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Title: Bleak House


Author: Charles Dickens


Release Date: August 1, 1997  [eBook #1023]
Most recently updated: February 21, 2012

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLEAK HOUSE***


E-text prepared by Donald Lainson, Toronto, Canada,
and revised by Thomas Berger and Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.



BLEAK HOUSE

by

CHARLES DICKENS





CONTENTS

            Preface
         I. In Chancery
        II. In Fashion
       III. A Progress
        IV. Telescopic Philanthropy
         V. A Morning Adventure
        VI. Quite at Home
       VII. The Ghost's Walk
      VIII. Covering a Multitude of Sins
        IX. Signs and Tokens
         X. The Law-Writer
        XI. Our Dear Brother
       XII. On the Watch
      XIII. Esther's Narrative
       XIV. Deportment
        XV. Bell Yard
       XVI. Tom-all-Alone's
      XVII. Esther's Narrative
     XVIII. Lady Dedlock
       XIX. Moving On
        XX. A New Lodger
       XXI. The Smallweed Family
      XXII. Mr. Bucket
     XXIII. Esther's Narrative
      XXIV. An Appeal Case
       XXV. Mrs. Snagsby Sees It All
      XXVI. Sharpshooters
     XXVII. More Old Soldiers Than One
    XXVIII. The Ironmaster
      XXIX. The Young Man
       XXX. Esther's Narrative
      XXXI. Nurse and Patient
     XXXII. The Appointed Time
    XXXIII. Interlopers
     XXXIV. A Turn of the Screw
      XXXV. Esther's Narrative
     XXXVI. Chesney Wold
    XXXVII. Jarndyce and Jarndyce
   XXXVIII. A Struggle
     XXXIX. Attorney and Client
        XL. National and Domestic
       XLI. In Mr. Tulkinghorn's Room
      XLII. In Mr. Tulkinghorn's Chambers
     XLIII. Esther's Narrative
      XLIV. The Letter and the Answer
       XLV. In Trust
      XLVI. Stop Him!
     XLVII. Jo's Will
    XLVIII. Closing In
      XLIX. Dutiful Friendship
         L. Esther's Narrative
        LI. Enlightened
       LII. Obstinacy
      LIII. The Track
       LIV. Springing a Mine
        LV. Flight
       LVI. Pursuit
      LVII. Esther's Narrative
     LVIII. A Wintry Day and Night
       LIX. Esther's Narrative
        LX. Perspective
       LXI. A Discovery
      LXII. Another Discovery
     LXIII. Steel and Iron
   LXIV. Esther's Narrative
   LXV. Beginning the World
   LXVI. Down in Lincolnshire
   LXVII. The Close of Esther's Narrative




PREFACE


A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a
company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under
any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the
shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought
the judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.
There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of
progress, but this was exaggerated and had been entirely owing to the
"parsimony of the public," which guilty public, it appeared, had been
until lately bent in the most determined manner on by no means
enlarging the number of Chancery judges appointed--I believe by
Richard the Second, but any other king will do as well.

This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body of
this book or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to
Mr. Vholes, with one or other of whom I think it must have
originated. In such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt
quotation from one of Shakespeare's sonnets:

                     "My nature is subdued
   To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:
   Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed!"

But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should know what
has been doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I mention here
that everything set forth in these pages concerning the Court of
Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth. The case of
Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence,
made public by a disinterested person who was professionally
acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to
end. At the present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the
court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from
thirty to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time, in
which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand
pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am assured) no
nearer to its termination now than when it was begun. There is
another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was
commenced before the close of the last century and in which more than
double the amount of seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in
costs. If I wanted other authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I
could rain them on these pages, to the shame of--a parsimonious
public.

There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark. The
possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been denied
since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite
mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have been
abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters to me
at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that spontaneous
combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to observe that I do
not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I
wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject. There
are about thirty cases on record, of which the most famous, that of
the Countess Cornelia de Baudi Cesenate, was minutely investigated
and described by Giuseppe Bianchini, a prebendary of Verona,
otherwise distinguished in letters, who published an account of it at
Verona in 1731, which he afterwards republished at Rome. The
appearances, beyond all rational doubt, observed in that case are the
appearances observed in Mr. Krook's case. The next most famous
instance happened at Rheims six years earlier, and the historian in
that case is Le Cat, one of the most renowned surgeons produced by
France. The subject was a woman, whose husband was ignorantly
convicted of having murdered her; but on solemn appeal to a higher
court, he was acquitted because it was shown upon the evidence that
she had died the death of which this name of spontaneous combustion
is given. I do not think it necessary to add to these notable facts,
and that general reference to the authorities which will be found at
page 30, vol. ii.,* the recorded opinions and experiences of
distinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, in
more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not
abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable
spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences
are usually received.**

In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of
familiar things.


1853


   *Transcriber's note. This referred to a specific page in
    the printed book. In this Project Gutenberg edition the
    pertinent information is in Chapter XXX, paragraph 90.

   ** Another case, very clearly described by a dentist,
    occurred at the town of Columbus, in the United States
    of America, quite recently. The subject was a German who
    kept a liquor-shop and was an inveterate drunkard.




CHAPTER I

In Chancery


London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting
in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in
the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of
the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus,
forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn
Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black
drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown
snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of
the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better;
splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one
another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing
their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other
foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke
(if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust
of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and
accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and
meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers
of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.
Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping
into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and
hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales
of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient
Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog
in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper,
down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of
his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the
bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog
all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the
misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as
the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman
and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their
time--as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling
look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the
muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction,
appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old
corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn
Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in
his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire
too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which
this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds
this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be
sitting here--as here he is--with a foggy glory round his head,
softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a
large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an
interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the
lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an
afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar
ought to be--as here they are--mistily engaged in one of the ten
thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on
slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running
their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and
making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On
such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or
three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a
fortune by it, ought to be--as are they not?--ranged in a line, in a
long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom
of it) between the registrar's red table and the silk gowns, with
bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits,
issues, references to masters, masters' reports, mountains of costly
nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting
candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it
would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their
colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the
uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in
the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the
drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the
Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it
and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the
Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted
lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every
madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined
suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and
begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to
monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so
exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain
and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its
practitioners who would not give--who does not often give--the
warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come
here!"

Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor's court this murky afternoon
besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three
counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before
mentioned? There is the registrar below the judge, in wig and gown;
and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses, or
whatever they may be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning,
for no crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the
cause in hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The
short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of
the newspapers invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when
Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on
a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained
sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is
always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting
some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour. Some say
she really is, or was, a party to a suit, but no one knows for
certain because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a
reticule which she calls her documents, principally consisting of
paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come up, in
custody, for the half-dozenth time to make a personal application "to
purge himself of his contempt," which, being a solitary surviving
executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts
of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is
not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime his prospects in life
are ended. Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from
Shropshire and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at
the close of the day's business and who can by no means be made to
understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence
after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself
in a good place and keeps an eye on the judge, ready to call out "My
Lord!" in a voice of sonorous complaint on the instant of his rising.
A few lawyers' clerks and others who know this suitor by sight linger
on the chance of his furnishing some fun and enlivening the dismal
weather a little.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in
course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it
means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been
observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five
minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the
premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause;
innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people
have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found
themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how
or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the
suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new
rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown
up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the
other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and
grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone
out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere
bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth
perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a
coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags
its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good
that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke
in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference out
of it. Every Chancellor was "in it," for somebody or other, when he
was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by
blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers in select port-wine committee
after dinner in hall. Articled clerks have been in the habit of
fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it
neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers, the eminent silk gown who said
that such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes, he
observed, "or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr.
Blowers"--a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and
purses.

How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched
forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide
question. From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty
warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many
shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks' Office who has
copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under that
eternal heading, no man's nature has been made better by it. In
trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under
false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never
come to good. The very solicitors' boys who have kept the wretched
suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle,
Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly engaged and had appointments
until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into
themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause
has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has acquired too a
distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle,
Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising
themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter
and see what can be done for Drizzle--who was not well used--when
Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and
sharking in all their many varieties have been sown broadcast by the
ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history
from the outermost circle of such evil have been insensibly tempted
into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad
course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong it was in some
off-hand manner never meant to go right.

Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the
Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

"Mr. Tangle," says the Lord High Chancellor, latterly something
restless under the eloquence of that learned gentleman.

"Mlud," says Mr. Tangle. Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce and
Jarndyce than anybody. He is famous for it--supposed never to have
read anything else since he left school.

"Have you nearly concluded your argument?"

"Mlud, no--variety of points--feel it my duty tsubmit--ludship," is
the reply that slides out of Mr. Tangle.

"Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I believe?" says
the Chancellor with a slight smile.

Eighteen of Mr. Tangle's learned friends, each armed with a little
summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a
pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places
of obscurity.

"We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday fortnight," says the
Chancellor. For the question at issue is only a question of costs, a
mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and really will come
to a settlement one of these days.

The Chancellor rises; the bar rises; the prisoner is brought forward
in a hurry; the man from Shropshire cries, "My lord!" Maces, bags,
and purses indignantly proclaim silence and frown at the man from
Shropshire.

"In reference," proceeds the Chancellor, still on Jarndyce and
Jarndyce, "to the young girl--"

"Begludship's pardon--boy," says Mr. Tangle prematurely. "In
reference," proceeds the Chancellor with extra distinctness, "to the
young girl and boy, the two young people"--Mr. Tangle crushed--"whom
I directed to be in attendance to-day and who are now in my private
room, I will see them and satisfy myself as to the expediency of
making the order for their residing with their uncle."

Mr. Tangle on his legs again. "Begludship's pardon--dead."

"With their"--Chancellor looking through his double eye-glass at the
papers on his desk--"grandfather."

"Begludship's pardon--victim of rash action--brains."

Suddenly a very little counsel with a terrific bass voice arises,
fully inflated, in the back settlements of the fog, and says, "Will
your lordship allow me? I appear for him. He is a cousin, several
times removed. I am not at the moment prepared to inform the court in
what exact remove he is a cousin, but he IS a cousin."

Leaving this address (delivered like a sepulchral message) ringing in
the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog
knows him no more. Everybody looks for him. Nobody can see him.

"I will speak with both the young people," says the Chancellor anew,
"and satisfy myself on the subject of their residing with their
cousin. I will mention the matter to-morrow morning when I take my
seat."

The Chancellor is about to bow to the bar when the prisoner is
presented. Nothing can possibly come of the prisoner's conglomeration
but his being sent back to prison, which is soon done. The man from
Shropshire ventures another remonstrative "My lord!" but the
Chancellor, being aware of him, has dexterously vanished. Everybody
else quickly vanishes too. A battery of blue bags is loaded with
heavy charges of papers and carried off by clerks; the little mad old
woman marches off with her documents; the empty court is locked up.
If all the injustice it has committed and all the misery it has
caused could only be locked up with it, and the whole burnt away in a
great funeral pyre--why so much the better for other parties than the
parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce!




CHAPTER II

In Fashion


It is but a glimpse of the world of fashion that we want on this same
miry afternoon. It is not so unlike the Court of Chancery but that we
may pass from the one scene to the other, as the crow flies. Both the
world of fashion and the Court of Chancery are things of precedent
and usage: oversleeping Rip Van Winkles who have played at strange
games through a deal of thundery weather; sleeping beauties whom the
knight will wake one day, when all the stopped spits in the kitchen
shall begin to turn prodigiously!

It is not a large world. Relatively even to this world of ours, which
has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have made
the tour of it and are come to the brink of the void beyond), it is a
very little speck. There is much good in it; there are many good and
true people in it; it has its appointed place. But the evil of it is
that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller's cotton and fine
wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot
see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and
its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air.

My Lady Dedlock has returned to her house in town for a few days
previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to
stay some weeks, after which her movements are uncertain. The
fashionable intelligence says so for the comfort of the Parisians,
and it knows all fashionable things. To know things otherwise were to
be unfashionable. My Lady Dedlock has been down at what she calls, in
familiar conversation, her "place" in Lincolnshire. The waters are
out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been
sapped and sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground for half a mile
in breadth is a stagnant river with melancholy trees for islands in
it and a surface punctured all over, all day long, with falling rain.
My Lady Dedlock's place has been extremely dreary. The weather for
many a day and night has been so wet that the trees seem wet through,
and the soft loppings and prunings of the woodman's axe can make no
crash or crackle as they fall. The deer, looking soaked, leave
quagmires where they pass. The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in
the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud towards
the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a background for the
falling rain. The view from my Lady Dedlock's own windows is
alternately a lead-coloured view and a view in Indian ink. The vases
on the stone terrace in the foreground catch the rain all day; and
the heavy drops fall--drip, drip, drip--upon the broad flagged
pavement, called from old time the Ghost's Walk, all night. On
Sundays the little church in the park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit
breaks out into a cold sweat; and there is a general smell and taste
as of the ancient Dedlocks in their graves. My Lady Dedlock (who is
childless), looking out in the early twilight from her boudoir at a
keeper's lodge and seeing the light of a fire upon the latticed
panes, and smoke rising from the chimney, and a child, chased by a
woman, running out into the rain to meet the shining figure of a
wrapped-up man coming through the gate, has been put quite out of
temper. My Lady Dedlock says she has been "bored to death."

Therefore my Lady Dedlock has come away from the place in
Lincolnshire and has left it to the rain, and the crows, and the
rabbits, and the deer, and the partridges and pheasants. The pictures
of the Dedlocks past and gone have seemed to vanish into the damp
walls in mere lowness of spirits, as the housekeeper has passed along
the old rooms shutting up the shutters. And when they will next come
forth again, the fashionable intelligence--which, like the fiend, is
omniscient of the past and present, but not the future--cannot yet
undertake to say.

Sir Leicester Dedlock is only a baronet, but there is no mightier
baronet than he. His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely
more respectable. He has a general opinion that the world might get
on without hills but would be done up without Dedlocks. He would on
the whole admit nature to be a good idea (a little low, perhaps, when
not enclosed with a park-fence), but an idea dependent for its
execution on your great county families. He is a gentleman of strict
conscience, disdainful of all littleness and meanness and ready on
the shortest notice to die any death you may please to mention rather
than give occasion for the least impeachment of his integrity. He is
an honourable, obstinate, truthful, high-spirited, intensely
prejudiced, perfectly unreasonable man.

Sir Leicester is twenty years, full measure, older than my Lady. He
will never see sixty-five again, nor perhaps sixty-six, nor yet
sixty-seven. He has a twist of the gout now and then and walks a
little stiffly. He is of a worthy presence, with his light-grey hair
and whiskers, his fine shirt-frill, his pure-white waistcoat, and his
blue coat with bright buttons always buttoned. He is ceremonious,
stately, most polite on every occasion to my Lady, and holds her
personal attractions in the highest estimation. His gallantry to my
Lady, which has never changed since he courted her, is the one little
touch of romantic fancy in him.

Indeed, he married her for love. A whisper still goes about that she
had not even family; howbeit, Sir Leicester had so much family that
perhaps he had enough and could dispense with any more. But she had
beauty, pride, ambition, insolent resolve, and sense enough to
portion out a legion of fine ladies. Wealth and station, added to
these, soon floated her upward, and for years now my Lady Dedlock has
been at the centre of the fashionable intelligence and at the top of
the fashionable tree.

How Alexander wept when he had no more worlds to conquer, everybody
knows--or has some reason to know by this time, the matter having
been rather frequently mentioned. My Lady Dedlock, having conquered
HER world, fell not into the melting, but rather into the freezing,
mood. An exhausted composure, a worn-out placidity, an equanimity of
fatigue not to be ruffled by interest or satisfaction, are the
trophies of her victory. She is perfectly well-bred. If she could be
translated to heaven to-morrow, she might be expected to ascend
without any rapture.

She has beauty still, and if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet
in its autumn. She has a fine face--originally of a character that
would be rather called very pretty than handsome, but improved into
classicality by the acquired expression of her fashionable state. Her
figure is elegant and has the effect of being tall. Not that she is
so, but that "the most is made," as the Honourable Bob Stables has
frequently asserted upon oath, "of all her points." The same
authority observes that she is perfectly got up and remarks in
commendation of her hair especially that she is the best-groomed
woman in the whole stud.

With all her perfections on her head, my Lady Dedlock has come up
from her place in Lincolnshire (hotly pursued by the fashionable
intelligence) to pass a few days at her house in town previous to her
departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay some weeks,
after which her movements are uncertain. And at her house in town,
upon this muddy, murky afternoon, presents himself an old-fashioned
old gentleman, attorney-at-law and eke solicitor of the High Court of
Chancery, who has the honour of acting as legal adviser of the
Dedlocks and has as many cast-iron boxes in his office with that name
outside as if the present baronet were the coin of the conjuror's
trick and were constantly being juggled through the whole set. Across
the hall, and up the stairs, and along the passages, and through the
rooms, which are very brilliant in the season and very dismal out of
it--fairy-land to visit, but a desert to live in--the old gentleman
is conducted by a Mercury in powder to my Lady's presence.

The old gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have made
good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and aristocratic
wills, and to be very rich. He is surrounded by a mysterious halo of
family confidences, of which he is known to be the silent depository.
There are noble mausoleums rooted for centuries in retired glades of
parks among the growing timber and the fern, which perhaps hold fewer
noble secrets than walk abroad among men, shut up in the breast of
Mr. Tulkinghorn. He is of what is called the old school--a phrase
generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young--and
wears knee-breeches tied with ribbons, and gaiters or stockings. One
peculiarity of his black clothes and of his black stockings, be they
silk or worsted, is that they never shine. Mute, close, irresponsive
to any glancing light, his dress is like himself. He never converses
when not professionally consulted. He is found sometimes, speechless
but quite at home, at corners of dinner-tables in great country
houses and near doors of drawing-rooms, concerning which the
fashionable intelligence is eloquent, where everybody knows him and
where half the Peerage stops to say "How do you do, Mr. Tulkinghorn?"
He receives these salutations with gravity and buries them along with
the rest of his knowledge.

Sir Leicester Dedlock is with my Lady and is happy to see Mr.
Tulkinghorn. There is an air of prescription about him which is
always agreeable to Sir Leicester; he receives it as a kind of
tribute. He likes Mr. Tulkinghorn's dress; there is a kind of tribute
in that too. It is eminently respectable, and likewise, in a general
way, retainer-like. It expresses, as it were, the steward of the
legal mysteries, the butler of the legal cellar, of the Dedlocks.

Has Mr. Tulkinghorn any idea of this himself? It may be so, or it may
not, but there is this remarkable circumstance to be noted in
everything associated with my Lady Dedlock as one of a class--as one
of the leaders and representatives of her little world. She supposes
herself to be an inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach and ken of
ordinary mortals--seeing herself in her glass, where indeed she looks
so. Yet every dim little star revolving about her, from her maid to
the manager of the Italian Opera, knows her weaknesses, prejudices,
follies, haughtinesses, and caprices and lives upon as accurate a
calculation and as nice a measure of her moral nature as her
dressmaker takes of her physical proportions. Is a new dress, a new
custom, a new singer, a new dancer, a new form of jewellery, a new
dwarf or giant, a new chapel, a new anything, to be set up? There are
deferential people in a dozen callings whom my Lady Dedlock suspects
of nothing but prostration before her, who can tell you how to manage
her as if she were a baby, who do nothing but nurse her all their
lives, who, humbly affecting to follow with profound subservience,
lead her and her whole troop after them; who, in hooking one, hook
all and bear them off as Lemuel Gulliver bore away the stately fleet
of the majestic Lilliput. "If you want to address our people, sir,"
say Blaze and Sparkle, the jewellers--meaning by our people Lady
Dedlock and the rest--"you must remember that you are not dealing
with the general public; you must hit our people in their weakest
place, and their weakest place is such a place." "To make this
article go down, gentlemen," say Sheen and Gloss, the mercers, to
their friends the manufacturers, "you must come to us, because we
know where to have the fashionable people, and we can make it
fashionable." "If you want to get this print upon the tables of my
high connexion, sir," says Mr. Sladdery, the librarian, "or if you
want to get this dwarf or giant into the houses of my high connexion,
sir, or if you want to secure to this entertainment the patronage of
my high connexion, sir, you must leave it, if you please, to me, for
I have been accustomed to study the leaders of my high connexion,
sir, and I may tell you without vanity that I can turn them round my
finger"--in which Mr. Sladdery, who is an honest man, does not
exaggerate at all.

Therefore, while Mr. Tulkinghorn may not know what is passing in the
Dedlock mind at present, it is very possible that he may.

"My Lady's cause has been again before the Chancellor, has it, Mr.
Tulkinghorn?" says Sir Leicester, giving him his hand.

"Yes. It has been on again to-day," Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, making
one of his quiet bows to my Lady, who is on a sofa near the fire,
shading her face with a hand-screen.

"It would be useless to ask," says my Lady with the dreariness of the
place in Lincolnshire still upon her, "whether anything has been
done."

"Nothing that YOU would call anything has been done to-day," replies
Mr. Tulkinghorn.

"Nor ever will be," says my Lady.

Sir Leicester has no objection to an interminable Chancery suit. It
is a slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing. To be
sure, he has not a vital interest in the suit in question, her part
in which was the only property my Lady brought him; and he has a
shadowy impression that for his name--the name of Dedlock--to be in a
cause, and not in the title of that cause, is a most ridiculous
accident. But he regards the Court of Chancery, even if it should
involve an occasional delay of justice and a trifling amount of
confusion, as a something devised in conjunction with a variety of
other somethings by the perfection of human wisdom for the eternal
settlement (humanly speaking) of everything. And he is upon the whole
of a fixed opinion that to give the sanction of his countenance to
any complaints respecting it would be to encourage some person in the
lower classes to rise up somewhere--like Wat Tyler.

"As a few fresh affidavits have been put upon the file," says Mr.
Tulkinghorn, "and as they are short, and as I proceed upon the
troublesome principle of begging leave to possess my clients with any
new proceedings in a cause"--cautious man Mr. Tulkinghorn, taking no
more responsibility than necessary--"and further, as I see you are
going to Paris, I have brought them in my pocket."

(Sir Leicester was going to Paris too, by the by, but the delight of
the fashionable intelligence was in his Lady.)

Mr. Tulkinghorn takes out his papers, asks permission to place them
on a golden talisman of a table at my Lady's elbow, puts on his
spectacles, and begins to read by the light of a shaded lamp.

"'In Chancery. Between John Jarndyce--'"

My Lady interrupts, requesting him to miss as many of the formal
horrors as he can.

Mr. Tulkinghorn glances over his spectacles and begins again lower
down. My Lady carelessly and scornfully abstracts her attention. Sir
Leicester in a great chair looks at the file and appears to have a
stately liking for the legal repetitions and prolixities as ranging
among the national bulwarks. It happens that the fire is hot where my
Lady sits and that the hand-screen is more beautiful than useful,
being priceless but small. My Lady, changing her position, sees the
papers on the table--looks at them nearer--looks at them nearer
still--asks impulsively, "Who copied that?"

Mr. Tulkinghorn stops short, surprised by my Lady's animation and her
unusual tone.

"Is it what you people call law-hand?" she asks, looking full at him
in her careless way again and toying with her screen.

"Not quite. Probably"--Mr. Tulkinghorn examines it as he speaks--"the
legal character which it has was acquired after the original hand was
formed. Why do you ask?"

"Anything to vary this detestable monotony. Oh, go on, do!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn reads again. The heat is greater; my Lady screens her
face. Sir Leicester dozes, starts up suddenly, and cries, "Eh? What
do you say?"

"I say I am afraid," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, who had risen hastily,
"that Lady Dedlock is ill."

"Faint," my Lady murmurs with white lips, "only that; but it is like
the faintness of death. Don't speak to me. Ring, and take me to my
room!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn retires into another chamber; bells ring, feet
shuffle and patter, silence ensues. Mercury at last begs Mr.
Tulkinghorn to return.

"Better now," quoth Sir Leicester, motioning the lawyer to sit down
and read to him alone. "I have been quite alarmed. I never knew my
Lady swoon before. But the weather is extremely trying, and she
really has been bored to death down at our place in Lincolnshire."




CHAPTER III

A Progress


I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of
these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that. I can
remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used to say to my
doll when we were alone together, "Now, Dolly, I am not clever, you
know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!" And so
she used to sit propped up in a great arm-chair, with her beautiful
complexion and rosy lips, staring at me--or not so much at me, I
think, as at nothing--while I busily stitched away and told her every
one of my secrets.

My dear old doll! I was such a shy little thing that I seldom dared
to open my lips, and never dared to open my heart, to anybody else.
It almost makes me cry to think what a relief it used to be to me
when I came home from school of a day to run upstairs to my room and
say, "Oh, you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be expecting me!"
and then to sit down on the floor, leaning on the elbow of her great
chair, and tell her all I had noticed since we parted. I had always
rather a noticing way--not a quick way, oh, no!--a silent way of
noticing what passed before me and thinking I should like to
understand it better. I have not by any means a quick understanding.
When I love a person very tenderly indeed, it seems to brighten. But
even that may be my vanity.

I was brought up, from my earliest remembrance--like some of the
princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming--by my
godmother. At least, I only knew her as such. She was a good, good
woman! She went to church three times every Sunday, and to morning
prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays, and to lectures whenever there
were lectures; and never missed. She was handsome; and if she had
ever smiled, would have been (I used to think) like an angel--but she
never smiled. She was always grave and strict. She was so very good
herself, I thought, that the badness of other people made her frown
all her life. I felt so different from her, even making every
allowance for the differences between a child and a woman; I felt so
poor, so trifling, and so far off that I never could be unrestrained
with her--no, could never even love her as I wished. It made me very
sorry to consider how good she was and how unworthy of her I was, and
I used ardently to hope that I might have a better heart; and I
talked it over very often with the dear old doll, but I never loved
my godmother as I ought to have loved her and as I felt I must have
loved her if I had been a better girl.

This made me, I dare say, more timid and retiring than I naturally
was and cast me upon Dolly as the only friend with whom I felt at
ease. But something happened when I was still quite a little thing
that helped it very much.

I had never heard my mama spoken of. I had never heard of my papa
either, but I felt more interested about my mama. I had never worn a
black frock, that I could recollect. I had never been shown my mama's
grave. I had never been told where it was. Yet I had never been
taught to pray for any relation but my godmother. I had more than
once approached this subject of my thoughts with Mrs. Rachael, our
only servant, who took my light away when I was in bed (another very
good woman, but austere to me), and she had only said, "Esther, good
night!" and gone away and left me.

Although there were seven girls at the neighbouring school where I
was a day boarder, and although they called me little Esther
Summerson, I knew none of them at home. All of them were older than
I, to be sure (I was the youngest there by a good deal), but there
seemed to be some other separation between us besides that, and
besides their being far more clever than I was and knowing much more
than I did. One of them in the first week of my going to the school
(I remember it very well) invited me home to a little party, to my
great joy. But my godmother wrote a stiff letter declining for me,
and I never went. I never went out at all.

It was my birthday. There were holidays at school on other
birthdays--none on mine. There were rejoicings at home on other
birthdays, as I knew from what I heard the girls relate to one
another--there were none on mine. My birthday was the most melancholy
day at home in the whole year.

I have mentioned that unless my vanity should deceive me (as I know
it may, for I may be very vain without suspecting it, though indeed I
don't), my comprehension is quickened when my affection is. My
disposition is very affectionate, and perhaps I might still feel such
a wound if such a wound could be received more than once with the
quickness of that birthday.

Dinner was over, and my godmother and I were sitting at the table
before the fire. The clock ticked, the fire clicked; not another
sound had been heard in the room or in the house for I don't know how
long. I happened to look timidly up from my stitching, across the
table at my godmother, and I saw in her face, looking gloomily at me,
"It would have been far better, little Esther, that you had had no
birthday, that you had never been born!"

I broke out crying and sobbing, and I said, "Oh, dear godmother, tell
me, pray do tell me, did Mama die on my birthday?"

"No," she returned. "Ask me no more, child!"

"Oh, do pray tell me something of her. Do now, at last, dear
godmother, if you please! What did I do to her? How did I lose her?
Why am I so different from other children, and why is it my fault,
dear godmother? No, no, no, don't go away. Oh, speak to me!"

I was in a kind of fright beyond my grief, and I caught hold of her
dress and was kneeling to her. She had been saying all the while,
"Let me go!" But now she stood still.

Her darkened face had such power over me that it stopped me in the
midst of my vehemence. I put up my trembling little hand to clasp
hers or to beg her pardon with what earnestness I might, but withdrew
it as she looked at me, and laid it on my fluttering heart. She
raised me, sat in her chair, and standing me before her, said slowly
in a cold, low voice--I see her knitted brow and pointed
finger--"Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers.
The time will come--and soon enough--when you will understand this
better and will feel it too, as no one save a woman can. I have
forgiven her"--but her face did not relent--"the wrong she did to me,
and I say no more of it, though it was greater than you will ever
know--than any one will ever know but I, the sufferer. For yourself,
unfortunate girl, orphaned and degraded from the first of these evil
anniversaries, pray daily that the sins of others be not visited upon
your head, according to what is written. Forget your mother and leave
all other people to forget her who will do her unhappy child that
greatest kindness. Now, go!"

She checked me, however, as I was about to depart from her--so frozen
as I was!--and added this, "Submission, self-denial, diligent work,
are the preparations for a life begun with such a shadow on it. You
are different from other children, Esther, because you were not born,
like them, in common sinfulness and wrath. You are set apart."

I went up to my room, and crept to bed, and laid my doll's cheek
against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend upon my
bosom, cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding of my
sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy at any time to anybody's
heart and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was to me.

Dear, dear, to think how much time we passed alone together
afterwards, and how often I repeated to the doll the story of my
birthday and confided to her that I would try as hard as ever I could
to repair the fault I had been born with (of which I confessedly felt
guilty and yet innocent) and would strive as I grew up to be
industrious, contented, and kind-hearted and to do some good to some
one, and win some love to myself if I could. I hope it is not
self-indulgent to shed these tears as I think of it. I am very
thankful, I am very cheerful, but I cannot quite help their coming to
my eyes.

There! I have wiped them away now and can go on again properly.

I felt the distance between my godmother and myself so much more
after the birthday, and felt so sensible of filling a place in her
house which ought to have been empty, that I found her more difficult
of approach, though I was fervently grateful to her in my heart, than
ever. I felt in the same way towards my school companions; I felt in
the same way towards Mrs. Rachael, who was a widow; and oh, towards
her daughter, of whom she was proud, who came to see her once a
fortnight! I was very retired and quiet, and tried to be very
diligent.

One sunny afternoon when I had come home from school with my books
and portfolio, watching my long shadow at my side, and as I was
gliding upstairs to my room as usual, my godmother looked out of the
parlour-door and called me back. Sitting with her, I found--which was
very unusual indeed--a stranger. A portly, important-looking
gentleman, dressed all in black, with a white cravat, large gold
watch seals, a pair of gold eye-glasses, and a large seal-ring upon
his little finger.

"This," said my godmother in an undertone, "is the child." Then she
said in her naturally stern way of speaking, "This is Esther, sir."

The gentleman put up his eye-glasses to look at me and said, "Come
here, my dear!" He shook hands with me and asked me to take off my
bonnet, looking at me all the while. When I had complied, he said,
"Ah!" and afterwards "Yes!" And then, taking off his eye-glasses and
folding them in a red case, and leaning back in his arm-chair,
turning the case about in his two hands, he gave my godmother a nod.
Upon that, my godmother said, "You may go upstairs, Esther!" And I
made him my curtsy and left him.

It must have been two years afterwards, and I was almost fourteen,
when one dreadful night my godmother and I sat at the fireside. I was
reading aloud, and she was listening. I had come down at nine o'clock
as I always did to read the Bible to her, and was reading from St.
John how our Saviour stooped down, writing with his finger in the
dust, when they brought the sinful woman to him.

"So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself and said
unto them, 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a
stone at her!'"

I was stopped by my godmother's rising, putting her hand to her head,
and crying out in an awful voice from quite another part of the book,
"'Watch ye, therefore, lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And
what I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch!'"

In an instant, while she stood before me repeating these words, she
fell down on the floor. I had no need to cry out; her voice had
sounded through the house and been heard in the street.

She was laid upon her bed. For more than a week she lay there, little
altered outwardly, with her old handsome resolute frown that I so
well knew carved upon her face. Many and many a time, in the day and
in the night, with my head upon the pillow by her that my whispers
might be plainer to her, I kissed her, thanked her, prayed for her,
asked her for her blessing and forgiveness, entreated her to give me
the least sign that she knew or heard me. No, no, no. Her face was
immovable. To the very last, and even afterwards, her frown remained
unsoftened.

On the day after my poor good godmother was buried, the gentleman in
black with the white neckcloth reappeared. I was sent for by Mrs.
Rachael, and found him in the same place, as if he had never gone
away.

"My name is Kenge," he said; "you may remember it, my child; Kenge
and Carboy, Lincoln's Inn."

I replied that I remembered to have seen him once before.

"Pray be seated--here near me. Don't distress yourself; it's of no
use. Mrs. Rachael, I needn't inform you who were acquainted with the
late Miss Barbary's affairs, that her means die with her and that
this young lady, now her aunt is dead--"

"My aunt, sir!"

"It is really of no use carrying on a deception when no object is to
be gained by it," said Mr. Kenge smoothly, "Aunt in fact, though not
in law. Don't distress yourself! Don't weep! Don't tremble! Mrs.
Rachael, our young friend has no doubt heard of--the--a--Jarndyce and
Jarndyce."

"Never," said Mrs. Rachael.

"Is it possible," pursued Mr. Kenge, putting up his eye-glasses,
"that our young friend--I BEG you won't distress yourself!--never
heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce!"

I shook my head, wondering even what it was.

"Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?" said Mr. Kenge, looking over his
glasses at me and softly turning the case about and about as if he
were petting something. "Not of one of the greatest Chancery suits
known? Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce--the--a--in itself a monument of
Chancery practice. In which (I would say) every difficulty, every
contingency, every masterly fiction, every form of procedure known
in that court, is represented over and over again? It is a cause
that could not exist out of this free and great country. I should
say that the aggregate of costs in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mrs.
Rachael"--I was afraid he addressed himself to her because I appeared
inattentive"--amounts at the present hour to from SIX-ty to SEVEN-ty
THOUSAND POUNDS!" said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair.

I felt very ignorant, but what could I do? I was so entirely
unacquainted with the subject that I understood nothing about it even
then.

"And she really never heard of the cause!" said Mr. Kenge.
"Surprising!"

"Miss Barbary, sir," returned Mrs. Rachael, "who is now among the
Seraphim--"

"I hope so, I am sure," said Mr. Kenge politely.

"--Wished Esther only to know what would be serviceable to her. And
she knows, from any teaching she has had here, nothing more."

"Well!" said Mr. Kenge. "Upon the whole, very proper. Now to the
point," addressing me. "Miss Barbary, your sole relation (in fact
that is, for I am bound to observe that in law you had none) being
deceased and it naturally not being to be expected that Mrs.
Rachael--"

"Oh, dear no!" said Mrs. Rachael quickly.

"Quite so," assented Mr. Kenge; "--that Mrs. Rachael should charge
herself with your maintenance and support (I beg you won't distress
yourself), you are in a position to receive the renewal of an offer
which I was instructed to make to Miss Barbary some two years ago and
which, though rejected then, was understood to be renewable under the
lamentable circumstances that have since occurred. Now, if I avow
that I represent, in Jarndyce and Jarndyce and otherwise, a highly
humane, but at the same time singular, man, shall I compromise myself
by any stretch of my professional caution?" said Mr. Kenge, leaning
back in his chair again and looking calmly at us both.

He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice. I
couldn't wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave great
importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself with
obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own music
with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand. I was very much
impressed by him--even then, before I knew that he formed himself on
the model of a great lord who was his client and that he was
generally called Conversation Kenge.

"Mr. Jarndyce," he pursued, "being aware of the--I would say,
desolate--position of our young friend, offers to place her at a
first-rate establishment where her education shall be completed,
where her comfort shall be secured, where her reasonable wants shall
be anticipated, where she shall be eminently qualified to discharge
her duty in that station of life unto which it has pleased--shall I
say Providence?--to call her."

My heart was filled so full, both by what he said and by his
affecting manner of saying it, that I was not able to speak, though I
tried.

"Mr. Jarndyce," he went on, "makes no condition beyond expressing his
expectation that our young friend will not at any time remove herself
from the establishment in question without his knowledge and
concurrence. That she will faithfully apply herself to the
acquisition of those accomplishments, upon the exercise of which she
will be ultimately dependent. That she will tread in the paths of
virtue and honour, and--the--a--so forth."

I was still less able to speak than before.

"Now, what does our young friend say?" proceeded Mr. Kenge. "Take
time, take time! I pause for her reply. But take time!"

What the destitute subject of such an offer tried to say, I need not
repeat. What she did say, I could more easily tell, if it were worth
the telling. What she felt, and will feel to her dying hour, I could
never relate.

This interview took place at Windsor, where I had passed (as far as I
knew) my whole life. On that day week, amply provided with all
necessaries, I left it, inside the stagecoach, for Reading.

Mrs. Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was
not so good, and wept bitterly. I thought that I ought to have known
her better after so many years and ought to have made myself enough
of a favourite with her to make her sorry then. When she gave me one
cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw-drop from the stone
porch--it was a very frosty day--I felt so miserable and
self-reproachful that I clung to her and told her it was my fault, I
knew, that she could say good-bye so easily!

"No, Esther!" she returned. "It is your misfortune!"

The coach was at the little lawn-gate--we had not come out until we
heard the wheels--and thus I left her, with a sorrowful heart. She
went in before my boxes were lifted to the coach-roof and shut the
door. As long as I could see the house, I looked back at it from the
window through my tears. My godmother had left Mrs. Rachael all the
little property she possessed; and there was to be a sale; and an old
hearth-rug with roses on it, which always seemed to me the first
thing in the world I had ever seen, was hanging outside in the frost
and snow. A day or two before, I had wrapped the dear old doll in her
own shawl and quietly laid her--I am half ashamed to tell it--in the
garden-earth under the tree that shaded my old window. I had no
companion left but my bird, and him I carried with me in his cage.

When the house was out of sight, I sat, with my bird-cage in the
straw at my feet, forward on the low seat to look out of the high
window, watching the frosty trees, that were like beautiful pieces of
spar, and the fields all smooth and white with last night's snow, and
the sun, so red but yielding so little heat, and the ice, dark like
metal where the skaters and sliders had brushed the snow away. There
was a gentleman in the coach who sat on the opposite seat and looked
very large in a quantity of wrappings, but he sat gazing out of the
other window and took no notice of me.

I thought of my dead godmother, of the night when I read to her, of
her frowning so fixedly and sternly in her bed, of the strange place
I was going to, of the people I should find there, and what they
would be like, and what they would say to me, when a voice in the
coach gave me a terrible start.

It said, "What the de-vil are you crying for?"

I was so frightened that I lost my voice and could only answer in a
whisper, "Me, sir?" For of course I knew it must have been the
gentleman in the quantity of wrappings, though he was still looking
out of his window.

"Yes, you," he said, turning round.

"I didn't know I was crying, sir," I faltered.

"But you are!" said the gentleman. "Look here!" He came quite
opposite to me from the other corner of the coach, brushed one of his
large furry cuffs across my eyes (but without hurting me), and showed
me that it was wet.

"There! Now you know you are," he said. "Don't you?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

"And what are you crying for?" said the gentleman, "Don't you want to
go there?"

"Where, sir?"

"Where? Why, wherever you are going," said the gentleman.

"I am very glad to go there, sir," I answered.

"Well, then! Look glad!" said the gentleman.

I thought he was very strange, or at least that what I could see of
him was very strange, for he was wrapped up to the chin, and his face
was almost hidden in a fur cap with broad fur straps at the side of
his head fastened under his chin; but I was composed again, and not
afraid of him. So I told him that I thought I must have been crying
because of my godmother's death and because of Mrs. Rachael's not
being sorry to part with me.

"Confound Mrs. Rachael!" said the gentleman. "Let her fly away in a
high wind on a broomstick!"

I began to be really afraid of him now and looked at him with the
greatest astonishment. But I thought that he had pleasant eyes,
although he kept on muttering to himself in an angry manner and
calling Mrs. Rachael names.

After a little while he opened his outer wrapper, which appeared to
me large enough to wrap up the whole coach, and put his arm down into
a deep pocket in the side.

"Now, look here!" he said. "In this paper," which was nicely folded,
"is a piece of the best plum-cake that can be got for money--sugar on
the outside an inch thick, like fat on mutton chops. Here's a little
pie (a gem this is, both for size and quality), made in France. And
what do you suppose it's made of? Livers of fat geese. There's a pie!
Now let's see you eat 'em."

"Thank you, sir," I replied; "thank you very much indeed, but I hope
you won't be offended--they are too rich for me."

"Floored again!" said the gentleman, which I didn't at all
understand, and threw them both out of window.

He did not speak to me any more until he got out of the coach a
little way short of Reading, when he advised me to be a good girl and
to be studious, and shook hands with me. I must say I was relieved by
his departure. We left him at a milestone. I often walked past it
afterwards, and never for a long time without thinking of him and
half expecting to meet him. But I never did; and so, as time went on,
he passed out of my mind.

When the coach stopped, a very neat lady looked up at the window and
said, "Miss Donny."

"No, ma'am, Esther Summerson."

"That is quite right," said the lady, "Miss Donny."

I now understood that she introduced herself by that name, and begged
Miss Donny's pardon for my mistake, and pointed out my boxes at her
request. Under the direction of a very neat maid, they were put
outside a very small green carriage; and then Miss Donny, the maid,
and I got inside and were driven away.

"Everything is ready for you, Esther," said Miss Donny, "and the
scheme of your pursuits has been arranged in exact accordance with
the wishes of your guardian, Mr. Jarndyce."

"Of--did you say, ma'am?"

"Of your guardian, Mr. Jarndyce," said Miss Donny.

I was so bewildered that Miss Donny thought the cold had been too
severe for me and lent me her smelling-bottle.

"Do you know my--guardian, Mr. Jarndyce, ma'am?" I asked after a good
deal of hesitation.

"Not personally, Esther," said Miss Donny; "merely through his
solicitors, Messrs. Kenge and Carboy, of London. A very superior
gentleman, Mr. Kenge. Truly eloquent indeed. Some of his periods
quite majestic!"

I felt this to be very true but was too confused to attend to it. Our
speedy arrival at our destination, before I had time to recover
myself, increased my confusion, and I never shall forget the
uncertain and the unreal air of everything at Greenleaf (Miss Donny's
house) that afternoon!

But I soon became used to it. I was so adapted to the routine of
Greenleaf before long that I seemed to have been there a great while
and almost to have dreamed rather than really lived my old life at my
godmother's. Nothing could be more precise, exact, and orderly than
Greenleaf. There was a time for everything all round the dial of the
clock, and everything was done at its appointed moment.

We were twelve boarders, and there were two Miss Donnys, twins. It
was understood that I would have to depend, by and by, on my
qualifications as a governess, and I was not only instructed in
everything that was taught at Greenleaf, but was very soon engaged in
helping to instruct others. Although I was treated in every other
respect like the rest of the school, this single difference was made
in my case from the first. As I began to know more, I taught more,
and so in course of time I had plenty to do, which I was very fond of
doing because it made the dear girls fond of me. At last, whenever a
new pupil came who was a little downcast and unhappy, she was so
sure--indeed I don't know why--to make a friend of me that all
new-comers were confided to my care. They said I was so gentle, but I
am sure THEY were! I often thought of the resolution I had made on my
birthday to try to be industrious, contented, and true-hearted and to
do some good to some one and win some love if I could; and indeed,
indeed, I felt almost ashamed to have done so little and have won so
much.

I passed at Greenleaf six happy, quiet years. I never saw in any face
there, thank heaven, on my birthday, that it would have been better
if I had never been born. When the day came round, it brought me so
many tokens of affectionate remembrance that my room was beautiful
with them from New Year's Day to Christmas.

In those six years I had never been away except on visits at holiday
time in the neighbourhood. After the first six months or so I had
taken Miss Donny's advice in reference to the propriety of writing to
Mr. Kenge to say that I was happy and grateful, and with her approval
I had written such a letter. I had received a formal answer
acknowledging its receipt and saying, "We note the contents thereof,
which shall be duly communicated to our client." After that I
sometimes heard Miss Donny and her sister mention how regular my
accounts were paid, and about twice a year I ventured to write a
similar letter. I always received by return of post exactly the same
answer in the same round hand, with the signature of Kenge and Carboy
in another writing, which I supposed to be Mr. Kenge's.

It seems so curious to me to be obliged to write all this about
myself! As if this narrative were the narrative of MY life! But my
little body will soon fall into the background now.

Six quiet years (I find I am saying it for the second time) I had
passed at Greenleaf, seeing in those around me, as it might be in a
looking-glass, every stage of my own growth and change there, when,
one November morning, I received this letter. I omit the date.


   Old Square, Lincoln's Inn

   Madam,

   Jarndyce and Jarndyce

   Our clt Mr. Jarndyce being abt to rece into his house,
   under an Order of the Ct of Chy, a Ward of the Ct in this
   cause, for whom he wishes to secure an elgble compn,
   directs us to inform you that he will be glad of your
   serces in the afsd capacity.

   We have arrngd for your being forded, carriage free, pr
   eight o'clock coach from Reading, on Monday morning next,
   to White Horse Cellar, Piccadilly, London, where one of
   our clks will be in waiting to convey you to our offe as
   above.

   We are, Madam, Your obedt Servts,

   Kenge and Carboy

   Miss Esther Summerson


Oh, never, never, never shall I forget the emotion this letter caused
in the house! It was so tender in them to care so much for me, it was
so gracious in that father who had not forgotten me to have made my
orphan way so smooth and easy and to have inclined so many youthful
natures towards me, that I could hardly bear it. Not that I would
have had them less sorry--I am afraid not; but the pleasure of it,
and the pain of it, and the pride and joy of it, and the humble
regret of it were so blended that my heart seemed almost breaking
while it was full of rapture.

The letter gave me only five days' notice of my removal. When every
minute added to the proofs of love and kindness that were given me in
those five days, and when at last the morning came and when they took
me through all the rooms that I might see them for the last time, and
when some cried, "Esther, dear, say good-bye to me here at my
bedside, where you first spoke so kindly to me!" and when others
asked me only to write their names, "With Esther's love," and when
they all surrounded me with their parting presents and clung to me
weeping and cried, "What shall we do when dear, dear Esther's gone!"
and when I tried to tell them how forbearing and how good they had
all been to me and how I blessed and thanked them every one, what a
heart I had!

And when the two Miss Donnys grieved as much to part with me as the
least among them, and when the maids said, "Bless you, miss, wherever
you go!" and when the ugly lame old gardener, who I thought had
hardly noticed me in all those years, came panting after the coach to
give me a little nosegay of geraniums and told me I had been the
light of his eyes--indeed the old man said so!--what a heart I had
then!

And could I help it if with all this, and the coming to the little
school, and the unexpected sight of the poor children outside waving
their hats and bonnets to me, and of a grey-haired gentleman and lady
whose daughter I had helped to teach and at whose house I had visited
(who were said to be the proudest people in all that country), caring
for nothing but calling out, "Good-bye, Esther. May you be very
happy!"--could I help it if I was quite bowed down in the coach by
myself and said "Oh, I am so thankful, I am so thankful!" many times
over!

But of course I soon considered that I must not take tears where I
was going after all that had been done for me. Therefore, of course,
I made myself sob less and persuaded myself to be quiet by saying
very often, "Esther, now you really must! This WILL NOT do!" I
cheered myself up pretty well at last, though I am afraid I was
longer about it than I ought to have been; and when I had cooled my
eyes with lavender water, it was time to watch for London.

I was quite persuaded that we were there when we were ten miles off,
and when we really were there, that we should never get there.
However, when we began to jolt upon a stone pavement, and
particularly when every other conveyance seemed to be running into
us, and we seemed to be running into every other conveyance, I began
to believe that we really were approaching the end of our journey.
Very soon afterwards we stopped.

A young gentleman who had inked himself by accident addressed me from
the pavement and said, "I am from Kenge and Carboy's, miss, of
Lincoln's Inn."

"If you please, sir," said I.

He was very obliging, and as he handed me into a fly after
superintending the removal of my boxes, I asked him whether there was
a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown
smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen.

"Oh, dear no, miss," he said. "This is a London particular."

I had never heard of such a thing.

"A fog, miss," said the young gentleman.

"Oh, indeed!" said I.

We drove slowly through the dirtiest and darkest streets that ever
were seen in the world (I thought) and in such a distracting state of
confusion that I wondered how the people kept their senses, until we
passed into sudden quietude under an old gateway and drove on through
a silent square until we came to an odd nook in a corner, where there
was an entrance up a steep, broad flight of stairs, like an entrance
to a church. And there really was a churchyard outside under some
cloisters, for I saw the gravestones from the staircase window.

This was Kenge and Carboy's. The young gentleman showed me through an
outer office into Mr. Kenge's room--there was no one in it--and
politely put an arm-chair for me by the fire. He then called my
attention to a little looking-glass hanging from a nail on one side
of the chimney-piece.

"In case you should wish to look at yourself, miss, after the
journey, as you're going before the Chancellor. Not that it's
requisite, I am sure," said the young gentleman civilly.

"Going before the Chancellor?" I said, startled for a moment.

"Only a matter of form, miss," returned the young gentleman. "Mr.
Kenge is in court now. He left his compliments, and would you partake
of some refreshment"--there were biscuits and a decanter of wine on a
small table--"and look over the paper," which the young gentleman
gave me as he spoke. He then stirred the fire and left me.

Everything was so strange--the stranger from its being night in the
day-time, the candles burning with a white flame, and looking raw and
cold--that I read the words in the newspaper without knowing what
they meant and found myself reading the same words repeatedly. As it
was of no use going on in that way, I put the paper down, took a peep
at my bonnet in the glass to see if it was neat, and looked at the
room, which was not half lighted, and at the shabby, dusty tables,
and at the piles of writings, and at a bookcase full of the most
inexpressive-looking books that ever had anything to say for
themselves. Then I went on, thinking, thinking, thinking; and the
fire went on, burning, burning, burning; and the candles went on
flickering and guttering, and there were no snuffers--until the young
gentleman by and by brought a very dirty pair--for two hours.

At last Mr. Kenge came. HE was not altered, but he was surprised to
see how altered I was and appeared quite pleased. "As you are going
to be the companion of the young lady who is now in the Chancellor's
private room, Miss Summerson," he said, "we thought it well that you
should be in attendance also. You will not be discomposed by the Lord
Chancellor, I dare say?"

"No, sir," I said, "I don't think I shall," really not seeing on
consideration why I should be.

So Mr. Kenge gave me his arm and we went round the corner, under a
colonnade, and in at a side door. And so we came, along a passage,
into a comfortable sort of room where a young lady and a young
gentleman were standing near a great, loud-roaring fire. A screen was
interposed between them and it, and they were leaning on the screen,
talking.

They both looked up when I came in, and I saw in the young lady, with
the fire shining upon her, such a beautiful girl! With such rich
golden hair, such soft blue eyes, and such a bright, innocent,
trusting face!

"Miss Ada," said Mr. Kenge, "this is Miss Summerson."

She came to meet me with a smile of welcome and her hand extended,
but seemed to change her mind in a moment and kissed me. In short,
she had such a natural, captivating, winning manner that in a few
minutes we were sitting in the window-seat, with the light of the
fire upon us, talking together as free and happy as could be.

What a load off my mind! It was so delightful to know that she could
confide in me and like me! It was so good of her, and so encouraging
to me!

The young gentleman was her distant cousin, she told me, and his name
Richard Carstone. He was a handsome youth with an ingenuous face and
a most engaging laugh; and after she had called him up to where we
sat, he stood by us, in the light of the fire, talking gaily, like a
light-hearted boy. He was very young, not more than nineteen then, if
quite so much, but nearly two years older than she was. They were
both orphans and (what was very unexpected and curious to me) had
never met before that day. Our all three coming together for the
first time in such an unusual place was a thing to talk about, and we
talked about it; and the fire, which had left off roaring, winked its
red eyes at us--as Richard said--like a drowsy old Chancery lion.

We conversed in a low tone because a full-dressed gentleman in a bag
wig frequently came in and out, and when he did so, we could hear a
drawling sound in the distance, which he said was one of the counsel
in our case addressing the Lord Chancellor. He told Mr. Kenge that
the Chancellor would be up in five minutes; and presently we heard a
bustle and a tread of feet, and Mr. Kenge said that the Court had
risen and his lordship was in the next room.

The gentleman in the bag wig opened the door almost directly and
requested Mr. Kenge to come in. Upon that, we all went into the next
room, Mr. Kenge first, with my darling--it is so natural to me now
that I can't help writing it; and there, plainly dressed in black and
sitting in an arm-chair at a table near the fire, was his lordship,
whose robe, trimmed with beautiful gold lace, was thrown upon another
chair. He gave us a searching look as we entered, but his manner was
both courtly and kind.

The gentleman in the bag wig laid bundles of papers on his lordship's
table, and his lordship silently selected one and turned over the
leaves.

"Miss Clare," said the Lord Chancellor. "Miss Ada Clare?"

Mr. Kenge presented her, and his lordship begged her to sit down near
him. That he admired her and was interested by her even I could see
in a moment. It touched me that the home of such a beautiful young
creature should be represented by that dry, official place. The Lord
High Chancellor, at his best, appeared so poor a substitute for the
love and pride of parents.

"The Jarndyce in question," said the Lord Chancellor, still turning
over leaves, "is Jarndyce of Bleak House."

"Jarndyce of Bleak House, my lord," said Mr. Kenge.

"A dreary name," said the Lord Chancellor.

"But not a dreary place at present, my lord," said Mr. Kenge.

"And Bleak House," said his lordship, "is in--"

"Hertfordshire, my lord."

"Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House is not married?" said his lordship.

"He is not, my lord," said Mr. Kenge.

A pause.

"Young Mr. Richard Carstone is present?" said the Lord Chancellor,
glancing towards him.

Richard bowed and stepped forward.

"Hum!" said the Lord Chancellor, turning over more leaves.

"Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House, my lord," Mr. Kenge observed in a low
voice, "if I may venture to remind your lordship, provides a suitable
companion for--"

"For Mr. Richard Carstone?" I thought (but I am not quite sure) I
heard his lordship say in an equally low voice and with a smile.

"For Miss Ada Clare. This is the young lady. Miss Summerson."

His lordship gave me an indulgent look and acknowledged my curtsy
very graciously.

"Miss Summerson is not related to any party in the cause, I think?"

"No, my lord."

Mr. Kenge leant over before it was quite said and whispered. His
lordship, with his eyes upon his papers, listened, nodded twice or
thrice, turned over more leaves, and did not look towards me again
until we were going away.

Mr. Kenge now retired, and Richard with him, to where I was, near the
door, leaving my pet (it is so natural to me that again I can't help
it!) sitting near the Lord Chancellor, with whom his lordship spoke a
little part, asking her, as she told me afterwards, whether she had
well reflected on the proposed arrangement, and if she thought she
would be happy under the roof of Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House, and why
she thought so? Presently he rose courteously and released her, and
then he spoke for a minute or two with Richard Carstone, not seated,
but standing, and altogether with more ease and less ceremony, as if
he still knew, though he WAS Lord Chancellor, how to go straight to
the candour of a boy.

"Very well!" said his lordship aloud. "I shall make the order. Mr.
Jarndyce of Bleak House has chosen, so far as I may judge," and this
was when he looked at me, "a very good companion for the young lady,
and the arrangement altogether seems the best of which the
circumstances admit."

He dismissed us pleasantly, and we all went out, very much obliged to
him for being so affable and polite, by which he had certainly lost
no dignity but seemed to us to have gained some.

When we got under the colonnade, Mr. Kenge remembered that he must go
back for a moment to ask a question and left us in the fog, with the
Lord Chancellor's carriage and servants waiting for him to come out.

"Well!" said Richard Carstone. "THAT'S over! And where do we go next,
Miss Summerson?"

"Don't you know?" I said.

"Not in the least," said he.

"And don't YOU know, my love?" I asked Ada.

"No!" said she. "Don't you?"

"Not at all!" said I.

We looked at one another, half laughing at our being like the
children in the wood, when a curious little old woman in a squeezed
bonnet and carrying a reticule came curtsying and smiling up to us
with an air of great ceremony.

"Oh!" said she. "The wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure, to
have the honour! It is a good omen for youth, and hope, and beauty
when they find themselves in this place, and don't know what's to
come of it."

"Mad!" whispered Richard, not thinking she could hear him.

"Right! Mad, young gentleman," she returned so quickly that he was
quite abashed. "I was a ward myself. I was not mad at that time,"
curtsying low and smiling between every little sentence. "I had youth
and hope. I believe, beauty. It matters very little now. Neither of
the three served or saved me. I have the honour to attend court
regularly. With my documents. I expect a judgment. Shortly. On the
Day of Judgment. I have discovered that the sixth seal mentioned in
the Revelations is the Great Seal. It has been open a long time! Pray
accept my blessing."

As Ada was a little frightened, I said, to humour the poor old lady,
that we were much obliged to her.

"Ye-es!" she said mincingly. "I imagine so. And here is Conversation
Kenge. With HIS documents! How does your honourable worship do?"

"Quite well, quite well! Now don't be troublesome, that's a good
soul!" said Mr. Kenge, leading the way back.

"By no means," said the poor old lady, keeping up with Ada and me.
"Anything but troublesome. I shall confer estates on both--which is
not being troublesome, I trust? I expect a judgment. Shortly. On the
Day of Judgment. This is a good omen for you. Accept my blessing!"

She stopped at the bottom of the steep, broad flight of stairs; but
we looked back as we went up, and she was still there, saying, still
with a curtsy and a smile between every little sentence, "Youth. And
hope. And beauty. And Chancery. And Conversation Kenge! Ha! Pray
accept my blessing!"




CHAPTER IV

Telescopic Philanthropy


We were to pass the night, Mr. Kenge told us when we arrived in his
room, at Mrs. Jellyby's; and then he turned to me and said he took it
for granted I knew who Mrs. Jellyby was.

"I really don't, sir," I returned. "Perhaps Mr. Carstone--or Miss
Clare--"

But no, they knew nothing whatever about Mrs. Jellyby. "In-deed! Mrs.
Jellyby," said Mr. Kenge, standing with his back to the fire and
casting his eyes over the dusty hearth-rug as if it were Mrs.
Jellyby's biography, "is a lady of very remarkable strength of
character who devotes herself entirely to the public. She has devoted
herself to an extensive variety of public subjects at various times
and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the
subject of Africa, with a view to the general cultivation of the
coffee berry--AND the natives--and the happy settlement, on the banks
of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population. Mr.
Jarndyce, who is desirous to aid any work that is considered likely
to be a good work and who is much sought after by philanthropists,
has, I believe, a very high opinion of Mrs. Jellyby."

Mr. Kenge, adjusting his cravat, then looked at us.

"And Mr. Jellyby, sir?" suggested Richard.

"Ah! Mr. Jellyby," said Mr. Kenge, "is--a--I don't know that I can
describe him to you better than by saying that he is the husband of
Mrs. Jellyby."

"A nonentity, sir?" said Richard with a droll look.

"I don't say that," returned Mr. Kenge gravely. "I can't say that,
indeed, for I know nothing whatever OF Mr. Jellyby. I never, to my
knowledge, had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Jellyby. He may be a very
superior man, but he is, so to speak, merged--merged--in the more
shining qualities of his wife." Mr. Kenge proceeded to tell us that
as the road to Bleak House would have been very long, dark, and
tedious on such an evening, and as we had been travelling already,
Mr. Jarndyce had himself proposed this arrangement. A carriage would
be at Mrs. Jellyby's to convey us out of town early in the forenoon
of to-morrow.

He then rang a little bell, and the young gentleman came in.
Addressing him by the name of Guppy, Mr. Kenge inquired whether Miss
Summerson's boxes and the rest of the baggage had been "sent round."
Mr. Guppy said yes, they had been sent round, and a coach was waiting
to take us round too as soon as we pleased.

"Then it only remains," said Mr. Kenge, shaking hands with us, "for
me to express my lively satisfaction in (good day, Miss Clare!) the
arrangement this day concluded and my (GOOD-bye to you, Miss
Summerson!) lively hope that it will conduce to the happiness, the
(glad to have had the honour of making your acquaintance, Mr.
Carstone!) welfare, the advantage in all points of view, of all
concerned! Guppy, see the party safely there."

"Where IS 'there,' Mr. Guppy?" said Richard as we went downstairs.

"No distance," said Mr. Guppy; "round in Thavies Inn, you know."

"I can't say I know where it is, for I come from Winchester and am
strange in London."

"Only round the corner," said Mr. Guppy. "We just twist up Chancery
Lane, and cut along Holborn, and there we are in four minutes' time,
as near as a toucher. This is about a London particular NOW, ain't
it, miss?" He seemed quite delighted with it on my account.

"The fog is very dense indeed!" said I.

"Not that it affects you, though, I'm sure," said Mr. Guppy, putting
up the steps. "On the contrary, it seems to do you good, miss,
judging from your appearance."

I knew he meant well in paying me this compliment, so I laughed at
myself for blushing at it when he had shut the door and got upon the
box; and we all three laughed and chatted about our inexperience and
the strangeness of London until we turned up under an archway to our
destination--a narrow street of high houses like an oblong cistern to
hold the fog. There was a confused little crowd of people,
principally children, gathered about the house at which we stopped,
which had a tarnished brass plate on the door with the inscription
JELLYBY.

"Don't be frightened!" said Mr. Guppy, looking in at the
coach-window. "One of the young Jellybys been and got his head
through the area railings!"

"Oh, poor child," said I; "let me out, if you please!"

"Pray be careful of yourself, miss. The young Jellybys are always up
to something," said Mr. Guppy.

I made my way to the poor child, who was one of the dirtiest little
unfortunates I ever saw, and found him very hot and frightened and
crying loudly, fixed by the neck between two iron railings, while a
milkman and a beadle, with the kindest intentions possible, were
endeavouring to drag him back by the legs, under a general impression
that his skull was compressible by those means. As I found (after
pacifying him) that he was a little boy with a naturally large head,
I thought that perhaps where his head could go, his body could
follow, and mentioned that the best mode of extrication might be to
push him forward. This was so favourably received by the milkman and
beadle that he would immediately have been pushed into the area if I
had not held his pinafore while Richard and Mr. Guppy ran down
through the kitchen to catch him when he should be released. At last
he was happily got down without any accident, and then he began to
beat Mr. Guppy with a hoop-stick in quite a frantic manner.

Nobody had appeared belonging to the house except a person in
pattens, who had been poking at the child from below with a broom; I
don't know with what object, and I don't think she did. I therefore
supposed that Mrs. Jellyby was not at home, and was quite surprised
when the person appeared in the passage without the pattens, and
going up to the back room on the first floor before Ada and me,
announced us as, "Them two young ladies, Missis Jellyby!" We passed
several more children on the way up, whom it was difficult to avoid
treading on in the dark; and as we came into Mrs. Jellyby's presence,
one of the poor little things fell downstairs--down a whole flight
(as it sounded to me), with a great noise.

Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we
could not help showing in our own faces as the dear child's head
recorded its passage with a bump on every stair--Richard afterwards
said he counted seven, besides one for the landing--received us with
perfect equanimity. She was a pretty, very diminutive, plump woman of
from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious
habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if--I am quoting Richard
again--they could see nothing nearer than Africa!

"I am very glad indeed," said Mrs. Jellyby in an agreeable voice, "to
have the pleasure of receiving you. I have a great respect for Mr.
Jarndyce, and no one in whom he is interested can be an object of
indifference to me."

We expressed our acknowledgments and sat down behind the door, where
there was a lame invalid of a sofa. Mrs. Jellyby had very good hair
but was too much occupied with her African duties to brush it. The
shawl in which she had been loosely muffled dropped onto her chair
when she advanced to us; and as she turned to resume her seat, we
could not help noticing that her dress didn't nearly meet up the back
and that the open space was railed across with a lattice-work of
stay-lace--like a summer-house.

The room, which was strewn with papers and nearly filled by a great
writing-table covered with similar litter, was, I must say, not only
very untidy but very dirty. We were obliged to take notice of that
with our sense of sight, even while, with our sense of hearing, we
followed the poor child who had tumbled downstairs: I think into the
back kitchen, where somebody seemed to stifle him.

But what principally struck us was a jaded and unhealthy-looking
though by no means plain girl at the writing-table, who sat biting
the feather of her pen and staring at us. I suppose nobody ever was
in such a state of ink. And from her tumbled hair to her pretty feet,
which were disfigured with frayed and broken satin slippers trodden
down at heel, she really seemed to have no article of dress upon her,
from a pin upwards, that was in its proper condition or its right
place.

"You find me, my dears," said Mrs. Jellyby, snuffing the two great
office candles in tin candlesticks, which made the room taste
strongly of hot tallow (the fire had gone out, and there was nothing
in the grate but ashes, a bundle of wood, and a poker), "you find me,
my dears, as usual, very busy; but that you will excuse. The African
project at present employs my whole time. It involves me in
correspondence with public bodies and with private individuals
anxious for the welfare of their species all over the country. I am
happy to say it is advancing. We hope by this time next year to have
from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating
coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank
of the Niger."

As Ada said nothing, but looked at me, I said it must be very
gratifying.

"It IS gratifying," said Mrs. Jellyby. "It involves the devotion of
all my energies, such as they are; but that is nothing, so that it
succeeds; and I am more confident of success every day. Do you know,
Miss Summerson, I almost wonder that YOU never turned your thoughts
to Africa."

This application of the subject was really so unexpected to me that I
was quite at a loss how to receive it. I hinted that the climate--

"The finest climate in the world!" said Mrs. Jellyby.

"Indeed, ma'am?"

"Certainly. With precaution," said Mrs. Jellyby. "You may go into
Holborn, without precaution, and be run over. You may go into
Holborn, with precaution, and never be run over. Just so with
Africa."

I said, "No doubt." I meant as to Holborn.

"If you would like," said Mrs. Jellyby, putting a number of papers
towards us, "to look over some remarks on that head, and on the
general subject, which have been extensively circulated, while I
finish a letter I am now dictating to my eldest daughter, who is my
amanuensis--"

The girl at the table left off biting her pen and made a return to
our recognition, which was half bashful and half sulky.

"--I shall then have finished for the present," proceeded Mrs.
Jellyby with a sweet smile, "though my work is never done. Where are
you, Caddy?"

"'Presents her compliments to Mr. Swallow, and begs--'" said Caddy.

"'And begs,'" said Mrs. Jellyby, dictating, "'to inform him, in
reference to his letter of inquiry on the African project--' No,
Peepy! Not on my account!"

Peepy (so self-named) was the unfortunate child who had fallen
downstairs, who now interrupted the correspondence by presenting
himself, with a strip of plaster on his forehead, to exhibit his
wounded knees, in which Ada and I did not know which to pity
most--the bruises or the dirt. Mrs. Jellyby merely added, with the
serene composure with which she said everything, "Go along, you
naughty Peepy!" and fixed her fine eyes on Africa again.

However, as she at once proceeded with her dictation, and as I
interrupted nothing by doing it, I ventured quietly to stop poor
Peepy as he was going out and to take him up to nurse. He looked very
much astonished at it and at Ada's kissing him, but soon fell fast
asleep in my arms, sobbing at longer and longer intervals, until he
was quiet. I was so occupied with Peepy that I lost the letter in
detail, though I derived such a general impression from it of the
momentous importance of Africa, and the utter insignificance of all
other places and things, that I felt quite ashamed to have thought so
little about it.

"Six o'clock!" said Mrs. Jellyby. "And our dinner hour is nominally
(for we dine at all hours) five! Caddy, show Miss Clare and Miss
Summerson their rooms. You will like to make some change, perhaps?
You will excuse me, I know, being so much occupied. Oh, that very bad
child! Pray put him down, Miss Summerson!"

I begged permission to retain him, truly saying that he was not at
all troublesome, and carried him upstairs and laid him on my bed. Ada
and I had two upper rooms with a door of communication between. They
were excessively bare and disorderly, and the curtain to my window
was fastened up with a fork.

"You would like some hot water, wouldn't you?" said Miss Jellyby,
looking round for a jug with a handle to it, but looking in vain.

"If it is not being troublesome," said we.

"Oh, it's not the trouble," returned Miss Jellyby; "the question is,
if there IS any."

The evening was so very cold and the rooms had such a marshy smell
that I must confess it was a little miserable, and Ada was half
crying. We soon laughed, however, and were busily unpacking when Miss
Jellyby came back to say that she was sorry there was no hot water,
but they couldn't find the kettle, and the boiler was out of order.

We begged her not to mention it and made all the haste we could to
get down to the fire again. But all the little children had come up
to the landing outside to look at the phenomenon of Peepy lying on my
bed, and our attention was distracted by the constant apparition of
noses and fingers in situations of danger between the hinges of the
doors. It was impossible to shut the door of either room, for my
lock, with no knob to it, looked as if it wanted to be wound up; and
though the handle of Ada's went round and round with the greatest
smoothness, it was attended with no effect whatever on the door.
Therefore I proposed to the children that they should come in and be
very good at my table, and I would tell them the story of Little Red
Riding Hood while I dressed; which they did, and were as quiet as
mice, including Peepy, who awoke opportunely before the appearance of
the wolf.

When we went downstairs we found a mug with "A Present from Tunbridge
Wells" on it lighted up in the staircase window with a floating wick,
and a young woman, with a swelled face bound up in a flannel bandage
blowing the fire of the drawing-room (now connected by an open door
with Mrs. Jellyby's room) and choking dreadfully. It smoked to that
degree, in short, that we all sat coughing and crying with the
windows open for half an hour, during which Mrs. Jellyby, with the
same sweetness of temper, directed letters about Africa. Her being so
employed was, I must say, a great relief to me, for Richard told us
that he had washed his hands in a pie-dish and that they had found
the kettle on his dressing-table, and he made Ada laugh so that they
made me laugh in the most ridiculous manner.

Soon after seven o'clock we went down to dinner, carefully, by Mrs.
Jellyby's advice, for the stair-carpets, besides being very deficient
in stair-wires, were so torn as to be absolute traps. We had a fine
cod-fish, a piece of roast beef, a dish of cutlets, and a pudding; an
excellent dinner, if it had had any cooking to speak of, but it was
almost raw. The young woman with the flannel bandage waited, and
dropped everything on the table wherever it happened to go, and never
moved it again until she put it on the stairs. The person I had seen
in pattens, who I suppose to have been the cook, frequently came and
skirmished with her at the door, and there appeared to be ill will
between them.

All through dinner--which was long, in consequence of such accidents
as the dish of potatoes being mislaid in the coal skuttle and the
handle of the corkscrew coming off and striking the young woman in
the chin--Mrs. Jellyby preserved the evenness of her disposition. She
told us a great deal that was interesting about Borrioboola-Gha and
the natives, and received so many letters that Richard, who sat by
her, saw four envelopes in the gravy at once. Some of the letters
were proceedings of ladies' committees or resolutions of ladies'
meetings, which she read to us; others were applications from people
excited in various ways about the cultivation of coffee, and natives;
others required answers, and these she sent her eldest daughter from
the table three or four times to write. She was full of business and
undoubtedly was, as she had told us, devoted to the cause.

I was a little curious to know who a mild bald gentleman in
spectacles was, who dropped into a vacant chair (there was no top or
bottom in particular) after the fish was taken away and seemed
passively to submit himself to Borrioboola-Gha but not to be actively
interested in that settlement. As he never spoke a word, he might
have been a native but for his complexion. It was not until we left
the table and he remained alone with Richard that the possibility of
his being Mr. Jellyby ever entered my head. But he WAS Mr. Jellyby;
and a loquacious young man called Mr. Quale, with large shining knobs
for temples and his hair all brushed to the back of his head, who
came in the evening, and told Ada he was a philanthropist, also
informed her that he called the matrimonial alliance of Mrs. Jellyby
with Mr. Jellyby the union of mind and matter.

This young man, besides having a great deal to say for himself about
Africa and a project of his for teaching the coffee colonists to
teach the natives to turn piano-forte legs and establish an export
trade, delighted in drawing Mrs. Jellyby out by saying, "I believe
now, Mrs. Jellyby, you have received as many as from one hundred and
fifty to two hundred letters respecting Africa in a single day, have
you not?" or, "If my memory does not deceive me, Mrs. Jellyby, you
once mentioned that you had sent off five thousand circulars from one
post-office at one time?"--always repeating Mrs. Jellyby's answer to
us like an interpreter. During the whole evening, Mr. Jellyby sat in
a corner with his head against the wall as if he were subject to low
spirits. It seemed that he had several times opened his mouth when
alone with Richard after dinner, as if he had something on his mind,
but had always shut it again, to Richard's extreme confusion, without
saying anything.

Mrs. Jellyby, sitting in quite a nest of waste paper, drank coffee
all the evening and dictated at intervals to her eldest daughter. She
also held a discussion with Mr. Quale, of which the subject seemed to
be--if I understood it--the brotherhood of humanity, and gave
utterance to some beautiful sentiments. I was not so attentive an
auditor as I might have wished to be, however, for Peepy and the
other children came flocking about Ada and me in a corner of the
drawing-room to ask for another story; so we sat down among them and
told them in whispers "Puss in Boots" and I don't know what else
until Mrs. Jellyby, accidentally remembering them, sent them to bed.
As Peepy cried for me to take him to bed, I carried him upstairs,
where the young woman with the flannel bandage charged into the midst
of the little family like a dragon and overturned them into cribs.

After that I occupied myself in making our room a little tidy and in
coaxing a very cross fire that had been lighted to burn, which at
last it did, quite brightly. On my return downstairs, I felt that
Mrs. Jellyby looked down upon me rather for being so frivolous, and I
was sorry for it, though at the same time I knew that I had no higher
pretensions.

It was nearly midnight before we found an opportunity of going to
bed, and even then we left Mrs. Jellyby among her papers drinking
coffee and Miss Jellyby biting the feather of her pen.

"What a strange house!" said Ada when we got upstairs. "How curious
of my cousin Jarndyce to send us here!"

"My love," said I, "it quite confuses me. I want to understand it,
and I can't understand it at all."

"What?" asked Ada with her pretty smile.

"All this, my dear," said I. "It MUST be very good of Mrs. Jellyby to
take such pains about a scheme for the benefit of natives--and
yet--Peepy and the housekeeping!"

Ada laughed and put her arm about my neck as I stood looking at the
fire, and told me I was a quiet, dear, good creature and had won her
heart. "You are so thoughtful, Esther," she said, "and yet so
cheerful! And you do so much, so unpretendingly! You would make a
home out of even this house."

My simple darling! She was quite unconscious that she only praised
herself and that it was in the goodness of her own heart that she
made so much of me!

"May I ask you a question?" said I when we had sat before the fire a
little while.

"Five hundred," said Ada.

"Your cousin, Mr. Jarndyce. I owe so much to him. Would you mind
describing him to me?"

Shaking her golden hair, Ada turned her eyes upon me with such
laughing wonder that I was full of wonder too, partly at her beauty,
partly at her surprise.

"Esther!" she cried.

"My dear!"

"You want a description of my cousin Jarndyce?"

"My dear, I never saw him."

"And I never saw him!" returned Ada.

Well, to be sure!

No, she had never seen him. Young as she was when her mama died, she
remembered how the tears would come into her eyes when she spoke of
him and of the noble generosity of his character, which she had said
was to be trusted above all earthly things; and Ada trusted it. Her
cousin Jarndyce had written to her a few months ago--"a plain, honest
letter," Ada said--proposing the arrangement we were now to enter on
and telling her that "in time it might heal some of the wounds made
by the miserable Chancery suit." She had replied, gratefully
accepting his proposal. Richard had received a similar letter and had
made a similar response. He HAD seen Mr. Jarndyce once, but only
once, five years ago, at Winchester school. He had told Ada, when
they were leaning on the screen before the fire where I found them,
that he recollected him as "a bluff, rosy fellow." This was the
utmost description Ada could give me.

It set me thinking so that when Ada was asleep, I still remained
before the fire, wondering and wondering about Bleak House, and
wondering and wondering that yesterday morning should seem so long
ago. I don't know where my thoughts had wandered when they were
recalled by a tap at the door.

I opened it softly and found Miss Jellyby shivering there with a
broken candle in a broken candlestick in one hand and an egg-cup in
the other.

"Good night!" she said very sulkily.

"Good night!" said I.

"May I come in?" she shortly and unexpectedly asked me in the same
sulky way.

"Certainly," said I. "Don't wake Miss Clare."

She would not sit down, but stood by the fire dipping her inky middle
finger in the egg-cup, which contained vinegar, and smearing it over
the ink stains on her face, frowning the whole time and looking very
gloomy.

"I wish Africa was dead!" she said on a sudden.

I was going to remonstrate.

"I do!" she said "Don't talk to me, Miss Summerson. I hate it and
detest it. It's a beast!"

I told her she was tired, and I was sorry. I put my hand upon her
head, and touched her forehead, and said it was hot now but would be
cool to-morrow. She still stood pouting and frowning at me, but
presently put down her egg-cup and turned softly towards the bed
where Ada lay.

"She is very pretty!" she said with the same knitted brow and in the
same uncivil manner.

I assented with a smile.

"An orphan. Ain't she?"

"Yes."

"But knows a quantity, I suppose? Can dance, and play music, and
sing? She can talk French, I suppose, and do geography, and globes,
and needlework, and everything?"

"No doubt," said I.

"I can't," she returned. "I can't do anything hardly, except write.
I'm always writing for Ma. I wonder you two were not ashamed of
yourselves to come in this afternoon and see me able to do nothing
else. It was like your ill nature. Yet you think yourselves very
fine, I dare say!"

I could see that the poor girl was near crying, and I resumed my
chair without speaking and looked at her (I hope) as mildly as I felt
towards her.

"It's disgraceful," she said. "You know it is. The whole house is
disgraceful. The children are disgraceful. I'M disgraceful. Pa's
miserable, and no wonder! Priscilla drinks--she's always drinking.
It's a great shame and a great story of you if you say you didn't
smell her to-day. It was as bad as a public-house, waiting at dinner;
you know it was!"

"My dear, I don't know it," said I.

"You do," she said very shortly. "You shan't say you don't. You do!"

"Oh, my dear!" said I. "If you won't let me speak--"

"You're speaking now. You know you are. Don't tell stories, Miss
Summerson."

"My dear," said I, "as long as you won't hear me out--"

"I don't want to hear you out."

"Oh, yes, I think you do," said I, "because that would be so very
unreasonable. I did not know what you tell me because the servant did
not come near me at dinner; but I don't doubt what you tell me, and I
am sorry to hear it."

"You needn't make a merit of that," said she.

"No, my dear," said I. "That would be very foolish."

She was still standing by the bed, and now stooped down (but still
with the same discontented face) and kissed Ada. That done, she came
softly back and stood by the side of my chair. Her bosom was heaving
in a distressful manner that I greatly pitied, but I thought it
better not to speak.

"I wish I was dead!" she broke out. "I wish we were all dead. It
would be a great deal better for us."

In a moment afterwards, she knelt on the ground at my side, hid her
face in my dress, passionately begged my pardon, and wept. I
comforted her and would have raised her, but she cried no, no; she
wanted to stay there!

"You used to teach girls," she said, "If you could only have taught
me, I could have learnt from you! I am so very miserable, and I like
you so much!"

I could not persuade her to sit by me or to do anything but move a
ragged stool to where she was kneeling, and take that, and still hold
my dress in the same manner. By degrees the poor tired girl fell
asleep, and then I contrived to raise her head so that it should rest
on my lap, and to cover us both with shawls. The fire went out, and
all night long she slumbered thus before the ashy grate. At first I
was painfully awake and vainly tried to lose myself, with my eyes
closed, among the scenes of the day. At length, by slow degrees, they
became indistinct and mingled. I began to lose the identity of the
sleeper resting on me. Now it was Ada, now one of my old Reading
friends from whom I could not believe I had so recently parted. Now
it was the little mad woman worn out with curtsying and smiling, now
some one in authority at Bleak House. Lastly, it was no one, and I
was no one.

The purblind day was feebly struggling with the fog when I opened my
eyes to encounter those of a dirty-faced little spectre fixed upon
me. Peepy had scaled his crib, and crept down in his bed-gown and
cap, and was so cold that his teeth were chattering as if he had cut
them all.




CHAPTER V

A Morning Adventure


Although the morning was raw, and although the fog still seemed
heavy--I say seemed, for the windows were so encrusted with dirt that
they would have made midsummer sunshine dim--I was sufficiently
forewarned of the discomfort within doors at that early hour and
sufficiently curious about London to think it a good idea on the part
of Miss Jellyby when she proposed that we should go out for a walk.

"Ma won't be down for ever so long," she said, "and then it's a
chance if breakfast's ready for an hour afterwards, they dawdle so.
As to Pa, he gets what he can and goes to the office. He never has
what you would call a regular breakfast. Priscilla leaves him out the
loaf and some milk, when there is any, overnight. Sometimes there
isn't any milk, and sometimes the cat drinks it. But I'm afraid you
must be tired, Miss Summerson, and perhaps you would rather go to
bed."

"I am not at all tired, my dear," said I, "and would much prefer to
go out."

"If you're sure you would," returned Miss Jellyby, "I'll get my
things on."

Ada said she would go too, and was soon astir. I made a proposal to
Peepy, in default of being able to do anything better for him, that
he should let me wash him and afterwards lay him down on my bed
again. To this he submitted with the best grace possible, staring at
me during the whole operation as if he never had been, and never
could again be, so astonished in his life--looking very miserable
also, certainly, but making no complaint, and going snugly to sleep
as soon as it was over. At first I was in two minds about taking such
a liberty, but I soon reflected that nobody in the house was likely
to notice it.

What with the bustle of dispatching Peepy and the bustle of getting
myself ready and helping Ada, I was soon quite in a glow. We found
Miss Jellyby trying to warm herself at the fire in the writing-room,
which Priscilla was then lighting with a smutty parlour candlestick,
throwing the candle in to make it burn better. Everything was just as
we had left it last night and was evidently intended to remain so.
Below-stairs the dinner-cloth had not been taken away, but had been
left ready for breakfast. Crumbs, dust, and waste-paper were all over
the house. Some pewter pots and a milk-can hung on the area railings;
the door stood open; and we met the cook round the corner coming out
of a public-house, wiping her mouth. She mentioned, as she passed us,
that she had been to see what o'clock it was.

But before we met the cook, we met Richard, who was dancing up and
down Thavies Inn to warm his feet. He was agreeably surprised to see
us stirring so soon and said he would gladly share our walk. So he
took care of Ada, and Miss Jellyby and I went first. I may mention
that Miss Jellyby had relapsed into her sulky manner and that I
really should not have thought she liked me much unless she had told
me so.

"Where would you wish to go?" she asked.

"Anywhere, my dear," I replied.

"Anywhere's nowhere," said Miss Jellyby, stopping perversely.

"Let us go somewhere at any rate," said I.

She then walked me on very fast.

"I don't care!" she said. "Now, you are my witness, Miss Summerson, I
say I don't care--but if he was to come to our house with his great,
shining, lumpy forehead night after night till he was as old as
Methuselah, I wouldn't have anything to say to him. Such ASSES as he
and Ma make of themselves!"

"My dear!" I remonstrated, in allusion to the epithet and the
vigorous emphasis Miss Jellyby set upon it. "Your duty as a child--"

"Oh! Don't talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson; where's Ma's duty
as a parent? All made over to the public and Africa, I suppose! Then
let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it's much more their
affair than mine. You are shocked, I dare say! Very well, so am I
shocked too; so we are both shocked, and there's an end of it!"

She walked me on faster yet.

"But for all that, I say again, he may come, and come, and come, and
I won't have anything to say to him. I can't bear him. If there's any
stuff in the world that I hate and detest, it's the stuff he and Ma
talk. I wonder the very paving-stones opposite our house can have the
patience to stay there and be a witness of such inconsistencies and
contradictions as all that sounding nonsense, and Ma's management!"

I could not but understand her to refer to Mr. Quale, the young
gentleman who had appeared after dinner yesterday. I was saved the
disagreeable necessity of pursuing the subject by Richard and Ada
coming up at a round pace, laughing and asking us if we meant to run
a race. Thus interrupted, Miss Jellyby became silent and walked
moodily on at my side while I admired the long successions and
varieties of streets, the quantity of people already going to and
fro, the number of vehicles passing and repassing, the busy
preparations in the setting forth of shop windows and the sweeping
out of shops, and the extraordinary creatures in rags secretly
groping among the swept-out rubbish for pins and other refuse.

"So, cousin," said the cheerful voice of Richard to Ada behind me.
"We are never to get out of Chancery! We have come by another way to
our place of meeting yesterday, and--by the Great Seal, here's the
old lady again!"

Truly, there she was, immediately in front of us, curtsying, and
smiling, and saying with her yesterday's air of patronage, "The wards
in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure!"

"You are out early, ma'am," said I as she curtsied to me.

"Ye-es! I usually walk here early. Before the court sits. It's
retired. I collect my thoughts here for the business of the day,"
said the old lady mincingly. "The business of the day requires a
great deal of thought. Chancery justice is so ve-ry difficult to
follow."

"Who's this, Miss Summerson?" whispered Miss Jellyby, drawing my arm
tighter through her own.

The little old lady's hearing was remarkably quick. She answered for
herself directly.

"A suitor, my child. At your service. I have the honour to attend
court regularly. With my documents. Have I the pleasure of addressing
another of the youthful parties in Jarndyce?" said the old lady,
recovering herself, with her head on one side, from a very low
curtsy.

Richard, anxious to atone for his thoughtlessness of yesterday,
good-naturedly explained that Miss Jellyby was not connected with the
suit.

"Ha!" said the old lady. "She does not expect a judgment? She will
still grow old. But not so old. Oh, dear, no! This is the garden of
Lincoln's Inn. I call it my garden. It is quite a bower in the
summer-time. Where the birds sing melodiously. I pass the greater
part of the long vacation here. In contemplation. You find the long
vacation exceedingly long, don't you?"

We said yes, as she seemed to expect us to say so.

"When the leaves are falling from the trees and there are no more
flowers in bloom to make up into nosegays for the Lord Chancellor's
court," said the old lady, "the vacation is fulfilled and the sixth
seal, mentioned in the Revelations, again prevails. Pray come and see
my lodging. It will be a good omen for me. Youth, and hope, and
beauty are very seldom there. It is a long, long time since I had a
visit from either."

She had taken my hand, and leading me and Miss Jellyby away, beckoned
Richard and Ada to come too. I did not know how to excuse myself and
looked to Richard for aid. As he was half amused and half curious and
all in doubt how to get rid of the old lady without offence, she
continued to lead us away, and he and Ada continued to follow, our
strange conductress informing us all the time, with much smiling
condescension, that she lived close by.

It was quite true, as it soon appeared. She lived so close by that we
had not time to have done humouring her for a few moments before she
was at home. Slipping us out at a little side gate, the old lady
stopped most unexpectedly in a narrow back street, part of some
courts and lanes immediately outside the wall of the inn, and said,
"This is my lodging. Pray walk up!"

She had stopped at a shop over which was written KROOK, RAG AND
BOTTLE WAREHOUSE. Also, in long thin letters, KROOK, DEALER IN MARINE
STORES. In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill
at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old rags. In
another was the inscription BONES BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF
BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another, WASTE-PAPER BOUGHT.
In another, LADIES' AND GENTLEMEN'S WARDROBES BOUGHT. Everything
seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold there. In all parts of the
window were quantities of dirty bottles--blacking bottles, medicine
bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine
bottles, ink bottles; I am reminded by mentioning the latter that the
shop had in several little particulars the air of being in a legal
neighbourhood and of being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and
disowned relation of the law. There were a great many ink bottles.
There was a little tottering bench of shabby old volumes outside the
door, labelled "Law Books, all at 9d." Some of the inscriptions I
have enumerated were written in law-hand, like the papers I had seen
in Kenge and Carboy's office and the letters I had so long received
from the firm. Among them was one, in the same writing, having
nothing to do with the business of the shop, but announcing that a
respectable man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to
execute with neatness and dispatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr.
Krook, within. There were several second-hand bags, blue and red,
hanging up. A little way within the shop-door lay heaps of old
crackled parchment scrolls and discoloured and dog's-eared
law-papers. I could have fancied that all the rusty keys, of which
there must have been hundreds huddled together as old iron, had once
belonged to doors of rooms or strong chests in lawyers' offices. The
litter of rags tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged
wooden scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might
have been counsellors' bands and gowns torn up. One had only to
fancy, as Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking
in, that yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very
clean, were the bones of clients, to make the picture complete.

As it was still foggy and dark, and as the shop was blinded besides
by the wall of Lincoln's Inn, intercepting the light within a couple
of yards, we should not have seen so much but for a lighted lantern
that an old man in spectacles and a hairy cap was carrying about in
the shop. Turning towards the door, he now caught sight of us. He was
short, cadaverous, and withered, with his head sunk sideways between
his shoulders and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth
as if he were on fire within. His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so
frosted with white hairs and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin
that he looked from his breast upward like some old root in a fall of
snow.

"Hi, hi!" said the old man, coming to the door. "Have you anything to
sell?"

We naturally drew back and glanced at our conductress, who had been
trying to open the house-door with a key she had taken from her
pocket, and to whom Richard now said that as we had had the pleasure
of seeing where she lived, we would leave her, being pressed for
time. But she was not to be so easily left. She became so
fantastically and pressingly earnest in her entreaties that we would
walk up and see her apartment for an instant, and was so bent, in her
harmless way, on leading me in, as part of the good omen she desired,
that I (whatever the others might do) saw nothing for it but to
comply. I suppose we were all more or less curious; at any rate, when
the old man added his persuasions to hers and said, "Aye, aye! Please
her! It won't take a minute! Come in, come in! Come in through the
shop if t'other door's out of order!" we all went in, stimulated by
Richard's laughing encouragement and relying on his protection.

"My landlord, Krook," said the little old lady, condescending to him
from her lofty station as she presented him to us. "He is called
among the neighbours the Lord Chancellor. His shop is called the
Court of Chancery. He is a very eccentric person. He is very odd. Oh,
I assure you he is very odd!"

She shook her head a great many times and tapped her forehead with
her finger to express to us that we must have the goodness to excuse
him, "For he is a little--you know--M!" said the old lady with great
stateliness. The old man overheard, and laughed.

"It's true enough," he said, going before us with the lantern, "that
they call me the Lord Chancellor and call my shop Chancery. And why
do you think they call me the Lord Chancellor and my shop Chancery?"

"I don't know, I am sure!" said Richard rather carelessly.

"You see," said the old man, stopping and turning round, "they--Hi!
Here's lovely hair! I have got three sacks of ladies' hair below, but
none so beautiful and fine as this. What colour, and what texture!"

"That'll do, my good friend!" said Richard, strongly disapproving of
his having drawn one of Ada's tresses through his yellow hand. "You
can admire as the rest of us do without taking that liberty."

The old man darted at him a sudden look which even called my
attention from Ada, who, startled and blushing, was so remarkably
beautiful that she seemed to fix the wandering attention of the
little old lady herself. But as Ada interposed and laughingly said
she could only feel proud of such genuine admiration, Mr. Krook
shrunk into his former self as suddenly as he had leaped out of it.

"You see, I have so many things here," he resumed, holding up the
lantern, "of so many kinds, and all as the neighbours think (but THEY
know nothing), wasting away and going to rack and ruin, that that's
why they have given me and my place a christening. And I have so many
old parchmentses and papers in my stock. And I have a liking for rust
and must and cobwebs. And all's fish that comes to my net. And I
can't abear to part with anything I once lay hold of (or so my
neighbours think, but what do THEY know?) or to alter anything, or to
have any sweeping, nor scouring, nor cleaning, nor repairing going on
about me. That's the way I've got the ill name of Chancery. I don't
mind. I go to see my noble and learned brother pretty well every day,
when he sits in the Inn. He don't notice me, but I notice him.
There's no great odds betwixt us. We both grub on in a muddle. Hi,
Lady Jane!"

A large grey cat leaped from some neighbouring shelf on his shoulder
and startled us all.

"Hi! Show 'em how you scratch. Hi! Tear, my lady!" said her master.

The cat leaped down and ripped at a bundle of rags with her tigerish
claws, with a sound that it set my teeth on edge to hear.

"She'd do as much for any one I was to set her on," said the old man.
"I deal in cat-skins among other general matters, and hers was
offered to me. It's a very fine skin, as you may see, but I didn't
have it stripped off! THAT warn't like Chancery practice though, says
you!"

He had by this time led us across the shop, and now opened a door in
the back part of it, leading to the house-entry. As he stood with his
hand upon the lock, the little old lady graciously observed to him
before passing out, "That will do, Krook. You mean well, but are
tiresome. My young friends are pressed for time. I have none to spare
myself, having to attend court very soon. My young friends are the
wards in Jarndyce."

"Jarndyce!" said the old man with a start.

"Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The great suit, Krook," returned his lodger.

"Hi!" exclaimed the old man in a tone of thoughtful amazement and
with a wider stare than before. "Think of it!"

He seemed so rapt all in a moment and looked so curiously at us that
Richard said, "Why, you appear to trouble yourself a good deal about
the causes before your noble and learned brother, the other
Chancellor!"

"Yes," said the old man abstractedly. "Sure! YOUR name now will be--"

"Richard Carstone."

"Carstone," he repeated, slowly checking off that name upon his
forefinger; and each of the others he went on to mention upon a
separate finger. "Yes. There was the name of Barbary, and the name of
Clare, and the name of Dedlock, too, I think."

"He knows as much of the cause as the real salaried Chancellor!" said
Richard, quite astonished, to Ada and me.

"Aye!" said the old man, coming slowly out of his abstraction. "Yes!
Tom Jarndyce--you'll excuse me, being related; but he was never known
about court by any other name, and was as well known there as--she is
now," nodding slightly at his lodger. "Tom Jarndyce was often in
here. He got into a restless habit of strolling about when the cause
was on, or expected, talking to the little shopkeepers and telling
'em to keep out of Chancery, whatever they did. 'For,' says he, 'it's
being ground to bits in a slow mill; it's being roasted at a slow
fire; it's being stung to death by single bees; it's being drowned by
drops; it's going mad by grains.' He was as near making away with
himself, just where the young lady stands, as near could be."

We listened with horror.

"He come in at the door," said the old man, slowly pointing an
imaginary track along the shop, "on the day he did it--the whole
neighbourhood had said for months before that he would do it, of a
certainty sooner or later--he come in at the door that day, and
walked along there, and sat himself on a bench that stood there, and
asked me (you'll judge I was a mortal sight younger then) to fetch
him a pint of wine. 'For,' says he, 'Krook, I am much depressed; my
cause is on again, and I think I'm nearer judgment than I ever was.'
I hadn't a mind to leave him alone; and I persuaded him to go to the
tavern over the way there, t'other side my lane (I mean Chancery
Lane); and I followed and looked in at the window, and saw him,
comfortable as I thought, in the arm-chair by the fire, and company
with him. I hadn't hardly got back here when I heard a shot go
echoing and rattling right away into the inn. I ran out--neighbours
ran out--twenty of us cried at once, 'Tom Jarndyce!'"

The old man stopped, looked hard at us, looked down into the lantern,
blew the light out, and shut the lantern up.

"We were right, I needn't tell the present hearers. Hi! To be sure,
how the neighbourhood poured into court that afternoon while the
cause was on! How my noble and learned brother, and all the rest of
'em, grubbed and muddled away as usual and tried to look as if they
hadn't heard a word of the last fact in the case or as if they
had--Oh, dear me!--nothing at all to do with it if they had heard of
it by any chance!"

Ada's colour had entirely left her, and Richard was scarcely less
pale. Nor could I wonder, judging even from my emotions, and I was no
party in the suit, that to hearts so untried and fresh it was a shock
to come into the inheritance of a protracted misery, attended in the
minds of many people with such dreadful recollections. I had another
uneasiness, in the application of the painful story to the poor
half-witted creature who had brought us there; but, to my surprise,
she seemed perfectly unconscious of that and only led the way
upstairs again, informing us with the toleration of a superior
creature for the infirmities of a common mortal that her landlord was
"a little M, you know!"

She lived at the top of the house, in a pretty large room, from which
she had a glimpse of Lincoln's Inn Hall. This seemed to have been her
principal inducement, originally, for taking up her residence there.
She could look at it, she said, in the night, especially in the
moonshine. Her room was clean, but very, very bare. I noticed the
scantiest necessaries in the way of furniture; a few old prints from
books, of Chancellors and barristers, wafered against the wall; and
some half-dozen reticles and work-bags, "containing documents," as
she informed us. There were neither coals nor ashes in the grate, and
I saw no articles of clothing anywhere, nor any kind of food. Upon a
shelf in an open cupboard were a plate or two, a cup or two, and so
forth, but all dry and empty. There was a more affecting meaning in
her pinched appearance, I thought as I looked round, than I had
understood before.

"Extremely honoured, I am sure," said our poor hostess with the
greatest suavity, "by this visit from the wards in Jarndyce. And very
much indebted for the omen. It is a retired situation. Considering. I
am limited as to situation. In consequence of the necessity of
attending on the Chancellor. I have lived here many years. I pass my
days in court, my evenings and my nights here. I find the nights
long, for I sleep but little and think much. That is, of course,
unavoidable, being in Chancery. I am sorry I cannot offer chocolate.
I expect a judgment shortly and shall then place my establishment on
a superior footing. At present, I don't mind confessing to the wards
in Jarndyce (in strict confidence) that I sometimes find it difficult
to keep up a genteel appearance. I have felt the cold here. I have
felt something sharper than cold. It matters very little. Pray excuse
the introduction of such mean topics."

She partly drew aside the curtain of the long, low garret window and
called our attention to a number of bird-cages hanging there, some
containing several birds. There were larks, linnets, and
goldfinches--I should think at least twenty.

"I began to keep the little creatures," she said, "with an object
that the wards will readily comprehend. With the intention of
restoring them to liberty. When my judgment should be given. Ye-es!
They die in prison, though. Their lives, poor silly things, are so
short in comparison with Chancery proceedings that, one by one, the
whole collection has died over and over again. I doubt, do you know,
whether one of these, though they are all young, will live to be
free! Ve-ry mortifying, is it not?"

Although she sometimes asked a question, she never seemed to expect a
reply, but rambled on as if she were in the habit of doing so when no
one but herself was present.

"Indeed," she pursued, "I positively doubt sometimes, I do assure
you, whether while matters are still unsettled, and the sixth or
Great Seal still prevails, I may not one day be found lying stark and
senseless here, as I have found so many birds!"

Richard, answering what he saw in Ada's compassionate eyes, took the
opportunity of laying some money, softly and unobserved, on the
chimney-piece. We all drew nearer to the cages, feigning to examine
the birds.

"I can't allow them to sing much," said the little old lady, "for
(you'll think this curious) I find my mind confused by the idea that
they are singing while I am following the arguments in court. And my
mind requires to be so very clear, you know! Another time, I'll tell
you their names. Not at present. On a day of such good omen, they
shall sing as much as they like. In honour of youth," a smile and
curtsy, "hope," a smile and curtsy, "and beauty," a smile and curtsy.
"There! We'll let in the full light."

The birds began to stir and chirp.

"I cannot admit the air freely," said the little old lady--the room
was close, and would have been the better for it--"because the cat
you saw downstairs, called Lady Jane, is greedy for their lives. She
crouches on the parapet outside for hours and hours. I have
discovered," whispering mysteriously, "that her natural cruelty is
sharpened by a jealous fear of their regaining their liberty. In
consequence of the judgment I expect being shortly given. She is sly
and full of malice. I half believe, sometimes, that she is no cat,
but the wolf of the old saying. It is so very difficult to keep her
from the door."

Some neighbouring bells, reminding the poor soul that it was
half-past nine, did more for us in the way of bringing our visit to
an end than we could easily have done for ourselves. She hurriedly
took up her little bag of documents, which she had laid upon the
table on coming in, and asked if we were also going into court. On
our answering no, and that we would on no account detain her, she
opened the door to attend us downstairs.

"With such an omen, it is even more necessary than usual that I
should be there before the Chancellor comes in," said she, "for he
might mention my case the first thing. I have a presentiment that he
WILL mention it the first thing this morning."

She stopped to tell us in a whisper as we were going down that the
whole house was filled with strange lumber which her landlord had
bought piecemeal and had no wish to sell, in consequence of being a
little M. This was on the first floor. But she had made a previous
stoppage on the second floor and had silently pointed at a dark door
there.

"The only other lodger," she now whispered in explanation, "a
law-writer. The children in the lanes here say he has sold himself to
the devil. I don't know what he can have done with the money. Hush!"

She appeared to mistrust that the lodger might hear her even there,
and repeating "Hush!" went before us on tiptoe as though even the
sound of her footsteps might reveal to him what she had said.

Passing through the shop on our way out, as we had passed through it
on our way in, we found the old man storing a quantity of packets of
waste-paper in a kind of well in the floor. He seemed to be working
hard, with the perspiration standing on his forehead, and had a piece
of chalk by him, with which, as he put each separate package or
bundle down, he made a crooked mark on the panelling of the wall.

Richard and Ada, and Miss Jellyby, and the little old lady had gone
by him, and I was going when he touched me on the arm to stay me, and
chalked the letter J upon the wall--in a very curious manner,
beginning with the end of the letter and shaping it backward. It was
a capital letter, not a printed one, but just such a letter as any
clerk in Messrs. Kenge and Carboy's office would have made.

"Can you read it?" he asked me with a keen glance.

"Surely," said I. "It's very plain."

"What is it?"

"J."

With another glance at me, and a glance at the door, he rubbed it out
and turned an "a" in its place (not a capital letter this time), and
said, "What's that?"

I told him. He then rubbed that out and turned the letter "r," and
asked me the same question. He went on quickly until he had formed in
the same curious manner, beginning at the ends and bottoms of the
letters, the word Jarndyce, without once leaving two letters on the
wall together.

"What does that spell?" he asked me.

When I told him, he laughed. In the same odd way, yet with the same
rapidity, he then produced singly, and rubbed out singly, the letters
forming the words Bleak House. These, in some astonishment, I also
read; and he laughed again.

"Hi!" said the old man, laying aside the chalk. "I have a turn for
copying from memory, you see, miss, though I can neither read nor
write."

He looked so disagreeable and his cat looked so wickedly at me, as if
I were a blood-relation of the birds upstairs, that I was quite
relieved by Richard's appearing at the door and saying, "Miss
Summerson, I hope you are not bargaining for the sale of your hair.
Don't be tempted. Three sacks below are quite enough for Mr. Krook!"

I lost no time in wishing Mr. Krook good morning and joining my
friends outside, where we parted with the little old lady, who gave
us her blessing with great ceremony and renewed her assurance of
yesterday in reference to her intention of settling estates on Ada
and me. Before we finally turned out of those lanes, we looked back
and saw Mr. Krook standing at his shop-door, in his spectacles,
looking after us, with his cat upon his shoulder, and her tail
sticking up on one side of his hairy cap like a tall feather.

"Quite an adventure for a morning in London!" said Richard with a
sigh. "Ah, cousin, cousin, it's a weary word this Chancery!"

"It is to me, and has been ever since I can remember," returned Ada.
"I am grieved that I should be the enemy--as I suppose I am--of a
great number of relations and others, and that they should be my
enemies--as I suppose they are--and that we should all be ruining one
another without knowing how or why and be in constant doubt and
discord all our lives. It seems very strange, as there must be right
somewhere, that an honest judge in real earnest has not been able to
find out through all these years where it is."

"Ah, cousin!" said Richard. "Strange, indeed! All this wasteful,
wanton chess-playing IS very strange. To see that composed court
yesterday jogging on so serenely and to think of the wretchedness of
the pieces on the board gave me the headache and the heartache both
together. My head ached with wondering how it happened, if men were
neither fools nor rascals; and my heart ached to think they could
possibly be either. But at all events, Ada--I may call you Ada?"

"Of course you may, cousin Richard."

"At all events, Chancery will work none of its bad influences on US.
We have happily been brought together, thanks to our good kinsman,
and it can't divide us now!"

"Never, I hope, cousin Richard!" said Ada gently.

Miss Jellyby gave my arm a squeeze and me a very significant look. I
smiled in return, and we made the rest of the way back very
pleasantly.

In half an hour after our arrival, Mrs. Jellyby appeared; and in the
course of an hour the various things necessary for breakfast
straggled one by one into the dining-room. I do not doubt that Mrs.
Jellyby had gone to bed and got up in the usual manner, but she
presented no appearance of having changed her dress. She was greatly
occupied during breakfast, for the morning's post brought a heavy
correspondence relative to Borrioboola-Gha, which would occasion her
(she said) to pass a busy day. The children tumbled about, and
notched memoranda of their accidents in their legs, which were
perfect little calendars of distress; and Peepy was lost for an hour
and a half, and brought home from Newgate market by a policeman. The
equable manner in which Mrs. Jellyby sustained both his absence and
his restoration to the family circle surprised us all.

She was by that time perseveringly dictating to Caddy, and Caddy was
fast relapsing into the inky condition in which we had found her. At
one o'clock an open carriage arrived for us, and a cart for our
luggage. Mrs. Jellyby charged us with many remembrances to her good
friend Mr. Jarndyce; Caddy left her desk to see us depart, kissed me
in the passage, and stood biting her pen and sobbing on the steps;
Peepy, I am happy to say, was asleep and spared the pain of
separation (I was not without misgivings that he had gone to Newgate
market in search of me); and all the other children got up behind the
barouche and fell off, and we saw them, with great concern, scattered
over the surface of Thavies Inn as we rolled out of its precincts.




CHAPTER VI

Quite at Home


The day had brightened very much, and still brightened as we went
westward. We went our way through the sunshine and the fresh air,
wondering more and more at the extent of the streets, the brilliancy
of the shops, the great traffic, and the crowds of people whom the
pleasanter weather seemed to have brought out like many-coloured
flowers. By and by we began to leave the wonderful city and to
proceed through suburbs which, of themselves, would have made a
pretty large town in my eyes; and at last we got into a real country
road again, with windmills, rick-yards, milestones, farmers' waggons,
scents of old hay, swinging signs, and horse troughs: trees, fields,
and hedge-rows. It was delightful to see the green landscape before
us and the immense metropolis behind; and when a waggon with a train
of beautiful horses, furnished with red trappings and clear-sounding
bells, came by us with its music, I believe we could all three have
sung to the bells, so cheerful were the influences around.

"The whole road has been reminding me of my namesake Whittington,"
said Richard, "and that waggon is the finishing touch. Halloa! What's
the matter?"

We had stopped, and the waggon had stopped too. Its music changed as
the horses came to a stand, and subsided to a gentle tinkling, except
when a horse tossed his head or shook himself and sprinkled off a
little shower of bell-ringing.

"Our postilion is looking after the waggoner," said Richard, "and the
waggoner is coming back after us. Good day, friend!" The waggoner was
at our coach-door. "Why, here's an extraordinary thing!" added
Richard, looking closely at the man. "He has got your name, Ada, in
his hat!"

He had all our names in his hat. Tucked within the band were three
small notes--one addressed to Ada, one to Richard, one to me. These
the waggoner delivered to each of us respectively, reading the name
aloud first. In answer to Richard's inquiry from whom they came, he
briefly answered, "Master, sir, if you please"; and putting on his
hat again (which was like a soft bowl), cracked his whip, re-awakened
his music, and went melodiously away.

"Is that Mr. Jarndyce's waggon?" said Richard, calling to our
post-boy.

"Yes, sir," he replied. "Going to London."

We opened the notes. Each was a counterpart of the other and
contained these words in a solid, plain hand.


   I look forward, my dear, to our meeting easily and
   without constraint on either side. I therefore have to
   propose that we meet as old friends and take the past for
   granted. It will be a relief to you possibly, and to me
   certainly, and so my love to you.

   John Jarndyce


I had perhaps less reason to be surprised than either of my
companions, having never yet enjoyed an opportunity of thanking one
who had been my benefactor and sole earthly dependence through so
many years. I had not considered how I could thank him, my gratitude
lying too deep in my heart for that; but I now began to consider how
I could meet him without thanking him, and felt it would be very
difficult indeed.

The notes revived in Richard and Ada a general impression that they
both had, without quite knowing how they came by it, that their
cousin Jarndyce could never bear acknowledgments for any kindness he
performed and that sooner than receive any he would resort to the
most singular expedients and evasions or would even run away. Ada
dimly remembered to have heard her mother tell, when she was a very
little child, that he had once done her an act of uncommon generosity
and that on her going to his house to thank him, he happened to see
her through a window coming to the door, and immediately escaped by
the back gate, and was not heard of for three months. This discourse
led to a great deal more on the same theme, and indeed it lasted us
all day, and we talked of scarcely anything else. If we did by any
chance diverge into another subject, we soon returned to this, and
wondered what the house would be like, and when we should get there,
and whether we should see Mr. Jarndyce as soon as we arrived or after
a delay, and what he would say to us, and what we should say to him.
All of which we wondered about, over and over again.

The roads were very heavy for the horses, but the pathway was
generally good, so we alighted and walked up all the hills, and liked
it so well that we prolonged our walk on the level ground when we got
to the top. At Barnet there were other horses waiting for us, but as
they had only just been fed, we had to wait for them too, and got a
long fresh walk over a common and an old battle-field before the
carriage came up. These delays so protracted the journey that the
short day was spent and the long night had closed in before we came
to St. Albans, near to which town Bleak House was, we knew.

By that time we were so anxious and nervous that even Richard
confessed, as we rattled over the stones of the old street, to
feeling an irrational desire to drive back again. As to Ada and me,
whom he had wrapped up with great care, the night being sharp and
frosty, we trembled from head to foot. When we turned out of the
town, round a corner, and Richard told us that the post-boy, who had
for a long time sympathized with our heightened expectation, was
looking back and nodding, we both stood up in the carriage (Richard
holding Ada lest she should be jolted down) and gazed round upon the
open country and the starlight night for our destination. There was a
light sparkling on the top of a hill before us, and the driver,
pointing to it with his whip and crying, "That's Bleak House!" put
his horses into a canter and took us forward at such a rate, uphill
though it was, that the wheels sent the road drift flying about our
heads like spray from a water-mill. Presently we lost the light,
presently saw it, presently lost it, presently saw it, and turned
into an avenue of trees and cantered up towards where it was beaming
brightly. It was in a window of what seemed to be an old-fashioned
house with three peaks in the roof in front and a circular sweep
leading to the porch. A bell was rung as we drew up, and amidst the
sound of its deep voice in the still air, and the distant barking of
some dogs, and a gush of light from the opened door, and the smoking
and steaming of the heated horses, and the quickened beating of our
own hearts, we alighted in no inconsiderable confusion.

"Ada, my love, Esther, my dear, you are welcome. I rejoice to see
you! Rick, if I had a hand to spare at present, I would give it you!"

The gentleman who said these words in a clear, bright, hospitable
voice had one of his arms round Ada's waist and the other round mine,
and kissed us both in a fatherly way, and bore us across the hall
into a ruddy little room, all in a glow with a blazing fire. Here he
kissed us again, and opening his arms, made us sit down side by side
on a sofa ready drawn out near the hearth. I felt that if we had been
at all demonstrative, he would have run away in a moment.

"Now, Rick!" said he. "I have a hand at liberty. A word in earnest is
as good as a speech. I am heartily glad to see you. You are at home.
Warm yourself!"

Richard shook him by both hands with an intuitive mixture of respect
and frankness, and only saying (though with an earnestness that
rather alarmed me, I was so afraid of Mr. Jarndyce's suddenly
disappearing), "You are very kind, sir! We are very much obliged to
you!" laid aside his hat and coat and came up to the fire.

"And how did you like the ride? And how did you like Mrs. Jellyby, my
dear?" said Mr. Jarndyce to Ada.

While Ada was speaking to him in reply, I glanced (I need not say
with how much interest) at his face. It was a handsome, lively, quick
face, full of change and motion; and his hair was a silvered
iron-grey. I took him to be nearer sixty than fifty, but he was
upright, hearty, and robust. From the moment of his first speaking to
us his voice had connected itself with an association in my mind that
I could not define; but now, all at once, a something sudden in his
manner and a pleasant expression in his eyes recalled the gentleman
in the stagecoach six years ago on the memorable day of my journey to
Reading. I was certain it was he. I never was so frightened in my
life as when I made the discovery, for he caught my glance, and
appearing to read my thoughts, gave such a look at the door that I
thought we had lost him.

However, I am happy to say he remained where he was, and asked me
what I thought of Mrs. Jellyby.

"She exerts herself very much for Africa, sir," I said.

"Nobly!" returned Mr. Jarndyce. "But you answer like Ada." Whom I had
not heard. "You all think something else, I see."

"We rather thought," said I, glancing at Richard and Ada, who
entreated me with their eyes to speak, "that perhaps she was a little
unmindful of her home."

"Floored!" cried Mr. Jarndyce.

I was rather alarmed again.

"Well! I want to know your real thoughts, my dear. I may have sent
you there on purpose."

"We thought that, perhaps," said I, hesitating, "it is right to begin
with the obligations of home, sir; and that, perhaps, while those are
overlooked and neglected, no other duties can possibly be substituted
for them."

"The little Jellybys," said Richard, coming to my relief, "are
really--I can't help expressing myself strongly, sir--in a devil of a
state."

"She means well," said Mr. Jarndyce hastily. "The wind's in the
east."

"It was in the north, sir, as we came down," observed Richard.

"My dear Rick," said Mr. Jarndyce, poking the fire, "I'll take an
oath it's either in the east or going to be. I am always conscious of
an uncomfortable sensation now and then when the wind is blowing in
the east."

"Rheumatism, sir?" said Richard.

"I dare say it is, Rick. I believe it is. And so the little Jell--I
had my doubts about 'em--are in a--oh, Lord, yes, it's easterly!"
said Mr. Jarndyce.

He had taken two or three undecided turns up and down while uttering
these broken sentences, retaining the poker in one hand and rubbing
his hair with the other, with a good-natured vexation at once so
whimsical and so lovable that I am sure we were more delighted with
him than we could possibly have expressed in any words. He gave an
arm to Ada and an arm to me, and bidding Richard bring a candle, was
leading the way out when he suddenly turned us all back again.

"Those little Jellybys. Couldn't you--didn't you--now, if it had
rained sugar-plums, or three-cornered raspberry tarts, or anything of
that sort!" said Mr. Jarndyce.

"Oh, cousin--" Ada hastily began.

"Good, my pretty pet. I like cousin. Cousin John, perhaps, is
better."

"Then, cousin John--" Ada laughingly began again.

"Ha, ha! Very good indeed!" said Mr. Jarndyce with great enjoyment.
"Sounds uncommonly natural. Yes, my dear?"

"It did better than that. It rained Esther."

"Aye?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "What did Esther do?"

"Why, cousin John," said Ada, clasping her hands upon his arm and
shaking her head at me across him--for I wanted her to be
quiet--"Esther was their friend directly. Esther nursed them, coaxed
them to sleep, washed and dressed them, told them stories, kept them
quiet, bought them keepsakes"--My dear girl! I had only gone out with
Peepy after he was found and given him a little, tiny horse!--"and,
cousin John, she softened poor Caroline, the eldest one, so much and
was so thoughtful for me and so amiable! No, no, I won't be
contradicted, Esther dear! You know, you know, it's true!"

The warm-hearted darling leaned across her cousin John and kissed me,
and then looking up in his face, boldly said, "At all events, cousin
John, I WILL thank you for the companion you have given me." I felt
as if she challenged him to run away. But he didn't.

"Where did you say the wind was, Rick?" asked Mr. Jarndyce.

"In the north as we came down, sir."

"You are right. There's no east in it. A mistake of mine. Come,
girls, come and see your home!"

It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you go up and
down steps out of one room into another, and where you come upon more
rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and where there is
a bountiful provision of little halls and passages, and where you
find still older cottage-rooms in unexpected places with lattice
windows and green growth pressing through them. Mine, which we
entered first, was of this kind, with an up-and-down roof that had
more corners in it than I ever counted afterwards and a chimney
(there was a wood fire on the hearth) paved all around with pure
white tiles, in every one of which a bright miniature of the fire was
blazing. Out of this room, you went down two steps into a charming
little sitting-room looking down upon a flower-garden, which room was
henceforth to belong to Ada and me. Out of this you went up three
steps into Ada's bedroom, which had a fine broad window commanding a
beautiful view (we saw a great expanse of darkness lying underneath
the stars), to which there was a hollow window-seat, in which, with a
spring-lock, three dear Adas might have been lost at once. Out of
this room you passed into a little gallery, with which the other best
rooms (only two) communicated, and so, by a little staircase of
shallow steps with a number of corner stairs in it, considering its
length, down into the hall. But if instead of going out at Ada's door
you came back into my room, and went out at the door by which you had
entered it, and turned up a few crooked steps that branched off in an
unexpected manner from the stairs, you lost yourself in passages,
with mangles in them, and three-cornered tables, and a native Hindu
chair, which was also a sofa, a box, and a bedstead, and looked in
every form something between a bamboo skeleton and a great bird-cage,
and had been brought from India nobody knew by whom or when. From
these you came on Richard's room, which was part library, part
sitting-room, part bedroom, and seemed indeed a comfortable compound
of many rooms. Out of that you went straight, with a little interval
of passage, to the plain room where Mr. Jarndyce slept, all the year
round, with his window open, his bedstead without any furniture
standing in the middle of the floor for more air, and his cold bath
gaping for him in a smaller room adjoining. Out of that you came into
another passage, where there were back-stairs and where you could
hear the horses being rubbed down outside the stable and being told
to "Hold up" and "Get over," as they slipped about very much on the
uneven stones. Or you might, if you came out at another door (every
room had at least two doors), go straight down to the hall again by
half-a-dozen steps and a low archway, wondering how you got back
there or had ever got out of it.

The furniture, old-fashioned rather than old, like the house, was as
pleasantly irregular. Ada's sleeping-room was all flowers--in chintz
and paper, in velvet, in needlework, in the brocade of two stiff
courtly chairs which stood, each attended by a little page of a stool
for greater state, on either side of the fire-place. Our sitting-room
was green and had framed and glazed upon the walls numbers of
surprising and surprised birds, staring out of pictures at a real
trout in a case, as brown and shining as if it had been served with
gravy; at the death of Captain Cook; and at the whole process of
preparing tea in China, as depicted by Chinese artists. In my room
there were oval engravings of the months--ladies haymaking in short
waists and large hats tied under the chin, for June; smooth-legged
noblemen pointing with cocked-hats to village steeples, for October.
Half-length portraits in crayons abounded all through the house, but
were so dispersed that I found the brother of a youthful officer of
mine in the china-closet and the grey old age of my pretty young
bride, with a flower in her bodice, in the breakfast-room. As
substitutes, I had four angels, of Queen Anne's reign, taking a
complacent gentleman to heaven, in festoons, with some difficulty;
and a composition in needlework representing fruit, a kettle, and an
alphabet. All the movables, from the wardrobes to the chairs and
tables, hangings, glasses, even to the pincushions and scent-bottles
on the dressing-tables, displayed the same quaint variety. They
agreed in nothing but their perfect neatness, their display of the
whitest linen, and their storing-up, wheresoever the existence of a
drawer, small or large, rendered it possible, of quantities of
rose-leaves and sweet lavender. Such, with its illuminated windows,
softened here and there by shadows of curtains, shining out upon the
starlight night; with its light, and warmth, and comfort; with its
hospitable jingle, at a distance, of preparations for dinner; with
the face of its generous master brightening everything we saw; and
just wind enough without to sound a low accompaniment to everything
we heard, were our first impressions of Bleak House.

"I am glad you like it," said Mr. Jarndyce when he had brought us
round again to Ada's sitting-room. "It makes no pretensions, but it
is a comfortable little place, I hope, and will be more so with such
bright young looks in it. You have barely half an hour before dinner.
There's no one here but the finest creature upon earth--a child."

"More children, Esther!" said Ada.

"I don't mean literally a child," pursued Mr. Jarndyce; "not a child
in years. He is grown up--he is at least as old as I am--but in
simplicity, and freshness, and enthusiasm, and a fine guileless
inaptitude for all worldly affairs, he is a perfect child."

We felt that he must be very interesting.

"He knows Mrs. Jellyby," said Mr. Jarndyce. "He is a musical man, an
amateur, but might have been a professional. He is an artist too, an
amateur, but might have been a professional. He is a man of
attainments and of captivating manners. He has been unfortunate in
his affairs, and unfortunate in his pursuits, and unfortunate in his
family; but he don't care--he's a child!"

"Did you imply that he has children of his own, sir?" inquired
Richard.

"Yes, Rick! Half-a-dozen. More! Nearer a dozen, I should think. But
he has never looked after them. How could he? He wanted somebody to
look after HIM. He is a child, you know!" said Mr. Jarndyce.

"And have the children looked after themselves at all, sir?" inquired
Richard.

"Why, just as you may suppose," said Mr. Jarndyce, his countenance
suddenly falling. "It is said that the children of the very poor are
not brought up, but dragged up. Harold Skimpole's children have
tumbled up somehow or other. The wind's getting round again, I am
afraid. I feel it rather!"

Richard observed that the situation was exposed on a sharp night.

"It IS exposed," said Mr. Jarndyce. "No doubt that's the cause. Bleak
House has an exposed sound. But you are coming my way. Come along!"

Our luggage having arrived and being all at hand, I was dressed in a
few minutes and engaged in putting my worldly goods away when a maid
(not the one in attendance upon Ada, but another, whom I had not
seen) brought a basket into my room with two bunches of keys in it,
all labelled.

"For you, miss, if you please," said she.

"For me?" said I.

"The housekeeping keys, miss."

I showed my surprise, for she added with some little surprise on her
own part, "I was told to bring them as soon as you was alone, miss.
Miss Summerson, if I don't deceive myself?"

"Yes," said I. "That is my name."

"The large bunch is the housekeeping, and the little bunch is the
cellars, miss. Any time you was pleased to appoint to-morrow morning,
I was to show you the presses and things they belong to."

I said I would be ready at half-past six, and after she was gone,
stood looking at the basket, quite lost in the magnitude of my trust.
Ada found me thus and had such a delightful confidence in me when I
showed her the keys and told her about them that it would have been
insensibility and ingratitude not to feel encouraged. I knew, to be
sure, that it was the dear girl's kindness, but I liked to be so
pleasantly cheated.

When we went downstairs, we were presented to Mr. Skimpole, who was
standing before the fire telling Richard how fond he used to be, in
his school-time, of football. He was a little bright creature with a
rather large head, but a delicate face and a sweet voice, and there
was a perfect charm in him. All he said was so free from effort and
spontaneous and was said with such a captivating gaiety that it was
fascinating to hear him talk. Being of a more slender figure than Mr.
Jarndyce and having a richer complexion, with browner hair, he looked
younger. Indeed, he had more the appearance in all respects of a
damaged young man than a well-preserved elderly one. There was an
easy negligence in his manner and even in his dress (his hair
carelessly disposed, and his neck-kerchief loose and flowing, as I
have seen artists paint their own portraits) which I could not
separate from the idea of a romantic youth who had undergone some
unique process of depreciation. It struck me as being not at all like
the manner or appearance of a man who had advanced in life by the
usual road of years, cares, and experiences.

I gathered from the conversation that Mr. Skimpole had been educated
for the medical profession and had once lived, in his professional
capacity, in the household of a German prince. He told us, however,
that as he had always been a mere child in point of weights and
measures and had never known anything about them (except that they
disgusted him), he had never been able to prescribe with the
requisite accuracy of detail. In fact, he said, he had no head for
detail. And he told us, with great humour, that when he was wanted to
bleed the prince or physic any of his people, he was generally found
lying on his back in bed, reading the newspapers or making
fancy-sketches in pencil, and couldn't come. The prince, at last,
objecting to this, "in which," said Mr. Skimpole, in the frankest
manner, "he was perfectly right," the engagement terminated, and Mr.
Skimpole having (as he added with delightful gaiety) "nothing to live
upon but love, fell in love, and married, and surrounded himself with
rosy cheeks." His good friend Jarndyce and some other of his good
friends then helped him, in quicker or slower succession, to several
openings in life, but to no purpose, for he must confess to two of
the oldest infirmities in the world: one was that he had no idea of
time, the other that he had no idea of money. In consequence of which
he never kept an appointment, never could transact any business, and
never knew the value of anything! Well! So he had got on in life, and
here he was! He was very fond of reading the papers, very fond of
making fancy-sketches with a pencil, very fond of nature, very fond
of art. All he asked of society was to let him live. THAT wasn't
much. His wants were few. Give him the papers, conversation, music,
mutton, coffee, landscape, fruit in the season, a few sheets of
Bristol-board, and a little claret, and he asked no more. He was a
mere child in the world, but he didn't cry for the moon. He said to
the world, "Go your several ways in peace! Wear red coats, blue
coats, lawn sleeves; put pens behind your ears, wear aprons; go after
glory, holiness, commerce, trade, any object you prefer; only--let
Harold Skimpole live!"

All this and a great deal more he told us, not only with the
utmost brilliancy and enjoyment, but with a certain vivacious
candour--speaking of himself as if he were not at all his own affair,
as if Skimpole were a third person, as if he knew that Skimpole had
his singularities but still had his claims too, which were the
general business of the community and must not be slighted. He was
quite enchanting. If I felt at all confused at that early time in
endeavouring to reconcile anything he said with anything I had
thought about the duties and accountabilities of life (which I am far
from sure of), I was confused by not exactly understanding why he was
free of them. That he WAS free of them, I scarcely doubted; he was so
very clear about it himself.

"I covet nothing," said Mr. Skimpole in the same light way.
"Possession is nothing to me. Here is my friend Jarndyce's excellent
house. I feel obliged to him for possessing it. I can sketch it and
alter it. I can set it to music. When I am here, I have sufficient
possession of it and have neither trouble, cost, nor responsibility.
My steward's name, in short, is Jarndyce, and he can't cheat me. We
have been mentioning Mrs. Jellyby. There is a bright-eyed woman, of a
strong will and immense power of business detail, who throws herself
into objects with surprising ardour! I don't regret that I have not a
strong will and an immense power of business detail to throw myself
into objects with surprising ardour. I can admire her without envy. I
can sympathize with the objects. I can dream of them. I can lie down
on the grass--in fine weather--and float along an African river,
embracing all the natives I meet, as sensible of the deep silence and
sketching the dense overhanging tropical growth as accurately as if I
were there. I don't know that it's of any direct use my doing so, but
it's all I can do, and I do it thoroughly. Then, for heaven's sake,
having Harold Skimpole, a confiding child, petitioning you, the
world, an agglomeration of practical people of business habits, to
let him live and admire the human family, do it somehow or other,
like good souls, and suffer him to ride his rocking-horse!"

It was plain enough that Mr. Jarndyce had not been neglectful of the
adjuration. Mr. Skimpole's general position there would have rendered
it so without the addition of what he presently said.

"It's only you, the generous creatures, whom I envy," said Mr.
Skimpole, addressing us, his new friends, in an impersonal manner. "I
envy you your power of doing what you do. It is what I should revel
in myself. I don't feel any vulgar gratitude to you. I almost feel as
if YOU ought to be grateful to ME for giving you the opportunity of
enjoying the luxury of generosity. I know you like it. For anything I
can tell, I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of
increasing your stock of happiness. I may have been born to be a
benefactor to you by sometimes giving you an opportunity of assisting
me in my little perplexities. Why should I regret my incapacity for
details and worldly affairs when it leads to such pleasant
consequences? I don't regret it therefore."

Of all his playful speeches (playful, yet always fully meaning what
they expressed) none seemed to be more to the taste of Mr. Jarndyce
than this. I had often new temptations, afterwards, to wonder whether
it was really singular, or only singular to me, that he, who was
probably the most grateful of mankind upon the least occasion, should
so desire to escape the gratitude of others.

We were all enchanted. I felt it a merited tribute to the engaging
qualities of Ada and Richard that Mr. Skimpole, seeing them for the
first time, should be so unreserved and should lay himself out to be
so exquisitely agreeable. They (and especially Richard) were
naturally pleased, for similar reasons, and considered it no common
privilege to be so freely confided in by such an attractive man. The
more we listened, the more gaily Mr. Skimpole talked. And what with
his fine hilarious manner and his engaging candour and his genial way
of lightly tossing his own weaknesses about, as if he had said, "I am
a child, you know! You are designing people compared with me" (he
really made me consider myself in that light) "but I am gay and
innocent; forget your worldly arts and play with me!" the effect was
absolutely dazzling.

He was so full of feeling too and had such a delicate sentiment for
what was beautiful or tender that he could have won a heart by that
alone. In the evening, when I was preparing to make tea and Ada was
touching the piano in the adjoining room and softly humming a tune to
her cousin Richard, which they had happened to mention, he came and
sat down on the sofa near me and so spoke of Ada that I almost loved
him.

"She is like the morning," he said. "With that golden hair, those
blue eyes, and that fresh bloom on her cheek, she is like the summer
morning. The birds here will mistake her for it. We will not call
such a lovely young creature as that, who is a joy to all mankind, an
orphan. She is the child of the universe."

Mr. Jarndyce, I found, was standing near us with his hands behind him
and an attentive smile upon his face.

"The universe," he observed, "makes rather an indifferent parent, I
am afraid."

"Oh! I don't know!" cried Mr. Skimpole buoyantly.

"I think I do know," said Mr. Jarndyce.

"Well!" cried Mr. Skimpole. "You know the world (which in your sense
is the universe), and I know nothing of it, so you shall have your
way. But if I had mine," glancing at the cousins, "there should be no
brambles of sordid realities in such a path as that. It should be
strewn with roses; it should lie through bowers, where there was no
spring, autumn, nor winter, but perpetual summer. Age or change
should never wither it. The base word money should never be breathed
near it!"

Mr. Jarndyce patted him on the head with a smile, as if he had been
really a child, and passing a step or two on, and stopping a moment,
glanced at the young cousins. His look was thoughtful, but had a
benignant expression in it which I often (how often!) saw again,
which has long been engraven on my heart. The room in which they
were, communicating with that in which he stood, was only lighted by
the fire. Ada sat at the piano; Richard stood beside her, bending
down. Upon the wall, their shadows blended together, surrounded by
strange forms, not without a ghostly motion caught from the unsteady
fire, though reflecting from motionless objects. Ada touched the
notes so softly and sang so low that the wind, sighing away to the
distant hills, was as audible as the music. The mystery of the future
and the little clue afforded to it by the voice of the present seemed
expressed in the whole picture.

But it is not to recall this fancy, well as I remember it, that I
recall the scene. First, I was not quite unconscious of the contrast
in respect of meaning and intention between the silent look directed
that way and the flow of words that had preceded it. Secondly, though
Mr. Jarndyce's glance as he withdrew it rested for but a moment on
me, I felt as if in that moment he confided to me--and knew that he
confided to me and that I received the confidence--his hope that Ada
and Richard might one day enter on a dearer relationship.

Mr. Skimpole could play on the piano and the violoncello, and he was
a composer--had composed half an opera once, but got tired of it--and
played what he composed with taste. After tea we had quite a little
concert, in which Richard--who was enthralled by Ada's singing and
told me that she seemed to know all the songs that ever were
written--and Mr. Jarndyce, and I were the audience. After a little
while I missed first Mr. Skimpole and afterwards Richard, and while I
was thinking how could Richard stay away so long and lose so much,
the maid who had given me the keys looked in at the door, saying, "If
you please, miss, could you spare a minute?"

When I was shut out with her in the hall, she said, holding up her
hands, "Oh, if you please, miss, Mr. Carstone says would you come
upstairs to Mr. Skimpole's room. He has been took, miss!"

"Took?" said I.

"Took, miss. Sudden," said the maid.

I was apprehensive that his illness might be of a dangerous kind, but
of course I begged her to be quiet and not disturb any one and
collected myself, as I followed her quickly upstairs, sufficiently to
consider what were the best remedies to be applied if it should prove
to be a fit. She threw open a door and I went into a chamber, where,
to my unspeakable surprise, instead of finding Mr. Skimpole stretched
upon the bed or prostrate on the floor, I found him standing before
the fire smiling at Richard, while Richard, with a face of great
embarrassment, looked at a person on the sofa, in a white great-coat,
with smooth hair upon his head and not much of it, which he was
wiping smoother and making less of with a pocket-handkerchief.

"Miss Summerson," said Richard hurriedly, "I am glad you are come.
You will be able to advise us. Our friend Mr. Skimpole--don't be
alarmed!--is arrested for debt."

"And really, my dear Miss Summerson," said Mr. Skimpole with his
agreeable candour, "I never was in a situation in which that
excellent sense and quiet habit of method and usefulness, which
anybody must observe in you who has the happiness of being a quarter
of an hour in your society, was more needed."

The person on the sofa, who appeared to have a cold in his head, gave
such a very loud snort that he startled me.

"Are you arrested for much, sir?" I inquired of Mr. Skimpole.

"My dear Miss Summerson," said he, shaking his head pleasantly, "I
don't know. Some pounds, odd shillings, and halfpence, I think, were
mentioned."

"It's twenty-four pound, sixteen, and sevenpence ha'penny," observed
the stranger. "That's wot it is."

"And it sounds--somehow it sounds," said Mr. Skimpole, "like a small
sum?"

The strange man said nothing but made another snort. It was such a
powerful one that it seemed quite to lift him out of his seat.

"Mr. Skimpole," said Richard to me, "has a delicacy in applying to my
cousin Jarndyce because he has lately--I think, sir, I understood you
that you had lately--"

"Oh, yes!" returned Mr. Skimpole, smiling. "Though I forgot how much
it was and when it was. Jarndyce would readily do it again, but I
have the epicure-like feeling that I would prefer a novelty in help,
that I would rather," and he looked at Richard and me, "develop
generosity in a new soil and in a new form of flower."

"What do you think will be best, Miss Summerson?" said Richard,
aside.

I ventured to inquire, generally, before replying, what would happen
if the money were not produced.

"Jail," said the strange man, coolly putting his handkerchief into
his hat, which was on the floor at his feet. "Or Coavinses."

"May I ask, sir, what is--"

"Coavinses?" said the strange man. "A 'ouse."

Richard and I looked at one another again. It was a most singular
thing that the arrest was our embarrassment and not Mr. Skimpole's.
He observed us with a genial interest, but there seemed, if I may
venture on such a contradiction, nothing selfish in it. He had
entirely washed his hands of the difficulty, and it had become ours.

"I thought," he suggested, as if good-naturedly to help us out, "that
being parties in a Chancery suit concerning (as people say) a large
amount of property, Mr. Richard or his beautiful cousin, or both,
could sign something, or make over something, or give some sort of
undertaking, or pledge, or bond? I don't know what the business name
of it may be, but I suppose there is some instrument within their
power that would settle this?"

"Not a bit on it," said the strange man.

"Really?" returned Mr. Skimpole. "That seems odd, now, to one who is
no judge of these things!"

"Odd or even," said the stranger gruffly, "I tell you, not a bit on
it!"

"Keep your temper, my good fellow, keep your temper!" Mr. Skimpole
gently reasoned with him as he made a little drawing of his head on
the fly-leaf of a book. "Don't be ruffled by your occupation. We can
separate you from your office; we can separate the individual from
the pursuit. We are not so prejudiced as to suppose that in private
life you are otherwise than a very estimable man, with a great deal
of poetry in your nature, of which you may not be conscious."

The stranger only answered with another violent snort, whether in
acceptance of the poetry-tribute or in disdainful rejection of it, he
did not express to me.

"Now, my dear Miss Summerson, and my dear Mr. Richard," said Mr.
Skimpole gaily, innocently, and confidingly as he looked at his
drawing with his head on one side, "here you see me utterly incapable
of helping myself, and entirely in your hands! I only ask to be free.
The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold
Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!"

"My dear Miss Summerson," said Richard in a whisper, "I have ten
pounds that I received from Mr. Kenge. I must try what that will do."

I possessed fifteen pounds, odd shillings, which I had saved from my
quarterly allowance during several years. I had always thought that
some accident might happen which would throw me suddenly, without any
relation or any property, on the world and had always tried to keep
some little money by me that I might not be quite penniless. I told
Richard of my having this little store and having no present need of
it, and I asked him delicately to inform Mr. Skimpole, while I should
be gone to fetch it, that we would have the pleasure of paying his
debt.

When I came back, Mr. Skimpole kissed my hand and seemed quite
touched. Not on his own account (I was again aware of that perplexing
and extraordinary contradiction), but on ours, as if personal
considerations were impossible with him and the contemplation of our
happiness alone affected him. Richard, begging me, for the greater
grace of the transaction, as he said, to settle with Coavinses (as
Mr. Skimpole now jocularly called him), I counted out the money and
received the necessary acknowledgment. This, too, delighted Mr.
Skimpole.

His compliments were so delicately administered that I blushed less
than I might have done and settled with the stranger in the white
coat without making any mistakes. He put the money in his pocket and
shortly said, "Well, then, I'll wish you a good evening, miss.

"My friend," said Mr. Skimpole, standing with his back to the fire
after giving up the sketch when it was half finished, "I should like
to ask you something, without offence."

I think the reply was, "Cut away, then!"

"Did you know this morning, now, that you were coming out on this
errand?" said Mr. Skimpole.

"Know'd it yes'day aft'noon at tea-time," said Coavinses.

"It didn't affect your appetite? Didn't make you at all uneasy?"

"Not a bit," said Coavinses. "I know'd if you wos missed to-day, you
wouldn't be missed to-morrow. A day makes no such odds."

"But when you came down here," proceeded Mr. Skimpole, "it was a fine
day. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing, the lights and
shadows were passing across the fields, the birds were singing."

"Nobody said they warn't, in MY hearing," returned Coavinses.

"No," observed Mr. Skimpole. "But what did you think upon the road?"

"Wot do you mean?" growled Coavinses with an appearance of strong
resentment. "Think! I've got enough to do, and little enough to get
for it without thinking. Thinking!" (with profound contempt).

"Then you didn't think, at all events," proceeded Mr. Skimpole, "to
this effect: 'Harold Skimpole loves to see the sun shine, loves to
hear the wind blow, loves to watch the changing lights and shadows,
loves to hear the birds, those choristers in Nature's great
cathedral. And does it seem to me that I am about to deprive Harold
Skimpole of his share in such possessions, which are his only
birthright!' You thought nothing to that effect?"

"I--certainly--did--NOT," said Coavinses, whose doggedness in utterly
renouncing the idea was of that intense kind that he could only give
adequate expression to it by putting a long interval between each
word, and accompanying the last with a jerk that might have
dislocated his neck.

"Very odd and very curious, the mental process is, in you men of
business!" said Mr. Skimpole thoughtfully. "Thank you, my friend.
Good night."

As our absence had been long enough already to seem strange
downstairs, I returned at once and found Ada sitting at work by the
fireside talking to her cousin John. Mr. Skimpole presently appeared,
and Richard shortly after him. I was sufficiently engaged during the
remainder of the evening in taking my first lesson in backgammon from
Mr. Jarndyce, who was very fond of the game and from whom I wished of
course to learn it as quickly as I could in order that I might be of
the very small use of being able to play when he had no better
adversary. But I thought, occasionally, when Mr. Skimpole played some
fragments of his own compositions or when, both at the piano and the
violoncello, and at our table, he preserved with an absence of all
effort his delightful spirits and his easy flow of conversation, that
Richard and I seemed to retain the transferred impression of having
been arrested since dinner and that it was very curious altogether.

It was late before we separated, for when Ada was going at eleven
o'clock, Mr. Skimpole went to the piano and rattled hilariously that
the best of all ways to lengthen our days was to steal a few hours
from night, my dear! It was past twelve before he took his candle and
his radiant face out of the room, and I think he might have kept us
there, if he had seen fit, until daybreak. Ada and Richard were
lingering for a few moments by the fire, wondering whether Mrs.
Jellyby had yet finished her dictation for the day, when Mr.
Jarndyce, who had been out of the room, returned.

"Oh, dear me, what's this, what's this!" he said, rubbing his head
and walking about with his good-humoured vexation. "What's this they
tell me? Rick, my boy, Esther, my dear, what have you been doing? Why
did you do it? How could you do it? How much apiece was it? The
wind's round again. I feel it all over me!"

We neither of us quite knew what to answer.

"Come, Rick, come! I must settle this before I sleep. How much are
you out of pocket? You two made the money up, you know! Why did you?
How could you? Oh, Lord, yes, it's due east--must be!"

"Really, sir," said Richard, "I don't think it would be honourable in
me to tell you. Mr. Skimpole relied upon us--"

"Lord bless you, my dear boy! He relies upon everybody!" said Mr.
Jarndyce, giving his head a great rub and stopping short.

"Indeed, sir?"

"Everybody! And he'll be in the same scrape again next week!" said
Mr. Jarndyce, walking again at a great pace, with a candle in his
hand that had gone out. "He's always in the same scrape. He was born
in the same scrape. I verily believe that the announcement in the
newspapers when his mother was confined was 'On Tuesday last, at her
residence in Botheration Buildings, Mrs. Skimpole of a son in
difficulties.'"

Richard laughed heartily but added, "Still, sir, I don't want to
shake his confidence or to break his confidence, and if I submit to
your better knowledge again, that I ought to keep his secret, I hope
you will consider before you press me any more. Of course, if you do
press me, sir, I shall know I am wrong and will tell you."

"Well!" cried Mr. Jarndyce, stopping again, and making several absent
endeavours to put his candlestick in his pocket. "I--here! Take it
away, my dear. I don't know what I am about with it; it's all the
wind--invariably has that effect--I won't press you, Rick; you may be
right. But really--to get hold of you and Esther--and to squeeze you
like a couple of tender young Saint Michael's oranges! It'll blow a
gale in the course of the night!"

He was now alternately putting his hands into his pockets as if he
were going to keep them there a long time, and taking them out again
and vehemently rubbing them all over his head.

I ventured to take this opportunity of hinting that Mr. Skimpole,
being in all such matters quite a child--

"Eh, my dear?" said Mr. Jarndyce, catching at the word.

"Being quite a child, sir," said I, "and so different from other
people--"

"You are right!" said Mr. Jarndyce, brightening. "Your woman's wit
hits the mark. He is a child--an absolute child. I told you he was a
child, you know, when I first mentioned him."

Certainly! Certainly! we said.

"And he IS a child. Now, isn't he?" asked Mr. Jarndyce, brightening
more and more.

He was indeed, we said.

"When you come to think of it, it's the height of childishness in
you--I mean me--" said Mr. Jarndyce, "to regard him for a moment as a
man. You can't make HIM responsible. The idea of Harold Skimpole with
designs or plans, or knowledge of consequences! Ha, ha, ha!"

It was so delicious to see the clouds about his bright face clearing,
and to see him so heartily pleased, and to know, as it was impossible
not to know, that the source of his pleasure was the goodness which
was tortured by condemning, or mistrusting, or secretly accusing any
one, that I saw the tears in Ada's eyes, while she echoed his laugh,
and felt them in my own.

"Why, what a cod's head and shoulders I am," said Mr. Jarndyce, "to
require reminding of it! The whole business shows the child from
beginning to end. Nobody but a child would have thought of singling
YOU two out for parties in the affair! Nobody but a child would have
thought of YOUR having the money! If it had been a thousand pounds,
it would have been just the same!" said Mr. Jarndyce with his whole
face in a glow.

We all confirmed it from our night's experience.

"To be sure, to be sure!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "However, Rick, Esther,
and you too, Ada, for I don't know that even your little purse is
safe from his inexperience--I must have a promise all round that
nothing of this sort shall ever be done any more. No advances! Not
even sixpences."

We all promised faithfully, Richard with a merry glance at me
touching his pocket as if to remind me that there was no danger of
OUR transgressing.

"As to Skimpole," said Mr. Jarndyce, "a habitable doll's house with
good board and a few tin people to get into debt with and borrow
money of would set the boy up in life. He is in a child's sleep by
this time, I suppose; it's time I should take my craftier head to my
more worldly pillow. Good night, my dears. God bless you!"

He peeped in again, with a smiling face, before we had lighted our
candles, and said, "Oh! I have been looking at the weather-cock. I
find it was a false alarm about the wind. It's in the south!" And
went away singing to himself.

Ada and I agreed, as we talked together for a little while upstairs,
that this caprice about the wind was a fiction and that he used the
pretence to account for any disappointment he could not conceal,
rather than he would blame the real cause of it or disparage or
depreciate any one. We thought this very characteristic of his
eccentric gentleness and of the difference between him and those
petulant people who make the weather and the winds (particularly that
unlucky wind which he had chosen for such a different purpose) the
stalking-horses of their splenetic and gloomy humours.

Indeed, so much affection for him had been added in this one evening
to my gratitude that I hoped I already began to understand him
through that mingled feeling. Any seeming inconsistencies in Mr.
Skimpole or in Mrs. Jellyby I could not expect to be able to
reconcile, having so little experience or practical knowledge.
Neither did I try, for my thoughts were busy when I was alone, with
Ada and Richard and with the confidence I had seemed to receive
concerning them. My fancy, made a little wild by the wind perhaps,
would not consent to be all unselfish, either, though I would have
persuaded it to be so if I could. It wandered back to my godmother's
house and came along the intervening track, raising up shadowy
speculations which had sometimes trembled there in the dark as to
what knowledge Mr. Jarndyce had of my earliest history--even as to
the possibility of his being my father, though that idle dream was
quite gone now.

It was all gone now, I remembered, getting up from the fire. It was
not for me to muse over bygones, but to act with a cheerful spirit
and a grateful heart. So I said to myself, "Esther, Esther, Esther!
Duty, my dear!" and gave my little basket of housekeeping keys such a
shake that they sounded like little bells and rang me hopefully to
bed.




CHAPTER VII

The Ghost's Walk


While Esther sleeps, and while Esther wakes, it is still wet weather
down at the place in Lincolnshire. The rain is ever falling--drip,
drip, drip--by day and night upon the broad flagged terrace-pavement,
the Ghost's Walk. The weather is so very bad down in Lincolnshire
that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being
fine again. Not that there is any superabundant life of imagination
on the spot, for Sir Leicester is not here (and, truly, even if he
were, would not do much for it in that particular), but is in Paris
with my Lady; and solitude, with dusky wings, sits brooding upon
Chesney Wold.

There may be some motions of fancy among the lower animals at Chesney
Wold. The horses in the stables--the long stables in a barren,
red-brick court-yard, where there is a great bell in a turret, and a
clock with a large face, which the pigeons who live near it and who
love to perch upon its shoulders seem to be always consulting--THEY
may contemplate some mental pictures of fine weather on occasions,
and may be better artists at them than the grooms. The old roan, so
famous for cross-country work, turning his large eyeball to the
grated window near his rack, may remember the fresh leaves that
glisten there at other times and the scents that stream in, and may
have a fine run with the hounds, while the human helper, clearing out
the next stall, never stirs beyond his pitchfork and birch-broom. The
grey, whose place is opposite the door and who with an impatient
rattle of his halter pricks his ears and turns his head so wistfully
when it is opened, and to whom the opener says, "Woa grey, then,
steady! Noabody wants you to-day!" may know it quite as well as the
man. The whole seemingly monotonous and uncompanionable half-dozen,
stabled together, may pass the long wet hours when the door is shut
in livelier communication than is held in the servants' hall or at
the Dedlock Arms, or may even beguile the time by improving (perhaps
corrupting) the pony in the loose-box in the corner.

So the mastiff, dozing in his kennel in the court-yard with his large
head on his paws, may think of the hot sunshine when the shadows of
the stable-buildings tire his patience out by changing and leave him
at one time of the day no broader refuge than the shadow of his own
house, where he sits on end, panting and growling short, and very
much wanting something to worry besides himself and his chain. So
now, half-waking and all-winking, he may recall the house full of
company, the coach-houses full of vehicles, the stables full of
horses, and the out-buildings full of attendants upon horses, until
he is undecided about the present and comes forth to see how it is.
Then, with that impatient shake of himself, he may growl in the
spirit, "Rain, rain, rain! Nothing but rain--and no family here!" as
he goes in again and lies down with a gloomy yawn.

So with the dogs in the kennel-buildings across the park, who have
their restless fits and whose doleful voices when the wind has been
very obstinate have even made it known in the house itself--upstairs,
downstairs, and in my Lady's chamber. They may hunt the whole
country-side, while the raindrops are pattering round their
inactivity. So the rabbits with their self-betraying tails, frisking
in and out of holes at roots of trees, may be lively with ideas of
the breezy days when their ears are blown about or of those seasons
of interest when there are sweet young plants to gnaw. The turkey in
the poultry-yard, always troubled with a class-grievance (probably
Christmas), may be reminiscent of that summer morning wrongfully
taken from him when he got into the lane among the felled trees,
where there was a barn and barley. The discontented goose, who stoops
to pass under the old gateway, twenty feet high, may gabble out, if
we only knew it, a waddling preference for weather when the gateway
casts its shadow on the ground.

Be this as it may, there is not much fancy otherwise stirring at
Chesney Wold. If there be a little at any odd moment, it goes, like a
little noise in that old echoing place, a long way and usually leads
off to ghosts and mystery.

It has rained so hard and rained so long down in Lincolnshire that
Mrs. Rouncewell, the old housekeeper at Chesney Wold, has several
times taken off her spectacles and cleaned them to make certain that
the drops were not upon the glasses. Mrs. Rouncewell might have been
sufficiently assured by hearing the rain, but that she is rather
deaf, which nothing will induce her to believe. She is a fine old
lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat, and has such a back and
such a stomacher that if her stays should turn out when she dies to
have been a broad old-fashioned family fire-grate, nobody who knows
her would have cause to be surprised. Weather affects Mrs. Rouncewell
little. The house is there in all weathers, and the house, as she
expresses it, "is what she looks at." She sits in her room (in a side
passage on the ground floor, with an arched window commanding a
smooth quadrangle, adorned at regular intervals with smooth round
trees and smooth round blocks of stone, as if the trees were going to
play at bowls with the stones), and the whole house reposes on her
mind. She can open it on occasion and be busy and fluttered, but it
is shut up now and lies on the breadth of Mrs. Rouncewell's
iron-bound bosom in a majestic sleep.

It is the next difficult thing to an impossibility to imagine Chesney
Wold without Mrs. Rouncewell, but she has only been here fifty years.
Ask her how long, this rainy day, and she shall answer "fifty year,
three months, and a fortnight, by the blessing of heaven, if I live
till Tuesday." Mr. Rouncewell died some time before the decease of
the pretty fashion of pig-tails, and modestly hid his own (if he took
it with him) in a corner of the churchyard in the park near the
mouldy porch. He was born in the market-town, and so was his young
widow. Her progress in the family began in the time of the last Sir
Leicester and originated in the still-room.

The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master. He
supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual
characters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was
born to supersede the necessity of their having any. If he were to
make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned--would
never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die. But he is
an excellent master still, holding it a part of his state to be so.
He has a great liking for Mrs. Rouncewell; he says she is a most
respectable, creditable woman. He always shakes hands with her when
he comes down to Chesney Wold and when he goes away; and if he were
very ill, or if he were knocked down by accident, or run over, or
placed in any situation expressive of a Dedlock at a disadvantage, he
would say if he could speak, "Leave me, and send Mrs. Rouncewell
here!" feeling his dignity, at such a pass, safer with her than with
anybody else.

Mrs. Rouncewell has known trouble. She has had two sons, of whom the
younger ran wild, and went for a soldier, and never came back. Even
to this hour, Mrs. Rouncewell's calm hands lose their composure when
she speaks of him, and unfolding themselves from her stomacher, hover
about her in an agitated manner as she says what a likely lad, what a
fine lad, what a gay, good-humoured, clever lad he was! Her second
son would have been provided for at Chesney Wold and would have been
made steward in due season, but he took, when he was a schoolboy, to
constructing steam-engines out of saucepans and setting birds to draw
their own water with the least possible amount of labour, so
assisting them with artful contrivance of hydraulic pressure that a
thirsty canary had only, in a literal sense, to put his shoulder to
the wheel and the job was done. This propensity gave Mrs. Rouncewell
great uneasiness. She felt it with a mother's anguish to be a move in
the Wat Tyler direction, well knowing that Sir Leicester had that
general impression of an aptitude for any art to which smoke and a
tall chimney might be considered essential. But the doomed young
rebel (otherwise a mild youth, and very persevering), showing no sign
of grace as he got older but, on the contrary, constructing a model
of a power-loom, she was fain, with many tears, to mention his
backslidings to the baronet. "Mrs. Rouncewell," said Sir Leicester,
"I can never consent to argue, as you know, with any one on any
subject. You had better get rid of your boy; you had better get him
into some Works. The iron country farther north is, I suppose, the
congenial direction for a boy with these tendencies." Farther north
he went, and farther north he grew up; and if Sir Leicester Dedlock
ever saw him when he came to Chesney Wold to visit his mother, or
ever thought of him afterwards, it is certain that he only regarded
him as one of a body of some odd thousand conspirators, swarthy and
grim, who were in the habit of turning out by torchlight two or three
nights in the week for unlawful purposes.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Rouncewell's son has, in the course of nature and
art, grown up, and established himself, and married, and called unto
him Mrs. Rouncewell's grandson, who, being out of his apprenticeship,
and home from a journey in far countries, whither he was sent to
enlarge his knowledge and complete his preparations for the venture
of this life, stands leaning against the chimney-piece this very day
in Mrs. Rouncewell's room at Chesney Wold.

"And, again and again, I am glad to see you, Watt! And, once again, I
am glad to see you, Watt!" says Mrs. Rouncewell. "You are a fine
young fellow. You are like your poor uncle George. Ah!" Mrs.
Rouncewell's hands unquiet, as usual, on this reference.

"They say I am like my father, grandmother."

"Like him, also, my dear--but most like your poor uncle George! And
your dear father." Mrs. Rouncewell folds her hands again. "He is
well?"

"Thriving, grandmother, in every way."

"I am thankful!" Mrs. Rouncewell is fond of her son but has a
plaintive feeling towards him, much as if he were a very honourable
soldier who had gone over to the enemy.

"He is quite happy?" says she.

"Quite."

"I am thankful! So he has brought you up to follow in his ways and
has sent you into foreign countries and the like? Well, he knows
best. There may be a world beyond Chesney Wold that I don't
understand. Though I am not young, either. And I have seen a quantity
of good company too!"

"Grandmother," says the young man, changing the subject, "what a very
pretty girl that was I found with you just now. You called her Rosa?"

"Yes, child. She is daughter of a widow in the village. Maids are so
hard to teach, now-a-days, that I have put her about me young. She's
an apt scholar and will do well. She shows the house already, very
pretty. She lives with me at my table here."

"I hope I have not driven her away?"

"She supposes we have family affairs to speak about, I dare say. She
is very modest. It is a fine quality in a young woman. And scarcer,"
says Mrs. Rouncewell, expanding her stomacher to its utmost limits,
"than it formerly was!"

The young man inclines his head in acknowledgment of the precepts of
experience. Mrs. Rouncewell listens.

"Wheels!" says she. They have long been audible to the younger ears
of her companion. "What wheels on such a day as this, for gracious
sake?"

After a short interval, a tap at the door. "Come in!" A dark-eyed,
dark-haired, shy, village beauty comes in--so fresh in her rosy and
yet delicate bloom that the drops of rain which have beaten on her
hair look like the dew upon a flower fresh gathered.

"What company is this, Rosa?" says Mrs. Rouncewell.

"It's two young men in a gig, ma'am, who want to see the house--yes,
and if you please, I told them so!" in quick reply to a gesture of
dissent from the housekeeper. "I went to the hall-door and told them
it was the wrong day and the wrong hour, but the young man who was
driving took off his hat in the wet and begged me to bring this card
to you."

"Read it, my dear Watt," says the housekeeper.

Rosa is so shy as she gives it to him that they drop it between them
and almost knock their foreheads together as they pick it up. Rosa is
shyer than before.

"Mr. Guppy" is all the information the card yields.

"Guppy!" repeats Mrs. Rouncewell, "MR. Guppy! Nonsense, I never heard
of him!"

"If you please, he told ME that!" says Rosa. "But he said that he and
the other young gentleman came from London only last night by the
mail, on business at the magistrates' meeting, ten miles off, this
morning, and that as their business was soon over, and they had heard
a great deal said of Chesney Wold, and really didn't know what to do
with themselves, they had come through the wet to see it. They are
lawyers. He says he is not in Mr. Tulkinghorn's office, but he is
sure he may make use of Mr. Tulkinghorn's name if necessary."
Finding, now she leaves off, that she has been making quite a long
speech, Rosa is shyer than ever.

Now, Mr. Tulkinghorn is, in a manner, part and parcel of the place,
and besides, is supposed to have made Mrs. Rouncewell's will. The old
lady relaxes, consents to the admission of the visitors as a favour,
and dismisses Rosa. The grandson, however, being smitten by a sudden
wish to see the house himself, proposes to join the party. The
grandmother, who is pleased that he should have that interest,
accompanies him--though to do him justice, he is exceedingly
unwilling to trouble her.

"Much obliged to you, ma'am!" says Mr. Guppy, divesting himself of
his wet dreadnought in the hall. "Us London lawyers don't often get
an out, and when we do, we like to make the most of it, you know."

The old housekeeper, with a gracious severity of deportment, waves
her hand towards the great staircase. Mr. Guppy and his friend follow
Rosa; Mrs. Rouncewell and her grandson follow them; a young gardener
goes before to open the shutters.

As is usually the case with people who go over houses, Mr. Guppy and
his friend are dead beat before they have well begun. They straggle
about in wrong places, look at wrong things, don't care for the right
things, gape when more rooms are opened, exhibit profound depression
of spirits, and are clearly knocked up. In each successive chamber
that they enter, Mrs. Rouncewell, who is as upright as the house
itself, rests apart in a window-seat or other such nook and listens
with stately approval to Rosa's exposition. Her grandson is so
attentive to it that Rosa is shyer than ever--and prettier. Thus they
pass on from room to room, raising the pictured Dedlocks for a few
brief minutes as the young gardener admits the light, and
reconsigning them to their graves as he shuts it out again. It
appears to the afflicted Mr. Guppy and his inconsolable friend that
there is no end to the Dedlocks, whose family greatness seems to
consist in their never having done anything to distinguish themselves
for seven hundred years.

Even the long drawing-room of Chesney Wold cannot revive Mr. Guppy's
spirits. He is so low that he droops on the threshold and has hardly
strength of mind to enter. But a portrait over the chimney-piece,
painted by the fashionable artist of the day, acts upon him like a
charm. He recovers in a moment. He stares at it with uncommon
interest; he seems to be fixed and fascinated by it.

"Dear me!" says Mr. Guppy. "Who's that?"

"The picture over the fire-place," says Rosa, "is the portrait of the
present Lady Dedlock. It is considered a perfect likeness, and the
best work of the master."

"Blest," says Mr. Guppy, staring in a kind of dismay at his friend,
"if I can ever have seen her. Yet I know her! Has the picture been
engraved, miss?"

"The picture has never been engraved. Sir Leicester has always
refused permission."

"Well!" says Mr. Guppy in a low voice. "I'll be shot if it ain't very
curious how well I know that picture! So that's Lady Dedlock, is it!"

"The picture on the right is the present Sir Leicester Dedlock. The
picture on the left is his father, the late Sir Leicester."

Mr. Guppy has no eyes for either of these magnates. "It's
unaccountable to me," he says, still staring at the portrait, "how
well I know that picture! I'm dashed," adds Mr. Guppy, looking round,
"if I don't think I must have had a dream of that picture, you know!"

As no one present takes any especial interest in Mr. Guppy's dreams,
the probability is not pursued. But he still remains so absorbed by
the portrait that he stands immovable before it until the young
gardener has closed the shutters, when he comes out of the room in a
dazed state that is an odd though a sufficient substitute for
interest and follows into the succeeding rooms with a confused stare,
as if he were looking everywhere for Lady Dedlock again.

He sees no more of her. He sees her rooms, which are the last shown,
as being very elegant, and he looks out of the windows from which she
looked out, not long ago, upon the weather that bored her to death.
All things have an end, even houses that people take infinite pains
to see and are tired of before they begin to see them. He has come to
the end of the sight, and the fresh village beauty to the end of her
description; which is always this: "The terrace below is much
admired. It is called, from an old story in the family, the Ghost's
Walk."

"No?" says Mr. Guppy, greedily curious. "What's the story, miss? Is
it anything about a picture?"

"Pray tell us the story," says Watt in a half whisper.

"I don't know it, sir." Rosa is shyer than ever.

"It is not related to visitors; it is almost forgotten," says the
housekeeper, advancing. "It has never been more than a family
anecdote."

"You'll excuse my asking again if it has anything to do with a
picture, ma'am," observes Mr. Guppy, "because I do assure you that
the more I think of that picture the better I know it, without
knowing how I know it!"

The story has nothing to do with a picture; the housekeeper can
guarantee that. Mr. Guppy is obliged to her for the information and
is, moreover, generally obliged. He retires with his friend, guided
down another staircase by the young gardener, and presently is heard
to drive away. It is now dusk. Mrs. Rouncewell can trust to the
discretion of her two young hearers and may tell THEM how the terrace
came to have that ghostly name.

She seats herself in a large chair by the fast-darkening window and
tells them: "In the wicked days, my dears, of King Charles the
First--I mean, of course, in the wicked days of the rebels who
leagued themselves against that excellent king--Sir Morbury Dedlock
was the owner of Chesney Wold. Whether there was any account of a
ghost in the family before those days, I can't say. I should think it
very likely indeed."

Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a
family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost. She
regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a
genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.

"Sir Morbury Dedlock," says Mrs. Rouncewell, "was, I have no occasion
to say, on the side of the blessed martyr. But it IS supposed that
his Lady, who had none of the family blood in her veins, favoured the
bad cause. It is said that she had relations among King Charles's
enemies, that she was in correspondence with them, and that she gave
them information. When any of the country gentlemen who followed his
Majesty's cause met here, it is said that my Lady was always nearer
to the door of their council-room than they supposed. Do you hear a
sound like a footstep passing along the terrace, Watt?"

Rosa draws nearer to the housekeeper.

"I hear the rain-drip on the stones," replies the young man, "and I
hear a curious echo--I suppose an echo--which is very like a halting
step."

The housekeeper gravely nods and continues: "Partly on account of
this division between them, and partly on other accounts, Sir Morbury
and his Lady led a troubled life. She was a lady of a haughty temper.
They were not well suited to each other in age or character, and they
had no children to moderate between them. After her favourite
brother, a young gentleman, was killed in the civil wars (by Sir
Morbury's near kinsman), her feeling was so violent that she hated
the race into which she had married. When the Dedlocks were about to
ride out from Chesney Wold in the king's cause, she is supposed to
have more than once stolen down into the stables in the dead of night
and lamed their horses; and the story is that once at such an hour,
her husband saw her gliding down the stairs and followed her into the
stall where his own favourite horse stood. There he seized her by the
wrist, and in a struggle or in a fall or through the horse being
frightened and lashing out, she was lamed in the hip and from that
hour began to pine away."

The housekeeper has dropped her voice to a little more than a
whisper.

"She had been a lady of a handsome figure and a noble carriage. She
never complained of the change; she never spoke to any one of being
crippled or of being in pain, but day by day she tried to walk upon
the terrace, and with the help of the stone balustrade, went up and
down, up and down, up and down, in sun and shadow, with greater
difficulty every day. At last, one afternoon her husband (to whom she
had never, on any persuasion, opened her lips since that night),
standing at the great south window, saw her drop upon the pavement.
He hastened down to raise her, but she repulsed him as he bent over
her, and looking at him fixedly and coldly, said, 'I will die here
where I have walked. And I will walk here, though I am in my grave. I
will walk here until the pride of this house is humbled. And when
calamity or when disgrace is coming to it, let the Dedlocks listen
for my step!'"

Watt looks at Rosa. Rosa in the deepening gloom looks down upon the
ground, half frightened and half shy.

"There and then she died. And from those days," says Mrs. Rouncewell,
"the name has come down--the Ghost's Walk. If the tread is an echo,
it is an echo that is only heard after dark, and is often unheard for
a long while together. But it comes back from time to time; and so
sure as there is sickness or death in the family, it will be heard
then."

"And disgrace, grandmother--" says Watt.

"Disgrace never comes to Chesney Wold," returns the housekeeper.

Her grandson apologizes with "True. True."

"That is the story. Whatever the sound is, it is a worrying sound,"
says Mrs. Rouncewell, getting up from her chair; "and what is to be
noticed in it is that it MUST BE HEARD. My Lady, who is afraid of
nothing, admits that when it is there, it must be heard. You cannot
shut it out. Watt, there is a tall French clock behind you (placed
there, 'a purpose) that has a loud beat when it is in motion and can
play music. You understand how those things are managed?"

"Pretty well, grandmother, I think."

"Set it a-going."

Watt sets it a-going--music and all.

"Now, come hither," says the housekeeper. "Hither, child, towards my
Lady's pillow. I am not sure that it is dark enough yet, but listen!
Can you hear the sound upon the terrace, through the music, and the
beat, and everything?"

"I certainly can!"

"So my Lady says."




CHAPTER VIII

Covering a Multitude of Sins


It was interesting when I dressed before daylight to peep out of
window, where my candles were reflected in the black panes like
two beacons, and finding all beyond still enshrouded in the
indistinctness of last night, to watch how it turned out when the day
came on. As the prospect gradually revealed itself and disclosed the
scene over which the wind had wandered in the dark, like my memory
over my life, I had a pleasure in discovering the unknown objects
that had been around me in my sleep. At first they were faintly
discernible in the mist, and above them the later stars still
glimmered. That pale interval over, the picture began to enlarge and
fill up so fast that at every new peep I could have found enough
to look at for an hour. Imperceptibly my candles became the only
incongruous part of the morning, the dark places in my room all
melted away, and the day shone bright upon a cheerful landscape,
prominent in which the old Abbey Church, with its massive tower,
threw a softer train of shadow on the view than seemed compatible
with its rugged character. But so from rough outsides (I hope I have
learnt), serene and gentle influences often proceed.

Every part of the house was in such order, and every one was so
attentive to me, that I had no trouble with my two bunches of keys,
though what with trying to remember the contents of each little
store-room drawer and cupboard; and what with making notes on a slate
about jams, and pickles, and preserves, and bottles, and glass, and
china, and a great many other things; and what with being generally a
methodical, old-maidish sort of foolish little person, I was so busy
that I could not believe it was breakfast-time when I heard the bell
ring. Away I ran, however, and made tea, as I had already been
installed into the responsibility of the tea-pot; and then, as they
were all rather late and nobody was down yet, I thought I would take
a peep at the garden and get some knowledge of that too. I found it
quite a delightful place--in front, the pretty avenue and drive by
which we had approached (and where, by the by, we had cut up the
gravel so terribly with our wheels that I asked the gardener to roll
it); at the back, the flower-garden, with my darling at her window up
there, throwing it open to smile out at me, as if she would have
kissed me from that distance. Beyond the flower-garden was a
kitchen-garden, and then a paddock, and then a snug little rick-yard,
and then a dear little farm-yard. As to the house itself, with its
three peaks in the roof; its various-shaped windows, some so large,
some so small, and all so pretty; its trellis-work, against the
south-front for roses and honey-suckle, and its homely, comfortable,
welcoming look--it was, as Ada said when she came out to meet me with
her arm through that of its master, worthy of her cousin John, a bold
thing to say, though he only pinched her dear cheek for it.

Mr. Skimpole was as agreeable at breakfast as he had been overnight.
There was honey on the table, and it led him into a discourse about
bees. He had no objection to honey, he said (and I should think he
had not, for he seemed to like it), but he protested against the
overweening assumptions of bees. He didn't at all see why the busy
bee should be proposed as a model to him; he supposed the bee liked
to make honey, or he wouldn't do it--nobody asked him. It was not
necessary for the bee to make such a merit of his tastes. If every
confectioner went buzzing about the world banging against everything
that came in his way and egotistically calling upon everybody to take
notice that he was going to his work and must not be interrupted, the
world would be quite an unsupportable place. Then, after all, it was
a ridiculous position to be smoked out of your fortune with brimstone
as soon as you had made it. You would have a very mean opinion of a
Manchester man if he spun cotton for no other purpose. He must say he
thought a drone the embodiment of a pleasanter and wiser idea. The
drone said unaffectedly, "You will excuse me; I really cannot attend
to the shop! I find myself in a world in which there is so much to
see and so short a time to see it in that I must take the liberty of
looking about me and begging to be provided for by somebody who
doesn't want to look about him." This appeared to Mr. Skimpole to be
the drone philosophy, and he thought it a very good philosophy,
always supposing the drone to be willing to be on good terms with the
bee, which, so far as he knew, the easy fellow always was, if the
consequential creature would only let him, and not be so conceited
about his honey!

He pursued this fancy with the lightest foot over a variety of ground
and made us all merry, though again he seemed to have as serious a
meaning in what he said as he was capable of having. I left them
still listening to him when I withdrew to attend to my new duties.
They had occupied me for some time, and I was passing through the
passages on my return with my basket of keys on my arm when Mr.
Jarndyce called me into a small room next his bed-chamber, which I
found to be in part a little library of books and papers and in part
quite a little museum of his boots and shoes and hat-boxes.

"Sit down, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce. "This, you must know, is the
growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here."

"You must be here very seldom, sir," said I.

"Oh, you don't know me!" he returned. "When I am deceived or
disappointed in--the wind, and it's easterly, I take refuge here. The
growlery is the best-used room in the house. You are not aware of
half my humours yet. My dear, how you are trembling!"

I could not help it; I tried very hard, but being alone with that
benevolent presence, and meeting his kind eyes, and feeling so happy
and so honoured there, and my heart so full--I kissed his hand. I
don't know what I said, or even that I spoke. He was disconcerted and
walked to the window; I almost believed with an intention of jumping
out, until he turned and I was reassured by seeing in his eyes what
he had gone there to hide. He gently patted me on the head, and I sat
down.

"There! There!" he said. "That's over. Pooh! Don't be foolish."

"It shall not happen again, sir," I returned, "but at first it is
difficult--"

"Nonsense!" he said. "It's easy, easy. Why not? I hear of a good
little orphan girl without a protector, and I take it into my head to
be that protector. She grows up, and more than justifies my good
opinion, and I remain her guardian and her friend. What is there in
all this? So, so! Now, we have cleared off old scores, and I have
before me thy pleasant, trusting, trusty face again."

I said to myself, "Esther, my dear, you surprise me! This really is
not what I expected of you!" And it had such a good effect that I
folded my hands upon my basket and quite recovered myself. Mr.
Jarndyce, expressing his approval in his face, began to talk to me as
confidentially as if I had been in the habit of conversing with him
every morning for I don't know how long. I almost felt as if I had.

"Of course, Esther," he said, "you don't understand this Chancery
business?"

And of course I shook my head.

"I don't know who does," he returned. "The lawyers have twisted it
into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case
have long disappeared from the face of the earth. It's about a will
and the trusts under a will--or it was once. It's about nothing but
costs now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing,
and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and
sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving
about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably
waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about costs. That's the great
question. All the rest, by some extraordinary means, has melted
away."

"But it was, sir," said I, to bring him back, for he began to rub his
head, "about a will?"

"Why, yes, it was about a will when it was about anything," he
returned. "A certain Jarndyce, in an evil hour, made a great fortune,
and made a great will. In the question how the trusts under that will
are to be administered, the fortune left by the will is squandered
away; the legatees under the will are reduced to such a miserable
condition that they would be sufficiently punished if they had
committed an enormous crime in having money left them, and the will
itself is made a dead letter. All through the deplorable cause,
everything that everybody in it, except one man, knows already is
referred to that only one man who don't know, it to find out--all
through the deplorable cause, everybody must have copies, over and
over again, of everything that has accumulated about it in the way of
cartloads of papers (or must pay for them without having them, which
is the usual course, for nobody wants them) and must go down the
middle and up again through such an infernal country-dance of costs
and fees and nonsense and corruption as was never dreamed of in the
wildest visions of a witch's Sabbath. Equity sends questions to law,
law sends questions back to equity; law finds it can't do this,
equity finds it can't do that; neither can so much as say it can't
do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel
appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel
appearing for B; and so on through the whole alphabet, like the
history of the apple pie. And thus, through years and years, and
lives and lives, everything goes on, constantly beginning over and
over again, and nothing ever ends. And we can't get out of the suit
on any terms, for we are made parties to it, and MUST BE parties to
it, whether we like it or not. But it won't do to think of it! When
my great uncle, poor Tom Jarndyce, began to think of it, it was the
beginning of the end!"

"The Mr. Jarndyce, sir, whose story I have heard?"

He nodded gravely. "I was his heir, and this was his house, Esther.
When I came here, it was bleak indeed. He had left the signs of his
misery upon it."

"How changed it must be now!" I said.

"It had been called, before his time, the Peaks. He gave it its
present name and lived here shut up, day and night poring over the
wicked heaps of papers in the suit and hoping against hope to
disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the
meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the
cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds
choked the passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained
of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of
the house too, it was so shattered and ruined."

He walked a little to and fro after saying this to himself with a
shudder, and then looked at me, and brightened, and came and sat down
again with his hands in his pockets.

"I told you this was the growlery, my dear. Where was I?"

I reminded him, at the hopeful change he had made in Bleak House.

"Bleak House; true. There is, in that city of London there, some
property of ours which is much at this day what Bleak House was then;
I say property of ours, meaning of the suit's, but I ought to call it
the property of costs, for costs is the only power on earth that will
ever get anything out of it now or will ever know it for anything but
an eyesore and a heartsore. It is a street of perishing blind houses,
with their eyes stoned out, without a pane of glass, without so much
as a window-frame, with the bare blank shutters tumbling from their
hinges and falling asunder, the iron rails peeling away in flakes of
rust, the chimneys sinking in, the stone steps to every door (and
every door might be death's door) turning stagnant green, the very
crutches on which the ruins are propped decaying. Although Bleak
House was not in Chancery, its master was, and it was stamped with
the same seal. These are the Great Seal's impressions, my dear, all
over England--the children know them!"

"How changed it is!" I said again.

"Why, so it is," he answered much more cheerfully; "and it is wisdom
in you to keep me to the bright side of the picture." (The idea of my
wisdom!) "These are things I never talk about or even think about,
excepting in the growlery here. If you consider it right to mention
them to Rick and Ada," looking seriously at me, "you can. I leave it
to your discretion, Esther."

"I hope, sir--" said I.

"I think you had better call me guardian, my dear."

I felt that I was choking again--I taxed myself with it, "Esther,
now, you know you are!"--when he feigned to say this slightly, as if
it were a whim instead of a thoughtful tenderness. But I gave the
housekeeping keys the least shake in the world as a reminder to
myself, and folding my hands in a still more determined manner on the
basket, looked at him quietly.

"I hope, guardian," said I, "that you may not trust too much to my
discretion. I hope you may not mistake me. I am afraid it will be a
disappointment to you to know that I am not clever, but it really is
the truth, and you would soon find it out if I had not the honesty to
confess it."

He did not seem at all disappointed; quite the contrary. He told me,
with a smile all over his face, that he knew me very well indeed and
that I was quite clever enough for him.

"I hope I may turn out so," said I, "but I am much afraid of it,
guardian."

"You are clever enough to be the good little woman of our lives here,
my dear," he returned playfully; "the little old woman of the child's
(I don't mean Skimpole's) rhyme:


   "'Little old woman, and whither so high?'
    'To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky.'


"You will sweep them so neatly out of OUR sky in the course of your
housekeeping, Esther, that one of these days we shall have to abandon
the growlery and nail up the door."

This was the beginning of my being called Old Woman, and Little Old
Woman, and Cobweb, and Mrs. Shipton, and Mother Hubbard, and Dame
Durden, and so many names of that sort that my own name soon became
quite lost among them.

"However," said Mr. Jarndyce, "to return to our gossip. Here's Rick,
a fine young fellow full of promise. What's to be done with him?"

Oh, my goodness, the idea of asking my advice on such a point!

"Here he is, Esther," said Mr. Jarndyce, comfortably putting his
hands into his pockets and stretching out his legs. "He must have a
profession; he must make some choice for himself. There will be a
world more wiglomeration about it, I suppose, but it must be done."

"More what, guardian?" said I.

"More wiglomeration," said he. "It's the only name I know for the
thing. He is a ward in Chancery, my dear. Kenge and Carboy will have
something to say about it; Master Somebody--a sort of ridiculous
sexton, digging graves for the merits of causes in a back room at the
end of Quality Court, Chancery Lane--will have something to say about
it; counsel will have something to say about it; the Chancellor will
have something to say about it; the satellites will have something to
say about it; they will all have to be handsomely feed, all round,
about it; the whole thing will be vastly ceremonious, wordy,
unsatisfactory, and expensive, and I call it, in general,
wiglomeration. How mankind ever came to be afflicted with
wiglomeration, or for whose sins these young people ever fell into a
pit of it, I don't know; so it is."

He began to rub his head again and to hint that he felt the wind. But
it was a delightful instance of his kindness towards me that whether
he rubbed his head, or walked about, or did both, his face was sure
to recover its benignant expression as it looked at mine; and he was
sure to turn comfortable again and put his hands in his pockets and
stretch out his legs.

"Perhaps it would be best, first of all," said I, "to ask Mr. Richard
what he inclines to himself."

"Exactly so," he returned. "That's what I mean! You know, just
accustom yourself to talk it over, with your tact and in your quiet
way, with him and Ada, and see what you all make of it. We are sure
to come at the heart of the matter by your means, little woman."

I really was frightened at the thought of the importance I was
attaining and the number of things that were being confided to me. I
had not meant this at all; I had meant that he should speak to
Richard. But of course I said nothing in reply except that I would do
my best, though I feared (I really felt it necessary to repeat this)
that he thought me much more sagacious than I was. At which my
guardian only laughed the pleasantest laugh I ever heard.

"Come!" he said, rising and pushing back his chair. "I think we may
have done with the growlery for one day! Only a concluding word.
Esther, my dear, do you wish to ask me anything?"

He looked so attentively at me that I looked attentively at him and
felt sure I understood him.

"About myself, sir?" said I.

"Yes."

"Guardian," said I, venturing to put my hand, which was suddenly
colder than I could have wished, in his, "nothing! I am quite sure
that if there were anything I ought to know or had any need to know,
I should not have to ask you to tell it to me. If my whole reliance
and confidence were not placed in you, I must have a hard heart
indeed. I have nothing to ask you, nothing in the world."

He drew my hand through his arm and we went away to look for Ada.
From that hour I felt quite easy with him, quite unreserved, quite
content to know no more, quite happy.

We lived, at first, rather a busy life at Bleak House, for we had to
become acquainted with many residents in and out of the neighbourhood
who knew Mr. Jarndyce. It seemed to Ada and me that everybody knew
him who wanted to do anything with anybody else's money. It amazed us
when we began to sort his letters and to answer some of them for him
in the growlery of a morning to find how the great object of the
lives of nearly all his correspondents appeared to be to form
themselves into committees for getting in and laying out money. The
ladies were as desperate as the gentlemen; indeed, I think they were
even more so. They threw themselves into committees in the most
impassioned manner and collected subscriptions with a vehemence quite
extraordinary. It appeared to us that some of them must pass their
whole lives in dealing out subscription-cards to the whole
post-office directory--shilling cards, half-crown cards,
half-sovereign cards, penny cards. They wanted everything. They
wanted wearing apparel, they wanted linen rags, they wanted money,
they wanted coals, they wanted soup, they wanted interest, they
wanted autographs, they wanted flannel, they wanted whatever Mr.
Jarndyce had--or had not. Their objects were as various as their
demands. They were going to raise new buildings, they were going to
pay off debts on old buildings, they were going to establish in a
picturesque building (engraving of proposed west elevation attached)
the Sisterhood of Mediaeval Marys, they were going to give a
testimonial to Mrs. Jellyby, they were going to have their
secretary's portrait painted and presented to his mother-in-law,
whose deep devotion to him was well known, they were going to get up
everything, I really believe, from five hundred thousand tracts to an
annuity and from a marble monument to a silver tea-pot. They took a
multitude of titles. They were the Women of England, the Daughters of
Britain, the Sisters of all the cardinal virtues separately, the
Females of America, the Ladies of a hundred denominations. They
appeared to be always excited about canvassing and electing. They
seemed to our poor wits, and according to their own accounts, to be
constantly polling people by tens of thousands, yet never bringing
their candidates in for anything. It made our heads ache to think, on
the whole, what feverish lives they must lead.

Among the ladies who were most distinguished for this rapacious
benevolence (if I may use the expression) was a Mrs. Pardiggle, who
seemed, as I judged from the number of her letters to Mr. Jarndyce,
to be almost as powerful a correspondent as Mrs. Jellyby herself. We
observed that the wind always changed when Mrs. Pardiggle became the
subject of conversation and that it invariably interrupted Mr.
Jarndyce and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked
that there were two classes of charitable people; one, the people who
did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people
who did a great deal and made no noise at all. We were therefore
curious to see Mrs. Pardiggle, suspecting her to be a type of the
former class, and were glad when she called one day with her five
young sons.

She was a formidable style of lady with spectacles, a prominent nose,
and a loud voice, who had the effect of wanting a great deal of room.
And she really did, for she knocked down little chairs with her
skirts that were quite a great way off. As only Ada and I were at
home, we received her timidly, for she seemed to come in like cold
weather and to make the little Pardiggles blue as they followed.

"These, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle with great volubility
after the first salutations, "are my five boys. You may have seen
their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in
the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce. Egbert, my eldest
(twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket-money, to the amount of
five and threepence, to the Tockahoopo Indians. Oswald, my second
(ten and a half), is the child who contributed two and nine-pence to
the Great National Smithers Testimonial. Francis, my third (nine),
one and sixpence halfpenny; Felix, my fourth (seven), eightpence to
the Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), has voluntarily
enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is pledged never,
through life, to use tobacco in any form."

We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that
they were weazened and shrivelled--though they were certainly that
too--but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the
mention of the Tockahoopo Indians, I could really have supposed
Egbert to be one of the most baleful members of that tribe, he gave
me such a savage frown. The face of each child, as the amount of his
contribution was mentioned, darkened in a peculiarly vindictive
manner, but his was by far the worst. I must except, however, the
little recruit into the Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly and
evenly miserable.

"You have been visiting, I understand," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "at Mrs.
Jellyby's?"

We said yes, we had passed one night there.

"Mrs. Jellyby," pursued the lady, always speaking in the same
demonstrative, loud, hard tone, so that her voice impressed my fancy
as if it had a sort of spectacles on too--and I may take the
opportunity of remarking that her spectacles were made the less
engaging by her eyes being what Ada called "choking eyes," meaning
very prominent--"Mrs. Jellyby is a benefactor to society and deserves
a helping hand. My boys have contributed to the African
project--Egbert, one and six, being the entire allowance of nine
weeks; Oswald, one and a penny halfpenny, being the same; the rest,
according to their little means. Nevertheless, I do not go with Mrs.
Jellyby in all things. I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in her treatment
of her young family. It has been noticed. It has been observed that
her young family are excluded from participation in the objects to
which she is devoted. She may be right, she may be wrong; but, right
or wrong, this is not my course with MY young family. I take them
everywhere."

I was afterwards convinced (and so was Ada) that from the
ill-conditioned eldest child, these words extorted a sharp yell. He
turned it off into a yawn, but it began as a yell.

"They attend matins with me (very prettily done) at half-past six
o'clock in the morning all the year round, including of course the
depth of winter," said Mrs. Pardiggle rapidly, "and they are with me
during the revolving duties of the day. I am a School lady, I am a
Visiting lady, I am a Reading lady, I am a Distributing lady; I am on
the local Linen Box Committee and many general committees; and my
canvassing alone is very extensive--perhaps no one's more so. But
they are my companions everywhere; and by these means they acquire
that knowledge of the poor, and that capacity of doing charitable
business in general--in short, that taste for the sort of
thing--which will render them in after life a service to their
neighbours and a satisfaction to themselves. My young family are not
frivolous; they expend the entire amount of their allowance in
subscriptions, under my direction; and they have attended as many
public meetings and listened to as many lectures, orations, and
discussions as generally fall to the lot of few grown people. Alfred
(five), who, as I mentioned, has of his own election joined the
Infant Bonds of Joy, was one of the very few children who manifested
consciousness on that occasion after a fervid address of two hours
from the chairman of the evening."

Alfred glowered at us as if he never could, or would, forgive the
injury of that night.

"You may have observed, Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "in
some of the lists to which I have referred, in the possession of our
esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce, that the names of my young family are
concluded with the name of O. A. Pardiggle, F.R.S., one pound. That
is their father. We usually observe the same routine. I put down my
mite first; then my young family enrol their contributions, according
to their ages and their little means; and then Mr. Pardiggle brings
up the rear. Mr. Pardiggle is happy to throw in his limited donation,
under my direction; and thus things are made not only pleasant to
ourselves, but, we trust, improving to others."

Suppose Mr. Pardiggle were to dine with Mr. Jellyby, and suppose Mr.
Jellyby were to relieve his mind after dinner to Mr. Pardiggle, would
Mr. Pardiggle, in return, make any confidential communication to Mr.
Jellyby? I was quite confused to find myself thinking this, but it
came into my head.

"You are very pleasantly situated here!" said Mrs. Pardiggle.

We were glad to change the subject, and going to the window, pointed
out the beauties of the prospect, on which the spectacles appeared to
me to rest with curious indifference.

"You know Mr. Gusher?" said our visitor.

We were obliged to say that we had not the pleasure of Mr. Gusher's
acquaintance.

"The loss is yours, I assure you," said Mrs. Pardiggle with her
commanding deportment. "He is a very fervid, impassioned
speaker--full of fire! Stationed in a waggon on this lawn, now,
which, from the shape of the land, is naturally adapted to a public
meeting, he would improve almost any occasion you could mention for
hours and hours! By this time, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle,
moving back to her chair and overturning, as if by invisible agency,
a little round table at a considerable distance with my work-basket
on it, "by this time you have found me out, I dare say?"

This was really such a confusing question that Ada looked at me in
perfect dismay. As to the guilty nature of my own consciousness after
what I had been thinking, it must have been expressed in the colour
of my cheeks.

"Found out, I mean," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "the prominent point in my
character. I am aware that it is so prominent as to be discoverable
immediately. I lay myself open to detection, I know. Well! I freely
admit, I am a woman of business. I love hard work; I enjoy hard work.
The excitement does me good. I am so accustomed and inured to hard
work that I don't know what fatigue is."

We murmured that it was very astonishing and very gratifying, or
something to that effect. I don't think we knew what it was either,
but this is what our politeness expressed.

"I do not understand what it is to be tired; you cannot tire me if
you try!" said Mrs. Pardiggle. "The quantity of exertion (which is no
exertion to me), the amount of business (which I regard as nothing),
that I go through sometimes astonishes myself. I have seen my young
family, and Mr. Pardiggle, quite worn out with witnessing it, when I
may truly say I have been as fresh as a lark!"

If that dark-visaged eldest boy could look more malicious than he had
already looked, this was the time when he did it. I observed that he
doubled his right fist and delivered a secret blow into the crown of
his cap, which was under his left arm.

"This gives me a great advantage when I am making my rounds," said
Mrs. Pardiggle. "If I find a person unwilling to hear what I have to
say, I tell that person directly, 'I am incapable of fatigue, my good
friend, I am never tired, and I mean to go on until I have done.' It
answers admirably! Miss Summerson, I hope I shall have your
assistance in my visiting rounds immediately, and Miss Clare's very
soon."

At first I tried to excuse myself for the present on the general
ground of having occupations to attend to which I must not neglect.
But as this was an ineffectual protest, I then said, more
particularly, that I was not sure of my qualifications. That I was
inexperienced in the art of adapting my mind to minds very
differently situated, and addressing them from suitable points of
view. That I had not that delicate knowledge of the heart which must
be essential to such a work. That I had much to learn, myself, before
I could teach others, and that I could not confide in my good
intentions alone. For these reasons I thought it best to be as useful
as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those
immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually
and naturally expand itself. All this I said with anything but
confidence, because Mrs. Pardiggle was much older than I, and had
great experience, and was so very military in her manners.

"You are wrong, Miss Summerson," said she, "but perhaps you are not
equal to hard work or the excitement of it, and that makes a vast
difference. If you would like to see how I go through my work, I am
now about--with my young family--to visit a brickmaker in the
neighbourhood (a very bad character) and shall be glad to take you
with me. Miss Clare also, if she will do me the favour."

Ada and I interchanged looks, and as we were going out in any case,
accepted the offer. When we hastily returned from putting on our
bonnets, we found the young family languishing in a corner and Mrs.
Pardiggle sweeping about the room, knocking down nearly all the light
objects it contained. Mrs. Pardiggle took possession of Ada, and I
followed with the family.

Ada told me afterwards that Mrs. Pardiggle talked in the same loud
tone (that, indeed, I overheard) all the way to the brickmaker's
about an exciting contest which she had for two or three years waged
against another lady relative to the bringing in of their rival
candidates for a pension somewhere. There had been a quantity of
printing, and promising, and proxying, and polling, and it appeared
to have imparted great liveliness to all concerned, except the
pensioners--who were not elected yet.

I am very fond of being confided in by children and am happy in being
usually favoured in that respect, but on this occasion it gave me
great uneasiness. As soon as we were out of doors, Egbert, with the
manner of a little footpad, demanded a shilling of me on the ground
that his pocket-money was "boned" from him. On my pointing out the
great impropriety of the word, especially in connexion with his
parent (for he added sulkily "By her!"), he pinched me and said, "Oh,
then! Now! Who are you! YOU wouldn't like it, I think? What does she
make a sham for, and pretend to give me money, and take it away
again? Why do you call it my allowance, and never let me spend it?"
These exasperating questions so inflamed his mind and the minds of
Oswald and Francis that they all pinched me at once, and in a
dreadfully expert way--screwing up such little pieces of my arms that
I could hardly forbear crying out. Felix, at the same time, stamped
upon my toes. And the Bond of Joy, who on account of always having
the whole of his little income anticipated stood in fact pledged to
abstain from cakes as well as tobacco, so swelled with grief and rage
when we passed a pastry-cook's shop that he terrified me by becoming
purple. I never underwent so much, both in body and mind, in the
course of a walk with young people as from these unnaturally
constrained children when they paid me the compliment of being
natural.

I was glad when we came to the brickmaker's house, though it was one
of a cluster of wretched hovels in a brick-field, with pigsties close
to the broken windows and miserable little gardens before the doors
growing nothing but stagnant pools. Here and there an old tub was put
to catch the droppings of rain-water from a roof, or they were banked
up with mud into a little pond like a large dirt-pie. At the doors
and windows some men and women lounged or prowled about, and took
little notice of us except to laugh to one another or to say
something as we passed about gentlefolks minding their own business
and not troubling their heads and muddying their shoes with coming to
look after other people's.

Mrs. Pardiggle, leading the way with a great show of moral
determination and talking with much volubility about the untidy
habits of the people (though I doubted if the best of us could have
been tidy in such a place), conducted us into a cottage at the
farthest corner, the ground-floor room of which we nearly filled.
Besides ourselves, there were in this damp, offensive room a woman
with a black eye, nursing a poor little gasping baby by the fire; a
man, all stained with clay and mud and looking very dissipated, lying
at full length on the ground, smoking a pipe; a powerful young man
fastening a collar on a dog; and a bold girl doing some kind of
washing in very dirty water. They all looked up at us as we came in,
and the woman seemed to turn her face towards the fire as if to hide
her bruised eye; nobody gave us any welcome.

"Well, my friends," said Mrs. Pardiggle, but her voice had not a
friendly sound, I thought; it was much too business-like and
systematic. "How do you do, all of you? I am here again. I told you,
you couldn't tire me, you know. I am fond of hard work, and am true
to my word."

"There an't," growled the man on the floor, whose head rested on his
hand as he stared at us, "any more on you to come in, is there?"

"No, my friend," said Mrs. Pardiggle, seating herself on one stool
and knocking down another. "We are all here."

"Because I thought there warn't enough of you, perhaps?" said the
man, with his pipe between his lips as he looked round upon us.

The young man and the girl both laughed. Two friends of the young
man, whom we had attracted to the doorway and who stood there with
their hands in their pockets, echoed the laugh noisily.

"You can't tire me, good people," said Mrs. Pardiggle to these
latter. "I enjoy hard work, and the harder you make mine, the better
I like it."

"Then make it easy for her!" growled the man upon the floor. "I wants
it done, and over. I wants a end of these liberties took with my
place. I wants an end of being drawed like a badger. Now you're
a-going to poll-pry and question according to custom--I know what
you're a-going to be up to. Well! You haven't got no occasion to be
up to it. I'll save you the trouble. Is my daughter a-washin? Yes,
she IS a-washin. Look at the water. Smell it! That's wot we drinks.
How do you like it, and what do you think of gin instead! An't my
place dirty? Yes, it is dirty--it's nat'rally dirty, and it's
nat'rally onwholesome; and we've had five dirty and onwholesome
children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them,
and for us besides. Have I read the little book wot you left? No, I
an't read the little book wot you left. There an't nobody here as
knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn't be suitable to
me. It's a book fit for a babby, and I'm not a babby. If you was to
leave me a doll, I shouldn't nuss it. How have I been conducting of
myself? Why, I've been drunk for three days; and I'da been drunk four
if I'da had the money. Don't I never mean for to go to church? No, I
don't never mean for to go to church. I shouldn't be expected there,
if I did; the beadle's too gen-teel for me. And how did my wife get
that black eye? Why, I give it her; and if she says I didn't, she's a
lie!"

He had pulled his pipe out of his mouth to say all this, and he now
turned over on his other side and smoked again. Mrs. Pardiggle, who
had been regarding him through her spectacles with a forcible
composure, calculated, I could not help thinking, to increase his
antagonism, pulled out a good book as if it were a constable's staff
and took the whole family into custody. I mean into religious
custody, of course; but she really did it as if she were an
inexorable moral policeman carrying them all off to a station-house.

Ada and I were very uncomfortable. We both felt intrusive and out of
place, and we both thought that Mrs. Pardiggle would have got on
infinitely better if she had not had such a mechanical way of taking
possession of people. The children sulked and stared; the family took
no notice of us whatever, except when the young man made the dog
bark, which he usually did when Mrs. Pardiggle was most emphatic. We
both felt painfully sensible that between us and these people there
was an iron barrier which could not be removed by our new friend. By
whom or how it could be removed, we did not know, but we knew that.
Even what she read and said seemed to us to be ill-chosen for such
auditors, if it had been imparted ever so modestly and with ever so
much tact. As to the little book to which the man on the floor had
referred, we acquired a knowledge of it afterwards, and Mr. Jarndyce
said he doubted if Robinson Crusoe could have read it, though he had
had no other on his desolate island.

We were much relieved, under these circumstances, when Mrs. Pardiggle
left off.

The man on the floor, then turning his head round again, said
morosely, "Well! You've done, have you?"

"For to-day, I have, my friend. But I am never fatigued. I shall come
to you again in your regular order," returned Mrs. Pardiggle with
demonstrative cheerfulness.

"So long as you goes now," said he, folding his arms and shutting his
eyes with an oath, "you may do wot you like!"

Mrs. Pardiggle accordingly rose and made a little vortex in the
confined room from which the pipe itself very narrowly escaped.
Taking one of her young family in each hand, and telling the others
to follow closely, and expressing her hope that the brickmaker and
all his house would be improved when she saw them next, she then
proceeded to another cottage. I hope it is not unkind in me to say
that she certainly did make, in this as in everything else, a show
that was not conciliatory of doing charity by wholesale and of
dealing in it to a large extent.

She supposed that we were following her, but as soon as the space was
left clear, we approached the woman sitting by the fire to ask if the
baby were ill.

She only looked at it as it lay on her lap. We had observed before
that when she looked at it she covered her discoloured eye with her
hand, as though she wished to separate any association with noise and
violence and ill treatment from the poor little child.

Ada, whose gentle heart was moved by its appearance, bent down to
touch its little face. As she did so, I saw what happened and drew
her back. The child died.

"Oh, Esther!" cried Ada, sinking on her knees beside it. "Look here!
Oh, Esther, my love, the little thing! The suffering, quiet, pretty
little thing! I am so sorry for it. I am so sorry for the mother. I
never saw a sight so pitiful as this before! Oh, baby, baby!"

Such compassion, such gentleness, as that with which she bent down
weeping and put her hand upon the mother's might have softened any
mother's heart that ever beat. The woman at first gazed at her in
astonishment and then burst into tears.

Presently I took the light burden from her lap, did what I could to
make the baby's rest the prettier and gentler, laid it on a shelf,
and covered it with my own handkerchief. We tried to comfort the
mother, and we whispered to her what Our Saviour said of children.
She answered nothing, but sat weeping--weeping very much.

When I turned, I found that the young man had taken out the dog and
was standing at the door looking in upon us with dry eyes, but quiet.
The girl was quiet too and sat in a corner looking on the ground. The
man had risen. He still smoked his pipe with an air of defiance, but
he was silent.

An ugly woman, very poorly clothed, hurried in while I was glancing
at them, and coming straight up to the mother, said, "Jenny! Jenny!"
The mother rose on being so addressed and fell upon the woman's neck.

She also had upon her face and arms the marks of ill usage. She had
no kind of grace about her, but the grace of sympathy; but when she
condoled with the woman, and her own tears fell, she wanted no
beauty. I say condoled, but her only words were "Jenny! Jenny!" All
the rest was in the tone in which she said them.

I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby
and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to
see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was
softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of
such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor
is little known, excepting to themselves and God.

We felt it better to withdraw and leave them uninterrupted. We stole
out quietly and without notice from any one except the man. He was
leaning against the wall near the door, and finding that there was
scarcely room for us to pass, went out before us. He seemed to want
to hide that he did this on our account, but we perceived that he
did, and thanked him. He made no answer.

Ada was so full of grief all the way home, and Richard, whom we found
at home, was so distressed to see her in tears (though he said to me,
when she was not present, how beautiful it was too!), that we
arranged to return at night with some little comforts and repeat our
visit at the brick-maker's house. We said as little as we could to
Mr. Jarndyce, but the wind changed directly.

Richard accompanied us at night to the scene of our morning
expedition. On our way there, we had to pass a noisy drinking-house,
where a number of men were flocking about the door. Among them, and
prominent in some dispute, was the father of the little child. At a
short distance, we passed the young man and the dog, in congenial
company. The sister was standing laughing and talking with some other
young women at the corner of the row of cottages, but she seemed
ashamed and turned away as we went by.

We left our escort within sight of the brickmaker's dwelling and
proceeded by ourselves. When we came to the door, we found the woman
who had brought such consolation with her standing there looking
anxiously out.

"It's you, young ladies, is it?" she said in a whisper. "I'm
a-watching for my master. My heart's in my mouth. If he was to catch
me away from home, he'd pretty near murder me."

"Do you mean your husband?" said I.

"Yes, miss, my master. Jenny's asleep, quite worn out. She's scarcely
had the child off her lap, poor thing, these seven days and nights,
except when I've been able to take it for a minute or two."

As she gave way for us, she went softly in and put what we had
brought near the miserable bed on which the mother slept. No effort
had been made to clean the room--it seemed in its nature almost
hopeless of being clean; but the small waxen form from which so much
solemnity diffused itself had been composed afresh, and washed, and
neatly dressed in some fragments of white linen; and on my
handkerchief, which still covered the poor baby, a little bunch of
sweet herbs had been laid by the same rough, scarred hands, so
lightly, so tenderly!

"May heaven reward you!" we said to her. "You are a good woman."

"Me, young ladies?" she returned with surprise. "Hush! Jenny, Jenny!"

The mother had moaned in her sleep and moved. The sound of the
familiar voice seemed to calm her again. She was quiet once more.

How little I thought, when I raised my handkerchief to look upon the
tiny sleeper underneath and seemed to see a halo shine around the
child through Ada's drooping hair as her pity bent her head--how
little I thought in whose unquiet bosom that handkerchief would come
to lie after covering the motionless and peaceful breast! I only
thought that perhaps the Angel of the child might not be all
unconscious of the woman who replaced it with so compassionate a
hand; not all unconscious of her presently, when we had taken leave,
and left her at the door, by turns looking, and listening in terror
for herself, and saying in her old soothing manner, "Jenny, Jenny!"




CHAPTER IX

Signs and Tokens


I don't know how it is I seem to be always writing about myself. I
mean all the time to write about other people, and I try to think
about myself as little as possible, and I am sure, when I find myself
coming into the story again, I am really vexed and say, "Dear, dear,
you tiresome little creature, I wish you wouldn't!" but it is all of
no use. I hope any one who may read what I write will understand that
if these pages contain a great deal about me, I can only suppose it
must be because I have really something to do with them and can't be
kept out.

My darling and I read together, and worked, and practised, and found
so much employment for our time that the winter days flew by us like
bright-winged birds. Generally in the afternoons, and always in the
evenings, Richard gave us his company. Although he was one of the
most restless creatures in the world, he certainly was very fond of
our society.

He was very, very, very fond of Ada. I mean it, and I had better say
it at once. I had never seen any young people falling in love before,
but I found them out quite soon. I could not say so, of course, or
show that I knew anything about it. On the contrary, I was so demure
and used to seem so unconscious that sometimes I considered within
myself while I was sitting at work whether I was not growing quite
deceitful.

But there was no help for it. All I had to do was to be quiet, and I
was as quiet as a mouse. They were as quiet as mice too, so far as
any words were concerned, but the innocent manner in which they
relied more and more upon me as they took more and more to one
another was so charming that I had great difficulty in not showing
how it interested me.

"Our dear little old woman is such a capital old woman," Richard
would say, coming up to meet me in the garden early, with his
pleasant laugh and perhaps the least tinge of a blush, "that I can't
get on without her. Before I begin my harum-scarum day--grinding away
at those books and instruments and then galloping up hill and down
dale, all the country round, like a highwayman--it does me so much
good to come and have a steady walk with our comfortable friend, that
here I am again!"

"You know, Dame Durden, dear," Ada would say at night, with her head
upon my shoulder and the firelight shining in her thoughtful eyes, "I
don't want to talk when we come upstairs here. Only to sit a little
while thinking, with your dear face for company, and to hear the wind
and remember the poor sailors at sea--"

Ah! Perhaps Richard was going to be a sailor. We had talked it over
very often now, and there was some talk of gratifying the inclination
of his childhood for the sea. Mr. Jarndyce had written to a relation
of the family, a great Sir Leicester Dedlock, for his interest in
Richard's favour, generally; and Sir Leicester had replied in a
gracious manner that he would be happy to advance the prospects of
the young gentleman if it should ever prove to be within his power,
which was not at all probable, and that my Lady sent her compliments
to the young gentleman (to whom she perfectly remembered that she was
allied by remote consanguinity) and trusted that he would ever do his
duty in any honourable profession to which he might devote himself.

"So I apprehend it's pretty clear," said Richard to me, "that I shall
have to work my own way. Never mind! Plenty of people have had to do
that before now, and have done it. I only wish I had the command of a
clipping privateer to begin with and could carry off the Chancellor
and keep him on short allowance until he gave judgment in our cause.
He'd find himself growing thin, if he didn't look sharp!"

With a buoyancy and hopefulness and a gaiety that hardly ever
flagged, Richard had a carelessness in his character that quite
perplexed me, principally because he mistook it, in such a very odd
way, for prudence. It entered into all his calculations about money
in a singular manner which I don't think I can better explain than by
reverting for a moment to our loan to Mr. Skimpole.

Mr. Jarndyce had ascertained the amount, either from Mr. Skimpole
himself or from Coavinses, and had placed the money in my hands with
instructions to me to retain my own part of it and hand the rest to
Richard. The number of little acts of thoughtless expenditure which
Richard justified by the recovery of his ten pounds, and the number
of times he talked to me as if he had saved or realized that amount,
would form a sum in simple addition.

"My prudent Mother Hubbard, why not?" he said to me when he wanted,
without the least consideration, to bestow five pounds on the
brickmaker. "I made ten pounds, clear, out of Coavinses' business."

"How was that?" said I.

"Why, I got rid of ten pounds which I was quite content to get rid of
and never expected to see any more. You don't deny that?"

"No," said I.

"Very well! Then I came into possession of ten pounds--"

"The same ten pounds," I hinted.

"That has nothing to do with it!" returned Richard. "I have got ten
pounds more than I expected to have, and consequently I can afford to
spend it without being particular."

In exactly the same way, when he was persuaded out of the sacrifice
of these five pounds by being convinced that it would do no good, he
carried that sum to his credit and drew upon it.

"Let me see!" he would say. "I saved five pounds out of the
brickmaker's affair, so if I have a good rattle to London and back in
a post-chaise and put that down at four pounds, I shall have saved
one. And it's a very good thing to save one, let me tell you: a penny
saved is a penny got!"

I believe Richard's was as frank and generous a nature as there
possibly can be. He was ardent and brave, and in the midst of all his
wild restlessness, was so gentle that I knew him like a brother in a
few weeks. His gentleness was natural to him and would have shown
itself abundantly even without Ada's influence; but with it, he
became one of the most winning of companions, always so ready to be
interested and always so happy, sanguine, and light-hearted. I am
sure that I, sitting with them, and walking with them, and talking
with them, and noticing from day to day how they went on, falling
deeper and deeper in love, and saying nothing about it, and each
shyly thinking that this love was the greatest of secrets, perhaps
not yet suspected even by the other--I am sure that I was scarcely
less enchanted than they were and scarcely less pleased with the
pretty dream.

We were going on in this way, when one morning at breakfast Mr.
Jarndyce received a letter, and looking at the superscription, said,
"From Boythorn? Aye, aye!" and opened and read it with evident
pleasure, announcing to us in a parenthesis when he was about
half-way through, that Boythorn was "coming down" on a visit. Now who
was Boythorn, we all thought. And I dare say we all thought too--I am
sure I did, for one--would Boythorn at all interfere with what was
going forward?

"I went to school with this fellow, Lawrence Boythorn," said Mr.
Jarndyce, tapping the letter as he laid it on the table, "more than
five and forty years ago. He was then the most impetuous boy in the
world, and he is now the most impetuous man. He was then the loudest
boy in the world, and he is now the loudest man. He was then the
heartiest and sturdiest boy in the world, and he is now the heartiest
and sturdiest man. He is a tremendous fellow."

"In stature, sir?" asked Richard.

"Pretty well, Rick, in that respect," said Mr. Jarndyce; "being some
ten years older than I and a couple of inches taller, with his head
thrown back like an old soldier, his stalwart chest squared, his
hands like a clean blacksmith's, and his lungs! There's no simile for
his lungs. Talking, laughing, or snoring, they make the beams of the
house shake."

As Mr. Jarndyce sat enjoying the image of his friend Boythorn, we
observed the favourable omen that there was not the least indication
of any change in the wind.

"But it's the inside of the man, the warm heart of the man, the
passion of the man, the fresh blood of the man, Rick--and Ada, and
little Cobweb too, for you are all interested in a visitor--that I
speak of," he pursued. "His language is as sounding as his voice. He
is always in extremes, perpetually in the superlative degree. In his
condemnation he is all ferocity. You might suppose him to be an ogre
from what he says, and I believe he has the reputation of one with
some people. There! I tell you no more of him beforehand. You must
not be surprised to see him take me under his protection, for he has
never forgotten that I was a low boy at school and that our
friendship began in his knocking two of my head tyrant's teeth out
(he says six) before breakfast. Boythorn and his man," to me, "will
be here this afternoon, my dear."

I took care that the necessary preparations were made for Mr.
Boythorn's reception, and we looked forward to his arrival with some
curiosity. The afternoon wore away, however, and he did not appear.
The dinner-hour arrived, and still he did not appear. The dinner was
put back an hour, and we were sitting round the fire with no light
but the blaze when the hall-door suddenly burst open and the hall
resounded with these words, uttered with the greatest vehemence and
in a stentorian tone: "We have been misdirected, Jarndyce, by a most
abandoned ruffian, who told us to take the turning to the right
instead of to the left. He is the most intolerable scoundrel on the
face of the earth. His father must have been a most consummate
villain, ever to have such a son. I would have had that fellow shot
without the least remorse!"

"Did he do it on purpose?" Mr. Jarndyce inquired.

"I have not the slightest doubt that the scoundrel has passed his
whole existence in misdirecting travellers!" returned the other. "By
my soul, I thought him the worst-looking dog I had ever beheld when
he was telling me to take the turning to the right. And yet I stood
before that fellow face to face and didn't knock his brains out!"

"Teeth, you mean?" said Mr. Jarndyce.

"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed Mr. Lawrence Boythorn, really making the whole
house vibrate. "What, you have not forgotten it yet! Ha, ha, ha! And
that was another most consummate vagabond! By my soul, the
countenance of that fellow when he was a boy was the blackest image
of perfidy, cowardice, and cruelty ever set up as a scarecrow in a
field of scoundrels. If I were to meet that most unparalleled despot
in the streets to-morrow, I would fell him like a rotten tree!"

"I have no doubt of it," said Mr. Jarndyce. "Now, will you come
upstairs?"

"By my soul, Jarndyce," returned his guest, who seemed to refer to
his watch, "if you had been married, I would have turned back at the
garden-gate and gone away to the remotest summits of the Himalaya
Mountains sooner than I would have presented myself at this
unseasonable hour."

"Not quite so far, I hope?" said Mr. Jarndyce.

"By my life and honour, yes!" cried the visitor. "I wouldn't be
guilty of the audacious insolence of keeping a lady of the house
waiting all this time for any earthly consideration. I would
infinitely rather destroy myself--infinitely rather!"

Talking thus, they went upstairs, and presently we heard him in his
bedroom thundering "Ha, ha, ha!" and again "Ha, ha, ha!" until the
flattest echo in the neighbourhood seemed to catch the contagion and
to laugh as enjoyingly as he did or as we did when we heard him
laugh.

We all conceived a prepossession in his favour, for there was a
sterling quality in this laugh, and in his vigorous, healthy voice,
and in the roundness and fullness with which he uttered every word he
spoke, and in the very fury of his superlatives, which seemed to go
off like blank cannons and hurt nothing. But we were hardly prepared
to have it so confirmed by his appearance when Mr. Jarndyce presented
him. He was not only a very handsome old gentleman--upright and
stalwart as he had been described to us--with a massive grey head, a
fine composure of face when silent, a figure that might have become
corpulent but for his being so continually in earnest that he gave it
no rest, and a chin that might have subsided into a double chin but
for the vehement emphasis in which it was constantly required to
assist; but he was such a true gentleman in his manner, so
chivalrously polite, his face was lighted by a smile of so much
sweetness and tenderness, and it seemed so plain that he had nothing
to hide, but showed himself exactly as he was--incapable, as Richard
said, of anything on a limited scale, and firing away with those
blank great guns because he carried no small arms whatever--that
really I could not help looking at him with equal pleasure as he sat
at dinner, whether he smilingly conversed with Ada and me, or was led
by Mr. Jarndyce into some great volley of superlatives, or threw up
his head like a bloodhound and gave out that tremendous "Ha, ha, ha!"

"You have brought your bird with you, I suppose?" said Mr. Jarndyce.

"By heaven, he is the most astonishing bird in Europe!" replied the
other. "He IS the most wonderful creature! I wouldn't take ten
thousand guineas for that bird. I have left an annuity for his sole
support in case he should outlive me. He is, in sense and attachment,
a phenomenon. And his father before him was one of the most
astonishing birds that ever lived!"

The subject of this laudation was a very little canary, who was so
tame that he was brought down by Mr. Boythorn's man, on his
forefinger, and after taking a gentle flight round the room, alighted
on his master's head. To hear Mr. Boythorn presently expressing the
most implacable and passionate sentiments, with this fragile mite of
a creature quietly perched on his forehead, was to have a good
illustration of his character, I thought.

"By my soul, Jarndyce," he said, very gently holding up a bit of
bread to the canary to peck at, "if I were in your place I would
seize every master in Chancery by the throat to-morrow morning and
shake him until his money rolled out of his pockets and his bones
rattled in his skin. I would have a settlement out of somebody, by
fair means or by foul. If you would empower me to do it, I would do
it for you with the greatest satisfaction!" (All this time the very
small canary was eating out of his hand.)

"I thank you, Lawrence, but the suit is hardly at such a point at
present," returned Mr. Jarndyce, laughing, "that it would be greatly
advanced even by the legal process of shaking the bench and the whole
bar."

"There never was such an infernal cauldron as that Chancery on the
face of the earth!" said Mr. Boythorn. "Nothing but a mine below it
on a busy day in term time, with all its records, rules, and
precedents collected in it and every functionary belonging to it
also, high and low, upward and downward, from its son the
Accountant-General to its father the Devil, and the whole blown to
atoms with ten thousand hundredweight of gunpowder, would reform it
in the least!"

It was impossible not to laugh at the energetic gravity with which he
recommended this strong measure of reform. When we laughed, he threw
up his head and shook his broad chest, and again the whole country
seemed to echo to his "Ha, ha, ha!" It had not the least effect in
disturbing the bird, whose sense of security was complete and who
hopped about the table with its quick head now on this side and now
on that, turning its bright sudden eye on its master as if he were no
more than another bird.

"But how do you and your neighbour get on about the disputed right of
way?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "You are not free from the toils of the law
yourself!"

"The fellow has brought actions against ME for trespass, and I have
brought actions against HIM for trespass," returned Mr. Boythorn. "By
heaven, he is the proudest fellow breathing. It is morally impossible
that his name can be Sir Leicester. It must be Sir Lucifer."

"Complimentary to our distant relation!" said my guardian laughingly
to Ada and Richard.

"I would beg Miss Clare's pardon and Mr. Carstone's pardon," resumed
our visitor, "if I were not reassured by seeing in the fair face of
the lady and the smile of the gentleman that it is quite unnecessary
and that they keep their distant relation at a comfortable distance."

"Or he keeps us," suggested Richard.

"By my soul," exclaimed Mr. Boythorn, suddenly firing another volley,
"that fellow is, and his father was, and his grandfather was, the
most stiff-necked, arrogant imbecile, pig-headed numskull, ever, by
some inexplicable mistake of Nature, born in any station of life but
a walking-stick's! The whole of that family are the most solemnly
conceited and consummate blockheads! But it's no matter; he should
not shut up my path if he were fifty baronets melted into one and
living in a hundred Chesney Wolds, one within another, like the ivory
balls in a Chinese carving. The fellow, by his agent, or secretary,
or somebody, writes to me 'Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, presents
his compliments to Mr. Lawrence Boythorn, and has to call his
attention to the fact that the green pathway by the old
parsonage-house, now the property of Mr. Lawrence Boythorn, is Sir
Leicester's right of way, being in fact a portion of the park of
Chesney Wold, and that Sir Leicester finds it convenient to close up
the same.' I write to the fellow, 'Mr. Lawrence Boythorn presents his
compliments to Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and has to call HIS
attention to the fact that he totally denies the whole of Sir
Leicester Dedlock's positions on every possible subject and has to
add, in reference to closing up the pathway, that he will be glad to
see the man who may undertake to do it.' The fellow sends a most
abandoned villain with one eye to construct a gateway. I play upon
that execrable scoundrel with a fire-engine until the breath is
nearly driven out of his body. The fellow erects a gate in the night.
I chop it down and burn it in the morning. He sends his myrmidons to
come over the fence and pass and repass. I catch them in humane man
traps, fire split peas at their legs, play upon them with the
engine--resolve to free mankind from the insupportable burden of the
existence of those lurking ruffians. He brings actions for trespass;
I bring actions for trespass. He brings actions for assault and
battery; I defend them and continue to assault and batter. Ha, ha,
ha!"

To hear him say all this with unimaginable energy, one might have
thought him the angriest of mankind. To see him at the very same
time, looking at the bird now perched upon his thumb and softly
smoothing its feathers with his forefinger, one might have thought
him the gentlest. To hear him laugh and see the broad good nature of
his face then, one might have supposed that he had not a care in the
world, or a dispute, or a dislike, but that his whole existence was a
summer joke.

"No, no," he said, "no closing up of my paths by any Dedlock! Though
I willingly confess," here he softened in a moment, "that Lady
Dedlock is the most accomplished lady in the world, to whom I would
do any homage that a plain gentleman, and no baronet with a head
seven hundred years thick, may. A man who joined his regiment at
twenty and within a week challenged the most imperious and
presumptuous coxcomb of a commanding officer that ever drew the
breath of life through a tight waist--and got broke for it--is not
the man to be walked over by all the Sir Lucifers, dead or alive,
locked or unlocked. Ha, ha, ha!"

"Nor the man to allow his junior to be walked over either?" said my
guardian.

"Most assuredly not!" said Mr. Boythorn, clapping him on the shoulder
with an air of protection that had something serious in it, though he
laughed. "He will stand by the low boy, always. Jarndyce, you may
rely upon him! But speaking of this trespass--with apologies to Miss
Clare and Miss Summerson for the length at which I have pursued so
dry a subject--is there nothing for me from your men Kenge and
Carboy?"

"I think not, Esther?" said Mr. Jarndyce.

"Nothing, guardian."

"Much obliged!" said Mr. Boythorn. "Had no need to ask, after even my
slight experience of Miss Summerson's forethought for every one about
her." (They all encouraged me; they were determined to do it.) "I
inquired because, coming from Lincolnshire, I of course have not yet
been in town, and I thought some letters might have been sent down
here. I dare say they will report progress to-morrow morning."

I saw him so often in the course of the evening, which passed very
pleasantly, contemplate Richard and Ada with an interest and a
satisfaction that made his fine face remarkably agreeable as he sat
at a little distance from the piano listening to the music--and he
had small occasion to tell us that he was passionately fond of music,
for his face showed it--that I asked my guardian as we sat at the
backgammon board whether Mr. Boythorn had ever been married.

"No," said he. "No."

"But he meant to be!" said I.

"How did you find out that?" he returned with a smile. "Why,
guardian," I explained, not without reddening a little at hazarding
what was in my thoughts, "there is something so tender in his manner,
after all, and he is so very courtly and gentle to us, and--"

Mr. Jarndyce directed his eyes to where he was sitting as I have just
described him.

I said no more.

"You are right, little woman," he answered. "He was all but married
once. Long ago. And once."

"Did the lady die?"

"No--but she died to him. That time has had its influence on all his
later life. Would you suppose him to have a head and a heart full of
romance yet?"

"I think, guardian, I might have supposed so. But it is easy to say
that when you have told me so."

"He has never since been what he might have been," said Mr. Jarndyce,
"and now you see him in his age with no one near him but his servant
and his little yellow friend. It's your throw, my dear!"

I felt, from my guardian's manner, that beyond this point I could not
pursue the subject without changing the wind. I therefore forbore to
ask any further questions. I was interested, but not curious. I
thought a little while about this old love story in the night, when I
was awakened by Mr. Boythorn's lusty snoring; and I tried to do that
very difficult thing, imagine old people young again and invested
with the graces of youth. But I fell asleep before I had succeeded,
and dreamed of the days when I lived in my godmother's house. I am
not sufficiently acquainted with such subjects to know whether it is
at all remarkable that I almost always dreamed of that period of my
life.

With the morning there came a letter from Messrs. Kenge and Carboy to
Mr. Boythorn informing him that one of their clerks would wait upon
him at noon. As it was the day of the week on which I paid the bills,
and added up my books, and made all the household affairs as compact
as possible, I remained at home while Mr. Jarndyce, Ada, and Richard
took advantage of a very fine day to make a little excursion, Mr.
Boythorn was to wait for Kenge and Carboy's clerk and then was to go
on foot to meet them on their return.

Well! I was full of business, examining tradesmen's books, adding up
columns, paying money, filing receipts, and I dare say making a great
bustle about it when Mr. Guppy was announced and shown in. I had had
some idea that the clerk who was to be sent down might be the young
gentleman who had met me at the coach-office, and I was glad to see
him, because he was associated with my present happiness.

I scarcely knew him again, he was so uncommonly smart. He had an
entirely new suit of glossy clothes on, a shining hat, lilac-kid
gloves, a neckerchief of a variety of colours, a large hot-house
flower in his button-hole, and a thick gold ring on his little
finger. Besides which, he quite scented the dining-room with
bear's-grease and other perfumery. He looked at me with an attention
that quite confused me when I begged him to take a seat until the
servant should return; and as he sat there crossing and uncrossing
his legs in a corner, and I asked him if he had had a pleasant ride,
and hoped that Mr. Kenge was well, I never looked at him, but I found
him looking at me in the same scrutinizing and curious way.

When the request was brought to him that he would go upstairs to Mr.
Boythorn's room, I mentioned that he would find lunch prepared for
him when he came down, of which Mr. Jarndyce hoped he would partake.
He said with some embarrassment, holding the handle of the door,
"Shall I have the honour of finding you here, miss?" I replied yes, I
should be there; and he went out with a bow and another look.

I thought him only awkward and shy, for he was evidently much
embarrassed; and I fancied that the best thing I could do would be to
wait until I saw that he had everything he wanted and then to leave
him to himself. The lunch was soon brought, but it remained for some
time on the table. The interview with Mr. Boythorn was a long one,
and a stormy one too, I should think, for although his room was at
some distance I heard his loud voice rising every now and then like a
high wind, and evidently blowing perfect broadsides of denunciation.

At last Mr. Guppy came back, looking something the worse for the
conference. "My eye, miss," he said in a low voice, "he's a Tartar!"

"Pray take some refreshment, sir," said I.

Mr. Guppy sat down at the table and began nervously sharpening the
carving-knife on the carving-fork, still looking at me (as I felt
quite sure without looking at him) in the same unusual manner. The
sharpening lasted so long that at last I felt a kind of obligation on
me to raise my eyes in order that I might break the spell under which
he seemed to labour, of not being able to leave off.

He immediately looked at the dish and began to carve.

"What will you take yourself, miss? You'll take a morsel of
something?"

"No, thank you," said I.

"Shan't I give you a piece of anything at all, miss?" said Mr. Guppy,
hurriedly drinking off a glass of wine.

"Nothing, thank you," said I. "I have only waited to see that you
have everything you want. Is there anything I can order for you?"

"No, I am much obliged to you, miss, I'm sure. I've everything that I
can require to make me comfortable--at least I--not comfortable--I'm
never that." He drank off two more glasses of wine, one after
another.

I thought I had better go.

"I beg your pardon, miss!" said Mr. Guppy, rising when he saw me
rise. "But would you allow me the favour of a minute's private
conversation?"

Not knowing what to say, I sat down again.

"What follows is without prejudice, miss?" said Mr. Guppy, anxiously
bringing a chair towards my table.

"I don't understand what you mean," said I, wondering.

"It's one of our law terms, miss. You won't make any use of it to my
detriment at Kenge and Carboy's or elsewhere. If our conversation
shouldn't lead to anything, I am to be as I was and am not to be
prejudiced in my situation or worldly prospects. In short, it's in
total confidence."

"I am at a loss, sir," said I, "to imagine what you can have to
communicate in total confidence to me, whom you have never seen but
once; but I should be very sorry to do you any injury."

"Thank you, miss. I'm sure of it--that's quite sufficient." All this
time Mr. Guppy was either planing his forehead with his handkerchief
or tightly rubbing the palm of his left hand with the palm of his
right. "If you would excuse my taking another glass of wine, miss, I
think it might assist me in getting on without a continual choke that
cannot fail to be mutually unpleasant."

He did so, and came back again. I took the opportunity of moving well
behind my table.

"You wouldn't allow me to offer you one, would you miss?" said Mr.
Guppy, apparently refreshed.

"Not any," said I.

"Not half a glass?" said Mr. Guppy. "Quarter? No! Then, to proceed.
My present salary, Miss Summerson, at Kenge and Carboy's, is two
pound a week. When I first had the happiness of looking upon you, it
was one fifteen, and had stood at that figure for a lengthened
period. A rise of five has since taken place, and a further rise of
five is guaranteed at the expiration of a term not exceeding twelve
months from the present date. My mother has a little property, which
takes the form of a small life annuity, upon which she lives in an
independent though unassuming manner in the Old Street Road. She is
eminently calculated for a mother-in-law. She never interferes, is
all for peace, and her disposition easy. She has her failings--as who
has not?--but I never knew her do it when company was present, at
which time you may freely trust her with wines, spirits, or malt
liquors. My own abode is lodgings at Penton Place, Pentonville. It is
lowly, but airy, open at the back, and considered one of the
'ealthiest outlets. Miss Summerson! In the mildest language, I adore
you. Would you be so kind as to allow me (as I may say) to file a
declaration--to make an offer!"

Mr. Guppy went down on his knees. I was well behind my table and not
much frightened. I said, "Get up from that ridiculous position
immediately, sir, or you will oblige me to break my implied promise
and ring the bell!"

"Hear me out, miss!" said Mr. Guppy, folding his hands.

"I cannot consent to hear another word, sir," I returned, "Unless you
get up from the carpet directly and go and sit down at the table as
you ought to do if you have any sense at all."

He looked piteously, but slowly rose and did so.

"Yet what a mockery it is, miss," he said with his hand upon his
heart and shaking his head at me in a melancholy manner over the
tray, "to be stationed behind food at such a moment. The soul recoils
from food at such a moment, miss."

"I beg you to conclude," said I; "you have asked me to hear you out,
and I beg you to conclude."

"I will, miss," said Mr. Guppy. "As I love and honour, so likewise I
obey. Would that I could make thee the subject of that vow before the
shrine!"

"That is quite impossible," said I, "and entirely out of the
question."

"I am aware," said Mr. Guppy, leaning forward over the tray and
regarding me, as I again strangely felt, though my eyes were not
directed to him, with his late intent look, "I am aware that in a
worldly point of view, according to all appearances, my offer is a
poor one. But, Miss Summerson! Angel! No, don't ring--I have been
brought up in a sharp school and am accustomed to a variety of
general practice. Though a young man, I have ferreted out evidence,
got up cases, and seen lots of life. Blest with your hand, what means
might I not find of advancing your interests and pushing your
fortunes! What might I not get to know, nearly concerning you? I know
nothing now, certainly; but what MIGHT I not if I had your
confidence, and you set me on?"

I told him that he addressed my interest or what he supposed to be my
interest quite as unsuccessfully as he addressed my inclination, and
he would now understand that I requested him, if he pleased, to go
away immediately.

"Cruel miss," said Mr. Guppy, "hear but another word! I think you
must have seen that I was struck with those charms on the day when I
waited at the Whytorseller. I think you must have remarked that I
could not forbear a tribute to those charms when I put up the steps
of the 'ackney-coach. It was a feeble tribute to thee, but it was
well meant. Thy image has ever since been fixed in my breast. I have
walked up and down of an evening opposite Jellyby's house only to
look upon the bricks that once contained thee. This out of to-day,
quite an unnecessary out so far as the attendance, which was its
pretended object, went, was planned by me alone for thee alone. If I
speak of interest, it is only to recommend myself and my respectful
wretchedness. Love was before it, and is before it."

"I should be pained, Mr. Guppy," said I, rising and putting my hand
upon the bell-rope, "to do you or any one who was sincere the
injustice of slighting any honest feeling, however disagreeably
expressed. If you have really meant to give me a proof of your good
opinion, though ill-timed and misplaced, I feel that I ought to thank
you. I have very little reason to be proud, and I am not proud. I
hope," I think I added, without very well knowing what I said, "that
you will now go away as if you had never been so exceedingly foolish
and attend to Messrs. Kenge and Carboy's business."

"Half a minute, miss!" cried Mr. Guppy, checking me as I was about to
ring. "This has been without prejudice?"

"I will never mention it," said I, "unless you should give me future
occasion to do so."

"A quarter of a minute, miss! In case you should think better at any
time, however distant--THAT'S no consequence, for my feelings can
never alter--of anything I have said, particularly what might I not
do, Mr. William Guppy, eighty-seven, Penton Place, or if removed, or
dead (of blighted hopes or anything of that sort), care of Mrs.
Guppy, three hundred and two, Old Street Road, will be sufficient."

I rang the bell, the servant came, and Mr. Guppy, laying his written
card upon the table and making a dejected bow, departed. Raising my
eyes as he went out, I once more saw him looking at me after he had
passed the door.

I sat there for another hour or more, finishing my books and payments
and getting through plenty of business. Then I arranged my desk, and
put everything away, and was so composed and cheerful that I thought
I had quite dismissed this unexpected incident. But, when I went
upstairs to my own room, I surprised myself by beginning to laugh
about it and then surprised myself still more by beginning to cry
about it. In short, I was in a flutter for a little while and felt as
if an old chord had been more coarsely touched than it ever had been
since the days of the dear old doll, long buried in the garden.




CHAPTER X

The Law-Writer


On the eastern borders of Chancery Lane, that is to say, more
particularly in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, Mr. Snagsby,
law-stationer, pursues his lawful calling. In the shade of Cook's
Court, at most times a shady place, Mr. Snagsby has dealt in
all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls
of parchment; in paper--foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white,
whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens,
ink, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and
wafers; in red tape and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacs,
diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands--glass
and leaden--pen-knives, scissors, bodkins, and other small
office-cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention, ever
since he was out of his time and went into partnership with Peffer.
On that occasion, Cook's Court was in a manner revolutionized by the
new inscription in fresh paint, PEFFER AND SNAGSBY, displacing the
time-honoured and not easily to be deciphered legend PEFFER only. For
smoke, which is the London ivy, had so wreathed itself round Peffer's
name and clung to his dwelling-place that the affectionate parasite
quite overpowered the parent tree.

Peffer is never seen in Cook's Court now. He is not expected there,
for he has been recumbent this quarter of a century in the churchyard
of St. Andrews, Holborn, with the waggons and hackney-coaches roaring
past him all the day and half the night like one great dragon. If he
ever steal forth when the dragon is at rest to air himself again in
Cook's Court until admonished to return by the crowing of the
sanguine cock in the cellar at the little dairy in Cursitor Street,
whose ideas of daylight it would be curious to ascertain, since he
knows from his personal observation next to nothing about it--if
Peffer ever do revisit the pale glimpses of Cook's Court, which no
law-stationer in the trade can positively deny, he comes invisibly,
and no one is the worse or wiser.

In his lifetime, and likewise in the period of Snagsby's "time"
of seven long years, there dwelt with Peffer in the same
law-stationering premises a niece--a short, shrewd niece, something
too violently compressed about the waist, and with a sharp nose like
a sharp autumn evening, inclining to be frosty towards the end. The
Cook's Courtiers had a rumour flying among them that the mother of
this niece did, in her daughter's childhood, moved by too jealous a
solicitude that her figure should approach perfection, lace her
up every morning with her maternal foot against the bed-post for
a stronger hold and purchase; and further, that she exhibited
internally pints of vinegar and lemon-juice, which acids, they held,
had mounted to the nose and temper of the patient. With whichsoever
of the many tongues of Rumour this frothy report originated, it
either never reached or never influenced the ears of young Snagsby,
who, having wooed and won its fair subject on his arrival at man's
estate, entered into two partnerships at once. So now, in Cook's
Court, Cursitor Street, Mr. Snagsby and the niece are one; and the
niece still cherishes her figure, which, however tastes may differ,
is unquestionably so far precious that there is mighty little of it.

Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are not only one bone and one flesh, but, to the
neighbours' thinking, one voice too. That voice, appearing to proceed
from Mrs. Snagsby alone, is heard in Cook's Court very often. Mr.
Snagsby, otherwise than as he finds expression through these dulcet
tones, is rarely heard. He is a mild, bald, timid man with a shining
head and a scrubby clump of black hair sticking out at the back. He
tends to meekness and obesity. As he stands at his door in Cook's
Court in his grey shop-coat and black calico sleeves, looking up at
the clouds, or stands behind a desk in his dark shop with a heavy
flat ruler, snipping and slicing at sheepskin in company with his two
'prentices, he is emphatically a retiring and unassuming man. From
beneath his feet, at such times, as from a shrill ghost unquiet in
its grave, there frequently arise complainings and lamentations in
the voice already mentioned; and haply, on some occasions when these
reach a sharper pitch than usual, Mr. Snagsby mentions to the
'prentices, "I think my little woman is a-giving it to Guster!"

This proper name, so used by Mr. Snagsby, has before now sharpened
the wit of the Cook's Courtiers to remark that it ought to be the
name of Mrs. Snagsby, seeing that she might with great force and
expression be termed a Guster, in compliment to her stormy character.
It is, however, the possession, and the only possession except fifty
shillings per annum and a very small box indifferently filled with
clothing, of a lean young woman from a workhouse (by some supposed to
have been christened Augusta) who, although she was farmed or
contracted for during her growing time by an amiable benefactor of
his species resident at Tooting, and cannot fail to have been
developed under the most favourable circumstances, "has fits," which
the parish can't account for.

Guster, really aged three or four and twenty, but looking a round ten
years older, goes cheap with this unaccountable drawback of fits, and
is so apprehensive of being returned on the hands of her patron saint
that except when she is found with her head in the pail, or the sink,
or the copper, or the dinner, or anything else that happens to be
near her at the time of her seizure, she is always at work. She is a
satisfaction to the parents and guardians of the 'prentices, who feel
that there is little danger of her inspiring tender emotions in the
breast of youth; she is a satisfaction to Mrs. Snagsby, who can
always find fault with her; she is a satisfaction to Mr. Snagsby, who
thinks it a charity to keep her. The law-stationer's establishment
is, in Guster's eyes, a temple of plenty and splendour. She believes
the little drawing-room upstairs, always kept, as one may say, with
its hair in papers and its pinafore on, to be the most elegant
apartment in Christendom. The view it commands of Cook's Court at one
end (not to mention a squint into Cursitor Street) and of Coavinses'
the sheriff's officer's backyard at the other she regards as a
prospect of unequalled beauty. The portraits it displays in oil--and
plenty of it too--of Mr. Snagsby looking at Mrs. Snagsby and of Mrs.
Snagsby looking at Mr. Snagsby are in her eyes as achievements of
Raphael or Titian. Guster has some recompenses for her many
privations.

Mr. Snagsby refers everything not in the practical mysteries of the
business to Mrs. Snagsby. She manages the money, reproaches the
tax-gatherers, appoints the times and places of devotion on Sundays,
licenses Mr. Snagsby's entertainments, and acknowledges no
responsibility as to what she thinks fit to provide for dinner,
insomuch that she is the high standard of comparison among the
neighbouring wives a long way down Chancery Lane on both sides, and
even out in Holborn, who in any domestic passages of arms habitually
call upon their husbands to look at the difference between their (the
wives') position and Mrs. Snagsby's, and their (the husbands')
behaviour and Mr. Snagsby's. Rumour, always flying bat-like about
Cook's Court and skimming in and out at everybody's windows, does say
that Mrs. Snagsby is jealous and inquisitive and that Mr. Snagsby is
sometimes worried out of house and home, and that if he had the
spirit of a mouse he wouldn't stand it. It is even observed that the
wives who quote him to their self-willed husbands as a shining
example in reality look down upon him and that nobody does so with
greater superciliousness than one particular lady whose lord is more
than suspected of laying his umbrella on her as an instrument of
correction. But these vague whisperings may arise from Mr. Snagsby's
being in his way rather a meditative and poetical man, loving to walk
in Staple Inn in the summer-time and to observe how countrified the
sparrows and the leaves are, also to lounge about the Rolls Yard of a
Sunday afternoon and to remark (if in good spirits) that there were
old times once and that you'd find a stone coffin or two now under
that chapel, he'll be bound, if you was to dig for it. He solaces his
imagination, too, by thinking of the many Chancellors and Vices, and
Masters of the Rolls who are deceased; and he gets such a flavour of
the country out of telling the two 'prentices how he HAS heard say
that a brook "as clear as crystal" once ran right down the middle of
Holborn, when Turnstile really was a turnstile, leading slap away
into the meadows--gets such a flavour of the country out of this that
he never wants to go there.

The day is closing in and the gas is lighted, but is not yet fully
effective, for it is not quite dark. Mr. Snagsby standing at his
shop-door looking up at the clouds sees a crow who is out late skim
westward over the slice of sky belonging to Cook's Court. The crow
flies straight across Chancery Lane and Lincoln's Inn Garden into
Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Here, in a large house, formerly a house of state, lives Mr.
Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now, and in those
shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in
nuts. But its roomy staircases, passages, and antechambers still
remain; and even its painted ceilings, where Allegory, in Roman
helmet and celestial linen, sprawls among balustrades and pillars,
flowers, clouds, and big-legged boys, and makes the head ache--as
would seem to be Allegory's object always, more or less. Here, among
his many boxes labelled with transcendent names, lives Mr.
Tulkinghorn, when not speechlessly at home in country-houses where
the great ones of the earth are bored to death. Here he is to-day,
quiet at his table. An oyster of the old school whom nobody can open.

Like as he is to look at, so is his apartment in the dusk of
the present afternoon. Rusty, out of date, withdrawing from
attention, able to afford it. Heavy, broad-backed, old-fashioned,
mahogany-and-horsehair chairs, not easily lifted; obsolete tables
with spindle-legs and dusty baize covers; presentation prints of the
holders of great titles in the last generation or the last but one,
environ him. A thick and dingy Turkey-carpet muffles the floor where
he sits, attended by two candles in old-fashioned silver candlesticks
that give a very insufficient light to his large room. The titles on
the backs of his books have retired into the binding; everything that
can have a lock has got one; no key is visible. Very few loose papers
are about. He has some manuscript near him, but is not referring
to it. With the round top of an inkstand and two broken bits of
sealing-wax he is silently and slowly working out whatever train of
indecision is in his mind. Now the inkstand top is in the middle, now
the red bit of sealing-wax, now the black bit. That's not it. Mr.
Tulkinghorn must gather them all up and begin again.

Here, beneath the painted ceiling, with foreshortened Allegory
staring down at his intrusion as if it meant to swoop upon him, and
he cutting it dead, Mr. Tulkinghorn has at once his house and office.
He keeps no staff, only one middle-aged man, usually a little out at
elbows, who sits in a high pew in the hall and is rarely overburdened
with business. Mr. Tulkinghorn is not in a common way. He wants no
clerks. He is a great reservoir of confidences, not to be so tapped.
His clients want HIM; he is all in all. Drafts that he requires to be
drawn are drawn by special-pleaders in the temple on mysterious
instructions; fair copies that he requires to be made are made at the
stationers', expense being no consideration. The middle-aged man in
the pew knows scarcely more of the affairs of the peerage than any
crossing-sweeper in Holborn.

The red bit, the black bit, the inkstand top, the other inkstand top,
the little sand-box. So! You to the middle, you to the right, you to
the left. This train of indecision must surely be worked out now or
never. Now! Mr. Tulkinghorn gets up, adjusts his spectacles, puts on
his hat, puts the manuscript in his pocket, goes out, tells the
middle-aged man out at elbows, "I shall be back presently." Very
rarely tells him anything more explicit.

Mr. Tulkinghorn goes, as the crow came--not quite so straight, but
nearly--to Cook's Court, Cursitor Street. To Snagsby's,
Law-Stationer's, Deeds engrossed and copied, Law-Writing executed in
all its branches, &c., &c., &c.

It is somewhere about five or six o'clock in the afternoon, and a
balmy fragrance of warm tea hovers in Cook's Court. It hovers about
Snagsby's door. The hours are early there: dinner at half-past one
and supper at half-past nine. Mr. Snagsby was about to descend into
the subterranean regions to take tea when he looked out of his door
just now and saw the crow who was out late.

"Master at home?"

Guster is minding the shop, for the 'prentices take tea in the
kitchen with Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby; consequently, the robe-maker's two
daughters, combing their curls at the two glasses in the two
second-floor windows of the opposite house, are not driving the two
'prentices to distraction as they fondly suppose, but are merely
awakening the unprofitable admiration of Guster, whose hair won't
grow, and never would, and it is confidently thought, never will.

"Master at home?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn.

Master is at home, and Guster will fetch him. Guster disappears, glad
to get out of the shop, which she regards with mingled dread and
veneration as a storehouse of awful implements of the great torture
of the law--a place not to be entered after the gas is turned off.

Mr. Snagsby appears, greasy, warm, herbaceous, and chewing. Bolts a
bit of bread and butter. Says, "Bless my soul, sir! Mr. Tulkinghorn!"

"I want half a word with you, Snagsby."

"Certainly, sir! Dear me, sir, why didn't you send your young man
round for me? Pray walk into the back shop, sir." Snagsby has
brightened in a moment.

The confined room, strong of parchment-grease, is warehouse,
counting-house, and copying-office. Mr. Tulkinghorn sits, facing
round, on a stool at the desk.

"Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Snagsby."

"Yes, sir." Mr. Snagsby turns up the gas and coughs behind his hand,
modestly anticipating profit. Mr. Snagsby, as a timid man, is
accustomed to cough with a variety of expressions, and so to save
words.

"You copied some affidavits in that cause for me lately."

"Yes, sir, we did."

"There was one of them," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, carelessly
feeling--tight, unopenable oyster of the old school!--in the wrong
coat-pocket, "the handwriting of which is peculiar, and I rather
like. As I happened to be passing, and thought I had it about me, I
looked in to ask you--but I haven't got it. No matter, any other time
will do. Ah! here it is! I looked in to ask you who copied this."

"Who copied this, sir?" says Mr. Snagsby, taking it, laying it flat
on the desk, and separating all the sheets at once with a twirl and a
twist of the left hand peculiar to lawstationers. "We gave this out,
sir. We were giving out rather a large quantity of work just at that
time. I can tell you in a moment who copied it, sir, by referring to
my book."

Mr. Snagsby takes his book down from the safe, makes another bolt of
the bit of bread and butter which seemed to have stopped short, eyes
the affidavit aside, and brings his right forefinger travelling down
a page of the book, "Jewby--Packer--Jarndyce."

"Jarndyce! Here we are, sir," says Mr. Snagsby. "To be sure! I might
have remembered it. This was given out, sir, to a writer who lodges
just over on the opposite side of the lane."

Mr. Tulkinghorn has seen the entry, found it before the
law-stationer, read it while the forefinger was coming down the hill.

"WHAT do you call him? Nemo?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Nemo, sir. Here
it is. Forty-two folio. Given out on the Wednesday night at eight
o'clock, brought in on the Thursday morning at half after nine."

"Nemo!" repeats Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Nemo is Latin for no one."

"It must be English for some one, sir, I think," Mr. Snagsby submits
with his deferential cough. "It is a person's name. Here it is, you
see, sir! Forty-two folio. Given out Wednesday night, eight o'clock;
brought in Thursday morning, half after nine."

The tail of Mr. Snagsby's eye becomes conscious of the head of Mrs.
Snagsby looking in at the shop-door to know what he means by
deserting his tea. Mr. Snagsby addresses an explanatory cough to Mrs.
Snagsby, as who should say, "My dear, a customer!"

"Half after nine, sir," repeats Mr. Snagsby. "Our law-writers, who
live by job-work, are a queer lot; and this may not be his name, but
it's the name he goes by. I remember now, sir, that he gives it in a
written advertisement he sticks up down at the Rule Office, and the
King's Bench Office, and the Judges' Chambers, and so forth. You know
the kind of document, sir--wanting employ?"

Mr. Tulkinghorn glances through the little window at the back of
Coavinses', the sheriff's officer's, where lights shine in Coavinses'
windows. Coavinses' coffee-room is at the back, and the shadows of
several gentlemen under a cloud loom cloudily upon the blinds. Mr.
Snagsby takes the opportunity of slightly turning his head to glance
over his shoulder at his little woman and to make apologetic motions
with his mouth to this effect: "Tul-king-horn--rich--in-flu-en-tial!"

"Have you given this man work before?" asks Mr. Tulkinghorn.

"Oh, dear, yes, sir! Work of yours."

"Thinking of more important matters, I forget where you said he
lived?"

"Across the lane, sir. In fact, he lodges at a--" Mr. Snagsby makes
another bolt, as if the bit of bread and butter were insurmountable
"--at a rag and bottle shop."

"Can you show me the place as I go back?"

"With the greatest pleasure, sir!"

Mr. Snagsby pulls off his sleeves and his grey coat, pulls on his
black coat, takes his hat from its peg. "Oh! Here is my little
woman!" he says aloud. "My dear, will you be so kind as to tell one
of the lads to look after the shop while I step across the lane with
Mr. Tulkinghorn? Mrs. Snagsby, sir--I shan't be two minutes, my
love!"

Mrs. Snagsby bends to the lawyer, retires behind the counter, peeps
at them through the window-blind, goes softly into the back office,
refers to the entries in the book still lying open. Is evidently
curious.

"You will find that the place is rough, sir," says Mr. Snagsby,
walking deferentially in the road and leaving the narrow pavement to
the lawyer; "and the party is very rough. But they're a wild lot in
general, sir. The advantage of this particular man is that he never
wants sleep. He'll go at it right on end if you want him to, as long
as ever you like."

It is quite dark now, and the gas-lamps have acquired their full
effect. Jostling against clerks going to post the day's letters, and
against counsel and attorneys going home to dinner, and against
plaintiffs and defendants and suitors of all sorts, and against the
general crowd, in whose way the forensic wisdom of ages has
interposed a million of obstacles to the transaction of the commonest
business of life; diving through law and equity, and through that
kindred mystery, the street mud, which is made of nobody knows what
and collects about us nobody knows whence or how--we only knowing in
general that when there is too much of it we find it necessary to
shovel it away--the lawyer and the law-stationer come to a rag and
bottle shop and general emporium of much disregarded merchandise,
lying and being in the shadow of the wall of Lincoln's Inn, and kept,
as is announced in paint, to all whom it may concern, by one Krook.

"This is where he lives, sir," says the law-stationer.

"This is where he lives, is it?" says the lawyer unconcernedly.
"Thank you."

"Are you not going in, sir?"

"No, thank you, no; I am going on to the Fields at present. Good
evening. Thank you!" Mr. Snagsby lifts his hat and returns to his
little woman and his tea.

But Mr. Tulkinghorn does not go on to the Fields at present. He goes
a short way, turns back, comes again to the shop of Mr. Krook, and
enters it straight. It is dim enough, with a blot-headed candle or so
in the windows, and an old man and a cat sitting in the back part by
a fire. The old man rises and comes forward, with another blot-headed
candle in his hand.

"Pray is your lodger within?"

"Male or female, sir?" says Mr. Krook.

"Male. The person who does copying."

Mr. Krook has eyed his man narrowly. Knows him by sight. Has an
indistinct impression of his aristocratic repute.

"Did you wish to see him, sir?"

"Yes."

"It's what I seldom do myself," says Mr. Krook with a grin. "Shall I
call him down? But it's a weak chance if he'd come, sir!"

"I'll go up to him, then," says Mr. Tulkinghorn.

"Second floor, sir. Take the candle. Up there!" Mr. Krook, with his
cat beside him, stands at the bottom of the staircase, looking after
Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Hi-hi!" he says when Mr. Tulkinghorn has nearly
disappeared. The lawyer looks down over the hand-rail. The cat
expands her wicked mouth and snarls at him.

"Order, Lady Jane! Behave yourself to visitors, my lady! You know
what they say of my lodger?" whispers Krook, going up a step or two.

"What do they say of him?"

"They say he has sold himself to the enemy, but you and I know
better--he don't buy. I'll tell you what, though; my lodger is so
black-humoured and gloomy that I believe he'd as soon make that
bargain as any other. Don't put him out, sir. That's my advice!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn with a nod goes on his way. He comes to the dark door
on the second floor. He knocks, receives no answer, opens it, and
accidentally extinguishes his candle in doing so.

The air of the room is almost bad enough to have extinguished it if
he had not. It is a small room, nearly black with soot, and grease,
and dirt. In the rusty skeleton of a grate, pinched at the middle as
if poverty had gripped it, a red coke fire burns low. In the corner
by the chimney stand a deal table and a broken desk, a wilderness
marked with a rain of ink. In another corner a ragged old portmanteau
on one of the two chairs serves for cabinet or wardrobe; no larger
one is needed, for it collapses like the cheeks of a starved man. The
floor is bare, except that one old mat, trodden to shreds of
rope-yarn, lies perishing upon the hearth. No curtain veils the
darkness of the night, but the discoloured shutters are drawn
together, and through the two gaunt holes pierced in them, famine
might be staring in--the banshee of the man upon the bed.

For, on a low bed opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty patchwork,
lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the lawyer, hesitating just
within the doorway, sees a man. He lies there, dressed in shirt and
trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look in the spectral
darkness of a candle that has guttered down until the whole length of
its wick (still burning) has doubled over and left a tower of
winding-sheet above it. His hair is ragged, mingling with his
whiskers and his beard--the latter, ragged too, and grown, like the
scum and mist around him, in neglect. Foul and filthy as the room is,
foul and filthy as the air is, it is not easy to perceive what fumes
those are which most oppress the senses in it; but through the
general sickliness and faintness, and the odour of stale tobacco,
there comes into the lawyer's mouth the bitter, vapid taste of opium.

"Hallo, my friend!" he cries, and strikes his iron candlestick
against the door.

He thinks he has awakened his friend. He lies a little turned away,
but his eyes are surely open.

"Hallo, my friend!" he cries again. "Hallo! Hallo!"

As he rattles on the door, the candle which has drooped so long goes
out and leaves him in the dark, with the gaunt eyes in the shutters
staring down upon the bed.




CHAPTER XI

Our Dear Brother


A touch on the lawyer's wrinkled hand as he stands in the dark room,
irresolute, makes him start and say, "What's that?"

"It's me," returns the old man of the house, whose breath is in his
ear. "Can't you wake him?"

"No."

"What have you done with your candle?"

"It's gone out. Here it is."

Krook takes it, goes to the fire, stoops over the red embers, and
tries to get a light. The dying ashes have no light to spare, and his
endeavours are vain. Muttering, after an ineffectual call to his
lodger, that he will go downstairs and bring a lighted candle from
the shop, the old man departs. Mr. Tulkinghorn, for some new reason
that he has, does not await his return in the room, but on the stairs
outside.

The welcome light soon shines upon the wall, as Krook comes slowly up
with his green-eyed cat following at his heels. "Does the man
generally sleep like this?" inquired the lawyer in a low voice. "Hi!
I don't know," says Krook, shaking his head and lifting his eyebrows.
"I know next to nothing of his habits except that he keeps himself
very close."

Thus whispering, they both go in together. As the light goes in, the
great eyes in the shutters, darkening, seem to close. Not so the eyes
upon the bed.

"God save us!" exclaims Mr. Tulkinghorn. "He is dead!" Krook drops
the heavy hand he has taken up so suddenly that the arm swings over
the bedside.

They look at one another for a moment.

"Send for some doctor! Call for Miss Flite up the stairs, sir. Here's
poison by the bed! Call out for Flite, will you?" says Krook, with
his lean hands spread out above the body like a vampire's wings.

Mr. Tulkinghorn hurries to the landing and calls, "Miss Flite! Flite!
Make haste, here, whoever you are! Flite!" Krook follows him with his
eyes, and while he is calling, finds opportunity to steal to the old
portmanteau and steal back again.

"Run, Flite, run! The nearest doctor! Run!" So Mr. Krook addresses a
crazy little woman who is his female lodger, who appears and vanishes
in a breath, who soon returns accompanied by a testy medical man
brought from his dinner, with a broad, snuffy upper lip and a broad
Scotch tongue.

"Ey! Bless the hearts o' ye," says the medical man, looking up at
them after a moment's examination. "He's just as dead as Phairy!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn (standing by the old portmanteau) inquires if he has
been dead any time.

"Any time, sir?" says the medical gentleman. "It's probable he wull
have been dead aboot three hours."

"About that time, I should say," observes a dark young man on the
other side of the bed.

"Air you in the maydickle prayfession yourself, sir?" inquires the
first.

The dark young man says yes.

"Then I'll just tak' my depairture," replies the other, "for I'm nae
gude here!" With which remark he finishes his brief attendance and
returns to finish his dinner.

The dark young surgeon passes the candle across and across the face
and carefully examines the law-writer, who has established his
pretensions to his name by becoming indeed No one.

"I knew this person by sight very well," says he. "He has purchased
opium of me for the last year and a half. Was anybody present related
to him?" glancing round upon the three bystanders.

"I was his landlord," grimly answers Krook, taking the candle from
the surgeon's outstretched hand. "He told me once I was the nearest
relation he had."

"He has died," says the surgeon, "of an over-dose of opium, there is
no doubt. The room is strongly flavoured with it. There is enough
here now," taking an old tea-pot from Mr. Krook, "to kill a dozen
people."

"Do you think he did it on purpose?" asks Krook.

"Took the over-dose?"

"Yes!" Krook almost smacks his lips with the unction of a horrible
interest.

"I can't say. I should think it unlikely, as he has been in the habit
of taking so much. But nobody can tell. He was very poor, I suppose?"

"I suppose he was. His room--don't look rich," says Krook, who might
have changed eyes with his cat, as he casts his sharp glance around.
"But I have never been in it since he had it, and he was too close to
name his circumstances to me."

"Did he owe you any rent?"

"Six weeks."

"He will never pay it!" says the young man, resuming his examination.
"It is beyond a doubt that he is indeed as dead as Pharaoh; and to
judge from his appearance and condition, I should think it a happy
release. Yet he must have been a good figure when a youth, and I dare
say, good-looking." He says this, not unfeelingly, while sitting on
the bedstead's edge with his face towards that other face and his
hand upon the region of the heart. "I recollect once thinking there
was something in his manner, uncouth as it was, that denoted a fall
in life. Was that so?" he continues, looking round.

Krook replies, "You might as well ask me to describe the ladies whose
heads of hair I have got in sacks downstairs. Than that he was my
lodger for a year and a half and lived--or didn't live--by
law-writing, I know no more of him."

During this dialogue Mr. Tulkinghorn has stood aloof by the old
portmanteau, with his hands behind him, equally removed, to all
appearance, from all three kinds of interest exhibited near the
bed--from the young surgeon's professional interest in death,
noticeable as being quite apart from his remarks on the deceased as
an individual; from the old man's unction; and the little crazy
woman's awe. His imperturbable face has been as inexpressive as his
rusty clothes. One could not even say he has been thinking all this
while. He has shown neither patience nor impatience, nor attention
nor abstraction. He has shown nothing but his shell. As easily might
the tone of a delicate musical instrument be inferred from its case,
as the tone of Mr. Tulkinghorn from his case.

He now interposes, addressing the young surgeon in his unmoved,
professional way.

"I looked in here," he observes, "just before you, with the
intention of giving this deceased man, whom I never saw alive, some
employment at his trade of copying. I had heard of him from my
stationer--Snagsby of Cook's Court. Since no one here knows anything
about him, it might be as well to send for Snagsby. Ah!" to the
little crazy woman, who has often seen him in court, and whom he has
often seen, and who proposes, in frightened dumb-show, to go for the
law-stationer. "Suppose you do!"

While she is gone, the surgeon abandons his hopeless investigation
and covers its subject with the patchwork counterpane. Mr. Krook and
he interchange a word or two. Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing, but
stands, ever, near the old portmanteau.

Mr. Snagsby arrives hastily in his grey coat and his black sleeves.
"Dear me, dear me," he says; "and it has come to this, has it! Bless
my soul!"

"Can you give the person of the house any information about this
unfortunate creature, Snagsby?" inquires Mr. Tulkinghorn. "He was in
arrears with his rent, it seems. And he must be buried, you know."

"Well, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, coughing his apologetic cough behind
his hand, "I really don't know what advice I could offer, except
sending for the beadle."

"I don't speak of advice," returns Mr. Tulkinghorn. "I could
advise--"

"No one better, sir, I am sure," says Mr. Snagsby, with his
deferential cough.

"I speak of affording some clue to his connexions, or to where he
came from, or to anything concerning him."

"I assure you, sir," says Mr. Snagsby after prefacing his reply with
his cough of general propitiation, "that I no more know where he came
from than I know--"

"Where he has gone to, perhaps," suggests the surgeon to help him
out.

A pause. Mr. Tulkinghorn looking at the law-stationer. Mr. Krook,
with his mouth open, looking for somebody to speak next.

"As to his connexions, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, "if a person was to
say to me, 'Snagsby, here's twenty thousand pound down, ready for you
in the Bank of England if you'll only name one of 'em,' I couldn't do
it, sir! About a year and a half ago--to the best of my belief, at
the time when he first came to lodge at the present rag and bottle
shop--"

"That was the time!" says Krook with a nod.

"About a year and a half ago," says Mr. Snagsby, strengthened, "he
came into our place one morning after breakfast, and finding my
little woman (which I name Mrs. Snagsby when I use that appellation)
in our shop, produced a specimen of his handwriting and gave her to
understand that he was in want of copying work to do and was, not to
put too fine a point upon it," a favourite apology for plain speaking
with Mr. Snagsby, which he always offers with a sort of argumentative
frankness, "hard up! My little woman is not in general partial to
strangers, particular--not to put too fine a point upon it--when they
want anything. But she was rather took by something about this
person, whether by his being unshaved, or by his hair being in want
of attention, or by what other ladies' reasons, I leave you to judge;
and she accepted of the specimen, and likewise of the address. My
little woman hasn't a good ear for names," proceeds Mr. Snagsby after
consulting his cough of consideration behind his hand, "and she
considered Nemo equally the same as Nimrod. In consequence of which,
she got into a habit of saying to me at meals, 'Mr. Snagsby, you
haven't found Nimrod any work yet!' or 'Mr. Snagsby, why didn't you
give that eight and thirty Chancery folio in Jarndyce to Nimrod?' or
such like. And that is the way he gradually fell into job-work at our
place; and that is the most I know of him except that he was a quick
hand, and a hand not sparing of night-work, and that if you gave him
out, say, five and forty folio on the Wednesday night, you would have
it brought in on the Thursday morning. All of which--" Mr. Snagsby
concludes by politely motioning with his hat towards the bed, as much
as to add, "I have no doubt my honourable friend would confirm if he
were in a condition to do it."

"Hadn't you better see," says Mr. Tulkinghorn to Krook, "whether he
had any papers that may enlighten you? There will be an inquest, and
you will be asked the question. You can read?"

"No, I can't," returns the old man with a sudden grin.

"Snagsby," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "look over the room for him. He will
get into some trouble or difficulty otherwise. Being here, I'll wait
if you make haste, and then I can testify on his behalf, if it should
ever be necessary, that all was fair and right. If you will hold the
candle for Mr. Snagsby, my friend, he'll soon see whether there is
anything to help you."

"In the first place, here's an old portmanteau, sir," says Snagsby.

Ah, to be sure, so there is! Mr. Tulkinghorn does not appear to have
seen it before, though he is standing so close to it, and though
there is very little else, heaven knows.

The marine-store merchant holds the light, and the law-stationer
conducts the search. The surgeon leans against the corner of the
chimney-piece; Miss Flite peeps and trembles just within the door.
The apt old scholar of the old school, with his dull black breeches
tied with ribbons at the knees, his large black waistcoat, his
long-sleeved black coat, and his wisp of limp white neckerchief tied
in the bow the peerage knows so well, stands in exactly the same
place and attitude.

There are some worthless articles of clothing in the old portmanteau;
there is a bundle of pawnbrokers' duplicates, those turnpike tickets
on the road of poverty; there is a crumpled paper, smelling of opium,
on which are scrawled rough memoranda--as, took, such a day, so many
grains; took, such another day, so many more--begun some time ago, as
if with the intention of being regularly continued, but soon left
off. There are a few dirty scraps of newspapers, all referring to
coroners' inquests; there is nothing else. They search the cupboard
and the drawer of the ink-splashed table. There is not a morsel of an
old letter or of any other writing in either. The young surgeon
examines the dress on the law-writer. A knife and some odd halfpence
are all he finds. Mr. Snagsby's suggestion is the practical
suggestion after all, and the beadle must be called in.

So the little crazy lodger goes for the beadle, and the rest come out
of the room. "Don't leave the cat there!" says the surgeon; "that
won't do!" Mr. Krook therefore drives her out before him, and she
goes furtively downstairs, winding her lithe tail and licking her
lips.

"Good night!" says Mr. Tulkinghorn, and goes home to Allegory and
meditation.

By this time the news has got into the court. Groups of its
inhabitants assemble to discuss the thing, and the outposts of the
army of observation (principally boys) are pushed forward to Mr.
Krook's window, which they closely invest. A policeman has already
walked up to the room, and walked down again to the door, where he
stands like a tower, only condescending to see the boys at his base
occasionally; but whenever he does see them, they quail and fall
back. Mrs. Perkins, who has not been for some weeks on speaking terms
with Mrs. Piper in consequence for an unpleasantness originating in
young Perkins' having "fetched" young Piper "a crack," renews her
friendly intercourse on this auspicious occasion. The potboy at the
corner, who is a privileged amateur, as possessing official knowledge
of life and having to deal with drunken men occasionally, exchanges
confidential communications with the policeman and has the appearance
of an impregnable youth, unassailable by truncheons and unconfinable
in station-houses. People talk across the court out of window, and
bare-headed scouts come hurrying in from Chancery Lane to know what's
the matter. The general feeling seems to be that it's a blessing Mr.
Krook warn't made away with first, mingled with a little natural
disappointment that he was not. In the midst of this sensation, the
beadle arrives.

The beadle, though generally understood in the neighbourhood to be a
ridiculous institution, is not without a certain popularity for the
moment, if it were only as a man who is going to see the body. The
policeman considers him an imbecile civilian, a remnant of the
barbarous watchmen times, but gives him admission as something that
must be borne with until government shall abolish him. The sensation
is heightened as the tidings spread from mouth to mouth that the
beadle is on the ground and has gone in.

By and by the beadle comes out, once more intensifying the sensation,
which has rather languished in the interval. He is understood to be
in want of witnesses for the inquest to-morrow who can tell the
coroner and jury anything whatever respecting the deceased. Is
immediately referred to innumerable people who can tell nothing
whatever. Is made more imbecile by being constantly informed that
Mrs. Green's son "was a law-writer his-self and knowed him better
than anybody," which son of Mrs. Green's appears, on inquiry, to be
at the present time aboard a vessel bound for China, three months
out, but considered accessible by telegraph on application to the
Lords of the Admiralty. Beadle goes into various shops and parlours,
examining the inhabitants, always shutting the door first, and by
exclusion, delay, and general idiotcy exasperating the public.
Policeman seen to smile to potboy. Public loses interest and
undergoes reaction. Taunts the beadle in shrill youthful voices with
having boiled a boy, choruses fragments of a popular song to that
effect and importing that the boy was made into soup for the
workhouse. Policeman at last finds it necessary to support the law
and seize a vocalist, who is released upon the flight of the rest on
condition of his getting out of this then, come, and cutting it--a
condition he immediately observes. So the sensation dies off for the
time; and the unmoved policeman (to whom a little opium, more or
less, is nothing), with his shining hat, stiff stock, inflexible
great-coat, stout belt and bracelet, and all things fitting, pursues
his lounging way with a heavy tread, beating the palms of his white
gloves one against the other and stopping now and then at a
street-corner to look casually about for anything between a lost
child and a murder.

Under cover of the night, the feeble-minded beadle comes flitting
about Chancery Lane with his summonses, in which every juror's name
is wrongly spelt, and nothing rightly spelt but the beadle's own
name, which nobody can read or wants to know. The summonses served
and his witnesses forewarned, the beadle goes to Mr. Krook's to keep
a small appointment he has made with certain paupers, who, presently
arriving, are conducted upstairs, where they leave the great eyes in
the shutter something new to stare at, in that last shape which
earthly lodgings take for No one--and for Every one.

And all that night the coffin stands ready by the old portmanteau;
and the lonely figure on the bed, whose path in life has lain through
five and forty years, lies there with no more track behind him that
any one can trace than a deserted infant.

Next day the court is all alive--is like a fair, as Mrs. Perkins,
more than reconciled to Mrs. Piper, says in amicable conversation
with that excellent woman. The coroner is to sit in the first-floor
room at the Sol's Arms, where the Harmonic Meetings take place twice
a week and where the chair is filled by a gentleman of professional
celebrity, faced by Little Swills, the comic vocalist, who hopes
(according to the bill in the window) that his friends will rally
round him and support first-rate talent. The Sol's Arms does a brisk
stroke of business all the morning. Even children so require
sustaining under the general excitement that a pieman who has
established himself for the occasion at the corner of the court says
his brandy-balls go off like smoke. What time the beadle, hovering
between the door of Mr. Krook's establishment and the door of the
Sol's Arms, shows the curiosity in his keeping to a few discreet
spirits and accepts the compliment of a glass of ale or so in return.

At the appointed hour arrives the coroner, for whom the jurymen are
waiting and who is received with a salute of skittles from the good
dry skittle-ground attached to the Sol's Arms. The coroner frequents
more public-houses than any man alive. The smell of sawdust, beer,
tobacco-smoke, and spirits is inseparable in his vocation from death
in its most awful shapes. He is conducted by the beadle and the
landlord to the Harmonic Meeting Room, where he puts his hat on the
piano and takes a Windsor-chair at the head of a long table formed of
several short tables put together and ornamented with glutinous rings
in endless involutions, made by pots and glasses. As many of the jury
as can crowd together at the table sit there. The rest get among the
spittoons and pipes or lean against the piano. Over the coroner's
head is a small iron garland, the pendant handle of a bell, which
rather gives the majesty of the court the appearance of going to be
hanged presently.

Call over and swear the jury! While the ceremony is in progress,
sensation is created by the entrance of a chubby little man in a
large shirt-collar, with a moist eye and an inflamed nose, who
modestly takes a position near the door as one of the general public,
but seems familiar with the room too. A whisper circulates that this
is Little Swills. It is considered not unlikely that he will get up
an imitation of the coroner and make it the principal feature of the
Harmonic Meeting in the evening.

"Well, gentlemen--" the coroner begins.

"Silence there, will you!" says the beadle. Not to the coroner,
though it might appear so.

"Well, gentlemen," resumes the coroner. "You are impanelled here to
inquire into the death of a certain man. Evidence will be given
before you as to the circumstances attending that death, and you will
give your verdict according to the--skittles; they must be stopped,
you know, beadle!--evidence, and not according to anything else. The
first thing to be done is to view the body."

"Make way there!" cries the beadle.

So they go out in a loose procession, something after the manner of a
straggling funeral, and make their inspection in Mr. Krook's back
second floor, from which a few of the jurymen retire pale and
precipitately. The beadle is very careful that two gentlemen not very
neat about the cuffs and buttons (for whose accommodation he has
provided a special little table near the coroner in the Harmonic
Meeting Room) should see all that is to be seen. For they are the
public chroniclers of such inquiries by the line; and he is not
superior to the universal human infirmity, but hopes to read in print
what "Mooney, the active and intelligent beadle of the district,"
said and did and even aspires to see the name of Mooney as familiarly
and patronizingly mentioned as the name of the hangman is, according
to the latest examples.

Little Swills is waiting for the coroner and jury on their return.
Mr. Tulkinghorn, also. Mr. Tulkinghorn is received with distinction
and seated near the coroner between that high judicial officer, a
bagatelle-board, and the coal-box. The inquiry proceeds. The jury
learn how the subject of their inquiry died, and learn no more about
him. "A very eminent solicitor is in attendance, gentlemen," says the
coroner, "who, I am informed, was accidentally present when discovery
of the death was made, but he could only repeat the evidence you have
already heard from the surgeon, the landlord, the lodger, and the
law-stationer, and it is not necessary to trouble him. Is anybody in
attendance who knows anything more?"

Mrs. Piper pushed forward by Mrs. Perkins. Mrs. Piper sworn.

Anastasia Piper, gentlemen. Married woman. Now, Mrs. Piper, what have
you got to say about this?

Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and
without punctuation, but not much to tell. Mrs. Piper lives in the
court (which her husband is a cabinet-maker), and it has long been
well beknown among the neighbours (counting from the day next but one
before the half-baptizing of Alexander James Piper aged eighteen
months and four days old on accounts of not being expected to live
such was the sufferings gentlemen of that child in his gums) as the
plaintive--so Mrs. Piper insists on calling the deceased--was
reported to have sold himself. Thinks it was the plaintive's air in
which that report originatinin. See the plaintive often and
considered as his air was feariocious and not to be allowed to go
about some children being timid (and if doubted hoping Mrs. Perkins
may be brought forard for she is here and will do credit to her
husband and herself and family). Has seen the plaintive wexed and
worrited by the children (for children they will ever be and you
cannot expect them specially if of playful dispositions to be
Methoozellers which you was not yourself). On accounts of this and
his dark looks has often dreamed as she see him take a pick-axe from
his pocket and split Johnny's head (which the child knows not fear
and has repeatually called after him close at his eels). Never
however see the plaintive take a pick-axe or any other wepping far
from it. Has seen him hurry away when run and called after as if not
partial to children and never see him speak to neither child nor
grown person at any time (excepting the boy that sweeps the crossing
down the lane over the way round the corner which if he was here
would tell you that he has been seen a-speaking to him frequent).

Says the coroner, is that boy here? Says the beadle, no, sir, he is
not here. Says the coroner, go and fetch him then. In the absence of
the active and intelligent, the coroner converses with Mr.
Tulkinghorn.

Oh! Here's the boy, gentlemen!

Here he is, very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged. Now, boy! But stop
a minute. Caution. This boy must be put through a few preliminary
paces.

Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don't know that everybody
has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don't know that Jo is
short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for HIM. HE don't find
no fault with it. Spell it? No. HE can't spell it. No father, no
mother, no friends. Never been to school. What's home? Knows a
broom's a broom, and knows it's wicked to tell a lie. Don't recollect
who told him about the broom or about the lie, but knows both. Can't
exactly say what'll be done to him arter he's dead if he tells a lie
to the gentlemen here, but believes it'll be something wery bad to
punish him, and serve him right--and so he'll tell the truth.

"This won't do, gentlemen!" says the coroner with a melancholy shake
of the head.

"Don't you think you can receive his evidence, sir?" asks an
attentive juryman.

"Out of the question," says the coroner. "You have heard the boy.
'Can't exactly say' won't do, you know. We can't take THAT in a court
of justice, gentlemen. It's terrible depravity. Put the boy aside."

Boy put aside, to the great edification of the audience, especially
of Little Swills, the comic vocalist.

Now. Is there any other witness? No other witness.

Very well, gentlemen! Here's a man unknown, proved to have been in
the habit of taking opium in large quantities for a year and a half,
found dead of too much opium. If you think you have any evidence to
lead you to the conclusion that he committed suicide, you will come
to that conclusion. If you think it is a case of accidental death,
you will find a verdict accordingly.

Verdict accordingly. Accidental death. No doubt. Gentlemen, you are
discharged. Good afternoon.

While the coroner buttons his great-coat, Mr. Tulkinghorn and he give
private audience to the rejected witness in a corner.

That graceless creature only knows that the dead man (whom he
recognized just now by his yellow face and black hair) was sometimes
hooted and pursued about the streets. That one cold winter night when
he, the boy, was shivering in a doorway near his crossing, the man
turned to look at him, and came back, and having questioned him and
found that he had not a friend in the world, said, "Neither have I.
Not one!" and gave him the price of a supper and a night's lodging.
That the man had often spoken to him since and asked him whether he
slept sound at night, and how he bore cold and hunger, and whether he
ever wished to die, and similar strange questions. That when the man
had no money, he would say in passing, "I am as poor as you to-day,
Jo," but that when he had any, he had always (as the boy most
heartily believes) been glad to give him some.

"He was wery good to me," says the boy, wiping his eyes with his
wretched sleeve. "Wen I see him a-layin' so stritched out just now, I
wished he could have heerd me tell him so. He wos wery good to me, he
wos!"

As he shuffles downstairs, Mr. Snagsby, lying in wait for him, puts a
half-crown in his hand. "If you ever see me coming past your crossing
with my little woman--I mean a lady--" says Mr. Snagsby with his
finger on his nose, "don't allude to it!"

For some little time the jurymen hang about the Sol's Arms
colloquially. In the sequel, half-a-dozen are caught up in a cloud of
pipe-smoke that pervades the parlour of the Sol's Arms; two stroll to
Hampstead; and four engage to go half-price to the play at night, and
top up with oysters. Little Swills is treated on several hands. Being
asked what he thinks of the proceedings, characterizes them (his
strength lying in a slangular direction) as "a rummy start." The
landlord of the Sol's Arms, finding Little Swills so popular,
commends him highly to the jurymen and public, observing that for a
song in character he don't know his equal and that that man's
character-wardrobe would fill a cart.

Thus, gradually the Sol's Arms melts into the shadowy night and then
flares out of it strong in gas. The Harmonic Meeting hour arriving,
the gentleman of professional celebrity takes the chair, is faced
(red-faced) by Little Swills; their friends rally round them and
support first-rate talent. In the zenith of the evening, Little
Swills says, "Gentlemen, if you'll permit me, I'll attempt a short
description of a scene of real life that came off here to-day." Is
much applauded and encouraged; goes out of the room as Swills; comes
in as the coroner (not the least in the world like him); describes
the inquest, with recreative intervals of piano-forte accompaniment,
to the refrain: With his (the coroner's) tippy tol li doll, tippy tol
lo doll, tippy tol li doll, Dee!

The jingling piano at last is silent, and the Harmonic friends rally
round their pillows. Then there is rest around the lonely figure, now
laid in its last earthly habitation; and it is watched by the gaunt
eyes in the shutters through some quiet hours of night. If this
forlorn man could have been prophetically seen lying here by the
mother at whose breast he nestled, a little child, with eyes upraised
to her loving face, and soft hand scarcely knowing how to close upon
the neck to which it crept, what an impossibility the vision would
have seemed! Oh, if in brighter days the now-extinguished fire within
him ever burned for one woman who held him in her heart, where is
she, while these ashes are above the ground!

It is anything but a night of rest at Mr. Snagsby's, in Cook's Court,
where Guster murders sleep by going, as Mr. Snagsby himself
allows--not to put too fine a point upon it--out of one fit into
twenty. The occasion of this seizure is that Guster has a tender
heart and a susceptible something that possibly might have been
imagination, but for Tooting and her patron saint. Be it what it may,
now, it was so direfully impressed at tea-time by Mr. Snagsby's
account of the inquiry at which he had assisted that at supper-time
she projected herself into the kitchen, preceded by a flying Dutch
cheese, and fell into a fit of unusual duration, which she only came
out of to go into another, and another, and so on through a chain of
fits, with short intervals between, of which she has pathetically
availed herself by consuming them in entreaties to Mrs. Snagsby not
to give her warning "when she quite comes to," and also in appeals to
the whole establishment to lay her down on the stones and go to bed.
Hence, Mr. Snagsby, at last hearing the cock at the little dairy in
Cursitor Street go into that disinterested ecstasy of his on the
subject of daylight, says, drawing a long breath, though the most
patient of men, "I thought you was dead, I am sure!"

What question this enthusiastic fowl supposes he settles when he
strains himself to such an extent, or why he should thus crow (so men
crow on various triumphant public occasions, however) about what
cannot be of any moment to him, is his affair. It is enough that
daylight comes, morning comes, noon comes.

Then the active and intelligent, who has got into the morning papers
as such, comes with his pauper company to Mr. Krook's and bears off
the body of our dear brother here departed to a hemmed-in churchyard,
pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated
to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed,
while our dear brothers and sisters who hang about official
back-stairs--would to heaven they HAD departed!--are very complacent
and agreeable. Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would
reject as a savage abomination and a Caffre would shudder at, they
bring our dear brother here departed to receive Christian burial.

With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little
tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate--with every villainy
of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of
death in action close on life--here they lower our dear brother down
a foot or two, here sow him in corruption, to be raised in
corruption: an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside, a shameful
testimony to future ages how civilization and barbarism walked this
boastful island together.

Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or stay too
long by such a place as this! Come, straggling lights into the
windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it at
least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas, burning so
sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its
witch-ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you should call to
every passerby, "Look here!"

With the night comes a slouching figure through the tunnel-court to
the outside of the iron gate. It holds the gate with its hands and
looks in between the bars, stands looking in for a little while.

It then, with an old broom it carries, softly sweeps the step and
makes the archway clean. It does so very busily and trimly, looks in
again a little while, and so departs.

Jo, is it thou? Well, well! Though a rejected witness, who "can't
exactly say" what will be done to him in greater hands than men's,
thou art not quite in outer darkness. There is something like a
distant ray of light in thy muttered reason for this: "He wos wery
good to me, he wos!"




CHAPTER XII

On the Watch


It has left off raining down in Lincolnshire at last, and Chesney
Wold has taken heart. Mrs. Rouncewell is full of hospitable cares,
for Sir Leicester and my Lady are coming home from Paris. The
fashionable intelligence has found it out and communicates the glad
tidings to benighted England. It has also found out that they will
entertain a brilliant and distinguished circle of the ELITE of the
BEAU MONDE (the fashionable intelligence is weak in English, but a
giant refreshed in French) at the ancient and hospitable family seat
in Lincolnshire.

For the greater honour of the brilliant and distinguished circle, and
of Chesney Wold into the bargain, the broken arch of the bridge in
the park is mended; and the water, now retired within its proper
limits and again spanned gracefully, makes a figure in the prospect
from the house. The clear, cold sunshine glances into the brittle
woods and approvingly beholds the sharp wind scattering the leaves
and drying the moss. It glides over the park after the moving shadows
of the clouds, and chases them, and never catches them, all day. It
looks in at the windows and touches the ancestral portraits with bars
and patches of brightness never contemplated by the painters. Athwart
the picture of my Lady, over the great chimney-piece, it throws a
broad bend-sinister of light that strikes down crookedly into the
hearth and seems to rend it.

Through the same cold sunshine and the same sharp wind, my Lady and
Sir Leicester, in their travelling chariot (my Lady's woman and Sir
Leicester's man affectionate in the rumble), start for home. With a
considerable amount of jingling and whip-cracking, and many plunging
demonstrations on the part of two bare-backed horses and two centaurs
with glazed hats, jack-boots, and flowing manes and tails, they
rattle out of the yard of the Hotel Bristol in the Place Vendome and
canter between the sun-and-shadow-chequered colonnade of the Rue de
Rivoli and the garden of the ill-fated palace of a headless king and
queen, off by the Place of Concord, and the Elysian Fields, and the
Gate of the Star, out of Paris.

Sooth to say, they cannot go away too fast, for even here my Lady
Dedlock has been bored to death. Concert, assembly, opera, theatre,
drive, nothing is new to my Lady under the worn-out heavens. Only
last Sunday, when poor wretches were gay--within the walls playing
with children among the clipped trees and the statues in the Palace
Garden; walking, a score abreast, in the Elysian Fields, made more
Elysian by performing dogs and wooden horses; between whiles
filtering (a few) through the gloomy Cathedral of Our Lady to say a
word or two at the base of a pillar within flare of a rusty little
gridiron-full of gusty little tapers; without the walls encompassing
Paris with dancing, love-making, wine-drinking, tobacco-smoking,
tomb-visiting, billiard card and domino playing, quack-doctoring, and
much murderous refuse, animate and inanimate--only last Sunday, my
Lady, in the desolation of Boredom and the clutch of Giant Despair,
almost hated her own maid for being in spirits.

She cannot, therefore, go too fast from Paris. Weariness of soul lies
before her, as it lies behind--her Ariel has put a girdle of it round
the whole earth, and it cannot be unclasped--but the imperfect remedy
is always to fly from the last place where it has been experienced.
Fling Paris back into the distance, then, exchanging it for endless
avenues and cross-avenues of wintry trees! And, when next beheld, let
it be some leagues away, with the Gate of the Star a white speck
glittering in the sun, and the city a mere mound in a plain--two dark
square towers rising out of it, and light and shadow descending on it
aslant, like the angels in Jacob's dream!

Sir Leicester is generally in a complacent state, and rarely bored.
When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own
greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man to have so
inexhaustible a subject. After reading his letters, he leans back in
his corner of the carriage and generally reviews his importance to
society.

"You have an unusual amount of correspondence this morning?" says my
Lady after a long time. She is fatigued with reading. Has almost read
a page in twenty miles.

"Nothing in it, though. Nothing whatever."

"I saw one of Mr. Tulkinghorn's long effusions, I think?"

"You see everything," says Sir Leicester with admiration.

"Ha!" sighs my Lady. "He is the most tiresome of men!"

"He sends--I really beg your pardon--he sends," says Sir Leicester,
selecting the letter and unfolding it, "a message to you. Our
stopping to change horses as I came to his postscript drove it out of
my memory. I beg you'll excuse me. He says--" Sir Leicester is so
long in taking out his eye-glass and adjusting it that my Lady looks
a little irritated. "He says 'In the matter of the right of way--' I
beg your pardon, that's not the place. He says--yes! Here I have it!
He says, 'I beg my respectful compliments to my Lady, who, I hope,
has benefited by the change. Will you do me the favour to mention (as
it may interest her) that I have something to tell her on her return
in reference to the person who copied the affidavit in the Chancery
suit, which so powerfully stimulated her curiosity. I have seen
him.'"

My Lady, leaning forward, looks out of her window.

"That's the message," observes Sir Leicester.

"I should like to walk a little," says my Lady, still looking out of
her window.

"Walk?" repeats Sir Leicester in a tone of surprise.

"I should like to walk a little," says my Lady with unmistakable
distinctness. "Please to stop the carriage."

The carriage is stopped, the affectionate man alights from the
rumble, opens the door, and lets down the steps, obedient to an
impatient motion of my Lady's hand. My Lady alights so quickly and
walks away so quickly that Sir Leicester, for all his scrupulous
politeness, is unable to assist her, and is left behind. A space of a
minute or two has elapsed before he comes up with her. She smiles,
looks very handsome, takes his arm, lounges with him for a quarter of
a mile, is very much bored, and resumes her seat in the carriage.

The rattle and clatter continue through the greater part of three
days, with more or less of bell-jingling and whip-cracking, and more
or less plunging of centaurs and bare-backed horses. Their courtly
politeness to each other at the hotels where they tarry is the theme
of general admiration. Though my Lord IS a little aged for my Lady,
says Madame, the hostess of the Golden Ape, and though he might be
her amiable father, one can see at a glance that they love each
other. One observes my Lord with his white hair, standing, hat in
hand, to help my Lady to and from the carriage. One observes my Lady,
how recognisant of my Lord's politeness, with an inclination of her
gracious head and the concession of her so-genteel fingers! It is
ravishing!

The sea has no appreciation of great men, but knocks them about like
the small fry. It is habitually hard upon Sir Leicester, whose
countenance it greenly mottles in the manner of sage-cheese and in
whose aristocratic system it effects a dismal revolution. It is the
Radical of Nature to him. Nevertheless, his dignity gets over it
after stopping to refit, and he goes on with my Lady for Chesney
Wold, lying only one night in London on the way to Lincolnshire.

Through the same cold sunlight, colder as the day declines, and
through the same sharp wind, sharper as the separate shadows of bare
trees gloom together in the woods, and as the Ghost's Walk, touched
at the western corner by a pile of fire in the sky, resigns itself to
coming night, they drive into the park. The rooks, swinging in their
lofty houses in the elm-tree avenue, seem to discuss the question of
the occupancy of the carriage as it passes underneath, some agreeing
that Sir Leicester and my Lady are come down, some arguing with
malcontents who won't admit it, now all consenting to consider the
question disposed of, now all breaking out again in violent debate,
incited by one obstinate and drowsy bird who will persist in putting
in a last contradictory croak. Leaving them to swing and caw, the
travelling chariot rolls on to the house, where fires gleam warmly
through some of the windows, though not through so many as to give an
inhabited expression to the darkening mass of front. But the
brilliant and distinguished circle will soon do that.

Mrs. Rouncewell is in attendance and receives Sir Leicester's
customary shake of the hand with a profound curtsy.

"How do you do, Mrs. Rouncewell? I am glad to see you."

"I hope I have the honour of welcoming you in good health, Sir
Leicester?"

"In excellent health, Mrs. Rouncewell."

"My Lady is looking charmingly well," says Mrs. Rouncewell with
another curtsy.

My Lady signifies, without profuse expenditure of words, that she is
as wearily well as she can hope to be.

But Rosa is in the distance, behind the housekeeper; and my Lady, who
has not subdued the quickness of her observation, whatever else she
may have conquered, asks, "Who is that girl?"

"A young scholar of mine, my Lady. Rosa."

"Come here, Rosa!" Lady Dedlock beckons her, with even an appearance
of interest. "Why, do you know how pretty you are, child?" she says,
touching her shoulder with her two forefingers.

Rosa, very much abashed, says, "No, if you please, my Lady!" and
glances up, and glances down, and don't know where to look, but looks
all the prettier.

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen, my Lady."

"Nineteen," repeats my Lady thoughtfully. "Take care they don't spoil
you by flattery."

"Yes, my Lady."

My Lady taps her dimpled cheek with the same delicate gloved fingers
and goes on to the foot of the oak staircase, where Sir Leicester
pauses for her as her knightly escort. A staring old Dedlock in a
panel, as large as life and as dull, looks as if he didn't know what
to make of it, which was probably his general state of mind in the
days of Queen Elizabeth.

That evening, in the housekeeper's room, Rosa can do nothing but
murmur Lady Dedlock's praises. She is so affable, so graceful, so
beautiful, so elegant; has such a sweet voice and such a thrilling
touch that Rosa can feel it yet! Mrs. Rouncewell confirms all this,
not without personal pride, reserving only the one point of
affability. Mrs. Rouncewell is not quite sure as to that. Heaven
forbid that she should say a syllable in dispraise of any member of
that excellent family, above all, of my Lady, whom the whole world
admires; but if my Lady would only be "a little more free," not quite
so cold and distant, Mrs. Rouncewell thinks she would be more
affable.

"'Tis almost a pity," Mrs. Rouncewell adds--only "almost" because it
borders on impiety to suppose that anything could be better than it
is, in such an express dispensation as the Dedlock affairs--"that my
Lady has no family. If she had had a daughter now, a grown young
lady, to interest her, I think she would have had the only kind of
excellence she wants."

"Might not that have made her still more proud, grandmother?" says
Watt, who has been home and come back again, he is such a good
grandson.

"More and most, my dear," returns the housekeeper with dignity, "are
words it's not my place to use--nor so much as to hear--applied to
any drawback on my Lady."

"I beg your pardon, grandmother. But she is proud, is she not?"

"If she is, she has reason to be. The Dedlock family have always
reason to be."

"Well," says Watt, "it's to be hoped they line out of their
prayer-books a certain passage for the common people about pride and
vainglory. Forgive me, grandmother! Only a joke!"

"Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, my dear, are not fit subjects for
joking."

"Sir Leicester is no joke by any means," says Watt, "and I humbly ask
his pardon. I suppose, grandmother, that even with the family and
their guests down here, there is no objection to my prolonging my
stay at the Dedlock Arms for a day or two, as any other traveller
might?"

"Surely, none in the world, child."

"I am glad of that," says Watt, "because I have an inexpressible
desire to extend my knowledge of this beautiful neighbourhood."

He happens to glance at Rosa, who looks down and is very shy indeed.
But according to the old superstition, it should be Rosa's ears that
burn, and not her fresh bright cheeks, for my Lady's maid is holding
forth about her at this moment with surpassing energy.

My Lady's maid is a Frenchwoman of two and thirty, from somewhere in
the southern country about Avignon and Marseilles, a large-eyed brown
woman with black hair who would be handsome but for a certain feline
mouth and general uncomfortable tightness of face, rendering the jaws
too eager and the skull too prominent. There is something indefinably
keen and wan about her anatomy, and she has a watchful way of looking
out of the corners of her eyes without turning her head which could
be pleasantly dispensed with, especially when she is in an ill humour
and near knives. Through all the good taste of her dress and little
adornments, these objections so express themselves that she seems to
go about like a very neat she-wolf imperfectly tamed. Besides being
accomplished in all the knowledge appertaining to her post, she is
almost an Englishwoman in her acquaintance with the language;
consequently, she is in no want of words to shower upon Rosa for
having attracted my Lady's attention, and she pours them out with
such grim ridicule as she sits at dinner that her companion, the
affectionate man, is rather relieved when she arrives at the spoon
stage of that performance.

Ha, ha, ha! She, Hortense, been in my Lady's service since five years
and always kept at the distance, and this doll, this puppet,
caressed--absolutely caressed--by my Lady on the moment of her
arriving at the house! Ha, ha, ha! "And do you know how pretty you
are, child?" "No, my Lady." You are right there! "And how old are
you, child! And take care they do not spoil you by flattery, child!"
Oh, how droll! It is the BEST thing altogether.

In short, it is such an admirable thing that Mademoiselle Hortense
can't forget it; but at meals for days afterwards, even among her
countrywomen and others attached in like capacity to the troop of
visitors, relapses into silent enjoyment of the joke--an enjoyment
expressed, in her own convivial manner, by an additional tightness of
face, thin elongation of compressed lips, and sidewise look, which
intense appreciation of humour is frequently reflected in my Lady's
mirrors when my Lady is not among them.

All the mirrors in the house are brought into action now, many of
them after a long blank. They reflect handsome faces, simpering
faces, youthful faces, faces of threescore and ten that will not
submit to be old; the entire collection of faces that have come to
pass a January week or two at Chesney Wold, and which the fashionable
intelligence, a mighty hunter before the Lord, hunts with a keen
scent, from their breaking cover at the Court of St. James's to their
being run down to death. The place in Lincolnshire is all alive. By
day guns and voices are heard ringing in the woods, horsemen and
carriages enliven the park roads, servants and hangers-on pervade the
village and the Dedlock Arms. Seen by night from distant openings in
the trees, the row of windows in the long drawing-room, where my
Lady's picture hangs over the great chimney-piece, is like a row of
jewels set in a black frame. On Sunday the chill little church is
almost warmed by so much gallant company, and the general flavour of
the Dedlock dust is quenched in delicate perfumes.

The brilliant and distinguished circle comprehends within it no
contracted amount of education, sense, courage, honour, beauty, and
virtue. Yet there is something a little wrong about it in despite of
its immense advantages. What can it be?

Dandyism? There is no King George the Fourth now (more the pity) to
set the dandy fashion; there are no clear-starched jack-towel
neckcloths, no short-waisted coats, no false calves, no stays. There
are no caricatures, now, of effeminate exquisites so arrayed,
swooning in opera boxes with excess of delight and being revived by
other dainty creatures poking long-necked scent-bottles at their
noses. There is no beau whom it takes four men at once to shake into
his buckskins, or who goes to see all the executions, or who is
troubled with the self-reproach of having once consumed a pea. But is
there dandyism in the brilliant and distinguished circle
notwithstanding, dandyism of a more mischievous sort, that has got
below the surface and is doing less harmless things than
jack-towelling itself and stopping its own digestion, to which no
rational person need particularly object?

Why, yes. It cannot be disguised. There ARE at Chesney Wold this
January week some ladies and gentlemen of the newest fashion, who
have set up a dandyism--in religion, for instance. Who in mere
lackadaisical want of an emotion have agreed upon a little dandy talk
about the vulgar wanting faith in things in general, meaning in the
things that have been tried and found wanting, as though a low fellow
should unaccountably lose faith in a bad shilling after finding it
out! Who would make the vulgar very picturesque and faithful by
putting back the hands upon the clock of time and cancelling a few
hundred years of history.

There are also ladies and gentlemen of another fashion, not so new,
but very elegant, who have agreed to put a smooth glaze on the world
and to keep down all its realities. For whom everything must be
languid and pretty. Who have found out the perpetual stoppage. Who
are to rejoice at nothing and be sorry for nothing. Who are not to be
disturbed by ideas. On whom even the fine arts, attending in powder
and walking backward like the Lord Chamberlain, must array themselves
in the milliners' and tailors' patterns of past generations and be
particularly careful not to be in earnest or to receive any impress
from the moving age.

Then there is my Lord Boodle, of considerable reputation with his
party, who has known what office is and who tells Sir Leicester
Dedlock with much gravity, after dinner, that he really does not see
to what the present age is tending. A debate is not what a debate
used to be; the House is not what the House used to be; even a
Cabinet is not what it formerly was. He perceives with astonishment
that supposing the present government to be overthrown, the limited
choice of the Crown, in the formation of a new ministry, would lie
between Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle--supposing it to be
impossible for the Duke of Foodle to act with Goodle, which may be
assumed to be the case in consequence of the breach arising out of
that affair with Hoodle. Then, giving the Home Department and the
leadership of the House of Commons to Joodle, the Exchequer to
Koodle, the Colonies to Loodle, and the Foreign Office to Moodle,
what are you to do with Noodle? You can't offer him the Presidency of
the Council; that is reserved for Poodle. You can't put him in the
Woods and Forests; that is hardly good enough for Quoodle. What
follows? That the country is shipwrecked, lost, and gone to pieces
(as is made manifest to the patriotism of Sir Leicester Dedlock)
because you can't provide for Noodle!

On the other hand, the Right Honourable William Buffy, M.P., contends
across the table with some one else that the shipwreck of the
country--about which there is no doubt; it is only the manner of it
that is in question--is attributable to Cuffy. If you had done with
Cuffy what you ought to have done when he first came into Parliament,
and had prevented him from going over to Duffy, you would have got
him into alliance with Fuffy, you would have had with you the weight
attaching as a smart debater to Guffy, you would have brought to bear
upon the elections the wealth of Huffy, you would have got in for
three counties Juffy, Kuffy, and Luffy, and you would have
strengthened your administration by the official knowledge and the
business habits of Muffy. All this, instead of being as you now are,
dependent on the mere caprice of Puffy!

As to this point, and as to some minor topics, there are differences
of opinion; but it is perfectly clear to the brilliant and
distinguished circle, all round, that nobody is in question but
Boodle and his retinue, and Buffy and HIS retinue. These are the
great actors for whom the stage is reserved. A People there are, no
doubt--a certain large number of supernumeraries, who are to be
occasionally addressed, and relied upon for shouts and choruses, as
on the theatrical stage; but Boodle and Buffy, their followers and
families, their heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns, are
the born first-actors, managers, and leaders, and no others can
appear upon the scene for ever and ever.

In this, too, there is perhaps more dandyism at Chesney Wold than the
brilliant and distinguished circle will find good for itself in the
long run. For it is, even with the stillest and politest circles, as
with the circle the necromancer draws around him--very strange
appearances may be seen in active motion outside. With this
difference, that being realities and not phantoms, there is the
greater danger of their breaking in.

Chesney Wold is quite full anyhow, so full that a burning sense of
injury arises in the breasts of ill-lodged ladies'-maids, and is not
to be extinguished. Only one room is empty. It is a turret chamber of
the third order of merit, plainly but comfortably furnished and
having an old-fashioned business air. It is Mr. Tulkinghorn's room,
and is never bestowed on anybody else, for he may come at any time.
He is not come yet. It is his quiet habit to walk across the park
from the village in fine weather, to drop into this room as if he had
never been out of it since he was last seen there, to request a
servant to inform Sir Leicester that he is arrived in case he should
be wanted, and to appear ten minutes before dinner in the shadow of
the library-door. He sleeps in his turret with a complaining
flag-staff over his head, and has some leads outside on which, any
fine morning when he is down here, his black figure may be seen
walking before breakfast like a larger species of rook.

Every day before dinner, my Lady looks for him in the dusk of the
library, but he is not there. Every day at dinner, my Lady glances
down the table for the vacant place that would be waiting to receive
him if he had just arrived, but there is no vacant place. Every night
my Lady casually asks her maid, "Is Mr. Tulkinghorn come?"

Every night the answer is, "No, my Lady, not yet."

One night, while having her hair undressed, my Lady loses herself in
deep thought after this reply until she sees her own brooding face in
the opposite glass, and a pair of black eyes curiously observing her.

"Be so good as to attend," says my Lady then, addressing the
reflection of Hortense, "to your business. You can contemplate your
beauty at another time."

"Pardon! It was your Ladyship's beauty."

"That," says my Lady, "you needn't contemplate at all."

At length, one afternoon a little before sunset, when the bright
groups of figures which have for the last hour or two enlivened the
Ghost's Walk are all dispersed and only Sir Leicester and my Lady
remain upon the terrace, Mr. Tulkinghorn appears. He comes towards
them at his usual methodical pace, which is never quickened, never
slackened. He wears his usual expressionless mask--if it be a
mask--and carries family secrets in every limb of his body and every
crease of his dress. Whether his whole soul is devoted to the great
or whether he yields them nothing beyond the services he sells is his
personal secret. He keeps it, as he keeps the secrets of his clients;
he is his own client in that matter, and will never betray himself.

"How do you do, Mr. Tulkinghorn?" says Sir Leicester, giving him his
hand.

Mr. Tulkinghorn is quite well. Sir Leicester is quite well. My Lady
is quite well. All highly satisfactory. The lawyer, with his hands
behind him, walks at Sir Leicester's side along the terrace. My Lady
walks upon the other side.

"We expected you before," says Sir Leicester. A gracious observation.
As much as to say, "Mr. Tulkinghorn, we remember your existence when
you are not here to remind us of it by your presence. We bestow a
fragment of our minds upon you, sir, you see!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn, comprehending it, inclines his head and says he is
much obliged.

"I should have come down sooner," he explains, "but that I have been
much engaged with those matters in the several suits between yourself
and Boythorn."

"A man of a very ill-regulated mind," observes Sir Leicester with
severity. "An extremely dangerous person in any community. A man of a
very low character of mind."

"He is obstinate," says Mr. Tulkinghorn.

"It is natural to such a man to be so," says Sir Leicester, looking
most profoundly obstinate himself. "I am not at all surprised to hear
it."

"The only question is," pursues the lawyer, "whether you will give up
anything."

"No, sir," replies Sir Leicester. "Nothing. I give up?"

"I don't mean anything of importance. That, of course, I know you
would not abandon. I mean any minor point."

"Mr. Tulkinghorn," returns Sir Leicester, "there can be no minor
point between myself and Mr. Boythorn. If I go farther, and observe
that I cannot readily conceive how ANY right of mine can be a minor
point, I speak not so much in reference to myself as an individual as
in reference to the family position I have it in charge to maintain."

Mr. Tulkinghorn inclines his head again. "I have now my
instructions," he says. "Mr. Boythorn will give us a good deal of
trouble--"

"It is the character of such a mind, Mr. Tulkinghorn," Sir Leicester
interrupts him, "TO give trouble. An exceedingly ill-conditioned,
levelling person. A person who, fifty years ago, would probably have
been tried at the Old Bailey for some demagogue proceeding, and
severely punished--if not," adds Sir Leicester after a moment's
pause, "if not hanged, drawn, and quartered."

Sir Leicester appears to discharge his stately breast of a burden in
passing this capital sentence, as if it were the next satisfactory
thing to having the sentence executed.

"But night is coming on," says he, "and my Lady will take cold. My
dear, let us go in."

As they turn towards the hall-door, Lady Dedlock addresses Mr.
Tulkinghorn for the first time.

"You sent me a message respecting the person whose writing I happened
to inquire about. It was like you to remember the circumstance; I had
quite forgotten it. Your message reminded me of it again. I can't
imagine what association I had with a hand like that, but I surely
had some."

"You had some?" Mr. Tulkinghorn repeats.

"Oh, yes!" returns my Lady carelessly. "I think I must have had some.
And did you really take the trouble to find out the writer of that
actual thing--what is it!--affidavit?"

"Yes."

"How very odd!"

They pass into a sombre breakfast-room on the ground floor, lighted
in the day by two deep windows. It is now twilight. The fire glows
brightly on the panelled wall and palely on the window-glass, where,
through the cold reflection of the blaze, the colder landscape
shudders in the wind and a grey mist creeps along, the only traveller
besides the waste of clouds.

My Lady lounges in a great chair in the chimney-corner, and Sir
Leicester takes another great chair opposite. The lawyer stands
before the fire with his hand out at arm's length, shading his face.
He looks across his arm at my Lady.

"Yes," he says, "I inquired about the man, and found him. And, what
is very strange, I found him--"

"Not to be any out-of-the-way person, I am afraid!" Lady Dedlock
languidly anticipates.

"I found him dead."

"Oh, dear me!" remonstrated Sir Leicester. Not so much shocked by the
fact as by the fact of the fact being mentioned.

"I was directed to his lodging--a miserable, poverty-stricken
place--and I found him dead."

"You will excuse me, Mr. Tulkinghorn," observes Sir Leicester. "I
think the less said--"

"Pray, Sir Leicester, let me hear the story out" (it is my Lady
speaking). "It is quite a story for twilight. How very shocking!
Dead?"

Mr. Tulkinghorn re-asserts it by another inclination of his head.
"Whether by his own hand--"

"Upon my honour!" cries Sir Leicester. "Really!"

"Do let me hear the story!" says my Lady.

"Whatever you desire, my dear. But, I must say--"

"No, you mustn't say! Go on, Mr. Tulkinghorn."

Sir Leicester's gallantry concedes the point, though he still feels
that to bring this sort of squalor among the upper classes is
really--really--

"I was about to say," resumes the lawyer with undisturbed calmness,
"that whether he had died by his own hand or not, it was beyond my
power to tell you. I should amend that phrase, however, by saying
that he had unquestionably died of his own act, though whether by his
own deliberate intention or by mischance can never certainly be
known. The coroner's jury found that he took the poison
accidentally."

"And what kind of man," my Lady asks, "was this deplorable creature?"

"Very difficult to say," returns the lawyer, shaking his head. "He
had lived so wretchedly and was so neglected, with his gipsy colour
and his wild black hair and beard, that I should have considered him
the commonest of the common. The surgeon had a notion that he had
once been something better, both in appearance and condition."

"What did they call the wretched being?"

"They called him what he had called himself, but no one knew his
name."

"Not even any one who had attended on him?"

"No one had attended on him. He was found dead. In fact, I found
him."

"Without any clue to anything more?"

"Without any; there was," says the lawyer meditatively, "an old
portmanteau, but--No, there were no papers."

During the utterance of every word of this short dialogue, Lady
Dedlock and Mr. Tulkinghorn, without any other alteration in their
customary deportment, have looked very steadily at one another--as
was natural, perhaps, in the discussion of so unusual a subject. Sir
Leicester has looked at the fire, with the general expression of the
Dedlock on the staircase. The story being told, he renews his stately
protest, saying that as it is quite clear that no association in my
Lady's mind can possibly be traceable to this poor wretch (unless he
was a begging-letter writer), he trusts to hear no more about a
subject so far removed from my Lady's station.

"Certainly, a collection of horrors," says my Lady, gathering up her
mantles and furs, "but they interest one for the moment! Have the
kindness, Mr. Tulkinghorn, to open the door for me."

Mr. Tulkinghorn does so with deference and holds it open while she
passes out. She passes close to him, with her usual fatigued manner
and insolent grace. They meet again at dinner--again, next
day--again, for many days in succession. Lady Dedlock is always the
same exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable
to be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine. Mr.
Tulkinghorn is always the same speechless repository of noble
confidences, so oddly out of place and yet so perfectly at home. They
appear to take as little note of one another as any two people
enclosed within the same walls could. But whether each evermore
watches and suspects the other, evermore mistrustful of some great
reservation; whether each is evermore prepared at all points for the
other, and never to be taken unawares; what each would give to know
how much the other knows--all this is hidden, for the time, in their
own hearts.




CHAPTER XIII

Esther's Narrative


We held many consultations about what Richard was to be, first
without Mr. Jarndyce, as he had requested, and afterwards with him,
but it was a long time before we seemed to make progress. Richard
said he was ready for anything. When Mr. Jarndyce doubted whether he
might not already be too old to enter the Navy, Richard said he had
thought of that, and perhaps he was. When Mr. Jarndyce asked him what
he thought of the Army, Richard said he had thought of that, too, and
it wasn't a bad idea. When Mr. Jarndyce advised him to try and decide
within himself whether his old preference for the sea was an ordinary
boyish inclination or a strong impulse, Richard answered, Well he
really HAD tried very often, and he couldn't make out.

"How much of this indecision of character," Mr. Jarndyce said to me,
"is chargeable on that incomprehensible heap of uncertainty and
procrastination on which he has been thrown from his birth, I don't
pretend to say; but that Chancery, among its other sins, is
responsible for some of it, I can plainly see. It has engendered or
confirmed in him a habit of putting off--and trusting to this, that,
and the other chance, without knowing what chance--and dismissing
everything as unsettled, uncertain, and confused. The character of
much older and steadier people may be even changed by the
circumstances surrounding them. It would be too much to expect that a
boy's, in its formation, should be the subject of such influences and
escape them."

I felt this to be true; though if I may venture to mention what I
thought besides, I thought it much to be regretted that Richard's
education had not counteracted those influences or directed his
character. He had been eight years at a public school and had learnt,
I understood, to make Latin verses of several sorts in the most
admirable manner. But I never heard that it had been anybody's
business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings
lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to HIM. HE had been adapted to
the verses and had learnt the art of making them to such perfection
that if he had remained at school until he was of age, I suppose he
could only have gone on making them over and over again unless he had
enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it. Still, although I
had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and very improving, and
very sufficient for a great many purposes of life, and always
remembered all through life, I did doubt whether Richard would not
have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his
studying them quite so much.

To be sure, I knew nothing of the subject and do not even now know
whether the young gentlemen of classic Rome or Greece made verses to
the same extent--or whether the young gentlemen of any country ever
did.

"I haven't the least idea," said Richard, musing, "what I had better
be. Except that I am quite sure I don't want to go into the Church,
it's a toss-up."

"You have no inclination in Mr. Kenge's way?" suggested Mr. Jarndyce.

"I don't know that, sir!" replied Richard. "I am fond of boating.
Articled clerks go a good deal on the water. It's a capital
profession!"

"Surgeon--" suggested Mr. Jarndyce.

"That's the thing, sir!" cried Richard.

I doubt if he had ever once thought of it before.

"That's the thing, sir," repeated Richard with the greatest
enthusiasm. "We have got it at last. M.R.C.S.!"

He was not to be laughed out of it, though he laughed at it heartily.
He said he had chosen his profession, and the more he thought of it,
the more he felt that his destiny was clear; the art of healing was
the art of all others for him. Mistrusting that he only came to this
conclusion because, having never had much chance of finding out for
himself what he was fitted for and having never been guided to the
discovery, he was taken by the newest idea and was glad to get rid of
the trouble of consideration, I wondered whether the Latin verses
often ended in this or whether Richard's was a solitary case.

Mr. Jarndyce took great pains to talk with him seriously and to put
it to his good sense not to deceive himself in so important a matter.
Richard was a little grave after these interviews, but invariably
told Ada and me that it was all right, and then began to talk about
something else.

"By heaven!" cried Mr. Boythorn, who interested himself strongly in
the subject--though I need not say that, for he could do nothing
weakly; "I rejoice to find a young gentleman of spirit and gallantry
devoting himself to that noble profession! The more spirit there is
in it, the better for mankind and the worse for those mercenary
task-masters and low tricksters who delight in putting that
illustrious art at a disadvantage in the world. By all that is base
and despicable," cried Mr. Boythorn, "the treatment of surgeons
aboard ship is such that I would submit the legs--both legs--of every
member of the Admiralty Board to a compound fracture and render it a
transportable offence in any qualified practitioner to set them if
the system were not wholly changed in eight and forty hours!"

"Wouldn't you give them a week?" asked Mr. Jarndyce.

"No!" cried Mr. Boythorn firmly. "Not on any consideration! Eight and
forty hours! As to corporations, parishes, vestry-boards, and similar
gatherings of jolter-headed clods who assemble to exchange such
speeches that, by heaven, they ought to be worked in quicksilver
mines for the short remainder of their miserable existence, if it
were only to prevent their detestable English from contaminating a
language spoken in the presence of the sun--as to those fellows, who
meanly take advantage of the ardour of gentlemen in the pursuit of
knowledge to recompense the inestimable services of the best years of
their lives, their long study, and their expensive education with
pittances too small for the acceptance of clerks, I would have the
necks of every one of them wrung and their skulls arranged in
Surgeons' Hall for the contemplation of the whole profession in order
that its younger members might understand from actual measurement, in
early life, HOW thick skulls may become!"

He wound up this vehement declaration by looking round upon us with a
most agreeable smile and suddenly thundering, "Ha, ha, ha!" over and
over again, until anybody else might have been expected to be quite
subdued by the exertion.

As Richard still continued to say that he was fixed in his choice
after repeated periods for consideration had been recommended by Mr.
Jarndyce and had expired, and he still continued to assure Ada and me
in the same final manner that it was "all right," it became advisable
to take Mr. Kenge into council. Mr. Kenge, therefore, came down to
dinner one day, and leaned back in his chair, and turned his
eye-glasses over and over, and spoke in a sonorous voice, and did
exactly what I remembered to have seen him do when I was a little
girl.

"Ah!" said Mr. Kenge. "Yes. Well! A very good profession, Mr.
Jarndyce, a very good profession."

"The course of study and preparation requires to be diligently
pursued," observed my guardian with a glance at Richard.

"Oh, no doubt," said Mr. Kenge. "Diligently."

"But that being the case, more or less, with all pursuits that are
worth much," said Mr. Jarndyce, "it is not a special consideration
which another choice would be likely to escape."

"Truly," said Mr. Kenge. "And Mr. Richard Carstone, who has so
meritoriously acquitted himself in the--shall I say the classic
shades?--in which his youth had been passed, will, no doubt, apply
the habits, if not the principles and practice, of versification in
that tongue in which a poet was said (unless I mistake) to be born,
not made, to the more eminently practical field of action on which he
enters."

"You may rely upon it," said Richard in his off-hand manner, "that I
shall go at it and do my best."

"Very well, Mr. Jarndyce!" said Mr. Kenge, gently nodding his head.
"Really, when we are assured by Mr. Richard that he means to go at it
and to do his best," nodding feelingly and smoothly over those
expressions, "I would submit to you that we have only to inquire into
the best mode of carrying out the object of his ambition. Now, with
reference to placing Mr. Richard with some sufficiently eminent
practitioner. Is there any one in view at present?"

"No one, Rick, I think?" said my guardian.

"No one, sir," said Richard.

"Quite so!" observed Mr. Kenge. "As to situation, now. Is there any
particular feeling on that head?"

"N--no," said Richard.

"Quite so!" observed Mr. Kenge again.

"I should like a little variety," said Richard; "I mean a good range
of experience."

"Very requisite, no doubt," returned Mr. Kenge. "I think this may be
easily arranged, Mr. Jarndyce? We have only, in the first place, to
discover a sufficiently eligible practitioner; and as soon as we make
our want--and shall I add, our ability to pay a premium?--known, our
only difficulty will be in the selection of one from a large number.
We have only, in the second place, to observe those little
formalities which are rendered necessary by our time of life and our
being under the guardianship of the court. We shall soon be--shall I
say, in Mr. Richard's own light-hearted manner, 'going at it'--to our
heart's content. It is a coincidence," said Mr. Kenge with a tinge of
melancholy in his smile, "one of those coincidences which may or may
not require an explanation beyond our present limited faculties, that
I have a cousin in the medical profession. He might be deemed
eligible by you and might be disposed to respond to this proposal. I
can answer for him as little as for you, but he MIGHT!"

As this was an opening in the prospect, it was arranged that Mr.
Kenge should see his cousin. And as Mr. Jarndyce had before proposed
to take us to London for a few weeks, it was settled next day that we
should make our visit at once and combine Richard's business with it.

Mr. Boythorn leaving us within a week, we took up our abode at a
cheerful lodging near Oxford Street over an upholsterer's shop.
London was a great wonder to us, and we were out for hours and hours
at a time, seeing the sights, which appeared to be less capable of
exhaustion than we were. We made the round of the principal theatres,
too, with great delight, and saw all the plays that were worth
seeing. I mention this because it was at the theatre that I began to
be made uncomfortable again by Mr. Guppy.

I was sitting in front of the box one night with Ada, and Richard was
in the place he liked best, behind Ada's chair, when, happening to
look down into the pit, I saw Mr. Guppy, with his hair flattened down
upon his head and woe depicted in his face, looking up at me. I felt
all through the performance that he never looked at the actors but
constantly looked at me, and always with a carefully prepared
expression of the deepest misery and the profoundest dejection.

It quite spoiled my pleasure for that night because it was so very
embarrassing and so very ridiculous. But from that time forth, we
never went to the play without my seeing Mr. Guppy in the pit, always
with his hair straight and flat, his shirt-collar turned down, and a
general feebleness about him. If he were not there when we went in,
and I began to hope he would not come and yielded myself for a little
while to the interest of the scene, I was certain to encounter his
languishing eyes when I least expected it and, from that time, to be
quite sure that they were fixed upon me all the evening.

I really cannot express how uneasy this made me. If he would only
have brushed up his hair or turned up his collar, it would have been
bad enough; but to know that that absurd figure was always gazing at
me, and always in that demonstrative state of despondency, put such a
constraint upon me that I did not like to laugh at the play, or to
cry at it, or to move, or to speak. I seemed able to do nothing
naturally. As to escaping Mr. Guppy by going to the back of the box,
I could not bear to do that because I knew Richard and Ada relied on
having me next them and that they could never have talked together so
happily if anybody else had been in my place. So there I sat, not
knowing where to look--for wherever I looked, I knew Mr. Guppy's eyes
were following me--and thinking of the dreadful expense to which this
young man was putting himself on my account.

Sometimes I thought of telling Mr. Jarndyce. Then I feared that the
young man would lose his situation and that I might ruin him.
Sometimes I thought of confiding in Richard, but was deterred by the
possibility of his fighting Mr. Guppy and giving him black eyes.
Sometimes I thought, should I frown at him or shake my head. Then I
felt I could not do it. Sometimes I considered whether I should write
to his mother, but that ended in my being convinced that to open a
correspondence would be to make the matter worse. I always came to
the conclusion, finally, that I could do nothing. Mr. Guppy's
perseverance, all this time, not only produced him regularly at any
theatre to which we went, but caused him to appear in the crowd as we
were coming out, and even to get up behind our fly--where I am sure I
saw him, two or three times, struggling among the most dreadful
spikes. After we got home, he haunted a post opposite our house. The
upholsterer's where we lodged being at the corner of two streets, and
my bedroom window being opposite the post, I was afraid to go near
the window when I went upstairs, lest I should see him (as I did one
moonlight night) leaning against the post and evidently catching
cold. If Mr. Guppy had not been, fortunately for me, engaged in the
daytime, I really should have had no rest from him.

While we were making this round of gaieties, in which Mr. Guppy so
extraordinarily participated, the business which had helped to bring
us to town was not neglected. Mr. Kenge's cousin was a Mr. Bayham
Badger, who had a good practice at Chelsea and attended a large
public institution besides. He was quite willing to receive Richard
into his house and to superintend his studies, and as it seemed that
those could be pursued advantageously under Mr. Badger's roof, and
Mr. Badger liked Richard, and as Richard said he liked Mr. Badger
"well enough," an agreement was made, the Lord Chancellor's consent
was obtained, and it was all settled.

On the day when matters were concluded between Richard and Mr.
Badger, we were all under engagement to dine at Mr. Badger's house.
We were to be "merely a family party," Mrs. Badger's note said; and
we found no lady there but Mrs. Badger herself. She was surrounded in
the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a
little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little,
playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little,
reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little.
She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed,
and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her
accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there
was any harm in it.

Mr. Bayham Badger himself was a pink, fresh-faced, crisp-looking
gentleman with a weak voice, white teeth, light hair, and surprised
eyes, some years younger, I should say, than Mrs. Bayham Badger. He
admired her exceedingly, but principally, and to begin with, on the
curious ground (as it seemed to us) of her having had three husbands.
We had barely taken our seats when he said to Mr. Jarndyce quite
triumphantly, "You would hardly suppose that I am Mrs. Bayham
Badger's third!"

"Indeed?" said Mr. Jarndyce.

"Her third!" said Mr. Badger. "Mrs. Bayham Badger has not the
appearance, Miss Summerson, of a lady who has had two former
husbands?"

I said "Not at all!"

"And most remarkable men!" said Mr. Badger in a tone of confidence.
"Captain Swosser of the Royal Navy, who was Mrs. Badger's first
husband, was a very distinguished officer indeed. The name of
Professor Dingo, my immediate predecessor, is one of European
reputation."

Mrs. Badger overheard him and smiled.

"Yes, my dear!" Mr. Badger replied to the smile, "I was observing to
Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson that you had had two former
husbands--both very distinguished men. And they found it, as people
generally do, difficult to believe."

"I was barely twenty," said Mrs. Badger, "when I married Captain
Swosser of the Royal Navy. I was in the Mediterranean with him; I am
quite a sailor. On the twelfth anniversary of my wedding-day, I
became the wife of Professor Dingo."

"Of European reputation," added Mr. Badger in an undertone.

"And when Mr. Badger and myself were married," pursued Mrs. Badger,
"we were married on the same day of the year. I had become attached
to the day."

"So that Mrs. Badger has been married to three husbands--two of them
highly distinguished men," said Mr. Badger, summing up the facts,
"and each time upon the twenty-first of March at eleven in the
forenoon!"

We all expressed our admiration.

"But for Mr. Badger's modesty," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I would take
leave to correct him and say three distinguished men."

"Thank you, Mr. Jarndyce! What I always tell him!" observed Mrs.
Badger.

"And, my dear," said Mr. Badger, "what do I always tell you? That
without any affectation of disparaging such professional distinction
as I may have attained (which our friend Mr. Carstone will have many
opportunities of estimating), I am not so weak--no, really," said Mr.
Badger to us generally, "so unreasonable--as to put my reputation on
the same footing with such first-rate men as Captain Swosser and
Professor Dingo. Perhaps you may be interested, Mr. Jarndyce,"
continued Mr. Bayham Badger, leading the way into the next
drawing-room, "in this portrait of Captain Swosser. It was taken on
his return home from the African station, where he had suffered from
the fever of the country. Mrs. Badger considers it too yellow. But
it's a very fine head. A very fine head!"

We all echoed, "A very fine head!"

"I feel when I look at it," said Mr. Badger, "'That's a man I should
like to have seen!' It strikingly bespeaks the first-class man that
Captain Swosser pre-eminently was. On the other side, Professor
Dingo. I knew him well--attended him in his last illness--a speaking
likeness! Over the piano, Mrs. Bayham Badger when Mrs. Swosser. Over
the sofa, Mrs. Bayham Badger when Mrs. Dingo. Of Mrs. Bayham Badger
IN ESSE, I possess the original and have no copy."

Dinner was now announced, and we went downstairs. It was a very
genteel entertainment, very handsomely served. But the captain and
the professor still ran in Mr. Badger's head, and as Ada and I had
the honour of being under his particular care, we had the full
benefit of them.

"Water, Miss Summerson? Allow me! Not in that tumbler, pray. Bring me
the professor's goblet, James!"

Ada very much admired some artificial flowers under a glass.

"Astonishing how they keep!" said Mr. Badger. "They were presented to
Mrs. Bayham Badger when she was in the Mediterranean."

He invited Mr. Jarndyce to take a glass of claret.

"Not that claret!" he said. "Excuse me! This is an occasion, and ON
an occasion I produce some very special claret I happen to have.
(James, Captain Swosser's wine!) Mr. Jarndyce, this is a wine that
was imported by the captain, we will not say how many years ago. You
will find it very curious. My dear, I shall be happy to take some of
this wine with you. (Captain Swosser's claret to your mistress,
James!) My love, your health!"

After dinner, when we ladies retired, we took Mrs. Badger's first and
second husband with us. Mrs. Badger gave us in the drawing-room a
biographical sketch of the life and services of Captain Swosser
before his marriage and a more minute account of him dating from the
time when he fell in love with her at a ball on board the Crippler,
given to the officers of that ship when she lay in Plymouth Harbour.

"The dear old Crippler!" said Mrs. Badger, shaking her head. "She was
a noble vessel. Trim, ship-shape, all a taunto, as Captain Swosser
used to say. You must excuse me if I occasionally introduce a
nautical expression; I was quite a sailor once. Captain Swosser loved
that craft for my sake. When she was no longer in commission, he
frequently said that if he were rich enough to buy her old hulk, he
would have an inscription let into the timbers of the quarter-deck
where we stood as partners in the dance to mark the spot where he
fell--raked fore and aft (Captain Swosser used to say) by the fire
from my tops. It was his naval way of mentioning my eyes."

Mrs. Badger shook her head, sighed, and looked in the glass.

"It was a great change from Captain Swosser to Professor Dingo," she
resumed with a plaintive smile. "I felt it a good deal at first. Such
an entire revolution in my mode of life! But custom, combined with
science--particularly science--inured me to it. Being the professor's
sole companion in his botanical excursions, I almost forgot that I
had ever been afloat, and became quite learned. It is singular that
the professor was the antipodes of Captain Swosser and that Mr.
Badger is not in the least like either!"

We then passed into a narrative of the deaths of Captain Swosser and
Professor Dingo, both of whom seem to have had very bad complaints.
In the course of it, Mrs. Badger signified to us that she had never
madly loved but once and that the object of that wild affection,
never to be recalled in its fresh enthusiasm, was Captain Swosser.
The professor was yet dying by inches in the most dismal manner, and
Mrs. Badger was giving us imitations of his way of saying, with great
difficulty, "Where is Laura? Let Laura give me my toast and water!"
when the entrance of the gentlemen consigned him to the tomb.

Now, I observed that evening, as I had observed for some days past,
that Ada and Richard were more than ever attached to each other's
society, which was but natural, seeing that they were going to be
separated so soon. I was therefore not very much surprised when we
got home, and Ada and I retired upstairs, to find Ada more silent
than usual, though I was not quite prepared for her coming into my
arms and beginning to speak to me, with her face hidden.

"My darling Esther!" murmured Ada. "I have a great secret to tell
you!"

A mighty secret, my pretty one, no doubt!

"What is it, Ada?"

"Oh, Esther, you would never guess!"

"Shall I try to guess?" said I.

"Oh, no! Don't! Pray don't!" cried Ada, very much startled by the
idea of my doing so.

"Now, I wonder who it can be about?" said I, pretending to consider.

"It's about--" said Ada in a whisper. "It's about--my cousin
Richard!"

"Well, my own!" said I, kissing her bright hair, which was all I
could see. "And what about him?"

"Oh, Esther, you would never guess!"

It was so pretty to have her clinging to me in that way, hiding her
face, and to know that she was not crying in sorrow but in a little
glow of joy, and pride, and hope, that I would not help her just yet.

"He says--I know it's very foolish, we are both so young--but he
says," with a burst of tears, "that he loves me dearly, Esther."

"Does he indeed?" said I. "I never heard of such a thing! Why, my pet
of pets, I could have told you that weeks and weeks ago!"

To see Ada lift up her flushed face in joyful surprise, and hold me
round the neck, and laugh, and cry, and blush, was so pleasant!

"Why, my darling," said I, "what a goose you must take me for! Your
cousin Richard has been loving you as plainly as he could for I don't
know how long!"

"And yet you never said a word about it!" cried Ada, kissing me.

"No, my love," said I. "I waited to be told."

"But now I have told you, you don't think it wrong of me, do you?"
returned Ada. She might have coaxed me to say no if I had been the
hardest-hearted duenna in the world. Not being that yet, I said no
very freely.

"And now," said I, "I know the worst of it."

"Oh, that's not quite the worst of it, Esther dear!" cried Ada,
holding me tighter and laying down her face again upon my breast.

"No?" said I. "Not even that?"

"No, not even that!" said Ada, shaking her head.

"Why, you never mean to say--" I was beginning in joke.

But Ada, looking up and smiling through her tears, cried, "Yes, I do!
You know, you know I do!" And then sobbed out, "With all my heart I
do! With all my whole heart, Esther!"

I told her, laughing, why I had known that, too, just as well as I
had known the other! And we sat before the fire, and I had all the
talking to myself for a little while (though there was not much of
it); and Ada was soon quiet and happy.

"Do you think my cousin John knows, dear Dame Durden?" she asked.

"Unless my cousin John is blind, my pet," said I, "I should think my
cousin John knows pretty well as much as we know."

"We want to speak to him before Richard goes," said Ada timidly, "and
we wanted you to advise us, and to tell him so. Perhaps you wouldn't
mind Richard's coming in, Dame Durden?"

"Oh! Richard is outside, is he, my dear?" said I.

"I am not quite certain," returned Ada with a bashful simplicity that
would have won my heart if she had not won it long before, "but I
think he's waiting at the door."

There he was, of course. They brought a chair on either side of me,
and put me between them, and really seemed to have fallen in love
with me instead of one another, they were so confiding, and so
trustful, and so fond of me. They went on in their own wild way for a
little while--I never stopped them; I enjoyed it too much myself--and
then we gradually fell to considering how young they were, and how
there must be a lapse of several years before this early love could
come to anything, and how it could come to happiness only if it were
real and lasting and inspired them with a steady resolution to do
their duty to each other, with constancy, fortitude, and
perseverance, each always for the other's sake. Well! Richard said
that he would work his fingers to the bone for Ada, and Ada said that
she would work her fingers to the bone for Richard, and they called
me all sorts of endearing and sensible names, and we sat there,
advising and talking, half the night. Finally, before we parted, I
gave them my promise to speak to their cousin John to-morrow.

So, when to-morrow came, I went to my guardian after breakfast, in
the room that was our town-substitute for the growlery, and told him
that I had it in trust to tell him something.

"Well, little woman," said he, shutting up his book, "if you have
accepted the trust, there can be no harm in it."

"I hope not, guardian," said I. "I can guarantee that there is no
secrecy in it. For it only happened yesterday."

"Aye? And what is it, Esther?"

"Guardian," said I, "you remember the happy night when first we came
down to Bleak House? When Ada was singing in the dark room?"

I wished to call to his remembrance the look he had given me then.
Unless I am much mistaken, I saw that I did so.

"Because--" said I with a little hesitation.

"Yes, my dear!" said he. "Don't hurry."

"Because," said I, "Ada and Richard have fallen in love. And have
told each other so."

"Already!" cried my guardian, quite astonished.

"Yes!" said I. "And to tell you the truth, guardian, I rather
expected it."

"The deuce you did!" said he.

He sat considering for a minute or two, with his smile, at once so
handsome and so kind, upon his changing face, and then requested me
to let them know that he wished to see them. When they came, he
encircled Ada with one arm in his fatherly way and addressed himself
to Richard with a cheerful gravity.

"Rick," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I am glad to have won your confidence. I
hope to preserve it. When I contemplated these relations between us
four which have so brightened my life and so invested it with new
interests and pleasures, I certainly did contemplate, afar off, the
possibility of you and your pretty cousin here (don't be shy, Ada,
don't be shy, my dear!) being in a mind to go through life together.
I saw, and do see, many reasons to make it desirable. But that was
afar off, Rick, afar off!"

"We look afar off, sir," returned Richard.

"Well!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "That's rational. Now, hear me, my dears!
I might tell you that you don't know your own minds yet, that a
thousand things may happen to divert you from one another, that it is
well this chain of flowers you have taken up is very easily broken,
or it might become a chain of lead. But I will not do that. Such
wisdom will come soon enough, I dare say, if it is to come at all. I
will assume that a few years hence you will be in your hearts to one
another what you are to-day. All I say before speaking to you
according to that assumption is, if you DO change--if you DO come to
find that you are more commonplace cousins to each other as man and
woman than you were as boy and girl (your manhood will excuse me,
Rick!)--don't be ashamed still to confide in me, for there will be
nothing monstrous or uncommon in it. I am only your friend and
distant kinsman. I have no power over you whatever. But I wish and
hope to retain your confidence if I do nothing to forfeit it."

"I am very sure, sir," returned Richard, "that I speak for Ada too
when I say that you have the strongest power over us both--rooted in
respect, gratitude, and affection--strengthening every day."

"Dear cousin John," said Ada, on his shoulder, "my father's place can
never be empty again. All the love and duty I could ever have
rendered to him is transferred to you."

"Come!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "Now for our assumption. Now we lift our
eyes up and look hopefully at the distance! Rick, the world is before
you; and it is most probable that as you enter it, so it will receive
you. Trust in nothing but in Providence and your own efforts. Never
separate the two, like the heathen waggoner. Constancy in love is a
good thing, but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy
in every kind of effort. If you had the abilities of all the great
men, past and present, you could do nothing well without sincerely
meaning it and setting about it. If you entertain the supposition
that any real success, in great things or in small, ever was or could
be, ever will or can be, wrested from Fortune by fits and starts,
leave that wrong idea here or leave your cousin Ada here."

"I will leave IT here, sir," replied Richard smiling, "if I brought
it here just now (but I hope I did not), and will work my way on to
my cousin Ada in the hopeful distance."

"Right!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "If you are not to make her happy, why
should you pursue her?"

"I wouldn't make her unhappy--no, not even for her love," retorted
Richard proudly.

"Well said!" cried Mr. Jarndyce. "That's well said! She remains here,
in her home with me. Love her, Rick, in your active life, no less
than in her home when you revisit it, and all will go well.
Otherwise, all will go ill. That's the end of my preaching. I think
you and Ada had better take a walk."

Ada tenderly embraced him, and Richard heartily shook hands with him,
and then the cousins went out of the room, looking back again
directly, though, to say that they would wait for me.

The door stood open, and we both followed them with our eyes as they
passed down the adjoining room, on which the sun was shining, and out
at its farther end. Richard with his head bent, and her hand drawn
through his arm, was talking to her very earnestly; and she looked up
in his face, listening, and seemed to see nothing else. So young, so
beautiful, so full of hope and promise, they went on lightly through
the sunlight as their own happy thoughts might then be traversing the
years to come and making them all years of brightness. So they passed
away into the shadow and were gone. It was only a burst of light that
had been so radiant. The room darkened as they went out, and the sun
was clouded over.

"Am I right, Esther?" said my guardian when they were gone.

He was so good and wise to ask ME whether he was right!

"Rick may gain, out of this, the quality he wants. Wants, at the core
of so much that is good!" said Mr. Jarndyce, shaking his head. "I
have said nothing to Ada, Esther. She has her friend and counsellor
always near." And he laid his hand lovingly upon my head.

I could not help showing that I was a little moved, though I did all
I could to conceal it.

"Tut tut!" said he. "But we must take care, too, that our little
woman's life is not all consumed in care for others."

"Care? My dear guardian, I believe I am the happiest creature in the
world!"

"I believe so, too," said he. "But some one may find out what Esther
never will--that the little woman is to be held in remembrance above
all other people!"

I have omitted to mention in its place that there was some one else
at the family dinner party. It was not a lady. It was a gentleman. It
was a gentleman of a dark complexion--a young surgeon. He was rather
reserved, but I thought him very sensible and agreeable. At least,
Ada asked me if I did not, and I said yes.




CHAPTER XIV

Deportment


Richard left us on the very next evening to begin his new career, and
committed Ada to my charge with great love for her and great trust in
me. It touched me then to reflect, and it touches me now, more
nearly, to remember (having what I have to tell) how they both
thought of me, even at that engrossing time. I was a part of all
their plans, for the present and the future. I was to write Richard
once a week, making my faithful report of Ada, who was to write to
him every alternate day. I was to be informed, under his own hand, of
all his labours and successes; I was to observe how resolute and
persevering he would be; I was to be Ada's bridesmaid when they were
married; I was to live with them afterwards; I was to keep all the
keys of their house; I was to be made happy for ever and a day.

"And if the suit SHOULD make us rich, Esther--which it may, you
know!" said Richard to crown all.

A shade crossed Ada's face.

"My dearest Ada," asked Richard, "why not?"

"It had better declare us poor at once," said Ada.

"Oh! I don't know about that," returned Richard, "but at all events,
it won't declare anything at once. It hasn't declared anything in
heaven knows how many years."

"Too true," said Ada.

"Yes, but," urged Richard, answering what her look suggested rather
than her words, "the longer it goes on, dear cousin, the nearer it
must be to a settlement one way or other. Now, is not that
reasonable?"

"You know best, Richard. But I am afraid if we trust to it, it will
make us unhappy."

"But, my Ada, we are not going to trust to it!" cried Richard gaily.
"We know it better than to trust to it. We only say that if it SHOULD
make us rich, we have no constitutional objection to being rich. The
court is, by solemn settlement of law, our grim old guardian, and we
are to suppose that what it gives us (when it gives us anything) is
our right. It is not necessary to quarrel with our right."

"No," said Ada, "but it may be better to forget all about it."

"Well, well," cried Richard, "then we will forget all about it! We
consign the whole thing to oblivion. Dame Durden puts on her
approving face, and it's done!"

"Dame Durden's approving face," said I, looking out of the box in
which I was packing his books, "was not very visible when you called
it by that name; but it does approve, and she thinks you can't do
better."

So, Richard said there was an end of it, and immediately began, on no
other foundation, to build as many castles in the air as would man
the Great Wall of China. He went away in high spirits. Ada and I,
prepared to miss him very much, commenced our quieter career.

On our arrival in London, we had called with Mr. Jarndyce at Mrs.
Jellyby's but had not been so fortunate as to find her at home. It
appeared that she had gone somewhere to a tea-drinking and had taken
Miss Jellyby with her. Besides the tea-drinking, there was to be some
considerable speech-making and letter-writing on the general merits
of the cultivation of coffee, conjointly with natives, at the
Settlement of Borrioboola-Gha. All this involved, no doubt,
sufficient active exercise of pen and ink to make her daughter's part
in the proceedings anything but a holiday.

It being now beyond the time appointed for Mrs. Jellyby's return, we
called again. She was in town, but not at home, having gone to Mile
End directly after breakfast on some Borrioboolan business, arising
out of a society called the East London Branch Aid Ramification. As I
had not seen Peepy on the occasion of our last call (when he was not
to be found anywhere, and when the cook rather thought he must have
strolled away with the dustman's cart), I now inquired for him again.
The oyster shells he had been building a house with were still in the
passage, but he was nowhere discoverable, and the cook supposed that
he had "gone after the sheep." When we repeated, with some surprise,
"The sheep?" she said, Oh, yes, on market days he sometimes followed
them quite out of town and came back in such a state as never was!

I was sitting at the window with my guardian on the following
morning, and Ada was busy writing--of course to Richard--when Miss
Jellyby was announced, and entered, leading the identical Peepy, whom
she had made some endeavours to render presentable by wiping the dirt
into corners of his face and hands and making his hair very wet and
then violently frizzling it with her fingers. Everything the dear
child wore was either too large for him or too small. Among his other
contradictory decorations he had the hat of a bishop and the little
gloves of a baby. His boots were, on a small scale, the boots of a
ploughman, while his legs, so crossed and recrossed with scratches
that they looked like maps, were bare below a very short pair of
plaid drawers finished off with two frills of perfectly different
patterns. The deficient buttons on his plaid frock had evidently been
supplied from one of Mr. Jellyby's coats, they were so extremely
brazen and so much too large. Most extraordinary specimens of
needlework appeared on several parts of his dress, where it had been
hastily mended, and I recognized the same hand on Miss Jellyby's. She
was, however, unaccountably improved in her appearance and looked
very pretty. She was conscious of poor little Peepy being but a
failure after all her trouble, and she showed it as she came in by
the way in which she glanced first at him and then at us.

"Oh, dear me!" said my guardian. "Due east!"

Ada and I gave her a cordial welcome and presented her to Mr.
Jarndyce, to whom she said as she sat down, "Ma's compliments, and
she hopes you'll excuse her, because she's correcting proofs of the
plan. She's going to put out five thousand new circulars, and she
knows you'll be interested to hear that. I have brought one of them
with me. Ma's compliments." With which she presented it sulkily
enough.

"Thank you," said my guardian. "I am much obliged to Mrs. Jellyby.
Oh, dear me! This is a very trying wind!"

We were busy with Peepy, taking off his clerical hat, asking him if
he remembered us, and so on. Peepy retired behind his elbow at first,
but relented at the sight of sponge-cake and allowed me to take him
on my lap, where he sat munching quietly. Mr. Jarndyce then
withdrawing into the temporary growlery, Miss Jellyby opened a
conversation with her usual abruptness.

"We are going on just as bad as ever in Thavies Inn," said she. "I
have no peace of my life. Talk of Africa! I couldn't be worse off if
I was a what's-his-name--man and a brother!"

I tried to say something soothing.

"Oh, it's of no use, Miss Summerson," exclaimed Miss Jellyby, "though
I thank you for the kind intention all the same. I know how I am
used, and I am not to be talked over. YOU wouldn't be talked over if
you were used so. Peepy, go and play at Wild Beasts under the piano!"

"I shan't!" said Peepy.

"Very well, you ungrateful, naughty, hard-hearted boy!" returned Miss
Jellyby with tears in her eyes. "I'll never take pains to dress you
any more."

"Yes, I will go, Caddy!" cried Peepy, who was really a good child and
who was so moved by his sister's vexation that he went at once.

"It seems a little thing to cry about," said poor Miss Jellyby
apologetically, "but I am quite worn out. I was directing the new
circulars till two this morning. I detest the whole thing so that
that alone makes my head ache till I can't see out of my eyes. And
look at that poor unfortunate child! Was there ever such a fright as
he is!"

Peepy, happily unconscious of the defects in his appearance, sat on
the carpet behind one of the legs of the piano, looking calmly out of
his den at us while he ate his cake.

"I have sent him to the other end of the room," observed Miss
Jellyby, drawing her chair nearer ours, "because I don't want him to
hear the conversation. Those little things are so sharp! I was going
to say, we really are going on worse than ever. Pa will be a bankrupt
before long, and then I hope Ma will be satisfied. There'll he nobody
but Ma to thank for it."

We said we hoped Mr. Jellyby's affairs were not in so bad a state as
that.

"It's of no use hoping, though it's very kind of you," returned Miss
Jellyby, shaking her head. "Pa told me only yesterday morning (and
dreadfully unhappy he is) that he couldn't weather the storm. I
should be surprised if he could. When all our tradesmen send into our
house any stuff they like, and the servants do what they like with
it, and I have no time to improve things if I knew how, and Ma don't
care about anything, I should like to make out how Pa is to weather
the storm. I declare if I was Pa, I'd run away."

"My dear!" said I, smiling. "Your papa, no doubt, considers his
family."

"Oh, yes, his family is all very fine, Miss Summerson," replied Miss
Jellyby; "but what comfort is his family to him? His family is
nothing but bills, dirt, waste, noise, tumbles downstairs, confusion,
and wretchedness. His scrambling home, from week's end to week's end,
is like one great washing-day--only nothing's washed!"

Miss Jellyby tapped her foot upon the floor and wiped her eyes.

"I am sure I pity Pa to that degree," she said, "and am so angry with
Ma that I can't find words to express myself! However, I am not going
to bear it, I am determined. I won't be a slave all my life, and I
won't submit to be proposed to by Mr. Quale. A pretty thing, indeed,
to marry a philanthropist. As if I hadn't had enough of THAT!" said
poor Miss Jellyby.

I must confess that I could not help feeling rather angry with Mrs.
Jellyby myself, seeing and hearing this neglected girl and knowing
how much of bitterly satirical truth there was in what she said.

"If it wasn't that we had been intimate when you stopped at our
house," pursued Miss Jellyby, "I should have been ashamed to come
here to-day, for I know what a figure I must seem to you two. But as
it is, I made up my mind to call, especially as I am not likely to
see you again the next time you come to town."

She said this with such great significance that Ada and I glanced at
one another, foreseeing something more.

"No!" said Miss Jellyby, shaking her head. "Not at all likely! I know
I may trust you two. I am sure you won't betray me. I am engaged."

"Without their knowledge at home?" said I.

"Why, good gracious me, Miss Summerson," she returned, justifying
herself in a fretful but not angry manner, "how can it be otherwise?
You know what Ma is--and I needn't make poor Pa more miserable by
telling HIM."

"But would it not be adding to his unhappiness to marry without his
knowledge or consent, my dear?" said I.

"No," said Miss Jellyby, softening. "I hope not. I should try to make
him happy and comfortable when he came to see me, and Peepy and the
others should take it in turns to come and stay with me, and they
should have some care taken of them then."

There was a good deal of affection in poor Caddy. She softened more
and more while saying this and cried so much over the unwonted little
home-picture she had raised in her mind that Peepy, in his cave under
the piano, was touched, and turned himself over on his back with loud
lamentations. It was not until I had brought him to kiss his sister,
and had restored him to his place on my lap, and had shown him that
Caddy was laughing (she laughed expressly for the purpose), that we
could recall his peace of mind; even then it was for some time
conditional on his taking us in turns by the chin and smoothing our
faces all over with his hand. At last, as his spirits were not equal
to the piano, we put him on a chair to look out of window; and Miss
Jellyby, holding him by one leg, resumed her confidence.

"It began in your coming to our house," she said.

We naturally asked how.

"I felt I was so awkward," she replied, "that I made up my mind to be
improved in that respect at all events and to learn to dance. I told
Ma I was ashamed of myself, and I must be taught to dance. Ma looked
at me in that provoking way of hers as if I wasn't in sight, but I
was quite determined to be taught to dance, and so I went to Mr.
Turveydrop's Academy in Newman Street."

"And was it there, my dear--" I began.

"Yes, it was there," said Caddy, "and I am engaged to Mr. Turveydrop.
There are two Mr. Turveydrops, father and son. My Mr. Turveydrop is
the son, of course. I only wish I had been better brought up and was
likely to make him a better wife, for I am very fond of him."

"I am sorry to hear this," said I, "I must confess."

"I don't know why you should be sorry," she retorted a little
anxiously, "but I am engaged to Mr. Turveydrop, whether or no, and he
is very fond of me. It's a secret as yet, even on his side, because
old Mr. Turveydrop has a share in the connexion and it might break
his heart or give him some other shock if he was told of it abruptly.
Old Mr. Turveydrop is a very gentlemanly man indeed--very
gentlemanly."

"Does his wife know of it?" asked Ada.

"Old Mr. Turveydrop's wife, Miss Clare?" returned Miss Jellyby,
opening her eyes. "There's no such person. He is a widower."

We were here interrupted by Peepy, whose leg had undergone so much on
account of his sister's unconsciously jerking it like a bell-rope
whenever she was emphatic that the afflicted child now bemoaned his
sufferings with a very low-spirited noise. As he appealed to me for
compassion, and as I was only a listener, I undertook to hold him.
Miss Jellyby proceeded, after begging Peepy's pardon with a kiss and
assuring him that she hadn't meant to do it.

"That's the state of the case," said Caddy. "If I ever blame myself,
I still think it's Ma's fault. We are to be married whenever we can,
and then I shall go to Pa at the office and write to Ma. It won't
much agitate Ma; I am only pen and ink to HER. One great comfort is,"
said Caddy with a sob, "that I shall never hear of Africa after I am
married. Young Mr. Turveydrop hates it for my sake, and if old Mr.
Turveydrop knows there is such a place, it's as much as he does."

"It was he who was very gentlemanly, I think!" said I.

"Very gentlemanly indeed," said Caddy. "He is celebrated almost
everywhere for his deportment."

"Does he teach?" asked Ada.

"No, he don't teach anything in particular," replied Caddy. "But his
deportment is beautiful."

Caddy went on to say with considerable hesitation and reluctance that
there was one thing more she wished us to know, and felt we ought to
know, and which she hoped would not offend us. It was that she had
improved her acquaintance with Miss Flite, the little crazy old lady,
and that she frequently went there early in the morning and met her
lover for a few minutes before breakfast--only for a few minutes. "I
go there at other times," said Caddy, "but Prince does not come then.
Young Mr. Turveydrop's name is Prince; I wish it wasn't, because it
sounds like a dog, but of course he didn't christen himself. Old Mr.
Turveydrop had him christened Prince in remembrance of the Prince
Regent. Old Mr. Turveydrop adored the Prince Regent on account of his
deportment. I hope you won't think the worse of me for having made
these little appointments at Miss Flite's, where I first went with
you, because I like the poor thing for her own sake and I believe she
likes me. If you could see young Mr. Turveydrop, I am sure you would
think well of him--at least, I am sure you couldn't possibly think
any ill of him. I am going there now for my lesson. I couldn't ask
you to go with me, Miss Summerson; but if you would," said Caddy, who
had said all this earnestly and tremblingly, "I should be very
glad--very glad."

It happened that we had arranged with my guardian to go to Miss
Flite's that day. We had told him of our former visit, and our
account had interested him; but something had always happened to
prevent our going there again. As I trusted that I might have
sufficient influence with Miss Jellyby to prevent her taking any very
rash step if I fully accepted the confidence she was so willing to
place in me, poor girl, I proposed that she and I and Peepy should go
to the academy and afterwards meet my guardian and Ada at Miss
Flite's, whose name I now learnt for the first time. This was on
condition that Miss Jellyby and Peepy should come back with us to
dinner. The last article of the agreement being joyfully acceded to
by both, we smartened Peepy up a little with the assistance of a few
pins, some soap and water, and a hair-brush, and went out, bending
our steps towards Newman Street, which was very near.

I found the academy established in a sufficiently dingy house at the
corner of an archway, with busts in all the staircase windows. In the
same house there were also established, as I gathered from the plates
on the door, a drawing-master, a coal-merchant (there was, certainly,
no room for his coals), and a lithographic artist. On the plate
which, in size and situation, took precedence of all the rest, I
read, MR. TURVEYDROP. The door was open, and the hall was blocked up
by a grand piano, a harp, and several other musical instruments in
cases, all in progress of removal, and all looking rakish in the
daylight. Miss Jellyby informed me that the academy had been lent,
last night, for a concert.

We went upstairs--it had been quite a fine house once, when it was
anybody's business to keep it clean and fresh, and nobody's business
to smoke in it all day--and into Mr. Turveydrop's great room, which
was built out into a mews at the back and was lighted by a skylight.
It was a bare, resounding room smelling of stables, with cane forms
along the walls, and the walls ornamented at regular intervals with
painted lyres and little cut-glass branches for candles, which seemed
to be shedding their old-fashioned drops as other branches might shed
autumn leaves. Several young lady pupils, ranging from thirteen or
fourteen years of age to two or three and twenty, were assembled; and
I was looking among them for their instructor when Caddy, pinching my
arm, repeated the ceremony of introduction. "Miss Summerson, Mr.
Prince Turveydrop!"

I curtsied to a little blue-eyed fair man of youthful appearance with
flaxen hair parted in the middle and curling at the ends all round
his head. He had a little fiddle, which we used to call at school a
kit, under his left arm, and its little bow in the same hand. His
little dancing-shoes were particularly diminutive, and he had a
little innocent, feminine manner which not only appealed to me in an
amiable way, but made this singular effect upon me, that I received
the impression that he was like his mother and that his mother had
not been much considered or well used.

"I am very happy to see Miss Jellyby's friend," he said, bowing low
to me. "I began to fear," with timid tenderness, "as it was past the
usual time, that Miss Jellyby was not coming."

"I beg you will have the goodness to attribute that to me, who have
detained her, and to receive my excuses, sir," said I.

"Oh, dear!" said he.

"And pray," I entreated, "do not allow me to be the cause of any more
delay."

With that apology I withdrew to a seat between Peepy (who, being well
used to it, had already climbed into a corner place) and an old lady
of a censorious countenance whose two nieces were in the class and
who was very indignant with Peepy's boots. Prince Turveydrop then
tinkled the strings of his kit with his fingers, and the young ladies
stood up to dance. Just then there appeared from a side-door old Mr.
Turveydrop, in the full lustre of his deportment.

He was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth,
false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded
breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon
to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and
strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear. He had such a
neckcloth on (puffing his very eyes out of their natural shape), and
his chin and even his ears so sunk into it, that it seemed as though
he must inevitably double up if it were cast loose. He had under his
arm a hat of great size and weight, shelving downward from the crown
to the brim, and in his hand a pair of white gloves with which he
flapped it as he stood poised on one leg in a high-shouldered,
round-elbowed state of elegance not to be surpassed. He had a cane,
he had an eye-glass, he had a snuff-box, he had rings, he had
wristbands, he had everything but any touch of nature; he was not
like youth, he was not like age, he was not like anything in the
world but a model of deportment.

"Father! A visitor. Miss Jellyby's friend, Miss Summerson."

"Distinguished," said Mr. Turveydrop, "by Miss Summerson's presence."
As he bowed to me in that tight state, I almost believe I saw creases
come into the whites of his eyes.

"My father," said the son, aside, to me with quite an affecting
belief in him, "is a celebrated character. My father is greatly
admired."

"Go on, Prince! Go on!" said Mr. Turveydrop, standing with his back
to the fire and waving his gloves condescendingly. "Go on, my son!"

At this command, or by this gracious permission, the lesson went on.
Prince Turveydrop sometimes played the kit, dancing; sometimes played
the piano, standing; sometimes hummed the tune with what little
breath he could spare, while he set a pupil right; always
conscientiously moved with the least proficient through every step
and every part of the figure; and never rested for an instant. His
distinguished father did nothing whatever but stand before the fire,
a model of deportment.

"And he never does anything else," said the old lady of the
censorious countenance. "Yet would you believe that it's HIS name on
the door-plate?"

"His son's name is the same, you know," said I.

"He wouldn't let his son have any name if he could take it from him,"
returned the old lady. "Look at the son's dress!" It certainly was
plain--threadbare--almost shabby. "Yet the father must be garnished
and tricked out," said the old lady, "because of his deportment. I'd
deport him! Transport him would be better!"

I felt curious to know more concerning this person. I asked, "Does he
give lessons in deportment now?"

"Now!" returned the old lady shortly. "Never did."

After a moment's consideration, I suggested that perhaps fencing had
been his accomplishment.

"I don't believe he can fence at all, ma'am," said the old lady.

I looked surprised and inquisitive. The old lady, becoming more and
more incensed against the master of deportment as she dwelt upon the
subject, gave me some particulars of his career, with strong
assurances that they were mildly stated.

He had married a meek little dancing-mistress, with a tolerable
connexion (having never in his life before done anything but deport
himself), and had worked her to death, or had, at the best, suffered
her to work herself to death, to maintain him in those expenses which
were indispensable to his position. At once to exhibit his deportment
to the best models and to keep the best models constantly before
himself, he had found it necessary to frequent all public places of
fashionable and lounging resort, to be seen at Brighton and elsewhere
at fashionable times, and to lead an idle life in the very best
clothes. To enable him to do this, the affectionate little
dancing-mistress had toiled and laboured and would have toiled and
laboured to that hour if her strength had lasted so long. For the
mainspring of the story was that in spite of the man's absorbing
selfishness, his wife (overpowered by his deportment) had, to the
last, believed in him and had, on her death-bed, in the most moving
terms, confided him to their son as one who had an inextinguishable
claim upon him and whom he could never regard with too much pride and
deference. The son, inheriting his mother's belief, and having the
deportment always before him, had lived and grown in the same faith,
and now, at thirty years of age, worked for his father twelve hours a
day and looked up to him with veneration on the old imaginary
pinnacle.

"The airs the fellow gives himself!" said my informant, shaking her
head at old Mr. Turveydrop with speechless indignation as he drew on
his tight gloves, of course unconscious of the homage she was
rendering. "He fully believes he is one of the aristocracy! And he is
so condescending to the son he so egregiously deludes that you might
suppose him the most virtuous of parents. Oh!" said the old lady,
apostrophizing him with infinite vehemence. "I could bite you!"

I could not help being amused, though I heard the old lady out with
feelings of real concern. It was difficult to doubt her with the
father and son before me. What I might have thought of them without
the old lady's account, or what I might have thought of the old
lady's account without them, I cannot say. There was a fitness of
things in the whole that carried conviction with it.

My eyes were yet wandering, from young Mr. Turveydrop working so
hard, to old Mr. Turveydrop deporting himself so beautifully, when
the latter came ambling up to me and entered into conversation.

He asked me, first of all, whether I conferred a charm and a
distinction on London by residing in it? I did not think it necessary
to reply that I was perfectly aware I should not do that, in any
case, but merely told him where I did reside.

"A lady so graceful and accomplished," he said, kissing his
right glove and afterwards extending it towards the pupils,
"will look leniently on the deficiencies here. We do our best to
polish--polish--polish!"

He sat down beside me, taking some pains to sit on the form, I
thought, in imitation of the print of his illustrious model on the
sofa. And really he did look very like it.

"To polish--polish--polish!" he repeated, taking a pinch of snuff and
gently fluttering his fingers. "But we are not, if I may say so to
one formed to be graceful both by Nature and Art--" with the
high-shouldered bow, which it seemed impossible for him to make
without lifting up his eyebrows and shutting his eyes "--we are not
what we used to be in point of deportment."

"Are we not, sir?" said I.

"We have degenerated," he returned, shaking his head, which he could
do to a very limited extent in his cravat. "A levelling age is not
favourable to deportment. It develops vulgarity. Perhaps I speak with
some little partiality. It may not be for me to say that I have been
called, for some years now, Gentleman Turveydrop, or that his Royal
Highness the Prince Regent did me the honour to inquire, on my
removing my hat as he drove out of the Pavilion at Brighton (that
fine building), 'Who is he? Who the devil is he? Why don't I know
him? Why hasn't he thirty thousand a year?' But these are little
matters of anecdote--the general property, ma'am--still repeated
occasionally among the upper classes."

"Indeed?" said I.

He replied with the high-shouldered bow. "Where what is left among us
of deportment," he added, "still lingers. England--alas, my
country!--has degenerated very much, and is degenerating every day.
She has not many gentlemen left. We are few. I see nothing to succeed
us but a race of weavers."

"One might hope that the race of gentlemen would be perpetuated
here," said I.

"You are very good." He smiled with a high-shouldered bow again. "You
flatter me. But, no--no! I have never been able to imbue my poor boy
with that part of his art. Heaven forbid that I should disparage my
dear child, but he has--no deportment."

"He appears to be an excellent master," I observed.

"Understand me, my dear madam, he IS an excellent master. All that
can be acquired, he has acquired. All that can be imparted, he can
impart. But there ARE things--" He took another pinch of snuff and
made the bow again, as if to add, "This kind of thing, for instance."

I glanced towards the centre of the room, where Miss Jellyby's lover,
now engaged with single pupils, was undergoing greater drudgery than
ever.

"My amiable child," murmured Mr. Turveydrop, adjusting his cravat.

"Your son is indefatigable," said I.

"It is my reward," said Mr. Turveydrop, "to hear you say so. In some
respects, he treads in the footsteps of his sainted mother. She was a
devoted creature. But wooman, lovely wooman," said Mr. Turveydrop
with very disagreeable gallantry, "what a sex you are!"

I rose and joined Miss Jellyby, who was by this time putting on her
bonnet. The time allotted to a lesson having fully elapsed, there was
a general putting on of bonnets. When Miss Jellyby and the
unfortunate Prince found an opportunity to become betrothed I don't
know, but they certainly found none on this occasion to exchange a
dozen words.

"My dear," said Mr. Turveydrop benignly to his son, "do you know the
hour?"

"No, father." The son had no watch. The father had a handsome gold
one, which he pulled out with an air that was an example to mankind.

"My son," said he, "it's two o'clock. Recollect your school at
Kensington at three."

"That's time enough for me, father," said Prince. "I can take a
morsel of dinner standing and be off."

"My dear boy," returned his father, "you must be very quick. You will
find the cold mutton on the table."

"Thank you, father. Are YOU off now, father?"

"Yes, my dear. I suppose," said Mr. Turveydrop, shutting his eyes and
lifting up his shoulders with modest consciousness, "that I must show
myself, as usual, about town."

"You had better dine out comfortably somewhere," said his son.

"My dear child, I intend to. I shall take my little meal, I think, at
the French house, in the Opera Colonnade."

"That's right. Good-bye, father!" said Prince, shaking hands.

"Good-bye, my son. Bless you!"

Mr. Turveydrop said this in quite a pious manner, and it seemed to do
his son good, who, in parting from him, was so pleased with him, so
dutiful to him, and so proud of him that I almost felt as if it were
an unkindness to the younger man not to be able to believe implicitly
in the elder. The few moments that were occupied by Prince in taking
leave of us (and particularly of one of us, as I saw, being in the
secret), enhanced my favourable impression of his almost childish
character. I felt a liking for him and a compassion for him as he put
his little kit in his pocket--and with it his desire to stay a little
while with Caddy--and went away good-humouredly to his cold mutton
and his school at Kensington, that made me scarcely less irate with
his father than the censorious old lady.

The father opened the room door for us and bowed us out in a manner,
I must acknowledge, worthy of his shining original. In the same style
he presently passed us on the other side of the street, on his way to
the aristocratic part of the town, where he was going to show himself
among the few other gentlemen left. For some moments, I was so lost
in reconsidering what I had heard and seen in Newman Street that I
was quite unable to talk to Caddy or even to fix my attention on what
she said to me, especially when I began to inquire in my mind whether
there were, or ever had been, any other gentlemen, not in the dancing
profession, who lived and founded a reputation entirely on their
deportment. This became so bewildering and suggested the possibility
of so many Mr. Turveydrops that I said, "Esther, you must make up
your mind to abandon this subject altogether and attend to Caddy." I
accordingly did so, and we chatted all the rest of the way to
Lincoln's Inn.

Caddy told me that her lover's education had been so neglected that
it was not always easy to read his notes. She said if he were not so
anxious about his spelling and took less pains to make it clear, he
would do better; but he put so many unnecessary letters into short
words that they sometimes quite lost their English appearance. "He
does it with the best intention," observed Caddy, "but it hasn't the
effect he means, poor fellow!" Caddy then went on to reason, how
could he be expected to be a scholar when he had passed his whole
life in the dancing-school and had done nothing but teach and fag,
fag and teach, morning, noon, and night! And what did it matter? She
could write letters enough for both, as she knew to her cost, and it
was far better for him to be amiable than learned. "Besides, it's not
as if I was an accomplished girl who had any right to give herself
airs," said Caddy. "I know little enough, I am sure, thanks to Ma!

"There's another thing I want to tell you, now we are alone,"
continued Caddy, "which I should not have liked to mention unless you
had seen Prince, Miss Summerson. You know what a house ours is. It's
of no use my trying to learn anything that it would be useful for
Prince's wife to know in OUR house. We live in such a state of muddle
that it's impossible, and I have only been more disheartened whenever
I have tried. So I get a little practice with--who do you think? Poor
Miss Flite! Early in the morning I help her to tidy her room and
clean her birds, and I make her cup of coffee for her (of course she
taught me), and I have learnt to make it so well that Prince says
it's the very best coffee he ever tasted, and would quite delight old
Mr. Turveydrop, who is very particular indeed about his coffee. I can
make little puddings too; and I know how to buy neck of mutton, and
tea, and sugar, and butter, and a good many housekeeping things. I am
not clever at my needle, yet," said Caddy, glancing at the repairs on
Peepy's frock, "but perhaps I shall improve, and since I have been
engaged to Prince and have been doing all this, I have felt
better-tempered, I hope, and more forgiving to Ma. It rather put me
out at first this morning to see you and Miss Clare looking so neat
and pretty and to feel ashamed of Peepy and myself too, but on the
whole I hope I am better-tempered than I was and more forgiving to
Ma."

The poor girl, trying so hard, said it from her heart, and touched
mine. "Caddy, my love," I replied, "I begin to have a great affection
for you, and I hope we shall become friends."

"Oh, do you?" cried Caddy. "How happy that would make me!"

"My dear Caddy," said I, "let us be friends from this time, and let
us often have a chat about these matters and try to find the right
way through them." Caddy was overjoyed. I said everything I could in
my old-fashioned way to comfort and encourage her, and I would not
have objected to old Mr. Turveydrop that day for any smaller
consideration than a settlement on his daughter-in-law.

By this time we were come to Mr. Krook's, whose private door stood
open. There was a bill, pasted on the door-post, announcing a room to
let on the second floor. It reminded Caddy to tell me as we proceeded
upstairs that there had been a sudden death there and an inquest and
that our little friend had been ill of the fright. The door and
window of the vacant room being open, we looked in. It was the room
with the dark door to which Miss Flite had secretly directed my
attention when I was last in the house. A sad and desolate place it
was, a gloomy, sorrowful place that gave me a strange sensation of
mournfulness and even dread. "You look pale," said Caddy when we came
out, "and cold!" I felt as if the room had chilled me.

We had walked slowly while we were talking, and my guardian and Ada
were here before us. We found them in Miss Flite's garret. They were
looking at the birds, while a medical gentleman who was so good as to
attend Miss Flite with much solicitude and compassion spoke with her
cheerfully by the fire.

"I have finished my professional visit," he said, coming forward.
"Miss Flite is much better and may appear in court (as her mind is
set upon it) to-morrow. She has been greatly missed there, I
understand."

Miss Flite received the compliment with complacency and dropped a
general curtsy to us.

"Honoured, indeed," said she, "by another visit from the wards in
Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy to receive Jarndyce of Bleak House beneath my
humble roof!" with a special curtsy. "Fitz-Jarndyce, my dear"--she
had bestowed that name on Caddy, it appeared, and always called her
by it--"a double welcome!"

"Has she been very ill?" asked Mr. Jarndyce of the gentleman whom we
had found in attendance on her. She answered for herself directly,
though he had put the question in a whisper.

"Oh, decidedly unwell! Oh, very unwell indeed," she said
confidentially. "Not pain, you know--trouble. Not bodily so much as
nervous, nervous! The truth is," in a subdued voice and trembling,
"we have had death here. There was poison in the house. I am very
susceptible to such horrid things. It frightened me. Only Mr.
Woodcourt knows how much. My physician, Mr. Woodcourt!" with
great stateliness. "The wards in Jarndyce--Jarndyce of Bleak
House--Fitz-Jarndyce!"

"Miss Flite," said Mr. Woodcourt in a grave kind of voice, as if he
were appealing to her while speaking to us, and laying his hand
gently on her arm, "Miss Flite describes her illness with her usual
accuracy. She was alarmed by an occurrence in the house which might
have alarmed a stronger person, and was made ill by the distress and
agitation. She brought me here in the first hurry of the discovery,
though too late for me to be of any use to the unfortunate man. I
have compensated myself for that disappointment by coming here since
and being of some small use to her."

"The kindest physician in the college," whispered Miss Flite to me.
"I expect a judgment. On the day of judgment. And shall then confer
estates."

"She will be as well in a day or two," said Mr. Woodcourt, looking at
her with an observant smile, "as she ever will be. In other words,
quite well of course. Have you heard of her good fortune?"

"Most extraordinary!" said Miss Flite, smiling brightly. "You never
heard of such a thing, my dear! Every Saturday, Conversation Kenge or
Guppy (clerk to Conversation K.) places in my hand a paper of
shillings. Shillings. I assure you! Always the same number in the
paper. Always one for every day in the week. Now you know, really! So
well-timed, is it not? Ye-es! From whence do these papers come, you
say? That is the great question. Naturally. Shall I tell you what I
think? I think," said Miss Flite, drawing herself back with a very
shrewd look and shaking her right forefinger in a most significant
manner, "that the Lord Chancellor, aware of the length of time during
which the Great Seal has been open (for it has been open a long
time!), forwards them. Until the judgment I expect is given. Now
that's very creditable, you know. To confess in that way that he IS a
little slow for human life. So delicate! Attending court the other
day--I attend it regularly, with my documents--I taxed him with it,
and he almost confessed. That is, I smiled at him from my bench, and
HE smiled at me from his bench. But it's great good fortune, is it
not? And Fitz-Jarndyce lays the money out for me to great advantage.
Oh, I assure you to the greatest advantage!"

I congratulated her (as she addressed herself to me) upon this
fortunate addition to her income and wished her a long continuance of
it. I did not speculate upon the source from which it came or wonder
whose humanity was so considerate. My guardian stood before me,
contemplating the birds, and I had no need to look beyond him.

"And what do you call these little fellows, ma'am?" said he in his
pleasant voice. "Have they any names?"

"I can answer for Miss Flite that they have," said I, "for she
promised to tell us what they were. Ada remembers?"

Ada remembered very well.

"Did I?" said Miss Flite. "Who's that at my door? What are you
listening at my door for, Krook?"

The old man of the house, pushing it open before him, appeared there
with his fur cap in his hand and his cat at his heels.

"I warn't listening, Miss Flite," he said, "I was going to give a rap
with my knuckles, only you're so quick!"

"Make your cat go down. Drive her away!" the old lady angrily
exclaimed.

"Bah, bah! There ain't no danger, gentlefolks," said Mr. Krook,
looking slowly and sharply from one to another until he had looked at
all of us; "she'd never offer at the birds when I was here unless I
told her to it."

"You will excuse my landlord," said the old lady with a dignified
air. "M, quite M! What do you want, Krook, when I have company?"

"Hi!" said the old man. "You know I am the Chancellor."

"Well?" returned Miss Flite. "What of that?"

"For the Chancellor," said the old man with a chuckle, "not to be
acquainted with a Jarndyce is queer, ain't it, Miss Flite? Mightn't I
take the liberty? Your servant, sir. I know Jarndyce and Jarndyce
a'most as well as you do, sir. I knowed old Squire Tom, sir. I never
to my knowledge see you afore though, not even in court. Yet, I go
there a mortal sight of times in the course of the year, taking one
day with another."

"I never go there," said Mr. Jarndyce (which he never did on any
consideration). "I would sooner go--somewhere else."

"Would you though?" returned Krook, grinning. "You're bearing hard
upon my noble and learned brother in your meaning, sir, though
perhaps it is but nat'ral in a Jarndyce. The burnt child, sir! What,
you're looking at my lodger's birds, Mr. Jarndyce?" The old man had
come by little and little into the room until he now touched my
guardian with his elbow and looked close up into his face with his
spectacled eyes. "It's one of her strange ways that she'll never tell
the names of these birds if she can help it, though she named 'em
all." This was in a whisper. "Shall I run 'em over, Flite?" he asked
aloud, winking at us and pointing at her as she turned away,
affecting to sweep the grate.

"If you like," she answered hurriedly.

The old man, looking up at the cages after another look at us, went
through the list.

"Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin,
Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags,
Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach. That's
the whole collection," said the old man, "all cooped up together, by
my noble and learned brother."

"This is a bitter wind!" muttered my guardian.

"When my noble and learned brother gives his judgment, they're to be
let go free," said Krook, winking at us again. "And then," he added,
whispering and grinning, "if that ever was to happen--which it
won't--the birds that have never been caged would kill 'em."

"If ever the wind was in the east," said my guardian, pretending to
look out of the window for a weathercock, "I think it's there
to-day!"

We found it very difficult to get away from the house. It was not
Miss Flite who detained us; she was as reasonable a little creature
in consulting the convenience of others as there possibly could be.
It was Mr. Krook. He seemed unable to detach himself from Mr.
Jarndyce. If he had been linked to him, he could hardly have attended
him more closely. He proposed to show us his Court of Chancery and
all the strange medley it contained; during the whole of our
inspection (prolonged by himself) he kept close to Mr. Jarndyce and
sometimes detained him under one pretence or other until we had
passed on, as if he were tormented by an inclination to enter upon
some secret subject which he could not make up his mind to approach.
I cannot imagine a countenance and manner more singularly expressive
of caution and indecision, and a perpetual impulse to do something he
could not resolve to venture on, than Mr. Krook's was that day. His
watchfulness of my guardian was incessant. He rarely removed his eyes
from his face. If he went on beside him, he observed him with the
slyness of an old white fox. If he went before, he looked back. When
we stood still, he got opposite to him, and drawing his hand across
and across his open mouth with a curious expression of a sense of
power, and turning up his eyes, and lowering his grey eyebrows until
they appeared to be shut, seemed to scan every lineament of his face.

At last, having been (always attended by the cat) all over the house
and having seen the whole stock of miscellaneous lumber, which was
certainly curious, we came into the back part of the shop. Here on
the head of an empty barrel stood on end were an ink-bottle, some old
stumps of pens, and some dirty playbills; and against the wall were
pasted several large printed alphabets in several plain hands.

"What are you doing here?" asked my guardian.

"Trying to learn myself to read and write," said Krook.

"And how do you get on?"

"Slow. Bad," returned the old man impatiently. "It's hard at my time
of life."

"It would be easier to be taught by some one," said my guardian.

"Aye, but they might teach me wrong!" returned the old man with a
wonderfully suspicious flash of his eye. "I don't know what I may
have lost by not being learned afore. I wouldn't like to lose
anything by being learned wrong now."

"Wrong?" said my guardian with his good-humoured smile. "Who do you
suppose would teach you wrong?"

"I don't know, Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House!" replied the old man,
turning up his spectacles on his forehead and rubbing his hands. "I
don't suppose as anybody would, but I'd rather trust my own self than
another!"

These answers and his manner were strange enough to cause my guardian
to inquire of Mr. Woodcourt, as we all walked across Lincoln's Inn
together, whether Mr. Krook were really, as his lodger represented
him, deranged. The young surgeon replied, no, he had seen no reason
to think so. He was exceedingly distrustful, as ignorance usually
was, and he was always more or less under the influence of raw gin,
of which he drank great quantities and of which he and his back-shop,
as we might have observed, smelt strongly; but he did not think him
mad as yet.

On our way home, I so conciliated Peepy's affections by buying him a
windmill and two flour-sacks that he would suffer nobody else to take
off his hat and gloves and would sit nowhere at dinner but at my
side. Caddy sat upon the other side of me, next to Ada, to whom we
imparted the whole history of the engagement as soon as we got back.
We made much of Caddy, and Peepy too; and Caddy brightened
exceedingly; and my guardian was as merry as we were; and we were all
very happy indeed until Caddy went home at night in a hackney-coach,
with Peepy fast asleep, but holding tight to the windmill.

I have forgotten to mention--at least I have not mentioned--that Mr.
Woodcourt was the same dark young surgeon whom we had met at Mr.
Badger's. Or that Mr. Jarndyce invited him to dinner that day. Or
that he came. Or that when they were all gone and I said to Ada,
"Now, my darling, let us have a little talk about Richard!" Ada
laughed and said--

But I don't think it matters what my darling said. She was always
merry.




CHAPTER XV

Bell Yard


While we were in London Mr. Jarndyce was constantly beset by the
crowd of excitable ladies and gentlemen whose proceedings had so much
astonished us. Mr. Quale, who presented himself soon after our
arrival, was in all such excitements. He seemed to project those two
shining knobs of temples of his into everything that went on and to
brush his hair farther and farther back, until the very roots were
almost ready to fly out of his head in inappeasable philanthropy. All
objects were alike to him, but he was always particularly ready for
anything in the way of a testimonial to any one. His great power
seemed to be his power of indiscriminate admiration. He would sit for
any length of time, with the utmost enjoyment, bathing his temples in
the light of any order of luminary. Having first seen him perfectly
swallowed up in admiration of Mrs. Jellyby, I had supposed her to be
the absorbing object of his devotion. I soon discovered my mistake
and found him to be train-bearer and organ-blower to a whole
procession of people.

Mrs. Pardiggle came one day for a subscription to something, and with
her, Mr. Quale. Whatever Mrs. Pardiggle said, Mr. Quale repeated to
us; and just as he had drawn Mrs. Jellyby out, he drew Mrs. Pardiggle
out. Mrs. Pardiggle wrote a letter of introduction to my guardian in
behalf of her eloquent friend Mr. Gusher. With Mr. Gusher appeared
Mr. Quale again. Mr. Gusher, being a flabby gentleman with a moist
surface and eyes so much too small for his moon of a face that they
seemed to have been originally made for somebody else, was not at
first sight prepossessing; yet he was scarcely seated before Mr.
Quale asked Ada and me, not inaudibly, whether he was not a great
creature--which he certainly was, flabbily speaking, though Mr. Quale
meant in intellectual beauty--and whether we were not struck by his
massive configuration of brow. In short, we heard of a great many
missions of various sorts among this set of people, but nothing
respecting them was half so clear to us as that it was Mr. Quale's
mission to be in ecstasies with everybody else's mission and that it
was the most popular mission of all.

Mr. Jarndyce had fallen into this company in the tenderness of his
heart and his earnest desire to do all the good in his power; but
that he felt it to be too often an unsatisfactory company, where
benevolence took spasmodic forms, where charity was assumed as a
regular uniform by loud professors and speculators in cheap
notoriety, vehement in profession, restless and vain in action,
servile in the last degree of meanness to the great, adulatory of one
another, and intolerable to those who were anxious quietly to help
the weak from failing rather than with a great deal of bluster and
self-laudation to raise them up a little way when they were down, he
plainly told us. When a testimonial was originated to Mr. Quale by
Mr. Gusher (who had already got one, originated by Mr. Quale), and
when Mr. Gusher spoke for an hour and a half on the subject to a
meeting, including two charity schools of small boys and girls, who
were specially reminded of the widow's mite, and requested to come
forward with halfpence and be acceptable sacrifices, I think the wind
was in the east for three whole weeks.

I mention this because I am coming to Mr. Skimpole again. It seemed
to me that his off-hand professions of childishness and carelessness
were a great relief to my guardian, by contrast with such things, and
were the more readily believed in since to find one perfectly
undesigning and candid man among many opposites could not fail to
give him pleasure. I should be sorry to imply that Mr. Skimpole
divined this and was politic; I really never understood him well
enough to know. What he was to my guardian, he certainly was to the
rest of the world.

He had not been very well; and thus, though he lived in London, we
had seen nothing of him until now. He appeared one morning in his
usual agreeable way and as full of pleasant spirits as ever.

Well, he said, here he was! He had been bilious, but rich men were
often bilious, and therefore he had been persuading himself that he
was a man of property. So he was, in a certain point of view--in his
expansive intentions. He had been enriching his medical attendant in
the most lavish manner. He had always doubled, and sometimes
quadrupled, his fees. He had said to the doctor, "Now, my dear
doctor, it is quite a delusion on your part to suppose that you
attend me for nothing. I am overwhelming you with money--in my
expansive intentions--if you only knew it!" And really (he said) he
meant it to that degree that he thought it much the same as doing it.
If he had had those bits of metal or thin paper to which mankind
attached so much importance to put in the doctor's hand, he would
have put them in the doctor's hand. Not having them, he substituted
the will for the deed. Very well! If he really meant it--if his will
were genuine and real, which it was--it appeared to him that it was
the same as coin, and cancelled the obligation.

"It may be, partly, because I know nothing of the value of money,"
said Mr. Skimpole, "but I often feel this. It seems so reasonable! My
butcher says to me he wants that little bill. It's a part of the
pleasant unconscious poetry of the man's nature that he always calls
it a 'little' bill--to make the payment appear easy to both of us. I
reply to the butcher, 'My good friend, if you knew it, you are paid.
You haven't had the trouble of coming to ask for the little bill. You
are paid. I mean it.'"

"But, suppose," said my guardian, laughing, "he had meant the meat in
the bill, instead of providing it?"

"My dear Jarndyce," he returned, "you surprise me. You take the
butcher's position. A butcher I once dealt with occupied that very
ground. Says he, 'Sir, why did you eat spring lamb at eighteen pence
a pound?' 'Why did I eat spring lamb at eighteen pence a pound, my
honest friend?' said I, naturally amazed by the question. 'I like
spring lamb!' This was so far convincing. 'Well, sir,' says he, 'I
wish I had meant the lamb as you mean the money!' 'My good fellow,'
said I, 'pray let us reason like intellectual beings. How could that
be? It was impossible. You HAD got the lamb, and I have NOT got the
money. You couldn't really mean the lamb without sending it in,
whereas I can, and do, really mean the money without paying it!' He
had not a word. There was an end of the subject."

"Did he take no legal proceedings?" inquired my guardian.

"Yes, he took legal proceedings," said Mr. Skimpole. "But in that he
was influenced by passion, not by reason. Passion reminds me of
Boythorn. He writes me that you and the ladies have promised him a
short visit at his bachelor-house in Lincolnshire."

"He is a great favourite with my girls," said Mr. Jarndyce, "and I
have promised for them."

"Nature forgot to shade him off, I think," observed Mr. Skimpole to
Ada and me. "A little too boisterous--like the sea. A little too
vehement--like a bull who has made up his mind to consider every
colour scarlet. But I grant a sledge-hammering sort of merit in him!"

I should have been surprised if those two could have thought very
highly of one another, Mr. Boythorn attaching so much importance to
many things and Mr. Skimpole caring so little for anything. Besides
which, I had noticed Mr. Boythorn more than once on the point of
breaking out into some strong opinion when Mr. Skimpole was referred
to. Of course I merely joined Ada in saying that we had been greatly
pleased with him.

"He has invited me," said Mr. Skimpole; "and if a child may trust
himself in such hands--which the present child is encouraged to do,
with the united tenderness of two angels to guard him--I shall go. He
proposes to frank me down and back again. I suppose it will cost
money? Shillings perhaps? Or pounds? Or something of that sort? By
the by, Coavinses. You remember our friend Coavinses, Miss
Summerson?"

He asked me as the subject arose in his mind, in his graceful,
light-hearted manner and without the least embarrassment.

"Oh, yes!" said I.

"Coavinses has been arrested by the Great Bailiff," said Mr.
Skimpole. "He will never do violence to the sunshine any more."

It quite shocked me to hear it, for I had already recalled with
anything but a serious association the image of the man sitting on
the sofa that night wiping his head.

"His successor informed me of it yesterday," said Mr. Skimpole. "His
successor is in my house now--in possession, I think he calls it. He
came yesterday, on my blue-eyed daughter's birthday. I put it to him,
'This is unreasonable and inconvenient. If you had a blue-eyed
daughter you wouldn't like ME to come, uninvited, on HER birthday?'
But he stayed."

Mr. Skimpole laughed at the pleasant absurdity and lightly touched
the piano by which he was seated.

"And he told me," he said, playing little chords where I shall put
full stops, "The Coavinses had left. Three children. No mother. And
that Coavinses' profession. Being unpopular. The rising Coavinses.
Were at a considerable disadvantage."

Mr. Jarndyce got up, rubbing his head, and began to walk about. Mr.
Skimpole played the melody of one of Ada's favourite songs. Ada and I
both looked at Mr. Jarndyce, thinking that we knew what was passing
in his mind.

After walking and stopping, and several times leaving off rubbing his
head, and beginning again, my guardian put his hand upon the keys and
stopped Mr. Skimpole's playing. "I don't like this, Skimpole," he
said thoughtfully.

Mr. Skimpole, who had quite forgotten the subject, looked up
surprised.

"The man was necessary," pursued my guardian, walking backward and
forward in the very short space between the piano and the end of the
room and rubbing his hair up from the back of his head as if a high
east wind had blown it into that form. "If we make such men necessary
by our faults and follies, or by our want of worldly knowledge, or by
our misfortunes, we must not revenge ourselves upon them. There was
no harm in his trade. He maintained his children. One would like to
know more about this."

"Oh! Coavinses?" cried Mr. Skimpole, at length perceiving what he
meant. "Nothing easier. A walk to Coavinses' headquarters, and you
can know what you will."

Mr. Jarndyce nodded to us, who were only waiting for the signal.
"Come! We will walk that way, my dears. Why not that way as soon as
another!" We were quickly ready and went out. Mr. Skimpole went with
us and quite enjoyed the expedition. It was so new and so refreshing,
he said, for him to want Coavinses instead of Coavinses wanting him!

He took us, first, to Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane, where there was
a house with barred windows, which he called Coavinses' Castle. On
our going into the entry and ringing a bell, a very hideous boy came
out of a sort of office and looked at us over a spiked wicket.

"Who did you want?" said the boy, fitting two of the spikes into his
chin.

"There was a follower, or an officer, or something, here," said Mr.
Jarndyce, "who is dead."

"Yes?" said the boy. "Well?"

"I want to know his name, if you please?"

"Name of Neckett," said the boy.

"And his address?"

"Bell Yard," said the boy. "Chandler's shop, left hand side, name of
Blinder."

"Was he--I don't know how to shape the question--" murmured my
guardian, "industrious?"

"Was Neckett?" said the boy. "Yes, wery much so. He was never tired
of watching. He'd set upon a post at a street corner eight or ten
hours at a stretch if he undertook to do it."

"He might have done worse," I heard my guardian soliloquize. "He
might have undertaken to do it and not done it. Thank you. That's all
I want."

We left the boy, with his head on one side and his arms on the gate,
fondling and sucking the spikes, and went back to Lincoln's Inn,
where Mr. Skimpole, who had not cared to remain nearer Coavinses,
awaited us. Then we all went to Bell Yard, a narrow alley at a very
short distance. We soon found the chandler's shop. In it was a
good-natured-looking old woman with a dropsy, or an asthma, or
perhaps both.

"Neckett's children?" said she in reply to my inquiry. "Yes, Surely,
miss. Three pair, if you please. Door right opposite the stairs." And
she handed me the key across the counter.

I glanced at the key and glanced at her, but she took it for granted
that I knew what to do with it. As it could only be intended for the
children's door, I came out without asking any more questions and led
the way up the dark stairs. We went as quietly as we could, but four
of us made some noise on the aged boards, and when we came to the
second story we found we had disturbed a man who was standing there
looking out of his room.

"Is it Gridley that's wanted?" he said, fixing his eyes on me with an
angry stare.

"No, sir," said I; "I am going higher up."

He looked at Ada, and at Mr. Jarndyce, and at Mr. Skimpole, fixing
the same angry stare on each in succession as they passed and
followed me. Mr. Jarndyce gave him good day. "Good day!" he said
abruptly and fiercely. He was a tall, sallow man with a careworn head
on which but little hair remained, a deeply lined face, and prominent
eyes. He had a combative look and a chafing, irritable manner which,
associated with his figure--still large and powerful, though
evidently in its decline--rather alarmed me. He had a pen in his
hand, and in the glimpse I caught of his room in passing, I saw that
it was covered with a litter of papers.

Leaving him standing there, we went up to the top room. I tapped at
the door, and a little shrill voice inside said, "We are locked in.
Mrs. Blinder's got the key!"

I applied the key on hearing this and opened the door. In a poor room
with a sloping ceiling and containing very little furniture was a
mite of a boy, some five or six years old, nursing and hushing a
heavy child of eighteen months. There was no fire, though the weather
was cold; both children were wrapped in some poor shawls and tippets
as a substitute. Their clothing was not so warm, however, but that
their noses looked red and pinched and their small figures shrunken
as the boy walked up and down nursing and hushing the child with its
head on his shoulder.

"Who has locked you up here alone?" we naturally asked.

"Charley," said the boy, standing still to gaze at us.

"Is Charley your brother?"

"No. She's my sister, Charlotte. Father called her Charley."

"Are there any more of you besides Charley?"

"Me," said the boy, "and Emma," patting the limp bonnet of the child
he was nursing. "And Charley."

"Where is Charley now?"

"Out a-washing," said the boy, beginning to walk up and down again
and taking the nankeen bonnet much too near the bedstead by trying to
gaze at us at the same time.

We were looking at one another and at these two children when there
came into the room a very little girl, childish in figure but shrewd
and older-looking in the face--pretty-faced too--wearing a womanly
sort of bonnet much too large for her and drying her bare arms on a
womanly sort of apron. Her fingers were white and wrinkled with
washing, and the soap-suds were yet smoking which she wiped off her
arms. But for this, she might have been a child playing at washing
and imitating a poor working-woman with a quick observation of the
truth.

She had come running from some place in the neighbourhood and had
made all the haste she could. Consequently, though she was very
light, she was out of breath and could not speak at first, as she
stood panting, and wiping her arms, and looking quietly at us.

"Oh, here's Charley!" said the boy.

The child he was nursing stretched forth its arms and cried out to be
taken by Charley. The little girl took it, in a womanly sort of
manner belonging to the apron and the bonnet, and stood looking at us
over the burden that clung to her most affectionately.

"Is it possible," whispered my guardian as we put a chair for the
little creature and got her to sit down with her load, the boy
keeping close to her, holding to her apron, "that this child works
for the rest? Look at this! For God's sake, look at this!"

It was a thing to look at. The three children close together, and two
of them relying solely on the third, and the third so young and yet
with an air of age and steadiness that sat so strangely on the
childish figure.

"Charley, Charley!" said my guardian. "How old are you?"

"Over thirteen, sir," replied the child.

"Oh! What a great age," said my guardian. "What a great age,
Charley!"

I cannot describe the tenderness with which he spoke to her, half
playfully yet all the more compassionately and mournfully.

"And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?" said my
guardian.

"Yes, sir," returned the child, looking up into his face with perfect
confidence, "since father died."

"And how do you live, Charley? Oh! Charley," said my guardian,
turning his face away for a moment, "how do you live?"

"Since father died, sir, I've gone out to work. I'm out washing
to-day."

"God help you, Charley!" said my guardian. "You're not tall enough to
reach the tub!"

"In pattens I am, sir," she said quickly. "I've got a high pair as
belonged to mother."

"And when did mother die? Poor mother!"

"Mother died just after Emma was born," said the child, glancing at
the face upon her bosom. "Then father said I was to be as good a
mother to her as I could. And so I tried. And so I worked at home and
did cleaning and nursing and washing for a long time before I began
to go out. And that's how I know how; don't you see, sir?"

"And do you often go out?"

"As often as I can," said Charley, opening her eyes and smiling,
"because of earning sixpences and shillings!"

"And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?"

"To keep 'em safe, sir, don't you see?" said Charley. "Mrs. Blinder
comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, and
perhaps I can run in sometimes, and they can play you know, and Tom
an't afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom?"

"No-o!" said Tom stoutly.

"When it comes on dark, the lamps are lighted down in the court, and
they show up here quite bright--almost quite bright. Don't they,
Tom?"

"Yes, Charley," said Tom, "almost quite bright."

"Then he's as good as gold," said the little creature--Oh, in such a
motherly, womanly way! "And when Emma's tired, he puts her to bed.
And when he's tired he goes to bed himself. And when I come home and
light the candle and has a bit of supper, he sits up again and has it
with me. Don't you, Tom?"

"Oh, yes, Charley!" said Tom. "That I do!" And either in this glimpse
of the great pleasure of his life or in gratitude and love for
Charley, who was all in all to him, he laid his face among the scanty
folds of her frock and passed from laughing into crying.

It was the first time since our entry that a tear had been shed among
these children. The little orphan girl had spoken of their father and
their mother as if all that sorrow were subdued by the necessity of
taking courage, and by her childish importance in being able to work,
and by her bustling busy way. But now, when Tom cried, although she
sat quite tranquil, looking quietly at us, and did not by any
movement disturb a hair of the head of either of her little charges,
I saw two silent tears fall down her face.

I stood at the window with Ada, pretending to look at the housetops,
and the blackened stack of chimneys, and the poor plants, and the
birds in little cages belonging to the neighbours, when I found that
Mrs. Blinder, from the shop below, had come in (perhaps it had taken
her all this time to get upstairs) and was talking to my guardian.

"It's not much to forgive 'em the rent, sir," she said; "who could
take it from them!"

"Well, well!" said my guardian to us two. "It is enough that the time
will come when this good woman will find that it WAS much, and that
forasmuch as she did it unto the least of these--This child," he
added after a few moments, "could she possibly continue this?"

"Really, sir, I think she might," said Mrs. Blinder, getting her
heavy breath by painful degrees. "She's as handy as it's possible to
be. Bless you, sir, the way she tended them two children after the
mother died was the talk of the yard! And it was a wonder to see her
with him after he was took ill, it really was! 'Mrs. Blinder,' he
said to me the very last he spoke--he was lying there--'Mrs.
Blinder, whatever my calling may have been, I see a angel sitting in
this room last night along with my child, and I trust her to Our
Father!'"

"He had no other calling?" said my guardian.

"No, sir," returned Mrs. Blinder, "he was nothing but a follerers.
When he first came to lodge here, I didn't know what he was, and I
confess that when I found out I gave him notice. It wasn't liked in
the yard. It wasn't approved by the other lodgers. It is NOT a
genteel calling," said Mrs. Blinder, "and most people do object to
it. Mr. Gridley objected to it very strong, and he is a good lodger,
though his temper has been hard tried."

"So you gave him notice?" said my guardian.

"So I gave him notice," said Mrs. Blinder. "But really when the time
came, and I knew no other ill of him, I was in doubts. He was
punctual and diligent; he did what he had to do, sir," said Mrs.
Blinder, unconsciously fixing Mr. Skimpole with her eye, "and it's
something in this world even to do that."

"So you kept him after all?"

"Why, I said that if he could arrange with Mr. Gridley, I could
arrange it with the other lodgers and should not so much mind its
being liked or disliked in the yard. Mr. Gridley gave his consent
gruff--but gave it. He was always gruff with him, but he has been
kind to the children since. A person is never known till a person is
proved."

"Have many people been kind to the children?" asked Mr. Jarndyce.

"Upon the whole, not so bad, sir," said Mrs. Blinder; "but certainly
not so many as would have been if their father's calling had been
different. Mr. Coavins gave a guinea, and the follerers made up a
little purse. Some neighbours in the yard that had always joked and
tapped their shoulders when he went by came forward with a little
subscription, and--in general--not so bad. Similarly with Charlotte.
Some people won't employ her because she was a follerer's child; some
people that do employ her cast it at her; some make a merit of having
her to work for them, with that and all her draw-backs upon her, and
perhaps pay her less and put upon her more. But she's patienter than
others would be, and is clever too, and always willing, up to the
full mark of her strength and over. So I should say, in general, not
so bad, sir, but might be better."

Mrs. Blinder sat down to give herself a more favourable opportunity
of recovering her breath, exhausted anew by so much talking before it
was fully restored. Mr. Jarndyce was turning to speak to us when his
attention was attracted by the abrupt entrance into the room of the
Mr. Gridley who had been mentioned and whom we had seen on our way
up.

"I don't know what you may be doing here, ladies and gentlemen," he
said, as if he resented our presence, "but you'll excuse my coming
in. I don't come in to stare about me. Well, Charley! Well, Tom!
Well, little one! How is it with us all to-day?"

He bent over the group in a caressing way and clearly was regarded as
a friend by the children, though his face retained its stern
character and his manner to us was as rude as it could be. My
guardian noticed it and respected it.

"No one, surely, would come here to stare about him," he said mildly.

"May be so, sir, may be so," returned the other, taking Tom upon his
knee and waving him off impatiently. "I don't want to argue with
ladies and gentlemen. I have had enough of arguing to last one man
his life."

"You have sufficient reason, I dare say," said Mr. Jarndyce, "for
being chafed and irritated--"

"There again!" exclaimed the man, becoming violently angry. "I am of
a quarrelsome temper. I am irascible. I am not polite!"

"Not very, I think."

"Sir," said Gridley, putting down the child and going up to him as if
he meant to strike him, "do you know anything of Courts of Equity?"

"Perhaps I do, to my sorrow."

"To your sorrow?" said the man, pausing in his wrath, "if so, I beg
your pardon. I am not polite, I know. I beg your pardon! Sir," with
renewed violence, "I have been dragged for five and twenty years over
burning iron, and I have lost the habit of treading upon velvet. Go
into the Court of Chancery yonder and ask what is one of the standing
jokes that brighten up their business sometimes, and they will tell
you that the best joke they have is the man from Shropshire. I," he
said, beating one hand on the other passionately, "am the man from
Shropshire."

"I believe I and my family have also had the honour of furnishing
some entertainment in the same grave place," said my guardian
composedly. "You may have heard my name--Jarndyce."

"Mr. Jarndyce," said Gridley with a rough sort of salutation, "you
bear your wrongs more quietly than I can bear mine. More than that, I
tell you--and I tell this gentleman, and these young ladies, if they
are friends of yours--that if I took my wrongs in any other way, I
should be driven mad! It is only by resenting them, and by revenging
them in my mind, and by angrily demanding the justice I never get,
that I am able to keep my wits together. It is only that!" he said,
speaking in a homely, rustic way and with great vehemence. "You may
tell me that I over-excite myself. I answer that it's in my nature to
do it, under wrong, and I must do it. There's nothing between doing
it, and sinking into the smiling state of the poor little mad woman
that haunts the court. If I was once to sit down under it, I should
become imbecile."

The passion and heat in which he was, and the manner in which his
face worked, and the violent gestures with which he accompanied what
he said, were most painful to see.

"Mr. Jarndyce," he said, "consider my case. As true as there is a
heaven above us, this is my case. I am one of two brothers. My father
(a farmer) made a will and left his farm and stock and so forth to my
mother for her life. After my mother's death, all was to come to me
except a legacy of three hundred pounds that I was then to pay my
brother. My mother died. My brother some time afterwards claimed his
legacy. I and some of my relations said that he had had a part of it
already in board and lodging and some other things. Now mind! That
was the question, and nothing else. No one disputed the will; no one
disputed anything but whether part of that three hundred pounds had
been already paid or not. To settle that question, my brother filing
a bill, I was obliged to go into this accursed Chancery; I was forced
there because the law forced me and would let me go nowhere else.
Seventeen people were made defendants to that simple suit! It first
came on after two years. It was then stopped for another two years
while the master (may his head rot off!) inquired whether I was my
father's son, about which there was no dispute at all with any mortal
creature. He then found out that there were not defendants
enough--remember, there were only seventeen as yet!--but that we must
have another who had been left out and must begin all over again. The
costs at that time--before the thing was begun!--were three times the
legacy. My brother would have given up the legacy, and joyful, to
escape more costs. My whole estate, left to me in that will of my
father's, has gone in costs. The suit, still undecided, has fallen
into rack, and ruin, and despair, with everything else--and here I
stand, this day! Now, Mr. Jarndyce, in your suit there are thousands
and thousands involved, where in mine there are hundreds. Is mine
less hard to bear or is it harder to bear, when my whole living was
in it and has been thus shamefully sucked away?"

Mr. Jarndyce said that he condoled with him with all his heart and
that he set up no monopoly himself in being unjustly treated by this
monstrous system.

"There again!" said Mr. Gridley with no diminution of his rage. "The
system! I am told on all hands, it's the system. I mustn't look to
individuals. It's the system. I mustn't go into court and say, 'My
Lord, I beg to know this from you--is this right or wrong? Have you
the face to tell me I have received justice and therefore am
dismissed?' My Lord knows nothing of it. He sits there to administer
the system. I mustn't go to Mr. Tulkinghorn, the solicitor in
Lincoln's Inn Fields, and say to him when he makes me furious by
being so cool and satisfied--as they all do, for I know they gain by
it while I lose, don't I?--I mustn't say to him, 'I will have
something out of some one for my ruin, by fair means or foul!' HE is
not responsible. It's the system. But, if I do no violence to any of
them, here--I may! I don't know what may happen if I am carried
beyond myself at last! I will accuse the individual workers of that
system against me, face to face, before the great eternal bar!"

His passion was fearful. I could not have believed in such rage
without seeing it.

"I have done!" he said, sitting down and wiping his face. "Mr.
Jarndyce, I have done! I am violent, I know. I ought to know it. I
have been in prison for contempt of court. I have been in prison for
threatening the solicitor. I have been in this trouble, and that
trouble, and shall be again. I am the man from Shropshire, and I
sometimes go beyond amusing them, though they have found it amusing,
too, to see me committed into custody and brought up in custody and
all that. It would be better for me, they tell me, if I restrained
myself. I tell them that if I did restrain myself I should become
imbecile. I was a good-enough-tempered man once, I believe. People in
my part of the country say they remember me so, but now I must have
this vent under my sense of injury or nothing could hold my wits
together. It would be far better for you, Mr. Gridley,' the Lord
Chancellor told me last week, 'not to waste your time here, and to
stay, usefully employed, down in Shropshire.' 'My Lord, my Lord, I
know it would,' said I to him, 'and it would have been far better for
me never to have heard the name of your high office, but unhappily
for me, I can't undo the past, and the past drives me here!'
Besides," he added, breaking fiercely out, "I'll shame them. To the
last, I'll show myself in that court to its shame. If I knew when I
was going to die, and could be carried there, and had a voice to
speak with, I would die there, saying, 'You have brought me here and
sent me from here many and many a time. Now send me out feet
foremost!'"

His countenance had, perhaps for years, become so set in its
contentious expression that it did not soften, even now when he was
quiet.

"I came to take these babies down to my room for an hour," he said,
going to them again, "and let them play about. I didn't mean to say
all this, but it don't much signify. You're not afraid of me, Tom,
are you?"

"No!" said Tom. "You ain't angry with ME."

"You are right, my child. You're going back, Charley? Aye? Come then,
little one!" He took the youngest child on his arm, where she was
willing enough to be carried. "I shouldn't wonder if we found a
ginger-bread soldier downstairs. Let's go and look for him!"

He made his former rough salutation, which was not deficient in a
certain respect, to Mr. Jarndyce, and bowing slightly to us, went
downstairs to his room.

Upon that, Mr. Skimpole began to talk, for the first time since our
arrival, in his usual gay strain. He said, Well, it was really very
pleasant to see how things lazily adapted themselves to purposes.
Here was this Mr. Gridley, a man of a robust will and surprising
energy--intellectually speaking, a sort of inharmonious
blacksmith--and he could easily imagine that there Gridley was, years
ago, wandering about in life for something to expend his superfluous
combativeness upon--a sort of Young Love among the thorns--when the
Court of Chancery came in his way and accommodated him with the exact
thing he wanted. There they were, matched, ever afterwards! Otherwise
he might have been a great general, blowing up all sorts of towns, or
he might have been a great politician, dealing in all sorts of
parliamentary rhetoric; but as it was, he and the Court of Chancery
had fallen upon each other in the pleasantest way, and nobody was
much the worse, and Gridley was, so to speak, from that hour provided
for. Then look at Coavinses! How delightfully poor Coavinses (father
of these charming children) illustrated the same principle! He, Mr.
Skimpole, himself, had sometimes repined at the existence of
Coavinses. He had found Coavinses in his way. He could had dispensed
with Coavinses. There had been times when, if he had been a sultan,
and his grand vizier had said one morning, "What does the Commander
of the Faithful require at the hands of his slave?" he might have
even gone so far as to reply, "The head of Coavinses!" But what
turned out to be the case? That, all that time, he had been giving
employment to a most deserving man, that he had been a benefactor to
Coavinses, that he had actually been enabling Coavinses to bring up
these charming children in this agreeable way, developing these
social virtues! Insomuch that his heart had just now swelled and the
tears had come into his eyes when he had looked round the room and
thought, "I was the great patron of Coavinses, and his little
comforts were MY work!"

There was something so captivating in his light way of touching these
fantastic strings, and he was such a mirthful child by the side of
the graver childhood we had seen, that he made my guardian smile even
as he turned towards us from a little private talk with Mrs. Blinder.
We kissed Charley, and took her downstairs with us, and stopped
outside the house to see her run away to her work. I don't know where
she was going, but we saw her run, such a little, little creature in
her womanly bonnet and apron, through a covered way at the bottom of
the court and melt into the city's strife and sound like a dewdrop in
an ocean.




CHAPTER XVI

Tom-all-Alone's


My Lady Dedlock is restless, very restless. The astonished
fashionable intelligence hardly knows where to have her. To-day she
is at Chesney Wold; yesterday she was at her house in town; to-morrow
she may be abroad, for anything the fashionable intelligence can with
confidence predict. Even Sir Leicester's gallantry has some trouble
to keep pace with her. It would have more but that his other faithful
ally, for better and for worse--the gout--darts into the old oak
bed-chamber at Chesney Wold and grips him by both legs.

Sir Leicester receives the gout as a troublesome demon, but still a
demon of the patrician order. All the Dedlocks, in the direct male
line, through a course of time during and beyond which the memory of
man goeth not to the contrary, have had the gout. It can be proved,
sir. Other men's fathers may have died of the rheumatism or may have
taken base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick vulgar, but
the Dedlock family have communicated something exclusive even to the
levelling process of dying by dying of their own family gout. It has
come down through the illustrious line like the plate, or the
pictures, or the place in Lincolnshire. It is among their dignities.
Sir Leicester is perhaps not wholly without an impression, though he
has never resolved it into words, that the angel of death in the
discharge of his necessary duties may observe to the shades of the
aristocracy, "My lords and gentlemen, I have the honour to present to
you another Dedlock certified to have arrived per the family gout."

Hence Sir Leicester yields up his family legs to the family disorder
as if he held his name and fortune on that feudal tenure. He feels
that for a Dedlock to be laid upon his back and spasmodically
twitched and stabbed in his extremities is a liberty taken somewhere,
but he thinks, "We have all yielded to this; it belongs to us; it has
for some hundreds of years been understood that we are not to make
the vaults in the park interesting on more ignoble terms; and I
submit myself to the compromise."

And a goodly show he makes, lying in a flush of crimson and gold in
the midst of the great drawing-room before his favourite picture of
my Lady, with broad strips of sunlight shining in, down the long
perspective, through the long line of windows, and alternating with
soft reliefs of shadow. Outside, the stately oaks, rooted for ages in
the green ground which has never known ploughshare, but was still a
chase when kings rode to battle with sword and shield and rode
a-hunting with bow and arrow, bear witness to his greatness. Inside,
his forefathers, looking on him from the walls, say, "Each of us was
a passing reality here and left this coloured shadow of himself and
melted into remembrance as dreamy as the distant voices of the rooks
now lulling you to rest," and hear their testimony to his greatness
too. And he is very great this day. And woe to Boythorn or other
daring wight who shall presumptuously contest an inch with him!

My Lady is at present represented, near Sir Leicester, by her
portrait. She has flitted away to town, with no intention of
remaining there, and will soon flit hither again, to the confusion of
the fashionable intelligence. The house in town is not prepared for
her reception. It is muffled and dreary. Only one Mercury in powder
gapes disconsolate at the hall-window; and he mentioned last night to
another Mercury of his acquaintance, also accustomed to good society,
that if that sort of thing was to last--which it couldn't, for a man
of his spirits couldn't bear it, and a man of his figure couldn't be
expected to bear it--there would be no resource for him, upon his
honour, but to cut his throat!

What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the
house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the
outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him
when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been
between many people in the innumerable histories of this world who
from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been very
curiously brought together!

Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if any
link there be. He sums up his mental condition when asked a question
by replying that he "don't know nothink." He knows that it's hard to
keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and harder still to
live by doing it. Nobody taught him even that much; he found it out.

Jo lives--that is to say, Jo has not yet died--in a ruinous place
known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone's. It is a
black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people, where the
crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by
some bold vagrants who after establishing their own possession took
to letting them out in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements
contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As on the ruined human wretch
vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd
of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards;
and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips
in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever and sowing more
evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle,
and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to
Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years--though born expressly
to do it.

Twice lately there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the
springing of a mine, in Tom-all-Alone's; and each time a house has
fallen. These accidents have made a paragraph in the newspapers and
have filled a bed or two in the nearest hospital. The gaps remain,
and there are not unpopular lodgings among the rubbish. As several
more houses are nearly ready to go, the next crash in Tom-all-Alone's
may be expected to be a good one.

This desirable property is in Chancery, of course. It would be an
insult to the discernment of any man with half an eye to tell him so.
Whether "Tom" is the popular representative of the original plaintiff
or defendant in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, or whether Tom lived here when
the suit had laid the street waste, all alone, until other settlers
came to join him, or whether the traditional title is a comprehensive
name for a retreat cut off from honest company and put out of the
pale of hope, perhaps nobody knows. Certainly Jo don't know.

"For I don't," says Jo, "I don't know nothink."

It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the
streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the
meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and
at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To
see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen
deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that
language--to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! It must
be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on
Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps
Jo DOES think at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means
anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me? To be
hustled, and jostled, and moved on; and really to feel that it would
appear to be perfectly true that I have no business here, or there,
or anywhere; and yet to be perplexed by the consideration that I AM
here somehow, too, and everybody overlooked me until I became the
creature that I am! It must be a strange state, not merely to be told
that I am scarcely human (as in the case of my offering myself for a
witness), but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life! To see the
horses, dogs, and cattle go by me and to know that in ignorance I
belong to them and not to the superior beings in my shape, whose
delicacy I offend! Jo's ideas of a criminal trial, or a judge, or a
bishop, or a government, or that inestimable jewel to him (if he only
knew it) the Constitution, should be strange! His whole material and
immaterial life is wonderfully strange; his death, the strangest
thing of all.

Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone's, meeting the tardy morning which is
always late in getting down there, and munches his dirty bit of bread
as he comes along. His way lying through many streets, and the houses
not yet being open, he sits down to breakfast on the door-step of the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and gives
it a brush when he has finished as an acknowledgment of the
accommodation. He admires the size of the edifice and wonders what
it's all about. He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual
destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific or what it costs to look
up the precious souls among the coco-nuts and bread-fruit.

He goes to his crossing and begins to lay it out for the day. The
town awakes; the great tee-totum is set up for its daily spin and
whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been
suspended for a few hours, recommences. Jo and the other lower
animals get on in the unintelligible mess as they can. It is
market-day. The blinded oxen, over-goaded, over-driven, never guided,
run into wrong places and are beaten out, and plunge red-eyed and
foaming at stone walls, and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often
sorely hurt themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like!

A band of music comes and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog--a
drover's dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher's shop, and
evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind for
some hours and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting three
or four, can't remember where he left them, looks up and down the
street as half expecting to see them astray, suddenly pricks up his
ears and remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog,
accustomed to low company and public-houses; a terrific dog to sheep,
ready at a whistle to scamper over their backs and tear out mouthfuls
of their wool; but an educated, improved, developed dog who has been
taught his duties and knows how to discharge them. He and Jo listen
to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal
satisfaction; likewise as to awakened association, aspiration, or
regret, melancholy or joyful reference to things beyond the senses,
they are probably upon a par. But, otherwise, how far above the human
listener is the brute!

Turn that dog's descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years
they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark--but not
their bite.

The day changes as it wears itself away and becomes dark and drizzly.
Jo fights it out at his crossing among the mud and wheels, the
horses, whips, and umbrellas, and gets but a scanty sum to pay for
the unsavoury shelter of Tom-all-Alone's. Twilight comes on; gas
begins to start up in the shops; the lamplighter, with his ladder,
runs along the margin of the pavement. A wretched evening is
beginning to close in.

In his chambers Mr. Tulkinghorn sits meditating an application to the
nearest magistrate to-morrow morning for a warrant. Gridley, a
disappointed suitor, has been here to-day and has been alarming. We
are not to be put in bodily fear, and that ill-conditioned fellow
shall be held to bail again. From the ceiling, foreshortened
Allegory, in the person of one impossible Roman upside down, points
with the arm of Samson (out of joint, and an odd one) obtrusively
toward the window. Why should Mr. Tulkinghorn, for such no reason,
look out of window? Is the hand not always pointing there? So he does
not look out of window.

And if he did, what would it be to see a woman going by? There are
women enough in the world, Mr. Tulkinghorn thinks--too many; they are
at the bottom of all that goes wrong in it, though, for the matter of
that, they create business for lawyers. What would it be to see a
woman going by, even though she were going secretly? They are all
secret. Mr. Tulkinghorn knows that very well.

But they are not all like the woman who now leaves him and his house
behind, between whose plain dress and her refined manner there is
something exceedingly inconsistent. She should be an upper servant by
her attire, yet in her air and step, though both are hurried and
assumed--as far as she can assume in the muddy streets, which she
treads with an unaccustomed foot--she is a lady. Her face is veiled,
and still she sufficiently betrays herself to make more than one of
those who pass her look round sharply.

She never turns her head. Lady or servant, she has a purpose in her
and can follow it. She never turns her head until she comes to the
crossing where Jo plies with his broom. He crosses with her and begs.
Still, she does not turn her head until she has landed on the other
side. Then she slightly beckons to him and says, "Come here!"

Jo follows her a pace or two into a quiet court.

"Are you the boy I've read of in the papers?" she asked behind her
veil.

"I don't know," says Jo, staring moodily at the veil, "nothink about
no papers. I don't know nothink about nothink at all."

"Were you examined at an inquest?"

"I don't know nothink about no--where I was took by the beadle, do
you mean?" says Jo. "Was the boy's name at the inkwhich Jo?"

"Yes."

"That's me!" says Jo.

"Come farther up."

"You mean about the man?" says Jo, following. "Him as wos dead?"

"Hush! Speak in a whisper! Yes. Did he look, when he was living, so
very ill and poor?"

"Oh, jist!" says Jo.

"Did he look like--not like YOU?" says the woman with abhorrence.

"Oh, not so bad as me," says Jo. "I'm a reg'lar one I am! You didn't
know him, did you?"

"How dare you ask me if I knew him?"

"No offence, my lady," says Jo with much humility, for even he has
got at the suspicion of her being a lady.

"I am not a lady. I am a servant."

"You are a jolly servant!" says Jo without the least idea of saying
anything offensive, merely as a tribute of admiration.

"Listen and be silent. Don't talk to me, and stand farther from me!
Can you show me all those places that were spoken of in the account I
read? The place he wrote for, the place he died at, the place where
you were taken to, and the place where he was buried? Do you know the
place where he was buried?"

Jo answers with a nod, having also nodded as each other place was
mentioned.

"Go before me and show me all those dreadful places. Stop opposite to
each, and don't speak to me unless I speak to you. Don't look back.
Do what I want, and I will pay you well."

Jo attends closely while the words are being spoken; tells them off
on his broom-handle, finding them rather hard; pauses to consider
their meaning; considers it satisfactory; and nods his ragged head.

"I'm fly," says Jo. "But fen larks, you know. Stow hooking it!"

"What does the horrible creature mean?" exclaims the servant,
recoiling from him.

"Stow cutting away, you know!" says Jo.

"I don't understand you. Go on before! I will give you more money
than you ever had in your life."

Jo screws up his mouth into a whistle, gives his ragged head a rub,
takes his broom under his arm, and leads the way, passing deftly with
his bare feet over the hard stones and through the mud and mire.

Cook's Court. Jo stops. A pause.

"Who lives here?"

"Him wot give him his writing and give me half a bull," says Jo in a
whisper without looking over his shoulder.

"Go on to the next."

Krook's house. Jo stops again. A longer pause.

"Who lives here?"

"HE lived here," Jo answers as before.

After a silence he is asked, "In which room?"

"In the back room up there. You can see the winder from this corner.
Up there! That's where I see him stritched out. This is the
public-ouse where I was took to."

"Go on to the next!"

It is a longer walk to the next, but Jo, relieved of his first
suspicions, sticks to the forms imposed upon him and does not look
round. By many devious ways, reeking with offence of many kinds, they
come to the little tunnel of a court, and to the gas-lamp (lighted
now), and to the iron gate.

"He was put there," says Jo, holding to the bars and looking in.

"Where? Oh, what a scene of horror!"

"There!" says Jo, pointing. "Over yinder. Among them piles of bones,
and close to that there kitchin winder! They put him wery nigh the
top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to git it in. I could unkiver
it for you with my broom if the gate was open. That's why they locks
it, I s'pose," giving it a shake. "It's always locked. Look at the
rat!" cries Jo, excited. "Hi! Look! There he goes! Ho! Into the
ground!"

The servant shrinks into a corner, into a corner of that hideous
archway, with its deadly stains contaminating her dress; and putting
out her two hands and passionately telling him to keep away from her,
for he is loathsome to her, so remains for some moments. Jo stands
staring and is still staring when she recovers herself.

"Is this place of abomination consecrated ground?"

"I don't know nothink of consequential ground," says Jo, still
staring.

"Is it blessed?"

"Which?" says Jo, in the last degree amazed.

"Is it blessed?"

"I'm blest if I know," says Jo, staring more than ever; "but I
shouldn't think it warn't. Blest?" repeats Jo, something troubled in
his mind. "It an't done it much good if it is. Blest? I should think
it was t'othered myself. But I don't know nothink!"

The servant takes as little heed of what he says as she seems to take
of what she has said herself. She draws off her glove to get some
money from her purse. Jo silently notices how white and small her
hand is and what a jolly servant she must be to wear such sparkling
rings.

She drops a piece of money in his hand without touching it, and
shuddering as their hands approach. "Now," she adds, "show me the
spot again!"

Jo thrusts the handle of his broom between the bars of the gate, and
with his utmost power of elaboration, points it out. At length,
looking aside to see if he has made himself intelligible, he finds
that he is alone.

His first proceeding is to hold the piece of money to the gas-light
and to be overpowered at finding that it is yellow--gold. His next is
to give it a one-sided bite at the edge as a test of its quality.
His next, to put it in his mouth for safety and to sweep the
step and passage with great care. His job done, he sets off for
Tom-all-Alone's, stopping in the light of innumerable gas-lamps to
produce the piece of gold and give it another one-sided bite as a
reassurance of its being genuine.

The Mercury in powder is in no want of society to-night, for my Lady
goes to a grand dinner and three or four balls. Sir Leicester is
fidgety down at Chesney Wold, with no better company than the gout;
he complains to Mrs. Rouncewell that the rain makes such a monotonous
pattering on the terrace that he can't read the paper even by the
fireside in his own snug dressing-room.

"Sir Leicester would have done better to try the other side of the
house, my dear," says Mrs. Rouncewell to Rosa. "His dressing-room is
on my Lady's side. And in all these years I never heard the step upon
the Ghost's Walk more distinct than it is to-night!"




CHAPTER XVII

Esther's Narrative


Richard very often came to see us while we remained in London (though
he soon failed in his letter-writing), and with his quick abilities,
his good spirits, his good temper, his gaiety and freshness, was
always delightful. But though I liked him more and more the better I
knew him, I still felt more and more how much it was to be regretted
that he had been educated in no habits of application and
concentration. The system which had addressed him in exactly the same
manner as it had addressed hundreds of other boys, all varying in
character and capacity, had enabled him to dash through his tasks,
always with fair credit and often with distinction, but in a fitful,
dazzling way that had confirmed his reliance on those very qualities
in himself which it had been most desirable to direct and train. They
were good qualities, without which no high place can be meritoriously
won, but like fire and water, though excellent servants, they were
very bad masters. If they had been under Richard's direction, they
would have been his friends; but Richard being under their direction,
they became his enemies.

I write down these opinions not because I believe that this or any
other thing was so because I thought so, but only because I did think
so and I want to be quite candid about all I thought and did. These
were my thoughts about Richard. I thought I often observed besides
how right my guardian was in what he had said, and that the
uncertainties and delays of the Chancery suit had imparted to his
nature something of the careless spirit of a gamester who felt that
he was part of a great gaming system.

Mr. and Mrs. Bayham Badger coming one afternoon when my guardian was
not at home, in the course of conversation I naturally inquired after
Richard.

"Why, Mr. Carstone," said Mrs. Badger, "is very well and is, I assure
you, a great acquisition to our society. Captain Swosser used to say
of me that I was always better than land a-head and a breeze a-starn
to the midshipmen's mess when the purser's junk had become as tough
as the fore-topsel weather earings. It was his naval way of
mentioning generally that I was an acquisition to any society. I may
render the same tribute, I am sure, to Mr. Carstone. But I--you won't
think me premature if I mention it?"

I said no, as Mrs. Badger's insinuating tone seemed to require such
an answer.

"Nor Miss Clare?" said Mrs. Bayham Badger sweetly.

Ada said no, too, and looked uneasy.

"Why, you see, my dears," said Mrs. Badger, "--you'll excuse me
calling you my dears?"

We entreated Mrs. Badger not to mention it.

"Because you really are, if I may take the liberty of saying so,"
pursued Mrs. Badger, "so perfectly charming. You see, my dears, that
although I am still young--or Mr. Bayham Badger pays me the
compliment of saying so--"

"No," Mr. Badger called out like some one contradicting at a public
meeting. "Not at all!"

"Very well," smiled Mrs. Badger, "we will say still young."

"Undoubtedly," said Mr. Badger.

"My dears, though still young, I have had many opportunities of
observing young men. There were many such on board the dear old
Crippler, I assure you. After that, when I was with Captain Swosser
in the Mediterranean, I embraced every opportunity of knowing and
befriending the midshipmen under Captain Swosser's command. YOU never
heard them called the young gentlemen, my dears, and probably would
not understand allusions to their pipe-claying their weekly accounts,
but it is otherwise with me, for blue water has been a second home to
me, and I have been quite a sailor. Again, with Professor Dingo."

"A man of European reputation," murmured Mr. Badger.

"When I lost my dear first and became the wife of my dear second,"
said Mrs. Badger, speaking of her former husbands as if they were
parts of a charade, "I still enjoyed opportunities of observing
youth. The class attendant on Professor Dingo's lectures was a large
one, and it became my pride, as the wife of an eminent scientific man
seeking herself in science the utmost consolation it could impart, to
throw our house open to the students as a kind of Scientific
Exchange. Every Tuesday evening there was lemonade and a mixed
biscuit for all who chose to partake of those refreshments. And there
was science to an unlimited extent."

"Remarkable assemblies those, Miss Summerson," said Mr. Badger
reverentially. "There must have been great intellectual friction
going on there under the auspices of such a man!"

"And now," pursued Mrs. Badger, "now that I am the wife of my dear
third, Mr. Badger, I still pursue those habits of observation which
were formed during the lifetime of Captain Swosser and adapted to new
and unexpected purposes during the lifetime of Professor Dingo. I
therefore have not come to the consideration of Mr. Carstone as a
neophyte. And yet I am very much of the opinion, my dears, that he
has not chosen his profession advisedly."

Ada looked so very anxious now that I asked Mrs. Badger on what she
founded her supposition.

"My dear Miss Summerson," she replied, "on Mr. Carstone's character
and conduct. He is of such a very easy disposition that probably he
would never think it worth-while to mention how he really feels, but
he feels languid about the profession. He has not that positive
interest in it which makes it his vocation. If he has any decided
impression in reference to it, I should say it was that it is a
tiresome pursuit. Now, this is not promising. Young men like Mr.
Allan Woodcourt who take it from a strong interest in all that it can
do will find some reward in it through a great deal of work for a
very little money and through years of considerable endurance and
disappointment. But I am quite convinced that this would never be the
case with Mr. Carstone."

"Does Mr. Badger think so too?" asked Ada timidly.

"Why," said Mr. Badger, "to tell the truth, Miss Clare, this view of
the matter had not occurred to me until Mrs. Badger mentioned it. But
when Mrs. Badger put it in that light, I naturally gave great
consideration to it, knowing that Mrs. Badger's mind, in addition to
its natural advantages, has had the rare advantage of being formed by
two such very distinguished (I will even say illustrious) public men
as Captain Swosser of the Royal Navy and Professor Dingo. The
conclusion at which I have arrived is--in short, is Mrs. Badger's
conclusion."

"It was a maxim of Captain Swosser's," said Mrs. Badger, "speaking in
his figurative naval manner, that when you make pitch hot, you cannot
make it too hot; and that if you only have to swab a plank, you
should swab it as if Davy Jones were after you. It appears to me that
this maxim is applicable to the medical as well as to the nautical
profession.

"To all professions," observed Mr. Badger. "It was admirably said by
Captain Swosser. Beautifully said."

"People objected to Professor Dingo when we were staying in the north
of Devon after our marriage," said Mrs. Badger, "that he disfigured
some of the houses and other buildings by chipping off fragments of
those edifices with his little geological hammer. But the professor
replied that he knew of no building save the Temple of Science. The
principle is the same, I think?"

"Precisely the same," said Mr. Badger. "Finely expressed! The
professor made the same remark, Miss Summerson, in his last illness,
when (his mind wandering) he insisted on keeping his little hammer
under the pillow and chipping at the countenances of the attendants.
The ruling passion!"

Although we could have dispensed with the length at which Mr. and
Mrs. Badger pursued the conversation, we both felt that it was
disinterested in them to express the opinion they had communicated to
us and that there was a great probability of its being sound. We
agreed to say nothing to Mr. Jarndyce until we had spoken to Richard;
and as he was coming next evening, we resolved to have a very serious
talk with him.

So after he had been a little while with Ada, I went in and found my
darling (as I knew she would be) prepared to consider him thoroughly
right in whatever he said.

"And how do you get on, Richard?" said I. I always sat down on the
other side of him. He made quite a sister of me.

"Oh! Well enough!" said Richard.

"He can't say better than that, Esther, can he?" cried my pet
triumphantly.

I tried to look at my pet in the wisest manner, but of course I
couldn't.

"Well enough?" I repeated.

"Yes," said Richard, "well enough. It's rather jog-trotty and
humdrum. But it'll do as well as anything else!"

"Oh! My dear Richard!" I remonstrated.

"What's the matter?" said Richard.

"Do as well as anything else!"

"I don't think there's any harm in that, Dame Durden," said Ada,
looking so confidingly at me across him; "because if it will do as
well as anything else, it will do very well, I hope."

"Oh, yes, I hope so," returned Richard, carelessly tossing his hair
from his forehead. "After all, it may be only a kind of probation
till our suit is--I forgot though. I am not to mention the suit.
Forbidden ground! Oh, yes, it's all right enough. Let us talk about
something else."

Ada would have done so willingly, and with a full persuasion that we
had brought the question to a most satisfactory state. But I thought
it would be useless to stop there, so I began again.

"No, but Richard," said I, "and my dear Ada! Consider how important
it is to you both, and what a point of honour it is towards your
cousin, that you, Richard, should be quite in earnest without any
reservation. I think we had better talk about this, really, Ada. It
will be too late very soon."

"Oh, yes! We must talk about it!" said Ada. "But I think Richard is
right."

What was the use of my trying to look wise when she was so pretty,
and so engaging, and so fond of him!

"Mr. and Mrs. Badger were here yesterday, Richard," said I, "and they
seemed disposed to think that you had no great liking for the
profession."

"Did they though?" said Richard. "Oh! Well, that rather alters the
case, because I had no idea that they thought so, and I should not
have liked to disappoint or inconvenience them. The fact is, I don't
care much about it. But, oh, it don't matter! It'll do as well as
anything else!"

"You hear him, Ada!" said I.

"The fact is," Richard proceeded, half thoughtfully and half
jocosely, "it is not quite in my way. I don't take to it. And I get
too much of Mrs. Bayham Badger's first and second."

"I am sure THAT'S very natural!" cried Ada, quite delighted. "The
very thing we both said yesterday, Esther!"

"Then," pursued Richard, "it's monotonous, and to-day is too like
yesterday, and to-morrow is too like to-day."

"But I am afraid," said I, "this is an objection to all kinds of
application--to life itself, except under some very uncommon
circumstances."

"Do you think so?" returned Richard, still considering. "Perhaps! Ha!
Why, then, you know," he added, suddenly becoming gay again, "we
travel outside a circle to what I said just now. It'll do as well as
anything else. Oh, it's all right enough! Let us talk about something
else."

But even Ada, with her loving face--and if it had seemed innocent and
trusting when I first saw it in that memorable November fog, how much
more did it seem now when I knew her innocent and trusting
heart--even Ada shook her head at this and looked serious. So I
thought it a good opportunity to hint to Richard that if he were
sometimes a little careless of himself, I was very sure he never
meant to be careless of Ada, and that it was a part of his
affectionate consideration for her not to slight the importance of a
step that might influence both their lives. This made him almost
grave.

"My dear Mother Hubbard," he said, "that's the very thing! I have
thought of that several times and have been quite angry with myself
for meaning to be so much in earnest and--somehow--not exactly being
so. I don't know how it is; I seem to want something or other to
stand by. Even you have no idea how fond I am of Ada (my darling
cousin, I love you, so much!), but I don't settle down to constancy
in other things. It's such uphill work, and it takes such a time!"
said Richard with an air of vexation.

"That may be," I suggested, "because you don't like what you have
chosen."

"Poor fellow!" said Ada. "I am sure I don't wonder at it!"

No. It was not of the least use my trying to look wise. I tried
again, but how could I do it, or how could it have any effect if I
could, while Ada rested her clasped hands upon his shoulder and while
he looked at her tender blue eyes, and while they looked at him!

"You see, my precious girl," said Richard, passing her golden curls
through and through his hand, "I was a little hasty perhaps; or I
misunderstood my own inclinations perhaps. They don't seem to lie in
that direction. I couldn't tell till I tried. Now the question is
whether it's worth-while to undo all that has been done. It seems
like making a great disturbance about nothing particular."

"My dear Richard," said I, "how CAN you say about nothing
particular?"

"I don't mean absolutely that," he returned. "I mean that it MAY be
nothing particular because I may never want it."

Both Ada and I urged, in reply, not only that it was decidedly
worth-while to undo what had been done, but that it must be undone. I
then asked Richard whether he had thought of any more congenial
pursuit.

"There, my dear Mrs. Shipton," said Richard, "you touch me home. Yes,
I have. I have been thinking that the law is the boy for me."

"The law!" repeated Ada as if she were afraid of the name.

"If I went into Kenge's office," said Richard, "and if I were placed
under articles to Kenge, I should have my eye on the--hum!--the
forbidden ground--and should be able to study it, and master it, and
to satisfy myself that it was not neglected and was being properly
conducted. I should be able to look after Ada's interests and my own
interests (the same thing!); and I should peg away at Blackstone and
all those fellows with the most tremendous ardour."

I was not by any means so sure of that, and I saw how his hankering
after the vague things yet to come of those long-deferred hopes cast
a shade on Ada's face. But I thought it best to encourage him in any
project of continuous exertion, and only advised him to be quite sure
that his mind was made up now.

"My dear Minerva," said Richard, "I am as steady as you are. I made a
mistake; we are all liable to mistakes; I won't do so any more, and
I'll become such a lawyer as is not often seen. That is, you know,"
said Richard, relapsing into doubt, "if it really is worth-while,
after all, to make such a disturbance about nothing particular!"

This led to our saying again, with a great deal of gravity, all that
we had said already and to our coming to much the same conclusion
afterwards. But we so strongly advised Richard to be frank and open
with Mr. Jarndyce, without a moment's delay, and his disposition was
naturally so opposed to concealment that he sought him out at once
(taking us with him) and made a full avowal. "Rick," said my
guardian, after hearing him attentively, "we can retreat with honour,
and we will. But we must be careful--for our cousin's sake, Rick, for
our cousin's sake--that we make no more such mistakes. Therefore, in
the matter of the law, we will have a good trial before we decide. We
will look before we leap, and take plenty of time about it."

Richard's energy was of such an impatient and fitful kind that he
would have liked nothing better than to have gone to Mr. Kenge's
office in that hour and to have entered into articles with him on the
spot. Submitting, however, with a good grace to the caution that we
had shown to be so necessary, he contented himself with sitting down
among us in his lightest spirits and talking as if his one unvarying
purpose in life from childhood had been that one which now held
possession of him. My guardian was very kind and cordial with him,
but rather grave, enough so to cause Ada, when he had departed and we
were going upstairs to bed, to say, "Cousin John, I hope you don't
think the worse of Richard?"

"No, my love," said he.

"Because it was very natural that Richard should be mistaken in such
a difficult case. It is not uncommon."

"No, no, my love," said he. "Don't look unhappy."

"Oh, I am not unhappy, cousin John!" said Ada, smiling cheerfully,
with her hand upon his shoulder, where she had put it in bidding him
good night. "But I should be a little so if you thought at all the
worse of Richard."

"My dear," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I should think the worse of him only
if you were ever in the least unhappy through his means. I should be
more disposed to quarrel with myself even then, than with poor Rick,
for I brought you together. But, tut, all this is nothing! He has
time before him, and the race to run. I think the worse of him? Not
I, my loving cousin! And not you, I swear!"

"No, indeed, cousin John," said Ada, "I am sure I could not--I am
sure I would not--think any ill of Richard if the whole world did. I
could, and I would, think better of him then than at any other time!"

So quietly and honestly she said it, with her hands upon his
shoulders--both hands now--and looking up into his face, like the
picture of truth!

"I think," said my guardian, thoughtfully regarding her, "I think it
must be somewhere written that the virtues of the mothers shall
occasionally be visited on the children, as well as the sins of the
father. Good night, my rosebud. Good night, little woman. Pleasant
slumbers! Happy dreams!"

This was the first time I ever saw him follow Ada with his eyes with
something of a shadow on their benevolent expression. I well
remembered the look with which he had contemplated her and Richard
when she was singing in the firelight; it was but a very little while
since he had watched them passing down the room in which the sun was
shining, and away into the shade; but his glance was changed, and
even the silent look of confidence in me which now followed it once
more was not quite so hopeful and untroubled as it had originally
been.

Ada praised Richard more to me that night than ever she had praised
him yet. She went to sleep with a little bracelet he had given her
clasped upon her arm. I fancied she was dreaming of him when I kissed
her cheek after she had slept an hour and saw how tranquil and happy
she looked.

For I was so little inclined to sleep myself that night that I sat up
working. It would not be worth mentioning for its own sake, but I was
wakeful and rather low-spirited. I don't know why. At least I don't
think I know why. At least, perhaps I do, but I don't think it
matters.

At any rate, I made up my mind to be so dreadfully industrious that I
would leave myself not a moment's leisure to be low-spirited. For I
naturally said, "Esther! You to be low-spirited. YOU!" And it really
was time to say so, for I--yes, I really did see myself in the glass,
almost crying. "As if you had anything to make you unhappy, instead
of everything to make you happy, you ungrateful heart!" said I.

If I could have made myself go to sleep, I would have done it
directly, but not being able to do that, I took out of my basket some
ornamental work for our house (I mean Bleak House) that I was busy
with at that time and sat down to it with great determination. It was
necessary to count all the stitches in that work, and I resolved to
go on with it until I couldn't keep my eyes open, and then to go to
bed.

I soon found myself very busy. But I had left some silk downstairs in
a work-table drawer in the temporary growlery, and coming to a stop
for want of it, I took my candle and went softly down to get it. To
my great surprise, on going in I found my guardian still there, and
sitting looking at the ashes. He was lost in thought, his book lay
unheeded by his side, his silvered iron-grey hair was scattered
confusedly upon his forehead as though his hand had been wandering
among it while his thoughts were elsewhere, and his face looked worn.
Almost frightened by coming upon him so unexpectedly, I stood still
for a moment and should have retired without speaking had he not, in
again passing his hand abstractedly through his hair, seen me and
started.

"Esther!"

I told him what I had come for.

"At work so late, my dear?"

"I am working late to-night," said I, "because I couldn't sleep and
wished to tire myself. But, dear guardian, you are late too, and look
weary. You have no trouble, I hope, to keep you waking?"

"None, little woman, that YOU would readily understand," said he.

He spoke in a regretful tone so new to me that I inwardly repeated,
as if that would help me to his meaning, "That I could readily
understand!"

"Remain a moment, Esther," said he, "You were in my thoughts."

"I hope I was not the trouble, guardian?"

He slightly waved his hand and fell into his usual manner. The change
was so remarkable, and he appeared to make it by dint of so much
self-command, that I found myself again inwardly repeating, "None
that I could understand!"

"Little woman," said my guardian, "I was thinking--that is, I have
been thinking since I have been sitting here--that you ought to know
of your own history all I know. It is very little. Next to nothing."

"Dear guardian," I replied, "when you spoke to me before on that
subject--"

"But since then," he gravely interposed, anticipating what I meant to
say, "I have reflected that your having anything to ask me, and my
having anything to tell you, are different considerations, Esther. It
is perhaps my duty to impart to you the little I know."

"If you think so, guardian, it is right."

"I think so," he returned very gently, and kindly, and very
distinctly. "My dear, I think so now. If any real disadvantage can
attach to your position in the mind of any man or woman worth a
thought, it is right that you at least of all the world should not
magnify it to yourself by having vague impressions of its nature."

I sat down and said after a little effort to be as calm as I ought to
be, "One of my earliest remembrances, guardian, is of these words:
'Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers. The time
will come, and soon enough, when you will understand this better, and
will feel it too, as no one save a woman can.'" I had covered my face
with my hands in repeating the words, but I took them away now with a
better kind of shame, I hope, and told him that to him I owed the
blessing that I had from my childhood to that hour never, never,
never felt it. He put up his hand as if to stop me. I well knew that
he was never to be thanked, and said no more.

"Nine years, my dear," he said after thinking for a little while,
"have passed since I received a letter from a lady living in
seclusion, written with a stern passion and power that rendered it
unlike all other letters I have ever read. It was written to me (as
it told me in so many words), perhaps because it was the writer's
idiosyncrasy to put that trust in me, perhaps because it was mine to
justify it. It told me of a child, an orphan girl then twelve years
old, in some such cruel words as those which live in your
remembrance. It told me that the writer had bred her in secrecy from
her birth, had blotted out all trace of her existence, and that if
the writer were to die before the child became a woman, she would be
left entirely friendless, nameless, and unknown. It asked me to
consider if I would, in that case, finish what the writer had begun."

I listened in silence and looked attentively at him.

"Your early recollection, my dear, will supply the gloomy medium
through which all this was seen and expressed by the writer, and the
distorted religion which clouded her mind with impressions of the
need there was for the child to expiate an offence of which she was
quite innocent. I felt concerned for the little creature, in her
darkened life, and replied to the letter."

I took his hand and kissed it.

"It laid the injunction on me that I should never propose to see the
writer, who had long been estranged from all intercourse with the
world, but who would see a confidential agent if I would appoint one.
I accredited Mr. Kenge. The lady said, of her own accord and not of
his seeking, that her name was an assumed one. That she was, if there
were any ties of blood in such a case, the child's aunt. That more
than this she would never (and he was well persuaded of the
steadfastness of her resolution) for any human consideration
disclose. My dear, I have told you all."

I held his hand for a little while in mine.

"I saw my ward oftener than she saw me," he added, cheerily making
light of it, "and I always knew she was beloved, useful, and happy.
She repays me twenty-thousandfold, and twenty more to that, every
hour in every day!"

"And oftener still," said I, "she blesses the guardian who is a
father to her!"

At the word father, I saw his former trouble come into his face. He
subdued it as before, and it was gone in an instant; but it had been
there and it had come so swiftly upon my words that I felt as if they
had given him a shock. I again inwardly repeated, wondering, "That I
could readily understand. None that I could readily understand!" No,
it was true. I did not understand it. Not for many and many a day.

"Take a fatherly good night, my dear," said he, kissing me on the
forehead, "and so to rest. These are late hours for working and
thinking. You do that for all of us, all day long, little
housekeeper!"

I neither worked nor thought any more that night. I opened my
grateful heart to heaven in thankfulness for its providence to me and
its care of me, and fell asleep.

We had a visitor next day. Mr. Allan Woodcourt came. He came to take
leave of us; he had settled to do so beforehand. He was going to
China and to India as a surgeon on board ship. He was to be away a
long, long time.

I believe--at least I know--that he was not rich. All his widowed
mother could spare had been spent in qualifying him for his
profession. It was not lucrative to a young practitioner, with very
little influence in London; and although he was, night and day, at
the service of numbers of poor people and did wonders of gentleness
and skill for them, he gained very little by it in money. He was
seven years older than I. Not that I need mention it, for it hardly
seems to belong to anything.

I think--I mean, he told us--that he had been in practice three or
four years and that if he could have hoped to contend through three
or four more, he would not have made the voyage on which he was
bound. But he had no fortune or private means, and so he was going
away. He had been to see us several times altogether. We thought it a
pity he should go away. Because he was distinguished in his art among
those who knew it best, and some of the greatest men belonging to it
had a high opinion of him.

When he came to bid us good-bye, he brought his mother with him for
the first time. She was a pretty old lady, with bright black eyes,
but she seemed proud. She came from Wales and had had, a long time
ago, an eminent person for an ancestor, of the name of Morgan
ap-Kerrig--of some place that sounded like Gimlet--who was the most
illustrious person that ever was known and all of whose relations
were a sort of royal family. He appeared to have passed his life
in always getting up into mountains and fighting somebody; and
a bard whose name sounded like Crumlinwallinwer had sung his
praises in a piece which was called, as nearly as I could catch it,
Mewlinnwillinwodd.

Mrs. Woodcourt, after expatiating to us on the fame of her great
kinsman, said that no doubt wherever her son Allan went he would
remember his pedigree and would on no account form an alliance below
it. She told him that there were many handsome English ladies in
India who went out on speculation, and that there were some to be
picked up with property, but that neither charms nor wealth would
suffice for the descendant from such a line without birth, which must
ever be the first consideration. She talked so much about birth that
for a moment I half fancied, and with pain--But what an idle fancy to
suppose that she could think or care what MINE was!

Mr. Woodcourt seemed a little distressed by her prolixity, but he was
too considerate to let her see it and contrived delicately to bring
the conversation round to making his acknowledgments to my guardian
for his hospitality and for the very happy hours--he called them the
very happy hours--he had passed with us. The recollection of them, he
said, would go with him wherever he went and would be always
treasured. And so we gave him our hands, one after another--at least,
they did--and I did; and so he put his lips to Ada's hand--and to
mine; and so he went away upon his long, long voyage!

I was very busy indeed all day and wrote directions home to the
servants, and wrote notes for my guardian, and dusted his books and
papers, and jingled my housekeeping keys a good deal, one way and
another. I was still busy between the lights, singing and working by
the window, when who should come in but Caddy, whom I had no
expectation of seeing!

"Why, Caddy, my dear," said I, "what beautiful flowers!"

She had such an exquisite little nosegay in her hand.

"Indeed, I think so, Esther," replied Caddy. "They are the loveliest
I ever saw."

"Prince, my dear?" said I in a whisper.

"No," answered Caddy, shaking her head and holding them to me to
smell. "Not Prince."

"Well, to be sure, Caddy!" said I. "You must have two lovers!"

"What? Do they look like that sort of thing?" said Caddy.

"Do they look like that sort of thing?" I repeated, pinching her
cheek.

Caddy only laughed in return, and telling me that she had come for
half an hour, at the expiration of which time Prince would be waiting
for her at the corner, sat chatting with me and Ada in the window,
every now and then handing me the flowers again or trying how they
looked against my hair. At last, when she was going, she took me into
my room and put them in my dress.

"For me?" said I, surprised.

"For you," said Caddy with a kiss. "They were left behind by
somebody."

"Left behind?"

"At poor Miss Flite's," said Caddy. "Somebody who has been very good
to her was hurrying away an hour ago to join a ship and left these
flowers behind. No, no! Don't take them out. Let the pretty little
things lie here," said Caddy, adjusting them with a careful hand,
"because I was present myself, and I shouldn't wonder if somebody
left them on purpose!"

"Do they look like that sort of thing?" said Ada, coming laughingly
behind me and clasping me merrily round the waist. "Oh, yes, indeed
they do, Dame Durden! They look very, very like that sort of thing.
Oh, very like it indeed, my dear!"




CHAPTER XVIII

Lady Dedlock


It was not so easy as it had appeared at first to arrange for
Richard's making a trial of Mr. Kenge's office. Richard himself was
the chief impediment. As soon as he had it in his power to leave Mr.
Badger at any moment, he began to doubt whether he wanted to leave
him at all. He didn't know, he said, really. It wasn't a bad
profession; he couldn't assert that he disliked it; perhaps he liked
it as well as he liked any other--suppose he gave it one more chance!
Upon that, he shut himself up for a few weeks with some books and
some bones and seemed to acquire a considerable fund of information
with great rapidity. His fervour, after lasting about a month, began
to cool, and when it was quite cooled, began to grow warm again. His
vacillations between law and medicine lasted so long that midsummer
arrived before he finally separated from Mr. Badger and entered on an
experimental course of Messrs. Kenge and Carboy. For all his
waywardness, he took great credit to himself as being determined to
be in earnest "this time." And he was so good-natured throughout, and
in such high spirits, and so fond of Ada, that it was very difficult
indeed to be otherwise than pleased with him.

"As to Mr. Jarndyce," who, I may mention, found the wind much given,
during this period, to stick in the east; "As to Mr. Jarndyce,"
Richard would say to me, "he is the finest fellow in the world,
Esther! I must be particularly careful, if it were only for his
satisfaction, to take myself well to task and have a regular wind-up
of this business now."

The idea of his taking himself well to task, with that laughing face
and heedless manner and with a fancy that everything could catch and
nothing could hold, was ludicrously anomalous. However, he told us
between-whiles that he was doing it to such an extent that he
wondered his hair didn't turn grey. His regular wind-up of the
business was (as I have said) that he went to Mr. Kenge's about
midsummer to try how he liked it.

All this time he was, in money affairs, what I have described him in
a former illustration--generous, profuse, wildly careless, but fully
persuaded that he was rather calculating and prudent. I happened to
say to Ada, in his presence, half jestingly, half seriously, about
the time of his going to Mr. Kenge's, that he needed to have
Fortunatus' purse, he made so light of money, which he answered in
this way, "My jewel of a dear cousin, you hear this old woman! Why
does she say that? Because I gave eight pounds odd (or whatever it
was) for a certain neat waistcoat and buttons a few days ago. Now, if
I had stayed at Badger's I should have been obliged to spend twelve
pounds at a blow for some heart-breaking lecture-fees. So I make four
pounds--in a lump--by the transaction!"

It was a question much discussed between him and my guardian what
arrangements should be made for his living in London while he
experimented on the law, for we had long since gone back to Bleak
House, and it was too far off to admit of his coming there oftener
than once a week. My guardian told me that if Richard were to settle
down at Mr. Kenge's he would take some apartments or chambers where
we too could occasionally stay for a few days at a time; "but, little
woman," he added, rubbing his head very significantly, "he hasn't
settled down there yet!" The discussions ended in our hiring for him,
by the month, a neat little furnished lodging in a quiet old house
near Queen Square. He immediately began to spend all the money he had
in buying the oddest little ornaments and luxuries for this lodging;
and so often as Ada and I dissuaded him from making any purchase that
he had in contemplation which was particularly unnecessary and
expensive, he took credit for what it would have cost and made out
that to spend anything less on something else was to save the
difference.

While these affairs were in abeyance, our visit to Mr. Boythorn's was
postponed. At length, Richard having taken possession of his lodging,
there was nothing to prevent our departure. He could have gone with
us at that time of the year very well, but he was in the full novelty
of his new position and was making most energetic attempts to unravel
the mysteries of the fatal suit. Consequently we went without him,
and my darling was delighted to praise him for being so busy.

We made a pleasant journey down into Lincolnshire by the coach and
had an entertaining companion in Mr. Skimpole. His furniture had been
all cleared off, it appeared, by the person who took possession of it
on his blue-eyed daughter's birthday, but he seemed quite relieved to
think that it was gone. Chairs and table, he said, were wearisome
objects; they were monotonous ideas, they had no variety of
expression, they looked you out of countenance, and you looked them
out of countenance. How pleasant, then, to be bound to no particular
chairs and tables, but to sport like a butterfly among all the
furniture on hire, and to flit from rosewood to mahogany, and from
mahogany to walnut, and from this shape to that, as the humour took
one!

"The oddity of the thing is," said Mr. Skimpole with a quickened
sense of the ludicrous, "that my chairs and tables were not paid for,
and yet my landlord walks off with them as composedly as possible.
Now, that seems droll! There is something grotesque in it. The chair
and table merchant never engaged to pay my landlord my rent. Why
should my landlord quarrel with HIM? If I have a pimple on my nose
which is disagreeable to my landlord's peculiar ideas of beauty, my
landlord has no business to scratch my chair and table merchant's
nose, which has no pimple on it. His reasoning seems defective!"

"Well," said my guardian good-humouredly, "it's pretty clear that
whoever became security for those chairs and tables will have to pay
for them."

"Exactly!" returned Mr. Skimpole. "That's the crowning point of
unreason in the business! I said to my landlord, 'My good man, you
are not aware that my excellent friend Jarndyce will have to pay for
those things that you are sweeping off in that indelicate manner.
Have you no consideration for HIS property?' He hadn't the least."

"And refused all proposals," said my guardian.

"Refused all proposals," returned Mr. Skimpole. "I made him business
proposals. I had him into my room. I said, 'You are a man of
business, I believe?' He replied, 'I am,' 'Very well,' said I, 'now
let us be business-like. Here is an inkstand, here are pens and
paper, here are wafers. What do you want? I have occupied your house
for a considerable period, I believe to our mutual satisfaction until
this unpleasant misunderstanding arose; let us be at once friendly
and business-like. What do you want?' In reply to this, he made use
of the figurative expression--which has something Eastern about
it--that he had never seen the colour of my money. 'My amiable
friend,' said I, 'I never have any money. I never know anything about
money.' 'Well, sir,' said he, 'what do you offer if I give you time?'
'My good fellow,' said I, 'I have no idea of time; but you say you
are a man of business, and whatever you can suggest to be done in a
business-like way with pen, and ink, and paper--and wafers--I am
ready to do. Don't pay yourself at another man's expense (which is
foolish), but be business-like!' However, he wouldn't be, and there
was an end of it."

If these were some of the inconveniences of Mr. Skimpole's childhood,
it assuredly possessed its advantages too. On the journey he had a
very good appetite for such refreshment as came in our way (including
a basket of choice hothouse peaches), but never thought of paying for
anything. So when the coachman came round for his fee, he pleasantly
asked him what he considered a very good fee indeed, now--a liberal
one--and on his replying half a crown for a single passenger, said it
was little enough too, all things considered, and left Mr. Jarndyce
to give it him.

It was delightful weather. The green corn waved so beautifully, the
larks sang so joyfully, the hedges were so full of wild flowers, the
trees were so thickly out in leaf, the bean-fields, with a light wind
blowing over them, filled the air with such a delicious fragrance!
Late in the afternoon we came to the market-town where we were to
alight from the coach--a dull little town with a church-spire, and a
marketplace, and a market-cross, and one intensely sunny street, and
a pond with an old horse cooling his legs in it, and a very few men
sleepily lying and standing about in narrow little bits of shade.
After the rustling of the leaves and the waving of the corn all along
the road, it looked as still, as hot, as motionless a little town as
England could produce.

At the inn we found Mr. Boythorn on horseback, waiting with an open
carriage to take us to his house, which was a few miles off. He was
overjoyed to see us and dismounted with great alacrity.

"By heaven!" said he after giving us a courteous greeting. "This a
most infamous coach. It is the most flagrant example of an abominable
public vehicle that ever encumbered the face of the earth. It is
twenty-five minutes after its time this afternoon. The coachman ought
to be put to death!"

"IS he after his time?" said Mr. Skimpole, to whom he happened to
address himself. "You know my infirmity."

"Twenty-five minutes! Twenty-six minutes!" replied Mr. Boythorn,
referring to his watch. "With two ladies in the coach, this scoundrel
has deliberately delayed his arrival six and twenty minutes.
Deliberately! It is impossible that it can be accidental! But his
father--and his uncle--were the most profligate coachmen that ever
sat upon a box."

While he said this in tones of the greatest indignation, he handed us
into the little phaeton with the utmost gentleness and was all smiles
and pleasure.

"I am sorry, ladies," he said, standing bare-headed at the
carriage-door when all was ready, "that I am obliged to conduct you
nearly two miles out of the way. But our direct road lies through Sir
Leicester Dedlock's park, and in that fellow's property I have sworn
never to set foot of mine, or horse's foot of mine, pending the
present relations between us, while I breathe the breath of life!"
And here, catching my guardian's eye, he broke into one of his
tremendous laughs, which seemed to shake even the motionless little
market-town.

"Are the Dedlocks down here, Lawrence?" said my guardian as we drove
along and Mr. Boythorn trotted on the green turf by the roadside.

"Sir Arrogant Numskull is here," replied Mr. Boythorn. "Ha ha ha! Sir
Arrogant is here, and I am glad to say, has been laid by the heels
here. My Lady," in naming whom he always made a courtly gesture as if
particularly to exclude her from any part in the quarrel, "is
expected, I believe, daily. I am not in the least surprised that she
postpones her appearance as long as possible. Whatever can have
induced that transcendent woman to marry that effigy and figure-head
of a baronet is one of the most impenetrable mysteries that ever
baffled human inquiry. Ha ha ha ha!"

"I suppose," said my guardian, laughing, "WE may set foot in the park
while we are here? The prohibition does not extend to us, does it?"

"I can lay no prohibition on my guests," he said, bending his head to
Ada and me with the smiling politeness which sat so gracefully upon
him, "except in the matter of their departure. I am only sorry that I
cannot have the happiness of being their escort about Chesney Wold,
which is a very fine place! But by the light of this summer day,
Jarndyce, if you call upon the owner while you stay with me, you are
likely to have but a cool reception. He carries himself like an
eight-day clock at all times, like one of a race of eight-day clocks
in gorgeous cases that never go and never went--Ha ha ha!--but he
will have some extra stiffness, I can promise you, for the friends of
his friend and neighbour Boythorn!"

"I shall not put him to the proof," said my guardian. "He is as
indifferent to the honour of knowing me, I dare say, as I am to the
honour of knowing him. The air of the grounds and perhaps such a view
of the house as any other sightseer might get are quite enough for
me."

"Well!" said Mr. Boythorn. "I am glad of it on the whole. It's in
better keeping. I am looked upon about here as a second Ajax defying
the lightning. Ha ha ha ha! When I go into our little church on a
Sunday, a considerable part of the inconsiderable congregation expect
to see me drop, scorched and withered, on the pavement under the
Dedlock displeasure. Ha ha ha ha! I have no doubt he is surprised
that I don't. For he is, by heaven, the most self-satisfied, and the
shallowest, and the most coxcombical and utterly brainless ass!"

Our coming to the ridge of a hill we had been ascending enabled our
friend to point out Chesney Wold itself to us and diverted his
attention from its master.

It was a picturesque old house in a fine park richly wooded. Among
the trees and not far from the residence he pointed out the spire of
the little church of which he had spoken. Oh, the solemn woods over
which the light and shadow travelled swiftly, as if heavenly wings
were sweeping on benignant errands through the summer air; the smooth
green slopes, the glittering water, the garden where the flowers were
so symmetrically arranged in clusters of the richest colours, how
beautiful they looked! The house, with gable and chimney, and tower,
and turret, and dark doorway, and broad terrace-walk, twining among
the balustrades of which, and lying heaped upon the vases, there was
one great flush of roses, seemed scarcely real in its light solidity
and in the serene and peaceful hush that rested on all around it. To
Ada and to me, that above all appeared the pervading influence. On
everything, house, garden, terrace, green slopes, water, old oaks,
fern, moss, woods again, and far away across the openings in the
prospect to the distance lying wide before us with a purple bloom
upon it, there seemed to be such undisturbed repose.

When we came into the little village and passed a small inn with the
sign of the Dedlock Arms swinging over the road in front, Mr.
Boythorn interchanged greetings with a young gentleman sitting on a
bench outside the inn-door who had some fishing-tackle lying beside
him.

"That's the housekeeper's grandson, Mr. Rouncewell by name," said,
he, "and he is in love with a pretty girl up at the house. Lady
Dedlock has taken a fancy to the pretty girl and is going to keep her
about her own fair person--an honour which my young friend himself
does not at all appreciate. However, he can't marry just yet, even if
his Rosebud were willing; so he is fain to make the best of it. In
the meanwhile, he comes here pretty often for a day or two at a time
to--fish. Ha ha ha ha!"

"Are he and the pretty girl engaged, Mr. Boythorn?" asked Ada.

"Why, my dear Miss Clare," he returned, "I think they may perhaps
understand each other; but you will see them soon, I dare say, and I
must learn from you on such a point--not you from me."

Ada blushed, and Mr. Boythorn, trotting forward on his comely grey
horse, dismounted at his own door and stood ready with extended arm
and uncovered head to welcome us when we arrived.

He lived in a pretty house, formerly the parsonage house, with a lawn
in front, a bright flower-garden at the side, and a well-stocked
orchard and kitchen-garden in the rear, enclosed with a venerable
wall that had of itself a ripened ruddy look. But, indeed, everything
about the place wore an aspect of maturity and abundance. The old
lime-tree walk was like green cloisters, the very shadows of the
cherry-trees and apple-trees were heavy with fruit, the
gooseberry-bushes were so laden that their branches arched and rested
on the earth, the strawberries and raspberries grew in like
profusion, and the peaches basked by the hundred on the wall. Tumbled
about among the spread nets and the glass frames sparkling and
winking in the sun there were such heaps of drooping pods, and
marrows, and cucumbers, that every foot of ground appeared a
vegetable treasury, while the smell of sweet herbs and all kinds of
wholesome growth (to say nothing of the neighbouring meadows where
the hay was carrying) made the whole air a great nosegay. Such
stillness and composure reigned within the orderly precincts of the
old red wall that even the feathers hung in garlands to scare the
birds hardly stirred; and the wall had such a ripening influence that
where, here and there high up, a disused nail and scrap of list still
clung to it, it was easy to fancy that they had mellowed with the
changing seasons and that they had rusted and decayed according to
the common fate.

The house, though a little disorderly in comparison with the garden,
was a real old house with settles in the chimney of the brick-floored
kitchen and great beams across the ceilings. On one side of it was
the terrible piece of ground in dispute, where Mr. Boythorn
maintained a sentry in a smock-frock day and night, whose duty was
supposed to be, in cases of aggression, immediately to ring a large
bell hung up there for the purpose, to unchain a great bull-dog
established in a kennel as his ally, and generally to deal
destruction on the enemy. Not content with these precautions, Mr.
Boythorn had himself composed and posted there, on painted boards to
which his name was attached in large letters, the following solemn
warnings: "Beware of the bull-dog. He is most ferocious. Lawrence
Boythorn." "The blunderbus is loaded with slugs. Lawrence Boythorn."
"Man-traps and spring-guns are set here at all times of the day and
night. Lawrence Boythorn." "Take notice. That any person or persons
audaciously presuming to trespass on this property will be punished
with the utmost severity of private chastisement and prosecuted with
the utmost rigour of the law. Lawrence Boythorn." These he showed us
from the drawing-room window, while his bird was hopping about his
head, and he laughed, "Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha!" to that extent as
he pointed them out that I really thought he would have hurt himself.

"But this is taking a good deal of trouble," said Mr. Skimpole in his
light way, "when you are not in earnest after all."

"Not in earnest!" returned Mr. Boythorn with unspeakable warmth. "Not
in earnest! If I could have hoped to train him, I would have bought a
lion instead of that dog and would have turned him loose upon the
first intolerable robber who should dare to make an encroachment on
my rights. Let Sir Leicester Dedlock consent to come out and decide
this question by single combat, and I will meet him with any weapon
known to mankind in any age or country. I am that much in earnest.
Not more!"

We arrived at his house on a Saturday. On the Sunday morning we all
set forth to walk to the little church in the park. Entering the
park, almost immediately by the disputed ground, we pursued a
pleasant footpath winding among the verdant turf and the beautiful
trees until it brought us to the church-porch.

The congregation was extremely small and quite a rustic one with the
exception of a large muster of servants from the house, some of whom
were already in their seats, while others were yet dropping in. There
were some stately footmen, and there was a perfect picture of an old
coachman, who looked as if he were the official representative of all
the pomps and vanities that had ever been put into his coach. There
was a very pretty show of young women, and above them, the handsome
old face and fine responsible portly figure of the housekeeper
towered pre-eminent. The pretty girl of whom Mr. Boythorn had told us
was close by her. She was so very pretty that I might have known her
by her beauty even if I had not seen how blushingly conscious she was
of the eyes of the young fisherman, whom I discovered not far off.
One face, and not an agreeable one, though it was handsome, seemed
maliciously watchful of this pretty girl, and indeed of every one and
everything there. It was a Frenchwoman's.

As the bell was yet ringing and the great people were not yet come, I
had leisure to glance over the church, which smelt as earthy as a
grave, and to think what a shady, ancient, solemn little church it
was. The windows, heavily shaded by trees, admitted a subdued light
that made the faces around me pale, and darkened the old brasses in
the pavement and the time and damp-worn monuments, and rendered the
sunshine in the little porch, where a monotonous ringer was working
at the bell, inestimably bright. But a stir in that direction, a
gathering of reverential awe in the rustic faces, and a blandly
ferocious assumption on the part of Mr. Boythorn of being resolutely
unconscious of somebody's existence forewarned me that the great
people were come and that the service was going to begin.

"'Enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord, for in thy
sight--'"

Shall I ever forget the rapid beating at my heart, occasioned by the
look I met as I stood up! Shall I ever forget the manner in which
those handsome proud eyes seemed to spring out of their languor and
to hold mine! It was only a moment before I cast mine down--released
again, if I may say so--on my book; but I knew the beautiful face
quite well in that short space of time.

And, very strangely, there was something quickened within me,
associated with the lonely days at my godmother's; yes, away even to
the days when I had stood on tiptoe to dress myself at my little
glass after dressing my doll. And this, although I had never seen
this lady's face before in all my life--I was quite sure of
it--absolutely certain.

It was easy to know that the ceremonious, gouty, grey-haired
gentleman, the only other occupant of the great pew, was Sir
Leicester Dedlock, and that the lady was Lady Dedlock. But why her
face should be, in a confused way, like a broken glass to me, in
which I saw scraps of old remembrances, and why I should be so
fluttered and troubled (for I was still) by having casually met her
eyes, I could not think.

I felt it to be an unmeaning weakness in me and tried to overcome it
by attending to the words I heard. Then, very strangely, I seemed to
hear them, not in the reader's voice, but in the well-remembered
voice of my godmother. This made me think, did Lady Dedlock's face
accidentally resemble my godmother's? It might be that it did, a
little; but the expression was so different, and the stern decision
which had worn into my godmother's face, like weather into rocks, was
so completely wanting in the face before me that it could not be that
resemblance which had struck me. Neither did I know the loftiness and
haughtiness of Lady Dedlock's face, at all, in any one. And yet I--I,
little Esther Summerson, the child who lived a life apart and on
whose birthday there was no rejoicing--seemed to arise before my own
eyes, evoked out of the past by some power in this fashionable lady,
whom I not only entertained no fancy that I had ever seen, but whom I
perfectly well knew I had never seen until that hour.

It made me tremble so to be thrown into this unaccountable agitation
that I was conscious of being distressed even by the observation of
the French maid, though I knew she had been looking watchfully here,
and there, and everywhere, from the moment of her coming into the
church. By degrees, though very slowly, I at last overcame my strange
emotion. After a long time, I looked towards Lady Dedlock again. It
was while they were preparing to sing, before the sermon. She took no
heed of me, and the beating at my heart was gone. Neither did it
revive for more than a few moments when she once or twice afterwards
glanced at Ada or at me through her glass.

The service being concluded, Sir Leicester gave his arm with much
taste and gallantry to Lady Dedlock--though he was obliged to walk by
the help of a thick stick--and escorted her out of church to the pony
carriage in which they had come. The servants then dispersed, and so
did the congregation, whom Sir Leicester had contemplated all along
(Mr. Skimpole said to Mr. Boythorn's infinite delight) as if he were
a considerable landed proprietor in heaven.

"He believes he is!" said Mr. Boythorn. "He firmly believes it. So
did his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather!"

"Do you know," pursued Mr. Skimpole very unexpectedly to Mr.
Boythorn, "it's agreeable to me to see a man of that sort."

"IS it!" said Mr. Boythorn.

"Say that he wants to patronize me," pursued Mr. Skimpole. "Very
well! I don't object."

"I do," said Mr. Boythorn with great vigour.

"Do you really?" returned Mr. Skimpole in his easy light vein. "But
that's taking trouble, surely. And why should you take trouble? Here
am I, content to receive things childishly as they fall out, and I
never take trouble! I come down here, for instance, and I find a
mighty potentate exacting homage. Very well! I say 'Mighty potentate,
here IS my homage! It's easier to give it than to withhold it. Here
it is. If you have anything of an agreeable nature to show me, I
shall be happy to see it; if you have anything of an agreeable nature
to give me, I shall be happy to accept it.' Mighty potentate replies
in effect, 'This is a sensible fellow. I find him accord with my
digestion and my bilious system. He doesn't impose upon me the
necessity of rolling myself up like a hedgehog with my points
outward. I expand, I open, I turn my silver lining outward like
Milton's cloud, and it's more agreeable to both of us.' That's my
view of such things, speaking as a child!"

"But suppose you went down somewhere else to-morrow," said Mr.
Boythorn, "where there was the opposite of that fellow--or of this
fellow. How then?"

"How then?" said Mr. Skimpole with an appearance of the utmost
simplicity and candour. "Just the same then! I should say, 'My
esteemed Boythorn'--to make you the personification of our imaginary
friend--'my esteemed Boythorn, you object to the mighty potentate?
Very good. So do I. I take it that my business in the social system
is to be agreeable; I take it that everybody's business in the social
system is to be agreeable. It's a system of harmony, in short.
Therefore if you object, I object. Now, excellent Boythorn, let us go
to dinner!'"

"But excellent Boythorn might say," returned our host, swelling and
growing very red, "I'll be--"

"I understand," said Mr. Skimpole. "Very likely he would."

"--if I WILL go to dinner!" cried Mr. Boythorn in a violent burst and
stopping to strike his stick upon the ground. "And he would probably
add, 'Is there such a thing as principle, Mr. Harold Skimpole?'"

"To which Harold Skimpole would reply, you know," he returned in his
gayest manner and with his most ingenuous smile, "'Upon my life I
have not the least idea! I don't know what it is you call by that
name, or where it is, or who possesses it. If you possess it and find
it comfortable, I am quite delighted and congratulate you heartily.
But I know nothing about it, I assure you; for I am a mere child, and
I lay no claim to it, and I don't want it!' So, you see, excellent
Boythorn and I would go to dinner after all!"

This was one of many little dialogues between them which I always
expected to end, and which I dare say would have ended under other
circumstances, in some violent explosion on the part of our host. But
he had so high a sense of his hospitable and responsible position as
our entertainer, and my guardian laughed so sincerely at and with Mr.
Skimpole, as a child who blew bubbles and broke them all day long,
that matters never went beyond this point. Mr. Skimpole, who always
seemed quite unconscious of having been on delicate ground, then
betook himself to beginning some sketch in the park which he never
finished, or to playing fragments of airs on the piano, or to singing
scraps of songs, or to lying down on his back under a tree and
looking at the sky--which he couldn't help thinking, he said, was
what he was meant for; it suited him so exactly.

"Enterprise and effort," he would say to us (on his back), "are
delightful to me. I believe I am truly cosmopolitan. I have the
deepest sympathy with them. I lie in a shady place like this and
think of adventurous spirits going to the North Pole or penetrating
to the heart of the Torrid Zone with admiration. Mercenary creatures
ask, 'What is the use of a man's going to the North Pole? What good
does it do?' I can't say; but, for anything I CAN say, he may go for
the purpose--though he don't know it--of employing my thoughts as I
lie here. Take an extreme case. Take the case of the slaves on
American plantations. I dare say they are worked hard, I dare say
they don't altogether like it. I dare say theirs is an unpleasant
experience on the whole; but they people the landscape for me, they
give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter
objects of their existence. I am very sensible of it, if it be, and I
shouldn't wonder if it were!"

I always wondered on these occasions whether he ever thought of Mrs.
Skimpole and the children, and in what point of view they presented
themselves to his cosmopolitan mind. So far as I could understand,
they rarely presented themselves at all.

The week had gone round to the Saturday following that beating of my
heart in the church; and every day had been so bright and blue that
to ramble in the woods, and to see the light striking down among the
transparent leaves and sparkling in the beautiful interlacings of the
shadows of the trees, while the birds poured out their songs and the
air was drowsy with the hum of insects, had been most delightful. We
had one favourite spot, deep in moss and last year's leaves, where
there were some felled trees from which the bark was all stripped
off. Seated among these, we looked through a green vista supported by
thousands of natural columns, the whitened stems of trees, upon a
distant prospect made so radiant by its contrast with the shade in
which we sat and made so precious by the arched perspective through
which we saw it that it was like a glimpse of the better land. Upon
the Saturday we sat here, Mr. Jarndyce, Ada, and I, until we heard
thunder muttering in the distance and felt the large raindrops rattle
through the leaves.

The weather had been all the week extremely sultry, but the storm
broke so suddenly--upon us, at least, in that sheltered spot--that
before we reached the outskirts of the wood the thunder and lightning
were frequent and the rain came plunging through the leaves as if
every drop were a great leaden bead. As it was not a time for
standing among trees, we ran out of the wood, and up and down the
moss-grown steps which crossed the plantation-fence like two
broad-staved ladders placed back to back, and made for a keeper's
lodge which was close at hand. We had often noticed the dark beauty
of this lodge standing in a deep twilight of trees, and how the ivy
clustered over it, and how there was a steep hollow near, where we
had once seen the keeper's dog dive down into the fern as if it were
water.

The lodge was so dark within, now the sky was overcast, that we only
clearly saw the man who came to the door when we took shelter there
and put two chairs for Ada and me. The lattice-windows were all
thrown open, and we sat just within the doorway watching the storm.
It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove
the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the solemn
thunder and to see the lightning; and while thinking with awe of the
tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed, to
consider how beneficent they are and how upon the smallest flower and
leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage
which seemed to make creation new again.

"Is it not dangerous to sit in so exposed a place?"

"Oh, no, Esther dear!" said Ada quietly.

Ada said it to me, but I had not spoken.

The beating of my heart came back again. I had never heard the voice,
as I had never seen the face, but it affected me in the same strange
way. Again, in a moment, there arose before my mind innumerable
pictures of myself.

Lady Dedlock had taken shelter in the lodge before our arrival there
and had come out of the gloom within. She stood behind my chair with
her hand upon it. I saw her with her hand close to my shoulder when I
turned my head.

"I have frightened you?" she said.

No. It was not fright. Why should I be frightened!

"I believe," said Lady Dedlock to my guardian, "I have the pleasure
of speaking to Mr. Jarndyce."

"Your remembrance does me more honour than I had supposed it would,
Lady Dedlock," he returned.

"I recognized you in church on Sunday. I am sorry that any local
disputes of Sir Leicester's--they are not of his seeking, however, I
believe--should render it a matter of some absurd difficulty to show
you any attention here."

"I am aware of the circumstances," returned my guardian with a smile,
"and am sufficiently obliged."

She had given him her hand in an indifferent way that seemed habitual
to her and spoke in a correspondingly indifferent manner, though in a
very pleasant voice. She was as graceful as she was beautiful,
perfectly self-possessed, and had the air, I thought, of being able
to attract and interest any one if she had thought it worth her
while. The keeper had brought her a chair on which she sat in the
middle of the porch between us.

"Is the young gentleman disposed of whom you wrote to Sir Leicester
about and whose wishes Sir Leicester was sorry not to have it in his
power to advance in any way?" she said over her shoulder to my
guardian.

"I hope so," said he.

She seemed to respect him and even to wish to conciliate him. There
was something very winning in her haughty manner, and it became more
familiar--I was going to say more easy, but that could hardly be--as
she spoke to him over her shoulder.

"I presume this is your other ward, Miss Clare?"

He presented Ada, in form.

"You will lose the disinterested part of your Don Quixote character,"
said Lady Dedlock to Mr. Jarndyce over her shoulder again, "if you
only redress the wrongs of beauty like this. But present me," and she
turned full upon me, "to this young lady too!"

"Miss Summerson really is my ward," said Mr. Jarndyce. "I am
responsible to no Lord Chancellor in her case."

"Has Miss Summerson lost both her parents?" said my Lady.

"Yes."

"She is very fortunate in her guardian."

Lady Dedlock looked at me, and I looked at her and said I was indeed.
All at once she turned from me with a hasty air, almost expressive of
displeasure or dislike, and spoke to him over her shoulder again.

"Ages have passed since we were in the habit of meeting, Mr.
Jarndyce."

"A long time. At least I thought it was a long time, until I saw you
last Sunday," he returned.

"What! Even you are a courtier, or think it necessary to become one
to me!" she said with some disdain. "I have achieved that reputation,
I suppose."

"You have achieved so much, Lady Dedlock," said my guardian, "that
you pay some little penalty, I dare say. But none to me."

"So much!" she repeated, slightly laughing. "Yes!"

With her air of superiority, and power, and fascination, and I know
not what, she seemed to regard Ada and me as little more than
children. So, as she slightly laughed and afterwards sat looking at
the rain, she was as self-possessed and as free to occupy herself
with her own thoughts as if she had been alone.

"I think you knew my sister when we were abroad together better than
you know me?" she said, looking at him again.

"Yes, we happened to meet oftener," he returned.

"We went our several ways," said Lady Dedlock, "and had little in
common even before we agreed to differ. It is to be regretted, I
suppose, but it could not be helped."

Lady Dedlock again sat looking at the rain. The storm soon began to
pass upon its way. The shower greatly abated, the lightning ceased,
the thunder rolled among the distant hills, and the sun began to
glisten on the wet leaves and the falling rain. As we sat there,
silently, we saw a little pony phaeton coming towards us at a merry
pace.

"The messenger is coming back, my Lady," said the keeper, "with the
carriage."

As it drove up, we saw that there were two people inside. There
alighted from it, with some cloaks and wrappers, first the
Frenchwoman whom I had seen in church, and secondly the pretty girl,
the Frenchwoman with a defiant confidence, the pretty girl confused
and hesitating.

"What now?" said Lady Dedlock. "Two!"

"I am your maid, my Lady, at the present," said the Frenchwoman. "The
message was for the attendant."

"I was afraid you might mean me, my Lady," said the pretty girl.

"I did mean you, child," replied her mistress calmly. "Put that shawl
on me."

She slightly stooped her shoulders to receive it, and the pretty girl
lightly dropped it in its place. The Frenchwoman stood unnoticed,
looking on with her lips very tightly set.

"I am sorry," said Lady Dedlock to Mr. Jarndyce, "that we are not
likely to renew our former acquaintance. You will allow me to send
the carriage back for your two wards. It shall be here directly."

But as he would on no account accept this offer, she took a graceful
leave of Ada--none of me--and put her hand upon his proffered arm,
and got into the carriage, which was a little, low, park carriage
with a hood.

"Come in, child," she said to the pretty girl; "I shall want you. Go
on!"

The carriage rolled away, and the Frenchwoman, with the wrappers she
had brought hanging over her arm, remained standing where she had
alighted.

I suppose there is nothing pride can so little bear with as pride
itself, and that she was punished for her imperious manner. Her
retaliation was the most singular I could have imagined. She remained
perfectly still until the carriage had turned into the drive, and
then, without the least discomposure of countenance, slipped off her
shoes, left them on the ground, and walked deliberately in the same
direction through the wettest of the wet grass.

"Is that young woman mad?" said my guardian.

"Oh, no, sir!" said the keeper, who, with his wife, was looking after
her. "Hortense is not one of that sort. She has as good a head-piece
as the best. But she's mortal high and passionate--powerful high and
passionate; and what with having notice to leave, and having others
put above her, she don't take kindly to it."

"But why should she walk shoeless through all that water?" said my
guardian.

"Why, indeed, sir, unless it is to cool her down!" said the man.

"Or unless she fancies it's blood," said the woman. "She'd as soon
walk through that as anything else, I think, when her own's up!"

We passed not far from the house a few minutes afterwards. Peaceful
as it had looked when we first saw it, it looked even more so now,
with a diamond spray glittering all about it, a light wind blowing,
the birds no longer hushed but singing strongly, everything refreshed
by the late rain, and the little carriage shining at the doorway like
a fairy carriage made of silver. Still, very steadfastly and quietly
walking towards it, a peaceful figure too in the landscape, went
Mademoiselle Hortense, shoeless, through the wet grass.




CHAPTER XIX

Moving On


It is the long vacation in the regions of Chancery Lane. The good
ships Law and Equity, those teak-built, copper-bottomed,
iron-fastened, brazen-faced, and not by any means fast-sailing
clippers are laid up in ordinary. The Flying Dutchman, with a crew of
ghostly clients imploring all whom they may encounter to peruse their
papers, has drifted, for the time being, heaven knows where. The
courts are all shut up; the public offices lie in a hot sleep.
Westminster Hall itself is a shady solitude where nightingales might
sing, and a tenderer class of suitors than is usually found there,
walk.

The Temple, Chancery Lane, Serjeants' Inn, and Lincoln's Inn even
unto the Fields are like tidal harbours at low water, where stranded
proceedings, offices at anchor, idle clerks lounging on lop-sided
stools that will not recover their perpendicular until the current of
Term sets in, lie high and dry upon the ooze of the long vacation.
Outer doors of chambers are shut up by the score, messages and
parcels are to be left at the Porter's Lodge by the bushel. A crop of
grass would grow in the chinks of the stone pavement outside
Lincoln's Inn Hall, but that the ticket-porters, who have nothing to
do beyond sitting in the shade there, with their white aprons over
their heads to keep the flies off, grub it up and eat it
thoughtfully.

There is only one judge in town. Even he only comes twice a week to
sit in chambers. If the country folks of those assize towns on his
circuit could see him now! No full-bottomed wig, no red petticoats,
no fur, no javelin-men, no white wands. Merely a close-shaved
gentleman in white trousers and a white hat, with sea-bronze on the
judicial countenance, and a strip of bark peeled by the solar rays
from the judicial nose, who calls in at the shell-fish shop as he
comes along and drinks iced ginger-beer!

The bar of England is scattered over the face of the earth. How
England can get on through four long summer months without its
bar--which is its acknowledged refuge in adversity and its only
legitimate triumph in prosperity--is beside the question; assuredly
that shield and buckler of Britannia are not in present wear. The
learned gentleman who is always so tremendously indignant at the
unprecedented outrage committed on the feelings of his client by the
opposite party that he never seems likely to recover it is doing
infinitely better than might be expected in Switzerland. The learned
gentleman who does the withering business and who blights all
opponents with his gloomy sarcasm is as merry as a grig at a French
watering-place. The learned gentleman who weeps by the pint on the
smallest provocation has not shed a tear these six weeks. The very
learned gentleman who has cooled the natural heat of his gingery
complexion in pools and fountains of law until he has become great in
knotty arguments for term-time, when he poses the drowsy bench with
legal "chaff," inexplicable to the uninitiated and to most of the
initiated too, is roaming, with a characteristic delight in aridity
and dust, about Constantinople. Other dispersed fragments of the same
great palladium are to be found on the canals of Venice, at the
second cataract of the Nile, in the baths of Germany, and sprinkled
on the sea-sand all over the English coast. Scarcely one is to be
encountered in the deserted region of Chancery Lane. If such a lonely
member of the bar do flit across the waste and come upon a prowling
suitor who is unable to leave off haunting the scenes of his anxiety,
they frighten one another and retreat into opposite shades.

It is the hottest long vacation known for many years. All the young
clerks are madly in love, and according to their various degrees,
pine for bliss with the beloved object, at Margate, Ramsgate, or
Gravesend. All the middle-aged clerks think their families too large.
All the unowned dogs who stray into the Inns of Court and pant about
staircases and other dry places seeking water give short howls of
aggravation. All the blind men's dogs in the streets draw their
masters against pumps or trip them over buckets. A shop with a
sun-blind, and a watered pavement, and a bowl of gold and silver fish
in the window, is a sanctuary. Temple Bar gets so hot that it is, to
the adjacent Strand and Fleet Street, what a heater is in an urn, and
keeps them simmering all night.

There are offices about the Inns of Court in which a man might be
cool, if any coolness were worth purchasing at such a price in
dullness; but the little thoroughfares immediately outside those
retirements seem to blaze. In Mr. Krook's court, it is so hot that
the people turn their houses inside out and sit in chairs upon the
pavement--Mr. Krook included, who there pursues his studies, with his
cat (who never is too hot) by his side. The Sol's Arms has
discontinued the Harmonic Meetings for the season, and Little Swills
is engaged at the Pastoral Gardens down the river, where he comes out
in quite an innocent manner and sings comic ditties of a juvenile
complexion calculated (as the bill says) not to wound the feelings of
the most fastidious mind.

Over all the legal neighbourhood there hangs, like some great veil of
rust or gigantic cobweb, the idleness and pensiveness of the long
vacation. Mr. Snagsby, law-stationer of Cook's Court, Cursitor
Street, is sensible of the influence not only in his mind as a
sympathetic and contemplative man, but also in his business as a
law-stationer aforesaid. He has more leisure for musing in Staple Inn
and in the Rolls Yard during the long vacation than at other seasons,
and he says to the two 'prentices, what a thing it is in such hot
weather to think that you live in an island with the sea a-rolling
and a-bowling right round you.

Guster is busy in the little drawing-room on this present afternoon
in the long vacation, when Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby have it in
contemplation to receive company. The expected guests are rather
select than numerous, being Mr. and Mrs. Chadband and no more. From
Mr. Chadband's being much given to describe himself, both verbally
and in writing, as a vessel, he is occasionally mistaken by strangers
for a gentleman connected with navigation, but he is, as he expresses
it, "in the ministry." Mr. Chadband is attached to no particular
denomination and is considered by his persecutors to have nothing so
very remarkable to say on the greatest of subjects as to render his
volunteering, on his own account, at all incumbent on his conscience;
but he has his followers, and Mrs. Snagsby is of the number. Mrs.
Snagsby has but recently taken a passage upward by the vessel,
Chadband; and her attention was attracted to that Bark A 1, when she
was something flushed by the hot weather.

"My little woman," says Mr. Snagsby to the sparrows in Staple Inn,
"likes to have her religion rather sharp, you see!"

So Guster, much impressed by regarding herself for the time as the
handmaid of Chadband, whom she knows to be endowed with the gift of
holding forth for four hours at a stretch, prepares the little
drawing-room for tea. All the furniture is shaken and dusted, the
portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are touched up with a wet cloth,
the best tea-service is set forth, and there is excellent provision
made of dainty new bread, crusty twists, cool fresh butter, thin
slices of ham, tongue, and German sausage, and delicate little rows
of anchovies nestling in parsley, not to mention new-laid eggs, to be
brought up warm in a napkin, and hot buttered toast. For Chadband is
rather a consuming vessel--the persecutors say a gorging vessel--and
can wield such weapons of the flesh as a knife and fork remarkably
well.

Mr. Snagsby in his best coat, looking at all the preparations when
they are completed and coughing his cough of deference behind his
hand, says to Mrs. Snagsby, "At what time did you expect Mr. and Mrs.
Chadband, my love?"

"At six," says Mrs. Snagsby.

Mr. Snagsby observes in a mild and casual way that "it's gone that."

"Perhaps you'd like to begin without them," is Mrs. Snagsby's
reproachful remark.

Mr. Snagsby does look as if he would like it very much, but he says,
with his cough of mildness, "No, my dear, no. I merely named the
time."

"What's time," says Mrs. Snagsby, "to eternity?"

"Very true, my dear," says Mr. Snagsby. "Only when a person lays in
victuals for tea, a person does it with a view--perhaps--more to
time. And when a time is named for having tea, it's better to come up
to it."

"To come up to it!" Mrs. Snagsby repeats with severity. "Up to it! As
if Mr. Chadband was a fighter!"

"Not at all, my dear," says Mr. Snagsby.

Here, Guster, who had been looking out of the bedroom window, comes
rustling and scratching down the little staircase like a popular
ghost, and falling flushed into the drawing-room, announces that Mr.
and Mrs. Chadband have appeared in the court. The bell at the inner
door in the passage immediately thereafter tinkling, she is
admonished by Mrs. Snagsby, on pain of instant reconsignment to her
patron saint, not to omit the ceremony of announcement. Much
discomposed in her nerves (which were previously in the best order)
by this threat, she so fearfully mutilates that point of state as to
announce "Mr. and Mrs. Cheeseming, least which, Imeantersay,
whatsername!" and retires conscience-stricken from the presence.

Mr. Chadband is a large yellow man with a fat smile and a general
appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his system. Mrs.
Chadband is a stern, severe-looking, silent woman. Mr. Chadband moves
softly and cumbrously, not unlike a bear who has been taught to walk
upright. He is very much embarrassed about the arms, as if they were
inconvenient to him and he wanted to grovel, is very much in a
perspiration about the head, and never speaks without first putting
up his great hand, as delivering a token to his hearers that he is
going to edify them.

"My friends," says Mr. Chadband, "peace be on this house! On the
master thereof, on the mistress thereof, on the young maidens, and on
the young men! My friends, why do I wish for peace? What is peace? Is
it war? No. Is it strife? No. Is it lovely, and gentle, and
beautiful, and pleasant, and serene, and joyful? Oh, yes! Therefore,
my friends, I wish for peace, upon you and upon yours."

In consequence of Mrs. Snagsby looking deeply edified, Mr. Snagsby
thinks it expedient on the whole to say amen, which is well received.

"Now, my friends," proceeds Mr. Chadband, "since I am upon this
theme--"

Guster presents herself. Mrs. Snagsby, in a spectral bass voice and
without removing her eyes from Chadband, says with dreadful
distinctness, "Go away!"

"Now, my friends," says Chadband, "since I am upon this theme, and in
my lowly path improving it--"

Guster is heard unaccountably to murmur "one thousing seven hundred
and eighty-two." The spectral voice repeats more solemnly, "Go away!"

"Now, my friends," says Mr. Chadband, "we will inquire in a spirit of
love--"

Still Guster reiterates "one thousing seven hundred and eighty-two."

Mr. Chadband, pausing with the resignation of a man accustomed to be
persecuted and languidly folding up his chin into his fat smile,
says, "Let us hear the maiden! Speak, maiden!"

"One thousing seven hundred and eighty-two, if you please, sir. Which
he wish to know what the shilling ware for," says Guster, breathless.

"For?" returns Mrs. Chadband. "For his fare!"

Guster replied that "he insistes on one and eightpence or on
summonsizzing the party." Mrs. Snagsby and Mrs. Chadband are
proceeding to grow shrill in indignation when Mr. Chadband quiets the
tumult by lifting up his hand.

"My friends," says he, "I remember a duty unfulfilled yesterday. It
is right that I should be chastened in some penalty. I ought not to
murmur. Rachael, pay the eightpence!"

While Mrs. Snagsby, drawing her breath, looks hard at Mr. Snagsby, as
who should say, "You hear this apostle!" and while Mr. Chadband glows
with humility and train oil, Mrs. Chadband pays the money. It is Mr.
Chadband's habit--it is the head and front of his pretensions
indeed--to keep this sort of debtor and creditor account in the
smallest items and to post it publicly on the most trivial occasions.

"My friends," says Chadband, "eightpence is not much; it might justly
have been one and fourpence; it might justly have been half a crown.
O let us be joyful, joyful! O let us be joyful!"

With which remark, which appears from its sound to be an extract in
verse, Mr. Chadband stalks to the table, and before taking a chair,
lifts up his admonitory hand.

"My friends," says he, "what is this which we now behold as being
spread before us? Refreshment. Do we need refreshment then, my
friends? We do. And why do we need refreshment, my friends? Because
we are but mortal, because we are but sinful, because we are but of
the earth, because we are not of the air. Can we fly, my friends? We
cannot. Why can we not fly, my friends?"

Mr. Snagsby, presuming on the success of his last point, ventures to
observe in a cheerful and rather knowing tone, "No wings." But is
immediately frowned down by Mrs. Snagsby.

"I say, my friends," pursues Mr. Chadband, utterly rejecting and
obliterating Mr. Snagsby's suggestion, "why can we not fly? Is it
because we are calculated to walk? It is. Could we walk, my friends,
without strength? We could not. What should we do without strength,
my friends? Our legs would refuse to bear us, our knees would double
up, our ankles would turn over, and we should come to the ground.
Then from whence, my friends, in a human point of view, do we derive
the strength that is necessary to our limbs? Is it," says Chadband,
glancing over the table, "from bread in various forms, from butter
which is churned from the milk which is yielded unto us by the cow,
from the eggs which are laid by the fowl, from ham, from tongue, from
sausage, and from such like? It is. Then let us partake of the good
things which are set before us!"

The persecutors denied that there was any particular gift in Mr.
Chadband's piling verbose flights of stairs, one upon another, after
this fashion. But this can only be received as a proof of their
determination to persecute, since it must be within everybody's
experience that the Chadband style of oratory is widely received and
much admired.

Mr. Chadband, however, having concluded for the present, sits down at
Mr. Snagsby's table and lays about him prodigiously. The conversion
of nutriment of any sort into oil of the quality already mentioned
appears to be a process so inseparable from the constitution of this
exemplary vessel that in beginning to eat and drink, he may be
described as always becoming a kind of considerable oil mills or
other large factory for the production of that article on a wholesale
scale. On the present evening of the long vacation, in Cook's Court,
Cursitor Street, he does such a powerful stroke of business that the
warehouse appears to be quite full when the works cease.

At this period of the entertainment, Guster, who has never recovered
her first failure, but has neglected no possible or impossible means
of bringing the establishment and herself into contempt--among which
may be briefly enumerated her unexpectedly performing clashing
military music on Mr. Chadband's head with plates, and afterwards
crowning that gentleman with muffins--at which period of the
entertainment, Guster whispers Mr. Snagsby that he is wanted.

"And being wanted in the--not to put too fine a point upon it--in the
shop," says Mr. Snagsby, rising, "perhaps this good company will
excuse me for half a minute."

Mr. Snagsby descends and finds the two 'prentices intently
contemplating a police constable, who holds a ragged boy by the arm.

"Why, bless my heart," says Mr. Snagsby, "what's the matter!"

"This boy," says the constable, "although he's repeatedly told to,
won't move on--"

"I'm always a-moving on, sar," cries the boy, wiping away his grimy
tears with his arm. "I've always been a-moving and a-moving on, ever
since I was born. Where can I possibly move to, sir, more nor I do
move!"

"He won't move on," says the constable calmly, with a slight
professional hitch of his neck involving its better settlement in his
stiff stock, "although he has been repeatedly cautioned, and
therefore I am obliged to take him into custody. He's as obstinate a
young gonoph as I know. He WON'T move on."

"Oh, my eye! Where can I move to!" cries the boy, clutching quite
desperately at his hair and beating his bare feet upon the floor of
Mr. Snagsby's passage.

"Don't you come none of that or I shall make blessed short work of
you!" says the constable, giving him a passionless shake. "My
instructions are that you are to move on. I have told you so five
hundred times."

"But where?" cries the boy.

"Well! Really, constable, you know," says Mr. Snagsby wistfully, and
coughing behind his hand his cough of great perplexity and doubt,
"really, that does seem a question. Where, you know?"

"My instructions don't go to that," replies the constable. "My
instructions are that this boy is to move on."

Do you hear, Jo? It is nothing to you or to any one else that the
great lights of the parliamentary sky have failed for some few years
in this business to set you the example of moving on. The one grand
recipe remains for you--the profound philosophical prescription--the
be-all and the end-all of your strange existence upon earth. Move on!
You are by no means to move off, Jo, for the great lights can't at
all agree about that. Move on!

Mr. Snagsby says nothing to this effect, says nothing at all indeed,
but coughs his forlornest cough, expressive of no thoroughfare in any
direction. By this time Mr. and Mrs. Chadband and Mrs. Snagsby,
hearing the altercation, have appeared upon the stairs. Guster having
never left the end of the passage, the whole household are assembled.

"The simple question is, sir," says the constable, "whether you know
this boy. He says you do."

Mrs. Snagsby, from her elevation, instantly cries out, "No he don't!"

"My lit-tle woman!" says Mr. Snagsby, looking up the staircase. "My
love, permit me! Pray have a moment's patience, my dear. I do know
something of this lad, and in what I know of him, I can't say that
there's any harm; perhaps on the contrary, constable." To whom the
law-stationer relates his Joful and woeful experience, suppressing
the half-crown fact.

"Well!" says the constable, "so far, it seems, he had grounds for
what he said. When I took him into custody up in Holborn, he said you
knew him. Upon that, a young man who was in the crowd said he was
acquainted with you, and you were a respectable housekeeper, and if
I'd call and make the inquiry, he'd appear. The young man don't seem
inclined to keep his word, but--Oh! Here IS the young man!"

Enter Mr. Guppy, who nods to Mr. Snagsby and touches his hat with the
chivalry of clerkship to the ladies on the stairs.

"I was strolling away from the office just now when I found this row
going on," says Mr. Guppy to the law-stationer, "and as your name was
mentioned, I thought it was right the thing should be looked into."

"It was very good-natured of you, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, "and I am
obliged to you." And Mr. Snagsby again relates his experience, again
suppressing the half-crown fact.

"Now, I know where you live," says the constable, then, to Jo. "You
live down in Tom-all-Alone's. That's a nice innocent place to live
in, ain't it?"

"I can't go and live in no nicer place, sir," replies Jo. "They
wouldn't have nothink to say to me if I wos to go to a nice innocent
place fur to live. Who ud go and let a nice innocent lodging to such
a reg'lar one as me!"

"You are very poor, ain't you?" says the constable.

"Yes, I am indeed, sir, wery poor in gin'ral," replies Jo. "I leave
you to judge now! I shook these two half-crowns out of him," says the
constable, producing them to the company, "in only putting my hand
upon him!"

"They're wot's left, Mr. Snagsby," says Jo, "out of a sov-ring as wos
give me by a lady in a wale as sed she wos a servant and as come to
my crossin one night and asked to be showd this 'ere ouse and the
ouse wot him as you giv the writin to died at, and the berrin-ground
wot he's berrid in. She ses to me she ses 'are you the boy at the
inkwhich?' she ses. I ses 'yes' I ses. She ses to me she ses 'can you
show me all them places?' I ses 'yes I can' I ses. And she ses to me
'do it' and I dun it and she giv me a sov'ring and hooked it. And I
an't had much of the sov'ring neither," says Jo, with dirty tears,
"fur I had to pay five bob, down in Tom-all-Alone's, afore they'd
square it fur to give me change, and then a young man he thieved
another five while I was asleep and another boy he thieved ninepence
and the landlord he stood drains round with a lot more on it."

"You don't expect anybody to believe this, about the lady and the
sovereign, do you?" says the constable, eyeing him aside with
ineffable disdain.

"I don't know as I do, sir," replies Jo. "I don't expect nothink at
all, sir, much, but that's the true hist'ry on it."

"You see what he is!" the constable observes to the audience. "Well,
Mr. Snagsby, if I don't lock him up this time, will you engage for
his moving on?"

"No!" cries Mrs. Snagsby from the stairs.

"My little woman!" pleads her husband. "Constable, I have no doubt
he'll move on. You know you really must do it," says Mr. Snagsby.

"I'm everyways agreeable, sir," says the hapless Jo.

"Do it, then," observes the constable. "You know what you have got to
do. Do it! And recollect you won't get off so easy next time. Catch
hold of your money. Now, the sooner you're five mile off, the better
for all parties."

With this farewell hint and pointing generally to the setting sun as
a likely place to move on to, the constable bids his auditors good
afternoon and makes the echoes of Cook's Court perform slow music for
him as he walks away on the shady side, carrying his iron-bound hat
in his hand for a little ventilation.

Now, Jo's improbable story concerning the lady and the sovereign has
awakened more or less the curiosity of all the company. Mr. Guppy,
who has an inquiring mind in matters of evidence and who has
been suffering severely from the lassitude of the long vacation,
takes that interest in the case that he enters on a regular
cross-examination of the witness, which is found so interesting by
the ladies that Mrs. Snagsby politely invites him to step upstairs
and drink a cup of tea, if he will excuse the disarranged state of
the tea-table, consequent on their previous exertions. Mr. Guppy
yielding his assent to this proposal, Jo is requested to follow into
the drawing-room doorway, where Mr. Guppy takes him in hand as a
witness, patting him into this shape, that shape, and the other shape
like a butterman dealing with so much butter, and worrying him
according to the best models. Nor is the examination unlike many such
model displays, both in respect of its eliciting nothing and of its
being lengthy, for Mr. Guppy is sensible of his talent, and Mrs.
Snagsby feels not only that it gratifies her inquisitive disposition,
but that it lifts her husband's establishment higher up in the law.
During the progress of this keen encounter, the vessel Chadband,
being merely engaged in the oil trade, gets aground and waits to be
floated off.

"Well!" says Mr. Guppy. "Either this boy sticks to it like
cobbler's-wax or there is something out of the common here that beats
anything that ever came into my way at Kenge and Carboy's."

Mrs. Chadband whispers Mrs. Snagsby, who exclaims, "You don't say
so!"

"For years!" replied Mrs. Chadband.

"Has known Kenge and Carboy's office for years," Mrs. Snagsby
triumphantly explains to Mr. Guppy. "Mrs. Chadband--this gentleman's
wife--Reverend Mr. Chadband."

"Oh, indeed!" says Mr. Guppy.

"Before I married my present husband," says Mrs. Chadband.

"Was you a party in anything, ma'am?" says Mr. Guppy, transferring
his cross-examination.

"No."

"NOT a party in anything, ma'am?" says Mr. Guppy.

Mrs. Chadband shakes her head.

"Perhaps you were acquainted with somebody who was a party in
something, ma'am?" says Mr. Guppy, who likes nothing better than to
model his conversation on forensic principles.

"Not exactly that, either," replies Mrs. Chadband, humouring the joke
with a hard-favoured smile.

"Not exactly that, either!" repeats Mr. Guppy. "Very good. Pray,
ma'am, was it a lady of your acquaintance who had some transactions
(we will not at present say what transactions) with Kenge and
Carboy's office, or was it a gentleman of your acquaintance? Take
time, ma'am. We shall come to it presently. Man or woman, ma'am?"

"Neither," says Mrs. Chadband as before.

"Oh! A child!" says Mr. Guppy, throwing on the admiring Mrs. Snagsby
the regular acute professional eye which is thrown on British
jurymen. "Now, ma'am, perhaps you'll have the kindness to tell us
WHAT child."

"You have got it at last, sir," says Mrs. Chadband with another
hard-favoured smile. "Well, sir, it was before your time, most
likely, judging from your appearance. I was left in charge of a child
named Esther Summerson, who was put out in life by Messrs. Kenge and
Carboy."

"Miss Summerson, ma'am!" cries Mr. Guppy, excited.

"I call her Esther Summerson," says Mrs. Chadband with austerity.
"There was no Miss-ing of the girl in my time. It was Esther.
'Esther, do this! Esther, do that!' and she was made to do it."

"My dear ma'am," returns Mr. Guppy, moving across the small
apartment, "the humble individual who now addresses you received that
young lady in London when she first came here from the establishment
to which you have alluded. Allow me to have the pleasure of taking
you by the hand."

Mr. Chadband, at last seeing his opportunity, makes his accustomed
signal and rises with a smoking head, which he dabs with his
pocket-handkerchief. Mrs. Snagsby whispers "Hush!"

"My friends," says Chadband, "we have partaken in moderation" (which
was certainly not the case so far as he was concerned) "of the
comforts which have been provided for us. May this house live upon
the fatness of the land; may corn and wine be plentiful therein; may
it grow, may it thrive, may it prosper, may it advance, may it
proceed, may it press forward! But, my friends, have we partaken of
anything else? We have. My friends, of what else have we partaken? Of
spiritual profit? Yes. From whence have we derived that spiritual
profit? My young friend, stand forth!"

Jo, thus apostrophized, gives a slouch backward, and another slouch
forward, and another slouch to each side, and confronts the eloquent
Chadband with evident doubts of his intentions.

"My young friend," says Chadband, "you are to us a pearl, you are to
us a diamond, you are to us a gem, you are to us a jewel. And why, my
young friend?"

"I don't know," replies Jo. "I don't know nothink."

"My young friend," says Chadband, "it is because you know nothing
that you are to us a gem and jewel. For what are you, my young
friend? Are you a beast of the field? No. A bird of the air? No. A
fish of the sea or river? No. You are a human boy, my young friend. A
human boy. O glorious to be a human boy! And why glorious, my young
friend? Because you are capable of receiving the lessons of wisdom,
because you are capable of profiting by this discourse which I now
deliver for your good, because you are not a stick, or a staff, or a
stock, or a stone, or a post, or a pillar.

   O running stream of sparkling joy
   To be a soaring human boy!

And do you cool yourself in that stream now, my young friend? No.
Why do you not cool yourself in that stream now? Because you are in a
state of darkness, because you are in a state of obscurity, because
you are in a state of sinfulness, because you are in a state of
bondage. My young friend, what is bondage? Let us, in a spirit of
love, inquire."

At this threatening stage of the discourse, Jo, who seems to have
been gradually going out of his mind, smears his right arm over his
face and gives a terrible yawn. Mrs. Snagsby indignantly expresses
her belief that he is a limb of the arch-fiend.

"My friends," says Mr. Chadband with his persecuted chin folding
itself into its fat smile again as he looks round, "it is right that
I should be humbled, it is right that I should be tried, it is right
that I should be mortified, it is right that I should be corrected. I
stumbled, on Sabbath last, when I thought with pride of my three
hours' improving. The account is now favourably balanced: my creditor
has accepted a composition. O let us be joyful, joyful! O let us be
joyful!"

Great sensation on the part of Mrs. Snagsby.

"My friends," says Chadband, looking round him in conclusion, "I will
not proceed with my young friend now. Will you come to-morrow, my
young friend, and inquire of this good lady where I am to be found to
deliver a discourse unto you, and will you come like the thirsty
swallow upon the next day, and upon the day after that, and upon the
day after that, and upon many pleasant days, to hear discourses?"
(This with a cow-like lightness.)

Jo, whose immediate object seems to be to get away on any terms,
gives a shuffling nod. Mr. Guppy then throws him a penny, and Mrs.
Snagsby calls to Guster to see him safely out of the house. But
before he goes downstairs, Mr. Snagsby loads him with some broken
meats from the table, which he carries away, hugging in his arms.

So, Mr. Chadband--of whom the persecutors say that it is no wonder he
should go on for any length of time uttering such abominable
nonsense, but that the wonder rather is that he should ever leave
off, having once the audacity to begin--retires into private life
until he invests a little capital of supper in the oil-trade. Jo
moves on, through the long vacation, down to Blackfriars Bridge,
where he finds a baking stony corner wherein to settle to his repast.

And there he sits, munching and gnawing, and looking up at the great
cross on the summit of St. Paul's Cathedral, glittering above a
red-and-violet-tinted cloud of smoke. From the boy's face one might
suppose that sacred emblem to be, in his eyes, the crowning confusion
of the great, confused city--so golden, so high up, so far out of his
reach. There he sits, the sun going down, the river running fast, the
crowd flowing by him in two streams--everything moving on to some
purpose and to one end--until he is stirred up and told to "move on"
too.




CHAPTER XX

A New Lodger


The long vacation saunters on towards term-time like an idle river
very leisurely strolling down a flat country to the sea. Mr. Guppy
saunters along with it congenially. He has blunted the blade of his
penknife and broken the point off by sticking that instrument into
his desk in every direction. Not that he bears the desk any ill will,
but he must do something, and it must be something of an unexciting
nature, which will lay neither his physical nor his intellectual
energies under too heavy contribution. He finds that nothing agrees
with him so well as to make little gyrations on one leg of his stool,
and stab his desk, and gape.

Kenge and Carboy are out of town, and the articled clerk has taken
out a shooting license and gone down to his father's, and Mr. Guppy's
two fellow-stipendiaries are away on leave. Mr. Guppy and Mr. Richard
Carstone divide the dignity of the office. But Mr. Carstone is for
the time being established in Kenge's room, whereat Mr. Guppy chafes.
So exceedingly that he with biting sarcasm informs his mother, in the
confidential moments when he sups with her off a lobster and lettuce
in the Old Street Road, that he is afraid the office is hardly good
enough for swells, and that if he had known there was a swell coming,
he would have got it painted.

Mr. Guppy suspects everybody who enters on the occupation of a stool
in Kenge and Carboy's office of entertaining, as a matter of course,
sinister designs upon him. He is clear that every such person wants
to depose him. If he be ever asked how, why, when, or wherefore, he
shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the strength of these
profound views, he in the most ingenious manner takes infinite pains
to counterplot when there is no plot, and plays the deepest games of
chess without any adversary.

It is a source of much gratification to Mr. Guppy, therefore, to find
the new-comer constantly poring over the papers in Jarndyce and
Jarndyce, for he well knows that nothing but confusion and failure
can come of that. His satisfaction communicates itself to a third
saunterer through the long vacation in Kenge and Carboy's office, to
wit, Young Smallweed.

Whether Young Smallweed (metaphorically called Small and eke Chick
Weed, as it were jocularly to express a fledgling) was ever a boy is
much doubted in Lincoln's Inn. He is now something under fifteen and
an old limb of the law. He is facetiously understood to entertain a
passion for a lady at a cigar-shop in the neighbourhood of Chancery
Lane and for her sake to have broken off a contract with another
lady, to whom he had been engaged some years. He is a town-made
article, of small stature and weazen features, but may be perceived
from a considerable distance by means of his very tall hat. To become
a Guppy is the object of his ambition. He dresses at that gentleman
(by whom he is patronized), talks at him, walks at him, founds
himself entirely on him. He is honoured with Mr. Guppy's particular
confidence and occasionally advises him, from the deep wells of his
experience, on difficult points in private life.

Mr. Guppy has been lolling out of window all the morning after trying
all the stools in succession and finding none of them easy, and after
several times putting his head into the iron safe with a notion of
cooling it. Mr. Smallweed has been twice dispatched for effervescent
drinks, and has twice mixed them in the two official tumblers and
stirred them up with the ruler. Mr. Guppy propounds for Mr.
Smallweed's consideration the paradox that the more you drink the
thirstier you are and reclines his head upon the window-sill in a
state of hopeless languor.

While thus looking out into the shade of Old Square, Lincoln's Inn,
surveying the intolerable bricks and mortar, Mr. Guppy becomes
conscious of a manly whisker emerging from the cloistered walk below
and turning itself up in the direction of his face. At the same time,
a low whistle is wafted through the Inn and a suppressed voice cries,
"Hip! Gup-py!"

"Why, you don't mean it!" says Mr. Guppy, aroused. "Small! Here's
Jobling!" Small's head looks out of window too and nods to Jobling.

"Where have you sprung up from?" inquires Mr. Guppy.

"From the market-gardens down by Deptford. I can't stand it any
longer. I must enlist. I say! I wish you'd lend me half a crown. Upon
my soul, I'm hungry."

Jobling looks hungry and also has the appearance of having run to
seed in the market-gardens down by Deptford.

"I say! Just throw out half a crown if you have got one to spare. I
want to get some dinner."

"Will you come and dine with me?" says Mr. Guppy, throwing out the
coin, which Mr. Jobling catches neatly.

"How long should I have to hold out?" says Jobling.

"Not half an hour. I am only waiting here till the enemy goes,
returns Mr. Guppy, butting inward with his head.

"What enemy?"

"A new one. Going to be articled. Will you wait?"

"Can you give a fellow anything to read in the meantime?" says Mr.
Jobling.

Smallweed suggests the law list. But Mr. Jobling declares with much
earnestness that he "can't stand it."

"You shall have the paper," says Mr. Guppy. "He shall bring it down.
But you had better not be seen about here. Sit on our staircase and
read. It's a quiet place."

Jobling nods intelligence and acquiescence. The sagacious Smallweed
supplies him with the newspaper and occasionally drops his eye upon
him from the landing as a precaution against his becoming disgusted
with waiting and making an untimely departure. At last the enemy
retreats, and then Smallweed fetches Mr. Jobling up.

"Well, and how are you?" says Mr. Guppy, shaking hands with him.

"So, so. How are you?"

Mr. Guppy replying that he is not much to boast of, Mr. Jobling
ventures on the question, "How is SHE?" This Mr. Guppy resents as a
liberty, retorting, "Jobling, there ARE chords in the human mind--"
Jobling begs pardon.

"Any subject but that!" says Mr. Guppy with a gloomy enjoyment of his
injury. "For there ARE chords, Jobling--"

Mr. Jobling begs pardon again.

During this short colloquy, the active Smallweed, who is of the
dinner party, has written in legal characters on a slip of paper,
"Return immediately." This notification to all whom it may concern,
he inserts in the letter-box, and then putting on the tall hat at the
angle of inclination at which Mr. Guppy wears his, informs his patron
that they may now make themselves scarce.

Accordingly they betake themselves to a neighbouring dining-house, of
the class known among its frequenters by the denomination slap-bang,
where the waitress, a bouncing young female of forty, is supposed to
have made some impression on the susceptible Smallweed, of whom it
may be remarked that he is a weird changeling to whom years are
nothing. He stands precociously possessed of centuries of owlish
wisdom. If he ever lay in a cradle, it seems as if he must have lain
there in a tail-coat. He has an old, old eye, has Smallweed; and he
drinks and smokes in a monkeyish way; and his neck is stiff in his
collar; and he is never to be taken in; and he knows all about it,
whatever it is. In short, in his bringing up he has been so nursed by
Law and Equity that he has become a kind of fossil imp, to account
for whose terrestrial existence it is reported at the public offices
that his father was John Doe and his mother the only female member of
the Roe family, also that his first long-clothes were made from a
blue bag.

Into the dining-house, unaffected by the seductive show in the window
of artificially whitened cauliflowers and poultry, verdant baskets of
peas, coolly blooming cucumbers, and joints ready for the spit, Mr.
Smallweed leads the way. They know him there and defer to him. He has
his favourite box, he bespeaks all the papers, he is down upon bald
patriarchs, who keep them more than ten minutes afterwards. It is of
no use trying him with anything less than a full-sized "bread" or
proposing to him any joint in cut unless it is in the very best cut.
In the matter of gravy he is adamant.

Conscious of his elfin power and submitting to his dread experience,
Mr. Guppy consults him in the choice of that day's banquet, turning
an appealing look towards him as the waitress repeats the catalogue
of viands and saying "What do YOU take, Chick?" Chick, out of the
profundity of his artfulness, preferring "veal and ham and French
beans--and don't you forget the stuffing, Polly" (with an unearthly
cock of his venerable eye), Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling give the like
order. Three pint pots of half-and-half are superadded. Quickly the
waitress returns bearing what is apparently a model of the Tower of
Babel but what is really a pile of plates and flat tin dish-covers.
Mr. Smallweed, approving of what is set before him, conveys
intelligent benignity into his ancient eye and winks upon her. Then,
amid a constant coming in, and going out, and running about, and a
clatter of crockery, and a rumbling up and down of the machine which
brings the nice cuts from the kitchen, and a shrill crying for more
nice cuts down the speaking-pipe, and a shrill reckoning of the cost
of nice cuts that have been disposed of, and a general flush and
steam of hot joints, cut and uncut, and a considerably heated
atmosphere in which the soiled knives and tablecloths seem to break
out spontaneously into eruptions of grease and blotches of beer, the
legal triumvirate appease their appetites.

Mr. Jobling is buttoned up closer than mere adornment might require.
His hat presents at the rims a peculiar appearance of a glistening
nature, as if it had been a favourite snail-promenade. The same
phenomenon is visible on some parts of his coat, and particularly at
the seams. He has the faded appearance of a gentleman in embarrassed
circumstances; even his light whiskers droop with something of a
shabby air.

His appetite is so vigorous that it suggests spare living for some
little time back. He makes such a speedy end of his plate of veal and
ham, bringing it to a close while his companions are yet midway in
theirs, that Mr. Guppy proposes another. "Thank you, Guppy," says Mr.
Jobling, "I really don't know but what I WILL take another."

Another being brought, he falls to with great goodwill.

Mr. Guppy takes silent notice of him at intervals until he is half
way through this second plate and stops to take an enjoying pull at
his pint pot of half-and-half (also renewed) and stretches out his
legs and rubs his hands. Beholding him in which glow of contentment,
Mr. Guppy says, "You are a man again, Tony!"

"Well, not quite yet," says Mr. Jobling. "Say, just born."

"Will you take any other vegetables? Grass? Peas? Summer cabbage?"

"Thank you, Guppy," says Mr. Jobling. "I really don't know but what I
WILL take summer cabbage."

Order given; with the sarcastic addition (from Mr. Smallweed) of
"Without slugs, Polly!" And cabbage produced.

"I am growing up, Guppy," says Mr. Jobling, plying his knife and fork
with a relishing steadiness.

"Glad to hear it."

"In fact, I have just turned into my teens," says Mr. Jobling.

He says no more until he has performed his task, which he achieves as
Messrs. Guppy and Smallweed finish theirs, thus getting over the
ground in excellent style and beating those two gentlemen easily by a
veal and ham and a cabbage.

"Now, Small," says Mr. Guppy, "what would you recommend about
pastry?"

"Marrow puddings," says Mr. Smallweed instantly.

"Aye, aye!" cries Mr. Jobling with an arch look. "You're there, are
you? Thank you, Mr. Guppy, I don't know but what I WILL take a marrow
pudding."

Three marrow puddings being produced, Mr. Jobling adds in a pleasant
humour that he is coming of age fast. To these succeed, by command of
Mr. Smallweed, "three Cheshires," and to those "three small rums."
This apex of the entertainment happily reached, Mr. Jobling puts up
his legs on the carpeted seat (having his own side of the box to
himself), leans against the wall, and says, "I am grown up now,
Guppy. I have arrived at maturity."

"What do you think, now," says Mr. Guppy, "about--you don't mind
Smallweed?"

"Not the least in the world. I have the pleasure of drinking his good
health."

"Sir, to you!" says Mr. Smallweed.

"I was saying, what do you think NOW," pursues Mr. Guppy, "of
enlisting?"

"Why, what I may think after dinner," returns Mr. Jobling, "is one
thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another
thing. Still, even after dinner, I ask myself the question, What am I
to do? How am I to live? Ill fo manger, you know," says Mr. Jobling,
pronouncing that word as if he meant a necessary fixture in an
English stable. "Ill fo manger. That's the French saying, and
mangering is as necessary to me as it is to a Frenchman. Or more so."

Mr. Smallweed is decidedly of opinion "much more so."

"If any man had told me," pursues Jobling, "even so lately as when
you and I had the frisk down in Lincolnshire, Guppy, and drove over
to see that house at Castle Wold--"

Mr. Smallweed corrects him--Chesney Wold.

"Chesney Wold. (I thank my honourable friend for that cheer.) If any
man had told me then that I should be as hard up at the present time
as I literally find myself, I should have--well, I should have
pitched into him," says Mr. Jobling, taking a little rum-and-water
with an air of desperate resignation; "I should have let fly at his
head."

"Still, Tony, you were on the wrong side of the post then,"
remonstrates Mr. Guppy. "You were talking about nothing else in the
gig."

"Guppy," says Mr. Jobling, "I will not deny it. I was on the wrong
side of the post. But I trusted to things coming round."

That very popular trust in flat things coming round! Not in their
being beaten round, or worked round, but in their "coming" round! As
though a lunatic should trust in the world's "coming" triangular!

"I had confident expectations that things would come round and be all
square," says Mr. Jobling with some vagueness of expression and
perhaps of meaning too. "But I was disappointed. They never did. And
when it came to creditors making rows at the office and to people
that the office dealt with making complaints about dirty trifles of
borrowed money, why there was an end of that connexion. And of any
new professional connexion too, for if I was to give a reference
to-morrow, it would be mentioned and would sew me up. Then what's a
fellow to do? I have been keeping out of the way and living cheap
down about the market-gardens, but what's the use of living cheap
when you have got no money? You might as well live dear."

"Better," Mr. Smallweed thinks.

"Certainly. It's the fashionable way; and fashion and whiskers have
been my weaknesses, and I don't care who knows it," says Mr. Jobling.
"They are great weaknesses--Damme, sir, they are great. Well,"
proceeds Mr. Jobling after a defiant visit to his rum-and-water,
"what can a fellow do, I ask you, BUT enlist?"

Mr. Guppy comes more fully into the conversation to state what, in
his opinion, a fellow can do. His manner is the gravely impressive
manner of a man who has not committed himself in life otherwise than
as he has become the victim of a tender sorrow of the heart.

"Jobling," says Mr. Guppy, "myself and our mutual friend Smallweed--"

Mr. Smallweed modestly observes, "Gentlemen both!" and drinks.

"--Have had a little conversation on this matter more than once since
you--"

"Say, got the sack!" cries Mr. Jobling bitterly. "Say it, Guppy. You
mean it."

"No-o-o! Left the Inn," Mr. Smallweed delicately suggests.

"Since you left the Inn, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy; "and I have
mentioned to our mutual friend Smallweed a plan I have lately thought
of proposing. You know Snagsby the stationer?"

"I know there is such a stationer," returns Mr. Jobling. "He was not
ours, and I am not acquainted with him."

"He IS ours, Jobling, and I AM acquainted with him," Mr. Guppy
retorts. "Well, sir! I have lately become better acquainted with him
through some accidental circumstances that have made me a visitor of
his in private life. Those circumstances it is not necessary to offer
in argument. They may--or they may not--have some reference to a
subject which may--or may not--have cast its shadow on my existence."

As it is Mr. Guppy's perplexing way with boastful misery to tempt his
particular friends into this subject, and the moment they touch it,
to turn on them with that trenchant severity about the chords in the
human mind, both Mr. Jobling and Mr. Smallweed decline the pitfall by
remaining silent.

"Such things may be," repeats Mr. Guppy, "or they may not be. They
are no part of the case. It is enough to mention that both Mr. and
Mrs. Snagsby are very willing to oblige me and that Snagsby has, in
busy times, a good deal of copying work to give out. He has all
Tulkinghorn's, and an excellent business besides. I believe if our
mutual friend Smallweed were put into the box, he could prove this?"

Mr. Smallweed nods and appears greedy to be sworn.

"Now, gentlemen of the jury," says Mr. Guppy, "--I mean, now,
Jobling--you may say this is a poor prospect of a living. Granted.
But it's better than nothing, and better than enlistment. You want
time. There must be time for these late affairs to blow over. You
might live through it on much worse terms than by writing for
Snagsby."

Mr. Jobling is about to interrupt when the sagacious Smallweed checks
him with a dry cough and the words, "Hem! Shakspeare!"

"There are two branches to this subject, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy.
"That is the first. I come to the second. You know Krook, the
Chancellor, across the lane. Come, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy in his
encouraging cross-examination-tone, "I think you know Krook, the
Chancellor, across the lane?"

"I know him by sight," says Mr. Jobling.

"You know him by sight. Very well. And you know little Flite?"

"Everybody knows her," says Mr. Jobling.

"Everybody knows her. VERY well. Now it has been one of my duties of
late to pay Flite a certain weekly allowance, deducting from it the
amount of her weekly rent, which I have paid (in consequence of
instructions I have received) to Krook himself, regularly in her
presence. This has brought me into communication with Krook and into
a knowledge of his house and his habits. I know he has a room to let.
You may live there at a very low charge under any name you like, as
quietly as if you were a hundred miles off. He'll ask no questions
and would accept you as a tenant at a word from me--before the clock
strikes, if you chose. And I tell you another thing, Jobling," says
Mr. Guppy, who has suddenly lowered his voice and become familiar
again, "he's an extraordinary old chap--always rummaging among a
litter of papers and grubbing away at teaching himself to read and
write, without getting on a bit, as it seems to me. He is a most
extraordinary old chap, sir. I don't know but what it might be worth
a fellow's while to look him up a bit."

"You don't mean--" Mr. Jobling begins.

"I mean," returns Mr. Guppy, shrugging his shoulders with becoming
modesty, "that I can't make him out. I appeal to our mutual friend
Smallweed whether he has or has not heard me remark that I can't make
him out."

Mr. Smallweed bears the concise testimony, "A few!"

"I have seen something of the profession and something of life,
Tony," says Mr. Guppy, "and it's seldom I can't make a man out, more
or less. But such an old card as this, so deep, so sly, and secret
(though I don't believe he is ever sober), I never came across. Now,
he must be precious old, you know, and he has not a soul about him,
and he is reported to be immensely rich; and whether he is a
smuggler, or a receiver, or an unlicensed pawnbroker, or a
money-lender--all of which I have thought likely at different
times--it might pay you to knock up a sort of knowledge of him. I
don't see why you shouldn't go in for it, when everything else
suits."

Mr. Jobling, Mr. Guppy, and Mr. Smallweed all lean their elbows on
the table and their chins upon their hands, and look at the ceiling.
After a time, they all drink, slowly lean back, put their hands in
their pockets, and look at one another.

"If I had the energy I once possessed, Tony!" says Mr. Guppy with a
sigh. "But there are chords in the human mind--"

Expressing the remainder of the desolate sentiment in rum-and-water,
Mr. Guppy concludes by resigning the adventure to Tony Jobling and
informing him that during the vacation and while things are slack,
his purse, "as far as three or four or even five pound goes," will be
at his disposal. "For never shall it be said," Mr. Guppy adds with
emphasis, "that William Guppy turned his back upon his friend!"

The latter part of the proposal is so directly to the purpose that
Mr. Jobling says with emotion, "Guppy, my trump, your fist!" Mr.
Guppy presents it, saying, "Jobling, my boy, there it is!" Mr.
Jobling returns, "Guppy, we have been pals now for some years!" Mr.
Guppy replies, "Jobling, we have."

They then shake hands, and Mr. Jobling adds in a feeling manner,
"Thank you, Guppy, I don't know but what I WILL take another glass
for old acquaintance sake."

"Krook's last lodger died there," observes Mr. Guppy in an incidental
way.

"Did he though!" says Mr. Jobling.

"There was a verdict. Accidental death. You don't mind that?"

"No," says Mr. Jobling, "I don't mind it; but he might as well have
died somewhere else. It's devilish odd that he need go and die at MY
place!" Mr. Jobling quite resents this liberty, several times
returning to it with such remarks as, "There are places enough to die
in, I should think!" or, "He wouldn't have liked my dying at HIS
place, I dare say!"

However, the compact being virtually made, Mr. Guppy proposes to
dispatch the trusty Smallweed to ascertain if Mr. Krook is at home,
as in that case they may complete the negotiation without delay. Mr.
Jobling approving, Smallweed puts himself under the tall hat and
conveys it out of the dining-rooms in the Guppy manner. He soon
returns with the intelligence that Mr. Krook is at home and that he
has seen him through the shop-door, sitting in the back premises,
sleeping "like one o'clock."

"Then I'll pay," says Mr. Guppy, "and we'll go and see him. Small,
what will it be?"

Mr. Smallweed, compelling the attendance of the waitress with one
hitch of his eyelash, instantly replies as follows: "Four veals and
hams is three, and four potatoes is three and four, and one summer
cabbage is three and six, and three marrows is four and six, and six
breads is five, and three Cheshires is five and three, and four
half-pints of half-and-half is six and three, and four small rums is
eight and three, and three Pollys is eight and six. Eight and six in
half a sovereign, Polly, and eighteenpence out!"

Not at all excited by these stupendous calculations, Smallweed
dismisses his friends with a cool nod and remains behind to take a
little admiring notice of Polly, as opportunity may serve, and to
read the daily papers, which are so very large in proportion to
himself, shorn of his hat, that when he holds up the Times to run his
eye over the columns, he seems to have retired for the night and to
have disappeared under the bedclothes.

Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling repair to the rag and bottle shop, where
they find Krook still sleeping like one o'clock, that is to say,
breathing stertorously with his chin upon his breast and quite
insensible to any external sounds or even to gentle shaking. On the
table beside him, among the usual lumber, stand an empty gin-bottle
and a glass. The unwholesome air is so stained with this liquor that
even the green eyes of the cat upon her shelf, as they open and shut
and glimmer on the visitors, look drunk.

"Hold up here!" says Mr. Guppy, giving the relaxed figure of the old
man another shake. "Mr. Krook! Halloa, sir!"

But it would seem as easy to wake a bundle of old clothes with a
spirituous heat smouldering in it. "Did you ever see such a stupor as
he falls into, between drink and sleep?" says Mr. Guppy.

"If this is his regular sleep," returns Jobling, rather alarmed,
"it'll last a long time one of these days, I am thinking."

"It's always more like a fit than a nap," says Mr. Guppy, shaking him
again. "Halloa, your lordship! Why, he might be robbed fifty times
over! Open your eyes!"

After much ado, he opens them, but without appearing to see his
visitors or any other objects. Though he crosses one leg on another,
and folds his hands, and several times closes and opens his parched
lips, he seems to all intents and purposes as insensible as before.

"He is alive, at any rate," says Mr. Guppy. "How are you, my Lord
Chancellor. I have brought a friend of mine, sir, on a little matter
of business."

The old man still sits, often smacking his dry lips without the least
consciousness. After some minutes he makes an attempt to rise. They
help him up, and he staggers against the wall and stares at them.

"How do you do, Mr. Krook?" says Mr. Guppy in some discomfiture. "How
do you do, sir? You are looking charming, Mr. Krook. I hope you are
pretty well?"

The old man, in aiming a purposeless blow at Mr. Guppy, or at
nothing, feebly swings himself round and comes with his face against
the wall. So he remains for a minute or two, heaped up against it,
and then staggers down the shop to the front door. The air, the
movement in the court, the lapse of time, or the combination of these
things recovers him. He comes back pretty steadily, adjusting his fur
cap on his head and looking keenly at them.

"Your servant, gentlemen; I've been dozing. Hi! I am hard to wake,
odd times."

"Rather so, indeed, sir," responds Mr. Guppy.

"What? You've been a-trying to do it, have you?" says the suspicious
Krook.

"Only a little," Mr. Guppy explains.

The old man's eye resting on the empty bottle, he takes it up,
examines it, and slowly tilts it upside down.

"I say!" he cries like the hobgoblin in the story. "Somebody's been
making free here!"

"I assure you we found it so," says Mr. Guppy. "Would you allow me to
get it filled for you?"

"Yes, certainly I would!" cries Krook in high glee. "Certainly I
would! Don't mention it! Get it filled next door--Sol's Arms--the
Lord Chancellor's fourteenpenny. Bless you, they know ME!"

He so presses the empty bottle upon Mr. Guppy that that gentleman,
with a nod to his friend, accepts the trust and hurries out and
hurries in again with the bottle filled. The old man receives it in
his arms like a beloved grandchild and pats it tenderly.

"But, I say," he whispers, with his eyes screwed up, after tasting
it, "this ain't the Lord Chancellor's fourteenpenny. This is
eighteenpenny!"

"I thought you might like that better," says Mr. Guppy.

"You're a nobleman, sir," returns Krook with another taste, and his
hot breath seems to come towards them like a flame. "You're a baron
of the land."

Taking advantage of this auspicious moment, Mr. Guppy presents his
friend under the impromptu name of Mr. Weevle and states the object
of their visit. Krook, with his bottle under his arm (he never gets
beyond a certain point of either drunkenness or sobriety), takes time
to survey his proposed lodger and seems to approve of him. "You'd
like to see the room, young man?" he says. "Ah! It's a good room!
Been whitewashed. Been cleaned down with soft soap and soda. Hi! It's
worth twice the rent, letting alone my company when you want it and
such a cat to keep the mice away."

Commending the room after this manner, the old man takes them
upstairs, where indeed they do find it cleaner than it used to be and
also containing some old articles of furniture which he has dug up
from his inexhaustible stores. The terms are easily concluded--for
the Lord Chancellor cannot be hard on Mr. Guppy, associated as he is
with Kenge and Carboy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and other famous claims
on his professional consideration--and it is agreed that Mr. Weevle
shall take possession on the morrow. Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy then
repair to Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, where the personal
introduction of the former to Mr. Snagsby is effected and (more
important) the vote and interest of Mrs. Snagsby are secured. They
then report progress to the eminent Smallweed, waiting at the office
in his tall hat for that purpose, and separate, Mr. Guppy explaining
that he would terminate his little entertainment by standing treat at
the play but that there are chords in the human mind which would
render it a hollow mockery.

On the morrow, in the dusk of evening, Mr. Weevle modestly appears at
Krook's, by no means incommoded with luggage, and establishes himself
in his new lodging, where the two eyes in the shutters stare at him
in his sleep, as if they were full of wonder. On the following day
Mr. Weevle, who is a handy good-for-nothing kind of young fellow,
borrows a needle and thread of Miss Flite and a hammer of his
landlord and goes to work devising apologies for window-curtains, and
knocking up apologies for shelves, and hanging up his two teacups,
milkpot, and crockery sundries on a pennyworth of little hooks, like
a shipwrecked sailor making the best of it.

But what Mr. Weevle prizes most of all his few possessions (next
after his light whiskers, for which he has an attachment that only
whiskers can awaken in the breast of man) is a choice collection of
copper-plate impressions from that truly national work The Divinities
of Albion, or Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty, representing ladies
of title and fashion in every variety of smirk that art, combined
with capital, is capable of producing. With these magnificent
portraits, unworthily confined in a band-box during his seclusion
among the market-gardens, he decorates his apartment; and as the
Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty wears every variety of fancy dress,
plays every variety of musical instrument, fondles every variety of
dog, ogles every variety of prospect, and is backed up by every
variety of flower-pot and balustrade, the result is very imposing.

But fashion is Mr. Weevle's, as it was Tony Jobling's, weakness. To
borrow yesterday's paper from the Sol's Arms of an evening and read
about the brilliant and distinguished meteors that are shooting
across the fashionable sky in every direction is unspeakable
consolation to him. To know what member of what brilliant and
distinguished circle accomplished the brilliant and distinguished
feat of joining it yesterday or contemplates the no less brilliant
and distinguished feat of leaving it to-morrow gives him a thrill of
joy. To be informed what the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty is
about, and means to be about, and what Galaxy marriages are on the
tapis, and what Galaxy rumours are in circulation, is to become
acquainted with the most glorious destinies of mankind. Mr. Weevle
reverts from this intelligence to the Galaxy portraits implicated,
and seems to know the originals, and to be known of them.

For the rest he is a quiet lodger, full of handy shifts and devices
as before mentioned, able to cook and clean for himself as well as to
carpenter, and developing social inclinations after the shades of
evening have fallen on the court. At those times, when he is not
visited by Mr. Guppy or by a small light in his likeness quenched in
a dark hat, he comes out of his dull room--where he has inherited the
deal wilderness of desk bespattered with a rain of ink--and talks to
Krook or is "very free," as they call it in the court, commendingly,
with any one disposed for conversation. Wherefore, Mrs. Piper, who
leads the court, is impelled to offer two remarks to Mrs. Perkins:
firstly, that if her Johnny was to have whiskers, she could wish 'em
to be identically like that young man's; and secondly, "Mark my
words, Mrs. Perkins, ma'am, and don't you be surprised, Lord bless
you, if that young man comes in at last for old Krook's money!"




CHAPTER XXI

The Smallweed Family


In a rather ill-favoured and ill-savoured neighbourhood, though one
of its rising grounds bears the name of Mount Pleasant, the Elfin
Smallweed, christened Bartholomew and known on the domestic hearth as
Bart, passes that limited portion of his time on which the office and
its contingencies have no claim. He dwells in a little narrow street,
always solitary, shady, and sad, closely bricked in on all sides like
a tomb, but where there yet lingers the stump of an old forest tree
whose flavour is about as fresh and natural as the Smallweed smack of
youth.

There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several
generations. Little old men and women there have been, but no child,
until Mr. Smallweed's grandmother, now living, became weak in her
intellect and fell (for the first time) into a childish state. With
such infantine graces as a total want of observation, memory,
understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition to fall
asleep over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed's grandmother has
undoubtedly brightened the family.

Mr. Smallweed's grandfather is likewise of the party. He is in a
helpless condition as to his lower, and nearly so as to his upper,
limbs, but his mind is unimpaired. It holds, as well as it ever held,
the first four rules of arithmetic and a certain small collection of
the hardest facts. In respect of ideality, reverence, wonder, and
other such phrenological attributes, it is no worse off than it used
to be. Everything that Mr. Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in
his mind was a grub at first, and is a grub at last. In all his life
he has never bred a single butterfly.

The father of this pleasant grandfather, of the neighbourhood of
Mount Pleasant, was a horny-skinned, two-legged, money-getting
species of spider who spun webs to catch unwary flies and retired
into holes until they were entrapped. The name of this old pagan's
god was Compound Interest. He lived for it, married it, died of it.
Meeting with a heavy loss in an honest little enterprise in which all
the loss was intended to have been on the other side, he broke
something--something necessary to his existence, therefore it
couldn't have been his heart--and made an end of his career. As his
character was not good, and he had been bred at a charity school in a
complete course, according to question and answer, of those ancient
people the Amorites and Hittites, he was frequently quoted as an
example of the failure of education.

His spirit shone through his son, to whom he had always preached of
"going out" early in life and whom he made a clerk in a sharp
scrivener's office at twelve years old. There the young gentleman
improved his mind, which was of a lean and anxious character, and
developing the family gifts, gradually elevated himself into the
discounting profession. Going out early in life and marrying late, as
his father had done before him, he too begat a lean and
anxious-minded son, who in his turn, going out early in life and
marrying late, became the father of Bartholomew and Judith Smallweed,
twins. During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this
family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late
to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has
discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books,
fairy-tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities
whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born
to it and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced
have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something
depressing on their minds.

At the present time, in the dark little parlour certain feet below
the level of the street--a grim, hard, uncouth parlour, only
ornamented with the coarsest of baize table-covers, and the hardest
of sheet-iron tea-trays, and offering in its decorative character no
bad allegorical representation of Grandfather Smallweed's
mind--seated in two black horsehair porter's chairs, one on each side
of the fire-place, the superannuated Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed while
away the rosy hours. On the stove are a couple of trivets for the
pots and kettles which it is Grandfather Smallweed's usual occupation
to watch, and projecting from the chimney-piece between them is a
sort of brass gallows for roasting, which he also superintends when
it is in action. Under the venerable Mr. Smallweed's seat and guarded
by his spindle legs is a drawer in his chair, reported to contain
property to a fabulous amount. Beside him is a spare cushion with
which he is always provided in order that he may have something to
throw at the venerable partner of his respected age whenever she
makes an allusion to money--a subject on which he is particularly
sensitive.

"And where's Bart?" Grandfather Smallweed inquires of Judy, Bart's
twin sister.

"He an't come in yet," says Judy.

"It's his tea-time, isn't it?"

"No."

"How much do you mean to say it wants then?"

"Ten minutes."

"Hey?"

"Ten minutes." (Loud on the part of Judy.)

"Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Ten minutes."

Grandmother Smallweed, who has been mumbling and shaking her head at
the trivets, hearing figures mentioned, connects them with money and
screeches like a horrible old parrot without any plumage, "Ten
ten-pound notes!"

Grandfather Smallweed immediately throws the cushion at her.

"Drat you, be quiet!" says the good old man.

The effect of this act of jaculation is twofold. It not only doubles
up Mrs. Smallweed's head against the side of her porter's chair and
causes her to present, when extricated by her granddaughter, a highly
unbecoming state of cap, but the necessary exertion recoils on Mr.
Smallweed himself, whom it throws back into HIS porter's chair like a
broken puppet. The excellent old gentleman being at these times a
mere clothes-bag with a black skull-cap on the top of it, does not
present a very animated appearance until he has undergone the two
operations at the hands of his granddaughter of being shaken up like
a great bottle and poked and punched like a great bolster. Some
indication of a neck being developed in him by these means, he and
the sharer of his life's evening again fronting one another in their
two porter's chairs, like a couple of sentinels long forgotten on
their post by the Black Serjeant, Death.

Judy the twin is worthy company for these associates. She is so
indubitably sister to Mr. Smallweed the younger that the two kneaded
into one would hardly make a young person of average proportions,
while she so happily exemplifies the before-mentioned family likeness
to the monkey tribe that attired in a spangled robe and cap she might
walk about the table-land on the top of a barrel-organ without
exciting much remark as an unusual specimen. Under existing
circumstances, however, she is dressed in a plain, spare gown of
brown stuff.

Judy never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at
any game. She once or twice fell into children's company when she was
about ten years old, but the children couldn't get on with Judy, and
Judy couldn't get on with them. She seemed like an animal of another
species, and there was instinctive repugnance on both sides. It is
very doubtful whether Judy knows how to laugh. She has so rarely seen
the thing done that the probabilities are strong the other way. Of
anything like a youthful laugh, she certainly can have no conception.
If she were to try one, she would find her teeth in her way,
modelling that action of her face, as she has unconsciously modelled
all its other expressions, on her pattern of sordid age. Such is
Judy.

And her twin brother couldn't wind up a top for his life. He knows no
more of Jack the Giant Killer or of Sinbad the Sailor than he knows
of the people in the stars. He could as soon play at leap-frog or at
cricket as change into a cricket or a frog himself. But he is so much
the better off than his sister that on his narrow world of fact an
opening has dawned into such broader regions as lie within the ken of
Mr. Guppy. Hence his admiration and his emulation of that shining
enchanter.

Judy, with a gong-like clash and clatter, sets one of the sheet-iron
tea-trays on the table and arranges cups and saucers. The bread she
puts on in an iron basket, and the butter (and not much of it) in a
small pewter plate. Grandfather Smallweed looks hard after the tea as
it is served out and asks Judy where the girl is.

"Charley, do you mean?" says Judy.

"Hey?" from Grandfather Smallweed.

"Charley, do you mean?"

This touches a spring in Grandmother Smallweed, who, chuckling as
usual at the trivets, cries, "Over the water! Charley over the water,
Charley over the water, over the water to Charley, Charley over the
water, over the water to Charley!" and becomes quite energetic about
it. Grandfather looks at the cushion but has not sufficiently
recovered his late exertion.

"Ha!" he says when there is silence. "If that's her name. She eats a
deal. It would be better to allow her for her keep."

Judy, with her brother's wink, shakes her head and purses up her
mouth into no without saying it.

"No?" returns the old man. "Why not?"

"She'd want sixpence a day, and we can do it for less," says Judy.

"Sure?"

Judy answers with a nod of deepest meaning and calls, as she scrapes
the butter on the loaf with every precaution against waste and cuts
it into slices, "You, Charley, where are you?" Timidly obedient to
the summons, a little girl in a rough apron and a large bonnet, with
her hands covered with soap and water and a scrubbing brush in one of
them, appears, and curtsys.

"What work are you about now?" says Judy, making an ancient snap at
her like a very sharp old beldame.

"I'm a-cleaning the upstairs back room, miss," replies Charley.

"Mind you do it thoroughly, and don't loiter. Shirking won't do for
me. Make haste! Go along!" cries Judy with a stamp upon the ground.
"You girls are more trouble than you're worth, by half."

On this severe matron, as she returns to her task of scraping the
butter and cutting the bread, falls the shadow of her brother,
looking in at the window. For whom, knife and loaf in hand, she opens
the street-door.

"Aye, aye, Bart!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Here you are, hey?"

"Here I am," says Bart.

"Been along with your friend again, Bart?"

Small nods.

"Dining at his expense, Bart?"

Small nods again.

"That's right. Live at his expense as much as you can, and take
warning by his foolish example. That's the use of such a friend. The
only use you can put him to," says the venerable sage.

His grandson, without receiving this good counsel as dutifully as he
might, honours it with all such acceptance as may lie in a slight
wink and a nod and takes a chair at the tea-table. The four old faces
then hover over teacups like a company of ghastly cherubim, Mrs.
Smallweed perpetually twitching her head and chattering at the
trivets and Mr. Smallweed requiring to be repeatedly shaken up like a
large black draught.

"Yes, yes," says the good old gentleman, reverting to his lesson of
wisdom. "That's such advice as your father would have given you,
Bart. You never saw your father. More's the pity. He was my true
son." Whether it is intended to be conveyed that he was particularly
pleasant to look at, on that account, does not appear.

"He was my true son," repeats the old gentleman, folding his bread
and butter on his knee, "a good accountant, and died fifteen years
ago."

Mrs. Smallweed, following her usual instinct, breaks out with
"Fifteen hundred pound. Fifteen hundred pound in a black box, fifteen
hundred pound locked up, fifteen hundred pound put away and hid!" Her
worthy husband, setting aside his bread and butter, immediately
discharges the cushion at her, crushes her against the side of her
chair, and falls back in his own, overpowered. His appearance, after
visiting Mrs. Smallweed with one of these admonitions, is
particularly impressive and not wholly prepossessing, firstly because
the exertion generally twists his black skull-cap over one eye and
gives him an air of goblin rakishness, secondly because he mutters
violent imprecations against Mrs. Smallweed, and thirdly because the
contrast between those powerful expressions and his powerless figure
is suggestive of a baleful old malignant who would be very wicked if
he could. All this, however, is so common in the Smallweed family
circle that it produces no impression. The old gentleman is merely
shaken and has his internal feathers beaten up, the cushion is
restored to its usual place beside him, and the old lady, perhaps
with her cap adjusted and perhaps not, is planted in her chair again,
ready to be bowled down like a ninepin.

Some time elapses in the present instance before the old gentleman is
sufficiently cool to resume his discourse, and even then he mixes it
up with several edifying expletives addressed to the unconscious
partner of his bosom, who holds communication with nothing on earth
but the trivets. As thus: "If your father, Bart, had lived longer, he
might have been worth a deal of money--you brimstone chatterer!--but
just as he was beginning to build up the house that he had been
making the foundations for, through many a year--you jade of a
magpie, jackdaw, and poll-parrot, what do you mean!--he took ill and
died of a low fever, always being a sparing and a spare man, full of
business care--I should like to throw a cat at you instead of a
cushion, and I will too if you make such a confounded fool of
yourself!--and your mother, who was a prudent woman as dry as a chip,
just dwindled away like touchwood after you and Judy were born--you
are an old pig. You are a brimstone pig. You're a head of swine!"

Judy, not interested in what she has often heard, begins to collect
in a basin various tributary streams of tea, from the bottoms of cups
and saucers and from the bottom of the tea-pot for the little
charwoman's evening meal. In like manner she gets together, in the
iron bread-basket, as many outside fragments and worn-down heels of
loaves as the rigid economy of the house has left in existence.

"But your father and me were partners, Bart," says the old gentleman,
"and when I am gone, you and Judy will have all there is. It's rare
for you both that you went out early in life--Judy to the flower
business, and you to the law. You won't want to spend it. You'll get
your living without it, and put more to it. When I am gone, Judy will
go back to the flower business and you'll still stick to the law."

One might infer from Judy's appearance that her business rather lay
with the thorns than the flowers, but she has in her time been
apprenticed to the art and mystery of artificial flower-making. A
close observer might perhaps detect both in her eye and her
brother's, when their venerable grandsire anticipates his being gone,
some little impatience to know when he may be going, and some
resentful opinion that it is time he went.

"Now, if everybody has done," says Judy, completing her preparations,
"I'll have that girl in to her tea. She would never leave off if she
took it by herself in the kitchen."

Charley is accordingly introduced, and under a heavy fire of eyes,
sits down to her basin and a Druidical ruin of bread and butter. In
the active superintendence of this young person, Judy Smallweed
appears to attain a perfectly geological age and to date from the
remotest periods. Her systematic manner of flying at her and pouncing
on her, with or without pretence, whether or no, is wonderful,
evincing an accomplishment in the art of girl-driving seldom reached
by the oldest practitioners.

"Now, don't stare about you all the afternoon," cries Judy, shaking
her head and stamping her foot as she happens to catch the glance
which has been previously sounding the basin of tea, "but take your
victuals and get back to your work."

"Yes, miss," says Charley.

"Don't say yes," returns Miss Smallweed, "for I know what you girls
are. Do it without saying it, and then I may begin to believe you."

Charley swallows a great gulp of tea in token of submission and so
disperses the Druidical ruins that Miss Smallweed charges her not to
gormandize, which "in you girls," she observes, is disgusting.
Charley might find some more difficulty in meeting her views on the
general subject of girls but for a knock at the door.

"See who it is, and don't chew when you open it!" cries Judy.

The object of her attentions withdrawing for the purpose, Miss
Smallweed takes that opportunity of jumbling the remainder of the
bread and butter together and launching two or three dirty tea-cups
into the ebb-tide of the basin of tea as a hint that she considers
the eating and drinking terminated.

"Now! Who is it, and what's wanted?" says the snappish Judy.

It is one Mr. George, it appears. Without other announcement or
ceremony, Mr. George walks in.

"Whew!" says Mr. George. "You are hot here. Always a fire, eh? Well!
Perhaps you do right to get used to one." Mr. George makes the latter
remark to himself as he nods to Grandfather Smallweed.

"Ho! It's you!" cries the old gentleman. "How de do? How de do?"

"Middling," replies Mr. George, taking a chair. "Your granddaughter I
have had the honour of seeing before; my service to you, miss."

"This is my grandson," says Grandfather Smallweed. "You ha'n't seen
him before. He is in the law and not much at home."

"My service to him, too! He is like his sister. He is very like his
sister. He is devilish like his sister," says Mr. George, laying a
great and not altogether complimentary stress on his last adjective.

"And how does the world use you, Mr. George?" Grandfather Smallweed
inquires, slowly rubbing his legs.

"Pretty much as usual. Like a football."

He is a swarthy brown man of fifty, well made, and good looking, with
crisp dark hair, bright eyes, and a broad chest. His sinewy and
powerful hands, as sunburnt as his face, have evidently been used to
a pretty rough life. What is curious about him is that he sits
forward on his chair as if he were, from long habit, allowing space
for some dress or accoutrements that he has altogether laid aside.
His step too is measured and heavy and would go well with a weighty
clash and jingle of spurs. He is close-shaved now, but his mouth is
set as if his upper lip had been for years familiar with a great
moustache; and his manner of occasionally laying the open palm of his
broad brown hand upon it is to the same effect. Altogether one might
guess Mr. George to have been a trooper once upon a time.

A special contrast Mr. George makes to the Smallweed family. Trooper
was never yet billeted upon a household more unlike him. It is a
broadsword to an oyster-knife. His developed figure and their stunted
forms, his large manner filling any amount of room and their little
narrow pinched ways, his sounding voice and their sharp spare tones,
are in the strongest and the strangest opposition. As he sits in the
middle of the grim parlour, leaning a little forward, with his hands
upon his thighs and his elbows squared, he looks as though, if he
remained there long, he would absorb into himself the whole family
and the whole four-roomed house, extra little back-kitchen and all.

"Do you rub your legs to rub life into 'em?" he asks of Grandfather
Smallweed after looking round the room.

"Why, it's partly a habit, Mr. George, and--yes--it partly helps the
circulation," he replies.

"The cir-cu-la-tion!" repeats Mr. George, folding his arms upon his
chest and seeming to become two sizes larger. "Not much of that, I
should think."

"Truly I'm old, Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed. "But I can
carry my years. I'm older than HER," nodding at his wife, "and see
what she is? You're a brimstone chatterer!" with a sudden revival of
his late hostility.

"Unlucky old soul!" says Mr. George, turning his head in that
direction. "Don't scold the old lady. Look at her here, with her poor
cap half off her head and her poor hair all in a muddle. Hold up,
ma'am. That's better. There we are! Think of your mother, Mr.
Smallweed," says Mr. George, coming back to his seat from assisting
her, "if your wife an't enough."

"I suppose you were an excellent son, Mr. George?" the old man hints
with a leer.

The colour of Mr. George's face rather deepens as he replies, "Why
no. I wasn't."

"I am astonished at it."

"So am I. I ought to have been a good son, and I think I meant to
have been one. But I wasn't. I was a thundering bad son, that's the
long and the short of it, and never was a credit to anybody."

"Surprising!" cries the old man.

"However," Mr. George resumes, "the less said about it, the better
now. Come! You know the agreement. Always a pipe out of the two
months' interest! (Bosh! It's all correct. You needn't be afraid to
order the pipe. Here's the new bill, and here's the two months'
interest-money, and a devil-and-all of a scrape it is to get it
together in my business.)"

Mr. George sits, with his arms folded, consuming the family and the
parlour while Grandfather Smallweed is assisted by Judy to two black
leathern cases out of a locked bureau, in one of which he secures the
document he has just received, and from the other takes another
similar document which he hands to Mr. George, who twists it up for a
pipelight. As the old man inspects, through his glasses, every
up-stroke and down-stroke of both documents before he releases them
from their leathern prison, and as he counts the money three times
over and requires Judy to say every word she utters at least twice,
and is as tremulously slow of speech and action as it is possible to
be, this business is a long time in progress. When it is quite
concluded, and not before, he disengages his ravenous eyes and
fingers from it and answers Mr. George's last remark by saying,
"Afraid to order the pipe? We are not so mercenary as that, sir.
Judy, see directly to the pipe and the glass of cold brandy-and-water
for Mr. George."

The sportive twins, who have been looking straight before them all
this time except when they have been engrossed by the black leathern
cases, retire together, generally disdainful of the visitor, but
leaving him to the old man as two young cubs might leave a traveller
to the parental bear.

"And there you sit, I suppose, all the day long, eh?" says Mr. George
with folded arms.

"Just so, just so," the old man nods.

"And don't you occupy yourself at all?"

"I watch the fire--and the boiling and the roasting--"

"When there is any," says Mr. George with great expression.

"Just so. When there is any."

"Don't you read or get read to?"

The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. "No, no. We have
never been readers in our family. It don't pay. Stuff. Idleness.
Folly. No, no!"

"There's not much to choose between your two states," says the
visitor in a key too low for the old man's dull hearing as he looks
from him to the old woman and back again. "I say!" in a louder voice.

"I hear you."

"You'll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear."

"My dear friend!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both
hands to embrace him. "Never! Never, my dear friend! But my friend in
the city that I got to lend you the money--HE might!"

"Oh! You can't answer for him?" says Mr. George, finishing the
inquiry in his lower key with the words "You lying old rascal!"

"My dear friend, he is not to be depended on. I wouldn't trust him.
He will have his bond, my dear friend."

"Devil doubt him," says Mr. George. Charley appearing with a
tray, on which are the pipe, a small paper of tobacco, and the
brandy-and-water, he asks her, "How do you come here! You haven't got
the family face."

"I goes out to work, sir," returns Charley.

The trooper (if trooper he be or have been) takes her bonnet off,
with a light touch for so strong a hand, and pats her on the head.
"You give the house almost a wholesome look. It wants a bit of youth
as much as it wants fresh air." Then he dismisses her, lights his
pipe, and drinks to Mr. Smallweed's friend in the city--the one
solitary flight of that esteemed old gentleman's imagination.

"So you think he might be hard upon me, eh?"

"I think he might--I am afraid he would. I have known him do it,"
says Grandfather Smallweed incautiously, "twenty times."

Incautiously, because his stricken better-half, who has been dozing
over the fire for some time, is instantly aroused and jabbers "Twenty
thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money-box, twenty
guineas, twenty million twenty per cent, twenty--" and is then cut
short by the flying cushion, which the visitor, to whom this singular
experiment appears to be a novelty, snatches from her face as it
crushes her in the usual manner.

"You're a brimstone idiot. You're a scorpion--a brimstone scorpion!
You're a sweltering toad. You're a chattering clattering broomstick
witch that ought to be burnt!" gasps the old man, prostrate in his
chair. "My dear friend, will you shake me up a little?"

Mr. George, who has been looking first at one of them and then at the
other, as if he were demented, takes his venerable acquaintance by
the throat on receiving this request, and dragging him upright in his
chair as easily as if he were a doll, appears in two minds whether or
no to shake all future power of cushioning out of him and shake him
into his grave. Resisting the temptation, but agitating him violently
enough to make his head roll like a harlequin's, he puts him smartly
down in his chair again and adjusts his skull-cap with such a rub
that the old man winks with both eyes for a minute afterwards.

"O Lord!" gasps Mr. Smallweed. "That'll do. Thank you, my dear
friend, that'll do. Oh, dear me, I'm out of breath. O Lord!" And Mr.
Smallweed says it not without evident apprehensions of his dear
friend, who still stands over him looming larger than ever.

The alarming presence, however, gradually subsides into its chair and
falls to smoking in long puffs, consoling itself with the
philosophical reflection, "The name of your friend in the city begins
with a D, comrade, and you're about right respecting the bond."

"Did you speak, Mr. George?" inquires the old man.

The trooper shakes his head, and leaning forward with his right elbow
on his right knee and his pipe supported in that hand, while his
other hand, resting on his left leg, squares his left elbow in a
martial manner, continues to smoke. Meanwhile he looks at Mr.
Smallweed with grave attention and now and then fans the cloud of
smoke away in order that he may see him the more clearly.

"I take it," he says, making just as much and as little change in his
position as will enable him to reach the glass to his lips with a
round, full action, "that I am the only man alive (or dead either)
that gets the value of a pipe out of YOU?"

"Well," returns the old man, "it's true that I don't see company, Mr.
George, and that I don't treat. I can't afford to it. But as you, in
your pleasant way, made your pipe a condition--"

"Why, it's not for the value of it; that's no great thing. It was a
fancy to get it out of you. To have something in for my money."

"Ha! You're prudent, prudent, sir!" cries Grandfather Smallweed,
rubbing his legs.

"Very. I always was." Puff. "It's a sure sign of my prudence that I
ever found the way here." Puff. "Also, that I am what I am." Puff. "I
am well known to be prudent," says Mr. George, composedly smoking. "I
rose in life that way."

"Don't be down-hearted, sir. You may rise yet."

Mr. George laughs and drinks.

"Ha'n't you no relations, now," asks Grandfather Smallweed with a
twinkle in his eyes, "who would pay off this little principal or who
would lend you a good name or two that I could persuade my friend in
the city to make you a further advance upon? Two good names would be
sufficient for my friend in the city. Ha'n't you no such relations,
Mr. George?"

Mr. George, still composedly smoking, replies, "If I had, I shouldn't
trouble them. I have been trouble enough to my belongings in my day.
It MAY be a very good sort of penitence in a vagabond, who has wasted
the best time of his life, to go back then to decent people that he
never was a credit to and live upon them, but it's not my sort. The
best kind of amends then for having gone away is to keep away, in my
opinion."

"But natural affection, Mr. George," hints Grandfather Smallweed.

"For two good names, hey?" says Mr. George, shaking his head and
still composedly smoking. "No. That's not my sort either."

Grandfather Smallweed has been gradually sliding down in his chair
since his last adjustment and is now a bundle of clothes with a voice
in it calling for Judy. That houri, appearing, shakes him up in the
usual manner and is charged by the old gentleman to remain near him.
For he seems chary of putting his visitor to the trouble of repeating
his late attentions.

"Ha!" he observes when he is in trim again. "If you could have traced
out the captain, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you. If
when you first came here, in consequence of our advertisement in the
newspapers--when I say 'our,' I'm alluding to the advertisements of
my friend in the city, and one or two others who embark their capital
in the same way, and are so friendly towards me as sometimes to give
me a lift with my little pittance--if at that time you could have
helped us, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you."

"I was willing enough to be 'made,' as you call it," says Mr. George,
smoking not quite so placidly as before, for since the entrance of
Judy he has been in some measure disturbed by a fascination, not of
the admiring kind, which obliges him to look at her as she stands by
her grandfather's chair, "but on the whole, I am glad I wasn't now."

"Why, Mr. George? In the name of--of brimstone, why?" says
Grandfather Smallweed with a plain appearance of exasperation.
(Brimstone apparently suggested by his eye lighting on Mrs. Smallweed
in her slumber.)

"For two reasons, comrade."

"And what two reasons, Mr. George? In the name of the--"

"Of our friend in the city?" suggests Mr. George, composedly
drinking.

"Aye, if you like. What two reasons?"

"In the first place," returns Mr. George, but still looking at Judy
as if she being so old and so like her grandfather it is indifferent
which of the two he addresses, "you gentlemen took me in. You
advertised that Mr. Hawdon (Captain Hawdon, if you hold to the saying
'Once a captain, always a captain') was to hear of something to his
advantage."

"Well?" returns the old man shrilly and sharply.

"Well!" says Mr. George, smoking on. "It wouldn't have been much to
his advantage to have been clapped into prison by the whole bill and
judgment trade of London."

"How do you know that? Some of his rich relations might have paid his
debts or compounded for 'em. Besides, he had taken US in. He owed us
immense sums all round. I would sooner have strangled him than had no
return. If I sit here thinking of him," snarls the old man, holding
up his impotent ten fingers, "I want to strangle him now." And in a
sudden access of fury, he throws the cushion at the unoffending Mrs.
Smallweed, but it passes harmlessly on one side of her chair.

"I don't need to be told," returns the trooper, taking his pipe from
his lips for a moment and carrying his eyes back from following the
progress of the cushion to the pipe-bowl which is burning low, "that
he carried on heavily and went to ruin. I have been at his right hand
many a day when he was charging upon ruin full-gallop. I was with him
when he was sick and well, rich and poor. I laid this hand upon him
after he had run through everything and broken down everything
beneath him--when he held a pistol to his head."

"I wish he had let it off," says the benevolent old man, "and blown
his head into as many pieces as he owed pounds!"

"That would have been a smash indeed," returns the trooper coolly;
"any way, he had been young, hopeful, and handsome in the days gone
by, and I am glad I never found him, when he was neither, to lead to
a result so much to his advantage. That's reason number one."

"I hope number two's as good?" snarls the old man.

"Why, no. It's more of a selfish reason. If I had found him, I must
have gone to the other world to look. He was there."

"How do you know he was there?"

"He wasn't here."

"How do you know he wasn't here?"

"Don't lose your temper as well as your money," says Mr. George,
calmly knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "He was drowned long
before. I am convinced of it. He went over a ship's side. Whether
intentionally or accidentally, I don't know. Perhaps your friend in
the city does. Do you know what that tune is, Mr. Smallweed?" he adds
after breaking off to whistle one, accompanied on the table with the
empty pipe.

"Tune!" replied the old man. "No. We never have tunes here."

"That's the Dead March in Saul. They bury soldiers to it,
so it's the natural end of the subject. Now, if your pretty
granddaughter--excuse me, miss--will condescend to take care of this
pipe for two months, we shall save the cost of one next time. Good
evening, Mr. Smallweed!"

"My dear friend!" the old man gives him both his hands.

"So you think your friend in the city will be hard upon me if I fall
in a payment?" says the trooper, looking down upon him like a giant.

"My dear friend, I am afraid he will," returns the old man, looking
up at him like a pygmy.

Mr. George laughs, and with a glance at Mr. Smallweed and a parting
salutation to the scornful Judy, strides out of the parlour, clashing
imaginary sabres and other metallic appurtenances as he goes.

"You're a damned rogue," says the old gentleman, making a hideous
grimace at the door as he shuts it. "But I'll lime you, you dog, I'll
lime you!"

After this amiable remark, his spirit soars into those enchanting
regions of reflection which its education and pursuits have opened to
it, and again he and Mrs. Smallweed while away the rosy hours, two
unrelieved sentinels forgotten as aforesaid by the Black Serjeant.

While the twain are faithful to their post, Mr. George strides
through the streets with a massive kind of swagger and a grave-enough
face. It is eight o'clock now, and the day is fast drawing in. He
stops hard by Waterloo Bridge and reads a playbill, decides to go to
Astley's Theatre. Being there, is much delighted with the horses and
the feats of strength; looks at the weapons with a critical eye;
disapproves of the combats as giving evidences of unskilful
swordsmanship; but is touched home by the sentiments. In the last
scene, when the Emperor of Tartary gets up into a cart and
condescends to bless the united lovers by hovering over them with the
Union Jack, his eyelashes are moistened with emotion.

The theatre over, Mr. George comes across the water again and makes
his way to that curious region lying about the Haymarket and
Leicester Square which is a centre of attraction to indifferent
foreign hotels and indifferent foreigners, racket-courts,
fighting-men, swordsmen, footguards, old china, gaming-houses,
exhibitions, and a large medley of shabbiness and shrinking out of
sight. Penetrating to the heart of this region, he arrives by a court
and a long whitewashed passage at a great brick building composed of
bare walls, floors, roof-rafters, and skylights, on the front of
which, if it can be said to have any front, is painted GEORGE'S
SHOOTING GALLERY, &c.

Into George's Shooting Gallery, &c., he goes; and in it there are
gaslights (partly turned off now), and two whitened targets for
rifle-shooting, and archery accommodation, and fencing appliances,
and all necessaries for the British art of boxing. None of these
sports or exercises being pursued in George's Shooting Gallery
to-night, which is so devoid of company that a little grotesque man
with a large head has it all to himself and lies asleep upon the
floor.

The little man is dressed something like a gunsmith, in a green-baize
apron and cap; and his face and hands are dirty with gunpowder and
begrimed with the loading of guns. As he lies in the light before a
glaring white target, the black upon him shines again. Not far off is
the strong, rough, primitive table with a vice upon it at which he
has been working. He is a little man with a face all crushed
together, who appears, from a certain blue and speckled appearance
that one of his cheeks presents, to have been blown up, in the way of
business, at some odd time or times.

"Phil!" says the trooper in a quiet voice.

"All right!" cries Phil, scrambling to his feet.

"Anything been doing?"

"Flat as ever so much swipes," says Phil. "Five dozen rifle and a
dozen pistol. As to aim!" Phil gives a howl at the recollection.

"Shut up shop, Phil!"

As Phil moves about to execute this order, it appears that he is
lame, though able to move very quickly. On the speckled side of his
face he has no eyebrow, and on the other side he has a bushy black
one, which want of uniformity gives him a very singular and rather
sinister appearance. Everything seems to have happened to his hands
that could possibly take place consistently with the retention of all
the fingers, for they are notched, and seamed, and crumpled all over.
He appears to be very strong and lifts heavy benches about as if he
had no idea what weight was. He has a curious way of limping round
the gallery with his shoulder against the wall and tacking off at
objects he wants to lay hold of instead of going straight to them,
which has left a smear all round the four walls, conventionally
called "Phil's mark."

This custodian of George's Gallery in George's absence concludes his
proceedings, when he has locked the great doors and turned out all
the lights but one, which he leaves to glimmer, by dragging out from
a wooden cabin in a corner two mattresses and bedding. These being
drawn to opposite ends of the gallery, the trooper makes his own bed
and Phil makes his.

"Phil!" says the master, walking towards him without his coat and
waistcoat, and looking more soldierly than ever in his braces. "You
were found in a doorway, weren't you?"

"Gutter," says Phil. "Watchman tumbled over me."

"Then vagabondizing came natural to YOU from the beginning."

"As nat'ral as possible," says Phil.

"Good night!"

"Good night, guv'ner."

Phil cannot even go straight to bed, but finds it necessary to
shoulder round two sides of the gallery and then tack off at his
mattress. The trooper, after taking a turn or two in the
rifle-distance and looking up at the moon now shining through the
skylights, strides to his own mattress by a shorter route and goes to
bed too.




CHAPTER XXII

Mr. Bucket


Allegory looks pretty cool in Lincoln's Inn Fields, though the
evening is hot, for both Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows are wide open, and
the room is lofty, gusty, and gloomy. These may not be desirable
characteristics when November comes with fog and sleet or January
with ice and snow, but they have their merits in the sultry long
vacation weather. They enable Allegory, though it has cheeks like
peaches, and knees like bunches of blossoms, and rosy swellings for
calves to its legs and muscles to its arms, to look tolerably cool
to-night.

Plenty of dust comes in at Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows, and plenty more
has generated among his furniture and papers. It lies thick
everywhere. When a breeze from the country that has lost its way
takes fright and makes a blind hurry to rush out again, it flings as
much dust in the eyes of Allegory as the law--or Mr. Tulkinghorn, one
of its trustiest representatives--may scatter, on occasion, in the
eyes of the laity.

In his lowering magazine of dust, the universal article into which
his papers and himself, and all his clients, and all things of earth,
animate and inanimate, are resolving, Mr. Tulkinghorn sits at one of
the open windows enjoying a bottle of old port. Though a hard-grained
man, close, dry, and silent, he can enjoy old wine with the best. He
has a priceless bin of port in some artful cellar under the Fields,
which is one of his many secrets. When he dines alone in chambers, as
he has dined to-day, and has his bit of fish and his steak or chicken
brought in from the coffee-house, he descends with a candle to the
echoing regions below the deserted mansion, and heralded by a remote
reverberation of thundering doors, comes gravely back encircled by an
earthy atmosphere and carrying a bottle from which he pours a radiant
nectar, two score and ten years old, that blushes in the glass to
find itself so famous and fills the whole room with the fragrance of
southern grapes.

Mr. Tulkinghorn, sitting in the twilight by the open window, enjoys
his wine. As if it whispered to him of its fifty years of silence and
seclusion, it shuts him up the closer. More impenetrable than ever,
he sits, and drinks, and mellows as it were in secrecy, pondering at
that twilight hour on all the mysteries he knows, associated with
darkening woods in the country, and vast blank shut-up houses in
town, and perhaps sparing a thought or two for himself, and his
family history, and his money, and his will--all a mystery to every
one--and that one bachelor friend of his, a man of the same mould and
a lawyer too, who lived the same kind of life until he was
seventy-five years old, and then suddenly conceiving (as it is
supposed) an impression that it was too monotonous, gave his gold
watch to his hair-dresser one summer evening and walked leisurely
home to the Temple and hanged himself.

But Mr. Tulkinghorn is not alone to-night to ponder at his usual
length. Seated at the same table, though with his chair modestly and
uncomfortably drawn a little way from it, sits a bald, mild, shining
man who coughs respectfully behind his hand when the lawyer bids him
fill his glass.

"Now, Snagsby," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "to go over this odd story
again."

"If you please, sir."

"You told me when you were so good as to step round here last
night--"

"For which I must ask you to excuse me if it was a liberty, sir; but
I remember that you had taken a sort of an interest in that person,
and I thought it possible that you might--just--wish--to--"

Mr. Tulkinghorn is not the man to help him to any conclusion or to
admit anything as to any possibility concerning himself. So Mr.
Snagsby trails off into saying, with an awkward cough, "I must ask
you to excuse the liberty, sir, I am sure."

"Not at all," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "You told me, Snagsby, that you
put on your hat and came round without mentioning your intention to
your wife. That was prudent I think, because it's not a matter of
such importance that it requires to be mentioned."

"Well, sir," returns Mr. Snagsby, "you see, my little woman is--not
to put too fine a point upon it--inquisitive. She's inquisitive. Poor
little thing, she's liable to spasms, and it's good for her to have
her mind employed. In consequence of which she employs it--I should
say upon every individual thing she can lay hold of, whether it
concerns her or not--especially not. My little woman has a very
active mind, sir."

Mr. Snagsby drinks and murmurs with an admiring cough behind his
hand, "Dear me, very fine wine indeed!"

"Therefore you kept your visit to yourself last night?" says Mr.
Tulkinghorn. "And to-night too?"

"Yes, sir, and to-night, too. My little woman is at present in--not
to put too fine a point on it--in a pious state, or in what she
considers such, and attends the Evening Exertions (which is the name
they go by) of a reverend party of the name of Chadband. He has a
great deal of eloquence at his command, undoubtedly, but I am not
quite favourable to his style myself. That's neither here nor there.
My little woman being engaged in that way made it easier for me to
step round in a quiet manner."

Mr. Tulkinghorn assents. "Fill your glass, Snagsby."

"Thank you, sir, I am sure," returns the stationer with his cough of
deference. "This is wonderfully fine wine, sir!"

"It is a rare wine now," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "It is fifty years
old."

"Is it indeed, sir? But I am not surprised to hear it, I am sure. It
might be--any age almost." After rendering this general tribute to
the port, Mr. Snagsby in his modesty coughs an apology behind his
hand for drinking anything so precious.

"Will you run over, once again, what the boy said?" asks Mr.
Tulkinghorn, putting his hands into the pockets of his rusty
smallclothes and leaning quietly back in his chair.

"With pleasure, sir."

Then, with fidelity, though with some prolixity, the law-stationer
repeats Jo's statement made to the assembled guests at his house. On
coming to the end of his narrative, he gives a great start and breaks
off with, "Dear me, sir, I wasn't aware there was any other gentleman
present!"

Mr. Snagsby is dismayed to see, standing with an attentive face
between himself and the lawyer at a little distance from the table, a
person with a hat and stick in his hand who was not there when he
himself came in and has not since entered by the door or by either of
the windows. There is a press in the room, but its hinges have not
creaked, nor has a step been audible upon the floor. Yet this third
person stands there with his attentive face, and his hat and stick in
his hands, and his hands behind him, a composed and quiet listener.
He is a stoutly built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in black, of
about the middle-age. Except that he looks at Mr. Snagsby as if he
were going to take his portrait, there is nothing remarkable about
him at first sight but his ghostly manner of appearing.

"Don't mind this gentleman," says Mr. Tulkinghorn in his quiet way.
"This is only Mr. Bucket."

"Oh, indeed, sir?" returns the stationer, expressing by a cough that
he is quite in the dark as to who Mr. Bucket may be.

"I wanted him to hear this story," says the lawyer, "because I have
half a mind (for a reason) to know more of it, and he is very
intelligent in such things. What do you say to this, Bucket?"

"It's very plain, sir. Since our people have moved this boy on, and
he's not to be found on his old lay, if Mr. Snagsby don't object to
go down with me to Tom-all-Alone's and point him out, we can have him
here in less than a couple of hours' time. I can do it without Mr.
Snagsby, of course, but this is the shortest way."

"Mr. Bucket is a detective officer, Snagsby," says the lawyer in
explanation.

"Is he indeed, sir?" says Mr. Snagsby with a strong tendency in his
clump of hair to stand on end.

"And if you have no real objection to accompany Mr. Bucket to the
place in question," pursues the lawyer, "I shall feel obliged to you
if you will do so."

In a moment's hesitation on the part of Mr. Snagsby, Bucket dips down
to the bottom of his mind.

"Don't you be afraid of hurting the boy," he says. "You won't do
that. It's all right as far as the boy's concerned. We shall only
bring him here to ask him a question or so I want to put to him, and
he'll be paid for his trouble and sent away again. It'll be a good
job for him. I promise you, as a man, that you shall see the boy sent
away all right. Don't you be afraid of hurting him; you an't going to
do that."

"Very well, Mr. Tulkinghorn!" cries Mr. Snagsby cheerfully. And
reassured, "Since that's the case--"

"Yes! And lookee here, Mr. Snagsby," resumes Bucket, taking him aside
by the arm, tapping him familiarly on the breast, and speaking in a
confidential tone. "You're a man of the world, you know, and a man of
business, and a man of sense. That's what YOU are."

"I am sure I am much obliged to you for your good opinion," returns
the stationer with his cough of modesty, "but--"

"That's what YOU are, you know," says Bucket. "Now, it an't necessary
to say to a man like you, engaged in your business, which is a
business of trust and requires a person to be wide awake and have his
senses about him and his head screwed on tight (I had an uncle in
your business once)--it an't necessary to say to a man like you that
it's the best and wisest way to keep little matters like this quiet.
Don't you see? Quiet!"

"Certainly, certainly," returns the other.

"I don't mind telling YOU," says Bucket with an engaging appearance
of frankness, "that as far as I can understand it, there seems to be
a doubt whether this dead person wasn't entitled to a little
property, and whether this female hasn't been up to some games
respecting that property, don't you see?"

"Oh!" says Mr. Snagsby, but not appearing to see quite distinctly.

"Now, what YOU want," pursues Bucket, again tapping Mr. Snagsby on
the breast in a comfortable and soothing manner, "is that every
person should have their rights according to justice. That's what YOU
want."

"To be sure," returns Mr. Snagsby with a nod.

"On account of which, and at the same time to oblige a--do you call
it, in your business, customer or client? I forget how my uncle used
to call it."

"Why, I generally say customer myself," replies Mr. Snagsby.

"You're right!" returns Mr. Bucket, shaking hands with him quite
affectionately. "--On account of which, and at the same time to
oblige a real good customer, you mean to go down with me, in
confidence, to Tom-all-Alone's and to keep the whole thing quiet ever
afterwards and never mention it to any one. That's about your
intentions, if I understand you?"

"You are right, sir. You are right," says Mr. Snagsby.

"Then here's your hat," returns his new friend, quite as intimate
with it as if he had made it; "and if you're ready, I am."

They leave Mr. Tulkinghorn, without a ruffle on the surface of his
unfathomable depths, drinking his old wine, and go down into the
streets.

"You don't happen to know a very good sort of person of the name of
Gridley, do you?" says Bucket in friendly converse as they descend
the stairs.

"No," says Mr. Snagsby, considering, "I don't know anybody of that
name. Why?"

"Nothing particular," says Bucket; "only having allowed his temper to
get a little the better of him and having been threatening some
respectable people, he is keeping out of the way of a warrant I have
got against him--which it's a pity that a man of sense should do."

As they walk along, Mr. Snagsby observes, as a novelty, that however
quick their pace may be, his companion still seems in some
undefinable manner to lurk and lounge; also, that whenever he is
going to turn to the right or left, he pretends to have a fixed
purpose in his mind of going straight ahead, and wheels off, sharply,
at the very last moment. Now and then, when they pass a
police-constable on his beat, Mr. Snagsby notices that both the
constable and his guide fall into a deep abstraction as they come
towards each other, and appear entirely to overlook each other, and
to gaze into space. In a few instances, Mr. Bucket, coming behind
some under-sized young man with a shining hat on, and his sleek hair
twisted into one flat curl on each side of his head, almost without
glancing at him touches him with his stick, upon which the young man,
looking round, instantly evaporates. For the most part Mr. Bucket
notices things in general, with a face as unchanging as the great
mourning ring on his little finger or the brooch, composed of not
much diamond and a good deal of setting, which he wears in his shirt.

When they come at last to Tom-all-Alone's, Mr. Bucket stops for a
moment at the corner and takes a lighted bull's-eye from the
constable on duty there, who then accompanies him with his own
particular bull's-eye at his waist. Between his two conductors, Mr.
Snagsby passes along the middle of a villainous street, undrained,
unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water--though the roads
are dry elsewhere--and reeking with such smells and sights that he,
who has lived in London all his life, can scarce believe his senses.
Branching from this street and its heaps of ruins are other streets
and courts so infamous that Mr. Snagsby sickens in body and mind and
feels as if he were going every moment deeper down into the infernal
gulf.

"Draw off a bit here, Mr. Snagsby," says Bucket as a kind of shabby
palanquin is borne towards them, surrounded by a noisy crowd. "Here's
the fever coming up the street!"

As the unseen wretch goes by, the crowd, leaving that object of
attraction, hovers round the three visitors like a dream of horrible
faces and fades away up alleys and into ruins and behind walls, and
with occasional cries and shrill whistles of warning, thenceforth
flits about them until they leave the place.

"Are those the fever-houses, Darby?" Mr. Bucket coolly asks as he
turns his bull's-eye on a line of stinking ruins.

Darby replies that "all them are," and further that in all, for
months and months, the people "have been down by dozens" and have
been carried out dead and dying "like sheep with the rot." Bucket
observing to Mr. Snagsby as they go on again that he looks a little
poorly, Mr. Snagsby answers that he feels as if he couldn't breathe
the dreadful air.

There is inquiry made at various houses for a boy named Jo. As few
people are known in Tom-all-Alone's by any Christian sign, there is
much reference to Mr. Snagsby whether he means Carrots, or the
Colonel, or Gallows, or Young Chisel, or Terrier Tip, or Lanky, or
the Brick. Mr. Snagsby describes over and over again. There are
conflicting opinions respecting the original of his picture. Some
think it must be Carrots, some say the Brick. The Colonel is
produced, but is not at all near the thing. Whenever Mr. Snagsby and
his conductors are stationary, the crowd flows round, and from its
squalid depths obsequious advice heaves up to Mr. Bucket. Whenever
they move, and the angry bull's-eyes glare, it fades away and flits
about them up the alleys, and in the ruins, and behind the walls, as
before.

At last there is a lair found out where Toughy, or the Tough Subject,
lays him down at night; and it is thought that the Tough Subject may
be Jo. Comparison of notes between Mr. Snagsby and the proprietress
of the house--a drunken face tied up in a black bundle, and flaring
out of a heap of rags on the floor of a dog-hutch which is her
private apartment--leads to the establishment of this conclusion.
Toughy has gone to the doctor's to get a bottle of stuff for a sick
woman but will be here anon.

"And who have we got here to-night?" says Mr. Bucket, opening another
door and glaring in with his bull's-eye. "Two drunken men, eh? And
two women? The men are sound enough," turning back each sleeper's arm
from his face to look at him. "Are these your good men, my dears?"

"Yes, sir," returns one of the women. "They are our husbands."

"Brickmakers, eh?"

"Yes, sir."

"What are you doing here? You don't belong to London."

"No, sir. We belong to Hertfordshire."

"Whereabouts in Hertfordshire?"

"Saint Albans."

"Come up on the tramp?"

"We walked up yesterday. There's no work down with us at present, but
we have done no good by coming here, and shall do none, I expect."

"That's not the way to do much good," says Mr. Bucket, turning his
head in the direction of the unconscious figures on the ground.

"It an't indeed," replies the woman with a sigh. "Jenny and me knows
it full well."

The room, though two or three feet higher than the door, is so low
that the head of the tallest of the visitors would touch the
blackened ceiling if he stood upright. It is offensive to every
sense; even the gross candle burns pale and sickly in the polluted
air. There are a couple of benches and a higher bench by way of
table. The men lie asleep where they stumbled down, but the women sit
by the candle. Lying in the arms of the woman who has spoken is a
very young child.

"Why, what age do you call that little creature?" says Bucket. "It
looks as if it was born yesterday." He is not at all rough about it;
and as he turns his light gently on the infant, Mr. Snagsby is
strangely reminded of another infant, encircled with light, that he
has seen in pictures.

"He is not three weeks old yet, sir," says the woman.

"Is he your child?"

"Mine."

The other woman, who was bending over it when they came in, stoops
down again and kisses it as it lies asleep.

"You seem as fond of it as if you were the mother yourself," says Mr.
Bucket.

"I was the mother of one like it, master, and it died."

"Ah, Jenny, Jenny!" says the other woman to her. "Better so. Much
better to think of dead than alive, Jenny! Much better!"

"Why, you an't such an unnatural woman, I hope," returns Bucket
sternly, "as to wish your own child dead?"

"God knows you are right, master," she returns. "I am not. I'd stand
between it and death with my own life if I could, as true as any
pretty lady."

"Then don't talk in that wrong manner," says Mr. Bucket, mollified
again. "Why do you do it?"

"It's brought into my head, master," returns the woman, her eyes
filling with tears, "when I look down at the child lying so. If it
was never to wake no more, you'd think me mad, I should take on so. I
know that very well. I was with Jenny when she lost hers--warn't I,
Jenny?--and I know how she grieved. But look around you at this
place. Look at them," glancing at the sleepers on the ground. "Look
at the boy you're waiting for, who's gone out to do me a good turn.
Think of the children that your business lays with often and often,
and that YOU see grow up!"

"Well, well," says Mr. Bucket, "you train him respectable, and he'll
be a comfort to you, and look after you in your old age, you know."

"I mean to try hard," she answers, wiping her eyes. "But I have been
a-thinking, being over-tired to-night and not well with the ague, of
all the many things that'll come in his way. My master will be
against it, and he'll be beat, and see me beat, and made to fear his
home, and perhaps to stray wild. If I work for him ever so much, and
ever so hard, there's no one to help me; and if he should be turned
bad 'spite of all I could do, and the time should come when I should
sit by him in his sleep, made hard and changed, an't it likely I
should think of him as he lies in my lap now and wish he had died as
Jenny's child died!"

"There, there!" says Jenny. "Liz, you're tired and ill. Let me take
him."

In doing so, she displaces the mother's dress, but quickly readjusts
it over the wounded and bruised bosom where the baby has been lying.

"It's my dead child," says Jenny, walking up and down as she nurses,
"that makes me love this child so dear, and it's my dead child that
makes her love it so dear too, as even to think of its being taken
away from her now. While she thinks that, I think what fortune would
I give to have my darling back. But we mean the same thing, if we
knew how to say it, us two mothers does in our poor hearts!"

As Mr. Snagsby blows his nose and coughs his cough of sympathy, a
step is heard without. Mr. Bucket throws his light into the doorway
and says to Mr. Snagsby, "Now, what do you say to Toughy? Will HE
do?"

"That's Jo," says Mr. Snagsby.

Jo stands amazed in the disk of light, like a ragged figure in a
magic-lantern, trembling to think that he has offended against the
law in not having moved on far enough. Mr. Snagsby, however, giving
him the consolatory assurance, "It's only a job you will be paid for,
Jo," he recovers; and on being taken outside by Mr. Bucket for a
little private confabulation, tells his tale satisfactorily, though
out of breath.

"I have squared it with the lad," says Mr. Bucket, returning, "and
it's all right. Now, Mr. Snagsby, we're ready for you."

First, Jo has to complete his errand of good nature by handing over
the physic he has been to get, which he delivers with the laconic
verbal direction that "it's to be all took d'rectly." Secondly, Mr.
Snagsby has to lay upon the table half a crown, his usual panacea for
an immense variety of afflictions. Thirdly, Mr. Bucket has to take Jo
by the arm a little above the elbow and walk him on before him,
without which observance neither the Tough Subject nor any other
Subject could be professionally conducted to Lincoln's Inn Fields.
These arrangements completed, they give the women good night and come
out once more into black and foul Tom-all-Alone's.

By the noisome ways through which they descended into that pit, they
gradually emerge from it, the crowd flitting, and whistling, and
skulking about them until they come to the verge, where restoration
of the bull's-eyes is made to Darby. Here the crowd, like a concourse
of imprisoned demons, turns back, yelling, and is seen no more.
Through the clearer and fresher streets, never so clear and fresh to
Mr. Snagsby's mind as now, they walk and ride until they come to Mr.
Tulkinghorn's gate.

As they ascend the dim stairs (Mr. Tulkinghorn's chambers being on
the first floor), Mr. Bucket mentions that he has the key of the
outer door in his pocket and that there is no need to ring. For a man
so expert in most things of that kind, Bucket takes time to open the
door and makes some noise too. It may be that he sounds a note of
preparation.

Howbeit, they come at last into the hall, where a lamp is burning,
and so into Mr. Tulkinghorn's usual room--the room where he drank his
old wine to-night. He is not there, but his two old-fashioned
candlesticks are, and the room is tolerably light.

Mr. Bucket, still having his professional hold of Jo and appearing to
Mr. Snagsby to possess an unlimited number of eyes, makes a little
way into this room, when Jo starts and stops.

"What's the matter?" says Bucket in a whisper.

"There she is!" cries Jo.

"Who!"

"The lady!"

A female figure, closely veiled, stands in the middle of the room,
where the light falls upon it. It is quite still and silent. The
front of the figure is towards them, but it takes no notice of their
entrance and remains like a statue.

"Now, tell me," says Bucket aloud, "how you know that to be the
lady."

"I know the wale," replies Jo, staring, "and the bonnet, and the
gownd."

"Be quite sure of what you say, Tough," returns Bucket, narrowly
observant of him. "Look again."

"I am a-looking as hard as ever I can look," says Jo with starting
eyes, "and that there's the wale, the bonnet, and the gownd."

"What about those rings you told me of?" asks Bucket.

"A-sparkling all over here," says Jo, rubbing the fingers of his left
hand on the knuckles of his right without taking his eyes from the
figure.

The figure removes the right-hand glove and shows the hand.

"Now, what do you say to that?" asks Bucket.

Jo shakes his head. "Not rings a bit like them. Not a hand like
that."

"What are you talking of?" says Bucket, evidently pleased though, and
well pleased too.

"Hand was a deal whiter, a deal delicater, and a deal smaller,"
returns Jo.

"Why, you'll tell me I'm my own mother next," says Mr. Bucket. "Do
you recollect the lady's voice?"

"I think I does," says Jo.

The figure speaks. "Was it at all like this? I will speak as long as
you like if you are not sure. Was it this voice, or at all like this
voice?"

Jo looks aghast at Mr. Bucket. "Not a bit!"

"Then, what," retorts that worthy, pointing to the figure, "did you
say it was the lady for?"

"Cos," says Jo with a perplexed stare but without being at all shaken
in his certainty, "cos that there's the wale, the bonnet, and the
gownd. It is her and it an't her. It an't her hand, nor yet her
rings, nor yet her woice. But that there's the wale, the bonnet, and
the gownd, and they're wore the same way wot she wore 'em, and it's
her height wot she wos, and she giv me a sov'ring and hooked it."

"Well!" says Mr. Bucket slightly, "we haven't got much good out of
YOU. But, however, here's five shillings for you. Take care how you
spend it, and don't get yourself into trouble." Bucket stealthily
tells the coins from one hand into the other like counters--which is
a way he has, his principal use of them being in these games of
skill--and then puts them, in a little pile, into the boy's hand and
takes him out to the door, leaving Mr. Snagsby, not by any means
comfortable under these mysterious circumstances, alone with the
veiled figure. But on Mr. Tulkinghorn's coming into the room, the
veil is raised and a sufficiently good-looking Frenchwoman is
revealed, though her expression is something of the intensest.

"Thank you, Mademoiselle Hortense," says Mr. Tulkinghorn with his
usual equanimity. "I will give you no further trouble about this
little wager."

"You will do me the kindness to remember, sir, that I am not at
present placed?" says mademoiselle.

"Certainly, certainly!"

"And to confer upon me the favour of your distinguished
recommendation?"

"By all means, Mademoiselle Hortense."

"A word from Mr. Tulkinghorn is so powerful."

"It shall not be wanting, mademoiselle."

"Receive the assurance of my devoted gratitude, dear sir."

"Good night."

Mademoiselle goes out with an air of native gentility; and Mr.
Bucket, to whom it is, on an emergency, as natural to be groom of the
ceremonies as it is to be anything else, shows her downstairs, not
without gallantry.

"Well, Bucket?" quoth Mr. Tulkinghorn on his return.

"It's all squared, you see, as I squared it myself, sir. There an't a
doubt that it was the other one with this one's dress on. The boy was
exact respecting colours and everything. Mr. Snagsby, I promised you
as a man that he should be sent away all right. Don't say it wasn't
done!"

"You have kept your word, sir," returns the stationer; "and if I can
be of no further use, Mr. Tulkinghorn, I think, as my little woman
will be getting anxious--"

"Thank you, Snagsby, no further use," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "I am
quite indebted to you for the trouble you have taken already."

"Not at all, sir. I wish you good night."

"You see, Mr. Snagsby," says Mr. Bucket, accompanying him to the door
and shaking hands with him over and over again, "what I like in you
is that you're a man it's of no use pumping; that's what YOU are.
When you know you have done a right thing, you put it away, and it's
done with and gone, and there's an end of it. That's what YOU do."

"That is certainly what I endeavour to do, sir," returns Mr. Snagsby.

"No, you don't do yourself justice. It an't what you endeavour to
do," says Mr. Bucket, shaking hands with him and blessing him in the
tenderest manner, "it's what you DO. That's what I estimate in a man
in your way of business."

Mr. Snagsby makes a suitable response and goes homeward so confused
by the events of the evening that he is doubtful of his being awake
and out--doubtful of the reality of the streets through which he
goes--doubtful of the reality of the moon that shines above him. He
is presently reassured on these subjects by the unchallengeable
reality of Mrs. Snagsby, sitting up with her head in a perfect
beehive of curl-papers and night-cap, who has dispatched Guster to
the police-station with official intelligence of her husband's being
made away with, and who within the last two hours has passed through
every stage of swooning with the greatest decorum. But as the little
woman feelingly says, many thanks she gets for it!




CHAPTER XXIII

Esther's Narrative


We came home from Mr. Boythorn's after six pleasant weeks. We were
often in the park and in the woods and seldom passed the lodge where
we had taken shelter without looking in to speak to the keeper's
wife; but we saw no more of Lady Dedlock, except at church on
Sundays. There was company at Chesney Wold; and although several
beautiful faces surrounded her, her face retained the same influence
on me as at first. I do not quite know even now whether it was
painful or pleasurable, whether it drew me towards her or made me
shrink from her. I think I admired her with a kind of fear, and I
know that in her presence my thoughts always wandered back, as they
had done at first, to that old time of my life.

I had a fancy, on more than one of these Sundays, that what this lady
so curiously was to me, I was to her--I mean that I disturbed her
thoughts as she influenced mine, though in some different way. But
when I stole a glance at her and saw her so composed and distant and
unapproachable, I felt this to be a foolish weakness. Indeed, I felt
the whole state of my mind in reference to her to be weak and
unreasonable, and I remonstrated with myself about it as much as I
could.

One incident that occurred before we quitted Mr. Boythorn's house, I
had better mention in this place.

I was walking in the garden with Ada when I was told that some one
wished to see me. Going into the breakfast-room where this person was
waiting, I found it to be the French maid who had cast off her shoes
and walked through the wet grass on the day when it thundered and
lightened.

"Mademoiselle," she began, looking fixedly at me with her too-eager
eyes, though otherwise presenting an agreeable appearance and
speaking neither with boldness nor servility, "I have taken a great
liberty in coming here, but you know how to excuse it, being so
amiable, mademoiselle."

"No excuse is necessary," I returned, "if you wish to speak to me."

"That is my desire, mademoiselle. A thousand thanks for the
permission. I have your leave to speak. Is it not?" she said in a
quick, natural way.

"Certainly," said I.

"Mademoiselle, you are so amiable! Listen then, if you please. I have
left my Lady. We could not agree. My Lady is so high, so very high.
Pardon! Mademoiselle, you are right!" Her quickness anticipated what
I might have said presently but as yet had only thought. "It is not
for me to come here to complain of my Lady. But I say she is so high,
so very high. I will not say a word more. All the world knows that."

"Go on, if you please," said I.

"Assuredly; mademoiselle, I am thankful for your politeness.
Mademoiselle, I have an inexpressible desire to find service with a
young lady who is good, accomplished, beautiful. You are good,
accomplished, and beautiful as an angel. Ah, could I have the honour
of being your domestic!"

"I am sorry--" I began.

"Do not dismiss me so soon, mademoiselle!" she said with an
involuntary contraction of her fine black eyebrows. "Let me hope a
moment! Mademoiselle, I know this service would be more retired than
that which I have quitted. Well! I wish that. I know this service
would be less distinguished than that which I have quitted. Well! I
wish that, I know that I should win less, as to wages here. Good. I
am content."

"I assure you," said I, quite embarrassed by the mere idea of having
such an attendant, "that I keep no maid--"

"Ah, mademoiselle, but why not? Why not, when you can have one so
devoted to you! Who would be enchanted to serve you; who would be so
true, so zealous, and so faithful every day! Mademoiselle, I wish
with all my heart to serve you. Do not speak of money at present.
Take me as I am. For nothing!"

She was so singularly earnest that I drew back, almost afraid of her.
Without appearing to notice it, in her ardour she still pressed
herself upon me, speaking in a rapid subdued voice, though always
with a certain grace and propriety.

"Mademoiselle, I come from the South country where we are quick and
where we like and dislike very strong. My Lady was too high for me; I
was too high for her. It is done--past--finished! Receive me as your
domestic, and I will serve you well. I will do more for you than you
figure to yourself now. Chut! Mademoiselle, I will--no matter, I will
do my utmost possible in all things. If you accept my service, you
will not repent it. Mademoiselle, you will not repent it, and I will
serve you well. You don't know how well!"

There was a lowering energy in her face as she stood looking at me
while I explained the impossibility of my engaging her (without
thinking it necessary to say how very little I desired to do so),
which seemed to bring visibly before me some woman from the streets
of Paris in the reign of terror.

She heard me out without interruption and then said with her pretty
accent and in her mildest voice, "Hey, mademoiselle, I have received
my answer! I am sorry of it. But I must go elsewhere and seek what I
have not found here. Will you graciously let me kiss your hand?"

She looked at me more intently as she took it, and seemed to take
note, with her momentary touch, of every vein in it. "I fear I
surprised you, mademoiselle, on the day of the storm?" she said with
a parting curtsy.

I confessed that she had surprised us all.

"I took an oath, mademoiselle," she said, smiling, "and I wanted to
stamp it on my mind so that I might keep it faithfully. And I will!
Adieu, mademoiselle!"

So ended our conference, which I was very glad to bring to a close. I
supposed she went away from the village, for I saw her no more; and
nothing else occurred to disturb our tranquil summer pleasures until
six weeks were out and we returned home as I began just now by
saying.

At that time, and for a good many weeks after that time, Richard was
constant in his visits. Besides coming every Saturday or Sunday and
remaining with us until Monday morning, he sometimes rode out on
horseback unexpectedly and passed the evening with us and rode back
again early next day. He was as vivacious as ever and told us he was
very industrious, but I was not easy in my mind about him. It
appeared to me that his industry was all misdirected. I could not
find that it led to anything but the formation of delusive hopes in
connexion with the suit already the pernicious cause of so much
sorrow and ruin. He had got at the core of that mystery now, he told
us, and nothing could be plainer than that the will under which he
and Ada were to take I don't know how many thousands of pounds must
be finally established if there were any sense or justice in the
Court of Chancery--but oh, what a great IF that sounded in my
ears--and that this happy conclusion could not be much longer
delayed. He proved this to himself by all the weary arguments on that
side he had read, and every one of them sunk him deeper in the
infatuation. He had even begun to haunt the court. He told us how he
saw Miss Flite there daily, how they talked together, and how he did
her little kindnesses, and how, while he laughed at her, he pitied
her from his heart. But he never thought--never, my poor, dear,
sanguine Richard, capable of so much happiness then, and with such
better things before him--what a fatal link was riveting between his
fresh youth and her faded age, between his free hopes and her caged
birds, and her hungry garret, and her wandering mind.

Ada loved him too well to mistrust him much in anything he said or
did, and my guardian, though he frequently complained of the east
wind and read more than usual in the growlery, preserved a strict
silence on the subject. So I thought one day when I went to London to
meet Caddy Jellyby, at her solicitation, I would ask Richard to be in
waiting for me at the coach-office, that we might have a little talk
together. I found him there when I arrived, and we walked away arm in
arm.

"Well, Richard," said I as soon as I could begin to be grave with
him, "are you beginning to feel more settled now?"

"Oh, yes, my dear!" returned Richard. "I'm all right enough."

"But settled?" said I.

"How do you mean, settled?" returned Richard with his gay laugh.

"Settled in the law," said I.

"Oh, aye," replied Richard, "I'm all right enough."

"You said that before, my dear Richard."

"And you don't think it's an answer, eh? Well! Perhaps it's not.
Settled? You mean, do I feel as if I were settling down?"

"Yes."

"Why, no, I can't say I am settling down," said Richard, strongly
emphasizing "down," as if that expressed the difficulty, "because one
can't settle down while this business remains in such an unsettled
state. When I say this business, of course I mean the--forbidden
subject."

"Do you think it will ever be in a settled state?" said I.

"Not the least doubt of it," answered Richard.

We walked a little way without speaking, and presently Richard
addressed me in his frankest and most feeling manner, thus: "My dear
Esther, I understand you, and I wish to heaven I were a more constant
sort of fellow. I don't mean constant to Ada, for I love her
dearly--better and better every day--but constant to myself.
(Somehow, I mean something that I can't very well express, but you'll
make it out.) If I were a more constant sort of fellow, I should have
held on either to Badger or to Kenge and Carboy like grim death, and
should have begun to be steady and systematic by this time, and
shouldn't be in debt, and--"

"ARE you in debt, Richard?"

"Yes," said Richard, "I am a little so, my dear. Also, I have taken
rather too much to billiards and that sort of thing. Now the murder's
out; you despise me, Esther, don't you?"

"You know I don't," said I.

"You are kinder to me than I often am to myself," he returned. "My
dear Esther, I am a very unfortunate dog not to be more settled, but
how CAN I be more settled? If you lived in an unfinished house, you
couldn't settle down in it; if you were condemned to leave everything
you undertook unfinished, you would find it hard to apply yourself to
anything; and yet that's my unhappy case. I was born into this
unfinished contention with all its chances and changes, and it began
to unsettle me before I quite knew the difference between a suit at
law and a suit of clothes; and it has gone on unsettling me ever
since; and here I am now, conscious sometimes that I am but a
worthless fellow to love my confiding cousin Ada."

We were in a solitary place, and he put his hands before his eyes and
sobbed as he said the words.

"Oh, Richard!" said I. "Do not be so moved. You have a noble nature,
and Ada's love may make you worthier every day."

"I know, my dear," he replied, pressing my arm, "I know all that. You
mustn't mind my being a little soft now, for I have had all this upon
my mind for a long time, and have often meant to speak to you, and
have sometimes wanted opportunity and sometimes courage. I know what
the thought of Ada ought to do for me, but it doesn't do it. I am too
unsettled even for that. I love her most devotedly, and yet I do her
wrong, in doing myself wrong, every day and hour. But it can't last
for ever. We shall come on for a final hearing and get judgment in
our favour, and then you and Ada shall see what I can really be!"

It had given me a pang to hear him sob and see the tears start out
between his fingers, but that was infinitely less affecting to me
than the hopeful animation with which he said these words.

"I have looked well into the papers, Esther. I have been deep in them
for months," he continued, recovering his cheerfulness in a moment,
"and you may rely upon it that we shall come out triumphant. As to
years of delay, there has been no want of them, heaven knows! And
there is the greater probability of our bringing the matter to a
speedy close; in fact, it's on the paper now. It will be all right at
last, and then you shall see!"

Recalling how he had just now placed Messrs. Kenge and Carboy in the
same category with Mr. Badger, I asked him when he intended to be
articled in Lincoln's Inn.

"There again! I think not at all, Esther," he returned with an
effort. "I fancy I have had enough of it. Having worked at Jarndyce
and Jarndyce like a galley slave, I have slaked my thirst for the law
and satisfied myself that I shouldn't like it. Besides, I find it
unsettles me more and more to be so constantly upon the scene of
action. So what," continued Richard, confident again by this time,
"do I naturally turn my thoughts to?"

"I can't imagine," said I.

"Don't look so serious," returned Richard, "because it's the best
thing I can do, my dear Esther, I am certain. It's not as if I wanted
a profession for life. These proceedings will come to a termination,
and then I am provided for. No. I look upon it as a pursuit which is
in its nature more or less unsettled, and therefore suited to my
temporary condition--I may say, precisely suited. What is it that I
naturally turn my thoughts to?"

I looked at him and shook my head.

"What," said Richard, in a tone of perfect conviction, "but the
army!"

"The army?" said I.

"The army, of course. What I have to do is to get a commission;
and--there I am, you know!" said Richard.

And then he showed me, proved by elaborate calculations in his
pocket-book, that supposing he had contracted, say, two hundred
pounds of debt in six months out of the army; and that he contracted
no debt at all within a corresponding period in the army--as to which
he had quite made up his mind; this step must involve a saving of
four hundred pounds in a year, or two thousand pounds in five years,
which was a considerable sum. And then he spoke so ingenuously and
sincerely of the sacrifice he made in withdrawing himself for a time
from Ada, and of the earnestness with which he aspired--as in thought
he always did, I know full well--to repay her love, and to ensure her
happiness, and to conquer what was amiss in himself, and to acquire
the very soul of decision, that he made my heart ache keenly, sorely.
For, I thought, how would this end, how could this end, when so soon
and so surely all his manly qualities were touched by the fatal
blight that ruined everything it rested on!

I spoke to Richard with all the earnestness I felt, and all the hope
I could not quite feel then, and implored him for Ada's sake not to
put any trust in Chancery. To all I said, Richard readily assented,
riding over the court and everything else in his easy way and drawing
the brightest pictures of the character he was to settle into--alas,
when the grievous suit should loose its hold upon him! We had a long
talk, but it always came back to that, in substance.

At last we came to Soho Square, where Caddy Jellyby had appointed to
wait for me, as a quiet place in the neighbourhood of Newman Street.
Caddy was in the garden in the centre and hurried out as soon as I
appeared. After a few cheerful words, Richard left us together.

"Prince has a pupil over the way, Esther," said Caddy, "and got the
key for us. So if you will walk round and round here with me, we can
lock ourselves in and I can tell you comfortably what I wanted to see
your dear good face about."

"Very well, my dear," said I. "Nothing could be better." So Caddy,
after affectionately squeezing the dear good face as she called it,
locked the gate, and took my arm, and we began to walk round the
garden very cosily.

"You see, Esther," said Caddy, who thoroughly enjoyed a little
confidence, "after you spoke to me about its being wrong to marry
without Ma's knowledge, or even to keep Ma long in the dark
respecting our engagement--though I don't believe Ma cares much for
me, I must say--I thought it right to mention your opinions to
Prince. In the first place because I want to profit by everything you
tell me, and in the second place because I have no secrets from
Prince."

"I hope he approved, Caddy?"

"Oh, my dear! I assure you he would approve of anything you could
say. You have no idea what an opinion he has of you!"

"Indeed!"

"Esther, it's enough to make anybody but me jealous," said Caddy,
laughing and shaking her head; "but it only makes me joyful, for you
are the first friend I ever had, and the best friend I ever can have,
and nobody can respect and love you too much to please me."

"Upon my word, Caddy," said I, "you are in the general conspiracy to
keep me in a good humour. Well, my dear?"

"Well! I am going to tell you," replied Caddy, crossing her hands
confidentially upon my arm. "So we talked a good deal about it, and
so I said to Prince, 'Prince, as Miss Summerson--'"

"I hope you didn't say 'Miss Summerson'?"

"No. I didn't!" cried Caddy, greatly pleased and with the brightest
of faces. "I said, 'Esther.' I said to Prince, 'As Esther is
decidedly of that opinion, Prince, and has expressed it to me, and
always hints it when she writes those kind notes, which you are so
fond of hearing me read to you, I am prepared to disclose the truth
to Ma whenever you think proper. And I think, Prince,' said I, 'that
Esther thinks that I should be in a better, and truer, and more
honourable position altogether if you did the same to your papa.'"

"Yes, my dear," said I. "Esther certainly does think so."

"So I was right, you see!" exclaimed Caddy. "Well! This troubled
Prince a good deal, not because he had the least doubt about it, but
because he is so considerate of the feelings of old Mr. Turveydrop;
and he had his apprehensions that old Mr. Turveydrop might break his
heart, or faint away, or be very much overcome in some affecting
manner or other if he made such an announcement. He feared old Mr.
Turveydrop might consider it undutiful and might receive too great a
shock. For old Mr. Turveydrop's deportment is very beautiful, you
know, Esther," said Caddy, "and his feelings are extremely
sensitive."

"Are they, my dear?"

"Oh, extremely sensitive. Prince says so. Now, this has caused my
darling child--I didn't mean to use the expression to you, Esther,"
Caddy apologized, her face suffused with blushes, "but I generally
call Prince my darling child."

I laughed; and Caddy laughed and blushed, and went on.

"This has caused him, Esther--"

"Caused whom, my dear?"

"Oh, you tiresome thing!" said Caddy, laughing, with her pretty face
on fire. "My darling child, if you insist upon it! This has caused
him weeks of uneasiness and has made him delay, from day to day, in a
very anxious manner. At last he said to me, 'Caddy, if Miss
Summerson, who is a great favourite with my father, could be
prevailed upon to be present when I broke the subject, I think I
could do it.' So I promised I would ask you. And I made up my mind,
besides," said Caddy, looking at me hopefully but timidly, "that if
you consented, I would ask you afterwards to come with me to Ma. This
is what I meant when I said in my note that I had a great favour and
a great assistance to beg of you. And if you thought you could grant
it, Esther, we should both be very grateful."

"Let me see, Caddy," said I, pretending to consider. "Really, I think
I could do a greater thing than that if the need were pressing. I am
at your service and the darling child's, my dear, whenever you like."

Caddy was quite transported by this reply of mine, being, I believe,
as susceptible to the least kindness or encouragement as any tender
heart that ever beat in this world; and after another turn or two
round the garden, during which she put on an entirely new pair of
gloves and made herself as resplendent as possible that she might do
no avoidable discredit to the Master of Deportment, we went to Newman
Street direct.

Prince was teaching, of course. We found him engaged with a not very
hopeful pupil--a stubborn little girl with a sulky forehead, a deep
voice, and an inanimate, dissatisfied mama--whose case was certainly
not rendered more hopeful by the confusion into which we threw her
preceptor. The lesson at last came to an end, after proceeding as
discordantly as possible; and when the little girl had changed her
shoes and had had her white muslin extinguished in shawls, she was
taken away. After a few words of preparation, we then went in search
of Mr. Turveydrop, whom we found, grouped with his hat and gloves, as
a model of deportment, on the sofa in his private apartment--the only
comfortable room in the house. He appeared to have dressed at his
leisure in the intervals of a light collation, and his dressing-case,
brushes, and so forth, all of quite an elegant kind, lay about.

"Father, Miss Summerson; Miss Jellyby."

"Charmed! Enchanted!" said Mr. Turveydrop, rising with his
high-shouldered bow. "Permit me!" Handing chairs. "Be seated!"
Kissing the tips of his left fingers. "Overjoyed!" Shutting his eyes
and rolling. "My little retreat is made a paradise." Recomposing
himself on the sofa like the second gentleman in Europe.

"Again you find us, Miss Summerson," said he, "using our little arts
to polish, polish! Again the sex stimulates us and rewards us by the
condescension of its lovely presence. It is much in these times (and
we have made an awfully degenerating business of it since the days of
his Royal Highness the Prince Regent--my patron, if I may presume to
say so) to experience that deportment is not wholly trodden under
foot by mechanics. That it can yet bask in the smile of beauty, my
dear madam."

I said nothing, which I thought a suitable reply; and he took a pinch
of snuff.

"My dear son," said Mr. Turveydrop, "you have four schools this
afternoon. I would recommend a hasty sandwich."

"Thank you, father," returned Prince, "I will be sure to be punctual.
My dear father, may I beg you to prepare your mind for what I am
going to say?"

"Good heaven!" exclaimed the model, pale and aghast as Prince and
Caddy, hand in hand, bent down before him. "What is this? Is this
lunacy! Or what is this?"

"Father," returned Prince with great submission, "I love this young
lady, and we are engaged."

"Engaged!" cried Mr. Turveydrop, reclining on the sofa and shutting
out the sight with his hand. "An arrow launched at my brain by my own
child!"

"We have been engaged for some time, father," faltered Prince, "and
Miss Summerson, hearing of it, advised that we should declare the
fact to you and was so very kind as to attend on the present
occasion. Miss Jellyby is a young lady who deeply respects you,
father."

Mr. Turveydrop uttered a groan.

"No, pray don't! Pray don't, father," urged his son. "Miss Jellyby is
a young lady who deeply respects you, and our first desire is to
consider your comfort."

Mr. Turveydrop sobbed.

"No, pray don't, father!" cried his son.

"Boy," said Mr. Turveydrop, "it is well that your sainted mother is
spared this pang. Strike deep, and spare not. Strike home, sir,
strike home!"

"Pray don't say so, father," implored Prince, in tears. "It goes to
my heart. I do assure you, father, that our first wish and intention
is to consider your comfort. Caroline and I do not forget our
duty--what is my duty is Caroline's, as we have often said
together--and with your approval and consent, father, we will devote
ourselves to making your life agreeable."

"Strike home," murmured Mr. Turveydrop. "Strike home!" But he seemed
to listen, I thought, too.

"My dear father," returned Prince, "we well know what little comforts
you are accustomed to and have a right to, and it will always be our
study and our pride to provide those before anything. If you will
bless us with your approval and consent, father, we shall not think
of being married until it is quite agreeable to you; and when we ARE
married, we shall always make you--of course--our first
consideration. You must ever be the head and master here, father; and
we feel how truly unnatural it would be in us if we failed to know it
or if we failed to exert ourselves in every possible way to please
you."

Mr. Turveydrop underwent a severe internal struggle and came upright
on the sofa again with his cheeks puffing over his stiff cravat, a
perfect model of parental deportment.

"My son!" said Mr. Turveydrop. "My children! I cannot resist your
prayer. Be happy!"

His benignity as he raised his future daughter-in-law and stretched
out his hand to his son (who kissed it with affectionate respect and
gratitude) was the most confusing sight I ever saw.

"My children," said Mr. Turveydrop, paternally encircling Caddy with
his left arm as she sat beside him, and putting his right hand
gracefully on his hip. "My son and daughter, your happiness shall be
my care. I will watch over you. You shall always live with
me"--meaning, of course, I will always live with you--"this house is
henceforth as much yours as mine; consider it your home. May you long
live to share it with me!"

The power of his deportment was such that they really were as much
overcome with thankfulness as if, instead of quartering himself upon
them for the rest of his life, he were making some munificent
sacrifice in their favour.

"For myself, my children," said Mr. Turveydrop, "I am falling into
the sear and yellow leaf, and it is impossible to say how long the
last feeble traces of gentlemanly deportment may linger in this
weaving and spinning age. But, so long, I will do my duty to society
and will show myself, as usual, about town. My wants are few and
simple. My little apartment here, my few essentials for the toilet,
my frugal morning meal, and my little dinner will suffice. I charge
your dutiful affection with the supply of these requirements, and I
charge myself with all the rest."

They were overpowered afresh by his uncommon generosity.

"My son," said Mr. Turveydrop, "for those little points in which you
are deficient--points of deportment, which are born with a man, which
may be improved by cultivation, but can never be originated--you may
still rely on me. I have been faithful to my post since the days of
his Royal Highness the Prince Regent, and I will not desert it now.
No, my son. If you have ever contemplated your father's poor position
with a feeling of pride, you may rest assured that he will do nothing
to tarnish it. For yourself, Prince, whose character is different (we
cannot be all alike, nor is it advisable that we should), work, be
industrious, earn money, and extend the connexion as much as
possible."

"That you may depend I will do, dear father, with all my heart,"
replied Prince.

"I have no doubt of it," said Mr. Turveydrop. "Your qualities are not
shining, my dear child, but they are steady and useful. And to both
of you, my children, I would merely observe, in the spirit of a
sainted wooman on whose path I had the happiness of casting, I
believe, SOME ray of light, take care of the establishment, take care
of my simple wants, and bless you both!"

Old Mr. Turveydrop then became so very gallant, in honour of the
occasion, that I told Caddy we must really go to Thavies Inn at once
if we were to go at all that day. So we took our departure after a
very loving farewell between Caddy and her betrothed, and during our
walk she was so happy and so full of old Mr. Turveydrop's praises
that I would not have said a word in his disparagement for any
consideration.

The house in Thavies Inn had bills in the windows announcing that it
was to let, and it looked dirtier and gloomier and ghastlier than
ever. The name of poor Mr. Jellyby had appeared in the list of
bankrupts but a day or two before, and he was shut up in the
dining-room with two gentlemen and a heap of blue bags,
account-books, and papers, making the most desperate endeavours to
understand his affairs. They appeared to me to be quite beyond his
comprehension, for when Caddy took me into the dining-room by mistake
and we came upon Mr. Jellyby in his spectacles, forlornly fenced into
a corner by the great dining-table and the two gentlemen, he seemed
to have given up the whole thing and to be speechless and insensible.

Going upstairs to Mrs. Jellyby's room (the children were all
screaming in the kitchen, and there was no servant to be seen), we
found that lady in the midst of a voluminous correspondence, opening,
reading, and sorting letters, with a great accumulation of torn
covers on the floor. She was so preoccupied that at first she did not
know me, though she sat looking at me with that curious, bright-eyed,
far-off look of hers.

"Ah! Miss Summerson!" she said at last. "I was thinking of something
so different! I hope you are well. I am happy to see you. Mr.
Jarndyce and Miss Clare quite well?"

I hoped in return that Mr. Jellyby was quite well.

"Why, not quite, my dear," said Mrs. Jellyby in the calmest manner.
"He has been unfortunate in his affairs and is a little out of
spirits. Happily for me, I am so much engaged that I have no time to
think about it. We have, at the present moment, one hundred and
seventy families, Miss Summerson, averaging five persons in each,
either gone or going to the left bank of the Niger."

I thought of the one family so near us who were neither gone nor
going to the left bank of the Niger, and wondered how she could be so
placid.

"You have brought Caddy back, I see," observed Mrs. Jellyby with a
glance at her daughter. "It has become quite a novelty to see her
here. She has almost deserted her old employment and in fact obliges
me to employ a boy."

"I am sure, Ma--" began Caddy.

"Now you know, Caddy," her mother mildly interposed, "that I DO
employ a boy, who is now at his dinner. What is the use of your
contradicting?"

"I was not going to contradict, Ma," returned Caddy. "I was only
going to say that surely you wouldn't have me be a mere drudge all my
life."

"I believe, my dear," said Mrs. Jellyby, still opening her letters,
casting her bright eyes smilingly over them, and sorting them as she
spoke, "that you have a business example before you in your mother.
Besides. A mere drudge? If you had any sympathy with the destinies of
the human race, it would raise you high above any such idea. But you
have none. I have often told you, Caddy, you have no such sympathy."

"Not if it's Africa, Ma, I have not."

"Of course you have not. Now, if I were not happily so much engaged,
Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Jellyby, sweetly casting her eyes for a
moment on me and considering where to put the particular letter she
had just opened, "this would distress and disappoint me. But I have
so much to think of, in connexion with Borrioboola-Gha and it is so
necessary I should concentrate myself that there is my remedy, you
see."

As Caddy gave me a glance of entreaty, and as Mrs. Jellyby was
looking far away into Africa straight through my bonnet and head, I
thought it a good opportunity to come to the subject of my visit and
to attract Mrs. Jellyby's attention.

"Perhaps," I began, "you will wonder what has brought me here to
interrupt you."

"I am always delighted to see Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Jellyby,
pursuing her employment with a placid smile. "Though I wish," and she
shook her head, "she was more interested in the Borrioboolan
project."

"I have come with Caddy," said I, "because Caddy justly thinks she
ought not to have a secret from her mother and fancies I shall
encourage and aid her (though I am sure I don't know how) in
imparting one."

"Caddy," said Mrs. Jellyby, pausing for a moment in her occupation
and then serenely pursuing it after shaking her head, "you are going
to tell me some nonsense."

Caddy untied the strings of her bonnet, took her bonnet off, and
letting it dangle on the floor by the strings, and crying heartily,
said, "Ma, I am engaged."

"Oh, you ridiculous child!" observed Mrs. Jellyby with an abstracted
air as she looked over the dispatch last opened; "what a goose you
are!"

"I am engaged, Ma," sobbed Caddy, "to young Mr. Turveydrop, at the
academy; and old Mr. Turveydrop (who is a very gentlemanly man
indeed) has given his consent, and I beg and pray you'll give us
yours, Ma, because I never could be happy without it. I never, never
could!" sobbed Caddy, quite forgetful of her general complainings and
of everything but her natural affection.

"You see again, Miss Summerson," observed Mrs. Jellyby serenely,
"what a happiness it is to be so much occupied as I am and to have
this necessity for self-concentration that I have. Here is Caddy
engaged to a dancing-master's son--mixed up with people who have no
more sympathy with the destinies of the human race than she has
herself! This, too, when Mr. Quale, one of the first philanthropists
of our time, has mentioned to me that he was really disposed to be
interested in her!"

"Ma, I always hated and detested Mr. Quale!" sobbed Caddy.

"Caddy, Caddy!" returned Mrs. Jellyby, opening another letter with
the greatest complacency. "I have no doubt you did. How could you do
otherwise, being totally destitute of the sympathies with which he
overflows! Now, if my public duties were not a favourite child to me,
if I were not occupied with large measures on a vast scale, these
petty details might grieve me very much, Miss Summerson. But can I
permit the film of a silly proceeding on the part of Caddy (from whom
I expect nothing else) to interpose between me and the great African
continent? No. No," repeated Mrs. Jellyby in a calm clear voice, and
with an agreeable smile, as she opened more letters and sorted them.
"No, indeed."

I was so unprepared for the perfect coolness of this reception,
though I might have expected it, that I did not know what to say.
Caddy seemed equally at a loss. Mrs. Jellyby continued to open and
sort letters and to repeat occasionally in quite a charming tone of
voice and with a smile of perfect composure, "No, indeed."

"I hope, Ma," sobbed poor Caddy at last, "you are not angry?"

"Oh, Caddy, you really are an absurd girl," returned Mrs. Jellyby,
"to ask such questions after what I have said of the preoccupation of
my mind."

"And I hope, Ma, you give us your consent and wish us well?" said
Caddy.

"You are a nonsensical child to have done anything of this kind,"
said Mrs. Jellyby; "and a degenerate child, when you might have
devoted yourself to the great public measure. But the step is taken,
and I have engaged a boy, and there is no more to be said. Now, pray,
Caddy," said Mrs. Jellyby, for Caddy was kissing her, "don't delay me
in my work, but let me clear off this heavy batch of papers before
the afternoon post comes in!"

I thought I could not do better than take my leave; I was detained
for a moment by Caddy's saying, "You won't object to my bringing him
to see you, Ma?"

"Oh, dear me, Caddy," cried Mrs. Jellyby, who had relapsed into that
distant contemplation, "have you begun again? Bring whom?"

"Him, Ma."

"Caddy, Caddy!" said Mrs. Jellyby, quite weary of such little
matters. "Then you must bring him some evening which is not a Parent
Society night, or a Branch night, or a Ramification night. You must
accommodate the visit to the demands upon my time. My dear Miss
Summerson, it was very kind of you to come here to help out this
silly chit. Good-bye! When I tell you that I have fifty-eight new
letters from manufacturing families anxious to understand the details
of the native and coffee-cultivation question this morning, I need
not apologize for having very little leisure."

I was not surprised by Caddy's being in low spirits when we went
downstairs, or by her sobbing afresh on my neck, or by her saying she
would far rather have been scolded than treated with such
indifference, or by her confiding to me that she was so poor in
clothes that how she was ever to be married creditably she didn't
know. I gradually cheered her up by dwelling on the many things she
would do for her unfortunate father and for Peepy when she had a home
of her own; and finally we went downstairs into the damp dark
kitchen, where Peepy and his little brothers and sisters were
grovelling on the stone floor and where we had such a game of play
with them that to prevent myself from being quite torn to pieces I
was obliged to fall back on my fairy-tales. From time to time I heard
loud voices in the parlour overhead, and occasionally a violent
tumbling about of the furniture. The last effect I am afraid was
caused by poor Mr. Jellyby's breaking away from the dining-table and
making rushes at the window with the intention of throwing himself
into the area whenever he made any new attempt to understand his
affairs.

As I rode quietly home at night after the day's bustle, I thought a
good deal of Caddy's engagement and felt confirmed in my hopes (in
spite of the elder Mr. Turveydrop) that she would be the happier and
better for it. And if there seemed to be but a slender chance of her
and her husband ever finding out what the model of deportment really
was, why that was all for the best too, and who would wish them to be
wiser? I did not wish them to be any wiser and indeed was half
ashamed of not entirely believing in him myself. And I looked up at
the stars, and thought about travellers in distant countries and the
stars THEY saw, and hoped I might always be so blest and happy as to
be useful to some one in my small way.

They were so glad to see me when I got home, as they always were,
that I could have sat down and cried for joy if that had not been a
method of making myself disagreeable. Everybody in the house, from
the lowest to the highest, showed me such a bright face of welcome,
and spoke so cheerily, and was so happy to do anything for me, that I
suppose there never was such a fortunate little creature in the
world.

We got into such a chatty state that night, through Ada and my
guardian drawing me out to tell them all about Caddy, that I went on
prose, prose, prosing for a length of time. At last I got up to my
own room, quite red to think how I had been holding forth, and then I
heard a soft tap at my door. So I said, "Come in!" and there came in
a pretty little girl, neatly dressed in mourning, who dropped a
curtsy.

"If you please, miss," said the little girl in a soft voice, "I am
Charley."

"Why, so you are," said I, stooping down in astonishment and giving
her a kiss. "How glad am I to see you, Charley!"

"If you please, miss," pursued Charley in the same soft voice, "I'm
your maid."

"Charley?"

"If you please, miss, I'm a present to you, with Mr. Jarndyce's
love."

I sat down with my hand on Charley's neck and looked at Charley.

"And oh, miss," says Charley, clapping her hands, with the tears
starting down her dimpled cheeks, "Tom's at school, if you please,
and learning so good! And little Emma, she's with Mrs. Blinder, miss,
a-being took such care of! And Tom, he would have been at school--and
Emma, she would have been left with Mrs. Blinder--and me, I should
have been here--all a deal sooner, miss; only Mr. Jarndyce thought
that Tom and Emma and me had better get a little used to parting
first, we was so small. Don't cry, if you please, miss!"

"I can't help it, Charley."

"No, miss, nor I can't help it," says Charley. "And if you please,
miss, Mr. Jarndyce's love, and he thinks you'll like to teach me now
and then. And if you please, Tom and Emma and me is to see each other
once a month. And I'm so happy and so thankful, miss," cried Charley
with a heaving heart, "and I'll try to be such a good maid!"

"Oh, Charley dear, never forget who did all this!"

"No, miss, I never will. Nor Tom won't. Nor yet Emma. It was all you,
miss."

"I have known nothing of it. It was Mr. Jarndyce, Charley."

"Yes, miss, but it was all done for the love of you and that you
might be my mistress. If you please, miss, I am a little present with
his love, and it was all done for the love of you. Me and Tom was to
be sure to remember it."

Charley dried her eyes and entered on her functions, going in her
matronly little way about and about the room and folding up
everything she could lay her hands upon. Presently Charley came
creeping back to my side and said, "Oh, don't cry, if you please,
miss."

And I said again, "I can't help it, Charley."

And Charley said again, "No, miss, nor I can't help it." And so,
after all, I did cry for joy indeed, and so did she.




CHAPTER XXIV

An Appeal Case


As soon as Richard and I had held the conversation of which I have
given an account, Richard communicated the state of his mind to Mr.
Jarndyce. I doubt if my guardian were altogether taken by surprise
when he received the representation, though it caused him much
uneasiness and disappointment. He and Richard were often closeted
together, late at night and early in the morning, and passed whole
days in London, and had innumerable appointments with Mr. Kenge, and
laboured through a quantity of disagreeable business. While they were
thus employed, my guardian, though he underwent considerable
inconvenience from the state of the wind and rubbed his head so
constantly that not a single hair upon it ever rested in its right
place, was as genial with Ada and me as at any other time, but
maintained a steady reserve on these matters. And as our utmost
endeavours could only elicit from Richard himself sweeping assurances
that everything was going on capitally and that it really was all
right at last, our anxiety was not much relieved by him.

We learnt, however, as the time went on, that a new application was
made to the Lord Chancellor on Richard's behalf as an infant and a
ward, and I don't know what, and that there was a quantity of
talking, and that the Lord Chancellor described him in open court as
a vexatious and capricious infant, and that the matter was adjourned
and readjourned, and referred, and reported on, and petitioned about
until Richard began to doubt (as he told us) whether, if he entered
the army at all, it would not be as a veteran of seventy or eighty
years of age. At last an appointment was made for him to see the Lord
Chancellor again in his private room, and there the Lord Chancellor
very seriously reproved him for trifling with time and not knowing
his mind--"a pretty good joke, I think," said Richard, "from that
quarter!"--and at last it was settled that his application should be
granted. His name was entered at the Horse Guards as an applicant for
an ensign's commission; the purchase-money was deposited at an
agent's; and Richard, in his usual characteristic way, plunged into a
violent course of military study and got up at five o'clock every
morning to practise the broadsword exercise.

Thus, vacation succeeded term, and term succeeded vacation. We
sometimes heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce as being in the paper or out
of the paper, or as being to be mentioned, or as being to be spoken
to; and it came on, and it went off. Richard, who was now in a
professor's house in London, was able to be with us less frequently
than before; my guardian still maintained the same reserve; and so
time passed until the commission was obtained and Richard received
directions with it to join a regiment in Ireland.

He arrived post-haste with the intelligence one evening, and had a
long conference with my guardian. Upwards of an hour elapsed before
my guardian put his head into the room where Ada and I were sitting
and said, "Come in, my dears!" We went in and found Richard, whom we
had last seen in high spirits, leaning on the chimney-piece looking
mortified and angry.

"Rick and I, Ada," said Mr. Jarndyce, "are not quite of one mind.
Come, come, Rick, put a brighter face upon it!"

"You are very hard with me, sir," said Richard. "The harder because
you have been so considerate to me in all other respects and have
done me kindnesses that I can never acknowledge. I never could have
been set right without you, sir."

"Well, well!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "I want to set you more right yet. I
want to set you more right with yourself."

"I hope you will excuse my saying, sir," returned Richard in a fiery
way, but yet respectfully, "that I think I am the best judge about
myself."

"I hope you will excuse my saying, my dear Rick," observed Mr.
Jarndyce with the sweetest cheerfulness and good humour, "that it's
quite natural in you to think so, but I don't think so. I must do my
duty, Rick, or you could never care for me in cool blood; and I hope
you will always care for me, cool and hot."

Ada had turned so pale that he made her sit down in his reading-chair
and sat beside her.

"It's nothing, my dear," he said, "it's nothing. Rick and I have only
had a friendly difference, which we must state to you, for you are
the theme. Now you are afraid of what's coming."

"I am not indeed, cousin John," replied Ada with a smile, "if it is
to come from you."

"Thank you, my dear. Do you give me a minute's calm attention,
without looking at Rick. And, little woman, do you likewise. My dear
girl," putting his hand on hers as it lay on the side of the
easy-chair, "you recollect the talk we had, we four when the little
woman told me of a little love affair?"

"It is not likely that either Richard or I can ever forget your
kindness that day, cousin John."

"I can never forget it," said Richard.

"And I can never forget it," said Ada.

"So much the easier what I have to say, and so much the easier for us
to agree," returned my guardian, his face irradiated by the
gentleness and honour of his heart. "Ada, my bird, you should know
that Rick has now chosen his profession for the last time. All that
he has of certainty will be expended when he is fully equipped. He
has exhausted his resources and is bound henceforward to the tree he
has planted."

"Quite true that I have exhausted my present resources, and I am
quite content to know it. But what I have of certainty, sir," said
Richard, "is not all I have."

"Rick, Rick!" cried my guardian with a sudden terror in his manner,
and in an altered voice, and putting up his hands as if he would have
stopped his ears. "For the love of God, don't found a hope or
expectation on the family curse! Whatever you do on this side the
grave, never give one lingering glance towards the horrible phantom
that has haunted us so many years. Better to borrow, better to beg,
better to die!"

We were all startled by the fervour of this warning. Richard bit his
lip and held his breath, and glanced at me as if he felt, and knew
that I felt too, how much he needed it.

"Ada, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce, recovering his cheerfulness,
"these are strong words of advice, but I live in Bleak House and have
seen a sight here. Enough of that. All Richard had to start him in
the race of life is ventured. I recommend to him and you, for his
sake and your own, that he should depart from us with the
understanding that there is no sort of contract between you. I must
go further. I will be plain with you both. You were to confide freely
in me, and I will confide freely in you. I ask you wholly to
relinquish, for the present, any tie but your relationship."

"Better to say at once, sir," returned Richard, "that you renounce
all confidence in me and that you advise Ada to do the same."

"Better to say nothing of the sort, Rick, because I don't mean it."

"You think I have begun ill, sir," retorted Richard. "I HAVE, I
know."

"How I hoped you would begin, and how go on, I told you when we spoke
of these things last," said Mr. Jarndyce in a cordial and encouraging
manner. "You have not made that beginning yet, but there is a time
for all things, and yours is not gone by; rather, it is just now
fully come. Make a clear beginning altogether. You two (very young,
my dears) are cousins. As yet, you are nothing more. What more may
come must come of being worked out, Rick, and no sooner."

"You are very hard with me, sir," said Richard. "Harder than I could
have supposed you would be."

"My dear boy," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I am harder with myself when I do
anything that gives you pain. You have your remedy in your own hands.
Ada, it is better for him that he should be free and that there
should be no youthful engagement between you. Rick, it is better for
her, much better; you owe it to her. Come! Each of you will do what
is best for the other, if not what is best for yourselves."

"Why is it best, sir?" returned Richard hastily. "It was not when we
opened our hearts to you. You did not say so then."

"I have had experience since. I don't blame you, Rick, but I have had
experience since."

"You mean of me, sir."

"Well! Yes, of both of you," said Mr. Jarndyce kindly. "The time is
not come for your standing pledged to one another. It is not right,
and I must not recognize it. Come, come, my young cousins, begin
afresh! Bygones shall be bygones, and a new page turned for you to
write your lives in."

Richard gave an anxious glance at Ada but said nothing.

"I have avoided saying one word to either of you or to Esther," said
Mr. Jarndyce, "until now, in order that we might be open as the day,
and all on equal terms. I now affectionately advise, I now most
earnestly entreat, you two to part as you came here. Leave all else
to time, truth, and steadfastness. If you do otherwise, you will do
wrong, and you will have made me do wrong in ever bringing you
together."

A long silence succeeded.

"Cousin Richard," said Ada then, raising her blue eyes tenderly to
his face, "after what our cousin John has said, I think no choice is
left us. Your mind may be quite at ease about me, for you will leave
me here under his care and will be sure that I can have nothing to
wish for--quite sure if I guide myself by his advice. I--I don't
doubt, cousin Richard," said Ada, a little confused, "that you are
very fond of me, and I--I don't think you will fall in love with
anybody else. But I should like you to consider well about it too, as
I should like you to be in all things very happy. You may trust in
me, cousin Richard. I am not at all changeable; but I am not
unreasonable, and should never blame you. Even cousins may be sorry
to part; and in truth I am very, very sorry, Richard, though I know
it's for your welfare. I shall always think of you affectionately,
and often talk of you with Esther, and--and perhaps you will
sometimes think a little of me, cousin Richard. So now," said Ada,
going up to him and giving him her trembling hand, "we are only
cousins again, Richard--for the time perhaps--and I pray for a
blessing on my dear cousin, wherever he goes!"

It was strange to me that Richard should not be able to forgive my
guardian for entertaining the very same opinion of him which he
himself had expressed of himself in much stronger terms to me. But it
was certainly the case. I observed with great regret that from this
hour he never was as free and open with Mr. Jarndyce as he had been
before. He had every reason given him to be so, but he was not; and
solely on his side, an estrangement began to arise between them.

In the business of preparation and equipment he soon lost himself,
and even his grief at parting from Ada, who remained in Hertfordshire
while he, Mr. Jarndyce, and I went up to London for a week. He
remembered her by fits and starts, even with bursts of tears, and at
such times would confide to me the heaviest self-reproaches. But in a
few minutes he would recklessly conjure up some undefinable means by
which they were both to be made rich and happy for ever, and would
become as gay as possible.

It was a busy time, and I trotted about with him all day long, buying
a variety of things of which he stood in need. Of the things he would
have bought if he had been left to his own ways I say nothing. He was
perfectly confidential with me, and often talked so sensibly and
feelingly about his faults and his vigorous resolutions, and dwelt so
much upon the encouragement he derived from these conversations that
I could never have been tired if I had tried.

There used, in that week, to come backward and forward to our lodging
to fence with Richard a person who had formerly been a cavalry
soldier; he was a fine bluff-looking man, of a frank free bearing,
with whom Richard had practised for some months. I heard so much
about him, not only from Richard, but from my guardian too, that I
was purposely in the room with my work one morning after breakfast
when he came.

"Good morning, Mr. George," said my guardian, who happened to be
alone with me. "Mr. Carstone will be here directly. Meanwhile, Miss
Summerson is very happy to see you, I know. Sit down."

He sat down, a little disconcerted by my presence, I thought, and
without looking at me, drew his heavy sunburnt hand across and across
his upper lip.

"You are as punctual as the sun," said Mr. Jarndyce.

"Military time, sir," he replied. "Force of habit. A mere habit in
me, sir. I am not at all business-like."

"Yet you have a large establishment, too, I am told?" said Mr.
Jarndyce.

"Not much of a one, sir. I keep a shooting gallery, but not much of a
one."

"And what kind of a shot and what kind of a swordsman do you make of
Mr. Carstone?" said my guardian.

"Pretty good, sir," he replied, folding his arms upon his broad chest
and looking very large. "If Mr. Carstone was to give his full mind to
it, he would come out very good."

"But he don't, I suppose?" said my guardian.

"He did at first, sir, but not afterwards. Not his full mind. Perhaps
he has something else upon it--some young lady, perhaps." His bright
dark eyes glanced at me for the first time.

"He has not me upon his mind, I assure you, Mr. George," said I,
laughing, "though you seem to suspect me."

He reddened a little through his brown and made me a trooper's bow.
"No offence, I hope, miss. I am one of the roughs."

"Not at all," said I. "I take it as a compliment."

If he had not looked at me before, he looked at me now in three or
four quick successive glances. "I beg your pardon, sir," he said to
my guardian with a manly kind of diffidence, "but you did me the
honour to mention the young lady's name--"

"Miss Summerson."

"Miss Summerson," he repeated, and looked at me again.

"Do you know the name?" I asked.

"No, miss. To my knowledge I never heard it. I thought I had seen you
somewhere."

"I think not," I returned, raising my head from my work to look at
him; and there was something so genuine in his speech and manner that
I was glad of the opportunity. "I remember faces very well."

"So do I, miss!" he returned, meeting my look with the fullness of
his dark eyes and broad forehead. "Humph! What set me off, now, upon
that!"

His once more reddening through his brown and being disconcerted by
his efforts to remember the association brought my guardian to his
relief.

"Have you many pupils, Mr. George?"

"They vary in their number, sir. Mostly they're but a small lot to
live by."

"And what classes of chance people come to practise at your gallery?"

"All sorts, sir. Natives and foreigners. From gentlemen to
'prentices. I have had Frenchwomen come, before now, and show
themselves dabs at pistol-shooting. Mad people out of number, of
course, but THEY go everywhere where the doors stand open."

"People don't come with grudges and schemes of finishing their
practice with live targets, I hope?" said my guardian, smiling.

"Not much of that, sir, though that HAS happened. Mostly they come
for skill--or idleness. Six of one, and half-a-dozen of the other. I
beg your pardon," said Mr. George, sitting stiffly upright and
squaring an elbow on each knee, "but I believe you're a Chancery
suitor, if I have heard correct?"

"I am sorry to say I am."

"I have had one of YOUR compatriots in my time, sir."

"A Chancery suitor?" returned my guardian. "How was that?"

"Why, the man was so badgered and worried and tortured by being
knocked about from post to pillar, and from pillar to post," said Mr.
George, "that he got out of sorts. I don't believe he had any idea of
taking aim at anybody, but he was in that condition of resentment and
violence that he would come and pay for fifty shots and fire away
till he was red hot. One day I said to him when there was nobody by
and he had been talking to me angrily about his wrongs, 'If this
practice is a safety-valve, comrade, well and good; but I don't
altogether like your being so bent upon it in your present state of
mind; I'd rather you took to something else.' I was on my guard for a
blow, he was that passionate; but he received it in very good part
and left off directly. We shook hands and struck up a sort of
friendship."

"What was that man?" asked my guardian in a new tone of interest.

"Why, he began by being a small Shropshire farmer before they made a
baited bull of him," said Mr. George.

"Was his name Gridley?"

"It was, sir."

Mr. George directed another succession of quick bright glances at me
as my guardian and I exchanged a word or two of surprise at the
coincidence, and I therefore explained to him how we knew the name.
He made me another of his soldierly bows in acknowledgment of what he
called my condescension.

"I don't know," he said as he looked at me, "what it is that sets me
off again--but--bosh! What's my head running against!" He passed one
of his heavy hands over his crisp dark hair as if to sweep the broken
thoughts out of his mind and sat a little forward, with one arm
akimbo and the other resting on his leg, looking in a brown study at
the ground.

"I am sorry to learn that the same state of mind has got this Gridley
into new troubles and that he is in hiding," said my guardian.

"So I am told, sir," returned Mr. George, still musing and looking on
the ground. "So I am told."

"You don't know where?"

"No, sir," returned the trooper, lifting up his eyes and coming out
of his reverie. "I can't say anything about him. He will be worn out
soon, I expect. You may file a strong man's heart away for a good
many years, but it will tell all of a sudden at last."

Richard's entrance stopped the conversation. Mr. George rose, made me
another of his soldierly bows, wished my guardian a good day, and
strode heavily out of the room.

This was the morning of the day appointed for Richard's departure. We
had no more purchases to make now; I had completed all his packing
early in the afternoon; and our time was disengaged until night, when
he was to go to Liverpool for Holyhead. Jarndyce and Jarndyce being
again expected to come on that day, Richard proposed to me that we
should go down to the court and hear what passed. As it was his last
day, and he was eager to go, and I had never been there, I gave my
consent and we walked down to Westminster, where the court was then
sitting. We beguiled the way with arrangements concerning the letters
that Richard was to write to me and the letters that I was to write
to him and with a great many hopeful projects. My guardian knew where
we were going and therefore was not with us.

When we came to the court, there was the Lord Chancellor--the same
whom I had seen in his private room in Lincoln's Inn--sitting in
great state and gravity on the bench, with the mace and seals on a
red table below him and an immense flat nosegay, like a little
garden, which scented the whole court. Below the table, again, was a
long row of solicitors, with bundles of papers on the matting at
their feet; and then there were the gentlemen of the bar in wigs and
gowns--some awake and some asleep, and one talking, and nobody paying
much attention to what he said. The Lord Chancellor leaned back in
his very easy chair with his elbow on the cushioned arm and his
forehead resting on his hand; some of those who were present dozed;
some read the newspapers; some walked about or whispered in groups:
all seemed perfectly at their ease, by no means in a hurry, very
unconcerned, and extremely comfortable.

To see everything going on so smoothly and to think of the roughness
of the suitors' lives and deaths; to see all that full dress and
ceremony and to think of the waste, and want, and beggared misery it
represented; to consider that while the sickness of hope deferred was
raging in so many hearts this polite show went calmly on from day to
day, and year to year, in such good order and composure; to behold
the Lord Chancellor and the whole array of practitioners under him
looking at one another and at the spectators as if nobody had ever
heard that all over England the name in which they were assembled was
a bitter jest, was held in universal horror, contempt, and
indignation, was known for something so flagrant and bad that little
short of a miracle could bring any good out of it to any one--this
was so curious and self-contradictory to me, who had no experience of
it, that it was at first incredible, and I could not comprehend it. I
sat where Richard put me, and tried to listen, and looked about me;
but there seemed to be no reality in the whole scene except poor
little Miss Flite, the madwoman, standing on a bench and nodding at
it.

Miss Flite soon espied us and came to where we sat. She gave me a
gracious welcome to her domain and indicated, with much gratification
and pride, its principal attractions. Mr. Kenge also came to speak to
us and did the honours of the place in much the same way, with the
bland modesty of a proprietor. It was not a very good day for a
visit, he said; he would have preferred the first day of term; but it
was imposing, it was imposing.

When we had been there half an hour or so, the case in progress--if I
may use a phrase so ridiculous in such a connexion--seemed to die out
of its own vapidity, without coming, or being by anybody expected to
come, to any result. The Lord Chancellor then threw down a bundle of
papers from his desk to the gentlemen below him, and somebody said,
"Jarndyce and Jarndyce." Upon this there was a buzz, and a laugh, and
a general withdrawal of the bystanders, and a bringing in of great
heaps, and piles, and bags and bags full of papers.

I think it came on "for further directions"--about some bill of
costs, to the best of my understanding, which was confused enough.
But I counted twenty-three gentlemen in wigs who said they were "in
it," and none of them appeared to understand it much better than I.
They chatted about it with the Lord Chancellor, and contradicted and
explained among themselves, and some of them said it was this way,
and some of them said it was that way, and some of them jocosely
proposed to read huge volumes of affidavits, and there was more
buzzing and laughing, and everybody concerned was in a state of idle
entertainment, and nothing could be made of it by anybody. After an
hour or so of this, and a good many speeches being begun and cut
short, it was "referred back for the present," as Mr. Kenge said, and
the papers were bundled up again before the clerks had finished
bringing them in.

I glanced at Richard on the termination of these hopeless proceedings
and was shocked to see the worn look of his handsome young face. "It
can't last for ever, Dame Durden. Better luck next time!" was all he
said.

I had seen Mr. Guppy bringing in papers and arranging them for Mr.
Kenge; and he had seen me and made me a forlorn bow, which rendered
me desirous to get out of the court. Richard had given me his arm and
was taking me away when Mr. Guppy came up.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Carstone," said he in a whisper, "and Miss
Summerson's also, but there's a lady here, a friend of mine, who
knows her and wishes to have the pleasure of shaking hands." As he
spoke, I saw before me, as if she had started into bodily shape from
my remembrance, Mrs. Rachael of my godmother's house.

"How do you do, Esther?" said she. "Do you recollect me?"

I gave her my hand and told her yes and that she was very little
altered.

"I wonder you remember those times, Esther," she returned with her
old asperity. "They are changed now. Well! I am glad to see you, and
glad you are not too proud to know me." But indeed she seemed
disappointed that I was not.

"Proud, Mrs. Rachael!" I remonstrated.

"I am married, Esther," she returned, coldly correcting me, "and am
Mrs. Chadband. Well! I wish you good day, and I hope you'll do well."

Mr. Guppy, who had been attentive to this short dialogue, heaved a
sigh in my ear and elbowed his own and Mrs. Rachael's way through the
confused little crowd of people coming in and going out, which we
were in the midst of and which the change in the business had brought
together. Richard and I were making our way through it, and I was yet
in the first chill of the late unexpected recognition when I saw,
coming towards us, but not seeing us, no less a person than Mr.
George. He made nothing of the people about him as he tramped on,
staring over their heads into the body of the court.

"George!" said Richard as I called his attention to him.

"You are well met, sir," he returned. "And you, miss. Could you point
a person out for me, I want? I don't understand these places."

Turning as he spoke and making an easy way for us, he stopped when we
were out of the press in a corner behind a great red curtain.

"There's a little cracked old woman," he began, "that--"

I put up my finger, for Miss Flite was close by me, having kept
beside me all the time and having called the attention of several of
her legal acquaintance to me (as I had overheard to my confusion) by
whispering in their ears, "Hush! Fitz Jarndyce on my left!"

"Hem!" said Mr. George. "You remember, miss, that we passed some
conversation on a certain man this morning? Gridley," in a low
whisper behind his hand.

"Yes," said I.

"He is hiding at my place. I couldn't mention it. Hadn't his
authority. He is on his last march, miss, and has a whim to see her.
He says they can feel for one another, and she has been almost as
good as a friend to him here. I came down to look for her, for when I
sat by Gridley this afternoon, I seemed to hear the roll of the
muffled drums."

"Shall I tell her?" said I.

"Would you be so good?" he returned with a glance of something like
apprehension at Miss Flite. "It's a providence I met you, miss; I
doubt if I should have known how to get on with that lady." And he
put one hand in his breast and stood upright in a martial attitude as
I informed little Miss Flite, in her ear, of the purport of his kind
errand.

"My angry friend from Shropshire! Almost as celebrated as myself!"
she exclaimed. "Now really! My dear, I will wait upon him with the
greatest pleasure."

"He is living concealed at Mr. George's," said I. "Hush! This is Mr.
George."

"In--deed!" returned Miss Flite. "Very proud to have the honour! A
military man, my dear. You know, a perfect general!" she whispered to
me.

Poor Miss Flite deemed it necessary to be so courtly and polite, as a
mark of her respect for the army, and to curtsy so very often that it
was no easy matter to get her out of the court. When this was at last
done, and addressing Mr. George as "General," she gave him her arm,
to the great entertainment of some idlers who were looking on, he was
so discomposed and begged me so respectfully "not to desert him" that
I could not make up my mind to do it, especially as Miss Flite was
always tractable with me and as she too said, "Fitz Jarndyce, my
dear, you will accompany us, of course." As Richard seemed quite
willing, and even anxious, that we should see them safely to their
destination, we agreed to do so. And as Mr. George informed us that
Gridley's mind had run on Mr. Jarndyce all the afternoon after
hearing of their interview in the morning, I wrote a hasty note in
pencil to my guardian to say where we were gone and why. Mr. George
sealed it at a coffee-house, that it might lead to no discovery, and
we sent it off by a ticket-porter.

We then took a hackney-coach and drove away to the neighbourhood of
Leicester Square. We walked through some narrow courts, for which Mr.
George apologized, and soon came to the shooting gallery, the door of
which was closed. As he pulled a bell-handle which hung by a chain to
the door-post, a very respectable old gentleman with grey hair,
wearing spectacles, and dressed in a black spencer and gaiters and a
broad-brimmed hat, and carrying a large gold-beaded cane, addressed
him.

"I ask your pardon, my good friend," said he, "but is this George's
Shooting Gallery?"

"It is, sir," returned Mr. George, glancing up at the great letters
in which that inscription was painted on the whitewashed wall.

"Oh! To be sure!" said the old gentleman, following his eyes. "Thank
you. Have you rung the bell?"

"My name is George, sir, and I have rung the bell."

"Oh, indeed?" said the old gentleman. "Your name is George? Then I am
here as soon as you, you see. You came for me, no doubt?"

"No, sir. You have the advantage of me."

"Oh, indeed?" said the old gentleman. "Then it was your young man who
came for me. I am a physician and was requested--five minutes ago--to
come and visit a sick man at George's Shooting Gallery."

"The muffled drums," said Mr. George, turning to Richard and me and
gravely shaking his head. "It's quite correct, sir. Will you please
to walk in."

The door being at that moment opened by a very singular-looking
little man in a green-baize cap and apron, whose face and hands and
dress were blackened all over, we passed along a dreary passage into
a large building with bare brick walls where there were targets, and
guns, and swords, and other things of that kind. When we had all
arrived here, the physician stopped, and taking off his hat, appeared
to vanish by magic and to leave another and quite a different man in
his place.

"Now lookee here, George," said the man, turning quickly round upon
him and tapping him on the breast with a large forefinger. "You know
me, and I know you. You're a man of the world, and I'm a man of the
world. My name's Bucket, as you are aware, and I have got a
peace-warrant against Gridley. You have kept him out of the way a
long time, and you have been artful in it, and it does you credit."

Mr. George, looking hard at him, bit his lip and shook his head.

"Now, George," said the other, keeping close to him, "you're a
sensible man and a well-conducted man; that's what YOU are, beyond a
doubt. And mind you, I don't talk to you as a common character,
because you have served your country and you know that when duty
calls we must obey. Consequently you're very far from wanting to give
trouble. If I required assistance, you'd assist me; that's what YOU'D
do. Phil Squod, don't you go a-sidling round the gallery like
that"--the dirty little man was shuffling about with his shoulder
against the wall, and his eyes on the intruder, in a manner that
looked threatening--"because I know you and won't have it."

"Phil!" said Mr. George.

"Yes, guv'ner."

"Be quiet."

The little man, with a low growl, stood still.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said Mr. Bucket, "you'll excuse anything that
may appear to be disagreeable in this, for my name's Inspector Bucket
of the Detective, and I have a duty to perform. George, I know where
my man is because I was on the roof last night and saw him through
the skylight, and you along with him. He is in there, you know,"
pointing; "that's where HE is--on a sofy. Now I must see my man, and
I must tell my man to consider himself in custody; but you know me,
and you know I don't want to take any uncomfortable measures. You
give me your word, as from one man to another (and an old soldier,
mind you, likewise), that it's honourable between us two, and I'll
accommodate you to the utmost of my power."

"I give it," was the reply. "But it wasn't handsome in you, Mr.
Bucket."

"Gammon, George! Not handsome?" said Mr. Bucket, tapping him on his
broad breast again and shaking hands with him. "I don't say it wasn't
handsome in you to keep my man so close, do I? Be equally
good-tempered to me, old boy! Old William Tell, Old Shaw, the Life
Guardsman! Why, he's a model of the whole British army in himself,
ladies and gentlemen. I'd give a fifty-pun' note to be such a figure
of a man!"

The affair being brought to this head, Mr. George, after a little
consideration, proposed to go in first to his comrade (as he called
him), taking Miss Flite with him. Mr. Bucket agreeing, they went away
to the further end of the gallery, leaving us sitting and standing by
a table covered with guns. Mr. Bucket took this opportunity of
entering into a little light conversation, asking me if I were afraid
of fire-arms, as most young ladies were; asking Richard if he were a
good shot; asking Phil Squod which he considered the best of those
rifles and what it might be worth first-hand, telling him in return
that it was a pity he ever gave way to his temper, for he was
naturally so amiable that he might have been a young woman, and
making himself generally agreeable.

After a time he followed us to the further end of the gallery, and
Richard and I were going quietly away when Mr. George came after us.
He said that if we had no objection to see his comrade, he would take
a visit from us very kindly. The words had hardly passed his lips
when the bell was rung and my guardian appeared, "on the chance," he
slightly observed, "of being able to do any little thing for a poor
fellow involved in the same misfortune as himself." We all four went
back together and went into the place where Gridley was.

It was a bare room, partitioned off from the gallery with unpainted
wood. As the screening was not more than eight or ten feet high and
only enclosed the sides, not the top, the rafters of the high gallery
roof were overhead, and the skylight through which Mr. Bucket had
looked down. The sun was low--near setting--and its light came redly
in above, without descending to the ground. Upon a plain
canvas-covered sofa lay the man from Shropshire, dressed much as we
had seen him last, but so changed that at first I recognized no
likeness in his colourless face to what I recollected.

He had been still writing in his hiding-place, and still dwelling on
his grievances, hour after hour. A table and some shelves were
covered with manuscript papers and with worn pens and a medley of
such tokens. Touchingly and awfully drawn together, he and the little
mad woman were side by side and, as it were, alone. She sat on a
chair holding his hand, and none of us went close to them.

His voice had faded, with the old expression of his face, with his
strength, with his anger, with his resistance to the wrongs that had
at last subdued him. The faintest shadow of an object full of form
and colour is such a picture of it as he was of the man from
Shropshire whom we had spoken with before.

He inclined his head to Richard and me and spoke to my guardian.

"Mr. Jarndyce, it is very kind of you to come to see me. I am not
long to be seen, I think. I am very glad to take your hand, sir. You
are a good man, superior to injustice, and God knows I honour you."

They shook hands earnestly, and my guardian said some words of
comfort to him.

"It may seem strange to you, sir," returned Gridley; "I should not
have liked to see you if this had been the first time of our meeting.
But you know I made a fight for it, you know I stood up with my
single hand against them all, you know I told them the truth to the
last, and told them what they were, and what they had done to me; so
I don't mind your seeing me, this wreck."

"You have been courageous with them many and many a time," returned
my guardian.

"Sir, I have been," with a faint smile. "I told you what would come
of it when I ceased to be so, and see here! Look at us--look at us!"
He drew the hand Miss Flite held through her arm and brought her
something nearer to him.

"This ends it. Of all my old associations, of all my old pursuits and
hopes, of all the living and the dead world, this one poor soul alone
comes natural to me, and I am fit for. There is a tie of many
suffering years between us two, and it is the only tie I ever had on
earth that Chancery has not broken."

"Accept my blessing, Gridley," said Miss Flite in tears. "Accept my
blessing!"

"I thought, boastfully, that they never could break my heart, Mr.
Jarndyce. I was resolved that they should not. I did believe that I
could, and would, charge them with being the mockery they were until
I died of some bodily disorder. But I am worn out. How long I have
been wearing out, I don't know; I seemed to break down in an hour. I
hope they may never come to hear of it. I hope everybody here will
lead them to believe that I died defying them, consistently and
perseveringly, as I did through so many years."

Here Mr. Bucket, who was sitting in a corner by the door,
good-naturedly offered such consolation as he could administer.

"Come, come!" he said from his corner. "Don't go on in that way, Mr.
Gridley. You are only a little low. We are all of us a little low
sometimes. I am. Hold up, hold up! You'll lose your temper with the
whole round of 'em, again and again; and I shall take you on a score
of warrants yet, if I have luck."

He only shook his head.

"Don't shake your head," said Mr. Bucket. "Nod it; that's what I want
to see you do. Why, Lord bless your soul, what times we have had
together! Haven't I seen you in the Fleet over and over again for
contempt? Haven't I come into court, twenty afternoons for no other
purpose than to see you pin the Chancellor like a bull-dog? Don't you
remember when you first began to threaten the lawyers, and the peace
was sworn against you two or three times a week? Ask the little old
lady there; she has been always present. Hold up, Mr. Gridley, hold
up, sir!"

"What are you going to do about him?" asked George in a low voice.

"I don't know yet," said Bucket in the same tone. Then resuming his
encouragement, he pursued aloud: "Worn out, Mr. Gridley? After
dodging me for all these weeks and forcing me to climb the roof here
like a tom cat and to come to see you as a doctor? That ain't like
being worn out. I should think not! Now I tell you what you want. You
want excitement, you know, to keep YOU up; that's what YOU want.
You're used to it, and you can't do without it. I couldn't myself.
Very well, then; here's this warrant got by Mr. Tulkinghorn of
Lincoln's Inn Fields, and backed into half-a-dozen counties since.
What do you say to coming along with me, upon this warrant, and
having a good angry argument before the magistrates? It'll do you
good; it'll freshen you up and get you into training for another turn
at the Chancellor. Give in? Why, I am surprised to hear a man of your
energy talk of giving in. You mustn't do that. You're half the fun of
the fair in the Court of Chancery. George, you lend Mr. Gridley a
hand, and let's see now whether he won't be better up than down."

"He is very weak," said the trooper in a low voice.

"Is he?" returned Bucket anxiously. "I only want to rouse him. I
don't like to see an old acquaintance giving in like this. It would
cheer him up more than anything if I could make him a little waxy
with me. He's welcome to drop into me, right and left, if he likes. I
shall never take advantage of it."

The roof rang with a scream from Miss Flite, which still rings in my
ears.

"Oh, no, Gridley!" she cried as he fell heavily and calmly back from
before her. "Not without my blessing. After so many years!"

The sun was down, the light had gradually stolen from the roof, and
the shadow had crept upward. But to me the shadow of that pair, one
living and one dead, fell heavier on Richard's departure than the
darkness of the darkest night. And through Richard's farewell words I
heard it echoed: "Of all my old associations, of all my old pursuits
and hopes, of all the living and the dead world, this one poor soul
alone comes natural to me, and I am fit for. There is a tie of many
suffering years between us two, and it is the only tie I ever had on
earth that Chancery has not broken!"




CHAPTER XXV

Mrs. Snagsby Sees It All


There is disquietude in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street. Black
suspicion hides in that peaceful region. The mass of Cook's Courtiers
are in their usual state of mind, no better and no worse; but Mr.
Snagsby is changed, and his little woman knows it.

For Tom-all-Alone's and Lincoln's Inn Fields persist in harnessing
themselves, a pair of ungovernable coursers, to the chariot of Mr.
Snagsby's imagination; and Mr. Bucket drives; and the passengers are
Jo and Mr. Tulkinghorn; and the complete equipage whirls though the
law-stationery business at wild speed all round the clock. Even in
the little front kitchen where the family meals are taken, it rattles
away at a smoking pace from the dinner-table, when Mr. Snagsby pauses
in carving the first slice of the leg of mutton baked with potatoes
and stares at the kitchen wall.

Mr. Snagsby cannot make out what it is that he has had to do with.
Something is wrong somewhere, but what something, what may come of
it, to whom, when, and from which unthought of and unheard of quarter
is the puzzle of his life. His remote impressions of the robes and
coronets, the stars and garters, that sparkle through the
surface-dust of Mr. Tulkinghorn's chambers; his veneration for the
mysteries presided over by that best and closest of his customers,
whom all the Inns of Court, all Chancery Lane, and all the legal
neighbourhood agree to hold in awe; his remembrance of Detective Mr.
Bucket with his forefinger and his confidential manner, impossible to
be evaded or declined, persuade him that he is a party to some
dangerous secret without knowing what it is. And it is the fearful
peculiarity of this condition that, at any hour of his daily life, at
any opening of the shop-door, at any pull of the bell, at any
entrance of a messenger, or any delivery of a letter, the secret may
take air and fire, explode, and blow up--Mr. Bucket only knows whom.

For which reason, whenever a man unknown comes into the shop (as many
men unknown do) and says, "Is Mr. Snagsby in?" or words to that
innocent effect, Mr. Snagsby's heart knocks hard at his guilty
breast. He undergoes so much from such inquiries that when they are
made by boys he revenges himself by flipping at their ears over the
counter and asking the young dogs what they mean by it and why they
can't speak out at once? More impracticable men and boys persist in
walking into Mr. Snagsby's sleep and terrifying him with
unaccountable questions, so that often when the cock at the little
dairy in Cursitor Street breaks out in his usual absurd way about the
morning, Mr. Snagsby finds himself in a crisis of nightmare, with his
little woman shaking him and saying "What's the matter with the man!"

The little woman herself is not the least item in his difficulty. To
know that he is always keeping a secret from her, that he has under
all circumstances to conceal and hold fast a tender double tooth,
which her sharpness is ever ready to twist out of his head, gives Mr.
Snagsby, in her dentistical presence, much of the air of a dog who
has a reservation from his master and will look anywhere rather than
meet his eye.

These various signs and tokens, marked by the little woman, are not
lost upon her. They impel her to say, "Snagsby has something on his
mind!" And thus suspicion gets into Cook's Court, Cursitor Street.
From suspicion to jealousy, Mrs. Snagsby finds the road as natural
and short as from Cook's Court to Chancery Lane. And thus jealousy
gets into Cook's Court, Cursitor Street. Once there (and it was
always lurking thereabout), it is very active and nimble in Mrs.
Snagsby's breast, prompting her to nocturnal examinations of Mr.
Snagsby's pockets; to secret perusals of Mr. Snagsby's letters; to
private researches in the day book and ledger, till, cash-box, and
iron safe; to watchings at windows, listenings behind doors, and a
general putting of this and that together by the wrong end.

Mrs. Snagsby is so perpetually on the alert that the house becomes
ghostly with creaking boards and rustling garments. The 'prentices
think somebody may have been murdered there in bygone times. Guster
holds certain loose atoms of an idea (picked up at Tooting, where
they were found floating among the orphans) that there is buried
money underneath the cellar, guarded by an old man with a white
beard, who cannot get out for seven thousand years because he said
the Lord's Prayer backwards.

"Who was Nimrod?" Mrs. Snagsby repeatedly inquires of herself. "Who
was that lady--that creature? And who is that boy?" Now, Nimrod being
as dead as the mighty hunter whose name Mrs. Snagsby has
appropriated, and the lady being unproducible, she directs her mental
eye, for the present, with redoubled vigilance to the boy. "And who,"
quoth Mrs. Snagsby for the thousand and first time, "is that boy? Who
is that--!" And there Mrs. Snagsby is seized with an inspiration.

He has no respect for Mr. Chadband. No, to be sure, and he wouldn't
have, of course. Naturally he wouldn't, under those contagious
circumstances. He was invited and appointed by Mr. Chadband--why,
Mrs. Snagsby heard it herself with her own ears!--to come back, and
be told where he was to go, to be addressed by Mr. Chadband; and he
never came! Why did he never come? Because he was told not to come.
Who told him not to come? Who? Ha, ha! Mrs. Snagsby sees it all.

But happily (and Mrs. Snagsby tightly shakes her head and tightly
smiles) that boy was met by Mr. Chadband yesterday in the streets;
and that boy, as affording a subject which Mr. Chadband desires to
improve for the spiritual delight of a select congregation, was
seized by Mr. Chadband and threatened with being delivered over to
the police unless he showed the reverend gentleman where he lived and
unless he entered into, and fulfilled, an undertaking to appear in
Cook's Court to-morrow night, "to--mor--row--night," Mrs. Snagsby
repeats for mere emphasis with another tight smile and another tight
shake of her head; and to-morrow night that boy will be here, and
to-morrow night Mrs. Snagsby will have her eye upon him and upon some
one else; and oh, you may walk a long while in your secret ways (says
Mrs. Snagsby with haughtiness and scorn), but you can't blind ME!

Mrs. Snagsby sounds no timbrel in anybody's ears, but holds her
purpose quietly, and keeps her counsel. To-morrow comes, the savoury
preparations for the Oil Trade come, the evening comes. Comes Mr.
Snagsby in his black coat; come the Chadbands; come (when the gorging
vessel is replete) the 'prentices and Guster, to be edified; comes at
last, with his slouching head, and his shuffle backward, and his
shuffle forward, and his shuffle to the right, and his shuffle to the
left, and his bit of fur cap in his muddy hand, which he picks as if
it were some mangy bird he had caught and was plucking before eating
raw, Jo, the very, very tough subject Mr. Chadband is to improve.

Mrs. Snagsby screws a watchful glance on Jo as he is brought into the
little drawing-room by Guster. He looks at Mr. Snagsby the moment he
comes in. Aha! Why does he look at Mr. Snagsby? Mr. Snagsby looks at
him. Why should he do that, but that Mrs. Snagsby sees it all? Why
else should that look pass between them, why else should Mr. Snagsby
be confused and cough a signal cough behind his hand? It is as clear
as crystal that Mr. Snagsby is that boy's father.

"Peace, my friends," says Chadband, rising and wiping the oily
exudations from his reverend visage. "Peace be with us! My friends,
why with us? Because," with his fat smile, "it cannot be against us,
because it must be for us; because it is not hardening, because it is
softening; because it does not make war like the hawk, but comes home
unto us like the dove. Therefore, my friends, peace be with us! My
human boy, come forward!"

Stretching forth his flabby paw, Mr. Chadband lays the same on Jo's
arm and considers where to station him. Jo, very doubtful of his
reverend friend's intentions and not at all clear but that something
practical and painful is going to be done to him, mutters, "You let
me alone. I never said nothink to you. You let me alone."

"No, my young friend," says Chadband smoothly, "I will not let you
alone. And why? Because I am a harvest-labourer, because I am a
toiler and a moiler, because you are delivered over unto me and are
become as a precious instrument in my hands. My friends, may I so
employ this instrument as to use it to your advantage, to your
profit, to your gain, to your welfare, to your enrichment! My young
friend, sit upon this stool."

Jo, apparently possessed by an impression that the reverend gentleman
wants to cut his hair, shields his head with both arms and is got
into the required position with great difficulty and every possible
manifestation of reluctance.

When he is at last adjusted like a lay-figure, Mr. Chadband, retiring
behind the table, holds up his bear's-paw and says, "My friends!"
This is the signal for a general settlement of the audience. The
'prentices giggle internally and nudge each other. Guster falls into
a staring and vacant state, compounded of a stunned admiration of Mr.
Chadband and pity for the friendless outcast whose condition touches
her nearly. Mrs. Snagsby silently lays trains of gunpowder. Mrs.
Chadband composes herself grimly by the fire and warms her knees,
finding that sensation favourable to the reception of eloquence.

It happens that Mr. Chadband has a pulpit habit of fixing some member
of his congregation with his eye and fatly arguing his points with
that particular person, who is understood to be expected to be moved
to an occasional grunt, groan, gasp, or other audible expression of
inward working, which expression of inward working, being echoed by
some elderly lady in the next pew and so communicated like a game of
forfeits through a circle of the more fermentable sinners present,
serves the purpose of parliamentary cheering and gets Mr. Chadband's
steam up. From mere force of habit, Mr. Chadband in saying "My
friends!" has rested his eye on Mr. Snagsby and proceeds to make that
ill-starred stationer, already sufficiently confused, the immediate
recipient of his discourse.

"We have here among us, my friends," says Chadband, "a Gentile and a
heathen, a dweller in the tents of Tom-all-Alone's and a mover-on
upon the surface of the earth. We have here among us, my friends,"
and Mr. Chadband, untwisting the point with his dirty thumb-nail,
bestows an oily smile on Mr. Snagsby, signifying that he will throw
him an argumentative back-fall presently if he be not already down,
"a brother and a boy. Devoid of parents, devoid of relations, devoid
of flocks and herds, devoid of gold and silver and of precious
stones. Now, my friends, why do I say he is devoid of these
possessions? Why? Why is he?" Mr. Chadband states the question as if
he were propounding an entirely new riddle of much ingenuity and
merit to Mr. Snagsby and entreating him not to give it up.

Mr. Snagsby, greatly perplexed by the mysterious look he received
just now from his little woman--at about the period when Mr. Chadband
mentioned the word parents--is tempted into modestly remarking, "I
don't know, I'm sure, sir." On which interruption Mrs. Chadband
glares and Mrs. Snagsby says, "For shame!"

"I hear a voice," says Chadband; "is it a still small voice, my
friends? I fear not, though I fain would hope so--"

"Ah--h!" from Mrs. Snagsby.

"Which says, 'I don't know.' Then I will tell you why. I say this
brother present here among us is devoid of parents, devoid of
relations, devoid of flocks and herds, devoid of gold, of silver, and
of precious stones because he is devoid of the light that shines in
upon some of us. What is that light? What is it? I ask you, what is
that light?"

Mr. Chadband draws back his head and pauses, but Mr. Snagsby is not
to be lured on to his destruction again. Mr. Chadband, leaning
forward over the table, pierces what he has got to follow directly
into Mr. Snagsby with the thumb-nail already mentioned.

"It is," says Chadband, "the ray of rays, the sun of suns, the moon
of moons, the star of stars. It is the light of Terewth."

Mr. Chadband draws himself up again and looks triumphantly at Mr.
Snagsby as if he would be glad to know how he feels after that.

"Of Terewth," says Mr. Chadband, hitting him again. "Say not to me
that it is NOT the lamp of lamps. I say to you it is. I say to you, a
million of times over, it is. It is! I say to you that I will
proclaim it to you, whether you like it or not; nay, that the less
you like it, the more I will proclaim it to you. With a
speaking-trumpet! I say to you that if you rear yourself against it,
you shall fall, you shall be bruised, you shall be battered, you
shall be flawed, you shall be smashed."

The present effect of this flight of oratory--much admired for its
general power by Mr. Chadband's followers--being not only to make Mr.
Chadband unpleasantly warm, but to represent the innocent Mr. Snagsby
in the light of a determined enemy to virtue, with a forehead of
brass and a heart of adamant, that unfortunate tradesman becomes yet
more disconcerted and is in a very advanced state of low spirits and
false position when Mr. Chadband accidentally finishes him.

"My friends," he resumes after dabbing his fat head for some
time--and it smokes to such an extent that he seems to light his
pocket-handkerchief at it, which smokes, too, after every dab--"to
pursue the subject we are endeavouring with our lowly gifts to
improve, let us in a spirit of love inquire what is that Terewth to
which I have alluded. For, my young friends," suddenly addressing the
'prentices and Guster, to their consternation, "if I am told by the
doctor that calomel or castor-oil is good for me, I may naturally ask
what is calomel, and what is castor-oil. I may wish to be informed of
that before I dose myself with either or with both. Now, my young
friends, what is this Terewth then? Firstly (in a spirit of love),
what is the common sort of Terewth--the working clothes--the
every-day wear, my young friends? Is it deception?"

"Ah--h!" from Mrs. Snagsby.

"Is it suppression?"

A shiver in the negative from Mrs. Snagsby.

"Is it reservation?"

A shake of the head from Mrs. Snagsby--very long and very tight.

"No, my friends, it is neither of these. Neither of these names
belongs to it. When this young heathen now among us--who is now, my
friends, asleep, the seal of indifference and perdition being set
upon his eyelids; but do not wake him, for it is right that I should
have to wrestle, and to combat and to struggle, and to conquer, for
his sake--when this young hardened heathen told us a story of a cock,
and of a bull, and of a lady, and of a sovereign, was THAT the
Terewth? No. Or if it was partly, was it wholly and entirely? No, my
friends, no!"

If Mr. Snagsby could withstand his little woman's look as it enters
at his eyes, the windows of his soul, and searches the whole
tenement, he were other than the man he is. He cowers and droops.

"Or, my juvenile friends," says Chadband, descending to the level of
their comprehension with a very obtrusive demonstration in his
greasily meek smile of coming a long way downstairs for the purpose,
"if the master of this house was to go forth into the city and there
see an eel, and was to come back, and was to call unto him the
mistress of this house, and was to say, 'Sarah, rejoice with me, for
I have seen an elephant!' would THAT be Terewth?"

Mrs. Snagsby in tears.

"Or put it, my juvenile friends, that he saw an elephant, and
returning said 'Lo, the city is barren, I have seen but an eel,'
would THAT be Terewth?"

Mrs. Snagsby sobbing loudly.

"Or put it, my juvenile friends," said Chadband, stimulated by the
sound, "that the unnatural parents of this slumbering heathen--for
parents he had, my juvenile friends, beyond a doubt--after casting
him forth to the wolves and the vultures, and the wild dogs and the
young gazelles, and the serpents, went back to their dwellings and
had their pipes, and their pots, and their flutings and their
dancings, and their malt liquors, and their butcher's meat and
poultry, would THAT be Terewth?"

Mrs. Snagsby replies by delivering herself a prey to spasms, not an
unresisting prey, but a crying and a tearing one, so that Cook's
Court re-echoes with her shrieks. Finally, becoming cataleptic, she
has to be carried up the narrow staircase like a grand piano. After
unspeakable suffering, productive of the utmost consternation, she is
pronounced, by expresses from the bedroom, free from pain, though
much exhausted, in which state of affairs Mr. Snagsby, trampled and
crushed in the piano-forte removal, and extremely timid and feeble,
ventures to come out from behind the door in the drawing-room.

All this time Jo has been standing on the spot where he woke up, ever
picking his cap and putting bits of fur in his mouth. He spits them
out with a remorseful air, for he feels that it is in his nature to
be an unimprovable reprobate and that it's no good HIS trying to keep
awake, for HE won't never know nothink. Though it may be, Jo, that
there is a history so interesting and affecting even to minds as near
the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on this earth for common
men, that if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the
light, would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it
unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without
their modest aid--it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from
it yet!

Jo never heard of any such book. Its compilers and the Reverend
Chadband are all one to him, except that he knows the Reverend
Chadband and would rather run away from him for an hour than hear him
talk for five minutes. "It an't no good my waiting here no longer,"
thinks Jo. "Mr. Snagsby an't a-going to say nothink to me to-night."
And downstairs he shuffles.

But downstairs is the charitable Guster, holding by the handrail of
the kitchen stairs and warding off a fit, as yet doubtfully, the same
having been induced by Mrs. Snagsby's screaming. She has her own
supper of bread and cheese to hand to Jo, with whom she ventures to
interchange a word or so for the first time.

"Here's something to eat, poor boy," says Guster.

"Thank'ee, mum," says Jo.

"Are you hungry?"

"Jist!" says Jo.

"What's gone of your father and your mother, eh?"

Jo stops in the middle of a bite and looks petrified. For this orphan
charge of the Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting has patted
him on the shoulder, and it is the first time in his life that any
decent hand has been so laid upon him.

"I never know'd nothink about 'em," says Jo.

"No more didn't I of mine," cries Guster. She is repressing symptoms
favourable to the fit when she seems to take alarm at something and
vanishes down the stairs.

"Jo," whispers the law-stationer softly as the boy lingers on the
step.

"Here I am, Mr. Snagsby!"

"I didn't know you were gone--there's another half-crown, Jo. It was
quite right of you to say nothing about the lady the other night when
we were out together. It would breed trouble. You can't be too quiet,
Jo."

"I am fly, master!"

And so, good night.

A ghostly shade, frilled and night-capped, follows the law-stationer
to the room he came from and glides higher up. And henceforth he
begins, go where he will, to be attended by another shadow than his
own, hardly less constant than his own, hardly less quiet than his
own. And into whatsoever atmosphere of secrecy his own shadow may
pass, let all concerned in the secrecy beware! For the watchful Mrs.
Snagsby is there too--bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, shadow of
his shadow.




CHAPTER XXVI

Sharpshooters


Wintry morning, looking with dull eyes and sallow face upon the
neighbourhood of Leicester Square, finds its inhabitants unwilling to
get out of bed. Many of them are not early risers at the brightest of
times, being birds of night who roost when the sun is high and are
wide awake and keen for prey when the stars shine out. Behind dingy
blind and curtain, in upper story and garret, skulking more or less
under false names, false hair, false titles, false jewellery, and
false histories, a colony of brigands lie in their first sleep.
Gentlemen of the green-baize road who could discourse from personal
experience of foreign galleys and home treadmills; spies of strong
governments that eternally quake with weakness and miserable fear,
broken traitors, cowards, bullies, gamesters, shufflers, swindlers,
and false witnesses; some not unmarked by the branding-iron beneath
their dirty braid; all with more cruelty in them than was in Nero,
and more crime than is in Newgate. For howsoever bad the devil can be
in fustian or smock-frock (and he can be very bad in both), he is a
more designing, callous, and intolerable devil when he sticks a pin
in his shirt-front, calls himself a gentleman, backs a card or
colour, plays a game or so of billiards, and knows a little about
bills and promissory notes than in any other form he wears. And in
such form Mr. Bucket shall find him, when he will, still pervading
the tributary channels of Leicester Square.

But the wintry morning wants him not and wakes him not. It wakes Mr.
George of the shooting gallery and his familiar. They arise, roll up
and stow away their mattresses. Mr. George, having shaved himself
before a looking-glass of minute proportions, then marches out,
bare-headed and bare-chested, to the pump in the little yard and anon
comes back shining with yellow soap, friction, drifting rain, and
exceedingly cold water. As he rubs himself upon a large jack-towel,
blowing like a military sort of diver just come up, his hair curling
tighter and tighter on his sunburnt temples the more he rubs it so
that it looks as if it never could be loosened by any less coercive
instrument than an iron rake or a curry-comb--as he rubs, and puffs,
and polishes, and blows, turning his head from side to side the more
conveniently to excoriate his throat, and standing with his body well
bent forward to keep the wet from his martial legs, Phil, on his
knees lighting a fire, looks round as if it were enough washing for
him to see all that done, and sufficient renovation for one day to
take in the superfluous health his master throws off.

When Mr. George is dry, he goes to work to brush his head with two
hard brushes at once, to that unmerciful degree that Phil,
shouldering his way round the gallery in the act of sweeping it,
winks with sympathy. This chafing over, the ornamental part of Mr.
George's toilet is soon performed. He fills his pipe, lights it, and
marches up and down smoking, as his custom is, while Phil, raising a
powerful odour of hot rolls and coffee, prepares breakfast. He smokes
gravely and marches in slow time. Perhaps this morning's pipe is
devoted to the memory of Gridley in his grave.

"And so, Phil," says George of the shooting gallery after several
turns in silence, "you were dreaming of the country last night?"

Phil, by the by, said as much in a tone of surprise as he scrambled
out of bed.

"Yes, guv'ner."

"What was it like?"

"I hardly know what it was like, guv'ner," said Phil, considering.

"How did you know it was the country?"

"On account of the grass, I think. And the swans upon it," says Phil
after further consideration.

"What were the swans doing on the grass?"

"They was a-eating of it, I expect," says Phil.

The master resumes his march, and the man resumes his preparation of
breakfast. It is not necessarily a lengthened preparation, being
limited to the setting forth of very simple breakfast requisites for
two and the broiling of a rasher of bacon at the fire in the rusty
grate; but as Phil has to sidle round a considerable part of the
gallery for every object he wants, and never brings two objects at
once, it takes time under the circumstances. At length the breakfast
is ready. Phil announcing it, Mr. George knocks the ashes out of his
pipe on the hob, stands his pipe itself in the chimney corner, and
sits down to the meal. When he has helped himself, Phil follows suit,
sitting at the extreme end of the little oblong table and taking his
plate on his knees. Either in humility, or to hide his blackened
hands, or because it is his natural manner of eating.

"The country," says Mr. George, plying his knife and fork; "why, I
suppose you never clapped your eyes on the country, Phil?"

"I see the marshes once," says Phil, contentedly eating his
breakfast.

"What marshes?"

"THE marshes, commander," returns Phil.

"Where are they?"

"I don't know where they are," says Phil; "but I see 'em, guv'ner.
They was flat. And miste."

Governor and commander are interchangeable terms with Phil,
expressive of the same respect and deference and applicable to nobody
but Mr. George.

"I was born in the country, Phil."

"Was you indeed, commander?"

"Yes. And bred there."

Phil elevates his one eyebrow, and after respectfully staring at his
master to express interest, swallows a great gulp of coffee, still
staring at him.

"There's not a bird's note that I don't know," says Mr. George. "Not
many an English leaf or berry that I couldn't name. Not many a tree
that I couldn't climb yet if I was put to it. I was a real country
boy, once. My good mother lived in the country."

"She must have been a fine old lady, guv'ner," Phil observes.

"Aye! And not so old either, five and thirty years ago," says Mr.
George. "But I'll wager that at ninety she would be near as upright
as me, and near as broad across the shoulders."

"Did she die at ninety, guv'ner?" inquires Phil.

"No. Bosh! Let her rest in peace, God bless her!" says the
trooper. "What set me on about country boys, and runaways, and
good-for-nothings? You, to be sure! So you never clapped your eyes
upon the country--marshes and dreams excepted. Eh?"

Phil shakes his head.

"Do you want to see it?"

"N-no, I don't know as I do, particular," says Phil.

"The town's enough for you, eh?"

"Why, you see, commander," says Phil, "I ain't acquainted with
anythink else, and I doubt if I ain't a-getting too old to take to
novelties."

"How old ARE you, Phil?" asks the trooper, pausing as he conveys his
smoking saucer to his lips.

"I'm something with a eight in it," says Phil. "It can't be eighty.
Nor yet eighteen. It's betwixt 'em, somewheres."

Mr. George, slowly putting down his saucer without tasting its
contents, is laughingly beginning, "Why, what the deuce, Phil--" when
he stops, seeing that Phil is counting on his dirty fingers.

"I was just eight," says Phil, "agreeable to the parish calculation,
when I went with the tinker. I was sent on a errand, and I see him
a-sittin under a old buildin with a fire all to himself wery
comfortable, and he says, 'Would you like to come along a me, my
man?' I says 'Yes,' and him and me and the fire goes home to
Clerkenwell together. That was April Fool Day. I was able to count up
to ten; and when April Fool Day come round again, I says to myself,
'Now, old chap, you're one and a eight in it.' April Fool Day after
that, I says, 'Now, old chap, you're two and a eight in it.' In
course of time, I come to ten and a eight in it; two tens and a eight
in it. When it got so high, it got the upper hand of me, but this is
how I always know there's a eight in it."

"Ah!" says Mr. George, resuming his breakfast. "And where's the
tinker?"

"Drink put him in the hospital, guv'ner, and the hospital put him--in
a glass-case, I HAVE heerd," Phil replies mysteriously.

"By that means you got promotion? Took the business, Phil?"

"Yes, commander, I took the business. Such as it was. It wasn't much
of a beat--round Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell, Smiffeld,
and there--poor neighbourhood, where they uses up the kettles till
they're past mending. Most of the tramping tinkers used to come and
lodge at our place; that was the best part of my master's earnings.
But they didn't come to me. I warn't like him. He could sing 'em a
good song. I couldn't! He could play 'em a tune on any sort of pot
you please, so as it was iron or block tin. I never could do nothing
with a pot but mend it or bile it--never had a note of music in me.
Besides, I was too ill-looking, and their wives complained of me."

"They were mighty particular. You would pass muster in a crowd,
Phil!" says the trooper with a pleasant smile.

"No, guv'ner," returns Phil, shaking his head. "No, I shouldn't. I
was passable enough when I went with the tinker, though nothing to
boast of then; but what with blowing the fire with my mouth when I
was young, and spileing my complexion, and singeing my hair off, and
swallering the smoke, and what with being nat'rally unfort'nate in
the way of running against hot metal and marking myself by sich
means, and what with having turn-ups with the tinker as I got older,
almost whenever he was too far gone in drink--which was almost
always--my beauty was queer, wery queer, even at that time. As to
since, what with a dozen years in a dark forge where the men was
given to larking, and what with being scorched in a accident at a
gas-works, and what with being blowed out of winder case-filling at
the firework business, I am ugly enough to be made a show on!"

Resigning himself to which condition with a perfectly satisfied
manner, Phil begs the favour of another cup of coffee. While drinking
it, he says, "It was after the case-filling blow-up when I first see
you, commander. You remember?"

"I remember, Phil. You were walking along in the sun."

"Crawling, guv'ner, again a wall--"

"True, Phil--shouldering your way on--"

"In a night-cap!" exclaims Phil, excited.

"In a night-cap--"

"And hobbling with a couple of sticks!" cries Phil, still more
excited.

"With a couple of sticks. When--"

"When you stops, you know," cries Phil, putting down his cup and
saucer and hastily removing his plate from his knees, "and says to
me, 'What, comrade! You have been in the wars!' I didn't say much to
you, commander, then, for I was took by surprise that a person so
strong and healthy and bold as you was should stop to speak to such a
limping bag of bones as I was. But you says to me, says you,
delivering it out of your chest as hearty as possible, so that it was
like a glass of something hot, 'What accident have you met with? You
have been badly hurt. What's amiss, old boy? Cheer up, and tell us
about it!' Cheer up! I was cheered already! I says as much to you,
you says more to me, I says more to you, you says more to me, and
here I am, commander! Here I am, commander!" cries Phil, who has
started from his chair and unaccountably begun to sidle away. "If a
mark's wanted, or if it will improve the business, let the customers
take aim at me. They can't spoil MY beauty. I'M all right. Come on!
If they want a man to box at, let 'em box at me. Let 'em knock me
well about the head. I don't mind. If they want a light-weight to be
throwed for practice, Cornwall, Devonshire, or Lancashire, let 'em
throw me. They won't hurt ME. I have been throwed, all sorts of
styles, all my life!"

With this unexpected speech, energetically delivered and accompanied
by action illustrative of the various exercises referred to, Phil
Squod shoulders his way round three sides of the gallery, and
abruptly tacking off at his commander, makes a butt at him with his
head, intended to express devotion to his service. He then begins to
clear away the breakfast.

Mr. George, after laughing cheerfully and clapping him on the
shoulder, assists in these arrangements and helps to get the gallery
into business order. That done, he takes a turn at the dumb-bells,
and afterwards weighing himself and opining that he is getting "too
fleshy," engages with great gravity in solitary broadsword practice.
Meanwhile Phil has fallen to work at his usual table, where he screws
and unscrews, and cleans, and files, and whistles into small
apertures, and blackens himself more and more, and seems to do and
undo everything that can be done and undone about a gun.

Master and man are at length disturbed by footsteps in the passage,
where they make an unusual sound, denoting the arrival of unusual
company. These steps, advancing nearer and nearer to the gallery,
bring into it a group at first sight scarcely reconcilable with any
day in the year but the fifth of November.

It consists of a limp and ugly figure carried in a chair by two
bearers and attended by a lean female with a face like a pinched
mask, who might be expected immediately to recite the popular verses
commemorative of the time when they did contrive to blow Old England
up alive but for her keeping her lips tightly and defiantly closed as
the chair is put down. At which point the figure in it gasping, "O
Lord! Oh, dear me! I am shaken!" adds, "How de do, my dear friend,
how de do?" Mr. George then descries, in the procession, the
venerable Mr. Smallweed out for an airing, attended by his
granddaughter Judy as body-guard.

"Mr. George, my dear friend," says Grandfather Smallweed, removing
his right arm from the neck of one of his bearers, whom he has nearly
throttled coming along, "how de do? You're surprised to see me, my
dear friend."

"I should hardly have been more surprised to have seen your friend in
the city," returns Mr. George.

"I am very seldom out," pants Mr. Smallweed. "I haven't been out for
many months. It's inconvenient--and it comes expensive. But I longed
so much to see you, my dear Mr. George. How de do, sir?"

"I am well enough," says Mr. George. "I hope you are the same."

"You can't be too well, my dear friend." Mr. Smallweed takes him by
both hands. "I have brought my granddaughter Judy. I couldn't keep
her away. She longed so much to see you."

"Hum! She bears it calmly!" mutters Mr. George.

"So we got a hackney-cab, and put a chair in it, and just round the
corner they lifted me out of the cab and into the chair, and carried
me here that I might see my dear friend in his own establishment!
This," says Grandfather Smallweed, alluding to the bearer, who has
been in danger of strangulation and who withdraws adjusting his
windpipe, "is the driver of the cab. He has nothing extra. It is by
agreement included in his fare. This person," the other bearer, "we
engaged in the street outside for a pint of beer. Which is twopence.
Judy, give the person twopence. I was not sure you had a workman of
your own here, my dear friend, or we needn't have employed this
person."

Grandfather Smallweed refers to Phil with a glance of considerable
terror and a half-subdued "O Lord! Oh, dear me!" Nor in his
apprehension, on the surface of things, without some reason, for
Phil, who has never beheld the apparition in the black-velvet cap
before, has stopped short with a gun in his hand with much of the air
of a dead shot intent on picking Mr. Smallweed off as an ugly old
bird of the crow species.

"Judy, my child," says Grandfather Smallweed, "give the person his
twopence. It's a great deal for what he has done."

The person, who is one of those extraordinary specimens of human
fungus that spring up spontaneously in the western streets of London,
ready dressed in an old red jacket, with a "mission" for holding
horses and calling coaches, received his twopence with anything but
transport, tosses the money into the air, catches it over-handed, and
retires.

"My dear Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed, "would you be so
kind as help to carry me to the fire? I am accustomed to a fire, and
I am an old man, and I soon chill. Oh, dear me!"

His closing exclamation is jerked out of the venerable gentleman by
the suddenness with which Mr. Squod, like a genie, catches him up,
chair and all, and deposits him on the hearth-stone.

"O Lord!" says Mr. Smallweed, panting. "Oh, dear me! Oh, my stars! My
dear friend, your workman is very strong--and very prompt. O Lord, he
is very prompt! Judy, draw me back a little. I'm being scorched in
the legs," which indeed is testified to the noses of all present by
the smell of his worsted stockings.

The gentle Judy, having backed her grandfather a little way from the
fire, and having shaken him up as usual, and having released his
overshadowed eye from its black-velvet extinguisher, Mr. Smallweed
again says, "Oh, dear me! O Lord!" and looking about and meeting Mr.
George's glance, again stretches out both hands.

"My dear friend! So happy in this meeting! And this is your
establishment? It's a delightful place. It's a picture! You never
find that anything goes off here accidentally, do you, my dear
friend?" adds Grandfather Smallweed, very ill at ease.

"No, no. No fear of that."

"And your workman. He--Oh, dear me!--he never lets anything off
without meaning it, does he, my dear friend?"

"He has never hurt anybody but himself," says Mr. George, smiling.

"But he might, you know. He seems to have hurt himself a good deal,
and he might hurt somebody else," the old gentleman returns. "He
mightn't mean it--or he even might. Mr. George, will you order him to
leave his infernal fire-arms alone and go away?"

Obedient to a nod from the trooper, Phil retires, empty-handed, to
the other end of the gallery. Mr. Smallweed, reassured, falls to
rubbing his legs.

"And you're doing well, Mr. George?" he says to the trooper, squarely
standing faced about towards him with his broadsword in his hand.
"You are prospering, please the Powers?"

Mr. George answers with a cool nod, adding, "Go on. You have not come
to say that, I know."

"You are so sprightly, Mr. George," returns the venerable
grandfather. "You are such good company."

"Ha ha! Go on!" says Mr. George.

"My dear friend! But that sword looks awful gleaming and sharp. It
might cut somebody, by accident. It makes me shiver, Mr. George.
Curse him!" says the excellent old gentleman apart to Judy as the
trooper takes a step or two away to lay it aside. "He owes me money,
and might think of paying off old scores in this murdering place. I
wish your brimstone grandmother was here, and he'd shave her head
off."

Mr. George, returning, folds his arms, and looking down at the old
man, sliding every moment lower and lower in his chair, says quietly,
"Now for it!"

"Ho!" cries Mr. Smallweed, rubbing his hands with an artful chuckle.
"Yes. Now for it. Now for what, my dear friend?"

"For a pipe," says Mr. George, who with great composure sets his
chair in the chimney-corner, takes his pipe from the grate, fills it
and lights it, and falls to smoking peacefully.

This tends to the discomfiture of Mr. Smallweed, who finds it so
difficult to resume his object, whatever it may be, that he becomes
exasperated and secretly claws the air with an impotent
vindictiveness expressive of an intense desire to tear and rend the
visage of Mr. George. As the excellent old gentleman's nails are long
and leaden, and his hands lean and veinous, and his eyes green and
watery; and, over and above this, as he continues, while he claws, to
slide down in his chair and to collapse into a shapeless bundle, he
becomes such a ghastly spectacle, even in the accustomed eyes of
Judy, that that young virgin pounces at him with something more than
the ardour of affection and so shakes him up and pats and pokes him
in divers parts of his body, but particularly in that part which the
science of self-defence would call his wind, that in his grievous
distress he utters enforced sounds like a paviour's rammer.

When Judy has by these means set him up again in his chair, with a
white face and a frosty nose (but still clawing), she stretches out
her weazen forefinger and gives Mr. George one poke in the back. The
trooper raising his head, she makes another poke at her esteemed
grandfather, and having thus brought them together, stares rigidly at
the fire.

"Aye, aye! Ho, ho! U--u--u--ugh!" chatters Grandfather Smallweed,
swallowing his rage. "My dear friend!" (still clawing).

"I tell you what," says Mr. George. "If you want to converse with me,
you must speak out. I am one of the roughs, and I can't go about and
about. I haven't the art to do it. I am not clever enough. It don't
suit me. When you go winding round and round me," says the trooper,
putting his pipe between his lips again, "damme, if I don't feel as
if I was being smothered!"

And he inflates his broad chest to its utmost extent as if to assure
himself that he is not smothered yet.

"If you have come to give me a friendly call," continues Mr. George,
"I am obliged to you; how are you? If you have come to see whether
there's any property on the premises, look about you; you are
welcome. If you want to out with something, out with it!"

The blooming Judy, without removing her gaze from the fire, gives her
grandfather one ghostly poke.

"You see! It's her opinion too. And why the devil that young woman
won't sit down like a Christian," says Mr. George with his eyes
musingly fixed on Judy, "I can't comprehend."

"She keeps at my side to attend to me, sir," says Grandfather
Smallweed. "I am an old man, my dear Mr. George, and I need some
attention. I can carry my years; I am not a brimstone poll-parrot"
(snarling and looking unconsciously for the cushion), "but I need
attention, my dear friend."

"Well!" returns the trooper, wheeling his chair to face the old man.
"Now then?"

"My friend in the city, Mr. George, has done a little business with a
pupil of yours."

"Has he?" says Mr. George. "I am sorry to hear it."

"Yes, sir." Grandfather Smallweed rubs his legs. "He is a fine young
soldier now, Mr. George, by the name of Carstone. Friends came
forward and paid it all up, honourable."

"Did they?" returns Mr. George. "Do you think your friend in the city
would like a piece of advice?"

"I think he would, my dear friend. From you."

"I advise him, then, to do no more business in that quarter. There's
no more to be got by it. The young gentleman, to my knowledge, is
brought to a dead halt."

"No, no, my dear friend. No, no, Mr. George. No, no, no, sir,"
remonstrates Grandfather Smallweed, cunningly rubbing his spare legs.
"Not quite a dead halt, I think. He has good friends, and he is good
for his pay, and he is good for the selling price of his commission,
and he is good for his chance in a lawsuit, and he is good for his
chance in a wife, and--oh, do you know, Mr. George, I think my friend
would consider the young gentleman good for something yet?" says
Grandfather Smallweed, turning up his velvet cap and scratching his
ear like a monkey.

Mr. George, who has put aside his pipe and sits with an arm on his
chair-back, beats a tattoo on the ground with his right foot as if he
were not particularly pleased with the turn the conversation has
taken.

"But to pass from one subject to another," resumes Mr. Smallweed.
"'To promote the conversation,' as a joker might say. To pass, Mr.
George, from the ensign to the captain."

"What are you up to, now?" asks Mr. George, pausing with a frown in
stroking the recollection of his moustache. "What captain?"

"Our captain. The captain we know of. Captain Hawdon."

"Oh! That's it, is it?" says Mr. George with a low whistle as he sees
both grandfather and granddaughter looking hard at him. "You are
there! Well? What about it? Come, I won't be smothered any more.
Speak!"

"My dear friend," returns the old man, "I was applied--Judy, shake me
up a little!--I was applied to yesterday about the captain, and my
opinion still is that the captain is not dead."

"Bosh!" observes Mr. George.

"What was your remark, my dear friend?" inquires the old man with his
hand to his ear.

"Bosh!"

"Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Mr. George, of my opinion you can
judge for yourself according to the questions asked of me and the
reasons given for asking 'em. Now, what do you think the lawyer
making the inquiries wants?"

"A job," says Mr. George.

"Nothing of the kind!"

"Can't be a lawyer, then," says Mr. George, folding his arms with an
air of confirmed resolution.

"My dear friend, he is a lawyer, and a famous one. He wants to see
some fragment in Captain Hawdon's writing. He don't want to keep it.
He only wants to see it and compare it with a writing in his
possession."

"Well?"

"Well, Mr. George. Happening to remember the advertisement concerning
Captain Hawdon and any information that could be given respecting
him, he looked it up and came to me--just as you did, my dear friend.
WILL you shake hands? So glad you came that day! I should have missed
forming such a friendship if you hadn't come!"

"Well, Mr. Smallweed?" says Mr. George again after going through the
ceremony with some stiffness.

"I had no such thing. I have nothing but his signature. Plague
pestilence and famine, battle murder and sudden death upon him," says
the old man, making a curse out of one of his few remembrances of a
prayer and squeezing up his velvet cap between his angry hands, "I
have half a million of his signatures, I think! But you,"
breathlessly recovering his mildness of speech as Judy re-adjusts the
cap on his skittle-ball of a head, "you, my dear Mr. George, are
likely to have some letter or paper that would suit the purpose.
Anything would suit the purpose, written in the hand."

"Some writing in that hand," says the trooper, pondering; "may be, I
have."

"My dearest friend!"

"May be, I have not."

"Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed, crest-fallen.

"But if I had bushels of it, I would not show as much as would make a
cartridge without knowing why."

"Sir, I have told you why. My dear Mr. George, I have told you why."

"Not enough," says the trooper, shaking his head. "I must know more,
and approve it."

"Then, will you come to the lawyer? My dear friend, will you come and
see the gentleman?" urges Grandfather Smallweed, pulling out a lean
old silver watch with hands like the leg of a skeleton. "I told him
it was probable I might call upon him between ten and eleven this
forenoon, and it's now half after ten. Will you come and see the
gentleman, Mr. George?"

"Hum!" says he gravely. "I don't mind that. Though why this should
concern you so much, I don't know."

"Everything concerns me that has a chance in it of bringing anything
to light about him. Didn't he take us all in? Didn't he owe us
immense sums, all round? Concern me? Who can anything about him
concern more than me? Not, my dear friend," says Grandfather
Smallweed, lowering his tone, "that I want YOU to betray anything.
Far from it. Are you ready to come, my dear friend?"

"Aye! I'll come in a moment. I promise nothing, you know."

"No, my dear Mr. George; no."

"And you mean to say you're going to give me a lift to this place,
wherever it is, without charging for it?" Mr. George inquires,
getting his hat and thick wash-leather gloves.

This pleasantry so tickles Mr. Smallweed that he laughs, long and
low, before the fire. But ever while he laughs, he glances over his
paralytic shoulder at Mr. George and eagerly watches him as he
unlocks the padlock of a homely cupboard at the distant end of the
gallery, looks here and there upon the higher shelves, and ultimately
takes something out with a rustling of paper, folds it, and puts it
in his breast. Then Judy pokes Mr. Smallweed once, and Mr. Smallweed
pokes Judy once.

"I am ready," says the trooper, coming back. "Phil, you can carry
this old gentleman to his coach, and make nothing of him."

"Oh, dear me! O Lord! Stop a moment!" says Mr. Smallweed. "He's so
very prompt! Are you sure you can do it carefully, my worthy man?"

Phil makes no reply, but seizing the chair and its load, sidles away,
tightly hugged by the now speechless Mr. Smallweed, and bolts along
the passage as if he had an acceptable commission to carry the old
gentleman to the nearest volcano. His shorter trust, however,
terminating at the cab, he deposits him there; and the fair Judy
takes her place beside him, and the chair embellishes the roof, and
Mr. George takes the vacant place upon the box.

Mr. George is quite confounded by the spectacle he beholds from time
to time as he peeps into the cab through the window behind him, where
the grim Judy is always motionless, and the old gentleman with his
cap over one eye is always sliding off the seat into the straw and
looking upward at him out of his other eye with a helpless expression
of being jolted in the back.




CHAPTER XXVII

More Old Soldiers Than One


Mr. George has not far to ride with folded arms upon the box, for
their destination is Lincoln's Inn Fields. When the driver stops his
horses, Mr. George alights, and looking in at the window, says,
"What, Mr. Tulkinghorn's your man, is he?"

"Yes, my dear friend. Do you know him, Mr. George?"

"Why, I have heard of him--seen him too, I think. But I don't know
him, and he don't know me."

There ensues the carrying of Mr. Smallweed upstairs, which is done to
perfection with the trooper's help. He is borne into Mr.
Tulkinghorn's great room and deposited on the Turkey rug before the
fire. Mr. Tulkinghorn is not within at the present moment but will be
back directly. The occupant of the pew in the hall, having said thus
much, stirs the fire and leaves the triumvirate to warm themselves.

Mr. George is mightily curious in respect of the room. He looks up at
the painted ceiling, looks round at the old law-books, contemplates
the portraits of the great clients, reads aloud the names on the
boxes.

"'Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,'" Mr. George reads thoughtfully.
"Ha! 'Manor of Chesney Wold.' Humph!" Mr. George stands looking at
these boxes a long while--as if they were pictures--and comes back to
the fire repeating, "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and Manor of
Chesney Wold, hey?"

"Worth a mint of money, Mr. George!" whispers Grandfather Smallweed,
rubbing his legs. "Powerfully rich!"

"Who do you mean? This old gentleman, or the Baronet?"

"This gentleman, this gentleman."

"So I have heard; and knows a thing or two, I'll hold a wager. Not
bad quarters, either," says Mr. George, looking round again. "See the
strong-box yonder!"

This reply is cut short by Mr. Tulkinghorn's arrival. There is no
change in him, of course. Rustily drest, with his spectacles in his
hand, and their very case worn threadbare. In manner, close and dry.
In voice, husky and low. In face, watchful behind a blind; habitually
not uncensorious and contemptuous perhaps. The peerage may have
warmer worshippers and faithfuller believers than Mr. Tulkinghorn,
after all, if everything were known.

"Good morning, Mr. Smallweed, good morning!" he says as he comes in.
"You have brought the sergeant, I see. Sit down, sergeant."

As Mr. Tulkinghorn takes off his gloves and puts them in his hat, he
looks with half-closed eyes across the room to where the trooper
stands and says within himself perchance, "You'll do, my friend!"

"Sit down, sergeant," he repeats as he comes to his table, which is
set on one side of the fire, and takes his easy-chair. "Cold and raw
this morning, cold and raw!" Mr. Tulkinghorn warms before the bars,
alternately, the palms and knuckles of his hands and looks (from
behind that blind which is always down) at the trio sitting in a
little semicircle before him.

"Now, I can feel what I am about" (as perhaps he can in two senses),
"Mr. Smallweed." The old gentleman is newly shaken up by Judy to bear
his part in the conversation. "You have brought our good friend the
sergeant, I see."

"Yes, sir," returns Mr. Smallweed, very servile to the lawyer's
wealth and influence.

"And what does the sergeant say about this business?"

"Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed with a tremulous wave of his
shrivelled hand, "this is the gentleman, sir."

Mr. George salutes the gentleman but otherwise sits bolt upright and
profoundly silent--very forward in his chair, as if the full
complement of regulation appendages for a field-day hung about him.

Mr. Tulkinghorn proceeds, "Well, George--I believe your name is
George?"

"It is so, Sir."

"What do you say, George?"

"I ask your pardon, sir," returns the trooper, "but I should wish to
know what YOU say?"

"Do you mean in point of reward?"

"I mean in point of everything, sir."

This is so very trying to Mr. Smallweed's temper that he suddenly
breaks out with "You're a brimstone beast!" and as suddenly asks
pardon of Mr. Tulkinghorn, excusing himself for this slip of the
tongue by saying to Judy, "I was thinking of your grandmother, my
dear."

"I supposed, sergeant," Mr. Tulkinghorn resumes as he leans on one
side of his chair and crosses his legs, "that Mr. Smallweed might
have sufficiently explained the matter. It lies in the smallest
compass, however. You served under Captain Hawdon at one time, and
were his attendant in illness, and rendered him many little services,
and were rather in his confidence, I am told. That is so, is it not?"

"Yes, sir, that is so," says Mr. George with military brevity.

"Therefore you may happen to have in your possession
something--anything, no matter what; accounts, instructions, orders,
a letter, anything--in Captain Hawdon's writing. I wish to compare
his writing with some that I have. If you can give me the
opportunity, you shall be rewarded for your trouble. Three, four,
five, guineas, you would consider handsome, I dare say."

"Noble, my dear friend!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, screwing up his
eyes.

"If not, say how much more, in your conscience as a soldier, you can
demand. There is no need for you to part with the writing, against
your inclination--though I should prefer to have it."

Mr. George sits squared in exactly the same attitude, looks at the
painted ceiling, and says never a word. The irascible Mr. Smallweed
scratches the air.

"The question is," says Mr. Tulkinghorn in his methodical, subdued,
uninterested way, "first, whether you have any of Captain Hawdon's
writing?"

"First, whether I have any of Captain Hawdon's writing, sir," repeats
Mr. George.

"Secondly, what will satisfy you for the trouble of producing it?"

"Secondly, what will satisfy me for the trouble of producing it,
sir," repeats Mr. George.

"Thirdly, you can judge for yourself whether it is at all like that,"
says Mr. Tulkinghorn, suddenly handing him some sheets of written
paper tied together.

"Whether it is at all like that, sir. Just so," repeats Mr. George.

All three repetitions Mr. George pronounces in a mechanical manner,
looking straight at Mr. Tulkinghorn; nor does he so much as glance at
the affidavit in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, that has been given to him
for his inspection (though he still holds it in his hand), but
continues to look at the lawyer with an air of troubled meditation.

"Well?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "What do you say?"

"Well, sir," replies Mr. George, rising erect and looking immense, "I
would rather, if you'll excuse me, have nothing to do with this."

Mr. Tulkinghorn, outwardly quite undisturbed, demands, "Why not?"

"Why, sir," returns the trooper. "Except on military compulsion, I am
not a man of business. Among civilians I am what they call in
Scotland a ne'er-do-weel. I have no head for papers, sir. I can stand
any fire better than a fire of cross questions. I mentioned to Mr.
Smallweed, only an hour or so ago, that when I come into things of
this kind I feel as if I was being smothered. And that is my
sensation," says Mr. George, looking round upon the company, "at the
present moment."

With that, he takes three strides forward to replace the papers on
the lawyer's table and three strides backward to resume his former
station, where he stands perfectly upright, now looking at the ground
and now at the painted ceiling, with his hands behind him as if to
prevent himself from accepting any other document whatever.

Under this provocation, Mr. Smallweed's favourite adjective of
disparagement is so close to his tongue that he begins the words "my
dear friend" with the monosyllable "brim," thus converting the
possessive pronoun into brimmy and appearing to have an impediment in
his speech. Once past this difficulty, however, he exhorts his dear
friend in the tenderest manner not to be rash, but to do what so
eminent a gentleman requires, and to do it with a good grace,
confident that it must be unobjectionable as well as profitable. Mr.
Tulkinghorn merely utters an occasional sentence, as, "You are the
best judge of your own interest, sergeant." "Take care you do no harm
by this." "Please yourself, please yourself." "If you know what you
mean, that's quite enough." These he utters with an appearance of
perfect indifference as he looks over the papers on his table and
prepares to write a letter.

Mr. George looks distrustfully from the painted ceiling to the
ground, from the ground to Mr. Smallweed, from Mr. Smallweed to Mr.
Tulkinghorn, and from Mr. Tulkinghorn to the painted ceiling again,
often in his perplexity changing the leg on which he rests.

"I do assure you, sir," says Mr. George, "not to say it offensively,
that between you and Mr. Smallweed here, I really am being smothered
fifty times over. I really am, sir. I am not a match for you
gentlemen. Will you allow me to ask why you want to see the captain's
hand, in the case that I could find any specimen of it?"

Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly shakes his head. "No. If you were a man of
business, sergeant, you would not need to be informed that there are
confidential reasons, very harmless in themselves, for many such
wants in the profession to which I belong. But if you are afraid of
doing any injury to Captain Hawdon, you may set your mind at rest
about that."

"Aye! He is dead, sir."

"IS he?" Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly sits down to write.

"Well, sir," says the trooper, looking into his hat after another
disconcerted pause, "I am sorry not to have given you more
satisfaction. If it would be any satisfaction to any one that I
should be confirmed in my judgment that I would rather have nothing
to do with this by a friend of mine who has a better head for
business than I have, and who is an old soldier, I am willing to
consult with him. I--I really am so completely smothered myself at
present," says Mr. George, passing his hand hopelessly across his
brow, "that I don't know but what it might be a satisfaction to me."

Mr. Smallweed, hearing that this authority is an old soldier, so
strongly inculcates the expediency of the trooper's taking counsel
with him, and particularly informing him of its being a question of
five guineas or more, that Mr. George engages to go and see him. Mr.
Tulkinghorn says nothing either way.

"I'll consult my friend, then, by your leave, sir," says the trooper,
"and I'll take the liberty of looking in again with the final answer
in the course of the day. Mr. Smallweed, if you wish to be carried
downstairs--"

"In a moment, my dear friend, in a moment. Will you first let me
speak half a word with this gentleman in private?"

"Certainly, sir. Don't hurry yourself on my account." The trooper
retires to a distant part of the room and resumes his curious
inspection of the boxes, strong and otherwise.

"If I wasn't as weak as a brimstone baby, sir," whispers Grandfather
Smallweed, drawing the lawyer down to his level by the lapel of his
coat and flashing some half-quenched green fire out of his angry
eyes, "I'd tear the writing away from him. He's got it buttoned in
his breast. I saw him put it there. Judy saw him put it there. Speak
up, you crabbed image for the sign of a walking-stick shop, and say
you saw him put it there!"

This vehement conjuration the old gentleman accompanies with such a
thrust at his granddaughter that it is too much for his strength, and
he slips away out of his chair, drawing Mr. Tulkinghorn with him,
until he is arrested by Judy, and well shaken.

"Violence will not do for me, my friend," Mr. Tulkinghorn then
remarks coolly.

"No, no, I know, I know, sir. But it's chafing and
galling--it's--it's worse than your smattering chattering magpie of a
grandmother," to the imperturbable Judy, who only looks at the fire,
"to know he has got what's wanted and won't give it up. He, not to
give it up! HE! A vagabond! But never mind, sir, never mind. At the
most, he has only his own way for a little while. I have him
periodically in a vice. I'll twist him, sir. I'll screw him, sir. If
he won't do it with a good grace, I'll make him do it with a bad one,
sir! Now, my dear Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed, winking at
the lawyer hideously as he releases him, "I am ready for your kind
assistance, my excellent friend!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn, with some shadowy sign of amusement manifesting
itself through his self-possession, stands on the hearth-rug with his
back to the fire, watching the disappearance of Mr. Smallweed and
acknowledging the trooper's parting salute with one slight nod.

It is more difficult to get rid of the old gentleman, Mr. George
finds, than to bear a hand in carrying him downstairs, for when he is
replaced in his conveyance, he is so loquacious on the subject of the
guineas and retains such an affectionate hold of his button--having,
in truth, a secret longing to rip his coat open and rob him--that
some degree of force is necessary on the trooper's part to effect a
separation. It is accomplished at last, and he proceeds alone in
quest of his adviser.

By the cloisterly Temple, and by Whitefriars (there, not without a
glance at Hanging-Sword Alley, which would seem to be something in
his way), and by Blackfriars Bridge, and Blackfriars Road, Mr. George
sedately marches to a street of little shops lying somewhere in that
ganglion of roads from Kent and Surrey, and of streets from the
bridges of London, centring in the far-famed elephant who has lost
his castle formed of a thousand four-horse coaches to a stronger iron
monster than he, ready to chop him into mince-meat any day he dares.
To one of the little shops in this street, which is a musician's
shop, having a few fiddles in the window, and some Pan's pipes and a
tambourine, and a triangle, and certain elongated scraps of music,
Mr. George directs his massive tread. And halting at a few paces from
it, as he sees a soldierly looking woman, with her outer skirts
tucked up, come forth with a small wooden tub, and in that tub
commence a-whisking and a-splashing on the margin of the pavement,
Mr. George says to himself, "She's as usual, washing greens. I never
saw her, except upon a baggage-waggon, when she wasn't washing
greens!"

The subject of this reflection is at all events so occupied in
washing greens at present that she remains unsuspicious of Mr.
George's approach until, lifting up herself and her tub together when
she has poured the water off into the gutter, she finds him standing
near her. Her reception of him is not flattering.

"George, I never see you but I wish you was a hundred mile away!"

The trooper, without remarking on this welcome, follows into the
musical-instrument shop, where the lady places her tub of greens upon
the counter, and having shaken hands with him, rests her arms upon
it.

"I never," she says, "George, consider Matthew Bagnet safe a minute
when you're near him. You are that restless and that roving--"

"Yes! I know I am, Mrs. Bagnet. I know I am."

"You know you are!" says Mrs. Bagnet. "What's the use of that? WHY
are you?"

"The nature of the animal, I suppose," returns the trooper
good-humouredly.

"Ah!" cries Mrs. Bagnet, something shrilly. "But what satisfaction
will the nature of the animal be to me when the animal shall have
tempted my Mat away from the musical business to New Zealand or
Australey?"

Mrs. Bagnet is not at all an ill-looking woman. Rather large-boned, a
little coarse in the grain, and freckled by the sun and wind which
have tanned her hair upon the forehead, but healthy, wholesome, and
bright-eyed. A strong, busy, active, honest-faced woman of from
forty-five to fifty. Clean, hardy, and so economically dressed
(though substantially) that the only article of ornament of which she
stands possessed appear's to be her wedding-ring, around which her
finger has grown to be so large since it was put on that it will
never come off again until it shall mingle with Mrs. Bagnet's dust.

"Mrs. Bagnet," says the trooper, "I am on my parole with you. Mat
will get no harm from me. You may trust me so far."

"Well, I think I may. But the very looks of you are unsettling," Mrs.
Bagnet rejoins. "Ah, George, George! If you had only settled down and
married Joe Pouch's widow when he died in North America, SHE'D have
combed your hair for you."

"It was a chance for me, certainly," returns the trooper half
laughingly, half seriously, "but I shall never settle down into a
respectable man now. Joe Pouch's widow might have done me good--there
was something in her, and something of her--but I couldn't make up my
mind to it. If I had had the luck to meet with such a wife as Mat
found!"

Mrs. Bagnet, who seems in a virtuous way to be under little reserve
with a good sort of fellow, but to be another good sort of fellow
herself for that matter, receives this compliment by flicking Mr.
George in the face with a head of greens and taking her tub into the
little room behind the shop.

"Why, Quebec, my poppet," says George, following, on invitation, into
that department. "And little Malta, too! Come and kiss your Bluffy!"

These young ladies--not supposed to have been actually christened by
the names applied to them, though always so called in the family from
the places of their birth in barracks--are respectively employed on
three-legged stools, the younger (some five or six years old) in
learning her letters out of a penny primer, the elder (eight or nine
perhaps) in teaching her and sewing with great assiduity. Both hail
Mr. George with acclamations as an old friend and after some kissing
and romping plant their stools beside him.

"And how's young Woolwich?" says Mr. George.

"Ah! There now!" cries Mrs. Bagnet, turning about from her saucepans
(for she is cooking dinner) with a bright flush on her face. "Would
you believe it? Got an engagement at the theayter, with his father,
to play the fife in a military piece."

"Well done, my godson!" cries Mr. George, slapping his thigh.

"I believe you!" says Mrs. Bagnet. "He's a Briton. That's what
Woolwich is. A Briton!"

"And Mat blows away at his bassoon, and you're respectable civilians
one and all," says Mr. George. "Family people. Children growing up.
Mat's old mother in Scotland, and your old father somewhere else,
corresponded with, and helped a little, and--well, well! To be sure,
I don't know why I shouldn't be wished a hundred mile away, for I
have not much to do with all this!"

Mr. George is becoming thoughtful, sitting before the fire in the
whitewashed room, which has a sanded floor and a barrack smell and
contains nothing superfluous and has not a visible speck of dirt or
dust in it, from the faces of Quebec and Malta to the bright tin pots
and pannikins upon the dresser shelves--Mr. George is becoming
thoughtful, sitting here while Mrs. Bagnet is busy, when Mr. Bagnet
and young Woolwich opportunely come home. Mr. Bagnet is an
ex-artilleryman, tall and upright, with shaggy eyebrows and whiskers
like the fibres of a coco-nut, not a hair upon his head, and a torrid
complexion. His voice, short, deep, and resonant, is not at all
unlike the tones of the instrument to which he is devoted. Indeed
there may be generally observed in him an unbending, unyielding,
brass-bound air, as if he were himself the bassoon of the human
orchestra. Young Woolwich is the type and model of a young drummer.

Both father and son salute the trooper heartily. He saying, in due
season, that he has come to advise with Mr. Bagnet, Mr. Bagnet
hospitably declares that he will hear of no business until after
dinner and that his friend shall not partake of his counsel without
first partaking of boiled pork and greens. The trooper yielding to
this invitation, he and Mr. Bagnet, not to embarrass the domestic
preparations, go forth to take a turn up and down the little street,
which they promenade with measured tread and folded arms, as if it
were a rampart.

"George," says Mr. Bagnet. "You know me. It's my old girl that
advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her.
Discipline must be maintained. Wait till the greens is off her mind.
Then we'll consult. Whatever the old girl says, do--do it!"

"I intend to, Mat," replies the other. "I would sooner take her
opinion than that of a college."

"College," returns Mr. Bagnet in short sentences, bassoon-like. "What
college could you leave--in another quarter of the world--with
nothing but a grey cloak and an umbrella--to make its way home to
Europe? The old girl would do it to-morrow. Did it once!"

"You are right," says Mr. George.

"What college," pursues Bagnet, "could you set up in life--with two
penn'orth of white lime--a penn'orth of fuller's earth--a ha'porth of
sand--and the rest of the change out of sixpence in money? That's
what the old girl started on. In the present business."

"I am rejoiced to hear it's thriving, Mat."

"The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, acquiescing, "saves. Has a stocking
somewhere. With money in it. I never saw it. But I know she's got it.
Wait till the greens is off her mind. Then she'll set you up."

"She is a treasure!" exclaims Mr. George.

"She's more. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be
maintained. It was the old girl that brought out my musical
abilities. I should have been in the artillery now but for the old
girl. Six years I hammered at the fiddle. Ten at the flute. The old
girl said it wouldn't do; intention good, but want of flexibility;
try the bassoon. The old girl borrowed a bassoon from the bandmaster
of the Rifle Regiment. I practised in the trenches. Got on, got
another, get a living by it!"

George remarks that she looks as fresh as a rose and as sound as an
apple.

"The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet in reply, "is a thoroughly fine
woman. Consequently she is like a thoroughly fine day. Gets finer as
she gets on. I never saw the old girl's equal. But I never own to it
before her. Discipline must be maintained!"

Proceeding to converse on indifferent matters, they walk up and down
the little street, keeping step and time, until summoned by Quebec
and Malta to do justice to the pork and greens, over which Mrs.
Bagnet, like a military chaplain, says a short grace. In the
distribution of these comestibles, as in every other household duty,
Mrs. Bagnet developes an exact system, sitting with every dish before
her, allotting to every portion of pork its own portion of
pot-liquor, greens, potatoes, and even mustard, and serving it out
complete. Having likewise served out the beer from a can and thus
supplied the mess with all things necessary, Mrs. Bagnet proceeds to
satisfy her own hunger, which is in a healthy state. The kit of the
mess, if the table furniture may be so denominated, is chiefly
composed of utensils of horn and tin that have done duty in several
parts of the world. Young Woolwich's knife, in particular, which is
of the oyster kind, with the additional feature of a strong
shutting-up movement which frequently balks the appetite of that
young musician, is mentioned as having gone in various hands the
complete round of foreign service.

The dinner done, Mrs. Bagnet, assisted by the younger branches (who
polish their own cups and platters, knives and forks), makes all the
dinner garniture shine as brightly as before and puts it all away,
first sweeping the hearth, to the end that Mr. Bagnet and the visitor
may not be retarded in the smoking of their pipes. These household
cares involve much pattening and counter-pattening in the backyard
and considerable use of a pail, which is finally so happy as to
assist in the ablutions of Mrs. Bagnet herself. That old girl
reappearing by and by, quite fresh, and sitting down to her
needlework, then and only then--the greens being only then to be
considered as entirely off her mind--Mr. Bagnet requests the trooper
to state his case.

This Mr. George does with great discretion, appearing to address
himself to Mr. Bagnet, but having an eye solely on the old girl all
the time, as Bagnet has himself. She, equally discreet, busies
herself with her needlework. The case fully stated, Mr. Bagnet
resorts to his standard artifice for the maintenance of discipline.

"That's the whole of it, is it, George?" says he.

"That's the whole of it."

"You act according to my opinion?"

"I shall be guided," replies George, "entirely by it."

"Old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, "give him my opinion. You know it. Tell
him what it is."

It is that he cannot have too little to do with people who are too
deep for him and cannot be too careful of interference with matters
he does not understand--that the plain rule is to do nothing in the
dark, to be a party to nothing underhanded or mysterious, and never
to put his foot where he cannot see the ground. This, in effect, is
Mr. Bagnet's opinion, as delivered through the old girl, and it so
relieves Mr. George's mind by confirming his own opinion and
banishing his doubts that he composes himself to smoke another pipe
on that exceptional occasion and to have a talk over old times with
the whole Bagnet family, according to their various ranges of
experience.

Through these means it comes to pass that Mr. George does not again
rise to his full height in that parlour until the time is drawing on
when the bassoon and fife are expected by a British public at the
theatre; and as it takes time even then for Mr. George, in his
domestic character of Bluffy, to take leave of Quebec and Malta and
insinuate a sponsorial shilling into the pocket of his godson with
felicitations on his success in life, it is dark when Mr. George
again turns his face towards Lincoln's Inn Fields.

"A family home," he ruminates as he marches along, "however small it
is, makes a man like me look lonely. But it's well I never made that
evolution of matrimony. I shouldn't have been fit for it. I am such a
vagabond still, even at my present time of life, that I couldn't hold
to the gallery a month together if it was a regular pursuit or if I
didn't camp there, gipsy fashion. Come! I disgrace nobody and cumber
nobody; that's something. I have not done that for many a long year!"

So he whistles it off and marches on.

Arrived in Lincoln's Inn Fields and mounting Mr. Tulkinghorn's stair,
he finds the outer door closed and the chambers shut, but the trooper
not knowing much about outer doors, and the staircase being dark
besides, he is yet fumbling and groping about, hoping to discover a
bell-handle or to open the door for himself, when Mr. Tulkinghorn
comes up the stairs (quietly, of course) and angrily asks, "Who is
that? What are you doing there?"

"I ask your pardon, sir. It's George. The sergeant."

"And couldn't George, the sergeant, see that my door was locked?"

"Why, no, sir, I couldn't. At any rate, I didn't," says the trooper,
rather nettled.

"Have you changed your mind? Or are you in the same mind?" Mr.
Tulkinghorn demands. But he knows well enough at a glance.

"In the same mind, sir."

"I thought so. That's sufficient. You can go. So you are the man,"
says Mr. Tulkinghorn, opening his door with the key, "in whose
hiding-place Mr. Gridley was found?"

"Yes, I AM the man," says the trooper, stopping two or three stairs
down. "What then, sir?"

"What then? I don't like your associates. You should not have seen
the inside of my door this morning if I had thought of your being
that man. Gridley? A threatening, murderous, dangerous fellow."

With these words, spoken in an unusually high tone for him, the
lawyer goes into his rooms and shuts the door with a thundering
noise.

Mr. George takes his dismissal in great dudgeon, the greater because
a clerk coming up the stairs has heard the last words of all and
evidently applies them to him. "A pretty character to bear," the
trooper growls with a hasty oath as he strides downstairs. "A
threatening, murderous, dangerous fellow!" And looking up, he sees
the clerk looking down at him and marking him as he passes a lamp.
This so intensifies his dudgeon that for five minutes he is in an ill
humour. But he whistles that off like the rest of it and marches home
to the shooting gallery.




CHAPTER XXVIII

The Ironmaster


Sir Leicester Dedlock has got the better, for the time being, of the
family gout and is once more, in a literal no less than in a
figurative point of view, upon his legs. He is at his place in
Lincolnshire; but the waters are out again on the low-lying grounds,
and the cold and damp steal into Chesney Wold, though well defended,
and eke into Sir Leicester's bones. The blazing fires of faggot and
coal--Dedlock timber and antediluvian forest--that blaze upon the
broad wide hearths and wink in the twilight on the frowning woods,
sullen to see how trees are sacrificed, do not exclude the enemy. The
hot-water pipes that trail themselves all over the house, the
cushioned doors and windows, and the screens and curtains fail to
supply the fires' deficiencies and to satisfy Sir Leicester's need.
Hence the fashionable intelligence proclaims one morning to the
listening earth that Lady Dedlock is expected shortly to return to
town for a few weeks.

It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor
relations. Indeed great men have often more than their fair share of
poor relations, inasmuch as very red blood of the superior quality,
like inferior blood unlawfully shed, WILL cry aloud and WILL be
heard. Sir Leicester's cousins, in the remotest degree, are so many
murders in the respect that they "will out." Among whom there are
cousins who are so poor that one might almost dare to think it would
have been the happier for them never to have been plated links upon
the Dedlock chain of gold, but to have been made of common iron at
first and done base service.

Service, however (with a few limited reservations, genteel but not
profitable), they may not do, being of the Dedlock dignity. So they
visit their richer cousins, and get into debt when they can, and live
but shabbily when they can't, and find--the women no husbands, and
the men no wives--and ride in borrowed carriages, and sit at feasts
that are never of their own making, and so go through high life. The
rich family sum has been divided by so many figures, and they are the
something over that nobody knows what to do with.

Everybody on Sir Leicester Dedlock's side of the question and of his
way of thinking would appear to be his cousin more or less. From my
Lord Boodle, through the Duke of Foodle, down to Noodle, Sir
Leicester, like a glorious spider, stretches his threads of
relationship. But while he is stately in the cousinship of the
Everybodys, he is a kind and generous man, according to his dignified
way, in the cousinship of the Nobodys; and at the present time, in
despite of the damp, he stays out the visit of several such cousins
at Chesney Wold with the constancy of a martyr.

Of these, foremost in the front rank stands Volumnia Dedlock, a young
lady (of sixty) who is doubly highly related, having the honour to be
a poor relation, by the mother's side, to another great family. Miss
Volumnia, displaying in early life a pretty talent for cutting
ornaments out of coloured paper, and also for singing to the guitar
in the Spanish tongue, and propounding French conundrums in country
houses, passed the twenty years of her existence between twenty and
forty in a sufficiently agreeable manner. Lapsing then out of date
and being considered to bore mankind by her vocal performances in the
Spanish language, she retired to Bath, where she lives slenderly on
an annual present from Sir Leicester and whence she makes occasional
resurrections in the country houses of her cousins. She has an
extensive acquaintance at Bath among appalling old gentlemen with
thin legs and nankeen trousers, and is of high standing in that
dreary city. But she is a little dreaded elsewhere in consequence of
an indiscreet profusion in the article of rouge and persistency in an
obsolete pearl necklace like a rosary of little bird's-eggs.

In any country in a wholesome state, Volumnia would be a clear case
for the pension list. Efforts have been made to get her on it, and
when William Buffy came in, it was fully expected that her name would
be put down for a couple of hundred a year. But William Buffy somehow
discovered, contrary to all expectation, that these were not the
times when it could be done, and this was the first clear indication
Sir Leicester Dedlock had conveyed to him that the country was going
to pieces.

There is likewise the Honourable Bob Stables, who can make warm
mashes with the skill of a veterinary surgeon and is a better shot
than most gamekeepers. He has been for some time particularly
desirous to serve his country in a post of good emoluments,
unaccompanied by any trouble or responsibility. In a well-regulated
body politic this natural desire on the part of a spirited young
gentleman so highly connected would be speedily recognized, but
somehow William Buffy found when he came in that these were not times
in which he could manage that little matter either, and this was the
second indication Sir Leicester Dedlock had conveyed to him that the
country was going to pieces.

The rest of the cousins are ladies and gentlemen of various ages and
capacities, the major part amiable and sensible and likely to have
done well enough in life if they could have overcome their
cousinship; as it is, they are almost all a little worsted by it, and
lounge in purposeless and listless paths, and seem to be quite as
much at a loss how to dispose of themselves as anybody else can be
how to dispose of them.

In this society, and where not, my Lady Dedlock reigns supreme.
Beautiful, elegant, accomplished, and powerful in her little world
(for the world of fashion does not stretch ALL the way from pole to
pole), her influence in Sir Leicester's house, however haughty and
indifferent her manner, is greatly to improve it and refine it. The
cousins, even those older cousins who were paralysed when Sir
Leicester married her, do her feudal homage; and the Honourable Bob
Stables daily repeats to some chosen person between breakfast and
lunch his favourite original remark, that she is the best-groomed
woman in the whole stud.

Such the guests in the long drawing-room at Chesney Wold this dismal
night when the step on the Ghost's Walk (inaudible here, however)
might be the step of a deceased cousin shut out in the cold. It is
near bed-time. Bedroom fires blaze brightly all over the house,
raising ghosts of grim furniture on wall and ceiling. Bedroom
candlesticks bristle on the distant table by the door, and cousins
yawn on ottomans. Cousins at the piano, cousins at the soda-water
tray, cousins rising from the card-table, cousins gathered round the
fire. Standing on one side of his own peculiar fire (for there are
two), Sir Leicester. On the opposite side of the broad hearth, my
Lady at her table. Volumnia, as one of the more privileged cousins,
in a luxurious chair between them. Sir Leicester glancing, with
magnificent displeasure, at the rouge and the pearl necklace.

"I occasionally meet on my staircase here," drawls Volumnia, whose
thoughts perhaps are already hopping up it to bed, after a long
evening of very desultory talk, "one of the prettiest girls, I think,
that I ever saw in my life."

"A PROTEGEE of my Lady's," observes Sir Leicester.

"I thought so. I felt sure that some uncommon eye must have picked
that girl out. She really is a marvel. A dolly sort of beauty
perhaps," says Miss Volumnia, reserving her own sort, "but in its
way, perfect; such bloom I never saw!"

Sir Leicester, with his magnificent glance of displeasure at the
rouge, appears to say so too.

"Indeed," remarks my Lady languidly, "if there is any uncommon eye in
the case, it is Mrs. Rouncewell's, and not mine. Rosa is her
discovery."

"Your maid, I suppose?"

"No. My anything; pet--secretary--messenger--I don't know what."

"You like to have her about you, as you would like to have a flower,
or a bird, or a picture, or a poodle--no, not a poodle, though--or
anything else that was equally pretty?" says Volumnia, sympathizing.
"Yes, how charming now! And how well that delightful old soul Mrs.
Rouncewell is looking. She must be an immense age, and yet she is as
active and handsome! She is the dearest friend I have, positively!"

Sir Leicester feels it to be right and fitting that the housekeeper
of Chesney Wold should be a remarkable person. Apart from that, he
has a real regard for Mrs. Rouncewell and likes to hear her praised.
So he says, "You are right, Volumnia," which Volumnia is extremely
glad to hear.

"She has no daughter of her own, has she?"

"Mrs. Rouncewell? No, Volumnia. She has a son. Indeed, she had two."

My Lady, whose chronic malady of boredom has been sadly aggravated by
Volumnia this evening, glances wearily towards the candlesticks and
heaves a noiseless sigh.

"And it is a remarkable example of the confusion into which the
present age has fallen; of the obliteration of landmarks, the opening
of floodgates, and the uprooting of distinctions," says Sir Leicester
with stately gloom, "that I have been informed by Mr. Tulkinghorn
that Mrs. Rouncewell's son has been invited to go into Parliament."

Miss Volumnia utters a little sharp scream.

"Yes, indeed," repeats Sir Leicester. "Into Parliament."

"I never heard of such a thing! Good gracious, what is the man?"
exclaims Volumnia.

"He is called, I believe--an--ironmaster." Sir Leicester says it
slowly and with gravity and doubt, as not being sure but that he is
called a lead-mistress or that the right word may be some other word
expressive of some other relationship to some other metal.

Volumnia utters another little scream.

"He has declined the proposal, if my information from Mr. Tulkinghorn
be correct, as I have no doubt it is. Mr. Tulkinghorn being always
correct and exact; still that does not," says Sir Leicester, "that
does not lessen the anomaly, which is fraught with strange
considerations--startling considerations, as it appears to me."

Miss Volumnia rising with a look candlestick-wards, Sir Leicester
politely performs the grand tour of the drawing-room, brings one, and
lights it at my Lady's shaded lamp.

"I must beg you, my Lady," he says while doing so, "to remain a few
moments, for this individual of whom I speak arrived this evening
shortly before dinner and requested in a very becoming note"--Sir
Leicester, with his habitual regard to truth, dwells upon it--"I am
bound to say, in a very becoming and well-expressed note, the favour
of a short interview with yourself and MYself on the subject of this
young girl. As it appeared that he wished to depart to-night, I
replied that we would see him before retiring."

Miss Volumnia with a third little scream takes flight, wishing her
hosts--O Lud!--well rid of the--what is it?--ironmaster!

The other cousins soon disperse, to the last cousin there. Sir
Leicester rings the bell, "Make my compliments to Mr. Rouncewell, in
the housekeeper's apartments, and say I can receive him now."

My Lady, who has heard all this with slight attention outwardly,
looks towards Mr. Rouncewell as he comes in. He is a little over
fifty perhaps, of a good figure, like his mother, and has a clear
voice, a broad forehead from which his dark hair has retired, and a
shrewd though open face. He is a responsible-looking gentleman
dressed in black, portly enough, but strong and active. Has a
perfectly natural and easy air and is not in the least embarrassed by
the great presence into which he comes.

"Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, as I have already apologized for
intruding on you, I cannot do better than be very brief. I thank you,
Sir Leicester."

The head of the Dedlocks has motioned towards a sofa between himself
and my Lady. Mr. Rouncewell quietly takes his seat there.

"In these busy times, when so many great undertakings are in
progress, people like myself have so many workmen in so many places
that we are always on the flight."

Sir Leicester is content enough that the ironmaster should feel that
there is no hurry there; there, in that ancient house, rooted in that
quiet park, where the ivy and the moss have had time to mature, and
the gnarled and warted elms and the umbrageous oaks stand deep in the
fern and leaves of a hundred years; and where the sun-dial on the
terrace has dumbly recorded for centuries that time which was as much
the property of every Dedlock--while he lasted--as the house and
lands. Sir Leicester sits down in an easy-chair, opposing his repose
and that of Chesney Wold to the restless flights of ironmasters.

"Lady Dedlock has been so kind," proceeds Mr. Rouncewell with a
respectful glance and a bow that way, "as to place near her a young
beauty of the name of Rosa. Now, my son has fallen in love with Rosa
and has asked my consent to his proposing marriage to her and to
their becoming engaged if she will take him--which I suppose she
will. I have never seen Rosa until to-day, but I have some confidence
in my son's good sense--even in love. I find her what he represents
her, to the best of my judgment; and my mother speaks of her with
great commendation."

"She in all respects deserves it," says my Lady.

"I am happy, Lady Dedlock, that you say so, and I need not comment on
the value to me of your kind opinion of her."

"That," observes Sir Leicester with unspeakable grandeur, for he
thinks the ironmaster a little too glib, "must be quite unnecessary."

"Quite unnecessary, Sir Leicester. Now, my son is a very young man,
and Rosa is a very young woman. As I made my way, so my son must make
his; and his being married at present is out of the question. But
supposing I gave my consent to his engaging himself to this pretty
girl, if this pretty girl will engage herself to him, I think it a
piece of candour to say at once--I am sure, Sir Leicester and Lady
Dedlock, you will understand and excuse me--I should make it a
condition that she did not remain at Chesney Wold. Therefore, before
communicating further with my son, I take the liberty of saying that
if her removal would be in any way inconvenient or objectionable, I
will hold the matter over with him for any reasonable time and leave
it precisely where it is."

Not remain at Chesney Wold! Make it a condition! All Sir Leicester's
old misgivings relative to Wat Tyler and the people in the iron
districts who do nothing but turn out by torchlight come in a shower
upon his head, the fine grey hair of which, as well as of his
whiskers, actually stirs with indignation.

"Am I to understand, sir," says Sir Leicester, "and is my Lady to
understand"--he brings her in thus specially, first as a point of
gallantry, and next as a point of prudence, having great reliance on
her sense--"am I to understand, Mr. Rouncewell, and is my Lady to
understand, sir, that you consider this young woman too good for
Chesney Wold or likely to be injured by remaining here?"

"Certainly not, Sir Leicester,"

"I am glad to hear it." Sir Leicester very lofty indeed.

"Pray, Mr. Rouncewell," says my Lady, warning Sir Leicester off with
the slightest gesture of her pretty hand, as if he were a fly,
"explain to me what you mean."

"Willingly, Lady Dedlock. There is nothing I could desire more."

Addressing her composed face, whose intelligence, however, is too
quick and active to be concealed by any studied impassiveness,
however habitual, to the strong Saxon face of the visitor, a picture
of resolution and perseverance, my Lady listens with attention,
occasionally slightly bending her head.

"I am the son of your housekeeper, Lady Dedlock, and passed my
childhood about this house. My mother has lived here half a
century and will die here I have no doubt. She is one of those
examples--perhaps as good a one as there is--of love, and attachment,
and fidelity in such a nation, which England may well be proud of,
but of which no order can appropriate the whole pride or the whole
merit, because such an instance bespeaks high worth on two sides--on
the great side assuredly, on the small one no less assuredly."

Sir Leicester snorts a little to hear the law laid down in this way,
but in his honour and his love of truth, he freely, though silently,
admits the justice of the ironmaster's proposition.

"Pardon me for saying what is so obvious, but I wouldn't have it
hastily supposed," with the least turn of his eyes towards Sir
Leicester, "that I am ashamed of my mother's position here, or
wanting in all just respect for Chesney Wold and the family.
I certainly may have desired--I certainly have desired, Lady
Dedlock--that my mother should retire after so many years and end
her days with me. But as I have found that to sever this strong bond
would be to break her heart, I have long abandoned that idea."

Sir Leicester very magnificent again at the notion of Mrs. Rouncewell
being spirited off from her natural home to end her days with an
ironmaster.

"I have been," proceeds the visitor in a modest, clear way, "an
apprentice and a workman. I have lived on workman's wages, years and
years, and beyond a certain point have had to educate myself. My wife
was a foreman's daughter, and plainly brought up. We have three
daughters besides this son of whom I have spoken, and being
fortunately able to give them greater advantages than we have had
ourselves, we have educated them well, very well. It has been one of
our great cares and pleasures to make them worthy of any station."

A little boastfulness in his fatherly tone here, as if he added in
his heart, "even of the Chesney Wold station." Not a little more
magnificence, therefore, on the part of Sir Leicester.

"All this is so frequent, Lady Dedlock, where I live, and among the
class to which I belong, that what would be generally called unequal
marriages are not of such rare occurrence with us as elsewhere. A son
will sometimes make it known to his father that he has fallen in
love, say, with a young woman in the factory. The father, who once
worked in a factory himself, will be a little disappointed at first
very possibly. It may be that he had other views for his son.
However, the chances are that having ascertained the young woman to
be of unblemished character, he will say to his son, 'I must be quite
sure you are in earnest here. This is a serious matter for both of
you. Therefore I shall have this girl educated for two years,' or it
may be, 'I shall place this girl at the same school with your sisters
for such a time, during which you will give me your word and honour
to see her only so often. If at the expiration of that time, when she
has so far profited by her advantages as that you may be upon a fair
equality, you are both in the same mind, I will do my part to make
you happy.' I know of several cases such as I describe, my Lady, and
I think they indicate to me my own course now."

Sir Leicester's magnificence explodes. Calmly, but terribly.

"Mr. Rouncewell," says Sir Leicester with his right hand in the
breast of his blue coat, the attitude of state in which he is painted
in the gallery, "do you draw a parallel between Chesney Wold and a--"
Here he resists a disposition to choke, "a factory?"

"I need not reply, Sir Leicester, that the two places are very
different; but for the purposes of this case, I think a parallel may
be justly drawn between them."

Sir Leicester directs his majestic glance down one side of the long
drawing-room and up the other before he can believe that he is awake.

"Are you aware, sir, that this young woman whom my Lady--my Lady--has
placed near her person was brought up at the village school outside
the gates?"

"Sir Leicester, I am quite aware of it. A very good school it is, and
handsomely supported by this family."

"Then, Mr. Rouncewell," returns Sir Leicester, "the application of
what you have said is, to me, incomprehensible."

"Will it be more comprehensible, Sir Leicester, if I say," the
ironmaster is reddening a little, "that I do not regard the village
school as teaching everything desirable to be known by my son's
wife?"

From the village school of Chesney Wold, intact as it is this minute,
to the whole framework of society; from the whole framework of
society, to the aforesaid framework receiving tremendous cracks in
consequence of people (iron-masters, lead-mistresses, and what not)
not minding their catechism, and getting out of the station unto
which they are called--necessarily and for ever, according to Sir
Leicester's rapid logic, the first station in which they happen to
find themselves; and from that, to their educating other people out
of THEIR stations, and so obliterating the landmarks, and opening the
floodgates, and all the rest of it; this is the swift progress of the
Dedlock mind.

"My Lady, I beg your pardon. Permit me, for one moment!" She has
given a faint indication of intending to speak. "Mr. Rouncewell, our
views of duty, and our views of station, and our views of education,
and our views of--in short, ALL our views--are so diametrically
opposed, that to prolong this discussion must be repellent to your
feelings and repellent to my own. This young woman is honoured with
my Lady's notice and favour. If she wishes to withdraw herself from
that notice and favour or if she chooses to place herself under the
influence of any one who may in his peculiar opinions--you will allow
me to say, in his peculiar opinions, though I readily admit that he
is not accountable for them to me--who may, in his peculiar opinions,
withdraw her from that notice and favour, she is at any time at
liberty to do so. We are obliged to you for the plainness with which
you have spoken. It will have no effect of itself, one way or other,
on the young woman's position here. Beyond this, we can make no
terms; and here we beg--if you will be so good--to leave the
subject."

The visitor pauses a moment to give my Lady an opportunity, but she
says nothing. He then rises and replies, "Sir Leicester and Lady
Dedlock, allow me to thank you for your attention and only to observe
that I shall very seriously recommend my son to conquer his present
inclinations. Good night!"

"Mr. Rouncewell," says Sir Leicester with all the nature of a
gentleman shining in him, "it is late, and the roads are dark. I hope
your time is not so precious but that you will allow my Lady and
myself to offer you the hospitality of Chesney Wold, for to-night at
least."

"I hope so," adds my Lady.

"I am much obliged to you, but I have to travel all night in order to
reach a distant part of the country punctually at an appointed time
in the morning."

Therewith the ironmaster takes his departure, Sir Leicester ringing
the bell and my Lady rising as he leaves the room.

When my Lady goes to her boudoir, she sits down thoughtfully by the
fire, and inattentive to the Ghost's Walk, looks at Rosa, writing in
an inner room. Presently my Lady calls her.

"Come to me, child. Tell me the truth. Are you in love?"

"Oh! My Lady!"

My Lady, looking at the downcast and blushing face, says smiling,
"Who is it? Is it Mrs. Rouncewell's grandson?"

"Yes, if you please, my Lady. But I don't know that I am in love with
him--yet."

"Yet, you silly little thing! Do you know that he loves YOU, yet?"

"I think he likes me a little, my Lady." And Rosa bursts into tears.

Is this Lady Dedlock standing beside the village beauty, smoothing
her dark hair with that motherly touch, and watching her with eyes so
full of musing interest? Aye, indeed it is!

"Listen to me, child. You are young and true, and I believe you are
attached to me."

"Indeed I am, my Lady. Indeed there is nothing in the world I
wouldn't do to show how much."

"And I don't think you would wish to leave me just yet, Rosa, even
for a lover?"

"No, my Lady! Oh, no!" Rosa looks up for the first time, quite
frightened at the thought.

"Confide in me, my child. Don't fear me. I wish you to be happy, and
will make you so--if I can make anybody happy on this earth."

Rosa, with fresh tears, kneels at her feet and kisses her hand. My
Lady takes the hand with which she has caught it, and standing with
her eyes fixed on the fire, puts it about and about between her own
two hands, and gradually lets it fall. Seeing her so absorbed, Rosa
softly withdraws; but still my Lady's eyes are on the fire.

In search of what? Of any hand that is no more, of any hand that
never was, of any touch that might have magically changed her life?
Or does she listen to the Ghost's Walk and think what step does it
most resemble? A man's? A woman's? The pattering of a little child's
feet, ever coming on--on--on? Some melancholy influence is upon her,
or why should so proud a lady close the doors and sit alone upon the
hearth so desolate?

Volumnia is away next day, and all the cousins are scattered before
dinner. Not a cousin of the batch but is amazed to hear from Sir
Leicester at breakfast-time of the obliteration of landmarks, and
opening of floodgates, and cracking of the framework of society,
manifested through Mrs. Rouncewell's son. Not a cousin of the batch
but is really indignant, and connects it with the feebleness of
William Buffy when in office, and really does feel deprived of a
stake in the country--or the pension list--or something--by fraud and
wrong. As to Volumnia, she is handed down the great staircase by Sir
Leicester, as eloquent upon the theme as if there were a general
rising in the north of England to obtain her rouge-pot and pearl
necklace. And thus, with a clatter of maids and valets--for it is one
appurtenance of their cousinship that however difficult they may find
it to keep themselves, they MUST keep maids and valets--the cousins
disperse to the four winds of heaven; and the one wintry wind that
blows to-day shakes a shower from the trees near the deserted house,
as if all the cousins had been changed into leaves.




CHAPTER XXIX

The Young Man


Chesney Wold is shut up, carpets are rolled into great scrolls in
corners of comfortless rooms, bright damask does penance in brown
holland, carving and gilding puts on mortification, and the Dedlock
ancestors retire from the light of day again. Around and around the
house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling
down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow. Let the gardener
sweep and sweep the turf as he will, and press the leaves into full
barrows, and wheel them off, still they lie ankle-deep. Howls the
shrill wind round Chesney Wold; the sharp rain beats, the windows
rattle, and the chimneys growl. Mists hide in the avenues, veil the
points of view, and move in funeral-wise across the rising grounds.
On all the house there is a cold, blank smell like the smell of a
little church, though something dryer, suggesting that the dead and
buried Dedlocks walk there in the long nights and leave the flavour
of their graves behind them.

But the house in town, which is rarely in the same mind as Chesney
Wold at the same time, seldom rejoicing when it rejoices or mourning
when it mourns, excepting when a Dedlock dies--the house in town
shines out awakened. As warm and bright as so much state may be, as
delicately redolent of pleasant scents that bear no trace of winter
as hothouse flowers can make it, soft and hushed so that the ticking
of the clocks and the crisp burning of the fires alone disturb the
stillness in the rooms, it seems to wrap those chilled bones of Sir
Leicester's in rainbow-coloured wool. And Sir Leicester is glad to
repose in dignified contentment before the great fire in the library,
condescendingly perusing the backs of his books or honouring the fine
arts with a glance of approbation. For he has his pictures, ancient
and modern. Some of the Fancy Ball School in which art occasionally
condescends to become a master, which would be best catalogued like
the miscellaneous articles in a sale. As "Three high-backed chairs, a
table and cover, long-necked bottle (containing wine), one flask, one
Spanish female's costume, three-quarter face portrait of Miss Jogg
the model, and a suit of armour containing Don Quixote." Or "One
stone terrace (cracked), one gondola in distance, one Venetian
senator's dress complete, richly embroidered white satin costume with
profile portrait of Miss Jogg the model, one Scimitar superbly
mounted in gold with jewelled handle, elaborate Moorish dress (very
rare), and Othello."

Mr. Tulkinghorn comes and goes pretty often, there being estate
business to do, leases to be renewed, and so on. He sees my Lady
pretty often, too; and he and she are as composed, and as
indifferent, and take as little heed of one another, as ever. Yet it
may be that my Lady fears this Mr. Tulkinghorn and that he knows it.
It may be that he pursues her doggedly and steadily, with no touch of
compunction, remorse, or pity. It may be that her beauty and all the
state and brilliancy surrounding her only gives him the greater zest
for what he is set upon and makes him the more inflexible in it.
Whether he be cold and cruel, whether immovable in what he has made
his duty, whether absorbed in love of power, whether determined
to have nothing hidden from him in ground where he has burrowed
among secrets all his life, whether he in his heart despises the
splendour of which he is a distant beam, whether he is always
treasuring up slights and offences in the affability of his gorgeous
clients--whether he be any of this, or all of this, it may be that my
Lady had better have five thousand pairs of fashionable eyes upon
her, in distrustful vigilance, than the two eyes of this rusty lawyer
with his wisp of neckcloth and his dull black breeches tied with
ribbons at the knees.

Sir Leicester sits in my Lady's room--that room in which Mr.
Tulkinghorn read the affidavit in Jarndyce and Jarndyce--particularly
complacent. My Lady, as on that day, sits before the fire with her
screen in her hand. Sir Leicester is particularly complacent because
he has found in his newspaper some congenial remarks bearing directly
on the floodgates and the framework of society. They apply so happily
to the late case that Sir Leicester has come from the library to my
Lady's room expressly to read them aloud. "The man who wrote this
article," he observes by way of preface, nodding at the fire as if he
were nodding down at the man from a mount, "has a well-balanced
mind."

The man's mind is not so well balanced but that he bores my Lady,
who, after a languid effort to listen, or rather a languid
resignation of herself to a show of listening, becomes distraught and
falls into a contemplation of the fire as if it were her fire at
Chesney Wold, and she had never left it. Sir Leicester, quite
unconscious, reads on through his double eye-glass, occasionally
stopping to remove his glass and express approval, as "Very true
indeed," "Very properly put," "I have frequently made the same remark
myself," invariably losing his place after each observation, and
going up and down the column to find it again.

Sir Leicester is reading with infinite gravity and state when the
door opens, and the Mercury in powder makes this strange
announcement, "The young man, my Lady, of the name of Guppy."

Sir Leicester pauses, stares, repeats in a killing voice, "The young
man of the name of Guppy?"

Looking round, he beholds the young man of the name of Guppy, much
discomfited and not presenting a very impressive letter of
introduction in his manner and appearance.

"Pray," says Sir Leicester to Mercury, "what do you mean by
announcing with this abruptness a young man of the name of Guppy?"

"I beg your pardon, Sir Leicester, but my Lady said she would see the
young man whenever he called. I was not aware that you were here, Sir
Leicester."

With this apology, Mercury directs a scornful and indignant look at
the young man of the name of Guppy which plainly says, "What do you
come calling here for and getting ME into a row?"

"It's quite right. I gave him those directions," says my Lady. "Let
the young man wait."

"By no means, my Lady. Since he has your orders to come, I will not
interrupt you." Sir Leicester in his gallantry retires, rather
declining to accept a bow from the young man as he goes out and
majestically supposing him to be some shoemaker of intrusive
appearance.

Lady Dedlock looks imperiously at her visitor when the servant has
left the room, casting her eyes over him from head to foot. She
suffers him to stand by the door and asks him what he wants.

"That your ladyship would have the kindness to oblige me with a
little conversation," returns Mr. Guppy, embarrassed.

"You are, of course, the person who has written me so many letters?"

"Several, your ladyship. Several before your ladyship condescended to
favour me with an answer."

"And could you not take the same means of rendering a Conversation
unnecessary? Can you not still?"

Mr. Guppy screws his mouth into a silent "No!" and shakes his head.

"You have been strangely importunate. If it should appear, after all,
that what you have to say does not concern me--and I don't know how
it can, and don't expect that it will--you will allow me to cut you
short with but little ceremony. Say what you have to say, if you
please."

My Lady, with a careless toss of her screen, turns herself towards
the fire again, sitting almost with her back to the young man of the
name of Guppy.

"With your ladyship's permission, then," says the young man, "I will
now enter on my business. Hem! I am, as I told your ladyship in my
first letter, in the law. Being in the law, I have learnt the habit
of not committing myself in writing, and therefore I did not mention
to your ladyship the name of the firm with which I am connected and
in which my standing--and I may add income--is tolerably good. I may
now state to your ladyship, in confidence, that the name of that firm
is Kenge and Carboy, of Lincoln's Inn, which may not be altogether
unknown to your ladyship in connexion with the case in Chancery of
Jarndyce and Jarndyce."

My Lady's figure begins to be expressive of some attention. She has
ceased to toss the screen and holds it as if she were listening.

"Now, I may say to your ladyship at once," says Mr. Guppy, a little
emboldened, "it is no matter arising out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce
that made me so desirous to speak to your ladyship, which conduct I
have no doubt did appear, and does appear, obtrusive--in fact, almost
blackguardly."

After waiting for a moment to receive some assurance to the contrary,
and not receiving any, Mr. Guppy proceeds, "If it had been Jarndyce
and Jarndyce, I should have gone at once to your ladyship's
solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn, of the Fields. I have the pleasure of
being acquainted with Mr. Tulkinghorn--at least we move when we meet
one another--and if it had been any business of that sort, I should
have gone to him."

My Lady turns a little round and says, "You had better sit down."

"Thank your ladyship." Mr. Guppy does so. "Now, your ladyship"--Mr.
Guppy refers to a little slip of paper on which he has made small
notes of his line of argument and which seems to involve him in the
densest obscurity whenever he looks at it--"I--Oh, yes!--I place
myself entirely in your ladyship's hands. If your ladyship was to
make any complaint to Kenge and Carboy or to Mr. Tulkinghorn of the
present visit, I should be placed in a very disagreeable situation.
That, I openly admit. Consequently, I rely upon your ladyship's
honour."

My Lady, with a disdainful gesture of the hand that holds the screen,
assures him of his being worth no complaint from her.

"Thank your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy; "quite satisfactory.
Now--I--dash it!--The fact is that I put down a head or two here of
the order of the points I thought of touching upon, and they're
written short, and I can't quite make out what they mean. If your
ladyship will excuse me taking it to the window half a moment, I--"

Mr. Guppy, going to the window, tumbles into a pair of love-birds, to
whom he says in his confusion, "I beg your pardon, I am sure." This
does not tend to the greater legibility of his notes. He murmurs,
growing warm and red and holding the slip of paper now close to his
eyes, now a long way off, "C.S. What's C.S. for? Oh! C.S.! Oh, I
know! Yes, to be sure!" And comes back enlightened.

"I am not aware," says Mr. Guppy, standing midway between my Lady and
his chair, "whether your ladyship ever happened to hear of, or to
see, a young lady of the name of Miss Esther Summerson."

My Lady's eyes look at him full. "I saw a young lady of that name not
long ago. This past autumn."

"Now, did it strike your ladyship that she was like anybody?" asks
Mr. Guppy, crossing his arms, holding his head on one side, and
scratching the corner of his mouth with his memoranda.

My Lady removes her eyes from him no more.

"No."

"Not like your ladyship's family?"

"No."

"I think your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy, "can hardly remember Miss
Summerson's face?"

"I remember the young lady very well. What has this to do with me?"

"Your ladyship, I do assure you that having Miss Summerson's image
imprinted on my 'eart--which I mention in confidence--I found, when I
had the honour of going over your ladyship's mansion of Chesney Wold
while on a short out in the county of Lincolnshire with a friend,
such a resemblance between Miss Esther Summerson and your ladyship's
own portrait that it completely knocked me over, so much so that I
didn't at the moment even know what it WAS that knocked me over. And
now I have the honour of beholding your ladyship near (I have often,
since that, taken the liberty of looking at your ladyship in your
carriage in the park, when I dare say you was not aware of me, but I
never saw your ladyship so near), it's really more surprising than I
thought it."

Young man of the name of Guppy! There have been times, when ladies
lived in strongholds and had unscrupulous attendants within call,
when that poor life of yours would NOT have been worth a minute's
purchase, with those beautiful eyes looking at you as they look at
this moment.

My Lady, slowly using her little hand-screen as a fan, asks him again
what he supposes that his taste for likenesses has to do with her.

"Your ladyship," replies Mr. Guppy, again referring to his paper, "I
am coming to that. Dash these notes! Oh! 'Mrs. Chadband.' Yes." Mr.
Guppy draws his chair a little forward and seats himself again. My
Lady reclines in her chair composedly, though with a trifle less of
graceful ease than usual perhaps, and never falters in her steady
gaze. "A--stop a minute, though!" Mr. Guppy refers again. "E.S.
twice? Oh, yes! Yes, I see my way now, right on."

Rolling up the slip of paper as an instrument to point his speech
with, Mr. Guppy proceeds.

"Your ladyship, there is a mystery about Miss Esther Summerson's
birth and bringing up. I am informed of that fact because--which I
mention in confidence--I know it in the way of my profession at Kenge
and Carboy's. Now, as I have already mentioned to your ladyship, Miss
Summerson's image is imprinted on my 'eart. If I could clear this
mystery for her, or prove her to be well related, or find that having
the honour to be a remote branch of your ladyship's family she had a
right to be made a party in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, why, I might make
a sort of a claim upon Miss Summerson to look with an eye of more
dedicated favour on my proposals than she has exactly done as yet. In
fact, as yet she hasn't favoured them at all."

A kind of angry smile just dawns upon my Lady's face.

"Now, it's a very singular circumstance, your ladyship," says Mr.
Guppy, "though one of those circumstances that do fall in the way of
us professional men--which I may call myself, for though not
admitted, yet I have had a present of my articles made to me by Kenge
and Carboy, on my mother's advancing from the principal of her little
income the money for the stamp, which comes heavy--that I have
encountered the person who lived as servant with the lady who brought
Miss Summerson up before Mr. Jarndyce took charge of her. That lady
was a Miss Barbary, your ladyship."

Is the dead colour on my Lady's face reflected from the screen which
has a green silk ground and which she holds in her raised hand as if
she had forgotten it, or is it a dreadful paleness that has fallen on
her?

"Did your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy, "ever happen to hear of Miss
Barbary?"

"I don't know. I think so. Yes."

"Was Miss Barbary at all connected with your ladyship's family?"

My Lady's lips move, but they utter nothing. She shakes her head.

"NOT connected?" says Mr. Guppy. "Oh! Not to your ladyship's
knowledge, perhaps? Ah! But might be? Yes." After each of these
interrogatories, she has inclined her head. "Very good! Now, this
Miss Barbary was extremely close--seems to have been extraordinarily
close for a female, females being generally (in common life at least)
rather given to conversation--and my witness never had an idea
whether she possessed a single relative. On one occasion, and only
one, she seems to have been confidential to my witness on a single
point, and she then told her that the little girl's real name was not
Esther Summerson, but Esther Hawdon."

"My God!"

Mr. Guppy stares. Lady Dedlock sits before him looking him through,
with the same dark shade upon her face, in the same attitude even to
the holding of the screen, with her lips a little apart, her brow a
little contracted, but for the moment dead. He sees her consciousness
return, sees a tremor pass across her frame like a ripple over water,
sees her lips shake, sees her compose them by a great effort, sees
her force herself back to the knowledge of his presence and of what
he has said. All this, so quickly, that her exclamation and her dead
condition seem to have passed away like the features of those
long-preserved dead bodies sometimes opened up in tombs, which,
struck by the air like lightning, vanish in a breath.

"Your ladyship is acquainted with the name of Hawdon?"

"I have heard it before."

"Name of any collateral or remote branch of your ladyship's family?"

"No."

"Now, your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy, "I come to the last point of
the case, so far as I have got it up. It's going on, and I shall
gather it up closer and closer as it goes on. Your ladyship must
know--if your ladyship don't happen, by any chance, to know
already--that there was found dead at the house of a person named
Krook, near Chancery Lane, some time ago, a law-writer in great
distress. Upon which law-writer there was an inquest, and which
law-writer was an anonymous character, his name being unknown. But,
your ladyship, I have discovered very lately that that law-writer's
name was Hawdon."

"And what is THAT to me?"

"Aye, your ladyship, that's the question! Now, your ladyship, a queer
thing happened after that man's death. A lady started up, a disguised
lady, your ladyship, who went to look at the scene of action and went
to look at his grave. She hired a crossing-sweeping boy to show it
her. If your ladyship would wish to have the boy produced in
corroboration of this statement, I can lay my hand upon him at any
time."

The wretched boy is nothing to my Lady, and she does NOT wish to have
him produced.

"Oh, I assure your ladyship it's a very queer start indeed," says Mr.
Guppy. "If you was to hear him tell about the rings that sparkled on
her fingers when she took her glove off, you'd think it quite
romantic."

There are diamonds glittering on the hand that holds the screen. My
Lady trifles with the screen and makes them glitter more, again with
that expression which in other times might have been so dangerous to
the young man of the name of Guppy.

"It was supposed, your ladyship, that he left no rag or scrap behind
him by which he could be possibly identified. But he did. He left a
bundle of old letters."

The screen still goes, as before. All this time her eyes never once
release him.

"They were taken and secreted. And to-morrow night, your ladyship,
they will come into my possession."

"Still I ask you, what is this to me?"

"Your ladyship, I conclude with that." Mr. Guppy rises. "If you think
there's enough in this chain of circumstances put together--in the
undoubted strong likeness of this young lady to your ladyship, which
is a positive fact for a jury; in her having been brought up by Miss
Barbary; in Miss Barbary stating Miss Summerson's real name to be
Hawdon; in your ladyship's knowing both these names VERY WELL; and in
Hawdon's dying as he did--to give your ladyship a family interest in
going further into the case, I will bring these papers here. I don't
know what they are, except that they are old letters: I have never
had them in my possession yet. I will bring those papers here as soon
as I get them and go over them for the first time with your ladyship.
I have told your ladyship my object. I have told your ladyship that I
should be placed in a very disagreeable situation if any complaint
was made, and all is in strict confidence."

Is this the full purpose of the young man of the name of Guppy, or
has he any other? Do his words disclose the length, breadth, depth,
of his object and suspicion in coming here; or if not, what do they
hide? He is a match for my Lady there. She may look at him, but he
can look at the table and keep that witness-box face of his from
telling anything.

"You may bring the letters," says my Lady, "if you choose."

"Your ladyship is not very encouraging, upon my word and honour,"
says Mr. Guppy, a little injured.

"You may bring the letters," she repeats in the same tone, "if
you--please."

"It shall be done. I wish your ladyship good day."

On a table near her is a rich bauble of a casket, barred and clasped
like an old strong-chest. She, looking at him still, takes it to her
and unlocks it.

"Oh! I assure your ladyship I am not actuated by any motives of that
sort," says Mr. Guppy, "and I couldn't accept anything of the kind. I
wish your ladyship good day, and am much obliged to you all the
same."

So the young man makes his bow and goes downstairs, where the
supercilious Mercury does not consider himself called upon to leave
his Olympus by the hall-fire to let the young man out.

As Sir Leicester basks in his library and dozes over his newspaper,
is there no influence in the house to startle him, not to say to make
the very trees at Chesney Wold fling up their knotted arms, the very
portraits frown, the very armour stir?

No. Words, sobs, and cries are but air, and air is so shut in and
shut out throughout the house in town that sounds need be uttered
trumpet-tongued indeed by my Lady in her chamber to carry any faint
vibration to Sir Leicester's ears; and yet this cry is in the house,
going upward from a wild figure on its knees.

"O my child, my child! Not dead in the first hours of her life, as my
cruel sister told me, but sternly nurtured by her, after she had
renounced me and my name! O my child, O my child!"




CHAPTER XXX

Esther's Narrative


Richard had been gone away some time when a visitor came to pass a
few days with us. It was an elderly lady. It was Mrs. Woodcourt, who,
having come from Wales to stay with Mrs. Bayham Badger and having
written to my guardian, "by her son Allan's desire," to report that
she had heard from him and that he was well "and sent his kind
remembrances to all of us," had been invited by my guardian to make a
visit to Bleak House. She stayed with us nearly three weeks. She took
very kindly to me and was extremely confidential, so much so that
sometimes she almost made me uncomfortable. I had no right, I knew
very well, to be uncomfortable because she confided in me, and I felt
it was unreasonable; still, with all I could do, I could not quite
help it.

She was such a sharp little lady and used to sit with her hands
folded in each other looking so very watchful while she talked to me
that perhaps I found that rather irksome. Or perhaps it was her being
so upright and trim, though I don't think it was that, because I
thought that quaintly pleasant. Nor can it have been the general
expression of her face, which was very sparkling and pretty for an
old lady. I don't know what it was. Or at least if I do now, I
thought I did not then. Or at least--but it don't matter.

Of a night when I was going upstairs to bed, she would invite me
into her room, where she sat before the fire in a great chair;
and, dear me, she would tell me about Morgan ap-Kerrig until I
was quite low-spirited! Sometimes she recited a few verses from
Crumlinwallinwer and the Mewlinnwillinwodd (if those are the right
names, which I dare say they are not), and would become quite fiery
with the sentiments they expressed. Though I never knew what they
were (being in Welsh), further than that they were highly eulogistic
of the lineage of Morgan ap-Kerrig.

"So, Miss Summerson," she would say to me with stately triumph,
"this, you see, is the fortune inherited by my son. Wherever my son
goes, he can claim kindred with Ap-Kerrig. He may not have money, but
he always has what is much better--family, my dear."

I had my doubts of their caring so very much for Morgan ap-Kerrig in
India and China, but of course I never expressed them. I used to say
it was a great thing to be so highly connected.

"It IS, my dear, a great thing," Mrs. Woodcourt would reply. "It has
its disadvantages; my son's choice of a wife, for instance, is
limited by it, but the matrimonial choice of the royal family is
limited in much the same manner."

Then she would pat me on the arm and smooth my dress, as much as to
assure me that she had a good opinion of me, the distance between us
notwithstanding.

"Poor Mr. Woodcourt, my dear," she would say, and always with some
emotion, for with her lofty pedigree she had a very affectionate
heart, "was descended from a great Highland family, the MacCoorts of
MacCoort. He served his king and country as an officer in the Royal
Highlanders, and he died on the field. My son is one of the last
representatives of two old families. With the blessing of heaven he
will set them up again and unite them with another old family."

It was in vain for me to try to change the subject, as I used to try,
only for the sake of novelty or perhaps because--but I need not be so
particular. Mrs. Woodcourt never would let me change it.

"My dear," she said one night, "you have so much sense and you look
at the world in a quiet manner so superior to your time of life that
it is a comfort to me to talk to you about these family matters of
mine. You don't know much of my son, my dear; but you know enough of
him, I dare say, to recollect him?"

"Yes, ma'am. I recollect him."

"Yes, my dear. Now, my dear, I think you are a judge of character,
and I should like to have your opinion of him."

"Oh, Mrs. Woodcourt," said I, "that is so difficult!"

"Why is it so difficult, my dear?" she returned. "I don't see it
myself."

"To give an opinion--"

"On so slight an acquaintance, my dear. THAT'S true."

I didn't mean that, because Mr. Woodcourt had been at our house a
good deal altogether and had become quite intimate with my guardian.
I said so, and added that he seemed to be very clever in his
profession--we thought--and that his kindness and gentleness to Miss
Flite were above all praise.

"You do him justice!" said Mrs. Woodcourt, pressing my hand. "You
define him exactly. Allan is a dear fellow, and in his profession
faultless. I say it, though I am his mother. Still, I must confess he
is not without faults, love."

"None of us are," said I.

"Ah! But his really are faults that he might correct, and ought to
correct," returned the sharp old lady, sharply shaking her head. "I
am so much attached to you that I may confide in you, my dear, as a
third party wholly disinterested, that he is fickleness itself."

I said I should have thought it hardly possible that he could have
been otherwise than constant to his profession and zealous in the
pursuit of it, judging from the reputation he had earned.

"You are right again, my dear," the old lady retorted, "but I don't
refer to his profession, look you."

"Oh!" said I.

"No," said she. "I refer, my dear, to his social conduct. He is
always paying trivial attentions to young ladies, and always has
been, ever since he was eighteen. Now, my dear, he has never really
cared for any one of them and has never meant in doing this to do any
harm or to express anything but politeness and good nature. Still,
it's not right, you know; is it?"

"No," said I, as she seemed to wait for me.

"And it might lead to mistaken notions, you see, my dear."

I supposed it might.

"Therefore, I have told him many times that he really should be more
careful, both in justice to himself and in justice to others. And he
has always said, 'Mother, I will be; but you know me better than
anybody else does, and you know I mean no harm--in short, mean
nothing.' All of which is very true, my dear, but is no
justification. However, as he is now gone so far away and for an
indefinite time, and as he will have good opportunities and
introductions, we may consider this past and gone. And you, my dear,"
said the old lady, who was now all nods and smiles, "regarding your
dear self, my love?"

"Me, Mrs. Woodcourt?"

"Not to be always selfish, talking of my son, who has gone to seek
his fortune and to find a wife--when do you mean to seek YOUR fortune
and to find a husband, Miss Summerson? Hey, look you! Now you blush!"

I don't think I did blush--at all events, it was not important if I
did--and I said my present fortune perfectly contented me and I had
no wish to change it.

"Shall I tell you what I always think of you and the fortune yet to
come for you, my love?" said Mrs. Woodcourt.

"If you believe you are a good prophet," said I.

"Why, then, it is that you will marry some one very rich and very
worthy, much older--five and twenty years, perhaps--than yourself.
And you will be an excellent wife, and much beloved, and very happy."

"That is a good fortune," said I. "But why is it to be mine?"

"My dear," she returned, "there's suitability in it--you are so busy,
and so neat, and so peculiarly situated altogether that there's
suitability in it, and it will come to pass. And nobody, my love,
will congratulate you more sincerely on such a marriage than I
shall."

It was curious that this should make me uncomfortable, but I think it
did. I know it did. It made me for some part of that night
uncomfortable. I was so ashamed of my folly that I did not like to
confess it even to Ada, and that made me more uncomfortable still. I
would have given anything not to have been so much in the bright old
lady's confidence if I could have possibly declined it. It gave me
the most inconsistent opinions of her. At one time I thought she was
a story-teller, and at another time that she was the pink of truth.
Now I suspected that she was very cunning, next moment I believed her
honest Welsh heart to be perfectly innocent and simple. And after
all, what did it matter to me, and why did it matter to me? Why could
not I, going up to bed with my basket of keys, stop to sit down by
her fire and accommodate myself for a little while to her, at least
as well as to anybody else, and not trouble myself about the harmless
things she said to me? Impelled towards her, as I certainly was, for
I was very anxious that she should like me and was very glad indeed
that she did, why should I harp afterwards, with actual distress and
pain, on every word she said and weigh it over and over again in
twenty scales? Why was it so worrying to me to have her in our house,
and confidential to me every night, when I yet felt that it was
better and safer somehow that she should be there than anywhere else?
These were perplexities and contradictions that I could not account
for. At least, if I could--but I shall come to all that by and by,
and it is mere idleness to go on about it now.

So when Mrs. Woodcourt went away, I was sorry to lose her but was
relieved too. And then Caddy Jellyby came down, and Caddy brought
such a packet of domestic news that it gave us abundant occupation.

First Caddy declared (and would at first declare nothing else) that I
was the best adviser that ever was known. This, my pet said, was no
news at all; and this, I said, of course, was nonsense. Then Caddy
told us that she was going to be married in a month and that if Ada
and I would be her bridesmaids, she was the happiest girl in the
world. To be sure, this was news indeed; and I thought we never
should have done talking about it, we had so much to say to Caddy,
and Caddy had so much to say to us.

It seemed that Caddy's unfortunate papa had got over his
bankruptcy--"gone through the Gazette," was the expression Caddy
used, as if it were a tunnel--with the general clemency and
commiseration of his creditors, and had got rid of his affairs in
some blessed manner without succeeding in understanding them, and had
given up everything he possessed (which was not worth much, I should
think, to judge from the state of the furniture), and had satisfied
every one concerned that he could do no more, poor man. So, he had
been honourably dismissed to "the office" to begin the world again.
What he did at the office, I never knew; Caddy said he was a
"custom-house and general agent," and the only thing I ever
understood about that business was that when he wanted money more
than usual he went to the docks to look for it, and hardly ever found
it.

As soon as her papa had tranquillized his mind by becoming this shorn
lamb, and they had removed to a furnished lodging in Hatton Garden
(where I found the children, when I afterwards went there, cutting
the horse hair out of the seats of the chairs and choking themselves
with it), Caddy had brought about a meeting between him and old Mr.
Turveydrop; and poor Mr. Jellyby, being very humble and meek, had
deferred to Mr. Turveydrop's deportment so submissively that they had
become excellent friends. By degrees, old Mr. Turveydrop, thus
familiarized with the idea of his son's marriage, had worked up his
parental feelings to the height of contemplating that event as being
near at hand and had given his gracious consent to the young couple
commencing housekeeping at the academy in Newman Street when they
would.

"And your papa, Caddy. What did he say?"

"Oh! Poor Pa," said Caddy, "only cried and said he hoped we might get
on better than he and Ma had got on. He didn't say so before Prince,
he only said so to me. And he said, 'My poor girl, you have not been
very well taught how to make a home for your husband, but unless you
mean with all your heart to strive to do it, you had better murder
him than marry him--if you really love him.'"

"And how did you reassure him, Caddy?"

"Why, it was very distressing, you know, to see poor Pa so low and
hear him say such terrible things, and I couldn't help crying myself.
But I told him that I DID mean it with all my heart and that I hoped
our house would be a place for him to come and find some comfort in
of an evening and that I hoped and thought I could be a better
daughter to him there than at home. Then I mentioned Peepy's coming
to stay with me, and then Pa began to cry again and said the children
were Indians."

"Indians, Caddy?"

"Yes," said Caddy, "wild Indians. And Pa said"--here she began to
sob, poor girl, not at all like the happiest girl in the world--"that
he was sensible the best thing that could happen to them was their
being all tomahawked together."

Ada suggested that it was comfortable to know that Mr. Jellyby did
not mean these destructive sentiments.

"No, of course I know Pa wouldn't like his family to be weltering in
their blood," said Caddy, "but he means that they are very
unfortunate in being Ma's children and that he is very unfortunate in
being Ma's husband; and I am sure that's true, though it seems
unnatural to say so."

I asked Caddy if Mrs. Jellyby knew that her wedding-day was fixed.

"Oh! You know what Ma is, Esther," she returned. "It's impossible to
say whether she knows it or not. She has been told it often enough;
and when she IS told it, she only gives me a placid look, as if I was
I don't know what--a steeple in the distance," said Caddy with a
sudden idea; "and then she shakes her head and says 'Oh, Caddy,
Caddy, what a tease you are!' and goes on with the Borrioboola
letters."

"And about your wardrobe, Caddy?" said I. For she was under no
restraint with us.

"Well, my dear Esther," she returned, drying her eyes, "I must do the
best I can and trust to my dear Prince never to have an unkind
remembrance of my coming so shabbily to him. If the question
concerned an outfit for Borrioboola, Ma would know all about it and
would be quite excited. Being what it is, she neither knows nor
cares."

Caddy was not at all deficient in natural affection for her mother,
but mentioned this with tears as an undeniable fact, which I am
afraid it was. We were sorry for the poor dear girl and found so much
to admire in the good disposition which had survived under such
discouragement that we both at once (I mean Ada and I) proposed a
little scheme that made her perfectly joyful. This was her staying
with us for three weeks, my staying with her for one, and our all
three contriving and cutting out, and repairing, and sewing, and
saving, and doing the very best we could think of to make the most of
her stock. My guardian being as pleased with the idea as Caddy was,
we took her home next day to arrange the matter and brought her out
again in triumph with her boxes and all the purchases that could be
squeezed out of a ten-pound note, which Mr. Jellyby had found in the
docks I suppose, but which he at all events gave her. What my
guardian would not have given her if we had encouraged him, it would
be difficult to say, but we thought it right to compound for no more
than her wedding-dress and bonnet. He agreed to this compromise, and
if Caddy had ever been happy in her life, she was happy when we sat
down to work.

She was clumsy enough with her needle, poor girl, and pricked her
fingers as much as she had been used to ink them. She could not help
reddening a little now and then, partly with the smart and partly
with vexation at being able to do no better, but she soon got over
that and began to improve rapidly. So day after day she, and my
darling, and my little maid Charley, and a milliner out of the town,
and I, sat hard at work, as pleasantly as possible.

Over and above this, Caddy was very anxious "to learn housekeeping,"
as she said. Now, mercy upon us! The idea of her learning
housekeeping of a person of my vast experience was such a joke that I
laughed, and coloured up, and fell into a comical confusion when she
proposed it. However, I said, "Caddy, I am sure you are very welcome
to learn anything that you can learn of ME, my dear," and I showed
her all my books and methods and all my fidgety ways. You would have
supposed that I was showing her some wonderful inventions, by her
study of them; and if you had seen her, whenever I jingled my
housekeeping keys, get up and attend me, certainly you might have
thought that there never was a greater imposter than I with a blinder
follower than Caddy Jellyby.

So what with working and housekeeping, and lessons to Charley, and
backgammon in the evening with my guardian, and duets with Ada, the
three weeks slipped fast away. Then I went home with Caddy to see
what could be done there, and Ada and Charley remained behind to take
care of my guardian.

When I say I went home with Caddy, I mean to the furnished lodging in
Hatton Garden. We went to Newman Street two or three times, where
preparations were in progress too--a good many, I observed, for
enhancing the comforts of old Mr. Turveydrop, and a few for putting
the newly married couple away cheaply at the top of the house--but
our great point was to make the furnished lodging decent for the
wedding-breakfast and to imbue Mrs. Jellyby beforehand with some
faint sense of the occasion.

The latter was the more difficult thing of the two because Mrs.
Jellyby and an unwholesome boy occupied the front sitting-room (the
back one was a mere closet), and it was littered down with
waste-paper and Borrioboolan documents, as an untidy stable might be
littered with straw. Mrs. Jellyby sat there all day drinking strong
coffee, dictating, and holding Borrioboolan interviews by
appointment. The unwholesome boy, who seemed to me to be going into a
decline, took his meals out of the house. When Mr. Jellyby came home,
he usually groaned and went down into the kitchen. There he got
something to eat if the servant would give him anything, and then,
feeling that he was in the way, went out and walked about Hatton
Garden in the wet. The poor children scrambled up and tumbled down
the house as they had always been accustomed to do.

The production of these devoted little sacrifices in any presentable
condition being quite out of the question at a week's notice, I
proposed to Caddy that we should make them as happy as we could on
her marriage morning in the attic where they all slept, and should
confine our greatest efforts to her mama and her mama's room, and a
clean breakfast. In truth Mrs. Jellyby required a good deal of
attention, the lattice-work up her back having widened considerably
since I first knew her and her hair looking like the mane of a
dustman's horse.

Thinking that the display of Caddy's wardrobe would be the best means
of approaching the subject, I invited Mrs. Jellyby to come and look
at it spread out on Caddy's bed in the evening after the unwholesome
boy was gone.

"My dear Miss Summerson," said she, rising from her desk with her
usual sweetness of temper, "these are really ridiculous preparations,
though your assisting them is a proof of your kindness. There is
something so inexpressibly absurd to me in the idea of Caddy being
married! Oh, Caddy, you silly, silly, silly puss!"

She came upstairs with us notwithstanding and looked at the clothes
in her customary far-off manner. They suggested one distinct idea to
her, for she said with her placid smile, and shaking her head, "My
good Miss Summerson, at half the cost, this weak child might have
been equipped for Africa!"

On our going downstairs again, Mrs. Jellyby asked me whether this
troublesome business was really to take place next Wednesday. And on
my replying yes, she said, "Will my room be required, my dear Miss
Summerson? For it's quite impossible that I can put my papers away."

I took the liberty of saying that the room would certainly be wanted
and that I thought we must put the papers away somewhere. "Well, my
dear Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Jellyby, "you know best, I dare say.
But by obliging me to employ a boy, Caddy has embarrassed me to that
extent, overwhelmed as I am with public business, that I don't know
which way to turn. We have a Ramification meeting, too, on Wednesday
afternoon, and the inconvenience is very serious."

"It is not likely to occur again," said I, smiling. "Caddy will be
married but once, probably."

"That's true," Mrs. Jellyby replied; "that's true, my dear. I suppose
we must make the best of it!"

The next question was how Mrs. Jellyby should be dressed on the
occasion. I thought it very curious to see her looking on serenely
from her writing-table while Caddy and I discussed it, occasionally
shaking her head at us with a half-reproachful smile like a superior
spirit who could just bear with our trifling.

The state in which her dresses were, and the extraordinary confusion
in which she kept them, added not a little to our difficulty; but at
length we devised something not very unlike what a common-place
mother might wear on such an occasion. The abstracted manner in which
Mrs. Jellyby would deliver herself up to having this attire tried on
by the dressmaker, and the sweetness with which she would then
observe to me how sorry she was that I had not turned my thoughts to
Africa, were consistent with the rest of her behaviour.

The lodging was rather confined as to space, but I fancied that if
Mrs. Jellyby's household had been the only lodgers in Saint Paul's or
Saint Peter's, the sole advantage they would have found in the size
of the building would have been its affording a great deal of room to
be dirty in. I believe that nothing belonging to the family which it
had been possible to break was unbroken at the time of those
preparations for Caddy's marriage, that nothing which it had been
possible to spoil in any way was unspoilt, and that no domestic
object which was capable of collecting dirt, from a dear child's knee
to the door-plate, was without as much dirt as could well accumulate
upon it.

Poor Mr. Jellyby, who very seldom spoke and almost always sat when he
was at home with his head against the wall, became interested when he
saw that Caddy and I were attempting to establish some order among
all this waste and ruin and took off his coat to help. But such
wonderful things came tumbling out of the closets when they were
opened--bits of mouldy pie, sour bottles, Mrs. Jellyby's caps,
letters, tea, forks, odd boots and shoes of children, firewood,
wafers, saucepan-lids, damp sugar in odds and ends of paper bags,
footstools, blacklead brushes, bread, Mrs. Jellyby's bonnets, books
with butter sticking to the binding, guttered candle ends put out
by being turned upside down in broken candlesticks, nutshells,
heads and tails of shrimps, dinner-mats, gloves, coffee-grounds,
umbrellas--that he looked frightened, and left off again. But he came
regularly every evening and sat without his coat, with his head
against the wall, as though he would have helped us if he had known
how.

"Poor Pa!" said Caddy to me on the night before the great day, when
we really had got things a little to rights. "It seems unkind to
leave him, Esther. But what could I do if I stayed! Since I first
knew you, I have tidied and tidied over and over again, but it's
useless. Ma and Africa, together, upset the whole house directly. We
never have a servant who don't drink. Ma's ruinous to everything."

Mr. Jellyby could not hear what she said, but he seemed very low
indeed and shed tears, I thought.

"My heart aches for him; that it does!" sobbed Caddy. "I can't help
thinking to-night, Esther, how dearly I hope to be happy with Prince,
and how dearly Pa hoped, I dare say, to be happy with Ma. What a
disappointed life!"

"My dear Caddy!" said Mr. Jellyby, looking slowly round from the
wail. It was the first time, I think, I ever heard him say three
words together.

"Yes, Pa!" cried Caddy, going to him and embracing him
affectionately.

"My dear Caddy," said Mr. Jellyby. "Never have--"

"Not Prince, Pa?" faltered Caddy. "Not have Prince?"

"Yes, my dear," said Mr. Jellyby. "Have him, certainly. But, never
have--"

I mentioned in my account of our first visit in Thavies Inn that
Richard described Mr. Jellyby as frequently opening his mouth after
dinner without saying anything. It was a habit of his. He opened his
mouth now a great many times and shook his head in a melancholy
manner.

"What do you wish me not to have? Don't have what, dear Pa?" asked
Caddy, coaxing him, with her arms round his neck.

"Never have a mission, my dear child."

Mr. Jellyby groaned and laid his head against the wall again, and
this was the only time I ever heard him make any approach to
expressing his sentiments on the Borrioboolan question. I suppose he
had been more talkative and lively once, but he seemed to have been
completely exhausted long before I knew him.

I thought Mrs. Jellyby never would have left off serenely looking
over her papers and drinking coffee that night. It was twelve o'clock
before we could obtain possession of the room, and the clearance it
required then was so discouraging that Caddy, who was almost tired
out, sat down in the middle of the dust and cried. But she soon
cheered up, and we did wonders with it before we went to bed.

In the morning it looked, by the aid of a few flowers and a quantity
of soap and water and a little arrangement, quite gay. The plain
breakfast made a cheerful show, and Caddy was perfectly charming. But
when my darling came, I thought--and I think now--that I never had
seen such a dear face as my beautiful pet's.

We made a little feast for the children upstairs, and we put Peepy at
the head of the table, and we showed them Caddy in her bridal dress,
and they clapped their hands and hurrahed, and Caddy cried to think
that she was going away from them and hugged them over and over again
until we brought Prince up to fetch her away--when, I am sorry to
say, Peepy bit him. Then there was old Mr. Turveydrop downstairs, in
a state of deportment not to be expressed, benignly blessing Caddy
and giving my guardian to understand that his son's happiness was his
own parental work and that he sacrificed personal considerations to
ensure it. "My dear sir," said Mr. Turveydrop, "these young people
will live with me; my house is large enough for their accommodation,
and they shall not want the shelter of my roof. I could have
wished--you will understand the allusion, Mr. Jarndyce, for you
remember my illustrious patron the Prince Regent--I could have
wished that my son had married into a family where there was more
deportment, but the will of heaven be done!"

Mr. and Mrs. Pardiggle were of the party--Mr. Pardiggle, an
obstinate-looking man with a large waistcoat and stubbly hair, who
was always talking in a loud bass voice about his mite, or Mrs.
Pardiggle's mite, or their five boys' mites. Mr. Quale, with his hair
brushed back as usual and his knobs of temples shining very much, was
also there, not in the character of a disappointed lover, but as the
accepted of a young--at least, an unmarried--lady, a Miss Wisk, who
was also there. Miss Wisk's mission, my guardian said, was to show
the world that woman's mission was man's mission and that the only
genuine mission of both man and woman was to be always moving
declaratory resolutions about things in general at public meetings.
The guests were few, but were, as one might expect at Mrs. Jellyby's,
all devoted to public objects only. Besides those I have mentioned,
there was an extremely dirty lady with her bonnet all awry and the
ticketed price of her dress still sticking on it, whose neglected
home, Caddy told me, was like a filthy wilderness, but whose church
was like a fancy fair. A very contentious gentleman, who said it was
his mission to be everybody's brother but who appeared to be on terms
of coolness with the whole of his large family, completed the party.

A party, having less in common with such an occasion, could hardly
have been got together by any ingenuity. Such a mean mission as the
domestic mission was the very last thing to be endured among them;
indeed, Miss Wisk informed us, with great indignation, before we sat
down to breakfast, that the idea of woman's mission lying chiefly in
the narrow sphere of home was an outrageous slander on the part of
her tyrant, man. One other singularity was that nobody with a
mission--except Mr. Quale, whose mission, as I think I have formerly
said, was to be in ecstasies with everybody's mission--cared at all
for anybody's mission. Mrs. Pardiggle being as clear that the only
one infallible course was her course of pouncing upon the poor and
applying benevolence to them like a strait-waistcoat; as Miss Wisk
was that the only practical thing for the world was the emancipation
of woman from the thraldom of her tyrant, man. Mrs. Jellyby, all the
while, sat smiling at the limited vision that could see anything but
Borrioboola-Gha.

But I am anticipating now the purport of our conversation on the ride
home instead of first marrying Caddy. We all went to church, and Mr.
Jellyby gave her away. Of the air with which old Mr. Turveydrop, with
his hat under his left arm (the inside presented at the clergyman
like a cannon) and his eyes creasing themselves up into his wig,
stood stiff and high-shouldered behind us bridesmaids during the
ceremony, and afterwards saluted us, I could never say enough to do
it justice. Miss Wisk, whom I cannot report as prepossessing in
appearance, and whose manner was grim, listened to the proceedings,
as part of woman's wrongs, with a disdainful face. Mrs. Jellyby, with
her calm smile and her bright eyes, looked the least concerned of all
the company.

We duly came back to breakfast, and Mrs. Jellyby sat at the head of
the table and Mr. Jellyby at the foot. Caddy had previously stolen
upstairs to hug the children again and tell them that her name was
Turveydrop. But this piece of information, instead of being an
agreeable surprise to Peepy, threw him on his back in such transports
of kicking grief that I could do nothing on being sent for but accede
to the proposal that he should be admitted to the breakfast table. So
he came down and sat in my lap; and Mrs. Jellyby, after saying, in
reference to the state of his pinafore, "Oh, you naughty Peepy, what
a shocking little pig you are!" was not at all discomposed. He was
very good except that he brought down Noah with him (out of an ark I
had given him before we went to church) and WOULD dip him head first
into the wine-glasses and then put him in his mouth.

My guardian, with his sweet temper and his quick perception and his
amiable face, made something agreeable even out of the ungenial
company. None of them seemed able to talk about anything but his, or
her, own one subject, and none of them seemed able to talk about even
that as part of a world in which there was anything else; but my
guardian turned it all to the merry encouragement of Caddy and the
honour of the occasion, and brought us through the breakfast nobly.
What we should have done without him, I am afraid to think, for all
the company despising the bride and bridegroom and old Mr.
Turveydrop--and old Mr. Thurveydrop, in virtue of his deportment,
considering himself vastly superior to all the company--it was a very
unpromising case.

At last the time came when poor Caddy was to go and when all her
property was packed on the hired coach and pair that was to take her
and her husband to Gravesend. It affected us to see Caddy clinging,
then, to her deplorable home and hanging on her mother's neck with
the greatest tenderness.

"I am very sorry I couldn't go on writing from dictation, Ma," sobbed
Caddy. "I hope you forgive me now."

"Oh, Caddy, Caddy!" said Mrs. Jellyby. "I have told you over and over
again that I have engaged a boy, and there's an end of it."

"You are sure you are not the least angry with me, Ma? Say you are
sure before I go away, Ma?"

"You foolish Caddy," returned Mrs. Jellyby, "do I look angry, or have
I inclination to be angry, or time to be angry? How CAN you?"

"Take a little care of Pa while I am gone, Mama!"

Mrs. Jellyby positively laughed at the fancy. "You romantic child,"
said she, lightly patting Caddy's back. "Go along. I am excellent
friends with you. Now, good-bye, Caddy, and be very happy!"

Then Caddy hung upon her father and nursed his cheek against hers as
if he were some poor dull child in pain. All this took place in the
hall. Her father released her, took out his pocket handkerchief, and
sat down on the stairs with his head against the wall. I hope he
found some consolation in walls. I almost think he did.

And then Prince took her arm in his and turned with great emotion and
respect to his father, whose deportment at that moment was
overwhelming.

"Thank you over and over again, father!" said Prince, kissing his
hand. "I am very grateful for all your kindness and consideration
regarding our marriage, and so, I can assure you, is Caddy."

"Very," sobbed Caddy. "Ve-ry!"

"My dear son," said Mr. Turveydrop, "and dear daughter, I have done
my duty. If the spirit of a sainted wooman hovers above us and looks
down on the occasion, that, and your constant affection, will be my
recompense. You will not fail in YOUR duty, my son and daughter, I
believe?"

"Dear father, never!" cried Prince.

"Never, never, dear Mr. Turveydrop!" said Caddy.

"This," returned Mr. Turveydrop, "is as it should be. My children, my
home is yours, my heart is yours, my all is yours. I will never leave
you; nothing but death shall part us. My dear son, you contemplate an
absence of a week, I think?"

"A week, dear father. We shall return home this day week."

"My dear child," said Mr. Turveydrop, "let me, even under the present
exceptional circumstances, recommend strict punctuality. It is highly
important to keep the connexion together; and schools, if at all
neglected, are apt to take offence."

"This day week, father, we shall be sure to be home to dinner."

"Good!" said Mr. Turveydrop. "You will find fires, my dear Caroline,
in your own room, and dinner prepared in my apartment. Yes, yes,
Prince!" anticipating some self-denying objection on his son's part
with a great air. "You and our Caroline will be strange in the upper
part of the premises and will, therefore, dine that day in my
apartment. Now, bless ye!"

They drove away, and whether I wondered most at Mrs. Jellyby or at
Mr. Turveydrop, I did not know. Ada and my guardian were in the same
condition when we came to talk it over. But before we drove away too,
I received a most unexpected and eloquent compliment from Mr.
Jellyby. He came up to me in the hall, took both my hands, pressed
them earnestly, and opened his mouth twice. I was so sure of his
meaning that I said, quite flurried, "You are very welcome, sir. Pray
don't mention it!"

"I hope this marriage is for the best, guardian," said I when we
three were on our road home.

"I hope it is, little woman. Patience. We shall see."

"Is the wind in the east to-day?" I ventured to ask him.

He laughed heartily and answered, "No."

"But it must have been this morning, I think," said I.

He answered "No" again, and this time my dear girl confidently
answered "No" too and shook the lovely head which, with its blooming
flowers against the golden hair, was like the very spring. "Much YOU
know of east winds, my ugly darling," said I, kissing her in my
admiration--I couldn't help it.

Well! It was only their love for me, I know very well, and it is a
long time ago. I must write it even if I rub it out again, because it
gives me so much pleasure. They said there could be no east wind
where Somebody was; they said that wherever Dame Durden went, there
was sunshine and summer air.




CHAPTER XXXI

Nurse and Patient


I had not been at home again many days when one evening I went
upstairs into my own room to take a peep over Charley's shoulder and
see how she was getting on with her copy-book. Writing was a trying
business to Charley, who seemed to have no natural power over a pen,
but in whose hand every pen appeared to become perversely animated,
and to go wrong and crooked, and to stop, and splash, and sidle into
corners like a saddle-donkey. It was very odd to see what old letters
Charley's young hand had made, they so wrinkled, and shrivelled, and
tottering, it so plump and round. Yet Charley was uncommonly expert
at other things and had as nimble little fingers as I ever watched.

"Well, Charley," said I, looking over a copy of the letter O in which
it was represented as square, triangular, pear-shaped, and collapsed
in all kinds of ways, "we are improving. If we only get to make it
round, we shall be perfect, Charley."

Then I made one, and Charley made one, and the pen wouldn't join
Charley's neatly, but twisted it up into a knot.

"Never mind, Charley. We shall do it in time."

Charley laid down her pen, the copy being finished, opened and shut
her cramped little hand, looked gravely at the page, half in pride
and half in doubt, and got up, and dropped me a curtsy.

"Thank you, miss. If you please, miss, did you know a poor person of
the name of Jenny?"

"A brickmaker's wife, Charley? Yes."

"She came and spoke to me when I was out a little while ago, and said
you knew her, miss. She asked me if I wasn't the young lady's little
maid--meaning you for the young lady, miss--and I said yes, miss."

"I thought she had left this neighbourhood altogether, Charley."

"So she had, miss, but she's come back again to where she used to
live--she and Liz. Did you know another poor person of the name of
Liz, miss?"

"I think I do, Charley, though not by name."

"That's what she said!" returned Charley. "They have both come back,
miss, and have been tramping high and low."

"Tramping high and low, have they, Charley?"

"Yes, miss." If Charley could only have made the letters in her copy
as round as the eyes with which she looked into my face, they would
have been excellent. "And this poor person came about the house three
or four days, hoping to get a glimpse of you, miss--all she wanted,
she said--but you were away. That was when she saw me. She saw me
a-going about, miss," said Charley with a short laugh of the greatest
delight and pride, "and she thought I looked like your maid!"

"Did she though, really, Charley?"

"Yes, miss!" said Charley. "Really and truly." And Charley, with
another short laugh of the purest glee, made her eyes very round
again and looked as serious as became my maid. I was never tired of
seeing Charley in the full enjoyment of that great dignity, standing
before me with her youthful face and figure, and her steady manner,
and her childish exultation breaking through it now and then in the
pleasantest way.

"And where did you see her, Charley?" said I.

My little maid's countenance fell as she replied, "By the doctor's
shop, miss." For Charley wore her black frock yet.

I asked if the brickmaker's wife were ill, but Charley said no. It
was some one else. Some one in her cottage who had tramped down to
Saint Albans and was tramping he didn't know where. A poor boy,
Charley said. No father, no mother, no any one. "Like as Tom might
have been, miss, if Emma and me had died after father," said Charley,
her round eyes filling with tears.

"And she was getting medicine for him, Charley?"

"She said, miss," returned Charley, "how that he had once done as
much for her."

My little maid's face was so eager and her quiet hands were folded so
closely in one another as she stood looking at me that I had no great
difficulty in reading her thoughts. "Well, Charley," said I, "it
appears to me that you and I can do no better than go round to
Jenny's and see what's the matter."

The alacrity with which Charley brought my bonnet and veil, and
having dressed me, quaintly pinned herself into her warm shawl and
made herself look like a little old woman, sufficiently expressed her
readiness. So Charley and I, without saying anything to any one, went
out.

It was a cold, wild night, and the trees shuddered in the wind. The
rain had been thick and heavy all day, and with little intermission
for many days. None was falling just then, however. The sky had
partly cleared, but was very gloomy--even above us, where a few stars
were shining. In the north and north-west, where the sun had set
three hours before, there was a pale dead light both beautiful and
awful; and into it long sullen lines of cloud waved up like a sea
stricken immovable as it was heaving. Towards London a lurid glare
overhung the whole dark waste, and the contrast between these two
lights, and the fancy which the redder light engendered of an
unearthly fire, gleaming on all the unseen buildings of the city and
on all the faces of its many thousands of wondering inhabitants, was
as solemn as might be.

I had no thought that night--none, I am quite sure--of what was soon
to happen to me. But I have always remembered since that when we had
stopped at the garden-gate to look up at the sky, and when we went
upon our way, I had for a moment an undefinable impression of myself
as being something different from what I then was. I know it was then
and there that I had it. I have ever since connected the feeling with
that spot and time and with everything associated with that spot and
time, to the distant voices in the town, the barking of a dog, and
the sound of wheels coming down the miry hill.

It was Saturday night, and most of the people belonging to the place
where we were going were drinking elsewhere. We found it quieter than
I had previously seen it, though quite as miserable. The kilns were
burning, and a stifling vapour set towards us with a pale-blue glare.

We came to the cottage, where there was a feeble candle in the
patched window. We tapped at the door and went in. The mother of the
little child who had died was sitting in a chair on one side of the
poor fire by the bed; and opposite to her, a wretched boy, supported
by the chimney-piece, was cowering on the floor. He held under his
arm, like a little bundle, a fragment of a fur cap; and as he tried
to warm himself, he shook until the crazy door and window shook. The
place was closer than before and had an unhealthy and a very peculiar
smell.

I had not lifted my veil when I first spoke to the woman, which was
at the moment of our going in. The boy staggered up instantly and
stared at me with a remarkable expression of surprise and terror.

His action was so quick and my being the cause of it was so evident
that I stood still instead of advancing nearer.

"I won't go no more to the berryin ground," muttered the boy; "I
ain't a-going there, so I tell you!"

I lifted my veil and spoke to the woman. She said to me in a low
voice, "Don't mind him, ma'am. He'll soon come back to his head," and
said to him, "Jo, Jo, what's the matter?"

"I know wot she's come for!" cried the boy.

"Who?"

"The lady there. She's come to get me to go along with her to the
berryin ground. I won't go to the berryin ground. I don't like the
name on it. She might go a-berryin ME." His shivering came on again,
and as he leaned against the wall, he shook the hovel.

"He has been talking off and on about such like all day, ma'am," said
Jenny softly. "Why, how you stare! This is MY lady, Jo."

"Is it?" returned the boy doubtfully, and surveying me with his arm
held out above his burning eyes. "She looks to me the t'other one. It
ain't the bonnet, nor yet it ain't the gownd, but she looks to me the
t'other one."

My little Charley, with her premature experience of illness and
trouble, had pulled off her bonnet and shawl and now went quietly up
to him with a chair and sat him down in it like an old sick nurse.
Except that no such attendant could have shown him Charley's youthful
face, which seemed to engage his confidence.

"I say!" said the boy. "YOU tell me. Ain't the lady the t'other
lady?"

Charley shook her head as she methodically drew his rags about him
and made him as warm as she could.

"Oh!" the boy muttered. "Then I s'pose she ain't."

"I came to see if I could do you any good," said I. "What is the
matter with you?"

"I'm a-being froze," returned the boy hoarsely, with his haggard gaze
wandering about me, "and then burnt up, and then froze, and then
burnt up, ever so many times in a hour. And my head's all sleepy, and
all a-going mad-like--and I'm so dry--and my bones isn't half so much
bones as pain.

"When did he come here?" I asked the woman.

"This morning, ma'am, I found him at the corner of the town. I had
known him up in London yonder. Hadn't I, Jo?"

"Tom-all-Alone's," the boy replied.

Whenever he fixed his attention or his eyes, it was only for a very
little while. He soon began to droop his head again, and roll it
heavily, and speak as if he were half awake.

"When did he come from London?" I asked.

"I come from London yes'day," said the boy himself, now flushed and
hot. "I'm a-going somewheres."

"Where is he going?" I asked.

"Somewheres," repeated the boy in a louder tone. "I have been moved
on, and moved on, more nor ever I was afore, since the t'other one
give me the sov'ring. Mrs. Snagsby, she's always a-watching, and
a-driving of me--what have I done to her?--and they're all a-watching
and a-driving of me. Every one of 'em's doing of it, from the time
when I don't get up, to the time when I don't go to bed. And I'm
a-going somewheres. That's where I'm a-going. She told me, down in
Tom-all-Alone's, as she came from Stolbuns, and so I took the
Stolbuns Road. It's as good as another."

He always concluded by addressing Charley.

"What is to be done with him?" said I, taking the woman aside. "He
could not travel in this state even if he had a purpose and knew
where he was going!"

"I know no more, ma'am, than the dead," she replied, glancing
compassionately at him. "Perhaps the dead know better, if they could
only tell us. I've kept him here all day for pity's sake, and I've
given him broth and physic, and Liz has gone to try if any one will
take him in (here's my pretty in the bed--her child, but I call it
mine); but I can't keep him long, for if my husband was to come home
and find him here, he'd be rough in putting him out and might do him
a hurt. Hark! Here comes Liz back!"

The other woman came hurriedly in as she spoke, and the boy got up
with a half-obscured sense that he was expected to be going. When the
little child awoke, and when and how Charley got at it, took it out
of bed, and began to walk about hushing it, I don't know. There she
was, doing all this in a quiet motherly manner as if she were living
in Mrs. Blinder's attic with Tom and Emma again.

The friend had been here and there, and had been played about from
hand to hand, and had come back as she went. At first it was too
early for the boy to be received into the proper refuge, and at last
it was too late. One official sent her to another, and the other sent
her back again to the first, and so backward and forward, until it
appeared to me as if both must have been appointed for their skill in
evading their duties instead of performing them. And now, after all,
she said, breathing quickly, for she had been running and was
frightened too, "Jenny, your master's on the road home, and mine's
not far behind, and the Lord help the boy, for we can do no more for
him!" They put a few halfpence together and hurried them into his
hand, and so, in an oblivious, half-thankful, half-insensible way, he
shuffled out of the house.

"Give me the child, my dear," said its mother to Charley, "and thank
you kindly too! Jenny, woman dear, good night! Young lady, if my
master don't fall out with me, I'll look down by the kiln by and by,
where the boy will be most like, and again in the morning!" She
hurried off, and presently we passed her hushing and singing to her
child at her own door and looking anxiously along the road for her
drunken husband.

I was afraid of staying then to speak to either woman, lest I should
bring her into trouble. But I said to Charley that we must not leave
the boy to die. Charley, who knew what to do much better than I did,
and whose quickness equalled her presence of mind, glided on before
me, and presently we came up with Jo, just short of the brick-kiln.

I think he must have begun his journey with some small bundle under
his arm and must have had it stolen or lost it. For he still carried
his wretched fragment of fur cap like a bundle, though he went
bare-headed through the rain, which now fell fast. He stopped when we
called to him and again showed a dread of me when I came up, standing
with his lustrous eyes fixed upon me, and even arrested in his
shivering fit.

I asked him to come with us, and we would take care that he had some
shelter for the night.

"I don't want no shelter," he said; "I can lay amongst the warm
bricks."

"But don't you know that people die there?" replied Charley.

"They dies everywheres," said the boy. "They dies in their
lodgings--she knows where; I showed her--and they dies down in
Tom-all-Alone's in heaps. They dies more than they lives, according
to what I see." Then he hoarsely whispered Charley, "If she ain't the
t'other one, she ain't the forrenner. Is there THREE of 'em then?"

Charley looked at me a little frightened. I felt half frightened at
myself when the boy glared on me so.

But he turned and followed when I beckoned to him, and finding that
he acknowledged that influence in me, I led the way straight home. It
was not far, only at the summit of the hill. We passed but one man. I
doubted if we should have got home without assistance, the boy's
steps were so uncertain and tremulous. He made no complaint, however,
and was strangely unconcerned about himself, if I may say so strange
a thing.

Leaving him in the hall for a moment, shrunk into the corner of the
window-seat and staring with an indifference that scarcely could be
called wonder at the comfort and brightness about him, I went into
the drawing-room to speak to my guardian. There I found Mr. Skimpole,
who had come down by the coach, as he frequently did without notice,
and never bringing any clothes with him, but always borrowing
everything he wanted.

They came out with me directly to look at the boy. The servants had
gathered in the hall too, and he shivered in the window-seat with
Charley standing by him, like some wounded animal that had been found
in a ditch.

"This is a sorrowful case," said my guardian after asking him a
question or two and touching him and examining his eyes. "What do you
say, Harold?"

"You had better turn him out," said Mr. Skimpole.

"What do you mean?" inquired my guardian, almost sternly.

"My dear Jarndyce," said Mr. Skimpole, "you know what I am: I am a
child. Be cross to me if I deserve it. But I have a constitutional
objection to this sort of thing. I always had, when I was a medical
man. He's not safe, you know. There's a very bad sort of fever about
him."

Mr. Skimpole had retreated from the hall to the drawing-room again
and said this in his airy way, seated on the music-stool as we stood
by.

"You'll say it's childish," observed Mr. Skimpole, looking gaily at
us. "Well, I dare say it may be; but I AM a child, and I never
pretend to be anything else. If you put him out in the road, you only
put him where he was before. He will be no worse off than he was, you
know. Even make him better off, if you like. Give him sixpence, or
five shillings, or five pound ten--you are arithmeticians, and I am
not--and get rid of him!"

"And what is he to do then?" asked my guardian.

"Upon my life," said Mr. Skimpole, shrugging his shoulders with his
engaging smile, "I have not the least idea what he is to do then. But
I have no doubt he'll do it."

"Now, is it not a horrible reflection," said my guardian, to whom I
had hastily explained the unavailing efforts of the two women, "is it
not a horrible reflection," walking up and down and rumpling his
hair, "that if this wretched creature were a convicted prisoner, his
hospital would be wide open to him, and he would be as well taken
care of as any sick boy in the kingdom?"

"My dear Jarndyce," returned Mr. Skimpole, "you'll pardon the
simplicity of the question, coming as it does from a creature who is
perfectly simple in worldly matters, but why ISN'T he a prisoner
then?"

My guardian stopped and looked at him with a whimsical mixture of
amusement and indignation in his face.

"Our young friend is not to be suspected of any delicacy, I should
imagine," said Mr. Skimpole, unabashed and candid. "It seems to me
that it would be wiser, as well as in a certain kind of way more
respectable, if he showed some misdirected energy that got him into
prison. There would be more of an adventurous spirit in it, and
consequently more of a certain sort of poetry."

"I believe," returned my guardian, resuming his uneasy walk, "that
there is not such another child on earth as yourself."

"Do you really?" said Mr. Skimpole. "I dare say! But I confess I
don't see why our young friend, in his degree, should not seek to
invest himself with such poetry as is open to him. He is no doubt
born with an appetite--probably, when he is in a safer state of
health, he has an excellent appetite. Very well. At our young
friend's natural dinner hour, most likely about noon, our young
friend says in effect to society, 'I am hungry; will you have the
goodness to produce your spoon and feed me?' Society, which has taken
upon itself the general arrangement of the whole system of spoons and
professes to have a spoon for our young friend, does NOT produce that
spoon; and our young friend, therefore, says 'You really must excuse
me if I seize it.' Now, this appears to me a case of misdirected
energy, which has a certain amount of reason in it and a certain
amount of romance; and I don't know but what I should be more
interested in our young friend, as an illustration of such a case,
than merely as a poor vagabond--which any one can be."

"In the meantime," I ventured to observe, "he is getting worse."

"In the meantime," said Mr. Skimpole cheerfully, "as Miss Summerson,
with her practical good sense, observes, he is getting worse.
Therefore I recommend your turning him out before he gets still
worse."

The amiable face with which he said it, I think I shall never forget.

"Of course, little woman," observed my guardian, turning to me, "I
can ensure his admission into the proper place by merely going there
to enforce it, though it's a bad state of things when, in his
condition, that is necessary. But it's growing late, and is a very
bad night, and the boy is worn out already. There is a bed in the
wholesome loft-room by the stable; we had better keep him there till
morning, when he can be wrapped up and removed. We'll do that."

"Oh!" said Mr. Skimpole, with his hands upon the keys of the piano as
we moved away. "Are you going back to our young friend?"

"Yes," said my guardian.

"How I envy you your constitution, Jarndyce!" returned Mr. Skimpole
with playful admiration. "You don't mind these things; neither does
Miss Summerson. You are ready at all times to go anywhere, and do
anything. Such is will! I have no will at all--and no won't--simply
can't."

"You can't recommend anything for the boy, I suppose?" said my
guardian, looking back over his shoulder half angrily; only half
angrily, for he never seemed to consider Mr. Skimpole an accountable
being.

"My dear Jarndyce, I observed a bottle of cooling medicine in his
pocket, and it's impossible for him to do better than take it. You
can tell them to sprinkle a little vinegar about the place where he
sleeps and to keep it moderately cool and him moderately warm. But it
is mere impertinence in me to offer any recommendation. Miss
Summerson has such a knowledge of detail and such a capacity for the
administration of detail that she knows all about it."

We went back into the hall and explained to Jo what we proposed to
do, which Charley explained to him again and which he received with
the languid unconcern I had already noticed, wearily looking on at
what was done as if it were for somebody else. The servants
compassionating his miserable state and being very anxious to help,
we soon got the loft-room ready; and some of the men about the house
carried him across the wet yard, well wrapped up. It was pleasant to
observe how kind they were to him and how there appeared to be a
general impression among them that frequently calling him "Old Chap"
was likely to revive his spirits. Charley directed the operations and
went to and fro between the loft-room and the house with such little
stimulants and comforts as we thought it safe to give him. My
guardian himself saw him before he was left for the night and
reported to me when he returned to the growlery to write a letter on
the boy's behalf, which a messenger was charged to deliver at
day-light in the morning, that he seemed easier and inclined to
sleep. They had fastened his door on the outside, he said, in case of
his being delirious, but had so arranged that he could not make any
noise without being heard.

Ada being in our room with a cold, Mr. Skimpole was left alone all
this time and entertained himself by playing snatches of pathetic
airs and sometimes singing to them (as we heard at a distance) with
great expression and feeling. When we rejoined him in the
drawing-room he said he would give us a little ballad which had come
into his head "apropos of our young friend," and he sang one about a
peasant boy,

   "Thrown on the wide world, doomed to wander and roam,
    Bereft of his parents, bereft of a home."

quite exquisitely. It was a song that always made him cry, he told
us.

He was extremely gay all the rest of the evening, for he absolutely
chirped--those were his delighted words--when he thought by what a
happy talent for business he was surrounded. He gave us, in his glass
of negus, "Better health to our young friend!" and supposed and gaily
pursued the case of his being reserved like Whittington to become
Lord Mayor of London. In that event, no doubt, he would establish the
Jarndyce Institution and the Summerson Almshouses, and a little
annual Corporation Pilgrimage to St. Albans. He had no doubt, he
said, that our young friend was an excellent boy in his way, but his
way was not the Harold Skimpole way; what Harold Skimpole was, Harold
Skimpole had found himself, to his considerable surprise, when he
first made his own acquaintance; he had accepted himself with all his
failings and had thought it sound philosophy to make the best of the
bargain; and he hoped we would do the same.

Charley's last report was that the boy was quiet. I could see, from
my window, the lantern they had left him burning quietly; and I went
to bed very happy to think that he was sheltered.

There was more movement and more talking than usual a little before
daybreak, and it awoke me. As I was dressing, I looked out of my
window and asked one of our men who had been among the active
sympathizers last night whether there was anything wrong about the
house. The lantern was still burning in the loft-window.

"It's the boy, miss," said he.

"Is he worse?" I inquired.

"Gone, miss.

"Dead!"

"Dead, miss? No. Gone clean off."

At what time of the night he had gone, or how, or why, it seemed
hopeless ever to divine. The door remaining as it had been left, and
the lantern standing in the window, it could only be supposed that he
had got out by a trap in the floor which communicated with an empty
cart-house below. But he had shut it down again, if that were so; and
it looked as if it had not been raised. Nothing of any kind was
missing. On this fact being clearly ascertained, we all yielded to
the painful belief that delirium had come upon him in the night and
that, allured by some imaginary object or pursued by some imaginary
horror, he had strayed away in that worse than helpless state; all of
us, that is to say, but Mr. Skimpole, who repeatedly suggested, in
his usual easy light style, that it had occurred to our young friend
that he was not a safe inmate, having a bad kind of fever upon him,
and that he had with great natural politeness taken himself off.

Every possible inquiry was made, and every place was searched. The
brick-kilns were examined, the cottages were visited, the two women
were particularly questioned, but they knew nothing of him, and
nobody could doubt that their wonder was genuine. The weather had for
some time been too wet and the night itself had been too wet to admit
of any tracing by footsteps. Hedge and ditch, and wall, and rick and
stack, were examined by our men for a long distance round, lest the
boy should be lying in such a place insensible or dead; but nothing
was seen to indicate that he had ever been near. From the time when
he was left in the loft-room, he vanished.

The search continued for five days. I do not mean that it ceased even
then, but that my attention was then diverted into a current very
memorable to me.

As Charley was at her writing again in my room in the evening, and as
I sat opposite to her at work, I felt the table tremble. Looking up,
I saw my little maid shivering from head to foot.

"Charley," said I, "are you so cold?"

"I think I am, miss," she replied. "I don't know what it is. I can't
hold myself still. I felt so yesterday at about this same time, miss.
Don't be uneasy, I think I'm ill."

I heard Ada's voice outside, and I hurried to the door of
communication between my room and our pretty sitting-room, and locked
it. Just in time, for she tapped at it while my hand was yet upon the
key.

Ada called to me to let her in, but I said, "Not now, my dearest. Go
away. There's nothing the matter; I will come to you presently." Ah!
It was a long, long time before my darling girl and I were companions
again.

Charley fell ill. In twelve hours she was very ill. I moved her to my
room, and laid her in my bed, and sat down quietly to nurse her. I
told my guardian all about it, and why I felt it was necessary that I
should seclude myself, and my reason for not seeing my darling above
all. At first she came very often to the door, and called to me, and
even reproached me with sobs and tears; but I wrote her a long letter
saying that she made me anxious and unhappy and imploring her, as she
loved me and wished my mind to be at peace, to come no nearer than
the garden. After that she came beneath the window even oftener than
she had come to the door, and if I had learnt to love her dear sweet
voice before when we were hardly ever apart, how did I learn to love
it then, when I stood behind the window-curtain listening and
replying, but not so much as looking out! How did I learn to love it
afterwards, when the harder time came!

They put a bed for me in our sitting-room; and by keeping the door
wide open, I turned the two rooms into one, now that Ada had vacated
that part of the house, and kept them always fresh and airy. There
was not a servant in or about the house but was so good that they
would all most gladly have come to me at any hour of the day or night
without the least fear or unwillingness, but I thought it best to
choose one worthy woman who was never to see Ada and whom I could
trust to come and go with all precaution. Through her means I got out
to take the air with my guardian when there was no fear of meeting
Ada, and wanted for nothing in the way of attendance, any more than
in any other respect.

And thus poor Charley sickened and grew worse, and fell into heavy
danger of death, and lay severely ill for many a long round of day
and night. So patient she was, so uncomplaining, and inspired by such
a gentle fortitude that very often as I sat by Charley holding her
head in my arms--repose would come to her, so, when it would come to
her in no other attitude--I silently prayed to our Father in heaven
that I might not forget the lesson which this little sister taught
me.

I was very sorrowful to think that Charley's pretty looks would
change and be disfigured, even if she recovered--she was such a child
with her dimpled face--but that thought was, for the greater part,
lost in her greater peril. When she was at the worst, and her mind
rambled again to the cares of her father's sick bed and the little
children, she still knew me so far as that she would be quiet in my
arms when she could lie quiet nowhere else, and murmur out the
wanderings of her mind less restlessly. At those times I used to
think, how should I ever tell the two remaining babies that the baby
who had learned of her faithful heart to be a mother to them in their
need was dead!

There were other times when Charley knew me well and talked to me,
telling me that she sent her love to Tom and Emma and that she was
sure Tom would grow up to be a good man. At those times Charley would
speak to me of what she had read to her father as well as she could
to comfort him, of that young man carried out to be buried who was
the only son of his mother and she was a widow, of the ruler's
daughter raised up by the gracious hand upon her bed of death. And
Charley told me that when her father died she had kneeled down and
prayed in her first sorrow that he likewise might be raised up and
given back to his poor children, and that if she should never get
better and should die too, she thought it likely that it might come
into Tom's mind to offer the same prayer for her. Then would I show
Tom how these people of old days had been brought back to life on
earth, only that we might know our hope to be restored to heaven!

But of all the various times there were in Charley's illness, there
was not one when she lost the gentle qualities I have spoken of. And
there were many, many when I thought in the night of the last high
belief in the watching angel, and the last higher trust in God, on
the part of her poor despised father.

And Charley did not die. She flutteringly and slowly turned the
dangerous point, after long lingering there, and then began to mend.
The hope that never had been given, from the first, of Charley being
in outward appearance Charley any more soon began to be encouraged;
and even that prospered, and I saw her growing into her old childish
likeness again.

It was a great morning when I could tell Ada all this as she stood
out in the garden; and it was a great evening when Charley and I at
last took tea together in the next room. But on that same evening, I
felt that I was stricken cold.

Happily for both of us, it was not until Charley was safe in bed
again and placidly asleep that I began to think the contagion of her
illness was upon me. I had been able easily to hide what I felt at
tea-time, but I was past that already now, and I knew that I was
rapidly following in Charley's steps.

I was well enough, however, to be up early in the morning, and to
return my darling's cheerful blessing from the garden, and to talk
with her as long as usual. But I was not free from an impression that
I had been walking about the two rooms in the night, a little beside
myself, though knowing where I was; and I felt confused at
times--with a curious sense of fullness, as if I were becoming too
large altogether.

In the evening I was so much worse that I resolved to prepare
Charley, with which view I said, "You're getting quite strong,
Charley, are you not?'

"Oh, quite!" said Charley.

"Strong enough to be told a secret, I think, Charley?"

"Quite strong enough for that, miss!" cried Charley. But Charley's
face fell in the height of her delight, for she saw the secret in MY
face; and she came out of the great chair, and fell upon my bosom,
and said "Oh, miss, it's my doing! It's my doing!" and a great deal
more out of the fullness of her grateful heart.

"Now, Charley," said I after letting her go on for a little while,
"if I am to be ill, my great trust, humanly speaking, is in you. And
unless you are as quiet and composed for me as you always were for
yourself, you can never fulfil it, Charley."

"If you'll let me cry a little longer, miss," said Charley. "Oh, my
dear, my dear! If you'll only let me cry a little longer. Oh, my
dear!"--how affectionately and devotedly she poured this out as she
clung to my neck, I never can remember without tears--"I'll be good."

So I let Charley cry a little longer, and it did us both good.

"Trust in me now, if you please, miss," said Charley quietly. "I am
listening to everything you say."

"It's very little at present, Charley. I shall tell your doctor
to-night that I don't think I am well and that you are going to nurse
me."

For that the poor child thanked me with her whole heart. "And in the
morning, when you hear Miss Ada in the garden, if I should not be
quite able to go to the window-curtain as usual, do you go, Charley,
and say I am asleep--that I have rather tired myself, and am asleep.
At all times keep the room as I have kept it, Charley, and let no one
come."

Charley promised, and I lay down, for I was very heavy. I saw the
doctor that night and asked the favour of him that I wished to ask
relative to his saying nothing of my illness in the house as yet. I
have a very indistinct remembrance of that night melting into day,
and of day melting into night again; but I was just able on the first
morning to get to the window and speak to my darling.

On the second morning I heard her dear voice--Oh, how dear
now!--outside; and I asked Charley, with some difficulty (speech
being painful to me), to go and say I was asleep. I heard her answer
softly, "Don't disturb her, Charley, for the world!"

"How does my own Pride look, Charley?" I inquired.

"Disappointed, miss," said Charley, peeping through the curtain.

"But I know she is very beautiful this morning."

"She is indeed, miss," answered Charley, peeping. "Still looking up
at the window."

With her blue clear eyes, God bless them, always loveliest when
raised like that!

I called Charley to me and gave her her last charge.

"Now, Charley, when she knows I am ill, she will try to make her way
into the room. Keep her out, Charley, if you love me truly, to the
last! Charley, if you let her in but once, only to look upon me for
one moment as I lie here, I shall die."

"I never will! I never will!" she promised me.

"I believe it, my dear Charley. And now come and sit beside me for a
little while, and touch me with your hand. For I cannot see you,
Charley; I am blind."




CHAPTER XXXII

The Appointed Time


It is night in Lincoln's Inn--perplexed and troublous valley of the
shadow of the law, where suitors generally find but little day--and
fat candles are snuffed out in offices, and clerks have rattled down
the crazy wooden stairs and dispersed. The bell that rings at nine
o'clock has ceased its doleful clangour about nothing; the gates are
shut; and the night-porter, a solemn warder with a mighty power of
sleep, keeps guard in his lodge. From tiers of staircase windows
clogged lamps like the eyes of Equity, bleared Argus with a
fathomless pocket for every eye and an eye upon it, dimly blink at
the stars. In dirty upper casements, here and there, hazy little
patches of candlelight reveal where some wise draughtsman and
conveyancer yet toils for the entanglement of real estate in meshes
of sheep-skin, in the average ratio of about a dozen of sheep to an
acre of land. Over which bee-like industry these benefactors of their
species linger yet, though office-hours be past, that they may give,
for every day, some good account at last.

In the neighbouring court, where the Lord Chancellor of the rag and
bottle shop dwells, there is a general tendency towards beer and
supper. Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins, whose respective sons, engaged
with a circle of acquaintance in the game of hide and seek, have been
lying in ambush about the by-ways of Chancery Lane for some hours and
scouring the plain of the same thoroughfare to the confusion of
passengers--Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins have but now exchanged
congratulations on the children being abed, and they still linger on
a door-step over a few parting words. Mr. Krook and his lodger, and
the fact of Mr. Krook's being "continually in liquor," and the
testamentary prospects of the young man are, as usual, the staple of
their conversation. But they have something to say, likewise, of the
Harmonic Meeting at the Sol's Arms, where the sound of the piano
through the partly opened windows jingles out into the court, and
where Little Swills, after keeping the lovers of harmony in a roar
like a very Yorick, may now be heard taking the gruff line in a
concerted piece and sentimentally adjuring his friends and patrons to
"Listen, listen, listen, tew the wa-ter fall!" Mrs. Perkins and Mrs.
Piper compare opinions on the subject of the young lady of
professional celebrity who assists at the Harmonic Meetings and who
has a space to herself in the manuscript announcement in the window,
Mrs. Perkins possessing information that she has been married a year
and a half, though announced as Miss M. Melvilleson, the noted siren,
and that her baby is clandestinely conveyed to the Sol's Arms every
night to receive its natural nourishment during the entertainments.
"Sooner than which, myself," says Mrs. Perkins, "I would get my
living by selling lucifers." Mrs. Piper, as in duty bound, is of the
same opinion, holding that a private station is better than public
applause, and thanking heaven for her own (and, by implication, Mrs.
Perkins') respectability. By this time the pot-boy of the Sol's Arms
appearing with her supper-pint well frothed, Mrs. Piper accepts that
tankard and retires indoors, first giving a fair good night to Mrs.
Perkins, who has had her own pint in her hand ever since it was
fetched from the same hostelry by young Perkins before he was sent to
bed. Now there is a sound of putting up shop-shutters in the court
and a smell as of the smoking of pipes; and shooting stars are seen
in upper windows, further indicating retirement to rest. Now, too,
the policeman begins to push at doors; to try fastenings; to be
suspicious of bundles; and to administer his beat, on the hypothesis
that every one is either robbing or being robbed.

It is a close night, though the damp cold is searching too, and there
is a laggard mist a little way up in the air. It is a fine steaming
night to turn the slaughter-houses, the unwholesome trades, the
sewerage, bad water, and burial-grounds to account, and give the
registrar of deaths some extra business. It may be something in the
air--there is plenty in it--or it may be something in himself that is
in fault; but Mr. Weevle, otherwise Jobling, is very ill at ease. He
comes and goes between his own room and the open street door twenty
times an hour. He has been doing so ever since it fell dark. Since
the Chancellor shut up his shop, which he did very early to-night,
Mr. Weevle has been down and up, and down and up (with a cheap tight
velvet skull-cap on his head, making his whiskers look out of all
proportion), oftener than before.

It is no phenomenon that Mr. Snagsby should be ill at ease too, for
he always is so, more or less, under the oppressive influence of the
secret that is upon him. Impelled by the mystery of which he is a
partaker and yet in which he is not a sharer, Mr. Snagsby haunts what
seems to be its fountain-head--the rag and bottle shop in the court.
It has an irresistible attraction for him. Even now, coming round by
the Sol's Arms with the intention of passing down the court, and out
at the Chancery Lane end, and so terminating his unpremeditated
after-supper stroll of ten minutes' long from his own door and back
again, Mr. Snagsby approaches.

"What, Mr. Weevle?" says the stationer, stopping to speak. "Are YOU
there?"

"Aye!" says Weevle, "Here I am, Mr. Snagsby."

"Airing yourself, as I am doing, before you go to bed?" the stationer
inquires.

"Why, there's not much air to be got here; and what there is, is not
very freshening," Weevle answers, glancing up and down the court.

"Very true, sir. Don't you observe," says Mr. Snagsby, pausing to
sniff and taste the air a little, "don't you observe, Mr. Weevle,
that you're--not to put too fine a point upon it--that you're rather
greasy here, sir?"

"Why, I have noticed myself that there is a queer kind of flavour in
the place to-night," Mr. Weevle rejoins. "I suppose it's chops at the
Sol's Arms."

"Chops, do you think? Oh! Chops, eh?" Mr. Snagsby sniffs and tastes
again. "Well, sir, I suppose it is. But I should say their cook at
the Sol wanted a little looking after. She has been burning 'em, sir!
And I don't think"--Mr. Snagsby sniffs and tastes again and then
spits and wipes his mouth--"I don't think--not to put too fine a
point upon it--that they were quite fresh when they were shown the
gridiron."

"That's very likely. It's a tainting sort of weather."

"It IS a tainting sort of weather," says Mr. Snagsby, "and I find it
sinking to the spirits."

"By George! I find it gives me the horrors," returns Mr. Weevle.

"Then, you see, you live in a lonesome way, and in a lonesome room,
with a black circumstance hanging over it," says Mr. Snagsby, looking
in past the other's shoulder along the dark passage and then falling
back a step to look up at the house. "I couldn't live in that room
alone, as you do, sir. I should get so fidgety and worried of an
evening, sometimes, that I should be driven to come to the door and
stand here sooner than sit there. But then it's very true that you
didn't see, in your room, what I saw there. That makes a difference."

"I know quite enough about it," returns Tony.

"It's not agreeable, is it?" pursues Mr. Snagsby, coughing his cough
of mild persuasion behind his hand. "Mr. Krook ought to consider it
in the rent. I hope he does, I am sure."

"I hope he does," says Tony. "But I doubt it."

"You find the rent too high, do you, sir?" returns the stationer.
"Rents ARE high about here. I don't know how it is exactly, but the
law seems to put things up in price. Not," adds Mr. Snagsby with his
apologetic cough, "that I mean to say a word against the profession I
get my living by."

Mr. Weevle again glances up and down the court and then looks at the
stationer. Mr. Snagsby, blankly catching his eye, looks upward for a
star or so and coughs a cough expressive of not exactly seeing his
way out of this conversation.

"It's a curious fact, sir," he observes, slowly rubbing his hands,
"that he should have been--"

"Who's he?" interrupts Mr. Weevle.

"The deceased, you know," says Mr. Snagsby, twitching his head and
right eyebrow towards the staircase and tapping his acquaintance on
the button.

"Ah, to be sure!" returns the other as if he were not over-fond of
the subject. "I thought we had done with him."

"I was only going to say it's a curious fact, sir, that he should
have come and lived here, and been one of my writers, and then that
you should come and live here, and be one of my writers too. Which
there is nothing derogatory, but far from it in the appellation,"
says Mr. Snagsby, breaking off with a mistrust that he may have
unpolitely asserted a kind of proprietorship in Mr. Weevle, "because
I have known writers that have gone into brewers' houses and done
really very respectable indeed. Eminently respectable, sir," adds Mr.
Snagsby with a misgiving that he has not improved the matter.

"It's a curious coincidence, as you say," answers Weevle, once more
glancing up and down the court.

"Seems a fate in it, don't there?" suggests the stationer.

"There does."

"Just so," observes the stationer with his confirmatory cough. "Quite
a fate in it. Quite a fate. Well, Mr. Weevle, I am afraid I must bid
you good night"--Mr. Snagsby speaks as if it made him desolate to go,
though he has been casting about for any means of escape ever since
he stopped to speak--"my little woman will be looking for me else.
Good night, sir!"

If Mr. Snagsby hastens home to save his little woman the trouble of
looking for him, he might set his mind at rest on that score. His
little woman has had her eye upon him round the Sol's Arms all this
time and now glides after him with a pocket handkerchief wrapped over
her head, honouring Mr. Weevle and his doorway with a searching
glance as she goes past.

"You'll know me again, ma'am, at all events," says Mr. Weevle to
himself; "and I can't compliment you on your appearance, whoever you
are, with your head tied up in a bundle. Is this fellow NEVER
coming!"

This fellow approaches as he speaks. Mr. Weevle softly holds up his
finger, and draws him into the passage, and closes the street door.
Then they go upstairs, Mr. Weevle heavily, and Mr. Guppy (for it is
he) very lightly indeed. When they are shut into the back room, they
speak low.

"I thought you had gone to Jericho at least instead of coming here,"
says Tony.

"Why, I said about ten."

"You said about ten," Tony repeats. "Yes, so you did say about ten.
But according to my count, it's ten times ten--it's a hundred
o'clock. I never had such a night in my life!"

"What has been the matter?"

"That's it!" says Tony. "Nothing has been the matter. But here have I
been stewing and fuming in this jolly old crib till I have had the
horrors falling on me as thick as hail. THERE'S a blessed-looking
candle!" says Tony, pointing to the heavily burning taper on his
table with a great cabbage head and a long winding-sheet.

"That's easily improved," Mr. Guppy observes as he takes the snuffers
in hand.

"IS it?" returns his friend. "Not so easily as you think. It has been
smouldering like that ever since it was lighted."

"Why, what's the matter with you, Tony?" inquires Mr. Guppy, looking
at him, snuffers in hand, as he sits down with his elbow on the
table.

"William Guppy," replies the other, "I am in the downs. It's this
unbearably dull, suicidal room--and old Boguey downstairs, I
suppose." Mr. Weevle moodily pushes the snuffers-tray from him with
his elbow, leans his head on his hand, puts his feet on the fender,
and looks at the fire. Mr. Guppy, observing him, slightly tosses his
head and sits down on the other side of the table in an easy
attitude.

"Wasn't that Snagsby talking to you, Tony?"

"Yes, and he--yes, it was Snagsby," said Mr. Weevle, altering the
construction of his sentence.

"On business?"

"No. No business. He was only sauntering by and stopped to prose."

"I thought it was Snagsby," says Mr. Guppy, "and thought it as well
that he shouldn't see me, so I waited till he was gone."

"There we go again, William G.!" cried Tony, looking up for an
instant. "So mysterious and secret! By George, if we were going to
commit a murder, we couldn't have more mystery about it!"

Mr. Guppy affects to smile, and with the view of changing the
conversation, looks with an admiration, real or pretended, round the
room at the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty, terminating his survey
with the portrait of Lady Dedlock over the mantelshelf, in which she
is represented on a terrace, with a pedestal upon the terrace, and a
vase upon the pedestal, and her shawl upon the vase, and a prodigious
piece of fur upon the shawl, and her arm on the prodigious piece of
fur, and a bracelet on her arm.

"That's very like Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Guppy. "It's a speaking
likeness."

"I wish it was," growls Tony, without changing his position. "I
should have some fashionable conversation, here, then."

Finding by this time that his friend is not to be wheedled into a
more sociable humour, Mr. Guppy puts about upon the ill-used tack and
remonstrates with him.

"Tony," says he, "I can make allowances for lowness of spirits, for
no man knows what it is when it does come upon a man better than I
do, and no man perhaps has a better right to know it than a man who
has an unrequited image imprinted on his 'eart. But there are bounds
to these things when an unoffending party is in question, and I will
acknowledge to you, Tony, that I don't think your manner on the
present occasion is hospitable or quite gentlemanly."

"This is strong language, William Guppy," returns Mr. Weevle.

"Sir, it may be," retorts Mr. William Guppy, "but I feel strongly
when I use it."

Mr. Weevle admits that he has been wrong and begs Mr. William Guppy
to think no more about it. Mr. William Guppy, however, having got the
advantage, cannot quite release it without a little more injured
remonstrance.

"No! Dash it, Tony," says that gentleman, "you really ought to be
careful how you wound the feelings of a man who has an unrequited
image imprinted on his 'eart and who is NOT altogether happy in those
chords which vibrate to the tenderest emotions. You, Tony, possess in
yourself all that is calculated to charm the eye and allure the
taste. It is not--happily for you, perhaps, and I may wish that I
could say the same--it is not your character to hover around one
flower. The ole garden is open to you, and your airy pinions carry
you through it. Still, Tony, far be it from me, I am sure, to wound
even your feelings without a cause!"

Tony again entreats that the subject may be no longer pursued, saying
emphatically, "William Guppy, drop it!" Mr. Guppy acquiesces, with
the reply, "I never should have taken it up, Tony, of my own accord."

"And now," says Tony, stirring the fire, "touching this same bundle
of letters. Isn't it an extraordinary thing of Krook to have
appointed twelve o'clock to-night to hand 'em over to me?"

"Very. What did he do it for?"

"What does he do anything for? HE don't know. Said to-day was his
birthday and he'd hand 'em over to-night at twelve o'clock. He'll
have drunk himself blind by that time. He has been at it all day."

"He hasn't forgotten the appointment, I hope?"

"Forgotten? Trust him for that. He never forgets anything. I saw him
to-night, about eight--helped him to shut up his shop--and he had got
the letters then in his hairy cap. He pulled it off and showed 'em
me. When the shop was closed, he took them out of his cap, hung his
cap on the chair-back, and stood turning them over before the fire. I
heard him a little while afterwards, through the floor here, humming
like the wind, the only song he knows--about Bibo, and old Charon,
and Bibo being drunk when he died, or something or other. He has been
as quiet since as an old rat asleep in his hole."

"And you are to go down at twelve?"

"At twelve. And as I tell you, when you came it seemed to me a
hundred."

"Tony," says Mr. Guppy after considering a little with his legs
crossed, "he can't read yet, can he?"

"Read! He'll never read. He can make all the letters separately, and
he knows most of them separately when he sees them; he has got on
that much, under me; but he can't put them together. He's too old to
acquire the knack of it now--and too drunk."

"Tony," says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs, "how do
you suppose he spelt out that name of Hawdon?"

"He never spelt it out. You know what a curious power of eye he has
and how he has been used to employ himself in copying things by eye
alone. He imitated it, evidently from the direction of a letter, and
asked me what it meant."

"Tony," says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs again,
"should you say that the original was a man's writing or a woman's?"

"A woman's. Fifty to one a lady's--slopes a good deal, and the end of
the letter 'n,' long and hasty."

Mr. Guppy has been biting his thumb-nail during this dialogue,
generally changing the thumb when he has changed the cross leg. As he
is going to do so again, he happens to look at his coat-sleeve. It
takes his attention. He stares at it, aghast.

"Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house to-night? Is
there a chimney on fire?"

"Chimney on fire!"

"Ah!" returns Mr. Guppy. "See how the soot's falling. See here, on my
arm! See again, on the table here! Confound the stuff, it won't blow
off--smears like black fat!"

They look at one another, and Tony goes listening to the door, and a
little way upstairs, and a little way downstairs. Comes back and says
it's all right and all quiet, and quotes the remark he lately made to
Mr. Snagsby about their cooking chops at the Sol's Arms.

"And it was then," resumes Mr. Guppy, still glancing with remarkable
aversion at the coat-sleeve, as they pursue their conversation before
the fire, leaning on opposite sides of the table, with their heads
very near together, "that he told you of his having taken the bundle
of letters from his lodger's portmanteau?"

"That was the time, sir," answers Tony, faintly adjusting his
whiskers. "Whereupon I wrote a line to my dear boy, the Honourable
William Guppy, informing him of the appointment for to-night and
advising him not to call before, Boguey being a slyboots."

The light vivacious tone of fashionable life which is usually assumed
by Mr. Weevle sits so ill upon him to-night that he abandons that and
his whiskers together, and after looking over his shoulder, appears
to yield himself up a prey to the horrors again.

"You are to bring the letters to your room to read and compare, and
to get yourself into a position to tell him all about them. That's
the arrangement, isn't it, Tony?" asks Mr. Guppy, anxiously biting
his thumb-nail.

"You can't speak too low. Yes. That's what he and I agreed."

"I tell you what, Tony--"

"You can't speak too low," says Tony once more. Mr. Guppy nods his
sagacious head, advances it yet closer, and drops into a whisper.

"I tell you what. The first thing to be done is to make another
packet like the real one so that if he should ask to see the real one
while it's in my possession, you can show him the dummy."

"And suppose he detects the dummy as soon as he sees it, which with
his biting screw of an eye is about five hundred times more likely
than not," suggests Tony.

"Then we'll face it out. They don't belong to him, and they never
did. You found that, and you placed them in my hands--a legal friend
of yours--for security. If he forces us to it, they'll be producible,
won't they?"

"Ye-es," is Mr. Weevle's reluctant admission.

"Why, Tony," remonstrates his friend, "how you look! You don't doubt
William Guppy? You don't suspect any harm?"

"I don't suspect anything more than I know, William," returns the
other gravely.

"And what do you know?" urges Mr. Guppy, raising his voice a little;
but on his friend's once more warning him, "I tell you, you can't
speak too low," he repeats his question without any sound at all,
forming with his lips only the words, "What do you know?"

"I know three things. First, I know that here we are whispering in
secrecy, a pair of conspirators."

"Well!" says Mr. Guppy. "And we had better be that than a pair of
noodles, which we should be if we were doing anything else, for it's
the only way of doing what we want to do. Secondly?"

"Secondly, it's not made out to me how it's likely to be profitable,
after all."

Mr. Guppy casts up his eyes at the portrait of Lady Dedlock over the
mantelshelf and replies, "Tony, you are asked to leave that to the
honour of your friend. Besides its being calculated to serve that
friend in those chords of the human mind which--which need not be
called into agonizing vibration on the present occasion--your friend
is no fool. What's that?"

"It's eleven o'clock striking by the bell of Saint Paul's. Listen and
you'll hear all the bells in the city jangling."

Both sit silent, listening to the metal voices, near and distant,
resounding from towers of various heights, in tones more various than
their situations. When these at length cease, all seems more
mysterious and quiet than before. One disagreeable result of
whispering is that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence,
haunted by the ghosts of sound--strange cracks and tickings, the
rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of
dreadful feet that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter
snow. So sensitive the two friends happen to be that the air is full
of these phantoms, and the two look over their shoulders by one
consent to see that the door is shut.

"Yes, Tony?" says Mr. Guppy, drawing nearer to the fire and biting
his unsteady thumb-nail. "You were going to say, thirdly?"

"It's far from a pleasant thing to be plotting about a dead man in
the room where he died, especially when you happen to live in it."

"But we are plotting nothing against him, Tony."

"May be not, still I don't like it. Live here by yourself and see how
YOU like it."

"As to dead men, Tony," proceeds Mr. Guppy, evading this proposal,
"there have been dead men in most rooms."

"I know there have, but in most rooms you let them alone, and--and
they let you alone," Tony answers.

The two look at each other again. Mr. Guppy makes a hurried remark to
the effect that they may be doing the deceased a service, that he
hopes so. There is an oppressive blank until Mr. Weevle, by stirring
the fire suddenly, makes Mr. Guppy start as if his heart had been
stirred instead.

"Fah! Here's more of this hateful soot hanging about," says he. "Let
us open the window a bit and get a mouthful of air. It's too close."

He raises the sash, and they both rest on the window-sill, half in
and half out of the room. The neighbouring houses are too near to
admit of their seeing any sky without craning their necks and looking
up, but lights in frowsy windows here and there, and the rolling of
distant carriages, and the new expression that there is of the stir
of men, they find to be comfortable. Mr. Guppy, noiselessly tapping
on the window-sill, resumes his whispering in quite a light-comedy
tone.

"By the by, Tony, don't forget old Smallweed," meaning the younger of
that name. "I have not let him into this, you know. That grandfather
of his is too keen by half. It runs in the family."

"I remember," says Tony. "I am up to all that."

"And as to Krook," resumes Mr. Guppy. "Now, do you suppose he really
has got hold of any other papers of importance, as he has boasted to
you, since you have been such allies?"

Tony shakes his head. "I don't know. Can't Imagine. If we get through
this business without rousing his suspicions, I shall be better
informed, no doubt. How can I know without seeing them, when he don't
know himself? He is always spelling out words from them, and chalking
them over the table and the shop-wall, and asking what this is and
what that is; but his whole stock from beginning to end may easily be
the waste-paper he bought it as, for anything I can say. It's a
monomania with him to think he is possessed of documents. He has been
going to learn to read them this last quarter of a century, I should
judge, from what he tells me."

"How did he first come by that idea, though? That's the question,"
Mr. Guppy suggests with one eye shut, after a little forensic
meditation. "He may have found papers in something he bought, where
papers were not supposed to be, and may have got it into his shrewd
head from the manner and place of their concealment that they are
worth something."

"Or he may have been taken in, in some pretended bargain. Or he may
have been muddled altogether by long staring at whatever he HAS got,
and by drink, and by hanging about the Lord Chancellor's Court and
hearing of documents for ever," returns Mr. Weevle.

Mr. Guppy sitting on the window-sill, nodding his head and balancing
all these possibilities in his mind, continues thoughtfully to tap
it, and clasp it, and measure it with his hand, until he hastily
draws his hand away.

"What, in the devil's name," he says, "is this! Look at my fingers!"

A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch
and sight and more offensive to the smell. A stagnant, sickening oil
with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder.

"What have you been doing here? What have you been pouring out of
window?"

"I pouring out of window! Nothing, I swear! Never, since I have been
here!" cries the lodger.

And yet look here--and look here! When he brings the candle here,
from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips and creeps away
down the bricks, here lies in a little thick nauseous pool.

"This is a horrible house," says Mr. Guppy, shutting down the window.
"Give me some water or I shall cut my hand off."

He so washes, and rubs, and scrubs, and smells, and washes, that he
has not long restored himself with a glass of brandy and stood
silently before the fire when Saint Paul's bell strikes twelve and
all those other bells strike twelve from their towers of various
heights in the dark air, and in their many tones. When all is quiet
again, the lodger says, "It's the appointed time at last. Shall I
go?"

Mr. Guppy nods and gives him a "lucky touch" on the back, but not
with the washed hand, though it is his right hand.

He goes downstairs, and Mr. Guppy tries to compose himself before the
fire for waiting a long time. But in no more than a minute or two the
stairs creak and Tony comes swiftly back.

"Have you got them?"

"Got them! No. The old man's not there."

He has been so horribly frightened in the short interval that his
terror seizes the other, who makes a rush at him and asks loudly,
"What's the matter?"

"I couldn't make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked
in. And the burning smell is there--and the soot is there, and the
oil is there--and he is not there!" Tony ends this with a groan.

Mr. Guppy takes the light. They go down, more dead than alive, and
holding one another, push open the door of the back shop. The cat has
retreated close to it and stands snarling, not at them, at something
on the ground before the fire. There is a very little fire left in
the grate, but there is a smouldering, suffocating vapour in the room
and a dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. The chairs and
table, and the bottle so rarely absent from the table, all stand as
usual. On one chair-back hang the old man's hairy cap and coat.

"Look!" whispers the lodger, pointing his friend's attention to these
objects with a trembling finger. "I told you so. When I saw him last,
he took his cap off, took out the little bundle of old letters, hung
his cap on the back of the chair--his coat was there already, for he
had pulled that off before he went to put the shutters up--and I left
him turning the letters over in his hand, standing just where that
crumbled black thing is upon the floor."

Is he hanging somewhere? They look up. No.

"See!" whispers Tony. "At the foot of the same chair there lies a
dirty bit of thin red cord that they tie up pens with. That went
round the letters. He undid it slowly, leering and laughing at me,
before he began to turn them over, and threw it there. I saw it
fall."

"What's the matter with the cat?" says Mr. Guppy. "Look at her!"

"Mad, I think. And no wonder in this evil place."

They advance slowly, looking at all these things. The cat remains
where they found her, still snarling at the something on the ground
before the fire and between the two chairs. What is it? Hold up the
light.

Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a
little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to
be steeped in something; and here is--is it the cinder of a small
charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it
coal? Oh, horror, he IS here! And this from which we run away,
striking out the light and overturning one another into the street,
is all that represents him.

Help, help, help! Come into this house for heaven's sake! Plenty will
come in, but none can help. The Lord Chancellor of that court, true
to his title in his last act, has died the death of all lord
chancellors in all courts and of all authorities in all places under
all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice
is done. Call the death by any name your Highness will, attribute
it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you
will, it is the same death eternally--inborn, inbred, engendered
in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that
only--spontaneous combustion, and none other of all the deaths that
can be died.




CHAPTER XXXIII

Interlopers


Now do those two gentlemen not very neat about the cuffs and buttons
who attended the last coroner's inquest at the Sol's Arms reappear in
the precincts with surprising swiftness (being, in fact, breathlessly
fetched by the active and intelligent beadle), and institute
perquisitions through the court, and dive into the Sol's parlour, and
write with ravenous little pens on tissue-paper. Now do they note
down, in the watches of the night, how the neighbourhood of Chancery
Lane was yesterday, at about midnight, thrown into a state of the
most intense agitation and excitement by the following alarming and
horrible discovery. Now do they set forth how it will doubtless be
remembered that some time back a painful sensation was created in the
public mind by a case of mysterious death from opium occurring in the
first floor of the house occupied as a rag, bottle, and general
marine store shop, by an eccentric individual of intemperate habits,
far advanced in life, named Krook; and how, by a remarkable
coincidence, Krook was examined at the inquest, which it may be
recollected was held on that occasion at the Sol's Arms, a
well-conducted tavern immediately adjoining the premises in question
on the west side and licensed to a highly respectable landlord, Mr.
James George Bogsby. Now do they show (in as many words as possible)
how during some hours of yesterday evening a very peculiar smell was
observed by the inhabitants of the court, in which the tragical
occurrence which forms the subject of that present account
transpired; and which odour was at one time so powerful that Mr.
Swills, a comic vocalist professionally engaged by Mr. J. G. Bogsby,
has himself stated to our reporter that he mentioned to Miss M.
Melvilleson, a lady of some pretensions to musical ability, likewise
engaged by Mr. J. G. Bogsby to sing at a series of concerts called
Harmonic Assemblies, or Meetings, which it would appear are held at
the Sol's Arms under Mr. Bogsby's direction pursuant to the Act of
George the Second, that he (Mr. Swills) found his voice seriously
affected by the impure state of the atmosphere, his jocose expression
at the time being that he was like an empty post-office, for he
hadn't a single note in him. How this account of Mr. Swills is
entirely corroborated by two intelligent married females residing in
the same court and known respectively by the names of Mrs. Piper and
Mrs. Perkins, both of whom observed the foetid effluvia and regarded
them as being emitted from the premises in the occupation of Krook,
the unfortunate deceased. All this and a great deal more the two
gentlemen who have formed an amicable partnership in the melancholy
catastrophe write down on the spot; and the boy population of the
court (out of bed in a moment) swarm up the shutters of the Sol's
Arms parlour, to behold the tops of their heads while they are about
it.

The whole court, adult as well as boy, is sleepless for that night,
and can do nothing but wrap up its many heads, and talk of the
ill-fated house, and look at it. Miss Flite has been bravely rescued
from her chamber, as if it were in flames, and accommodated with a
bed at the Sol's Arms. The Sol neither turns off its gas nor shuts
its door all night, for any kind of public excitement makes good for
the Sol and causes the court to stand in need of comfort. The house
has not done so much in the stomachic article of cloves or in
brandy-and-water warm since the inquest. The moment the pot-boy heard
what had happened, he rolled up his shirt-sleeves tight to his
shoulders and said, "There'll be a run upon us!" In the first outcry,
young Piper dashed off for the fire-engines and returned in triumph
at a jolting gallop perched up aloft on the Phoenix and holding on to
that fabulous creature with all his might in the midst of helmets and
torches. One helmet remains behind after careful investigation of all
chinks and crannies and slowly paces up and down before the house in
company with one of the two policemen who have likewise been left in
charge thereof. To this trio everybody in the court possessed of
sixpence has an insatiate desire to exhibit hospitality in a liquid
form.

Mr. Weevle and his friend Mr. Guppy are within the bar at the Sol and
are worth anything to the Sol that the bar contains if they will only
stay there. "This is not a time," says Mr. Bogsby, "to haggle about
money," though he looks something sharply after it, over the counter;
"give your orders, you two gentlemen, and you're welcome to whatever
you put a name to."

Thus entreated, the two gentlemen (Mr. Weevle especially) put names
to so many things that in course of time they find it difficult to
put a name to anything quite distinctly, though they still relate to
all new-comers some version of the night they have had of it, and of
what they said, and what they thought, and what they saw. Meanwhile,
one or other of the policemen often flits about the door, and pushing
it open a little way at the full length of his arm, looks in from
outer gloom. Not that he has any suspicions, but that he may as well
know what they are up to in there.

Thus night pursues its leaden course, finding the court still out of
bed through the unwonted hours, still treating and being treated,
still conducting itself similarly to a court that has had a little
money left it unexpectedly. Thus night at length with slow-retreating
steps departs, and the lamp-lighter going his rounds, like an
executioner to a despotic king, strikes off the little heads of fire
that have aspired to lessen the darkness. Thus the day cometh,
whether or no.

And the day may discern, even with its dim London eye, that the court
has been up all night. Over and above the faces that have fallen
drowsily on tables and the heels that lie prone on hard floors
instead of beds, the brick and mortar physiognomy of the very court
itself looks worn and jaded. And now the neighbourhood, waking up and
beginning to hear of what has happened, comes streaming in, half
dressed, to ask questions; and the two policemen and the helmet (who
are far less impressible externally than the court) have enough to do
to keep the door.

"Good gracious, gentlemen!" says Mr. Snagsby, coming up. "What's this
I hear!"

"Why, it's true," returns one of the policemen. "That's what it is.
Now move on here, come!"

"Why, good gracious, gentlemen," says Mr. Snagsby, somewhat promptly
backed away, "I was at this door last night betwixt ten and eleven
o'clock in conversation with the young man who lodges here."

"Indeed?" returns the policeman. "You will find the young man next
door then. Now move on here, some of you."

"Not hurt, I hope?" says Mr. Snagsby.

"Hurt? No. What's to hurt him!"

Mr. Snagsby, wholly unable to answer this or any question in his
troubled mind, repairs to the Sol's Arms and finds Mr. Weevle
languishing over tea and toast with a considerable expression on him
of exhausted excitement and exhausted tobacco-smoke.

"And Mr. Guppy likewise!" quoth Mr. Snagsby. "Dear, dear, dear! What
a fate there seems in all this! And my lit--"

Mr. Snagsby's power of speech deserts him in the formation of the
words "my little woman." For to see that injured female walk into the
Sol's Arms at that hour of the morning and stand before the
beer-engine, with her eyes fixed upon him like an accusing spirit,
strikes him dumb.

"My dear," says Mr. Snagsby when his tongue is loosened, "will you
take anything? A little--not to put too fine a point upon it--drop of
shrub?"

"No," says Mrs. Snagsby.

"My love, you know these two gentlemen?"

"Yes!" says Mrs. Snagsby, and in a rigid manner acknowledges their
presence, still fixing Mr. Snagsby with her eye.

The devoted Mr. Snagsby cannot bear this treatment. He takes Mrs.
Snagsby by the hand and leads her aside to an adjacent cask.

"My little woman, why do you look at me in that way? Pray don't do
it."

"I can't help my looks," says Mrs. Snagsby, "and if I could I
wouldn't."

Mr. Snagsby, with his cough of meekness, rejoins, "Wouldn't you
really, my dear?" and meditates. Then coughs his cough of trouble and
says, "This is a dreadful mystery, my love!" still fearfully
disconcerted by Mrs. Snagsby's eye.

"It IS," returns Mrs. Snagsby, shaking her head, "a dreadful
mystery."

"My little woman," urges Mr. Snagsby in a piteous manner, "don't for
goodness' sake speak to me with that bitter expression and look at me
in that searching way! I beg and entreat of you not to do it. Good
Lord, you don't suppose that I would go spontaneously combusting any
person, my dear?"

"I can't say," returns Mrs. Snagsby.

On a hasty review of his unfortunate position, Mr. Snagsby "can't
say" either. He is not prepared positively to deny that he may have
had something to do with it. He has had something--he don't know
what--to do with so much in this connexion that is mysterious that it
is possible he may even be implicated, without knowing it, in the
present transaction. He faintly wipes his forehead with his
handkerchief and gasps.

"My life," says the unhappy stationer, "would you have any objections
to mention why, being in general so delicately circumspect in your
conduct, you come into a wine-vaults before breakfast?"

"Why do YOU come here?" inquires Mrs. Snagsby.

"My dear, merely to know the rights of the fatal accident which has
happened to the venerable party who has been--combusted." Mr. Snagsby
has made a pause to suppress a groan. "I should then have related
them to you, my love, over your French roll."

"I dare say you would! You relate everything to me, Mr. Snagsby."

"Every--my lit--"

"I should be glad," says Mrs. Snagsby after contemplating his
increased confusion with a severe and sinister smile, "if you would
come home with me; I think you may be safer there, Mr. Snagsby, than
anywhere else."

"My love, I don't know but what I may be, I am sure. I am ready to
go."

Mr. Snagsby casts his eye forlornly round the bar, gives Messrs.
Weevle and Guppy good morning, assures them of the satisfaction with
which he sees them uninjured, and accompanies Mrs. Snagsby from the
Sol's Arms. Before night his doubt whether he may not be responsible
for some inconceivable part in the catastrophe which is the talk of
the whole neighbourhood is almost resolved into certainty by Mrs.
Snagsby's pertinacity in that fixed gaze. His mental sufferings are
so great that he entertains wandering ideas of delivering himself up
to justice and requiring to be cleared if innocent and punished with
the utmost rigour of the law if guilty.

Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy, having taken their breakfast, step into
Lincoln's Inn to take a little walk about the square and clear as
many of the dark cobwebs out of their brains as a little walk may.

"There can be no more favourable time than the present, Tony," says
Mr. Guppy after they have broodingly made out the four sides of the
square, "for a word or two between us upon a point on which we must,
with very little delay, come to an understanding."

"Now, I tell you what, William G.!" returns the other, eyeing his
companion with a bloodshot eye. "If it's a point of conspiracy, you
needn't take the trouble to mention it. I have had enough of that,
and I ain't going to have any more. We shall have YOU taking fire
next or blowing up with a bang."

This supposititious phenomenon is so very disagreeable to Mr. Guppy
that his voice quakes as he says in a moral way, "Tony, I should have
thought that what we went through last night would have been a lesson
to you never to be personal any more as long as you lived." To which
Mr. Weevle returns, "William, I should have thought it would have
been a lesson to YOU never to conspire any more as long as you
lived." To which Mr. Guppy says, "Who's conspiring?" To which Mr.
Jobling replies, "Why, YOU are!" To which Mr. Guppy retorts, "No, I
am not." To which Mr. Jobling retorts again, "Yes, you are!" To which
Mr. Guppy retorts, "Who says so?" To which Mr. Jobling retorts, "I
say so!" To which Mr. Guppy retorts, "Oh, indeed?" To which Mr.
Jobling retorts, "Yes, indeed!" And both being now in a heated state,
they walk on silently for a while to cool down again.

"Tony," says Mr. Guppy then, "if you heard your friend out instead of
flying at him, you wouldn't fall into mistakes. But your temper is
hasty and you are not considerate. Possessing in yourself, Tony, all
that is calculated to charm the eye--"

"Oh! Blow the eye!" cries Mr. Weevle, cutting him short. "Say what
you have got to say!"

Finding his friend in this morose and material condition, Mr. Guppy
only expresses the finer feelings of his soul through the tone of
injury in which he recommences, "Tony, when I say there is a point on
which we must come to an understanding pretty soon, I say so quite
apart from any kind of conspiring, however innocent. You know it is
professionally arranged beforehand in all cases that are tried what
facts the witnesses are to prove. Is it or is it not desirable that
we should know what facts we are to prove on the inquiry into the
death of this unfortunate old mo--gentleman?" (Mr. Guppy was going to
say "mogul," but thinks "gentleman" better suited to the
circumstances.)

"What facts? THE facts."

"The facts bearing on that inquiry. Those are"--Mr. Guppy tells them
off on his fingers--"what we knew of his habits, when you saw him
last, what his condition was then, the discovery that we made, and
how we made it."

"Yes," says Mr. Weevle. "Those are about the facts."

"We made the discovery in consequence of his having, in his eccentric
way, an appointment with you at twelve o'clock at night, when you
were to explain some writing to him as you had often done before on
account of his not being able to read. I, spending the evening with
you, was called down--and so forth. The inquiry being only into the
circumstances touching the death of the deceased, it's not necessary
to go beyond these facts, I suppose you'll agree?"

"No!" returns Mr. Weevle. "I suppose not."

"And this is not a conspiracy, perhaps?" says the injured Guppy.

"No," returns his friend; "if it's nothing worse than this, I
withdraw the observation."

"Now, Tony," says Mr. Guppy, taking his arm again and walking him
slowly on, "I should like to know, in a friendly way, whether you
have yet thought over the many advantages of your continuing to live
at that place?"

"What do you mean?" says Tony, stopping.

"Whether you have yet thought over the many advantages of your
continuing to live at that place?" repeats Mr. Guppy, walking him on
again.

"At what place? THAT place?" pointing in the direction of the rag and
bottle shop.

Mr. Guppy nods.

"Why, I wouldn't pass another night there for any consideration that
you could offer me," says Mr. Weevle, haggardly staring.

"Do you mean it though, Tony?"

"Mean it! Do I look as if I mean it? I feel as if I do; I know that,"
says Mr. Weevle with a very genuine shudder.

"Then the possibility or probability--for such it must be
considered--of your never being disturbed in possession of those
effects lately belonging to a lone old man who seemed to have no
relation in the world, and the certainty of your being able to find
out what he really had got stored up there, don't weigh with you at
all against last night, Tony, if I understand you?" says Mr. Guppy,
biting his thumb with the appetite of vexation.

"Certainly not. Talk in that cool way of a fellow's living there?"
cries Mr. Weevle indignantly. "Go and live there yourself."

"Oh! I, Tony!" says Mr. Guppy, soothing him. "I have never lived
there and couldn't get a lodging there now, whereas you have got
one."

"You are welcome to it," rejoins his friend, "and--ugh!--you may make
yourself at home in it."

"Then you really and truly at this point," says Mr. Guppy, "give up
the whole thing, if I understand you, Tony?"

"You never," returns Tony with a most convincing steadfastness, "said
a truer word in all your life. I do!"

While they are so conversing, a hackney-coach drives into the square,
on the box of which vehicle a very tall hat makes itself manifest to
the public. Inside the coach, and consequently not so manifest to the
multitude, though sufficiently so to the two friends, for the coach
stops almost at their feet, are the venerable Mr. Smallweed and Mrs.
Smallweed, accompanied by their granddaughter Judy.

An air of haste and excitement pervades the party, and as the tall
hat (surmounting Mr. Smallweed the younger) alights, Mr. Smallweed
the elder pokes his head out of window and bawls to Mr. Guppy, "How
de do, sir! How de do!"

"What do Chick and his family want here at this time of the morning,
I wonder!" says Mr. Guppy, nodding to his familiar.

"My dear sir," cries Grandfather Smallweed, "would you do me a
favour? Would you and your friend be so very obleeging as to carry me
into the public-house in the court, while Bart and his sister bring
their grandmother along? Would you do an old man that good turn,
sir?"

Mr. Guppy looks at his friend, repeating inquiringly, "The
public-house in the court?" And they prepare to bear the venerable
burden to the Sol's Arms.

"There's your fare!" says the patriarch to the coachman with a fierce
grin and shaking his incapable fist at him. "Ask me for a penny more,
and I'll have my lawful revenge upon you. My dear young men, be easy
with me, if you please. Allow me to catch you round the neck. I won't
squeeze you tighter than I can help. Oh, Lord! Oh, dear me! Oh, my
bones!"

It is well that the Sol is not far off, for Mr. Weevle presents an
apoplectic appearance before half the distance is accomplished. With
no worse aggravation of his symptoms, however, than the utterance of
divers croaking sounds expressive of obstructed respiration, he
fulfils his share of the porterage and the benevolent old gentleman
is deposited by his own desire in the parlour of the Sol's Arms.

"Oh, Lord!" gasps Mr. Smallweed, looking about him, breathless, from
an arm-chair. "Oh, dear me! Oh, my bones and back! Oh, my aches and
pains! Sit down, you dancing, prancing, shambling, scrambling
poll-parrot! Sit down!"

This little apostrophe to Mrs. Smallweed is occasioned by a
propensity on the part of that unlucky old lady whenever she finds
herself on her feet to amble about and "set" to inanimate objects,
accompanying herself with a chattering noise, as in a witch dance. A
nervous affection has probably as much to do with these
demonstrations as any imbecile intention in the poor old woman, but
on the present occasion they are so particularly lively in connexion
with the Windsor arm-chair, fellow to that in which Mr. Smallweed is
seated, that she only quite desists when her grandchildren have held
her down in it, her lord in the meanwhile bestowing upon her, with
great volubility, the endearing epithet of "a pig-headed jackdaw,"
repeated a surprising number of times.

"My dear sir," Grandfather Smallweed then proceeds, addressing Mr.
Guppy, "there has been a calamity here. Have you heard of it, either
of you?"

"Heard of it, sir! Why, we discovered it."

"You discovered it. You two discovered it! Bart, THEY discovered it!"

The two discoverers stare at the Smallweeds, who return the
compliment.

"My dear friends," whines Grandfather Smallweed, putting out both his
hands, "I owe you a thousand thanks for discharging the melancholy
office of discovering the ashes of Mrs. Smallweed's brother."

"Eh?" says Mr. Guppy.

"Mrs. Smallweed's brother, my dear friend--her only relation. We were
not on terms, which is to be deplored now, but he never WOULD be on
terms. He was not fond of us. He was eccentric--he was very
eccentric. Unless he has left a will (which is not at all likely) I
shall take out letters of administration. I have come down to look
after the property; it must be sealed up, it must be protected. I
have come down," repeats Grandfather Smallweed, hooking the air
towards him with all his ten fingers at once, "to look after the
property."

"I think, Small," says the disconsolate Mr. Guppy, "you might have
mentioned that the old man was your uncle."

"You two were so close about him that I thought you would like me to
be the same," returns that old bird with a secretly glistening eye.
"Besides, I wasn't proud of him."

"Besides which, it was nothing to you, you know, whether he was or
not," says Judy. Also with a secretly glistening eye.

"He never saw me in his life to know me," observed Small; "I don't
know why I should introduce HIM, I am sure!"

"No, he never communicated with us, which is to be deplored," the old
gentleman strikes in, "but I have come to look after the property--to
look over the papers, and to look after the property. We shall make
good our title. It is in the hands of my solicitor. Mr. Tulkinghorn,
of Lincoln's Inn Fields, over the way there, is so good as to act as
my solicitor; and grass don't grow under HIS feet, I can tell ye.
Krook was Mrs. Smallweed's only brother; she had no relation but
Krook, and Krook had no relation but Mrs. Smallweed. I am speaking of
your brother, you brimstone black-beetle, that was seventy-six years
of age."

Mrs. Smallweed instantly begins to shake her head and pipe up,
"Seventy-six pound seven and sevenpence! Seventy-six thousand bags of
money! Seventy-six hundred thousand million of parcels of
bank-notes!"

"Will somebody give me a quart pot?" exclaims her exasperated
husband, looking helplessly about him and finding no missile within
his reach. "Will somebody obleege me with a spittoon? Will somebody
hand me anything hard and bruising to pelt at her? You hag, you cat,
you dog, you brimstone barker!" Here Mr. Smallweed, wrought up to the
highest pitch by his own eloquence, actually throws Judy at her
grandmother in default of anything else, by butting that young virgin
at the old lady with such force as he can muster and then dropping
into his chair in a heap.

"Shake me up, somebody, if you'll be so good," says the voice from
within the faintly struggling bundle into which he has collapsed. "I
have come to look after the property. Shake me up, and call in the
police on duty at the next house to be explained to about the
property. My solicitor will be here presently to protect the
property. Transportation or the gallows for anybody who shall touch
the property!" As his dutiful grandchildren set him up, panting, and
putting him through the usual restorative process of shaking and
punching, he still repeats like an echo, "The--the property! The
property! Property!"

Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy look at each other, the former as having
relinquished the whole affair, the latter with a discomfited
countenance as having entertained some lingering expectations yet.
But there is nothing to be done in opposition to the Smallweed
interest. Mr. Tulkinghorn's clerk comes down from his official pew in
the chambers to mention to the police that Mr. Tulkinghorn is
answerable for its being all correct about the next of kin and that
the papers and effects will be formally taken possession of in due
time and course. Mr. Smallweed is at once permitted so far to assert
his supremacy as to be carried on a visit of sentiment into the next
house and upstairs into Miss Flite's deserted room, where he looks
like a hideous bird of prey newly added to her aviary.

The arrival of this unexpected heir soon taking wind in the court
still makes good for the Sol and keeps the court upon its mettle.
Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins think it hard upon the young man if there
really is no will, and consider that a handsome present ought to be
made him out of the estate. Young Piper and young Perkins, as members
of that restless juvenile circle which is the terror of the
foot-passengers in Chancery Lane, crumble into ashes behind the pump
and under the archway all day long, where wild yells and hootings
take place over their remains. Little Swills and Miss M. Melvilleson
enter into affable conversation with their patrons, feeling that
these unusual occurrences level the barriers between professionals
and non-professionals. Mr. Bogsby puts up "The popular song of King
Death, with chorus by the whole strength of the company," as the
great Harmonic feature of the week and announces in the bill that "J.
G. B. is induced to do so at a considerable extra expense in
consequence of a wish which has been very generally expressed at the
bar by a large body of respectable individuals and in homage to a
late melancholy event which has aroused so much sensation." There is
one point connected with the deceased upon which the court is
particularly anxious, namely, that the fiction of a full-sized coffin
should be preserved, though there is so little to put in it. Upon the
undertaker's stating in the Sol's bar in the course of the day that
he has received orders to construct "a six-footer," the general
solicitude is much relieved, and it is considered that Mr.
Smallweed's conduct does him great honour.

Out of the court, and a long way out of it, there is considerable
excitement too, for men of science and philosophy come to look, and
carriages set down doctors at the corner who arrive with the same
intent, and there is more learned talk about inflammable gases and
phosphuretted hydrogen than the court has ever imagined. Some of
these authorities (of course the wisest) hold with indignation that
the deceased had no business to die in the alleged manner; and being
reminded by other authorities of a certain inquiry into the evidence
for such deaths reprinted in the sixth volume of the Philosophical
Transactions; and also of a book not quite unknown on English medical
jurisprudence; and likewise of the Italian case of the Countess
Cornelia Baudi as set forth in detail by one Bianchini, prebendary of
Verona, who wrote a scholarly work or so and was occasionally heard
of in his time as having gleams of reason in him; and also of the
testimony of Messrs. Fodere and Mere, two pestilent Frenchmen who
WOULD investigate the subject; and further, of the corroborative
testimony of Monsieur Le Cat, a rather celebrated French surgeon once
upon a time, who had the unpoliteness to live in a house where such a
case occurred and even to write an account of it--still they regard
the late Mr. Krook's obstinacy in going out of the world by any such
by-way as wholly unjustifiable and personally offensive. The less the
court understands of all this, the more the court likes it, and the
greater enjoyment it has in the stock in trade of the Sol's Arms.
Then there comes the artist of a picture newspaper, with a foreground
and figures ready drawn for anything from a wreck on the Cornish
coast to a review in Hyde Park or a meeting in Manchester, and in
Mrs. Perkins' own room, memorable evermore, he then and there throws
in upon the block Mr. Krook's house, as large as life; in fact,
considerably larger, making a very temple of it. Similarly, being
permitted to look in at the door of the fatal chamber, he depicts
that apartment as three-quarters of a mile long by fifty yards high,
at which the court is particularly charmed. All this time the two
gentlemen before mentioned pop in and out of every house and assist
at the philosophical disputations--go everywhere and listen to
everybody--and yet are always diving into the Sol's parlour and
writing with the ravenous little pens on the tissue-paper.

At last come the coroner and his inquiry, like as before, except that
the coroner cherishes this case as being out of the common way and
tells the gentlemen of the jury, in his private capacity, that "that
would seem to be an unlucky house next door, gentlemen, a destined
house; but so we sometimes find it, and these are mysteries we can't
account for!" After which the six-footer comes into action and is
much admired.

In all these proceedings Mr. Guppy has so slight a part, except when
he gives his evidence, that he is moved on like a private individual
and can only haunt the secret house on the outside, where he has the
mortification of seeing Mr. Smallweed padlocking the door, and of
bitterly knowing himself to be shut out. But before these proceedings
draw to a close, that is to say, on the night next after the
catastrophe, Mr. Guppy has a thing to say that must be said to Lady
Dedlock.

For which reason, with a sinking heart and with that hang-dog sense
of guilt upon him which dread and watching enfolded in the Sol's Arms
have produced, the young man of the name of Guppy presents himself at
the town mansion at about seven o'clock in the evening and requests
to see her ladyship. Mercury replies that she is going out to dinner;
don't he see the carriage at the door? Yes, he does see the carriage
at the door; but he wants to see my Lady too.

Mercury is disposed, as he will presently declare to a
fellow-gentleman in waiting, "to pitch into the young man"; but his
instructions are positive. Therefore he sulkily supposes that the
young man must come up into the library. There he leaves the young
man in a large room, not over-light, while he makes report of him.

Mr. Guppy looks into the shade in all directions, discovering
everywhere a certain charred and whitened little heap of coal or
wood. Presently he hears a rustling. Is it--? No, it's no ghost, but
fair flesh and blood, most brilliantly dressed.

"I have to beg your ladyship's pardon," Mr. Guppy stammers, very
downcast. "This is an inconvenient time--"

"I told you, you could come at any time." She takes a chair, looking
straight at him as on the last occasion.

"Thank your ladyship. Your ladyship is very affable."

"You can sit down." There is not much affability in her tone.

"I don't know, your ladyship, that it's worth while my sitting down
and detaining you, for I--I have not got the letters that I mentioned
when I had the honour of waiting on your ladyship."

"Have you come merely to say so?"

"Merely to say so, your ladyship." Mr. Guppy besides being depressed,
disappointed, and uneasy, is put at a further disadvantage by the
splendour and beauty of her appearance.

She knows its influence perfectly, has studied it too well to miss a
grain of its effect on any one. As she looks at him so steadily and
coldly, he not only feels conscious that he has no guide in the least
perception of what is really the complexion of her thoughts, but also
that he is being every moment, as it were, removed further and
further from her.

She will not speak, it is plain. So he must.

"In short, your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy like a meanly penitent
thief, "the person I was to have had the letters of, has come to a
sudden end, and--" He stops. Lady Dedlock calmly finishes the
sentence.

"And the letters are destroyed with the person?"

Mr. Guppy would say no if he could--as he is unable to hide.

"I believe so, your ladyship."

If he could see the least sparkle of relief in her face now? No, he
could see no such thing, even if that brave outside did not utterly
put him away, and he were not looking beyond it and about it.

He falters an awkward excuse or two for his failure.

"Is this all you have to say?" inquires Lady Dedlock, having heard
him out--or as nearly out as he can stumble.

Mr. Guppy thinks that's all.

"You had better be sure that you wish to say nothing more to me, this
being the last time you will have the opportunity."

Mr. Guppy is quite sure. And indeed he has no such wish at present,
by any means.

"That is enough. I will dispense with excuses. Good evening to you!"
And she rings for Mercury to show the young man of the name of Guppy
out.

But in that house, in that same moment, there happens to be an old
man of the name of Tulkinghorn. And that old man, coming with his
quiet footstep to the library, has his hand at that moment on the
handle of the door--comes in--and comes face to face with the young
man as he is leaving the room.

One glance between the old man and the lady, and for an instant the
blind that is always down flies up. Suspicion, eager and sharp, looks
out. Another instant, close again.

"I beg your pardon, Lady Dedlock. I beg your pardon a thousand times.
It is so very unusual to find you here at this hour. I supposed the
room was empty. I beg your pardon!"

"Stay!" She negligently calls him back. "Remain here, I beg. I am
going out to dinner. I have nothing more to say to this young man!"

The disconcerted young man bows, as he goes out, and cringingly hopes
that Mr. Tulkinghorn of the Fields is well.

"Aye, aye?" says the lawyer, looking at him from under his bent
brows, though he has no need to look again--not he. "From Kenge and
Carboy's, surely?"

"Kenge and Carboy's, Mr. Tulkinghorn. Name of Guppy, sir."

"To be sure. Why, thank you, Mr. Guppy, I am very well!"

"Happy to hear it, sir. You can't be too well, sir, for the credit of
the profession."

"Thank you, Mr. Guppy!"

Mr. Guppy sneaks away. Mr. Tulkinghorn, such a foil in his
old-fashioned rusty black to Lady Dedlock's brightness, hands her
down the staircase to her carriage. He returns rubbing his chin, and
rubs it a good deal in the course of the evening.




CHAPTER XXXIV

A Turn of the Screw


"Now, what," says Mr. George, "may this be? Is it blank cartridge or
ball? A flash in the pan or a shot?"

An open letter is the subject of the trooper's speculations, and it
seems to perplex him mightily. He looks at it at arm's length, brings
it close to him, holds it in his right hand, holds it in his left
hand, reads it with his head on this side, with his head on that
side, contracts his eyebrows, elevates them, still cannot satisfy
himself. He smooths it out upon the table with his heavy palm, and
thoughtfully walking up and down the gallery, makes a halt before it
every now and then to come upon it with a fresh eye. Even that won't
do. "Is it," Mr. George still muses, "blank cartridge or ball?"

Phil Squod, with the aid of a brush and paint-pot, is employed in the
distance whitening the targets, softly whistling in quick-march time
and in drum-and-fife manner that he must and will go back again to
the girl he left behind him.

"Phil!" The trooper beckons as he calls him.

Phil approaches in his usual way, sidling off at first as if he were
going anywhere else and then bearing down upon his commander like a
bayonet-charge. Certain splashes of white show in high relief upon
his dirty face, and he scrapes his one eyebrow with the handle of the
brush.

"Attention, Phil! Listen to this."

"Steady, commander, steady."

"'Sir. Allow me to remind you (though there is no legal necessity for
my doing so, as you are aware) that the bill at two months' date
drawn on yourself by Mr. Matthew Bagnet, and by you accepted, for the
sum of ninety-seven pounds four shillings and ninepence, will become
due to-morrow, when you will please be prepared to take up the same
on presentation. Yours, Joshua Smallweed.' What do you make of that,
Phil?"

"Mischief, guv'ner."

"Why?"

"I think," replies Phil after pensively tracing out a cross-wrinkle
in his forehead with the brush-handle, "that mischeevious
consequences is always meant when money's asked for."

"Lookye, Phil," says the trooper, sitting on the table. "First and
last, I have paid, I may say, half as much again as this principal in
interest and one thing and another."

Phil intimates by sidling back a pace or two, with a very
unaccountable wrench of his wry face, that he does not regard the
transaction as being made more promising by this incident.

"And lookye further, Phil," says the trooper, staying his premature
conclusions with a wave of his hand. "There has always been an
understanding that this bill was to be what they call renewed. And it
has been renewed no end of times. What do you say now?"

"I say that I think the times is come to a end at last."

"You do? Humph! I am much of the same mind myself."

"Joshua Smallweed is him that was brought here in a chair?"

"The same."

"Guv'ner," says Phil with exceeding gravity, "he's a leech in his
dispositions, he's a screw and a wice in his actions, a snake in his
twistings, and a lobster in his claws."

Having thus expressively uttered his sentiments, Mr. Squod, after
waiting a little to ascertain if any further remark be expected of
him, gets back by his usual series of movements to the target he has
in hand and vigorously signifies through his former musical medium
that he must and he will return to that ideal young lady. George,
having folded the letter, walks in that direction.

"There IS a way, commander," says Phil, looking cunningly at him, "of
settling this."

"Paying the money, I suppose? I wish I could."

Phil shakes his head. "No, guv'ner, no; not so bad as that. There IS
a way," says Phil with a highly artistic turn of his brush; "what I'm
a-doing at present."

"Whitewashing."

Phil nods.

"A pretty way that would be! Do you know what would become of the
Bagnets in that case? Do you know they would be ruined to pay off my
old scores? YOU'RE a moral character," says the trooper, eyeing him
in his large way with no small indignation; "upon my life you are,
Phil!"

Phil, on one knee at the target, is in course of protesting
earnestly, though not without many allegorical scoops of his brush
and smoothings of the white surface round the rim with his thumb,
that he had forgotten the Bagnet responsibility and would not so much
as injure a hair of the head of any member of that worthy family when
steps are audible in the long passage without, and a cheerful voice
is heard to wonder whether George is at home. Phil, with a look at
his master, hobbles up, saying, "Here's the guv'ner, Mrs. Bagnet!
Here he is!" and the old girl herself, accompanied by Mr. Bagnet,
appears.

The old girl never appears in walking trim, in any season of the
year, without a grey cloth cloak, coarse and much worn but very
clean, which is, undoubtedly, the identical garment rendered so
interesting to Mr. Bagnet by having made its way home to Europe from
another quarter of the globe in company with Mrs. Bagnet and an
umbrella. The latter faithful appendage is also invariably a part of
the old girl's presence out of doors. It is of no colour known in
this life and has a corrugated wooden crook for a handle, with a
metallic object let into its prow, or beak, resembling a little model
of a fanlight over a street door or one of the oval glasses out of a
pair of spectacles, which ornamental object has not that tenacious
capacity of sticking to its post that might be desired in an article
long associated with the British army. The old girl's umbrella is of
a flabby habit of waist and seems to be in need of stays--an
appearance that is possibly referable to its having served through a
series of years at home as a cupboard and on journeys as a carpet
bag. She never puts it up, having the greatest reliance on her
well-proved cloak with its capacious hood, but generally uses the
instrument as a wand with which to point out joints of meat or
bunches of greens in marketing or to arrest the attention of
tradesmen by a friendly poke. Without her market-basket, which is a
sort of wicker well with two flapping lids, she never stirs abroad.
Attended by these her trusty companions, therefore, her honest
sunburnt face looking cheerily out of a rough straw bonnet, Mrs.
Bagnet now arrives, fresh-coloured and bright, in George's Shooting
Gallery.

"Well, George, old fellow," says she, "and how do YOU do, this
sunshiny morning?"

Giving him a friendly shake of the hand, Mrs. Bagnet draws a long
breath after her walk and sits down to enjoy a rest. Having a
faculty, matured on the tops of baggage-waggons and in other such
positions, of resting easily anywhere, she perches on a rough bench,
unties her bonnet-strings, pushes back her bonnet, crosses her arms,
and looks perfectly comfortable.

Mr. Bagnet in the meantime has shaken hands with his old comrade and
with Phil, on whom Mrs. Bagnet likewise bestows a good-humoured nod
and smile.

"Now, George," said Mrs. Bagnet briskly, "here we are, Lignum and
myself"--she often speaks of her husband by this appellation, on
account, as it is supposed, of Lignum Vitae having been his old
regimental nickname when they first became acquainted, in compliment
to the extreme hardness and toughness of his physiognomy--"just
looked in, we have, to make it all correct as usual about that
security. Give him the new bill to sign, George, and he'll sign it
like a man."

"I was coming to you this morning," observes the trooper reluctantly.

"Yes, we thought you'd come to us this morning, but we turned out
early and left Woolwich, the best of boys, to mind his sisters and
came to you instead--as you see! For Lignum, he's tied so close now,
and gets so little exercise, that a walk does him good. But what's
the matter, George?" asks Mrs. Bagnet, stopping in her cheerful talk.
"You don't look yourself."

"I am not quite myself," returns the trooper; "I have been a little
put out, Mrs. Bagnet."

Her bright quick eye catches the truth directly. "George!" holding up
her forefinger. "Don't tell me there's anything wrong about that
security of Lignum's! Don't do it, George, on account of the
children!"

The trooper looks at her with a troubled visage.

"George," says Mrs. Bagnet, using both her arms for emphasis and
occasionally bringing down her open hands upon her knees. "If you
have allowed anything wrong to come to that security of Lignum's, and
if you have let him in for it, and if you have put us in danger of
being sold up--and I see sold up in your face, George, as plain as
print--you have done a shameful action and have deceived us cruelly.
I tell you, cruelly, George. There!"

Mr. Bagnet, otherwise as immovable as a pump or a lamp-post, puts his
large right hand on the top of his bald head as if to defend it from
a shower-bath and looks with great uneasiness at Mrs. Bagnet.

"George," says that old girl, "I wonder at you! George, I am ashamed
of you! George, I couldn't have believed you would have done it! I
always knew you to be a rolling stone that gathered no moss, but I
never thought you would have taken away what little moss there was
for Bagnet and the children to lie upon. You know what a
hard-working, steady-going chap he is. You know what Quebec and Malta
and Woolwich are, and I never did think you would, or could, have had
the heart to serve us so. Oh, George!" Mrs. Bagnet gathers up her
cloak to wipe her eyes on in a very genuine manner, "How could you do
it?"

Mrs. Bagnet ceasing, Mr. Bagnet removes his hand from his head as if
the shower-bath were over and looks disconsolately at Mr. George, who
has turned quite white and looks distressfully at the grey cloak and
straw bonnet.

"Mat," says the trooper in a subdued voice, addressing him but still
looking at his wife, "I am sorry you take it so much to heart,
because I do hope it's not so bad as that comes to. I certainly have,
this morning, received this letter"--which he reads aloud--"but I
hope it may be set right yet. As to a rolling stone, why, what you
say is true. I AM a rolling stone, and I never rolled in anybody's
way, I fully believe, that I rolled the least good to. But it's
impossible for an old vagabond comrade to like your wife and family
better than I like 'em, Mat, and I trust you'll look upon me as
forgivingly as you can. Don't think I've kept anything from you. I
haven't had the letter more than a quarter of an hour."

"Old girl," murmurs Mr. Bagnet after a short silence, "will you tell
him my opinion?"

"Oh! Why didn't he marry," Mrs. Bagnet answers, half laughing and
half crying, "Joe Pouch's widder in North America? Then he wouldn't
have got himself into these troubles."

"The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, "puts it correct--why didn't you?"

"Well, she has a better husband by this time, I hope," returns the
trooper. "Anyhow, here I stand, this present day, NOT married to Joe
Pouch's widder. What shall I do? You see all I have got about me.
It's not mine; it's yours. Give the word, and I'll sell off every
morsel. If I could have hoped it would have brought in nearly the sum
wanted, I'd have sold all long ago. Don't believe that I'll leave you
or yours in the lurch, Mat. I'd sell myself first. I only wish," says
the trooper, giving himself a disparaging blow in the chest, "that I
knew of any one who'd buy such a second-hand piece of old stores."

"Old girl," murmurs Mr. Bagnet, "give him another bit of my mind."

"George," says the old girl, "you are not so much to be blamed, on
full consideration, except for ever taking this business without the
means."

"And that was like me!" observes the penitent trooper, shaking his
head. "Like me, I know."

"Silence! The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, "is correct--in her way of
giving my opinions--hear me out!"

"That was when you never ought to have asked for the security,
George, and when you never ought to have got it, all things
considered. But what's done can't be undone. You are always an
honourable and straightforward fellow, as far as lays in your power,
though a little flighty. On the other hand, you can't admit but what
it's natural in us to be anxious with such a thing hanging over our
heads. So forget and forgive all round, George. Come! Forget and
forgive all round!"

Mrs. Bagnet, giving him one of her honest hands and giving her
husband the other, Mr. George gives each of them one of his and holds
them while he speaks.

"I do assure you both, there's nothing I wouldn't do to discharge
this obligation. But whatever I have been able to scrape together has
gone every two months in keeping it up. We have lived plainly enough
here, Phil and I. But the gallery don't quite do what was expected of
it, and it's not--in short, it's not the mint. It was wrong in me to
take it? Well, so it was. But I was in a manner drawn into that step,
and I thought it might steady me, and set me up, and you'll try to
overlook my having such expectations, and upon my soul, I am very
much obliged to you, and very much ashamed of myself." With these
concluding words, Mr. George gives a shake to each of the hands he
holds, and relinquishing them, backs a pace or two in a
broad-chested, upright attitude, as if he had made a final confession
and were immediately going to be shot with all military honours.

"George, hear me out!" says Mr. Bagnet, glancing at his wife. "Old
girl, go on!"

Mr. Bagnet, being in this singular manner heard out, has merely to
observe that the letter must be attended to without any delay, that
it is advisable that George and he should immediately wait on Mr.
Smallweed in person, and that the primary object is to save and hold
harmless Mr. Bagnet, who had none of the money. Mr. George, entirely
assenting, puts on his hat and prepares to march with Mr. Bagnet to
the enemy's camp.

"Don't you mind a woman's hasty word, George," says Mrs. Bagnet,
patting him on the shoulder. "I trust my old Lignum to you, and I am
sure you'll bring him through it."

The trooper returns that this is kindly said and that he WILL bring
Lignum through it somehow. Upon which Mrs. Bagnet, with her cloak,
basket, and umbrella, goes home, bright-eyed again, to the rest of
her family, and the comrades sally forth on the hopeful errand of
mollifying Mr. Smallweed.

Whether there are two people in England less likely to come
satisfactorily out of any negotiation with Mr. Smallweed than Mr.
George and Mr. Matthew Bagnet may be very reasonably questioned.
Also, notwithstanding their martial appearance, broad square
shoulders, and heavy tread, whether there are within the same limits
two more simple and unaccustomed children in all the Smallweedy
affairs of life. As they proceed with great gravity through the
streets towards the region of Mount Pleasant, Mr. Bagnet, observing
his companion to be thoughtful, considers it a friendly part to refer
to Mrs. Bagnet's late sally.

"George, you know the old girl--she's as sweet and as mild as milk.
But touch her on the children--or myself--and she's off like
gunpowder."

"It does her credit, Mat!"

"George," says Mr. Bagnet, looking straight before him, "the old
girl--can't do anything--that don't do her credit. More or less. I
never say so. Discipline must be maintained."

"She's worth her weight in gold," says the trooper.

"In gold?" says Mr. Bagnet. "I'll tell you what. The old girl's
weight--is twelve stone six. Would I take that weight--in any
metal--for the old girl? No. Why not? Because the old girl's metal is
far more precious--than the preciousest metal. And she's ALL metal!"

"You are right, Mat!"

"When she took me--and accepted of the ring--she 'listed under me and
the children--heart and head, for life. She's that earnest," says Mr.
Bagnet, "and true to her colours--that, touch us with a finger--and
she turns out--and stands to her arms. If the old girl fires
wide--once in a way--at the call of duty--look over it, George. For
she's loyal!"

"Why, bless her, Mat," returns the trooper, "I think the higher of
her for it!"

"You are right!" says Mr. Bagnet with the warmest enthusiasm, though
without relaxing the rigidity of a single muscle. "Think as high of
the old girl--as the rock of Gibraltar--and still you'll be thinking
low--of such merits. But I never own to it before her. Discipline
must be maintained."

These encomiums bring them to Mount Pleasant and to Grandfather
Smallweed's house. The door is opened by the perennial Judy, who,
having surveyed them from top to toe with no particular favour, but
indeed with a malignant sneer, leaves them standing there while she
consults the oracle as to their admission. The oracle may be inferred
to give consent from the circumstance of her returning with the words
on her honey lips that they can come in if they want to it. Thus
privileged, they come in and find Mr. Smallweed with his feet in the
drawer of his chair as if it were a paper foot-bath and Mrs.
Smallweed obscured with the cushion like a bird that is not to sing.

"My dear friend," says Grandfather Smallweed with those two lean
affectionate arms of his stretched forth. "How de do? How de do? Who
is our friend, my dear friend?"

"Why this," returns George, not able to be very conciliatory at
first, "is Matthew Bagnet, who has obliged me in that matter of ours,
you know."

"Oh! Mr. Bagnet? Surely!" The old man looks at him under his hand.

"Hope you're well, Mr. Bagnet? Fine man, Mr. George! Military air,
sir!"

No chairs being offered, Mr. George brings one forward for Bagnet and
one for himself. They sit down, Mr. Bagnet as if he had no power of
bending himself, except at the hips, for that purpose.

"Judy," says Mr. Smallweed, "bring the pipe."

"Why, I don't know," Mr. George interposes, "that the young woman
need give herself that trouble, for to tell you the truth, I am not
inclined to smoke it to-day."

"Ain't you?" returns the old man. "Judy, bring the pipe."

"The fact is, Mr. Smallweed," proceeds George, "that I find myself in
rather an unpleasant state of mind. It appears to me, sir, that your
friend in the city has been playing tricks."

"Oh, dear no!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "He never does that!"

"Don't he? Well, I am glad to hear it, because I thought it might be
HIS doing. This, you know, I am speaking of. This letter."

Grandfather Smallweed smiles in a very ugly way in recognition of the
letter.

"What does it mean?" asks Mr. George.

"Judy," says the old man. "Have you got the pipe? Give it to me. Did
you say what does it mean, my good friend?"

"Aye! Now, come, come, you know, Mr. Smallweed," urges the trooper,
constraining himself to speak as smoothly and confidentially as he
can, holding the open letter in one hand and resting the broad
knuckles of the other on his thigh, "a good lot of money has passed
between us, and we are face to face at the present moment, and are
both well aware of the understanding there has always been. I am
prepared to do the usual thing which I have done regularly and to
keep this matter going. I never got a letter like this from you
before, and I have been a little put about by it this morning,
because here's my friend Matthew Bagnet, who, you know, had none of
the money--"

"I DON'T know it, you know," says the old man quietly.

"Why, con-found you--it, I mean--I tell you so, don't I?"

"Oh, yes, you tell me so," returns Grandfather Smallweed. "But I
don't know it."

"Well!" says the trooper, swallowing his fire. "I know it."

Mr. Smallweed replies with excellent temper, "Ah! That's quite
another thing!" And adds, "But it don't matter. Mr. Bagnet's
situation is all one, whether or no."

The unfortunate George makes a great effort to arrange the affair
comfortably and to propitiate Mr. Smallweed by taking him upon his
own terms.

"That's just what I mean. As you say, Mr. Smallweed, here's Matthew
Bagnet liable to be fixed whether or no. Now, you see, that makes his
good lady very uneasy in her mind, and me too, for whereas I'm a
harum-scarum sort of a good-for-nought that more kicks than halfpence
come natural to, why he's a steady family man, don't you see? Now,
Mr. Smallweed," says the trooper, gaining confidence as he proceeds
in his soldierly mode of doing business, "although you and I are good
friends enough in a certain sort of a way, I am well aware that I
can't ask you to let my friend Bagnet off entirely."

"Oh, dear, you are too modest. You can ASK me anything, Mr. George."
(There is an ogreish kind of jocularity in Grandfather Smallweed
to-day.)

"And you can refuse, you mean, eh? Or not you so much, perhaps, as
your friend in the city? Ha ha ha!"

"Ha ha ha!" echoes Grandfather Smallweed. In such a very hard manner
and with eyes so particularly green that Mr. Bagnet's natural gravity
is much deepened by the contemplation of that venerable man.

"Come!" says the sanguine George. "I am glad to find we can be
pleasant, because I want to arrange this pleasantly. Here's my friend
Bagnet, and here am I. We'll settle the matter on the spot, if you
please, Mr. Smallweed, in the usual way. And you'll ease my friend
Bagnet's mind, and his family's mind, a good deal if you'll just
mention to him what our understanding is."

Here some shrill spectre cries out in a mocking manner, "Oh, good
gracious! Oh!" Unless, indeed, it be the sportive Judy, who is found
to be silent when the startled visitors look round, but whose chin
has received a recent toss, expressive of derision and contempt. Mr.
Bagnet's gravity becomes yet more profound.

"But I think you asked me, Mr. George"--old Smallweed, who all this
time has had the pipe in his hand, is the speaker now--"I think you
asked me, what did the letter mean?"

"Why, yes, I did," returns the trooper in his off-hand way, "but I
don't care to know particularly, if it's all correct and pleasant."

Mr. Smallweed, purposely balking himself in an aim at the trooper's
head, throws the pipe on the ground and breaks it to pieces.

"That's what it means, my dear friend. I'll smash you. I'll crumble
you. I'll powder you. Go to the devil!"

The two friends rise and look at one another. Mr. Bagnet's gravity
has now attained its profoundest point.

"Go to the devil!" repeats the old man. "I'll have no more of your
pipe-smokings and swaggerings. What? You're an independent dragoon,
too! Go to my lawyer (you remember where; you have been there before)
and show your independence now, will you? Come, my dear friend,
there's a chance for you. Open the street door, Judy; put these
blusterers out! Call in help if they don't go. Put 'em out!"

He vociferates this so loudly that Mr. Bagnet, laying his hands on
the shoulders of his comrade before the latter can recover from his
amazement, gets him on the outside of the street door, which is
instantly slammed by the triumphant Judy. Utterly confounded, Mr.
George awhile stands looking at the knocker. Mr. Bagnet, in a perfect
abyss of gravity, walks up and down before the little parlour window
like a sentry and looks in every time he passes, apparently revolving
something in his mind.

"Come, Mat," says Mr. George when he has recovered himself, "we must
try the lawyer. Now, what do you think of this rascal?"

Mr. Bagnet, stopping to take a farewell look into the parlour,
replies with one shake of his head directed at the interior, "If my
old girl had been here--I'd have told him!" Having so discharged
himself of the subject of his cogitations, he falls into step and
marches off with the trooper, shoulder to shoulder.

When they present themselves in Lincoln's Inn Fields, Mr. Tulkinghorn
is engaged and not to be seen. He is not at all willing to see them,
for when they have waited a full hour, and the clerk, on his bell
being rung, takes the opportunity of mentioning as much, he brings
forth no more encouraging message than that Mr. Tulkinghorn has
nothing to say to them and they had better not wait. They do wait,
however, with the perseverance of military tactics, and at last the
bell rings again and the client in possession comes out of Mr.
Tulkinghorn's room.

The client is a handsome old lady, no other than Mrs. Rouncewell,
housekeeper at Chesney Wold. She comes out of the sanctuary with a
fair old-fashioned curtsy and softly shuts the door. She is treated
with some distinction there, for the clerk steps out of his pew to
show her through the outer office and to let her out. The old lady is
thanking him for his attention when she observes the comrades in
waiting.

"I beg your pardon, sir, but I think those gentlemen are military?"

The clerk referring the question to them with his eye, and Mr. George
not turning round from the almanac over the fire-place. Mr. Bagnet
takes upon himself to reply, "Yes, ma'am. Formerly."

"I thought so. I was sure of it. My heart warms, gentlemen, at the
sight of you. It always does at the sight of such. God bless you,
gentlemen! You'll excuse an old woman, but I had a son once who went
for a soldier. A fine handsome youth he was, and good in his bold
way, though some people did disparage him to his poor mother. I ask
your pardon for troubling you, sir. God bless you, gentlemen!"

"Same to you, ma'am!" returns Mr. Bagnet with right good will.

There is something very touching in the earnestness of the old lady's
voice and in the tremble that goes through her quaint old figure. But
Mr. George is so occupied with the almanac over the fire-place
(calculating the coming months by it perhaps) that he does not look
round until she has gone away and the door is closed upon her.

"George," Mr. Bagnet gruffly whispers when he does turn from the
almanac at last. "Don't be cast down! 'Why, soldiers, why--should we
be melancholy, boys?' Cheer up, my hearty!"

The clerk having now again gone in to say that they are still there
and Mr. Tulkinghorn being heard to return with some irascibility,
"Let 'em come in then!" they pass into the great room with the
painted ceiling and find him standing before the fire.

"Now, you men, what do you want? Sergeant, I told you the last time I
saw you that I don't desire your company here."

Sergeant replies--dashed within the last few minutes as to his usual
manner of speech, and even as to his usual carriage--that he has
received this letter, has been to Mr. Smallweed about it, and has
been referred there.

"I have nothing to say to you," rejoins Mr. Tulkinghorn. "If you get
into debt, you must pay your debts or take the consequences. You have
no occasion to come here to learn that, I suppose?"

Sergeant is sorry to say that he is not prepared with the money.

"Very well! Then the other man--this man, if this is he--must pay it
for you."

Sergeant is sorry to add that the other man is not prepared with the
money either.

"Very well! Then you must pay it between you or you must both be sued
for it and both suffer. You have had the money and must refund it.
You are not to pocket other people's pounds, shillings, and pence and
escape scot-free."

The lawyer sits down in his easy-chair and stirs the fire. Mr. George
hopes he will have the goodness to--"I tell you, sergeant, I have
nothing to say to you. I don't like your associates and don't want
you here. This matter is not at all in my course of practice and is
not in my office. Mr. Smallweed is good enough to offer these affairs
to me, but they are not in my way. You must go to Melchisedech's in
Clifford's Inn."

"I must make an apology to you, sir," says Mr. George, "for pressing
myself upon you with so little encouragement--which is almost as
unpleasant to me as it can be to you--but would you let me say a
private word to you?"

Mr. Tulkinghorn rises with his hands in his pockets and walks into
one of the window recesses. "Now! I have no time to waste." In the
midst of his perfect assumption of indifference, he directs a sharp
look at the trooper, taking care to stand with his own back to the
light and to have the other with his face towards it.

"Well, sir," says Mr. George, "this man with me is the other party
implicated in this unfortunate affair--nominally, only nominally--and
my sole object is to prevent his getting into trouble on my account.
He is a most respectable man with a wife and family, formerly in the
Royal Artillery--"

"My friend, I don't care a pinch of snuff for the whole Royal
Artillery establishment--officers, men, tumbrils, waggons, horses,
guns, and ammunition."

"'Tis likely, sir. But I care a good deal for Bagnet and his wife and
family being injured on my account. And if I could bring them through
this matter, I should have no help for it but to give up without any
other consideration what you wanted of me the other day."

"Have you got it here?"

"I have got it here, sir."

"Sergeant," the lawyer proceeds in his dry passionless manner, far
more hopeless in the dealing with than any amount of vehemence, "make
up your mind while I speak to you, for this is final. After I have
finished speaking I have closed the subject, and I won't re-open it.
Understand that. You can leave here, for a few days, what you say you
have brought here if you choose; you can take it away at once if you
choose. In case you choose to leave it here, I can do this for you--I
can replace this matter on its old footing, and I can go so far
besides as to give you a written undertaking that this man Bagnet
shall never be troubled in any way until you have been proceeded
against to the utmost, that your means shall be exhausted before the
creditor looks to his. This is in fact all but freeing him. Have you
decided?"

The trooper puts his hand into his breast and answers with a long
breath, "I must do it, sir."

So Mr. Tulkinghorn, putting on his spectacles, sits down and writes
the undertaking, which he slowly reads and explains to Bagnet, who
has all this time been staring at the ceiling and who puts his hand
on his bald head again, under this new verbal shower-bath, and seems
exceedingly in need of the old girl through whom to express his
sentiments. The trooper then takes from his breast-pocket a folded
paper, which he lays with an unwilling hand at the lawyer's elbow.
"'Tis only a letter of instructions, sir. The last I ever had from
him."

Look at a millstone, Mr. George, for some change in its expression,
and you will find it quite as soon as in the face of Mr. Tulkinghorn
when he opens and reads the letter! He refolds it and lays it in his
desk with a countenance as unperturbable as death.

Nor has he anything more to say or do but to nod once in the same
frigid and discourteous manner and to say briefly, "You can go. Show
these men out, there!" Being shown out, they repair to Mr. Bagnet's
residence to dine.

Boiled beef and greens constitute the day's variety on the former
repast of boiled pork and greens, and Mrs. Bagnet serves out the meal
in the same way and seasons it with the best of temper, being that
rare sort of old girl that she receives Good to her arms without a
hint that it might be Better and catches light from any little spot
of darkness near her. The spot on this occasion is the darkened brow
of Mr. George; he is unusually thoughtful and depressed. At first
Mrs. Bagnet trusts to the combined endearments of Quebec and Malta to
restore him, but finding those young ladies sensible that their
existing Bluffy is not the Bluffy of their usual frolicsome
acquaintance, she winks off the light infantry and leaves him to
deploy at leisure on the open ground of the domestic hearth.

But he does not. He remains in close order, clouded and depressed.
During the lengthy cleaning up and pattening process, when he and Mr.
Bagnet are supplied with their pipes, he is no better than he was at
dinner. He forgets to smoke, looks at the fire and ponders, lets his
pipe out, fills the breast of Mr. Bagnet with perturbation and dismay
by showing that he has no enjoyment of tobacco.

Therefore when Mrs. Bagnet at last appears, rosy from the
invigorating pail, and sits down to her work, Mr. Bagnet growls, "Old
girl!" and winks monitions to her to find out what's the matter.

"Why, George!" says Mrs. Bagnet, quietly threading her needle. "How
low you are!"

"Am I? Not good company? Well, I am afraid I am not."

"He ain't at all like Bluffy, mother!" cries little Malta.

"Because he ain't well, I think, mother," adds Quebec.

"Sure that's a bad sign not to be like Bluffy, too!" returns the
trooper, kissing the young damsels. "But it's true," with a sigh,
"true, I am afraid. These little ones are always right!"

"George," says Mrs. Bagnet, working busily, "if I thought you cross
enough to think of anything that a shrill old soldier's wife--who
could have bitten her tongue off afterwards and ought to have done it
almost--said this morning, I don't know what I shouldn't say to you
now."

"My kind soul of a darling," returns the trooper. "Not a morsel of
it."

"Because really and truly, George, what I said and meant to say was
that I trusted Lignum to you and was sure you'd bring him through it.
And you HAVE brought him through it, noble!"

"Thankee, my dear!" says George. "I am glad of your good opinion."

In giving Mrs. Bagnet's hand, with her work in it, a friendly
shake--for she took her seat beside him--the trooper's attention is
attracted to her face. After looking at it for a little while as she
plies her needle, he looks to young Woolwich, sitting on his stool in
the corner, and beckons that fifer to him.

"See there, my boy," says George, very gently smoothing the mother's
hair with his hand, "there's a good loving forehead for you! All
bright with love of you, my boy. A little touched by the sun and the
weather through following your father about and taking care of you,
but as fresh and wholesome as a ripe apple on a tree."

Mr. Bagnet's face expresses, so far as in its wooden material lies,
the highest approbation and acquiescence.

"The time will come, my boy," pursues the trooper, "when this hair of
your mother's will be grey, and this forehead all crossed and
re-crossed with wrinkles, and a fine old lady she'll be then. Take
care, while you are young, that you can think in those days, 'I never
whitened a hair of her dear head--I never marked a sorrowful line in
her face!' For of all the many things that you can think of when you
are a man, you had better have THAT by you, Woolwich!"

Mr. George concludes by rising from his chair, seating the boy beside
his mother in it, and saying, with something of a hurry about him,
that he'll smoke his pipe in the street a bit.




CHAPTER XXXV

Esther's Narrative


I lay ill through several weeks, and the usual tenor of my life
became like an old remembrance. But this was not the effect of time
so much as of the change in all my habits made by the helplessness
and inaction of a sick-room. Before I had been confined to it many
days, everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance
where there was little or no separation between the various stages of
my life which had been really divided by years. In falling ill, I
seemed to have crossed a dark lake and to have left all my
experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy
shore.

My housekeeping duties, though at first it caused me great anxiety to
think that they were unperformed, were soon as far off as the oldest
of the old duties at Greenleaf or the summer afternoons when I went
home from school with my portfolio under my arm, and my childish
shadow at my side, to my godmother's house. I had never known before
how short life really was and into how small a space the mind could
put it.

While I was very ill, the way in which these divisions of time became
confused with one another distressed my mind exceedingly. At once a
child, an elder girl, and the little woman I had been so happy as, I
was not only oppressed by cares and difficulties adapted to each
station, but by the great perplexity of endlessly trying to reconcile
them. I suppose that few who have not been in such a condition can
quite understand what I mean or what painful unrest arose from this
source.

For the same reason I am almost afraid to hint at that time in my
disorder--it seemed one long night, but I believe there were both
nights and days in it--when I laboured up colossal staircases, ever
striving to reach the top, and ever turned, as I have seen a worm in
a garden path, by some obstruction, and labouring again. I knew
perfectly at intervals, and I think vaguely at most times, that I was
in my bed; and I talked with Charley, and felt her touch, and knew
her very well; yet I would find myself complaining, "Oh, more of
these never-ending stairs, Charley--more and more--piled up to the
sky', I think!" and labouring on again.

Dare I hint at that worse time when, strung together somewhere in
great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry
circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my
only prayer was to be taken off from the rest and when it was such
inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing?

Perhaps the less I say of these sick experiences, the less tedious
and the more intelligible I shall be. I do not recall them to make
others unhappy or because I am now the least unhappy in remembering
them. It may be that if we knew more of such strange afflictions we
might be the better able to alleviate their intensity.

The repose that succeeded, the long delicious sleep, the blissful
rest, when in my weakness I was too calm to have any care for myself
and could have heard (or so I think now) that I was dying, with no
other emotion than with a pitying love for those I left behind--this
state can be perhaps more widely understood. I was in this state when
I first shrunk from the light as it twinkled on me once more, and
knew with a boundless joy for which no words are rapturous enough
that I should see again.

I had heard my Ada crying at the door, day and night; I had heard her
calling to me that I was cruel and did not love her; I had heard her
praying and imploring to be let in to nurse and comfort me and to
leave my bedside no more; but I had only said, when I could speak,
"Never, my sweet girl, never!" and I had over and over again reminded
Charley that she was to keep my darling from the room whether I lived
or died. Charley had been true to me in that time of need, and with
her little hand and her great heart had kept the door fast.

But now, my sight strengthening and the glorious light coming every
day more fully and brightly on me, I could read the letters that my
dear wrote to me every morning and evening and could put them to my
lips and lay my cheek upon them with no fear of hurting her. I could
see my little maid, so tender and so careful, going about the two
rooms setting everything in order and speaking cheerfully to Ada from
the open window again. I could understand the stillness in the house
and the thoughtfulness it expressed on the part of all those who had
always been so good to me. I could weep in the exquisite felicity of
my heart and be as happy in my weakness as ever I had been in my
strength.

By and by my strength began to be restored. Instead of lying, with so
strange a calmness, watching what was done for me, as if it were done
for some one else whom I was quietly sorry for, I helped it a little,
and so on to a little more and much more, until I became useful to
myself, and interested, and attached to life again.

How well I remember the pleasant afternoon when I was raised in bed
with pillows for the first time to enjoy a great tea-drinking with
Charley! The little creature--sent into the world, surely, to
minister to the weak and sick--was so happy, and so busy, and stopped
so often in her preparations to lay her head upon my bosom, and
fondle me, and cry with joyful tears she was so glad, she was so
glad, that I was obliged to say, "Charley, if you go on in this way,
I must lie down again, my darling, for I am weaker than I thought I
was!" So Charley became as quiet as a mouse and took her bright face
here and there across and across the two rooms, out of the shade into
the divine sunshine, and out of the sunshine into the shade, while I
watched her peacefully. When all her preparations were concluded and
the pretty tea-table with its little delicacies to tempt me, and its
white cloth, and its flowers, and everything so lovingly and
beautifully arranged for me by Ada downstairs, was ready at the
bedside, I felt sure I was steady enough to say something to Charley
that was not new to my thoughts.

First I complimented Charley on the room, and indeed it was so fresh
and airy, so spotless and neat, that I could scarce believe I had
been lying there so long. This delighted Charley, and her face was
brighter than before.

"Yet, Charley," said I, looking round, "I miss something, surely,
that I am accustomed to?"

Poor little Charley looked round too and pretended to shake her head
as if there were nothing absent.

"Are the pictures all as they used to be?" I asked her.

"Every one of them, miss," said Charley.

"And the furniture, Charley?"

"Except where I have moved it about to make more room, miss."

"And yet," said I, "I miss some familiar object. Ah, I know what it
is, Charley! It's the looking-glass."

Charley got up from the table, making as if she had forgotten
something, and went into the next room; and I heard her sob there.

I had thought of this very often. I was now certain of it. I could
thank God that it was not a shock to me now. I called Charley back,
and when she came--at first pretending to smile, but as she drew
nearer to me, looking grieved--I took her in my arms and said, "It
matters very little, Charley. I hope I can do without my old face
very well."

I was presently so far advanced as to be able to sit up in a great
chair and even giddily to walk into the adjoining room, leaning on
Charley. The mirror was gone from its usual place in that room too,
but what I had to bear was none the harder to bear for that.

My guardian had throughout been earnest to visit me, and there was
now no good reason why I should deny myself that happiness. He came
one morning, and when he first came in, could only hold me in his
embrace and say, "My dear, dear girl!" I had long known--who could
know better?--what a deep fountain of affection and generosity his
heart was; and was it not worth my trivial suffering and change to
fill such a place in it? "Oh, yes!" I thought. "He has seen me, and
he loves me better than he did; he has seen me and is even fonder of
me than he was before; and what have I to mourn for!"

He sat down by me on the sofa, supporting me with his arm. For a
little while he sat with his hand over his face, but when he removed
it, fell into his usual manner. There never can have been, there
never can be, a pleasanter manner.

"My little woman," said he, "what a sad time this has been. Such an
inflexible little woman, too, through all!"

"Only for the best, guardian," said I.

"For the best?" he repeated tenderly. "Of course, for the best. But
here have Ada and I been perfectly forlorn and miserable; here has
your friend Caddy been coming and going late and early; here has
every one about the house been utterly lost and dejected; here has
even poor Rick been writing--to ME too--in his anxiety for you!"

I had read of Caddy in Ada's letters, but not of Richard. I told him
so.

"Why, no, my dear," he replied. "I have thought it better not to
mention it to her."

"And you speak of his writing to YOU," said I, repeating his
emphasis. "As if it were not natural for him to do so, guardian; as
if he could write to a better friend!"

"He thinks he could, my love," returned my guardian, "and to many a
better. The truth is, he wrote to me under a sort of protest while
unable to write to you with any hope of an answer--wrote coldly,
haughtily, distantly, resentfully. Well, dearest little woman, we
must look forbearingly on it. He is not to blame. Jarndyce and
Jarndyce has warped him out of himself and perverted me in his eyes.
I have known it do as bad deeds, and worse, many a time. If two
angels could be concerned in it, I believe it would change their
nature."

"It has not changed yours, guardian."

"Oh, yes, it has, my dear," he said laughingly. "It has made the
south wind easterly, I don't know how often. Rick mistrusts and
suspects me--goes to lawyers, and is taught to mistrust and suspect
me. Hears I have conflicting interests, claims clashing against his
and what not. Whereas, heaven knows that if I could get out of the
mountains of wiglomeration on which my unfortunate name has been so
long bestowed (which I can't) or could level them by the extinction
of my own original right (which I can't either, and no human power
ever can, anyhow, I believe, to such a pass have we got), I would do
it this hour. I would rather restore to poor Rick his proper nature
than be endowed with all the money that dead suitors, broken, heart
and soul, upon the wheel of Chancery, have left unclaimed with the
Accountant-General--and that's money enough, my dear, to be cast into
a pyramid, in memory of Chancery's transcendent wickedness."

"IS it possible, guardian," I asked, amazed, "that Richard can be
suspicious of you?"

"Ah, my love, my love," he said, "it is in the subtle poison of such
abuses to breed such diseases. His blood is infected, and objects
lose their natural aspects in his sight. It is not HIS fault."

"But it is a terrible misfortune, guardian."

"It is a terrible misfortune, little woman, to be ever drawn within
the influences of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. I know none greater. By
little and little he has been induced to trust in that rotten reed,
and it communicates some portion of its rottenness to everything
around him. But again I say with all my soul, we must be patient with
poor Rick and not blame him. What a troop of fine fresh hearts like
his have I seen in my time turned by the same means!"

I could not help expressing something of my wonder and regret that
his benevolent, disinterested intentions had prospered so little.

"We must not say so, Dame Durden," he cheerfully replied; "Ada is the
happier, I hope, and that is much. I did think that I and both these
young creatures might be friends instead of distrustful foes and that
we might so far counter-act the suit and prove too strong for it. But
it was too much to expect. Jarndyce and Jarndyce was the curtain of
Rick's cradle."

"But, guardian, may we not hope that a little experience will teach
him what a false and wretched thing it is?"

"We WILL hope so, my Esther," said Mr. Jarndyce, "and that it may not
teach him so too late. In any case we must not be hard on him. There
are not many grown and matured men living while we speak, good men
too, who if they were thrown into this same court as suitors would
not be vitally changed and depreciated within three years--within
two--within one. How can we stand amazed at poor Rick? A young man so
unfortunate," here he fell into a lower tone, as if he were thinking
aloud, "cannot at first believe (who could?) that Chancery is what it
is. He looks to it, flushed and fitfully, to do something with his
interests and bring them to some settlement. It procrastinates,
disappoints, tries, tortures him; wears out his sanguine hopes and
patience, thread by thread; but he still looks to it, and hankers
after it, and finds his whole world treacherous and hollow. Well,
well, well! Enough of this, my dear!"

He had supported me, as at first, all this time, and his tenderness
was so precious to me that I leaned my head upon his shoulder and
loved him as if he had been my father. I resolved in my own mind in
this little pause, by some means, to see Richard when I grew strong
and try to set him right.

"There are better subjects than these," said my guardian, "for such a
joyful time as the time of our dear girl's recovery. And I had a
commission to broach one of them as soon as I should begin to talk.
When shall Ada come to see you, my love?"

I had been thinking of that too. A little in connexion with the
absent mirrors, but not much, for I knew my loving girl would be
changed by no change in my looks.

"Dear guardian," said I, "as I have shut her out so long--though
indeed, indeed, she is like the light to me--"

"I know it well, Dame Durden, well."

He was so good, his touch expressed such endearing compassion and
affection, and the tone of his voice carried such comfort into my
heart that I stopped for a little while, quite unable to go on. "Yes,
yes, you are tired," said he. "Rest a little."

"As I have kept Ada out so long," I began afresh after a short while,
"I think I should like to have my own way a little longer, guardian.
It would be best to be away from here before I see her. If Charley
and I were to go to some country lodging as soon as I can move, and
if I had a week there in which to grow stronger and to be revived by
the sweet air and to look forward to the happiness of having Ada with
me again, I think it would be better for us."

I hope it was not a poor thing in me to wish to be a little more used
to my altered self before I met the eyes of the dear girl I longed so
ardently to see, but it is the truth. I did. He understood me, I was
sure; but I was not afraid of that. If it were a poor thing, I knew
he would pass it over.

"Our spoilt little woman," said my guardian, "shall have her own way
even in her inflexibility, though at the price, I know, of tears
downstairs. And see here! Here is Boythorn, heart of chivalry,
breathing such ferocious vows as never were breathed on paper before,
that if you don't go and occupy his whole house, he having already
turned out of it expressly for that purpose, by heaven and by earth
he'll pull it down and not leave one brick standing on another!"

And my guardian put a letter in my hand, without any ordinary
beginning such as "My dear Jarndyce," but rushing at once into the
words, "I swear if Miss Summerson do not come down and take
possession of my house, which I vacate for her this day at one
o'clock, P.M.," and then with the utmost seriousness, and in the most
emphatic terms, going on to make the extraordinary declaration he had
quoted. We did not appreciate the writer the less for laughing
heartily over it, and we settled that I should send him a letter of
thanks on the morrow and accept his offer. It was a most agreeable
one to me, for all the places I could have thought of, I should have
liked to go to none so well as Chesney Wold.

"Now, little housewife," said my guardian, looking at his watch, "I
was strictly timed before I came upstairs, for you must not be tired
too soon; and my time has waned away to the last minute. I have one
other petition. Little Miss Flite, hearing a rumour that you were
ill, made nothing of walking down here--twenty miles, poor soul, in a
pair of dancing shoes--to inquire. It was heaven's mercy we were at
home, or she would have walked back again."

The old conspiracy to make me happy! Everybody seemed to be in it!

"Now, pet," said my guardian, "if it would not be irksome to you to
admit the harmless little creature one afternoon before you save
Boythorn's otherwise devoted house from demolition, I believe you
would make her prouder and better pleased with herself than I--though
my eminent name is Jarndyce--could do in a lifetime."

I have no doubt he knew there would be something in the simple image
of the poor afflicted creature that would fall like a gentle lesson
on my mind at that time. I felt it as he spoke to me. I could not
tell him heartily enough how ready I was to receive her. I had always
pitied her, never so much as now. I had always been glad of my little
power to soothe her under her calamity, but never, never, half so
glad before.

We arranged a time for Miss Flite to come out by the coach and share
my early dinner. When my guardian left me, I turned my face away upon
my couch and prayed to be forgiven if I, surrounded by such
blessings, had magnified to myself the little trial that I had to
undergo. The childish prayer of that old birthday when I had aspired
to be industrious, contented, and true-hearted and to do good to some
one and win some love to myself if I could came back into my mind
with a reproachful sense of all the happiness I had since enjoyed and
all the affectionate hearts that had been turned towards me. If I
were weak now, what had I profited by those mercies? I repeated the
old childish prayer in its old childish words and found that its old
peace had not departed from it.

My guardian now came every day. In a week or so more I could walk
about our rooms and hold long talks with Ada from behind the
window-curtain. Yet I never saw her, for I had not as yet the courage
to look at the dear face, though I could have done so easily without
her seeing me.

On the appointed day Miss Flite arrived. The poor little creature ran
into my room quite forgetful of her usual dignity, and crying from
her very heart of hearts, "My dear Fitz Jarndyce!" fell upon my neck
and kissed me twenty times.

"Dear me!" said she, putting her hand into her reticule, "I have
nothing here but documents, my dear Fitz Jarndyce; I must borrow a
pocket handkerchief."

Charley gave her one, and the good creature certainly made use of it,
for she held it to her eyes with both hands and sat so, shedding
tears for the next ten minutes.

"With pleasure, my dear Fitz Jarndyce," she was careful to explain.
"Not the least pain. Pleasure to see you well again. Pleasure at
having the honour of being admitted to see you. I am so much fonder
of you, my love, than of the Chancellor. Though I DO attend court
regularly. By the by, my dear, mentioning pocket handkerchiefs--"

Miss Flite here looked at Charley, who had been to meet her at the
place where the coach stopped. Charley glanced at me and looked
unwilling to pursue the suggestion.

"Ve-ry right!" said Miss Flite, "Ve-ry correct. Truly! Highly
indiscreet of me to mention it; but my dear Miss Fitz Jarndyce, I am
afraid I am at times (between ourselves, you wouldn't think it) a
little--rambling you know," said Miss Flite, touching her forehead.
"Nothing more."

"What were you going to tell me?" said I, smiling, for I saw she
wanted to go on. "You have roused my curiosity, and now you must
gratify it."

Miss Flite looked at Charley for advice in this important crisis, who
said, "If you please, ma'am, you had better tell then," and therein
gratified Miss Flite beyond measure.

"So sagacious, our young friend," said she to me in her mysterious
way. "Diminutive. But ve-ry sagacious! Well, my dear, it's a pretty
anecdote. Nothing more. Still I think it charming. Who should follow
us down the road from the coach, my dear, but a poor person in a very
ungenteel bonnet--"

"Jenny, if you please, miss," said Charley.

"Just so!" Miss Flite acquiesced with the greatest suavity. "Jenny.
Ye-es! And what does she tell our young friend but that there has
been a lady with a veil inquiring at her cottage after my dear Fitz
Jarndyce's health and taking a handkerchief away with her as a little
keepsake merely because it was my amiable Fitz Jarndyce's! Now, you
know, so very prepossessing in the lady with the veil!"

"If you please, miss," said Charley, to whom I looked in some
astonishment, "Jenny says that when her baby died, you left a
handkerchief there, and that she put it away and kept it with the
baby's little things. I think, if you please, partly because it was
yours, miss, and partly because it had covered the baby."

"Diminutive," whispered Miss Flite, making a variety of motions about
her own forehead to express intellect in Charley. "But exceedingly
sagacious! And so dear! My love, she's clearer than any counsel I
ever heard!"

"Yes, Charley," I returned. "I remember it. Well?"

"Well, miss," said Charley, "and that's the handkerchief the lady
took. And Jenny wants you to know that she wouldn't have made away
with it herself for a heap of money but that the lady took it and
left some money instead. Jenny don't know her at all, if you please,
miss!"

"Why, who can she be?" said I.

"My love," Miss Flite suggested, advancing her lips to my ear with
her most mysterious look, "in MY opinion--don't mention this to our
diminutive friend--she's the Lord Chancellor's wife. He's married,
you know. And I understand she leads him a terrible life. Throws his
lordship's papers into the fire, my dear, if he won't pay the
jeweller!"

I did not think very much about this lady then, for I had an
impression that it might be Caddy. Besides, my attention was diverted
by my visitor, who was cold after her ride and looked hungry and who,
our dinner being brought in, required some little assistance in
arraying herself with great satisfaction in a pitiable old scarf and
a much-worn and often-mended pair of gloves, which she had brought
down in a paper parcel. I had to preside, too, over the
entertainment, consisting of a dish of fish, a roast fowl, a
sweetbread, vegetables, pudding, and Madeira; and it was so pleasant
to see how she enjoyed it, and with what state and ceremony she did
honour to it, that I was soon thinking of nothing else.

When we had finished and had our little dessert before us,
embellished by the hands of my dear, who would yield the
superintendence of everything prepared for me to no one, Miss Flite
was so very chatty and happy that I thought I would lead her to her
own history, as she was always pleased to talk about herself. I began
by saying "You have attended on the Lord Chancellor many years, Miss
Flite?"

"Oh, many, many, many years, my dear. But I expect a judgment.
Shortly."

There was an anxiety even in her hopefulness that made me doubtful if
I had done right in approaching the subject. I thought I would say no
more about it.

"My father expected a judgment," said Miss Flite. "My brother. My
sister. They all expected a judgment. The same that I expect."

"They are all--"

"Ye-es. Dead of course, my dear," said she.

As I saw she would go on, I thought it best to try to be serviceable
to her by meeting the theme rather than avoiding it.

"Would it not be wiser," said I, "to expect this judgment no more?"

"Why, my dear," she answered promptly, "of course it would!"

"And to attend the court no more?"

"Equally of course," said she. "Very wearing to be always in
expectation of what never comes, my dear Fitz Jarndyce! Wearing, I
assure you, to the bone!"

She slightly showed me her arm, and it was fearfully thin indeed.

"But, my dear," she went on in her mysterious way, "there's a
dreadful attraction in the place. Hush! Don't mention it to our
diminutive friend when she comes in. Or it may frighten her. With
good reason. There's a cruel attraction in the place. You CAN'T leave
it. And you MUST expect."

I tried to assure her that this was not so. She heard me patiently
and smilingly, but was ready with her own answer.

"Aye, aye, aye! You think so because I am a little rambling. Ve-ry
absurd, to be a little rambling, is it not? Ve-ry confusing, too. To
the head. I find it so. But, my dear, I have been there many years,
and I have noticed. It's the mace and seal upon the table."

What could they do, did she think? I mildly asked her.

"Draw," returned Miss Flite. "Draw people on, my dear. Draw peace out
of them. Sense out of them. Good looks out of them. Good qualities
out of them. I have felt them even drawing my rest away in the night.
Cold and glittering devils!"

She tapped me several times upon the arm and nodded good-humouredly
as if she were anxious I should understand that I had no cause to
fear her, though she spoke so gloomily, and confided these awful
secrets to me.

"Let me see," said she. "I'll tell you my own case. Before they ever
drew me--before I had ever seen them--what was it I used to do?
Tambourine playing? No. Tambour work. I and my sister worked at
tambour work. Our father and our brother had a builder's business.
We all lived together. Ve-ry respectably, my dear! First, our father
was drawn--slowly. Home was drawn with him. In a few years he
was a fierce, sour, angry bankrupt without a kind word or a kind
look for any one. He had been so different, Fitz Jarndyce. He was
drawn to a debtors' prison. There he died. Then our brother was
drawn--swiftly--to drunkenness. And rags. And death. Then my sister
was drawn. Hush! Never ask to what! Then I was ill and in misery, and
heard, as I had often heard before, that this was all the work of
Chancery. When I got better, I went to look at the monster. And then
I found out how it was, and I was drawn to stay there."

Having got over her own short narrative, in the delivery of which she
had spoken in a low, strained voice, as if the shock were fresh upon
her, she gradually resumed her usual air of amiable importance.

"You don't quite credit me, my dear! Well, well! You will, some day.
I am a little rambling. But I have noticed. I have seen many new
faces come, unsuspicious, within the influence of the mace and seal
in these many years. As my father's came there. As my brother's. As
my sister's. As my own. I hear Conversation Kenge and the rest of
them say to the new faces, 'Here's little Miss Flite. Oh, you are new
here; and you must come and be presented to little Miss Flite!' Ve-ry
good. Proud I am sure to have the honour! And we all laugh. But, Fitz
Jarndyce, I know what will happen. I know, far better than they do,
when the attraction has begun. I know the signs, my dear. I saw them
begin in Gridley. And I saw them end. Fitz Jarndyce, my love,"
speaking low again, "I saw them beginning in our friend the ward in
Jarndyce. Let some one hold him back. Or he'll be drawn to ruin."

She looked at me in silence for some moments, with her face gradually
softening into a smile. Seeming to fear that she had been too gloomy,
and seeming also to lose the connexion in her mind, she said politely
as she sipped her glass of wine, "Yes, my dear, as I was saying, I
expect a judgment shortly. Then I shall release my birds, you know,
and confer estates."

I was much impressed by her allusion to Richard and by the sad
meaning, so sadly illustrated in her poor pinched form, that made its
way through all her incoherence. But happily for her, she was quite
complacent again now and beamed with nods and smiles.

"But, my dear," she said, gaily, reaching another hand to put it upon
mine. "You have not congratulated me on my physician. Positively not
once, yet!"

I was obliged to confess that I did not quite know what she meant.

"My physician, Mr. Woodcourt, my dear, who was so exceedingly
attentive to me. Though his services were rendered quite
gratuitously. Until the Day of Judgment. I mean THE judgment that
will dissolve the spell upon me of the mace and seal."

"Mr. Woodcourt is so far away, now," said I, "that I thought the time
for such congratulation was past, Miss Flite."

"But, my child," she returned, "is it possible that you don't know
what has happened?"

"No," said I.

"Not what everybody has been talking of, my beloved Fitz Jarndyce!"

"No," said I. "You forget how long I have been here."

"True! My dear, for the moment--true. I blame myself. But my memory
has been drawn out of me, with everything else, by what I mentioned.
Ve-ry strong influence, is it not? Well, my dear, there has been a
terrible shipwreck over in those East Indian seas."

"Mr. Woodcourt shipwrecked!"

"Don't be agitated, my dear. He is safe. An awful scene. Death in all
shapes. Hundreds of dead and dying. Fire, storm, and darkness.
Numbers of the drowning thrown upon a rock. There, and through it
all, my dear physician was a hero. Calm and brave through everything.
Saved many lives, never complained in hunger and thirst, wrapped
naked people in his spare clothes, took the lead, showed them what to
do, governed them, tended the sick, buried the dead, and brought the
poor survivors safely off at last! My dear, the poor emaciated
creatures all but worshipped him. They fell down at his feet when
they got to the land and blessed him. The whole country rings with
it. Stay! Where's my bag of documents? I have got it there, and you
shall read it, you shall read it!"

And I DID read all the noble history, though very slowly and
imperfectly then, for my eyes were so dimmed that I could not see the
words, and I cried so much that I was many times obliged to lay down
the long account she had cut out of the newspaper. I felt so
triumphant ever to have known the man who had done such generous and
gallant deeds, I felt such glowing exultation in his renown, I so
admired and loved what he had done, that I envied the storm-worn
people who had fallen at his feet and blessed him as their preserver.
I could myself have kneeled down then, so far away, and blessed him
in my rapture that he should be so truly good and brave. I felt that
no one--mother, sister, wife--could honour him more than I. I did,
indeed!

My poor little visitor made me a present of the account, and when as
the evening began to close in she rose to take her leave, lest she
should miss the coach by which she was to return, she was still full
of the shipwreck, which I had not yet sufficiently composed myself to
understand in all its details.

"My dear," said she as she carefully folded up her scarf and gloves,
"my brave physician ought to have a title bestowed upon him. And no
doubt he will. You are of that opinion?"

That he well deserved one, yes. That he would ever have one, no.

"Why not, Fitz Jarndyce?" she asked rather sharply.

I said it was not the custom in England to confer titles on men
distinguished by peaceful services, however good and great, unless
occasionally when they consisted of the accumulation of some very
large amount of money.

"Why, good gracious," said Miss Flite, "how can you say that? Surely
you know, my dear, that all the greatest ornaments of England in
knowledge, imagination, active humanity, and improvement of every
sort are added to its nobility! Look round you, my dear, and
consider. YOU must be rambling a little now, I think, if you don't
know that this is the great reason why titles will always last in the
land!"

I am afraid she believed what she said, for there were moments when
she was very mad indeed.

And now I must part with the little secret I have thus far tried to
keep. I had thought, sometimes, that Mr. Woodcourt loved me and that
if he had been richer he would perhaps have told me that he loved me
before he went away. I had thought, sometimes, that if he had done
so, I should have been glad of it. But how much better it was now
that this had never happened! What should I have suffered if I had
had to write to him and tell him that the poor face he had known as
mine was quite gone from me and that I freely released him from his
bondage to one whom he had never seen!

Oh, it was so much better as it was! With a great pang mercifully
spared me, I could take back to my heart my childish prayer to be all
he had so brightly shown himself; and there was nothing to be undone:
no chain for me to break or for him to drag; and I could go, please
God, my lowly way along the path of duty, and he could go his nobler
way upon its broader road; and though we were apart upon the journey,
I might aspire to meet him, unselfishly, innocently, better far than
he had thought me when I found some favour in his eyes, at the
journey's end.




CHAPTER XXXVI

Chesney Wold


Charley and I did not set off alone upon our expedition into
Lincolnshire. My guardian had made up his mind not to lose sight of
me until I was safe in Mr. Boythorn's house, so he accompanied us,
and we were two days upon the road. I found every breath of air, and
every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass, and every
passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful
to me than I had ever found it yet. This was my first gain from my
illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of
delight for me.

My guardian intending to go back immediately, we appointed, on our
way down, a day when my dear girl should come. I wrote her a letter,
of which he took charge, and he left us within half an hour of our
arrival at our destination, on a delightful evening in the early
summer-time.

If a good fairy had built the house for me with a wave of her wand,
and I had been a princess and her favoured god-child, I could not
have been more considered in it. So many preparations were made for
me and such an endearing remembrance was shown of all my little
tastes and likings that I could have sat down, overcome, a dozen
times before I had revisited half the rooms. I did better than that,
however, by showing them all to Charley instead. Charley's delight
calmed mine; and after we had had a walk in the garden, and Charley
had exhausted her whole vocabulary of admiring expressions, I was as
tranquilly happy as I ought to have been. It was a great comfort to
be able to say to myself after tea, "Esther, my dear, I think you are
quite sensible enough to sit down now and write a note of thanks to
your host." He had left a note of welcome for me, as sunny as his own
face, and had confided his bird to my care, which I knew to be his
highest mark of confidence. Accordingly I wrote a little note to him
in London, telling him how all his favourite plants and trees were
looking, and how the most astonishing of birds had chirped the
honours of the house to me in the most hospitable manner, and how,
after singing on my shoulder, to the inconceivable rapture of my
little maid, he was then at roost in the usual corner of his cage,
but whether dreaming or no I could not report. My note finished and
sent off to the post, I made myself very busy in unpacking and
arranging; and I sent Charley to bed in good time and told her I
should want her no more that night.

For I had not yet looked in the glass and had never asked to have my
own restored to me. I knew this to be a weakness which must be
overcome, but I had always said to myself that I would begin afresh
when I got to where I now was. Therefore I had wanted to be alone,
and therefore I said, now alone, in my own room, "Esther, if you are
to be happy, if you are to have any right to pray to be true-hearted,
you must keep your word, my dear." I was quite resolved to keep it,
but I sat down for a little while first to reflect upon all my
blessings. And then I said my prayers and thought a little more.

My hair had not been cut off, though it had been in danger more than
once. It was long and thick. I let it down, and shook it out, and
went up to the glass upon the dressing-table. There was a little
muslin curtain drawn across it. I drew it back and stood for a moment
looking through such a veil of my own hair that I could see nothing
else. Then I put my hair aside and looked at the reflection in the
mirror, encouraged by seeing how placidly it looked at me. I was very
much changed--oh, very, very much. At first my face was so strange to
me that I think I should have put my hands before it and started back
but for the encouragement I have mentioned. Very soon it became more
familiar, and then I knew the extent of the alteration in it better
than I had done at first. It was not like what I had expected, but I
had expected nothing definite, and I dare say anything definite would
have surprised me.

I had never been a beauty and had never thought myself one, but I had
been very different from this. It was all gone now. Heaven was so
good to me that I could let it go with a few not bitter tears and
could stand there arranging my hair for the night quite thankfully.

One thing troubled me, and I considered it for a long time before I
went to sleep. I had kept Mr. Woodcourt's flowers. When they were
withered I had dried them and put them in a book that I was fond of.
Nobody knew this, not even Ada. I was doubtful whether I had a right
to preserve what he had sent to one so different--whether it was
generous towards him to do it. I wished to be generous to him, even
in the secret depths of my heart, which he would never know, because
I could have loved him--could have been devoted to him. At last I
came to the conclusion that I might keep them if I treasured them
only as a remembrance of what was irrevocably past and gone, never to
be looked back on any more, in any other light. I hope this may not
seem trivial. I was very much in earnest.

I took care to be up early in the morning and to be before the glass
when Charley came in on tiptoe.

"Dear, dear, miss!" cried Charley, starting. "Is that you?"

"Yes, Charley," said I, quietly putting up my hair. "And I am very
well indeed, and very happy."

I saw it was a weight off Charley's mind, but it was a greater weight
off mine. I knew the worst now and was composed to it. I shall not
conceal, as I go on, the weaknesses I could not quite conquer, but
they always passed from me soon and the happier frame of mind stayed
by me faithfully.

Wishing to be fully re-established in my strength and my good spirits
before Ada came, I now laid down a little series of plans with
Charley for being in the fresh air all day long. We were to be out
before breakfast, and were to dine early, and were to be out again
before and after dinner, and were to talk in the garden after tea,
and were to go to rest betimes, and were to climb every hill and
explore every road, lane, and field in the neighbourhood. As to
restoratives and strengthening delicacies, Mr. Boythorn's good
housekeeper was for ever trotting about with something to eat or
drink in her hand; I could not even be heard of as resting in the
park but she would come trotting after me with a basket, her cheerful
face shining with a lecture on the importance of frequent
nourishment. Then there was a pony expressly for my riding, a chubby
pony with a short neck and a mane all over his eyes who could
canter--when he would--so easily and quietly that he was a treasure.
In a very few days he would come to me in the paddock when I called
him, and eat out of my hand, and follow me about. We arrived at such
a capital understanding that when he was jogging with me lazily, and
rather obstinately, down some shady lane, if I patted his neck and
said, "Stubbs, I am surprised you don't canter when you know how much
I like it; and I think you might oblige me, for you are only getting
stupid and going to sleep," he would give his head a comical shake or
two and set off directly, while Charley would stand still and laugh
with such enjoyment that her laughter was like music. I don't know
who had given Stubbs his name, but it seemed to belong to him as
naturally as his rough coat. Once we put him in a little chaise and
drove him triumphantly through the green lanes for five miles; but
all at once, as we were extolling him to the skies, he seemed to take
it ill that he should have been accompanied so far by the circle of
tantalizing little gnats that had been hovering round and round his
ears the whole way without appearing to advance an inch, and stopped
to think about it. I suppose he came to the decision that it was not
to be borne, for he steadily refused to move until I gave the reins
to Charley and got out and walked, when he followed me with a sturdy
sort of good humour, putting his head under my arm and rubbing his
ear against my sleeve. It was in vain for me to say, "Now, Stubbs, I
feel quite sure from what I know of you that you will go on if I ride
a little while," for the moment I left him, he stood stock still
again. Consequently I was obliged to lead the way, as before; and in
this order we returned home, to the great delight of the village.

Charley and I had reason to call it the most friendly of villages, I
am sure, for in a week's time the people were so glad to see us go
by, though ever so frequently in the course of a day, that there were
faces of greeting in every cottage. I had known many of the grown
people before and almost all the children, but now the very steeple
began to wear a familiar and affectionate look. Among my new friends
was an old old woman who lived in such a little thatched and
whitewashed dwelling that when the outside shutter was turned up on
its hinges, it shut up the whole house-front. This old lady had a
grandson who was a sailor, and I wrote a letter to him for her and
drew at the top of it the chimney-corner in which she had brought him
up and where his old stool yet occupied its old place. This was
considered by the whole village the most wonderful achievement in the
world, but when an answer came back all the way from Plymouth, in
which he mentioned that he was going to take the picture all the way
to America, and from America would write again, I got all the credit
that ought to have been given to the post-office and was invested
with the merit of the whole system.

Thus, what with being so much in the air, playing with so many
children, gossiping with so many people, sitting on invitation in so
many cottages, going on with Charley's education, and writing long
letters to Ada every day, I had scarcely any time to think about that
little loss of mine and was almost always cheerful. If I did think of
it at odd moments now and then, I had only to be busy and forget it.
I felt it more than I had hoped I should once when a child said,
"Mother, why is the lady not a pretty lady now like she used to be?"
But when I found the child was not less fond of me, and drew its soft
hand over my face with a kind of pitying protection in its touch,
that soon set me up again. There were many little occurrences which
suggested to me, with great consolation, how natural it is to gentle
hearts to be considerate and delicate towards any inferiority. One of
these particularly touched me. I happened to stroll into the little
church when a marriage was just concluded, and the young couple had
to sign the register.

The bridegroom, to whom the pen was handed first, made a rude cross
for his mark; the bride, who came next, did the same. Now, I had
known the bride when I was last there, not only as the prettiest girl
in the place, but as having quite distinguished herself in the
school, and I could not help looking at her with some surprise. She
came aside and whispered to me, while tears of honest love and
admiration stood in her bright eyes, "He's a dear good fellow, miss;
but he can't write yet--he's going to learn of me--and I wouldn't
shame him for the world!" Why, what had I to fear, I thought, when
there was this nobility in the soul of a labouring man's daughter!

The air blew as freshly and revivingly upon me as it had ever blown,
and the healthy colour came into my new face as it had come into my
old one. Charley was wonderful to see, she was so radiant and so
rosy; and we both enjoyed the whole day and slept soundly the whole
night.

There was a favourite spot of mine in the park-woods of Chesney Wold
where a seat had been erected commanding a lovely view. The wood had
been cleared and opened to improve this point of sight, and the
bright sunny landscape beyond was so beautiful that I rested there at
least once every day. A picturesque part of the Hall, called the
Ghost's Walk, was seen to advantage from this higher ground; and the
startling name, and the old legend in the Dedlock family which I had
heard from Mr. Boythorn accounting for it, mingled with the view and
gave it something of a mysterious interest in addition to its real
charms. There was a bank here, too, which was a famous one for
violets; and as it was a daily delight of Charley's to gather wild
flowers, she took as much to the spot as I did.

It would be idle to inquire now why I never went close to the house
or never went inside it. The family were not there, I had heard on my
arrival, and were not expected. I was far from being incurious or
uninterested about the building; on the contrary, I often sat in this
place wondering how the rooms ranged and whether any echo like a
footstep really did resound at times, as the story said, upon the
lonely Ghost's Walk. The indefinable feeling with which Lady Dedlock
had impressed me may have had some influence in keeping me from the
house even when she was absent. I am not sure. Her face and figure
were associated with it, naturally; but I cannot say that they
repelled me from it, though something did. For whatever reason or no
reason, I had never once gone near it, down to the day at which my
story now arrives.

I was resting at my favourite point after a long ramble, and Charley
was gathering violets at a little distance from me. I had been
looking at the Ghost's Walk lying in a deep shade of masonry afar off
and picturing to myself the female shape that was said to haunt it
when I became aware of a figure approaching through the wood. The
perspective was so long and so darkened by leaves, and the shadows of
the branches on the ground made it so much more intricate to the eye,
that at first I could not discern what figure it was. By little and
little it revealed itself to be a woman's--a lady's--Lady Dedlock's.
She was alone and coming to where I sat with a much quicker step, I
observed to my surprise, than was usual with her.

I was fluttered by her being unexpectedly so near (she was almost
within speaking distance before I knew her) and would have risen to
continue my walk. But I could not. I was rendered motionless. Not so
much by her hurried gesture of entreaty, not so much by her quick
advance and outstretched hands, not so much by the great change in
her manner and the absence of her haughty self-restraint, as by a
something in her face that I had pined for and dreamed of when I was
a little child, something I had never seen in any face, something I
had never seen in hers before.

A dread and faintness fell upon me, and I called to Charley. Lady
Dedlock stopped upon the instant and changed back almost to what I
had known her.

"Miss Summerson, I am afraid I have startled you," she said, now
advancing slowly. "You can scarcely be strong yet. You have been very
ill, I know. I have been much concerned to hear it."

I could no more have removed my eyes from her pale face than I could
have stirred from the bench on which I sat. She gave me her hand, and
its deadly coldness, so at variance with the enforced composure of
her features, deepened the fascination that overpowered me. I cannot
say what was in my whirling thoughts.

"You are recovering again?" she asked kindly.

"I was quite well but a moment ago, Lady Dedlock."

"Is this your young attendant?"

"Yes."

"Will you send her on before and walk towards your house with me?"

"Charley," said I, "take your flowers home, and I will follow you
directly."

Charley, with her best curtsy, blushingly tied on her bonnet and went
her way. When she was gone, Lady Dedlock sat down on the seat beside
me.

I cannot tell in any words what the state of my mind was when I saw
in her hand my handkerchief with which I had covered the dead baby.

I looked at her, but I could not see her, I could not hear her, I
could not draw my breath. The beating of my heart was so violent and
wild that I felt as if my life were breaking from me. But when she
caught me to her breast, kissed me, wept over me, compassionated me,
and called me back to myself; when she fell down on her knees and
cried to me, "Oh, my child, my child, I am your wicked and unhappy
mother! Oh, try to forgive me!"--when I saw her at my feet on the
bare earth in her great agony of mind, I felt, through all my tumult
of emotion, a burst of gratitude to the providence of God that I was
so changed as that I never could disgrace her by any trace of
likeness, as that nobody could ever now look at me and look at her
and remotely think of any near tie between us.

I raised my mother up, praying and beseeching her not to stoop before
me in such affliction and humiliation. I did so in broken, incoherent
words, for besides the trouble I was in, it frightened me to see her
at MY feet. I told her--or I tried to tell her--that if it were for
me, her child, under any circumstances to take upon me to forgive
her, I did it, and had done it, many, many years. I told her that my
heart overflowed with love for her, that it was natural love which
nothing in the past had changed or could change. That it was not for
me, then resting for the first time on my mother's bosom, to take her
to account for having given me life, but that my duty was to bless
her and receive her, though the whole world turned from her, and that
I only asked her leave to do it. I held my mother in my embrace, and
she held me in hers, and among the still woods in the silence of the
summer day there seemed to be nothing but our two troubled minds that
was not at peace.

"To bless and receive me," groaned my mother, "it is far too late. I
must travel my dark road alone, and it will lead me where it will.
From day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, I do not see the way
before my guilty feet. This is the earthly punishment I have brought
upon myself. I bear it, and I hide it."

Even in the thinking of her endurance, she drew her habitual air of
proud indifference about her like a veil, though she soon cast it off
again.

"I must keep this secret, if by any means it can be kept, not wholly
for myself. I have a husband, wretched and dishonouring creature that
I am!"

These words she uttered with a suppressed cry of despair, more
terrible in its sound than any shriek. Covering her face with her
hands, she shrank down in my embrace as if she were unwilling that I
should touch her; nor could I, by my utmost persuasions or by any
endearments I could use, prevail upon her to rise. She said, no, no,
no, she could only speak to me so; she must be proud and disdainful
everywhere else; she would be humbled and ashamed there, in the only
natural moments of her life.

My unhappy mother told me that in my illness she had been nearly
frantic. She had but then known that her child was living. She could
not have suspected me to be that child before. She had followed me
down here to speak to me but once in all her life. We never could
associate, never could communicate, never probably from that time
forth could interchange another word on earth. She put into my hands
a letter she had written for my reading only and said when I had read
it and destroyed it--but not so much for her sake, since she asked
nothing, as for her husband's and my own--I must evermore consider
her as dead. If I could believe that she loved me, in this agony in
which I saw her, with a mother's love, she asked me to do that, for
then I might think of her with a greater pity, imagining what she
suffered. She had put herself beyond all hope and beyond all help.
Whether she preserved her secret until death or it came to be
discovered and she brought dishonour and disgrace upon the name she
had taken, it was her solitary struggle always; and no affection
could come near her, and no human creature could render her any aid.

"But is the secret safe so far?" I asked. "Is it safe now, dearest
mother?"

"No," replied my mother. "It has been very near discovery. It was
saved by an accident. It may be lost by another accident--to-morrow,
any day."

"Do you dread a particular person?"

"Hush! Do not tremble and cry so much for me. I am not worthy of
these tears," said my mother, kissing my hands. "I dread one person
very much."

"An enemy?"

"Not a friend. One who is too passionless to be either. He is Sir
Leicester Dedlock's lawyer, mechanically faithful without attachment,
and very jealous of the profit, privilege, and reputation of being
master of the mysteries of great houses."

"Has he any suspicions?"

"Many."

"Not of you?" I said alarmed.

"Yes! He is always vigilant and always near me. I may keep him at a
standstill, but I can never shake him off."

"Has he so little pity or compunction?"

"He has none, and no anger. He is indifferent to everything but his
calling. His calling is the acquisition of secrets and the holding
possession of such power as they give him, with no sharer or opponent
in it."

"Could you trust in him?"

"I shall never try. The dark road I have trodden for so many years
will end where it will. I follow it alone to the end, whatever the
end be. It may be near, it may be distant; while the road lasts,
nothing turns me."

"Dear mother, are you so resolved?"

"I AM resolved. I have long outbidden folly with folly, pride with
pride, scorn with scorn, insolence with insolence, and have outlived
many vanities with many more. I will outlive this danger, and outdie
it, if I can. It has closed around me almost as awfully as if these
woods of Chesney Wold had closed around the house, but my course
through it is the same. I have but one; I can have but one."

"Mr. Jarndyce--" I was beginning when my mother hurriedly inquired,
"Does HE suspect?"

"No," said I. "No, indeed! Be assured that he does not!" And I told
her what he had related to me as his knowledge of my story. "But he
is so good and sensible," said I, "that perhaps if he knew--"

My mother, who until this time had made no change in her position,
raised her hand up to my lips and stopped me.

"Confide fully in him," she said after a little while. "You have my
free consent--a small gift from such a mother to her injured
child!--but do not tell me of it. Some pride is left in me even yet."

I explained, as nearly as I could then, or can recall now--for my
agitation and distress throughout were so great that I scarcely
understood myself, though every word that was uttered in the mother's
voice, so unfamiliar and so melancholy to me, which in my childhood I
had never learned to love and recognize, had never been sung to sleep
with, had never heard a blessing from, had never had a hope inspired
by, made an enduring impression on my memory--I say I explained, or
tried to do it, how I had only hoped that Mr. Jarndyce, who had been
the best of fathers to me, might be able to afford some counsel and
support to her. But my mother answered no, it was impossible; no one
could help her. Through the desert that lay before her, she must go
alone.

"My child, my child!" she said. "For the last time! These kisses for
the last time! These arms upon my neck for the last time! We shall
meet no more. To hope to do what I seek to do, I must be what I have
been so long. Such is my reward and doom. If you hear of Lady
Dedlock, brilliant, prosperous, and flattered, think of your wretched
mother, conscience-stricken, underneath that mask! Think that the
reality is in her suffering, in her useless remorse, in her murdering
within her breast the only love and truth of which it is capable! And
then forgive her if you can, and cry to heaven to forgive her, which
it never can!"

We held one another for a little space yet, but she was so firm that
she took my hands away, and put them back against my breast, and with
a last kiss as she held them there, released them, and went from me
into the wood. I was alone, and calm and quiet below me in the sun
and shade lay the old house, with its terraces and turrets, on which
there had seemed to me to be such complete repose when I first saw
it, but which now looked like the obdurate and unpitying watcher of
my mother's misery.

Stunned as I was, as weak and helpless at first as I had ever been in
my sick chamber, the necessity of guarding against the danger of
discovery, or even of the remotest suspicion, did me service. I took
such precautions as I could to hide from Charley that I had been
crying, and I constrained myself to think of every sacred obligation
that there was upon me to be careful and collected. It was not a
little while before I could succeed or could even restrain bursts of
grief, but after an hour or so I was better and felt that I might
return. I went home very slowly and told Charley, whom I found at the
gate looking for me, that I had been tempted to extend my walk after
Lady Dedlock had left me and that I was over-tired and would lie
down. Safe in my own room, I read the letter. I clearly derived from
it--and that was much then--that I had not been abandoned by my
mother. Her elder and only sister, the godmother of my childhood,
discovering signs of life in me when I had been laid aside as dead,
had in her stern sense of duty, with no desire or willingness that I
should live, reared me in rigid secrecy and had never again beheld my
mother's face from within a few hours of my birth. So strangely did I
hold my place in this world that until within a short time back I had
never, to my own mother's knowledge, breathed--had been buried--had
never been endowed with life--had never borne a name. When she had
first seen me in the church she had been startled and had thought of
what would have been like me if it had ever lived, and had lived on,
but that was all then.

What more the letter told me needs not to be repeated here. It has
its own times and places in my story.

My first care was to burn what my mother had written and to consume
even its ashes. I hope it may not appear very unnatural or bad in me
that I then became heavily sorrowful to think I had ever been reared.
That I felt as if I knew it would have been better and happier for
many people if indeed I had never breathed. That I had a terror of
myself as the danger and the possible disgrace of my own mother and
of a proud family name. That I was so confused and shaken as to be
possessed by a belief that it was right and had been intended that I
should die in my birth, and that it was wrong and not intended that I
should be then alive.

These are the real feelings that I had. I fell asleep worn out, and
when I awoke I cried afresh to think that I was back in the world
with my load of trouble for others. I was more than ever frightened
of myself, thinking anew of her against whom I was a witness, of the
owner of Chesney Wold, of the new and terrible meaning of the old
words now moaning in my ear like a surge upon the shore, "Your
mother, Esther, was your disgrace, and you are hers. The time will
come--and soon enough--when you will understand this better, and will
feel it too, as no one save a woman can." With them, those other
words returned, "Pray daily that the sins of others be not visited
upon your head." I could not disentangle all that was about me, and I
felt as if the blame and the shame were all in me, and the visitation
had come down.

The day waned into a gloomy evening, overcast and sad, and I still
contended with the same distress. I went out alone, and after walking
a little in the park, watching the dark shades falling on the trees
and the fitful flight of the bats, which sometimes almost touched me,
was attracted to the house for the first time. Perhaps I might not
have gone near it if I had been in a stronger frame of mind. As it
was, I took the path that led close by it.

I did not dare to linger or to look up, but I passed before the
terrace garden with its fragrant odours, and its broad walks, and its
well-kept beds and smooth turf; and I saw how beautiful and grave it
was, and how the old stone balustrades and parapets, and wide flights
of shallow steps, were seamed by time and weather; and how the
trained moss and ivy grew about them, and around the old stone
pedestal of the sun-dial; and I heard the fountain falling. Then the
way went by long lines of dark windows diversified by turreted towers
and porches of eccentric shapes, where old stone lions and grotesque
monsters bristled outside dens of shadow and snarled at the evening
gloom over the escutcheons they held in their grip. Thence the path
wound underneath a gateway, and through a court-yard where the
principal entrance was (I hurried quickly on), and by the stables
where none but deep voices seemed to be, whether in the murmuring of
the wind through the strong mass of ivy holding to a high red wall,
or in the low complaining of the weathercock, or in the barking of
the dogs, or in the slow striking of a clock. So, encountering
presently a sweet smell of limes, whose rustling I could hear, I
turned with the turning of the path to the south front, and there
above me were the balustrades of the Ghost's Walk and one lighted
window that might be my mother's.

The way was paved here, like the terrace overhead, and my footsteps
from being noiseless made an echoing sound upon the flags. Stopping
to look at nothing, but seeing all I did see as I went, I was passing
quickly on, and in a few moments should have passed the lighted
window, when my echoing footsteps brought it suddenly into my mind
that there was a dreadful truth in the legend of the Ghost's Walk,
that it was I who was to bring calamity upon the stately house and
that my warning feet were haunting it even then. Seized with an
augmented terror of myself which turned me cold, I ran from myself
and everything, retraced the way by which I had come, and never
paused until I had gained the lodge-gate, and the park lay sullen and
black behind me.

Not before I was alone in my own room for the night and had again
been dejected and unhappy there did I begin to know how wrong and
thankless this state was. But from my darling who was coming on the
morrow, I found a joyful letter, full of such loving anticipation
that I must have been of marble if it had not moved me; from my
guardian, too, I found another letter, asking me to tell Dame Durden,
if I should see that little woman anywhere, that they had moped most
pitiably without her, that the housekeeping was going to rack and
ruin, that nobody else could manage the keys, and that everybody in
and about the house declared it was not the same house and was
becoming rebellious for her return. Two such letters together made me
think how far beyond my deserts I was beloved and how happy I ought
to be. That made me think of all my past life; and that brought me,
as it ought to have done before, into a better condition.

For I saw very well that I could not have been intended to die, or I
should never have lived; not to say should never have been reserved
for such a happy life. I saw very well how many things had worked
together for my welfare, and that if the sins of the fathers were
sometimes visited upon the children, the phrase did not mean what I
had in the morning feared it meant. I knew I was as innocent of my
birth as a queen of hers and that before my Heavenly Father I should
not be punished for birth nor a queen rewarded for it. I had had
experience, in the shock of that very day, that I could, even thus
soon, find comforting reconcilements to the change that had fallen on
me. I renewed my resolutions and prayed to be strengthened in them,
pouring out my heart for myself and for my unhappy mother and feeling
that the darkness of the morning was passing away. It was not upon my
sleep; and when the next day's light awoke me, it was gone.

My dear girl was to arrive at five o'clock in the afternoon. How to
help myself through the intermediate time better than by taking a
long walk along the road by which she was to come, I did not know; so
Charley and I and Stubbs--Stubbs saddled, for we never drove him
after the one great occasion--made a long expedition along that road
and back. On our return, we held a great review of the house and
garden and saw that everything was in its prettiest condition, and
had the bird out ready as an important part of the establishment.

There were more than two full hours yet to elapse before she could
come, and in that interval, which seemed a long one, I must confess I
was nervously anxious about my altered looks. I loved my darling so
well that I was more concerned for their effect on her than on any
one. I was not in this slight distress because I at all repined--I am
quite certain I did not, that day--but, I thought, would she be
wholly prepared? When she first saw me, might she not be a little
shocked and disappointed? Might it not prove a little worse than she
expected? Might she not look for her old Esther and not find her?
Might she not have to grow used to me and to begin all over again?

I knew the various expressions of my sweet girl's face so well, and
it was such an honest face in its loveliness, that I was sure
beforehand she could not hide that first look from me. And I
considered whether, if it should signify any one of these meanings,
which was so very likely, could I quite answer for myself?

Well, I thought I could. After last night, I thought I could. But to
wait and wait, and expect and expect, and think and think, was such
bad preparation that I resolved to go along the road again and meet
her.

So I said to Charley, "Charley, I will go by myself and walk along
the road until she comes." Charley highly approving of anything that
pleased me, I went and left her at home.

But before I got to the second milestone, I had been in so many
palpitations from seeing dust in the distance (though I knew it was
not, and could not, be the coach yet) that I resolved to turn back
and go home again. And when I had turned, I was in such fear of the
coach coming up behind me (though I still knew that it neither would,
nor could, do any such thing) that I ran the greater part of the way
to avoid being overtaken.

Then, I considered, when I had got safe back again, this was a nice
thing to have done! Now I was hot and had made the worst of it
instead of the best.

At last, when I believed there was at least a quarter of an hour more
yet, Charley all at once cried out to me as I was trembling in the
garden, "Here she comes, miss! Here she is!"

I did not mean to do it, but I ran upstairs into my room and hid
myself behind the door. There I stood trembling, even when I heard my
darling calling as she came upstairs, "Esther, my dear, my love,
where are you? Little woman, dear Dame Durden!"

She ran in, and was running out again when she saw me. Ah, my angel
girl! The old dear look, all love, all fondness, all affection.
Nothing else in it--no, nothing, nothing!

Oh, how happy I was, down upon the floor, with my sweet beautiful
girl down upon the floor too, holding my scarred face to her lovely
cheek, bathing it with tears and kisses, rocking me to and fro like a
child, calling me by every tender name that she could think of, and
pressing me to her faithful heart.




CHAPTER XXXVII

Jarndyce and Jarndyce


If the secret I had to keep had been mine, I must have confided it to
Ada before we had been long together. But it was not mine, and I did
not feel that I had a right to tell it, even to my guardian, unless
some great emergency arose. It was a weight to bear alone; still my
present duty appeared to be plain, and blest in the attachment of my
dear, I did not want an impulse and encouragement to do it. Though
often when she was asleep and all was quiet, the remembrance of my
mother kept me waking and made the night sorrowful, I did not yield
to it at another time; and Ada found me what I used to be--except, of
course, in that particular of which I have said enough and which I
have no intention of mentioning any more just now, if I can help it.

The difficulty that I felt in being quite composed that first evening
when Ada asked me, over our work, if the family were at the house,
and when I was obliged to answer yes, I believed so, for Lady Dedlock
had spoken to me in the woods the day before yesterday, was great.
Greater still when Ada asked me what she had said, and when I replied
that she had been kind and interested, and when Ada, while admitting
her beauty and elegance, remarked upon her proud manner and her
imperious chilling air. But Charley helped me through, unconsciously,
by telling us that Lady Dedlock had only stayed at the house two
nights on her way from London to visit at some other great house in
the next county and that she had left early on the morning after we
had seen her at our view, as we called it. Charley verified the adage
about little pitchers, I am sure, for she heard of more sayings and
doings in a day than would have come to my ears in a month.

We were to stay a month at Mr. Boythorn's. My pet had scarcely been
there a bright week, as I recollect the time, when one evening after
we had finished helping the gardener in watering his flowers, and
just as the candles were lighted, Charley, appearing with a very
important air behind Ada's chair, beckoned me mysteriously out of the
room.

"Oh! If you please, miss," said Charley in a whisper, with her eyes
at their roundest and largest. "You're wanted at the Dedlock Arms."

"Why, Charley," said I, "who can possibly want me at the
public-house?"

"I don't know, miss," returned Charley, putting her head forward and
folding her hands tight upon the band of her little apron, which she
always did in the enjoyment of anything mysterious or confidential,
"but it's a gentleman, miss, and his compliments, and will you please
to come without saying anything about it."

"Whose compliments, Charley?"

"His'n, miss," returned Charley, whose grammatical education was
advancing, but not very rapidly.

"And how do you come to be the messenger, Charley?"

"I am not the messenger, if you please, miss," returned my little
maid. "It was W. Grubble, miss."

"And who is W. Grubble, Charley?"

"Mister Grubble, miss," returned Charley. "Don't you know, miss? The
Dedlock Arms, by W. Grubble," which Charley delivered as if she were
slowly spelling out the sign.

"Aye? The landlord, Charley?"

"Yes, miss. If you please, miss, his wife is a beautiful woman, but
she broke her ankle, and it never joined. And her brother's the
sawyer that was put in the cage, miss, and they expect he'll drink
himself to death entirely on beer," said Charley.

Not knowing what might be the matter, and being easily apprehensive
now, I thought it best to go to this place by myself. I bade Charley
be quick with my bonnet and veil and my shawl, and having put them
on, went away down the little hilly street, where I was as much at
home as in Mr. Boythorn's garden.

Mr. Grubble was standing in his shirt-sleeves at the door of his very
clean little tavern waiting for me. He lifted off his hat with both
hands when he saw me coming, and carrying it so, as if it were an
iron vessel (it looked as heavy), preceded me along the sanded
passage to his best parlour, a neat carpeted room with more plants in
it than were quite convenient, a coloured print of Queen Caroline,
several shells, a good many tea-trays, two stuffed and dried fish in
glass cases, and either a curious egg or a curious pumpkin (but I
don't know which, and I doubt if many people did) hanging from his
ceiling. I knew Mr. Grubble very well by sight, from his often
standing at his door. A pleasant-looking, stoutish, middle-aged man
who never seemed to consider himself cozily dressed for his own
fire-side without his hat and top-boots, but who never wore a coat
except at church.

He snuffed the candle, and backing away a little to see how it
looked, backed out of the room--unexpectedly to me, for I was going
to ask him by whom he had been sent. The door of the opposite parlour
being then opened, I heard some voices, familiar in my ears I
thought, which stopped. A quick light step approached the room in
which I was, and who should stand before me but Richard!

"My dear Esther!" he said. "My best friend!" And he really was so
warm-hearted and earnest that in the first surprise and pleasure of
his brotherly greeting I could scarcely find breath to tell him that
Ada was well.

"Answering my very thoughts--always the same dear girl!" said
Richard, leading me to a chair and seating himself beside me.

I put my veil up, but not quite.

"Always the same dear girl!" said Richard just as heartily as before.

I put up my veil altogether, and laying my hand on Richard's sleeve
and looking in his face, told him how much I thanked him for his kind
welcome and how greatly I rejoiced to see him, the more so because of
the determination I had made in my illness, which I now conveyed to
him.

"My love," said Richard, "there is no one with whom I have a greater
wish to talk than you, for I want you to understand me."

"And I want you, Richard," said I, shaking my head, "to understand
some one else."

"Since you refer so immediately to John Jarndyce," said Richard, "--I
suppose you mean him?"

"Of course I do."

"Then I may say at once that I am glad of it, because it is on that
subject that I am anxious to be understood. By you, mind--you, my
dear! I am not accountable to Mr. Jarndyce or Mr. Anybody."

I was pained to find him taking this tone, and he observed it.

"Well, well, my dear," said Richard, "we won't go into that now. I
want to appear quietly in your country-house here, with you under my
arm, and give my charming cousin a surprise. I suppose your loyalty
to John Jarndyce will allow that?"

"My dear Richard," I returned, "you know you would be heartily
welcome at his house--your home, if you will but consider it so; and
you are as heartily welcome here!"

"Spoken like the best of little women!" cried Richard gaily.

I asked him how he liked his profession.

"Oh, I like it well enough!" said Richard. "It's all right. It does
as well as anything else, for a time. I don't know that I shall care
about it when I come to be settled, but I can sell out then
and--however, never mind all that botheration at present."

So young and handsome, and in all respects so perfectly the opposite
of Miss Flite! And yet, in the clouded, eager, seeking look that
passed over him, so dreadfully like her!

"I am in town on leave just now," said Richard.

"Indeed?"

"Yes. I have run over to look after my--my Chancery interests before
the long vacation," said Richard, forcing a careless laugh. "We are
beginning to spin along with that old suit at last, I promise you."

No wonder that I shook my head!

"As you say, it's not a pleasant subject." Richard spoke with the
same shade crossing his face as before. "Let it go to the four winds
for to-night. Puff! Gone! Who do you suppose is with me?"

"Was it Mr. Skimpole's voice I heard?"

"That's the man! He does me more good than anybody. What a
fascinating child it is!"

I asked Richard if any one knew of their coming down together. He
answered, no, nobody. He had been to call upon the dear old
infant--so he called Mr. Skimpole--and the dear old infant had told
him where we were, and he had told the dear old infant he was bent on
coming to see us, and the dear old infant had directly wanted to come
too; and so he had brought him. "And he is worth--not to say his
sordid expenses--but thrice his weight in gold," said Richard. "He is
such a cheery fellow. No worldliness about him. Fresh and
green-hearted!"

I certainly did not see the proof of Mr. Skimpole's worldliness in
his having his expenses paid by Richard, but I made no remark about
that. Indeed, he came in and turned our conversation. He was charmed
to see me, said he had been shedding delicious tears of joy and
sympathy at intervals for six weeks on my account, had never been so
happy as in hearing of my progress, began to understand the mixture
of good and evil in the world now, felt that he appreciated health
the more when somebody else was ill, didn't know but what it might be
in the scheme of things that A should squint to make B happier in
looking straight or that C should carry a wooden leg to make D better
satisfied with his flesh and blood in a silk stocking.

"My dear Miss Summerson, here is our friend Richard," said Mr.
Skimpole, "full of the brightest visions of the future, which he
evokes out of the darkness of Chancery. Now that's delightful, that's
inspiriting, that's full of poetry! In old times the woods and
solitudes were made joyous to the shepherd by the imaginary piping
and dancing of Pan and the nymphs. This present shepherd, our
pastoral Richard, brightens the dull Inns of Court by making Fortune
and her train sport through them to the melodious notes of a judgment
from the bench. That's very pleasant, you know! Some ill-conditioned
growling fellow may say to me, 'What's the use of these legal and
equitable abuses? How do you defend them?' I reply, 'My growling
friend, I DON'T defend them, but they are very agreeable to me. There
is a shepherd--youth, a friend of mine, who transmutes them into
something highly fascinating to my simplicity. I don't say it is for
this that they exist--for I am a child among you worldly grumblers,
and not called upon to account to you or myself for anything--but it
may be so.'"

I began seriously to think that Richard could scarcely have found a
worse friend than this. It made me uneasy that at such a time when he
most required some right principle and purpose he should have this
captivating looseness and putting-off of everything, this airy
dispensing with all principle and purpose, at his elbow. I thought I
could understand how such a nature as my guardian's, experienced in
the world and forced to contemplate the miserable evasions and
contentions of the family misfortune, found an immense relief in Mr.
Skimpole's avowal of his weaknesses and display of guileless candour;
but I could not satisfy myself that it was as artless as it seemed or
that it did not serve Mr. Skimpole's idle turn quite as well as any
other part, and with less trouble.

They both walked back with me, and Mr. Skimpole leaving us at the
gate, I walked softly in with Richard and said, "Ada, my love, I have
brought a gentleman to visit you." It was not difficult to read the
blushing, startled face. She loved him dearly, and he knew it, and I
knew it. It was a very transparent business, that meeting as cousins
only.

I almost mistrusted myself as growing quite wicked in my suspicions,
but I was not so sure that Richard loved her dearly. He admired her
very much--any one must have done that--and I dare say would have
renewed their youthful engagement with great pride and ardour but
that he knew how she would respect her promise to my guardian. Still
I had a tormenting idea that the influence upon him extended even
here, that he was postponing his best truth and earnestness in this
as in all things until Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be off his mind.
Ah me! What Richard would have been without that blight, I never
shall know now!

He told Ada, in his most ingenuous way, that he had not come to make
any secret inroad on the terms she had accepted (rather too
implicitly and confidingly, he thought) from Mr. Jarndyce, that he
had come openly to see her and to see me and to justify himself for
the present terms on which he stood with Mr. Jarndyce. As the dear
old infant would be with us directly, he begged that I would make an
appointment for the morning, when he might set himself right through
the means of an unreserved conversation with me. I proposed to walk
with him in the park at seven o'clock, and this was arranged. Mr.
Skimpole soon afterwards appeared and made us merry for an hour. He
particularly requested to see little Coavinses (meaning Charley) and
told her, with a patriarchal air, that he had given her late father
all the business in his power and that if one of her little brothers
would make haste to get set up in the same profession, he hoped he
should still be able to put a good deal of employment in his way.

"For I am constantly being taken in these nets," said Mr. Skimpole,
looking beamingly at us over a glass of wine-and-water, "and am
constantly being bailed out--like a boat. Or paid off--like a ship's
company. Somebody always does it for me. I can't do it, you know, for
I never have any money. But somebody does it. I get out by somebody's
means; I am not like the starling; I get out. If you were to ask me
who somebody is, upon my word I couldn't tell you. Let us drink to
somebody. God bless him!"

Richard was a little late in the morning, but I had not to wait for
him long, and we turned into the park. The air was bright and dewy
and the sky without a cloud. The birds sang delightfully; the
sparkles in the fern, the grass, and trees, were exquisite to see;
the richness of the woods seemed to have increased twenty-fold since
yesterday, as if, in the still night when they had looked so
massively hushed in sleep, Nature, through all the minute details of
every wonderful leaf, had been more wakeful than usual for the glory
of that day.

"This is a lovely place," said Richard, looking round. "None of the
jar and discord of law-suits here!"

But there was other trouble.

"I tell you what, my dear girl," said Richard, "when I get affairs in
general settled, I shall come down here, I think, and rest."

"Would it not be better to rest now?" I asked.

"Oh, as to resting NOW," said Richard, "or as to doing anything very
definite NOW, that's not easy. In short, it can't be done; I can't do
it at least."

"Why not?" said I.

"You know why not, Esther. If you were living in an unfinished house,
liable to have the roof put on or taken off--to be from top to bottom
pulled down or built up--to-morrow, next day, next week, next month,
next year--you would find it hard to rest or settle. So do I. Now?
There's no now for us suitors."

I could almost have believed in the attraction on which my poor
little wandering friend had expatiated when I saw again the darkened
look of last night. Terrible to think it had in it also a shade of
that unfortunate man who had died.

"My dear Richard," said I, "this is a bad beginning of our
conversation."

"I knew you would tell me so, Dame Durden."

"And not I alone, dear Richard. It was not I who cautioned you once
never to found a hope or expectation on the family curse."

"There you come back to John Jarndyce!" said Richard impatiently.
"Well! We must approach him sooner or later, for he is the staple of
what I have to say, and it's as well at once. My dear Esther, how can
you be so blind? Don't you see that he is an interested party and
that it may be very well for him to wish me to know nothing of the
suit, and care nothing about it, but that it may not be quite so well
for me?"

"Oh, Richard," I remonstrated, "is it possible that you can ever have
seen him and heard him, that you can ever have lived under his roof
and known him, and can yet breathe, even to me in this solitary place
where there is no one to hear us, such unworthy suspicions?"

He reddened deeply, as if his natural generosity felt a pang of
reproach. He was silent for a little while before he replied in a
subdued voice, "Esther, I am sure you know that I am not a mean
fellow and that I have some sense of suspicion and distrust being
poor qualities in one of my years."

"I know it very well," said I. "I am not more sure of anything."

"That's a dear girl," retorted Richard, "and like you, because it
gives me comfort. I had need to get some scrap of comfort out of all
this business, for it's a bad one at the best, as I have no occasion
to tell you."

"I know perfectly," said I. "I know as well, Richard--what shall I
say? as well as you do--that such misconstructions are foreign to
your nature. And I know, as well as you know, what so changes it."

"Come, sister, come," said Richard a little more gaily, "you will be
fair with me at all events. If I have the misfortune to be under that
influence, so has he. If it has a little twisted me, it may have a
little twisted him too. I don't say that he is not an honourable man,
out of all this complication and uncertainty; I am sure he is. But it
taints everybody. You know it taints everybody. You have heard him
say so fifty times. Then why should HE escape?"

"Because," said I, "his is an uncommon character, and he has
resolutely kept himself outside the circle, Richard."

"Oh, because and because!" replied Richard in his vivacious way. "I
am not sure, my dear girl, but that it may be wise and specious to
preserve that outward indifference. It may cause other parties
interested to become lax about their interests; and people may die
off, and points may drag themselves out of memory, and many things
may smoothly happen that are convenient enough."

I was so touched with pity for Richard that I could not reproach him
any more, even by a look. I remembered my guardian's gentleness
towards his errors and with what perfect freedom from resentment he
had spoken of them.

"Esther," Richard resumed, "you are not to suppose that I have come
here to make underhanded charges against John Jarndyce. I have only
come to justify myself. What I say is, it was all very well and we
got on very well while I was a boy, utterly regardless of this same
suit; but as soon as I began to take an interest in it and to look
into it, then it was quite another thing. Then John Jarndyce
discovers that Ada and I must break off and that if I don't amend
that very objectionable course, I am not fit for her. Now, Esther, I
don't mean to amend that very objectionable course: I will not hold
John Jarndyce's favour on those unfair terms of compromise, which he
has no right to dictate. Whether it pleases him or displeases him, I
must maintain my rights and Ada's. I have been thinking about it a
good deal, and this is the conclusion I have come to."

Poor dear Richard! He had indeed been thinking about it a good deal.
His face, his voice, his manner, all showed that too plainly.

"So I tell him honourably (you are to know I have written to him
about all this) that we are at issue and that we had better be at
issue openly than covertly. I thank him for his goodwill and his
protection, and he goes his road, and I go mine. The fact is, our
roads are not the same. Under one of the wills in dispute, I should
take much more than he. I don't mean to say that it is the one to be
established, but there it is, and it has its chance."

"I have not to learn from you, my dear Richard," said I, "of your
letter. I had heard of it already without an offended or angry word."

"Indeed?" replied Richard, softening. "I am glad I said he was an
honourable man, out of all this wretched affair. But I always say
that and have never doubted it. Now, my dear Esther, I know these
views of mine appear extremely harsh to you, and will to Ada when you
tell her what has passed between us. But if you had gone into the
case as I have, if you had only applied yourself to the papers as I
did when I was at Kenge's, if you only knew what an accumulation of
charges and counter-charges, and suspicions and cross-suspicions,
they involve, you would think me moderate in comparison."

"Perhaps so," said I. "But do you think that, among those many
papers, there is much truth and justice, Richard?"

"There is truth and justice somewhere in the case, Esther--"

"Or was once, long ago," said I.

"Is--is--must be somewhere," pursued Richard impetuously, "and must
be brought out. To allow Ada to be made a bribe and hush-money of is
not the way to bring it out. You say the suit is changing me; John
Jarndyce says it changes, has changed, and will change everybody who
has any share in it. Then the greater right I have on my side when I
resolve to do all I can to bring it to an end."

"All you can, Richard! Do you think that in these many years no
others have done all they could? Has the difficulty grown easier
because of so many failures?"

"It can't last for ever," returned Richard with a fierceness kindling
in him which again presented to me that last sad reminder. "I am
young and earnest, and energy and determination have done wonders
many a time. Others have only half thrown themselves into it. I
devote myself to it. I make it the object of my life."

"Oh, Richard, my dear, so much the worse, so much the worse!"

"No, no, no, don't you be afraid for me," he returned affectionately.
"You're a dear, good, wise, quiet, blessed girl; but you have your
prepossessions. So I come round to John Jarndyce. I tell you, my good
Esther, when he and I were on those terms which he found so
convenient, we were not on natural terms."

"Are division and animosity your natural terms, Richard?"

"No, I don't say that. I mean that all this business puts us on
unnatural terms, with which natural relations are incompatible. See
another reason for urging it on! I may find out when it's over that I
have been mistaken in John Jarndyce. My head may be clearer when I am
free of it, and I may then agree with what you say to-day. Very well.
Then I shall acknowledge it and make him reparation."

Everything postponed to that imaginary time! Everything held in
confusion and indecision until then!

"Now, my best of confidantes," said Richard, "I want my cousin Ada to
understand that I am not captious, fickle, and wilful about John
Jarndyce, but that I have this purpose and reason at my back. I wish
to represent myself to her through you, because she has a great
esteem and respect for her cousin John; and I know you will soften
the course I take, even though you disapprove of it; and--and in
short," said Richard, who had been hesitating through these words,
"I--I don't like to represent myself in this litigious, contentious,
doubting character to a confiding girl like Ada."

I told him that he was more like himself in those latter words than
in anything he had said yet.

"Why," acknowledged Richard, "that may be true enough, my love. I
rather feel it to be so. But I shall be able to give myself fair-play
by and by. I shall come all right again, then, don't you be afraid."

I asked him if this were all he wished me to tell Ada.

"Not quite," said Richard. "I am bound not to withhold from her that
John Jarndyce answered my letter in his usual manner, addressing me
as 'My dear Rick,' trying to argue me out of my opinions, and telling
me that they should make no difference in him. (All very well of
course, but not altering the case.) I also want Ada to know that if I
see her seldom just now, I am looking after her interests as well as
my own--we two being in the same boat exactly--and that I hope she
will not suppose from any flying rumours she may hear that I am at
all light-headed or imprudent; on the contrary, I am always looking
forward to the termination of the suit, and always planning in that
direction. Being of age now and having taken the step I have taken, I
consider myself free from any accountability to John Jarndyce; but
Ada being still a ward of the court, I don't yet ask her to renew our
engagement. When she is free to act for herself, I shall be myself
once more and we shall both be in very different worldly
circumstances, I believe. If you tell her all this with the advantage
of your considerate way, you will do me a very great and a very kind
service, my dear Esther; and I shall knock Jarndyce and Jarndyce on
the head with greater vigour. Of course I ask for no secrecy at Bleak
House."

"Richard," said I, "you place great confidence in me, but I fear you
will not take advice from me?"

"It's impossible that I can on this subject, my dear girl. On any
other, readily."

As if there were any other in his life! As if his whole career and
character were not being dyed one colour!

"But I may ask you a question, Richard?"

"I think so," said he, laughing. "I don't know who may not, if you
may not."

"You say, yourself, you are not leading a very settled life."

"How can I, my dear Esther, with nothing settled!"

"Are you in debt again?"

"Why, of course I am," said Richard, astonished at my simplicity.

"Is it of course?"

"My dear child, certainly. I can't throw myself into an object so
completely without expense. You forget, or perhaps you don't know,
that under either of the wills Ada and I take something. It's only a
question between the larger sum and the smaller. I shall be within
the mark any way. Bless your heart, my excellent girl," said Richard,
quite amused with me, "I shall be all right! I shall pull through, my
dear!"

I felt so deeply sensible of the danger in which he stood that I
tried, in Ada's name, in my guardian's, in my own, by every fervent
means that I could think of, to warn him of it and to show him some
of his mistakes. He received everything I said with patience and
gentleness, but it all rebounded from him without taking the least
effect. I could not wonder at this after the reception his
preoccupied mind had given to my guardian's letter, but I determined
to try Ada's influence yet.

So when our walk brought us round to the village again, and I went
home to breakfast, I prepared Ada for the account I was going to give
her and told her exactly what reason we had to dread that Richard was
losing himself and scattering his whole life to the winds. It made
her very unhappy, of course, though she had a far, far greater
reliance on his correcting his errors than I could have--which was so
natural and loving in my dear!--and she presently wrote him this
little letter:


   My dearest cousin,

   Esther has told me all you said to her this morning. I
   write this to repeat most earnestly for myself all that
   she said to you and to let you know how sure I am that
   you will sooner or later find our cousin John a pattern
   of truth, sincerity, and goodness, when you will deeply,
   deeply grieve to have done him (without intending it) so
   much wrong.

   I do not quite know how to write what I wish to say next,
   but I trust you will understand it as I mean it. I have
   some fears, my dearest cousin, that it may be partly for
   my sake you are now laying up so much unhappiness for
   yourself--and if for yourself, for me. In case this should
   be so, or in case you should entertain much thought of me
   in what you are doing, I most earnestly entreat and beg
   you to desist. You can do nothing for my sake that will
   make me half so happy as for ever turning your back upon
   the shadow in which we both were born. Do not be angry
   with me for saying this. Pray, pray, dear Richard, for my
   sake, and for your own, and in a natural repugnance for
   that source of trouble which had its share in making us
   both orphans when we were very young, pray, pray, let it
   go for ever. We have reason to know by this time that
   there is no good in it and no hope, that there is nothing
   to be got from it but sorrow.

   My dearest cousin, it is needless for me to say that you
   are quite free and that it is very likely you may find
   some one whom you will love much better than your first
   fancy. I am quite sure, if you will let me say so, that
   the object of your choice would greatly prefer to follow
   your fortunes far and wide, however moderate or poor, and
   see you happy, doing your duty and pursuing your chosen
   way, than to have the hope of being, or even to be, very
   rich with you (if such a thing were possible) at the cost
   of dragging years of procrastination and anxiety and of
   your indifference to other aims. You may wonder at my
   saying this so confidently with so little knowledge or
   experience, but I know it for a certainty from my own
   heart.

   Ever, my dearest cousin, your most affectionate

   Ada


This note brought Richard to us very soon, but it made little change
in him if any. We would fairly try, he said, who was right and who
was wrong--he would show us--we should see! He was animated and
glowing, as if Ada's tenderness had gratified him; but I could only
hope, with a sigh, that the letter might have some stronger effect
upon his mind on re-perusal than it assuredly had then.

As they were to remain with us that day and had taken their places to
return by the coach next morning, I sought an opportunity of speaking
to Mr. Skimpole. Our out-of-door life easily threw one in my way, and
I delicately said that there was a responsibility in encouraging
Richard.

"Responsibility, my dear Miss Summerson?" he repeated, catching at
the word with the pleasantest smile. "I am the last man in the world
for such a thing. I never was responsible in my life--I can't be."

"I am afraid everybody is obliged to be," said I timidly enough, he
being so much older and more clever than I.

"No, really?" said Mr. Skimpole, receiving this new light with a most
agreeable jocularity of surprise. "But every man's not obliged to be
solvent? I am not. I never was. See, my dear Miss Summerson," he took
a handful of loose silver and halfpence from his pocket, "there's so
much money. I have not an idea how much. I have not the power of
counting. Call it four and ninepence--call it four pound nine. They
tell me I owe more than that. I dare say I do. I dare say I owe as
much as good-natured people will let me owe. If they don't stop, why
should I? There you have Harold Skimpole in little. If that's
responsibility, I am responsible."

The perfect ease of manner with which he put the money up again and
looked at me with a smile on his refined face, as if he had been
mentioning a curious little fact about somebody else, almost made me
feel as if he really had nothing to do with it.

"Now, when you mention responsibility," he resumed, "I am disposed to
say that I never had the happiness of knowing any one whom I should
consider so refreshingly responsible as yourself. You appear to me
to be the very touchstone of responsibility. When I see you, my
dear Miss Summerson, intent upon the perfect working of the whole
little orderly system of which you are the centre, I feel inclined
to say to myself--in fact I do say to myself very often--THAT'S
responsibility!"

It was difficult, after this, to explain what I meant; but I
persisted so far as to say that we all hoped he would check and not
confirm Richard in the sanguine views he entertained just then.

"Most willingly," he retorted, "if I could. But, my dear Miss
Summerson, I have no art, no disguise. If he takes me by the hand and
leads me through Westminster Hall in an airy procession after
fortune, I must go. If he says, 'Skimpole, join the dance!' I must
join it. Common sense wouldn't, I know, but I have NO common sense."

It was very unfortunate for Richard, I said.

"Do you think so!" returned Mr. Skimpole. "Don't say that, don't say
that. Let us suppose him keeping company with Common Sense--an
excellent man--a good deal wrinkled--dreadfully practical--change for
a ten-pound note in every pocket--ruled account-book in his
hand--say, upon the whole, resembling a tax-gatherer. Our dear
Richard, sanguine, ardent, overleaping obstacles, bursting with
poetry like a young bud, says to this highly respectable companion,
'I see a golden prospect before me; it's very bright, it's very
beautiful, it's very joyous; here I go, bounding over the landscape
to come at it!' The respectable companion instantly knocks him down
with the ruled account-book; tells him in a literal, prosaic way that
he sees no such thing; shows him it's nothing but fees, fraud,
horsehair wigs, and black gowns. Now you know that's a painful
change--sensible in the last degree, I have no doubt, but
disagreeable. I can't do it. I haven't got the ruled account-book, I
have none of the tax-gathering elements in my composition, I am not
at all respectable, and I don't want to be. Odd perhaps, but so it
is!"

It was idle to say more, so I proposed that we should join Ada and
Richard, who were a little in advance, and I gave up Mr. Skimpole in
despair. He had been over the Hall in the course of the morning and
whimsically described the family pictures as we walked. There were
such portentous shepherdesses among the Ladies Dedlock dead and gone,
he told us, that peaceful crooks became weapons of assault in their
hands. They tended their flocks severely in buckram and powder and
put their sticking-plaster patches on to terrify commoners as the
chiefs of some other tribes put on their war-paint. There was a Sir
Somebody Dedlock, with a battle, a sprung-mine, volumes of smoke,
flashes of lightning, a town on fire, and a stormed fort, all in full
action between his horse's two hind legs, showing, he supposed, how
little a Dedlock made of such trifles. The whole race he represented
as having evidently been, in life, what he called "stuffed people"--a
large collection, glassy eyed, set up in the most approved manner on
their various twigs and perches, very correct, perfectly free from
animation, and always in glass cases.

I was not so easy now during any reference to the name but that I
felt it a relief when Richard, with an exclamation of surprise,
hurried away to meet a stranger whom he first descried coming slowly
towards us.

"Dear me!" said Mr. Skimpole. "Vholes!"

We asked if that were a friend of Richard's.

"Friend and legal adviser," said Mr. Skimpole. "Now, my dear Miss
Summerson, if you want common sense, responsibility, and
respectability, all united--if you want an exemplary man--Vholes is
THE man."

We had not known, we said, that Richard was assisted by any gentleman
of that name.

"When he emerged from legal infancy," returned Mr. Skimpole, "he
parted from our conversational friend Kenge and took up, I believe,
with Vholes. Indeed, I know he did, because I introduced him to
Vholes."

"Had you known him long?" asked Ada.

"Vholes? My dear Miss Clare, I had had that kind of acquaintance with
him which I have had with several gentlemen of his profession. He had
done something or other in a very agreeable, civil manner--taken
proceedings, I think, is the expression--which ended in the
proceeding of his taking ME. Somebody was so good as to step in and
pay the money--something and fourpence was the amount; I forget the
pounds and shillings, but I know it ended with fourpence, because it
struck me at the time as being so odd that I could owe anybody
fourpence--and after that I brought them together. Vholes asked me
for the introduction, and I gave it. Now I come to think of it," he
looked inquiringly at us with his frankest smile as he made the
discovery, "Vholes bribed me, perhaps? He gave me something and
called it commission. Was it a five-pound note? Do you know, I think
it MUST have been a five-pound note!"

His further consideration of the point was prevented by Richard's
coming back to us in an excited state and hastily representing Mr.
Vholes--a sallow man with pinched lips that looked as if they were
cold, a red eruption here and there upon his face, tall and thin,
about fifty years of age, high-shouldered, and stooping. Dressed in
black, black-gloved, and buttoned to the chin, there was nothing so
remarkable in him as a lifeless manner and a slow, fixed way he had
of looking at Richard.

"I hope I don't disturb you, ladies," said Mr. Vholes, and now I
observed that he was further remarkable for an inward manner of
speaking. "I arranged with Mr. Carstone that he should always know
when his cause was in the Chancellor's paper, and being informed by
one of my clerks last night after post time that it stood, rather
unexpectedly, in the paper for to-morrow, I put myself into the coach
early this morning and came down to confer with him."

"Yes," said Richard, flushed, and looking triumphantly at Ada and me,
"we don't do these things in the old slow way now. We spin along now!
Mr. Vholes, we must hire something to get over to the post town in,
and catch the mail to-night, and go up by it!"

"Anything you please, sir," returned Mr. Vholes. "I am quite at your
service."

"Let me see," said Richard, looking at his watch. "If I run down to
the Dedlock, and get my portmanteau fastened up, and order a gig, or
a chaise, or whatever's to be got, we shall have an hour then before
starting. I'll come back to tea. Cousin Ada, will you and Esther take
care of Mr. Vholes when I am gone?"

He was away directly, in his heat and hurry, and was soon lost in the
dusk of evening. We who were left walked on towards the house.

"Is Mr. Carstone's presence necessary to-morrow, Sir?" said I. "Can
it do any good?"

"No, miss," Mr. Vholes replied. "I am not aware that it can."

Both Ada and I expressed our regret that he should go, then, only to
be disappointed.

"Mr. Carstone has laid down the principle of watching his own
interests," said Mr. Vholes, "and when a client lays down his own
principle, and it is not immoral, it devolves upon me to carry it
out. I wish in business to be exact and open. I am a widower with
three daughters--Emma, Jane, and Caroline--and my desire is so to
discharge the duties of life as to leave them a good name. This
appears to be a pleasant spot, miss."

The remark being made to me in consequence of my being next him as we
walked, I assented and enumerated its chief attractions.

"Indeed?" said Mr. Vholes. "I have the privilege of supporting an
aged father in the Vale of Taunton--his native place--and I admire
that country very much. I had no idea there was anything so
attractive here."

To keep up the conversation, I asked Mr. Vholes if he would like to
live altogether in the country.

"There, miss," said he, "you touch me on a tender string. My health
is not good (my digestion being much impaired), and if I had only
myself to consider, I should take refuge in rural habits, especially
as the cares of business have prevented me from ever coming much into
contact with general society, and particularly with ladies' society,
which I have most wished to mix in. But with my three daughters,
Emma, Jane, and Caroline--and my aged father--I cannot afford to be
selfish. It is true I have no longer to maintain a dear grandmother
who died in her hundred and second year, but enough remains to render
it indispensable that the mill should be always going."

It required some attention to hear him on account of his inward
speaking and his lifeless manner.

"You will excuse my having mentioned my daughters," he said. "They
are my weak point. I wish to leave the poor girls some little
independence, as well as a good name."

We now arrived at Mr. Boythorn's house, where the tea-table, all
prepared, was awaiting us. Richard came in restless and hurried
shortly afterwards, and leaning over Mr. Vholes's chair, whispered
something in his ear. Mr. Vholes replied aloud--or as nearly aloud I
suppose as he had ever replied to anything--"You will drive me, will
you, sir? It is all the same to me, sir. Anything you please. I am
quite at your service."

We understood from what followed that Mr. Skimpole was to be left
until the morning to occupy the two places which had been already
paid for. As Ada and I were both in low spirits concerning Richard
and very sorry so to part with him, we made it as plain as we
politely could that we should leave Mr. Skimpole to the Dedlock Arms
and retire when the night-travellers were gone.

Richard's high spirits carrying everything before them, we all went
out together to the top of the hill above the village, where he had
ordered a gig to wait and where we found a man with a lantern
standing at the head of the gaunt pale horse that had been harnessed
to it.

I never shall forget those two seated side by side in the lantern's
light, Richard all flush and fire and laughter, with the reins in his
hand; Mr. Vholes quite still, black-gloved, and buttoned up, looking
at him as if he were looking at his prey and charming it. I have
before me the whole picture of the warm dark night, the summer
lightning, the dusty track of road closed in by hedgerows and high
trees, the gaunt pale horse with his ears pricked up, and the driving
away at speed to Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

My dear girl told me that night how Richard's being thereafter
prosperous or ruined, befriended or deserted, could only make this
difference to her, that the more he needed love from one unchanging
heart, the more love that unchanging heart would have to give him;
how he thought of her through his present errors, and she would think
of him at all times--never of herself if she could devote herself to
him, never of her own delights if she could minister to his.

And she kept her word?

I look along the road before me, where the distance already shortens
and the journey's end is growing visible; and true and good above the
dead sea of the Chancery suit and all the ashy fruit it cast ashore,
I think I see my darling.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

A Struggle


When our time came for returning to Bleak House again, we were
punctual to the day and were received with an overpowering welcome. I
was perfectly restored to health and strength, and finding my
housekeeping keys laid ready for me in my room, rang myself in as if
I had been a new year, with a merry little peal. "Once more, duty,
duty, Esther," said I; "and if you are not overjoyed to do it, more
than cheerfully and contentedly, through anything and everything, you
ought to be. That's all I have to say to you, my dear!"

The first few mornings were mornings of so much bustle and business,
devoted to such settlements of accounts, such repeated journeys to
and fro between the growlery and all other parts of the house, so
many rearrangements of drawers and presses, and such a general new
beginning altogether, that I had not a moment's leisure. But when
these arrangements were completed and everything was in order, I paid
a visit of a few hours to London, which something in the letter I had
destroyed at Chesney Wold had induced me to decide upon in my own
mind.

I made Caddy Jellyby--her maiden name was so natural to me that I
always called her by it--the pretext for this visit and wrote her a
note previously asking the favour of her company on a little business
expedition. Leaving home very early in the morning, I got to London
by stage-coach in such good time that I got to Newman Street with the
day before me.

Caddy, who had not seen me since her wedding-day, was so glad and so
affectionate that I was half inclined to fear I should make her
husband jealous. But he was, in his way, just as bad--I mean as good;
and in short it was the old story, and nobody would leave me any
possibility of doing anything meritorious.

The elder Mr. Turveydrop was in bed, I found, and Caddy was
milling his chocolate, which a melancholy little boy who was an
apprentice--it seemed such a curious thing to be apprenticed to the
trade of dancing--was waiting to carry upstairs. Her father-in-law
was extremely kind and considerate, Caddy told me, and they lived
most happily together. (When she spoke of their living together, she
meant that the old gentleman had all the good things and all the good
lodging, while she and her husband had what they could get, and were
poked into two corner rooms over the Mews.)

"And how is your mama, Caddy?" said I.

"Why, I hear of her, Esther," replied Caddy, "through Pa, but I see
very little of her. We are good friends, I am glad to say, but Ma
thinks there is something absurd in my having married a
dancing-master, and she is rather afraid of its extending to her."

It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural
duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope
in search of others, she would have taken the best precautions
against becoming absurd, but I need scarcely observe that I kept this
to myself.

"And your papa, Caddy?"

"He comes here every evening," returned Caddy, "and is so fond of
sitting in the corner there that it's a treat to see him."

Looking at the corner, I plainly perceived the mark of Mr. Jellyby's
head against the wall. It was consolatory to know that he had found
such a resting-place for it.

"And you, Caddy," said I, "you are always busy, I'll be bound?"

"Well, my dear," returned Caddy, "I am indeed, for to tell you a
grand secret, I am qualifying myself to give lessons. Prince's health
is not strong, and I want to be able to assist him. What with
schools, and classes here, and private pupils, AND the apprentices,
he really has too much to do, poor fellow!"

The notion of the apprentices was still so odd to me that I asked
Caddy if there were many of them.

"Four," said Caddy. "One in-door, and three out. They are
very good children; only when they get together they WILL
play--children-like--instead of attending to their work. So the
little boy you saw just now waltzes by himself in the empty kitchen,
and we distribute the others over the house as well as we can."

"That is only for their steps, of course?" said I.

"Only for their steps," said Caddy. "In that way they practise, so
many hours at a time, whatever steps they happen to be upon. They
dance in the academy, and at this time of year we do figures at five
every morning."

"Why, what a laborious life!" I exclaimed.

"I assure you, my dear," returned Caddy, smiling, "when the out-door
apprentices ring us up in the morning (the bell rings into our room,
not to disturb old Mr. Turveydrop), and when I put up the window and
see them standing on the door-step with their little pumps under
their arms, I am actually reminded of the Sweeps."

All this presented the art to me in a singular light, to be sure.
Caddy enjoyed the effect of her communication and cheerfully
recounted the particulars of her own studies.

"You see, my dear, to save expense I ought to know something of the
piano, and I ought to know something of the kit too, and consequently
I have to practise those two instruments as well as the details of
our profession. If Ma had been like anybody else, I might have had
some little musical knowledge to begin upon. However, I hadn't any;
and that part of the work is, at first, a little discouraging, I must
allow. But I have a very good ear, and I am used to drudgery--I have
to thank Ma for that, at all events--and where there's a will there's
a way, you know, Esther, the world over." Saying these words, Caddy
laughingly sat down at a little jingling square piano and really
rattled off a quadrille with great spirit. Then she good-humouredly
and blushingly got up again, and while she still laughed herself,
said, "Don't laugh at me, please; that's a dear girl!"

I would sooner have cried, but I did neither. I encouraged her and
praised her with all my heart. For I conscientiously believed,
dancing-master's wife though she was, and dancing-mistress though in
her limited ambition she aspired to be, she had struck out a natural,
wholesome, loving course of industry and perseverance that was quite
as good as a mission.

"My dear," said Caddy, delighted, "you can't think how you cheer me.
I shall owe you, you don't know how much. What changes, Esther, even
in my small world! You recollect that first night, when I was so
unpolite and inky? Who would have thought, then, of my ever teaching
people to dance, of all other possibilities and impossibilities!"

Her husband, who had left us while we had this chat, now coming back,
preparatory to exercising the apprentices in the ball-room, Caddy
informed me she was quite at my disposal. But it was not my time yet,
I was glad to tell her, for I should have been vexed to take her away
then. Therefore we three adjourned to the apprentices together, and I
made one in the dance.

The apprentices were the queerest little people. Besides the
melancholy boy, who, I hoped, had not been made so by waltzing alone
in the empty kitchen, there were two other boys and one dirty little
limp girl in a gauzy dress. Such a precocious little girl, with such
a dowdy bonnet on (that, too, of a gauzy texture), who brought her
sandalled shoes in an old threadbare velvet reticule. Such mean
little boys, when they were not dancing, with string, and marbles,
and cramp-bones in their pockets, and the most untidy legs and
feet--and heels particularly.

I asked Caddy what had made their parents choose this profession for
them. Caddy said she didn't know; perhaps they were designed for
teachers, perhaps for the stage. They were all people in humble
circumstances, and the melancholy boy's mother kept a ginger-beer
shop.

We danced for an hour with great gravity, the melancholy child doing
wonders with his lower extremities, in which there appeared to be
some sense of enjoyment though it never rose above his waist. Caddy,
while she was observant of her husband and was evidently founded upon
him, had acquired a grace and self-possession of her own, which,
united to her pretty face and figure, was uncommonly agreeable. She
already relieved him of much of the instruction of these young
people, and he seldom interfered except to walk his part in the
figure if he had anything to do in it. He always played the tune. The
affectation of the gauzy child, and her condescension to the boys,
was a sight. And thus we danced an hour by the clock.

When the practice was concluded, Caddy's husband made himself ready
to go out of town to a school, and Caddy ran away to get ready to go
out with me. I sat in the ball-room in the interval, contemplating
the apprentices. The two out-door boys went upon the staircase to put
on their half-boots and pull the in-door boy's hair, as I judged from
the nature of his objections. Returning with their jackets buttoned
and their pumps stuck in them, they then produced packets of cold
bread and meat and bivouacked under a painted lyre on the wall. The
little gauzy child, having whisked her sandals into the reticule and
put on a trodden-down pair of shoes, shook her head into the dowdy
bonnet at one shake, and answering my inquiry whether she liked
dancing by replying, "Not with boys," tied it across her chin, and
went home contemptuous.

"Old Mr. Turveydrop is so sorry," said Caddy, "that he has not
finished dressing yet and cannot have the pleasure of seeing you
before you go. You are such a favourite of his, Esther."

I expressed myself much obliged to him, but did not think it
necessary to add that I readily dispensed with this attention.

"It takes him a long time to dress," said Caddy, "because he is very
much looked up to in such things, you know, and has a reputation to
support. You can't think how kind he is to Pa. He talks to Pa of an
evening about the Prince Regent, and I never saw Pa so interested."

There was something in the picture of Mr. Turveydrop bestowing his
deportment on Mr. Jellyby that quite took my fancy. I asked Caddy if
he brought her papa out much.

"No," said Caddy, "I don't know that he does that, but he talks to
Pa, and Pa greatly admires him, and listens, and likes it. Of course
I am aware that Pa has hardly any claims to deportment, but they get
on together delightfully. You can't think what good companions they
make. I never saw Pa take snuff before in my life, but he takes one
pinch out of Mr. Turveydrop's box regularly and keeps putting it to
his nose and taking it away again all the evening."

That old Mr. Turveydrop should ever, in the chances and changes of
life, have come to the rescue of Mr. Jellyby from Borrioboola-Gha
appeared to me to be one of the pleasantest of oddities.

"As to Peepy," said Caddy with a little hesitation, "whom I was most
afraid of--next to having any family of my own, Esther--as an
inconvenience to Mr. Turveydrop, the kindness of the old gentleman to
that child is beyond everything. He asks to see him, my dear! He lets
him take the newspaper up to him in bed; he gives him the crusts of
his toast to eat; he sends him on little errands about the house; he
tells him to come to me for sixpences. In short," said Caddy
cheerily, "and not to prose, I am a very fortunate girl and ought to
be very grateful. Where are we going, Esther?"

"To the Old Street Road," said I, "where I have a few words to say to
the solicitor's clerk who was sent to meet me at the coach-office on
the very day when I came to London and first saw you, my dear. Now I
think of it, the gentleman who brought us to your house."

"Then, indeed, I seem to be naturally the person to go with you,"
returned Caddy.

To the Old Street Road we went and there inquired at Mrs. Guppy's
residence for Mrs. Guppy. Mrs. Guppy, occupying the parlours and
having indeed been visibly in danger of cracking herself like a nut
in the front-parlour door by peeping out before she was asked for,
immediately presented herself and requested us to walk in. She was an
old lady in a large cap, with rather a red nose and rather an
unsteady eye, but smiling all over. Her close little sitting-room was
prepared for a visit, and there was a portrait of her son in it
which, I had almost written here, was more like than life: it
insisted upon him with such obstinacy, and was so determined not to
let him off.

Not only was the portrait there, but we found the original there too.
He was dressed in a great many colours and was discovered at a table
reading law-papers with his forefinger to his forehead.

"Miss Summerson," said Mr. Guppy, rising, "this is indeed an oasis.
Mother, will you be so good as to put a chair for the other lady and
get out of the gangway."

Mrs. Guppy, whose incessant smiling gave her quite a waggish
appearance, did as her son requested and then sat down in a corner,
holding her pocket handkerchief to her chest, like a fomentation,
with both hands.

I presented Caddy, and Mr. Guppy said that any friend of mine was
more than welcome. I then proceeded to the object of my visit.

"I took the liberty of sending you a note, sir," said I.

Mr. Guppy acknowledged the receipt by taking it out of his
breast-pocket, putting it to his lips, and returning it to his pocket
with a bow. Mr. Guppy's mother was so diverted that she rolled her
head as she smiled and made a silent appeal to Caddy with her elbow.

"Could I speak to you alone for a moment?" said I.

Anything like the jocoseness of Mr. Guppy's mother just now, I think
I never saw. She made no sound of laughter, but she rolled her head,
and shook it, and put her handkerchief to her mouth, and appealed to
Caddy with her elbow, and her hand, and her shoulder, and was so
unspeakably entertained altogether that it was with some difficulty
she could marshal Caddy through the little folding-door into her
bedroom adjoining.

"Miss Summerson," said Mr. Guppy, "you will excuse the waywardness of
a parent ever mindful of a son's appiness. My mother, though highly
exasperating to the feelings, is actuated by maternal dictates."

I could hardly have believed that anybody could in a moment have
turned so red or changed so much as Mr. Guppy did when I now put up
my veil.

"I asked the favour of seeing you for a few moments here," said I,
"in preference to calling at Mr. Kenge's because, remembering what
you said on an occasion when you spoke to me in confidence, I feared
I might otherwise cause you some embarrassment, Mr. Guppy."

I caused him embarrassment enough as it was, I am sure. I never saw
such faltering, such confusion, such amazement and apprehension.

"Miss Summerson," stammered Mr. Guppy, "I--I--beg your pardon, but in
our profession--we--we--find it necessary to be explicit. You have
referred to an occasion, miss, when I--when I did myself the honour
of making a declaration which--"

Something seemed to rise in his throat that he could not possibly
swallow. He put his hand there, coughed, made faces, tried again to
swallow it, coughed again, made faces again, looked all round the
room, and fluttered his papers.

"A kind of giddy sensation has come upon me, miss," he explained,
"which rather knocks me over. I--er--a little subject to this sort of
thing--er--by George!"

I gave him a little time to recover. He consumed it in putting his
hand to his forehead and taking it away again, and in backing his
chair into the corner behind him.

"My intention was to remark, miss," said Mr. Guppy, "dear
me--something bronchial, I think--hem!--to remark that you was so
good on that occasion as to repel and repudiate that declaration.
You--you wouldn't perhaps object to admit that? Though no witnesses
are present, it might be a satisfaction to--to your mind--if you was
to put in that admission."

"There can be no doubt," said I, "that I declined your proposal
without any reservation or qualification whatever, Mr. Guppy."

"Thank you, miss," he returned, measuring the table with his troubled
hands. "So far that's satisfactory, and it does you credit. Er--this
is certainly bronchial!--must be in the tubes--er--you wouldn't
perhaps be offended if I was to mention--not that it's necessary, for
your own good sense or any person's sense must show 'em that--if I
was to mention that such declaration on my part was final, and there
terminated?"

"I quite understand that," said I.

"Perhaps--er--it may not be worth the form, but it might be a
satisfaction to your mind--perhaps you wouldn't object to admit that,
miss?" said Mr. Guppy.

"I admit it most fully and freely," said I.

"Thank you," returned Mr. Guppy. "Very honourable, I am sure. I
regret that my arrangements in life, combined with circumstances over
which I have no control, will put it out of my power ever to fall
back upon that offer or to renew it in any shape or form whatever,
but it will ever be a retrospect entwined--er--with friendship's
bowers." Mr. Guppy's bronchitis came to his relief and stopped his
measurement of the table.

"I may now perhaps mention what I wished to say to you?" I began.

"I shall be honoured, I am sure," said Mr. Guppy. "I am so persuaded
that your own good sense and right feeling, miss, will--will keep you
as square as possible--that I can have nothing but pleasure, I am
sure, in hearing any observations you may wish to offer."

"You were so good as to imply, on that occasion--"

"Excuse me, miss," said Mr. Guppy, "but we had better not travel out
of the record into implication. I cannot admit that I implied
anything."

"You said on that occasion," I recommenced, "that you might possibly
have the means of advancing my interests and promoting my fortunes by
making discoveries of which I should be the subject. I presume that
you founded that belief upon your general knowledge of my being an
orphan girl, indebted for everything to the benevolence of Mr.
Jarndyce. Now, the beginning and the end of what I have come to beg
of you is, Mr. Guppy, that you will have the kindness to relinquish
all idea of so serving me. I have thought of this sometimes, and I
have thought of it most lately--since I have been ill. At length I
have decided, in case you should at any time recall that purpose and
act upon it in any way, to come to you and assure you that you are
altogether mistaken. You could make no discovery in reference to me
that would do me the least service or give me the least pleasure. I
am acquainted with my personal history, and I have it in my power to
assure you that you never can advance my welfare by such means. You
may, perhaps, have abandoned this project a long time. If so, excuse
my giving you unnecessary trouble. If not, I entreat you, on the
assurance I have given you, henceforth to lay it aside. I beg you to
do this, for my peace."

"I am bound to confess," said Mr. Guppy, "that you express yourself,
miss, with that good sense and right feeling for which I gave you
credit. Nothing can be more satisfactory than such right feeling, and
if I mistook any intentions on your part just now, I am prepared to
tender a full apology. I should wish to be understood, miss, as
hereby offering that apology--limiting it, as your own good sense and
right feeling will point out the necessity of, to the present
proceedings."

I must say for Mr. Guppy that the snuffling manner he had had upon
him improved very much. He seemed truly glad to be able to do
something I asked, and he looked ashamed.

"If you will allow me to finish what I have to say at once so that I
may have no occasion to resume," I went on, seeing him about to
speak, "you will do me a kindness, sir. I come to you as privately as
possible because you announced this impression of yours to me in a
confidence which I have really wished to respect--and which I always
have respected, as you remember. I have mentioned my illness. There
really is no reason why I should hesitate to say that I know very
well that any little delicacy I might have had in making a request to
you is quite removed. Therefore I make the entreaty I have now
preferred, and I hope you will have sufficient consideration for me
to accede to it."

I must do Mr. Guppy the further justice of saying that he had looked
more and more ashamed and that he looked most ashamed and very
earnest when he now replied with a burning face, "Upon my word and
honour, upon my life, upon my soul, Miss Summerson, as I am a living
man, I'll act according to your wish! I'll never go another step in
opposition to it. I'll take my oath to it if it will be any
satisfaction to you. In what I promise at this present time touching
the matters now in question," continued Mr. Guppy rapidly, as if he
were repeating a familiar form of words, "I speak the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so--"

"I am quite satisfied," said I, rising at this point, "and I thank
you very much. Caddy, my dear, I am ready!"

Mr. Guppy's mother returned with Caddy (now making me the recipient
of her silent laughter and her nudges), and we took our leave. Mr.
Guppy saw us to the door with the air of one who was either
imperfectly awake or walking in his sleep; and we left him there,
staring.

But in a minute he came after us down the street without any hat, and
with his long hair all blown about, and stopped us, saying fervently,
"Miss Summerson, upon my honour and soul, you may depend upon me!"

"I do," said I, "quite confidently."

"I beg your pardon, miss," said Mr. Guppy, going with one leg and
staying with the other, "but this lady being present--your own
witness--it might be a satisfaction to your mind (which I should wish
to set at rest) if you was to repeat those admissions."

"Well, Caddy," said I, turning to her, "perhaps you will not be
surprised when I tell you, my dear, that there never has been any
engagement--"

"No proposal or promise of marriage whatsoever," suggested Mr. Guppy.

"No proposal or promise of marriage whatsoever," said I, "between
this gentleman--"

"William Guppy, of Penton Place, Pentonville, in the county of
Middlesex," he murmured.

"Between this gentleman, Mr. William Guppy, of Penton Place,
Pentonville, in the county of Middlesex, and myself."

"Thank you, miss," said Mr. Guppy. "Very full--er--excuse me--lady's
name, Christian and surname both?"

I gave them.

"Married woman, I believe?" said Mr. Guppy. "Married woman. Thank
you. Formerly Caroline Jellyby, spinster, then of Thavies Inn, within
the city of London, but extra-parochial; now of Newman Street, Oxford
Street. Much obliged."

He ran home and came running back again.

"Touching that matter, you know, I really and truly am very sorry
that my arrangements in life, combined with circumstances over which
I have no control, should prevent a renewal of what was wholly
terminated some time back," said Mr. Guppy to me forlornly and
despondently, "but it couldn't be. Now COULD it, you know! I only put
it to you."

I replied it certainly could not. The subject did not admit of a
doubt. He thanked me and ran to his mother's again--and back again.

"It's very honourable of you, miss, I am sure," said Mr. Guppy. "If
an altar could be erected in the bowers of friendship--but, upon my
soul, you may rely upon me in every respect save and except the
tender passion only!"

The struggle in Mr. Guppy's breast and the numerous oscillations it
occasioned him between his mother's door and us were sufficiently
conspicuous in the windy street (particularly as his hair wanted
cutting) to make us hurry away. I did so with a lightened heart; but
when we last looked back, Mr. Guppy was still oscillating in the same
troubled state of mind.




CHAPTER XXXIX

Attorney and Client


The name of Mr. Vholes, preceded by the legend Ground-Floor, is
inscribed upon a door-post in Symond's Inn, Chancery Lane--a little,
pale, wall-eyed, woebegone inn like a large dust-binn of two
compartments and a sifter. It looks as if Symond were a sparing man
in his way and constructed his inn of old building materials which
took kindly to the dry rot and to dirt and all things decaying and
dismal, and perpetuated Symond's memory with congenial shabbiness.
Quartered in this dingy hatchment commemorative of Symond are the
legal bearings of Mr. Vholes.

Mr. Vholes's office, in disposition retiring and in situation
retired, is squeezed up in a corner and blinks at a dead wall. Three
feet of knotty-floored dark passage bring the client to Mr. Vholes's
jet-black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the brightest
midsummer morning and encumbered by a black bulk-head of cellarage
staircase against which belated civilians generally strike their
brows. Mr. Vholes's chambers are on so small a scale that one clerk
can open the door without getting off his stool, while the other who
elbows him at the same desk has equal facilities for poking the fire.
A smell as of unwholesome sheep blending with the smell of must and
dust is referable to the nightly (and often daily) consumption of
mutton fat in candles and to the fretting of parchment forms and
skins in greasy drawers. The atmosphere is otherwise stale and close.
The place was last painted or whitewashed beyond the memory of man,
and the two chimneys smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of
soot everywhere, and the dull cracked windows in their heavy frames
have but one piece of character in them, which is a determination to
be always dirty and always shut unless coerced. This accounts for the
phenomenon of the weaker of the two usually having a bundle of
firewood thrust between its jaws in hot weather.

Mr. Vholes is a very respectable man. He has not a large business,
but he is a very respectable man. He is allowed by the greater
attorneys who have made good fortunes or are making them to be a most
respectable man. He never misses a chance in his practice, which is a
mark of respectability. He never takes any pleasure, which is another
mark of respectability. He is reserved and serious, which is another
mark of respectability. His digestion is impaired, which is highly
respectable. And he is making hay of the grass which is flesh, for
his three daughters. And his father is dependent on him in the Vale
of Taunton.

The one great principle of the English law is to make business for
itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and
consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by
this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze
the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive
that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their
expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.

But not perceiving this quite plainly--only seeing it by halves in a
confused way--the laity sometimes suffer in peace and pocket, with a
bad grace, and DO grumble very much. Then this respectability of Mr.
Vholes is brought into powerful play against them. "Repeal this
statute, my good sir?" says Mr. Kenge to a smarting client. "Repeal
it, my dear sir? Never, with my consent. Alter this law, sir, and
what will be the effect of your rash proceeding on a class of
practitioners very worthily represented, allow me to say to you, by
the opposite attorney in the case, Mr. Vholes? Sir, that class of
practitioners would be swept from the face of the earth. Now you
cannot afford--I will say, the social system cannot afford--to lose
an order of men like Mr. Vholes. Diligent, persevering, steady, acute
in business. My dear sir, I understand your present feelings against
the existing state of things, which I grant to be a little hard in
your case; but I can never raise my voice for the demolition of a
class of men like Mr. Vholes." The respectability of Mr. Vholes has
even been cited with crushing effect before Parliamentary committees,
as in the following blue minutes of a distinguished attorney's
evidence. "Question (number five hundred and seventeen thousand eight
hundred and sixty-nine): If I understand you, these forms of practice
indisputably occasion delay? Answer: Yes, some delay. Question: And
great expense? Answer: Most assuredly they cannot be gone through for
nothing. Question: And unspeakable vexation? Answer: I am not
prepared to say that. They have never given ME any vexation; quite
the contrary. Question: But you think that their abolition would
damage a class of practitioners? Answer: I have no doubt of it.
Question: Can you instance any type of that class? Answer: Yes. I
would unhesitatingly mention Mr. Vholes. He would be ruined.
Question: Mr. Vholes is considered, in the profession, a respectable
man? Answer:"--which proved fatal to the inquiry for ten years--"Mr.
Vholes is considered, in the profession, a MOST respectable man."

So in familiar conversation, private authorities no less
disinterested will remark that they don't know what this age is
coming to, that we are plunging down precipices, that now here is
something else gone, that these changes are death to people like
Vholes--a man of undoubted respectability, with a father in the Vale
of Taunton, and three daughters at home. Take a few steps more in
this direction, say they, and what is to become of Vholes's father?
Is he to perish? And of Vholes's daughters? Are they to be
shirt-makers, or governesses? As though, Mr. Vholes and his relations
being minor cannibal chiefs and it being proposed to abolish
cannibalism, indignant champions were to put the case thus: Make
man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses!

In a word, Mr. Vholes, with his three daughters and his father in the
Vale of Taunton, is continually doing duty, like a piece of timber,
to shore up some decayed foundation that has become a pitfall and a
nuisance. And with a great many people in a great many instances, the
question is never one of a change from wrong to right (which is quite
an extraneous consideration), but is always one of injury or
advantage to that eminently respectable legion, Vholes.

The Chancellor is, within these ten minutes, "up" for the long
vacation. Mr. Vholes, and his young client, and several blue bags
hastily stuffed out of all regularity of form, as the larger sort of
serpents are in their first gorged state, have returned to the
official den. Mr. Vholes, quiet and unmoved, as a man of so much
respectability ought to be, takes off his close black gloves as if he
were skinning his hands, lifts off his tight hat as if he were
scalping himself, and sits down at his desk. The client throws his
hat and gloves upon the ground--tosses them anywhere, without looking
after them or caring where they go; flings himself into a chair, half
sighing and half groaning; rests his aching head upon his hand and
looks the portrait of young despair.

"Again nothing done!" says Richard. "Nothing, nothing done!"

"Don't say nothing done, sir," returns the placid Vholes. "That is
scarcely fair, sir, scarcely fair!"

"Why, what IS done?" says Richard, turning gloomily upon him.

"That may not be the whole question," returns Vholes, "The question
may branch off into what is doing, what is doing?"

"And what is doing?" asks the moody client.

Vholes, sitting with his arms on the desk, quietly bringing the tips
of his five right fingers to meet the tips of his five left fingers,
and quietly separating them again, and fixedly and slowly looking at
his client, replies, "A good deal is doing, sir. We have put our
shoulders to the wheel, Mr. Carstone, and the wheel is going round."

"Yes, with Ixion on it. How am I to get through the next four or five
accursed months?" exclaims the young man, rising from his chair and
walking about the room.

"Mr. C.," returns Vholes, following him close with his eyes wherever
he goes, "your spirits are hasty, and I am sorry for it on your
account. Excuse me if I recommend you not to chafe so much, not to be
so impetuous, not to wear yourself out so. You should have more
patience. You should sustain yourself better."

"I ought to imitate you, in fact, Mr. Vholes?" says Richard, sitting
down again with an impatient laugh and beating the devil's tattoo
with his boot on the patternless carpet.

"Sir," returns Vholes, always looking at the client as if he were
making a lingering meal of him with his eyes as well as with his
professional appetite. "Sir," returns Vholes with his inward manner
of speech and his bloodless quietude, "I should not have had the
presumption to propose myself as a model for your imitation or any
man's. Let me but leave the good name to my three daughters, and that
is enough for me; I am not a self-seeker. But since you mention me so
pointedly, I will acknowledge that I should like to impart to you a
little of my--come, sir, you are disposed to call it insensibility,
and I am sure I have no objection--say insensibility--a little of my
insensibility."

"Mr. Vholes," explains the client, somewhat abashed, "I had no
intention to accuse you of insensibility."

"I think you had, sir, without knowing it," returns the equable
Vholes. "Very naturally. It is my duty to attend to your interests
with a cool head, and I can quite understand that to your excited
feelings I may appear, at such times as the present, insensible. My
daughters may know me better; my aged father may know me better. But
they have known me much longer than you have, and the confiding eye
of affection is not the distrustful eye of business. Not that I
complain, sir, of the eye of business being distrustful; quite the
contrary. In attending to your interests, I wish to have all possible
checks upon me; it is right that I should have them; I court inquiry.
But your interests demand that I should be cool and methodical, Mr.
Carstone; and I cannot be otherwise--no, sir, not even to please
you."

Mr. Vholes, after glancing at the official cat who is patiently
watching a mouse's hole, fixes his charmed gaze again on his young
client and proceeds in his buttoned-up, half-audible voice as if
there were an unclean spirit in him that will neither come out nor
speak out, "What are you to do, sir, you inquire, during the
vacation. I should hope you gentlemen of the army may find many means
of amusing yourselves if you give your minds to it. If you had asked
me what I was to do during the vacation, I could have answered you
more readily. I am to attend to your interests. I am to be found
here, day by day, attending to your interests. That is my duty, Mr.
C., and term-time or vacation makes no difference to me. If you wish
to consult me as to your interests, you will find me here at all
times alike. Other professional men go out of town. I don't. Not that
I blame them for going; I merely say I don't go. This desk is your
rock, sir!"

Mr. Vholes gives it a rap, and it sounds as hollow as a coffin. Not
to Richard, though. There is encouragement in the sound to him.
Perhaps Mr. Vholes knows there is.

"I am perfectly aware, Mr. Vholes," says Richard, more familiarly and
good-humouredly, "that you are the most reliable fellow in the world
and that to have to do with you is to have to do with a man of
business who is not to be hoodwinked. But put yourself in my case,
dragging on this dislocated life, sinking deeper and deeper into
difficulty every day, continually hoping and continually
disappointed, conscious of change upon change for the worse in
myself, and of no change for the better in anything else, and you
will find it a dark-looking case sometimes, as I do."

"You know," says Mr. Vholes, "that I never give hopes, sir. I told
you from the first, Mr. C., that I never give hopes. Particularly in
a case like this, where the greater part of the costs comes out of
the estate, I should not be considerate of my good name if I gave
hopes. It might seem as if costs were my object. Still, when you say
there is no change for the better, I must, as a bare matter of fact,
deny that."

"Aye?" returns Richard, brightening. "But how do you make it out?"

"Mr. Carstone, you are represented by--"

"You said just now--a rock."

"Yes, sir," says Mr. Vholes, gently shaking his head and rapping the
hollow desk, with a sound as if ashes were falling on ashes, and dust
on dust, "a rock. That's something. You are separately represented,
and no longer hidden and lost in the interests of others. THAT'S
something. The suit does not sleep; we wake it up, we air it, we walk
it about. THAT'S something. It's not all Jarndyce, in fact as well as
in name. THAT'S something. Nobody has it all his own way now, sir.
And THAT'S something, surely."

Richard, his face flushing suddenly, strikes the desk with his
clenched hand.

"Mr. Vholes! If any man had told me when I first went to John
Jarndyce's house that he was anything but the disinterested friend he
seemed--that he was what he has gradually turned out to be--I could
have found no words strong enough to repel the slander; I could not
have defended him too ardently. So little did I know of the world!
Whereas now I do declare to you that he becomes to me the embodiment
of the suit; that in place of its being an abstraction, it is John
Jarndyce; that the more I suffer, the more indignant I am with him;
that every new delay and every new disappointment is only a new
injury from John Jarndyce's hand."

"No, no," says Vholes. "Don't say so. We ought to have patience, all
of us. Besides, I never disparage, sir. I never disparage."

"Mr. Vholes," returns the angry client. "You know as well as I that
he would have strangled the suit if he could."

"He was not active in it," Mr. Vholes admits with an appearance of
reluctance. "He certainly was not active in it. But however, but
however, he might have had amiable intentions. Who can read the
heart, Mr. C.!"

"You can," returns Richard.

"I, Mr. C.?"

"Well enough to know what his intentions were. Are or are not our
interests conflicting? Tell--me--that!" says Richard, accompanying
his last three words with three raps on his rock of trust.

"Mr. C.," returns Vholes, immovable in attitude and never winking his
hungry eyes, "I should be wanting in my duty as your professional
adviser, I should be departing from my fidelity to your interests, if
I represented those interests as identical with the interests of Mr.
Jarndyce. They are no such thing, sir. I never impute motives; I both
have and am a father, and I never impute motives. But I must not
shrink from a professional duty, even if it sows dissensions in
families. I understand you to be now consulting me professionally as
to your interests? You are so? I reply, then, they are not identical
with those of Mr. Jarndyce."

"Of course they are not!" cries Richard. "You found that out long
ago."

"Mr. C.," returns Vholes, "I wish to say no more of any third party
than is necessary. I wish to leave my good name unsullied, together
with any little property of which I may become possessed through
industry and perseverance, to my daughters Emma, Jane, and Caroline.
I also desire to live in amity with my professional brethren. When
Mr. Skimpole did me the honour, sir--I will not say the very high
honour, for I never stoop to flattery--of bringing us together in
this room, I mentioned to you that I could offer no opinion or advice
as to your interests while those interests were entrusted to another
member of the profession. And I spoke in such terms as I was bound to
speak of Kenge and Carboy's office, which stands high. You, sir,
thought fit to withdraw your interests from that keeping nevertheless
and to offer them to me. You brought them with clean hands, sir, and
I accepted them with clean hands. Those interests are now paramount
in this office. My digestive functions, as you may have heard me
mention, are not in a good state, and rest might improve them; but I
shall not rest, sir, while I am your representative. Whenever you
want me, you will find me here. Summon me anywhere, and I will come.
During the long vacation, sir, I shall devote my leisure to studying
your interests more and more closely and to making arrangements for
moving heaven and earth (including, of course, the Chancellor) after
Michaelmas term; and when I ultimately congratulate you, sir," says
Mr. Vholes with the severity of a determined man, "when I ultimately
congratulate you, sir, with all my heart, on your accession to
fortune--which, but that I never give hopes, I might say something
further about--you will owe me nothing beyond whatever little balance
may be then outstanding of the costs as between solicitor and client
not included in the taxed costs allowed out of the estate. I pretend
to no claim upon you, Mr. C., but for the zealous and active
discharge--not the languid and routine discharge, sir: that much
credit I stipulate for--of my professional duty. My duty prosperously
ended, all between us is ended."

Vholes finally adds, by way of rider to this declaration of his
principles, that as Mr. Carstone is about to rejoin his regiment,
perhaps Mr. C. will favour him with an order on his agent for twenty
pounds on account.

"For there have been many little consultations and attendances of
late, sir," observes Vholes, turning over the leaves of his diary,
"and these things mount up, and I don't profess to be a man of
capital. When we first entered on our present relations I stated to
you openly--it is a principle of mine that there never can be too
much openness between solicitor and client--that I was not a man of
capital and that if capital was your object you had better leave your
papers in Kenge's office. No, Mr. C., you will find none of the
advantages or disadvantages of capital here, sir. This," Vholes gives
the desk one hollow blow again, "is your rock; it pretends to be
nothing more."

The client, with his dejection insensibly relieved and his vague
hopes rekindled, takes pen and ink and writes the draft, not without
perplexed consideration and calculation of the date it may bear,
implying scant effects in the agent's hands. All the while, Vholes,
buttoned up in body and mind, looks at him attentively. All the
while, Vholes's official cat watches the mouse's hole.

Lastly, the client, shaking hands, beseeches Mr. Vholes, for heaven's
sake and earth's sake, to do his utmost to "pull him through" the
Court of Chancery. Mr. Vholes, who never gives hopes, lays his palm
upon the client's shoulder and answers with a smile, "Always here,
sir. Personally, or by letter, you will always find me here, sir,
with my shoulder to the wheel." Thus they part, and Vholes, left
alone, employs himself in carrying sundry little matters out of his
diary into his draft bill book for the ultimate behoof of his three
daughters. So might an industrious fox or bear make up his account of
chickens or stray travellers with an eye to his cubs, not to
disparage by that word the three raw-visaged, lank, and buttoned-up
maidens who dwell with the parent Vholes in an earthy cottage
situated in a damp garden at Kennington.

Richard, emerging from the heavy shade of Symond's Inn into the
sunshine of Chancery Lane--for there happens to be sunshine there
to-day--walks thoughtfully on, and turns into Lincoln's Inn, and
passes under the shadow of the Lincoln's Inn trees. On many such
loungers have the speckled shadows of those trees often fallen; on
the like bent head, the bitten nail, the lowering eye, the lingering
step, the purposeless and dreamy air, the good consuming and
consumed, the life turned sour. This lounger is not shabby yet, but
that may come. Chancery, which knows no wisdom but in precedent, is
very rich in such precedents; and why should one be different from
ten thousand?

Yet the time is so short since his depreciation began that as he
saunters away, reluctant to leave the spot for some long months
together, though he hates it, Richard himself may feel his own case
as if it were a startling one. While his heart is heavy with
corroding care, suspense, distrust, and doubt, it may have room for
some sorrowful wonder when he recalls how different his first visit
there, how different he, how different all the colours of his mind.
But injustice breeds injustice; the fighting with shadows and being
defeated by them necessitates the setting up of substances to combat;
from the impalpable suit which no man alive can understand, the time
for that being long gone by, it has become a gloomy relief to turn to
the palpable figure of the friend who would have saved him from this
ruin and make HIM his enemy. Richard has told Vholes the truth. Is he
in a hardened or a softened mood, he still lays his injuries equally
at that door; he was thwarted, in that quarter, of a set purpose, and
that purpose could only originate in the one subject that is
resolving his existence into itself; besides, it is a justification
to him in his own eyes to have an embodied antagonist and oppressor.

Is Richard a monster in all this, or would Chancery be found rich in
such precedents too if they could be got for citation from the
Recording Angel?

Two pairs of eyes not unused to such people look after him, as,
biting his nails and brooding, he crosses the square and is swallowed
up by the shadow of the southern gateway. Mr. Guppy and Mr. Weevle
are the possessors of those eyes, and they have been leaning in
conversation against the low stone parapet under the trees. He passes
close by them, seeing nothing but the ground.

"William," says Mr. Weevle, adjusting his whiskers, "there's
combustion going on there! It's not a case of spontaneous, but it's
smouldering combustion it is."

"Ah!" says Mr. Guppy. "He wouldn't keep out of Jarndyce, and I
suppose he's over head and ears in debt. I never knew much of him. He
was as high as the monument when he was on trial at our place. A good
riddance to me, whether as clerk or client! Well, Tony, that as I was
mentioning is what they're up to."

Mr. Guppy, refolding his arms, resettles himself against the parapet,
as resuming a conversation of interest.

"They are still up to it, sir," says Mr. Guppy, "still taking stock,
still examining papers, still going over the heaps and heaps of
rubbish. At this rate they'll be at it these seven years."

"And Small is helping?"

"Small left us at a week's notice. Told Kenge his grandfather's
business was too much for the old gentleman and he could better
himself by undertaking it. There had been a coolness between myself
and Small on account of his being so close. But he said you and I
began it, and as he had me there--for we did--I put our acquaintance
on the old footing. That's how I come to know what they're up to."

"You haven't looked in at all?"

"Tony," says Mr. Guppy, a little disconcerted, "to be unreserved with
you, I don't greatly relish the house, except in your company, and
therefore I have not; and therefore I proposed this little
appointment for our fetching away your things. There goes the hour by
the clock! Tony"--Mr. Guppy becomes mysteriously and tenderly
eloquent--"it is necessary that I should impress upon your mind once
more that circumstances over which I have no control have made a
melancholy alteration in my most cherished plans and in that
unrequited image which I formerly mentioned to you as a friend. That
image is shattered, and that idol is laid low. My only wish now in
connexion with the objects which I had an idea of carrying out in the
court with your aid as a friend is to let 'em alone and bury 'em in
oblivion. Do you think it possible, do you think it at all likely (I
put it to you, Tony, as a friend), from your knowledge of that
capricious and deep old character who fell a prey to the--spontaneous
element, do you, Tony, think it at all likely that on second thoughts
he put those letters away anywhere, after you saw him alive, and that
they were not destroyed that night?"

Mr. Weevle reflects for some time. Shakes his head. Decidedly thinks
not.

"Tony," says Mr. Guppy as they walk towards the court, "once again
understand me, as a friend. Without entering into further
explanations, I may repeat that the idol is down. I have no purpose
to serve now but burial in oblivion. To that I have pledged myself. I
owe it to myself, and I owe it to the shattered image, as also to the
circumstances over which I have no control. If you was to express to
me by a gesture, by a wink, that you saw lying anywhere in your late
lodgings any papers that so much as looked like the papers in
question, I would pitch them into the fire, sir, on my own
responsibility."

Mr. Weevle nods. Mr. Guppy, much elevated in his own opinion by
having delivered these observations, with an air in part forensic and
in part romantic--this gentleman having a passion for conducting
anything in the form of an examination, or delivering anything in the
form of a summing up or a speech--accompanies his friend with dignity
to the court.

Never since it has been a court has it had such a Fortunatus' purse
of gossip as in the proceedings at the rag and bottle shop.
Regularly, every morning at eight, is the elder Mr. Smallweed brought
down to the corner and carried in, accompanied by Mrs. Smallweed,
Judy, and Bart; and regularly, all day, do they all remain there
until nine at night, solaced by gipsy dinners, not abundant in
quantity, from the cook's shop, rummaging and searching, digging,
delving, and diving among the treasures of the late lamented. What
those treasures are they keep so secret that the court is maddened.
In its delirium it imagines guineas pouring out of tea-pots,
crown-pieces overflowing punch-bowls, old chairs and mattresses
stuffed with Bank of England notes. It possesses itself of the
sixpenny history (with highly coloured folding frontispiece) of Mr.
Daniel Dancer and his sister, and also of Mr. Elwes, of Suffolk, and
transfers all the facts from those authentic narratives to Mr. Krook.
Twice when the dustman is called in to carry off a cartload of old
paper, ashes, and broken bottles, the whole court assembles and pries
into the baskets as they come forth. Many times the two gentlemen who
write with the ravenous little pens on the tissue-paper are seen
prowling in the neighbourhood--shy of each other, their late
partnership being dissolved. The Sol skilfully carries a vein of the
prevailing interest through the Harmonic nights. Little Swills, in
what are professionally known as "patter" allusions to the subject,
is received with loud applause; and the same vocalist "gags" in the
regular business like a man inspired. Even Miss M. Melvilleson, in
the revived Caledonian melody of "We're a-Nodding," points the
sentiment that "the dogs love broo" (whatever the nature of that
refreshment may be) with such archness and such a turn of the head
towards next door that she is immediately understood to mean Mr.
Smallweed loves to find money, and is nightly honoured with a double
encore. For all this, the court discovers nothing; and as Mrs. Piper
and Mrs. Perkins now communicate to the late lodger whose appearance
is the signal for a general rally, it is in one continual ferment to
discover everything, and more.

Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy, with every eye in the court's head upon
them, knock at the closed door of the late lamented's house, in a
high state of popularity. But being contrary to the court's
expectation admitted, they immediately become unpopular and are
considered to mean no good.

The shutters are more or less closed all over the house, and the
ground-floor is sufficiently dark to require candles. Introduced into
the back shop by Mr. Smallweed the younger, they, fresh from the
sunlight, can at first see nothing save darkness and shadows; but
they gradually discern the elder Mr. Smallweed seated in his chair
upon the brink of a well or grave of waste-paper, the virtuous Judy
groping therein like a female sexton, and Mrs. Smallweed on the level
ground in the vicinity snowed up in a heap of paper fragments, print,
and manuscript which would appear to be the accumulated compliments
that have been sent flying at her in the course of the day. The whole
party, Small included, are blackened with dust and dirt and present a
fiendish appearance not relieved by the general aspect of the room.
There is more litter and lumber in it than of old, and it is dirtier
if possible; likewise, it is ghostly with traces of its dead
inhabitant and even with his chalked writing on the wall.

On the entrance of visitors, Mr. Smallweed and Judy simultaneously
fold their arms and stop in their researches.

"Aha!" croaks the old gentleman. "How de do, gentlemen, how de do!
Come to fetch your property, Mr. Weevle? That's well, that's well.
Ha! Ha! We should have been forced to sell you up, sir, to pay your
warehouse room if you had left it here much longer. You feel quite at
home here again, I dare say? Glad to see you, glad to see you!"

Mr. Weevle, thanking him, casts an eye about. Mr. Guppy's eye follows
Mr. Weevle's eye. Mr. Weevle's eye comes back without any new
intelligence in it. Mr. Guppy's eye comes back and meets Mr.
Smallweed's eye. That engaging old gentleman is still murmuring, like
some wound-up instrument running down, "How de do, sir--how
de--how--" And then having run down, he lapses into grinning silence,
as Mr. Guppy starts at seeing Mr. Tulkinghorn standing in the
darkness opposite with his hands behind him.

"Gentleman so kind as to act as my solicitor," says Grandfather
Smallweed. "I am not the sort of client for a gentleman of such note,
but he is so good!"

Mr. Guppy, slightly nudging his friend to take another look, makes a
shuffling bow to Mr. Tulkinghorn, who returns it with an easy nod.
Mr. Tulkinghorn is looking on as if he had nothing else to do and
were rather amused by the novelty.

"A good deal of property here, sir, I should say," Mr. Guppy observes
to Mr. Smallweed.

"Principally rags and rubbish, my dear friend! Rags and rubbish! Me
and Bart and my granddaughter Judy are endeavouring to make out an
inventory of what's worth anything to sell. But we haven't come to
much as yet; we--haven't--come--to--hah!"

Mr. Smallweed has run down again, while Mr. Weevle's eye, attended by
Mr. Guppy's eye, has again gone round the room and come back.

"Well, sir," says Mr. Weevle. "We won't intrude any longer if you'll
allow us to go upstairs."

"Anywhere, my dear sir, anywhere! You're at home. Make yourself so,
pray!"

As they go upstairs, Mr. Guppy lifts his eyebrows inquiringly and
looks at Tony. Tony shakes his head. They find the old room very dull
and dismal, with the ashes of the fire that was burning on that
memorable night yet in the discoloured grate. They have a great
disinclination to touch any object, and carefully blow the dust from
it first. Nor are they desirous to prolong their visit, packing the
few movables with all possible speed and never speaking above a
whisper.

"Look here," says Tony, recoiling. "Here's that horrible cat coming
in!"

Mr. Guppy retreats behind a chair. "Small told me of her. She went
leaping and bounding and tearing about that night like a dragon, and
got out on the house-top, and roamed about up there for a fortnight,
and then came tumbling down the chimney very thin. Did you ever see
such a brute? Looks as if she knew all about it, don't she? Almost
looks as if she was Krook. Shoohoo! Get out, you goblin!"

Lady Jane, in the doorway, with her tiger snarl from ear to ear and
her club of a tail, shows no intention of obeying; but Mr.
Tulkinghorn stumbling over her, she spits at his rusty legs, and
swearing wrathfully, takes her arched back upstairs. Possibly to roam
the house-tops again and return by the chimney.

"Mr. Guppy," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "could I have a word with you?"

Mr. Guppy is engaged in collecting the Galaxy Gallery of British
Beauty from the wall and depositing those works of art in their old
ignoble band-box. "Sir," he returns, reddening, "I wish to act with
courtesy towards every member of the profession, and especially, I am
sure, towards a member of it so well known as yourself--I will truly
add, sir, so distinguished as yourself. Still, Mr. Tulkinghorn, sir,
I must stipulate that if you have any word with me, that word is
spoken in the presence of my friend."

"Oh, indeed?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn.

"Yes, sir. My reasons are not of a personal nature at all, but they
are amply sufficient for myself."

"No doubt, no doubt." Mr. Tulkinghorn is as imperturbable as the
hearthstone to which he has quietly walked. "The matter is not of
that consequence that I need put you to the trouble of making any
conditions, Mr. Guppy." He pauses here to smile, and his smile is as
dull and rusty as his pantaloons. "You are to be congratulated, Mr.
Guppy; you are a fortunate young man, sir."

"Pretty well so, Mr. Tulkinghorn; I don't complain."

"Complain? High friends, free admission to great houses, and access
to elegant ladies! Why, Mr. Guppy, there are people in London who
would give their ears to be you."

Mr. Guppy, looking as if he would give his own reddening and still
reddening ears to be one of those people at present instead of
himself, replies, "Sir, if I attend to my profession and do what is
right by Kenge and Carboy, my friends and acquaintances are of no
consequence to them nor to any member of the profession, not
excepting Mr. Tulkinghorn of the Fields. I am not under any
obligation to explain myself further; and with all respect for you,
sir, and without offence--I repeat, without offence--"

"Oh, certainly!"

"--I don't intend to do it."

"Quite so," says Mr. Tulkinghorn with a calm nod. "Very good; I see
by these portraits that you take a strong interest in the fashionable
great, sir?"

He addresses this to the astounded Tony, who admits the soft
impeachment.

"A virtue in which few Englishmen are deficient," observes Mr.
Tulkinghorn. He has been standing on the hearthstone with his back to
the smoked chimney-piece, and now turns round with his glasses to his
eyes. "Who is this? 'Lady Dedlock.' Ha! A very good likeness in its
way, but it wants force of character. Good day to you, gentlemen;
good day!"

When he has walked out, Mr. Guppy, in a great perspiration, nerves
himself to the hasty completion of the taking down of the Galaxy
Gallery, concluding with Lady Dedlock.

"Tony," he says hurriedly to his astonished companion, "let us be
quick in putting the things together and in getting out of this
place. It were in vain longer to conceal from you, Tony, that between
myself and one of the members of a swan-like aristocracy whom I now
hold in my hand, there has been undivulged communication and
association. The time might have been when I might have revealed it
to you. It never will be more. It is due alike to the oath I have
taken, alike to the shattered idol, and alike to circumstances over
which I have no control, that the whole should be buried in oblivion.
I charge you as a friend, by the interest you have ever testified in
the fashionable intelligence, and by any little advances with which I
may have been able to accommodate you, so to bury it without a word
of inquiry!"

This charge Mr. Guppy delivers in a state little short of forensic
lunacy, while his friend shows a dazed mind in his whole head of hair
and even in his cultivated whiskers.




CHAPTER XL

National and Domestic


England has been in a dreadful state for some weeks. Lord Coodle
would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn't come in, and there being
nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except Coodle and Doodle, there
has been no government. It is a mercy that the hostile meeting
between those two great men, which at one time seemed inevitable, did
not come off, because if both pistols had taken effect, and Coodle
and Doodle had killed each other, it is to be presumed that England
must have waited to be governed until young Coodle and young Doodle,
now in frocks and long stockings, were grown up. This stupendous
national calamity, however, was averted by Lord Coodle's making the
timely discovery that if in the heat of debate he had said that he
scorned and despised the whole ignoble career of Sir Thomas Doodle,
he had merely meant to say that party differences should never induce
him to withhold from it the tribute of his warmest admiration; while
it as opportunely turned out, on the other hand, that Sir Thomas
Doodle had in his own bosom expressly booked Lord Coodle to go down
to posterity as the mirror of virtue and honour. Still England has
been some weeks in the dismal strait of having no pilot (as was well
observed by Sir Leicester Dedlock) to weather the storm; and the
marvellous part of the matter is that England has not appeared to
care very much about it, but has gone on eating and drinking and
marrying and giving in marriage as the old world did in the days
before the flood. But Coodle knew the danger, and Doodle knew the
danger, and all their followers and hangers-on had the clearest
possible perception of the danger. At last Sir Thomas Doodle has not
only condescended to come in, but has done it handsomely, bringing in
with him all his nephews, all his male cousins, and all his
brothers-in-law. So there is hope for the old ship yet.

Doodle has found that he must throw himself upon the country, chiefly
in the form of sovereigns and beer. In this metamorphosed state he is
available in a good many places simultaneously and can throw himself
upon a considerable portion of the country at one time. Britannia
being much occupied in pocketing Doodle in the form of sovereigns,
and swallowing Doodle in the form of beer, and in swearing herself
black in the face that she does neither--plainly to the advancement
of her glory and morality--the London season comes to a sudden end,
through all the Doodleites and Coodleites dispersing to assist
Britannia in those religious exercises.

Hence Mrs. Rouncewell, housekeeper at Chesney Wold, foresees, though
no instructions have yet come down, that the family may shortly be
expected, together with a pretty large accession of cousins and
others who can in any way assist the great Constitutional work. And
hence the stately old dame, taking Time by the forelock, leads him up
and down the staircases, and along the galleries and passages, and
through the rooms, to witness before he grows any older that
everything is ready, that floors are rubbed bright, carpets spread,
curtains shaken out, beds puffed and patted, still-room and kitchen
cleared for action--all things prepared as beseems the Dedlock
dignity.

This present summer evening, as the sun goes down, the preparations
are complete. Dreary and solemn the old house looks, with so many
appliances of habitation and with no inhabitants except the pictured
forms upon the walls. So did these come and go, a Dedlock in
possession might have ruminated passing along; so did they see this
gallery hushed and quiet, as I see it now; so think, as I think, of
the gap that they would make in this domain when they were gone; so
find it, as I find it, difficult to believe that it could be without
them; so pass from my world, as I pass from theirs, now closing the
reverberating door; so leave no blank to miss them, and so die.

Through some of the fiery windows beautiful from without, and set, at
this sunset hour, not in dull-grey stone but in a glorious house of
gold, the light excluded at other windows pours in rich, lavish,
overflowing like the summer plenty in the land. Then do the frozen
Dedlocks thaw. Strange movements come upon their features as the
shadows of leaves play there. A dense justice in a corner is beguiled
into a wink. A staring baronet, with a truncheon, gets a dimple in
his chin. Down into the bosom of a stony shepherdess there steals a
fleck of light and warmth that would have done it good a hundred
years ago. One ancestress of Volumnia, in high-heeled shoes, very
like her--casting the shadow of that virgin event before her full two
centuries--shoots out into a halo and becomes a saint. A maid of
honour of the court of Charles the Second, with large round eyes (and
other charms to correspond), seems to bathe in glowing water, and it
ripples as it glows.

But the fire of the sun is dying. Even now the floor is dusky, and
shadow slowly mounts the walls, bringing the Dedlocks down like age
and death. And now, upon my Lady's picture over the great
chimney-piece, a weird shade falls from some old tree, that turns it
pale, and flutters it, and looks as if a great arm held a veil or
hood, watching an opportunity to draw it over her. Higher and darker
rises shadow on the wall--now a red gloom on the ceiling--now the
fire is out.

All that prospect, which from the terrace looked so near, has moved
solemnly away and changed--not the first nor the last of beautiful
things that look so near and will so change--into a distant phantom.
Light mists arise, and the dew falls, and all the sweet scents in the
garden are heavy in the air. Now the woods settle into great masses
as if they were each one profound tree. And now the moon rises to
separate them, and to glimmer here and there in horizontal lines
behind their stems, and to make the avenue a pavement of light among
high cathedral arches fantastically broken.

Now the moon is high; and the great house, needing habitation more
than ever, is like a body without life. Now it is even awful,
stealing through it, to think of the live people who have slept in
the solitary bedrooms, to say nothing of the dead. Now is the time
for shadow, when every corner is a cavern and every downward step a
pit, when the stained glass is reflected in pale and faded hues upon
the floors, when anything and everything can be made of the heavy
staircase beams excepting their own proper shapes, when the armour
has dull lights upon it not easily to be distinguished from stealthy
movement, and when barred helmets are frightfully suggestive of heads
inside. But of all the shadows in Chesney Wold, the shadow in the
long drawing-room upon my Lady's picture is the first to come, the
last to be disturbed. At this hour and by this light it changes into
threatening hands raised up and menacing the handsome face with every
breath that stirs.

"She is not well, ma'am," says a groom in Mrs. Rouncewell's
audience-chamber.

"My Lady not well! What's the matter?"

"Why, my Lady has been but poorly, ma'am, since she was last here--I
don't mean with the family, ma'am, but when she was here as a bird of
passage like. My Lady has not been out much, for her, and has kept
her room a good deal."

"Chesney Wold, Thomas," rejoins the housekeeper with proud
complacency, "will set my Lady up! There is no finer air and no
healthier soil in the world!"

Thomas may have his own personal opinions on this subject, probably
hints them in his manner of smoothing his sleek head from the nape of
his neck to his temples, but he forbears to express them further and
retires to the servants' hall to regale on cold meat-pie and ale.

This groom is the pilot-fish before the nobler shark. Next evening,
down come Sir Leicester and my Lady with their largest retinue, and
down come the cousins and others from all the points of the compass.
Thenceforth for some weeks backward and forward rush mysterious men
with no names, who fly about all those particular parts of the
country on which Doodle is at present throwing himself in an
auriferous and malty shower, but who are merely persons of a restless
disposition and never do anything anywhere.

On these national occasions Sir Leicester finds the cousins useful. A
better man than the Honourable Bob Stables to meet the Hunt at
dinner, there could not possibly be. Better got up gentlemen than the
other cousins to ride over to polling-booths and hustings here and
there, and show themselves on the side of England, it would be hard
to find. Volumnia is a little dim, but she is of the true descent;
and there are many who appreciate her sprightly conversation, her
French conundrums so old as to have become in the cycles of time
almost new again, the honour of taking the fair Dedlock in to dinner,
or even the privilege of her hand in the dance. On these national
occasions dancing may be a patriotic service, and Volumnia is
constantly seen hopping about for the good of an ungrateful and
unpensioning country.

My Lady takes no great pains to entertain the numerous guests, and
being still unwell, rarely appears until late in the day. But at all
the dismal dinners, leaden lunches, basilisk balls, and other
melancholy pageants, her mere appearance is a relief. As to Sir
Leicester, he conceives it utterly impossible that anything can be
wanting, in any direction, by any one who has the good fortune to be
received under that roof; and in a state of sublime satisfaction, he
moves among the company, a magnificent refrigerator.

Daily the cousins trot through dust and canter over roadside turf,
away to hustings and polling-booths (with leather gloves and
hunting-whips for the counties and kid gloves and riding-canes for
the boroughs), and daily bring back reports on which Sir Leicester
holds forth after dinner. Daily the restless men who have no
occupation in life present the appearance of being rather busy. Daily
Volumnia has a little cousinly talk with Sir Leicester on the state
of the nation, from which Sir Leicester is disposed to conclude that
Volumnia is a more reflecting woman than he had thought her.

"How are we getting on?" says Miss Volumnia, clasping her hands. "ARE
we safe?"

The mighty business is nearly over by this time, and Doodle will
throw himself off the country in a few days more. Sir Leicester has
just appeared in the long drawing-room after dinner, a bright
particular star surrounded by clouds of cousins.

"Volumnia," replies Sir Leicester, who has a list in his hand, "we
are doing tolerably."

"Only tolerably!"

Although it is summer weather, Sir Leicester always has his own
particular fire in the evening. He takes his usual screened seat near
it and repeats with much firmness and a little displeasure, as who
should say, I am not a common man, and when I say tolerably, it must
not be understood as a common expression, "Volumnia, we are doing
tolerably."

"At least there is no opposition to YOU," Volumnia asserts with
confidence.

"No, Volumnia. This distracted country has lost its senses in many
respects, I grieve to say, but--"

"It is not so mad as that. I am glad to hear it!"

Volumnia's finishing the sentence restores her to favour. Sir
Leicester, with a gracious inclination of his head, seems to say to
himself, "A sensible woman this, on the whole, though occasionally
precipitate."

In fact, as to this question of opposition, the fair Dedlock's
observation was superfluous, Sir Leicester on these occasions always
delivering in his own candidateship, as a kind of handsome wholesale
order to be promptly executed. Two other little seats that belong to
him he treats as retail orders of less importance, merely sending
down the men and signifying to the tradespeople, "You will have the
goodness to make these materials into two members of Parliament and
to send them home when done."

"I regret to say, Volumnia, that in many places the people have shown
a bad spirit, and that this opposition to the government has been of
a most determined and most implacable description."

"W-r-retches!" says Volumnia.

"Even," proceeds Sir Leicester, glancing at the circumjacent cousins
on sofas and ottomans, "even in many--in fact, in most--of those
places in which the government has carried it against a faction--"

(Note, by the way, that the Coodleites are always a faction with the
Doodleites, and that the Doodleites occupy exactly the same position
towards the Coodleites.)

"--Even in them I am shocked, for the credit of Englishmen, to be
constrained to inform you that the party has not triumphed without
being put to an enormous expense. Hundreds," says Sir Leicester,
eyeing the cousins with increasing dignity and swelling indignation,
"hundreds of thousands of pounds!"

If Volumnia have a fault, it is the fault of being a trifle too
innocent, seeing that the innocence which would go extremely well
with a sash and tucker is a little out of keeping with the rouge and
pearl necklace. Howbeit, impelled by innocence, she asks, "What for?"

"Volumnia," remonstrates Sir Leicester with his utmost severity.
"Volumnia!"

"No, no, I don't mean what for," cries Volumnia with her favourite
little scream. "How stupid I am! I mean what a pity!"

"I am glad," returns Sir Leicester, "that you do mean what a pity."

Volumnia hastens to express her opinion that the shocking people
ought to be tried as traitors and made to support the party.

"I am glad, Volumnia," repeats Sir Leicester, unmindful of these
mollifying sentiments, "that you do mean what a pity. It is
disgraceful to the electors. But as you, though inadvertently and
without intending so unreasonable a question, asked me 'what for?'
let me reply to you. For necessary expenses. And I trust to your good
sense, Volumnia, not to pursue the subject, here or elsewhere."

Sir Leicester feels it incumbent on him to observe a crushing aspect
towards Volumnia because it is whispered abroad that these necessary
expenses will, in some two hundred election petitions, be
unpleasantly connected with the word bribery, and because some
graceless jokers have consequently suggested the omission from the
Church service of the ordinary supplication in behalf of the High
Court of Parliament and have recommended instead that the prayers of
the congregation be requested for six hundred and fifty-eight
gentlemen in a very unhealthy state.

"I suppose," observes Volumnia, having taken a little time to recover
her spirits after her late castigation, "I suppose Mr. Tulkinghorn
has been worked to death."

"I don't know," says Sir Leicester, opening his eyes, "why Mr.
Tulkinghorn should be worked to death. I don't know what Mr.
Tulkinghorn's engagements may be. He is not a candidate."

Volumnia had thought he might have been employed. Sir Leicester could
desire to know by whom, and what for. Volumnia, abashed again,
suggests, by somebody--to advise and make arrangements. Sir Leicester
is not aware that any client of Mr. Tulkinghorn has been in need of
his assistance.

Lady Dedlock, seated at an open window with her arm upon its
cushioned ledge and looking out at the evening shadows falling on the
park, has seemed to attend since the lawyer's name was mentioned.

A languid cousin with a moustache in a state of extreme debility now
observes from his couch that man told him ya'as'dy that Tulkinghorn
had gone down t' that iron place t' give legal 'pinion 'bout
something, and that contest being over t' day, 'twould be highly
jawlly thing if Tulkinghorn should 'pear with news that Coodle man
was floored.

Mercury in attendance with coffee informs Sir Leicester, hereupon,
that Mr. Tulkinghorn has arrived and is taking dinner. My Lady turns
her head inward for the moment, then looks out again as before.

Volumnia is charmed to hear that her delight is come. He is so
original, such a stolid creature, such an immense being for knowing
all sorts of things and never telling them! Volumnia is persuaded
that he must be a Freemason. Is sure he is at the head of a lodge,
and wears short aprons, and is made a perfect idol of with
candlesticks and trowels. These lively remarks the fair Dedlock
delivers in her youthful manner, while making a purse.

"He has not been here once," she adds, "since I came. I really had
some thoughts of breaking my heart for the inconstant creature. I had
almost made up my mind that he was dead."

It may be the gathering gloom of evening, or it may be the darker
gloom within herself, but a shade is on my Lady's face, as if she
thought, "I would he were!"

"Mr. Tulkinghorn," says Sir Leicester, "is always welcome here and
always discreet wheresoever he is. A very valuable person, and
deservedly respected."

The debilitated cousin supposes he is "'normously rich fler."

"He has a stake in the country," says Sir Leicester, "I have no
doubt. He is, of course, handsomely paid, and he associates almost on
a footing of equality with the highest society."

Everybody starts. For a gun is fired close by.

"Good gracious, what's that?" cries Volumnia with her little withered
scream.

"A rat," says my Lady. "And they have shot him."

Enter Mr. Tulkinghorn, followed by Mercuries with lamps and candles.

"No, no," says Sir Leicester, "I think not. My Lady, do you object to
the twilight?"

On the contrary, my Lady prefers it.

"Volumnia?"

Oh! Nothing is so delicious to Volumnia as to sit and talk in the
dark.

"Then take them away," says Sir Leicester. "Tulkinghorn, I beg your
pardon. How do you do?"

Mr. Tulkinghorn with his usual leisurely ease advances, renders his
passing homage to my Lady, shakes Sir Leicester's hand, and subsides
into the chair proper to him when he has anything to communicate, on
the opposite side of the Baronet's little newspaper-table. Sir
Leicester is apprehensive that my Lady, not being very well, will
take cold at that open window. My Lady is obliged to him, but would
rather sit there for the air. Sir Leicester rises, adjusts her scarf
about her, and returns to his seat. Mr. Tulkinghorn in the meanwhile
takes a pinch of snuff.

"Now," says Sir Leicester. "How has that contest gone?"

"Oh, hollow from the beginning. Not a chance. They have brought in
both their people. You are beaten out of all reason. Three to one."

It is a part of Mr. Tulkinghorn's policy and mastery to have no
political opinions; indeed, NO opinions. Therefore he says "you" are
beaten, and not "we."

Sir Leicester is majestically wroth. Volumnia never heard of such a
thing. 'The debilitated cousin holds that it's sort of thing that's
sure tapn slongs votes--giv'n--Mob.

"It's the place, you know," Mr. Tulkinghorn goes on to say in the
fast-increasing darkness when there is silence again, "where they
wanted to put up Mrs. Rouncewell's son."

"A proposal which, as you correctly informed me at the time, he had
the becoming taste and perception," observes Sir Leicester, "to
decline. I cannot say that I by any means approve of the sentiments
expressed by Mr. Rouncewell when he was here for some half-hour in
this room, but there was a sense of propriety in his decision which I
am glad to acknowledge."

"Ha!" says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "It did not prevent him from being very
active in this election, though."

Sir Leicester is distinctly heard to gasp before speaking. "Did I
understand you? Did you say that Mr. Rouncewell had been very active
in this election?"

"Uncommonly active."

"Against--"

"Oh, dear yes, against you. He is a very good speaker. Plain and
emphatic. He made a damaging effect, and has great influence. In the
business part of the proceedings he carried all before him."

It is evident to the whole company, though nobody can see him, that
Sir Leicester is staring majestically.

"And he was much assisted," says Mr. Tulkinghorn as a wind-up, "by
his son."

"By his son, sir?" repeats Sir Leicester with awful politeness.

"By his son."

"The son who wished to marry the young woman in my Lady's service?"

"That son. He has but one."

"Then upon my honour," says Sir Leicester after a terrific pause
during which he has been heard to snort and felt to stare, "then
upon my honour, upon my life, upon my reputation and principles,
the floodgates of society are burst open, and the waters
have--a--obliterated the landmarks of the framework of the cohesion
by which things are held together!"

General burst of cousinly indignation. Volumnia thinks it is
really high time, you know, for somebody in power to step in
and do something strong. Debilitated cousin thinks--country's
going--Dayvle--steeple-chase pace.

"I beg," says Sir Leicester in a breathless condition, "that we may
not comment further on this circumstance. Comment is superfluous. My
Lady, let me suggest in reference to that young woman--"

"I have no intention," observes my Lady from her window in a low but
decided tone, "of parting with her."

"That was not my meaning," returns Sir Leicester. "I am glad to hear
you say so. I would suggest that as you think her worthy of your
patronage, you should exert your influence to keep her from these
dangerous hands. You might show her what violence would be done in
such association to her duties and principles, and you might preserve
her for a better fate. You might point out to her that she probably
would, in good time, find a husband at Chesney Wold by whom she would
not be--" Sir Leicester adds, after a moment's consideration,
"dragged from the altars of her forefathers."

These remarks he offers with his unvarying politeness and deference
when he addresses himself to his wife. She merely moves her head in
reply. The moon is rising, and where she sits there is a little
stream of cold pale light, in which her head is seen.

"It is worthy of remark," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "however, that these
people are, in their way, very proud."

"Proud?" Sir Leicester doubts his hearing.

"I should not be surprised if they all voluntarily abandoned the
girl--yes, lover and all--instead of her abandoning them, supposing
she remained at Chesney Wold under such circumstances."

"Well!" says Sir Leicester tremulously. "Well! You should know, Mr.
Tulkinghorn. You have been among them."

"Really, Sir Leicester," returns the lawyer, "I state the fact. Why,
I could tell you a story--with Lady Dedlock's permission."

Her head concedes it, and Volumnia is enchanted. A story! Oh, he is
going to tell something at last! A ghost in it, Volumnia hopes?

"No. Real flesh and blood." Mr. Tulkinghorn stops for an instant and
repeats with some little emphasis grafted upon his usual monotony,
"Real flesh and blood, Miss Dedlock. Sir Leicester, these particulars
have only lately become known to me. They are very brief. They
exemplify what I have said. I suppress names for the present. Lady
Dedlock will not think me ill-bred, I hope?"

By the light of the fire, which is low, he can be seen looking
towards the moonlight. By the light of the moon Lady Dedlock can be
seen, perfectly still.

"A townsman of this Mrs. Rouncewell, a man in exactly parallel
circumstances as I am told, had the good fortune to have a daughter
who attracted the notice of a great lady. I speak of really a great
lady, not merely great to him, but married to a gentleman of your
condition, Sir Leicester."

Sir Leicester condescendingly says, "Yes, Mr. Tulkinghorn," implying
that then she must have appeared of very considerable moral
dimensions indeed in the eyes of an iron-master.

"The lady was wealthy and beautiful, and had a liking for the girl,
and treated her with great kindness, and kept her always near her.
Now this lady preserved a secret under all her greatness, which she
had preserved for many years. In fact, she had in early life been
engaged to marry a young rake--he was a captain in the army--nothing
connected with whom came to any good. She never did marry him, but
she gave birth to a child of which he was the father."

By the light of the fire he can be seen looking towards the
moonlight. By the moonlight, Lady Dedlock can be seen in profile,
perfectly still.

"The captain in the army being dead, she believed herself safe; but a
train of circumstances with which I need not trouble you led to
discovery. As I received the story, they began in an imprudence on
her own part one day when she was taken by surprise, which shows how
difficult it is for the firmest of us (she was very firm) to be
always guarded. There was great domestic trouble and amazement, you
may suppose; I leave you to imagine, Sir Leicester, the husband's
grief. But that is not the present point. When Mr. Rouncewell's
townsman heard of the disclosure, he no more allowed the girl to be
patronized and honoured than he would have suffered her to be trodden
underfoot before his eyes. Such was his pride, that he indignantly
took her away, as if from reproach and disgrace. He had no sense of
the honour done him and his daughter by the lady's condescension; not
the least. He resented the girl's position, as if the lady had been
the commonest of commoners. That is the story. I hope Lady Dedlock
will excuse its painful nature."

There are various opinions on the merits, more or less conflicting
with Volumnia's. That fair young creature cannot believe there ever
was any such lady and rejects the whole history on the threshold. The
majority incline to the debilitated cousin's sentiment, which is in
few words--"no business--Rouncewell's fernal townsman." Sir Leicester
generally refers back in his mind to Wat Tyler and arranges a
sequence of events on a plan of his own.

There is not much conversation in all, for late hours have been kept
at Chesney Wold since the necessary expenses elsewhere began, and
this is the first night in many on which the family have been alone.
It is past ten when Sir Leicester begs Mr. Tulkinghorn to ring for
candles. Then the stream of moonlight has swelled into a lake, and
then Lady Dedlock for the first time moves, and rises, and comes
forward to a table for a glass of water. Winking cousins, bat-like in
the candle glare, crowd round to give it; Volumnia (always ready for
something better if procurable) takes another, a very mild sip of
which contents her; Lady Dedlock, graceful, self-possessed, looked
after by admiring eyes, passes away slowly down the long perspective
by the side of that nymph, not at all improving her as a question of
contrast.




CHAPTER XLI

In Mr. Tulkinghorn's Room


Mr. Tulkinghorn arrives in his turret-room a little breathed by the
journey up, though leisurely performed. There is an expression on his
face as if he had discharged his mind of some grave matter and were,
in his close way, satisfied. To say of a man so severely and strictly
self-repressed that he is triumphant would be to do him as great an
injustice as to suppose him troubled with love or sentiment or any
romantic weakness. He is sedately satisfied. Perhaps there is a
rather increased sense of power upon him as he loosely grasps one of
his veinous wrists with his other hand and holding it behind his back
walks noiselessly up and down.

There is a capacious writing-table in the room on which is a pretty
large accumulation of papers. The green lamp is lighted, his
reading-glasses lie upon the desk, the easy-chair is wheeled up to
it, and it would seem as though he had intended to bestow an hour or
so upon these claims on his attention before going to bed. But he
happens not to be in a business mind. After a glance at the documents
awaiting his notice--with his head bent low over the table, the old
man's sight for print or writing being defective at night--he opens
the French window and steps out upon the leads. There he again walks
slowly up and down in the same attitude, subsiding, if a man so cool
may have any need to subside, from the story he has related
downstairs.

The time was once when men as knowing as Mr. Tulkinghorn would walk
on turret-tops in the starlight and look up into the sky to read
their fortunes there. Hosts of stars are visible to-night, though
their brilliancy is eclipsed by the splendour of the moon. If he be
seeking his own star as he methodically turns and turns upon the
leads, it should be but a pale one to be so rustily represented
below. If he be tracing out his destiny, that may be written in other
characters nearer to his hand.

As he paces the leads with his eyes most probably as high above his
thoughts as they are high above the earth, he is suddenly stopped in
passing the window by two eyes that meet his own. The ceiling of his
room is rather low; and the upper part of the door, which is opposite
the window, is of glass. There is an inner baize door, too, but the
night being warm he did not close it when he came upstairs. These
eyes that meet his own are looking in through the glass from the
corridor outside. He knows them well. The blood has not flushed into
his face so suddenly and redly for many a long year as when he
recognizes Lady Dedlock.

He steps into the room, and she comes in too, closing both the doors
behind her. There is a wild disturbance--is it fear or anger?--in her
eyes. In her carriage and all else she looks as she looked downstairs
two hours ago.

Is it fear or is it anger now? He cannot be sure. Both might be as
pale, both as intent.

"Lady Dedlock?"

She does not speak at first, nor even when she has slowly dropped
into the easy-chair by the table. They look at each other, like two
pictures.

"Why have you told my story to so many persons?"

"Lady Dedlock, it was necessary for me to inform you that I knew it."

"How long have you known it?"

"I have suspected it a long while--fully known it a little while."

"Months?"

"Days."

He stands before her with one hand on a chair-back and the other in
his old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt-frill, exactly as he has stood
before her at any time since her marriage. The same formal
politeness, the same composed deference that might as well be
defiance; the whole man the same dark, cold object, at the same
distance, which nothing has ever diminished.

"Is this true concerning the poor girl?"

He slightly inclines and advances his head as not quite understanding
the question.

"You know what you related. Is it true? Do her friends know my story
also? Is it the town-talk yet? Is it chalked upon the walls and cried
in the streets?"

So! Anger, and fear, and shame. All three contending. What power this
woman has to keep these raging passions down! Mr. Tulkinghorn's
thoughts take such form as he looks at her, with his ragged grey
eyebrows a hair's breadth more contracted than usual under her gaze.

"No, Lady Dedlock. That was a hypothetical case, arising out of Sir
Leicester's unconsciously carrying the matter with so high a hand.
But it would be a real case if they knew--what we know."

"Then they do not know it yet?"

"No."

"Can I save the poor girl from injury before they know it?"

"Really, Lady Dedlock," Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, "I cannot give a
satisfactory opinion on that point."

And he thinks, with the interest of attentive curiosity, as he
watches the struggle in her breast, "The power and force of this
woman are astonishing!"

"Sir," she says, for the moment obliged to set her lips with all the
energy she has, that she may speak distinctly, "I will make it
plainer. I do not dispute your hypothetical case. I anticipated it,
and felt its truth as strongly as you can do, when I saw Mr.
Rouncewell here. I knew very well that if he could have had the power
of seeing me as I was, he would consider the poor girl tarnished by
having for a moment been, although most innocently, the subject of my
great and distinguished patronage. But I have an interest in her, or
I should rather say--no longer belonging to this place--I had, and if
you can find so much consideration for the woman under your foot as
to remember that, she will be very sensible of your mercy."

Mr. Tulkinghorn, profoundly attentive, throws this off with a shrug
of self-depreciation and contracts his eyebrows a little more.

"You have prepared me for my exposure, and I thank you for that too.
Is there anything that you require of me? Is there any claim that I
can release or any charge or trouble that I can spare my husband in
obtaining HIS release by certifying to the exactness of your
discovery? I will write anything, here and now, that you will
dictate. I am ready to do it."

And she would do it, thinks the lawyer, watchful of the firm hand
with which she takes the pen!

"I will not trouble you, Lady Dedlock. Pray spare yourself."

"I have long expected this, as you know. I neither wish to spare
myself nor to be spared. You can do nothing worse to me than you have
done. Do what remains now."

"Lady Dedlock, there is nothing to be done. I will take leave to say
a few words when you have finished."

Their need for watching one another should be over now, but they do
it all this time, and the stars watch them both through the opened
window. Away in the moonlight lie the woodland fields at rest, and
the wide house is as quiet as the narrow one. The narrow one! Where
are the digger and the spade, this peaceful night, destined to add
the last great secret to the many secrets of the Tulkinghorn
existence? Is the man born yet, is the spade wrought yet? Curious
questions to consider, more curious perhaps not to consider, under
the watching stars upon a summer night.

"Of repentance or remorse or any feeling of mine," Lady Dedlock
presently proceeds, "I say not a word. If I were not dumb, you would
be deaf. Let that go by. It is not for your ears."

He makes a feint of offering a protest, but she sweeps it away with
her disdainful hand.

"Of other and very different things I come to speak to you. My jewels
are all in their proper places of keeping. They will be found there.
So, my dresses. So, all the valuables I have. Some ready money I had
with me, please to say, but no large amount. I did not wear my own
dress, in order that I might avoid observation. I went to be
henceforward lost. Make this known. I leave no other charge with
you."

"Excuse me, Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, quite unmoved. "I am
not sure that I understand you. You want--"

"To be lost to all here. I leave Chesney Wold to-night. I go this
hour."

Mr. Tulkinghorn shakes his head. She rises, but he, without moving
hand from chair-back or from old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt-frill,
shakes his head.

"What? Not go as I have said?"

"No, Lady Dedlock," he very calmly replies.

"Do you know the relief that my disappearance will be? Have you
forgotten the stain and blot upon this place, and where it is, and
who it is?"

"No, Lady Dedlock, not by any means."

Without deigning to rejoin, she moves to the inner door and has it in
her hand when he says to her, without himself stirring hand or foot
or raising his voice, "Lady Dedlock, have the goodness to stop and
hear me, or before you reach the staircase I shall ring the
alarm-bell and rouse the house. And then I must speak out before
every guest and servant, every man and woman, in it."

He has conquered her. She falters, trembles, and puts her hand
confusedly to her head. Slight tokens these in any one else, but when
so practised an eye as Mr. Tulkinghorn's sees indecision for a moment
in such a subject, he thoroughly knows its value.

He promptly says again, "Have the goodness to hear me, Lady Dedlock,"
and motions to the chair from which she has risen. She hesitates, but
he motions again, and she sits down.

"The relations between us are of an unfortunate description, Lady
Dedlock; but as they are not of my making, I will not apologize for
them. The position I hold in reference to Sir Leicester is so well
known to you that I can hardly imagine but that I must long have
appeared in your eyes the natural person to make this discovery."

"Sir," she returns without looking up from the ground on which her
eyes are now fixed, "I had better have gone. It would have been far
better not to have detained me. I have no more to say."

"Excuse me, Lady Dedlock, if I add a little more to hear."

"I wish to hear it at the window, then. I can't breathe where I am."

His jealous glance as she walks that way betrays an instant's
misgiving that she may have it in her thoughts to leap over, and
dashing against ledge and cornice, strike her life out upon the
terrace below. But a moment's observation of her figure as she stands
in the window without any support, looking out at the stars--not
up--gloomily out at those stars which are low in the heavens,
reassures him. By facing round as she has moved, he stands a little
behind her.

"Lady Dedlock, I have not yet been able to come to a decision
satisfactory to myself on the course before me. I am not clear what
to do or how to act next. I must request you, in the meantime, to
keep your secret as you have kept it so long and not to wonder that I
keep it too."

He pauses, but she makes no reply.

"Pardon me, Lady Dedlock. This is an important subject. You are
honouring me with your attention?"

"I am."

"Thank you. I might have known it from what I have seen of your
strength of character. I ought not to have asked the question, but I
have the habit of making sure of my ground, step by step, as I go on.
The sole consideration in this unhappy case is Sir Leicester."

"Then why," she asks in a low voice and without removing her gloomy
look from those distant stars, "do you detain me in his house?"

"Because he IS the consideration. Lady Dedlock, I have no occasion to
tell you that Sir Leicester is a very proud man, that his reliance
upon you is implicit, that the fall of that moon out of the sky would
not amaze him more than your fall from your high position as his
wife."

She breathes quickly and heavily, but she stands as unflinchingly as
ever he has seen her in the midst of her grandest company.

"I declare to you, Lady Dedlock, that with anything short of this
case that I have, I would as soon have hoped to root up by means of
my own strength and my own hands the oldest tree on this estate as to
shake your hold upon Sir Leicester and Sir Leicester's trust and
confidence in you. And even now, with this case, I hesitate. Not that
he could doubt (that, even with him, is impossible), but that nothing
can prepare him for the blow."

"Not my flight?" she returned. "Think of it again."

"Your flight, Lady Dedlock, would spread the whole truth, and a
hundred times the whole truth, far and wide. It would be impossible
to save the family credit for a day. It is not to be thought of."

There is a quiet decision in his reply which admits of no
remonstrance.

"When I speak of Sir Leicester being the sole consideration, he and
the family credit are one. Sir Leicester and the baronetcy, Sir
Leicester and Chesney Wold, Sir Leicester and his ancestors and his
patrimony"--Mr. Tulkinghorn very dry here--"are, I need not say to
you, Lady Dedlock, inseparable."

"Go on!"

"Therefore," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, pursuing his case in his jog-trot
style, "I have much to consider. This is to be hushed up if it can
be. How can it be, if Sir Leicester is driven out of his wits or laid
upon a death-bed? If I inflicted this shock upon him to-morrow
morning, how could the immediate change in him be accounted for? What
could have caused it? What could have divided you? Lady Dedlock, the
wall-chalking and the street-crying would come on directly, and you
are to remember that it would not affect you merely (whom I cannot at
all consider in this business) but your husband, Lady Dedlock, your
husband."

He gets plainer as he gets on, but not an atom more emphatic or
animated.

"There is another point of view," he continues, "in which the case
presents itself. Sir Leicester is devoted to you almost to
infatuation. He might not be able to overcome that infatuation, even
knowing what we know. I am putting an extreme case, but it might be
so. If so, it were better that he knew nothing. Better for common
sense, better for him, better for me. I must take all this into
account, and it combines to render a decision very difficult."

She stands looking out at the same stars without a word. They are
beginning to pale, and she looks as if their coldness froze her.

"My experience teaches me," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, who has by this
time got his hands in his pockets and is going on in his business
consideration of the matter like a machine. "My experience teaches
me, Lady Dedlock, that most of the people I know would do far better
to leave marriage alone. It is at the bottom of three fourths of
their troubles. So I thought when Sir Leicester married, and so I
always have thought since. No more about that. I must now be guided
by circumstances. In the meanwhile I must beg you to keep your own
counsel, and I will keep mine."

"I am to drag my present life on, holding its pains at your pleasure,
day by day?" she asks, still looking at the distant sky.

"Yes, I am afraid so, Lady Dedlock."

"It is necessary, you think, that I should be so tied to the stake?"

"I am sure that what I recommend is necessary."

"I am to remain on this gaudy platform on which my miserable
deception has been so long acted, and it is to fall beneath me when
you give the signal?" she said slowly.

"Not without notice, Lady Dedlock. I shall take no step without
forewarning you."

She asks all her questions as if she were repeating them from memory
or calling them over in her sleep.

"We are to meet as usual?"

"Precisely as usual, if you please."

"And I am to hide my guilt, as I have done so many years?"

"As you have done so many years. I should not have made that
reference myself, Lady Dedlock, but I may now remind you that your
secret can be no heavier to you than it was, and is no worse and no
better than it was. I know it certainly, but I believe we have never
wholly trusted each other."

She stands absorbed in the same frozen way for some little time
before asking, "Is there anything more to be said to-night?"

"Why," Mr. Tulkinghorn returns methodically as he softly rubs his
hands, "I should like to be assured of your acquiescence in my
arrangements, Lady Dedlock."

"You may be assured of it."

"Good. And I would wish in conclusion to remind you, as a business
precaution, in case it should be necessary to recall the fact in any
communication with Sir Leicester, that throughout our interview I
have expressly stated my sole consideration to be Sir Leicester's
feelings and honour and the family reputation. I should have been
happy to have made Lady Dedlock a prominent consideration, too, if
the case had admitted of it; but unfortunately it does not."

"I can attest your fidelity, sir."

Both before and after saying it she remains absorbed, but at length
moves, and turns, unshaken in her natural and acquired presence,
towards the door. Mr. Tulkinghorn opens both the doors exactly as he
would have done yesterday, or as he would have done ten years ago,
and makes his old-fashioned bow as she passes out. It is not an
ordinary look that he receives from the handsome face as it goes into
the darkness, and it is not an ordinary movement, though a very
slight one, that acknowledges his courtesy. But as he reflects when
he is left alone, the woman has been putting no common constraint
upon herself.

He would know it all the better if he saw the woman pacing her own
rooms with her hair wildly thrown from her flung-back face, her hands
clasped behind her head, her figure twisted as if by pain. He would
think so all the more if he saw the woman thus hurrying up and down
for hours, without fatigue, without intermission, followed by the
faithful step upon the Ghost's Walk. But he shuts out the now chilled
air, draws the window-curtain, goes to bed, and falls asleep. And
truly when the stars go out and the wan day peeps into the
turret-chamber, finding him at his oldest, he looks as if the digger
and the spade were both commissioned and would soon be digging.

The same wan day peeps in at Sir Leicester pardoning the repentant
country in a majestically condescending dream; and at the cousins
entering on various public employments, principally receipt of
salary; and at the chaste Volumnia, bestowing a dower of fifty
thousand pounds upon a hideous old general with a mouth of false
teeth like a pianoforte too full of keys, long the admiration of Bath
and the terror of every other community. Also into rooms high in the
roof, and into offices in court-yards, and over stables, where
humbler ambition dreams of bliss, in keepers' lodges, and in holy
matrimony with Will or Sally. Up comes the bright sun, drawing
everything up with it--the Wills and Sallys, the latent vapour in the
earth, the drooping leaves and flowers, the birds and beasts and
creeping things, the gardeners to sweep the dewy turf and unfold
emerald velvet where the roller passes, the smoke of the great
kitchen fire wreathing itself straight and high into the lightsome
air. Lastly, up comes the flag over Mr. Tulkinghorn's unconscious
head cheerfully proclaiming that Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock are
in their happy home and that there is hospitality at the place in
Lincolnshire.




CHAPTER XLII

In Mr. Tulkinghorn's Chambers


From the verdant undulations and the spreading oaks of the Dedlock
property, Mr. Tulkinghorn transfers himself to the stale heat and
dust of London. His manner of coming and going between the two places
is one of his impenetrabilities. He walks into Chesney Wold as if it
were next door to his chambers and returns to his chambers as if he
had never been out of Lincoln's Inn Fields. He neither changes his
dress before the journey nor talks of it afterwards. He melted out of
his turret-room this morning, just as now, in the late twilight, he
melts into his own square.

Like a dingy London bird among the birds at roost in these pleasant
fields, where the sheep are all made into parchment, the goats into
wigs, and the pasture into chaff, the lawyer, smoke-dried and faded,
dwelling among mankind but not consorting with them, aged without
experience of genial youth, and so long used to make his cramped nest
in holes and corners of human nature that he has forgotten its
broader and better range, comes sauntering home. In the oven made by
the hot pavements and hot buildings, he has baked himself dryer than
usual; and he has in his thirsty mind his mellowed port-wine half a
century old.

The lamplighter is skipping up and down his ladder on Mr.
Tulkinghorn's side of the Fields when that high-priest of noble
mysteries arrives at his own dull court-yard. He ascends the
door-steps and is gliding into the dusky hall when he encounters, on
the top step, a bowing and propitiatory little man.

"Is that Snagsby?"

"Yes, sir. I hope you are well, sir. I was just giving you up, sir,
and going home."

"Aye? What is it? What do you want with me?"

"Well, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, holding his hat at the side of his
head in his deference towards his best customer, "I was wishful to
say a word to you, sir."

"Can you say it here?"

"Perfectly, sir."

"Say it then." The lawyer turns, leans his arms on the iron railing
at the top of the steps, and looks at the lamplighter lighting the
court-yard.

"It is relating," says Mr. Snagsby in a mysterious low voice, "it is
relating--not to put too fine a point upon it--to the foreigner,
sir!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn eyes him with some surprise. "What foreigner?"

"The foreign female, sir. French, if I don't mistake? I am not
acquainted with that language myself, but I should judge from her
manners and appearance that she was French; anyways, certainly
foreign. Her that was upstairs, sir, when Mr. Bucket and me had the
honour of waiting upon you with the sweeping-boy that night."

"Oh! Yes, yes. Mademoiselle Hortense."

"Indeed, sir?" Mr. Snagsby coughs his cough of submission behind his
hat. "I am not acquainted myself with the names of foreigners in
general, but I have no doubt it WOULD be that." Mr. Snagsby appears
to have set out in this reply with some desperate design of repeating
the name, but on reflection coughs again to excuse himself.

"And what can you have to say, Snagsby," demands Mr. Tulkinghorn,
"about her?"

"Well, sir," returns the stationer, shading his communication with
his hat, "it falls a little hard upon me. My domestic happiness is
very great--at least, it's as great as can be expected, I'm sure--but
my little woman is rather given to jealousy. Not to put too fine a
point upon it, she is very much given to jealousy. And you see, a
foreign female of that genteel appearance coming into the shop, and
hovering--I should be the last to make use of a strong expression if
I could avoid it, but hovering, sir--in the court--you know it
is--now ain't it? I only put it to yourself, sir."

Mr. Snagsby, having said this in a very plaintive manner, throws in a
cough of general application to fill up all the blanks.

"Why, what do you mean?" asks Mr. Tulkinghorn.

"Just so, sir," returns Mr. Snagsby; "I was sure you would feel it
yourself and would excuse the reasonableness of MY feelings when
coupled with the known excitableness of my little woman. You see, the
foreign female--which you mentioned her name just now, with quite a
native sound I am sure--caught up the word Snagsby that night, being
uncommon quick, and made inquiry, and got the direction and come at
dinner-time. Now Guster, our young woman, is timid and has fits, and
she, taking fright at the foreigner's looks--which are fierce--and at
a grinding manner that she has of speaking--which is calculated to
alarm a weak mind--gave way to it, instead of bearing up against it,
and tumbled down the kitchen stairs out of one into another, such
fits as I do sometimes think are never gone into, or come out of, in
any house but ours. Consequently there was by good fortune ample
occupation for my little woman, and only me to answer the shop. When
she DID say that Mr. Tulkinghorn, being always denied to her by his
employer (which I had no doubt at the time was a foreign mode of
viewing a clerk), she would do herself the pleasure of continually
calling at my place until she was let in here. Since then she has
been, as I began by saying, hovering, hovering, sir"--Mr. Snagsby
repeats the word with pathetic emphasis--"in the court. The effects
of which movement it is impossible to calculate. I shouldn't wonder
if it might have already given rise to the painfullest mistakes even
in the neighbours' minds, not mentioning (if such a thing was
possible) my little woman. Whereas, goodness knows," says Mr.
Snagsby, shaking his head, "I never had an idea of a foreign female,
except as being formerly connected with a bunch of brooms and a baby,
or at the present time with a tambourine and earrings. I never had, I
do assure you, sir!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn had listened gravely to this complaint and inquires
when the stationer has finished, "And that's all, is it, Snagsby?"

"Why yes, sir, that's all," says Mr. Snagsby, ending with a cough
that plainly adds, "and it's enough too--for me."

"I don't know what Mademoiselle Hortense may want or mean, unless she
is mad," says the lawyer.

"Even if she was, you know, sir," Mr. Snagsby pleads, "it wouldn't be
a consolation to have some weapon or another in the form of a foreign
dagger planted in the family."

"No," says the other. "Well, well! This shall be stopped. I am sorry
you have been inconvenienced. If she comes again, send her here."

Mr. Snagsby, with much bowing and short apologetic coughing, takes
his leave, lightened in heart. Mr. Tulkinghorn goes upstairs, saying
to himself, "These women were created to give trouble the whole earth
over. The mistress not being enough to deal with, here's the maid
now! But I will be short with THIS jade at least!"

So saying, he unlocks his door, gropes his way into his murky rooms,
lights his candles, and looks about him. It is too dark to see much
of the Allegory overhead there, but that importunate Roman, who is
for ever toppling out of the clouds and pointing, is at his old work
pretty distinctly. Not honouring him with much attention, Mr.
Tulkinghorn takes a small key from his pocket, unlocks a drawer in
which there is another key, which unlocks a chest in which there is
another, and so comes to the cellar-key, with which he prepares to
descend to the regions of old wine. He is going towards the door with
a candle in his hand when a knock comes.

"Who's this? Aye, aye, mistress, it's you, is it? You appear at a
good time. I have just been hearing of you. Now! What do you want?"

He stands the candle on the chimney-piece in the clerk's hall and
taps his dry cheek with the key as he addresses these words of
welcome to Mademoiselle Hortense. That feline personage, with her
lips tightly shut and her eyes looking out at him sideways, softly
closes the door before replying.

"I have had great deal of trouble to find you, sir."

"HAVE you!"

"I have been here very often, sir. It has always been said to me, he
is not at home, he is engage, he is this and that, he is not for
you."

"Quite right, and quite true."

"Not true. Lies!"

At times there is a suddenness in the manner of Mademoiselle Hortense
so like a bodily spring upon the subject of it that such subject
involuntarily starts and fails back. It is Mr. Tulkinghorn's case at
present, though Mademoiselle Hortense, with her eyes almost shut up
(but still looking out sideways), is only smiling contemptuously and
shaking her head.

"Now, mistress," says the lawyer, tapping the key hastily upon the
chimney-piece. "If you have anything to say, say it, say it."

"Sir, you have not use me well. You have been mean and shabby."

"Mean and shabby, eh?" returns the lawyer, rubbing his nose with the
key.

"Yes. What is it that I tell you? You know you have. You have
attrapped me--catched me--to give you information; you have asked me
to show you the dress of mine my Lady must have wore that night, you
have prayed me to come in it here to meet that boy. Say! Is it not?"
Mademoiselle Hortense makes another spring.

"You are a vixen, a vixen!" Mr. Tulkinghorn seems to meditate as he
looks distrustfully at her, then he replies, "Well, wench, well. I
paid you."

"You paid me!" she repeats with fierce disdain. "Two sovereign! I
have not change them, I re-fuse them, I des-pise them, I throw them
from me!" Which she literally does, taking them out of her bosom as
she speaks and flinging them with such violence on the floor that
they jerk up again into the light before they roll away into corners
and slowly settle down there after spinning vehemently.

"Now!" says Mademoiselle Hortense, darkening her large eyes again.
"You have paid me? Eh, my God, oh yes!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn rubs his head with the key while she entertains
herself with a sarcastic laugh.

"You must be rich, my fair friend," he composedly observes, "to throw
money about in that way!"

"I AM rich," she returns. "I am very rich in hate. I hate my Lady, of
all my heart. You know that."

"Know it? How should I know it?"

"Because you have known it perfectly before you prayed me to give you
that information. Because you have known perfectly that I was
en-r-r-r-raged!" It appears impossible for mademoiselle to roll the
letter "r" sufficiently in this word, notwithstanding that she
assists her energetic delivery by clenching both her hands and
setting all her teeth.

"Oh! I knew that, did I?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn, examining the wards
of the key.

"Yes, without doubt. I am not blind. You have made sure of me because
you knew that. You had reason! I det-est her." Mademoiselle Hortense folds her
arms and throws this last remark at him over one of her shoulders.

"Having said this, have you anything else to say, mademoiselle?"

"I am not yet placed. Place me well. Find me a good condition! If you
cannot, or do not choose to do that, employ me to pursue her, to
chase her, to disgrace and to dishonour her. I will help you well,
and with a good will. It is what YOU do. Do I not know that?"

"You appear to know a good deal," Mr. Tulkinghorn retorts.

"Do I not? Is it that I am so weak as to believe, like a child, that
I come here in that dress to rec-eive that boy only to decide a
little bet, a wager? Eh, my God, oh yes!" In this reply, down to the
word "wager" inclusive, mademoiselle has been ironically polite and
tender, then as suddenly dashed into the bitterest and most defiant
scorn, with her black eyes in one and the same moment very nearly
shut and staringly wide open.

"Now, let us see," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, tapping his chin with the
key and looking imperturbably at her, "how this matter stands."

"Ah! Let us see," mademoiselle assents, with many angry and tight
nods of her head.

"You come here to make a remarkably modest demand, which you have
just stated, and it not being conceded, you will come again."

"And again," says mademoiselle with more tight and angry nods. "And
yet again. And yet again. And many times again. In effect, for ever!"

"And not only here, but you will go to Mr. Snagsby's too, perhaps?
That visit not succeeding either, you will go again perhaps?"

"And again," repeats mademoiselle, cataleptic with determination.
"And yet again. And yet again. And many times again. In effect, for
ever!"

"Very well. Now, Mademoiselle Hortense, let me recommend you to take
the candle and pick up that money of yours. I think you will find it
behind the clerk's partition in the corner yonder."

She merely throws a laugh over her shoulder and stands her ground
with folded arms.

"You will not, eh?"

"No, I will not!"

"So much the poorer you; so much the richer I! Look, mistress, this
is the key of my wine-cellar. It is a large key, but the keys of
prisons are larger. In this city there are houses of correction
(where the treadmills are, for women), the gates of which are very
strong and heavy, and no doubt the keys too. I am afraid a lady of
your spirit and activity would find it an inconvenience to have one
of those keys turned upon her for any length of time. What do you
think?"

"I think," mademoiselle replies without any action and in a clear,
obliging voice, "that you are a miserable wretch."

"Probably," returns Mr. Tulkinghorn, quietly blowing his nose. "But I
don't ask what you think of myself; I ask what you think of the
prison."

"Nothing. What does it matter to me?"

"Why, it matters this much, mistress," says the lawyer, deliberately
putting away his handkerchief and adjusting his frill; "the law is so
despotic here that it interferes to prevent any of our good English
citizens from being troubled, even by a lady's visits against his
desire. And on his complaining that he is so troubled, it takes hold
of the troublesome lady and shuts her up in prison under hard
discipline. Turns the key upon her, mistress." Illustrating with the
cellar-key.

"Truly?" returns mademoiselle in the same pleasant voice. "That is
droll! But--my faith!--still what does it matter to me?"

"My fair friend," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "make another visit here, or
at Mr. Snagsby's, and you shall learn."

"In that case you will send me to the prison, perhaps?"

"Perhaps."

It would be contradictory for one in mademoiselle's state of
agreeable jocularity to foam at the mouth, otherwise a tigerish
expansion thereabouts might look as if a very little more would make
her do it.

"In a word, mistress," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "I am sorry to be
unpolite, but if you ever present yourself uninvited here--or
there--again, I will give you over to the police. Their gallantry is
great, but they carry troublesome people through the streets in an
ignominious manner, strapped down on a board, my good wench."

"I will prove you," whispers mademoiselle, stretching out her hand,
"I will try if you dare to do it!"

"And if," pursues the lawyer without minding her, "I place you in
that good condition of being locked up in jail, it will be some time
before you find yourself at liberty again."

"I will prove you," repeats mademoiselle in her former whisper.

"And now," proceeds the lawyer, still without minding her, "you had
better go. Think twice before you come here again."

"Think you," she answers, "twice two hundred times!"

"You were dismissed by your lady, you know," Mr. Tulkinghorn
observes, following her out upon the staircase, "as the most
implacable and unmanageable of women. Now turn over a new leaf and
take warning by what I say to you. For what I say, I mean; and what I
threaten, I will do, mistress."

She goes down without answering or looking behind her. When she is
gone, he goes down too, and returning with his cobweb-covered bottle,
devotes himself to a leisurely enjoyment of its contents, now and
then, as he throws his head back in his chair, catching sight of the
pertinacious Roman pointing from the ceiling.




CHAPTER XLIII

Esther's Narrative


It matters little now how much I thought of my living mother who had
told me evermore to consider her dead. I could not venture to
approach her or to communicate with her in writing, for my sense of
the peril in which her life was passed was only to be equalled by my
fears of increasing it. Knowing that my mere existence as a living
creature was an unforeseen danger in her way, I could not always
conquer that terror of myself which had seized me when I first knew
the secret. At no time did I dare to utter her name. I felt as if I
did not even dare to hear it. If the conversation anywhere, when I
was present, took that direction, as it sometimes naturally did, I
tried not to hear: I mentally counted, repeated something that I
knew, or went out of the room. I am conscious now that I often did
these things when there can have been no danger of her being spoken
of, but I did them in the dread I had of hearing anything that might
lead to her betrayal, and to her betrayal through me.

It matters little now how often I recalled the tones of my mother's
voice, wondered whether I should ever hear it again as I so longed to
do, and thought how strange and desolate it was that it should be so
new to me. It matters little that I watched for every public mention
of my mother's name; that I passed and repassed the door of her house
in town, loving it, but afraid to look at it; that I once sat in the
theatre when my mother was there and saw me, and when we were so wide
asunder before the great company of all degrees that any link or
confidence between us seemed a dream. It is all, all over. My lot has
been so blest that I can relate little of myself which is not a story
of goodness and generosity in others. I may well pass that little and
go on.

When we were settled at home again, Ada and I had many conversations
with my guardian of which Richard was the theme. My dear girl was
deeply grieved that he should do their kind cousin so much wrong, but
she was so faithful to Richard that she could not bear to blame him
even for that. My guardian was assured of it, and never coupled his
name with a word of reproof. "Rick is mistaken, my dear," he would
say to her. "Well, well! We have all been mistaken over and over
again. We must trust to you and time to set him right."

We knew afterwards what we suspected then, that he did not trust to
time until he had often tried to open Richard's eyes. That he had
written to him, gone to him, talked with him, tried every gentle and
persuasive art his kindness could devise. Our poor devoted Richard
was deaf and blind to all. If he were wrong, he would make amends
when the Chancery suit was over. If he were groping in the dark,
he could not do better than do his utmost to clear away those
clouds in which so much was confused and obscured. Suspicion and
misunderstanding were the fault of the suit? Then let him work the
suit out and come through it to his right mind. This was his
unvarying reply. Jarndyce and Jarndyce had obtained such possession
of his whole nature that it was impossible to place any consideration
before him which he did not, with a distorted kind of reason, make a
new argument in favour of his doing what he did. "So that it is even
more mischievous," said my guardian once to me, "to remonstrate with
the poor dear fellow than to leave him alone."

I took one of these opportunities of mentioning my doubts of Mr.
Skimpole as a good adviser for Richard.

"Adviser!" returned my guardian, laughing, "My dear, who would advise
with Skimpole?"

"Encourager would perhaps have been a better word," said I.

"Encourager!" returned my guardian again. "Who could be encouraged by
Skimpole?"

"Not Richard?" I asked.

"No," he replied. "Such an unworldly, uncalculating, gossamer
creature is a relief to him and an amusement. But as to advising or
encouraging or occupying a serious station towards anybody or
anything, it is simply not to be thought of in such a child as
Skimpole."

"Pray, cousin John," said Ada, who had just joined us and now looked
over my shoulder, "what made him such a child?"

"What made him such a child?" inquired my guardian, rubbing his head,
a little at a loss.

"Yes, cousin John."

"Why," he slowly replied, roughening his head more and more, "he is
all sentiment, and--and susceptibility, and--and sensibility,
and--and imagination. And these qualities are not regulated in him,
somehow. I suppose the people who admired him for them in his youth
attached too much importance to them and too little to any training
that would have balanced and adjusted them, and so he became what he
is. Hey?" said my guardian, stopping short and looking at us
hopefully. "What do you think, you two?"

Ada, glancing at me, said she thought it was a pity he should be an
expense to Richard.

"So it is, so it is," returned my guardian hurriedly. "That must not
be. We must arrange that. I must prevent it. That will never do."

And I said I thought it was to be regretted that he had ever
introduced Richard to Mr. Vholes for a present of five pounds.

"Did he?" said my guardian with a passing shade of vexation on his
face. "But there you have the man. There you have the man! There is
nothing mercenary in that with him. He has no idea of the value of
money. He introduces Rick, and then he is good friends with Mr.
Vholes and borrows five pounds of him. He means nothing by it and
thinks nothing of it. He told you himself, I'll be bound, my dear?"

"Oh, yes!" said I.

"Exactly!" cried my guardian, quite triumphant. "There you have the
man! If he had meant any harm by it or was conscious of any harm in
it, he wouldn't tell it. He tells it as he does it in mere
simplicity. But you shall see him in his own home, and then you'll
understand him better. We must pay a visit to Harold Skimpole and
caution him on these points. Lord bless you, my dears, an infant, an
infant!"

In pursuance of this plan, we went into London on an early day and
presented ourselves at Mr. Skimpole's door.

He lived in a place called the Polygon, in Somers Town, where there
were at that time a number of poor Spanish refugees walking about in
cloaks, smoking little paper cigars. Whether he was a better tenant
than one might have supposed, in consequence of his friend Somebody
always paying his rent at last, or whether his inaptitude for
business rendered it particularly difficult to turn him out, I don't
know; but he had occupied the same house some years. It was in a
state of dilapidation quite equal to our expectation. Two or three of
the area railings were gone, the water-butt was broken, the knocker
was loose, the bell-handle had been pulled off a long time to judge
from the rusty state of the wire, and dirty footprints on the steps
were the only signs of its being inhabited.

A slatternly full-blown girl who seemed to be bursting out at the
rents in her gown and the cracks in her shoes like an over-ripe berry
answered our knock by opening the door a very little way and stopping
up the gap with her figure. As she knew Mr. Jarndyce (indeed Ada and
I both thought that she evidently associated him with the receipt of
her wages), she immediately relented and allowed us to pass in. The
lock of the door being in a disabled condition, she then applied
herself to securing it with the chain, which was not in good action
either, and said would we go upstairs?

We went upstairs to the first floor, still seeing no other furniture
than the dirty footprints. Mr. Jarndyce without further ceremony
entered a room there, and we followed. It was dingy enough and not at
all clean, but furnished with an odd kind of shabby luxury, with a
large footstool, a sofa, and plenty of cushions, an easy-chair, and
plenty of pillows, a piano, books, drawing materials, music,
newspapers, and a few sketches and pictures. A broken pane of glass
in one of the dirty windows was papered and wafered over, but there
was a little plate of hothouse nectarines on the table, and there was
another of grapes, and another of sponge-cakes, and there was a
bottle of light wine. Mr. Skimpole himself reclined upon the sofa in
a dressing-gown, drinking some fragrant coffee from an old china
cup--it was then about mid-day--and looking at a collection of
wallflowers in the balcony.

He was not in the least disconcerted by our appearance, but rose and
received us in his usual airy manner.

"Here I am, you see!" he said when we were seated, not without some
little difficulty, the greater part of the chairs being broken. "Here
I am! This is my frugal breakfast. Some men want legs of beef and
mutton for breakfast; I don't. Give me my peach, my cup of coffee,
and my claret; I am content. I don't want them for themselves, but
they remind me of the sun. There's nothing solar about legs of beef
and mutton. Mere animal satisfaction!"

"This is our friend's consulting-room (or would be, if he ever
prescribed), his sanctum, his studio," said my guardian to us.

"Yes," said Mr. Skimpole, turning his bright face about, "this is the
bird's cage. This is where the bird lives and sings. They pluck his
feathers now and then and clip his wings, but he sings, he sings!"

He handed us the grapes, repeating in his radiant way, "He sings! Not
an ambitious note, but still he sings."

"These are very fine," said my guardian. "A present?"

"No," he answered. "No! Some amiable gardener sells them. His man
wanted to know, when he brought them last evening, whether he should
wait for the money. 'Really, my friend,' I said, 'I think not--if
your time is of any value to you.' I suppose it was, for he went
away."

My guardian looked at us with a smile, as though he asked us, "Is it
possible to be worldly with this baby?"

"This is a day," said Mr. Skimpole, gaily taking a little claret in a
tumbler, "that will ever be remembered here. We shall call it Saint
Clare and Saint Summerson day. You must see my daughters. I have a
blue-eyed daughter who is my Beauty daughter, I have a Sentiment
daughter, and I have a Comedy daughter. You must see them all.
They'll be enchanted."

He was going to summon them when my guardian interposed and asked him
to pause a moment, as he wished to say a word to him first. "My dear
Jarndyce," he cheerfully replied, going back to his sofa, "as many
moments as you please. Time is no object here. We never know what
o'clock it is, and we never care. Not the way to get on in life,
you'll tell me? Certainly. But we DON'T get on in life. We don't
pretend to do it."

My guardian looked at us again, plainly saying, "You hear him?"

"Now, Harold," he began, "the word I have to say relates to Rick."

"The dearest friend I have!" returned Mr. Skimpole cordially. "I
suppose he ought not to be my dearest friend, as he is not on terms
with you. But he is, I can't help it; he is full of youthful poetry,
and I love him. If you don't like it, I can't help it. I love him."

The engaging frankness with which he made this declaration really had
a disinterested appearance and captivated my guardian, if not, for
the moment, Ada too.

"You are welcome to love him as much as you like," returned Mr.
Jarndyce, "but we must save his pocket, Harold."

"Oh!" said Mr. Skimpole. "His pocket? Now you are coming to what I
don't understand." Taking a little more claret and dipping one of the
cakes in it, he shook his head and smiled at Ada and me with an
ingenuous foreboding that he never could be made to understand.

"If you go with him here or there," said my guardian plainly, "you
must not let him pay for both."

"My dear Jarndyce," returned Mr. Skimpole, his genial face irradiated
by the comicality of this idea, "what am I to do? If he takes me
anywhere, I must go. And how can I pay? I never have any money. If I
had any money, I don't know anything about it. Suppose I say to a
man, how much? Suppose the man says to me seven and sixpence? I know
nothing about seven and sixpence. It is impossible for me to pursue
the subject with any consideration for the man. I don't go about
asking busy people what seven and sixpence is in Moorish--which I
don't understand. Why should I go about asking them what seven and
sixpence is in Money--which I don't understand?"

"Well," said my guardian, by no means displeased with this artless
reply, "if you come to any kind of journeying with Rick, you must
borrow the money of me (never breathing the least allusion to that
circumstance), and leave the calculation to him."

"My dear Jarndyce," returned Mr. Skimpole, "I will do anything to
give you pleasure, but it seems an idle form--a superstition.
Besides, I give you my word, Miss Clare and my dear Miss Summerson, I
thought Mr. Carstone was immensely rich. I thought he had only to
make over something, or to sign a bond, or a draft, or a cheque, or a
bill, or to put something on a file somewhere, to bring down a shower
of money."

"Indeed it is not so, sir," said Ada. "He is poor."

"No, really?" returned Mr. Skimpole with his bright smile. "You
surprise me.

"And not being the richer for trusting in a rotten reed," said my
guardian, laying his hand emphatically on the sleeve of Mr.
Skimpole's dressing-gown, "be you very careful not to encourage him
in that reliance, Harold."

"My dear good friend," returned Mr. Skimpole, "and my dear Miss
Simmerson, and my dear Miss Clare, how can I do that? It's business,
and I don't know business. It is he who encourages me. He emerges
from great feats of business, presents the brightest prospects before
me as their result, and calls upon me to admire them. I do admire
them--as bright prospects. But I know no more about them, and I tell
him so."

The helpless kind of candour with which he presented this before us,
the light-hearted manner in which he was amused by his innocence, the
fantastic way in which he took himself under his own protection and
argued about that curious person, combined with the delightful ease
of everything he said exactly to make out my guardian's case. The
more I saw of him, the more unlikely it seemed to me, when he was
present, that he could design, conceal, or influence anything; and
yet the less likely that appeared when he was not present, and the
less agreeable it was to think of his having anything to do with any
one for whom I cared.

Hearing that his examination (as he called it) was now over, Mr.
Skimpole left the room with a radiant face to fetch his daughters
(his sons had run away at various times), leaving my guardian quite
delighted by the manner in which he had vindicated his childish
character. He soon came back, bringing with him the three young
ladies and Mrs. Skimpole, who had once been a beauty but was now a
delicate high-nosed invalid suffering under a complication of
disorders.

"This," said Mr. Skimpole, "is my Beauty daughter, Arethusa--plays
and sings odds and ends like her father. This is my Sentiment
daughter, Laura--plays a little but don't sing. This is my Comedy
daughter, Kitty--sings a little but don't play. We all draw a little
and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money."

Mrs. Skimpole sighed, I thought, as if she would have been glad to
strike out this item in the family attainments. I also thought that
she rather impressed her sigh upon my guardian and that she took
every opportunity of throwing in another.

"It is pleasant," said Mr. Skimpole, turning his sprightly eyes from
one to the other of us, "and it is whimsically interesting to trace
peculiarities in families. In this family we are all children, and I
am the youngest."

The daughters, who appeared to be very fond of him, were amused by
this droll fact, particularly the Comedy daughter.

"My dears, it is true," said Mr. Skimpole, "is it not? So it is, and
so it must be, because like the dogs in the hymn, 'it is our nature
to.' Now, here is Miss Summerson with a fine administrative capacity
and a knowledge of details perfectly surprising. It will sound very
strange in Miss Summerson's ears, I dare say, that we know nothing
about chops in this house. But we don't, not the least. We can't cook
anything whatever. A needle and thread we don't know how to use. We
admire the people who possess the practical wisdom we want, but we
don't quarrel with them. Then why should they quarrel with us? Live
and let live, we say to them. Live upon your practical wisdom, and
let us live upon you!"

He laughed, but as usual seemed quite candid and really to mean what
he said.

"We have sympathy, my roses," said Mr. Skimpole, "sympathy for
everything. Have we not?"

"Oh, yes, papa!" cried the three daughters.

"In fact, that is our family department," said Mr. Skimpole, "in this
hurly-burly of life. We are capable of looking on and of being
interested, and we DO look on, and we ARE interested. What more can
we do? Here is my Beauty daughter, married these three years. Now I
dare say her marrying another child, and having two more, was all
wrong in point of political economy, but it was very agreeable. We
had our little festivities on those occasions and exchanged social
ideas. She brought her young husband home one day, and they and their
young fledglings have their nest upstairs. I dare say at some time or
other Sentiment and Comedy will bring THEIR husbands home and have
THEIR nests upstairs too. So we get on, we don't know how, but
somehow."

She looked very young indeed to be the mother of two children, and I
could not help pitying both her and them. It was evident that the
three daughters had grown up as they could and had had just as little
haphazard instruction as qualified them to be their father's
playthings in his idlest hours. His pictorial tastes were consulted,
I observed, in their respective styles of wearing their hair, the
Beauty daughter being in the classic manner, the Sentiment daughter
luxuriant and flowing, and the Comedy daughter in the arch style,
with a good deal of sprightly forehead, and vivacious little curls
dotted about the corners of her eyes. They were dressed to
correspond, though in a most untidy and negligent way.

Ada and I conversed with these young ladies and found them
wonderfully like their father. In the meanwhile Mr. Jarndyce (who had
been rubbing his head to a great extent, and hinted at a change in
the wind) talked with Mrs. Skimpole in a corner, where we could not
help hearing the chink of money. Mr. Skimpole had previously
volunteered to go home with us and had withdrawn to dress himself for
the purpose.

"My roses," he said when he came back, "take care of mama. She is
poorly to-day. By going home with Mr. Jarndyce for a day or two, I
shall hear the larks sing and preserve my amiability. It has been
tried, you know, and would be tried again if I remained at home."

"That bad man!" said the Comedy daughter.

"At the very time when he knew papa was lying ill by his wallflowers,
looking at the blue sky," Laura complained.

"And when the smell of hay was in the air!" said Arethusa.

"It showed a want of poetry in the man," Mr. Skimpole assented, but
with perfect good humour. "It was coarse. There was an absence of the
finer touches of humanity in it! My daughters have taken great
offence," he explained to us, "at an honest man--"

"Not honest, papa. Impossible!" they all three protested.

"At a rough kind of fellow--a sort of human hedgehog rolled up," said
Mr. Skimpole, "who is a baker in this neighbourhood and from whom we
borrowed a couple of arm-chairs. We wanted a couple of arm-chairs,
and we hadn't got them, and therefore of course we looked to a man
who HAD got them, to lend them. Well! This morose person lent them,
and we wore them out. When they were worn out, he wanted them back.
He had them back. He was contented, you will say. Not at all. He
objected to their being worn. I reasoned with him, and pointed out
his mistake. I said, 'Can you, at your time of life, be so
headstrong, my friend, as to persist that an arm-chair is a thing to
put upon a shelf and look at? That it is an object to contemplate, to
survey from a distance, to consider from a point of sight? Don't you
KNOW that these arm-chairs were borrowed to be sat upon?' He was
unreasonable and unpersuadable and used intemperate language. Being
as patient as I am at this minute, I addressed another appeal to him.
I said, 'Now, my good man, however our business capacities may vary,
we are all children of one great mother, Nature. On this blooming
summer morning here you see me' (I was on the sofa) 'with flowers
before me, fruit upon the table, the cloudless sky above me, the air
full of fragrance, contemplating Nature. I entreat you, by our common
brotherhood, not to interpose between me and a subject so sublime,
the absurd figure of an angry baker!' But he did," said Mr. Skimpole,
raising his laughing eyes in playful astonishment; "he did interpose
that ridiculous figure, and he does, and he will again. And therefore
I am very glad to get out of his way and to go home with my friend
Jarndyce."

It seemed to escape his consideration that Mrs. Skimpole and the
daughters remained behind to encounter the baker, but this was so old
a story to all of them that it had become a matter of course. He took
leave of his family with a tenderness as airy and graceful as any
other aspect in which he showed himself and rode away with us in
perfect harmony of mind. We had an opportunity of seeing through some
open doors, as we went downstairs, that his own apartment was a
palace to the rest of the house.

I could have no anticipation, and I had none, that something very
startling to me at the moment, and ever memorable to me in what
ensued from it, was to happen before this day was out. Our guest was
in such spirits on the way home that I could do nothing but listen to
him and wonder at him; nor was I alone in this, for Ada yielded to
the same fascination. As to my guardian, the wind, which had
threatened to become fixed in the east when we left Somers Town,
veered completely round before we were a couple of miles from it.

Whether of questionable childishness or not in any other matters, Mr.
Skimpole had a child's enjoyment of change and bright weather. In no
way wearied by his sallies on the road, he was in the drawing-room
before any of us; and I heard him at the piano while I was yet
looking after my housekeeping, singing refrains of barcaroles and
drinking songs, Italian and German, by the score.

We were all assembled shortly before dinner, and he was still at the
piano idly picking out in his luxurious way little strains of music,
and talking between whiles of finishing some sketches of the ruined
old Verulam wall to-morrow, which he had begun a year or two ago and
had got tired of, when a card was brought in and my guardian read
aloud in a surprised voice, "Sir Leicester Dedlock!"

The visitor was in the room while it was yet turning round with me
and before I had the power to stir. If I had had it, I should have
hurried away. I had not even the presence of mind, in my giddiness,
to retire to Ada in the window, or to see the window, or to know
where it was. I heard my name and found that my guardian was
presenting me before I could move to a chair.

"Pray be seated, Sir Leicester."

"Mr. Jarndyce," said Sir Leicester in reply as he bowed and seated
himself, "I do myself the honour of calling here--"

"You do ME the honour, Sir Leicester."

"Thank you--of calling here on my road from Lincolnshire to express
my regret that any cause of complaint, however strong, that I may
have against a gentleman who--who is known to you and has been your
host, and to whom therefore I will make no farther reference, should
have prevented you, still more ladies under your escort and charge,
from seeing whatever little there may be to gratify a polite and
refined taste at my house, Chesney Wold."

"You are exceedingly obliging, Sir Leicester, and on behalf of those
ladies (who are present) and for myself, I thank you very much."

"It is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that the gentleman to whom, for the
reasons I have mentioned, I refrain from making further allusion--it
is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that that gentleman may have done me the
honour so far to misapprehend my character as to induce you to
believe that you would not have been received by my local
establishment in Lincolnshire with that urbanity, that courtesy,
which its members are instructed to show to all ladies and gentlemen
who present themselves at that house. I merely beg to observe, sir,
that the fact is the reverse."

My guardian delicately dismissed this remark without making any
verbal answer.

"It has given me pain, Mr. Jarndyce," Sir Leicester weightily
proceeded. "I assure you, sir, it has given--me--pain--to learn from
the housekeeper at Chesney Wold that a gentleman who was in your
company in that part of the county, and who would appear to possess a
cultivated taste for the fine arts, was likewise deterred by some
such cause from examining the family pictures with that leisure, that
attention, that care, which he might have desired to bestow upon them
and which some of them might possibly have repaid." Here he produced
a card and read, with much gravity and a little trouble, through his
eye-glass, "Mr. Hirrold--Herald--Harold--Skampling--Skumpling--I beg
your pardon--Skimpole."

"This is Mr. Harold Skimpole," said my guardian, evidently surprised.

"Oh!" exclaimed Sir Leicester, "I am happy to meet Mr. Skimpole and
to have the opportunity of tendering my personal regrets. I hope,
sir, that when you again find yourself in my part of the county, you
will be under no similar sense of restraint."

"You are very obliging, Sir Leicester Dedlock. So encouraged, I shall
certainly give myself the pleasure and advantage of another visit to
your beautiful house. The owners of such places as Chesney Wold,"
said Mr. Skimpole with his usual happy and easy air, "are public
benefactors. They are good enough to maintain a number of delightful
objects for the admiration and pleasure of us poor men; and not to
reap all the admiration and pleasure that they yield is to be
ungrateful to our benefactors."

Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this sentiment highly. "An artist,
sir?"

"No," returned Mr. Skimpole. "A perfectly idle man. A mere amateur."

Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this even more. He hoped he might
have the good fortune to be at Chesney Wold when Mr. Skimpole next
came down into Lincolnshire. Mr. Skimpole professed himself much
flattered and honoured.

"Mr. Skimpole mentioned," pursued Sir Leicester, addressing himself
again to my guardian, "mentioned to the housekeeper, who, as he may
have observed, is an old and attached retainer of the family--"

("That is, when I walked through the house the other day, on the
occasion of my going down to visit Miss Summerson and Miss Clare,"
Mr. Skimpole airily explained to us.)

"--That the friend with whom he had formerly been staying there was
Mr. Jarndyce." Sir Leicester bowed to the bearer of that name. "And
hence I became aware of the circumstance for which I have professed
my regret. That this should have occurred to any gentleman, Mr.
Jarndyce, but especially a gentleman formerly known to Lady Dedlock,
and indeed claiming some distant connexion with her, and for whom (as
I learn from my Lady herself) she entertains a high respect, does, I
assure you, give--me--pain."

"Pray say no more about it, Sir Leicester," returned my guardian. "I
am very sensible, as I am sure we all are, of your consideration.
Indeed the mistake was mine, and I ought to apologize for it."

I had not once looked up. I had not seen the visitor and had not even
appeared to myself to hear the conversation. It surprises me to find
that I can recall it, for it seemed to make no impression on me as it
passed. I heard them speaking, but my mind was so confused and my
instinctive avoidance of this gentleman made his presence so
distressing to me that I thought I understood nothing, through the
rushing in my head and the beating of my heart.

"I mentioned the subject to Lady Dedlock," said Sir Leicester,
rising, "and my Lady informed me that she had had the pleasure of
exchanging a few words with Mr. Jarndyce and his wards on the
occasion of an accidental meeting during their sojourn in the
vicinity. Permit me, Mr. Jarndyce, to repeat to yourself, and to
these ladies, the assurance I have already tendered to Mr. Skimpole.
Circumstances undoubtedly prevent my saying that it would afford me
any gratification to hear that Mr. Boythorn had favoured my house
with his presence, but those circumstances are confined to that
gentleman himself and do not extend beyond him."

"You know my old opinion of him," said Mr. Skimpole, lightly
appealing to us. "An amiable bull who is determined to make every
colour scarlet!"

Sir Leicester Dedlock coughed as if he could not possibly hear
another word in reference to such an individual and took his leave
with great ceremony and politeness. I got to my own room with all
possible speed and remained there until I had recovered my
self-command. It had been very much disturbed, but I was thankful to
find when I went downstairs again that they only rallied me for
having been shy and mute before the great Lincolnshire baronet.

By that time I had made up my mind that the period was come when I
must tell my guardian what I knew. The possibility of my being
brought into contact with my mother, of my being taken to her house,
even of Mr. Skimpole's, however distantly associated with me,
receiving kindnesses and obligations from her husband, was so painful
that I felt I could no longer guide myself without his assistance.

When we had retired for the night, and Ada and I had had our usual
talk in our pretty room, I went out at my door again and sought my
guardian among his books. I knew he always read at that hour, and as
I drew near I saw the light shining out into the passage from his
reading-lamp.

"May I come in, guardian?"

"Surely, little woman. What's the matter?"

"Nothing is the matter. I thought I would like to take this quiet
time of saying a word to you about myself."

He put a chair for me, shut his book, and put it by, and turned his
kind attentive face towards me. I could not help observing that it
wore that curious expression I had observed in it once before--on
that night when he had said that he was in no trouble which I could
readily understand.

"What concerns you, my dear Esther," said he, "concerns us all. You
cannot be more ready to speak than I am to hear."

"I know that, guardian. But I have such need of your advice and
support. Oh! You don't know how much need I have to-night."

He looked unprepared for my being so earnest, and even a little
alarmed.

"Or how anxious I have been to speak to you," said I, "ever since the
visitor was here to-day."

"The visitor, my dear! Sir Leicester Dedlock?"

"Yes."

He folded his arms and sat looking at me with an air of the
profoundest astonishment, awaiting what I should say next. I did not
know how to prepare him.

"Why, Esther," said he, breaking into a smile, "our visitor and you
are the two last persons on earth I should have thought of connecting
together!"

"Oh, yes, guardian, I know it. And I too, but a little while ago."

The smile passed from his face, and he became graver than before. He
crossed to the door to see that it was shut (but I had seen to that)
and resumed his seat before me.

"Guardian," said I, "do you remember, when we were overtaken by the
thunder-storm, Lady Dedlock's speaking to you of her sister?"

"Of course. Of course I do."

"And reminding you that she and her sister had differed, had gone
their several ways?"

"Of course."

"Why did they separate, guardian?"

His face quite altered as he looked at me. "My child, what questions
are these! I never knew. No one but themselves ever did know, I
believe. Who could tell what the secrets of those two handsome and
proud women were! You have seen Lady Dedlock. If you had ever seen
her sister, you would know her to have been as resolute and haughty
as she."

"Oh, guardian, I have seen her many and many a time!"

"Seen her?"

He paused a little, biting his lip. "Then, Esther, when you spoke to
me long ago of Boythorn, and when I told you that he was all but
married once, and that the lady did not die, but died to him, and
that that time had had its influence on his later life--did you know
it all, and know who the lady was?"

"No, guardian," I returned, fearful of the light that dimly broke
upon me. "Nor do I know yet."

"Lady Dedlock's sister."

"And why," I could scarcely ask him, "why, guardian, pray tell me why
were THEY parted?"

"It was her act, and she kept its motives in her inflexible heart. He
afterwards did conjecture (but it was mere conjecture) that some
injury which her haughty spirit had received in her cause of quarrel
with her sister had wounded her beyond all reason, but she wrote him
that from the date of that letter she died to him--as in literal
truth she did--and that the resolution was exacted from her by her
knowledge of his proud temper and his strained sense of honour, which
were both her nature too. In consideration for those master points in
him, and even in consideration for them in herself, she made the
sacrifice, she said, and would live in it and die in it. She did
both, I fear; certainly he never saw her, never heard of her from
that hour. Nor did any one."

"Oh, guardian, what have I done!" I cried, giving way to my grief;
"what sorrow have I innocently caused!"

"You caused, Esther?"

"Yes, guardian. Innocently, but most surely. That secluded sister is
my first remembrance."

"No, no!" he cried, starting.

"Yes, guardian, yes! And HER sister is my mother!"

I would have told him all my mother's letter, but he would not hear
it then. He spoke so tenderly and wisely to me, and he put so plainly
before me all I had myself imperfectly thought and hoped in my better
state of mind, that, penetrated as I had been with fervent gratitude
towards him through so many years, I believed I had never loved him
so dearly, never thanked him in my heart so fully, as I did that
night. And when he had taken me to my room and kissed me at the door,
and when at last I lay down to sleep, my thought was how could I ever
be busy enough, how could I ever be good enough, how in my little way
could I ever hope to be forgetful enough of myself, devoted enough to
him, and useful enough to others, to show him how I blessed and
honoured him.




CHAPTER XLIV

The Letter and the Answer


My guardian called me into his room next morning, and then I told him
what had been left untold on the previous night. There was nothing to
be done, he said, but to keep the secret and to avoid another such
encounter as that of yesterday. He understood my feeling and entirely
shared it. He charged himself even with restraining Mr. Skimpole from
improving his opportunity. One person whom he need not name to me, it
was not now possible for him to advise or help. He wished it were,
but no such thing could be. If her mistrust of the lawyer whom she
had mentioned were well-founded, which he scarcely doubted, he
dreaded discovery. He knew something of him, both by sight and by
reputation, and it was certain that he was a dangerous man. Whatever
happened, he repeatedly impressed upon me with anxious affection and
kindness, I was as innocent of as himself and as unable to influence.

"Nor do I understand," said he, "that any doubts tend towards you, my
dear. Much suspicion may exist without that connexion."

"With the lawyer," I returned. "But two other persons have come into
my mind since I have been anxious. Then I told him all about Mr.
Guppy, who I feared might have had his vague surmises when I little
understood his meaning, but in whose silence after our last interview
I expressed perfect confidence.

"Well," said my guardian. "Then we may dismiss him for the present.
Who is the other?"

I called to his recollection the French maid and the eager offer of
herself she had made to me.

"Ha!" he returned thoughtfully. "That is a more alarming person than
the clerk. But after all, my dear, it was but seeking for a new
service. She had seen you and Ada a little while before, and it was
natural that you should come into her head. She merely proposed
herself for your maid, you know. She did nothing more."

"Her manner was strange," said I.

"Yes, and her manner was strange when she took her shoes off and
showed that cool relish for a walk that might have ended in her
death-bed," said my guardian. "It would be useless self-distress and
torment to reckon up such chances and possibilities. There are very
few harmless circumstances that would not seem full of perilous
meaning, so considered. Be hopeful, little woman. You can be nothing
better than yourself; be that, through this knowledge, as you were
before you had it. It is the best you can do for everybody's sake. I,
sharing the secret with you--"

"And lightening it, guardian, so much," said I.

"--will be attentive to what passes in that family, so far as I can
observe it from my distance. And if the time should come when I can
stretch out a hand to render the least service to one whom it is
better not to name even here, I will not fail to do it for her dear
daughter's sake."

I thanked him with my whole heart. What could I ever do but thank
him! I was going out at the door when he asked me to stay a moment.
Quickly turning round, I saw that same expression on his face again;
and all at once, I don't know how, it flashed upon me as a new and
far-off possibility that I understood it.

"My dear Esther," said my guardian, "I have long had something in my
thoughts that I have wished to say to you."

"Indeed?"

"I have had some difficulty in approaching it, and I still have. I
should wish it to be so deliberately said, and so deliberately
considered. Would you object to my writing it?"

"Dear guardian, how could I object to your writing anything for ME to
read?"

"Then see, my love," said he with his cheery smile, "am I at this
moment quite as plain and easy--do I seem as open, as honest and
old-fashioned--as I am at any time?"

I answered in all earnestness, "Quite." With the strictest truth, for
his momentary hesitation was gone (it had not lasted a minute), and
his fine, sensible, cordial, sterling manner was restored.

"Do I look as if I suppressed anything, meant anything but what I
said, had any reservation at all, no matter what?" said he with his
bright clear eyes on mine.

I answered, most assuredly he did not.

"Can you fully trust me, and thoroughly rely on what I profess,
Esther?"

"Most thoroughly," said I with my whole heart.

"My dear girl," returned my guardian, "give me your hand."

He took it in his, holding me lightly with his arm, and looking down
into my face with the same genuine freshness and faithfulness of
manner--the old protecting manner which had made that house my home
in a moment--said, "You have wrought changes in me, little woman,
since the winter day in the stage-coach. First and last you have done
me a world of good since that time."

"Ah, guardian, what have you done for me since that time!"

"But," said he, "that is not to be remembered now."

"It never can be forgotten."

"Yes, Esther," said he with a gentle seriousness, "it is to be
forgotten now, to be forgotten for a while. You are only to remember
now that nothing can change me as you know me. Can you feel quite
assured of that, my dear?"

"I can, and I do," I said.

"That's much," he answered. "That's everything. But I must not take
that at a word. I will not write this something in my thoughts until
you have quite resolved within yourself that nothing can change me as
you know me. If you doubt that in the least degree, I will never
write it. If you are sure of that, on good consideration, send
Charley to me this night week--'for the letter.' But if you are not
quite certain, never send. Mind, I trust to your truth, in this thing
as in everything. If you are not quite certain on that one point,
never send!"

"Guardian," said I, "I am already certain, I can no more be changed
in that conviction than you can be changed towards me. I shall send
Charley for the letter."

He shook my hand and said no more. Nor was any more said in reference
to this conversation, either by him or me, through the whole week.
When the appointed night came, I said to Charley as soon as I was
alone, "Go and knock at Mr. Jarndyce's door, Charley, and say you
have come from me--'for the letter.'" Charley went up the stairs, and
down the stairs, and along the passages--the zig-zag way about the
old-fashioned house seemed very long in my listening ears that
night--and so came back, along the passages, and down the stairs, and
up the stairs, and brought the letter. "Lay it on the table,
Charley," said I. So Charley laid it on the table and went to bed,
and I sat looking at it without taking it up, thinking of many
things.

I began with my overshadowed childhood, and passed through those
timid days to the heavy time when my aunt lay dead, with her resolute
face so cold and set, and when I was more solitary with Mrs. Rachael
than if I had had no one in the world to speak to or to look at. I
passed to the altered days when I was so blest as to find friends in
all around me, and to be beloved. I came to the time when I first saw
my dear girl and was received into that sisterly affection which was
the grace and beauty of my life. I recalled the first bright gleam of
welcome which had shone out of those very windows upon our expectant
faces on that cold bright night, and which had never paled. I lived
my happy life there over again, I went through my illness and
recovery, I thought of myself so altered and of those around me so
unchanged; and all this happiness shone like a light from one central
figure, represented before me by the letter on the table.

I opened it and read it. It was so impressive in its love for me, and
in the unselfish caution it gave me, and the consideration it showed
for me in every word, that my eyes were too often blinded to read
much at a time. But I read it through three times before I laid it
down. I had thought beforehand that I knew its purport, and I did. It
asked me, would I be the mistress of Bleak House.

It was not a love letter, though it expressed so much love, but was
written just as he would at any time have spoken to me. I saw his
face, and heard his voice, and felt the influence of his kind
protecting manner in every line. It addressed me as if our places
were reversed, as if all the good deeds had been mine and all the
feelings they had awakened his. It dwelt on my being young, and he
past the prime of life; on his having attained a ripe age, while I
was a child; on his writing to me with a silvered head, and knowing
all this so well as to set it in full before me for mature
deliberation. It told me that I would gain nothing by such a marriage
and lose nothing by rejecting it, for no new relation could enhance
the tenderness in which he held me, and whatever my decision was, he
was certain it would be right. But he had considered this step anew
since our late confidence and had decided on taking it, if it only
served to show me through one poor instance that the whole world
would readily unite to falsify the stern prediction of my childhood.
I was the last to know what happiness I could bestow upon him, but of
that he said no more, for I was always to remember that I owed him
nothing and that he was my debtor, and for very much. He had often
thought of our future, and foreseeing that the time must come, and
fearing that it might come soon, when Ada (now very nearly of age)
would leave us, and when our present mode of life must be broken up,
had become accustomed to reflect on this proposal. Thus he made it.
If I felt that I could ever give him the best right he could have to
be my protector, and if I felt that I could happily and justly become
the dear companion of his remaining life, superior to all lighter
chances and changes than death, even then he could not have me bind
myself irrevocably while this letter was yet so new to me, but even
then I must have ample time for reconsideration. In that case, or in
the opposite case, let him be unchanged in his old relation, in his
old manner, in the old name by which I called him. And as to his
bright Dame Durden and little housekeeper, she would ever be the
same, he knew.

This was the substance of the letter, written throughout with a
justice and a dignity as if he were indeed my responsible guardian
impartially representing the proposal of a friend against whom in his
integrity he stated the full case.

But he did not hint to me that when I had been better looking he had
had this same proceeding in his thoughts and had refrained from it.
That when my old face was gone from me, and I had no attractions, he
could love me just as well as in my fairer days. That the discovery
of my birth gave him no shock. That his generosity rose above my
disfigurement and my inheritance of shame. That the more I stood in
need of such fidelity, the more firmly I might trust in him to the
last.

But I knew it, I knew it well now. It came upon me as the close of
the benignant history I had been pursuing, and I felt that I had but
one thing to do. To devote my life to his happiness was to thank him
poorly, and what had I wished for the other night but some new means
of thanking him?

Still I cried very much, not only in the fullness of my heart after
reading the letter, not only in the strangeness of the prospect--for
it was strange though I had expected the contents--but as if
something for which there was no name or distinct idea were
indefinitely lost to me. I was very happy, very thankful, very
hopeful; but I cried very much.

By and by I went to my old glass. My eyes were red and swollen, and I
said, "Oh, Esther, Esther, can that be you!" I am afraid the face in
the glass was going to cry again at this reproach, but I held up my
finger at it, and it stopped.

"That is more like the composed look you comforted me with, my dear,
when you showed me such a change!" said I, beginning to let down my
hair. "When you are mistress of Bleak House, you are to be as
cheerful as a bird. In fact, you are always to be cheerful; so let us
begin for once and for all."

I went on with my hair now, quite comfortably. I sobbed a little
still, but that was because I had been crying, not because I was
crying then.

"And so Esther, my dear, you are happy for life. Happy with your best
friends, happy in your old home, happy in the power of doing a great
deal of good, and happy in the undeserved love of the best of men."

I thought, all at once, if my guardian had married some one else, how
should I have felt, and what should I have done! That would have been
a change indeed. It presented my life in such a new and blank form
that I rang my housekeeping keys and gave them a kiss before I laid
them down in their basket again.

Then I went on to think, as I dressed my hair before the glass, how
often had I considered within myself that the deep traces of my
illness and the circumstances of my birth were only new reasons why I
should be busy, busy, busy--useful, amiable, serviceable, in all
honest, unpretending ways. This was a good time, to be sure, to sit
down morbidly and cry! As to its seeming at all strange to me at
first (if that were any excuse for crying, which it was not) that I
was one day to be the mistress of Bleak House, why should it seem
strange? Other people had thought of such things, if I had not.
"Don't you remember, my plain dear," I asked myself, looking at the
glass, "what Mrs. Woodcourt said before those scars were there about
your marrying--"

Perhaps the name brought them to my remembrance. The dried remains of
the flowers. It would be better not to keep them now. They had only
been preserved in memory of something wholly past and gone, but it
would be better not to keep them now.

They were in a book, and it happened to be in the next room--our
sitting-room, dividing Ada's chamber from mine. I took a candle and
went softly in to fetch it from its shelf. After I had it in my hand,
I saw my beautiful darling, through the open door, lying asleep, and
I stole in to kiss her.

It was weak in me, I know, and I could have no reason for crying; but
I dropped a tear upon her dear face, and another, and another. Weaker
than that, I took the withered flowers out and put them for a moment
to her lips. I thought about her love for Richard, though, indeed,
the flowers had nothing to do with that. Then I took them into my own
room and burned them at the candle, and they were dust in an instant.

On entering the breakfast-room next morning, I found my guardian just
as usual, quite as frank, as open, and free. There being not the
least constraint in his manner, there was none (or I think there was
none) in mine. I was with him several times in the course of the
morning, in and out, when there was no one there, and I thought it
not unlikely that he might speak to me about the letter, but he did
not say a word.

So, on the next morning, and the next, and for at least a week, over
which time Mr. Skimpole prolonged his stay. I expected, every day,
that my guardian might speak to me about the letter, but he never
did.

I thought then, growing uneasy, that I ought to write an answer. I
tried over and over again in my own room at night, but I could not
write an answer that at all began like a good answer, so I thought
each night I would wait one more day. And I waited seven more days,
and he never said a word.

At last, Mr. Skimpole having departed, we three were one afternoon
going out for a ride; and I, being dressed before Ada and going down,
came upon my guardian, with his back towards me, standing at the
drawing-room window looking out.

He turned on my coming in and said, smiling, "Aye, it's you, little
woman, is it?" and looked out again.

I had made up my mind to speak to him now. In short, I had come down
on purpose. "Guardian," I said, rather hesitating and trembling,
"when would you like to have the answer to the letter Charley came
for?"

"When it's ready, my dear," he replied.

"I think it is ready," said I.

"Is Charley to bring it?" he asked pleasantly.

"No. I have brought it myself, guardian," I returned.

I put my two arms round his neck and kissed him, and he said was this
the mistress of Bleak House, and I said yes; and it made no
difference presently, and we all went out together, and I said
nothing to my precious pet about it.




CHAPTER XLV

In Trust


One morning when I had done jingling about with my baskets of keys,
as my beauty and I were walking round and round the garden I happened
to turn my eyes towards the house and saw a long thin shadow going in
which looked like Mr. Vholes. Ada had been telling me only that
morning of her hopes that Richard might exhaust his ardour in the
Chancery suit by being so very earnest in it; and therefore, not to
damp my dear girl's spirits, I said nothing about Mr. Vholes's
shadow.

Presently came Charley, lightly winding among the bushes and tripping
along the paths, as rosy and pretty as one of Flora's attendants
instead of my maid, saying, "Oh, if you please, miss, would you step
and speak to Mr. Jarndyce!"

It was one of Charley's peculiarities that whenever she was charged
with a message she always began to deliver it as soon as she beheld,
at any distance, the person for whom it was intended. Therefore I saw
Charley asking me in her usual form of words to "step and speak" to
Mr. Jarndyce long before I heard her. And when I did hear her, she
had said it so often that she was out of breath.

I told Ada I would make haste back and inquired of Charley as we went
in whether there was not a gentleman with Mr. Jarndyce. To which
Charley, whose grammar, I confess to my shame, never did any credit
to my educational powers, replied, "Yes, miss. Him as come down in
the country with Mr. Richard."

A more complete contrast than my guardian and Mr. Vholes I suppose
there could not be. I found them looking at one another across a
table, the one so open and the other so close, the one so broad and
upright and the other so narrow and stooping, the one giving out what
he had to say in such a rich ringing voice and the other keeping it
in in such a cold-blooded, gasping, fish-like manner that I thought I
never had seen two people so unmatched.

"You know Mr. Vholes, my dear," said my guardian. Not with the
greatest urbanity, I must say.

Mr. Vholes rose, gloved and buttoned up as usual, and seated himself
again, just as he had seated himself beside Richard in the gig. Not
having Richard to look at, he looked straight before him.

"Mr. Vholes," said my guardian, eyeing his black figure as if he were
a bird of ill omen, "has brought an ugly report of our most
unfortunate Rick." Laying a marked emphasis on "most unfortunate" as
if the words were rather descriptive of his connexion with Mr.
Vholes.

I sat down between them; Mr. Vholes remained immovable, except that
he secretly picked at one of the red pimples on his yellow face with
his black glove.

"And as Rick and you are happily good friends, I should like to
know," said my guardian, "what you think, my dear. Would you be so
good as to--as to speak up, Mr. Vholes?"

Doing anything but that, Mr. Vholes observed, "I have been saying
that I have reason to know, Miss Summerson, as Mr. C.'s professional
adviser, that Mr. C.'s circumstances are at the present moment in an
embarrassed state. Not so much in point of amount as owing to the
peculiar and pressing nature of liabilities Mr. C. has incurred and
the means he has of liquidating or meeting the same. I have staved
off many little matters for Mr. C., but there is a limit to staving
off, and we have reached it. I have made some advances out of pocket
to accommodate these unpleasantnesses, but I necessarily look to
being repaid, for I do not pretend to be a man of capital, and I have
a father to support in the Vale of Taunton, besides striving to
realize some little independence for three dear girls at home. My
apprehension is, Mr. C.'s circumstances being such, lest it should
end in his obtaining leave to part with his commission, which at all
events is desirable to be made known to his connexions."

Mr. Vholes, who had looked at me while speaking, here emerged into
the silence he could hardly be said to have broken, so stifled was
his tone, and looked before him again.

"Imagine the poor fellow without even his present resource," said my
guardian to me. "Yet what can I do? You know him, Esther. He would
never accept of help from me now. To offer it or hint at it would be
to drive him to an extremity, if nothing else did."

Mr. Vholes hereupon addressed me again.

"What Mr. Jarndyce remarks, miss, is no doubt the case, and is the
difficulty. I do not see that anything is to be done. I do not say
that anything is to be done. Far from it. I merely come down here
under the seal of confidence and mention it in order that everything
may be openly carried on and that it may not be said afterwards that
everything was not openly carried on. My wish is that everything
should be openly carried on. I desire to leave a good name behind me.
If I consulted merely my own interests with Mr. C., I should not be
here. So insurmountable, as you must well know, would be his
objections. This is not a professional attendance. This can he
charged to nobody. I have no interest in it except as a member of
society and a father--AND a son," said Mr. Vholes, who had nearly
forgotten that point.

It appeared to us that Mr. Vholes said neither more nor less than the
truth in intimating that he sought to divide the responsibility, such
as it was, of knowing Richard's situation. I could only suggest that
I should go down to Deal, where Richard was then stationed, and see
him, and try if it were possible to avert the worst. Without
consulting Mr. Vholes on this point, I took my guardian aside to
propose it, while Mr. Vholes gauntly stalked to the fire and warmed
his funeral gloves.

The fatigue of the journey formed an immediate objection on my
guardian's part, but as I saw he had no other, and as I was only too
happy to go, I got his consent. We had then merely to dispose of Mr.
Vholes.

"Well, sir," said Mr. Jarndyce, "Miss Summerson will communicate with
Mr. Carstone, and you can only hope that his position may be yet
retrievable. You will allow me to order you lunch after your journey,
sir."

"I thank you, Mr. Jarndyce," said Mr. Vholes, putting out his long
black sleeve to check the ringing of the bell, "not any. I thank you,
no, not a morsel. My digestion is much impaired, and I am but a poor
knife and fork at any time. If I was to partake of solid food at this
period of the day, I don't know what the consequences might be.
Everything having been openly carried on, sir, I will now with your
permission take my leave."

"And I would that you could take your leave, and we could all take
our leave, Mr. Vholes," returned my guardian bitterly, "of a cause
you know of."

Mr. Vholes, whose black dye was so deep from head to foot that it had
quite steamed before the fire, diffusing a very unpleasant perfume,
made a short one-sided inclination of his head from the neck and
slowly shook it.

"We whose ambition it is to be looked upon in the light of
respectable practitioners, sir, can but put our shoulders to the
wheel. We do it, sir. At least, I do it myself; and I wish to think
well of my professional brethren, one and all. You are sensible of an
obligation not to refer to me, miss, in communicating with Mr. C.?"

I said I would be careful not to do it.

"Just so, miss. Good morning. Mr. Jarndyce, good morning, sir." Mr.
Vholes put his dead glove, which scarcely seemed to have any hand in
it, on my fingers, and then on my guardian's fingers, and took his
long thin shadow away. I thought of it on the outside of the coach,
passing over all the sunny landscape between us and London, chilling
the seed in the ground as it glided along.

Of course it became necessary to tell Ada where I was going and why I
was going, and of course she was anxious and distressed. But she was
too true to Richard to say anything but words of pity and words of
excuse, and in a more loving spirit still--my dear devoted girl!--she
wrote him a long letter, of which I took charge.

Charley was to be my travelling companion, though I am sure I wanted
none and would willingly have left her at home. We all went to London
that afternoon, and finding two places in the mail, secured them. At
our usual bed-time, Charley and I were rolling away seaward with the
Kentish letters.

It was a night's journey in those coach times, but we had the mail to
ourselves and did not find the night very tedious. It passed with me
as I suppose it would with most people under such circumstances. At
one while my journey looked hopeful, and at another hopeless. Now I
thought I should do some good, and now I wondered how I could ever
have supposed so. Now it seemed one of the most reasonable things in
the world that I should have come, and now one of the most
unreasonable. In what state I should find Richard, what I should say
to him, and what he would say to me occupied my mind by turns with
these two states of feeling; and the wheels seemed to play one tune
(to which the burden of my guardian's letter set itself) over and
over again all night.

At last we came into the narrow streets of Deal, and very gloomy they
were upon a raw misty morning. The long flat beach, with its little
irregular houses, wooden and brick, and its litter of capstans, and
great boats, and sheds, and bare upright poles with tackle and
blocks, and loose gravelly waste places overgrown with grass and
weeds, wore as dull an appearance as any place I ever saw. The sea
was heaving under a thick white fog; and nothing else was moving but
a few early ropemakers, who, with the yarn twisted round their
bodies, looked as if, tired of their present state of existence, they
were spinning themselves into cordage.

But when we got into a warm room in an excellent hotel and sat down,
comfortably washed and dressed, to an early breakfast (for it was too
late to think of going to bed), Deal began to look more cheerful. Our
little room was like a ship's cabin, and that delighted Charley very
much. Then the fog began to rise like a curtain, and numbers of ships
that we had had no idea were near appeared. I don't know how many
sail the waiter told us were then lying in the downs. Some of these
vessels were of grand size--one was a large Indiaman just come home;
and when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in
the dark sea, the way in which these ships brightened, and shadowed,
and changed, amid a bustle of boats pulling off from the shore to
them and from them to the shore, and a general life and motion in
themselves and everything around them, was most beautiful.

The large Indiaman was our great attraction because she had come into
the downs in the night. She was surrounded by boats, and we said how
glad the people on board of her must be to come ashore. Charley was
curious, too, about the voyage, and about the heat in India, and the
serpents and the tigers; and as she picked up such information much
faster than grammar, I told her what I knew on those points. I told
her, too, how people in such voyages were sometimes wrecked and cast
on rocks, where they were saved by the intrepidity and humanity of
one man. And Charley asking how that could be, I told her how we knew
at home of such a case.

I had thought of sending Richard a note saying I was there, but it
seemed so much better to go to him without preparation. As he lived
in barracks I was a little doubtful whether this was feasible, but we
went out to reconnoitre. Peeping in at the gate of the barrack-yard,
we found everything very quiet at that time in the morning, and I
asked a sergeant standing on the guardhouse-steps where he lived. He
sent a man before to show me, who went up some bare stairs, and
knocked with his knuckles at a door, and left us.

"Now then!" cried Richard from within. So I left Charley in the
little passage, and going on to the half-open door, said, "Can I come
in, Richard? It's only Dame Durden."

He was writing at a table, with a great confusion of clothes, tin
cases, books, boots, brushes, and portmanteaus strewn all about the
floor. He was only half dressed--in plain clothes, I observed, not in
uniform--and his hair was unbrushed, and he looked as wild as his
room. All this I saw after he had heartily welcomed me and I was
seated near him, for he started upon hearing my voice and caught me
in his arms in a moment. Dear Richard! He was ever the same to me.
Down to--ah, poor poor fellow!--to the end, he never received me but
with something of his old merry boyish manner.

"Good heaven, my dear little woman," said he, "how do you come here?
Who could have thought of seeing you! Nothing the matter? Ada is
well?"

"Quite well. Lovelier than ever, Richard!"

"Ah!" he said, leaning back in his chair. "My poor cousin! I was
writing to you, Esther."

So worn and haggard as he looked, even in the fullness of his
handsome youth, leaning back in his chair and crushing the closely
written sheet of paper in his hand!

"Have you been at the trouble of writing all that, and am I not to
read it after all?" I asked.

"Oh, my dear," he returned with a hopeless gesture. "You may read it
in the whole room. It is all over here."

I mildly entreated him not to be despondent. I told him that I had
heard by chance of his being in difficulty and had come to consult
with him what could best be done.

"Like you, Esther, but useless, and so NOT like you!" said he with a
melancholy smile. "I am away on leave this day--should have been gone
in another hour--and that is to smooth it over, for my selling out.
Well! Let bygones be bygones. So this calling follows the rest. I
only want to have been in the church to have made the round of all
the professions."

"Richard," I urged, "it is not so hopeless as that?"

"Esther," he returned, "it is indeed. I am just so near disgrace as
that those who are put in authority over me (as the catechism goes)
would far rather be without me than with me. And they are right.
Apart from debts and duns and all such drawbacks, I am not fit even
for this employment. I have no care, no mind, no heart, no soul, but
for one thing. Why, if this bubble hadn't broken now," he said,
tearing the letter he had written into fragments and moodily casting
them away, by driblets, "how could I have gone abroad? I must have
been ordered abroad, but how could I have gone? How could I, with my
experience of that thing, trust even Vholes unless I was at his
back!"

I suppose he knew by my face what I was about to say, but he caught
the hand I had laid upon his arm and touched my own lips with it to
prevent me from going on.

"No, Dame Durden! Two subjects I forbid--must forbid. The first is
John Jarndyce. The second, you know what. Call it madness, and I tell
you I can't help it now, and can't be sane. But it is no such thing;
it is the one object I have to pursue. It is a pity I ever was
prevailed upon to turn out of my road for any other. It would be
wisdom to abandon it now, after all the time, anxiety, and pains I
have bestowed upon it! Oh, yes, true wisdom. It would be very
agreeable, too, to some people; but I never will."

He was in that mood in which I thought it best not to increase his
determination (if anything could increase it) by opposing him. I took
out Ada's letter and put it in his hand.

"Am I to read it now?" he asked.

As I told him yes, he laid it on the table, and resting his head upon
his hand, began. He had not read far when he rested his head upon his
two hands--to hide his face from me. In a little while he rose as if
the light were bad and went to the window. He finished reading it
there, with his back towards me, and after he had finished and had
folded it up, stood there for some minutes with the letter in his
hand. When he came back to his chair, I saw tears in his eyes.

"Of course, Esther, you know what she says here?" He spoke in a
softened voice and kissed the letter as he asked me.

"Yes, Richard."

"Offers me," he went on, tapping his foot upon the floor, "the little
inheritance she is certain of so soon--just as little and as much as
I have wasted--and begs and prays me to take it, set myself right
with it, and remain in the service."

"I know your welfare to be the dearest wish of her heart," said I.
"And, oh, my dear Richard, Ada's is a noble heart."

"I am sure it is. I--I wish I was dead!"

He went back to the window, and laying his arm across it, leaned his
head down on his arm. It greatly affected me to see him so, but I
hoped he might become more yielding, and I remained silent. My
experience was very limited; I was not at all prepared for his
rousing himself out of this emotion to a new sense of injury.

"And this is the heart that the same John Jarndyce, who is not
otherwise to be mentioned between us, stepped in to estrange from
me," said he indignantly. "And the dear girl makes me this generous
offer from under the same John Jarndyce's roof, and with the same
John Jarndyce's gracious consent and connivance, I dare say, as a new
means of buying me off."

"Richard!" I cried out, rising hastily. "I will not hear you say such
shameful words!" I was very angry with him indeed, for the first time
in my life, but it only lasted a moment. When I saw his worn young
face looking at me as if he were sorry, I put my hand on his shoulder
and said, "If you please, my dear Richard, do not speak in such a
tone to me. Consider!"

He blamed himself exceedingly and told me in the most generous manner
that he had been very wrong and that he begged my pardon a thousand
times. At that I laughed, but trembled a little too, for I was rather
fluttered after being so fiery.

"To accept this offer, my dear Esther," said he, sitting down beside
me and resuming our conversation, "--once more, pray, pray forgive
me; I am deeply grieved--to accept my dearest cousin's offer is, I
need not say, impossible. Besides, I have letters and papers that I
could show you which would convince you it is all over here. I have
done with the red coat, believe me. But it is some satisfaction, in
the midst of my troubles and perplexities, to know that I am pressing
Ada's interests in pressing my own. Vholes has his shoulder to the
wheel, and he cannot help urging it on as much for her as for me,
thank God!"

His sanguine hopes were rising within him and lighting up his
features, but they made his face more sad to me than it had been
before.

"No, no!" cried Richard exultingly. "If every farthing of Ada's
little fortune were mine, no part of it should be spent in retaining
me in what I am not fit for, can take no interest in, and am weary
of. It should be devoted to what promises a better return, and should
be used where she has a larger stake. Don't be uneasy for me! I shall
now have only one thing on my mind, and Vholes and I will work it. I
shall not be without means. Free of my commission, I shall be able to
compound with some small usurers who will hear of nothing but their
bond now--Vholes says so. I should have a balance in my favour
anyway, but that would swell it. Come, come! You shall carry a letter
to Ada from me, Esther, and you must both of you be more hopeful of
me and not believe that I am quite cast away just yet, my dear."

I will not repeat what I said to Richard. I know it was tiresome, and
nobody is to suppose for a moment that it was at all wise. It only
came from my heart. He heard it patiently and feelingly, but I saw
that on the two subjects he had reserved it was at present hopeless
to make any representation to him. I saw too, and had experienced in
this very interview, the sense of my guardian's remark that it was
even more mischievous to use persuasion with him than to leave him as
he was.

Therefore I was driven at last to asking Richard if he would mind
convincing me that it really was all over there, as he had said, and
that it was not his mere impression. He showed me without hesitation
a correspondence making it quite plain that his retirement was
arranged. I found, from what he told me, that Mr. Vholes had copies
of these papers and had been in consultation with him throughout.
Beyond ascertaining this, and having been the bearer of Ada's letter,
and being (as I was going to be) Richard's companion back to London,
I had done no good by coming down. Admitting this to myself with a
reluctant heart, I said I would return to the hotel and wait until he
joined me there, so he threw a cloak over his shoulders and saw me to
the gate, and Charley and I went back along the beach.

There was a concourse of people in one spot, surrounding some naval
officers who were landing from a boat, and pressing about them with
unusual interest. I said to Charley this would be one of the great
Indiaman's boats now, and we stopped to look.

The gentlemen came slowly up from the waterside, speaking
good-humouredly to each other and to the people around and glancing
about them as if they were glad to be in England again. "Charley,
Charley," said I, "come away!" And I hurried on so swiftly that my
little maid was surprised.

It was not until we were shut up in our cabin-room and I had had time
to take breath that I began to think why I had made such haste. In
one of the sunburnt faces I had recognized Mr. Allan Woodcourt, and I
had been afraid of his recognizing me. I had been unwilling that he
should see my altered looks. I had been taken by surprise, and my
courage had quite failed me.

But I knew this would not do, and I now said to myself, "My dear,
there is no reason--there is and there can be no reason at all--why
it should be worse for you now than it ever has been. What you were
last month, you are to-day; you are no worse, you are no better. This
is not your resolution; call it up, Esther, call it up!" I was in a
great tremble--with running--and at first was quite unable to calm
myself; but I got better, and I was very glad to know it.

The party came to the hotel. I heard them speaking on the staircase.
I was sure it was the same gentlemen because I knew their voices
again--I mean I knew Mr. Woodcourt's. It would still have been a
great relief to me to have gone away without making myself known, but
I was determined not to do so. "No, my dear, no. No, no, no!"

I untied my bonnet and put my veil half up--I think I mean half down,
but it matters very little--and wrote on one of my cards that I
happened to be there with Mr. Richard Carstone, and I sent it in to
Mr. Woodcourt. He came immediately. I told him I was rejoiced to be
by chance among the first to welcome him home to England. And I saw
that he was very sorry for me.

"You have been in shipwreck and peril since you left us, Mr.
Woodcourt," said I, "but we can hardly call that a misfortune which
enabled you to be so useful and so brave. We read of it with the
truest interest. It first came to my knowledge through your old
patient, poor Miss Flite, when I was recovering from my severe
illness."

"Ah! Little Miss Flite!" he said. "She lives the same life yet?"

"Just the same."

I was so comfortable with myself now as not to mind the veil and to
be able to put it aside.

"Her gratitude to you, Mr. Woodcourt, is delightful. She is a most
affectionate creature, as I have reason to say."

"You--you have found her so?" he returned. "I--I am glad of that." He
was so very sorry for me that he could scarcely speak.

"I assure you," said I, "that I was deeply touched by her sympathy
and pleasure at the time I have referred to."

"I was grieved to hear that you had been very ill."

"I was very ill."

"But you have quite recovered?"

"I have quite recovered my health and my cheerfulness," said I. "You
know how good my guardian is and what a happy life we lead, and I
have everything to be thankful for and nothing in the world to
desire."

I felt as if he had greater commiseration for me than I had ever had
for myself. It inspired me with new fortitude and new calmness to
find that it was I who was under the necessity of reassuring him. I
spoke to him of his voyage out and home, and of his future plans, and
of his probable return to India. He said that was very doubtful. He
had not found himself more favoured by fortune there than here. He
had gone out a poor ship's surgeon and had come home nothing better.
While we were talking, and when I was glad to believe that I had
alleviated (if I may use such a term) the shock he had had in seeing
me, Richard came in. He had heard downstairs who was with me, and
they met with cordial pleasure.

I saw that after their first greetings were over, and when they spoke
of Richard's career, Mr. Woodcourt had a perception that all was not
going well with him. He frequently glanced at his face as if there
were something in it that gave him pain, and more than once he looked
towards me as though he sought to ascertain whether I knew what the
truth was. Yet Richard was in one of his sanguine states and in good
spirits and was thoroughly pleased to see Mr. Woodcourt again, whom
he had always liked.

Richard proposed that we all should go to London together; but Mr.
Woodcourt, having to remain by his ship a little longer, could not
join us. He dined with us, however, at an early hour, and became so
much more like what he used to be that I was still more at peace to
think I had been able to soften his regrets. Yet his mind was not
relieved of Richard. When the coach was almost ready and Richard ran
down to look after his luggage, he spoke to me about him.

I was not sure that I had a right to lay his whole story open, but I
referred in a few words to his estrangement from Mr Jarndyce and to
his being entangled in the ill-fated Chancery suit. Mr. Woodcourt
listened with interest and expressed his regret.

"I saw you observe him rather closely," said I, "Do you think him so
changed?"

"He is changed," he returned, shaking his head.

I felt the blood rush into my face for the first time, but it was
only an instantaneous emotion. I turned my head aside, and it was
gone.

"It is not," said Mr. Woodcourt, "his being so much younger or older,
or thinner or fatter, or paler or ruddier, as there being upon his
face such a singular expression. I never saw so remarkable a look in
a young person. One cannot say that it is all anxiety or all
weariness; yet it is both, and like ungrown despair."

"You do not think he is ill?" said I.

No. He looked robust in body.

"That he cannot be at peace in mind, we have too much reason to
know," I proceeded. "Mr. Woodcourt, you are going to London?"

"To-morrow or the next day."

"There is nothing Richard wants so much as a friend. He always liked
you. Pray see him when you get there. Pray help him sometimes with
your companionship if you can. You do not know of what service it
might be. You cannot think how Ada, and Mr. Jarndyce, and even I--how
we should all thank you, Mr. Woodcourt!"

"Miss Summerson," he said, more moved than he had been from the
first, "before heaven, I will be a true friend to him! I will accept
him as a trust, and it shall be a sacred one!"

"God bless you!" said I, with my eyes filling fast; but I thought
they might, when it was not for myself. "Ada loves him--we all love
him, but Ada loves him as we cannot. I will tell her what you say.
Thank you, and God bless you, in her name!"

Richard came back as we finished exchanging these hurried words and
gave me his arm to take me to the coach.

"Woodcourt," he said, unconscious with what application, "pray let us
meet in London!"

"Meet?" returned the other. "I have scarcely a friend there now but
you. Where shall I find you?"

"Why, I must get a lodging of some sort," said Richard, pondering.
"Say at Vholes's, Symond's Inn."

"Good! Without loss of time."

They shook hands heartily. When I was seated in the coach and Richard
was yet standing in the street, Mr. Woodcourt laid his friendly hand
on Richard's shoulder and looked at me. I understood him and waved
mine in thanks.

And in his last look as we drove away, I saw that he was very sorry
for me. I was glad to see it. I felt for my old self as the dead may
feel if they ever revisit these scenes. I was glad to be tenderly
remembered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite forgotten.




CHAPTER XLVI

Stop Him!


Darkness rests upon Tom-All-Alone's. Dilating and dilating since the
sun went down last night, it has gradually swelled until it fills
every void in the place. For a time there were some dungeon lights
burning, as the lamp of life hums in Tom-all-Alone's, heavily,
heavily, in the nauseous air, and winking--as that lamp, too, winks
in Tom-all-Alone's--at many horrible things. But they are blotted
out. The moon has eyed Tom with a dull cold stare, as admitting some
puny emulation of herself in his desert region unfit for life and
blasted by volcanic fires; but she has passed on and is gone. The
blackest nightmare in the infernal stables grazes on Tom-all-Alone's,
and Tom is fast asleep.

Much mighty speech-making there has been, both in and out of
Parliament, concerning Tom, and much wrathful disputation how Tom
shall be got right. Whether he shall be put into the main road by
constables, or by beadles, or by bell-ringing, or by force of
figures, or by correct principles of taste, or by high church, or by
low church, or by no church; whether he shall be set to splitting
trusses of polemical straws with the crooked knife of his mind or
whether he shall be put to stone-breaking instead. In the midst of
which dust and noise there is but one thing perfectly clear, to wit,
that Tom only may and can, or shall and will, be reclaimed according
to somebody's theory but nobody's practice. And in the hopeful
meantime, Tom goes to perdition head foremost in his old determined
spirit.

But he has his revenge. Even the winds are his messengers, and they
serve him in these hours of darkness. There is not a drop of Tom's
corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere. It
shall pollute, this very night, the choice stream (in which chemists
on analysis would find the genuine nobility) of a Norman house, and
his Grace shall not be able to say nay to the infamous alliance.
There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic inch of any
pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation
about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his
committing, but shall work its retribution through every order of
society up to the proudest of the proud and to the highest of the
high. Verily, what with tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has
his revenge.

It is a moot point whether Tom-all-Alone's be uglier by day or by
night, but on the argument that the more that is seen of it the more
shocking it must be, and that no part of it left to the imagination
is at all likely to be made so bad as the reality, day carries it.
The day begins to break now; and in truth it might be better for the
national glory even that the sun should sometimes set upon the
British dominions than that it should ever rise upon so vile a wonder
as Tom.

A brown sunburnt gentleman, who appears in some inaptitude for sleep
to be wandering abroad rather than counting the hours on a restless
pillow, strolls hitherward at this quiet time. Attracted by
curiosity, he often pauses and looks about him, up and down the
miserable by-ways. Nor is he merely curious, for in his bright dark
eye there is compassionate interest; and as he looks here and there,
he seems to understand such wretchedness and to have studied it
before.

On the banks of the stagnant channel of mud which is the main street
of Tom-all-Alone's, nothing is to be seen but the crazy houses, shut
up and silent. No waking creature save himself appears except in one
direction, where he sees the solitary figure of a woman sitting on a
door-step. He walks that way. Approaching, he observes that she has
journeyed a long distance and is footsore and travel-stained. She
sits on the door-step in the manner of one who is waiting, with her
elbow on her knee and her head upon her hand. Beside her is a canvas
bag, or bundle, she has carried. She is dozing probably, for she
gives no heed to his steps as he comes toward her.

The broken footway is so narrow that when Allan Woodcourt comes to
where the woman sits, he has to turn into the road to pass her.
Looking down at her face, his eye meets hers, and he stops.

"What is the matter?"

"Nothing, sir."

"Can't you make them hear? Do you want to be let in?"

"I'm waiting till they get up at another house--a lodging-house--not
here," the woman patiently returns. "I'm waiting here because there
will be sun here presently to warm me."

"I am afraid you are tired. I am sorry to see you sitting in the
street."

"Thank you, sir. It don't matter."

A habit in him of speaking to the poor and of avoiding patronage or
condescension or childishness (which is the favourite device, many
people deeming it quite a subtlety to talk to them like little
spelling books) has put him on good terms with the woman easily.

"Let me look at your forehead," he says, bending down. "I am a
doctor. Don't be afraid. I wouldn't hurt you for the world."

He knows that by touching her with his skilful and accustomed hand he
can soothe her yet more readily. She makes a slight objection,
saying, "It's nothing"; but he has scarcely laid his fingers on the
wounded place when she lifts it up to the light.

"Aye! A bad bruise, and the skin sadly broken. This must be very
sore."

"It do ache a little, sir," returns the woman with a started tear
upon her cheek.

"Let me try to make it more comfortable. My handkerchief won't hurt
you."

"Oh, dear no, sir, I'm sure of that!"

He cleanses the injured place and dries it, and having carefully
examined it and gently pressed it with the palm of his hand, takes a
small case from his pocket, dresses it, and binds it up. While he is
thus employed, he says, after laughing at his establishing a surgery
in the street, "And so your husband is a brickmaker?"

"How do you know that, sir?" asks the woman, astonished.

"Why, I suppose so from the colour of the clay upon your bag and on
your dress. And I know brickmakers go about working at piecework in
different places. And I am sorry to say I have known them cruel to
their wives too."

The woman hastily lifts up her eyes as if she would deny that her
injury is referable to such a cause. But feeling the hand upon her
forehead, and seeing his busy and composed face, she quietly drops
them again.

"Where is he now?" asks the surgeon.

"He got into trouble last night, sir; but he'll look for me at the
lodging-house."

"He will get into worse trouble if he often misuses his large and
heavy hand as he has misused it here. But you forgive him, brutal as
he is, and I say no more of him, except that I wish he deserved it.
You have no young child?"

The woman shakes her head. "One as I calls mine, sir, but it's
Liz's."

"Your own is dead. I see! Poor little thing!"

By this time he has finished and is putting up his case. "I suppose
you have some settled home. Is it far from here?" he asks,
good-humouredly making light of what he has done as she gets up and
curtsys.

"It's a good two or three and twenty mile from here, sir. At Saint
Albans. You know Saint Albans, sir? I thought you gave a start like,
as if you did."

"Yes, I know something of it. And now I will ask you a question in
return. Have you money for your lodging?"

"Yes, sir," she says, "really and truly." And she shows it. He tells
her, in acknowledgment of her many subdued thanks, that she is very
welcome, gives her good day, and walks away. Tom-all-Alone's is still
asleep, and nothing is astir.

Yes, something is! As he retraces his way to the point from which he
descried the woman at a distance sitting on the step, he sees a
ragged figure coming very cautiously along, crouching close to the
soiled walls--which the wretchedest figure might as well avoid--and
furtively thrusting a hand before it. It is the figure of a youth
whose face is hollow and whose eyes have an emaciated glare. He is so
intent on getting along unseen that even the apparition of a stranger
in whole garments does not tempt him to look back. He shades his face
with his ragged elbow as he passes on the other side of the way, and
goes shrinking and creeping on with his anxious hand before him and
his shapeless clothes hanging in shreds. Clothes made for what
purpose, or of what material, it would be impossible to say. They
look, in colour and in substance, like a bundle of rank leaves of
swampy growth that rotted long ago.

Allan Woodcourt pauses to look after him and note all this, with a
shadowy belief that he has seen the boy before. He cannot recall how
or where, but there is some association in his mind with such a form.
He imagines that he must have seen it in some hospital or refuge,
still, cannot make out why it comes with any special force on his
remembrance.

He is gradually emerging from Tom-all-Alone's in the morning light,
thinking about it, when he hears running feet behind him, and looking
round, sees the boy scouring towards him at great speed, followed by
the woman.

"Stop him, stop him!" cries the woman, almost breathless. "Stop him,
sir!"

He darts across the road into the boy's path, but the boy is quicker
than he, makes a curve, ducks, dives under his hands, comes up
half-a-dozen yards beyond him, and scours away again. Still the woman
follows, crying, "Stop him, sir, pray stop him!" Allan, not knowing
but that he has just robbed her of her money, follows in chase and
runs so hard that he runs the boy down a dozen times, but each time
he repeats the curve, the duck, the dive, and scours away again. To
strike at him on any of these occasions would be to fell and disable
him, but the pursuer cannot resolve to do that, and so the grimly
ridiculous pursuit continues. At last the fugitive, hard-pressed,
takes to a narrow passage and a court which has no thoroughfare.
Here, against a hoarding of decaying timber, he is brought to bay and
tumbles down, lying gasping at his pursuer, who stands and gasps at
him until the woman comes up.

"Oh, you, Jo!" cries the woman. "What? I have found you at last!"

"Jo," repeats Allan, looking at him with attention, "Jo! Stay. To be
sure! I recollect this lad some time ago being brought before the
coroner."

"Yes, I see you once afore at the inkwhich," whimpers Jo. "What of
that? Can't you never let such an unfortnet as me alone? An't I
unfortnet enough for you yet? How unfortnet do you want me fur to be?
I've been a-chivied and a-chivied, fust by one on you and nixt by
another on you, till I'm worritted to skins and bones. The inkwhich
warn't MY fault. I done nothink. He wos wery good to me, he wos; he
wos the only one I knowed to speak to, as ever come across my
crossing. It ain't wery likely I should want him to be inkwhiched. I
only wish I wos, myself. I don't know why I don't go and make a hole
in the water, I'm sure I don't."

He says it with such a pitiable air, and his grimy tears appear so
real, and he lies in the corner up against the hoarding so like a
growth of fungus or any unwholesome excrescence produced there in
neglect and impurity, that Allan Woodcourt is softened towards him.
He says to the woman, "Miserable creature, what has he done?"

To which she only replies, shaking her head at the prostrate figure
more amazedly than angrily, "Oh, you Jo, you Jo. I have found you at
last!"

"What has he done?" says Allan. "Has he robbed you?"

"No, sir, no. Robbed me? He did nothing but what was kind-hearted by
me, and that's the wonder of it."

Allan looks from Jo to the woman, and from the woman to Jo, waiting
for one of them to unravel the riddle.

"But he was along with me, sir," says the woman. "Oh, you Jo! He was
along with me, sir, down at Saint Albans, ill, and a young lady, Lord
bless her for a good friend to me, took pity on him when I durstn't,
and took him home--"

Allan shrinks back from him with a sudden horror.

"Yes, sir, yes. Took him home, and made him comfortable, and like a
thankless monster he ran away in the night and never has been seen or
heard of since till I set eyes on him just now. And that young lady
that was such a pretty dear caught his illness, lost her beautiful
looks, and wouldn't hardly be known for the same young lady now if it
wasn't for her angel temper, and her pretty shape, and her sweet
voice. Do you know it? You ungrateful wretch, do you know that this
is all along of you and of her goodness to you?" demands the woman,
beginning to rage at him as she recalls it and breaking into
passionate tears.

The boy, in rough sort stunned by what he hears, falls to smearing
his dirty forehead with his dirty palm, and to staring at the ground,
and to shaking from head to foot until the crazy hoarding against
which he leans rattles.

Allan restrains the woman, merely by a quiet gesture, but
effectually.

"Richard told me--" He falters. "I mean, I have heard of this--don't
mind me for a moment, I will speak presently."

He turns away and stands for a while looking out at the covered
passage. When he comes back, he has recovered his composure, except
that he contends against an avoidance of the boy, which is so very
remarkable that it absorbs the woman's attention.

"You hear what she says. But get up, get up!"

Jo, shaking and chattering, slowly rises and stands, after the manner
of his tribe in a difficulty, sideways against the hoarding, resting
one of his high shoulders against it and covertly rubbing his right
hand over his left and his left foot over his right.

"You hear what she says, and I know it's true. Have you been here
ever since?"

"Wishermaydie if I seen Tom-all-Alone's till this blessed morning,"
replies Jo hoarsely.

"Why have you come here now?"

Jo looks all round the confined court, looks at his questioner no
higher than the knees, and finally answers, "I don't know how to do
nothink, and I can't get nothink to do. I'm wery poor and ill, and I
thought I'd come back here when there warn't nobody about, and lay
down and hide somewheres as I knows on till arter dark, and then go
and beg a trifle of Mr. Snagsby. He wos allus willin fur to give me
somethink he wos, though Mrs. Snagsby she was allus a-chivying on
me--like everybody everywheres."

"Where have you come from?"

Jo looks all round the court again, looks at his questioner's knees
again, and concludes by laying his profile against the hoarding in a
sort of resignation.

"Did you hear me ask you where you have come from?"

"Tramp then," says Jo.

"Now tell me," proceeds Allan, making a strong effort to overcome his
repugnance, going very near to him, and leaning over him with an
expression of confidence, "tell me how it came about that you left
that house when the good young lady had been so unfortunate as to
pity you and take you home."

Jo suddenly comes out of his resignation and excitedly declares,
addressing the woman, that he never known about the young lady, that
he never heern about it, that he never went fur to hurt her, that he
would sooner have hurt his own self, that he'd sooner have had his
unfortnet ed chopped off than ever gone a-nigh her, and that she wos
wery good to him, she wos. Conducting himself throughout as if in his
poor fashion he really meant it, and winding up with some very
miserable sobs.

Allan Woodcourt sees that this is not a sham. He constrains himself
to touch him. "Come, Jo. Tell me."

"No. I dustn't," says Jo, relapsing into the profile state. "I
dustn't, or I would."

"But I must know," returns the other, "all the same. Come, Jo."

After two or three such adjurations, Jo lifts up his head again,
looks round the court again, and says in a low voice, "Well, I'll
tell you something. I was took away. There!"

"Took away? In the night?"

"Ah!" Very apprehensive of being overheard, Jo looks about him and
even glances up some ten feet at the top of the hoarding and through
the cracks in it lest the object of his distrust should be looking
over or hidden on the other side.

"Who took you away?"

"I dustn't name him," says Jo. "I dustn't do it, sir.

"But I want, in the young lady's name, to know. You may trust me. No
one else shall hear."

"Ah, but I don't know," replies Jo, shaking his head fearfully, "as
he DON'T hear."

"Why, he is not in this place."

"Oh, ain't he though?" says Jo. "He's in all manner of places, all at
wanst."

Allan looks at him in perplexity, but discovers some real meaning and
good faith at the bottom of this bewildering reply. He patiently
awaits an explicit answer; and Jo, more baffled by his patience than
by anything else, at last desperately whispers a name in his ear.

"Aye!" says Allan. "Why, what had you been doing?"

"Nothink, sir. Never done nothink to get myself into no trouble,
'sept in not moving on and the inkwhich. But I'm a-moving on now. I'm
a-moving on to the berryin ground--that's the move as I'm up to."

"No, no, we will try to prevent that. But what did he do with you?"

"Put me in a horsepittle," replied Jo, whispering, "till I was
discharged, then giv me a little money--four half-bulls, wot you may
call half-crowns--and ses 'Hook it! Nobody wants you here,' he ses.
'You hook it. You go and tramp,' he ses. 'You move on,' he ses.
'Don't let me ever see you nowheres within forty mile of London, or
you'll repent it.' So I shall, if ever he doos see me, and he'll see
me if I'm above ground," concludes Jo, nervously repeating all his
former precautions and investigations.

Allan considers a little, then remarks, turning to the woman but
keeping an encouraging eye on Jo, "He is not so ungrateful as you
supposed. He had a reason for going away, though it was an
insufficient one."

"Thankee, sir, thankee!" exclaims Jo. "There now! See how hard you
wos upon me. But ony you tell the young lady wot the genlmn ses, and
it's all right. For YOU wos wery good to me too, and I knows it."

"Now, Jo," says Allan, keeping his eye upon him, "come with me and I
will find you a better place than this to lie down and hide in. If I
take one side of the way and you the other to avoid observation, you
will not run away, I know very well, if you make me a promise."

"I won't, not unless I wos to see HIM a-coming, sir."

"Very well. I take your word. Half the town is getting up by this
time, and the whole town will be broad awake in another hour. Come
along. Good day again, my good woman."

"Good day again, sir, and I thank you kindly many times again."

She has been sitting on her bag, deeply attentive, and now rises and
takes it up. Jo, repeating, "Ony you tell the young lady as I never
went fur to hurt her and wot the genlmn ses!" nods and shambles and
shivers, and smears and blinks, and half laughs and half cries, a
farewell to her, and takes his creeping way along after Allan
Woodcourt, close to the houses on the opposite side of the street. In
this order, the two come up out of Tom-all-Alone's into the broad
rays of the sunlight and the purer air.




CHAPTER XLVII

Jo's Will


As Allan Woodcourt and Jo proceed along the streets where the high
church spires and the distances are so near and clear in the morning
light that the city itself seems renewed by rest, Allan revolves in
his mind how and where he shall bestow his companion. "It surely is a
strange fact," he considers, "that in the heart of a civilized world
this creature in human form should be more difficult to dispose of
than an unowned dog." But it is none the less a fact because of its
strangeness, and the difficulty remains.

At first he looks behind him often to assure himself that Jo is still
really following. But look where he will, he still beholds him close
to the opposite houses, making his way with his wary hand from brick
to brick and from door to door, and often, as he creeps along,
glancing over at him watchfully. Soon satisfied that the last thing
in his thoughts is to give him the slip, Allan goes on, considering
with a less divided attention what he shall do.

A breakfast-stall at a street-corner suggests the first thing to be
done. He stops there, looks round, and beckons Jo. Jo crosses and
comes halting and shuffling up, slowly scooping the knuckles of his
right hand round and round in the hollowed palm of his left, kneading
dirt with a natural pestle and mortar. What is a dainty repast to Jo
is then set before him, and he begins to gulp the coffee and to gnaw
the bread and butter, looking anxiously about him in all directions
as he eats and drinks, like a scared animal.

But he is so sick and miserable that even hunger has abandoned him.
"I thought I was amost a-starvin, sir," says Jo, soon putting down
his food, "but I don't know nothink--not even that. I don't care for
eating wittles nor yet for drinking on 'em." And Jo stands shivering
and looking at the breakfast wonderingly.

Allan Woodcourt lays his hand upon his pulse and on his chest. "Draw
breath, Jo!" "It draws," says Jo, "as heavy as a cart." He might add,
"And rattles like it," but he only mutters, "I'm a-moving on, sir."

Allan looks about for an apothecary's shop. There is none at hand,
but a tavern does as well or better. He obtains a little measure of
wine and gives the lad a portion of it very carefully. He begins to
revive almost as soon as it passes his lips. "We may repeat that
dose, Jo," observes Allan after watching him with his attentive face.
"So! Now we will take five minutes' rest, and then go on again."

Leaving the boy sitting on the bench of the breakfast-stall, with his
back against an iron railing, Allan Woodcourt paces up and down in
the early sunshine, casting an occasional look towards him without
appearing to watch him. It requires no discernment to perceive that
he is warmed and refreshed. If a face so shaded can brighten, his
face brightens somewhat; and by little and little he eats the slice
of bread he had so hopelessly laid down. Observant of these signs of
improvement, Allan engages him in conversation and elicits to his no
small wonder the adventure of the lady in the veil, with all its
consequences. Jo slowly munches as he slowly tells it. When he has
finished his story and his bread, they go on again.

Intending to refer his difficulty in finding a temporary place of
refuge for the boy to his old patient, zealous little Miss Flite,
Allan leads the way to the court where he and Jo first foregathered.
But all is changed at the rag and bottle shop; Miss Flite no longer
lodges there; it is shut up; and a hard-featured female, much
obscured by dust, whose age is a problem, but who is indeed no other
than the interesting Judy, is tart and spare in her replies. These
sufficing, however, to inform the visitor that Miss Flite and her
birds are domiciled with a Mrs. Blinder, in Bell Yard, he repairs to
that neighbouring place, where Miss Flite (who rises early that she
may be punctual at the divan of justice held by her excellent friend
the Chancellor) comes running downstairs with tears of welcome and
with open arms.

"My dear physician!" cries Miss Flite. "My meritorious,
distinguished, honourable officer!" She uses some odd expressions,
but is as cordial and full of heart as sanity itself can be--more so
than it often is. Allan, very patient with her, waits until she has
no more raptures to express, then points out Jo, trembling in a
doorway, and tells her how he comes there.

"Where can I lodge him hereabouts for the present? Now, you have a
fund of knowledge and good sense and can advise me."

Miss Flite, mighty proud of the compliment, sets herself to consider;
but it is long before a bright thought occurs to her. Mrs. Blinder is
entirely let, and she herself occupies poor Gridley's room.
"Gridley!" exclaims Miss Flite, clapping her hands after a twentieth
repetition of this remark. "Gridley! To be sure! Of course! My dear
physician! General George will help us out."

It is hopeless to ask for any information about General George, and
would be, though Miss Flite had not already run upstairs to put on
her pinched bonnet and her poor little shawl and to arm herself with
her reticule of documents. But as she informs her physician in her
disjointed manner on coming down in full array that General George,
whom she often calls upon, knows her dear Fitz Jarndyce and takes a
great interest in all connected with her, Allan is induced to think
that they may be in the right way. So he tells Jo, for his
encouragement, that this walking about will soon be over now; and
they repair to the general's. Fortunately it is not far.

From the exterior of George's Shooting Gallery, and the long entry,
and the bare perspective beyond it, Allan Woodcourt augurs well. He
also descries promise in the figure of Mr. George himself, striding
towards them in his morning exercise with his pipe in his mouth, no
stock on, and his muscular arms, developed by broadsword and
dumbbell, weightily asserting themselves through his light
shirt-sleeves.

"Your servant, sir," says Mr. George with a military salute.
Good-humouredly smiling all over his broad forehead up into his crisp
hair, he then defers to Miss Flite, as, with great stateliness, and
at some length, she performs the courtly ceremony of presentation. He
winds it up with another "Your servant, sir!" and another salute.

"Excuse me, sir. A sailor, I believe?" says Mr. George.

"I am proud to find I have the air of one," returns Allan; "but I am
only a sea-going doctor."

"Indeed, sir! I should have thought you was a regular blue-jacket
myself."

Allan hopes Mr. George will forgive his intrusion the more readily on
that account, and particularly that he will not lay aside his pipe,
which, in his politeness, he has testified some intention of doing.
"You are very good, sir," returns the trooper. "As I know by
experience that it's not disagreeable to Miss Flite, and since it's
equally agreeable to yourself--" and finishes the sentence by putting
it between his lips again. Allan proceeds to tell him all he knows
about Jo, unto which the trooper listens with a grave face.

"And that's the lad, sir, is it?" he inquires, looking along the
entry to where Jo stands staring up at the great letters on the
whitewashed front, which have no meaning in his eyes.

"That's he," says Allan. "And, Mr. George, I am in this difficulty
about him. I am unwilling to place him in a hospital, even if I could
procure him immediate admission, because I foresee that he would not
stay there many hours if he could be so much as got there. The same
objection applies to a workhouse, supposing I had the patience to be
evaded and shirked, and handed about from post to pillar in trying to
get him into one, which is a system that I don't take kindly to."

"No man does, sir," returns Mr. George.

"I am convinced that he would not remain in either place, because he
is possessed by an extraordinary terror of this person who ordered
him to keep out of the way; in his ignorance, he believes this person
to be everywhere, and cognizant of everything."

"I ask your pardon, sir," says Mr. George. "But you have not
mentioned that party's name. Is it a secret, sir?"

"The boy makes it one. But his name is Bucket."

"Bucket the detective, sir?"

"The same man."

"The man is known to me, sir," returns the trooper after blowing out
a cloud of smoke and squaring his chest, "and the boy is so far
correct that he undoubtedly is a--rum customer." Mr. George smokes
with a profound meaning after this and surveys Miss Flite in silence.

"Now, I wish Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson at least to know that
this Jo, who tells so strange a story, has reappeared, and to have it
in their power to speak with him if they should desire to do so.
Therefore I want to get him, for the present moment, into any poor
lodging kept by decent people where he would be admitted. Decent
people and Jo, Mr. George," says Allan, following the direction of
the trooper's eyes along the entry, "have not been much acquainted,
as you see. Hence the difficulty. Do you happen to know any one in
this neighbourhood who would receive him for a while on my paying for
him beforehand?"

As he puts the question, he becomes aware of a dirty-faced little man
standing at the trooper's elbow and looking up, with an oddly twisted
figure and countenance, into the trooper's face. After a few more
puffs at his pipe, the trooper looks down askant at the little man,
and the little man winks up at the trooper.

"Well, sir," says Mr. George, "I can assure you that I would
willingly be knocked on the head at any time if it would be at all
agreeable to Miss Summerson, and consequently I esteem it a privilege
to do that young lady any service, however small. We are naturally in
the vagabond way here, sir, both myself and Phil. You see what the
place is. You are welcome to a quiet corner of it for the boy if the
same would meet your views. No charge made, except for rations. We
are not in a flourishing state of circumstances here, sir. We are
liable to be tumbled out neck and crop at a moment's notice. However,
sir, such as the place is, and so long as it lasts, here it is at
your service."

With a comprehensive wave of his pipe, Mr. George places the whole
building at his visitor's disposal.

"I take it for granted, sir," he adds, "you being one of the medical
staff, that there is no present infection about this unfortunate
subject?"

Allan is quite sure of it.

"Because, sir," says Mr. George, shaking his head sorrowfully, "we
have had enough of that."

His tone is no less sorrowfully echoed by his new acquaintance.
"Still I am bound to tell you," observes Allan after repeating his
former assurance, "that the boy is deplorably low and reduced and
that he may be--I do not say that he is--too far gone to recover."

"Do you consider him in present danger, sir?" inquires the trooper.

"Yes, I fear so."

"Then, sir," returns the trooper in a decisive manner, "it appears to
me--being naturally in the vagabond way myself--that the sooner he
comes out of the street, the better. You, Phil! Bring him in!"

Mr. Squod tacks out, all on one side, to execute the word of command;
and the trooper, having smoked his pipe, lays it by. Jo is brought
in. He is not one of Mrs. Pardiggle's Tockahoopo Indians; he is not
one of Mrs. Jellyby's lambs, being wholly unconnected with
Borrioboola-Gha; he is not softened by distance and unfamiliarity; he
is not a genuine foreign-grown savage; he is the ordinary home-made
article. Dirty, ugly, disagreeable to all the senses, in body a
common creature of the common streets, only in soul a heathen. Homely
filth begrimes him, homely parasites devour him, homely sores are in
him, homely rags are on him; native ignorance, the growth of English
soil and climate, sinks his immortal nature lower than the beasts
that perish. Stand forth, Jo, in uncompromising colours! From the
sole of thy foot to the crown of thy head, there is nothing
interesting about thee.

He shuffles slowly into Mr. George's gallery and stands huddled
together in a bundle, looking all about the floor. He seems to know
that they have an inclination to shrink from him, partly for what he
is and partly for what he has caused. He, too, shrinks from them. He
is not of the same order of things, not of the same place in
creation. He is of no order and no place, neither of the beasts nor
of humanity.

"Look here, Jo!" says Allan. "This is Mr. George."

Jo searches the floor for some time longer, then looks up for a
moment, and then down again.

"He is a kind friend to you, for he is going to give you lodging room
here."

Jo makes a scoop with one hand, which is supposed to be a bow. After
a little more consideration and some backing and changing of the foot
on which he rests, he mutters that he is "wery thankful."

"You are quite safe here. All you have to do at present is to be
obedient and to get strong. And mind you tell us the truth here,
whatever you do, Jo."

"Wishermaydie if I don't, sir," says Jo, reverting to his favourite
declaration. "I never done nothink yit, but wot you knows on, to get
myself into no trouble. I never was in no other trouble at all, sir,
'sept not knowin' nothink and starwation."

"I believe it, now attend to Mr. George. I see he is going to speak
to you."

"My intention merely was, sir," observes Mr. George, amazingly broad
and upright, "to point out to him where he can lie down and get a
thorough good dose of sleep. Now, look here." As the trooper speaks,
he conducts them to the other end of the gallery and opens one of the
little cabins. "There you are, you see! Here is a mattress, and here
you may rest, on good behaviour, as long as Mr., I ask your pardon,
sir"--he refers apologetically to the card Allan has given him--"Mr.
Woodcourt pleases. Don't you be alarmed if you hear shots; they'll be
aimed at the target, and not you. Now, there's another thing I would
recommend, sir," says the trooper, turning to his visitor. "Phil,
come here!"

Phil bears down upon them according to his usual tactics. "Here is a
man, sir, who was found, when a baby, in the gutter. Consequently, it
is to be expected that he takes a natural interest in this poor
creature. You do, don't you, Phil?"

"Certainly and surely I do, guv'ner," is Phil's reply.

"Now I was thinking, sir," says Mr. George in a martial sort of
confidence, as if he were giving his opinion in a council of war at a
drum-head, "that if this man was to take him to a bath and was to lay
out a few shillings in getting him one or two coarse articles--"

"Mr. George, my considerate friend," returns Allan, taking out his
purse, "it is the very favour I would have asked."

Phil Squod and Jo are sent out immediately on this work of
improvement. Miss Flite, quite enraptured by her success, makes the
best of her way to court, having great fears that otherwise her
friend the Chancellor may be uneasy about her or may give the
judgment she has so long expected in her absence, and observing
"which you know, my dear physician, and general, after so many years,
would be too absurdly unfortunate!" Allan takes the opportunity of
going out to procure some restorative medicines, and obtaining them
near at hand, soon returns to find the trooper walking up and down
the gallery, and to fall into step and walk with him.

"I take it, sir," says Mr. George, "that you know Miss Summerson
pretty well?"

Yes, it appears.

"Not related to her, sir?"

No, it appears.

"Excuse the apparent curiosity," says Mr. George. "It seemed to me
probable that you might take more than a common interest in this poor
creature because Miss Summerson had taken that unfortunate interest
in him. 'Tis MY case, sir, I assure you."

"And mine, Mr. George."

The trooper looks sideways at Allan's sunburnt cheek and bright dark
eye, rapidly measures his height and build, and seems to approve of
him.

"Since you have been out, sir, I have been thinking that I
unquestionably know the rooms in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where Bucket
took the lad, according to his account. Though he is not acquainted
with the name, I can help you to it. It's Tulkinghorn. That's what it
is."

Allan looks at him inquiringly, repeating the name.

"Tulkinghorn. That's the name, sir. I know the man, and know him to
have been in communication with Bucket before, respecting a deceased
person who had given him offence. I know the man, sir. To my sorrow."

Allan naturally asks what kind of man he is.

"What kind of man! Do you mean to look at?"

"I think I know that much of him. I mean to deal with. Generally,
what kind of man?"

"Why, then I'll tell you, sir," returns the trooper, stopping short
and folding his arms on his square chest so angrily that his face
fires and flushes all over; "he is a confoundedly bad kind of man. He
is a slow-torturing kind of man. He is no more like flesh and blood
than a rusty old carbine is. He is a kind of man--by George!--that
has caused me more restlessness, and more uneasiness, and more
dissatisfaction with myself than all other men put together. That's
the kind of man Mr. Tulkinghorn is!"

"I am sorry," says Allan, "to have touched so sore a place."

"Sore?" The trooper plants his legs wider apart, wets the palm of his
broad right hand, and lays it on the imaginary moustache. "It's no
fault of yours, sir; but you shall judge. He has got a power over me.
He is the man I spoke of just now as being able to tumble me out of
this place neck and crop. He keeps me on a constant see-saw. He won't
hold off, and he won't come on. If I have a payment to make him, or
time to ask him for, or anything to go to him about, he don't see me,
don't hear me--passes me on to Melchisedech's in Clifford's Inn,
Melchisedech's in Clifford's Inn passes me back again to him--he
keeps me prowling and dangling about him as if I was made of the same
stone as himself. Why, I spend half my life now, pretty well,
loitering and dodging about his door. What does he care? Nothing.
Just as much as the rusty old carbine I have compared him to. He
chafes and goads me till--Bah! Nonsense! I am forgetting myself. Mr.
Woodcourt," the trooper resumes his march, "all I say is, he is an
old man; but I am glad I shall never have the chance of setting spurs
to my horse and riding at him in a fair field. For if I had that
chance, in one of the humours he drives me into--he'd go down, sir!"

Mr. George has been so excited that he finds it necessary to wipe his
forehead on his shirt-sleeve. Even while he whistles his impetuosity
away with the national anthem, some involuntary shakings of his head
and heavings of his chest still linger behind, not to mention an
occasional hasty adjustment with both hands of his open shirt-collar,
as if it were scarcely open enough to prevent his being troubled by a
choking sensation. In short, Allan Woodcourt has not much doubt about
the going down of Mr. Tulkinghorn on the field referred to.

Jo and his conductor presently return, and Jo is assisted to his
mattress by the careful Phil, to whom, after due administration of
medicine by his own hands, Allan confides all needful means and
instructions. The morning is by this time getting on apace. He
repairs to his lodgings to dress and breakfast, and then, without
seeking rest, goes away to Mr. Jarndyce to communicate his discovery.

With him Mr. Jarndyce returns alone, confidentially telling him that
there are reasons for keeping this matter very quiet indeed and
showing a serious interest in it. To Mr. Jarndyce, Jo repeats in
substance what he said in the morning, without any material
variation. Only that cart of his is heavier to draw, and draws with a
hollower sound.

"Let me lay here quiet and not be chivied no more," falters Jo, "and
be so kind any person as is a-passin nigh where I used fur to sleep,
as jist to say to Mr. Sangsby that Jo, wot he known once, is a-moving
on right forards with his duty, and I'll be wery thankful. I'd be
more thankful than I am aready if it wos any ways possible for an
unfortnet to be it."

He makes so many of these references to the law-stationer in the
course of a day or two that Allan, after conferring with Mr.
Jarndyce, good-naturedly resolves to call in Cook's Court, the
rather, as the cart seems to be breaking down.

To Cook's Court, therefore, he repairs. Mr. Snagsby is behind his
counter in his grey coat and sleeves, inspecting an indenture of
several skins which has just come in from the engrosser's, an immense
desert of law-hand and parchment, with here and there a resting-place
of a few large letters to break the awful monotony and save the
traveller from despair. Mr Snagsby puts up at one of these inky wells
and greets the stranger with his cough of general preparation for
business.

"You don't remember me, Mr. Snagsby?"

The stationer's heart begins to thump heavily, for his old
apprehensions have never abated. It is as much as he can do to
answer, "No, sir, I can't say I do. I should have considered--not to
put too fine a point upon it--that I never saw you before, sir."

"Twice before," says Allan Woodcourt. "Once at a poor bedside, and
once--"

"It's come at last!" thinks the afflicted stationer, as recollection
breaks upon him. "It's got to a head now and is going to burst!" But
he has sufficient presence of mind to conduct his visitor into the
little counting-house and to shut the door.

"Are you a married man, sir?"

"No, I am not."

"Would you make the attempt, though single," says Mr. Snagsby in a
melancholy whisper, "to speak as low as you can? For my little woman
is a-listening somewheres, or I'll forfeit the business and five
hundred pound!"

In deep dejection Mr. Snagsby sits down on his stool, with his back
against his desk, protesting, "I never had a secret of my own, sir. I
can't charge my memory with ever having once attempted to deceive my
little woman on my own account since she named the day. I wouldn't
have done it, sir. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I couldn't
have done it, I dursn't have done it. Whereas, and nevertheless, I
find myself wrapped round with secrecy and mystery, till my life is a
burden to me."

His visitor professes his regret to hear it and asks him does he
remember Jo. Mr. Snagsby answers with a suppressed groan, oh, don't
he!

"You couldn't name an individual human being--except myself--that my
little woman is more set and determined against than Jo," says Mr.
Snagsby.

Allan asks why.

"Why?" repeats Mr. Snagsby, in his desperation clutching at the clump
of hair at the back of his bald head. "How should I know why? But you
are a single person, sir, and may you long be spared to ask a married
person such a question!"

With this beneficent wish, Mr. Snagsby coughs a cough of dismal
resignation and submits himself to hear what the visitor has to
communicate.

"There again!" says Mr. Snagsby, who, between the earnestness of his
feelings and the suppressed tones of his voice is discoloured in the
face. "At it again, in a new direction! A certain person charges me,
in the solemnest way, not to talk of Jo to any one, even my little
woman. Then comes another certain person, in the person of yourself,
and charges me, in an equally solemn way, not to mention Jo to that
other certain person above all other persons. Why, this is a private
asylum! Why, not to put too fine a point upon it, this is Bedlam,
sir!" says Mr. Snagsby.

But it is better than he expected after all, being no explosion of
the mine below him or deepening of the pit into which he has fallen.
And being tender-hearted and affected by the account he hears of Jo's
condition, he readily engages to "look round" as early in the evening
as he can manage it quietly. He looks round very quietly when the
evening comes, but it may turn out that Mrs. Snagsby is as quiet a
manager as he.

Jo is very glad to see his old friend and says, when they are left
alone, that he takes it uncommon kind as Mr. Sangsby should come so
far out of his way on accounts of sich as him. Mr. Snagsby, touched
by the spectacle before him, immediately lays upon the table half a
crown, that magic balsam of his for all kinds of wounds.

"And how do you find yourself, my poor lad?" inquires the stationer
with his cough of sympathy.

"I am in luck, Mr. Sangsby, I am," returns Jo, "and don't want for
nothink. I'm more cumfbler nor you can't think. Mr. Sangsby! I'm wery
sorry that I done it, but I didn't go fur to do it, sir."

The stationer softly lays down another half-crown and asks him what
it is that he is sorry for having done.

"Mr. Sangsby," says Jo, "I went and giv a illness to the lady as wos
and yit as warn't the t'other lady, and none of 'em never says
nothink to me for having done it, on accounts of their being ser good
and my having been s'unfortnet. The lady come herself and see me
yesday, and she ses, 'Ah, Jo!' she ses. 'We thought we'd lost you,
Jo!' she ses. And she sits down a-smilin so quiet, and don't pass a
word nor yit a look upon me for having done it, she don't, and I
turns agin the wall, I doos, Mr. Sangsby. And Mr. Jarnders, I see him
a-forced to turn away his own self. And Mr. Woodcot, he come fur to
giv me somethink fur to ease me, wot he's allus a-doin' on day and
night, and wen he come a-bending over me and a-speakin up so bold, I
see his tears a-fallin, Mr. Sangsby."

The softened stationer deposits another half-crown on the table.
Nothing less than a repetition of that infallible remedy will relieve
his feelings.

"Wot I was a-thinkin on, Mr. Sangsby," proceeds Jo, "wos, as you wos
able to write wery large, p'raps?"

"Yes, Jo, please God," returns the stationer.

"Uncommon precious large, p'raps?" says Jo with eagerness.

"Yes, my poor boy."

Jo laughs with pleasure. "Wot I wos a-thinking on then, Mr. Sangsby,
wos, that when I wos moved on as fur as ever I could go and couldn't
be moved no furder, whether you might be so good p'raps as to write
out, wery large so that any one could see it anywheres, as that I wos
wery truly hearty sorry that I done it and that I never went fur to
do it, and that though I didn't know nothink at all, I knowd as Mr.
Woodcot once cried over it and wos allus grieved over it, and that I
hoped as he'd be able to forgive me in his mind. If the writin could
be made to say it wery large, he might."

"It shall say it, Jo. Very large."

Jo laughs again. "Thankee, Mr. Sangsby. It's wery kind of you, sir,
and it makes me more cumfbler nor I was afore."

The meek little stationer, with a broken and unfinished cough, slips
down his fourth half-crown--he has never been so close to a case
requiring so many--and is fain to depart. And Jo and he, upon this
little earth, shall meet no more. No more.

For the cart so hard to draw is near its journey's end and drags over
stony ground. All round the clock it labours up the broken steps,
shattered and worn. Not many times can the sun rise and behold it
still upon its weary road.

Phil Squod, with his smoky gunpowder visage, at once acts as nurse
and works as armourer at his little table in a corner, often looking
round and saying with a nod of his green-baize cap and an encouraging
elevation of his one eyebrow, "Hold up, my boy! Hold up!" There, too,
is Mr. Jarndyce many a time, and Allan Woodcourt almost always, both
thinking, much, how strangely fate has entangled this rough outcast
in the web of very different lives. There, too, the trooper is a
frequent visitor, filling the doorway with his athletic figure and,
from his superfluity of life and strength, seeming to shed down
temporary vigour upon Jo, who never fails to speak more robustly in
answer to his cheerful words.

Jo is in a sleep or in a stupor to-day, and Allan Woodcourt, newly
arrived, stands by him, looking down upon his wasted form. After a
while he softly seats himself upon the bedside with his face towards
him--just as he sat in the law-writer's room--and touches his chest
and heart. The cart had very nearly given up, but labours on a little
more.

The trooper stands in the doorway, still and silent. Phil has stopped
in a low clinking noise, with his little hammer in his hand. Mr.
Woodcourt looks round with that grave professional interest and
attention on his face, and glancing significantly at the trooper,
signs to Phil to carry his table out. When the little hammer is next
used, there will be a speck of rust upon it.

"Well, Jo! What is the matter? Don't be frightened."

"I thought," says Jo, who has started and is looking round, "I
thought I was in Tom-all-Alone's agin. Ain't there nobody here but
you, Mr. Woodcot?"

"Nobody."

"And I ain't took back to Tom-all-Alone's. Am I, sir?"

"No." Jo closes his eyes, muttering, "I'm wery thankful."

After watching him closely a little while, Allan puts his mouth very
near his ear and says to him in a low, distinct voice, "Jo! Did you
ever know a prayer?"

"Never knowd nothink, sir."

"Not so much as one short prayer?"

"No, sir. Nothink at all. Mr. Chadbands he wos a-prayin wunst at Mr.
Sangsby's and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a-speakin to
hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but I couldn't make out
nothink on it. Different times there was other genlmen come down
Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin, but they all mostly sed as the t'other
'wuns prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a-talking to
theirselves, or a-passing blame on the t'others, and not a-talkin to
us. WE never knowd nothink. I never knowd what it wos all about."

It takes him a long time to say this, and few but an experienced and
attentive listener could hear, or, hearing, understand him. After a
short relapse into sleep or stupor, he makes, of a sudden, a strong
effort to get out of bed.

"Stay, Jo! What now?"

"It's time for me to go to that there berryin ground, sir," he
returns with a wild look.

"Lie down, and tell me. What burying ground, Jo?"

"Where they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me indeed,
he wos. It's time fur me to go down to that there berryin ground,
sir, and ask to be put along with him. I wants to go there and be
berried. He used fur to say to me, 'I am as poor as you to-day, Jo,'
he ses. I wants to tell him that I am as poor as him now and have
come there to be laid along with him."

"By and by, Jo. By and by."

"Ah! P'raps they wouldn't do it if I wos to go myself. But will you
promise to have me took there, sir, and laid along with him?"

"I will, indeed."

"Thankee, sir. Thankee, sir. They'll have to get the key of the gate
afore they can take me in, for it's allus locked. And there's a step
there, as I used for to clean with my broom. It's turned wery dark,
sir. Is there any light a-comin?"

"It is coming fast, Jo."

Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very
near its end.

"Jo, my poor fellow!"

"I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I'm a-gropin--a-gropin--let me
catch hold of your hand."

"Jo, can you say what I say?"

"I'll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it's good."

"Our Father."

"Our Father! Yes, that's wery good, sir."

"Which art in heaven."

"Art in heaven--is the light a-comin, sir?"

"It is close at hand. Hallowed be thy name!"

"Hallowed be--thy--"

The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right
reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women,
born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around
us every day.




CHAPTER XLVIII

Closing In


The place in Lincolnshire has shut its many eyes again, and the house
in town is awake. In Lincolnshire the Dedlocks of the past doze in
their picture-frames, and the low wind murmurs through the long
drawing-room as if they were breathing pretty regularly. In town the
Dedlocks of the present rattle in their fire-eyed carriages through
the darkness of the night, and the Dedlock Mercuries, with ashes (or
hair-powder) on their heads, symptomatic of their great humility,
loll away the drowsy mornings in the little windows of the hall. The
fashionable world--tremendous orb, nearly five miles round--is in
full swing, and the solar system works respectfully at its appointed
distances.

Where the throng is thickest, where the lights are brightest, where
all the senses are ministered to with the greatest delicacy and
refinement, Lady Dedlock is. From the shining heights she has scaled
and taken, she is never absent. Though the belief she of old reposed
in herself as one able to reserve whatsoever she would under
her mantle of pride is beaten down, though she has no assurance
that what she is to those around her she will remain another day,
it is not in her nature when envious eyes are looking on to
yield or to droop. They say of her that she has lately grown
more handsome and more haughty. The debilitated cousin says of
her that she's beauty nough--tsetup shopofwomen--but rather
larming kind--remindingmanfact--inconvenient woman--who WILL
getoutofbedandbawthstahlishment--Shakespeare.

Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing, looks nothing. Now, as heretofore, he
is to be found in doorways of rooms, with his limp white cravat
loosely twisted into its old-fashioned tie, receiving patronage from
the peerage and making no sign. Of all men he is still the last who
might be supposed to have any influence upon my Lady. Of all women
she is still the last who might be supposed to have any dread of him.

One thing has been much on her mind since their late interview in his
turret-room at Chesney Wold. She is now decided, and prepared to
throw it off.

It is morning in the great world, afternoon according to the little
sun. The Mercuries, exhausted by looking out of window, are reposing
in the hall and hang their heavy heads, the gorgeous creatures, like
overblown sunflowers. Like them, too, they seem to run to a deal of
seed in their tags and trimmings. Sir Leicester, in the library, has
fallen asleep for the good of the country over the report of a
Parliamentary committee. My Lady sits in the room in which she gave
audience to the young man of the name of Guppy. Rosa is with her and
has been writing for her and reading to her. Rosa is now at work upon
embroidery or some such pretty thing, and as she bends her head over
it, my Lady watches her in silence. Not for the first time to-day.

"Rosa."

The pretty village face looks brightly up. Then, seeing how serious
my Lady is, looks puzzled and surprised.

"See to the door. Is it shut?"

Yes. She goes to it and returns, and looks yet more surprised.

"I am about to place confidence in you, child, for I know I may trust
your attachment, if not your judgment. In what I am going to do, I
will not disguise myself to you at least. But I confide in you. Say
nothing to any one of what passes between us."

The timid little beauty promises in all earnestness to be
trustworthy.

"Do you know," Lady Dedlock asks her, signing to her to bring her
chair nearer, "do you know, Rosa, that I am different to you from
what I am to any one?"

"Yes, my Lady. Much kinder. But then I often think I know you as you
really are."

"You often think you know me as I really am? Poor child, poor child!"

She says it with a kind of scorn--though not of Rosa--and sits
brooding, looking dreamily at her.

"Do you think, Rosa, you are any relief or comfort to me? Do you
suppose your being young and natural, and fond of me and grateful to
me, makes it any pleasure to me to have you near me?"

"I don't know, my Lady; I can scarcely hope so. But with all my
heart, I wish it was so."

"It is so, little one."

The pretty face is checked in its flush of pleasure by the dark
expression on the handsome face before it. It looks timidly for an
explanation.

"And if I were to say to-day, 'Go! Leave me!' I should say what would
give me great pain and disquiet, child, and what would leave me very
solitary."

"My Lady! Have I offended you?"

"In nothing. Come here."

Rosa bends down on the footstool at my Lady's feet. My Lady, with
that motherly touch of the famous ironmaster night, lays her hand
upon her dark hair and gently keeps it there.

"I told you, Rosa, that I wished you to be happy and that I would
make you so if I could make anybody happy on this earth. I cannot.
There are reasons now known to me, reasons in which you have no part,
rendering it far better for you that you should not remain here. You
must not remain here. I have determined that you shall not. I have
written to the father of your lover, and he will be here to-day. All
this I have done for your sake."

The weeping girl covers her hand with kisses and says what shall she
do, what shall she do, when they are separated! Her mistress kisses
her on the cheek and makes no other answer.

"Now, be happy, child, under better circumstances. Be beloved and
happy!"

"Ah, my Lady, I have sometimes thought--forgive my being so
free--that YOU are not happy."

"I!"

"Will you be more so when you have sent me away? Pray, pray, think
again. Let me stay a little while!"

"I have said, my child, that what I do, I do for your sake, not my
own. It is done. What I am towards you, Rosa, is what I am now--not
what I shall be a little while hence. Remember this, and keep my
confidence. Do so much for my sake, and thus all ends between us!"

She detaches herself from her simple-hearted companion and leaves the
room. Late in the afternoon, when she next appears upon the
staircase, she is in her haughtiest and coldest state. As indifferent
as if all passion, feeling, and interest had been worn out in the
earlier ages of the world and had perished from its surface with its
other departed monsters.

Mercury has announced Mr. Rouncewell, which is the cause of her
appearance. Mr. Rouncewell is not in the library, but she repairs to
the library. Sir Leicester is there, and she wishes to speak to him
first.

"Sir Leicester, I am desirous--but you are engaged."

Oh, dear no! Not at all. Only Mr. Tulkinghorn.

Always at hand. Haunting every place. No relief or security from him
for a moment.

"I beg your pardon, Lady Dedlock. Will you allow me to retire?"

With a look that plainly says, "You know you have the power to remain
if you will," she tells him it is not necessary and moves towards a
chair. Mr. Tulkinghorn brings it a little forward for her with his
clumsy bow and retires into a window opposite. Interposed between her
and the fading light of day in the now quiet street, his shadow falls
upon her, and he darkens all before her. Even so does he darken her
life.

It is a dull street under the best conditions, where the two long
rows of houses stare at each other with that severity that
half-a-dozen of its greatest mansions seem to have been slowly stared
into stone rather than originally built in that material. It is a
street of such dismal grandeur, so determined not to condescend to
liveliness, that the doors and windows hold a gloomy state of their
own in black paint and dust, and the echoing mews behind have a dry
and massive appearance, as if they were reserved to stable the stone
chargers of noble statues. Complicated garnish of iron-work entwines
itself over the flights of steps in this awful street, and from these
petrified bowers, extinguishers for obsolete flambeaux gasp at the
upstart gas. Here and there a weak little iron hoop, through which
bold boys aspire to throw their friends' caps (its only present use),
retains its place among the rusty foliage, sacred to the memory of
departed oil. Nay, even oil itself, yet lingering at long intervals
in a little absurd glass pot, with a knob in the bottom like an
oyster, blinks and sulks at newer lights every night, like its high
and dry master in the House of Lords.

Therefore there is not much that Lady Dedlock, seated in her chair,
could wish to see through the window in which Mr. Tulkinghorn stands.
And yet--and yet--she sends a look in that direction as if it were
her heart's desire to have that figure moved out of the way.

Sir Leicester begs his Lady's pardon. She was about to say?

"Only that Mr. Rouncewell is here (he has called by my appointment)
and that we had better make an end of the question of that girl. I am
tired to death of the matter."

"What can I do--to--assist?" demands Sir Leicester in some
considerable doubt.

"Let us see him here and have done with it. Will you tell them to
send him up?"

"Mr. Tulkinghorn, be so good as to ring. Thank you. Request," says
Sir Leicester to Mercury, not immediately remembering the business
term, "request the iron gentleman to walk this way."

Mercury departs in search of the iron gentleman, finds, and produces
him. Sir Leicester receives that ferruginous person graciously.

"I hope you are well, Mr. Rouncewell. Be seated. (My solicitor, Mr.
Tulkinghorn.) My Lady was desirous, Mr. Rouncewell," Sir Leicester
skilfully transfers him with a solemn wave of his hand, "was desirous
to speak with you. Hem!"

"I shall be very happy," returns the iron gentleman, "to give my best
attention to anything Lady Dedlock does me the honour to say."

As he turns towards her, he finds that the impression she makes upon
him is less agreeable than on the former occasion. A distant
supercilious air makes a cold atmosphere about her, and there is
nothing in her bearing, as there was before, to encourage openness.

"Pray, sir," says Lady Dedlock listlessly, "may I be allowed to
inquire whether anything has passed between you and your son
respecting your son's fancy?"

It is almost too troublesome to her languid eyes to bestow a look
upon him as she asks this question.

"If my memory serves me, Lady Dedlock, I said, when I had the
pleasure of seeing you before, that I should seriously advise my son
to conquer that--fancy." The ironmaster repeats her expression with a
little emphasis.

"And did you?"

"Oh! Of course I did."

Sir Leicester gives a nod, approving and confirmatory. Very proper.
The iron gentleman, having said that he would do it, was bound to do
it. No difference in this respect between the base metals and the
precious. Highly proper.

"And pray has he done so?"

"Really, Lady Dedlock, I cannot make you a definite reply. I fear
not. Probably not yet. In our condition of life, we sometimes couple
an intention with our--our fancies which renders them not altogether
easy to throw off. I think it is rather our way to be in earnest."

Sir Leicester has a misgiving that there may be a hidden Wat Tylerish
meaning in this expression, and fumes a little. Mr. Rouncewell is
perfectly good-humoured and polite, but within such limits, evidently
adapts his tone to his reception.

"Because," proceeds my Lady, "I have been thinking of the subject,
which is tiresome to me."

"I am very sorry, I am sure."

"And also of what Sir Leicester said upon it, in which I quite
concur"--Sir Leicester flattered--"and if you cannot give us the
assurance that this fancy is at an end, I have come to the conclusion
that the girl had better leave me."

"I can give no such assurance, Lady Dedlock. Nothing of the kind."

"Then she had better go."

"Excuse me, my Lady," Sir Leicester considerately interposes, "but
perhaps this may be doing an injury to the young woman which she has
not merited. Here is a young woman," says Sir Leicester,
magnificently laying out the matter with his right hand like a
service of plate, "whose good fortune it is to have attracted the
notice and favour of an eminent lady and to live, under the
protection of that eminent lady, surrounded by the various advantages
which such a position confers, and which are unquestionably very
great--I believe unquestionably very great, sir--for a young woman in
that station of life. The question then arises, should that young
woman be deprived of these many advantages and that good fortune
simply because she has"--Sir Leicester, with an apologetic but
dignified inclination of his head towards the ironmaster, winds up
his sentence--"has attracted the notice of Mr Rouncewell's son? Now,
has she deserved this punishment? Is this just towards her? Is this
our previous understanding?"

"I beg your pardon," interposes Mr. Rouncewell's son's father. "Sir
Leicester, will you allow me? I think I may shorten the subject. Pray
dismiss that from your consideration. If you remember anything so
unimportant--which is not to be expected--you would recollect that my
first thought in the affair was directly opposed to her remaining
here."

Dismiss the Dedlock patronage from consideration? Oh! Sir Leicester
is bound to believe a pair of ears that have been handed down to him
through such a family, or he really might have mistrusted their
report of the iron gentleman's observations.

"It is not necessary," observes my Lady in her coldest manner before
he can do anything but breathe amazedly, "to enter into these matters
on either side. The girl is a very good girl; I have nothing whatever
to say against her, but she is so far insensible to her many
advantages and her good fortune that she is in love--or supposes she
is, poor little fool--and unable to appreciate them."

Sir Leicester begs to observe that wholly alters the case. He might
have been sure that my Lady had the best grounds and reasons in
support of her view. He entirely agrees with my Lady. The young woman
had better go.

"As Sir Leicester observed, Mr. Rouncewell, on the last occasion when
we were fatigued by this business," Lady Dedlock languidly proceeds,
"we cannot make conditions with you. Without conditions, and under
present circumstances, the girl is quite misplaced here and had
better go. I have told her so. Would you wish to have her sent back
to the village, or would you like to take her with you, or what would
you prefer?"

"Lady Dedlock, if I may speak plainly--"

"By all means."

"--I should prefer the course which will the soonest relieve you of
the incumbrance and remove her from her present position."

"And to speak as plainly," she returns with the same studied
carelessness, "so should I. Do I understand that you will take her
with you?"

The iron gentleman makes an iron bow.

"Sir Leicester, will you ring?" Mr. Tulkinghorn steps forward from
his window and pulls the bell. "I had forgotten you. Thank you." He
makes his usual bow and goes quietly back again. Mercury,
swift-responsive, appears, receives instructions whom to produce,
skims away, produces the aforesaid, and departs.

Rosa has been crying and is yet in distress. On her coming in, the
ironmaster leaves his chair, takes her arm in his, and remains with
her near the door ready to depart.

"You are taken charge of, you see," says my Lady in her weary manner,
"and are going away well protected. I have mentioned that you are a
very good girl, and you have nothing to cry for."

"She seems after all," observes Mr. Tulkinghorn, loitering a little
forward with his hands behind him, "as if she were crying at going
away."

"Why, she is not well-bred, you see," returns Mr. Rouncewell with
some quickness in his manner, as if he were glad to have the lawyer
to retort upon, "and she is an inexperienced little thing and knows
no better. If she had remained here, sir, she would have improved, no
doubt."

"No doubt," is Mr. Tulkinghorn's composed reply.

Rosa sobs out that she is very sorry to leave my Lady, and that she
was happy at Chesney Wold, and has been happy with my Lady, and that
she thanks my Lady over and over again. "Out, you silly little puss!"
says the ironmaster, checking her in a low voice, though not angrily.
"Have a spirit, if you're fond of Watt!" My Lady merely waves her off
with indifference, saying, "There, there, child! You are a good girl.
Go away!" Sir Leicester has magnificently disengaged himself from the
subject and retired into the sanctuary of his blue coat. Mr.
Tulkinghorn, an indistinct form against the dark street now dotted
with lamps, looms in my Lady's view, bigger and blacker than before.

"Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Rouncewell after a pause
of a few moments, "I beg to take my leave, with an apology for having
again troubled you, though not of my own act, on this tiresome
subject. I can very well understand, I assure you, how tiresome so
small a matter must have become to Lady Dedlock. If I am doubtful of
my dealing with it, it is only because I did not at first quietly
exert my influence to take my young friend here away without
troubling you at all. But it appeared to me--I dare say magnifying
the importance of the thing--that it was respectful to explain to you
how the matter stood and candid to consult your wishes and
convenience. I hope you will excuse my want of acquaintance with the
polite world."

Sir Leicester considers himself evoked out of the sanctuary by these
remarks. "Mr. Rouncewell," he returns, "do not mention it.
Justifications are unnecessary, I hope, on either side."

"I am glad to hear it, Sir Leicester; and if I may, by way of a last
word, revert to what I said before of my mother's long connexion with
the family and the worth it bespeaks on both sides, I would point out
this little instance here on my arm who shows herself so affectionate
and faithful in parting and in whom my mother, I dare say, has done
something to awaken such feelings--though of course Lady Dedlock, by
her heartfelt interest and her genial condescension, has done much
more."

If he mean this ironically, it may be truer than he thinks. He points
it, however, by no deviation from his straightforward manner of
speech, though in saying it he turns towards that part of the dim
room where my Lady sits. Sir Leicester stands to return his parting
salutation, Mr. Tulkinghorn again rings, Mercury takes another
flight, and Mr. Rouncewell and Rosa leave the house.

Then lights are brought in, discovering Mr. Tulkinghorn still
standing in his window with his hands behind him and my Lady still
sitting with his figure before her, closing up her view of the night
as well as of the day. She is very pale. Mr. Tulkinghorn, observing
it as she rises to retire, thinks, "Well she may be! The power of
this woman is astonishing. She has been acting a part the whole
time." But he can act a part too--his one unchanging character--and
as he holds the door open for this woman, fifty pairs of eyes, each
fifty times sharper than Sir Leicester's pair, should find no flaw in
him.

Lady Dedlock dines alone in her own room to-day. Sir Leicester is
whipped in to the rescue of the Doodle Party and the discomfiture of
the Coodle Faction. Lady Dedlock asks on sitting down to dinner,
still deadly pale (and quite an illustration of the debilitated
cousin's text), whether he is gone out? Yes. Whether Mr. Tulkinghorn
is gone yet? No. Presently she asks again, is he gone YET? No. What
is he doing? Mercury thinks he is writing letters in the library.
Would my Lady wish to see him? Anything but that.

But he wishes to see my Lady. Within a few more minutes he is
reported as sending his respects, and could my Lady please to receive
him for a word or two after her dinner? My Lady will receive him now.
He comes now, apologizing for intruding, even by her permission,
while she is at table. When they are alone, my Lady waves her hand to
dispense with such mockeries.

"What do you want, sir?"

"Why, Lady Dedlock," says the lawyer, taking a chair at a little
distance from her and slowly rubbing his rusty legs up and down, up
and down, up and down, "I am rather surprised by the course you have
taken."

"Indeed?"

"Yes, decidedly. I was not prepared for it. I consider it a departure
from our agreement and your promise. It puts us in a new position,
Lady Dedlock. I feel myself under the necessity of saying that I
don't approve of it."

He stops in his rubbing and looks at her, with his hands on his
knees. Imperturbable and unchangeable as he is, there is still an
indefinable freedom in his manner which is new and which does not
escape this woman's observation.

"I do not quite understand you."

"Oh, yes you do, I think. I think you do. Come, come, Lady Dedlock,
we must not fence and parry now. You know you like this girl."

"Well, sir?"

"And you know--and I know--that you have not sent her away for the
reasons you have assigned, but for the purpose of separating her as
much as possible from--excuse my mentioning it as a matter of
business--any reproach and exposure that impend over yourself."

"Well, sir?"

"Well, Lady Dedlock," returns the lawyer, crossing his legs and
nursing the uppermost knee. "I object to that. I consider that a
dangerous proceeding. I know it to be unnecessary and calculated to
awaken speculation, doubt, rumour, I don't know what, in the house.
Besides, it is a violation of our agreement. You were to be exactly
what you were before. Whereas, it must be evident to yourself, as it
is to me, that you have been this evening very different from what
you were before. Why, bless my soul, Lady Dedlock, transparently so!"

"If, sir," she begins, "in my knowledge of my secret--" But he
interrupts her.

"Now, Lady Dedlock, this is a matter of business, and in a matter of
business the ground cannot be kept too clear. It is no longer your
secret. Excuse me. That is just the mistake. It is my secret, in
trust for Sir Leicester and the family. If it were your secret, Lady
Dedlock, we should not be here holding this conversation."

"That is very true. If in my knowledge of THE secret I do what I can
to spare an innocent girl (especially, remembering your own reference
to her when you told my story to the assembled guests at Chesney
Wold) from the taint of my impending shame, I act upon a resolution I
have taken. Nothing in the world, and no one in the world, could
shake it or could move me." This she says with great deliberation and
distinctness and with no more outward passion than himself. As for
him, he methodically discusses his matter of business as if she were
any insensible instrument used in business.

"Really? Then you see, Lady Dedlock," he returns, "you are not to be
trusted. You have put the case in a perfectly plain way, and
according to the literal fact; and that being the case, you are not
to be trusted."

"Perhaps you may remember that I expressed some anxiety on this same
point when we spoke at night at Chesney Wold?"

"Yes," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, coolly getting up and standing on the
hearth. "Yes. I recollect, Lady Dedlock, that you certainly referred
to the girl, but that was before we came to our arrangement, and both
the letter and the spirit of our arrangement altogether precluded any
action on your part founded upon my discovery. There can be no doubt
about that. As to sparing the girl, of what importance or value is
she? Spare! Lady Dedlock, here is a family name compromised. One
might have supposed that the course was straight on--over everything,
neither to the right nor to the left, regardless of all
considerations in the way, sparing nothing, treading everything under
foot."

She has been looking at the table. She lifts up her eyes and looks at
him. There is a stern expression on her face and a part of her lower
lip is compressed under her teeth. "This woman understands me," Mr.
Tulkinghorn thinks as she lets her glance fall again. "SHE cannot be
spared. Why should she spare others?"

For a little while they are silent. Lady Dedlock has eaten no dinner,
but has twice or thrice poured out water with a steady hand and drunk
it. She rises from table, takes a lounging-chair, and reclines in it,
shading her face. There is nothing in her manner to express weakness
or excite compassion. It is thoughtful, gloomy, concentrated. "This
woman," thinks Mr. Tulkinghorn, standing on the hearth, again a dark
object closing up her view, "is a study."

He studies her at his leisure, not speaking for a time. She too
studies something at her leisure. She is not the first to speak,
appearing indeed so unlikely to be so, though he stood there until
midnight, that even he is driven upon breaking silence.

"Lady Dedlock, the most disagreeable part of this business interview
remains, but it is business. Our agreement is broken. A lady of your
sense and strength of character will be prepared for my now declaring
it void and taking my own course."

"I am quite prepared."

Mr. Tulkinghorn inclines his head. "That is all I have to trouble you
with, Lady Dedlock."

She stops him as he is moving out of the room by asking, "This is the
notice I was to receive? I wish not to misapprehend you."

"Not exactly the notice you were to receive, Lady Dedlock, because
the contemplated notice supposed the agreement to have been observed.
But virtually the same, virtually the same. The difference is merely
in a lawyer's mind."

"You intend to give me no other notice?"

"You are right. No."

"Do you contemplate undeceiving Sir Leicester to-night?"

"A home question!" says Mr. Tulkinghorn with a slight smile and
cautiously shaking his head at the shaded face. "No, not to-night."

"To-morrow?"

"All things considered, I had better decline answering that question,
Lady Dedlock. If I were to say I don't know when, exactly, you would
not believe me, and it would answer no purpose. It may be to-morrow.
I would rather say no more. You are prepared, and I hold out no
expectations which circumstances might fail to justify. I wish you
good evening."

She removes her hand, turns her pale face towards him as he walks
silently to the door, and stops him once again as he is about to open
it.

"Do you intend to remain in the house any time? I heard you were
writing in the library. Are you going to return there?"

"Only for my hat. I am going home."

She bows her eyes rather than her head, the movement is so slight and
curious, and he withdraws. Clear of the room he looks at his watch
but is inclined to doubt it by a minute or thereabouts. There is a
splendid clock upon the staircase, famous, as splendid clocks not
often are, for its accuracy. "And what do YOU say," Mr. Tulkinghorn
inquires, referring to it. "What do you say?"

If it said now, "Don't go home!" What a famous clock, hereafter, if
it said to-night of all the nights that it has counted off, to this
old man of all the young and old men who have ever stood before it,
"Don't go home!" With its sharp clear bell it strikes three quarters
after seven and ticks on again. "Why, you are worse than I thought
you," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, muttering reproof to his watch. "Two
minutes wrong? At this rate you won't last my time." What a watch to
return good for evil if it ticked in answer, "Don't go home!"

He passes out into the streets and walks on, with his hands behind
him, under the shadow of the lofty houses, many of whose mysteries,
difficulties, mortgages, delicate affairs of all kinds, are treasured
up within his old black satin waistcoat. He is in the confidence of
the very bricks and mortar. The high chimney-stacks telegraph family
secrets to him. Yet there is not a voice in a mile of them to
whisper, "Don't go home!"

Through the stir and motion of the commoner streets; through the roar
and jar of many vehicles, many feet, many voices; with the blazing
shop-lights lighting him on, the west wind blowing him on, and the
crowd pressing him on, he is pitilessly urged upon his way, and
nothing meets him murmuring, "Don't go home!" Arrived at last in his
dull room to light his candles, and look round and up, and see the
Roman pointing from the ceiling, there is no new significance in the
Roman's hand to-night or in the flutter of the attendant groups to
give him the late warning, "Don't come here!"

It is a moonlight night, but the moon, being past the full, is only
now rising over the great wilderness of London. The stars are shining
as they shone above the turret-leads at Chesney Wold. This woman, as
he has of late been so accustomed to call her, looks out upon them.
Her soul is turbulent within her; she is sick at heart and restless.
The large rooms are too cramped and close. She cannot endure their
restraint and will walk alone in a neighbouring garden.

Too capricious and imperious in all she does to be the cause of much
surprise in those about her as to anything she does, this woman,
loosely muffled, goes out into the moonlight. Mercury attends with
the key. Having opened the garden-gate, he delivers the key into his
Lady's hands at her request and is bidden to go back. She will walk
there some time to ease her aching head. She may be an hour, she may
be more. She needs no further escort. The gate shuts upon its spring
with a clash, and he leaves her passing on into the dark shade of
some trees.

A fine night, and a bright large moon, and multitudes of stars. Mr.
Tulkinghorn, in repairing to his cellar and in opening and shutting
those resounding doors, has to cross a little prison-like yard. He
looks up casually, thinking what a fine night, what a bright large
moon, what multitudes of stars! A quiet night, too.

A very quiet night. When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude
and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even crowded
places full of life. Not only is it a still night on dusty high roads
and on hill-summits, whence a wide expanse of country may be seen in
repose, quieter and quieter as it spreads away into a fringe of trees
against the sky with the grey ghost of a bloom upon them; not only is
it a still night in gardens and in woods, and on the river where the
water-meadows are fresh and green, and the stream sparkles on among
pleasant islands, murmuring weirs, and whispering rushes; not only
does the stillness attend it as it flows where houses cluster thick,
where many bridges are reflected in it, where wharves and shipping
make it black and awful, where it winds from these disfigurements
through marshes whose grim beacons stand like skeletons washed
ashore, where it expands through the bolder region of rising grounds,
rich in cornfield wind-mill and steeple, and where it mingles with
the ever-heaving sea; not only is it a still night on the deep, and
on the shore where the watcher stands to see the ship with her spread
wings cross the path of light that appears to be presented to only
him; but even on this stranger's wilderness of London there is some
rest. Its steeples and towers and its one great dome grow more
ethereal; its smoky house-tops lose their grossness in the pale
effulgence; the noises that arise from the streets are fewer and are
softened, and the footsteps on the pavements pass more tranquilly
away. In these fields of Mr. Tulkinghorn's inhabiting, where the
shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop, and keep their
sheep in the fold by hook and by crook until they have shorn them
exceeding close, every noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a
distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating.

What's that? Who fired a gun or pistol? Where was it?

The few foot-passengers start, stop, and stare about them. Some
windows and doors are opened, and people come out to look. It was a
loud report and echoed and rattled heavily. It shook one house, or so
a man says who was passing. It has aroused all the dogs in the
neighbourhood, who bark vehemently. Terrified cats scamper across the
road. While the dogs are yet barking and howling--there is one dog
howling like a demon--the church-clocks, as if they were startled
too, begin to strike. The hum from the streets, likewise, seems to
swell into a shout. But it is soon over. Before the last clock begins
to strike ten, there is a lull. When it has ceased, the fine night,
the bright large moon, and multitudes of stars, are left at peace
again.

Has Mr. Tulkinghorn been disturbed? His windows are dark and quiet,
and his door is shut. It must be something unusual indeed to bring
him out of his shell. Nothing is heard of him, nothing is seen of
him. What power of cannon might it take to shake that rusty old man
out of his immovable composure?

For many years the persistent Roman has been pointing, with no
particular meaning, from that ceiling. It is not likely that he has
any new meaning in him to-night. Once pointing, always pointing--like
any Roman, or even Briton, with a single idea. There he is, no doubt,
in his impossible attitude, pointing, unavailingly, all night long.
Moonlight, darkness, dawn, sunrise, day. There he is still, eagerly
pointing, and no one minds him.

But a little after the coming of the day come people to clean the
rooms. And either the Roman has some new meaning in him, not
expressed before, or the foremost of them goes wild, for looking up
at his outstretched hand and looking down at what is below it, that
person shrieks and flies. The others, looking in as the first one
looked, shriek and fly too, and there is an alarm in the street.

What does it mean? No light is admitted into the darkened chamber,
and people unaccustomed to it enter, and treading softly but heavily,
carry a weight into the bedroom and lay it down. There is whispering
and wondering all day, strict search of every corner, careful tracing
of steps, and careful noting of the disposition of every article of
furniture. All eyes look up at the Roman, and all voices murmur, "If
he could only tell what he saw!"

He is pointing at a table with a bottle (nearly full of wine) and a
glass upon it and two candles that were blown out suddenly soon after
being lighted. He is pointing at an empty chair and at a stain upon
the ground before it that might be almost covered with a hand. These
objects lie directly within his range. An excited imagination might
suppose that there was something in them so terrific as to drive the
rest of the composition, not only the attendant big-legged boys, but
the clouds and flowers and pillars too--in short, the very body and
soul of Allegory, and all the brains it has--stark mad. It happens
surely that every one who comes into the darkened room and looks at
these things looks up at the Roman and that he is invested in all
eyes with mystery and awe, as if he were a paralysed dumb witness.

So it shall happen surely, through many years to come, that ghostly
stories shall be told of the stain upon the floor, so easy to be
covered, so hard to be got out, and that the Roman, pointing from the
ceiling shall point, so long as dust and damp and spiders spare him,
with far greater significance than he ever had in Mr. Tulkinghorn's
time, and with a deadly meaning. For Mr. Tulkinghorn's time is over
for evermore, and the Roman pointed at the murderous hand uplifted
against his life, and pointed helplessly at him, from night to
morning, lying face downward on the floor, shot through the heart.




CHAPTER XLIX

Dutiful Friendship


A great annual occasion has come round in the establishment of Mr.
Matthew Bagnet, otherwise Lignum Vitae, ex-artilleryman and present
bassoon-player. An occasion of feasting and festival. The celebration
of a birthday in the family.

It is not Mr. Bagnet's birthday. Mr. Bagnet merely distinguishes that
epoch in the musical instrument business by kissing the children with
an extra smack before breakfast, smoking an additional pipe after
dinner, and wondering towards evening what his poor old mother is
thinking about it--a subject of infinite speculation, and rendered so
by his mother having departed this life twenty years. Some men rarely
revert to their father, but seem, in the bank-books of their
remembrance, to have transferred all the stock of filial affection
into their mother's name. Mr. Bagnet is one of these. Perhaps his
exalted appreciation of the merits of the old girl causes him usually
to make the noun-substantive "goodness" of the feminine gender.

It is not the birthday of one of the three children. Those occasions
are kept with some marks of distinction, but they rarely overleap the
bounds of happy returns and a pudding. On young Woolwich's last
birthday, Mr. Bagnet certainly did, after observing on his growth and
general advancement, proceed, in a moment of profound reflection on
the changes wrought by time, to examine him in the catechism,
accomplishing with extreme accuracy the questions number one and two,
"What is your name?" and "Who gave you that name?" but there failing
in the exact precision of his memory and substituting for number
three the question "And how do you like that name?" which he
propounded with a sense of its importance, in itself so edifying and
improving as to give it quite an orthodox air. This, however, was a
speciality on that particular birthday, and not a general solemnity.

It is the old girl's birthday, and that is the greatest holiday and
reddest-letter day in Mr. Bagnet's calendar. The auspicious event is
always commemorated according to certain forms settled and prescribed
by Mr. Bagnet some years since. Mr. Bagnet, being deeply convinced
that to have a pair of fowls for dinner is to attain the highest
pitch of imperial luxury, invariably goes forth himself very early in
the morning of this day to buy a pair; he is, as invariably, taken in
by the vendor and installed in the possession of the oldest
inhabitants of any coop in Europe. Returning with these triumphs of
toughness tied up in a clean blue and white cotton handkerchief
(essential to the arrangements), he in a casual manner invites Mrs.
Bagnet to declare at breakfast what she would like for dinner. Mrs.
Bagnet, by a coincidence never known to fail, replying fowls, Mr.
Bagnet instantly produces his bundle from a place of concealment
amidst general amazement and rejoicing. He further requires that the
old girl shall do nothing all day long but sit in her very best gown
and be served by himself and the young people. As he is not
illustrious for his cookery, this may be supposed to be a matter of
state rather than enjoyment on the old girl's part, but she keeps her
state with all imaginable cheerfulness.

On this present birthday, Mr. Bagnet has accomplished the usual
preliminaries. He has bought two specimens of poultry, which, if
there be any truth in adages, were certainly not caught with chaff,
to be prepared for the spit; he has amazed and rejoiced the family by
their unlooked-for production; he is himself directing the roasting
of the poultry; and Mrs. Bagnet, with her wholesome brown fingers
itching to prevent what she sees going wrong, sits in her gown of
ceremony, an honoured guest.

Quebec and Malta lay the cloth for dinner, while Woolwich, serving,
as beseems him, under his father, keeps the fowls revolving. To these
young scullions Mrs. Bagnet occasionally imparts a wink, or a shake
of the head, or a crooked face, as they made mistakes.

"At half after one." Says Mr. Bagnet. "To the minute. They'll be
done."

Mrs. Bagnet, with anguish, beholds one of them at a standstill before
the fire and beginning to burn.

"You shall have a dinner, old girl," says Mr. Bagnet. "Fit for a
queen."

Mrs. Bagnet shows her white teeth cheerfully, but to the perception
of her son, betrays so much uneasiness of spirit that he is impelled
by the dictates of affection to ask her, with his eyes, what is the
matter, thus standing, with his eyes wide open, more oblivious of the
fowls than before, and not affording the least hope of a return to
consciousness. Fortunately his elder sister perceives the cause of
the agitation in Mrs. Bagnet's breast and with an admonitory poke
recalls him. The stopped fowls going round again, Mrs. Bagnet closes
her eyes in the intensity of her relief.

"George will look us up," says Mr. Bagnet. "At half after four. To
the moment. How many years, old girl. Has George looked us up. This
afternoon?"

"Ah, Lignum, Lignum, as many as make an old woman of a young one, I
begin to think. Just about that, and no less," returns Mrs. Bagnet,
laughing and shaking her head.

"Old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, "never mind. You'd be as young as ever
you was. If you wasn't younger. Which you are. As everybody knows."

Quebec and Malta here exclaim, with clapping of hands, that Bluffy is
sure to bring mother something, and begin to speculate on what it
will be.

"Do you know, Lignum," says Mrs. Bagnet, casting a glance on the
table-cloth, and winking "salt!" at Malta with her right eye, and
shaking the pepper away from Quebec with her head, "I begin to think
George is in the roving way again.

"George," returns Mr. Bagnet, "will never desert. And leave his old
comrade. In the lurch. Don't be afraid of it."

"No, Lignum. No. I don't say he will. I don't think he will. But if
he could get over this money trouble of his, I believe he would be
off."

Mr. Bagnet asks why.

"Well," returns his wife, considering, "George seems to me to be
getting not a little impatient and restless. I don't say but what
he's as free as ever. Of course he must be free or he wouldn't be
George, but he smarts and seems put out."

"He's extra-drilled," says Mr. Bagnet. "By a lawyer. Who would put
the devil out."

"There's something in that," his wife assents; "but so it is,
Lignum."

Further conversation is prevented, for the time, by the necessity
under which Mr. Bagnet finds himself of directing the whole force of
his mind to the dinner, which is a little endangered by the dry
humour of the fowls in not yielding any gravy, and also by the made
gravy acquiring no flavour and turning out of a flaxen complexion.
With a similar perverseness, the potatoes crumble off forks in the
process of peeling, upheaving from their centres in every direction,
as if they were subject to earthquakes. The legs of the fowls, too,
are longer than could be desired, and extremely scaly. Overcoming
these disadvantages to the best of his ability, Mr. Bagnet at last
dishes and they sit down at table, Mrs. Bagnet occupying the guest's
place at his right hand.

It is well for the old girl that she has but one birthday in a year,
for two such indulgences in poultry might be injurious. Every kind of
finer tendon and ligament that is in the nature of poultry to possess
is developed in these specimens in the singular form of
guitar-strings. Their limbs appear to have struck roots into their
breasts and bodies, as aged trees strike roots into the earth. Their
legs are so hard as to encourage the idea that they must have devoted
the greater part of their long and arduous lives to pedestrian
exercises and the walking of matches. But Mr. Bagnet, unconscious of
these little defects, sets his heart on Mrs. Bagnet eating a most
severe quantity of the delicacies before her; and as that good old
girl would not cause him a moment's disappointment on any day, least
of all on such a day, for any consideration, she imperils her
digestion fearfully. How young Woolwich cleans the drum-sticks
without being of ostrich descent, his anxious mother is at a loss to
understand.

The old girl has another trial to undergo after the conclusion of the
repast in sitting in state to see the room cleared, the hearth swept,
and the dinner-service washed up and polished in the backyard. The
great delight and energy with which the two young ladies apply
themselves to these duties, turning up their skirts in imitation of
their mother and skating in and out on little scaffolds of pattens,
inspire the highest hopes for the future, but some anxiety for the
present. The same causes lead to confusion of tongues, a clattering
of crockery, a rattling of tin mugs, a whisking of brooms, and an
expenditure of water, all in excess, while the saturation of the
young ladies themselves is almost too moving a spectacle for Mrs.
Bagnet to look upon with the calmness proper to her position. At last
the various cleansing processes are triumphantly completed; Quebec
and Malta appear in fresh attire, smiling and dry; pipes, tobacco,
and something to drink are placed upon the table; and the old girl
enjoys the first peace of mind she ever knows on the day of this
delightful entertainment.

When Mr. Bagnet takes his usual seat, the hands of the clock are very
near to half-past four; as they mark it accurately, Mr. Bagnet
announces, "George! Military time."

It is George, and he has hearty congratulations for the old girl
(whom he kisses on the great occasion), and for the children, and for
Mr. Bagnet. "Happy returns to all!" says Mr. George.

"But, George, old man!" cries Mrs. Bagnet, looking at him curiously.
"What's come to you?"

"Come to me?"

"Ah! You are so white, George--for you--and look so shocked. Now
don't he, Lignum?"

"George," says Mr. Bagnet, "tell the old girl. What's the matter."

"I didn't know I looked white," says the trooper, passing his hand
over his brow, "and I didn't know I looked shocked, and I'm sorry I
do. But the truth is, that boy who was taken in at my place died
yesterday afternoon, and it has rather knocked me over."

"Poor creetur!" says Mrs. Bagnet with a mother's pity. "Is he gone?
Dear, dear!"

"I didn't mean to say anything about it, for it's not birthday talk,
but you have got it out of me, you see, before I sit down. I should
have roused up in a minute," says the trooper, making himself speak
more gaily, "but you're so quick, Mrs. Bagnet."

"You're right. The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet. "Is as quick. As
powder."

"And what's more, she's the subject of the day, and we'll stick to
her," cries Mr. George. "See here, I have brought a little brooch
along with me. It's a poor thing, you know, but it's a keepsake.
That's all the good it is, Mrs. Bagnet."

Mr. George produces his present, which is greeted with admiring
leapings and clappings by the young family, and with a species of
reverential admiration by Mr. Bagnet. "Old girl," says Mr. Bagnet.
"Tell him my opinion of it."

"Why, it's a wonder, George!" Mrs. Bagnet exclaims. "It's the
beautifullest thing that ever was seen!"

"Good!" says Mr. Bagnet. "My opinion."

"It's so pretty, George," cries Mrs. Bagnet, turning it on all sides
and holding it out at arm's length, "that it seems too choice for
me."

"Bad!" says Mr. Bagnet. "Not my opinion."

"But whatever it is, a hundred thousand thanks, old fellow," says
Mrs. Bagnet, her eyes sparkling with pleasure and her hand stretched
out to him; "and though I have been a crossgrained soldier's wife to
you sometimes, George, we are as strong friends, I am sure, in
reality, as ever can be. Now you shall fasten it on yourself, for
good luck, if you will, George."

The children close up to see it done, and Mr. Bagnet looks over young
Woolwich's head to see it done with an interest so maturely wooden,
yet pleasantly childish, that Mrs. Bagnet cannot help laughing in her
airy way and saying, "Oh, Lignum, Lignum, what a precious old chap
you are!" But the trooper fails to fasten the brooch. His hand
shakes, he is nervous, and it falls off. "Would any one believe
this?" says he, catching it as it drops and looking round. "I am so
out of sorts that I bungle at an easy job like this!"

Mrs. Bagnet concludes that for such a case there is no remedy like a
pipe, and fastening the brooch herself in a twinkling, causes the
trooper to be inducted into his usual snug place and the pipes to be
got into action. "If that don't bring you round, George," says she,
"just throw your eye across here at your present now and then, and
the two together MUST do it."

"You ought to do it of yourself," George answers; "I know that very
well, Mrs. Bagnet. I'll tell you how, one way and another, the blues
have got to be too many for me. Here was this poor lad. 'Twas dull
work to see him dying as he did, and not be able to help him."

"What do you mean, George? You did help him. You took him under your
roof."

"I helped him so far, but that's little. I mean, Mrs. Bagnet, there
he was, dying without ever having been taught much more than to know
his right hand from his left. And he was too far gone to be helped
out of that."

"Ah, poor creetur!" says Mrs. Bagnet.

"Then," says the trooper, not yet lighting his pipe, and passing his
heavy hand over his hair, "that brought up Gridley in a man's mind.
His was a bad case too, in a different way. Then the two got mixed up
in a man's mind with a flinty old rascal who had to do with both. And
to think of that rusty carbine, stock and barrel, standing up on end
in his corner, hard, indifferent, taking everything so evenly--it
made flesh and blood tingle, I do assure you."

"My advice to you," returns Mrs. Bagnet, "is to light your pipe and
tingle that way. It's wholesomer and comfortabler, and better for the
health altogether."

"You're right," says the trooper, "and I'll do it."

So he does it, though still with an indignant gravity that impresses
the young Bagnets, and even causes Mr. Bagnet to defer the ceremony
of drinking Mrs. Bagnet's health, always given by himself on these
occasions in a speech of exemplary terseness. But the young ladies
having composed what Mr. Bagnet is in the habit of calling "the
mixtur," and George's pipe being now in a glow, Mr. Bagnet considers
it his duty to proceed to the toast of the evening. He addresses the
assembled company in the following terms.

"George. Woolwich. Quebec. Malta. This is her birthday. Take a day's
march. And you won't find such another. Here's towards her!"

The toast having been drunk with enthusiasm, Mrs. Bagnet returns
thanks in a neat address of corresponding brevity. This model
composition is limited to the three words "And wishing yours!" which
the old girl follows up with a nod at everybody in succession and a
well-regulated swig of the mixture. This she again follows up, on the
present occasion, by the wholly unexpected exclamation, "Here's a
man!"

Here IS a man, much to the astonishment of the little company,
looking in at the parlour-door. He is a sharp-eyed man--a quick keen
man--and he takes in everybody's look at him, all at once,
individually and collectively, in a manner that stamps him a
remarkable man.

"George," says the man, nodding, "how do you find yourself?"

"Why, it's Bucket!" cries Mr. George.

"Yes," says the man, coming in and closing the door. "I was going
down the street here when I happened to stop and look in at the
musical instruments in the shop-window--a friend of mine is in want
of a second-hand wiolinceller of a good tone--and I saw a party
enjoying themselves, and I thought it was you in the corner; I
thought I couldn't be mistaken. How goes the world with you, George,
at the present moment? Pretty smooth? And with you, ma'am? And with
you, governor? And Lord," says Mr. Bucket, opening his arms, "here's
children too! You may do anything with me if you only show me
children. Give us a kiss, my pets. No occasion to inquire who YOUR
father and mother is. Never saw such a likeness in my life!"

Mr. Bucket, not unwelcome, has sat himself down next to Mr. George
and taken Quebec and Malta on his knees. "You pretty dears," says Mr.
Bucket, "give us another kiss; it's the only thing I'm greedy in.
Lord bless you, how healthy you look! And what may be the ages of
these two, ma'am? I should put 'em down at the figures of about eight
and ten."

"You're very near, sir," says Mrs. Bagnet.

"I generally am near," returns Mr. Bucket, "being so fond of
children. A friend of mine has had nineteen of 'em, ma'am, all by one
mother, and she's still as fresh and rosy as the morning. Not so much
so as yourself, but, upon my soul, she comes near you! And what do
you call these, my darling?" pursues Mr. Bucket, pinching Malta's
cheeks. "These are peaches, these are. Bless your heart! And what do
you think about father? Do you think father could recommend a
second-hand wiolinceller of a good tone for Mr. Bucket's friend, my
dear? My name's Bucket. Ain't that a funny name?"

These blandishments have entirely won the family heart. Mrs. Bagnet
forgets the day to the extent of filling a pipe and a glass for Mr.
Bucket and waiting upon him hospitably. She would be glad to receive
so pleasant a character under any circumstances, but she tells him
that as a friend of George's she is particularly glad to see him this
evening, for George has not been in his usual spirits.

"Not in his usual spirits?" exclaims Mr. Bucket. "Why, I never heard
of such a thing! What's the matter, George? You don't intend to tell
me you've been out of spirits. What should you be out of spirits for?
You haven't got anything on your mind, you know."

"Nothing particular," returns the trooper.

"I should think not," rejoins Mr. Bucket. "What could you have on
your mind, you know! And have these pets got anything on THEIR minds,
eh? Not they, but they'll be upon the minds of some of the young
fellows, some of these days, and make 'em precious low-spirited. I
ain't much of a prophet, but I can tell you that, ma'am."

Mrs. Bagnet, quite charmed, hopes Mr. Bucket has a family of his own.

"There, ma'am!" says Mr. Bucket. "Would you believe it? No, I
haven't. My wife and a lodger constitute my family. Mrs. Bucket is as
fond of children as myself and as wishful to have 'em, but no. So it
is. Worldly goods are divided unequally, and man must not repine.
What a very nice backyard, ma'am! Any way out of that yard, now?"

There is no way out of that yard.

"Ain't there really?" says Mr. Bucket. "I should have thought there
might have been. Well, I don't know as I ever saw a backyard that
took my fancy more. Would you allow me to look at it? Thank you. No,
I see there's no way out. But what a very good-proportioned yard it
is!"

Having cast his sharp eye all about it, Mr. Bucket returns to his
chair next his friend Mr. George and pats Mr. George affectionately
on the shoulder.

"How are your spirits now, George?"

"All right now," returns the trooper.

"That's your sort!" says Mr. Bucket. "Why should you ever have been
otherwise? A man of your fine figure and constitution has no right to
be out of spirits. That ain't a chest to be out of spirits, is it,
ma'am? And you haven't got anything on your mind, you know, George;
what could you have on your mind!"

Somewhat harping on this phrase, considering the extent and variety
of his conversational powers, Mr. Bucket twice or thrice repeats it
to the pipe he lights, and with a listening face that is particularly
his own. But the sun of his sociality soon recovers from this brief
eclipse and shines again.

"And this is brother, is it, my dears?" says Mr. Bucket, referring to
Quebec and Malta for information on the subject of young Woolwich.
"And a nice brother he is--half-brother I mean to say. For he's too
old to be your boy, ma'am."

"I can certify at all events that he is not anybody else's," returns
Mrs. Bagnet, laughing.

"Well, you do surprise me! Yet he's like you, there's no denying.
Lord, he's wonderfully like you! But about what you may call the
brow, you know, THERE his father comes out!" Mr. Bucket compares the
faces with one eye shut up, while Mr. Bagnet smokes in stolid
satisfaction.

This is an opportunity for Mrs. Bagnet to inform him that the boy is
George's godson.

"George's godson, is he?" rejoins Mr. Bucket with extreme cordiality.
"I must shake hands over again with George's godson. Godfather and
godson do credit to one another. And what do you intend to make of
him, ma'am? Does he show any turn for any musical instrument?"

Mr. Bagnet suddenly interposes, "Plays the fife. Beautiful."

"Would you believe it, governor," says Mr. Bucket, struck by the
coincidence, "that when I was a boy I played the fife myself? Not in
a scientific way, as I expect he does, but by ear. Lord bless you!
'British Grenadiers'--there's a tune to warm an Englishman up! COULD
you give us 'British Grenadiers,' my fine fellow?"

Nothing could be more acceptable to the little circle than this call
upon young Woolwich, who immediately fetches his fife and performs
the stirring melody, during which performance Mr. Bucket, much
enlivened, beats time and never fails to come in sharp with the
burden, "British Gra-a-anadeers!" In short, he shows so much musical
taste that Mr. Bagnet actually takes his pipe from his lips to
express his conviction that he is a singer. Mr. Bucket receives the
harmonious impeachment so modestly, confessing how that he did once
chaunt a little, for the expression of the feelings of his own bosom,
and with no presumptuous idea of entertaining his friends, that he is
asked to sing. Not to be behindhand in the sociality of the evening,
he complies and gives them "Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young
Charms." This ballad, he informs Mrs. Bagnet, he considers to have
been his most powerful ally in moving the heart of Mrs. Bucket when a
maiden, and inducing her to approach the altar--Mr. Bucket's own
words are "to come up to the scratch."

This sparkling stranger is such a new and agreeable feature in the
evening that Mr. George, who testified no great emotions of pleasure
on his entrance, begins, in spite of himself, to be rather proud of
him. He is so friendly, is a man of so many resources, and so easy to
get on with, that it is something to have made him known there. Mr.
Bagnet becomes, after another pipe, so sensible of the value of his
acquaintance that he solicits the honour of his company on the old
girl's next birthday. If anything can more closely cement and
consolidate the esteem which Mr. Bucket has formed for the family, it
is the discovery of the nature of the occasion. He drinks to Mrs.
Bagnet with a warmth approaching to rapture, engages himself for that
day twelvemonth more than thankfully, makes a memorandum of the day
in a large black pocket-book with a girdle to it, and breathes a hope
that Mrs. Bucket and Mrs. Bagnet may before then become, in a manner,
sisters. As he says himself, what is public life without private
ties? He is in his humble way a public man, but it is not in that
sphere that he finds happiness. No, it must be sought within the
confines of domestic bliss.

It is natural, under these circumstances, that he, in his turn,
should remember the friend to whom he is indebted for so promising an
acquaintance. And he does. He keeps very close to him. Whatever the
subject of the conversation, he keeps a tender eye upon him. He waits
to walk home with him. He is interested in his very boots and
observes even them attentively as Mr. George sits smoking
cross-legged in the chimney-corner.

At length Mr. George rises to depart. At the same moment Mr. Bucket,
with the secret sympathy of friendship, also rises. He dotes upon the
children to the last and remembers the commission he has undertaken
for an absent friend.

"Respecting that second-hand wiolinceller, governor--could you
recommend me such a thing?"

"Scores," says Mr. Bagnet.

"I am obliged to you," returns Mr. Bucket, squeezing his hand.
"You're a friend in need. A good tone, mind you! My friend is a
regular dab at it. Ecod, he saws away at Mozart and Handel and the
rest of the big-wigs like a thorough workman. And you needn't," says
Mr. Bucket in a considerate and private voice, "you needn't commit
yourself to too low a figure, governor. I don't want to pay too large
a price for my friend, but I want you to have your proper percentage
and be remunerated for your loss of time. That is but fair. Every man
must live, and ought to it."

Mr. Bagnet shakes his head at the old girl to the effect that they
have found a jewel of price.

"Suppose I was to give you a look in, say, at half arter ten
to-morrow morning. Perhaps you could name the figures of a few
wiolincellers of a good tone?" says Mr. Bucket.

Nothing easier. Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet both engage to have the requisite
information ready and even hint to each other at the practicability
of having a small stock collected there for approval.

"Thank you," says Mr. Bucket, "thank you. Good night, ma'am. Good
night, governor. Good night, darlings. I am much obliged to you for
one of the pleasantest evenings I ever spent in my life."

They, on the contrary, are much obliged to him for the pleasure he
has given them in his company; and so they part with many expressions
of goodwill on both sides. "Now George, old boy," says Mr. Bucket,
taking his arm at the shop-door, "come along!" As they go down the
little street and the Bagnets pause for a minute looking after them,
Mrs. Bagnet remarks to the worthy Lignum that Mr. Bucket "almost
clings to George like, and seems to be really fond of him."

The neighbouring streets being narrow and ill-paved, it is a little
inconvenient to walk there two abreast and arm in arm. Mr. George
therefore soon proposes to walk singly. But Mr. Bucket, who cannot
make up his mind to relinquish his friendly hold, replies, "Wait half
a minute, George. I should wish to speak to you first." Immediately
afterwards, he twists him into a public-house and into a parlour,
where he confronts him and claps his own back against the door.

"Now, George," says Mr. Bucket, "duty is duty, and friendship is
friendship. I never want the two to clash if I can help it. I have
endeavoured to make things pleasant to-night, and I put it to you
whether I have done it or not. You must consider yourself in custody,
George."

"Custody? What for?" returns the trooper, thunderstruck.

"Now, George," says Mr. Bucket, urging a sensible view of the case
upon him with his fat forefinger, "duty, as you know very well, is
one thing, and conversation is another. It's my duty to inform you
that any observations you may make will be liable to be used against
you. Therefore, George, be careful what you say. You don't happen to
have heard of a murder?"

"Murder!"

"Now, George," says Mr. Bucket, keeping his forefinger in an
impressive state of action, "bear in mind what I've said to you. I
ask you nothing. You've been in low spirits this afternoon. I say,
you don't happen to have heard of a murder?"

"No. Where has there been a murder?"

"Now, George," says Mr. Bucket, "don't you go and commit yourself.
I'm a-going to tell you what I want you for. There has been a murder
in Lincoln's Inn Fields--gentleman of the name of Tulkinghorn. He was
shot last night. I want you for that."

The trooper sinks upon a seat behind him, and great drops start out
upon his forehead, and a deadly pallor overspreads his face.

"Bucket! It's not possible that Mr. Tulkinghorn has been killed and
that you suspect ME?"

"George," returns Mr. Bucket, keeping his forefinger going, "it is
certainly possible, because it's the case. This deed was done last
night at ten o'clock. Now, you know where you were last night at ten
o'clock, and you'll be able to prove it, no doubt."

"Last night! Last night?" repeats the trooper thoughtfully. Then it
flashes upon him. "Why, great heaven, I was there last night!"

"So I have understood, George," returns Mr. Bucket with great
deliberation. "So I have understood. Likewise you've been very often
there. You've been seen hanging about the place, and you've been
heard more than once in a wrangle with him, and it's possible--I
don't say it's certainly so, mind you, but it's possible--that he may
have been heard to call you a threatening, murdering, dangerous
fellow."

The trooper gasps as if he would admit it all if he could speak.

"Now, George," continues Mr. Bucket, putting his hat upon the table
with an air of business rather in the upholstery way than otherwise,
"my wish is, as it has been all the evening, to make things pleasant.
I tell you plainly there's a reward out, of a hundred guineas,
offered by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. You and me have always
been pleasant together; but I have got a duty to discharge; and if
that hundred guineas is to be made, it may as well be made by me as
any other man. On all of which accounts, I should hope it was clear
to you that I must have you, and that I'm damned if I don't have you.
Am I to call in any assistance, or is the trick done?"

Mr. George has recovered himself and stands up like a soldier.
"Come," he says; "I am ready."

"George," continues Mr. Bucket, "wait a bit!" With his upholsterer
manner, as if the trooper were a window to be fitted up, he takes
from his pocket a pair of handcuffs. "This is a serious charge,
George, and such is my duty."

The trooper flushes angrily and hesitates a moment, but holds out his
two hands, clasped together, and says, "There! Put them on!"

Mr. Bucket adjusts them in a moment. "How do you find them? Are they
comfortable? If not, say so, for I wish to make things as pleasant as
is consistent with my duty, and I've got another pair in my pocket."
This remark he offers like a most respectable tradesman anxious to
execute an order neatly and to the perfect satisfaction of his
customer. "They'll do as they are? Very well! Now, you see,
George"--he takes a cloak from a corner and begins adjusting it about
the trooper's neck--"I was mindful of your feelings when I come out,
and brought this on purpose. There! Who's the wiser?"

"Only I," returns the trooper, "but as I know it, do me one more good
turn and pull my hat over my eyes."

"Really, though! Do you mean it? Ain't it a pity? It looks so."

"I can't look chance men in the face with these things on," Mr.
George hurriedly replies. "Do, for God's sake, pull my hat forward."

So strongly entreated, Mr. Bucket complies, puts his own hat on, and
conducts his prize into the streets, the trooper marching on as
steadily as usual, though with his head less erect, and Mr. Bucket
steering him with his elbow over the crossings and up the turnings.




CHAPTER L

Esther's Narrative


It happened that when I came home from Deal I found a note from Caddy
Jellyby (as we always continued to call her), informing me that her
health, which had been for some time very delicate, was worse and
that she would be more glad than she could tell me if I would go to
see her. It was a note of a few lines, written from the couch on
which she lay and enclosed to me in another from her husband, in
which he seconded her entreaty with much solicitude. Caddy was now
the mother, and I the godmother, of such a poor little baby--such a
tiny old-faced mite, with a countenance that seemed to be scarcely
anything but cap-border, and a little lean, long-fingered hand,
always clenched under its chin. It would lie in this attitude all
day, with its bright specks of eyes open, wondering (as I used to
imagine) how it came to be so small and weak. Whenever it was moved
it cried, but at all other times it was so patient that the sole
desire of its life appeared to be to lie quiet and think. It had
curious little dark veins in its face and curious little dark marks
under its eyes like faint remembrances of poor Caddy's inky days, and
altogether, to those who were not used to it, it was quite a piteous
little sight.

But it was enough for Caddy that SHE was used to it. The projects
with which she beguiled her illness, for little Esther's education,
and little Esther's marriage, and even for her own old age as the
grandmother of little Esther's little Esthers, was so prettily
expressive of devotion to this pride of her life that I should be
tempted to recall some of them but for the timely remembrance that I
am getting on irregularly as it is.

To return to the letter. Caddy had a superstition about me which had
been strengthening in her mind ever since that night long ago when
she had lain asleep with her head in my lap. She almost--I think I
must say quite--believed that I did her good whenever I was near her.
Now although this was such a fancy of the affectionate girl's that I
am almost ashamed to mention it, still it might have all the force of
a fact when she was really ill. Therefore I set off to Caddy, with my
guardian's consent, post-haste; and she and Prince made so much of me
that there never was anything like it.

Next day I went again to sit with her, and next day I went again. It
was a very easy journey, for I had only to rise a little earlier in
the morning, and keep my accounts, and attend to housekeeping matters
before leaving home.

But when I had made these three visits, my guardian said to me, on my
return at night, "Now, little woman, little woman, this will never
do. Constant dropping will wear away a stone, and constant coaching
will wear out a Dame Durden. We will go to London for a while and
take possession of our old lodgings."

"Not for me, dear guardian," said I, "for I never feel tired," which
was strictly true. I was only too happy to be in such request.

"For me then," returned my guardian, "or for Ada, or for both of us.
It is somebody's birthday to-morrow, I think."

"Truly I think it is," said I, kissing my darling, who would be
twenty-one to-morrow.

"Well," observed my guardian, half pleasantly, half seriously,
"that's a great occasion and will give my fair cousin some necessary
business to transact in assertion of her independence, and will make
London a more convenient place for all of us. So to London we will
go. That being settled, there is another thing--how have you left
Caddy?"

"Very unwell, guardian. I fear it will be some time before she
regains her health and strength."

"What do you call some time, now?" asked my guardian thoughtfully.

"Some weeks, I am afraid."

"Ah!" He began to walk about the room with his hands in his pockets,
showing that he had been thinking as much. "Now, what do you say
about her doctor? Is he a good doctor, my love?"

I felt obliged to confess that I knew nothing to the contrary but
that Prince and I had agreed only that evening that we would like his
opinion to be confirmed by some one.

"Well, you know," returned my guardian quickly, "there's Woodcourt."

I had not meant that, and was rather taken by surprise. For a moment
all that I had had in my mind in connexion with Mr. Woodcourt seemed
to come back and confuse me.

"You don't object to him, little woman?"

"Object to him, guardian? Oh no!"

"And you don't think the patient would object to him?"

So far from that, I had no doubt of her being prepared to have a
great reliance on him and to like him very much. I said that he was
no stranger to her personally, for she had seen him often in his kind
attendance on Miss Flite.

"Very good," said my guardian. "He has been here to-day, my dear, and
I will see him about it to-morrow."

I felt in this short conversation--though I did not know how, for she
was quiet, and we interchanged no look--that my dear girl well
remembered how merrily she had clasped me round the waist when no
other hands than Caddy's had brought me the little parting token.
This caused me to feel that I ought to tell her, and Caddy too, that
I was going to be the mistress of Bleak House and that if I avoided
that disclosure any longer I might become less worthy in my own eyes
of its master's love. Therefore, when we went upstairs and had waited
listening until the clock struck twelve in order that only I might be
the first to wish my darling all good wishes on her birthday and to
take her to my heart, I set before her, just as I had set before
myself, the goodness and honour of her cousin John and the happy life
that was in store for me. If ever my darling were fonder of me at
one time than another in all our intercourse, she was surely fondest
of me that night. And I was so rejoiced to know it and so comforted
by the sense of having done right in casting this last idle
reservation away that I was ten times happier than I had been before.
I had scarcely thought it a reservation a few hours ago, but now that
it was gone I felt as if I understood its nature better.

Next day we went to London. We found our old lodging vacant, and in
half an hour were quietly established there, as if we had never gone
away. Mr. Woodcourt dined with us to celebrate my darling's birthday,
and we were as pleasant as we could be with the great blank among us
that Richard's absence naturally made on such an occasion. After that
day I was for some weeks--eight or nine as I remember--very much with
Caddy, and thus it fell out that I saw less of Ada at this time than
any other since we had first come together, except the time of my own
illness. She often came to Caddy's, but our function there was to
amuse and cheer her, and we did not talk in our usual confidential
manner. Whenever I went home at night we were together, but Caddy's
rest was broken by pain, and I often remained to nurse her.

With her husband and her poor little mite of a baby to love and their
home to strive for, what a good creature Caddy was! So self-denying,
so uncomplaining, so anxious to get well on their account, so afraid
of giving trouble, and so thoughtful of the unassisted labours of her
husband and the comforts of old Mr. Turveydrop; I had never known the
best of her until now. And it seemed so curious that her pale face
and helpless figure should be lying there day after day where dancing
was the business of life, where the kit and the apprentices began
early every morning in the ball-room, and where the untidy little boy
waltzed by himself in the kitchen all the afternoon.

At Caddy's request I took the supreme direction of her apartment,
trimmed it up, and pushed her, couch and all, into a lighter and more
airy and more cheerful corner than she had yet occupied; then, every
day, when we were in our neatest array, I used to lay my small small
namesake in her arms and sit down to chat or work or read to her. It
was at one of the first of these quiet times that I told Caddy about
Bleak House.

We had other visitors besides Ada. First of all we had Prince, who in
his hurried intervals of teaching used to come softly in and sit
softly down, with a face of loving anxiety for Caddy and the very
little child. Whatever Caddy's condition really was, she never failed
to declare to Prince that she was all but well--which I, heaven
forgive me, never failed to confirm. This would put Prince in such
good spirits that he would sometimes take the kit from his pocket and
play a chord or two to astonish the baby, which I never knew it to do
in the least degree, for my tiny namesake never noticed it at all.

Then there was Mrs. Jellyby. She would come occasionally, with her
usual distraught manner, and sit calmly looking miles beyond her
grandchild as if her attention were absorbed by a young Borrioboolan
on its native shores. As bright-eyed as ever, as serene, and as
untidy, she would say, "Well, Caddy, child, and how do you do
to-day?" And then would sit amiably smiling and taking no notice of
the reply or would sweetly glide off into a calculation of the number
of letters she had lately received and answered or of the
coffee-bearing power of Borrioboola-Gha. This she would always do
with a serene contempt for our limited sphere of action, not to be
disguised.

Then there was old Mr. Turveydrop, who was from morning to night and
from night to morning the subject of innumerable precautions. If the
baby cried, it was nearly stifled lest the noise should make him
uncomfortable. If the fire wanted stirring in the night, it was
surreptitiously done lest his rest should be broken. If Caddy
required any little comfort that the house contained, she first
carefully discussed whether he was likely to require it too. In
return for this consideration he would come into the room once a day,
all but blessing it--showing a condescension, and a patronage, and a
grace of manner in dispensing the light of his high-shouldered
presence from which I might have supposed him (if I had not known
better) to have been the benefactor of Caddy's life.

"My Caroline," he would say, making the nearest approach that he
could to bending over her. "Tell me that you are better to-day."

"Oh, much better, thank you, Mr. Turveydrop," Caddy would reply.

"Delighted! Enchanted! And our dear Miss Summerson. She is not quite
prostrated by fatigue?" Here he would crease up his eyelids and kiss
his fingers to me, though I am happy to say he had ceased to be
particular in his attentions since I had been so altered.

"Not at all," I would assure him.

"Charming! We must take care of our dear Caroline, Miss Summerson. We
must spare nothing that will restore her. We must nourish her. My
dear Caroline"--he would turn to his daughter-in-law with infinite
generosity and protection--"want for nothing, my love. Frame a wish
and gratify it, my daughter. Everything this house contains,
everything my room contains, is at your service, my dear. Do not," he
would sometimes add in a burst of deportment, "even allow my simple
requirements to be considered if they should at any time interfere
with your own, my Caroline. Your necessities are greater than mine."

He had established such a long prescriptive right to this deportment
(his son's inheritance from his mother) that I several times knew
both Caddy and her husband to be melted to tears by these
affectionate self-sacrifices.

"Nay, my dears," he would remonstrate; and when I saw Caddy's thin
arm about his fat neck as he said it, I would be melted too, though
not by the same process. "Nay, nay! I have promised never to leave
ye. Be dutiful and affectionate towards me, and I ask no other
return. Now, bless ye! I am going to the Park."

He would take the air there presently and get an appetite for his
hotel dinner. I hope I do old Mr. Turveydrop no wrong, but I never
saw any better traits in him than these I faithfully record, except
that he certainly conceived a liking for Peepy and would take the
child out walking with great pomp, always on those occasions sending
him home before he went to dinner himself, and occasionally with a
halfpenny in his pocket. But even this disinterestedness was attended
with no inconsiderable cost, to my knowledge, for before Peepy was
sufficiently decorated to walk hand in hand with the professor of
deportment, he had to be newly dressed, at the expense of Caddy and
her husband, from top to toe.

Last of our visitors, there was Mr. Jellyby. Really when he used to
come in of an evening, and ask Caddy in his meek voice how she was,
and then sit down with his head against the wall, and make no attempt
to say anything more, I liked him very much. If he found me bustling
about doing any little thing, he sometimes half took his coat off, as
if with an intention of helping by a great exertion; but he never got
any further. His sole occupation was to sit with his head against the
wall, looking hard at the thoughtful baby; and I could not quite
divest my mind of a fancy that they understood one another.

I have not counted Mr. Woodcourt among our visitors because he was
now Caddy's regular attendant. She soon began to improve under his
care, but he was so gentle, so skilful, so unwearying in the pains he
took that it is not to be wondered at, I am sure. I saw a good deal
of Mr. Woodcourt during this time, though not so much as might be
supposed, for knowing Caddy to be safe in his hands, I often slipped
home at about the hours when he was expected. We frequently met,
notwithstanding. I was quite reconciled to myself now, but I still
felt glad to think that he was sorry for me, and he still WAS sorry
for me I believed. He helped Mr. Badger in his professional
engagements, which were numerous, and had as yet no settled projects
for the future.

It was when Caddy began to recover that I began to notice a change in
my dear girl. I cannot say how it first presented itself to me,
because I observed it in many slight particulars which were nothing
in themselves and only became something when they were pieced
together. But I made it out, by putting them together, that Ada was
not so frankly cheerful with me as she used to be. Her tenderness for
me was as loving and true as ever; I did not for a moment doubt that;
but there was a quiet sorrow about her which she did not confide to
me, and in which I traced some hidden regret.

Now, I could not understand this, and I was so anxious for the
happiness of my own pet that it caused me some uneasiness and set me
thinking often. At length, feeling sure that Ada suppressed this
something from me lest it should make me unhappy too, it came into my
head that she was a little grieved--for me--by what I had told her
about Bleak House.

How I persuaded myself that this was likely, I don't know. I had no
idea that there was any selfish reference in my doing so. I was not
grieved for myself: I was quite contented and quite happy. Still,
that Ada might be thinking--for me, though I had abandoned all such
thoughts--of what once was, but was now all changed, seemed so easy
to believe that I believed it.

What could I do to reassure my darling (I considered then) and show
her that I had no such feelings? Well! I could only be as brisk and
busy as possible, and that I had tried to be all along. However, as
Caddy's illness had certainly interfered, more or less, with my home
duties--though I had always been there in the morning to make my
guardian's breakfast, and he had a hundred times laughed and said
there must be two little women, for his little woman was never
missing--I resolved to be doubly diligent and gay. So I went about
the house humming all the tunes I knew, and I sat working and working
in a desperate manner, and I talked and talked, morning, noon, and
night.

And still there was the same shade between me and my darling.

"So, Dame Trot," observed my guardian, shutting up his book one night
when we were all three together, "so Woodcourt has restored Caddy
Jellyby to the full enjoyment of life again?"

"Yes," I said; "and to be repaid by such gratitude as hers is to be
made rich, guardian."

"I wish it was," he returned, "with all my heart."

So did I too, for that matter. I said so.

"Aye! We would make him as rich as a Jew if we knew how. Would we
not, little woman?"

I laughed as I worked and replied that I was not sure about that, for
it might spoil him, and he might not be so useful, and there might be
many who could ill spare him. As Miss Flite, and Caddy herself, and
many others.

"True," said my guardian. "I had forgotten that. But we would agree
to make him rich enough to live, I suppose? Rich enough to work with
tolerable peace of mind? Rich enough to have his own happy home and
his own household gods--and household goddess, too, perhaps?"

That was quite another thing, I said. We must all agree in that.

"To be sure," said my guardian. "All of us. I have a great regard for
Woodcourt, a high esteem for him; and I have been sounding him
delicately about his plans. It is difficult to offer aid to an
independent man with that just kind of pride which he possesses. And
yet I would be glad to do it if I might or if I knew how. He seems
half inclined for another voyage. But that appears like casting such
a man away."

"It might open a new world to him," said I.

"So it might, little woman," my guardian assented. "I doubt if he
expects much of the old world. Do you know I have fancied that he
sometimes feels some particular disappointment or misfortune
encountered in it. You never heard of anything of that sort?"

I shook my head.

"Humph," said my guardian. "I am mistaken, I dare say." As there was
a little pause here, which I thought, for my dear girl's
satisfaction, had better be filled up, I hummed an air as I worked
which was a favourite with my guardian.

"And do you think Mr. Woodcourt will make another voyage?" I asked
him when I had hummed it quietly all through.

"I don't quite know what to think, my dear, but I should say it was
likely at present that he will give a long trip to another country."

"I am sure he will take the best wishes of all our hearts with him
wherever he goes," said I; "and though they are not riches, he will
never be the poorer for them, guardian, at least."

"Never, little woman," he replied.

I was sitting in my usual place, which was now beside my guardian's
chair. That had not been my usual place before the letter, but it was
now. I looked up to Ada, who was sitting opposite, and I saw, as she
looked at me, that her eyes were filled with tears and that tears
were falling down her face. I felt that I had only to be placid and
merry once for all to undeceive my dear and set her loving heart at
rest. I really was so, and I had nothing to do but to be myself.

So I made my sweet girl lean upon my shoulder--how little thinking
what was heavy on her mind!--and I said she was not quite well, and
put my arm about her, and took her upstairs. When we were in our own
room, and when she might perhaps have told me what I was so
unprepared to hear, I gave her no encouragement to confide in me; I
never thought she stood in need of it.

"Oh, my dear good Esther," said Ada, "if I could only make up my mind
to speak to you and my cousin John when you are together!"

"Why, my love!" I remonstrated. "Ada, why should you not speak to
us!"

Ada only dropped her head and pressed me closer to her heart.

"You surely don't forget, my beauty," said I, smiling, "what quiet,
old-fashioned people we are and how I have settled down to be the
discreetest of dames? You don't forget how happily and peacefully my
life is all marked out for me, and by whom? I am certain that you
don't forget by what a noble character, Ada. That can never be."

"No, never, Esther."

"Why then, my dear," said I, "there can be nothing amiss--and why
should you not speak to us?"

"Nothing amiss, Esther?" returned Ada. "Oh, when I think of all these
years, and of his fatherly care and kindness, and of the old
relations among us, and of you, what shall I do, what shall I do!"

I looked at my child in some wonder, but I thought it better not to
answer otherwise than by cheering her, and so I turned off into many
little recollections of our life together and prevented her from
saying more. When she lay down to sleep, and not before, I returned
to my guardian to say good night, and then I came back to Ada and sat
near her for a little while.

She was asleep, and I thought as I looked at her that she was a
little changed. I had thought so more than once lately. I could not
decide, even looking at her while she was unconscious, how she was
changed, but something in the familiar beauty of her face looked
different to me. My guardian's old hopes of her and Richard arose
sorrowfully in my mind, and I said to myself, "She has been anxious
about him," and I wondered how that love would end.

When I had come home from Caddy's while she was ill, I had often
found Ada at work, and she had always put her work away, and I had
never known what it was. Some of it now lay in a drawer near her,
which was not quite closed. I did not open the drawer, but I still
rather wondered what the work could be, for it was evidently nothing
for herself.

And I noticed as I kissed my dear that she lay with one hand under
her pillow so that it was hidden.

How much less amiable I must have been than they thought me, how much
less amiable than I thought myself, to be so preoccupied with my own
cheerfulness and contentment as to think that it only rested with me
to put my dear girl right and set her mind at peace!

But I lay down, self-deceived, in that belief. And I awoke in it next
day to find that there was still the same shade between me and my
darling.




CHAPTER LI

Enlightened


When Mr. Woodcourt arrived in London, he went, that very same day, to
Mr. Vholes's in Symond's Inn. For he never once, from the moment when
I entreated him to be a friend to Richard, neglected or forgot his
promise. He had told me that he accepted the charge as a sacred
trust, and he was ever true to it in that spirit.

He found Mr. Vholes in his office and informed Mr. Vholes of his
agreement with Richard that he should call there to learn his
address.

"Just so, sir," said Mr. Vholes. "Mr. C.'s address is not a hundred
miles from here, sir, Mr. C.'s address is not a hundred miles from
here. Would you take a seat, sir?"

Mr. Woodcourt thanked Mr. Vholes, but he had no business with him
beyond what he had mentioned.

"Just so, sir. I believe, sir," said Mr. Vholes, still quietly
insisting on the seat by not giving the address, "that you have
influence with Mr. C. Indeed I am aware that you have."

"I was not aware of it myself," returned Mr. Woodcourt; "but I
suppose you know best."

"Sir," rejoined Mr. Vholes, self-contained as usual, voice and all,
"it is a part of my professional duty to know best. It is a part of
my professional duty to study and to understand a gentleman who
confides his interests to me. In my professional duty I shall not be
wanting, sir, if I know it. I may, with the best intentions, be
wanting in it without knowing it; but not if I know it, sir."

Mr. Woodcourt again mentioned the address.

"Give me leave, sir," said Mr. Vholes. "Bear with me for a moment.
Sir, Mr. C. is playing for a considerable stake, and cannot play
without--need I say what?"

"Money, I presume?"

"Sir," said Mr. Vholes, "to be honest with you (honesty being my
golden rule, whether I gain by it or lose, and I find that I
generally lose), money is the word. Now, sir, upon the chances of Mr.
C.'s game I express to you no opinion, NO opinion. It might be highly
impolitic in Mr. C., after playing so long and so high, to leave off;
it might be the reverse; I say nothing. No, sir," said Mr. Vholes,
bringing his hand flat down upon his desk in a positive manner,
"nothing."

"You seem to forget," returned Mr. Woodcourt, "that I ask you to say
nothing and have no interest in anything you say."

"Pardon me, sir!" retorted Mr. Vholes. "You do yourself an injustice.
No, sir! Pardon me! You shall not--shall not in my office, if I know
it--do yourself an injustice. You are interested in anything, and in
everything, that relates to your friend. I know human nature much
better, sir, than to admit for an instant that a gentleman of your
appearance is not interested in whatever concerns his friend."

"Well," replied Mr. Woodcourt, "that may be. I am particularly
interested in his address."

"The number, sir," said Mr. Vholes parenthetically, "I believe I have
already mentioned. If Mr. C. is to continue to play for this
considerable stake, sir, he must have funds. Understand me! There are
funds in hand at present. I ask for nothing; there are funds in hand.
But for the onward play, more funds must be provided, unless Mr. C.
is to throw away what he has already ventured, which is wholly and
solely a point for his consideration. This, sir, I take the
opportunity of stating openly to you as the friend of Mr. C. Without
funds I shall always be happy to appear and act for Mr. C. to the
extent of all such costs as are safe to be allowed out of the estate,
not beyond that. I could not go beyond that, sir, without wronging
some one. I must either wrong my three dear girls or my venerable
father, who is entirely dependent on me, in the Vale of Taunton; or
some one. Whereas, sir, my resolution is (call it weakness or folly
if you please) to wrong no one."

Mr. Woodcourt rather sternly rejoined that he was glad to hear it.

"I wish, sir," said Mr. Vholes, "to leave a good name behind me.
Therefore I take every opportunity of openly stating to a friend of
Mr. C. how Mr. C. is situated. As to myself, sir, the labourer is
worthy of his hire. If I undertake to put my shoulder to the wheel, I
do it, and I earn what I get. I am here for that purpose. My name is
painted on the door outside, with that object."

"And Mr. Carstone's address, Mr. Vholes?"

"Sir," returned Mr. Vholes, "as I believe I have already mentioned,
it is next door. On the second story you will find Mr. C.'s
apartments. Mr. C. desires to be near his professional adviser, and I
am far from objecting, for I court inquiry."

Upon this Mr. Woodcourt wished Mr. Vholes good day and went in search
of Richard, the change in whose appearance he began to understand now
but too well.

He found him in a dull room, fadedly furnished, much as I had found
him in his barrack-room but a little while before, except that he was
not writing but was sitting with a book before him, from which his
eyes and thoughts were far astray. As the door chanced to be standing
open, Mr. Woodcourt was in his presence for some moments without
being perceived, and he told me that he never could forget the
haggardness of his face and the dejection of his manner before he was
aroused from his dream.

"Woodcourt, my dear fellow," cried Richard, starting up with extended
hands, "you come upon my vision like a ghost."

"A friendly one," he replied, "and only waiting, as they say ghosts
do, to be addressed. How does the mortal world go?" They were seated
now, near together.

"Badly enough, and slowly enough," said Richard, "speaking at least
for my part of it."

"What part is that?"

"The Chancery part."

"I never heard," returned Mr. Woodcourt, shaking his head, "of its
going well yet."

"Nor I," said Richard moodily. "Who ever did?" He brightened again in
a moment and said with his natural openness, "Woodcourt, I should be
sorry to be misunderstood by you, even if I gained by it in your
estimation. You must know that I have done no good this long time. I
have not intended to do much harm, but I seem to have been capable of
nothing else. It may be that I should have done better by keeping out
of the net into which my destiny has worked me, but I think not,
though I dare say you will soon hear, if you have not already heard,
a very different opinion. To make short of a long story, I am afraid
I have wanted an object; but I have an object now--or it has me--and
it is too late to discuss it. Take me as I am, and make the best of
me."

"A bargain," said Mr. Woodcourt. "Do as much by me in return."

"Oh! You," returned Richard, "you can pursue your art for its own
sake, and can put your hand upon the plough and never turn, and can
strike a purpose out of anything. You and I are very different
creatures."

He spoke regretfully and lapsed for a moment into his weary
condition.

"Well, well!" he cried, shaking it off. "Everything has an end. We
shall see! So you will take me as I am, and make the best of me?"

"Aye! Indeed I will." They shook hands upon it laughingly, but in
deep earnestness. I can answer for one of them with my heart of
hearts.

"You come as a godsend," said Richard, "for I have seen nobody here
yet but Vholes. Woodcourt, there is one subject I should like to
mention, for once and for all, in the beginning of our treaty. You
can hardly make the best of me if I don't. You know, I dare say, that
I have an attachment to my cousin Ada?"

Mr. Woodcourt replied that I had hinted as much to him. "Now pray,"
returned Richard, "don't think me a heap of selfishness. Don't
suppose that I am splitting my head and half breaking my heart over
this miserable Chancery suit for my own rights and interests alone.
Ada's are bound up with mine; they can't be separated; Vholes works
for both of us. Do think of that!"

He was so very solicitous on this head that Mr. Woodcourt gave him
the strongest assurances that he did him no injustice.

"You see," said Richard, with something pathetic in his manner of
lingering on the point, though it was off-hand and unstudied, "to an
upright fellow like you, bringing a friendly face like yours here, I
cannot bear the thought of appearing selfish and mean. I want to see
Ada righted, Woodcourt, as well as myself; I want to do my utmost to
right her, as well as myself; I venture what I can scrape together to
extricate her, as well as myself. Do, I beseech you, think of that!"

Afterwards, when Mr. Woodcourt came to reflect on what had passed, he
was so very much impressed by the strength of Richard's anxiety on
this point that in telling me generally of his first visit to
Symond's Inn he particularly dwelt upon it. It revived a fear I had
had before that my dear girl's little property would be absorbed by
Mr. Vholes and that Richard's justification to himself would be
sincerely this. It was just as I began to take care of Caddy that the
interview took place, and I now return to the time when Caddy had
recovered and the shade was still between me and my darling.

I proposed to Ada that morning that we should go and see Richard. It
a little surprised me to find that she hesitated and was not so
radiantly willing as I had expected.

"My dear," said I, "you have not had any difference with Richard
since I have been so much away?"

"No, Esther."

"Not heard of him, perhaps?" said I.

"Yes, I have heard of him," said Ada.

Such tears in her eyes, and such love in her face. I could not make
my darling out. Should I go to Richard's by myself? I said. No, Ada
thought I had better not go by myself. Would she go with me? Yes, Ada
thought she had better go with me. Should we go now? Yes, let us go
now. Well, I could not understand my darling, with the tears in her
eyes and the love in her face!

We were soon equipped and went out. It was a sombre day, and drops of
chill rain fell at intervals. It was one of those colourless days
when everything looks heavy and harsh. The houses frowned at us, the
dust rose at us, the smoke swooped at us, nothing made any compromise
about itself or wore a softened aspect. I fancied my beautiful girl
quite out of place in the rugged streets, and I thought there were
more funerals passing along the dismal pavements than I had ever seen
before.

We had first to find out Symond's Inn. We were going to inquire in a
shop when Ada said she thought it was near Chancery Lane. "We are not
likely to be far out, my love, if we go in that direction," said I.
So to Chancery Lane we went, and there, sure enough, we saw it
written up. Symond's Inn.

We had next to find out the number. "Or Mr. Vholes's office will do,"
I recollected, "for Mr. Vholes's office is next door." Upon which Ada
said, perhaps that was Mr. Vholes's office in the corner there. And
it really was.

Then came the question, which of the two next doors? I was going for
the one, and my darling was going for the other; and my darling was
right again. So up we went to the second story, when we came to
Richard's name in great white letters on a hearse-like panel.

I should have knocked, but Ada said perhaps we had better turn the
handle and go in. Thus we came to Richard, poring over a table
covered with dusty bundles of papers which seemed to me like dusty
mirrors reflecting his own mind. Wherever I looked I saw the ominous
words that ran in it repeated. Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

He received us very affectionately, and we sat down. "If you had come
a little earlier," he said, "you would have found Woodcourt here.
There never was such a good fellow as Woodcourt is. He finds time to
look in between-whiles, when anybody else with half his work to do
would be thinking about not being able to come. And he is so cheery,
so fresh, so sensible, so earnest, so--everything that I am not, that
the place brightens whenever he comes, and darkens whenever he goes
again."

"God bless him," I thought, "for his truth to me!"

"He is not so sanguine, Ada," continued Richard, casting his dejected
look over the bundles of papers, "as Vholes and I are usually, but he
is only an outsider and is not in the mysteries. We have gone into
them, and he has not. He can't be expected to know much of such a
labyrinth."

As his look wandered over the papers again and he passed his two
hands over his head, I noticed how sunken and how large his eyes
appeared, how dry his lips were, and how his finger-nails were all
bitten away.

"Is this a healthy place to live in, Richard, do you think?" said I.

"Why, my dear Minerva," answered Richard with his old gay laugh, "it
is neither a rural nor a cheerful place; and when the sun shines
here, you may lay a pretty heavy wager that it is shining brightly in
an open spot. But it's well enough for the time. It's near the
offices and near Vholes."

"Perhaps," I hinted, "a change from both--"

"Might do me good?" said Richard, forcing a laugh as he finished the
sentence. "I shouldn't wonder! But it can only come in one way
now--in one of two ways, I should rather say. Either the suit must be
ended, Esther, or the suitor. But it shall be the suit, my dear girl,
the suit, my dear girl!"

These latter words were addressed to Ada, who was sitting nearest to
him. Her face being turned away from me and towards him, I could not
see it.

"We are doing very well," pursued Richard. "Vholes will tell you so.
We are really spinning along. Ask Vholes. We are giving them no rest.
Vholes knows all their windings and turnings, and we are upon them
everywhere. We have astonished them already. We shall rouse up that
nest of sleepers, mark my words!"

His hopefulness had long been more painful to me than his
despondency; it was so unlike hopefulness, had something so fierce in
its determination to be it, was so hungry and eager, and yet so
conscious of being forced and unsustainable that it had long touched
me to the heart. But the commentary upon it now indelibly written in
his handsome face made it far more distressing than it used to be. I
say indelibly, for I felt persuaded that if the fatal cause could
have been for ever terminated, according to his brightest visions, in
that same hour, the traces of the premature anxiety, self-reproach,
and disappointment it had occasioned him would have remained upon his
features to the hour of his death.

"The sight of our dear little woman," said Richard, Ada still
remaining silent and quiet, "is so natural to me, and her
compassionate face is so like the face of old days--"

Ah! No, no. I smiled and shook my head.

"--So exactly like the face of old days," said Richard in his cordial
voice, and taking my hand with the brotherly regard which nothing
ever changed, "that I can't make pretences with her. I fluctuate a
little; that's the truth. Sometimes I hope, my dear, and sometimes
I--don't quite despair, but nearly. I get," said Richard,
relinquishing my hand gently and walking across the room, "so tired!"

He took a few turns up and down and sunk upon the sofa. "I get," he
repeated gloomily, "so tired. It is such weary, weary work!"

He was leaning on his arm saying these words in a meditative voice
and looking at the ground when my darling rose, put off her bonnet,
kneeled down beside him with her golden hair falling like sunlight on
his head, clasped her two arms round his neck, and turned her face to
me. Oh, what a loving and devoted face I saw!

"Esther, dear," she said very quietly, "I am not going home again."

A light shone in upon me all at once.

"Never any more. I am going to stay with my dear husband. We have
been married above two months. Go home without me, my own Esther; I
shall never go home any more!" With those words my darling drew his
head down on her breast and held it there. And if ever in my life I
saw a love that nothing but death could change, I saw it then before
me.

"Speak to Esther, my dearest," said Richard, breaking the silence
presently. "Tell her how it was."

I met her before she could come to me and folded her in my arms. We
neither of us spoke, but with her cheek against my own I wanted to
hear nothing. "My pet," said I. "My love. My poor, poor girl!" I
pitied her so much. I was very fond of Richard, but the impulse that
I had upon me was to pity her so much.

"Esther, will you forgive me? Will my cousin John forgive me?"

"My dear," said I, "to doubt it for a moment is to do him a great
wrong. And as to me!" Why, as to me, what had I to forgive!

I dried my sobbing darling's eyes and sat beside her on the sofa, and
Richard sat on my other side; and while I was reminded of that so
different night when they had first taken me into their confidence
and had gone on in their own wild happy way, they told me between
them how it was.

"All I had was Richard's," Ada said; "and Richard would not take it,
Esther, and what could I do but be his wife when I loved him dearly!"

"And you were so fully and so kindly occupied, excellent Dame
Durden," said Richard, "that how could we speak to you at such a
time! And besides, it was not a long-considered step. We went out one
morning and were married."

"And when it was done, Esther," said my darling, "I was always
thinking how to tell you and what to do for the best. And sometimes I
thought you ought to know it directly, and sometimes I thought you
ought not to know it and keep it from my cousin John; and I could not
tell what to do, and I fretted very much."

How selfish I must have been not to have thought of this before! I
don't know what I said now. I was so sorry, and yet I was so fond of
them and so glad that they were fond of me; I pitied them so much,
and yet I felt a kind of pride in their loving one another. I never
had experienced such painful and pleasurable emotion at one time, and
in my own heart I did not know which predominated. But I was not
there to darken their way; I did not do that.

When I was less foolish and more composed, my darling took her
wedding-ring from her bosom, and kissed it, and put it on. Then I
remembered last night and told Richard that ever since her marriage
she had worn it at night when there was no one to see. Then Ada
blushingly asked me how did I know that, my dear. Then I told Ada how
I had seen her hand concealed under her pillow and had little thought
why, my dear. Then they began telling me how it was all over again,
and I began to be sorry and glad again, and foolish again, and to
hide my plain old face as much as I could lest I should put them out
of heart.

Thus the time went on until it became necessary for me to think of
returning. When that time arrived it was the worst of all, for then
my darling completely broke down. She clung round my neck, calling me
by every dear name she could think of and saying what should she do
without me! Nor was Richard much better; and as for me, I should have
been the worst of the three if I had not severely said to myself,
"Now Esther, if you do, I'll never speak to you again!"

"Why, I declare," said I, "I never saw such a wife. I don't think she
loves her husband at all. Here, Richard, take my child, for goodness'
sake." But I held her tight all the while, and could have wept over
her I don't know how long.

"I give this dear young couple notice," said I, "that I am only going
away to come back to-morrow and that I shall be always coming
backwards and forwards until Symond's Inn is tired of the sight of
me. So I shall not say good-bye, Richard. For what would be the use
of that, you know, when I am coming back so soon!"

I had given my darling to him now, and I meant to go; but I lingered
for one more look of the precious face which it seemed to rive my
heart to turn from.

So I said (in a merry, bustling manner) that unless they gave me some
encouragement to come back, I was not sure that I could take that
liberty, upon which my dear girl looked up, faintly smiling through
her tears, and I folded her lovely face between my hands, and gave it
one last kiss, and laughed, and ran away.

And when I got downstairs, oh, how I cried! It almost seemed to me
that I had lost my Ada for ever. I was so lonely and so blank without
her, and it was so desolate to be going home with no hope of seeing
her there, that I could get no comfort for a little while as I walked
up and down in a dim corner sobbing and crying.

I came to myself by and by, after a little scolding, and took a coach
home. The poor boy whom I had found at St. Albans had reappeared a
short time before and was lying at the point of death; indeed, was
then dead, though I did not know it. My guardian had gone out to
inquire about him and did not return to dinner. Being quite alone, I
cried a little again, though on the whole I don't think I behaved so
very, very ill.

It was only natural that I should not be quite accustomed to the loss
of my darling yet. Three or four hours were not a long time after
years. But my mind dwelt so much upon the uncongenial scene in which
I had left her, and I pictured it as such an overshadowed
stony-hearted one, and I so longed to be near her and taking some
sort of care of her, that I determined to go back in the evening only
to look up at her windows.

It was foolish, I dare say, but it did not then seem at all so to me,
and it does not seem quite so even now. I took Charley into my
confidence, and we went out at dusk. It was dark when we came to the
new strange home of my dear girl, and there was a light behind the
yellow blinds. We walked past cautiously three or four times, looking
up, and narrowly missed encountering Mr. Vholes, who came out of his
office while we were there and turned his head to look up too before
going home. The sight of his lank black figure and the lonesome air
of that nook in the dark were favourable to the state of my mind. I
thought of the youth and love and beauty of my dear girl, shut up in
such an ill-assorted refuge, almost as if it were a cruel place.

It was very solitary and very dull, and I did not doubt that I might
safely steal upstairs. I left Charley below and went up with a light
foot, not distressed by any glare from the feeble oil lanterns on the
way. I listened for a few moments, and in the musty rotting silence
of the house believed that I could hear the murmur of their young
voices. I put my lips to the hearse-like panel of the door as a kiss
for my dear and came quietly down again, thinking that one of these
days I would confess to the visit.

And it really did me good, for though nobody but Charley and I knew
anything about it, I somehow felt as if it had diminished the
separation between Ada and me and had brought us together again for
those moments. I went back, not quite accustomed yet to the change,
but all the better for that hovering about my darling.

My guardian had come home and was standing thoughtfully by the dark
window. When I went in, his face cleared and he came to his seat, but
he caught the light upon my face as I took mine.

"Little woman," said he, "You have been crying."

"Why, yes, guardian," said I, "I am afraid I have been, a little. Ada
has been in such distress, and is so very sorry, guardian."

I put my arm on the back of his chair, and I saw in his glance that
my words and my look at her empty place had prepared him.

"Is she married, my dear?"

I told him all about it and how her first entreaties had referred to
his forgiveness.

"She has no need of it," said he. "Heaven bless her and her husband!"
But just as my first impulse had been to pity her, so was his. "Poor
girl, poor girl! Poor Rick! Poor Ada!"

Neither of us spoke after that, until he said with a sigh, "Well,
well, my dear! Bleak House is thinning fast."

"But its mistress remains, guardian." Though I was timid about saying
it, I ventured because of the sorrowful tone in which he had spoken.
"She will do all she can to make it happy," said I.

"She will succeed, my love!"

The letter had made no difference between us except that the seat by
his side had come to be mine; it made none now. He turned his old
bright fatherly look upon me, laid his hand on my hand in his old
way, and said again, "She will succeed, my dear. Nevertheless, Bleak
House is thinning fast, O little woman!"

I was sorry presently that this was all we said about that. I was
rather disappointed. I feared I might not quite have been all I had
meant to be since the letter and the answer.




CHAPTER LII

Obstinacy


But one other day had intervened when, early in the morning as we
were going to breakfast, Mr. Woodcourt came in haste with the
astounding news that a terrible murder had been committed for which
Mr. George had been apprehended and was in custody. When he told us
that a large reward was offered by Sir Leicester Dedlock for the
murderer's apprehension, I did not in my first consternation
understand why; but a few more words explained to me that the
murdered person was Sir Leicester's lawyer, and immediately my
mother's dread of him rushed into my remembrance.

This unforeseen and violent removal of one whom she had long watched
and distrusted and who had long watched and distrusted her, one for
whom she could have had few intervals of kindness, always dreading in
him a dangerous and secret enemy, appeared so awful that my first
thoughts were of her. How appalling to hear of such a death and be
able to feel no pity! How dreadful to remember, perhaps, that she had
sometimes even wished the old man away who was so swiftly hurried out
of life!

Such crowding reflections, increasing the distress and fear I always
felt when the name was mentioned, made me so agitated that I could
scarcely hold my place at the table. I was quite unable to follow the
conversation until I had had a little time to recover. But when I
came to myself and saw how shocked my guardian was and found that
they were earnestly speaking of the suspected man and recalling every
favourable impression we had formed of him out of the good we had
known of him, my interest and my fears were so strongly aroused in
his behalf that I was quite set up again.

"Guardian, you don't think it possible that he is justly accused?"

"My dear, I CAN'T think so. This man whom we have seen so
open-hearted and compassionate, who with the might of a giant has the
gentleness of a child, who looks as brave a fellow as ever lived and
is so simple and quiet with it, this man justly accused of such a
crime? I can't believe it. It's not that I don't or I won't. I
can't!"

"And I can't," said Mr. Woodcourt. "Still, whatever we believe or
know of him, we had better not forget that some appearances are
against him. He bore an animosity towards the deceased gentleman. He
has openly mentioned it in many places. He is said to have expressed
himself violently towards him, and he certainly did about him, to my
knowledge. He admits that he was alone on the scene of the murder
within a few minutes of its commission. I sincerely believe him to be
as innocent of any participation in it as I am, but these are all
reasons for suspicion falling upon him."

"True," said my guardian. And he added, turning to me, "It would be
doing him a very bad service, my dear, to shut our eyes to the truth
in any of these respects."

I felt, of course, that we must admit, not only to ourselves but to
others, the full force of the circumstances against him. Yet I knew
withal (I could not help saying) that their weight would not induce
us to desert him in his need.

"Heaven forbid!" returned my guardian. "We will stand by him, as he
himself stood by the two poor creatures who are gone." He meant Mr.
Gridley and the boy, to both of whom Mr. George had given shelter.

Mr. Woodcourt then told us that the trooper's man had been with him
before day, after wandering about the streets all night like a
distracted creature. That one of the trooper's first anxieties was
that we should not suppose him guilty. That he had charged his
messenger to represent his perfect innocence with every solemn
assurance he could send us. That Mr. Woodcourt had only quieted the
man by undertaking to come to our house very early in the morning
with these representations. He added that he was now upon his way to
see the prisoner himself.

My guardian said directly he would go too. Now, besides that I liked
the retired soldier very much and that he liked me, I had that secret
interest in what had happened which was only known to my guardian. I
felt as if it came close and near to me. It seemed to become
personally important to myself that the truth should be discovered
and that no innocent people should be suspected, for suspicion, once
run wild, might run wilder.

In a word, I felt as if it were my duty and obligation to go with
them. My guardian did not seek to dissuade me, and I went.

It was a large prison with many courts and passages so like one
another and so uniformly paved that I seemed to gain a new
comprehension, as I passed along, of the fondness that solitary
prisoners, shut up among the same staring walls from year to year,
have had--as I have read--for a weed or a stray blade of grass. In an
arched room by himself, like a cellar upstairs, with walls so
glaringly white that they made the massive iron window-bars and
iron-bound door even more profoundly black than they were, we found
the trooper standing in a corner. He had been sitting on a bench
there and had risen when he heard the locks and bolts turn.

When he saw us, he came forward a step with his usual heavy tread,
and there stopped and made a slight bow. But as I still advanced,
putting out my hand to him, he understood us in a moment.

"This is a load off my mind, I do assure you, miss and gentlemen,"
said he, saluting us with great heartiness and drawing a long breath.
"And now I don't so much care how it ends."

He scarcely seemed to be the prisoner. What with his coolness and his
soldierly bearing, he looked far more like the prison guard.

"This is even a rougher place than my gallery to receive a lady in,"
said Mr. George, "but I know Miss Summerson will make the best of
it." As he handed me to the bench on which he had been sitting, I sat
down, which seemed to give him great satisfaction.

"I thank you, miss," said he.

"Now, George," observed my guardian, "as we require no new assurances
on your part, so I believe we need give you none on ours."

"Not at all, sir. I thank you with all my heart. If I was not
innocent of this crime, I couldn't look at you and keep my secret to
myself under the condescension of the present visit. I feel the
present visit very much. I am not one of the eloquent sort, but I
feel it, Miss Summerson and gentlemen, deeply."

He laid his hand for a moment on his broad chest and bent his head to
us. Although he squared himself again directly, he expressed a great
amount of natural emotion by these simple means.

"First," said my guardian, "can we do anything for your personal
comfort, George?"

"For which, sir?" he inquired, clearing his throat.

"For your personal comfort. Is there anything you want that would
lessen the hardship of this confinement?"

"Well, sir," replied George, after a little cogitation, "I am equally
obliged to you, but tobacco being against the rules, I can't say that
there is."

"You will think of many little things perhaps, by and by. Whenever
you do, George, let us know."

"Thank you, sir. Howsoever," observed Mr. George with one of his
sunburnt smiles, "a man who has been knocking about the world in a
vagabond kind of a way as long as I have gets on well enough in a
place like the present, so far as that goes."

"Next, as to your case," observed my guardian.

"Exactly so, sir," returned Mr. George, folding his arms upon his
breast with perfect self-possession and a little curiosity.

"How does it stand now?"

"Why, sir, it is under remand at present. Bucket gives me to
understand that he will probably apply for a series of remands from
time to time until the case is more complete. How it is to be made
more complete I don't myself see, but I dare say Bucket will manage
it somehow."

"Why, heaven save us, man," exclaimed my guardian, surprised into his
old oddity and vehemence, "you talk of yourself as if you were
somebody else!"

"No offence, sir," said Mr. George. "I am very sensible of your
kindness. But I don't see how an innocent man is to make up his mind
to this kind of thing without knocking his head against the walls
unless he takes it in that point of view.

"That is true enough to a certain extent," returned my guardian,
softened. "But my good fellow, even an innocent man must take
ordinary precautions to defend himself."

"Certainly, sir. And I have done so. I have stated to the
magistrates, 'Gentlemen, I am as innocent of this charge as
yourselves; what has been stated against me in the way of facts is
perfectly true; I know no more about it.' I intend to continue
stating that, sir. What more can I do? It's the truth."

"But the mere truth won't do," rejoined my guardian.

"Won't it indeed, sir? Rather a bad look-out for me!" Mr. George
good-humouredly observed.

"You must have a lawyer," pursued my guardian. "We must engage a good
one for you."

"I ask your pardon, sir," said Mr. George with a step backward. "I am
equally obliged. But I must decidedly beg to be excused from anything
of that sort."

"You won't have a lawyer?"

"No, sir." Mr. George shook his head in the most emphatic manner. "I
thank you all the same, sir, but--no lawyer!"

"Why not?"

"I don't take kindly to the breed," said Mr. George. "Gridley didn't.
And--if you'll excuse my saying so much--I should hardly have thought
you did yourself, sir."

"That's equity," my guardian explained, a little at a loss; "that's
equity, George."

"Is it, indeed, sir?" returned the trooper in his off-hand manner. "I
am not acquainted with those shades of names myself, but in a general
way I object to the breed."

Unfolding his arms and changing his position, he stood with one
massive hand upon the table and the other on his hip, as complete a
picture of a man who was not to be moved from a fixed purpose as ever
I saw. It was in vain that we all three talked to him and endeavoured
to persuade him; he listened with that gentleness which went so well
with his bluff bearing, but was evidently no more shaken by our
representations that his place of confinement was.

"Pray think, once more, Mr. George," said I. "Have you no wish in
reference to your case?"

"I certainly could wish it to be tried, miss," he returned, "by
court-martial; but that is out of the question, as I am well aware.
If you will be so good as to favour me with your attention for a
couple of minutes, miss, not more, I'll endeavour to explain myself
as clearly as I can."

He looked at us all three in turn, shook his head a little as if he
were adjusting it in the stock and collar of a tight uniform, and
after a moment's reflection went on.

"You see, miss, I have been handcuffed and taken into custody and
brought here. I am a marked and disgraced man, and here I am. My
shooting gallery is rummaged, high and low, by Bucket; such property
as I have--'tis small--is turned this way and that till it don't know
itself; and (as aforesaid) here I am! I don't particular complain of
that. Though I am in these present quarters through no immediately
preceding fault of mine, I can very well understand that if I hadn't
gone into the vagabond way in my youth, this wouldn't have happened.
It HAS happened. Then comes the question how to meet it."

He rubbed his swarthy forehead for a moment with a good-humoured look
and said apologetically, "I am such a short-winded talker that I must
think a bit." Having thought a bit, he looked up again and resumed.

"How to meet it. Now, the unfortunate deceased was himself a lawyer
and had a pretty tight hold of me. I don't wish to rake up his ashes,
but he had, what I should call if he was living, a devil of a tight
hold of me. I don't like his trade the better for that. If I had kept
clear of his trade, I should have kept outside this place. But that's
not what I mean. Now, suppose I had killed him. Suppose I really had
discharged into his body any one of those pistols recently fired off
that Bucket has found at my place, and dear me, might have found
there any day since it has been my place. What should I have done as
soon as I was hard and fast here? Got a lawyer."

He stopped on hearing some one at the locks and bolts and did not
resume until the door had been opened and was shut again. For what
purpose opened, I will mention presently.

"I should have got a lawyer, and he would have said (as I have often
read in the newspapers), 'My client says nothing, my client reserves
his defence': my client this, that, and t'other. Well, 'tis not the
custom of that breed to go straight, according to my opinion, or to
think that other men do. Say I am innocent and I get a lawyer. He
would be as likely to believe me guilty as not; perhaps more. What
would he do, whether or not? Act as if I was--shut my mouth up, tell
me not to commit myself, keep circumstances back, chop the evidence
small, quibble, and get me off perhaps! But, Miss Summerson, do I
care for getting off in that way; or would I rather be hanged in my
own way--if you'll excuse my mentioning anything so disagreeable to a
lady?"

He had warmed into his subject now, and was under no further
necessity to wait a bit.

"I would rather be hanged in my own way. And I mean to be! I don't
intend to say," looking round upon us with his powerful arms akimbo
and his dark eyebrows raised, "that I am more partial to being hanged
than another man. What I say is, I must come off clear and full or
not at all. Therefore, when I hear stated against me what is true, I
say it's true; and when they tell me, 'whatever you say will be
used,' I tell them I don't mind that; I mean it to be used. If they
can't make me innocent out of the whole truth, they are not likely to
do it out of anything less, or anything else. And if they are, it's
worth nothing to me."

Taking a pace or two over the stone floor, he came back to the table
and finished what he had to say.

"I thank you, miss and gentlemen both, many times for your attention,
and many times more for your interest. That's the plain state of the
matter as it points itself out to a mere trooper with a blunt
broadsword kind of a mind. I have never done well in life beyond my
duty as a soldier, and if the worst comes after all, I shall reap
pretty much as I have sown. When I got over the first crash of being
seized as a murderer--it don't take a rover who has knocked about so
much as myself so very long to recover from a crash--I worked my way
round to what you find me now. As such I shall remain. No relations
will be disgraced by me or made unhappy for me, and--and that's all
I've got to say."

The door had been opened to admit another soldier-looking man of less
prepossessing appearance at first sight and a weather-tanned,
bright-eyed wholesome woman with a basket, who, from her entrance,
had been exceedingly attentive to all Mr. George had said. Mr. George
had received them with a familiar nod and a friendly look, but
without any more particular greeting in the midst of his address. He
now shook them cordially by the hand and said, "Miss Summerson and
gentlemen, this is an old comrade of mine, Matthew Bagnet. And this
is his wife, Mrs. Bagnet."

Mr. Bagnet made us a stiff military bow, and Mrs. Bagnet dropped us a
curtsy.

"Real good friends of mine, they are," sald Mr. George. "It was at
their house I was taken."

"With a second-hand wiolinceller," Mr. Bagnet put in, twitching his
head angrily. "Of a good tone. For a friend. That money was no object
to."

"Mat," said Mr. George, "you have heard pretty well all I have been
saying to this lady and these two gentlemen. I know it meets your
approval?"

Mr. Bagnet, after considering, referred the point to his wife. "Old
girl," said he. "Tell him. Whether or not. It meets my approval."

"Why, George," exclaimed Mrs. Bagnet, who had been unpacking her
basket, in which there was a piece of cold pickled pork, a little tea
and sugar, and a brown loaf, "you ought to know it don't. You ought
to know it's enough to drive a person wild to hear you. You won't be
got off this way, and you won't be got off that way--what do you mean
by such picking and choosing? It's stuff and nonsense, George."

"Don't be severe upon me in my misfortunes, Mrs. Bagnet," said the
trooper lightly.

"Oh! Bother your misfortunes," cried Mrs. Bagnet, "if they don't make
you more reasonable than that comes to. I never was so ashamed in my
life to hear a man talk folly as I have been to hear you talk this
day to the present company. Lawyers? Why, what but too many cooks
should hinder you from having a dozen lawyers if the gentleman
recommended them to you."

"This is a very sensible woman," said my guardian. "I hope you will
persuade him, Mrs. Bagnet."

"Persuade him, sir?" she returned. "Lord bless you, no. You don't
know George. Now, there!" Mrs. Bagnet left her basket to point him
out with both her bare brown hands. "There he stands! As self-willed
and as determined a man, in the wrong way, as ever put a human
creature under heaven out of patience! You could as soon take up and
shoulder an eight and forty pounder by your own strength as turn that
man when he has got a thing into his head and fixed it there. Why,
don't I know him!" cried Mrs. Bagnet. "Don't I know you, George! You
don't mean to set up for a new character with ME after all these
years, I hope?"

Her friendly indignation had an exemplary effect upon her husband,
who shook his head at the trooper several times as a silent
recommendation to him to yield. Between whiles, Mrs. Bagnet looked at
me; and I understood from the play of her eyes that she wished me to
do something, though I did not comprehend what.

"But I have given up talking to you, old fellow, years and years,"
said Mrs. Bagnet as she blew a little dust off the pickled pork,
looking at me again; "and when ladies and gentlemen know you as well
as I do, they'll give up talking to you too. If you are not too
headstrong to accept of a bit of dinner, here it is."

"I accept it with many thanks," returned the trooper.

"Do you though, indeed?" said Mrs. Bagnet, continuing to grumble on
good-humouredly. "I'm sure I'm surprised at that. I wonder you don't
starve in your own way also. It would only be like you. Perhaps
you'll set your mind upon THAT next." Here she again looked at me,
and I now perceived from her glances at the door and at me, by turns,
that she wished us to retire and to await her following us outside
the prison. Communicating this by similar means to my guardian and
Mr. Woodcourt, I rose.

"We hope you will think better of it, Mr. George," said I, "and we
shall come to see you again, trusting to find you more reasonable."

"More grateful, Miss Summerson, you can't find me," he returned.

"But more persuadable we can, I hope," said I. "And let me entreat
you to consider that the clearing up of this mystery and the
discovery of the real perpetrator of this deed may be of the last
importance to others besides yourself."

He heard me respectfully but without much heeding these words, which
I spoke a little turned from him, already on my way to the door; he
was observing (this they afterwards told me) my height and figure,
which seemed to catch his attention all at once.

"'Tis curious," said he. "And yet I thought so at the time!"

My guardian asked him what he meant.

"Why, sir," he answered, "when my ill fortune took me to the dead
man's staircase on the night of his murder, I saw a shape so like
Miss Summerson's go by me in the dark that I had half a mind to speak
to it."

For an instant I felt such a shudder as I never felt before or since
and hope I shall never feel again.

"It came downstairs as I went up," said the trooper, "and crossed the
moonlighted window with a loose black mantle on; I noticed a deep
fringe to it. However, it has nothing to do with the present subject,
excepting that Miss Summerson looked so like it at the moment that it
came into my head."

I cannot separate and define the feelings that arose in me after
this; it is enough that the vague duty and obligation I had felt upon
me from the first of following the investigation was, without my
distinctly daring to ask myself any question, increased, and that I
was indignantly sure of there being no possibility of a reason for my
being afraid.

We three went out of the prison and walked up and down at some short
distance from the gate, which was in a retired place. We had not
waited long when Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet came out too and quickly joined
us.

There was a tear in each of Mrs. Bagnet's eyes, and her face was
flushed and hurried. "I didn't let George see what I thought about
it, you know, miss," was her first remark when she came up, "but he's
in a bad way, poor old fellow!"

"Not with care and prudence and good help," said my guardian.

"A gentleman like you ought to know best, sir," returned Mrs. Bagnet,
hurriedly drying her eyes on the hem of her grey cloak, "but I am
uneasy for him. He has been so careless and said so much that he
never meant. The gentlemen of the juries might not understand him as
Lignum and me do. And then such a number of circumstances have
happened bad for him, and such a number of people will be brought
forward to speak against him, and Bucket is so deep."

"With a second-hand wiolinceller. And said he played the fife. When a
boy," Mr. Bagnet added with great solemnity.

"Now, I tell you, miss," said Mrs. Bagnet; "and when I say miss, I
mean all! Just come into the corner of the wall and I'll tell you!"

Mrs. Bagnet hurried us into a more secluded place and was at first
too breathless to proceed, occasioning Mr. Bagnet to say, "Old girl!
Tell 'em!"

"Why, then, miss," the old girl proceeded, untying the strings of her
bonnet for more air, "you could as soon move Dover Castle as move
George on this point unless you had got a new power to move him with.
And I have got it!"

"You are a jewel of a woman," said my guardian. "Go on!"

"Now, I tell you, miss," she proceeded, clapping her hands in her
hurry and agitation a dozen times in every sentence, "that what he
says concerning no relations is all bosh. They don't know of him, but
he does know of them. He has said more to me at odd times than to
anybody else, and it warn't for nothing that he once spoke to my
Woolwich about whitening and wrinkling mothers' heads. For fifty
pounds he had seen his mother that day. She's alive and must be
brought here straight!"

Instantly Mrs. Bagnet put some pins into her mouth and began pinning
up her skirts all round a little higher than the level of her grey
cloak, which she accomplished with surpassing dispatch and dexterity.

"Lignum," said Mrs. Bagnet, "you take care of the children, old man,
and give me the umbrella! I'm away to Lincolnshire to bring that old
lady here."

"But, bless the woman," cried my guardian with his hand in his
pocket, "how is she going? What money has she got?"

Mrs. Bagnet made another application to her skirts and brought forth
a leathern purse in which she hastily counted over a few shillings
and which she then shut up with perfect satisfaction.

"Never you mind for me, miss. I'm a soldier's wife and accustomed to
travel my own way. Lignum, old boy," kissing him, "one for yourself,
three for the children. Now I'm away into Lincolnshire after George's
mother!"

And she actually set off while we three stood looking at one another
lost in amazement. She actually trudged away in her grey cloak at a
sturdy pace, and turned the corner, and was gone.

"Mr. Bagnet," said my guardian. "Do you mean to let her go in that
way?"

"Can't help it," he returned. "Made her way home once from another
quarter of the world. With the same grey cloak. And same umbrella.
Whatever the old girl says, do. Do it! Whenever the old girl says,
I'LL do it. She does it."

"Then she is as honest and genuine as she looks," rejoined my
guardian, "and it is impossible to say more for her."

"She's Colour-Sergeant of the Nonpareil battalion," said Mr. Bagnet,
looking at us over his shoulder as he went his way also. "And there's
not such another. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must
be maintained."




CHAPTER LIII

The Track


Mr. Bucket and his fat forefinger are much in consultation together
under existing circumstances. When Mr. Bucket has a matter of this
pressing interest under his consideration, the fat forefinger seems
to rise, to the dignity of a familiar demon. He puts it to his ears,
and it whispers information; he puts it to his lips, and it enjoins
him to secrecy; he rubs it over his nose, and it sharpens his scent;
he shakes it before a guilty man, and it charms him to his
destruction. The Augurs of the Detective Temple invariably predict
that when Mr. Bucket and that finger are in much conference, a
terrible avenger will be heard of before long.

Otherwise mildly studious in his observation of human nature, on the
whole a benignant philosopher not disposed to be severe upon the
follies of mankind, Mr. Bucket pervades a vast number of houses and
strolls about an infinity of streets, to outward appearance rather
languishing for want of an object. He is in the friendliest condition
towards his species and will drink with most of them. He is free with
his money, affable in his manners, innocent in his conversation--but
through the placid stream of his life there glides an under-current
of forefinger.

Time and place cannot bind Mr. Bucket. Like man in the abstract, he
is here to-day and gone to-morrow--but, very unlike man indeed, he is
here again the next day. This evening he will be casually looking
into the iron extinguishers at the door of Sir Leicester Dedlock's
house in town; and to-morrow morning he will be walking on the leads
at Chesney Wold, where erst the old man walked whose ghost is
propitiated with a hundred guineas. Drawers, desks, pockets, all
things belonging to him, Mr. Bucket examines. A few hours afterwards,
he and the Roman will be alone together comparing forefingers.

It is likely that these occupations are irreconcilable with home
enjoyment, but it is certain that Mr. Bucket at present does not go
home. Though in general he highly appreciates the society of Mrs.
Bucket--a lady of a natural detective genius, which if it had been
improved by professional exercise, might have done great things, but
which has paused at the level of a clever amateur--he holds himself
aloof from that dear solace. Mrs. Bucket is dependent on their lodger
(fortunately an amiable lady in whom she takes an interest) for
companionship and conversation.

A great crowd assembles in Lincoln's Inn Fields on the day of the
funeral. Sir Leicester Dedlock attends the ceremony in person;
strictly speaking, there are only three other human followers, that
is to say, Lord Doodle, William Buffy, and the debilitated cousin
(thrown in as a make-weight), but the amount of inconsolable
carriages is immense. The peerage contributes more four-wheeled
affliction than has ever been seen in that neighbourhood. Such is the
assemblage of armorial bearings on coach panels that the Herald's
College might be supposed to have lost its father and mother at a
blow. The Duke of Foodle sends a splendid pile of dust and ashes,
with silver wheel-boxes, patent axles, all the last improvements, and
three bereaved worms, six feet high, holding on behind, in a bunch of
woe. All the state coachmen in London seem plunged into mourning; and
if that dead old man of the rusty garb be not beyond a taste in
horseflesh (which appears impossible), it must be highly gratified
this day.

Quiet among the undertakers and the equipages and the calves of so
many legs all steeped in grief, Mr. Bucket sits concealed in one of
the inconsolable carriages and at his ease surveys the crowd through
the lattice blinds. He has a keen eye for a crowd--as for what
not?--and looking here and there, now from this side of the carriage,
now from the other, now up at the house windows, now along the
people's heads, nothing escapes him.

"And there you are, my partner, eh?" says Mr. Bucket to himself,
apostrophizing Mrs. Bucket, stationed, by his favour, on the steps of
the deceased's house. "And so you are. And so you are! And very well
indeed you are looking, Mrs. Bucket!"

The procession has not started yet, but is waiting for the cause of
its assemblage to be brought out. Mr. Bucket, in the foremost
emblazoned carriage, uses his two fat forefingers to hold the lattice
a hair's breadth open while he looks.

And it says a great deal for his attachment, as a husband, that he is
still occupied with Mrs. B. "There you are, my partner, eh?" he
murmuringly repeats. "And our lodger with you. I'm taking notice of
you, Mrs. Bucket; I hope you're all right in your health, my dear!"

Not another word does Mr. Bucket say, but sits with most attentive
eyes until the sacked depository of noble secrets is brought
down--Where are all those secrets now? Does he keep them yet? Did
they fly with him on that sudden journey?--and until the procession
moves, and Mr. Bucket's view is changed. After which he composes
himself for an easy ride and takes note of the fittings of the
carriage in case he should ever find such knowledge useful.

Contrast enough between Mr. Tulkinghorn shut up in his dark carriage
and Mr. Bucket shut up in HIS. Between the immeasurable track of
space beyond the little wound that has thrown the one into the fixed
sleep which jolts so heavily over the stones of the streets, and the
narrow track of blood which keeps the other in the watchful state
expressed in every hair of his head! But it is all one to both;
neither is troubled about that.

Mr. Bucket sits out the procession in his own easy manner and glides
from the carriage when the opportunity he has settled with himself
arrives. He makes for Sir Leicester Dedlock's, which is at present a
sort of home to him, where he comes and goes as he likes at all
hours, where he is always welcome and made much of, where he knows
the whole establishment, and walks in an atmosphere of mysterious
greatness.

No knocking or ringing for Mr. Bucket. He has caused himself to be
provided with a key and can pass in at his pleasure. As he is
crossing the hall, Mercury informs him, "Here's another letter for
you, Mr. Bucket, come by post," and gives it him.

"Another one, eh?" says Mr. Bucket.

If Mercury should chance to be possessed by any lingering curiosity
as to Mr. Bucket's letters, that wary person is not the man to
gratify it. Mr. Bucket looks at him as if his face were a vista of
some miles in length and he were leisurely contemplating the same.

"Do you happen to carry a box?" says Mr. Bucket.

Unfortunately Mercury is no snuff-taker.

"Could you fetch me a pinch from anywheres?" says Mr. Bucket.
"Thankee. It don't matter what it is; I'm not particular as to the
kind. Thankee!"

Having leisurely helped himself from a canister borrowed from
somebody downstairs for the purpose, and having made a considerable
show of tasting it, first with one side of his nose and then with the
other, Mr. Bucket, with much deliberation, pronounces it of the right
sort and goes on, letter in hand.

Now although Mr. Bucket walks upstairs to the little library within
the larger one with the face of a man who receives some scores of
letters every day, it happens that much correspondence is not
incidental to his life. He is no great scribe, rather handling his
pen like the pocket-staff he carries about with him always convenient
to his grasp, and discourages correspondence with himself in others
as being too artless and direct a way of doing delicate business.
Further, he often sees damaging letters produced in evidence and has
occasion to reflect that it was a green thing to write them. For
these reasons he has very little to do with letters, either as sender
or receiver. And yet he has received a round half-dozen within the
last twenty-four hours.

"And this," says Mr. Bucket, spreading it out on the table, "is in
the same hand, and consists of the same two words."

What two words?

He turns the key in the door, ungirdles his black pocket-book (book
of fate to many), lays another letter by it, and reads, boldly
written in each, "Lady Dedlock."

"Yes, yes," says Mr. Bucket. "But I could have made the money without
this anonymous information."

Having put the letters in his book of fate and girdled it up again,
he unlocks the door just in time to admit his dinner, which is
brought upon a goodly tray with a decanter of sherry. Mr. Bucket
frequently observes, in friendly circles where there is no restraint,
that he likes a toothful of your fine old brown East Inder sherry
better than anything you can offer him. Consequently he fills and
empties his glass with a smack of his lips and is proceeding with his
refreshment when an idea enters his mind.

Mr. Bucket softly opens the door of communication between that room
and the next and looks in. The library is deserted, and the fire is
sinking low. Mr. Bucket's eye, after taking a pigeon-flight round the
room, alights upon a table where letters are usually put as they
arrive. Several letters for Sir Leicester are upon it. Mr. Bucket
draws near and examines the directions. "No," he says, "there's none
in that hand. It's only me as is written to. I can break it to Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to-morrow."

With that he returns to finish his dinner with a good appetite, and
after a light nap, is summoned into the drawing-room. Sir Leicester
has received him there these several evenings past to know whether he
has anything to report. The debilitated cousin (much exhausted by the
funeral) and Volumnia are in attendance.

Mr. Bucket makes three distinctly different bows to these three
people. A bow of homage to Sir Leicester, a bow of gallantry to
Volumnia, and a bow of recognition to the debilitated Cousin, to whom
it airily says, "You are a swell about town, and you know me, and I
know you." Having distributed these little specimens of his tact, Mr.
Bucket rubs his hands.

"Have you anything new to communicate, officer?" inquires Sir
Leicester. "Do you wish to hold any conversation with me in private?"

"Why--not to-night, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet."

"Because my time," pursues Sir Leicester, "is wholly at your disposal
with a view to the vindication of the outraged majesty of the law."

Mr. Bucket coughs and glances at Volumnia, rouged and necklaced, as
though he would respectfully observe, "I do assure you, you're a
pretty creetur. I've seen hundreds worse looking at your time of
life, I have indeed."

The fair Volumnia, not quite unconscious perhaps of the humanizing
influence of her charms, pauses in the writing of cocked-hat notes
and meditatively adjusts the pearl necklace. Mr. Bucket prices that
decoration in his mind and thinks it as likely as not that Volumnia
is writing poetry.

"If I have not," pursues Sir Leicester, "in the most emphatic manner,
adjured you, officer, to exercise your utmost skill in this atrocious
case, I particularly desire to take the present opportunity of
rectifying any omission I may have made. Let no expense be a
consideration. I am prepared to defray all charges. You can incur
none in pursuit of the object you have undertaken that I shall
hesitate for a moment to bear."

Mr. Bucket made Sir Leicester's bow again as a response to this
liberality.

"My mind," Sir Leicester adds with a generous warmth, "has not, as
may be easily supposed, recovered its tone since the late diabolical
occurrence. It is not likely ever to recover its tone. But it is full
of indignation to-night after undergoing the ordeal of consigning to
the tomb the remains of a faithful, a zealous, a devoted adherent."

Sir Leicester's voice trembles and his grey hair stirs upon his head.
Tears are in his eyes; the best part of his nature is aroused.

"I declare," he says, "I solemnly declare that until this crime is
discovered and, in the course of justice, punished, I almost feel as
if there were a stain upon my name. A gentleman who has devoted a
large portion of his life to me, a gentleman who has devoted the last
day of his life to me, a gentleman who has constantly sat at my table
and slept under my roof, goes from my house to his own, and is struck
down within an hour of his leaving my house. I cannot say but that he
may have been followed from my house, watched at my house, even first
marked because of his association with my house--which may have
suggested his possessing greater wealth and being altogether of
greater importance than his own retiring demeanour would have
indicated. If I cannot with my means and influence and my position
bring all the perpetrators of such a crime to light, I fail in the
assertion of my respect for that gentleman's memory and of my
fidelity towards one who was ever faithful to me."

While he makes this protestation with great emotion and earnestness,
looking round the room as if he were addressing an assembly, Mr.
Bucket glances at him with an observant gravity in which there might
be, but for the audacity of the thought, a touch of compassion.

"The ceremony of to-day," continues Sir Leicester, "strikingly
illustrative of the respect in which my deceased friend"--he lays a
stress upon the word, for death levels all distinctions--"was held by
the flower of the land, has, I say, aggravated the shock I have
received from this most horrible and audacious crime. If it were my
brother who had committed it, I would not spare him."

Mr. Bucket looks very grave. Volumnia remarks of the deceased that he
was the trustiest and dearest person!

"You must feel it as a deprivation to you, miss," replies Mr. Bucket
soothingly, "no doubt. He was calculated to BE a deprivation, I'm
sure he was."

Volumnia gives Mr. Bucket to understand, in reply, that her sensitive
mind is fully made up never to get the better of it as long as she
lives, that her nerves are unstrung for ever, and that she has not
the least expectation of ever smiling again. Meanwhile she folds up a
cocked hat for that redoubtable old general at Bath, descriptive of
her melancholy condition.

"It gives a start to a delicate female," says Mr. Bucket
sympathetically, "but it'll wear off."

Volumnia wishes of all things to know what is doing? Whether they are
going to convict, or whatever it is, that dreadful soldier? Whether
he had any accomplices, or whatever the thing is called in the law?
And a great deal more to the like artless purpose.

"Why you see, miss," returns Mr. Bucket, bringing the finger into
persuasive action--and such is his natural gallantry that he had
almost said "my dear"--"it ain't easy to answer those questions at
the present moment. Not at the present moment. I've kept myself on
this case, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," whom Mr. Bucket takes
into the conversation in right of his importance, "morning, noon, and
night. But for a glass or two of sherry, I don't think I could have
had my mind so much upon the stretch as it has been. I COULD answer
your questions, miss, but duty forbids it. Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, will very soon be made acquainted with all that has been
traced. And I hope that he may find it"--Mr. Bucket again looks
grave--"to his satisfaction."

The debilitated cousin only hopes some fler'll be executed--zample.
Thinks more interest's wanted--get man hanged presentime--than get
man place ten thousand a year. Hasn't a doubt--zample--far better
hang wrong fler than no fler.

"YOU know life, you know, sir," says Mr. Bucket with a complimentary
twinkle of his eye and crook of his finger, "and you can confirm what
I've mentioned to this lady. YOU don't want to be told that from
information I have received I have gone to work. You're up to what a
lady can't be expected to be up to. Lord! Especially in your elevated
station of society, miss," says Mr. Bucket, quite reddening at
another narrow escape from "my dear."

"The officer, Volumnia," observes Sir Leicester, "is faithful to his
duty, and perfectly right."

Mr. Bucket murmurs, "Glad to have the honour of your approbation, Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet."

"In fact, Volumnia," proceeds Sir Leicester, "it is not holding up a
good model for imitation to ask the officer any such questions as you
have put to him. He is the best judge of his own responsibility; he
acts upon his responsibility. And it does not become us, who assist
in making the laws, to impede or interfere with those who carry them
into execution. Or," says Sir Leicester somewhat sternly, for
Volumnia was going to cut in before he had rounded his sentence, "or
who vindicate their outraged majesty."

Volumnia with all humility explains that she had not merely the plea
of curiosity to urge (in common with the giddy youth of her sex in
general) but that she is perfectly dying with regret and interest for
the darling man whose loss they all deplore.

"Very well, Volumnia," returns Sir Leicester. "Then you cannot be too
discreet."

Mr. Bucket takes the opportunity of a pause to be heard again.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I have no objections to telling this
lady, with your leave and among ourselves, that I look upon the case
as pretty well complete. It is a beautiful case--a beautiful
case--and what little is wanting to complete it, I expect to be able
to supply in a few hours."

"I am very glad indeed to hear it," says Sir Leicester. "Highly
creditable to you."

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," returns Mr. Bucket very seriously,
"I hope it may at one and the same time do me credit and prove
satisfactory to all. When I depict it as a beautiful case, you see,
miss," Mr. Bucket goes on, glancing gravely at Sir Leicester, "I mean
from my point of view. As considered from other points of view, such
cases will always involve more or less unpleasantness. Very strange
things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart,
what you would think to be phenomenons, quite."

Volumnia, with her innocent little scream, supposes so.

"Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great
families," says Mr. Bucket, again gravely eyeing Sir Leicester aside.
"I have had the honour of being employed in high families before, and
you have no idea--come, I'll go so far as to say not even YOU have
any idea, sir," this to the debilitated cousin, "what games goes on!"

The cousin, who has been casting sofa-pillows on his head, in a
prostration of boredom yawns, "Vayli," being the used-up for "very
likely."

Sir Leicester, deeming it time to dismiss the officer, here
majestically interposes with the words, "Very good. Thank you!" and
also with a wave of his hand, implying not only that there is an end
of the discourse, but that if high families fall into low habits they
must take the consequences. "You will not forget, officer," he adds
with condescension, "that I am at your disposal when you please."

Mr. Bucket (still grave) inquires if to-morrow morning, now, would
suit, in case he should be as for'ard as he expects to be. Sir
Leicester replies, "All times are alike to me." Mr. Bucket makes his
three bows and is withdrawing when a forgotten point occurs to him.

"Might I ask, by the by," he says in a low voice, cautiously
returning, "who posted the reward-bill on the staircase."

"I ordered it to be put up there," replies Sir Leicester.

"Would it be considered a liberty, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, if
I was to ask you why?"

"Not at all. I chose it as a conspicuous part of the house. I think
it cannot be too prominently kept before the whole establishment. I
wish my people to be impressed with the enormity of the crime, the
determination to punish it, and the hopelessness of escape. At the
same time, officer, if you in your better knowledge of the subject
see any objection--"

Mr. Bucket sees none now; the bill having been put up, had better not
be taken down. Repeating his three bows he withdraws, closing the
door on Volumnia's little scream, which is a preliminary to her
remarking that that charmingly horrible person is a perfect Blue
Chamber.

In his fondness for society and his adaptability to all grades, Mr.
Bucket is presently standing before the hall-fire--bright and warm on
the early winter night--admiring Mercury.

"Why, you're six foot two, I suppose?" says Mr. Bucket.

"Three," says Mercury.

"Are you so much? But then, you see, you're broad in proportion and
don't look it. You're not one of the weak-legged ones, you ain't. Was
you ever modelled now?" Mr. Bucket asks, conveying the expression of
an artist into the turn of his eye and head.

Mercury never was modelled.

"Then you ought to be, you know," says Mr. Bucket; "and a friend of
mine that you'll hear of one day as a Royal Academy sculptor would
stand something handsome to make a drawing of your proportions for
the marble. My Lady's out, ain't she?"

"Out to dinner."

"Goes out pretty well every day, don't she?"

"Yes."

"Not to be wondered at!" says Mr. Bucket. "Such a fine woman as her,
so handsome and so graceful and so elegant, is like a fresh lemon on
a dinner-table, ornamental wherever she goes. Was your father in the
same way of life as yourself?"

Answer in the negative.

"Mine was," says Mr. Bucket. "My father was first a page, then a
footman, then a butler, then a steward, then an inn-keeper. Lived
universally respected, and died lamented. Said with his last breath
that he considered service the most honourable part of his career,
and so it was. I've a brother in service, AND a brother-in-law. My
Lady a good temper?"

Mercury replies, "As good as you can expect."

"Ah!" says Mr. Bucket. "A little spoilt? A little capricious? Lord!
What can you anticipate when they're so handsome as that? And we like
'em all the better for it, don't we?"

Mercury, with his hands in the pockets of his bright peach-blossom
small-clothes, stretches his symmetrical silk legs with the air of a
man of gallantry and can't deny it. Come the roll of wheels and a
violent ringing at the bell. "Talk of the angels," says Mr. Bucket.
"Here she is!"

The doors are thrown open, and she passes through the hall. Still
very pale, she is dressed in slight mourning and wears two beautiful
bracelets. Either their beauty or the beauty of her arms is
particularly attractive to Mr. Bucket. He looks at them with an eager
eye and rattles something in his pocket--halfpence perhaps.

Noticing him at his distance, she turns an inquiring look on the
other Mercury who has brought her home.

"Mr. Bucket, my Lady."

Mr. Bucket makes a leg and comes forward, passing his familiar demon
over the region of his mouth.

"Are you waiting to see Sir Leicester?"

"No, my Lady, I've seen him!"

"Have you anything to say to me?"

"Not just at present, my Lady."

"Have you made any new discoveries?"

"A few, my Lady."

This is merely in passing. She scarcely makes a stop, and sweeps
upstairs alone. Mr. Bucket, moving towards the staircase-foot,
watches her as she goes up the steps the old man came down to his
grave, past murderous groups of statuary repeated with their shadowy
weapons on the wall, past the printed bill, which she looks at going
by, out of view.

"She's a lovely woman, too, she really is," says Mr. Bucket, coming
back to Mercury. "Don't look quite healthy though."

Is not quite healthy, Mercury informs him. Suffers much from
headaches.

Really? That's a pity! Walking, Mr. Bucket would recommend for that.
Well, she tries walking, Mercury rejoins. Walks sometimes for two
hours when she has them bad. By night, too.

"Are you sure you're quite so much as six foot three?" asks Mr.
Bucket. "Begging your pardon for interrupting you a moment?"

Not a doubt about it.

"You're so well put together that I shouldn't have thought it. But
the household troops, though considered fine men, are built so
straggling. Walks by night, does she? When it's moonlight, though?"

Oh, yes. When it's moonlight! Of course. Oh, of course!
Conversational and acquiescent on both sides.

"I suppose you ain't in the habit of walking yourself?" says Mr.
Bucket. "Not much time for it, I should say?"

Besides which, Mercury don't like it. Prefers carriage exercise.

"To be sure," says Mr. Bucket. "That makes a difference. Now I think
of it," says Mr. Bucket, warming his hands and looking pleasantly at
the blaze, "she went out walking the very night of this business."

"To be sure she did! I let her into the garden over the way."

"And left her there. Certainly you did. I saw you doing it."

"I didn't see YOU," says Mercury.

"I was rather in a hurry," returns Mr. Bucket, "for I was going to
visit a aunt of mine that lives at Chelsea--next door but two to the
old original Bun House--ninety year old the old lady is, a single
woman, and got a little property. Yes, I chanced to be passing at the
time. Let's see. What time might it be? It wasn't ten."

"Half-past nine."

"You're right. So it was. And if I don't deceive myself, my Lady was
muffled in a loose black mantle, with a deep fringe to it?"

"Of course she was."

Of course she was. Mr. Bucket must return to a little work he has to
get on with upstairs, but he must shake hands with Mercury in
acknowledgment of his agreeable conversation, and will he--this is
all he asks--will he, when he has a leisure half-hour, think of
bestowing it on that Royal Academy sculptor, for the advantage of
both parties?




CHAPTER LIV

Springing a Mine


Refreshed by sleep, Mr. Bucket rises betimes in the morning and
prepares for a field-day. Smartened up by the aid of a clean shirt
and a wet hairbrush, with which instrument, on occasions of ceremony,
he lubricates such thin locks as remain to him after his life of
severe study, Mr. Bucket lays in a breakfast of two mutton chops as a
foundation to work upon, together with tea, eggs, toast, and
marmalade on a corresponding scale. Having much enjoyed these
strengthening matters and having held subtle conference with his
familiar demon, he confidently instructs Mercury "just to mention
quietly to Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, that whenever he's ready
for me, I'm ready for him." A gracious message being returned that
Sir Leicester will expedite his dressing and join Mr. Bucket in the
library within ten minutes, Mr. Bucket repairs to that apartment and
stands before the fire with his finger on his chin, looking at the
blazing coals.

Thoughtful Mr. Bucket is, as a man may be with weighty work to do,
but composed, sure, confident. From the expression of his face he
might be a famous whist-player for a large stake--say a hundred
guineas certain--with the game in his hand, but with a high
reputation involved in his playing his hand out to the last card in a
masterly way. Not in the least anxious or disturbed is Mr. Bucket
when Sir Leicester appears, but he eyes the baronet aside as he comes
slowly to his easy-chair with that observant gravity of yesterday in
which there might have been yesterday, but for the audacity of the
idea, a touch of compassion.

"I am sorry to have kept you waiting, officer, but I am rather later
than my usual hour this morning. I am not well. The agitation and the
indignation from which I have recently suffered have been too much
for me. I am subject to--gout"--Sir Leicester was going to say
indisposition and would have said it to anybody else, but Mr. Bucket
palpably knows all about it--"and recent circumstances have brought
it on."

As he takes his seat with some difficulty and with an air of pain,
Mr. Bucket draws a little nearer, standing with one of his large
hands on the library-table.

"I am not aware, officer," Sir Leicester observes; raising his eyes
to his face, "whether you wish us to be alone, but that is entirely
as you please. If you do, well and good. If not, Miss Dedlock would
be interested--"

"Why, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," returns Mr. Bucket with his
head persuasively on one side and his forefinger pendant at one ear
like an earring, "we can't be too private just at present. You will
presently see that we can't be too private. A lady, under the
circumstances, and especially in Miss Dedlock's elevated station of
society, can't but be agreeable to me, but speaking without a view to
myself, I will take the liberty of assuring you that I know we can't
be too private."

"That is enough."

"So much so, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," Mr. Bucket resumes,
"that I was on the point of asking your permission to turn the key in
the door."

"By all means." Mr. Bucket skilfully and softly takes that
precaution, stooping on his knee for a moment from mere force of
habit so to adjust the key in the lock as that no one shall peep in
from the outerside.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I mentioned yesterday evening that I
wanted but a very little to complete this case. I have now completed
it and collected proof against the person who did this crime."

"Against the soldier?"

"No, Sir Leicester Dedlock; not the soldier."

Sir Leicester looks astounded and inquires, "Is the man in custody?"

Mr. Bucket tells him, after a pause, "It was a woman."

Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates,
"Good heaven!"

"Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," Mr. Bucket begins, standing
over him with one hand spread out on the library-table and the
forefinger of the other in impressive use, "it's my duty to prepare
you for a train of circumstances that may, and I go so far as to say
that will, give you a shock. But Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, you
are a gentleman, and I know what a gentleman is and what a gentleman
is capable of. A gentleman can bear a shock when it must come, boldly
and steadily. A gentleman can make up his mind to stand up against
almost any blow. Why, take yourself, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet.
If there's a blow to be inflicted on you, you naturally think of your
family. You ask yourself, how would all them ancestors of yours, away
to Julius Caesar--not to go beyond him at present--have borne that
blow; you remember scores of them that would have borne it well; and
you bear it well on their accounts, and to maintain the family
credit. That's the way you argue, and that's the way you act, Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet."

Sir Leicester, leaning back in his chair and grasping the elbows,
sits looking at him with a stony face.

"Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock," proceeds Mr. Bucket, "thus preparing
you, let me beg of you not to trouble your mind for a moment as to
anything having come to MY knowledge. I know so much about so many
characters, high and low, that a piece of information more or less
don't signify a straw. I don't suppose there's a move on the board
that would surprise ME, and as to this or that move having taken
place, why my knowing it is no odds at all, any possible move
whatever (provided it's in a wrong direction) being a probable move
according to my experience. Therefore, what I say to you, Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, is, don't you go and let yourself be put
out of the way because of my knowing anything of your family
affairs."

"I thank you for your preparation," returns Sir Leicester after a
silence, without moving hand, foot, or feature, "which I hope is not
necessary; though I give it credit for being well intended. Be so
good as to go on. Also"--Sir Leicester seems to shrink in the shadow
of his figure--"also, to take a seat, if you have no objection."

None at all. Mr. Bucket brings a chair and diminishes his shadow.
"Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, with this short preface I come
to the point. Lady Dedlock--"

Sir Leicester raises himself in his seat and stares at him fiercely.
Mr. Bucket brings the finger into play as an emollient.

"Lady Dedlock, you see she's universally admired. That's what her
ladyship is; she's universally admired," says Mr. Bucket.

"I would greatly prefer, officer," Sir Leicester returns stiffly, "my
Lady's name being entirely omitted from this discussion."

"So would I, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, but--it's impossible."

"Impossible?"

Mr. Bucket shakes his relentless head.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it's altogether impossible. What I
have got to say is about her ladyship. She is the pivot it all turns
on."

"Officer," retorts Sir Leicester with a fiery eye and a quivering
lip, "you know your duty. Do your duty, but be careful not to
overstep it. I would not suffer it. I would not endure it. You bring
my Lady's name into this communication upon your responsibility--upon
your responsibility. My Lady's name is not a name for common persons
to trifle with!"

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I say what I must say, and no more."

"I hope it may prove so. Very well. Go on. Go on, sir!" Glancing at
the angry eyes which now avoid him and at the angry figure trembling
from head to foot, yet striving to be still, Mr. Bucket feels his way
with his forefinger and in a low voice proceeds.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it becomes my duty to tell you that
the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn long entertained mistrusts and
suspicions of Lady Dedlock."

"If he had dared to breathe them to me, sir--which he never did--I
would have killed him myself!" exclaims Sir Leicester, striking his
hand upon the table. But in the very heat and fury of the act he
stops, fixed by the knowing eyes of Mr. Bucket, whose forefinger is
slowly going and who, with mingled confidence and patience, shakes
his head.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn was deep and
close, and what he fully had in his mind in the very beginning I
can't quite take upon myself to say. But I know from his lips that he
long ago suspected Lady Dedlock of having discovered, through the
sight of some handwriting--in this very house, and when you yourself,
Sir Leicester Dedlock, were present--the existence, in great poverty,
of a certain person who had been her lover before you courted her and
who ought to have been her husband." Mr. Bucket stops and
deliberately repeats, "Ought to have been her husband, not a doubt
about it. I know from his lips that when that person soon afterwards
died, he suspected Lady Dedlock of visiting his wretched lodging and
his wretched grave, alone and in secret. I know from my own inquiries
and through my eyes and ears that Lady Dedlock did make such visit in
the dress of her own maid, for the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn employed
me to reckon up her ladyship--if you'll excuse my making use of the
term we commonly employ--and I reckoned her up, so far, completely. I
confronted the maid in the chambers in Lincoln's Inn Fields with a
witness who had been Lady Dedlock's guide, and there couldn't be the
shadow of a doubt that she had worn the young woman's dress, unknown
to her. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I did endeavour to pave the
way a little towards these unpleasant disclosures yesterday by saying
that very strange things happened even in high families sometimes.
All this, and more, has happened in your own family, and to and
through your own Lady. It's my belief that the deceased Mr.
Tulkinghorn followed up these inquiries to the hour of his death and
that he and Lady Dedlock even had bad blood between them upon the
matter that very night. Now, only you put that to Lady Dedlock, Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and ask her ladyship whether, even after
he had left here, she didn't go down to his chambers with the
intention of saying something further to him, dressed in a loose
black mantle with a deep fringe to it."

Sir Leicester sits like a statue, gazing at the cruel finger that is
probing the life-blood of his heart.

"You put that to her ladyship, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, from
me, Inspector Bucket of the Detective. And if her ladyship makes any
difficulty about admitting of it, you tell her that it's no use, that
Inspector Bucket knows it and knows that she passed the soldier as
you called him (though he's not in the army now) and knows that she
knows she passed him on the staircase. Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, why do I relate all this?"

Sir Leicester, who has covered his face with his hands, uttering a
single groan, requests him to pause for a moment. By and by he takes
his hands away, and so preserves his dignity and outward calmness,
though there is no more colour in his face than in his white hair,
that Mr. Bucket is a little awed by him. Something frozen and fixed
is upon his manner, over and above its usual shell of haughtiness,
and Mr. Bucket soon detects an unusual slowness in his speech, with
now and then a curious trouble in beginning, which occasions him to
utter inarticulate sounds. With such sounds he now breaks silence,
soon, however, controlling himself to say that he does not comprehend
why a gentleman so faithful and zealous as the late Mr. Tulkinghorn
should have communicated to him nothing of this painful, this
distressing, this unlooked-for, this overwhelming, this incredible
intelligence.

"Again, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," returns Mr. Bucket, "put it
to her ladyship to clear that up. Put it to her ladyship, if you
think it right, from Inspector Bucket of the Detective. You'll find,
or I'm much mistaken, that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn had the
intention of communicating the whole to you as soon as he considered
it ripe, and further, that he had given her ladyship so to
understand. Why, he might have been going to reveal it the very
morning when I examined the body! You don't know what I'm going to
say and do five minutes from this present time, Sir Leicester
Dedlock, Baronet; and supposing I was to be picked off now, you might
wonder why I hadn't done it, don't you see?"

True. Sir Leicester, avoiding, with some trouble those obtrusive
sounds, says, "True." At this juncture a considerable noise of voices
is heard in the hall. Mr. Bucket, after listening, goes to the
library-door, softly unlocks and opens it, and listens again. Then he
draws in his head and whispers hurriedly but composedly, "Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, this unfortunate family affair has taken
air, as I expected it might, the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn being cut
down so sudden. The chance to hush it is to let in these people now
in a wrangle with your footmen. Would you mind sitting quiet--on the
family account--while I reckon 'em up? And would you just throw in a
nod when I seem to ask you for it?"

Sir Leicester indistinctly answers, "Officer. The best you can, the
best you can!" and Mr. Bucket, with a nod and a sagacious crook of
the forefinger, slips down into the hall, where the voices quickly
die away. He is not long in returning; a few paces ahead of Mercury
and a brother deity also powdered and in peach-blossomed smalls, who
bear between them a chair in which is an incapable old man. Another
man and two women come behind. Directing the pitching of the chair in
an affable and easy manner, Mr. Bucket dismisses the Mercuries and
locks the door again. Sir Leicester looks on at this invasion of the
sacred precincts with an icy stare.

"Now, perhaps you may know me, ladies and gentlemen," says Mr. Bucket
in a confidential voice. "I am Inspector Bucket of the Detective, I
am; and this," producing the tip of his convenient little staff from
his breast-pocket, "is my authority. Now, you wanted to see Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Well! You do see him, and mind you, it
ain't every one as is admitted to that honour. Your name, old
gentleman, is Smallweed; that's what your name is; I know it well."

"Well, and you never heard any harm of it!" cries Mr. Smallweed in a
shrill loud voice.

"You don't happen to know why they killed the pig, do you?" retorts
Mr. Bucket with a steadfast look, but without loss of temper.

"No!"

"Why, they killed him," says Mr. Bucket, "on account of his having so
much cheek. Don't YOU get into the same position, because it isn't
worthy of you. You ain't in the habit of conversing with a deaf
person, are you?"

"Yes," snarls Mr. Smallweed, "my wife's deaf."

"That accounts for your pitching your voice so high. But as she ain't
here; just pitch it an octave or two lower, will you, and I'll not
only be obliged to you, but it'll do you more credit," says Mr.
Bucket. "This other gentleman is in the preaching line, I think?"

"Name of Chadband," Mr. Smallweed puts in, speaking henceforth in a
much lower key.

"Once had a friend and brother serjeant of the same name," says Mr.
Bucket, offering his hand, "and consequently feel a liking for it.
Mrs. Chadband, no doubt?"

"And Mrs. Snagsby," Mr. Smallweed introduces.

"Husband a law-stationer and a friend of my own," says Mr. Bucket.
"Love him like a brother! Now, what's up?"

"Do you mean what business have we come upon?" Mr. Smallweed asks, a
little dashed by the suddenness of this turn.

"Ah! You know what I mean. Let us hear what it's all about in
presence of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Come."

Mr. Smallweed, beckoning Mr. Chadband, takes a moment's counsel with
him in a whisper. Mr. Chadband, expressing a considerable amount of
oil from the pores of his forehead and the palms of his hands, says
aloud, "Yes. You first!" and retires to his former place.

"I was the client and friend of Mr. Tulkinghorn," pipes Grandfather
Smallweed then; "I did business with him. I was useful to him, and he
was useful to me. Krook, dead and gone, was my brother-in-law. He was
own brother to a brimstone magpie--leastways Mrs. Smallweed. I come
into Krook's property. I examined all his papers and all his effects.
They was all dug out under my eyes. There was a bundle of letters
belonging to a dead and gone lodger as was hid away at the back of a
shelf in the side of Lady Jane's bed--his cat's bed. He hid all
manner of things away, everywheres. Mr. Tulkinghorn wanted 'em and
got 'em, but I looked 'em over first. I'm a man of business, and I
took a squint at 'em. They was letters from the lodger's sweetheart,
and she signed Honoria. Dear me, that's not a common name, Honoria,
is it? There's no lady in this house that signs Honoria is there? Oh,
no, I don't think so! Oh, no, I don't think so! And not in the same
hand, perhaps? Oh, no, I don't think so!"

Here Mr. Smallweed, seized with a fit of coughing in the midst of his
triumph, breaks off to ejaculate, "Oh, dear me! Oh, Lord! I'm shaken
all to pieces!"

"Now, when you're ready," says Mr. Bucket after awaiting his
recovery, "to come to anything that concerns Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, here the gentleman sits, you know."

"Haven't I come to it, Mr. Bucket?" cries Grandfather Smallweed.
"Isn't the gentleman concerned yet? Not with Captain Hawdon, and his
ever affectionate Honoria, and their child into the bargain? Come,
then, I want to know where those letters are. That concerns me, if it
don't concern Sir Leicester Dedlock. I will know where they are. I
won't have 'em disappear so quietly. I handed 'em over to my friend
and solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn, not to anybody else."

"Why, he paid you for them, you know, and handsome too," says Mr.
Bucket.

"I don't care for that. I want to know who's got 'em. And I tell you
what we want--what we all here want, Mr. Bucket. We want more
painstaking and search-making into this murder. We know where the
interest and the motive was, and you have not done enough. If George
the vagabond dragoon had any hand in it, he was only an accomplice,
and was set on. You know what I mean as well as any man."

"Now I tell you what," says Mr. Bucket, instantaneously altering his
manner, coming close to him, and communicating an extraordinary
fascination to the forefinger, "I am damned if I am a-going to have
my case spoilt, or interfered with, or anticipated by so much as half
a second of time by any human being in creation. YOU want more
painstaking and search-making! YOU do? Do you see this hand, and do
you think that I don't know the right time to stretch it out and put
it on the arm that fired that shot?"

Such is the dread power of the man, and so terribly evident it is
that he makes no idle boast, that Mr. Smallweed begins to apologize.
Mr. Bucket, dismissing his sudden anger, checks him.

"The advice I give you is, don't you trouble your head about the
murder. That's my affair. You keep half an eye on the newspapers, and
I shouldn't wonder if you was to read something about it before long,
if you look sharp. I know my business, and that's all I've got to say
to you on that subject. Now about those letters. You want to know
who's got 'em. I don't mind telling you. I have got 'em. Is that the
packet?"

Mr. Smallweed looks, with greedy eyes, at the little bundle Mr.
Bucket produces from a mysterious part of his coat, and identifies it
as the same.

"What have you got to say next?" asks Mr. Bucket. "Now, don't open
your mouth too wide, because you don't look handsome when you do it."

"I want five hundred pound."

"No, you don't; you mean fifty," says Mr. Bucket humorously.

It appears, however, that Mr. Smallweed means five hundred.

"That is, I am deputed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to consider
(without admitting or promising anything) this bit of business," says
Mr. Bucket--Sir Leicester mechanically bows his head--"and you ask me
to consider a proposal of five hundred pounds. Why, it's an
unreasonable proposal! Two fifty would be bad enough, but better than
that. Hadn't you better say two fifty?"

Mr. Smallweed is quite clear that he had better not.

"Then," says Mr. Bucket, "let's hear Mr. Chadband. Lord! Many a time
I've heard my old fellow-serjeant of that name; and a moderate man he
was in all respects, as ever I come across!"

Thus invited, Mr. Chadband steps forth, and after a little sleek
smiling and a little oil-grinding with the palms of his hands,
delivers himself as follows, "My friends, we are now--Rachael, my
wife, and I--in the mansions of the rich and great. Why are we now in
the mansions of the rich and great, my friends? Is it because we are
invited? Because we are bidden to feast with them, because we are
bidden to rejoice with them, because we are bidden to play the lute
with them, because we are bidden to dance with them? No. Then why are
we here, my friends? Air we in possession of a sinful secret, and do
we require corn, and wine, and oil, or what is much the same thing,
money, for the keeping thereof? Probably so, my friends."

"You're a man of business, you are," returns Mr. Bucket, very
attentive, "and consequently you're going on to mention what the
nature of your secret is. You are right. You couldn't do better."

"Let us then, my brother, in a spirit of love," says Mr. Chadband
with a cunning eye, "proceed unto it. Rachael, my wife, advance!"

Mrs. Chadband, more than ready, so advances as to jostle her husband
into the background and confronts Mr. Bucket with a hard, frowning
smile.

"Since you want to know what we know," says she, "I'll tell you. I
helped to bring up Miss Hawdon, her ladyship's daughter. I was in the
service of her ladyship's sister, who was very sensitive to the
disgrace her ladyship brought upon her, and gave out, even to her
ladyship, that the child was dead--she WAS very nearly so--when she
was born. But she's alive, and I know her." With these words, and a
laugh, and laying a bitter stress on the word "ladyship," Mrs.
Chadband folds her arms and looks implacably at Mr. Bucket.

"I suppose now," returns that officer, "YOU will be expecting a
twenty-pound note or a present of about that figure?"

Mrs. Chadband merely laughs and contemptuously tells him he can
"offer" twenty pence.

"My friend the law-stationer's good lady, over there," says Mr.
Bucket, luring Mrs. Snagsby forward with the finger. "What may YOUR
game be, ma'am?"

Mrs. Snagsby is at first prevented, by tears and lamentations, from
stating the nature of her game, but by degrees it confusedly comes to
light that she is a woman overwhelmed with injuries and wrongs, whom
Mr. Snagsby has habitually deceived, abandoned, and sought to keep in
darkness, and whose chief comfort, under her afflictions, has been
the sympathy of the late Mr. Tulkinghorn, who showed so much
commiseration for her on one occasion of his calling in Cook's Court
in the absence of her perjured husband that she has of late
habitually carried to him all her woes. Everybody it appears, the
present company excepted, has plotted against Mrs. Snagsby's peace.
There is Mr. Guppy, clerk to Kenge and Carboy, who was at first as
open as the sun at noon, but who suddenly shut up as close as
midnight, under the influence--no doubt--of Mr. Snagsby's suborning
and tampering. There is Mr. Weevle, friend of Mr. Guppy, who lived
mysteriously up a court, owing to the like coherent causes. There was
Krook, deceased; there was Nimrod, deceased; and there was Jo,
deceased; and they were "all in it." In what, Mrs. Snagsby does not
with particularity express, but she knows that Jo was Mr. Snagsby's
son, "as well as if a trumpet had spoken it," and she followed Mr.
Snagsby when he went on his last visit to the boy, and if he was not
his son why did he go? The one occupation of her life has been, for
some time back, to follow Mr. Snagsby to and fro, and up and down,
and to piece suspicious circumstances together--and every
circumstance that has happened has been most suspicious; and in this
way she has pursued her object of detecting and confounding her false
husband, night and day. Thus did it come to pass that she brought the
Chadbands and Mr. Tulkinghorn together, and conferred with Mr.
Tulkinghorn on the change in Mr. Guppy, and helped to turn up the
circumstances in which the present company are interested, casually,
by the wayside, being still and ever on the great high road that is
to terminate in Mr. Snagsby's full exposure and a matrimonial
separation. All this, Mrs. Snagsby, as an injured woman, and the
friend of Mrs. Chadband, and the follower of Mr. Chadband, and the
mourner of the late Mr. Tulkinghorn, is here to certify under the
seal of confidence, with every possible confusion and involvement
possible and impossible, having no pecuniary motive whatever, no
scheme or project but the one mentioned, and bringing here, and
taking everywhere, her own dense atmosphere of dust, arising from the
ceaseless working of her mill of jealousy.

While this exordium is in hand--and it takes some time--Mr. Bucket,
who has seen through the transparency of Mrs. Snagsby's vinegar at a
glance, confers with his familiar demon and bestows his shrewd
attention on the Chadbands and Mr. Smallweed. Sir Leicester Dedlock
remains immovable, with the same icy surface upon him, except that he
once or twice looks towards Mr. Bucket, as relying on that officer
alone of all mankind.

"Very good," says Mr. Bucket. "Now I understand you, you know, and
being deputed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to look into this
little matter," again Sir Leicester mechanically bows in confirmation
of the statement, "can give it my fair and full attention. Now I
won't allude to conspiring to extort money or anything of that sort,
because we are men and women of the world here, and our object is to
make things pleasant. But I tell you what I DO wonder at; I am
surprised that you should think of making a noise below in the hall.
It was so opposed to your interests. That's what I look at."

"We wanted to get in," pleads Mr. Smallweed.

"Why, of course you wanted to get in," Mr. Bucket asserts with
cheerfulness; "but for a old gentleman at your time of life--what I
call truly venerable, mind you!--with his wits sharpened, as I have
no doubt they are, by the loss of the use of his limbs, which
occasions all his animation to mount up into his head, not to
consider that if he don't keep such a business as the present as
close as possible it can't be worth a mag to him, is so curious! You
see your temper got the better of you; that's where you lost ground,"
says Mr. Bucket in an argumentative and friendly way.

"I only said I wouldn't go without one of the servants came up to Sir
Leicester Dedlock," returns Mr. Smallweed.

"That's it! That's where your temper got the better of you. Now, you
keep it under another time and you'll make money by it. Shall I ring
for them to carry you down?"

"When are we to hear more of this?" Mrs. Chadband sternly demands.

"Bless your heart for a true woman! Always curious, your delightful
sex is!" replies Mr. Bucket with gallantry. "I shall have the
pleasure of giving you a call to-morrow or next day--not forgetting
Mr. Smallweed and his proposal of two fifty."

"Five hundred!" exclaims Mr. Smallweed.

"All right! Nominally five hundred." Mr. Bucket has his hand on the
bell-rope. "SHALL I wish you good day for the present on the part of
myself and the gentleman of the house?" he asks in an insinuating
tone.

Nobody having the hardihood to object to his doing so, he does it,
and the party retire as they came up. Mr. Bucket follows them to the
door, and returning, says with an air of serious business, "Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it's for you to consider whether or not
to buy this up. I should recommend, on the whole, it's being bought
up myself; and I think it may be bought pretty cheap. You see, that
little pickled cowcumber of a Mrs. Snagsby has been used by all sides
of the speculation and has done a deal more harm in bringing odds and
ends together than if she had meant it. Mr. Tulkinghorn, deceased, he
held all these horses in his hand and could have drove 'em his own
way, I haven't a doubt; but he was fetched off the box head-foremost,
and now they have got their legs over the traces, and are all
dragging and pulling their own ways. So it is, and such is life. The
cat's away, and the mice they play; the frost breaks up, and the
water runs. Now, with regard to the party to be apprehended."

Sir Leicester seems to wake, though his eyes have been wide open, and
he looks intently at Mr. Bucket as Mr. Bucket refers to his watch.

"The party to be apprehended is now in this house," proceeds Mr.
Bucket, putting up his watch with a steady hand and with rising
spirits, "and I'm about to take her into custody in your presence.
Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, don't you say a word nor yet stir.
There'll be no noise and no disturbance at all. I'll come back in the
course of the evening, if agreeable to you, and endeavour to meet
your wishes respecting this unfortunate family matter and the
nobbiest way of keeping it quiet. Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, don't you be nervous on account of the apprehension at
present coming off. You shall see the whole case clear, from first to
last."

Mr. Bucket rings, goes to the door, briefly whispers Mercury, shuts
the door, and stands behind it with his arms folded. After a suspense
of a minute or two the door slowly opens and a Frenchwoman enters.
Mademoiselle Hortense.

The moment she is in the room Mr. Bucket claps the door to and puts
his back against it. The suddenness of the noise occasions her to
turn, and then for the first time she sees Sir Leicester Dedlock in
his chair.

"I ask you pardon," she mutters hurriedly. "They tell me there was no
one here."

Her step towards the door brings her front to front with Mr. Bucket.
Suddenly a spasm shoots across her face and she turns deadly pale.

"This is my lodger, Sir Leicester Dedlock," says Mr. Bucket, nodding
at her. "This foreign young woman has been my lodger for some weeks
back."

"What do Sir Leicester care for that, you think, my angel?" returns
mademoiselle in a jocular strain.

"Why, my angel," returns Mr. Bucket, "we shall see."

Mademoiselle Hortense eyes him with a scowl upon her tight face,
which gradually changes into a smile of scorn, "You are very
mysterieuse. Are you drunk?"

"Tolerable sober, my angel," returns Mr. Bucket.

"I come from arriving at this so detestable house with your wife.
Your wife have left me since some minutes. They tell me downstairs
that your wife is here. I come here, and your wife is not here. What
is the intention of this fool's play, say then?" mademoiselle
demands, with her arms composedly crossed, but with something in her
dark cheek beating like a clock.

Mr. Bucket merely shakes the finger at her.

"Ah, my God, you are an unhappy idiot!" cries mademoiselle with a
toss of her head and a laugh. "Leave me to pass downstairs, great
pig." With a stamp of her foot and a menace.

"Now, mademoiselle," says Mr. Bucket in a cool determined way, "you
go and sit down upon that sofy."

"I will not sit down upon nothing," she replies with a shower of
nods.

"Now, mademoiselle," repeats Mr. Bucket, making no demonstration
except with the finger, "you sit down upon that sofy."

"Why?"

"Because I take you into custody on a charge of murder, and you don't
need to be told it. Now, I want to be polite to one of your sex and a
foreigner if I can. If I can't, I must be rough, and there's rougher
ones outside. What I am to be depends on you. So I recommend you, as
a friend, afore another half a blessed moment has passed over your
head, to go and sit down upon that sofy."

Mademoiselle complies, saying in a concentrated voice while that
something in her cheek beats fast and hard, "You are a devil."

"Now, you see," Mr. Bucket proceeds approvingly, "you're comfortable
and conducting yourself as I should expect a foreign young woman of
your sense to do. So I'll give you a piece of advice, and it's this,
don't you talk too much. You're not expected to say anything here,
and you can't keep too quiet a tongue in your head. In short, the
less you PARLAY, the better, you know." Mr. Bucket is very complacent
over this French explanation.

Mademoiselle, with that tigerish expansion of the mouth and her black
eyes darting fire upon him, sits upright on the sofa in a rigid
state, with her hands clenched--and her feet too, one might
suppose--muttering, "Oh, you Bucket, you are a devil!"

"Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," says Mr. Bucket, and from this
time forth the finger never rests, "this young woman, my lodger, was
her ladyship's maid at the time I have mentioned to you; and this
young woman, besides being extraordinary vehement and passionate
against her ladyship after being discharged--"

"Lie!" cries mademoiselle. "I discharge myself."

"Now, why don't you take my advice?" returns Mr. Bucket in an
impressive, almost in an imploring, tone. "I'm surprised at the
indiscreetness you commit. You'll say something that'll be used
against you, you know. You're sure to come to it. Never you mind what
I say till it's given in evidence. It is not addressed to you."

"Discharge, too," cries mademoiselle furiously, "by her ladyship! Eh,
my faith, a pretty ladyship! Why, I r-r-r-ruin my character by
remaining with a ladyship so infame!"

"Upon my soul I wonder at you!" Mr. Bucket remonstrates. "I thought
the French were a polite nation, I did, really. Yet to hear a female
going on like that before Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet!"

"He is a poor abused!" cries mademoiselle. "I spit upon his house,
upon his name, upon his imbecility," all of which she makes the
carpet represent. "Oh, that he is a great man! Oh, yes, superb! Oh,
heaven! Bah!"

"Well, Sir Leicester Dedlock," proceeds Mr. Bucket, "this intemperate
foreigner also angrily took it into her head that she had established
a claim upon Mr. Tulkinghorn, deceased, by attending on the occasion
I told you of at his chambers, though she was liberally paid for her
time and trouble."

"Lie!" cries mademoiselle. "I ref-use his money all togezzer."

"If you WILL PARLAY, you know," says Mr. Bucket parenthetically, "you
must take the consequences. Now, whether she became my lodger, Sir
Leicester Dedlock, with any deliberate intention then of doing this
deed and blinding me, I give no opinion on; but she lived in my house
in that capacity at the time that she was hovering about the chambers
of the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn with a view to a wrangle, and
likewise persecuting and half frightening the life out of an
unfortunate stationer."

"Lie!" cries mademoiselle. "All lie!"

"The murder was committed, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and you
know under what circumstances. Now, I beg of you to follow me close
with your attention for a minute or two. I was sent for, and the case
was entrusted to me. I examined the place, and the body, and the
papers, and everything. From information I received (from a clerk in
the same house) I took George into custody as having been seen
hanging about there on the night, and at very nigh the time of the
murder, also as having been overheard in high words with the deceased
on former occasions--even threatening him, as the witness made out.
If you ask me, Sir Leicester Dedlock, whether from the first I
believed George to be the murderer, I tell you candidly no, but he
might be, notwithstanding, and there was enough against him to make
it my duty to take him and get him kept under remand. Now, observe!"

As Mr. Bucket bends forward in some excitement--for him--and
inaugurates what he is going to say with one ghostly beat of his
forefinger in the air, Mademoiselle Hortense fixes her black eyes
upon him with a dark frown and sets her dry lips closely and firmly
together.

"I went home, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, at night and found this
young woman having supper with my wife, Mrs. Bucket. She had made a
mighty show of being fond of Mrs. Bucket from her first offering
herself as our lodger, but that night she made more than ever--in
fact, overdid it. Likewise she overdid her respect, and all that, for
the lamented memory of the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn. By the living
Lord it flashed upon me, as I sat opposite to her at the table and
saw her with a knife in her hand, that she had done it!"

Mademoiselle is hardly audible in straining through her teeth and
lips the words, "You are a devil."

"Now where," pursues Mr. Bucket, "had she been on the night of the
murder? She had been to the theayter. (She really was there, I have
since found, both before the deed and after it.) I knew I had an
artful customer to deal with and that proof would be very difficult;
and I laid a trap for her--such a trap as I never laid yet, and such
a venture as I never made yet. I worked it out in my mind while I was
talking to her at supper. When I went upstairs to bed, our house
being small and this young woman's ears sharp, I stuffed the sheet
into Mrs. Bucket's mouth that she shouldn't say a word of surprise
and told her all about it. My dear, don't you give your mind to that
again, or I shall link your feet together at the ankles." Mr. Bucket,
breaking off, has made a noiseless descent upon mademoiselle and laid
his heavy hand upon her shoulder.

"What is the matter with you now?" she asks him.

"Don't you think any more," returns Mr. Bucket with admonitory
finger, "of throwing yourself out of window. That's what's the matter
with me. Come! Just take my arm. You needn't get up; I'll sit down by
you. Now take my arm, will you? I'm a married man, you know; you're
acquainted with my wife. Just take my arm."

Vainly endeavouring to moisten those dry lips, with a painful sound
she struggles with herself and complies.

"Now we're all right again. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, this case
could never have been the case it is but for Mrs. Bucket, who is a
woman in fifty thousand--in a hundred and fifty thousand! To throw
this young woman off her guard, I have never set foot in our house
since, though I've communicated with Mrs. Bucket in the baker's
loaves and in the milk as often as required. My whispered words to
Mrs. Bucket when she had the sheet in her mouth were, 'My dear, can
you throw her off continually with natural accounts of my suspicions
against George, and this, and that, and t'other? Can you do without
rest and keep watch upon her night and day? Can you undertake to say,
'She shall do nothing without my knowledge, she shall be my prisoner
without suspecting it, she shall no more escape from me than from
death, and her life shall be my life, and her soul my soul, till I
have got her, if she did this murder?' Mrs. Bucket says to me, as
well as she could speak on account of the sheet, 'Bucket, I can!' And
she has acted up to it glorious!"

"Lies!" mademoiselle interposes. "All lies, my friend!"

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, how did my calculations come out
under these circumstances? When I calculated that this impetuous
young woman would overdo it in new directions, was I wrong or right?
I was right. What does she try to do? Don't let it give you a turn?
To throw the murder on her ladyship."

Sir Leicester rises from his chair and staggers down again.

"And she got encouragement in it from hearing that I was always here,
which was done a-purpose. Now, open that pocket-book of mine, Sir
Leicester Dedlock, if I may take the liberty of throwing it towards
you, and look at the letters sent to me, each with the two words
'Lady Dedlock' in it. Open the one directed to yourself, which I
stopped this very morning, and read the three words 'Lady Dedlock,
Murderess' in it. These letters have been falling about like a shower
of lady-birds. What do you say now to Mrs. Bucket, from her spy-place
having seen them all 'written by this young woman? What do you say to
Mrs. Bucket having, within this half-hour, secured the corresponding
ink and paper, fellow half-sheets and what not? What do you say to
Mrs. Bucket having watched the posting of 'em every one by this young
woman, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet?" Mr. Bucket asks, triumphant
in his admiration of his lady's genius.

Two things are especially observable as Mr. Bucket proceeds to a
conclusion. First, that he seems imperceptibly to establish a
dreadful right of property in mademoiselle. Secondly, that the very
atmosphere she breathes seems to narrow and contract about her as if
a close net or a pall were being drawn nearer and yet nearer around
her breathless figure.

"There is no doubt that her ladyship was on the spot at the eventful
period," says Mr. Bucket, "and my foreign friend here saw her, I
believe, from the upper part of the staircase. Her ladyship and
George and my foreign friend were all pretty close on one another's
heels. But that don't signify any more, so I'll not go into it. I
found the wadding of the pistol with which the deceased Mr.
Tulkinghorn was shot. It was a bit of the printed description of your
house at Chesney Wold. Not much in that, you'll say, Sir Leicester
Dedlock, Baronet. No. But when my foreign friend here is so
thoroughly off her guard as to think it a safe time to tear up the
rest of that leaf, and when Mrs. Bucket puts the pieces together and
finds the wadding wanting, it begins to look like Queer Street."

"These are very long lies," mademoiselle interposes. "You prose great
deal. Is it that you have almost all finished, or are you speaking
always?"

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," proceeds Mr. Bucket, who delights
in a full title and does violence to himself when he dispenses with
any fragment of it, "the last point in the case which I am now going
to mention shows the necessity of patience in our business, and never
doing a thing in a hurry. I watched this young woman yesterday
without her knowledge when she was looking at the funeral, in company
with my wife, who planned to take her there; and I had so much to
convict her, and I saw such an expression in her face, and my mind so
rose against her malice towards her ladyship, and the time was
altogether such a time for bringing down what you may call
retribution upon her, that if I had been a younger hand with less
experience, I should have taken her, certain. Equally, last night,
when her ladyship, as is so universally admired I am sure, come home
looking--why, Lord, a man might almost say like Venus rising from the
ocean--it was so unpleasant and inconsistent to think of her being
charged with a murder of which she was innocent that I felt quite to
want to put an end to the job. What should I have lost? Sir Leicester
Dedlock, Baronet, I should have lost the weapon. My prisoner here
proposed to Mrs. Bucket, after the departure of the funeral, that
they should go per bus a little ways into the country and take tea at
a very decent house of entertainment. Now, near that house of
entertainment there's a piece of water. At tea, my prisoner got up to
fetch her pocket handkercher from the bedroom where the bonnets was;
she was rather a long time gone and came back a little out of wind.
As soon as they came home this was reported to me by Mrs. Bucket,
along with her observations and suspicions. I had the piece of water
dragged by moonlight, in presence of a couple of our men, and the
pocket pistol was brought up before it had been there half-a-dozen
hours. Now, my dear, put your arm a little further through mine, and
hold it steady, and I shan't hurt you!"

In a trice Mr. Bucket snaps a handcuff on her wrist. "That's one,"
says Mr. Bucket. "Now the other, darling. Two, and all told!"

He rises; she rises too. "Where," she asks him, darkening her large
eyes until their drooping lids almost conceal them--and yet they
stare, "where is your false, your treacherous, and cursed wife?"

"She's gone forrard to the Police Office," returns Mr. Bucket.
"You'll see her there, my dear."

"I would like to kiss her!" exclaims Mademoiselle Hortense, panting
tigress-like.

"You'd bite her, I suspect," says Mr. Bucket.

"I would!" making her eyes very large. "I would love to tear her limb
from limb."

"Bless you, darling," says Mr. Bucket with the greatest composure,
"I'm fully prepared to hear that. Your sex have such a surprising
animosity against one another when you do differ. You don't mind me
half so much, do you?"

"No. Though you are a devil still."

"Angel and devil by turns, eh?" cries Mr. Bucket. "But I am in my
regular employment, you must consider. Let me put your shawl tidy.
I've been lady's maid to a good many before now. Anything wanting to
the bonnet? There's a cab at the door."

Mademoiselle Hortense, casting an indignant eye at the glass, shakes
herself perfectly neat in one shake and looks, to do her justice,
uncommonly genteel.

"Listen then, my angel," says she after several sarcastic nods. "You
are very spiritual. But can you restore him back to life?"

Mr. Bucket answers, "Not exactly."

"That is droll. Listen yet one time. You are very spiritual. Can you
make a honourable lady of her?"

"Don't be so malicious," says Mr. Bucket.

"Or a haughty gentleman of HIM?" cries mademoiselle, referring to Sir
Leicester with ineffable disdain. "Eh! Oh, then regard him! The poor
infant! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

"Come, come, why this is worse PARLAYING than the other," says Mr.
Bucket. "Come along!"

"You cannot do these things? Then you can do as you please with me.
It is but the death, it is all the same. Let us go, my angel. Adieu,
you old man, grey. I pity you, and I despise you!"

With these last words she snaps her teeth together as if her mouth
closed with a spring. It is impossible to describe how Mr. Bucket
gets her out, but he accomplishes that feat in a manner so peculiar
to himself, enfolding and pervading her like a cloud, and hovering
away with her as if he were a homely Jupiter and she the object of
his affections.

Sir Leicester, left alone, remains in the same attitude, as though he
were still listening and his attention were still occupied. At length
he gazes round the empty room, and finding it deserted, rises
unsteadily to his feet, pushes back his chair, and walks a few steps,
supporting himself by the table. Then he stops, and with more of
those inarticulate sounds, lifts up his eyes and seems to stare at
something.

Heaven knows what he sees. The green, green woods of Chesney Wold,
the noble house, the pictures of his forefathers, strangers defacing
them, officers of police coarsely handling his most precious
heirlooms, thousands of fingers pointing at him, thousands of faces
sneering at him. But if such shadows flit before him to his
bewilderment, there is one other shadow which he can name with
something like distinctness even yet and to which alone he addresses
his tearing of his white hair and his extended arms.

It is she in association with whom, saving that she has been for
years a main fibre of the root of his dignity and pride, he has never
had a selfish thought. It is she whom he has loved, admired,
honoured, and set up for the world to respect. It is she who, at the
core of all the constrained formalities and conventionalities of his
life, has been a stock of living tenderness and love, susceptible as
nothing else is of being struck with the agony he feels. He sees her,
almost to the exclusion of himself, and cannot bear to look upon her
cast down from the high place she has graced so well.

And even to the point of his sinking on the ground, oblivious of his
suffering, he can yet pronounce her name with something like
distinctness in the midst of those intrusive sounds, and in a tone of
mourning and compassion rather than reproach.




CHAPTER LV

Flight


Inspector Bucket of the Detective has not yet struck his great blow,
as just now chronicled, but is yet refreshing himself with sleep
preparatory to his field-day, when through the night and along the
freezing wintry roads a chaise and pair comes out of Lincolnshire,
making its way towards London.

Railroads shall soon traverse all this country, and with a rattle and
a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor over the wide
night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but as yet such things are
non-existent in these parts, though not wholly unexpected.
Preparations are afoot, measurements are made, ground is staked out.
Bridges are begun, and their not yet united piers desolately look at
one another over roads and streams like brick and mortar couples with
an obstacle to their union; fragments of embankments are thrown up
and left as precipices with torrents of rusty carts and barrows
tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles appear on hilltops, where
there are rumours of tunnels; everything looks chaotic and abandoned
in full hopelessness. Along the freezing roads, and through the
night, the post-chaise makes its way without a railroad on its mind.

Mrs. Rouncewell, so many years housekeeper at Chesney Wold, sits
within the chaise; and by her side sits Mrs. Bagnet with her grey
cloak and umbrella. The old girl would prefer the bar in front, as
being exposed to the weather and a primitive sort of perch more in
accordance with her usual course of travelling, but Mrs. Rouncewell
is too thoughtful of her comfort to admit of her proposing it. The
old lady cannot make enough of the old girl. She sits, in her stately
manner, holding her hand, and regardless of its roughness, puts it
often to her lips. "You are a mother, my dear soul," says she many
times, "and you found out my George's mother!"

"Why, George," returns Mrs. Bagnet, "was always free with me, ma'am,
and when he said at our house to my Woolwich that of all the things
my Woolwich could have to think of when he grew to be a man, the
comfortablest would be that he had never brought a sorrowful line
into his mother's face or turned a hair of her head grey, then I felt
sure, from his way, that something fresh had brought his own mother
into his mind. I had often known him say to me, in past times, that
he had behaved bad to her."

"Never, my dear!" returns Mrs. Rouncewell, bursting into tears. "My
blessing on him, never! He was always fond of me, and loving to me,
was my George! But he had a bold spirit, and he ran a little wild and
went for a soldier. And I know he waited at first, in letting us know
about himself, till he should rise to be an officer; and when he
didn't rise, I know he considered himself beneath us, and wouldn't be
a disgrace to us. For he had a lion heart, had my George, always from
a baby!"

The old lady's hands stray about her as of yore, while she recalls,
all in a tremble, what a likely lad, what a fine lad, what a gay
good-humoured clever lad he was; how they all took to him down at
Chesney Wold; how Sir Leicester took to him when he was a young
gentleman; how the dogs took to him; how even the people who had been
angry with him forgave him the moment he was gone, poor boy. And now
to see him after all, and in a prison too! And the broad stomacher
heaves, and the quaint upright old-fashioned figure bends under its
load of affectionate distress.

Mrs. Bagnet, with the instinctive skill of a good warm heart, leaves
the old housekeeper to her emotions for a little while--not without
passing the back of her hand across her own motherly eyes--and
presently chirps up in her cheery manner, "So I says to George when I
goes to call him in to tea (he pretended to be smoking his pipe
outside), 'What ails you this afternoon, George, for gracious sake? I
have seen all sorts, and I have seen you pretty often in season and
out of season, abroad and at home, and I never see you so melancholy
penitent.' 'Why, Mrs. Bagnet,' says George, 'it's because I AM
melancholy and penitent both, this afternoon, that you see me so.'
'What have you done, old fellow?' I says. 'Why, Mrs. Bagnet,' says
George, shaking his head, 'what I have done has been done this many a
long year, and is best not tried to be undone now. If I ever get to
heaven it won't be for being a good son to a widowed mother; I say no
more.' Now, ma'am, when George says to me that it's best not tried to
be undone now, I have my thoughts as I have often had before, and I
draw it out of George how he comes to have such things on him that
afternoon. Then George tells me that he has seen by chance, at the
lawyer's office, a fine old lady that has brought his mother plain
before him, and he runs on about that old lady till he quite forgets
himself and paints her picture to me as she used to be, years upon
years back. So I says to George when he has done, who is this old
lady he has seen? And George tells me it's Mrs. Rouncewell,
housekeeper for more than half a century to the Dedlock family down
at Chesney Wold in Lincolnshire. George has frequently told me before
that he's a Lincolnshire man, and I says to my old Lignum that night,
'Lignum, that's his mother for five and for-ty pound!'"

All this Mrs. Bagnet now relates for the twentieth time at least
within the last four hours. Trilling it out like a kind of bird, with
a pretty high note, that it may be audible to the old lady above the
hum of the wheels.

"Bless you, and thank you," says Mrs. Rouncewell. "Bless you, and
thank you, my worthy soul!"

"Dear heart!" cries Mrs. Bagnet in the most natural manner. "No
thanks to me, I am sure. Thanks to yourself, ma'am, for being so
ready to pay 'em! And mind once more, ma'am, what you had best do
on finding George to be your own son is to make him--for your
sake--have every sort of help to put himself in the right and clear
himself of a charge of which he is as innocent as you or me. It won't
do to have truth and justice on his side; he must have law and
lawyers," exclaims the old girl, apparently persuaded that the latter
form a separate establishment and have dissolved partnership with
truth and justice for ever and a day.

"He shall have," says Mrs. Rouncewell, "all the help that can be got
for him in the world, my dear. I will spend all I have, and
thankfully, to procure it. Sir Leicester will do his best, the whole
family will do their best. I--I know something, my dear; and will
make my own appeal, as his mother parted from him all these years,
and finding him in a jail at last."

The extreme disquietude of the old housekeeper's manner in saying
this, her broken words, and her wringing of her hands make a powerful
impression on Mrs. Bagnet and would astonish her but that she refers
them all to her sorrow for her son's condition. And yet Mrs. Bagnet
wonders too why Mrs. Rouncewell should murmur so distractedly, "My
Lady, my Lady, my Lady!" over and over again.

The frosty night wears away, and the dawn breaks, and the post-chaise
comes rolling on through the early mist like the ghost of a chaise
departed. It has plenty of spectral company in ghosts of trees and
hedges, slowly vanishing and giving place to the realities of day.
London reached, the travellers alight, the old housekeeper in great
tribulation and confusion, Mrs. Bagnet quite fresh and collected--as
she would be if her next point, with no new equipage and outfit, were
the Cape of Good Hope, the Island of Ascension, Hong Kong, or any
other military station.

But when they set out for the prison where the trooper is
confined, the old lady has managed to draw about her, with her
lavender-coloured dress, much of the staid calmness which is its
usual accompaniment. A wonderfully grave, precise, and handsome piece
of old china she looks, though her heart beats fast and her stomacher
is ruffled more than even the remembrance of this wayward son has
ruffled it these many years.

Approaching the cell, they find the door opening and a warder in the
act of coming out. The old girl promptly makes a sign of entreaty to
him to say nothing; assenting with a nod, he suffers them to enter as
he shuts the door.

So George, who is writing at his table, supposing himself to be
alone, does not raise his eyes, but remains absorbed. The old
housekeeper looks at him, and those wandering hands of hers are quite
enough for Mrs. Bagnet's confirmation, even if she could see the
mother and the son together, knowing what she knows, and doubt their
relationship.

Not a rustle of the housekeeper's dress, not a gesture, not a word
betrays her. She stands looking at him as he writes on, all
unconscious, and only her fluttering hands give utterance to her
emotions. But they are very eloquent, very, very eloquent. Mrs.
Bagnet understands them. They speak of gratitude, of joy, of grief,
of hope; of inextinguishable affection, cherished with no return
since this stalwart man was a stripling; of a better son loved less,
and this son loved so fondly and so proudly; and they speak in such
touching language that Mrs. Bagnet's eyes brim up with tears and they
run glistening down her sun-brown face.

"George Rouncewell! Oh, my dear child, turn and look at me!"

The trooper starts up, clasps his mother round the neck, and falls
down on his knees before her. Whether in a late repentance, whether
in the first association that comes back upon him, he puts his hands
together as a child does when it says its prayers, and raising them
towards her breast, bows down his head, and cries.

"My George, my dearest son! Always my favourite, and my favourite
still, where have you been these cruel years and years? Grown such a
man too, grown such a fine strong man. Grown so like what I knew he
must be, if it pleased God he was alive!"

She can ask, and he can answer, nothing connected for a time. All
that time the old girl, turned away, leans one arm against the
whitened wall, leans her honest forehead upon it, wipes her eyes with
her serviceable grey cloak, and quite enjoys herself like the best of
old girls as she is.

"Mother," says the trooper when they are more composed, "forgive me
first of all, for I know my need of it."

Forgive him! She does it with all her heart and soul. She always has
done it. She tells him how she has had it written in her will, these
many years, that he was her beloved son George. She has never
believed any ill of him, never. If she had died without this
happiness--and she is an old woman now and can't look to live very
long--she would have blessed him with her last breath, if she had had
her senses, as her beloved son George.

"Mother, I have been an undutiful trouble to you, and I have my
reward; but of late years I have had a kind of glimmering of a
purpose in me too. When I left home I didn't care much, mother--I am
afraid not a great deal--for leaving; and went away and 'listed,
harum-scarum, making believe to think that I cared for nobody, no not
I, and that nobody cared for me."

The trooper has dried his eyes and put away his handkerchief, but
there is an extraordinary contrast between his habitual manner of
expressing himself and carrying himself and the softened tone in
which he speaks, interrupted occasionally by a half-stifled sob.

"So I wrote a line home, mother, as you too well know, to say I had
'listed under another name, and I went abroad. Abroad, at one time I
thought I would write home next year, when I might be better off; and
when that year was out, I thought I would write home next year, when
I might be better off; and when that year was out again, perhaps I
didn't think much about it. So on, from year to year, through a
service of ten years, till I began to get older, and to ask myself
why should I ever write."

"I don't find any fault, child--but not to ease my mind, George? Not
a word to your loving mother, who was growing older too?"

This almost overturns the trooper afresh, but he sets himself up with
a great, rough, sounding clearance of his throat.

"Heaven forgive me, mother, but I thought there would be small
consolation then in hearing anything about me. There were you,
respected and esteemed. There was my brother, as I read in chance
North Country papers now and then, rising to be prosperous and
famous. There was I a dragoon, roving, unsettled, not self-made like
him, but self-unmade--all my earlier advantages thrown away, all my
little learning unlearnt, nothing picked up but what unfitted me for
most things that I could think of. What business had I to make myself
known? After letting all that time go by me, what good could come of
it? The worst was past with you, mother. I knew by that time (being a
man) how you had mourned for me, and wept for me, and prayed for me;
and the pain was over, or was softened down, and I was better in your
mind as it was."

The old lady sorrowfully shakes her head, and taking one of his
powerful hands, lays it lovingly upon her shoulder.

"No, I don't say that it was so, mother, but that I made it out to be
so. I said just now, what good could come of it? Well, my dear
mother, some good might have come of it to myself--and there was the
meanness of it. You would have sought me out; you would have
purchased my discharge; you would have taken me down to Chesney Wold;
you would have brought me and my brother and my brother's family
together; you would all have considered anxiously how to do something
for me and set me up as a respectable civilian. But how could any of
you feel sure of me when I couldn't so much as feel sure of myself?
How could you help regarding as an incumbrance and a discredit to you
an idle dragooning chap who was an incumbrance and a discredit to
himself, excepting under discipline? How could I look my brother's
children in the face and pretend to set them an example--I, the
vagabond boy who had run away from home and been the grief and
unhappiness of my mother's life? 'No, George.' Such were my words,
mother, when I passed this in review before me: 'You have made your
bed. Now, lie upon it.'"

Mrs. Rouncewell, drawing up her stately form, shakes her head at the
old girl with a swelling pride upon her, as much as to say, "I told
you so!" The old girl relieves her feelings and testifies her
interest in the conversation by giving the trooper a great poke
between the shoulders with her umbrella; this action she afterwards
repeats, at intervals, in a species of affectionate lunacy, never
failing, after the administration of each of these remonstrances, to
resort to the whitened wall and the grey cloak again.

"This was the way I brought myself to think, mother, that my best
amends was to lie upon that bed I had made, and die upon it. And I
should have done it (though I have been to see you more than once
down at Chesney Wold, when you little thought of me) but for my old
comrade's wife here, who I find has been too many for me. But I thank
her for it. I thank you for it, Mrs. Bagnet, with all my heart and
might."

To which Mrs. Bagnet responds with two pokes.

And now the old lady impresses upon her son George, her own dear
recovered boy, her joy and pride, the light of her eyes, the happy
close of her life, and every fond name she can think of, that he must
be governed by the best advice obtainable by money and influence,
that he must yield up his case to the greatest lawyers that can be
got, that he must act in this serious plight as he shall be advised
to act and must not be self-willed, however right, but must promise
to think only of his poor old mother's anxiety and suffering until he
is released, or he will break her heart.

"Mother, 'tis little enough to consent to," returns the trooper,
stopping her with a kiss; "tell me what I shall do, and I'll make a
late beginning and do it. Mrs. Bagnet, you'll take care of my mother,
I know?"

A very hard poke from the old girl's umbrella.

"If you'll bring her acquainted with Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson,
she will find them of her way of thinking, and they will give her the
best advice and assistance."

"And, George," says the old lady, "we must send with all haste for
your brother. He is a sensible sound man as they tell me--out in the
world beyond Chesney Wold, my dear, though I don't know much of it
myself--and will be of great service."

"Mother," returns the trooper, "is it too soon to ask a favour?"

"Surely not, my dear."

"Then grant me this one great favour. Don't let my brother know."

"Not know what, my dear?"

"Not know of me. In fact, mother, I can't bear it; I can't make up my
mind to it. He has proved himself so different from me and has done
so much to raise himself while I've been soldiering that I haven't
brass enough in my composition to see him in this place and under
this charge. How could a man like him be expected to have any
pleasure in such a discovery? It's impossible. No, keep my secret
from him, mother; do me a greater kindness than I deserve and keep my
secret from my brother, of all men."

"But not always, dear George?"

"Why, mother, perhaps not for good and all--though I may come to ask
that too--but keep it now, I do entreat you. If it's ever broke to
him that his rip of a brother has turned up, I could wish," says the
trooper, shaking his head very doubtfully, "to break it myself and be
governed as to advancing or retreating by the way in which he seems
to take it."

As he evidently has a rooted feeling on this point, and as the depth
of it is recognized in Mrs. Bagnet's face, his mother yields her
implicit assent to what he asks. For this he thanks her kindly.

"In all other respects, my dear mother, I'll be as tractable and
obedient as you can wish; on this one alone, I stand out. So now I am
ready even for the lawyers. I have been drawing up," he glances at
his writing on the table, "an exact account of what I knew of the
deceased and how I came to be involved in this unfortunate affair.
It's entered, plain and regular, like an orderly-book; not a word in
it but what's wanted for the facts. I did intend to read it, straight
on end, whensoever I was called upon to say anything in my defence. I
hope I may be let to do it still; but I have no longer a will of my
own in this case, and whatever is said or done, I give my promise not
to have any."

Matters being brought to this so far satisfactory pass, and time
being on the wane, Mrs. Bagnet proposes a departure. Again and again
the old lady hangs upon her son's neck, and again and again the
trooper holds her to his broad chest.

"Where are you going to take my mother, Mrs. Bagnet?"

"I am going to the town house, my dear, the family house. I have some
business there that must be looked to directly," Mrs. Rouncewell
answers.

"Will you see my mother safe there in a coach, Mrs. Bagnet? But of
course I know you will. Why should I ask it!"

Why indeed, Mrs. Bagnet expresses with the umbrella.

"Take her, my old friend, and take my gratitude along with you.
Kisses to Quebec and Malta, love to my godson, a hearty shake of the
hand to Lignum, and this for yourself, and I wish it was ten thousand
pound in gold, my dear!" So saying, the trooper puts his lips to the
old girl's tanned forehead, and the door shuts upon him in his cell.

No entreaties on the part of the good old housekeeper will induce
Mrs. Bagnet to retain the coach for her own conveyance home. Jumping
out cheerfully at the door of the Dedlock mansion and handing Mrs.
Rouncewell up the steps, the old girl shakes hands and trudges off,
arriving soon afterwards in the bosom of the Bagnet family and
falling to washing the greens as if nothing had happened.

My Lady is in that room in which she held her last conference with
the murdered man, and is sitting where she sat that night, and is
looking at the spot where he stood upon the hearth studying her so
leisurely, when a tap comes at the door. Who is it? Mrs. Rouncewell.
What has brought Mrs. Rouncewell to town so unexpectedly?

"Trouble, my Lady. Sad trouble. Oh, my Lady, may I beg a word with
you?"

What new occurrence is it that makes this tranquil old woman tremble
so? Far happier than her Lady, as her Lady has often thought, why
does she falter in this manner and look at her with such strange
mistrust?

"What is the matter? Sit down and take your breath."

"Oh, my Lady, my Lady. I have found my son--my youngest, who went
away for a soldier so long ago. And he is in prison."

"For debt?"

"Oh, no, my Lady; I would have paid any debt, and joyful."

"For what is he in prison then?"

"Charged with a murder, my Lady, of which he is as innocent as--as I
am. Accused of the murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn."

What does she mean by this look and this imploring gesture? Why does
she come so close? What is the letter that she holds?

"Lady Dedlock, my dear Lady, my good Lady, my kind Lady! You must
have a heart to feel for me, you must have a heart to forgive me. I
was in this family before you were born. I am devoted to it. But
think of my dear son wrongfully accused."

"I do not accuse him."

"No, my Lady, no. But others do, and he is in prison and in danger.
Oh, Lady Dedlock, if you can say but a word to help to clear him, say
it!"

What delusion can this be? What power does she suppose is in the
person she petitions to avert this unjust suspicion, if it be unjust?
Her Lady's handsome eyes regard her with astonishment, almost with
fear.

"My Lady, I came away last night from Chesney Wold to find my son in
my old age, and the step upon the Ghost's Walk was so constant and so
solemn that I never heard the like in all these years. Night after
night, as it has fallen dark, the sound has echoed through your
rooms, but last night it was awfullest. And as it fell dark last
night, my Lady, I got this letter."

"What letter is it?"

"Hush! Hush!" The housekeeper looks round and answers in a frightened
whisper, "My Lady, I have not breathed a word of it, I don't believe
what's written in it, I know it can't be true, I am sure and certain
that it is not true. But my son is in danger, and you must have a
heart to pity me. If you know of anything that is not known to
others, if you have any suspicion, if you have any clue at all, and
any reason for keeping it in your own breast, oh, my dear Lady, think
of me, and conquer that reason, and let it be known! This is the most
I consider possible. I know you are not a hard lady, but you go your
own way always without help, and you are not familiar with your
friends; and all who admire you--and all do--as a beautiful and
elegant lady, know you to be one far away from themselves who can't
be approached close. My Lady, you may have some proud or angry
reasons for disdaining to utter something that you know; if so, pray,
oh, pray, think of a faithful servant whose whole life has been
passed in this family which she dearly loves, and relent, and help to
clear my son! My Lady, my good Lady," the old housekeeper pleads with
genuine simplicity, "I am so humble in my place and you are by nature
so high and distant that you may not think what I feel for my child,
but I feel so much that I have come here to make so bold as to beg
and pray you not to be scornful of us if you can do us any right or
justice at this fearful time!"

Lady Dedlock raises her without one word, until she takes the letter
from her hand.

"Am I to read this?"

"When I am gone, my Lady, if you please, and then remembering the
most that I consider possible."

"I know of nothing I can do. I know of nothing I reserve that can
affect your son. I have never accused him."

"My Lady, you may pity him the more under a false accusation after
reading the letter."

The old housekeeper leaves her with the letter in her hand. In truth
she is not a hard lady naturally, and the time has been when the
sight of the venerable figure suing to her with such strong
earnestness would have moved her to great compassion. But so long
accustomed to suppress emotion and keep down reality, so long
schooled for her own purposes in that destructive school which shuts
up the natural feelings of the heart like flies in amber and spreads
one uniform and dreary gloss over the good and bad, the feeling and
the unfeeling, the sensible and the senseless, she had subdued even
her wonder until now.

She opens the letter. Spread out upon the paper is a printed account
of the discovery of the body as it lay face downward on the floor,
shot through the heart; and underneath is written her own name, with
the word "murderess" attached.

It falls out of her hand. How long it may have lain upon the ground
she knows not, but it lies where it fell when a servant stands before
her announcing the young man of the name of Guppy. The words have
probably been repeated several times, for they are ringing in her
head before she begins to understand them.

"Let him come in!"

He comes in. Holding the letter in her hand, which she has taken from
the floor, she tries to collect her thoughts. In the eyes of Mr.
Guppy she is the same Lady Dedlock, holding the same prepared, proud,
chilling state.

"Your ladyship may not be at first disposed to excuse this visit from
one who has never been welcome to your ladyship"--which he don't
complain of, for he is bound to confess that there never has been any
particular reason on the face of things why he should be--"but I hope
when I mention my motives to your ladyship you will not find fault
with me," says Mr. Guppy.

"Do so."

"Thank your ladyship. I ought first to explain to your ladyship," Mr.
Guppy sits on the edge of a chair and puts his hat on the carpet at
his feet, "that Miss Summerson, whose image, as I formerly mentioned
to your ladyship, was at one period of my life imprinted on my 'eart
until erased by circumstances over which I had no control,
communicated to me, after I had the pleasure of waiting on your
ladyship last, that she particularly wished me to take no steps
whatever in any manner at all relating to her. And Miss Summerson's
wishes being to me a law (except as connected with circumstances over
which I have no control), I consequently never expected to have the
distinguished honour of waiting on your ladyship again."

And yet he is here now, Lady Dedlock moodily reminds him.

"And yet I am here now," Mr. Guppy admits. "My object being to
communicate to your ladyship, under the seal of confidence, why I am
here."

He cannot do so, she tells him, too plainly or too briefly. "Nor can
I," Mr. Guppy returns with a sense of injury upon him, "too
particularly request your ladyship to take particular notice that
it's no personal affair of mine that brings me here. I have no
interested views of my own to serve in coming here. If it was not for
my promise to Miss Summerson and my keeping of it sacred--I, in point
of fact, shouldn't have darkened these doors again, but should have
seen 'em further first."

Mr. Guppy considers this a favourable moment for sticking up his hair
with both hands.

"Your ladyship will remember when I mention it that the last time I
was here I run against a party very eminent in our profession and
whose loss we all deplore. That party certainly did from that time
apply himself to cutting in against me in a way that I will call
sharp practice, and did make it, at every turn and point, extremely
difficult for me to be sure that I hadn't inadvertently led up to
something contrary to Miss Summerson's wishes. Self-praise is no
recommendation, but I may say for myself that I am not so bad a man
of business neither."

Lady Dedlock looks at him in stern inquiry. Mr. Guppy immediately
withdraws his eyes from her face and looks anywhere else.

"Indeed, it has been made so hard," he goes on, "to have any idea
what that party was up to in combination with others that until the
loss which we all deplore I was gravelled--an expression which your
ladyship, moving in the higher circles, will be so good as to
consider tantamount to knocked over. Small likewise--a name by which
I refer to another party, a friend of mine that your ladyship is not
acquainted with--got to be so close and double-faced that at times it
wasn't easy to keep one's hands off his 'ead. However, what with the
exertion of my humble abilities, and what with the help of a mutual
friend by the name of Mr. Tony Weevle (who is of a high aristocratic
turn and has your ladyship's portrait always hanging up in his room),
I have now reasons for an apprehension as to which I come to put your
ladyship upon your guard. First, will your ladyship allow me to ask
you whether you have had any strange visitors this morning? I don't
mean fashionable visitors, but such visitors, for instance, as Miss
Barbary's old servant, or as a person without the use of his lower
extremities, carried upstairs similarly to a guy?"

"No!"

"Then I assure your ladyship that such visitors have been here and
have been received here. Because I saw them at the door, and waited
at the corner of the square till they came out, and took half an
hour's turn afterwards to avoid them."

"What have I to do with that, or what have you? I do not understand
you. What do you mean?"

"Your ladyship, I come to put you on your guard. There may be no
occasion for it. Very well. Then I have only done my best to keep my
promise to Miss Summerson. I strongly suspect (from what Small has
dropped, and from what we have corkscrewed out of him) that those
letters I was to have brought to your ladyship were not destroyed
when I supposed they were. That if there was anything to be blown
upon, it IS blown upon. That the visitors I have alluded to have been
here this morning to make money of it. And that the money is made, or
making."

Mr. Guppy picks up his hat and rises.

"Your ladyship, you know best whether there's anything in what I say
or whether there's nothing. Something or nothing, I have acted up to
Miss Summerson's wishes in letting things alone and in undoing what I
had begun to do, as far as possible; that's sufficient for me. In
case I should be taking a liberty in putting your ladyship on your
guard when there's no necessity for it, you will endeavour, I should
hope, to outlive my presumption, and I shall endeavour to outlive
your disapprobation. I now take my farewell of your ladyship, and
assure you that there's no danger of your ever being waited on by me
again."

She scarcely acknowledges these parting words by any look, but when
he has been gone a little while, she rings her bell.

"Where is Sir Leicester?"

Mercury reports that he is at present shut up in the library alone.

"Has Sir Leicester had any visitors this morning?"

Several, on business. Mercury proceeds to a description of them,
which has been anticipated by Mr. Guppy. Enough; he may go.

So! All is broken down. Her name is in these many mouths, her husband
knows his wrongs, her shame will be published--may be spreading while
she thinks about it--and in addition to the thunderbolt so long
foreseen by her, so unforeseen by him, she is denounced by an
invisible accuser as the murderess of her enemy.

Her enemy he was, and she has often, often, often wished him dead.
Her enemy he is, even in his grave. This dreadful accusation comes
upon her like a new torment at his lifeless hand. And when she
recalls how she was secretly at his door that night, and how she may
be represented to have sent her favourite girl away so soon before
merely to release herself from observation, she shudders as if the
hangman's hands were at her neck.

She has thrown herself upon the floor and lies with her hair all
wildly scattered and her face buried in the cushions of a couch. She
rises up, hurries to and fro, flings herself down again, and rocks
and moans. The horror that is upon her is unutterable. If she really
were the murderess, it could hardly be, for the moment, more intense.

For as her murderous perspective, before the doing of the deed,
however subtle the precautions for its commission, would have been
closed up by a gigantic dilatation of the hateful figure, preventing
her from seeing any consequences beyond it; and as those consequences
would have rushed in, in an unimagined flood, the moment the figure
was laid low--which always happens when a murder is done; so, now she
sees that when he used to be on the watch before her, and she used to
think, "if some mortal stroke would but fall on this old man and take
him from my way!" it was but wishing that all he held against her in
his hand might be flung to the winds and chance-sown in many places.
So, too, with the wicked relief she has felt in his death. What was
his death but the key-stone of a gloomy arch removed, and now the
arch begins to fall in a thousand fragments, each crushing and
mangling piecemeal!

Thus, a terrible impression steals upon and overshadows her that from
this pursuer, living or dead--obdurate and imperturbable before her
in his well-remembered shape, or not more obdurate and imperturbable
in his coffin-bed--there is no escape but in death. Hunted, she
flies. The complication of her shame, her dread, remorse, and misery,
overwhelms her at its height; and even her strength of self-reliance
is overturned and whirled away like a leaf before a mighty wind.

She hurriedly addresses these lines to her husband, seals, and leaves
them on her table:


   If I am sought for, or accused of, his murder, believe
   that I am wholly innocent. Believe no other good of me,
   for I am innocent of nothing else that you have heard,
   or will hear, laid to my charge. He prepared me, on that
   fatal night, for his disclosure of my guilt to you. After
   he had left me, I went out on pretence of walking in the
   garden where I sometimes walk, but really to follow him
   and make one last petition that he would not protract the
   dreadful suspense on which I have been racked by him, you
   do not know how long, but would mercifully strike next
   morning.

   I found his house dark and silent. I rang twice at his
   door, but there was no reply, and I came home.

   I have no home left. I will encumber you no more. May
   you, in your just resentment, be able to forget the
   unworthy woman on whom you have wasted a most generous
   devotion--who avoids you only with a deeper shame than
   that with which she hurries from herself--and who writes
   this last adieu.


She veils and dresses quickly, leaves all her jewels and her money,
listens, goes downstairs at a moment when the hall is empty, opens
and shuts the great door, flutters away in the shrill frosty wind.




CHAPTER LVI

Pursuit


Impassive, as behoves its high breeding, the Dedlock town house
stares at the other houses in the street of dismal grandeur and gives
no outward sign of anything going wrong within. Carriages rattle,
doors are battered at, the world exchanges calls; ancient charmers
with skeleton throats and peachy cheeks that have a rather ghastly
bloom upon them seen by daylight, when indeed these fascinating
creatures look like Death and the Lady fused together, dazzle the
eyes of men. Forth from the frigid mews come easily swinging
carriages guided by short-legged coachmen in flaxen wigs, deep sunk
into downy hammercloths, and up behind mount luscious Mercuries
bearing sticks of state and wearing cocked hats broadwise, a
spectacle for the angels.

The Dedlock town house changes not externally, and hours pass before
its exalted dullness is disturbed within. But Volumnia the fair,
being subject to the prevalent complaint of boredom and finding that
disorder attacking her spirits with some virulence, ventures at
length to repair to the library for change of scene. Her gentle
tapping at the door producing no response, she opens it and peeps in;
seeing no one there, takes possession.

The sprightly Dedlock is reputed, in that grass-grown city of the
ancients, Bath, to be stimulated by an urgent curiosity which impels
her on all convenient and inconvenient occasions to sidle about with
a golden glass at her eye, peering into objects of every description.
Certain it is that she avails herself of the present opportunity of
hovering over her kinsman's letters and papers like a bird, taking a
short peck at this document and a blink with her head on one side at
that document, and hopping about from table to table with her glass
at her eye in an inquisitive and restless manner. In the course of
these researches she stumbles over something, and turning her glass
in that direction, sees her kinsman lying on the ground like a felled
tree.

Volumnia's pet little scream acquires a considerable augmentation of
reality from this surprise, and the house is quickly in commotion.
Servants tear up and down stairs, bells are violently rung, doctors
are sent for, and Lady Dedlock is sought in all directions, but not
found. Nobody has seen or heard her since she last rang her bell. Her
letter to Sir Leicester is discovered on her table, but it is
doubtful yet whether he has not received another missive from another
world requiring to be personally answered, and all the living
languages, and all the dead, are as one to him.

They lay him down upon his bed, and chafe, and rub, and fan, and put
ice to his head, and try every means of restoration. Howbeit, the day
has ebbed away, and it is night in his room before his stertorous
breathing lulls or his fixed eyes show any consciousness of the
candle that is occasionally passed before them. But when this change
begins, it goes on; and by and by he nods or moves his eyes or even
his hand in token that he hears and comprehends.

He fell down, this morning, a handsome stately gentleman, somewhat
infirm, but of a fine presence, and with a well-filled face. He lies
upon his bed, an aged man with sunken cheeks, the decrepit shadow of
himself. His voice was rich and mellow and he had so long been
thoroughly persuaded of the weight and import to mankind of any word
he said that his words really had come to sound as if there were
something in them. But now he can only whisper, and what he whispers
sounds like what it is--mere jumble and jargon.

His favourite and faithful housekeeper stands at his bedside. It is
the first act he notices, and he clearly derives pleasure from it.
After vainly trying to make himself understood in speech, he makes
signs for a pencil. So inexpressively that they cannot at first
understand him; it is his old housekeeper who makes out what he wants
and brings in a slate.

After pausing for some time, he slowly scrawls upon it in a hand that
is not his, "Chesney Wold?"

No, she tells him; he is in London. He was taken ill in the library
this morning. Right thankful she is that she happened to come to
London and is able to attend upon him.

"It is not an illness of any serious consequence, Sir Leicester. You
will be much better to-morrow, Sir Leicester. All the gentlemen say
so." This, with the tears coursing down her fair old face.

After making a survey of the room and looking with particular
attention all round the bed where the doctors stand, he writes, "My
Lady."

"My Lady went out, Sir Leicester, before you were taken ill, and
don't know of your illness yet."

He points again, in great agitation, at the two words. They all try
to quiet him, but he points again with increased agitation. On their
looking at one another, not knowing what to say, he takes the slate
once more and writes "My Lady. For God's sake, where?" And makes an
imploring moan.

It is thought better that his old housekeeper should give him Lady
Dedlock's letter, the contents of which no one knows or can surmise.
She opens it for him and puts it out for his perusal. Having read it
twice by a great effort, he turns it down so that it shall not be
seen and lies moaning. He passes into a kind of relapse or into a
swoon, and it is an hour before he opens his eyes, reclining on his
faithful and attached old servant's arm. The doctors know that he is
best with her, and when not actively engaged about him, stand aloof.

The slate comes into requisition again, but the word he wants to
write he cannot remember. His anxiety, his eagerness, and affliction
at this pass are pitiable to behold. It seems as if he must go mad in
the necessity he feels for haste and the inability under which he
labours of expressing to do what or to fetch whom. He has written the
letter B, and there stopped. Of a sudden, in the height of his
misery, he puts Mr. before it. The old housekeeper suggests Bucket.
Thank heaven! That's his meaning.

Mr. Bucket is found to be downstairs, by appointment. Shall he come
up?

There is no possibility of misconstruing Sir Leicester's burning wish
to see him or the desire he signifies to have the room cleared of
every one but the housekeeper. It is speedily done, and Mr. Bucket
appears. Of all men upon earth, Sir Leicester seems fallen from his
high estate to place his sole trust and reliance upon this man.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I'm sorry to see you like this. I
hope you'll cheer up. I'm sure you will, on account of the family
credit."

Sir Leicester puts her letter in his hands and looks intently in his
face while he reads it. A new intelligence comes into Mr. Bucket's
eye as he reads on; with one hook of his finger, while that eye is
still glancing over the words, he indicates, "Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, I understand you."

Sir Leicester writes upon the slate. "Full forgiveness. Find--" Mr.
Bucket stops his hand.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I'll find her. But my search after
her must be begun out of hand. Not a minute must be lost."

With the quickness of thought, he follows Sir Leicester Dedlock's
look towards a little box upon a table.

"Bring it here, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet? Certainly. Open it
with one of these here keys? Certainly. The littlest key? TO be sure.
Take the notes out? So I will. Count 'em? That's soon done. Twenty
and thirty's fifty, and twenty's seventy, and fifty's one twenty, and
forty's one sixty. Take 'em for expenses? That I'll do, and render an
account of course. Don't spare money? No I won't."

The velocity and certainty of Mr. Bucket's interpretation on all
these heads is little short of miraculous. Mrs. Rouncewell, who holds
the light, is giddy with the swiftness of his eyes and hands as he
starts up, furnished for his journey.

"You're George's mother, old lady; that's about what you are, I
believe?" says Mr. Bucket aside, with his hat already on and
buttoning his coat.

"Yes, sir, I am his distressed mother."

"So I thought, according to what he mentioned to me just now. Well,
then, I'll tell you something. You needn't be distressed no more.
Your son's all right. Now, don't you begin a-crying, because what
you've got to do is to take care of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,
and you won't do that by crying. As to your son, he's all right, I
tell you; and he sends his loving duty, and hoping you're the same.
He's discharged honourable; that's about what HE is; with no more
imputation on his character than there is on yours, and yours is a
tidy one, I'LL bet a pound. You may trust me, for I took your son. He
conducted himself in a game way, too, on that occasion; and he's a
fine-made man, and you're a fine-made old lady, and you're a mother
and son, the pair of you, as might be showed for models in a caravan.
Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, what you've trusted to me I'll go
through with. Don't you be afraid of my turning out of my way, right
or left, or taking a sleep, or a wash, or a shave till I have found
what I go in search of. Say everything as is kind and forgiving on
your part? Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I will. And I wish you
better, and these family affairs smoothed over--as, Lord, many other
family affairs equally has been, and equally will be, to the end of
time."

With this peroration, Mr. Bucket, buttoned up, goes quietly out,
looking steadily before him as if he were already piercing the night
in quest of the fugitive.

His first step is to take himself to Lady Dedlock's rooms and look
all over them for any trifling indication that may help him. The
rooms are in darkness now; and to see Mr. Bucket with a wax-light in
his hand, holding it above his head and taking a sharp mental
inventory of the many delicate objects so curiously at variance with
himself, would be to see a sight--which nobody DOES see, as he is
particular to lock himself in.

"A spicy boudoir, this," says Mr. Bucket, who feels in a manner
furbished up in his French by the blow of the morning. "Must have
cost a sight of money. Rum articles to cut away from, these; she must
have been hard put to it!"

Opening and shutting table-drawers and looking into caskets and
jewel-cases, he sees the reflection of himself in various mirrors,
and moralizes thereon.

"One might suppose I was a-moving in the fashionable circles and
getting myself up for almac's," says Mr. Bucket. "I begin to think I
must be a swell in the Guards without knowing it."

Ever looking about, he has opened a dainty little chest in an inner
drawer. His great hand, turning over some gloves which it can
scarcely feel, they are so light and soft within it, comes upon a
white handkerchief.

"Hum! Let's have a look at YOU," says Mr. Bucket, putting down the
light. "What should YOU be kept by yourself for? What's YOUR motive?
Are you her ladyship's property, or somebody else's? You've got a
mark upon you somewheres or another, I suppose?"

He finds it as he speaks, "Esther Summerson."

"Oh!" says Mr. Bucket, pausing, with his finger at his ear. "Come,
I'll take YOU."

He completes his observations as quietly and carefully as he has
carried them on, leaves everything else precisely as he found it,
glides away after some five minutes in all, and passes into the
street. With a glance upward at the dimly lighted windows of Sir
Leicester's room, he sets off, full-swing, to the nearest
coach-stand, picks out the horse for his money, and directs to be
driven to the shooting gallery. Mr. Bucket does not claim to be a
scientific judge of horses, but he lays out a little money on the
principal events in that line, and generally sums up his knowledge of
the subject in the remark that when he sees a horse as can go, he
knows him.

His knowledge is not at fault in the present instance. Clattering
over the stones at a dangerous pace, yet thoughtfully bringing his
keen eyes to bear on every slinking creature whom he passes in the
midnight streets, and even on the lights in upper windows where
people are going or gone to bed, and on all the turnings that he
rattles by, and alike on the heavy sky, and on the earth where the
snow lies thin--for something may present itself to assist him,
anywhere--he dashes to his destination at such a speed that when he
stops the horse half smothers him in a cloud of steam.

"Unbear him half a moment to freshen him up, and I'll be back."

He runs up the long wooden entry and finds the trooper smoking his
pipe.

"I thought I should, George, after what you have gone through, my
lad. I haven't a word to spare. Now, honour! All to save a woman.
Miss Summerson that was here when Gridley died--that was the name, I
know--all right--where does she live?"

The trooper has just come from there and gives him the address, near
Oxford Street.

"You won't repent it, George. Good night!"

He is off again, with an impression of having seen Phil sitting by
the frosty fire staring at him open-mouthed, and gallops away again,
and gets out in a cloud of steam again.

Mr. Jarndyce, the only person up in the house, is just going to bed,
rises from his book on hearing the rapid ringing at the bell, and
comes down to the door in his dressing-gown.

"Don't be alarmed, sir." In a moment his visitor is confidential with
him in the hall, has shut the door, and stands with his hand upon the
lock. "I've had the pleasure of seeing you before. Inspector Bucket.
Look at that handkerchief, sir, Miss Esther Summerson's. Found it
myself put away in a drawer of Lady Dedlock's, quarter of an hour
ago. Not a moment to lose. Matter of life or death. You know Lady
Dedlock?"

"Yes."

"There has been a discovery there to-day. Family affairs have come
out. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, has had a fit--apoplexy or
paralysis--and couldn't be brought to, and precious time has been
lost. Lady Dedlock disappeared this afternoon and left a letter for
him that looks bad. Run your eye over it. Here it is!"

Mr. Jarndyce, having read it, asks him what he thinks.

"I don't know. It looks like suicide. Anyways, there's more and more
danger, every minute, of its drawing to that. I'd give a hundred
pound an hour to have got the start of the present time. Now, Mr.
Jarndyce, I am employed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to follow
her and find her, to save her and take her his forgiveness. I have
money and full power, but I want something else. I want Miss
Summerson."

Mr. Jarndyce in a troubled voice repeats, "Miss Summerson?"

"Now, Mr. Jarndyce"--Mr. Bucket has read his face with the greatest
attention all along--"I speak to you as a gentleman of a humane
heart, and under such pressing circumstances as don't often happen.
If ever delay was dangerous, it's dangerous now; and if ever you
couldn't afterwards forgive yourself for causing it, this is the
time. Eight or ten hours, worth, as I tell you, a hundred pound
apiece at least, have been lost since Lady Dedlock disappeared. I am
charged to find her. I am Inspector Bucket. Besides all the rest
that's heavy on her, she has upon her, as she believes, suspicion of
murder. If I follow her alone, she, being in ignorance of what Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, has communicated to me, may be driven to
desperation. But if I follow her in company with a young lady,
answering to the description of a young lady that she has a
tenderness for--I ask no question, and I say no more than that--she
will give me credit for being friendly. Let me come up with her and
be able to have the hold upon her of putting that young lady for'ard,
and I'll save her and prevail with her if she is alive. Let me come
up with her alone--a hard matter--and I'll do my best, but I don't
answer for what the best may be. Time flies; it's getting on for one
o'clock. When one strikes, there's another hour gone, and it's worth
a thousand pound now instead of a hundred."

This is all true, and the pressing nature of the case cannot be
questioned. Mr. Jarndyce begs him to remain there while he speaks to
Miss Summerson. Mr. Bucket says he will, but acting on his usual
principle, does no such thing, following upstairs instead and keeping
his man in sight. So he remains, dodging and lurking about in the
gloom of the staircase while they confer. In a very little time Mr.
Jarndyce comes down and tells him that Miss Summerson will join him
directly and place herself under his protection to accompany him
where he pleases. Mr. Bucket, satisfied, expresses high approval and
awaits her coming at the door.

There he mounts a high tower in his mind and looks out far and wide.
Many solitary figures he perceives creeping through the streets; many
solitary figures out on heaths, and roads, and lying under haystacks.
But the figure that he seeks is not among them. Other solitaries he
perceives, in nooks of bridges, looking over; and in shadowed places
down by the river's level; and a dark, dark, shapeless object
drifting with the tide, more solitary than all, clings with a
drowning hold on his attention.

Where is she? Living or dead, where is she? If, as he folds the
handkerchief and carefully puts it up, it were able with an enchanted
power to bring before him the place where she found it and the
night-landscape near the cottage where it covered the little child,
would he descry her there? On the waste where the brick-kilns are
burning with a pale blue flare, where the straw-roofs of the wretched
huts in which the bricks are made are being scattered by the wind,
where the clay and water are hard frozen and the mill in which the
gaunt blind horse goes round all day looks like an instrument of
human torture--traversing this deserted, blighted spot there is a
lonely figure with the sad world to itself, pelted by the snow and
driven by the wind, and cast out, it would seem, from all
companionship. It is the figure of a woman, too; but it is miserably
dressed, and no such clothes ever came through the hall and out at
the great door of the Dedlock mansion.




CHAPTER LVII

Esther's Narrative


I had gone to bed and fallen asleep when my guardian knocked at the
door of my room and begged me to get up directly. On my hurrying to
speak to him and learn what had happened, he told me, after a word or
two of preparation, that there had been a discovery at Sir Leicester
Dedlock's. That my mother had fled, that a person was now at our door
who was empowered to convey to her the fullest assurances of
affectionate protection and forgiveness if he could possibly find
her, and that I was sought for to accompany him in the hope that my
entreaties might prevail upon her if his failed. Something to this
general purpose I made out, but I was thrown into such a tumult of
alarm, and hurry and distress, that in spite of every effort I could
make to subdue my agitation, I did not seem, to myself, fully to
recover my right mind until hours had passed.

But I dressed and wrapped up expeditiously without waking Charley or
any one and went down to Mr. Bucket, who was the person entrusted
with the secret. In taking me to him my guardian told me this, and
also explained how it was that he had come to think of me. Mr.
Bucket, in a low voice, by the light of my guardian's candle, read to
me in the hall a letter that my mother had left upon her table; and I
suppose within ten minutes of my having been aroused I was sitting
beside him, rolling swiftly through the streets.

His manner was very keen, and yet considerate when he explained to me
that a great deal might depend on my being able to answer, without
confusion, a few questions that he wished to ask me. These were,
chiefly, whether I had had much communication with my mother (to whom
he only referred as Lady Dedlock), when and where I had spoken with
her last, and how she had become possessed of my handkerchief. When I
had satisfied him on these points, he asked me particularly to
consider--taking time to think--whether within my knowledge there was
any one, no matter where, in whom she might be at all likely to
confide under circumstances of the last necessity. I could think of
no one but my guardian. But by and by I mentioned Mr. Boythorn. He
came into my mind as connected with his old chivalrous manner of
mentioning my mother's name and with what my guardian had informed me
of his engagement to her sister and his unconscious connexion with
her unhappy story.

My companion had stopped the driver while we held this conversation,
that we might the better hear each other. He now told him to go on
again and said to me, after considering within himself for a few
moments, that he had made up his mind how to proceed. He was quite
willing to tell me what his plan was, but I did not feel clear enough
to understand it.

We had not driven very far from our lodgings when we stopped in a
by-street at a public-looking place lighted up with gas. Mr. Bucket
took me in and sat me in an arm-chair by a bright fire. It was now
past one, as I saw by the clock against the wall. Two police
officers, looking in their perfectly neat uniform not at all like
people who were up all night, were quietly writing at a desk; and the
place seemed very quiet altogether, except for some beating and
calling out at distant doors underground, to which nobody paid any
attention.

A third man in uniform, whom Mr. Bucket called and to whom he
whispered his instructions, went out; and then the two others advised
together while one wrote from Mr. Bucket's subdued dictation. It was
a description of my mother that they were busy with, for Mr. Bucket
brought it to me when it was done and read it in a whisper. It was
very accurate indeed.

The second officer, who had attended to it closely, then copied it
out and called in another man in uniform (there were several in an
outer room), who took it up and went away with it. All this was done
with the greatest dispatch and without the waste of a moment; yet
nobody was at all hurried. As soon as the paper was sent out upon its
travels, the two officers resumed their former quiet work of writing
with neatness and care. Mr. Bucket thoughtfully came and warmed the
soles of his boots, first one and then the other, at the fire.

"Are you well wrapped up, Miss Summerson?" he asked me as his eyes
met mine. "It's a desperate sharp night for a young lady to be out
in."

I told him I cared for no weather and was warmly clothed.

"It may be a long job," he observed; "but so that it ends well, never
mind, miss."

"I pray to heaven it may end well!" said I.

He nodded comfortingly. "You see, whatever you do, don't you go and
fret yourself. You keep yourself cool and equal for anything that may
happen, and it'll be the better for you, the better for me, the
better for Lady Dedlock, and the better for Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet."

He was really very kind and gentle, and as he stood before the fire
warming his boots and rubbing his face with his forefinger, I felt a
confidence in his sagacity which reassured me. It was not yet a
quarter to two when I heard horses' feet and wheels outside. "Now,
Miss Summerson," said he, "we are off, if you please!"

He gave me his arm, and the two officers courteously bowed me out,
and we found at the door a phaeton or barouche with a postilion and
post horses. Mr. Bucket handed me in and took his own seat on the
box. The man in uniform whom he had sent to fetch this equipage then
handed him up a dark lantern at his request, and when he had given a
few directions to the driver, we rattled away.

I was far from sure that I was not in a dream. We rattled with great
rapidity through such a labyrinth of streets that I soon lost all
idea where we were, except that we had crossed and re-crossed the
river, and still seemed to be traversing a low-lying, waterside,
dense neighbourhood of narrow thoroughfares chequered by docks and
basins, high piles of warehouses, swing-bridges, and masts of ships.
At length we stopped at the corner of a little slimy turning, which
the wind from the river, rushing up it, did not purify; and I saw my
companion, by the light of his lantern, in conference with several
men who looked like a mixture of police and sailors. Against the
mouldering wall by which they stood, there was a bill, on which I
could discern the words, "Found Drowned"; and this and an inscription
about drags possessed me with the awful suspicion shadowed forth in
our visit to that place.

I had no need to remind myself that I was not there by the indulgence
of any feeling of mine to increase the difficulties of the search, or
to lessen its hopes, or enhance its delays. I remained quiet, but
what I suffered in that dreadful spot I never can forget. And still
it was like the horror of a dream. A man yet dark and muddy, in long
swollen sodden boots and a hat like them, was called out of a boat
and whispered with Mr. Bucket, who went away with him down some
slippery steps--as if to look at something secret that he had to
show. They came back, wiping their hands upon their coats, after
turning over something wet; but thank God it was not what I feared!

After some further conference, Mr. Bucket (whom everybody seemed to
know and defer to) went in with the others at a door and left me in
the carriage, while the driver walked up and down by his horses to
warm himself. The tide was coming in, as I judged from the sound it
made, and I could hear it break at the end of the alley with a little
rush towards me. It never did so--and I thought it did so, hundreds
of times, in what can have been at the most a quarter of an hour, and
probably was less--but the thought shuddered through me that it would
cast my mother at the horses' feet.

Mr. Bucket came out again, exhorting the others to be vigilant,
darkened his lantern, and once more took his seat. "Don't you be
alarmed, Miss Summerson, on account of our coming down here," he
said, turning to me. "I only want to have everything in train and to
know that it is in train by looking after it myself. Get on, my lad!"

We appeared to retrace the way we had come. Not that I had taken note
of any particular objects in my perturbed state of mind, but judging
from the general character of the streets. We called at another
office or station for a minute and crossed the river again. During
the whole of this time, and during the whole search, my companion,
wrapped up on the box, never relaxed in his vigilance a single
moment; but when we crossed the bridge he seemed, if possible, to be
more on the alert than before. He stood up to look over the parapet,
he alighted and went back after a shadowy female figure that flitted
past us, and he gazed into the profound black pit of water with a
face that made my heart die within me. The river had a fearful look,
so overcast and secret, creeping away so fast between the low flat
lines of shore--so heavy with indistinct and awful shapes, both of
substance and shadow; so death-like and mysterious. I have seen it
many times since then, by sunlight and by moonlight, but never free
from the impressions of that journey. In my memory the lights upon
the bridge are always burning dim, the cutting wind is eddying round
the homeless woman whom we pass, the monotonous wheels are whirling
on, and the light of the carriage-lamps reflected back looks palely
in upon me--a face rising out of the dreaded water.

Clattering and clattering through the empty streets, we came at
length from the pavement on to dark smooth roads and began to leave
the houses behind us. After a while I recognized the familiar way to
Saint Albans. At Barnet fresh horses were ready for us, and we
changed and went on. It was very cold indeed, and the open country
was white with snow, though none was falling then.

"An old acquaintance of yours, this road, Miss Summerson," said Mr.
Bucket cheerfully.

"Yes," I returned. "Have you gathered any intelligence?"

"None that can be quite depended on as yet," he answered, "but it's
early times as yet."

He had gone into every late or early public-house where there
was a light (they were not a few at that time, the road being
then much frequented by drovers) and had got down to talk to the
turnpike-keepers. I had heard him ordering drink, and chinking money,
and making himself agreeable and merry everywhere; but whenever he
took his seat upon the box again, his face resumed its watchful
steady look, and he always said to the driver in the same business
tone, "Get on, my lad!"

With all these stoppages, it was between five and six o'clock and we
were yet a few miles short of Saint Albans when he came out of one of
these houses and handed me in a cup of tea.

"Drink it, Miss Summerson, it'll do you good. You're beginning to get
more yourself now, ain't you?"

I thanked him and said I hoped so.

"You was what you may call stunned at first," he returned; "and Lord,
no wonder! Don't speak loud, my dear. It's all right. She's on
ahead."

I don't know what joyful exclamation I made or was going to make, but
he put up his finger and I stopped myself.

"Passed through here on foot this evening about eight or nine. I
heard of her first at the archway toll, over at Highgate, but
couldn't make quite sure. Traced her all along, on and off. Picked
her up at one place, and dropped her at another; but she's before us
now, safe. Take hold of this cup and saucer, ostler. Now, if you
wasn't brought up to the butter trade, look out and see if you can
catch half a crown in your t'other hand. One, two, three, and there
you are! Now, my lad, try a gallop!"

We were soon in Saint Albans and alighted a little before day, when I
was just beginning to arrange and comprehend the occurrences of the
night and really to believe that they were not a dream. Leaving the
carriage at the posting-house and ordering fresh horses to be ready,
my companion gave me his arm, and we went towards home.

"As this is your regular abode, Miss Summerson, you see," he
observed, "I should like to know whether you've been asked for by any
stranger answering the description, or whether Mr. Jarndyce has. I
don't much expect it, but it might be."

As we ascended the hill, he looked about him with a sharp eye--the
day was now breaking--and reminded me that I had come down it one
night, as I had reason for remembering, with my little servant and
poor Jo, whom he called Toughey.

I wondered how he knew that.

"When you passed a man upon the road, just yonder, you know," said
Mr. Bucket.

Yes, I remembered that too, very well.

"That was me," said Mr. Bucket.

Seeing my surprise, he went on, "I drove down in a gig that afternoon
to look after that boy. You might have heard my wheels when you came
out to look after him yourself, for I was aware of you and your
little maid going up when I was walking the horse down. Making an
inquiry or two about him in the town, I soon heard what company he
was in and was coming among the brick-fields to look for him when I
observed you bringing him home here."

"Had he committed any crime?" I asked.

"None was charged against him," said Mr. Bucket, coolly lifting off
his hat, "but I suppose he wasn't over-particular. No. What I wanted
him for was in connexion with keeping this very matter of Lady
Dedlock quiet. He had been making his tongue more free than welcome
as to a small accidental service he had been paid for by the deceased
Mr. Tulkinghorn; and it wouldn't do, at any sort of price, to have
him playing those games. So having warned him out of London, I made
an afternoon of it to warn him to keep out of it now he WAS away, and
go farther from it, and maintain a bright look-out that I didn't
catch him coming back again."

"Poor creature!" said I.

"Poor enough," assented Mr. Bucket, "and trouble enough, and well
enough away from London, or anywhere else. I was regularly turned on
my back when I found him taken up by your establishment, I do assure
you."

I asked him why. "Why, my dear?" said Mr. Bucket. "Naturally there
was no end to his tongue then. He might as well have been born with a
yard and a half of it, and a remnant over."

Although I remember this conversation now, my head was in confusion
at the time, and my power of attention hardly did more than enable me
to understand that he entered into these particulars to divert me.
With the same kind intention, manifestly, he often spoke to me of
indifferent things, while his face was busy with the one object that
we had in view. He still pursued this subject as we turned in at the
garden-gate.

"Ah!" said Mr. Bucket. "Here we are, and a nice retired place it is.
Puts a man in mind of the country house in the Woodpecker-tapping,
that was known by the smoke which so gracefully curled. They're early
with the kitchen fire, and that denotes good servants. But what
you've always got to be careful of with servants is who comes to see
'em; you never know what they're up to if you don't know that. And
another thing, my dear. Whenever you find a young man behind the
kitchen-door, you give that young man in charge on suspicion of being
secreted in a dwelling-house with an unlawful purpose."

We were now in front of the house; he looked attentively and closely
at the gravel for footprints before he raised his eyes to the
windows.

"Do you generally put that elderly young gentleman in the same room
when he's on a visit here, Miss Summerson?" he inquired, glancing at
Mr. Skimpole's usual chamber.

"You know Mr. Skimpole!" said I.

"What do you call him again?" returned Mr. Bucket, bending down his
ear. "Skimpole, is it? I've often wondered what his name might be.
Skimpole. Not John, I should say, nor yet Jacob?"

"Harold," I told him.

"Harold. Yes. He's a queer bird is Harold," said Mr. Bucket, eyeing
me with great expression.

"He is a singular character," said I.

"No idea of money," observed Mr. Bucket. "He takes it, though!"

I involuntarily returned for answer that I perceived Mr. Bucket knew
him.

"Why, now I'll tell you, Miss Summerson," he replied. "Your mind will
be all the better for not running on one point too continually, and
I'll tell you for a change. It was him as pointed out to me where
Toughey was. I made up my mind that night to come to the door and ask
for Toughey, if that was all; but willing to try a move or so first,
if any such was on the board, I just pitched up a morsel of gravel at
that window where I saw a shadow. As soon as Harold opens it and I
have had a look at him, thinks I, you're the man for me. So I
smoothed him down a bit about not wanting to disturb the family after
they was gone to bed and about its being a thing to be regretted that
charitable young ladies should harbour vagrants; and then, when I
pretty well understood his ways, I said I should consider a fypunnote
well bestowed if I could relieve the premises of Toughey without
causing any noise or trouble. Then says he, lifting up his eyebrows
in the gayest way, 'It's no use mentioning a fypunnote to me, my
friend, because I'm a mere child in such matters and have no idea of
money.' Of course I understood what his taking it so easy meant; and
being now quite sure he was the man for me, I wrapped the note round
a little stone and threw it up to him. Well! He laughs and beams, and
looks as innocent as you like, and says, 'But I don't know the value
of these things. What am I to DO with this?' 'Spend it, sir,' says I.
'But I shall be taken in,' he says, 'they won't give me the right
change, I shall lose it, it's no use to me.' Lord, you never saw such
a face as he carried it with! Of course he told me where to find
Toughey, and I found him."

I regarded this as very treacherous on the part of Mr. Skimpole
towards my guardian and as passing the usual bounds of his childish
innocence.

"Bounds, my dear?" returned Mr. Bucket. "Bounds? Now, Miss Summerson,
I'll give you a piece of advice that your husband will find useful
when you are happily married and have got a family about you.
Whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent as can be in
all concerning money, look well after your own money, for they are
dead certain to collar it if they can. Whenever a person proclaims to
you 'In worldly matters I'm a child,' you consider that that person
is only a-crying off from being held accountable and that you have
got that person's number, and it's Number One. Now, I am not a
poetical man myself, except in a vocal way when it goes round a
company, but I'm a practical one, and that's my experience. So's this
rule. Fast and loose in one thing, fast and loose in everything. I
never knew it fail. No more will you. Nor no one. With which caution
to the unwary, my dear, I take the liberty of pulling this here bell,
and so go back to our business."

I believe it had not been for a moment out of his mind, any more than
it had been out of my mind, or out of his face. The whole household
were amazed to see me, without any notice, at that time in the
morning, and so accompanied; and their surprise was not diminished by
my inquiries. No one, however, had been there. It could not be
doubted that this was the truth.

"Then, Miss Summerson," said my companion, "we can't be too soon at
the cottage where those brickmakers are to be found. Most inquiries
there I leave to you, if you'll be so good as to make 'em. The
naturalest way is the best way, and the naturalest way is your own
way."

We set off again immediately. On arriving at the cottage, we found it
shut up and apparently deserted, but one of the neighbours who knew
me and who came out when I was trying to make some one hear informed
me that the two women and their husbands now lived together in
another house, made of loose rough bricks, which stood on the margin
of the piece of ground where the kilns were and where the long rows
of bricks were drying. We lost no time in repairing to this place,
which was within a few hundred yards; and as the door stood ajar, I
pushed it open.

There were only three of them sitting at breakfast, the child lying
asleep on a bed in the corner. It was Jenny, the mother of the dead
child, who was absent. The other woman rose on seeing me; and the
men, though they were, as usual, sulky and silent, each gave me a
morose nod of recognition. A look passed between them when Mr. Bucket
followed me in, and I was surprised to see that the woman evidently
knew him.

I had asked leave to enter of course. Liz (the only name by which I
knew her) rose to give me her own chair, but I sat down on a stool
near the fire, and Mr. Bucket took a corner of the bedstead. Now that
I had to speak and was among people with whom I was not familiar, I
became conscious of being hurried and giddy. It was very difficult to
begin, and I could not help bursting into tears.

"Liz," said I, "I have come a long way in the night and through the
snow to inquire after a lady--"

"Who has been here, you know," Mr. Bucket struck in, addressing the
whole group with a composed propitiatory face; "that's the lady the
young lady means. The lady that was here last night, you know."

"And who told YOU as there was anybody here?" inquired Jenny's
husband, who had made a surly stop in his eating to listen and now
measured him with his eye.

"A person of the name of Michael Jackson, with a blue welveteen
waistcoat with a double row of mother of pearl buttons," Mr. Bucket
immediately answered.

"He had as good mind his own business, whoever he is," growled the
man.

"He's out of employment, I believe," said Mr. Bucket apologetically
for Michael Jackson, "and so gets talking."

The woman had not resumed her chair, but stood faltering with her
hand upon its broken back, looking at me. I thought she would have
spoken to me privately if she had dared. She was still in this
attitude of uncertainty when her husband, who was eating with a lump
of bread and fat in one hand and his clasp-knife in the other, struck
the handle of his knife violently on the table and told her with an
oath to mind HER own business at any rate and sit down.

"I should like to have seen Jenny very much," said I, "for I am sure
she would have told me all she could about this lady, whom I am very
anxious indeed--you cannot think how anxious--to overtake. Will Jenny
be here soon? Where is she?"

The woman had a great desire to answer, but the man, with another
oath, openly kicked at her foot with his heavy boot. He left it to
Jenny's husband to say what he chose, and after a dogged silence the
latter turned his shaggy head towards me.

"I'm not partial to gentlefolks coming into my place, as you've heerd
me say afore now, I think, miss. I let their places be, and it's
curious they can't let my place be. There'd be a pretty shine made if
I was to go a-wisitin THEM, I think. Howsoever, I don't so much
complain of you as of some others, and I'm agreeable to make you a
civil answer, though I give notice that I'm not a-going to be drawed
like a badger. Will Jenny be here soon? No she won't. Where is she?
She's gone up to Lunnun."

"Did she go last night?" I asked.

"Did she go last night? Ah! She went last night," he answered with a
sulky jerk of his head.

"But was she here when the lady came? And what did the lady say to
her? And where is the lady gone? I beg and pray you to be so kind as
to tell me," said I, "for I am in great distress to know."

"If my master would let me speak, and not say a word of harm--" the
woman timidly began.

"Your master," said her husband, muttering an imprecation with slow
emphasis, "will break your neck if you meddle with wot don't concern
you."

After another silence, the husband of the absent woman, turning to me
again, answered me with his usual grumbling unwillingness.

"Wos Jenny here when the lady come? Yes, she wos here when the lady
come. Wot did the lady say to her? Well, I'll tell you wot the lady
said to her. She said, 'You remember me as come one time to talk to
you about the young lady as had been a-wisiting of you? You remember
me as give you somethink handsome for a handkercher wot she had
left?' Ah, she remembered. So we all did. Well, then, wos that young
lady up at the house now? No, she warn't up at the house now. Well,
then, lookee here. The lady was upon a journey all alone, strange as
we might think it, and could she rest herself where you're a setten
for a hour or so. Yes she could, and so she did. Then she went--it
might be at twenty minutes past eleven, and it might be at twenty
minutes past twelve; we ain't got no watches here to know the time
by, nor yet clocks. Where did she go? I don't know where she go'd.
She went one way, and Jenny went another; one went right to Lunnun,
and t'other went right from it. That's all about it. Ask this man. He
heerd it all, and see it all. He knows."

The other man repeated, "That's all about it."

"Was the lady crying?" I inquired.

"Devil a bit," returned the first man. "Her shoes was the worse, and
her clothes was the worse, but she warn't--not as I see."

The woman sat with her arms crossed and her eyes upon the ground. Her
husband had turned his seat a little so as to face her and kept his
hammer-like hand upon the table as if it were in readiness to execute
his threat if she disobeyed him.

"I hope you will not object to my asking your wife," said I, "how the
lady looked."

"Come, then!" he gruffly cried to her. "You hear what she says. Cut
it short and tell her."

"Bad," replied the woman. "Pale and exhausted. Very bad."

"Did she speak much?"

"Not much, but her voice was hoarse."

She answered, looking all the while at her husband for leave.

"Was she faint?" said I. "Did she eat or drink here?"

"Go on!" said the husband in answer to her look. "Tell her and cut it
short."

"She had a little water, miss, and Jenny fetched her some bread and
tea. But she hardly touched it."

"And when she went from here," I was proceeding, when Jenny's husband
impatiently took me up.

"When she went from here, she went right away nor'ard by the high
road. Ask on the road if you doubt me, and see if it warn't so. Now,
there's the end. That's all about it."

I glanced at my companion, and finding that he had already risen and
was ready to depart, thanked them for what they had told me, and took
my leave. The woman looked full at Mr. Bucket as he went out, and he
looked full at her.

"Now, Miss Summerson," he said to me as we walked quickly away.
"They've got her ladyship's watch among 'em. That's a positive fact."

"You saw it?" I exclaimed.

"Just as good as saw it," he returned. "Else why should he talk about
his 'twenty minutes past' and about his having no watch to tell the
time by? Twenty minutes! He don't usually cut his time so fine as
that. If he comes to half-hours, it's as much as HE does. Now, you
see, either her ladyship gave him that watch or he took it. I think
she gave it him. Now, what should she give it him for? What should
she give it him for?"

He repeated this question to himself several times as we hurried on,
appearing to balance between a variety of answers that arose in his
mind.

"If time could be spared," said Mr. Bucket, "which is the only thing
that can't be spared in this case, I might get it out of that woman;
but it's too doubtful a chance to trust to under present
circumstances. They are up to keeping a close eye upon her, and any
fool knows that a poor creetur like her, beaten and kicked and
scarred and bruised from head to foot, will stand by the husband that
ill uses her through thick and thin. There's something kept back.
It's a pity but what we had seen the other woman."

I regretted it exceedingly, for she was very grateful, and I felt
sure would have resisted no entreaty of mine.

"It's possible, Miss Summerson," said Mr. Bucket, pondering on it,
"that her ladyship sent her up to London with some word for you, and
it's possible that her husband got the watch to let her go. It don't
come out altogether so plain as to please me, but it's on the cards.
Now, I don't take kindly to laying out the money of Sir Leicester
Dedlock, Baronet, on these roughs, and I don't see my way to the
usefulness of it at present. No! So far our road, Miss Summerson, is
for'ard--straight ahead--and keeping everything quiet!"

We called at home once more that I might send a hasty note to my
guardian, and then we hurried back to where we had left the carriage.
The horses were brought out as soon as we were seen coming, and we
were on the road again in a few minutes.

It had set in snowing at daybreak, and it now snowed hard. The air
was so thick with the darkness of the day and the density of the fall
that we could see but a very little way in any direction. Although it
was extremely cold, the snow was but partially frozen, and it
churned--with a sound as if it were a beach of small shells--under
the hoofs of the horses into mire and water. They sometimes slipped
and floundered for a mile together, and we were obliged to come to a
standstill to rest them. One horse fell three times in this first
stage, and trembled so and was so shaken that the driver had to
dismount from his saddle and lead him at last.

I could eat nothing and could not sleep, and I grew so nervous under
those delays and the slow pace at which we travelled that I had an
unreasonable desire upon me to get out and walk. Yielding to my
companion's better sense, however, I remained where I was. All this
time, kept fresh by a certain enjoyment of the work in which he was
engaged, he was up and down at every house we came to, addressing
people whom he had never beheld before as old acquaintances, running
in to warm himself at every fire he saw, talking and drinking and
shaking hands at every bar and tap, friendly with every waggoner,
wheelwright, blacksmith, and toll-taker, yet never seeming to lose
time, and always mounting to the box again with his watchful, steady
face and his business-like "Get on, my lad!"

When we were changing horses the next time, he came from the
stable-yard, with the wet snow encrusted upon him and dropping off
him--plashing and crashing through it to his wet knees as he had been
doing frequently since we left Saint Albans--and spoke to me at the
carriage side.

"Keep up your spirits. It's certainly true that she came on here,
Miss Summerson. There's not a doubt of the dress by this time, and
the dress has been seen here."

"Still on foot?" said I.

"Still on foot. I think the gentleman you mentioned must be the point
she's aiming at, and yet I don't like his living down in her own part
of the country neither."

"I know so little," said I. "There may be some one else nearer here,
of whom I never heard."

"That's true. But whatever you do, don't you fall a-crying, my dear;
and don't you worry yourself no more than you can help. Get on, my
lad!"

The sleet fell all that day unceasingly, a thick mist came on early,
and it never rose or lightened for a moment. Such roads I had never
seen. I sometimes feared we had missed the way and got into the
ploughed grounds or the marshes. If I ever thought of the time I had
been out, it presented itself as an indefinite period of great
duration, and I seemed, in a strange way, never to have been free
from the anxiety under which I then laboured.

As we advanced, I began to feel misgivings that my companion lost
confidence. He was the same as before with all the roadside people,
but he looked graver when he sat by himself on the box. I saw his
finger uneasily going across and across his mouth during the whole of
one long weary stage. I overheard that he began to ask the drivers of
coaches and other vehicles coming towards us what passengers they had
seen in other coaches and vehicles that were in advance. Their
replies did not encourage him. He always gave me a reassuring beck of
his finger and lift of his eyelid as he got upon the box again, but
he seemed perplexed now when he said, "Get on, my lad!"

At last, when we were changing, he told me that he had lost the track
of the dress so long that he began to be surprised. It was nothing,
he said, to lose such a track for one while, and to take it up for
another while, and so on; but it had disappeared here in an
unaccountable manner, and we had not come upon it since. This
corroborated the apprehensions I had formed, when he began to look at
direction-posts, and to leave the carriage at cross roads for a
quarter of an hour at a time while he explored them. But I was not to
be down-hearted, he told me, for it was as likely as not that the
next stage might set us right again.

The next stage, however, ended as that one ended; we had no new clue.
There was a spacious inn here, solitary, but a comfortable
substantial building, and as we drove in under a large gateway before
I knew it, where a landlady and her pretty daughters came to the
carriage-door, entreating me to alight and refresh myself while the
horses were making ready, I thought it would be uncharitable to
refuse. They took me upstairs to a warm room and left me there.

It was at the corner of the house, I remember, looking two ways. On
one side to a stable-yard open to a by-road, where the ostlers were
unharnessing the splashed and tired horses from the muddy carriage,
and beyond that to the by-road itself, across which the sign was
heavily swinging; on the other side to a wood of dark pine-trees.
Their branches were encumbered with snow, and it silently dropped off
in wet heaps while I stood at the window. Night was setting in, and
its bleakness was enhanced by the contrast of the pictured fire
glowing and gleaming in the window-pane. As I looked among the stems
of the trees and followed the discoloured marks in the snow where the
thaw was sinking into it and undermining it, I thought of the
motherly face brightly set off by daughters that had just now
welcomed me and of MY mother lying down in such a wood to die.

I was frightened when I found them all about me, but I remembered
that before I fainted I tried very hard not to do it; and that was
some little comfort. They cushioned me up on a large sofa by the
fire, and then the comely landlady told me that I must travel no
further to-night, but must go to bed. But this put me into such a
tremble lest they should detain me there that she soon recalled her
words and compromised for a rest of half an hour.

A good endearing creature she was. She and her three fair girls, all
so busy about me. I was to take hot soup and broiled fowl, while Mr.
Bucket dried himself and dined elsewhere; but I could not do it when
a snug round table was presently spread by the fireside, though I was
very unwilling to disappoint them. However, I could take some toast
and some hot negus, and as I really enjoyed that refreshment, it made
some recompense.

Punctual to the time, at the half-hour's end the carriage came
rumbling under the gateway, and they took me down, warmed, refreshed,
comforted by kindness, and safe (I assured them) not to faint any
more. After I had got in and had taken a grateful leave of them all,
the youngest daughter--a blooming girl of nineteen, who was to be the
first married, they had told me--got upon the carriage step, reached
in, and kissed me. I have never seen her, from that hour, but I think
of her to this hour as my friend.

The transparent windows with the fire and light, looking so bright
and warm from the cold darkness out of doors, were soon gone, and
again we were crushing and churning the loose snow. We went on with
toil enough, but the dismal roads were not much worse than they had
been, and the stage was only nine miles. My companion smoking on the
box--I had thought at the last inn of begging him to do so when I saw
him standing at a great fire in a comfortable cloud of tobacco--was
as vigilant as ever and as quickly down and up again when we came to
any human abode or any human creature. He had lighted his little dark
lantern, which seemed to be a favourite with him, for we had lamps to
the carriage; and every now and then he turned it upon me to see that
I was doing well. There was a folding-window to the carriage-head,
but I never closed it, for it seemed like shutting out hope.

We came to the end of the stage, and still the lost trace was not
recovered. I looked at him anxiously when we stopped to change, but I
knew by his yet graver face as he stood watching the ostlers that he
had heard nothing. Almost in an instant afterwards, as I leaned back
in my seat, he looked in, with his lighted lantern in his hand, an
excited and quite different man.

"What is it?" said I, starting. "Is she here?"

"No, no. Don't deceive yourself, my dear. Nobody's here. But I've got
it!"

The crystallized snow was in his eyelashes, in his hair, lying in
ridges on his dress. He had to shake it from his face and get his
breath before he spoke to me.

"Now, Miss Summerson," said he, beating his finger on the apron,
"don't you be disappointed at what I'm a-going to do. You know me.
I'm Inspector Bucket, and you can trust me. We've come a long way;
never mind. Four horses out there for the next stage up! Quick!"

There was a commotion in the yard, and a man came running out of the
stables to know if he meant up or down.

"Up, I tell you! Up! Ain't it English? Up!"

"Up?" said I, astonished. "To London! Are we going back?"

"Miss Summerson," he answered, "back. Straight back as a die. You
know me. Don't be afraid. I'll follow the other, by G----"

"The other?" I repeated. "Who?"

"You called her Jenny, didn't you? I'll follow her. Bring those two
pair out here for a crown a man. Wake up, some of you!"

"You will not desert this lady we are in search of; you will not
abandon her on such a night and in such a state of mind as I know her
to be in!" said I, in an agony, and grasping his hand.

"You are right, my dear, I won't. But I'll follow the other. Look
alive here with them horses. Send a man for'ard in the saddle to the
next stage, and let him send another for'ard again, and order four
on, up, right through. My darling, don't you be afraid!"

These orders and the way in which he ran about the yard urging them
caused a general excitement that was scarcely less bewildering to me
than the sudden change. But in the height of the confusion, a mounted
man galloped away to order the relays, and our horses were put to
with great speed.

"My dear," said Mr. Bucket, jumping to his seat and looking in again,
"--you'll excuse me if I'm too familiar--don't you fret and worry
yourself no more than you can help. I say nothing else at present;
but you know me, my dear; now, don't you?"

I endeavoured to say that I knew he was far more capable than I of
deciding what we ought to do, but was he sure that this was right?
Could I not go forward by myself in search of--I grasped his hand
again in my distress and whispered it to him--of my own mother.

"My dear," he answered, "I know, I know, and would I put you wrong,
do you think? Inspector Bucket. Now you know me, don't you?"

What could I say but yes!

"Then you keep up as good a heart as you can, and you rely upon me
for standing by you, no less than by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet.
Now, are you right there?"

"All right, sir!"

"Off she goes, then. And get on, my lads!"

We were again upon the melancholy road by which we had come, tearing
up the miry sleet and thawing snow as if they were torn up by a
waterwheel.




CHAPTER LVIII

A Wintry Day and Night


Still impassive, as behoves its breeding, the Dedlock town house
carries itself as usual towards the street of dismal grandeur. There
are powdered heads from time to time in the little windows of the
hall, looking out at the untaxed powder falling all day from the sky;
and in the same conservatory there is peach blossom turning itself
exotically to the great hall fire from the nipping weather out of
doors. It is given out that my Lady has gone down into Lincolnshire,
but is expected to return presently.

Rumour, busy overmuch, however, will not go down into Lincolnshire.
It persists in flitting and chattering about town. It knows that that
poor unfortunate man, Sir Leicester, has been sadly used. It hears,
my dear child, all sorts of shocking things. It makes the world of
five miles round quite merry. Not to know that there is something
wrong at the Dedlocks' is to augur yourself unknown. One of the
peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton throats is already apprised
of all the principal circumstances that will come out before the
Lords on Sir Leicester's application for a bill of divorce.

At Blaze and Sparkle's the jewellers and at Sheen and Gloss's the
mercers, it is and will be for several hours the topic of the age,
the feature of the century. The patronesses of those establishments,
albeit so loftily inscrutable, being as nicely weighed and measured
there as any other article of the stock-in-trade, are perfectly
understood in this new fashion by the rawest hand behind the counter.
"Our people, Mr. Jones," said Blaze and Sparkle to the hand in
question on engaging him, "our people, sir, are sheep--mere sheep.
Where two or three marked ones go, all the rest follow. Keep those
two or three in your eye, Mr. Jones, and you have the flock." So,
likewise, Sheen and Gloss to THEIR Jones, in reference to knowing
where to have the fashionable people and how to bring what they
(Sheen and Gloss) choose into fashion. On similar unerring
principles, Mr. Sladdery the librarian, and indeed the great farmer
of gorgeous sheep, admits this very day, "Why yes, sir, there
certainly ARE reports concerning Lady Dedlock, very current indeed
among my high connexion, sir. You see, my high connexion must talk
about something, sir; and it's only to get a subject into vogue with
one or two ladies I could name to make it go down with the whole.
Just what I should have done with those ladies, sir, in the case of
any novelty you had left to me to bring in, they have done of
themselves in this case through knowing Lady Dedlock and being
perhaps a little innocently jealous of her too, sir. You'll find,
sir, that this topic will be very popular among my high connexion. If
it had been a speculation, sir, it would have brought money. And when
I say so, you may trust to my being right, sir, for I have made it my
business to study my high connexion and to be able to wind it up like
a clock, sir."

Thus rumour thrives in the capital, and will not go down into
Lincolnshire. By half-past five, post meridian, Horse Guards' time,
it has even elicited a new remark from the Honourable Mr. Stables,
which bids fair to outshine the old one, on which he has so long
rested his colloquial reputation. This sparkling sally is to the
effect that although he always knew she was the best-groomed woman in
the stud, he had no idea she was a bolter. It is immensely received
in turf-circles.

At feasts and festivals also, in firmaments she has often graced, and
among constellations she outshone but yesterday, she is still the
prevalent subject. What is it? Who is it? When was it? Where was it?
How was it? She is discussed by her dear friends with all the
genteelest slang in vogue, with the last new word, the last new
manner, the last new drawl, and the perfection of polite
indifference. A remarkable feature of the theme is that it is found
to be so inspiring that several people come out upon it who never
came out before--positively say things! William Buffy carries one of
these smartnesses from the place where he dines down to the House,
where the Whip for his party hands it about with his snuff-box to
keep men together who want to be off, with such effect that the
Speaker (who has had it privately insinuated into his own ear under
the corner of his wig) cries, "Order at the bar!" three times without
making an impression.

And not the least amazing circumstance connected with her being
vaguely the town talk is that people hovering on the confines of Mr.
Sladdery's high connexion, people who know nothing and ever did know
nothing about her, think it essential to their reputation to pretend
that she is their topic too, and to retail her at second-hand with
the last new word and the last new manner, and the last new drawl,
and the last new polite indifference, and all the rest of it, all at
second-hand but considered equal to new in inferior systems and to
fainter stars. If there be any man of letters, art, or science among
these little dealers, how noble in him to support the feeble sisters
on such majestic crutches!

So goes the wintry day outside the Dedlock mansion. How within it?

Sir Leicester, lying in his bed, can speak a little, though with
difficulty and indistinctness. He is enjoined to silence and to rest,
and they have given him some opiate to lull his pain, for his old
enemy is very hard with him. He is never asleep, though sometimes he
seems to fall into a dull waking doze. He caused his bedstead to be
moved out nearer to the window when he heard it was such inclement
weather, and his head to be so adjusted that he could see the driving
snow and sleet. He watches it as it falls, throughout the whole
wintry day.

Upon the least noise in the house, which is kept hushed, his hand is
at the pencil. The old housekeeper, sitting by him, knows what he
would write and whispers, "No, he has not come back yet, Sir
Leicester. It was late last night when he went. He has been but a
little time gone yet."

He withdraws his hand and falls to looking at the sleet and snow
again until they seem, by being long looked at, to fall so thick and
fast that he is obliged to close his eyes for a minute on the giddy
whirl of white flakes and icy blots.

He began to look at them as soon as it was light. The day is not yet
far spent when he conceives it to be necessary that her rooms should
be prepared for her. It is very cold and wet. Let there be good
fires. Let them know that she is expected. Please see to it yourself.
He writes to this purpose on his slate, and Mrs. Rouncewell with a
heavy heart obeys.

"For I dread, George," the old lady says to her son, who waits below
to keep her company when she has a little leisure, "I dread, my dear,
that my Lady will never more set foot within these walls."

"That's a bad presentiment, mother."

"Nor yet within the walls of Chesney Wold, my dear."

"That's worse. But why, mother?"

"When I saw my Lady yesterday, George, she looked to me--and I may
say at me too--as if the step on the Ghost's Walk had almost walked
her down."

"Come, come! You alarm yourself with old-story fears, mother."

"No I don't, my dear. No I don't. It's going on for sixty year that I
have been in this family, and I never had any fears for it before.
But it's breaking up, my dear; the great old Dedlock family is
breaking up."

"I hope not, mother."

"I am thankful I have lived long enough to be with Sir Leicester in
this illness and trouble, for I know I am not too old nor too useless
to be a welcomer sight to him than anybody else in my place would be.
But the step on the Ghost's Walk will walk my Lady down, George; it
has been many a day behind her, and now it will pass her and go on."

"Well, mother dear, I say again, I hope not."

"Ah, so do I, George," the old lady returns, shaking her head and
parting her folded hands. "But if my fears come true, and he has to
know it, who will tell him!"

"Are these her rooms?"

"These are my Lady's rooms, just as she left them."

"Why, now," says the trooper, glancing round him and speaking in a
lower voice, "I begin to understand how you come to think as you do
think, mother. Rooms get an awful look about them when they are
fitted up, like these, for one person you are used to see in them,
and that person is away under any shadow, let alone being God knows
where."

He is not far out. As all partings foreshadow the great final one,
so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper
what your room and what mine must one day be. My Lady's state has a
hollow look, thus gloomy and abandoned; and in the inner apartment,
where Mr. Bucket last night made his secret perquisition, the traces
of her dresses and her ornaments, even the mirrors accustomed to
reflect them when they were a portion of herself, have a desolate and
vacant air. Dark and cold as the wintry day is, it is darker and
colder in these deserted chambers than in many a hut that will barely
exclude the weather; and though the servants heap fires in the grates
and set the couches and the chairs within the warm glass screens that
let their ruddy light shoot through to the furthest corners, there is
a heavy cloud upon the rooms which no light will dispel.

The old housekeeper and her son remain until the preparations are
complete, and then she returns upstairs. Volumnia has taken Mrs.
Rouncewell's place in the meantime, though pearl necklaces and rouge
pots, however calculated to embellish Bath, are but indifferent
comforts to the invalid under present circumstances. Volumnia, not
being supposed to know (and indeed not knowing) what is the matter,
has found it a ticklish task to offer appropriate observations and
consequently has supplied their place with distracting smoothings of
the bed-linen, elaborate locomotion on tiptoe, vigilant peeping at
her kinsman's eyes, and one exasperating whisper to herself of, "He
is asleep." In disproof of which superfluous remark Sir Leicester has
indignantly written on the slate, "I am not."

Yielding, therefore, the chair at the bedside to the quaint old
housekeeper, Volumnia sits at a table a little removed,
sympathetically sighing. Sir Leicester watches the sleet and snow and
listens for the returning steps that he expects. In the ears of his
old servant, looking as if she had stepped out of an old
picture-frame to attend a summoned Dedlock to another world, the
silence is fraught with echoes of her own words, "Who will tell him!"

He has been under his valet's hands this morning to be made
presentable and is as well got up as the circumstances will allow. He
is propped with pillows, his grey hair is brushed in its usual
manner, his linen is arranged to a nicety, and he is wrapped in a
responsible dressing-gown. His eye-glass and his watch are ready to
his hand. It is necessary--less to his own dignity now perhaps than
for her sake--that he should be seen as little disturbed and as much
himself as may be. Women will talk, and Volumnia, though a Dedlock,
is no exceptional case. He keeps her here, there is little doubt, to
prevent her talking somewhere else. He is very ill, but he makes his
present stand against distress of mind and body most courageously.

The fair Volumnia, being one of those sprightly girls who cannot long
continue silent without imminent peril of seizure by the dragon
Boredom, soon indicates the approach of that monster with a series of
undisguisable yawns. Finding it impossible to suppress those yawns by
any other process than conversation, she compliments Mrs. Rouncewell
on her son, declaring that he positively is one of the finest figures
she ever saw and as soldierly a looking person, she should think, as
what's his name, her favourite Life Guardsman--the man she dotes on,
the dearest of creatures--who was killed at Waterloo.

Sir Leicester hears this tribute with so much surprise and stares
about him in such a confused way that Mrs. Rouncewell feels it
necessary to explain.

"Miss Dedlock don't speak of my eldest son, Sir Leicester, but my
youngest. I have found him. He has come home."

Sir Leicester breaks silence with a harsh cry. "George? Your son
George come home, Mrs. Rouncewell?"

The old housekeeper wipes her eyes. "Thank God. Yes, Sir Leicester."

Does this discovery of some one lost, this return of some one so long
gone, come upon him as a strong confirmation of his hopes? Does he
think, "Shall I not, with the aid I have, recall her safely after
this, there being fewer hours in her case than there are years in
his?"

It is of no use entreating him; he is determined to speak now, and he
does. In a thick crowd of sounds, but still intelligibly enough to be
understood.

"Why did you not tell me, Mrs. Rouncewell?"

"It happened only yesterday, Sir Leicester, and I doubted your being
well enough to be talked to of such things."

Besides, the giddy Volumnia now remembers with her little scream that
nobody was to have known of his being Mrs. Rouncewell's son and that
she was not to have told. But Mrs. Rouncewell protests, with warmth
enough to swell the stomacher, that of course she would have told Sir
Leicester as soon as he got better.

"Where is your son George, Mrs. Rouncewell?" asks Sir Leicester,

Mrs. Rouncewell, not a little alarmed by his disregard of the
doctor's injunctions, replies, in London.

"Where in London?"

Mrs. Rouncewell is constrained to admit that he is in the house.

"Bring him here to my room. Bring him directly."

The old lady can do nothing but go in search of him. Sir Leicester,
with such power of movement as he has, arranges himself a little to
receive him. When he has done so, he looks out again at the falling
sleet and snow and listens again for the returning steps. A quantity
of straw has been tumbled down in the street to deaden the noises
there, and she might be driven to the door perhaps without his
hearing wheels.

He is lying thus, apparently forgetful of his newer and minor
surprise, when the housekeeper returns, accompanied by her trooper
son. Mr. George approaches softly to the bedside, makes his bow,
squares his chest, and stands, with his face flushed, very heartily
ashamed of himself.

"Good heaven, and it is really George Rouncewell!" exclaims Sir
Leicester. "Do you remember me, George?"

The trooper needs to look at him and to separate this sound from that
sound before he knows what he has said, but doing this and being a
little helped by his mother, he replies, "I must have a very bad
memory, indeed, Sir Leicester, if I failed to remember you."

"When I look at you, George Rouncewell," Sir Leicester observes with
difficulty, "I see something of a boy at Chesney Wold--I remember
well--very well."

He looks at the trooper until tears come into his eyes, and then he
looks at the sleet and snow again.

"I ask your pardon, Sir Leicester," says the trooper, "but would you
accept of my arms to raise you up? You would lie easier, Sir
Leicester, if you would allow me to move you."

"If you please, George Rouncewell; if you will be so good."

The trooper takes him in his arms like a child, lightly raises him,
and turns him with his face more towards the window. "Thank you. You
have your mother's gentleness," returns Sir Leicester, "and your own
strength. Thank you."

He signs to him with his hand not to go away. George quietly remains
at the bedside, waiting to be spoken to.

"Why did you wish for secrecy?" It takes Sir Leicester some time to
ask this.

"Truly I am not much to boast of, Sir Leicester, and I--I should
still, Sir Leicester, if you was not so indisposed--which I hope you
will not be long--I should still hope for the favour of being allowed
to remain unknown in general. That involves explanations not very
hard to be guessed at, not very well timed here, and not very
creditable to myself. However opinions may differ on a variety of
subjects, I should think it would be universally agreed, Sir
Leicester, that I am not much to boast of."

"You have been a soldier," observes Sir Leicester, "and a faithful
one."

George makes his military bow. "As far as that goes, Sir Leicester, I
have done my duty under discipline, and it was the least I could do."

"You find me," says Sir Leicester, whose eyes are much attracted
towards him, "far from well, George Rouncewell."

"I am very sorry both to hear it and to see it, Sir Leicester."

"I am sure you are. No. In addition to my older malady, I have had a
sudden and bad attack. Something that deadens," making an endeavour
to pass one hand down one side, "and confuses," touching his lips.

George, with a look of assent and sympathy, makes another bow. The
different times when they were both young men (the trooper much the
younger of the two) and looked at one another down at Chesney Wold
arise before them both and soften both.

Sir Leicester, evidently with a great determination to say, in his
own manner, something that is on his mind before relapsing into
silence, tries to raise himself among his pillows a little more.
George, observant of the action, takes him in his arms again and
places him as he desires to be. "Thank you, George. You are another
self to me. You have often carried my spare gun at Chesney Wold,
George. You are familiar to me in these strange circumstances, very
familiar." He has put Sir Leicester's sounder arm over his shoulder
in lifting him up, and Sir Leicester is slow in drawing it away again
as he says these words.

"I was about to add," he presently goes on, "I was about to add,
respecting this attack, that it was unfortunately simultaneous with a
slight misunderstanding between my Lady and myself. I do not mean
that there was any difference between us (for there has been none),
but that there was a misunderstanding of certain circumstances
important only to ourselves, which deprives me, for a little while,
of my Lady's society. She has found it necessary to make a journey--I
trust will shortly return. Volumnia, do I make myself intelligible?
The words are not quite under my command in the manner of pronouncing
them."

Volumnia understands him perfectly, and in truth he delivers himself
with far greater plainness than could have been supposed possible a
minute ago. The effort by which he does so is written in the anxious
and labouring expression of his face. Nothing but the strength of his
purpose enables him to make it.

"Therefore, Volumnia, I desire to say in your presence--and in the
presence of my old retainer and friend, Mrs. Rouncewell, whose truth
and fidelity no one can question, and in the presence of her son
George, who comes back like a familiar recollection of my youth in
the home of my ancestors at Chesney Wold--in case I should relapse,
in case I should not recover, in case I should lose both my speech
and the power of writing, though I hope for better things--"

The old housekeeper weeping silently; Volumnia in the greatest
agitation, with the freshest bloom on her cheeks; the trooper with
his arms folded and his head a little bent, respectfully attentive.

"Therefore I desire to say, and to call you all to
witness--beginning, Volumnia, with yourself, most solemnly--that I am
on unaltered terms with Lady Dedlock. That I assert no cause whatever
of complaint against her. That I have ever had the strongest
affection for her, and that I retain it undiminished. Say this to
herself, and to every one. If you ever say less than this, you will
be guilty of deliberate falsehood to me."

Volumnia tremblingly protests that she will observe his injunctions
to the letter.

"My Lady is too high in position, too handsome, too accomplished, too
superior in most respects to the best of those by whom she is
surrounded, not to have her enemies and traducers, I dare say. Let it
be known to them, as I make it known to you, that being of sound
mind, memory, and understanding, I revoke no disposition I have made
in her favour. I abridge nothing I have ever bestowed upon her. I am
on unaltered terms with her, and I recall--having the full power to
do it if I were so disposed, as you see--no act I have done for her
advantage and happiness."

His formal array of words might have at any other time, as it has
often had, something ludicrous in it, but at this time it is serious
and affecting. His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his gallant
shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong and his own
pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and true. Nothing
less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such qualities in the
commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be seen in the best-born
gentleman. In such a light both aspire alike, both rise alike, both
children of the dust shine equally.

Overpowered by his exertions, he lays his head back on his pillows
and closes his eyes for not more than a minute, when he again resumes
his watching of the weather and his attention to the muffled sounds.
In the rendering of those little services, and in the manner of their
acceptance, the trooper has become installed as necessary to him.
Nothing has been said, but it is quite understood. He falls a step or
two backward to be out of sight and mounts guard a little behind his
mother's chair.

The day is now beginning to decline. The mist and the sleet into
which the snow has all resolved itself are darker, and the blaze
begins to tell more vividly upon the room walls and furniture. The
gloom augments; the bright gas springs up in the streets; and the
pertinacious oil lamps which yet hold their ground there, with their
source of life half frozen and half thawed, twinkle gaspingly like
fiery fish out of water--as they are. The world, which has been
rumbling over the straw and pulling at the bell, "to inquire," begins
to go home, begins to dress, to dine, to discuss its dear friend with
all the last new modes, as already mentioned.

Now does Sir Leicester become worse, restless, uneasy, and in great
pain. Volumnia, lighting a candle (with a predestined aptitude for
doing something objectionable), is bidden to put it out again, for it
is not yet dark enough. Yet it is very dark too, as dark as it will
be all night. By and by she tries again. No! Put it out. It is not
dark enough yet.

His old housekeeper is the first to understand that he is striving to
uphold the fiction with himself that it is not growing late.

"Dear Sir Leicester, my honoured master," she softly whispers, "I
must, for your own good, and my duty, take the freedom of begging and
praying that you will not lie here in the lone darkness watching and
waiting and dragging through the time. Let me draw the curtains, and
light the candles, and make things more comfortable about you. The
church-clocks will strike the hours just the same, Sir Leicester, and
the night will pass away just the same. My Lady will come back, just
the same."

"I know it, Mrs. Rouncewell, but I am weak--and she has been so long
gone."

"Not so very long, Sir Leicester. Not twenty-four hours yet."

"But that is a long time. Oh, it is a long time!"

He says it with a groan that wrings her heart.

She knows that this is not a period for bringing the rough light upon
him; she thinks his tears too sacred to be seen, even by her.
Therefore she sits in the darkness for a while without a word, then
gently begins to move about, now stirring the fire, now standing at
the dark window looking out. Finally he tells her, with recovered
self-command, "As you say, Mrs. Rouncewell, it is no worse for being
confessed. It is getting late, and they are not come. Light the
room!" When it is lighted and the weather shut out, it is only left
to him to listen.

But they find that however dejected and ill he is, he brightens when
a quiet pretence is made of looking at the fires in her rooms and
being sure that everything is ready to receive her. Poor pretence as
it is, these allusions to her being expected keep up hope within him.

Midnight comes, and with it the same blank. The carriages in the
streets are few, and other late sounds in that neighbourhood there
are none, unless a man so very nomadically drunk as to stray into the
frigid zone goes brawling and bellowing along the pavement. Upon this
wintry night it is so still that listening to the intense silence is
like looking at intense darkness. If any distant sound be audible in
this case, it departs through the gloom like a feeble light in that,
and all is heavier than before.

The corporation of servants are dismissed to bed (not unwilling to
go, for they were up all last night), and only Mrs. Rouncewell and
George keep watch in Sir Leicester's room. As the night lags tardily
on--or rather when it seems to stop altogether, at between two and
three o'clock--they find a restless craving on him to know more about
the weather, now he cannot see it. Hence George, patrolling regularly
every half-hour to the rooms so carefully looked after, extends his
march to the hall-door, looks about him, and brings back the best
report he can make of the worst of nights, the sleet still falling
and even the stone footways lying ankle-deep in icy sludge.

Volumnia, in her room up a retired landing on the staircase--the
second turning past the end of the carving and gilding, a cousinly
room containing a fearful abortion of a portrait of Sir Leicester
banished for its crimes, and commanding in the day a solemn yard
planted with dried-up shrubs like antediluvian specimens of black
tea--is a prey to horrors of many kinds. Not last nor least among
them, possibly, is a horror of what may befall her little income in
the event, as she expresses it, "of anything happening" to Sir
Leicester. Anything, in this sense, meaning one thing only; and that
the last thing that can happen to the consciousness of any baronet in
the known world.

An effect of these horrors is that Volumnia finds she cannot go to
bed in her own room or sit by the fire in her own room, but must come
forth with her fair head tied up in a profusion of shawl, and her
fair form enrobed in drapery, and parade the mansion like a ghost,
particularly haunting the rooms, warm and luxurious, prepared for one
who still does not return. Solitude under such circumstances being
not to be thought of, Volumnia is attended by her maid, who,
impressed from her own bed for that purpose, extremely cold, very
sleepy, and generally an injured maid as condemned by circumstances
to take office with a cousin, when she had resolved to be maid to
nothing less than ten thousand a year, has not a sweet expression of
countenance.

The periodical visits of the trooper to these rooms, however, in the
course of his patrolling is an assurance of protection and company
both to mistress and maid, which renders them very acceptable in the
small hours of the night. Whenever he is heard advancing, they both
make some little decorative preparation to receive him; at other
times they divide their watches into short scraps of oblivion and
dialogues not wholly free from acerbity, as to whether Miss Dedlock,
sitting with her feet upon the fender, was or was not falling into
the fire when rescued (to her great displeasure) by her guardian
genius the maid.

"How is Sir Leicester now, Mr. George?" inquires Volumnia, adjusting
her cowl over her head.

"Why, Sir Leicester is much the same, miss. He is very low and ill,
and he even wanders a little sometimes."

"Has he asked for me?" inquires Volumnia tenderly.

"Why, no, I can't say he has, miss. Not within my hearing, that is to
say."

"This is a truly sad time, Mr. George."

"It is indeed, miss. Hadn't you better go to bed?"

"You had a deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock," quoth the maid
sharply.

But Volumnia answers No! No! She may be asked for, she may be wanted
at a moment's notice. She never should forgive herself "if anything
was to happen" and she was not on the spot. She declines to enter on
the question, mooted by the maid, how the spot comes to be there, and
not in her room (which is nearer to Sir Leicester's), but staunchly
declares that on the spot she will remain. Volumnia further makes a
merit of not having "closed an eye"--as if she had twenty or
thirty--though it is hard to reconcile this statement with her having
most indisputably opened two within five minutes.

But when it comes to four o'clock, and still the same blank,
Volumnia's constancy begins to fail her, or rather it begins to
strengthen, for she now considers that it is her duty to be ready for
the morrow, when much may be expected of her, that, in fact,
howsoever anxious to remain upon the spot, it may be required of her,
as an act of self-devotion, to desert the spot. So when the trooper
reappears with his, "Hadn't you better go to bed, miss?" and when the
maid protests, more sharply than before, "You had a deal better go to
bed, Miss Dedlock!" she meekly rises and says, "Do with me what you
think best!"

Mr. George undoubtedly thinks it best to escort her on his arm to the
door of her cousinly chamber, and the maid as undoubtedly thinks it
best to hustle her into bed with mighty little ceremony. Accordingly,
these steps are taken; and now the trooper, in his rounds, has the
house to himself.

There is no improvement in the weather. From the portico, from the
eaves, from the parapet, from every ledge and post and pillar, drips
the thawed snow. It has crept, as if for shelter, into the lintels of
the great door--under it, into the corners of the windows, into every
chink and crevice of retreat, and there wastes and dies. It is
falling still; upon the roof, upon the skylight, even through the
skylight, and drip, drip, drip, with the regularity of the Ghost's
Walk, on the stone floor below.

The trooper, his old recollections awakened by the solitary grandeur
of a great house--no novelty to him once at Chesney Wold--goes up the
stairs and through the chief rooms, holding up his light at arm's
length. Thinking of his varied fortunes within the last few weeks,
and of his rustic boyhood, and of the two periods of his life so
strangely brought together across the wide intermediate space;
thinking of the murdered man whose image is fresh in his mind;
thinking of the lady who has disappeared from these very rooms and
the tokens of whose recent presence are all here; thinking of the
master of the house upstairs and of the foreboding, "Who will tell
him!" he looks here and looks there, and reflects how he MIGHT see
something now, which it would tax his boldness to walk up to, lay his
hand upon, and prove to be a fancy. But it is all blank, blank as the
darkness above and below, while he goes up the great staircase again,
blank as the oppressive silence.

"All is still in readiness, George Rouncewell?"

"Quite orderly and right, Sir Leicester."

"No word of any kind?"

The trooper shakes his head.

"No letter that can possibly have been overlooked?"

But he knows there is no such hope as that and lays his head down
without looking for an answer.

Very familiar to him, as he said himself some hours ago, George
Rouncewell lifts him into easier positions through the long remainder
of the blank wintry night, and equally familiar with his unexpressed
wish, extinguishes the light and undraws the curtains at the first
late break of day. The day comes like a phantom. Cold, colourless,
and vague, it sends a warning streak before it of a deathlike hue, as
if it cried out, "Look what I am bringing you who watch there! Who
will tell him!"




CHAPTER LIX

Esther's Narrative


It was three o'clock in the morning when the houses outside London
did at last begin to exclude the country and to close us in with
streets. We had made our way along roads in a far worse condition
than when we had traversed them by daylight, both the fall and the
thaw having lasted ever since; but the energy of my companion never
slackened. It had only been, as I thought, of less assistance than
the horses in getting us on, and it had often aided them. They had
stopped exhausted half-way up hills, they had been driven through
streams of turbulent water, they had slipped down and become
entangled with the harness; but he and his little lantern had been
always ready, and when the mishap was set right, I had never heard
any variation in his cool, "Get on, my lads!"

The steadiness and confidence with which he had directed our journey
back I could not account for. Never wavering, he never even stopped
to make an inquiry until we were within a few miles of London. A very
few words, here and there, were then enough for him; and thus we
came, at between three and four o'clock in the morning, into
Islington.

I will not dwell on the suspense and anxiety with which I reflected
all this time that we were leaving my mother farther and farther
behind every minute. I think I had some strong hope that he must be
right and could not fail to have a satisfactory object in following
this woman, but I tormented myself with questioning it and discussing
it during the whole journey. What was to ensue when we found her and
what could compensate us for this loss of time were questions also
that I could not possibly dismiss; my mind was quite tortured by long
dwelling on such reflections when we stopped.

We stopped in a high-street where there was a coach-stand. My
companion paid our two drivers, who were as completely covered with
splashes as if they had been dragged along the roads like the
carriage itself, and giving them some brief direction where to take
it, lifted me out of it and into a hackney-coach he had chosen from
the rest.

"Why, my dear!" he said as he did this. "How wet you are!"

I had not been conscious of it. But the melted snow had found its way
into the carriage, and I had got out two or three times when a fallen
horse was plunging and had to be got up, and the wet had penetrated
my dress. I assured him it was no matter, but the driver, who knew
him, would not be dissuaded by me from running down the street to his
stable, whence he brought an armful of clean dry straw. They shook it
out and strewed it well about me, and I found it warm and
comfortable.

"Now, my dear," said Mr. Bucket, with his head in at the window after
I was shut up. "We're a-going to mark this person down. It may take a
little time, but you don't mind that. You're pretty sure that I've
got a motive. Ain't you?"

I little thought what it was, little thought in how short a time I
should understand it better, but I assured him that I had confidence
in him.

"So you may have, my dear," he returned. "And I tell you what! If you
only repose half as much confidence in me as I repose in you after
what I've experienced of you, that'll do. Lord! You're no trouble at
all. I never see a young woman in any station of society--and I've
seen many elevated ones too--conduct herself like you have conducted
yourself since you was called out of your bed. You're a pattern, you
know, that's what you are," said Mr. Bucket warmly; "you're a
pattern."

I told him I was very glad, as indeed I was, to have been no
hindrance to him, and that I hoped I should be none now.

"My dear," he returned, "when a young lady is as mild as she's game,
and as game as she's mild, that's all I ask, and more than I expect.
She then becomes a queen, and that's about what you are yourself."

With these encouraging words--they really were encouraging to me
under those lonely and anxious circumstances--he got upon the box,
and we once more drove away. Where we drove I neither knew then nor
have ever known since, but we appeared to seek out the narrowest and
worst streets in London. Whenever I saw him directing the driver, I
was prepared for our descending into a deeper complication of such
streets, and we never failed to do so.

Sometimes we emerged upon a wider thoroughfare or came to a larger
building than the generality, well lighted. Then we stopped at
offices like those we had visited when we began our journey, and I
saw him in consultation with others. Sometimes he would get down by
an archway or at a street corner and mysteriously show the light of
his little lantern. This would attract similar lights from various
dark quarters, like so many insects, and a fresh consultation would
be held. By degrees we appeared to contract our search within
narrower and easier limits. Single police-officers on duty could now
tell Mr. Bucket what he wanted to know and point to him where to go.
At last we stopped for a rather long conversation between him and one
of these men, which I supposed to be satisfactory from his manner of
nodding from time to time. When it was finished he came to me looking
very busy and very attentive.

"Now, Miss Summerson," he said to me, "you won't be alarmed whatever
comes off, I know. It's not necessary for me to give you any further
caution than to tell you that we have marked this person down and
that you may be of use to me before I know it myself. I don't like to
ask such a thing, my dear, but would you walk a little way?"

Of course I got out directly and took his arm.

"It ain't so easy to keep your feet," said Mr. Bucket, "but take
time."

Although I looked about me confusedly and hurriedly as we crossed the
street, I thought I knew the place. "Are we in Holborn?" I asked him.

"Yes," said Mr. Bucket. "Do you know this turning?"

"It looks like Chancery Lane."

"And was christened so, my dear," said Mr. Bucket.

We turned down it, and as we went shuffling through the sleet, I
heard the clocks strike half-past five. We passed on in silence and
as quickly as we could with such a foot-hold, when some one coming
towards us on the narrow pavement, wrapped in a cloak, stopped and
stood aside to give me room. In the same moment I heard an
exclamation of wonder and my own name from Mr. Woodcourt. I knew his
voice very well.

It was so unexpected and so--I don't know what to call it, whether
pleasant or painful--to come upon it after my feverish wandering
journey, and in the midst of the night, that I could not keep back
the tears from my eyes. It was like hearing his voice in a strange
country.

"My dear Miss Summerson, that you should be out at this hour, and in
such weather!"

He had heard from my guardian of my having been called away on some
uncommon business and said so to dispense with any explanation. I
told him that we had but just left a coach and were going--but then I
was obliged to look at my companion.

"Why, you see, Mr. Woodcourt"--he had caught the name from me--"we
are a-going at present into the next street. Inspector Bucket."

Mr. Woodcourt, disregarding my remonstrances, had hurriedly taken off
his cloak and was putting it about me. "That's a good move, too,"
said Mr. Bucket, assisting, "a very good move."

"May I go with you?" said Mr. Woodcourt. I don't know whether to me
or to my companion.

"Why, Lord!" exclaimed Mr. Bucket, taking the answer on himself. "Of
course you may."

It was all said in a moment, and they took me between them, wrapped
in the cloak.

"I have just left Richard," said Mr. Woodcourt. "I have been sitting
with him since ten o'clock last night."

"Oh, dear me, he is ill!"

"No, no, believe me; not ill, but not quite well. He was depressed
and faint--you know he gets so worried and so worn sometimes--and Ada
sent to me of course; and when I came home I found her note and came
straight here. Well! Richard revived so much after a little while,
and Ada was so happy and so convinced of its being my doing, though
God knows I had little enough to do with it, that I remained with him
until he had been fast asleep some hours. As fast asleep as she is
now, I hope!"

His friendly and familiar way of speaking of them, his unaffected
devotion to them, the grateful confidence with which I knew he had
inspired my darling, and the comfort he was to her; could I separate
all this from his promise to me? How thankless I must have been if it
had not recalled the words he said to me when he was so moved by the
change in my appearance: "I will accept him as a trust, and it shall
be a sacred one!"

We now turned into another narrow street. "Mr. Woodcourt," said Mr.
Bucket, who had eyed him closely as we came along, "our business
takes us to a law-stationer's here, a certain Mr. Snagsby's. What,
you know him, do you?" He was so quick that he saw it in an instant.

"Yes, I know a little of him and have called upon him at this place."

"Indeed, sir?" said Mr. Bucket. "Then you will be so good as to let
me leave Miss Summerson with you for a moment while I go and have
half a word with him?"

The last police-officer with whom he had conferred was standing
silently behind us. I was not aware of it until he struck in on my
saying I heard some one crying.

"Don't be alarmed, miss," he returned. "It's Snagsby's servant."

"Why, you see," said Mr. Bucket, "the girl's subject to fits, and has
'em bad upon her to-night. A most contrary circumstance it is, for I
want certain information out of that girl, and she must be brought to
reason somehow."

"At all events, they wouldn't be up yet if it wasn't for her, Mr.
Bucket," said the other man. "She's been at it pretty well all night,
sir."

"Well, that's true," he returned. "My light's burnt out. Show yours a
moment."

All this passed in a whisper a door or two from the house in which I
could faintly hear crying and moaning. In the little round of light
produced for the purpose, Mr. Bucket went up to the door and knocked.
The door was opened after he had knocked twice, and he went in,
leaving us standing in the street.

"Miss Summerson," said Mr. Woodcourt, "if without obtruding myself on
your confidence I may remain near you, pray let me do so."

"You are truly kind," I answered. "I need wish to keep no secret of
my own from you; if I keep any, it is another's."

"I quite understand. Trust me, I will remain near you only so long as
I can fully respect it."

"I trust implicitly to you," I said. "I know and deeply feel how
sacredly you keep your promise."

After a short time the little round of light shone out again, and Mr.
Bucket advanced towards us in it with his earnest face. "Please to
come in, Miss Summerson," he said, "and sit down by the fire. Mr.
Woodcourt, from information I have received I understand you are a
medical man. Would you look to this girl and see if anything can be
done to bring her round. She has a letter somewhere that I
particularly want. It's not in her box, and I think it must be about
her; but she is so twisted and clenched up that she is difficult to
handle without hurting."

We all three went into the house together; although it was cold and
raw, it smelt close too from being up all night. In the passage
behind the door stood a scared, sorrowful-looking little man in a
grey coat who seemed to have a naturally polite manner and spoke
meekly.

"Downstairs, if you please, Mr. Bucket," said he. "The lady will
excuse the front kitchen; we use it as our workaday sitting-room. The
back is Guster's bedroom, and in it she's a-carrying on, poor thing,
to a frightful extent!"

We went downstairs, followed by Mr. Snagsby, as I soon found the
little man to be. In the front kitchen, sitting by the fire, was Mrs.
Snagsby, with very red eyes and a very severe expression of face.

"My little woman," said Mr. Snagsby, entering behind us, "to
wave--not to put too fine a point upon it, my dear--hostilities for
one single moment in the course of this prolonged night, here is
Inspector Bucket, Mr. Woodcourt, and a lady."

She looked very much astonished, as she had reason for doing, and
looked particularly hard at me.

"My little woman," said Mr. Snagsby, sitting down in the remotest
corner by the door, as if he were taking a liberty, "it is not
unlikely that you may inquire of me why Inspector Bucket, Mr.
Woodcourt, and a lady call upon us in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street,
at the present hour. I don't know. I have not the least idea. If I
was to be informed, I should despair of understanding, and I'd rather
not be told."

He appeared so miserable, sitting with his head upon his hand, and I
appeared so unwelcome, that I was going to offer an apology when Mr.
Bucket took the matter on himself.

"Now, Mr. Snagsby," said he, "the best thing you can do is to go
along with Mr. Woodcourt to look after your Guster--"

"My Guster, Mr. Bucket!" cried Mr. Snagsby. "Go on, sir, go on. I
shall be charged with that next."

"And to hold the candle," pursued Mr. Bucket without correcting
himself, "or hold her, or make yourself useful in any way you're
asked. Which there's not a man alive more ready to do, for you're a
man of urbanity and suavity, you know, and you've got the sort of
heart that can feel for another. Mr. Woodcourt, would you be so good
as see to her, and if you can get that letter from her, to let me
have it as soon as ever you can?"

As they went out, Mr. Bucket made me sit down in a corner by the fire
and take off my wet shoes, which he turned up to dry upon the fender,
talking all the time.

"Don't you be at all put out, miss, by the want of a hospitable look
from Mrs. Snagsby there, because she's under a mistake altogether.
She'll find that out sooner than will be agreeable to a lady of her
generally correct manner of forming her thoughts, because I'm a-going
to explain it to her." Here, standing on the hearth with his wet hat
and shawls in his hand, himself a pile of wet, he turned to Mrs.
Snagsby. "Now, the first thing that I say to you, as a married woman
possessing what you may call charms, you know--'Believe Me, if All
Those Endearing,' and cetrer--you're well acquainted with the song,
because it's in vain for you to tell me that you and good society are
strangers--charms--attractions, mind you, that ought to give you
confidence in yourself--is, that you've done it."

Mrs. Snagsby looked rather alarmed, relented a little and faltered,
what did Mr. Bucket mean.

"What does Mr. Bucket mean?" he repeated, and I saw by his face that
all the time he talked he was listening for the discovery of the
letter, to my own great agitation, for I knew then how important it
must be; "I'll tell you what he means, ma'am. Go and see Othello
acted. That's the tragedy for you."

Mrs. Snagsby consciously asked why.

"Why?" said Mr. Bucket. "Because you'll come to that if you don't
look out. Why, at the very moment while I speak, I know what your
mind's not wholly free from respecting this young lady. But shall I
tell you who this young lady is? Now, come, you're what I call an
intellectual woman--with your soul too large for your body, if you
come to that, and chafing it--and you know me, and you recollect
where you saw me last, and what was talked of in that circle. Don't
you? Yes! Very well. This young lady is that young lady."

Mrs. Snagsby appeared to understand the reference better than I did
at the time.

"And Toughey--him as you call Jo--was mixed up in the same business,
and no other; and the law-writer that you know of was mixed up in the
same business, and no other; and your husband, with no more knowledge
of it than your great grandfather, was mixed up (by Mr. Tulkinghorn,
deceased, his best customer) in the same business, and no other; and
the whole bileing of people was mixed up in the same business, and no
other. And yet a married woman, possessing your attractions, shuts
her eyes (and sparklers too), and goes and runs her delicate-formed
head against a wall. Why, I am ashamed of you! (I expected Mr.
Woodcourt might have got it by this time.)"

Mrs. Snagsby shook her head and put her handkerchief to her eyes.

"Is that all?" said Mr. Bucket excitedly. "No. See what happens.
Another person mixed up in that business and no other, a person in a
wretched state, comes here to-night and is seen a-speaking to your
maid-servant; and between her and your maid-servant there passes
a paper that I would give a hundred pound for, down. What do
you do? You hide and you watch 'em, and you pounce upon that
maid-servant--knowing what she's subject to and what a little thing
will bring 'em on--in that surprising manner and with that severity
that, by the Lord, she goes off and keeps off, when a life may be
hanging upon that girl's words!"

He so thoroughly meant what he said now that I involuntarily clasped
my hands and felt the room turning away from me. But it stopped. Mr.
Woodcourt came in, put a paper into his hand, and went away again.

"Now, Mrs. Snagsby, the only amends you can make," said Mr. Bucket,
rapidly glancing at it, "is to let me speak a word to this young lady
in private here. And if you know of any help that you can give to
that gentleman in the next kitchen there or can think of any one
thing that's likelier than another to bring the girl round, do your
swiftest and best!" In an instant she was gone, and he had shut the
door. "Now my dear, you're steady and quite sure of yourself?"

"Quite," said I.

"Whose writing is that?"

It was my mother's. A pencil-writing, on a crushed and torn piece of
paper, blotted with wet. Folded roughly like a letter, and directed
to me at my guardian's.

"You know the hand," he said, "and if you are firm enough to read it
to me, do! But be particular to a word."

It had been written in portions, at different times. I read what
follows:


   I came to the cottage with two objects. First, to see the
   dear one, if I could, once more--but only to see her--not
   to speak to her or let her know that I was near. The other
   object, to elude pursuit and to be lost. Do not blame the
   mother for her share. The assistance that she rendered me,
   she rendered on my strongest assurance that it was for the
   dear one's good. You remember her dead child. The men's
   consent I bought, but her help was freely given.


"'I came.' That was written," said my companion, "when she rested
there. It bears out what I made of it. I was right."

The next was written at another time:


   I have wandered a long distance, and for many hours, and
   I know that I must soon die. These streets! I have no
   purpose but to die. When I left, I had a worse, but I am
   saved from adding that guilt to the rest. Cold, wet, and
   fatigue are sufficient causes for my being found dead, but
   I shall die of others, though I suffer from these. It was
   right that all that had sustained me should give way at
   once and that I should die of terror and my conscience.


"Take courage," said Mr. Bucket. "There's only a few words more."

Those, too, were written at another time. To all appearance, almost
in the dark:


   I have done all I could do to be lost. I shall be soon
   forgotten so, and shall disgrace him least. I have nothing
   about me by which I can be recognized. This paper I part
   with now. The place where I shall lie down, if I can get
   so far, has been often in my mind. Farewell. Forgive.


Mr. Bucket, supporting me with his arm, lowered me gently into my
chair. "Cheer up! Don't think me hard with you, my dear, but as soon
as ever you feel equal to it, get your shoes on and be ready."

I did as he required, but I was left there a long time, praying for
my unhappy mother. They were all occupied with the poor girl, and I
heard Mr. Woodcourt directing them and speaking to her often. At
length he came in with Mr. Bucket and said that as it was important
to address her gently, he thought it best that I should ask her for
whatever information we desired to obtain. There was no doubt that
she could now reply to questions if she were soothed and not alarmed.
The questions, Mr. Bucket said, were how she came by the letter, what
passed between her and the person who gave her the letter, and where
the person went. Holding my mind as steadily as I could to these
points, I went into the next room with them. Mr. Woodcourt would have
remained outside, but at my solicitation went in with us.

The poor girl was sitting on the floor where they had laid her down.
They stood around her, though at a little distance, that she might
have air. She was not pretty and looked weak and poor, but she had a
plaintive and a good face, though it was still a little wild. I
kneeled on the ground beside her and put her poor head upon my
shoulder, whereupon she drew her arm round my neck and burst into
tears.

"My poor girl," said I, laying my face against her forehead, for
indeed I was crying too, and trembling, "it seems cruel to trouble
you now, but more depends on our knowing something about this letter
than I could tell you in an hour."

She began piteously declaring that she didn't mean any harm, she
didn't mean any harm, Mrs. Snagsby!

"We are all sure of that," said I. "But pray tell me how you got it."

"Yes, dear lady, I will, and tell you true. I'll tell true, indeed,
Mrs. Snagsby."

"I am sure of that," said I. "And how was it?"

"I had been out on an errand, dear lady--long after it was
dark--quite late; and when I came home, I found a common-looking
person, all wet and muddy, looking up at our house. When she saw me
coming in at the door, she called me back and said did I live here.
And I said yes, and she said she knew only one or two places about
here, but had lost her way and couldn't find them. Oh, what shall I
do, what shall I do! They won't believe me! She didn't say any harm
to me, and I didn't say any harm to her, indeed, Mrs. Snagsby!"

It was necessary for her mistress to comfort her--which she did, I
must say, with a good deal of contrition--before she could be got
beyond this.

"She could not find those places," said I.

"No!" cried the girl, shaking her head. "No! Couldn't find them. And
she was so faint, and lame, and miserable, Oh so wretched, that if
you had seen her, Mr. Snagsby, you'd have given her half a crown, I
know!"

"Well, Guster, my girl," said he, at first not knowing what to say.
"I hope I should."

"And yet she was so well spoken," said the girl, looking at me with
wide open eyes, "that it made a person's heart bleed. And so she said
to me, did I know the way to the burying ground? And I asked her
which burying ground. And she said, the poor burying ground. And so I
told her I had been a poor child myself, and it was according to
parishes. But she said she meant a poor burying ground not very far
from here, where there was an archway, and a step, and an iron gate."

As I watched her face and soothed her to go on, I saw that Mr. Bucket
received this with a look which I could not separate from one of
alarm.

"Oh, dear, dear!" cried the girl, pressing her hair back with her
hands. "What shall I do, what shall I do! She meant the burying
ground where the man was buried that took the sleeping-stuff--that
you came home and told us of, Mr. Snagsby--that frightened me so,
Mrs. Snagsby. Oh, I am frightened again. Hold me!"

"You are so much better now," sald I. "Pray, pray tell me more."

"Yes I will, yes I will! But don't be angry with me, that's a dear
lady, because I have been so ill."

Angry with her, poor soul!

"There! Now I will, now I will. So she said, could I tell her how to
find it, and I said yes, and I told her; and she looked at me with
eyes like almost as if she was blind, and herself all waving back.
And so she took out the letter, and showed it me, and said if she was
to put that in the post-office, it would be rubbed out and not minded
and never sent; and would I take it from her, and send it, and the
messenger would be paid at the house. And so I said yes, if it was no
harm, and she said no--no harm. And so I took it from her, and she
said she had nothing to give me, and I said I was poor myself and
consequently wanted nothing. And so she said God bless you, and
went."

"And did she go--"

"Yes," cried the girl, anticipating the inquiry. "Yes! She went the
way I had shown her. Then I came in, and Mrs. Snagsby came behind me
from somewhere and laid hold of me, and I was frightened."

Mr. Woodcourt took her kindly from me. Mr. Bucket wrapped me up, and
immediately we were in the street. Mr. Woodcourt hesitated, but I
said, "Don't leave me now!" and Mr. Bucket added, "You'll be better
with us, we may want you; don't lose time!"

I have the most confused impressions of that walk. I recollect that
it was neither night nor day, that morning was dawning but the
street-lamps were not yet put out, that the sleet was still falling
and that all the ways were deep with it. I recollect a few chilled
people passing in the streets. I recollect the wet house-tops, the
clogged and bursting gutters and water-spouts, the mounds of
blackened ice and snow over which we passed, the narrowness of the
courts by which we went. At the same time I remember that the poor
girl seemed to be yet telling her story audibly and plainly in my
hearing, that I could feel her resting on my arm, that the stained
house-fronts put on human shapes and looked at me, that great
water-gates seemed to be opening and closing in my head or in the
air, and that the unreal things were more substantial than the real.

At last we stood under a dark and miserable covered way, where one
lamp was burning over an iron gate and where the morning faintly
struggled in. The gate was closed. Beyond it was a burial ground--a
dreadful spot in which the night was very slowly stirring, but where
I could dimly see heaps of dishonoured graves and stones, hemmed in
by filthy houses with a few dull lights in their windows and on whose
walls a thick humidity broke out like a disease. On the step at the
gate, drenched in the fearful wet of such a place, which oozed and
splashed down everywhere, I saw, with a cry of pity and horror, a
woman lying--Jenny, the mother of the dead child.

I ran forward, but they stopped me, and Mr. Woodcourt entreated me
with the greatest earnestness, even with tears, before I went up to
the figure to listen for an instant to what Mr. Bucket said. I did
so, as I thought. I did so, as I am sure.

"Miss Summerson, you'll understand me, if you think a moment. They
changed clothes at the cottage."

They changed clothes at the cottage. I could repeat the words in my
mind, and I knew what they meant of themselves, but I attached no
meaning to them in any other connexion.

"And one returned," said Mr. Bucket, "and one went on. And the one
that went on only went on a certain way agreed upon to deceive and
then turned across country and went home. Think a moment!"

I could repeat this in my mind too, but I had not the least idea what
it meant. I saw before me, lying on the step, the mother of the dead
child. She lay there with one arm creeping round a bar of the iron
gate and seeming to embrace it. She lay there, who had so lately
spoken to my mother. She lay there, a distressed, unsheltered,
senseless creature. She who had brought my mother's letter, who could
give me the only clue to where my mother was; she, who was to guide
us to rescue and save her whom we had sought so far, who had come to
this condition by some means connected with my mother that I could
not follow, and might be passing beyond our reach and help at that
moment; she lay there, and they stopped me! I saw but did not
comprehend the solemn and compassionate look in Mr. Woodcourt's face.
I saw but did not comprehend his touching the other on the breast to
keep him back. I saw him stand uncovered in the bitter air, with a
reverence for something. But my understanding for all this was gone.

I even heard it said between them, "Shall she go?"

"She had better go. Her hands should be the first to touch her. They
have a higher right than ours."

I passed on to the gate and stooped down. I lifted the heavy head,
put the long dank hair aside, and turned the face. And it was my
mother, cold and dead.




CHAPTER LX

Perspective


I proceed to other passages of my narrative. From the goodness of all
about me I derived such consolation as I can never think of unmoved.
I have already said so much of myself, and so much still remains,
that I will not dwell upon my sorrow. I had an illness, but it was
not a long one; and I would avoid even this mention of it if I could
quite keep down the recollection of their sympathy.

I proceed to other passages of my narrative.

During the time of my illness, we were still in London, where Mrs.
Woodcourt had come, on my guardian's invitation, to stay with us.
When my guardian thought me well and cheerful enough to talk with him
in our old way--though I could have done that sooner if he would have
believed me--I resumed my work and my chair beside his. He had
appointed the time himself, and we were alone.

"Dame Trot," said he, receiving me with a kiss, "welcome to the
growlery again, my dear. I have a scheme to develop, little woman. I
propose to remain here, perhaps for six months, perhaps for a longer
time--as it may be. Quite to settle here for a while, in short."

"And in the meanwhile leave Bleak House?" said I.

"Aye, my dear? Bleak House," he returned, "must learn to take care of
itself."

I thought his tone sounded sorrowful, but looking at him, I saw his
kind face lighted up by its pleasantest smile.

"Bleak House," he repeated--and his tone did NOT sound sorrowful, I
found--"must learn to take care of itself. It is a long way from Ada,
my dear, and Ada stands much in need of you."

"It's like you, guardian," said I, "to have been taking that into
consideration for a happy surprise to both of us."

"Not so disinterested either, my dear, if you mean to extol me for
that virtue, since if you were generally on the road, you could be
seldom with me. And besides, I wish to hear as much and as often of
Ada as I can in this condition of estrangement from poor Rick. Not of
her alone, but of him too, poor fellow."

"Have you seen Mr. Woodcourt, this morning, guardian?"

"I see Mr. Woodcourt every morning, Dame Durden."

"Does he still say the same of Richard?"

"Just the same. He knows of no direct bodily illness that he has; on
the contrary, he believes that he has none. Yet he is not easy about
him; who CAN be?"

My dear girl had been to see us lately every day, some times twice in
a day. But we had foreseen, all along, that this would only last
until I was quite myself. We knew full well that her fervent heart
was as full of affection and gratitude towards her cousin John as it
had ever been, and we acquitted Richard of laying any injunctions
upon her to stay away; but we knew on the other hand that she felt it
a part of her duty to him to be sparing of her visits at our house.
My guardian's delicacy had soon perceived this and had tried to
convey to her that he thought she was right.

"Dear, unfortunate, mistaken Richard," said I. "When will he awake
from his delusion!"

"He is not in the way to do so now, my dear," replied my guardian.
"The more he suffers, the more averse he will be to me, having made
me the principal representative of the great occasion of his
suffering."

I could not help adding, "So unreasonably!"

"Ah, Dame Trot, Dame Trot," returned my guardian, "what shall we find
reasonable in Jarndyce and Jarndyce! Unreason and injustice at the
top, unreason and injustice at the heart and at the bottom, unreason
and injustice from beginning to end--if it ever has an end--how
should poor Rick, always hovering near it, pluck reason out of it? He
no more gathers grapes from thorns or figs from thistles than older
men did in old times."

His gentleness and consideration for Richard whenever we spoke of him
touched me so that I was always silent on this subject very soon.

"I suppose the Lord Chancellor, and the Vice Chancellors, and the
whole Chancery battery of great guns would be infinitely astonished
by such unreason and injustice in one of their suitors," pursued my
guardian. "When those learned gentlemen begin to raise moss-roses
from the powder they sow in their wigs, I shall begin to be
astonished too!"

He checked himself in glancing towards the window to look where the
wind was and leaned on the back of my chair instead.

"Well, well, little woman! To go on, my dear. This rock we must leave
to time, chance, and hopeful circumstance. We must not shipwreck Ada
upon it. She cannot afford, and he cannot afford, the remotest chance
of another separation from a friend. Therefore I have particularly
begged of Woodcourt, and I now particularly beg of you, my dear, not
to move this subject with Rick. Let it rest. Next week, next month,
next year, sooner or later, he will see me with clearer eyes. I can
wait."

But I had already discussed it with him, I confessed; and so, I
thought, had Mr. Woodcourt.

"So he tells me," returned my guardian. "Very good. He has made his
protest, and Dame Durden has made hers, and there is nothing more to
be said about it. Now I come to Mrs. Woodcourt. How do you like her,
my dear?"

In answer to this question, which was oddly abrupt, I said I liked
her very much and thought she was more agreeable than she used to be.

"I think so too," said my guardian. "Less pedigree? Not so much of
Morgan ap--what's his name?"

That was what I meant, I acknowledged, though he was a very harmless
person, even when we had had more of him.

"Still, upon the whole, he is as well in his native mountains," said
my guardian. "I agree with you. Then, little woman, can I do better
for a time than retain Mrs. Woodcourt here?"

No. And yet--

My guardian looked at me, waiting for what I had to say.

I had nothing to say. At least I had nothing in my mind that I could
say. I had an undefined impression that it might have been better if
we had had some other inmate, but I could hardly have explained why
even to myself. Or, if to myself, certainly not to anybody else.

"You see," said my guardian, "our neighbourhood is in Woodcourt's
way, and he can come here to see her as often as he likes, which is
agreeable to them both; and she is familiar to us and fond of you."

Yes. That was undeniable. I had nothing to say against it. I could
not have suggested a better arrangement, but I was not quite easy in
my mind. Esther, Esther, why not? Esther, think!

"It is a very good plan indeed, dear guardian, and we could not do
better."

"Sure, little woman?"

Quite sure. I had had a moment's time to think, since I had urged
that duty on myself, and I was quite sure.

"Good," said my guardian. "It shall be done. Carried unanimously."

"Carried unanimously," I repeated, going on with my work.

It was a cover for his book-table that I happened to be ornamenting.
It had been laid by on the night preceding my sad journey and never
resumed. I showed it to him now, and he admired it highly. After I
had explained the pattern to him and all the great effects that were
to come out by and by, I thought I would go back to our last theme.

"You said, dear guardian, when we spoke of Mr. Woodcourt before Ada
left us, that you thought he would give a long trial to another
country. Have you been advising him since?"

"Yes, little woman, pretty often."

"Has he decided to do so?"

"I rather think not."

"Some other prospect has opened to him, perhaps?" said I.

"Why--yes--perhaps," returned my guardian, beginning his answer in a
very deliberate manner. "About half a year hence or so, there is a
medical attendant for the poor to be appointed at a certain place in
Yorkshire. It is a thriving place, pleasantly situated--streams and
streets, town and country, mill and moor--and seems to present an
opening for such a man. I mean a man whose hopes and aims may
sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the
ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough
after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good
service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I
suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road,
instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care
for. It is Woodcourt's kind."

"And will he get this appointment?" I asked.

"Why, little woman," returned my guardian, smiling, "not being an
oracle, I cannot confidently say, but I think so. His reputation
stands very high; there were people from that part of the country in
the shipwreck; and strange to say, I believe the best man has the
best chance. You must not suppose it to be a fine endowment. It is a
very, very commonplace affair, my dear, an appointment to a great
amount of work and a small amount of pay; but better things will
gather about it, it may be fairly hoped."

"The poor of that place will have reason to bless the choice if it
falls on Mr. Woodcourt, guardian."

"You are right, little woman; that I am sure they will."

We said no more about it, nor did he say a word about the future of
Bleak House. But it was the first time I had taken my seat at his
side in my mourning dress, and that accounted for it, I considered.

I now began to visit my dear girl every day in the dull dark corner
where she lived. The morning was my usual time, but whenever I found
I had an hour or so to spare, I put on my bonnet and bustled off to
Chancery Lane. They were both so glad to see me at all hours, and
used to brighten up so when they heard me opening the door and coming
in (being quite at home, I never knocked), that I had no fear of
becoming troublesome just yet.

On these occasions I frequently found Richard absent. At other times
he would be writing or reading papers in the cause at that table of
his, so covered with papers, which was never disturbed. Sometimes I
would come upon him lingering at the door of Mr. Vholes's office.
Sometimes I would meet him in the neighbourhood lounging about and
biting his nails. I often met him wandering in Lincoln's Inn, near
the place where I had first seen him, oh how different, how
different!

That the money Ada brought him was melting away with the candles I
used to see burning after dark in Mr. Vholes's office I knew very
well. It was not a large amount in the beginning, he had married in
debt, and I could not fail to understand, by this time, what was
meant by Mr. Vholes's shoulder being at the wheel--as I still heard
it was. My dear made the best of housekeepers and tried hard to save,
but I knew that they were getting poorer and poorer every day.

She shone in the miserable corner like a beautiful star. She adorned
and graced it so that it became another place. Paler than she had
been at home, and a little quieter than I had thought natural when
she was yet so cheerful and hopeful, her face was so unshadowed that
I half believed she was blinded by her love for Richard to his
ruinous career.

I went one day to dine with them while I was under this impression.
As I turned into Symond's Inn, I met little Miss Flite coming out.
She had been to make a stately call upon the wards in Jarndyce, as
she still called them, and had derived the highest gratification from
that ceremony. Ada had already told me that she called every Monday
at five o'clock, with one little extra white bow in her bonnet, which
never appeared there at any other time, and with her largest reticule
of documents on her arm.

"My dear!" she began. "So delighted! How do you do! So glad to see
you. And you are going to visit our interesting Jarndyce wards? TO be
sure! Our beauty is at home, my dear, and will be charmed to see
you."

"Then Richard is not come in yet?" said I. "I am glad of that, for I
was afraid of being a little late."

"No, he is not come in," returned Miss Flite. "He has had a long day
in court. I left him there with Vholes. You don't like Vholes, I
hope? DON'T like Vholes. Dan-gerous man!"

"I am afraid you see Richard oftener than ever now," said I.

"My dearest," returned Miss Flite, "daily and hourly. You know what I
told you of the attraction on the Chancellor's table? My dear, next
to myself he is the most constant suitor in court. He begins quite to
amuse our little party. Ve-ry friendly little party, are we not?"

It was miserable to hear this from her poor mad lips, though it was
no surprise.

"In short, my valued friend," pursued Miss Flite, advancing her lips
to my ear with an air of equal patronage and mystery, "I must tell
you a secret. I have made him my executor. Nominated, constituted,
and appointed him. In my will. Ye-es."

"Indeed?" said I.

"Ye-es," repeated Miss Flite in her most genteel accents, "my
executor, administrator, and assign. (Our Chancery phrases, my love.)
I have reflected that if I should wear out, he will be able to watch
that judgment. Being so very regular in his attendance."

It made me sigh to think of him.

"I did at one time mean," said Miss Flite, echoing the sigh, "to
nominate, constitute, and appoint poor Gridley. Also very regular, my
charming girl. I assure you, most exemplary! But he wore out, poor
man, so I have appointed his successor. Don't mention it. This is in
confidence."

She carefully opened her reticule a little way and showed me a folded
piece of paper inside as the appointment of which she spoke.

"Another secret, my dear. I have added to my collection of birds."

"Really, Miss Flite?" said I, knowing how it pleased her to have her
confidence received with an appearance of interest.

She nodded several times, and her face became overcast and gloomy.
"Two more. I call them the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up with
all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust,
Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly,
Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and
Spinach!"

The poor soul kissed me with the most troubled look I had ever seen
in her and went her way. Her manner of running over the names of her
birds, as if she were afraid of hearing them even from her own lips,
quite chilled me.

This was not a cheering preparation for my visit, and I could have
dispensed with the company of Mr. Vholes, when Richard (who arrived
within a minute or two after me) brought him to share our dinner.
Although it was a very plain one, Ada and Richard were for some
minutes both out of the room together helping to get ready what we
were to eat and drink. Mr. Vholes took that opportunity of holding a
little conversation in a low voice with me. He came to the window
where I was sitting and began upon Symond's Inn.

"A dull place, Miss Summerson, for a life that is not an official
one," said Mr. Vholes, smearing the glass with his black glove to
make it clearer for me.

"There is not much to see here," said I.

"Nor to hear, miss," returned Mr. Vholes. "A little music does
occasionally stray in, but we are not musical in the law and soon
eject it. I hope Mr. Jarndyce is as well as his friends could wish
him?"

I thanked Mr. Vholes and said he was quite well.

"I have not the pleasure to be admitted among the number of his
friends myself," said Mr. Vholes, "and I am aware that the gentlemen
of our profession are sometimes regarded in such quarters with an
unfavourable eye. Our plain course, however, under good report and
evil report, and all kinds of prejudice (we are the victims of
prejudice), is to have everything openly carried on. How do you find
Mr. C. looking, Miss Summerson?"

"He looks very ill. Dreadfully anxious."

"Just so," said Mr. Vholes.

He stood behind me with his long black figure reaching nearly to the
ceiling of those low rooms, feeling the pimples on his face as if
they were ornaments and speaking inwardly and evenly as though there
were not a human passion or emotion in his nature.

"Mr. Woodcourt is in attendance upon Mr. C., I believe?" he resumed.

"Mr. Woodcourt is his disinterested friend," I answered.

"But I mean in professional attendance, medical attendance."

"That can do little for an unhappy mind," said I.

"Just so," said Mr. Vholes.

So slow, so eager, so bloodless and gaunt, I felt as if Richard were
wasting away beneath the eyes of this adviser and there were
something of the vampire in him.

"Miss Summerson," said Mr. Vholes, very slowly rubbing his gloved
hands, as if, to his cold sense of touch, they were much the same in
black kid or out of it, "this was an ill-advised marriage of Mr.
C.'s."

I begged he would excuse me from discussing it. They had been engaged
when they were both very young, I told him (a little indignantly) and
when the prospect before them was much fairer and brighter. When
Richard had not yielded himself to the unhappy influence which now
darkened his life.

"Just so," assented Mr. Vholes again. "Still, with a view to
everything being openly carried on, I will, with your permission,
Miss Summerson, observe to you that I consider this a very
ill-advised marriage indeed. I owe the opinion not only to Mr. C.'s
connexions, against whom I should naturally wish to protect myself,
but also to my own reputation--dear to myself as a professional man
aiming to keep respectable; dear to my three girls at home, for whom
I am striving to realize some little independence; dear, I will even
say, to my aged father, whom it is my privilege to support."

"It would become a very different marriage, a much happier and better
marriage, another marriage altogether, Mr. Vholes," said I, "if
Richard were persuaded to turn his back on the fatal pursuit in which
you are engaged with him."

Mr. Vholes, with a noiseless cough--or rather gasp--into one of his
black gloves, inclined his head as if he did not wholly dispute even
that.

"Miss Summerson," he said, "it may be so; and I freely admit that the
young lady who has taken Mr. C.'s name upon herself in so ill-advised
a manner--you will I am sure not quarrel with me for throwing out
that remark again, as a duty I owe to Mr. C.'s connexions--is a
highly genteel young lady. Business has prevented me from mixing much
with general society in any but a professional character; still I
trust I am competent to perceive that she is a highly genteel young
lady. As to beauty, I am not a judge of that myself, and I never did
give much attention to it from a boy, but I dare say the young lady
is equally eligible in that point of view. She is considered so (I
have heard) among the clerks in the Inn, and it is a point more in
their way than in mine. In reference to Mr. C.'s pursuit of his
interests--"

"Oh! His interests, Mr. Vholes!"

"Pardon me," returned Mr. Vholes, going on in exactly the same inward
and dispassionate manner. "Mr. C. takes certain interests under
certain wills disputed in the suit. It is a term we use. In reference
to Mr. C,'s pursuit of his interests, I mentioned to you, Miss
Summerson, the first time I had the pleasure of seeing you, in my
desire that everything should be openly carried on--I used those
words, for I happened afterwards to note them in my diary, which is
producible at any time--I mentioned to you that Mr. C. had laid down
the principle of watching his own interests, and that when a client
of mine laid down a principle which was not of an immoral (that is to
say, unlawful) nature, it devolved upon me to carry it out. I HAVE
carried it out; I do carry it out. But I will not smooth things over
to any connexion of Mr. C.'s on any account. As open as I was to Mr.
Jarndyce, I am to you. I regard it in the light of a professional
duty to be so, though it can be charged to no one. I openly say,
unpalatable as it may be, that I consider Mr. C.'s affairs in a very
bad way, that I consider Mr. C. himself in a very bad way, and that I
regard this as an exceedingly ill-advised marriage. Am I here, sir?
Yes, I thank you; I am here, Mr. C., and enjoying the pleasure of
some agreeable conversation with Miss Summerson, for which I have to
thank you very much, sir!"

He broke off thus in answer to Richard, who addressed him as he came
into the room. By this time I too well understood Mr. Vholes's
scrupulous way of saving himself and his respectability not to feel
that our worst fears did but keep pace with his client's progress.

We sat down to dinner, and I had an opportunity of observing Richard,
anxiously. I was not disturbed by Mr. Vholes (who took off his gloves
to dine), though he sat opposite to me at the small table, for I
doubt if, looking up at all, he once removed his eyes from his host's
face. I found Richard thin and languid, slovenly in his dress,
abstracted in his manner, forcing his spirits now and then, and at
other intervals relapsing into a dull thoughtfulness. About his large
bright eyes that used to be so merry there was a wanness and a
restlessness that changed them altogether. I cannot use the
expression that he looked old. There is a ruin of youth which is not
like age, and into such a ruin Richard's youth and youthful beauty
had all fallen away.

He ate little and seemed indifferent what it was, showed himself to
be much more impatient than he used to be, and was quick even with
Ada. I thought at first that his old light-hearted manner was all
gone, but it shone out of him sometimes as I had occasionally known
little momentary glimpses of my own old face to look out upon me from
the glass. His laugh had not quite left him either, but it was like
the echo of a joyful sound, and that is always sorrowful.

Yet he was as glad as ever, in his old affectionate way, to have me
there, and we talked of the old times pleasantly. These did not
appear to be interesting to Mr. Vholes, though he occasionally made a
gasp which I believe was his smile. He rose shortly after dinner and
said that with the permission of the ladies he would retire to his
office.

"Always devoted to business, Vholes!" cried Richard.

"Yes, Mr. C.," he returned, "the interests of clients are never to be
neglected, sir. They are paramount in the thoughts of a professional
man like myself, who wishes to preserve a good name among his
fellow-practitioners and society at large. My denying myself the
pleasure of the present agreeable conversation may not be wholly
irrespective of your own interests, Mr. C."

Richard expressed himself quite sure of that and lighted Mr. Vholes
out. On his return he told us, more than once, that Vholes was a good
fellow, a safe fellow, a man who did what he pretended to do, a very
good fellow indeed! He was so defiant about it that it struck me he
had begun to doubt Mr. Vholes.

Then he threw himself on the sofa, tired out; and Ada and I put
things to rights, for they had no other servant than the woman who
attended to the chambers. My dear girl had a cottage piano there and
quietly sat down to sing some of Richard's favourites, the lamp being
first removed into the next room, as he complained of its hurting his
eyes.

I sat between them, at my dear girl's side, and felt very melancholy
listening to her sweet voice. I think Richard did too; I think he
darkened the room for that reason. She had been singing some time,
rising between whiles to bend over him and speak to him, when Mr.
Woodcourt came in. Then he sat down by Richard and half playfully,
half earnestly, quite naturally and easily, found out how he felt and
where he had been all day. Presently he proposed to accompany him in
a short walk on one of the bridges, as it was a moonlight airy night;
and Richard readily consenting, they went out together.

They left my dear girl still sitting at the piano and me still
sitting beside her. When they were gone out, I drew my arm round her
waist. She put her left hand in mine (I was sitting on that side),
but kept her right upon the keys, going over and over them without
striking any note.

"Esther, my dearest," she said, breaking silence, "Richard is never
so well and I am never so easy about him as when he is with Allan
Woodcourt. We have to thank you for that."

I pointed out to my darling how this could scarcely be, because Mr.
Woodcourt had come to her cousin John's house and had known us all
there, and because he had always liked Richard, and Richard had
always liked him, and--and so forth.

"All true," said Ada, "but that he is such a devoted friend to us we
owe to you."

I thought it best to let my dear girl have her way and to say no more
about it. So I said as much. I said it lightly, because I felt her
trembling.

"Esther, my dearest, I want to be a good wife, a very, very good wife
indeed. You shall teach me."

I teach! I said no more, for I noticed the hand that was fluttering
over the keys, and I knew that it was not I who ought to speak, that
it was she who had something to say to me.

"When I married Richard I was not insensible to what was before him.
I had been perfectly happy for a long time with you, and I had never
known any trouble or anxiety, so loved and cared for, but I
understood the danger he was in, dear Esther."

"I know, I know, my darling."

"When we were married I had some little hope that I might be able to
convince him of his mistake, that he might come to regard it in a new
way as my husband and not pursue it all the more desperately for my
sake--as he does. But if I had not had that hope, I would have
married him just the same, Esther. Just the same!"

In the momentary firmness of the hand that was never still--a
firmness inspired by the utterance of these last words, and dying
away with them--I saw the confirmation of her earnest tones.

"You are not to think, my dearest Esther, that I fail to see what you
see and fear what you fear. No one can understand him better than I
do. The greatest wisdom that ever lived in the world could scarcely
know Richard better than my love does."

She spoke so modestly and softly and her trembling hand expressed
such agitation as it moved to and fro upon the silent notes! My dear,
dear girl!

"I see him at his worst every day. I watch him in his sleep. I know
every change of his face. But when I married Richard I was quite
determined, Esther, if heaven would help me, never to show him that I
grieved for what he did and so to make him more unhappy. I want him,
when he comes home, to find no trouble in my face. I want him, when
he looks at me, to see what he loved in me. I married him to do this,
and this supports me."

I felt her trembling more. I waited for what was yet to come, and I
now thought I began to know what it was.

"And something else supports me, Esther."

She stopped a minute. Stopped speaking only; her hand was still in
motion.

"I look forward a little while, and I don't know what great aid may
come to me. When Richard turns his eyes upon me then, there may be
something lying on my breast more eloquent than I have been, with
greater power than mine to show him his true course and win him
back."

Her hand stopped now. She clasped me in her arms, and I clasped her
in mine.

"If that little creature should fail too, Esther, I still look
forward. I look forward a long while, through years and years, and
think that then, when I am growing old, or when I am dead perhaps, a
beautiful woman, his daughter, happily married, may be proud of him
and a blessing to him. Or that a generous brave man, as handsome as
he used to be, as hopeful, and far more happy, may walk in the
sunshine with him, honouring his grey head and saying to himself, 'I
thank God this is my father! Ruined by a fatal inheritance, and
restored through me!'"

Oh, my sweet girl, what a heart was that which beat so fast against
me!

"These hopes uphold me, my dear Esther, and I know they will. Though
sometimes even they depart from me before a dread that arises when I
look at Richard."

I tried to cheer my darling, and asked her what it was. Sobbing and
weeping, she replied, "That he may not live to see his child."




CHAPTER LXI

A Discovery


The days when I frequented that miserable corner which my dear girl
brightened can never fade in my remembrance. I never see it, and I
never wish to see it now; I have been there only once since, but in
my memory there is a mournful glory shining on the place which will
shine for ever.

Not a day passed without my going there, of course. At first I found
Mr. Skimpole there, on two or three occasions, idly playing the piano
and talking in his usual vivacious strain. Now, besides my very much
mistrusting the probability of his being there without making Richard
poorer, I felt as if there were something in his careless gaiety too
inconsistent with what I knew of the depths of Ada's life. I clearly
perceived, too, that Ada shared my feelings. I therefore resolved,
after much thinking of it, to make a private visit to Mr. Skimpole
and try delicately to explain myself. My dear girl was the great
consideration that made me bold.

I set off one morning, accompanied by Charley, for Somers Town. As I
approached the house, I was strongly inclined to turn back, for I
felt what a desperate attempt it was to make an impression on Mr.
Skimpole and how extremely likely it was that he would signally
defeat me. However, I thought that being there, I would go through
with it. I knocked with a trembling hand at Mr. Skimpole's
door--literally with a hand, for the knocker was gone--and after a
long parley gained admission from an Irishwoman, who was in the area
when I knocked, breaking up the lid of a water-butt with a poker to
light the fire with.

Mr. Skimpole, lying on the sofa in his room, playing the flute a
little, was enchanted to see me. Now, who should receive me, he
asked. Who would I prefer for mistress of the ceremonies? Would I
have his Comedy daughter, his Beauty daughter, or his Sentiment
daughter? Or would I have all the daughters at once in a perfect
nosegay?

I replied, half defeated already, that I wished to speak to himself
only if he would give me leave.

"My dear Miss Summerson, most joyfully! Of course," he said, bringing
his chair nearer mine and breaking into his fascinating smile, "of
course it's not business. Then it's pleasure!"

I said it certainly was not business that I came upon, but it was not
quite a pleasant matter.

"Then, my dear Miss Summerson," said he with the frankest gaiety,
"don't allude to it. Why should you allude to anything that is NOT a
pleasant matter? I never do. And you are a much pleasanter creature,
in every point of view, than I. You are perfectly pleasant; I am
imperfectly pleasant; then, if I never allude to an unpleasant
matter, how much less should you! So that's disposed of, and we will
talk of something else."

Although I was embarrassed, I took courage to intimate that I still
wished to pursue the subject.

"I should think it a mistake," said Mr. Skimpole with his airy laugh,
"if I thought Miss Summerson capable of making one. But I don't!"

"Mr. Skimpole," said I, raising my eyes to his, "I have so often
heard you say that you are unacquainted with the common affairs of
life--"

"Meaning our three banking-house friends, L, S, and who's the junior
partner? D?" said Mr. Skimpole, brightly. "Not an idea of them!"

"--That perhaps," I went on, "you will excuse my boldness on that
account. I think you ought most seriously to know that Richard is
poorer than he was."

"Dear me!" said Mr. Skimpole. "So am I, they tell me."

"And in very embarrassed circumstances."

"Parallel case, exactly!" said Mr. Skimpole with a delighted
countenance.

"This at present naturally causes Ada much secret anxiety, and as I
think she is less anxious when no claims are made upon her by
visitors, and as Richard has one uneasiness always heavy on his mind,
it has occurred to me to take the liberty of saying that--if you
would--not--"

I was coming to the point with great difficulty when he took me by
both hands and with a radiant face and in the liveliest way
anticipated it.

"Not go there? Certainly not, my dear Miss Summerson, most assuredly
not. Why SHOULD I go there? When I go anywhere, I go for pleasure. I
don't go anywhere for pain, because I was made for pleasure. Pain
comes to ME when it wants me. Now, I have had very little pleasure at
our dear Richard's lately, and your practical sagacity demonstrates
why. Our young friends, losing the youthful poetry which was once so
captivating in them, begin to think, 'This is a man who wants
pounds.' So I am; I always want pounds; not for myself, but because
tradespeople always want them of me. Next, our young friends begin to
think, becoming mercenary, 'This is the man who HAD pounds, who
borrowed them,' which I did. I always borrow pounds. So our young
friends, reduced to prose (which is much to be regretted), degenerate
in their power of imparting pleasure to me. Why should I go to see
them, therefore? Absurd!"

Through the beaming smile with which he regarded me as he reasoned
thus, there now broke forth a look of disinterested benevolence quite
astonishing.

"Besides," he said, pursuing his argument in his tone of
light-hearted conviction, "if I don't go anywhere for pain--which
would be a perversion of the intention of my being, and a monstrous
thing to do--why should I go anywhere to be the cause of pain? If I
went to see our young friends in their present ill-regulated state of
mind, I should give them pain. The associations with me would be
disagreeable. They might say, 'This is the man who had pounds and who
can't pay pounds,' which I can't, of course; nothing could be more
out of the question! Then kindness requires that I shouldn't go near
them--and I won't."

He finished by genially kissing my hand and thanking me. Nothing but
Miss Summerson's fine tact, he said, would have found this out for
him.

I was much disconcerted, but I reflected that if the main point were
gained, it mattered little how strangely he perverted everything
leading to it. I had determined to mention something else, however,
and I thought I was not to be put off in that.

"Mr. Skimpole," said I, "I must take the liberty of saying before I
conclude my visit that I was much surprised to learn, on the best
authority, some little time ago, that you knew with whom that poor
boy left Bleak House and that you accepted a present on that
occasion. I have not mentioned it to my guardian, for I fear it would
hurt him unnecessarily; but I may say to you that I was much
surprised."

"No? Really surprised, my dear Miss Summerson?" he returned
inquiringly, raising his pleasant eyebrows.

"Greatly surprised."

He thought about it for a little while with a highly agreeable and
whimsical expression of face, then quite gave it up and said in his
most engaging manner, "You know what a child I am. Why surprised?"

I was reluctant to enter minutely into that question, but as he
begged I would, for he was really curious to know, I gave him to
understand in the gentlest words I could use that his conduct seemed
to involve a disregard of several moral obligations. He was much
amused and interested when he heard this and said, "No, really?" with
ingenuous simplicity.

"You know I don't intend to be responsible. I never could do it.
Responsibility is a thing that has always been above me--or below
me," said Mr. Skimpole. "I don't even know which; but as I understand
the way in which my dear Miss Summerson (always remarkable for her
practical good sense and clearness) puts this case, I should imagine
it was chiefly a question of money, do you know?"

I incautiously gave a qualified assent to this.

"Ah! Then you see," said Mr. Skimpole, shaking his head, "I am
hopeless of understanding it."

I suggested, as I rose to go, that it was not right to betray my
guardian's confidence for a bribe.

"My dear Miss Summerson," he returned with a candid hilarity that was
all his own, "I can't be bribed."

"Not by Mr. Bucket?" said I.

"No," said he. "Not by anybody. I don't attach any value to money. I
don't care about it, I don't know about it, I don't want it, I don't
keep it--it goes away from me directly. How can I be bribed?"

I showed that I was of a different opinion, though I had not the
capacity for arguing the question.

"On the contrary," said Mr. Skimpole, "I am exactly the man to be
placed in a superior position in such a case as that. I am above the
rest of mankind in such a case as that. I can act with philosophy in
such a case as that. I am not warped by prejudices, as an Italian
baby is by bandages. I am as free as the air. I feel myself as far
above suspicion as Caesar's wife."

Anything to equal the lightness of his manner and the playful
impartiality with which he seemed to convince himself, as he tossed
the matter about like a ball of feathers, was surely never seen in
anybody else!

"Observe the case, my dear Miss Summerson. Here is a boy received
into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object to.
The boy being in bed, a man arrives--like the house that Jack built.
Here is the man who demands the boy who is received into the house
and put to bed in a state that I strongly object to. Here is a
bank-note produced by the man who demands the boy who is received
into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object to.
Here is the Skimpole who accepts the bank-note produced by the man
who demands the boy who is received into the house and put to bed in
a state that I strongly object to. Those are the facts. Very well.
Should the Skimpole have refused the note? WHY should the Skimpole
have refused the note? Skimpole protests to Bucket, 'What's this for?
I don't understand it, it is of no use to me, take it away.' Bucket
still entreats Skimpole to accept it. Are there reasons why Skimpole,
not being warped by prejudices, should accept it? Yes. Skimpole
perceives them. What are they? Skimpole reasons with himself, this is
a tamed lynx, an active police-officer, an intelligent man, a person
of a peculiarly directed energy and great subtlety both of conception
and execution, who discovers our friends and enemies for us when they
run away, recovers our property for us when we are robbed, avenges us
comfortably when we are murdered. This active police-officer and
intelligent man has acquired, in the exercise of his art, a strong
faith in money; he finds it very useful to him, and he makes it very
useful to society. Shall I shake that faith in Bucket because I want
it myself; shall I deliberately blunt one of Bucket's weapons; shall
I positively paralyse Bucket in his next detective operation? And
again. If it is blameable in Skimpole to take the note, it is
blameable in Bucket to offer the note--much more blameable in Bucket,
because he is the knowing man. Now, Skimpole wishes to think well of
Bucket; Skimpole deems it essential, in its little place, to the
general cohesion of things, that he SHOULD think well of Bucket. The
state expressly asks him to trust to Bucket. And he does. And that's
all he does!"

I had nothing to offer in reply to this exposition and therefore took
my leave. Mr. Skimpole, however, who was in excellent spirits, would
not hear of my returning home attended only by "Little Coavinses,"
and accompanied me himself. He entertained me on the way with a
variety of delightful conversation and assured me, at parting, that
he should never forget the fine tact with which I had found that out
for him about our young friends.

As it so happened that I never saw Mr. Skimpole again, I may at once
finish what I know of his history. A coolness arose between him and
my guardian, based principally on the foregoing grounds and on his
having heartlessly disregarded my guardian's entreaties (as we
afterwards learned from Ada) in reference to Richard. His being
heavily in my guardian's debt had nothing to do with their
separation. He died some five years afterwards and left a diary
behind him, with letters and other materials towards his life, which
was published and which showed him to have been the victim of a
combination on the part of mankind against an amiable child. It was
considered very pleasant reading, but I never read more of it myself
than the sentence on which I chanced to light on opening the book. It
was this: "Jarndyce, in common with most other men I have known, is
the incarnation of selfishness."

And now I come to a part of my story touching myself very nearly
indeed, and for which I was quite unprepared when the circumstance
occurred. Whatever little lingerings may have now and then revived in
my mind associated with my poor old face had only revived as
belonging to a part of my life that was gone--gone like my infancy or
my childhood. I have suppressed none of my many weaknesses on that
subject, but have written them as faithfully as my memory has
recalled them. And I hope to do, and mean to do, the same down to the
last words of these pages, which I see now not so very far before me.

The months were gliding away, and my dear girl, sustained by the
hopes she had confided in me, was the same beautiful star in the
miserable corner. Richard, more worn and haggard, haunted the court
day after day, listlessly sat there the whole day long when he knew
there was no remote chance of the suit being mentioned, and became
one of the stock sights of the place. I wonder whether any of the
gentlemen remembered him as he was when he first went there.

So completely was he absorbed in his fixed idea that he used to avow
in his cheerful moments that he should never have breathed the fresh
air now "but for Woodcourt." It was only Mr. Woodcourt who could
occasionally divert his attention for a few hours at a time and rouse
him, even when he sunk into a lethargy of mind and body that alarmed
us greatly, and the returns of which became more frequent as the
months went on. My dear girl was right in saying that he only pursued
his errors the more desperately for her sake. I have no doubt that
his desire to retrieve what he had lost was rendered the more intense
by his grief for his young wife, and became like the madness of a
gamester.

I was there, as I have mentioned, at all hours. When I was there at
night, I generally went home with Charley in a coach; sometimes my
guardian would meet me in the neighbourhood, and we would walk home
together. One evening he had arranged to meet me at eight o'clock. I
could not leave, as I usually did, quite punctually at the time, for
I was working for my dear girl and had a few stitches more to do to
finish what I was about; but it was within a few minutes of the hour
when I bundled up my little work-basket, gave my darling my last kiss
for the night, and hurried downstairs. Mr. Woodcourt went with me, as
it was dusk.

When we came to the usual place of meeting--it was close by, and Mr.
Woodcourt had often accompanied me before--my guardian was not there.
We waited half an hour, walking up and down, but there were no signs
of him. We agreed that he was either prevented from coming or that he
had come and gone away, and Mr. Woodcourt proposed to walk home with
me.

It was the first walk we had ever taken together, except that very
short one to the usual place of meeting. We spoke of Richard and Ada
the whole way. I did not thank him in words for what he had done--my
appreciation of it had risen above all words then--but I hoped he
might not be without some understanding of what I felt so strongly.

Arriving at home and going upstairs, we found that my guardian was
out and that Mrs. Woodcourt was out too. We were in the very same
room into which I had brought my blushing girl when her youthful
lover, now her so altered husband, was the choice of her young heart,
the very same room from which my guardian and I had watched them
going away through the sunlight in the fresh bloom of their hope and
promise.

We were standing by the opened window looking down into the street
when Mr. Woodcourt spoke to me. I learned in a moment that he loved
me. I learned in a moment that my scarred face was all unchanged to
him. I learned in a moment that what I had thought was pity and
compassion was devoted, generous, faithful love. Oh, too late to know
it now, too late, too late. That was the first ungrateful thought I
had. Too late.

"When I returned," he told me, "when I came back, no richer than when
I went away, and found you newly risen from a sick bed, yet so
inspired by sweet consideration for others and so free from a selfish
thought--"

"Oh, Mr. Woodcourt, forbear, forbear!" I entreated him. "I do not
deserve your high praise. I had many selfish thoughts at that time,
many!"

"Heaven knows, beloved of my life," said he, "that my praise is not a
lover's praise, but the truth. You do not know what all around you
see in Esther Summerson, how many hearts she touches and awakens,
what sacred admiration and what love she wins."

"Oh, Mr. Woodcourt," cried I, "it is a great thing to win love, it is
a great thing to win love! I am proud of it, and honoured by it; and
the hearing of it causes me to shed these tears of mingled joy and
sorrow--joy that I have won it, sorrow that I have not deserved it
better; but I am not free to think of yours."

I said it with a stronger heart, for when he praised me thus and when
I heard his voice thrill with his belief that what he said was true,
I aspired to be more worthy of it. It was not too late for that.
Although I closed this unforeseen page in my life to-night, I could
be worthier of it all through my life. And it was a comfort to me,
and an impulse to me, and I felt a dignity rise up within me that was
derived from him when I thought so.

He broke the silence.

"I should poorly show the trust that I have in the dear one who will
evermore be as dear to me as now"--and the deep earnestness with
which he said it at once strengthened me and made me weep--"if, after
her assurance that she is not free to think of my love, I urged it.
Dear Esther, let me only tell you that the fond idea of you which I
took abroad was exalted to the heavens when I came home. I have
always hoped, in the first hour when I seemed to stand in any ray of
good fortune, to tell you this. I have always feared that I should
tell it you in vain. My hopes and fears are both fulfilled to-night.
I distress you. I have said enough."

Something seemed to pass into my place that was like the angel he
thought me, and I felt so sorrowful for the loss he had sustained! I
wished to help him in his trouble, as I had wished to do when he
showed that first commiseration for me.

"Dear Mr. Woodcourt," said I, "before we part to-night, something is
left for me to say. I never could say it as I wish--I never
shall--but--"

I had to think again of being more deserving of his love and his
affliction before I could go on.

"--I am deeply sensible of your generosity, and I shall treasure its
remembrance to my dying hour. I know full well how changed I am, I
know you are not unacquainted with my history, and I know what a
noble love that is which is so faithful. What you have said to me
could have affected me so much from no other lips, for there are none
that could give it such a value to me. It shall not be lost. It shall
make me better."

He covered his eyes with his hand and turned away his head. How could
I ever be worthy of those tears?

"If, in the unchanged intercourse we shall have together--in tending
Richard and Ada, and I hope in many happier scenes of life--you ever
find anything in me which you can honestly think is better than it
used to be, believe that it will have sprung up from to-night and
that I shall owe it to you. And never believe, dear dear Mr.
Woodcourt, never believe that I forget this night or that while my
heart beats it can be insensible to the pride and joy of having been
beloved by you."

He took my hand and kissed it. He was like himself again, and I felt
still more encouraged.

"I am induced by what you said just now," said I, "to hope that you
have succeeded in your endeavour."

"I have," he answered. "With such help from Mr. Jarndyce as you who
know him so well can imagine him to have rendered me, I have
succeeded."

"Heaven bless him for it," said I, giving him my hand; "and heaven
bless you in all you do!"

"I shall do it better for the wish," he answered; "it will make me
enter on these new duties as on another sacred trust from you."

"Ah! Richard!" I exclaimed involuntarily, "What will he do when you
are gone!"

"I am not required to go yet; I would not desert him, dear Miss
Summerson, even if I were."

One other thing I felt it needful to touch upon before he left me. I
knew that I should not be worthier of the love I could not take if I
reserved it.

"Mr. Woodcourt," said I, "you will be glad to know from my lips
before I say good night that in the future, which is clear and bright
before me, I am most happy, most fortunate, have nothing to regret or
desire."

It was indeed a glad hearing to him, he replied.

"From my childhood I have been," said I, "the object of the untiring
goodness of the best of human beings, to whom I am so bound by every
tie of attachment, gratitude, and love, that nothing I could do in
the compass of a life could express the feelings of a single day."

"I share those feelings," he returned. "You speak of Mr. Jarndyce."

"You know his virtues well," said I, "but few can know the greatness
of his character as I know it. All its highest and best qualities
have been revealed to me in nothing more brightly than in the shaping
out of that future in which I am so happy. And if your highest homage
and respect had not been his already--which I know they are--they
would have been his, I think, on this assurance and in the feeling it
would have awakened in you towards him for my sake."

He fervently replied that indeed indeed they would have been. I gave
him my hand again.

"Good night," I said, "Good-bye."

"The first until we meet to-morrow, the second as a farewell to this
theme between us for ever."

"Yes."

"Good night; good-bye."

He left me, and I stood at the dark window watching the street. His
love, in all its constancy and generosity, had come so suddenly upon
me that he had not left me a minute when my fortitude gave way again
and the street was blotted out by my rushing tears.

But they were not tears of regret and sorrow. No. He had called me
the beloved of his life and had said I would be evermore as dear to
him as I was then, and I felt as if my heart would not hold the
triumph of having heard those words. My first wild thought had died
away. It was not too late to hear them, for it was not too late to be
animated by them to be good, true, grateful, and contented. How easy
my path, how much easier than his!




CHAPTER LXII

Another Discovery


I had not the courage to see any one that night. I had not even the
courage to see myself, for I was afraid that my tears might a little
reproach me. I went up to my room in the dark, and prayed in the
dark, and lay down in the dark to sleep. I had no need of any light
to read my guardian's letter by, for I knew it by heart. I took it
from the place where I kept it, and repeated its contents by its own
clear light of integrity and love, and went to sleep with it on my
pillow.

I was up very early in the morning and called Charley to come for a
walk. We bought flowers for the breakfast-table, and came back and
arranged them, and were as busy as possible. We were so early that I
had a good time still for Charley's lesson before breakfast; Charley
(who was not in the least improved in the old defective article of
grammar) came through it with great applause; and we were altogether
very notable. When my guardian appeared he said, "Why, little woman,
you look fresher than your flowers!" And Mrs. Woodcourt repeated and
translated a passage from the Mewlinnwillinwodd expressive of my
being like a mountain with the sun upon it.

This was all so pleasant that I hope it made me still more like the
mountain than I had been before. After breakfast I waited my
opportunity and peeped about a little until I saw my guardian in his
own room--the room of last night--by himself. Then I made an excuse
to go in with my housekeeping keys, shutting the door after me.

"Well, Dame Durden?" said my guardian; the post had brought him
several letters, and he was writing. "You want money?"

"No, indeed, I have plenty in hand."

"There never was such a Dame Durden," said my guardian, "for making
money last."

He had laid down his pen and leaned back in his chair looking at me.
I have often spoken of his bright face, but I thought I had never
seen it look so bright and good. There was a high happiness upon it
which made me think, "He has been doing some great kindness this
morning."

"There never was," said my guardian, musing as he smiled upon me,
"such a Dame Durden for making money last."

He had never yet altered his old manner. I loved it and him so much
that when I now went up to him and took my usual chair, which was
always put at his side--for sometimes I read to him, and sometimes I
talked to him, and sometimes I silently worked by him--I hardly liked
to disturb it by laying my hand on his breast. But I found I did not
disturb it at all.

"Dear guardian," said I, "I want to speak to you. Have I been remiss
in anything?"

"Remiss in anything, my dear!"

"Have I not been what I have meant to be since--I brought the answer
to your letter, guardian?"

"You have been everything I could desire, my love."

"I am very glad indeed to hear that," I returned. "You know, you said
to me, was this the mistress of Bleak House. And I said, yes."

"Yes," said my guardian, nodding his head. He had put his arm about
me as if there were something to protect me from and looked in my
face, smiling.

"Since then," said I, "we have never spoken on the subject except
once."

"And then I said Bleak House was thinning fast; and so it was, my
dear."

"And I said," I timidly reminded him, "but its mistress remained."

He still held me in the same protecting manner and with the same
bright goodness in his face.

"Dear guardian," said I, "I know how you have felt all that has
happened, and how considerate you have been. As so much time has
passed, and as you spoke only this morning of my being so well again,
perhaps you expect me to renew the subject. Perhaps I ought to do so.
I will be the mistress of Bleak House when you please."

"See," he returned gaily, "what a sympathy there must be between us!
I have had nothing else, poor Rick excepted--it's a large
exception--in my mind. When you came in, I was full of it. When shall
we give Bleak House its mistress, little woman?"

"When you please."

"Next month?"

"Next month, dear guardian."

"The day on which I take the happiest and best step of my life--the
day on which I shall be a man more exulting and more enviable than
any other man in the world--the day on which I give Bleak House its
little mistress--shall be next month then," said my guardian.

I put my arms round his neck and kissed him just as I had done on the
day when I brought my answer.

A servant came to the door to announce Mr. Bucket, which was quite
unnecessary, for Mr. Bucket was already looking in over the servant's
shoulder. "Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson," said he, rather out of
breath, "with all apologies for intruding, WILL you allow me to order
up a person that's on the stairs and that objects to being left there
in case of becoming the subject of observations in his absence? Thank
you. Be so good as chair that there member in this direction, will
you?" said Mr. Bucket, beckoning over the banisters.

This singular request produced an old man in a black skull-cap,
unable to walk, who was carried up by a couple of bearers and
deposited in the room near the door. Mr. Bucket immediately got rid
of the bearers, mysteriously shut the door, and bolted it.

"Now you see, Mr. Jarndyce," he then began, putting down his hat and
opening his subject with a flourish of his well-remembered finger,
"you know me, and Miss Summerson knows me. This gentleman likewise
knows me, and his name is Smallweed. The discounting line is his line
principally, and he's what you may call a dealer in bills. That's
about what YOU are, you know, ain't you?" said Mr. Bucket, stopping a
little to address the gentleman in question, who was exceedingly
suspicious of him.

He seemed about to dispute this designation of himself when he was
seized with a violent fit of coughing.

"Now, moral, you know!" said Mr. Bucket, improving the accident.
"Don't you contradict when there ain't no occasion, and you won't be
took in that way. Now, Mr. Jarndyce, I address myself to you. I've
been negotiating with this gentleman on behalf of Sir Leicester
Dedlock, Baronet, and one way and another I've been in and out and
about his premises a deal. His premises are the premises formerly
occupied by Krook, marine store dealer--a relation of this
gentleman's that you saw in his lifetime if I don't mistake?"

My guardian replied, "Yes."

"Well! You are to understand," said Mr. Bucket, "that this gentleman
he come into Krook's property, and a good deal of magpie property
there was. Vast lots of waste-paper among the rest. Lord bless you,
of no use to nobody!"

The cunning of Mr. Bucket's eye and the masterly manner in which he
contrived, without a look or a word against which his watchful
auditor could protest, to let us know that he stated the case
according to previous agreement and could say much more of Mr.
Smallweed if he thought it advisable, deprived us of any merit in
quite understanding him. His difficulty was increased by Mr.
Smallweed's being deaf as well as suspicious and watching his face
with the closest attention.

"Among them odd heaps of old papers, this gentleman, when he comes
into the property, naturally begins to rummage, don't you see?" said
Mr. Bucket.

"To which? Say that again," cried Mr. Smallweed in a shrill, sharp
voice.

"To rummage," repeated Mr. Bucket. "Being a prudent man and
accustomed to take care of your own affairs, you begin to rummage
among the papers as you have come into; don't you?"

"Of course I do," cried Mr. Smallweed.

"Of course you do," said Mr. Bucket conversationally, "and much to
blame you would be if you didn't. And so you chance to find, you
know," Mr. Bucket went on, stooping over him with an air of cheerful
raillery which Mr. Smallweed by no means reciprocated, "and so you
chance to find, you know, a paper with the signature of Jarndyce to
it. Don't you?"

Mr. Smallweed glanced with a troubled eye at us and grudgingly nodded
assent.

"And coming to look at that paper at your full leisure and
convenience--all in good time, for you're not curious to read it, and
why should you be?--what do you find it to be but a will, you see.
That's the drollery of it," said Mr. Bucket with the same lively air
of recalling a joke for the enjoyment of Mr. Smallweed, who still had
the same crest-fallen appearance of not enjoying it at all; "what do
you find it to be but a will?"

"I don't know that it's good as a will or as anything else," snarled
Mr. Smallweed.

Mr. Bucket eyed the old man for a moment--he had slipped and shrunk
down in his chair into a mere bundle--as if he were much disposed to
pounce upon him; nevertheless, he continued to bend over him with the
same agreeable air, keeping the corner of one of his eyes upon us.

"Notwithstanding which," said Mr. Bucket, "you get a little doubtful
and uncomfortable in your mind about it, having a very tender mind of
your own."

"Eh? What do you say I have got of my own?" asked Mr. Smallweed with
his hand to his ear.

"A very tender mind."

"Ho! Well, go on," said Mr. Smallweed.

"And as you've heard a good deal mentioned regarding a celebrated
Chancery will case of the same name, and as you know what a card
Krook was for buying all manner of old pieces of furniter, and books,
and papers, and what not, and never liking to part with 'em, and
always a-going to teach himself to read, you begin to think--and you
never was more correct in your born days--'Ecod, if I don't look
about me, I may get into trouble regarding this will.'"

"Now, mind how you put it, Bucket," cried the old man anxiously with
his hand at his ear. "Speak up; none of your brimstone tricks. Pick
me up; I want to hear better. Oh, Lord, I am shaken to bits!"

Mr. Bucket had certainly picked him up at a dart. However, as soon as
he could be heard through Mr. Smallweed's coughing and his vicious
ejaculations of "Oh, my bones! Oh, dear! I've no breath in my body!
I'm worse than the chattering, clattering, brimstone pig at home!"
Mr. Bucket proceeded in the same convivial manner as before.

"So, as I happen to be in the habit of coming about your premises,
you take me into your confidence, don't you?"

I think it would be impossible to make an admission with more ill
will and a worse grace than Mr. Smallweed displayed when he admitted
this, rendering it perfectly evident that Mr. Bucket was the very
last person he would have thought of taking into his confidence if he
could by any possibility have kept him out of it.

"And I go into the business with you--very pleasant we are over it;
and I confirm you in your well-founded fears that you will get
yourself into a most precious line if you don't come out with that
there will," said Mr. Bucket emphatically; "and accordingly you
arrange with me that it shall be delivered up to this present Mr.
Jarndyce, on no conditions. If it should prove to be valuable, you
trusting yourself to him for your reward; that's about where it is,
ain't it?"

"That's what was agreed," Mr. Smallweed assented with the same bad
grace.

"In consequence of which," said Mr. Bucket, dismissing his agreeable
manner all at once and becoming strictly business-like, "you've got
that will upon your person at the present time, and the only thing
that remains for you to do is just to out with it!"

Having given us one glance out of the watching corner of his eye, and
having given his nose one triumphant rub with his forefinger, Mr.
Bucket stood with his eyes fastened on his confidential friend and
his hand stretched forth ready to take the paper and present it to my
guardian. It was not produced without much reluctance and many
declarations on the part of Mr. Smallweed that he was a poor
industrious man and that he left it to Mr. Jarndyce's honour not to
let him lose by his honesty. Little by little he very slowly took
from a breast-pocket a stained, discoloured paper which was much
singed upon the outside and a little burnt at the edges, as if it had
long ago been thrown upon a fire and hastily snatched off again. Mr.
Bucket lost no time in transferring this paper, with the dexterity of
a conjuror, from Mr. Smallweed to Mr. Jarndyce. As he gave it to my
guardian, he whispered behind his fingers, "Hadn't settled how to
make their market of it. Quarrelled and hinted about it. I laid out
twenty pound upon it. First the avaricious grandchildren split upon
him on account of their objections to his living so unreasonably
long, and then they split on one another. Lord! There ain't one of
the family that wouldn't sell the other for a pound or two, except
the old lady--and she's only out of it because she's too weak in her
mind to drive a bargain."

"Mr Bucket," said my guardian aloud, "whatever the worth of this
paper may be to any one, my obligations are great to you; and if it
be of any worth, I hold myself bound to see Mr. Smallweed remunerated
accordingly."

"Not according to your merits, you know," said Mr. Bucket in friendly
explanation to Mr. Smallweed. "Don't you be afraid of that. According
to its value."

"That is what I mean," said my guardian. "You may observe, Mr.
Bucket, that I abstain from examining this paper myself. The plain
truth is, I have forsworn and abjured the whole business these many
years, and my soul is sick of it. But Miss Summerson and I will
immediately place the paper in the hands of my solicitor in the
cause, and its existence shall be made known without delay to all
other parties interested."

"Mr. Jarndyce can't say fairer than that, you understand," observed
Mr. Bucket to his fellow-visitor. "And it being now made clear to you
that nobody's a-going to be wronged--which must be a great relief to
YOUR mind--we may proceed with the ceremony of chairing you home
again."

He unbolted the door, called in the bearers, wished us good morning,
and with a look full of meaning and a crook of his finger at parting
went his way.

We went our way too, which was to Lincoln's Inn, as quickly as
possible. Mr. Kenge was disengaged, and we found him at his table in
his dusty room with the inexpressive-looking books and the piles of
papers. Chairs having been placed for us by Mr. Guppy, Mr. Kenge
expressed the surprise and gratification he felt at the unusual sight
of Mr. Jarndyce in his office. He turned over his double eye-glass as
he spoke and was more Conversation Kenge than ever.

"I hope," said Mr. Kenge, "that the genial influence of Miss
Summerson," he bowed to me, "may have induced Mr. Jarndyce," he bowed
to him, "to forego some little of his animosity towards a cause and
towards a court which are--shall I say, which take their place in the
stately vista of the pillars of our profession?"

"I am inclined to think," returned my guardian, "that Miss Summerson
has seen too much of the effects of the court and the cause to exert
any influence in their favour. Nevertheless, they are a part of the
occasion of my being here. Mr. Kenge, before I lay this paper on your
desk and have done with it, let me tell you how it has come into my
hands."

He did so shortly and distinctly.

"It could not, sir," said Mr. Kenge, "have been stated more plainly
and to the purpose if it had been a case at law."

"Did you ever know English law, or equity either, plain and to the
purpose?" said my guardian.

"Oh, fie!" said Mr. Kenge.

At first he had not seemed to attach much importance to the paper,
but when he saw it he appeared more interested, and when he had
opened and read a little of it through his eye-glass, he became
amazed. "Mr. Jarndyce," he said, looking off it, "you have perused
this?"

"Not I!" returned my guardian.

"But, my dear sir," said Mr. Kenge, "it is a will of later date than
any in the suit. It appears to be all in the testator's handwriting.
It is duly executed and attested. And even if intended to be
cancelled, as might possibly be supposed to be denoted by these marks
of fire, it is NOT cancelled. Here it is, a perfect instrument!"

"Well!" said my guardian. "What is that to me?"

"Mr. Guppy!" cried Mr. Kenge, raising his voice. "I beg your pardon,
Mr. Jarndyce."

"Sir."

"Mr. Vholes of Symond's Inn. My compliments. Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
Glad to speak with him."

Mr. Guppy disappeared.

"You ask me what is this to you, Mr. Jarndyce. If you had perused
this document, you would have seen that it reduces your interest
considerably, though still leaving it a very handsome one, still
leaving it a very handsome one," said Mr. Kenge, waving his hand
persuasively and blandly. "You would further have seen that the
interests of Mr. Richard Carstone and of Miss Ada Clare, now Mrs.
Richard Carstone, are very materially advanced by it."

"Kenge," said my guardian, "if all the flourishing wealth that the
suit brought into this vile court of Chancery could fall to my two
young cousins, I should be well contented. But do you ask ME to
believe that any good is to come of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?"

"Oh, really, Mr. Jarndyce! Prejudice, prejudice. My dear sir, this is
a very great country, a very great country. Its system of equity is a
very great system, a very great system. Really, really!"

My guardian said no more, and Mr. Vholes arrived. He was modestly
impressed by Mr. Kenge's professional eminence.

"How do you do, Mr. Vholes? Will you be so good as to take a chair
here by me and look over this paper?"

Mr. Vholes did as he was asked and seemed to read it every word. He
was not excited by it, but he was not excited by anything. When he
had well examined it, he retired with Mr. Kenge into a window, and
shading his mouth with his black glove, spoke to him at some length.
I was not surprised to observe Mr. Kenge inclined to dispute what
he said before he had said much, for I knew that no two people ever
did agree about anything in Jarndyce and Jarndyce. But he seemed
to get the better of Mr. Kenge too in a conversation that sounded
as if it were almost composed of the words "Receiver-General,"
"Accountant-General," "report," "estate," and "costs." When they had
finished, they came back to Mr. Kenge's table and spoke aloud.

"Well! But this is a very remarkable document, Mr. Vholes," said Mr.
Kenge.

Mr. Vholes said, "Very much so."

"And a very important document, Mr. Vholes," said Mr. Kenge.

Again Mr. Vholes said, "Very much so."

"And as you say, Mr. Vholes, when the cause is in the paper next
term, this document will be an unexpected and interesting feature in
it," said Mr. Kenge, looking loftily at my guardian.

Mr. Vholes was gratified, as a smaller practitioner striving to keep
respectable, to be confirmed in any opinion of his own by such an
authority.

"And when," asked my guardian, rising after a pause, during which Mr.
Kenge had rattled his money and Mr. Vholes had picked his pimples,
"when is next term?"

"Next term, Mr. Jarndyce, will be next month," said Mr. Kenge. "Of
course we shall at once proceed to do what is necessary with this
document and to collect the necessary evidence concerning it; and of
course you will receive our usual notification of the cause being in
the paper."

"To which I shall pay, of course, my usual attention."

"Still bent, my dear sir," said Mr. Kenge, showing us through the
outer office to the door, "still bent, even with your enlarged mind,
on echoing a popular prejudice? We are a prosperous community, Mr.
Jarndyce, a very prosperous community. We are a great country, Mr.
Jarndyce, we are a very great country. This is a great system, Mr.
Jarndyce, and would you wish a great country to have a little system?
Now, really, really!"

He said this at the stair-head, gently moving his right hand as if it
were a silver trowel with which to spread the cement of his words on
the structure of the system and consolidate it for a thousand ages.




CHAPTER LXIII

Steel and Iron


George's Shooting Gallery is to let, and the stock is sold off, and
George himself is at Chesney Wold attending on Sir Leicester in his
rides and riding very near his bridle-rein because of the uncertain
hand with which he guides his horse. But not to-day is George so
occupied. He is journeying to-day into the iron country farther north
to look about him.

As he comes into the iron country farther north, such fresh green
woods as those of Chesney Wold are left behind; and coal pits and
ashes, high chimneys and red bricks, blighted verdure, scorching
fires, and a heavy never-lightening cloud of smoke become the
features of the scenery. Among such objects rides the trooper,
looking about him and always looking for something he has come to
find.

At last, on the black canal bridge of a busy town, with a clang of
iron in it, and more fires and more smoke than he has seen yet, the
trooper, swart with the dust of the coal roads, checks his horse and
asks a workman does he know the name of Rouncewell thereabouts.

"Why, master," quoth the workman, "do I know my own name?"

"'Tis so well known here, is it, comrade?" asks the trooper.

"Rouncewell's? Ah! You're right."

"And where might it be now?" asks the trooper with a glance before
him.

"The bank, the factory, or the house?" the workman wants to know.

"Hum! Rouncewell's is so great apparently," mutters the trooper,
stroking his chin, "that I have as good as half a mind to go back
again. Why, I don't know which I want. Should I find Mr. Rouncewell
at the factory, do you think?"

"Tain't easy to say where you'd find him--at this time of the day you
might find either him or his son there, if he's in town; but his
contracts take him away."

And which is the factory? Why, he sees those chimneys--the tallest
ones! Yes, he sees THEM. Well! Let him keep his eye on those
chimneys, going on as straight as ever he can, and presently he'll
see 'em down a turning on the left, shut in by a great brick wall
which forms one side of the street. That's Rouncewell's.

The trooper thanks his informant and rides slowly on, looking about
him. He does not turn back, but puts up his horse (and is much
disposed to groom him too) at a public-house where some of
Rouncewell's hands are dining, as the ostler tells him. Some of
Rouncewell's hands have just knocked off for dinner-time and seem to
be invading the whole town. They are very sinewy and strong, are
Rouncewell's hands--a little sooty too.

He comes to a gateway in the brick wall, looks in, and sees a great
perplexity of iron lying about in every stage and in a vast variety
of shapes--in bars, in wedges, in sheets; in tanks, in boilers, in
axles, in wheels, in cogs, in cranks, in rails; twisted and wrenched
into eccentric and perverse forms as separate parts of machinery;
mountains of it broken up, and rusty in its age; distant furnaces of
it glowing and bubbling in its youth; bright fireworks of it
showering about under the blows of the steam-hammer; red-hot iron,
white-hot iron, cold-black iron; an iron taste, an iron smell, and a
Babel of iron sounds.

"This is a place to make a man's head ache too!" says the trooper,
looking about him for a counting-house. "Who comes here? This is very
like me before I was set up. This ought to be my nephew, if
likenesses run in families. Your servant, sir."

"Yours, sir. Are you looking for any one?"

"Excuse me. Young Mr. Rouncewell, I believe?"

"Yes."

"I was looking for your father, sir. I wish to have a word with him."

The young man, telling him he is fortunate in his choice of a time,
for his father is there, leads the way to the office where he is to
be found. "Very like me before I was set up--devilish like me!"
thinks the trooper as he follows. They come to a building in the yard
with an office on an upper floor. At sight of the gentleman in the
office, Mr. George turns very red.

"What name shall I say to my father?" asks the young man.

George, full of the idea of iron, in desperation answers "Steel," and
is so presented. He is left alone with the gentleman in the office,
who sits at a table with account-books before him and some sheets of
paper blotted with hosts of figures and drawings of cunning shapes.
It is a bare office, with bare windows, looking on the iron view
below. Tumbled together on the table are some pieces of iron,
purposely broken to be tested at various periods of their service, in
various capacities. There is iron-dust on everything; and the smoke
is seen through the windows rolling heavily out of the tall chimneys
to mingle with the smoke from a vaporous Babylon of other chimneys.

"I am at your service, Mr. Steel," says the gentleman when his
visitor has taken a rusty chair.

"Well, Mr. Rouncewell," George replies, leaning forward with his left
arm on his knee and his hat in his hand, and very chary of meeting
his brother's eye, "I am not without my expectations that in the
present visit I may prove to be more free than welcome. I have served
as a dragoon in my day, and a comrade of mine that I was once rather
partial to was, if I don't deceive myself, a brother of yours. I
believe you had a brother who gave his family some trouble, and ran
away, and never did any good but in keeping away?"

"Are you quite sure," returns the ironmaster in an altered voice,
"that your name is Steel?"

The trooper falters and looks at him. His brother starts up, calls
him by his name, and grasps him by both hands.

"You are too quick for me!" cries the trooper with the tears
springing out of his eyes. "How do you do, my dear old fellow? I
never could have thought you would have been half so glad to see me
as all this. How do you do, my dear old fellow, how do you do!"

They shake hands and embrace each other over and over again, the
trooper still coupling his "How do you do, my dear old fellow!" with
his protestation that he never thought his brother would have been
half so glad to see him as all this!

"So far from it," he declares at the end of a full account of what
has preceded his arrival there, "I had very little idea of making
myself known. I thought if you took by any means forgivingly to my
name I might gradually get myself up to the point of writing a
letter. But I should not have been surprised, brother, if you had
considered it anything but welcome news to hear of me."

"We will show you at home what kind of news we think it, George,"
returns his brother. "This is a great day at home, and you could not
have arrived, you bronzed old soldier, on a better. I make an
agreement with my son Watt to-day that on this day twelvemonth he
shall marry as pretty and as good a girl as you have seen in all your
travels. She goes to Germany to-morrow with one of your nieces for a
little polishing up in her education. We make a feast of the event,
and you will be made the hero of it."

Mr. George is so entirely overcome at first by this prospect that he
resists the proposed honour with great earnestness. Being overborne,
however, by his brother and his nephew--concerning whom he renews his
protestations that he never could have thought they would have been
half so glad to see him--he is taken home to an elegant house in all
the arrangements of which there is to be observed a pleasant mixture
of the originally simple habits of the father and mother with such as
are suited to their altered station and the higher fortunes of their
children. Here Mr. George is much dismayed by the graces and
accomplishments of his nieces that are and by the beauty of Rosa, his
niece that is to be, and by the affectionate salutations of these
young ladies, which he receives in a sort of dream. He is sorely
taken aback, too, by the dutiful behaviour of his nephew and has a
woeful consciousness upon him of being a scapegrace. However, there
is great rejoicing and a very hearty company and infinite enjoyment,
and Mr. George comes bluff and martial through it all, and his pledge
to be present at the marriage and give away the bride is received
with universal favour. A whirling head has Mr. George that night when
he lies down in the state-bed of his brother's house to think of all
these things and to see the images of his nieces (awful all the
evening in their floating muslins) waltzing, after the German manner,
over his counterpane.

The brothers are closeted next morning in the ironmaster's room,
where the elder is proceeding, in his clear sensible way, to show how
he thinks he may best dispose of George in his business, when George
squeezes his hand and stops him.

"Brother, I thank you a million times for your more than brotherly
welcome, and a million times more to that for your more than
brotherly intentions. But my plans are made. Before I say a word as
to them, I wish to consult you upon one family point. How," says the
trooper, folding his arms and looking with indomitable firmness at
his brother, "how is my mother to be got to scratch me?"

"I am not sure that I understand you, George," replies the
ironmaster.

"I say, brother, how is my mother to be got to scratch me? She must
be got to do it somehow."

"Scratch you out of her will, I think you mean?"

"Of course I do. In short," says the trooper, folding his arms more
resolutely yet, "I mean--TO--scratch me!"

"My dear George," returns his brother, "is it so indispensable that
you should undergo that process?"

"Quite! Absolutely! I couldn't be guilty of the meanness of coming
back without it. I should never be safe not to be off again. I have
not sneaked home to rob your children, if not yourself, brother, of
your rights. I, who forfeited mine long ago! If I am to remain and
hold up my head, I must be scratched. Come. You are a man of
celebrated penetration and intelligence, and you can tell me how it's
to be brought about."

"I can tell you, George," replies the ironmaster deliberately, "how
it is not to be brought about, which I hope may answer the purpose as
well. Look at our mother, think of her, recall her emotion when she
recovered you. Do you believe there is a consideration in the world
that would induce her to take such a step against her favourite son?
Do you believe there is any chance of her consent, to balance against
the outrage it would be to her (loving dear old lady!) to propose it?
If you do, you are wrong. No, George! You must make up your mind to
remain UNscratched, I think." There is an amused smile on the
ironmaster's face as he watches his brother, who is pondering, deeply
disappointed. "I think you may manage almost as well as if the thing
were done, though."

"How, brother?"

"Being bent upon it, you can dispose by will of anything you have the
misfortune to inherit in any way you like, you know."

"That's true!" says the trooper, pondering again. Then he wistfully
asks, with his hand on his brother's, "Would you mind mentioning
that, brother, to your wife and family?"

"Not at all."

"Thank you. You wouldn't object to say, perhaps, that although an
undoubted vagabond, I am a vagabond of the harum-scarum order, and
not of the mean sort?"

The ironmaster, repressing his amused smile, assents.

"Thank you. Thank you. It's a weight off my mind," says the trooper
with a heave of his chest as he unfolds his arms and puts a hand on
each leg, "though I had set my heart on being scratched, too!"

The brothers are very like each other, sitting face to face; but a
certain massive simplicity and absence of usage in the ways of the
world is all on the trooper's side.

"Well," he proceeds, throwing off his disappointment, "next and last,
those plans of mine. You have been so brotherly as to propose to me
to fall in here and take my place among the products of your
perseverance and sense. I thank you heartily. It's more than
brotherly, as I said before, and I thank you heartily for it,"
shaking him a long time by the hand. "But the truth is, brother, I am
a--I am a kind of a weed, and it's too late to plant me in a regular
garden."

"My dear George," returns the elder, concentrating his strong steady
brow upon him and smiling confidently, "leave that to me, and let me
try."

George shakes his head. "You could do it, I have not a doubt, if
anybody could; but it's not to be done. Not to be done, sir! Whereas
it so falls out, on the other hand, that I am able to be of some
trifle of use to Sir Leicester Dedlock since his illness--brought on
by family sorrows--and that he would rather have that help from our
mother's son than from anybody else."

"Well, my dear George," returns the other with a very slight shade
upon his open face, "if you prefer to serve in Sir Leicester
Dedlock's household brigade--"

"There it is, brother," cries the trooper, checking him, with his
hand upon his knee again; "there it is! You don't take kindly to that
idea; I don't mind it. You are not used to being officered; I am.
Everything about you is in perfect order and discipline; everything
about me requires to be kept so. We are not accustomed to carry
things with the same hand or to look at 'em from the same point. I
don't say much about my garrison manners because I found myself
pretty well at my ease last night, and they wouldn't be noticed here,
I dare say, once and away. But I shall get on best at Chesney Wold,
where there's more room for a weed than there is here; and the dear
old lady will be made happy besides. Therefore I accept of Sir
Leicester Dedlock's proposals. When I come over next year to give
away the bride, or whenever I come, I shall have the sense to keep
the household brigade in ambuscade and not to manoeuvre it on your
ground. I thank you heartily again and am proud to think of the
Rouncewells as they'll be founded by you."

"You know yourself, George," says the elder brother, returning the
grip of his hand, "and perhaps you know me better than I know myself.
Take your way. So that we don't quite lose one another again, take
your way."

"No fear of that!" returns the trooper. "Now, before I turn my
horse's head homewards, brother, I will ask you--if you'll be so
good--to look over a letter for me. I brought it with me to send from
these parts, as Chesney Wold might be a painful name just now to the
person it's written to. I am not much accustomed to correspondence
myself, and I am particular respecting this present letter because I
want it to be both straightforward and delicate."

Herewith he hands a letter, closely written in somewhat pale ink but
in a neat round hand, to the ironmaster, who reads as follows:


   Miss Esther Summerson,

   A communication having been made to me by Inspector Bucket
   of a letter to myself being found among the papers of a
   certain person, I take the liberty to make known to you
   that it was but a few lines of instruction from abroad,
   when, where, and how to deliver an enclosed letter to a
   young and beautiful lady, then unmarried, in England. I
   duly observed the same.

   I further take the liberty to make known to you that it
   was got from me as a proof of handwriting only and that
   otherwise I would not have given it up, as appearing to
   be the most harmless in my possession, without being
   previously shot through the heart.

   I further take the liberty to mention that if I could have
   supposed a certain unfortunate gentleman to have been in
   existence, I never could and never would have rested until
   I had discovered his retreat and shared my last farthing
   with him, as my duty and my inclination would have equally
   been. But he was (officially) reported drowned, and
   assuredly went over the side of a transport-ship at night
   in an Irish harbour within a few hours of her arrival from
   the West Indies, as I have myself heard both from officers
   and men on board, and know to have been (officially)
   confirmed.

   I further take the liberty to state that in my humble
   quality as one of the rank and file, I am, and shall ever
   continue to be, your thoroughly devoted and admiring
   servant and that I esteem the qualities you possess above
   all others far beyond the limits of the present dispatch.

   I have the honour to be,

   GEORGE


"A little formal," observes the elder brother, refolding it with a
puzzled face.

"But nothing that might not be sent to a pattern young lady?" asks
the younger.

"Nothing at all."

Therefore it is sealed and deposited for posting among the iron
correspondence of the day. This done, Mr. George takes a hearty
farewell of the family party and prepares to saddle and mount. His
brother, however, unwilling to part with him so soon, proposes to
ride with him in a light open carriage to the place where he will
bait for the night, and there remain with him until morning, a
servant riding for so much of the journey on the thoroughbred old
grey from Chesney Wold. The offer, being gladly accepted, is followed
by a pleasant ride, a pleasant dinner, and a pleasant breakfast, all
in brotherly communion. Then they once more shake hands long and
heartily and part, the ironmaster turning his face to the smoke and
fires, and the trooper to the green country. Early in the afternoon
the subdued sound of his heavy military trot is heard on the turf in
the avenue as he rides on with imaginary clank and jingle of
accoutrements under the old elm-trees.




CHAPTER LXIV

Esther's Narrative


Soon after I had that conversation with my guardian, he put a sealed
paper in my hand one morning and said, "This is for next month, my
dear." I found in it two hundred pounds.

I now began very quietly to make such preparations as I thought were
necessary. Regulating my purchases by my guardian's taste, which I
knew very well of course, I arranged my wardrobe to please him and
hoped I should be highly successful. I did it all so quietly because
I was not quite free from my old apprehension that Ada would be
rather sorry and because my guardian was so quiet himself. I had no
doubt that under all the circumstances we should be married in the
most private and simple manner. Perhaps I should only have to say to
Ada, "Would you like to come and see me married to-morrow, my pet?"
Perhaps our wedding might even be as unpretending as her own, and I
might not find it necessary to say anything about it until it was
over. I thought that if I were to choose, I would like this best.

The only exception I made was Mrs. Woodcourt. I told her that I was
going to be married to my guardian and that we had been engaged some
time. She highly approved. She could never do enough for me and was
remarkably softened now in comparison with what she had been when we
first knew her. There was no trouble she would not have taken to have
been of use to me, but I need hardly say that I only allowed her to
take as little as gratified her kindness without tasking it.

Of course this was not a time to neglect my guardian, and of course
it was not a time for neglecting my darling. So I had plenty of
occupation, which I was glad of; and as to Charley, she was
absolutely not to be seen for needlework. To surround herself with
great heaps of it--baskets full and tables full--and do a little, and
spend a great deal of time in staring with her round eyes at what
there was to do, and persuade herself that she was going to do it,
were Charley's great dignities and delights.

Meanwhile, I must say, I could not agree with my guardian on the
subject of the will, and I had some sanguine hopes of Jarndyce and
Jarndyce. Which of us was right will soon appear, but I certainly did
encourage expectations. In Richard, the discovery gave occasion for a
burst of business and agitation that buoyed him up for a little time,
but he had lost the elasticity even of hope now and seemed to me to
retain only its feverish anxieties. From something my guardian said
one day when we were talking about this, I understood that my
marriage would not take place until after the term-time we had been
told to look forward to; and I thought the more, for that, how
rejoiced I should be if I could be married when Richard and Ada were
a little more prosperous.

The term was very near indeed when my guardian was called out of town
and went down into Yorkshire on Mr. Woodcourt's business. He had told
me beforehand that his presence there would be necessary. I had just
come in one night from my dear girl's and was sitting in the midst of
all my new clothes, looking at them all around me and thinking, when
a letter from my guardian was brought to me. It asked me to join him
in the country and mentioned by what stage-coach my place was taken
and at what time in the morning I should have to leave town. It added
in a postscript that I would not be many hours from Ada.

I expected few things less than a journey at that time, but I was
ready for it in half an hour and set off as appointed early next
morning. I travelled all day, wondering all day what I could be
wanted for at such a distance; now I thought it might be for this
purpose, and now I thought it might be for that purpose, but I was
never, never, never near the truth.

It was night when I came to my journey's end and found my guardian
waiting for me. This was a great relief, for towards evening I had
begun to fear (the more so as his letter was a very short one) that
he might be ill. However, there he was, as well as it was possible to
be; and when I saw his genial face again at its brightest and best, I
said to myself, he has been doing some other great kindness. Not that
it required much penetration to say that, because I knew that his
being there at all was an act of kindness.

Supper was ready at the hotel, and when we were alone at table he
said, "Full of curiosity, no doubt, little woman, to know why I have
brought you here?"

"Well, guardian," said I, "without thinking myself a Fatima or you a
Blue Beard, I am a little curious about it."

"Then to ensure your night's rest, my love," he returned gaily, "I
won't wait until to-morrow to tell you. I have very much wished to
express to Woodcourt, somehow, my sense of his humanity to poor
unfortunate Jo, his inestimable services to my young cousins, and his
value to us all. When it was decided that he should settle here, it
came into my head that I might ask his acceptance of some
unpretending and suitable little place to lay his own head in. I
therefore caused such a place to be looked out for, and such a place
was found on very easy terms, and I have been touching it up for him
and making it habitable. However, when I walked over it the day
before yesterday and it was reported ready, I found that I was not
housekeeper enough to know whether things were all as they ought to
be. So I sent off for the best little housekeeper that could possibly
be got to come and give me her advice and opinion. And here she is,"
said my guardian, "laughing and crying both together!"

Because he was so dear, so good, so admirable. I tried to tell him
what I thought of him, but I could not articulate a word.

"Tut, tut!" said my guardian. "You make too much of it, little woman.
Why, how you sob, Dame Durden, how you sob!"

"It is with exquisite pleasure, guardian--with a heart full of
thanks."

"Well, well," said he. "I am delighted that you approve. I thought
you would. I meant it as a pleasant surprise for the little mistress
of Bleak House."

I kissed him and dried my eyes. "I know now!" said I. "I have seen
this in your face a long while."

"No; have you really, my dear?" said he. "What a Dame Durden it is to
read a face!"

He was so quaintly cheerful that I could not long be otherwise, and
was almost ashamed of having been otherwise at all. When I went to
bed, I cried. I am bound to confess that I cried; but I hope it was
with pleasure, though I am not quite sure it was with pleasure. I
repeated every word of the letter twice over.

A most beautiful summer morning succeeded, and after breakfast we
went out arm in arm to see the house of which I was to give my mighty
housekeeping opinion. We entered a flower-garden by a gate in a side
wall, of which he had the key, and the first thing I saw was that the
beds and flowers were all laid out according to the manner of my beds
and flowers at home.

"You see, my dear," observed my guardian, standing still with a
delighted face to watch my looks, "knowing there could be no better
plan, I borrowed yours."

We went on by a pretty little orchard, where the cherries were
nestling among the green leaves and the shadows of the apple-trees
were sporting on the grass, to the house itself--a cottage, quite a
rustic cottage of doll's rooms; but such a lovely place, so tranquil
and so beautiful, with such a rich and smiling country spread around
it; with water sparkling away into the distance, here all overhung
with summer-growth, there turning a humming mill; at its nearest
point glancing through a meadow by the cheerful town, where
cricket-players were assembling in bright groups and a flag was
flying from a white tent that rippled in the sweet west wind. And
still, as we went through the pretty rooms, out at the little rustic
verandah doors, and underneath the tiny wooden colonnades garlanded
with woodbine, jasmine, and honey-suckle, I saw in the papering on
the walls, in the colours of the furniture, in the arrangement of all
the pretty objects, MY little tastes and fancies, MY little methods
and inventions which they used to laugh at while they praised them,
my odd ways everywhere.

I could not say enough in admiration of what was all so beautiful,
but one secret doubt arose in my mind when I saw this, I thought, oh,
would he be the happier for it! Would it not have been better for his
peace that I should not have been so brought before him? Because
although I was not what he thought me, still he loved me very dearly,
and it might remind him mournfully of what be believed he had lost. I
did not wish him to forget me--perhaps he might not have done so,
without these aids to his memory--but my way was easier than his, and
I could have reconciled myself even to that so that he had been the
happier for it.

"And now, little woman," said my guardian, whom I had never seen so
proud and joyful as in showing me these things and watching my
appreciation of them, "now, last of all, for the name of this house."

"What is it called, dear guardian?"

"My child," said he, "come and see,"

He took me to the porch, which he had hitherto avoided, and said,
pausing before we went out, "My dear child, don't you guess the
name?"

"No!" said I.

We went out of the porch and he showed me written over it, Bleak
House.

He led me to a seat among the leaves close by, and sitting down
beside me and taking my hand in his, spoke to me thus, "My darling
girl, in what there has been between us, I have, I hope, been really
solicitous for your happiness. When I wrote you the letter to which
you brought the answer," smiling as he referred to it, "I had my own
too much in view; but I had yours too. Whether, under different
circumstances, I might ever have renewed the old dream I sometimes
dreamed when you were very young, of making you my wife one day, I
need not ask myself. I did renew it, and I wrote my letter, and you
brought your answer. You are following what I say, my child?"

I was cold, and I trembled violently, but not a word he uttered was
lost. As I sat looking fixedly at him and the sun's rays descended,
softly shining through the leaves upon his bare head, I felt as if
the brightness on him must be like the brightness of the angels.

"Hear me, my love, but do not speak. It is for me to speak now. When
it was that I began to doubt whether what I had done would really
make you happy is no matter. Woodcourt came home, and I soon had no
doubt at all."

I clasped him round the neck and hung my head upon his breast and
wept. "Lie lightly, confidently here, my child," said he, pressing me
gently to him. "I am your guardian and your father now. Rest
confidently here."

Soothingly, like the gentle rustling of the leaves; and genially,
like the ripening weather; and radiantly and beneficently, like the
sunshine, he went on.

"Understand me, my dear girl. I had no doubt of your being contented
and happy with me, being so dutiful and so devoted; but I saw with
whom you would be happier. That I penetrated his secret when Dame
Durden was blind to it is no wonder, for I knew the good that could
never change in her better far than she did. Well! I have long been
in Allan Woodcourt's confidence, although he was not, until
yesterday, a few hours before you came here, in mine. But I would not
have my Esther's bright example lost; I would not have a jot of my
dear girl's virtues unobserved and unhonoured; I would not have her
admitted on sufferance into the line of Morgan ap-Kerrig, no, not for
the weight in gold of all the mountains in Wales!"

He stopped to kiss me on the forehead, and I sobbed and wept afresh.
For I felt as if I could not bear the painful delight of his praise.

"Hush, little woman! Don't cry; this is to be a day of joy. I have
looked forward to it," he said exultingly, "for months on months! A
few words more, Dame Trot, and I have said my say. Determined not to
throw away one atom of my Esther's worth, I took Mrs. Woodcourt into
a separate confidence. 'Now, madam,' said I, 'I clearly perceive--and
indeed I know, to boot--that your son loves my ward. I am further
very sure that my ward loves your son, but will sacrifice her love to
a sense of duty and affection, and will sacrifice it so completely,
so entirely, so religiously, that you should never suspect it though
you watched her night and day.' Then I told her all our
story--ours--yours and mine. 'Now, madam,' said I, 'come you, knowing
this, and live with us. Come you, and see my child from hour to hour;
set what you see against her pedigree, which is this, and this'--for
I scorned to mince it--'and tell me what is the true legitimacy when
you shall have quite made up your mind on that subject.' Why, honour
to her old Welsh blood, my dear," cried my guardian with enthusiasm,
"I believe the heart it animates beats no less warmly, no less
admiringly, no less lovingly, towards Dame Durden than my own!"

He tenderly raised my head, and as I clung to him, kissed me in his
old fatherly way again and again. What a light, now, on the
protecting manner I had thought about!

"One more last word. When Allan Woodcourt spoke to you, my dear, he
spoke with my knowledge and consent--but I gave him no encouragement,
not I, for these surprises were my great reward, and I was too
miserly to part with a scrap of it. He was to come and tell me all
that passed, and he did. I have no more to say. My dearest, Allan
Woodcourt stood beside your father when he lay dead--stood beside
your mother. This is Bleak House. This day I give this house its
little mistress; and before God, it is the brightest day in all my
life!"

He rose and raised me with him. We were no longer alone. My
husband--I have called him by that name full seven happy years
now--stood at my side.

"Allan," said my guardian, "take from me a willing gift, the best
wife that ever man had. What more can I say for you than that I know
you deserve her! Take with her the little home she brings you. You
know what she will make it, Allan; you know what she has made its
namesake. Let me share its felicity sometimes, and what do I
sacrifice? Nothing, nothing."

He kissed me once again, and now the tears were in his eyes as he
said more softly, "Esther, my dearest, after so many years, there is
a kind of parting in this too. I know that my mistake has caused you
some distress. Forgive your old guardian, in restoring him to his old
place in your affections; and blot it out of your memory. Allan, take
my dear."

He moved away from under the green roof of leaves, and stopping in
the sunlight outside and turning cheerfully towards us, said, "I
shall be found about here somewhere. It's a west wind, little woman,
due west! Let no one thank me any more, for I am going to revert to
my bachelor habits, and if anybody disregards this warning, I'll run
away and never come back!"

What happiness was ours that day, what joy, what rest, what hope,
what gratitude, what bliss! We were to be married before the month
was out, but when we were to come and take possession of our own
house was to depend on Richard and Ada.

We all three went home together next day. As soon as we arrived in
town, Allan went straight to see Richard and to carry our joyful news
to him and my darling. Late as it was, I meant to go to her for a few
minutes before lying down to sleep, but I went home with my guardian
first to make his tea for him and to occupy the old chair by his
side, for I did not like to think of its being empty so soon.

When we came home we found that a young man had called three times in
the course of that one day to see me and that having been told on the
occasion of his third call that I was not expected to return before
ten o'clock at night, he had left word that he would call about then.
He had left his card three times. Mr. Guppy.

As I naturally speculated on the object of these visits, and as I
always associated something ludicrous with the visitor, it fell out
that in laughing about Mr. Guppy I told my guardian of his old
proposal and his subsequent retraction. "After that," said my
guardian, "we will certainly receive this hero." So instructions were
given that Mr. Guppy should be shown in when he came again, and they
were scarcely given when he did come again.

He was embarrassed when he found my guardian with me, but recovered
himself and said, "How de do, sir?"

"How do you do, sir?" returned my guardian.

"Thank you, sir, I am tolerable," returned Mr. Guppy. "Will you allow
me to introduce my mother, Mrs. Guppy of the Old Street Road, and my
particular friend, Mr. Weevle. That is to say, my friend has gone by
the name of Weevle, but his name is really and truly Jobling."

My guardian begged them to be seated, and they all sat down.

"Tony," said Mr. Guppy to his friend after an awkward silence. "Will
you open the case?"

"Do it yourself," returned the friend rather tartly.

"Well, Mr. Jarndyce, sir," Mr. Guppy, after a moment's consideration,
began, to the great diversion of his mother, which she displayed by
nudging Mr. Jobling with her elbow and winking at me in a most
remarkable manner, "I had an idea that I should see Miss Summerson by
herself and was not quite prepared for your esteemed presence. But
Miss Summerson has mentioned to you, perhaps, that something has
passed between us on former occasions?"

"Miss Summerson," returned my guardian, smiling, "has made a
communication to that effect to me."

"That," said Mr. Guppy, "makes matters easier. Sir, I have come out
of my articles at Kenge and Carboy's, and I believe with satisfaction
to all parties. I am now admitted (after undergoing an examination
that's enough to badger a man blue, touching a pack of nonsense that
he don't want to know) on the roll of attorneys and have taken out my
certificate, if it would be any satisfaction to you to see it."

"Thank you, Mr. Guppy," returned my guardian. "I am quite willing--I
believe I use a legal phrase--to admit the certificate."

Mr. Guppy therefore desisted from taking something out of his pocket
and proceeded without it.

"I have no capital myself, but my mother has a little property which
takes the form of an annuity"--here Mr. Guppy's mother rolled her
head as if she never could sufficiently enjoy the observation, and
put her handkerchief to her mouth, and again winked at me--"and a few
pounds for expenses out of pocket in conducting business will never
be wanting, free of interest, which is an advantage, you know," said
Mr. Guppy feelingly.

"Certainly an advantage," returned my guardian.

"I HAVE some connexion," pursued Mr. Guppy, "and it lays in the
direction of Walcot Square, Lambeth. I have therefore taken a 'ouse
in that locality, which, in the opinion of my friends, is a hollow
bargain (taxes ridiculous, and use of fixtures included in the rent),
and intend setting up professionally for myself there forthwith."

Here Mr. Guppy's mother fell into an extraordinary passion of rolling
her head and smiling waggishly at anybody who would look at her.

"It's a six-roomer, exclusive of kitchens," said Mr. Guppy, "and in
the opinion of my friends, a commodious tenement. When I mention my
friends, I refer principally to my friend Jobling, who I believe has
known me," Mr. Guppy looked at him with a sentimental air, "from
boyhood's hour."

Mr. Jobling confirmed this with a sliding movement of his legs.

"My friend Jobling will render me his assistance in the capacity of
clerk and will live in the 'ouse," said Mr. Guppy. "My mother will
likewise live in the 'ouse when her present quarter in the Old Street
Road shall have ceased and expired; and consequently there will be no
want of society. My friend Jobling is naturally aristocratic by
taste, and besides being acquainted with the movements of the upper
circles, fully backs me in the intentions I am now developing."

Mr. Jobling said "Certainly" and withdrew a little from the elbow of
Mr Guppy's mother.

"Now, I have no occasion to mention to you, sir, you being in the
confidence of Miss Summerson," said Mr. Guppy, "(mother, I wish you'd
be so good as to keep still), that Miss Summerson's image was
formerly imprinted on my 'eart and that I made her a proposal of
marriage."

"That I have heard," returned my guardian.

"Circumstances," pursued Mr. Guppy, "over which I had no control, but
quite the contrary, weakened the impression of that image for a time.
At which time Miss Summerson's conduct was highly genteel; I may even
add, magnanimous."

My guardian patted me on the shoulder and seemed much amused.

"Now, sir," said Mr. Guppy, "I have got into that state of mind
myself that I wish for a reciprocity of magnanimous behaviour. I wish
to prove to Miss Summerson that I can rise to a heighth of which
perhaps she hardly thought me capable. I find that the image which I
did suppose had been eradicated from my 'eart is NOT eradicated. Its
influence over me is still tremenjous, and yielding to it, I am
willing to overlook the circumstances over which none of us have had
any control and to renew those proposals to Miss Summerson which I
had the honour to make at a former period. I beg to lay the 'ouse in
Walcot Square, the business, and myself before Miss Summerson for her
acceptance."

"Very magnanimous indeed, sir," observed my guardian.

"Well, sir," replied Mr. Guppy with candour, "my wish is to BE
magnanimous. I do not consider that in making this offer to Miss
Summerson I am by any means throwing myself away; neither is that the
opinion of my friends. Still, there are circumstances which I submit
may be taken into account as a set off against any little drawbacks
of mine, and so a fair and equitable balance arrived at."

"I take upon myself, sir," said my guardian, laughing as he rang the
bell, "to reply to your proposals on behalf of Miss Summerson. She is
very sensible of your handsome intentions, and wishes you good
evening, and wishes you well."

"Oh!" said Mr. Guppy with a blank look. "Is that tantamount, sir, to
acceptance, or rejection, or consideration?"

"To decided rejection, if you please," returned my guardian.

Mr. Guppy looked incredulously at his friend, and at his mother, who
suddenly turned very angry, and at the floor, and at the ceiling.

"Indeed?" said he. "Then, Jobling, if you was the friend you
represent yourself, I should think you might hand my mother out of
the gangway instead of allowing her to remain where she ain't
wanted."

But Mrs. Guppy positively refused to come out of the gangway. She
wouldn't hear of it. "Why, get along with you," said she to my
guardian, "what do you mean? Ain't my son good enough for you? You
ought to be ashamed of yourself. Get out with you!"

"My good lady," returned my guardian, "it is hardly reasonable to ask
me to get out of my own room."

"I don't care for that," said Mrs. Guppy. "Get out with you. If we
ain't good enough for you, go and procure somebody that is good
enough. Go along and find 'em."

I was quite unprepared for the rapid manner in which Mrs. Guppy's
power of jocularity merged into a power of taking the profoundest
offence.

"Go along and find somebody that's good enough for you," repeated
Mrs. Guppy. "Get out!" Nothing seemed to astonish Mr. Guppy's mother
so much and to make her so very indignant as our not getting out.
"Why don't you get out?" said Mrs. Guppy. "What are you stopping here
for?"

"Mother," interposed her son, always getting before her and pushing
her back with one shoulder as she sidled at my guardian, "WILL you
hold your tongue?"

"No, William," she returned, "I won't! Not unless he gets out, I
won't!"

However, Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling together closed on Mr. Guppy's
mother (who began to be quite abusive) and took her, very much
against her will, downstairs, her voice rising a stair higher every
time her figure got a stair lower, and insisting that we should
immediately go and find somebody who was good enough for us, and
above all things that we should get out.




CHAPTER LXV

Beginning the World


The term had commenced, and my guardian found an intimation from Mr.
Kenge that the cause would come on in two days. As I had sufficient
hopes of the will to be in a flutter about it, Allan and I agreed to
go down to the court that morning. Richard was extremely agitated and
was so weak and low, though his illness was still of the mind, that
my dear girl indeed had sore occasion to be supported. But she looked
forward--a very little way now--to the help that was to come to her,
and never drooped.

It was at Westminster that the cause was to come on. It had come on
there, I dare say, a hundred times before, but I could not divest
myself of an idea that it MIGHT lead to some result now. We left home
directly after breakfast to be at Westminster Hall in good time and
walked down there through the lively streets--so happily and
strangely it seemed!--together.

As we were going along, planning what we should do for Richard and
Ada, I heard somebody calling "Esther! My dear Esther! Esther!" And
there was Caddy Jellyby, with her head out of the window of a little
carriage which she hired now to go about in to her pupils (she had so
many), as if she wanted to embrace me at a hundred yards' distance. I
had written her a note to tell her of all that my guardian had done,
but had not had a moment to go and see her. Of course we turned back,
and the affectionate girl was in that state of rapture, and was so
overjoyed to talk about the night when she brought me the flowers,
and was so determined to squeeze my face (bonnet and all) between her
hands, and go on in a wild manner altogether, calling me all kinds of
precious names, and telling Allan I had done I don't know what for
her, that I was just obliged to get into the little carriage and calm
her down by letting her say and do exactly what she liked. Allan,
standing at the window, was as pleased as Caddy; and I was as pleased
as either of them; and I wonder that I got away as I did, rather than
that I came off laughing, and red, and anything but tidy, and looking
after Caddy, who looked after us out of the coach-window as long as
she could see us.

This made us some quarter of an hour late, and when we came to
Westminster Hall we found that the day's business was begun. Worse
than that, we found such an unusual crowd in the Court of Chancery
that it was full to the door, and we could neither see nor hear what
was passing within. It appeared to be something droll, for
occasionally there was a laugh and a cry of "Silence!" It appeared to
be something interesting, for every one was pushing and striving to
get nearer. It appeared to be something that made the professional
gentlemen very merry, for there were several young counsellors in
wigs and whiskers on the outside of the crowd, and when one of them
told the others about it, they put their hands in their pockets, and
quite doubled themselves up with laughter, and went stamping about
the pavement of the Hall.

We asked a gentleman by us if he knew what cause was on. He told us
Jarndyce and Jarndyce. We asked him if he knew what was doing in it.
He said really, no he did not, nobody ever did, but as well as he
could make out, it was over. Over for the day? we asked him. No, he
said, over for good.

Over for good!

When we heard this unaccountable answer, we looked at one another
quite lost in amazement. Could it be possible that the will had set
things right at last and that Richard and Ada were going to be rich?
It seemed too good to be true. Alas it was!

Our suspense was short, for a break-up soon took place in the crowd,
and the people came streaming out looking flushed and hot and
bringing a quantity of bad air with them. Still they were all
exceedingly amused and were more like people coming out from a farce
or a juggler than from a court of justice. We stood aside, watching
for any countenance we knew, and presently great bundles of paper
began to be carried out--bundles in bags, bundles too large to be got
into any bags, immense masses of papers of all shapes and no shapes,
which the bearers staggered under, and threw down for the time being,
anyhow, on the Hall pavement, while they went back to bring out more.
Even these clerks were laughing. We glanced at the papers, and seeing
Jarndyce and Jarndyce everywhere, asked an official-looking person
who was standing in the midst of them whether the cause was over.
Yes, he said, it was all up with it at last, and burst out laughing
too.

At this juncture we perceived Mr. Kenge coming out of court with an
affable dignity upon him, listening to Mr. Vholes, who was
deferential and carried his own bag. Mr. Vholes was the first to see
us. "Here is Miss Summerson, sir," he said. "And Mr. Woodcourt."

"Oh, indeed! Yes. Truly!" said Mr. Kenge, raising his hat to me with
polished politeness. "How do you do? Glad to see you. Mr. Jarndyce is
not here?"

No. He never came there, I reminded him.

"Really," returned Mr. Kenge, "it is as well that he is NOT here
to-day, for his--shall I say, in my good friend's absence, his
indomitable singularity of opinion?--might have been strengthened,
perhaps; not reasonably, but might have been strengthened."

"Pray what has been done to-day?" asked Allan.

"I beg your pardon?" said Mr. Kenge with excessive urbanity.

"What has been done to-day?"

"What has been done," repeated Mr. Kenge. "Quite so. Yes. Why, not
much has been done; not much. We have been checked--brought up
suddenly, I would say--upon the--shall I term it threshold?"

"Is this will considered a genuine document, sir?" said Allan. "Will
you tell us that?"

"Most certainly, if I could," said Mr. Kenge; "but we have not gone
into that, we have not gone into that."

"We have not gone into that," repeated Mr. Vholes as if his low
inward voice were an echo.

"You are to reflect, Mr. Woodcourt," observed Mr. Kenge, using his
silver trowel persuasively and smoothingly, "that this has been a
great cause, that this has been a protracted cause, that this has
been a complex cause. Jarndyce and Jarndyce has been termed, not
inaptly, a monument of Chancery practice."

"And patience has sat upon it a long time," said Allan.

"Very well indeed, sir," returned Mr. Kenge with a certain
condescending laugh he had. "Very well! You are further to reflect,
Mr. Woodcourt," becoming dignified almost to severity, "that on the
numerous difficulties, contingencies, masterly fictions, and forms of
procedure in this great cause, there has been expended study,
ability, eloquence, knowledge, intellect, Mr. Woodcourt, high
intellect. For many years, the--a--I would say the flower of the bar,
and the--a--I would presume to add, the matured autumnal fruits of
the woolsack--have been lavished upon Jarndyce and Jarndyce. If the
public have the benefit, and if the country have the adornment, of
this great grasp, it must be paid for in money or money's worth,
sir."

"Mr. Kenge," said Allan, appearing enlightened all in a moment.
"Excuse me, our time presses. Do I understand that the whole estate
is found to have been absorbed in costs?"

"Hem! I believe so," returned Mr. Kenge. "Mr. Vholes, what do YOU
say?"

"I believe so," said Mr. Vholes.

"And that thus the suit lapses and melts away?"

"Probably," returned Mr. Kenge. "Mr. Vholes?"

"Probably," said Mr. Vholes.

"My dearest life," whispered Allan, "this will break Richard's
heart!"

There was such a shock of apprehension in his face, and he knew
Richard so perfectly, and I too had seen so much of his gradual
decay, that what my dear girl had said to me in the fullness of her
foreboding love sounded like a knell in my ears.

"In case you should be wanting Mr. C., sir," said Mr. Vholes, coming
after us, "you'll find him in court. I left him there resting himself
a little. Good day, sir; good day, Miss Summerson." As he gave me
that slowly devouring look of his, while twisting up the strings of
his bag before he hastened with it after Mr. Kenge, the benignant
shadow of whose conversational presence he seemed afraid to leave, he
gave one gasp as if he had swallowed the last morsel of his client,
and his black buttoned-up unwholesome figure glided away to the low
door at the end of the Hall.

"My dear love," said Allan, "leave to me, for a little while, the
charge you gave me. Go home with this intelligence and come to Ada's
by and by!"

I would not let him take me to a coach, but entreated him to go to
Richard without a moment's delay and leave me to do as he wished.
Hurrying home, I found my guardian and told him gradually with what
news I had returned. "Little woman," said he, quite unmoved for
himself, "to have done with the suit on any terms is a greater
blessing than I had looked for. But my poor young cousins!"

We talked about them all the morning and discussed what it was
possible to do. In the afternoon my guardian walked with me to
Symond's Inn and left me at the door. I went upstairs. When my
darling heard my footsteps, she came out into the small passage and
threw her arms round my neck, but she composed herself directly and
said that Richard had asked for me several times. Allan had found him
sitting in the corner of the court, she told me, like a stone figure.
On being roused, he had broken away and made as if he would have
spoken in a fierce voice to the judge. He was stopped by his mouth
being full of blood, and Allan had brought him home.

He was lying on a sofa with his eyes closed when I went in. There
were restoratives on the table; the room was made as airy as
possible, and was darkened, and was very orderly and quiet. Allan
stood behind him watching him gravely. His face appeared to me to be
quite destitute of colour, and now that I saw him without his seeing
me, I fully saw, for the first time, how worn away he was. But he
looked handsomer than I had seen him look for many a day.

I sat down by his side in silence. Opening his eyes by and by, he
said in a weak voice, but with his old smile, "Dame Durden, kiss me,
my dear!"

It was a great comfort and surprise to me to find him in his low
state cheerful and looking forward. He was happier, he said, in our
intended marriage than he could find words to tell me. My husband had
been a guardian angel to him and Ada, and he blessed us both and
wished us all the joy that life could yield us. I almost felt as if
my own heart would have broken when I saw him take my husband's hand
and hold it to his breast.

We spoke of the future as much as possible, and he said several times
that he must be present at our marriage if he could stand upon his
feet. Ada would contrive to take him, somehow, he said. "Yes, surely,
dearest Richard!" But as my darling answered him thus hopefully, so
serene and beautiful, with the help that was to come to her so
near--I knew--I knew!

It was not good for him to talk too much, and when he was silent, we
were silent too. Sitting beside him, I made a pretence of working for
my dear, as he had always been used to joke about my being busy. Ada
leaned upon his pillow, holding his head upon her arm. He dozed
often, and whenever he awoke without seeing him, said first of all,
"Where is Woodcourt?"

Evening had come on when I lifted up my eyes and saw my guardian
standing in the little hall. "Who is that, Dame Durden?" Richard
asked me. The door was behind him, but he had observed in my face
that some one was there.

I looked to Allan for advice, and as he nodded "Yes," bent over
Richard and told him. My guardian saw what passed, came softly by me
in a moment, and laid his hand on Richard's. "Oh, sir," said Richard,
"you are a good man, you are a good man!" and burst into tears for
the first time.

My guardian, the picture of a good man, sat down in my place, keeping
his hand on Richard's.

"My dear Rick," said he, "the clouds have cleared away, and it is
bright now. We can see now. We were all bewildered, Rick, more or
less. What matters! And how are you, my dear boy?"

"I am very weak, sir, but I hope I shall be stronger. I have to begin
the world."

"Aye, truly; well said!" cried my guardian.

"I will not begin it in the old way now," said Richard with a sad
smile. "I have learned a lesson now, sir. It was a hard one, but you
shall be assured, indeed, that I have learned it."

"Well, well," said my guardian, comforting him; "well, well, well,
dear boy!"

"I was thinking, sir," resumed Richard, "that there is nothing on
earth I should so much like to see as their house--Dame Durden's and
Woodcourt's house. If I could be removed there when I begin to
recover my strength, I feel as if I should get well there sooner than
anywhere."

"Why, so have I been thinking too, Rick," said my guardian, "and our
little woman likewise; she and I have been talking of it this very
day. I dare say her husband won't object. What do you think?"

Richard smiled and lifted up his arm to touch him as he stood behind
the head of the couch.

"I say nothing of Ada," said Richard, "but I think of her, and have
thought of her very much. Look at her! See her here, sir, bending
over this pillow when she has so much need to rest upon it herself,
my dear love, my poor girl!"

He clasped her in his arms, and none of us spoke. He gradually
released her, and she looked upon us, and looked up to heaven, and
moved her lips.

"When I get down to Bleak House," said Richard, "I shall have much to
tell you, sir, and you will have much to show me. You will go, won't
you?"

"Undoubtedly, dear Rick."

"Thank you; like you, like you," said Richard. "But it's all like
you. They have been telling me how you planned it and how you
remembered all Esther's familiar tastes and ways. It will be like
coming to the old Bleak House again."

"And you will come there too, I hope, Rick. I am a solitary man now,
you know, and it will be a charity to come to me. A charity to come
to me, my love!" he repeated to Ada as he gently passed his hand over
her golden hair and put a lock of it to his lips. (I think he vowed
within himself to cherish her if she were left alone.)

"It was a troubled dream?" said Richard, clasping both my guardian's
hands eagerly.

"Nothing more, Rick; nothing more."

"And you, being a good man, can pass it as such, and forgive and pity
the dreamer, and be lenient and encouraging when he wakes?"

"Indeed I can. What am I but another dreamer, Rick?"

"I will begin the world!" said Richard with a light in his eyes.

My husband drew a little nearer towards Ada, and I saw him solemnly
lift up his hand to warn my guardian.

"When shall I go from this place to that pleasant country where the
old times are, where I shall have strength to tell what Ada has been
to me, where I shall be able to recall my many faults and
blindnesses, where I shall prepare myself to be a guide to my unborn
child?" said Richard. "When shall I go?"

"Dear Rick, when you are strong enough," returned my guardian.

"Ada, my darling!"

He sought to raise himself a little. Allan raised him so that she
could hold him on her bosom, which was what he wanted.

"I have done you many wrongs, my own. I have fallen like a poor stray
shadow on your way, I have married you to poverty and trouble, I have
scattered your means to the winds. You will forgive me all this, my
Ada, before I begin the world?"

A smile irradiated his face as she bent to kiss him. He slowly laid
his face down upon her bosom, drew his arms closer round her neck,
and with one parting sob began the world. Not this world, oh, not
this! The world that sets this right.

When all was still, at a late hour, poor crazed Miss Flite came
weeping to me and told me she had given her birds their liberty.




CHAPTER LXVI

Down in Lincolnshire


There is a hush upon Chesney Wold in these altered days, as there is
upon a portion of the family history. The story goes that Sir
Leicester paid some who could have spoken out to hold their peace;
but it is a lame story, feebly whispering and creeping about, and any
brighter spark of life it shows soon dies away. It is known for
certain that the handsome Lady Dedlock lies in the mausoleum in the
park, where the trees arch darkly overhead, and the owl is heard at
night making the woods ring; but whence she was brought home to be
laid among the echoes of that solitary place, or how she died, is all
mystery. Some of her old friends, principally to be found among the
peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton throats, did once
occasionally say, as they toyed in a ghastly manner with large
fans--like charmers reduced to flirting with grim death, after losing
all their other beaux--did once occasionally say, when the world
assembled together, that they wondered the ashes of the Dedlocks,
entombed in the mausoleum, never rose against the profanation of her
company. But the dead-and-gone Dedlocks take it very calmly and have
never been known to object.

Up from among the fern in the hollow, and winding by the bridle-road
among the trees, comes sometimes to this lonely spot the sound of
horses' hoofs. Then may be seen Sir Leicester--invalided, bent, and
almost blind, but of worthy presence yet--riding with a stalwart man
beside him, constant to his bridle-rein. When they come to a certain
spot before the mausoleum-door, Sir Leicester's accustomed horse
stops of his own accord, and Sir Leicester, pulling off his hat, is
still for a few moments before they ride away.

War rages yet with the audacious Boythorn, though at uncertain
intervals, and now hotly, and now coolly, flickering like an unsteady
fire. The truth is said to be that when Sir Leicester came down to
Lincolnshire for good, Mr. Boythorn showed a manifest desire to
abandon his right of way and do whatever Sir Leicester would, which
Sir Leicester, conceiving to be a condescension to his illness or
misfortune, took in such high dudgeon, and was so magnificently
aggrieved by, that Mr. Boythorn found himself under the necessity of
committing a flagrant trespass to restore his neighbour to himself.
Similarly, Mr. Boythorn continues to post tremendous placards on the
disputed thoroughfare and (with his bird upon his head) to hold forth
vehemently against Sir Leicester in the sanctuary of his own home;
similarly, also, he defies him as of old in the little church by
testifying a bland unconsciousness of his existence. But it is
whispered that when he is most ferocious towards his old foe, he is
really most considerate, and that Sir Leicester, in the dignity of
being implacable, little supposes how much he is humoured. As little
does he think how near together he and his antagonist have suffered
in the fortunes of two sisters, and his antagonist, who knows it now,
is not the man to tell him. So the quarrel goes on to the
satisfaction of both.

In one of the lodges of the park--that lodge within sight of the
house where, once upon a time, when the waters were out down in
Lincolnshire, my Lady used to see the keeper's child--the stalwart
man, the trooper formerly, is housed. Some relics of his old calling
hang upon the walls, and these it is the chosen recreation of a
little lame man about the stable-yard to keep gleaming bright. A busy
little man he always is, in the polishing at harness-house doors, of
stirrup-irons, bits, curb-chains, harness bosses, anything in the way
of a stable-yard that will take a polish, leading a life of friction.
A shaggy little damaged man, withal, not unlike an old dog of some
mongrel breed, who has been considerably knocked about. He answers to
the name of Phil.

A goodly sight it is to see the grand old housekeeper (harder of
hearing now) going to church on the arm of her son and to
observe--which few do, for the house is scant of company in these
times--the relations of both towards Sir Leicester, and his towards
them. They have visitors in the high summer weather, when a grey
cloak and umbrella, unknown to Chesney Wold at other periods, are
seen among the leaves; when two young ladies are occasionally found
gambolling in sequestered saw-pits and such nooks of the park; and
when the smoke of two pipes wreathes away into the fragrant evening
air from the trooper's door. Then is a fife heard trolling within the
lodge on the inspiring topic of the "British Grenadiers"; and as the
evening closes in, a gruff inflexible voice is heard to say, while
two men pace together up and down, "But I never own to it before the
old girl. Discipline must be maintained."

The greater part of the house is shut up, and it is a show-house no
longer; yet Sir Leicester holds his shrunken state in the long
drawing-room for all that, and reposes in his old place before my
Lady's picture. Closed in by night with broad screens, and illumined
only in that part, the light of the drawing-room seems gradually
contracting and dwindling until it shall be no more. A little more,
in truth, and it will be all extinguished for Sir Leicester; and the
damp door in the mausoleum which shuts so tight, and looks so
obdurate, will have opened and received him.

Volumnia, growing with the flight of time pinker as to the red in her
face, and yellower as to the white, reads to Sir Leicester in the
long evenings and is driven to various artifices to conceal her
yawns, of which the chief and most efficacious is the insertion of
the pearl necklace between her rosy lips. Long-winded treatises on
the Buffy and Boodle question, showing how Buffy is immaculate and
Boodle villainous, and how the country is lost by being all Boodle
and no Buffy, or saved by being all Buffy and no Boodle (it must be
one of the two, and cannot be anything else), are the staple of her
reading. Sir Leicester is not particular what it is and does not
appear to follow it very closely, further than that he always comes
broad awake the moment Volumnia ventures to leave off, and sonorously
repeating her last words, begs with some displeasure to know if she
finds herself fatigued. However, Volumnia, in the course of her
bird-like hopping about and pecking at papers, has alighted on a
memorandum concerning herself in the event of "anything happening" to
her kinsman, which is handsome compensation for an extensive course
of reading and holds even the dragon Boredom at bay.

The cousins generally are rather shy of Chesney Wold in its dullness,
but take to it a little in the shooting season, when guns are heard
in the plantations, and a few scattered beaters and keepers wait at
the old places of appointment for low-spirited twos and threes of
cousins. The debilitated cousin, more debilitated by the dreariness
of the place, gets into a fearful state of depression, groaning under
penitential sofa-pillows in his gunless hours and protesting that
such fernal old jail's--nough t'sew fler up--frever.

The only great occasions for Volumnia in this changed aspect of the
place in Lincolnshire are those occasions, rare and widely separated,
when something is to be done for the county or the country in the way
of gracing a public ball. Then, indeed, does the tuckered sylph come
out in fairy form and proceed with joy under cousinly escort to the
exhausted old assembly-room, fourteen heavy miles off, which, during
three hundred and sixty-four days and nights of every ordinary year,
is a kind of antipodean lumber-room full of old chairs and tables
upside down. Then, indeed, does she captivate all hearts by her
condescension, by her girlish vivacity, and by her skipping about as
in the days when the hideous old general with the mouth too full of
teeth had not cut one of them at two guineas each. Then does she
twirl and twine, a pastoral nymph of good family, through the mazes
of the dance. Then do the swains appear with tea, with lemonade, with
sandwiches, with homage. Then is she kind and cruel, stately and
unassuming, various, beautifully wilful. Then is there a singular
kind of parallel between her and the little glass chandeliers of
another age embellishing that assembly-room, which, with their meagre
stems, their spare little drops, their disappointing knobs where no
drops are, their bare little stalks from which knobs and drops have
both departed, and their little feeble prismatic twinkling, all seem
Volumnias.

For the rest, Lincolnshire life to Volumnia is a vast blank of
overgrown house looking out upon trees, sighing, wringing their
hands, bowing their heads, and casting their tears upon the
window-panes in monotonous depressions. A labyrinth of grandeur, less
the property of an old family of human beings and their ghostly
likenesses than of an old family of echoings and thunderings which
start out of their hundred graves at every sound and go resounding
through the building. A waste of unused passages and staircases in
which to drop a comb upon a bedroom floor at night is to send a
stealthy footfall on an errand through the house. A place where few
people care to go about alone, where a maid screams if an ash drops
from the fire, takes to crying at all times and seasons, becomes the
victim of a low disorder of the spirits, and gives warning and
departs.

Thus Chesney Wold. With so much of itself abandoned to darkness and
vacancy; with so little change under the summer shining or the wintry
lowering; so sombre and motionless always--no flag flying now by day,
no rows of lights sparkling by night; with no family to come and go,
no visitors to be the souls of pale cold shapes of rooms, no stir of
life about it--passion and pride, even to the stranger's eye, have
died away from the place in Lincolnshire and yielded it to dull
repose.




CHAPTER LXVII

The Close of Esther's Narrative


Full seven happy years I have been the mistress of Bleak House. The
few words that I have to add to what I have written are soon penned;
then I and the unknown friend to whom I write will part for ever. Not
without much dear remembrance on my side. Not without some, I hope,
on his or hers.

They gave my darling into my arms, and through many weeks I never
left her. The little child who was to have done so much was born
before the turf was planted on its father's grave. It was a boy; and
I, my husband, and my guardian gave him his father's name.

The help that my dear counted on did come to her, though it came, in
the eternal wisdom, for another purpose. Though to bless and restore
his mother, not his father, was the errand of this baby, its power
was mighty to do it. When I saw the strength of the weak little hand
and how its touch could heal my darling's heart and raised hope
within her, I felt a new sense of the goodness and the tenderness of
God.

They throve, and by degrees I saw my dear girl pass into my country
garden and walk there with her infant in her arms. I was married
then. I was the happiest of the happy.

It was at this time that my guardian joined us and asked Ada when she
would come home.

"Both houses are your home, my dear," said he, "but the older Bleak
House claims priority. When you and my boy are strong enough to do
it, come and take possession of your home."

Ada called him "her dearest cousin, John." But he said, no, it must
be guardian now. He was her guardian henceforth, and the boy's; and
he had an old association with the name. So she called him guardian,
and has called him guardian ever since. The children know him by no
other name. I say the children; I have two little daughters.

It is difficult to believe that Charley (round-eyed still, and not at
all grammatical) is married to a miller in our neighbourhood; yet so
it is; and even now, looking up from my desk as I write early in the
morning at my summer window, I see the very mill beginning to go
round. I hope the miller will not spoil Charley; but he is very fond
of her, and Charley is rather vain of such a match, for he is well to
do and was in great request. So far as my small maid is concerned, I
might suppose time to have stood for seven years as still as the mill
did half an hour ago, since little Emma, Charley's sister, is exactly
what Charley used to be. As to Tom, Charley's brother, I am really
afraid to say what he did at school in ciphering, but I think it was
decimals. He is apprenticed to the miller, whatever it was, and is a
good bashful fellow, always falling in love with somebody and being
ashamed of it.

Caddy Jellyby passed her very last holidays with us and was a dearer
creature than ever, perpetually dancing in and out of the house with
the children as if she had never given a dancing-lesson in her life.
Caddy keeps her own little carriage now instead of hiring one, and
lives full two miles further westward than Newman Street. She works
very hard, her husband (an excellent one) being lame and able to do
very little. Still, she is more than contented and does all she has
to do with all her heart. Mr. Jellyby spends his evenings at her new
house with his head against the wall as he used to do in her old one.
I have heard that Mrs. Jellyby was understood to suffer great
mortification from her daughter's ignoble marriage and pursuits, but
I hope she got over it in time. She has been disappointed in
Borrioboola-Gha, which turned out a failure in consequence of the
king of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody--who survived the
climate--for rum, but she has taken up with the rights of women to
sit in Parliament, and Caddy tells me it is a mission involving more
correspondence than the old one. I had almost forgotten Caddy's poor
little girl. She is not such a mite now, but she is deaf and dumb. I
believe there never was a better mother than Caddy, who learns, in
her scanty intervals of leisure, innumerable deaf and dumb arts to
soften the affliction of her child.

As if I were never to have done with Caddy, I am reminded here of
Peepy and old Mr. Turveydrop. Peepy is in the Custom House, and doing
extremely well. Old Mr. Turveydrop, very apoplectic, still exhibits
his deportment about town, still enjoys himself in the old manner, is
still believed in in the old way. He is constant in his patronage of
Peepy and is understood to have bequeathed him a favourite French
clock in his dressing-room--which is not his property.

With the first money we saved at home, we added to our pretty house
by throwing out a little growlery expressly for my guardian, which we
inaugurated with great splendour the next time he came down to see
us. I try to write all this lightly, because my heart is full in
drawing to an end, but when I write of him, my tears will have their
way.

I never look at him but I hear our poor dear Richard calling him a
good man. To Ada and her pretty boy, he is the fondest father; to me
he is what he has ever been, and what name can I give to that? He is
my husband's best and dearest friend, he is our children's darling,
he is the object of our deepest love and veneration. Yet while I feel
towards him as if he were a superior being, I am so familiar with him
and so easy with him that I almost wonder at myself. I have never
lost my old names, nor has he lost his; nor do I ever, when he is
with us, sit in any other place than in my old chair at his side,
Dame Trot, Dame Durden, Little Woman--all just the same as ever; and
I answer, "Yes, dear guardian!" just the same.

I have never known the wind to be in the east for a single moment
since the day when he took me to the porch to read the name. I
remarked to him once that the wind seemed never in the east now, and
he said, no, truly; it had finally departed from that quarter on that
very day.

I think my darling girl is more beautiful than ever. The sorrow that
has been in her face--for it is not there now--seems to have purified
even its innocent expression and to have given it a diviner quality.
Sometimes when I raise my eyes and see her in the black dress that
she still wears, teaching my Richard, I feel--it is difficult to
express--as if it were so good to know that she remembers her dear
Esther in her prayers.

I call him my Richard! But he says that he has two mamas, and I am
one.

We are not rich in the bank, but we have always prospered, and we
have quite enough. I never walk out with my husband but I hear the
people bless him. I never go into a house of any degree but I hear
his praises or see them in grateful eyes. I never lie down at night
but I know that in the course of that day he has alleviated pain and
soothed some fellow-creature in the time of need. I know that from
the beds of those who were past recovery, thanks have often, often
gone up, in the last hour, for his patient ministration. Is not this
to be rich?

The people even praise me as the doctor's wife. The people even like
me as I go about, and make so much of me that I am quite abashed. I
owe it all to him, my love, my pride! They like me for his sake, as I
do everything I do in life for his sake.

A night or two ago, after bustling about preparing for my darling and
my guardian and little Richard, who are coming to-morrow, I was
sitting out in the porch of all places, that dearly memorable porch,
when Allan came home. So he said, "My precious little woman, what are
you doing here?" And I said, "The moon is shining so brightly, Allan,
and the night is so delicious, that I have been sitting here
thinking."

"What have you been thinking about, my dear?" said Allan then.

"How curious you are!" said I. "I am almost ashamed to tell you, but
I will. I have been thinking about my old looks--such as they were."

"And what have you been thinking about THEM, my busy bee?" said
Allan.

"I have been thinking that I thought it was impossible that you COULD
have loved me any better, even if I had retained them."

"'Such as they were'?" said Allan, laughing.

"Such as they were, of course."

"My dear Dame Durden," said Allan, drawing my arm through his, "do
you ever look in the glass?"

"You know I do; you see me do it."

"And don't you know that you are prettier than you ever were?"

"I did not know that; I am not certain that I know it now. But I know
that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is
very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my
guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was
seen, and that they can very well do without much beauty in me--even
supposing--."



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Title: A Christmas Carol
       A Ghost Story of Christmas

Author: Charles Dickens

Release Date: August 11, 2004 [EBook #46]
Last Updated: March 4, 2018

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CHRISTMAS CAROL ***




Produced by Jose Menendez




A CHRISTMAS CAROL

IN PROSE
BEING
A Ghost Story of Christmas

by Charles Dickens



PREFACE

I HAVE endeavoured in this Ghostly little book,
to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my
readers out of humour with themselves, with each other,
with the season, or with me.  May it haunt their houses
pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant,
                                   C. D.
December, 1843.



CONTENTS

Stave   I: Marley's Ghost
Stave  II: The First of the Three Spirits
Stave III: The Second of the Three Spirits
Stave  IV: The Last of the Spirits
Stave   V: The End of It



STAVE I:  MARLEY'S GHOST

MARLEY was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt
whatever about that. The register of his burial was
signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker,
and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and
Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he
chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a
door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my
own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about
a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to
regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery
in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors
is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands
shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You
will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that
Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did.
How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were
partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge
was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole
assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and
sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully
cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent
man of business on the very day of the funeral,
and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to
the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley
was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or
nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going
to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that
Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there
would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a
stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts,
than there would be in any other middle-aged
gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy
spot--say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance--
literally to astonish his son's weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name.
There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse
door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as
Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the
business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley,
but he answered to both names. It was all the
same to him.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone,
Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping,
clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint,
from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire;
secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The
cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed
nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his
eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his
grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his
eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low
temperature always about with him; he iced his office in
the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on
Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather
chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he,
no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no
pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't
know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and
snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage
over him in only one respect. They often "came down"
handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with
gladsome looks, "My dear Scrooge, how are you?
When will you come to see me?" No beggars implored
him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him
what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all
his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of
Scrooge. Even the blind men's dogs appeared to
know him; and when they saw him coming on, would
tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and
then would wag their tails as though they said, "No
eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!"

But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing
he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths
of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance,
was what the knowing ones call "nuts" to Scrooge.

Once upon a time--of all the good days in the year,
on Christmas Eve--old Scrooge sat busy in his
counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy
withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside,
go wheezing up and down, beating their hands
upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the
pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had
only just gone three, but it was quite dark already--
it had not been light all day--and candles were flaring
in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like
ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog
came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was
so dense without, that although the court was of the
narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms.
To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring
everything, one might have thought that Nature
lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open
that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a
dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying
letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's
fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one
coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept
the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the
clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted
that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore
the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to
warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being
a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

"A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried
a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge's
nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was
the first intimation he had of his approach.

"Bah!" said Scrooge, "Humbug!"

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the
fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was
all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his
eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

"Christmas a humbug, uncle!" said Scrooge's
nephew. "You don't mean that, I am sure?"

"I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What
right have you to be merry? What reason have you
to be merry? You're poor enough."

"Come, then," returned the nephew gaily. "What
right have you to be dismal? What reason have you
to be morose? You're rich enough."

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur
of the moment, said, "Bah!" again; and followed it up
with "Humbug."

"Don't be cross, uncle!" said the nephew.

"What else can I be," returned the uncle, "when I
live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas!
Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas
time to you but a time for paying bills without
money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but
not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books
and having every item in 'em through a round dozen
of months presented dead against you? If I could
work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot
who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips,
should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried
with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

"Uncle!" pleaded the nephew.

"Nephew!" returned the uncle sternly, "keep Christmas
in your own way, and let me keep it in mine."

"Keep it!" repeated Scrooge's nephew. "But you
don't keep it."

"Let me leave it alone, then," said Scrooge. "Much
good may it do you! Much good it has ever done
you!"

"There are many things from which I might have
derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare
say," returned the nephew. "Christmas among the
rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas
time, when it has come round--apart from the
veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything
belonging to it can be apart from that--as a
good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant
time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar
of the year, when men and women seem by one consent
to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think
of people below them as if they really were
fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race
of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore,
uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or
silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me
good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"

The clerk in the Tank involuntarily applauded.
Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety,
he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark
for ever.

"Let me hear another sound from you," said
Scrooge, "and you'll keep your Christmas by losing
your situation! You're quite a powerful speaker,
sir," he added, turning to his nephew. "I wonder you
don't go into Parliament."

"Don't be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us to-morrow."

Scrooge said that he would see him--yes, indeed he
did. He went the whole length of the expression,
and said that he would see him in that extremity first.

"But why?" cried Scrooge's nephew. "Why?"

"Why did you get married?" said Scrooge.

"Because I fell in love."

"Because you fell in love!" growled Scrooge, as if
that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous
than a merry Christmas. "Good afternoon!"

"Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before
that happened. Why give it as a reason for not
coming now?"

"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.

"I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you;
why cannot we be friends?"

"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.

"I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so
resolute. We have never had any quarrel, to which I
have been a party. But I have made the trial in
homage to Christmas, and I'll keep my Christmas
humour to the last. So A Merry Christmas, uncle!"

"Good afternoon!" said Scrooge.

"And A Happy New Year!"

"Good afternoon!" said Scrooge.

His nephew left the room without an angry word,
notwithstanding. He stopped at the outer door to
bestow the greetings of the season on the clerk, who,
cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he returned
them cordially.

"There's another fellow," muttered Scrooge; who
overheard him: "my clerk, with fifteen shillings a
week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry
Christmas. I'll retire to Bedlam."

This lunatic, in letting Scrooge's nephew out, had
let two other people in. They were portly gentlemen,
pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off,
in Scrooge's office. They had books and papers in
their hands, and bowed to him.

"Scrooge and Marley's, I believe," said one of the
gentlemen, referring to his list. "Have I the pleasure
of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?"

"Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,"
Scrooge replied. "He died seven years ago, this very
night."

"We have no doubt his liberality is well represented
by his surviving partner," said the gentleman, presenting
his credentials.

It certainly was; for they had been two kindred
spirits. At the ominous word "liberality," Scrooge
frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials
back.

"At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,"
said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than
usually desirable that we should make some slight
provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer
greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in
want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands
are in want of common comforts, sir."

"Are there no prisons?" asked Scrooge.

"Plenty of prisons," said the gentleman, laying down
the pen again.

"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Scrooge.
"Are they still in operation?"

"They are. Still," returned the gentleman, "I wish
I could say they were not."

"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour,
then?" said Scrooge.

"Both very busy, sir."

"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first,
that something had occurred to stop them in their
useful course," said Scrooge. "I'm very glad to
hear it."

"Under the impression that they scarcely furnish
Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,"
returned the gentleman, "a few of us are endeavouring
to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink,
and means of warmth. We choose this time, because
it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt,
and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down
for?"

"Nothing!" Scrooge replied.

"You wish to be anonymous?"

"I wish to be left alone," said Scrooge. "Since you
ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer.
I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't
afford to make idle people merry. I help to support
the establishments I have mentioned--they cost
enough; and those who are badly off must go there."

"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had
better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
Besides--excuse me--I don't know that."

"But you might know it," observed the gentleman.

"It's not my business," Scrooge returned. "It's
enough for a man to understand his own business, and
not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies
me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!"

Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue
their point, the gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge resumed
his labours with an improved opinion of himself,
and in a more facetious temper than was usual
with him.

Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that
people ran about with flaring links, proffering their
services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct
them on their way. The ancient tower of a church,
whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down
at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became
invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the
clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if
its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there.
The cold became intense. In the main street, at the
corner of the court, some labourers were repairing
the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier,
round which a party of ragged men and boys were
gathered: warming their hands and winking their
eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug
being left in solitude, its overflowings sullenly congealed,
and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness
of the shops where holly sprigs and berries
crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale
faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers' and grocers'
trades became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant,
with which it was next to impossible to believe that
such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything
to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the
mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks
and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor's
household should; and even the little tailor, whom he
had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for
being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred up
to-morrow's pudding in his garret, while his lean
wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.

Foggier yet, and colder. Piercing, searching, biting
cold. If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped
the Evil Spirit's nose with a touch of such weather
as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then
indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose. The
owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled
by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs,
stooped down at Scrooge's keyhole to regale him with
a Christmas carol: but at the first sound of

        "God bless you, merry gentleman!
         May nothing you dismay!"

Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action,
that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to
the fog and even more congenial frost.

At length the hour of shutting up the counting-house
arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his
stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant
clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out,
and put on his hat.

"You'll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?" said
Scrooge.

"If quite convenient, sir."

"It's not convenient," said Scrooge, "and it's not
fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd
think yourself ill-used, I'll be bound?"

The clerk smiled faintly.

"And yet," said Scrooge, "you don't think me ill-used,
when I pay a day's wages for no work."

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every
twenty-fifth of December!" said Scrooge, buttoning
his great-coat to the chin. "But I suppose you must
have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next
morning."

The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge
walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a
twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his
white comforter dangling below his waist (for he
boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill,
at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in
honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home
to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play
at blindman's-buff.

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual
melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and
beguiled the rest of the evening with his
banker's-book, went home to bed. He lived in
chambers which had once belonged to his deceased
partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a
lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so
little business to be, that one could scarcely help
fancying it must have run there when it was a young
house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses,
and forgotten the way out again. It was old enough
now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but
Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices.
The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew
its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands.
The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway
of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of
the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the
threshold.

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all
particular about the knocker on the door, except that it
was very large. It is also a fact, that Scrooge had
seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence
in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what
is called fancy about him as any man in the city of
London, even including--which is a bold word--the
corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be
borne in mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one
thought on Marley, since his last mention of his
seven years' dead partner that afternoon. And then
let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened
that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door,
saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate
process of change--not a knocker, but Marley's face.

Marley's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow
as the other objects in the yard were, but had a
dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark
cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked
at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly
spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The
hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air;
and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly
motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it
horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the
face and beyond its control, rather than a part of
its own expression.

As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it
was a knocker again.

To say that he was not startled, or that his blood
was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it
had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue.
But he put his hand upon the key he had relinquished,
turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.

He did pause, with a moment's irresolution, before
he shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind
it first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the
sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall.
But there was nothing on the back of the door, except
the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he
said "Pooh, pooh!" and closed it with a bang.

The sound resounded through the house like thunder.
Every room above, and every cask in the wine-merchant's
cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal
of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to
be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and
walked across the hall, and up the stairs; slowly too:
trimming his candle as he went.

You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six
up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad
young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you
might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken
it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall
and the door towards the balustrades: and done it
easy. There was plenty of width for that, and room
to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge
thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before
him in the gloom. Half-a-dozen gas-lamps out of
the street wouldn't have lighted the entry too well,
so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with
Scrooge's dip.

Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that.
Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. But before
he shut his heavy door, he walked through his rooms
to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection
of the face to desire to do that.

Sitting-room, bedroom, lumber-room. All as they
should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under
the sofa; a small fire in the grate; spoon and basin
ready; and the little saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had
a cold in his head) upon the hob. Nobody under the
bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown,
which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude
against the wall. Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guard,
old shoes, two fish-baskets, washing-stand on three
legs, and a poker.

Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked
himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his
custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off
his cravat; put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and
his nightcap; and sat down before the fire to take
his gruel.

It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a
bitter night. He was obliged to sit close to it, and
brood over it, before he could extract the least
sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel.
The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch
merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint
Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures.
There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh's daughters;
Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending
through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams,
Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats,
hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts;
and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came
like the ancient Prophet's rod, and swallowed up the
whole. If each smooth tile had been a blank at first,
with power to shape some picture on its surface from
the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would
have been a copy of old Marley's head on every one.

"Humbug!" said Scrooge; and walked across the
room.

After several turns, he sat down again. As he
threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened
to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the
room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten
with a chamber in the highest story of the
building. It was with great astonishment, and with
a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he
saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in
the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it
rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.

This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute,
but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had
begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking
noise, deep down below; as if some person were
dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the
wine-merchant's cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have
heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as
dragging chains.

The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound,
and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors
below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight
towards his door.

"It's humbug still!" said Scrooge. "I won't believe it."

His colour changed though, when, without a pause,
it came on through the heavy door, and passed into
the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the
dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, "I know
him; Marley's Ghost!" and fell again.

The same face: the very same. Marley in his pigtail,
usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on
the latter bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts,
and the hair upon his head. The chain he drew was
clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound
about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge
observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks,
ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.
His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him,
and looking through his waistcoat, could see
the two buttons on his coat behind.

Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no
bowels, but he had never believed it until now.

No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he
looked the phantom through and through, and saw
it standing before him; though he felt the chilling
influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the very
texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head
and chin, which wrapper he had not observed before;
he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.

"How now!" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever.
"What do you want with me?"

"Much!"--Marley's voice, no doubt about it.

"Who are you?"

"Ask me who I was."

"Who were you then?" said Scrooge, raising his
voice. "You're particular, for a shade." He was going
to say "to a shade," but substituted this, as more
appropriate.

"In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley."

"Can you--can you sit down?" asked Scrooge, looking
doubtfully at him.

"I can."

"Do it, then."

Scrooge asked the question, because he didn't know
whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in
a condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event
of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity
of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat
down on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he
were quite used to it.

"You don't believe in me," observed the Ghost.

"I don't," said Scrooge.

"What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of
your senses?"

"I don't know," said Scrooge.

"Why do you doubt your senses?"

"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them.
A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may
be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of
cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of
gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking
jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means
waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be
smart, as a means of distracting his own attention,
and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice
disturbed the very marrow in his bones.

To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence
for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very
deuce with him. There was something very awful,
too, in the spectre's being provided with an infernal
atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it
himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the
Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts,
and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour
from an oven.

"You see this toothpick?" said Scrooge, returning
quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned;
and wishing, though it were only for a second, to
divert the vision's stony gaze from himself.

"I do," replied the Ghost.

"You are not looking at it," said Scrooge.

"But I see it," said the Ghost, "notwithstanding."

"Well!" returned Scrooge, "I have but to swallow
this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a
legion of goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug,
I tell you! humbug!"

At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook
its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that
Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself
from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was
his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage
round its head, as if it were too warm to wear indoors,
its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!

Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands
before his face.

"Mercy!" he said. "Dreadful apparition, why do
you trouble me?"

"Man of the worldly mind!" replied the Ghost, "do
you believe in me or not?"

"I do," said Scrooge. "I must. But why do spirits
walk the earth, and why do they come to me?"

"It is required of every man," the Ghost returned,
"that the spirit within him should walk abroad among
his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that
spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so
after death. It is doomed to wander through the
world--oh, woe is me!--and witness what it cannot
share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to
happiness!"

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain
and wrung its shadowy hands.

"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell
me why?"

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost.
"I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded
it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I
wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"

Scrooge trembled more and more.

"Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the
weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself?
It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven
Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since.
It is a ponderous chain!"

Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the
expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty
or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see
nothing.

"Jacob," he said, imploringly. "Old Jacob Marley,
tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob!"

"I have none to give," the Ghost replied. "It comes
from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed
by other ministers, to other kinds of men. Nor
can I tell you what I would. A very little more is
all permitted to me. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I
cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never walked
beyond our counting-house--mark me!--in life my
spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our
money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before
me!"

It was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he became
thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets.
Pondering on what the Ghost had said, he did so now,
but without lifting up his eyes, or getting off his
knees.

"You must have been very slow about it, Jacob,"
Scrooge observed, in a business-like manner, though
with humility and deference.

"Slow!" the Ghost repeated.

"Seven years dead," mused Scrooge. "And travelling
all the time!"

"The whole time," said the Ghost. "No rest, no
peace. Incessant torture of remorse."

"You travel fast?" said Scrooge.

"On the wings of the wind," replied the Ghost.

"You might have got over a great quantity of
ground in seven years," said Scrooge.

The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and
clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of
the night, that the Ward would have been justified in
indicting it for a nuisance.

"Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed," cried the
phantom, "not to know, that ages of incessant labour
by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into
eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is
all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit
working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may
be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast
means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of
regret can make amends for one life's opportunity
misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!"

"But you were always a good man of business,
Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this
to himself.

"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands
again. "Mankind was my business. The common
welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance,
and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings
of my trade were but a drop of water in the
comprehensive ocean of my business!"

It held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were
the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it
heavily upon the ground again.

"At this time of the rolling year," the spectre said,
"I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of
fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never
raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise
Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to
which its light would have conducted me!"

Scrooge was very much dismayed to hear the
spectre going on at this rate, and began to quake
exceedingly.

"Hear me!" cried the Ghost. "My time is nearly
gone."

"I will," said Scrooge. "But don't be hard upon
me! Don't be flowery, Jacob! Pray!"

"How it is that I appear before you in a shape that
you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible
beside you many and many a day."

It was not an agreeable idea. Scrooge shivered,
and wiped the perspiration from his brow.

"That is no light part of my penance," pursued
the Ghost. "I am here to-night to warn you, that you
have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A
chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer."

"You were always a good friend to me," said
Scrooge. "Thank'ee!"

"You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by
Three Spirits."

Scrooge's countenance fell almost as low as the
Ghost's had done.

"Is that the chance and hope you mentioned,
Jacob?" he demanded, in a faltering voice.

"It is."

"I--I think I'd rather not," said Scrooge.

"Without their visits," said the Ghost, "you cannot
hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first to-morrow,
when the bell tolls One."

"Couldn't I take 'em all at once, and have it over,
Jacob?" hinted Scrooge.

"Expect the second on the next night at the same
hour. The third upon the next night when the last
stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see
me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you
remember what has passed between us!"

When it had said these words, the spectre took its
wrapper from the table, and bound it round its head,
as before. Scrooge knew this, by the smart sound its
teeth made, when the jaws were brought together
by the bandage. He ventured to raise his eyes again,
and found his supernatural visitor confronting him
in an erect attitude, with its chain wound over and
about its arm.

The apparition walked backward from him; and at
every step it took, the window raised itself a little,
so that when the spectre reached it, it was wide open.

It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did.
When they were within two paces of each other,
Marley's Ghost held up its hand, warning him to
come no nearer. Scrooge stopped.

Not so much in obedience, as in surprise and fear:
for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible
of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of
lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and
self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment,
joined in the mournful dirge; and floated out upon the
bleak, dark night.

Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his
curiosity. He looked out.

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither
and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they
went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley's
Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments)
were linked together; none were free. Many had
been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He
had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white
waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to
its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist
a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below,
upon a door-step. The misery with them all was,
clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in
human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

Whether these creatures faded into mist, or mist
enshrouded them, he could not tell. But they and
their spirit voices faded together; and the night became
as it had been when he walked home.

Scrooge closed the window, and examined the door
by which the Ghost had entered. It was double-locked,
as he had locked it with his own hands, and
the bolts were undisturbed. He tried to say "Humbug!"
but stopped at the first syllable. And being,
from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues
of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or
the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of
the hour, much in need of repose; went straight to
bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the
instant.


STAVE II:  THE FIRST OF THE THREE SPIRITS

WHEN Scrooge awoke, it was so dark, that looking out of bed,
he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from
the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to
pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes, when the chimes of a
neighbouring church struck the four quarters. So he listened
for the hour.

To his great astonishment the heavy bell went on from
six to seven, and from seven to eight, and regularly up to
twelve; then stopped. Twelve! It was past two when he
went to bed. The clock was wrong. An icicle must have
got into the works. Twelve!

He touched the spring of his repeater, to correct this most
preposterous clock. Its rapid little pulse beat twelve:
and stopped.

"Why, it isn't possible," said Scrooge, "that I can have
slept through a whole day and far into another night. It
isn't possible that anything has happened to the sun, and
this is twelve at noon!"

The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed,
and groped his way to the window. He was obliged to rub
the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing-gown before he
could see anything; and could see very little then. All he
could make out was, that it was still very foggy and extremely
cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and fro,
and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been
if night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the
world.  This was a great relief, because "three days after sight
of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his
order," and so forth, would have become a mere United States'
security if there were no days to count by.

Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought
it over and over and over, and could make nothing of it.  The more he
thought, the more perplexed he was; and the more he endeavoured
not to think, the more he thought.

Marley's Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved
within himself, after mature inquiry, that it was all a dream, his
mind flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first
position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through,
"Was it a dream or not?"

Scrooge lay in this state until the chime had gone three quarters
more, when he remembered, on a sudden, that the Ghost had warned
him of a visitation when the bell tolled one.  He resolved to lie
awake until the hour was passed; and, considering that he could
no more go to sleep than go to Heaven, this was perhaps the
wisest resolution in his power.

The quarter was so long, that he was more than once convinced he
must have sunk into a doze unconsciously, and missed the clock.
At length it broke upon his listening ear.

"Ding, dong!"

"A quarter past," said Scrooge, counting.

"Ding, dong!"

"Half-past!" said Scrooge.

"Ding, dong!"

"A quarter to it," said Scrooge.

"Ding, dong!"

"The hour itself," said Scrooge, triumphantly, "and nothing else!"

He spoke before the hour bell sounded, which it now did with a
deep, dull, hollow, melancholy ONE.  Light flashed up in the room
upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn.

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a
hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his
back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains
of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a
half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the
unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now
to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.

It was a strange figure--like a child: yet not so like a
child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural
medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded
from the view, and being diminished to a child's proportions.
Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was
white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in
it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were
very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold
were of uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately
formed, were, like those upper members, bare. It wore a tunic
of the purest white; and round its waist was bound
a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held
a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular
contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed
with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was,
that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear
jet of light, by which all this was visible; and which was
doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a
great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.

Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing
steadiness, was not its strangest quality. For as its belt
sparkled and glittered now in one part and now in another,
and what was light one instant, at another time was dark, so
the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a
thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs,
now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a
body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible
in the dense gloom wherein they melted away. And in the
very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and
clear as ever.

"Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to
me?" asked Scrooge.

"I am!"

The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if
instead of being so close beside him, it were at a distance.

"Who, and what are you?" Scrooge demanded.

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."

"Long Past?" inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish
stature.

"No. Your past."

Perhaps, Scrooge could not have told anybody why, if
anybody could have asked him; but he had a special desire
to see the Spirit in his cap; and begged him to be covered.

"What!" exclaimed the Ghost, "would you so soon put out,
with worldly hands, the light I give? Is it not enough
that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and
force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon
my brow!"

Scrooge reverently disclaimed all intention to offend
or any knowledge of having wilfully "bonneted" the Spirit at
any period of his life. He then made bold to inquire what
business brought him there.

"Your welfare!" said the Ghost.

Scrooge expressed himself much obliged, but could not
help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have been
more conducive to that end. The Spirit must have heard
him thinking, for it said immediately:

"Your reclamation, then. Take heed!"

It put out its strong hand as it spoke, and clasped him
gently by the arm.

"Rise! and walk with me!"

It would have been in vain for Scrooge to plead that the
weather and the hour were not adapted to pedestrian purposes;
that bed was warm, and the thermometer a long way below
freezing; that he was clad but lightly in his slippers,
dressing-gown, and nightcap; and that he had a cold upon him at
that time. The grasp, though gentle as a woman's hand,
was not to be resisted. He rose: but finding that the Spirit
made towards the window, clasped his robe in supplication.

"I am a mortal," Scrooge remonstrated, "and liable to fall."

"Bear but a touch of my hand there," said the Spirit,
laying it upon his heart, "and you shall be upheld in more
than this!"

As the words were spoken, they passed through the wall,
and stood upon an open country road, with fields on either
hand. The city had entirely vanished. Not a vestige of it
was to be seen. The darkness and the mist had vanished
with it, for it was a clear, cold, winter day, with snow upon
the ground.

"Good Heaven!" said Scrooge, clasping his hands together,
as he looked about him. "I was bred in this place. I was
a boy here!"

The Spirit gazed upon him mildly. Its gentle touch,
though it had been light and instantaneous, appeared still
present to the old man's sense of feeling. He was conscious
of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected
with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares
long, long, forgotten!

"Your lip is trembling," said the Ghost. "And what is
that upon your cheek?"

Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice,
that it was a pimple; and begged the Ghost to lead him
where he would.

"You recollect the way?" inquired the Spirit.

"Remember it!" cried Scrooge with fervour; "I could
walk it blindfold."

"Strange to have forgotten it for so many years!" observed
the Ghost. "Let us go on."

They walked along the road, Scrooge recognising every
gate, and post, and tree; until a little market-town appeared
in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and winding river.
Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them
with boys upon their backs, who called to other boys in
country gigs and carts, driven by farmers. All these boys
were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the
broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air
laughed to hear it!

"These are but shadows of the things that have been," said
the Ghost. "They have no consciousness of us."

The jocund travellers came on; and as they came, Scrooge
knew and named them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond
all bounds to see them! Why did his cold eye glisten, and
his heart leap up as they went past! Why was he filled
with gladness when he heard them give each other Merry
Christmas, as they parted at cross-roads and bye-ways, for
their several homes! What was merry Christmas to Scrooge?
Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done
to him?

"The school is not quite deserted," said the Ghost. "A
solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still."

Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed.

They left the high-road, by a well-remembered lane, and
soon approached a mansion of dull red brick, with a little
weathercock-surmounted cupola, on the roof, and a bell
hanging in it. It was a large house, but one of broken
fortunes; for the spacious offices were little used, their walls
were damp and mossy, their windows broken, and their
gates decayed. Fowls clucked and strutted in the stables;
and the coach-houses and sheds were over-run with grass.
Nor was it more retentive of its ancient state, within; for
entering the dreary hall, and glancing through the open
doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished,
cold, and vast. There was an earthy savour in the air, a
chilly bareness in the place, which associated itself somehow
with too much getting up by candle-light, and not too
much to eat.

They went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a
door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and
disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by
lines of plain deal forms and desks. At one of these a lonely
boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down
upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he
used to be.

Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle
from the mice behind the panelling, not a drip from the
half-thawed water-spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among
the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar, not the idle
swinging of an empty store-house door, no, not a clicking in
the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with a softening
influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears.

The Spirit touched him on the arm, and pointed to his
younger self, intent upon his reading. Suddenly a man, in
foreign garments: wonderfully real and distinct to look at:
stood outside the window, with an axe stuck in his belt, and
leading by the bridle an ass laden with wood.

"Why, it's Ali Baba!" Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. "It's
dear old honest Ali Baba! Yes, yes, I know! One Christmas
time, when yonder solitary child was left here all alone,
he did come, for the first time, just like that. Poor boy! And
Valentine," said Scrooge, "and his wild brother, Orson; there
they go! And what's his name, who was put down in his
drawers, asleep, at the Gate of Damascus; don't you see him!
And the Sultan's Groom turned upside down by the Genii;
there he is upon his head! Serve him right. I'm glad of it.
What business had he to be married to the Princess!"

To hear Scrooge expending all the earnestness of his nature
on such subjects, in a most extraordinary voice between
laughing and crying; and to see his heightened and excited
face; would have been a surprise to his business friends in
the city, indeed.

"There's the Parrot!" cried Scrooge. "Green body and
yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the
top of his head; there he is! Poor Robin Crusoe, he called
him, when he came home again after sailing round the
island. 'Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin
Crusoe?'  The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn't.
It was the Parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running
for his life to the little creek! Halloa! Hoop! Halloo!"

Then, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his
usual character, he said, in pity for his former self, "Poor
boy!" and cried again.

"I wish," Scrooge muttered, putting his hand in his
pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with his
cuff: "but it's too late now."

"What is the matter?" asked the Spirit.

"Nothing," said Scrooge. "Nothing. There was a boy
singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should
like to have given him something: that's all."

The Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand:
saying as it did so, "Let us see another Christmas!"

Scrooge's former self grew larger at the words, and the
room became a little darker and more dirty. The panels shrunk,
the windows cracked; fragments of plaster fell out of the
ceiling, and the naked laths were shown instead; but how
all this was brought about, Scrooge knew no more than you
do. He only knew that it was quite correct; that everything
had happened so; that there he was, alone again, when all
the other boys had gone home for the jolly holidays.

He was not reading now, but walking up and down despairingly.
Scrooge looked at the Ghost, and with a mournful shaking of
his head, glanced anxiously towards the door.

It opened; and a little girl, much younger than the boy,
came darting in, and putting her arms about his neck, and
often kissing him, addressed him as her "Dear, dear
brother."

"I have come to bring you home, dear brother!" said the
child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to laugh.
"To bring you home, home, home!"

"Home, little Fan?" returned the boy.

"Yes!" said the child, brimful of glee. "Home, for good
and all. Home, for ever and ever. Father is so much kinder
than he used to be, that home's like Heaven! He spoke so
gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that
I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come
home; and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a coach
to bring you. And you're to be a man!" said the child,
opening her eyes, "and are never to come back here; but
first, we're to be together all the Christmas long, and have
the merriest time in all the world."

"You are quite a woman, little Fan!" exclaimed the boy.

She clapped her hands and laughed, and tried to touch his
head; but being too little, laughed again, and stood on
tiptoe to embrace him. Then she began to drag him, in her
childish eagerness, towards the door; and he, nothing loth to
go, accompanied her.

A terrible voice in the hall cried, "Bring down Master
Scrooge's box, there!" and in the hall appeared the schoolmaster
himself, who glared on Master Scrooge with a ferocious
condescension, and threw him into a dreadful state of mind
by shaking hands with him. He then conveyed him and his
sister into the veriest old well of a shivering best-parlour that
ever was seen, where the maps upon the wall, and the celestial
and terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold.
Here he produced a decanter of curiously light wine, and a
block of curiously heavy cake, and administered instalments
of those dainties to the young people: at the same time,
sending out a meagre servant to offer a glass of "something"
to the postboy, who answered that he thanked the gentleman,
but if it was the same tap as he had tasted before, he had
rather not. Master Scrooge's trunk being by this time tied
on to the top of the chaise, the children bade the schoolmaster
good-bye right willingly; and getting into it, drove
gaily down the garden-sweep: the quick wheels dashing the
hoar-frost and snow from off the dark leaves of the evergreens
like spray.

"Always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have
withered," said the Ghost. "But she had a large heart!"

"So she had," cried Scrooge. "You're right. I will not
gainsay it, Spirit. God forbid!"

"She died a woman," said the Ghost, "and had, as I think,
children."

"One child," Scrooge returned.

"True," said the Ghost. "Your nephew!"

Scrooge seemed uneasy in his mind; and answered briefly,
"Yes."

Although they had but that moment left the school behind
them, they were now in the busy thoroughfares of a city,
where shadowy passengers passed and repassed; where shadowy
carts and coaches battled for the way, and all the strife and
tumult of a real city were. It was made plain enough, by
the dressing of the shops, that here too it was Christmas
time again; but it was evening, and the streets were
lighted up.

The Ghost stopped at a certain warehouse door, and asked
Scrooge if he knew it.

"Know it!" said Scrooge. "Was I apprenticed here!"

They went in. At sight of an old gentleman in a Welsh
wig, sitting behind such a high desk, that if he had been two
inches taller he must have knocked his head against the
ceiling, Scrooge cried in great excitement:

"Why, it's old Fezziwig! Bless his heart; it's Fezziwig
alive again!"

Old Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked up at the
clock, which pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his
hands; adjusted his capacious waistcoat; laughed all over
himself, from his shoes to his organ of benevolence; and
called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice:

"Yo ho, there! Ebenezer! Dick!"

Scrooge's former self, now grown a young man, came briskly
in, accompanied by his fellow-'prentice.

"Dick Wilkins, to be sure!" said Scrooge to the Ghost.
"Bless me, yes. There he is. He was very much attached
to me, was Dick. Poor Dick! Dear, dear!"

"Yo ho, my boys!" said Fezziwig. "No more work to-night.
Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let's
have the shutters up," cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap
of his hands, "before a man can say Jack Robinson!"

You wouldn't believe how those two fellows went at it!
They charged into the street with the shutters--one, two,
three--had 'em up in their places--four, five, six--barred
'em and pinned 'em--seven, eight, nine--and came back
before you could have got to twelve, panting like race-horses.

"Hilli-ho!" cried old Fezziwig, skipping down from the
high desk, with wonderful agility. "Clear away, my lads,
and let's have lots of room here! Hilli-ho, Dick! Chirrup,
Ebenezer!"

Clear away! There was nothing they wouldn't have cleared
away, or couldn't have cleared away, with old Fezziwig looking
on. It was done in a minute. Every movable was packed off, as if
it were dismissed from public life for evermore; the floor was
swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon
the fire; and the warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and
bright a ball-room, as you would desire to see upon a winter's
night.

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the
lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty
stomach-aches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial
smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and
lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they
broke. In came all the young men and women employed in
the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the
baker. In came the cook, with her brother's particular friend,
the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was
suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying
to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who
was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress.
In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly,
some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling;
in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went,
twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again
the other way; down the middle and up again; round
and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old
top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top
couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top
couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them! When
this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his
hands to stop the dance, cried out, "Well done!" and the
fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially
provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his
reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no
dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home,
exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran-new man
resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.

There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more
dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there
was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece
of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer.
But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast
and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind! The sort
of man who knew his business better than you or I could
have told it him!) struck up "Sir Roger de Coverley."  Then
old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top
couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them;
three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were
not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no
notion of walking.

But if they had been twice as many--ah, four times--old
Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would
Mrs. Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner
in every sense of the term. If that's not high praise, tell me
higher, and I'll use it. A positive light appeared to issue
from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in every part of the
dance like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any given
time, what would have become of them next. And when old
Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig had gone all through the dance;
advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and
curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to
your place; Fezziwig "cut"--cut so deftly, that he appeared
to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without
a stagger.

When the clock struck eleven, this domestic ball broke up.
Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side
of the door, and shaking hands with every person individually
as he or she went out, wished him or her a Merry Christmas.
When everybody had retired but the two 'prentices, they did
the same to them; and thus the cheerful voices died away,
and the lads were left to their beds; which were under a
counter in the back-shop.

During the whole of this time, Scrooge had acted like a
man out of his wits. His heart and soul were in the scene,
and with his former self. He corroborated everything,
remembered everything, enjoyed everything, and underwent
the strangest agitation. It was not until now, when the
bright faces of his former self and Dick were turned from
them, that he remembered the Ghost, and became conscious
that it was looking full upon him, while the light upon its
head burnt very clear.

"A small matter," said the Ghost, "to make these silly
folks so full of gratitude."

"Small!" echoed Scrooge.

The Spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices,
who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig:
and when he had done so, said,

"Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of
your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so
much that he deserves this praise?"

"It isn't that," said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and
speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self.
"It isn't that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy
or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a
pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and
looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is
impossible to add and count 'em up: what then? The happiness
he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune."

He felt the Spirit's glance, and stopped.

"What is the matter?" asked the Ghost.

"Nothing particular," said Scrooge.

"Something, I think?" the Ghost insisted.

"No," said Scrooge, "No. I should like to be able to say
a word or two to my clerk just now. That's all."

His former self turned down the lamps as he gave utterance
to the wish; and Scrooge and the Ghost again stood side by
side in the open air.

"My time grows short," observed the Spirit. "Quick!"

This was not addressed to Scrooge, or to any one whom he
could see, but it produced an immediate effect. For again
Scrooge saw himself. He was older now; a man in the prime
of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later
years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice.
There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which
showed the passion that had taken root, and where the
shadow of the growing tree would fall.

He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young
girl in a mourning-dress: in whose eyes there were tears,
which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of
Christmas Past.

"It matters little," she said, softly. "To you, very little.
Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort
you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have
no just cause to grieve."

"What Idol has displaced you?" he rejoined.

"A golden one."

"This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said.
"There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and
there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity
as the pursuit of wealth!"

"You fear the world too much," she answered, gently.
"All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being
beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your
nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion,
Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?"

"What then?" he retorted. "Even if I have grown so
much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you."

She shook her head.

"Am I?"

"Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were
both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could
improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You
are changed. When it was made, you were another man."

"I was a boy," he said impatiently.

"Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you
are," she returned. "I am. That which promised happiness
when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that
we are two. How often and how keenly I have thought of
this, I will not say. It is enough that I have thought of it,
and can release you."

"Have I ever sought release?"

"In words. No. Never."

"In what, then?"

"In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another
atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end. In
everything that made my love of any worth or value in your
sight. If this had never been between us," said the girl,
looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him; "tell me,
would you seek me out and try to win me now? Ah, no!"

He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition, in
spite of himself. But he said with a struggle, "You think
not."

"I would gladly think otherwise if I could," she answered,
"Heaven knows! When I have learned a Truth like this,
I know how strong and irresistible it must be. But if you
were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe
that you would choose a dowerless girl--you who, in your
very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or,
choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your
one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your
repentance and regret would surely follow? I do; and I
release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you
once were."

He was about to speak; but with her head turned from
him, she resumed.

"You may--the memory of what is past half makes me
hope you will--have pain in this. A very, very brief time,
and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an
unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you
awoke. May you be happy in the life you have chosen!"

She left him, and they parted.

"Spirit!" said Scrooge, "show me no more! Conduct
me home. Why do you delight to torture me?"

"One shadow more!" exclaimed the Ghost.

"No more!" cried Scrooge. "No more. I don't wish to
see it. Show me no more!"

But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms,
and forced him to observe what happened next.

They were in another scene and place; a room, not very
large or handsome, but full of comfort. Near to the winter
fire sat a beautiful young girl, so like that last that Scrooge
believed it was the same, until he saw her, now a comely
matron, sitting opposite her daughter. The noise in this
room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children
there, than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count;
and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not
forty children conducting themselves like one, but every
child was conducting itself like forty. The consequences
were uproarious beyond belief; but no one seemed to care;
on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily,
and enjoyed it very much; and the latter, soon beginning to
mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands
most ruthlessly. What would I not have given to be one of
them! Though I never could have been so rude, no, no! I
wouldn't for the wealth of all the world have crushed that
braided hair, and torn it down; and for the precious little
shoe, I wouldn't have plucked it off, God bless my soul! to
save my life. As to measuring her waist in sport, as they
did, bold young brood, I couldn't have done it; I should
have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment,
and never come straight again. And yet I should
have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have
questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have
looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never
raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of
which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should
have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence
of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its
value.

But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a
rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and
plundered dress was borne towards it the centre of a flushed
and boisterous group, just in time to greet the father, who
came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys
and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and
the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter!
The scaling him with chairs for ladders to dive into his
pockets, despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold on tight
by his cravat, hug him round his neck, pommel his back,
and kick his legs in irrepressible affection! The shouts of
wonder and delight with which the development of every
package was received! The terrible announcement that the
baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll's frying-pan
into his mouth, and was more than suspected of having
swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter!
The immense relief of finding this a false alarm! The joy,
and gratitude, and ecstasy! They are all indescribable alike.
It is enough that by degrees the children and their emotions
got out of the parlour, and by one stair at a time, up to the
top of the house; where they went to bed, and so subsided.

And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever,
when the master of the house, having his daughter leaning
fondly on him, sat down with her and her mother at his
own fireside; and when he thought that such another
creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might
have called him father, and been a spring-time in the
haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim indeed.

"Belle," said the husband, turning to his wife with a
smile, "I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon."

"Who was it?"

"Guess!"

"How can I? Tut, don't I know?" she added in the
same breath, laughing as he laughed. "Mr. Scrooge."

"Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as
it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could
scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point
of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in
the world, I do believe."

"Spirit!" said Scrooge in a broken voice, "remove me
from this place."

"I told you these were shadows of the things that have
been," said the Ghost. "That they are what they are, do
not blame me!"

"Remove me!" Scrooge exclaimed, "I cannot bear it!"

He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked upon
him with a face, in which in some strange way there were
fragments of all the faces it had shown him, wrestled with it.

"Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no longer!"

In the struggle, if that can be called a struggle in which
the Ghost with no visible resistance on its own part was
undisturbed by any effort of its adversary, Scrooge observed
that its light was burning high and bright; and dimly
connecting that with its influence over him, he seized the
extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down
upon its head.

The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher
covered its whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it down
with all his force, he could not hide the light: which streamed
from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.

He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an
irresistible drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own
bedroom.  He gave the cap a parting squeeze, in which his hand
relaxed; and had barely time to reel to bed, before he sank
into a heavy sleep.


STAVE III:  THE SECOND OF THE THREE SPIRITS

AWAKING in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and
sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had
no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the
stroke of One. He felt that he was restored to consciousness
in the right nick of time, for the especial purpose of holding
a conference with the second messenger despatched to him
through Jacob Marley's intervention. But finding that he
turned uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which
of his curtains this new spectre would draw back, he put
them every one aside with his own hands; and lying down
again, established a sharp look-out all round the bed. For
he wished to challenge the Spirit on the moment of its
appearance, and did not wish to be taken by surprise, and
made nervous.

Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves
on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually
equal to the time-of-day, express the wide range of their
capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for
anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between which
opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and
comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for
Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don't mind calling on you
to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of
strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and
rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.

Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by
any means prepared for nothing; and, consequently, when the
Bell struck One, and no shape appeared, he was taken with a
violent fit of trembling. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter
of an hour went by, yet nothing came. All this time, he lay
upon his bed, the very core and centre of a blaze of ruddy
light, which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the
hour; and which, being only light, was more alarming than
a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it
meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive
that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of
spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of
knowing it. At last, however, he began to think--as you or
I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not
in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done
in it, and would unquestionably have done it too--at last, I
say, he began to think that the source and secret of this
ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, from whence,
on further tracing it, it seemed to shine. This idea taking
full possession of his mind, he got up softly and shuffled in
his slippers to the door.

The moment Scrooge's hand was on the lock, a strange
voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He
obeyed.

It was his own room. There was no doubt about that.
But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls
and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a
perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming
berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and
ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had
been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring
up the chimney, as that dull petrification of a hearth had
never known in Scrooge's time, or Marley's, or for many and
many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form
a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn,
great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages,
mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts,
cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears,
immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that
made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy
state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to
see; who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty's
horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge,
as he came peeping round the door.

"Come in!" exclaimed the Ghost. "Come in! and know
me better, man!"

Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before this
Spirit. He was not the dogged Scrooge he had been; and
though the Spirit's eyes were clear and kind, he did not like
to meet them.

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Present," said the Spirit.
"Look upon me!"

Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple
green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment
hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was
bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any
artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the
garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other
covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining
icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its
genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice,
its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded
round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword
was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.

"You have never seen the like of me before!" exclaimed
the Spirit.

"Never," Scrooge made answer to it.

"Have never walked forth with the younger members of
my family; meaning (for I am very young) my elder brothers
born in these later years?" pursued the Phantom.

"I don't think I have," said Scrooge. "I am afraid I have
not. Have you had many brothers, Spirit?"

"More than eighteen hundred," said the Ghost.

"A tremendous family to provide for!" muttered Scrooge.

The Ghost of Christmas Present rose.

"Spirit," said Scrooge submissively, "conduct me where
you will. I went forth last night on compulsion, and I learnt
a lesson which is working now. To-night, if you have aught
to teach me, let me profit by it."

"Touch my robe!"

Scrooge did as he was told, and held it fast.

Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game,
poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings,
fruit, and punch, all vanished instantly. So did the room,
the fire, the ruddy glow, the hour of night, and they stood
in the city streets on Christmas morning, where (for the
weather was severe) the people made a rough, but brisk and
not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the
pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of
their houses, whence it was mad delight to the boys to see
it come plumping down into the road below, and splitting
into artificial little snow-storms.

The house fronts looked black enough, and the windows
blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow
upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground;
which last deposit had been ploughed up in deep furrows by
the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows that crossed
and re-crossed each other hundreds of times where the great
streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace
in the thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy,
and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist,
half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended
in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great
Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away
to their dear hearts' content. There was nothing very cheerful
in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of
cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest
summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.

For, the people who were shovelling away on the housetops
were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another
from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious
snowball--better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest--
laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it
went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the
fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round,
pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats
of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out
into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were
ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in
the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking
from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went
by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were
pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there
were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence
to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might
water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy
and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among
the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered
leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squat and swarthy, setting
off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great
compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and
beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after
dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth among
these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and
stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was
something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and
round their little world in slow and passionless excitement.

The Grocers'! oh, the Grocers'! nearly closed, with perhaps
two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such
glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the
counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller
parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled
up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended
scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even
that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so
extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight,
the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and
spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on
feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs
were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in
modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that
everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but
the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful
promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other
at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left
their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to
fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in
the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people
were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which
they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own,
worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws
to peck at if they chose.

But soon the steeples called good people all, to church and
chapel, and away they came, flocking through the streets in
their best clothes, and with their gayest faces. And at the
same time there emerged from scores of bye-streets, lanes, and
nameless turnings, innumerable people, carrying their dinners
to the bakers' shops. The sight of these poor revellers
appeared to interest the Spirit very much, for he stood with
Scrooge beside him in a baker's doorway, and taking off the
covers as their bearers passed, sprinkled incense on their
dinners from his torch. And it was a very uncommon kind
of torch, for once or twice when there were angry words
between some dinner-carriers who had jostled each other, he
shed a few drops of water on them from it, and their good
humour was restored directly. For they said, it was a shame
to quarrel upon Christmas Day. And so it was! God love
it, so it was!

In time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut up; and
yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners
and the progress of their cooking, in the thawed blotch of
wet above each baker's oven; where the pavement smoked as
if its stones were cooking too.

"Is there a peculiar flavour in what you sprinkle from
your torch?" asked Scrooge.

"There is. My own."

"Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day?"
asked Scrooge.

"To any kindly given. To a poor one most."

"Why to a poor one most?" asked Scrooge.

"Because it needs it most."

"Spirit," said Scrooge, after a moment's thought, "I wonder
you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should
desire to cramp these people's opportunities of innocent
enjoyment."

"I!" cried the Spirit.

"You would deprive them of their means of dining every
seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said
to dine at all," said Scrooge. "Wouldn't you?"

"I!" cried the Spirit.

"You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day?" said
Scrooge. "And it comes to the same thing."

"I seek!" exclaimed the Spirit.

"Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your
name, or at least in that of your family," said Scrooge.

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit,
"who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion,
pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness
in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and
kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge
their doings on themselves, not us."

Scrooge promised that he would; and they went on,
invisible, as they had been before, into the suburbs of the
town. It was a remarkable quality of the Ghost (which
Scrooge had observed at the baker's), that notwithstanding
his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any place
with ease; and that he stood beneath a low roof quite as
gracefully and like a supernatural creature, as it was possible
he could have done in any lofty hall.

And perhaps it was the pleasure the good Spirit had in
showing off this power of his, or else it was his own kind,
generous, hearty nature, and his sympathy with all poor
men, that led him straight to Scrooge's clerk's; for there he
went, and took Scrooge with him, holding to his robe; and
on the threshold of the door the Spirit smiled, and stopped
to bless Bob Cratchit's dwelling with the sprinkling of his
torch. Think of that! Bob had but fifteen "Bob" a-week
himself; he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his
Christian name; and yet the Ghost of Christmas Present
blessed his four-roomed house!

Then up rose Mrs. Cratchit, Cratchit's wife, dressed out
but poorly in a twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons,
which are cheap and make a goodly show for sixpence; and
she laid the cloth, assisted by Belinda Cratchit, second of
her daughters, also brave in ribbons; while Master Peter
Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and
getting the corners of his monstrous shirt collar (Bob's private
property, conferred upon his son and heir in honour of the
day) into his mouth, rejoiced to find himself so gallantly
attired, and yearned to show his linen in the fashionable Parks.
And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing
in, screaming that outside the baker's they had smelt the
goose, and known it for their own; and basking in luxurious
thoughts of sage and onion, these young Cratchits danced
about the table, and exalted Master Peter Cratchit to the
skies, while he (not proud, although his collars nearly choked
him) blew the fire, until the slow potatoes bubbling up,
knocked loudly at the saucepan-lid to be let out and
peeled.

"What has ever got your precious father then?" said Mrs.
Cratchit. "And your brother, Tiny Tim! And Martha
warn't as late last Christmas Day by half-an-hour?"

"Here's Martha, mother!" said a girl, appearing as she
spoke.

"Here's Martha, mother!" cried the two young Cratchits.
"Hurrah! There's such a goose, Martha!"

"Why, bless your heart alive, my dear, how late you are!"
said Mrs. Cratchit, kissing her a dozen times, and taking off
her shawl and bonnet for her with officious zeal.

"We'd a deal of work to finish up last night," replied the
girl, "and had to clear away this morning, mother!"

"Well! Never mind so long as you are come," said Mrs.
Cratchit. "Sit ye down before the fire, my dear, and have
a warm, Lord bless ye!"

"No, no! There's father coming," cried the two young
Cratchits, who were everywhere at once. "Hide, Martha,
hide!"

So Martha hid herself, and in came little Bob, the father,
with at least three feet of comforter exclusive of the fringe,
hanging down before him; and his threadbare clothes darned
up and brushed, to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his
shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and
had his limbs supported by an iron frame!

"Why, where's our Martha?" cried Bob Cratchit, looking
round.

"Not coming," said Mrs. Cratchit.

"Not coming!" said Bob, with a sudden declension in his
high spirits; for he had been Tim's blood horse all the way
from church, and had come home rampant. "Not coming
upon Christmas Day!"

Martha didn't like to see him disappointed, if it were only
in joke; so she came out prematurely from behind the closet
door, and ran into his arms, while the two young Cratchits
hustled Tiny Tim, and bore him off into the wash-house,
that he might hear the pudding singing in the copper.

"And how did little Tim behave?" asked Mrs. Cratchit,
when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had
hugged his daughter to his heart's content.

"As good as gold," said Bob, "and better. Somehow he
gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the
strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home,
that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he
was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember
upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind
men see."

Bob's voice was tremulous when he told them this, and
trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing
strong and hearty.

His active little crutch was heard upon the floor, and back
came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by
his brother and sister to his stool before the fire; and while
Bob, turning up his cuffs--as if, poor fellow, they were
capable of being made more shabby--compounded some hot
mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round
and round and put it on the hob to simmer; Master Peter,
and the two ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the
goose, with which they soon returned in high procession.

Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose
the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a
black swan was a matter of course--and in truth it was
something very like it in that house. Mrs. Cratchit made
the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot;
Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour;
Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple-sauce; Martha dusted
the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny
corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for
everybody, not forgetting themselves, and mounting guard
upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest
they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be
helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was
said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs.
Cratchit, looking slowly all along the carving-knife, prepared
to plunge it in the breast; but when she did, and when the
long expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of
delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim,
excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with
the handle of his knife, and feebly cried Hurrah!

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe
there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and
flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal
admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes,
it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as
Mrs. Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small
atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn't ate it all at
last! Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest
Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to
the eyebrows! But now, the plates being changed by Miss
Belinda, Mrs. Cratchit left the room alone--too nervous to
bear witnesses--to take the pudding up and bring it in.

Suppose it should not be done enough! Suppose it should
break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got
over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they
were merry with the goose--a supposition at which the two
young Cratchits became livid! All sorts of horrors were
supposed.

Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of
the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the
cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next
door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that!
That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit
entered--flushed, but smiling proudly--with the pudding,
like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half
of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with
Christmas holly stuck into the top.

Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly
too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by
Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs. Cratchit said that
now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had
had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had
something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it
was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have
been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed
to hint at such a thing.

At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the
hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the
jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges
were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the
fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in
what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and
at Bob Cratchit's elbow stood the family display of glass.
Two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.

These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as
golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with
beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and
cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed:

"A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!"

Which all the family re-echoed.

"God bless us every one!" said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

He sat very close to his father's side upon his little
stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he
loved the child, and wished to keep him by his side, and
dreaded that he might be taken from him.

"Spirit," said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt
before, "tell me if Tiny Tim will live."

"I see a vacant seat," replied the Ghost, "in the poor
chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully
preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future,
the child will die."

"No, no," said Scrooge. "Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he
will be spared."

"If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none
other of my race," returned the Ghost, "will find him here.
What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and
decrease the surplus population."

Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by
the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.

"Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not
adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered
What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what
men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the
sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live
than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear
the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life
among his hungry brothers in the dust!"

Scrooge bent before the Ghost's rebuke, and trembling cast
his eyes upon the ground. But he raised them speedily, on
hearing his own name.

"Mr. Scrooge!" said Bob; "I'll give you Mr. Scrooge, the
Founder of the Feast!"

"The Founder of the Feast indeed!" cried Mrs. Cratchit,
reddening. "I wish I had him here. I'd give him a piece
of my mind to feast upon, and I hope he'd have a good
appetite for it."

"My dear," said Bob, "the children! Christmas Day."

"It should be Christmas Day, I am sure," said she, "on
which one drinks the health of such an odious, stingy, hard,
unfeeling man as Mr. Scrooge. You know he is, Robert!
Nobody knows it better than you do, poor fellow!"

"My dear," was Bob's mild answer, "Christmas Day."

"I'll drink his health for your sake and the Day's," said
Mrs. Cratchit, "not for his. Long life to him! A merry
Christmas and a happy new year! He'll be very merry and
very happy, I have no doubt!"

The children drank the toast after her. It was the first of
their proceedings which had no heartiness. Tiny Tim drank
it last of all, but he didn't care twopence for it. Scrooge
was the Ogre of the family. The mention of his name cast
a dark shadow on the party, which was not dispelled for full
five minutes.

After it had passed away, they were ten times merrier than
before, from the mere relief of Scrooge the Baleful being done
with. Bob Cratchit told them how he had a situation in his
eye for Master Peter, which would bring in, if obtained, full
five-and-sixpence weekly. The two young Cratchits laughed
tremendously at the idea of Peter's being a man of business;
and Peter himself looked thoughtfully at the fire from
between his collars, as if he were deliberating what particular
investments he should favour when he came into the receipt
of that bewildering income. Martha, who was a poor
apprentice at a milliner's, then told them what kind of work
she had to do, and how many hours she worked at a stretch,
and how she meant to lie abed to-morrow morning for a
good long rest; to-morrow being a holiday she passed at
home. Also how she had seen a countess and a lord some
days before, and how the lord "was much about as tall as
Peter;" at which Peter pulled up his collars so high that you
couldn't have seen his head if you had been there. All this
time the chestnuts and the jug went round and round; and
by-and-bye they had a song, about a lost child travelling in
the snow, from Tiny Tim, who had a plaintive little voice,
and sang it very well indeed.

There was nothing of high mark in this. They were not
a handsome family; they were not well dressed; their shoes
were far from being water-proof; their clothes were scanty;
and Peter might have known, and very likely did, the inside
of a pawnbroker's. But, they were happy, grateful, pleased
with one another, and contented with the time; and when
they faded, and looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings
of the Spirit's torch at parting, Scrooge had his eye upon
them, and especially on Tiny Tim, until the last.

By this time it was getting dark, and snowing pretty
heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets,
the brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlours, and
all sorts of rooms, was wonderful. Here, the flickering of
the blaze showed preparations for a cosy dinner, with hot
plates baking through and through before the fire, and deep
red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut out cold and darkness.
There all the children of the house were running out
into the snow to meet their married sisters, brothers, cousins,
uncles, aunts, and be the first to greet them. Here, again,
were shadows on the window-blind of guests assembling; and
there a group of handsome girls, all hooded and fur-booted,
and all chattering at once, tripped lightly off to some near
neighbour's house; where, woe upon the single man who saw
them enter--artful witches, well they knew it--in a glow!

But, if you had judged from the numbers of people on
their way to friendly gatherings, you might have thought
that no one was at home to give them welcome when they
got there, instead of every house expecting company, and
piling up its fires half-chimney high. Blessings on it, how
the Ghost exulted! How it bared its breadth of breast, and
opened its capacious palm, and floated on, outpouring, with
a generous hand, its bright and harmless mirth on everything
within its reach! The very lamplighter, who ran on before,
dotting the dusky street with specks of light, and who was
dressed to spend the evening somewhere, laughed out loudly
as the Spirit passed, though little kenned the lamplighter
that he had any company but Christmas!

And now, without a word of warning from the Ghost, they
stood upon a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses
of rude stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place
of giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed,
or would have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner;
and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank grass.
Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery
red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a
sullen eye, and frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in
the thick gloom of darkest night.

"What place is this?" asked Scrooge.

"A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of
the earth," returned the Spirit. "But they know me. See!"

A light shone from the window of a hut, and swiftly they
advanced towards it. Passing through the wall of mud and
stone, they found a cheerful company assembled round a
glowing fire. An old, old man and woman, with their
children and their children's children, and another generation
beyond that, all decked out gaily in their holiday attire.
The old man, in a voice that seldom rose above the howling
of the wind upon the barren waste, was singing them a
Christmas song--it had been a very old song when he was a
boy--and from time to time they all joined in the chorus.
So surely as they raised their voices, the old man got quite
blithe and loud; and so surely as they stopped, his vigour
sank again.

The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge hold his
robe, and passing on above the moor, sped--whither? Not
to sea? To sea. To Scrooge's horror, looking back, he saw
the last of the land, a frightful range of rocks, behind them;
and his ears were deafened by the thundering of water, as it
rolled and roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it
had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth.

Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league
or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed,
the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse.
Great heaps of sea-weed clung to its base, and storm-birds
--born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed of the
water--rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.

But even here, two men who watched the light had made
a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed
out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their
horny hands over the rough table at which they sat, they
wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog; and
one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and
scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship
might be: struck up a sturdy song that was like a Gale in
itself.

Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea
--on, on--until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any
shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman
at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who
had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations;
but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or
had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his
companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward
hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or
sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another
on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared
to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those
he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted
to remember him.

It was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening to the
moaning of the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it
was to move on through the lonely darkness over an unknown
abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as Death: it
was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus engaged, to hear
a hearty laugh. It was a much greater surprise to Scrooge
to recognise it as his own nephew's and to find himself in a
bright, dry, gleaming room, with the Spirit standing smiling
by his side, and looking at that same nephew with approving
affability!

"Ha, ha!" laughed Scrooge's nephew. "Ha, ha, ha!"

If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a
man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge's nephew, all I can
say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me,
and I'll cultivate his acquaintance.

It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that
while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing
in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and
good-humour. When Scrooge's nephew laughed in this way: holding
his sides, rolling his head, and twisting his face into the
most extravagant contortions: Scrooge's niece, by marriage,
laughed as heartily as he. And their assembled friends being
not a bit behindhand, roared out lustily.

"Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!"

"He said that Christmas was a humbug, as I live!" cried
Scrooge's nephew. "He believed it too!"

"More shame for him, Fred!" said Scrooge's niece,
indignantly. Bless those women; they never do anything by
halves. They are always in earnest.

She was very pretty: exceedingly pretty. With a dimpled,
surprised-looking, capital face; a ripe little mouth, that
seemed made to be kissed--as no doubt it was; all kinds of
good little dots about her chin, that melted into one another
when she laughed; and the sunniest pair of eyes you ever
saw in any little creature's head. Altogether she was what
you would have called provoking, you know; but satisfactory, too.
Oh, perfectly satisfactory.

"He's a comical old fellow," said Scrooge's nephew, "that's
the truth: and not so pleasant as he might be. However,
his offences carry their own punishment, and I have nothing
to say against him."

"I'm sure he is very rich, Fred," hinted Scrooge's niece.
"At least you always tell me so."

"What of that, my dear!" said Scrooge's nephew. "His
wealth is of no use to him. He don't do any good with it.
He don't make himself comfortable with it. He hasn't the
satisfaction of thinking--ha, ha, ha!--that he is ever going
to benefit US with it."

"I have no patience with him," observed Scrooge's niece.
Scrooge's niece's sisters, and all the other ladies, expressed
the same opinion.

"Oh, I have!" said Scrooge's nephew. "I am sorry for
him; I couldn't be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers
by his ill whims! Himself, always. Here, he takes it into
his head to dislike us, and he won't come and dine with us.
What's the consequence? He don't lose much of a dinner."

"Indeed, I think he loses a very good dinner," interrupted
Scrooge's niece. Everybody else said the same, and they
must be allowed to have been competent judges, because
they had just had dinner; and, with the dessert upon the
table, were clustered round the fire, by lamplight.

"Well! I'm very glad to hear it," said Scrooge's nephew,
"because I haven't great faith in these young housekeepers.
What do you say, Topper?"

Topper had clearly got his eye upon one of Scrooge's niece's
sisters, for he answered that a bachelor was a wretched outcast,
who had no right to express an opinion on the subject.
Whereat Scrooge's niece's sister--the plump one with the lace
tucker: not the one with the roses--blushed.

"Do go on, Fred," said Scrooge's niece, clapping her hands.
"He never finishes what he begins to say! He is such a
ridiculous fellow!"

Scrooge's nephew revelled in another laugh, and as it was
impossible to keep the infection off; though the plump sister
tried hard to do it with aromatic vinegar; his example was
unanimously followed.

"I was only going to say," said Scrooge's nephew, "that
the consequence of his taking a dislike to us, and not making
merry with us, is, as I think, that he loses some pleasant
moments, which could do him no harm. I am sure he loses
pleasanter companions than he can find in his own thoughts,
either in his mouldy old office, or his dusty chambers. I
mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he
likes it or not, for I pity him. He may rail at Christmas
till he dies, but he can't help thinking better of it--I defy
him--if he finds me going there, in good temper, year after
year, and saying Uncle Scrooge, how are you? If it only
puts him in the vein to leave his poor clerk fifty pounds,
that's something; and I think I shook him yesterday."

It was their turn to laugh now at the notion of his shaking
Scrooge. But being thoroughly good-natured, and not much
caring what they laughed at, so that they laughed at any
rate, he encouraged them in their merriment, and passed the
bottle joyously.

After tea, they had some music. For they were a musical
family, and knew what they were about, when they sung a
Glee or Catch, I can assure you: especially Topper, who
could growl away in the bass like a good one, and never
swell the large veins in his forehead, or get red in the face
over it. Scrooge's niece played well upon the harp; and
played among other tunes a simple little air (a mere nothing:
you might learn to whistle it in two minutes), which had
been familiar to the child who fetched Scrooge from the
boarding-school, as he had been reminded by the Ghost of
Christmas Past. When this strain of music sounded, all the
things that Ghost had shown him, came upon his mind; he
softened more and more; and thought that if he could have
listened to it often, years ago, he might have cultivated the
kindnesses of life for his own happiness with his own hands,
without resorting to the sexton's spade that buried Jacob
Marley.

But they didn't devote the whole evening to music. After
a while they played at forfeits; for it is good to be children
sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its
mighty Founder was a child himself. Stop! There was first
a game at blind-man's buff. Of course there was. And I
no more believe Topper was really blind than I believe he
had eyes in his boots. My opinion is, that it was a done
thing between him and Scrooge's nephew; and that the
Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The way he went after
that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage on the
credulity of human nature. Knocking down the fire-irons,
tumbling over the chairs, bumping against the piano,
smothering himself among the curtains, wherever she went,
there went he! He always knew where the plump sister was.
He wouldn't catch anybody else. If you had fallen up
against him (as some of them did), on purpose, he would
have made a feint of endeavouring to seize you, which would
have been an affront to your understanding, and would instantly
have sidled off in the direction of the plump sister.
She often cried out that it wasn't fair; and it really was not.
But when at last, he caught her; when, in spite of all her
silken rustlings, and her rapid flutterings past him, he got
her into a corner whence there was no escape; then his
conduct was the most execrable. For his pretending not to
know her; his pretending that it was necessary to touch her
head-dress, and further to assure himself of her identity by
pressing a certain ring upon her finger, and a certain chain
about her neck; was vile, monstrous! No doubt she told
him her opinion of it, when, another blind-man being in
office, they were so very confidential together, behind the
curtains.

Scrooge's niece was not one of the blind-man's buff party,
but was made comfortable with a large chair and a footstool,
in a snug corner, where the Ghost and Scrooge were close
behind her. But she joined in the forfeits, and loved her
love to admiration with all the letters of the alphabet.
Likewise at the game of How, When, and Where, she was
very great, and to the secret joy of Scrooge's nephew, beat
her sisters hollow: though they were sharp girls too, as Topper
could have told you. There might have been twenty people there,
young and old, but they all played, and so did Scrooge; for
wholly forgetting in the interest he had in what was going on, that
his voice made no sound in their ears, he sometimes came out with
his guess quite loud, and very often guessed quite right, too;
for the sharpest needle, best Whitechapel, warranted not to cut
in the eye, was not sharper than Scrooge; blunt as he took it in
his head to be.

The Ghost was greatly pleased to find him in this mood,
and looked upon him with such favour, that he begged like
a boy to be allowed to stay until the guests departed. But
this the Spirit said could not be done.

"Here is a new game," said Scrooge. "One half hour,
Spirit, only one!"

It was a Game called Yes and No, where Scrooge's nephew
had to think of something, and the rest must find out what;
he only answering to their questions yes or no, as the case
was. The brisk fire of questioning to which he was exposed,
elicited from him that he was thinking of an animal, a live
animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage animal, an
animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes,
and lived in London, and walked about the streets,
and wasn't made a show of, and wasn't led by anybody, and
didn't live in a menagerie, and was never killed in a market,
and was not a horse, or an ass, or a cow, or a bull, or a
tiger, or a dog, or a pig, or a cat, or a bear. At every fresh
question that was put to him, this nephew burst into a
fresh roar of laughter; and was so inexpressibly tickled, that
he was obliged to get up off the sofa and stamp. At last
the plump sister, falling into a similar state, cried out:

"I have found it out! I know what it is, Fred! I know
what it is!"

"What is it?" cried Fred.

"It's your Uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!"

Which it certainly was. Admiration was the universal
sentiment, though some objected that the reply to "Is it a
bear?" ought to have been "Yes;" inasmuch as an answer
in the negative was sufficient to have diverted their thoughts
from Mr. Scrooge, supposing they had ever had any tendency
that way.

"He has given us plenty of merriment, I am sure," said
Fred, "and it would be ungrateful not to drink his health.
Here is a glass of mulled wine ready to our hand at the
moment; and I say, 'Uncle Scrooge!'"

"Well! Uncle Scrooge!" they cried.

"A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to the old
man, whatever he is!" said Scrooge's nephew. "He wouldn't
take it from me, but may he have it, nevertheless. Uncle
Scrooge!"

Uncle Scrooge had imperceptibly become so gay and light
of heart, that he would have pledged the unconscious
company in return, and thanked them in an inaudible speech,
if the Ghost had given him time. But the whole scene
passed off in the breath of the last word spoken by his
nephew; and he and the Spirit were again upon their travels.

Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they
visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood
beside sick beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands,
and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they
were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was
rich. In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery's every
refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not
made fast the door, and barred the Spirit out, he left his
blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.

It was a long night, if it were only a night; but Scrooge
had his doubts of this, because the Christmas Holidays appeared
to be condensed into the space of time they passed
together. It was strange, too, that while Scrooge remained
unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew older, clearly
older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke of
it, until they left a children's Twelfth Night party, when,
looking at the Spirit as they stood together in an open place,
he noticed that its hair was grey.

"Are spirits' lives so short?" asked Scrooge.

"My life upon this globe, is very brief," replied the Ghost.
"It ends to-night."

"To-night!" cried Scrooge.

"To-night at midnight. Hark! The time is drawing
near."

The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at
that moment.

"Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask," said
Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, "but I see
something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding
from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?"

"It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it," was
the Spirit's sorrowful reply. "Look here."

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children;
wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt
down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

"Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!" exclaimed
the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling,
wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where
graceful youth should have filled their features out, and
touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled
hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and
pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat
enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No
change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any
grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has
monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to
him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but
the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie
of such enormous magnitude.

"Spirit! are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.

"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon
them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers.
This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both,
and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for
on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the
writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out
its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye!
Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse.
And bide the end!"

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him
for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

The bell struck twelve.

Scrooge looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it not.
As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the
prediction of old Jacob Marley, and lifting up his eyes,
beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like
a mist along the ground, towards him.


STAVE IV:  THE LAST OF THE SPIRITS

THE Phantom slowly, gravely, silently, approached. When
it came near him, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in
the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to
scatter gloom and mystery.

It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed
its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible
save one outstretched hand. But for this it would have been
difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it
from the darkness by which it was surrounded.

He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside
him, and that its mysterious presence filled him with a
solemn dread. He knew no more, for the Spirit neither
spoke nor moved.

"I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To
Come?" said Scrooge.

The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its
hand.

"You are about to show me shadows of the things that
have not happened, but will happen in the time before us,"
Scrooge pursued. "Is that so, Spirit?"

The upper portion of the garment was contracted for an
instant in its folds, as if the Spirit had inclined its head.
That was the only answer he received.

Although well used to ghostly company by this time,
Scrooge feared the silent shape so much that his legs trembled
beneath him, and he found that he could hardly stand when
he prepared to follow it. The Spirit paused a moment, as
observing his condition, and giving him time to recover.

But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him
with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the
dusky shroud, there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon
him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost,
could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap
of black.

"Ghost of the Future!" he exclaimed, "I fear you more
than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose
is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another
man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company,
and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak
to me?"

It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight
before them.

"Lead on!" said Scrooge. "Lead on! The night is
waning fast, and it is precious time to me, I know. Lead
on, Spirit!"

The Phantom moved away as it had come towards him.
Scrooge followed in the shadow of its dress, which bore him
up, he thought, and carried him along.

They scarcely seemed to enter the city; for the city rather
seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its
own act. But there they were, in the heart of it; on
'Change, amongst the merchants; who hurried up and down,
and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in
groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully
with their great gold seals; and so forth, as Scrooge had
seen them often.

The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of business men.
Observing that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge
advanced to listen to their talk.

"No," said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, "I
don't know much about it, either way. I only know he's
dead."

"When did he die?" inquired another.

"Last night, I believe."

"Why, what was the matter with him?" asked a third,
taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large snuff-box.
"I thought he'd never die."

"God knows," said the first, with a yawn.

"What has he done with his money?" asked a red-faced
gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his
nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.

"I haven't heard," said the man with the large chin,
yawning again. "Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn't
left it to me. That's all I know."

This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.

"It's likely to be a very cheap funeral," said the same
speaker; "for upon my life I don't know of anybody to go
to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?"

"I don't mind going if a lunch is provided," observed the
gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. "But I must
be fed, if I make one."

Another laugh.

"Well, I am the most disinterested among you, after all,"
said the first speaker, "for I never wear black gloves, and I
never eat lunch. But I'll offer to go, if anybody else will.
When I come to think of it, I'm not at all sure that I wasn't
his most particular friend; for we used to stop and speak
whenever we met. Bye, bye!"

Speakers and listeners strolled away, and mixed with
other groups. Scrooge knew the men, and looked towards the
Spirit for an explanation.

The Phantom glided on into a street. Its finger pointed
to two persons meeting. Scrooge listened again, thinking
that the explanation might lie here.

He knew these men, also, perfectly. They were men of business:
very wealthy, and of great importance. He had made a point
always of standing well in their esteem: in a business point
of view, that is; strictly in a business point of view.

"How are you?" said one.

"How are you?" returned the other.

"Well!" said the first. "Old Scratch has got his own at
last, hey?"

"So I am told," returned the second. "Cold, isn't it?"

"Seasonable for Christmas time. You're not a skater, I
suppose?"

"No. No. Something else to think of. Good morning!"

Not another word. That was their meeting, their
conversation, and their parting.

Scrooge was at first inclined to be surprised that the
Spirit should attach importance to conversations apparently so
trivial; but feeling assured that they must have some hidden
purpose, he set himself to consider what it was likely to be.
They could scarcely be supposed to have any bearing on the
death of Jacob, his old partner, for that was Past, and this
Ghost's province was the Future. Nor could he think of any
one immediately connected with himself, to whom he could
apply them. But nothing doubting that to whomsoever they
applied they had some latent moral for his own improvement,
he resolved to treasure up every word he heard,
and everything he saw; and especially to observe the
shadow of himself when it appeared. For he had an expectation
that the conduct of his future self would give him
the clue he missed, and would render the solution of these
riddles easy.

He looked about in that very place for his own image; but
another man stood in his accustomed corner, and though the
clock pointed to his usual time of day for being there, he
saw no likeness of himself among the multitudes that poured
in through the Porch. It gave him little surprise, however;
for he had been revolving in his mind a change of life, and
thought and hoped he saw his new-born resolutions carried
out in this.

Quiet and dark, beside him stood the Phantom, with its
outstretched hand. When he roused himself from his
thoughtful quest, he fancied from the turn of the hand, and
its situation in reference to himself, that the Unseen Eyes
were looking at him keenly. It made him shudder, and feel
very cold.

They left the busy scene, and went into an obscure part
of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before,
although he recognised its situation, and its bad repute. The
ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched;
the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and
archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of
smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the
whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth, and misery.

Far in this den of infamous resort, there was a low-browed,
beetling shop, below a pent-house roof, where iron, old rags,
bottles, bones, and greasy offal, were bought. Upon the floor
within, were piled up heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges,
files, scales, weights, and refuse iron of all kinds. Secrets
that few would like to scrutinise were bred and hidden in
mountains of unseemly rags, masses of corrupted fat, and
sepulchres of bones. Sitting in among the wares he dealt in, by a
charcoal stove, made of old bricks, was a grey-haired rascal,
nearly seventy years of age; who had screened himself from the
cold air without, by a frousy curtaining of miscellaneous
tatters, hung upon a line; and smoked his pipe in all the luxury
of calm retirement.

Scrooge and the Phantom came into the presence of this
man, just as a woman with a heavy bundle slunk into the
shop. But she had scarcely entered, when another woman,
similarly laden, came in too; and she was closely followed by
a man in faded black, who was no less startled by the sight
of them, than they had been upon the recognition of each
other. After a short period of blank astonishment, in which
the old man with the pipe had joined them, they all three
burst into a laugh.

"Let the charwoman alone to be the first!" cried she who
had entered first. "Let the laundress alone to be the second;
and let the undertaker's man alone to be the third. Look
here, old Joe, here's a chance! If we haven't all three met
here without meaning it!"

"You couldn't have met in a better place," said old Joe,
removing his pipe from his mouth. "Come into the parlour.
You were made free of it long ago, you know; and the other
two an't strangers. Stop till I shut the door of the shop.
Ah! How it skreeks! There an't such a rusty bit of metal
in the place as its own hinges, I believe; and I'm sure there's
no such old bones here, as mine. Ha, ha! We're all suitable
to our calling, we're well matched. Come into the
parlour. Come into the parlour."

The parlour was the space behind the screen of rags. The
old man raked the fire together with an old stair-rod, and
having trimmed his smoky lamp (for it was night), with the
stem of his pipe, put it in his mouth again.

While he did this, the woman who had already spoken
threw her bundle on the floor, and sat down in a flaunting
manner on a stool; crossing her elbows on her knees, and
looking with a bold defiance at the other two.

"What odds then! What odds, Mrs. Dilber?" said the
woman. "Every person has a right to take care of themselves.
He always did."

"That's true, indeed!" said the laundress. "No man
more so."

"Why then, don't stand staring as if you was afraid,
woman; who's the wiser? We're not going to pick holes in
each other's coats, I suppose?"

"No, indeed!" said Mrs. Dilber and the man together.
"We should hope not."

"Very well, then!" cried the woman. "That's enough.
Who's the worse for the loss of a few things like these?
Not a dead man, I suppose."

"No, indeed," said Mrs. Dilber, laughing.

"If he wanted to keep 'em after he was dead, a wicked old
screw," pursued the woman, "why wasn't he natural in his
lifetime? If he had been, he'd have had somebody to look
after him when he was struck with Death, instead of lying
gasping out his last there, alone by himself."

"It's the truest word that ever was spoke," said Mrs.
Dilber. "It's a judgment on him."

"I wish it was a little heavier judgment," replied the
woman; "and it should have been, you may depend upon it,
if I could have laid my hands on anything else. Open that
bundle, old Joe, and let me know the value of it. Speak out
plain. I'm not afraid to be the first, nor afraid for them to
see it. We know pretty well that we were helping ourselves,
before we met here, I believe. It's no sin. Open the bundle,
Joe."

But the gallantry of her friends would not allow of this;
and the man in faded black, mounting the breach first,
produced his plunder. It was not extensive. A seal or two,
a pencil-case, a pair of sleeve-buttons, and a brooch of no
great value, were all. They were severally examined and
appraised by old Joe, who chalked the sums he was disposed
to give for each, upon the wall, and added them up into a
total when he found there was nothing more to come.

"That's your account," said Joe, "and I wouldn't give
another sixpence, if I was to be boiled for not doing it.
Who's next?"

Mrs. Dilber was next. Sheets and towels, a little wearing
apparel, two old-fashioned silver teaspoons, a pair of
sugar-tongs, and a few boots. Her account was stated on the wall
in the same manner.

"I always give too much to ladies. It's a weakness of mine,
and that's the way I ruin myself," said old Joe. "That's
your account. If you asked me for another penny, and made
it an open question, I'd repent of being so liberal and knock
off half-a-crown."

"And now undo my bundle, Joe," said the first woman.

Joe went down on his knees for the greater convenience
of opening it, and having unfastened a great many knots,
dragged out a large and heavy roll of some dark stuff.

"What do you call this?" said Joe. "Bed-curtains!"

"Ah!" returned the woman, laughing and leaning forward
on her crossed arms. "Bed-curtains!"

"You don't mean to say you took 'em down, rings and
all, with him lying there?" said Joe.

"Yes I do," replied the woman. "Why not?"

"You were born to make your fortune," said Joe, "and
you'll certainly do it."

"I certainly shan't hold my hand, when I can get anything
in it by reaching it out, for the sake of such a man as He
was, I promise you, Joe," returned the woman coolly. "Don't
drop that oil upon the blankets, now."

"His blankets?" asked Joe.

"Whose else's do you think?" replied the woman. "He
isn't likely to take cold without 'em, I dare say."

"I hope he didn't die of anything catching? Eh?" said
old Joe, stopping in his work, and looking up.

"Don't you be afraid of that," returned the woman. "I
an't so fond of his company that I'd loiter about him for
such things, if he did. Ah! you may look through that
shirt till your eyes ache; but you won't find a hole in it, nor
a threadbare place. It's the best he had, and a fine one too.
They'd have wasted it, if it hadn't been for me."

"What do you call wasting of it?" asked old Joe.

"Putting it on him to be buried in, to be sure," replied
the woman with a laugh. "Somebody was fool enough to
do it, but I took it off again. If calico an't good enough for
such a purpose, it isn't good enough for anything. It's quite
as becoming to the body. He can't look uglier than he did
in that one."

Scrooge listened to this dialogue in horror. As they sat
grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by
the old man's lamp, he viewed them with a detestation and
disgust, which could hardly have been greater, though they
had been obscene demons, marketing the corpse itself.

"Ha, ha!" laughed the same woman, when old Joe,
producing a flannel bag with money in it, told out their
several gains upon the ground. "This is the end of it, you
see! He frightened every one away from him when he was
alive, to profit us when he was dead! Ha, ha, ha!"

"Spirit!" said Scrooge, shuddering from head to foot. "I
see, I see. The case of this unhappy man might be my own.
My life tends that way, now. Merciful Heaven, what is
this!"

He recoiled in terror, for the scene had changed, and now
he almost touched a bed: a bare, uncurtained bed: on which,
beneath a ragged sheet, there lay a something covered up,
which, though it was dumb, announced itself in awful
language.

The room was very dark, too dark to be observed with
any accuracy, though Scrooge glanced round it in obedience
to a secret impulse, anxious to know what kind of room it
was. A pale light, rising in the outer air, fell straight upon
the bed; and on it, plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept,
uncared for, was the body of this man.

Scrooge glanced towards the Phantom. Its steady hand
was pointed to the head. The cover was so carelessly adjusted
that the slightest raising of it, the motion of a finger upon
Scrooge's part, would have disclosed the face. He thought
of it, felt how easy it would be to do, and longed to do it;
but had no more power to withdraw the veil than to dismiss
the spectre at his side.

Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar
here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy
command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved,
revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair
to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is
not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released;
it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the
hand WAS open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm,
and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, Shadow, strike!
And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow
the world with life immortal!

No voice pronounced these words in Scrooge's ears, and
yet he heard them when he looked upon the bed. He
thought, if this man could be raised up now, what would be
his foremost thoughts? Avarice, hard-dealing, griping cares?
They have brought him to a rich end, truly!

He lay, in the dark empty house, with not a man, a
woman, or a child, to say that he was kind to me in this
or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be
kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was
a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What
they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so
restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think.

"Spirit!" he said, "this is a fearful place. In leaving it,
I shall not leave its lesson, trust me. Let us go!"

Still the Ghost pointed with an unmoved finger to the
head.

"I understand you," Scrooge returned, "and I would do
it, if I could. But I have not the power, Spirit. I have
not the power."

Again it seemed to look upon him.

"If there is any person in the town, who feels emotion
caused by this man's death," said Scrooge quite agonised,
"show that person to me, Spirit, I beseech you!"

The Phantom spread its dark robe before him for a
moment, like a wing; and withdrawing it, revealed a room
by daylight, where a mother and her children were.

She was expecting some one, and with anxious eagerness;
for she walked up and down the room; started at every
sound; looked out from the window; glanced at the clock;
tried, but in vain, to work with her needle; and could hardly
bear the voices of the children in their play.

At length the long-expected knock was heard. She hurried
to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was
careworn and depressed, though he was young. There was
a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of serious delight
of which he felt ashamed, and which he struggled to repress.

He sat down to the dinner that had been hoarding for
him by the fire; and when she asked him faintly what news
(which was not until after a long silence), he appeared
embarrassed how to answer.

"Is it good?" she said, "or bad?"--to help him.

"Bad," he answered.

"We are quite ruined?"

"No. There is hope yet, Caroline."

"If he relents," she said, amazed, "there is! Nothing is
past hope, if such a miracle has happened."

"He is past relenting," said her husband. "He is dead."

She was a mild and patient creature if her face spoke
truth; but she was thankful in her soul to hear it, and she
said so, with clasped hands. She prayed forgiveness the next
moment, and was sorry; but the first was the emotion of
her heart.

"What the half-drunken woman whom I told you of last
night, said to me, when I tried to see him and obtain a
week's delay; and what I thought was a mere excuse to avoid
me; turns out to have been quite true. He was not only
very ill, but dying, then."

"To whom will our debt be transferred?"

"I don't know. But before that time we shall be ready
with the money; and even though we were not, it would be
a bad fortune indeed to find so merciless a creditor in his
successor. We may sleep to-night with light hearts, Caroline!"

Yes. Soften it as they would, their hearts were lighter.
The children's faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what
they so little understood, were brighter; and it was a happier
house for this man's death! The only emotion that the
Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of
pleasure.

"Let me see some tenderness connected with a death," said
Scrooge; "or that dark chamber, Spirit, which we left just
now, will be for ever present to me."

The Ghost conducted him through several streets familiar
to his feet; and as they went along, Scrooge looked here and
there to find himself, but nowhere was he to be seen. They
entered poor Bob Cratchit's house; the dwelling he had
visited before; and found the mother and the children seated
round the fire.

Quiet. Very quiet. The noisy little Cratchits were as
still as statues in one corner, and sat looking up at Peter,
who had a book before him. The mother and her daughters
were engaged in sewing. But surely they were very quiet!

"'And He took a child, and set him in the midst of
them.'"

Where had Scrooge heard those words? He had not
dreamed them. The boy must have read them out, as he
and the Spirit crossed the threshold. Why did he not
go on?

The mother laid her work upon the table, and put her
hand up to her face.

"The colour hurts my eyes," she said.

The colour? Ah, poor Tiny Tim!

"They're better now again," said Cratchit's wife. "It
makes them weak by candle-light; and I wouldn't show weak
eyes to your father when he comes home, for the world. It
must be near his time."

"Past it rather," Peter answered, shutting up his book.
"But I think he has walked a little slower than he used,
these few last evenings, mother."

They were very quiet again. At last she said, and in a
steady, cheerful voice, that only faltered once:

"I have known him walk with--I have known him walk
with Tiny Tim upon his shoulder, very fast indeed."

"And so have I," cried Peter. "Often."

"And so have I," exclaimed another. So had all.

"But he was very light to carry," she resumed, intent upon
her work, "and his father loved him so, that it was no
trouble: no trouble. And there is your father at the door!"

She hurried out to meet him; and little Bob in his comforter
--he had need of it, poor fellow--came in. His tea
was ready for him on the hob, and they all tried who should
help him to it most. Then the two young Cratchits got
upon his knees and laid, each child a little cheek, against
his face, as if they said, "Don't mind it, father. Don't be
grieved!"

Bob was very cheerful with them, and spoke pleasantly to
all the family. He looked at the work upon the table, and
praised the industry and speed of Mrs. Cratchit and the girls.
They would be done long before Sunday, he said.

"Sunday! You went to-day, then, Robert?" said his
wife.

"Yes, my dear," returned Bob. "I wish you could have
gone. It would have done you good to see how green a
place it is. But you'll see it often. I promised him that I
would walk there on a Sunday. My little, little child!"
cried Bob. "My little child!"

He broke down all at once. He couldn't help it. If he
could have helped it, he and his child would have been farther
apart perhaps than they were.

He left the room, and went up-stairs into the room above,
which was lighted cheerfully, and hung with Christmas.
There was a chair set close beside the child, and there were
signs of some one having been there, lately. Poor Bob sat
down in it, and when he had thought a little and composed
himself, he kissed the little face. He was reconciled to what
had happened, and went down again quite happy.

They drew about the fire, and talked; the girls and mother
working still. Bob told them of the extraordinary kindness
of Mr. Scrooge's nephew, whom he had scarcely seen but
once, and who, meeting him in the street that day, and seeing
that he looked a little--"just a little down you know," said
Bob, inquired what had happened to distress him. "On
which," said Bob, "for he is the pleasantest-spoken gentleman
you ever heard, I told him. 'I am heartily sorry for it, Mr.
Cratchit,' he said, 'and heartily sorry for your good wife.'
By the bye, how he ever knew that, I don't know."

"Knew what, my dear?"

"Why, that you were a good wife," replied Bob.

"Everybody knows that!" said Peter.

"Very well observed, my boy!" cried Bob. "I hope they
do. 'Heartily sorry,' he said, 'for your good wife. If I
can be of service to you in any way,' he said, giving me
his card, 'that's where I live. Pray come to me.' Now, it
wasn't," cried Bob, "for the sake of anything he might be
able to do for us, so much as for his kind way, that this was
quite delightful. It really seemed as if he had known our
Tiny Tim, and felt with us."

"I'm sure he's a good soul!" said Mrs. Cratchit.

"You would be surer of it, my dear," returned Bob, "if
you saw and spoke to him. I shouldn't be at all surprised--
mark what I say!--if he got Peter a better situation."

"Only hear that, Peter," said Mrs. Cratchit.

"And then," cried one of the girls, "Peter will be keeping
company with some one, and setting up for himself."

"Get along with you!" retorted Peter, grinning.

"It's just as likely as not," said Bob, "one of these days;
though there's plenty of time for that, my dear. But however
and whenever we part from one another, I am sure we
shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim--shall we--or this
first parting that there was among us?"

"Never, father!" cried they all.

"And I know," said Bob, "I know, my dears, that when
we recollect how patient and how mild he was; although he
was a little, little child; we shall not quarrel easily among
ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it."

"No, never, father!" they all cried again.

"I am very happy," said little Bob, "I am very happy!"

Mrs. Cratchit kissed him, his daughters kissed him, the
two young Cratchits kissed him, and Peter and himself shook
hands. Spirit of Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was from
God!

"Spectre," said Scrooge, "something informs me that our
parting moment is at hand. I know it, but I know not
how. Tell me what man that was whom we saw lying dead?"

The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come conveyed him, as
before--though at a different time, he thought: indeed, there
seemed no order in these latter visions, save that they were
in the Future--into the resorts of business men, but showed
him not himself. Indeed, the Spirit did not stay for anything,
but went straight on, as to the end just now desired,
until besought by Scrooge to tarry for a moment.

"This court," said Scrooge, "through which we hurry now,
is where my place of occupation is, and has been for a length
of time. I see the house. Let me behold what I shall be,
in days to come!"

The Spirit stopped; the hand was pointed elsewhere.

"The house is yonder," Scrooge exclaimed. "Why do you
point away?"

The inexorable finger underwent no change.

Scrooge hastened to the window of his office, and looked
in. It was an office still, but not his. The furniture was
not the same, and the figure in the chair was not himself.
The Phantom pointed as before.

He joined it once again, and wondering why and whither
he had gone, accompanied it until they reached an iron gate.
He paused to look round before entering.

A churchyard. Here, then; the wretched man whose name
he had now to learn, lay underneath the ground. It was a
worthy place. Walled in by houses; overrun by grass and
weeds, the growth of vegetation's death, not life; choked up
with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite. A
worthy place!

The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to
One. He advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom was
exactly as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw new
meaning in its solemn shape.

"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,"
said Scrooge, "answer me one question. Are these the
shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of
things that May be, only?"

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which
it stood.

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if
persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the
courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is
thus with what you show me!"

The Spirit was immovable as ever.

Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and
following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected
grave his own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE.

"Am I that man who lay upon the bed?" he cried, upon
his knees.

The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.

"No, Spirit! Oh no, no!"

The finger still was there.

"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me!
I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must
have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I
am past all hope!"

For the first time the hand appeared to shake.

"Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he
fell before it: "Your nature intercedes for me, and pities
me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you
have shown me, by an altered life!"

The kind hand trembled.

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it
all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the
Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I
will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I
may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to
free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it.
The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him.

Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate
reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress.
It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.


STAVE V:  THE END OF IT

YES! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own,
the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time
before him was his own, to make amends in!

"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!"
Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. "The Spirits
of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley!
Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say
it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!"

He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions,
that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his
call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the
Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.

"They are not torn down," cried Scrooge, folding one of
his bed-curtains in his arms, "they are not torn down, rings
and all. They are here--I am here--the shadows of the
things that would have been, may be dispelled. They will
be. I know they will!"

His hands were busy with his garments all this time;
turning them inside out, putting them on upside down,
tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every
kind of extravagance.

"I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and
crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoön of
himself with his stockings. "I am as light as a feather, I
am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I
am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to
everybody! A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo
here! Whoop! Hallo!"

He had frisked into the sitting-room, and was now standing
there: perfectly winded.

"There's the saucepan that the gruel was in!" cried
Scrooge, starting off again, and going round the fireplace.
"There's the door, by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley
entered! There's the corner where the Ghost of Christmas
Present, sat! There's the window where I saw the wandering
Spirits! It's all right, it's all true, it all happened.
Ha ha ha!"

Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so
many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh.
The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!

"I don't know what day of the month it is!" said
Scrooge. "I don't know how long I've been among the
Spirits. I don't know anything. I'm quite a baby. Never
mind. I don't care. I'd rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop!
Hallo here!"

He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing
out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang,
hammer; ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang,
clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!

Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his
head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold;
cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight;
Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious!
Glorious!

"What's to-day!" cried Scrooge, calling downward to a
boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look
about him.

"EH?" returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.

"What's to-day, my fine fellow?" said Scrooge.

"To-day!" replied the boy. "Why, CHRISTMAS DAY."

"It's Christmas Day!" said Scrooge to himself. "I
haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night.
They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of
course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!"

"Hallo!" returned the boy.

"Do you know the Poulterer's, in the next street but one,
at the corner?" Scrooge inquired.

"I should hope I did," replied the lad.

"An intelligent boy!" said Scrooge. "A remarkable boy!
Do you know whether they've sold the prize Turkey that
was hanging up there?--Not the little prize Turkey: the
big one?"

"What, the one as big as me?" returned the boy.

"What a delightful boy!" said Scrooge. "It's a pleasure
to talk to him. Yes, my buck!"

"It's hanging there now," replied the boy.

"Is it?" said Scrooge. "Go and buy it."

"Walk-ER!" exclaimed the boy.

"No, no," said Scrooge, "I am in earnest. Go and buy
it, and tell 'em to bring it here, that I may give them the
direction where to take it. Come back with the man, and
I'll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than
five minutes and I'll give you half-a-crown!"

The boy was off like a shot. He must have had a steady
hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half so fast.

"I'll send it to Bob Cratchit's!" whispered Scrooge,
rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. "He sha'n't
know who sends it. It's twice the size of Tiny Tim. Joe
Miller never made such a joke as sending it to Bob's
will be!"

The hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady
one, but write it he did, somehow, and went down-stairs to
open the street door, ready for the coming of the poulterer's
man. As he stood there, waiting his arrival, the knocker
caught his eye.

"I shall love it, as long as I live!" cried Scrooge, patting
it with his hand. "I scarcely ever looked at it before.
What an honest expression it has in its face! It's a
wonderful knocker!--Here's the Turkey! Hallo! Whoop!
How are you! Merry Christmas!"

It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his
legs, that bird. He would have snapped 'em short off in a
minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.

"Why, it's impossible to carry that to Camden Town,"
said Scrooge. "You must have a cab."

The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with
which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which
he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed
the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle
with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and
chuckled till he cried.

Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to
shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even when
you don't dance while you are at it. But if he had cut the
end of his nose off, he would have put a piece of
sticking-plaister over it, and been quite satisfied.

He dressed himself "all in his best," and at last got out
into the streets. The people were by this time pouring forth,
as he had seen them with the Ghost of Christmas Present;
and walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge regarded
every one with a delighted smile. He looked so irresistibly
pleasant, in a word, that three or four good-humoured fellows
said, "Good morning, sir! A merry Christmas to you!"
And Scrooge said often afterwards, that of all the blithe
sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.

He had not gone far, when coming on towards him he
beheld the portly gentleman, who had walked into his
counting-house the day before, and said, "Scrooge and Marley's, I
believe?"  It sent a pang across his heart to think how this
old gentleman would look upon him when they met; but he
knew what path lay straight before him, and he took it.

"My dear sir," said Scrooge, quickening his pace, and
taking the old gentleman by both his hands. "How do you
do? I hope you succeeded yesterday. It was very kind of
you. A merry Christmas to you, sir!"

"Mr. Scrooge?"

"Yes," said Scrooge. "That is my name, and I fear it
may not be pleasant to you. Allow me to ask your pardon.
And will you have the goodness"--here Scrooge whispered in
his ear.

"Lord bless me!" cried the gentleman, as if his breath
were taken away. "My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?"

"If you please," said Scrooge. "Not a farthing less. A
great many back-payments are included in it, I assure you.
Will you do me that favour?"

"My dear sir," said the other, shaking hands with him.
"I don't know what to say to such munifi--"

"Don't say anything, please," retorted Scrooge. "Come
and see me. Will you come and see me?"

"I will!" cried the old gentleman. And it was clear he
meant to do it.

"Thank'ee," said Scrooge. "I am much obliged to you.
I thank you fifty times. Bless you!"

He went to church, and walked about the streets, and
watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children
on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into
the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found
that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never
dreamed that any walk--that anything--could give him so
much happiness. In the afternoon he turned his steps
towards his nephew's house.

He passed the door a dozen times, before he had the
courage to go up and knock. But he made a dash, and
did it:

"Is your master at home, my dear?" said Scrooge to the
girl. Nice girl! Very.

"Yes, sir."

"Where is he, my love?" said Scrooge.

"He's in the dining-room, sir, along with mistress. I'll
show you up-stairs, if you please."

"Thank'ee. He knows me," said Scrooge, with his hand
already on the dining-room lock. "I'll go in here, my dear."

He turned it gently, and sidled his face in, round the door.
They were looking at the table (which was spread out in
great array); for these young housekeepers are always nervous
on such points, and like to see that everything is right.

"Fred!" said Scrooge.

Dear heart alive, how his niece by marriage started!
Scrooge had forgotten, for the moment, about her sitting
in the corner with the footstool, or he wouldn't have done
it, on any account.

"Why bless my soul!" cried Fred, "who's that?"

"It's I. Your uncle Scrooge. I have come to dinner.
Will you let me in, Fred?"

Let him in! It is a mercy he didn't shake his arm off.
He was at home in five minutes. Nothing could be heartier.
His niece looked just the same. So did Topper when he
came. So did the plump sister when she came. So did
every one when they came. Wonderful party, wonderful
games, wonderful unanimity, won-der-ful happiness!

But he was early at the office next morning. Oh, he was
early there. If he could only be there first, and catch Bob
Cratchit coming late! That was the thing he had set his
heart upon.

And he did it; yes, he did! The clock struck nine. No
Bob. A quarter past. No Bob. He was full eighteen
minutes and a half behind his time. Scrooge sat with his
door wide open, that he might see him come into the Tank.

His hat was off, before he opened the door; his comforter
too. He was on his stool in a jiffy; driving away with his
pen, as if he were trying to overtake nine o'clock.

"Hallo!" growled Scrooge, in his accustomed voice, as
near as he could feign it. "What do you mean by coming
here at this time of day?"

"I am very sorry, sir," said Bob. "I am behind my time."

"You are?" repeated Scrooge. "Yes. I think you are.
Step this way, sir, if you please."

"It's only once a year, sir," pleaded Bob, appearing from
the Tank. "It shall not be repeated. I was making rather
merry yesterday, sir."

"Now, I'll tell you what, my friend," said Scrooge, "I
am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer. And
therefore," he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving
Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into
the Tank again; "and therefore I am about to raise your
salary!"

Bob trembled, and got a little nearer to the ruler. He
had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it,
holding him, and calling to the people in the court for help
and a strait-waistcoat.

"A merry Christmas, Bob!" said Scrooge, with an earnestness
that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the
back. "A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I
have given you, for many a year! I'll raise your salary, and
endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss
your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of
smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another
coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!"


Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and
infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was
a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a
master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or
any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old
world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him,
but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was
wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this
globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill
of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these
would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they
should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in
less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was
quite enough for him.

He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon
the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was
always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas
well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that
be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim
observed, God bless Us, Every One!





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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit, by
Charles Dickens

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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Title: Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit

Author: Charles Dickens

Release Date: April 27, 2006 [EBook #968]
Last Updated: September 25, 2016

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT ***




Produced by Donald Lainson





LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT

by Charles Dickens




PREFACE

What is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain
truth to another. That which is commonly called a long-sight, perceives
in a prospect innumerable features and bearings non-existent to
a short-sighted person. I sometimes ask myself whether there may
occasionally be a difference of this kind between some writers and some
readers; whether it is ALWAYS the writer who colours highly, or whether
it is now and then the reader whose eye for colour is a little dull?

On this head of exaggeration I have a positive experience, more curious
than the speculation I have just set down. It is this: I have never
touched a character precisely from the life, but some counterpart of
that character has incredulously asked me: “Now really, did I ever
really, see one like it?”

All the Pecksniff family upon earth are quite agreed, I believe, that
Mr Pecksniff is an exaggeration, and that no such character ever
existed. I will not offer any plea on his behalf to so powerful and
genteel a body, but will make a remark on the character of Jonas
Chuzzlewit.

I conceive that the sordid coarseness and brutality of Jonas would be
unnatural, if there had been nothing in his early education, and in the
precept and example always before him, to engender and develop the vices
that make him odious. But, so born and so bred, admired for that which
made him hateful, and justified from his cradle in cunning, treachery,
and avarice; I claim him as the legitimate issue of the father upon whom
those vices are seen to recoil. And I submit that their recoil upon that
old man, in his unhonoured age, is not a mere piece of poetical justice,
but is the extreme exposition of a direct truth.

I make this comment, and solicit the reader’s attention to it in his or
her consideration of this tale, because nothing is more common in real
life than a want of profitable reflection on the causes of many vices
and crimes that awaken the general horror. What is substantially true of
families in this respect, is true of a whole commonwealth. As we sow,
we reap. Let the reader go into the children’s side of any prison in
England, or, I grieve to add, of many workhouses, and judge whether
those are monsters who disgrace our streets, people our hulks and
penitentiaries, and overcrowd our penal colonies, or are creatures whom
we have deliberately suffered to be bred for misery and ruin.

The American portion of this story is in no other respect a caricature
than as it is an exhibition, for the most part (Mr Bevan expected), of
a ludicrous side, ONLY, of the American character--of that side which
was, four-and-twenty years ago, from its nature, the most obtrusive, and
the most likely to be seen by such travellers as Young Martin and Mark
Tapley. As I had never, in writing fiction, had any disposition to
soften what is ridiculous or wrong at home, so I then hoped that the
good-humored people of the United States would not be generally disposed
to quarrel with me for carrying the same usage abroad. I am happy to
believe that my confidence in that great nation was not misplaced.

When this book was first published, I was given to understand, by some
authorities, that the Watertoast Association and eloquence were beyond
all bounds of belief. Therefore I record the fact that all that portion
of Martin Chuzzlewit’s experiences is a literal paraphrase of some
reports of public proceedings in the United States (especially of the
proceedings of a certain Brandywine Association), which were printed in
the Times Newspaper in June and July, 1843--at about the time when I was
engaged in writing those parts of the book; and which remain on the file
of the Times Newspaper, of course.

In all my writings, I hope I have taken every available opportunity of
showing the want of sanitary improvements in the neglected dwellings
of the poor. Mrs Sarah Gamp was, four-and-twenty years ago, a fair
representation of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness. The
hospitals of London were, in many respects, noble Institutions; in
others, very defective. I think it not the least among the instances
of their mismanagement, that Mrs Betsey Prig was a fair specimen of
a Hospital Nurse; and that the Hospitals, with their means and funds,
should have left it to private humanity and enterprise, to enter on
an attempt to improve that class of persons--since, greatly improved
through the agency of good women.




POSTSCRIPT

At a Public Dinner given to me on Saturday the 18th of April, 1868, in
the city of New York, by two hundred representatives of the Press of
the United States of America, I made the following observations, among
others:--

“So much of my voice has lately been heard in the land, that I might
have been contented with troubling you no further from my present
standing-point, were it not a duty with which I henceforth charge
myself, not only here but on every suitable occasion, whatsoever
and wheresoever, to express my high and grateful sense of my second
reception in America, and to bear my honest testimony to the national
generosity and magnanimity. Also, to declare how astounded I have been
by the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side--changes
moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and
peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth
of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and
amenities of life, changes in the Press, without whose advancement no
advancement can take place anywhere. Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant
as to suppose that in five-and-twenty years there have been no changes
in me, and that I had nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to
correct when I was here first. And this brings me to a point on which I
have, ever since I landed in the United States last November, observed
a strict silence, though sometimes tempted to break it, but in reference
to which I will, with your good leave, take you into my confidence now.
Even the Press, being human, may be sometimes mistaken or misinformed,
and I rather think that I have in one or two rare instances observed
its information to be not strictly accurate with reference to myself.
Indeed, I have, now and again, been more surprised by printed news that
I have read of myself, than by any printed news that I have ever read
in my present state of existence. Thus, the vigour and perseverance with
which I have for some months past been collecting materials for, and
hammering away at, a new book on America has much astonished me; seeing
that all that time my declaration has been perfectly well known to my
publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, that no consideration on earth
would induce me to write one. But what I have intended, what I have
resolved upon (and this is the confidence I seek to place in you), is,
on my return to England, in my own person, in my own Journal, to bear,
for the behoof of my countrymen, such testimony to the gigantic changes
in this country as I have hinted at to-night. Also, to record that
wherever I have been, in the smallest places equally with the largest,
I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet
temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for
the privacy daily enforced upon me by the nature of my avocation here
and the state of my health. This testimony, so long as I live, and so
long as my descendants have any legal right in my books, I shall cause
to be republished, as an appendix to every copy of those two books of
mine in which I have referred to America. And this I will do and cause
to be done, not in mere love and thankfulness, but because I regard it
as an act of plain justice and honour.”

I said these words with the greatest earnestness that I could lay upon
them, and I repeat them in print here with equal earnestness. So long as
this book shall last, I hope that they will form a part of it, and will
be fairly read as inseparable from my experiences and impressions of
America.

CHARLES DICKENS.

May, 1868.





CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTORY, CONCERNING THE PEDIGREE OF THE CHUZZLEWIT FAMILY


As no lady or gentleman, with any claims to polite breeding, can
possibly sympathize with the Chuzzlewit Family without being first
assured of the extreme antiquity of the race, it is a great satisfaction
to know that it undoubtedly descended in a direct line from Adam and
Eve; and was, in the very earliest times, closely connected with the
agricultural interest. If it should ever be urged by grudging and
malicious persons, that a Chuzzlewit, in any period of the family
history, displayed an overweening amount of family pride, surely the
weakness will be considered not only pardonable but laudable, when the
immense superiority of the house to the rest of mankind, in respect of
this its ancient origin, is taken into account.

It is remarkable that as there was, in the oldest family of which we
have any record, a murderer and a vagabond, so we never fail to meet,
in the records of all old families, with innumerable repetitions of
the same phase of character. Indeed, it may be laid down as a general
principle, that the more extended the ancestry, the greater the amount
of violence and vagabondism; for in ancient days those two amusements,
combining a wholesome excitement with a promising means of repairing
shattered fortunes, were at once the ennobling pursuit and the healthful
recreation of the Quality of this land.

Consequently, it is a source of inexpressible comfort and happiness
to find, that in various periods of our history, the Chuzzlewits were
actively connected with divers slaughterous conspiracies and bloody
frays. It is further recorded of them, that being clad from head to
heel in steel of proof, they did on many occasions lead their
leather-jerkined soldiers to the death with invincible courage, and
afterwards return home gracefully to their relations and friends.

There can be no doubt that at least one Chuzzlewit came over with
William the Conqueror. It does not appear that this illustrious ancestor
‘came over’ that monarch, to employ the vulgar phrase, at any subsequent
period; inasmuch as the Family do not seem to have been ever greatly
distinguished by the possession of landed estate. And it is well known
that for the bestowal of that kind of property upon his favourites,
the liberality and gratitude of the Norman were as remarkable as those
virtues are usually found to be in great men when they give away what
belongs to other people.

Perhaps in this place the history may pause to congratulate itself upon
the enormous amount of bravery, wisdom, eloquence, virtue, gentle birth,
and true nobility, that appears to have come into England with the
Norman Invasion: an amount which the genealogy of every ancient family
lends its aid to swell, and which would beyond all question have been
found to be just as great, and to the full as prolific in giving birth
to long lines of chivalrous descendants, boastful of their origin, even
though William the Conqueror had been William the Conquered; a change of
circumstances which, it is quite certain, would have made no manner of
difference in this respect.

There was unquestionably a Chuzzlewit in the Gunpowder Plot, if indeed
the arch-traitor, Fawkes himself, were not a scion of this remarkable
stock; as he might easily have been, supposing another Chuzzlewit
to have emigrated to Spain in the previous generation, and there
intermarried with a Spanish lady, by whom he had issue, one
olive-complexioned son. This probable conjecture is strengthened, if not
absolutely confirmed, by a fact which cannot fail to be interesting
to those who are curious in tracing the progress of hereditary tastes
through the lives of their unconscious inheritors. It is a notable
circumstance that in these later times, many Chuzzlewits, being
unsuccessful in other pursuits, have, without the smallest rational
hope of enriching themselves, or any conceivable reason, set up as
coal-merchants; and have, month after month, continued gloomily to watch
a small stock of coals, without in any one instance negotiating with a
purchaser. The remarkable similarity between this course of proceeding
and that adopted by their Great Ancestor beneath the vaults of the
Parliament House at Westminster, is too obvious and too full of
interest, to stand in need of comment.

It is also clearly proved by the oral traditions of the Family, that
there existed, at some one period of its history which is not distinctly
stated, a matron of such destructive principles, and so familiarized to
the use and composition of inflammatory and combustible engines, that
she was called ‘The Match Maker;’ by which nickname and byword she is
recognized in the Family legends to this day. Surely there can be
no reasonable doubt that this was the Spanish lady, the mother of
Chuzzlewit Fawkes.

But there is one other piece of evidence, bearing immediate reference
to their close connection with this memorable event in English History,
which must carry conviction, even to a mind (if such a mind there be)
remaining unconvinced by these presumptive proofs.

There was, within a few years, in the possession of a highly respectable
and in every way credible and unimpeachable member of the Chuzzlewit
Family (for his bitterest enemy never dared to hint at his being
otherwise than a wealthy man), a dark lantern of undoubted antiquity;
rendered still more interesting by being, in shape and pattern,
extremely like such as are in use at the present day. Now this
gentleman, since deceased, was at all times ready to make oath, and
did again and again set forth upon his solemn asseveration, that he had
frequently heard his grandmother say, when contemplating this venerable
relic, ‘Aye, aye! This was carried by my fourth son on the fifth of
November, when he was a Guy Fawkes.’ These remarkable words wrought
(as well they might) a strong impression on his mind, and he was in the
habit of repeating them very often. The just interpretation which
they bear, and the conclusion to which they lead, are triumphant and
irresistible. The old lady, naturally strong-minded, was nevertheless
frail and fading; she was notoriously subject to that confusion of
ideas, or, to say the least, of speech, to which age and garrulity
are liable. The slight, the very slight, confusion apparent in these
expressions is manifest, and is ludicrously easy of correction. ‘Aye,
aye,’ quoth she, and it will be observed that no emendation whatever is
necessary to be made in these two initiative remarks, ‘Aye, aye!
This lantern was carried by my forefather’--not fourth son, which is
preposterous--‘on the fifth of November. And HE was Guy Fawkes.’ Here
we have a remark at once consistent, clear, natural, and in strict
accordance with the character of the speaker. Indeed the anecdote is
so plainly susceptible of this meaning and no other, that it would be
hardly worth recording in its original state, were it not a proof of
what may be (and very often is) affected not only in historical prose
but in imaginative poetry, by the exercise of a little ingenious labour
on the part of a commentator.

It has been said that there is no instance, in modern times, of a
Chuzzlewit having been found on terms of intimacy with the Great. But
here again the sneering detractors who weave such miserable figments
from their malicious brains, are stricken dumb by evidence. For letters
are yet in the possession of various branches of the family, from which
it distinctly appears, being stated in so many words, that one Diggory
Chuzzlewit was in the habit of perpetually dining with Duke Humphrey.
So constantly was he a guest at that nobleman’s table, indeed; and so
unceasingly were His Grace’s hospitality and companionship forced, as
it were, upon him; that we find him uneasy, and full of constraint and
reluctance; writing his friends to the effect that if they fail to do
so and so by bearer, he will have no choice but to dine again with Duke
Humphrey; and expressing himself in a very marked and extraordinary
manner as one surfeited of High Life and Gracious Company.

It has been rumoured, and it is needless to say the rumour originated in
the same base quarters, that a certain male Chuzzlewit, whose birth must
be admitted to be involved in some obscurity, was of very mean and low
descent. How stands the proof? When the son of that individual, to whom
the secret of his father’s birth was supposed to have been communicated
by his father in his lifetime, lay upon his deathbed, this question was
put to him in a distinct, solemn, and formal way: ‘Toby Chuzzlewit,
who was your grandfather?’ To which he, with his last breath, no less
distinctly, solemnly, and formally replied: and his words were taken
down at the time, and signed by six witnesses, each with his name and
address in full: ‘The Lord No Zoo.’ It may be said--it HAS been said,
for human wickedness has no limits--that there is no Lord of that
name, and that among the titles which have become extinct, none at all
resembling this, in sound even, is to be discovered. But what is the
irresistible inference? Rejecting a theory broached by some well-meaning
but mistaken persons, that this Mr Toby Chuzzlewit’s grandfather, to
judge from his name, must surely have been a Mandarin (which is wholly
insupportable, for there is no pretence of his grandmother ever having
been out of this country, or of any Mandarin having been in it within
some years of his father’s birth; except those in the tea-shops, which
cannot for a moment be regarded as having any bearing on the question,
one way or other), rejecting this hypothesis, is it not manifest that
Mr Toby Chuzzlewit had either received the name imperfectly from his
father, or that he had forgotten it, or that he had mispronounced it?
and that even at the recent period in question, the Chuzzlewits were
connected by a bend sinister, or kind of heraldic over-the-left, with
some unknown noble and illustrious House?

From documentary evidence, yet preserved in the family, the fact is
clearly established that in the comparatively modern days of the Diggory
Chuzzlewit before mentioned, one of its members had attained to
very great wealth and influence. Throughout such fragments of his
correspondence as have escaped the ravages of the moths (who, in right
of their extensive absorption of the contents of deeds and papers, may
be called the general registers of the Insect World), we find him making
constant reference to an uncle, in respect of whom he would seem to have
entertained great expectations, as he was in the habit of seeking to
propitiate his favour by presents of plate, jewels, books, watches, and
other valuable articles. Thus, he writes on one occasion to his
brother in reference to a gravy-spoon, the brother’s property, which he
(Diggory) would appear to have borrowed or otherwise possessed himself
of: ‘Do not be angry, I have parted with it--to my uncle.’ On another
occasion he expresses himself in a similar manner with regard to a
child’s mug which had been entrusted to him to get repaired. On another
occasion he says, ‘I have bestowed upon that irresistible uncle of mine
everything I ever possessed.’ And that he was in the habit of paying
long and constant visits to this gentleman at his mansion, if, indeed,
he did not wholly reside there, is manifest from the following sentence:
‘With the exception of the suit of clothes I carry about with me,
the whole of my wearing apparel is at present at my uncle’s.’ This
gentleman’s patronage and influence must have been very extensive, for
his nephew writes, ‘His interest is too high’--‘It is too much’--‘It is
tremendous’--and the like. Still it does not appear (which is strange)
to have procured for him any lucrative post at court or elsewhere, or
to have conferred upon him any other distinction than that which was
necessarily included in the countenance of so great a man, and the being
invited by him to certain entertainment’s, so splendid and costly in
their nature, that he calls them ‘Golden Balls.’

It is needless to multiply instances of the high and lofty station, and
the vast importance of the Chuzzlewits, at different periods. If it
came within the scope of reasonable probability that further proofs were
required, they might be heaped upon each other until they formed an Alps
of testimony, beneath which the boldest scepticism should be crushed
and beaten flat. As a goodly tumulus is already collected, and decently
battened up above the Family grave, the present chapter is content to
leave it as it is: merely adding, by way of a final spadeful, that many
Chuzzlewits, both male and female, are proved to demonstration, on the
faith of letters written by their own mothers, to have had chiselled
noses, undeniable chins, forms that might have served the sculptor for a
model, exquisitely-turned limbs and polished foreheads of so transparent
a texture that the blue veins might be seen branching off in various
directions, like so many roads on an ethereal map. This fact in itself,
though it had been a solitary one, would have utterly settled and
clenched the business in hand; for it is well known, on the authority
of all the books which treat of such matters, that every one of these
phenomena, but especially that of the chiselling, are invariably
peculiar to, and only make themselves apparent in, persons of the very
best condition.

This history having, to its own perfect satisfaction, (and,
consequently, to the full contentment of all its readers,) proved the
Chuzzlewits to have had an origin, and to have been at one time or other
of an importance which cannot fail to render them highly improving and
acceptable acquaintance to all right-minded individuals, may now proceed
in earnest with its task. And having shown that they must have had, by
reason of their ancient birth, a pretty large share in the foundation
and increase of the human family, it will one day become its province to
submit, that such of its members as shall be introduced in these pages,
have still many counterparts and prototypes in the Great World about us.
At present it contents itself with remarking, in a general way, on this
head: Firstly, that it may be safely asserted, and yet without
implying any direct participation in the Manboddo doctrine touching the
probability of the human race having once been monkeys, that men do
play very strange and extraordinary tricks. Secondly, and yet without
trenching on the Blumenbach theory as to the descendants of Adam having
a vast number of qualities which belong more particularly to swine than
to any other class of animals in the creation, that some men certainly
are remarkable for taking uncommon good care of themselves.



CHAPTER TWO

WHEREIN CERTAIN PERSONS ARE PRESENTED TO THE READER, WITH WHOM HE MAY,
IF HE PLEASE, BECOME BETTER ACQUAINTED


It was pretty late in the autumn of the year, when the declining sun
struggling through the mist which had obscured it all day, looked
brightly down upon a little Wiltshire village, within an easy journey of
the fair old town of Salisbury.

Like a sudden flash of memory or spirit kindling up the mind of an old
man, it shed a glory upon the scene, in which its departed youth and
freshness seemed to live again. The wet grass sparkled in the light;
the scanty patches of verdure in the hedges--where a few green twigs
yet stood together bravely, resisting to the last the tyranny of nipping
winds and early frosts--took heart and brightened up; the stream which
had been dull and sullen all day long, broke out into a cheerful smile;
the birds began to chirp and twitter on the naked boughs, as though the
hopeful creatures half believed that winter had gone by, and spring
had come already. The vane upon the tapering spire of the old church
glistened from its lofty station in sympathy with the general gladness;
and from the ivy-shaded windows such gleams of light shone back upon
the glowing sky, that it seemed as if the quiet buildings were the
hoarding-place of twenty summers, and all their ruddiness and warmth
were stored within.

Even those tokens of the season which emphatically whispered of the
coming winter, graced the landscape, and, for the moment, tinged its
livelier features with no oppressive air of sadness. The fallen leaves,
with which the ground was strewn, gave forth a pleasant fragrance, and
subduing all harsh sounds of distant feet and wheels created a repose
in gentle unison with the light scattering of seed hither and thither by
the distant husbandman, and with the noiseless passage of the plough as
it turned up the rich brown earth, and wrought a graceful pattern in
the stubbled fields. On the motionless branches of some trees, autumn
berries hung like clusters of coral beads, as in those fabled orchards
where the fruits were jewels; others stripped of all their garniture,
stood, each the centre of its little heap of bright red leaves, watching
their slow decay; others again, still wearing theirs, had them all
crunched and crackled up, as though they had been burnt; about the stems
of some were piled, in ruddy mounds, the apples they had borne that
year; while others (hardy evergreens this class) showed somewhat stern
and gloomy in their vigour, as charged by nature with the admonition
that it is not to her more sensitive and joyous favourites she grants
the longest term of life. Still athwart their darker boughs, the
sunbeams struck out paths of deeper gold; and the red light, mantling in
among their swarthy branches, used them as foils to set its brightness
off, and aid the lustre of the dying day.

A moment, and its glory was no more. The sun went down beneath the long
dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in the west an airy city,
wall heaped on wall, and battlement on battlement; the light was all
withdrawn; the shining church turned cold and dark; the stream forgot
to smile; the birds were silent; and the gloom of winter dwelt on
everything.

An evening wind uprose too, and the slighter branches cracked and
rattled as they moved, in skeleton dances, to its moaning music. The
withering leaves no longer quiet, hurried to and fro in search of
shelter from its chill pursuit; the labourer unyoked his horses, and
with head bent down, trudged briskly home beside them; and from the
cottage windows lights began to glance and wink upon the darkening
fields.

Then the village forge came out in all its bright importance. The lusty
bellows roared Ha ha! to the clear fire, which roared in turn, and bade
the shining sparks dance gayly to the merry clinking of the hammers on
the anvil. The gleaming iron, in its emulation, sparkled too, and shed
its red-hot gems around profusely. The strong smith and his men dealt
such strokes upon their work, as made even the melancholy night rejoice,
and brought a glow into its dark face as it hovered about the door and
windows, peeping curiously in above the shoulders of a dozen loungers.
As to this idle company, there they stood, spellbound by the place, and,
casting now and then a glance upon the darkness in their rear, settled
their lazy elbows more at ease upon the sill, and leaned a little
further in: no more disposed to tear themselves away than if they had
been born to cluster round the blazing hearth like so many crickets.

Out upon the angry wind! how from sighing, it began to bluster round the
merry forge, banging at the wicket, and grumbling in the chimney, as if
it bullied the jolly bellows for doing anything to order. And what an
impotent swaggerer it was too, for all its noise; for if it had any
influence on that hoarse companion, it was but to make him roar his
cheerful song the louder, and by consequence to make the fire burn
the brighter, and the sparks to dance more gayly yet; at length, they
whizzed so madly round and round, that it was too much for such a surly
wind to bear; so off it flew with a howl giving the old sign before the
ale-house door such a cuff as it went, that the Blue Dragon was more
rampant than usual ever afterwards, and indeed, before Christmas, reared
clean out of its crazy frame.

It was small tyranny for a respectable wind to go wreaking its vengeance
on such poor creatures as the fallen leaves, but this wind happening to
come up with a great heap of them just after venting its humour on the
insulted Dragon, did so disperse and scatter them that they fled away,
pell-mell, some here, some there, rolling over each other, whirling
round and round upon their thin edges, taking frantic flights into the
air, and playing all manner of extraordinary gambols in the extremity
of their distress. Nor was this enough for its malicious fury; for not
content with driving them abroad, it charged small parties of them and
hunted them into the wheel wright’s saw-pit, and below the planks and
timbers in the yard, and, scattering the sawdust in the air, it looked
for them underneath, and when it did meet with any, whew! how it drove
them on and followed at their heels!

The scared leaves only flew the faster for all this, and a giddy chase
it was; for they got into unfrequented places, where there was no
outlet, and where their pursuer kept them eddying round and round at his
pleasure; and they crept under the eaves of houses, and clung tightly to
the sides of hay-ricks, like bats; and tore in at open chamber windows,
and cowered close to hedges; and, in short, went anywhere for safety.
But the oddest feat they achieved was, to take advantage of the sudden
opening of Mr Pecksniff’s front-door, to dash wildly into his passage;
whither the wind following close upon them, and finding the back-door
open, incontinently blew out the lighted candle held by Miss Pecksniff,
and slammed the front-door against Mr Pecksniff who was at that moment
entering, with such violence, that in the twinkling of an eye he lay on
his back at the bottom of the steps. Being by this time weary of such
trifling performances, the boisterous rover hurried away rejoicing,
roaring over moor and meadow, hill and flat, until it got out to sea,
where it met with other winds similarly disposed, and made a night of
it.

In the meantime Mr Pecksniff, having received from a sharp angle in the
bottom step but one, that sort of knock on the head which lights up, for
the patient’s entertainment, an imaginary general illumination of very
bright short-sixes, lay placidly staring at his own street door. And it
would seem to have been more suggestive in its aspect than street
doors usually are; for he continued to lie there, rather a lengthy and
unreasonable time, without so much as wondering whether he was hurt
or no; neither, when Miss Pecksniff inquired through the key-hole in a
shrill voice, which might have belonged to a wind in its teens, ‘Who’s
there’ did he make any reply; nor, when Miss Pecksniff opened the door
again, and shading the candle with her hand, peered out, and looked
provokingly round him, and about him, and over him, and everywhere but
at him, did he offer any remark, or indicate in any manner the least
hint of a desire to be picked up.

‘I see you,’ cried Miss Pecksniff, to the ideal inflicter of a runaway
knock. ‘You’ll catch it, sir!’

Still Mr Pecksniff, perhaps from having caught it already, said nothing.

‘You’re round the corner now,’ cried Miss Pecksniff. She said it at a
venture, but there was appropriate matter in it too; for Mr Pecksniff,
being in the act of extinguishing the candles before mentioned pretty
rapidly, and of reducing the number of brass knobs on his street door
from four or five hundred (which had previously been juggling of their
own accord before his eyes in a very novel manner) to a dozen or so,
might in one sense have been said to be coming round the corner, and
just turning it.

With a sharply delivered warning relative to the cage and the constable,
and the stocks and the gallows, Miss Pecksniff was about to close the
door again, when Mr Pecksniff (being still at the bottom of the steps)
raised himself on one elbow, and sneezed.

‘That voice!’ cried Miss Pecksniff. ‘My parent!’

At this exclamation, another Miss Pecksniff bounced out of the parlour;
and the two Miss Pecksniffs, with many incoherent expressions, dragged
Mr Pecksniff into an upright posture.

‘Pa!’ they cried in concert. ‘Pa! Speak, Pa! Do not look so wild my
dearest Pa!’

But as a gentleman’s looks, in such a case of all others, are by no
means under his own control, Mr Pecksniff continued to keep his mouth
and his eyes very wide open, and to drop his lower jaw, somewhat after
the manner of a toy nut-cracker; and as his hat had fallen off, and his
face was pale, and his hair erect, and his coat muddy, the spectacle he
presented was so very doleful, that neither of the Miss Pecksniffs could
repress an involuntary screech.

‘That’ll do,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘I’m better.’

‘He’s come to himself!’ cried the youngest Miss Pecksniff.

‘He speaks again!’ exclaimed the eldest.

With these joyful words they kissed Mr Pecksniff on either cheek; and
bore him into the house. Presently, the youngest Miss Pecksniff ran
out again to pick up his hat, his brown paper parcel, his umbrella, his
gloves, and other small articles; and that done, and the door closed,
both young ladies applied themselves to tending Mr Pecksniff’s wounds in
the back parlour.

They were not very serious in their nature; being limited to abrasions
on what the eldest Miss Pecksniff called ‘the knobby parts’ of her
parent’s anatomy, such as his knees and elbows, and to the development
of an entirely new organ, unknown to phrenologists, on the back of his
head. These injuries having been comforted externally, with patches of
pickled brown paper, and Mr Pecksniff having been comforted internally,
with some stiff brandy-and-water, the eldest Miss Pecksniff sat down
to make the tea, which was all ready. In the meantime the youngest Miss
Pecksniff brought from the kitchen a smoking dish of ham and eggs, and,
setting the same before her father, took up her station on a low stool
at his feet; thereby bringing her eyes on a level with the teaboard.

It must not be inferred from this position of humility, that the
youngest Miss Pecksniff was so young as to be, as one may say, forced to
sit upon a stool, by reason of the shortness of her legs. Miss Pecksniff
sat upon a stool because of her simplicity and innocence, which were
very great, very great. Miss Pecksniff sat upon a stool because she was
all girlishness, and playfulness, and wildness, and kittenish buoyancy.
She was the most arch and at the same time the most artless creature,
was the youngest Miss Pecksniff, that you can possibly imagine. It
was her great charm. She was too fresh and guileless, and too full of
child-like vivacity, was the youngest Miss Pecksniff, to wear combs in
her hair, or to turn it up, or to frizzle it, or braid it. She wore it
in a crop, a loosely flowing crop, which had so many rows of curls in
it, that the top row was only one curl. Moderately buxom was her shape,
and quite womanly too; but sometimes--yes, sometimes--she even wore
a pinafore; and how charming THAT was! Oh! she was indeed ‘a gushing
thing’ (as a young gentleman had observed in verse, in the Poet’s Corner
of a provincial newspaper), was the youngest Miss Pecksniff!

Mr Pecksniff was a moral man--a grave man, a man of noble sentiments and
speech--and he had had her christened Mercy. Mercy! oh, what a charming
name for such a pure-souled Being as the youngest Miss Pecksniff! Her
sister’s name was Charity. There was a good thing! Mercy and Charity!
And Charity, with her fine strong sense and her mild, yet not
reproachful gravity, was so well named, and did so well set off and
illustrate her sister! What a pleasant sight was that the contrast
they presented; to see each loved and loving one sympathizing with, and
devoted to, and leaning on, and yet correcting and counter-checking,
and, as it were, antidoting, the other! To behold each damsel in her
very admiration of her sister, setting up in business for herself on
an entirely different principle, and announcing no connection with
over-the-way, and if the quality of goods at that establishment don’t
please you, you are respectfully invited to favour ME with a call! And
the crowning circumstance of the whole delightful catalogue was, that
both the fair creatures were so utterly unconscious of all this!
They had no idea of it. They no more thought or dreamed of it than Mr
Pecksniff did. Nature played them off against each other; THEY had no
hand in it, the two Miss Pecksniffs.

It has been remarked that Mr Pecksniff was a moral man. So he was.
Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr Pecksniff, especially
in his conversation and correspondence. It was once said of him by a
homely admirer, that he had a Fortunatus’s purse of good sentiments in
his inside. In this particular he was like the girl in the fairy tale,
except that if they were not actual diamonds which fell from his lips,
they were the very brightest paste, and shone prodigiously. He was a
most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept than a copy book. Some
people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the
way to a place, and never goes there; but these were his enemies, the
shadows cast by his brightness; that was all. His very throat was moral.
You saw a good deal of it. You looked over a very low fence of white
cravat (whereof no man had ever beheld the tie for he fastened it
behind), and there it lay, a valley between two jutting heights of
collar, serene and whiskerless before you. It seemed to say, on the part
of Mr Pecksniff, ‘There is no deception, ladies and gentlemen, all is
peace, a holy calm pervades me.’ So did his hair, just grizzled with
an iron-grey which was all brushed off his forehead, and stood bolt
upright, or slightly drooped in kindred action with his heavy eyelids.
So did his person, which was sleek though free from corpulency. So did
his manner, which was soft and oily. In a word, even his plain black
suit, and state of widower and dangling double eye-glass, all tended to
the same purpose, and cried aloud, ‘Behold the moral Pecksniff!’

The brazen plate upon the door (which being Mr Pecksniff’s, could
not lie) bore this inscription, ‘PECKSNIFF, ARCHITECT,’ to which Mr
Pecksniff, on his cards of business, added, AND LAND SURVEYOR.’ In one
sense, and only one, he may be said to have been a Land Surveyor on a
pretty large scale, as an extensive prospect lay stretched out before
the windows of his house. Of his architectural doings, nothing was
clearly known, except that he had never designed or built anything; but
it was generally understood that his knowledge of the science was almost
awful in its profundity.

Mr Pecksniff’s professional engagements, indeed, were almost, if not
entirely, confined to the reception of pupils; for the collection of
rents, with which pursuit he occasionally varied and relieved his graver
toils, can hardly be said to be a strictly architectural employment. His
genius lay in ensnaring parents and guardians, and pocketing premiums. A
young gentleman’s premium being paid, and the young gentleman come to
Mr Pecksniff’s house, Mr Pecksniff borrowed his case of mathematical
instruments (if silver-mounted or otherwise valuable); entreated him,
from that moment, to consider himself one of the family; complimented
him highly on his parents or guardians, as the case might be; and
turned him loose in a spacious room on the two-pair front; where, in the
company of certain drawing-boards, parallel rulers, very stiff-legged
compasses, and two, or perhaps three, other young gentlemen, he improved
himself, for three or five years, according to his articles, in making
elevations of Salisbury Cathedral from every possible point of sight;
and in constructing in the air a vast quantity of Castles, Houses of
Parliament, and other Public Buildings. Perhaps in no place in the
world were so many gorgeous edifices of this class erected as under
Mr Pecksniff’s auspices; and if but one-twentieth part of the churches
which were built in that front room, with one or other of the Miss
Pecksniffs at the altar in the act of marrying the architect, could only
be made available by the parliamentary commissioners, no more churches
would be wanted for at least five centuries.

‘Even the worldly goods of which we have just disposed,’ said Mr
Pecksniff, glancing round the table when he had finished, ‘even cream,
sugar, tea, toast, ham--’

‘And eggs,’ suggested Charity in a low voice.

‘And eggs,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘even they have their moral. See how they
come and go! Every pleasure is transitory. We can’t even eat, long.
If we indulge in harmless fluids, we get the dropsy; if in exciting
liquids, we get drunk. What a soothing reflection is that!’

‘Don’t say WE get drunk, Pa,’ urged the eldest Miss Pecksniff.

‘When I say we, my dear,’ returned her father, ‘I mean mankind in
general; the human race, considered as a body, and not as individuals.
There is nothing personal in morality, my love. Even such a thing as
this,’ said Mr Pecksniff, laying the fore-finger of his left hand upon
the brown paper patch on the top of his head, ‘slight casual baldness
though it be, reminds us that we are but’--he was going to say ‘worms,’
but recollecting that worms were not remarkable for heads of hair, he
substituted ‘flesh and blood.’

‘Which,’ cried Mr Pecksniff after a pause, during which he seemed to
have been casting about for a new moral, and not quite successfully,
‘which is also very soothing. Mercy, my dear, stir the fire and throw up
the cinders.’

The young lady obeyed, and having done so, resumed her stool, reposed
one arm upon her father’s knee, and laid her blooming cheek upon
it. Miss Charity drew her chair nearer the fire, as one prepared for
conversation, and looked towards her father.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Pecksniff, after a short pause, during which he had been
silently smiling, and shaking his head at the fire--‘I have again been
fortunate in the attainment of my object. A new inmate will very shortly
come among us.’

‘A youth, papa?’ asked Charity.

‘Ye-es, a youth,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘He will avail himself of the
eligible opportunity which now offers, for uniting the advantages of the
best practical architectural education with the comforts of a home, and
the constant association with some who (however humble their sphere,
and limited their capacity) are not unmindful of their moral
responsibilities.’

‘Oh Pa!’ cried Mercy, holding up her finger archly. ‘See advertisement!’

‘Playful--playful warbler,’ said Mr Pecksniff. It may be observed in
connection with his calling his daughter a ‘warbler,’ that she was not
at all vocal, but that Mr Pecksniff was in the frequent habit of using
any word that occurred to him as having a good sound, and rounding a
sentence well without much care for its meaning. And he did this so
boldly, and in such an imposing manner, that he would sometimes stagger
the wisest people with his eloquence, and make them gasp again.

His enemies asserted, by the way, that a strong trustfulness in sounds
and forms was the master-key to Mr Pecksniff’s character.

‘Is he handsome, Pa?’ inquired the younger daughter.

‘Silly Merry!’ said the eldest: Merry being fond for Mercy. ‘What is the
premium, Pa? tell us that.’

‘Oh, good gracious, Cherry!’ cried Miss Mercy, holding up her hands with
the most winning giggle in the world, ‘what a mercenary girl you are! oh
you naughty, thoughtful, prudent thing!’

It was perfectly charming, and worthy of the Pastoral age, to see how
the two Miss Pecksniffs slapped each other after this, and then subsided
into an embrace expressive of their different dispositions.

‘He is well looking,’ said Mr Pecksniff, slowly and distinctly; ‘well
looking enough. I do not positively expect any immediate premium with
him.’

Notwithstanding their different natures, both Charity and Mercy
concurred in opening their eyes uncommonly wide at this announcement,
and in looking for the moment as blank as if their thoughts had actually
had a direct bearing on the main chance.

‘But what of that!’ said Mr Pecksniff, still smiling at the fire. ‘There
is disinterestedness in the world, I hope? We are not all arrayed in two
opposite ranks; the OFfensive and the DEfensive. Some few there are
who walk between; who help the needy as they go; and take no part with
either side. Umph!’

There was something in these morsels of philanthropy which reassured the
sisters. They exchanged glances, and brightened very much.

‘Oh! let us not be for ever calculating, devising, and plotting for the
future,’ said Mr Pecksniff, smiling more and more, and looking at the
fire as a man might, who was cracking a joke with it: ‘I am weary of
such arts. If our inclinations are but good and open-hearted, let us
gratify them boldly, though they bring upon us Loss instead of Profit.
Eh, Charity?’

Glancing towards his daughters for the first time since he had begun
these reflections, and seeing that they both smiled, Mr Pecksniff eyed
them for an instant so jocosely (though still with a kind of saintly
waggishness) that the younger one was moved to sit upon his knee
forthwith, put her fair arms round his neck, and kiss him twenty times.
During the whole of this affectionate display she laughed to a most
immoderate extent: in which hilarious indulgence even the prudent Cherry
joined.

‘Tut, tut,’ said Mr Pecksniff, pushing his latest-born away and running
his fingers through his hair, as he resumed his tranquil face. ‘What
folly is this! Let us take heed how we laugh without reason lest we cry
with it. What is the domestic news since yesterday? John Westlock is
gone, I hope?’

‘Indeed, no,’ said Charity.

‘And why not?’ returned her father. ‘His term expired yesterday. And his
box was packed, I know; for I saw it, in the morning, standing in the
hall.’

‘He slept last night at the Dragon,’ returned the young lady, ‘and had
Mr Pinch to dine with him. They spent the evening together, and Mr Pinch
was not home till very late.’

‘And when I saw him on the stairs this morning, Pa,’ said Mercy with her
usual sprightliness, ‘he looked, oh goodness, SUCH a monster! with his
face all manner of colours, and his eyes as dull as if they had been
boiled, and his head aching dreadfully, I am sure from the look of
it, and his clothes smelling, oh it’s impossible to say how strong,
oh’--here the young lady shuddered--‘of smoke and punch.’

‘Now I think,’ said Mr Pecksniff with his accustomed gentleness, though
still with the air of one who suffered under injury without complaint,
‘I think Mr Pinch might have done better than choose for his companion
one who, at the close of a long intercourse, had endeavoured, as he
knew, to wound my feelings. I am not quite sure that this was delicate
in Mr Pinch. I am not quite sure that this was kind in Mr Pinch. I will
go further and say, I am not quite sure that this was even ordinarily
grateful in Mr Pinch.’

‘But what can anyone expect from Mr Pinch!’ cried Charity, with as
strong and scornful an emphasis on the name as if it would have given
her unspeakable pleasure to express it, in an acted charade, on the calf
of that gentleman’s leg.

‘Aye, aye,’ returned her father, raising his hand mildly: ‘it is
very well to say what can we expect from Mr Pinch, but Mr Pinch is
a fellow-creature, my dear; Mr Pinch is an item in the vast total of
humanity, my love; and we have a right, it is our duty, to expect in
Mr Pinch some development of those better qualities, the possession
of which in our own persons inspires our humble self-respect. No,’
continued Mr Pecksniff. ‘No! Heaven forbid that I should say, nothing
can be expected from Mr Pinch; or that I should say, nothing can be
expected from any man alive (even the most degraded, which Mr Pinch is
not, no, really); but Mr Pinch has disappointed me; he has hurt me;
I think a little the worse of him on this account, but not if human
nature. Oh, no, no!’

‘Hark!’ said Miss Charity, holding up her finger, as a gentle rap was
heard at the street door. ‘There is the creature! Now mark my words, he
has come back with John Westlock for his box, and is going to help
him to take it to the mail. Only mark my words, if that isn’t his
intention!’

Even as she spoke, the box appeared to be in progress of conveyance from
the house, but after a brief murmuring of question and answer, it was
put down again, and somebody knocked at the parlour door.

‘Come in!’ cried Mr Pecksniff--not severely; only virtuously. ‘Come in!’

An ungainly, awkward-looking man, extremely short-sighted, and
prematurely bald, availed himself of this permission; and seeing that
Mr Pecksniff sat with his back towards him, gazing at the fire,
stood hesitating, with the door in his hand. He was far from handsome
certainly; and was drest in a snuff-coloured suit, of an uncouth make at
the best, which, being shrunk with long wear, was twisted and tortured
into all kinds of odd shapes; but notwithstanding his attire, and his
clumsy figure, which a great stoop in his shoulders, and a ludicrous
habit he had of thrusting his head forward, by no means redeemed, one
would not have been disposed (unless Mr Pecksniff said so) to consider
him a bad fellow by any means. He was perhaps about thirty, but he might
have been almost any age between sixteen and sixty; being one of those
strange creatures who never decline into an ancient appearance, but look
their oldest when they are very young, and get it over at once.

Keeping his hand upon the lock of the door, he glanced from Mr Pecksniff
to Mercy, from Mercy to Charity, and from Charity to Mr Pecksniff again,
several times; but the young ladies being as intent upon the fire as
their father was, and neither of the three taking any notice of him, he
was fain to say, at last,

‘Oh! I beg your pardon, Mr Pecksniff: I beg your pardon for intruding;
but--’

‘No intrusion, Mr Pinch,’ said that gentleman very sweetly, but without
looking round. ‘Pray be seated, Mr Pinch. Have the goodness to shut the
door, Mr Pinch, if you please.’

‘Certainly, sir,’ said Pinch; not doing so, however, but holding it
rather wider open than before, and beckoning nervously to somebody
without: ‘Mr Westlock, sir, hearing that you were come home--’

‘Mr Pinch, Mr Pinch!’ said Pecksniff, wheeling his chair about, and
looking at him with an aspect of the deepest melancholy, ‘I did not
expect this from you. I have not deserved this from you!’

‘No, but upon my word, sir--’ urged Pinch.

‘The less you say, Mr Pinch,’ interposed the other, ‘the better. I utter
no complaint. Make no defence.’

‘No, but do have the goodness, sir,’ cried Pinch, with great
earnestness, ‘if you please. Mr Westlock, sir, going away for good and
all, wishes to leave none but friends behind him. Mr Westlock and you,
sir, had a little difference the other day; you have had many little
differences.’

‘Little differences!’ cried Charity.

‘Little differences!’ echoed Mercy.

‘My loves!’ said Mr Pecksniff, with the same serene upraising of his
hand; ‘My dears!’ After a solemn pause he meekly bowed to Mr Pinch, as
who should say, ‘Proceed;’ but Mr Pinch was so very much at a loss how
to resume, and looked so helplessly at the two Miss Pecksniffs, that
the conversation would most probably have terminated there, if a
good-looking youth, newly arrived at man’s estate, had not stepped
forward from the doorway and taken up the thread of the discourse.

‘Come, Mr Pecksniff,’ he said, with a smile, ‘don’t let there be any
ill-blood between us, pray. I am sorry we have ever differed, and
extremely sorry I have ever given you offence. Bear me no ill-will at
parting, sir.’

‘I bear,’ answered Mr Pecksniff, mildly, ‘no ill-will to any man on
earth.’

‘I told you he didn’t,’ said Pinch, in an undertone; ‘I knew he didn’t!
He always says he don’t.’

‘Then you will shake hands, sir?’ cried Westlock, advancing a step or
two, and bespeaking Mr Pinch’s close attention by a glance.

‘Umph!’ said Mr Pecksniff, in his most winning tone.

‘You will shake hands, sir.’

‘No, John,’ said Mr Pecksniff, with a calmness quite ethereal; ‘no, I
will not shake hands, John. I have forgiven you. I had already forgiven
you, even before you ceased to reproach and taunt me. I have embraced
you in the spirit, John, which is better than shaking hands.’

‘Pinch,’ said the youth, turning towards him, with a hearty disgust of
his late master, ‘what did I tell you?’

Poor Pinch looked down uneasily at Mr Pecksniff, whose eye was fixed
upon him as it had been from the first; and looking up at the ceiling
again, made no reply.

‘As to your forgiveness, Mr Pecksniff,’ said the youth, ‘I’ll not have
it upon such terms. I won’t be forgiven.’

‘Won’t you, John?’ retorted Mr Pecksniff, with a smile. ‘You must. You
can’t help it. Forgiveness is a high quality; an exalted virtue; far
above YOUR control or influence, John. I WILL forgive you. You cannot
move me to remember any wrong you have ever done me, John.’

‘Wrong!’ cried the other, with all the heat and impetuosity of his age.
‘Here’s a pretty fellow! Wrong! Wrong I have done him! He’ll not even
remember the five hundred pounds he had with me under false pretences;
or the seventy pounds a year for board and lodging that would have been
dear at seventeen! Here’s a martyr!’

‘Money, John,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘is the root of all evil. I grieve
to see that it is already bearing evil fruit in you. But I will not
remember its existence. I will not even remember the conduct of that
misguided person’--and here, although he spoke like one at peace with
all the world, he used an emphasis that plainly said “I have my eye
upon the rascal now”--‘that misguided person who has brought you here
to-night, seeking to disturb (it is a happiness to say, in vain) the
heart’s repose and peace of one who would have shed his dearest blood to
serve him.’

The voice of Mr Pecksniff trembled as he spoke, and sobs were heard from
his daughters. Sounds floated on the air, moreover, as if two spirit
voices had exclaimed: one, ‘Beast!’ the other, ‘Savage!’

‘Forgiveness,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘entire and pure forgiveness is not
incompatible with a wounded heart; perchance when the heart is wounded,
it becomes a greater virtue. With my breast still wrung and grieved to
its inmost core by the ingratitude of that person, I am proud and glad
to say that I forgive him. Nay! I beg,’ cried Mr Pecksniff, raising his
voice, as Pinch appeared about to speak, ‘I beg that individual not to
offer a remark; he will truly oblige me by not uttering one word, just
now. I am not sure that I am equal to the trial. In a very short space
of time, I shall have sufficient fortitude, I trust to converse with
him as if these events had never happened. But not,’ said Mr Pecksniff,
turning round again towards the fire, and waving his hand in the
direction of the door, ‘not now.’

‘Bah!’ cried John Westlock, with the utmost disgust and disdain the
monosyllable is capable of expressing. ‘Ladies, good evening. Come,
Pinch, it’s not worth thinking of. I was right and you were wrong.
That’s small matter; you’ll be wiser another time.’

So saying, he clapped that dejected companion on the shoulder, turned
upon his heel, and walked out into the passage, whither poor Mr
Pinch, after lingering irresolutely in the parlour for a few seconds,
expressing in his countenance the deepest mental misery and gloom
followed him. Then they took up the box between them, and sallied out to
meet the mail.

That fleet conveyance passed, every night, the corner of a lane at some
distance; towards which point they bent their steps. For some minutes
they walked along in silence, until at length young Westlock burst into
a loud laugh, and at intervals into another, and another. Still there
was no response from his companion.

‘I’ll tell you what, Pinch!’ he said abruptly, after another lengthened
silence--‘You haven’t half enough of the devil in you. Half enough! You
haven’t any.’

‘Well!’ said Pinch with a sigh, ‘I don’t know, I’m sure. It’s compliment
to say so. If I haven’t, I suppose, I’m all the better for it.’

‘All the better!’ repeated his companion tartly: ‘All the worse, you
mean to say.’

‘And yet,’ said Pinch, pursuing his own thoughts and not this last
remark on the part of his friend, ‘I must have a good deal of what
you call the devil in me, too, or how could I make Pecksniff so
uncomfortable? I wouldn’t have occasioned him so much distress--don’t
laugh, please--for a mine of money; and Heaven knows I could find good
use for it too, John. How grieved he was!’

‘HE grieved!’ returned the other.

‘Why didn’t you observe that the tears were almost starting out of his
eyes!’ cried Pinch. ‘Bless my soul, John, is it nothing to see a man
moved to that extent and know one’s self to be the cause! And did you
hear him say that he could have shed his blood for me?’

‘Do you WANT any blood shed for you?’ returned his friend, with
considerable irritation. ‘Does he shed anything for you that you DO
want? Does he shed employment for you, instruction for you, pocket
money for you? Does he shed even legs of mutton for you in any decent
proportion to potatoes and garden stuff?’

‘I am afraid,’ said Pinch, sighing again, ‘that I am a great eater; I
can’t disguise from myself that I’m a great eater. Now, you know that,
John.’

‘You a great eater!’ retorted his companion, with no less indignation
than before. ‘How do you know you are?’

There appeared to be forcible matter in this inquiry, for Mr Pinch only
repeated in an undertone that he had a strong misgiving on the subject,
and that he greatly feared he was.

‘Besides, whether I am or no,’ he added, ‘that has little or nothing to
do with his thinking me ungrateful. John, there is scarcely a sin in the
world that is in my eyes such a crying one as ingratitude; and when
he taxes me with that, and believes me to be guilty of it, he makes me
miserable and wretched.’

‘Do you think he don’t know that?’ returned the other scornfully.
‘But come, Pinch, before I say anything more to you, just run over the
reasons you have for being grateful to him at all, will you? Change
hands first, for the box is heavy. That’ll do. Now, go on.’

‘In the first place,’ said Pinch, ‘he took me as his pupil for much less
than he asked.’

‘Well,’ rejoined his friend, perfectly unmoved by this instance of
generosity. ‘What in the second place?’

‘What in the second place?’ cried Pinch, in a sort of desperation, ‘why,
everything in the second place. My poor old grandmother died happy to
think that she had put me with such an excellent man. I have grown up
in his house, I am in his confidence, I am his assistant, he allows me a
salary; when his business improves, my prospects are to improve too.
All this, and a great deal more, is in the second place. And in the very
prologue and preface to the first place, John, you must consider this,
which nobody knows better than I: that I was born for much plainer and
poorer things, that I am not a good hand for his kind of business, and
have no talent for it, or indeed for anything else but odds and ends
that are of no use or service to anybody.’

He said this with so much earnestness, and in a tone so full of feeling,
that his companion instinctively changed his manner as he sat down on
the box (they had by this time reached the finger-post at the end of the
lane); motioned him to sit down beside him; and laid his hand upon his
shoulder.

‘I believe you are one of the best fellows in the world,’ he said, ‘Tom
Pinch.’

‘Not at all,’ rejoined Tom. ‘If you only knew Pecksniff as well as I do,
you might say it of him, indeed, and say it truly.’

‘I’ll say anything of him, you like,’ returned the other, ‘and not
another word to his disparagement.’

‘It’s for my sake, then; not his, I am afraid,’ said Pinch, shaking his
head gravely.

‘For whose you please, Tom, so that it does please you. Oh! He’s a
famous fellow! HE never scraped and clawed into his pouch all your poor
grandmother’s hard savings--she was a housekeeper, wasn’t she, Tom?’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Pinch, nursing one of his large knees, and nodding his
head; ‘a gentleman’s housekeeper.’

‘HE never scraped and clawed into his pouch all her hard savings;
dazzling her with prospects of your happiness and advancement, which he
knew (and no man better) never would be realised! HE never speculated
and traded on her pride in you, and her having educated you, and on her
desire that you at least should live to be a gentleman. Not he, Tom!’

‘No,’ said Tom, looking into his friend’s face, as if he were a little
doubtful of his meaning. ‘Of course not.’

‘So I say,’ returned the youth, ‘of course he never did. HE didn’t take
less than he had asked, because that less was all she had, and more than
he expected; not he, Tom! He doesn’t keep you as his assistant
because you are of any use to him; because your wonderful faith in his
pretensions is of inestimable service in all his mean disputes; because
your honesty reflects honesty on him; because your wandering about this
little place all your spare hours, reading in ancient books and foreign
tongues, gets noised abroad, even as far as Salisbury, making of him,
Pecksniff the master, a man of learning and of vast importance. HE gets
no credit from you, Tom, not he.’

‘Why, of course he don’t,’ said Pinch, gazing at his friend with a more
troubled aspect than before. ‘Pecksniff get credit from me! Well!’

‘Don’t I say that it’s ridiculous,’ rejoined the other, ‘even to think
of such a thing?’

‘Why, it’s madness,’ said Tom.

‘Madness!’ returned young Westlock. ‘Certainly it’s madness. Who but
a madman would suppose he cares to hear it said on Sundays, that the
volunteer who plays the organ in the church, and practises on summer
evenings in the dark, is Mr Pecksniff’s young man, eh, Tom? Who but a
madman would suppose it is the game of such a man as he, to have his
name in everybody’s mouth, connected with the thousand useless odds and
ends you do (and which, of course, he taught you), eh, Tom? Who but a
madman would suppose you advertised him hereabouts, much cheaper and
much better than a chalker on the walls could, eh, Tom? As well might
one suppose that he doesn’t on all occasions pour out his whole heart
and soul to you; that he doesn’t make you a very liberal and indeed
rather an extravagant allowance; or, to be more wild and monstrous
still, if that be possible, as well might one suppose,’ and here, at
every word, he struck him lightly on the breast, ‘that Pecksniff traded
in your nature, and that your nature was to be timid and distrustful
of yourself, and trustful of all other men, but most of all, of him who
least deserves it. There would be madness, Tom!’

Mr Pinch had listened to all this with looks of bewilderment, which
seemed to be in part occasioned by the matter of his companion’s speech,
and in part by his rapid and vehement manner. Now that he had come to a
close, he drew a very long breath; and gazing wistfully in his face as
if he were unable to settle in his own mind what expression it wore, and
were desirous to draw from it as good a clue to his real meaning as it
was possible to obtain in the dark, was about to answer, when the sound
of the mail guard’s horn came cheerily upon their ears, putting
an immediate end to the conference; greatly as it seemed to the
satisfaction of the younger man, who jumped up briskly, and gave his
hand to his companion.

‘Both hands, Tom. I shall write to you from London, mind!’

‘Yes,’ said Pinch. ‘Yes. Do, please. Good-bye. Good-bye. I can hardly
believe you’re going. It seems, now, but yesterday that you came.
Good-bye! my dear old fellow!’

John Westlock returned his parting words with no less heartiness of
manner, and sprung up to his seat upon the roof. Off went the mail at
a canter down the dark road; the lamps gleaming brightly, and the horn
awakening all the echoes, far and wide.

‘Go your ways,’ said Pinch, apostrophizing the coach; ‘I can hardly
persuade myself but you’re alive, and are some great monster who visits
this place at certain intervals, to bear my friends away into the world.
You’re more exulting and rampant than usual tonight, I think; and you
may well crow over your prize; for he is a fine lad, an ingenuous lad,
and has but one fault that I know of; he don’t mean it, but he is most
cruelly unjust to Pecksniff!’



CHAPTER THREE

IN WHICH CERTAIN OTHER PERSONS ARE INTRODUCED; ON THE SAME TERMS AS IN
THE LAST CHAPTER


Mention has been already made more than once, of a certain Dragon who
swung and creaked complainingly before the village alehouse door. A
faded, and an ancient dragon he was; and many a wintry storm of rain,
snow, sleet, and hail, had changed his colour from a gaudy blue to a
faint lack-lustre shade of grey. But there he hung; rearing, in a state
of monstrous imbecility, on his hind legs; waxing, with every month that
passed, so much more dim and shapeless, that as you gazed at him on
one side of the sign-board it seemed as if he must be gradually melting
through it, and coming out upon the other.

He was a courteous and considerate dragon, too; or had been in his
distincter days; for in the midst of his rampant feebleness, he kept
one of his forepaws near his nose, as though he would say, ‘Don’t
mind me--it’s only my fun;’ while he held out the other in polite and
hospitable entreaty. Indeed it must be conceded to the whole brood
of dragons of modern times, that they have made a great advance in
civilisation and refinement. They no longer demand a beautiful virgin
for breakfast every morning, with as much regularity as any tame single
gentleman expects his hot roll, but rest content with the society of
idle bachelors and roving married men; and they are now remarkable
rather for holding aloof from the softer sex and discouraging their
visits (especially on Saturday nights), than for rudely insisting on
their company without any reference to their inclinations, as they are
known to have done in days of yore.

Nor is this tribute to the reclaimed animals in question so wide a
digression into the realms of Natural History as it may, at first sight,
appear to be; for the present business of these pages in with the dragon
who had his retreat in Mr Pecksniff’s neighbourhood, and that courteous
animal being already on the carpet, there is nothing in the way of its
immediate transaction.

For many years, then, he had swung and creaked, and flapped himself
about, before the two windows of the best bedroom of that house of
entertainment to which he lent his name; but never in all his swinging,
creaking, and flapping, had there been such a stir within its dingy
precincts, as on the evening next after that upon which the incidents,
detailed in the last chapter occurred; when there was such a hurrying up
and down stairs of feet, such a glancing of lights, such a whispering
of voices, such a smoking and sputtering of wood newly lighted in a
damp chimney, such an airing of linen, such a scorching smell of hot
warming-pans, such a domestic bustle and to-do, in short, as never
dragon, griffin, unicorn, or other animal of that species presided over,
since they first began to interest themselves in household affairs.

An old gentleman and a young lady, travelling, unattended, in a rusty
old chariot with post-horses; coming nobody knew whence and going nobody
knew whither; had turned out of the high road, and driven unexpectedly
to the Blue Dragon; and here was the old gentleman, who had taken this
step by reason of his sudden illness in the carriage, suffering the most
horrible cramps and spasms, yet protesting and vowing in the very midst
of his pain, that he wouldn’t have a doctor sent for, and wouldn’t take
any remedies but those which the young lady administered from a small
medicine-chest, and wouldn’t, in a word, do anything but terrify the
landlady out of her five wits, and obstinately refuse compliance with
every suggestion that was made to him.

Of all the five hundred proposals for his relief which the good woman
poured out in less than half an hour, he would entertain but one. That
was that he should go to bed. And it was in the preparation of his bed
and the arrangement of his chamber, that all the stir was made in the
room behind the Dragon.

He was, beyond all question, very ill, and suffered exceedingly; not the
less, perhaps, because he was a strong and vigorous old man, with a will
of iron, and a voice of brass. But neither the apprehensions which
he plainly entertained, at times, for his life, nor the great pain he
underwent, influenced his resolution in the least degree. He would have
no person sent for. The worse he grew, the more rigid and inflexible he
became in his determination. If they sent for any person to attend him,
man, woman, or child, he would leave the house directly (so he told
them), though he quitted it on foot, and died upon the threshold of the
door.

Now, there being no medical practitioner actually resident in the
village, but a poor apothecary who was also a grocer and general dealer,
the landlady had, upon her own responsibility, sent for him, in the
very first burst and outset of the disaster. Of course it followed, as
a necessary result of his being wanted, that he was not at home. He had
gone some miles away, and was not expected home until late at night; so
the landlady, being by this time pretty well beside herself, dispatched
the same messenger in all haste for Mr Pecksniff, as a learned man
who could bear a deal of responsibility, and a moral man who could
administer a world of comfort to a troubled mind. That her guest had
need of some efficient services under the latter head was obvious enough
from the restless expressions, importing, however, rather a worldly than
a spiritual anxiety, to which he gave frequent utterance.

From this last-mentioned secret errand, the messenger returned with no
better news than from the first; Mr Pecksniff was not at home. However,
they got the patient into bed without him; and in the course of two
hours, he gradually became so far better that there were much longer
intervals than at first between his terms of suffering. By degrees, he
ceased to suffer at all; though his exhaustion was occasionally so great
that it suggested hardly less alarm than his actual endurance had done.

It was in one of his intervals of repose, when, looking round with
great caution, and reaching uneasily out of his nest of pillows, he
endeavoured, with a strange air of secrecy and distrust, to make use
of the writing materials which he had ordered to be placed on a table
beside him, that the young lady and the mistress of the Blue Dragon
found themselves sitting side by side before the fire in the sick
chamber.

The mistress of the Blue Dragon was in outward appearance just what a
landlady should be: broad, buxom, comfortable, and good looking, with a
face of clear red and white, which, by its jovial aspect, at once bore
testimony to her hearty participation in the good things of the larder
and cellar, and to their thriving and healthful influences. She was a
widow, but years ago had passed through her state of weeds, and burst
into flower again; and in full bloom she had continued ever since; and
in full bloom she was now; with roses on her ample skirts, and roses
on her bodice, roses in her cap, roses in her cheeks,--aye, and roses,
worth the gathering too, on her lips, for that matter. She had still a
bright black eye, and jet black hair; was comely, dimpled, plump, and
tight as a gooseberry; and though she was not exactly what the world
calls young, you may make an affidavit, on trust, before any mayor or
magistrate in Christendom, that there are a great many young ladies in
the world (blessings on them one and all!) whom you wouldn’t like half
as well, or admire half as much, as the beaming hostess of the Blue
Dragon.

As this fair matron sat beside the fire, she glanced occasionally with
all the pride of ownership, about the room; which was a large apartment,
such as one may see in country places, with a low roof and a sunken
flooring, all downhill from the door, and a descent of two steps on
the inside so exquisitely unexpected, that strangers, despite the
most elaborate cautioning, usually dived in head first, as into a
plunging-bath. It was none of your frivolous and preposterously bright
bedrooms, where nobody can close an eye with any kind of propriety or
decent regard to the association of ideas; but it was a good, dull,
leaden, drowsy place, where every article of furniture reminded you
that you came there to sleep, and that you were expected to go to sleep.
There was no wakeful reflection of the fire there, as in your modern
chambers, which upon the darkest nights have a watchful consciousness of
French polish; the old Spanish mahogany winked at it now and then, as
a dozing cat or dog might, nothing more. The very size and shape, and
hopeless immovability of the bedstead, and wardrobe, and in a minor
degree of even the chairs and tables, provoked sleep; they were plainly
apoplectic and disposed to snore. There were no staring portraits
to remonstrate with you for being lazy; no round-eyed birds upon the
curtains, disgustingly wide awake, and insufferably prying. The
thick neutral hangings, and the dark blinds, and the heavy heap
of bed-clothes, were all designed to hold in sleep, and act as
nonconductors to the day and getting up. Even the old stuffed fox upon
the top of the wardrobe was devoid of any spark of vigilance, for his
glass eye had fallen out, and he slumbered as he stood.

The wandering attention of the mistress of the Blue Dragon roved to
these things but twice or thrice, and then for but an instant at a time.
It soon deserted them, and even the distant bed with its strange burden,
for the young creature immediately before her, who, with her downcast
eyes intently fixed upon the fire, sat wrapped in silent meditation.

She was very young; apparently no more than seventeen; timid and
shrinking in her manner, and yet with a greater share of self possession
and control over her emotions than usually belongs to a far more
advanced period of female life. This she had abundantly shown, but now,
in her tending of the sick gentleman. She was short in stature; and her
figure was slight, as became her years; but all the charms of youth and
maidenhood set it off, and clustered on her gentle brow. Her face was
very pale, in part no doubt from recent agitation. Her dark brown hair,
disordered from the same cause, had fallen negligently from its bonds,
and hung upon her neck; for which instance of its waywardness no male
observer would have had the heart to blame it.

Her attire was that of a lady, but extremely plain; and in her manner,
even when she sat as still as she did then, there was an indefinable
something which appeared to be in kindred with her scrupulously
unpretending dress. She had sat, at first looking anxiously towards the
bed; but seeing that the patient remained quiet, and was busy with his
writing, she had softly moved her chair into its present place; partly,
as it seemed, from an instinctive consciousness that he desired to avoid
observation; and partly that she might, unseen by him, give some vent to
the natural feelings she had hitherto suppressed.

Of all this, and much more, the rosy landlady of the Blue Dragon took
as accurate note and observation as only woman can take of woman. And at
length she said, in a voice too low, she knew, to reach the bed:

‘You have seen the gentleman in this way before, miss? Is he used to
these attacks?’

‘I have seen him very ill before, but not so ill as he has been
tonight.’

‘What a Providence!’ said the landlady of the Dragon, ‘that you had the
prescriptions and the medicines with you, miss!’

‘They are intended for such an emergency. We never travel without them.’

‘Oh!’ thought the hostess, ‘then we are in the habit of travelling, and
of travelling together.’

She was so conscious of expressing this in her face, that meeting
the young lady’s eyes immediately afterwards, and being a very honest
hostess, she was rather confused.

‘The gentleman--your grandpapa’--she resumed, after a short pause,
‘being so bent on having no assistance, must terrify you very much,
miss?’

‘I have been very much alarmed to-night. He--he is not my grandfather.’

‘Father, I should have said,’ returned the hostess, sensible of having
made an awkward mistake.

‘Nor my father’ said the young lady. ‘Nor,’ she added, slightly smiling
with a quick perception of what the landlady was going to add, ‘Nor my
uncle. We are not related.’

‘Oh dear me!’ returned the landlady, still more embarrassed than before;
‘how could I be so very much mistaken; knowing, as anybody in their
proper senses might that when a gentleman is ill, he looks so much older
than he really is? That I should have called you “Miss,” too, ma’am!’
But when she had proceeded thus far, she glanced involuntarily at the
third finger of the young lady’s left hand, and faltered again; for
there was no ring upon it.

‘When I told you we were not related,’ said the other mildly, but not
without confusion on her own part, ‘I meant not in any way. Not even by
marriage. Did you call me, Martin?’

‘Call you?’ cried the old man, looking quickly up, and hurriedly drawing
beneath the coverlet the paper on which he had been writing. ‘No.’

She had moved a pace or two towards the bed, but stopped immediately,
and went no farther.

‘No,’ he repeated, with a petulant emphasis. ‘Why do you ask me? If I
had called you, what need for such a question?’

‘It was the creaking of the sign outside, sir, I dare say,’ observed the
landlady; a suggestion by the way (as she felt a moment after she had
made it), not at all complimentary to the voice of the old gentleman.

‘No matter what, ma’am,’ he rejoined: ‘it wasn’t I. Why how you stand
there, Mary, as if I had the plague! But they’re all afraid of me,’ he
added, leaning helplessly backward on his pillow; ‘even she! There is a
curse upon me. What else have I to look for?’

‘Oh dear, no. Oh no, I’m sure,’ said the good-tempered landlady, rising,
and going towards him. ‘Be of better cheer, sir. These are only sick
fancies.’

‘What are only sick fancies?’ he retorted. ‘What do you know about
fancies? Who told you about fancies? The old story! Fancies!’

‘Only see again there, how you take one up!’ said the mistress of the
Blue Dragon, with unimpaired good humour. ‘Dear heart alive, there is
no harm in the word, sir, if it is an old one. Folks in good health have
their fancies, too, and strange ones, every day.’

Harmless as this speech appeared to be, it acted on the traveller’s
distrust, like oil on fire. He raised his head up in the bed, and,
fixing on her two dark eyes whose brightness was exaggerated by the
paleness of his hollow cheeks, as they in turn, together with his
straggling locks of long grey hair, were rendered whiter by the tight
black velvet skullcap which he wore, he searched her face intently.

‘Ah! you begin too soon,’ he said, in so low a voice that he seemed to
be thinking it, rather than addressing her. ‘But you lose no time. You
do your errand, and you earn your fee. Now, who may be your client?’

The landlady looked in great astonishment at her whom he called Mary,
and finding no rejoinder in the drooping face, looked back again at him.
At first she had recoiled involuntarily, supposing him disordered in
his mind; but the slow composure of his manner, and the settled purpose
announced in his strong features, and gathering, most of all, about his
puckered mouth, forbade the supposition.

‘Come,’ he said, ‘tell me who is it? Being here, it is not very hard for
me to guess, you may suppose.’

‘Martin,’ interposed the young lady, laying her hand upon his arm;
‘reflect how short a time we have been in this house, and that even your
name is unknown here.’

‘Unless,’ he said, ‘you--’ He was evidently tempted to express a
suspicion of her having broken his confidence in favour of the landlady,
but either remembering her tender nursing, or being moved in some sort
by her face, he checked himself, and changing his uneasy posture in the
bed, was silent.

‘There!’ said Mrs Lupin; for in that name the Blue Dragon was licensed
to furnish entertainment, both to man and beast. ‘Now, you will be well
again, sir. You forgot, for the moment, that there were none but friends
here.’

‘Oh!’ cried the old man, moaning impatiently, as he tossed one restless
arm upon the coverlet; ‘why do you talk to me of friends! Can you or
anybody teach me to know who are my friends, and who my enemies?’

‘At least,’ urged Mrs Lupin, gently, ‘this young lady is your friend, I
am sure.’

‘She has no temptation to be otherwise,’ cried the old man, like one
whose hope and confidence were utterly exhausted. ‘I suppose she is.
Heaven knows. There, let me try to sleep. Leave the candle where it is.’

As they retired from the bed, he drew forth the writing which had
occupied him so long, and holding it in the flame of the taper burnt
it to ashes. That done, he extinguished the light, and turning his face
away with a heavy sigh, drew the coverlet about his head, and lay quite
still.

This destruction of the paper, both as being strangely inconsistent with
the labour he had devoted to it, and as involving considerable danger of
fire to the Dragon, occasioned Mrs Lupin not a little consternation. But
the young lady evincing no surprise, curiosity, or alarm, whispered her,
with many thanks for her solicitude and company, that she would remain
there some time longer; and that she begged her not to share her watch,
as she was well used to being alone, and would pass the time in reading.

Mrs Lupin had her full share and dividend of that large capital of
curiosity which is inherited by her sex, and at another time it might
have been difficult so to impress this hint upon her as to induce her to
take it. But now, in sheer wonder and amazement at these mysteries, she
withdrew at once, and repairing straightway to her own little parlour
below stairs, sat down in her easy-chair with unnatural composure.
At this very crisis, a step was heard in the entry, and Mr Pecksniff,
looking sweetly over the half-door of the bar, and into the vista of
snug privacy beyond, murmured:

‘Good evening, Mrs Lupin!’

‘Oh dear me, sir!’ she cried, advancing to receive him, ‘I am so very
glad you have come.’

‘And I am very glad I have come,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘if I can be of
service. I am very glad I have come. What is the matter, Mrs Lupin?’

‘A gentleman taken ill upon the road, has been so very bad upstairs,
sir,’ said the tearful hostess.

‘A gentleman taken ill upon the road, has been so very bad upstairs, has
he?’ repeated Mr Pecksniff. ‘Well, well!’

Now there was nothing that one may call decidedly original in this
remark, nor can it be exactly said to have contained any wise precept
theretofore unknown to mankind, or to have opened any hidden source of
consolation; but Mr Pecksniff’s manner was so bland, and he nodded his
head so soothingly, and showed in everything such an affable sense of
his own excellence, that anybody would have been, as Mrs Lupin was,
comforted by the mere voice and presence of such a man; and, though he
had merely said ‘a verb must agree with its nominative case in number
and person, my good friend,’ or ‘eight times eight are sixty-four, my
worthy soul,’ must have felt deeply grateful to him for his humanity and
wisdom.

‘And how,’ asked Mr Pecksniff, drawing off his gloves and warming his
hands before the fire, as benevolently as if they were somebody else’s,
not his; ‘and how is he now?’

‘He is better, and quite tranquil,’ answered Mrs Lupin.

‘He is better, and quite tranquil,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Very well! Ve-ry
well!’

Here again, though the statement was Mrs Lupin’s and not Mr Pecksniff’s,
Mr Pecksniff made it his own and consoled her with it. It was not much
when Mrs Lupin said it, but it was a whole book when Mr Pecksniff said
it. ‘I observe,’ he seemed to say, ‘and through me, morality in general
remarks, that he is better and quite tranquil.’

‘There must be weighty matters on his mind, though,’ said the hostess,
shaking her head, ‘for he talks, sir, in the strangest way you ever
heard. He is far from easy in his thoughts, and wants some proper advice
from those whose goodness makes it worth his having.’

‘Then,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘he is the sort of customer for me.’ But
though he said this in the plainest language, he didn’t speak a word. He
only shook his head; disparagingly of himself too.

‘I am afraid, sir,’ continued the landlady, first looking round to
assure herself that there was nobody within hearing, and then looking
down upon the floor. ‘I am very much afraid, sir, that his conscience
is troubled by his not being related to--or--or even married to--a very
young lady--’

‘Mrs Lupin!’ said Mr Pecksniff, holding up his hand with something in
his manner as nearly approaching to severity as any expression of his,
mild being that he was, could ever do. ‘Person! young person?’

‘A very young person,’ said Mrs Lupin, curtseying and blushing; ‘--I beg
your pardon, sir, but I have been so hurried to-night, that I don’t know
what I say--who is with him now.’

‘Who is with him now,’ ruminated Mr Pecksniff, warming his back (as he
had warmed his hands) as if it were a widow’s back, or an orphan’s back,
or an enemy’s back, or a back that any less excellent man would have
suffered to be cold. ‘Oh dear me, dear me!’

‘At the same time I am bound to say, and I do say with all my heart,’
observed the hostess, earnestly, ‘that her looks and manner almost
disarm suspicion.’

‘Your suspicion, Mrs Lupin,’ said Mr Pecksniff gravely, ‘is very
natural.’

Touching which remark, let it be written down to their confusion, that
the enemies of this worthy man unblushingly maintained that he always
said of what was very bad, that it was very natural; and that he
unconsciously betrayed his own nature in doing so.

‘Your suspicion, Mrs Lupin,’ he repeated, ‘is very natural, and I have
no doubt correct. I will wait upon these travellers.’

With that he took off his great-coat, and having run his fingers through
his hair, thrust one hand gently in the bosom of his waist-coat and
meekly signed to her to lead the way.

‘Shall I knock?’ asked Mrs Lupin, when they reached the chamber door.

‘No,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘enter if you please.’

They went in on tiptoe; or rather the hostess took that precaution for
Mr Pecksniff always walked softly. The old gentleman was still asleep,
and his young companion still sat reading by the fire.

‘I am afraid,’ said Mr Pecksniff, pausing at the door, and giving
his head a melancholy roll, ‘I am afraid that this looks artful. I am
afraid, Mrs Lupin, do you know, that this looks very artful!’

As he finished this whisper, he advanced before the hostess; and at the
same time the young lady, hearing footsteps, rose. Mr Pecksniff glanced
at the volume she held, and whispered Mrs Lupin again; if possible, with
increased despondency.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, ‘it is a good book. I was fearful of that
beforehand. I am apprehensive that this is a very deep thing indeed!’

‘What gentleman is this?’ inquired the object of his virtuous doubts.

‘Hush! don’t trouble yourself, ma’am,’ said Mr Pecksniff, as the
landlady was about to answer. ‘This young’--in spite of himself he
hesitated when “person” rose to his lips, and substituted another word:
‘this young stranger, Mrs Lupin, will excuse me for replying briefly,
that I reside in this village; it may be in an influential manner,
however, undeserved; and that I have been summoned here by you. I am
here, as I am everywhere, I hope, in sympathy for the sick and sorry.’

With these impressive words, Mr Pecksniff passed over to the bedside,
where, after patting the counterpane once or twice in a very solemn
manner, as if by that means he gained a clear insight into the patient’s
disorder, he took his seat in a large arm-chair, and in an attitude of
some thoughtfulness and much comfort, waited for his waking. Whatever
objection the young lady urged to Mrs Lupin went no further, for nothing
more was said to Mr Pecksniff, and Mr Pecksniff said nothing more to
anybody else.

Full half an hour elapsed before the old man stirred, but at length he
turned himself in bed, and, though not yet awake, gave tokens that
his sleep was drawing to an end. By little and little he removed the
bed-clothes from about his head, and turned still more towards the side
where Mr Pecksniff sat. In course of time his eyes opened; and he
lay for a few moments as people newly roused sometimes will, gazing
indolently at his visitor, without any distinct consciousness of his
presence.

There was nothing remarkable in these proceedings, except the influence
they worked on Mr Pecksniff, which could hardly have been surpassed by
the most marvellous of natural phenomena. Gradually his hands became
tightly clasped upon the elbows of the chair, his eyes dilated with
surprise, his mouth opened, his hair stood more erect upon his forehead
than its custom was, until, at length, when the old man rose in bed,
and stared at him with scarcely less emotion than he showed himself, the
Pecksniff doubts were all resolved, and he exclaimed aloud:

‘You ARE Martin Chuzzlewit!’

His consternation of surprise was so genuine, that the old man, with all
the disposition that he clearly entertained to believe it assumed, was
convinced of its reality.

‘I am Martin Chuzzlewit,’ he said, bitterly: ‘and Martin Chuzzlewit
wishes you had been hanged, before you had come here to disturb him in
his sleep. Why, I dreamed of this fellow!’ he said, lying down again,
and turning away his face, ‘before I knew that he was near me!’

‘My good cousin--’ said Mr Pecksniff.

‘There! His very first words!’ cried the old man, shaking his grey head
to and fro upon the pillow, and throwing up his hands. ‘In his very
first words he asserts his relationship! I knew he would; they all do
it! Near or distant, blood or water, it’s all one. Ugh! What a calendar
of deceit, and lying, and false-witnessing, the sound of any word of
kindred opens before me!’

‘Pray do not be hasty, Mr Chuzzlewit,’ said Pecksniff, in a tone that
was at once in the sublimest degree compassionate and dispassionate;
for he had by this time recovered from his surprise, and was in full
possession of his virtuous self. ‘You will regret being hasty, I know
you will.’

‘You know!’ said Martin, contemptuously.

‘Yes,’ retorted Mr Pecksniff. ‘Aye, aye, Mr Chuzzlewit; and don’t
imagine that I mean to court or flatter you; for nothing is further from
my intention. Neither, sir, need you entertain the least misgiving that
I shall repeat that obnoxious word which has given you so much offence
already. Why should I? What do I expect or want from you? There is
nothing in your possession that I know of, Mr Chuzzlewit, which is much
to be coveted for the happiness it brings you.’

‘That’s true enough,’ muttered the old man.

‘Apart from that consideration,’ said Mr Pecksniff, watchful of the
effect he made, ‘it must be plain to you (I am sure) by this time, that
if I had wished to insinuate myself into your good opinion, I should
have been, of all things, careful not to address you as a relative;
knowing your humour, and being quite certain beforehand that I could not
have a worse letter of recommendation.’

Martin made not any verbal answer; but he as clearly implied though only
by a motion of his legs beneath the bed-clothes, that there was reason
in this, and that he could not dispute it, as if he had said as much in
good set terms.

‘No,’ said Mr Pecksniff, keeping his hand in his waistcoat as though
he were ready, on the shortest notice, to produce his heart for
Martin Chuzzlewit’s inspection, ‘I came here to offer my services to
a stranger. I make no offer of them to you, because I know you would
distrust me if I did. But lying on that bed, sir, I regard you as a
stranger, and I have just that amount of interest in you which I hope I
should feel in any stranger, circumstanced as you are. Beyond that, I am
quite as indifferent to you, Mr Chuzzlewit, as you are to me.’

Having said which, Mr Pecksniff threw himself back in the easy-chair;
so radiant with ingenuous honesty, that Mrs Lupin almost wondered not to
see a stained-glass Glory, such as the Saint wore in the church, shining
about his head.

A long pause succeeded. The old man, with increased restlessness,
changed his posture several times. Mrs Lupin and the young lady gazed
in silence at the counterpane. Mr Pecksniff toyed abstractedly with his
eye-glass, and kept his eyes shut, that he might ruminate the better.

‘Eh?’ he said at last, opening them suddenly, and looking towards the
bed. ‘I beg your pardon. I thought you spoke. Mrs Lupin,’ he continued,
slowly rising ‘I am not aware that I can be of any service to you here.
The gentleman is better, and you are as good a nurse as he can have.
Eh?’

This last note of interrogation bore reference to another change
of posture on the old man’s part, which brought his face towards Mr
Pecksniff for the first time since he had turned away from him.

‘If you desire to speak to me before I go, sir,’ continued that
gentleman, after another pause, ‘you may command my leisure; but I
must stipulate, in justice to myself, that you do so as to a stranger,
strictly as to a stranger.’

Now if Mr Pecksniff knew, from anything Martin Chuzzlewit had expressed
in gestures, that he wanted to speak to him, he could only have found it
out on some such principle as prevails in melodramas, and in virtue of
which the elderly farmer with the comic son always knows what the dumb
girl means when she takes refuge in his garden, and relates her personal
memoirs in incomprehensible pantomime. But without stopping to make any
inquiry on this point, Martin Chuzzlewit signed to his young companion
to withdraw, which she immediately did, along with the landlady leaving
him and Mr Pecksniff alone together. For some time they looked at each
other in silence; or rather the old man looked at Mr Pecksniff, and Mr
Pecksniff again closing his eyes on all outward objects, took an inward
survey of his own breast. That it amply repaid him for his trouble,
and afforded a delicious and enchanting prospect, was clear from the
expression of his face.

‘You wish me to speak to you as to a total stranger,’ said the old man,
‘do you?’

Mr Pecksniff replied, by a shrug of his shoulders and an apparent
turning round of his eyes in their sockets before he opened them, that
he was still reduced to the necessity of entertaining that desire.

‘You shall be gratified,’ said Martin. ‘Sir, I am a rich man. Not so
rich as some suppose, perhaps, but yet wealthy. I am not a miser sir,
though even that charge is made against me, as I hear, and currently
believed. I have no pleasure in hoarding. I have no pleasure in the
possession of money, The devil that we call by that name can give me
nothing but unhappiness.’

It would be no description of Mr Pecksniff’s gentleness of manner to
adopt the common parlance, and say that he looked at this moment as if
butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. He rather looked as if any quantity
of butter might have been made out of him, by churning the milk of human
kindness, as it spouted upwards from his heart.

‘For the same reason that I am not a hoarder of money,’ said the old
man, ‘I am not lavish of it. Some people find their gratification in
storing it up; and others theirs in parting with it; but I have no
gratification connected with the thing. Pain and bitterness are the only
goods it ever could procure for me. I hate it. It is a spectre walking
before me through the world, and making every social pleasure hideous.’

A thought arose in Pecksniff’s mind, which must have instantly mounted
to his face, or Martin Chuzzlewit would not have resumed as quickly and
as sternly as he did:

‘You would advise me for my peace of mind, to get rid of this source of
misery, and transfer it to some one who could bear it better. Even you,
perhaps, would rid me of a burden under which I suffer so grievously.
But, kind stranger,’ said the old man, whose every feature darkened as
he spoke, ‘good Christian stranger, that is a main part of my trouble.
In other hands, I have known money do good; in other hands I have known
it triumphed in, and boasted of with reason, as the master-key to all
the brazen gates that close upon the paths to worldly honour,
fortune, and enjoyment. To what man or woman; to what worthy, honest,
incorruptible creature; shall I confide such a talisman, either now
or when I die? Do you know any such person? YOUR virtues are of course
inestimable, but can you tell me of any other living creature who will
bear the test of contact with myself?’

‘Of contact with yourself, sir?’ echoed Mr Pecksniff.

‘Aye,’ returned the old man, ‘the test of contact with me--with me. You
have heard of him whose misery (the gratification of his own foolish
wish) was, that he turned every thing he touched into gold. The curse
of my existence, and the realisation of my own mad desire is that by the
golden standard which I bear about me, I am doomed to try the metal of
all other men, and find it false and hollow.’

Mr Pecksniff shook his head, and said, ‘You think so.’

‘Oh yes,’ cried the old man, ‘I think so! and in your telling me “I
think so,” I recognize the true unworldly ring of YOUR metal. I tell
you, man,’ he added, with increasing bitterness, ‘that I have gone, a
rich man, among people of all grades and kinds; relatives, friends, and
strangers; among people in whom, when I was poor, I had confidence, and
justly, for they never once deceived me then, or, to me, wronged each
other. But I have never found one nature, no, not one, in which, being
wealthy and alone, I was not forced to detect the latent corruption that
lay hid within it waiting for such as I to bring it forth. Treachery,
deceit, and low design; hatred of competitors, real or fancied, for my
favour; meanness, falsehood, baseness, and servility; or,’ and here
he looked closely in his cousin’s eyes, ‘or an assumption of honest
independence, almost worse than all; these are the beauties which my
wealth has brought to light. Brother against brother, child against
parent, friends treading on the faces of friends, this is the social
company by whom my way has been attended. There are stories told--they
may be true or false--of rich men who, in the garb of poverty, have
found out virtue and rewarded it. They were dolts and idiots for their
pains. They should have made the search in their own characters. They
should have shown themselves fit objects to be robbed and preyed upon
and plotted against and adulated by any knaves, who, but for joy, would
have spat upon their coffins when they died their dupes; and then their
search would have ended as mine has done, and they would be what I am.’

Mr Pecksniff, not at all knowing what it might be best to say in the
momentary pause which ensued upon these remarks, made an elaborate
demonstration of intending to deliver something very oracular indeed;
trusting to the certainty of the old man interrupting him, before he
should utter a word. Nor was he mistaken, for Martin Chuzzlewit having
taken breath, went on to say:

‘Hear me to an end; judge what profit you are like to gain from any
repetition of this visit; and leave me. I have so corrupted and changed
the nature of all those who have ever attended on me, by breeding
avaricious plots and hopes within them; I have engendered such domestic
strife and discord, by tarrying even with members of my own family; I
have been such a lighted torch in peaceful homes, kindling up all the
inflammable gases and vapours in their moral atmosphere, which, but for
me, might have proved harmless to the end, that I have, I may say, fled
from all who knew me, and taking refuge in secret places have lived, of
late, the life of one who is hunted. The young girl whom you just now
saw--what! your eye lightens when I talk of her! You hate her already,
do you?’

‘Upon my word, sir!’ said Mr Pecksniff, laying his hand upon his breast,
and dropping his eyelids.

‘I forgot,’ cried the old man, looking at him with a keenness which the
other seemed to feel, although he did not raise his eyes so as to see
it. ‘I ask your pardon. I forgot you were a stranger. For the moment
you reminded me of one Pecksniff, a cousin of mine. As I was saying--the
young girl whom you just now saw, is an orphan child, whom, with one
steady purpose, I have bred and educated, or, if you prefer the word,
adopted. For a year or more she has been my constant companion, and she
is my only one. I have taken, as she knows, a solemn oath never to
leave her sixpence when I die, but while I live I make her an annual
allowance; not extravagant in its amount and yet not stinted. There is
a compact between us that no term of affectionate cajolery shall ever be
addressed by either to the other, but that she shall call me always by
my Christian name; I her, by hers. She is bound to me in life by ties
of interest, and losing by my death, and having no expectation
disappointed, will mourn it, perhaps; though for that I care little.
This is the only kind of friend I have or will have. Judge from such
premises what a profitable hour you have spent in coming here, and leave
me, to return no more.’

With these words, the old man fell slowly back upon his pillow. Mr
Pecksniff as slowly rose, and, with a prefatory hem, began as follows:

‘Mr Chuzzlewit.’

‘There. Go!’ interposed the other. ‘Enough of this. I am weary of you.’

‘I am sorry for that, sir,’ rejoined Mr Pecksniff, ‘because I have a
duty to discharge, from which, depend upon it, I shall not shrink. No,
sir, I shall not shrink.’

It is a lamentable fact, that as Mr Pecksniff stood erect beside the
bed, in all the dignity of Goodness, and addressed him thus, the old man
cast an angry glance towards the candlestick, as if he were possessed
by a strong inclination to launch it at his cousin’s head. But he
constrained himself, and pointing with his finger to the door, informed
him that his road lay there.

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Pecksniff; ‘I am aware of that. I am going.
But before I go, I crave your leave to speak, and more than that, Mr
Chuzzlewit, I must and will--yes indeed, I repeat it, must and will--be
heard. I am not surprised, sir, at anything you have told me tonight.
It is natural, very natural, and the greater part of it was known to
me before. I will not say,’ continued Mr Pecksniff, drawing out his
pocket-handkerchief, and winking with both eyes at once, as it were,
against his will, ‘I will not say that you are mistaken in me. While
you are in your present mood I would not say so for the world. I almost
wish, indeed, that I had a different nature, that I might repress even
this slight confession of weakness; which I cannot disguise from you;
which I feel is humiliating; but which you will have the goodness to
excuse. We will say, if you please,’ added Mr Pecksniff, with great
tenderness of manner, ‘that it arises from a cold in the head, or is
attributable to snuff, or smelling-salts, or onions, or anything but the
real cause.’

Here he paused for an instant, and concealed his face behind his
pocket-handkerchief. Then, smiling faintly, and holding the bed
furniture with one hand, he resumed:

‘But, Mr Chuzzlewit, while I am forgetful of myself, I owe it to myself,
and to my character--aye, sir, and I HAVE a character which is very dear
to me, and will be the best inheritance of my two daughters--to tell
you, on behalf of another, that your conduct is wrong, unnatural,
indefensible, monstrous. And I tell you, sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff,
towering on tiptoe among the curtains, as if he were literally rising
above all worldly considerations, and were fain to hold on tight, to
keep himself from darting skyward like a rocket, ‘I tell you without
fear or favour, that it will not do for you to be unmindful of your
grandson, young Martin, who has the strongest natural claim upon you.
It will not do, sir,’ repeated Mr Pecksniff, shaking his head. ‘You may
think it will do, but it won’t. You must provide for that young man;
you shall provide for him; you WILL provide for him. I believe,’ said Mr
Pecksniff, glancing at the pen-and-ink, ‘that in secret you have already
done so. Bless you for doing so. Bless you for doing right, sir. Bless
you for hating me. And good night!’

So saying, Mr Pecksniff waved his right hand with much solemnity, and
once more inserting it in his waistcoat, departed. There was emotion in
his manner, but his step was firm. Subject to human weaknesses, he was
upheld by conscience.

Martin lay for some time, with an expression on his face of silent
wonder, not unmixed with rage; at length he muttered in a whisper:

‘What does this mean? Can the false-hearted boy have chosen such a
tool as yonder fellow who has just gone out? Why not! He has conspired
against me, like the rest, and they are but birds of one feather. A new
plot; a new plot! Oh self, self, self! At every turn nothing but self!’

He fell to trifling, as he ceased to speak, with the ashes of the burnt
paper in the candlestick. He did so, at first, in pure abstraction, but
they presently became the subject of his thoughts.

‘Another will made and destroyed,’ he said, ‘nothing determined on,
nothing done, and I might have died to-night! I plainly see to what foul
uses all this money will be put at last,’ he cried, almost writhing in
the bed; ‘after filling me with cares and miseries all my life, it will
perpetuate discord and bad passions when I am dead. So it always is.
What lawsuits grow out of the graves of rich men, every day; sowing
perjury, hatred, and lies among near kindred, where there should be
nothing but love! Heaven help us, we have much to answer for! Oh self,
self, self! Every man for himself, and no creature for me!’

Universal self! Was there nothing of its shadow in these reflections,
and in the history of Martin Chuzzlewit, on his own showing?



CHAPTER FOUR

FROM WHICH IT WILL APPEAR THAT IF UNION BE STRENGTH, AND FAMILY
AFFECTION BE PLEASANT TO CONTEMPLATE, THE CHUZZLEWITS WERE THE STRONGEST
AND MOST AGREEABLE FAMILY IN THE WORLD


That worthy man Mr Pecksniff having taken leave of his cousin in the
solemn terms recited in the last chapter, withdrew to his own home, and
remained there three whole days; not so much as going out for a walk
beyond the boundaries of his own garden, lest he should be hastily
summoned to the bedside of his penitent and remorseful relative,
whom, in his ample benevolence, he had made up his mind to forgive
unconditionally, and to love on any terms. But such was the obstinacy
and such the bitter nature of that stern old man, that no repentant
summons came; and the fourth day found Mr Pecksniff apparently much
farther from his Christian object than the first.

During the whole of this interval, he haunted the Dragon at all times
and seasons in the day and night, and, returning good for evil evinced
the deepest solicitude in the progress of the obdurate invalid, in so
much that Mrs Lupin was fairly melted by his disinterested anxiety (for
he often particularly required her to take notice that he would do the
same by any stranger or pauper in the like condition), and shed many
tears of admiration and delight.

Meantime, old Martin Chuzzlewit remained shut up in his own chamber, and
saw no person but his young companion, saving the hostess of the Blue
Dragon, who was, at certain times, admitted to his presence. So surely
as she came into the room, however, Martin feigned to fall asleep. It
was only when he and the young lady were alone, that he would utter a
word, even in answer to the simplest inquiry; though Mr Pecksniff
could make out, by hard listening at the door, that they two being left
together, he was talkative enough.

It happened on the fourth evening, that Mr Pecksniff walking, as usual,
into the bar of the Dragon and finding no Mrs Lupin there, went straight
upstairs; purposing, in the fervour of his affectionate zeal, to apply
his ear once more to the keyhole, and quiet his mind by assuring himself
that the hard-hearted patient was going on well. It happened that Mr
Pecksniff, coming softly upon the dark passage into which a spiral ray
of light usually darted through the same keyhole, was astonished to find
no such ray visible; and it happened that Mr Pecksniff, when he had felt
his way to the chamber-door, stooping hurriedly down to ascertain by
personal inspection whether the jealousy of the old man had caused this
keyhole to be stopped on the inside, brought his head into such violent
contact with another head that he could not help uttering in an audible
voice the monosyllable ‘Oh!’ which was, as it were, sharply unscrewed
and jerked out of him by very anguish. It happened then, and lastly,
that Mr Pecksniff found himself immediately collared by something which
smelt like several damp umbrellas, a barrel of beer, a cask of warm
brandy-and-water, and a small parlour-full of stale tobacco smoke,
mixed; and was straightway led downstairs into the bar from which he
had lately come, where he found himself standing opposite to, and in
the grasp of, a perfectly strange gentleman of still stranger appearance
who, with his disengaged hand, rubbed his own head very hard, and looked
at him, Pecksniff, with an evil countenance.

The gentleman was of that order of appearance which is currently termed
shabby-genteel, though in respect of his dress he can hardly be said to
have been in any extremities, as his fingers were a long way out of his
gloves, and the soles of his feet were at an inconvenient distance from
the upper leather of his boots. His nether garments were of a
bluish grey--violent in its colours once, but sobered now by age and
dinginess--and were so stretched and strained in a tough conflict
between his braces and his straps, that they appeared every moment in
danger of flying asunder at the knees. His coat, in colour blue and of
a military cut, was buttoned and frogged up to his chin. His cravat was,
in hue and pattern, like one of those mantles which hairdressers are
accustomed to wrap about their clients, during the progress of the
professional mysteries. His hat had arrived at such a pass that it would
have been hard to determine whether it was originally white or black.
But he wore a moustache--a shaggy moustache too; nothing in the meek and
merciful way, but quite in the fierce and scornful style; the regular
Satanic sort of thing--and he wore, besides, a vast quantity of
unbrushed hair. He was very dirty and very jaunty; very bold and very
mean; very swaggering and very slinking; very much like a man who might
have been something better, and unspeakably like a man who deserved to
be something worse.

‘You were eaves-dropping at that door, you vagabond!’ said this
gentleman.

Mr Pecksniff cast him off, as Saint George might have repudiated the
Dragon in that animal’s last moments, and said:

‘Where is Mrs Lupin, I wonder! can the good woman possibly be aware that
there is a person here who--’

‘Stay!’ said the gentleman. ‘Wait a bit. She DOES know. What then?’

‘What then, sir?’ cried Mr Pecksniff. ‘What then? Do you know, sir,
that I am the friend and relative of that sick gentleman? That I am his
protector, his guardian, his--’

‘Not his niece’s husband,’ interposed the stranger, ‘I’ll be sworn; for
he was there before you.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Mr Pecksniff, with indignant surprise. ‘What do
you tell me, sir?’

‘Wait a bit!’ cried the other, ‘Perhaps you are a cousin--the cousin who
lives in this place?’

‘I AM the cousin who lives in this place,’ replied the man of worth.

‘Your name is Pecksniff?’ said the gentleman.

‘It is.’

‘I am proud to know you, and I ask your pardon,’ said the gentleman,
touching his hat, and subsequently diving behind his cravat for a
shirt-collar, which however he did not succeed in bringing to the
surface. ‘You behold in me, sir, one who has also an interest in that
gentleman upstairs. Wait a bit.’

As he said this, he touched the tip of his high nose, by way of
intimation that he would let Mr Pecksniff into a secret presently; and
pulling off his hat, began to search inside the crown among a mass of
crumpled documents and small pieces of what may be called the bark of
broken cigars; whence he presently selected the cover of an old letter,
begrimed with dirt and redolent of tobacco.

‘Read that,’ he cried, giving it to Mr Pecksniff.

‘This is addressed to Chevy Slyme, Esquire,’ said that gentleman.

‘You know Chevy Slyme, Esquire, I believe?’ returned the stranger.

Mr Pecksniff shrugged his shoulders as though he would say ‘I know there
is such a person, and I am sorry for it.’

‘Very good,’ remarked the gentleman. ‘That is my interest and business
here.’ With that he made another dive for his shirt-collar and brought
up a string.

‘Now, this is very distressing, my friend,’ said Mr Pecksniff, shaking
his head and smiling composedly. ‘It is very distressing to me, to be
compelled to say that you are not the person you claim to be. I know Mr
Slyme, my friend; this will not do; honesty is the best policy you had
better not; you had indeed.’

‘Stop’ cried the gentleman, stretching forth his right arm, which was
so tightly wedged into his threadbare sleeve that it looked like a cloth
sausage. ‘Wait a bit!’

He paused to establish himself immediately in front of the fire with his
back towards it. Then gathering the skirts of his coat under his left
arm, and smoothing his moustache with his right thumb and forefinger, he
resumed:

‘I understand your mistake, and I am not offended. Why? Because it’s
complimentary. You suppose I would set myself up for Chevy Slyme.
Sir, if there is a man on earth whom a gentleman would feel proud and
honoured to be mistaken for, that man is my friend Slyme. For he is,
without an exception, the highest-minded, the most independent-spirited,
most original, spiritual, classical, talented, the most thoroughly
Shakspearian, if not Miltonic, and at the same time the most
disgustingly-unappreciated dog I know. But, sir, I have not the vanity
to attempt to pass for Slyme. Any other man in the wide world, I am
equal to; but Slyme is, I frankly confess, a great many cuts above me.
Therefore you are wrong.’

‘I judged from this,’ said Mr Pecksniff, holding out the cover of the
letter.

‘No doubt you did,’ returned the gentleman. ‘But, Mr Pecksniff, the
whole thing resolves itself into an instance of the peculiarities
of genius. Every man of true genius has his peculiarity. Sir, the
peculiarity of my friend Slyme is, that he is always waiting round the
corner. He is perpetually round the corner, sir. He is round the corner
at this instant. Now,’ said the gentleman, shaking his forefinger before
his nose, and planting his legs wider apart as he looked attentively in
Mr Pecksniff’s face, ‘that is a remarkably curious and interesting trait
in Mr Slyme’s character; and whenever Slyme’s life comes to be written,
that trait must be thoroughly worked out by his biographer or society
will not be satisfied. Observe me, society will not be satisfied!’

Mr Pecksniff coughed.

‘Slyme’s biographer, sir, whoever he may be,’ resumed the gentleman,
‘must apply to me; or, if I am gone to that what’s-his-name from which
no thingumbob comes back, he must apply to my executors for leave to
search among my papers. I have taken a few notes in my poor way, of some
of that man’s proceedings--my adopted brother, sir,--which would amaze
you. He made use of an expression, sir, only on the fifteenth of last
month when he couldn’t meet a little bill and the other party wouldn’t
renew, which would have done honour to Napoleon Bonaparte in addressing
the French army.’

‘And pray,’ asked Mr Pecksniff, obviously not quite at his ease, ‘what
may be Mr Slyme’s business here, if I may be permitted to inquire, who
am compelled by a regard for my own character to disavow all interest in
his proceedings?’

‘In the first place,’ returned the gentleman, ‘you will permit me to
say, that I object to that remark, and that I strongly and indignantly
protest against it on behalf of my friend Slyme. In the next place, you
will give me leave to introduce myself. My name, sir, is Tigg. The name
of Montague Tigg will perhaps be familiar to you, in connection with the
most remarkable events of the Peninsular War?’

Mr Pecksniff gently shook his head.

‘No matter,’ said the gentleman. ‘That man was my father, and I bear his
name. I am consequently proud--proud as Lucifer. Excuse me one moment.
I desire my friend Slyme to be present at the remainder of this
conference.’

With this announcement he hurried away to the outer door of the Blue
Dragon, and almost immediately returned with a companion shorter than
himself, who was wrapped in an old blue camlet cloak with a lining of
faded scarlet. His sharp features being much pinched and nipped by long
waiting in the cold, and his straggling red whiskers and frowzy hair
being more than usually dishevelled from the same cause, he certainly
looked rather unwholesome and uncomfortable than Shakspearian or
Miltonic.

‘Now,’ said Mr Tigg, clapping one hand on the shoulder of his
prepossessing friend, and calling Mr Pecksniff’s attention to him with
the other, ‘you two are related; and relations never did agree, and
never will; which is a wise dispensation and an inevitable thing, or
there would be none but family parties, and everybody in the world
would bore everybody else to death. If you were on good terms, I should
consider you a most confoundedly unnatural pair; but standing
towards each other as you do, I took upon you as a couple of devilish
deep-thoughted fellows, who may be reasoned with to any extent.’

Here Mr Chevy Slyme, whose great abilities seemed one and all to point
towards the sneaking quarter of the moral compass, nudged his friend
stealthily with his elbow, and whispered in his ear.

‘Chiv,’ said Mr Tigg aloud, in the high tone of one who was not to
be tampered with. ‘I shall come to that presently. I act upon my own
responsibility, or not at all. To the extent of such a trifling loan
as a crownpiece to a man of your talents, I look upon Mr Pecksniff
as certain;’ and seeing at this juncture that the expression of Mr
Pecksniff’s face by no means betokened that he shared this certainty, Mr
Tigg laid his finger on his nose again for that gentleman’s private
and especial behoof; calling upon him thereby to take notice that the
requisition of small loans was another instance of the peculiarities of
genius as developed in his friend Slyme; that he, Tigg, winked at the
same, because of the strong metaphysical interest which these weaknesses
possessed; and that in reference to his own personal advocacy of such
small advances, he merely consulted the humour of his friend, without
the least regard to his own advantage or necessities.

‘Oh, Chiv, Chiv!’ added Mr Tigg, surveying his adopted brother with an
air of profound contemplation after dismissing this piece of pantomime.
‘You are, upon my life, a strange instance of the little frailties that
beset a mighty mind. If there had never been a telescope in the world,
I should have been quite certain from my observation of you, Chiv,
that there were spots on the sun! I wish I may die, if this isn’t the
queerest state of existence that we find ourselves forced into without
knowing why or wherefore, Mr Pecksniff! Well, never mind! Moralise as we
will, the world goes on. As Hamlet says, Hercules may lay about him with
his club in every possible direction, but he can’t prevent the cats from
making a most intolerable row on the roofs of the houses, or the
dogs from being shot in the hot weather if they run about the streets
unmuzzled. Life’s a riddle; a most infernally hard riddle to guess, Mr
Pecksniff. My own opinions, that like that celebrated conundrum, “Why’s
a man in jail like a man out of jail?” there’s no answer to it. Upon my
soul and body, it’s the queerest sort of thing altogether--but there’s
no use in talking about it. Ha! Ha!’

With which consolatory deduction from the gloomy premises recited,
Mr Tigg roused himself by a great effort, and proceeded in his former
strain.

‘Now I’ll tell you what it is. I’m a most confoundedly soft-hearted
kind of fellow in my way, and I cannot stand by, and see you two blades
cutting each other’s throats when there’s nothing to be got by it. Mr
Pecksniff, you’re the cousin of the testator upstairs and we’re the
nephew--I say we, meaning Chiv. Perhaps in all essential points you are
more nearly related to him than we are. Very good. If so, so be it. But
you can’t get at him, neither can we. I give you my brightest word of
honour, sir, that I’ve been looking through that keyhole with short
intervals of rest, ever since nine o’clock this morning, in expectation
of receiving an answer to one of the most moderate and gentlemanly
applications for a little temporary assistance--only fifteen pounds, and
MY security--that the mind of man can conceive. In the meantime, sir, he
is perpetually closeted with, and pouring his whole confidence into the
bosom of, a stranger. Now I say decisively with regard to this state of
circumstances, that it won’t do; that it won’t act; that it can’t be;
and that it must not be suffered to continue.’

‘Every man,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘has a right, an undoubted right, (which
I, for one, would not call in question for any earthly consideration; oh
no!) to regulate his own proceedings by his own likings and dislikings,
supposing they are not immoral and not irreligious. I may feel in my
own breast, that Mr Chuzzlewit does not regard--me, for instance; say
me--with exactly that amount of Christian love which should subsist
between us. I may feel grieved and hurt at the circumstance; still I
may not rush to the conclusion that Mr Chuzzlewit is wholly without a
justification in all his coldnesses. Heaven forbid! Besides; how, Mr
Tigg,’ continued Pecksniff even more gravely and impressively than he
had spoken yet, ‘how could Mr Chuzzlewit be prevented from having these
peculiar and most extraordinary confidences of which you speak; the
existence of which I must admit; and which I cannot but deplore--for
his sake? Consider, my good sir--’ and here Mr Pecksniff eyed him
wistfully--‘how very much at random you are talking.’

‘Why, as to that,’ rejoined Tigg, ‘it certainly is a difficult
question.’

‘Undoubtedly it is a difficult question,’ Mr Pecksniff answered. As he
spoke he drew himself aloft, and seemed to grow more mindful, suddenly,
of the moral gulf between himself and the creature he addressed.
‘Undoubtedly it is a very difficult question. And I am far from feeling
sure that it is a question any one is authorized to discuss. Good
evening to you.’

‘You don’t know that the Spottletoes are here, I suppose?’ said Mr Tigg.

‘What do you mean, sir? what Spottletoes?’ asked Pecksniff, stopping
abruptly on his way to the door.

‘Mr and Mrs Spottletoe,’ said Chevy Slyme, Esquire, speaking aloud for
the first time, and speaking very sulkily; shambling with his legs the
while. ‘Spottletoe married my father’s brother’s child, didn’t he?
And Mrs Spottletoe is Chuzzlewit’s own niece, isn’t she? She was his
favourite once. You may well ask what Spottletoes.’

‘Now upon my sacred word!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, looking upwards. ‘This is
dreadful. The rapacity of these people is absolutely frightful!’

‘It’s not only the Spottletoes either, Tigg,’ said Slyme, looking at
that gentleman and speaking at Mr Pecksniff. ‘Anthony Chuzzlewit and his
son have got wind of it, and have come down this afternoon. I saw ‘em
not five minutes ago, when I was waiting round the corner.’

‘Oh, Mammon, Mammon!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, smiting his forehead.

‘So there,’ said Slyme, regardless of the interruption, ‘are his brother
and another nephew for you, already.’

‘This is the whole thing, sir,’ said Mr Tigg; ‘this is the point and
purpose at which I was gradually arriving when my friend Slyme here,
with six words, hit it full. Mr Pecksniff, now that your cousin (and
Chiv’s uncle) has turned up, some steps must be taken to prevent his
disappearing again; and, if possible, to counteract the influence which
is exercised over him now, by this designing favourite. Everybody who
is interested feels it, sir. The whole family is pouring down to this
place. The time has come when individual jealousies and interests must
be forgotten for a time, sir, and union must be made against the
common enemy. When the common enemy is routed, you will all set up for
yourselves again; every lady and gentleman who has a part in the game,
will go in on their own account and bowl away, to the best of their
ability, at the testator’s wicket, and nobody will be in a worse
position than before. Think of it. Don’t commit yourself now. You’ll
find us at the Half Moon and Seven Stars in this village, at any time,
and open to any reasonable proposition. Hem! Chiv, my dear fellow, go
out and see what sort of a night it is.’

Mr Slyme lost no time in disappearing, and it is to be presumed in going
round the corner. Mr Tigg, planting his legs as wide apart as he could
be reasonably expected by the most sanguine man to keep them, shook his
head at Mr Pecksniff and smiled.

‘We must not be too hard,’ he said, ‘upon the little eccentricities of
our friend Slyme. You saw him whisper me?’

Mr Pecksniff had seen him.

‘You heard my answer, I think?’

Mr Pecksniff had heard it.

‘Five shillings, eh?’ said Mr Tigg, thoughtfully. ‘Ah! what an
extraordinary fellow! Very moderate too!’

Mr Pecksniff made no answer.

‘Five shillings!’ pursued Mr Tigg, musing; ‘and to be punctually repaid
next week; that’s the best of it. You heard that?’

Mr Pecksniff had not heard that.

‘No! You surprise me!’ cried Tigg. ‘That’s the cream of the thing sir. I
never knew that man fail to redeem a promise, in my life. You’re not in
want of change, are you?’

‘No,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘thank you. Not at all.’

‘Just so,’ returned Mr Tigg. ‘If you had been, I’d have got it for you.’
With that he began to whistle; but a dozen seconds had not elapsed when
he stopped short, and looking earnestly at Mr Pecksniff, said:

‘Perhaps you’d rather not lend Slyme five shillings?’

‘I would much rather not,’ Mr Pecksniff rejoined.

‘Egad!’ cried Tigg, gravely nodding his head as if some ground of
objection occurred to him at that moment for the first time, ‘it’s
very possible you may be right. Would you entertain the same sort of
objection to lending me five shillings now?’

‘Yes, I couldn’t do it, indeed,’ said Mr Pecksniff.

‘Not even half-a-crown, perhaps?’ urged Mr Tigg.

‘Not even half-a-crown.’

‘Why, then we come,’ said Mr Tigg, ‘to the ridiculously small amount of
eighteen pence. Ha! ha!’

‘And that,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘would be equally objectionable.’

On receipt of this assurance, Mr Tigg shook him heartily by both hands,
protesting with much earnestness, that he was one of the most consistent
and remarkable men he had ever met, and that he desired the honour
of his better acquaintance. He moreover observed that there were many
little characteristics about his friend Slyme, of which he could by no
means, as a man of strict honour, approve; but that he was prepared to
forgive him all these slight drawbacks, and much more, in consideration
of the great pleasure he himself had that day enjoyed in his social
intercourse with Mr Pecksniff, which had given him a far higher and more
enduring delight than the successful negotiation of any small loan on
the part of his friend could possibly have imparted. With which remarks
he would beg leave, he said, to wish Mr Pecksniff a very good evening.
And so he took himself off; as little abashed by his recent failure as
any gentleman would desire to be.

The meditations of Mr Pecksniff that evening at the bar of the Dragon,
and that night in his own house, were very serious and grave indeed; the
more especially as the intelligence he had received from Messrs Tigg and
Slyme touching the arrival of other members of the family, were fully
confirmed on more particular inquiry. For the Spottletoes had actually
gone straight to the Dragon, where they were at that moment housed and
mounting guard, and where their appearance had occasioned such a vast
sensation that Mrs Lupin, scenting their errand before they had been
under her roof half an hour, carried the news herself with all possible
secrecy straight to Mr Pecksniff’s house; indeed it was her great
caution in doing so which occasioned her to miss that gentleman, who
entered at the front door of the Dragon just as she emerged from
the back one. Moreover, Mr Anthony Chuzzlewit and his son Jonas were
economically quartered at the Half Moon and Seven Stars, which was an
obscure ale-house; and by the very next coach there came posting to the
scene of action, so many other affectionate members of the family (who
quarrelled with each other, inside and out, all the way down, to the
utter distraction of the coachman), that in less than four-and-twenty
hours the scanty tavern accommodation was at a premium, and all the
private lodgings in the place, amounting to full four beds and sofa,
rose cent per cent in the market.

In a word, things came to that pass that nearly the whole family sat
down before the Blue Dragon, and formally invested it; and Martin
Chuzzlewit was in a state of siege. But he resisted bravely; refusing
to receive all letters, messages, and parcels; obstinately declining to
treat with anybody; and holding out no hope or promise of capitulation.
Meantime the family forces were perpetually encountering each other
in divers parts of the neighbourhood; and, as no one branch of the
Chuzzlewit tree had ever been known to agree with another within the
memory of man, there was such a skirmishing, and flouting, and snapping
off of heads, in the metaphorical sense of that expression; such a
bandying of words and calling of names; such an upturning of noses and
wrinkling of brows; such a formal interment of good feelings and violent
resurrection of ancient grievances; as had never been known in those
quiet parts since the earliest record of their civilized existence.

At length, in utter despair and hopelessness, some few of the
belligerents began to speak to each other in only moderate terms of
mutual aggravation; and nearly all addressed themselves with a show of
tolerable decency to Mr Pecksniff, in recognition of his high character
and influential position. Thus, by little and little, they made common
cause of Martin Chuzzlewit’s obduracy, until it was agreed (if such a
word can be used in connection with the Chuzzlewits) that there should
be a general council and conference held at Mr Pecksniff’s house upon
a certain day at noon; which all members of the family who had brought
themselves within reach of the summons, were forthwith bidden and
invited, solemnly, to attend.

If ever Mr Pecksniff wore an apostolic look, he wore it on this
memorable day. If ever his unruffled smile proclaimed the words, ‘I am
a messenger of peace!’ that was its mission now. If ever man combined
within himself all the mild qualities of the lamb with a considerable
touch of the dove, and not a dash of the crocodile, or the least
possible suggestion of the very mildest seasoning of the serpent, that
man was he. And, oh, the two Miss Pecksniffs! Oh, the serene expression
on the face of Charity, which seemed to say, ‘I know that all my family
have injured me beyond the possibility of reparation, but I forgive
them, for it is my duty so to do!’ And, oh, the gay simplicity of Mercy;
so charming, innocent, and infant-like, that if she had gone out
walking by herself, and it had been a little earlier in the season, the
robin-redbreasts might have covered her with leaves against her will,
believing her to be one of the sweet children in the wood, come out of
it, and issuing forth once more to look for blackberries in the young
freshness of her heart! What words can paint the Pecksniffs in that
trying hour? Oh, none; for words have naughty company among them, and
the Pecksniffs were all goodness.

But when the company arrived! That was the time. When Mr Pecksniff,
rising from his seat at the table’s head, with a daughter on either
hand, received his guests in the best parlour and motioned them to
chairs, with eyes so overflowing and countenance so damp with gracious
perspiration, that he may be said to have been in a kind of moist
meekness! And the company; the jealous stony-hearted distrustful
company, who were all shut up in themselves, and had no faith in
anybody, and wouldn’t believe anything, and would no more allow
themselves to be softened or lulled asleep by the Pecksniffs than if
they had been so many hedgehogs or porcupines!

First, there was Mr Spottletoe, who was so bald and had such big
whiskers, that he seemed to have stopped his hair, by the sudden
application of some powerful remedy, in the very act of falling off his
head, and to have fastened it irrevocably on his face. Then there was
Mrs Spottletoe, who being much too slim for her years, and of a poetical
constitution, was accustomed to inform her more intimate friends that
the said whiskers were ‘the lodestar of her existence;’ and who could
now, by reason of her strong affection for her uncle Chuzzlewit, and the
shock it gave her to be suspected of testamentary designs upon him, do
nothing but cry--except moan. Then there were Anthony Chuzzlewit, and
his son Jonas; the face of the old man so sharpened by the wariness and
cunning of his life, that it seemed to cut him a passage through the
crowded room, as he edged away behind the remotest chairs; while the son
had so well profited by the precept and example of the father, that he
looked a year or two the elder of the twain, as they stood winking their
red eyes, side by side, and whispering to each other softly. Then there
was the widow of a deceased brother of Mr Martin Chuzzlewit, who being
almost supernaturally disagreeable, and having a dreary face and a bony
figure and a masculine voice, was, in right of these qualities, what is
commonly called a strong-minded woman; and who, if she could, would have
established her claim to the title, and have shown herself, mentally
speaking, a perfect Samson, by shutting up her brother-in-law in a
private madhouse, until he proved his complete sanity by loving her very
much. Beside her sat her spinster daughters, three in number, and of
gentlemanly deportment, who had so mortified themselves with tight
stays, that their tempers were reduced to something less than their
waists, and sharp lacing was expressed in their very noses. Then there
was a young gentleman, grandnephew of Mr Martin Chuzzlewit, very dark
and very hairy, and apparently born for no particular purpose but to
save looking-glasses the trouble of reflecting more than just the first
idea and sketchy notion of a face, which had never been carried out.
Then there was a solitary female cousin who was remarkable for nothing
but being very deaf, and living by herself, and always having the
toothache. Then there was George Chuzzlewit, a gay bachelor cousin,
who claimed to be young but had been younger, and was inclined to
corpulency, and rather overfed himself; to that extent, indeed, that his
eyes were strained in their sockets, as if with constant surprise; and
he had such an obvious disposition to pimples, that the bright spots on
his cravat, the rich pattern on his waistcoat, and even his glittering
trinkets, seemed to have broken out upon him, and not to have come into
existence comfortably. Last of all there were present Mr Chevy Slyme and
his friend Tigg. And it is worthy of remark, that although each person
present disliked the other, mainly because he or she DID belong to the
family, they one and all concurred in hating Mr Tigg because he didn’t.

Such was the pleasant little family circle now assembled in Mr
Pecksniff’s best parlour, agreeably prepared to fall foul of Mr
Pecksniff or anybody else who might venture to say anything whatever
upon any subject.

‘This,’ said Mr Pecksniff, rising and looking round upon them with
folded hands, ‘does me good. It does my daughters good. We thank you for
assembling here. We are grateful to you with our whole hearts. It is a
blessed distinction that you have conferred upon us, and believe me’--it
is impossible to conceive how he smiled here--‘we shall not easily
forget it.’

‘I am sorry to interrupt you, Pecksniff,’ remarked Mr Spottletoe, with
his whiskers in a very portentous state; ‘but you are assuming too much
to yourself, sir. Who do you imagine has it in contemplation to confer a
distinction upon YOU, sir?’

A general murmur echoed this inquiry, and applauded it.

‘If you are about to pursue the course with which you have begun, sir,’
pursued Mr Spottletoe in a great heat, and giving a violent rap on
the table with his knuckles, ‘the sooner you desist, and this assembly
separates, the better. I am no stranger, sir, to your preposterous
desire to be regarded as the head of this family, but I can tell YOU,
sir--’

Oh yes, indeed! HE tell. HE! What? He was the head, was he? From the
strong-minded woman downwards everybody fell, that instant, upon Mr
Spottletoe, who after vainly attempting to be heard in silence was
fain to sit down again, folding his arms and shaking his head most
wrathfully, and giving Mrs Spottletoe to understand in dumb show, that
that scoundrel Pecksniff might go on for the present, but he would cut
in presently, and annihilate him.

‘I am not sorry,’ said Mr Pecksniff in resumption of his address, ‘I am
really not sorry that this little incident has happened. It is good to
feel that we are met here without disguise. It is good to know that we
have no reserve before each other, but are appearing freely in our own
characters.’

Here, the eldest daughter of the strong-minded woman rose a little way
from her seat, and trembling violently from head to foot, more as it
seemed with passion than timidity, expressed a general hope that some
people WOULD appear in their own characters, if it were only for such
a proceeding having the attraction of novelty to recommend it; and that
when they (meaning the some people before mentioned) talked about their
relations, they would be careful to observe who was present in company
at the time; otherwise it might come round to those relations’ ears, in
a way they little expected; and as to red noses (she observed) she
had yet to learn that a red nose was any disgrace, inasmuch as people
neither made nor coloured their own noses, but had that feature provided
for them without being first consulted; though even upon that branch of
the subject she had great doubts whether certain noses were redder than
other noses, or indeed half as red as some. This remark being received
with a shrill titter by the two sisters of the speaker, Miss Charity
Pecksniff begged with much politeness to be informed whether any of
those very low observations were levelled at her; and receiving no more
explanatory answer than was conveyed in the adage ‘Those the cap fits,
let them wear it,’ immediately commenced a somewhat acrimonious and
personal retort, wherein she was much comforted and abetted by her
sister Mercy, who laughed at the same with great heartiness; indeed
far more naturally than life. And it being quite impossible that any
difference of opinion can take place among women without every woman who
is within hearing taking active part in it, the strong-minded lady and
her two daughters, and Mrs Spottletoe, and the deaf cousin (who was
not at all disqualified from joining in the dispute by reason of being
perfectly unacquainted with its merits), one and all plunged into the
quarrel directly.

The two Miss Pecksniffs being a pretty good match for the three Miss
Chuzzlewits, and all five young ladies having, in the figurative
language of the day, a great amount of steam to dispose of, the
altercation would no doubt have been a long one but for the high valour
and prowess of the strong-minded woman, who, in right of her reputation
for powers of sarcasm, did so belabour and pummel Mrs Spottletoe with
taunting words that the poor lady, before the engagement was two minutes
old, had no refuge but in tears. These she shed so plentifully, and so
much to the agitation and grief of Mr Spottletoe, that that gentleman,
after holding his clenched fist close to Mr Pecksniff’s eyes, as if
it were some natural curiosity from the near inspection whereof he was
likely to derive high gratification and improvement, and after offering
(for no particular reason that anybody could discover) to kick Mr George
Chuzzlewit for, and in consideration of, the trifling sum of sixpence,
took his wife under his arm and indignantly withdrew. This diversion, by
distracting the attention of the combatants, put an end to the strife,
which, after breaking out afresh some twice or thrice in certain
inconsiderable spurts and dashes, died away in silence.

It was then that Mr Pecksniff once more rose from his chair. It was then
that the two Miss Pecksniffs composed themselves to look as if there
were no such beings--not to say present, but in the whole compass of the
world--as the three Miss Chuzzlewits; while the three Miss Chuzzlewits
became equally unconscious of the existence of the two Miss Pecksniffs.

‘It is to be lamented,’ said Mr Pecksniff, with a forgiving recollection
of Mr Spottletoe’s fist, ‘that our friend should have withdrawn himself
so very hastily, though we have cause for mutual congratulation even in
that, since we are assured that he is not distrustful of us in regard
to anything we may say or do while he is absent. Now, that is very
soothing, is it not?’

‘Pecksniff,’ said Anthony, who had been watching the whole party with
peculiar keenness from the first--‘don’t you be a hypocrite.’

‘A what, my good sir?’ demanded Mr Pecksniff.

‘A hypocrite.’

‘Charity, my dear,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘when I take my chamber
candlestick to-night, remind me to be more than usually particular in
praying for Mr Anthony Chuzzlewit; who has done me an injustice.’

This was said in a very bland voice, and aside, as being addressed to
his daughter’s private ear. With a cheerfulness of conscience, prompting
almost a sprightly demeanour, he then resumed:

‘All our thoughts centring in our very dear but unkind relative, and he
being as it were beyond our reach, we are met to-day, really as if we
were a funeral party, except--a blessed exception--that there is no body
in the house.’

The strong-minded lady was not at all sure that this was a blessed
exception. Quite the contrary.

‘Well, my dear madam!’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Be that as it may, here we
are; and being here, we are to consider whether it is possible by any
justifiable means--’

‘Why, you know as well as I,’ said the strong-minded lady, ‘that any
means are justifiable in such a case, don’t you?’

‘Very good, my dear madam, very good; whether it is possible by ANY
means, we will say by ANY means, to open the eyes of our valued
relative to his present infatuation. Whether it is possible to make
him acquainted by any means with the real character and purpose of that
young female whose strange, whose very strange position, in reference
to himself’--here Mr Pecksniff sunk his voice to an impressive
whisper--‘really casts a shadow of disgrace and shame upon this family;
and who, we know’--here he raised his voice again--‘else why is she his
companion? harbours the very basest designs upon his weakness and his
property.’

In their strong feeling on this point, they, who agreed in nothing else,
all concurred as one mind. Good Heaven, that she should harbour designs
upon his property! The strong-minded lady was for poison, her three
daughters were for Bridewell and bread-and-water, the cousin with
the toothache advocated Botany Bay, the two Miss Pecksniffs suggested
flogging. Nobody but Mr Tigg, who, notwithstanding his extreme
shabbiness, was still understood to be in some sort a lady’s man,
in right of his upper lip and his frogs, indicated a doubt of the
justifiable nature of these measures; and he only ogled the three Miss
Chuzzlewits with the least admixture of banter in his admiration, as
though he would observe, ‘You are positively down upon her to too great
an extent, my sweet creatures, upon my soul you are!’

‘Now,’ said Mr Pecksniff, crossing his two forefingers in a manner which
was at once conciliatory and argumentative; ‘I will not, upon the one
hand, go so far as to say that she deserves all the inflictions which
have been so very forcibly and hilariously suggested;’ one of his
ornamental sentences; ‘nor will I, upon the other, on any account
compromise my common understanding as a man, by making the assertion
that she does not. What I would observe is, that I think some practical
means might be devised of inducing our respected, shall I say our
revered--?’

‘No!’ interposed the strong-minded woman in a loud voice.

‘Then I will not,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘You are quite right, my
dear madam, and I appreciate and thank you for your discriminating
objection--our respected relative, to dispose himself to listen to the
promptings of nature, and not to the--’

‘Go on, Pa!’ cried Mercy.

‘Why, the truth is, my dear,’ said Mr Pecksniff, smiling upon his
assembled kindred, ‘that I am at a loss for a word. The name of those
fabulous animals (pagan, I regret to say) who used to sing in the water,
has quite escaped me.’

Mr George Chuzzlewit suggested ‘swans.’

‘No,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Not swans. Very like swans, too. Thank you.’

The nephew with the outline of a countenance, speaking for the first and
last time on that occasion, propounded ‘Oysters.’

‘No,’ said Mr Pecksniff, with his own peculiar urbanity, ‘nor oysters.
But by no means unlike oysters; a very excellent idea; thank you, my
dear sir, very much. Wait! Sirens. Dear me! sirens, of course. I think,
I say, that means might be devised of disposing our respected relative
to listen to the promptings of nature, and not to the siren-like
delusions of art. Now we must not lose sight of the fact that our
esteemed friend has a grandson, to whom he was, until lately, very much
attached, and whom I could have wished to see here to-day, for I have a
real and deep regard for him. A fine young man, a very fine young man!
I would submit to you, whether we might not remove Mr Chuzzlewit’s
distrust of us, and vindicate our own disinterestedness by--’

‘If Mr George Chuzzlewit has anything to say to ME,’ interposed the
strong-minded woman, sternly, ‘I beg him to speak out like a man; and
not to look at me and my daughters as if he could eat us.’

‘As to looking, I have heard it said, Mrs Ned,’ returned Mr George,
angrily, ‘that a cat is free to contemplate a monarch; and therefore
I hope I have some right, having been born a member of this family, to
look at a person who only came into it by marriage. As to eating, I
beg to say, whatever bitterness your jealousies and disappointed
expectations may suggest to you, that I am not a cannibal, ma’am.’

‘I don’t know that!’ cried the strong-minded woman.

‘At all events, if I was a cannibal,’ said Mr George Chuzzlewit, greatly
stimulated by this retort, ‘I think it would occur to me that a lady
who had outlived three husbands, and suffered so very little from their
loss, must be most uncommonly tough.’

The strong-minded woman immediately rose.

‘And I will further add,’ said Mr George, nodding his head violently at
every second syllable; ‘naming no names, and therefore hurting nobody
but those whose consciences tell them they are alluded to, that I think
it would be much more decent and becoming, if those who hooked and
crooked themselves into this family by getting on the blind side of some
of its members before marriage, and manslaughtering them afterwards by
crowing over them to that strong pitch that they were glad to die, would
refrain from acting the part of vultures in regard to other members of
this family who are living. I think it would be full as well, if not
better, if those individuals would keep at home, contenting themselves
with what they have got (luckily for them) already; instead of hovering
about, and thrusting their fingers into, a family pie, which they
flavour much more than enough, I can tell them, when they are fifty
miles away.’

‘I might have been prepared for this!’ cried the strong-minded woman,
looking about her with a disdainful smile as she moved towards the door,
followed by her three daughters. ‘Indeed I was fully prepared for it
from the first. What else could I expect in such an atmosphere as this!’

‘Don’t direct your halfpay-officers’ gaze at me, ma’am, if you please,’
interposed Miss Charity; ‘for I won’t bear it.’

This was a smart stab at a pension enjoyed by the strong-minded woman,
during her second widowhood and before her last coverture. It told
immensely.

‘I passed from the memory of a grateful country, you very miserable
minx,’ said Mrs Ned, ‘when I entered this family; and I feel now, though
I did not feel then, that it served me right, and that I lost my claim
upon the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland when I so degraded
myself. Now, my dears, if you’re quite ready, and have sufficiently
improved yourselves by taking to heart the genteel example of these two
young ladies, I think we’ll go. Mr Pecksniff, we are very much obliged
to you, really. We came to be entertained, and you have far surpassed
our utmost expectations, in the amusement you have provided for us.
Thank you. Good-bye!’

With such departing words, did this strong-minded female paralyse the
Pecksniffian energies; and so she swept out of the room, and out of
the house, attended by her daughters, who, as with one accord, elevated
their three noses in the air, and joined in a contemptuous titter.
As they passed the parlour window on the outside, they were seen to
counterfeit a perfect transport of delight among themselves; and
with this final blow and great discouragement for those within, they
vanished.

Before Mr Pecksniff or any of his remaining visitors could offer a
remark, another figure passed this window, coming, at a great rate in
the opposite direction; and immediately afterwards, Mr Spottletoe burst
into the chamber. Compared with his present state of heat, he had gone
out a man of snow or ice. His head distilled such oil upon his whiskers,
that they were rich and clogged with unctuous drops; his face was
violently inflamed, his limbs trembled; and he gasped and strove for
breath.

‘My good sir!’ cried Mr Pecksniff.

‘Oh yes!’ returned the other; ‘oh yes, certainly! Oh to be sure! Oh, of
course! You hear him? You hear him? all of you!’

‘What’s the matter?’ cried several voices.

‘Oh nothing!’ cried Spottletoe, still gasping. ‘Nothing at all! It’s of
no consequence! Ask him! HE’ll tell you!’

‘I do not understand our friend,’ said Mr Pecksniff, looking about him
in utter amazement. ‘I assure you that he is quite unintelligible to
me.’

‘Unintelligible, sir!’ cried the other. ‘Unintelligible! Do you mean
to say, sir, that you don’t know what has happened! That you haven’t
decoyed us here, and laid a plot and a plan against us! Will you venture
to say that you didn’t know Mr Chuzzlewit was going, sir, and that you
don’t know he’s gone, sir?’

‘Gone!’ was the general cry.

‘Gone,’ echoed Mr Spottletoe. ‘Gone while we were sitting here. Gone.
Nobody knows where he’s gone. Oh, of course not! Nobody knew he was
going. Oh, of course not! The landlady thought up to the very last
moment that they were merely going for a ride; she had no other
suspicion. Oh, of course not! She’s not this fellow’s creature. Oh, of
course not!’

Adding to these exclamations a kind of ironical howl, and gazing upon
the company for one brief instant afterwards, in a sudden silence, the
irritated gentleman started off again at the same tremendous pace, and
was seen no more.

It was in vain for Mr Pecksniff to assure them that this new and
opportune evasion of the family was at least as great a shock
and surprise to him as to anybody else. Of all the bullyings and
denunciations that were ever heaped on one unlucky head, none can
ever have exceeded in energy and heartiness those with which he was
complimented by each of his remaining relatives, singly, upon bidding
him farewell.

The moral position taken by Mr Tigg was something quite tremendous; and
the deaf cousin, who had the complicated aggravation of seeing all the
proceedings and hearing nothing but the catastrophe, actually scraped
her shoes upon the scraper, and afterwards distributed impressions of
them all over the top step, in token that she shook the dust from her
feet before quitting that dissembling and perfidious mansion.

Mr Pecksniff had, in short, but one comfort, and that was the knowledge
that all these his relations and friends had hated him to the very
utmost extent before; and that he, for his part, had not distributed
among them any more love than, with his ample capital in that respect,
he could comfortably afford to part with. This view of his affairs
yielded him great consolation; and the fact deserves to be noted, as
showing with what ease a good man may be consoled under circumstances of
failure and disappointment.



CHAPTER FIVE

CONTAINING A FULL ACCOUNT OF THE INSTALLATION OF MR PECKSNIFF’S NEW
PUPIL INTO THE BOSOM OF MR PECKSNIFF’S FAMILY. WITH ALL THE FESTIVITIES
HELD ON THAT OCCASION, AND THE GREAT ENJOYMENT OF MR PINCH


The best of architects and land surveyors kept a horse, in whom the
enemies already mentioned more than once in these pages pretended to
detect a fanciful resemblance to his master. Not in his outward
person, for he was a raw-boned, haggard horse, always on a much shorter
allowance of corn than Mr Pecksniff; but in his moral character,
wherein, said they, he was full of promise, but of no performance.
He was always in a manner, going to go, and never going. When at his
slowest rate of travelling he would sometimes lift up his legs so high,
and display such mighty action, that it was difficult to believe he was
doing less than fourteen miles an hour; and he was for ever so
perfectly satisfied with his own speed, and so little disconcerted by
opportunities of comparing himself with the fastest trotters, that the
illusion was the more difficult of resistance. He was a kind of animal
who infused into the breasts of strangers a lively sense of hope, and
possessed all those who knew him better with a grim despair. In what
respect, having these points of character, he might be fairly likened
to his master, that good man’s slanderers only can explain. But it is a
melancholy truth, and a deplorable instance of the uncharitableness of
the world, that they made the comparison.

In this horse, and the hooded vehicle, whatever its proper name might
be, to which he was usually harnessed--it was more like a gig with a
tumour than anything else--all Mr Pinch’s thoughts and wishes centred,
one bright frosty morning; for with this gallant equipage he was about
to drive to Salisbury alone, there to meet with the new pupil, and
thence to bring him home in triumph.

Blessings on thy simple heart, Tom Pinch, how proudly dost thou button
up that scanty coat, called by a sad misnomer, for these many years,
a ‘great’ one; and how thoroughly, as with thy cheerful voice thou
pleasantly adjurest Sam the hostler ‘not to let him go yet,’ dost thou
believe that quadruped desires to go, and would go if he might! Who
could repress a smile--of love for thee, Tom Pinch, and not in jest at
thy expense, for thou art poor enough already, Heaven knows--to think
that such a holiday as lies before thee should awaken that quick flow
and hurry of the spirits, in which thou settest down again, almost
untasted, on the kitchen window-sill, that great white mug (put by, by
thy own hands, last night, that breakfast might not hold thee late), and
layest yonder crust upon the seat beside thee, to be eaten on the road,
when thou art calmer in thy high rejoicing! Who, as thou drivest off, a
happy, man, and noddest with a grateful lovingness to Pecksniff in his
nightcap at his chamber-window, would not cry, ‘Heaven speed thee, Tom,
and send that thou wert going off for ever to some quiet home where thou
mightst live at peace, and sorrow should not touch thee!’

What better time for driving, riding, walking, moving through the air by
any means, than a fresh, frosty morning, when hope runs cheerily through
the veins with the brisk blood, and tingles in the frame from head to
foot! This was the glad commencement of a bracing day in early winter,
such as may put the languid summer season (speaking of it when it can’t
be had) to the blush, and shame the spring for being sometimes cold by
halves. The sheep-bells rang as clearly in the vigorous air, as if they
felt its wholesome influence like living creatures; the trees, in lieu
of leaves or blossoms, shed upon the ground a frosty rime that sparkled
as it fell, and might have been the dust of diamonds. So it was to Tom.
From cottage chimneys, smoke went streaming up high, high, as if the
earth had lost its grossness, being so fair, and must not be oppressed
by heavy vapour. The crust of ice on the else rippling brook was so
transparent, and so thin in texture, that the lively water might of its
own free will have stopped--in Tom’s glad mind it had--to look upon the
lovely morning. And lest the sun should break this charm too eagerly,
there moved between him and the ground, a mist like that which waits
upon the moon on summer nights--the very same to Tom--and wooed him to
dissolve it gently.

Tom Pinch went on; not fast, but with a sense of rapid motion, which did
just as well; and as he went, all kinds of things occurred to keep him
happy. Thus when he came within sight of the turnpike, and was--oh a
long way off!--he saw the tollman’s wife, who had that moment checked a
waggon, run back into the little house again like mad, to say (she knew)
that Mr Pinch was coming up. And she was right, for when he drew within
hail of the gate, forth rushed the tollman’s children, shrieking in tiny
chorus, ‘Mr Pinch!’ to Tom’s intense delight. The very tollman, though
an ugly chap in general, and one whom folks were rather shy of handling,
came out himself to take the toll, and give him rough good morning; and
that with all this, and a glimpse of the family breakfast on a little
round table before the fire, the crust Tom Pinch had brought away with
him acquired as rich a flavour as though it had been cut from a fairy
loaf.

But there was more than this. It was not only the married people and the
children who gave Tom Pinch a welcome as he passed. No, no. Sparkling
eyes and snowy breasts came hurriedly to many an upper casement as he
clattered by, and gave him back his greeting: not stinted either, but
sevenfold, good measure. They were all merry. They all laughed. And some
of the wickedest among them even kissed their hands as Tom looked back.
For who minded poor Mr Pinch? There was no harm in HIM.

And now the morning grew so fair, and all things were so wide awake and
gay, that the sun seeming to say--Tom had no doubt he said--‘I can’t
stand it any longer; I must have a look,’ streamed out in radiant
majesty. The mist, too shy and gentle for such lusty company, fled off,
quite scared, before it; and as it swept away, the hills and mounds and
distant pasture lands, teeming with placid sheep and noisy crows, came
out as bright as though they were unrolled bran new for the occasion. In
compliment to which discovery, the brook stood still no longer, but ran
briskly off to bear the tidings to the water-mill, three miles away.

Mr Pinch was jogging along, full of pleasant thoughts and cheerful
influences, when he saw, upon the path before him, going in the same
direction with himself, a traveller on foot, who walked with a light
quick step, and sang as he went--for certain in a very loud voice, but
not unmusically. He was a young fellow, of some five or six-and-twenty
perhaps, and was dressed in such a free and fly-away fashion, that the
long ends of his loose red neckcloth were streaming out behind him
quite as often as before; and the bunch of bright winter berries in the
buttonhole of his velveteen coat was as visible to Mr Pinch’s rearward
observation, as if he had worn that garment wrong side foremost. He
continued to sing with so much energy, that he did not hear the sound
of wheels until it was close behind him; when he turned a whimsical
face and a very merry pair of blue eyes on Mr Pinch, and checked himself
directly.

‘Why, Mark?’ said Tom Pinch, stopping. ‘Who’d have thought of seeing you
here? Well! this is surprising!’

Mark touched his hat, and said, with a very sudden decrease of vivacity,
that he was going to Salisbury.

‘And how spruce you are, too!’ said Mr Pinch, surveying him with great
pleasure. ‘Really, I didn’t think you were half such a tight-made
fellow, Mark!’

‘Thankee, Mr Pinch. Pretty well for that, I believe. It’s not my fault,
you know. With regard to being spruce, sir, that’s where it is, you
see.’ And here he looked particularly gloomy.

‘Where what is?’ Mr Pinch demanded.

‘Where the aggravation of it is. Any man may be in good spirits and good
temper when he’s well dressed. There an’t much credit in that. If I was
very ragged and very jolly, then I should begin to feel I had gained a
point, Mr Pinch.’

‘So you were singing just now, to bear up, as it were, against being
well dressed, eh, Mark?’ said Pinch.

‘Your conversation’s always equal to print, sir,’ rejoined Mark, with a
broad grin. ‘That was it.’

‘Well!’ cried Pinch, ‘you are the strangest young man, Mark, I ever knew
in my life. I always thought so; but now I am quite certain of it. I am
going to Salisbury, too. Will you get in? I shall be very glad of your
company.’

The young fellow made his acknowledgments and accepted the offer;
stepping into the carriage directly, and seating himself on the very
edge of the seat with his body half out of it, to express his being
there on sufferance, and by the politeness of Mr Pinch. As they went
along, the conversation proceeded after this manner.

‘I more than half believed, just now, seeing you so very smart,’ said
Pinch, ‘that you must be going to be married, Mark.’

‘Well, sir, I’ve thought of that, too,’ he replied. ‘There might be some
credit in being jolly with a wife, ‘specially if the children had the
measles and that, and was very fractious indeed. But I’m a’most afraid
to try it. I don’t see my way clear.’

‘You’re not very fond of anybody, perhaps?’ said Pinch.

‘Not particular, sir, I think.’

‘But the way would be, you know, Mark, according to your views of
things,’ said Mr Pinch, ‘to marry somebody you didn’t like, and who was
very disagreeable.’

‘So it would, sir; but that might be carrying out a principle a little
too far, mightn’t it?’

‘Perhaps it might,’ said Mr Pinch. At which they both laughed gayly.

‘Lord bless you, sir,’ said Mark, ‘you don’t half know me, though. I
don’t believe there ever was a man as could come out so strong under
circumstances that would make other men miserable, as I could, if I
could only get a chance. But I can’t get a chance. It’s my opinion
that nobody never will know half of what’s in me, unless something very
unexpected turns up. And I don’t see any prospect of that. I’m a-going
to leave the Dragon, sir.’

‘Going to leave the Dragon!’ cried Mr Pinch, looking at him with great
astonishment. ‘Why, Mark, you take my breath away!’

‘Yes, sir,’ he rejoined, looking straight before him and a long way off,
as men do sometimes when they cogitate profoundly. ‘What’s the use of my
stopping at the Dragon? It an’t at all the sort of place for ME. When
I left London (I’m a Kentish man by birth, though), and took that
situation here, I quite made up my mind that it was the dullest little
out-of-the-way corner in England, and that there would be some credit in
being jolly under such circumstances. But, Lord, there’s no dullness at
the Dragon! Skittles, cricket, quoits, nine-pins, comic songs, choruses,
company round the chimney corner every winter’s evening. Any man could
be jolly at the Dragon. There’s no credit in THAT.’

‘But if common report be true for once, Mark, as I think it is, being
able to confirm it by what I know myself,’ said Mr Pinch, ‘you are the
cause of half this merriment, and set it going.’

‘There may be something in that, too, sir,’ answered Mark. ‘But that’s
no consolation.’

‘Well!’ said Mr Pinch, after a short silence, his usually subdued tone
being even now more subdued than ever. ‘I can hardly think enough of
what you tell me. Why, what will become of Mrs Lupin, Mark?’

Mark looked more fixedly before him, and further off still, as he
answered that he didn’t suppose it would be much of an object to her.
There were plenty of smart young fellows as would be glad of the place.
He knew a dozen himself.

‘That’s probable enough,’ said Mr Pinch, ‘but I am not at all sure that
Mrs Lupin would be glad of them. Why, I always supposed that Mrs Lupin
and you would make a match of it, Mark; and so did every one, as far as
I know.’

‘I never,’ Mark replied, in some confusion, ‘said nothing as was in a
direct way courting-like to her, nor she to me, but I don’t know what I
mightn’t do one of these odd times, and what she mightn’t say in answer.
Well, sir, THAT wouldn’t suit.’

‘Not to be landlord of the Dragon, Mark?’ cried Mr Pinch.

‘No, sir, certainly not,’ returned the other, withdrawing his gaze from
the horizon, and looking at his fellow-traveller. ‘Why that would be the
ruin of a man like me. I go and sit down comfortably for life, and no
man never finds me out. What would be the credit of the landlord of the
Dragon’s being jolly? Why, he couldn’t help it, if he tried.’

‘Does Mrs Lupin know you are going to leave her?’ Mr Pinch inquired.

‘I haven’t broke it to her yet, sir, but I must. I’m looking out this
morning for something new and suitable,’ he said, nodding towards the
city.

‘What kind of thing now?’ Mr Pinch demanded.

‘I was thinking,’ Mark replied, ‘of something in the grave-digging
way.’

‘Good gracious, Mark?’ cried Mr Pinch.

‘It’s a good damp, wormy sort of business, sir,’ said Mark, shaking his
head argumentatively, ‘and there might be some credit in being jolly,
with one’s mind in that pursuit, unless grave-diggers is usually given
that way; which would be a drawback. You don’t happen to know how that
is in general, do you, sir?’

‘No,’ said Mr Pinch, ‘I don’t indeed. I never thought upon the subject.’

‘In case of that not turning out as well as one could wish, you know,’
said Mark, musing again, ‘there’s other businesses. Undertaking now.
That’s gloomy. There might be credit to be gained there. A broker’s man
in a poor neighbourhood wouldn’t be bad perhaps. A jailor sees a deal of
misery. A doctor’s man is in the very midst of murder. A bailiff’s an’t
a lively office nat’rally. Even a tax-gatherer must find his feelings
rather worked upon, at times. There’s lots of trades in which I should
have an opportunity, I think.’

Mr Pinch was so perfectly overwhelmed by these remarks that he could
do nothing but occasionally exchange a word or two on some indifferent
subject, and cast sidelong glances at the bright face of his odd friend
(who seemed quite unconscious of his observation), until they reached a
certain corner of the road, close upon the outskirts of the city, when
Mark said he would jump down there, if he pleased.

‘But bless my soul, Mark,’ said Mr Pinch, who in the progress of
his observation just then made the discovery that the bosom of his
companion’s shirt was as much exposed as if it was Midsummer, and was
ruffled by every breath of air, ‘why don’t you wear a waistcoat?’

‘What’s the good of one, sir?’ asked Mark.

‘Good of one?’ said Mr Pinch. ‘Why, to keep your chest warm.’

‘Lord love you, sir!’ cried Mark, ‘you don’t know me. My chest don’t
want no warming. Even if it did, what would no waistcoat bring it to?
Inflammation of the lungs, perhaps? Well, there’d be some credit in
being jolly, with a inflammation of the lungs.’

As Mr Pinch returned no other answer than such as was conveyed in his
breathing very hard, and opening his eyes very wide, and nodding his
head very much, Mark thanked him for his ride, and without troubling
him to stop, jumped lightly down. And away he fluttered, with his red
neckerchief, and his open coat, down a cross-lane; turning back from
time to time to nod to Mr Pinch, and looking one of the most careless,
good-humoured comical fellows in life. His late companion, with a
thoughtful face pursued his way to Salisbury.

Mr Pinch had a shrewd notion that Salisbury was a very desperate sort of
place; an exceeding wild and dissipated city; and when he had put up the
horse, and given the hostler to understand that he would look in again
in the course of an hour or two to see him take his corn, he set forth
on a stroll about the streets with a vague and not unpleasant idea that
they teemed with all kinds of mystery and bedevilment. To one of
his quiet habits this little delusion was greatly assisted by the
circumstance of its being market-day, and the thoroughfares about the
market-place being filled with carts, horses, donkeys, baskets, waggons,
garden-stuff, meat, tripe, pies, poultry and huckster’s wares of every
opposite description and possible variety of character. Then there were
young farmers and old farmers with smock-frocks, brown great-coats, drab
great-coats, red worsted comforters, leather-leggings, wonderful shaped
hats, hunting-whips, and rough sticks, standing about in groups, or
talking noisily together on the tavern steps, or paying and receiving
huge amounts of greasy wealth, with the assistance of such bulky
pocket-books that when they were in their pockets it was apoplexy to
get them out, and when they were out it was spasms to get them in again.
Also there were farmers’ wives in beaver bonnets and red cloaks, riding
shaggy horses purged of all earthly passions, who went soberly into all
manner of places without desiring to know why, and who, if required,
would have stood stock still in a china shop, with a complete
dinner-service at each hoof. Also a great many dogs, who were strongly
interested in the state of the market and the bargains of their masters;
and a great confusion of tongues, both brute and human.

Mr Pinch regarded everything exposed for sale with great delight, and
was particularly struck by the itinerant cutlery, which he considered
of the very keenest kind, insomuch that he purchased a pocket knife with
seven blades in it, and not a cut (as he afterwards found out) among
them. When he had exhausted the market-place, and watched the farmers
safe into the market dinner, he went back to look after the horse.
Having seen him eat unto his heart’s content he issued forth again,
to wander round the town and regale himself with the shop windows;
previously taking a long stare at the bank, and wondering in what
direction underground the caverns might be where they kept the money;
and turning to look back at one or two young men who passed him, whom
he knew to be articled to solicitors in the town; and who had a sort of
fearful interest in his eyes, as jolly dogs who knew a thing or two, and
kept it up tremendously.

But the shops. First of all there were the jewellers’ shops, with all
the treasures of the earth displayed therein, and such large silver
watches hanging up in every pane of glass, that if they were anything
but first-rate goers it certainly was not because the works could
decently complain of want of room. In good sooth they were big enough,
and perhaps, as the saying is, ugly enough, to be the most correct of
all mechanical performers; in Mr Pinch’s eyes, however they were smaller
than Geneva ware; and when he saw one very bloated watch announced as a
repeater, gifted with the uncommon power of striking every quarter of an
hour inside the pocket of its happy owner, he almost wished that he were
rich enough to buy it.

But what were even gold and silver, precious stones and clockwork, to
the bookshops, whence a pleasant smell of paper freshly pressed came
issuing forth, awakening instant recollections of some new grammar had
at school, long time ago, with ‘Master Pinch, Grove House Academy,’
inscribed in faultless writing on the fly-leaf! That whiff of russia
leather, too, and all those rows on rows of volumes neatly ranged
within--what happiness did they suggest! And in the window were
the spick-and-span new works from London, with the title-pages, and
sometimes even the first page of the first chapter, laid wide open;
tempting unwary men to begin to read the book, and then, in the
impossibility of turning over, to rush blindly in, and buy it! Here too
were the dainty frontispiece and trim vignette, pointing like handposts
on the outskirts of great cities, to the rich stock of incident beyond;
and store of books, with many a grave portrait and time-honoured name,
whose matter he knew well, and would have given mines to have, in any
form, upon the narrow shell beside his bed at Mr Pecksniff’s. What a
heart-breaking shop it was!

There was another; not quite so bad at first, but still a trying shop;
where children’s books were sold, and where poor Robinson Crusoe
stood alone in his might, with dog and hatchet, goat-skin cap and
fowling-pieces; calmly surveying Philip Quarn and the host of imitators
round him, and calling Mr Pinch to witness that he, of all the crowd,
impressed one solitary footprint on the shore of boyish memory, whereof
the tread of generations should not stir the lightest grain of sand.
And there too were the Persian tales, with flying chests and students of
enchanted books shut up for years in caverns; and there too was Abudah,
the merchant, with the terrible little old woman hobbling out of the box
in his bedroom; and there the mighty talisman, the rare Arabian Nights,
with Cassim Baba, divided by four, like the ghost of a dreadful sum,
hanging up, all gory, in the robbers’ cave. Which matchless wonders,
coming fast on Mr Pinch’s mind, did so rub up and chafe that wonderful
lamp within him, that when he turned his face towards the busy street,
a crowd of phantoms waited on his pleasure, and he lived again, with new
delight, the happy days before the Pecksniff era.

He had less interest now in the chemists’ shops, with their great
glowing bottles (with smaller repositories of brightness in their very
stoppers); and in their agreeable compromises between medicine and
perfumery, in the shape of toothsome lozenges and virgin honey. Neither
had he the least regard (but he never had much) for the tailors’, where
the newest metropolitan waistcoat patterns were hanging up, which by
some strange transformation always looked amazing there, and never
appeared at all like the same thing anywhere else. But he stopped to
read the playbill at the theatre and surveyed the doorway with a kind
of awe, which was not diminished when a sallow gentleman with long dark
hair came out, and told a boy to run home to his lodgings and bring down
his broadsword. Mr Pinch stood rooted to the spot on hearing this, and
might have stood there until dark, but that the old cathedral bell began
to ring for vesper service, on which he tore himself away.

Now, the organist’s assistant was a friend of Mr Pinch’s, which was a
good thing, for he too was a very quiet gentle soul, and had been, like
Tom, a kind of old-fashioned boy at school, though well liked by the
noisy fellow too. As good luck would have it (Tom always said he had
great good luck) the assistant chanced that very afternoon to be on duty
by himself, with no one in the dusty organ loft but Tom; so while he
played, Tom helped him with the stops; and finally, the service being
just over, Tom took the organ himself. It was then turning dark, and the
yellow light that streamed in through the ancient windows in the choir
was mingled with a murky red. As the grand tones resounded through
the church, they seemed, to Tom, to find an echo in the depth of every
ancient tomb, no less than in the deep mystery of his own heart. Great
thoughts and hopes came crowding on his mind as the rich music rolled
upon the air and yet among them--something more grave and solemn in
their purpose, but the same--were all the images of that day, down to
its very lightest recollection of childhood. The feeling that the sounds
awakened, in the moment of their existence, seemed to include his whole
life and being; and as the surrounding realities of stone and wood
and glass grew dimmer in the darkness, these visions grew so much the
brighter that Tom might have forgotten the new pupil and the expectant
master, and have sat there pouring out his grateful heart till midnight,
but for a very earthy old verger insisting on locking up the cathedral
forthwith. So he took leave of his friend, with many thanks, groped his
way out, as well as he could, into the now lamp-lighted streets, and
hurried off to get his dinner.

All the farmers being by this time jogging homewards, there was nobody
in the sanded parlour of the tavern where he had left the horse; so he
had his little table drawn out close before the fire, and fell to
work upon a well-cooked steak and smoking hot potatoes, with a strong
appreciation of their excellence, and a very keen sense of enjoyment.
Beside him, too, there stood a jug of most stupendous Wiltshire beer;
and the effect of the whole was so transcendent, that he was obliged
every now and then to lay down his knife and fork, rub his hands, and
think about it. By the time the cheese and celery came, Mr Pinch had
taken a book out of his pocket, and could afford to trifle with the
viands; now eating a little, now drinking a little, now reading a
little, and now stopping to wonder what sort of a young man the new
pupil would turn out to be. He had passed from this latter theme and was
deep in his book again, when the door opened, and another guest came in,
bringing with him such a quantity of cold air, that he positively seemed
at first to put the fire out.

‘Very hard frost to-night, sir,’ said the newcomer, courteously
acknowledging Mr Pinch’s withdrawal of the little table, that he might
have place: ‘Don’t disturb yourself, I beg.’

Though he said this with a vast amount of consideration for Mr Pinch’s
comfort, he dragged one of the great leather-bottomed chairs to the
very centre of the hearth, notwithstanding; and sat down in front of the
fire, with a foot on each hob.

‘My feet are quite numbed. Ah! Bitter cold to be sure.’

‘You have been in the air some considerable time, I dare say?’ said Mr
Pinch.

‘All day. Outside a coach, too.’

‘That accounts for his making the room so cool,’ thought Mr Pinch. ‘Poor
fellow! How thoroughly chilled he must be!’

The stranger became thoughtful likewise, and sat for five or ten minutes
looking at the fire in silence. At length he rose and divested himself
of his shawl and great-coat, which (far different from Mr Pinch’s) was
a very warm and thick one; but he was not a whit more conversational out
of his great-coat than in it, for he sat down again in the same place
and attitude, and leaning back in his chair, began to bite his nails. He
was young--one-and-twenty, perhaps--and handsome; with a keen dark eye,
and a quickness of look and manner which made Tom sensible of a great
contrast in his own bearing, and caused him to feel even more shy than
usual.

There was a clock in the room, which the stranger often turned to
look at. Tom made frequent reference to it also; partly from a nervous
sympathy with its taciturn companion; and partly because the new pupil
was to inquire for him at half after six, and the hands were getting
on towards that hour. Whenever the stranger caught him looking at this
clock, a kind of confusion came upon Tom as if he had been found out in
something; and it was a perception of his uneasiness which caused the
younger man to say, perhaps, with a smile:

‘We both appear to be rather particular about the time. The fact is, I
have an engagement to meet a gentleman here.’

‘So have I,’ said Mr Pinch.

‘At half-past six,’ said the stranger.

‘At half-past six,’ said Tom in the very same breath; whereupon the
other looked at him with some surprise.

‘The young gentleman, I expect,’ remarked Tom, timidly, ‘was to inquire
at that time for a person by the name of Pinch.’

‘Dear me!’ cried the other, jumping up. ‘And I have been keeping the
fire from you all this while! I had no idea you were Mr Pinch. I am the
Mr Martin for whom you were to inquire. Pray excuse me. How do you do?
Oh, do draw nearer, pray!’

‘Thank you,’ said Tom, ‘thank you. I am not at all cold, and you are;
and we have a cold ride before us. Well, if you wish it, I will. I--I am
very glad,’ said Tom, smiling with an embarrassed frankness peculiarly
his, and which was as plainly a confession of his own imperfections, and
an appeal to the kindness of the person he addressed, as if he had drawn
one up in simple language and committed it to paper: ‘I am very glad
indeed that you turn out to be the party I expected. I was thinking, but
a minute ago, that I could wish him to be like you.’

‘I am very glad to hear it,’ returned Martin, shaking hands with him
again; ‘for I assure you, I was thinking there could be no such luck as
Mr Pinch’s turning out like you.’

‘No, really!’ said Tom, with great pleasure. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Upon my word I am,’ replied his new acquaintance. ‘You and I will get
on excellently well, I know; which it’s no small relief to me to feel,
for to tell you the truth, I am not at all the sort of fellow who could
get on with everybody, and that’s the point on which I had the greatest
doubts. But they’re quite relieved now.--Do me the favour to ring the
bell, will you?’

Mr Pinch rose, and complied with great alacrity--the handle hung just
over Martin’s head, as he warmed himself--and listened with a smiling
face to what his friend went on to say. It was:

‘If you like punch, you’ll allow me to order a glass apiece, as hot
as it can be made, that we may usher in our friendship in a becoming
manner. To let you into a secret, Mr Pinch, I never was so much in want
of something warm and cheering in my life; but I didn’t like to run the
chance of being found drinking it, without knowing what kind of person
you were; for first impressions, you know, often go a long way, and last
a long time.’

Mr Pinch assented, and the punch was ordered. In due course it came; hot
and strong. After drinking to each other in the steaming mixture, they
became quite confidential.

‘I’m a sort of relation of Pecksniff’s, you know,’ said the young man.

‘Indeed!’ cried Mr Pinch.

‘Yes. My grandfather is his cousin, so he’s kith and kin to me, somehow,
if you can make that out. I can’t.’

‘Then Martin is your Christian name?’ said Mr Pinch, thoughtfully. ‘Oh!’

‘Of course it is,’ returned his friend: ‘I wish it was my surname for
my own is not a very pretty one, and it takes a long time to sign.
Chuzzlewit is my name.’

‘Dear me!’ cried Mr Pinch, with an involuntary start.

‘You’re not surprised at my having two names, I suppose?’ returned the
other, setting his glass to his lips. ‘Most people have.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Mr Pinch, ‘not at all. Oh dear no! Well!’ And then
remembering that Mr Pecksniff had privately cautioned him to say nothing
in reference to the old gentleman of the same name who had lodged at
the Dragon, but to reserve all mention of that person for him, he had
no better means of hiding his confusion than by raising his own glass
to his mouth. They looked at each other out of their respective tumblers
for a few seconds, and then put them down empty.

‘I told them in the stable to be ready for us ten minutes ago,’ said Mr
Pinch, glancing at the clock again. ‘Shall we go?’

‘If you please,’ returned the other.

‘Would you like to drive?’ said Mr Pinch; his whole face beaming with a
consciousness of the splendour of his offer. ‘You shall, if you wish.’

‘Why, that depends, Mr Pinch,’ said Martin, laughing, ‘upon what sort
of a horse you have. Because if he’s a bad one, I would rather keep my
hands warm by holding them comfortably in my greatcoat pockets.’

He appeared to think this such a good joke, that Mr Pinch was quite sure
it must be a capital one. Accordingly, he laughed too, and was fully
persuaded that he enjoyed it very much. Then he settled his bill, and Mr
Chuzzlewit paid for the punch; and having wrapped themselves up, to the
extent of their respective means, they went out together to the front
door, where Mr Pecksniff’s property stopped the way.

‘I won’t drive, thank you, Mr Pinch,’ said Martin, getting into the
sitter’s place. ‘By the bye, there’s a box of mine. Can we manage to
take it?’

‘Oh, certainly,’ said Tom. ‘Put it in, Dick, anywhere!’

It was not precisely of that convenient size which would admit of its
being squeezed into any odd corner, but Dick the hostler got it in
somehow, and Mr Chuzzlewit helped him. It was all on Mr Pinch’s side,
and Mr Chuzzlewit said he was very much afraid it would encumber him; to
which Tom said, ‘Not at all;’ though it forced him into such an awkward
position, that he had much ado to see anything but his own knees. But it
is an ill wind that blows nobody any good; and the wisdom of the saying
was verified in this instance; for the cold air came from Mr Pinch’s
side of the carriage, and by interposing a perfect wall of box and
man between it and the new pupil, he shielded that young gentleman
effectually; which was a great comfort.

It was a clear evening, with a bright moon. The whole landscape was
silvered by its light and by the hoar-frost; and everything looked
exquisitely beautiful. At first, the great serenity and peace through
which they travelled, disposed them both to silence; but in a very short
time the punch within them and the healthful air without, made them
loquacious, and they talked incessantly. When they were halfway home,
and stopped to give the horse some water, Martin (who was very generous
with his money) ordered another glass of punch, which they drank between
them, and which had not the effect of making them less conversational
than before. Their principal topic of discourse was naturally Mr
Pecksniff and his family; of whom, and of the great obligations they had
heaped upon him, Tom Pinch, with the tears standing in his eyes, drew
such a picture as would have inclined any one of common feeling
almost to revere them; and of which Mr Pecksniff had not the slightest
foresight or preconceived idea, or he certainly (being very humble)
would not have sent Tom Pinch to bring the pupil home.

In this way they went on, and on, and on--in the language of the
story-books--until at last the village lights appeared before them, and
the church spire cast a long reflection on the graveyard grass; as if
it were a dial (alas, the truest in the world!) marking, whatever light
shone out of Heaven, the flight of days and weeks and years, by some new
shadow on that solemn ground.

‘A pretty church!’ said Martin, observing that his companion slackened
the slack pace of the horse, as they approached.

‘Is it not?’ cried Tom, with great pride. ‘There’s the sweetest little
organ there you ever heard. I play it for them.’

‘Indeed?’ said Martin. ‘It is hardly worth the trouble, I should think.
What do you get for that, now?’

‘Nothing,’ answered Tom.

‘Well,’ returned his friend, ‘you ARE a very strange fellow!’

To which remark there succeeded a brief silence.

‘When I say nothing,’ observed Mr Pinch, cheerfully, ‘I am wrong, and
don’t say what I mean, because I get a great deal of pleasure from it,
and the means of passing some of the happiest hours I know. It led to
something else the other day; but you will not care to hear about that I
dare say?’

‘Oh yes I shall. What?’

‘It led to my seeing,’ said Tom, in a lower voice, ‘one of the loveliest
and most beautiful faces you can possibly picture to yourself.’

‘And yet I am able to picture a beautiful one,’ said his friend,
thoughtfully, ‘or should be, if I have any memory.’

‘She came’ said Tom, laying his hand upon the other’s arm, ‘for the
first time very early in the morning, when it was hardly light; and when
I saw her, over my shoulder, standing just within the porch, I turned
quite cold, almost believing her to be a spirit. A moment’s reflection
got the better of that, of course, and fortunately it came to my relief
so soon, that I didn’t leave off playing.’

‘Why fortunately?’

‘Why? Because she stood there, listening. I had my spectacles on, and
saw her through the chinks in the curtains as plainly as I see you; and
she was beautiful. After a while she glided off, and I continued to play
until she was out of hearing.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Don’t you see?’ responded Tom. ‘Because she might suppose I hadn’t seen
her; and might return.’

‘And did she?’

‘Certainly she did. Next morning, and next evening too; but always when
there were no people about, and always alone. I rose earlier and sat
there later, that when she came, she might find the church door open,
and the organ playing, and might not be disappointed. She strolled that
way for some days, and always stayed to listen. But she is gone now,
and of all unlikely things in this wide world, it is perhaps the most
improbable that I shall ever look upon her face again.’

‘You don’t know anything more about her?’

‘No.’

‘And you never followed her when she went away?’

‘Why should I distress her by doing that?’ said Tom Pinch. ‘Is it likely
that she wanted my company? She came to hear the organ, not to see me;
and would you have had me scare her from a place she seemed to grow
quite fond of? Now, Heaven bless her!’ cried Tom, ‘to have given her but
a minute’s pleasure every day, I would have gone on playing the organ
at those times until I was an old man; quite contented if she sometimes
thought of a poor fellow like me, as a part of the music; and more than
recompensed if she ever mixed me up with anything she liked as well as
she liked that!’

The new pupil was clearly very much amazed by Mr Pinch’s weakness, and
would probably have told him so, and given him some good advice, but
for their opportune arrival at Mr Pecksniff’s door; the front door this
time, on account of the occasion being one of ceremony and rejoicing.
The same man was in waiting for the horse who had been adjured by Mr
Pinch in the morning not to yield to his rabid desire to start;
and after delivering the animal into his charge, and beseeching Mr
Chuzzlewit in a whisper never to reveal a syllable of what he had just
told him in the fullness of his heart, Tom led the pupil in, for instant
presentation.

Mr Pecksniff had clearly not expected them for hours to come; for he was
surrounded by open books, and was glancing from volume to volume, with a
black lead-pencil in his mouth, and a pair of compasses in his hand,
at a vast number of mathematical diagrams, of such extraordinary shapes
that they looked like designs for fireworks. Neither had Miss Charity
expected them, for she was busied, with a capacious wicker basket before
her, in making impracticable nightcaps for the poor. Neither had Miss
Mercy expected them, for she was sitting upon her stool, tying on
the--oh good gracious!--the petticoat of a large doll that she was
dressing for a neighbour’s child--really, quite a grown-up doll, which
made it more confusing--and had its little bonnet dangling by the ribbon
from one of her fair curls, to which she had fastened it lest it should
be lost or sat upon. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to
conceive a family so thoroughly taken by surprise as the Pecksniffs
were, on this occasion.

Bless my life!’ said Mr Pecksniff, looking up, and gradually exchanging
his abstracted face for one of joyful recognition. ‘Here already!
Martin, my dear boy, I am delighted to welcome you to my poor house!’

With this kind greeting, Mr Pecksniff fairly took him to his arms, and
patted him several times upon the back with his right hand the while,
as if to express that his feelings during the embrace were too much for
utterance.

‘But here,’ he said, recovering, ‘are my daughters, Martin; my two only
children, whom (if you ever saw them) you have not beheld--ah, these sad
family divisions!--since you were infants together. Nay, my dears, why
blush at being detected in your everyday pursuits? We had prepared
to give you the reception of a visitor, Martin, in our little room of
state,’ said Mr Pecksniff, smiling, ‘but I like this better, I like this
better!’

Oh blessed star of Innocence, wherever you may be, how did you glitter
in your home of ether, when the two Miss Pecksniffs put forth each her
lily hand, and gave the same, with mantling cheeks, to Martin! How did
you twinkle, as if fluttering with sympathy, when Mercy, reminded of
the bonnet in her hair, hid her fair face and turned her head aside; the
while her gentle sister plucked it out, and smote her with a sister’s
soft reproof, upon her buxom shoulder!

‘And how,’ said Mr Pecksniff, turning round after the contemplation of
these passages, and taking Mr Pinch in a friendly manner by the elbow,
‘how has our friend used you, Martin?’

‘Very well indeed, sir. We are on the best terms, I assure you.’

‘Old Tom Pinch!’ said Mr Pecksniff, looking on him with affectionate
sadness. ‘Ah! It seems but yesterday that Thomas was a boy fresh from
a scholastic course. Yet years have passed, I think, since Thomas Pinch
and I first walked the world together!’

Mr Pinch could say nothing. He was too much moved. But he pressed his
master’s hand, and tried to thank him.

‘And Thomas Pinch and I,’ said Mr Pecksniff, in a deeper voice, ‘will
walk it yet, in mutual faithfulness and friendship! And if it comes to
pass that either of us be run over in any of those busy crossings which
divide the streets of life, the other will convey him to the hospital in
Hope, and sit beside his bed in Bounty!’

‘Well, well, well!’ he added in a happier tone, as he shook Mr Pinch’s
elbow hard. ‘No more of this! Martin, my dear friend, that you may be at
home within these walls, let me show you how we live, and where. Come!’

With that he took up a lighted candle, and, attended by his young
relative, prepared to leave the room. At the door, he stopped.

‘You’ll bear us company, Tom Pinch?’

Aye, cheerfully, though it had been to death, would Tom have followed
him; glad to lay down his life for such a man!

‘This,’ said Mr Pecksniff, opening the door of an opposite parlour, ‘is
the little room of state, I mentioned to you. My girls have pride in it,
Martin! This,’ opening another door, ‘is the little chamber in which my
works (slight things at best) have been concocted. Portrait of myself
by Spiller. Bust by Spoker. The latter is considered a good likeness.
I seem to recognize something about the left-hand corner of the nose,
myself.’

Martin thought it was very like, but scarcely intellectual enough. Mr
Pecksniff observed that the same fault had been found with it before. It
was remarkable it should have struck his young relation too. He was glad
to see he had an eye for art.

‘Various books you observe,’ said Mr Pecksniff, waving his hand towards
the wall, ‘connected with our pursuit. I have scribbled myself, but
have not yet published. Be careful how you come upstairs. This,’ opening
another door, ‘is my chamber. I read here when the family suppose I have
retired to rest. Sometimes I injure my health rather more than I can
quite justify to myself, by doing so; but art is long and time is short.
Every facility you see for jotting down crude notions, even here.’

These latter words were explained by his pointing to a small round table
on which were a lamp, divers sheets of paper, a piece of India rubber,
and a case of instruments; all put ready, in case an architectural idea
should come into Mr Pecksniff’s head in the night; in which event he
would instantly leap out of bed, and fix it for ever.

Mr Pecksniff opened another door on the same floor, and shut it again,
all at once, as if it were a Blue Chamber. But before he had well done
so, he looked smilingly round, and said, ‘Why not?’

Martin couldn’t say why not, because he didn’t know anything at all
about it. So Mr Pecksniff answered himself, by throwing open the door,
and saying:

‘My daughters’ room. A poor first-floor to us, but a bower to them. Very
neat. Very airy. Plants you observe; hyacinths; books again; birds.’
These birds, by the bye, comprised, in all, one staggering old sparrow
without a tail, which had been borrowed expressly from the kitchen.
‘Such trifles as girls love are here. Nothing more. Those who seek
heartless splendour, would seek here in vain.’

With that he led them to the floor above.

‘This,’ said Mr Pecksniff, throwing wide the door of the memorable
two-pair front; ‘is a room where some talent has been developed I
believe. This is a room in which an idea for a steeple occurred to me
that I may one day give to the world. We work here, my dear Martin. Some
architects have been bred in this room; a few, I think, Mr Pinch?’

Tom fully assented; and, what is more, fully believed it.

‘You see,’ said Mr Pecksniff, passing the candle rapidly from roll to
roll of paper, ‘some traces of our doings here. Salisbury Cathedral
from the north. From the south. From the east. From the west. From the
south-east. From the nor’west. A bridge. An almshouse. A jail. A
church. A powder-magazine. A wine-cellar. A portico. A summer-house. An
ice-house. Plans, elevations, sections, every kind of thing. And this,’
he added, having by this time reached another large chamber on the same
story, with four little beds in it, ‘this is your room, of which Mr
Pinch here is the quiet sharer. A southern aspect; a charming prospect;
Mr Pinch’s little library, you perceive; everything agreeable and
appropriate. If there is any additional comfort you would desire to have
here at anytime, pray mention it. Even to strangers, far less to you, my
dear Martin, there is no restriction on that point.’

It was undoubtedly true, and may be stated in corroboration of Mr
Pecksniff, that any pupil had the most liberal permission to mention
anything in this way that suggested itself to his fancy. Some young
gentlemen had gone on mentioning the very same thing for five years
without ever being stopped.

‘The domestic assistants,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘sleep above; and that
is all.’ After which, and listening complacently as he went, to the
encomiums passed by his young friend on the arrangements generally, he
led the way to the parlour again.

Here a great change had taken place; for festive preparations on
a rather extensive scale were already completed, and the two Miss
Pecksniffs were awaiting their return with hospitable looks. There were
two bottles of currant wine, white and red; a dish of sandwiches (very
long and very slim); another of apples; another of captain’s biscuits
(which are always a moist and jovial sort of viand); a plate of oranges
cut up small and gritty; with powdered sugar, and a highly geological
home-made cake. The magnitude of these preparations quite took away Tom
Pinch’s breath; for though the new pupils were usually let down softly,
as one may say, particularly in the wine department, which had so many
stages of declension, that sometimes a young gentleman was a whole
fortnight in getting to the pump; still this was a banquet; a sort of
Lord Mayor’s feast in private life; a something to think of, and hold on
by, afterwards.

To this entertainment, which apart from its own intrinsic merits, had
the additional choice quality, that it was in strict keeping with the
night, being both light and cool, Mr Pecksniff besought the company to
do full justice.

‘Martin,’ he said, ‘will seat himself between you two, my dears, and
Mr Pinch will come by me. Let us drink to our new inmate, and may we be
happy together! Martin, my dear friend, my love to you! Mr Pinch, if you
spare the bottle we shall quarrel.’

And trying (in his regard for the feelings of the rest) to look as if
the wine were not acid and didn’t make him wink, Mr Pecksniff did honour
to his own toast.

‘This,’ he said, in allusion to the party, not the wine, ‘is a mingling
that repays one for much disappointment and vexation. Let us be merry.’
Here he took a captain’s biscuit. ‘It is a poor heart that never
rejoices; and our hearts are not poor. No!’

With such stimulants to merriment did he beguile the time, and do the
honours of the table; while Mr Pinch, perhaps to assure himself that
what he saw and heard was holiday reality, and not a charming dream, ate
of everything, and in particular disposed of the slim sandwiches to a
surprising extent. Nor was he stinted in his draughts of wine; but on
the contrary, remembering Mr Pecksniff’s speech, attacked the bottle
with such vigour, that every time he filled his glass anew, Miss
Charity, despite her amiable resolves, could not repress a fixed and
stony glare, as if her eyes had rested on a ghost. Mr Pecksniff also
became thoughtful at those moments, not to say dejected; but as he
knew the vintage, it is very likely he may have been speculating on the
probable condition of Mr Pinch upon the morrow, and discussing within
himself the best remedies for colic.

Martin and the young ladies were excellent friends already, and compared
recollections of their childish days, to their mutual liveliness and
entertainment. Miss Mercy laughed immensely at everything that was said;
and sometimes, after glancing at the happy face of Mr Pinch, was
seized with such fits of mirth as brought her to the very confines of
hysterics. But for these bursts of gaiety, her sister, in her better
sense, reproved her; observing, in an angry whisper, that it was far
from being a theme for jest; and that she had no patience with the
creature; though it generally ended in her laughing too--but much more
moderately--and saying that indeed it was a little too ridiculous and
intolerable to be serious about.

At length it became high time to remember the first clause of that great
discovery made by the ancient philosopher, for securing health, riches,
and wisdom; the infallibility of which has been for generations verified
by the enormous fortunes constantly amassed by chimney-sweepers and
other persons who get up early and go to bed betimes. The young ladies
accordingly rose, and having taken leave of Mr Chuzzlewit with much
sweetness, and of their father with much duty and of Mr Pinch with
much condescension, retired to their bower. Mr Pecksniff insisted on
accompanying his young friend upstairs for personal superintendence of
his comforts; and taking him by the arm, conducted him once more to his
bedroom, followed by Mr Pinch, who bore the light.

‘Mr Pinch,’ said Pecksniff, seating himself with folded arms on one of
the spare beds. ‘I don’t see any snuffers in that candlestick. Will you
oblige me by going down, and asking for a pair?’

Mr Pinch, only too happy to be useful, went off directly.

‘You will excuse Thomas Pinch’s want of polish, Martin,’ said Mr
Pecksniff, with a smile of patronage and pity, as soon as he had left
the room. ‘He means well.’

‘He is a very good fellow, sir.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Yes. Thomas Pinch means well. He is very
grateful. I have never regretted having befriended Thomas Pinch.’

‘I should think you never would, sir.’

‘No,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘No. I hope not. Poor fellow, he is always
disposed to do his best; but he is not gifted. You will make him useful
to you, Martin, if you please. If Thomas has a fault, it is that he is
sometimes a little apt to forget his position. But that is soon checked.
Worthy soul! You will find him easy to manage. Good night!’

‘Good night, sir.’

By this time Mr Pinch had returned with the snuffers.

‘And good night to YOU, Mr Pinch,’ said Pecksniff. ‘And sound sleep to
you both. Bless you! Bless you!’

Invoking this benediction on the heads of his young friends with great
fervour, he withdrew to his own room; while they, being tired, soon fell
asleep. If Martin dreamed at all, some clue to the matter of his visions
may possibly be gathered from the after-pages of this history. Those
of Thomas Pinch were all of holidays, church organs, and seraphic
Pecksniffs. It was some time before Mr Pecksniff dreamed at all, or even
sought his pillow, as he sat for full two hours before the fire in his
own chamber, looking at the coals and thinking deeply. But he, too,
slept and dreamed at last. Thus in the quiet hours of the night, one
house shuts in as many incoherent and incongruous fancies as a madman’s
head.



CHAPTER SIX

COMPRISES, AMONG OTHER IMPORTANT MATTERS, PECKSNIFFIAN AND
ARCHITECTURAL, AND EXACT RELATION OF THE PROGRESS MADE BY MR PINCH IN
THE CONFIDENCE AND FRIENDSHIP OF THE NEW PUPIL


It was morning; and the beautiful Aurora, of whom so much hath been
written, said, and sung, did, with her rosy fingers, nip and tweak Miss
Pecksniff’s nose. It was the frolicsome custom of the Goddess, in her
intercourse with the fair Cherry, so to do; or in more prosaic phrase,
the tip of that feature in the sweet girl’s countenance was always
very red at breakfast-time. For the most part, indeed, it wore, at that
season of the day, a scraped and frosty look, as if it had been rasped;
while a similar phenomenon developed itself in her humour, which was
then observed to be of a sharp and acid quality, as though an extra
lemon (figuratively speaking) had been squeezed into the nectar of her
disposition, and had rather damaged its flavour.

This additional pungency on the part of the fair young creature led, on
ordinary occasions, to such slight consequences as the copious dilution
of Mr Pinch’s tea, or to his coming off uncommonly short in respect
of butter, or to other the like results. But on the morning after the
Installation Banquet, she suffered him to wander to and fro among the
eatables and drinkables, a perfectly free and unchecked man; so utterly
to Mr Pinch’s wonder and confusion, that like the wretched captive who
recovered his liberty in his old age, he could make but little use of
his enlargement, and fell into a strange kind of flutter for want of
some kind hand to scrape his bread, and cut him off in the article of
sugar with a lump, and pay him those other little attentions to which
he was accustomed. There was something almost awful, too, about the
self-possession of the new pupil; who ‘troubled’ Mr Pecksniff for the
loaf, and helped himself to a rasher of that gentleman’s own particular
and private bacon, with all the coolness in life. He even seemed to
think that he was doing quite a regular thing, and to expect that Mr
Pinch would follow his example, since he took occasion to observe of
that young man ‘that he didn’t get on’; a speech of so tremendous a
character, that Tom cast down his eyes involuntarily, and felt as if
he himself had committed some horrible deed and heinous breach of Mr
Pecksniff’s confidence. Indeed, the agony of having such an indiscreet
remark addressed to him before the assembled family, was breakfast
enough in itself, and would, without any other matter of reflection,
have settled Mr Pinch’s business and quenched his appetite, for one
meal, though he had been never so hungry.

The young ladies, however, and Mr Pecksniff likewise, remained in
the very best of spirits in spite of these severe trials, though with
something of a mysterious understanding among themselves. When the meal
was nearly over, Mr Pecksniff smilingly explained the cause of their
common satisfaction.

‘It is not often,’ he said, ‘Martin, that my daughters and I desert our
quiet home to pursue the giddy round of pleasures that revolves abroad.
But we think of doing so to-day.’

‘Indeed, sir!’ cried the new pupil.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Pecksniff, tapping his left hand with a letter which
he held in his right. ‘I have a summons here to repair to London;
on professional business, my dear Martin; strictly on professional
business; and I promised my girls, long ago, that whenever that happened
again, they should accompany me. We shall go forth to-night by the
heavy coach--like the dove of old, my dear Martin--and it will be a week
before we again deposit our olive-branches in the passage. When I say
olive-branches,’ observed Mr Pecksniff, in explanation, ‘I mean, our
unpretending luggage.’

‘I hope the young ladies will enjoy their trip,’ said Martin.

‘Oh! that I’m sure we shall!’ cried Mercy, clapping her hands. ‘Good
gracious, Cherry, my darling, the idea of London!’

‘Ardent child!’ said Mr Pecksniff, gazing on her in a dreamy way. ‘And
yet there is a melancholy sweetness in these youthful hopes! It is
pleasant to know that they never can be realised. I remember thinking
once myself, in the days of my childhood, that pickled onions grew on
trees, and that every elephant was born with an impregnable castle on
his back. I have not found the fact to be so; far from it; and yet those
visions have comforted me under circumstances of trial. Even when I have
had the anguish of discovering that I have nourished in my breast on
ostrich, and not a human pupil--even in that hour of agony, they have
soothed me.’

At this dread allusion to John Westlock, Mr Pinch precipitately choked
in his tea; for he had that very morning received a letter from him, as
Mr Pecksniff very well knew.

‘You will take care, my dear Martin,’ said Mr Pecksniff, resuming his
former cheerfulness, ‘that the house does not run away in our absence.
We leave you in charge of everything. There is no mystery; all is free
and open. Unlike the young man in the Eastern tale--who is described as
a one-eyed almanac, if I am not mistaken, Mr Pinch?--’

‘A one-eyed calender, I think, sir,’ faltered Tom.

‘They are pretty nearly the same thing, I believe,’ said Mr Pecksniff,
smiling compassionately; ‘or they used to be in my time. Unlike that
young man, my dear Martin, you are forbidden to enter no corner of this
house; but are requested to make yourself perfectly at home in every
part of it. You will be jovial, my dear Martin, and will kill the fatted
calf if you please!’

There was not the least objection, doubtless, to the young man’s
slaughtering and appropriating to his own use any calf, fat or lean,
that he might happen to find upon the premises; but as no such animal
chanced at that time to be grazing on Mr Pecksniff’s estate, this
request must be considered rather as a polite compliment that
a substantial hospitality. It was the finishing ornament of the
conversation; for when he had delivered it, Mr Pecksniff rose and led
the way to that hotbed of architectural genius, the two-pair front.

‘Let me see,’ he said, searching among the papers, ‘how you can best
employ yourself, Martin, while I am absent. Suppose you were to give
me your idea of a monument to a Lord Mayor of London; or a tomb for a
sheriff; or your notion of a cow-house to be erected in a nobleman’s
park. Do you know, now,’ said Mr Pecksniff, folding his hands, and
looking at his young relation with an air of pensive interest, ‘that I
should very much like to see your notion of a cow-house?’

But Martin by no means appeared to relish this suggestion.

‘A pump,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘is very chaste practice. I have found that
a lamp post is calculated to refine the mind and give it a classical
tendency. An ornamental turnpike has a remarkable effect upon the
imagination. What do you say to beginning with an ornamental turnpike?’

‘Whatever Mr Pecksniff pleased,’ said Martin, doubtfully.

‘Stay,’ said that gentleman. ‘Come! as you’re ambitious, and are a very
neat draughtsman, you shall--ha ha!--you shall try your hand on these
proposals for a grammar-school; regulating your plan, of course, by the
printed particulars. Upon my word, now,’ said Mr Pecksniff, merrily, ‘I
shall be very curious to see what you make of the grammar-school.
Who knows but a young man of your taste might hit upon something,
impracticable and unlikely in itself, but which I could put into shape?
For it really is, my dear Martin, it really is in the finishing touches
alone, that great experience and long study in these matters tell. Ha,
ha, ha! Now it really will be,’ continued Mr Pecksniff, clapping his
young friend on the back in his droll humour, ‘an amusement to me, to
see what you make of the grammar-school.’

Martin readily undertook this task, and Mr Pecksniff forthwith proceeded
to entrust him with the materials necessary for its execution; dwelling
meanwhile on the magical effect of a few finishing touches from the hand
of a master; which, indeed, as some people said (and these were the
old enemies again!) was unquestionably very surprising, and almost
miraculous; as there were cases on record in which the masterly
introduction of an additional back window, or a kitchen door, or
half-a-dozen steps, or even a water spout, had made the design of a
pupil Mr Pecksniff’s own work, and had brought substantial rewards into
that gentleman’s pocket. But such is the magic of genius, which changes
all it handles into gold!

‘When your mind requires to be refreshed by change of occupation,’ said
Mr Pecksniff, ‘Thomas Pinch will instruct you in the art of surveying
the back garden, or in ascertaining the dead level of the road between
this house and the finger-post, or in any other practical and pleasing
pursuit. There are a cart-load of loose bricks, and a score or two of
old flower-pots, in the back yard. If you could pile them up my dear
Martin, into any form which would remind me on my return say of St.
Peter’s at Rome, or the Mosque of St. Sophia at Constantinople, it would
be at once improving to you and agreeable to my feelings. And now,’ said
Mr Pecksniff, in conclusion, ‘to drop, for the present, our professional
relations and advert to private matters, I shall be glad to talk with
you in my own room, while I pack up my portmanteau.’

Martin attended him; and they remained in secret conference together for
an hour or more; leaving Tom Pinch alone. When the young man returned,
he was very taciturn and dull, in which state he remained all day; so
that Tom, after trying him once or twice with indifferent conversation,
felt a delicacy in obtruding himself upon his thoughts, and said no
more.

He would not have had leisure to say much, had his new friend been ever
so loquacious; for first of all Mr Pecksniff called him down to stand
upon the top of his portmanteau and represent ancient statues there,
until such time as it would consent to be locked; and then Miss Charity
called him to come and cord her trunk; and then Miss Mercy sent for him
to come and mend her box; and then he wrote the fullest possible cards
for all the luggage; and then he volunteered to carry it all downstairs;
and after that to see it safely carried on a couple of barrows to the
old finger-post at the end of the lane; and then to mind it till the
coach came up. In short, his day’s work would have been a pretty heavy
one for a porter, but his thorough good-will made nothing of it; and as
he sat upon the luggage at last, waiting for the Pecksniffs, escorted by
the new pupil, to come down the lane, his heart was light with the hope
of having pleased his benefactor.

‘I was almost afraid,’ said Tom, taking a letter from his pocket and
wiping his face, for he was hot with bustling about though it was a cold
day, ‘that I shouldn’t have had time to write it, and that would have
been a thousand pities; postage from such a distance being a serious
consideration, when one’s not rich. She will be glad to see my hand,
poor girl, and to hear that Pecksniff is as kind as ever. I would have
asked John Westlock to call and see her, and tell her all about me by
word of mouth, but I was afraid he might speak against Pecksniff to her,
and make her uneasy. Besides, they are particular people where she is,
and it might have rendered her situation uncomfortable if she had had a
visit from a young man like John. Poor Ruth!’

Tom Pinch seemed a little disposed to be melancholy for half a minute or
so, but he found comfort very soon, and pursued his ruminations thus:

‘I’m a nice man, I don’t think, as John used to say (John was a kind,
merry-hearted fellow; I wish he had liked Pecksniff better), to be
feeling low, on account of the distance between us, when I ought to
be thinking, instead, of my extraordinary good luck in having ever got
here. I must have been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I am sure,
to have ever come across Pecksniff. And here have I fallen again into
my usual good luck with the new pupil! Such an affable, generous, free
fellow, as he is, I never saw. Why, we were companions directly! and he
a relation of Pecksniff’s too, and a clever, dashing youth who might cut
his way through the world as if it were a cheese! Here he comes while
the words are on my lips’ said Tom; ‘walking down the lane as if the
lane belonged to him.’

In truth, the new pupil, not at all disconcerted by the honour of having
Miss Mercy Pecksniff on his arm, or by the affectionate adieux of that
young lady, approached as Mr Pinch spoke, followed by Miss Charity and
Mr Pecksniff. As the coach appeared at the same moment, Tom lost no time
in entreating the gentleman last mentioned, to undertake the delivery of
his letter.

‘Oh!’ said Mr Pecksniff, glancing at the superscription. ‘For your
sister, Thomas. Yes, oh yes, it shall be delivered, Mr Pinch. Make your
mind easy upon that score. She shall certainly have it, Mr Pinch.’

He made the promise with so much condescension and patronage, that
Tom felt he had asked a great deal (this had not occurred to his mind
before), and thanked him earnestly. The Miss Pecksniffs, according to
a custom they had, were amused beyond description at the mention of
Mr Pinch’s sister. Oh the fright! The bare idea of a Miss Pinch! Good
heavens!

Tom was greatly pleased to see them so merry, for he took it as a token
of their favour, and good-humoured regard. Therefore he laughed too and
rubbed his hands and wished them a pleasant journey and safe return,
and was quite brisk. Even when the coach had rolled away with the
olive-branches in the boot and the family of doves inside, he stood
waving his hand and bowing; so much gratified by the unusually courteous
demeanour of the young ladies, that he was quite regardless, for the
moment, of Martin Chuzzlewit, who stood leaning thoughtfully against
the finger-post, and who after disposing of his fair charge had hardly
lifted his eyes from the ground.

The perfect silence which ensued upon the bustle and departure of the
coach, together with the sharp air of the wintry afternoon, roused them
both at the same time. They turned, as by mutual consent, and moved off
arm-in-arm.

‘How melancholy you are!’ said Tom; ‘what is the matter?’

‘Nothing worth speaking of,’ said Martin. ‘Very little more than was
the matter yesterday, and much more, I hope, than will be the matter
to-morrow. I’m out of spirits, Pinch.’

‘Well,’ cried Tom, ‘now do you know I am in capital spirits today, and
scarcely ever felt more disposed to be good company. It was a very kind
thing in your predecessor, John, to write to me, was it not?’

‘Why, yes,’ said Martin carelessly; ‘I should have thought he would have
had enough to do to enjoy himself, without thinking of you, Pinch.’

‘Just what I felt to be so very likely,’ Tom rejoined; ‘but no, he keeps
his word, and says, “My dear Pinch, I often think of you,” and all sorts
of kind and considerate things of that description.’

‘He must be a devilish good-natured fellow,’ said Martin, somewhat
peevishly: ‘because he can’t mean that, you know.’

‘I don’t suppose he can, eh?’ said Tom, looking wistfully in his
companion’s face. ‘He says so to please me, you think?’

‘Why, is it likely,’ rejoined Martin, with greater earnestness, ‘that
a young man newly escaped from this kennel of a place, and fresh to all
the delights of being his own master in London, can have much leisure
or inclination to think favourably of anything or anybody he has left
behind him here? I put it to you, Pinch, is it natural?’

After a short reflection, Mr Pinch replied, in a more subdued tone, that
to be sure it was unreasonable to expect any such thing, and that he had
no doubt Martin knew best.

‘Of course I know best,’ Martin observed.

‘Yes, I feel that,’ said Mr Pinch mildly. ‘I said so.’ And when he had
made this rejoinder, they fell into a blank silence again, which lasted
until they reached home; by which time it was dark.

Now, Miss Charity Pecksniff, in consideration of the inconvenience of
carrying them with her in the coach, and the impossibility of preserving
them by artificial means until the family’s return, had set forth, in a
couple of plates, the fragments of yesterday’s feast. In virtue of which
liberal arrangement, they had the happiness to find awaiting them in
the parlour two chaotic heaps of the remains of last night’s pleasure,
consisting of certain filmy bits of oranges, some mummied sandwiches,
various disrupted masses of the geological cake, and several entire
captain’s biscuits. That choice liquor in which to steep these dainties
might not be wanting, the remains of the two bottles of currant wine
had been poured together and corked with a curl-paper; so that every
material was at hand for making quite a heavy night of it.

Martin Chuzzlewit beheld these roystering preparations with infinite
contempt, and stirring the fire into a blaze (to the great destruction
of Mr Pecksniff’s coals), sat moodily down before it, in the most
comfortable chair he could find. That he might the better squeeze
himself into the small corner that was left for him, Mr Pinch took up
his position on Miss Mercy Pecksniff’s stool, and setting his glass down
upon the hearthrug and putting his plate upon his knees, began to enjoy
himself.

If Diogenes coming to life again could have rolled himself, tub and all,
into Mr Pecksniff’s parlour and could have seen Tom Pinch as he sat on
Mercy Pecksniff’s stool with his plate and glass before him he could
not have faced it out, though in his surliest mood, but must have
smiled good-temperedly. The perfect and entire satisfaction of Tom; his
surpassing appreciation of the husky sandwiches, which crumbled in his
mouth like saw-dust; the unspeakable relish with which he swallowed the
thin wine by drops, and smacked his lips, as though it were so rich and
generous that to lose an atom of its fruity flavour were a sin; the look
with which he paused sometimes, with his glass in his hand, proposing
silent toasts to himself; and the anxious shade that came upon his
contented face when, after wandering round the room, exulting in
its uninvaded snugness, his glance encountered the dull brow of his
companion; no cynic in the world, though in his hatred of its men a very
griffin, could have withstood these things in Thomas Pinch.

Some men would have slapped him on the back, and pledged him in a bumper
of the currant wine, though it had been the sharpest vinegar--aye, and
liked its flavour too; some would have seized him by his honest hand,
and thanked him for the lesson that his simple nature taught them. Some
would have laughed with, and others would have laughed at him; of which
last class was Martin Chuzzlewit, who, unable to restrain himself, at
last laughed loud and long.

‘That’s right,’ said Tom, nodding approvingly. ‘Cheer up! That’s
capital!’

At which encouragement young Martin laughed again; and said, as soon as
he had breath and gravity enough:

‘I never saw such a fellow as you are, Pinch.’

‘Didn’t you though?’ said Tom. ‘Well, it’s very likely you do find me
strange, because I have hardly seen anything of the world, and you have
seen a good deal I dare say?’

‘Pretty well for my time of life,’ rejoined Martin, drawing his chair
still nearer to the fire, and spreading his feet out on the fender.
‘Deuce take it, I must talk openly to somebody. I’ll talk openly to you,
Pinch.’

‘Do!’ said Tom. ‘I shall take it as being very friendly of you,’

‘I’m not in your way, am I?’ inquired Martin, glancing down at Mr Pinch,
who was by this time looking at the fire over his leg.

‘Not at all!’ cried Tom.

‘You must know then, to make short of a long story,’ said Martin,
beginning with a kind of effort, as if the revelation were not
agreeable to him; ‘that I have been bred up from childhood with great
expectations, and have always been taught to believe that I should be,
one day, very rich. So I should have been, but for certain brief
reasons which I am going to tell you, and which have led to my being
disinherited.’

‘By your father?’ inquired Mr Pinch, with open eyes.

‘By my grandfather. I have had no parents these many years. Scarcely
within my remembrance.’

‘Neither have I,’ said Tom, touching the young man’s hand with his own
and timidly withdrawing it again. ‘Dear me!’

‘Why, as to that, you know, Pinch,’ pursued the other, stirring the fire
again, and speaking in his rapid, off-hand way; ‘it’s all very right
and proper to be fond of parents when we have them, and to bear them in
remembrance after they’re dead, if you have ever known anything of them.
But as I never did know anything about mine personally, you know, why, I
can’t be expected to be very sentimental about ‘em. And I am not; that’s
the truth.’

Mr Pinch was just then looking thoughtfully at the bars. But on
his companion pausing in this place, he started, and said ‘Oh! of
course’--and composed himself to listen again.

‘In a word,’ said Martin, ‘I have been bred and reared all my life by
this grandfather of whom I have just spoken. Now, he has a great many
good points--there is no doubt about that; I’ll not disguise the fact
from you--but he has two very great faults, which are the staple of his
bad side. In the first place, he has the most confirmed obstinacy of
character you ever met with in any human creature. In the second, he is
most abominably selfish.’

‘Is he indeed?’ cried Tom.

‘In those two respects,’ returned the other, ‘there never was such a
man. I have often heard from those who know, that they have been, time
out of mind, the failings of our family; and I believe there’s some
truth in it. But I can’t say of my own knowledge. All I have to do, you
know, is to be very thankful that they haven’t descended to me, and, to
be very careful that I don’t contract ‘em.’

‘To be sure,’ said Mr Pinch. ‘Very proper.’

‘Well, sir,’ resumed Martin, stirring the fire once more, and drawing
his chair still closer to it, ‘his selfishness makes him exacting,
you see; and his obstinacy makes him resolute in his exactions. The
consequence is that he has always exacted a great deal from me in the
way of respect, and submission, and self-denial when his wishes were in
question, and so forth. I have borne a great deal from him, because I
have been under obligations to him (if one can ever be said to be under
obligations to one’s own grandfather), and because I have been really
attached to him; but we have had a great many quarrels for all that, for
I could not accommodate myself to his ways very often--not out of the
least reference to myself, you understand, but because--’ he stammered
here, and was rather at a loss.

Mr Pinch being about the worst man in the world to help anybody out of a
difficulty of this sort, said nothing.

‘Well! as you understand me,’ resumed Martin, quickly, ‘I needn’t hunt
for the precise expression I want. Now I come to the cream of my story,
and the occasion of my being here. I am in love, Pinch.’

Mr Pinch looked up into his face with increased interest.

‘I say I am in love. I am in love with one of the most beautiful girls
the sun ever shone upon. But she is wholly and entirely dependent upon
the pleasure of my grandfather; and if he were to know that she favoured
my passion, she would lose her home and everything she possesses in the
world. There is nothing very selfish in THAT love, I think?’

‘Selfish!’ cried Tom. ‘You have acted nobly. To love her as I am sure
you do, and yet in consideration for her state of dependence, not even
to disclose--’

‘What are you talking about, Pinch?’ said Martin pettishly: ‘don’t
make yourself ridiculous, my good fellow! What do you mean by not
disclosing?’

‘I beg your pardon,’ answered Tom. ‘I thought you meant that, or I
wouldn’t have said it.’

‘If I didn’t tell her I loved her, where would be the use of my being in
love?’ said Martin: ‘unless to keep myself in a perpetual state of worry
and vexation?’

‘That’s true,’ Tom answered. ‘Well! I can guess what SHE said when you
told her,’ he added, glancing at Martin’s handsome face.

‘Why, not exactly, Pinch,’ he rejoined, with a slight frown; ‘because
she has some girlish notions about duty and gratitude, and all the rest
of it, which are rather hard to fathom; but in the main you are right.
Her heart was mine, I found.’

‘Just what I supposed,’ said Tom. ‘Quite natural!’ and, in his great
satisfaction, he took a long sip out of his wine-glass.

‘Although I had conducted myself from the first with the utmost
circumspection,’ pursued Martin, ‘I had not managed matters so well but
that my grandfather, who is full of jealousy and distrust, suspected me
of loving her. He said nothing to her, but straightway attacked me
in private, and charged me with designing to corrupt the fidelity to
himself (there you observe his selfishness), of a young creature whom
he had trained and educated to be his only disinterested and faithful
companion, when he should have disposed of me in marriage to his heart’s
content. Upon that, I took fire immediately, and told him that with his
good leave I would dispose of myself in marriage, and would rather
not be knocked down by him or any other auctioneer to any bidder
whomsoever.’

Mr Pinch opened his eyes wider, and looked at the fire harder than he
had done yet.

‘You may be sure,’ said Martin, ‘that this nettled him, and that he
began to be the very reverse of complimentary to myself. Interview
succeeded interview; words engendered words, as they always do; and the
upshot of it was, that I was to renounce her, or be renounced by him.
Now you must bear in mind, Pinch, that I am not only desperately fond
of her (for though she is poor, her beauty and intellect would reflect
great credit on anybody, I don’t care of what pretensions who might
become her husband), but that a chief ingredient in my composition is a
most determined--’

‘Obstinacy,’ suggested Tom in perfect good faith. But the suggestion was
not so well received as he had expected; for the young man immediately
rejoined, with some irritation,

‘What a fellow you are, Pinch!’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Tom, ‘I thought you wanted a word.’

‘I didn’t want that word,’ he rejoined. ‘I told you obstinacy was no
part of my character, did I not? I was going to say, if you had given
me leave, that a chief ingredient in my composition is a most determined
firmness.’

‘Oh!’ cried Tom, screwing up his mouth, and nodding. ‘Yes, yes; I see!’

‘And being firm,’ pursued Martin, ‘of course I was not going to yield to
him, or give way by so much as the thousandth part of an inch.’

‘No, no,’ said Tom.

‘On the contrary, the more he urged, the more I was determined to oppose
him.’

‘To be sure!’ said Tom.

‘Very well,’ rejoined Martin, throwing himself back in his chair, with
a careless wave of both hands, as if the subject were quite settled, and
nothing more could be said about it--‘There is an end of the matter, and
here am I!’

Mr Pinch sat staring at the fire for some minutes with a puzzled look,
such as he might have assumed if some uncommonly difficult conundrum had
been proposed, which he found it impossible to guess. At length he said:

‘Pecksniff, of course, you had known before?’

‘Only by name. No, I had never seen him, for my grandfather kept not
only himself but me, aloof from all his relations. But our separation
took place in a town in the adjoining country. From that place I came to
Salisbury, and there I saw Pecksniff’s advertisement, which I answered,
having always had some natural taste, I believe, in the matters to which
it referred, and thinking it might suit me. As soon as I found it to be
his, I was doubly bent on coming to him if possible, on account of his
being--’

‘Such an excellent man,’ interposed Tom, rubbing his hands: ‘so he is.
You were quite right.’

‘Why, not so much on that account, if the truth must be spoken,’
returned Martin, ‘as because my grandfather has an inveterate dislike to
him, and after the old man’s arbitrary treatment of me, I had a natural
desire to run as directly counter to all his opinions as I could. Well!
As I said before, here I am. My engagement with the young lady I have
been telling you about is likely to be a tolerably long one; for neither
her prospects nor mine are very bright; and of course I shall not think
of marrying until I am well able to do so. It would never do, you know,
for me to be plunging myself into poverty and shabbiness and love in one
room up three pair of stairs, and all that sort of thing.’

‘To say nothing of her,’ remarked Tom Pinch, in a low voice.

‘Exactly so,’ rejoined Martin, rising to warm his back, and leaning
against the chimney-piece. ‘To say nothing of her. At the same time,
of course it’s not very hard upon her to be obliged to yield to the
necessity of the case; first, because she loves me very much; and
secondly, because I have sacrificed a great deal on her account, and
might have done much better, you know.’

It was a very long time before Tom said ‘Certainly;’ so long, that he
might have taken a nap in the interval, but he did say it at last.

‘Now, there is one odd coincidence connected with this love-story,’ said
Martin, ‘which brings it to an end. You remember what you told me last
night as we were coming here, about your pretty visitor in the church?’

‘Surely I do,’ said Tom, rising from his stool, and seating himself in
the chair from which the other had lately risen, that he might see his
face. ‘Undoubtedly.’

‘That was she.’

‘I knew what you were going to say,’ cried Tom, looking fixedly at him,
and speaking very softly. ‘You don’t tell me so?’

‘That was she,’ repeated the young man. ‘After what I have heard
from Pecksniff, I have no doubt that she came and went with my
grandfather.--Don’t you drink too much of that sour wine, or you’ll have
a fit of some sort, Pinch, I see.’

‘It is not very wholesome, I am afraid,’ said Tom, setting down the
empty glass he had for some time held. ‘So that was she, was it?’

Martin nodded assent; and adding, with a restless impatience, that if
he had been a few days earlier he would have seen her; and that now she
might be, for anything he knew, hundreds of miles away; threw himself,
after a few turns across the room, into a chair, and chafed like a
spoilt child.

Tom Pinch’s heart was very tender, and he could not bear to see the
most indifferent person in distress; still less one who had awakened
an interest in him, and who regarded him (either in fact, or as he
supposed) with kindness, and in a spirit of lenient construction.
Whatever his own thoughts had been a few moments before--and to judge
from his face they must have been pretty serious--he dismissed them
instantly, and gave his young friend the best counsel and comfort that
occurred to him.

‘All will be well in time,’ said Tom, ‘I have no doubt; and some trial
and adversity just now will only serve to make you more attached to each
other in better days. I have always read that the truth is so, and I
have a feeling within me, which tells me how natural and right it is
that it should be. That never ran smooth yet,’ said Tom, with a smile
which, despite the homeliness of his face, was pleasanter to see than
many a proud beauty’s brightest glance; ‘what never ran smooth yet, can
hardly be expected to change its character for us; so we must take it as
we find it, and fashion it into the very best shape we can, by patience
and good-humour. I have no power at all; I needn’t tell you that; but I
have an excellent will; and if I could ever be of use to you, in any way
whatever, how very glad I should be!’

‘Thank you,’ said Martin, shaking his hand. ‘You’re a good fellow, upon
my word, and speak very kindly. Of course you know,’ he added, after a
moment’s pause, as he drew his chair towards the fire again, ‘I should
not hesitate to avail myself of your services if you could help me at
all; but mercy on us!’--Here he rumpled his hair impatiently with his
hand, and looked at Tom as if he took it rather ill that he was not
somebody else--‘you might as well be a toasting-fork or a frying-pan,
Pinch, for any help you can render me.’

‘Except in the inclination,’ said Tom, gently.

‘Oh! to be sure. I meant that, of course. If inclination went for
anything, I shouldn’t want help. I tell you what you may do, though, if
you will, and at the present moment too.’

‘What is that?’ demanded Tom.

‘Read to me.’

‘I shall be delighted,’ cried Tom, catching up the candle with
enthusiasm. ‘Excuse my leaving you in the dark a moment, and I’ll fetch
a book directly. What will you like? Shakespeare?’

‘Aye!’ replied his friend, yawning and stretching himself. ‘He’ll do. I
am tired with the bustle of to-day, and the novelty of everything about
me; and in such a case, there’s no greater luxury in the world, I think,
than being read to sleep. You won’t mind my going to sleep, if I can?’

‘Not at all!’ cried Tom.

‘Then begin as soon as you like. You needn’t leave off when you see
me getting drowsy (unless you feel tired), for it’s pleasant to wake
gradually to the sounds again. Did you ever try that?’

‘No, I never tried that,’ said Tom

‘Well! You can, you know, one of these days when we’re both in the right
humour. Don’t mind leaving me in the dark. Look sharp!’

Mr Pinch lost no time in moving away; and in a minute or two returned
with one of the precious volumes from the shelf beside his bed. Martin
had in the meantime made himself as comfortable as circumstances would
permit, by constructing before the fire a temporary sofa of three chairs
with Mercy’s stool for a pillow, and lying down at full-length upon it.

‘Don’t be too loud, please,’ he said to Pinch.

‘No, no,’ said Tom.

‘You’re sure you’re not cold’

‘Not at all!’ cried Tom.

‘I am quite ready, then.’

Mr Pinch accordingly, after turning over the leaves of his book with as
much care as if they were living and highly cherished creatures, made
his own selection, and began to read. Before he had completed fifty
lines his friend was snoring.

‘Poor fellow!’ said Tom, softly, as he stretched out his head to peep
at him over the backs of the chairs. ‘He is very young to have so much
trouble. How trustful and generous in him to bestow all this confidence
in me. And that was she, was it?’

But suddenly remembering their compact, he took up the poem at the place
where he had left off, and went on reading; always forgetting to snuff
the candle, until its wick looked like a mushroom. He gradually became
so much interested, that he quite forgot to replenish the fire; and was
only reminded of his neglect by Martin Chuzzlewit starting up after the
lapse of an hour or so, and crying with a shiver.

‘Why, it’s nearly out, I declare! No wonder I dreamed of being frozen.
Do call for some coals. What a fellow you are, Pinch!’



CHAPTER SEVEN

IN WHICH MR CHEVY SLYME ASSERTS THE INDEPENDENCE OF HIS SPIRIT, AND THE
BLUE DRAGON LOSES A LIMB


Martin began to work at the grammar-school next morning, with so much
vigour and expedition, that Mr Pinch had new reason to do homage to
the natural endowments of that young gentleman, and to acknowledge
his infinite superiority to himself. The new pupil received Tom’s
compliments very graciously; and having by this time conceived a real
regard for him, in his own peculiar way, predicted that they would
always be the very best of friends, and that neither of them, he was
certain (but particularly Tom), would ever have reason to regret the day
on which they became acquainted. Mr Pinch was delighted to hear him say
this, and felt so much flattered by his kind assurances of friendship
and protection, that he was at a loss how to express the pleasure they
afforded him. And indeed it may be observed of this friendship, such as
it was, that it had within it more likely materials of endurance than
many a sworn brotherhood that has been rich in promise; for so long as
the one party found a pleasure in patronizing, and the other in
being patronised (which was in the very essence of their respective
characters), it was of all possible events among the least probable,
that the twin demons, Envy and Pride, would ever arise between them. So
in very many cases of friendship, or what passes for it, the old axiom
is reversed, and like clings to unlike more than to like.

They were both very busy on the afternoon succeeding the family’s
departure--Martin with the grammar-school, and Tom in balancing certain
receipts of rents, and deducting Mr Pecksniff’s commission from the
same; in which abstruse employment he was much distracted by a habit his
new friend had of whistling aloud while he was drawing--when they were
not a little startled by the unexpected obtrusion into that sanctuary of
genius, of a human head which, although a shaggy and somewhat alarming
head in appearance, smiled affably upon them from the doorway, in
a manner that was at once waggish, conciliatory, and expressive of
approbation.

‘I am not industrious myself, gents both,’ said the head, ‘but I know
how to appreciate that quality in others. I wish I may turn grey
and ugly, if it isn’t in my opinion, next to genius, one of the very
charmingest qualities of the human mind. Upon my soul, I am grateful
to my friend Pecksniff for helping me to the contemplation of such
a delicious picture as you present. You remind me of Whittington,
afterwards thrice Lord Mayor of London. I give you my unsullied word of
honour, that you very strongly remind me of that historical character.
You are a pair of Whittingtons, gents, without the cat; which is a most
agreeable and blessed exception to me, for I am not attached to the
feline species. My name is Tigg; how do you do?’

Martin looked to Mr Pinch for an explanation; and Tom, who had never in
his life set eyes on Mr Tigg before, looked to that gentleman himself.

‘Chevy Slyme?’ said Mr Tigg, interrogatively, and kissing his left hand
in token of friendship. ‘You will understand me when I say that I am the
accredited agent of Chevy Slyme; that I am the ambassador from the court
of Chiv? Ha ha!’

‘Heyday!’ asked Martin, starting at the mention of a name he knew.
‘Pray, what does he want with me?’

‘If your name is Pinch’--Mr Tigg began.

‘It is not’ said Martin, checking himself. ‘That is Mr Pinch.’

‘If that is Mr Pinch,’ cried Tigg, kissing his hand again, and beginning
to follow his head into the room, ‘he will permit me to say that I
greatly esteem and respect his character, which has been most highly
commended to me by my friend Pecksniff; and that I deeply appreciate his
talent for the organ, notwithstanding that I do not, if I may use the
expression, grind myself. If that is Mr Pinch, I will venture to express
a hope that I see him well, and that he is suffering no inconvenience
from the easterly wind?’

‘Thank you,’ said Tom. ‘I am very well.’

‘That is a comfort,’ Mr Tigg rejoined. ‘Then,’ he added, shielding his
lips with the palm of his hand, and applying them close to Mr Pinch’s
ear, ‘I have come for the letter.’

‘For the letter,’ said Tom, aloud. ‘What letter?’

‘The letter,’ whispered Tigg in the same cautious manner as before,
‘which my friend Pecksniff addressed to Chevy Slyme, Esquire, and left
with you.’

‘He didn’t leave any letter with me,’ said Tom.

‘Hush!’ cried the other. ‘It’s all the same thing, though not so
delicately done by my friend Pecksniff as I could have wished. The
money.’

‘The money!’ cried Tom quite scared.

‘Exactly so,’ said Mr Tigg. With which he rapped Tom twice or thrice
upon the breast and nodded several times, as though he would say that he
saw they understood each other; that it was unnecessary to mention
the circumstance before a third person; and that he would take it as a
particular favour if Tom would slip the amount into his hand, as quietly
as possible.

Mr Pinch, however, was so very much astounded by this (to him)
inexplicable deportment, that he at once openly declared there must be
some mistake, and that he had been entrusted with no commission whatever
having any reference to Mr Tigg or to his friend, either. Mr Tigg
received this declaration with a grave request that Mr Pinch would have
the goodness to make it again; and on Tom’s repeating it in a still more
emphatic and unmistakable manner, checked it off, sentence for sentence,
by nodding his head solemnly at the end of each. When it had come to
a close for the second time, Mr Tigg sat himself down in a chair and
addressed the young men as follows:

‘Then I tell you what it is, gents both. There is at this present moment
in this very place, a perfect constellation of talent and genius, who is
involved, through what I cannot but designate as the culpable negligence
of my friend Pecksniff, in a situation as tremendous, perhaps, as the
social intercourse of the nineteenth century will readily admit
of. There is actually at this instant, at the Blue Dragon in this
village--an ale-house, observe; a common, paltry, low-minded,
clodhopping, pipe-smoking ale-house--an individual, of whom it may be
said, in the language of the Poet, that nobody but himself can in any
way come up to him; who is detained there for his bill. Ha! ha! For his
bill. I repeat it--for his bill. Now,’ said Mr Tigg, ‘we have heard
of Fox’s Book of Martyrs, I believe, and we have heard of the Court of
Requests, and the Star Chamber; but I fear the contradiction of no man
alive or dead, when I assert that my friend Chevy Slyme being held
in pawn for a bill, beats any amount of cockfighting with which I am
acquainted.’

Martin and Mr Pinch looked, first at each other, and afterwards at Mr
Tigg, who with his arms folded on his breast surveyed them, half in
despondency and half in bitterness.

‘Don’t mistake me, gents both,’ he said, stretching forth his right
hand. ‘If it had been for anything but a bill, I could have borne it,
and could still have looked upon mankind with some feeling of respect;
but when such a man as my friend Slyme is detained for a score--a thing
in itself essentially mean; a low performance on a slate, or possibly
chalked upon the back of a door--I do feel that there is a screw of
such magnitude loose somewhere, that the whole framework of society
is shaken, and the very first principles of things can no longer be
trusted. In short, gents both,’ said Mr Tigg with a passionate flourish
of his hands and head, ‘when a man like Slyme is detained for such
a thing as a bill, I reject the superstitions of ages, and believe
nothing. I don’t even believe that I DON’T believe, curse me if I do!’

‘I am very sorry, I am sure,’ said Tom after a pause, ‘but Mr
Pecksniff said nothing to me about it, and I couldn’t act without his
instructions. Wouldn’t it be better, sir, if you were to go to--to
wherever you came from--yourself, and remit the money to your friend?’

‘How can that be done, when I am detained also?’ said Mr Tigg; ‘and when
moreover, owing to the astounding, and I must add, guilty negligence of
my friend Pecksniff, I have no money for coach-hire?’

Tom thought of reminding the gentleman (who, no doubt, in his agitation
had forgotten it) that there was a post-office in the land; and that
possibly if he wrote to some friend or agent for a remittance it might
not be lost upon the road; or at all events that the chance, however
desperate, was worth trusting to. But, as his good-nature presently
suggested to him certain reasons for abstaining from this hint, he
paused again, and then asked:

‘Did you say, sir, that you were detained also?’

‘Come here,’ said Mr Tigg, rising. ‘You have no objection to my opening
this window for a moment?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Tom.

‘Very good,’ said Mr Tigg, lifting the sash. ‘You see a fellow down
there in a red neckcloth and no waistcoat?’

‘Of course I do,’ cried Tom. ‘That’s Mark Tapley.’

‘Mark Tapley is it?’ said the gentleman. ‘Then Mark Tapley had not only
the great politeness to follow me to this house, but is waiting now, to
see me home again. And for that attention, sir,’ added Mr Tigg, stroking
his moustache, ‘I can tell you, that Mark Tapley had better in his
infancy have been fed to suffocation by Mrs Tapley, than preserved to
this time.’

Mr Pinch was not so dismayed by this terrible threat, but that he had
voice enough to call to Mark to come in, and upstairs; a summons which
he so speedily obeyed, that almost as soon as Tom and Mr Tigg had drawn
in their heads and closed the window again, he, the denounced, appeared
before them.

‘Come here, Mark!’ said Mr Pinch. ‘Good gracious me! what’s the matter
between Mrs Lupin and this gentleman?’

‘What gentleman, sir?’ said Mark. ‘I don’t see no gentleman here sir,
excepting you and the new gentleman,’ to whom he made a rough kind of
bow--‘and there’s nothing wrong between Mrs Lupin and either of you, Mr
Pinch, I am sure.’

‘Nonsense, Mark!’ cried Tom. ‘You see Mr--’

‘Tigg,’ interposed that gentleman. ‘Wait a bit. I shall crush him soon.
All in good time!’

‘Oh HIM!’ rejoined Mark, with an air of careless defiance. ‘Yes, I see
HIM. I could see him a little better, if he’d shave himself, and get his
hair cut.’

Mr Tigg shook his head with a ferocious look, and smote himself once
upon the breast.

‘It’s no use,’ said Mark. ‘If you knock ever so much in that quarter,
you’ll get no answer. I know better. There’s nothing there but padding;
and a greasy sort it is.’

‘Nay, Mark,’ urged Mr Pinch, interposing to prevent hostilities, ‘tell
me what I ask you. You’re not out of temper, I hope?’

‘Out of temper, sir!’ cried Mark, with a grin; ‘why no, sir. There’s
a little credit--not much--in being jolly, when such fellows as him is
a-going about like roaring lions; if there is any breed of lions, at
least, as is all roar and mane. What is there between him and Mrs Lupin,
sir? Why, there’s a score between him and Mrs Lupin. And I think Mrs
Lupin lets him and his friend off very easy in not charging ‘em double
prices for being a disgrace to the Dragon. That’s my opinion. I wouldn’t
have any such Peter the Wild Boy as him in my house, sir, not if I was
paid race-week prices for it. He’s enough to turn the very beer in
the casks sour with his looks; he is! So he would, if it had judgment
enough.’

‘You’re not answering my question, you know, Mark,’ observed Mr Pinch.

‘Well, sir,’ said Mark, ‘I don’t know as there’s much to answer further
than that. Him and his friend goes and stops at the Moon and Stars till
they’ve run a bill there; and then comes and stops with us and does the
same. The running of bills is common enough Mr Pinch; it an’t that as
we object to; it’s the ways of this chap. Nothing’s good enough for him;
all the women is dying for him he thinks, and is overpaid if he winks at
‘em; and all the men was made to be ordered about by him. This not being
aggravation enough, he says this morning to me, in his usual captivating
way, “We’re going to-night, my man.” “Are you, sir?” says I. “Perhaps
you’d like the bill got ready, sir?” “Oh no, my man,” he says; “you
needn’t mind that. I’ll give Pecksniff orders to see to that.” In reply
to which, the Dragon makes answer, “Thankee, sir, you’re very kind to
honour us so far, but as we don’t know any particular good of you, and
you don’t travel with luggage, and Mr Pecksniff an’t at home (which
perhaps you mayn’t happen to be aware of, sir), we should prefer
something more satisfactory;” and that’s where the matter stands. And I
ask,’ said Mr Tapley, pointing, in conclusion, to Mr Tigg, with his hat,
‘any lady or gentleman, possessing ordinary strength of mind, to say
whether he’s a disagreeable-looking chap or not!’

‘Let me inquire,’ said Martin, interposing between this candid speech
and the delivery of some blighting anathema by Mr Tigg, ‘what the amount
of this debt may be?’

‘In point of money, sir, very little,’ answered Mark. ‘Only just turned
of three pounds. But it an’t that; it’s the--’

‘Yes, yes, you told us so before,’ said Martin. ‘Pinch, a word with
you.’

‘What is it?’ asked Tom, retiring with him to a corner of the room.

‘Why, simply--I am ashamed to say--that this Mr Slyme is a relation of
mine, of whom I never heard anything pleasant; and that I don’t want him
here just now, and think he would be cheaply got rid of, perhaps, for
three or four pounds. You haven’t enough money to pay this bill, I
suppose?’

Tom shook his head to an extent that left no doubt of his entire
sincerity.

‘That’s unfortunate, for I am poor too; and in case you had had it, I’d
have borrowed it of you. But if we told this landlady we would see her
paid, I suppose that would answer the same purpose?’

‘Oh dear, yes!’ said Tom. ‘She knows me, bless you!’

‘Then let us go down at once and tell her so; for the sooner we are rid
of their company the better. As you have conducted the conversation with
this gentleman hitherto, perhaps you’ll tell him what we purpose doing;
will you?’

Mr Pinch, complying, at once imparted the intelligence to Mr Tigg, who
shook him warmly by the hand in return, assuring him that his faith in
anything and everything was again restored. It was not so much, he said,
for the temporary relief of this assistance that he prized it, as for
its vindication of the high principle that Nature’s Nobs felt with
Nature’s Nobs, and that true greatness of soul sympathized with true
greatness of soul, all the world over. It proved to him, he said, that
like him they admired genius, even when it was coupled with the alloy
occasionally visible in the metal of his friend Slyme; and on behalf
of that friend, he thanked them; as warmly and heartily as if the
cause were his own. Being cut short in these speeches by a general move
towards the stairs, he took possession at the street door of the lapel
of Mr Pinch’s coat, as a security against further interruption; and
entertained that gentleman with some highly improving discourse until
they reached the Dragon, whither they were closely followed by Mark and
the new pupil.

The rosy hostess scarcely needed Mr Pinch’s word as a preliminary to
the release of her two visitors, of whom she was glad to be rid on
any terms; indeed, their brief detention had originated mainly with
Mr Tapley, who entertained a constitutional dislike to gentleman
out-at-elbows who flourished on false pretences; and had conceived a
particular aversion to Mr Tigg and his friend, as choice specimens of
the species. The business in hand thus easily settled, Mr Pinch and
Martin would have withdrawn immediately, but for the urgent entreaties
of Mr Tigg that they would allow him the honour of presenting them
to his friend Slyme, which were so very difficult of resistance that,
yielding partly to these persuasions and partly to their own curiosity,
they suffered themselves to be ushered into the presence of that
distinguished gentleman.

He was brooding over the remains of yesterday’s decanter of brandy, and
was engaged in the thoughtful occupation of making a chain of rings on
the top of the table with the wet foot of his drinking-glass. Wretched
and forlorn as he looked, Mr Slyme had once been in his way, the
choicest of swaggerers; putting forth his pretensions boldly, as a
man of infinite taste and most undoubted promise. The stock-in-trade
requisite to set up an amateur in this department of business is very
slight, and easily got together; a trick of the nose and a curl of the
lip sufficient to compound a tolerable sneer, being ample provision for
any exigency. But, in an evil hour, this off-shoot of the Chuzzlewit
trunk, being lazy, and ill qualified for any regular pursuit and having
dissipated such means as he ever possessed, had formally established
himself as a professor of Taste for a livelihood; and finding, too late,
that something more than his old amount of qualifications was necessary
to sustain him in this calling, had quickly fallen to his present level,
where he retained nothing of his old self but his boastfulness and his
bile, and seemed to have no existence separate or apart from his friend
Tigg. And now so abject and so pitiful was he--at once so maudlin,
insolent, beggarly, and proud--that even his friend and parasite,
standing erect beside him, swelled into a Man by contrast.

‘Chiv,’ said Mr Tigg, clapping him on the back, ‘my friend Pecksniff not
being at home, I have arranged our trifling piece of business with Mr
Pinch and friend. Mr Pinch and friend, Mr Chevy Slyme! Chiv, Mr Pinch
and friend!’

‘These are agreeable circumstances in which to be introduced to
strangers,’ said Chevy Slyme, turning his bloodshot eyes towards Tom
Pinch. ‘I am the most miserable man in the world, I believe!’

Tom begged he wouldn’t mention it; and finding him in this condition,
retired, after an awkward pause, followed by Martin. But Mr Tigg so
urgently conjured them, by coughs and signs, to remain in the shadow of
the door, that they stopped there.

‘I swear,’ cried Mr Slyme, giving the table an imbecile blow with his
fist, and then feebly leaning his head upon his hand, while some drunken
drops oozed from his eyes, ‘that I am the wretchedest creature on
record. Society is in a conspiracy against me. I’m the most literary
man alive. I’m full of scholarship. I’m full of genius; I’m full of
information; I’m full of novel views on every subject; yet look at my
condition! I’m at this moment obliged to two strangers for a tavern
bill!’

Mr Tigg replenished his friend’s glass, pressed it into his hand, and
nodded an intimation to the visitors that they would see him in a better
aspect immediately.

‘Obliged to two strangers for a tavern bill, eh!’ repeated Mr Slyme,
after a sulky application to his glass. ‘Very pretty! And crowds of
impostors, the while, becoming famous; men who are no more on a level
with me than--Tigg, I take you to witness that I am the most persecuted
hound on the face of the earth.’

With a whine, not unlike the cry of the animal he named, in its lowest
state of humiliation, he raised his glass to his mouth again. He found
some encouragement in it; for when he set it down he laughed scornfully.
Upon that Mr Tigg gesticulated to the visitors once more, and with great
expression, implying that now the time was come when they would see Chiv
in his greatness.

‘Ha, ha, ha,’ laughed Mr Slyme. ‘Obliged to two strangers for a tavern
bill! Yet I think I’ve a rich uncle, Tigg, who could buy up the uncles
of fifty strangers! Have I, or have I not? I come of a good family,
I believe! Do I, or do I not? I’m not a man of common capacity or
accomplishments, I think! Am I, or am I not?’

‘You are the American aloe of the human race, my dear Chiv,’ said Mr
Tigg, ‘which only blooms once in a hundred years!’

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ laughed Mr Slyme again. ‘Obliged to two strangers for
a tavern bill! I obliged to two architect’s apprentices. Fellows who
measure earth with iron chains, and build houses like bricklayers. Give
me the names of those two apprentices. How dare they oblige me!’

Mr Tigg was quite lost in admiration of this noble trait in his friend’s
character; as he made known to Mr Pinch in a neat little ballet of
action, spontaneously invented for the purpose.

‘I’ll let ‘em know, and I’ll let all men know,’ cried Chevy Slyme,
‘that I’m none of the mean, grovelling, tame characters they meet with
commonly. I have an independent spirit. I have a heart that swells in my
bosom. I have a soul that rises superior to base considerations.’

‘Oh Chiv, Chiv,’ murmured Mr Tigg, ‘you have a nobly independent nature,
Chiv!’

‘You go and do your duty, sir,’ said Mr Slyme, angrily, ‘and borrow
money for travelling expenses; and whoever you borrow it of, let ‘em
know that I possess a haughty spirit, and a proud spirit, and have
infernally finely-touched chords in my nature, which won’t brook
patronage. Do you hear? Tell ‘em I hate ‘em, and that that’s the way
I preserve my self-respect; and tell ‘em that no man ever respected
himself more than I do!’

He might have added that he hated two sorts of men; all those who did
him favours, and all those who were better off than himself; as in
either case their position was an insult to a man of his stupendous
merits. But he did not; for with the apt closing words above recited, Mr
Slyme; of too haughty a stomach to work, to beg, to borrow, or to steal;
yet mean enough to be worked or borrowed, begged or stolen for, by any
catspaw that would serve his turn; too insolent to lick the hand that
fed him in his need, yet cur enough to bite and tear it in the dark;
with these apt closing words Mr Slyme fell forward with his head upon
the table, and so declined into a sodden sleep.

‘Was there ever,’ cried Mr Tigg, joining the young men at the door,
and shutting it carefully behind him, ‘such an independent spirit as is
possessed by that extraordinary creature? Was there ever such a Roman as
our friend Chiv? Was there ever a man of such a purely classical turn of
thought, and of such a toga-like simplicity of nature? Was there ever a
man with such a flow of eloquence? Might he not, gents both, I ask, have
sat upon a tripod in the ancient times, and prophesied to a perfectly
unlimited extent, if previously supplied with gin-and-water at the
public cost?’

Mr Pinch was about to contest this latter position with his usual
mildness, when, observing that his companion had already gone
downstairs, he prepared to follow him.

‘You are not going, Mr Pinch?’ said Tigg.

‘Thank you,’ answered Tom. ‘Yes. Don’t come down.’

‘Do you know that I should like one little word in private with you Mr
Pinch?’ said Tigg, following him. ‘One minute of your company in the
skittle-ground would very much relieve my mind. Might I beseech that
favour?’

‘Oh, certainly,’ replied Tom, ‘if you really wish it.’ So he accompanied
Mr Tigg to the retreat in question; on arriving at which place that
gentleman took from his hat what seemed to be the fossil remains of an
antediluvian pocket-handkerchief, and wiped his eyes therewith.

‘You have not beheld me this day,’ said Mr Tigg, ‘in a favourable
light.’

‘Don’t mention that,’ said Tom, ‘I beg.’

‘But you have NOT,’ cried Tigg. ‘I must persist in that opinion. If you
could have seen me, Mr Pinch, at the head of my regiment on the coast
of Africa, charging in the form of a hollow square, with the women and
children and the regimental plate-chest in the centre, you would not
have known me for the same man. You would have respected me, sir.’

Tom had certain ideas of his own upon the subject of glory; and
consequently he was not quite so much excited by this picture as Mr Tigg
could have desired.

‘But no matter!’ said that gentleman. ‘The school-boy writing home to
his parents and describing the milk-and-water, said “This is indeed
weakness.” I repeat that assertion in reference to myself at the present
moment; and I ask your pardon. Sir, you have seen my friend Slyme?’

‘No doubt,’ said Mr Pinch.

‘Sir, you have been impressed by my friend Slyme?’

‘Not very pleasantly, I must say,’ answered Tom, after a little
hesitation.

‘I am grieved but not surprised,’ cried Mr Tigg, detaining him with both
hands, ‘to hear that you have come to that conclusion; for it is my own.
But, Mr Pinch, though I am a rough and thoughtless man, I can honour
Mind. I honour Mind in following my friend. To you of all men, Mr Pinch,
I have a right to make appeal on Mind’s behalf, when it has not the art
to push its fortune in the world. And so, sir--not for myself, who have
no claim upon you, but for my crushed, my sensitive and independent
friend, who has--I ask the loan of three half-crowns. I ask you for the
loan of three half-crowns, distinctly, and without a blush. I ask it,
almost as a right. And when I add that they will be returned by post,
this week, I feel that you will blame me for that sordid stipulation.’

Mr Pinch took from his pocket an old-fashioned red-leather purse with
a steel clasp, which had probably once belonged to his deceased
grandmother. It held one half-sovereign and no more. All Tom’s worldly
wealth until next quarter-day.

‘Stay!’ cried Mr Tigg, who had watched this proceeding keenly. ‘I was
just about to say, that for the convenience of posting you had better
make it gold. Thank you. A general direction, I suppose, to Mr Pinch at
Mr Pecksniff’s--will that find you?’

‘That’ll find me,’ said Tom. ‘You had better put Esquire to Mr
Pecksniff’s name, if you please. Direct to me, you know, at Seth
Pecksniff’s, Esquire.’

‘At Seth Pecksniff’s, Esquire,’ repeated Mr Tigg, taking an exact note
of it with a stump of pencil. ‘We said this week, I believe?’

‘Yes; or Monday will do,’ observed Tom.

‘No, no, I beg your pardon. Monday will NOT do,’ said Mr Tigg. ‘If we
stipulated for this week, Saturday is the latest day. Did we stipulate
for this week?’

‘Since you are so particular about it,’ said Tom, ‘I think we did.’

Mr Tigg added this condition to his memorandum; read the entry over to
himself with a severe frown; and that the transaction might be the more
correct and business-like, appended his initials to the whole. That
done, he assured Mr Pinch that everything was now perfectly regular;
and, after squeezing his hand with great fervour, departed.

Tom entertained enough suspicion that Martin might possibly turn this
interview into a jest, to render him desirous to avoid the company of
that young gentleman for the present. With this view he took a few turns
up and down the skittle-ground, and did not re-enter the house until
Mr Tigg and his friend had quitted it, and the new pupil and Mark were
watching their departure from one of the windows.

‘I was just a-saying, sir, that if one could live by it,’ observed Mark,
pointing after their late guests, ‘that would be the sort of service
for me. Waiting on such individuals as them would be better than
grave-digging, sir.’

‘And staying here would be better than either, Mark,’ replied Tom. ‘So
take my advice, and continue to swim easily in smooth water.’

‘It’s too late to take it now, sir,’ said Mark. ‘I have broke it to her,
sir. I am off to-morrow morning.’

‘Off!’ cried Mr Pinch, ‘where to?’

‘I shall go up to London, sir.’

‘What to be?’ asked Mr Pinch.

‘Well! I don’t know yet, sir. Nothing turned up that day I opened my
mind to you, as was at all likely to suit me. All them trades I thought
of was a deal too jolly; there was no credit at all to be got in any
of ‘em. I must look for a private service, I suppose, sir. I might be
brought out strong, perhaps, in a serious family, Mr Pinch.’

‘Perhaps you might come out rather too strong for a serious family’s
taste, Mark.’

‘That’s possible, sir. If I could get into a wicked family, I might
do myself justice; but the difficulty is to make sure of one’s ground,
because a young man can’t very well advertise that he wants a place, and
wages an’t so much an object as a wicked sitivation; can he, sir?’

‘Why, no,’ said Mr Pinch, ‘I don’t think he can.’

‘An envious family,’ pursued Mark, with a thoughtful face; ‘or a
quarrelsome family, or a malicious family, or even a good out-and-out
mean family, would open a field of action as I might do something in.
The man as would have suited me of all other men was that old gentleman
as was took ill here, for he really was a trying customer. Howsever, I
must wait and see what turns up, sir; and hope for the worst.’

‘You are determined to go then?’ said Mr Pinch.

‘My box is gone already, sir, by the waggon, and I’m going to walk on
to-morrow morning, and get a lift by the day coach when it overtakes me.
So I wish you good-bye, Mr Pinch--and you too, sir--and all good luck
and happiness!’

They both returned his greeting laughingly, and walked home arm-in-arm.
Mr Pinch imparting to his new friend, as they went, such further
particulars of Mark Tapley’s whimsical restlessness as the reader is
already acquainted with.

In the meantime Mark, having a shrewd notion that his mistress was
in very low spirits, and that he could not exactly answer for the
consequences of any lengthened TETE-A-TETE in the bar, kept himself
obstinately out of her way all the afternoon and evening. In this piece
of generalship he was very much assisted by the great influx of company
into the taproom; for the news of his intention having gone abroad,
there was a perfect throng there all the evening, and much drinking of
healths and clinking of mugs. At length the house was closed for the
night; and there being now no help for it, Mark put the best face he
could upon the matter, and walked doggedly to the bar-door.

‘If I look at her,’ said Mark to himself, ‘I’m done. I feel that I’m
a-going fast.’

‘You have come at last,’ said Mrs Lupin.

Aye, Mark said: There he was.

‘And you are determined to leave us, Mark?’ cried Mrs Lupin.

‘Why, yes; I am,’ said Mark; keeping his eyes hard upon the floor.

‘I thought,’ pursued the landlady, with a most engaging hesitation,
‘that you had been--fond--of the Dragon?’

‘So I am,’ said Mark.

‘Then,’ pursued the hostess--and it really was not an unnatural
inquiry--‘why do you desert it?’

But as he gave no manner of answer to this question; not even on
its being repeated; Mrs Lupin put his money into his hand, and asked
him--not unkindly, quite the contrary--what he would take?

It is proverbial that there are certain things which flesh and blood
cannot bear. Such a question as this, propounded in such a manner, at
such a time, and by such a person, proved (at least, as far as, Mark’s
flesh and blood were concerned) to be one of them. He looked up in spite
of himself directly; and having once looked up, there was no
looking down again; for of all the tight, plump, buxom, bright-eyed,
dimple-faced landladies that ever shone on earth, there stood before him
then, bodily in that bar, the very pink and pineapple.

‘Why, I tell you what,’ said Mark, throwing off all his constraint in an
instant and seizing the hostess round the waist--at which she was not at
all alarmed, for she knew what a good young man he was--‘if I took what
I liked most, I should take you. If I only thought what was best for me,
I should take you. If I took what nineteen young fellows in twenty would
be glad to take, and would take at any price, I should take you. Yes,
I should,’ cried Mr Tapley, shaking his head expressively enough, and
looking (in a momentary state of forgetfulness) rather hard at the
hostess’s ripe lips. ‘And no man wouldn’t wonder if I did!’

Mrs Lupin said he amazed her. She was astonished how he could say such
things. She had never thought it of him.

‘Why, I never thought if of myself till now!’ said Mark, raising his
eyebrows with a look of the merriest possible surprise. ‘I always
expected we should part, and never have no explanation; I meant to do it
when I come in here just now; but there’s something about you, as makes
a man sensible. Then let us have a word or two together; letting it be
understood beforehand,’ he added this in a grave tone, to prevent the
possibility of any mistake, ‘that I’m not a-going to make no love, you
know.’

There was for just one second a shade, though not by any means a dark
one, on the landlady’s open brow. But it passed off instantly, in a
laugh that came from her very heart.

‘Oh, very good!’ she said; ‘if there is to be no love-making, you had
better take your arm away.’

‘Lord, why should I!’ cried Mark. ‘It’s quite innocent.’

‘Of course it’s innocent,’ returned the hostess, ‘or I shouldn’t allow
it.’

‘Very well!’ said Mark. ‘Then let it be.’

There was so much reason in this that the landlady laughed again,
suffered it to remain, and bade him say what he had to say, and be quick
about it. But he was an impudent fellow, she added.

‘Ha ha! I almost think I am!’ cried Mark, ‘though I never thought so
before. Why, I can say anything to-night!’

‘Say what you’re going to say if you please, and be quick,’ returned the
landlady, ‘for I want to get to bed.’

‘Why, then, my dear good soul,’ said Mark, ‘and a kinder woman than you
are never drawed breath--let me see the man as says she did!--what would
be the likely consequence of us two being--’

‘Oh nonsense!’ cried Mrs Lupin. ‘Don’t talk about that any more.’

‘No, no, but it an’t nonsense,’ said Mark; ‘and I wish you’d attend.
What would be the likely consequence of us two being married? If I can’t
be content and comfortable in this here lively Dragon now, is it to be
looked for as I should be then? By no means. Very good. Then you, even
with your good humour, would be always on the fret and worrit, always
uncomfortable in your own mind, always a-thinking as you was getting too
old for my taste, always a-picturing me to yourself as being chained
up to the Dragon door, and wanting to break away. I don’t know that it
would be so,’ said Mark, ‘but I don’t know that it mightn’t be. I am a
roving sort of chap, I know. I’m fond of change. I’m always a-thinking
that with my good health and spirits it would be more creditable in me
to be jolly where there’s things a-going on to make one dismal. It may
be a mistake of mine you see, but nothing short of trying how it acts
will set it right. Then an’t it best that I should go; particular when
your free way has helped me out to say all this, and we can part as
good friends as we have ever been since first I entered this here noble
Dragon, which,’ said Mr Tapley in conclusion, ‘has my good word and my
good wish to the day of my death!’

The hostess sat quite silent for a little time, but she very soon put
both her hands in Mark’s and shook them heartily.

‘For you are a good man,’ she said; looking into his face with a smile,
which was rather serious for her. ‘And I do believe have been a better
friend to me to-night than ever I have had in all my life.’

‘Oh! as to that, you know,’ said Mark, ‘that’s nonsense. But love my
heart alive!’ he added, looking at her in a sort of rapture, ‘if you ARE
that way disposed, what a lot of suitable husbands there is as you may
drive distracted!’

She laughed again at this compliment; and, once more shaking him by both
hands, and bidding him, if he should ever want a friend, to remember
her, turned gayly from the little bar and up the Dragon staircase.

‘Humming a tune as she goes,’ said Mark, listening, ‘in case I should
think she’s at all put out, and should be made down-hearted. Come,
here’s some credit in being jolly, at last!’

With that piece of comfort, very ruefully uttered, he went, in anything
but a jolly manner, to bed.

He rose early next morning, and was a-foot soon after sunrise. But it
was of no use; the whole place was up to see Mark Tapley off; the boys,
the dogs, the children, the old men, the busy people and the idlers;
there they were, all calling out ‘Good-b’ye, Mark,’ after their own
manner, and all sorry he was going. Somehow he had a kind of sense that
his old mistress was peeping from her chamber-window, but he couldn’t
make up his mind to look back.

‘Good-b’ye one, good-b’ye all!’ cried Mark, waving his hat on the top
of his walking-stick, as he strode at a quick pace up the little street.
‘Hearty chaps them wheelwrights--hurrah! Here’s the butcher’s dog
a-coming out of the garden--down, old fellow! And Mr Pinch a-going to
his organ--good-b’ye, sir! And the terrier-bitch from over the way--hie,
then, lass! And children enough to hand down human natur to the latest
posterity--good-b’ye, boys and girls! There’s some credit in it now. I’m
a-coming out strong at last. These are the circumstances that would try
a ordinary mind; but I’m uncommon jolly. Not quite as jolly as I could
wish to be, but very near. Good-b’ye! good-b’ye!’



CHAPTER EIGHT

ACCOMPANIES MR PECKSNIFF AND HIS CHARMING DAUGHTERS TO THE CITY OF
LONDON; AND RELATES WHAT FELL OUT UPON THEIR WAY THITHER


When Mr Pecksniff and the two young ladies got into the heavy coach at
the end of the lane, they found it empty, which was a great comfort;
particularly as the outside was quite full and the passengers looked
very frosty. For as Mr Pecksniff justly observed--when he and his
daughters had burrowed their feet deep in the straw, wrapped themselves
to the chin, and pulled up both windows--it is always satisfactory to
feel, in keen weather, that many other people are not as warm as
you are. And this, he said, was quite natural, and a very beautiful
arrangement; not confined to coaches, but extending itself into many
social ramifications. ‘For’ (he observed), ‘if every one were warm and
well-fed, we should lose the satisfaction of admiring the fortitude with
which certain conditions of men bear cold and hunger. And if we were
no better off than anybody else, what would become of our sense of
gratitude; which,’ said Mr Pecksniff with tears in his eyes, as he shook
his fist at a beggar who wanted to get up behind, ‘is one of the holiest
feelings of our common nature.’

His children heard with becoming reverence these moral precepts from the
lips of their father, and signified their acquiescence in the same, by
smiles. That he might the better feed and cherish that sacred flame of
gratitude in his breast, Mr Pecksniff remarked that he would trouble
his eldest daughter, even in this early stage of their journey, for the
brandy-bottle. And from the narrow neck of that stone vessel he imbibed
a copious refreshment.

‘What are we?’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘but coaches? Some of us are slow
coaches’--

‘Goodness, Pa!’ cried Charity.

‘Some of us, I say,’ resumed her parent with increased emphasis, ‘are
slow coaches; some of us are fast coaches. Our passions are the horses;
and rampant animals too--!’

‘Really, Pa,’ cried both the daughters at once. ‘How very unpleasant.’

‘And rampant animals too’ repeated Mr Pecksniff with so much
determination, that he may be said to have exhibited, at the moment a
sort of moral rampancy himself;’--and Virtue is the drag. We start from
The Mother’s Arms, and we run to The Dust Shovel.’

When he had said this, Mr Pecksniff, being exhausted, took some further
refreshment. When he had done that, he corked the bottle tight, with the
air of a man who had effectually corked the subject also; and went to
sleep for three stages.

The tendency of mankind when it falls asleep in coaches, is to wake up
cross; to find its legs in its way; and its corns an aggravation.
Mr Pecksniff not being exempt from the common lot of humanity found
himself, at the end of his nap, so decidedly the victim of these
infirmities, that he had an irresistible inclination to visit them upon
his daughters; which he had already begun to do in the shape of divers
random kicks, and other unexpected motions of his shoes, when the coach
stopped, and after a short delay the door was opened.

‘Now mind,’ said a thin sharp voice in the dark. ‘I and my son go
inside, because the roof is full, but you agree only to charge us
outside prices. It’s quite understood that we won’t pay more. Is it?’

‘All right, sir,’ replied the guard.

‘Is there anybody inside now?’ inquired the voice.

‘Three passengers,’ returned the guard.

‘Then I ask the three passengers to witness this bargain, if they will
be so good,’ said the voice. ‘My boy, I think we may safely get in.’

In pursuance of which opinion, two people took their seats in the
vehicle, which was solemnly licensed by Act of Parliament to carry any
six persons who could be got in at the door.

‘That was lucky!’ whispered the old man, when they moved on again. ‘And
a great stroke of policy in you to observe it. He, he, he! We couldn’t
have gone outside. I should have died of the rheumatism!’

Whether it occurred to the dutiful son that he had in some degree
over-reached himself by contributing to the prolongation of his father’s
days; or whether the cold had effected his temper; is doubtful. But he
gave his father such a nudge in reply, that that good old gentleman
was taken with a cough which lasted for full five minutes without
intermission, and goaded Mr Pecksniff to that pitch of irritation, that
he said at last--and very suddenly:

‘There is no room! There is really no room in this coach for any
gentleman with a cold in his head!’

‘Mine,’ said the old man, after a moment’s pause, ‘is upon my chest,
Pecksniff.’

The voice and manner, together, now that he spoke out; the composure of
the speaker; the presence of his son; and his knowledge of Mr Pecksniff;
afforded a clue to his identity which it was impossible to mistake.

‘Hem! I thought,’ said Mr Pecksniff, returning to his usual mildness,
‘that I addressed a stranger. I find that I address a relative, Mr
Anthony Chuzzlewit and his son Mr Jonas--for they, my dear children,
are our travelling companions--will excuse me for an apparently harsh
remark. It is not MY desire to wound the feelings of any person with
whom I am connected in family bonds. I may be a Hypocrite,’ said Mr
Pecksniff, cuttingly; ‘but I am not a Brute.’

‘Pooh, pooh!’ said the old man. ‘What signifies that word, Pecksniff?
Hypocrite! why, we are all hypocrites. We were all hypocrites t’other
day. I am sure I felt that to be agreed upon among us, or I shouldn’t
have called you one. We should not have been there at all, if we had not
been hypocrites. The only difference between you and the rest was--shall
I tell you the difference between you and the rest now, Pecksniff?’

‘If you please, my good sir; if you please.’

‘Why, the annoying quality in YOU, is,’ said the old man, ‘that you
never have a confederate or partner in YOUR juggling; you would deceive
everybody, even those who practise the same art; and have a way with
you, as if you--he, he, he!--as if you really believed yourself. I’d
lay a handsome wager now,’ said the old man, ‘if I laid wagers, which
I don’t and never did, that you keep up appearances by a tacit
understanding, even before your own daughters here. Now I, when I have
a business scheme in hand, tell Jonas what it is, and we discuss it
openly. You’re not offended, Pecksniff?’

‘Offended, my good sir!’ cried that gentleman, as if he had received the
highest compliments that language could convey.

‘Are you travelling to London, Mr Pecksniff?’ asked the son.

‘Yes, Mr Jonas, we are travelling to London. We shall have the pleasure
of your company all the way, I trust?’

‘Oh! ecod, you had better ask father that,’ said Jonas. ‘I am not
a-going to commit myself.’

Mr Pecksniff was, as a matter of course, greatly entertained by this
retort. His mirth having subsided, Mr Jonas gave him to understand
that himself and parent were in fact travelling to their home in the
metropolis; and that, since the memorable day of the great family
gathering, they had been tarrying in that part of the country, watching
the sale of certain eligible investments, which they had had in their
copartnership eye when they came down; for it was their custom, Mr Jonas
said, whenever such a thing was practicable, to kill two birds with one
stone, and never to throw away sprats, but as bait for whales. When he
had communicated to Mr Pecksniff these pithy scraps of intelligence,
he said, ‘That if it was all the same to him, he would turn him over
to father, and have a chat with the gals;’ and in furtherance of
this polite scheme, he vacated his seat adjoining that gentleman, and
established himself in the opposite corner, next to the fair Miss Mercy.

The education of Mr Jonas had been conducted from his cradle on the
strictest principles of the main chance. The very first word he learnt
to spell was ‘gain,’ and the second (when he got into two syllables),
‘money.’ But for two results, which were not clearly foreseen perhaps by
his watchful parent in the beginning, his training may be said to have
been unexceptionable. One of these flaws was, that having been long
taught by his father to over-reach everybody, he had imperceptibly
acquired a love of over-reaching that venerable monitor himself.
The other, that from his early habits of considering everything as a
question of property, he had gradually come to look, with impatience,
on his parent as a certain amount of personal estate, which had no
right whatever to be going at large, but ought to be secured in that
particular description of iron safe which is commonly called a coffin,
and banked in the grave.

‘Well, cousin!’ said Mr Jonas--‘Because we ARE cousins, you know, a few
times removed--so you’re going to London?’

Miss Mercy replied in the affirmative, pinching her sister’s arm at the
same time, and giggling excessively.

‘Lots of beaux in London, cousin!’ said Mr Jonas, slightly advancing his
elbow.

‘Indeed, sir!’ cried the young lady. ‘They won’t hurt us, sir, I dare
say.’ And having given him this answer with great demureness she was so
overcome by her own humour, that she was fain to stifle her merriment in
her sister’s shawl.

‘Merry,’ cried that more prudent damsel, ‘really I am ashamed of you.
How can you go on so? You wild thing!’ At which Miss Merry only laughed
the more, of course.

‘I saw a wildness in her eye, t’other day,’ said Mr Jonas, addressing
Charity. ‘But you’re the one to sit solemn! I say--You were regularly
prim, cousin!’

‘Oh! The old-fashioned fright!’ cried Merry, in a whisper. ‘Cherry my
dear, upon my word you must sit next him. I shall die outright if he
talks to me any more; I shall, positively!’ To prevent which fatal
consequence, the buoyant creature skipped out of her seat as she spoke,
and squeezed her sister into the place from which she had risen.

‘Don’t mind crowding me,’ cried Mr Jonas. ‘I like to be crowded by gals.
Come a little closer, cousin.’

‘No, thank you, sir,’ said Charity.

‘There’s that other one a-laughing again,’ said Mr Jonas; ‘she’s
a-laughing at my father, I shouldn’t wonder. If he puts on that old
flannel nightcap of his, I don’t know what she’ll do! Is that my father
a-snoring, Pecksniff?’

‘Yes, Mr Jonas.’

‘Tread upon his foot, will you be so good?’ said the young gentleman.
‘The foot next you’s the gouty one.’

Mr Pecksniff hesitating to perform this friendly office, Mr Jonas did it
himself; at the same time crying:

‘Come, wake up, father, or you’ll be having the nightmare, and
screeching out, I know.--Do you ever have the nightmare, cousin?’ he
asked his neighbour, with characteristic gallantry, as he dropped his
voice again.

‘Sometimes,’ answered Charity. ‘Not often.’

‘The other one,’ said Mr Jonas, after a pause. ‘Does SHE ever have the
nightmare?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Charity. ‘You had better ask her.’

‘She laughs so,’ said Jonas; ‘there’s no talking to her. Only hark how
she’s a-going on now! You’re the sensible one, cousin!’

‘Tut, tut!’ cried Charity.

‘Oh! But you are! You know you are!’

‘Mercy is a little giddy,’ said Miss Charity. But she’ll sober down in
time.’

‘It’ll be a very long time, then, if she does at all,’ rejoined her
cousin. ‘Take a little more room.’

‘I am afraid of crowding you,’ said Charity. But she took it
notwithstanding; and after one or two remarks on the extreme heaviness
of the coach, and the number of places it stopped at, they fell into
a silence which remained unbroken by any member of the party until
supper-time.

Although Mr Jonas conducted Charity to the hotel and sat himself beside
her at the board, it was pretty clear that he had an eye to ‘the other
one’ also, for he often glanced across at Mercy, and seemed to draw
comparisons between the personal appearance of the two, which were not
unfavourable to the superior plumpness of the younger sister. He allowed
himself no great leisure for this kind of observation, however, being
busily engaged with the supper, which, as he whispered in his fair
companion’s ear, was a contract business, and therefore the more she
ate, the better the bargain was. His father and Mr Pecksniff, probably
acting on the same wise principle, demolished everything that came
within their reach, and by that means acquired a greasy expression of
countenance, indicating contentment, if not repletion, which it was very
pleasant to contemplate.

When they could eat no more, Mr Pecksniff and Mr Jonas subscribed for
two sixpenny-worths of hot brandy-and-water, which the latter gentleman
considered a more politic order than one shillingsworth; there being
a chance of their getting more spirit out of the innkeeper under this
arrangement than if it were all in one glass. Having swallowed his share
of the enlivening fluid, Mr Pecksniff, under pretence of going to see if
the coach were ready, went secretly to the bar, and had his own little
bottle filled, in order that he might refresh himself at leisure in the
dark coach without being observed.

These arrangements concluded, and the coach being ready, they got into
their old places and jogged on again. But before he composed himself
for a nap, Mr Pecksniff delivered a kind of grace after meat, in these
words:

‘The process of digestion, as I have been informed by anatomical
friends, is one of the most wonderful works of nature. I do not know
how it may be with others, but it is a great satisfaction to me to know,
when regaling on my humble fare, that I am putting in motion the most
beautiful machinery with which we have any acquaintance. I really feel
at such times as if I was doing a public service. When I have wound
myself up, if I may employ such a term,’ said Mr Pecksniff with
exquisite tenderness, ‘and know that I am Going, I feel that in the
lesson afforded by the works within me, I am a Benefactor to my Kind!’

As nothing could be added to this, nothing was said; and Mr Pecksniff,
exulting, it may be presumed, in his moral utility, went to sleep again.

The rest of the night wore away in the usual manner. Mr Pecksniff
and Old Anthony kept tumbling against each other and waking up much
terrified, or crushed their heads in opposite corners of the coach and
strangely tattooed the surface of their faces--Heaven knows how--in
their sleep. The coach stopped and went on, and went on and stopped,
times out of number. Passengers got up and passengers got down, and
fresh horses came and went and came again, with scarcely any interval
between each team as it seemed to those who were dozing, and with a gap
of a whole night between every one as it seemed to those who were broad
awake. At length they began to jolt and rumble over horribly uneven
stones, and Mr Pecksniff looking out of window said it was to-morrow
morning, and they were there.

Very soon afterwards the coach stopped at the office in the city; and
the street in which it was situated was already in a bustle, that fully
bore out Mr Pecksniff’s words about its being morning, though for any
signs of day yet appearing in the sky it might have been midnight. There
was a dense fog too; as if it were a city in the clouds, which they had
been travelling to all night up a magic beanstalk; and there was a thick
crust upon the pavement like oilcake; which, one of the outsides (mad,
no doubt) said to another (his keeper, of course), was Snow.

Taking a confused leave of Anthony and his son, and leaving the luggage
of himself and daughters at the office to be called for afterwards, Mr
Pecksniff, with one of the young ladies under each arm, dived across the
street, and then across other streets, and so up the queerest courts,
and down the strangest alleys and under the blindest archways, in a kind
of frenzy; now skipping over a kennel, now running for his life from a
coach and horses; now thinking he had lost his way, now thinking he had
found it; now in a state of the highest confidence, now despondent to
the last degree, but always in a great perspiration and flurry; until at
length they stopped in a kind of paved yard near the Monument. That is
to say, Mr Pecksniff told them so; for as to anything they could see
of the Monument, or anything else but the buildings close at hand, they
might as well have been playing blindman’s buff at Salisbury.

Mr Pecksniff looked about him for a moment, and then knocked at the
door of a very dingy edifice, even among the choice collection of dingy
edifices at hand; on the front of which was a little oval board like
a tea-tray, with this inscription--‘Commercial Boarding-House: M.
Todgers.’

It seemed that M. Todgers was not up yet, for Mr Pecksniff knocked twice
and rang thrice, without making any impression on anything but a dog
over the way. At last a chain and some bolts were withdrawn with a rusty
noise, as if the weather had made the very fastenings hoarse, and a
small boy with a large red head, and no nose to speak of, and a very
dirty Wellington boot on his left arm, appeared; who (being surprised)
rubbed the nose just mentioned with the back of a shoe-brush, and said
nothing.

‘Still a-bed my man?’ asked Mr Pecksniff.

‘Still a-bed!’ replied the boy. ‘I wish they wos still a-bed. They’re
very noisy a-bed; all calling for their boots at once. I thought you
was the Paper, and wondered why you didn’t shove yourself through the
grating as usual. What do you want?’

Considering his years, which were tender, the youth may be said to have
preferred this question sternly, and in something of a defiant manner.
But Mr Pecksniff, without taking umbrage at his bearing put a card
in his hand, and bade him take that upstairs, and show them in the
meanwhile into a room where there was a fire.

‘Or if there’s one in the eating parlour,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘I can
find it myself.’ So he led his daughters, without waiting for any
further introduction, into a room on the ground-floor, where a
table-cloth (rather a tight and scanty fit in reference to the table it
covered) was already spread for breakfast; displaying a mighty dish of
pink boiled beef; an instance of that particular style of loaf which
is known to housekeepers as a slack-baked, crummy quartern; a liberal
provision of cups and saucers; and the usual appendages.

Inside the fender were some half-dozen pairs of shoes and boots, of
various sizes, just cleaned and turned with the soles upwards to dry;
and a pair of short black gaiters, on one of which was chalked--in
sport, it would appear, by some gentleman who had slipped down for the
purpose, pending his toilet, and gone up again--‘Jinkins’s Particular,’
while the other exhibited a sketch in profile, claiming to be the
portrait of Jinkins himself.

M. Todgers’s Commercial Boarding-House was a house of that sort which is
likely to be dark at any time; but that morning it was especially dark.
There was an odd smell in the passage, as if the concentrated essence of
all the dinners that had been cooked in the kitchen since the house was
built, lingered at the top of the kitchen stairs to that hour, and like
the Black Friar in Don Juan, ‘wouldn’t be driven away.’ In particular,
there was a sensation of cabbage; as if all the greens that had ever
been boiled there, were evergreens, and flourished in immortal strength.
The parlour was wainscoted, and communicated to strangers a magnetic
and instinctive consciousness of rats and mice. The staircase was very
gloomy and very broad, with balustrades so thick and heavy that they
would have served for a bridge. In a sombre corner on the first landing,
stood a gruff old giant of a clock, with a preposterous coronet of three
brass balls on his head; whom few had ever seen--none ever looked in the
face--and who seemed to continue his heavy tick for no other reason than
to warn heedless people from running into him accidentally. It had not
been papered or painted, hadn’t Todgers’s, within the memory of man. It
was very black, begrimed, and mouldy. And, at the top of the staircase,
was an old, disjointed, rickety, ill-favoured skylight, patched
and mended in all kinds of ways, which looked distrustfully down at
everything that passed below, and covered Todgers’s up as if it were a
sort of human cucumber-frame, and only people of a peculiar growth were
reared there.

Mr Pecksniff and his fair daughters had not stood warming themselves at
the fire ten minutes, when the sound of feet was heard upon the stairs,
and the presiding deity of the establishment came hurrying in.

M. Todgers was a lady, rather a bony and hard-featured lady, with a row
of curls in front of her head, shaped like little barrels of beer;
and on the top of it something made of net--you couldn’t call it a cap
exactly--which looked like a black cobweb. She had a little basket on
her arm, and in it a bunch of keys that jingled as she came. In her
other hand she bore a flaming tallow candle, which, after surveying Mr
Pecksniff for one instant by its light, she put down upon the table, to
the end that she might receive him with the greater cordiality.

‘Mr Pecksniff!’ cried Mrs Todgers. ‘Welcome to London! Who would have
thought of such a visit as this, after so--dear, dear!--so many years!
How do you DO, Mr Pecksniff?’

‘As well as ever; and as glad to see you, as ever;’ Mr Pecksniff made
response. ‘Why, you are younger than you used to be!’

‘YOU are, I am sure!’ said Mrs Todgers. ‘You’re not a bit changed.’

‘What do you say to this?’ cried Mr Pecksniff, stretching out his hand
towards the young ladies. ‘Does this make me no older?’

‘Not your daughters!’ exclaimed the lady, raising her hands and clasping
them. ‘Oh, no, Mr Pecksniff! Your second, and her bridesmaid!’

Mr Pecksniff smiled complacently; shook his head; and said, ‘My
daughters, Mrs Todgers. Merely my daughters.’

‘Ah!’ sighed the good lady, ‘I must believe you, for now I look at ‘em
I think I should have known ‘em anywhere. My dear Miss Pecksniffs, how
happy your Pa has made me!’

She hugged them both; and being by this time overpowered by her feelings
or the inclemency of the morning, jerked a little pocket handkerchief
out of the little basket, and applied the same to her face.

‘Now, my good madam,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘I know the rules of your
establishment, and that you only receive gentlemen boarders. But
it occurred to me, when I left home, that perhaps you would give my
daughters house room, and make an exception in their favour.’

‘Perhaps?’ cried Mrs Todgers ecstatically. ‘Perhaps?’

‘I may say then, that I was sure you would,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘I
know that you have a little room of your own, and that they can be
comfortable there, without appearing at the general table.’

‘Dear girls!’ said Mrs Todgers. ‘I must take that liberty once more.’

Mrs Todgers meant by this that she must embrace them once more, which
she accordingly did with great ardour. But the truth was that the house
being full with the exception of one bed, which would now be occupied
by Mr Pecksniff, she wanted time for consideration; and so much time too
(for it was a knotty point how to dispose of them), that even when
this second embrace was over, she stood for some moments gazing at the
sisters, with affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out
of the other.

‘I think I know how to arrange it,’ said Mrs Todgers, at length. ‘A sofa
bedstead in the little third room which opens from my own parlour.--Oh,
you dear girls!’

Thereupon she embraced them once more, observing that she could not
decide which was most like their poor mother (which was highly probable,
seeing that she had never beheld that lady), but that she rather thought
the youngest was; and then she said that as the gentlemen would be down
directly, and the ladies were fatigued with travelling, would they step
into her room at once?

It was on the same floor; being, in fact, the back parlour; and had,
as Mrs Todgers said, the great advantage (in London) of not being
overlooked; as they would see when the fog cleared off. Nor was this
a vainglorious boast, for it commanded at a perspective of two feet,
a brown wall with a black cistern on the top. The sleeping apartment
designed for the young ladies was approached from this chamber by a
mightily convenient little door, which would only open when fallen
against by a strong person. It commanded from a similar point of sight
another angle of the wall, and another side of the cistern. ‘Not the
damp side,’ said Mrs Todgers. ‘THAT is Mr Jinkins’s.’

In the first of these sanctuaries a fire was speedily kindled by the
youthful porter, who, whistling at his work in the absence of Mrs
Todgers (not to mention his sketching figures on his corduroys with
burnt firewood), and being afterwards taken by that lady in the fact,
was dismissed with a box on his ears. Having prepared breakfast for the
young ladies with her own hands, she withdrew to preside in the other
room; where the joke at Mr Jinkins’s expense seemed to be proceeding
rather noisily.

‘I won’t ask you yet, my dears,’ said Mr Pecksniff, looking in at the
door, ‘how you like London. Shall I?’

‘We haven’t seen much of it, Pa!’ cried Merry.

‘Nothing, I hope,’ said Cherry. (Both very miserably.)

‘Indeed,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘that’s true. We have our pleasure, and our
business too, before us. All in good time. All in good time!’

Whether Mr Pecksniff’s business in London was as strictly professional
as he had given his new pupil to understand, we shall see, to adopt that
worthy man’s phraseology, ‘all in good time.’



CHAPTER NINE

TOWN AND TODGER’S


Surely there never was, in any other borough, city, or hamlet in the
world, such a singular sort of a place as Todgers’s. And surely London,
to judge from that part of it which hemmed Todgers’s round and hustled
it, and crushed it, and stuck its brick-and-mortar elbows into it, and
kept the air from it, and stood perpetually between it and the
light, was worthy of Todgers’s, and qualified to be on terms of close
relationship and alliance with hundreds and thousands of the odd family
to which Todgers’s belonged.

You couldn’t walk about Todgers’s neighbourhood, as you could in any
other neighbourhood. You groped your way for an hour through lanes and
byways, and court-yards, and passages; and you never once emerged upon
anything that might be reasonably called a street. A kind of resigned
distraction came over the stranger as he trod those devious mazes, and,
giving himself up for lost, went in and out and round about and quietly
turned back again when he came to a dead wall or was stopped by an
iron railing, and felt that the means of escape might possibly present
themselves in their own good time, but that to anticipate them was
hopeless. Instances were known of people who, being asked to dine at
Todgers’s, had travelled round and round for a weary time, with its very
chimney-pots in view; and finding it, at last, impossible of attainment,
had gone home again with a gentle melancholy on their spirits,
tranquil and uncomplaining. Nobody had ever found Todgers’s on a verbal
direction, though given within a few minutes’ walk of it. Cautious
emigrants from Scotland or the North of England had been known to reach
it safely, by impressing a charity-boy, town-bred, and bringing him
along with them; or by clinging tenaciously to the postman; but these
were rare exceptions, and only went to prove the rule that Todgers’s was
in a labyrinth, whereof the mystery was known but to a chosen few.

Several fruit-brokers had their marts near Todgers’s; and one of the
first impressions wrought upon the stranger’s senses was of oranges--of
damaged oranges--with blue and green bruises on them, festering in
boxes, or mouldering away in cellars. All day long, a stream of porters
from the wharves beside the river, each bearing on his back a bursting
chest of oranges, poured slowly through the narrow passages; while
underneath the archway by the public-house, the knots of those who
rested and regaled within, were piled from morning until night. Strange
solitary pumps were found near Todgers’s hiding themselves for the most
part in blind alleys, and keeping company with fire-ladders. There were
churches also by dozens, with many a ghostly little churchyard, all
overgrown with such straggling vegetation as springs up spontaneously
from damp, and graves, and rubbish. In some of these dingy
resting-places which bore much the same analogy to green churchyards,
as the pots of earth for mignonette and wall-flower in the windows
overlooking them did to rustic gardens, there were trees; tall trees;
still putting forth their leaves in each succeeding year, with such a
languishing remembrance of their kind (so one might fancy, looking on
their sickly boughs) as birds in cages have of theirs. Here, paralysed
old watchmen guarded the bodies of the dead at night, year after year,
until at last they joined that solemn brotherhood; and, saving that they
slept below the ground a sounder sleep than even they had ever known
above it, and were shut up in another kind of box, their condition can
hardly be said to have undergone any material change when they, in turn,
were watched themselves.

Among the narrow thoroughfares at hand, there lingered, here and there,
an ancient doorway of carved oak, from which, of old, the sounds of
revelry and feasting often came; but now these mansions, only used
for storehouses, were dark and dull, and, being filled with wool, and
cotton, and the like--such heavy merchandise as stifles sound and stops
the throat of echo--had an air of palpable deadness about them which,
added to their silence and desertion, made them very grim. In like
manner, there were gloomy courtyards in these parts, into which few but
belated wayfarers ever strayed, and where vast bags and packs of goods,
upward or downward bound, were for ever dangling between heaven and
earth from lofty cranes There were more trucks near Todgers’s than
you would suppose whole city could ever need; not active trucks, but
a vagabond race, for ever lounging in the narrow lanes before
their masters’ doors and stopping up the pass; so that when a stray
hackney-coach or lumbering waggon came that way, they were the cause of
such an uproar as enlivened the whole neighbourhood, and made the bells
in the next churchtower vibrate again. In the throats and maws of dark
no-thoroughfares near Todgers’s, individual wine-merchants and wholesale
dealers in grocery-ware had perfect little towns of their own; and, deep
among the foundations of these buildings, the ground was undermined and
burrowed out into stables, where cart-horses, troubled by rats, might be
heard on a quiet Sunday rattling their halters, as disturbed spirits in
tales of haunted houses are said to clank their chains.

To tell of half the queer old taverns that had a drowsy and secret
existence near Todgers’s, would fill a goodly book; while a second
volume no less capacious might be devoted to an account of the quaint
old guests who frequented their dimly lighted parlours. These were, in
general, ancient inhabitants of that region; born, and bred there from
boyhood, who had long since become wheezy and asthmatical, and short of
breath, except in the article of story-telling; in which respect they
were still marvellously long-winded. These gentry were much opposed to
steam and all new-fangled ways, and held ballooning to be sinful, and
deplored the degeneracy of the times; which that particular member
of each little club who kept the keys of the nearest church,
professionally, always attributed to the prevalence of dissent and
irreligion; though the major part of the company inclined to the belief
that virtue went out with hair-powder, and that Old England’s greatness
had decayed amain with barbers.

As to Todgers’s itself--speaking of it only as a house in that
neighbourhood, and making no reference to its merits as a commercial
boarding establishment--it was worthy to stand where it did. There was
one staircase-window in it, at the side of the house, on the ground
floor; which tradition said had not been opened for a hundred years at
least, and which, abutting on an always dirty lane, was so begrimed and
coated with a century’s mud, that no one pane of glass could possibly
fall out, though all were cracked and broken twenty times. But the grand
mystery of Todgers’s was the cellarage, approachable only by a little
back door and a rusty grating; which cellarage within the memory of man
had had no connection with the house, but had always been the freehold
property of somebody else, and was reported to be full of wealth; though
in what shape--whether in silver, brass, or gold, or butts of wine,
or casks of gun-powder--was matter of profound uncertainty and supreme
indifference to Todgers’s and all its inmates.

The top of the house was worthy of notice. There was a sort of terrace
on the roof, with posts and fragments of rotten lines, once intended to
dry clothes upon; and there were two or three tea-chests out there,
full of earth, with forgotten plants in them, like old walking-sticks.
Whoever climbed to this observatory, was stunned at first from having
knocked his head against the little door in coming out; and after that,
was for the moment choked from having looked perforce, straight down the
kitchen chimney; but these two stages over, there were things to gaze
at from the top of Todgers’s, well worth your seeing too. For first
and foremost, if the day were bright, you observed upon the house-tops,
stretching far away, a long dark path; the shadow of the Monument; and
turning round, the tall original was close beside you, with every hair
erect upon his golden head, as if the doings of the city frightened him.
Then there were steeples, towers, belfries, shining vanes, and masts of
ships; a very forest. Gables, housetops, garret-windows, wilderness upon
wilderness. Smoke and noise enough for all the world at once.

After the first glance, there were slight features in the midst of this
crowd of objects, which sprung out from the mass without any reason, as
it were, and took hold of the attention whether the spectator would or
no. Thus, the revolving chimney-pots on one great stack of buildings
seemed to be turning gravely to each other every now and then, and
whispering the result of their separate observation of what was going
on below. Others, of a crook-backed shape, appeared to be maliciously
holding themselves askew, that they might shut the prospect out and
baffle Todgers’s. The man who was mending a pen at an upper window over
the way, became of paramount importance in the scene, and made a blank
in it, ridiculously disproportionate in its extent, when he retired. The
gambols of a piece of cloth upon the dyer’s pole had far more interest
for the moment than all the changing motion of the crowd. Yet even while
the looker-on felt angry with himself for this, and wondered how it was,
the tumult swelled into a roar; the hosts of objects seemed to thicken
and expand a hundredfold, and after gazing round him, quite scared, he
turned into Todgers’s again, much more rapidly than he came out; and ten
to one he told M. Todgers afterwards that if he hadn’t done so, he would
certainly have come into the street by the shortest cut; that is to say,
head-foremost.

So said the two Miss Pecksniffs, when they retired with Mrs Todgers from
this place of espial, leaving the youthful porter to close the door
and follow them downstairs; who, being of a playful temperament, and
contemplating with a delight peculiar to his sex and time of life, any
chance of dashing himself into small fragments, lingered behind to walk
upon the parapet.

It being the second day of their stay in London, the Miss Pecksniffs
and Mrs Todgers were by this time highly confidential, insomuch that the
last-named lady had already communicated the particulars of three early
disappointments of a tender nature; and had furthermore possessed her
young friends with a general summary of the life, conduct, and character
of Mr Todgers. Who, it seemed, had cut his matrimonial career rather
short, by unlawfully running away from his happiness, and establishing
himself in foreign countries as a bachelor.

‘Your pa was once a little particular in his attentions, my dears,’ said
Mrs Todgers, ‘but to be your ma was too much happiness denied me. You’d
hardly know who this was done for, perhaps?’

She called their attention to an oval miniature, like a little blister,
which was tacked up over the kettle-holder, and in which there was a
dreamy shadowing forth of her own visage.

‘It’s a speaking likeness!’ cried the two Miss Pecksniffs.

‘It was considered so once,’ said Mrs Todgers, warming herself in a
gentlemanly manner at the fire; ‘but I hardly thought you would have
known it, my loves.’

They would have known it anywhere. If they could have met with it in
the street, or seen it in a shop window, they would have cried ‘Good
gracious! Mrs Todgers!’

‘Presiding over an establishment like this, makes sad havoc with the
features, my dear Miss Pecksniffs,’ said Mrs Todgers. ‘The gravy alone,
is enough to add twenty years to one’s age, I do assure you.’

‘Lor’!’ cried the two Miss Pecksniffs.

‘The anxiety of that one item, my dears,’ said Mrs Todgers, ‘keeps the
mind continually upon the stretch. There is no such passion in human
nature, as the passion for gravy among commercial gentlemen. It’s
nothing to say a joint won’t yield--a whole animal wouldn’t yield--the
amount of gravy they expect each day at dinner. And what I have
undergone in consequence,’ cried Mrs Todgers, raising her eyes and
shaking her head, ‘no one would believe!’

‘Just like Mr Pinch, Merry!’ said Charity. ‘We have always noticed it in
him, you remember?’

‘Yes, my dear,’ giggled Merry, ‘but we have never given it him, you
know.’

‘You, my dears, having to deal with your pa’s pupils who can’t help
themselves, are able to take your own way,’ said Mrs Todgers; ‘but in
a commercial establishment, where any gentleman may say any Saturday
evening, “Mrs Todgers, this day week we part, in consequence of the
cheese,” it is not so easy to preserve a pleasant understanding. Your pa
was kind enough,’ added the good lady, ‘to invite me to take a ride with
you to-day; and I think he mentioned that you were going to call upon
Miss Pinch. Any relation to the gentleman you were speaking of just now,
Miss Pecksniff?’

‘For goodness sake, Mrs Todgers,’ interposed the lively Merry, ‘don’t
call him a gentleman. My dear Cherry, Pinch a gentleman! The idea!’

‘What a wicked girl you are!’ cried Mrs Todgers, embracing her with
great affection. ‘You are quite a quiz, I do declare! My dear Miss
Pecksniff, what a happiness your sister’s spirits must be to your pa and
self!’

‘He’s the most hideous, goggle-eyed creature, Mrs Todgers, in
existence,’ resumed Merry: ‘quite an ogre. The ugliest, awkwardest
frightfullest being, you can imagine. This is his sister, so I leave you
to suppose what SHE is. I shall be obliged to laugh outright, I know
I shall!’ cried the charming girl, ‘I never shall be able to keep my
countenance. The notion of a Miss Pinch presuming to exist at all is
sufficient to kill one, but to see her--oh my stars!’

Mrs Todgers laughed immensely at the dear love’s humour, and declared
she was quite afraid of her, that she was. She was so very severe.

‘Who is severe?’ cried a voice at the door. ‘There is no such thing as
severity in our family, I hope!’ And then Mr Pecksniff peeped smilingly
into the room, and said, ‘May I come in, Mrs Todgers?’

Mrs Todgers almost screamed, for the little door of communication
between that room and the inner one being wide open, there was a full
disclosure of the sofa bedstead in all its monstrous impropriety. But
she had the presence of mind to close this portal in the twinkling of an
eye; and having done so, said, though not without confusion, ‘Oh yes, Mr
Pecksniff, you can come in, if you please.’

‘How are we to-day,’ said Mr Pecksniff, jocosely, ‘and what are our
plans? Are we ready to go and see Tom Pinch’s sister? Ha, ha, ha! Poor
Thomas Pinch!’

‘Are we ready,’ returned Mrs Todgers, nodding her head with mysterious
intelligence, ‘to send a favourable reply to Mr Jinkins’s round-robin?
That’s the first question, Mr Pecksniff.’

‘Why Mr Jinkins’s robin, my dear madam?’ asked Mr Pecksniff, putting one
arm round Mercy, and the other round Mrs Todgers, whom he seemed, in the
abstraction of the moment, to mistake for Charity. ‘Why Mr Jinkins’s?’

‘Because he began to get it up, and indeed always takes the lead in the
house,’ said Mrs Todgers, playfully. ‘That’s why, sir.’

‘Jinkins is a man of superior talents,’ observed Mr Pecksniff. ‘I have
conceived a great regard for Jinkins. I take Jinkins’s desire to pay
polite attention to my daughters, as an additional proof of the friendly
feeling of Jinkins, Mrs Todgers.’

‘Well now,’ returned that lady, ‘having said so much, you must say the
rest, Mr Pecksniff; so tell the dear young ladies all about it.’

With these words she gently eluded Mr Pecksniff’s grasp, and took Miss
Charity into her own embrace; though whether she was impelled to this
proceeding solely by the irrepressible affection she had conceived for
that young lady, or whether it had any reference to a lowering, not to
say distinctly spiteful expression which had been visible in her face
for some moments, has never been exactly ascertained. Be this as it may,
Mr Pecksniff went on to inform his daughters of the purport and history
of the round-robin aforesaid, which was in brief, that the commercial
gentlemen who helped to make up the sum and substance of that noun of
multitude signifying many, called Todgers’s, desired the honour of their
presence at the general table, so long as they remained in the house,
and besought that they would grace the board at dinner-time next
day, the same being Sunday. He further said, that Mrs Todgers being a
consenting party to this invitation, he was willing, for his part, to
accept it; and so left them that he might write his gracious answer, the
while they armed themselves with their best bonnets for the utter defeat
and overthrow of Miss Pinch.

Tom Pinch’s sister was governess in a family, a lofty family; perhaps
the wealthiest brass and copper founders’ family known to mankind.
They lived at Camberwell; in a house so big and fierce, that its mere
outside, like the outside of a giant’s castle, struck terror into vulgar
minds and made bold persons quail. There was a great front gate; with a
great bell, whose handle was in itself a note of admiration; and a
great lodge; which being close to the house, rather spoilt the look-out
certainly but made the look-in tremendous. At this entry, a great porter
kept constant watch and ward; and when he gave the visitor high leave
to pass, he rang a second great bell, responsive to whose note a great
footman appeared in due time at the great halldoor, with such great
tags upon his liveried shoulder that he was perpetually entangling and
hooking himself among the chairs and tables, and led a life of torment
which could scarcely have been surpassed, if he had been a blue-bottle
in a world of cobwebs.

To this mansion Mr Pecksniff, accompanied by his daughters and Mrs
Todgers, drove gallantly in a one-horse fly. The foregoing ceremonies
having been all performed, they were ushered into the house; and so, by
degrees, they got at last into a small room with books in it, where Mr
Pinch’s sister was at that moment instructing her eldest pupil; to wit,
a premature little woman of thirteen years old, who had already arrived
at such a pitch of whalebone and education that she had nothing girlish
about her, which was a source of great rejoicing to all her relations
and friends.

‘Visitors for Miss Pinch!’ said the footman. He must have been
an ingenious young man, for he said it very cleverly; with a nice
discrimination between the cold respect with which he would have
announced visitors to the family, and the warm personal interest with
which he would have announced visitors to the cook.

‘Visitors for Miss Pinch!’

Miss Pinch rose hastily; with such tokens of agitation as plainly
declared that her list of callers was not numerous. At the same time,
the little pupil became alarmingly upright, and prepared herself to take
mental notes of all that might be said and done. For the lady of the
establishment was curious in the natural history and habits of the
animal called Governess, and encouraged her daughters to report thereon
whenever occasion served; which was, in reference to all parties
concerned, very laudable, improving, and pleasant.

It is a melancholy fact; but it must be related, that Mr Pinch’s sister
was not at all ugly. On the contrary, she had a good face; a very mild
and prepossessing face; and a pretty little figure--slight and short,
but remarkable for its neatness. There was something of her brother,
much of him indeed, in a certain gentleness of manner, and in her look
of timid trustfulness; but she was so far from being a fright, or
a dowdy, or a horror, or anything else, predicted by the two Miss
Pecksniffs, that those young ladies naturally regarded her with great
indignation, feeling that this was by no means what they had come to
see.

Miss Mercy, as having the larger share of gaiety, bore up the best
against this disappointment, and carried it off, in outward show at
least, with a titter; but her sister, not caring to hide her disdain,
expressed it pretty openly in her looks. As to Mrs Todgers, she leaned
on Mr Pecksniff’s arm and preserved a kind of genteel grimness, suitable
to any state of mind, and involving any shade of opinion.

‘Don’t be alarmed, Miss Pinch,’ said Mr Pecksniff, taking her hand
condescendingly in one of his, and patting it with the other. ‘I have
called to see you, in pursuance of a promise given to your brother,
Thomas Pinch. My name--compose yourself, Miss Pinch--is Pecksniff.’

The good man emphasised these words as though he would have said, ‘You
see in me, young person, the benefactor of your race; the patron of your
house; the preserver of your brother, who is fed with manna daily from
my table; and in right of whom there is a considerable balance in my
favour at present standing in the books beyond the sky. But I have no
pride, for I can afford to do without it!’

The poor girl felt it all as if it had been Gospel truth. Her brother
writing in the fullness of his simple heart, had often told her so, and
how much more! As Mr Pecksniff ceased to speak, she hung her head, and
dropped a tear upon his hand.

‘Oh very well, Miss Pinch!’ thought the sharp pupil, ‘crying before
strangers, as if you didn’t like the situation!’

‘Thomas is well,’ said Mr Pecksniff; ‘and sends his love and this
letter. I cannot say, poor fellow, that he will ever be distinguished in
our profession; but he has the will to do well, which is the next thing
to having the power; and, therefore, we must bear with him. Eh?’

‘I know he has the will, sir,’ said Tom Pinch’s sister, ‘and I know how
kindly and considerately you cherish it, for which neither he nor I can
ever be grateful enough, as we very often say in writing to each
other. The young ladies too,’ she added, glancing gratefully at his two
daughters, ‘I know how much we owe to them.’

‘My dears,’ said Mr Pecksniff, turning to them with a smile: ‘Thomas’s
sister is saying something you will be glad to hear, I think.’

‘We can’t take any merit to ourselves, papa!’ cried Cherry, as they
both apprised Tom Pinch’s sister, with a curtsey, that they would
feel obliged if she would keep her distance. ‘Mr Pinch’s being so well
provided for is owing to you alone, and we can only say how glad we are
to hear that he is as grateful as he ought to be.’

‘Oh very well, Miss Pinch!’ thought the pupil again. ‘Got a grateful
brother, living on other people’s kindness!’

‘It was very kind of you,’ said Tom Pinch’s sister, with Tom’s own
simplicity and Tom’s own smile, ‘to come here; very kind indeed; though
how great a kindness you have done me in gratifying my wish to see you,
and to thank you with my own lips, you, who make so light of benefits
conferred, can scarcely think.’

‘Very grateful; very pleasant; very proper,’ murmured Mr Pecksniff.

‘It makes me happy too,’ said Ruth Pinch, who now that her first
surprise was over, had a chatty, cheerful way with her, and a
single-hearted desire to look upon the best side of everything, which
was the very moral and image of Tom; ‘very happy to think that you will
be able to tell him how more than comfortably I am situated here, and
how unnecessary it is that he should ever waste a regret on my being
cast upon my own resources. Dear me! So long as I heard that he was
happy, and he heard that I was,’ said Tom’s sister, ‘we could both bear,
without one impatient or complaining thought, a great deal more than
ever we have had to endure, I am very certain.’ And if ever the plain
truth were spoken on this occasionally false earth, Tom’s sister spoke
it when she said that.

‘Ah!’ cried Mr Pecksniff whose eyes had in the meantime wandered to the
pupil; ‘certainly. And how do YOU do, my very interesting child?’

‘Quite well, I thank you, sir,’ replied that frosty innocent.

‘A sweet face this, my dears,’ said Mr Pecksniff, turning to his
daughters. ‘A charming manner!’

Both young ladies had been in ecstasies with the scion of a wealthy
house (through whom the nearest road and shortest cut to her parents
might be supposed to lie) from the first. Mrs Todgers vowed that
anything one quarter so angelic she had never seen. ‘She wanted but
a pair of wings, a dear,’ said that good woman, ‘to be a young
syrup’--meaning, possibly, young sylph, or seraph.

‘If you will give that to your distinguished parents, my amiable little
friend,’ said Mr Pecksniff, producing one of his professional cards,
‘and will say that I and my daughters--’

‘And Mrs Todgers, pa,’ said Merry.

‘And Mrs Todgers, of London,’ added Mr Pecksniff; ‘that I, and my
daughters, and Mrs Todgers, of London, did not intrude upon them, as our
object simply was to take some notice of Miss Pinch, whose brother is a
young man in my employment; but that I could not leave this very chaste
mansion, without adding my humble tribute, as an Architect, to
the correctness and elegance of the owner’s taste, and to his just
appreciation of that beautiful art to the cultivation of which I have
devoted a life, and to the promotion of whose glory and advancement I
have sacrified a--a fortune--I shall be very much obliged to you.’

‘Missis’s compliments to Miss Pinch,’ said the footman, suddenly
appearing, and speaking in exactly the same key as before, ‘and begs to
know wot my young lady is a-learning of just now.’

‘Oh!’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘Here is the young man. HE will take the
card. With my compliments, if you please, young man. My dears, we are
interrupting the studies. Let us go.’

Some confusion was occasioned for an instant by Mrs Todgers’s
unstrapping her little flat hand-basket, and hurriedly entrusting the
‘young man’ with one of her own cards, which, in addition to
certain detailed information relative to the terms of the commercial
establishment, bore a foot-note to the effect that M. T. took that
opportunity of thanking those gentlemen who had honoured her with their
favours, and begged they would have the goodness, if satisfied with
the table, to recommend her to their friends. But Mr Pecksniff, with
admirable presence of mind, recovered this document, and buttoned it up
in his own pocket.

Then he said to Miss Pinch--with more condescension and kindness than
ever, for it was desirable the footman should expressly understand that
they were not friends of hers, but patrons:

‘Good morning. Good-bye. God bless you! You may depend upon my continued
protection of your brother Thomas. Keep your mind quite at ease, Miss
Pinch!’

‘Thank you,’ said Tom’s sister heartily; ‘a thousand times.’

‘Not at all,’ he retorted, patting her gently on the head. ‘Don’t
mention it. You will make me angry if you do. My sweet child’--to the
pupil--‘farewell! That fairy creature,’ said Mr Pecksniff, looking in
his pensive mood hard at the footman, as if he meant him, ‘has shed
a vision on my path, refulgent in its nature, and not easily to be
obliterated. My dears, are you ready?’

They were not quite ready yet, for they were still caressing the pupil.
But they tore themselves away at length; and sweeping past Miss Pinch
with each a haughty inclination of the head and a curtsey strangled in
its birth, flounced into the passage.

The young man had rather a long job in showing them out; for Mr
Pecksniff’s delight in the tastefulness of the house was such that he
could not help often stopping (particularly when they were near the
parlour door) and giving it expression, in a loud voice and very learned
terms. Indeed, he delivered, between the study and the hall, a
familiar exposition of the whole science of architecture as applied to
dwelling-houses, and was yet in the freshness of his eloquence when they
reached the garden.

‘If you look,’ said Mr Pecksniff, backing from the steps, with his head
on one side and his eyes half-shut that he might the better take in
the proportions of the exterior: ‘If you look, my dears, at the cornice
which supports the roof, and observe the airiness of its construction,
especially where it sweeps the southern angle of the building, you will
feel with me--How do you do, sir? I hope you’re well?’

Interrupting himself with these words, he very politely bowed to a
middle-aged gentleman at an upper window, to whom he spoke--not because
the gentleman could hear him (for he certainly could not), but as an
appropriate accompaniment to his salutation.

‘I have no doubt, my dears,’ said Mr Pecksniff, feigning to point out
other beauties with his hand, ‘that this is the proprietor. I should be
glad to know him. It might lead to something. Is he looking this way,
Charity?’

‘He is opening the window pa!’

‘Ha, ha!’ cried Mr Pecksniff softly. ‘All right! He has found I’m
professional. He heard me inside just now, I have no doubt. Don’t look!
With regard to the fluted pillars in the portico, my dears--’

‘Hallo!’ cried the gentleman.

‘Sir, your servant!’ said Mr Pecksniff, taking off his hat. ‘I am proud
to make your acquaintance.’

‘Come off the grass, will you!’ roared the gentleman.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff, doubtful of his having
heard aright. ‘Did you--?’

‘Come off the grass!’ repeated the gentleman, warmly.

‘We are unwilling to intrude, sir,’ Mr Pecksniff smilingly began.

‘But you ARE intruding,’ returned the other, ‘unwarrantably intruding.
Trespassing. You see a gravel walk, don’t you? What do you think it’s
meant for? Open the gate there! Show that party out!’

With that he clapped down the window again, and disappeared.

Mr Pecksniff put on his hat, and walked with great deliberation and in
profound silence to the fly, gazing at the clouds as he went, with
great interest. After helping his daughters and Mrs Todgers into that
conveyance, he stood looking at it for some moments, as if he were not
quite certain whether it was a carriage or a temple; but having settled
this point in his mind, he got into his place, spread his hands out on
his knees, and smiled upon the three beholders.

But his daughters, less tranquil-minded, burst into a torrent of
indignation. This came, they said, of cherishing such creatures as the
Pinches. This came of lowering themselves to their level. This came of
putting themselves in the humiliating position of seeming to know such
bold, audacious, cunning, dreadful girls as that. They had expected
this. They had predicted it to Mrs Todgers, as she (Todgers) could
depone, that very morning. To this, they added, that the owner of the
house, supposing them to be Miss Pinch’s friends, had acted, in
their opinion, quite correctly, and had done no more than, under such
circumstances, might reasonably have been expected. To that they added
(with a trifling inconsistency), that he was a brute and a bear; and
then they merged into a flood of tears, which swept away all wandering
epithets before it.

Perhaps Miss Pinch was scarcely so much to blame in the matter as the
Seraph, who, immediately on the withdrawal of the visitors, had hastened
to report them at head-quarters, with a full account of their having
presumptuously charged her with the delivery of a message afterwards
consigned to the footman; which outrage, taken in conjunction with Mr
Pecksniff’s unobtrusive remarks on the establishment, might possibly
have had some share in their dismissal. Poor Miss Pinch, however, had to
bear the brunt of it with both parties; being so severely taken to task
by the Seraph’s mother for having such vulgar acquaintances, that
she was fain to retire to her own room in tears, which her natural
cheerfulness and submission, and the delight of having seen Mr
Pecksniff, and having received a letter from her brother, were at first
insufficient to repress.

As to Mr Pecksniff, he told them in the fly, that a good action was its
own reward; and rather gave them to understand, that if he could have
been kicked in such a cause, he would have liked it all the better. But
this was no comfort to the young ladies, who scolded violently the whole
way back, and even exhibited, more than once, a keen desire to attack
the devoted Mrs Todgers; on whose personal appearance, but particularly
on whose offending card and hand-basket, they were secretly inclined to
lay the blame of half their failure.

Todgers’s was in a great bustle that evening, partly owing to some
additional domestic preparations for the morrow, and partly to the
excitement always inseparable in that house from Saturday night, when
every gentleman’s linen arrived at a different hour in its own little
bundle, with his private account pinned on the outside. There was always
a great clinking of pattens downstairs, too, until midnight or so, on
Saturdays; together with a frequent gleaming of mysterious lights in
the area; much working at the pump; and a constant jangling of the iron
handle of the pail. Shrill altercations from time to time arose between
Mrs Todgers and unknown females in remote back kitchens; and sounds were
occasionally heard, indicative of small articles of iron mongery and
hardware being thrown at the boy. It was the custom of that youth on
Saturdays, to roll up his shirt sleeves to his shoulders, and pervade
all parts of the house in an apron of coarse green baize; moreover, he
was more strongly tempted on Saturdays than on other days (it being a
busy time), to make excursive bolts into the neighbouring alleys when he
answered the door, and there to play at leap-frog and other sports with
vagrant lads, until pursued and brought back by the hair of his head or
the lobe of his ear; thus he was quite a conspicuous feature among the
peculiar incidents of the last day in the week at Todgers’s.

He was especially so on this particular Saturday evening, and honoured
the Miss Pecksniffs with a deal of notice; seldom passing the door
of Mrs Todgers’s private room, where they sat alone before the fire,
working by the light of a solitary candle, without putting in his head
and greeting them with some such compliments as, ‘There you are agin!’
‘An’t it nice?’--and similar humorous attentions.

‘I say,’ he whispered, stopping in one of his journeys to and fro,
‘young ladies, there’s soup to-morrow. She’s a-making it now. An’t she
a-putting in the water? Oh! not at all neither!’

In the course of answering another knock, he thrust in his head again.

‘I say! There’s fowls to-morrow. Not skinny ones. Oh no!’

Presently he called through the key-hole:

‘There’s a fish to-morrow. Just come. Don’t eat none of him!’ And, with
this special warning, vanished again.

By-and-bye, he returned to lay the cloth for supper; it having been
arranged between Mrs Todgers and the young ladies, that they should
partake of an exclusive veal-cutlet together in the privacy of that
apartment. He entertained them on this occasion by thrusting the
lighted candle into his mouth, and exhibiting his face in a state of
transparency; after the performance of which feat, he went on with his
professional duties; brightening every knife as he laid it on the table,
by breathing on the blade and afterwards polishing the same on the apron
already mentioned. When he had completed his preparations, he grinned
at the sisters, and expressed his belief that the approaching collation
would be of ‘rather a spicy sort.’

‘Will it be long, before it’s ready, Bailey?’ asked Mercy.

‘No,’ said Bailey, ‘it IS cooked. When I come up, she was dodging among
the tender pieces with a fork, and eating of ‘em.’

But he had scarcely achieved the utterance of these words, when he
received a manual compliment on the head, which sent him staggering
against the wall; and Mrs Todgers, dish in hand, stood indignantly
before him.

‘Oh you little villain!’ said that lady. ‘Oh you bad, false boy!’

‘No worse than yerself,’ retorted Bailey, guarding his head, on a
principle invented by Mr Thomas Cribb. ‘Ah! Come now! Do that again,
will yer?’

‘He’s the most dreadful child,’ said Mrs Todgers, setting down the dish,
‘I ever had to deal with. The gentlemen spoil him to that extent, and
teach him such things, that I’m afraid nothing but hanging will ever do
him any good.’

‘Won’t it!’ cried Bailey. ‘Oh! Yes! Wot do you go a-lowerin the
table-beer for then, and destroying my constitooshun?’

‘Go downstairs, you vicious boy,’ said Mrs Todgers, holding the door
open. ‘Do you hear me? Go along!’

After two or three dexterous feints, he went, and was seen no more that
night, save once, when he brought up some tumblers and hot water, and
much disturbed the two Miss Pecksniffs by squinting hideously behind
the back of the unconscious Mrs Todgers. Having done this justice to his
wounded feelings, he retired underground; where, in company with a swarm
of black beetles and a kitchen candle, he employed his faculties in
cleaning boots and brushing clothes until the night was far advanced.

Benjamin was supposed to be the real name of this young retainer but he
was known by a great variety of names. Benjamin, for instance, had been
converted into Uncle Ben, and that again had been corrupted into Uncle;
which, by an easy transition, had again passed into Barnwell, in memory
of the celebrated relative in that degree who was shot by his nephew
George, while meditating in his garden at Camberwell. The gentlemen at
Todgers’s had a merry habit, too, of bestowing upon him, for the time
being, the name of any notorious malefactor or minister; and sometimes
when current events were flat they even sought the pages of history for
these distinctions; as Mr Pitt, Young Brownrigg, and the like. At the
period of which we write, he was generally known among the gentlemen as
Bailey junior; a name bestowed upon him in contradistinction, perhaps,
to Old Bailey; and possibly as involving the recollection of an
unfortunate lady of the same name, who perished by her own hand early in
life, and has been immortalised in a ballad.

The usual Sunday dinner-hour at Todgers’s was two o’clock--a suitable
time, it was considered for all parties; convenient to Mrs Todgers, on
account of the bakers; and convenient to the gentlemen with reference
to their afternoon engagements. But on the Sunday which was to introduce
the two Miss Pecksniffs to a full knowledge of Todgers’s and its
society, the dinner was postponed until five, in order that everything
might be as genteel as the occasion demanded.

When the hour drew nigh, Bailey junior, testifying great excitement,
appeared in a complete suit of cast-off clothes several sizes too large
for him, and in particular, mounted a clean shirt of such extraordinary
magnitude, that one of the gentlemen (remarkable for his ready wit)
called him ‘collars’ on the spot. At about a quarter before five, a
deputation, consisting of Mr Jinkins, and another gentleman, whose
name was Gander, knocked at the door of Mrs Todgers’s room, and, being
formally introduced to the two Miss Pecksniffs by their parent who was
in waiting, besought the honour of conducting them upstairs.

The drawing-room at Todgers’s was out of the common style; so much so
indeed, that you would hardly have taken it to be a drawingroom, unless
you were told so by somebody who was in the secret. It was floor-clothed
all over; and the ceiling, including a great beam in the middle,
was papered. Besides the three little windows, with seats in them,
commanding the opposite archway, there was another window looking point
blank, without any compromise at all about it into Jinkins’s bedroom;
and high up, all along one side of the wall was a strip of panes of
glass, two-deep, giving light to the staircase. There were the oddest
closets possible, with little casements in them like eight-day clocks,
lurking in the wainscot and taking the shape of the stairs; and the very
door itself (which was painted black) had two great glass eyes in its
forehead, with an inquisitive green pupil in the middle of each.

Here the gentlemen were all assembled. There was a general cry of ‘Hear,
hear!’ and ‘Bravo Jink!’ when Mr Jinkins appeared with Charity on his
arm; which became quite rapturous as Mr Gander followed, escorting
Mercy, and Mr Pecksniff brought up the rear with Mrs Todgers.

Then the presentations took place. They included a gentleman of a
sporting turn, who propounded questions on jockey subjects to the
editors of Sunday papers, which were regarded by his friends as rather
stiff things to answer; and they included a gentleman of a theatrical
turn, who had once entertained serious thoughts of ‘coming out,’ but
had been kept in by the wickedness of human nature; and they included
a gentleman of a debating turn, who was strong at speech-making; and a
gentleman of a literary turn, who wrote squibs upon the rest, and
knew the weak side of everybody’s character but his own. There was a
gentleman of a vocal turn, and a gentleman of a smoking turn, and a
gentleman of a convivial turn; some of the gentlemen had a turn for
whist, and a large proportion of the gentlemen had a strong turn for
billiards and betting. They had all, it may be presumed, a turn for
business; being all commercially employed in one way or other; and
had, every one in his own way, a decided turn for pleasure to boot. Mr
Jinkins was of a fashionable turn; being a regular frequenter of the
Parks on Sundays, and knowing a great many carriages by sight. He spoke
mysteriously, too, of splendid women, and was suspected of having once
committed himself with a Countess. Mr Gander was of a witty turn being
indeed the gentleman who had originated the sally about ‘collars;’ which
sparkling pleasantry was now retailed from mouth to mouth, under the
title of Gander’s Last, and was received in all parts of the room with
great applause. Mr Jinkins it may be added, was much the oldest of
the party; being a fish-salesman’s book-keeper, aged forty. He was the
oldest boarder also; and in right of his double seniority, took the lead
in the house, as Mrs Todgers had already said.

There was considerable delay in the production of dinner, and poor Mrs
Todgers, being reproached in confidence by Jinkins, slipped in and out,
at least twenty times to see about it; always coming back as though she
had no such thing upon her mind, and hadn’t been out at all. But there
was no hitch in the conversation nevertheless; for one gentleman, who
travelled in the perfumery line, exhibited an interesting nick-nack,
in the way of a remarkable cake of shaving soap which he had lately
met with in Germany; and the gentleman of a literary turn repeated (by
desire) some sarcastic stanzas he had recently produced on the freezing
of the tank at the back of the house. These amusements, with the
miscellaneous conversation arising out of them, passed the time
splendidly, until dinner was announced by Bailey junior in these terms:

‘The wittles is up!’

On which notice they immediately descended to the banquet-hall; some of
the more facetious spirits in the rear taking down gentlemen as if they
were ladies, in imitation of the fortunate possessors of the two Miss
Pecksniffs.

Mr Pecksniff said grace--a short and pious grace, involving a blessing
on the appetites of those present, and committing all persons who had
nothing to eat, to the care of Providence; whose business (so said the
grace, in effect) it clearly was, to look after them. This done, they
fell to with less ceremony than appetite; the table groaning beneath the
weight, not only of the delicacies whereof the Miss Pecksniffs had been
previously forewarned, but of boiled beef, roast veal, bacon, pies
and abundance of such heavy vegetables as are favourably known to
housekeepers for their satisfying qualities. Besides which, there were
bottles of stout, bottles of wine, bottles of ale, and divers other
strong drinks, native and foreign.

All this was highly agreeable to the two Miss Pecksniffs, who were in
immense request; sitting one on either hand of Mr Jinkins at the bottom
of the table; and who were called upon to take wine with some new
admirer every minute. They had hardly ever felt so pleasant, and so full
of conversation, in their lives; Mercy, in particular, was uncommonly
brilliant, and said so many good things in the way of lively repartee
that she was looked upon as a prodigy. ‘In short,’ as that young lady
observed, ‘they felt now, indeed, that they were in London, and for the
first time too.’

Their young friend Bailey sympathized in these feelings to the
fullest extent, and, abating nothing of his patronage, gave them every
encouragement in his power; favouring them, when the general attention
was diverted from his proceedings, with many nods and winks and other
tokens of recognition, and occasionally touching his nose with a
corkscrew, as if to express the Bacchanalian character of the meeting.
In truth, perhaps even the spirits of the two Miss Pecksniffs, and the
hungry watchfulness of Mrs Todgers, were less worthy of note than the
proceedings of this remarkable boy, whom nothing disconcerted or put out
of his way. If any piece of crockery, a dish or otherwise, chanced to
slip through his hands (which happened once or twice), he let it go with
perfect good breeding, and never added to the painful emotions of the
company by exhibiting the least regret. Nor did he, by hurrying to and
fro, disturb the repose of the assembly, as many well-trained servants
do; on the contrary, feeling the hopelessness of waiting upon so large a
party, he left the gentlemen to help themselves to what they wanted, and
seldom stirred from behind Mr Jinkins’s chair, where, with his hands
in his pockets, and his legs planted pretty wide apart, he led the
laughter, and enjoyed the conversation.

The dessert was splendid. No waiting either. The pudding-plates had been
washed in a little tub outside the door while cheese was on, and though
they were moist and warm with friction, still there they were again,
up to the mark, and true to time. Quarts of almonds; dozens of oranges;
pounds of raisins; stacks of biffins; soup-plates full of nuts.--Oh,
Todgers’s could do it when it chose! mind that.

Then more wine came on; red wines and white wines; and a large china
bowl of punch, brewed by the gentleman of a convivial turn, who adjured
the Miss Pecksniffs not to be despondent on account of its dimensions,
as there were materials in the house for the decoction of half a dozen
more of the same size. Good gracious, how they laughed! How they coughed
when they sipped it, because it was so strong; and how they laughed
again when somebody vowed that but for its colour it might have been
mistaken, in regard of its innocuous qualities, for new milk! What a
shout of ‘No!’ burst from the gentlemen when they pathetically implored
Mr Jinkins to suffer them to qualify it with hot water; and how
blushingly, by little and little, did each of them drink her whole
glassful, down to its very dregs!

Now comes the trying time. The sun, as Mr Jinkins says (gentlemanly
creature, Jinkins--never at a loss!), is about to leave the firmament.
‘Miss Pecksniff!’ says Mrs Todgers, softly, ‘will you--?’ ‘Oh dear, no
more, Mrs Todgers.’ Mrs Todgers rises; the two Miss Pecksniffs rise; all
rise. Miss Mercy Pecksniff looks downward for her scarf. Where is it?
Dear me, where CAN it be? Sweet girl, she has it on; not on her fair
neck, but loose upon her flowing figure. A dozen hands assist her. She
is all confusion. The youngest gentleman in company thirsts to murder
Jinkins. She skips and joins her sister at the door. Her sister has her
arm about the waist of Mrs Todgers. She winds her arm around her sister.
Diana, what a picture! The last things visible are a shape and a skip.
‘Gentlemen, let us drink the ladies!’

The enthusiasm is tremendous. The gentleman of a debating turn rises in
the midst, and suddenly lets loose a tide of eloquence which bears down
everything before it. He is reminded of a toast--a toast to which they
will respond. There is an individual present; he has him in his eye; to
whom they owe a debt of gratitude. He repeats it--a debt of gratitude.
Their rugged natures have been softened and ameliorated that day, by
the society of lovely woman. There is a gentleman in company whom two
accomplished and delightful females regard with veneration, as the
fountain of their existence. Yes, when yet the two Miss Pecksniffs
lisped in language scarce intelligible, they called that individual
‘Father!’ There is great applause. He gives them ‘Mr Pecksniff, and God
bless him!’ They all shake hands with Mr Pecksniff, as they drink the
toast. The youngest gentleman in company does so with a thrill; for he
feels that a mysterious influence pervades the man who claims that being
in the pink scarf for his daughter.

What saith Mr Pecksniff in reply? Or rather let the question be, What
leaves he unsaid? Nothing. More punch is called for, and produced, and
drunk. Enthusiasm mounts still higher. Every man comes out freely in
his own character. The gentleman of a theatrical turn recites. The vocal
gentleman regales them with a song. Gander leaves the Gander of all
former feasts whole leagues behind. HE rises to propose a toast. It is,
The Father of Todgers’s. It is their common friend Jink--it is old
Jink, if he may call him by that familiar and endearing appellation. The
youngest gentleman in company utters a frantic negative. He won’t
have it--he can’t bear it--it mustn’t be. But his depth of feeling is
misunderstood. He is supposed to be a little elevated; and nobody heeds
him.

Mr Jinkins thanks them from his heart. It is, by many degrees, the
proudest day in his humble career. When he looks around him on the
present occasion, he feels that he wants words in which to express
his gratitude. One thing he will say. He hopes it has been shown that
Todgers’s can be true to itself; and that, an opportunity arising, it
can come out quite as strong as its neighbours--perhaps stronger. He
reminds them, amidst thunders of encouragement, that they have heard of
a somewhat similar establishment in Cannon Street; and that they have
heard it praised. He wishes to draw no invidious comparisons; he would
be the last man to do it; but when that Cannon Street establishment
shall be able to produce such a combination of wit and beauty as has
graced that board that day, and shall be able to serve up (all things
considered) such a dinner as that of which they have just partaken, he
will be happy to talk to it. Until then, gentlemen, he will stick to
Todgers’s.

More punch, more enthusiasm, more speeches. Everybody’s health is drunk,
saving the youngest gentleman’s in company. He sits apart, with his
elbow on the back of a vacant chair, and glares disdainfully at Jinkins.
Gander, in a convulsing speech, gives them the health of Bailey junior;
hiccups are heard; and a glass is broken. Mr Jinkins feels that it is
time to join the ladies. He proposes, as a final sentiment, Mrs Todgers.
She is worthy to be remembered separately. Hear, hear. So she is; no
doubt of it. They all find fault with her at other times; but every man
feels now, that he could die in her defence.

They go upstairs, where they are not expected so soon; for Mrs Todgers
is asleep, Miss Charity is adjusting her hair, and Mercy, who has made
a sofa of one of the window-seats is in a gracefully recumbent attitude.
She is rising hastily, when Mr Jinkins implores her, for all their
sakes, not to stir; she looks too graceful and too lovely, he remarks,
to be disturbed. She laughs, and yields, and fans herself, and drops
her fan, and there is a rush to pick it up. Being now installed, by one
consent, as the beauty of the party, she is cruel and capricious, and
sends gentlemen on messages to other gentlemen, and forgets all about
them before they can return with the answer, and invents a thousand
tortures, rending their hearts to pieces. Bailey brings up the tea and
coffee. There is a small cluster of admirers round Charity; but they
are only those who cannot get near her sister. The youngest gentleman
in company is pale, but collected, and still sits apart; for his spirit
loves to hold communion with itself, and his soul recoils from noisy
revellers. She has a consciousness of his presence and adoration.
He sees it flashing sometimes in the corner of her eye. Have a care,
Jinkins, ere you provoke a desperate man to frenzy!

Mr Pecksniff had followed his younger friends upstairs, and taken a
chair at the side of Mrs Todgers. He had also spilt a cup of coffee over
his legs without appearing to be aware of the circumstance; nor did he
seem to know that there was muffin on his knee.

‘And how have they used you downstairs, sir?’ asked the hostess.

‘Their conduct has been such, my dear madam,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘as I
can never think of without emotion, or remember without a tear. Oh, Mrs
Todgers!’

‘My goodness!’ exclaimed that lady. ‘How low you are in your spirits,
sir!’

‘I am a man, my dear madam,’ said Mr Pecksniff, shedding tears and
speaking with an imperfect articulation, ‘but I am also a father. I
am also a widower. My feelings, Mrs Todgers, will not consent to be
entirely smothered, like the young children in the Tower. They are grown
up, and the more I press the bolster on them, the more they look round
the corner of it.’

He suddenly became conscious of the bit of muffin, and stared at it
intently; shaking his head the while, in a forlorn and imbecile manner,
as if he regarded it as his evil genius, and mildly reproached it.

‘She was beautiful, Mrs Todgers,’ he said, turning his glazed eye
again upon her, without the least preliminary notice. ‘She had a small
property.’

‘So I have heard,’ cried Mrs Todgers with great sympathy.

‘Those are her daughters,’ said Mr Pecksniff, pointing out the young
ladies, with increased emotion.

Mrs Todgers had no doubt about it.

‘Mercy and Charity,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘Charity and Mercy. Not unholy
names, I hope?’

‘Mr Pecksniff!’ cried Mrs Todgers. ‘What a ghastly smile! Are you ill,
sir?’

He pressed his hand upon her arm, and answered in a solemn manner, and a
faint voice, ‘Chronic.’

‘Cholic?’ cried the frightened Mrs Todgers.

‘Chron-ic,’ he repeated with some difficulty. ‘Chron-ic. A chronic
disorder. I have been its victim from childhood. It is carrying me to my
grave.’

‘Heaven forbid!’ cried Mrs Todgers.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Mr Pecksniff, reckless with despair. ‘I am rather
glad of it, upon the whole. You are like her, Mrs Todgers.’

‘Don’t squeeze me so tight, pray, Mr Pecksniff. If any of the gentlemen
should notice us.’

‘For her sake,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Permit me--in honour of her memory.
For the sake of a voice from the tomb. You are VERY like her Mrs
Todgers! What a world this is!’

‘Ah! Indeed you may say that!’ cried Mrs Todgers.

‘I’m afraid it is a vain and thoughtless world,’ said Mr Pecksniff,
overflowing with despondency. ‘These young people about us. Oh! what
sense have they of their responsibilities? None. Give me your other
hand, Mrs Todgers.’

The lady hesitated, and said ‘she didn’t like.’

‘Has a voice from the grave no influence?’ said Mr Pecksniff, with,
dismal tenderness. ‘This is irreligious! My dear creature.’

‘Hush!’ urged Mrs Todgers. ‘Really you mustn’t.’

‘It’s not me,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Don’t suppose it’s me; it’s the
voice; it’s her voice.’

Mrs Pecksniff deceased, must have had an unusually thick and husky voice
for a lady, and rather a stuttering voice, and to say the truth somewhat
of a drunken voice, if it had ever borne much resemblance to that in
which Mr Pecksniff spoke just then. But perhaps this was delusion on his
part.

‘It has been a day of enjoyment, Mrs Todgers, but still it has been a
day of torture. It has reminded me of my loneliness. What am I in the
world?’

‘An excellent gentleman, Mr Pecksniff,’ said Mrs Todgers.

‘There is consolation in that too,’ cried Mr Pecksniff. ‘Am I?’

‘There is no better man living,’ said Mrs Todgers, ‘I am sure.’

Mr Pecksniff smiled through his tears, and slightly shook his head. ‘You
are very good,’ he said, ‘thank you. It is a great happiness to me, Mrs
Todgers, to make young people happy. The happiness of my pupils is my
chief object. I dote upon ‘em. They dote upon me too--sometimes.’

‘Always,’ said Mrs Todgers.

‘When they say they haven’t improved, ma’am,’ whispered Mr Pecksniff,
looking at her with profound mystery, and motioning to her to advance
her ear a little closer to his mouth. ‘When they say they haven’t
improved, ma’am, and the premium was too high, they lie! I shouldn’t
wish it to be mentioned; you will understand me; but I say to you as to
an old friend, they lie.’

‘Base wretches they must be!’ said Mrs Todgers.

‘Madam,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘you are right. I respect you for that
observation. A word in your ear. To Parents and Guardians. This is in
confidence, Mrs Todgers?’

‘The strictest, of course!’ cried that lady.

‘To Parents and Guardians,’ repeated Mr Pecksniff. ‘An eligible
opportunity now offers, which unites the advantages of the best
practical architectural education with the comforts of a home, and the
constant association with some, who, however humble their sphere and
limited their capacity--observe!--are not unmindful of their moral
responsibilities.’

Mrs Todgers looked a little puzzled to know what this might mean, as
well she might; for it was, as the reader may perchance remember, Mr
Pecksniff’s usual form of advertisement when he wanted a pupil; and
seemed to have no particular reference, at present, to anything. But Mr
Pecksniff held up his finger as a caution to her not to interrupt him.

‘Do you know any parent or guardian, Mrs Todgers,’ said Mr Pecksniff,
‘who desires to avail himself of such an opportunity for a young
gentleman? An orphan would be preferred. Do you know of any orphan with
three or four hundred pound?’

Mrs Todgers reflected, and shook her head.

‘When you hear of an orphan with three or four hundred pound,’ said Mr
Pecksniff, ‘let that dear orphan’s friends apply, by letter post-paid,
to S. P., Post Office, Salisbury. I don’t know who he is exactly. Don’t
be alarmed, Mrs Todgers,’ said Mr Pecksniff, falling heavily against
her; ‘Chronic--chronic! Let’s have a little drop of something to drink.’

‘Bless my life, Miss Pecksniffs!’ cried Mrs Todgers, aloud, ‘your dear
pa’s took very poorly!’

Mr Pecksniff straightened himself by a surprising effort, as every
one turned hastily towards him; and standing on his feet, regarded the
assembly with a look of ineffable wisdom. Gradually it gave place to
a smile; a feeble, helpless, melancholy smile; bland, almost to
sickliness. ‘Do not repine, my friends,’ said Mr Pecksniff, tenderly.
‘Do not weep for me. It is chronic.’ And with these words, after making
a futile attempt to pull off his shoes, he fell into the fireplace.

The youngest gentleman in company had him out in a second. Yes, before a
hair upon his head was singed, he had him on the hearth-rug--her father!

She was almost beside herself. So was her sister. Jinkins consoled them
both. They all consoled them. Everybody had something to say, except the
youngest gentleman in company, who with a noble self-devotion did the
heavy work, and held up Mr Pecksniff’s head without being taken notice
of by anybody. At last they gathered round, and agreed to carry him
upstairs to bed. The youngest gentleman in company was rebuked by
Jinkins for tearing Mr Pecksniff’s coat! Ha, ha! But no matter.

They carried him upstairs, and crushed the youngest gentleman at every
step. His bedroom was at the top of the house, and it was a long way;
but they got him there in course of time. He asked them frequently
on the road for a little drop of something to drink. It seemed an
idiosyncrasy. The youngest gentleman in company proposed a draught of
water. Mr Pecksniff called him opprobious names for the suggestion.

Jinkins and Gander took the rest upon themselves, and made him as
comfortable as they could, on the outside of his bed; and when he seemed
disposed to sleep, they left him. But before they had all gained the
bottom of the staircase, a vision of Mr Pecksniff, strangely attired,
was seen to flutter on the top landing. He desired to collect their
sentiments, it seemed, upon the nature of human life.

‘My friends,’ cried Mr Pecksniff, looking over the banisters, ‘let us
improve our minds by mutual inquiry and discussion. Let us be moral. Let
us contemplate existence. Where is Jinkins?’

‘Here,’ cried that gentleman. ‘Go to bed again’

‘To bed!’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Bed! ‘Tis the voice of the sluggard, I
hear him complain, you have woke me too soon, I must slumber again. If
any young orphan will repeat the remainder of that simple piece from
Doctor Watts’s collection, an eligible opportunity now offers.’

Nobody volunteered.

‘This is very soothing,’ said Mr Pecksniff, after a pause. ‘Extremely
so. Cool and refreshing; particularly to the legs! The legs of the
human subject, my friends, are a beautiful production. Compare them with
wooden legs, and observe the difference between the anatomy of nature
and the anatomy of art. Do you know,’ said Mr Pecksniff, leaning over
the banisters, with an odd recollection of his familiar manner among
new pupils at home, ‘that I should very much like to see Mrs Todgers’s
notion of a wooden leg, if perfectly agreeable to herself!’

As it appeared impossible to entertain any reasonable hopes of him after
this speech, Mr Jinkins and Mr Gander went upstairs again, and once more
got him into bed. But they had not descended to the second floor before
he was out again; nor, when they had repeated the process, had they
descended the first flight, before he was out again. In a word, as often
as he was shut up in his own room, he darted out afresh, charged
with some new moral sentiment, which he continually repeated over the
banisters, with extraordinary relish, and an irrepressible desire for
the improvement of his fellow creatures that nothing could subdue.

Under these circumstances, when they had got him into bed for the
thirtieth time or so, Mr Jinkins held him, while his companion went
downstairs in search of Bailey junior, with whom he presently returned.
That youth having been apprised of the service required of him, was in
great spirits, and brought up a stool, a candle, and his supper; to the
end that he might keep watch outside the bedroom door with tolerable
comfort.

When he had completed his arrangements, they locked Mr Pecksniff in,
and left the key on the outside; charging the young page to listen
attentively for symptoms of an apoplectic nature, with which the patient
might be troubled, and, in case of any such presenting themselves, to
summon them without delay. To which Mr Bailey modestly replied that
‘he hoped he knowed wot o’clock it wos in gineral, and didn’t date his
letters to his friends from Todgers’s for nothing.’



CHAPTER TEN

CONTAINING STRANGE MATTER, ON WHICH MANY EVENTS IN THIS HISTORY MAY, FOR
THEIR GOOD OR EVIL INFLUENCE, CHIEFLY DEPEND


But Mr Pecksniff came to town on business. Had he forgotten that? Was he
always taking his pleasure with Todgers’s jovial brood, unmindful of the
serious demands, whatever they might be, upon his calm consideration?
No.

Time and tide will wait for no man, saith the adage. But all men have to
wait for time and tide. That tide which, taken at the flood, would lead
Seth Pecksniff on to fortune, was marked down in the table, and about to
flow. No idle Pecksniff lingered far inland, unmindful of the changes
of the stream; but there, upon the water’s edge, over his shoes already,
stood the worthy creature, prepared to wallow in the very mud, so that
it slid towards the quarter of his hope.

The trustfulness of his two fair daughters was beautiful indeed. They
had that firm reliance on their parent’s nature, which taught them to
feel certain that in all he did he had his purpose straight and full
before him. And that its noble end and object was himself, which almost
of necessity included them, they knew. The devotion of these maids was
perfect.

Their filial confidence was rendered the more touching, by their having
no knowledge of their parent’s real designs, in the present instance.
All that they knew of his proceedings was, that every morning, after
the early breakfast, he repaired to the post office and inquired for
letters. That task performed, his business for the day was over; and he
again relaxed, until the rising of another sun proclaimed the advent of
another post.

This went on for four or five days. At length, one morning, Mr Pecksniff
returned with a breathless rapidity, strange to observe in him, at other
times so calm; and, seeking immediate speech with his daughters, shut
himself up with them in private conference for two whole hours. Of all
that passed in this period, only the following words of Mr Pecksniff’s
utterance are known:

‘How he has come to change so very much (if it should turn out as I
expect, that he has), we needn’t stop to inquire. My dears, I have my
thoughts upon the subject, but I will not impart them. It is enough
that we will not be proud, resentful, or unforgiving. If he wants our
friendship he shall have it. We know our duty, I hope!’

That same day at noon, an old gentleman alighted from a hackney-coach at
the post-office, and, giving his name, inquired for a letter addressed
to himself, and directed to be left till called for. It had been lying
there some days. The superscription was in Mr Pecksniff’s hand, and it
was sealed with Mr Pecksniff’s seal.

It was very short, containing indeed nothing more than an address
‘with Mr Pecksniff’s respectful, and (not withstanding what has
passed) sincerely affectionate regards.’ The old gentleman tore off the
direction--scattering the rest in fragments to the winds--and giving
it to the coachman, bade him drive as near that place as he could. In
pursuance of these instructions he was driven to the Monument; where he
again alighted, and dismissed the vehicle, and walked towards Todgers’s.

Though the face, and form, and gait of this old man, and even his
grip of the stout stick on which he leaned, were all expressive of a
resolution not easily shaken, and a purpose (it matters little whether
right or wrong, just now) such as in other days might have survived
the rack, and had its strongest life in weakest death; still there were
grains of hesitation in his mind, which made him now avoid the house he
sought, and loiter to and fro in a gleam of sunlight, that brightened
the little churchyard hard by. There may have been, in the presence of
those idle heaps of dust among the busiest stir of life, something to
increase his wavering; but there he walked, awakening the echoes as he
paced up and down, until the church clock, striking the quarters for
the second time since he had been there, roused him from his meditation.
Shaking off his incertitude as the air parted with the sound of the
bells, he walked rapidly to the house, and knocked at the door.

Mr Pecksniff was seated in the landlady’s little room, and his visitor
found him reading--by an accident; he apologised for it--an excellent
theological work. There were cake and wine upon a little table--by
another accident, for which he also apologised. Indeed he said, he
had given his visitor up, and was about to partake of that simple
refreshment with his children, when he knocked at the door.

‘Your daughters are well?’ said old Martin, laying down his hat and
stick.

Mr Pecksniff endeavoured to conceal his agitation as a father when he
answered Yes, they were. They were good girls, he said, very good. He
would not venture to recommend Mr Chuzzlewit to take the easy-chair,
or to keep out of the draught from the door. If he made any such
suggestion, he would expose himself, he feared, to most unjust
suspicion. He would, therefore, content himself with remarking that
there was an easy-chair in the room, and that the door was far from
being air-tight. This latter imperfection, he might perhaps venture to
add, was not uncommonly to be met with in old houses.

The old man sat down in the easy-chair, and after a few moments’
silence, said:

‘In the first place, let me thank you for coming to London so promptly,
at my almost unexplained request; I need scarcely add, at my cost.’

‘At YOUR cost, my good sir!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, in a tone of great
surprise.

‘It is not,’ said Martin, waving his hand impatiently, ‘my habit to put
my--well! my relatives--to any personal expense to gratify my caprices.’

‘Caprices, my good sir!’ cried Mr Pecksniff

‘That is scarcely the proper word either, in this instance,’ said the
old man. ‘No. You are right.’

Mr Pecksniff was inwardly very much relieved to hear it, though he
didn’t at all know why.

‘You are right,’ repeated Martin. ‘It is not a caprice. It is built up
on reason, proof, and cool comparison. Caprices never are. Moreover, I
am not a capricious man. I never was.’

‘Most assuredly not,’ said Mr Pecksniff.

‘How do you know?’ returned the other quickly. ‘You are to begin to know
it now. You are to test and prove it, in time to come. You and yours are
to find that I can be constant, and am not to be diverted from my end.
Do you hear?’

‘Perfectly,’ said Mr Pecksniff.

‘I very much regret,’ Martin resumed, looking steadily at him, and
speaking in a slow and measured tone; ‘I very much regret that you and
I held such a conversation together, as that which passed between us at
our last meeting. I very much regret that I laid open to you what were
then my thoughts of you, so freely as I did. The intentions that I bear
towards you now are of another kind; deserted by all in whom I have ever
trusted; hoodwinked and beset by all who should help and sustain me;
I fly to you for refuge. I confide in you to be my ally; to attach
yourself to me by ties of Interest and Expectation’--he laid great
stress upon these words, though Mr Pecksniff particularly begged him
not to mention it; ‘and to help me to visit the consequences of the very
worst species of meanness, dissimulation, and subtlety, on the right
heads.’

‘My noble sir!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, catching at his outstretched hand.
‘And YOU regret the having harboured unjust thoughts of me! YOU with
those grey hairs!’

‘Regrets,’ said Martin, ‘are the natural property of grey hairs; and
I enjoy, in common with all other men, at least my share of such
inheritance. And so enough of that. I regret having been severed from
you so long. If I had known you sooner, and sooner used you as you well
deserve, I might have been a happier man.’

Mr Pecksniff looked up to the ceiling, and clasped his hands in rapture.

‘Your daughters,’ said Martin, after a short silence. ‘I don’t know
them. Are they like you?’

‘In the nose of my eldest and the chin of my youngest, Mr Chuzzlewit,’
returned the widower, ‘their sainted parent (not myself, their mother)
lives again.’

‘I don’t mean in person,’ said the old man. ‘Morally, morally.’

‘’Tis not for me to say,’ retorted Mr Pecksniff with a gentle smile. ‘I
have done my best, sir.’

‘I could wish to see them,’ said Martin; ‘are they near at hand?’

They were, very near; for they had in fact been listening at the
door from the beginning of this conversation until now, when they
precipitately retired. Having wiped the signs of weakness from his eyes,
and so given them time to get upstairs, Mr Pecksniff opened the door,
and mildly cried in the passage,

‘My own darlings, where are you?’

‘Here, my dear pa!’ replied the distant voice of Charity.

‘Come down into the back parlour, if you please, my love,’ said Mr
Pecksniff, ‘and bring your sister with you.’

‘Yes, my dear pa,’ cried Merry; and down they came directly (being all
obedience), singing as they came.

Nothing could exceed the astonishment of the two Miss Pecksniffs when
they found a stranger with their dear papa. Nothing could surpass their
mute amazement when he said, ‘My children, Mr Chuzzlewit!’ But when he
told them that Mr Chuzzlewit and he were friends, and that Mr Chuzzlewit
had said such kind and tender words as pierced his very heart, the two
Miss Pecksniffs cried with one accord, ‘Thank Heaven for this!’ and
fell upon the old man’s neck. And when they had embraced him with
such fervour of affection that no words can describe it, they grouped
themselves about his chair, and hung over him, as figuring to themselves
no earthly joy like that of ministering to his wants, and crowding into
the remainder of his life, the love they would have diffused over their
whole existence, from infancy, if he--dear obdurate!--had but consented
to receive the precious offering.

The old man looked attentively from one to the other, and then at Mr
Pecksniff, several times.

‘What,’ he asked of Mr Pecksniff, happening to catch his eye in its
descent; for until now it had been piously upraised, with something of
that expression which the poetry of ages has attributed to a domestic
bird, when breathing its last amid the ravages of an electric storm:
‘What are their names?’

Mr Pecksniff told him, and added, rather hastily; his caluminators
would have said, with a view to any testamentary thoughts that might be
flitting through old Martin’s mind; ‘Perhaps, my dears, you had better
write them down. Your humble autographs are of no value in themselves,
but affection may prize them.’

‘Affection,’ said the old man, ‘will expend itself on the living
originals. Do not trouble yourselves, my girls, I shall not so easily
forget you, Charity and Mercy, as to need such tokens of remembrance.
Cousin!’

‘Sir!’ said Mr Pecksniff, with alacrity.

‘Do you never sit down?’

‘Why--yes--occasionally, sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff, who had been standing
all this time.

‘Will you do so now?’

‘Can you ask me,’ returned Mr Pecksniff, slipping into a chair
immediately, ‘whether I will do anything that you desire?’

‘You talk confidently,’ said Martin, ‘and you mean well; but I fear you
don’t know what an old man’s humours are. You don’t know what it is to
be required to court his likings and dislikings; to adapt yourself to
his prejudices; to do his bidding, be it what it may; to bear with his
distrusts and jealousies; and always still be zealous in his service.
When I remember how numerous these failings are in me, and judge of
their occasional enormity by the injurious thoughts I lately entertained
of you, I hardly dare to claim you for my friend.’

‘My worthy sir,’ returned his relative, ‘how CAN you talk in such a
painful strain! What was more natural than that you should make one
slight mistake, when in all other respects you were so very correct, and
have had such reason--such very sad and undeniable reason--to judge of
every one about you in the worst light!’

‘True,’ replied the other. ‘You are very lenient with me.’

‘We always said, my girls and I,’ cried Mr Pecksniff with increasing
obsequiousness, ‘that while we mourned the heaviness of our misfortune
in being confounded with the base and mercenary, still we could not
wonder at it. My dears, you remember?’

Oh vividly! A thousand times!

‘We uttered no complaint,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Occasionally we had the
presumption to console ourselves with the remark that Truth would in
the end prevail, and Virtue be triumphant; but not often. My loves, you
recollect?’

Recollect! Could he doubt it! Dearest pa, what strange unnecessary
questions!

‘And when I saw you,’ resumed Mr Pecksniff, with still greater
deference, ‘in the little, unassuming village where we take the liberty
of dwelling, I said you were mistaken in me, my dear sir; that was all,
I think?’

‘No--not all,’ said Martin, who had been sitting with his hand upon his
brow for some time past, and now looked up again; ‘you said much more,
which, added to other circumstances that have come to my knowledge,
opened my eyes. You spoke to me, disinterestedly, on behalf of--I
needn’t name him. You know whom I mean.’

Trouble was expressed in Mr Pecksniff’s visage, as he pressed his hot
hands together, and replied, with humility, ‘Quite disinterestedly, sir,
I assure you.’

‘I know it,’ said old Martin, in his quiet way. ‘I am sure of it. I said
so. It was disinterested too, in you, to draw that herd of harpies
off from me, and be their victim yourself; most other men would have
suffered them to display themselves in all their rapacity, and would
have striven to rise, by contrast, in my estimation. You felt for me,
and drew them off, for which I owe you many thanks. Although I left the
place, I know what passed behind my back, you see!’

‘You amaze me, sir!’ cried Mr Pecksniff; which was true enough.

‘My knowledge of your proceedings,’ said the old man, does not stop at
this. You have a new inmate in your house.’

‘Yes, sir,’ rejoined the architect, ‘I have.’

‘He must quit it’ said Martin.

‘For--for yours?’ asked Mr Pecksniff, with a quavering mildness.

‘For any shelter he can find,’ the old man answered. ‘He has deceived
you.’

‘I hope not’ said Mr Pecksniff, eagerly. ‘I trust not. I have been
extremely well disposed towards that young man. I hope it cannot be
shown that he has forfeited all claim to my protection. Deceit--deceit,
my dear Mr Chuzzlewit, would be final. I should hold myself bound, on
proof of deceit, to renounce him instantly.’

The old man glanced at both his fair supporters, but especially at
Miss Mercy, whom, indeed, he looked full in the face, with a greater
demonstration of interest than had yet appeared in his features. His
gaze again encountered Mr Pecksniff, as he said, composedly:

‘Of course you know that he has made his matrimonial choice?’

‘Oh dear!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, rubbing his hair up very stiff upon
his head, and staring wildly at his daughters. ‘This is becoming
tremendous!’

‘You know the fact?’ repeated Martin

‘Surely not without his grandfather’s consent and approbation my dear
sir!’ cried Mr Pecksniff. ‘Don’t tell me that. For the honour of human
nature, say you’re not about to tell me that!’

‘I thought he had suppressed it,’ said the old man.

The indignation felt by Mr Pecksniff at this terrible disclosure, was
only to be equalled by the kindling anger of his daughters. What! Had
they taken to their hearth and home a secretly contracted serpent; a
crocodile, who had made a furtive offer of his hand; an imposition on
society; a bankrupt bachelor with no effects, trading with the spinster
world on false pretences! And oh, to think that he should have disobeyed
and practised on that sweet, that venerable gentleman, whose name
he bore; that kind and tender guardian; his more than father--to say
nothing at all of mother--horrible, horrible! To turn him out with
ignominy would be treatment much too good. Was there nothing else that
could be done to him? Had he incurred no legal pains and penalties?
Could it be that the statutes of the land were so remiss as to have
affixed no punishment to such delinquency? Monster; how basely had they
been deceived!

‘I am glad to find you second me so warmly,’ said the old man holding up
his hand to stay the torrent of their wrath. ‘I will not deny that it
is a pleasure to me to find you so full of zeal. We will consider that
topic as disposed of.’

‘No, my dear sir,’ cried Mr Pecksniff, ‘not as disposed of, until I have
purged my house of this pollution.’

‘That will follow,’ said the old man, ‘in its own time. I look upon that
as done.’

‘You are very good, sir,’ answered Mr Pecksniff, shaking his hand. ‘You
do me honour. You MAY look upon it as done, I assure you.’

‘There is another topic,’ said Martin, ‘on which I hope you will assist
me. You remember Mary, cousin?’

‘The young lady that I mentioned to you, my dears, as having interested
me so very much,’ remarked Mr Pecksniff. ‘Excuse my interrupting you,
sir.’

‘I told you her history?’ said the old man.

‘Which I also mentioned, you will recollect, my dears,’ cried Mr
Pecksniff. ‘Silly girls, Mr Chuzzlewit--quite moved by it, they were!’

‘Why, look now!’ said Martin, evidently pleased; ‘I feared I should have
had to urge her case upon you, and ask you to regard her favourably for
my sake. But I find you have no jealousies! Well! You have no cause
for any, to be sure. She has nothing to gain from me, my dears, and she
knows it.’

The two Miss Pecksniffs murmured their approval of this wise
arrangement, and their cordial sympathy with its interesting object.

‘If I could have anticipated what has come to pass between us four,’
said the old man thoughfully; ‘but it is too late to think of that. You
would receive her courteously, young ladies, and be kind to her, if need
were?’

Where was the orphan whom the two Miss Pecksniffs would not have
cherished in their sisterly bosom! But when that orphan was commended to
their care by one on whom the dammed-up love of years was gushing forth,
what exhaustless stores of pure affection yearned to expend themselves
upon her!

An interval ensued, during which Mr Chuzzlewit, in an absent frame of
mind, sat gazing at the ground, without uttering a word; and as it was
plain that he had no desire to be interrupted in his meditations, Mr
Pecksniff and his daughters were profoundly silent also. During the
whole of the foregoing dialogue, he had borne his part with a cold,
passionless promptitude, as though he had learned and painfully
rehearsed it all a hundred times. Even when his expressions were warmest
and his language most encouraging, he had retained the same manner,
without the least abatement. But now there was a keener brightness in
his eye, and more expression in his voice, as he said, awakening from
his thoughtful mood:

‘You know what will be said of this? Have you reflected?’

‘Said of what, my dear sir?’ Mr Pecksniff asked.

‘Of this new understanding between us.’

Mr Pecksniff looked benevolently sagacious, and at the same time far
above all earthly misconstruction, as he shook his head, and observed
that a great many things would be said of it, no doubt.

‘A great many,’ rejoined the old man. ‘Some will say that I dote in my
old age; that illness has shaken me; that I have lost all strength of
mind, and have grown childish. You can bear that?’

Mr Pecksniff answered that it would be dreadfully hard to bear, but he
thought he could, if he made a great effort.

‘Others will say--I speak of disappointed, angry people only--that you
have lied and fawned, and wormed yourself through dirty ways into my
favour; by such concessions and such crooked deeds, such meannesses and
vile endurances, as nothing could repay; no, not the legacy of half the
world we live in. You can bear that?’

Mr Pecksniff made reply that this would be also very hard to bear, as
reflecting, in some degree, on the discernment of Mr Chuzzlewit. Still
he had a modest confidence that he could sustain the calumny, with the
help of a good conscience, and that gentleman’s friendship.

‘With the great mass of slanderers,’ said old Martin, leaning back in
his chair, ‘the tale, as I clearly foresee, will run thus: That to mark
my contempt for the rabble whom I despised, I chose from among them the
very worst, and made him do my will, and pampered and enriched him at
the cost of all the rest. That, after casting about for the means of a
punishment which should rankle in the bosoms of these kites the most,
and strike into their gall, I devised this scheme at a time when the
last link in the chain of grateful love and duty, that held me to
my race, was roughly snapped asunder; roughly, for I loved him well;
roughly, for I had ever put my trust in his affection; roughly, for that
he broke it when I loved him most--God help me!--and he without a pang
could throw me off, while I clung about his heart! Now,’ said the old
man, dismissing this passionate outburst as suddenly as he had yielded
to it, ‘is your mind made up to bear this likewise? Lay your account
with having it to bear, and put no trust in being set right by me.’

‘My dear Mr Chuzzlewit,’ cried Pecksniff in an ecstasy, ‘for such a man
as you have shown yourself to be this day; for a man so injured, yet so
very humane; for a man so--I am at a loss what precise term to use--yet
at the same time so remarkably--I don’t know how to express my meaning;
for such a man as I have described, I hope it is no presumption to say
that I, and I am sure I may add my children also (my dears, we perfectly
agree in this, I think?), would bear anything whatever!’

‘Enough,’ said Martin. ‘You can charge no consequences on me. When do
you retire home?’

‘Whenever you please, my dear sir. To-night if you desire it.’

‘I desire nothing,’ returned the old man, ‘that is unreasonable. Such a
request would be. Will you be ready to return at the end of this week?’

The very time of all others that Mr Pecksniff would have suggested if
it had been left to him to make his own choice. As to his daughters--the
words, ‘Let us be at home on Saturday, dear pa,’ were actually upon
their lips.

‘Your expenses, cousin,’ said Martin, taking a folded slip of paper from
his pocketbook, ‘may possibly exceed that amount. If so, let me know the
balance that I owe you, when we next meet. It would be useless if I told
you where I live just now; indeed, I have no fixed abode. When I have,
you shall know it. You and your daughters may expect to see me
before long; in the meantime I need not tell you that we keep our own
confidence. What you will do when you get home is understood between us.
Give me no account of it at any time; and never refer to it in any way.
I ask that as a favour. I am commonly a man of few words, cousin; and
all that need be said just now is said, I think.’

‘One glass of wine--one morsel of this homely cake?’ cried Mr Pecksniff,
venturing to detain him. ‘My dears--!’

The sisters flew to wait upon him.

‘Poor girls!’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘You will excuse their agitation, my
dear sir. They are made up of feeling. A bad commodity to go through the
world with, Mr Chuzzlewit! My youngest daughter is almost as much of a
woman as my eldest, is she not, sir?’

‘Which IS the youngest?’ asked the old man.

‘Mercy, by five years,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘We sometimes venture to
consider her rather a fine figure, sir. Speaking as an artist, I
may perhaps be permitted to suggest that its outline is graceful and
correct. I am naturally,’ said Mr Pecksniff, drying his hands upon his
handkerchief, and looking anxiously in his cousin’s face at almost every
word, ‘proud, if I may use the expression, to have a daughter who is
constructed on the best models.’

‘She seems to have a lively disposition,’ observed Martin.

‘Dear me!’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘That is quite remarkable. You have
defined her character, my dear sir, as correctly as if you had known her
from her birth. She HAS a lively disposition. I assure you, my dear sir,
that in our unpretending home her gaiety is delightful.’

‘No doubt,’ returned the old man.

‘Charity, upon the other hand,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘is remarkable for
strong sense, and for rather a deep tone of sentiment, if the partiality
of a father may be excused in saying so. A wonderful affection between
them, my dear sir! Allow me to drink your health. Bless you!’

‘I little thought,’ retorted Martin, ‘but a month ago, that I should be
breaking bread and pouring wine with you. I drink to you.’

Not at all abashed by the extraordinary abruptness with which these
latter words were spoken, Mr Pecksniff thanked him devoutly.

‘Now let me go,’ said Martin, putting down the wine when he had merely
touched it with his lips. ‘My dears, good morning!’

But this distant form of farewell was by no means tender enough for the
yearnings of the young ladies, who again embraced him with all their
hearts--with all their arms at any rate--to which parting caresses their
new-found friend submitted with a better grace than might have been
expected from one who, not a moment before, had pledged their parent in
such a very uncomfortable manner. These endearments terminated, he took
a hasty leave of Mr Pecksniff and withdrew, followed to the door by both
father and daughters, who stood there kissing their hands and beaming
with affection until he disappeared; though, by the way, he never once
looked back, after he had crossed the threshold.

When they returned into the house, and were again alone in Mrs Todgers’s
room, the two young ladies exhibited an unusual amount of gaiety;
insomuch that they clapped their hands, and laughed, and looked with
roguish aspects and a bantering air upon their dear papa. This conduct
was so very unaccountable, that Mr Pecksniff (being singularly grave
himself) could scarcely choose but ask them what it meant; and took them
to task, in his gentle manner, for yielding to such light emotions.

‘If it was possible to divine any cause for this merriment, even the
most remote,’ he said, ‘I should not reprove you. But when you can have
none whatever--oh, really, really!’

This admonition had so little effect on Mercy, that she was obliged to
hold her handkerchief before her rosy lips, and to throw herself back in
her chair, with every demonstration of extreme amusement; which want
of duty so offended Mr Pecksniff that he reproved her in set terms,
and gave her his parental advice to correct herself in solitude and
contemplation. But at that juncture they were disturbed by the sound of
voices in dispute; and as it proceeded from the next room, the subject
matter of the altercation quickly reached their ears.

‘I don’t care that! Mrs Todgers,’ said the young gentleman who had been
the youngest gentleman in company on the day of the festival; ‘I don’t
care THAT, ma’am,’ said he, snapping his fingers, ‘for Jinkins. Don’t
suppose I do.’

‘I am quite certain you don’t, sir,’ replied Mrs Todgers. ‘You have
too independent a spirit, I know, to yield to anybody. And quite right.
There is no reason why you should give way to any gentleman. Everybody
must be well aware of that.’

‘I should think no more of admitting daylight into the fellow,’ said the
youngest gentleman, in a desperate voice, ‘than if he was a bulldog.’

Mrs Todgers did not stop to inquire whether, as a matter of principle,
there was any particular reason for admitting daylight even into a
bulldog, otherwise than by the natural channel of his eyes, but she
seemed to wring her hands, and she moaned.

‘Let him be careful,’ said the youngest gentleman. ‘I give him warning.
No man shall step between me and the current of my vengeance. I know
a Cove--’ he used that familiar epithet in his agitation but corrected
himself by adding, ‘a gentleman of property, I mean--who practices with
a pair of pistols (fellows too) of his own. If I am driven to borrow
‘em, and to send at friend to Jinkins, a tragedy will get into the
papers. That’s all.’

Again Mrs Todgers moaned.

‘I have borne this long enough,’ said the youngest gentleman but now
my soul rebels against it, and I won’t stand it any longer. I left home
originally, because I had that within me which wouldn’t be domineered
over by a sister; and do you think I’m going to be put down by HIM? No.’

‘It is very wrong in Mr Jinkins; I know it is perfectly inexcusable in
Mr Jinkins, if he intends it,’ observed Mrs Todgers

‘If he intends it!’ cried the youngest gentleman. ‘Don’t he interrupt
and contradict me on every occasion? Does he ever fail to interpose
himself between me and anything or anybody that he sees I have set my
mind upon? Does he make a point of always pretending to forget me,
when he’s pouring out the beer? Does he make bragging remarks about his
razors, and insulting allusions to people who have no necessity to shave
more than once a week? But let him look out! He’ll find himself shaved,
pretty close, before long, and so I tell him.’

The young gentleman was mistaken in this closing sentence, inasmuch as
he never told it to Jinkins, but always to Mrs Todgers.

‘However,’ he said, ‘these are not proper subjects for ladies’ ears.
All I’ve got to say to you, Mrs Todgers, is, a week’s notice from next
Saturday. The same house can’t contain that miscreant and me any longer.
If we get over the intermediate time without bloodshed, you may think
yourself pretty fortunate. I don’t myself expect we shall.’

‘Dear, dear!’ cried Mrs Todgers, ‘what would I have given to have
prevented this? To lose you, sir, would be like losing the house’s
right-hand. So popular as you are among the gentlemen; so generally
looked up to; and so much liked! I do hope you’ll think better of it; if
on nobody else’s account, on mine.’

‘There’s Jinkins,’ said the youngest gentleman, moodily. ‘Your
favourite. He’ll console you, and the gentlemen too, for the loss of
twenty such as me. I’m not understood in this house. I never have been.’

‘Don’t run away with that opinion, sir!’ cried Mrs Todgers, with a show
of honest indignation. ‘Don’t make such a charge as that against the
establishment, I must beg of you. It is not so bad as that comes to,
sir. Make any remark you please against the gentlemen, or against me;
but don’t say you’re not understood in this house.’

‘I’m not treated as if I was,’ said the youngest gentleman.

‘There you make a great mistake, sir,’ returned Mrs Todgers, in the same
strain. ‘As many of the gentlemen and I have often said, you are too
sensitive. That’s where it is. You are of too susceptible a nature; it’s
in your spirit.’

The young gentleman coughed.

‘And as,’ said Mrs Todgers, ‘as to Mr Jinkins, I must beg of you, if we
ARE to part, to understand that I don’t abet Mr Jinkins by any means.
Far from it. I could wish that Mr Jinkins would take a lower tone in
this establishment, and would not be the means of raising differences
between me and gentlemen that I can much less bear to part with than I
could with Mr Jinkins. Mr Jinkins is not such a boarder, sir,’ added Mrs
Todgers, ‘that all considerations of private feeling and respect give
way before him. Quite the contrary, I assure you.’

The young gentleman was so much mollified by these and similar speeches
on the part of Mrs Todgers, that he and that lady gradually changed
positions; so that she became the injured party, and he was understood
to be the injurer; but in a complimentary, not in an offensive sense;
his cruel conduct being attributable to his exalted nature, and to that
alone. So, in the end, the young gentleman withdrew his notice, and
assured Mrs Todgers of his unalterable regard; and having done so, went
back to business.

‘Goodness me, Miss Pecksniffs!’ cried that lady, as she came into the
back room, and sat wearily down, with her basket on her knees, and her
hands folded upon it, ‘what a trial of temper it is to keep a house like
this! You must have heard most of what has just passed. Now did you ever
hear the like?’

‘Never!’ said the two Miss Pecksniffs.

‘Of all the ridiculous young fellows that ever I had to deal with,’
resumed Mrs Todgers, ‘that is the most ridiculous and unreasonable. Mr
Jinkins is hard upon him sometimes, but not half as hard as he deserves.
To mention such a gentleman as Mr Jinkins in the same breath with
HIM--you know it’s too much! And yet he’s as jealous of him, bless you,
as if he was his equal.’

The young ladies were greatly entertained by Mrs Todgers’s account,
no less than with certain anecdotes illustrative of the youngest
gentleman’s character, which she went on to tell them. But Mr Pecksniff
looked quite stern and angry; and when she had concluded, said in a
solemn voice:

‘Pray, Mrs Todgers, if I may inquire, what does that young gentleman
contribute towards the support of these premises?’

‘Why, sir, for what HE has, he pays about eighteen shillings a week!’
said Mrs Todgers.

‘Eighteen shillings a week!’ repeated Mr Pecksniff.

‘Taking one week with another; as near that as possible,’ said Mrs
Todgers.

Mr Pecksniff rose from his chair, folded his arms, looked at her, and
shook his head.

‘And do you mean to say, ma’am--is it possible, Mrs Todgers--that for
such a miserable consideration as eighteen shillings a week, a female of
your understanding can so far demean herself as to wear a double face,
even for an instant?’

‘I am forced to keep things on the square if I can, sir,’ faltered
Mrs Todgers. ‘I must preserve peace among them, and keep my connection
together, if possible, Mr Pecksniff. The profit is very small.’

‘The profit!’ cried that gentleman, laying great stress upon the word.
‘The profit, Mrs Todgers! You amaze me!’

He was so severe, that Mrs Todgers shed tears.

‘The profit!’ repeated Mr pecksniff. ‘The profit of dissimulation! To
worship the golden calf of Baal, for eighteen shillings a week!’

‘Don’t in your own goodness be too hard upon me, Mr Pecksniff,’ cried
Mrs Todgers, taking out her handkerchief.

‘Oh Calf, Calf!’ cried Mr Pecksniff mournfully. ‘Oh, Baal, Baal! oh my
friend, Mrs Todgers! To barter away that precious jewel, self-esteem,
and cringe to any mortal creature--for eighteen shillings a week!’

He was so subdued and overcome by the reflection, that he immediately
took down his hat from its peg in the passage, and went out for a walk,
to compose his feelings. Anybody passing him in the street might have
known him for a good man at first sight; for his whole figure teemed
with a consciousness of the moral homily he had read to Mrs Todgers.

Eighteen shillings a week! Just, most just, thy censure, upright
Pecksniff! Had it been for the sake of a ribbon, star, or garter;
sleeves of lawn, a great man’s smile, a seat in parliament, a tap upon
the shoulder from a courtly sword; a place, a party, or a thriving lie,
or eighteen thousand pounds, or even eighteen hundred;--but to worship
the golden calf for eighteen shillings a week! oh pitiful, pitiful!



CHAPTER ELEVEN

WHEREIN A CERTAIN GENTLEMAN BECOMES PARTICULAR IN HIS ATTENTIONS TO A
CERTAIN LADY; AND MORE COMING EVENTS THAN ONE, CAST THEIR SHADOWS BEFORE


The family were within two or three days of their departure from Mrs
Todgers’s, and the commercial gentlemen were to a man despondent and
not to be comforted, because of the approaching separation, when Bailey
junior, at the jocund time of noon, presented himself before Miss
Charity Pecksniff, then sitting with her sister in the banquet chamber,
hemming six new pocket-handkerchiefs for Mr Jinkins; and having
expressed a hope, preliminary and pious, that he might be blest, gave
her in his pleasant way to understand that a visitor attended to pay
his respects to her, and was at that moment waiting in the drawing-room.
Perhaps this last announcement showed in a more striking point of view
than many lengthened speeches could have done, the trustfulness and
faith of Bailey’s nature; since he had, in fact, last seen the visitor
on the door-mat, where, after signifying to him that he would do well to
go upstairs, he had left him to the guidance of his own sagacity. Hence
it was at least an even chance that the visitor was then wandering on
the roof of the house, or vainly seeking to extricate himself from the
maze of bedrooms; Todgers’s being precisely that kind of establishment
in which an unpiloted stranger is pretty sure to find himself in some
place where he least expects and least desires to be.

‘A gentleman for me!’ cried Charity, pausing in her work; ‘my gracious,
Bailey!’

‘Ah!’ said Bailey. ‘It IS my gracious, an’t it? Wouldn’t I be gracious
neither, not if I wos him!’

The remark was rendered somewhat obscure in itself, by reason (as the
reader may have observed) of a redundancy of negatives; but accompanied
by action expressive of a faithful couple walking arm-in-arm towards
a parochial church, mutually exchanging looks of love, it clearly
signified this youth’s conviction that the caller’s purpose was of an
amorous tendency. Miss Charity affected to reprove so great a liberty;
but she could not help smiling. He was a strange boy, to be sure. There
was always some ground of probability and likelihood mingled with his
absurd behaviour. That was the best of it!

‘But I don’t know any gentlemen, Bailey,’ said Miss Pecksniff. ‘I think
you must have made a mistake.’

Mr Bailey smiled at the extreme wildness of such a supposition, and
regarded the young ladies with unimpaired affability.

‘My dear Merry,’ said Charity, ‘who CAN it be? Isn’t it odd? I have a
great mind not to go to him really. So very strange, you know!’

The younger sister plainly considered that this appeal had its origin in
the pride of being called upon and asked for; and that it was intended
as an assertion of superiority, and a retaliation upon her for having
captured the commercial gentlemen. Therefore, she replied, with great
affection and politeness, that it was, no doubt, very strange indeed;
and that she was totally at a loss to conceive what the ridiculous
person unknown could mean by it.

‘Quite impossible to divine!’ said Charity, with some sharpness, ‘though
still, at the same time, you needn’t be angry, my dear.’

‘Thank you,’ retorted Merry, singing at her needle. ‘I am quite aware of
that, my love.’

‘I am afraid your head is turned, you silly thing,’ said Cherry.

‘Do you know, my dear,’ said Merry, with engaging candour, ‘that I have
been afraid of that, myself, all along! So much incense and nonsense,
and all the rest of it, is enough to turn a stronger head than mine.
What a relief it must be to you, my dear, to be so very comfortable in
that respect, and not to be worried by those odious men! How do you do
it, Cherry?’

This artless inquiry might have led to turbulent results, but for the
strong emotions of delight evinced by Bailey junior, whose relish in the
turn the conversation had lately taken was so acute, that it impelled
and forced him to the instantaneous performance of a dancing step,
extremely difficult in its nature, and only to be achieved in a
moment of ecstasy, which is commonly called The Frog’s Hornpipe. A
manifestation so lively, brought to their immediate recollection the
great virtuous precept, ‘Keep up appearances whatever you do,’ in which
they had been educated. They forbore at once, and jointly signified to
Mr Bailey that if he should presume to practice that figure any more in
their presence, they would instantly acquaint Mrs Todgers with the fact,
and would demand his condign punishment, at the hands of that lady. The
young gentleman having expressed the bitterness of his contrition by
affecting to wipe away scalding tears with his apron, and afterwards
feigning to wring a vast amount of water from that garment, held the
door open while Miss Charity passed out; and so that damsel went in
state upstairs to receive her mysterious adorer.

By some strange occurrence of favourable circumstances he had found out
the drawing-room, and was sitting there alone.

‘Ah, cousin!’ he said. ‘Here I am, you see. You thought I was lost, I’ll
be bound. Well! how do you find yourself by this time?’

Miss Charity replied that she was quite well, and gave Mr Jonas
Chuzzlewit her hand.

‘That’s right,’ said Mr Jonas, ‘and you’ve got over the fatigues of the
journey have you? I say. How’s the other one?’

‘My sister is very well, I believe,’ returned the young lady. ‘I have
not heard her complain of any indisposition, sir. Perhaps you would like
to see her, and ask her yourself?’

‘No, no cousin!’ said Mr Jonas, sitting down beside her on the
window-seat. ‘Don’t be in a hurry. There’s no occasion for that, you
know. What a cruel girl you are!’

‘It’s impossible for YOU to know,’ said Cherry, ‘whether I am or not.’

‘Well, perhaps it is,’ said Mr Jonas. ‘I say--Did you think I was lost?
You haven’t told me that.’

‘I didn’t think at all about it,’ answered Cherry.

‘Didn’t you though?’ said Jonas, pondering upon this strange reply. ‘Did
the other one?’

‘I am sure it’s impossible for me to say what my sister may, or may not
have thought on such a subject,’ cried Cherry. ‘She never said anything
to me about it, one way or other.’

‘Didn’t she laugh about it?’ inquired Jonas.

‘No. She didn’t even laugh about it,’ answered Charity.

‘She’s a terrible one to laugh, an’t she?’ said Jonas, lowering his
voice.

‘She is very lively,’ said Cherry.

‘Liveliness is a pleasant thing--when it don’t lead to spending money.
An’t it?’ asked Mr Jonas.

‘Very much so, indeed,’ said Cherry, with a demureness of manner that
gave a very disinterested character to her assent.

‘Such liveliness as yours I mean, you know,’ observed Mr Jonas, as he
nudged her with his elbow. ‘I should have come to see you before, but I
didn’t know where you was. How quick you hurried off, that morning!’

‘I was amenable to my papa’s directions,’ said Miss Charity.

‘I wish he had given me his direction,’ returned her cousin, ‘and then
I should have found you out before. Why, I shouldn’t have found you even
now, if I hadn’t met him in the street this morning. What a sleek, sly
chap he is! Just like a tomcat, an’t he?’

‘I must trouble you to have the goodness to speak more respectfully of
my papa, Mr Jonas,’ said Charity. ‘I can’t allow such a tone as that,
even in jest.’

‘Ecod, you may say what you like of MY father, then, and so I give you
leave,’ said Jonas. ‘I think it’s liquid aggravation that circulates
through his veins, and not regular blood. How old should you think my
father was, cousin?’

‘Old, no doubt,’ replied Miss Charity; ‘but a fine old gentleman.’

‘A fine old gentleman!’ repeated Jonas, giving the crown of his hat an
angry knock. ‘Ah! It’s time he was thinking of being drawn out a little
finer too. Why, he’s eighty!’

‘Is he, indeed?’ said the young lady.

‘And ecod,’ cried Jonas, ‘now he’s gone so far without giving in, I
don’t see much to prevent his being ninety; no, nor even a hundred. Why,
a man with any feeling ought to be ashamed of being eighty, let alone
more. Where’s his religion, I should like to know, when he goes flying
in the face of the Bible like that? Threescore-and-ten’s the mark, and
no man with a conscience, and a proper sense of what’s expected of him,
has any business to live longer.’

Is any one surprised at Mr Jonas making such a reference to such a
book for such a purpose? Does any one doubt the old saw, that the Devil
(being a layman) quotes Scripture for his own ends? If he will take the
trouble to look about him, he may find a greater number of confirmations
of the fact in the occurrences of any single day, than the steam-gun can
discharge balls in a minute.

‘But there’s enough of my father,’ said Jonas; ‘it’s of no use to go
putting one’s self out of the way by talking about HIM. I called to ask
you to come and take a walk, cousin, and see some of the sights; and
to come to our house afterwards, and have a bit of something. Pecksniff
will most likely look in in the evening, he says, and bring you home.
See, here’s his writing; I made him put it down this morning when he
told me he shouldn’t be back before I came here; in case you wouldn’t
believe me. There’s nothing like proof, is there? Ha, ha! I say--you’ll
bring the other one, you know!’

Miss Charity cast her eyes upon her father’s autograph, which merely
said--‘Go, my children, with your cousin. Let there be union among us
when it is possible;’ and after enough of hesitation to impart a proper
value to her consent, withdrew to prepare her sister and herself for the
excursion. She soon returned, accompanied by Miss Mercy, who was by
no means pleased to leave the brilliant triumphs of Todgers’s for the
society of Mr Jonas and his respected father.

‘Aha!’ cried Jonas. ‘There you are, are you?’

‘Yes, fright,’ said Mercy, ‘here I am; and I would much rather be
anywhere else, I assure you.’

‘You don’t mean that,’ cried Mr Jonas. ‘You can’t, you know. It isn’t
possible.’

‘You can have what opinion you like, fright,’ retorted Mercy. ‘I am
content to keep mine; and mine is that you are a very unpleasant,
odious, disagreeable person.’ Here she laughed heartily, and seemed to
enjoy herself very much.

‘Oh, you’re a sharp gal!’ said Mr Jonas. ‘She’s a regular teaser, an’t
she, cousin?’

Miss Charity replied in effect, that she was unable to say what the
habits and propensities of a regular teaser might be; and that even if
she possessed such information, it would ill become her to admit the
existence of any creature with such an unceremonious name in her family;
far less in the person of a beloved sister; ‘whatever,’ added Cherry
with an angry glance, ‘whatever her real nature may be.’

‘Well, my dear,’ said Merry, ‘the only observation I have to make is,
that if we don’t go out at once, I shall certainly take my bonnet off
again, and stay at home.’

This threat had the desired effect of preventing any farther
altercation, for Mr Jonas immediately proposed an adjournment, and
the same being carried unanimously, they departed from the house
straightway. On the doorstep, Mr Jonas gave an arm to each cousin;
which act of gallantry being observed by Bailey junior, from the garret
window, was by him saluted with a loud and violent fit of coughing, to
which paroxysm he was still the victim when they turned the corner.

Mr Jonas inquired in the first instance if they were good walkers and
being answered, ‘Yes,’ submitted their pedestrian powers to a pretty
severe test; for he showed them as many sights, in the way of bridges,
churches, streets, outsides of theatres, and other free spectacles,
in that one forenoon, as most people see in a twelvemonth. It was
observable in this gentleman, that he had an insurmountable distaste to
the insides of buildings, and that he was perfectly acquainted with
the merits of all shows, in respect of which there was any charge for
admission, which it seemed were every one detestable, and of the very
lowest grade of merit. He was so thoroughly possessed with this opinion,
that when Miss Charity happened to mention the circumstance of their
having been twice or thrice to the theatre with Mr Jinkins and party, he
inquired, as a matter of course, ‘where the orders came from?’ and being
told that Mr Jinkins and party paid, was beyond description entertained,
observing that ‘they must be nice flats, certainly;’ and often in the
course of the walk, bursting out again into a perfect convulsion of
laughter at the surpassing silliness of those gentlemen, and (doubtless)
at his own superior wisdom.

When they had been out for some hours and were thoroughly fatigued, it
being by that time twilight, Mr Jonas intimated that he would show them
one of the best pieces of fun with which he was acquainted. This joke
was of a practical kind, and its humour lay in taking a hackney-coach
to the extreme limits of possibility for a shilling. Happily it brought
them to the place where Mr Jonas dwelt, or the young ladies might have
rather missed the point and cream of the jest.

The old-established firm of Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son, Manchester
Warehousemen, and so forth, had its place of business in a very narrow
street somewhere behind the Post Office; where every house was in the
brightest summer morning very gloomy; and where light porters watered
the pavement, each before his own employer’s premises, in fantastic
patterns, in the dog-days; and where spruce gentlemen with their hands
in the pockets of symmetrical trousers, were always to be seen in
warm weather, contemplating their undeniable boots in dusty warehouse
doorways; which appeared to be the hardest work they did, except now and
then carrying pens behind their ears. A dim, dirty, smoky, tumble-down,
rotten old house it was, as anybody would desire to see; but there the
firm of Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son transacted all their business and
their pleasure too, such as it was; for neither the young man nor the
old had any other residence, or any care or thought beyond its narrow
limits.

Business, as may be readily supposed, was the main thing in this
establishment; insomuch indeed that it shouldered comfort out of
doors, and jostled the domestic arrangements at every turn. Thus in the
miserable bedrooms there were files of moth-eaten letters hanging up
against the walls; and linen rollers, and fragments of old patterns,
and odds and ends of spoiled goods, strewed upon the ground; while the
meagre bedsteads, washing-stands, and scraps of carpet, were huddled
away into corners as objects of secondary consideration, not to be
thought of but as disagreeable necessities, furnishing no profit, and
intruding on the one affair of life. The single sitting-room was on
the same principle, a chaos of boxes and old papers, and had more
counting-house stools in it than chairs; not to mention a great monster
of a desk straddling over the middle of the floor, and an iron safe
sunk into the wall above the fireplace. The solitary little table for
purposes of refection and social enjoyment, bore as fair a proportion
to the desk and other business furniture, as the graces and harmless
relaxations of life had ever done, in the persons of the old man and his
son, to their pursuit of wealth. It was meanly laid out now for dinner;
and in a chair before the fire sat Anthony himself, who rose to greet
his son and his fair cousins as they entered.

An ancient proverb warns us that we should not expect to find old heads
upon young shoulders; to which it may be added that we seldom meet with
that unnatural combination, but we feel a strong desire to knock them
off; merely from an inherent love we have of seeing things in their
right places. It is not improbable that many men, in no wise choleric
by nature, felt this impulse rising up within them, when they first made
the acquaintance of Mr Jonas; but if they had known him more intimately
in his own house, and had sat with him at his own board, it would
assuredly have been paramount to all other considerations.

‘Well, ghost!’ said Mr Jonas, dutifully addressing his parent by that
title. ‘Is dinner nearly ready?’

‘I should think it was,’ rejoined the old man.

‘What’s the good of that?’ rejoined the son. ‘I should think it was. I
want to know.’

‘Ah! I don’t know for certain,’ said Anthony.

‘You don’t know for certain,’ rejoined his son in a lower tone. ‘No. You
don’t know anything for certain, YOU don’t. Give me your candle here. I
want it for the gals.’

Anthony handed him a battered old office candlestick, with which Mr
Jonas preceded the young ladies to the nearest bedroom, where he left
them to take off their shawls and bonnets; and returning, occupied
himself in opening a bottle of wine, sharpening the carving-knife, and
muttering compliments to his father, until they and the dinner appeared
together. The repast consisted of a hot leg of mutton with greens and
potatoes; and the dishes having been set upon the table by a slipshod
old woman, they were left to enjoy it after their own manner.

‘Bachelor’s Hall, you know, cousin,’ said Mr Jonas to Charity. ‘I
say--the other one will be having a laugh at this when she gets home,
won’t she? Here; you sit on the right side of me, and I’ll have her upon
the left. Other one, will you come here?’

‘You’re such a fright,’ replied Mercy, ‘that I know I shall have no
appetite if I sit so near you; but I suppose I must.’

‘An’t she lively?’ whispered Mr Jonas to the elder sister, with his
favourite elbow emphasis.

‘Oh I really don’t know!’ replied Miss Pecksniff, tartly. ‘I am tired of
being asked such ridiculous questions.’

‘What’s that precious old father of mine about now?’ said Mr Jonas,
seeing that his parent was travelling up and down the room instead of
taking his seat at table. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘I’ve lost my glasses, Jonas,’ said old Anthony.

‘Sit down without your glasses, can’t you?’ returned his son. ‘You don’t
eat or drink out of ‘em, I think; and where’s that sleepy-headed old
Chuffey got to! Now, stupid. Oh! you know your name, do you?’

It would seem that he didn’t, for he didn’t come until the father
called. As he spoke, the door of a small glass office, which was
partitioned off from the rest of the room, was slowly opened, and a
little blear-eyed, weazen-faced, ancient man came creeping out. He was
of a remote fashion, and dusty, like the rest of the furniture; he was
dressed in a decayed suit of black; with breeches garnished at the knees
with rusty wisps of ribbon, the very paupers of shoestrings; on the
lower portion of his spindle legs were dingy worsted stockings of the
same colour. He looked as if he had been put away and forgotten half a
century before, and somebody had just found him in a lumber-closet.

Such as he was, he came slowly creeping on towards the table, until at
last he crept into the vacant chair, from which, as his dim faculties
became conscious of the presence of strangers, and those strangers
ladies, he rose again, apparently intending to make a bow. But he sat
down once more without having made it, and breathing on his shrivelled
hands to warm them, remained with his poor blue nose immovable above his
plate, looking at nothing, with eyes that saw nothing, and a face that
meant nothing. Take him in that state, and he was an embodiment of
nothing. Nothing else.

‘Our clerk,’ said Mr Jonas, as host and master of the ceremonies: ‘Old
Chuffey.’

‘Is he deaf?’ inquired one of the young ladies.

‘No, I don’t know that he is. He an’t deaf, is he, father?’

‘I never heard him say he was,’ replied the old man.

‘Blind?’ inquired the young ladies.

‘N--no. I never understood that he was at all blind,’ said Jonas,
carelessly. ‘You don’t consider him so, do you, father?’

‘Certainly not,’ replied Anthony.

‘What is he, then?’

‘Why, I’ll tell you what he is,’ said Mr Jonas, apart to the young
ladies, ‘he’s precious old, for one thing; and I an’t best pleased with
him for that, for I think my father must have caught it of him. He’s a
strange old chap, for another,’ he added in a louder voice, ‘and don’t
understand any one hardly, but HIM!’ He pointed to his honoured parent
with the carving-fork, in order that they might know whom he meant.

‘How very strange!’ cried the sisters.

‘Why, you see,’ said Mr Jonas, ‘he’s been addling his old brains with
figures and book-keeping all his life; and twenty years ago or so he
went and took a fever. All the time he was out of his head (which was
three weeks) he never left off casting up; and he got to so many million
at last that I don’t believe he’s ever been quite right since. We don’t
do much business now though, and he an’t a bad clerk.’

‘A very good one,’ said Anthony.

‘Well! He an’t a dear one at all events,’ observed Jonas; ‘and he earns
his salt, which is enough for our look-out. I was telling you that he
hardly understands any one except my father; he always understands him,
though, and wakes up quite wonderful. He’s been used to his ways so
long, you see! Why, I’ve seen him play whist, with my father for a
partner; and a good rubber too; when he had no more notion what sort of
people he was playing against, than you have.’

‘Has he no appetite?’ asked Merry.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Jonas, plying his own knife and fork very fast. ‘He
eats--when he’s helped. But he don’t care whether he waits a minute or
an hour, as long as father’s here; so when I’m at all sharp set, as I am
to-day, I come to him after I’ve taken the edge off my own hunger, you
know. Now, Chuffey, stupid, are you ready?’

Chuffey remained immovable.

‘Always a perverse old file, he was,’ said Mr Jonas, coolly helping
himself to another slice. ‘Ask him, father.’

‘Are you ready for your dinner, Chuffey?’ asked the old man

‘Yes, yes,’ said Chuffey, lighting up into a sentient human creature at
the first sound of the voice, so that it was at once a curious and quite
a moving sight to see him. ‘Yes, yes. Quite ready, Mr Chuzzlewit. Quite
ready, sir. All ready, all ready, all ready.’ With that he stopped,
smilingly, and listened for some further address; but being spoken to
no more, the light forsook his face by little and little, until he was
nothing again.

‘He’ll be very disagreeable, mind,’ said Jonas, addressing his cousins
as he handed the old man’s portion to his father. ‘He always chokes
himself when it an’t broth. Look at him, now! Did you ever see a horse
with such a wall-eyed expression as he’s got? If it hadn’t been for the
joke of it I wouldn’t have let him come in to-day; but I thought he’d
amuse you.’

The poor old subject of this humane speech was, happily for himself, as
unconscious of its purport as of most other remarks that were made in
his presence. But the mutton being tough, and his gums weak, he quickly
verified the statement relative to his choking propensities, and
underwent so much in his attempts to dine, that Mr Jonas was infinitely
amused; protesting that he had seldom seen him better company in all
his life, and that he was enough to make a man split his sides with
laughing. Indeed, he went so far as to assure the sisters, that in this
point of view he considered Chuffey superior to his own father; which,
as he significantly added, was saying a great deal.

It was strange enough that Anthony Chuzzlewit, himself so old a man,
should take a pleasure in these gibings of his estimable son at the
expense of the poor shadow at their table. But he did, unquestionably;
though not so much--to do him justice--with reference to their ancient
clerk, as in exultation at the sharpness of Jonas. For the same reason
that young man’s coarse allusions, even to himself, filled him with a
stealthy glee; causing him to rub his hands and chuckle covertly, as if
he said in his sleeve, ‘I taught him. I trained him. This is the heir of
my bringing-up. Sly, cunning, and covetous, he’ll not squander my money.
I worked for this; I hoped for this; it has been the great end and aim
of my life.’

What a noble end and aim it was to contemplate in the attainment truly!
But there be some who manufacture idols after the fashion of themselves,
and fail to worship them when they are made; charging their deformity on
outraged nature. Anthony was better than these at any rate.

Chuffey boggled over his plate so long, that Mr Jonas, losing patience,
took it from him at last with his own hands, and requested his father
to signify to that venerable person that he had better ‘peg away at his
bread;’ which Anthony did.

‘Aye, aye!’ cried the old man, brightening up as before, when this was
communicated to him in the same voice, ‘quite right, quite right. He’s
your own son, Mr Chuzzlewit! Bless him for a sharp lad! Bless him, bless
him!’

Mr Jonas considered this so particularly childish (perhaps with some
reason), that he only laughed the more, and told his cousins that he was
afraid one of these fine days, Chuffey would be the death of him. The
cloth was then removed, and the bottle of wine set upon the table, from
which Mr Jonas filled the young ladies’ glasses, calling on them not to
spare it, as they might be certain there was plenty more where that came
from. But he added with some haste after this sally that it was only his
joke, and they wouldn’t suppose him to be in earnest, he was sure.

‘I shall drink,’ said Anthony, ‘to Pecksniff. Your father, my dears. A
clever man, Pecksniff. A wary man! A hypocrite, though, eh? A hypocrite,
girls, eh? Ha, ha, ha! Well, so he is. Now, among friends, he is. I
don’t think the worse of him for that, unless it is that he overdoes it.
You may overdo anything, my darlings. You may overdo even hypocrisy. Ask
Jonas!’

‘You can’t overdo taking care of yourself,’ observed that hopeful
gentleman with his mouth full.

‘Do you hear that, my dears?’ cried Anthony, quite enraptured. ‘Wisdom,
wisdom! A good exception, Jonas. No. It’s not easy to overdo that.’

‘Except,’ whispered Mr Jonas to his favourite cousin, ‘except when one
lives too long. Ha, ha! Tell the other one that--I say!’

‘Good gracious me!’ said Cherry, in a petulant manner. ‘You can tell her
yourself, if you wish, can’t you?’

‘She seems to make such game of one,’ replied Mr Jonas.

‘Then why need you trouble yourself about her?’ said Charity. ‘I am sure
she doesn’t trouble herself much about you.’

‘Don’t she though?’ asked Jonas.

‘Good gracious me, need I tell you that she don’t?’ returned the young
lady.

Mr Jonas made no verbal rejoinder, but he glanced at Mercy with an odd
expression in his face; and said THAT wouldn’t break his heart, she
might depend upon it. Then he looked on Charity with even greater favour
than before, and besought her, as his polite manner was, to ‘come a
little closer.’

‘There’s another thing that’s not easily overdone, father,’ remarked
Jonas, after a short silence.

‘What’s that?’ asked the father; grinning already in anticipation.

‘A bargain,’ said the son. ‘Here’s the rule for bargains--“Do other men,
for they would do you.” That’s the true business precept. All others are
counterfeits.’

The delighted father applauded this sentiment to the echo; and was so
much tickled by it, that he was at the pains of imparting the same to
his ancient clerk, who rubbed his hands, nodded his palsied head, winked
his watery eyes, and cried in his whistling tones, ‘Good! good! Your own
son, Mr Chuzzlewit’ with every feeble demonstration of delight that he
was capable of making. But this old man’s enthusiasm had the redeeming
quality of being felt in sympathy with the only creature to whom he was
linked by ties of long association, and by his present helplessness. And
if there had been anybody there, who cared to think about it, some dregs
of a better nature unawakened, might perhaps have been descried through
that very medium, melancholy though it was, yet lingering at the bottom
of the worn-out cask called Chuffey.

As matters stood, nobody thought or said anything upon the subject; so
Chuffey fell back into a dark corner on one side of the fireplace, where
he always spent his evenings, and was neither seen nor heard again that
night; save once, when a cup of tea was given him, in which he was seen
to soak his bread mechanically. There was no reason to suppose that he
went to sleep at these seasons, or that he heard, or saw, or felt, or
thought. He remained, as it were, frozen up--if any term expressive of
such a vigorous process can be applied to him--until he was again thawed
for the moment by a word or touch from Anthony.

Miss Charity made tea by desire of Mr Jonas, and felt and looked so
like the lady of the house that she was in the prettiest confusion
imaginable; the more so from Mr Jonas sitting close beside her, and
whispering a variety of admiring expressions in her ear. Miss Mercy, for
her part, felt the entertainment of the evening to be so distinctly
and exclusively theirs, that she silently deplored the commercial
gentlemen--at that moment, no doubt, wearying for her return--and yawned
over yesterday’s newspaper. As to Anthony, he went to sleep outright, so
Jonas and Cherry had a clear stage to themselves as long as they chose
to keep possession of it.

When the tea-tray was taken away, as it was at last, Mr Jonas produced a
dirty pack of cards, and entertained the sisters with divers small feats
of dexterity: whereof the main purpose of every one was, that you were
to decoy somebody into laying a wager with you that you couldn’t do it;
and were then immediately to win and pocket his money. Mr Jonas
informed them that these accomplishments were in high vogue in the most
intellectual circles, and that large amounts were constantly changing
hands on such hazards. And it may be remarked that he fully believed
this; for there is a simplicity of cunning no less than a simplicity
of innocence; and in all matters where a lively faith in knavery and
meanness was required as the ground-work of belief, Mr Jonas was one of
the most credulous of men. His ignorance, which was stupendous, may be
taken into account, if the reader pleases, separately.

This fine young man had all the inclination to be a profligate of the
first water, and only lacked the one good trait in the common catalogue
of debauched vices--open-handedness--to be a notable vagabond. But there
his griping and penurious habits stepped in; and as one poison will
sometimes neutralise another, when wholesome remedies would not avail,
so he was restrained by a bad passion from quaffing his full measure of
evil, when virtue might have sought to hold him back in vain.

By the time he had unfolded all the peddling schemes he knew upon the
cards, it was growing late in the evening; and Mr Pecksniff not making
his appearance, the young ladies expressed a wish to return home. But
this, Mr Jonas, in his gallantry, would by no means allow, until they
had partaken of some bread and cheese and porter; and even then he was
excessively unwilling to allow them to depart; often beseeching Miss
Charity to come a little closer, or to stop a little longer, and
preferring many other complimentary petitions of that nature in his own
hospitable and earnest way. When all his efforts to detain them were
fruitless, he put on his hat and greatcoat preparatory to escorting them
to Todgers’s; remarking that he knew they would rather walk thither than
ride; and that for his part he was quite of their opinion.

‘Good night,’ said Anthony. ‘Good night; remember me to--ha, ha, ha!--to
Pecksniff. Take care of your cousin, my dears; beware of Jonas; he’s a
dangerous fellow. Don’t quarrel for him, in any case!’

‘Oh, the creature!’ cried Mercy. ‘The idea of quarrelling for HIM! You
may take him, Cherry, my love, all to yourself. I make you a present of
my share.’

‘What! I’m a sour grape, am I, cousin?’ said Jonas.

Miss Charity was more entertained by this repartee than one would have
supposed likely, considering its advanced age and simple character. But
in her sisterly affection she took Mr Jonas to task for leaning so very
hard upon a broken reed, and said that he must not be so cruel to poor
Merry any more, or she (Charity) would positively be obliged to hate
him. Mercy, who really had her share of good humour, only retorted with
a laugh; and they walked home in consequence without any angry passages
of words upon the way. Mr Jonas being in the middle, and having a cousin
on each arm, sometimes squeezed the wrong one; so tightly too, as to
cause her not a little inconvenience; but as he talked to Charity in
whispers the whole time, and paid her great attention, no doubt this was
an accidental circumstance. When they arrived at Todgers’s, and the door
was opened, Mercy broke hastily from them, and ran upstairs; but Charity
and Jonas lingered on the steps talking together for more than five
minutes; so, as Mrs Todgers observed next morning, to a third party, ‘It
was pretty clear what was going on THERE, and she was glad of it, for it
really was high time that Miss Pecksniff thought of settling.’

And now the day was coming on, when that bright vision which had burst
on Todgers’s so suddenly, and made a sunshine in the shady breast of
Jinkins, was to be seen no more; when it was to be packed, like a brown
paper parcel, or a fish-basket, or an oyster barrel or a fat gentleman,
or any other dull reality of life, in a stagecoach and carried down into
the country.

‘Never, my dear Miss Pecksniffs,’ said Mrs Todgers, when they retired
to rest on the last night of their stay, ‘never have I seen an
establishment so perfectly broken-hearted as mine is at this present
moment of time. I don’t believe the gentlemen will be the gentlemen they
were, or anything like it--no, not for weeks to come. You have a great
deal to answer for, both of you.’

They modestly disclaimed any wilful agency in this disastrous state of
things, and regretted it very much.

‘Your pious pa, too,’ said Mrs Todgers. ‘There’s a loss! My dear Miss
Pecksniffs, your pa is a perfect missionary of peace and love.’

Entertaining an uncertainty as to the particular kind of love supposed
to be comprised in Mr Pecksniff’s mission, the young ladies received the
compliment rather coldly.

‘If I dared,’ said Mrs Todgers, perceiving this, ‘to violate a
confidence which has been reposed in me, and to tell you why I must beg
of you to leave the little door between your room and mine open tonight,
I think you would be interested. But I mustn’t do it, for I promised Mr
Jinkins faithfully, that I would be as silent as the tomb.’

‘Dear Mrs Todgers! What can you mean?’

‘Why, then, my sweet Miss Pecksniffs,’ said the lady of the house; ‘my
own loves, if you will allow me the privilege of taking that freedom on
the eve of our separation, Mr Jinkins and the gentlemen have made up
a little musical party among themselves, and DO intend, in the dead of
this night, to perform a serenade upon the stairs outside the door. I
could have wished, I own,’ said Mrs Todgers, with her usual foresight,
‘that it had been fixed to take place an hour or two earlier; because
when gentlemen sit up late they drink, and when they drink they’re not
so musical, perhaps, as when they don’t. But this is the arrangement;
and I know you will be gratified, my dear Miss Pecksniffs, by such a
mark of their attention.’

The young ladies were at first so much excited by the news, that they
vowed they couldn’t think of going to bed until the serenade was over.
But half an hour of cool waiting so altered their opinion that they not
only went to bed, but fell asleep; and were, moreover, not ecstatically
charmed to be awakened some time afterwards by certain dulcet strains
breaking in upon the silent watches of the night.

It was very affecting--very. Nothing more dismal could have been desired
by the most fastidious taste. The gentleman of a vocal turn was head
mute, or chief mourner; Jinkins took the bass; and the rest took
anything they could get. The youngest gentleman blew his melancholy into
a flute. He didn’t blow much out of it, but that was all the better.
If the two Miss Pecksniffs and Mrs Todgers had perished by spontaneous
combustion, and the serenade had been in honour of their ashes, it would
have been impossible to surpass the unutterable despair expressed in
that one chorus, ‘Go where glory waits thee!’ It was a requiem, a dirge,
a moan, a howl, a wail, a lament, an abstract of everything that is
sorrowful and hideous in sound. The flute of the youngest gentleman was
wild and fitful. It came and went in gusts, like the wind. For a long
time together he seemed to have left off, and when it was quite settled
by Mrs Todgers and the young ladies that, overcome by his feelings, he
had retired in tears, he unexpectedly turned up again at the very top of
the tune, gasping for breath. He was a tremendous performer. There was
no knowing where to have him; and exactly when you thought he was doing
nothing at all, then was he doing the very thing that ought to astonish
you most.

There were several of these concerted pieces; perhaps two or three too
many, though that, as Mrs Todgers said, was a fault on the right side.
But even then, even at that solemn moment, when the thrilling sounds may
be presumed to have penetrated into the very depths of his nature, if he
had any depths, Jinkins couldn’t leave the youngest gentleman alone. He
asked him distinctly, before the second song began--as a personal favour
too, mark the villain in that--not to play. Yes; he said so; not to
play. The breathing of the youngest gentleman was heard through the
key-hole of the door. He DIDN’T play. What vent was a flute for the
passions swelling up within his breast? A trombone would have been a
world too mild.

The serenade approached its close. Its crowning interest was at hand.
The gentleman of a literary turn had written a song on the departure of
the ladies, and adapted it to an old tune. They all joined, except
the youngest gentleman in company, who, for the reasons aforesaid,
maintained a fearful silence. The song (which was of a classical nature)
invoked the oracle of Apollo, and demanded to know what would become
of Todgers’s when CHARITY and MERCY were banished from its walls. The
oracle delivered no opinion particularly worth remembering, according
to the not infrequent practice of oracles from the earliest ages down to
the present time. In the absence of enlightenment on that subject, the
strain deserted it, and went on to show that the Miss Pecksniffs were
nearly related to Rule Britannia, and that if Great Britain hadn’t been
an island, there could have been no Miss Pecksniffs. And being now on a
nautical tack, it closed with this verse:

     ‘All hail to the vessel of Pecksniff the sire!
            And favouring breezes to fan;
     While Tritons flock round it, and proudly admire
            The architect, artist, and man!’

As they presented this beautiful picture to the imagination, the
gentlemen gradually withdrew to bed to give the music the effect of
distance; and so it died away, and Todgers’s was left to its repose.

Mr Bailey reserved his vocal offering until the morning, when he put
his head into the room as the young ladies were kneeling before their
trunks, packing up, and treated them to an imitation of the voice of
a young dog in trying circumstances; when that animal is supposed by
persons of a lively fancy, to relieve his feelings by calling for pen
and ink.

‘Well, young ladies,’ said the youth, ‘so you’re a-going home, are you,
worse luck?’

‘Yes, Bailey, we’re going home,’ returned Mercy.

‘An’t you a-going to leave none of ‘em a lock of your hair?’ inquired
the youth. ‘It’s real, an’t it?’

They laughed at this, and told him of course it was.

‘Oh, is it of course, though?’ said Bailey. ‘I know better than that.
Hers an’t. Why, I see it hanging up once, on that nail by the winder.
Besides, I have gone behind her at dinner-time and pulled it; and she
never know’d. I say, young ladies, I’m a-going to leave. I an’t a-going
to stand being called names by her, no longer.’

Miss Mercy inquired what his plans for the future might be; in reply to
whom Mr Bailey intimated that he thought of going either into top-boots,
or into the army.

‘Into the army!’ cried the young ladies, with a laugh.

‘Ah!’ said Bailey, ‘why not? There’s a many drummers in the Tower. I’m
acquainted with ‘em. Don’t their country set a valley on ‘em, mind you!
Not at all!’

‘You’ll be shot, I see,’ observed Mercy.

‘Well!’ cried Mr Bailey, ‘wot if I am? There’s something gamey in it,
young ladies, an’t there? I’d sooner be hit with a cannon-ball than a
rolling-pin, and she’s always a-catching up something of that sort, and
throwing it at me, when the gentlemans’ appetites is good. Wot,’ said
Mr Bailey, stung by the recollection of his wrongs, ‘wot, if they DO
consume the per-vishuns. It an’t MY fault, is it?’

‘Surely no one says it is,’ said Mercy.

‘Don’t they though?’ retorted the youth. ‘No. Yes. Ah! oh! No one mayn’t
say it is! but some one knows it is. But I an’t a-going to have every
rise in prices wisited on me. I an’t a-going to be killed because
the markets is dear. I won’t stop. And therefore,’ added Mr Bailey,
relenting into a smile, ‘wotever you mean to give me, you’d better give
me all at once, becos if ever you come back agin, I shan’t be here; and
as to the other boy, HE won’t deserve nothing, I know.’

The young ladies, on behalf of Mr Pecksniff and themselves, acted
on this thoughtful advice; and in consideration of their private
friendship, presented Mr Bailey with a gratuity so liberal that he could
hardly do enough to show his gratitude; which found but an imperfect
vent, during the remainder of the day, in divers secret slaps upon his
pocket, and other such facetious pantomime. Nor was it confined to these
ebullitions; for besides crushing a bandbox, with a bonnet in it, he
seriously damaged Mr Pecksniff’s luggage, by ardently hauling it down
from the top of the house; and in short evinced, by every means in his
power, a lively sense of the favours he had received from that gentleman
and his family.

Mr Pecksniff and Mr Jinkins came home to dinner arm-in-arm; for the
latter gentleman had made half-holiday on purpose; thus gaining an
immense advantage over the youngest gentleman and the rest, whose time,
as it perversely chanced, was all bespoke, until the evening. The bottle
of wine was Mr Pecksniff’s treat, and they were very sociable indeed;
though full of lamentations on the necessity of parting. While they were
in the midst of their enjoyment, old Anthony and his son were announced;
much to the surprise of Mr Pecksniff, and greatly to the discomfiture of
Jinkins.

‘Come to say good-bye, you see,’ said Anthony, in a low voice, to Mr
Pecksniff, as they took their seats apart at the table, while the rest
conversed among themselves. ‘Where’s the use of a division between
you and me? We are the two halves of a pair of scissors, when apart,
Pecksniff; but together we are something. Eh?’

‘Unanimity, my good sir,’ rejoined Mr Pecksniff, ‘is always delightful.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said the old man, ‘for there are some people
I would rather differ from than agree with. But you know my opinion of
you.’

Mr Pecksniff, still having ‘hypocrite’ in his mind, only replied by a
motion of his head, which was something between an affirmative bow, and
a negative shake.

‘Complimentary,’ said Anthony. ‘Complimentary, upon my word. It was an
involuntary tribute to your abilities, even at the time; and it was not
a time to suggest compliments either. But we agreed in the coach, you
know, that we quite understood each other.’

‘Oh, quite!’ assented Mr Pecksniff, in a manner which implied that he
himself was misunderstood most cruelly, but would not complain.

Anthony glanced at his son as he sat beside Miss Charity, and then at Mr
Pecksniff, and then at his son again, very many times. It happened that
Mr Pecksniff’s glances took a similar direction; but when he became
aware of it, he first cast down his eyes, and then closed them; as if he
were determined that the old man should read nothing there.

‘Jonas is a shrewd lad,’ said the old man.

‘He appears,’ rejoined Mr Pecksniff in his most candid manner, ‘to be
very shrewd.’

‘And careful,’ said the old man.

‘And careful, I have no doubt,’ returned Mr Pecksniff.

‘Look ye!’ said Anthony in his ear. ‘I think he is sweet upon you
daughter.’

‘Tut, my good sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff, with his eyes still closed;
‘young people--young people--a kind of cousins, too--no more sweetness
than is in that, sir.’

‘Why, there is very little sweetness in that, according to our
experience,’ returned Anthony. ‘Isn’t there a trifle more here?’

‘Impossible to say,’ rejoined Mr Pecksniff. ‘Quite impossible! You
surprise me.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ said the old man, drily. ‘It may last; I mean the
sweetness, not the surprise; and it may die off. Supposing it should
last, perhaps (you having feathered your nest pretty well, and I having
done the same), we might have a mutual interest in the matter.’

Mr Pecksniff, smiling gently, was about to speak, but Anthony stopped
him.

‘I know what you are going to say. It’s quite unnecessary. You have
never thought of this for a moment; and in a point so nearly affecting
the happiness of your dear child, you couldn’t, as a tender father,
express an opinion; and so forth. Yes, quite right. And like you! But it
seems to me, my dear Pecksniff,’ added Anthony, laying his hand upon
his sleeve, ‘that if you and I kept up the joke of pretending not to see
this, one of us might possibly be placed in a position of disadvantage;
and as I am very unwilling to be that party myself, you will excuse my
taking the liberty of putting the matter beyond a doubt thus early; and
having it distinctly understood, as it is now, that we do see it, and do
know it. Thank you for your attention. We are now upon an equal footing;
which is agreeable to us both, I am sure.’

He rose as he spoke; and giving Mr Pecksniff a nod of intelligence,
moved away from him to where the young people were sitting; leaving that
good man somewhat puzzled and discomfited by such very plain dealing,
and not quite free from a sense of having been foiled in the exercise of
his familiar weapons.

But the night-coach had a punctual character, and it was time to join
it at the office; which was so near at hand that they had already sent
their luggage and arranged to walk. Thither the whole party repaired,
therefore, after no more delay than sufficed for the equipment of the
Miss Pecksniffs and Mrs Todgers. They found the coach already at its
starting-place, and the horses in; there, too, were a large majority
of the commercial gentlemen, including the youngest, who was visibly
agitated, and in a state of deep mental dejection.

Nothing could equal the distress of Mrs Todgers in parting from the
young ladies, except the strong emotions with which she bade adieu to Mr
Pecksniff. Never surely was a pocket-handkerchief taken in and out of
a flat reticule so often as Mrs Todgers’s was, as she stood upon the
pavement by the coach-door supported on either side by a commercial
gentleman; and by the sight of the coach-lamps caught such brief
snatches and glimpses of the good man’s face, as the constant
interposition of Mr Jinkins allowed. For Jinkins, to the last the
youngest gentleman’s rock a-head in life, stood upon the coachstep
talking to the ladies. Upon the other step was Mr Jonas, who maintained
that position in right of his cousinship; whereas the youngest
gentleman, who had been first upon the ground, was deep in the
booking-office among the black and red placards, and the portraits of
fast coaches, where he was ignominiously harassed by porters, and had to
contend and strive perpetually with heavy baggage. This false
position, combined with his nervous excitement, brought about the very
consummation and catastrophe of his miseries; for when in the moment of
parting he aimed a flower, a hothouse flower that had cost money, at the
fair hand of Mercy, it reached, instead, the coachman on the box, who
thanked him kindly, and stuck it in his buttonhole.

They were off now; and Todgers’s was alone again. The two young ladies,
leaning back in their separate corners, resigned themselves to their
own regretful thoughts. But Mr Pecksniff, dismissing all ephemeral
considerations of social pleasure and enjoyment, concentrated his
meditations on the one great virtuous purpose before him, of casting
out that ingrate and deceiver, whose presence yet troubled his domestic
hearth, and was a sacrilege upon the altars of his household gods.



CHAPTER TWELVE

WILL BE SEEN IN THE LONG RUN, IF NOT IN THE SHORT ONE, TO CONCERN MR
PINCH AND OTHERS, NEARLY. MR PECKSNIFF ASSERTS THE DIGNITY OF OUTRAGED
VIRTUE. YOUNG MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT FORMS A DESPERATE RESOLUTION


Mr Pinch and Martin, little dreaming of the stormy weather that
impended, made themselves very comfortable in the Pecksniffian halls,
and improved their friendship daily. Martin’s facility, both of
invention and execution, being remarkable, the grammar-school proceeded
with great vigour; and Tom repeatedly declared, that if there were
anything like certainty in human affairs, or impartiality in human
judges, a design so new and full of merit could not fail to carry off
the first prize when the time of competition arrived. Without being
quite so sanguine himself, Martin had his hopeful anticipations too; and
they served to make him brisk and eager at his task.

‘If I should turn out a great architect, Tom,’ said the new pupil one
day, as he stood at a little distance from his drawing, and eyed it with
much complacency, ‘I’ll tell you what should be one of the things I’d
build.’

‘Aye!’ cried Tom. ‘What?’

‘Why, your fortune.’

‘No!’ said Tom Pinch, quite as much delighted as if the thing were done.
‘Would you though? How kind of you to say so.’

‘I’d build it up, Tom,’ returned Martin, ‘on such a strong foundation,
that it should last your life--aye, and your children’s lives too, and
their children’s after them. I’d be your patron, Tom. I’d take you under
my protection. Let me see the man who should give the cold shoulder to
anybody I chose to protect and patronise, if I were at the top of the
tree, Tom!’

‘Now, I don’t think,’ said Mr Pinch, ‘upon my word, that I was ever more
gratified than by this. I really don’t.’

‘Oh! I mean what I say,’ retorted Martin, with a manner as free and easy
in its condescension to, not to say in its compassion for, the other, as
if he were already First Architect in ordinary to all the Crowned Heads
in Europe. ‘I’d do it. I’d provide for you.’

‘I am afraid,’ said Tom, shaking his head, ‘that I should be a mighty
awkward person to provide for.’

‘Pooh, pooh!’ rejoined Martin. ‘Never mind that. If I took it in my head
to say, “Pinch is a clever fellow; I approve of Pinch;” I should like
to know the man who would venture to put himself in opposition to me.
Besides, confound it, Tom, you could be useful to me in a hundred ways.’

‘If I were not useful in one or two, it shouldn’t be for want of
trying,’ said Tom.

‘For instance,’ pursued Martin, after a short reflection, ‘you’d be a
capital fellow, now, to see that my ideas were properly carried out; and
to overlook the works in their progress before they were sufficiently
advanced to be very interesting to ME; and to take all that sort of
plain sailing. Then you’d be a splendid fellow to show people over my
studio, and to talk about Art to ‘em, when I couldn’t be bored myself,
and all that kind of thing. For it would be devilish creditable, Tom
(I’m quite in earnest, I give you my word), to have a man of your
information about one, instead of some ordinary blockhead. Oh, I’d take
care of you. You’d be useful, rely upon it!’

To say that Tom had no idea of playing first fiddle in any social
orchestra, but was always quite satisfied to be set down for the hundred
and fiftieth violin in the band, or thereabouts, is to express his
modesty in very inadequate terms. He was much delighted, therefore, by
these observations.

‘I should be married to her then, Tom, of course,’ said Martin.

What was that which checked Tom Pinch so suddenly, in the high flow
of his gladness; bringing the blood into his honest cheeks, and a
remorseful feeling to his honest heart, as if he were unworthy of his
friend’s regard?

‘I should be married to her then,’ said Martin, looking with a smile
towards the light; ‘and we should have, I hope, children about us.
They’d be very fond of you, Tom.’

But not a word said Mr Pinch. The words he would have uttered died upon
his lips, and found a life more spiritual in self-denying thoughts.

‘All the children hereabouts are fond of you, Tom, and mine would be,
of course,’ pursued Martin. ‘Perhaps I might name one of ‘em after
you. Tom, eh? Well, I don’t know. Tom’s not a bad name. Thomas Pinch
Chuzzlewit. T. P. C. on his pinafores--no objection to that, I should
say?’

Tom cleared his throat, and smiled.

‘SHE would like you, Tom, I know,’ said Martin.

‘Aye!’ cried Tom Pinch, faintly.

‘I can tell exactly what she would think of you,’ said Martin leaning
his chin upon his hand, and looking through the window-glass as if he
read there what he said; ‘I know her so well. She would smile, Tom,
often at first when you spoke to her, or when she looked at you--merrily
too--but you wouldn’t mind that. A brighter smile you never saw.’

‘No, no,’ said Tom. ‘I wouldn’t mind that.’

‘She would be as tender with you, Tom,’ said Martin, ‘as if you were a
child yourself. So you are almost, in some things, an’t you, Tom?’

Mr Pinch nodded his entire assent.

‘She would always be kind and good-humoured, and glad to see you,’ said
Martin; ‘and when she found out exactly what sort of fellow you were
(which she’d do very soon), she would pretend to give you little
commissions to execute, and to ask little services of you, which she
knew you were burning to render; so that when she really pleased you
most, she would try to make you think you most pleased her. She
would take to you uncommonly, Tom; and would understand you far more
delicately than I ever shall; and would often say, I know, that you were
a harmless, gentle, well-intentioned, good fellow.’

How silent Tom Pinch was!

‘In honour of old time,’ said Martin, ‘and of her having heard you play
the organ in this damp little church down here--for nothing too--we will
have one in the house. I shall build an architectural music-room on a
plan of my own, and it’ll look rather knowing in a recess at one end.
There you shall play away, Tom, till you tire yourself; and, as you like
to do so in the dark, it shall BE dark; and many’s the summer evening
she and I will sit and listen to you, Tom; be sure of that!’

It may have required a stronger effort on Tom Pinch’s part to leave the
seat on which he sat, and shake his friend by both hands, with nothing
but serenity and grateful feeling painted on his face; it may have
required a stronger effort to perform this simple act with a pure heart,
than to achieve many and many a deed to which the doubtful trumpet blown
by Fame has lustily resounded. Doubtful, because from its long hovering
over scenes of violence, the smoke and steam of death have clogged the
keys of that brave instrument; and it is not always that its notes are
either true or tuneful.

‘It’s a proof of the kindness of human nature,’ said Tom,
characteristically putting himself quite out of sight in the matter,
‘that everybody who comes here, as you have done, is more considerate
and affectionate to me than I should have any right to hope, if I were
the most sanguine creature in the world; or should have any power to
express, if I were the most eloquent. It really overpowers me. But trust
me,’ said Tom, ‘that I am not ungrateful--that I never forget--and that
if I can ever prove the truth of my words to you, I will.’

‘That’s all right,’ observed Martin, leaning back in his chair with a
hand in each pocket, and yawning drearily. ‘Very fine talking, Tom;
but I’m at Pecksniff’s, I remember, and perhaps a mile or so out of the
high-road to fortune just at this minute. So you’ve heard again this
morning from what’s his name, eh?’

‘Who may that be?’ asked Tom, seeming to enter a mild protest on behalf
of the dignity of an absent person.

‘YOU know. What is it? Northkey.’

‘Westlock,’ rejoined Tom, in rather a louder tone than usual.

‘Ah! to be sure,’ said Martin, ‘Westlock. I knew it was something
connected with a point of the compass and a door. Well! and what says
Westlock?’

‘Oh! he has come into his property,’ answered Tom, nodding his head, and
smiling.

‘He’s a lucky dog,’ said Martin. ‘I wish it were mine instead. Is that
all the mystery you were to tell me?’

‘No,’ said Tom; ‘not all.’

‘What’s the rest?’ asked Martin.

‘For the matter of that,’ said Tom, ‘it’s no mystery, and you won’t
think much of it; but it’s very pleasant to me. John always used to say
when he was here, “Mark my words, Pinch. When my father’s executors cash
up”--he used strange expressions now and then, but that was his way.’

‘Cash-up’s a very good expression,’ observed Martin, ‘when other people
don’t apply it to you. Well!--What a slow fellow you are, Pinch!’

‘Yes, I am I know,’ said Tom; ‘but you’ll make me nervous if you tell me
so. I’m afraid you have put me out a little now, for I forget what I was
going to say.’

‘When John’s father’s executors cashed up,’ said Martin impatiently.

‘Oh yes, to be sure,’ cried Tom; ‘yes. “Then,” says John, “I’ll give you
a dinner, Pinch, and come down to Salisbury on purpose.” Now, when John
wrote the other day--the morning Pecksniff left, you know--he said his
business was on the point of being immediately settled, and as he was to
receive his money directly, when could I meet him at Salisbury? I wrote
and said, any day this week; and I told him besides, that there was a
new pupil here, and what a fine fellow you were, and what friends we
had become. Upon which John writes back this letter’--Tom produced
it--‘fixes to-morrow; sends his compliments to you; and begs that we
three may have the pleasure of dining together; not at the house where
you and I were, either; but at the very first hotel in the town. Read
what he says.’

‘Very well,’ said Martin, glancing over it with his customary coolness;
‘much obliged to him. I’m agreeable.’

Tom could have wished him to be a little more astonished, a little more
pleased, or in some form or other a little more interested in such a
great event. But he was perfectly self-possessed; and falling into his
favourite solace of whistling, took another turn at the grammar-school,
as if nothing at all had happened.

Mr Pecksniff’s horse being regarded in the light of a sacred animal,
only to be driven by him, the chief priest of that temple, or by some
person distinctly nominated for the time being to that high office by
himself, the two young men agreed to walk to Salisbury; and so, when the
time came, they set off on foot; which was, after all, a better mode of
travelling than in the gig, as the weather was very cold and very dry.

Better! A rare strong, hearty, healthy walk--four statute miles an
hour--preferable to that rumbling, tumbling, jolting, shaking, scraping,
creaking, villanous old gig? Why, the two things will not admit of
comparison. It is an insult to the walk, to set them side by side. Where
is an instance of a gig having ever circulated a man’s blood, unless
when, putting him in danger of his neck, it awakened in his veins and in
his ears, and all along his spine, a tingling heat, much more peculiar
than agreeable? When did a gig ever sharpen anybody’s wits and energies,
unless it was when the horse bolted, and, crashing madly down a steep
hill with a stone wall at the bottom, his desperate circumstances
suggested to the only gentleman left inside, some novel and unheard-of
mode of dropping out behind? Better than the gig!

The air was cold, Tom; so it was, there was no denying it; but would
it have been more genial in the gig? The blacksmith’s fire burned very
bright, and leaped up high, as though it wanted men to warm; but would
it have been less tempting, looked at from the clammy cushions of a gig?
The wind blew keenly, nipping the features of the hardy wight who fought
his way along; blinding him with his own hair if he had enough to it,
and wintry dust if he hadn’t; stopping his breath as though he had been
soused in a cold bath; tearing aside his wrappings-up, and whistling in
the very marrow of his bones; but it would have done all this a hundred
times more fiercely to a man in a gig, wouldn’t it? A fig for gigs!

Better than the gig! When were travellers by wheels and hoofs seen with
such red-hot cheeks as those? when were they so good-humouredly and
merrily bloused? when did their laughter ring upon the air, as they
turned them round, what time the stronger gusts came sweeping up; and,
facing round again as they passed by, dashed on, in such a glow of
ruddy health as nothing could keep pace with, but the high spirits it
engendered? Better than the gig! Why, here is a man in a gig coming
the same way now. Look at him as he passes his whip into his left hand,
chafes his numbed right fingers on his granite leg, and beats those
marble toes of his upon the foot-board. Ha, ha, ha! Who would exchange
this rapid hurry of the blood for yonder stagnant misery, though its
pace were twenty miles for one?

Better than the gig! No man in a gig could have such interest in the
milestones. No man in a gig could see, or feel, or think, like merry
users of their legs. How, as the wind sweeps on, upon these breezy
downs, it tracks its flight in darkening ripples on the grass, and
smoothest shadows on the hills! Look round and round upon this bare
bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter’s day, how beautiful
the shadows are! Alas! it is the nature of their kind to be so. The
loveliest things in life, Tom, are but shadows; and they come and go,
and change and fade away, as rapidly as these!

Another mile, and then begins a fall of snow, making the crow, who skims
away so close above the ground to shirk the wind, a blot of ink upon the
landscape. But though it drives and drifts against them as they walk,
stiffening on their skirts, and freezing in the lashes of their eyes,
they wouldn’t have it fall more sparingly, no, not so much as by a
single flake, although they had to go a score of miles. And, lo! the
towers of the Old Cathedral rise before them, even now! and by-and-bye
they come into the sheltered streets, made strangely silent by their
white carpet; and so to the Inn for which they are bound; where they
present such flushed and burning faces to the cold waiter, and are so
brimful of vigour, that he almost feels assaulted by their presence;
and, having nothing to oppose to the attack (being fresh, or rather
stale, from the blazing fire in the coffee-room), is quite put out of
his pale countenance.

A famous Inn! the hall a very grove of dead game, and dangling joints
of mutton; and in one corner an illustrious larder, with glass doors,
developing cold fowls and noble joints, and tarts wherein the raspberry
jam coyly withdrew itself, as such a precious creature should, behind a
lattice work of pastry. And behold, on the first floor, at the court-end
of the house, in a room with all the window-curtains drawn, a fire piled
half-way up the chimney, plates warming before it, wax candles gleaming
everywhere, and a table spread for three, with silver and glass enough
for thirty--John Westlock; not the old John of Pecksniff’s, but a proper
gentleman; looking another and a grander person, with the consciousness
of being his own master and having money in the bank; and yet in some
respects the old John too, for he seized Tom Pinch by both his hands the
instant he appeared, and fairly hugged him, in his cordial welcome.

‘And this,’ said John, ‘is Mr Chuzzlewit. I am very glad to see
him!’--John had an off-hand manner of his own; so they shook hands
warmly, and were friends in no time.

‘Stand off a moment, Tom,’ cried the old pupil, laying one hand on each
of Mr Pinch’s shoulders, and holding him out at arm’s length. ‘Let me
look at you! Just the same! Not a bit changed!’

‘Why, it’s not so very long ago, you know,’ said Tom Pinch, ‘after all.’

‘It seems an age to me,’ cried John, ‘and so it ought to seem to you,
you dog.’ And then he pushed Tom down into the easiest chair, and
clapped him on the back so heartily, and so like his old self in their
old bedroom at old Pecksniff’s that it was a toss-up with Tom Pinch
whether he should laugh or cry. Laughter won it; and they all three
laughed together.

‘I have ordered everything for dinner, that we used to say we’d have,
Tom,’ observed John Westlock.

‘No!’ said Tom Pinch. ‘Have you?’

‘Everything. Don’t laugh, if you can help it, before the waiters. I
couldn’t when I was ordering it. It’s like a dream.’

John was wrong there, because nobody ever dreamed such soup as was put
upon the table directly afterwards; or such fish; or such side-dishes;
or such a top and bottom; or such a course of birds and sweets; or
in short anything approaching the reality of that entertainment at
ten-and-sixpence a head, exclusive of wines. As to THEM, the man who can
dream such iced champagne, such claret, port, or sherry, had better go
to bed and stop there.

But perhaps the finest feature of the banquet was, that nobody was half
so much amazed by everything as John himself, who in his high delight
was constantly bursting into fits of laughter, and then endeavouring
to appear preternaturally solemn, lest the waiters should conceive he
wasn’t used to it. Some of the things they brought him to carve, were
such outrageous practical jokes, though, that it was impossible to stand
it; and when Tom Pinch insisted, in spite of the deferential advice of
an attendant, not only on breaking down the outer wall of a raised pie
with a tablespoon, but on trying to eat it afterwards, John lost all
dignity, and sat behind the gorgeous dish-cover at the head of the
table, roaring to that extent that he was audible in the kitchen. Nor
had he the least objection to laugh at himself, as he demonstrated when
they had all three gathered round the fire and the dessert was on
the table; at which period the head waiter inquired with respectful
solicitude whether that port, being a light and tawny wine, was suited
to his taste, or whether he would wish to try a fruity port with greater
body. To this John gravely answered that he was well satisfied with what
he had, which he esteemed, as one might say, a pretty tidy vintage;
for which the waiter thanked him and withdrew. And then John told his
friends, with a broad grin, that he supposed it was all right, but he
didn’t know; and went off into a perfect shout.

They were very merry and full of enjoyment the whole time, but not the
least pleasant part of the festival was when they all three sat about
the fire, cracking nuts, drinking wine and talking cheerfully. It
happened that Tom Pinch had a word to say to his friend the organist’s
assistant, and so deserted his warm corner for a few minutes at this
season, lest it should grow too late; leaving the other two young men
together.

They drank his health in his absence, of course; and John Westlock took
that opportunity of saying, that he had never had even a peevish word
with Tom during the whole term of their residence in Mr Pecksniff’s
house. This naturally led him to dwell upon Tom’s character, and to hint
that Mr Pecksniff understood it pretty well. He only hinted this, and
very distantly; knowing that it pained Tom Pinch to have that gentleman
disparaged, and thinking it would be as well to leave the new pupil to
his own discoveries.

‘Yes,’ said Martin. ‘It’s impossible to like Pinch better than I do,
or to do greater justice to his good qualities. He is the most willing
fellow I ever saw.’

‘He’s rather too willing,’ observed John, who was quick in observation.
‘It’s quite a fault in him.’

‘So it is,’ said Martin. ‘Very true. There was a fellow only a week or
so ago--a Mr Tigg--who borrowed all the money he had, on a promise to
repay it in a few days. It was but half a sovereign, to be sure; but
it’s well it was no more, for he’ll never see it again.’

‘Poor fellow!’ said John, who had been very attentive to these few
words. ‘Perhaps you have not had an opportunity of observing that, in
his own pecuniary transactions, Tom’s proud.’

‘You don’t say so! No, I haven’t. What do you mean? Won’t he borrow?’

John Westlock shook his head.

‘That’s very odd,’ said Martin, setting down his empty glass. ‘He’s a
strange compound, to be sure.’

‘As to receiving money as a gift,’ resumed John Westlock; ‘I think he’d
die first.’

‘He’s made up of simplicity,’ said Martin. ‘Help yourself.’

‘You, however,’ pursued John, filling his own glass, and looking at his
companion with some curiosity, ‘who are older than the majority of Mr
Pecksniff’s assistants, and have evidently had much more experience,
understand him, I have no doubt, and see how liable he is to be imposed
upon.’

‘Certainly,’ said Martin, stretching out his legs, and holding his wine
between his eye and the light. ‘Mr Pecksniff knows that too. So do his
daughters. Eh?’

John Westlock smiled, but made no answer.

‘By the bye,’ said Martin, ‘that reminds me. What’s your opinion of
Pecksniff? How did he use you? What do you think of him now?--Coolly,
you know, when it’s all over?’

‘Ask Pinch,’ returned the old pupil. ‘He knows what my sentiments used
to be upon the subject. They are not changed, I assure you.’

‘No, no,’ said Martin, ‘I’d rather have them from you.’

‘But Pinch says they are unjust,’ urged John with a smile.

‘Oh! well! Then I know what course they take beforehand,’ said Martin;
‘and, therefore, you can have no delicacy in speaking plainly. Don’t
mind me, I beg. I don’t like him I tell you frankly. I am with him
because it happens from particular circumstances to suit my convenience.
I have some ability, I believe, in that way; and the obligation, if any,
will most likely be on his side and not mine. At the lowest mark, the
balance will be even, and there’ll be no obligation at all. So you may
talk to me, as if I had no connection with him.’

‘If you press me to give my opinion--’ returned John Westlock.

‘Yes, I do,’ said Martin. ‘You’ll oblige me.’

‘--I should say,’ resumed the other, ‘that he is the most consummate
scoundrel on the face of the earth.’

‘Oh!’ said Martin, as coolly as ever. ‘That’s rather strong.’

‘Not stronger than he deserves,’ said John; ‘and if he called upon me
to express my opinion of him to his face, I would do so in the very same
terms, without the least qualification. His treatment of Pinch is in
itself enough to justify them; but when I look back upon the five years
I passed in that house, and remember the hyprocrisy, the knavery, the
meannesses, the false pretences, the lip service of that fellow, and
his trading in saintly semblances for the very worst realities; when
I remember how often I was the witness of all this and how often I was
made a kind of party to it, by the fact of being there, with him for my
teacher; I swear to you that I almost despise myself.’

Martin drained his glass, and looked at the fire.

‘I don’t mean to say that is a right feeling,’ pursued John Westlock
‘because it was no fault of mine; and I can quite understand--you for
instance, fully appreciating him, and yet being forced by circumstances
to remain there. I tell you simply what my feeling is; and even now,
when, as you say, it’s all over; and when I have the satisfaction of
knowing that he always hated me, and we always quarrelled, and I always
told him my mind; even now, I feel sorry that I didn’t yield to an
impulse I often had, as a boy, of running away from him and going
abroad.’

‘Why abroad?’ asked Martin, turning his eyes upon the speaker.

‘In search,’ replied John Westlock, shrugging his shoulders, ‘of
the livelihood I couldn’t have earned at home. There would have been
something spirited in that. But, come! Fill your glass, and let us
forget him.’

‘As soon as you please,’ said Martin. ‘In reference to myself and my
connection with him, I have only to repeat what I said before. I have
taken my own way with him so far, and shall continue to do so, even more
than ever; for the fact is, to tell you the truth, that I believe he
looks to me to supply his defects, and couldn’t afford to lose me. I had
a notion of that in first going there. Your health!’

‘Thank you,’ returned young Westlock. ‘Yours. And may the new pupil turn
out as well as you can desire!’

‘What new pupil?’

‘The fortunate youth, born under an auspicious star,’ returned John
Westlock, laughing; ‘whose parents, or guardians, are destined to be
hooked by the advertisement. What! Don’t you know that he has advertised
again?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, yes. I read it just before dinner in the old newspaper. I know it
to be his; having some reason to remember the style. Hush! Here’s Pinch.
Strange, is it not, that the more he likes Pecksniff (if he can like him
better than he does), the greater reason one has to like HIM? Not a word
more, or we shall spoil his whole enjoyment.’

Tom entered as the words were spoken, with a radiant smile upon his
face; and rubbing his hands, more from a sense of delight than because
he was cold (for he had been running fast), sat down in his warm corner
again, and was as happy as only Tom Pinch could be. There is no other
simile that will express his state of mind.

‘And so,’ he said, when he had gazed at his friend for some time in
silent pleasure, ‘so you really are a gentleman at last, John. Well, to
be sure!’

‘Trying to be, Tom; trying to be,’ he rejoined good-humouredly. ‘There
is no saying what I may turn out, in time.’

‘I suppose you wouldn’t carry your own box to the mail now?’ said Tom
Pinch, smiling; ‘although you lost it altogether by not taking it.’

‘Wouldn’t I?’ retorted John. ‘That’s all you know about it, Pinch.
It must be a very heavy box that I wouldn’t carry to get away from
Pecksniff’s, Tom.’

‘There!’ cried Pinch, turning to Martin, ‘I told you so. The great fault
in his character is his injustice to Pecksniff. You mustn’t mind a word
he says on that subject. His prejudice is most extraordinary.’

‘The absence of anything like prejudice on Tom’s part, you know,’ said
John Westlock, laughing heartily, as he laid his hand on Mr Pinch’s
shoulder, ‘is perfectly wonderful. If one man ever had a profound
knowledge of another, and saw him in a true light, and in his own proper
colours, Tom has that knowledge of Mr Pecksniff.’

‘Why, of course I have,’ cried Tom. ‘That’s exactly what I have so often
said to you. If you knew him as well as I do--John, I’d give almost any
money to bring that about--you’d admire, respect, and reverence him. You
couldn’t help it. Oh, how you wounded his feelings when you went away!’

‘If I had known whereabout his feelings lay,’ retorted young Westlock,
‘I’d have done my best, Tom, with that end in view, you may depend upon
it. But as I couldn’t wound him in what he has not, and in what he knows
nothing of, except in his ability to probe them to the quick in other
people, I am afraid I can lay no claim to your compliment.’

Mr Pinch, being unwilling to protract a discussion which might possibly
corrupt Martin, forbore to say anything in reply to this speech; but
John Westlock, whom nothing short of an iron gag would have
silenced when Mr Pecksniff’s merits were once in question, continued
notwithstanding.

‘HIS feelings! Oh, he’s a tender-hearted man. HIS feelings! Oh, he’s a
considerate, conscientious, self-examining, moral vagabond, he is! HIS
feelings! Oh!--what’s the matter, Tom?’

Mr Pinch was by this time erect upon the hearth-rug, buttoning his coat
with great energy.

‘I can’t bear it,’ said Tom, shaking his head. ‘No. I really cannot. You
must excuse me, John. I have a great esteem and friendship for you;
I love you very much; and have been perfectly charmed and overjoyed
to-day, to find you just the same as ever; but I cannot listen to this.’

‘Why, it’s my old way, Tom; and you say yourself that you are glad to
find me unchanged.’

‘Not in this respect,’ said Tom Pinch. ‘You must excuse me, John. I
cannot, really; I will not. It’s very wrong; you should be more guarded
in your expressions. It was bad enough when you and I used to be alone
together, but under existing circumstances, I can’t endure it, really.
No. I cannot, indeed.’

‘You are quite right!’ exclaimed the other, exchanging looks with
Martin. ‘and I am quite wrong, Tom, I don’t know how the deuce we fell
on this unlucky theme. I beg your pardon with all my heart.’

‘You have a free and manly temper, I know,’ said Pinch; ‘and therefore,
your being so ungenerous in this one solitary instance, only grieves
me the more. It’s not my pardon you have to ask, John. You have done ME
nothing but kindnesses.’

‘Well! Pecksniff’s pardon then,’ said young Westlock. ‘Anything Tom,
or anybody. Pecksniff’s pardon--will that do? Here! let us drink
Pecksniff’s health!’

‘Thank you,’ cried Tom, shaking hands with him eagerly, and filling
a bumper. ‘Thank you; I’ll drink it with all my heart, John. Mr
Pecksniff’s health, and prosperity to him!’

John Westlock echoed the sentiment, or nearly so; for he drank Mr
Pecksniff’s health, and Something to him--but what, was not quite
audible. The general unanimity being then completely restored, they drew
their chairs closer round the fire, and conversed in perfect harmony and
enjoyment until bed-time.

No slight circumstance, perhaps, could have better illustrated the
difference of character between John Westlock and Martin Chuzzlewit,
than the manner in which each of the young men contemplated Tom Pinch,
after the little rupture just described. There was a certain amount of
jocularity in the looks of both, no doubt, but there all resemblance
ceased. The old pupil could not do enough to show Tom how cordially he
felt towards him, and his friendly regard seemed of a graver and more
thoughtful kind than before. The new one, on the other hand, had no
impulse but to laugh at the recollection of Tom’s extreme absurdity;
and mingled with his amusement there was something slighting and
contemptuous, indicative, as it appeared, of his opinion that Mr Pinch
was much too far gone in simplicity to be admitted as the friend, on
serious and equal terms, of any rational man.

John Westlock, who did nothing by halves, if he could help it, had
provided beds for his two guests in the hotel; and after a very happy
evening, they retired. Mr Pinch was sitting on the side of his bed with
his cravat and shoes off, ruminating on the manifold good qualities of
his old friend, when he was interrupted by a knock at his chamber door,
and the voice of John himself.

‘You’re not asleep yet, are you, Tom?’

‘Bless you, no! not I. I was thinking of you,’ replied Tom, opening the
door. ‘Come in.’

‘I am not going to detail you,’ said John; ‘but I have forgotten all the
evening a little commission I took upon myself; and I am afraid I may
forget it again, if I fail to discharge it at once. You know a Mr Tigg,
Tom, I believe?’

‘Tigg!’ cried Tom. ‘Tigg! The gentleman who borrowed some money of me?’

‘Exactly,’ said John Westlock. ‘He begged me to present his compliments,
and to return it with many thanks. Here it is. I suppose it’s a good
one, but he is rather a doubtful kind of customer, Tom.’

Mr Pinch received the little piece of gold with a face whose brightness
might have shamed the metal; and said he had no fear about that. He
was glad, he added, to find Mr Tigg so prompt and honourable in his
dealings; very glad.

‘Why, to tell you the truth, Tom,’ replied his friend, ‘he is not always
so. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll avoid him as much as you can, in
the event of your encountering him again. And by no means, Tom--pray
bear this in mind, for I am very serious--by no means lend him money any
more.’

‘Aye, aye!’ said Tom, with his eyes wide open.

‘He is very far from being a reputable acquaintance,’ returned young
Westlock; ‘and the more you let him know you think so, the better for
you, Tom.’

‘I say, John,’ quoth Mr Pinch, as his countenance fell, and he shook
his head in a dejected manner. ‘I hope you are not getting into bad
company.’

‘No, no,’ he replied laughing. ‘Don’t be uneasy on that score.’

‘Oh, but I AM uneasy,’ said Tom Pinch; ‘I can’t help it, when I hear you
talking in that way. If Mr Tigg is what you describe him to be, you have
no business to know him, John. You may laugh, but I don’t consider it by
any means a laughing matter, I assure you.’

‘No, no,’ returned his friend, composing his features. ‘Quite right. It
is not, certainly.’

‘You know, John,’ said Mr Pinch, ‘your very good nature and kindness of
heart make you thoughtless, and you can’t be too careful on such a
point as this. Upon my word, if I thought you were falling among bad
companions, I should be quite wretched, for I know how difficult you
would find it to shake them off. I would much rather have lost this
money, John, than I would have had it back again on such terms.’

‘I tell you, my dear good old fellow,’ cried his friend, shaking him
to and fro with both hands, and smiling at him with a cheerful, open
countenance, that would have carried conviction to a mind much more
suspicious than Tom’s; ‘I tell you there is no danger.’

‘Well!’ cried Tom, ‘I am glad to hear it; I am overjoyed to hear it. I
am sure there is not, when you say so in that manner. You won’t take it
ill, John, that I said what I did just now!’

‘Ill!’ said the other, giving his hand a hearty squeeze; ‘why what
do you think I am made of? Mr Tigg and I are not on such an intimate
footing that you need be at all uneasy, I give you my solemn assurance
of that, Tom. You are quite comfortable now?’

‘Quite,’ said Tom.

‘Then once more, good night!’

‘Good night!’ cried Tom; ‘and such pleasant dreams to you as should
attend the sleep of the best fellow in the world!’

‘--Except Pecksniff,’ said his friend, stopping at the door for a
moment, and looking gayly back.

‘Except Pecksniff,’ answered Tom, with great gravity; ‘of course.’

And thus they parted for the night; John Westlock full of
light-heartedness and good humour, and poor Tom Pinch quite satisfied;
though still, as he turned over on his side in bed, he muttered to
himself, ‘I really do wish, for all that, though, that he wasn’t
acquainted with Mr Tigg.’

They breakfasted together very early next morning, for the two young
men desired to get back again in good season; and John Westlock was to
return to London by the coach that day. As he had some hours to spare,
he bore them company for three or four miles on their walk, and
only parted from them at last in sheer necessity. The parting was an
unusually hearty one, not only as between him and Tom Pinch, but on the
side of Martin also, who had found in the old pupil a very different
sort of person from the milksop he had prepared himself to expect.

Young Westlock stopped upon a rising ground, when he had gone a little
distance, and looked back. They were walking at a brisk pace, and Tom
appeared to be talking earnestly. Martin had taken off his greatcoat,
the wind being now behind them, and carried it upon his arm. As he
looked, he saw Tom relieve him of it, after a faint resistance, and,
throwing it upon his own, encumber himself with the weight of both. This
trivial incident impressed the old pupil mightily, for he stood there,
gazing after them, until they were hidden from his view; when he
shook his head, as if he were troubled by some uneasy reflection, and
thoughtfully retraced his steps to Salisbury.

In the meantime, Martin and Tom pursued their way, until they halted,
safe and sound, at Mr Pecksniff’s house, where a brief epistle from that
good gentleman to Mr Pinch announced the family’s return by that night’s
coach. As it would pass the corner of the lane at about six o’clock in
the morning, Mr Pecksniff requested that the gig might be in waiting at
the finger-post about that time, together with a cart for the luggage.
And to the end that he might be received with the greater honour, the
young men agreed to rise early, and be upon the spot themselves.

It was the least cheerful day they had yet passed together. Martin
was out of spirits and out of humour, and took every opportunity of
comparing his condition and prospects with those of young Westlock;
much to his own disadvantage always. This mood of his depressed Tom; and
neither that morning’s parting, nor yesterday’s dinner, helped to mend
the matter. So the hours dragged on heavily enough; and they were glad
to go to bed early.

They were not quite so glad to get up again at half-past four o’clock,
in all the shivering discomfort of a dark winter’s morning; but they
turned out punctually, and were at the finger-post full half-an-hour
before the appointed time. It was not by any means a lively morning, for
the sky was black and cloudy, and it rained hard; but Martin said there
was some satisfaction in seeing that brute of a horse (by this, he meant
Mr Pecksniff’s Arab steed) getting very wet; and that he rejoiced, on
his account, that it rained so fast. From this it may be inferred that
Martin’s spirits had not improved, as indeed they had not; for while he
and Mr Pinch stood waiting under a hedge, looking at the rain, the gig,
the cart, and its reeking driver, he did nothing but grumble; and, but
that it is indispensable to any dispute that there should be two parties
to it, he would certainly have picked a quarrel with Tom.

At length the noise of wheels was faintly audible in the distance and
presently the coach came splashing through the mud and mire with one
miserable outside passenger crouching down among wet straw, under a
saturated umbrella; and the coachman, guard, and horses, in a fellowship
of dripping wretchedness. Immediately on its stopping, Mr Pecksniff let
down the window-glass and hailed Tom Pinch.

‘Dear me, Mr Pinch! Is it possible that you are out upon this very
inclement morning?’

‘Yes, sir,’ cried Tom, advancing eagerly, ‘Mr Chuzzlewit and I, sir.’

‘Oh!’ said Mr Pecksniff, looking not so much at Martin as at the spot on
which he stood. ‘Oh! Indeed. Do me the favour to see to the trunks, if
you please, Mr Pinch.’

Then Mr Pecksniff descended, and helped his daughters to alight; but
neither he nor the young ladies took the slightest notice of Martin,
who had advanced to offer his assistance, but was repulsed by Mr
Pecksniff’s standing immediately before his person, with his back
towards him. In the same manner, and in profound silence, Mr Pecksniff
handed his daughters into the gig; and following himself and taking the
reins, drove off home.

Lost in astonishment, Martin stood staring at the coach, and when the
coach had driven away, at Mr Pinch, and the luggage, until the cart
moved off too; when he said to Tom:

‘Now will you have the goodness to tell me what THIS portends?’

‘What?’ asked Tom.

‘This fellow’s behaviour. Mr Pecksniff’s, I mean. You saw it?’

‘No. Indeed I did not,’ cried Tom. ‘I was busy with the trunks.’

‘It is no matter,’ said Martin. ‘Come! Let us make haste back!’ And
without another word started off at such a pace, that Tom had some
difficulty in keeping up with him.

He had no care where he went, but walked through little heaps of mud
and little pools of water with the utmost indifference; looking straight
before him, and sometimes laughing in a strange manner within himself.
Tom felt that anything he could say would only render him the more
obstinate, and therefore trusted to Mr Pecksniff’s manner when they
reached the house, to remove the mistaken impression under which he felt
convinced so great a favourite as the new pupil must unquestionably be
labouring. But he was not a little amazed himself, when they did reach
it, and entered the parlour where Mr Pecksniff was sitting alone
before the fire, drinking some hot tea, to find that instead of taking
favourable notice of his relative and keeping him, Mr Pinch, in the
background, he did exactly the reverse, and was so lavish in his
attentions to Tom, that Tom was thoroughly confounded.

‘Take some tea, Mr Pinch--take some tea,’ said Pecksniff, stirring the
fire. ‘You must be very cold and damp. Pray take some tea, and come into
a warm place, Mr Pinch.’

Tom saw that Martin looked at Mr Pecksniff as though he could have
easily found it in his heart to give HIM an invitation to a very warm
place; but he was quite silent, and standing opposite that gentleman at
the table, regarded him attentively.

‘Take a chair, Pinch,’ said Pecksniff. ‘Take a chair, if you please. How
have things gone on in our absence, Mr Pinch?’

‘You--you will be very much pleased with the grammar-school, sir,’ said
Tom. ‘It’s nearly finished.’

‘If you will have the goodness, Mr Pinch,’ said Pecksniff, waving his
hand and smiling, ‘we will not discuss anything connected with that
question at present. What have YOU been doing, Thomas, humph?’

Mr Pinch looked from master to pupil, and from pupil to master, and was
so perplexed and dismayed that he wanted presence of mind to answer
the question. In this awkward interval, Mr Pecksniff (who was perfectly
conscious of Martin’s gaze, though he had never once glanced towards
him) poked the fire very much, and when he couldn’t do that any more,
drank tea assiduously.

‘Now, Mr Pecksniff,’ said Martin at last, in a very quiet voice, ‘if you
have sufficiently refreshed and recovered yourself, I shall be glad to
hear what you mean by this treatment of me.’

‘And what,’ said Mr Pecksniff, turning his eyes on Tom Pinch, even more
placidly and gently than before, ‘what have YOU been doing, Thomas,
humph?’

When he had repeated this inquiry, he looked round the walls of the room
as if he were curious to see whether any nails had been left there by
accident in former times.

Tom was almost at his wit’s end what to say between the two, and had
already made a gesture as if he would call Mr Pecksniff’s attention to
the gentleman who had last addressed him, when Martin saved him further
trouble, by doing so himself.

‘Mr Pecksniff,’ he said, softly rapping the table twice or thrice, and
moving a step or two nearer, so that he could have touched him with his
hand; ‘you heard what I said just now. Do me the favour to reply, if you
please. I ask you’--he raised his voice a little here--‘what you mean by
this?’

‘I will talk to you, sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff in a severe voice, as he
looked at him for the first time, ‘presently.’

‘You are very obliging,’ returned Martin; ‘presently will not do. I must
trouble you to talk to me at once.’

Mr Pecksniff made a feint of being deeply interested in his pocketbook,
but it shook in his hands; he trembled so.

‘Now,’ retorted Martin, rapping the table again. ‘Now. Presently will
not do. Now!’

‘Do you threaten me, sir?’ cried Mr Pecksniff.

Martin looked at him, and made no answer; but a curious observer
might have detected an ominous twitching at his mouth, and perhaps
an involuntary attraction of his right hand in the direction of Mr
Pecksniff’s cravat.

‘I lament to be obliged to say, sir,’ resumed Mr Pecksniff, ‘that it
would be quite in keeping with your character if you did threaten me.
You have deceived me. You have imposed upon a nature which you knew to
be confiding and unsuspicious. You have obtained admission, sir,’ said
Mr Pecksniff, rising, ‘to this house, on perverted statements and on
false pretences.’

‘Go on,’ said Martin, with a scornful smile. ‘I understand you now. What
more?’

‘Thus much more, sir,’ cried Mr Pecksniff, trembling from head to foot,
and trying to rub his hands, as though he were only cold. ‘Thus much
more, if you force me to publish your shame before a third party, which
I was unwilling and indisposed to do. This lowly roof, sir, must not
be contaminated by the presence of one who has deceived, and cruelly
deceived, an honourable, beloved, venerated, and venerable gentleman;
and who wisely suppressed that deceit from me when he sought my
protection and favour, knowing that, humble as I am, I am an honest
man, seeking to do my duty in this carnal universe, and setting my face
against all vice and treachery. I weep for your depravity, sir,’ said
Mr Pecksniff; ‘I mourn over your corruption, I pity your voluntary
withdrawal of yourself from the flowery paths of purity and peace;’ here
he struck himself upon his breast, or moral garden; ‘but I cannot have
a leper and a serpent for an inmate. Go forth,’ said Mr Pecksniff,
stretching out his hand: ‘go forth, young man! Like all who know you, I
renounce you!’

With what intention Martin made a stride forward at these words, it is
impossible to say. It is enough to know that Tom Pinch caught him in
his arms, and that, at the same moment, Mr Pecksniff stepped back so
hastily, that he missed his footing, tumbled over a chair, and fell in
a sitting posture on the ground; where he remained without an effort
to get up again, with his head in a corner, perhaps considering it the
safest place.

‘Let me go, Pinch!’ cried Martin, shaking him away. ‘Why do you hold me?
Do you think a blow could make him a more abject creature than he is? Do
you think that if I spat upon him, I could degrade him to a lower level
than his own? Look at him. Look at him, Pinch!’

Mr Pinch involuntarily did so. Mr Pecksniff sitting, as has been
already mentioned, on the carpet, with his head in an acute angle of the
wainscot, and all the damage and detriment of an uncomfortable journey
about him, was not exactly a model of all that is prepossessing and
dignified in man, certainly. Still he WAS Pecksniff; it was impossible
to deprive him of that unique and paramount appeal to Tom. And he
returned Tom’s glance, as if he would have said, ‘Aye, Mr Pinch, look at
me! Here I am! You know what the Poet says about an honest man; and an
honest man is one of the few great works that can be seen for nothing!
Look at me!’

‘I tell you,’ said Martin, ‘that as he lies there, disgraced, bought,
used; a cloth for dirty hands, a mat for dirty feet, a lying, fawning,
servile hound, he is the very last and worst among the vermin of the
world. And mark me, Pinch! The day will come--he knows it; see it
written on his face, while I speak!--when even you will find him out,
and will know him as I do, and as he knows I do. HE renounce ME!
Cast your eyes on the Renouncer, Pinch, and be the wiser for the
recollection!’

He pointed at him as he spoke, with unutterable contempt, and flinging
his hat upon his head, walked from the room and from the house. He went
so rapidly that he was already clear of the village, when he heard Tom
Pinch calling breathlessly after him in the distance.

‘Well! what now?’ he said, when Tom came up.

‘Dear, dear!’ cried Tom, ‘are you going?’

‘Going!’ he echoed. ‘Going!’

‘I didn’t so much mean that, as were you going now at once--in this bad
weather--on foot--without your clothes--with no money?’ cried Tom.

‘Yes,’ he answered sternly, ‘I am.’

‘And where?’ cried Tom. ‘Oh where will you go?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Yes, I do. I’ll go to America!’

‘No, no,’ cried Tom, in a kind of agony. ‘Don’t go there. Pray don’t.
Think better of it. Don’t be so dreadfully regardless of yourself. Don’t
go to America!’

‘My mind is made up,’ he said. ‘Your friend was right. I’ll go to
America. God bless you, Pinch!’

‘Take this!’ cried Tom, pressing a book upon him in great agitation.
‘I must make haste back, and can’t say anything I would. Heaven be with
you. Look at the leaf I have turned down. Good-bye, good-bye!’

The simple fellow wrung him by the hand, with tears stealing down his
cheeks; and they parted hurriedly upon their separate ways.



CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SHOWING WHAT BECAME OF MARTIN AND HIS DESPARATE RESOLVE, AFTER HE LEFT
MR PECKSNIFF’S HOUSE; WHAT PERSONS HE ENCOUNTERED; WHAT ANXIETIES HE
SUFFERED; AND WHAT NEWS HE HEARD


Carrying Tom Pinch’s book quite unconsciously under his arm, and not
even buttoning his coat as a protection against the heavy rain, Martin
went doggedly forward at the same quick pace, until he had passed the
finger-post, and was on the high road to London. He slackened very
little in his speed even then, but he began to think, and look about
him, and to disengage his senses from the coil of angry passions which
hitherto had held them prisoner.

It must be confessed that, at that moment, he had no very agreeable
employment either for his moral or his physical perceptions. The day was
dawning from a patch of watery light in the east, and sullen clouds
came driving up before it, from which the rain descended in a thick, wet
mist. It streamed from every twig and bramble in the hedge; made little
gullies in the path; ran down a hundred channels in the road; and
punched innumerable holes into the face of every pond and gutter. It
fell with an oozy, slushy sound among the grass; and made a muddy kennel
of every furrow in the ploughed fields. No living creature was anywhere
to be seen. The prospect could hardly have been more desolate if
animated nature had been dissolved in water, and poured down upon the
earth again in that form.

The range of view within the solitary traveller was quite as cheerless
as the scene without. Friendless and penniless; incensed to the last
degree; deeply wounded in his pride and self-love; full of independent
schemes, and perfectly destitute of any means of realizing them; his
most vindictive enemy might have been satisfied with the extent of his
troubles. To add to his other miseries, he was by this time sensible of
being wet to the skin, and cold at his very heart.

In this deplorable condition he remembered Mr Pinch’s book; more
because it was rather troublesome to carry, than from any hope of being
comforted by that parting gift. He looked at the dingy lettering on the
back, and finding it to be an odd volume of the ‘Bachelor of Salamanca,’
in the French tongue, cursed Tom Pinch’s folly twenty times. He was on
the point of throwing it away, in his ill-humour and vexation, when he
bethought himself that Tom had referred him to a leaf, turned down;
and opening it at that place, that he might have additional cause
of complaint against him for supposing that any cold scrap of the
Bachelor’s wisdom could cheer him in such circumstances, found!--

Well, well! not much, but Tom’s all. The half-sovereign. He had wrapped
it hastily in a piece of paper, and pinned it to the leaf. These words
were scrawled in pencil on the inside: ‘I don’t want it indeed. I should
not know what to do with it if I had it.’

There are some falsehoods, Tom, on which men mount, as on bright wings,
towards Heaven. There are some truths, cold bitter taunting truths,
wherein your worldly scholars are very apt and punctual, which bind men
down to earth with leaden chains. Who would not rather have to fan him,
in his dying hour, the lightest feather of a falsehood such as thine,
than all the quills that have been plucked from the sharp porcupine,
reproachful truth, since time began!

Martin felt keenly for himself, and he felt this good deed of Tom’s
keenly. After a few minutes it had the effect of raising his spirits,
and reminding him that he was not altogether destitute, as he had left
a fair stock of clothes behind him, and wore a gold hunting-watch in
his pocket. He found a curious gratification, too, in thinking what a
winning fellow he must be to have made such an impression on Tom; and in
reflecting how superior he was to Tom; and how much more likely to make
his way in the world. Animated by these thoughts, and strengthened in
his design of endeavouring to push his fortune in another country, he
resolved to get to London as a rallying-point, in the best way he could;
and to lose no time about it.

He was ten good miles from the village made illustrious by being the
abiding-place of Mr Pecksniff, when he stopped to breakfast at a little
roadside alehouse; and resting upon a high-backed settle before the
fire, pulled off his coat, and hung it before the cheerful blaze to
dry. It was a very different place from the last tavern in which he
had regaled; boasting no greater extent of accommodation than the
brick-floored kitchen yielded; but the mind so soon accommodates itself
to the necessities of the body, that this poor waggoner’s house-of-call,
which he would have despised yesterday, became now quite a choice hotel;
while his dish of eggs and bacon, and his mug of beer, were not by
any means the coarse fare he had supposed, but fully bore out the
inscription on the window-shutter, which proclaimed those viands to be
‘Good entertainment for Travellers.’

He pushed away his empty plate; and with a second mug upon the hearth
before him, looked thoughtfully at the fire until his eyes ached. Then
he looked at the highly-coloured scripture pieces on the walls, in
little black frames like common shaving-glasses, and saw how the Wise
Men (with a strong family likeness among them) worshipped in a pink
manger; and how the Prodigal Son came home in red rags to a purple
father, and already feasted his imagination on a sea-green calf. Then he
glanced through the window at the falling rain, coming down aslant upon
the sign-post over against the house, and overflowing the horse-trough;
and then he looked at the fire again, and seemed to descry a double
distant London, retreating among the fragments of the burning wood.

He had repeated this process in just the same order, many times, as
if it were a matter of necessity, when the sound of wheels called his
attention to the window out of its regular turn; and there he beheld a
kind of light van drawn by four horses, and laden, as well as he could
see (for it was covered in), with corn and straw. The driver, who
was alone, stopped at the door to water his team, and presently came
stamping and shaking the wet off his hat and coat, into the room where
Martin sat.

He was a red-faced burly young fellow; smart in his way, and with a
good-humoured countenance. As he advanced towards the fire he touched
his shining forehead with the forefinger of his stiff leather glove,
by way of salutation; and said (rather unnecessarily) that it was an
uncommon wet day.

‘Very wet,’ said Martin.

‘I don’t know as ever I see a wetter.’

‘I never felt one,’ said Martin.

The driver glanced at Martin’s soiled dress, and his damp shirt-sleeves,
and his coat hung up to dry; and said, after a pause, as he warmed his
hands:

‘You have been caught in it, sir?’

‘Yes,’ was the short reply.

‘Out riding, maybe?’ said the driver

‘I should have been, if I owned a horse; but I don’t,’ returned Martin.

‘That’s bad,’ said the driver.

‘And may be worse,’ said Martin.

Now the driver said ‘That’s bad,’ not so much because Martin didn’t own
a horse, as because he said he didn’t with all the reckless desperation
of his mood and circumstances, and so left a great deal to be inferred.
Martin put his hands in his pockets and whistled when he had retorted on
the driver; thus giving him to understand that he didn’t care a pin for
Fortune; that he was above pretending to be her favourite when he was
not; and that he snapped his fingers at her, the driver, and everybody
else.

The driver looked at him stealthily for a minute or so; and in the
pauses of his warming whistled too. At length he asked, as he pointed
his thumb towards the road.

‘Up or down?’

‘Which IS up?’ said Martin.

‘London, of course,’ said the driver.

‘Up then,’ said Martin. He tossed his head in a careless manner
afterwards, as if he would have added, ‘Now you know all about it.’
put his hands deeper into his pockets; changed his tune, and whistled a
little louder.

‘I’m going up,’ observed the driver; ‘Hounslow, ten miles this side
London.’

‘Are you?’ cried Martin, stopping short and looking at him.

The driver sprinkled the fire with his wet hat until it hissed again and
answered, ‘Aye, to be sure he was.’

‘Why, then,’ said Martin, ‘I’ll be plain with you. You may suppose from
my dress that I have money to spare. I have not. All I can afford for
coach-hire is a crown, for I have but two. If you can take me for that,
and my waistcoat, or this silk handkerchief, do. If you can’t, leave it
alone.’

‘Short and sweet,’ remarked the driver.

‘You want more?’ said Martin. ‘Then I haven’t got more, and I can’t get
it, so there’s an end of that.’ Whereupon he began to whistle again.

‘I didn’t say I wanted more, did I?’ asked the driver, with something
like indignation.

‘You didn’t say my offer was enough,’ rejoined Martin.

‘Why, how could I, when you wouldn’t let me? In regard to the waistcoat,
I wouldn’t have a man’s waistcoat, much less a gentleman’s waistcoat,
on my mind, for no consideration; but the silk handkerchief’s another
thing; and if you was satisfied when we got to Hounslow, I shouldn’t
object to that as a gift.’

‘Is it a bargain, then?’ said Martin.

‘Yes, it is,’ returned the other.

‘Then finish this beer,’ said Martin, handing him the mug, and pulling
on his coat with great alacrity; ‘and let us be off as soon as you
like.’

In two minutes more he had paid his bill, which amounted to a shilling;
was lying at full length on a truss of straw, high and dry at the top
of the van, with the tilt a little open in front for the convenience of
talking to his new friend; and was moving along in the right direction
with a most satisfactory and encouraging briskness.

The driver’s name, as he soon informed Martin, was William Simmons,
better known as Bill; and his spruce appearance was sufficiently
explained by his connection with a large stage-coaching establishment at
Hounslow, whither he was conveying his load from a farm belonging to
the concern in Wiltshire. He was frequently up and down the road on such
errands, he said, and to look after the sick and rest horses, of which
animals he had much to relate that occupied a long time in the
telling. He aspired to the dignity of the regular box, and expected
an appointment on the first vacancy. He was musical besides, and had
a little key-bugle in his pocket, on which, whenever the conversation
flagged, he played the first part of a great many tunes, and regularly
broke down in the second.

‘Ah!’ said Bill, with a sigh, as he drew the back of his hand across
his lips, and put this instrument in his pocket, after screwing off the
mouth-piece to drain it; ‘Lummy Ned of the Light Salisbury, HE was the
one for musical talents. He WAS a guard. What you may call a Guard’an
Angel, was Ned.’

‘Is he dead?’ asked Martin.

‘Dead!’ replied the other, with a contemptuous emphasis. ‘Not he. You
won’t catch Ned a-dying easy. No, no. He knows better than that.’

‘You spoke of him in the past tense,’ observed Martin, ‘so I supposed he
was no more.

‘He’s no more in England,’ said Bill, ‘if that’s what you mean. He went
to the U-nited States.’

‘Did he?’ asked Martin, with sudden interest. ‘When?’

‘Five year ago, or then about,’ said Bill. ‘He had set up in the public
line here, and couldn’t meet his engagements, so he cut off to Liverpool
one day, without saying anything about it, and went and shipped himself
for the U-nited States.’

‘Well?’ said Martin.

‘Well! as he landed there without a penny to bless himself with, of
course they wos very glad to see him in the U-nited States.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Martin, with some scorn.

‘What do I mean?’ said Bill. ‘Why, THAT. All men are alike in the
U-nited States, an’t they? It makes no odds whether a man has a thousand
pound, or nothing, there. Particular in New York, I’m told, where Ned
landed.’

‘New York, was it?’ asked Martin, thoughtfully.

‘Yes,’ said Bill. ‘New York. I know that, because he sent word home that
it brought Old York to his mind, quite vivid, in consequence of being so
exactly unlike it in every respect. I don’t understand what particular
business Ned turned his mind to, when he got there; but he wrote home
that him and his friends was always a-singing, Ale Columbia, and blowing
up the President, so I suppose it was something in the public line; or
free-and-easy way again. Anyhow, he made his fortune.’

‘No!’ cried Martin.

‘Yes, he did,’ said Bill. ‘I know that, because he lost it all the day
after, in six-and-twenty banks as broke. He settled a lot of the notes
on his father, when it was ascertained that they was really stopped and
sent ‘em over with a dutiful letter. I know that, because they was
shown down our yard for the old gentleman’s benefit, that he might treat
himself with tobacco in the workus.’

‘He was a foolish fellow not to take care of his money when he had it,’
said Martin, indignantly.

‘There you’re right,’ said Bill, ‘especially as it was all in paper, and
he might have took care of it so very easy, by folding it up in a small
parcel.’

Martin said nothing in reply, but soon afterwards fell asleep, and
remained so for an hour or more. When he awoke, finding it had ceased
to rain, he took his seat beside the driver, and asked him several
questions; as how long had the fortunate guard of the Light Salisbury
been in crossing the Atlantic; at what time of the year had he sailed;
what was the name of the ship in which he made the voyage; how much had
he paid for passage-money; did he suffer greatly from sea-sickness?
and so forth. But on these points of detail his friend was possessed
of little or no information; either answering obviously at random or
acknowledging that he had never heard, or had forgotten; nor, although
he returned to the charge very often, could he obtain any useful
intelligence on these essential particulars.

They jogged on all day, and stopped so often--now to refresh, now to
change their team of horses, now to exchange or bring away a set of
harness, now on one point of business, and now upon another, connected
with the coaching on that line of road--that it was midnight when they
reached Hounslow. A little short of the stables for which the van was
bound, Martin got down, paid his crown, and forced his silk handkerchief
upon his honest friend, notwithstanding the many protestations that he
didn’t wish to deprive him of it, with which he tried to give the lie to
his longing looks. That done, they parted company; and when the van had
driven into its own yard and the gates were closed, Martin stood in the
dark street, with a pretty strong sense of being shut out, alone, upon
the dreary world, without the key of it.

But in this moment of despondency, and often afterwards, the
recollection of Mr Pecksniff operated as a cordial to him; awakening
in his breast an indignation that was very wholesome in nerving him to
obstinate endurance. Under the influence of this fiery dram he started
off for London without more ado. Arriving there in the middle of the
night, and not knowing where to find a tavern open, he was fain to
stroll about the streets and market-places until morning.

He found himself, about an hour before dawn, in the humbler regions
of the Adelphi; and addressing himself to a man in a fur-cap, who was
taking down the shutters of an obscure public-house, informed him
that he was a stranger, and inquired if he could have a bed there. It
happened by good luck that he could. Though none of the gaudiest, it was
tolerably clean, and Martin felt very glad and grateful when he crept
into it, for warmth, rest, and forgetfulness.

It was quite late in the afternoon when he awoke; and by the time he had
washed and dressed, and broken his fast, it was growing dusk again. This
was all the better, for it was now a matter of absolute necessity that
he should part with his watch to some obliging pawn-broker. He would
have waited until after dark for this purpose, though it had been the
longest day in the year, and he had begun it without a breakfast.

He passed more Golden Balls than all the jugglers in Europe have juggled
with, in the course of their united performances, before he could
determine in favour of any particular shop where those symbols were
displayed. In the end he came back to one of the first he had seen,
and entering by a side-door in a court, where the three balls, with the
legend ‘Money Lent,’ were repeated in a ghastly transparency, passed
into one of a series of little closets, or private boxes, erected for
the accommodation of the more bashful and uninitiated customers. He
bolted himself in; pulled out his watch; and laid it on the counter.

‘Upon my life and soul!’ said a low voice in the next box to the shopman
who was in treaty with him, ‘you must make it more; you must make it a
trifle more, you must indeed! You must dispense with one half-quarter
of an ounce in weighing out your pound of flesh, my best of friends, and
make it two-and-six.’

Martin drew back involuntarily, for he knew the voice at once.

‘You’re always full of your chaff,’ said the shopman, rolling up the
article (which looked like a shirt) quite as a matter of course, and
nibbing his pen upon the counter.

‘I shall never be full of my wheat,’ said Mr Tigg, ‘as long as I come
here. Ha, ha! Not bad! Make it two-and-six, my dear friend, positively
for this occasion only. Half-a-crown is a delightful coin. Two-and-six.
Going at two-and-six! For the last time at two-and-six!’

‘It’ll never be the last time till it’s quite worn out,’ rejoined the
shopman. ‘It’s grown yellow in the service as it is.’

‘Its master has grown yellow in the service, if you mean that, my
friend,’ said Mr Tigg; ‘in the patriotic service of an ungrateful
country. You are making it two-and-six, I think?’

‘I’m making it,’ returned the shopman, ‘what it always has been--two
shillings. Same name as usual, I suppose?’

‘Still the same name,’ said Mr Tigg; ‘my claim to the dormant peerage
not being yet established by the House of Lords.’

‘The old address?’

‘Not at all,’ said Mr Tigg; ‘I have removed my town establishment from
thirty-eight, Mayfair, to number fifteen-hundred-and-forty-two, Park
Lane.’

‘Come, I’m not going to put down that, you know,’ said the shopman with
a grin.

‘You may put down what you please, my friend,’ quoth Mr Tigg. ‘The fact
is still the same. The apartments for the under-butler and the fifth
footman being of a most confounded low and vulgar kind at thirty-eight,
Mayfair, I have been compelled, in my regard for the feelings which do
them so much honour, to take on lease for seven, fourteen, or twenty-one
years, renewable at the option of the tenant, the elegant and commodious
family mansion, number fifteen-hundred-and-forty-two Park Lane. Make it
two-and-six, and come and see me!’

The shopman was so highly entertained by this piece of humour that Mr
Tigg himself could not repress some little show of exultation. It vented
itself, in part, in a desire to see how the occupant of the next
box received his pleasantry; to ascertain which he glanced round the
partition, and immediately, by the gaslight, recognized Martin.

‘I wish I may die,’ said Mr Tigg, stretching out his body so far that
his head was as much in Martin’s little cell as Martin’s own head was,
‘but this is one of the most tremendous meetings in Ancient or Modern
History! How are you? What is the news from the agricultural districts?
How are our friends the P.’s? Ha, ha! David, pay particular attention to
this gentleman immediately, as a friend of mine, I beg.’

‘Here! Please to give me the most you can for this,’ said Martin,
handing the watch to the shopman. ‘I want money sorely.’

‘He wants money, sorely!’ cried Mr Tigg with excessive sympathy. ‘David,
will you have the goodness to do your very utmost for my friend, who
wants money sorely. You will deal with my friend as if he were myself.
A gold hunting-watch, David, engine-turned, capped and jewelled in
four holes, escape movement, horizontal lever, and warranted to perform
correctly, upon my personal reputation, who have observed it narrowly
for many years, under the most trying circumstances’--here he winked
at Martin, that he might understand this recommendation would have an
immense effect upon the shopman; ‘what do you say, David, to my friend?
Be very particular to deserve my custom and recommendation, David.’

‘I can lend you three pounds on this, if you like’ said the shopman to
Martin, confidentially. ‘It is very old-fashioned. I couldn’t say more.’

‘And devilish handsome, too,’ cried Mr Tigg. ‘Two-twelve-six for the
watch, and seven-and-six for personal regard. I am gratified; it may
be weakness, but I am. Three pounds will do. We take it. The name of my
friend is Smivey: Chicken Smivey, of Holborn, twenty-six-and-a-half B:
lodger.’ Here he winked at Martin again, to apprise him that all the
forms and ceremonies prescribed by law were now complied with, and
nothing remained but the receipt for the money.

In point of fact, this proved to be the case, for Martin, who had no
resource but to take what was offered him, signified his acquiescence by
a nod of his head, and presently came out with the cash in his pocket.
He was joined in the entry by Mr Tigg, who warmly congratulated him, as
he took his arm and accompanied him into the street, on the successful
issue of the negotiation.

‘As for my part in the same,’ said Mr Tigg, ‘don’t mention it. Don’t
compliment me, for I can’t bear it!’

‘I have no such intention, I assure you,’ retorted Martin, releasing his
arm and stopping.

‘You oblige me very much’ said Mr Tigg. ‘Thank you.’

‘Now, sir,’ observed Martin, biting his lip, ‘this is a large town, and
we can easily find different ways in it. If you will show me which is
your way, I will take another.’

Mr Tigg was about to speak, but Martin interposed:

‘I need scarcely tell you, after what you have just seen, that I
have nothing to bestow upon your friend Mr Slyme. And it is quite as
unnecessary for me to tell you that I don’t desire the honour of your
company.’

‘Stop’ cried Mr Tigg, holding out his hand. ‘Hold! There is a most
remarkably long-headed, flowing-bearded, and patriarchal proverb, which
observes that it is the duty of a man to be just before he is generous.
Be just now, and you can be generous presently. Do not confuse me with
the man Slyme. Do not distinguish the man Slyme as a friend of mine, for
he is no such thing. I have been compelled, sir, to abandon the party
whom you call Slyme. I have no knowledge of the party whom you call
Slyme. I am, sir,’ said Mr Tigg, striking himself upon the breast,
‘a premium tulip, of a very different growth and cultivation from the
cabbage Slyme, sir.’

‘It matters very little to me,’ said Martin coolly, ‘whether you have
set up as a vagabond on your own account, or are still trading on behalf
of Mr Slyme. I wish to hold no correspondence with you. In the devil’s
name, man’ said Martin, scarcely able, despite his vexation, to repress
a smile as Mr Tigg stood leaning his back against the shutters of a shop
window, adjusting his hair with great composure, ‘will you go one way or
other?’

‘You will allow me to remind you, sir,’ said Mr Tigg, with sudden
dignity, ‘that you--not I--that you--I say emphatically, YOU--have
reduced the proceedings of this evening to a cold and distant matter of
business, when I was disposed to place them on a friendly footing.
It being made a matter of business, sir, I beg to say that I expect
a trifle (which I shall bestow in charity) as commission upon the
pecuniary advance, in which I have rendered you my humble services.
After the terms in which you have addressed me, sir,’ concluded Mr
Tigg, ‘you will not insult me, if you please, by offering more than
half-a-crown.’

Martin drew that piece of money from his pocket, and tossed it towards
him. Mr Tigg caught it, looked at it to assure himself of its goodness,
spun it in the air after the manner of a pieman, and buttoned it up.
Finally, he raised his hat an inch or two from his head with a military
air, and, after pausing a moment with deep gravity, as to decide in
which direction he should go, and to what Earl or Marquis among his
friends he should give the preference in his next call, stuck his hands
in his skirt-pockets and swaggered round the corner. Martin took the
directly opposite course; and so, to his great content, they parted
company.

It was with a bitter sense of humiliation that he cursed, again and
again, the mischance of having encountered this man in the pawnbroker’s
shop. The only comfort he had in the recollection was, Mr Tigg’s
voluntary avowal of a separation between himself and Slyme, that would
at least prevent his circumstances (so Martin argued) from being known
to any member of his family, the bare possibility of which filled him
with shame and wounded pride. Abstractedly there was greater reason,
perhaps, for supposing any declaration of Mr Tigg’s to be false, than
for attaching the least credence to it; but remembering the terms on
which the intimacy between that gentleman and his bosom friend had
subsisted, and the strong probability of Mr Tigg’s having established
an independent business of his own on Mr Slyme’s connection, it had a
reasonable appearance of probability; at all events, Martin hoped so;
and that went a long way.

His first step, now that he had a supply of ready money for his present
necessities, was, to retain his bed at the public-house until further
notice, and to write a formal note to Tom Pinch (for he knew Pecksniff
would see it) requesting to have his clothes forwarded to London by
coach, with a direction to be left at the office until called for. These
measures taken, he passed the interval before the box arrived--three
days--in making inquiries relative to American vessels, at the offices
of various shipping-agents in the city; and in lingering about the docks
and wharves, with the faint hope of stumbling upon some engagement
for the voyage, as clerk or supercargo, or custodian of something or
somebody, which would enable him to procure a free passage. But
finding, soon, that no such means of employment were likely to present
themselves, and dreading the consequences of delay, he drew up a short
advertisement, stating what he wanted, and inserted it in the leading
newspapers. Pending the receipt of the twenty or thirty answers which
he vaguely expected, he reduced his wardrobe to the narrowest limits
consistent with decent respectability, and carried the overplus at
different times to the pawnbroker’s shop, for conversion into money.

And it was strange, very strange, even to himself, to find how, by
quick though almost imperceptible degrees, he lost his delicacy and
self-respect, and gradually came to do that as a matter of course,
without the least compunction, which but a few short days before had
galled him to the quick. The first time he visited the pawnbroker’s,
he felt on his way there as if every person whom he passed suspected
whither he was going; and on his way back again, as if the whole human
tide he stemmed, knew well where he had come from. When did he care to
think of their discernment now! In his first wanderings up and down the
weary streets, he counterfeited the walk of one who had an object in
his view; but soon there came upon him the sauntering, slipshod gait of
listless idleness, and the lounging at street-corners, and plucking and
biting of stray bits of straw, and strolling up and down the same place,
and looking into the same shop-windows, with a miserable indifference,
fifty times a day. At first, he came out from his lodging with an uneasy
sense of being observed--even by those chance passers-by, on whom he had
never looked before, and hundreds to one would never see again--issuing
in the morning from a public-house; but now, in his comings-out and
goings-in he did not mind to lounge about the door, or to stand sunning
himself in careless thought beside the wooden stem, studded from head to
heel with pegs, on which the beer-pots dangled like so many boughs upon
a pewter-tree. And yet it took but five weeks to reach the lowest round
of this tall ladder!

Oh, moralists, who treat of happiness and self-respect, innate in every
sphere of life, and shedding light on every grain of dust in God’s
highway, so smooth below your carriage-wheels, so rough beneath the
tread of naked feet, bethink yourselves in looking on the swift descent
of men who HAVE lived in their own esteem, that there are scores of
thousands breathing now, and breathing thick with painful toil, who in
that high respect have never lived at all, nor had a chance of life! Go
ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young,
and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous
forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and
honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of
deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man’s neglect, and say can any
hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul’s
bright torch as fast as it is kindled! And, oh! ye Pharisees of the
nineteen hundredth year of Christian Knowledge, who soundingly appeal
to human nature, see that it be human first. Take heed it has not been
transformed, during your slumber and the sleep of generations, into the
nature of the Beasts!

Five weeks! Of all the twenty or thirty answers, not one had come. His
money--even the additional stock he had raised from the disposal of his
spare clothes (and that was not much, for clothes, though dear to buy,
are cheap to pawn)--was fast diminishing. Yet what could he do? At times
an agony came over him in which he darted forth again, though he was
but newly home, and, returning to some place where he had been already
twenty times, made some new attempt to gain his end, but always
unsuccessfully. He was years and years too old for a cabin-boy, and
years upon years too inexperienced to be accepted as a common seaman.
His dress and manner, too, militated fatally against any such proposal
as the latter; and yet he was reduced to making it; for even if he could
have contemplated the being set down in America totally without money,
he had not enough left now for a steerage passage and the poorest
provisions upon the voyage.

It is an illustration of a very common tendency in the mind of man, that
all this time he never once doubted, one may almost say the certainty
of doing great things in the New World, if he could only get there.
In proportion as he became more and more dejected by his present
circumstances, and the means of gaining America receded from his grasp,
the more he fretted himself with the conviction that that was the only
place in which he could hope to achieve any high end, and worried his
brain with the thought that men going there in the meanwhile might
anticipate him in the attainment of those objects which were dearest to
his heart. He often thought of John Westlock, and besides looking out
for him on all occasions, actually walked about London for three days
together for the express purpose of meeting with him. But although he
failed in this; and although he would not have scrupled to borrow money
of him; and although he believed that John would have lent it; yet still
he could not bring his mind to write to Pinch and inquire where he was
to be found. For although, as we have seen, he was fond of Tom after
his own fashion, he could not endure the thought (feeling so superior to
Tom) of making him the stepping-stone to his fortune, or being anything
to him but a patron; and his pride so revolted from the idea that it
restrained him even now.

It might have yielded, however; and no doubt must have yielded soon, but
for a very strange and unlooked-for occurrence.

The five weeks had quite run out, and he was in a truly desperate
plight, when one evening, having just returned to his lodging, and
being in the act of lighting his candle at the gas jet in the bar before
stalking moodily upstairs to his own room, his landlord called him by
his name. Now as he had never told it to the man, but had scrupulously
kept it to himself, he was not a little startled by this; and so plainly
showed his agitation that the landlord, to reassure him, said ‘it was
only a letter.’

‘A letter!’ cried Martin.

‘For Mr Martin Chuzzlewit,’ said the landlord, reading the
superscription of one he held in his hand. ‘Noon. Chief office. Paid.’

Martin took it from him, thanked him, and walked upstairs. It was not
sealed, but pasted close; the handwriting was quite unknown to him.
He opened it and found enclosed, without any name, address, or other
inscription or explanation of any kind whatever, a Bank of England note
for Twenty Pounds.

To say that he was perfectly stunned with astonishment and delight; that
he looked again and again at the note and the wrapper; that he hurried
below stairs to make quite certain that the note was a good note; and
then hurried up again to satisfy himself for the fiftieth time that
he had not overlooked some scrap of writing on the wrapper; that he
exhausted and bewildered himself with conjectures; and could make
nothing of it but that there the note was, and he was suddenly enriched;
would be only to relate so many matters of course to no purpose. The
final upshot of the business at that time was, that he resolved to treat
himself to a comfortable but frugal meal in his own chamber; and having
ordered a fire to be kindled, went out to purchase it forthwith.

He bought some cold beef, and ham, and French bread, and butter, and
came back with his pockets pretty heavily laden. It was somewhat of
a damping circumstance to find the room full of smoke, which was
attributable to two causes; firstly, to the flue being naturally vicious
and a smoker; and secondly, to their having forgotten, in lighting the
fire, an odd sack or two and some trifles, which had been put up the
chimney to keep the rain out. They had already remedied this oversight,
however; and propped up the window-sash with a bundle of firewood to
keep it open; so that except in being rather inflammatory to the eyes
and choking to the lungs, the apartment was quite comfortable.

Martin was in no vein to quarrel with it, if it had been in less
tolerable order, especially when a gleaming pint of porter was set upon
the table, and the servant-girl withdrew, bearing with her particular
instructions relative to the production of something hot when he should
ring the bell. The cold meat being wrapped in a playbill, Martin laid
the cloth by spreading that document on the little round table with the
print downwards, and arranging the collation upon it. The foot of the
bed, which was very close to the fire, answered for a sideboard; and
when he had completed these preparations, he squeezed an old arm-chair
into the warmest corner, and sat down to enjoy himself.

He had begun to eat with great appetite, glancing round the room
meanwhile with a triumphant anticipation of quitting it for ever on the
morrow, when his attention was arrested by a stealthy footstep on the
stairs, and presently by a knock at his chamber door, which, although
it was a gentle knock enough, communicated such a start to the bundle of
firewood, that it instantly leaped out of window, and plunged into the
street.

‘More coals, I suppose,’ said Martin. ‘Come in!’

‘It an’t a liberty, sir, though it seems so,’ rejoined a man’s voice.
‘Your servant, sir. Hope you’re pretty well, sir.’

Martin stared at the face that was bowing in the doorway, perfectly
remembering the features and expression, but quite forgetting to whom
they belonged.

‘Tapley, sir,’ said his visitor. ‘Him as formerly lived at the Dragon,
sir, and was forced to leave in consequence of a want of jollity, sir.’

‘To be sure!’ cried Martin. ‘Why, how did you come here?’

‘Right through the passage, and up the stairs, sir,’ said Mark.

‘How did you find me out, I mean?’ asked Martin.

‘Why, sir,’ said Mark, ‘I’ve passed you once or twice in the street, if
I’m not mistaken; and when I was a-looking in at the beef-and-ham shop
just now, along with a hungry sweep, as was very much calculated to make
a man jolly, sir--I see you a-buying that.’

Martin reddened as he pointed to the table, and said, somewhat hastily:

‘Well! What then?’

‘Why, then, sir,’ said Mark, ‘I made bold to foller; and as I told ‘em
downstairs that you expected me, I was let up.’

‘Are you charged with any message, that you told them you were
expected?’ inquired Martin.

‘No, sir, I an’t,’ said Mark. ‘That was what you may call a pious fraud,
sir, that was.’

Martin cast an angry look at him; but there was something in the
fellow’s merry face, and in his manner--which with all its cheerfulness
was far from being obtrusive or familiar--that quite disarmed him.
He had lived a solitary life too, for many weeks, and the voice was
pleasant in his ear.

‘Tapley,’ he said, ‘I’ll deal openly with you. From all I can judge and
from all I have heard of you through Pinch, you are not a likely kind of
fellow to have been brought here by impertinent curiosity or any other
offensive motive. Sit down. I’m glad to see you.’

‘Thankee, sir,’ said Mark. ‘I’d as lieve stand.’

‘If you don’t sit down,’ retorted Martin, ‘I’ll not talk to you.’

‘Very good, sir,’ observed Mark. ‘Your will’s a law, sir. Down it is;’
and he sat down accordingly upon the bedstead.

‘Help yourself,’ said Martin, handing him the only knife.

‘Thankee, sir,’ rejoined Mark. ‘After you’ve done.’

‘If you don’t take it now, you’ll not have any,’ said Martin.

‘Very good, sir,’ rejoined Mark. ‘That being your desire--now it is.’
With which reply he gravely helped himself and went on eating. Martin
having done the like for a short time in silence, said abruptly:

‘What are you doing in London?’

‘Nothing at all, sir,’ rejoined Mark.

‘How’s that?’ asked Martin.

‘I want a place,’ said Mark.

‘I’m sorry for you,’ said Martin.

‘--To attend upon a single gentleman,’ resumed Mark. ‘If from the
country the more desirable. Makeshifts would be preferred. Wages no
object.’

He said this so pointedly, that Martin stopped in his eating, and said:

‘If you mean me--’

‘Yes, I do, sir,’ interposed Mark.

‘Then you may judge from my style of living here, of my means of keeping
a man-servant. Besides, I am going to America immediately.’

‘Well, sir,’ returned Mark, quite unmoved by this intelligence ‘from all
that ever I heard about it, I should say America is a very likely sort
of place for me to be jolly in!’

Again Martin looked at him angrily; and again his anger melted away in
spite of himself.

‘Lord bless you, sir,’ said Mark, ‘what is the use of us a-going round
and round, and hiding behind the corner, and dodging up and down, when
we can come straight to the point in six words? I’ve had my eye upon you
any time this fortnight. I see well enough there’s a screw loose in
your affairs. I know’d well enough the first time I see you down at the
Dragon that it must be so, sooner or later. Now, sir here am I, without
a sitiwation; without any want of wages for a year to come; for I saved
up (I didn’t mean to do it, but I couldn’t help it) at the Dragon--here
am I with a liking for what’s wentersome, and a liking for you, and
a wish to come out strong under circumstances as would keep other men
down; and will you take me, or will you leave me?’

‘How can I take you?’ cried Martin.

‘When I say take,’ rejoined Mark, ‘I mean will you let me go? and when I
say will you let me go, I mean will you let me go along with you? for go
I will, somehow or another. Now that you’ve said America, I see clear at
once, that that’s the place for me to be jolly in. Therefore, if I don’t
pay my own passage in the ship you go in, sir, I’ll pay my own passage
in another. And mark my words, if I go alone it shall be, to carry out
the principle, in the rottenest, craziest, leakingest tub of a wessel
that a place can be got in for love or money. So if I’m lost upon the
way, sir, there’ll be a drowned man at your door--and always a-knocking
double knocks at it, too, or never trust me!’

‘This is mere folly,’ said Martin.

‘Very good, sir,’ returned Mark. ‘I’m glad to hear it, because if you
don’t mean to let me go, you’ll be more comfortable, perhaps, on account
of thinking so. Therefore I contradict no gentleman. But all I say is,
that if I don’t emigrate to America in that case, in the beastliest old
cockle-shell as goes out of port, I’m--’

‘You don’t mean what you say, I’m sure,’ said Martin.

‘Yes I do,’ cried Mark.

‘I tell you I know better,’ rejoined Martin.

‘Very good, sir,’ said Mark, with the same air of perfect satisfaction.
‘Let it stand that way at present, sir, and wait and see how it turns
out. Why, love my heart alive! the only doubt I have is, whether there’s
any credit in going with a gentleman like you, that’s as certain to make
his way there as a gimlet is to go through soft deal.’

This was touching Martin on his weak point, and having him at a great
advantage. He could not help thinking, either, what a brisk fellow this
Mark was, and how great a change he had wrought in the atmosphere of the
dismal little room already.

‘Why, certainly, Mark,’ he said, ‘I have hopes of doing well there, or I
shouldn’t go. I may have the qualifications for doing well, perhaps.’

‘Of course you have, sir,’ returned Mark Tapley. ‘Everybody knows that.’

‘You see,’ said Martin, leaning his chin upon his hand, and looking at
the fire, ‘ornamental architecture applied to domestic purposes,
can hardly fail to be in great request in that country; for men are
constantly changing their residences there, and moving further off; and
it’s clear they must have houses to live in.’

‘I should say, sir,’ observed Mark, ‘that that’s a state of things as
opens one of the jolliest look-outs for domestic architecture that ever
I heerd tell on.’

Martin glanced at him hastily, not feeling quite free from a suspicion
that this remark implied a doubt of the successful issue of his plans.
But Mr Tapley was eating the boiled beef and bread with such entire good
faith and singleness of purpose expressed in his visage that he could
not but be satisfied. Another doubt arose in his mind however, as this
one disappeared. He produced the blank cover in which the note had been
enclosed, and fixing his eyes on Mark as he put it in his hands, said:

‘Now tell me the truth. Do you know anything about that?’

Mark turned it over and over; held it near his eyes; held it away from
him at arm’s length; held it with the superscription upwards and with
the superscription downwards; and shook his head with such a genuine
expression of astonishment at being asked the question, that Martin
said, as he took it from him again:

‘No, I see you don’t. How should you! Though, indeed, your knowing about
it would not be more extraordinary than its being here. Come, Tapley,’
he added, after a moment’s thought, ‘I’ll trust you with my history,
such as it is, and then you’ll see more clearly what sort of fortunes
you would link yourself to, if you followed me.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Mark; ‘but afore you enter upon it
will you take me if I choose to go? Will you turn off me--Mark
Tapley--formerly of the Blue Dragon, as can be well recommended by Mr
Pinch, and as wants a gentleman of your strength of mind to look up to;
or will you, in climbing the ladder as you’re certain to get to the
top of, take me along with you at a respectful distance? Now, sir,’
said Mark, ‘it’s of very little importance to you, I know, there’s the
difficulty; but it’s of very great importance to me, and will you be so
good as to consider of it?’

If this were meant as a second appeal to Martin’s weak side, founded on
his observation of the effect of the first, Mr Tapley was a skillful and
shrewd observer. Whether an intentional or an accidental shot, it
hit the mark fully for Martin, relenting more and more, said with a
condescension which was inexpressibly delicious to him, after his recent
humiliation:

‘We’ll see about it, Tapley. You shall tell me in what disposition you
find yourself to-morrow.’

‘Then, sir,’ said Mark, rubbing his hands, ‘the job’s done. Go on, sir,
if you please. I’m all attention.’

Throwing himself back in his arm-chair, and looking at the fire, with
now and then a glance at Mark, who at such times nodded his head sagely,
to express his profound interest and attention. Martin ran over the
chief points in his history, to the same effect as he had related them,
weeks before, to Mr Pinch. But he adapted them, according to the best of
his judgment, to Mr Tapley’s comprehension; and with that view made as
light of his love affair as he could, and referred to it in very few
words. But here he reckoned without his host; for Mark’s interest was
keenest in this part of the business, and prompted him to ask sundry
questions in relation to it; for which he apologised as one in some
measure privileged to do so, from having seen (as Martin explained to
him) the young lady at the Blue Dragon.

‘And a young lady as any gentleman ought to feel more proud of being in
love with,’ said Mark, energetically, ‘don’t draw breath.’

‘Aye! You saw her when she was not happy,’ said Martin, gazing at the
fire again. ‘If you had seen her in the old times, indeed--’

‘Why, she certainly was a little down-hearted, sir, and something paler
in her colour than I could have wished,’ said Mark, ‘but none the worse
in her looks for that. I think she seemed better, sir, after she come to
London.’

Martin withdrew his eyes from the fire; stared at Mark as if he thought
he had suddenly gone mad; and asked him what he meant.

‘No offence intended, sir,’ urged Mark. ‘I don’t mean to say she was any
the happier without you; but I thought she was a-looking better, sir.’

‘Do you mean to tell me she has been in London?’ asked Martin, rising
hurriedly, and pushing back his chair.

‘Of course I do,’ said Mark, rising too, in great amazement from the
bedstead.

‘Do you mean to tell me she is in London now?’

‘Most likely, sir. I mean to say she was a week ago.’

‘And you know where?’

‘Yes!’ cried Mark. ‘What! Don’t you?’

‘My good fellow!’ exclaimed Martin, clutching him by both arms, ‘I have
never seen her since I left my grandfather’s house.’

‘Why, then!’ cried Mark, giving the little table such a blow with his
clenched fist that the slices of beef and ham danced upon it, while all
his features seemed, with delight, to be going up into his forehead, and
never coming back again any more, ‘if I an’t your nat’ral born servant,
hired by Fate, there an’t such a thing in natur’ as a Blue Dragon. What!
when I was a-rambling up and down a old churchyard in the City, getting
myself into a jolly state, didn’t I see your grandfather a-toddling to
and fro for pretty nigh a mortal hour! Didn’t I watch him into Todgers’s
commercial boarding-house, and watch him out, and watch him home to his
hotel, and go and tell him as his was the service for my money, and I
had said so, afore I left the Dragon! Wasn’t the young lady a-sitting
with him then, and didn’t she fall a-laughing in a manner as was
beautiful to see! Didn’t your grandfather say, “Come back again next
week,” and didn’t I go next week; and didn’t he say that he couldn’t
make up his mind to trust nobody no more; and therefore wouldn’t engage
me, but at the same time stood something to drink as was handsome! Why,’
cried Mr Tapley, with a comical mixture of delight and chagrin, ‘where’s
the credit of a man’s being jolly under such circumstances! Who could
help it, when things come about like this!’

For some moments Martin stood gazing at him, as if he really doubted the
evidence of his senses, and could not believe that Mark stood there, in
the body, before him. At length he asked him whether, if the young lady
were still in London, he thought he could contrive to deliver a letter
to her secretly.

‘Do I think I can?’ cried Mark. ‘THINK I can? Here, sit down, sir. Write
it out, sir!’

With that he cleared the table by the summary process of tilting
everything upon it into the fireplace; snatched some writing materials
from the mantel-shelf; set Martin’s chair before them; forced him down
into it; dipped a pen into the ink; and put it in his hand.

‘Cut away, sir!’ cried Mark. ‘Make it strong, sir. Let it be wery
pinted, sir. Do I think so? I should think so. Go to work, sir!’

Martin required no further adjuration, but went to work at a great rate;
while Mr Tapley, installing himself without any more formalities into
the functions of his valet and general attendant, divested himself
of his coat, and went on to clear the fireplace and arrange the room;
talking to himself in a low voice the whole time.

‘Jolly sort of lodgings,’ said Mark, rubbing his nose with the knob at
the end of the fire-shovel, and looking round the poor chamber; ‘that’s
a comfort. The rain’s come through the roof too. That an’t bad. A lively
old bedstead, I’ll be bound; popilated by lots of wampires, no doubt.
Come! my spirits is a-getting up again. An uncommon ragged nightcap
this. A very good sign. We shall do yet! Here, Jane, my dear,’ calling
down the stairs, ‘bring up that there hot tumbler for my master as was
a-mixing when I come in. That’s right, sir,’ to Martin. ‘Go at it as if
you meant it, sir. Be very tender, sir, if you please. You can’t make it
too strong, sir!’



CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IN WHICH MARTIN BIDS ADIEU TO THE LADY OF HIS LOVE; AND HONOURS AN
OBSCURE INDIVIDUAL WHOSE FORTUNE HE INTENDS TO MAKE BY COMMENDING HER TO
HIS PROTECTION


The letter being duly signed, sealed, and delivered, was handed to Mark
Tapley, for immediate conveyance if possible. And he succeeded so well
in his embassy as to be enabled to return that same night, just as the
house was closing, with the welcome intelligence that he had sent it
upstairs to the young lady, enclosed in a small manuscript of his
own, purporting to contain his further petition to be engaged in Mr
Chuzzlewit’s service; and that she had herself come down and told him,
in great haste and agitation, that she would meet the gentleman at
eight o’clock to-morrow morning in St. James’s Park. It was then agreed
between the new master and the new man, that Mark should be in waiting
near the hotel in good time, to escort the young lady to the place
of appointment; and when they had parted for the night with this
understanding, Martin took up his pen again; and before he went to bed
wrote another letter, whereof more will be seen presently.

He was up before daybreak, and came upon the Park with the morning,
which was clad in the least engaging of the three hundred and sixty-five
dresses in the wardrobe of the year. It was raw, damp, dark, and dismal;
the clouds were as muddy as the ground; and the short perspective
of every street and avenue was closed up by the mist as by a filthy
curtain.

‘Fine weather indeed,’ Martin bitterly soliloquised, ‘to be wandering
up and down here in, like a thief! Fine weather indeed, for a meeting of
lovers in the open air, and in a public walk! I need be departing, with
all speed, for another country; for I have come to a pretty pass in
this!’

He might perhaps have gone on to reflect that of all mornings in the
year, it was not the best calculated for a young lady’s coming forth
on such an errand, either. But he was stopped on the road to this
reflection, if his thoughts tended that way, by her appearance at a
short distance, on which he hurried forward to meet her. Her squire,
Mr Tapley, at the same time fell discreetly back, and surveyed the fog
above him with an appearance of attentive interest.

‘My dear Martin,’ said Mary.

‘My dear Mary,’ said Martin; and lovers are such a singular kind of
people that this is all they did say just then, though Martin took her
arm, and her hand too, and they paced up and down a short walk that was
least exposed to observation, half-a-dozen times.

‘If you have changed at all, my love, since we parted,’ said Martin at
length, as he looked upon her with a proud delight, ‘it is only to be
more beautiful than ever!’

Had she been of the common metal of love-worn young ladies, she would
have denied this in her most interesting manner; and would have told him
that she knew she had become a perfect fright; or that she had wasted
away with weeping and anxiety; or that she was dwindling gently into an
early grave; or that her mental sufferings were unspeakable; or would,
either by tears or words, or a mixture of both, have furnished him with
some other information to that effect, and made him as miserable as
possible. But she had been reared up in a sterner school than the minds
of most young girls are formed in; she had had her nature strengthened
by the hands of hard endurance and necessity; had come out from her
young trials constant, self-denying, earnest, and devoted; had acquired
in her maidenhood--whether happily in the end, for herself or him, is
foreign to our present purpose to inquire--something of that nobler
quality of gentle hearts which is developed often by the sorrows and
struggles of matronly years, but often by their lessons only. Unspoiled,
unpampered in her joys or griefs; with frank and full, and deep
affection for the object of her early love; she saw in him one who for
her sake was an outcast from his home and fortune, and she had no
more idea of bestowing that love upon him in other than cheerful and
sustaining words, full of high hope and grateful trustfulness, than she
had of being unworthy of it, in her lightest thought or deed, for any
base temptation that the world could offer.

‘What change is there in YOU, Martin,’ she replied; ‘for that concerns
me nearest? You look more anxious and more thoughtful than you used.’

‘Why, as to that, my love,’ said Martin as he drew her waist within his
arm, first looking round to see that there were no observers near,
and beholding Mr Tapley more intent than ever on the fog; ‘it would be
strange if I did not; for my life--especially of late--has been a hard
one.’

‘I know it must have been,’ she answered. ‘When have I forgotten to
think of it and you?’

‘Not often, I hope,’ said Martin. ‘Not often, I am sure. Not often, I
have some right to expect, Mary; for I have undergone a great deal of
vexation and privation, and I naturally look for that return, you know.’

‘A very, very poor return,’ she answered with a fainter smile. ‘But you
have it, and will have it always. You have paid a dear price for a poor
heart, Martin; but it is at least your own, and a true one.’

‘Of course I feel quite certain of that,’ said Martin, ‘or I shouldn’t
have put myself in my present position. And don’t say a poor heart,
Mary, for I say a rich one. Now, I am about to break a design to you,
dearest, which will startle you at first, but which is undertaken for
your sake. I am going,’ he added slowly, looking far into the deep
wonder of her bright dark eyes, ‘abroad.’

‘Abroad, Martin!’

‘Only to America. See now. How you droop directly!’

‘If I do, or, I hope I may say, if I did,’ she answered, raising her
head after a short silence, and looking once more into his face, ‘it was
for grief to think of what you are resolved to undergo for me. I would
not venture to dissuade you, Martin; but it is a long, long distance;
there is a wide ocean to be crossed; illness and want are sad calamities
in any place, but in a foreign country dreadful to endure. Have you
thought of all this?’

‘Thought of it!’ cried Martin, abating, in his fondness--and he WAS very
fond of her--hardly an iota of his usual impetuosity. ‘What am I to do?
It’s very well to say, “Have I thought of it?” my love; but you should
ask me in the same breath, have I thought of starving at home; have I
thought of doing porter’s work for a living; have I thought of holding
horses in the streets to earn my roll of bread from day to day? Come,
come,’ he added, in a gentler tone, ‘do not hang down your head, my
dear, for I need the encouragement that your sweet face alone can give
me. Why, that’s well! Now you are brave again.’

‘I am endeavouring to be,’ she answered, smiling through her tears.

‘Endeavouring to be anything that’s good, and being it, is, with you,
all one. Don’t I know that of old?’ cried Martin, gayly. ‘So! That’s
famous! Now I can tell you all my plans as cheerfully as if you were my
little wife already, Mary.’

She hung more closely on his arm, and looking upwards in his face, bade
him speak on.

‘You see,’ said Martin, playing with the little hand upon his wrist,
‘that my attempts to advance myself at home have been baffled and
rendered abortive. I will not say by whom, Mary, for that would give
pain to us both. But so it is. Have you heard him speak of late of any
relative of mine or his, called Pecksniff? Only tell me what I ask you,
no more.’

‘I have heard, to my surprise, that he is a better man than was
supposed.’

‘I thought so,’ interrupted Martin.

‘And that it is likely we may come to know him, if not to visit and
reside with him and--I think--his daughters. He HAS daughters, has he,
love?’

‘A pair of them,’ Martin answered. ‘A precious pair! Gems of the first
water!’

‘Ah! You are jesting!’

‘There is a sort of jesting which is very much in earnest, and includes
some pretty serious disgust,’ said Martin. ‘I jest in reference to Mr
Pecksniff (at whose house I have been living as his assistant, and at
whose hands I have received insult and injury), in that vein. Whatever
betides, or however closely you may be brought into communication with
this family, never forget that, Mary; and never for an instant,
whatever appearances may seem to contradict me, lose sight of this
assurance--Pecksniff is a scoundrel.’

‘Indeed!’

‘In thought, and in deed, and in everything else. A scoundrel from the
topmost hair of his head, to the nethermost atom of his heel. Of his
daughters I will only say that, to the best of my knowledge and belief,
they are dutiful young ladies, and take after their father closely. This
is a digression from the main point, and yet it brings me to what I was
going to say.’

He stopped to look into her eyes again, and seeing, in a hasty glance
over his shoulder, that there was no one near, and that Mark was still
intent upon the fog, not only looked at her lips, too, but kissed them
into the bargain.

‘Now I am going to America, with great prospects of doing well, and of
returning home myself very soon; it may be to take you there for a few
years, but, at all events, to claim you for my wife; which, after such
trials, I should do with no fear of your still thinking it a duty to
cleave to him who will not suffer me to live (for this is true), if he
can help it, in my own land. How long I may be absent is, of course,
uncertain; but it shall not be very long. Trust me for that.’

‘In the meantime, dear Martin--’

‘That’s the very thing I am coming to. In the meantime you shall hear,
constantly, of all my goings-on. Thus.’

He paused to take from his pocket the letter he had written overnight,
and then resumed:

‘In this fellow’s employment, and living in this fellow’s house (by
fellow, I mean Mr Pecksniff, of course), there is a certain person of
the name of Pinch. Don’t forget; a poor, strange, simple oddity, Mary;
but thoroughly honest and sincere; full of zeal; and with a cordial
regard for me. Which I mean to return one of these days, by setting him
up in life in some way or other.’

‘Your old kind nature, Martin!’

‘Oh!’ said Martin, ‘that’s not worth speaking of, my love. He’s very
grateful and desirous to serve me; and I am more than repaid. Now one
night I told this Pinch my history, and all about myself and you; in
which he was not a little interested, I can tell you, for he knows you!
Aye, you may look surprised--and the longer the better for it becomes
you--but you have heard him play the organ in the church of that village
before now; and he has seen you listening to his music; and has caught
his inspiration from you, too!’

‘Was HE the organist?’ cried Mary. ‘I thank him from my heart!’

‘Yes, he was,’ said Martin, ‘and is, and gets nothing for it either.
There never was such a simple fellow! Quite an infant! But a very good
sort of creature, I assure you.’

‘I am sure of that,’ she said with great earnestness. ‘He must be!’

‘Oh, yes, no doubt at all about it,’ rejoined Martin, in his usual
careless way. ‘He is. Well! It has occurred to me--but stay. If I read
you what I have written and intend sending to him by post to-night
it will explain itself. “My dear Tom Pinch.” That’s rather familiar
perhaps,’ said Martin, suddenly remembering that he was proud when they
had last met, ‘but I call him my dear Tom Pinch because he likes it, and
it pleases him.’

‘Very right, and very kind,’ said Mary.

‘Exactly so!’ cried Martin. ‘It’s as well to be kind whenever one can;
and, as I said before, he really is an excellent fellow. “My dear Tom
Pinch--I address this under cover to Mrs Lupin, at the Blue Dragon,
and have begged her in a short note to deliver it to you without saying
anything about it elsewhere; and to do the same with all future letters
she may receive from me. My reason for so doing will be at once apparent
to you”--I don’t know that it will be, by the bye,’ said Martin,
breaking off, ‘for he’s slow of comprehension, poor fellow; but he’ll
find it out in time. My reason simply is, that I don’t want my letters
to be read by other people; and particularly by the scoundrel whom he
thinks an angel.’

‘Mr Pecksniff again?’ asked Mary.

‘The same,’ said Martin ‘--will be at once apparent to you. I have
completed my arrangements for going to America; and you will be
surprised to hear that I am to be accompanied by Mark Tapley, upon whom
I have stumbled strangely in London, and who insists on putting himself
under my protection’--meaning, my love,’ said Martin, breaking off
again, ‘our friend in the rear, of course.’

She was delighted to hear this, and bestowed a kind glance upon Mark,
which he brought his eyes down from the fog to encounter and received
with immense satisfaction. She said in his hearing, too, that he was a
good soul and a merry creature, and would be faithful, she was certain;
commendations which Mr Tapley inwardly resolved to deserve, from such
lips, if he died for it.

‘“Now, my dear Pinch,”’ resumed Martin, proceeding with his letter; ‘“I
am going to repose great trust in you, knowing that I may do so with
perfect reliance on your honour and secrecy, and having nobody else just
now to trust in.”’

‘I don’t think I would say that, Martin.’

‘Wouldn’t you? Well! I’ll take that out. It’s perfectly true, though.’

‘But it might seem ungracious, perhaps.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind Pinch,’ said Martin. ‘There’s no occasion to stand on
any ceremony with HIM. However, I’ll take it out, as you wish it, and
make the full stop at “secrecy.” Very well! “I shall not only”--this is
the letter again, you know.’

‘I understand.’

‘“I shall not only enclose my letters to the young lady of whom I have
told you, to your charge, to be forwarded as she may request; but I most
earnestly commit her, the young lady herself, to your care and regard,
in the event of your meeting in my absence. I have reason to think
that the probabilities of your encountering each other--perhaps very
frequently--are now neither remote nor few; and although in our position
you can do very little to lessen the uneasiness of hers, I trust to you
implicitly to do that much, and so deserve the confidence I have reposed
in you.” You see, my dear Mary,’ said Martin, ‘it will be a great
consolation to you to have anybody, no matter how simple, with whom you
can speak about ME; and the very first time you talk to Pinch, you’ll
feel at once that there is no more occasion for any embarrassment or
hesitation in talking to him, than if he were an old woman.’

‘However that may be,’ she returned, smiling, ‘he is your friend, and
that is enough.’

‘Oh, yes, he’s my friend,’ said Martin, ‘certainly. In fact, I have told
him in so many words that we’ll always take notice of him, and protect
him; and it’s a good trait in his character that he’s grateful--very
grateful indeed. You’ll like him of all things, my love, I know. You’ll
observe very much that’s comical and old-fashioned about Pinch, but you
needn’t mind laughing at him; for he’ll not care about it. He’ll rather
like it indeed!’

‘I don’t think I shall put that to the test, Martin.’

‘You won’t if you can help it, of course,’ he said, ‘but I think you’ll
find him a little too much for your gravity. However, that’s neither
here nor there, and it certainly is not the letter; which ends
thus: “Knowing that I need not impress the nature and extent of that
confidence upon you at any greater length, as it is already sufficiently
established in your mind, I will only say, in bidding you farewell and
looking forward to our next meeting, that I shall charge myself from
this time, through all changes for the better, with your advancement and
happiness, as if they were my own. You may rely upon that. And
always believe me, my dear Tom Pinch, faithfully your friend, Martin
Chuzzlewit. P.S.--I enclose the amount which you so kindly”--Oh,’ said
Martin, checking himself, and folding up the letter, ‘that’s nothing!’

At this crisis Mark Tapley interposed, with an apology for remarking
that the clock at the Horse Guards was striking.

‘Which I shouldn’t have said nothing about, sir,’ added Mark, ‘if the
young lady hadn’t begged me to be particular in mentioning it.’

‘I did,’ said Mary. ‘Thank you. You are quite right. In another minute
I shall be ready to return. We have time for a very few words more, dear
Martin, and although I had much to say, it must remain unsaid until the
happy time of our next meeting. Heaven send it may come speedily and
prosperously! But I have no fear of that.’

‘Fear!’ cried Martin. ‘Why, who has? What are a few months? What is a
whole year? When I come gayly back, with a road through life hewn out
before me, then indeed, looking back upon this parting, it may seem
a dismal one. But now! I swear I wouldn’t have it happen under more
favourable auspices, if I could; for then I should be less inclined to
go, and less impressed with the necessity.’

‘Yes, yes. I feel that too. When do you go?’

‘To-night. We leave for Liverpool to-night. A vessel sails from that
port, as I hear, in three days. In a month, or less, we shall be there.
Why, what’s a month! How many months have flown by, since our last
parting!’

‘Long to look back upon,’ said Mary, echoing his cheerful tone, ‘but
nothing in their course!’

‘Nothing at all!’ cried Martin. ‘I shall have change of scene and change
of place; change of people, change of manners, change of cares and
hopes! Time will wear wings indeed! I can bear anything, so that I have
swift action, Mary.’

Was he thinking solely of her care for him, when he took so little heed
of her share in the separation; of her quiet monotonous endurance,
and her slow anxiety from day to day? Was there nothing jarring and
discordant even in his tone of courage, with this one note ‘self’ for
ever audible, however high the strain? Not in her ears. It had been
better otherwise, perhaps, but so it was. She heard the same bold spirit
which had flung away as dross all gain and profit for her sake, making
light of peril and privation that she might be calm and happy; and she
heard no more. That heart where self has found no place and raised no
throne, is slow to recognize its ugly presence when it looks upon it.
As one possessed of an evil spirit was held in old time to be alone
conscious of the lurking demon in the breasts of other men, so kindred
vices know each other in their hiding-places every day, when Virtue is
incredulous and blind.

‘The quarter’s gone!’ cried Mr Tapley, in a voice of admonition.

‘I shall be ready to return immediately,’ she said. ‘One thing, dear
Martin, I am bound to tell you. You entreated me a few minutes since
only to answer what you asked me in reference to one theme, but you
should and must know (otherwise I could not be at ease) that since
that separation of which I was the unhappy occasion, he has never once
uttered your name; has never coupled it, or any faint allusion to it,
with passion or reproach; and has never abated in his kindness to me.’

‘I thank him for that last act,’ said Martin, ‘and for nothing else.
Though on consideration I may thank him for his other forbearance also,
inasmuch as I neither expect nor desire that he will mention my name
again. He may once, perhaps--to couple it with reproach--in his will.
Let him, if he please! By the time it reaches me, he will be in his
grave; a satire on his own anger, God help him!’

‘Martin! If you would but sometimes, in some quiet hour; beside the
winter fire; in the summer air; when you hear gentle music, or think of
Death, or Home, or Childhood; if you would at such a season resolve to
think, but once a month, or even once a year, of him, or any one who
ever wronged you, you would forgive him in your heart, I know!’

‘If I believed that to be true, Mary,’ he replied, ‘I would resolve at
no such time to bear him in my mind; wishing to spare myself the shame
of such a weakness. I was not born to be the toy and puppet of any man,
far less his; to whose pleasure and caprice, in return for any good he
did me, my whole youth was sacrificed. It became between us two a fair
exchange--a barter--and no more; and there is no such balance against
me that I need throw in a mawkish forgiveness to poise the scale. He has
forbidden all mention of me to you, I know,’ he added hastily. ‘Come!
Has he not?’

‘That was long ago,’ she returned; ‘immediately after your parting;
before you had left the house. He has never done so since.’

‘He has never done so since because he has seen no occasion,’ said
Martin; ‘but that is of little consequence, one way or other. Let all
allusion to him between you and me be interdicted from this time forth.
And therefore, love’--he drew her quickly to him, for the time of
parting had now come--‘in the first letter that you write to me through
the Post Office, addressed to New York; and in all the others that you
send through Pinch; remember he has no existence, but has become to us
as one who is dead. Now, God bless you! This is a strange place for such
a meeting and such a parting; but our next meeting shall be in a better,
and our next and last parting in a worse.’

‘One other question, Martin, I must ask. Have you provided money for
this journey?’

‘Have I?’ cried Martin; it might have been in his pride; it might have
been in his desire to set her mind at ease: ‘Have I provided money? Why,
there’s a question for an emigrant’s wife! How could I move on land or
sea without it, love?’

‘I mean, enough.’

‘Enough! More than enough. Twenty times more than enough. A pocket-full.
Mark and I, for all essential ends, are quite as rich as if we had the
purse of Fortunatus in our baggage.’

‘The half-hour’s a-going!’ cried Mr Tapley.

‘Good-bye a hundred times!’ cried Mary, in a trembling voice.

But how cold the comfort in Good-bye! Mark Tapley knew it perfectly.
Perhaps he knew it from his reading, perhaps from his experience,
perhaps from intuition. It is impossible to say; but however he knew
it, his knowledge instinctively suggested to him the wisest course of
proceeding that any man could have adopted under the circumstances. He
was taken with a violent fit of sneezing, and was obliged to turn his
head another way. In doing which, he, in a manner fenced and screened
the lovers into a corner by themselves.

There was a short pause, but Mark had an undefined sensation that it was
a satisfactory one in its way. Then Mary, with her veil lowered, passed
him with a quick step, and beckoned him to follow. She stopped once more
before they lost that corner; looked back; and waved her hand to Martin.
He made a start towards them at the moment as if he had some other
farewell words to say; but she only hurried off the faster, and Mr
Tapley followed as in duty bound.

When he rejoined Martin again in his own chamber, he found that
gentleman seated moodily before the dusty grate, with his two feet on
the fender, his two elbows on his knees, and his chin supported, in a
not very ornamental manner, on the palms of his hands.

‘Well, Mark!’

‘Well, sir,’ said Mark, taking a long breath, ‘I see the young lady safe
home, and I feel pretty comfortable after it. She sent a lot of kind
words, sir, and this,’ handing him a ring, ‘for a parting keepsake.’

‘Diamonds!’ said Martin, kissing it--let us do him justice, it was for
her sake; not for theirs--and putting it on his little finger. ‘Splendid
diamonds! My grandfather is a singular character, Mark. He must have
given her this now.’

Mark Tapley knew as well that she had bought it, to the end that that
unconscious speaker might carry some article of sterling value with him
in his necessity; as he knew that it was day, and not night. Though he
had no more acquaintance of his own knowledge with the history of the
glittering trinket on Martin’s outspread finger, than Martin himself
had, he was as certain that in its purchase she had expended her whole
stock of hoarded money, as if he had seen it paid down coin by coin. Her
lover’s strange obtuseness in relation to this little incident, promptly
suggested to Mark’s mind its real cause and root; and from that moment
he had a clear and perfect insight into the one absorbing principle of
Martin’s character.

‘She is worthy of the sacrifices I have made,’ said Martin, folding his
arms, and looking at the ashes in the stove, as if in resumption of some
former thoughts. ‘Well worthy of them. No riches’--here he stroked his
chin and mused--‘could have compensated for the loss of such a nature.
Not to mention that in gaining her affection I have followed the bent
of my own wishes, and baulked the selfish schemes of others who had
no right to form them. She is quite worthy--more than worthy--of the
sacrifices I have made. Yes, she is. No doubt of it.’

These ruminations might or might not have reached Mark Tapley; for
though they were by no means addressed to him, yet they were softly
uttered. In any case, he stood there, watching Martin with an
indescribable and most involved expression on his visage, until that
young man roused himself and looked towards him; when he turned away,
as being suddenly intent upon certain preparations for the journey,
and, without giving vent to any articulate sound, smiled with surpassing
ghastliness, and seemed by a twist of his features and a motion of his
lips, to release himself of this word:

‘Jolly!’



CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE BURDEN WHEREOF, IS HAIL COLUMBIA!


A dark and dreary night; people nestling in their beds or circling
late about the fire; Want, colder than Charity, shivering at the street
corners; church-towers humming with the faint vibration of their own
tongues, but newly resting from the ghostly preachment ‘One!’ The earth
covered with a sable pall as for the burial of yesterday; the clumps of
dark trees, its giant plumes of funeral feathers, waving sadly to and
fro: all hushed, all noiseless, and in deep repose, save the swift
clouds that skim across the moon, and the cautious wind, as, creeping
after them upon the ground, it stops to listen, and goes rustling on,
and stops again, and follows, like a savage on the trail.

Whither go the clouds and wind so eagerly? If, like guilty spirits, they
repair to some dread conference with powers like themselves, in what
wild regions do the elements hold council, or where unbend in terrible
disport?

Here! Free from that cramped prison called the earth, and out upon the
waste of waters. Here, roaring, raging, shrieking, howling, all night
long. Hither come the sounding voices from the caverns on the coast of
that small island, sleeping, a thousand miles away, so quietly in the
midst of angry waves; and hither, to meet them, rush the blasts from
unknown desert places of the world. Here, in the fury of their unchecked
liberty, they storm and buffet with each other, until the sea, lashed
into passion like their own, leaps up, in ravings mightier than theirs,
and the whole scene is madness.

On, on, on, over the countless miles of angry space roll the long
heaving billows. Mountains and caves are here, and yet are not; for
what is now the one, is now the other; then all is but a boiling heap of
rushing water. Pursuit, and flight, and mad return of wave on wave, and
savage struggle, ending in a spouting-up of foam that whitens the
black night; incessant change of place, and form, and hue; constancy in
nothing, but eternal strife; on, on, on, they roll, and darker grows the
night, and louder howls the wind, and more clamorous and fierce become
the million voices in the sea, when the wild cry goes forth upon the
storm ‘A ship!’

Onward she comes, in gallant combat with the elements, her tall masts
trembling, and her timbers starting on the strain; onward she comes, now
high upon the curling billows, now low down in the hollows of the sea,
as hiding for the moment from its fury; and every storm-voice in the air
and water cries more loudly yet, ‘A ship!’

Still she comes striving on; and at her boldness and the spreading cry,
the angry waves rise up above each other’s hoary heads to look; and
round about the vessel, far as the mariners on the decks can pierce into
the gloom, they press upon her, forcing each other down and starting up,
and rushing forward from afar, in dreadful curiosity. High over her
they break; and round her surge and roar; and giving place to others,
moaningly depart, and dash themselves to fragments in their baffled
anger. Still she comes onward bravely. And though the eager multitude
crowd thick and fast upon her all the night, and dawn of day discovers
the untiring train yet bearing down upon the ship in an eternity of
troubled water, onward she comes, with dim lights burning in her hull,
and people there, asleep; as if no deadly element were peering in at
every seam and chink, and no drowned seaman’s grave, with but a plank to
cover it, were yawning in the unfathomable depths below.

Among these sleeping voyagers were Martin and Mark Tapley, who, rocked
into a heavy drowsiness by the unaccustomed motion, were as insensible
to the foul air in which they lay, as to the uproar without. It was
broad day when the latter awoke with a dim idea that he was dreaming
of having gone to sleep in a four-post bedstead which had turned bottom
upwards in the course of the night. There was more reason in this too,
than in the roasting of eggs; for the first objects Mr Tapley recognized
when he opened his eyes were his own heels--looking down to him, as he
afterwards observed, from a nearly perpendicular elevation.

‘Well!’ said Mark, getting himself into a sitting posture, after various
ineffectual struggles with the rolling of the ship. ‘This is the first
time as ever I stood on my head all night.’

‘You shouldn’t go to sleep upon the ground with your head to leeward
then,’ growled a man in one of the berths.

‘With my head to WHERE?’ asked Mark.

The man repeated his previous sentiment.

‘No, I won’t another time,’ said Mark, ‘when I know whereabouts on the
map that country is. In the meanwhile I can give you a better piece of
advice. Don’t you nor any other friend of mine never go to sleep with
his head in a ship any more.’

The man gave a grunt of discontented acquiescence, turned over in his
berth, and drew his blanket over his head.

‘--For,’ said Mr Tapley, pursuing the theme by way of soliloquy in a low
tone of voice; ‘the sea is as nonsensical a thing as any going. It never
knows what to do with itself. It hasn’t got no employment for its
mind, and is always in a state of vacancy. Like them Polar bears in the
wild-beast shows as is constantly a-nodding their heads from side to
side, it never CAN be quiet. Which is entirely owing to its uncommon
stupidity.’

‘Is that you, Mark?’ asked a faint voice from another berth.

‘It’s as much of me as is left, sir, after a fortnight of this work,’
Mr Tapley replied, ‘What with leading the life of a fly, ever since I’ve
been aboard--for I’ve been perpetually holding-on to something or other
in a upside-down position--what with that, sir, and putting a very
little into myself, and taking a good deal out of myself, there an’t too
much of me to swear by. How do you find yourself this morning, sir?’

‘Very miserable,’ said Martin, with a peevish groan. ‘Ugh. This is
wretched, indeed!’

‘Creditable,’ muttered Mark, pressing one hand upon his aching head and
looking round him with a rueful grin. ‘That’s the great comfort. It IS
creditable to keep up one’s spirits here. Virtue’s its own reward. So’s
jollity.’

Mark was so far right that unquestionably any man who retained his
cheerfulness among the steerage accommodations of that noble and
fast-sailing line-of-packet ship, ‘THE SCREW,’ was solely indebted to
his own resources, and shipped his good humour, like his provisions,
without any contribution or assistance from the owners. A dark, low,
stifling cabin, surrounded by berths all filled to overflowing with men,
women, and children, in various stages of sickness and misery, is not
the liveliest place of assembly at any time; but when it is so crowded
(as the steerage cabin of the Screw was, every passage out), that
mattresses and beds are heaped upon the floor, to the extinction of
everything like comfort, cleanliness, and decency, it is liable to
operate not only as a pretty strong banner against amiability of temper,
but as a positive encourager of selfish and rough humours. Mark felt
this, as he sat looking about him; and his spirits rose proportionately.

There were English people, Irish people, Welsh people, and Scotch people
there; all with their little store of coarse food and shabby clothes;
and nearly all with their families of children. There were children of
all ages; from the baby at the breast, to the slattern-girl who was as
much a grown woman as her mother. Every kind of domestic suffering that
is bred in poverty, illness, banishment, sorrow, and long travel in bad
weather, was crammed into the little space; and yet was there infinitely
less of complaint and querulousness, and infinitely more of mutual
assistance and general kindness to be found in that unwholesome ark,
than in many brilliant ballrooms.

Mark looked about him wistfully, and his face brightened as he looked.
Here an old grandmother was crooning over a sick child, and rocking it
to and fro, in arms hardly more wasted than its own young limbs; here a
poor woman with an infant in her lap, mended another little creature’s
clothes, and quieted another who was creeping up about her from their
scanty bed upon the floor. Here were old men awkwardly engaged in little
household offices, wherein they would have been ridiculous but for their
good-will and kind purpose; and here were swarthy fellows--giants in
their way--doing such little acts of tenderness for those about them,
as might have belonged to gentlest-hearted dwarfs. The very idiot in
the corner who sat mowing there, all day, had his faculty of imitation
roused by what he saw about him; and snapped his fingers to amuse a
crying child.

‘Now, then,’ said Mark, nodding to a woman who was dressing her three
children at no great distance from him--and the grin upon his face had
by this time spread from ear to ear--‘Hand over one of them young ‘uns
according to custom.’

‘I wish you’d get breakfast, Mark, instead of worrying with people who
don’t belong to you,’ observed Martin, petulantly.

‘All right,’ said Mark. ‘SHE’ll do that. It’s a fair division of labour,
sir. I wash her boys, and she makes our tea. I never COULD make tea, but
any one can wash a boy.’

The woman, who was delicate and ill, felt and understood his kindness,
as well she might, for she had been covered every night with his
greatcoat, while he had for his own bed the bare boards and a rug. But
Martin, who seldom got up or looked about him, was quite incensed by the
folly of this speech, and expressed his dissatisfaction by an impatient
groan.

‘So it is, certainly,’ said Mark, brushing the child’s hair as coolly as
if he had been born and bred a barber.

‘What are you talking about, now?’ asked Martin.

‘What you said,’ replied Mark; ‘or what you meant, when you gave that
there dismal vent to your feelings. I quite go along with it, sir. It IS
very hard upon her.’

‘What is?’

‘Making the voyage by herself along with these young impediments here,
and going such a way at such a time of the year to join her husband.
If you don’t want to be driven mad with yellow soap in your eye, young
man,’ said Mr Tapley to the second urchin, who was by this time under
his hands at the basin, ‘you’d better shut it.’

‘Where does she join her husband?’ asked Martin, yawning.

‘Why, I’m very much afraid,’ said Mr Tapley, in a low voice, ‘that she
don’t know. I hope she mayn’t miss him. But she sent her last letter by
hand, and it don’t seem to have been very clearly understood between ‘em
without it, and if she don’t see him a-waving his pocket-handkerchief on
the shore, like a pictur out of a song-book, my opinion is, she’ll break
her heart.’

‘Why, how, in Folly’s name, does the woman come to be on board ship on
such a wild-goose venture!’ cried Martin.

Mr Tapley glanced at him for a moment as he lay prostrate in his berth,
and then said, very quietly:

‘Ah! How indeed! I can’t think! He’s been away from her for two year;
she’s been very poor and lonely in her own country; and has always been
a-looking forward to meeting him. It’s very strange she should be here.
Quite amazing! A little mad perhaps! There can’t be no other way of
accounting for it.’

Martin was too far gone in the lassitude of sea-sickness to make any
reply to these words, or even to attend to them as they were spoken. And
the subject of their discourse returning at this crisis with some hot
tea, effectually put a stop to any resumption of the theme by Mr Tapley;
who, when the meal was over and he had adjusted Martin’s bed, went up on
deck to wash the breakfast service, which consisted of two half-pint tin
mugs, and a shaving-pot of the same metal.

It is due to Mark Tapley to state that he suffered at least as much from
sea-sickness as any man, woman, or child, on board; and that he had a
peculiar faculty of knocking himself about on the smallest provocation,
and losing his legs at every lurch of the ship. But resolved, in his
usual phrase, to ‘come out strong’ under disadvantageous circumstances,
he was the life and soul of the steerage, and made no more of stopping
in the middle of a facetious conversation to go away and be excessively
ill by himself, and afterwards come back in the very best and gayest of
tempers to resume it, than if such a course of proceeding had been the
commonest in the world.

It cannot be said that as his illness wore off, his cheerfulness and
good nature increased, because they would hardly admit of augmentation;
but his usefulness among the weaker members of the party was much
enlarged; and at all times and seasons there he was exerting it. If
a gleam of sun shone out of the dark sky, down Mark tumbled into the
cabin, and presently up he came again with a woman in his arms, or
half-a-dozen children, or a man, or a bed, or a saucepan, or a basket,
or something animate or inanimate, that he thought would be the better
for the air. If an hour or two of fine weather in the middle of the day
tempted those who seldom or never came on deck at other times to crawl
into the long-boat, or lie down upon the spare spars, and try to eat,
there, in the centre of the group, was Mr Tapley, handing about salt
beef and biscuit, or dispensing tastes of grog, or cutting up the
children’s provisions with his pocketknife, for their greater ease and
comfort, or reading aloud from a venerable newspaper, or singing some
roaring old song to a select party, or writing the beginnings of letters
to their friends at home for people who couldn’t write, or cracking
jokes with the crew, or nearly getting blown over the side, or emerging,
half-drowned, from a shower of spray, or lending a hand somewhere or
other; but always doing something for the general entertainment. At
night, when the cooking-fire was lighted on the deck, and the driving
sparks that flew among the rigging, and the clouds of sails, seemed to
menace the ship with certain annihilation by fire, in case the elements
of air and water failed to compass her destruction; there, again, was Mr
Tapley, with his coat off and his shirt-sleeves turned up to his elbows,
doing all kinds of culinary offices; compounding the strangest dishes;
recognized by every one as an established authority; and helping all
parties to achieve something which, left to themselves, they never could
have done, and never would have dreamed of. In short, there never was a
more popular character than Mark Tapley became, on board that noble and
fast-sailing line-of-packet ship, the Screw; and he attained at last to
such a pitch of universal admiration, that he began to have grave doubts
within himself whether a man might reasonably claim any credit for being
jolly under such exciting circumstances.

‘If this was going to last,’ said Tapley, ‘there’d be no great
difference as I can perceive, between the Screw and the Dragon. I
never am to get credit, I think. I begin to be afraid that the Fates is
determined to make the world easy to me.’

‘Well, Mark,’ said Martin, near whose berth he had ruminated to this
effect. ‘When will this be over?’

‘Another week, they say, sir,’ returned Mark, ‘will most likely bring
us into port. The ship’s a-going along at present, as sensible as a ship
can, sir; though I don’t mean to say as that’s any very high praise.’

‘I don’t think it is, indeed,’ groaned Martin.

‘You’d feel all the better for it, sir, if you was to turn out,’
observed Mark.

‘And be seen by the ladies and gentlemen on the after-deck,’ returned
Martin, with a scronful emphasis upon the words, ‘mingling with the
beggarly crowd that are stowed away in this vile hole. I should be
greatly the better for that, no doubt.’

‘I’m thankful that I can’t say from my own experience what the feelings
of a gentleman may be,’ said Mark, ‘but I should have thought, sir, as a
gentleman would feel a deal more uncomfortable down here than up in the
fresh air, especially when the ladies and gentlemen in the after-cabin
know just as much about him as he does about them, and are likely to
trouble their heads about him in the same proportion. I should have
thought that, certainly.’

‘I tell you, then,’ rejoined Martin, ‘you would have thought wrong, and
do think wrong.’

‘Very likely, sir,’ said Mark, with imperturbable good temper. ‘I often
do.’

‘As to lying here,’ cried Martin, raising himself on his elbow, and
looking angrily at his follower. ‘Do you suppose it’s a pleasure to lie
here?’

‘All the madhouses in the world,’ said Mr Tapley, ‘couldn’t produce such
a maniac as the man must be who could think that.’

‘Then why are you forever goading and urging me to get up?’ asked
Martin, ‘I lie here because I don’t wish to be recognized, in the better
days to which I aspire, by any purse-proud citizen, as the man who came
over with him among the steerage passengers. I lie here because I wish
to conceal my circumstances and myself, and not to arrive in a new world
badged and ticketed as an utterly poverty-stricken man. If I could have
afforded a passage in the after-cabin I should have held up my head with
the rest. As I couldn’t I hide it. Do you understand that?’

‘I am very sorry, sir,’ said Mark. ‘I didn’t know you took it so much to
heart as this comes to.’

‘Of course you didn’t know,’ returned his master. ‘How should you
know, unless I told you? It’s no trial to you, Mark, to make yourself
comfortable and to bustle about. It’s as natural for you to do so under
the circumstances as it is for me not to do so. Why, you don’t suppose
there is a living creature in this ship who can by possibility have half
so much to undergo on board of her as I have? Do you?’ he asked, sitting
upright in his berth and looking at Mark, with an expression of great
earnestness not unmixed with wonder.

Mark twisted his face into a tight knot, and with his head very much
on one side, pondered upon this question as if he felt it an extremely
difficult one to answer. He was relieved from his embarrassment by
Martin himself, who said, as he stretched himself upon his back again
and resumed the book he had been reading:

‘But what is the use of my putting such a case to you, when the very
essence of what I have been saying is, that you cannot by possibility
understand it! Make me a little brandy-and-water--cold and very
weak--and give me a biscuit, and tell your friend, who is a nearer
neighbour of ours than I could wish, to try and keep her children a
little quieter to-night than she did last night; that’s a good fellow.’

Mr Tapley set himself to obey these orders with great alacrity, and
pending their execution, it may be presumed his flagging spirits
revived; inasmuch as he several times observed, below his breath, that
in respect of its power of imparting a credit to jollity, the Screw
unquestionably had some decided advantages over the Dragon. He also
remarked that it was a high gratification to him to reflect that he
would carry its main excellence ashore with him, and have it constantly
beside him wherever he went; but what he meant by these consolatory
thoughts he did not explain.

And now a general excitement began to prevail on board; and various
predictions relative to the precise day, and even the precise hour
at which they would reach New York, were freely broached. There was
infinitely more crowding on deck and looking over the ship’s side than
there had been before; and an epidemic broke out for packing up things
every morning, which required unpacking again every night. Those who had
any letters to deliver, or any friends to meet, or any settled plans of
going anywhere or doing anything, discussed their prospects a hundred
times a day; and as this class of passengers was very small, and the
number of those who had no prospects whatever was very large, there were
plenty of listeners and few talkers. Those who had been ill all along,
got well now, and those who had been well, got better. An American
gentleman in the after-cabin, who had been wrapped up in fur and oilskin
the whole passage, unexpectedly appeared in a very shiny, tall, black
hat, and constantly overhauled a very little valise of pale leather,
which contained his clothes, linen, brushes, shaving apparatus, books,
trinkets, and other baggage. He likewise stuck his hands deep into
his pockets, and walked the deck with his nostrils dilated, as already
inhaling the air of Freedom which carries death to all tyrants, and can
never (under any circumstances worth mentioning) be breathed by slaves.
An English gentleman who was strongly suspected of having run away from
a bank, with something in his possession belonging to its strong box
besides the key, grew eloquent upon the subject of the rights of man,
and hummed the Marseillaise Hymn constantly. In a word, one great
sensation pervaded the whole ship, and the soil of America lay close
before them; so close at last, that, upon a certain starlight night they
took a pilot on board, and within a few hours afterwards lay to until
the morning, awaiting the arrival of a steamboat in which the passengers
were to be conveyed ashore.

Off she came, soon after it was light next morning, and lying alongside
an hour or more--during which period her very firemen were objects of
hardly less interest and curiosity than if they had been so many angels,
good or bad--took all her living freight aboard. Among them Mark, who
still had his friend and her three children under his close protection;
and Martin, who had once more dressed himself in his usual attire, but
wore a soiled, old cloak above his ordinary clothes, until such time as
he should separate for ever from his late companions.

The steamer--which, with its machinery on deck, looked, as it worked its
long slim legs, like some enormously magnified insect or antediluvian
monster--dashed at great speed up a beautiful bay; and presently they
saw some heights, and islands, and a long, flat, straggling city.

‘And this,’ said Mr Tapley, looking far ahead, ‘is the Land of Liberty,
is it? Very well. I’m agreeable. Any land will do for me, after so much
water!’



CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MARTIN DISEMBARKS FROM THAT NOBLE AND FAST-SAILING LINE-OF-PACKET SHIP,
‘THE SCREW’, AT THE PORT OF NEW YORK, IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
HE MAKES SOME ACQUAINTANCES, AND DINES AT A BOARDING-HOUSE. THE
PARTICULARS OF THOSE TRANSACTIONS


Some trifling excitement prevailed upon the very brink and margin of the
land of liberty; for an alderman had been elected the day before;
and Party Feeling naturally running rather high on such an exciting
occasion, the friends of the disappointed candidate had found it
necessary to assert the great principles of Purity of Election and
Freedom of opinion by breaking a few legs and arms, and furthermore
pursuing one obnoxious gentleman through the streets with the design of
hitting his nose. These good-humoured little outbursts of the popular
fancy were not in themselves sufficiently remarkable to create any great
stir, after the lapse of a whole night; but they found fresh life and
notoriety in the breath of the newsboys, who not only proclaimed them
with shrill yells in all the highways and byways of the town, upon the
wharves and among the shipping, but on the deck and down in the cabins
of the steamboat; which, before she touched the shore, was boarded and
overrun by a legion of those young citizens.

‘Here’s this morning’s New York Sewer!’ cried one. ‘Here’s this
morning’s New York Stabber! Here’s the New York Family Spy! Here’s the
New York Private Listener! Here’s the New York Peeper! Here’s the New
York Plunderer! Here’s the New York Keyhole Reporter! Here’s the
New York Rowdy Journal! Here’s all the New York papers! Here’s full
particulars of the patriotic locofoco movement yesterday, in which
the whigs was so chawed up; and the last Alabama gouging case; and the
interesting Arkansas dooel with Bowie knives; and all the Political,
Commercial, and Fashionable News. Here they are! Here they are! Here’s
the papers, here’s the papers!’

‘Here’s the Sewer!’ cried another. ‘Here’s the New York Sewer! Here’s
some of the twelfth thousand of to-day’s Sewer, with the best accounts
of the markets, and all the shipping news, and four whole columns of
country correspondence, and a full account of the Ball at Mrs White’s
last night, where all the beauty and fashion of New York was assembled;
with the Sewer’s own particulars of the private lives of all the ladies
that was there! Here’s the Sewer! Here’s some of the twelfth thousand of
the New York Sewer! Here’s the Sewer’s exposure of the Wall Street
Gang, and the Sewer’s exposure of the Washington Gang, and the Sewer’s
exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the
Secretary of State when he was eight years old; now communicated, at a
great expense, by his own nurse. Here’s the Sewer! Here’s the New York
Sewer, in its twelfth thousand, with a whole column of New Yorkers to be
shown up, and all their names printed! Here’s the Sewer’s article
upon the Judge that tried him, day afore yesterday, for libel, and the
Sewer’s tribute to the independent Jury that didn’t convict him, and the
Sewer’s account of what they might have expected if they had! Here’s
the Sewer, here’s the Sewer! Here’s the wide-awake Sewer; always on the
lookout; the leading Journal of the United States, now in its twelfth
thousand, and still a-printing off:--Here’s the New York Sewer!’

‘It is in such enlightened means,’ said a voice almost in Martin’s ear,
‘that the bubbling passions of my country find a vent.’

Martin turned involuntarily, and saw, standing close at his side, a
sallow gentleman, with sunken cheeks, black hair, small twinkling eyes,
and a singular expression hovering about that region of his face, which
was not a frown, nor a leer, and yet might have been mistaken at the
first glance for either. Indeed it would have been difficult, on a much
closer acquaintance, to describe it in any more satisfactory terms than
as a mixed expression of vulgar cunning and conceit. This gentleman wore
a rather broad-brimmed hat for the greater wisdom of his appearance; and
had his arms folded for the greater impressiveness of his attitude. He
was somewhat shabbily dressed in a blue surtout reaching nearly to
his ankles, short loose trousers of the same colour, and a faded buff
waistcoat, through which a discoloured shirt-frill struggled to force
itself into notice, as asserting an equality of civil rights with
the other portions of his dress, and maintaining a declaration of
Independence on its own account. His feet, which were of unusually
large proportions, were leisurely crossed before him as he half leaned
against, half sat upon, the steamboat’s bulwark; and his thick cane,
shod with a mighty ferule at one end and armed with a great metal
knob at the other, depended from a line-and-tassel on his wrist. Thus
attired, and thus composed into an aspect of great profundity, the
gentleman twitched up the right-hand corner of his mouth and his right
eye simultaneously, and said, once more:

‘It is in such enlightened means that the bubbling passions of my
country find a vent.’

As he looked at Martin, and nobody else was by, Martin inclined his
head, and said:

‘You allude to--?’

‘To the Palladium of rational Liberty at home, sir, and the dread of
Foreign oppression abroad,’ returned the gentleman, as he pointed with
his cane to an uncommonly dirty newsboy with one eye. ‘To the Envy of
the world, sir, and the leaders of Human Civilization. Let me ask you
sir,’ he added, bringing the ferule of his stick heavily upon the deck
with the air of a man who must not be equivocated with, ‘how do you like
my Country?’

‘I am hardly prepared to answer that question yet,’ said Martin ‘seeing
that I have not been ashore.’

‘Well, I should expect you were not prepared, sir,’ said the gentleman,
‘to behold such signs of National Prosperity as those?’

He pointed to the vessels lying at the wharves; and then gave a vague
flourish with his stick, as if he would include the air and water,
generally, in this remark.

‘Really,’ said Martin, ‘I don’t know. Yes. I think I was.’

The gentleman glanced at him with a knowing look, and said he liked his
policy. It was natural, he said, and it pleased him as a philosopher to
observe the prejudices of human nature.

‘You have brought, I see, sir,’ he said, turning round towards Martin,
and resting his chin on the top of his stick, ‘the usual amount of
misery and poverty and ignorance and crime, to be located in the bosom
of the great Republic. Well, sir! let ‘em come on in shiploads from the
old country. When vessels are about to founder, the rats are said to
leave ‘em. There is considerable of truth, I find, in that remark.’

‘The old ship will keep afloat a year or two longer yet, perhaps,’ said
Martin with a smile, partly occasioned by what the gentleman said,
and partly by his manner of saying it, which was odd enough for he
emphasised all the small words and syllables in his discourse, and left
the others to take care of themselves; as if he thought the larger parts
of speech could be trusted alone, but the little ones required to be
constantly looked after.

‘Hope is said by the poet, sir,’ observed the gentleman, ‘to be the
nurse of young Desire.’

Martin signified that he had heard of the cardinal virtue in question
serving occasionally in that domestic capacity.

‘She will not rear her infant in the present instance, sir, you’ll
find,’ observed the gentleman.

‘Time will show,’ said Martin.

The gentleman nodded his head gravely; and said, ‘What is your name,
sir?’

Martin told him.

‘How old are you, sir?’

Martin told him.

‘What is your profession, sir?’

Martin told him that also.

‘What is your destination, sir?’ inquired the gentleman.

‘Really,’ said Martin laughing, ‘I can’t satisfy you in that particular,
for I don’t know it myself.’

‘Yes?’ said the gentleman.

‘No,’ said Martin.

The gentleman adjusted his cane under his left arm, and took a more
deliberate and complete survey of Martin than he had yet had leisure to
make. When he had completed his inspection, he put out his right hand,
shook Martin’s hand, and said:

‘My name is Colonel Diver, sir. I am the Editor of the New York Rowdy
Journal.’

Martin received the communication with that degree of respect which an
announcement so distinguished appeared to demand.

‘The New York Rowdy Journal, sir,’ resumed the colonel, ‘is, as I expect
you know, the organ of our aristocracy in this city.’

‘Oh! there IS an aristocracy here, then?’ said Martin. ‘Of what is it
composed?’

‘Of intelligence, sir,’ replied the colonel; ‘of intelligence and
virtue. And of their necessary consequence in this republic--dollars,
sir.’

Martin was very glad to hear this, feeling well assured that if
intelligence and virtue led, as a matter of course, to the acquisition
of dollars, he would speedily become a great capitalist. He was about
to express the gratification such news afforded him, when he was
interrupted by the captain of the ship, who came up at the moment to
shake hands with the colonel; and who, seeing a well-dressed stranger on
the deck (for Martin had thrown aside his cloak), shook hands with him
also. This was an unspeakable relief to Martin, who, in spite of the
acknowledged supremacy of Intelligence and virtue in that happy country,
would have been deeply mortified to appear before Colonel Diver in the
poor character of a steerage passenger.

‘Well cap’en!’ said the colonel.

‘Well colonel,’ cried the captain. ‘You’re looking most uncommon bright,
sir. I can hardly realise its being you, and that’s a fact.’

‘A good passage, cap’en?’ inquired the colonel, taking him aside,

‘Well now! It was a pretty spanking run, sir,’ said, or rather sung, the
captain, who was a genuine New Englander; ‘considerin’ the weather.’

‘Yes?’ said the colonel.

‘Well! It was, sir,’ said the captain. ‘I’ve just now sent a boy up to
your office with the passenger-list, colonel.’

‘You haven’t got another boy to spare, p’raps, cap’en?’ said the
colonel, in a tone almost amounting to severity.

‘I guess there air a dozen if you want ‘em, colonel,’ said the captain.

‘One moderate big ‘un could convey a dozen champagne, perhaps,’ observed
the colonel, musing, ‘to my office. You said a spanking run, I think?’

‘Well, so I did,’ was the reply.

‘It’s very nigh, you know,’ observed the colonel. ‘I’m glad it was a
spanking run, cap’en. Don’t mind about quarts if you’re short of ‘em.
The boy can as well bring four-and-twenty pints, and travel twice as
once.--A first-rate spanker, cap’en, was it? Yes?’

‘A most e--tarnal spanker,’ said the skipper.

‘I admire at your good fortun, cap’en. You might loan me a corkscrew at
the same time, and half-a-dozen glasses if you liked. However bad the
elements combine against my country’s noble packet-ship, the Screw,
sir,’ said the colonel, turning to Martin, and drawing a flourish on
the surface of the deck with his cane, ‘her passage either way is almost
certain to eventuate a spanker!’

The captain, who had the Sewer below at that moment, lunching
expensively in one cabin, while the amiable Stabber was drinking himself
into a state of blind madness in another, took a cordial leave of his
friend the colonel, and hurried away to dispatch the champagne; well
knowing (as it afterwards appeared) that if he failed to conciliate the
editor of the Rowdy Journal, that potentate would denounce him and his
ship in large capitals before he was a day older; and would probably
assault the memory of his mother also, who had not been dead more than
twenty years. The colonel being again left alone with Martin, checked
him as he was moving away, and offered in consideration of his being an
Englishman, to show him the town and to introduce him, if such were his
desire, to a genteel boarding-house. But before they entered on these
proceedings (he said), he would beseech the honour of his company at the
office of the Rowdy Journal, to partake of a bottle of champagne of his
own importation.

All this was so extremely kind and hospitable, that Martin, though it
was quite early in the morning, readily acquiesced. So, instructing
Mark, who was deeply engaged with his friend and her three children,
that when he had done assisting them, and had cleared the baggage,
he was to wait for further orders at the Rowdy Journal Office, Martin
accompanied his new friend on shore.

They made their way as they best could through the melancholy crowd of
emigrants upon the wharf, who, grouped about their beds and boxes, with
the bare ground below them and the bare sky above, might have fallen
from another planet, for anything they knew of the country; and walked
for some short distance along a busy street, bounded on one side by the
quays and shipping; and on the other by a long row of staring red-brick
storehouses and offices, ornamented with more black boards and white
letters, and more white boards and black letters, than Martin had ever
seen before, in fifty times the space. Presently they turned up a narrow
street, and presently into other narrow streets, until at last they
stopped before a house whereon was painted in great characters, ‘ROWDY
JOURNAL.’

The colonel, who had walked the whole way with one hand in his breast,
his head occasionally wagging from side to side, and his hat thrown back
upon his ears, like a man who was oppressed to inconvenience by a sense
of his own greatness, led the way up a dark and dirty flight of stairs
into a room of similar character, all littered and bestrewn with odds
and ends of newspapers and other crumpled fragments, both in proof and
manuscript. Behind a mangy old writing-table in this apartment sat a
figure with a stump of a pen in its mouth and a great pair of scissors
in its right hand, clipping and slicing at a file of Rowdy Journals;
and it was such a laughable figure that Martin had some difficulty in
preserving his gravity, though conscious of the close observation of
Colonel Diver.

The individual who sat clipping and slicing as aforesaid at the Rowdy
Journals, was a small young gentleman of very juvenile appearance, and
unwholesomely pale in the face; partly, perhaps, from intense thought,
but partly, there is no doubt, from the excessive use of tobacco, which
he was at that moment chewing vigorously. He wore his shirt-collar
turned down over a black ribbon; and his lank hair, a fragile crop, was
not only smoothed and parted back from his brow, that none of the Poetry
of his aspect might be lost, but had, here and there, been grubbed up by
the roots; which accounted for his loftiest developments being somewhat
pimply. He had that order of nose on which the envy of mankind has
bestowed the appellation ‘snub,’ and it was very much turned up at the
end, as with a lofty scorn. Upon the upper lip of this young gentleman
were tokens of a sandy down; so very, very smooth and scant, that,
though encouraged to the utmost, it looked more like a recent trace of
gingerbread than the fair promise of a moustache; and this conjecture,
his apparently tender age went far to strengthen. He was intent upon
his work. Every time he snapped the great pair of scissors, he made
a corresponding motion with his jaws, which gave him a very terrible
appearance.

Martin was not long in determining within himself that this must be
Colonel Diver’s son; the hope of the family, and future mainspring of
the Rowdy Journal. Indeed he had begun to say that he presumed this
was the colonel’s little boy, and that it was very pleasant to see
him playing at Editor in all the guilelessness of childhood, when the
colonel proudly interposed and said:

‘My War Correspondent, sir--Mr Jefferson Brick!’

Martin could not help starting at this unexpected announcement, and the
consciousness of the irretrievable mistake he had nearly made.

Mr Brick seemed pleased with the sensation he produced upon the
stranger, and shook hands with him, with an air of patronage designed
to reassure him, and to let him blow that there was no occasion to be
frightened, for he (Brick) wouldn’t hurt him.

‘You have heard of Jefferson Brick, I see, sir,’ quoth the colonel,
with a smile. ‘England has heard of Jefferson Brick. Europe has heard of
Jefferson Brick. Let me see. When did you leave England, sir?’

‘Five weeks ago,’ said Martin.

‘Five weeks ago,’ repeated the colonel, thoughtfully; as he took his
seat upon the table, and swung his legs. ‘Now let me ask you, sir which
of Mr Brick’s articles had become at that time the most obnoxious to the
British Parliament and the Court of Saint James’s?’

‘Upon my word,’ said Martin, ‘I--’

‘I have reason to know, sir,’ interrupted the colonel, ‘that the
aristocratic circles of your country quail before the name of Jefferson
Brick. I should like to be informed, sir, from your lips, which of his
sentiments has struck the deadliest blow--’

‘At the hundred heads of the Hydra of Corruption now grovelling in the
dust beneath the lance of Reason, and spouting up to the universal arch
above us, its sanguinary gore,’ said Mr Brick, putting on a little blue
cloth cap with a glazed front, and quoting his last article.

‘The libation of freedom, Brick’--hinted the colonel.

‘--Must sometimes be quaffed in blood, colonel,’ cried Brick. And when
he said ‘blood,’ he gave the great pair of scissors a sharp snap, as if
THEY said blood too, and were quite of his opinion.

This done, they both looked at Martin, pausing for a reply.

‘Upon my life,’ said Martin, who had by this time quite recovered his
usual coolness, ‘I can’t give you any satisfactory information about it;
for the truth is that I--’

‘Stop!’ cried the colonel, glancing sternly at his war correspondent and
giving his head one shake after every sentence. ‘That you never heard of
Jefferson Brick, sir. That you never read Jefferson Brick, sir. That
you never saw the Rowdy Journal, sir. That you never knew, sir, of its
mighty influence upon the cabinets of Europe. Yes?’

‘That’s what I was about to observe, certainly,’ said Martin.

‘Keep cool, Jefferson,’ said the colonel gravely. ‘Don’t bust! oh you
Europeans! After that, let’s have a glass of wine!’ So saying, he got
down from the table, and produced, from a basket outside the door, a
bottle of champagne, and three glasses.

‘Mr Jefferson Brick, sir,’ said the colonel, filling Martin’s glass
and his own, and pushing the bottle to that gentleman, ‘will give us a
sentiment.’

‘Well, sir!’ cried the war correspondent, ‘Since you have concluded to
call upon me, I will respond. I will give you, sir, The Rowdy Journal
and its brethren; the well of Truth, whose waters are black from being
composed of printers’ ink, but are quite clear enough for my country to
behold the shadow of her Destiny reflected in.’

‘Hear, hear!’ cried the colonel, with great complacency. ‘There are
flowery components, sir, in the language of my friend?’

‘Very much so, indeed,’ said Martin.

‘There is to-day’s Rowdy, sir,’ observed the colonel, handing him a
paper. ‘You’ll find Jefferson Brick at his usual post in the van of
human civilization and moral purity.’

The colonel was by this time seated on the table again. Mr Brick also
took up a position on that same piece of furniture; and they fell to
drinking pretty hard. They often looked at Martin as he read the paper,
and then at each other. When he laid it down, which was not until they
had finished a second bottle, the colonel asked him what he thought of
it.

‘Why, it’s horribly personal,’ said Martin.

The colonel seemed much flattered by this remark; and said he hoped it
was.

‘We are independent here, sir,’ said Mr Jefferson Brick. ‘We do as we
like.’

‘If I may judge from this specimen,’ returned Martin, ‘there must be a
few thousands here, rather the reverse of independent, who do as they
don’t like.’

‘Well! They yield to the popular mind of the Popular Instructor, sir,’
said the colonel. ‘They rile up, sometimes; but in general we have a
hold upon our citizens, both in public and in private life, which is as
much one of the ennobling institutions of our happy country as--’

‘As nigger slavery itself,’ suggested Mr Brick.

‘En--tirely so,’ remarked the colonel.

‘Pray,’ said Martin, after some hesitation, ‘may I venture to ask,
with reference to a case I observe in this paper of yours, whether the
Popular Instructor often deals in--I am at a loss to express it without
giving you offence--in forgery? In forged letters, for instance,’ he
pursued, for the colonel was perfectly calm and quite at his ease,
‘solemnly purporting to have been written at recent periods by living
men?’

‘Well, sir!’ replied the colonel. ‘It does, now and then.’

‘And the popular instructed--what do they do?’ asked Martin.

‘Buy ‘em:’ said the colonel.

Mr Jefferson Brick expectorated and laughed; the former copiously, the
latter approvingly.

‘Buy ‘em by hundreds of thousands,’ resumed the colonel. ‘We are a smart
people here, and can appreciate smartness.’

‘Is smartness American for forgery?’ asked Martin.

‘Well!’ said the colonel, ‘I expect it’s American for a good many things
that you call by other names. But you can’t help yourself in Europe. We
can.’

‘And do, sometimes,’ thought Martin. ‘You help yourselves with very
little ceremony, too!’

‘At all events, whatever name we choose to employ,’ said the colonel,
stooping down to roll the third empty bottle into a corner after the
other two, ‘I suppose the art of forgery was not invented here sir?’

‘I suppose not,’ replied Martin.

‘Nor any other kind of smartness I reckon?’

‘Invented! No, I presume not.’

‘Well!’ said the colonel; ‘then we got it all from the old country, and
the old country’s to blame for it, and not the new ‘un. There’s an end
of THAT. Now, if Mr Jefferson Brick and you will be so good as to clear,
I’ll come out last, and lock the door.’

Rightly interpreting this as the signal for their departure, Martin
walked downstairs after the war correspondent, who preceded him with
great majesty. The colonel following, they left the Rowdy Journal Office
and walked forth into the streets; Martin feeling doubtful whether
he ought to kick the colonel for having presumed to speak to him,
or whether it came within the bounds of possibility that he and his
establishment could be among the boasted usages of that regenerated
land.

It was clear that Colonel Diver, in the security of his strong position,
and in his perfect understanding of the public sentiment, cared very
little what Martin or anybody else thought about him. His high-spiced
wares were made to sell, and they sold; and his thousands of readers
could as rationally charge their delight in filth upon him, as a glutton
can shift upon his cook the responsibility of his beastly excess.
Nothing would have delighted the colonel more than to be told that
no such man as he could walk in high success the streets of any other
country in the world; for that would only have been a logical assurance
to him of the correct adaptation of his labours to the prevailing taste,
and of his being strictly and peculiarly a national feature of America.

They walked a mile or more along a handsome street which the colonel
said was called Broadway, and which Mr Jefferson Brick said ‘whipped the
universe.’ Turning, at length, into one of the numerous streets which
branched from this main thoroughfare, they stopped before a rather
mean-looking house with jalousie blinds to every window; a flight of
steps before the green street-door; a shining white ornament on the
rails on either side like a petrified pineapple, polished; a little
oblong plate of the same material over the knocker whereon the name of
‘Pawkins’ was engraved; and four accidental pigs looking down the area.

The colonel knocked at this house with the air of a man who lived there;
and an Irish girl popped her head out of one of the top windows to see
who it was. Pending her journey downstairs, the pigs were joined by two
or three friends from the next street, in company with whom they lay
down sociably in the gutter.

‘Is the major indoors?’ inquired the colonel, as he entered.

‘Is it the master, sir?’ returned the girl, with a hesitation
which seemed to imply that they were rather flush of majors in that
establishment.

‘The master!’ said Colonel Diver, stopping short and looking round at
his war correspondent.

‘Oh! The depressing institutions of that British empire, colonel!’ said
Jefferson Brick. ‘Master!’

‘What’s the matter with the word?’ asked Martin.

‘I should hope it was never heard in our country, sir; that’s all,’ said
Jefferson Brick; ‘except when it is used by some degraded Help, as new
to the blessings of our form of government, as this Help is. There are
no masters here.’

‘All “owners,” are they?’ said Martin.

Mr Jefferson Brick followed in the Rowdy Journal’s footsteps without
returning any answer. Martin took the same course, thinking as he went,
that perhaps the free and independent citizens, who in their moral
elevation, owned the colonel for their master, might render better
homage to the goddess, Liberty, in nightly dreams upon the oven of a
Russian Serf.

The colonel led the way into a room at the back of the house upon
the ground-floor, light, and of fair dimensions, but exquisitely
uncomfortable; having nothing in it but the four cold white walls and
ceiling, a mean carpet, a dreary waste of dining-table reaching from
end to end, and a bewildering collection of cane-bottomed chairs. In the
further region of this banqueting-hall was a stove, garnished on either
side with a great brass spittoon, and shaped in itself like three little
iron barrels set up on end in a fender, and joined together on the
principle of the Siamese Twins. Before it, swinging himself in a
rocking-chair, lounged a large gentleman with his hat on, who amused
himself by spitting alternately into the spittoon on the right hand of
the stove, and the spittoon on the left, and then working his way back
again in the same order. A negro lad in a soiled white jacket was busily
engaged in placing on the table two long rows of knives and forks,
relieved at intervals by jugs of water; and as he travelled down one
side of this festive board, he straightened with his dirty hands the
dirtier cloth, which was all askew, and had not been removed since
breakfast. The atmosphere of this room was rendered intensely hot and
stifling by the stove; but being further flavoured by a sickly gush
of soup from the kitchen, and by such remote suggestions of tobacco as
lingered within the brazen receptacles already mentioned, it became, to
a stranger’s senses, almost insupportable.

The gentleman in the rocking-chair having his back towards them, and
being much engaged in his intellectual pastime, was not aware of their
approach until the colonel, walking up to the stove, contributed
his mite towards the support of the left-hand spittoon, just as the
major--for it was the major--bore down upon it. Major Pawkins then
reserved his fire, and looking upward, said, with a peculiar air of
quiet weariness, like a man who had been up all night--an air which
Martin had already observed both in the colonel and Mr Jefferson Brick--

‘Well, colonel!’

‘Here is a gentleman from England, major,’ the colonel replied, ‘who
has concluded to locate himself here if the amount of compensation suits
him.’

‘I am glad to see you, sir,’ observed the major, shaking hands with
Martin, and not moving a muscle of his face. ‘You are pretty bright, I
hope?’

‘Never better,’ said Martin.

‘You are never likely to be,’ returned the major. ‘You will see the sun
shine HERE.’

‘I think I remember to have seen it shine at home sometimes,’ said
Martin, smiling.

‘I think not,’ replied the major. He said so with a stoical indifference
certainly, but still in a tone of firmness which admitted of no further
dispute on that point. When he had thus settled the question, he put his
hat a little on one side for the greater convenience of scratching his
head, and saluted Mr Jefferson Brick with a lazy nod.

Major Pawkins (a gentleman of Pennsylvanian origin) was distinguished by
a very large skull, and a great mass of yellow forehead; in deference
to which commodities it was currently held in bar-rooms and other such
places of resort that the major was a man of huge sagacity. He was
further to be known by a heavy eye and a dull slow manner; and for being
a man of that kind who--mentally speaking--requires a deal of room to
turn himself in. But, in trading on his stock of wisdom, he invariably
proceeded on the principle of putting all the goods he had (and more)
into his window; and that went a great way with his constituency of
admirers. It went a great way, perhaps, with Mr Jefferson Brick, who
took occasion to whisper in Martin’s ear:

‘One of the most remarkable men in our country, sir!’

It must not be supposed, however, that the perpetual exhibition in the
market-place of all his stock-in-trade for sale or hire, was the major’s
sole claim to a very large share of sympathy and support. He was a great
politician; and the one article of his creed, in reference to all public
obligations involving the good faith and integrity of his country, was,
‘run a moist pen slick through everything, and start fresh.’ This
made him a patriot. In commercial affairs he was a bold speculator.
In plainer words he had a most distinguished genius for swindling, and
could start a bank, or negotiate a loan, or form a land-jobbing company
(entailing ruin, pestilence, and death, on hundreds of families), with
any gifted creature in the Union. This made him an admirable man of
business. He could hang about a bar-room, discussing the affairs of the
nation, for twelve hours together; and in that time could hold forth
with more intolerable dulness, chew more tobacco, smoke more tobacco,
drink more rum-toddy, mint-julep, gin-sling, and cocktail, than any
private gentleman of his acquaintance. This made him an orator and a
man of the people. In a word, the major was a rising character, and a
popular character, and was in a fair way to be sent by the popular party
to the State House of New York, if not in the end to Washington itself.
But as a man’s private prosperity does not always keep pace with his
patriotic devotion to public affairs; and as fraudulent transactions
have their downs as well as ups, the major was occasionally under a
cloud. Hence, just now Mrs Pawkins kept a boarding-house, and Major
Pawkins rather ‘loafed’ his time away than otherwise.

‘You have come to visit our country, sir, at a season of great
commercial depression,’ said the major.

‘At an alarming crisis,’ said the colonel.

‘At a period of unprecedented stagnation,’ said Mr Jefferson Brick.

‘I am sorry to hear that,’ returned Martin. ‘It’s not likely to last, I
hope?’

Martin knew nothing about America, or he would have known perfectly well
that if its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always
IS depressed, and always IS stagnated, and always IS at an alarming
crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body they are ready to make
oath upon the Evangelists at any hour of the day or night, that it
is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable
globe.

‘It’s not likely to last, I hope?’ said Martin.

‘Well!’ returned the major, ‘I expect we shall get along somehow, and
come right in the end.’

‘We are an elastic country,’ said the Rowdy Journal.

‘We are a young lion,’ said Mr Jefferson Brick.

‘We have revivifying and vigorous principles within ourselves,’ observed
the major. ‘Shall we drink a bitter afore dinner, colonel?’

The colonel assenting to this proposal with great alacrity, Major
Pawkins proposed an adjournment to a neighbouring bar-room, which, as he
observed, was ‘only in the next block.’ He then referred Martin to
Mrs Pawkins for all particulars connected with the rate of board and
lodging, and informed him that he would have the pleasure of seeing that
lady at dinner, which would soon be ready, as the dinner hour was two
o’clock, and it only wanted a quarter now. This reminded him that if the
bitter were to be taken at all, there was no time to lose; so he walked
off without more ado, and left them to follow if they thought proper.

When the major rose from his rocking-chair before the stove, and so
disturbed the hot air and balmy whiff of soup which fanned their brows,
the odour of stale tobacco became so decidedly prevalent as to leave no
doubt of its proceeding mainly from that gentleman’s attire. Indeed,
as Martin walked behind him to the bar-room, he could not help thinking
that the great square major, in his listlessness and langour, looked
very much like a stale weed himself; such as might be hoed out of
the public garden, with great advantage to the decent growth of that
preserve, and tossed on some congenial dunghill.

They encountered more weeds in the bar-room, some of whom (being thirsty
souls as well as dirty) were pretty stale in one sense, and pretty fresh
in another. Among them was a gentleman who, as Martin gathered from the
conversation that took place over the bitter, started that afternoon for
the Far West on a six months’ business tour, and who, as his outfit and
equipment for this journey, had just such another shiny hat and just
such another little pale valise as had composed the luggage of the
gentleman who came from England in the Screw.

They were walking back very leisurely; Martin arm-in-arm with Mr
Jefferson Brick, and the major and the colonel side-by-side before them;
when, as they came within a house or two of the major’s residence, they
heard a bell ringing violently. The instant this sound struck upon their
ears, the colonel and the major darted off, dashed up the steps and in
at the street-door (which stood ajar) like lunatics; while Mr Jefferson
Brick, detaching his arm from Martin’s, made a precipitate dive in the
same direction, and vanished also.

‘Good Heaven!’ thought Martin. ‘The premises are on fire! It was an
alarm bell!’

But there was no smoke to be seen, nor any flame, nor was there any
smell of fire. As Martin faltered on the pavement, three more gentlemen,
with horror and agitation depicted in their faces, came plunging wildly
round the street corner; jostled each other on the steps; struggled for
an instant; and rushed into the house, a confused heap of arms and
legs. Unable to bear it any longer, Martin followed. Even in his
rapid progress he was run down, thrust aside, and passed, by two more
gentlemen, stark mad, as it appeared, with fierce excitement.

‘Where is it?’ cried Martin, breathlessly, to a negro whom he
encountered in the passage.

‘In a eatin room, sa. Kernell, sa, him kep a seat ‘side himself, sa.’

‘A seat!’ cried Martin.

‘For a dinnar, sa.’

Martin started at him for a moment, and burst into a hearty laugh; to
which the negro, out of his natural good humour and desire to please, so
heartily responded, that his teeth shone like a gleam of light. ‘You’re
the pleasantest fellow I have seen yet,’ said Martin clapping him on the
back, ‘and give me a better appetite than bitters.’

With this sentiment he walked into the dining-room and slipped into
a chair next the colonel, which that gentleman (by this time nearly
through his dinner) had turned down in reserve for him, with its back
against the table.

It was a numerous company--eighteen or twenty perhaps. Of these some
five or six were ladies, who sat wedged together in a little phalanx by
themselves. All the knives and forks were working away at a rate that
was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to
eat his utmost in self-defence, as if a famine were expected to set in
before breakfast time to-morrow morning, and it had become high time
to assert the first law of nature. The poultry, which may perhaps be
considered to have formed the staple of the entertainment--for there was
a turkey at the top, a pair of ducks at the bottom, and two fowls in the
middle--disappeared as rapidly as if every bird had had the use of its
wings, and had flown in desperation down a human throat. The oysters,
stewed and pickled, leaped from their capacious reservoirs, and slid by
scores into the mouths of the assembly. The sharpest pickles vanished,
whole cucumbers at once, like sugar-plums, and no man winked his eye.
Great heaps of indigestible matter melted away as ice before the sun.
It was a solemn and an awful thing to see. Dyspeptic individuals bolted
their food in wedges; feeding, not themselves, but broods of nightmares,
who were continually standing at livery within them. Spare men, with
lank and rigid cheeks, came out unsatisfied from the destruction of
heavy dishes, and glared with watchful eyes upon the pastry. What Mrs
Pawkins felt each day at dinner-time is hidden from all human knowledge.
But she had one comfort. It was very soon over.

When the colonel had finished his dinner, which event took place while
Martin, who had sent his plate for some turkey, was waiting to begin,
he asked him what he thought of the boarders, who were from all parts of
the Union, and whether he would like to know any particulars concerning
them.

‘Pray,’ said Martin, ‘who is that sickly little girl opposite, with the
tight round eyes? I don’t see anybody here, who looks like her mother,
or who seems to have charge of her.’

‘Do you mean the matron in blue, sir?’ asked the colonel, with emphasis.
‘That is Mrs Jefferson Brick, sir.’

‘No, no,’ said Martin, ‘I mean the little girl, like a doll; directly
opposite.’

‘Well, sir!’ cried the colonel. ‘THAT is Mrs Jefferson Brick.’

Martin glanced at the colonel’s face, but he was quite serious.

‘Bless my soul! I suppose there will be a young Brick then, one of these
days?’ said Martin.

‘There are two young Bricks already, sir,’ returned the colonel.

The matron looked so uncommonly like a child herself, that Martin could
not help saying as much. ‘Yes, sir,’ returned the colonel, ‘but some
institutions develop human natur; others re--tard it.’

‘Jefferson Brick,’ he observed after a short silence, in commendation
of his correspondent, ‘is one of the most remarkable men in our country,
sir!’

This had passed almost in a whisper, for the distinguished gentleman
alluded to sat on Martin’s other hand.

‘Pray, Mr Brick,’ said Martin, turning to him, and asking a question
more for conversation’s sake than from any feeling of interest in its
subject, ‘who is that;’ he was going to say ‘young’ but thought it
prudent to eschew the word--‘that very short gentleman yonder, with the
red nose?’

‘That is Pro--fessor Mullit, sir,’ replied Jefferson.

‘May I ask what he is professor of?’ asked Martin.

‘Of education, sir,’ said Jefferson Brick.

‘A sort of schoolmaster, possibly?’ Martin ventured to observe.

‘He is a man of fine moral elements, sir, and not commonly endowed,’
said the war correspondent. ‘He felt it necessary, at the last election
for President, to repudiate and denounce his father, who voted on the
wrong interest. He has since written some powerful pamphlets, under
the signature of “Suturb,” or Brutus reversed. He is one of the most
remarkable men in our country, sir.’

‘There seem to be plenty of ‘em,’ thought Martin, ‘at any rate.’

Pursuing his inquiries Martin found that there were no fewer than four
majors present, two colonels, one general, and a captain, so that he
could not help thinking how strongly officered the American militia must
be; and wondering very much whether the officers commanded each other;
or if they did not, where on earth the privates came from. There seemed
to be no man there without a title; for those who had not attained to
military honours were either doctors, professors, or reverends. Three
very hard and disagreeable gentlemen were on missions from neighbouring
States; one on monetary affairs, one on political, one on sectarian.
Among the ladies, there were Mrs Pawkins, who was very straight, bony,
and silent; and a wiry-faced old damsel, who held strong sentiments
touching the rights of women, and had diffused the same in lectures;
but the rest were strangely devoid of individual traits of character,
insomuch that any one of them might have changed minds with the other,
and nobody would have found it out. These, by the way, were the only
members of the party who did not appear to be among the most remarkable
people in the country.

Several of the gentlemen got up, one by one, and walked off as they
swallowed their last morsel; pausing generally by the stove for a minute
or so to refresh themselves at the brass spittoons. A few sedentary
characters, however, remained at table full a quarter of an hour, and
did not rise until the ladies rose, when all stood up.

‘Where are they going?’ asked Martin, in the ear of Mr Jefferson Brick.

‘To their bedrooms, sir.’

‘Is there no dessert, or other interval of conversation?’ asked Martin,
who was disposed to enjoy himself after his long voyage.

‘We are a busy people here, sir, and have no time for that,’ was the
reply.

So the ladies passed out in single file; Mr Jefferson Brick and such
other married gentlemen as were left, acknowledging the departure
of their other halves by a nod; and there was an end of THEM. Martin
thought this an uncomfortable custom, but he kept his opinion to himself
for the present, being anxious to hear, and inform himself by, the
conversation of the busy gentlemen, who now lounged about the stove as
if a great weight had been taken off their minds by the withdrawal of
the other sex; and who made a plentiful use of the spittoons and their
toothpicks.

It was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater part
of it may be summed up in one word. Dollars. All their cares, hopes,
joys, affections, virtues, and associations, seemed to be melted down
into dollars. Whatever the chance contributions that fell into the slow
cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab with dollars.
Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by their dollars;
life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked down for its
dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any venture having
their attainment for its end. The more of that worthless ballast, honour
and fair-dealing, which any man cast overboard from the ship of his Good
Name and Good Intent, the more ample stowage-room he had for dollars.
Make commerce one huge lie and mighty theft. Deface the banner of the
nation for an idle rag; pollute it star by star; and cut out stripe by
stripe as from the arm of a degraded soldier. Do anything for dollars!
What is a flag to THEM!

One who rides at all hazards of limb and life in the chase of a fox,
will prefer to ride recklessly at most times. So it was with these
gentlemen. He was the greatest patriot, in their eyes, who brawled the
loudest, and who cared the least for decency. He was their champion who,
in the brutal fury of his own pursuit, could cast no stigma upon them
for the hot knavery of theirs. Thus, Martin learned in the five minutes’
straggling talk about the stove, that to carry pistols into legislative
assemblies, and swords in sticks, and other such peaceful toys; to seize
opponents by the throat, as dogs or rats might do; to bluster, bully,
and overbear by personal assailment; were glowing deeds. Not thrusts and
stabs at Freedom, striking far deeper into her House of Life than any
sultan’s scimitar could reach; but rare incense on her altars, having a
grateful scent in patriotic nostrils, and curling upward to the seventh
heaven of Fame.

Once or twice, when there was a pause, Martin asked such questions as
naturally occurred to him, being a stranger, about the national poets,
the theatre, literature, and the arts. But the information which these
gentlemen were in a condition to give him on such topics, did not extend
beyond the effusions of such master-spirits of the time as Colonel
Diver, Mr Jefferson Brick, and others; renowned, as it appeared, for
excellence in the achievement of a peculiar style of broadside essay
called ‘a screamer.’

‘We are a busy people, sir,’ said one of the captains, who was from the
West, ‘and have no time for reading mere notions. We don’t mind ‘em
if they come to us in newspapers along with almighty strong stuff of
another sort, but darn your books.’

Here the general, who appeared to grow quite faint at the bare thought
of reading anything which was neither mercantile nor political, and was
not in a newspaper, inquired ‘if any gentleman would drink some?’ Most
of the company, considering this a very choice and seasonable idea,
lounged out, one by one, to the bar-room in the next block. Thence
they probably went to their stores and counting-houses; thence to the
bar-room again, to talk once more of dollars, and enlarge their minds
with the perusal and discussion of screamers; and thence each man to
snore in the bosom of his own family.

‘Which would seem,’ said Martin, pursuing the current of his own
thoughts, ‘to be the principal recreation they enjoy in common.’ With
that, he fell a-musing again on dollars, demagogues, and bar-rooms;
debating within himself whether busy people of this class were really
as busy as they claimed to be, or only had an inaptitude for social and
domestic pleasure.

It was a difficult question to solve; and the mere fact of its being
strongly presented to his mind by all that he had seen and heard, was
not encouraging. He sat down at the deserted board, and becoming
more and more despondent, as he thought of all the uncertainties and
difficulties of his precarious situation, sighed heavily.

Now, there had been at the dinner-table a middle-aged man with a dark
eye and a sunburnt face, who had attracted Martin’s attention by having
something very engaging and honest in the expression of his features;
but of whom he could learn nothing from either of his neighbours, who
seemed to consider him quite beneath their notice. He had taken no part
in the conversation round the stove, nor had he gone forth with the
rest; and now, when he heard Martin sigh for the third or fourth
time, he interposed with some casual remark, as if he desired, without
obtruding himself upon a stranger’s notice, to engage him in cheerful
conversation if he could. His motive was so obvious, and yet so
delicately expressed, that Martin felt really grateful to him, and
showed him so in the manner of his reply.

‘I will not ask you,’ said this gentleman with a smile, as he rose and
moved towards him, ‘how you like my country, for I can quite anticipate
your feeling on that point. But, as I am an American, and consequently
bound to begin with a question, I’ll ask you how you like the colonel?’

‘You are so very frank,’ returned Martin, ‘that I have no hesitation in
saying I don’t like him at all. Though I must add that I am beholden to
him for his civility in bringing me here--and arranging for my stay,
on pretty reasonable terms, by the way,’ he added, remembering that the
colonel had whispered him to that effect, before going out.

‘Not much beholden,’ said the stranger drily. ‘The colonel occasionally
boards packet-ships, I have heard, to glean the latest information
for his journal; and he occasionally brings strangers to board here, I
believe, with a view to the little percentage which attaches to those
good offices; and which the hostess deducts from his weekly bill. I
don’t offend you, I hope?’ he added, seeing that Martin reddened.

‘My dear sir,’ returned Martin, as they shook hands, ‘how is that
possible! to tell you the truth, I--am--’

‘Yes?’ said the gentleman, sitting down beside him.

‘I am rather at a loss, since I must speak plainly,’ said Martin,
getting the better of his hesitation, ‘to know how this colonel escapes
being beaten.’

‘Well! He has been beaten once or twice,’ remarked the gentleman
quietly. ‘He is one of a class of men, in whom our own Franklin, so
long ago as ten years before the close of the last century, foresaw
our danger and disgrace. Perhaps you don’t know that Franklin, in very
severe terms, published his opinion that those who were slandered
by such fellows as this colonel, having no sufficient remedy in the
administration of this country’s laws or in the decent and right-minded
feeling of its people, were justified in retorting on such public
nuisances by means of a stout cudgel?’

‘I was not aware of that,’ said Martin, ‘but I am very glad to know
it, and I think it worthy of his memory; especially’--here he hesitated
again.

‘Go on,’ said the other, smiling as if he knew what stuck in Martin’s
throat.

‘Especially,’ pursued Martin, ‘as I can already understand that it may
have required great courage, even in his time, to write freely on any
question which was not a party one in this very free country.’

‘Some courage, no doubt,’ returned his new friend. ‘Do you think it
would require any to do so, now?’

‘Indeed I think it would; and not a little,’ said Martin.

‘You are right. So very right, that I believe no satirist could breathe
this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us to-morrow,
he would be hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature,
and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has
anatomized our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and
who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate
hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears,
believe me. In some cases I could name to you, where a native writer
has ventured on the most harmless and good-humoured illustrations of
our vices or defects, it has been found necessary to announce, that in
a second edition the passage has been expunged, or altered, or explained
away, or patched into praise.’

‘And how has this been brought about?’ asked Martin, in dismay.

‘Think of what you have seen and heard to-day, beginning with the
colonel,’ said his friend, ‘and ask yourself. How THEY came about,
is another question. Heaven forbid that they should be samples of the
intelligence and virtue of America, but they come uppermost, and in
great numbers, and too often represent it. Will you walk?’

There was a cordial candour in his manner, and an engaging confidence
that it would not be abused; a manly bearing on his own part, and a
simple reliance on the manly faith of a stranger; which Martin had
never seen before. He linked his arm readily in that of the American
gentleman, and they walked out together.

It was perhaps to men like this, his new companion, that a traveller
of honoured name, who trod those shores now nearly forty years ago, and
woke upon that soil, as many have done since, to blots and stains upon
its high pretensions, which in the brightness of his distant dreams were
lost to view, appealed in these words--

     ‘Oh, but for such, Columbia’s days were done;
     Rank without ripeness, quickened without sun,
     Crude at the surface, rotten at the core,
     Her fruits would fall before her spring were o’er!’



CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

MARTIN ENLARGES HIS CIRCLE OF AQUAINTANCE; INCREASES HIS STOCK
OF WISDOM; AND HAS AN EXCELLENT OPPORTUNITY OF COMPARING HIS OWN
EXPERIENCES WITH THOSE OF LUMMY NED OF THE LIGHT SALISBURY, AS RELATED
BY HIS FRIEND MR WILLIAM SIMMONS


It was characteristic of Martin, that all this while he had either
forgotten Mark Tapley as completely as if there had been no such person
in existence, or, if for a moment the figure of that gentleman rose
before his mental vision, had dismissed it as something by no means of
a pressing nature, which might be attended to by-and-bye, and could wait
his perfect leisure. But, being now in the streets again, it occurred to
him as just coming within the bare limits of possibility that Mr Tapley
might, in course of time, grow tired of waiting on the threshold of the
Rowdy Journal Office, so he intimated to his new friend, that if they
could conveniently walk in that direction, he would be glad to get this
piece of business off his mind.

‘And speaking of business,’ said Martin, ‘may I ask, in order that I may
not be behind-hand with questions either, whether your occupation holds
you to this city, or like myself, you are a visitor here?’

‘A visitor,’ replied his friend. ‘I was “raised” in the State of
Massachusetts, and reside there still. My home is in a quiet country
town. I am not often in these busy places; and my inclination to visit
them does not increase with our better acquaintance, I assure you.’

‘You have been abroad?’ asked Martin.

‘Oh yes.’

‘And, like most people who travel, have become more than ever attached
to your home and native country,’ said Martin, eyeing him curiously.

‘To my home--yes,’ rejoined his friend. ‘To my native country AS my
home--yes, also.’

‘You imply some reservation,’ said Martin.

‘Well,’ returned his new friend, ‘if you ask me whether I came back here
with a greater relish for my country’s faults; with a greater fondness
for those who claim (at the rate of so many dollars a day) to be her
friends; with a cooler indifference to the growth of principles among
us in respect of public matters and of private dealings between man and
man, the advocacy of which, beyond the foul atmosphere of a criminal
trial, would disgrace your own old Bailey lawyers; why, then I answer
plainly, No.’

‘Oh!’ said Martin; in so exactly the same key as his friend’s No, that
it sounded like an echo.

‘If you ask me,’ his companion pursued, ‘whether I came back here better
satisfied with a state of things which broadly divides society into two
classes--whereof one, the great mass, asserts a spurious independence,
most miserably dependent for its mean existence on the disregard of
humanizing conventionalities of manner and social custom, so that the
coarser a man is, the more distinctly it shall appeal to his taste;
while the other, disgusted with the low standard thus set up and made
adaptable to everything, takes refuge among the graces and refinements
it can bring to bear on private life, and leaves the public weal to
such fortune as may betide it in the press and uproar of a general
scramble--then again I answer, No.’

And again Martin said ‘Oh!’ in the same odd way as before, being anxious
and disconcerted; not so much, to say the truth, on public grounds, as
with reference to the fading prospects of domestic architecture.

‘In a word,’ resumed the other, ‘I do not find and cannot believe and
therefore will not allow, that we are a model of wisdom, and an example
to the world, and the perfection of human reason, and a great deal more
to the same purpose, which you may hear any hour in the day; simply
because we began our political life with two inestimable advantages.’

‘What were they?’ asked Martin.

‘One, that our history commenced at so late a period as to escape the
ages of bloodshed and cruelty through which other nations have passed;
and so had all the light of their probation, and none of its darkness.
The other, that we have a vast territory, and not--as yet--too many
people on it. These facts considered, we have done little enough, I
think.’

‘Education?’ suggested Martin, faintly.

‘Pretty well on that head,’ said the other, shrugging his shoulders,
‘still no mighty matter to boast of; for old countries, and despotic
countries too, have done as much, if not more, and made less noise about
it. We shine out brightly in comparison with England, certainly; but
hers is a very extreme case. You complimented me on my frankness, you
know,’ he added, laughing.

‘Oh! I am not at all astonished at your speaking thus openly when my
country is in question,’ returned Martin. ‘It is your plain-speaking in
reference to your own that surprises me.’

‘You will not find it a scarce quality here, I assure you, saving among
the Colonel Divers, and Jefferson Bricks, and Major Pawkinses; though
the best of us are something like the man in Goldsmith’s comedy, who
wouldn’t suffer anybody but himself to abuse his master. Come!’ he
added. ‘Let us talk of something else. You have come here on some design
of improving your fortune, I dare say; and I should grieve to put you
out of heart. I am some years older than you, besides; and may, on a few
trivial points, advise you, perhaps.’

There was not the least curiosity or impertinence in the manner of this
offer, which was open-hearted, unaffected, and good-natured. As it was
next to impossible that he should not have his confidence awakened by
a deportment so prepossessing and kind, Martin plainly stated what had
brought him into those parts, and even made the very difficult avowal
that he was poor. He did not say how poor, it must be admitted, rather
throwing off the declaration with an air which might have implied that
he had money enough for six months, instead of as many weeks; but poor
he said he was, and grateful he said he would be, for any counsel that
his friend would give him.

It would not have been very difficult for any one to see; but it was
particularly easy for Martin, whose perceptions were sharpened by his
circumstances, to discern; that the stranger’s face grew infinitely
longer as the domestic-architecture project was developed. Nor, although
he made a great effort to be as encouraging as possible, could he
prevent his head from shaking once involuntarily, as if it said in the
vulgar tongue, upon its own account, ‘No go!’ But he spoke in a cheerful
tone, and said, that although there was no such opening as Martin
wished, in that city, he would make it matter of immediate consideration
and inquiry where one was most likely to exist; and then he made Martin
acquainted with his name, which was Bevan; and with his profession,
which was physic, though he seldom or never practiced; and with other
circumstances connected with himself and family, which fully occupied
the time, until they reached the Rowdy Journal Office.

Mr Tapley appeared to be taking his ease on the landing of the first
floor; for sounds as of some gentleman established in that region
whistling ‘Rule Britannia’ with all his might and main, greeted their
ears before they reached the house. On ascending to the spot from
whence this music proceeded, they found him recumbent in the midst of a
fortification of luggage, apparently performing his national anthem
for the gratification of a grey-haired black man, who sat on one of the
outworks (a portmanteau), staring intently at Mark, while Mark, with
his head reclining on his hand, returned the compliment in a thoughtful
manner, and whistled all the time. He seemed to have recently dined, for
his knife, a casebottle, and certain broken meats in a handkerchief, lay
near at hand. He had employed a portion of his leisure in the decoration
of the Rowdy Journal door, whereon his own initials now appeared in
letters nearly half a foot long, together with the day of the month in
smaller type; the whole surrounded by an ornamental border, and looking
very fresh and bold.

‘I was a’most afraid you was lost, sir!’ cried Mark, rising, and
stopping the tune at that point where Britons generally are supposed to
declare (when it is whistled) that they never, never, never--

‘Nothing gone wrong, I hope, sir?’

‘No, Mark. Where’s your friend?’

‘The mad woman, sir?’ said Mr Tapley. ‘Oh! she’s all right, sir.’

‘Did she find her husband?’

‘Yes, sir. Leastways she’s found his remains,’ said Mark, correcting
himself.

‘The man’s not dead, I hope?’

‘Not altogether dead, sir,’ returned Mark; ‘but he’s had more fevers and
agues than is quite reconcilable with being alive. When she didn’t see
him a-waiting for her, I thought she’d have died herself, I did!’

‘Was he not here, then?’

‘HE wasn’t here. There was a feeble old shadow come a-creeping down at
last, as much like his substance when she know’d him, as your shadow
when it’s drawn out to its very finest and longest by the sun, is like
you. But it was his remains, there’s no doubt about that. She took on
with joy, poor thing, as much as if it had been all of him!’

‘Had he bought land?’ asked Mr Bevan.

‘Ah! He’d bought land,’ said Mark, shaking his head, ‘and paid for it
too. Every sort of nateral advantage was connected with it, the agents
said; and there certainly was ONE, quite unlimited. No end to the
water!’

‘It’s a thing he couldn’t have done without, I suppose,’ observed
Martin, peevishly.

‘Certainly not, sir. There it was, any way; always turned on, and no
water-rate. Independent of three or four slimy old rivers close by,
it varied on the farm from four to six foot deep in the dry season.
He couldn’t say how deep it was in the rainy time, for he never had
anything long enough to sound it with.’

‘Is this true?’ asked Martin of his companion.

‘Extremely probable,’ he answered. ‘Some Mississippi or Missouri lot, I
dare say.’

‘However,’ pursued Mark, ‘he came from I-don’t-know-where-and-all, down
to New York here, to meet his wife and children; and they started off
again in a steamboat this blessed afternoon, as happy to be along with
each other as if they were going to Heaven. I should think they was,
pretty straight, if I may judge from the poor man’s looks.’

‘And may I ask,’ said Martin, glancing, but not with any displeasure,
from Mark to the negro, ‘who this gentleman is? Another friend of
yours?’

‘Why sir,’ returned Mark, taking him aside, and speaking confidentially
in his ear, ‘he’s a man of colour, sir!’

‘Do you take me for a blind man,’ asked Martin, somewhat impatiently,
‘that you think it necessary to tell me that, when his face is the
blackest that ever was seen?’

‘No, no; when I say a man of colour,’ returned Mark, ‘I mean that
he’s been one of them as there’s picters of in the shops. A man and a
brother, you know, sir,’ said Mr Tapley, favouring his master with a
significant indication of the figure so often represented in tracts and
cheap prints.

‘A slave!’ cried Martin, in a whisper.

‘Ah!’ said Mark in the same tone. ‘Nothing else. A slave. Why, when that
there man was young--don’t look at him while I’m a-telling it--he was
shot in the leg; gashed in the arm; scored in his live limbs, like
crimped fish; beaten out of shape; had his neck galled with an iron
collar, and wore iron rings upon his wrists and ankles. The marks are on
him to this day. When I was having my dinner just now, he stripped off
his coat, and took away my appetite.’

‘Is THIS true?’ asked Martin of his friend, who stood beside them.

‘I have no reason to doubt it,’ he answered, shaking his head ‘It very
often is.’

‘Bless you,’ said Mark, ‘I know it is, from hearing his whole story.
That master died; so did his second master from having his head cut
open with a hatchet by another slave, who, when he’d done it, went and
drowned himself; then he got a better one; in years and years he saved
up a little money, and bought his freedom, which he got pretty cheap at
last, on account of his strength being nearly gone, and he being ill.
Then he come here. And now he’s a-saving up to treat himself, afore
he dies, to one small purchase--it’s nothing to speak of. Only his own
daughter; that’s all!’ cried Mr Tapley, becoming excited. ‘Liberty for
ever! Hurrah! Hail, Columbia!’

‘Hush!’ cried Martin, clapping his hand upon his mouth; ‘and don’t be an
idiot. What is he doing here?’

‘Waiting to take our luggage off upon a truck,’ said Mark. ‘He’d have
come for it by-and-bye, but I engaged him for a very reasonable charge
(out of my own pocket) to sit along with me and make me jolly; and I
am jolly; and if I was rich enough to contract with him to wait upon me
once a day, to be looked at, I’d never be anything else.’

The fact may cause a solemn impeachment of Mark’s veracity, but it must
be admitted nevertheless, that there was that in his face and manner at
the moment, which militated strongly against this emphatic declaration
of his state of mind.

‘Lord love you, sir,’ he added, ‘they’re so fond of Liberty in this part
of the globe, that they buy her and sell her and carry her to market
with ‘em. They’ve such a passion for Liberty, that they can’t help
taking liberties with her. That’s what it’s owing to.’

‘Very well,’ said Martin, wishing to change the theme. ‘Having come to
that conclusion, Mark, perhaps you’ll attend to me. The place to which
the luggage is to go is printed on this card. Mrs Pawkins’s Boarding
House.’

‘Mrs Pawkins’s boarding-house,’ repeated Mark. ‘Now, Cicero.’

‘Is that his name?’ asked Martin

‘That’s his name, sir,’ rejoined Mark. And the negro grinning assent
from under a leathern portmanteau, than which his own face was many
shades deeper, hobbled downstairs with his portion of their worldly
goods; Mark Tapley having already gone before with his share.

Martin and his friend followed them to the door below, and were about
to pursue their walk, when the latter stopped, and asked, with some
hesitation, whether that young man was to be trusted?

‘Mark! oh certainly! with anything.’

‘You don’t understand me--I think he had better go with us. He is an
honest fellow, and speaks his mind so very plainly.’

‘Why, the fact is,’ said Martin, smiling, ‘that being unaccustomed to a
free republic, he is used to do so.’

‘I think he had better go with us,’ returned the other. ‘He may get into
some trouble otherwise. This is not a slave State; but I am ashamed
to say that a spirit of Tolerance is not so common anywhere in
these latitudes as the form. We are not remarkable for behaving very
temperately to each other when we differ; but to strangers! no, I really
think he had better go with us.’

Martin called to him immediately to be of their party; so Cicero and the
truck went one way, and they three went another.

They walked about the city for two or three hours; seeing it from the
best points of view, and pausing in the principal streets, and before
such public buildings as Mr Bevan pointed out. Night then coming
on apace, Martin proposed that they should adjourn to Mrs Pawkins’s
establishment for coffee; but in this he was overruled by his new
acquaintance, who seemed to have set his heart on carrying him, though
it were only for an hour, to the house of a friend of his who lived hard
by. Feeling (however disinclined he was, being weary) that it would be
in bad taste, and not very gracious, to object that he was unintroduced,
when this open-hearted gentleman was so ready to be his sponsor,
Martin--for once in his life, at all events--sacrificed his own will and
pleasure to the wishes of another, and consented with a fair grace. So
travelling had done him that much good, already.

Mr Bevan knocked at the door of a very neat house of moderate size, from
the parlour windows of which, lights were shining brightly into the now
dark street. It was quickly opened by a man with such a thoroughly Irish
face, that it seemed as if he ought, as a matter of right and principle,
to be in rags, and could have no sort of business to be looking
cheerfully at anybody out of a whole suit of clothes.

Commending Mark to the care of this phenomenon--for such he may be said
to have been in Martin’s eyes--Mr Bevan led the way into the room
which had shed its cheerfulness upon the street, to whose occupants he
introduced Mr Chuzzlewit as a gentleman from England, whose acquaintance
he had recently had the pleasure to make. They gave him welcome in all
courtesy and politeness; and in less than five minutes’ time he found
himself sitting very much at his ease by the fireside, and becoming
vastly well acquainted with the whole family.

There were two young ladies--one eighteen; the other twenty--both very
slender, but very pretty; their mother, who looked, as Martin thought
much older and more faded than she ought to have looked; and their
grandmother, a little sharp-eyed, quick old woman, who seemed to have
got past that stage, and to have come all right again. Besides these,
there were the young ladies’ father, and the young ladies’ brother; the
first engaged in mercantile affairs; the second, a student at college;
both, in a certain cordiality of manner, like his own friend, and not
unlike him in face. Which was no great wonder, for it soon appeared that
he was their near relation. Martin could not help tracing the family
pedigree from the two young ladies, because they were foremost in his
thoughts; not only from being, as aforesaid, very pretty, but by reason
of their wearing miraculously small shoes, and the thinnest possible
silk stockings; the which their rocking-chairs developed to a
distracting extent.

There is no doubt that it was a monstrous comfortable circumstance to be
sitting in a snug, well-furnished room, warmed by a cheerful fire, and
full of various pleasant decorations, including four small shoes, and
the like amount of silk stockings, and--yes, why not?--the feet and
legs therein enshrined. And there is no doubt that Martin was monstrous
well-disposed to regard his position in that light, after his recent
experience of the Screw, and of Mrs Pawkins’s boarding-house. The
consequence was that he made himself very agreeable indeed; and by
the time the tea and coffee arrived (with sweet preserves, and cunning
tea-cakes in its train), was in a highly genial state, and much esteemed
by the whole family.

Another delightful circumstance turned up before the first cup of tea
was drunk. The whole family had been in England. There was a pleasant
thing! But Martin was not quite so glad of this, when he found that
they knew all the great dukes, lords, viscounts, marquesses, duchesses,
knights, and baronets, quite affectionately, and were beyond everything
interested in the least particular concerning them. However, when they
asked, after the wearer of this or that coronet, and said, ‘Was he quite
well?’ Martin answered, ‘Yes, oh yes. Never better;’ and when they said,
‘his lordship’s mother, the duchess, was she much changed?’ Martin said,
‘Oh dear no, they would know her anywhere, if they saw her to-morrow;’
and so got on pretty well. In like manner when the young ladies
questioned him touching the Gold Fish in that Grecian fountain in such
and such a nobleman’s conservatory, and whether there were as many as
there used to be, he gravely reported, after mature consideration, that
there must be at least twice as many; and as to the exotics, ‘Oh! well!
it was of no use talking about THEM; they must be seen to be believed;’
which improved state of circumstances reminded the family of the
splendour of that brilliant festival (comprehending the whole British
Peerage and Court Calendar) to which they were specially invited, and
which indeed had been partly given in their honour; and recollections
of what Mr Norris the father had said to the marquess, and of what Mrs
Norris the mother had said to the marchioness, and of what the marquess
and marchioness had both said, when they said that upon their words and
honours they wished Mr Norris the father and Mrs Norris the mother, and
the Misses Norris the daughters, and Mr Norris Junior, the son, would
only take up their permanent residence in England, and give them the
pleasure of their everlasting friendship, occupied a very considerable
time.

Martin thought it rather stange, and in some sort inconsistent, that
during the whole of these narrations, and in the very meridian of their
enjoyment thereof, both Mr Norris the father, and Mr Norris Junior,
the son (who corresponded, every post, with four members of the English
Peerage), enlarged upon the inestimable advantage of having no such
arbitrary distinctions in that enlightened land, where there were no
noblemen but nature’s noblemen, and where all society was based on one
broad level of brotherly love and natural equality. Indeed, Mr Norris
the father gradually expanding into an oration on this swelling theme,
was becoming tedious, when Mr Bevan diverted his thoughts by happening
to make some causal inquiry relative to the occupier of the next house;
in reply to which, this same Mr Norris the father observed, that ‘that
person entertained religious opinions of which he couldn’t approve; and
therefore he hadn’t the honour of knowing the gentleman.’ Mrs Norris the
mother added another reason of her own, the same in effect, but varying
in words; to wit, that she believed the people were well enough in their
way, but they were not genteel.

Another little trait came out, which impressed itself on Martin
forcibly. Mr Bevan told them about Mark and the negro, and then it
appeared that all the Norrises were abolitionists. It was a great relief
to hear this, and Martin was so much encouraged on finding himself in
such company, that he expressed his sympathy with the oppressed and
wretched blacks. Now, one of the young ladies--the prettiest and most
delicate--was mightily amused at the earnestness with which he spoke;
and on his craving leave to ask her why, was quite unable for a time to
speak for laughing. As soon however as she could, she told him that
the negroes were such a funny people, so excessively ludicrous in their
manners and appearance, that it was wholly impossible for those who knew
them well, to associate any serious ideas with such a very absurd part
of the creation. Mr Norris the father, and Mrs Norris the mother, and
Miss Norris the sister, and Mr Norris Junior the brother, and even Mrs
Norris Senior the grandmother, were all of this opinion, and laid
it down as an absolute matter of fact--as if there were nothing in
suffering and slavery, grim enough to cast a solemn air on any human
animal; though it were as ridiculous, physically, as the most
grotesque of apes, or morally, as the mildest Nimrod among tuft-hunting
republicans!

‘In short,’ said Mr Norris the father, settling the question
comfortably, ‘there is a natural antipathy between the races.’

‘Extending,’ said Martin’s friend, in a low voice, ‘to the cruellest of
tortures, and the bargain and sale of unborn generations.’

Mr Norris the son said nothing, but he made a wry face, and dusted his
fingers as Hamlet might after getting rid of Yorick’s skull; just as
though he had that moment touched a negro, and some of the black had
come off upon his hands.

In order that their talk might fall again into its former pleasant
channel, Martin dropped the subject, with a shrewd suspicion that it
would be a dangerous theme to revive under the best of circumstances;
and again addressed himself to the young ladies, who were very
gorgeously attired in very beautiful colours, and had every article of
dress on the same extensive scale as the little shoes and the thin silk
stockings. This suggested to him that they were great proficients in the
French fashions, which soon turned out to be the case, for though their
information appeared to be none of the newest, it was very extensive;
and the eldest sister in particular, who was distinguished by a talent
for metaphysics, the laws of hydraulic pressure, and the rights of human
kind, had a novel way of combining these acquirements and bringing them
to bear on any subject from Millinery to the Millennium, both inclusive,
which was at once improving and remarkable; so much so, in short, that
it was usually observed to reduce foreigners to a state of temporary
insanity in five minutes.

Martin felt his reason going; and as a means of saving himself, besought
the other sister (seeing a piano in the room) to sing. With this request
she willingly complied; and a bravura concert, solely sustained by the
Misses Noriss, presently began. They sang in all languages--except their
own. German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swiss; but nothing
native; nothing so low as native. For, in this respect, languages are
like many other travellers--ordinary and commonplace enough at home, but
‘specially genteel abroad.

There is little doubt that in course of time the Misses Norris would
have come to Hebrew, if they had not been interrupted by an announcement
from the Irishman, who, flinging open the door, cried in a loud voice--

‘Jiniral Fladdock!’

‘My!’ cried the sisters, desisting suddenly. ‘The general come back!’

As they made the exclamation, the general, attired in full uniform for a
ball, came darting in with such precipitancy that, hitching his boot
in the carpet, and getting his sword between his legs, he came down
headlong, and presented a curious little bald place on the crown of his
head to the eyes of the astonished company. Nor was this the worst of
it; for being rather corpulent and very tight, the general being down,
could not get up again, but lay there writhing and doing such things with
his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history.

Of course there was an immediate rush to his assistance; and the general
was promptly raised. But his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully
made, that he came up stiff and without a bend in him like a dead Clown,
and had no command whatever of himself until he was put quite flat upon
the soles of his feet, when he became animated as by a miracle, and
moving edgewise that he might go in a narrower compass and be in less
danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes by brushing them
against anything, advanced with a smiling visage to salute the lady of
the house.

To be sure, it would have been impossible for the family to testify
purer delight and joy than at this unlooked-for appearance of General
Fladdock! The general was as warmly received as if New York had been in
a state of siege and no other general was to be got for love or money.
He shook hands with the Norrises three times all round, and then
reviewed them from a little distance as a brave commander might, with
his ample cloak drawn forward over the right shoulder and thrown back
upon the left side to reveal his manly breast.

‘And do I then,’ cried the general, ‘once again behold the choicest
spirits of my country!’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Norris the father. ‘Here we are, general.’

Then all the Norrises pressed round the general, inquiring how and where
he had been since the date of his letter, and how he had enjoyed himself
in foreign parts, and particularly and above all, to what extent he had
become acquainted with the great dukes, lords, viscounts, marquesses,
duchesses, knights, and baronets, in whom the people of those benighted
countries had delight.

‘Well, then, don’t ask me,’ said the general, holding up his hand. ‘I
was among ‘em all the time, and have got public journals in my trunk
with my name printed’--he lowered his voice and was very impressive
here--‘among the fashionable news. But, oh, the conventionalities of
that a-mazing Europe!’

‘Ah!’ cried Mr Norris the father, giving his head a melancholy shake,
and looking towards Martin as though he would say, ‘I can’t deny it,
sir. I would if I could.’

‘The limited diffusion of a moral sense in that country!’ exclaimed the
general. ‘The absence of a moral dignity in man!’

‘Ah!’ sighed all the Norrises, quite overwhelmed with despondency.

‘I couldn’t have realised it,’ pursued the general, ‘without being
located on the spot. Norris, your imagination is the imagination of a
strong man, but YOU couldn’t have realised it, without being located on
the spot!’

‘Never,’ said Mr Norris.

‘The ex-clusiveness, the pride, the form, the ceremony,’ exclaimed the
general, emphasizing the article more vigorously at every repetition.
‘The artificial barriers set up between man and man; the division of the
human race into court cards and plain cards, of every denomination--into
clubs, diamonds, spades--anything but heart!’

‘Ah!’ cried the whole family. ‘Too true, general!’

‘But stay!’ cried Mr Norris the father, taking him by the arm. ‘Surely
you crossed in the Screw, general?’

‘Well! so I did,’ was the reply.

‘Possible!’ cried the young ladies. ‘Only think!’

The general seemed at a loss to understand why his having come home
in the Screw should occasion such a sensation, nor did he seem at all
clearer on the subject when Mr Norris, introducing him to Martin, said:

‘A fellow-passenger of yours, I think?’

‘Of mine?’ exclaimed the general; ‘No!’

He had never seen Martin, but Martin had seen him, and recognized him,
now that they stood face to face, as the gentleman who had stuck his
hands in his pockets towards the end of the voyage, and walked the deck
with his nostrils dilated.

Everybody looked at Martin. There was no help for it. The truth must
out.

‘I came over in the same ship as the general,’ said Martin, ‘but not in
the same cabin. It being necessary for me to observe strict economy, I
took my passage in the steerage.’

If the general had been carried up bodily to a loaded cannon, and
required to let it off that moment, he could not have been in a state
of greater consternation than when he heard these words. He,
Fladdock--Fladdock in full militia uniform, Fladdock the General,
Fladdock, the caressed of foreign noblemen--expected to know a fellow
who had come over in the steerage of line-of-packet ship, at the cost
of four pound ten! And meeting that fellow in the very sanctuary of New
York fashion, and nestling in the bosom of the New York aristocracy! He
almost laid his hand upon his sword.

A death-like stillness fell upon the Norisses. If this story should get
wind, their country relation had, by his imprudence, for ever disgraced
them. They were the bright particular stars of an exalted New York
sphere. There were other fashionable spheres above them, and other
fashionable spheres below, and none of the stars in any one of these
spheres had anything to say to the stars in any other of these spheres.
But, through all the spheres it would go forth that the Norrises,
deceived by gentlemanly manners and appearances, had, falling from their
high estate, ‘received’ a dollarless and unknown man. O guardian eagle
of the pure Republic, had they lived for this!

‘You will allow me,’ said Martin, after a terrible silence, ‘to take
my leave. I feel that I am the cause of at least as much embarrassment
here, as I have brought upon myself. But I am bound, before I go, to
exonerate this gentleman, who, in introducing me to such society, was
quite ignorant of my unworthiness, I assure you.’

With that he made his bow to the Norrises, and walked out like a man of
snow; very cool externally, but pretty hot within.

‘Come, come,’ said Mr Norris the father, looking with a pale face on
the assembled circle as Martin closed the door, ‘the young man has this
night beheld a refinement of social manner, and an easy magnificence of
social decoration, to which he is a stranger in his own country. Let us
hope it may awake a moral sense within him.’

If that peculiarly transatlantic article, a moral sense--for, if native
statesmen, orators, and pamphleteers, are to be believed, America quite
monopolises the commodity--if that peculiarly transatlantic article be
supposed to include a benevolent love of all mankind, certainly Martin’s
would have borne, just then, a deal of waking. As he strode along
the street, with Mark at his heels, his immoral sense was in active
operation; prompting him to the utterance of some rather sanguinary
remarks, which it was well for his own credit that nobody overheard.
He had so far cooled down, however, that he had begun to laugh at the
recollection of these incidents, when he heard another step behind him,
and turning round encountered his friend Bevan, quite out of breath.

He drew his arm through Martin’s, and entreating him to walk slowly, was
silent for some minutes. At length he said:

‘I hope you exonerate me in another sense?’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Martin.

‘I hope you acquit me of intending or foreseeing the termination of our
visit. But I scarcely need ask you that.’

‘Scarcely indeed,’ said Martin. ‘I am the more beholden to you for your
kindness, when I find what kind of stuff the good citizens here are made
of.’

‘I reckon,’ his friend returned, ‘that they are made of pretty much the
same stuff as other folks, if they would but own it, and not set up on
false pretences.’

‘In good faith, that’s true,’ said Martin.

‘I dare say,’ resumed his friend, ‘you might have such a scene as that
in an English comedy, and not detect any gross improbability or anomaly
in the matter of it?’

‘Yes, indeed!’

‘Doubtless it is more ridiculous here than anywhere else,’ said his
companion; ‘but our professions are to blame for that. So far as I
myself am concerned, I may add that I was perfectly aware from the
first that you came over in the steerage, for I had seen the list of
passengers, and knew it did not comprise your name.’

‘I feel more obliged to you than before,’ said Martin.

‘Norris is a very good fellow in his way,’ observed Mr Bevan.

‘Is he?’ said Martin drily.

‘Oh yes! there are a hundred good points about him. If you or anybody
else addressed him as another order of being, and sued to him IN FORMA
PAUPERIS, he would be all kindness and consideration.’

‘I needn’t have travelled three thousand miles from home to find such a
character as THAT,’ said Martin. Neither he nor his friend said anything
more on the way back; each appearing to find sufficient occupation in
his own thoughts.

The tea, or the supper, or whatever else they called the evening meal,
was over when they reached the Major’s; but the cloth, ornamented with
a few additional smears and stains, was still upon the table. At one end
of the board Mrs Jefferson Brick and two other ladies were drinking
tea; out of the ordinary course, evidently, for they were bonneted
and shawled, and seemed to have just come home. By the light of three
flaring candles of different lengths, in as many candlesticks of
different patterns, the room showed to almost as little advantage as in
broad day.

These ladies were all three talking together in a very loud tone when
Martin and his friend entered; but seeing those gentlemen, they stopped
directly, and became excessively genteel, not to say frosty. As they
went on to exchange some few remarks in whispers, the very water in the
teapot might have fallen twenty degrees in temperature beneath their
chilling coldness.

‘Have you been to meeting, Mrs Brick?’ asked Martin’s friend, with
something of a roguish twinkle in his eye.

‘To lecture, sir.’

‘I beg your pardon. I forgot. You don’t go to meeting, I think?’

Here the lady on the right of Mrs Brick gave a pious cough as much as to
say ‘I do!’--as, indeed, she did nearly every night in the week.

‘A good discourse, ma’am?’ asked Mr Bevan, addressing this lady.

The lady raised her eyes in a pious manner, and answered ‘Yes.’ She
had been much comforted by some good, strong, peppery doctrine, which
satisfactorily disposed of all her friends and acquaintances, and quite
settled their business. Her bonnet, too, had far outshone every bonnet
in the congregation; so she was tranquil on all accounts.

‘What course of lectures are you attending now, ma’am?’ said Martin’s
friend, turning again to Mrs Brick.

‘The Philosophy of the Soul, on Wednesdays.’

‘On Mondays?’

‘The Philosophy of Crime.’

‘On Fridays?’

‘The Philosophy of Vegetables.’

‘You have forgotten Thursdays; the Philosophy of Government, my dear,’
observed the third lady.

‘No,’ said Mrs Brick. ‘That’s Tuesdays.’

‘So it is!’ cried the lady. ‘The Philosophy of Matter on Thursdays, of
course.’

‘You see, Mr Chuzzlewit, our ladies are fully employed,’ said Bevan.

‘Indeed you have reason to say so,’ answered Martin. ‘Between these very
grave pursuits abroad, and family duties at home, their time must be
pretty well engrossed.’

Martin stopped here, for he saw that the ladies regarded him with no
very great favour, though what he had done to deserve the disdainful
expression which appeared in their faces he was at a loss to divine. But
on their going upstairs to their bedrooms--which they very soon did--Mr
Bevan informed him that domestic drudgery was far beneath the exalted
range of these Philosophers, and that the chances were a hundred to one
that not one of the three could perform the easiest woman’s work for
herself, or make the simplest article of dress for any of her children.

‘Though whether they might not be better employed with such blunt
instruments as knitting-needles than with these edge-tools,’ he said,
‘is another question; but I can answer for one thing--they don’t often
cut themselves. Devotions and lectures are our balls and concerts. They
go to these places of resort, as an escape from monotony; look at each
other’s clothes; and come home again.’

‘When you say “home,” do you mean a house like this?’

‘Very often. But I see you are tired to death, and will wish you good
night. We will discuss your projects in the morning. You cannot but
feel already that it is useless staying here, with any hope of advancing
them. You will have to go further.’

‘And to fare worse?’ said Martin, pursuing the old adage.

‘Well, I hope not. But sufficient for the day, you know--good night’

They shook hands heartily and separated. As soon as Martin was left
alone, the excitement of novelty and change which had sustained him
through all the fatigues of the day, departed; and he felt so thoroughly
dejected and worn out, that he even lacked the energy to crawl upstairs
to bed.

In twelve or fifteen hours, how great a change had fallen on his hopes
and sanguine plans! New and strange as he was to the ground on which he
stood, and to the air he breathed, he could not--recalling all that he
had crowded into that one day--but entertain a strong misgiving that his
enterprise was doomed. Rash and ill-considered as it had often looked on
shipboard, but had never seemed on shore, it wore a dismal aspect, now,
that frightened him. Whatever thoughts he called up to his aid, they
came upon him in depressing and discouraging shapes, and gave him no
relief. Even the diamonds on his finger sparkled with the brightness of
tears, and had no ray of hope in all their brilliant lustre.

He continued to sit in gloomy rumination by the stove, unmindful of
the boarders who dropped in one by one from their stores and
counting-houses, or the neighbouring bar-rooms, and, after taking long
pulls from a great white waterjug upon the sideboard, and lingering with
a kind of hideous fascination near the brass spittoons, lounged heavily
to bed; until at length Mark Tapley came and shook him by the arm,
supposing him asleep.

‘Mark!’ he cried, starting.

‘All right, sir,’ said that cheerful follower, snuffing with his fingers
the candle he bore. ‘It ain’t a very large bed, your’n, sir; and a man
as wasn’t thirsty might drink, afore breakfast, all the water you’ve
got to wash in, and afterwards eat the towel. But you’ll sleep without
rocking to-night, sir.’

‘I feel as if the house were on the sea’ said Martin, staggering when he
rose; ‘and am utterly wretched.’

‘I’m as jolly as a sandboy, myself, sir,’ said Mark. ‘But, Lord, I have
reason to be! I ought to have been born here; that’s my opinion. Take
care how you go’--for they were now ascending the stairs. ‘You recollect
the gentleman aboard the Screw as had the very small trunk, sir?’

‘The valise? Yes.’

‘Well, sir, there’s been a delivery of clean clothes from the wash
to-night, and they’re put outside the bedroom doors here. If you take
notice as we go up, what a very few shirts there are, and what a many
fronts, you’ll penetrate the mystery of his packing.’

But Martin was too weary and despondent to take heed of anything, so
had no interest in this discovery. Mr Tapley, nothing dashed by his
indifference, conducted him to the top of the house, and into the
bed-chamber prepared for his reception; which was a very little narrow
room, with half a window in it; a bedstead like a chest without a lid;
two chairs; a piece of carpet, such as shoes are commonly tried upon
at a ready-made establishment in England; a little looking-glass nailed
against the wall; and a washing-table, with a jug and ewer, that might
have been mistaken for a milk-pot and slop-basin.

‘I suppose they polish themselves with a dry cloth in this country,’
said Mark. ‘They’ve certainly got a touch of the ‘phoby, sir.’

‘I wish you would pull off my boots for me,’ said Martin, dropping into
one of the chairs ‘I am quite knocked up--dead beat, Mark.’

‘You won’t say that to-morrow morning, sir,’ returned Mr Tapley; ‘nor
even to-night, sir, when you’ve made a trial of this.’ With which he
produced a very large tumbler, piled up to the brim with little blocks
of clear transparent ice, through which one or two thin slices of lemon,
and a golden liquid of delicious appearance, appealed from the still
depths below, to the loving eye of the spectator.

‘What do you call this?’ said Martin.

But Mr Tapley made no answer; merely plunging a reed into the
mixture--which caused a pleasant commotion among the pieces of ice--and
signifying by an expressive gesture that it was to be pumped up through
that agency by the enraptured drinker.

Martin took the glass with an astonished look; applied his lips to the
reed; and cast up his eyes once in ecstasy. He paused no more until the
goblet was drained to the last drop.

‘There, sir!’ said Mark, taking it from him with a triumphant face; ‘if
ever you should happen to be dead beat again, when I ain’t in the
way, all you’ve got to do is to ask the nearest man to go and fetch a
cobbler.’

‘To go and fetch a cobbler?’ repeated Martin.

‘This wonderful invention, sir,’ said Mark, tenderly patting the empty
glass, ‘is called a cobbler. Sherry cobbler when you name it long;
cobbler, when you name it short. Now you’re equal to having your boots
took off, and are, in every particular worth mentioning, another man.’

Having delivered himself of this solemn preface, he brought the
bootjack.

‘Mind! I am not going to relapse, Mark,’ said Martin; ‘but, good Heaven,
if we should be left in some wild part of this country without goods or
money!’

‘Well, sir!’ replied the imperturbable Tapley; ‘from what we’ve seen
already, I don’t know whether, under those circumstances, we shouldn’t
do better in the wild parts than in the tame ones.’

‘Oh, Tom Pinch, Tom Pinch!’ said Martin, in a thoughtful tone; ‘what
would I give to be again beside you, and able to hear your voice, though
it were even in the old bedroom at Pecksniff’s!’

‘Oh, Dragon, Dragon!’ echoed Mark, cheerfully, ‘if there warn’t any
water between you and me, and nothing faint-hearted-like in going back,
I don’t know that I mightn’t say the same. But here am I, Dragon, in
New York, America; and there are you in Wiltshire, Europe; and there’s a
fortune to make, Dragon, and a beautiful young lady to make it for; and
whenever you go to see the Monument, Dragon, you mustn’t give in on the
doorsteps, or you’ll never get up to the top!’

‘Wisely said, Mark,’ cried Martin. ‘We must look forward.’

‘In all the story-books as ever I read, sir, the people as looked
backward was turned into stones,’ replied Mark; ‘and my opinion always
was, that they brought it on themselves, and it served ‘em right. I wish
you good night, sir, and pleasant dreams!’

‘They must be of home, then,’ said Martin, as he lay down in bed.

‘So I say, too,’ whispered Mark Tapley, when he was out of hearing and
in his own room; ‘for if there don’t come a time afore we’re well out of
this, when there’ll be a little more credit in keeping up one’s jollity,
I’m a United Statesman!’

Leaving them to blend and mingle in their sleep the shadows of objects
afar off, as they take fantastic shapes upon the wall in the dim light
of thought without control, be it the part of this slight chronicle--a
dream within a dream--as rapidly to change the scene, and cross the
ocean to the English shore.



CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

DOES BUSINESS WITH THE HOUSE OF ANTHONY CHUZZLEWIT AND SON, FROM WHICH
ONE OF THE PARTNERS RETIRES UNEXPECTEDLY


Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast. If a man habituated to
a narrow circle of cares and pleasures, out of which he seldom travels,
step beyond it, though for never so brief a space, his departure from
the monotonous scene on which he has been an actor of importance, would
seem to be the signal for instant confusion. As if, in the gap he had
left, the wedge of change were driven to the head, rending what was a
solid mass to fragments, things cemented and held together by the usages
of years, burst asunder in as many weeks. The mine which Time has slowly
dug beneath familiar objects is sprung in an instant; and what was rock
before, becomes but sand and dust.

Most men, at one time or other, have proved this in some degree. The
extent to which the natural laws of change asserted their supremacy
in that limited sphere of action which Martin had deserted, shall be
faithfully set down in these pages.

‘What a cold spring it is!’ whimpered old Anthony, drawing near the
evening fire, ‘It was a warmer season, sure, when I was young!’

‘You needn’t go scorching your clothes into holes, whether it was or
not,’ observed the amiable Jonas, raising his eyes from yesterday’s
newspaper, ‘Broadcloth ain’t so cheap as that comes to.’

‘A good lad!’ cried the father, breathing on his cold hands, and feebly
chafing them against each other. ‘A prudent lad! He never delivered
himself up to the vanities of dress. No, no!’

‘I don’t know but I would, though, mind you, if I could do it for
nothing,’ said his son, as he resumed the paper.

‘Ah!’ chuckled the old man. ‘IF, indeed!--But it’s very cold.’

‘Let the fire be!’ cried Mr Jonas, stopping his honoured parent’s hand
in the use of the poker. ‘Do you mean to come to want in your old age,
that you take to wasting now?’

‘There’s not time for that, Jonas,’ said the old man.

‘Not time for what?’ bawled his heir.

‘For me to come to want. I wish there was!’

‘You always were as selfish an old blade as need be,’ said Jonas in a
voice too low for him to hear, and looking at him with an angry frown.
‘You act up to your character. You wouldn’t mind coming to want,
wouldn’t you! I dare say you wouldn’t. And your own flesh and blood
might come to want too, might they, for anything you cared? Oh you
precious old flint!’

After this dutiful address he took his tea-cup in his hand--for that
meal was in progress, and the father and son and Chuffey were partakers
of it. Then, looking steadfastly at his father, and stopping now and
then to carry a spoonful of tea to his lips, he proceeded in the same
tone, thus:

‘Want, indeed! You’re a nice old man to be talking of want at this time
of day. Beginning to talk of want, are you? Well, I declare! There isn’t
time? No, I should hope not. But you’d live to be a couple of hundred if
you could; and after all be discontented. I know you!’

The old man sighed, and still sat cowering before the fire. Mr Jonas
shook his Britannia-metal teaspoon at him, and taking a loftier
position, went on to argue the point on high moral grounds.

‘If you’re in such a state of mind as that,’ he grumbled, but in the
same subdued key, ‘why don’t you make over your property? Buy an annuity
cheap, and make your life interesting to yourself and everybody else
that watches the speculation. But no, that wouldn’t suit YOU. That would
be natural conduct to your own son, and you like to be unnatural, and to
keep him out of his rights. Why, I should be ashamed of myself if I was
you, and glad to hide my head in the what you may call it.’

Possibly this general phrase supplied the place of grave, or tomb,
or sepulchre, or cemetery, or mausoleum, or other such word which the
filial tenderness of Mr Jonas made him delicate of pronouncing. He
pursued the theme no further; for Chuffey, somehow discovering, from
his old corner by the fireside, that Anthony was in the attitude of a
listener, and that Jonas appeared to be speaking, suddenly cried out,
like one inspired:

‘He is your own son, Mr Chuzzlewit. Your own son, sir!’

Old Chuffey little suspected what depth of application these words had,
or that, in the bitter satire which they bore, they might have sunk into
the old man’s very soul, could he have known what words here hanging on
his own son’s lips, or what was passing in his thoughts. But the voice
diverted the current of Anthony’s reflections, and roused him.

‘Yes, yes, Chuffey, Jonas is a chip of the old block. It is a very
old block, now, Chuffey,’ said the old man, with a strange look of
discomposure.

‘Precious old,’ assented Jonas

‘No, no, no,’ said Chuffey. ‘No, Mr Chuzzlewit. Not old at all, sir.’

‘Oh! He’s worse than ever, you know!’ cried Jonas, quite disgusted.
‘Upon my soul, father, he’s getting too bad. Hold your tongue, will
you?’

‘He says you’re wrong!’ cried Anthony to the old clerk.

‘Tut, tut!’ was Chuffey’s answer. ‘I know better. I say HE’S wrong.
I say HE’S wrong. He’s a boy. That’s what he is. So are you, Mr
Chuzzlewit--a kind of boy. Ha! ha! ha! You’re quite a boy to many I have
known; you’re a boy to me; you’re a boy to hundreds of us. Don’t mind
him!’

With which extraordinary speech--for in the case of Chuffey this was a
burst of eloquence without a parallel--the poor old shadow drew through
his palsied arm his master’s hand, and held it there, with his own
folded upon it, as if he would defend him.

‘I grow deafer every day, Chuff,’ said Anthony, with as much softness of
manner, or, to describe it more correctly, with as little hardness as he
was capable of expressing.

‘No, no,’ cried Chuffey. ‘No, you don’t. What if you did? I’ve been deaf
this twenty year.’

‘I grow blinder, too,’ said the old man, shaking his head.

‘That’s a good sign!’ cried Chuffey. ‘Ha! ha! The best sign in the
world! You saw too well before.’

He patted Anthony upon the hand as one might comfort a child, and
drawing the old man’s arm still further through his own, shook his
trembling fingers towards the spot where Jonas sat, as though he would
wave him off. But, Anthony remaining quite still and silent, he relaxed
his hold by slow degrees and lapsed into his usual niche in the corner;
merely putting forth his hand at intervals and touching his old employer
gently on the coat, as with the design of assuring himself that he was
yet beside him.

Mr Jonas was so very much amazed by these proceedings that he could do
nothing but stare at the two old men, until Chuffey had fallen into his
usual state, and Anthony had sunk into a doze; when he gave some vent
to his emotions by going close up to the former personage, and making as
though he would, in vulgar parlance, ‘punch his head.’

‘They’ve been carrying on this game,’ thought Jonas in a brown study,
‘for the last two or three weeks. I never saw my father take so much
notice of him as he has in that time. What! You’re legacy hunting, are
you, Mister Chuff? Eh?’

But Chuffey was as little conscious of the thought as of the bodily
advance of Mr Jonas’s clenched fist, which hovered fondly about his ear.
When he had scowled at him to his heart’s content, Jonas took the candle
from the table, and walking into the glass office, produced a bunch of
keys from his pocket. With one of these he opened a secret drawer in the
desk; peeping stealthily out, as he did so, to be certain that the two
old men were still before the fire.

‘All as right as ever,’ said Jonas, propping the lid of the desk open
with his forehead, and unfolding a paper. ‘Here’s the will, Mister
Chuff. Thirty pound a year for your maintenance, old boy, and all the
rest to his only son, Jonas. You needn’t trouble yourself to be too
affectionate. You won’t get anything by it. What’s that?’

It WAS startling, certainly. A face on the other side of the glass
partition looking curiously in; and not at him but at the paper in his
hand. For the eyes were attentively cast down upon the writing, and were
swiftly raised when he cried out. Then they met his own, and were as the
eyes of Mr Pecksniff.

Suffering the lid of the desk to fall with a loud noise, but not
forgetting even then to lock it, Jonas, pale and breathless, gazed upon
this phantom. It moved, opened the door, and walked in.

‘What’s the matter?’ cried Jonas, falling back. ‘Who is it? Where do you
come from? What do you want?’

‘Matter!’ cried the voice of Mr Pecksniff, as Pecksniff in the flesh
smiled amiably upon him. ‘The matter, Mr Jonas!’

‘What are you prying and peering about here for?’ said Jonas, angrily.
‘What do you mean by coming up to town in this way, and taking one
unawares? It’s precious odd a man can’t read the--the newspaper--in his
own office without being startled out of his wits by people coming in
without notice. Why didn’t you knock at the door?’

‘So I did, Mr Jonas,’ answered Pecksniff, ‘but no one heard me. I was
curious,’ he added in his gentle way as he laid his hand upon the young
man’s shoulder, ‘to find out what part of the newspaper interested you
so much; but the glass was too dim and dirty.’

Jonas glanced in haste at the partition. Well. It wasn’t very clean. So
far he spoke the truth.

‘Was it poetry now?’ said Mr Pecksniff, shaking the forefinger of his
right hand with an air of cheerful banter. ‘Or was it politics? Or was
it the price of stock? The main chance, Mr Jonas, the main chance, I
suspect.’

‘You ain’t far from the truth,’ answered Jonas, recovering himself and
snuffing the candle; ‘but how the deuce do you come to be in London
again? Ecod! it’s enough to make a man stare, to see a fellow looking at
him all of a sudden, who he thought was sixty or seventy mile away.’

‘So it is,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘No doubt of it, my dear Mr Jonas. For
while the human mind is constituted as it is--’

‘Oh, bother the human mind,’ interrupted Jonas with impatience ‘what
have you come up for?’

‘A little matter of business,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘which has arisen
quite unexpectedly.’

‘Oh!’ cried Jonas, ‘is that all? Well. Here’s father in the next room.
Hallo father, here’s Pecksniff! He gets more addle-pated every day
he lives, I do believe,’ muttered Jonas, shaking his honoured parent
roundly. ‘Don’t I tell you Pecksniff’s here, stupid-head?’

The combined effects of the shaking and this loving remonstrance soon
awoke the old man, who gave Mr Pecksniff a chuckling welcome which was
attributable in part to his being glad to see that gentleman, and in
part to his unfading delight in the recollection of having called him a
hypocrite. As Mr Pecksniff had not yet taken tea (indeed he had, but an
hour before, arrived in London) the remains of the late collation, with
a rasher of bacon, were served up for his entertainment; and as Mr Jonas
had a business appointment in the next street, he stepped out to keep
it; promising to return before Mr Pecksniff could finish his repast.

‘And now, my good sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff to Anthony; ‘now that we
are alone, pray tell me what I can do for you. I say alone, because I
believe that our dear friend Mr Chuffey is, metaphysically speaking,
a--shall I say a dummy?’ asked Mr Pecksniff with his sweetest smile, and
his head very much on one side.

‘He neither hears us,’ replied Anthony, ‘nor sees us.’

‘Why, then,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘I will be bold to say, with the utmost
sympathy for his afflictions, and the greatest admiration of those
excellent qualities which do equal honour to his head and to his heart,
that he is what is playfully termed a dummy. You were going to observe,
my dear sir--?’

‘I was not going to make any observation that I know of,’ replied the
old man.

‘I was,’ said Mr Pecksniff, mildly.

‘Oh! YOU were? What was it?’

‘That I never,’ said Mr Pecksniff, previously rising to see that the
door was shut, and arranging his chair when he came back, so that it
could not be opened in the least without his immediately becoming aware
of the circumstance; ‘that I never in my life was so astonished as by
the receipt of your letter yesterday. That you should do me the honour
to wish to take counsel with me on any matter, amazed me; but that you
should desire to do so, to the exclusion even of Mr Jonas, showed an
amount of confidence in one to whom you had done a verbal injury--merely
a verbal injury, you were anxious to repair--which gratified, which
moved, which overcame me.’

He was always a glib speaker, but he delivered this short address very
glibly; having been at some pains to compose it outside the coach.

Although he paused for a reply, and truly said that he was there at
Anthony’s request, the old man sat gazing at him in profound silence and
with a perfectly blank face. Nor did he seem to have the least desire or
impulse to pursue the conversation, though Mr Pecksniff looked towards
the door, and pulled out his watch, and gave him many other hints that
their time was short, and Jonas, if he kept his word, would soon return.
But the strangest incident in all this strange behaviour was, that of a
sudden, in a moment, so swiftly that it was impossible to trace how,
or to observe any process of change, his features fell into their old
expression, and he cried, striking his hand passionately upon the table
as if no interval at all had taken place:

‘Will you hold your tongue, sir, and let me speak?’

Mr Pecksniff deferred to him with a submissive bow; and said within
himself, ‘I knew his hand was changed, and that his writing staggered. I
said so yesterday. Ahem! Dear me!’

‘Jonas is sweet upon your daughter, Pecksniff,’ said the old man, in his
usual tone.

‘We spoke of that, if you remember, sir, at Mrs Todgers’s,’ replied the
courteous architect.

‘You needn’t speak so loud,’ retorted Anthony. ‘I’m not so deaf as
that.’

Mr Pecksniff had certainly raised his voice pretty high; not so much
because he thought Anthony was deaf, as because he felt convinced that
his perceptive faculties were waxing dim; but this quick resentment of
his considerate behaviour greatly disconcerted him, and, not knowing
what tack to shape his course upon, he made another inclination of the
head, yet more submissive that the last.

‘I have said,’ repeated the old man, ‘that Jonas is sweet upon your
daughter.’

‘A charming girl, sir,’ murmured Mr Pecksniff, seeing that he waited
for an answer. ‘A dear girl, Mr Chuzzlewit, though I say it, who should
not.’

‘You know better,’ cried the old man, advancing his weazen face at least
a yard, and starting forward in his chair to do it. ‘You lie! What, you
WILL be a hypocrite, will you?’

‘My good sir,’ Mr Pecksniff began.

‘Don’t call me a good sir,’ retorted Anthony, ‘and don’t claim to be
one yourself. If your daughter was what you would have me believe, she
wouldn’t do for Jonas. Being what she is, I think she will. He might be
deceived in a wife. She might run riot, contract debts, and waste his
substance. Now when I am dead--’

His face altered so horribly as he said the word, that Mr Pecksniff
really was fain to look another way.

‘--It will be worse for me to know of such doings, than if I was alive;
for to be tormented for getting that together, which even while I suffer
for its acquisition, is flung into the very kennels of the streets,
would be insupportable torture. No,’ said the old man, hoarsely, ‘let
that be saved at least; let there be something gained, and kept fast
hold of, when so much is lost.’

‘My dear Mr Chuzzlewit,’ said Pecksniff, ‘these are unwholesome fancies;
quite unnecessary, sir, quite uncalled for, I am sure. The truth is, my
dear sir, that you are not well!’

‘Not dying though!’ cried Anthony, with something like the snarl of a
wild animal. ‘Not yet! There are years of life in me. Why, look at him,’
pointing to his feeble clerk. ‘Death has no right to leave him standing,
and to mow me down!’

Mr Pecksniff was so much afraid of the old man, and so completely taken
aback by the state in which he found him, that he had not even presence
of mind enough to call up a scrap of morality from the great storehouse
within his own breast. Therefore he stammered out that no doubt it was,
in fairness and decency, Mr Chuffey’s turn to expire; and that from
all he had heard of Mr Chuffey, and the little he had the pleasure of
knowing of that gentleman, personally, he felt convinced in his own
mind that he would see the propriety of expiring with as little delay as
possible.

‘Come here!’ said the old man, beckoning him to draw nearer. ‘Jonas
will be my heir, Jonas will be rich, and a great catch for you. You know
that. Jonas is sweet upon your daughter.’

‘I know that too,’ thought Mr Pecksniff, ‘for you have said it often
enough.’

‘He might get more money than with her,’ said the old man, ‘but she
will help him to take care of what they have. She is not too young or
heedless, and comes of a good hard griping stock. But don’t you play
too fine a game. She only holds him by a thread; and if you draw it too
tight (I know his temper) it’ll snap. Bind him when he’s in the mood,
Pecksniff; bind him. You’re too deep. In your way of leading him on,
you’ll leave him miles behind. Bah, you man of oil, have I no eyes to
see how you have angled with him from the first?’

‘Now I wonder,’ thought Mr Pecksniff, looking at him with a wistful
face, ‘whether this is all he has to say?’

Old Anthony rubbed his hands and muttered to himself; complained again
that he was cold; drew his chair before the fire; and, sitting with his
back to Mr Pecksniff, and his chin sunk down upon his breast, was, in
another minute, quite regardless or forgetful of his presence.

Uncouth and unsatisfactory as this short interview had been, it had
furnished Mr Pecksniff with a hint which, supposing nothing further
were imparted to him, repaid the journey up and home again. For the good
gentleman had never (for want of an opportunity) dived into the depths
of Mr Jonas’s nature; and any recipe for catching such a son-in-law
(much more one written on a leaf out of his own father’s book) was worth
the having. In order that he might lose no chance of improving so fair
an opportunity by allowing Anthony to fall asleep before he had finished
all he had to say, Mr Pecksniff, in the disposal of the refreshments on
the table, a work to which he now applied himself in earnest, resorted
to many ingenious contrivances for attracting his attention; such as
coughing, sneezing, clattering the teacups, sharpening the knives,
dropping the loaf, and so forth. But all in vain, for Mr Jonas returned,
and Anthony had said no more.

‘What! My father asleep again?’ he cried, as he hung up his hat, and
cast a look at him. ‘Ah! and snoring. Only hear!’

‘He snores very deep,’ said Mr Pecksniff.

‘Snores deep?’ repeated Jonas. ‘Yes; let him alone for that. He’ll snore
for six, at any time.’

‘Do you know, Mr Jonas,’ said Pecksniff, ‘that I think your father
is--don’t let me alarm you--breaking?’

‘Oh, is he though?’ replied Jonas, with a shake of the head which
expressed the closeness of his dutiful observation. ‘Ecod, you don’t
know how tough he is. He ain’t upon the move yet.’

‘It struck me that he was changed, both in his appearance and manner,’
said Mr Pecksniff.

‘That’s all you know about it,’ returned Jonas, seating himself with a
melancholy air. ‘He never was better than he is now. How are they all at
home? How’s Charity?’

‘Blooming, Mr Jonas, blooming.’

‘And the other one; how’s she?’

‘Volatile trifler!’ said Mr Pecksniff, fondly musing. ‘She is well, she
is well. Roving from parlour to bedroom, Mr Jonas, like a bee, skimming
from post to pillar, like the butterfly; dipping her young beak into our
currant wine, like the humming-bird! Ah! were she a little less giddy
than she is; and had she but the sterling qualities of Cherry, my young
friend!’

‘Is she so very giddy, then?’ asked Jonas.

‘Well, well!’ said Mr Pecksniff, with great feeling; ‘let me not be hard
upon my child. Beside her sister Cherry she appears so. A strange noise
that, Mr Jonas!’

‘Something wrong in the clock, I suppose,’ said Jonas, glancing towards
it. ‘So the other one ain’t your favourite, ain’t she?’

The fond father was about to reply, and had already summoned into his
face a look of most intense sensibility, when the sound he had already
noticed was repeated.

‘Upon my word, Mr Jonas, that is a very extraordinary clock,’ said
Pecksniff.

It would have been, if it had made the noise which startled them; but
another kind of time-piece was fast running down, and from that the
sound proceeded. A scream from Chuffey, rendered a hundred times more
loud and formidable by his silent habits, made the house ring from roof
to cellar; and, looking round, they saw Anthony Chuzzlewit extended on
the floor, with the old clerk upon his knees beside him.

He had fallen from his chair in a fit, and lay there, battling for each
gasp of breath, with every shrivelled vein and sinew starting in its
place, as if it were bent on bearing witness to his age, and sternly
pleading with Nature against his recovery. It was frightful to see how
the principle of life, shut up within his withered frame, fought like a
strong devil, mad to be released, and rent its ancient prison-house.
A young man in the fullness of his vigour, struggling with so much
strength of desperation, would have been a dismal sight; but an old,
old, shrunken body, endowed with preternatural might, and giving the lie
in every motion of its every limb and joint to its enfeebled aspect, was
a hideous spectacle indeed.

They raised him up, and fetched a surgeon with all haste, who bled the
patient and applied some remedies; but the fits held him so long that
it was past midnight when they got him--quiet now, but quite unconscious
and exhausted--into bed.

‘Don’t go,’ said Jonas, putting his ashy lips to Mr Pecksniff’s ear and
whispered across the bed. ‘It was a mercy you were present when he was
taken ill. Some one might have said it was my doing.’

‘YOUR doing!’ cried Mr Pecksniff.

‘I don’t know but they might,’ he replied, wiping the moisture from his
white face. ‘People say such things. How does he look now?’

Mr Pecksniff shook his head.

‘I used to joke, you know,’ said. Jonas: ‘but I--I never wished him
dead. Do you think he’s very bad?’

‘The doctor said he was. You heard,’ was Mr Pecksniff’s answer.

‘Ah! but he might say that to charge us more, in case of his getting
well’ said Jonas. ‘You mustn’t go away, Pecksniff. Now it’s come to
this, I wouldn’t be without a witness for a thousand pound.’

Chuffey said not a word, and heard not a word. He had sat himself down
in a chair at the bedside, and there he remained, motionless; except
that he sometimes bent his head over the pillow, and seemed to listen.
He never changed in this. Though once in the dreary night Mr Pecksniff,
having dozed, awoke with a confused impression that he had heard
him praying, and strangely mingling figures--not of speech, but
arithmetic--with his broken prayers.

Jonas sat there, too, all night; not where his father could have seen
him, had his consciousness returned, but hiding, as it were, behind him,
and only reading how he looked, in Mr Pecksniff’s eyes. HE, the coarse
upstart, who had ruled the house so long--that craven cur, who was
afraid to move, and shook so, that his very shadow fluttered on the
wall!

It was broad, bright, stirring day when, leaving the old clerk to watch
him, they went down to breakfast. People hurried up and down the street;
windows and doors were opened; thieves and beggars took their usual
posts; workmen bestirred themselves; tradesmen set forth their shops;
bailiffs and constables were on the watch; all kinds of human creatures
strove, in their several ways, as hard to live, as the one sick old
man who combated for every grain of sand in his fast-emptying glass, as
eagerly as if it were an empire.

‘If anything happens Pecksniff,’ said Jonas, ‘you must promise me to
stop here till it’s all over. You shall see that I do what’s right.’

‘I know that you will do what’s right, Mr Jonas,’ said Pecksniff.

‘Yes, yes, but I won’t be doubted. No one shall have it in his power to
say a syllable against me,’ he returned. ‘I know how people will talk.
Just as if he wasn’t old, or I had the secret of keeping him alive!’

Mr Pecksniff promised that he would remain, if circumstances should
render it, in his esteemed friend’s opinion, desirable; they were
finishing their meal in silence, when suddenly an apparition stood
before them, so ghastly to the view that Jonas shrieked aloud, and both
recoiled in horror.

Old Anthony, dressed in his usual clothes, was in the room--beside the
table. He leaned upon the shoulder of his solitary friend; and on his
livid face, and on his horny hands, and in his glassy eyes, and traced
by an eternal finger in the very drops of sweat upon his brow, was one
word--Death.

He spoke to them--in something of his own voice too, but sharpened and
made hollow, like a dead man’s face. What he would have said, God knows.
He seemed to utter words, but they were such as man had never heard.
And this was the most fearful circumstance of all, to see him standing
there, gabbling in an unearthly tongue.

‘He’s better now,’ said Chuffey. ‘Better now. Let him sit in his old
chair, and he’ll be well again. I told him not to mind. I said so,
yesterday.’

They put him in his easy-chair, and wheeled it near the window; then,
swinging open the door, exposed him to the free current of morning air.
But not all the air that is, nor all the winds that ever blew ‘twixt
Heaven and Earth, could have brought new life to him.

Plunge him to the throat in golden pieces now, and his heavy fingers
shall not close on one!



CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE READER IS BROUGHT INTO COMMUNICATION WITH SOME PROFESSIONAL PERSONS,
AND SHEDS A TEAR OVER THE FILIAL PIETY OF GOOD MR JONAS


Mr Pecksniff was in a hackney cabriolet, for Jonas Chuzzlewit had said
‘Spare no expense.’ Mankind is evil in its thoughts and in its base
constructions, and Jonas was resolved it should not have an inch to
stretch into an ell against him. It never should be charged upon his
father’s son that he had grudged the money for his father’s funeral.
Hence, until the obsequies should be concluded, Jonas had taken for his
motto ‘Spend, and spare not!’

Mr Pecksniff had been to the undertaker, and was now upon his way to
another officer in the train of mourning--a female functionary, a nurse,
and watcher, and performer of nameless offices about the persons of the
dead--whom he had recommended. Her name, as Mr Pecksniff gathered from
a scrap of writing in his hand, was Gamp; her residence in Kingsgate
Street, High Holborn. So Mr Pecksniff, in a hackney cab, was rattling
over Holborn stones, in quest of Mrs Gamp.

This lady lodged at a bird-fancier’s, next door but one to the
celebrated mutton-pie shop, and directly opposite to the original
cat’s-meat warehouse; the renown of which establishments was duly
heralded on their respective fronts. It was a little house, and this was
the more convenient; for Mrs Gamp being, in her highest walk of art,
a monthly nurse, or, as her sign-board boldly had it, ‘Midwife,’ and
lodging in the first-floor front, was easily assailable at night by
pebbles, walking-sticks, and fragments of tobacco-pipe; all much more
efficacious than the street-door knocker, which was so constructed as
to wake the street with ease, and even spread alarms of fire in Holborn,
without making the smallest impression on the premises to which it was
addressed.

It chanced on this particular occasion, that Mrs Gamp had been up all
the previous night, in attendance upon a ceremony to which the usage of
gossips has given that name which expresses, in two syllables, the curse
pronounced on Adam. It chanced that Mrs Gamp had not been regularly
engaged, but had been called in at a crisis, in consequence of her great
repute, to assist another professional lady with her advice; and thus it
happened that, all points of interest in the case being over, Mrs Gamp
had come home again to the bird-fancier’s and gone to bed. So when Mr
Pecksniff drove up in the hackney cab, Mrs Gamp’s curtains were drawn
close, and Mrs Gamp was fast asleep behind them.

If the bird-fancier had been at home, as he ought to have been, there
would have been no great harm in this; but he was out, and his shop was
closed. The shutters were down certainly; and in every pane of glass
there was at least one tiny bird in a tiny bird-cage, twittering and
hopping his little ballet of despair, and knocking his head against the
roof; while one unhappy goldfinch who lived outside a red villa with
his name on the door, drew the water for his own drinking, and mutely
appealed to some good man to drop a farthing’s-worth of poison in it.
Still, the door was shut. Mr Pecksniff tried the latch, and shook it,
causing a cracked bell inside to ring most mournfully; but no one came.
The bird-fancier was an easy shaver also, and a fashionable hair-dresser
also, and perhaps he had been sent for, express, from the court end of
the town, to trim a lord, or cut and curl a lady; but however that
might be, there, upon his own ground, he was not; nor was there any more
distinct trace of him to assist the imagination of an inquirer, than
a professional print or emblem of his calling (much favoured in the
trade), representing a hair-dresser of easy manners curling a lady
of distinguished fashion, in the presence of a patent upright grand
pianoforte.

Noting these circumstances, Mr Pecksniff, in the innocence of his heart,
applied himself to the knocker; but at the first double knock every
window in the street became alive with female heads; and before he could
repeat the performance whole troops of married ladies (some about to
trouble Mrs Gamp themselves very shortly) came flocking round the steps,
all crying out with one accord, and with uncommon interest, ‘Knock at
the winder, sir, knock at the winder. Lord bless you, don’t lose no more
time than you can help--knock at the winder!’

Acting upon this suggestion, and borrowing the driver’s whip for the
purpose, Mr Pecksniff soon made a commotion among the first floor
flower-pots, and roused Mrs Gamp, whose voice--to the great satisfaction
of the matrons--was heard to say, ‘I’m coming.’

‘He’s as pale as a muffin,’ said one lady, in allusion to Mr Pecksniff.

‘So he ought to be, if he’s the feelings of a man,’ observed another.

A third lady (with her arms folded) said she wished he had chosen any
other time for fetching Mrs Gamp, but it always happened so with HER.

It gave Mr Pecksniff much uneasiness to find, from these remarks, that
he was supposed to have come to Mrs Gamp upon an errand touching--not
the close of life, but the other end. Mrs Gamp herself was under the
same impression, for, throwing open the window, she cried behind the
curtains, as she hastily attired herself--

‘Is it Mrs Perkins?’

‘No!’ returned Mr Pecksniff, sharply. ‘Nothing of the sort.’

‘What, Mr Whilks!’ cried Mrs Gamp. ‘Don’t say it’s you, Mr Whilks, and
that poor creetur Mrs Whilks with not even a pincushion ready. Don’t say
it’s you, Mr Whilks!’

‘It isn’t Mr Whilks,’ said Pecksniff. ‘I don’t know the man. Nothing
of the kind. A gentleman is dead; and some person being wanted in the
house, you have been recommended by Mr Mould the undertaker.’

As she was by this time in a condition to appear, Mrs Gamp, who had
a face for all occasions, looked out of the window with her mourning
countenance, and said she would be down directly. But the matrons took
it very ill that Mr Pecksniff’s mission was of so unimportant a kind;
and the lady with her arms folded rated him in good round terms,
signifying that she would be glad to know what he meant by terrifying
delicate females ‘with his corpses;’ and giving it as her opinion that
he was quite ugly enough to know better. The other ladies were not at
all behind-hand in expressing similar sentiments; and the children, of
whom some scores had now collected, hooted and defied Mr Pecksniff quite
savagely. So when Mrs Gamp appeared, the unoffending gentleman was glad
to hustle her with very little ceremony into the cabriolet, and drive
off, overwhelmed with popular execration.

Mrs Gamp had a large bundle with her, a pair of pattens, and a species
of gig umbrella; the latter article in colour like a faded leaf, except
where a circular patch of a lively blue had been dexterously let in at
the top. She was much flurried by the haste she had made, and laboured
under the most erroneous views of cabriolets, which she appeared
to confound with mail-coaches or stage-wagons, inasmuch as she was
constantly endeavouring for the first half mile to force her luggage
through the little front window, and clamouring to the driver to ‘put
it in the boot.’ When she was disabused of this idea, her whole being
resolved itself into an absorbing anxiety about her pattens, with which
she played innumerable games at quoits on Mr Pecksniff’s legs. It was
not until they were close upon the house of mourning that she had enough
composure to observe--

‘And so the gentleman’s dead, sir! Ah! The more’s the pity.’ She didn’t
even know his name. ‘But it’s what we must all come to. It’s as certain
as being born, except that we can’t make our calculations as exact. Ah!
Poor dear!’

She was a fat old woman, this Mrs Gamp, with a husky voice and a moist
eye, which she had a remarkable power of turning up, and only showing
the white of it. Having very little neck, it cost her some trouble to
look over herself, if one may say so, at those to whom she talked. She
wore a very rusty black gown, rather the worse for snuff, and a shawl
and bonnet to correspond. In these dilapidated articles of dress she
had, on principle, arrayed herself, time out of mind, on such occasions
as the present; for this at once expressed a decent amount of veneration
for the deceased, and invited the next of kin to present her with a
fresher suit of weeds; an appeal so frequently successful, that the very
fetch and ghost of Mrs Gamp, bonnet and all, might be seen hanging up,
any hour in the day, in at least a dozen of the second-hand clothes
shops about Holborn. The face of Mrs Gamp--the nose in particular--was
somewhat red and swollen, and it was difficult to enjoy her society
without becoming conscious of a smell of spirits. Like most persons who
have attained to great eminence in their profession, she took to hers
very kindly; insomuch that, setting aside her natural predilections as
a woman, she went to a lying-in or a laying-out with equal zest and
relish.

‘Ah!’ repeated Mrs Gamp; for it was always a safe sentiment in cases of
mourning. ‘Ah dear! When Gamp was summoned to his long home, and I see
him a-lying in Guy’s Hospital with a penny-piece on each eye, and his
wooden leg under his left arm, I thought I should have fainted away. But
I bore up.’

If certain whispers current in the Kingsgate Street circles had any
truth in them, she had indeed borne up surprisingly; and had exerted
such uncommon fortitude as to dispose of Mr Gamp’s remains for the
benefit of science. But it should be added, in fairness, that this had
happened twenty years before; and that Mr and Mrs Gamp had long been
separated on the ground of incompatibility of temper in their drink.

‘You have become indifferent since then, I suppose?’ said Mr Pecksniff.
‘Use is second nature, Mrs Gamp.’

‘You may well say second nater, sir,’ returned that lady. ‘One’s first
ways is to find sich things a trial to the feelings, and so is one’s
lasting custom. If it wasn’t for the nerve a little sip of liquor gives
me (I never was able to do more than taste it), I never could go through
with what I sometimes has to do. “Mrs Harris,” I says, at the very last
case as ever I acted in, which it was but a young person, “Mrs Harris,”
 I says, “leave the bottle on the chimley-piece, and don’t ask me to take
none, but let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged, and then I
will do what I’m engaged to do, according to the best of my ability.”
 “Mrs Gamp,” she says, in answer, “if ever there was a sober creetur to
be got at eighteen pence a day for working people, and three and six for
gentlefolks--night watching,”’ said Mrs Gamp with emphasis, ‘“being a
extra charge--you are that inwallable person.” “Mrs Harris,” I says to
her, “don’t name the charge, for if I could afford to lay all my feller
creeturs out for nothink, I would gladly do it, sich is the love I bears
‘em. But what I always says to them as has the management of matters,
Mrs Harris”’--here she kept her eye on Mr Pecksniff--‘“be they gents or
be they ladies, is, don’t ask me whether I won’t take none, or whether I
will, but leave the bottle on the chimley-piece, and let me put my lips
to it when I am so dispoged.”’

The conclusion of this affecting narrative brought them to the house. In
the passage they encountered Mr Mould the undertaker; a little elderly
gentleman, bald, and in a suit of black; with a notebook in his hand,
a massive gold watch-chain dangling from his fob, and a face in which a
queer attempt at melancholy was at odds with a smirk of satisfaction; so
that he looked as a man might, who, in the very act of smacking his lips
over choice old wine, tried to make believe it was physic.

‘Well, Mrs Gamp, and how are YOU, Mrs Gamp?’ said this gentleman, in a
voice as soft as his step.

‘Pretty well, I thank you, sir,’ dropping a curtsey.

‘You’ll be very particular here, Mrs Gamp. This is not a common case,
Mrs Gamp. Let everything be very nice and comfortable, Mrs Gamp, if you
please,’ said the undertaker, shaking his head with a solemn air.

‘It shall be, sir,’ she replied, curtseying again. ‘You knows me of old,
sir, I hope.’

‘I hope so, too, Mrs Gamp,’ said the undertaker, ‘and I think so also.’
Mrs Gamp curtseyed again. ‘This is one of the most impressive cases,
sir,’ he continued, addressing Mr Pecksniff, ‘that I have seen in the
whole course of my professional experience.’

‘Indeed, Mr Mould!’ cried that gentleman.

‘Such affectionate regret, sir, I never saw. There is no limitation,
there is positively NO limitation’--opening his eyes wide, and standing
on tiptoe--‘in point of expense! I have orders, sir, to put on my whole
establishment of mutes; and mutes come very dear, Mr Pecksniff; not to
mention their drink. To provide silver-plated handles of the very best
description, ornamented with angels’ heads from the most expensive
dies. To be perfectly profuse in feathers. In short, sir, to turn out
something absolutely gorgeous.’

‘My friend Mr Jonas is an excellent man,’ said Mr Pecksniff.

‘I have seen a good deal of what is filial in my time, sir,’ retorted
Mould, ‘and what is unfilial too. It is our lot. We come into the
knowledge of those secrets. But anything so filial as this; anything so
honourable to human nature; so calculated to reconcile all of us to the
world we live in; never yet came under my observation. It only
proves, sir, what was so forcibly observed by the lamented theatrical
poet--buried at Stratford--that there is good in everything.’

‘It is very pleasant to hear you say so, Mr Mould,’ observed Pecksniff.

‘You are very kind, sir. And what a man Mr Chuzzlewit was, sir! Ah! what
a man he was. You may talk of your lord mayors,’ said Mould, waving his
hand at the public in general, ‘your sheriffs, your common councilmen,
your trumpery; but show me a man in this city who is worthy to walk
in the shoes of the departed Mr Chuzzlewit. No, no,’ cried Mould, with
bitter sarcasm. ‘Hang ‘em up, hang ‘em up; sole ‘em and heel ‘em, and
have ‘em ready for his son against he’s old enough to wear ‘em; but
don’t try ‘em on yourselves, for they won’t fit you. We knew him,’ said
Mould, in the same biting vein, as he pocketed his note-book; ‘we
knew him, and are not to be caught with chaff. Mr Pecksniff, sir, good
morning.’

Mr Pecksniff returned the compliment; and Mould, sensible of having
distinguished himself, was going away with a brisk smile, when he
fortunately remembered the occasion. Quickly becoming depressed again,
he sighed; looked into the crown of his hat, as if for comfort; put it
on without finding any; and slowly departed.

Mrs Gamp and Mr Pecksniff then ascended the staircase; and the former,
having been shown to the chamber in which all that remained of Anthony
Chuzzlewit lay covered up, with but one loving heart, and that a halting
one, to mourn it, left the latter free to enter the darkened room below,
and rejoin Mr Jonas, from whom he had now been absent nearly two hours.

He found that example to bereaved sons, and pattern in the eyes of all
performers of funerals, musing over a fragment of writing-paper on the
desk, and scratching figures on it with a pen. The old man’s chair, and
hat, and walking-stick, were removed from their accustomed places, and
put out of sight; the window-blinds as yellow as November fogs, were
drawn down close; Jonas himself was so subdued, that he could scarcely
be heard to speak, and only seen to walk across the room.

‘Pecksniff,’ he said, in a whisper, ‘you shall have the regulation of
it all, mind! You shall be able to tell anybody who talks about it that
everything was correctly and nicely done. There isn’t any one you’d like
to ask to the funeral, is there?’

‘No, Mr Jonas, I think not.’

‘Because if there is, you know,’ said Jonas, ‘ask him. We don’t want to
make a secret of it.’

‘No,’ repeated Mr Pecksniff, after a little reflection. ‘I am not
the less obliged to you on that account, Mr Jonas, for your liberal
hospitality; but there really is no one.’

‘Very well,’ said Jonas; ‘then you, and I, and Chuffey, and the doctor,
will be just a coachful. We’ll have the doctor, Pecksniff, because he
knows what was the matter with him, and that it couldn’t be helped.’

‘Where is our dear friend, Mr Chuffey?’ asked Pecksniff, looking round
the chamber, and winking both his eyes at once--for he was overcome by
his feelings.

But here he was interrupted by Mrs Gamp, who, divested of her bonnet and
shawl, came sidling and bridling into the room; and with some sharpness
demanded a conference outside the door with Mr Pecksniff.

‘You may say whatever you wish to say here, Mrs Gamp,’ said that
gentleman, shaking his head with a melancholy expression.

‘It is not much as I have to say when people is a-mourning for the dead
and gone,’ said Mrs Gamp; ‘but what I have to say is TO the pint and
purpose, and no offence intended, must be so considered. I have been at
a many places in my time, gentlemen, and I hope I knows what my duties
is, and how the same should be performed; in course, if I did not, it
would be very strange, and very wrong in sich a gentleman as Mr Mould,
which has undertook the highest families in this land, and given every
satisfaction, so to recommend me as he does. I have seen a deal of
trouble my own self,’ said Mrs Gamp, laying greater and greater stress
upon her words, ‘and I can feel for them as has their feelings tried,
but I am not a Rooshan or a Prooshan, and consequently cannot suffer
Spies to be set over me.’

Before it was possible that an answer could be returned, Mrs Gamp,
growing redder in the face, went on to say:

‘It is not a easy matter, gentlemen, to live when you are left a widder
woman; particular when your feelings works upon you to that extent that
you often find yourself a-going out on terms which is a certain loss,
and never can repay. But in whatever way you earns your bread, you may
have rules and regulations of your own which cannot be broke through.
Some people,’ said Mrs Gamp, again entrenching herself behind her
strong point, as if it were not assailable by human ingenuity, ‘may be
Rooshans, and others may be Prooshans; they are born so, and will please
themselves. Them which is of other naturs thinks different.’

‘If I understand this good lady,’ said Mr Pecksniff, turning to Jonas,
‘Mr Chuffey is troublesome to her. Shall I fetch him down?’

‘Do,’ said Jonas. ‘I was going to tell you he was up there, when she
came in. I’d go myself and bring him down, only--only I’d rather you
went, if you don’t mind.’

Mr Pecksniff promptly departed, followed by Mrs Gamp, who, seeing that
he took a bottle and glass from the cupboard, and carried it in his
hand, was much softened.

‘I am sure,’ she said, ‘that if it wasn’t for his own happiness, I
should no more mind him being there, poor dear, than if he was a
fly. But them as isn’t used to these things, thinks so much of ‘em
afterwards, that it’s a kindness to ‘em not to let ‘em have their wish.
And even,’ said Mrs Gamp, probably in reference to some flowers of
speech she had already strewn on Mr Chuffey, ‘even if one calls ‘em
names, it’s only done to rouse ‘em.’

Whatever epithets she had bestowed on the old clerk, they had not
roused HIM. He sat beside the bed, in the chair he had occupied all the
previous night, with his hands folded before him, and his head bowed
down; and neither looked up, on their entrance, nor gave any sign of
consciousness, until Mr Pecksniff took him by the arm, when he meekly
rose.

‘Three score and ten,’ said Chuffey, ‘ought and carry seven. Some men
are so strong that they live to four score--four times ought’s an ought,
four times two’s an eight--eighty. Oh! why--why--why didn’t he live to
four times ought’s an ought, and four times two’s an eight, eighty?’

‘Ah! what a wale of grief!’ cried Mrs Gamp, possessing herself of the
bottle and glass.

‘Why did he die before his poor old crazy servant?’ said Chuffey,
clasping his hands and looking up in anguish. ‘Take him from me, and
what remains?’

‘Mr Jonas,’ returned Pecksniff, ‘Mr Jonas, my good friend.’

‘I loved him,’ cried the old man, weeping. ‘He was good to me. We learnt
Tare and Tret together at school. I took him down once, six boys in the
arithmetic class. God forgive me! Had I the heart to take him down!’

‘Come, Mr Chuffey,’ said Pecksniff. ‘Come with me. Summon up your
fortitude, Mr Chuffey.’

‘Yes, I will,’ returned the old clerk. ‘Yes. I’ll sum up my forty--How
many times forty--Oh, Chuzzlewit and Son--Your own son Mr Chuzzlewit;
your own son, sir!’

He yielded to the hand that guided him, as he lapsed into this familiar
expression, and submitted to be led away. Mrs Gamp, with the bottle on
one knee, and the glass on the other, sat upon a stool, shaking her head
for a long time, until, in a moment of abstraction, she poured out
a dram of spirits, and raised it to her lips. It was succeeded by a
second, and by a third, and then her eyes--either in the sadness of
her reflections upon life and death, or in her admiration of the
liquor--were so turned up, as to be quite invisible. But she shook her
head still.

Poor Chuffey was conducted to his accustomed corner, and there he
remained, silent and quiet, save at long intervals, when he would rise,
and walk about the room, and wring his hands, or raise some strange and
sudden cry. For a whole week they all three sat about the hearth and
never stirred abroad. Mr Pecksniff would have walked out in the evening
time, but Mr Jonas was so averse to his being absent for a minute, that
he abandoned the idea, and so, from morning until night, they brooded
together in the dark room, without relief or occupation.

The weight of that which was stretched out, stiff and stark, in the
awful chamber above-stairs, so crushed and bore down Jonas, that he bent
beneath the load. During the whole long seven days and nights, he was
always oppressed and haunted by a dreadful sense of its presence in the
house. Did the door move, he looked towards it with a livid face and
starting eye, as if he fully believed that ghostly fingers clutched the
handle. Did the fire flicker in a draught of air, he glanced over his
shoulder, as almost dreading to behold some shrouded figure fanning and
flapping at it with its fearful dress. The lightest noise disturbed him;
and once, in the night, at the sound of a footstep overhead, he cried
out that the dead man was walking--tramp, tramp, tramp--about his
coffin.

He lay at night upon a mattress on the floor of the sitting-room; his
own chamber having been assigned to Mrs Gamp; and Mr Pecksniff was
similarly accommodated. The howling of a dog before the house, filled
him with a terror he could not disguise. He avoided the reflection in
the opposite windows of the light that burned above, as though it had
been an angry eye. He often, in every night, rose up from his fitful
sleep, and looked and longed for dawn; all directions and arrangements,
even to the ordering of their daily meals, he abandoned to Mr Pecksniff.
That excellent gentleman, deeming that the mourner wanted comfort, and
that high feeding was likely to do him infinite service, availed himself
of these opportunities to such good purpose, that they kept quite a
dainty table during this melancholy season; with sweetbreads, stewed
kidneys, oysters, and other such light viands for supper every night;
over which, and sundry jorums of hot punch, Mr Pecksniff delivered such
moral reflections and spiritual consolation as might have converted a
Heathen--especially if he had had but an imperfect acquaintance with the
English tongue.

Nor did Mr Pecksniff alone indulge in the creature comforts during
this sad time. Mrs Gamp proved to be very choice in her eating, and
repudiated hashed mutton with scorn. In her drinking too, she was very
punctual and particular, requiring a pint of mild porter at lunch, a
pint at dinner, half-a-pint as a species of stay or holdfast between
dinner and tea, and a pint of the celebrated staggering ale, or Real Old
Brighton Tipper, at supper; besides the bottle on the chimney-piece,
and such casual invitations to refresh herself with wine as the good
breeding of her employers might prompt them to offer. In like manner, Mr
Mould’s men found it necessary to drown their grief, like a young kitten
in the morning of its existence, for which reason they generally fuddled
themselves before they began to do anything, lest it should make head
and get the better of them. In short, the whole of that strange week was
a round of dismal joviality and grim enjoyment; and every one, except
poor Chuffey, who came within the shadow of Anthony Chuzzlewit’s grave,
feasted like a Ghoul.

At length the day of the funeral, pious and truthful ceremony that it
was, arrived. Mr Mould, with a glass of generous port between his eye
and the light, leaned against the desk in the little glass office with
his gold watch in his unoccupied hand, and conversed with Mrs Gamp; two
mutes were at the house-door, looking as mournful as could be reasonably
expected of men with such a thriving job in hand; the whole of Mr
Mould’s establishment were on duty within the house or without; feathers
waved, horses snorted, silk and velvets fluttered; in a word, as Mr
Mould emphatically said, ‘Everything that money could do was done.’

‘And what can do more, Mrs Gamp?’ exclaimed the undertaker as he emptied
his glass and smacked his lips.

‘Nothing in the world, sir.’

‘Nothing in the world,’ repeated Mr Mould. ‘You are right, Mrs Gamp.
Why do people spend more money’--here he filled his glass again--‘upon a
death, Mrs Gamp, than upon a birth? Come, that’s in your way; you ought
to know. How do you account for that now?’

‘Perhaps it is because an undertaker’s charges comes dearer than a
nurse’s charges, sir,’ said Mrs Gamp, tittering, and smoothing down her
new black dress with her hands.

‘Ha, ha!’ laughed Mr Mould. ‘You have been breakfasting at somebody’s
expense this morning, Mrs Gamp.’ But seeing, by the aid of a little
shaving-glass which hung opposite, that he looked merry, he composed his
features and became sorrowful.

‘Many’s the time that I’ve not breakfasted at my own expense along of
your recommending, sir; and many’s the time I hope to do the same in
time to come,’ said Mrs Gamp, with an apologetic curtsey.

‘So be it,’ replied Mr Mould, ‘please Providence. No, Mrs Gamp;
I’ll tell you why it is. It’s because the laying out of money with a
well-conducted establishment, where the thing is performed upon the
very best scale, binds the broken heart, and sheds balm upon the wounded
spirit. Hearts want binding, and spirits want balming when people die;
not when people are born. Look at this gentleman to-day; look at him.’

‘An open-handed gentleman?’ cried Mrs Gamp, with enthusiasm.

‘No, no,’ said the undertaker; ‘not an open-handed gentleman in general,
by any means. There you mistake him; but an afflicted gentleman, an
affectionate gentleman, who knows what it is in the power of money to
do, in giving him relief, and in testifying his love and veneration for
the departed. It can give him,’ said Mr Mould, waving his watch-chain
slowly round and round, so that he described one circle after every
item; ‘it can give him four horses to each vehicle; it can give him
velvet trappings; it can give him drivers in cloth cloaks and top-boots;
it can give him the plumage of the ostrich, dyed black; it can give him
any number of walking attendants, dressed in the first style of funeral
fashion, and carrying batons tipped with brass; it can give him a
handsome tomb; it can give him a place in Westminster Abbey itself, if
he choose to invest it in such a purchase. Oh! do not let us say that
gold is dross, when it can buy such things as these, Mrs Gamp.’

‘But what a blessing, sir,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘that there are such as you,
to sell or let ‘em out on hire!’

‘Aye, Mrs Gamp, you are right,’ rejoined the undertaker. ‘We should
be an honoured calling. We do good by stealth, and blush to have it
mentioned in our little bills. How much consolation may I--even I,’
cried Mr Mould, ‘have diffused among my fellow-creatures by means of my
four long-tailed prancers, never harnessed under ten pund ten!’

Mrs Gamp had begun to make a suitable reply, when she was interrupted
by the appearance of one of Mr Mould’s assistants--his chief mourner in
fact--an obese person, with his waistcoat in closer connection with his
legs than is quite reconcilable with the established ideas of grace;
with that cast of feature which is figuratively called a bottle nose;
and with a face covered all over with pimples. He had been a tender
plant once upon a time, but from constant blowing in the fat atmosphere
of funerals, had run to seed.

‘Well, Tacker,’ said Mr Mould, ‘is all ready below?’

‘A beautiful show, sir,’ rejoined Tacker. ‘The horses are prouder and
fresher than ever I see ‘em; and toss their heads, they do, as if they
knowed how much their plumes cost. One, two, three, four,’ said Mr
Tacker, heaping that number of black cloaks upon his left arm.

‘Is Tom there, with the cake and wine?’ asked Mr Mould.

‘Ready to come in at a moment’s notice, sir,’ said Tacker.

‘Then,’ rejoined Mr Mould, putting up his watch, and glancing at himself
in the little shaving-glass, that he might be sure his face had the
right expression on it; ‘then I think we may proceed to business. Give
me the paper of gloves, Tacker. Ah, what a man he was! Ah, Tacker,
Tacker, what a man he was!’

Mr Tacker, who from his great experience in the performance of funerals,
would have made an excellent pantomime actor, winked at Mrs Gamp without
at all disturbing the gravity of his countenance, and followed his
master into the next room.

It was a great point with Mr Mould, and a part of his professional
tact, not to seem to know the doctor; though in reality they were near
neighbours, and very often, as in the present instance, worked together.
So he advanced to fit on his black kid gloves as if he had never seen
him in all his life; while the doctor, on his part, looked as distant
and unconscious as if he had heard and read of undertakers, and had
passed their shops, but had never before been brought into communication
with one.

‘Gloves, eh?’ said the doctor. ‘Mr Pecksniff after you.’

‘I couldn’t think of it,’ returned Mr Pecksniff.

‘You are very good,’ said the doctor, taking a pair. ‘Well, sir, as I
was saying--I was called up to attend that case at about half-past one
o’clock. Cake and wine, eh? Which is port? Thank you.’

Mr Pecksniff took some also.

‘At about half-past one o’clock in the morning, sir,’ resumed the
doctor, ‘I was called up to attend that case. At the first pull of
the night-bell I turned out, threw up the window, and put out my head.
Cloak, eh? Don’t tie it too tight. That’ll do.’

Mr Pecksniff having been likewise inducted into a similar garment, the
doctor resumed.

‘And put out my head--hat, eh? My good friend, that is not mine. Mr
Pecksniff, I beg your pardon, but I think we have unintentionally made
an exchange. Thank you. Well, sir, I was going to tell you--’

‘We are quite ready,’ interrupted Mould in a low voice.

‘Ready, eh?’ said the doctor. ‘Very good, Mr Pecksniff, I’ll take an
opportunity of relating the rest in the coach. It’s rather curious.
Ready, eh? No rain, I hope?’

‘Quite fair, sir,’ returned Mould.

‘I was afraid the ground would have been wet,’ said the doctor, ‘for
my glass fell yesterday. We may congratulate ourselves upon our good
fortune.’ But seeing by this time that Mr Jonas and Chuffey were going
out at the door, he put a white pocket-handkerchief to his face as if a
violent burst of grief had suddenly come upon him, and walked down side
by side with Mr Pecksniff.

Mr Mould and his men had not exaggerated the grandeur of the
arrangements. They were splendid. The four hearse-horses, especially,
reared and pranced, and showed their highest action, as if they knew a
man was dead, and triumphed in it. ‘They break us, drive us, ride us;
ill-treat, abuse, and maim us for their pleasure--But they die; Hurrah,
they die!’

So through the narrow streets and winding city ways, went Anthony
Chuzzlewit’s funeral; Mr Jonas glancing stealthily out of the
coach-window now and then, to observe its effect upon the crowd;
Mr Mould as he walked along, listening with a sober pride to the
exclamations of the bystanders; the doctor whispering his story to Mr
Pecksniff, without appearing to come any nearer the end of it; and
poor old Chuffey sobbing unregarded in a corner. But he had greatly
scandalized Mr Mould at an early stage of the ceremony by carrying his
handkerchief in his hat in a perfectly informal manner, and wiping his
eyes with his knuckles. And as Mr Mould himself had said already, his
behaviour was indecent, and quite unworthy of such an occasion; and he
never ought to have been there.

There he was, however; and in the churchyard there he was, also,
conducting himself in a no less unbecoming manner, and leaning for
support on Tacker, who plainly told him that he was fit for nothing
better than a walking funeral. But Chuffey, Heaven help him! heard no
sound but the echoes, lingering in his own heart, of a voice for ever
silent.

‘I loved him,’ cried the old man, sinking down upon the grave when all
was done. ‘He was very good to me. Oh, my dear old friend and master!’

‘Come, come, Mr Chuffey,’ said the doctor, ‘this won’t do; it’s a clayey
soil, Mr Chuffey. You mustn’t, really.’

‘If it had been the commonest thing we do, and Mr Chuffey had been a
Bearer, gentlemen,’ said Mould, casting an imploring glance upon them,
as he helped to raise him, ‘he couldn’t have gone on worse than this.’

‘Be a man, Mr Chuffey,’ said Pecksniff.

‘Be a gentleman, Mr Chuffey,’ said Mould.

‘Upon my word, my good friend,’ murmured the doctor, in a tone of
stately reproof, as he stepped up to the old man’s side, ‘this is worse
than weakness. This is bad, selfish, very wrong, Mr Chuffey. You should
take example from others, my good sir. You forget that you were not
connected by ties of blood with our deceased friend; and that he had a
very near and very dear relation, Mr Chuffey.’

‘Aye, his own son!’ cried the old man, clasping his hands with
remarkable passion. ‘His own, own, only son!’

‘He’s not right in his head, you know,’ said Jonas, turning pale.
‘You’re not to mind anything he says. I shouldn’t wonder if he was
to talk some precious nonsense. But don’t you mind him, any of you. I
don’t. My father left him to my charge; and whatever he says or does,
that’s enough. I’ll take care of him.’

A hum of admiration rose from the mourners (including Mr Mould and his
merry men) at this new instance of magnanimity and kind feeling on the
part of Jonas. But Chuffey put it to the test no farther. He said not
a word more, and being left to himself for a little while, crept back
again to the coach.

It has been said that Mr Jonas turned pale when the behaviour of the old
clerk attracted general attention; his discomposure, however, was but
momentary, and he soon recovered. But these were not the only changes
he had exhibited that day. The curious eyes of Mr Pecksniff had observed
that as soon as they left the house upon their mournful errand, he began
to mend; that as the ceremonies proceeded he gradually, by little and
little, recovered his old condition, his old looks, his old bearing, his
old agreeable characteristics of speech and manner, and became, in all
respects, his old pleasant self. And now that they were seated in the
coach on their return home; and more when they got there, and found the
windows open, the light and air admitted, and all traces of the late
event removed; he felt so well convinced that Jonas was again the Jonas
he had known a week ago, and not the Jonas of the intervening time, that
he voluntarily gave up his recently-acquired power without one faint
attempt to exercise it, and at once fell back into his former position
of mild and deferential guest.

Mrs Gamp went home to the bird-fancier’s, and was knocked up again that
very night for a birth of twins; Mr Mould dined gayly in the bosom of
his family, and passed the evening facetiously at his club; the hearse,
after standing for a long time at the door of a roistering public-house,
repaired to its stables with the feathers inside and twelve red-nosed
undertakers on the roof, each holding on by a dingy peg, to which, in
times of state, a waving plume was fitted; the various trappings of
sorrow were carefully laid by in presses for the next hirer; the fiery
steeds were quenched and quiet in their stalls; the doctor got merry
with wine at a wedding-dinner, and forgot the middle of the story which
had no end to it; the pageant of a few short hours ago was written
nowhere half so legibly as in the undertaker’s books.

Not in the churchyard? Not even there. The gates were closed; the night
was dark and wet; the rain fell silently, among the stagnant weeds and
nettles. One new mound was there which had not been there last night.
Time, burrowing like a mole below the ground, had marked his track by
throwing up another heap of earth. And that was all.



CHAPTER TWENTY

IS A CHAPTER OF LOVE


‘Pecksniff,’ said Jonas, taking off his hat, to see that the black
crape band was all right; and finding that it was, putting it on again,
complacently; ‘what do you mean to give your daughters when they marry?’

‘My dear Mr Jonas,’ cried the affectionate parent, with an ingenuous
smile, ‘what a very singular inquiry!’

‘Now, don’t you mind whether it’s a singular inquiry or a plural one,’
retorted Jonas, eyeing Mr Pecksniff with no great favour, ‘but answer
it, or let it alone. One or the other.’

‘Hum! The question, my dear friend,’ said Mr Pecksniff, laying his hand
tenderly upon his kinsman’s knee, ‘is involved with many considerations.
What would I give them? Eh?’

‘Ah! what would you give ‘em?’ repeated Jonas.

‘Why, that, ‘said Mr Pecksniff, ‘would naturally depend in a great
measure upon the kind of husbands they might choose, my dear young
friend.’

Mr Jonas was evidently disconcerted, and at a loss how to proceed.
It was a good answer. It seemed a deep one, but such is the wisdom of
simplicity!’

‘My standard for the merits I would require in a son-in-law,’ said Mr
Pecksniff, after a short silence, ‘is a high one. Forgive me, my dear Mr
Jonas,’ he added, greatly moved, ‘if I say that you have spoiled me, and
made it a fanciful one; an imaginative one; a prismatically tinged one,
if I may be permitted to call it so.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ growled Jonas, looking at him with increased
disfavour.

‘Indeed, my dear friend,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘you may well inquire.
The heart is not always a royal mint, with patent machinery to work its
metal into current coin. Sometimes it throws it out in strange forms,
not easily recognized as coin at all. But it is sterling gold. It has at
least that merit. It is sterling gold.’

‘Is it?’ grumbled Jonas, with a doubtful shake of the head.

‘Aye!’ said Mr Pecksniff, warming with his subject ‘it is. To be plain
with you, Mr Jonas, if I could find two such sons-in-law as you will one
day make to some deserving man, capable of appreciating a nature such as
yours, I would--forgetful of myself--bestow upon my daughters portions
reaching to the very utmost limit of my means.’

This was strong language, and it was earnestly delivered. But who can
wonder that such a man as Mr Pecksniff, after all he had seen and heard
of Mr Jonas, should be strong and earnest upon such a theme; a theme
that touched even the worldly lips of undertakers with the honey of
eloquence!

Mr Jonas was silent, and looked thoughtfully at the landscape. For
they were seated on the outside of the coach, at the back, and were
travelling down into the country. He accompanied Mr Pecksniff home for a
few days’ change of air and scene after his recent trials.

‘Well,’ he said, at last, with captivating bluntness, ‘suppose you got
one such son-in-law as me, what then?’

Mr Pecksniff regarded him at first with inexpressible surprise; then
gradually breaking into a sort of dejected vivacity, said:

‘Then well I know whose husband he would be!’

‘Whose?’ asked Jonas, drily.

‘My eldest girl’s, Mr Jonas,’ replied Pecksniff, with moistening eyes.
‘My dear Cherry’s; my staff, my scrip, my treasure, Mr Jonas. A hard
struggle, but it is in the nature of things! I must one day part with
her to a husband. I know it, my dear friend. I am prepared for it.’

‘Ecod! you’ve been prepared for that a pretty long time, I should
think,’ said Jonas.

‘Many have sought to bear her from me,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘All have
failed. “I never will give my hand, papa”--those were her words--“unless
my heart is won.” She has not been quite so happy as she used to be, of
late. I don’t know why.’

Again Mr Jonas looked at the landscape; then at the coachman; then at
the luggage on the roof; finally at Mr Pecksniff.

‘I suppose you’ll have to part with the other one, some of these days?’
he observed, as he caught that gentleman’s eye.

‘Probably,’ said the parent. ‘Years will tame down the wildness of my
foolish bird, and then it will be caged. But Cherry, Mr Jonas, Cherry--’

‘Oh, ah!’ interrupted Jonas. ‘Years have made her all right enough.
Nobody doubts that. But you haven’t answered what I asked you. Of
course, you’re not obliged to do it, you know, if you don’t like. You’re
the best judge.’

There was a warning sulkiness in the manner of this speech, which
admonished Mr Pecksniff that his dear friend was not to be trifled with
or fenced off, and that he must either return a straight-forward reply
to his question, or plainly give him to understand that he declined to
enlighten him upon the subject to which it referred. Mindful in this
dilemma of the caution old Anthony had given him almost with his
latest breath, he resolved to speak to the point, and so told Mr Jonas
(enlarging upon the communication as a proof of his great attachment and
confidence), that in the case he had put; to wit, in the event of such
a man as he proposing for his daughter’s hand, he would endow her with a
fortune of four thousand pounds.

‘I should sadly pinch and cramp myself to do so,’ was his fatherly
remark; ‘but that would be my duty, and my conscience would reward me.
For myself, my conscience is my bank. I have a trifle invested there--a
mere trifle, Mr Jonas--but I prize it as a store of value, I assure
you.’

The good man’s enemies would have divided upon this question into two
parties. One would have asserted without scruple that if Mr Pecksniff’s
conscience were his bank, and he kept a running account there, he must
have overdrawn it beyond all mortal means of computation. The other
would have contended that it was a mere fictitious form; a perfectly
blank book; or one in which entries were only made with a peculiar kind
of invisible ink to become legible at some indefinite time; and that he
never troubled it at all.

‘It would sadly pinch and cramp me, my dear friend,’ repeated Mr
Pecksniff, ‘but Providence--perhaps I may be permitted to say a special
Providence--has blessed my endeavours, and I could guarantee to make the
sacrifice.’

A question of philosophy arises here, whether Mr Pecksniff had or had
not good reason to say that he was specially patronized and encouraged
in his undertakings. All his life long he had been walking up and down
the narrow ways and by-places, with a hook in one hand and a crook in
the other, scraping all sorts of valuable odds and ends into his pouch.
Now, there being a special Providence in the fall of a sparrow, it
follows (so Mr Pecksniff, and only such admirable men, would have
reasoned), that there must also be a special Providence in the alighting
of the stone or stick, or other substance which is aimed at the sparrow.
And Mr Pecksniff’s hook, or crook, having invariably knocked the sparrow
on the head and brought him down, that gentleman may have been led to
consider himself as specially licensed to bag sparrows, and as being
specially seized and possessed of all the birds he had got together.
That many undertakings, national as well as individual--but especially
the former--are held to be specially brought to a glorious and
successful issue, which never could be so regarded on any other process
of reasoning, must be clear to all men. Therefore the precedents would
seem to show that Mr Pecksniff had (as things go) good argument for
what he said and might be permitted to say it, and did not say it
presumptuously, vainly, or arrogantly, but in a spirit of high faith and
great wisdom.

Mr Jonas, not being much accustomed to perplex his mind with theories of
this nature, expressed no opinion on the subject. Nor did he receive
his companion’s announcement with one solitary syllable, good, bad, or
indifferent. He preserved this taciturnity for a quarter of an hour at
least, and during the whole of that time appeared to be steadily engaged
in subjecting some given amount to the operation of every known rule in
figures; adding to it, taking from it, multiplying it, reducing it by
long and short division; working it by the rule-of-three direct and
inversed; exchange or barter; practice; simple interest; compound
interest; and other means of arithmetical calculation. The result
of these labours appeared to be satisfactory, for when he did break
silence, it was as one who had arrived at some specific result, and
freed himself from a state of distressing uncertainty.

‘Come, old Pecksniff!’--Such was his jocose address, as he slapped that
gentleman on the back, at the end of the stage--‘let’s have something!’

‘With all my heart,’ said Mr Pecksniff.

‘Let’s treat the driver,’ cried Jonas.

‘If you think it won’t hurt the man, or render him discontented with his
station--certainly,’ faltered Mr Pecksniff.

Jonas only laughed at this, and getting down from the coach-top with
great alacrity, cut a cumbersome kind of caper in the road. After which,
he went into the public-house, and there ordered spirituous drink to
such an extent, that Mr Pecksniff had some doubts of his perfect sanity,
until Jonas set them quite at rest by saying, when the coach could wait
no longer:

‘I’ve been standing treat for a whole week and more, and letting
you have all the delicacies of the season. YOU shall pay for this
Pecksniff.’ It was not a joke either, as Mr Pecksniff at first supposed;
for he went off to the coach without further ceremony, and left his
respected victim to settle the bill.

But Mr Pecksniff was a man of meek endurance, and Mr Jonas was his
friend. Moreover, his regard for that gentleman was founded, as we know,
on pure esteem, and a knowledge of the excellence of his character. He
came out from the tavern with a smiling face, and even went so far as
to repeat the performance, on a less expensive scale, at the next
ale-house. There was a certain wildness in the spirits of Mr Jonas (not
usually a part of his character) which was far from being subdued
by these means, and, for the rest of the journey, he was so very
buoyant--it may be said, boisterous--that Mr Pecksniff had some
difficulty in keeping pace with him.

They were not expected--oh dear, no! Mr Pecksniff had proposed in London
to give the girls a surprise, and had said he wouldn’t write a word to
prepare them on any account, in order that he and Mr Jonas might take
them unawares, and just see what they were doing, when they thought
their dear papa was miles and miles away. As a consequence of this
playful device, there was nobody to meet them at the finger-post, but
that was of small consequence, for they had come down by the day
coach, and Mr Pecksniff had only a carpetbag, while Mr Jonas had only
a portmanteau. They took the portmanteau between them, put the bag upon
it, and walked off up the lane without delay; Mr Pecksniff already going
on tiptoe as if, without this precaution, his fond children, being then
at a distance of a couple of miles or so, would have some filial sense
of his approach.

It was a lovely evening in the spring-time of the year; and in the soft
stillness of the twilight, all nature was very calm and beautiful. The
day had been fine and warm; but at the coming on of night, the air grew
cool, and in the mellowing distance smoke was rising gently from the
cottage chimneys. There were a thousand pleasant scents diffused around,
from young leaves and fresh buds; the cuckoo had been singing all day
long, and was but just now hushed; the smell of earth newly-upturned,
first breath of hope to the first labourer after his garden withered,
was fragrant in the evening breeze. It was a time when most men cherish
good resolves, and sorrow for the wasted past; when most men, looking
on the shadows as they gather, think of that evening which must close on
all, and that to-morrow which has none beyond.

‘Precious dull,’ said Mr Jonas, looking about. ‘It’s enough to make a
man go melancholy mad.’

‘We shall have lights and a fire soon,’ observed Mr Pecksniff.

‘We shall need ‘em by the time we get there,’ said Jonas. ‘Why the devil
don’t you talk? What are you thinking of?’

‘To tell you the truth, Mr Jonas,’ said Pecksniff with great solemnity,
‘my mind was running at that moment on our late dear friend, your
departed father.’

Mr Jonas immediately let his burden fall, and said, threatening him with
his hand:

‘Drop that, Pecksniff!’

Mr Pecksniff not exactly knowing whether allusion was made to the
subject or the portmanteau, stared at his friend in unaffected surprise.

‘Drop it, I say!’ cried Jonas, fiercely. ‘Do you hear? Drop it, now and
for ever. You had better, I give you notice!’

‘It was quite a mistake,’ urged Mr Pecksniff, very much dismayed;
‘though I admit it was foolish. I might have known it was a tender
string.’

‘Don’t talk to me about tender strings,’ said Jonas, wiping his forehead
with the cuff of his coat. ‘I’m not going to be crowed over by you,
because I don’t like dead company.’

Mr Pecksniff had got out the words ‘Crowed over, Mr Jonas!’ when that
young man, with a dark expression in his countenance, cut him short once
more:

‘Mind!’ he said. ‘I won’t have it. I advise you not to revive the
subject, neither to me nor anybody else. You can take a hint, if you
choose as well as another man. There’s enough said about it. Come
along!’

Taking up his part of the load again, when he had said these words,
he hurried on so fast that Mr Pecksniff, at the other end of the
portmanteau, found himself dragged forward, in a very inconvenient and
ungraceful manner, to the great detriment of what is called by fancy
gentlemen ‘the bark’ upon his shins, which were most unmercifully bumped
against the hard leather and the iron buckles. In the course of a few
minutes, however, Mr Jonas relaxed his speed, and suffered his companion
to come up with him, and to bring the portmanteau into a tolerably
straight position.

It was pretty clear that he regretted his late outbreak, and that he
mistrusted its effect on Mr Pecksniff; for as often as that gentleman
glanced towards Mr Jonas, he found Mr Jonas glancing at him, which was
a new source of embarrassment. It was but a short-lived one, though, for
Mr Jonas soon began to whistle, whereupon Mr Pecksniff, taking his cue
from his friend, began to hum a tune melodiously.

‘Pretty nearly there, ain’t we?’ said Jonas, when this had lasted some
time.

‘Close, my dear friend,’ said Mr Pecksniff.

‘What’ll they be doing, do you suppose?’ asked Jonas.

‘Impossible to say,’ cried Mr Pecksniff. ‘Giddy truants! They may be
away from home, perhaps. I was going to--he! he! he!--I was going to
propose,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘that we should enter by the back way, and
come upon them like a clap of thunder, Mr Jonas.’

It might not have been easy to decide in respect of which of their
manifold properties, Jonas, Mr Pecksniff, the carpet-bag, and the
portmanteau, could be likened to a clap of thunder. But Mr Jonas giving
his assent to this proposal, they stole round into the back yard, and
softly advanced towards the kitchen window, through which the mingled
light of fire and candle shone upon the darkening night.

Truly Mr Pecksniff is blessed in his children--in one of them, at any
rate. The prudent Cherry--staff and scrip, and treasure of her doting
father--there she sits, at a little table white as driven snow, before
the kitchen fire, making up accounts! See the neat maiden, as with pen
in hand, and calculating look addressed towards the ceiling and bunch
of keys within a little basket at her side, she checks the housekeeping
expenditure! From flat-iron, dish-cover, and warming-pan; from pot and
kettle, face of brass footman, and black-leaded stove; bright glances
of approbation wink and glow upon her. The very onions dangling from the
beam, mantle and shine like cherubs’ cheeks. Something of the influence
of those vegetables sinks into Mr Pecksniff’s nature. He weeps.

It is but for a moment, and he hides it from the observation of
his friend--very carefully--by a somewhat elaborate use of his
pocket-handkerchief, in fact; for he would not have his weakness known.

‘Pleasant,’ he murmured, ‘pleasant to a father’s feelings! My dear girl!
Shall we let her know we are here, Mr Jonas?’

‘Why, I suppose you don’t mean to spend the evening in the stable, or
the coach-house,’ he returned.

‘That, indeed, is not such hospitality as I would show to YOU, my
friend,’ cried Mr Pecksniff, pressing his hand. And then he took a long
breath, and tapping at the window, shouted with stentorian blandness:

‘Boh!’

Cherry dropped her pen and screamed. But innocence is ever bold, or
should be. As they opened the door, the valiant girl exclaimed in a firm
voice, and with a presence of mind which even in that trying moment did
not desert her, ‘Who are you? What do you want? Speak! or I will call my
Pa.’

Mr Pecksniff held out his arms. She knew him instantly, and rushed into
his fond embrace.

‘It was thoughtless of us, Mr Jonas, it was very thoughtless,’ said
Pecksniff, smoothing his daugther’s hair. ‘My darling, do you see that I
am not alone!’

Not she. She had seen nothing but her father until now. She saw Mr
Jonas now, though; and blushed, and hung her head down, as she gave him
welcome.

But where was Merry? Mr Pecksniff didn’t ask the question in reproach,
but in a vein of mildness touched with a gentle sorrow. She was
upstairs, reading on the parlour couch. Ah! Domestic details had no
charms for HER. ‘But call her down,’ said Mr Pecksniff, with a placid
resignation. ‘Call her down, my love.’

She was called and came, all flushed and tumbled from reposing on the
sofa; but none the worse for that. No, not at all. Rather the better, if
anything.

‘Oh my goodness me!’ cried the arch girl, turning to her cousin when she
had kissed her father on both cheeks, and in her frolicsome nature had
bestowed a supernumerary salute upon the tip of his nose, ‘YOU here,
fright! Well, I’m very thankful that you won’t trouble ME much!’

‘What! you’re as lively as ever, are you?’ said Jonas. ‘Oh! You’re a
wicked one!’

‘There, go along!’ retorted Merry, pushing him away. ‘I’m sure I don’t
know what I shall ever do, if I have to see much of you. Go along, for
gracious’ sake!’

Mr Pecksniff striking in here, with a request that Mr Jonas would
immediately walk upstairs, he so far complied with the young lady’s
adjuration as to go at once. But though he had the fair Cherry on his
arm, he could not help looking back at her sister, and exchanging some
further dialogue of the same bantering description, as they all four
ascended to the parlour; where--for the young ladies happened, by good
fortune, to be a little later than usual that night--the tea-board was
at that moment being set out.

Mr Pinch was not at home, so they had it all to themselves, and were
very snug and talkative, Jonas sitting between the two sisters, and
displaying his gallantry in that engaging manner which was peculiar
to him. It was a hard thing, Mr Pecksniff said, when tea was done,
and cleared away, to leave so pleasant a little party, but having some
important papers to examine in his own apartment, he must beg them to
excuse him for half an hour. With this apology he withdrew, singing
a careless strain as he went. He had not been gone five minutes, when
Merry, who had been sitting in the window, apart from Jonas and her
sister, burst into a half-smothered laugh, and skipped towards the door.

‘Hallo!’ cried Jonas. ‘Don’t go.’

‘Oh, I dare say!’ rejoined Merry, looking back. ‘You’re very anxious I
should stay, fright, ain’t you?’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Jonas. ‘Upon my word I am. I want to speak to you.’
But as she left the room notwithstanding, he ran out after her,
and brought her back, after a short struggle in the passage which
scandalized Miss Cherry very much.

‘Upon my word, Merry,’ urged that young lady, ‘I wonder at you! There
are bounds even to absurdity, my dear.’

‘Thank you, my sweet,’ said Merry, pursing up her rosy Lips. ‘Much
obliged to it for its advice. Oh! do leave me alone, you monster, do!’
This entreaty was wrung from her by a new proceeding on the part of
Mr Jonas, who pulled her down, all breathless as she was, into a seat
beside him on the sofa, having at the same time Miss Cherry upon the
other side.

‘Now,’ said Jonas, clasping the waist of each; ‘I have got both arms
full, haven’t I?’

‘One of them will be black and blue to-morrow, if you don’t let me go,’
cried the playful Merry.

‘Ah! I don’t mind YOUR pinching,’ grinned Jonas, ‘a bit.’

‘Pinch him for me, Cherry, pray,’ said Mercy. ‘I never did hate anybody
so much as I hate this creature, I declare!’

‘No, no, don’t say that,’ urged Jonas, ‘and don’t pinch either, because
I want to be serious. I say--Cousin Charity--’

‘Well! what?’ she answered sharply.

‘I want to have some sober talk,’ said Jonas; ‘I want to prevent any
mistakes, you know, and to put everything upon a pleasant understanding.
That’s desirable and proper, ain’t it?’

Neither of the sisters spoke a word. Mr Jonas paused and cleared his
throat, which was very dry.

‘She’ll not believe what I am going to say, will she, cousin?’ said
Jonas, timidly squeezing Miss Charity.

‘Really, Mr Jonas, I don’t know, until I hear what it is. It’s quite
impossible!’

‘Why, you see,’ said Jonas, ‘her way always being to make game of
people, I know she’ll laugh, or pretend to--I know that, beforehand. But
you can tell her I’m in earnest, cousin; can’t you? You’ll confess you
know, won’t you? You’ll be honourable, I’m sure,’ he added persuasively.

No answer. His throat seemed to grow hotter and hotter, and to be more
and more difficult of control.

‘You see, Cousin Charity,’ said Jonas, ‘nobody but you can tell her
what pains I took to get into her company when you were both at the
boarding-house in the city, because nobody’s so well aware of it, you
know. Nobody else can tell her how hard I tried to get to know you
better, in order that I might get to know her without seeming to wish
it; can they? I always asked you about her, and said where had she gone,
and when would she come, and how lively she was, and all that; didn’t I,
cousin? I know you’ll tell her so, if you haven’t told her so already,
and--and--I dare say you have, because I’m sure you’re honourable, ain’t
you?’

Still not a word. The right arm of Mr Jonas--the elder sister sat upon
his right--may have been sensible of some tumultuous throbbing which was
not within itself; but nothing else apprised him that his words had had
the least effect.

‘Even if you kept it to yourself, and haven’t told her,’ resumed Jonas,
‘it don’t much matter, because you’ll bear honest witness now; won’t
you? We’ve been very good friends from the first; haven’t we? and of
course we shall be quite friends in future, and so I don’t mind speaking
before you a bit. Cousin Mercy, you’ve heard what I’ve been saying.
She’ll confirm it, every word; she must. Will you have me for your
husband? Eh?’

As he released his hold of Charity, to put this question with better
effect, she started up and hurried away to her own room, marking her
progress as she went by such a train of passionate and incoherent sound,
as nothing but a slighted woman in her anger could produce.

‘Let me go away. Let me go after her,’ said Merry, pushing him off,
and giving him--to tell the truth--more than one sounding slap upon his
outstretched face.

‘Not till you say yes. You haven’t told me. Will you have me for your
husband?’

‘No, I won’t. I can’t bear the sight of you. I have told you so a
hundred times. You are a fright. Besides, I always thought you liked my
sister best. We all thought so.’

‘But that wasn’t my fault,’ said Jonas.

‘Yes it was; you know it was.’

‘Any trick is fair in love,’ said Jonas. ‘She may have thought I liked
her best, but you didn’t.’

‘I did!’

‘No, you didn’t. You never could have thought I liked her best, when you
were by.’

‘There’s no accounting for tastes,’ said Merry; ‘at least I didn’t mean
to say that. I don’t know what I mean. Let me go to her.’

‘Say “Yes,” and then I will.’

‘If I ever brought myself to say so, it should only be that I might hate
and tease you all my life.’

‘That’s as good,’ cried Jonas, ‘as saying it right out. It’s a bargain,
cousin. We’re a pair, if ever there was one.’

This gallant speech was succeeded by a confused noise of kissing and
slapping; and then the fair but much dishevelled Merry broke away, and
followed in the footsteps of her sister.

Now whether Mr Pecksniff had been listening--which in one of his
character appears impossible; or divined almost by inspiration what the
matter was--which, in a man of his sagacity is far more probable; or
happened by sheer good fortune to find himself in exactly the
right place, at precisely the right time--which, under the special
guardianship in which he lived might very reasonably happen; it is quite
certain that at the moment when the sisters came together in their own
room, he appeared at the chamber door. And a marvellous contrast it
was--they so heated, noisy, and vehement; he so calm, so self-possessed,
so cool and full of peace, that not a hair upon his head was stirred.

‘Children!’ said Mr Pecksniff, spreading out his hands in wonder, but
not before he had shut the door, and set his back against it. ‘Girls!
Daughters! What is this?’

‘The wretch; the apostate; the false, mean, odious villain; has before
my very face proposed to Mercy!’ was his eldest daughter’s answer.

‘Who has proposed to Mercy!’ asked Mr Pecksniff.

‘HE has. That thing, Jonas, downstairs.’

‘Jonas proposed to Mercy?’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Aye, aye! Indeed!’

‘Have you nothing else to say?’ cried Charity. ‘Am I to be driven mad,
papa? He has proposed to Mercy, not to me.’

‘Oh, fie! For shame!’ said Mr Pecksniff, gravely. ‘Oh, for shame! Can
the triumph of a sister move you to this terrible display, my child? Oh,
really this is very sad! I am sorry; I am surprised and hurt to see
you so. Mercy, my girl, bless you! See to her. Ah, envy, envy, what a
passion you are!’

Uttering this apostrophe in a tone full of grief and lamentation, Mr
Pecksniff left the room (taking care to shut the door behind him),
and walked downstairs into the parlour. There he found his intended
son-in-law, whom he seized by both hands.

‘Jonas!’ cried Mr Pecksniff. ‘Jonas! the dearest wish of my heart is now
fulfilled!’

‘Very well; I’m glad to hear it,’ said Jonas. ‘That’ll do. I say! As
it ain’t the one you’re so fond of, you must come down with another
thousand, Pecksniff. You must make it up five. It’s worth that, to keep
your treasure to yourself, you know. You get off very cheap that way,
and haven’t a sacrifice to make.’

The grin with which he accompanied this, set off his other attractions
to such unspeakable advantage, that even Mr Pecksniff lost his presence
of mind for a moment, and looked at the young man as if he were quite
stupefied with wonder and admiration. But he quickly regained his
composure, and was in the very act of changing the subject, when a hasty
step was heard without, and Tom Pinch, in a state of great excitement,
came darting into the room.

On seeing a stranger there, apparently engaged with Mr Pecksniff in
private conversation, Tom was very much abashed, though he still looked
as if he had something of great importance to communicate, which would
be a sufficient apology for his intrusion.

‘Mr Pinch,’ said Pecksniff, ‘this is hardly decent. You will excuse my
saying that I think your conduct scarcely decent, Mr Pinch.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ replied Tom, ‘for not knocking at the door.’

‘Rather beg this gentleman’s pardon, Mr Pinch,’ said Pecksniff. ‘I know
you; he does not.--My young man, Mr Jonas.’

The son-in-law that was to be gave him a slight nod--not actively
disdainful or contemptuous, only passively; for he was in a good humour.

‘Could I speak a word with you, sir, if you please?’ said Tom. ‘It’s
rather pressing.’

‘It should be very pressing to justify this strange behaviour, Mr
Pinch,’ returned his master. ‘Excuse me for one moment, my dear friend.
Now, sir, what is the reason of this rough intrusion?’

‘I am very sorry, sir, I am sure,’ said Tom, standing, cap in hand,
before his patron in the passage; ‘and I know it must have a very rude
appearance--’

‘It HAS a very rude appearance, Mr Pinch.’

‘Yes, I feel that, sir; but the truth is, I was so surprised to see
them, and knew you would be too, that I ran home very fast indeed, and
really hadn’t enough command over myself to know what I was doing very
well. I was in the church just now, sir, touching the organ for my own
amusement, when I happened to look round, and saw a gentleman and lady
standing in the aisle listening. They seemed to be strangers, sir, as
well as I could make out in the dusk; and I thought I didn’t know
them; so presently I left off, and said, would they walk up into the
organ-loft, or take a seat? No, they said, they wouldn’t do that; but
they thanked me for the music they had heard. In fact,’ observed Tom,
blushing, ‘they said, “Delicious music!” at least, SHE did; and I am
sure that was a greater pleasure and honour to me than any compliment I
could have had. I--I--beg your pardon sir;’ he was all in a tremble, and
dropped his hat for the second time ‘but I--I’m rather flurried, and I
fear I’ve wandered from the point.’

‘If you will come back to it, Thomas,’ said Mr Pecksniff, with an icy
look, ‘I shall feel obliged.’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Tom, ‘certainly. They had a posting carriage at the
porch, sir, and had stopped to hear the organ, they said. And then they
said--SHE said, I mean, “I believe you live with Mr Pecksniff, sir?” I
said I had that honour, and I took the liberty, sir,’ added Tom, raising
his eyes to his benefactor’s face, ‘of saying, as I always will and
must, with your permission, that I was under great obligations to you,
and never could express my sense of them sufficiently.’

‘That,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘was very, very wrong. Take your time, Mr
Pinch.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ cried Tom. ‘On that they asked me--she asked, I
mean--“Wasn’t there a bridle road to Mr Pecksniff’s house?”’

Mr Pecksniff suddenly became full of interest.

‘“Without going by the Dragon?” When I said there was, and said how
happy I should be to show it ‘em, they sent the carriage on by the road,
and came with me across the meadows. I left ‘em at the turnstile to run
forward and tell you they were coming, and they’ll be here, sir, in--in
less than a minute’s time, I should say,’ added Tom, fetching his breath
with difficulty.

‘Now, who,’ said Mr Pecksniff, pondering, ‘who may these people be?’

‘Bless my soul, sir!’ cried Tom, ‘I meant to mention that at first, I
thought I had. I knew them--her, I mean--directly. The gentleman who
was ill at the Dragon, sir, last winter; and the young lady who attended
him.’

Tom’s teeth chattered in his head, and he positively staggered with
amazement, at witnessing the extraordinary effect produced on Mr
Pecksniff by these simple words. The dread of losing the old man’s
favour almost as soon as they were reconciled, through the mere fact
of having Jonas in the house; the impossibility of dismissing Jonas,
or shutting him up, or tying him hand and foot and putting him in
the coal-cellar, without offending him beyond recall; the horrible
discordance prevailing in the establishment, and the impossibility of
reducing it to decent harmony with Charity in loud hysterics, Mercy in
the utmost disorder, Jonas in the parlour, and Martin Chuzzlewit and his
young charge upon the very doorsteps; the total hopelessness of being
able to disguise or feasibly explain this state of rampant confusion;
the sudden accumulation over his devoted head of every complicated
perplexity and entanglement for his extrication from which he had
trusted to time, good fortune, chance, and his own plotting, so filled
the entrapped architect with dismay, that if Tom could have been a
Gorgon staring at Mr Pecksniff, and Mr Pecksniff could have been a
Gorgon staring at Tom, they could not have horrified each other half so
much as in their own bewildered persons.

‘Dear, dear!’ cried Tom, ‘what have I done? I hoped it would be a
pleasant surprise, sir. I thought you would like to know.’

But at that moment a loud knocking was heard at the hall door.



CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

MORE AMERICAN EXPERIENCES, MARTIN TAKES A PARTNER, AND MAKES A PURCHASE.
SOME ACCOUNT OF EDEN, AS IT APPEARED ON PAPER. ALSO OF THE BRITISH LION.
ALSO OF THE KIND OF SYMPATHY PROFESSED AND ENTERTAINED BY THE WATERTOAST
ASSOCIATION OF UNITED SYMPATHISERS


The knocking at Mr Pecksniff’s door, though loud enough, bore no
resemblance whatever to the noise of an American railway train at full
speed. It may be well to begin the present chapter with this frank
admission, lest the reader should imagine that the sounds now deafening
this history’s ears have any connection with the knocker on Mr
Pecksniff’s door, or with the great amount of agitation pretty equally
divided between that worthy man and Mr Pinch, of which its strong
performance was the cause.

Mr Pecksniff’s house is more than a thousand leagues away; and again
this happy chronicle has Liberty and Moral Sensibility for its high
companions. Again it breathes the blessed air of Independence; again it
contemplates with pious awe that moral sense which renders unto Ceasar
nothing that is his; again inhales that sacred atmosphere which was
the life of him--oh noble patriot, with many followers!--who dreamed of
Freedom in a slave’s embrace, and waking sold her offspring and his own
in public markets.

How the wheels clank and rattle, and the tram-road shakes, as the train
rushes on! And now the engine yells, as it were lashed and tortured like
a living labourer, and writhed in agony. A poor fancy; for steel and
iron are of infinitely greater account, in this commonwealth, than
flesh and blood. If the cunning work of man be urged beyond its power of
endurance, it has within it the elements of its own revenge; whereas
the wretched mechanism of the Divine Hand is dangerous with no such
property, but may be tampered with, and crushed, and broken, at the
driver’s pleasure. Look at that engine! It shall cost a man more dollars
in the way of penalty and fine, and satisfaction of the outraged law,
to deface in wantonness that senseless mass of metal, than to take the
lives of twenty human creatures! Thus the stars wink upon the bloody
stripes; and Liberty pulls down her cap upon her eyes, and owns
Oppression in its vilest aspect, for her sister.

The engine-driver of the train whose noise awoke us to the present
chapter was certainly troubled with no such reflections as these; nor is
it very probable that his mind was disturbed by any reflections at all.
He leaned with folded arms and crossed legs against the side of the
carriage, smoking; and, except when he expressed, by a grunt as short as
his pipe, his approval of some particularly dexterous aim on the part of
his colleague, the fireman, who beguiled his leisure by throwing logs
of wood from the tender at the numerous stray cattle on the line, he
preserved a composure so immovable, and an indifference so complete,
that if the locomotive had been a sucking-pig, he could not have been
more perfectly indifferent to its doings. Notwithstanding the tranquil
state of this officer, and his unbroken peace of mind, the train was
proceeding with tolerable rapidity; and the rails being but poorly laid,
the jolts and bumps it met with in its progress were neither slight nor
few.

There were three great caravans or cars attached. The ladies’ car, the
gentlemen’s car, and the car for negroes; the latter painted black, as
an appropriate compliment to its company. Martin and Mark Tapley were
in the first, as it was the most comfortable; and, being far from full,
received other gentlemen who, like them, were unblessed by the society
of ladies of their own. They were seated side by side, and were engaged
in earnest conversation.

‘And so, Mark,’ said Martin, looking at him with an anxious expression,
‘and so you are glad we have left New York far behind us, are you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Mark. ‘I am. Precious glad.’

‘Were you not “jolly” there?’ asked Martin.

‘On the contrairy, sir,’ returned Mark. ‘The jolliest week as ever I
spent in my life, was that there week at Pawkins’s.’

‘What do you think of our prospects?’ inquired Martin, with an air that
plainly said he had avoided the question for some time.

‘Uncommon bright, sir,’ returned Mark. ‘Impossible for a place to have
a better name, sir, than the Walley of Eden. No man couldn’t think of
settling in a better place than the Walley of Eden. And I’m told,’ added
Mark, after a pause, ‘as there’s lots of serpents there, so we shall
come out, quite complete and reg’lar.’

So far from dwelling upon this agreeable piece of information with the
least dismay, Mark’s face grew radiant as he called it to mind; so very
radiant, that a stranger might have supposed he had all his life been
yearning for the society of serpents, and now hailed with delight the
approaching consummation of his fondest wishes.

‘Who told you that?’ asked Martin, sternly.

‘A military officer,’ said Mark.

‘Confound you for a ridiculous fellow!’ cried Martin, laughing heartily
in spite of himself. ‘What military officer? You know they spring up in
every field.’

‘As thick as scarecrows in England, sir,’ interposed Mark, ‘which is a
sort of milita themselves, being entirely coat and wescoat, with a stick
inside. Ha, ha!--Don’t mind me, sir; it’s my way sometimes. I can’t help
being jolly. Why it was one of them inwading conquerors at Pawkins’s, as
told me. “Am I rightly informed,” he says--not exactly through his nose,
but as if he’d got a stoppage in it, very high up--“that you’re a-going
to the Walley of Eden?” “I heard some talk on it,” I told him. “Oh!”
 says he, “if you should ever happen to go to bed there--you MAY, you
know,” he says, “in course of time as civilisation progresses--don’t
forget to take a axe with you.” I looks at him tolerable hard. “Fleas?”
 says I. “And more,” says he. “Wampires?” says I. “And more,” says he.
“Musquitoes, perhaps?” says I. “And more,” says he. “What more?” says
I. “Snakes more,” says he; “rattle-snakes. You’re right to a certain
extent, stranger. There air some catawampous chawers in the small way
too, as graze upon a human pretty strong; but don’t mind THEM--they’re
company. It’s snakes,” he says, “as you’ll object to; and whenever you
wake and see one in a upright poster on your bed,” he says, “like a
corkscrew with the handle off a-sittin’ on its bottom ring, cut him
down, for he means wenom.”’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before!’ cried Martin, with an expression
of face which set off the cheerfulness of Mark’s visage to great
advantage.

‘I never thought on it, sir,’ said Mark. ‘It come in at one ear, and
went out at the other. But Lord love us, he was one of another Company,
I dare say, and only made up the story that we might go to his Eden, and
not the opposition one.’

‘There’s some probability in that,’ observed Martin. ‘I can honestly say
that I hope so, with all my heart.’

‘I’ve not a doubt about it, sir,’ returned Mark, who, full of the
inspiriting influence of the anecodote upon himself, had for the moment
forgotten its probable effect upon his master; ‘anyhow, we must live,
you know, sir.’

‘Live!’ cried Martin. ‘Yes, it’s easy to say live; but if we should
happen not to wake when rattlesnakes are making corkscrews of themselves
upon our beds, it may be not so easy to do it.’

‘And that’s a fact,’ said a voice so close in his ear that it tickled
him. ‘That’s dreadful true.’

Martin looked round, and found that a gentleman, on the seat behind, had
thrust his head between himself and Mark, and sat with his chin resting
on the back rail of their little bench, entertaining himself with their
conversation. He was as languid and listless in his looks as most of the
gentlemen they had seen; his cheeks were so hollow that he seemed to be
always sucking them in; and the sun had burnt him, not a wholesome red
or brown, but dirty yellow. He had bright dark eyes, which he kept half
closed; only peeping out of the corners, and even then with a glance
that seemed to say, ‘Now you won’t overreach me; you want to, but you
won’t.’ His arms rested carelessly on his knees as he leant forward;
in the palm of his left hand, as English rustics have their slice of
cheese, he had a cake of tobacco; in his right a penknife. He struck
into the dialogue with as little reserve as if he had been specially
called in, days before, to hear the arguments on both sides, and favour
them with his opinion; and he no more contemplated or cared for the
possibility of their not desiring the honour of his acquaintance or
interference in their private affairs than if he had been a bear or a
buffalo.

‘That,’ he repeated, nodding condescendingly to Martin, as to an outer
barbarian and foreigner, ‘is dreadful true. Darn all manner of vermin.’

Martin could not help frowning for a moment, as if he were disposed to
insinuate that the gentleman had unconsciously ‘darned’ himself. But
remembering the wisdom of doing at Rome as Romans do, he smiled with the
pleasantest expression he could assume upon so short a notice.

Their new friend said no more just then, being busily employed in
cutting a quid or plug from his cake of tobacco, and whistling softly to
himself the while. When he had shaped it to his liking, he took out his
old plug, and deposited the same on the back of the seat between Mark
and Martin, while he thrust the new one into the hollow of his cheek,
where it looked like a large walnut, or tolerable pippin. Finding it
quite satisfactory, he stuck the point of his knife into the old plug,
and holding it out for their inspection, remarked with the air of a man
who had not lived in vain, that it was ‘used up considerable.’ Then
he tossed it away; put his knife into one pocket and his tobacco into
another; rested his chin upon the rail as before; and approving of the
pattern on Martin’s waistcoat, reached out his hand to feel the texture
of that garment.

‘What do you call this now?’ he asked.

‘Upon my word’ said Martin, ‘I don’t know what it’s called.’

‘It’ll cost a dollar or more a yard, I reckon?’

‘I really don’t know.’

‘In my country,’ said the gentleman, ‘we know the cost of our own
pro-duce.’

Martin not discussing the question, there was a pause.

‘Well!’ resumed their new friend, after staring at them intently during
the whole interval of silence; ‘how’s the unnat’ral old parent by this
time?’

Mr Tapley regarding this inquiry as only another version of the
impertinent English question, ‘How’s your mother?’ would have resented
it instantly, but for Martin’s prompt interposition.

‘You mean the old country?’ he said.

‘Ah!’ was the reply. ‘How’s she? Progressing back’ards, I expect, as
usual? Well! How’s Queen Victoria?’

‘In good health, I believe,’ said Martin.

‘Queen Victoria won’t shake in her royal shoes at all, when she hears
to-morrow named,’ observed the stranger, ‘No.’

‘Not that I am aware of. Why should she?’

‘She won’t be taken with a cold chill, when she realises what is being
done in these diggings,’ said the stranger. ‘No.’

‘No,’ said Martin. ‘I think I could take my oath of that.’

The strange gentleman looked at him as if in pity for his ignorance or
prejudice, and said:

‘Well, sir, I tell you this--there ain’t a engine with its biler
bust, in God A’mighty’s free U-nited States, so fixed, and nipped,
and frizzled to a most e-tarnal smash, as that young critter, in her
luxurious location in the Tower of London will be, when she reads the
next double-extra Watertoast Gazette.’

Several other gentlemen had left their seats and gathered round during
the foregoing dialogue. They were highly delighted with this speech. One
very lank gentleman, in a loose limp white cravat, long white waistcoat,
and a black great-coat, who seemed to be in authority among them, felt
called upon to acknowledge it.

‘Hem! Mr La Fayette Kettle,’ he said, taking off his hat.

There was a grave murmur of ‘Hush!’

‘Mr La Fayette Kettle! Sir!’

Mr Kettle bowed.

‘In the name of this company, sir, and in the name of our common
country, and in the name of that righteous cause of holy sympathy in
which we are engaged, I thank you. I thank you, sir, in the name of
the Watertoast Sympathisers; and I thank you, sir, in the name of
the Watertoast Gazette; and I thank you, sir, in the name of the
star-spangled banner of the Great United States, for your eloquent and
categorical exposition. And if, sir,’ said the speaker, poking Martin
with the handle of his umbrella to bespeak his attention, for he was
listening to a whisper from Mark; ‘if, sir, in such a place, and at such
a time, I might venture to con-clude with a sentiment, glancing--however
slantin’dicularly--at the subject in hand, I would say, sir, may
the British Lion have his talons eradicated by the noble bill of the
American Eagle, and be taught to play upon the Irish Harp and the Scotch
Fiddle that music which is breathed in every empty shell that lies upon
the shores of green Co-lumbia!’

Here the lank gentleman sat down again, amidst a great sensation; and
every one looked very grave.

‘General Choke,’ said Mr La Fayette Kettle, ‘you warm my heart; sir, you
warm my heart. But the British Lion is not unrepresented here, sir; and
I should be glad to hear his answer to those remarks.’

‘Upon my word,’ cried Martin, laughing, ‘since you do me the honour to
consider me his representative, I have only to say that I never heard
of Queen Victoria reading the What’s-his-name Gazette and that I should
scarcely think it probable.’

General Choke smiled upon the rest, and said, in patient and benignant
explanation:

‘It is sent to her, sir. It is sent to her. Her mail.’

‘But if it is addressed to the Tower of London, it would hardly come to
hand, I fear,’ returned Martin; ‘for she don’t live there.’

‘The Queen of England, gentlemen,’ observed Mr Tapley, affecting the
greatest politeness, and regarding them with an immovable face, ‘usually
lives in the Mint to take care of the money. She HAS lodgings, in virtue
of her office, with the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House; but don’t often
occupy them, in consequence of the parlour chimney smoking.’

‘Mark,’ said Martin, ‘I shall be very much obliged to you if you’ll
have the goodness not to interfere with preposterous statements, however
jocose they may appear to you. I was merely remarking gentlemen--though
it’s a point of very little import--that the Queen of England does not
happen to live in the Tower of London.’

‘General!’ cried Mr La Fayette Kettle. ‘You hear?’

‘General!’ echoed several others. ‘General!’

‘Hush! Pray, silence!’ said General Choke, holding up his hand, and
speaking with a patient and complacent benevolence that was quite
touching. ‘I have always remarked it as a very extraordinary
circumstance, which I impute to the natur’ of British Institutions and
their tendency to suppress that popular inquiry and information which
air so widely diffused even in the trackless forests of this vast
Continent of the Western Ocean; that the knowledge of Britishers
themselves on such points is not to be compared with that possessed
by our intelligent and locomotive citizens. This is interesting, and
confirms my observation. When you say, sir,’ he continued, addressing
Martin, ‘that your Queen does not reside in the Tower of London, you
fall into an error, not uncommon to your countrymen, even when their
abilities and moral elements air such as to command respect. But, sir,
you air wrong. She DOES live there--’

‘When she is at the Court of Saint James’s,’ interposed Kettle.

‘When she is at the Court of Saint James’s, of course,’ returned the
General, in the same benignant way; ‘for if her location was in Windsor
Pavilion it couldn’t be in London at the same time. Your Tower of
London, sir,’ pursued the General, smiling with a mild consciousness of
his knowledge, ‘is nat’rally your royal residence. Being located in
the immediate neighbourhood of your Parks, your Drives, your Triumphant
Arches, your Opera, and your Royal Almacks, it nat’rally suggests
itself as the place for holding a luxurious and thoughtless court.
And, consequently,’ said the General, ‘consequently, the court is held
there.’

‘Have you been in England?’ asked Martin.

‘In print I have, sir,’ said the General, ‘not otherwise. We air a
reading people here, sir. You will meet with much information among us
that will surprise you, sir.’

‘I have not the least doubt of it,’ returned Martin. But here he was
interrupted by Mr La Fayette Kettle, who whispered in his ear:

‘You know General Choke?’

‘No,’ returned Martin, in the same tone.

‘You know what he is considered?’

‘One of the most remarkable men in the country?’ said Martin, at a
venture.

‘That’s a fact,’ rejoined Kettle. ‘I was sure you must have heard of
him!’

‘I think,’ said Martin, addressing himself to the General again, ‘that
I have the pleasure of being the bearer of a letter of introduction to
you, sir. From Mr Bevan, of Massachusetts,’ he added, giving it to him.

The General took it and read it attentively; now and then stopping to
glance at the two strangers. When he had finished the note, he came over
to Martin, sat down by him, and shook hands.

‘Well!’ he said, ‘and you think of settling in Eden?’

‘Subject to your opinion, and the agent’s advice,’ replied Martin. ‘I am
told there is nothing to be done in the old towns.’

‘I can introduce you to the agent, sir,’ said the General. ‘I know him.
In fact, I am a member of the Eden Land Corporation myself.’

This was serious news to Martin, for his friend had laid great stress
upon the General’s having no connection, as he thought, with any land
company, and therefore being likely to give him disinterested advice.
The General explained that he had joined the Corporation only a few
weeks ago, and that no communication had passed between himself and Mr
Bevan since.

‘We have very little to venture,’ said Martin anxiously--‘only a
few pounds--but it is our all. Now, do you think that for one of my
profession, this would be a speculation with any hope or chance in it?’

‘Well,’ observed the General, gravely, ‘if there wasn’t any hope or
chance in the speculation, it wouldn’t have engaged my dollars, I
opinionate.’

‘I don’t mean for the sellers,’ said Martin. ‘For the buyers--for the
buyers!’

‘For the buyers, sir?’ observed the General, in a most impressive
manner. ‘Well! you come from an old country; from a country, sir, that
has piled up golden calves as high as Babel, and worshipped ‘em for
ages. We are a new country, sir; man is in a more primeval state here,
sir; we have not the excuse of having lapsed in the slow course of time
into degenerate practices; we have no false gods; man, sir, here, is man
in all his dignity. We fought for that or nothing. Here am I, sir,’
said the General, setting up his umbrella to represent himself, and a
villanous-looking umbrella it was; a very bad counter to stand for the
sterling coin of his benevolence, ‘here am I with grey hairs sir, and
a moral sense. Would I, with my principles, invest capital in this
speculation if I didn’t think it full of hopes and chances for my
brother man?’

Martin tried to look convinced, but he thought of New York, and found it
difficult.

‘What are the Great United States for, sir,’ pursued the General ‘if not
for the regeneration of man? But it is nat’ral in you to make such an
enquerry, for you come from England, and you do not know my country.’

‘Then you think,’ said Martin, ‘that allowing for the hardships we are
prepared to undergo, there is a reasonable--Heaven knows we don’t expect
much--a reasonable opening in this place?’

‘A reasonable opening in Eden, sir! But see the agent, see the agent;
see the maps and plans, sir; and conclude to go or stay, according to
the natur’ of the settlement. Eden hadn’t need to go a-begging yet,
sir,’ remarked the General.

‘It is an awful lovely place, sure-ly. And frightful wholesome,
likewise!’ said Mr Kettle, who had made himself a party to this
conversation as a matter of course.

Martin felt that to dispute such testimony, for no better reason
than because he had his secret misgivings on the subject, would be
ungentlemanly and indecent. So he thanked the General for his promise to
put him in personal communication with the agent; and ‘concluded’ to see
that officer next morning. He then begged the General to inform him who
the Watertoast Sympathisers were, of whom he had spoken in addressing Mr
La Fayette Kettle, and on what grievances they bestowed their Sympathy.
To which the General, looking very serious, made answer, that he might
fully enlighten himself on those points to-morrow by attending a Great
Meeting of the Body, which would then be held at the town to which
they were travelling; ‘over which, sir,’ said the General, ‘my
fellow-citizens have called on me to preside.’

They came to their journey’s end late in the evening. Close to the
railway was an immense white edifice, like an ugly hospital, on which
was painted ‘NATIONAL HOTEL.’ There was a wooden gallery or verandah
in front, in which it was rather startling, when the train stopped, to
behold a great many pairs of boots and shoes, and the smoke of a
great many cigars, but no other evidences of human habitation. By slow
degrees, however, some heads and shoulders appeared, and connecting
themselves with the boots and shoes, led to the discovery that certain
gentlemen boarders, who had a fancy for putting their heels where the
gentlemen boarders in other countries usually put their heads, were
enjoying themselves after their own manner in the cool of the evening.

There was a great bar-room in this hotel, and a great public room
in which the general table was being set out for supper. There were
interminable whitewashed staircases, long whitewashed galleries upstairs
and downstairs, scores of little whitewashed bedrooms, and a four-sided
verandah to every story in the house, which formed a large brick square
with an uncomfortable courtyard in the centre, where some clothes were
drying. Here and there, some yawning gentlemen lounged up and down with
their hands in their pockets; but within the house and without, wherever
half a dozen people were collected together, there, in their looks,
dress, morals, manners, habits, intellect, and conversation, were Mr
Jefferson Brick, Colonel Diver, Major Pawkins, General Choke, and Mr
La Fayette Kettle, over, and over, and over again. They did the same
things; said the same things; judged all subjects by, and reduced all
subjects to, the same standard. Observing how they lived, and how they
were always in the enchanting company of each other, Martin even began
to comprehend their being the social, cheerful, winning, airy men they
were.

At the sounding of a dismal gong, this pleasant company went trooping
down from all parts of the house to the public room; while from the
neighbouring stores other guests came flocking in, in shoals; for half
the town, married folks as well as single, resided at the National
Hotel. Tea, coffee, dried meats, tongue, ham, pickles, cake, toast,
preserves, and bread and butter, were swallowed with the usual ravaging
speed; and then, as before, the company dropped off by degrees, and
lounged away to the desk, the counter, or the bar-room. The ladies had a
smaller ordinary of their own, to which their husbands and brothers
were admitted if they chose; and in all other respects they enjoyed
themselves as at Pawkins’s.

‘Now, Mark, my good fellow, said Martin, closing the door of his
little chamber, ‘we must hold a solemn council, for our fate is decided
to-morrow morning. You are determined to invest these savings of yours
in the common stock, are you?’

‘If I hadn’t been determined to make that wentur, sir,’ answered Mr
Tapley, ‘I shouldn’t have come.’

‘How much is there here, did you say’ asked Martin, holding up a little
bag.

‘Thirty-seven pound ten and sixpence. The Savings’ Bank said so at
least. I never counted it. But THEY know, bless you!’ said Mark, with a
shake of the head expressive of his unbounded confidence in the wisdom
and arithmetic of those Institutions.

‘The money we brought with us,’ said Martin, ‘is reduced to a few
shillings less than eight pounds.’

Mr Tapley smiled, and looked all manner of ways, that he might not be
supposed to attach any importance to this fact.

‘Upon the ring--HER ring, Mark,’ said Martin, looking ruefully at his
empty finger--

‘Ah!’ sighed Mr Tapley. ‘Beg your pardon, sir.’

‘--We raised, in English money, fourteen pounds. So, even with that,
your share of the stock is still very much the larger of the two you
see. Now, Mark,’ said Martin, in his old way, just as he might have
spoken to Tom Pinch, ‘I have thought of a means of making this up
to you--more than making it up to you, I hope--and very materially
elevating your prospects in life.’

‘Oh! don’t talk of that, you know, sir,’ returned Mark. ‘I don’t want no
elevating, sir. I’m all right enough, sir, I am.’

‘No, but hear me,’ said Martin, ‘because this is very important to you,
and a great satisfaction to me. Mark, you shall be a partner in the
business; an equal partner with myself. I will put in, as my additional
capital, my professional knowledge and ability; and half the annual
profits, as long as it is carried on, shall be yours.’

Poor Martin! For ever building castles in the air. For ever, in his very
selfishness, forgetful of all but his own teeming hopes and sanguine
plans. Swelling, at that instant, with the consciousness of patronizing
and most munificently rewarding Mark!

‘I don’t know, sir,’ Mark rejoined, much more sadly than his custom was,
though from a very different cause than Martin supposed, ‘what I can say
to this, in the way of thanking you. I’ll stand by you, sir, to the best
of my ability, and to the last. That’s all.’

‘We quite understand each other, my good fellow,’ said Martin rising in
self-approval and condescension. ‘We are no longer master and servant,
but friends and partners; and are mutually gratified. If we determine on
Eden, the business shall be commenced as soon as we get there. Under the
name,’ said Martin, who never hammered upon an idea that wasn’t red hot,
‘under the name of Chuzzlewit and Tapley.’

‘Lord love you, sir,’ cried Mark, ‘don’t have my name in it. I ain’t
acquainted with the business, sir. I must be Co., I must. I’ve often
thought,’ he added, in a low voice, ‘as I should like to know a Co.; but
I little thought as ever I should live to be one.’

‘You shall have your own way, Mark.’

‘Thank’ee, sir. If any country gentleman thereabouts, in the public way,
or otherwise, wanted such a thing as a skittle-ground made, I could take
that part of the bis’ness, sir.’

‘Against any architect in the States,’ said Martin. ‘Get a couple of
sherry-cobblers, Mark, and we’ll drink success to the firm.’

Either he forgot already (and often afterwards), that they were no
longer master and servant, or considered this kind of duty to be among
the legitimate functions of the Co. But Mark obeyed with his usual
alacrity; and before they parted for the night, it was agreed between
them that they should go together to the agent’s in the morning, but
that Martin should decide the Eden question, on his own sound judgment.
And Mark made no merit, even to himself in his jollity, of this
concession; perfectly well knowing that the matter would come to that in
the end, any way.

The General was one of the party at the public table next day, and after
breakfast suggested that they should wait upon the agent without loss of
time. They, desiring nothing more, agreed; so off they all four
started for the office of the Eden Settlement, which was almost within
rifle-shot of the National Hotel.

It was a small place--something like a turnpike. But a great deal of
land may be got into a dice-box, and why may not a whole territory be
bargained for in a shed? It was but a temporary office too; for the
Edeners were ‘going’ to build a superb establishment for the transaction
of their business, and had already got so far as to mark out the site.
Which is a great way in America. The office-door was wide open, and in
the doorway was the agent; no doubt a tremendous fellow to get through
his work, for he seemed to have no arrears, but was swinging backwards
and forwards in a rocking-chair, with one of his legs planted high up
against the door-post, and the other doubled up under him, as if he were
hatching his foot.

He was a gaunt man in a huge straw hat, and a coat of green stuff. The
weather being hot, he had no cravat, and wore his shirt collar wide
open; so that every time he spoke something was seen to twitch and jerk
up in his throat, like the little hammers in a harpsichord when the
notes are struck. Perhaps it was the Truth feebly endeavouring to leap
to his lips. If so, it never reached them.

Two grey eyes lurked deep within this agent’s head, but one of them had
no sight in it, and stood stock still. With that side of his face he
seemed to listen to what the other side was doing. Thus each profile had
a distinct expression; and when the movable side was most in action, the
rigid one was in its coldest state of watchfulness. It was like
turning the man inside out, to pass to that view of his features in his
liveliest mood, and see how calculating and intent they were.

Each long black hair upon his head hung down as straight as any plummet
line; but rumpled tufts were on the arches of his eyes, as if the crow
whose foot was deeply printed in the corners had pecked and torn them in
a savage recognition of his kindred nature as a bird of prey.

Such was the man whom they now approached, and whom the General saluted
by the name of Scadder.

‘Well, Gen’ral,’ he returned, ‘and how are you?’

‘Ac-tive and spry, sir, in my country’s service and the sympathetic
cause. Two gentlemen on business, Mr Scadder.’

He shook hands with each of them--nothing is done in America without
shaking hands--then went on rocking.

‘I think I know what bis’ness you have brought these strangers here
upon, then, Gen’ral?’

‘Well, sir. I expect you may.’

‘You air a tongue-y person, Gen’ral. For you talk too much, and that’s
fact,’ said Scadder. ‘You speak a-larming well in public, but you didn’t
ought to go ahead so fast in private. Now!’

‘If I can realise your meaning, ride me on a rail!’ returned the
General, after pausing for consideration.

‘You know we didn’t wish to sell the lots off right away to any loafer
as might bid,’ said Scadder; ‘but had con-cluded to reserve ‘em for
Aristocrats of Natur’. Yes!’

‘And they are here, sir!’ cried the General with warmth. ‘They are here,
sir!’

‘If they air here,’ returned the agent, in reproachful accents, ‘that’s
enough. But you didn’t ought to have your dander ris with ME, Gen’ral.’

The General whispered Martin that Scadder was the honestest fellow in
the world, and that he wouldn’t have given him offence designedly, for
ten thousand dollars.

‘I do my duty; and I raise the dander of my feller critters, as I
wish to serve,’ said Scadder in a low voice, looking down the road
and rocking still. ‘They rile up rough, along of my objecting to their
selling Eden off too cheap. That’s human natur’! Well!’

‘Mr Scadder,’ said the General, assuming his oratorical deportment.
‘Sir! Here is my hand, and here my heart. I esteem you, sir, and ask
your pardon. These gentlemen air friends of mine, or I would not have
brought ‘em here, sir, being well aware, sir, that the lots at present
go entirely too cheap. But these air friends, sir; these air partick’ler
friends.’

Mr Scadder was so satisfied by this explanation, that he shook the
General warmly by the hand, and got out of the rocking-chair to do it.
He then invited the General’s particular friends to accompany him into
the office. As to the General, he observed, with his usual benevolence,
that being one of the company, he wouldn’t interfere in the transaction
on any account; so he appropriated the rocking-chair to himself, and
looked at the prospect, like a good Samaritan waiting for a traveller.

‘Heyday!’ cried Martin, as his eye rested on a great plan which occupied
one whole side of the office. Indeed, the office had little else in it,
but some geological and botanical specimens, one or two rusty ledgers, a
homely desk, and a stool. ‘Heyday! what’s that?’

‘That’s Eden,’ said Scadder, picking his teeth with a sort of young
bayonet that flew out of his knife when he touched a spring.

‘Why, I had no idea it was a city.’

‘Hadn’t you? Oh, it’s a city.’

A flourishing city, too! An architectural city! There were banks,
churches, cathedrals, market-places, factories, hotels, stores,
mansions, wharves; an exchange, a theatre; public buildings of all
kinds, down to the office of the Eden Stinger, a daily journal; all
faithfully depicted in the view before them.

‘Dear me! It’s really a most important place!’ cried Martin turning
round.

‘Oh! it’s very important,’ observed the agent.

‘But, I am afraid,’ said Martin, glancing again at the Public Buildings,
‘that there’s nothing left for me to do.’

‘Well! it ain’t all built,’ replied the agent. ‘Not quite.’

This was a great relief.

‘The market-place, now,’ said Martin. ‘Is that built?’

‘That?’ said the agent, sticking his toothpick into the weathercock on
the top. ‘Let me see. No; that ain’t built.’

‘Rather a good job to begin with--eh, Mark?’ whispered Martin nudging
him with his elbow.

Mark, who, with a very stolid countenance had been eyeing the plan and
the agent by turns, merely rejoined ‘Uncommon!’

A dead silence ensued, Mr Scadder in some short recesses or vacations of
his toothpick, whistled a few bars of Yankee Doodle, and blew the dust
off the roof of the Theatre.

‘I suppose,’ said Martin, feigning to look more narrowly at the plan,
but showing by his tremulous voice how much depended, in his mind, upon
the answer; ‘I suppose there are--several architects there?’

‘There ain’t a single one,’ said Scadder.

‘Mark,’ whispered Martin, pulling him by the sleeve, ‘do you hear that?
But whose work is all this before us, then?’ he asked aloud.

‘The soil being very fruitful, public buildings grows spontaneous,
perhaps,’ said Mark.

He was on the agent’s dark side as he said it; but Scadder instantly
changed his place, and brought his active eye to bear upon him.

‘Feel of my hands, young man,’ he said.

‘What for?’ asked Mark, declining.

‘Air they dirty, or air they clean, sir?’ said Scadder, holding them
out.

In a physical point of view they were decidedly dirty. But it being
obvious that Mr Scadder offered them for examination in a figurative
sense, as emblems of his moral character, Martin hastened to pronounce
them pure as the driven snow.

‘I entreat, Mark,’ he said, with some irritation, ‘that you will
not obtrude remarks of that nature, which, however harmless and
well-intentioned, are quite out of place, and cannot be expected to be
very agreeable to strangers. I am quite surprised.’

‘The Co.’s a-putting his foot in it already,’ thought Mark. ‘He must be
a sleeping partner--fast asleep and snoring--Co. must; I see.’

Mr Scadder said nothing, but he set his back against the plan, and
thrust his toothpick into the desk some twenty times; looking at Mark
all the while as if he were stabbing him in effigy.

‘You haven’t said whose work it is,’ Martin ventured to observe at
length, in a tone of mild propitiation.

‘Well, never mind whose work it is, or isn’t,’ said the agent sulkily.
‘No matter how it did eventuate. P’raps he cleared off, handsome, with a
heap of dollars; p’raps he wasn’t worth a cent. P’raps he was a loafin’
rowdy; p’raps a ring-tailed roarer. Now!’

‘All your doing, Mark!’ said Martin.

‘P’raps,’ pursued the agent, ‘them ain’t plants of Eden’s raising. No!
P’raps that desk and stool ain’t made from Eden lumber. No! P’raps no
end of squatters ain’t gone out there. No! P’raps there ain’t no such
location in the territoary of the Great U-nited States. Oh, no!’

‘I hope you’re satisfied with the success of your joke, Mark,’ said
Martin.

But here, at a most opportune and happy time, the General interposed,
and called out to Scadder from the doorway to give his friends the
particulars of that little lot of fifty acres with the house upon it;
which, having belonged to the company formerly, had lately lapsed again
into their hands.

‘You air a deal too open-handed, Gen’ral,’ was the answer. ‘It is a lot
as should be rose in price. It is.’

He grumblingly opened his books notwithstanding, and always keeping his
bright side towards Mark, no matter at what amount of inconvenience
to himself, displayed a certain leaf for their perusal. Martin read it
greedily, and then inquired:

‘Now where upon the plan may this place be?’

‘Upon the plan?’ said Scadder.

‘Yes.’

He turned towards it, and reflected for a short time, as if, having
been put upon his mettle, he was resolved to be particular to the
very minutest hair’s breadth of a shade. At length, after wheeling his
toothpick slowly round and round in the air, as if it were a carrier
pigeon just thrown up, he suddenly made a dart at the drawing, and
pierced the very centre of the main wharf, through and through.

‘There!’ he said, leaving his knife quivering in the wall; ‘that’s where
it is!’

Martin glanced with sparkling eyes upon his Co., and his Co. saw that
the thing was done.

The bargain was not concluded as easily as might have been expected
though, for Scadder was caustic and ill-humoured, and cast much
unnecessary opposition in the way; at one time requesting them to think
of it, and call again in a week or a fortnight; at another, predicting
that they wouldn’t like it; at another, offering to retract and let them
off, and muttering strong imprecations upon the folly of the General.
But the whole of the astoundingly small sum total of purchase-money--it
was only one hundred and fifty dollars, or something more than thirty
pounds of the capital brought by Co. into the architectural concern--was
ultimately paid down; and Martin’s head was two inches nearer the roof
of the little wooden office, with the consciousness of being a landed
proprietor in the thriving city of Eden.

‘If it shouldn’t happen to fit,’ said Scadder, as he gave Martin the
necessary credentials on recepit of his money, ‘don’t blame me.’

‘No, no,’ he replied merrily. ‘We’ll not blame you. General, are you
going?’

‘I am at your service, sir; and I wish you,’ said the General, giving
him his hand with grave cordiality, ‘joy of your po-ssession. You air
now, sir, a denizen of the most powerful and highly-civilised dominion
that has ever graced the world; a do-minion, sir, where man is bound to
man in one vast bond of equal love and truth. May you, sir, be worthy of
your a-dopted country!’

Martin thanked him, and took leave of Mr Scadder; who had resumed his
post in the rocking-chair, immediately on the General’s rising from it,
and was once more swinging away as if he had never been disturbed.
Mark looked back several times as they went down the road towards the
National Hotel, but now his blighted profile was towards them, and
nothing but attentive thoughtfulness was written on it. Strangely
different to the other side! He was not a man much given to laughing,
and never laughed outright; but every line in the print of the crow’s
foot, and every little wiry vein in that division of his head, was
wrinkled up into a grin! The compound figure of Death and the Lady at
the top of the old ballad was not divided with a greater nicety, and
hadn’t halves more monstrously unlike each other, than the two profiles
of Zephaniah Scadder.

The General posted along at a great rate, for the clock was on the
stroke of twelve; and at that hour precisely, the Great Meeting of
the Watertoast Sympathisers was to be holden in the public room of the
National Hotel. Being very curious to witness the demonstration, and
know what it was all about, Martin kept close to the General; and,
keeping closer than ever when they entered the Hall, got by that means
upon a little platform of tables at the upper end; where an armchair was
set for the General, and Mr La Fayette Kettle, as secretary, was making
a great display of some foolscap documents. Screamers, no doubt.

‘Well, sir!’ he said, as he shook hands with Martin, ‘here is a
spectacle calc’lated to make the British Lion put his tail between his
legs, and howl with anguish, I expect!’

Martin certainly thought it possible that the British Lion might have
been rather out of his element in that Ark; but he kept the idea to
himself. The General was then voted to the chair, on the motion of a
pallid lad of the Jefferson Brick school; who forthwith set in for a
high-spiced speech, with a good deal about hearths and homes in it, and
unriveting the chains of Tyranny.

Oh but it was a clincher for the British Lion, it was! The indignation
of the glowing young Columbian knew no bounds. If he could only have
been one of his own forefathers, he said, wouldn’t he have peppered
that same Lion, and been to him as another Brute Tamer with a wire whip,
teaching him lessons not easily forgotten. ‘Lion! (cried that young
Columbian) where is he? Who is he? What is he? Show him to me. Let me
have him here. Here!’ said the young Columbian, in a wrestling attitude,
‘upon this sacred altar. Here!’ cried the young Columbian, idealising
the dining-table, ‘upon ancestral ashes, cemented with the glorious
blood poured out like water on our native plains of Chickabiddy Lick!
Bring forth that Lion!’ said the young Columbian. ‘Alone, I dare him! I
taunt that Lion. I tell that Lion, that Freedom’s hand once twisted
in his mane, he rolls a corse before me, and the Eagles of the Great
Republic laugh ha, ha!’

When it was found that the Lion didn’t come, but kept out of the way;
that the young Columbian stood there, with folded arms, alone in his
glory; and consequently that the Eagles were no doubt laughing wildly on
the mountain tops; such cheers arose as might have shaken the hands upon
the Horse-Guards’ clock, and changed the very mean time of the day in
England’s capital.

‘Who is this?’ Martin telegraphed to La Fayette.

The Secretary wrote something, very gravely, on a piece of paper,
twisted it up, and had it passed to him from hand to hand. It was an
improvement on the old sentiment: ‘Perhaps as remarkable a man as any in
our country.’

This young Columbian was succeeded by another, to the full as eloquent
as he, who drew down storms of cheers. But both remarkable youths,
in their great excitement (for your true poetry can never stoop to
details), forgot to say with whom or what the Watertoasters sympathized,
and likewise why or wherefore they were sympathetic. Thus Martin
remained for a long time as completely in the dark as ever; until
at length a ray of light broke in upon him through the medium of the
Secretary, who, by reading the minutes of their past proceedings,
made the matter somewhat clearer. He then learned that the Watertoast
Association sympathized with a certain Public Man in Ireland, who held a
contest upon certain points with England; and that they did so, because
they didn’t love England at all--not by any means because they loved
Ireland much; being indeed horribly jealous and distrustful of its
people always, and only tolerating them because of their working hard,
which made them very useful; labour being held in greater indignity in
the simple republic than in any other country upon earth. This
rendered Martin curious to see what grounds of sympathy the Watertoast
Association put forth; nor was he long in suspense, for the General
rose to read a letter to the Public Man, which with his own hands he had
written.

‘Thus,’ said the General, ‘thus, my friends and fellow-citizens, it
runs:


‘“SIR--I address you on behalf of the Watertoast Association of United
Sympathisers. It is founded, sir, in the great republic of America! and
now holds its breath, and swells the blue veins in its forehead nigh to
bursting, as it watches, sir, with feverish intensity and sympathetic
ardour, your noble efforts in the cause of Freedom.”’


At the name of Freedom, and at every repetition of that name, all the
Sympathisers roared aloud; cheering with nine times nine, and nine times
over.


‘“In Freedom’s name, sir--holy Freedom--I address you. In Freedom’s
name, I send herewith a contribution to the funds of your society.
In Freedom’s name, sir, I advert with indignation and disgust to that
accursed animal, with gore-stained whiskers, whose rampant cruelty and
fiery lust have ever been a scourge, a torment to the world. The naked
visitors to Crusoe’s Island, sir; the flying wives of Peter Wilkins; the
fruit-smeared children of the tangled bush; nay, even the men of large
stature, anciently bred in the mining districts of Cornwall; alike
bear witness to its savage nature. Where, sir, are the Cormorans,
the Blunderbores, the Great Feefofums, named in History? All, all,
exterminated by its destroying hand.

‘“I allude, sir, to the British Lion.

‘“Devoted, mind and body, heart and soul, to Freedom, sir--to Freedom,
blessed solace to the snail upon the cellar-door, the oyster in his
pearly bed, the still mite in his home of cheese, the very winkle of
your country in his shelly lair--in her unsullied name, we offer you our
sympathy. Oh, sir, in this our cherished and our happy land, her fires
burn bright and clear and smokeless; once lighted up in yours, the lion
shall be roasted whole.

‘“I am, sir, in Freedom’s name,

‘“Your affectionate friend and faithful Sympathiser,

‘“CYRUS CHOKE,

‘“General, U.S.M.”’


It happened that just as the General began to read this letter, the
railroad train arrived, bringing a new mail from England; and a packet
had been handed in to the Secretary, which during its perusal and
the frequent cheerings in homage to freedom, he had opened. Now, its
contents disturbed him very much, and the moment the General sat down,
he hurried to his side, and placed in his hand a letter and several
printed extracts from English newspapers; to which, in a state of
infinite excitement, he called his immediate attention.

The General, being greatly heated by his own composition, was in a
fit state to receive any inflammable influence; but he had no sooner
possessed himself of the contents of these documents, than a change came
over his face, involving such a huge amount of choler and passion, that
the noisy concourse were silent in a moment, in very wonder at the sight
of him.

‘My friends!’ cried the General, rising; ‘my friends and fellow
citizens, we have been mistaken in this man.’

‘In what man?’ was the cry.

‘In this,’ panted the General, holding up the letter he had read aloud
a few minutes before. ‘I find that he has been, and is, the
advocate--consistent in it always too--of Nigger emancipation!’

If anything beneath the sky be real, those Sons of Freedom would have
pistolled, stabbed--in some way slain--that man by coward hands and
murderous violence, if he had stood among them at that time. The most
confiding of their own countrymen would not have wagered then--no, nor
would they ever peril--one dunghill straw, upon the life of any man in
such a strait. They tore the letter, cast the fragments in the air, trod
down the pieces as they fell; and yelled, and groaned, and hissed, till
they could cry no longer.

‘I shall move,’ said the General, when he could make himself heard,
‘that the Watertoast Association of United Sympathisers be immediately
dissolved!’

Down with it! Away with it! Don’t hear of it! Burn its records! Pull the
room down! Blot it out of human memory!

‘But, my fellow-countrymen!’ said the General, ‘the contributions. We
have funds. What is to be done with the funds?’

It was hastily resolved that a piece of plate should be presented to a
certain constitutional Judge, who had laid down from the Bench the noble
principle that it was lawful for any white mob to murder any black man;
and that another piece of plate, of similar value should be presented
to a certain Patriot, who had declared from his high place in the
Legislature, that he and his friends would hang without trial, any
Abolitionist who might pay them a visit. For the surplus, it was agreed
that it should be devoted to aiding the enforcement of those free and
equal laws, which render it incalculably more criminal and dangerous
to teach a negro to read and write than to roast him alive in a public
city. These points adjusted, the meeting broke up in great disorder, and
there was an end of the Watertoast Sympathy.

As Martin ascended to his bedroom, his eye was attracted by the
Republican banner, which had been hoisted from the house-top in honour
of the occasion, and was fluttering before a window which he passed.

‘Tut!’ said Martin. ‘You’re a gay flag in the distance. But let a man
be near enough to get the light upon the other side and see through you;
and you are but sorry fustian!’



CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

FROM WHICH IT WILL BE SEEN THAT MARTIN BECAME A LION OF HIS OWN ACCOUNT.
TOGETHER WITH THE REASON WHY


As soon as it was generally known in the National Hotel, that the young
Englishman, Mr Chuzzlewit, had purchased a ‘lo-cation’ in the Valley
of Eden, and intended to betake himself to that earthly Paradise by the
next steamboat, he became a popular character. Why this should be, or
how it had come to pass, Martin no more knew than Mrs Gamp, of Kingsgate
Street, High Holborn, did; but that he was for the time being the lion,
by popular election, of the Watertoast community, and that his society
was in rather inconvenient request there could be no kind of doubt.

The first notification he received of this change in his position, was
the following epistle, written in a thin running hand--with here and
there a fat letter or two, to make the general effect more striking--on
a sheet of paper, ruled with blue lines.


‘NATIONAL HOTEL,

‘MONDAY MORNING.

‘Dear Sir--‘When I had the privillidge of being your fellow-traveller
in the cars, the day before yesterday, you offered some remarks upon the
subject of the tower of London, which (in common with my fellow-citizens
generally) I could wish to hear repeated to a public audience.

‘As secretary to the Young Men’s Watertoast Association of this town,
I am requested to inform you that the Society will be proud to hear
you deliver a lecture upon the Tower of London, at their Hall to-morrow
evening, at seven o’clock; and as a large issue of quarter-dollar
tickets may be expected, your answer and consent by bearer will be
considered obliging.

‘Dear Sir,

‘Yours truly,

‘LA FAYETTE KETTLE.

‘The Honourable M. Chuzzlewit.

‘P.S.--The Society would not be particular in limiting you to the Tower
of London. Permit me to suggest that any remarks upon the Elements of
Geology, or (if more convenient) upon the Writings of your talented and
witty countryman, the honourable Mr Miller, would be well received.’


Very much aghast at this invitation, Martin wrote back, civilly
declining it; and had scarcely done so, when he received another letter.


‘No. 47, Bunker Hill Street,

‘Monday Morning.

‘(Private).

‘Sir--I was raised in those interminable solitudes where our mighty
Mississippi (or Father of Waters) rolls his turbid flood.

‘I am young, and ardent. For there is a poetry in wildness, and every
alligator basking in the slime is in himself an Epic, self-contained. I
aspirate for fame. It is my yearning and my thirst.

‘Are you, sir, aware of any member of Congress in England, who would
undertake to pay my expenses to that country, and for six months after
my arrival?

‘There is something within me which gives me the assurance that this
enlightened patronage would not be thrown away. In literature or art;
the bar, the pulpit, or the stage; in one or other, if not all, I feel
that I am certain to succeed.

‘If too much engaged to write to any such yourself, please let me have
a list of three or four of those most likely to respond, and I will
address them through the Post Office. May I also ask you to favour me
with any critical observations that have ever presented themselves to
your reflective faculties, on “Cain, a Mystery,” by the Right Honourable
Lord Byron?

‘I am, Sir,

‘Yours (forgive me if I add, soaringly),

‘PUTNAM SMIF

‘P.S.--Address your answer to America Junior, Messrs. Hancock & Floby,
Dry Goods Store, as above.’


Both of which letters, together with Martin’s reply to each, were,
according to a laudable custom, much tending to the promotion of
gentlemanly feeling and social confidence, published in the next number
of the Watertoast Gazette.

He had scarcely got through this correspondence when Captain Kedgick,
the landlord, kindly came upstairs to see how he was getting on. The
Captain sat down upon the bed before he spoke; and finding it rather
hard, moved to the pillow.

‘Well, sir!’ said the Captain, putting his hat a little more on one
side, for it was rather tight in the crown: ‘You’re quite a public man I
calc’late.’

‘So it seems,’ retorted Martin, who was very tired.

‘Our citizens, sir,’ pursued the Captain, ‘intend to pay their respects
to you. You will have to hold a sort of le-vee, sir, while you’re here.’

‘Powers above!’ cried Martin, ‘I couldn’t do that, my good fellow!’

‘I reckon you MUST then,’ said the Captain.

‘Must is not a pleasant word, Captain,’ urged Martin.

‘Well! I didn’t fix the mother language, and I can’t unfix it,’ said the
Captain coolly; ‘else I’d make it pleasant. You must re-ceive. That’s
all.’

‘But why should I receive people who care as much for me as I care for
them?’ asked Martin.

‘Well! because I have had a muniment put up in the bar,’ returned the
Captain.

‘A what?’ cried Martin.

‘A muniment,’ rejoined the Captain.

Martin looked despairingly at Mark, who informed him that the
Captain meant a written notice that Mr Chuzzlewit would receive the
Watertoasters that day, at and after two o’clock which was in effect
then hanging in the bar, as Mark, from ocular inspection of the same,
could testify.

‘You wouldn’t be unpop’lar, I know,’ said the Captain, paring his nails.
‘Our citizens an’t long of riling up, I tell you; and our Gazette could
flay you like a wild cat.’

Martin was going to be very wroth, but he thought better of it, and
said:

‘In Heaven’s name let them come, then.’

‘Oh, THEY’ll come,’ returned the Captain. ‘I have seen the big room
fixed a’purpose, with my eyes.’

‘But will you,’ said Martin, seeing that the Captain was about to go;
‘will you at least tell me this? What do they want to see me for? what
have I done? and how do they happen to have such a sudden interest in
me?’

Captain Kedgick put a thumb and three fingers to each side of the
brim of his hat; lifted it a little way off his head; put it on again
carefully; passed one hand all down his face, beginning at the forehead
and ending at the chin; looked at Martin; then at Mark; then at Martin
again; winked, and walked out.

‘Upon my life, now!’ said Martin, bringing his hand heavily upon the
table; ‘such a perfectly unaccountable fellow as that, I never saw.
Mark, what do you say to this?’

‘Why, sir,’ returned his partner, ‘my opinion is that we must have got
to the MOST remarkable man in the country at last. So I hope there’s an
end to the breed, sir.’

Although this made Martin laugh, it couldn’t keep off two o’clock.
Punctually, as the hour struck, Captain Kedgick returned to hand him
to the room of state; and he had no sooner got him safe there, than
he bawled down the staircase to his fellow-citizens below, that Mr
Chuzzlewit was ‘receiving.’

Up they came with a rush. Up they came until the room was full, and,
through the open door, a dismal perspective of more to come, was shown
upon the stairs. One after another, one after another, dozen after
dozen, score after score, more, more, more, up they came; all shaking
hands with Martin. Such varieties of hands, the thick, the thin,
the short, the long, the fat, the lean, the coarse, the fine; such
differences of temperature, the hot, the cold, the dry, the moist,
the flabby; such diversities of grasp, the tight, the loose, the
short-lived, and the lingering! Still up, up, up, more, more, more; and
ever and anon the Captain’s voice was heard above the crowd--‘There’s
more below! there’s more below. Now, gentlemen you that have been
introduced to Mr Chuzzlewit, will you clear gentlemen? Will you clear?
Will you be so good as clear, gentlemen, and make a little room for
more?’

Regardless of the Captain’s cries, they didn’t clear at all, but stood
there, bolt upright and staring. Two gentlemen connected with the
Watertoast Gazette had come express to get the matter for an article on
Martin. They had agreed to divide the labour. One of them took him below
the waistcoat. One above. Each stood directly in front of his subject
with his head a little on one side, intent on his department. If Martin
put one boot before the other, the lower gentleman was down upon him;
he rubbed a pimple on his nose, and the upper gentleman booked it. He
opened his mouth to speak, and the same gentleman was on one knee before
him, looking in at his teeth, with the nice scrutiny of a dentist.
Amateurs in the physiognomical and phrenological sciences roved about
him with watchful eyes and itching fingers, and sometimes one, more
daring than the rest, made a mad grasp at the back of his head, and
vanished in the crowd. They had him in all points of view: in front, in
profile, three-quarter face, and behind. Those who were not professional
or scientific, audibly exchanged opinions on his looks. New lights shone
in upon him, in respect of his nose. Contradictory rumours were abroad
on the subject of his hair. And still the Captain’s voice was heard--so
stifled by the concourse, that he seemed to speak from underneath a
feather-bed--exclaiming--‘Gentlemen, you that have been introduced to Mr
Chuzzlewit, WILL you clear?’

Even when they began to clear it was no better; for then a stream of
gentlemen, every one with a lady on each arm (exactly like the chorus
to the National Anthem when Royalty goes in state to the play), came
gliding in--every new group fresher than the last, and bent on staying
to the latest moment. If they spoke to him, which was not often, they
invariably asked the same questions, in the same tone; with no more
remorse, or delicacy, or consideration, than if he had been a figure of
stone, purchased, and paid for, and set up there for their delight. Even
when, in the slow course of time, these died off, it was as bad as ever,
if not worse; for then the boys grew bold, and came in as a class
of themselves, and did everything that the grown-up people had done.
Uncouth stragglers, too, appeared; men of a ghostly kind, who being in,
didn’t know how to get out again; insomuch that one silent gentleman
with glazed and fishy eyes and only one button on his waistcoat (which
was a very large metal one, and shone prodigiously), got behind the
door, and stood there, like a clock, long after everybody else was gone.

Martin felt, from pure fatigue, and heat, and worry, as if he could have
fallen on the ground and willingly remained there, if they would but
have had the mercy to leave him alone. But as letters and messages,
threatening his public denouncement if he didn’t see the senders, poured
in like hail; and as more visitors came while he took his coffee by
himself; and as Mark, with all his vigilance, was unable to keep them
from the door; he resolved to go to bed--not that he felt at all sure
of bed being any protection, but that he might not leave a forlorn hope
untried.

He had communicated this design to Mark, and was on the eve of escaping,
when the door was thrown open in a great hurry, and an elderly gentleman
entered; bringing with him a lady who certainly could not be considered
young--that was matter of fact; and probably could not be considered
handsome--but that was matter of opinion. She was very straight, very
tall, and not at all flexible in face or figure. On her head she wore a
great straw bonnet, with trimmings of the same, in which she looked as
if she had been thatched by an unskillful labourer; and in her hand she
held a most enormous fan.

‘Mr Chuzzlewit, I believe?’ said the gentleman.

‘That is my name.’

‘Sir,’ said the gentleman, ‘I am pressed for time.’

‘Thank God!’ thought Martin.

‘I go back Toe my home, sir,’ pursued the gentleman, ‘by the return
train, which starts immediate. Start is not a word you use in your
country, sir.’

‘Oh yes, it is,’ said Martin.

‘You air mistaken, sir,’ returned the gentleman, with great decision:
‘but we will not pursue the subject, lest it should awake your
preju--dice. Sir, Mrs Hominy.’

Martin bowed.

‘Mrs Hominy, sir, is the lady of Major Hominy, one of our chicest
spirits; and belongs Toe one of our most aristocratic families. You air,
p’raps, acquainted, sir, with Mrs Hominy’s writings.’

Martin couldn’t say he was.

‘You have much Toe learn, and Toe enjoy, sir,’ said the gentleman.
‘Mrs Hominy is going Toe stay until the end of the Fall, sir, with her
married daughter at the settlement of New Thermopylae, three days this
side of Eden. Any attention, sir, that you can show Toe Mrs Hominy
upon the journey, will be very grateful Toe the Major and our
fellow-citizens. Mrs Hominy, I wish you good night, ma’am, and a
pleasant pro-gress on your route!’

Martin could scarcely believe it; but he had gone, and Mrs Hominy was
drinking the milk.

‘A’most used-up I am, I do declare!’ she observed. ‘The jolting in
the cars is pretty nigh as bad as if the rail was full of snags and
sawyers.’

‘Snags and sawyers, ma’am?’ said Martin.

‘Well, then, I do suppose you’ll hardly realise my meaning, sir,’ said
Mrs Hominy. ‘My! Only think! DO tell!’

It did not appear that these expressions, although they seemed to
conclude with an urgent entreaty, stood in need of any answer; for Mrs
Hominy, untying her bonnet-strings, observed that she would withdraw to
lay that article of dress aside, and would return immediately.

‘Mark!’ said Martin. ‘Touch me, will you. Am I awake?’

‘Hominy is, sir,’ returned his partner--‘Broad awake! Just the sort of
woman, sir, as would be discovered with her eyes wide open, and her mind
a-working for her country’s good, at any hour of the day or night.’

They had no opportunity of saying more, for Mrs Hominy stalked in
again--very erect, in proof of her aristocratic blood; and holding in
her clasped hands a red cotton pocket-handkerchief, perhaps a parting
gift from that choice spirit, the Major. She had laid aside her bonnet,
and now appeared in a highly aristocratic and classical cap, meeting
beneath her chin: a style of headdress so admirably adapted to her
countenance, that if the late Mr Grimaldi had appeared in the lappets of
Mrs Siddons, a more complete effect could not have been produced.

Martin handed her to a chair. Her first words arrested him before he
could get back to his own seat.

‘Pray, sir!’ said Mrs Hominy, ‘where do you hail from?’

‘I am afraid I am dull of comprehension,’ answered Martin, ‘being
extremely tired; but upon my word I don’t understand you.’

Mrs Hominy shook her head with a melancholy smile that said, not
inexpressively, ‘They corrupt even the language in that old country!’
and added then, as coming down a step or two to meet his low capacity,
‘Where was you rose?’

‘Oh!’ said Martin ‘I was born in Kent.’

‘And how do you like our country, sir?’ asked Mrs Hominy.

‘Very much indeed,’ said Martin, half asleep. ‘At least--that is--pretty
well, ma’am.’

‘Most strangers--and partick’larly Britishers--are much surprised by
what they see in the U-nited States,’ remarked Mrs Hominy.

‘They have excellent reason to be so, ma’am,’ said Martin. ‘I never was
so much surprised in all my life.’

‘Our institutions make our people smart much, sir,’ Mrs Hominy remarked.

‘The most short-sighted man could see that at a glance, with his naked
eye,’ said Martin.

Mrs Hominy was a philosopher and an authoress, and consequently had a
pretty strong digestion; but this coarse, this indecorous phrase,
was almost too much for her. For a gentleman sitting alone with a
lady--although the door WAS open--to talk about a naked eye!

A long interval elapsed before even she--woman of masculine and towering
intellect though she was--could call up fortitude enough to resume the
conversation. But Mrs Hominy was a traveller. Mrs Hominy was a writer
of reviews and analytical disquisitions. Mrs Hominy had had her letters
from abroad, beginning ‘My ever dearest blank,’ and signed ‘The Mother
of the Modern Gracchi’ (meaning the married Miss Hominy), regularly
printed in a public journal, with all the indignation in capitals, and
all the sarcasm in italics. Mrs Hominy had looked on foreign countries
with the eye of a perfect republican hot from the model oven; and Mrs
Hominy could talk (or write) about them by the hour together. So Mrs
Hominy at last came down on Martin heavily, and as he was fast asleep,
she had it all her own way, and bruised him to her heart’s content.

It is no great matter what Mrs Hominy said, save that she had learnt it
from the cant of a class, and a large class, of her fellow countrymen,
who in their every word, avow themselves to be as senseless to the high
principles on which America sprang, a nation, into life, as any Orson in
her legislative halls. Who are no more capable of feeling, or of caring
if they did feel, that by reducing their own country to the ebb of
honest men’s contempt, they put in hazard the rights of nations yet
unborn, and very progress of the human race, than are the swine who
wallow in their streets. Who think that crying out to other nations,
old in their iniquity, ‘We are no worse than you!’ (No worse!) is high
defence and ‘vantage-ground enough for that Republic, but yesterday let
loose upon her noble course, and but to-day so maimed and lame, so full
of sores and ulcers, foul to the eye and almost hopeless to the sense,
that her best friends turn from the loathsome creature with disgust.
Who, having by their ancestors declared and won their Independence,
because they would not bend the knee to certain Public vices and
corruptions, and would not abrogate the truth, run riot in the Bad,
and turn their backs upon the Good; and lying down contented with the
wretched boast that other Temples also are of glass, and stones which
batter theirs may be flung back; show themselves, in that alone, as
immeasurably behind the import of the trust they hold, and as unworthy
to possess it as if the sordid hucksterings of all their little
governments--each one a kingdom in its small depravity--were brought
into a heap for evidence against them.

Martin by degrees became so far awake, that he had a sense of a terrible
oppression on his mind; an imperfect dream that he had murdered a
particular friend, and couldn’t get rid of the body. When his eyes
opened it was staring him full in the face. There was the horrible
Hominy talking deep truths in a melodious snuffle, and pouring forth her
mental endowments to such an extent that the Major’s bitterest enemy,
hearing her, would have forgiven him from the bottom of his heart.
Martin might have done something desperate if the gong had not sounded
for supper; but sound it did most opportunely; and having stationed Mrs
Hominy at the upper end of the table he took refuge at the lower end
himself; whence, after a hasty meal he stole away, while the lady was
yet busied with dried beef and a saucer-full of pickled fixings.

It would be difficult to give an adequate idea of Mrs Hominy’s freshness
next day, or of the avidity with which she went headlong into moral
philosophy at breakfast. Some little additional degree of asperity,
perhaps, was visible in her features, but not more than the pickles
would have naturally produced. All that day she clung to Martin. She
sat beside him while he received his friends (for there was another
Reception, yet more numerous than the former), propounded theories, and
answered imaginary objections, so that Martin really began to think he
must be dreaming, and speaking for two; she quoted interminable passages
from certain essays on government, written by herself; used the Major’s
pocket-handkerchief as if the snuffle were a temporary malady, of which
she was determined to rid herself by some means or other; and, in short,
was such a remarkable companion, that Martin quite settled it between
himself and his conscience, that in any new settlement it would be
absolutely necessary to have such a person knocked on the head for the
general peace of society.

In the meantime Mark was busy, from early in the morning until late
at night, in getting on board the steamboat such provisions, tools and
other necessaries, as they had been forewarned it would be wise to take.
The purchase of these things, and the settlement of their bill at the
National, reduced their finances to so low an ebb, that if the captain
had delayed his departure any longer, they would have been in almost as
bad a plight as the unfortunate poorer emigrants, who (seduced on board
by solemn advertisement) had been living on the lower deck a whole week,
and exhausting their miserable stock of provisions before the voyage
commenced. There they were, all huddled together with the engine and the
fires. Farmers who had never seen a plough; woodmen who had never used
an axe; builders who couldn’t make a box; cast out of their own land,
with not a hand to aid them: newly come into an unknown world, children
in helplessness, but men in wants--with younger children at their backs,
to live or die as it might happen!

The morning came, and they would start at noon. Noon came, and they
would start at night. But nothing is eternal in this world; not even the
procrastination of an American skipper; and at night all was ready.

Dispirited and weary to the last degree, but a greater lion than
ever (he had done nothing all the afternoon but answer letters from
strangers; half of them about nothing; half about borrowing money, and
all requiring an instantaneous reply), Martin walked down to the wharf,
through a concourse of people, with Mrs Hominy upon his arm; and went on
board. But Mark was bent on solving the riddle of this lionship, if he
could; and so, not without the risk of being left behind, ran back to
the hotel.

Captain Kedgick was sitting in the colonnade, with a julep on his knee,
and a cigar in his mouth. He caught Mark’s eye, and said:

‘Why, what the ‘Tarnal brings you here?’

‘I’ll tell you plainly what it is, Captain,’ said Mark. ‘I want to ask
you a question.’

‘A man may ASK a question, so he may,’ returned Kedgick; strongly
implying that another man might not answer a question, so he mightn’t.

‘What have they been making so much of him for, now?’ said Mark, slyly.
‘Come!’

‘Our people like ex-citement,’ answered Kedgick, sucking his cigar.

‘But how has he excited ‘em?’ asked Mark.

The Captain looked at him as if he were half inclined to unburden his
mind of a capital joke.

‘You air a-going?’ he said.

‘Going!’ cried Mark. ‘Ain’t every moment precious?’

‘Our people like ex-citement,’ said the Captain, whispering. ‘He ain’t
like emigrants in gin’ral; and he excited ‘em along of this;’ he winked
and burst into a smothered laugh; ‘along of this. Scadder is a smart
man, and--and--nobody as goes to Eden ever comes back alive!’

The wharf was close at hand, and at that instant Mark could hear them
shouting out his name; could even hear Martin calling to him to make
haste, or they would be separated. It was too late to mend the matter,
or put any face upon it but the best. He gave the Captain a parting
benediction, and ran off like a race-horse.

‘Mark! Mark!’ cried Martin.

‘Here am I, sir!’ shouted Mark, suddenly replying from the edge of the
quay, and leaping at a bound on board. ‘Never was half so jolly, sir.
All right. Haul in! Go ahead!’

The sparks from the wood fire streamed upward from the two chimneys, as
if the vessel were a great firework just lighted; and they roared away
upon the dark water.



CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

MARTIN AND HIS PARTNER TAKE POSSESSION OF THEIR ESTATE. THE JOYFUL
OCCASION INVOLVES SOME FURTHER ACCOUNT OF EDEN


There happened to be on board the steamboat several gentlemen
passengers, of the same stamp as Martin’s New York friend Mr Bevan; and
in their society he was cheerful and happy. They released him as well
as they could from the intellectual entanglements of Mrs Hominy;
and exhibited, in all they said and did, so much good sense and high
feeling, that he could not like them too well. ‘If this were a republic
of Intellect and Worth,’ he said, ‘instead of vapouring and jobbing,
they would not want the levers to keep it in motion.’

‘Having good tools, and using bad ones,’ returned Mr Tapley, ‘would look
as if they was rather a poor sort of carpenters, sir, wouldn’t it?’

Martin nodded. ‘As if their work were infinitely above their powers and
purpose, Mark; and they botched it in consequence.’

‘The best on it is,’ said Mark, ‘that when they do happen to make a
decent stroke; such as better workmen, with no such opportunities, make
every day of their lives and think nothing of--they begin to sing out
so surprising loud. Take notice of my words, sir. If ever the defaulting
part of this here country pays its debts--along of finding that not
paying ‘em won’t do in a commercial point of view, you see, and is
inconvenient in its consequences--they’ll take such a shine out of it,
and make such bragging speeches, that a man might suppose no borrowed
money had ever been paid afore, since the world was first begun. That’s
the way they gammon each other, sir. Bless you, I know ‘em. Take notice
of my words, now!’

‘You seem to be growing profoundly sagacious!’ cried Martin, laughing.

‘Whether that is,’ thought Mark, ‘because I’m a day’s journey nearer
Eden, and am brightening up afore I die, I can’t say. P’rhaps by the
time I get there I shall have growed into a prophet.’

He gave no utterance to these sentiments; but the excessive joviality
they inspired within him, and the merriment they brought upon his
shining face, were quite enough for Martin. Although he might sometimes
profess to make light of his partner’s inexhaustible cheerfulness,
and might sometimes, as in the case of Zephaniah Scadder, find him
too jocose a commentator, he was always sensible of the effect of his
example in rousing him to hopefulness and courage. Whether he were in
the humour to profit by it, mattered not a jot. It was contagious, and
he could not choose but be affected.

At first they parted with some of their passengers once or twice a day,
and took in others to replace them. But by degrees, the towns upon their
route became more thinly scattered; and for many hours together they
would see no other habitations than the huts of the wood-cutters, where
the vessel stopped for fuel. Sky, wood, and water all the livelong day;
and heat that blistered everything it touched.

On they toiled through great solitudes, where the trees upon the banks
grew thick and close; and floated in the stream; and held up shrivelled
arms from out the river’s depths; and slid down from the margin of the
land, half growing, half decaying, in the miry water. On through the
weary day and melancholy night; beneath the burning sun, and in the mist
and vapour of the evening; on, until return appeared impossible, and
restoration to their home a miserable dream.

They had now but few people on board, and these few were as flat, as
dull, and stagnant, as the vegetation that oppressed their eyes. No
sound of cheerfulness or hope was heard; no pleasant talk beguiled
the tardy time; no little group made common cause against the full
depression of the scene. But that, at certain periods, they swallowed
food together from a common trough, it might have been old Charon’s
boat, conveying melancholy shades to judgment.

At length they drew near New Thermopylae; where, that same evening, Mrs
Hominy would disembark. A gleam of comfort sunk into Martin’s bosom when
she told him this. Mark needed none; but he was not displeased.

It was almost night when they came alongside the landing-place. A steep
bank with an hotel like a barn on the top of it; a wooden store or two;
and a few scattered sheds.

‘You sleep here to-night, and go on in the morning, I suppose, ma’am?’
said Martin.

‘Where should I go on to?’ cried the mother of the modern Gracchi.

‘To New Thermopylae.’

‘My! ain’t I there?’ said Mrs Hominy.

Martin looked for it all round the darkening panorama; but he couldn’t
see it, and was obliged to say so.

‘Why that’s it!’ cried Mrs Hominy, pointing to the sheds just mentioned.

‘THAT!’ exclaimed Martin.

‘Ah! that; and work it which way you will, it whips Eden,’ said Mrs
Hominy, nodding her head with great expression.

The married Miss Hominy, who had come on board with her husband, gave to
this statement her most unqualified support, as did that gentleman also.
Martin gratefully declined their invitation to regale himself at their
house during the half hour of the vessel’s stay; and having escorted
Mrs Hominy and the red pocket-handkerchief (which was still on active
service) safely across the gangway, returned in a thoughtful mood to
watch the emigrants as they removed their goods ashore.

Mark, as he stood beside him, glanced in his face from time to time;
anxious to discover what effect this dialogue had had upon him, and
not unwilling that his hopes should be dashed before they reached their
destination, so that the blow he feared might be broken in its fall. But
saving that he sometimes looked up quickly at the poor erections on the
hill, he gave him no clue to what was passing in his mind, until they
were again upon their way.

‘Mark,’ he said then, ‘are there really none but ourselves on board this
boat who are bound for Eden?’

‘None at all, sir. Most of ‘em, as you know, have stopped short; and
the few that are left are going further on. What matters that! More room
there for us, sir.’

‘Oh, to be sure!’ said Martin. ‘But I was thinking--’ and there he
paused.

‘Yes, sir?’ observed Mark.

‘How odd it was that the people should have arranged to try their
fortune at a wretched hole like that, for instance, when there is such
a much better, and such a very different kind of place, near at hand, as
one may say.’

He spoke in a tone so very different from his usual confidence, and with
such an obvious dread of Mark’s reply, that the good-natured fellow was
full of pity.

‘Why, you know, sir,’ said Mark, as gently as he could by any means
insinuate the observation, ‘we must guard against being too sanguine.
There’s no occasion for it, either, because we’re determined to make the
best of everything, after we know the worst of it. Ain’t we, sir?’

Martin looked at him, but answered not a word.

‘Even Eden, you know, ain’t all built,’ said Mark.

‘In the name of Heaven, man,’ cried Martin angrily, ‘don’t talk of Eden
in the same breath with that place. Are you mad? There--God forgive
me!--don’t think harshly of me for my temper!’

After that, he turned away, and walked to and fro upon the deck full two
hours. Nor did he speak again, except to say ‘Good night,’ until next
day; nor even then upon this subject, but on other topics quite foreign
to the purpose.

As they proceeded further on their track, and came more and more towards
their journey’s end, the monotonous desolation of the scene increased to
that degree, that for any redeeming feature it presented to their eyes,
they might have entered, in the body, on the grim domains of Giant
Despair. A flat morass, bestrewn with fallen timber; a marsh on which
the good growth of the earth seemed to have been wrecked and cast away,
that from its decomposing ashes vile and ugly things might rise; where
the very trees took the aspect of huge weeds, begotten of the slime
from which they sprung, by the hot sun that burnt them up; where fatal
maladies, seeking whom they might infect, came forth at night in misty
shapes, and creeping out upon the water, hunted them like spectres until
day; where even the blessed sun, shining down on festering elements
of corruption and disease, became a horror; this was the realm of Hope
through which they moved.

At last they stopped. At Eden too. The waters of the Deluge might have
left it but a week before; so choked with slime and matted growth was
the hideous swamp which bore that name.

There being no depth of water close in shore, they landed from the
vessel’s boat, with all their goods beside them. There were a few
log-houses visible among the dark trees; the best, a cow-shed or a rude
stable; but for the wharves, the market-place, the public buildings--

‘Here comes an Edener,’ said Mark. ‘He’ll get us help to carry these
things up. Keep a good heart, sir. Hallo there!’

The man advanced toward them through the thickening gloom, very slowly;
leaning on a stick. As he drew nearer, they observed that he was pale
and worn, and that his anxious eyes were deeply sunken in his head. His
dress of homespun blue hung about him in rags; his feet and head were
bare. He sat down on a stump half-way, and beckoned them to come to him.
When they complied, he put his hand upon his side as if in pain, and
while he fetched his breath stared at them, wondering.

‘Strangers!’ he exclaimed, as soon as he could speak.

‘The very same,’ said Mark. ‘How are you, sir?’

‘I’ve had the fever very bad,’ he answered faintly. ‘I haven’t stood
upright these many weeks. Those are your notions I see,’ pointing to
their property.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Mark, ‘they are. You couldn’t recommend us some one as
would lend a hand to help carry ‘em up to the--to the town, could you,
sir?’

‘My eldest son would do it if he could,’ replied the man; ‘but today
he has his chill upon him, and is lying wrapped up in the blankets. My
youngest died last week.’

‘I’m sorry for it, governor, with all my heart,’ said Mark, shaking him
by the hand. ‘Don’t mind us. Come along with me, and I’ll give you an
arm back. The goods is safe enough, sir’--to Martin--‘there ain’t many
people about, to make away with ‘em. What a comfort that is!’

‘No,’ cried the man. ‘You must look for such folk here,’ knocking his
stick upon the ground, ‘or yonder in the bush, towards the north. We’ve
buried most of ‘em. The rest have gone away. Them that we have here,
don’t come out at night.’

‘The night air ain’t quite wholesome, I suppose?’ said Mark.

‘It’s deadly poison,’ was the settler’s answer.

Mark showed no more uneasiness than if it had been commended to him as
ambrosia; but he gave the man his arm, and as they went along explained
to him the nature of their purchase, and inquired where it lay. Close to
his own log-house, he said; so close that he had used their dwelling
as a store-house for some corn; they must excuse it that night, but he
would endeavour to get it taken out upon the morrow. He then gave them
to understand, as an additional scrap of local chit-chat, that he had
buried the last proprietor with his own hands; a piece of information
which Mark also received without the least abatement of his equanimity.

In a word, he conducted them to a miserable cabin, rudely constructed
of the trunks of trees; the door of which had either fallen down or
been carried away long ago; and which was consequently open to the
wild landscape and the dark night. Saving for the little store he had
mentioned, it was perfectly bare of all furniture; but they had left a
chest upon the landing-place, and he gave them a rude torch in lieu
of candle. This latter acquisition Mark planted in the earth, and then
declaring that the mansion ‘looked quite comfortable,’ hurried
Martin off again to help bring up the chest. And all the way to the
landing-place and back, Mark talked incessantly; as if he would infuse
into his partner’s breast some faint belief that they had arrived under
the most auspicious and cheerful of all imaginable circumstances.

But many a man who would have stood within a home dismantled, strong in
his passion and design of vengeance, has had the firmness of his
nature conquered by the razing of an air-built castle. When the log-hut
received them for the second time, Martin laid down upon the ground, and
wept aloud.

‘Lord love you, sir!’ cried Mr Tapley, in great terror; ‘Don’t do that!
Don’t do that, sir! Anything but that! It never helped man, woman, or
child, over the lowest fence yet, sir, and it never will. Besides its
being of no use to you, it’s worse than of no use to me, for the least
sound of it will knock me flat down. I can’t stand up agin it, sir.
Anything but that!’

There is no doubt he spoke the truth, for the extraordinary alarm with
which he looked at Martin as he paused upon his knees before the chest,
in the act of unlocking it, to say these words, sufficiently confirmed
him.

‘I ask your forgiveness a thousand times, my dear fellow,’ said Martin.
‘I couldn’t have helped it, if death had been the penalty.’

‘Ask my forgiveness!’ said Mark, with his accustomed cheerfulness, as he
proceeded to unpack the chest. ‘The head partner a-asking forgiveness of
Co., eh? There must be something wrong in the firm when that happens. I
must have the books inspected and the accounts gone over immediate. Here
we are. Everything in its proper place. Here’s the salt pork. Here’s the
biscuit. Here’s the whiskey. Uncommon good it smells too. Here’s the
tin pot. This tin pot’s a small fortun’ in itself! Here’s the blankets.
Here’s the axe. Who says we ain’t got a first-rate fit out? I feel as if
I was a cadet gone out to Indy, and my noble father was chairman of the
Board of Directors. Now, when I’ve got some water from the stream afore
the door and mixed the grog,’ cried Mark, running out to suit the action
to the word, ‘there’s a supper ready, comprising every delicacy of
the season. Here we are, sir, all complete. For what we are going to
receive, et cetrer. Lord bless you, sir, it’s very like a gipsy party!’

It was impossible not to take heart, in the company of such a man as
this. Martin sat upon the ground beside the box; took out his knife; and
ate and drank sturdily.

‘Now you see,’ said Mark, when they had made a hearty meal; ‘with your
knife and mine, I sticks this blanket right afore the door. Or where, in
a state of high civilization, the door would be. And very neat it looks.
Then I stops the aperture below, by putting the chest agin it. And very
neat THAT looks. Then there’s your blanket, sir. Then here’s mine. And
what’s to hinder our passing a good night?’

For all his light-hearted speaking, it was long before he slept himself.
He wrapped his blanket round him, put the axe ready to his hand, and lay
across the threshold of the door; too anxious and too watchful to close
his eyes. The novelty of their dreary situation, the dread of some
rapacious animal or human enemy, the terrible uncertainty of their means
of subsistence, the apprehension of death, the immense distance and the
hosts of obstacles between themselves and England, were fruitful sources
of disquiet in the deep silence of the night. Though Martin would have
had him think otherwise, Mark felt that he was waking also, and a prey
to the same reflections. This was almost worse than all, for if he began
to brood over their miseries instead of trying to make head against them
there could be little doubt that such a state of mind would powerfully
assist the influence of the pestilent climate. Never had the light of
day been half so welcome to his eyes, as when awaking from a fitful
doze, Mark saw it shining through the blanket in the doorway.

He stole out gently, for his companion was sleeping now; and having
refreshed himself by washing in the river, where it snowed before the
door, took a rough survey of the settlement. There were not above a
score of cabins in the whole; half of these appeared untenanted; all
were rotten and decayed. The most tottering, abject, and forlorn among
them was called, with great propriety, the Bank, and National Credit
Office. It had some feeble props about it, but was settling deep down in
the mud, past all recovery.

Here and there an effort had been made to clear the land, and something
like a field had been marked out, where, among the stumps and ashes of
burnt trees, a scanty crop of Indian corn was growing. In some quarters,
a snake or zigzag fence had been begun, but in no instance had it been
completed; and the felled logs, half hidden in the soil, lay mouldering
away. Three or four meagre dogs, wasted and vexed with hunger; some
long-legged pigs, wandering away into the woods in search of food; some
children, nearly naked, gazing at him from the huts; were all the living
things he saw. A fetid vapour, hot and sickening as the breath of an
oven, rose up from the earth, and hung on everything around; and as his
foot-prints sunk into the marshy ground, a black ooze started forth to
blot them out.

Their own land was mere forest. The trees had grown so think and close
that they shouldered one another out of their places, and the weakest,
forced into shapes of strange distortion, languished like cripples.
The best were stunted, from the pressure and the want of room; and high
about the stems of all grew long rank grass, dank weeds, and frowsy
underwood; not divisible into their separate kinds, but tangled all
together in a heap; a jungle deep and dark, with neither earth nor water
at its roots, but putrid matter, formed of the pulpy offal of the two,
and of their own corruption.

He went down to the landing-place where they had left their goods last
night; and there he found some half-dozen men--wan and forlorn to look
at, but ready enough to assist--who helped him to carry them to the
log-house. They shook their heads in speaking of the settlement, and had
no comfort to give him. Those who had the means of going away had all
deserted it. They who were left had lost their wives, their children,
friends, or brothers there, and suffered much themselves. Most of
them were ill then; none were the men they had been once. They frankly
offered their assistance and advice, and, leaving him for that time,
went sadly off upon their several tasks.

Martin was by this time stirring; but he had greatly changed, even in
one night. He was very pale and languid; he spoke of pains and weakness
in his limbs, and complained that his sight was dim, and his voice
feeble. Increasing in his own briskness as the prospect grew more and
more dismal, Mark brought away a door from one of the deserted houses,
and fitted it to their own habitation; then went back again for a rude
bench he had observed, with which he presently returned in triumph;
and having put this piece of furniture outside the house, arranged the
notable tin pot and other such movables upon it, that it might represent
a dresser or a sideboard. Greatly satisfied with this arrangement, he
next rolled their cask of flour into the house and set it up on end in
one corner, where it served for a side-table. No better dining-table
could be required than the chest, which he solemnly devoted to that
useful service thenceforth. Their blankets, clothes, and the like, he
hung on pegs and nails. And lastly, he brought forth a great placard
(which Martin in the exultation of his heart had prepared with his own
hands at the National Hotel) bearing the inscription, CHUZZLEWIT & CO.,
ARCHITECTS AND SURVEYORS, which he displayed upon the most conspicuous
part of the premises, with as much gravity as if the thriving city of
Eden had a real existence, and they expected to be overwhelmed with
business.

‘These here tools,’ said Mark, bringing forward Martin’s case of
instruments and sticking the compasses upright in a stump before the
door, ‘shall be set out in the open air to show that we come provided.
And now, if any gentleman wants a house built, he’d better give his
orders, afore we’re other ways bespoke.’

Considering the intense heat of the weather, this was not a bad
morning’s work; but without pausing for a moment, though he was
streaming at every pore, Mark vanished into the house again, and
presently reappeared with a hatchet; intent on performing some
impossibilities with that implement.

‘Here’s ugly old tree in the way, sir,’ he observed, ‘which’ll be all
the better down. We can build the oven in the afternoon. There never was
such a handy spot for clay as Eden is. That’s convenient, anyhow.’

But Martin gave him no answer. He had sat the whole time with his head
upon his hands, gazing at the current as it rolled swiftly by; thinking,
perhaps, how fast it moved towards the open sea, the high road to the
home he never would behold again.

Not even the vigorous strokes which Mark dealt at the tree awoke him
from his mournful meditation. Finding all his endeavours to rouse him of
no use, Mark stopped in his work and came towards him.

‘Don’t give in, sir,’ said Mr Tapley.

‘Oh, Mark,’ returned his friend, ‘what have I done in all my life that
has deserved this heavy fate?’

‘Why, sir,’ returned Mark, ‘for the matter of that, everybody as is here
might say the same thing; many of ‘em with better reason p’raps than
you or me. Hold up, sir. Do something. Couldn’t you ease your mind, now,
don’t you think, by making some personal obserwations in a letter to
Scadder?’

‘No,’ said Martin, shaking his head sorrowfully: ‘I am past that.’

‘But if you’re past that already,’ returned Mark, ‘you must be ill, and
ought to be attended to.’

‘Don’t mind me,’ said Martin. ‘Do the best you can for yourself. You’ll
soon have only yourself to consider. And then God speed you home, and
forgive me for bringing you here! I am destined to die in this place. I
felt it the instant I set foot upon the shore. Sleeping or waking, Mark,
I dreamed it all last night.’

‘I said you must be ill,’ returned Mark, tenderly, ‘and now I’m sure of
it. A touch of fever and ague caught on these rivers, I dare say; but
bless you, THAT’S nothing. It’s only a seasoning, and we must all be
seasoned, one way or another. That’s religion that is, you know,’ said
Mark.

He only sighed and shook his head.

‘Wait half a minute,’ said Mark cheerily, ‘till I run up to one of our
neighbours and ask what’s best to be took, and borrow a little of it to
give you; and to-morrow you’ll find yourself as strong as ever again. I
won’t be gone a minute. Don’t give in while I’m away, whatever you do!’

Throwing down his hatchet, he sped away immediately, but stopped when he
had got a little distance, and looked back; then hurried on again.

‘Now, Mr Tapley,’ said Mark, giving himself a tremendous blow in the
chest by way of reviver, ‘just you attend to what I’ve got to say.
Things is looking about as bad as they CAN look, young man. You’ll not
have such another opportunity for showing your jolly disposition, my
fine fellow, as long as you live. And therefore, Tapley, Now’s your time
to come out strong; or Never!’



CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

REPORTS PROGRESS IN CERTAIN HOMELY MATTERS OF LOVE, HATRED, JEALOUSY,
AND REVENGE


‘Hallo, Pecksniff!’ cried Mr Jonas from the parlour. ‘Isn’t somebody
a-going to open that precious old door of yours?’

‘Immediately, Mr Jonas. Immediately.’

‘Ecod,’ muttered the orphan, ‘not before it’s time neither. Whoever it
is, has knocked three times, and each one loud enough to wake the--’ he
had such a repugnance to the idea of waking the Dead, that he stopped
even then with the words upon his tongue, and said, instead, ‘the Seven
Sleepers.’

‘Immediately, Mr Jonas; immediately,’ repeated Pecksniff. ‘Thomas
Pinch’--he couldn’t make up his mind, in his great agitation, whether to
call Tom his dear friend or a villain, so he shook his fist at him
PRO TEM--‘go up to my daughters’ room, and tell them who is here. Say,
Silence. Silence! Do you hear me, sir?

‘Directly, sir!’ cried Tom, departing, in a state of much amazement, on
his errand.

‘You’ll--ha, ha, ha!--you’ll excuse me, Mr Jonas, if I close this door
a moment, will you?’ said Pecksniff. ‘This may be a professional call.
Indeed I am pretty sure it is. Thank you.’ Then Mr Pecksniff, gently
warbling a rustic stave, put on his garden hat, seized a spade, and
opened the street door; calmly appearing on the threshold, as if he
thought he had, from his vineyard, heard a modest rap, but was not quite
certain.

Seeing a gentleman and lady before him, he started back in as much
confusion as a good man with a crystal conscience might betray in mere
surprise. Recognition came upon him the next moment, and he cried:

‘Mr Chuzzlewit! Can I believe my eyes! My dear sir; my good sir! A
joyful hour, a happy hour indeed. Pray, my dear sir, walk in. You find
me in my garden-dress. You will excuse it, I know. It is an ancient
pursuit, gardening. Primitive, my dear sir. Or, if I am not mistaken,
Adam was the first of our calling. MY Eve, I grieve to say is no more,
sir; but’--here he pointed to his spade, and shook his head as if he
were not cheerful without an effort--‘but I do a little bit of Adam
still.’

He had by this time got them into the best parlour, where the portrait
by Spiller, and the bust by Spoker, were.

‘My daughters,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘will be overjoyed. If I could feel
weary upon such a theme, I should have been worn out long ago, my dear
sir, by their constant anticipation of this happiness and their repeated
allusions to our meeting at Mrs Todgers’s. Their fair young friend,
too,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘whom they so desire to know and love--indeed
to know her, is to love--I hope I see her well. I hope in saying,
“Welcome to my humble roof!” I find some echo in her own sentiments.
If features are an index to the heart, I have no fears of that. An
extremely engaging expression of countenance, Mr Chuzzlewit, my dear
sir--very much so!’

‘Mary,’ said the old man, ‘Mr Pecksniff flatters you. But flattery from
him is worth the having. He is not a dealer in it, and it comes from his
heart. We thought Mr--’

‘Pinch,’ said Mary.

‘Mr Pinch would have arrived before us, Pecksniff.’

‘He did arrive before you, my dear sir,’ retorted Pecksniff, raising his
voice for the edification of Tom upon the stairs, ‘and was about, I dare
say, to tell me of your coming, when I begged him first to knock at my
daughters’ chamber, and inquire after Charity, my dear child, who is not
so well as I could wish. No,’ said Mr Pecksniff, answering their looks,
‘I am sorry to say, she is not. It is merely an hysterical affection;
nothing more, I am not uneasy. Mr Pinch! Thomas!’ exclaimed Pecksniff,
in his kindest accents. ‘Pray come in. I shall make no stranger of you.
Thomas is a friend of mine, of rather long-standing, Mr Chuzzlewit, you
must know.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Tom. ‘You introduce me very kindly, and speak of
me in terms of which I am very proud.’

‘Old Thomas!’ cried his master, pleasantly ‘God bless you!’

Tom reported that the young ladies would appear directly, and that
the best refreshments which the house afforded were even then in
preparation, under their joint superintendence. While he was speaking,
the old man looked at him intently, though with less harshness than was
common to him; nor did the mutual embarrassment of Tom and the
young lady, to whatever cause he attributed it, seem to escape his
observation.

‘Pecksniff,’ he said after a pause, rising and taking him aside towards
the window, ‘I was much shocked on hearing of my brother’s death. We
had been strangers for many years. My only comfort is that he must
have lived the happier and better man for having associated no hopes or
schemes with me. Peace to his memory! We were play-fellows once; and it
would have been better for us both if we had died then.’

Finding him in this gentle mood, Mr Pecksniff began to see another way
out of his difficulties, besides the casting overboard of Jonas.

‘That any man, my dear sir, could possibly be the happier for not
knowing you,’ he returned, ‘you will excuse my doubting. But that Mr
Anthony, in the evening of his life, was happier in the affection of his
excellent son--a pattern, my dear sir, a pattern to all sons--and in the
care of a distant relation who, however lowly in his means of serving
him, had no bounds to his inclination; I can inform you.’

‘How’s this?’ said the old man. ‘You are not a legatee?’

‘You don’t,’ said Mr Pecksniff, with a melancholy pressure of his hand,
‘quite understand my nature yet, I find. No, sir, I am not a legatee. I
am proud to say I am not a legatee. I am proud to say that neither of my
children is a legatee. And yet, sir, I was with him at his own request.
HE understood me somewhat better, sir. He wrote and said, “I am sick. I
am sinking. Come to me!” I went to him. I sat beside his bed, sir, and
I stood beside his grave. Yes, at the risk of offending even you, I did
it, sir. Though the avowal should lead to our instant separation, and
to the severing of those tender ties between us which have recently been
formed, I make it. But I am not a legatee,’ said Mr Pecksniff, smiling
dispassionately; ‘and I never expected to be a legatee. I knew better!’

‘His son a pattern!’ cried old Martin. ‘How can you tell me that? My
brother had in his wealth the usual doom of wealth, and root of misery.
He carried his corrupting influence with him, go where he would; and
shed it round him, even on his hearth. It made of his own child a
greedy expectant, who measured every day and hour the lessening distance
between his father and the grave, and cursed his tardy progress on that
dismal road.’

‘No!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, boldly. ‘Not at all, sir!’

‘But I saw that shadow in his house,’ said Martin Chuzzlewit, ‘the last
time we met, and warned him of its presence. I know it when I see it, do
I not? I, who have lived within it all these years!’

‘I deny it,’ Mr Pecksniff answered, warmly. ‘I deny it altogether. That
bereaved young man is now in this house, sir, seeking in change of scene
the peace of mind he has lost. Shall I be backward in doing justice to
that young man, when even undertakers and coffin-makers have been moved
by the conduct he has exhibited; when even mutes have spoken in his
praise, and the medical man hasn’t known what to do with himself in
the excitement of his feelings! There is a person of the name of Gamp,
sir--Mrs Gamp--ask her. She saw Mr Jonas in a trying time. Ask HER, sir.
She is respectable, but not sentimental, and will state the fact. A line
addressed to Mrs Gamp, at the Bird Shop, Kingsgate Street, High Holborn,
London, will meet with every attention, I have no doubt. Let her be
examined, my good sir. Strike, but hear! Leap, Mr Chuzzlewit, but look!
Forgive me, my dear sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff, taking both his hands, ‘if
I am warm; but I am honest, and must state the truth.’

In proof of the character he gave himself, Mr Pecksniff suffered tears
of honesty to ooze out of his eyes.

The old man gazed at him for a moment with a look of wonder, repeating
to himself, ‘Here now! In this house!’ But he mastered his surprise, and
said, after a pause:

‘Let me see him.’

‘In a friendly spirit, I hope?’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Forgive me, sir but
he is in the receipt of my humble hospitality.’

‘I said,’ replied the old man, ‘let me see him. If I were disposed to
regard him in any other than a friendly spirit, I should have said keep
us apart.’

‘Certainly, my dear sir. So you would. You are frankness itself, I know.
I will break this happiness to him,’ said Mr Pecksniff, as he left the
room, ‘if you will excuse me for a minute--gently.’

He paved the way to the disclosure so very gently, that a quarter of an
hour elapsed before he returned with Mr Jonas. In the meantime the young
ladies had made their appearance, and the table had been set out for the
refreshment of the travellers.

Now, however well Mr Pecksniff, in his morality, had taught Jonas the
lesson of dutiful behaviour to his uncle, and however perfectly Jonas,
in the cunning of his nature, had learnt it, that young man’s bearing,
when presented to his father’s brother, was anything but manly or
engaging. Perhaps, indeed, so singular a mixture of defiance and
obsequiousness, of fear and hardihood, of dogged sullenness and an
attempt at enraging and propitiation, never was expressed in any one
human figure as in that of Jonas, when, having raised his downcast
eyes to Martin’s face, he let them fall again, and uneasily closing
and unclosing his hands without a moment’s intermission, stood swinging
himself from side to side, waiting to be addressed.

‘Nephew,’ said the old man. ‘You have been a dutiful son, I hear.’

‘As dutiful as sons in general, I suppose,’ returned Jonas, looking up
and down once more. ‘I don’t brag to have been any better than other
sons; but I haven’t been any worse, I dare say.’

‘A pattern to all sons, I am told,’ said the old man, glancing towards
Mr Pecksniff.

‘Ecod!’ said Jonas, looking up again for a moment, and shaking his head,
‘I’ve been as good a son as ever you were a brother. It’s the pot and
the kettle, if you come to that.’

‘You speak bitterly, in the violence of your regret,’ said Martin, after
a pause. ‘Give me your hand.’

Jonas did so, and was almost at his ease. ‘Pecksniff,’ he whispered,
as they drew their chairs about the table; ‘I gave him as good as he
brought, eh? He had better look at home, before he looks out of window,
I think?’

Mr Pecksniff only answered by a nudge of the elbow, which might either
be construed into an indignant remonstrance or a cordial assent; but
which, in any case, was an emphatic admonition to his chosen son-in-law
to be silent. He then proceeded to do the honours of the house with his
accustomed ease and amiability.

But not even Mr Pecksniff’s guileless merriment could set such a
party at their ease, or reconcile materials so utterly discordant
and conflicting as those with which he had to deal. The unspeakable
jealously and hatred which that night’s explanation had sown in
Charity’s breast, was not to be so easily kept down; and more than
once it showed itself in such intensity, as seemed to render a full
disclosure of all the circumstances then and there, impossible to be
avoided. The beauteous Merry, too, with all the glory of her conquest
fresh upon her, so probed and lanced the rankling disappointment of her
sister by her capricious airs and thousand little trials of Mr Jonas’s
obedience, that she almost goaded her into a fit of madness, and obliged
her to retire from table in a burst of passion, hardly less vehement
than that to which she had abandoned herself in the first tumult of her
wrath. The constraint imposed upon the family by the presence among
them for the first time of Mary Graham (for by that name old Martin
Chuzzlewit had introduced her) did not at all improve this state of
things; gentle and quiet though her manner was. Mr Pecksniff’s situation
was peculiarly trying; for, what with having constantly to keep the
peace between his daughters; to maintain a reasonable show of affection
and unity in his household; to curb the growing ease and gaiety of
Jonas, which vented itself in sundry insolences towards Mr Pinch, and
an indefinable coarseness of manner in reference to Mary (they being the
two dependants); to make no mention at all of his having perpetually to
conciliate his rich old relative, and to smooth down, or explain
away, some of the ten thousand bad appearances and combinations of bad
appearances, by which they were surrounded on that unlucky evening--what
with having to do this, and it would be difficult to sum up how much
more, without the least relief or assistance from anybody, it may be
easily imagined that Mr Pecksniff had in his enjoyment something more
than that usual portion of alloy which is mixed up with the best of
men’s delights. Perhaps he had never in his life felt such relief as
when old Martin, looking at his watch, announced that it was time to go.

‘We have rooms,’ he said, ‘at the Dragon, for the present. I have a
fancy for the evening walk. The nights are dark just now; perhaps Mr
Pinch would not object to light us home?’

‘My dear sir!’ cried Pecksniff, ‘I shall be delighted. Merry, my child,
the lantern.’

‘The lantern, if you please, my dear,’ said Martin; ‘but I couldn’t
think of taking your father out of doors to-night; and, to be brief, I
won’t.’

Mr Pecksniff already had his hat in his hand, but it was so emphatically
said that he paused.

‘I take Mr Pinch, or go alone,’ said Martin. ‘Which shall it be?’

‘It shall be Thomas, sir,’ cried Pecksniff, ‘since you are so resolute
upon it. Thomas, my friend, be very careful, if you please.’

Tom was in some need of this injunction, for he felt so nervous, and
trembled to such a degree, that he found it difficult to hold the
lantern. How much more difficult when, at the old man’s bidding she drew
her hand through his--Tom Pinch’s--arm!

‘And so, Mr Pinch,’ said Martin, on the way, ‘you are very comfortably
situated here; are you?’

Tom answered, with even more than his usual enthusiasm, that he was
under obligations to Mr Pecksniff which the devotion of a lifetime would
but imperfectly repay.

‘How long have you known my nephew?’ asked Martin.

‘Your nephew, sir?’ faltered Tom.

‘Mr Jonas Chuzzlewit,’ said Mary.

‘Oh dear, yes,’ cried Tom, greatly relieved, for his mind was running
upon Martin. ‘Certainly. I never spoke to him before to-night, sir!’

‘Perhaps half a lifetime will suffice for the acknowledgment of HIS
kindness,’ observed the old man.

Tom felt that this was a rebuff for him, and could not but understand it
as a left-handed hit at his employer. So he was silent. Mary felt that
Mr Pinch was not remarkable for presence of mind, and that he could not
say too little under existing circumstances. So SHE was silent. The
old man, disgusted by what in his suspicious nature he considered a
shameless and fulsome puff of Mr Pecksniff, which was a part of Tom’s
hired service and in which he was determined to persevere, set him down
at once for a deceitful, servile, miserable fawner. So HE was silent.
And though they were all sufficiently uncomfortable, it is fair to say
that Martin was perhaps the most so; for he had felt kindly towards Tom
at first, and had been interested by his seeming simplicity.

‘You’re like the rest,’ he thought, glancing at the face of the
unconscious Tom. ‘You had nearly imposed upon me, but you have lost
your labour. You are too zealous a toad-eater, and betray yourself, Mr
Pinch.’

During the whole remainder of the walk, not another word was spoken.
First among the meetings to which Tom had long looked forward with
a beating heart, it was memorable for nothing but embarrassment
and confusion. They parted at the Dragon door; and sighing as he
extinguished the candle in the lantern, Tom turned back again over the
gloomy fields.

As he approached the first stile, which was in a lonely part, made very
dark by a plantation of young firs, a man slipped past him and went on
before. Coming to the stile he stopped, and took his seat upon it.
Tom was rather startled, and for a moment stood still, but he stepped
forward again immediately, and went close up to him.

It was Jonas; swinging his legs to and fro, sucking the head of a stick,
and looking with a sneer at Tom.

‘Good gracious me!’ cried Tom, ‘who would have thought of its being you!
You followed us, then?’

‘What’s that to you?’ said Jonas. ‘Go to the devil!’

‘You are not very civil, I think,’ remarked Tom.

‘Civil enough for YOU,’ retorted Jonas. ‘Who are you?’

‘One who has as good a right to common consideration as another,’ said
Tom mildly.

‘You’re a liar,’ said Jonas. ‘You haven’t a right to any consideration.
You haven’t a right to anything. You’re a pretty sort of fellow to talk
about your rights, upon my soul! Ha, ha!--Rights, too!’

‘If you proceed in this way,’ returned Tom, reddening, ‘you will oblige
me to talk about my wrongs. But I hope your joke is over.’

‘It’s the way with you curs,’ said Mr Jonas, ‘that when you know a man’s
in real earnest, you pretend to think he’s joking, so that you may turn
it off. But that won’t do with me. It’s too stale. Now just attend to me
for a bit, Mr Pitch, or Witch, or Stitch, or whatever your name is.’

‘My name is Pinch,’ observed Tom. ‘Have the goodness to call me by it.’

‘What! You mustn’t even be called out of your name, mustn’t you!’ cried
Jonas. ‘Pauper’ prentices are looking up, I think. Ecod, we manage ‘em a
little better in the city!’

‘Never mind what you do in the city,’ said Tom. ‘What have you got to
say to me?’

‘Just this, Mister Pinch,’ retorted Jonas, thrusting his face so close
to Tom’s that Tom was obliged to retreat a step. ‘I advise you to keep
your own counsel, and to avoid title-tattle, and not to cut in where
you’re not wanted. I’ve heard something of you, my friend, and your
meek ways; and I recommend you to forget ‘em till I am married to one
of Pecksniff’s gals, and not to curry favour among my relations, but
to leave the course clear. You know, when curs won’t leave the course
clear, they’re whipped off; so this is kind advice. Do you understand?
Eh? Damme, who are you,’ cried Jonas, with increased contempt, ‘that
you should walk home with THEM, unless it was behind ‘em, like any other
servant out of livery?’

‘Come!’ cried Tom, ‘I see that you had better get off the stile, and let
me pursue my way home. Make room for me, if you please.’

‘Don’t think it!’ said Jonas, spreading out his legs. ‘Not till I
choose. And I don’t choose now. What! You’re afraid of my making you
split upon some of your babbling just now, are you, Sneak?’

‘I am not afraid of many things, I hope,’ said Tom; ‘and certainly not
of anything that you will do. I am not a tale-bearer, and I despise all
meanness. You quite mistake me. Ah!’ cried Tom, indignantly. ‘Is this
manly from one in your position to one in mine? Please to make room for
me to pass. The less I say, the better.’

‘The less you say!’ retorted Jonas, dangling his legs the more, and
taking no heed of this request. ‘You say very little, don’t you? Ecod, I
should like to know what goes on between you and a vagabond member of my
family. There’s very little in that too, I dare say!’

‘I know no vagabond member of your family,’ cried Tom, stoutly.

‘You do!’ said Jonas.

‘I don’t,’ said Tom. ‘Your uncle’s namesake, if you mean him, is no
vagabond. Any comparison between you and him’--Tom snapped his fingers
at him, for he was rising fast in wrath--‘is immeasurably to your
disadvantage.’

‘Oh indeed!’ sneered Jonas. ‘And what do you think of his deary--his
beggarly leavings, eh, Mister Pinch?’

‘I don’t mean to say another word, or stay here another instant,’
replied Tom.

‘As I told you before, you’re a liar,’ said Jonas, coolly. ‘You’ll stay
here till I give you leave to go. Now, keep where you are, will you?’

He flourished his stick over Tom’s head; but in a moment it was spinning
harmlessly in the air, and Jonas himself lay sprawling in the ditch. In
the momentary struggle for the stick, Tom had brought it into violent
contact with his opponent’s forehead; and the blood welled out profusely
from a deep cut on the temple. Tom was first apprised of this by seeing
that he pressed his handkerchief to the wounded part, and staggered as
he rose, being stunned.

‘Are you hurt?’ said Tom. ‘I am very sorry. Lean on me for a moment.
You can do that without forgiving me, if you still bear me malice. But I
don’t know why; for I never offended you before we met on this spot.’

He made him no answer; not appearing at first to understand him, or even
to know that he was hurt, though he several times took his handkerchief
from the cut to look vacantly at the blood upon it. After one of these
examinations, he looked at Tom, and then there was an expression in
his features, which showed that he understood what had taken place, and
would remember it.

Nothing more passed between them as they went home. Jonas kept a little
in advance, and Tom Pinch sadly followed, thinking of the grief which
the knowledge of this quarrel must occasion his excellent benefactor.
When Jonas knocked at the door, Tom’s heart beat high; higher when Miss
Mercy answered it, and seeing her wounded lover, shireked aloud; higher,
when he followed them into the family parlour; higher than at any other
time, when Jonas spoke.

‘Don’t make a noise about it,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing worth mentioning.
I didn’t know the road; the night’s very dark; and just as I came up
with Mr Pinch’--he turned his face towards Tom, but not his eyes--‘I ran
against a tree. It’s only skin deep.’

‘Cold water, Merry, my child!’ cried Mr Pecksniff. ‘Brown paper!
Scissors! A piece of old linen! Charity, my dear, make a bandage. Bless
me, Mr Jonas!’

‘Oh, bother YOUR nonsense,’ returned the gracious son-in-law elect. ‘Be
of some use if you can. If you can’t, get out!’

Miss Charity, though called upon to lend her aid, sat upright in one
corner, with a smile upon her face, and didn’t move a finger. Though
Mercy laved the wound herself; and Mr Pecksniff held the patient’s head
between his two hands, as if without that assistance it must inevitably
come in half; and Tom Pinch, in his guilty agitation, shook a bottle of
Dutch Drops until they were nothing but English Froth, and in his other
hand sustained a formidable carving-knife, really intended to reduce the
swelling, but apparently designed for the ruthless infliction of another
wound as soon as that was dressed; Charity rendered not the least
assistance, nor uttered a word. But when Mr Jonas’s head was bound up,
and he had gone to bed, and everybody else had retired, and the house
was quiet, Mr Pinch, as he sat mournfully on his bedstead, ruminating,
heard a gentle tap at his door; and opening it, saw her, to his great
astonishment, standing before him with her finger on her lip.

‘Mr Pinch,’ she whispered. ‘Dear Mr Pinch! Tell me the truth! You did
that? There was some quarrel between you, and you struck him? I am sure
of it!’

It was the first time she had ever spoken kindly to Tom, in all the many
years they had passed together. He was stupefied with amazement.

‘Was it so, or not?’ she eagerly demanded.

‘I was very much provoked,’ said Tom.

‘Then it was?’ cried Charity, with sparkling eyes.

‘Ye-yes. We had a struggle for the path,’ said Tom. ‘But I didn’t mean
to hurt him so much.’

‘Not so much!’ she repeated, clenching her hand and stamping her foot,
to Tom’s great wonder. ‘Don’t say that. It was brave of you. I honour
you for it. If you should ever quarrel again, don’t spare him for the
world, but beat him down and set your shoe upon him. Not a word of this
to anybody. Dear Mr Pinch, I am your friend from tonight. I am always
your friend from this time.’

She turned her flushed face upon Tom to confirm her words by its
kindling expression; and seizing his right hand, pressed it to her
breast, and kissed it. And there was nothing personal in this to render
it at all embarrassing, for even Tom, whose power of observation was by
no means remarkable, knew from the energy with which she did it that she
would have fondled any hand, no matter how bedaubed or dyed, that had
broken the head of Jonas Chuzzlewit.

Tom went into his room, and went to bed, full of uncomfortable thoughts.
That there should be any such tremendous division in the family as he
knew must have taken place to convert Charity Pecksniff into his friend,
for any reason, but, above all, for that which was clearly the real one;
that Jonas, who had assailed him with such exceeding coarseness, should
have been sufficiently magnanimous to keep the secret of their quarrel;
and that any train of circumstances should have led to the commission of
an assault and battery by Thomas Pinch upon any man calling himself
the friend of Seth Pecksniff; were matters of such deep and painful
cogitation that he could not close his eyes. His own violence, in
particular, so preyed upon the generous mind of Tom, that coupling it
with the many former occasions on which he had given Mr Pecksniff pain
and anxiety (occasions of which that gentleman often reminded him), he
really began to regard himself as destined by a mysterious fate to be
the evil genius and bad angel of his patron. But he fell asleep at last,
and dreamed--new source of waking uneasiness--that he had betrayed his
trust, and run away with Mary Graham.

It must be acknowledged that, asleep or awake, Tom’s position in
reference to this young lady was full of uneasiness. The more he saw
of her, the more he admired her beauty, her intelligence, the amiable
qualities that even won on the divided house of Pecksniff, and in a
few days restored, at all events, the semblance of harmony and kindness
between the angry sisters. When she spoke, Tom held his breath, so
eagerly he listened; when she sang, he sat like one entranced. She
touched his organ, and from that bright epoch even it, the old companion
of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought of elevation, began a
new and deified existence.

God’s love upon thy patience, Tom! Who, that had beheld thee, for three
summer weeks, poring through half the deadlong night over the jingling
anatomy of that inscrutable old harpsichord in the back parlour, could
have missed the entrance to thy secret heart: albeit it was dimly known
to thee? Who that had seen the glow upon thy cheek when leaning down to
listen, after hours of labour, for the sound of one incorrigible note,
thou foundest that it had a voice at last, and wheezed out a flat
something, distantly akin to what it ought to be, would not have known
that it was destined for no common touch, but one that smote, though
gently as an angel’s hand, upon the deepest chord within thee! And if
a friendly glance--aye, even though it were as guileless as thine own,
Dear Tom--could have but pierced the twilight of that evening, when, in
a voice well tempered to the time, sad, sweet, and low, yet hopeful, she
first sang to the altered instrument, and wondered at the change;
and thou, sitting apart at the open window, kept a glad silence and a
swelling heart--must not that glance have read perforce the dawning of a
story, Tom, that it were well for thee had never been begun!

Tom Pinch’s situation was not made the less dangerous or difficult by
the fact of no one word passing between them in reference to Martin.
Honourably mindful of his promise, Tom gave her opportunities of all
kinds. Early and late he was in the church; in her favourite walks; in
the village, in the garden, in the meadows; and in any or all of these
places he might have spoken freely. But no; at all such times she
carefully avoided him, or never came in his way unaccompanied. It could
not be that she disliked or distrusted him, for by a thousand little
delicate means, too slight for any notice but his own, she singled
him out when others were present, and showed herself the very soul of
kindness. Could it be that she had broken with Martin, or had never
returned his affection, save in his own bold and heightened fancy? Tom’s
cheek grew red with self-reproach as he dismissed the thought.

All this time old Martin came and went in his own strange manner, or sat
among the rest absorbed within himself, and holding little intercourse
with any one. Although he was unsocial, he was not willful in other
things, or troublesome, or morose; being never better pleased than
when they left him quite unnoticed at his book, and pursued their own
amusements in his presence, unreserved. It was impossible to discern in
whom he took an interest, or whether he had an interest in any of them.
Unless they spoke to him directly, he never showed that he had ears or
eyes for anything that passed.

One day the lively Merry, sitting with downcast eyes under a shady tree
in the churchyard, whither she had retired after fatiguing herself by
the imposition of sundry trials on the temper of Mr Jonas, felt that
a new shadow came between her and the sun. Raising her eyes in the
expectation of seeing her betrothed, she was not a little surprised to
see old Martin instead. Her surprise was not diminished when he took his
seat upon the turf beside her, and opened a conversation thus:

‘When are you to be married?’

‘Oh! dear Mr Chuzzlewit, my goodness me! I’m sure I don’t know. Not yet
awhile, I hope.’

‘You hope?’ said the old man.

It was very gravely said, but she took it for banter, and giggled
excessively.

‘Come!’ said the old man, with unusual kindness, ‘you are young,
good-looking, and I think good-natured! Frivolous you are, and love to
be, undoubtedly; but you must have some heart.’

‘I have not given it all away, I can tell you,’ said Merry, nodding her
head shrewdly, and plucking up the grass.

‘Have you parted with any of it?’

She threw the grass about, and looked another way, but said nothing.

Martin repeated his question.

‘Lor, my dear Mr Chuzzlewit! really you must excuse me! How very odd you
are.’

‘If it be odd in me to desire to know whether you love the young man
whom I understand you are to marry, I AM very odd,’ said Martin. ‘For
that is certainly my wish.’

‘He’s such a monster, you know,’ said Merry, pouting.

‘Then you don’t love him?’ returned the old man. ‘Is that your meaning?’

‘Why, my dear Mr Chuzzlewit, I’m sure I tell him a hundred times a day
that I hate him. You must have heard me tell him that.’

‘Often,’ said Martin.

‘And so I do,’ cried Merry. ‘I do positively.’

‘Being at the same time engaged to marry him,’ observed the old man.

‘Oh yes,’ said Merry. ‘But I told the wretch--my dear Mr Chuzzlewit, I
told him when he asked me--that if I ever did marry him, it should only
be that I might hate and tease him all my life.’

She had a suspicion that the old man regarded Jonas with anything but
favour, and intended these remarks to be extremely captivating. He did
not appear, however, to regard them in that light by any means; for when
he spoke again, it was in a tone of severity.

‘Look about you,’ he said, pointing to the graves; ‘and remember that
from your bridal hour to the day which sees you brought as low as these,
and laid in such a bed, there will be no appeal against him. Think, and
speak, and act, for once, like an accountable creature. Is any control
put upon your inclinations? Are you forced into this match? Are you
insidiously advised or tempted to contract it, by any one? I will not
ask by whom; by any one?’

‘No,’ said Merry, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I don’t know that I am.’

‘Don’t know that you are! Are you?’

‘No,’ replied Merry. ‘Nobody ever said anything to me about it. If any
one had tried to make me have him, I wouldn’t have had him at all.’

‘I am told that he was at first supposed to be your sister’s admirer,’
said Martin.

‘Oh, good gracious! My dear Mr Chuzzlewit, it would be very hard to make
him, though he IS a monster, accountable for other people’s vanity,’
said Merry. ‘And poor dear Cherry is the vainest darling!’

‘It was her mistake, then?’

‘I hope it was,’ cried Merry; ‘but, all along, the dear child has been
so dreadfully jealous, and SO cross, that, upon my word and honour, it’s
impossible to please her, and it’s of no use trying.’

‘Not forced, persuaded, or controlled,’ said Martin, thoughtfully. ‘And
that’s true, I see. There is one chance yet. You may have lapsed into
this engagement in very giddiness. It may have been the wanton act of a
light head. Is that so?’

‘My dear Mr Chuzzlewit,’ simpered Merry, ‘as to light-headedness, there
never was such a feather of a head as mine. It’s perfect balloon, I
declare! You never DID, you know!’

He waited quietly till she had finished, and then said, steadily
and slowly, and in a softened voice, as if he would still invite her
confidence:

‘Have you any wish--or is there anything within your breast that
whispers you may form the wish, if you have time to think--to be
released from this engagement?’

Again Miss Merry pouted, and looked down, and plucked the grass, and
shrugged her shoulders. No. She didn’t know that she had. She was pretty
sure she hadn’t. Quite sure, she might say. She ‘didn’t mind it.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ said Martin, ‘that your married life may
perhaps be miserable, full of bitterness, and most unhappy?’

Merry looked down again; and now she tore the grass up by the roots.

‘My dear Mr Chuzzlewit, what shocking words! Of course, I shall quarrel
with him. I should quarrel with any husband. Married people always
quarrel, I believe. But as to being miserable, and bitter, and all those
dreadful things, you know, why I couldn’t be absolutely that, unless he
always had the best of it; and I mean to have the best of it myself. I
always do now,’ cried Merry, nodding her head and giggling very much;
‘for I make a perfect slave of the creature.’

‘Let it go on,’ said Martin, rising. ‘Let it go on! I sought to know
your mind, my dear, and you have shown it me. I wish you joy. Joy!’ he
repeated, looking full upon her, and pointing to the wicket-gate where
Jonas entered at the moment. And then, without waiting for his nephew,
he passed out at another gate, and went away.

‘Oh, you terrible old man!’ cried the facetious Merry to herself. ‘What
a perfectly hideous monster to be wandering about churchyards in the
broad daylight, frightening people out of their wits! Don’t come here,
Griffin, or I’ll go away directly.’

Mr Jonas was the Griffin. He sat down upon the grass at her side, in
spite of this warning, and sulkily inquired:

‘What’s my uncle been a-talking about?’

‘About you,’ rejoined Merry. ‘He says you’re not half good enough for
me.’

‘Oh, yes, I dare say! We all know that. He means to give you some
present worth having, I hope. Did he say anything that looked like it?’

‘THAT he didn’t!’ cried Merry, most decisively.

‘A stingy old dog he is,’ said Jonas. ‘Well?’

‘Griffin!’ cried Miss Mercy, in counterfeit amazement; ‘what are you
doing, Griffin?’

‘Only giving you a squeeze,’ said the discomfited Jonas. ‘There’s no
harm in that, I suppose?’

‘But there is great deal of harm in it, if I don’t consider it
agreeable,’ returned his cousin. ‘Do go along, will you? You make me so
hot!’

Mr Jonas withdrew his arm, and for a moment looked at her more like a
murderer than a lover. But he cleared his brow by degrees, and broke
silence with:

‘I say, Mel!’

‘What do you say, you vulgar thing--you low savage?’ cried his fair
betrothed.

‘When is it to be? I can’t afford to go on dawdling about here half
my life, I needn’t tell you, and Pecksniff says that father’s being so
lately dead makes very little odds; for we can be married as quiet as we
please down here, and my being lonely is a good reason to the neighbours
for taking a wife home so soon, especially one that he knew. As to
crossbones (my uncle, I mean), he’s sure not to put a spoke in the
wheel, whatever we settle on, for he told Pecksniff only this morning,
that if YOU liked it he’d nothing at all to say. So, Mel,’ said Jonas,
venturing on another squeeze; ‘when shall it be?’

‘Upon my word!’ cried Merry.

‘Upon my soul, if you like,’ said Jonas. ‘What do you say to next week,
now?’

‘To next week! If you had said next quarter, I should have wondered at
your impudence.’

‘But I didn’t say next quarter,’ retorted Jonas. ‘I said next week.’

‘Then, Griffin,’ cried Miss Merry, pushing him off, and rising. ‘I say
no! not next week. It shan’t be till I choose, and I may not choose it
to be for months. There!’

He glanced up at her from the ground, almost as darkly as he had looked
at Tom Pinch; but held his peace.

‘No fright of a Griffin with a patch over his eye shall dictate to me or
have a voice in the matter,’ said Merry. ‘There!’

Still Mr Jonas held his peace.

‘If it’s next month, that shall be the very earliest; but I won’t say
when it shall be till to-morrow; and if you don’t like that, it shall
never be at all,’ said Merry; ‘and if you follow me about and won’t
leave me alone, it shall never be at all. There! And if you don’t do
everything I order you to do, it shall never be at all. So don’t follow
me. There, Griffin!’

And with that, she skipped away, among the trees.

‘Ecod, my lady!’ said Jonas, looking after her, and biting a piece
of straw, almost to powder; ‘you’ll catch it for this, when you ARE
married. It’s all very well now--it keeps one on, somehow, and you know
it--but I’ll pay you off scot and lot by-and-bye. This is a plaguey dull
sort of a place for a man to be sitting by himself in. I never could
abide a mouldy old churchyard.’

As he turned into the avenue himself, Miss Merry, who was far ahead,
happened to look back.

‘Ah!’ said Jonas, with a sullen smile, and a nod that was not addressed
to her. ‘Make the most of it while it lasts. Get in your hay while the
sun shines. Take your own way as long as it’s in your power, my lady!’



CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

IS IN PART PROFESSIONAL, AND FURNISHES THE READER WITH SOME VALUABLE
HINTS IN RELATION TO THE MANAGEMENT OF A SICK CHAMBER


Mr Mould was surrounded by his household gods. He was enjoying the
sweets of domestic repose, and gazing on them with a calm delight. The
day being sultry, and the window open, the legs of Mr Mould were on the
window-seat, and his back reclined against the shutter. Over his shining
head a handkerchief was drawn, to guard his baldness from the flies. The
room was fragrant with the smell of punch, a tumbler of which grateful
compound stood upon a small round table, convenient to the hand of
Mr Mould; so deftly mixed that as his eye looked down into the cool
transparent drink, another eye, peering brightly from behind the crisp
lemon-peel, looked up at him, and twinkled like a star.

Deep in the City, and within the ward of Cheap, stood Mr Mould’s
establishment. His Harem, or, in other words, the common sitting room
of Mrs Mould and family, was at the back, over the little counting-house
behind the shop; abutting on a churchyard small and shady. In this
domestic chamber Mr Mould now sat; gazing, a placid man, upon his punch
and home. If, for a moment at a time, he sought a wider prospect, whence
he might return with freshened zest to these enjoyments, his moist
glance wandered like a sunbeam through a rural screen of scarlet
runners, trained on strings before the window, and he looked down, with
an artist’s eye, upon the graves.

The partner of his life, and daughters twain, were Mr Mould’s
companions. Plump as any partridge was each Miss Mould, and Mrs M.
was plumper than the two together. So round and chubby were their fair
proportions, that they might have been the bodies once belonging to the
angels’ faces in the shop below, grown up, with other heads attached
to make them mortal. Even their peachy cheeks were puffed out and
distended, as though they ought of right to be performing on celestial
trumpets. The bodiless cherubs in the shop, who were depicted as
constantly blowing those instruments for ever and ever without any
lungs, played, it is to be presumed, entirely by ear.

Mr Mould looked lovingly at Mrs Mould, who sat hard by, and was a
helpmate to him in his punch as in all other things. Each seraph
daughter, too, enjoyed her share of his regards, and smiled upon him in
return. So bountiful were Mr Mould’s possessions, and so large his
stock in trade, that even there, within his household sanctuary, stood
a cumbrous press, whose mahogany maw was filled with shrouds, and
winding-sheets, and other furniture of funerals. But, though the Misses
Mould had been brought up, as one may say, beneath his eye, it had cast
no shadow on their timid infancy or blooming youth. Sporting behind
the scenes of death and burial from cradlehood, the Misses Mould knew
better. Hat-bands, to them, were but so many yards of silk or crape; the
final robe but such a quantity of linen. The Misses Mould could idealise
a player’s habit, or a court-lady’s petticoat, or even an act of
parliament. But they were not to be taken in by palls. They made them
sometimes.

The premises of Mr Mould were hard of hearing to the boisterous noises
in the great main streets, and nestled in a quiet corner, where the City
strife became a drowsy hum, that sometimes rose and sometimes fell and
sometimes altogether ceased; suggesting to a thoughtful mind a stoppage
in Cheapside. The light came sparkling in among the scarlet runners,
as if the churchyard winked at Mr Mould, and said, ‘We understand
each other;’ and from the distant shop a pleasant sound arose of
coffin-making with a low melodious hammer, rat, tat, tat, tat, alike
promoting slumber and digestion.

‘Quite the buzz of insects,’ said Mr Mould, closing his eyes in a
perfect luxury. ‘It puts one in mind of the sound of animated nature in
the agricultural districts. It’s exactly like the woodpecker tapping.’

‘The woodpecker tapping the hollow ELM tree,’ observed Mrs Mould,
adapting the words of the popular melody to the description of wood
commonly used in the trade.

‘Ha, ha!’ laughed Mr Mould. ‘Not at all bad, my dear. We shall be glad
to hear from you again, Mrs M. Hollow elm tree, eh! Ha, ha! Very good
indeed. I’ve seen worse than that in the Sunday papers, my love.’

Mrs Mould, thus encouraged, took a little more of the punch, and handed
it to her daughters, who dutifully followed the example of their mother.

‘Hollow ELM tree, eh?’ said Mr Mould, making a slight motion with his
legs in his enjoyment of the joke. ‘It’s beech in the song. Elm, eh?
Yes, to be sure. Ha, ha, ha! Upon my soul, that’s one of the best things
I know?’ He was so excessively tickled by the jest that he couldn’t
forget it, but repeated twenty times, ‘Elm, eh? Yes, to be sure. Elm,
of course. Ha, ha, ha! Upon my life, you know, that ought to be sent to
somebody who could make use of it. It’s one of the smartest things that
ever was said. Hollow ELM tree, eh? of course. Very hollow. Ha, ha, ha!’

Here a knock was heard at the room door.

‘That’s Tacker, I know,’ said Mrs Mould, ‘by the wheezing he makes. Who
that hears him now, would suppose he’d ever had wind enough to carry the
feathers on his head! Come in, Tacker.’

‘Beg your pardon, ma’am,’ said Tacker, looking in a little way. ‘I
thought our Governor was here.’

‘Well! so he is,’ cried Mould.

‘Oh! I didn’t see you, I’m sure,’ said Tacker, looking in a little
farther. ‘You wouldn’t be inclined to take a walking one of two, with
the plain wood and a tin plate, I suppose?’

‘Certainly not,’ replied Mr Mould, ‘much too common. Nothing to say to
it.’

‘I told ‘em it was precious low,’ observed Mr Tacker.

‘Tell ‘em to go somewhere else. We don’t do that style of business
here,’ said Mr Mould. ‘Like their impudence to propose it. Who is it?’

‘Why,’ returned Tacker, pausing, ‘that’s where it is, you see. It’s the
beadle’s son-in-law.’

‘The beadle’s son-in-law, eh?’ said Mould. ‘Well! I’ll do it if the
beadle follows in his cocked hat; not else. We carry it off that way, by
looking official, but it’ll be low enough, then. His cocked hat, mind!’

‘I’ll take care, sir,’ rejoined Tacker. ‘Oh! Mrs Gamp’s below, and wants
to speak to you.’

‘Tell Mrs Gamp to come upstairs,’ said Mould. ‘Now Mrs Gamp, what’s YOUR
news?’

The lady in question was by this time in the doorway, curtseying to
Mrs Mould. At the same moment a peculiar fragrance was borne upon the
breeze, as if a passing fairy had hiccoughed, and had previously been to
a wine-vaults.

Mrs Gamp made no response to Mr Mould, but curtseyed to Mrs Mould again,
and held up her hands and eyes, as in a devout thanksgiving that she
looked so well. She was neatly, but not gaudily attired, in the
weeds she had worn when Mr Pecksniff had the pleasure of making her
acquaintance; and was perhaps the turning of a scale more snuffy.

‘There are some happy creeturs,’ Mrs Gamp observed, ‘as time runs
back’ards with, and you are one, Mrs Mould; not that he need do nothing
except use you in his most owldacious way for years to come, I’m
sure; for young you are and will be. I says to Mrs Harris,’ Mrs Gamp
continued, ‘only t’other day; the last Monday evening fortnight as
ever dawned upon this Piljian’s Projiss of a mortal wale; I says to Mrs
Harris when she says to me, “Years and our trials, Mrs Gamp, sets marks
upon us all.”--“Say not the words, Mrs Harris, if you and me is to be
continual friends, for sech is not the case. Mrs Mould,” I says, making
so free, I will confess, as use the name,’ (she curtseyed here), ‘“is
one of them that goes agen the obserwation straight; and never, Mrs
Harris, whilst I’ve a drop of breath to draw, will I set by, and not
stand up, don’t think it.”--“I ast your pardon, ma’am,” says Mrs Harris,
“and I humbly grant your grace; for if ever a woman lived as would see
her feller creeturs into fits to serve her friends, well do I know that
woman’s name is Sairey Gamp.”’

At this point she was fain to stop for breath; and advantage may be
taken of the circumstance, to state that a fearful mystery surrounded
this lady of the name of Harris, whom no one in the circle of Mrs Gamp’s
acquaintance had ever seen; neither did any human being know her place
of residence, though Mrs Gamp appeared on her own showing to be in
constant communication with her. There were conflicting rumours on the
subject; but the prevalent opinion was that she was a phantom of Mrs
Gamp’s brain--as Messrs. Doe and Roe are fictions of the law--created
for the express purpose of holding visionary dialogues with her on all
manner of subjects, and invariably winding up with a compliment to the
excellence of her nature.

‘And likeways what a pleasure,’ said Mrs Gamp, turning with a tearful
smile towards the daughters, ‘to see them two young ladies as I know’d
afore a tooth in their pretty heads was cut, and have many a day
seen--ah, the sweet creeturs!--playing at berryins down in the shop, and
follerin’ the order-book to its long home in the iron safe! But that’s
all past and over, Mr Mould;’ as she thus got in a carefully regulated
routine to that gentleman, she shook her head waggishly; ‘That’s all
past and over now, sir, an’t it?’

‘Changes, Mrs Gamp, changes!’ returned the undertaker.

‘More changes too, to come, afore we’ve done with changes, sir,’ said
Mrs Gamp, nodding yet more waggishly than before. ‘Young ladies with
such faces thinks of something else besides berryins, don’t they, sir?’

‘I am sure I don’t know, Mrs Gamp,’ said Mould, with a chuckle--‘Not bad
in Mrs Gamp, my dear?’

‘Oh yes, you do know, sir!’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘and so does Mrs Mould,
your ‘ansome pardner too, sir; and so do I, although the blessing of a
daughter was deniged me; which, if we had had one, Gamp would certainly
have drunk its little shoes right off its feet, as with our precious boy
he did, and arterward send the child a errand to sell his wooden leg for
any money it would fetch as matches in the rough, and bring it home
in liquor; which was truly done beyond his years, for ev’ry individgle
penny that child lost at toss or buy for kidney ones; and come home
arterwards quite bold, to break the news, and offering to drown himself
if sech would be a satisfaction to his parents.--Oh yes, you do know,
sir,’ said Mrs Gamp, wiping her eye with her shawl, and resuming the
thread of her discourse. ‘There’s something besides births and berryins
in the newspapers, an’t there, Mr Mould?’

Mr Mould winked at Mrs Mould, whom he had by this time taken on his
knee, and said: ‘No doubt. A good deal more, Mrs Gamp. Upon my life, Mrs
Gamp is very far from bad, my dear!’

‘There’s marryings, an’t there, sir?’ said Mrs Gamp, while both the
daughters blushed and tittered. ‘Bless their precious hearts, and well
they knows it! Well you know’d it too, and well did Mrs Mould, when you
was at their time of life! But my opinion is, you’re all of one age now.
For as to you and Mrs Mould, sir, ever having grandchildren--’

‘Oh! Fie, fie! Nonsense, Mrs Gamp,’ replied the undertaker. ‘Devilish
smart, though. Ca-pi-tal!’--this was in a whisper. ‘My dear’--aloud
again--‘Mrs Gamp can drink a glass of rum, I dare say. Sit down, Mrs
Gamp, sit down.’

Mrs Gamp took the chair that was nearest the door, and casting up her
eyes towards the ceiling, feigned to be wholly insensible to the fact of
a glass of rum being in preparation, until it was placed in her hand by
one of the young ladies, when she exhibited the greatest surprise.

‘A thing,’ she said, ‘as hardly ever, Mrs Mould, occurs with me unless
it is when I am indispoged, and find my half a pint of porter settling
heavy on the chest. Mrs Harris often and often says to me, “Sairey
Gamp,” she says, “you raly do amaze me!” “Mrs Harris,” I says to her,
“why so? Give it a name, I beg.” “Telling the truth then, ma’am,” says
Mrs Harris, “and shaming him as shall be nameless betwixt you and me,
never did I think till I know’d you, as any woman could sick-nurse and
monthly likeways, on the little that you takes to drink.” “Mrs Harris,”
 I says to her, “none on us knows what we can do till we tries; and
wunst, when me and Gamp kept ‘ouse, I thought so too. But now,” I says,
“my half a pint of porter fully satisfies; perwisin’, Mrs Harris, that
it is brought reg’lar, and draw’d mild. Whether I sicks or monthlies,
ma’am, I hope I does my duty, but I am but a poor woman, and I earns my
living hard; therefore I DO require it, which I makes confession, to be
brought reg’lar and draw’d mild.”’

The precise connection between these observations and the glass of rum,
did not appear; for Mrs Gamp proposing as a toast ‘The best of lucks
to all!’ took off the dram in quite a scientific manner, without any
further remarks.

‘And what’s your news, Mrs Gamp?’ asked Mould again, as that lady wiped
her lips upon her shawl, and nibbled a corner off a soft biscuit, which
she appeared to carry in her pocket as a provision against contingent
drams. ‘How’s Mr Chuffey?’

‘Mr Chuffey, sir,’ she replied, ‘is jest as usual; he an’t no better and
he an’t no worse. I take it very kind in the gentleman to have wrote up
to you and said, “let Mrs Gamp take care of him till I come home;” but
ev’rythink he does is kind. There an’t a many like him. If there was, we
shouldn’t want no churches.’

‘What do you want to speak to me about, Mrs Gamp?’ said Mould, coming to
the point.

‘Jest this, sir,’ Mrs Gamp returned, ‘with thanks to you for asking.
There IS a gent, sir, at the Bull in Holborn, as has been took ill
there, and is bad abed. They have a day nurse as was recommended from
Bartholomew’s; and well I knows her, Mr Mould, her name bein’ Mrs Prig,
the best of creeturs. But she is otherways engaged at night, and they
are in wants of night-watching; consequent she says to them, having
reposed the greatest friendliness in me for twenty year, “The soberest
person going, and the best of blessings in a sick room, is Mrs Gamp.
Send a boy to Kingsgate Street,” she says, “and snap her up at any
price, for Mrs Gamp is worth her weight and more in goldian guineas.”
 My landlord brings the message down to me, and says, “bein’ in a light
place where you are, and this job promising so well, why not unite the
two?” “No, sir,” I says, “not unbeknown to Mr Mould, and therefore do
not think it. But I will go to Mr Mould,” I says, “and ast him, if you
like.”’ Here she looked sideways at the undertaker, and came to a stop.

‘Night-watching, eh?’ said Mould, rubbing his chin.

‘From eight o’clock till eight, sir. I will not deceive you,’ Mrs Gamp
rejoined.

‘And then go back, eh?’ said would.

‘Quite free, then, sir, to attend to Mr Chuffey. His ways bein’ quiet,
and his hours early, he’d be abed, sir, nearly all the time. I will not
deny,’ said Mrs Gamp with meekness, ‘that I am but a poor woman, and
that the money is a object; but do not let that act upon you, Mr Mould.
Rich folks may ride on camels, but it an’t so easy for ‘em to see out of
a needle’s eye. That is my comfort, and I hope I knows it.’

‘Well, Mrs Gamp,’ observed Mould, ‘I don’t see any particular objection
to your earning an honest penny under such circumstances. I should keep
it quiet, I think, Mrs Gamp. I wouldn’t mention it to Mr Chuzzlewit
on his return, for instance, unless it were necessary, or he asked you
pointblank.’

‘The very words was on my lips, sir,’ Mrs Gamp rejoined. ‘Suppoging
that the gent should die, I hope I might take the liberty of saying as I
know’d some one in the undertaking line, and yet give no offence to you,
sir?’

‘Certainly, Mrs Gamp,’ said Mould, with much condescension. ‘You may
casually remark, in such a case, that we do the thing pleasantly and in
a great variety of styles, and are generally considered to make it
as agreeable as possible to the feelings of the survivors. But don’t
obtrude it, don’t obtrude it. Easy, easy! My dear, you may as well give
Mrs Gamp a card or two, if you please.’

Mrs Gamp received them, and scenting no more rum in the wind (for the
bottle was locked up again) rose to take her departure.

‘Wishing ev’ry happiness to this happy family,’ said Mrs Gamp ‘with
all my heart. Good arternoon, Mrs Mould! If I was Mr would I should be
jealous of you, ma’am; and I’m sure, if I was you, I should be jealous
of Mr Mould.’

‘Tut, tut! Bah, bah! Go along, Mrs Gamp!’ cried the delighted
undertaker.

‘As to the young ladies,’ said Mrs Gamp, dropping a curtsey, ‘bless
their sweet looks--how they can ever reconsize it with their duties to
be so grown up with such young parents, it an’t for sech as me to give a
guess at.’

‘Nonsense, nonsense. Be off, Mrs Gamp!’ cried Mould. But in the height
of his gratification he actually pinched Mrs Mould as he said it.

‘I’ll tell you what, my dear,’ he observed, when Mrs Gamp had at last
withdrawn and shut the door, ‘that’s a ve-ry shrewd woman. That’s a
woman whose intellect is immensely superior to her station in life.
That’s a woman who observes and reflects in an uncommon manner. She’s
the sort of woman now,’ said Mould, drawing his silk handkerchief over
his head again, and composing himself for a nap ‘one would almost feel
disposed to bury for nothing; and do it neatly, too!’

Mrs Mould and her daughters fully concurred in these remarks; the
subject of which had by this time reached the street, where she
experienced so much inconvenience from the air, that she was obliged to
stand under an archway for a short time, to recover herself. Even
after this precaution, she walked so unsteadily as to attract the
compassionate regards of divers kind-hearted boys, who took the
liveliest interest in her disorder; and in their simple language bade
her be of good cheer, for she was ‘only a little screwed.’

Whatever she was, or whatever name the vocabulary of medical science
would have bestowed upon her malady, Mrs Gamp was perfectly acquainted
with the way home again; and arriving at the house of Anthony Chuzzlewit
& Son, lay down to rest. Remaining there until seven o’clock in the
evening, and then persuading poor old Chuffey to betake himself to
bed, she sallied forth upon her new engagement. First, she went to
her private lodgings in Kingsgate Street, for a bundle of robes and
wrappings comfortable in the night season; and then repaired to the Bull
in Holborn, which she reached as the clocks were striking eight.

As she turned into the yard, she stopped; for the landlord, landlady,
and head chambermaid, were all on the threshold together talking
earnestly with a young gentleman who seemed to have just come or to
be just going away. The first words that struck upon Mrs Gamp’s ear
obviously bore reference to the patient; and it being expedient that all
good attendants should know as much as possible about the case on which
their skill is brought to bear, Mrs Gamp listened as a matter of duty.

‘No better, then?’ observed the gentleman.

‘Worse!’ said the landlord.

‘Much worse,’ added the landlady.

‘Oh! a deal badder,’ cried the chambermaid from the background, opening
her eyes very wide, and shaking her head.

‘Poor fellow!’ said the gentleman, ‘I am sorry to hear it. The worst of
it is, that I have no idea what friends or relations he has, or where
they live, except that it certainly is not in London.’

The landlord looked at the landlady; the landlady looked at the
landlord; and the chambermaid remarked, hysterically, ‘that of all the
many wague directions she had ever seen or heerd of (and they wasn’t few
in an hotel), THAT was the waguest.’

‘The fact is, you see,’ pursued the gentleman, ‘as I told you yesterday
when you sent to me, I really know very little about him. We were
school-fellows together; but since that time I have only met him twice.
On both occasions I was in London for a boy’s holiday (having come up
for a week or so from Wiltshire), and lost sight of him again directly.
The letter bearing my name and address which you found upon his table,
and which led to your applying to me, is in answer, you will observe,
to one he wrote from this house the very day he was taken ill, making an
appointment with him at his own request. Here is his letter, if you wish
to see it.’

The landlord read it; the landlady looked over him. The chambermaid, in
the background, made out as much of it as she could, and invented the
rest; believing it all from that time forth as a positive piece of
evidence.

‘He has very little luggage, you say?’ observed the gentleman, who was
no other than our old friend, John Westlock.

‘Nothing but a portmanteau,’ said the landlord; ‘and very little in it.’

‘A few pounds in his purse, though?’

‘Yes. It’s sealed up, and in the cash-box. I made a memorandum of the
amount, which you’re welcome to see.’

‘Well!’ said John, ‘as the medical gentleman says the fever must take
its course, and nothing can be done just now beyond giving him his
drinks regularly and having him carefully attended to, nothing more
can be said that I know of, until he is in a condition to give us some
information. Can you suggest anything else?’

‘N-no,’ replied the landlord, ‘except--’

‘Except, who’s to pay, I suppose?’ said John.

‘Why,’ hesitated the landlord, ‘it would be as well.’

‘Quite as well,’ said the landlady.

‘Not forgetting to remember the servants,’ said the chambermaid in a
bland whisper.

‘It is but reasonable, I fully admit,’ said John Westlock. ‘At all
events, you have the stock in hand to go upon for the present; and I
will readily undertake to pay the doctor and the nurses.’

‘Ah!’ cried Mrs Gamp. ‘A rayal gentleman!’

She groaned her admiration so audibly, that they all turned round. Mrs
Gamp felt the necessity of advancing, bundle in hand, and introducing
herself.

‘The night-nurse,’ she observed, ‘from Kingsgate Street, well beknown to
Mrs Prig the day-nurse, and the best of creeturs. How is the poor dear
gentleman to-night? If he an’t no better yet, still that is what must
be expected and prepared for. It an’t the fust time by a many score,
ma’am,’ dropping a curtsey to the landlady, ‘that Mrs Prig and me has
nussed together, turn and turn about, one off, one on. We knows each
other’s ways, and often gives relief when others fail. Our charges
is but low, sir’--Mrs Gamp addressed herself to John on this
head--‘considerin’ the nater of our painful dooty. If they wos made
accordin’ to our wishes, they would be easy paid.’

Regarding herself as having now delivered her inauguration address, Mrs
Gamp curtseyed all round, and signified her wish to be conducted to the
scene of her official duties. The chambermaid led her, through a variety
of intricate passages, to the top of the house; and pointing at length
to a solitary door at the end of a gallery, informed her that yonder was
the chamber where the patient lay. That done, she hurried off with all
the speed she could make.

Mrs Gamp traversed the gallery in a great heat from having carried
her large bundle up so many stairs, and tapped at the door which was
immediately opened by Mrs Prig, bonneted and shawled and all impatience
to be gone. Mrs Prig was of the Gamp build, but not so fat; and her
voice was deeper and more like a man’s. She had also a beard.

‘I began to think you warn’t a-coming!’ Mrs Prig observed, in some
displeasure.

‘It shall be made good to-morrow night,’ said Mrs Gamp ‘Honorable. I had
to go and fetch my things.’ She had begun to make signs of inquiry in
reference to the position of the patient and his overhearing them--for
there was a screen before the door--when Mrs Prig settled that point
easily.

‘Oh!’ she said aloud, ‘he’s quiet, but his wits is gone. It an’t no
matter wot you say.’

‘Anythin’ to tell afore you goes, my dear?’ asked Mrs Gamp, setting her
bundle down inside the door, and looking affectionately at her partner.

‘The pickled salmon,’ Mrs Prig replied, ‘is quite delicious. I can
partlck’ler recommend it. Don’t have nothink to say to the cold meat,
for it tastes of the stable. The drinks is all good.’

Mrs Gamp expressed herself much gratified.

‘The physic and them things is on the drawers and mankleshelf,’ said
Mrs Prig, cursorily. ‘He took his last slime draught at seven. The
easy-chair an’t soft enough. You’ll want his piller.’

Mrs Gamp thanked her for these hints, and giving her a friendly good
night, held the door open until she had disappeared at the other end
of the gallery. Having thus performed the hospitable duty of seeing her
safely off, she shut it, locked it on the inside, took up her bundle,
walked round the screen, and entered on her occupation of the sick
chamber.

‘A little dull, but not so bad as might be,’ Mrs Gamp remarked.
‘I’m glad to see a parapidge, in case of fire, and lots of roofs and
chimley-pots to walk upon.’

It will be seen from these remarks that Mrs Gamp was looking out of
window. When she had exhausted the prospect, she tried the easy-chair,
which she indignantly declared was ‘harder than a brickbadge.’ Next
she pursued her researches among the physic-bottles, glasses, jugs, and
tea-cups; and when she had entirely satisfied her curiosity on all these
subjects of investigation, she untied her bonnet-strings and strolled up
to the bedside to take a look at the patient.

A young man--dark and not ill-looking--with long black hair, that seemed
the blacker for the whiteness of the bed-clothes. His eyes were partly
open, and he never ceased to roll his head from side to side upon the
pillow, keeping his body almost quiet. He did not utter words; but
every now and then gave vent to an expression of impatience or fatigue,
sometimes of surprise; and still his restless head--oh, weary, weary
hour!--went to and fro without a moment’s intermission.

Mrs Gamp solaced herself with a pinch of snuff, and stood looking at him
with her head inclined a little sideways, as a connoisseur might gaze
upon a doubtful work of art. By degrees, a horrible remembrance of one
branch of her calling took possession of the woman; and stooping down,
she pinned his wandering arms against his sides, to see how he would
look if laid out as a dead man. Her fingers itched to compose his limbs
in that last marble attitude.

‘Ah!’ said Mrs Gamp, walking away from the bed, ‘he’d make a lovely
corpse.’

She now proceeded to unpack her bundle; lighted a candle with the aid
of a fire-box on the drawers; filled a small kettle, as a preliminary
to refreshing herself with a cup of tea in the course of the night;
laid what she called ‘a little bit of fire,’ for the same philanthropic
purpose; and also set forth a small tea-board, that nothing might be
wanting for her comfortable enjoyment. These preparations occupied so
long, that when they were brought to a conclusion it was high time to
think about supper; so she rang the bell and ordered it.

‘I think, young woman,’ said Mrs Gamp to the assistant chambermaid, in a
tone expressive of weakness, ‘that I could pick a little bit of pickled
salmon, with a nice little sprig of fennel, and a sprinkling of white
pepper. I takes new bread, my dear, with just a little pat of fresh
butter, and a mossel of cheese. In case there should be such a thing
as a cowcumber in the ‘ouse, will you be so kind as bring it, for I’m
rather partial to ‘em, and they does a world of good in a sick room. If
they draws the Brighton Old Tipper here, I takes THAT ale at night, my
love, it bein’ considered wakeful by the doctors. And whatever you
do, young woman, don’t bring more than a shilling’s-worth of gin and
water-warm when I rings the bell a second time; for that is always my
allowance, and I never takes a drop beyond!’

Having preferred these moderate requests, Mrs Gamp observed that she
would stand at the door until the order was executed, to the end that
the patient might not be disturbed by her opening it a second time; and
therefore she would thank the young woman to ‘look sharp.’

A tray was brought with everything upon it, even to the cucumber and
Mrs Gamp accordingly sat down to eat and drink in high good humour. The
extent to which she availed herself of the vinegar, and supped up that
refreshing fluid with the blade of her knife, can scarcely be expressed
in narrative.

‘Ah!’ sighed Mrs Gamp, as she meditated over the warm shilling’s-worth,
‘what a blessed thing it is--living in a wale--to be contented! What a
blessed thing it is to make sick people happy in their beds, and never
mind one’s self as long as one can do a service! I don’t believe a finer
cowcumber was ever grow’d. I’m sure I never see one!’

She moralised in the same vein until her glass was empty, and then
administered the patient’s medicine, by the simple process of clutching
his windpipe to make him gasp, and immediately pouring it down his
throat.

‘I a’most forgot the piller, I declare!’ said Mrs Gamp, drawing it away.
‘There! Now he’s comfortable as he can be, I’m sure! I must try to make
myself as much so as I can.’

With this view, she went about the construction of an extemporaneous bed
in the easy-chair, with the addition of the next easy one for her feet.
Having formed the best couch that the circumstances admitted of, she
took out of her bundle a yellow night-cap, of prodigious size, in shape
resembling a cabbage; which article of dress she fixed and tied on with
the utmost care, previously divesting herself of a row of bald old
curls that could scarcely be called false, they were so very innocent of
anything approaching to deception. From the same repository she brought
forth a night-jacket, in which she also attired herself. Finally, she
produced a watchman’s coat which she tied round her neck by the sleeves,
so that she become two people; and looked, behind, as if she were in the
act of being embraced by one of the old patrol.

All these arrangements made, she lighted the rush-light, coiled herself
up on her couch, and went to sleep. Ghostly and dark the room became,
and full of lowering shadows. The distant noises in the streets were
gradually hushed; the house was quiet as a sepulchre; the dead of night
was coffined in the silent city.

Oh, weary, weary hour! Oh, haggard mind, groping darkly through the
past; incapable of detaching itself from the miserable present; dragging
its heavy chain of care through imaginary feasts and revels, and scenes
of awful pomp; seeking but a moment’s rest among the long-forgotten
haunts of childhood, and the resorts of yesterday; and dimly finding
fear and horror everywhere! Oh, weary, weary hour! What were the
wanderings of Cain, to these!

Still, without a moment’s interval, the burning head tossed to and fro.
Still, from time to time, fatigue, impatience, suffering, and surprise,
found utterance upon that rack, and plainly too, though never once in
words. At length, in the solemn hour of midnight, he began to talk;
waiting awfully for answers sometimes; as though invisible companions
were about his bed; and so replying to their speech and questioning
again.

Mrs Gamp awoke, and sat up in her bed; presenting on the wall the shadow
of a gigantic night constable, struggling with a prisoner.

‘Come! Hold your tongue!’ she cried, in sharp reproof. ‘Don’t make none
of that noise here.’

There was no alteration in the face, or in the incessant motion of the
head, but he talked on wildly.

‘Ah!’ said Mrs Gamp, coming out of the chair with an impatient shiver;
‘I thought I was a-sleepin’ too pleasant to last! The devil’s in the
night, I think, it’s turned so chilly!’

‘Don’t drink so much!’ cried the sick man. ‘You’ll ruin us all. Don’t
you see how the fountain sinks? Look at the mark where the sparkling
water was just now!’

‘Sparkling water, indeed!’ said Mrs Gamp. ‘I’ll have a sparkling cup o’
tea, I think. I wish you’d hold your noise!’

He burst into a laugh, which, being prolonged, fell off into a dismal
wail. Checking himself, with fierce inconstancy he began to count--fast.

‘One--two--three--four--five--six.’

“One, two, buckle my shoe,”’ said Mrs Gamp, who was now on her knees,
lighting the fire, “three, four, shut the door,”--I wish you’d shut
your mouth, young man--“five, six, picking up sticks.” If I’d got a few
handy, I should have the kettle boiling all the sooner.’

Awaiting this desirable consummation, she sat down so close to the
fender (which was a high one) that her nose rested upon it; and for some
time she drowsily amused herself by sliding that feature backwards and
forwards along the brass top, as far as she could, without changing her
position to do it. She maintained, all the while, a running commentary
upon the wanderings of the man in bed.

‘That makes five hundred and twenty-one men, all dressed alike, and with
the same distortion on their faces, that have passed in at the window,
and out at the door,’ he cried, anxiously. ‘Look there! Five hundred and
twenty-two--twenty-three--twenty-four. Do you see them?’

‘Ah! I see ‘em,’ said Mrs Gamp; ‘all the whole kit of ‘em numbered like
hackney-coaches, an’t they?’

‘Touch me! Let me be sure of this. Touch me!’

‘You’ll take your next draught when I’ve made the kettle bile,’ retorted
Mrs Gamp, composedly, ‘and you’ll be touched then. You’ll be touched up,
too, if you don’t take it quiet.’

‘Five hundred and twenty-eight, five hundred and twenty-nine, five
hundred and thirty.--Look here!’

‘What’s the matter now?’ said Mrs Gamp.

‘They’re coming four abreast, each man with his arm entwined in the next
man’s, and his hand upon his shoulder. What’s that upon the arm of every
man, and on the flag?’

‘Spiders, p’raps,’ said Mrs Gamp.

‘Crape! Black crape! Good God! why do they wear it outside?’

‘Would you have ‘em carry black crape in their insides?’ Mrs Gamp
retorted. ‘Hold your noise, hold your noise.’

The fire beginning by this time to impart a grateful warmth, Mrs Gamp
became silent; gradually rubbed her nose more and more slowly along the
top of the fender; and fell into a heavy doze. She was awakened by the
room ringing (as she fancied) with a name she knew:

‘Chuzzlewit!’

The sound was so distinct and real, and so full of agonised entreaty,
that Mrs Gamp jumped up in terror, and ran to the door. She expected to
find the passage filled with people, come to tell her that the house in
the city had taken fire. But the place was empty; not a soul was there.
She opened the window, and looked out. Dark, dull, dingy, and desolate
house-tops. As she passed to her seat again, she glanced at the patient.
Just the same; but silent. Mrs Gamp was so warm now, that she threw off
the watchman’s coat, and fanned herself.

‘It seemed to make the wery bottles ring,’ she said. ‘What could I have
been a-dreaming of? That dratted Chuffey, I’ll be bound.’

The supposition was probable enough. At any rate, a pinch of snuff, and
the song of the steaming kettle, quite restored the tone of Mrs Gamp’s
nerves, which were none of the weakest. She brewed her tea; made some
buttered toast; and sat down at the tea-board, with her face to the
fire.

When once again, in a tone more terrible than that which had vibrated in
her slumbering ear, these words were shrieked out:

‘Chuzzlewit! Jonas! No!’

Mrs Gamp dropped the cup she was in the act of raising to her lips, and
turned round with a start that made the little tea-board leap. The cry
had come from the bed.


It was bright morning the next time Mrs Gamp looked out of the window,
and the sun was rising cheerfully. Lighter and lighter grew the sky, and
noisier the streets; and high into the summer air uprose the smoke of
newly kindled fires, until the busy day was broad awake.

Mrs Prig relieved punctually, having passed a good night at her other
patient’s. Mr Westlock came at the same time, but he was not admitted,
the disorder being infectious. The doctor came too. The doctor shook
his head. It was all he could do, under the circumstances, and he did it
well.

‘What sort of a night, nurse?’

‘Restless, sir,’ said Mrs Gamp.

‘Talk much?’

‘Middling, sir,’ said Mrs Gamp.

‘Nothing to the purpose, I suppose?’

‘Oh bless you, no, sir. Only jargon.’

‘Well!’ said the doctor, ‘we must keep him quiet; keep the room cool;
give him his draughts regularly; and see that he’s carefully looked to.
That’s all!’

‘And as long as Mrs Prig and me waits upon him, sir, no fear of that,’
said Mrs Gamp.

‘I suppose,’ observed Mrs Prig, when they had curtseyed the doctor out;
‘there’s nothin’ new?’

‘Nothin’ at all, my dear,’ said Mrs Gamp. ‘He’s rather wearin’ in his
talk from making up a lot of names; elseways you needn’t mind him.’

‘Oh, I shan’t mind him,’ Mrs Prig returned. ‘I have somethin’ else to
think of.’

‘I pays my debts to-night, you know, my dear, and comes afore my time,’
said Mrs Gamp. ‘But, Betsy Prig’--speaking with great feeling, and
laying her hand upon her arm--‘try the cowcumbers, God bless you!’



CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

AN UNEXPECTED MEETING, AND A PROMISING PROSPECT


The laws of sympathy between beards and birds, and the secret source
of that attraction which frequently impels a shaver of the one to be
a dealer in the other, are questions for the subtle reasoning of
scientific bodies; not the less so, because their investigation would
seem calculated to lead to no particular result. It is enough to know
that the artist who had the honour of entertaining Mrs Gamp as
his first-floor lodger, united the two pursuits of barbering and
bird-fancying; and that it was not an original idea of his, but one in
which he had, dispersed about the by-streets and suburbs of the town, a
host of rivals.

The name of the householder was Paul Sweedlepipe. But he was commonly
called Poll Sweedlepipe; and was not uncommonly believed to have been so
christened, among his friends and neighbours.

With the exception of the staircase, and his lodger’s private apartment,
Poll Sweedlepipe’s house was one great bird’s nest. Gamecocks resided in
the kitchen; pheasants wasted the brightness of their golden plumage on
the garret; bantams roosted in the cellar; owls had possession of the
bedroom; and specimens of all the smaller fry of birds chirrupped and
twittered in the shop. The staircase was sacred to rabbits. There in
hutches of all shapes and kinds, made from old packing-cases, boxes,
drawers, and tea-chests, they increased in a prodigious degree, and
contributed their share towards that complicated whiff which, quite
impartially, and without distinction of persons, saluted every nose that
was put into Sweedlepipe’s easy shaving-shop.

Many noses found their way there, for all that, especially on Sunday
morning, before church-time. Even archbishops shave, or must be shaved,
on a Sunday, and beards WILL grow after twelve o’clock on Saturday
night, though it be upon the chins of base mechanics; who, not being
able to engage their valets by the quarter, hire them by the job, and
pay them--oh, the wickedness of copper coin!--in dirty pence. Poll
Sweedlepipe, the sinner, shaved all comers at a penny each, and cut the
hair of any customer for twopence; and being a lone unmarried man, and
having some connection in the bird line, Poll got on tolerably well.

He was a little elderly man, with a clammy cold right hand, from which
even rabbits and birds could not remove the smell of shaving-soap. Poll
had something of the bird in his nature; not of the hawk or eagle, but
of the sparrow, that builds in chimney-stacks and inclines to human
company. He was not quarrelsome, though, like the sparrow; but peaceful,
like the dove. In his walk he strutted; and, in this respect, he bore
a faint resemblance to the pigeon, as well as in a certain prosiness of
speech, which might, in its monotony, be likened to the cooing of that
bird. He was very inquisitive; and when he stood at his shop-door in the
evening-tide, watching the neighbours, with his head on one side, and
his eye cocked knowingly, there was a dash of the raven in him. Yet
there was no more wickedness in Poll than in a robin. Happily, too, when
any of his ornithological properties were on the verge of going too
far, they were quenched, dissolved, melted down, and neutralised in
the barber; just as his bald head--otherwise, as the head of a shaved
magpie--lost itself in a wig of curly black ringlets, parted on one
side, and cut away almost to the crown, to indicate immense capacity of
intellect.

Poll had a very small, shrill treble voice, which might have led
the wags of Kingsgate Street to insist the more upon his feminine
designation. He had a tender heart, too; for, when he had a good
commission to provide three or four score sparrows for a shooting-match,
he would observe, in a compassionate tone, how singular it was that
sparrows should have been made expressly for such purposes. The
question, whether men were made to shoot them, never entered into Poll’s
philosophy.

Poll wore, in his sporting character, a velveteen coat, a great deal of
blue stocking, ankle boots, a neckerchief of some bright colour, and
a very tall hat. Pursuing his more quiet occupation of barber, he
generally subsided into an apron not over-clean, a flannel jacket, and
corduroy knee-shorts. It was in this latter costume, but with his apron
girded round his waist, as a token of his having shut up shop for
the night, that he closed the door one evening, some weeks after the
occurrences detailed in the last chapter, and stood upon the steps in
Kingsgate Street, listening until the little cracked bell within
should leave off ringing. For until it did--this was Mr Sweedlepipe’s
reflection--the place never seemed quiet enough to be left to itself.

‘It’s the greediest little bell to ring,’ said Poll, ‘that ever was. But
it’s quiet at last.’

He rolled his apron up a little tighter as he said these words, and
hastened down the street. Just as he was turning into Holborn, he ran
against a young gentleman in a livery. This youth was bold, though
small, and with several lively expressions of displeasure, turned upon
him instantly.

‘Now, STOO-PID!’ cried the young gentleman. ‘Can’t you look where you’re
a-going to--eh? Can’t you mind where you’re a-coming to--eh? What do you
think your eyes was made for--eh? Ah! Yes. Oh! Now then!’

The young gentleman pronounced the two last words in a very loud tone
and with frightful emphasis, as though they contained within themselves
the essence of the direst aggravation. But he had scarcely done so, when
his anger yielded to surprise, and he cried, in a milder tone:

‘What! Polly!’

‘Why, it an’t you, sure!’ cried Poll. ‘It can’t be you!’

‘No. It an’t me,’ returned the youth. ‘It’s my son, my oldest one. He’s
a credit to his father, an’t he, Polly?’ With this delicate little
piece of banter, he halted on the pavement, and went round and round
in circles, for the better exhibition of his figure; rather to the
inconvenience of the passengers generally, who were not in an equal
state of spirits with himself.

‘I wouldn’t have believed it,’ said Poll. ‘What! You’ve left your old
place, then? Have you?’

‘Have I!’ returned his young friend, who had by this time stuck his
hands into the pockets of his white cord breeches, and was swaggering
along at the barber’s side. ‘D’ye know a pair of top-boots when you see
‘em, Polly?--look here!’

‘Beau-ti-ful’ cried Mr Sweedlepipe.

‘D’ye know a slap-up sort of button, when you see it?’ said the youth.
‘Don’t look at mine, if you ain’t a judge, because these lions’ heads
was made for men of taste; not snobs.’

‘Beau-ti-ful!’ cried the barber again. ‘A grass-green frock-coat, too,
bound with gold; and a cockade in your hat!’

‘I should hope so,’ replied the youth. ‘Blow the cockade, though; for,
except that it don’t turn round, it’s like the wentilator that used to
be in the kitchen winder at Todgers’s. You ain’t seen the old lady’s
name in the Gazette, have you?’

‘No,’ returned the barber. ‘Is she a bankrupt?’

‘If she ain’t, she will be,’ retorted Bailey. ‘That bis’ness never can
be carried on without ME. Well! How are you?’

‘Oh! I’m pretty well,’ said Poll. ‘Are you living at this end of the
town, or were you coming to see me? Was that the bis’ness that brought
you to Holborn?’

‘I haven’t got no bis’ness in Holborn,’ returned Bailey, with some
displeasure. ‘All my bis’ness lays at the West End. I’ve got the right
sort of governor now. You can’t see his face for his whiskers, and can’t
see his whiskers for the dye upon ‘em. That’s a gentleman ain’t it? You
wouldn’t like a ride in a cab, would you? Why, it wouldn’t be safe to
offer it. You’d faint away, only to see me a-comin’ at a mild trot round
the corner.’

To convey a slight idea of the effect of this approach, Mr Bailey
counterfeited in his own person the action of a high-trotting horse and
threw up his head so high, in backing against a pump, that he shook his
hat off.

‘Why, he’s own uncle to Capricorn,’ said Bailey, ‘and brother to
Cauliflower. He’s been through the winders of two chaney shops since
we’ve had him, and was sold for killin’ his missis. That’s a horse, I
hope?’

‘Ah! you’ll never want to buy any more red polls, now,’ observed Poll,
looking on his young friend with an air of melancholy. ‘You’ll never
want to buy any more red polls now, to hang up over the sink, will you?’

‘I should think not,’ replied Bailey. ‘Reether so. I wouldn’t have
nothin’ to say to any bird below a Peacock; and HE’d be wulgar. Well,
how are you?’

‘Oh! I’m pretty well,’ said Poll. He answered the question again because
Mr Bailey asked it again; Mr Bailey asked it again, because--accompanied
with a straddling action of the white cords, a bend of the knees, and a
striking forth of the top-boots--it was an easy horse-fleshy, turfy sort
of thing to do.

‘Wot are you up to, old feller?’ added Mr Bailey, with the same graceful
rakishness. He was quite the man-about-town of the conversation, while
the easy-shaver was the child.

‘Why, I am going to fetch my lodger home,’ said Paul.

‘A woman!’ cried Mr Bailey, ‘for a twenty-pun’ note!’

The little barber hastened to explain that she was neither a young
woman, nor a handsome woman, but a nurse, who had been acting as a kind
of house-keeper to a gentleman for some weeks past, and left her place
that night, in consequence of being superseded by another and a more
legitimate house-keeper--to wit, the gentleman’s bride.

‘He’s newly married, and he brings his young wife home to-night,’ said
the barber. ‘So I’m going to fetch my lodger away--Mr Chuzzlewit’s,
close behind the Post Office--and carry her box for her.’

‘Jonas Chuzzlewit’s?’ said Bailey.

‘Ah!’ returned Paul: ‘that’s the name sure enough. Do you know him?’

‘Oh, no!’ cried Mr Bailey; ‘not at all. And I don’t know her! Not
neither! Why, they first kept company through me, a’most.’

‘Ah?’ said Paul.

‘Ah!’ said Mr Bailey, with a wink; ‘and she ain’t bad looking mind you.
But her sister was the best. SHE was the merry one. I often used to have
a bit of fun with her, in the hold times!’

Mr Bailey spoke as if he already had a leg and three-quarters in
the grave, and this had happened twenty or thirty years ago. Paul
Sweedlepipe, the meek, was so perfectly confounded by his precocious
self-possession, and his patronizing manner, as well as by his boots,
cockade, and livery, that a mist swam before his eyes, and he saw--not
the Bailey of acknowledged juvenility from Todgers’s Commercial
Boarding House, who had made his acquaintance within a twelvemonth,
by purchasing, at sundry times, small birds at twopence each--but a
highly-condensed embodiment of all the sporting grooms in London; an
abstract of all the stable-knowledge of the time; a something at a
high-pressure that must have had existence many years, and was fraught
with terrible experiences. And truly, though in the cloudy atmosphere
of Todgers’s, Mr Bailey’s genius had ever shone out brightly in this
particular respect, it now eclipsed both time and space, cheated
beholders of their senses, and worked on their belief in defiance of all
natural laws. He walked along the tangible and real stones of Holborn
Hill, an undersized boy; and yet he winked the winks, and thought the
thoughts, and did the deeds, and said the sayings of an ancient man.
There was an old principle within him, and a young surface without. He
became an inexplicable creature; a breeched and booted Sphinx. There was
no course open to the barber, but to go distracted himself, or to take
Bailey for granted; and he wisely chose the latter.

Mr Bailey was good enough to continue to bear him company, and to
entertain him, as they went, with easy conversation on various sporting
topics; especially on the comparative merits, as a general principle, of
horses with white stockings, and horses without. In regard to the style
of tail to be preferred, Mr Bailey had opinions of his own, which he
explained, but begged they might by no means influence his friend’s,
as here he knew he had the misfortune to differ from some excellent
authorities. He treated Mr Sweedlepipe to a dram, compounded agreeably
to his own directions, which he informed him had been invented by a
member of the Jockey Club; and, as they were by this time near the
barber’s destination, he observed that, as he had an hour to spare, and
knew the parties, he would, if quite agreeable, be introduced to Mrs
Gamp.

Paul knocked at Jonas Chuzzlewit’s; and, on the door being opened by
that lady, made the two distinguished persons known to one another. It
was a happy feature in Mrs Gamp’s twofold profession, that it gave her
an interest in everything that was young as well as in everything that
was old. She received Mr Bailey with much kindness.

‘It’s very good, I’m sure, of you to come,’ she said to her landlord,
‘as well as bring so nice a friend. But I’m afraid that I must trouble
you so far as to step in, for the young couple has not yet made
appearance.’

‘They’re late, ain’t they?’ inquired her landlord, when she had
conducted them downstairs into the kitchen.

‘Well, sir, considern’ the Wings of Love, they are,’ said Mrs Gamp.

Mr Bailey inquired whether the Wings of Love had ever won a plate, or
could be backed to do anything remarkable; and being informed that it
was not a horse, but merely a poetical or figurative expression, evinced
considerable disgust. Mrs Gamp was so very much astonished by his
affable manners and great ease, that she was about to propound to her
landlord in a whisper the staggering inquiry, whether he was a man or
a boy, when Mr Sweedlepipe, anticipating her design, made a timely
diversion.

‘He knows Mrs Chuzzlewit,’ said Paul aloud.

‘There’s nothin’ he don’t know; that’s my opinion,’ observed Mrs Gamp.
‘All the wickedness of the world is Print to him.’

Mr Bailey received this as a compliment, and said, adjusting his cravat,
‘reether so.’

‘As you knows Mrs Chuzzlewit, you knows, p’raps, what her chris’en name
is?’ Mrs Gamp observed.

‘Charity,’ said Bailey.

‘That it ain’t!’ cried Mrs Gamp.

‘Cherry, then,’ said Bailey. ‘Cherry’s short for it. It’s all the same.’

‘It don’t begin with a C at all,’ retorted Mrs Gamp, shaking her head.
‘It begins with a M.’

‘Whew!’ cried Mr Bailey, slapping a little cloud of pipe-clay out of his
left leg, ‘then he’s been and married the merry one!’

As these words were mysterious, Mrs Gamp called upon him to explain,
which Mr Bailey proceeded to do; that lady listening greedily to
everything he said. He was yet in the fullness of his narrative when the
sound of wheels, and a double knock at the street door, announced the
arrival of the newly married couple. Begging him to reserve what more he
had to say for her hearing on the way home, Mrs Gamp took up the candle,
and hurried away to receive and welcome the young mistress of the house.

‘Wishing you appiness and joy with all my art,’ said Mrs Gamp, dropping
a curtsey as they entered the hall; ‘and you, too, sir. Your lady looks
a little tired with the journey, Mr Chuzzlewit, a pretty dear!’

‘She has bothered enough about it,’ grumbled Mr Jonas. ‘Now, show a
light, will you?’

‘This way, ma’am, if you please,’ said Mrs Gamp, going upstairs before
them. ‘Things has been made as comfortable as they could be, but there’s
many things you’ll have to alter your own self when you gets time
to look about you! Ah! sweet thing! But you don’t,’ added Mrs Gamp,
internally, ‘you don’t look much like a merry one, I must say!’

It was true; she did not. The death that had gone before the bridal
seemed to have left its shade upon the house. The air was heavy and
oppressive; the rooms were dark; a deep gloom filled up every chink and
corner. Upon the hearthstone, like a creature of ill omen, sat the aged
clerk, with his eyes fixed on some withered branches in the stove. He
rose and looked at her.

‘So there you are, Mr Chuff,’ said Jonas carelessly, as he dusted his
boots; ‘still in the land of the living, eh?’

‘Still in the land of the living, sir,’ retorted Mrs Gamp. ‘And Mr
Chuffey may thank you for it, as many and many a time I’ve told him.’

Mr Jonas was not in the best of humours, for he merely said, as he
looked round, ‘We don’t want you any more, you know, Mrs Gamp.’

‘I’m a-going immediate, sir,’ returned the nurse; ‘unless there’s
nothink I can do for you, ma’am. Ain’t there,’ said Mrs Gamp, with
a look of great sweetness, and rummaging all the time in her pocket;
‘ain’t there nothink I can do for you, my little bird?’

‘No,’ said Merry, almost crying. ‘You had better go away, please!’

With a leer of mingled sweetness and slyness; with one eye on the
future, one on the bride, and an arch expression in her face, partly
spiritual, partly spirituous, and wholly professional and peculiar
to her art; Mrs Gamp rummaged in her pocket again, and took from it a
printed card, whereon was an inscription copied from her signboard.

‘Would you be so good, my darling dovey of a dear young married lady,’
Mrs Gamp observed, in a low voice, ‘as put that somewheres where you can
keep it in your mind? I’m well beknown to many ladies, and it’s my card.
Gamp is my name, and Gamp my nater. Livin’ quite handy, I will make
so bold as call in now and then, and make inquiry how your health and
spirits is, my precious chick!’

And with innumerable leers, winks, coughs, nods, smiles, and curtseys,
all leading to the establishment of a mysterious and confidential
understanding between herself and the bride, Mrs Gamp, invoking a
blessing upon the house, leered, winked, coughed, nodded, smiled, and
curtseyed herself out of the room.

‘But I will say, and I would if I was led a Martha to the Stakes for
it,’ Mrs Gamp remarked below stairs, in a whisper, ‘that she don’t look
much like a merry one at this present moment of time.’

‘Ah! wait till you hear her laugh!’ said Bailey.

‘Hem!’ cried Mrs Gamp, in a kind of groan. ‘I will, child.’

They said no more in the house, for Mrs Gamp put on her bonnet, Mr
Sweedlepipe took up her box; and Mr Bailey accompanied them towards
Kingsgate Street; recounting to Mrs Gamp as they went along, the origin
and progress of his acquaintance with Mrs Chuzzlewit and her sister. It
was a pleasant instance of this youth’s precocity, that he fancied Mrs
Gamp had conceived a tenderness for him, and was much tickled by her
misplaced attachment.

As the door closed heavily behind them, Mrs Jonas sat down in a chair,
and felt a strange chill creep upon her, whilst she looked about the
room. It was pretty much as she had known it, but appeared more dreary.
She had thought to see it brightened to receive her.

‘It ain’t good enough for you, I suppose?’ said Jonas, watching her
looks.

‘Why, it IS dull,’ said Merry, trying to be more herself.

‘It’ll be duller before you’re done with it,’ retorted Jonas, ‘if you
give me any of your airs. You’re a nice article, to turn sulky on first
coming home! Ecod, you used to have life enough, when you could plague
me with it. The gal’s downstairs. Ring the bell for supper, while I take
my boots off!’

She roused herself from looking after him as he left the room, to do
what he had desired; when the old man Chuffey laid his hand softly on
her arm.

‘You are not married?’ he said eagerly. ‘Not married?’

‘Yes. A month ago. Good Heaven, what is the matter?’

He answered nothing was the matter; and turned from her. But in her fear
and wonder, turning also, she saw him raise his trembling hands above
his head, and heard him say:

‘Oh! woe, woe, woe, upon this wicked house!’

It was her welcome--HOME.



CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

SHOWING THAT OLD FRIENDS MAY NOT ONLY APPEAR WITH NEW FACES, BUT IN
FALSE COLOURS. THAT PEOPLE ARE PRONE TO BITE, AND THAT BITERS MAY
SOMETIMES BE BITTEN.


Mr Bailey, Junior--for the sporting character, whilom of general utility
at Todgers’s, had now regularly set up in life under that name, without
troubling himself to obtain from the legislature a direct licence in
the form of a Private Bill, which of all kinds and classes of bills
is without exception the most unreasonable in its charges--Mr Bailey,
Junior, just tall enough to be seen by an inquiring eye, gazing
indolently at society from beneath the apron of his master’s cab, drove
slowly up and down Pall Mall, about the hour of noon, in waiting for his
‘Governor.’ The horse of distinguished family, who had Capricorn for his
nephew, and Cauliflower for his brother, showed himself worthy of his
high relations by champing at the bit until his chest was white with
foam, and rearing like a horse in heraldry; the plated harness and the
patent leather glittered in the sun; pedestrians admired; Mr Bailey was
complacent, but unmoved. He seemed to say, ‘A barrow, good people, a
mere barrow; nothing to what we could do, if we chose!’ and on he went,
squaring his short green arms outside the apron, as if he were hooked on
to it by his armpits.

Mr Bailey had a great opinion of Brother to Cauliflower, and estimated
his powers highly. But he never told him so. On the contrary, it was his
practice, in driving that animal, to assail him with disrespectful,
if not injurious, expressions, as, ‘Ah! would you!’ ‘Did you think
it, then?’ ‘Where are you going to now?’ ‘No, you won’t, my lad!’ and
similar fragmentary remarks. These being usually accompanied by a jerk
of the rein, or a crack of the whip, led to many trials of strength
between them, and to many contentions for the upper-hand, terminating,
now and then, in china-shops, and other unusual goals, as Mr Bailey had
already hinted to his friend Poll Sweedlepipe.

On the present occasion Mr Bailey, being in spirits, was more than
commonly hard upon his charge; in consequence of which that fiery animal
confined himself almost entirely to his hind legs in displaying his
paces, and constantly got himself into positions with reference to the
cabriolet that very much amazed the passengers in the street. But Mr
Bailey, not at all disturbed, had still a shower of pleasantries to
bestow on any one who crossed his path; as, calling to a full-grown
coal-heaver in a wagon, who for a moment blocked the way, ‘Now, young
‘un, who trusted YOU with a cart?’ inquiring of elderly ladies who
wanted to cross, and ran back again, ‘Why they didn’t go to the
workhouse and get an order to be buried?’ tempting boys, with friendly
words, to get up behind, and immediately afterwards cutting them down;
and the like flashes of a cheerful humour, which he would occasionally
relieve by going round St. James’s Square at a hand gallop, and coming
slowly into Pall Mall by another entry, as if, in the interval, his pace
had been a perfect crawl.

It was not until these amusements had been very often repeated, and the
apple-stall at the corner had sustained so many miraculous escapes as to
appear impregnable, that Mr Bailey was summoned to the door of a certain
house in Pall Mall, and turning short, obeyed the call and jumped out.
It was not until he had held the bridle for some minutes longer, every
jerk of Cauliflower’s brother’s head, and every twitch of Cauliflower’s
brother’s nostril, taking him off his legs in the meanwhile, that
two persons entered the vehicle, one of whom took the reins and drove
rapidly off. Nor was it until Mr Bailey had run after it some hundreds
of yards in vain, that he managed to lift his short leg into the iron
step, and finally to get his boots upon the little footboard behind.
Then, indeed, he became a sight to see; and--standing now on one foot
and now upon the other, now trying to look round the cab on this side,
now on that, and now endeavouring to peep over the top of it, as it went
dashing in among the carts and coaches--was from head to heel Newmarket.

The appearance of Mr Bailey’s governor as he drove along fully justified
that enthusiastic youth’s description of him to the wondering Poll. He
had a world of jet-black shining hair upon his head, upon his cheeks,
upon his chin, upon his upper lip. His clothes, symmetrically made, were
of the newest fashion and the costliest kind. Flowers of gold and blue,
and green and blushing red, were on his waistcoat; precious chains
and jewels sparkled on his breast; his fingers, clogged with brilliant
rings, were as unwieldly as summer flies but newly rescued from a
honey-pot. The daylight mantled in his gleaming hat and boots as in
a polished glass. And yet, though changed his name, and changed his
outward surface, it was Tigg. Though turned and twisted upside down,
and inside out, as great men have been sometimes known to be; though
no longer Montague Tigg, but Tigg Montague; still it was Tigg; the same
Satanic, gallant, military Tigg. The brass was burnished, lacquered,
newly stamped; yet it was the true Tigg metal notwithstanding.

Beside him sat a smiling gentleman, of less pretensions and of business
looks, whom he addressed as David. Surely not the David of the--how
shall it be phrased?--the triumvirate of golden balls? Not David,
tapster at the Lombards’ Arms? Yes. The very man.

‘The secretary’s salary, David,’ said Mr Montague, ‘the office being
now established, is eight hundred pounds per annum, with his house-rent,
coals, and candles free. His five-and-twenty shares he holds, of course.
Is that enough?’

David smiled and nodded, and coughed behind a little locked portfolio
which he carried; with an air that proclaimed him to be the secretary in
question.

‘If that’s enough,’ said Montague, ‘I will propose it at the Board
to-day, in my capacity as chairman.’

The secretary smiled again; laughed, indeed, this time; and said,
rubbing his nose slily with one end of the portfolio:

‘It was a capital thought, wasn’t it?’

‘What was a capital thought, David?’ Mr Montague inquired.

‘The Anglo-Bengalee,’ tittered the secretary.

‘The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company is
rather a capital concern, I hope, David,’ said Montague.

‘Capital indeed!’ cried the secretary, with another laugh--’ in one
sense.’

‘In the only important one,’ observed the chairman; ‘which is number
one, David.’

‘What,’ asked the secretary, bursting into another laugh, ‘what will be
the paid up capital, according to the next prospectus?’

‘A figure of two, and as many oughts after it as the printer can get
into the same line,’ replied his friend. ‘Ha, ha!’

At this they both laughed; the secretary so vehemently, that in kicking
up his feet, he kicked the apron open, and nearly started Cauliflower’s
brother into an oyster shop; not to mention Mr Bailey’s receiving such
a sudden swing, that he held on for a moment quite a young Fame, by one
strap and no legs.

‘What a chap you are!’ exclaimed David admiringly, when this little
alarm had subsided.

‘Say, genius, David, genius.’

‘Well, upon my soul, you ARE a genius then,’ said David. ‘I always knew
you had the gift of the gab, of course; but I never believed you were
half the man you are. How could I?’

‘I rise with circumstances, David. That’s a point of genius in itself,’
said Tigg. ‘If you were to lose a hundred pound wager to me at
this minute David, and were to pay it (which is most confoundedly
improbable), I should rise, in a mental point of view, directly.’

It is due to Mr Tigg to say that he had really risen with his
opportunities; and, peculating on a grander scale, he had become a
grander man altogether.

‘Ha, ha,’ cried the secretary, laying his hand, with growing
familiarity, upon the chairman’s arm. ‘When I look at you, and think of
your property in Bengal being--ha, ha, ha!--’

The half-expressed idea seemed no less ludicrous to Mr Tigg than to his
friend, for he laughed too, heartily.

‘--Being,’ resumed David, ‘being amenable--your property in Bengal being
amenable--to all claims upon the company; when I look at you and think
of that, you might tickle me into fits by waving the feather of a pen at
me. Upon my soul you might!’

‘It a devilish fine property,’ said Tigg Montague, ‘to be amenable
to any claims. The preserve of tigers alone is worth a mint of money,
David.’

David could only reply in the intervals of his laughter, ‘Oh, what a
chap you are!’ and so continued to laugh, and hold his sides, and wipe
his eyes, for some time, without offering any other observation.

‘A capital idea?’ said Tigg, returning after a time to his companion’s
first remark; ‘no doubt it was a capital idea. It was my idea.’

‘No, no. It was my idea,’ said David. ‘Hang it, let a man have some
credit. Didn’t I say to you that I’d saved a few pounds?--’

‘You said! Didn’t I say to you,’ interposed Tigg, ‘that I had come into
a few pounds?’

‘Certainly you did,’ returned David, warmly, ‘but that’s not the idea.
Who said, that if we put the money together we could furnish an office,
and make a show?’

‘And who said,’ retorted Mr Tigg, ‘that, provided we did it on a
sufficiently large scale, we could furnish an office and make a show,
without any money at all? Be rational, and just, and calm, and tell me
whose idea was that.’

‘Why, there,’ David was obliged to confess, ‘you had the advantage of
me, I admit. But I don’t put myself on a level with you. I only want a
little credit in the business.’

‘All the credit you deserve to have,’ said Tigg.

‘The plain work of the company, David--figures, books, circulars,
advertisements, pen, ink, and paper, sealing-wax and wafers--is
admirably done by you. You are a first-rate groveller. I don’t dispute
it. But the ornamental department, David; the inventive and poetical
department--’

‘Is entirely yours,’ said his friend. ‘No question of it. But with such
a swell turnout as this, and all the handsome things you’ve got about
you, and the life you lead, I mean to say it’s a precious comfortable
department too.’

‘Does it gain the purpose? Is it Anglo-Bengalee?’ asked Tigg.

‘Yes,’ said David.

‘Could you undertake it yourself?’ demanded Tigg.

‘No,’ said David.

‘Ha, ha!’ laughed Tigg. ‘Then be contented with your station and
your profits, David, my fine fellow, and bless the day that made us
acquainted across the counter of our common uncle, for it was a golden
day to you.’

It will have been already gathered from the conversation of these
worthies, that they were embarked in an enterprise of some magnitude, in
which they addressed the public in general from the strong position of
having everything to gain and nothing at all to lose; and which, based
upon this great principle, was thriving pretty comfortably.

The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company started
into existence one morning, not an Infant Institution, but a Grown-up
Company running alone at a great pace, and doing business right and
left: with a ‘branch’ in a first floor over a tailor’s at the west-end
of the town, and main offices in a new street in the City, comprising
the upper part of a spacious house resplendent in stucco and
plate-glass, with wire-blinds in all the windows, and ‘Anglo-Bengalee’
worked into the pattern of every one of them. On the doorpost was
painted again in large letters, ‘offices of the Anglo-Bengalee
Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company,’ and on the door was a
large brass plate with the same inscription; always kept very bright, as
courting inquiry; staring the City out of countenance after office hours
on working days, and all day long on Sundays; and looking bolder than
the Bank. Within, the offices were newly plastered, newly painted,
newly papered, newly countered, newly floor-clothed, newly tabled, newly
chaired, newly fitted up in every way, with goods that were substantial
and expensive, and designed (like the company) to last. Business! Look
at the green ledgers with red backs, like strong cricket-balls beaten
flat; the court-guides directories, day-books, almanacks, letter-boxes,
weighing-machines for letters, rows of fire-buckets for dashing out a
conflagration in its first spark, and saving the immense wealth in notes
and bonds belonging to the company; look at the iron safes, the clock,
the office seal--in its capacious self, security for anything. Solidity!
Look at the massive blocks of marble in the chimney-pieces, and the
gorgeous parapet on the top of the house! Publicity! Why, Anglo-Bengalee
Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance company is painted on the very
coal-scuttles. It is repeated at every turn until the eyes are dazzled
with it, and the head is giddy. It is engraved upon the top of all the
letter paper, and it makes a scroll-work round the seal, and it shines
out of the porter’s buttons, and it is repeated twenty times in every
circular and public notice wherein one David Crimple, Esquire, Secretary
and resident Director, takes the liberty of inviting your attention
to the accompanying statement of the advantages offered by the
Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company; and fully
proves to you that any connection on your part with that establishment
must result in a perpetual Christmas Box and constantly increasing Bonus
to yourself, and that nobody can run any risk by the transaction except
the office, which, in its great liberality is pretty sure to lose. And
this, David Crimple, Esquire, submits to you (and the odds are heavy you
believe him), is the best guarantee that can reasonably be suggested by
the Board of Management for its permanence and stability.

This gentleman’s name, by the way, had been originally Crimp; but as
the word was susceptible of an awkward construction and might be
misrepresented, he had altered it to Crimple.

Lest with all these proofs and confirmations, any man should be
suspicious of the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance
company; should doubt in tiger, cab, or person, Tigg Montague, Esquire,
(of Pall Mall and Bengal), or any other name in the imaginative List of
Directors; there was a porter on the premises--a wonderful creature,
in a vast red waistcoat and a short-tailed pepper-and-salt coat--who
carried more conviction to the minds of sceptics than the whole
establishment without him. No confidences existed between him and the
Directorship; nobody knew where he had served last; no character or
explanation had been given or required. No questions had been asked on
either side. This mysterious being, relying solely on his figure, had
applied for the situation, and had been instantly engaged on his own
terms. They were high; but he knew, doubtless, that no man could carry
such an extent of waistcoat as himself, and felt the full value of his
capacity to such an institution. When he sat upon a seat erected for him
in a corner of the office, with his glazed hat hanging on a peg over his
head, it was impossible to doubt the respectability of the concern.
It went on doubling itself with every square inch of his red waistcoat
until, like the problem of the nails in the horse’s shoes, the total
became enormous. People had been known to apply to effect an insurance
on their lives for a thousand pounds, and looking at him, to beg, before
the form of proposal was filled up, that it might be made two. And yet
he was not a giant. His coat was rather small than otherwise. The whole
charm was in his waistcoat. Respectability, competence, property in
Bengal or anywhere else, responsibility to any amount on the part of the
company that employed him, were all expressed in that one garment.

Rival offices had endeavoured to lure him away; Lombard Street itself
had beckoned to him; rich companies had whispered ‘Be a Beadle!’ but he
still continued faithful to the Anglo-Bengalee. Whether he was a deep
rogue, or a stately simpleton, it was impossible to make out, but he
appeared to believe in the Anglo-Bengalee. He was grave with imaginary
cares of office; and having nothing whatever to do, and something less
to take care of, would look as if the pressure of his numerous duties,
and a sense of the treasure in the company’s strong-room, made him a
solemn and a thoughtful man.

As the cabriolet drove up to the door, this officer appeared bare-headed
on the pavement, crying aloud ‘Room for the chairman, room for the
chairman, if you please!’ much to the admiration of the bystanders,
who, it is needless to say, had their attention directed to the
Anglo-Bengalee Company thenceforth, by that means. Mr Tigg leaped
gracefully out, followed by the Managing Director (who was by this time
very distant and respectful), and ascended the stairs, still preceded by
the porter, who cried as he went, ‘By your leave there! by your leave!
The Chairman of the Board, Gentle--MEN! In like manner, but in a still
more stentorian voice, he ushered the chairman through the public
office, where some humble clients were transacting business, into
an awful chamber, labelled Board-room; the door of which sanctuary
immediately closed, and screened the great capitalist from vulgar eyes.

The board-room had a Turkey carpet in it, a sideboard, a portrait of
Tigg Montague, Esquire, as chairman; a very imposing chair of office,
garnished with an ivory hammer and a little hand-bell; and a long table,
set out at intervals with sheets of blotting-paper, foolscap, clean
pens, and inkstands. The chairman having taken his seat with great
solemnity, the secretary supported him on his right hand, and the porter
stood bolt upright behind them, forming a warm background of waistcoat.
This was the board: everything else being a light-hearted little
fiction.

‘Bullamy!’ said Mr Tigg.

‘Sir!’ replied the porter.

‘Let the Medical Officer know, with my compliments, that I wish to see
him.’

Bullamy cleared his throat, and bustled out into the office, crying ‘The
Chairman of the Board wishes to see the Medical Officer. By your leave
there! By your leave!’ He soon returned with the gentleman in question;
and at both openings of the board-room door--at his coming in and at
his going out--simple clients were seen to stretch their necks and
stand upon their toes, thirsting to catch the slightest glimpse of that
mysterious chamber.

‘Jobling, my dear friend!’ said Mr Tigg, ‘how are you? Bullamy, wait
outside. Crimple, don’t leave us. Jobling, my good fellow, I am glad to
see you.’

‘And how are you, Mr Montague, eh?’ said the Medical Officer, throwing
himself luxuriously into an easy-chair (they were all easy-chairs in the
board-room), and taking a handsome gold snuff-box from the pocket of his
black satin waistcoat. ‘How are you? A little worn with business, eh? If
so, rest. A little feverish from wine, humph? If so, water. Nothing
at all the matter, and quite comfortable? Then take some lunch. A very
wholesome thing at this time of day to strengthen the gastric juices
with lunch, Mr Montague.’

The Medical Officer (he was the same medical officer who had followed
poor old Anthony Chuzzlewit to the grave, and who had attended Mrs
Gamp’s patient at the Bull) smiled in saying these words; and casually
added, as he brushed some grains of snuff from his shirt-frill, ‘I
always take it myself about this time of day, do you know!’

‘Bullamy!’ said the Chairman, ringing the little bell.

‘Sir!’

‘Lunch.’

‘Not on my account, I hope?’ said the doctor. ‘You are very good. Thank
you. I’m quite ashamed. Ha, ha! if I had been a sharp practitioner,
Mr Montague, I shouldn’t have mentioned it without a fee; for you may
depend upon it, my dear sir, that if you don’t make a point of taking
lunch, you’ll very soon come under my hands. Allow me to illustrate
this. In Mr Crimple’s leg--’

The resident Director gave an involuntary start, for the doctor, in the
heat of his demonstration, caught it up and laid it across his own, as
if he were going to take it off, then and there.

‘In Mr Crimple’s leg, you’ll observe,’ pursued the doctor, turning back
his cuffs and spanning the limb with both hands, ‘where Mr Crimple’s
knee fits into the socket, here, there is--that is to say, between the
bone and the socket--a certain quantity of animal oil.’

‘What do you pick MY leg out for?’ said Mr Crimple, looking with
something of an anxious expression at his limb. ‘It’s the same with
other legs, ain’t it?’

‘Never you mind, my good sir,’ returned the doctor, shaking his head,
‘whether it is the same with other legs, or not the same.’

‘But I do mind,’ said David.

‘I take a particular case, Mr Montague,’ returned the doctor, ‘as
illustrating my remark, you observe. In this portion of Mr Crimple’s
leg, sir, there is a certain amount of animal oil. In every one of Mr
Crimple’s joints, sir, there is more or less of the same deposit. Very
good. If Mr Crimple neglects his meals, or fails to take his proper
quantity of rest, that oil wanes, and becomes exhausted. What is the
consequence? Mr Crimple’s bones sink down into their sockets, sir, and
Mr Crimple becomes a weazen, puny, stunted, miserable man!’

The doctor let Mr Crimple’s leg fall suddenly, as if he were already in
that agreeable condition; turned down his wristbands again, and looked
triumphantly at the chairman.

‘We know a few secrets of nature in our profession, sir,’ said the
doctor. ‘Of course we do. We study for that; we pass the Hall and the
College for that; and we take our station in society BY that. It’s
extraordinary how little is known on these subjects generally. Where
do you suppose, now’--the doctor closed one eye, as he leaned back
smilingly in his chair, and formed a triangle with his hands, of which
his two thumbs composed the base--‘where do you suppose Mr Crimple’s
stomach is?’

Mr Crimple, more agitated than before, clapped his hand immediately
below his waistcoat.

‘Not at all,’ cried the doctor; ‘not at all. Quite a popular mistake! My
good sir, you’re altogether deceived.’

‘I feel it there, when it’s out of order; that’s all I know,’ said
Crimple.

‘You think you do,’ replied the doctor; ‘but science knows better. There
was a patient of mine once,’ touching one of the many mourning rings
upon his fingers, and slightly bowing his head, ‘a gentleman who did
me the honour to make a very handsome mention of me in his will--“in
testimony,” as he was pleased to say, “of the unremitting zeal, talent,
and attention of my friend and medical attendant, John Jobling, Esquire,
M.R.C.S.,”--who was so overcome by the idea of having all his life
laboured under an erroneous view of the locality of this important
organ, that when I assured him on my professional reputation, he was
mistaken, he burst into tears, put out his hand, and said, “Jobling,
God bless you!” Immediately afterwards he became speechless, and was
ultimately buried at Brixton.’

‘By your leave there!’ cried Bullamy, without. ‘By your leave!
Refreshment for the Board-room!’

‘Ha!’ said the doctor, jocularly, as he rubbed his hands, and drew his
chair nearer to the table. ‘The true Life Assurance, Mr Montague. The
best Policy in the world, my dear sir. We should be provident, and eat
and drink whenever we can. Eh, Mr Crimple?’

The resident Director acquiesced rather sulkily, as if the gratification
of replenishing his stomach had been impaired by the unsettlement of his
preconceived opinions in reference to its situation. But the appearance
of the porter and under-porter with a tray covered with a snow-white
cloth, which, being thrown back, displayed a pair of cold roast fowls,
flanked by some potted meats and a cool salad, quickly restored his
good humour. It was enhanced still further by the arrival of a bottle
of excellent madeira, and another of champagne; and he soon attacked
the repast with an appetite scarcely inferior to that of the medical
officer.

The lunch was handsomely served, with a profusion of rich glass plate,
and china; which seemed to denote that eating and drinking on a showy
scale formed no unimportant item in the business of the Anglo-Bengalee
Directorship. As it proceeded, the Medical Officer grew more and more
joyous and red-faced, insomuch that every mouthful he ate, and every
drop of wine he swallowed, seemed to impart new lustre to his eyes, and
to light up new sparks in his nose and forehead.

In certain quarters of the City and its neighbourhood, Mr Jobling was,
as we have already seen in some measure, a very popular character. He
had a portentously sagacious chin, and a pompous voice, with a rich
huskiness in some of its tones that went directly to the heart, like a
ray of light shining through the ruddy medium of choice old burgundy.
His neckerchief and shirt-frill were ever of the whitest, his clothes of
the blackest and sleekest, his gold watch-chain of the heaviest, and
his seals of the largest. His boots, which were always of the brightest,
creaked as he walked. Perhaps he could shake his head, rub his hands,
or warm himself before a fire, better than any man alive; and he had a
peculiar way of smacking his lips and saying, ‘Ah!’ at intervals while
patients detailed their symptoms, which inspired great confidence. It
seemed to express, ‘I know what you’re going to say better than you do;
but go on, go on.’ As he talked on all occasions whether he had anything
to say or not, it was unanimously observed of him that he was ‘full of
anecdote;’ and his experience and profit from it were considered, for
the same reason, to be something much too extensive for description. His
female patients could never praise him too highly; and the coldest of
his male admirers would always say this for him to their friends, ‘that
whatever Jobling’s professional skill might be (and it could not be
denied that he had a very high reputation), he was one of the most
comfortable fellows you ever saw in your life!’

Jobling was for many reasons, and not last in the list because his
connection lay principally among tradesmen and their families, exactly
the sort of person whom the Anglo-Bengalee Company wanted for a medical
officer. But Jobling was far too knowing to connect himself with the
company in any closer ties than as a paid (and well paid) functionary,
or to allow his connection to be misunderstood abroad, if he could help
it. Hence he always stated the case to an inquiring patient, after this
manner:

‘Why, my dear sir, with regard to the Anglo-Bengalee, my information,
you see, is limited; very limited. I am the medical officer, in
consideration of a certain monthly payment. The labourer is worthy of
his hire; BIS DAT QUI CITO DAT’--[‘classical scholar, Jobling!’ thinks
the patient, ‘well-read man!’)--‘and I receive it regularly. Therefore
I am bound, so far as my own knowledge goes, to speak well of the
establishment.’ [‘Nothing can be fairer than Jobling’s conduct,’ thinks
the patient, who has just paid Jobling’s bill himself.) ‘If you put
any question to me, my dear friend,’ says the doctor, ‘touching the
responsibility or capital of the company, there I am at fault; for I
have no head for figures, and not being a shareholder, am delicate of
showing any curiosity whatever on the subject. Delicacy--your
amiable lady will agree with me I am sure--should be one of the first
characteristics of a medical man.’ [‘Nothing can be finer or more
gentlemanly than Jobling’s feeling,’ thinks the patient.) ‘Very good,
my dear sir, so the matter stands. You don’t know Mr Montague? I’m sorry
for it. A remarkably handsome man, and quite the gentleman in every
respect. Property, I am told, in India. House and everything belonging
to him, beautiful. Costly furniture on the most elegant and lavish
scale. And pictures, which, even in an anatomical point of view, are
perfection. In case you should ever think of doing anything with the
company, I’ll pass you, you may depend upon it. I can conscientiously
report you a healthy subject. If I understand any man’s constitution, it
is yours; and this little indisposition has done him more good,
ma’am,’ says the doctor, turning to the patient’s wife, ‘than if he had
swallowed the contents of half the nonsensical bottles in my surgery.
For they ARE nonsense--to tell the honest truth, one half of them are
nonsense--compared with such a constitution as his!’ [‘Jobling is the
most friendly creature I ever met with in my life,’ thinks the patient;
‘and upon my word and honour, I’ll consider of it!’)

‘Commission to you, doctor, on four new policies, and a loan this
morning, eh?’ said Crimple, looking, when they had finished lunch, over
some papers brought in by the porter. ‘Well done!’

‘Jobling, my dear friend,’ said Tigg, ‘long life to you.’

‘No, no. Nonsense. Upon my word I’ve no right to draw the commission,’
said the doctor, ‘I haven’t really. It’s picking your pocket. I don’t
recommend anybody here. I only say what I know. My patients ask me what
I know, and I tell ‘em what I know. Nothing else. Caution is my weak
side, that’s the truth; and always was from a boy. That is,’ said the
doctor, filling his glass, ‘caution in behalf of other people. Whether I
would repose confidence in this company myself, if I had not been paying
money elsewhere for many years--that’s quite another question.’

He tried to look as if there were no doubt about it; but feeling that he
did it but indifferently, changed the theme and praised the wine.

‘Talking of wine,’ said the doctor, ‘reminds me of one of the finest
glasses of light old port I ever drank in my life; and that was at a
funeral. You have not seen anything of--of THAT party, Mr Montague, have
you?’ handing him a card.

‘He is not buried, I hope?’ said Tigg, as he took it. ‘The honour of his
company is not requested if he is.’

‘Ha, ha!’ laughed the doctor. ‘No; not quite. He was honourably
connected with that very occasion though.’

‘Oh!’ said Tigg, smoothing his moustache, as he cast his eyes upon the
name. ‘I recollect. No. He has not been here.’

The words were on his lips, when Bullamy entered, and presented a card
to the Medical Officer.

‘Talk of the what’s his name--’ observed the doctor rising.

‘And he’s sure to appear, eh?’ said Tigg.

‘Why, no, Mr Montague, no,’ returned the doctor. ‘We will not say that
in the present case, for this gentleman is very far from it.’

‘So much the better,’ retorted Tigg. ‘So much the more adaptable to the
Anglo-Bengalee. Bullamy, clear the table and take the things out by the
other door. Mr Crimple, business.’

‘Shall I introduce him?’ asked Jobling.

‘I shall be eternally delighted,’ answered Tigg, kissing his hand and
smiling sweetly.

The doctor disappeared into the outer office, and immediately returned
with Jonas Chuzzlewit.

‘Mr Montague,’ said Jobling. ‘Allow me. My friend Mr Chuzzlewit. My dear
friend--our chairman. Now do you know,’ he added checking himself with
infinite policy, and looking round with a smile; ‘that’s a very singular
instance of the force of example. It really is a very remarkable
instance of the force of example. I say OUR chairman. Why do I say our
chairman? Because he is not MY chairman, you know. I have no connection
with the company, farther than giving them, for a certain fee and
reward, my poor opinion as a medical man, precisely as I may give it any
day to Jack Noakes or Tom Styles. Then why do I say our chairman? Simply
because I hear the phrase constantly repeated about me. Such is the
involuntary operation of the mental faculty in the imitative biped man.
Mr Crimple, I believe you never take snuff? Injudicious. You should.’

Pending these remarks on the part of the doctor, and the lengthened and
sonorous pinch with which he followed them up, Jonas took a seat at
the board; as ungainly a man as ever he has been within the reader’s
knowledge. It is too common with all of us, but it is especially in
the nature of a mean mind, to be overawed by fine clothes and fine
furniture. They had a very decided influence on Jonas.

‘Now you two gentlemen have business to discuss, I know,’ said the
doctor, ‘and your time is precious. So is mine; for several lives are
waiting for me in the next room, and I have a round of visits to make
after--after I have taken ‘em. Having had the happiness to introduce you
to each other, I may go about my business. Good-bye. But allow me, Mr
Montague, before I go, to say this of my friend who sits beside you:
That gentleman has done more, sir,’ rapping his snuff-box solemnly, ‘to
reconcile me to human nature, than any man alive or dead. Good-bye!’

With these words Jobling bolted abruptly out of the room, and proceeded
in his own official department, to impress the lives in waiting with a
sense of his keen conscientiousness in the discharge of his duty, and
the great difficulty of getting into the Anglo-Bengalee; by feeling
their pulses, looking at their tongues, listening at their ribs,
poking them in the chest, and so forth; though, if he didn’t well know
beforehand that whatever kind of lives they were, the Anglo-Bengalee
would accept them readily, he was far from being the Jobling that his
friend considered him; and was not the original Jobling, but a spurious
imitation.

Mr Crimple also departed on the business of the morning; and Jonas
Chuzzlewit and Tigg were left alone.

‘I learn from our friend,’ said Tigg, drawing his chair towards Jonas
with a winning ease of manner, ‘that you have been thinking--’

‘Oh! Ecod then he’d no right to say so,’ cried Jonas, interrupting.
‘I didn’t tell HIM my thoughts. If he took it into his head that I was
coming here for such or such a purpose, why, that’s his lookout. I don’t
stand committed by that.’

Jonas said this offensively enough; for over and above the habitual
distrust of his character, it was in his nature to seek to revenge
himself on the fine clothes and the fine furniture, in exact proportion
as he had been unable to withstand their influence.

‘If I come here to ask a question or two, and get a document or two to
consider of, I don’t bind myself to anything. Let’s understand that, you
know,’ said Jonas.

‘My dear fellow!’ cried Tigg, clapping him on the shoulder, ‘I applaud
your frankness. If men like you and I speak openly at first, all
possible misunderstanding is avoided. Why should I disguise what you
know so well, but what the crowd never dream of? We companies are all
birds of prey; mere birds of prey. The only question is, whether in
serving our own turn, we can serve yours too; whether in double-lining
our own nest, we can put a single living into yours. Oh, you’re in our
secret. You’re behind the scenes. We’ll make a merit of dealing plainly
with you, when we know we can’t help it.’

It was remarked, on the first introduction of Mr Jonas into these pages,
that there is a simplicity of cunning no less than a simplicity of
innocence, and that in all matters involving a faith in knavery, he was
the most credulous of men. If Mr Tigg had preferred any claim to high
and honourable dealing, Jonas would have suspected him though he had
been a very model of probity; but when he gave utterance to Jonas’s own
thoughts of everything and everybody, Jonas began to feel that he was a
pleasant fellow, and one to be talked to freely.

He changed his position in the chair, not for a less awkward, but for a
more boastful attitude; and smiling in his miserable conceit rejoined:

‘You an’t a bad man of business, Mr Montague. You know how to set about
it, I WILL say.’

‘Tut, tut,’ said Tigg, nodding confidentially, and showing his white
teeth; ‘we are not children, Mr Chuzzlewit; we are grown men, I hope.’

Jonas assented, and said after a short silence, first spreading out his
legs, and sticking one arm akimbo to show how perfectly at home he was,

‘The truth is--’

‘Don’t say, the truth,’ interposed Tigg, with another grin. ‘It’s so
like humbug.’

Greatly charmed by this, Jonas began again.

‘The long and the short of it is--’

‘Better,’ muttered Tigg. ‘Much better!’

‘--That I didn’t consider myself very well used by one or two of the old
companies in some negotiations I have had with ‘em--once had, I mean.
They started objections they had no right to start, and put questions
they had no right to put, and carried things much too high for my
taste.’

As he made these observations he cast down his eyes, and looked
curiously at the carpet. Mr Tigg looked curiously at him.

He made so long a pause, that Tigg came to the rescue, and said, in his
pleasantest manner:

‘Take a glass of wine.’

‘No, no,’ returned Jonas, with a cunning shake of the head; ‘none of
that, thankee. No wine over business. All very well for you, but it
wouldn’t do for me.’

‘What an old hand you are, Mr Chuzzlewit!’ said Tigg, leaning back in
his chair, and leering at him through his half-shut eyes.

Jonas shook his head again, as much as to say, ‘You’re right there;’ And
then resumed, jocosely:

‘Not such an old hand, either, but that I’ve been and got married.
That’s rather green, you’ll say. Perhaps it is, especially as she’s
young. But one never knows what may happen to these women, so I’m
thinking of insuring her life. It is but fair, you know, that a man
should secure some consolation in case of meeting with such a loss.’

‘If anything can console him under such heart-breaking circumstances,’
murmured Tigg, with his eyes shut up as before.

‘Exactly,’ returned Jonas; ‘if anything can. Now, supposing I did it
here, I should do it cheap, I know, and easy, without bothering her
about it; which I’d much rather not do, for it’s just in a woman’s way
to take it into her head, if you talk to her about such things, that
she’s going to die directly.’

‘So it is,’ cried Tigg, kissing his hand in honour of the sex. ‘You’re
quite right. Sweet, silly, fluttering little simpletons!’

‘Well,’ said Jonas, ‘on that account, you know, and because offence
has been given me in other quarters, I wouldn’t mind patronizing this
Company. But I want to know what sort of security there is for the
Company’s going on. That’s the--’

‘Not the truth?’ cried Tigg, holding up his jewelled hand. ‘Don’t use
that Sunday School expression, please!’

‘The long and the short of it,’ said Jonas. ‘The long and the short of
it is, what’s the security?’

‘The paid-up capital, my dear sir,’ said Tigg, referring to some papers
on the table, ‘is, at this present moment--’

‘Oh! I understand all about paid-up capitals, you know,’ said Jonas.

‘You do?’ cried Tigg, stopping short.

‘I should hope so.’

He turned the papers down again, and moving nearer to him, said in his
ear:

‘I know you do. I know you do. Look at me!’

It was not much in Jonas’s way to look straight at anybody; but thus
requested, he made shift to take a tolerable survey of the chairman’s
features. The chairman fell back a little, to give him the better
opportunity.

‘You know me?’ he inquired, elevating his eyebrows. ‘You recollect?
You’ve seen me before?’

‘Why, I thought I remembered your face when I first came in,’ said
Jonas, gazing at it; ‘but I couldn’t call to mind where I had seen it.
No. I don’t remember, even now. Was it in the street?’

‘Was it in Pecksniff’s parlour?’ said Tigg

‘In Pecksniff’s parlour!’ echoed Jonas, fetching a long breath. ‘You
don’t mean when--’

‘Yes,’ cried Tigg, ‘when there was a very charming and delightful little
family party, at which yourself and your respected father assisted.’

‘Well, never mind HIM,’ said Jonas. ‘He’s dead, and there’s no help for
it.’

‘Dead, is he!’ cried Tigg, ‘Venerable old gentleman, is he dead! You’re
very like him.’

Jonas received this compliment with anything but a good grace, perhaps
because of his own private sentiments in reference to the personal
appearance of his deceased parent; perhaps because he was not best
pleased to find that Montague and Tigg were one. That gentleman
perceived it, and tapping him familiarly on the sleeve, beckoned him
to the window. From this moment, Mr Montague’s jocularity and flow of
spirits were remarkable.

‘Do you find me at all changed since that time?’ he asked. ‘Speak
plainly.’

Jonas looked hard at his waistcoat and jewels; and said ‘Rather, ecod!’

‘Was I at all seedy in those days?’ asked Montague.

‘Precious seedy,’ said Jonas.

Mr Montague pointed down into the street, where Bailey and the cab were
in attendance.

‘Neat; perhaps dashing. Do you know whose it is?’

‘No.’

‘Mine. Do you like this room?’

‘It must have cost a lot of money,’ said Jonas.

‘You’re right. Mine too. Why don’t you’--he whispered this, and nudged
him in the side with his elbow--‘why don’t you take premiums, instead of
paying ‘em? That’s what a man like you should do. Join us!’

Jonas stared at him in amazement.

‘Is that a crowded street?’ asked Montague, calling his attention to the
multitude without.

‘Very,’ said Jonas, only glancing at it, and immediately afterwards
looking at him again.

‘There are printed calculations,’ said his companion, ‘which will
tell you pretty nearly how many people will pass up and down that
thoroughfare in the course of a day. I can tell you how many of ‘em will
come in here, merely because they find this office here; knowing no more
about it than they do of the Pyramids. Ha, ha! Join us. You shall come
in cheap.’

Jonas looked at him harder and harder.

‘I can tell you,’ said Tigg in his ear, ‘how many of ‘em will buy
annuities, effect insurances, bring us their money in a hundred shapes
and ways, force it upon us, trust us as if we were the Mint; yet know no
more about us than you do of that crossing-sweeper at the corner. Not so
much. Ha, ha!’

Jonas gradually broke into a smile.

‘Yah!’ said Montague, giving him a pleasant thrust in the breast;
‘you’re too deep for us, you dog, or I wouldn’t have told you. Dine with
me to-morrow, in Pall Mall!’

‘I will’ said Jonas.

‘Done!’ cried Montague. ‘Wait a bit. Take these papers with you and look
‘em over. See,’ he said, snatching some printed forms from the table. ‘B
is a little tradesman, clerk, parson, artist, author, any common thing
you like.’

‘Yes,’ said Jonas, looking greedily over his shoulder. ‘Well!’

‘B wants a loan. Say fifty or a hundred pound; perhaps more; no matter.
B proposes self and two securities. B is accepted. Two securities give
a bond. B assures his own life for double the amount, and brings two
friends’ lives also--just to patronize the office. Ha ha, ha! Is that a
good notion?’

‘Ecod, that’s a capital notion!’ cried Jonas. ‘But does he really do
it?’

‘Do it!’ repeated the chairman. ‘B’s hard up, my good fellow, and will
do anything. Don’t you see? It’s my idea.’

‘It does you honour. I’m blest if it don’t,’ said Jonas.

‘I think it does,’ replied the chairman, ‘and I’m proud to hear you say
so. B pays the highest lawful interest--’

‘That an’t much,’ interrupted Jonas.

‘Right! quite right!’ retorted Tigg. ‘And hard it is upon the part
of the law that it should be so confoundedly down upon us unfortunate
victims; when it takes such amazing good interest for itself from all
its clients. But charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.
Well! The law being hard upon us, we’re not exactly soft upon B; for
besides charging B the regular interest, we get B’s premium, and B’s
friends’ premiums, and we charge B for the bond, and, whether we accept
him or not, we charge B for “inquiries” (we keep a man, at a pound a
week, to make ‘em), and we charge B a trifle for the secretary; and in
short, my good fellow, we stick it into B, up hill and down dale, and
make a devilish comfortable little property out of him. Ha, ha, ha! I
drive B, in point of fact,’ said Tigg, pointing to the cabriolet, ‘and a
thoroughbred horse he is. Ha, ha, ha!’

Jonas enjoyed this joke very much indeed. It was quite in his peculiar
vein of humour.

‘Then,’ said Tigg Montague, ‘we grant annuities on the very lowest and
most advantageous terms known in the money market; and the old ladies
and gentlemen down in the country buy ‘em. Ha, ha, ha! And we pay ‘em
too--perhaps. Ha, ha, ha!’

‘But there’s responsibility in that,’ said Jonas, looking doubtful.

‘I take it all myself,’ said Tigg Montague. ‘Here I am responsible for
everything. The only responsible person in the establishment! Ha,
ha, ha! Then there are the Life Assurances without loans; the common
policies. Very profitable, very comfortable. Money down, you know;
repeated every year; capital fun!’

‘But when they begin to fall in,’ observed Jonas. ‘It’s all very well,
while the office is young, but when the policies begin to die--that’s
what I am thinking of.’

‘At the first start, my dear fellow,’ said Montague, ‘to show you how
correct your judgment is, we had a couple of unlucky deaths that brought
us down to a grand piano.’

‘Brought you down where?’ cried Jonas.

‘I give you my sacred word of honour,’ said Tigg Montague, ‘that I
raised money on every other individual piece of property, and was left
alone in the world with a grand piano. And it was an upright-grand too,
so that I couldn’t even sit upon it. But, my dear fellow, we got over
it. We granted a great many new policies that week (liberal allowance
to solicitors, by the bye), and got over it in no time. Whenever they
should chance to fall in heavily, as you very justly observe they may,
one of these days; then--’ he finished the sentence in so low a whisper,
that only one disconnected word was audible, and that imperfectly. But
it sounded like ‘Bolt.’

‘Why, you’re as bold as brass!’ said Jonas, in the utmost admiration.

‘A man can well afford to be as bold as brass, my good fellow, when he
gets gold in exchange!’ cried the chairman, with a laugh that shook him
from head to foot. ‘You’ll dine with me to-morrow?’

‘At what time?’ asked Jonas.

‘Seven. Here’s my card. Take the documents. I see you’ll join us!’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Jonas. ‘There’s a good deal to be looked
into first.’

‘You shall look,’ said Montague, slapping him on the back, ‘into
anything and everything you please. But you’ll join us, I am convinced.
You were made for it. Bullamy!’

Obedient to the summons and the little bell, the waistcoat appeared.
Being charged to show Jonas out, it went before; and the voice within it
cried, as usual, ‘By your leave there, by your leave! Gentleman from the
board-room, by your leave!’

Mr Montague being left alone, pondered for some moments, and then said,
raising his voice:

‘Is Nadgett in the office there?’

‘Here he is, sir.’ And he promptly entered; shutting the board-room door
after him, as carefully as if he were about to plot a murder.

He was the man at a pound a week who made the inquiries. It was no
virtue or merit in Nadgett that he transacted all his Anglo-Bengalee
business secretly and in the closest confidence; for he was born to be
a secret. He was a short, dried-up, withered old man, who seemed to have
secreted his very blood; for nobody would have given him credit for the
possession of six ounces of it in his whole body. How he lived was a
secret; where he lived was a secret; and even what he was, was a secret.
In his musty old pocket-book he carried contradictory cards, in some of
which he called himself a coal-merchant, in others a wine-merchant,
in others a commission-agent, in others a collector, in others an
accountant; as if he really didn’t know the secret himself. He was
always keeping appointments in the City, and the other man never seemed
to come. He would sit on ‘Change for hours, looking at everybody who
walked in and out, and would do the like at Garraway’s, and in other
business coffee-rooms, in some of which he would be occasionally seen
drying a very damp pocket-handkerchief before the fire, and still
looking over his shoulder for the man who never appeared. He was
mildewed, threadbare, shabby; always had flue upon his legs and back;
and kept his linen so secretly buttoning up and wrapping over, that he
might have had none--perhaps he hadn’t. He carried one stained beaver
glove, which he dangled before him by the forefinger as he walked or
sat; but even its fellow was a secret. Some people said he had been a
bankrupt, others that he had gone an infant into an ancient Chancery
suit which was still depending, but it was all a secret. He carried bits
of sealing-wax and a hieroglyphical old copper seal in his pocket, and
often secretly indited letters in corner boxes of the trysting-places
before mentioned; but they never appeared to go to anybody, for he would
put them into a secret place in his coat, and deliver them to himself
weeks afterwards, very much to his own surprise, quite yellow. He was
that sort of man that if he had died worth a million of money, or had
died worth twopence halfpenny, everybody would have been perfectly
satisfied, and would have said it was just as they expected. And yet
he belonged to a class; a race peculiar to the City; who are secrets as
profound to one another, as they are to the rest of mankind.

‘Mr Nadgett,’ said Montague, copying Jonas Chuzzlewit’s address upon a
piece of paper, from the card which was still lying on the table, ‘any
information about this name, I shall be glad to have myself. Don’t you
mind what it is. Any you can scrape together, bring me. Bring it to me,
Mr Nadgett.’

Nadgett put on his spectacles, and read the name attentively; then
looked at the chairman over his glasses, and bowed; then took them off,
and put them in their case; and then put the case in his pocket. When he
had done so, he looked, without his spectacles, at the paper as it lay
before him, and at the same time produced his pocket-book from somewhere
about the middle of his spine. Large as it was, it was very full of
documents, but he found a place for this one; and having clasped it
carefully, passed it by a kind of solemn legerdemain into the same
region as before.

He withdrew with another bow and without a word; opening the door
no wider than was sufficient for his passage out; and shutting it as
carefully as before. The chairman of the board employed the rest of the
morning in affixing his sign-manual of gracious acceptance to various
new proposals of annuity-purchase and assurance. The Company was looking
up, for they flowed in gayly.



CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

MR MONTAGUE AT HOME. AND MR JONAS CHUZZLEWIT AT HOME


There were many powerful reasons for Jonas Chuzzlewit being strongly
prepossessed in favour of the scheme which its great originator had so
boldly laid open to him; but three among them stood prominently forward.
Firstly, there was money to be made by it. Secondly, the money had the
peculiar charm of being sagaciously obtained at other people’s cost.
Thirdly, it involved much outward show of homage and distinction: a
board being an awful institution in its own sphere, and a director a
mighty man. ‘To make a swingeing profit, have a lot of chaps to order
about, and get into regular good society by one and the same means, and
them so easy to one’s hand, ain’t such a bad look-out,’ thought
Jonas. The latter considerations were only second to his avarice; for,
conscious that there was nothing in his person, conduct, character, or
accomplishments, to command respect, he was greedy of power, and was, in
his heart, as much a tyrant as any laureled conqueror on record.

But he determined to proceed with cunning and caution, and to be very
keen on his observation of the gentility of Mr Montague’s private
establishment. For it no more occurred to this shallow knave that
Montague wanted him to be so, or he wouldn’t have invited him while his
decision was yet in abeyance, than the possibility of that genius being
able to overreach him in any way, pierced through his self-deceit by the
inlet of a needle’s point. He had said, in the outset, that Jonas
was too sharp for him; and Jonas, who would have been sharp enough to
believe him in nothing else, though he had solemnly sworn it, believed
him in that, instantly.

It was with a faltering hand, and yet with an imbecile attempt at a
swagger, that he knocked at his new friend’s door in Pall Mall when the
appointed hour arrived. Mr Bailey quickly answered to the summons. He
was not proud and was kindly disposed to take notice of Jonas; but Jonas
had forgotten him.

‘Mr Montague at home?’

‘I should hope he wos at home, and waiting dinner, too,’ said Bailey,
with the ease of an old acquaintance. ‘Will you take your hat up along
with you, or leave it here?’

Mr Jonas preferred leaving it there.

‘The hold name, I suppose?’ said Bailey, with a grin.

Mr Jonas stared at him in mute indignation.

‘What, don’t you remember hold mother Todgers’s?’ said Mr Bailey, with
his favourite action of the knees and boots. ‘Don’t you remember my
taking your name up to the young ladies, when you came a-courting there?
A reg’lar scaly old shop, warn’t it? Times is changed ain’t they. I say
how you’ve growed!’

Without pausing for any acknowledgement of this compliment, he ushered
the visitor upstairs, and having announced him, retired with a private
wink.

The lower story of the house was occupied by a wealthy tradesman, but
Mr Montague had all the upper portion, and splendid lodging it was. The
room in which he received Jonas was a spacious and elegant apartment,
furnished with extreme magnificence; decorated with pictures, copies
from the antique in alabaster and marble, china vases, lofty mirrors,
crimson hangings of the richest silk, gilded carvings, luxurious
couches, glistening cabinets inlaid with precious woods; costly toys of
every sort in negligent abundance. The only guests besides Jonas
were the doctor, the resident Director, and two other gentlemen, whom
Montague presented in due form.

‘My dear friend, I am delighted to see you. Jobling you know, I
believe?’

‘I think so,’ said the doctor pleasantly, as he stepped out of the
circle to shake hands. ‘I trust I have the honour. I hope so. My dear
sir, I see you well. Quite well? THAT’S well!’

‘Mr Wolf,’ said Montague, as soon as the doctor would allow him to
introduce the two others, ‘Mr Chuzzlewit. Mr Pip, Mr Chuzzlewit.’

Both gentlemen were exceedingly happy to have the honour of making Mr
Chuzzlewit’s acquaintance. The doctor drew Jonas a little apart, and
whispered behind his hand:

‘Men of the world, my dear sir--men of the world. Hem! Mr Wolf--literary
character--you needn’t mention it--remarkably clever weekly paper--oh,
remarkably clever! Mr Pip--theatrical man--capital man to know--oh,
capital man!’

‘Well!’ said Wolf, folding his arms and resuming a conversation which
the arrival of Jonas had interrupted. ‘And what did Lord Nobley say to
that?’

‘Why,’ returned Pip, with an oath. ‘He didn’t know what to say. Same,
sir, if he wasn’t as mute as a poker. But you know what a good fellow
Nobley is!’

‘The best fellow in the world!’ cried Wolf. ‘It as only last week that
Nobley said to me, “By Gad, Wolf, I’ve got a living to bestow, and if
you had but been brought up at the University, strike me blind if I
wouldn’t have made a parson of you!”’

‘Just like him,’ said Pip with another oath. ‘And he’d have done it!’

‘Not a doubt of it,’ said Wolf. ‘But you were going to tell us--’

‘Oh, yes!’ cried Pip. ‘To be sure. So I was. At first he was dumb--sewn
up, dead, sir--but after a minute he said to the Duke, “Here’s Pip.
Ask Pip. Pip’s our mutual friend. Ask Pip. He knows.” “Damme!” said the
Duke, “I appeal to Pip then. Come, Pip. Bandy or not bandy? Speak out!”
 “Bandy, your Grace, by the Lord Harry!” said I. “Ha, ha!” laughed the
Duke. “To be sure she is. Bravo, Pip. Well said Pip. I wish I may die
if you’re not a trump, Pip. Pop me down among your fashionable visitors
whenever I’m in town, Pip.” And so I do, to this day.’

The conclusion of this story gave immense satisfaction, which was in
no degree lessened by the announcement of dinner. Jonas repaired to the
dining room, along with his distinguished host, and took his seat at the
board between that individual and his friend the doctor. The rest fell
into their places like men who were well accustomed to the house; and
dinner was done full justice to, by all parties.

It was a good a one as money (or credit, no matter which) could produce.
The dishes, wines, and fruits were of the choicest kind. Everything was
elegantly served. The plate was gorgeous. Mr Jonas was in the midst of
a calculation of the value of this item alone, when his host disturbed
him.

‘A glass of wine?’

‘Oh!’ said Jonas, who had had several glasses already. ‘As much of that
as you like! It’s too good to refuse.’

‘Well said, Mr Chuzzlewit!’ cried Wolf.

‘Tom Gag, upon my soul!’ said Pip.

‘Positively, you know, that’s--ha, ha, ha!’ observed the doctor, laying
down his knife and fork for one instant, and then going to work again,
pell-mell--‘that’s epigrammatic; quite!’

‘You’re tolerably comfortable, I hope?’ said Tigg, apart to Jonas.

‘Oh! You needn’t trouble your head about ME,’ he replied, ‘Famous!’

‘I thought it best not to have a party,’ said Tigg. ‘You feel that?’

‘Why, what do you call this?’ retorted Jonas. ‘You don’t mean to say you
do this every day, do you?’

‘My dear fellow,’ said Montague, shrugging his shoulders, ‘every day of
my life, when I dine at home. This is my common style. It was of no use
having anything uncommon for you. You’d have seen through it. “You’ll
have a party?” said Crimple. “No, I won’t,” I said, “he shall take us in
the rough!”

‘And pretty smooth, too, ecod!’ said Jonas, glancing round the table.
‘This don’t cost a trifle.’

‘Why, to be candid with you, it does not,’ returned the other. ‘But I
like this sort of thing. It’s the way I spend my money.’

Jonas thrust his tongue into his cheek, and said, ‘Was it?’

‘When you join us, you won’t get rid of your share of the profits in the
same way?’ said Tigg.

‘Quite different,’ retorted Jonas.

‘Well, and you’re right,’ said Tigg, with friendly candour. ‘You
needn’t. It’s not necessary. One of a Company must do it to hold
the connection together; but, as I take a pleasure in it, that’s my
department. You don’t mind dining expensively at another man’s expense,
I hope?’

‘Not a bit,’ said Jonas.

‘Then I hope you’ll often dine with me?’

‘Ah!’ said Jonas, ‘I don’t mind. On the contrary.’

‘And I’ll never attempt to talk business to you over wine, I take my
oath,’ said Tigg. ‘Oh deep, deep, deep of you this morning! I must tell
‘em that. They’re the very men to enjoy it. Pip, my good fellow, I’ve
a splendid little trait to tell you of my friend Chuzzlewit who is
the deepest dog I know; I give you my sacred word of honour he is the
deepest dog I know, Pip!’

Pip swore a frightful oath that he was sure of it already; and
the anecdote, being told, was received with loud applause, as an
incontestable proof of Mr Jonas’s greatness. Pip, in a natural spirit of
emulation, then related some instances of his own depth; and Wolf not
to be left behind-hand, recited the leading points of one or two vastly
humorous articles he was then preparing. These lucubrations being of
what he called ‘a warm complexion,’ were highly approved; and all the
company agreed that they were full of point.

‘Men of the world, my dear sir,’ Jobling whispered to Jonas; ‘thorough
men of the world! To a professional person like myself it’s
quite refreshing to come into this kind of society. It’s not only
agreeable--and nothing CAN be more agreeable--but it’s philosophically
improving. It’s character, my dear sir; character!’

It is so pleasant to find real merit appreciated, whatever its
particular walk in life may be, that the general harmony of the company
was doubtless much promoted by their knowing that the two men of the
world were held in great esteem by the upper classes of society, and
by the gallant defenders of their country in the army and navy, but
particularly the former. The least of their stories had a colonel in it;
lords were as plentiful as oaths; and even the Blood Royal ran in the
muddy channel of their personal recollections.

‘Mr Chuzzlewit didn’t know him, I’m afraid,’ said Wolf, in reference to
a certain personage of illustrious descent, who had previously figured
in a reminiscence.

‘No,’ said Tigg. ‘But we must bring him into contact with this sort of
fellows.’

‘He was very fond of literature,’ observed Wolf.

‘Was he?’ said Tigg.

‘Oh, yes; he took my paper regularly for many years. Do you know he
said some good things now and then? He asked a certain Viscount, who’s
a friend of mine--Pip knows him--“What’s the editor’s name, what’s the
editor’s name?” “Wolf.” “Wolf, eh? Sharp biter, Wolf. We must keep the
Wolf from the door, as the proverb says.” It was very well. And being
complimentary, I printed it.’

‘But the Viscount’s the boy!’ cried Pip, who invented a new oath for
the introduction of everything he said. ‘The Viscount’s the boy! He came
into our place one night to take Her home; rather slued, but not much;
and said, “Where’s Pip? I want to see Pip. Produce Pip!”--“What’s the
row, my lord?”--“Shakspeare’s an infernal humbug, Pip! What’s the good
of Shakspeare, Pip? I never read him. What the devil is it all about,
Pip? There’s a lot of feet in Shakspeare’s verse, but there an’t any
legs worth mentioning in Shakspeare’s plays, are there, Pip? Juliet,
Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and all the rest of ‘em, whatever their names
are, might as well have no legs at all, for anything the audience know
about it, Pip. Why, in that respect they’re all Miss Biffins to the
audience, Pip. I’ll tell you what it is. What the people call dramatic
poetry is a collection of sermons. Do I go to the theatre to be
lectured? No, Pip. If I wanted that, I’d go to church. What’s the
legitimate object of the drama, Pip? Human nature. What are legs? Human
nature. Then let us have plenty of leg pieces, Pip, and I’ll stand by
you, my buck!” and I am proud to say,’ added Pip, ‘that he DID stand by
me, handsomely.’

The conversation now becoming general, Mr Jonas’s opinion was requested
on this subject; and as it was in full accordance with the sentiments of
Mr Pip, that gentleman was extremely gratified. Indeed, both himself and
Wolf had so much in common with Jonas, that they became very amicable;
and between their increasing friendship and the fumes of wine, Jonas
grew talkative.

It does not follow in the case of such a person that the more talkative
he becomes, the more agreeable he is; on the contrary, his merits show
to most advantage, perhaps, in silence. Having no means, as he thought,
of putting himself on an equality with the rest, but by the assertion
of that depth and sharpness on which he had been complimented, Jonas
exhibited that faculty to the utmost; and was so deep and sharp that
he lost himself in his own profundity, and cut his fingers with his own
edge-tools.

It was especially in his way and character to exhibit his quality at his
entertainer’s expense; and while he drank of his sparkling wines, and
partook of his monstrous profusion, to ridicule the extravagance which
had set such costly fare before him. Even at such a wanton board, and in
such more than doubtful company, this might have proved a disagreeable
experiment, but that Tigg and Crimple, studying to understand their man
thoroughly, gave him what license he chose: knowing that the more
he took, the better for their purpose. And thus while the blundering
cheat--gull that he was, for all his cunning--thought himself rolled
up hedgehog fashion, with his sharpest points towards them, he was,
in fact, betraying all his vulnerable parts to their unwinking
watchfulness.

Whether the two gentlemen who contributed so much to the doctor’s
philosophical knowledge (by the way, the doctor slipped off quietly,
after swallowing his usual amount of wine) had had their cue distinctly
from the host, or took it from what they saw and heard, they acted
their parts very well. They solicited the honour of Jonas’s better
acquaintance; trusted that they would have the pleasure of introducing
him into that elevated society in which he was so well qualified to
shine; and informed him, in the most friendly manner that the advantages
of their respective establishments were entirely at his control. In a
word, they said ‘Be one of us!’ And Jonas said he was infinitely obliged
to them, and he would be; adding within himself, that so long as they
‘stood treat,’ there was nothing he would like better.

After coffee, which was served in the drawing-room, there was a short
interval (mainly sustained by Pip and Wolf) of conversation; rather
highly spiced and strongly seasoned. When it flagged, Jonas took it up
and showed considerable humour in appraising the furniture; inquiring
whether such an article was paid for; what it had originally cost, and
the like. In all of this, he was, as he considered, desperately hard on
Montague, and very demonstrative of his own brilliant parts.

Some Champagne Punch gave a new though temporary fillip to the
entertainments of the evening. For after leading to some noisy
proceedings, which were not intelligible, it ended in the unsteady
departure of the two gentlemen of the world, and the slumber of Mr Jonas
upon one of the sofas.

As he could not be made to understand where he was, Mr Bailey received
orders to call a hackney-coach, and take him home; which that young
gentleman roused himself from an uneasy sleep in the hall to do. It
being now almost three o’clock in the morning.

‘Is he hooked, do you think?’ whispered Crimple, as himself and partner
stood in a distant part of the room observing him as he lay.

‘Aye!’ said Tigg, in the same tone. ‘With a strong iron, perhaps. Has
Nadgett been here to-night?’

‘Yes. I went out to him. Hearing you had company, he went away.’

‘Why did he do that?’

‘He said he would come back early in the morning, before you were out of
bed.’

‘Tell them to be sure and send him up to my bedside. Hush! Here’s the
boy! Now Mr Bailey, take this gentleman home, and see him safely in.
Hallo, here! Why Chuzzlewit, halloa!’

They got him upright with some difficulty, and assisted him downstairs,
where they put his hat upon his head, and tumbled him into the coach.
Mr Bailey, having shut him in, mounted the box beside the coachman, and
smoked his cigar with an air of particular satisfaction; the undertaking
in which he was engaged having a free and sporting character about it,
which was quite congenial to his taste.

Arriving in due time at the house in the City, Mr Bailey jumped down,
and expressed the lively nature of his feelings in a knock the like of
which had probably not been heard in that quarter since the great fire
of London. Going out into the road to observe the effect of this feat,
he saw that a dim light, previously visible at an upper window, had been
already removed and was travelling downstairs. To obtain a foreknowledge
of the bearer of this taper, Mr Bailey skipped back to the door again,
and put his eye to the keyhole.

It was the merry one herself. But sadly, strangely altered! So careworn
and dejected, so faltering and full of fear; so fallen, humbled,
broken; that to have seen her quiet in her coffin would have been a less
surprise.

She set the light upon a bracket in the hall, and laid her hand upon her
heart; upon her eyes; upon her burning head. Then she came on towards
the door with such a wild and hurried step that Mr Bailey lost his
self-possession, and still had his eye where the keyhole had been, when
she opened it.

‘Aha!’ said Mr Bailey, with an effort. ‘There you are, are you? What’s
the matter? Ain’t you well, though?’

In the midst of her astonishment as she recognized him in his altered
dress, so much of her old smile came back to her face that Bailey was
glad. But next moment he was sorry again, for he saw tears standing in
her poor dim eyes.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ said Bailey. ‘There ain’t nothing the matter.
I’ve brought home Mr Chuzzlewit. He ain’t ill. He’s only a little
swipey, you know.’ Mr Bailey reeled in his boots, to express
intoxication.

‘Have you come from Mrs Todgers’s?’ asked Merry, trembling.

‘Todgers’s, bless you! No!’ cried Mr Bailey. ‘I haven’t got nothin, to
do with Todgers’s. I cut that connection long ago. He’s been a-dining
with my governor at the west-end. Didn’t you know he was a-coming to see
us?’

‘No,’ she said, faintly.

‘Oh yes! We’re heavy swells too, and so I tell you. Don’t you come out,
a-catching cold in your head. I’ll wake him!’ Mr Bailey expressing in
his demeanour a perfect confidence that he could carry him in with ease,
if necessary, opened the coach door, let down the steps, and giving
Jonas a shake, cried ‘We’ve got home, my flower! Tumble up, then!’

He was so far recovered as to be able to respond to this appeal, and
to come stumbling out of the coach in a heap, to the great hazard of Mr
Bailey’s person. When he got upon the pavement, Mr Bailey first butted
at him in front, and then dexterously propped him up behind; and having
steadied him by these means, he assisted him into the house.

‘You go up first with the light,’ said Bailey to Mr Jonas, ‘and we’ll
foller. Don’t tremble so. He won’t hurt you. When I’ve had a drop too
much, I’m full of good natur myself.’

She went on before; and her husband and Bailey, by dint of tumbling
over each other, and knocking themselves about, got at last into the
sitting-room above stairs, where Jonas staggered into a seat.

‘There!’ said Mr Bailey. ‘He’s all right now. You ain’t got nothing to
cry for, bless you! He’s righter than a trivet!’

The ill-favoured brute, with dress awry, and sodden face, and rumpled
hair, sat blinking and drooping, and rolling his idiotic eyes about,
until, becoming conscious by degrees, he recognized his wife, and shook
his fist at her.

‘Ah!’ cried Mr Bailey, squaring his arms with a sudden emotion. ‘What,
you’re wicious, are you? Would you though! You’d better not!’

‘Pray, go away!’ said Merry. ‘Bailey, my good boy, go home. Jonas!’ she
said; timidly laying her hand upon his shoulder, and bending her head
down over him. ‘Jonas!’

‘Look at her!’ cried Jonas, pushing her off with his extended arm. ‘Look
here! Look at her! Here’s a bargain for a man!’

‘Dear Jonas!’

‘Dear Devil!’ he replied, with a fierce gesture. ‘You’re a pretty clog
to be tied to a man for life, you mewling, white-faced cat! Get out of
my sight!’

‘I know you don’t mean it, Jonas. You wouldn’t say it if you were
sober.’

With affected gayety she gave Bailey a piece of money, and again
implored him to be gone. Her entreaty was so earnest, that the boy had
not the heart to stay there. But he stopped at the bottom of the stairs,
and listened.

‘I wouldn’t say it if I was sober!’ retorted Jonas. ‘You know better.
Have I never said it when I was sober?’

‘Often, indeed!’ she answered through her tears.

‘Hark ye!’ cried Jonas, stamping his foot upon the ground. ‘You made me
bear your pretty humours once, and ecod I’ll make you bear mine now. I
always promised myself I would. I married you that I might. I’ll know
who’s master, and who’s slave!’

‘Heaven knows I am obedient!’ said the sobbing girl. ‘Much more so than
I ever thought to be!’

Jonas laughed in his drunken exultation. ‘What! you’re finding it out,
are you! Patience, and you will in time! Griffins have claws, my girl.
There’s not a pretty slight you ever put upon me, nor a pretty trick you
ever played me, nor a pretty insolence you ever showed me, that I won’t
pay back a hundred-fold. What else did I marry you for? YOU, too!’ he
said, with coarse contempt.

It might have softened him--indeed it might--to hear her turn a little
fragment of a song he used to say he liked; trying, with a heart so
full, to win him back.

‘Oho!’ he said, ‘you’re deaf, are you? You don’t hear me, eh? So much
the better for you. I hate you. I hate myself, for having, been fool
enough to strap a pack upon my back for the pleasure of treading on it
whenever I choose. Why, things have opened to me, now, so that I might
marry almost where I liked. But I wouldn’t; I’d keep single. I ought to
be single, among the friends I know. Instead of that, here I am, tied
like a log to you. Pah! Why do you show your pale face when I come home?
Am I never to forget you?’

‘How late it is!’ she said cheerfully, opening the shutter after an
interval of silence. ‘Broad day, Jonas!’

‘Broad day or black night, what do I care!’ was the kind rejoinder.

‘The night passed quickly, too. I don’t mind sitting up, at all.’

‘Sit up for me again, if you dare!’ growled Jonas.

‘I was reading,’ she proceeded, ‘all night long. I began when you went
out, and read till you came home again. The strangest story, Jonas! And
true, the book says. I’ll tell it you to-morrow.’

‘True, was it?’ said Jonas, doggedly.

‘So the book says.’

‘Was there anything in it, about a man’s being determined to conquer his
wife, break her spirit, bend her temper, crush all her humours like so
many nut-shells--kill her, for aught I know?’ said Jonas.

‘No. Not a word,’ she answered quickly.

‘Oh!’ he returned. ‘That’ll be a true story though, before long; for all
the book says nothing about it. It’s a lying book, I see. A fit book for
a lying reader. But you’re deaf. I forgot that.’

There was another interval of silence; and the boy was stealing away,
when he heard her footstep on the floor, and stopped. She went up to
him, as it seemed, and spoke lovingly; saying that she would defer to
him in everything and would consult his wishes and obey them, and they
might be very happy if he would be gentle with her. He answered with an
imprecation, and--

Not with a blow? Yes. Stern truth against the base-souled villain; with
a blow.

No angry cries; no loud reproaches. Even her weeping and her sobs were
stifled by her clinging round him. She only said, repeating it in agony
of heart, how could he, could he, could he--and lost utterance in tears.

Oh woman, God beloved in old Jerusalem! The best among us need deal
lightly with thy faults, if only for the punishment thy nature will
endure, in bearing heavy evidence against us, on the Day of Judgment!



CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

IN WHICH SOME PEOPLE ARE PRECOCIOUS, OTHERS PROFESSIONAL, AND OTHERS
MYSTERIOUS; ALL IN THEIR SEVERAL WAYS


It may have been the restless remembrance of what he had seen and heard
overnight, or it may have been no deeper mental operation than the
discovery that he had nothing to do, which caused Mr Bailey, on the
following afternoon, to feel particularly disposed for agreeable
society, and prompted him to pay a visit to his friend Poll Sweedlepipe.

On the little bell giving clamorous notice of a visitor’s approach (for
Mr Bailey came in at the door with a lunge, to get as much sound out of
the bell as possible), Poll Sweedlepipe desisted from the contemplation
of a favourite owl, and gave his young friend hearty welcome.

‘Why, you look smarter by day,’ said Poll, ‘than you do by candle-light.
I never see such a tight young dasher.’

‘Reether so, Polly. How’s our fair friend, Sairah?’

‘Oh, she’s pretty well,’ said Poll. ‘She’s at home.’

‘There’s the remains of a fine woman about Sairah, Poll,’ observed Mr
Bailey, with genteel indifference.

‘Oh!’ thought Poll, ‘he’s old. He must be very old!’

‘Too much crumb, you know,’ said Mr Bailey; ‘too fat, Poll. But there’s
many worse at her time of life.’

‘The very owl’s a-opening his eyes!’ thought Poll. ‘I don’t wonder at it
in a bird of his opinions.’

He happened to have been sharpening his razors, which were lying open
in a row, while a huge strop dangled from the wall. Glancing at these
preparations, Mr Bailey stroked his chin, and a thought appeared to
occur to him.

‘Poll,’ he said, ‘I ain’t as neat as I could wish about the gills. Being
here, I may as well have a shave, and get trimmed close.’

The barber stood aghast; but Mr Bailey divested himself of his
neck-cloth, and sat down in the easy shaving chair with all the dignity
and confidence in life. There was no resisting his manner. The evidence
of sight and touch became as nothing. His chin was as smooth as a
new-laid egg or a scraped Dutch cheese; but Poll Sweedlepipe wouldn’t
have ventured to deny, on affidavit, that he had the beard of a Jewish
rabbi.

‘Go WITH the grain, Poll, all round, please,’ said Mr Bailey, screwing
up his face for the reception of the lather. ‘You may do wot you like
with the bits of whisker. I don’t care for ‘em.’

The meek little barber stood gazing at him with the brush and soap-dish
in his hand, stirring them round and round in a ludicrous uncertainty,
as if he were disabled by some fascination from beginning. At last he
made a dash at Mr Bailey’s cheek. Then he stopped again, as if the
ghost of a beard had suddenly receded from his touch; but receiving mild
encouragement from Mr Bailey, in the form of an adjuration to ‘Go in and
win,’ he lathered him bountifully. Mr Bailey smiled through the suds in
his satisfaction. ‘Gently over the stones, Poll. Go a tip-toe over the
pimples!’

Poll Sweedlepipe obeyed, and scraped the lather off again with
particular care. Mr Bailey squinted at every successive dab, as it
was deposited on a cloth on his left shoulder, and seemed, with a
microscopic eye, to detect some bristles in it; for he murmured more
than once ‘Reether redder than I could wish, Poll.’ The operation being
concluded, Poll fell back and stared at him again, while Mr Bailey,
wiping his face on the jack-towel, remarked, ‘that arter late hours
nothing freshened up a man so much as a easy shave.’

He was in the act of tying his cravat at the glass, without his coat,
and Poll had wiped his razor, ready for the next customer, when Mrs
Gamp, coming downstairs, looked in at the shop-door to give the barber
neighbourly good day. Feeling for her unfortunate situation, in having
conceived a regard for himself which it was not in the nature of things
that he could return, Mr Bailey hastened to soothe her with words of
kindness.

‘Hallo!’ he said, ‘Sairah! I needn’t ask you how you’ve been this long
time, for you’re in full bloom. All a-blowin and a-growin; ain’t she,
Polly?’

‘Why, drat the Bragian boldness of that boy!’ cried Mrs Gamp, though
not displeased. ‘What a imperent young sparrow it is! I wouldn’t be that
creetur’s mother not for fifty pound!’

Mr Bailey regarded this as a delicate confession of her attachment,
and a hint that no pecuniary gain could recompense her for its being
rendered hopeless. He felt flattered. Disinterested affection is always
flattering.

‘Ah, dear!’ moaned Mrs Gamp, sinking into the shaving chair, ‘that there
blessed Bull, Mr Sweedlepipe, has done his wery best to conker me. Of
all the trying inwalieges in this walley of the shadder, that one beats
‘em black and blue.’

It was the practice of Mrs Gamp and her friends in the profession, to
say this of all the easy customers; as having at once the effect of
discouraging competitors for office, and accounting for the necessity of
high living on the part of the nurses.

‘Talk of constitooshun!’ Mrs Gamp observed. ‘A person’s constitooshun
need be made of bricks to stand it. Mrs Harris jestly says to me, but
t’other day, “Oh! Sairey Gamp,” she says, “how is it done?” “Mrs Harris,
ma’am,” I says to her, “we gives no trust ourselves, and puts a deal
o’trust elsevere; these is our religious feelins, and we finds ‘em
answer.” “Sairey,” says Mrs Harris, “sech is life. Vich likeways is the
hend of all things!”’

The barber gave a soft murmur, as much as to say that Mrs Harris’s
remark, though perhaps not quite so intelligible as could be desired
from such an authority, did equal honour to her head and to her heart.

‘And here,’ continued Mrs Gamp, ‘and here am I a-goin twenty mile in
distant, on as wentersome a chance as ever any one as monthlied ever
run, I do believe. Says Mrs Harris, with a woman’s and a mother’s
art a-beatin in her human breast, she says to me, “You’re not a-goin,
Sairey, Lord forgive you!” “Why am I not a-goin, Mrs Harris?” I replies.
“Mrs Gill,” I says, “wos never wrong with six; and is it likely,
ma’am--I ast you as a mother--that she will begin to be unreg’lar now?
Often and often have I heerd him say,” I says to Mrs Harris, meaning Mr
Gill, “that he would back his wife agen Moore’s almanack, to name the
very day and hour, for ninepence farden. IS it likely, ma’am,” I says,
“as she will fail this once?” Says Mrs Harris “No, ma’am, not in the
course of natur. But,” she says, the tears a-fillin in her eyes, “you
knows much betterer than me, with your experienge, how little puts us
out. A Punch’s show,” she says, “a chimbley sweep, a newfundlan dog, or
a drunkin man a-comin round the corner sharp may do it.” So it may, Mr
Sweedlepipes,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘there’s no deniging of it; and though my
books is clear for a full week, I takes a anxious art along with me, I
do assure you, sir.’

‘You’re so full of zeal, you see!’ said Poll. ‘You worrit yourself so.’

‘Worrit myself!’ cried Mrs Gamp, raising her hands and turning up her
eyes. ‘You speak truth in that, sir, if you never speaks no more ‘twixt
this and when two Sundays jines together. I feels the sufferins of other
people more than I feels my own, though no one mayn’t suppoge it. The
families I’ve had,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘if all was knowd and credit done
where credit’s doo, would take a week to chris’en at Saint Polge’s
fontin!’

‘Where’s the patient goin?’ asked Sweedlepipe.

‘Into Har’fordshire, which is his native air. But native airs nor native
graces neither,’ Mrs Gamp observed, ‘won’t bring HIM round.’

‘So bad as that?’ inquired the wistful barber. ‘Indeed!’

Mrs Gamp shook her head mysteriously, and pursed up her lips. ‘There’s
fevers of the mind,’ she said, ‘as well as body. You may take your slime
drafts till you flies into the air with efferwescence; but you won’t
cure that.’

‘Ah!’ said the barber, opening his eyes, and putting on his raven
aspect; ‘Lor!’

‘No. You may make yourself as light as any gash balloon,’ said Mrs Gamp.
‘But talk, when you’re wrong in your head and when you’re in your sleep,
of certain things; and you’ll be heavy in your mind.’

‘Of what kind of things now?’ inquired Poll, greedily biting his nails
in his great interest. ‘Ghosts?’

Mrs Gamp, who perhaps had been already tempted further than she had
intended to go, by the barber’s stimulating curiosity, gave a sniff of
uncommon significance, and said, it didn’t signify.

‘I’m a-goin down with my patient in the coach this arternoon,’ she
proceeded. ‘I’m a-goin to stop with him a day or so, till he gets a
country nuss (drat them country nusses, much the orkard hussies knows
about their bis’ness); and then I’m a-comin back; and that’s my trouble,
Mr Sweedlepipes. But I hope that everythink’ll only go on right and
comfortable as long as I’m away; perwisin which, as Mrs Harris says, Mrs
Gill is welcome to choose her own time; all times of the day and night
bein’ equally the same to me.’

During the progress of the foregoing remarks, which Mrs Gamp had
addressed exclusively to the barber, Mr Bailey had been tying his
cravat, getting on his coat, and making hideous faces at himself in the
glass. Being now personally addressed by Mrs Gamp, he turned round, and
mingled in the conversation.

‘You ain’t been in the City, I suppose, sir, since we was all three
there together,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘at Mr Chuzzlewit’s?’

‘Yes, I have, Sairah. I was there last night.’

‘Last night!’ cried the barber.

‘Yes, Poll, reether so. You can call it this morning, if you like to be
particular. He dined with us.’

‘Who does that young Limb mean by “hus?”’ said Mrs Gamp, with most
impatient emphasis.

‘Me and my Governor, Sairah. He dined at our house. We wos very merry,
Sairah. So much so, that I was obliged to see him home in a hackney
coach at three o’clock in the morning.’ It was on the tip of the boy’s
tongue to relate what had followed; but remembering how easily it might
be carried to his master’s ears, and the repeated cautions he had had
from Mr Crimple ‘not to chatter,’ he checked himself; adding, only, ‘She
was sitting up, expecting him.’

‘And all things considered,’ said Mrs Gamp sharply, ‘she might have
know’d better than to go a-tirin herself out, by doin’ anythink of the
sort. Did they seem pretty pleasant together, sir?’

‘Oh, yes,’ answered Bailey, ‘pleasant enough.’

‘I’m glad on it,’ said Mrs Gamp, with a second sniff of significance.

‘They haven’t been married so long,’ observed Poll, rubbing his hands,
‘that they need be anything but pleasant yet awhile.’

‘No,’ said Mrs Gamp, with a third significant signal.

‘Especially,’ pursued the barber, ‘when the gentleman bears such a
character as you gave him.’

‘I speak; as I find, Mr Sweedlepipes,’ said Mrs Gamp. ‘Forbid it should
be otherways! But we never knows wot’s hidden in each other’s hearts;
and if we had glass winders there, we’d need keep the shetters up, some
on us, I do assure you!’

‘But you don’t mean to say--’ Poll Sweedlepipe began.

‘No,’ said Mrs Gamp, cutting him very short, ‘I don’t. Don’t think I do.
The torters of the Imposition shouldn’t make me own I did. All I says
is,’ added the good woman, rising and folding her shawl about her, ‘that
the Bull’s a-waitin, and the precious moments is a-flyin’ fast.’

The little barber having in his eager curiosity a great desire to see
Mrs Gamp’s patient, proposed to Mr Bailey that they should accompany
her to the Bull, and witness the departure of the coach. That young
gentleman assenting, they all went out together.

Arriving at the tavern, Mrs Gamp (who was full-dressed for the journey,
in her latest suit of mourning) left her friends to entertain
themselves in the yard, while she ascended to the sick room, where her
fellow-labourer Mrs Prig was dressing the invalid.

He was so wasted, that it seemed as if his bones would rattle when they
moved him. His cheeks were sunken, and his eyes unnaturally large. He
lay back in the easy-chair like one more dead than living; and rolled
his languid eyes towards the door when Mrs Gamp appeared, as painfully
as if their weight alone were burdensome to move.

‘And how are we by this time?’ Mrs Gamp observed. ‘We looks charming.’

‘We looks a deal charminger than we are, then,’ returned Mrs Prig, a
little chafed in her temper. ‘We got out of bed back’ards, I think, for
we’re as cross as two sticks. I never see sich a man. He wouldn’t have
been washed, if he’d had his own way.’

‘She put the soap in my mouth,’ said the unfortunate patient feebly.

‘Couldn’t you keep it shut then?’ retorted Mrs Prig. ‘Who do you think’s
to wash one feater, and miss another, and wear one’s eyes out with all
manner of fine work of that description, for half-a-crown a day! If you
wants to be tittivated, you must pay accordin’.’

‘Oh dear me!’ cried the patient, ‘oh dear, dear!’

‘There!’ said Mrs Prig, ‘that’s the way he’s been a-conductin of
himself, Sarah, ever since I got him out of bed, if you’ll believe it.’

‘Instead of being grateful,’ Mrs Gamp observed, ‘for all our little
ways. Oh, fie for shame, sir, fie for shame!’

Here Mrs Prig seized the patient by the chin, and began to rasp his
unhappy head with a hair-brush.

‘I suppose you don’t like that, neither!’ she observed, stopping to look
at him.

It was just possible that he didn’t for the brush was a specimen of
the hardest kind of instrument producible by modern art; and his very
eyelids were red with the friction. Mrs Prig was gratified to observe
the correctness of her supposition, and said triumphantly ‘she know’d as
much.’

When his hair was smoothed down comfortably into his eyes, Mrs Prig and
Mrs Gamp put on his neckerchief; adjusting his shirt collar with great
nicety, so that the starched points should also invade those organs, and
afflict them with an artificial ophthalmia. His waistcoat and coat
were next arranged; and as every button was wrenched into a wrong
button-hole, and the order of his boots was reversed, he presented on
the whole rather a melancholy appearance.

‘I don’t think it’s right,’ said the poor weak invalid. ‘I feel as if I
was in somebody else’s clothes. I’m all on one side; and you’ve made one
of my legs shorter than the other. There’s a bottle in my pocket too.
What do you make me sit upon a bottle for?’

‘Deuce take the man!’ cried Mrs Gamp, drawing it forth. ‘If he ain’t
been and got my night-bottle here. I made a little cupboard of his coat
when it hung behind the door, and quite forgot it, Betsey. You’ll find a
ingun or two, and a little tea and sugar in his t’other pocket, my dear,
if you’ll just be good enough to take ‘em out.’

Betsey produced the property in question, together with some other
articles of general chandlery; and Mrs Gamp transferred them to her own
pocket, which was a species of nankeen pannier. Refreshment then arrived
in the form of chops and strong ale for the ladies, and a basin of
beef-tea for the patient; which refection was barely at an end when John
Westlock appeared.

‘Up and dressed!’ cried John, sitting down beside him. ‘That’s brave.
How do you feel?’

‘Much better. But very weak.’

‘No wonder. You have had a hard bout of it. But country air, and change
of scene,’ said John, ‘will make another man of you! Why, Mrs Gamp,’
he added, laughing, as he kindly arranged the sick man’s garments, ‘you
have odd notions of a gentleman’s dress!’

‘Mr Lewsome an’t a easy gent to get into his clothes, sir,’ Mrs Gamp
replied with dignity; ‘as me and Betsey Prig can certify afore the Lord
Mayor and Uncommon Counsellors, if needful!’

John at that moment was standing close in front of the sick man, in the
act of releasing him from the torture of the collars before mentioned,
when he said in a whisper:

‘Mr Westlock! I don’t wish to be overheard. I have something very
particular and strange to say to you; something that has been a dreadful
weight on my mind, through this long illness.’

Quick in all his motions, John was turning round to desire the women to
leave the room; when the sick man held him by the sleeve.

‘Not now. I’ve not the strength. I’ve not the courage. May I tell it
when I have? May I write it, if I find that easier and better?’

‘May you!’ cried John. ‘Why, Lewsome, what is this!’

‘Don’t ask me what it is. It’s unnatural and cruel. Frightful to think
of. Frightful to tell. Frightful to know. Frightful to have helped in.
Let me kiss your hand for all your goodness to me. Be kinder still, and
don’t ask me what it is!’

At first, John gazed at him in great surprise; but remembering how very
much reduced he was, and how recently his brain had been on fire with
fever, believed that he was labouring under some imaginary horror or
despondent fancy. For farther information on this point, he took an
opportunity of drawing Mrs Gamp aside, while Betsey Prig was wrapping
him in cloaks and shawls, and asked her whether he was quite collected
in his mind.

‘Oh bless you, no!’ said Mrs Gamp. ‘He hates his nusses to this hour.
They always does it, sir. It’s a certain sign. If you could have heerd
the poor dear soul a-findin fault with me and Betsey Prig, not half an
hour ago, you would have wondered how it is we don’t get fretted to the
tomb.’

This almost confirmed John in his suspicion; so, not taking what had
passed into any serious account, he resumed his former cheerful manner,
and assisted by Mrs Gamp and Betsey Prig, conducted Lewsome downstairs
to the coach; just then upon the point of starting. Poll Sweedlepipe
was at the door with his arms tight folded and his eyes wide open, and
looked on with absorbing interest, while the sick man was slowly
moved into the vehicle. His bony hands and haggard face impressed Poll
wonderfully; and he informed Mr Bailey in confidence, that he wouldn’t
have missed seeing him for a pound. Mr Bailey, who was of a different
constitution, remarked that he would have stayed away for five
shillings.

It was a troublesome matter to adjust Mrs Gamp’s luggage to her
satisfaction; for every package belonging to that lady had the
inconvenient property of requiring to be put in a boot by itself, and
to have no other luggage near it, on pain of actions at law for heavy
damages against the proprietors of the coach. The umbrella with the
circular patch was particularly hard to be got rid of, and several times
thrust out its battered brass nozzle from improper crevices and chinks,
to the great terror of the other passengers. Indeed, in her intense
anxiety to find a haven of refuge for this chattel, Mrs Gamp so often
moved it, in the course of five minutes, that it seemed not one umbrella
but fifty. At length it was lost, or said to be; and for the next five
minutes she was face to face with the coachman, go wherever he might,
protesting that it should be ‘made good,’ though she took the question
to the House of Commons.

At last, her bundle, and her pattens, and her basket, and everything
else, being disposed of, she took a friendly leave of Poll and Mr
Bailey, dropped a curtsey to John Westlock, and parted as from a
cherished member of the sisterhood with Betsey Prig.

‘Wishin you lots of sickness, my darlin creetur,’ Mrs Gamp observed,
‘and good places. It won’t be long, I hope, afore we works together, off
and on, again, Betsey; and may our next meetin’ be at a large family’s,
where they all takes it reg’lar, one from another, turn and turn about,
and has it business-like.’

‘I don’t care how soon it is,’ said Mrs Prig; ‘nor how many weeks it
lasts.’

Mrs Gamp with a reply in a congenial spirit was backing to the coach,
when she came in contact with a lady and gentleman who were passing
along the footway.

‘Take care, take care here!’ cried the gentleman. ‘Halloo! My dear! Why,
it’s Mrs Gamp!’

‘What, Mr Mould!’ exclaimed the nurse. ‘And Mrs Mould! who would have
thought as we should ever have a meetin’ here, I’m sure!’

‘Going out of town, Mrs Gamp?’ cried Mould. ‘That’s unusual, isn’t it?’

‘It IS unusual, sir,’ said Mrs Gamp. ‘But only for a day or two at most.
The gent,’ she whispered, ‘as I spoke about.’

‘What, in the coach!’ cried Mould. ‘The one you thought of recommending?
Very odd. My dear, this will interest you. The gentleman that Mrs Gamp
thought likely to suit us is in the coach, my love.’

Mrs Mould was greatly interested.

‘Here, my dear. You can stand upon the door-step,’ said Mould, ‘and take
a look at him. Ha! There he is. Where’s my glass? Oh! all right. I’ve
got it. Do you see him, my dear?’

‘Quite plain,’ said Mrs Mould.

‘Upon my life, you know, this is a very singular circumstance,’ said
Mould, quite delighted. ‘This is the sort of thing, my dear, I wouldn’t
have missed on any account. It tickles one. It’s interesting. It’s
almost a little play, you know. Ah! There he is! To be sure. Looks
poorly, Mrs M., don’t he?’

Mrs Mould assented.

‘He’s coming our way, perhaps, after all,’ said Mould. ‘Who knows! I
feel as if I ought to show him some little attention, really. He don’t
seem a stranger to me. I’m very much inclined to move my hat, my dear.’

‘He’s looking hard this way,’ said Mrs Mould.

‘Then I will!’ cried Mould. ‘How d’ye do, sir! I wish you good day. Ha!
He bows too. Very gentlemanly. Mrs Gamp has the cards in her pocket, I
have no doubt. This is very singular, my dear--and very pleasant. I am
not superstitious, but it really seems as if one was destined to pay him
those little melancholy civilities which belong to our peculiar line of
business. There can be no kind of objection to your kissing your hand to
him, my dear.’

Mrs Mould did so.

‘Ha!’ said Mould. ‘He’s evidently gratified. Poor fellow! I am quite
glad you did it, my love. Bye bye, Mrs Gamp!’ waving his hand. ‘There he
goes; there he goes!’

So he did; for the coach rolled off as the words were spoken. Mr and Mrs
Mould, in high good humour, went their merry way. Mr Bailey retired
with Poll Sweedlepipe as soon as possible; but some little time
elapsed before he could remove his friend from the ground, owing to
the impression wrought upon the barber’s nerves by Mrs Prig, whom he
pronounced, in admiration of her beard, to be a woman of transcendent
charms.

When the light cloud of bustle hanging round the coach was thus
dispersed, Nadgett was seen in the darkest box of the Bull coffee-room,
looking wistfully up at the clock--as if the man who never appeared were
a little behind his time.



CHAPTER THIRTY

PROVES THAT CHANGES MAY BE RUNG IN THE BEST-REGULATED FAMILIES, AND THAT
MR PECKNIFF WAS A SPECIAL HAND AT A TRIPLE-BOB-MAJOR


As the surgeon’s first care after amputating a limb, is to take up the
arteries the cruel knife has severed, so it is the duty of this history,
which in its remorseless course has cut from the Pecksniffian trunk its
right arm, Mercy, to look to the parent stem, and see how in all its
various ramifications it got on without her.

And first of Mr Pecksniff it may be observed, that having provided for
his youngest daughter that choicest of blessings, a tender and indulgent
husband; and having gratified the dearest wish of his parental heart by
establishing her in life so happily; he renewed his youth, and spreading
the plumage of his own bright conscience, felt himself equal to all
kinds of flights. It is customary with fathers in stage-plays, after
giving their daughters to the men of their hearts, to congratulate
themselves on having no other business on their hands but to die
immediately; though it is rarely found that they are in a hurry to do
it. Mr Pecksniff, being a father of a more sage and practical class,
appeared to think that his immediate business was to live; and having
deprived himself of one comfort, to surround himself with others.

But however much inclined the good man was to be jocose and playful, and
in the garden of his fancy to disport himself (if one may say so) like
an architectural kitten, he had one impediment constantly opposed to
him. The gentle Cherry, stung by a sense of slight and injury, which
far from softening down or wearing out, rankled and festered in her
heart--the gentle Cherry was in flat rebellion. She waged fierce war
against her dear papa, she led her parent what is usually called, for
want of a better figure of speech, the life of a dog. But never did that
dog live, in kennel, stable-yard, or house, whose life was half as hard
as Mr Pecksniff’s with his gentle child.

The father and daughter were sitting at their breakfast. Tom had
retired, and they were alone. Mr Pecksniff frowned at first; but having
cleared his brow, looked stealthily at his child. Her nose was very red
indeed, and screwed up tight, with hostile preparation.

‘Cherry,’ cried Mr Pecksniff, ‘what is amiss between us? My child, why
are we disunited?’

Miss Pecksniff’s answer was scarcely a response to this gush of
affection, for it was simply, ‘Bother, Pa!’

‘Bother!’ repeated Mr Pecksniff, in a tone of anguish.

‘Oh! ‘tis too late, Pa,’ said his daughter, calmly ‘to talk to me like
this. I know what it means, and what its value is.’

‘This is hard!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, addressing his breakfast-cup. ‘This
is very hard! She is my child. I carried her in my arms when she wore
shapeless worsted shoes--I might say, mufflers--many years ago!’

‘You needn’t taunt me with that, Pa,’ retorted Cherry, with a spiteful
look. ‘I am not so many years older than my sister, either, though she
IS married to your friend!’

‘Ah, human nature, human nature! Poor human nature!’ said Mr Pecksniff,
shaking his head at human nature, as if he didn’t belong to it. ‘To
think that this discord should arise from such a cause! oh dear, oh
dear!’

‘From such a cause indeed!’ cried Cherry. ‘State the real cause, Pa, or
I’ll state it myself. Mind! I will!’

Perhaps the energy with which she said this was infectious. However that
may be, Mr Pecksniff changed his tone and the expression of his face for
one of anger, if not downright violence, when he said:

‘You will! you have. You did yesterday. You do always. You have no
decency; you make no secret of your temper; you have exposed yourself to
Mr Chuzzlewit a hundred times.’

‘Myself!’ cried Cherry, with a bitter smile. ‘Oh indeed! I don’t mind
that.’

‘Me, too, then,’ said Mr Pecksniff.

His daughter answered with a scornful laugh.

‘And since we have come to an explanation, Charity,’ said Mr Pecksniff,
rolling his head portentously, ‘let me tell you that I won’t allow it.
None of your nonsense, Miss! I won’t permit it to be done.’

‘I shall do,’ said Charity, rocking her chair backwards and forwards,
and raising her voice to a high pitch, ‘I shall do, Pa, what I please
and what I have done. I am not going to be crushed in everything, depend
upon it. I’ve been more shamefully used than anybody ever was in
this world,’ here she began to cry and sob, ‘and may expect the worse
treatment from you, I know. But I don’t care for that. No, I don’t!’

Mr Pecksniff was made so desperate by the loud tone in which she spoke,
that, after looking about him in frantic uncertainty for some means of
softening it, he rose and shook her until the ornamental bow of hair
upon her head nodded like a plume. She was so very much astonished by
this assault, that it really had the desired effect.

‘I’ll do it again!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, as he resumed his seat and
fetched his breath, ‘if you dare to talk in that loud manner. How do
you mean about being shamefully used? If Mr Jonas chose your sister in
preference to you, who could help it, I should wish to know? What have I
to do with it?’

‘Wasn’t I made a convenience of? Weren’t my feelings trifled with?
Didn’t he address himself to me first?’ sobbed Cherry, clasping her
hands; ‘and oh, good gracious, that I should live to be shook!’

‘You’ll live to be shaken again,’ returned her parent, ‘if you drive
me to that means of maintaining the decorum of this humble roof. You
surprise me. I wonder you have not more spirit. If Mr Jonas didn’t care
for you, how could you wish to have him?’

‘I wish to have him!’ exclaimed Cherry. ‘I wish to have him, Pa!’

‘Then what are you making all this piece of work for,’ retorted her
father, ‘if you didn’t wish to have him?’

‘Because I was treated with duplicity,’ said Cherry; ‘and because my own
sister and my own father conspired against me. I am not angry with HER,’
said Cherry; looking much more angry than ever. ‘I pity her. I’m sorry
for her. I know the fate that’s in store for her, with that Wretch.’

‘Mr Jonas will survive your calling him a wretch, my child, I dare say,’
said Mr Pecksniff, with returning resignation; ‘but call him what you
like and make an end of it.’

‘Not an end, Pa,’ said Charity. ‘No, not an end. That’s not the only
point on which we’re not agreed. I won’t submit to it. It’s better you
should know that at once. No; I won’t submit to it indeed, Pa! I am
not quite a fool, and I am not blind. All I have got to say is, I won’t
submit to it.’

Whatever she meant, she shook Mr Pecksniff now; for his lame attempt to
seem composed was melancholy in the last degree. His anger changed to
meekness, and his words were mild and fawning.

‘My dear,’ he said; ‘if in the short excitement of an angry moment I
resorted to an unjustifiable means of suppressing a little outbreak
calculated to injure you as well as myself--it’s possible I may have
done so; perhaps I did--I ask your pardon. A father asking pardon of
his child,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘is, I believe, a spectacle to soften the
most rugged nature.’

But it didn’t at all soften Miss Pecksniff; perhaps because her nature
was not rugged enough. On the contrary, she persisted in saying, over
and over again, that she wasn’t quite a fool, and wasn’t blind, and
wouldn’t submit to it.

‘You labour under some mistake, my child!’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘but
I will not ask you what it is; I don’t desire to know. No, pray!’ he
added, holding out his hand and colouring again, ‘let us avoid the
subject, my dear, whatever it is!’

‘It’s quite right that the subject should be avoided between us,
sir,’ said Cherry. ‘But I wish to be able to avoid it altogether, and
consequently must beg you to provide me with a home.’

Mr Pecksniff looked about the room, and said, ‘A home, my child!’

‘Another home, papa,’ said Cherry, with increasing stateliness ‘Place me
at Mrs Todgers’s or somewhere, on an independent footing; but I will not
live here, if such is to be the case.’

It is possible that Miss Pecksniff saw in Mrs Todgers’s a vision
of enthusiastic men, pining to fall in adoration at her feet. It is
possible that Mr Pecksniff, in his new-born juvenility, saw, in the
suggestion of that same establishment, an easy means of relieving
himself from an irksome charge in the way of temper and watchfulness.
It is undoubtedly a fact that in the attentive ears of Mr Pecksniff, the
proposition did not sound quite like the dismal knell of all his hopes.

But he was a man of great feeling and acute sensibility; and he squeezed
his pocket-handkerchief against his eyes with both hands--as such men
always do, especially when they are observed. ‘One of my birds,’ Mr
Pecksniff said, ‘has left me for the stranger’s breast; the other would
take wing to Todgers’s! Well, well, what am I? I don’t know what I am,
exactly. Never mind!’

Even this remark, made more pathetic perhaps by his breaking down in
the middle of it, had no effect upon Charity. She was grim, rigid, and
inflexible.

‘But I have ever,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘sacrificed my children’s
happiness to my own--I mean my own happiness to my children’s--and I
will not begin to regulate my life by other rules of conduct now. If you
can be happier at Mrs Todgers’s than in your father’s house, my dear, go
to Mrs Todgers’s! Do not think of me, my girl!’ said Mr Pecksniff with
emotion; ‘I shall get on pretty well, no doubt.’

Miss Charity, who knew he had a secret pleasure in the contemplation of
the proposed change, suppressed her own, and went on to negotiate the
terms. His views upon this subject were at first so very limited that
another difference, involving possibly another shaking, threatened to
ensue; but by degrees they came to something like an understanding, and
the storm blew over. Indeed, Miss Charity’s idea was so agreeable
to both, that it would have been strange if they had not come to an
amicable agreement. It was soon arranged between them that the project
should be tried, and that immediately; and that Cherry’s not being well,
and needing change of scene, and wishing to be near her sister, should
form the excuse for her departure to Mr Chuzzlewit and Mary, to both of
whom she had pleaded indisposition for some time past. These premises
agreed on, Mr Pecksniff gave her his blessing, with all the dignity of
a self-denying man who had made a hard sacrifice, but comforted himself
with the reflection that virtue is its own reward. Thus they were
reconciled for the first time since that not easily forgiven night,
when Mr Jonas, repudiating the elder, had confessed his passion for the
younger sister, and Mr Pecksniff had abetted him on moral grounds.

But how happened it--in the name of an unexpected addition to that small
family, the Seven Wonders of the World, whatever and wherever they may
be, how happened it--that Mr Pecksniff and his daughter were about
to part? How happened it that their mutual relations were so greatly
altered? Why was Miss Pecksniff so clamorous to have it understood that
she was neither blind nor foolish, and she wouldn’t bear it? It is not
possible that Mr Pecksniff had any thoughts of marrying again; or that
his daughter, with the sharp eye of a single woman, fathomed his design!

Let us inquire into this.

Mr Pecksniff, as a man without reproach, from whom the breath of slander
passed like common breath from any other polished surface, could afford
to do what common men could not. He knew the purity of his own motives;
and when he had a motive worked at it as only a very good man (or a very
bad one) can. Did he set before himself any strong and palpable motives
for taking a second wife? Yes; and not one or two of them, but a
combination of very many.

Old Martin Chuzzlewit had gradually undergone an important change. Even
upon the night when he made such an ill-timed arrival at Mr Pecksniff’s
house, he was comparatively subdued and easy to deal with. This Mr
Pecksniff attributed, at the time, to the effect his brother’s death had
had upon him. But from that hour his character seemed to have modified
by regular degrees, and to have softened down into a dull indifference
for almost every one but Mr Pecksniff. His looks were much the same as
ever, but his mind was singularly altered. It was not that this or that
passion stood out in brighter or in dimmer hues; but that the colour of
the whole man was faded. As one trait disappeared, no other trait sprung
up to take its place. His senses dwindled too. He was less keen of
sight; was deaf sometimes; took little notice of what passed before him;
and would be profoundly taciturn for days together. The process of this
alteration was so easy that almost as soon as it began to be observed
it was complete. But Mr Pecksniff saw it first, and having Anthony
Chuzzlewit fresh in his recollection, saw in his brother Martin the same
process of decay.

To a gentleman of Mr Pecksniff’s tenderness, this was a very mournful
sight. He could not but foresee the probability of his respected
relative being made the victim of designing persons, and of his riches
falling into worthless hands. It gave him so much pain that he resolved
to secure the property to himself; to keep bad testamentary suitors at a
distance; to wall up the old gentleman, as it were, for his own use. By
little and little, therefore, he began to try whether Mr Chuzzlewit gave
any promise of becoming an instrument in his hands, and finding that he
did, and indeed that he was very supple in his plastic fingers, he made
it the business of his life--kind soul!--to establish an ascendancy over
him; and every little test he durst apply meeting with a success beyond
his hopes, he began to think he heard old Martin’s cash already chinking
in his own unworldly pockets.

But when Mr Pecksniff pondered on this subject (as, in his zealous
way, he often did), and thought with an uplifted heart of the train of
circumstances which had delivered the old gentleman into his hands for
the confusion of evil-doers and the triumph of a righteous nature, he
always felt that Mary Graham was his stumbling-block. Let the old man
say what he would, Mr Pecksniff knew he had a strong affection for her.
He knew that he showed it in a thousand little ways; that he liked to
have her near him, and was never quite at ease when she was absent
long. That he had ever really sworn to leave her nothing in his will, Mr
Pecksniff greatly doubted. That even if he had, there were many ways by
which he could evade the oath and satisfy his conscience, Mr Pecksniff
knew. That her unprotected state was no light burden on the old man’s
mind, he also knew, for Mr Chuzzlewit had plainly told him so. ‘Then,’
said Mr Pecksniff ‘what if I married her! What,’ repeated Mr Pecksniff,
sticking up his hair and glancing at his bust by Spoker; ‘what
if, making sure of his approval first--he is nearly imbecile, poor
gentleman--I married her!’

Mr Pecksniff had a lively sense of the Beautiful; especially in women.
His manner towards the sex was remarkable for its insinuating character.
It is recorded of him in another part of these pages, that he embraced
Mrs Todgers on the smallest provocation; and it was a way he had; it was
a part of the gentle placidity of his disposition. Before any thought of
matrimony was in his mind, he had bestowed on Mary many little tokens of
his spiritual admiration. They had been indignantly received, but that
was nothing. True, as the idea expanded within him, these had become
too ardent to escape the piercing eye of Cherry, who read his scheme at
once; but he had always felt the power of Mary’s charms. So Interest and
Inclination made a pair, and drew the curricle of Mr Pecksniff’s plan.

As to any thought of revenging himself on young Martin for his insolent
expressions when they parted, and of shutting him out still more
effectually from any hope of reconciliation with his grandfather, Mr
Pecksniff was much too meek and forgiving to be suspected of harbouring
it. As to being refused by Mary, Mr Pecksniff was quite satisfied that
in her position she could never hold out if he and Mr Chuzzlewit were
both against her. As to consulting the wishes of her heart in such a
case, it formed no part of Mr Pecksniff’s moral code; for he knew what a
good man he was, and what a blessing he must be to anybody. His daughter
having broken the ice, and the murder being out between them, Mr
Pecksniff had now only to pursue his design as cleverly as he could, and
by the craftiest approaches.

‘Well, my good sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff, meeting old Martin in the
garden, for it was his habit to walk in and out by that way, as the
fancy took him; ‘and how is my dear friend this delicious morning?’

‘Do you mean me?’ asked the old man.

‘Ah!’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘one of his deaf days, I see. Could I mean any
one else, my dear sir?’

‘You might have meant Mary,’ said the old man.

‘Indeed I might. Quite true. I might speak of her as a dear, dear
friend, I hope?’ observed Mr Pecksniff.

‘I hope so,’ returned old Martin. ‘I think she deserves it.’

‘Think!’ cried Pecksniff, ‘think, Mr Chuzzlewit!’

‘You are speaking, I know,’ returned Martin, ‘but I don’t catch what you
say. Speak up!’

‘He’s getting deafer than a flint,’ said Pecksniff. ‘I was saying, my
dear sir, that I am afraid I must make up my mind to part with Cherry.’

‘What has SHE been doing?’ asked the old man.

‘He puts the most ridiculous questions I ever heard!’ muttered Mr
Pecksniff. ‘He’s a child to-day.’ After which he added, in a mild roar:
‘She hasn’t been doing anything, my dear friend.’

‘What are you going to part with her for?’ demanded Martin.

‘She hasn’t her health by any means,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘She misses
her sister, my dear sir; they doted on each other from the cradle. And I
think of giving her a run in London for a change. A good long run, sir,
if I find she likes it.’

‘Quite right,’ cried Martin. ‘It’s judicious.’

‘I am glad to hear you say so. I hope you mean to bear me company in
this dull part, while she’s away?’ said Mr Pecksniff.

‘I have no intention of removing from it,’ was Martin’s answer.

‘Then why,’ said Mr Pecksniff, taking the old man’s arm in his, and
walking slowly on; ‘Why, my good sir, can’t you come and stay with me?
I am sure I could surround you with more comforts--lowly as is my
Cot--than you can obtain at a village house of entertainment. And pardon
me, Mr Chuzzlewit, pardon me if I say that such a place as the Dragon,
however well-conducted (and, as far as I know, Mrs Lupin is one of the
worthiest creatures in this county), is hardly a home for Miss Graham.’

Martin mused a moment; and then said, as he shook him by the hand:

‘No. You’re quite right; it is not.’

‘The very sight of skittles,’ Mr Pecksniff eloquently pursued, ‘is far
from being congenial to a delicate mind.’

‘It’s an amusement of the vulgar,’ said old Martin, ‘certainly.’

‘Of the very vulgar,’ Mr Pecksniff answered. ‘Then why not bring Miss
Graham here, sir? Here is the house. Here am I alone in it, for Thomas
Pinch I do not count as any one. Our lovely friend shall occupy my
daughter’s chamber; you shall choose your own; we shall not quarrel, I
hope!’

‘We are not likely to do that,’ said Martin.

Mr Pecksniff pressed his hand. ‘We understand each other, my dear sir,
I see!--I can wind him,’ he thought, with exultation, ‘round my little
finger.’

‘You leave the recompense to me?’ said the old man, after a minute’s
silence.

‘Oh! do not speak of recompense!’ cried Pecksniff.

‘I say,’ repeated Martin, with a glimmer of his old obstinacy, ‘you
leave the recompense to me. Do you?’

‘Since you desire it, my good sir.’

‘I always desire it,’ said the old man. ‘You know I always desire it. I
wish to pay as I go, even when I buy of you. Not that I do not leave a
balance to be settled one day, Pecksniff.’

The architect was too much overcome to speak. He tried to drop a tear
upon his patron’s hand, but couldn’t find one in his dry distillery.

‘May that day be very distant!’ was his pious exclamation. ‘Ah, sir! If
I could say how deep an interest I have in you and yours! I allude to
our beautiful young friend.’

‘True,’ he answered. ‘True. She need have some one interested in her.
I did her wrong to train her as I did. Orphan though she was, she would
have found some one to protect her whom she might have loved again. When
she was a child, I pleased myself with the thought that in gratifying my
whim of placing her between me and false-hearted knaves, I had done
her a kindness. Now she is a woman, I have no such comfort. She has no
protector but herself. I have put her at such odds with the world, that
any dog may bark or fawn upon her at his pleasure. Indeed she stands in
need of delicate consideration. Yes; indeed she does!’

‘If her position could be altered and defined, sir?’ Mr Pecksniff
hinted.

‘How can that be done? Should I make a seamstress of her, or a
governess?’

‘Heaven forbid!’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘My dear sir, there are other ways.
There are indeed. But I am much excited and embarrassed at present, and
would rather not pursue the subject. I scarcely know what I mean. Permit
me to resume it at another time.’

‘You are not unwell?’ asked Martin anxiously.

‘No, no!’ cried Pecksniff. ‘No. Permit me to resume it at another time.
I’ll walk a little. Bless you!’

Old Martin blessed him in return, and squeezed his hand. As he turned
away, and slowly walked towards the house, Mr Pecksniff stood gazing
after him; being pretty well recovered from his late emotion, which, in
any other man, one might have thought had been assumed as a machinery
for feeling Martin’s pulse. The change in the old man found such a
slight expression in his figure, that Mr Pecksniff, looking after him,
could not help saying to himself:

‘And I can wind him round my little finger! Only think!’

Old Martin happening to turn his head, saluted him affectionately. Mr
Pecksniff returned the gesture.

‘Why, the time was,’ said Mr Pecksniff; ‘and not long ago, when he
wouldn’t look at me! How soothing is this change. Such is the delicate
texture of the human heart; so complicated is the process of its being
softened! Externally he looks the same, and I can wind him round my
little finger. Only think!’

In sober truth, there did appear to be nothing on which Mr Pecksniff
might not have ventured with Martin Chuzzlewit; for whatever Mr
Pecksniff said or did was right, and whatever he advised was done.
Martin had escaped so many snares from needy fortune-hunters, and had
withered in the shell of his suspicion and distrust for so many years,
but to become the good man’s tool and plaything. With the happiness of
this conviction painted on his face, the architect went forth upon his
morning walk.

The summer weather in his bosom was reflected in the breast of Nature.
Through deep green vistas where the boughs arched overhead, and showed
the sunlight flashing in the beautiful perspective; through dewy fern
from which the startled hares leaped up, and fled at his approach; by
mantled pools, and fallen trees, and down in hollow places, rustling
among last year’s leaves whose scent woke memory of the past; the placid
Pecksniff strolled. By meadow gates and hedges fragrant with wild roses;
and by thatched-roof cottages whose inmates humbly bowed before him as
a man both good and wise; the worthy Pecksniff walked in tranquil
meditation. The bee passed onward, humming of the work he had to do;
the idle gnats for ever going round and round in one contracting and
expanding ring, yet always going on as fast as he, danced merrily before
him; the colour of the long grass came and went, as if the light clouds
made it timid as they floated through the distant air. The birds,
so many Pecksniff consciences, sang gayly upon every branch; and Mr
Pecksniff paid HIS homage to the day by ruminating on his projects as he
walked along.

Chancing to trip, in his abstraction, over the spreading root of an old
tree, he raised his pious eyes to take a survey of the ground before
him. It startled him to see the embodied image of his thoughts not far
ahead. Mary herself. And alone.

At first Mr Pecksniff stopped as if with the intention of avoiding
her; but his next impulse was to advance, which he did at a brisk pace;
caroling as he went so sweetly and with so much innocence that he only
wanted feathers and wings to be a bird.

Hearing notes behind her, not belonging to the songsters of the grove,
she looked round. Mr Pecksniff kissed his hand, and was at her side
immediately.

‘Communing with nature?’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘So am I.’

She said the morning was so beautiful that she had walked further than
she intended, and would return. Mr Pecksniff said it was exactly his
case, and he would return with her.

‘Take my arm, sweet girl,’ said Mr Pecksniff.

Mary declined it, and walked so very fast that he remonstrated. ‘You
were loitering when I came upon you,’ Mr Pecksniff said. ‘Why be so
cruel as to hurry now? You would not shun me, would you?’

‘Yes, I would,’ she answered, turning her glowing cheek indignantly
upon him, ‘you know I would. Release me, Mr Pecksniff. Your touch is
disagreeable to me.’

His touch! What? That chaste patriarchal touch which Mrs Todgers--surely
a discreet lady--had endured, not only without complaint, but with
apparent satisfaction! This was positively wrong. Mr Pecksniff was sorry
to hear her say it.

‘If you have not observed,’ said Mary, ‘that it is so, pray take
assurance from my lips, and do not, as you are a gentleman, continue to
offend me.’

‘Well, well!’ said Mr Pecksniff, mildly, ‘I feel that I might consider
this becoming in a daughter of my own, and why should I object to it
in one so beautiful! It’s harsh. It cuts me to the soul,’ said Mr
Pecksniff; ‘but I cannot quarrel with you, Mary.’

She tried to say she was sorry to hear it, but burst into tears. Mr
Pecksniff now repeated the Todgers performance on a comfortable scale,
as if he intended it to last some time; and in his disengaged hand,
catching hers, employed himself in separating the fingers with his own,
and sometimes kissing them, as he pursued the conversation thus:

‘I am glad we met. I am very glad we met. I am able now to ease my
bosom of a heavy load, and speak to you in confidence. Mary,’ said Mr
Pecksniff in his tenderest tones, indeed they were so very tender that
he almost squeaked: ‘My soul! I love you!’

A fantastic thing, that maiden affectation! She made believe to shudder.

‘I love you,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘my gentle life, with a devotion which
is quite surprising, even to myself. I did suppose that the sensation
was buried in the silent tomb of a lady, only second to you in qualities
of the mind and form; but I find I am mistaken.’

She tried to disengage her hand, but might as well have tried to free
herself from the embrace of an affectionate boa-constrictor; if anything
so wily may be brought into comparison with Pecksniff.

‘Although I am a widower,’ said Mr Pecksniff, examining the rings upon
her fingers, and tracing the course of one delicate blue vein with his
fat thumb, ‘a widower with two daughters, still I am not encumbered,
my love. One of them, as you know, is married. The other, by her own
desire, but with a view, I will confess--why not?--to my altering my
condition, is about to leave her father’s house. I have a character,
I hope. People are pleased to speak well of me, I think. My person
and manner are not absolutely those of a monster, I trust. Ah! naughty
Hand!’ said Mr Pecksniff, apostrophizing the reluctant prize, ‘why did
you take me prisoner? Go, go!’

He slapped the hand to punish it; but relenting, folded it in his
waistcoat to comfort it again.

‘Blessed in each other, and in the society of our venerable friend, my
darling,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘we shall be happy. When he is wafted to a
haven of rest, we will console each other. My pretty primrose, what do
you say?’

‘It is possible,’ Mary answered, in a hurried manner, ‘that I ought to
feel grateful for this mark of your confidence. I cannot say that I do,
but I am willing to suppose you may deserve my thanks. Take them; and
pray leave me, Mr Pecksniff.’

The good man smiled a greasy smile; and drew her closer to him.

‘Pray, pray release me, Mr Pecksniff. I cannot listen to your proposal.
I cannot receive it. There are many to whom it may be acceptable, but it
is not so to me. As an act of kindness and an act of pity, leave me!’

Mr Pecksniff walked on with his arm round her waist, and her hand in
his, as contentedly as if they had been all in all to each other, and
were joined in the bonds of truest love.

‘If you force me by your superior strength,’ said Mary, who finding that
good words had not the least effect upon him, made no further effort to
suppress her indignation; ‘if you force me by your superior strength
to accompany you back, and to be the subject of your insolence upon the
way, you cannot constrain the expression of my thoughts. I hold you in
the deepest abhorrence. I know your real nature and despise it.’

‘No, no,’ said Mr Pecksniff, sweetly. ‘No, no, no!’

‘By what arts or unhappy chances you have gained your influence over
Mr Chuzzlewit, I do not know,’ said Mary; ‘it may be strong enough to
soften even this, but he shall know of this, trust me, sir.’

Mr Pecksniff raised his heavy eyelids languidly, and let them fall
again. It was saying with perfect coolness, ‘Aye, aye! Indeed!’

‘Is it not enough,’ said Mary, ‘that you warp and change his nature,
adapt his every prejudice to your bad ends, and harden a heart naturally
kind by shutting out the truth and allowing none but false and distorted
views to reach it; is it not enough that you have the power of doing
this, and that you exercise it, but must you also be so coarse, so
cruel, and so cowardly to me?’

Still Mr Pecksniff led her calmly on, and looked as mild as any lamb
that ever pastured in the fields.

‘Will nothing move you, sir?’ cried Mary.

‘My dear,’ observed Mr Pecksniff, with a placid leer, ‘a habit of
self-examination, and the practice of--shall I say of virtue?’

‘Of hypocrisy,’ said Mary.

‘No, no,’ resumed Mr Pecksniff, chafing the captive hand reproachfully,
‘of virtue--have enabled me to set such guards upon myself, that it
is really difficult to ruffle me. It is a curious fact, but it is
difficult, do you know, for any one to ruffle me. And did she think,’
said Mr Pecksniff, with a playful tightening of his grasp ‘that SHE
could! How little did she know his heart!’

Little, indeed! Her mind was so strangely constituted that she would
have preferred the caresses of a toad, an adder, or a serpent--nay, the
hug of a bear--to the endearments of Mr Pecksniff.

‘Come, come,’ said that good gentleman, ‘a word or two will set this
matter right, and establish a pleasant understanding between us. I am
not angry, my love.’

‘YOU angry!’

‘No,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘I am not. I say so. Neither are you.’

There was a beating heart beneath his hand that told another story
though.

‘I am sure you are not,’ said Mr Pecksniff: ‘and I will tell you why.
There are two Martin Chuzzlewits, my dear; and your carrying your anger
to one might have a serious effect--who knows!--upon the other. You
wouldn’t wish to hurt him, would you?’

She trembled violently, and looked at him with such a proud disdain that
he turned his eyes away. No doubt lest he should be offended with her in
spite of his better self.

‘A passive quarrel, my love,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘may be changed into
an active one, remember. It would be sad to blight even a disinherited
young man in his already blighted prospects; but how easy to do it.
Ah, how easy! HAVE I influence with our venerable friend, do you think?
Well, perhaps I have. Perhaps I have.’

He raised his eyes to hers; and nodded with an air of banter that was
charming.

‘No,’ he continued, thoughtfully. ‘Upon the whole, my sweet, if I were
you I’d keep my secret to myself. I am not at all sure--very far from
it--that it would surprise our friend in any way, for he and I have had
some conversation together only this morning, and he is anxious, very
anxious, to establish you in some more settled manner. But whether he
was surprised or not surprised, the consequence of your imparting
it might be the same. Martin junior might suffer severely. I’d have
compassion on Martin junior, do you know?’ said Mr Pecksniff, with a
persuasive smile. ‘Yes. He don’t deserve it, but I would.’

She wept so bitterly now, and was so much distressed, that he thought it
prudent to unclasp her waist, and hold her only by the hand.

‘As to our own share in the precious little mystery,’ said Mr Pecksniff,
‘we will keep it to ourselves, and talk of it between ourselves, and
you shall think it over. You will consent, my love; you will consent,
I know. Whatever you may think; you will. I seem to remember to have
heard--I really don’t know where, or how’--he added, with bewitching
frankness, ‘that you and Martin junior, when you were children, had a
sort of childish fondness for each other. When we are married, you shall
have the satisfaction of thinking that it didn’t last to ruin him, but
passed away to do him good; for we’ll see then what we can do to put
some trifling help in Martin junior’s way. HAVE I any influence with our
venerable friend? Well! Perhaps I have. Perhaps I have.’

The outlet from the wood in which these tender passages occurred, was
close to Mr Pecksniff’s house. They were now so near it that he stopped,
and holding up her little finger, said in playful accents, as a parting
fancy:

‘Shall I bite it?’

Receiving no reply he kissed it instead; and then stooping down,
inclined his flabby face to hers--he had a flabby face, although he
WAS a good man--and with a blessing, which from such a source was quite
enough to set her up in life, and prosper her from that time forth
permitted her to leave him.

Gallantry in its true sense is supposed to ennoble and dignify a
man; and love has shed refinements on innumerable Cymons. But Mr
Pecksniff--perhaps because to one of his exalted nature these were mere
grossnesses--certainly did not appear to any unusual advantage, now that
he was left alone. On the contrary, he seemed to be shrunk and reduced;
to be trying to hide himself within himself; and to be wretched at not
having the power to do it. His shoes looked too large; his sleeve looked
too long; his hair looked too limp; his features looked too mean; his
exposed throat looked as if a halter would have done it good. For a
minute or two, in fact, he was hot, and pale, and mean, and shy, and
slinking, and consequently not at all Pecksniffian. But after that, he
recovered himself, and went home with as beneficent an air as if he had
been the High Priest of the summer weather.

‘I have arranged to go, Papa,’ said Charity, ‘to-morrow.’

‘So soon, my child!’

‘I can’t go too soon,’ said Charity, ‘under the circumstances. I have
written to Mrs Todgers to propose an arrangement, and have requested her
to meet me at the coach, at all events. You’ll be quite your own master
now, Mr Pinch!’

Mr Pecksniff had just gone out of the room, and Tom had just come into
it.

‘My own master!’ repeated Tom.

‘Yes, you’ll have nobody to interfere with you,’ said Charity. ‘At least
I hope you won’t. Hem! It’s a changing world.’

‘What! are YOU going to be married, Miss Pecksniff?’ asked Tom in great
surprise.

‘Not exactly,’ faltered Cherry. ‘I haven’t made up my mind to be. I
believe I could be, if I chose, Mr Pinch.’

‘Of course you could!’ said Tom. And he said it in perfect good faith.
He believed it from the bottom of his heart.

‘No,’ said Cherry, ‘I am not going to be married. Nobody is, that I know
of. Hem! But I am not going to live with Papa. I have my reasons, but
it’s all a secret. I shall always feel very kindly towards you, I assure
you, for the boldness you showed that night. As to you and me, Mr Pinch,
WE part the best friends possible!’

Tom thanked her for her confidence, and for her friendship, but there
was a mystery in the former which perfectly bewildered him. In his
extravagant devotion to the family, he had felt the loss of Merry more
than any one but those who knew that for all the slights he underwent he
thought his own demerits were to blame, could possibly have understood.
He had scarcely reconciled himself to that when here was Charity about
to leave them. She had grown up, as it were, under Tom’s eye.
The sisters were a part of Pecksniff, and a part of Tom; items in
Pecksniff’s goodness, and in Tom’s service. He couldn’t bear it; not two
hours’ sleep had Tom that night, through dwelling in his bed upon these
dreadful changes.

When morning dawned he thought he must have dreamed this piece of
ambiguity; but no, on going downstairs he found them packing trunks
and cording boxes, and making other preparations for Miss Charity’s
departure, which lasted all day long. In good time for the evening
coach, Miss Charity deposited her housekeeping keys with much ceremony
upon the parlour table; took a gracious leave of all the house; and
quitted her paternal roof--a blessing for which the Pecksniffian servant
was observed by some profane persons to be particularly active in the
thanksgiving at church next Sunday.



CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

MR PINCH IS DISCHARGED OF A DUTY WHICH HE NEVER OWED TO ANYBODY, AND MR
PECKSNIFF DISCHARGES A DUTY WHICH HE OWES TO SOCIETY


The closing words of the last chapter lead naturally to the commencement
of this, its successor; for it has to do with a church. With the church,
so often mentioned heretofore, in which Tom Pinch played the organ for
nothing.

One sultry afternoon, about a week after Miss Charity’s departure for
London, Mr Pecksniff being out walking by himself, took it into his head
to stray into the churchyard. As he was lingering among the tombstones,
endeavouring to extract an available sentiment or two from the
epitaphs--for he never lost an opportunity of making up a few moral
crackers, to be let off as occasion served--Tom Pinch began to practice.
Tom could run down to the church and do so whenever he had time to
spare; for it was a simple little organ, provided with wind by the
action of the musician’s feet; and he was independent, even of a
bellows-blower. Though if Tom had wanted one at any time, there was
not a man or boy in all the village, and away to the turnpike (tollman
included), but would have blown away for him till he was black in the
face.

Mr Pecksniff had no objection to music; not the least. He was tolerant
of everything; he often said so. He considered it a vagabond kind of
trifling, in general, just suited to Tom’s capacity. But in regard
to Tom’s performance upon this same organ, he was remarkably lenient,
singularly amiable; for when Tom played it on Sundays, Mr Pecksniff
in his unbounded sympathy felt as if he played it himself, and were a
benefactor to the congregation. So whenever it was impossible to devise
any other means of taking the value of Tom’s wages out of him, Mr
Pecksniff gave him leave to cultivate this instrument. For which mark of
his consideration Tom was very grateful.

The afternoon was remarkably warm, and Mr Pecksniff had been strolling
a long way. He had not what may be called a fine ear for music, but he
knew when it had a tranquilizing influence on his soul; and that was the
case now, for it sounded to him like a melodious snore. He approached
the church, and looking through the diamond lattice of a window near the
porch, saw Tom, with the curtains in the loft drawn back, playing away
with great expression and tenderness.

The church had an inviting air of coolness. The old oak roof supported
by cross-beams, the hoary walls, the marble tablets, and the cracked
stone pavement, were refreshing to look at. There were leaves of ivy
tapping gently at the opposite windows; and the sun poured in through
only one; leaving the body of the church in tempting shade. But the
most tempting spot of all, was one red-curtained and soft-cushioned pew,
wherein the official dignitaries of the place (of whom Mr Pecksniff was
the head and chief) enshrined themselves on Sundays. Mr Pecksniff’s seat
was in the corner; a remarkably comfortable corner; where his very large
Prayer-Book was at that minute making the most of its quarto self upon
the desk. He determined to go in and rest.

He entered very softly; in part because it was a church; in part because
his tread was always soft; in part because Tom played a solemn tune; in
part because he thought he would surprise him when he stopped. Unbolting
the door of the high pew of state, he glided in and shut it after him;
then sitting in his usual place, and stretching out his legs upon the
hassocks, he composed himself to listen to the music.

It is an unaccountable circumstance that he should have felt drowsy
there, where the force of association might surely have been enough
to keep him wide awake; but he did. He had not been in the snug little
corner five minutes before he began to nod. He had not recovered himself
one minute before he began to nod again. In the very act of opening his
eyes indolently, he nodded again. In the very act of shutting them, he
nodded again. So he fell out of one nod into another until at last he
ceased to nod at all, and was as fast as the church itself.

He had a consciousness of the organ, long after he fell asleep, though
as to its being an organ he had no more idea of that than he had of
its being a bull. After a while he began to have at intervals the same
dreamy impressions of voices; and awakening to an indolent curiosity
upon the subject, opened his eyes.

He was so indolent, that after glancing at the hassocks and the pew, he
was already half-way off to sleep again, when it occurred to him that
there really were voices in the church; low voices, talking earnestly
hard by; while the echoes seemed to mutter responses. He roused himself,
and listened.

Before he had listened half a dozen seconds, he became as broad awake as
ever he had been in all his life. With eyes, and ears, and mouth,
wide open, he moved himself a very little with the utmost caution, and
gathering the curtain in his hand, peeped out.

Tom Pinch and Mary. Of course. He had recognized their voices, and
already knew the topic they discussed. Looking like the small end of a
guillotined man, with his chin on a level with the top of the pew, so
that he might duck down immediately in case of either of them turning
round, he listened. Listened with such concentrated eagerness, that his
very hair and shirt-collar stood bristling up to help him.

‘No,’ cried Tom. ‘No letters have ever reached me, except that one from
New York. But don’t be uneasy on that account, for it’s very likely
they have gone away to some far-off place, where the posts are neither
regular nor frequent. He said in that very letter that it might be so,
even in that city to which they thought of travelling--Eden, you know.’

‘It is a great weight upon my mind,’ said Mary.

‘Oh, but you mustn’t let it be,’ said Tom. ‘There’s a true saying that
nothing travels so fast as ill news; and if the slightest harm had
happened to Martin, you may be sure you would have heard of it long
ago. I have often wished to say this to you,’ Tom continued with an
embarrassment that became him very well, ‘but you have never given me an
opportunity.’

‘I have sometimes been almost afraid,’ said Mary, ‘that you might
suppose I hesitated to confide in you, Mr Pinch.’

‘No,’ Tom stammered, ‘I--I am not aware that I ever supposed that. I
am sure that if I have, I have checked the thought directly, as an
injustice to you. I feel the delicacy of your situation in having to
confide in me at all,’ said Tom, ‘but I would risk my life to save you
from one day’s uneasiness; indeed I would!’

Poor Tom!

‘I have dreaded sometimes,’ Tom continued, ‘that I might have displeased
you by--by having the boldness to try and anticipate your wishes now and
then. At other times I have fancied that your kindness prompted you to
keep aloof from me.’

‘Indeed!’

‘It was very foolish; very presumptuous and ridiculous, to think
so,’ Tom pursued; ‘but I feared you might suppose it possible that
I--I--should admire you too much for my own peace; and so denied
yourself the slight assistance you would otherwise have accepted from
me. If such an idea has ever presented itself to you,’ faltered Tom,
‘pray dismiss it. I am easily made happy; and I shall live contented
here long after you and Martin have forgotten me. I am a poor, shy,
awkward creature; not at all a man of the world; and you should think no
more of me, bless you, than if I were an old friar!’

If friars bear such hearts as thine, Tom, let friars multiply; though
they have no such rule in all their stern arithmetic.

‘Dear Mr Pinch!’ said Mary, giving him her hand; ‘I cannot tell you how
your kindness moves me. I have never wronged you by the lightest doubt,
and have never for an instant ceased to feel that you were all--much
more than all--that Martin found you. Without the silent care and
friendship I have experienced from you, my life here would have been
unhappy. But you have been a good angel to me; filling me with gratitude
of heart, hope, and courage.’

‘I am as little like an angel, I am afraid,’ replied Tom, shaking his
head, ‘as any stone cherubim among the grave-stones; and I don’t think
there are many real angels of THAT pattern. But I should like to know
(if you will tell me) why you have been so very silent about Martin.’

‘Because I have been afraid,’ said Mary, ‘of injuring you.’

‘Of injuring me!’ cried Tom.

‘Of doing you an injury with your employer.’

The gentleman in question dived.

‘With Pecksniff!’ rejoined Tom, with cheerful confidence. ‘Oh dear, he’d
never think of us! He’s the best of men. The more at ease you were, the
happier he would be. Oh dear, you needn’t be afraid of Pecksniff. He is
not a spy.’

Many a man in Mr Pecksniff’s place, if he could have dived through the
floor of the pew of state and come out at Calcutta or any inhabited
region on the other side of the earth, would have done it instantly. Mr
Pecksniff sat down upon a hassock, and listening more attentively than
ever, smiled.

Mary seemed to have expressed some dissent in the meanwhile, for Tom
went on to say, with honest energy:

‘Well, I don’t know how it is, but it always happens, whenever I express
myself in this way to anybody almost, that I find they won’t do justice
to Pecksniff. It is one of the most extraordinary circumstances that
ever came within my knowledge, but it is so. There’s John Westlock, who
used to be a pupil here, one of the best-hearted young men in the world,
in all other matters--I really believe John would have Pecksniff flogged
at the cart’s tail if he could. And John is not a solitary case,
for every pupil we have had in my time has gone away with the same
inveterate hatred of him. There was Mark Tapley, too, quite in another
station of life,’ said Tom; ‘the mockery he used to make of Pecksniff
when he was at the Dragon was shocking. Martin too: Martin was worse
than any of ‘em. But I forgot. He prepared you to dislike Pecksniff, of
course. So you came with a prejudice, you know, Miss Graham, and are not
a fair witness.’

Tom triumphed very much in this discovery, and rubbed his hands with
great satisfaction.

‘Mr Pinch,’ said Mary, ‘you mistake him.’

‘No, no!’ cried Tom. ‘YOU mistake him. But,’ he added, with a rapid
change in his tone, ‘what is the matter? Miss Graham, what is the
matter?’

Mr Pecksniff brought up to the top of the pew, by slow degrees, his
hair, his forehead, his eyebrow, his eye. She was sitting on a bench
beside the door with her hands before her face; and Tom was bending over
her.

‘What is the matter?’ cried Tom. ‘Have I said anything to hurt you? Has
any one said anything to hurt you? Don’t cry. Pray tell me what it is.
I cannot bear to see you so distressed. Mercy on us, I never was so
surprised and grieved in all my life!’

Mr Pecksniff kept his eye in the same place. He could have moved it now
for nothing short of a gimlet or a red-hot wire.

‘I wouldn’t have told you, Mr Pinch,’ said Mary, ‘if I could have helped
it; but your delusion is so absorbing, and it is so necessary that we
should be upon our guard; that you should not be compromised; and to
that end that you should know by whom I am beset; that no alternative
is left me. I came here purposely to tell you, but I think I should
have wanted courage if you had not chanced to lead me so directly to the
object of my coming.’

Tom gazed at her steadfastly, and seemed to say, ‘What else?’ But he
said not a word.

‘That person whom you think the best of men,’ said Mary, looking up, and
speaking with a quivering lip and flashing eye.

‘Lord bless me!’ muttered Tom, staggering back. ‘Wait a moment. That
person whom I think the best of men! You mean Pecksniff, of course.
Yes, I see you mean Pecksniff. Good gracious me, don’t speak without
authority. What has he done? If he is not the best of men, what is he?’

‘The worst. The falsest, craftiest, meanest, cruellest, most
sordid, most shameless,’ said the trembling girl--trembling with her
indignation.

Tom sat down on a seat, and clasped his hands.

‘What is he,’ said Mary, ‘who receiving me in his house as his guest;
his unwilling guest; knowing my history, and how defenceless and alone
I am, presumes before his daughters to affront me so, that if I had a
brother but a child, who saw it, he would instinctively have helped me?’

‘He is a scoundrel!’ exclaimed Tom. ‘Whoever he may be, he is a
scoundrel.’

Mr Pecksniff dived again.

‘What is he,’ said Mary, ‘who, when my only friend--a dear and kind one,
too--was in full health of mind, humbled himself before him, but was
spurned away (for he knew him then) like a dog. Who, in his forgiving
spirit, now that that friend is sunk into a failing state, can crawl
about him again, and use the influence he basely gains for every base
and wicked purpose, and not for one--not one--that’s true or good?’

‘I say he is a scoundrel!’ answered Tom.

‘But what is he--oh, Mr Pinch, what IS he--who, thinking he could
compass these designs the better if I were his wife, assails me with the
coward’s argument that if I marry him, Martin, on whom I have brought so
much misfortune, shall be restored to something of his former hopes; and
if I do not, shall be plunged in deeper ruin? What is he who makes my
very constancy to one I love with all my heart a torture to myself and
wrong to him; who makes me, do what I will, the instrument to hurt a
head I would heap blessings on! What is he who, winding all these cruel
snares about me, explains their purpose to me, with a smooth tongue and
a smiling face, in the broad light of day; dragging me on, the while, in
his embrace, and holding to his lips a hand,’ pursued the agitated girl,
extending it, ‘which I would have struck off, if with it I could lose
the shame and degradation of his touch?’

‘I say,’ cried Tom, in great excitement, ‘he is a scoundrel and a
villain! I don’t care who he is, I say he is a double-dyed and most
intolerable villain!’

Covering her face with her hands again, as if the passion which had
sustained her through these disclosures lost itself in an overwhelming
sense of shame and grief, she abandoned herself to tears.

Any sight of distress was sure to move the tenderness of Tom, but this
especially. Tears and sobs from her were arrows in his heart. He tried
to comfort her; sat down beside her; expended all his store of homely
eloquence; and spoke in words of praise and hope of Martin. Aye, though
he loved her from his soul with such a self-denying love as woman seldom
wins; he spoke from first to last of Martin. Not the wealth of the rich
Indies would have tempted Tom to shirk one mention of her lover’s name.

When she was more composed, she impressed upon Tom that this man she
had described, was Pecksniff in his real colours; and word by word and
phrase by phrase, as well as she remembered it, related what had
passed between them in the wood: which was no doubt a source of high
gratification to that gentleman himself, who in his desire to see and
his dread of being seen, was constantly diving down into the state pew,
and coming up again like the intelligent householder in Punch’s Show,
who avoids being knocked on the head with a cudgel. When she had
concluded her account, and had besought Tom to be very distant and
unconscious in his manner towards her after this explanation, and had
thanked him very much, they parted on the alarm of footsteps in the
burial-ground; and Tom was left alone in the church again.

And now the full agitation and misery of the disclosure came rushing
upon Tom indeed. The star of his whole life from boyhood had become, in
a moment, putrid vapour. It was not that Pecksniff, Tom’s Pecksniff, had
ceased to exist, but that he never had existed. In his death Tom would
have had the comfort of remembering what he used to be, but in this
discovery, he had the anguish of recollecting what he never was. For,
as Tom’s blindness in this matter had been total and not partial, so was
his restored sight. HIS Pecksniff could never have worked the wickedness
of which he had just now heard, but any other Pecksniff could; and the
Pecksniff who could do that could do anything, and no doubt had been
doing anything and everything except the right thing, all through his
career. From the lofty height on which poor Tom had placed his idol it
was tumbled down headlong, and

     Not all the king’s horses, nor all the king’s men,
     Could have set Mr Pecksniff up again.

Legions of Titans couldn’t have got him out of the mud; and serve him
right! But it was not he who suffered; it was Tom. His compass was
broken, his chart destroyed, his chronometer had stopped, his masts were
gone by the board; his anchor was adrift, ten thousand leagues away.

Mr Pecksniff watched him with a lively interest, for he divined the
purpose of Tom’s ruminations, and was curious to see how he conducted
himself. For some time, Tom wandered up and down the aisle like a man
demented, stopping occasionally to lean against a pew and think it over;
then he stood staring at a blank old monument bordered tastefully with
skulls and cross-bones, as if it were the finest work of Art he had ever
seen, although at other times he held it in unspeakable contempt; then
he sat down; then walked to and fro again; then went wandering up into
the organ-loft, and touched the keys. But their minstrelsy was changed,
their music gone; and sounding one long melancholy chord, Tom drooped
his head upon his hands and gave it up as hopeless.

‘I wouldn’t have cared,’ said Tom Pinch, rising from his stool and
looking down into the church as if he had been the Clergyman, ‘I
wouldn’t have cared for anything he might have done to Me, for I have
tried his patience often, and have lived upon his sufferance and have
never been the help to him that others could have been. I wouldn’t have
minded, Pecksniff,’ Tom continued, little thinking who heard him, ‘if
you had done Me any wrong; I could have found plenty of excuses for
that; and though you might have hurt me, could have still gone on
respecting you. But why did you ever fall so low as this in my esteem!
Oh Pecksniff, Pecksniff, there is nothing I would not have given, to
have had you deserve my old opinion of you; nothing!’

Mr Pecksniff sat upon the hassock pulling up his shirt-collar, while
Tom, touched to the quick, delivered this apostrophe. After a pause he
heard Tom coming down the stairs, jingling the church keys; and bringing
his eye to the top of the pew again, saw him go slowly out and lock the
door.

Mr Pecksniff durst not issue from his place of concealment; for through
the windows of the church he saw Tom passing on among the graves, and
sometimes stopping at a stone, and leaning there as if he were a
mourner who had lost a friend. Even when he had left the churchyard, Mr
Pecksniff still remained shut up; not being at all secure but that in
his restless state of mind Tom might come wandering back. At length he
issued forth, and walked with a pleasant countenance into the vestry;
where he knew there was a window near the ground, by which he could
release himself by merely stepping out.

He was in a curious frame of mind, Mr Pecksniff; being in no hurry to
go, but rather inclining to a dilatory trifling with the time, which
prompted him to open the vestry cupboard, and look at himself in the
parson’s little glass that hung within the door. Seeing that his hair
was rumpled, he took the liberty of borrowing the canonical brush and
arranging it. He also took the liberty of opening another cupboard; but
he shut it up again quickly, being rather startled by the sight of a
black and a white surplice dangling against the wall; which had very
much the appearance of two curates who had committed suicide by hanging
themselves. Remembering that he had seen in the first cupboard a
port-wine bottle and some biscuits, he peeped into it again, and helped
himself with much deliberation; cogitating all the time though, in
a very deep and weighty manner, as if his thoughts were otherwise
employed.

He soon made up his mind, if it had ever been in doubt; and putting
back the bottle and biscuits, opened the casement. He got out into the
churchyard without any difficulty; shut the window after him; and walked
straight home.

‘Is Mr Pinch indoors?’ asked Mr Pecksniff of his serving-maid.

‘Just come in, sir.’

‘Just come in, eh?’ repeated Mr Pecksniff, cheerfully. ‘And gone
upstairs, I suppose?’

‘Yes sir. Gone upstairs. Shall I call him, sir?’

‘No,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘no. You needn’t call him, Jane. Thank you,
Jane. How are your relations, Jane?’

‘Pretty well, I thank you, sir.’

‘I am glad to hear it. Let them know I asked about them, Jane. Is Mr
Chuzzlewit in the way, Jane?’

‘Yes, sir. He’s in the parlour, reading.’

‘He’s in the parlour, reading, is he, Jane?’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Very
well. Then I think I’ll go and see him, Jane.’

Never had Mr Pecksniff been beheld in a more pleasant humour!

But when he walked into the parlour where the old man was engaged as
Jane had said; with pen and ink and paper on a table close at hand (for
Mr Pecksniff was always very particular to have him well supplied with
writing materials), he became less cheerful. He was not angry, he was
not vindictive, he was not cross, he was not moody, but he was grieved;
he was sorely grieved. As he sat down by the old man’s side, two
tears--not tears like those with which recording angels blot their
entries out, but drops so precious that they use them for their
ink--stole down his meritorious cheeks.

‘What is the matter?’ asked old Martin. ‘Pecksniff, what ails you, man?’

‘I am sorry to interrupt you, my dear sir, and I am still more sorry for
the cause. My good, my worthy friend, I am deceived.’

‘You are deceived!’

‘Ah!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, in an agony, ‘deceived in the tenderest
point. Cruelly deceived in that quarter, sir, in which I placed the most
unbounded confidence. Deceived, Mr Chuzzlewit, by Thomas Pinch.’

‘Oh! bad, bad, bad!’ said Martin, laying down his book. ‘Very bad! I
hope not. Are you certain?’

‘Certain, my good sir! My eyes and ears are witnesses. I wouldn’t have
believed it otherwise. I wouldn’t have believed it, Mr Chuzzlewit, if a
Fiery Serpent had proclaimed it from the top of Salisbury Cathedral. I
would have said,’ cried Mr Pecksniff, ‘that the Serpent lied. Such was
my faith in Thomas Pinch, that I would have cast the falsehood back into
the Serpent’s teeth, and would have taken Thomas to my heart. But I am
not a Serpent, sir, myself, I grieve to say, and no excuse or hope is
left me.’

Martin was greatly disturbed to see him so much agitated, and to hear
such unexpected news. He begged him to compose himself, and asked upon
what subject Mr Pinch’s treachery had been developed.

‘That is almost the worst of all, sir,’ Mr Pecksniff answered, ‘on a
subject nearly concerning YOU. Oh! is it not enough,’ said Mr Pecksniff,
looking upward, ‘that these blows must fall on me, but must they also
hit my friends!’

‘You alarm me,’ cried the old man, changing colour. ‘I am not so strong
as I was. You terrify me, Pecksniff!’

‘Cheer up, my noble sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff, taking courage, ‘and we
will do what is required of us. You shall know all, sir, and shall
be righted. But first excuse me, sir, excuse me. I have a duty to
discharge, which I owe to society.’

He rang the bell, and Jane appeared. ‘Send Mr Pinch here, if you please,
Jane.’

Tom came. Constrained and altered in his manner, downcast and dejected,
visibly confused; not liking to look Pecksniff in the face.

The honest man bestowed a glance on Mr Chuzzlewit, as who should say
‘You see!’ and addressed himself to Tom in these terms:

‘Mr Pinch, I have left the vestry-window unfastened. Will you do me the
favour to go and secure it; then bring the keys of the sacred edifice to
me!’

‘The vestry-window, sir?’ cried Tom.

‘You understand me, Mr Pinch, I think,’ returned his patron. ‘Yes, Mr
Pinch, the vestry-window. I grieve to say that sleeping in the church
after a fatiguing ramble, I overheard just now some fragments,’ he
emphasised that word, ‘of a dialogue between two parties; and one of
them locking the church when he went out, I was obliged to leave
it myself by the vestry-window. Do me the favour to secure that
vestry-window, Mr Pinch, and then come back to me.’

No physiognomist that ever dwelt on earth could have construed Tom’s
face when he heard these words. Wonder was in it, and a mild look of
reproach, but certainly no fear or guilt, although a host of strong
emotions struggled to display themselves. He bowed, and without saying
one word, good or bad, withdrew.

‘Pecksniff,’ cried Martin, in a tremble, ‘what does all this mean? You
are not going to do anything in haste, you may regret!’

‘No, my good sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff, firmly, ‘No. But I have a duty to
discharge which I owe to society; and it shall be discharged, my friend,
at any cost!’

Oh, late-remembered, much-forgotten, mouthing, braggart duty, always
owed, and seldom paid in any other coin than punishment and wrath, when
will mankind begin to know thee! When will men acknowledge thee in thy
neglected cradle, and thy stunted youth, and not begin their recognition
in thy sinful manhood and thy desolate old age! Oh, ermined Judge whose
duty to society is, now, to doom the ragged criminal to punishment and
death, hadst thou never, Man, a duty to discharge in barring up the
hundred open gates that wooed him to the felon’s dock, and throwing but
ajar the portals to a decent life! Oh, prelate, prelate, whose duty to
society it is to mourn in melancholy phrase the sad degeneracy of these
bad times in which thy lot of honours has been cast, did nothing go
before thy elevation to the lofty seat, from which thou dealest out thy
homilies to other tarriers for dead men’s shoes, whose duty to society
has not begun! Oh! magistrate, so rare a country gentleman and brave a
squire, had you no duty to society, before the ricks were blazing and
the mob were mad; or did it spring up, armed and booted from the earth,
a corps of yeomanry full-grown!

Mr Pecksniff’s duty to society could not be paid till Tom came back. The
interval which preceded the return of that young man, he occupied in a
close conference with his friend; so that when Tom did arrive, he found
the two quite ready to receive him. Mary was in her own room above,
whither Mr Pecksniff, always considerate, had besought old Martin to
entreat her to remain some half-hour longer, that her feelings might be
spared.

When Tom came back, he found old Martin sitting by the window, and Mr
Pecksniff in an imposing attitude at the table. On one side of him was
his pocket-handkerchief; and on the other a little heap (a very little
heap) of gold and silver, and odd pence. Tom saw, at a glance, that it
was his own salary for the current quarter.

‘Have you fastened the vestry-window, Mr Pinch?’ said Pecksniff.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Thank you. Put down the keys if you please, Mr Pinch.’

Tom placed them on the table. He held the bunch by the key of the
organ-loft (though it was one of the smallest), and looked hard at it
as he laid it down. It had been an old, old friend of Tom’s; a kind
companion to him, many and many a day.

‘Mr Pinch,’ said Pecksniff, shaking his head; ‘oh, Mr Pinch! I wonder
you can look me in the face!’

Tom did it though; and notwithstanding that he has been described as
stooping generally, he stood as upright then as man could stand.

‘Mr Pinch,’ said Pecksniff, taking up his handkerchief, as if he felt
that he should want it soon, ‘I will not dwell upon the past. I will
spare you, and I will spare myself, that pain at least.’

Tom’s was not a very bright eye, but it was a very expressive one when
he looked at Mr Pecksniff, and said:

‘Thank you, sir. I am very glad you will not refer to the past.’

‘The present is enough,’ said Mr Pecksniff, dropping a penny, ‘and
the sooner THAT is past, the better. Mr Pinch, I will not dismiss
you without a word of explanation. Even such a course would be quite
justifiable under the circumstances; but it might wear an appearance of
hurry, and I will not do it; for I am,’ said Mr Pecksniff, knocking down
another penny, ‘perfectly self-possessed. Therefore I will say to you,
what I have already said to Mr Chuzzlewit.’

Tom glanced at the old gentleman, who nodded now and then as approving
of Mr Pecksniff’s sentences and sentiments, but interposed between them
in no other way.

‘From fragments of a conversation which I overheard in the church, just
now, Mr Pinch,’ said Pecksniff, ‘between yourself and Miss Graham--I say
fragments, because I was slumbering at a considerable distance from you,
when I was roused by your voices--and from what I saw, I ascertained (I
would have given a great deal not to have ascertained, Mr Pinch) that
you, forgetful of all ties of duty and of honour, sir; regardless of the
sacred laws of hospitality, to which you were pledged as an inmate
of this house; have presumed to address Miss Graham with unreturned
professions of attachment and proposals of love.’

Tom looked at him steadily.

‘Do you deny it, sir?’ asked Mr Pecksniff, dropping one pound two and
fourpence, and making a great business of picking it up again.

‘No, sir,’ replied Tom. ‘I do not.’

‘You do not,’ said Mr Pecksniff, glancing at the old gentleman. ‘Oblige
me by counting this money, Mr Pinch, and putting your name to this
receipt. You do not?’

No, Tom did not. He scorned to deny it. He saw that Mr Pecksniff having
overheard his own disgrace, cared not a jot for sinking lower yet in his
contempt. He saw that he had devised this fiction as the readiest means
of getting rid of him at once, but that it must end in that any way. He
saw that Mr Pecksniff reckoned on his not denying it, because his doing
so and explaining would incense the old man more than ever against
Martin and against Mary; while Pecksniff himself would only have been
mistaken in his ‘fragments.’ Deny it! No.

‘You find the amount correct, do you, Mr Pinch?’ said Pecksniff.

‘Quite correct, sir,’ answered Tom.

‘A person is waiting in the kitchen,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘to carry
your luggage wherever you please. We part, Mr Pinch, at once, and are
strangers from this time.’

Something without a name; compassion, sorrow, old tenderness, mistaken
gratitude, habit; none of these, and yet all of them; smote upon Tom’s
gentle heart at parting. There was no such soul as Pecksniff’s in
that carcase; and yet, though his speaking out had not involved the
compromise of one he loved, he couldn’t have denounced the very shape
and figure of the man. Not even then.

‘I will not say,’ cried Mr Pecksniff, shedding tears, ‘what a blow this
is. I will not say how much it tries me; how it works upon my nature;
how it grates upon my feelings. I do not care for that. I can endure as
well as another man. But what I have to hope, and what you have to hope,
Mr Pinch (otherwise a great responsibility rests upon you), is, that
this deception may not alter my ideas of humanity; that it may not
impair my freshness, or contract, if I may use the expression, my
Pinions. I hope it will not; I don’t think it will. It may be a comfort
to you, if not now, at some future time, to know that I shall endeavour
not to think the worse of my fellow-creatures in general, for what has
passed between us. Farewell!’

Tom had meant to spare him one little puncturation with a lancet, which
he had it in his power to administer, but he changed his mind on hearing
this, and said:

‘I think you left something in the church, sir.’

‘Thank you, Mr Pinch,’ said Pecksniff. ‘I am not aware that I did.’

‘This is your double eye-glass, I believe?’ said Tom.

‘Oh!’ cried Pecksniff, with some degree of confusion. ‘I am obliged to
you. Put it down, if you please.’

‘I found it,’ said Tom, slowly--‘when I went to bolt the
vestry-window--in the pew.’

So he had. Mr Pecksniff had taken it off when he was bobbing up and
down, lest it should strike against the panelling; and had forgotten it.
Going back to the church with his mind full of having been watched, and
wondering very much from what part, Tom’s attention was caught by the
door of the state pew standing open. Looking into it he found the glass.
And thus he knew, and by returning it gave Mr Pecksniff the information
that he knew, where the listener had been; and that instead of
overhearing fragments of the conversation, he must have rejoiced in
every word of it.

‘I am glad he’s gone,’ said Martin, drawing a long breath when Tom had
left the room.

‘It IS a relief,’ assented Mr Pecksniff. ‘It is a great relief. But
having discharged--I hope with tolerable firmness--the duty which I owed
to society, I will now, my dear sir, if you will give me leave, retire
to shed a few tears in the back garden, as an humble individual.’

Tom went upstairs; cleared his shelf of books; packed them up with his
music and an old fiddle in his trunk; got out his clothes (they were not
so many that they made his head ache); put them on the top of his books;
and went into the workroom for his case of instruments. There was a
ragged stool there, with the horsehair all sticking out of the top like
a wig: a very Beast of a stool in itself; on which he had taken up his
daily seat, year after year, during the whole period of his service.
They had grown older and shabbier in company. Pupils had served their
time; seasons had come and gone. Tom and the worn-out stool had held
together through it all. That part of the room was traditionally called
‘Tom’s Corner.’ It had been assigned to him at first because of its
being situated in a strong draught, and a great way from the fire; and
he had occupied it ever since. There were portraits of him on the walls,
with all his weak points monstrously portrayed. Diabolical sentiments,
foreign to his character, were represented as issuing from his mouth in
fat balloons. Every pupil had added something, even unto fancy portraits
of his father with one eye, and of his mother with a disproportionate
nose, and especially of his sister; who always being presented as
extremely beautiful, made full amends to Tom for any other jokes. Under
less uncommon circumstances, it would have cut Tom to the heart to leave
these things and think that he saw them for the last time; but it didn’t
now. There was no Pecksniff; there never had been a Pecksniff; and all
his other griefs were swallowed up in that.

So, when he returned into the bedroom, and, having fastened his box and
a carpet-bag, put on his walking gaiters, and his great-coat, and his
hat, and taken his stick in his hand, looked round it for the last time.
Early on summer mornings, and by the light of private candle-ends on
winter nights, he had read himself half blind in this same room. He had
tried in this same room to learn the fiddle under the bedclothes, but
yielding to objections from the other pupils, had reluctantly abandoned
the design. At any other time he would have parted from it with a pang,
thinking of all he had learned there, of the many hours he had passed
there; for the love of his very dreams. But there was no Pecksniff;
there never had been a Pecksniff, and the unreality of Pecksniff
extended itself to the chamber, in which, sitting on one particular
bed, the thing supposed to be that Great Abstraction had often preached
morality with such effect that Tom had felt a moisture in his eyes,
while hanging breathless on the words.

The man engaged to bear his box--Tom knew him well: a Dragon man--came
stamping up the stairs, and made a roughish bow to Tom (to whom in
common times he would have nodded with a grin) as though he were aware
of what had happened, and wished him to perceive it made no difference
to HIM. It was clumsily done; he was a mere waterer of horses; but Tom
liked the man for it, and felt it more than going away.

Tom would have helped him with the box, but he made no more of it,
though it was a heavy one, than an elephant would have made of a
castle; just swinging it on his back and bowling downstairs as if, being
naturally a heavy sort of fellow, he could carry a box infinitely better
than he could go alone. Tom took the carpet-bag, and went downstairs
along with him. At the outer door stood Jane, crying with all her might;
and on the steps was Mrs Lupin, sobbing bitterly, and putting out her
hand for Tom to shake.

‘You’re coming to the Dragon, Mr Pinch?’

‘No,’ said Tom, ‘no. I shall walk to Salisbury to-night. I couldn’t stay
here. For goodness’ sake, don’t make me so unhappy, Mrs Lupin.’

‘But you’ll come to the Dragon, Mr Pinch. If it’s only for tonight. To
see me, you know; not as a traveller.’

‘God bless my soul!’ said Tom, wiping his eyes. ‘The kindness of people
is enough to break one’s heart! I mean to go to Salisbury to-night, my
dear good creature. If you’ll take care of my box for me till I write
for it, I shall consider it the greatest kindness you can do me.’

‘I wish,’ cried Mrs Lupin, ‘there were twenty boxes, Mr Pinch, that I
might have ‘em all.’

‘Thank’ee,’ said Tom. ‘It’s like you. Good-bye. Good-bye.’

There were several people, young and old, standing about the door, some
of whom cried with Mrs Lupin; while others tried to keep up a stout
heart, as Tom did; and others were absorbed in admiration of Mr
Pecksniff--a man who could build a church, as one may say, by squinting
at a sheet of paper; and others were divided between that feeling and
sympathy with Tom. Mr Pecksniff had appeared on the top of the steps,
simultaneously with his old pupil, and while Tom was talking with Mrs
Lupin kept his hand stretched out, as though he said ‘Go forth!’ When
Tom went forth, and had turned the corner Mr Pecksniff shook his head,
shut his eyes, and heaving a deep sigh, shut the door. On which, the
best of Tom’s supporters said he must have done some dreadful deed, or
such a man as Mr Pecksniff never could have felt like that. If it had
been a common quarrel (they observed), he would have said something, but
when he didn’t, Mr Pinch must have shocked him dreadfully.

Tom was out of hearing of their shrewd opinions, and plodded on as
steadily as he could go, until he came within sight of the turnpike
where the tollman’s family had cried out ‘Mr Pinch!’ that frosty
morning, when he went to meet young Martin. He had got through the
village, and this toll-bar was his last trial; but when the infant
toll-takers came screeching out, he had half a mind to run for it, and
make a bolt across the country.

‘Why, deary Mr Pinch! oh, deary sir!’ cried the tollman’s wife. ‘What an
unlikely time for you to be a-going this way with a bag!’

‘I am going to Salisbury,’ said Tom.

‘Why, goodness, where’s the gig, then?’ cried the tollman’s wife,
looking down the road, as if she thought Tom might have been upset
without observing it.

‘I haven’t got it,’ said Tom. ‘I--’ he couldn’t evade it; he felt she
would have him in the next question, if he got over this one. ‘I have
left Mr Pecksniff.’

The tollman--a crusty customer, always smoking solitary pipes in a
Windsor chair, inside, set artfully between two little windows that
looked up and down the road, so that when he saw anything coming up he
might hug himself on having toll to take, and when he saw it going down,
might hug himself on having taken it--the tollman was out in an instant.

‘Left Mr Pecksniff!’ cried the tollman.

‘Yes,’ said Tom, ‘left him.’

The tollman looked at his wife, uncertain whether to ask her if she had
anything to suggest, or to order her to mind the children. Astonishment
making him surly, he preferred the latter, and sent her into the
toll-house with a flea in her ear.

‘You left Mr Pecksniff!’ cried the tollman, folding his arms, and
spreading his legs. ‘I should as soon have thought of his head leaving
him.’

‘Aye!’ said Tom, ‘so should I, yesterday. Good night!’

If a heavy drove of oxen hadn’t come by immediately, the tollman would
have gone down to the village straight, to inquire into it. As
things turned out, he smoked another pipe, and took his wife into his
confidence. But their united sagacity could make nothing of it, and they
went to bed--metaphorically--in the dark. But several times that night,
when a waggon or other vehicle came through, and the driver asked
the tollkeeper ‘What news?’ he looked at the man by the light of his
lantern, to assure himself that he had an interest in the subject, and
then said, wrapping his watch-coat round his legs:

‘You’ve heerd of Mr Pecksniff down yonder?’

‘Ah! sure-ly!’

‘And of his young man Mr Pinch, p’raps?’

‘Ah!’

‘They’ve parted.’

After every one of these disclosures, the tollman plunged into his
house again, and was seen no more, while the other side went on in great
amazement.

But this was long after Tom was abed, and Tom was now with his face
towards Salisbury, doing his best to get there. The evening was
beautiful at first, but it became cloudy and dull at sunset, and the
rain fell heavily soon afterwards. For ten long miles he plodded on, wet
through, until at last the lights appeared, and he came into the welcome
precincts of the city.

He went to the inn where he had waited for Martin, and briefly answering
their inquiries after Mr Pecksniff, ordered a bed. He had no heart for
tea or supper, meat or drink of any kind, but sat by himself before
an empty table in the public room while the bed was getting ready,
revolving in his mind all that had happened that eventful day, and
wondering what he could or should do for the future. It was a great
relief when the chambermaid came in, and said the bed was ready.

It was a low four-poster, shelving downward in the centre like a trough,
and the room was crowded with impracticable tables and exploded chests
of drawers, full of damp linen. A graphic representation in oil of a
remarkably fat ox hung over the fireplace, and the portrait of some
former landlord (who might have been the ox’s brother, he was so like
him) stared roundly in, at the foot of the bed. A variety of queer
smells were partially quenched in the prevailing scent of very old
lavender; and the window had not been opened for such a long space of
time that it pleaded immemorial usage, and wouldn’t come open now.

These were trifles in themselves, but they added to the strangeness of
the place, and did not induce Tom to forget his new position. Pecksniff
had gone out of the world--had never been in it--and it was as much
as Tom could do to say his prayers without him. But he felt happier
afterwards, and went to sleep, and dreamed about him as he Never Was.



CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

TREATS OF TODGER’S AGAIN; AND OF ANOTHER BLIGHTED PLANT BESIDES THE
PLANTS UPON THE LEADS


Early on the day next after that on which she bade adieu to the halls
of her youth and the scenes of her childhood, Miss Pecksniff, arriving
safely at the coach-office in London, was there received, and conducted
to her peaceful home beneath the shadow of the Monument, by Mrs Todgers.
M. Todgers looked a little worn by cares of gravy and other such
solicitudes arising out of her establishment, but displayed her usual
earnestness and warmth of manner.

‘And how, my sweet Miss Pecksniff,’ said she, ‘how is your princely pa?’

Miss Pecksniff signified (in confidence) that he contemplated the
introduction of a princely ma; and repeated the sentiment that she
wasn’t blind, and wasn’t quite a fool, and wouldn’t bear it.

Mrs Todgers was more shocked by the intelligence than any one could have
expected. She was quite bitter. She said there was no truth in man and
that the warmer he expressed himself, as a general principle, the falser
and more treacherous he was. She foresaw with astonishing clearness that
the object of Mr Pecksniff’s attachment was designing, worthless, and
wicked; and receiving from Charity the fullest confirmation of these
views, protested with tears in her eyes that she loved Miss Pecksniff
like a sister, and felt her injuries as if they were her own.

‘Your real darling sister, I have not seen her more than once since her
marriage,’ said Mrs Todgers, ‘and then I thought her looking poorly. My
sweet Miss Pecksniff, I always thought that you was to be the lady?’

‘Oh dear no!’ cried Cherry, shaking her head. ‘Oh no, Mrs Todgers. Thank
you. No! not for any consideration he could offer.’

‘I dare say you are right,’ said Mrs Todgers with a sigh. ‘I feared
it all along. But the misery we have had from that match, here among
ourselves, in this house, my dear Miss Pecksniff, nobody would believe.’

‘Lor, Mrs Todgers!’

‘Awful, awful!’ repeated Mrs Todgers, with strong emphasis. ‘You
recollect our youngest gentleman, my dear?’

‘Of course I do,’ said Cherry.

‘You might have observed,’ said Mrs Todgers, ‘how he used to watch your
sister; and that a kind of stony dumbness came over him whenever she was
in company?’

‘I am sure I never saw anything of the sort,’ said Cherry, in a peevish
manner. ‘What nonsense, Mrs Todgers!’

‘My dear,’ returned that lady in a hollow voice, ‘I have seen him again
and again, sitting over his pie at dinner, with his spoon a perfect
fixture in his mouth, looking at your sister. I have seen him standing
in a corner of our drawing-room, gazing at her, in such a lonely,
melancholy state, that he was more like a Pump than a man, and might
have drawed tears.’

‘I never saw it!’ cried Cherry; ‘that’s all I can say.’

‘But when the marriage took place,’ said Mrs Todgers, proceeding
with her subject, ‘when it was in the paper, and was read out here at
breakfast, I thought he had taken leave of his senses, I did indeed.
The violence of that young man, my dear Miss Pecksniff; the frightful
opinions he expressed upon the subject of self-destruction; the
extraordinary actions he performed with his tea; the clenching way in
which he bit his bread and butter; the manner in which he taunted Mr
Jinkins; all combined to form a picture never to be forgotten.’

‘It’s a pity he didn’t destroy himself, I think,’ observed Miss
Pecksniff.

‘Himself!’ said Mrs Todgers, ‘it took another turn at night. He was for
destroying other people then. There was a little chaffing going on--I
hope you don’t consider that a low expression, Miss Pecksniff; it is
always in our gentlemen’s mouths--a little chaffing going on, my dear,
among ‘em, all in good nature, when suddenly he rose up, foaming with
his fury, and but for being held by three would have had Mr Jinkins’s
life with a bootjack.’

Miss Pecksniff’s face expressed supreme indifference.

‘And now,’ said Mrs Todgers, ‘now he is the meekest of men. You can
almost bring the tears into his eyes by looking at him. He sits with me
the whole day long on Sundays, talking in such a dismal way that I find
it next to impossible to keep my spirits up equal to the accommodation
of the boarders. His only comfort is in female society. He takes me
half-price to the play, to an extent which I sometimes fear is beyond
his means; and I see the tears a-standing in his eyes during the whole
performance--particularly if it is anything of a comic nature. The turn
I experienced only yesterday,’ said Mrs Todgers putting her hand to her
side, ‘when the house-maid threw his bedside carpet out of the window of
his room, while I was sitting here, no one can imagine. I thought it was
him, and that he had done it at last!’

The contempt with which Miss Charity received this pathetic account of
the state to which the youngest gentleman in company was reduced,
did not say much for her power of sympathising with that unfortunate
character. She treated it with great levity, and went on to inform
herself, then and afterwards, whether any other changes had occurred in
the commercial boarding-house.

Mr Bailey was gone, and had been succeeded (such is the decay of human
greatness!) by an old woman whose name was reported to be Tamaroo--which
seemed an impossibility. Indeed it appeared in the fullness of time that
the jocular boarders had appropriated the word from an English ballad,
in which it is supposed to express the bold and fiery nature of a
certain hackney coachman; and that it was bestowed upon Mr Bailey’s
successor by reason of her having nothing fiery about her, except an
occasional attack of that fire which is called St. Anthony’s. This
ancient female had been engaged, in fulfillment of a vow, registered by
Mrs Todgers, that no more boys should darken the commercial doors; and
she was chiefly remarkable for a total absence of all comprehension upon
every subject whatever. She was a perfect Tomb for messages and small
parcels; and when dispatched to the Post Office with letters, had been
frequently seen endeavouring to insinuate them into casual chinks in
private doors, under the delusion that any door with a hole in it would
answer the purpose. She was a very little old woman, and always wore
a very coarse apron with a bib before and a loop behind, together
with bandages on her wrists, which appeared to be afflicted with an
everlasting sprain. She was on all occasions chary of opening the street
door, and ardent to shut it again; and she waited at table in a bonnet.

This was the only great change over and above the change which had
fallen on the youngest gentleman. As for him, he more than corroborated
the account of Mrs Todgers; possessing greater sensibility than even
she had given him credit for. He entertained some terrible notions of
Destiny, among other matters, and talked much about people’s ‘Missions’;
upon which he seemed to have some private information not generally
attainable, as he knew it had been poor Merry’s mission to crush him
in the bud. He was very frail and tearful; for being aware that a
shepherd’s mission was to pipe to his flocks, and that a boatswain’s
mission was to pipe all hands, and that one man’s mission was to be a
paid piper, and another man’s mission was to pay the piper, so he had
got it into his head that his own peculiar mission was to pipe his eye.
Which he did perpetually.

He often informed Mrs Todgers that the sun had set upon him; that the
billows had rolled over him; that the car of Juggernaut had crushed him,
and also that the deadly Upas tree of Java had blighted him. His name
was Moddle.

Towards this most unhappy Moddle, Miss Pecksniff conducted herself at
first with distant haughtiness, being in no humour to be entertained
with dirges in honour of her married sister. The poor young gentleman
was additionally crushed by this, and remonstrated with Mrs Todgers on
the subject.

‘Even she turns from me, Mrs Todgers,’ said Moddle.

‘Then why don’t you try and be a little bit more cheerful, sir?’
retorted Mrs Todgers.

‘Cheerful, Mrs Todgers! cheerful!’ cried the youngest gentleman; ‘when
she reminds me of days for ever fled, Mrs Todgers!’

‘Then you had better avoid her for a short time, if she does,’ said Mrs
Todgers, ‘and come to know her again, by degrees. That’s my advice.’

‘But I can’t avoid her,’ replied Moddle, ‘I haven’t strength of mind to
do it. Oh, Mrs Todgers, if you knew what a comfort her nose is to me!’

‘Her nose, sir!’ Mrs Todgers cried.

‘Her profile, in general,’ said the youngest gentleman, ‘but
particularly her nose. It’s so like;’ here he yielded to a burst of
grief. ‘It’s so like hers who is Another’s, Mrs Todgers!’

The observant matron did not fail to report this conversation to
Charity, who laughed at the time, but treated Mr Moddle that very
evening with increased consideration, and presented her side face to him
as much as possible. Mr Moddle was not less sentimental than usual;
was rather more so, if anything; but he sat and stared at her with
glistening eyes, and seemed grateful.

‘Well, sir!’ said the lady of the Boarding-House next day. ‘You held up
your head last night. You’re coming round, I think.’

‘Only because she’s so like her who is Another’s, Mrs Todgers,’ rejoined
the youth. ‘When she talks, and when she smiles, I think I’m looking on
HER brow again, Mrs Todgers.’

This was likewise carried to Charity, who talked and smiled next evening
in her most engaging manner, and rallying Mr Moddle on the lowness of
his spirits, challenged him to play a rubber at cribbage. Mr Moddle
taking up the gauntlet, they played several rubbers for sixpences, and
Charity won them all. This may have been partially attributable to the
gallantry of the youngest gentleman, but it was certainly referable to
the state of his feelings also; for his eyes being frequently dimmed by
tears, he thought that aces were tens, and knaves queens, which at times
occasioned some confusion in his play.

On the seventh night of cribbage, when Mrs Todgers, sitting by, proposed
that instead of gambling they should play for ‘love,’ Mr Moddle was seen
to change colour. On the fourteenth night, he kissed Miss Pecksniff’s
snuffers, in the passage, when she went upstairs to bed; meaning to have
kissed her hand, but missing it.

In short, Mr Moddle began to be impressed with the idea that Miss
Pecksniff’s mission was to comfort him; and Miss Pecksniff began
to speculate on the probability of its being her mission to become
ultimately Mrs Moddle. He was a young gentleman (Miss Pecksniff was not
a very young lady) with rising prospects, and ‘almost’ enough to live
on. Really it looked very well.

Besides--besides--he had been regarded as devoted to Merry. Merry had
joked about him, and had once spoken of it to her sister as a conquest.
He was better looking, better shaped, better spoken, better tempered,
better mannered than Jonas. He was easy to manage, could be made to
consult the humours of his Betrothed, and could be shown off like a lamb
when Jonas was a bear. There was the rub!

In the meantime the cribbage went on, and Mrs Todgers went off; for the
youngest gentleman, dropping her society, began to take Miss Pecksniff
to the play. He also began, as Mrs Todgers said, to slip home ‘in his
dinner-times,’ and to get away from ‘the office’ at unholy seasons;
and twice, as he informed Mrs Todgers himself, he received anonymous
letters, enclosing cards from Furniture Warehouses--clearly the act of
that ungentlemanly ruffian Jinkins; only he hadn’t evidence enough to
call him out upon. All of which, so Mrs Todgers told Miss Pecksniff,
spoke as plain English as the shining sun.

‘My dear Miss Pecksniff, you may depend upon it,’ said Mrs Todgers,
‘that he is burning to propose.’

‘My goodness me, why don’t he then?’ cried Cherry.

‘Men are so much more timid than we think ‘em, my dear,’ returned
Mrs Todgers. ‘They baulk themselves continually. I saw the words on
Todgers’s lips for months and months and months, before he said ‘em.’

Miss Pecksniff submitted that Todgers might not have been a fair
specimen.

‘Oh yes, he was. Oh bless you, yes, my dear. I was very particular in
those days, I assure you,’ said Mrs Todgers, bridling. ‘No, no. You give
Mr Moddle a little encouragement, Miss Pecksniff, if you wish him to
speak; and he’ll speak fast enough, depend upon it.’

‘I am sure I don’t know what encouragement he would have, Mrs Todgers,’
returned Charity. ‘He walks with me, and plays cards with me, and he
comes and sits alone with me.’

‘Quite right,’ said Mrs Todgers. ‘That’s indispensable, my dear.’

‘And he sits very close to me.’

‘Also quite correct,’ said Mrs Todgers.

‘And he looks at me.’

‘To be sure he does,’ said Mrs Todgers.

‘And he has his arm upon the back of the chair or sofa, or whatever it
is--behind me, you know.’

‘I should think so,’ said Mrs Todgers.

‘And then he begins to cry!’

Mrs Todgers admitted that he might do better than that; and might
undoubtedly profit by the recollection of the great Lord Nelson’s signal
at the battle of Trafalgar. Still, she said, he would come round, or,
not to mince the matter, would be brought round, if Miss Pecksniff took
up a decided position, and plainly showed him that it must be done.

Determining to regulate her conduct by this opinion, the young lady
received Mr Moddle, on the earliest subsequent occasion, with an air of
constraint; and gradually leading him to inquire, in a dejected manner,
why she was so changed, confessed to him that she felt it necessary for
their mutual peace and happiness to take a decided step. They had been
much together lately, she observed, much together, and had tasted the
sweets of a genuine reciprocity of sentiment. She never could forget
him, nor could she ever cease to think of him with feelings of the
liveliest friendship, but people had begun to talk, the thing had been
observed, and it was necessary that they should be nothing more to each
other, than any gentleman and lady in society usually are. She was glad
she had had the resolution to say thus much before her feelings had been
tried too far; they had been greatly tried, she would admit; but though
she was weak and silly, she would soon get the better of it, she hoped.

Moddle, who had by this time become in the last degree maudlin, and wept
abundantly, inferred from the foregoing avowal, that it was his mission
to communicate to others the blight which had fallen on himself; and
that, being a kind of unintentional Vampire, he had had Miss Pecksniff
assigned to him by the Fates, as Victim Number One. Miss Pecksniff
controverting this opinion as sinful, Moddle was goaded on to ask
whether she could be contented with a blighted heart; and it appearing
on further examination that she could be, plighted his dismal troth,
which was accepted and returned.

He bore his good fortune with the utmost moderation. Instead of being
triumphant, he shed more tears than he had ever been known to shed
before; and, sobbing, said:

‘Oh! what a day this has been! I can’t go back to the office this
afternoon. Oh, what a trying day this has been! Good Gracious!’



CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

FURTHER PROCEEDINGS IN EDEN, AND A PROCEEDING OUT OF IT. MARTIN MAKES A
DISCOVERY OF SOME IMPORTANCE


From Mr Moddle to Eden is an easy and natural transition. Mr Moddle,
living in the atmosphere of Miss Pecksniff’s love, dwelt (if he had but
known it) in a terrestrial Paradise. The thriving city of Eden was
also a terrestrial Paradise, upon the showing of its proprietors. The
beautiful Miss Pecksniff might have been poetically described as a
something too good for man in his fallen and degraded state. That
was exactly the character of the thriving city of Eden, as poetically
heightened by Zephaniah Scadder, General Choke, and other worthies; part
and parcel of the talons of that great American Eagle, which is always
airing itself sky-high in purest aether, and never, no never, never,
tumbles down with draggled wings into the mud.

When Mark Tapley, leaving Martin in the architectural and surveying
offices, had effectually strengthened and encouraged his own spirits
by the contemplation of their joint misfortunes, he proceeded, with
new cheerfulness, in search of help; congratulating himself, as he went
along, on the enviable position to which he had at last attained.

‘I used to think, sometimes,’ said Mr Tapley, ‘as a desolate island
would suit me, but I should only have had myself to provide for there,
and being naturally a easy man to manage, there wouldn’t have been much
credit in THAT. Now here I’ve got my partner to take care on, and he’s
something like the sort of man for the purpose. I want a man as is
always a-sliding off his legs when he ought to be on ‘em. I want a
man as is so low down in the school of life that he’s always a-making
figures of one in his copy-book, and can’t get no further. I want a man
as is his own great coat and cloak, and is always a-wrapping himself up
in himself. And I have got him too,’ said Mr Tapley, after a moment’s
silence. ‘What a happiness!’

He paused to look round, uncertain to which of the log-houses he should
repair.

‘I don’t know which to take,’ he observed; ‘that’s the truth. They’re
equally prepossessing outside, and equally commodious, no doubt, within;
being fitted up with every convenience that a Alligator, in a state of
natur’, could possibly require. Let me see! The citizen as turned out
last night, lives under water, in the right hand dog-kennel at the
corner. I don’t want to trouble him if I can help it, poor man, for
he is a melancholy object; a reg’lar Settler in every respect. There’s
house with a winder, but I am afraid of their being proud. I don’t know
whether a door ain’t too aristocratic; but here goes for the first one!’

He went up to the nearest cabin, and knocked with his hand. Being
desired to enter, he complied.

‘Neighbour,’ said Mark; ‘for I AM a neighbour, though you don’t know me;
I’ve come a-begging. Hallo! hal--lo! Am I a-bed, and dreaming!’

He made this exclamation on hearing his own name pronounced, and finding
himself clasped about the skirts by two little boys, whose faces he had
often washed, and whose suppers he had often cooked, on board of that
noble and fast-sailing line-of-packet ship, the Screw.

‘My eyes is wrong!’ said Mark. ‘I don’t believe ‘em. That ain’t my
fellow-passenger younder, a-nursing her little girl, who, I am sorry to
see, is so delicate; and that ain’t her husband as come to New York to
fetch her. Nor these,’ he added, looking down upon the boys, ‘ain’t them
two young shavers as was so familiar to me; though they are uncommon
like ‘em. That I must confess.’

The woman shed tears, in very joy to see him; the man shook both his
hands and would not let them go; the two boys hugged his legs; the sick
child in the mother’s arms stretched out her burning little fingers, and
muttered, in her hoarse, dry throat, his well-remembered name.

It was the same family, sure enough. Altered by the salubrious air of
Eden. But the same.

‘This is a new sort of a morning call,’ said Mark, drawing a long
breath. ‘It strikes one all of a heap. Wait a little bit! I’m a-coming
round fast. That’ll do! These gentlemen ain’t my friends. Are they on
the visiting list of the house?’

The inquiry referred to certain gaunt pigs, who had walked in after him,
and were much interested in the heels of the family. As they did not
belong to the mansion, they were expelled by the two little boys.

‘I ain’t superstitious about toads,’ said Mark, looking round the room,
‘but if you could prevail upon the two or three I see in company, to
step out at the same time, my young friends, I think they’d find the
open air refreshing. Not that I at all object to ‘em. A very handsome
animal is a toad,’ said Mr Tapley, sitting down upon a stool; ‘very
spotted; very like a partickler style of old gentleman about the throat;
very bright-eyed, very cool, and very slippy. But one sees ‘em to the
best advantage out of doors perhaps.’

While pretending, with such talk as this, to be perfectly at his ease,
and to be the most indifferent and careless of men, Mark Tapley had
an eye on all around him. The wan and meagre aspect of the family, the
changed looks of the poor mother, the fevered child she held in her lap,
the air of great despondency and little hope on everything, were plain
to him, and made a deep impression on his mind. He saw it all as
clearly and as quickly, as with his bodily eyes he saw the rough shelves
supported by pegs driven between the logs, of which the house was made;
the flour-cask in the corner, serving also for a table; the blankets,
spades, and other articles against the walls; the damp that blotched the
ground; or the crop of vegetable rottenness in every crevice of the hut.

‘How is it that you have come here?’ asked the man, when their first
expressions of surprise were over.

‘Why, we come by the steamer last night,’ replied Mark. ‘Our intention
is to make our fortuns with punctuality and dispatch; and to retire upon
our property as soon as ever it’s realised. But how are you all? You’re
looking noble!’

‘We are but sickly now,’ said the poor woman, bending over her child.
‘But we shall do better when we are seasoned to the place.’

‘There are some here,’ thought Mark ‘whose seasoning will last for
ever.’

But he said cheerfully, ‘Do better! To be sure you will. We shall all
do better. What we’ve got to do is, to keep up our spirits, and be
neighbourly. We shall come all right in the end, never fear. That
reminds me, by the bye, that my partner’s all wrong just at present;
and that I looked in to beg for him. I wish you’d come and give me your
opinion of him, master.’

That must have been a very unreasonable request on the part of Mark
Tapley, with which, in their gratitude for his kind offices on board the
ship, they would not have complied instantly. The man rose to accompany
him without a moment’s delay. Before they went, Mark took the sick child
in his arms, and tried to comfort the mother; but the hand of death was
on it then, he saw.

They found Martin in the house, lying wrapped up in his blanket on
the ground. He was, to all appearance, very ill indeed, and shook and
shivered horribly; not as people do from cold, but in a frightful
kind of spasm or convulsion, that racked his whole body. Mark’s friend
pronounced his disease an aggravated kind of fever, accompanied with
ague; which was very common in those parts, and which he predicted would
be worse to-morrow, and for many more to-morrows. He had had it himself
off and on, he said, for a couple of years or so; but he was thankful
that, while so many he had known had died about him, he had escaped with
life.

‘And with not too much of that,’ thought Mark, surveying his emaciated
form. ‘Eden for ever!’

They had some medicine in their chest; and this man of sad experience
showed Mark how and when to administer it, and how he could best
alleviate the sufferings of Martin. His attentions did not stop there;
for he was backwards and forwards constantly, and rendered Mark
good service in all his brisk attempts to make their situation more
endurable. Hope or comfort for the future he could not bestow. The
season was a sickly one; the settlement a grave. His child died that
night; and Mark, keeping the secret from Martin, helped to bury it,
beneath a tree, next day.

With all his various duties of attendance upon Martin (who became the
more exacting in his claims, the worse he grew), Mark worked out of
doors, early and late; and with the assistance of his friend and others,
laboured to do something with their land. Not that he had the least
strength of heart or hope, or steady purpose in so doing, beyond the
habitual cheerfulness of his disposition, and his amazing power of
self-sustainment; for within himself, he looked on their condition
as beyond all hope, and, in his own words, ‘came out strong’ in
consequence.

‘As to coming out as strong as I could wish, sir,’ he confided to Martin
in a leisure moment; that is to say, one evening, while he was washing
the linen of the establishment, after a hard day’s work, ‘that I give
up. It’s a piece of good fortune as never is to happen to me, I see!’

‘Would you wish for circumstances stronger than these?’ Martin retorted
with a groan, from underneath his blanket.

‘Why, only see how easy they might have been stronger, sir,’ said Mark,
‘if it wasn’t for the envy of that uncommon fortun of mine, which is
always after me, and tripping me up. The night we landed here, I thought
things did look pretty jolly. I won’t deny it. I thought they did look
pretty jolly.’

‘How do they look now?’ groaned Martin.

‘Ah!’ said Mark, ‘Ah, to be sure. That’s the question. How do they look
now? On the very first morning of my going out, what do I do? Stumble
on a family I know, who are constantly assisting of us in all sorts of
ways, from that time to this! That won’t do, you know; that ain’t what
I’d a right to expect. If I had stumbled on a serpent and got bit; or
stumbled on a first-rate patriot, and got bowie-knifed, or stumbled on a
lot of Sympathisers with inverted shirt-collars, and got made a lion of;
I might have distinguished myself, and earned some credit. As it is,
the great object of my voyage is knocked on the head. So it would be,
wherever I went. How do you feel to-night, sir?’

‘Worse than ever,’ said poor Martin.

‘That’s something,’ returned Mark, ‘but not enough. Nothing but being
very bad myself, and jolly to the last, will ever do me justice.’

‘In Heaven’s name, don’t talk of that,’ said Martin with a thrill of
terror. ‘What should I do, Mark, if you were taken ill!’

Mr Tapley’s spirits appeared to be stimulated by this remark, although
it was not a very flattering one. He proceeded with his washing in a
brighter mood; and observed ‘that his glass was arising.’

‘There’s one good thing in this place, sir,’ said Mr Tapley, scrubbing
away at the linen, ‘as disposes me to be jolly; and that is that it’s
a reg’lar little United States in itself. There’s two or three American
settlers left; and they coolly comes over one, even here, sir, as if it
was the wholesomest and loveliest spot in the world. But they’re like
the cock that went and hid himself to save his life, and was found out
by the noise he made. They can’t help crowing. They was born to do it,
and do it they must, whatever comes of it.’

Glancing from his work out at the door as he said these words, Mark’s
eyes encountered a lean person in a blue frock and a straw hat, with
a short black pipe in his mouth, and a great hickory stick studded all
over with knots, in his hand; who smoking and chewing as he came along,
and spitting frequently, recorded his progress by a train of decomposed
tobacco on the ground.

‘Here’s one on ‘em,’ cried Mark, ‘Hannibal Chollop.’

‘Don’t let him in,’ said Martin, feebly.

‘He won’t want any letting in,’ replied Mark. ‘He’ll come in, sir.’
Which turned out to be quite true, for he did. His face was almost as
hard and knobby as his stick; and so were his hands. His head was like
an old black hearth-broom. He sat down on the chest with his hat on;
and crossing his legs and looking up at Mark, said, without removing his
pipe:

‘Well, Mr Co.! and how do you git along, sir?’

It may be necessary to observe that Mr Tapley had gravely introduced
himself to all strangers, by that name.

‘Pretty well, sir; pretty well,’ said Mark.

‘If this ain’t Mr Chuzzlewit, ain’t it!’ exclaimed the visitor ‘How do
YOU git along, sir?’

Martin shook his head, and drew the blanket over it involuntarily; for
he felt that Hannibal was going to spit; and his eye, as the song says,
was upon him.

‘You need not regard me, sir,’ observed Mr Chollop, complacently. ‘I am
fever-proof, and likewise agur.’

‘Mine was a more selfish motive,’ said Martin, looking out again. ‘I was
afraid you were going to--’

‘I can calc’late my distance, sir,’ returned Mr Chollop, ‘to an inch.’

With a proof of which happy faculty he immediately favoured him.

‘I re-quire, sir,’ said Hannibal, ‘two foot clear in a circ’lar
di-rection, and can engage my-self toe keep within it. I HAVE gone ten
foot, in a circ’lar di-rection, but that was for a wager.’

‘I hope you won it, sir,’ said Mark.

‘Well, sir, I realised the stakes,’ said Chollop. ‘Yes, sir.’

He was silent for a time, during which he was actively engaged in the
formation of a magic circle round the chest on which he sat. When it was
completed, he began to talk again.

‘How do you like our country, sir?’ he inquired, looking at Martin.

‘Not at all,’ was the invalid’s reply.

Chollop continued to smoke without the least appearance of emotion,
until he felt disposed to speak again. That time at length arriving, he
took his pipe from his mouth, and said:

‘I am not surprised to hear you say so. It re-quires An elevation, and
A preparation of the intellect. The mind of man must be prepared for
Freedom, Mr Co.’

He addressed himself to Mark; because he saw that Martin, who wished
him to go, being already half-mad with feverish irritation, which the
droning voice of this new horror rendered almost insupportable, had
closed his eyes, and turned on his uneasy bed.

‘A little bodily preparation wouldn’t be amiss, either, would it, sir,’
said Mark, ‘in the case of a blessed old swamp like this?’

‘Do you con-sider this a swamp, sir?’ inquired Chollop gravely.

‘Why yes, sir,’ returned Mark. ‘I haven’t a doubt about it myself.’

‘The sentiment is quite Europian,’ said the major, ‘and does not
surprise me; what would your English millions say to such a swamp in
England, sir?’

‘They’d say it was an uncommon nasty one, I should think, said Mark;
‘and that they would rather be inoculated for fever in some other way.’

‘Europian!’ remarked Chollop, with sardonic pity. ‘Quite Europian!’

And there he sat. Silent and cool, as if the house were his; smoking
away like a factory chimney.

Mr Chollop was, of course, one of the most remarkable men in the
country; but he really was a notorious person besides. He was usually
described by his friends, in the South and West, as ‘a splendid sample
of our na-tive raw material, sir,’ and was much esteemed for his
devotion to rational Liberty; for the better propagation whereof he
usually carried a brace of revolving pistols in his coat pocket, with
seven barrels a-piece. He also carried, amongst other trinkets, a
sword-stick, which he called his ‘Tickler.’ and a great knife, which
(for he was a man of a pleasant turn of humour) he called ‘Ripper,’ in
allusion to its usefulness as a means of ventilating the stomach of
any adversary in a close contest. He had used these weapons with
distinguished effect in several instances, all duly chronicled in the
newspapers; and was greatly beloved for the gallant manner in which
he had ‘jobbed out’ the eye of one gentleman, as he was in the act of
knocking at his own street-door.

Mr Chollop was a man of a roving disposition; and, in any less advanced
community, might have been mistaken for a violent vagabond. But his fine
qualities being perfectly understood and appreciated in those regions
where his lot was cast, and where he had many kindred spirits to consort
with, he may be regarded as having been born under a fortunate star,
which is not always the case with a man so much before the age in which
he lives. Preferring, with a view to the gratification of his tickling
and ripping fancies, to dwell upon the outskirts of society, and in the
more remote towns and cities, he was in the habit of emigrating from
place to place, and establishing in each some business--usually a
newspaper--which he presently sold; for the most part closing the
bargain by challenging, stabbing, pistolling, or gouging the new editor,
before he had quite taken possession of the property.

He had come to Eden on a speculation of this kind, but had abandoned it,
and was about to leave. He always introduced himself to strangers as
a worshipper of Freedom; was the consistent advocate of Lynch law,
and slavery; and invariably recommended, both in print and speech,
the ‘tarring and feathering’ of any unpopular person who differed from
himself. He called this ‘planting the standard of civilization in the
wilder gardens of My country.’

There is little doubt that Chollop would have planted this standard in
Eden at Mark’s expense, in return for his plainness of speech (for the
genuine Freedom is dumb, save when she vaunts herself), but for the
utter desolation and decay prevailing in the settlement, and his own
approaching departure from it. As it was, he contented himself with
showing Mark one of the revolving-pistols, and asking him what he
thought of that weapon.

‘It ain’t long since I shot a man down with that, sir, in the State of
IllinOY,’ observed Chollop.

‘Did you, indeed!’ said Mark, without the smallest agitation. ‘Very free
of you. And very independent!’

‘I shot him down, sir,’ pursued Chollop, ‘for asserting in the Spartan
Portico, a tri-weekly journal, that the ancient Athenians went a-head of
the present Locofoco Ticket.’

‘And what’s that?’ asked Mark.

‘Europian not to know,’ said Chollop, smoking placidly. ‘Europian
quite!’

After a short devotion to the interests of the magic circle, he resumed
the conversation by observing:

‘You won’t half feel yourself at home in Eden, now?’

‘No,’ said Mark, ‘I don’t.’

‘You miss the imposts of your country. You miss the house dues?’
observed Chollop.

‘And the houses--rather,’ said Mark.

‘No window dues here, sir,’ observed Chollop.

‘And no windows to put ‘em on,’ said Mark.

‘No stakes, no dungeons, no blocks, no racks, no scaffolds, no
thumbscrews, no pikes, no pillories,’ said Chollop.

‘Nothing but rewolwers and bowie-knives,’ returned Mark. ‘And what are
they? Not worth mentioning!’

The man who had met them on the night of their arrival came crawling up
at this juncture, and looked in at the door.

‘Well, sir,’ said Chollop. ‘How do YOU git along?’

He had considerable difficulty in getting along at all, and said as much
in reply.

‘Mr Co. And me, sir,’ observed Chollop, ‘are disputating a piece. He
ought to be slicked up pretty smart to disputate between the Old World
and the New, I do expect?’

‘Well!’ returned the miserable shadow. ‘So he had.’

‘I was merely observing, sir,’ said Mark, addressing this new visitor,
‘that I looked upon the city in which we have the honour to live, as
being swampy. What’s your sentiments?’

‘I opinionate it’s moist perhaps, at certain times,’ returned the man.

‘But not as moist as England, sir?’ cried Chollop, with a fierce
expression in his face.

‘Oh! Not as moist as England; let alone its Institutions,’ said the man.

‘I should hope there ain’t a swamp in all Americay, as don’t whip THAT
small island into mush and molasses,’ observed Chollop, decisively. ‘You
bought slick, straight, and right away, of Scadder, sir?’ to Mark.

He answered in the affirmative. Mr Chollop winked at the other citizen.

‘Scadder is a smart man, sir? He is a rising man? He is a man as will
come up’ards, right side up, sir?’ Mr Chollop winked again at the other
citizen.

‘He should have his right side very high up, if I had my way,’ said
Mark. ‘As high up as the top of a good tall gallows, perhaps.’

Mr Chollop was so delighted at the smartness of his excellent countryman
having been too much for the Britisher, and at the Britisher’s resenting
it, that he could contain himself no longer, and broke forth in a shout
of delight. But the strangest exposition of this ruling passion was
in the other--the pestilence-stricken, broken, miserable shadow of a
man--who derived so much entertainment from the circumstance that he
seemed to forget his own ruin in thinking of it, and laughed outright
when he said ‘that Scadder was a smart man, and had draw’d a lot of
British capital that way, as sure as sun-up.’

After a full enjoyment of this joke, Mr Hannibal Chollop sat smoking and
improving the circle, without making any attempts either to converse or
to take leave; apparently labouring under the not uncommon delusion
that for a free and enlightened citizen of the United States to convert
another man’s house into a spittoon for two or three hours together, was
a delicate attention, full of interest and politeness, of which nobody
could ever tire. At last he rose.

‘I am a-going easy,’ he observed.

Mark entreated him to take particular care of himself.

‘Afore I go,’ he said sternly, ‘I have got a leetle word to say to you.
You are darnation ‘cute, you are.’

Mark thanked him for the compliment.

‘But you are much too ‘cute to last. I can’t con-ceive of any spotted
Painter in the bush, as ever was so riddled through and through as you
will be, I bet.’

‘What for?’ asked Mark.

‘We must be cracked up, sir,’ retorted Chollop, in a tone of menace.
‘You are not now in A despotic land. We are a model to the airth, and
must be jist cracked-up, I tell you.’

‘What! I speak too free, do I?’ cried Mark.

‘I have draw’d upon A man, and fired upon A man for less,’ said Chollop,
frowning. ‘I have know’d strong men obleeged to make themselves uncommon
skase for less. I have know’d men Lynched for less, and beaten into
punkin’-sarse for less, by an enlightened people. We are the intellect
and virtue of the airth, the cream of human natur’, and the flower
Of moral force. Our backs is easy ris. We must be cracked-up, or they
rises, and we snarls. We shows our teeth, I tell you, fierce. You’d
better crack us up, you had!’

After the delivery of this caution, Mr Chollop departed; with Ripper,
Tickler, and the revolvers, all ready for action on the shortest notice.

‘Come out from under the blanket, sir,’ said Mark, ‘he’s gone. What’s
this!’ he added softly; kneeling down to look into his partner’s
face, and taking his hot hand. ‘What’s come of all that chattering and
swaggering? He’s wandering in his mind to-night, and don’t know me!’

Martin indeed was dangerously ill; very near his death. He lay in that
state many days, during which time Mark’s poor friends, regardless of
themselves, attended him. Mark, fatigued in mind and body; working
all the day and sitting up at night; worn with hard living and the
unaccustomed toil of his new life; surrounded by dismal and discouraging
circumstances of every kind; never complained or yielded in the least
degree. If ever he had thought Martin selfish or inconsiderate, or had
deemed him energetic only by fits and starts, and then too passive for
their desperate fortunes, he now forgot it all. He remembered nothing
but the better qualities of his fellow-wanderer, and was devoted to him,
heart and hand.

Many weeks elapsed before Martin was strong enough to move about with
the help of a stick and Mark’s arm; and even then his recovery, for want
of wholesome air and proper nourishment, was very slow. He was yet in a
feeble and weak condition, when the misfourtune he had so much dreaded
fell upon them. Mark was taken ill.

Mark fought against it; but the malady fought harder, and his efforts
were in vain.

‘Floored for the present, sir,’ he said one morning, sinking back upon
his bed; ‘but jolly!’

Floored indeed, and by a heavy blow! As any one but Martin might have
known beforehand.

If Mark’s friends had been kind to Martin (and they had been very), they
were twenty times kinder to Mark. And now it was Martin’s turn to work,
and sit beside the bed and watch, and listen through the long, long
nights, to every sound in the gloomy wilderness; and hear poor Mr
Tapley, in his wandering fancy, playing at skittles in the Dragon,
making love-remonstrances to Mrs Lupin, getting his sea-legs on board
the Screw, travelling with old Tom Pinch on English roads, and burning
stumps of trees in Eden, all at once.

But whenever Martin gave him drink or medicine, or tended him in any
way, or came into the house returning from some drudgery without, the
patient Mr Tapley brightened up and cried: ‘I’m jolly, sir; ‘I’m jolly!’

Now, when Martin began to think of this, and to look at Mark as he lay
there; never reproaching him by so much as an expression of regret;
never murmuring; always striving to be manful and staunch; he began to
think, how was it that this man who had had so few advantages, was so
much better than he who had had so many? And attendance upon a sick bed,
but especially the sick bed of one whom we have been accustomed to see
in full activity and vigour, being a great breeder of reflection, he
began to ask himself in what they differed.

He was assisted in coming to a conclusion on this head by the frequent
presence of Mark’s friend, their fellow-passenger across the ocean,
which suggested to him that in regard to having aided her, for example,
they had differed very much. Somehow he coupled Tom Pinch with this
train of reflection; and thinking that Tom would be very likely to have
struck up the same sort of acquaintance under similar circumstances,
began to think in what respects two people so extremely different were
like each other, and were unlike him. At first sight there was nothing
very distressing in these meditations, but they did undoubtedly distress
him for all that.

Martin’s nature was a frank and generous one; but he had been bred up
in his grandfather’s house; and it will usually be found that the
meaner domestic vices propagate themselves to be their own antagonists.
Selfishness does this especially; so do suspicion, cunning, stealth, and
covetous propensities. Martin had unconsciously reasoned as a child, ‘My
guardian takes so much thought of himself, that unless I do the like by
MYself, I shall be forgotten.’ So he had grown selfish.

But he had never known it. If any one had taxed him with the vice, he
would have indignantly repelled the accusation, and conceived himself
unworthily aspersed. He never would have known it, but that being newly
risen from a bed of dangerous sickness, to watch by such another couch,
he felt how nearly Self had dropped into the grave, and what a poor
dependent, miserable thing it was.

It was natural for him to reflect--he had months to do it in--upon his
own escape, and Mark’s extremity. This led him to consider which of them
could be the better spared, and why? Then the curtain slowly rose a very
little way; and Self, Self, Self, was shown below.

He asked himself, besides, when dreading Mark’s decease (as all men do
and must, at such a time), whether he had done his duty by him, and had
deserved and made a good response to his fidelity and zeal. No. Short
as their companionship had been, he felt in many, many instances, that
there was blame against himself; and still inquiring why, the curtain
slowly rose a little more, and Self, Self, Self, dilated on the scene.

It was long before he fixed the knowledge of himself so firmly in his
mind that he could thoroughly discern the truth; but in the hideous
solitude of that most hideous place, with Hope so far removed, Ambition
quenched, and Death beside him rattling at the very door, reflection
came, as in a plague-beleaguered town; and so he felt and knew the
failing of his life, and saw distinctly what an ugly spot it was.

Eden was a hard school to learn so hard a lesson in; but there were
teachers in the swamp and thicket, and the pestilential air, who had a
searching method of their own.

He made a solemn resolution that when his strength returned he would not
dispute the point or resist the conviction, but would look upon it as an
established fact, that selfishness was in his breast, and must be rooted
out. He was so doubtful (and with justice) of his own character, that he
determined not to say one word of vain regret or good resolve to Mark,
but steadily to keep his purpose before his own eyes solely; and there
was not a jot of pride in this; nothing but humility and steadfastness;
the best armour he could wear. So low had Eden brought him down. So high
had Eden raised him up.

After a long and lingering illness (in certain forlorn stages of which,
when too far gone to speak, he had feebly written ‘jolly!’ on a slate),
Mark showed some symptoms of returning health. They came and went, and
flickered for a time; but he began to mend at last decidedly; and after
that continued to improve from day to day.

As soon as he was well enough to talk without fatigue, Martin consulted
him upon a project he had in his mind, and which a few months back he
would have carried into execution without troubling anybody’s head but
his own.

‘Ours is a desperate case,’ said Martin. ‘Plainly. The place is
deserted; its failure must have become known; and selling what we have
bought to any one, for anything, is hopeless, even if it were honest. We
left home on a mad enterprise, and have failed. The only hope left
us, the only one end for which we have now to try, is to quit this
settlement for ever, and get back to England. Anyhow! by any means! only
to get back there, Mark.’

‘That’s all, sir,’ returned Mr Tapley, with a significant stress upon
the words; ‘only that!’

‘Now, upon this side of the water,’ said Martin, ‘we have but one friend
who can help us, and that is Mr Bevan.’

‘I thought of him when you was ill,’ said Mark.

‘But for the time that would be lost, I would even write to my
grandfather,’ Martin went on to say, ‘and implore him for money to free
us from this trap into which we were so cruelly decoyed. Shall I try Mr
Bevan first?’

‘He’s a very pleasant sort of a gentleman,’ said Mark. ‘I think so.’

‘The few goods we brought here, and in which we spent our money, would
produce something if sold,’ resumed Martin; ‘and whatever they realise
shall be paid him instantly. But they can’t be sold here.’

‘There’s nobody but corpses to buy ‘em,’ said Mr Tapley, shaking his
head with a rueful air, ‘and pigs.’

‘Shall I tell him so, and only ask him for money enough to enable us by
the cheapest means to reach New York, or any port from which we may hope
to get a passage home, by serving in any capacity? Explaining to him
at the same time how I am connected, and that I will endeavour to
repay him, even through my grandfather, immediately on our arrival in
England?’

‘Why to be sure,’ said Mark: ‘he can only say no, and he may say yes. If
you don’t mind trying him, sir--’

‘Mind!’ exclaimed Martin. ‘I am to blame for coming here, and I would do
anything to get away. I grieve to think of the past. If I had taken your
opinion sooner, Mark, we never should have been here, I am certain.’

Mr Tapley was very much surprised at this admission, but protested, with
great vehemence, that they would have been there all the same; and that
he had set his heart upon coming to Eden, from the first word he had
ever heard of it.

Martin then read him a letter to Mr Bevan, which he had already
prepared. It was frankly and ingenuously written, and described their
situation without the least concealment; plainly stated the miseries
they had undergone; and preferred their request in modest but
straightforward terms. Mark highly commended it; and they determined to
dispatch it by the next steamboat going the right way, that might call
to take in wood at Eden--where there was plenty of wood to spare.
Not knowing how to address Mr Bevan at his own place of abode, Martin
superscribed it to the care of the memorable Mr Norris of New York,
and wrote upon the cover an entreaty that it might be forwarded without
delay.

More than a week elapsed before a boat appeared; but at length they were
awakened very early one morning by the high-pressure snorting of
the ‘Esau Slodge;’ named after one of the most remarkable men in the
country, who had been very eminent somewhere. Hurrying down to the
landing-place, they got it safe on board; and waiting anxiously to see
the boat depart, stopped up the gangway; an instance of neglect which
caused the ‘Capting’ of the Esau Slodge to ‘wish he might be sifted fine
as flour, and whittled small as chips; that if they didn’t come off that
there fixing right smart too, he’d spill ‘em in the drink;’ whereby the
Capting metaphorically said he’d throw them in the river.

They were not likely to receive an answer for eight or ten weeks at the
earliest. In the meantime they devoted such strength as they had to
the attempted improvement of their land; to clearing some of it, and
preparing it for useful purposes. Monstrously defective as their farming
was, still it was better than their neighbours’; for Mark had some
practical knowledge of such matters, and Martin learned of him; whereas
the other settlers who remained upon the putrid swamp (a mere handful,
and those withered by disease), appeared to have wandered there with
the idea that husbandry was the natural gift of all mankind. They helped
each other after their own manner in these struggles, and in all others;
but they worked as hopelessly and sadly as a gang of convicts in a penal
settlement.

Often at night when Mark and Martin were alone, and lying down to sleep,
they spoke of home, familiar places, houses, roads, and people whom they
knew; sometimes in the lively hope of seeing them again, and sometimes
with a sorrowful tranquillity, as if that hope were dead. It was a
source of great amazement to Mark Tapley to find, pervading all these
conversations, a singular alteration in Martin.

‘I don’t know what to make of him,’ he thought one night, ‘he ain’t what
I supposed. He don’t think of himself half as much. I’ll try him again.
Asleep, sir?’

‘No, Mark.’

‘Thinking of home, sir?’

‘Yes, Mark.’

‘So was I, sir. I was wondering how Mr Pinch and Mr Pecksniff gets on
now.’

‘Poor Tom!’ said Martin, thoughtfully.

‘Weak-minded man, sir,’ observed Mr Tapley. ‘Plays the organ for
nothing, sir. Takes no care of himself?’

‘I wish he took a little more, indeed,’ said Martin. ‘Though I don’t
know why I should. We shouldn’t like him half as well, perhaps.’

‘He gets put upon, sir,’ hinted Mark.

‘Yes!’ said Martin, after a short silence. ‘I know that, Mark.’

He spoke so regretfully that his partner abandoned the theme, and was
silent for a short time until he had thought of another.

‘Ah, sir!’ said Mark, with a sigh. ‘Dear me! You’ve ventured a good deal
for a young lady’s love!’

‘I tell you what. I’m not so sure of that, Mark,’ was the reply; so
hastily and energetically spoken, that Martin sat up in his bed to give
it. ‘I begin to be far from clear upon it. You may depend upon it she is
very unhappy. She has sacrificed her peace of mind; she has endangered
her interests very much; she can’t run away from those who are jealous
of her, and opposed to her, as I have done. She has to endure, Mark; to
endure without the possibility of action, poor girl! I begin to think
that she has more to bear than ever I had. Upon my soul I do!’

Mr Tapley opened his eyes wide in the dark; but did not interrupt.

‘And I’ll tell you a secret, Mark,’ said Martin, ‘since we ARE upon this
subject. That ring--’

‘Which ring, sir?’ Mark inquired, opening his eyes still wider.

‘That ring she gave me when we parted, Mark. She bought it; bought it;
knowing I was poor and proud (Heaven help me! Proud!) and wanted money.’

‘Who says so, sir?’ asked Mark.

‘I say so. I know it. I thought of it, my good fellow, hundreds of
times, while you were lying ill. And like a beast, I took it from her
hand, and wore it on my own, and never dreamed of this even at the
moment when I parted with it, when some faint glimmering of the truth
might surely have possessed me! But it’s late,’ said Martin, checking
himself, ‘and you are weak and tired, I know. You only talk to cheer me
up. Good night! God bless you, Mark!’

‘God bless you, sir! But I’m reg’larly defrauded,’ thought Mr Tapley,
turning round with a happy face. ‘It’s a swindle. I never entered for
this sort of service. There’ll be no credit in being jolly with HIM!’

The time wore on, and other steamboats coming from the point on which
their hopes were fixed, arrived to take in wood; but still no answer
to the letter. Rain, heat, foul slime, and noxious vapour, with all the
ills and filthy things they bred, prevailed. The earth, the air, the
vegetation, and the water that they drank, all teemed with deadly
properties. Their fellow-passenger had lost two children long before;
and buried now her last. Such things are much too common to be widely
known or cared for. Smart citizens grow rich, and friendless victims
smart and die, and are forgotten. That is all.

At last a boat came panting up the ugly river, and stopped at Eden. Mark
was waiting at the wood hut when it came, and had a letter handed to
him from on board. He bore it off to Martin. They looked at one another,
trembling.

‘It feels heavy,’ faltered Martin. And opening it a little roll of
dollar-notes fell out upon the ground.

What either of them said, or did, or felt, at first, neither of them
knew. All Mark could ever tell was, that he was at the river’s bank
again out of breath, before the boat had gone, inquiring when it would
retrace its track and put in there.

The answer was, in ten or twelve days; notwithstanding which they began
to get their goods together and to tie them up that very night. When
this stage of excitement was passed, each of them believed (they found
this out, in talking of it afterwards) that he would surely die before
the boat returned.

They lived, however, and it came, after the lapse of three long crawling
weeks. At sunrise, on an autumn day, they stood upon her deck.

‘Courage! We shall meet again!’ cried Martin, waving his hand to two
thin figures on the bank. ‘In the Old World!’

‘Or in the next one,’ added Mark below his breath. ‘To see them standing
side by side, so quiet, is a’most the worst of all!’

They looked at one another as the vessel moved away, and then looked
backward at the spot from which it hurried fast. The log-house, with the
open door, and drooping trees about it; the stagnant morning mist, and
red sun, dimly seen beyond; the vapour rising up from land and river;
the quick stream making the loathsome banks it washed more flat and
dull; how often they returned in dreams! How often it was happiness to
wake and find them Shadows that had vanished!



CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

IN WHICH THE TRAVELLERS MOVE HOMEWARD, AND ENCOUNTER SOME DISTINGUISHED
CHARACTERS UPON THE WAY


Among the passengers on board the steamboat, there was a faint gentleman
sitting on a low camp-stool, with his legs on a high barrel of flour, as
if he were looking at the prospect with his ankles, who attracted their
attention speedily.

He had straight black hair, parted up the middle of his head and hanging
down upon his coat; a little fringe of hair upon his chin; wore no
neckcloth; a white hat; a suit of black, long in the sleeves and short
in the legs; soiled brown stockings and laced shoes. His complexion,
naturally muddy, was rendered muddier by too strict an economy of soap
and water; and the same observation will apply to the washable part
of his attire, which he might have changed with comfort to himself and
gratification to his friends. He was about five and thirty; was crushed
and jammed up in a heap, under the shade of a large green cotton
umbrella; and ruminated over his tobacco-plug like a cow.

He was not singular, to be sure, in these respects; for every gentleman
on board appeared to have had a difference with his laundress and to
have left off washing himself in early youth. Every gentleman, too,
was perfectly stopped up with tight plugging, and was dislocated in
the greater part of his joints. But about this gentleman there was a
peculiar air of sagacity and wisdom, which convinced Martin that he was
no common character; and this turned out to be the case.

‘How do you do sir?’ said a voice in Martin’s ear

‘How do you do sir?’ said Martin.

It was a tall thin gentleman who spoke to him, with a carpet-cap on,
and a long loose coat of green baize, ornamented about the pockets with
black velvet.

‘You air from Europe, sir?’

‘I am,’ said Martin.

‘You air fortunate, sir.’

Martin thought so too; but he soon discovered that the gentleman and he
attached different meanings to this remark.

‘You air fortunate, sir, in having an opportunity of beholding our
Elijah Pogram, sir.’

‘Your Elijahpogram!’ said Martin, thinking it was all one word, and a
building of some sort.

‘Yes sir.’

Martin tried to look as if he understood him, but he couldn’t make it
out.

‘Yes, sir,’ repeated the gentleman, ‘our Elijah Pogram, sir, is, at this
minute, identically settin’ by the engine biler.’

The gentleman under the umbrella put his right forefinger to his
eyebrow, as if he were revolving schemes of state.

‘That is Elijah Pogram, is it?’ said Martin.

‘Yes, sir,’ replied the other. ‘That is Elijah Pogram.’

‘Dear me!’ said Martin. ‘I am astonished.’ But he had not the least idea
who this Elijah Pogram was; having never heard the name in all his life.

‘If the biler of this vessel was Toe bust, sir,’ said his new
acquaintance, ‘and Toe bust now, this would be a festival day in the
calendar of despotism; pretty nigh equallin’, sir, in its effects upon
the human race, our Fourth of glorious July. Yes, sir, that is the
Honourable Elijah Pogram, Member of Congress; one of the master-minds of
our country, sir. There is a brow, sir, there!’

‘Quite remarkable,’ said Martin.

‘Yes, sir. Our own immortal Chiggle, sir, is said to have observed,
when he made the celebrated Pogram statter in marble, which rose so much
con-test and preju-dice in Europe, that the brow was more than mortal.
This was before the Pogram Defiance, and was, therefore, a pre-diction,
cruel smart.’

‘What is the Pogram Defiance?’ asked Martin, thinking, perhaps, it was
the sign of a public-house.

‘An o-ration, sir,’ returned his friend.

‘Oh! to be sure,’ cried Martin. ‘What am I thinking of! It defied--’

‘It defied the world, sir,’ said the other, gravely. ‘Defied the world
in general to com-pete with our country upon any hook; and devellop’d
our internal resources for making war upon the universal airth. You
would like to know Elijah Pogram, sir?’

‘If you please,’ said Martin.

‘Mr Pogram,’ said the stranger--Mr Pogram having overheard every word of
the dialogue--‘this is a gentleman from Europe, sir; from England, sir.
But gen’rous ene-mies may meet upon the neutral sile of private life, I
think.’

The languid Mr Pogram shook hands with Martin, like a clock-work figure
that was just running down. But he made amends by chewing like one that
was just wound up.

‘Mr Pogram,’ said the introducer, ‘is a public servant, sir. When
Congress is recessed, he makes himself acquainted with those free United
States, of which he is the gifted son.’

It occurred to Martin that if the Honourable Elijah Pogram had stayed at
home, and sent his shoes upon a tour, they would have answered the
same purpose; for they were the only part of him in a situation to see
anything.

In course of time, however, Mr Pogram rose; and having ejected certain
plugging consequences which would have impeded his articulation, took up
a position where there was something to lean against, and began to talk
to Martin; shading himself with the green umbrella all the time.

As he began with the words, ‘How do you like--?’ Martin took him up and
said:

‘The country, I presume?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Elijah Pogram. A knot of passengers gathered round to
hear what followed; and Martin heard his friend say, as he whispered
to another friend, and rubbed his hands, ‘Pogram will smash him into
sky-blue fits, I know!’

‘Why,’ said Martin, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘I have learned by
experience, that you take an unfair advantage of a stranger, when you
ask that question. You don’t mean it to be answered, except in one way.
Now, I don’t choose to answer it in that way, for I cannot honestly
answer it in that way. And therefore, I would rather not answer it at
all.’

But Mr Pogram was going to make a great speech in the next session
about foreign relations, and was going to write strong articles on the
subject; and as he greatly favoured the free and independent custom (a
very harmless and agreeable one) of procuring information of any sort
in any kind of confidence, and afterwards perverting it publicly in any
manner that happened to suit him, he had determined to get at Martin’s
opinions somehow or other. For if he could have got nothing out of
him, he would have had to invent it for him, and that would have been
laborious. He made a mental note of his answer, and went in again.

‘You are from Eden, sir? How did you like Eden?’

Martin said what he thought of that part of the country, in pretty
strong terms.

‘It is strange,’ said Pogram, looking round upon the group, ‘this hatred
of our country, and her Institutions! This national antipathy is deeply
rooted in the British mind!’

‘Good Heaven, sir,’ cried Martin. ‘Is the Eden Land Corporation, with Mr
Scadder at its head, and all the misery it has worked, at its door, an
Institution of America? A part of any form of government that ever was
known or heard of?’

‘I con-sider the cause of this to be,’ said Pogram, looking round again
and taking himself up where Martin had interrupted him, ‘partly jealousy
and pre-judice, and partly the nat’ral unfitness of the British people
to appreciate the ex-alted Institutions of our native land. I expect,
sir,’ turning to Martin again, ‘that a gentleman named Chollop happened
in upon you during your lo-cation in the town of Eden?’

‘Yes,’ answered Martin; ‘but my friend can answer this better than I
can, for I was very ill at the time. Mark! The gentleman is speaking of
Mr Chollop.’

‘Oh. Yes, sir. Yes. I see him,’ observed Mark.

‘A splendid example of our na-tive raw material, sir?’ said Pogram,
interrogatively.

‘Indeed, sir!’ cried Mark.

The Honourable Elijah Pogram glanced at his friends as though he would
have said, ‘Observe this! See what follows!’ and they rendered tribute
to the Pogram genius by a gentle murmur.

‘Our fellow-countryman is a model of a man, quite fresh from Natur’s
mould!’ said Pogram, with enthusiasm. ‘He is a true-born child of this
free hemisphere! Verdant as the mountains of our country; bright and
flowing as our mineral Licks; unspiled by withering conventionalities
as air our broad and boundless Perearers! Rough he may be. So air
our Barrs. Wild he may be. So air our Buffalers. But he is a child of
Natur’, and a child of Freedom; and his boastful answer to the Despot
and the Tyrant is, that his bright home is in the Settin Sun.’

Part of this referred to Chollop, and part to a Western postmaster, who,
being a public defaulter not very long before (a character not at all
uncommon in America), had been removed from office; and on whose behalf
Mr Pogram (he voted for Pogram) had thundered the last sentence from
his seat in Congress, at the head of an unpopular President. It told
brilliantly; for the bystanders were delighted, and one of them said to
Martin, ‘that he guessed he had now seen something of the eloquential
aspect of our country, and was chawed up pritty small.’

Mr Pogram waited until his hearers were calm again, before he said to
Mark:

‘You do not seem to coincide, sir?’

‘Why,’ said Mark, ‘I didn’t like him much; and that’s the truth, sir. I
thought he was a bully; and I didn’t admire his carryin’ them murderous
little persuaders, and being so ready to use ‘em.’

‘It’s singler!’ said Pogram, lifting his umbrella high enough to
look all round from under it. ‘It’s strange! You observe the settled
opposition to our Institutions which pervades the British mind!’

‘What an extraordinary people you are!’ cried Martin. ‘Are Mr Chollop
and the class he represents, an Institution here? Are pistols with
revolving barrels, sword-sticks, bowie-knives, and such things,
Institutions on which you pride yourselves? Are bloody duels, brutal
combats, savage assaults, shooting down and stabbing in the streets,
your Institutions! Why, I shall hear next that Dishonour and Fraud are
among the Institutions of the great republic!’

The moment the words passed his lips, the Honourable Elijah Pogram
looked round again.

‘This morbid hatred of our Institutions,’ he observed, ‘is quite a study
for the psychological observer. He’s alludin’ to Repudiation now!’

‘Oh! you may make anything an Institution if you like,’ said Martin,
laughing, ‘and I confess you had me there, for you certainly have made
that one. But the greater part of these things are one Institution with
us, and we call it by the generic name of Old Bailey!’

The bell being rung for dinner at this moment, everybody ran away
into the cabin, whither the Honourable Elijah Pogram fled with such
precipitation that he forgot his umbrella was up, and fixed it so
tightly in the cabin door that it could neither be let down nor got out.
For a minute or so this accident created a perfect rebellion among the
hungry passengers behind, who, seeing the dishes, and hearing the knives
and forks at work, well knew what would happen unless they got there
instantly, and were nearly mad; while several virtuous citizens at the
table were in deadly peril of choking themselves in their unnatural
efforts to get rid of all the meat before these others came.

They carried the umbrella by storm, however, and rushed in at the
breach. The Honourable Elijah Pogram and Martin found themselves, after
a severe struggle, side by side, as they might have come together in the
pit of a London theatre; and for four whole minutes afterwards, Pogram
was snapping up great blocks of everything he could get hold of, like a
raven. When he had taken this unusually protracted dinner, he began
to talk to Martin; and begged him not to have the least delicacy in
speaking with perfect freedom to him, for he was a calm philosopher.
Which Martin was extremely glad to hear; for he had begun to speculate
on Elijah being a disciple of that other school of republican
philosophy, whose noble sentiments are carved with knives upon a pupil’s
body, and written, not with pen and ink, but tar and feathers.

‘What do you think of my countrymen who are present, sir?’ inquired
Elijah Pogram.

‘Oh! very pleasant,’ said Martin.

They were a very pleasant party. No man had spoken a word; every one had
been intent, as usual, on his own private gorging; and the greater part
of the company were decidedly dirty feeders.

The Honourable Elijah Pogram looked at Martin as if he thought ‘You
don’t mean that, I know!’ and he was soon confirmed in this opinion.

Sitting opposite to them was a gentleman in a high state of tobacco, who
wore quite a little beard, composed of the overflowing of that weed, as
they had dried about his mouth and chin; so common an ornament that it
would scarcely have attracted Martin’s observation, but that this good
citizen, burning to assert his equality against all comers, sucked his
knife for some moments, and made a cut with it at the butter, just as
Martin was in the act of taking some. There was a juiciness about the
deed that might have sickened a scavenger.

When Elijah Pogram (to whom this was an every-day incident) saw that
Martin put the plate away, and took no butter, he was quite delighted,
and said,

‘Well! The morbid hatred of you British to the Institutions of our
country is as-TONishing!’

‘Upon my life!’ cried Martin, in his turn. ‘This is the most wonderful
community that ever existed. A man deliberately makes a hog of himself,
and THAT’S an Institution!’

‘We have no time to ac-quire forms, sir,’ said Elijah Pogram.

‘Acquire!’ cried Martin. ‘But it’s not a question of acquiring anything.
It’s a question of losing the natural politeness of a savage, and that
instinctive good breeding which admonishes one man not to offend and
disgust another. Don’t you think that man over the way, for instance,
naturally knows better, but considers it a very fine and independent
thing to be a brute in small matters?’

‘He is a na-tive of our country, and is nat’rally bright and spry, of
course,’ said Mr Pogram.

‘Now, observe what this comes to, Mr Pogram,’ pursued Martin. ‘The
mass of your countrymen begin by stubbornly neglecting little social
observances, which have nothing to do with gentility, custom, usage,
government, or country, but are acts of common, decent, natural, human
politeness. You abet them in this, by resenting all attacks upon their
social offences as if they were a beautiful national feature. From
disregarding small obligations they come in regular course to disregard
great ones; and so refuse to pay their debts. What they may do, or what
they may refuse to do next, I don’t know; but any man may see if he
will, that it will be something following in natural succession, and a
part of one great growth, which is rotten at the root.’

The mind of Mr Pogram was too philosophical to see this; so they went on
deck again, where, resuming his former post, he chewed until he was in a
lethargic state, amounting to insensibility.

After a weary voyage of several days, they came again to that same wharf
where Mark had been so nearly left behind, on the night of starting for
Eden. Captain Kedgick, the landlord, was standing there, and was greatly
surprised to see them coming from the boat.

‘Why, what the ‘tarnal!’ cried the Captain. ‘Well! I do admire at this,
I do!’

‘We can stay at your house until to-morrow, Captain, I suppose?’ said
Martin.

‘I reckon you can stay there for a twelvemonth if you like,’ retorted
Kedgick coolly. ‘But our people won’t best like your coming back.’

‘Won’t like it, Captain Kedgick!’ said Martin.

‘They did expect you was a-going to settle,’ Kedgick answered, as he
shook his head. ‘They’ve been took in, you can’t deny!’

‘What do you mean?’ cried Martin.

‘You didn’t ought to have received ‘em,’ said the Captain. ‘No you
didn’t!’

‘My good friend,’ returned Martin, ‘did I want to receive them? Was
it any act of mine? Didn’t you tell me they would rile up, and that I
should be flayed like a wild cat--and threaten all kinds of vengeance,
if I didn’t receive them?’

‘I don’t know about that,’ returned the Captain. ‘But when our people’s
frills is out, they’re starched up pretty stiff, I tell you!’

With that, he fell into the rear to walk with Mark, while Martin and
Elijah Pogram went on to the National.

‘We’ve come back alive, you see!’ said Mark.

‘It ain’t the thing I did expect,’ the Captain grumbled. ‘A man ain’t
got no right to be a public man, unless he meets the public views. Our
fashionable people wouldn’t have attended his le-vee, if they had know’d
it.’

Nothing mollified the Captain, who persisted in taking it very ill
that they had not both died in Eden. The boarders at the National felt
strongly on the subject too; but it happened by good fortune that they
had not much time to think about this grievance, for it was suddenly
determined to pounce upon the Honourable Elijah Pogram, and give HIM a
le-vee forthwith.

As the general evening meal of the house was over before the arrival of
the boat, Martin, Mark, and Pogram were taking tea and fixings at the
public table by themselves, when the deputation entered to announce this
honour; consisting of six gentlemen boarders and a very shrill boy.

‘Sir!’ said the spokesman.

‘Mr Pogram!’ cried the shrill boy.

The spokesman thus reminded of the shrill boy’s presence, introduced
him. ‘Doctor Ginery Dunkle, sir. A gentleman of great poetical elements.
He has recently jined us here, sir, and is an acquisition to us, sir,
I do assure you. Yes, sir. Mr Jodd, sir. Mr Izzard, sir. Mr Julius Bib,
sir.’

‘Julius Washington Merryweather Bib,’ said the gentleman himself TO
himself.

‘I beg your pardon, sir. Excuse me. Mr Julius Washington Merryweather
Bib, sir; a gentleman in the lumber line, sir, and much esteemed.
Colonel Groper, sir. Pro-fessor Piper, sir. My own name, sir, is Oscar
Buffum.’

Each man took one slide forward as he was named; butted at the
Honourable Elijah Pogram with his head; shook hands, and slid back
again. The introductions being completed, the spokesman resumed.

‘Sir!’

‘Mr Pogram!’ cried the shrill boy.

‘Perhaps,’ said the spokesman, with a hopeless look, ‘you will be so
good, Dr. Ginery Dunkle, as to charge yourself with the execution of our
little office, sir?’

As there was nothing the shrill boy desired more, he immediately stepped
forward.

‘Mr Pogram! Sir! A handful of your fellow-citizens, sir, hearing of your
arrival at the National Hotel, and feeling the patriotic character of
your public services, wish, sir, to have the gratification of beholding
you, and mixing with you, sir; and unbending with you, sir, in those
moments which--’

‘Air,’ suggested Buffum.

‘Which air so peculiarly the lot, sir, of our great and happy country.’

‘Hear!’ cried Colonel Grouper, in a loud voice. ‘Good! Hear him! Good!’

‘And therefore, sir,’ pursued the Doctor, ‘they request; as A mark Of
their respect; the honour of your company at a little le-Vee, sir, in
the ladies’ ordinary, at eight o’clock.’

Mr Pogram bowed, and said:

‘Fellow countrymen!’

‘Good!’ cried the Colonel. ‘Hear, him! Good!’

Mr Pogram bowed to the Colonel individually, and then resumed.

‘Your approbation of My labours in the common cause goes to My heart. At
all times and in all places; in the ladies’ ordinary, My friends, and in
the Battle Field--’

‘Good, very good! Hear him! Hear him!’ said the Colonel.

‘The name of Pogram will be proud to jine you. And may it, My friends,
be written on My tomb, “He was a member of the Congress of our common
country, and was ac-Tive in his trust.”’

‘The Com-mittee, sir,’ said the shrill boy, ‘will wait upon you at five
minutes afore eight. I take My leave, sir!’

Mr Pogram shook hands with him, and everybody else, once more; and when
they came back again at five minutes before eight, they said, one by
one, in a melancholy voice, ‘How do you do, sir?’ and shook hands with
Mr Pogram all over again, as if he had been abroad for a twelvemonth in
the meantime, and they met, now, at a funeral.

But by this time Mr Pogram had freshened himself up, and had composed
his hair and features after the Pogram statue, so that any one with half
an eye might cry out, ‘There he is! as he delivered the Defiance!’
The Committee were embellished also; and when they entered the ladies’
ordinary in a body, there was much clapping of hands from ladies and
gentlemen, accompanied by cries of ‘Pogram! Pogram!’ and some standing
up on chairs to see him.

The object of the popular caress looked round the room as he walked up
it, and smiled; at the same time observing to the shrill boy, that he
knew something of the beauty of the daughters of their common country,
but had never seen it in such lustre and perfection as at that moment.
Which the shrill boy put in the paper next day; to Elijah Pogram’s great
surprise.

‘We will re-quest you, sir, if you please,’ said Buffum, laying hands on
Mr Pogram as if he were taking his measure for a coat, ‘to stand up with
your back agin the wall right in the furthest corner, that there may
be more room for our fellow citizens. If you could set your back right
slap agin that curtain-peg, sir, keeping your left leg everlastingly
behind the stove, we should be fixed quite slick.’

Mr Pogram did as he was told, and wedged himself into such a little
corner that the Pogram statue wouldn’t have known him.

The entertainments of the evening then began. Gentlemen brought ladies
up, and brought themselves up, and brought each other up; and asked
Elijah Pogram what he thought of this political question, and what
he thought of that; and looked at him, and looked at one another, and
seemed very unhappy indeed. The ladies on the chairs looked at Elijah
Pogram through their glasses, and said audibly, ‘I wish he’d speak.
Why don’t he speak? Oh, do ask him to speak!’ And Elijah Pogram looked
sometimes at the ladies and sometimes elsewhere, delivering senatorial
opinions, as he was asked for them. But the great end and object of the
meeting seemed to be, not to let Elijah Pogram out of the corner on any
account; so there they kept him, hard and fast.

A great bustle at the door, in the course of the evening, announced the
arrival of some remarkable person; and immediately afterwards an elderly
gentleman, much excited, was seen to precipitate himself upon the crowd,
and battle his way towards the Honourable Elijah Pogram. Martin, who had
found a snug place of observation in a distant corner, where he
stood with Mark beside him (for he did not so often forget him now
as formerly, though he still did sometimes), thought he knew this
gentleman, but had no doubt of it, when he cried as loud as he could,
with his eyes starting out of his head:

‘Sir, Mrs Hominy!’

‘Lord bless that woman, Mark. She has turned up again!’

‘Here she comes, sir,’ answered Mr Tapley. ‘Pogram knows her. A public
character! Always got her eye upon her country, sir! If that there
lady’s husband is of my opinion, what a jolly old gentleman he must be!’

A lane was made; and Mrs Hominy, with the aristocratic stalk, the pocket
handkerchief, the clasped hands, and the classical cap, came slowly up
it, in a procession of one. Mr Pogram testified emotions of delight on
seeing her, and a general hush prevailed. For it was known that when
a woman like Mrs Hominy encountered a man like Pogram, something
interesting must be said.

Their first salutations were exchanged in a voice too low to reach the
impatient ears of the throng; but they soon became audible, for Mrs
Hominy felt her position, and knew what was expected of her.

Mrs H. was hard upon him at first; and put him through a rigid catechism
in reference to a certain vote he had given, which she had found it
necessary, as the mother of the modern Gracchi, to deprecate in a line
by itself, set up expressly for the purpose in German text. But Mr
Pogram evading it by a well-timed allusion to the star-spangled banner,
which, it appeared, had the remarkable peculiarity of flouting the
breeze whenever it was hoisted where the wind blew, she forgave him.
They now enlarged on certain questions of tariff, commercial treaty,
boundary, importation and exportation with great effect. And Mrs Hominy
not only talked, as the saying is, like a book, but actually did talk
her own books, word for word.

‘My! what is this!’ cried Mrs Hominy, opening a little note which was
handed her by her excited gentleman-usher. ‘Do tell! oh, well, now! on’y
think!’

And then she read aloud, as follows:

‘Two literary ladies present their compliments to the mother of the
modern Gracchi, and claim her kind introduction, as their talented
countrywoman, to the honourable (and distinguished) Elijah Pogram, whom
the two L. L.’s have often contemplated in the speaking marble of the
soul-subduing Chiggle. On a verbal intimation from the mother of the M.
G., that she will comply with the request of the two L. L.’s, they will
have the immediate pleasure of joining the galaxy assembled to do honour
to the patriotic conduct of a Pogram. It may be another bond of union
between the two L. L.’s and the mother of the M. G. to observe, that the
two L. L.’s are Transcendental.’

Mrs Hominy promptly rose, and proceeded to the door, whence she
returned, after a minute’s interval, with the two L. L.’s, whom she led,
through the lane in the crowd, with all that stateliness of deportment
which was so remarkably her own, up to the great Elijah Pogram. It was
(as the shrill boy cried out in an ecstasy) quite the Last Scene from
Coriolanus. One of the L. L.’s wore a brown wig of uncommon size.
Sticking on the forehead of the other, by invisible means, was a massive
cameo, in size and shape like the raspberry tart which is ordinarily
sold for a penny, representing on its front the Capitol at Washington.

‘Miss Toppit, and Miss Codger!’ said Mrs Hominy.

‘Codger’s the lady so often mentioned in the English newspapers I should
think, sir,’ whispered Mark. ‘The oldest inhabitant as never remembers
anything.’

‘To be presented to a Pogram,’ said Miss Codger, ‘by a Hominy, indeed,
a thrilling moment is it in its impressiveness on what we call our
feelings. But why we call them so, or why impressed they are, or if
impressed they are at all, or if at all we are, or if there really is,
oh gasping one! a Pogram or a Hominy, or any active principle to which
we give those titles, is a topic, Spirit searching, light abandoned,
much too vast to enter on, at this unlooked-for crisis.’

‘Mind and matter,’ said the lady in the wig, ‘glide swift into the
vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm
Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination. To hear it, sweet
it is. But then, outlaughs the stern philosopher, and saith to the
Grotesque, “What ho! arrest for me that Agency. Go, bring it here!” And
so the vision fadeth.’

After this, they both took Mr Pogram by the hand, and pressed it to
their lips, as a patriotic palm. That homage paid, the mother of the
modern Gracchi called for chairs, and the three literary ladies went to
work in earnest, to bring poor Pogram out, and make him show himself in
all his brilliant colours.

How Pogram got out of his depth instantly, and how the three L. L.’s
were never in theirs, is a piece of history not worth recording. Suffice
it, that being all four out of their depths, and all unable to swim,
they splashed up words in all directions, and floundered about famously.
On the whole, it was considered to have been the severest mental
exercise ever heard in the National Hotel. Tears stood in the shrill
boy’s eyes several times; and the whole company observed that their
heads ached with the effort--as well they might.

When it at last became necessary to release Elijah Pogram from the
corner, and the Committee saw him safely back again to the next room,
they were fervent in their admiration.

‘Which,’ said Mr Buffum, ‘must have vent, or it will bust. Toe you,
Mr Pogram, I am grateful. Toe-wards you, sir, I am inspired with lofty
veneration, and with deep e-mo-tion. The sentiment Toe which I would
propose to give ex-pression, sir, is this: “May you ever be as firm,
sir, as your marble statter! May it ever be as great a terror Toe its
ene-mies as you.”’

There is some reason to suppose that it was rather terrible to its
friends; being a statue of the Elevated or Goblin School, in which the
Honourable Elijah Pogram was represented as in a very high wind, with
his hair all standing on end, and his nostrils blown wide open. But Mr
Pogram thanked his friend and countryman for the aspiration to which he
had given utterance, and the Committee, after another solemn shaking of
hands, retired to bed, except the Doctor; who immediately repaired to
the newspaper-office, and there wrote a short poem suggested by the
events of the evening, beginning with fourteen stars, and headed, ‘A
Fragment. Suggested by witnessing the Honourable Elijah Pogram engaged
in a philosophical disputation with three of Columbia’s fairest
daughters. By Doctor Ginery Dunkle. Of Troy.’

If Pogram was as glad to get to bed as Martin was, he must have been
well rewarded for his labours. They started off again next day (Martin
and Mark previously disposing of their goods to the storekeepers of whom
they had purchased them, for anything they would bring), and were fellow
travellers to within a short distance of New York. When Pogram was about
to leave them he grew thoughtful, and after pondering for some time,
took Martin aside.

‘We air going to part, sir,’ said Pogram.

‘Pray don’t distress yourself,’ said Martin; ‘we must bear it.’

‘It ain’t that, sir,’ returned Pogram, ‘not at all. But I should wish
you to accept a copy of My oration.’

‘Thank you,’ said Martin, ‘you are very good. I shall be most happy.’

‘It ain’t quite that, sir, neither,’ resumed Pogram; ‘air you bold
enough to introduce a copy into your country?’

‘Certainly,’ said Martin. ‘Why not?’

‘Its sentiments air strong, sir,’ hinted Pogram, darkly.

‘That makes no difference,’ said Martin. ‘I’ll take a dozen if you
like.’

‘No, sir,’ retorted Pogram. ‘Not A dozen. That is more than I require.
If you are content to run the hazard, sir, here is one for your Lord
Chancellor,’ producing it, ‘and one for Your principal Secretary of
State. I should wish them to see it, sir, as expressing what my opinions
air. That they may not plead ignorance at a future time. But don’t get
into danger, sir, on my account!’

‘There is not the least danger, I assure you,’ said Martin. So he put
the pamphlets in his pocket, and they parted.

Mr Bevan had written in his letter that, at a certain time, which fell
out happily just then, he would be at a certain hotel in the city,
anxiously expecting to see them. To this place they repaired without a
moment’s delay. They had the satisfaction of finding him within; and of
being received by their good friend, with his own warmth and heartiness.

‘I am truly sorry and ashamed,’ said Martin, ‘to have begged of you. But
look at us. See what we are, and judge to what we are reduced!’

‘So far from claiming to have done you any service,’ returned the other,
‘I reproach myself with having been, unwittingly, the original cause
of your misfortunes. I no more supposed you would go to Eden on such
representations as you received; or, indeed, that you would do anything
but be dispossessed, by the readiest means, of your idea that fortunes
were so easily made here; than I thought of going to Eden myself.’

‘The fact is, I closed with the thing in a mad and sanguine manner,’
said Martin, ‘and the less said about it the better for me. Mark, here,
hadn’t a voice in the matter.’

‘Well! but he hadn’t a voice in any other matter, had he?’ returned Mr
Bevan; laughing with an air that showed his understanding of Mark and
Martin too.

‘Not a very powerful one, I am afraid,’ said Martin with a blush. ‘But
live and learn, Mr Bevan! Nearly die and learn; we learn the quicker.’

‘Now,’ said their friend, ‘about your plans. You mean to return home at
once?’

‘Oh, I think so,’ returned Martin hastily, for he turned pale at the
thought of any other suggestion. ‘That is your opinion too, I hope?’

‘Unquestionably. For I don’t know why you ever came here; though it’s
not such an unusual case, I am sorry to say, that we need go any farther
into that. You don’t know that the ship in which you came over with our
friend General Fladdock, is in port, of course?’

‘Indeed!’ said Martin.

‘Yes. And is advertised to sail to-morrow.’

This was tempting news, but tantalising too; for Martin knew that his
getting any employment on board a ship of that class was hopeless. The
money in his pocket would not pay one-fourth of the sum he had already
borrowed, and if it had been enough for their passage-money, he could
hardly have resolved to spend it. He explained this to Mr Bevan, and
stated what their project was.

‘Why, that’s as wild as Eden every bit,’ returned his friend. ‘You must
take your passage like a Christian; at least, as like a Christian as a
fore-cabin passenger can; and owe me a few more dollars than you intend.
If Mark will go down to the ship and see what passengers there are,
and finds that you can go in her without being actually suffocated, my
advice is, go! You and I will look about us in the meantime (we won’t
call at the Norris’s unless you like), and we will all three dine
together in the afternoon.’

Martin had nothing to express but gratitude, and so it was arranged.
But he went out of the room after Mark, and advised him to take their
passage in the Screw, though they lay upon the bare deck; which Mr
Tapley, who needed no entreaty on the subject readily promised to do.

When he and Martin met again, and were alone, he was in high spirits,
and evidently had something to communicate, in which he gloried very
much.

‘I’ve done Mr Bevan, sir,’ said Mark.

‘Done Mr Bevan!’ repeated Martin.

‘The cook of the Screw went and got married yesterday, sir,’ said Mr
Tapley.

Martin looked at him for farther explanation.

‘And when I got on board, and the word was passed that it was me,’ said
Mark, ‘the mate he comes and asks me whether I’d engage to take this
said cook’s place upon the passage home. “For you’re used to it,” he
says; “you were always a-cooking for everybody on your passage out.”
 And so I was,’ said Mark, ‘although I never cooked before, I’ll take my
oath.’

‘What did you say?’ demanded Martin.

‘Say!’ cried Mark. ‘That I’d take anything I could get. “If that’s
so,” says the mate, “why, bring a glass of rum;” which they brought
according. And my wages, sir,’ said Mark in high glee, ‘pays your
passage; and I’ve put the rolling-pin in your berth to take it (it’s
the easy one up in the corner); and there we are, Rule Britannia, and
Britons strike home!’

‘There never was such a good fellow as you are!’ cried Martin seizing
him by the hand. ‘But what do you mean by “doing” Mr Bevan, Mark?’

‘Why, don’t you see?’ said Mark. ‘We don’t tell him, you know. We take
his money, but we don’t spend it, and we don’t keep it. What we do is,
write him a little note, explaining this engagement, and roll it up,
and leave it at the bar, to be given to him after we are gone. Don’t you
see?’

Martin’s delight in this idea was not inferior to Mark’s. It was all
done as he proposed. They passed a cheerful evening; slept at the hotel;
left the letter as arranged; and went off to the ship betimes next
morning, with such light hearts as the weight of their past miseries
engendered.

‘Good-bye! a hundred thousand times good-bye!’ said Martin to their
friend. ‘How shall I remember all your kindness! How shall I ever thank
you!’

‘If you ever become a rich man, or a powerful one,’ returned his friend,
‘you shall try to make your Government more careful of its subjects when
they roam abroad to live. Tell it what you know of emigration in your
own case, and impress upon it how much suffering may be prevented with a
little pains!’

Cheerily, lads, cheerily! Anchor weighed. Ship in full sail. Her sturdy
bowsprit pointing true to England. America a cloud upon the sea behind
them!

‘Why, Cook! what are you thinking of so steadily?’ said Martin.

‘Why, I was a-thinking, sir,’ returned Mark, ‘that if I was a painter
and was called upon to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it?’

‘Paint it as like an Eagle as you could, I suppose.’

‘No,’ said Mark. ‘That wouldn’t do for me, sir. I should want to draw it
like a Bat, for its short-sightedness; like a Bantam, for its bragging;
like a Magpie, for its honesty; like a Peacock, for its vanity; like a
ostrich, for its putting its head in the mud, and thinking nobody sees
it--’

‘And like a Phoenix, for its power of springing from the ashes of its
faults and vices, and soaring up anew into the sky!’ said Martin. ‘Well,
Mark. Let us hope so.’



CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

ARRIVING IN ENGLAND, MARTIN WITNESSES A CEREMONY, FROM WHICH HE DERIVES
THE CHEERING INFORMATION THAT HE HAS NOT BEEN FORGOTTEN IN HIS ABSENCE


It was mid-day, and high water in the English port for which the Screw
was bound, when, borne in gallantly upon the fullness of the tide, she
let go her anchor in the river.

Bright as the scene was; fresh, and full of motion; airy, free, and
sparkling; it was nothing to the life and exultation in the breasts of
the two travellers, at sight of the old churches, roofs, and darkened
chimney stacks of Home. The distant roar that swelled up hoarsely from
the busy streets, was music in their ears; the lines of people gazing
from the wharves, were friends held dear; the canopy of smoke that
overhung the town was brighter and more beautiful to them than if the
richest silks of Persia had been waving in the air. And though the water
going on its glistening track, turned, ever and again, aside to dance
and sparkle round great ships, and heave them up; and leaped from off
the blades of oars, a shower of diving diamonds; and wantoned with
the idle boats, and swiftly passed, in many a sportive chase, through
obdurate old iron rings, set deep into the stone-work of the quays;
not even it was half so buoyant, and so restless, as their fluttering
hearts, when yearning to set foot, once more, on native ground.

A year had passed since those same spires and roofs had faded from their
eyes. It seemed to them, a dozen years. Some trifling changes, here
and there, they called to mind; and wondered that they were so few and
slight. In health and fortune, prospect and resource, they came back
poorer men than they had gone away. But it was home. And though home is
a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke,
or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.

Being set ashore, with very little money in their pockets, and no
definite plan of operation in their heads, they sought out a cheap
tavern, where they regaled upon a smoking steak, and certain flowing
mugs of beer, as only men just landed from the sea can revel in
the generous dainties of the earth. When they had feasted, as two
grateful-tempered giants might have done, they stirred the fire, drew
back the glowing curtain from the window, and making each a sofa for
himself, by union of the great unwieldy chairs, gazed blissfully into
the street.

Even the street was made a fairy street, by being half hidden in an
atmosphere of steak, and strong, stout, stand-up English beer. For on
the window-glass hung such a mist, that Mr Tapley was obliged to rise
and wipe it with his handkerchief, before the passengers appeared like
common mortals. And even then, a spiral little cloud went curling up
from their two glasses of hot grog, which nearly hid them from each
other.

It was one of those unaccountable little rooms which are never seen
anywhere but in a tavern, and are supposed to have got into taverns by
reason of the facilities afforded to the architect for getting drunk
while engaged in their construction. It had more corners in it than the
brain of an obstinate man; was full of mad closets, into which nothing
could be put that was not specially invented and made for that purpose;
had mysterious shelvings and bulkheads, and indications of staircases in
the ceiling; and was elaborately provided with a bell that rung in
the room itself, about two feet from the handle, and had no connection
whatever with any other part of the establishment. It was a little
below the pavement, and abutted close upon it; so that passengers grated
against the window-panes with their buttons, and scraped it with their
baskets; and fearful boys suddenly coming between a thoughtful guest
and the light, derided him, or put out their tongues as if he were a
physician; or made white knobs on the ends of their noses by flattening
the same against the glass, and vanished awfully, like spectres.

Martin and Mark sat looking at the people as they passed, debating every
now and then what their first step should be.

‘We want to see Miss Mary, of course,’ said Mark.

‘Of course,’ said Martin. ‘But I don’t know where she is. Not having had
the heart to write in our distress--you yourself thought silence most
advisable--and consequently, never having heard from her since we left
New York the first time, I don’t know where she is, my good fellow.’

‘My opinion is, sir,’ returned Mark, ‘that what we’ve got to do is to
travel straight to the Dragon. There’s no need for you to go there,
where you’re known, unless you like. You may stop ten mile short of it.
I’ll go on. Mrs Lupin will tell me all the news. Mr Pinch will give me
every information that we want; and right glad Mr Pinch will be to do
it. My proposal is: To set off walking this afternoon. To stop when we
are tired. To get a lift when we can. To walk when we can’t. To do it at
once, and do it cheap.’

‘Unless we do it cheap, we shall have some difficulty in doing it at
all,’ said Martin, pulling out the bank, and telling it over in his
hand.

‘The greater reason for losing no time, sir,’ replied Mark. ‘Whereas,
when you’ve seen the young lady; and know what state of mind the old
gentleman’s in, and all about it; then you’ll know what to do next.’

‘No doubt,’ said Martin. ‘You are quite right.’

They were raising their glasses to their lips, when their hands stopped
midway, and their gaze was arrested by a figure which slowly, very
slowly, and reflectively, passed the window at that moment.

Mr Pecksniff. Placid, calm, but proud. Honestly proud. Dressed with
peculiar care, smiling with even more than usual blandness, pondering
on the beauties of his art with a mild abstraction from all sordid
thoughts, and gently travelling across the disc, as if he were a figure
in a magic lantern.

As Mr Pecksniff passed, a person coming in the opposite direction
stopped to look after him with great interest and respect, almost with
veneration; and the landlord bouncing out of the house, as if he had
seen him too, joined this person, and spoke to him, and shook his head
gravely, and looked after Mr Pecksniff likewise.

Martin and Mark sat staring at each other, as if they could not believe
it; but there stood the landlord, and the other man still. In spite of
the indignation with which this glimpse of Mr Pecksniff had inspired
him, Martin could not help laughing heartily. Neither could Mark.

‘We must inquire into this!’ said Martin. ‘Ask the landlord in, Mark.’

Mr Tapley retired for that purpose, and immediately returned with their
large-headed host in safe convoy.

‘Pray, landlord!’ said Martin, ‘who is that gentleman who passed just
now, and whom you were looking after?’

The landlord poked the fire as if, in his desire to make the most of
his answer, he had become indifferent even to the price of coals; and
putting his hands in his pockets, said, after inflating himself to give
still further effect to his reply:

‘That, gentlemen, is the great Mr Pecksniff! The celebrated architect,
gentlemen!’

He looked from one to the other while he said it, as if he were ready to
assist the first man who might be overcome by the intelligence.

‘The great Mr Pecksniff, the celebrated architect, gentlemen.’ said the
landlord, ‘has come down here, to help to lay the first stone of a new
and splendid public building.’

‘Is it to be built from his designs?’ asked Martin.

‘The great Mr Pecksniff, the celebrated architect, gentlemen,’
returned the landlord, who seemed to have an unspeakable delight in
the repetition of these words, ‘carried off the First Premium, and will
erect the building.’

‘Who lays the stone?’ asked Martin.

‘Our member has come down express,’ returned the landlord. ‘No scrubs
would do for no such a purpose. Nothing less would satisfy our Directors
than our member in the House of Commons, who is returned upon the
Gentlemanly Interest.’

‘Which interest is that?’ asked Martin.

‘What, don’t you know!’ returned the landlord.

It was quite clear the landlord didn’t. They always told him at election
time, that it was the Gentlemanly side, and he immediately put on his
top-boots, and voted for it.

‘When does the ceremony take place?’ asked Martin.

‘This day,’ replied the landlord. Then pulling out his watch, he added,
impressively, ‘almost this minute.’

Martin hastily inquired whether there was any possibility of getting
in to witness it; and finding that there would be no objection to the
admittance of any decent person, unless indeed the ground were full,
hurried off with Mark, as hard as they could go.

They were fortunate enough to squeeze themselves into a famous corner on
the ground, where they could see all that passed, without much dread of
being beheld by Mr Pecksniff in return. They were not a minute too soon,
for as they were in the act of congratulating each other, a great noise
was heard at some distance, and everybody looked towards the gate.
Several ladies prepared their pocket handkerchiefs for waving; and a
stray teacher belonging to the charity school being much cheered by
mistake, was immensely groaned at when detected.

‘Perhaps he has Tom Pinch with him,’ Martin whispered Mr Tapley.

‘It would be rather too much of a treat for him, wouldn’t it, sir?’
whispered Mr Tapley in return.

There was no time to discuss the probabilities either way, for the
charity school, in clean linen, came filing in two and two, so much to
the self-approval of all the people present who didn’t subscribe to
it, that many of them shed tears. A band of music followed, led by
a conscientious drummer who never left off. Then came a great many
gentlemen with wands in their hands, and bows on their breasts, whose
share in the proceedings did not appear to be distinctly laid down, and
who trod upon each other, and blocked up the entry for a considerable
period. These were followed by the Mayor and Corporation, all clustering
round the member for the Gentlemanly Interest; who had the great Mr
Pecksniff, the celebrated architect on his right hand, and conversed
with him familiarly as they came along. Then the ladies waved their
handkerchiefs, and the gentlemen their hats, and the charity children
shrieked, and the member for the Gentlemanly Interest bowed.

Silence being restored, the member for the Gentlemanly Interest rubbed
his hands, and wagged his head, and looked about him pleasantly; and
there was nothing this member did, at which some lady or other did not
burst into an ecstatic waving of her pocket handkerchief. When he looked
up at the stone, they said how graceful! when he peeped into the hole,
they said how condescending! when he chatted with the Mayor, they
said how easy! when he folded his arms they cried with one accord, how
statesman-like!

Mr Pecksniff was observed too, closely. When he talked to the Mayor,
they said, Oh, really, what a courtly man he was! When he laid his
hand upon the mason’s shoulder, giving him directions, how pleasant his
demeanour to the working classes; just the sort of man who made their
toil a pleasure to them, poor dear souls!

But now a silver trowel was brought; and when the member for the
Gentlemanly Interest, tucking up his coat-sleeve, did a little sleight
of hand with the mortar, the air was rent, so loud was the applause.
The workman-like manner in which he did it was amazing. No one could
conceive where such a gentlemanly creature could have picked the
knowledge up.

When he had made a kind of dirt-pie under the direction of the mason,
they brought a little vase containing coins, the which the member
for the Gentlemanly Interest jingled, as if he were going to conjure.
Whereat they said how droll, how cheerful, what a flow of spirits! This
put into its place, an ancient scholar read the inscription, which
was in Latin; not in English; that would never do. It gave great
satisfaction; especially every time there was a good long substantive
in the third declension, ablative case, with an adjective to match; at
which periods the assembly became very tender, and were much affected.

And now the stone was lowered down into its place, amidst the shouting
of the concourse. When it was firmly fixed, the member for the
Gentlemanly Interest struck upon it thrice with the handle of the
trowel, as if inquiring, with a touch of humour, whether anybody was at
home. Mr Pecksniff then unrolled his Plans (prodigious plans they were),
and people gathered round to look at and admire them.

Martin, who had been fretting himself--quite unnecessarily, as Mark
thought--during the whole of these proceedings, could no longer restrain
his impatience; but stepping forward among several others, looked
straight over the shoulder of the unconscious Mr Pecksniff, at the
designs and plans he had unrolled. He returned to Mark, boiling with
rage.

‘Why, what’s the matter, sir?’ cried Mark.

‘Matter! This is MY building.’

‘Your building, sir!’ said Mark.

‘My grammar-school. I invented it. I did it all. He has only put four
windows in, the villain, and spoilt it!’

Mark could hardly believe it at first, but being assured that it was
really so, actually held him to prevent his interference foolishly,
until his temporary heat was past. In the meantime, the member addressed
the company on the gratifying deed which he had just performed.

He said that since he had sat in Parliament to represent the Gentlemanly
Interest of that town; and he might add, the Lady Interest, he hoped,
besides (pocket handkerchiefs); it had been his pleasant duty to come
among them, and to raise his voice on their behalf in Another Place
(pocket handkerchiefs and laughter), often. But he had never come among
them, and had never raised his voice, with half such pure, such deep,
such unalloyed delight, as now. ‘The present occasion,’ he said, ‘will
ever be memorable to me; not only for the reasons I have assigned, but
because it has afforded me an opportunity of becoming personally known
to a gentleman--’

Here he pointed the trowel at Mr Pecksniff, who was greeted with
vociferous cheering, and laid his hand upon his heart.

‘To a gentleman who, I am happy to believe, will reap both distinction
and profit from this field; whose fame had previously penetrated to
me--as to whose ears has it not!--but whose intellectual countenance I
never had the distinguished honour to behold until this day, and whose
intellectual conversation I had never before the improving pleasure to
enjoy.’

Everybody seemed very glad of this, and applauded more than ever.

‘But I hope my Honourable Friend,’ said the Gentlemanly member--of
course he added “if he will allow me to call him so,” and of course Mr
Pecksniff bowed--‘will give me many opportunities of cultivating the
knowledge of him; and that I may have the extraordinary gratification of
reflecting in after-time that I laid on this day two first stones, both
belonging to structures which shall last my life!’

Great cheering again. All this time, Martin was cursing Mr Pecksniff up
hill and down dale.

‘My friends!’ said Mr Pecksniff, in reply. ‘My duty is to build, not
speak; to act, not talk; to deal with marble, stone, and brick; not
language. I am very much affected. God bless you!’

This address, pumped out apparently from Mr Pecksniff’s very heart,
brought the enthusiasm to its highest pitch. The pocket handkerchiefs
were waved again; the charity children were admonished to grow up
Pecksniffs, every boy among them; the Corporation, gentlemen with wands,
member for the Gentlemanly Interest, all cheered for Mr Pecksniff. Three
cheers for Mr Pecksniff! Three more for Mr Pecksniff! Three more for
Mr Pecksniff, gentlemen, if you please! One more, gentlemen, for Mr
Pecksniff, and let it be a good one to finish with!

In short, Mr Pecksniff was supposed to have done a great work and was
very kindly, courteously, and generously rewarded. When the procession
moved away, and Martin and Mark were left almost alone upon the ground,
his merits and a desire to acknowledge them formed the common topic. He
was only second to the Gentlemanly member.

‘Compare the fellow’s situation to-day with ours!’ said Martin bitterly.

‘Lord bless you, sir!’ cried Mark, ‘what’s the use? Some architects are
clever at making foundations, and some architects are clever at building
on ‘em when they’re made. But it’ll all come right in the end, sir;
it’ll all come right!’

‘And in the meantime--’ began Martin.

‘In the meantime, as you say, sir, we have a deal to do, and far to go.
So sharp’s the word, and Jolly!’

‘You are the best master in the world, Mark,’ said Martin, ‘and I will
not be a bad scholar if I can help it, I am resolved! So come! Best foot
foremost, old fellow!’



CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

TOM PINCH DEPARTS TO SEEK HIS FORTUNE. WHAT HE FINDS AT STARTING


Oh! What a different town Salisbury was in Tom Pinch’s eyes to be sure,
when the substantial Pecksniff of his heart melted away into an idle
dream! He possessed the same faith in the wonderful shops, the same
intensified appreciation of the mystery and wickedness of the place;
made the same exalted estimate of its wealth, population, and resources;
and yet it was not the old city nor anything like it. He walked into the
market while they were getting breakfast ready for him at the Inn; and
though it was the same market as of old, crowded by the same buyers and
sellers; brisk with the same business; noisy with the same confusion of
tongues and cluttering of fowls in coops; fair with the same display
of rolls of butter, newly made, set forth in linen cloths of dazzling
whiteness; green with the same fresh show of dewy vegetables; dainty
with the same array in higglers’ baskets of small shaving-glasses,
laces, braces, trouser-straps, and hardware; savoury with the same
unstinted show of delicate pigs’ feet, and pies made precious by the
pork that once had walked upon them; still it was strangely changed to
Tom. For, in the centre of the market-place, he missed a statue he
had set up there as in all other places of his personal resort; and it
looked cold and bare without that ornament.

The change lay no deeper than this, for Tom was far from being sage
enough to know, that, having been disappointed in one man, it would have
been a strictly rational and eminently wise proceeding to have revenged
himself upon mankind in general, by mistrusting them one and all. Indeed
this piece of justice, though it is upheld by the authority of divers
profound poets and honourable men, bears a nearer resemblance to the
justice of that good Vizier in the Thousand-and-one Nights, who issues
orders for the destruction of all the Porters in Bagdad because one of
that unfortunate fraternity is supposed to have misconducted himself,
than to any logical, not to say Christian, system of conduct, known to
the world in later times.

Tom had so long been used to steep the Pecksniff of his fancy in his
tea, and spread him out upon his toast, and take him as a relish with
his beer, that he made but a poor breakfast on the first morning after
his expulsion. Nor did he much improve his appetite for dinner by
seriously considering his own affairs, and taking counsel thereon with
his friend the organist’s assistant.

The organist’s assistant gave it as his decided opinion that whatever
Tom did, he must go to London; for there was no place like it. Which
may be true in the main, though hardly, perhaps, in itself, a sufficient
reason for Tom’s going there.

But Tom had thought of London before, and had coupled with it thoughts
of his sister, and of his old friend John Westlock, whose advice
he naturally felt disposed to seek in this important crisis of his
fortunes. To London, therefore, he resolved to go; and he went away to
the coach-office at once, to secure his place. The coach being already
full, he was obliged to postpone his departure until the next night; but
even this circumstance had its bright side as well as its dark one, for
though it threatened to reduce his poor purse with unexpected country
charges, it afforded him an opportunity of writing to Mrs Lupin and
appointing his box to be brought to the old finger-post at the old time;
which would enable him to take that treasure with him to the metropolis,
and save the expense of its carriage. ‘So,’ said Tom, comforting
himself, ‘it’s very nearly as broad as it’s long.’

And it cannot be denied that, when he had made up his mind to even this
extent, he felt an unaccustomed sense of freedom--a vague and indistinct
impression of holiday-making--which was very luxurious. He had his
moments of depression and anxiety, and they were, with good reason,
pretty numerous; but still, it was wonderfully pleasant to reflect that
he was his own master, and could plan and scheme for himself. It was
startling, thrilling, vast, difficult to understand; it was a stupendous
truth, teeming with responsibility and self-distrust; but in spite of
all his cares, it gave a curious relish to the viands at the Inn, and
interposed a dreamy haze between him and his prospects, in which they
sometimes showed to magical advantage.

In this unsettled state of mind, Tom went once more to bed in the low
four-poster, to the same immovable surprise of the effigies of the
former landlord and the fat ox; and in this condition, passed the whole
of the succeeding day. When the coach came round at last with ‘London’
blazoned in letters of gold upon the boot, it gave Tom such a turn, that
he was half disposed to run away. But he didn’t do it; for he took his
seat upon the box instead, and looking down upon the four greys, felt
as if he were another grey himself, or, at all events, a part of the
turn-out; and was quite confused by the novelty and splendour of his
situation.

And really it might have confused a less modest man than Tom to find
himself sitting next that coachman; for of all the swells that ever
flourished a whip professionally, he might have been elected emperor. He
didn’t handle his gloves like another man, but put them on--even when he
was standing on the pavement, quite detached from the coach--as if the
four greys were, somehow or other, at the ends of the fingers. It was
the same with his hat. He did things with his hat, which nothing but an
unlimited knowledge of horses and the wildest freedom of the road, could
ever have made him perfect in. Valuable little parcels were brought to
him with particular instructions, and he pitched them into this hat, and
stuck it on again; as if the laws of gravity did not admit of such
an event as its being knocked off or blown off, and nothing like an
accident could befall it. The guard, too! Seventy breezy miles a day
were written in his very whiskers. His manners were a canter; his
conversation a round trot. He was a fast coach upon a down-hill turnpike
road; he was all pace. A waggon couldn’t have moved slowly, with that
guard and his key-bugle on the top of it.

These were all foreshadowings of London, Tom thought, as he sat upon
the box, and looked about him. Such a coachman, and such a guard, never
could have existed between Salisbury and any other place. The coach
was none of your steady-going, yokel coaches, but a swaggering, rakish,
dissipated London coach; up all night, and lying by all day, and leading
a devil of a life. It cared no more for Salisbury than if it had been
a hamlet. It rattled noisily through the best streets, defied the
Cathedral, took the worst corners sharpest, went cutting in everywhere,
making everything get out of its way; and spun along the open
country-road, blowing a lively defiance out of its key-bugle, as its
last glad parting legacy.

It was a charming evening. Mild and bright. And even with the weight
upon his mind which arose out of the immensity and uncertainty of
London, Tom could not resist the captivating sense of rapid motion
through the pleasant air. The four greys skimmed along, as if they liked
it quite as well as Tom did; the bugle was in as high spirits as the
greys; the coachman chimed in sometimes with his voice; the wheels
hummed cheerfully in unison; the brass work on the harness was an
orchestra of little bells; and thus, as they went clinking, jingling,
rattling smoothly on, the whole concern, from the buckles of the
leaders’ coupling-reins to the handle of the hind boot, was one great
instrument of music.

Yoho, past hedges, gates, and trees; past cottages and barns, and people
going home from work. Yoho, past donkey-chaises, drawn aside into the
ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses, whipped up at a bound upon
the little watercourse, and held by struggling carters close to the
five-barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the
road. Yoho, by churches dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks,
with rustic burial-grounds about them, where the graves are green, and
daisies sleep--for it is evening--on the bosoms of the dead. Yoho, past
streams, in which the cattle cool their feet, and where the rushes grow;
past paddock-fences, farms, and rick-yards; past last year’s stacks,
cut, slice by slice, away, and showing, in the waning light, like ruined
gables, old and brown. Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and through the merry
water-splash and up at a canter to the level road again. Yoho! Yoho!

Was the box there, when they came up to the old finger-post? The box!
Was Mrs Lupin herself? Had she turned out magnificently as a hostess
should, in her own chaise-cart, and was she sitting in a mahogany chair,
driving her own horse Dragon (who ought to have been called Dumpling),
and looking lovely? Did the stage-coach pull up beside her, shaving her
very wheel, and even while the guard helped her man up with the trunk,
did he send the glad echoes of his bugle careering down the chimneys of
the distant Pecksniff, as if the coach expressed its exultation in the
rescue of Tom Pinch?

‘This is kind indeed!’ said Tom, bending down to shake hands with her.
‘I didn’t mean to give you this trouble.’

‘Trouble, Mr Pinch!’ cried the hostess of the Dragon.

‘Well! It’s a pleasure to you, I know,’ said Tom, squeezing her hand
heartily. ‘Is there any news?’

The hostess shook her head.

‘Say you saw me,’ said Tom, ‘and that I was very bold and cheerful, and
not a bit down-hearted; and that I entreated her to be the same, for all
is certain to come right at last. Good-bye!’

‘You’ll write when you get settled, Mr Pinch?’ said Mrs Lupin.

‘When I get settled!’ cried Tom, with an involuntary opening of his
eyes. ‘Oh, yes, I’ll write when I get settled. Perhaps I had better
write before, because I may find that it takes a little time to settle
myself; not having too much money, and having only one friend. I shall
give your love to the friend, by the way. You were always great with Mr
Westlock, you know. Good-bye!’

‘Good-bye!’ said Mrs Lupin, hastily producing a basket with a long
bottle sticking out of it. ‘Take this. Good-bye!’

‘Do you want me to carry it to London for you?’ cried Tom. She was
already turning the chaise-cart round.

‘No, no,’ said Mrs Lupin. ‘It’s only a little something for refreshment
on the road. Sit fast, Jack. Drive on, sir. All right! Good-bye!’

She was a quarter of a mile off, before Tom collected himself; and then
he was waving his hand lustily; and so was she.

‘And that’s the last of the old finger-post,’ thought Tom, straining
his eyes, ‘where I have so often stood to see this very coach go by,
and where I have parted with so many companions! I used to compare this
coach to some great monster that appeared at certain times to bear my
friends away into the world. And now it’s bearing me away, to seek my
fortune, Heaven knows where and how!’

It made Tom melancholy to picture himself walking up the lane and back
to Pecksniff’s as of old; and being melancholy, he looked downwards at
the basket on his knee, which he had for the moment forgotten.

‘She is the kindest and most considerate creature in the world,’ thought
Tom. ‘Now I KNOW that she particularly told that man of hers not to look
at me, on purpose to prevent my throwing him a shilling! I had it ready
for him all the time, and he never once looked towards me; whereas that
man naturally, (for I know him very well,) would have done nothing but
grin and stare. Upon my word, the kindness of people perfectly melts
me.’

Here he caught the coachman’s eye. The coachman winked. ‘Remarkable fine
woman for her time of life,’ said the coachman.

‘I quite agree with you,’ returned Tom. ‘So she is.’

‘Finer than many a young ‘un, I mean to say,’ observed the coachman.
‘Eh?’

‘Than many a young one,’ Tom assented.

‘I don’t care for ‘em myself when they’re too young,’ remarked the
coachman.

This was a matter of taste, which Tom did not feel himself called upon
to discuss.

‘You’ll seldom find ‘em possessing correct opinions about refreshment,
for instance, when they’re too young, you know,’ said the coachman; ‘a
woman must have arrived at maturity, before her mind’s equal to coming
provided with a basket like that.’

‘Perhaps you would like to know what it contains?’ said Tom, smiling.

As the coachman only laughed, and as Tom was curious himself, he
unpacked it, and put the articles, one by one, upon the footboard. A
cold roast fowl, a packet of ham in slices, a crusty loaf, a piece of
cheese, a paper of biscuits, half a dozen apples, a knife, some butter,
a screw of salt, and a bottle of old sherry. There was a letter besides,
which Tom put in his pocket.

The coachman was so earnest in his approval of Mrs Lupin’s provident
habits, and congratulated Torn so warmly on his good fortune, that Tom
felt it necessary, for the lady’s sake, to explain that the basket was
a strictly Platonic basket, and had merely been presented to him in the
way of friendship. When he had made the statement with perfect gravity;
for he felt it incumbent on him to disabuse the mind of this lax rover
of any incorrect impressions on the subject; he signified that he would
be happy to share the gifts with him, and proposed that they should
attack the basket in a spirit of good fellowship at any time in the
course of the night which the coachman’s experience and knowledge of the
road might suggest, as being best adapted to the purpose. From this time
they chatted so pleasantly together, that although Tom knew infinitely
more of unicorns than horses, the coachman informed his friend the guard
at the end of the next stage, ‘that rum as the box-seat looked, he was
as good a one to go, in pint of conversation, as ever he’d wish to sit
by.’

Yoho, among the gathering shades; making of no account the deep
reflections of the trees, but scampering on through light and darkness,
all the same, as if the light of London fifty miles away, were quite
enough to travel by, and some to spare. Yoho, beside the village green,
where cricket-players linger yet, and every little indentation made in
the fresh grass by bat or wicket, ball or player’s foot, sheds out its
perfume on the night. Away with four fresh horses from the Bald-faced
Stag, where topers congregate about the door admiring; and the last
team with traces hanging loose, go roaming off towards the pond, until
observed and shouted after by a dozen throats, while volunteering boys
pursue them. Now, with a clattering of hoofs and striking out of fiery
sparks, across the old stone bridge, and down again into the shadowy
road, and through the open gate, and far away, away, into the wold.
Yoho!

Yoho, behind there, stop that bugle for a moment! Come creeping over to
the front, along the coach-roof, guard, and make one at this basket! Not
that we slacken in our pace the while, not we; we rather put the bits
of blood upon their metal, for the greater glory of the snack. Ah! It
is long since this bottle of old wine was brought into contact with the
mellow breath of night, you may depend, and rare good stuff it is to wet
a bugler’s whistle with. Only try it. Don’t be afraid of turning up your
finger, Bill, another pull! Now, take your breath, and try the bugle,
Bill. There’s music! There’s a tone!’ over the hills and far away,’
indeed. Yoho! The skittish mare is all alive to-night. Yoho! Yoho!

See the bright moon! High up before we know it; making the earth reflect
the objects on its breast like water. Hedges, trees, low cottages,
church steeples, blighted stumps and flourishing young slips, have
all grown vain upon the sudden, and mean to contemplate their own fair
images till morning. The poplars yonder rustle that their quivering
leaves may see themselves upon the ground. Not so the oak; trembling
does not become HIM; and he watches himself in his stout old burly
steadfastness, without the motion of a twig. The moss-grown gate,
ill-poised upon its creaking hinges, crippled and decayed swings to and
fro before its glass, like some fantastic dowager; while our own ghostly
likeness travels on, Yoho! Yoho! through ditch and brake, upon the
ploughed land and the smooth, along the steep hillside and steeper wall,
as if it were a phantom-Hunter.

Clouds too! And a mist upon the Hollow! Not a dull fog that hides it,
but a light airy gauze-like mist, which in our eyes of modest admiration
gives a new charm to the beauties it is spread before; as real gauze has
done ere now, and would again, so please you, though we were the Pope.
Yoho! Why now we travel like the Moon herself. Hiding this minute in a
grove of trees; next minute in a patch of vapour; emerging now upon our
broad clear course; withdrawing now, but always dashing on, our journey
is a counter-part of hers. Yoho! A match against the Moon!

The beauty of the night is hardly felt, when Day comes rushing up. Yoho!
Two stages, and the country roads are almost changed to a continuous
street. Yoho, past market-gardens, rows of houses, villas, crescents,
terraces, and squares; past waggons, coaches, carts; past early workmen,
late stragglers, drunken men, and sober carriers of loads; past brick
and mortar in its every shape; and in among the rattling pavements,
where a jaunty-seat upon a coach is not so easy to preserve! Yoho,
down countless turnings, and through countless mazy ways, until an old
Innyard is gained, and Tom Pinch, getting down quite stunned and giddy,
is in London!

‘Five minutes before the time, too!’ said the driver, as he received his
fee of Tom.

‘Upon my word,’ said Tom, ‘I should not have minded very much, if we had
been five hours after it; for at this early hour I don’t know where to
go, or what to do with myself.’

‘Don’t they expect you then?’ inquired the driver.

‘Who?’ said Tom.

‘Why them,’ returned the driver.

His mind was so clearly running on the assumption of Tom’s having come
to town to see an extensive circle of anxious relations and friends,
that it would have been pretty hard work to undeceive him. Tom did not
try. He cheerfully evaded the subject, and going into the Inn, fell fast
asleep before a fire in one of the public rooms opening from the yard.
When he awoke, the people in the house were all astir, so he washed and
dressed himself; to his great refreshment after the journey; and, it
being by that time eight o’clock, went forth at once to see his old
friend John.

John Westlock lived in Furnival’s Inn, High Holborn, which was within a
quarter of an hour’s walk of Tom’s starting-point, but seemed a long way
off, by reason of his going two or three miles out of the straight road
to make a short cut. When at last he arrived outside John’s door, two
stories up, he stood faltering with his hand upon the knocker, and
trembled from head to foot. For he was rendered very nervous by the
thought of having to relate what had fallen out between himself and
Pecksniff; and he had a misgiving that John would exult fearfully in the
disclosure.

‘But it must be made,’ thought Tom, ‘sooner or later; and I had better
get it over.’

Rat tat.

‘I am afraid that’s not a London knock,’ thought Tom. ‘It didn’t sound
bold. Perhaps that’s the reason why nobody answers the door.’

It is quite certain that nobody came, and that Tom stood looking at the
knocker; wondering whereabouts in the neighbourhood a certain gentleman
resided, who was roaring out to somebody ‘Come in!’ with all his might.

‘Bless my soul!’ thought Tom at last. ‘Perhaps he lives here, and is
calling to me. I never thought of that. Can I open the door from the
outside, I wonder. Yes, to be sure I can.’

To be sure he could, by turning the handle; and to be sure when he did
turn it the same voice came rushing out, crying ‘Why don’t you come
in? Come in, do you hear? What are you standing there for?’--quite
violently.

Tom stepped from the little passage into the room from which these
sounds proceeded, and had barely caught a glimpse of a gentleman in a
dressing-gown and slippers (with his boots beside him ready to put on),
sitting at his breakfast with a newspaper in his hand, when the said
gentleman, at the imminent hazard of oversetting his tea-table, made a
plunge at Tom, and hugged him.

‘Why, Tom, my boy!’ cried the gentleman. ‘Tom!’

‘How glad I am to see you, Mr Westlock!’ said Tom Pinch, shaking both
his hands, and trembling more than ever. ‘How kind you are!’

‘Mr Westlock!’ repeated John, ‘what do you mean by that, Pinch? You have
not forgotten my Christian name, I suppose?’

‘No, John, no. I have not forgotten,’ said Thomas Pinch. ‘Good gracious
me, how kind you are!’

‘I never saw such a fellow in all my life!’ cried John. ‘What do you
mean by saying THAT over and over again? What did you expect me to be, I
wonder! Here, sit down, Tom, and be a reasonable creature. How are you,
my boy? I am delighted to see you!’

‘And I am delighted to see YOU,’ said Tom.

‘It’s mutual, of course,’ returned John. ‘It always was, I hope. If
I had known you had been coming, Tom, I would have had something for
breakfast. I would rather have such a surprise than the best breakfast
in the world, myself; but yours is another case, and I have no doubt you
are as hungry as a hunter. You must make out as well as you can, Tom,
and we’ll recompense ourselves at dinner-time. You take sugar, I know;
I recollect the sugar at Pecksniff’s. Ha, ha, ha! How IS Pecksniff? When
did you come to town? DO begin at something or other, Tom. There are
only scraps here, but they are not at all bad. Boar’s Head potted. Try
it, Tom. Make a beginning whatever you do. What an old Blade you are! I
am delighted to see you.’

While he delivered himself of these words in a state of great commotion,
John was constantly running backwards and forwards to and from the
closet, bringing out all sorts of things in pots, scooping extraordinary
quantities of tea out of the caddy, dropping French rolls into his
boots, pouring hot water over the butter, and making a variety of
similar mistakes without disconcerting himself in the least.

‘There!’ said John, sitting down for the fiftieth time, and instantly
starting up again to make some other addition to the breakfast. ‘Now we
are as well off as we are likely to be till dinner. And now let us have
the news, Tom. Imprimis, how’s Pecksniff?’

‘I don’t know how he is,’ was Tom’s grave answer.

John Westlock put the teapot down, and looked at him, in astonishment.

‘I don’t know how he is,’ said Thomas Pinch; ‘and, saving that I wish
him no ill, I don’t care. I have left him, John. I have left him for
ever.’

‘Voluntarily?’

‘Why, no, for he dismissed me. But I had first found out that I was
mistaken in him; and I could not have remained with him under any
circumstances. I grieve to say that you were right in your estimate of
his character. It may be a ridiculous weakness, John, but it has been
very painful and bitter to me to find this out, I do assure you.’

Tom had no need to direct that appealing look towards his friend, in
mild and gentle deprecation of his answering with a laugh. John Westlock
would as soon have thought of striking him down upon the floor.

‘It was all a dream of mine,’ said Tom, ‘and it is over. I’ll tell you
how it happened, at some other time. Bear with my folly, John. I do not,
just now, like to think or speak about it.’

‘I swear to you, Tom,’ returned his friend, with great earnestness of
manner, after remaining silent for a few moments, ‘that when I see, as
I do now, how deeply you feel this, I don’t know whether to be glad or
sorry that you have made the discovery at last. I reproach myself with
the thought that I ever jested on the subject; I ought to have known
better.’

‘My dear friend,’ said Tom, extending his hand, ‘it is very generous and
gallant in you to receive me and my disclosure in this spirit; it makes
me blush to think that I should have felt a moment’s uneasiness as I
came along. You can’t think what a weight is lifted off my mind,’ said
Tom, taking up his knife and fork again, and looking very cheerful. ‘I
shall punish the Boar’s Head dreadfully.’

The host, thus reminded of his duties, instantly betook himself to
piling up all kinds of irreconcilable and contradictory viands in Tom’s
plate, and a very capital breakfast Tom made, and very much the better
for it Tom felt.

‘That’s all right,’ said John, after contemplating his visitor’s
proceedings with infinite satisfaction. ‘Now, about our plans. You are
going to stay with me, of course. Where’s your box?’

‘It’s at the Inn,’ said Tom. ‘I didn’t intend--’

‘Never mind what you didn’t intend,’ John Westlock interposed. ‘What you
DID intend is more to the purpose. You intended, in coming here, to ask
my advice, did you not, Tom?’

‘Certainly.’

‘And to take it when I gave it to you?’

‘Yes,’ rejoined Tom, smiling, ‘if it were good advice, which, being
yours, I have no doubt it will be.’

‘Very well. Then don’t be an obstinate old humbug in the outset, Tom, or
I shall shut up shop and dispense none of that invaluable commodity. You
are on a visit to me. I wish I had an organ for you, Tom!’

‘So do the gentlemen downstairs, and the gentlemen overhead I have no
doubt,’ was Tom’s reply.

‘Let me see. In the first place, you will wish to see your sister this
morning,’ pursued his friend, ‘and of course you will like to go there
alone. I’ll walk part of the way with you; and see about a little
business of my own, and meet you here again in the afternoon. Put that
in your pocket, Tom. It’s only the key of the door. If you come home
first you’ll want it.’

‘Really,’ said Tom, ‘quartering one’s self upon a friend in this way--’

‘Why, there are two keys,’ interposed John Westlock. ‘I can’t open the
door with them both at once, can I? What a ridiculous fellow you are,
Tom? Nothing particular you’d like for dinner, is there?’

‘Oh dear no,’ said Tom.

‘Very well, then you may as well leave it to me. Have a glass of cherry
brandy, Tom?’

‘Not a drop! What remarkable chambers these are!’ said Pinch ‘there’s
everything in ‘em!’

‘Bless your soul, Tom, nothing but a few little bachelor contrivances!
the sort of impromptu arrangements that might have suggested themselves
to Philip Quarll or Robinson Crusoe, that’s all. What do you say? Shall
we walk?’

‘By all means,’ cried Tom. ‘As soon as you like.’

Accordingly John Westlock took the French rolls out of his boots, and
put his boots on, and dressed himself; giving Tom the paper to read in
the meanwhile. When he returned, equipped for walking, he found Tom in a
brown study, with the paper in his hand.

‘Dreaming, Tom?’

‘No,’ said Mr Pinch, ‘No. I have been looking over the advertising
sheet, thinking there might be something in it which would be likely
to suit me. But, as I often think, the strange thing seems to be that
nobody is suited. Here are all kinds of employers wanting all sorts of
servants, and all sorts of servants wanting all kinds of employers, and
they never seem to come together. Here is a gentleman in a public office
in a position of temporary difficulty, who wants to borrow five hundred
pounds; and in the very next advertisement here is another gentleman who
has got exactly that sum to lend. But he’ll never lend it to him, John,
you’ll find! Here is a lady possessing a moderate independence, who
wants to board and lodge with a quiet, cheerful family; and here is a
family describing themselves in those very words, “a quiet, cheerful
family,” who want exactly such a lady to come and live with them. But
she’ll never go, John! Neither do any of these single gentlemen who want
an airy bedroom, with the occasional use of a parlour, ever appear to
come to terms with these other people who live in a rural situation
remarkable for its bracing atmosphere, within five minutes’ walk of
the Royal Exchange. Even those letters of the alphabet who are always
running away from their friends and being entreated at the tops of
columns to come back, never DO come back, if we may judge from the
number of times they are asked to do it and don’t. It really seems,’
said Tom, relinquishing the paper with a thoughtful sigh, ‘as if people
had the same gratification in printing their complaints as in making
them known by word of mouth; as if they found it a comfort and
consolation to proclaim “I want such and such a thing, and I can’t get
it, and I don’t expect I ever shall!”’

John Westlock laughed at the idea, and they went out together. So many
years had passed since Tom was last in London, and he had known so
little of it then, that his interest in all he saw was very great. He
was particularly anxious, among other notorious localities, to have
those streets pointed out to him which were appropriated to the
slaughter of countrymen; and was quite disappointed to find, after
half-an-hour’s walking, that he hadn’t had his pocket picked. But
on John Westlock’s inventing a pickpocket for his gratification, and
pointing out a highly respectable stranger as one of that fraternity, he
was much delighted.

His friend accompanied him to within a short distance of Camberwell
and having put him beyond the possibility of mistaking the wealthy
brass-and-copper founder’s, left him to make his visit. Arriving before
the great bell-handle, Tom gave it a gentle pull. The porter appeared.

‘Pray does Miss Pinch live here?’ said Tom.

‘Miss Pinch is governess here,’ replied the porter.

At the same time he looked at Tom from head to foot, as if he would have
said, ‘You are a nice man, YOU are; where did YOU come from?’

‘It’s the same young lady,’ said Tom. ‘It’s quite right. Is she at
home?’

‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ rejoined the porter.

‘Do you think you could have the goodness to ascertain?’ said Tom. He
had quite a delicacy in offering the suggestion, for the possibility
of such a step did not appear to present itself to the porter’s mind at
all.

The fact was that the porter in answering the gate-bell had, according
to usage, rung the house-bell (for it is as well to do these things in
the Baronial style while you are about it), and that there the functions
of his office had ceased. Being hired to open and shut the gate, and
not to explain himself to strangers, he left this little incident to be
developed by the footman with the tags, who, at this juncture, called
out from the door steps:

‘Hollo, there! wot are you up to? This way, young man!’

‘Oh!’ said Tom, hurrying towards him. ‘I didn’t observe that there was
anybody else. Pray is Miss Pinch at home?’

‘She’s IN,’ replied the footman. As much as to say to Tom: ‘But if you
think she has anything to do with the proprietorship of this place you
had better abandon that idea.’

‘I wish to see her, if you please,’ said Tom.

The footman, being a lively young man, happened to have his attention
caught at that moment by the flight of a pigeon, in which he took so
warm an interest that his gaze was rivetted on the bird until it was
quite out of sight. He then invited Tom to come in, and showed him into
a parlour.

‘Hany neem?’ said the young man, pausing languidly at the door.

It was a good thought; because without providing the stranger, in case
he should happen to be of a warm temper, with a sufficient excuse for
knocking him down, it implied this young man’s estimate of his quality,
and relieved his breast of the oppressive burden of rating him in secret
as a nameless and obscure individual.

‘Say her brother, if you please,’ said Tom.

‘Mother?’ drawled the footman.

‘Brother,’ repeated Tom, slightly raising his voice. ‘And if you will
say, in the first instance, a gentleman, and then say her brother,
I shall be obliged to you, as she does not expect me or know I am in
London, and I do not wish to startle her.’

The young man’s interest in Tom’s observations had ceased long before
this time, but he kindly waited until now; when, shutting the door, he
withdrew.

‘Dear me!’ said Tom. ‘This is very disrespectful and uncivil behaviour.
I hope these are new servants here, and that Ruth is very differently
treated.’

His cogitations were interrupted by the sound of voices in the adjoining
room. They seemed to be engaged in high dispute, or in indignant
reprimand of some offender; and gathering strength occasionally, broke
out into a perfect whirlwind. It was in one of these gusts, as it
appeared to Tom, that the footman announced him; for an abrupt and
unnatural calm took place, and then a dead silence. He was standing
before the window, wondering what domestic quarrel might have caused
these sounds, and hoping Ruth had nothing to do with it, when the door
opened, and his sister ran into his arms.

‘Why, bless my soul!’ said Tom, looking at her with great pride, when
they had tenderly embraced each other, ‘how altered you are Ruth! I
should scarcely have known you, my love, if I had seen you anywhere
else, I declare! You are so improved,’ said Tom, with inexpressible
delight; ‘you are so womanly; you are so--positively, you know, you are
so handsome!’

‘If YOU think so Tom--’

‘Oh, but everybody must think so, you know,’ said Tom, gently smoothing
down her hair. ‘It’s matter of fact; not opinion. But what’s the
matter?’ said Tom, looking at her more intently, ‘how flushed you are!
and you have been crying.’

‘No, I have not, Tom.’

‘Nonsense,’ said her brother stoutly. ‘That’s a story. Don’t tell me! I
know better. What is it, dear? I’m not with Mr Pecksniff now. I am going
to try and settle myself in London; and if you are not happy here (as I
very much fear you are not, for I begin to think you have been deceiving
me with the kindest and most affectionate intention) you shall not
remain here.’

Oh! Tom’s blood was rising; mind that! Perhaps the Boar’s Head had
something to do with it, but certainly the footman had. So had the sight
of his pretty sister--a great deal to do with it. Tom could bear a good
deal himself, but he was proud of her, and pride is a sensitive thing.
He began to think, ‘there are more Pecksniffs than one, perhaps,’ and by
all the pins and needles that run up and down in angry veins, Tom was in
a most unusual tingle all at once!

‘We will talk about it, Tom,’ said Ruth, giving him another kiss to
pacify him. ‘I am afraid I cannot stay here.’

‘Cannot!’ replied Tom. ‘Why then, you shall not, my love. Heyday! You
are not an object of charity! Upon my word!’

Tom was stopped in these exclamations by the footman, who brought a
message from his master, importing that he wished to speak with him
before he went, and with Miss Pinch also.

‘Show the way,’ said Tom. ‘I’ll wait upon him at once.’

Accordingly they entered the adjoining room from which the noise of
altercation had proceeded; and there they found a middle-aged gentleman,
with a pompous voice and manner, and a middle-aged lady, with what may
be termed an excisable face, or one in which starch and vinegar were
decidedly employed. There was likewise present that eldest pupil of Miss
Pinch, whom Mrs Todgers, on a previous occasion, had called a syrup, and
who was now weeping and sobbing spitefully.

‘My brother, sir,’ said Ruth Pinch, timidly presenting Tom.

‘Oh!’ cried the gentleman, surveying Tom attentively. ‘You really are
Miss Pinch’s brother, I presume? You will excuse my asking. I don’t
observe any resemblance.’

‘Miss Pinch has a brother, I know,’ observed the lady.

‘Miss Pinch is always talking about her brother, when she ought to be
engaged upon my education,’ sobbed the pupil.

‘Sophia! Hold your tongue!’ observed the gentleman. ‘Sit down, if you
please,’ addressing Tom.

Tom sat down, looking from one face to another, in mute surprise.

‘Remain here, if you please, Miss Pinch,’ pursued the gentleman, looking
slightly over his shoulder.

Tom interrupted him here, by rising to place a chair for his sister.
Having done which he sat down again.

‘I am glad you chance to have called to see your sister to-day, sir,’
resumed the brass-and-copper founder. ‘For although I do not approve, as
a principle, of any young person engaged in my family in the capacity
of a governess, receiving visitors, it happens in this case to be well
timed. I am sorry to inform you that we are not at all satisfied with
your sister.’

‘We are very much DISsatisfied with her,’ observed the lady.

‘I’d never say another lesson to Miss Pinch if I was to be beat to death
for it!’ sobbed the pupil.

‘Sophia!’ cried her father. ‘Hold your tongue!’

‘Will you allow me to inquire what your ground of dissatisfaction is?’
asked Tom.

‘Yes,’ said the gentleman, ‘I will. I don’t recognize it as a right;
but I will. Your sister has not the slightest innate power of commanding
respect. It has been a constant source of difference between us.
Although she has been in this family for some time, and although the
young lady who is now present has almost, as it were, grown up under
her tuition, that young lady has no respect for her. Miss Pinch has
been perfectly unable to command my daughter’s respect, or to win my
daughter’s confidence. Now,’ said the gentleman, allowing the palm of
his hand to fall gravely down upon the table: ‘I maintain that there is
something radically wrong in that! You, as her brother, may be disposed
to deny it--’

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Tom. ‘I am not at all disposed to
deny it. I am sure that there is something radically wrong; radically
monstrous, in that.’

‘Good Heavens!’ cried the gentleman, looking round the room with
dignity, ‘what do I find to be the case! what results obtrude themselves
upon me as flowing from this weakness of character on the part of
Miss Pinch! What are my feelings as a father, when, after my desire
(repeatedly expressed to Miss Pinch, as I think she will not venture to
deny) that my daughter should be choice in her expressions, genteel in
her deportment, as becomes her station in life, and politely distant to
her inferiors in society, I find her, only this very morning, addressing
Miss Pinch herself as a beggar!’

‘A beggarly thing,’ observed the lady, in correction.

‘Which is worse,’ said the gentleman, triumphantly; ‘which is worse. A
beggarly thing. A low, coarse, despicable expression!’

‘Most despicable,’ cried Tom. ‘I am glad to find that there is a just
appreciation of it here.’

‘So just, sir,’ said the gentleman, lowering his voice to be the more
impressive. ‘So just, that, but for my knowing Miss Pinch to be an
unprotected young person, an orphan, and without friends, I would, as
I assured Miss Pinch, upon my veracity and personal character, a few
minutes ago, I would have severed the connection between us at that
moment and from that time.’

‘Bless my soul, sir!’ cried Tom, rising from his seat; for he was now
unable to contain himself any longer; ‘don’t allow such considerations
as those to influence you, pray. They don’t exist, sir. She is not
unprotected. She is ready to depart this instant. Ruth, my dear, get
your bonnet on!’

‘Oh, a pretty family!’ cried the lady. ‘Oh, he’s her brother! There’s no
doubt about that!’

‘As little doubt, madam,’ said Tom, ‘as that the young lady yonder is
the child of your teaching, and not my sister’s. Ruth, my dear, get your
bonnet on!’

‘When you say, young man,’ interposed the brass-and-copper founder,
haughtily, ‘with that impertinence which is natural to you, and which I
therefore do not condescend to notice further, that the young lady, my
eldest daughter, has been educated by any one but Miss Pinch, you--I
needn’t proceed. You comprehend me fully. I have no doubt you are used
to it.’

‘Sir!’ cried Tom, after regarding him in silence for some little time.
‘If you do not understand what I mean, I will tell you. If you do
understand what I mean, I beg you not to repeat that mode of expressing
yourself in answer to it. My meaning is, that no man can expect his
children to respect what he degrades.’

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ laughed the gentleman. ‘Cant! cant! The common cant!’

‘The common story, sir!’ said Tom; ‘the story of a common mind. Your
governess cannot win the confidence and respect of your children,
forsooth! Let her begin by winning yours, and see what happens then.’

‘Miss Pinch is getting her bonnet on, I trust, my dear?’ said the
gentleman.

‘I trust she is,’ said Tom, forestalling the reply. ‘I have no doubt
she is. In the meantime I address myself to you, sir. You made your
statement to me, sir; you required to see me for that purpose; and I
have a right to answer it. I am not loud or turbulent,’ said Tom, which
was quite true, ‘though I can scarcely say as much for you, in your
manner of addressing yourself to me. And I wish, on my sister’s behalf,
to state the simple truth.’

‘You may state anything you like, young man,’ returned the gentleman,
affecting to yawn. ‘My dear, Miss Pinch’s money.’

‘When you tell me,’ resumed Tom, who was not the less indignant for
keeping himself quiet, ‘that my sister has no innate power of commanding
the respect of your children, I must tell you it is not so; and that she
has. She is as well bred, as well taught, as well qualified by nature
to command respect, as any hirer of a governess you know. But when you
place her at a disadvantage in reference to every servant in your house,
how can you suppose, if you have the gift of common sense, that she is
not in a tenfold worse position in reference to your daughters?’

‘Pretty well! Upon my word,’ exclaimed the gentleman, ‘this is pretty
well!’

‘It is very ill, sir,’ said Tom. ‘It is very bad and mean, and wrong and
cruel. Respect! I believe young people are quick enough to observe and
imitate; and why or how should they respect whom no one else respects,
and everybody slights? And very partial they must grow--oh, very
partial!--to their studies, when they see to what a pass proficiency in
those same tasks has brought their governess! Respect! Put anything the
most deserving of respect before your daughters in the light in which
you place her, and you will bring it down as low, no matter what it is!’

‘You speak with extreme impertinence, young man,’ observed the
gentleman.

‘I speak without passion, but with extreme indignation and contempt
for such a course of treatment, and for all who practice it,’ said
Tom. ‘Why, how can you, as an honest gentleman, profess displeasure or
surprise at your daughter telling my sister she is something beggarly
and humble, when you are for ever telling her the same thing yourself in
fifty plain, outspeaking ways, though not in words; and when your very
porter and footman make the same delicate announcement to all comers? As
to your suspicion and distrust of her; even of her word; if she is not
above their reach, you have no right to employ her.’

‘No right!’ cried the brass-and-copper founder.

‘Distinctly not,’ Tom answered. ‘If you imagine that the payment of an
annual sum of money gives it to you, you immensely exaggerate its power
and value. Your money is the least part of your bargain in such a case.
You may be punctual in that to half a second on the clock, and yet
be Bankrupt. I have nothing more to say,’ said Tom, much flushed and
flustered, now that it was over, ‘except to crave permission to stand in
your garden until my sister is ready.’

Not waiting to obtain it, Tom walked out.

Before he had well begun to cool, his sister joined him. She was crying;
and Tom could not bear that any one about the house should see her doing
that.

‘They will think you are sorry to go,’ said Tom. ‘You are not sorry to
go?’

‘No, Tom, no. I have been anxious to go for a very long time.’

‘Very well, then! Don’t cry!’ said Tom.

‘I am so sorry for YOU, dear,’ sobbed Tom’s sister.

‘But you ought to be glad on my account,’ said Tom. ‘I shall be twice as
happy with you for a companion. Hold up your head. There! Now we go
out as we ought. Not blustering, you know, but firm and confident in
ourselves.’

The idea of Tom and his sister blustering, under any circumstances, was
a splendid absurdity. But Tom was very far from feeling it to be so,
in his excitement; and passed out at the gate with such severe
determination written in his face that the porter hardly knew him again.

It was not until they had walked some short distance, and Tom found
himself getting cooler and more collected, that he was quite restored to
himself by an inquiry from his sister, who said in her pleasant little
voice:

‘Where are we going, Tom?’

‘Dear me!’ said Tom, stopping, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t you--don’t you live anywhere, dear?’ asked Tom’s sister looking
wistfully in his face.

‘No,’ said Tom. ‘Not at present. Not exactly. I only arrived this
morning. We must have some lodgings.’

He didn’t tell her that he had been going to stay with his friend John,
and could on no account think of billeting two inmates upon him, of whom
one was a young lady; for he knew that would make her uncomfortable,
and would cause her to regard herself as being an inconvenience to him.
Neither did he like to leave her anywhere while he called on John, and
told him of this change in his arrangements; for he was delicate of
seeming to encroach upon the generous and hospitable nature of his
friend. Therefore he said again, ‘We must have some lodgings, of
course;’ and said it as stoutly as if he had been a perfect Directory
and Guide-Book to all the lodgings in London.

‘Where shall we go and look for ‘em?’ said Tom. ‘What do you think?’

Tom’s sister was not much wiser on such a topic than he was. So she
squeezed her little purse into his coat-pocket, and folding the little
hand with which she did so on the other little hand with which she
clasped his arm, said nothing.

‘It ought to be a cheap neighbourhood,’ said Tom, ‘and not too far from
London. Let me see. Should you think Islington a good place?’

‘I should think it was an excellent place, Tom.’

‘It used to be called Merry Islington, once upon a time,’ said Tom.
‘Perhaps it’s merry now; if so, it’s all the better. Eh?’

‘If it’s not too dear,’ said Tom’s sister.

‘Of course, if it’s not too dear,’ assented Tom. ‘Well, where IS
Islington? We can’t do better than go there, I should think. Let’s go.’

Tom’s sister would have gone anywhere with him; so they walked off, arm
in arm, as comfortably as possible. Finding, presently, that Islington
was not in that neighbourhood, Tom made inquiries respecting a public
conveyance thither; which they soon obtained. As they rode along they
were very full of conversation indeed, Tom relating what had happened
to him, and Tom’s sister relating what had happened to her, and both
finding a great deal more to say than time to say it in; for they had
only just begun to talk, in comparison with what they had to tell each
other, when they reached their journey’s end.

‘Now,’ said Tom, ‘we must first look out for some very unpretending
streets, and then look out for bills in the windows.’

So they walked off again, quite as happily as if they had just stepped
out of a snug little house of their own, to look for lodgings on account
of somebody else. Tom’s simplicity was unabated, Heaven knows; but
now that he had somebody to rely upon him, he was stimulated to rely a
little more upon himself, and was, in his own opinion, quite a desperate
fellow.

After roaming up and down for hours, looking at some scores of lodgings,
they began to find it rather fatiguing, especially as they saw none
which were at all adapted to their purpose. At length, however, in a
singular little old-fashioned house, up a blind street, they discovered
two small bedrooms and a triangular parlour, which promised to suit
them well enough. Their desiring to take possession immediately was a
suspicious circumstance, but even this was surmounted by the payment
of their first week’s rent, and a reference to John Westlock, Esquire,
Furnival’s Inn, High Holborn.

Ah! It was a goodly sight, when this important point was settled,
to behold Tom and his sister trotting round to the baker’s, and the
butcher’s, and the grocer’s, with a kind of dreadful delight in the
unaccustomed cares of housekeeping; taking secret counsel together as
they gave their small orders, and distracted by the least suggestion
on the part of the shopkeeper! When they got back to the triangular
parlour, and Tom’s sister, bustling to and fro, busy about a thousand
pleasant nothings, stopped every now and then to give old Tom a kiss or
smile upon him, Tom rubbed his hands as if all Islington were his.

It was late in the afternoon now, though, and high time for Tom to
keep his appointment. So, after agreeing with his sister that
in consideration of not having dined, they would venture on the
extravagance of chops for supper at nine, he walked out again to narrate
these marvellous occurrences to John.

‘I am quite a family man all at once,’ thought Tom. ‘If I can only get
something to do, how comfortable Ruth and I may be! Ah, that if!
But it’s of no use to despond. I can but do that, when I have tried
everything and failed; and even then it won’t serve me much. Upon my
word,’ thought Tom, quickening his pace, ‘I don’t know what John will
think has become of me. He’ll begin to be afraid I have strayed into one
of those streets where the countrymen are murdered; and that I have been
made meat pies of, or some such horrible thing.’



CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

TOM PINCH, GOING ASTRAY, FINDS THAT HE IS NOT THE ONLY PERSON IN THAT
PREDICAMENT. HE RETALIATES UPON A FALLEN FOE


Tom’s evil genius did not lead him into the dens of any of those
preparers of cannibalic pastry, who are represented in many standard
country legends as doing a lively retail business in the Metropolis;
nor did it mark him out as the prey of ring-droppers, pea and
thimble-riggers, duffers, touters, or any of those bloodless sharpers,
who are, perhaps, a little better known to the Police. He fell into
conversation with no gentleman who took him into a public-house, where
there happened to be another gentleman who swore he had more money than
any gentleman, and very soon proved he had more money than one gentleman
by taking his away from him; neither did he fall into any other of
the numerous man-traps which are set up without notice, in the public
grounds of this city. But he lost his way. He very soon did that; and in
trying to find it again he lost it more and more.

Now, Tom, in his guileless distrust of London, thought himself very
knowing in coming to the determination that he would not ask to be
directed to Furnival’s Inn, if he could help it; unless, indeed, he
should happen to find himself near the Mint, or the Bank of England; in
which case he would step in, and ask a civil question or two, confiding
in the perfect respectability of the concern. So on he went, looking up
all the streets he came near, and going up half of them; and thus,
by dint of not being true to Goswell Street, and filing off into
Aldermanbury, and bewildering himself in Barbican, and being constant to
the wrong point of the compass in London Wall, and then getting himself
crosswise into Thames Street, by an instinct that would have been
marvellous if he had had the least desire or reason to go there, he
found himself, at last, hard by the Monument.

The Man in the Monument was quite as mysterious a being to Tom as the
Man in the Moon. It immediately occurred to him that the lonely creature
who held himself aloof from all mankind in that pillar like some old
hermit was the very man of whom to ask his way. Cold, he might be;
little sympathy he had, perhaps, with human passion--the column seemed
too tall for that; but if Truth didn’t live in the base of the Monument,
notwithstanding Pope’s couplet about the outside of it, where in London
(thought Tom) was she likely to be found!

Coming close below the pillar, it was a great encouragement to Tom to
find that the Man in the Monument had simple tastes; that stony
and artificial as his residence was, he still preserved some rustic
recollections; that he liked plants, hung up bird-cages, was not wholly
cut off from fresh groundsel, and kept young trees in tubs. The Man in
the Monument, himself, was sitting outside the door--his own door: the
Monument-door: what a grand idea!--and was actually yawning, as if there
were no Monument to stop his mouth, and give him a perpetual interest in
his own existence.

Tom was advancing towards this remarkable creature, to inquire the way
to Furnival’s Inn, when two people came to see the Monument. They were a
gentleman and a lady; and the gentleman said, ‘How much a-piece?’

The Man in the Monument replied, ‘A Tanner.’

It seemed a low expression, compared with the Monument.

The gentleman put a shilling into his hand, and the Man in the Monument
opened a dark little door. When the gentleman and lady had passed out of
view, he shut it again, and came slowly back to his chair.

He sat down and laughed.

‘They don’t know what a many steps there is!’ he said. ‘It’s worth twice
the money to stop here. Oh, my eye!’

The Man in the Monument was a Cynic; a worldly man! Tom couldn’t ask his
way of HIM. He was prepared to put no confidence in anything he said.

‘My gracious!’ cried a well-known voice behind Mr Pinch. ‘Why, to be
sure it is!’

At the same time he was poked in the back by a parasol. Turning round
to inquire into this salute, he beheld the eldest daughter of his late
patron.

‘Miss Pecksniff!’ said Tom.

‘Why, my goodness, Mr Pinch!’ cried Cherry. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I have rather wandered from my way,’ said Tom. ‘I--’

‘I hope you have run away,’ said Charity. ‘It would be quite spirited
and proper if you had, when my Papa so far forgets himself.’

‘I have left him,’ returned Tom. ‘But it was perfectly understood on
both sides. It was not done clandestinely.’

‘Is he married?’ asked Cherry, with a spasmodic shake of her chin.

‘No, not yet,’ said Tom, colouring; ‘to tell you the truth, I don’t
think he is likely to be, if--if Miss Graham is the object of his
passion.’

‘Tcha, Mr Pinch!’ cried Charity, with sharp impatience, ‘you’re very
easily deceived. You don’t know the arts of which such a creature is
capable. Oh! it’s a wicked world.’

‘You are not married?’ Tom hinted, to divert the conversation.

‘N--no!’ said Cherry, tracing out one particular paving-stone in
Monument Yard with the end of her parasol. ‘I--but really it’s quite
impossible to explain. Won’t you walk in?’

‘You live here, then?’ said Tom

‘Yes,’ returned Miss Pecksniff, pointing with her parasol to Todgers’s;
‘I reside with this lady, AT PRESENT.’

The great stress on the two last words suggested to Tom that he was
expected to say something in reference to them. So he said.

‘Only at present! Are you going home again soon?’

‘No, Mr Pinch,’ returned Charity. ‘No, thank you. No! A mother-in-law
who is younger than--I mean to say, who is as nearly as possible about
the same age as one’s self, would not quite suit my spirit. Not quite!’
said Cherry, with a spiteful shiver.

‘I thought from your saying “at present”’--Tom observed.

‘Really, upon my word! I had no idea you would press me so very closely
on the subject, Mr Pinch,’ said Charity, blushing, ‘or I should not have
been so foolish as to allude to--oh really!--won’t you walk in?’

Tom mentioned, to excuse himself, that he had an appointment in
Furnival’s Inn, and that coming from Islington he had taken a few wrong
turnings, and arrived at the Monument instead. Miss Pecksniff simpered
very much when he asked her if she knew the way to Furnival’s Inn, and
at length found courage to reply.

‘A gentleman who is a friend of mine, or at least who is not exactly a
friend so much as a sort of acquaintance--Oh upon my word, I hardly
know what I say, Mr Pinch; you mustn’t suppose there is any engagement
between us; or at least if there is, that it is at all a settled thing
as yet--is going to Furnival’s Inn immediately, I believe upon a little
business, and I am sure he would be very glad to accompany you, so as
to prevent your going wrong again. You had better walk in. You will very
likely find my sister Merry here,’ she said with a curious toss of her
head, and anything but an agreeable smile.

‘Then, I think, I’ll endeavour to find my way alone,’ said Tom, ‘for I
fear she would not be very glad to see me. That unfortunate occurrence,
in relation to which you and I had some amicable words together, in
private, is not likely to have impressed her with any friendly feeling
towards me. Though it really was not my fault.’

‘She has never heard of that, you may depend,’ said Cherry, gathering up
the corners of her mouth, and nodding at Tom. ‘I am far from sure that
she would bear you any mighty ill will for it, if she had.’

‘You don’t say so?’ cried Tom, who was really concerned by this
insinuation.

‘I say nothing,’ said Charity. ‘If I had not already known what shocking
things treachery and deceit are in themselves, Mr Pinch, I might perhaps
have learnt it from the success they meet with--from the success they
meet with.’ Here she smiled as before. ‘But I don’t say anything. On the
contrary, I should scorn it. You had better walk in!’

There was something hidden here, which piqued Tom’s interest and
troubled his tender heart. When, in a moment’s irresolution, he looked
at Charity, he could not but observe a struggle in her face between
a sense of triumph and a sense of shame; nor could he but remark how,
meeting even his eyes, which she cared so little for, she turned away
her own, for all the splenetic defiance in her manner.

An uneasy thought entered Tom’s head; a shadowy misgiving that the
altered relations between himself and Pecksniff were somehow to involve
an altered knowledge on his part of other people, and were to give him
an insight into much of which he had had no previous suspicion. And yet
he put no definite construction upon Charity’s proceedings. He certainly
had no idea that as he had been the audience and spectator of her
mortification, she grasped with eager delight at any opportunity of
reproaching her sister with his presence in HER far deeper misery; for
he knew nothing of it, and only pictured that sister as the same giddy,
careless, trivial creature she always had been, with the same slight
estimation of himself which she had never been at the least pains
to conceal. In short, he had merely a confused impression that Miss
Pecksniff was not quite sisterly or kind; and being curious to set it
right, accompanied her as she desired.

The house-door being opened, she went in before Tom, requesting him to
follow her; and led the way to the parlour door.

‘Oh, Merry!’ she said, looking in, ‘I am so glad you have not gone home.
Who do you think I have met in the street, and brought to see you! Mr
Pinch! There. Now you ARE surprised, I am sure!’

Not more surprised than Tom was, when he looked upon her. Not so much.
Not half so much.

‘Mr Pinch has left Papa, my dear,’ said Cherry, ‘and his prospects are
quite flourishing. I have promised that Augustus, who is going that way,
shall escort him to the place he wants. Augustus, my child, where are
you?’

With these words Miss Pecksniff screamed her way out of the parlour,
calling on Augustus Moddle to appear; and left Tom Pinch alone with her
sister.

If she had always been his kindest friend; if she had treated him
through all his servitude with such consideration as was never yet
received by struggling man; if she had lightened every moment of those
many years, and had ever spared and never wounded him; his honest heart
could not have swelled before her with a deeper pity, or a purer freedom
from all base remembrance than it did then.

‘My gracious me! You are really the last person in the world I should
have thought of seeing, I am sure!’

Tom was sorry to hear her speaking in her old manner. He had not
expected that. Yet he did not feel it a contradiction that he should be
sorry to see her so unlike her old self, and sorry at the same time
to hear her speaking in her old manner. The two things seemed quite
natural.

‘I wonder you find any gratification in coming to see me. I can’t think
what put it in your head. I never had much in seeing you. There was no
love lost between us, Mr Pinch, at any time, I think.’

Her bonnet lay beside her on the sofa, and she was very busy with the
ribbons as she spoke. Much too busy to be conscious of the work her
fingers did.

‘We never quarrelled,’ said Tom.--Tom was right in that, for one person
can no more quarrel without an adversary, than one person can play at
chess, or fight a duel. ‘I hoped you would be glad to shake hands with
an old friend. Don’t let us rake up bygones,’ said Tom. ‘If I ever
offended you, forgive me.’

She looked at him for a moment; dropped her bonnet from her hands;
spread them before her altered face, and burst into tears.

‘Oh, Mr Pinch!’ she said, ‘although I never used you well, I did believe
your nature was forgiving. I did not think you could be cruel.’

She spoke as little like her old self now, for certain, as Tom
could possibly have wished. But she seemed to be appealing to him
reproachfully, and he did not understand her.

‘I seldom showed it--never--I know that. But I had that belief in you,
that if I had been asked to name the person in the world least likely to
retort upon me, I would have named you, confidently.’

‘Would have named me!’ Tom repeated.

‘Yes,’ she said with energy, ‘and I have often thought so.’

After a moment’s reflection, Tom sat himself upon a chair beside her.

‘Do you believe,’ said Tom, ‘oh, can you think, that what I said just
now, I said with any but the true and plain intention which my words
professed? I mean it, in the spirit and the letter. If I ever offended
you, forgive me; I may have done so, many times. You never injured or
offended me. How, then, could I possibly retort, if even I were stern
and bad enough to wish to do it!’

After a little while she thanked him, through her tears and sobs, and
told him she had never been at once so sorry and so comforted, since she
left home. Still she wept bitterly; and it was the greater pain to Tom
to see her weeping, from her standing in especial need, just then, of
sympathy and tenderness.

‘Come, come!’ said Tom, ‘you used to be as cheerful as the day was
long.’

‘Ah! used!’ she cried, in such a tone as rent Tom’s heart.

‘And will be again,’ said Tom.

‘No, never more. No, never, never more. If you should talk with old Mr
Chuzzlewit, at any time,’ she added, looking hurriedly into his face--‘I
sometimes thought he liked you, but suppressed it--will you promise me
to tell him that you saw me here, and that I said I bore in mind the
time we talked together in the churchyard?’

Tom promised that he would.

‘Many times since then, when I have wished I had been carried there
before that day, I have recalled his words. I wish that he should know
how true they were, although the least acknowledgment to that effect has
never passed my lips and never will.’

Tom promised this, conditionally too. He did not tell her how improbable
it was that he and the old man would ever meet again, because he thought
it might disturb her more.

‘If he should ever know this, through your means, dear Mr Pinch,’ said
Mercy, ‘tell him that I sent the message, not for myself, but that he
might be more forbearing and more patient, and more trustful to some
other person, in some other time of need. Tell him that if he could know
how my heart trembled in the balance that day, and what a very little
would have turned the scale, his own would bleed with pity for me.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Tom, ‘I will.’

‘When I appeared to him the most unworthy of his help, I was--I know I
was, for I have often, often, thought about it since--the most inclined
to yield to what he showed me. Oh! if he had relented but a little more;
if he had thrown himself in my way for but one other quarter of an hour;
if he had extended his compassion for a vain, unthinking, miserable
girl, in but the least degree; he might, and I believe he would, have
saved her! Tell him that I don’t blame him, but am grateful for the
effort that he made; but ask him for the love of God, and youth, and
in merciful consideration for the struggle which an ill-advised and
unwakened nature makes to hide the strength it thinks its weakness--ask
him never, never, to forget this, when he deals with one again!’

Although Tom did not hold the clue to her full meaning, he could guess
it pretty nearly. Touched to the quick, he took her hand and said, or
meant to say, some words of consolation. She felt and understood them,
whether they were spoken or no. He was not quite certain, afterwards,
but that she had tried to kneel down at his feet, and bless him.

He found that he was not alone in the room when she had left it. Mrs
Todgers was there, shaking her head. Tom had never seen Mrs Todgers, it
is needless to say, but he had a perception of her being the lady of the
house; and he saw some genuine compassion in her eyes, that won his good
opinion.

‘Ah, sir! You are an old friend, I see,’ said Mrs Todgers.

‘Yes,’ said Tom.

‘And yet,’ quoth Mrs Todgers, shutting the door softly, ‘she hasn’t told
you what her troubles are, I’m certain.’

Tom was struck by these words, for they were quite true. ‘Indeed,’ he
said, ‘she has not.’

‘And never would,’ said Mrs Todgers, ‘if you saw her daily. She never
makes the least complaint to me, or utters a single word of explanation
or reproach. But I know,’ said Mrs Todgers, drawing in her breath, ‘I
know!’

Tom nodded sorrowfully, ‘So do I.’

‘I fully believe,’ said Mrs Todgers, taking her pocket-handkerchief
from the flat reticule, ‘that nobody can tell one half of what that poor
young creature has to undergo. But though she comes here, constantly,
to ease her poor full heart without his knowing it; and saying, “Mrs
Todgers, I am very low to-day; I think that I shall soon be dead,” sits
crying in my room until the fit is past; I know no more from her. And,
I believe,’ said Mrs Todgers, putting back her handkerchief again, ‘that
she considers me a good friend too.’

Mrs Todgers might have said her best friend. Commercial gentlemen and
gravy had tried Mrs Todgers’s temper; the main chance--it was such a
very small one in her case, that she might have been excused for looking
sharp after it, lest it should entirely vanish from her sight--had taken
a firm hold on Mrs Todgers’s attention. But in some odd nook in Mrs
Todgers’s breast, up a great many steps, and in a corner easy to be
overlooked, there was a secret door, with ‘Woman’ written on the spring,
which, at a touch from Mercy’s hand, had flown wide open, and admitted
her for shelter.

When boarding-house accounts are balanced with all other ledgers, and
the books of the Recording Angel are made up for ever, perhaps there may
be seen an entry to thy credit, lean Mrs Todgers, which shall make thee
beautiful!

She was growing beautiful so rapidly in Tom’s eyes; for he saw that she
was poor, and that this good had sprung up in her from among the sordid
strivings of her life; that she might have been a very Venus in a minute
more, if Miss Pecksniff had not entered with her friend.

‘Mr Thomas Pinch!’ said Charity, performing the ceremony of introduction
with evident pride. ‘Mr Moddle. Where’s my sister?’

‘Gone, Miss Pecksniff,’ Mrs Todgers answered. ‘She had appointed to be
home.’

‘Ah!’ said Charity, looking at Tom. ‘Oh, dear me!’

‘She’s greatly altered since she’s been Anoth--since she’s been married,
Mrs Todgers!’ observed Moddle.

‘My dear Augustus!’ said Miss Pecksniff, in a low voice. ‘I verily
believe you have said that fifty thousand times, in my hearing. What a
Prose you are!’

This was succeeded by some trifling love passages, which appeared to
originate with, if not to be wholly carried on by Miss Pecksniff. At any
rate, Mr Moddle was much slower in his responses than is customary
with young lovers, and exhibited a lowness of spirits which was quite
oppressive.

He did not improve at all when Tom and he were in the streets, but
sighed so dismally that it was dreadful to hear him. As a means of
cheering him up, Tom told him that he wished him joy.

‘Joy!’ cried Moddle. ‘Ha, ha!’

‘What an extraordinary young man!’ thought Tom.

‘The Scorner has not set his seal upon you. YOU care what becomes of
you?’ said Moddle.

Tom admitted that it was a subject in which he certainly felt some
interest.

‘I don’t,’ said Mr Moddle. ‘The Elements may have me when they please.
I’m ready.’

Tom inferred from these, and other expressions of the same nature, that
he was jealous. Therefore he allowed him to take his own course; which
was such a gloomy one, that he felt a load removed from his mind when
they parted company at the gate of Furnival’s Inn.

It was now a couple of hours past John Westlock’s dinner-time; and he
was walking up and down the room, quite anxious for Tom’s safety. The
table was spread; the wine was carefully decanted; and the dinner smelt
delicious.

‘Why, Tom, old boy, where on earth have you been? Your box is here. Get
your boots off instantly, and sit down!’

‘I am sorry to say I can’t stay, John,’ replied Tom Pinch, who was
breathless with the haste he had made in running up the stairs.

‘Can’t stay!’

‘If you’ll go on with your dinner,’ said Tom, ‘I’ll tell you my reason
the while. I mustn’t eat myself, or I shall have no appetite for the
chops.’

‘There are no chops here, my food fellow.’

‘No. But there are at Islington,’ said Tom.

John Westlock was perfectly confounded by this reply, and vowed he would
not touch a morsel until Tom had explained himself fully. So Tom sat
down, and told him all; to which he listened with the greatest interest.

He knew Tom too well, and respected his delicacy too much, to ask him
why he had taken these measures without communicating with him first. He
quite concurred in the expediency of Tom’s immediately returning to his
sister, as he knew so little of the place in which he had left her, and
good-humouredly proposed to ride back with him in a cab, in which he
might convey his box. Tom’s proposition that he should sup with them
that night, he flatly rejected, but made an appointment with him for the
morrow. ‘And now Tom,’ he said, as they rode along, ‘I have a question
to ask you to which I expect a manly and straightforward answer. Do you
want any money? I am pretty sure you do.’

‘I don’t indeed,’ said Tom.

‘I believe you are deceiving me.’

‘No. With many thanks to you, I am quite in earnest,’ Tom replied. ‘My
sister has some money, and so have I. If I had nothing else, John, I
have a five-pound note, which that good creature, Mrs Lupin, of the
Dragon, handed up to me outside the coach, in a letter begging me to
borrow it; and then drove off as hard as she could go.’

‘And a blessing on every dimple in her handsome face, say I!’ cried
John, ‘though why you should give her the preference over me, I don’t
know. Never mind. I bide my time, Tom.’

‘And I hope you’ll continue to bide it,’ returned Tom, gayly. ‘For I
owe you more, already, in a hundred other ways, than I can ever hope to
pay.’

They parted at the door of Tom’s new residence. John Westlock, sitting
in the cab, and, catching a glimpse of a blooming little busy creature
darting out to kiss Tom and to help him with his box, would not have had
the least objection to change places with him.

Well! she WAS a cheerful little thing; and had a quaint, bright
quietness about her that was infinitely pleasant. Surely she was the
best sauce for chops ever invented. The potatoes seemed to take a
pleasure in sending up their grateful steam before her; the froth upon
the pint of porter pouted to attract her notice. But it was all in vain.
She saw nothing but Tom. Tom was the first and last thing in the world.

As she sat opposite to Tom at supper, fingering one of Tom’s pet tunes
upon the table-cloth, and smiling in his face, he had never been so
happy in his life.



CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

SECRET SERVICE


In walking from the city with his sentimental friend, Tom Pinch had
looked into the face, and brushed against the threadbare sleeve, of Mr
Nadgett, man of mystery to the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and
Life Assurance Company. Mr Nadgett naturally passed away from Tom’s
remembrance as he passed out of his view; for he didn’t know him, and
had never heard his name.

As there are a vast number of people in the huge metropolis of England
who rise up every morning not knowing where their heads will rest at
night, so there are a multitude who shooting arrows over houses as their
daily business, never know on whom they fall. Mr Nadgett might have
passed Tom Pinch ten thousand times; might even have been quite familiar
with his face, his name, pursuits, and character; yet never once have
dreamed that Tom had any interest in any act or mystery of his. Tom
might have done the like by him of course. But the same private man out
of all the men alive, was in the mind of each at the same moment; was
prominently connected though in a different manner, with the day’s
adventures of both; and formed, when they passed each other in the
street, the one absorbing topic of their thoughts.

Why Tom had Jonas Chuzzlewit in his mind requires no explanation. Why Mr
Nadgett should have had Jonas Chuzzlewit in his, is quite another thing.

But, somehow or other, that amiable and worthy orphan had become a part
of the mystery of Mr Nadgett’s existence. Mr Nadgett took an interest
in his lightest proceedings; and it never flagged or wavered. He watched
him in and out of the Assurance Office, where he was now formally
installed as a Director; he dogged his footsteps in the streets; he
stood listening when he talked; he sat in coffee-rooms entering his
name in the great pocket-book, over and over again; he wrote letters to
himself about him constantly; and, when he found them in his pocket, put
them in the fire, with such distrust and caution that he would bend down
to watch the crumpled tinder while it floated upwards, as if his mind
misgave him, that the mystery it had contained might come out at the
chimney-pot.

And yet all this was quite a secret. Mr Nadgett kept it to himself, and
kept it close. Jonas had no more idea that Mr Nadgett’s eyes were fixed
on him, than he had that he was living under the daily inspection and
report of a whole order of Jesuits. Indeed Mr Nadgett’s eyes were seldom
fixed on any other objects than the ground, the clock, or the fire; but
every button on his coat might have been an eye, he saw so much.

The secret manner of the man disarmed suspicion in this wise;
suggesting, not that he was watching any one, but that he thought
some other man was watching him. He went about so stealthily, and kept
himself so wrapped up in himself, that the whole object of his life
appeared to be, to avoid notice and preserve his own mystery. Jonas
sometimes saw him in the street, hovering in the outer office, waiting
at the door for the man who never came, or slinking off with his
immovable face and drooping head, and the one beaver glove dangling
before him; but he would as soon have thought of the cross upon the top
of St. Paul’s Cathedral taking note of what he did, or slowly winding
a great net about his feet, as of Nadgett’s being engaged in such an
occupation.

Mr Nadgett made a mysterious change about this time in his mysterious
life: for whereas he had, until now, been first seen every morning
coming down Cornhill, so exactly like the Nadgett of the day before
as to occasion a popular belief that he never went to bed or took his
clothes off, he was now first seen in Holborn, coming out of Kingsgate
Street; and it was soon discovered that he actually went every morning
to a barber’s shop in that street to get shaved; and that the barber’s
name was Sweedlepipe. He seemed to make appointments with the man who
never came, to meet him at this barber’s; for he would frequently take
long spells of waiting in the shop, and would ask for pen and ink, and
pull out his pocket-book, and be very busy over it for an hour at a
time. Mrs Gamp and Mr Sweedlepipe had many deep discoursings on the
subject of this mysterious customer; but they usually agreed that he had
speculated too much and was keeping out of the way.

He must have appointed the man who never kept his word, to meet him at
another new place too; for one day he was found, for the first time,
by the waiter at the Mourning Coach-Horse, the House-of-call for
Undertakers, down in the City there, making figures with a pipe-stem in
the sawdust of a clean spittoon; and declining to call for anything, on
the ground of expecting a gentleman presently. As the gentleman was not
honourable enough to keep his engagement, he came again next day, with
his pocket-book in such a state of distention that he was regarded in
the bar as a man of large property. After that, he repeated his visits
every day, and had so much writing to do, that he made nothing of
emptying a capacious leaden inkstand in two sittings. Although he never
talked much, still, by being there among the regular customers, he made
their acquaintance, and in course of time became quite intimate with Mr
Tacker, Mr Mould’s foreman; and even with Mr Mould himself, who openly
said he was a long-headed man, a dry one, a salt fish, a deep file, a
rasper; and made him the subject of many other flattering encomiums.

At the same time, too, he told the people at the Assurance Office, in
his own mysterious way, that there was something wrong (secretly wrong,
of course) in his liver, and that he feared he must put himself
under the doctor’s hands. He was delivered over to Jobling upon this
representation; and though Jobling could not find out where his liver
was wrong, wrong Mr Nadgett said it was; observing that it was his
own liver, and he hoped he ought to know. Accordingly, he became Mr
Jobling’s patient; and detailing his symptoms in his slow and secret
way, was in and out of that gentleman’s room a dozen times a day.

As he pursued all these occupations at once; and all steadily; and all
secretly; and never slackened in his watchfulness of everything that
Mr Jonas said and did, and left unsaid and undone; it is not improbable
that they were, secretly, essential parts of some great scheme which Mr
Nadgett had on foot.

It was on the morning of this very day on which so much had happened to
Tom Pinch, that Nadgett suddenly appeared before Mr Montague’s house in
Pall Mall--he always made his appearance as if he had that moment come
up a trap--when the clocks were striking nine. He rang the bell in a
covert under-handed way, as though it were a treasonable act; and passed
in at the door, the moment it was opened wide enough to receive his
body. That done, he shut it immediately with his own hands.

Mr Bailey, taking up his name without delay, returned with a request
that he would follow him into his master’s chamber. The chairman of the
Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Board was dressing,
and received him as a business person who was often backwards and
forwards, and was received at all times for his business’ sake.

‘Well, Mr Nadgett?’

Mr Nadgett put his hat upon the ground and coughed. The boy having
withdrawn and shut the door, he went to it softly, examined the handle,
and returned to within a pace or two of the chair in which Mr Montague
sat.

‘Any news, Mr Nadgett?’

‘I think we have some news at last, sir.’

‘I am happy to hear it. I began to fear you were off the scent, Mr
Nadgett.’

‘No, sir. It grows cold occasionally. It will sometimes. We can’t help
that.’

‘You are truth itself, Mr Nadgett. Do you report a great success?’

‘That depends upon your judgment and construction of it,’ was his
answer, as he put on his spectacles.

‘What do you think of it yourself? Have you pleased yourself?’

Mr Nadgett rubbed his hands slowly, stroked his chin, looked round the
room, and said, ‘Yes, yes, I think it’s a good case. I am disposed to
think it’s a good case. Will you go into it at once?’

‘By all means.’

Mr Nadgett picked out a certain chair from among the rest, and having
planted it in a particular spot, as carefully as if he had been going to
vault over it, placed another chair in front of it; leaving room for his
own legs between them. He then sat down in chair number two, and laid
his pocket-book, very carefully, on chair number one. He then untied the
pocket-book, and hung the string over the back of chair number one. He
then drew both the chairs a little nearer Mr Montague, and opening
the pocket-book spread out its contents. Finally he selected a certain
memorandum from the rest, and held it out to his employer, who, during
the whole of these preliminary ceremonies, had been making violent
efforts to conceal his impatience.

‘I wish you wouldn’t be so fond of making notes, my excellent friend,’
said Tigg Montague with a ghastly smile. ‘I wish you would consent to
give me their purport by word of mouth.’

‘I don’t like word of mouth,’ said Mr Nadgett gravely. ‘We never know
who’s listening.’

Mr Montague was going to retort, when Nadgett handed him the paper, and
said, with quiet exultation in his tone, ‘We’ll begin at the beginning,
and take that one first, if you please, sir.’

The chairman cast his eyes upon it, coldly, and with a smile which did
not render any great homage to the slow and methodical habits of his
spy. But he had not read half-a-dozen lines when the expression of his
face began to change, and before he had finished the perusal of the
paper, it was full of grave and serious attention.

‘Number Two,’ said Mr Nadgett, handing him another, and receiving back
the first. ‘Read Number Two, sir, if you please. There is more interest
as you go on.’

Tigg Montague leaned backward in his chair, and cast upon his emissary
such a look of vacant wonder (not unmingled with alarm), that Mr Nadgett
considered it necessary to repeat the request he had already twice
preferred; with the view to recalling his attention to the point in
hand. Profiting by the hint, Mr Montague went on with Number Two, and
afterwards with Numbers Three, and Four, and Five, and so on.

These documents were all in Mr Nadgett’s writing, and were apparently a
series of memoranda, jotted down from time to time upon the backs of old
letters, or any scrap of paper that came first to hand. Loose straggling
scrawls they were, and of very uninviting exterior; but they had weighty
purpose in them, if the chairman’s face were any index to the character
of their contents.

The progress of Mr Nadgett’s secret satisfaction arising out of the
effect they made, kept pace with the emotions of the reader. At first,
Mr Nadgett sat with his spectacles low down upon his nose, looking over
them at his employer, and nervously rubbing his hands. After a little
while, he changed his posture in his chair for one of greater ease, and
leisurely perused the next document he held ready as if an occasional
glance at his employer’s face were now enough and all occasion for
anxiety or doubt were gone. And finally he rose and looked out of the
window, where he stood with a triumphant air until Tigg Montague had
finished.

‘And this is the last, Mr Nadgett!’ said that gentleman, drawing a long
breath.

‘That, sir, is the last.’

‘You are a wonderful man, Mr Nadgett!’

‘I think it is a pretty good case,’ he returned as he gathered up his
papers. ‘It cost some trouble, sir.’

‘The trouble shall be well rewarded, Mr Nadgett.’ Nadgett bowed. ‘There
is a deeper impression of Somebody’s Hoof here, than I had expected, Mr
Nadgett. I may congratulate myself upon your being such a good hand at a
secret.’

‘Oh! nothing has an interest to me that’s not a secret,’ replied
Nadgett, as he tied the string about his pocket-book, and put it up. ‘It
always takes away any pleasure I may have had in this inquiry even to
make it known to you.’

‘A most invaluable constitution,’ Tigg retorted. ‘A great gift for a
gentleman employed as you are, Mr Nadgett. Much better than discretion;
though you possess that quality also in an eminent degree. I think I
heard a double knock. Will you put your head out of window, and tell me
whether there is anybody at the door?’

Mr Nadgett softly raised the sash, and peered out from the very corner,
as a man might who was looking down into a street from whence a brisk
discharge of musketry might be expected at any moment. Drawing in his
head with equal caution, he observed, not altering his voice or manner:

‘Mr Jonas Chuzzlewit!’

‘I thought so,’ Tigg retorted.

‘Shall I go?’

‘I think you had better. Stay though! No! remain here, Mr Nadgett, if
you please.’

It was remarkable how pale and flurried he had become in an instant.
There was nothing to account for it. His eye had fallen on his razors;
but what of them!

Mr Chuzzlewit was announced.

‘Show him up directly. Nadgett! don’t you leave us alone together. Mind
you don’t, now! By the Lord!’ he added in a whisper to himself: ‘We
don’t know what may happen.’

Saying this, he hurriedly took up a couple of hair-brushes, and began
to exercise them on his own head, as if his toilet had not been
interrupted. Mr Nadgett withdrew to the stove, in which there was a
small fire for the convenience of heating curling-irons; and
taking advantage of so favourable an opportunity for drying his
pocket-handkerchief, produced it without loss of time. There he stood,
during the whole interview, holding it before the bars, and sometimes,
but not often, glancing over his shoulder.

‘My dear Chuzzlewit!’ cried Montague, as Jonas entered. ‘You rise with
the lark. Though you go to bed with the nightingale, you rise with the
lark. You have superhuman energy, my dear Chuzzlewit!’

‘Ecod!’ said Jonas, with an air of langour and ill-humour, as he took
a chair, ‘I should be very glad not to get up with the lark, if I could
help it. But I am a light sleeper; and it’s better to be up than lying
awake, counting the dismal old church-clocks, in bed.’

‘A light sleeper!’ cried his friend. ‘Now, what is a light sleeper?
I often hear the expression, but upon my life I have not the least
conception what a light sleeper is.’

‘Hallo!’ said Jonas, ‘Who’s that? Oh, old what’s-his-name: looking (as
usual) as if he wanted to skulk up the chimney.’

‘Ha, ha! I have no doubt he does.’

‘Well! He’s not wanted here, I suppose,’ said Jonas. ‘He may go, mayn’t
he?’

‘Oh, let him stay, let him stay!’ said Tigg. ‘He’s a mere piece of
furniture. He has been making his report, and is waiting for further
orders. He has been told,’ said Tigg, raising his voice, ‘not to lose
sight of certain friends of ours, or to think that he has done with them
by any means. He understands his business.’

‘He need,’ replied Jonas; ‘for of all the precious old dummies in
appearance that I ever saw, he’s about the worst. He’s afraid of me, I
think.’

‘It’s my belief,’ said Tigg, ‘that you are Poison to him. Nadgett! give
me that towel!’

He had as little occasion for a towel as Jonas had for a start. But
Nadgett brought it quickly; and, having lingered for a moment, fell back
upon his old post by the fire.

‘You see, my dear fellow,’ resumed Tigg, ‘you are too--what’s the matter
with your lips? How white they are!’

‘I took some vinegar just now,’ said Jonas. ‘I had oysters for my
breakfast. Where are they white?’ he added, muttering an oath, and
rubbing them upon his handkerchief. ‘I don’t believe they ARE white.’

‘Now I look again, they are not,’ replied his friend. ‘They are coming
right again.’

‘Say what you were going to say,’ cried Jonas angrily, ‘and let my face
be! As long as I can show my teeth when I want to (and I can do that
pretty well), the colour of my lips is not material.’

‘Quite true,’ said Tigg. ‘I was only going to say that you are too quick
and active for our friend. He is too shy to cope with such a man as you,
but does his duty well. Oh, very well! But what is a light sleeper?’

‘Hang a light sleeper!’ exclaimed Jonas pettishly.

‘No, no,’ interrupted Tigg. ‘No. We’ll not do that.’

‘A light sleeper ain’t a heavy one,’ said Jonas in his sulky way; ‘don’t
sleep much, and don’t sleep well, and don’t sleep sound.’

‘And dreams,’ said Tigg, ‘and cries out in an ugly manner; and when the
candle burns down in the night, is in an agony; and all that sort of
thing. I see!’

They were silent for a little time. Then Jonas spoke:

‘Now we’ve done with child’s talk, I want to have a word with you. I
want to have a word with you before we meet up yonder to-day. I am not
satisfied with the state of affairs.’

‘Not satisfied!’ cried Tigg. ‘The money comes in well.’

‘The money comes in well enough,’ retorted Jonas, ‘but it don’t come
out well enough. It can’t be got at easily enough. I haven’t sufficient
power; it is all in your hands. Ecod! what with one of your by-laws, and
another of your by-laws, and your votes in this capacity, and your votes
in that capacity, and your official rights, and your individual rights,
and other people’s rights who are only you again, there are no rights
left for me. Everybody else’s rights are my wrongs. What’s the use of my
having a voice if it’s always drowned? I might as well be dumb, and
it would be much less aggravating. I’m not a-going to stand that, you
know.’

‘No!’ said Tigg in an insinuating tone.

‘No!’ returned Jonas, ‘I’m not indeed. I’ll play old Gooseberry with the
office, and make you glad to buy me out at a good high figure, if you
try any of your tricks with me.’

‘I give you my honour--’ Montague began.

‘Oh! confound your honour,’ interrupted Jonas, who became more coarse
and quarrelsome as the other remonstrated, which may have been a part of
Mr Montague’s intention; ‘I want a little more control over the money.
You may have all the honour, if you like; I’ll never bring you to book
for that. But I’m not a-going to stand it, as it is now. If you should
take it into your honourable head to go abroad with the bank, I don’t
see much to prevent you. Well! That won’t do. I’ve had some very good
dinners here, but they’d come too dear on such terms; and therefore,
that won’t do.’

‘I am unfortunate to find you in this humour,’ said Tigg, with a
remarkable kind of smile; ‘for I was going to propose to you--for your
own advantage; solely for your own advantage--that you should venture a
little more with us.’

‘Was you, by G--?’ said Jonas, with a short laugh.

‘Yes. And to suggest,’ pursued Montague, ‘that surely you have friends;
indeed, I know you have; who would answer our purpose admirably, and
whom we should be delighted to receive.’

‘How kind of you! You’d be delighted to receive ‘em, would you?’ said
Jonas, bantering.

‘I give you my sacred honour, quite transported. As your friends,
observe!’

‘Exactly,’ said Jonas; ‘as my friends, of course. You’ll be very much
delighted when you get ‘em, I have no doubt. And it’ll be all to my
advantage, won’t it?’

‘It will be very much to your advantage,’ answered Montague poising a
brush in each hand, and looking steadily upon him. ‘It will be very much
to your advantage, I assure you.’

‘And you can tell me how,’ said Jonas, ‘can’t you?’

‘SHALL I tell you how?’ returned the other.

‘I think you had better,’ said Jonas. ‘Strange things have been done
in the Assurance way before now, by strange sorts of men, and I mean to
take care of myself.’

‘Chuzzlewit!’ replied Montague, leaning forward, with his arms upon his
knees, and looking full into his face. ‘Strange things have been done,
and are done every day; not only in our way, but in a variety of other
ways; and no one suspects them. But ours, as you say, my good friend,
is a strange way; and we strangely happen, sometimes, to come into the
knowledge of very strange events.’

He beckoned to Jonas to bring his chair nearer; and looking slightly
round, as if to remind him of the presence of Nadgett, whispered in his
ear.

From red to white; from white to red again; from red to yellow; then to
a cold, dull, awful, sweat-bedabbled blue. In that short whisper, all
these changes fell upon the face of Jonas Chuzzlewit; and when at last
he laid his hand upon the whisperer’s mouth, appalled, lest any syllable
of what he said should reach the ears of the third person present, it
was as bloodless and as heavy as the hand of Death.

He drew his chair away, and sat a spectacle of terror, misery, and
rage. He was afraid to speak, or look, or move, or sit still. Abject,
crouching, and miserable, he was a greater degradation to the form he
bore, than if he had been a loathsome wound from head to heel.

His companion leisurely resumed his dressing, and completed it, glancing
sometimes with a smile at the transformation he had effected, but never
speaking once.

‘You’ll not object,’ he said, when he was quite equipped, ‘to venture
further with us, Chuzzlewit, my friend?’

His pale lips faintly stammered out a ‘No.’

‘Well said! That’s like yourself. Do you know I was thinking yesterday
that your father-in-law, relying on your advice as a man of great
sagacity in money matters, as no doubt you are, would join us, if the
thing were well presented to him. He has money?’

‘Yes, he has money.’

‘Shall I leave Mr Pecksniff to you? Will you undertake for Mr
Pecksniff.’

‘I’ll try. I’ll do my best.’

‘A thousand thanks,’ replied the other, clapping him upon the shoulder.
‘Shall we walk downstairs? Mr Nadgett! Follow us, if you please.’

They went down in that order. Whatever Jonas felt in reference to
Montague; whatever sense he had of being caged, and barred, and trapped,
and having fallen down into a pit of deepest ruin; whatever thoughts
came crowding on his mind even at that early time, of one terrible
chance of escape, of one red glimmer in a sky of blackness; he no more
thought that the slinking figure half-a-dozen stairs behind him was
his pursuing Fate, than that the other figure at his side was his Good
Angel.



CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CONTAINING SOME FURTHER PARTICULARS OF THE DOMESTIC ECONOMY OF THE
PINCHES; WITH STRANGE NEWS FROM THE CITY, NARROWLY CONCERNING TOM


Pleasant little Ruth! Cheerful, tidy, bustling, quiet little Ruth! No
doll’s house ever yielded greater delight to its young mistress, than
little Ruth derived from her glorious dominion over the triangular
parlour and the two small bedrooms.

To be Tom’s housekeeper. What dignity! Housekeeping, upon the commonest
terms, associated itself with elevated responsibilities of all sorts and
kinds; but housekeeping for Tom implied the utmost complication of
grave trusts and mighty charges. Well might she take the keys out of
the little chiffonier which held the tea and sugar; and out of the
two little damp cupboards down by the fireplace, where the very black
beetles got mouldy, and had the shine taken out of their backs by
envious mildew; and jingle them upon a ring before Tom’s eyes when he
came down to breakfast! Well might she, laughing musically, put them
up in that blessed little pocket of hers with a merry pride! For it was
such a grand novelty to be mistress of anything, that if she had been
the most relentless and despotic of all little housekeepers, she might
have pleaded just that much for her excuse, and have been honourably
acquitted.

So far from being despotic, however, there was a coyness about her very
way of pouring out the tea, which Tom quite revelled in. And when
she asked him what he would like to have for dinner, and faltered
out ‘chops’ as a reasonably good suggestion after their last
night’s successful supper, Tom grew quite facetious, and rallied her
desperately.

‘I don’t know, Tom,’ said his sister, blushing, ‘I am not quite
confident, but I think I could make a beef-steak pudding, if I tried,
Tom.’

‘In the whole catalogue of cookery, there is nothing I should like so
much as a beef-steak pudding!’ cried Tom, slapping his leg to give the
greater force to this reply.

‘Yes, dear, that’s excellent! But if it should happen not to come quite
right the first time,’ his sister faltered; ‘if it should happen not
to be a pudding exactly, but should turn out a stew, or a soup, or
something of that sort, you’ll not be vexed, Tom, will you?’

The serious way in which she looked at Tom; the way in which Tom looked
at her; and the way in which she gradually broke into a merry laugh at
her own expense, would have enchanted you.

‘Why,’ said Tom ‘this is capital. It gives us a new, and quite an
uncommon interest in the dinner. We put into a lottery for a beefsteak
pudding, and it is impossible to say what we may get. We may make some
wonderful discovery, perhaps, and produce such a dish as never was known
before.’

‘I shall not be at all surprised if we do, Tom,’ returned his sister,
still laughing merrily, ‘or if it should prove to be such a dish as we
shall not feel very anxious to produce again; but the meat must come out
of the saucepan at last, somehow or other, you know. We can’t cook it
into nothing at all; that’s a great comfort. So if you like to venture,
I will.’

‘I have not the least doubt,’ rejoined Tom, ‘that it will come out an
excellent pudding, or at all events, I am sure that I shall think it so.
There is naturally something so handy and brisk about you, Ruth, that
if you said you could make a bowl of faultless turtle soup, I should
believe you.’

And Tom was right. She was precisely that sort of person. Nobody ought
to have been able to resist her coaxing manner; and nobody had any
business to try. Yet she never seemed to know it was her manner at all.
That was the best of it.

Well! she washed up the breakfast cups, chatting away the whole time,
and telling Tom all sorts of anecdotes about the brass-and-copper
founder; put everything in its place; made the room as neat as
herself;--you must not suppose its shape was half as neat as hers
though, or anything like it--and brushed Tom’s old hat round and
round and round again, until it was as sleek as Mr Pecksniff. Then she
discovered, all in a moment, that Tom’s shirt-collar was frayed at the
edge; and flying upstairs for a needle and thread, came flying down
again with her thimble on, and set it right with wonderful expertness;
never once sticking the needle into his face, although she was humming
his pet tune from first to last, and beating time with the fingers of
her left hand upon his neckcloth. She had no sooner done this, than off
she was again; and there she stood once more, as brisk and busy as a
bee, tying that compact little chin of hers into an equally compact
little bonnet; intent on bustling out to the butcher’s, without a
minute’s loss of time; and inviting Tom to come and see the steak cut,
with his own eyes. As to Tom, he was ready to go anywhere; so off they
trotted, arm-in-arm, as nimbly as you please; saying to each other what
a quiet street it was to lodge in, and how very cheap, and what an airy
situation.

To see the butcher slap the steak, before he laid it on the block, and
give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was
agreeable, too--it really was--to see him cut it off, so smooth and
juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large
and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch,
clearness of tone, skillful handling of the subject, fine shading. It
was the triumph of mind over matter; quite.

Perhaps the greenest cabbage-leaf ever grown in a garden was wrapped
about this steak, before it was delivered over to Tom. But the butcher
had a sentiment for his business, and knew how to refine upon it. When
he saw Tom putting the cabbage-leaf into his pocket awkwardly, he begged
to be allowed to do it for him; ‘for meat,’ he said with some emotion,
‘must be humoured, not drove.’

Back they went to the lodgings again, after they had bought some eggs,
and flour, and such small matters; and Tom sat gravely down to write at
one end of the parlour table, while Ruth prepared to make the pudding at
the other end; for there was nobody in the house but an old woman (the
landlord being a mysterious sort of man, who went out early in the
morning, and was scarcely ever seen); and saving in mere household
drudgery, they waited on themselves.

‘What are you writing, Tom?’ inquired his sister, laying her hand upon
his shoulder.

‘Why, you see, my dear,’ said Tom, leaning back in his chair, and
looking up in her face, ‘I am very anxious, of course, to obtain some
suitable employment; and before Mr Westlock comes this afternoon,
I think I may as well prepare a little description of myself and my
qualifications; such as he could show to any friend of his.’

‘You had better do the same for me, Tom, also,’ said his sister, casting
down her eyes. ‘I should dearly like to keep house for you and take care
of you always, Tom; but we are not rich enough for that.’

‘We are not rich,’ returned Tom, ‘certainly; and we may be much poorer.
But we will not part if we can help it. No, no; we will make up our
minds Ruth, that unless we are so very unfortunate as to render me quite
sure that you would be better off away from me than with me, we will
battle it out together. I am certain we shall be happier if we can
battle it out together. Don’t you think we shall?’

‘Think, Tom!’

‘Oh, tut, tut!’ interposed Tom, tenderly. ‘You mustn’t cry.’

‘No, no; I won’t, Tom. But you can’t afford it, dear. You can’t,
indeed.’

‘We don’t know that,’ said Tom. ‘How are we to know that, yet awhile,
and without trying? Lord bless my soul!’--Tom’s energy became quite
grand--‘there is no knowing what may happen, if we try hard. And I am
sure we can live contentedly upon a very little--if we can only get it.’

‘Yes; that I am sure we can, Tom.’

‘Why, then,’ said Tom, ‘we must try for it. My friend, John Westlock, is
a capital fellow, and very shrewd and intelligent. I’ll take his advice.
We’ll talk it over with him--both of us together. You’ll like John very
much, when you come to know him, I am certain. Don’t cry, don’t cry. YOU
make a beef-steak pudding, indeed!’ said Tom, giving her a gentle push.
‘Why, you haven’t boldness enough for a dumpling!’

‘You WILL call it a pudding, Tom. Mind! I told you not!’

‘I may as well call it that, till it proves to be something else,’ said
Tom. ‘Oh, you are going to work in earnest, are you?’

Aye, aye! That she was. And in such pleasant earnest, moreover, that
Tom’s attention wandered from his writing every moment. First, she
tripped downstairs into the kitchen for the flour, then for the
pie-board, then for the eggs, then for the butter, then for a jug of
water, then for the rolling-pin, then for a pudding-basin, then for the
pepper, then for the salt; making a separate journey for everything, and
laughing every time she started off afresh. When all the materials were
collected she was horrified to find she had no apron on, and so ran
UPstairs by way of variety, to fetch it. She didn’t put it on upstairs,
but came dancing down with it in her hand; and being one of those little
women to whom an apron is a most becoming little vanity, it took
an immense time to arrange; having to be carefully smoothed down
beneath--Oh, heaven, what a wicked little stomacher!--and to be gathered
up into little plaits by the strings before it could be tied, and to
be tapped, rebuked, and wheedled, at the pockets, before it would set
right, which at last it did, and when it did--but never mind; this is
a sober chronicle. And then, there were her cuffs to be tucked up, for
fear of flour; and she had a little ring to pull off her finger, which
wouldn’t come off (foolish little ring!); and during the whole of these
preparations she looked demurely every now and then at Tom, from under
her dark eyelashes, as if they were all a part of the pudding, and
indispensable to its composition.

For the life and soul of him, Tom could get no further in his
writing than, ‘A respectable young man, aged thirty-five,’ and this,
notwithstanding the show she made of being supernaturally quiet, and
going about on tiptoe, lest she should disturb him; which only served
as an additional means of distracting his attention, and keeping it upon
her.

‘Tom,’ she said at last, in high glee. ‘Tom!’

‘What now?’ said Tom, repeating to himself, ‘aged thirty-five!’

‘Will you look here a moment, please?’

As if he hadn’t been looking all the time!

‘I am going to begin, Tom. Don’t you wonder why I butter the inside of
the basin?’ said his busy little sister.

‘Not more than you do, I dare say,’ replied Tom, laughing. ‘For I
believe you don’t know anything about it.’

‘What an infidel you are, Tom! How else do you think it would turn out
easily when it was done! For a civil-engineer and land-surveyor not to
know that! My goodness, Tom!’

It was wholly out of the question to try to write. Tom lined out
‘respectable young man, aged thirty-five;’ and sat looking on, pen in
hand, with one of the most loving smiles imaginable.

Such a busy little woman as she was! So full of self-importance and
trying so hard not to smile, or seem uncertain about anything! It was a
perfect treat to Tom to see her with her brows knit, and her rosy lips
pursed up, kneading away at the crust, rolling it out, cutting it up
into strips, lining the basin with it, shaving it off fine round the
rim, chopping up the steak into small pieces, raining down pepper and
salt upon them, packing them into the basin, pouring in cold water for
gravy, and never venturing to steal a look in his direction, lest her
gravity should be disturbed; until, at last, the basin being quite full
and only wanting the top crust, she clapped her hands all covered with
paste and flour, at Tom, and burst out heartily into such a charming
little laugh of triumph, that the pudding need have had no other
seasoning to commend it to the taste of any reasonable man on earth.

‘Where’s the pudding?’ said Tom. For he was cutting his jokes, Tom was.

‘Where!’ she answered, holding it up with both hands. ‘Look at it!’

‘THAT a pudding!’ said Tom.

‘It WILL be, you stupid fellow, when it’s covered in,’ returned his
sister. Tom still pretending to look incredulous, she gave him a tap on
the head with the rolling-pin, and still laughing merrily, had returned
to the composition of the top crust, when she started and turned very
red. Tom started, too, for following her eyes, he saw John Westlock in
the room.

‘Why, my goodness, John! How did YOU come in?’

‘I beg pardon,’ said John--’ your sister’s pardon especially--but I met
an old lady at the street door, who requested me to enter here; and as
you didn’t hear me knock, and the door was open, I made bold to do so.
I hardly know,’ said John, with a smile, ‘why any of us should be
disconcerted at my having accidentally intruded upon such an agreeable
domestic occupation, so very agreeably and skillfully pursued; but I
must confess that I am. Tom, will you kindly come to my relief?’

‘Mr John Westlock,’ said Tom. ‘My sister.’

‘I hope that, as the sister of so old a friend,’ said John, laughing
‘you will have the goodness to detach your first impressions of me from
my unfortunate entrance.’

‘My sister is not indisposed perhaps to say the same to you on her own
behalf,’ retorted Tom.

John said, of course, that this was quite unnecessary, for he had been
transfixed in silent admiration; and he held out his hand to Miss Pinch;
who couldn’t take it, however, by reason of the flour and paste upon her
own. This, which might seem calculated to increase the general confusion
and render matters worse, had in reality the best effect in the
world, for neither of them could help laughing; and so they both found
themselves on easy terms immediately.

‘I am delighted to see you,’ said Tom. ‘Sit down.’

‘I can only think of sitting down on one condition,’ returned his
friend; ‘and that is, that your sister goes on with the pudding, as if
you were still alone.’

‘That I am sure she will,’ said Tom. ‘On one other condition, and that
is, that you stay and help us to eat it.’

Poor little Ruth was seized with a palpitation of the heart when Tom
committed this appalling indiscretion, for she felt that if the dish
turned out a failure, she never would be able to hold up her head
before John Westlock again. Quite unconscious of her state of mind,
John accepted the invitation with all imaginable heartiness; and after a
little more pleasantry concerning this same pudding, and the tremendous
expectations he made believe to entertain of it, she blushingly resumed
her occupation, and he took a chair.

‘I am here much earlier than I intended, Tom; but I will tell you, what
brings me, and I think I can answer for your being glad to hear it. Is
that anything you wish to show me?’

‘Oh dear no!’ cried Tom, who had forgotten the blotted scrap of paper
in his hand, until this inquiry brought it to his recollection. ‘“A
respectable young man, aged thirty-five”--The beginning of a description
of myself. That’s all.’

‘I don’t think you will have occasion to finish it, Tom. But how is it
you never told me you had friends in London?’

Tom looked at his sister with all his might; and certainly his sister
looked with all her might at him.

‘Friends in London!’ echoed Tom.

‘Ah!’ said Westlock, ‘to be sure.’

‘Have YOU any friends in London, Ruth, my dear!’ asked Tom.

‘No, Tom.’

‘I am very happy to hear that I have,’ said Tom, ‘but it’s news to me. I
never knew it. They must be capital people to keep a secret, John.’

‘You shall judge for yourself,’ returned the other. ‘Seriously, Tom,
here is the plain state of the case. As I was sitting at breakfast this
morning, there comes a knock at my door.’

‘On which you cried out, very loud, “Come in!”’ suggested Tom.

‘So I did. And the person who knocked, not being a respectable young
man, aged thirty-five, from the country, came in when he was invited,
instead of standing gaping and staring about him on the landing. Well!
When he came in, I found he was a stranger; a grave, business-like,
sedate-looking, stranger. “Mr Westlock?” said he. “That is my name,”
 said I. “The favour of a few words with you?” said he. “Pray be seated,
sir,” said I.’

Here John stopped for an instant, to glance towards the table, where
Tom’s sister, listening attentively, was still busy with the basin,
which by this time made a noble appearance. Then he resumed:

‘The pudding having taken a chair, Tom--’

‘What!’ cried Tom.

‘Having taken a chair.’

‘You said a pudding.’

‘No, no,’ replied John, colouring rather; ‘a chair. The idea of a
stranger coming into my rooms at half-past eight o’clock in the morning,
and taking a pudding! Having taken a chair, Tom, a chair--amazed me by
opening the conversation thus: “I believe you are acquainted, sir, with
Mr Thomas Pinch?”

‘No!’ cried Tom.

‘His very words, I assure you. I told him I was. Did I know where you
were at present residing? Yes. In London? Yes. He had casually heard,
in a roundabout way, that you had left your situation with Mr Pecksniff.
Was that the fact? Yes, it was. Did you want another? Yes, you did.’

‘Certainly,’ said Tom, nodding his head.

‘Just what I impressed upon him. You may rest assured that I set that
point beyond the possibility of any mistake, and gave him distinctly to
understand that he might make up his mind about it. Very well.’

“Then,” said he, “I think I can accommodate him.”’

Tom’s sister stopped short.

‘Lord bless me!’ cried Tom. ‘Ruth, my dear, “think I can accommodate
him.”’

‘Of course I begged him,’ pursued John Westlock, glancing at Tom’s
sister, who was not less eager in her interest than Tom himself, ‘to
proceed, and said that I would undertake to see you immediately. He
replied that he had very little to say, being a man of few words,
but such as it was, it was to the purpose--and so, indeed, it turned
out--for he immediately went on to tell me that a friend of his was in
want of a kind of secretary and librarian; and that although the salary
was small, being only a hundred pounds a year, with neither board
nor lodging, still the duties were not heavy, and there the post was.
Vacant, and ready for your acceptance.’

‘Good gracious me!’ cried Tom; ‘a hundred pounds a year! My dear John!
Ruth, my love! A hundred pounds a year!’

‘But the strangest part of the story,’ resumed John Westlock, laying his
hand on Tom’s wrist, to bespeak his attention, and repress his ecstasies
for the moment; ‘the strangest part of the story, Miss Pinch, is this. I
don’t know this man from Adam; neither does this man know Tom.’

‘He can’t,’ said Tom, in great perplexity, ‘if he’s a Londoner. I don’t
know any one in London.’

‘And on my observing,’ John resumed, still keeping his hand upon Tom’s
wrist, ‘that I had no doubt he would excuse the freedom I took in
inquiring who directed him to me; how he came to know of the change
which had taken place in my friend’s position; and how he came to be
acquainted with my friend’s peculiar fitness for such an office as he
had described; he drily said that he was not at liberty to enter into
any explanations.’

‘Not at liberty to enter into any explanations!’ repeated Tom, drawing a
long breath.

‘“I must be perfectly aware,” he said,’ John added, ‘“that to any person
who had ever been in Mr Pecksniff’s neighbourhood, Mr Thomas Pinch and
his acquirements were as well known as the Church steeple, or the Blue
Dragon.”’

‘The Blue Dragon!’ repeated Tom, staring alternately at his friend and
his sister.

‘Aye, think of that! He spoke as familiarly of the Blue Dragon, I give
you my word, as if he had been Mark Tapley. I opened my eyes, I can
tell you, when he did so; but I could not fancy I had ever seen the man
before, although he said with a smile, “You know the Blue Dragon, Mr
Westlock; you kept it up there, once or twice, yourself.” Kept it up
there! So I did. You remember, Tom?’

Tom nodded with great significance, and, falling into a state of deeper
perplexity than before, observed that this was the most unaccountable
and extraordinary circumstance he had ever heard of in his life.

‘Unaccountable?’ his friend repeated. ‘I became afraid of the man.
Though it was broad day, and bright sunshine, I was positively afraid
of him. I declare I half suspected him to be a supernatural visitor,
and not a mortal, until he took out a common-place description of
pocket-book, and handed me this card.’

‘Mr Fips,’ said Tom, reading it aloud. ‘Austin Friars. Austin Friars
sounds ghostly, John.’

‘Fips don’t, I think,’ was John’s reply. ‘But there he lives, Tom, and
there he expects us to call this morning. And now you know as much of
this strange incident as I do, upon my honour.’

Tom’s face, between his exultation in the hundred pounds a year, and
his wonder at this narration, was only to be equalled by the face of his
sister, on which there sat the very best expression of blooming surprise
that any painter could have wished to see. What the beef-steak pudding
would have come to, if it had not been by this time finished, astrology
itself could hardly determine.

‘Tom,’ said Ruth, after a little hesitation, ‘perhaps Mr Westlock, in
his friendship for you, knows more of this than he chooses to tell.’

‘No, indeed!’ cried John, eagerly. ‘It is not so, I assure you. I wish
it were. I cannot take credit to myself, Miss Pinch, for any such thing.
All that I know, or, so far as I can judge, am likely to know, I have
told you.’

‘Couldn’t you know more, if you thought proper?’ said Ruth, scraping the
pie-board industriously.

‘No,’ retorted John. ‘Indeed, no. It is very ungenerous in you to be so
suspicious of me when I repose implicit faith in you. I have unbounded
confidence in the pudding, Miss Pinch.’

She laughed at this, but they soon got back into a serious vein, and
discussed the subject with profound gravity. Whatever else was obscure
in the business, it appeared to be quite plain that Tom was offered a
salary of one hundred pounds a year; and this being the main point, the
surrounding obscurity rather set it off than otherwise.

Tom, being in a great flutter, wished to start for Austin Friars
instantly, but they waited nearly an hour, by John’s advice, before they
departed. Tom made himself as spruce as he could before leaving home,
and when John Westlock, through the half-opened parlour door, had
glimpses of that brave little sister brushing the collar of his coat in
the passage, taking up loose stitches in his gloves and hovering lightly
about and about him, touching him up here and there in the height of
her quaint, little, old-fashioned tidiness, he called to mind the
fancy-portraits of her on the wall of the Pecksniffian workroom, and
decided with uncommon indignation that they were gross libels, and not
half pretty enough; though, as hath been mentioned in its place, the
artists always made those sketches beautiful, and he had drawn at least
a score of them with his own hands.

‘Tom,’ he said, as they were walking along, ‘I begin to think you must
be somebody’s son.’

‘I suppose I am,’ Tom answered in his quiet way.

‘But I mean somebody’s of consequence.’

‘Bless your heart,’ replied Tom, ‘my poor father was of no consequence,
nor my mother either.’

‘You remember them perfectly, then?’

‘Remember them? oh dear yes. My poor mother was the last. She died when
Ruth was a mere baby, and then we both became a charge upon the savings
of that good old grandmother I used to tell you of. You remember! Oh!
There’s nothing romantic in our history, John.’

‘Very well,’ said John in quiet despair. ‘Then there is no way of
accounting for my visitor of this morning. So we’ll not try, Tom.’

They did try, notwithstanding, and never left off trying until they
got to Austin Friars, where, in a very dark passage on the first floor,
oddly situated at the back of a house, across some leads, they found a
little blear-eyed glass door up in one corner, with Mr FIPS painted on
it in characters which were meant to be transparent. There was also a
wicked old sideboard hiding in the gloom hard by, meditating designs
upon the ribs of visitors; and an old mat, worn into lattice work,
which, being useless as a mat (even if anybody could have seen it, which
was impossible), had for many years directed its industry into another
channel, and regularly tripped up every one of Mr Fips’s clients.

Mr Fips, hearing a violent concussion between a human hat and his office
door, was apprised, by the usual means of communication, that somebody
had come to call upon him, and giving that somebody admission, observed
that it was ‘rather dark.’

‘Dark indeed,’ John whispered in Tom Pinch’s ear. ‘Not a bad place to
dispose of a countryman in, I should think, Tom.’

Tom had been already turning over in his mind the possibility of their
having been tempted into that region to furnish forth a pie; but the
sight of Mr Fips, who was small and spare, and looked peaceable, and
wore black shorts and powder, dispelled his doubts.

‘Walk in,’ said Mr Fips.

They walked in. And a mighty yellow-jaundiced little office Mr Fips
had of it; with a great, black, sprawling splash upon the floor in one
corner, as if some old clerk had cut his throat there, years ago, and
had let out ink instead of blood.

‘I have brought my friend Mr Pinch, sir,’ said John Westlock.

‘Be pleased to sit,’ said Mr Fips.

They occupied the two chairs, and Mr Fips took the office stool from the
stuffing whereof he drew forth a piece of horse-hair of immense length,
which he put into his mouth with a great appearance of appetite.

He looked at Tom Pinch curiously, but with an entire freedom from any
such expression as could be reasonably construed into an unusual
display of interest. After a short silence, during which Mr Fips was
so perfectly unembarrassed as to render it manifest that he could have
broken it sooner without hesitation, if he had felt inclined to do so,
he asked if Mr Westlock had made his offer fully known to Mr Pinch.

John answered in the affirmative.

‘And you think it worth your while, sir, do you?’ Mr Fips inquired of
Tom.

‘I think it a piece of great good fortune, sir,’ said Tom. ‘I am
exceedingly obliged to you for the offer.’

‘Not to me,’ said Mr Fips. ‘I act upon instructions.’

‘To your friend, sir, then,’ said Tom. ‘To the gentleman with whom I am
to engage, and whose confidence I shall endeavour to deserve. When he
knows me better, sir, I hope he will not lose his good opinion of me.
He will find me punctual and vigilant, and anxious to do what is right.
That I think I can answer for, and so,’ looking towards him, ‘can Mr
Westlock.’

‘Most assuredly,’ said John.

Mr Fips appeared to have some little difficulty in resuming the
conversation. To relieve himself, he took up the wafer-stamp, and began
stamping capital F’s all over his legs.

‘The fact is,’ said Mr Fips, ‘that my friend is not, at this present
moment, in town.’

Tom’s countenance fell; for he thought this equivalent to telling him
that his appearance did not answer; and that Fips must look out for
somebody else.

‘When do you think he will be in town, sir?’ he asked.

‘I can’t say; it’s impossible to tell. I really have no idea. But,’ said
Fips, taking off a very deep impression of the wafer-stamp upon the calf
of his left leg, and looking steadily at Tom, ‘I don’t know that it’s a
matter of much consequence.’

Poor Tom inclined his head deferentially, but appeared to doubt that.

‘I say,’ repeated Mr Fips, ‘that I don’t know it’s a matter of much
consequence. The business lies entirely between yourself and me, Mr
Pinch. With reference to your duties, I can set you going; and with
reference to your salary, I can pay it. Weekly,’ said Mr Fips, putting
down the wafer-stamp, and looking at John Westlock and Tom Pinch by
turns, ‘weekly; in this office; at any time between the hours of four
and five o’clock in the afternoon.’ As Mr Fips said this, he made up his
face as if he were going to whistle. But he didn’t.

‘You are very good,’ said Tom, whose countenance was now suffused with
pleasure; ‘and nothing can be more satisfactory or straightforward. My
attendance will be required--’

‘From half-past nine to four o’clock or so, I should say,’ interrupted
Mr Fips. ‘About that.’

‘I did not mean the hours of attendance,’ retorted Tom, ‘which are light
and easy, I am sure; but the place.’

‘Oh, the place! The place is in the Temple.’

Tom was delighted.

‘Perhaps,’ said Mr Fips, ‘you would like to see the place?’

‘Oh, dear!’ cried Tom. ‘I shall only be too glad to consider myself
engaged, if you will allow me; without any further reference to the
place.’

‘You may consider yourself engaged, by all means,’ said Mr Fips; ‘you
couldn’t meet me at the Temple Gate in Fleet Street, in an hour from
this time, I suppose, could you?’

Certainly Tom could.

‘Good,’ said Mr Fips, rising. ‘Then I will show you the place; and you
can begin your attendance to-morrow morning. In an hour, therefore, I
shall see you. You too, Mr Westlock? Very good. Take care how you go.
It’s rather dark.’

With this remark, which seemed superfluous, he shut them out upon
the staircase, and they groped their way into the street again. The
interview had done so little to remove the mystery in which Tom’s
new engagement was involved, and had done so much to thicken it, that
neither could help smiling at the puzzled looks of the other. They
agreed, however, that the introduction of Tom to his new office and
office companions could hardly fail to throw a light upon the subject;
and therefore postponed its further consideration until after the
fulfillment of the appointment they had made with Mr Fips.

After looking at John Westlock’s chambers, and devoting a few spare
minutes to the Boar’s Head, they issued forth again to the place of
meeting. The time agreed upon had not quite come; but Mr Fips was
already at the Temple Gate, and expressed his satisfaction at their
punctuality.

He led the way through sundry lanes and courts, into one more quiet and
more gloomy than the rest, and, singling out a certain house, ascended
a common staircase; taking from his pocket, as he went, a bunch of rusty
keys. Stopping before a door upon an upper story, which had nothing
but a yellow smear of paint where custom would have placed the
tenant’s name, he began to beat the dust out of one of these keys, very
deliberately, upon the great broad handrail of the balustrade.

‘You had better have a little plug made,’ he said, looking round at Tom,
after blowing a shrill whistle into the barrel of the key. ‘It’s the
only way of preventing them from getting stopped up. You’ll find the
lock go the better, too, I dare say, for a little oil.’

Tom thanked him; but was too much occupied with his own speculations,
and John Westlock’s looks, to be very talkative. In the meantime Mr Fips
opened the door, which yielded to his hand very unwillingly, and with a
horribly discordant sound. He took the key out, when he had done so, and
gave it to Tom.

‘Aye, aye!’ said Mr Fips. ‘The dust lies rather thick here.’

Truly, it did. Mr Fips might have gone so far as to say, very thick.
It had accumulated everywhere; lay deep on everything, and in one part,
where a ray of sun shone through a crevice in the shutter and struck
upon the opposite wall, it went twirling round and round, like a
gigantic squirrel-cage.

Dust was the only thing in the place that had any motion about it. When
their conductor admitted the light freely, and lifting up the heavy
window-sash, let in the summer air, he showed the mouldering furniture,
discoloured wainscoting and ceiling, rusty stove, and ashy hearth, in
all their inert neglect. Close to the door there stood a candlestick,
with an extinguisher upon it; as if the last man who had been there
had paused, after securing a retreat, to take a parting look at
the dreariness he left behind, and then had shut out light and life
together, and closed the place up like a tomb.

There were two rooms on that floor; and in the first or outer one a
narrow staircase, leading to two more above. These last were fitted
up as bed-chambers. Neither in them, nor in the rooms below, was any
scarcity of convenient furniture observable, although the fittings
were of a bygone fashion; but solitude and want of use seemed to have
rendered it unfit for any purposes of comfort, and to have given it a
grisly, haunted air.

Movables of every kind lay strewn about, without the least attempt at
order, and were intermixed with boxes, hampers, and all sorts of lumber.
On all the floors were piles of books, to the amount, perhaps, of some
thousands of volumes: these, still in bales; those, wrapped in paper,
as they had been purchased; others scattered singly or in heaps; not one
upon the shelves which lined the walls. To these Mr Fips called Tom’s
attention.

‘Before anything else can be done, we must have them put in order,
catalogued, and ranged upon the book-shelves, Mr Pinch. That will do to
begin with, I think, sir.’

Tom rubbed his hands in the pleasant anticipation of a task so congenial
to his taste, and said:

‘An occupation full of interest for me, I assure you. It will occupy me,
perhaps, until Mr--’

‘Until Mr--’ repeated Fips; as much as to ask Tom what he was stopping
for.

‘I forgot that you had not mentioned the gentleman’s name,’ said Tom.

‘Oh!’ cried Mr Fips, pulling on his glove, ‘didn’t I? No, by-the-bye,
I don’t think I did. Ah! I dare say he’ll be here soon. You will get on
very well together, I have no doubt. I wish you success I am sure. You
won’t forget to shut the door? It’ll lock of itself if you slam it.
Half-past nine, you know. Let us say from half-past nine to four, or
half-past four, or thereabouts; one day, perhaps, a little earlier,
another day, perhaps, a little later, according as you feel disposed,
and as you arrange your work. Mr Fips, Austin Friars of course you’ll
remember? And you won’t forget to slam the door, if you please!’

He said all this in such a comfortable, easy manner, that Tom could only
rub his hands, and nod his head, and smile in acquiescence which he was
still doing, when Mr Fips walked coolly out.

‘Why, he’s gone!’ cried Tom.

‘And what’s more, Tom,’ said John Westlock, seating himself upon a pile
of books, and looking up at his astonished friend, ‘he is evidently not
coming back again; so here you are, installed. Under rather singular
circumstances, Tom!’

It was such an odd affair throughout, and Tom standing there among
the books with his hat in one hand and the key in the other, looked
so prodigiously confounded, that his friend could not help laughing
heartily. Tom himself was tickled; no less by the hilarity of his friend
than by the recollection of the sudden manner in which he had been
brought to a stop, in the very height of his urbane conference with
Mr Fips; so by degrees Tom burst out laughing too; and each making the
other laugh more, they fairly roared.

When they had had their laugh out, which did not happen very soon, for
give John an inch that way and he was sure to take several ells, being
a jovial, good-tempered fellow, they looked about them more closely,
groping among the lumber for any stray means of enlightenment that might
turn up. But no scrap or shred of information could they find. The books
were marked with a variety of owner’s names, having, no doubt, been
bought at sales, and collected here and there at different times; but
whether any one of these names belonged to Tom’s employer, and, if so,
which of them, they had no means whatever of determining. It occurred to
John as a very bright thought to make inquiry at the steward’s office,
to whom the chambers belonged, or by whom they were held; but he came
back no wiser than he went, the answer being, ‘Mr Fips, of Austin
Friars.’

‘After all, Tom, I begin to think it lies no deeper than this. Fips
is an eccentric man; has some knowledge of Pecksniff; despises him, of
course; has heard or seen enough of you to know that you are the man he
wants; and engages you in his own whimsical manner.’

‘But why in his own whimsical manner?’ asked Tom.

‘Oh! why does any man entertain his own whimsical taste? Why does Mr
Fips wear shorts and powder, and Mr Fips’s next-door neighbour boots and
a wig?’

Tom, being in that state of mind in which any explanation is a great
relief, adopted this last one (which indeed was quite as feasible as any
other) readily, and said he had no doubt of it. Nor was his faith at all
shaken by his having said exactly the same thing to each suggestion of
his friend’s in turn, and being perfectly ready to say it again if he
had any new solution to propose.

As he had not, Tom drew down the window-sash, and folded the shutter;
and they left the rooms. He closed the door heavily, as Mr Fips had
desired him; tried it, found it all safe, and put the key in his pocket.

They made a pretty wide circuit in going back to Islington, as they had
time to spare, and Tom was never tired of looking about him. It was well
he had John Westlock for his companion, for most people would have
been weary of his perpetual stoppages at shop-windows, and his frequent
dashes into the crowded carriage-way at the peril of his life, to get
the better view of church steeples, and other public buildings. But John
was charmed to see him so much interested, and every time Tom came back
with a beaming face from among the wheels of carts and hackney-coaches,
wholly unconscious of the personal congratulations addressed to him by
the drivers, John seemed to like him better than before.

There was no flour on Ruth’s hands when she received them in the
triangular parlour, but there were pleasant smiles upon her face, and a
crowd of welcomes shining out of every smile, and gleaming in her bright
eyes. By the bye, how bright they were! Looking into them for but
a moment, when you took her hand, you saw, in each, such a capital
miniature of yourself, representing you as such a restless, flashing,
eager, brilliant little fellow--

Ah! if you could only have kept them for your own miniature! But,
wicked, roving, restless, too impartial eyes, it was enough for any one
to stand before them, and, straightway, there he danced and sparkled
quite as merrily as you!

The table was already spread for dinner; and though it was spread with
nothing very choice in the way of glass or linen, and with green-handled
knives, and very mountebanks of two-pronged forks, which seemed to be
trying how far asunder they could possibly stretch their legs without
converting themselves into double the number of iron toothpicks, it
wanted neither damask, silver, gold, nor china; no, nor any other
garniture at all. There it was; and, being there, nothing else would
have done as well.

The success of that initiative dish; that first experiment of hers in
cookery; was so entire, so unalloyed and perfect, that John Westlock and
Tom agreed she must have been studying the art in secret for a long time
past; and urged her to make a full confession of the fact. They were
exceedingly merry over this jest, and many smart things were said
concerning it; but John was not as fair in his behaviour as might
have been expected, for, after luring Tom Pinch on for a long time,
he suddenly went over to the enemy, and swore to everything his sister
said. However, as Tom observed the same night before going to bed, it
was only in joke, and John had always been famous for being polite
to ladies, even when he was quite a boy. Ruth said, ‘Oh! indeed!’ She
didn’t say anything else.

It is astonishing how much three people may find to talk about. They
scarcely left off talking once. And it was not all lively chat which
occupied them; for when Tom related how he had seen Mr Pecksniff’s
daughters, and what a change had fallen on the younger, they were very
serious.

John Westlock became quite absorbed in her fortunes; asking many
questions of Tom Pinch about her marriage, inquiring whether her husband
was the gentleman whom Tom had brought to dine with him at Salisbury;
in what degree of relationship they stood towards each other, being
different persons; and taking, in short, the greatest interest in the
subject. Tom then went into it, at full length; he told how Martin had
gone abroad, and had not been heard of for a long time; how Dragon Mark
had borne him company; how Mr Pecksniff had got the poor old doting
grandfather into his power; and how he basely sought the hand of Mary
Graham. But not a word said Tom of what lay hidden in his heart; his
heart, so deep, and true, and full of honour, and yet with so much room
for every gentle and unselfish thought; not a word.

Tom, Tom! The man in all this world most confident in his sagacity and
shrewdness; the man in all this world most proud of his distrust of
other men, and having most to show in gold and silver as the gains
belonging to his creed; the meekest favourer of that wise doctrine,
Every man for himself, and God for us all (there being high wisdom in
the thought that the Eternal Majesty of Heaven ever was, or can be, on
the side of selfish lust and love!); shall never find, oh, never find,
be sure of that, the time come home to him, when all his wisdom is an
idiot’s folly, weighed against a simple heart!

Well, well, Tom, it was simple too, though simple in a different way, to
be so eager touching that same theatre, of which John said, when tea was
done, he had the absolute command, so far as taking parties in without
the payment of a sixpence was concerned; and simpler yet, perhaps, never
to suspect that when he went in first, alone, he paid the money! Simple
in thee, dear Tom, to laugh and cry so heartily at such a sorry show,
so poorly shown; simple to be so happy and loquacious trudging home
with Ruth; simple to be so surprised to find that merry present of
a cookery-book awaiting her in the parlour next morning, with the
beef-steak-pudding-leaf turned down and blotted out. There! Let
the record stand! Thy quality of soul was simple, simple, quite
contemptible, Tom Pinch!



CHAPTER FORTY

THE PINCHES MAKE A NEW ACQUAINTANCE, AND HAVE FRESH OCCASION FOR
SURPRISE AND WONDER


There was a ghostly air about these uninhabited chambers in the Temple,
and attending every circumstance of Tom’s employment there, which had a
strange charm in it. Every morning when he shut his door at Islington,
he turned his face towards an atmosphere of unaccountable fascination,
as surely as he turned it to the London smoke; and from that moment it
thickened round and round him all day long, until the time arrived for
going home again, and leaving it, like a motionless cloud, behind.

It seemed to Tom, every morning, that he approached this ghostly
mist, and became enveloped in it, by the easiest succession of degrees
imaginable. Passing from the roar and rattle of the streets into the
quiet court-yards of the Temple, was the first preparation. Every echo
of his footsteps sounded to him like a sound from the old walls and
pavements, wanting language to relate the histories of the dim, dismal
rooms; to tell him what lost documents were decaying in forgotten
corners of the shut-up cellars, from whose lattices such mouldy sighs
came breathing forth as he went past; to whisper of dark bins of rare
old wine, bricked up in vaults among the old foundations of the Halls;
or mutter in a lower tone yet darker legends of the cross-legged
knights, whose marble effigies were in the church. With the first
planting of his foot upon the staircase of his dusty office, all these
mysteries increased; until, ascending step by step, as Tom ascended,
they attained their full growth in the solitary labours of the day.

Every day brought one recurring, never-failing source of speculation.
This employer; would he come to-day, and what would he be like? For
Tom could not stop short at Mr Fips; he quite believed that Mr Fips had
spoken truly, when he said he acted for another; and what manner of man
that other was, became a full-blown flower of wonder in the garden of
Tom’s fancy, which never faded or got trodden down.

At one time, he conceived that Mr Pecksniff, repenting of his falsehood,
might, by exertion of his influence with some third person have
devised these means of giving him employment. He found this idea so
insupportable after what had taken place between that good man and
himself, that he confided it to John Westlock on the very same day;
informing John that he would rather ply for hire as a porter, than fall
so low in his own esteem as to accept the smallest obligation from the
hands of Mr Pecksniff. But John assured him that he (Tom Pinch) was far
from doing justice to the character of Mr Pecksniff yet, if he supposed
that gentleman capable of performing a generous action; and that he
might make his mind quite easy on that head until he saw the sun turn
green and the moon black, and at the same time distinctly perceived with
the naked eye, twelve first-rate comets careering round those planets.
In which unusual state of things, he said (and not before), it might
become not absolutely lunatic to suspect Mr Pecksniff of anything
so monstrous. In short he laughed the idea down completely; and Tom,
abandoning it, was thrown upon his beam-ends again, for some other
solution.

In the meantime Tom attended to his duties daily, and made considerable
progress with the books; which were already reduced to some sort of
order, and made a great appearance in his fairly-written catalogue.
During his business hours, he indulged himself occasionally with
snatches of reading; which were often, indeed, a necessary part of
his pursuit; and as he usually made bold to carry one of these goblin
volumes home at night (always bringing it back again next morning, in
case his strange employer should appear and ask what had become of it),
he led a happy, quiet, studious kind of life, after his own heart.

But though the books were never so interesting, and never so full of
novelty to Tom, they could not so enchain him, in those mysterious
chambers, as to render him unconscious, for a moment, of the lightest
sound. Any footstep on the flags without set him listening attentively
and when it turned into that house, and came up, up, up the stairs, he
always thought with a beating heart, ‘Now I am coming face to face with
him at last!’ But no footstep ever passed the floor immediately below:
except his own.

This mystery and loneliness engendered fancies in Tom’s mind, the folly
of which his common sense could readily discover, but which his common
sense was quite unable to keep away, notwithstanding; that quality being
with most of us, in such a case, like the old French Police--quick at
detection, but very weak as a preventive power. Misgivings, undefined,
absurd, inexplicable, that there was some one hiding in the inner
room--walking softly overhead, peeping in through the door-chink, doing
something stealthy, anywhere where he was not--came over him a
hundred times a day, making it pleasant to throw up the sash, and hold
communication even with the sparrows who had built in the roof and
water-spout, and were twittering about the windows all day long.

He sat with the outer door wide open, at all times, that he might hear
the footsteps as they entered, and turned off into the chambers on the
lower floor. He formed odd prepossessions too, regarding strangers in
the streets; and would say within himself of such or such a man, who
struck him as having anything uncommon in his dress or aspect, ‘I
shouldn’t wonder, now, if that were he!’ But it never was. And though
he actually turned back and followed more than one of these suspected
individuals, in a singular belief that they were going to the place he
was then upon his way from, he never got any other satisfaction by it,
than the satisfaction of knowing it was not the case.

Mr Fips, of Austin Friars, rather deepened than illumined the obscurity
of his position; for on the first occasion of Tom’s waiting on him to
receive his weekly pay, he said:

‘Oh! by the bye, Mr Pinch, you needn’t mention it, if you please!’

Tom thought he was going to tell him a secret; so he said that he
wouldn’t on any account, and that Mr Fips might entirely depend upon
him. But as Mr Fips said ‘Very good,’ in reply, and nothing more, Tom
prompted him:

‘Not on any account,’ repeated Tom.

Mr Fips repeated: ‘Very good.’

‘You were going to say’--Tom hinted.

‘Oh dear no!’ cried Fips. ‘Not at all.’ However, seeing Tom confused, he
added, ‘I mean that you needn’t mention any particulars about your place
of employment, to people generally. You’ll find it better not.’

‘I have not had the pleasure of seeing my employer yet, sir,’ observed
Tom, putting his week’s salary in his pocket.

‘Haven’t you?’ said Fips. ‘No, I don’t suppose you have though.’

‘I should like to thank him, and to know that what I have done so far,
is done to his satisfaction,’ faltered Tom.

‘Quite right,’ said Mr Fips, with a yawn. ‘Highly creditable. Very
proper.’

Tom hastily resolved to try him on another tack.

‘I shall soon have finished with the books,’ he said. ‘I hope that will
not terminate my engagement, sir, or render me useless?’

‘Oh dear no!’ retorted Fips. ‘Plenty to do; plen-ty to do! Be careful
how you go. It’s rather dark.’

This was the very utmost extent of information Tom could ever get out of
HIM. So it was dark enough in all conscience; and if Mr Fips expressed
himself with a double meaning, he had good reason for doing so.

But now a circumstance occurred, which helped to divert Tom’s thoughts
from even this mystery, and to divide them between it and a new channel,
which was a very Nile in itself.

The way it came about was this. Having always been an early riser and
having now no organ to engage him in sweet converse every morning,
it was his habit to take a long walk before going to the Temple; and
naturally inclining, as a stranger, towards those parts of the town
which were conspicuous for the life and animation pervading them, he
became a great frequenter of the market-places, bridges, quays, and
especially the steam-boat wharves; for it was very lively and fresh
to see the people hurrying away upon their many schemes of business or
pleasure, and it made Tom glad to think that there was that much change
and freedom in the monotonous routine of city lives.

In most of these morning excursions Ruth accompanied him. As their
landlord was always up and away at his business (whatever that might be,
no one seemed to know) at a very early hour, the habits of the people
of the house in which they lodged corresponded with their own. Thus they
had often finished their breakfast, and were out in the summer air, by
seven o’clock. After a two hours’ stroll they parted at some convenient
point; Tom going to the Temple, and his sister returning home, as
methodically as you please.

Many and many a pleasant stroll they had in Covent Garden Market;
snuffing up the perfume of the fruits and flowers, wondering at the
magnificence of the pineapples and melons; catching glimpses down side
avenues, of rows and rows of old women, seated on inverted baskets,
shelling peas; looking unutterable things at the fat bundles of
asparagus with which the dainty shops were fortified as with a
breastwork; and, at the herbalist’s doors, gratefully inhaling scents
as of veal-stuffing yet uncooked, dreamily mixed up with capsicums,
brown-paper, seeds, even with hints of lusty snails and fine young curly
leeches. Many and many a pleasant stroll they had among the poultry
markets, where ducks and fowls, with necks unnaturally long, lay
stretched out in pairs, ready for cooking; where there were speckled
eggs in mossy baskets, white country sausages beyond impeachment by
surviving cat or dog, or horse or donkey; new cheeses to any wild
extent, live birds in coops and cages, looking much too big to be
natural, in consequence of those receptacles being much too little;
rabbits, alive and dead, innumerable. Many a pleasant stroll they
had among the cool, refreshing, silvery fish-stalls, with a kind of
moonlight effect about their stock-in-trade, excepting always for
the ruddy lobsters. Many a pleasant stroll among the waggon-loads of
fragrant hay, beneath which dogs and tired waggoners lay fast asleep,
oblivious of the pieman and the public-house. But never half so good a
stroll as down among the steamboats on a bright morning.

There they lay, alongside of each other; hard and fast for ever, to all
appearance, but designing to get out somehow, and quite confident of
doing it; and in that faith shoals of passengers, and heaps of luggage,
were proceeding hurriedly on board. Little steam-boats dashed up and
down the stream incessantly. Tiers upon tiers of vessels, scores
of masts, labyrinths of tackle, idle sails, splashing oars, gliding
row-boats, lumbering barges, sunken piles, with ugly lodgings for
the water-rat within their mud-discoloured nooks; church steeples,
warehouses, house-roofs, arches, bridges, men and women, children,
casks, cranes, boxes, horses, coaches, idlers, and hard-labourers; there
they were, all jumbled up together, any summer morning, far beyond Tom’s
power of separation.

In the midst of all this turmoil there was an incessant roar from every
packet’s funnel, which quite expressed and carried out the uppermost
emotion of the scene. They all appeared to be perspiring and bothering
themselves, exactly as their passengers did; they never left off
fretting and chafing, in their own hoarse manner, once; but were always
panting out, without any stops, ‘Come along do make haste I’m very
nervous come along oh good gracious we shall never get there how late
you are do make haste I’m off directly come along!’

Even when they had left off, and had got safely out into the current,
on the smallest provocation they began again; for the bravest packet
of them all, being stopped by some entanglement in the river, would
immediately begin to fume and pant afresh, ‘oh here’s a stoppage what’s
the matter do go on there I’m in a hurry it’s done on purpose did you
ever oh my goodness DO go on here!’ and so, in a state of mind bordering
on distraction, would be last seen drifting slowly through the mist into
the summer light beyond, that made it red.

Tom’s ship, however; or, at least, the packet-boat in which Tom and his
sister took the greatest interest on one particular occasion; was not
off yet, by any means; but was at the height of its disorder. The press
of passengers was very great; another steam-boat lay on each side of
her; the gangways were choked up; distracted women, obviously bound
for Gravesend, but turning a deaf ear to all representations that this
particular vessel was about to sail for Antwerp, persisted in secreting
baskets of refreshments behind bulk-heads, and water-casks, and under
seats; and very great confusion prevailed.

It was so amusing, that Tom, with Ruth upon his arm, stood looking down
from the wharf, as nearly regardless as it was in the nature of flesh
and blood to be, of an elderly lady behind him, who had brought a large
umbrella with her, and didn’t know what to do with it. This tremendous
instrument had a hooked handle; and its vicinity was first made known
to him by a painful pressure on the windpipe, consequent upon its having
caught him round the throat. Soon after disengaging himself with perfect
good humour, he had a sensation of the ferule in his back; immediately
afterwards, of the hook entangling his ankles; then of the umbrella
generally, wandering about his hat, and flapping at it like a great
bird; and, lastly, of a poke or thrust below the ribs, which give him
such exceeding anguish, that he could not refrain from turning round to
offer a mild remonstrance.

Upon his turning round, he found the owner of the umbrella struggling
on tip-toe, with a countenance expressive of violent animosity, to look
down upon the steam-boats; from which he inferred that she had attacked
him, standing in the front row, by design, and as her natural enemy.

‘What a very ill-natured person you must be!’ said Tom.

The lady cried out fiercely, ‘Where’s the pelisse!’--meaning the
constabulary--and went on to say, shaking the handle of the umbrella
at Tom, that but for them fellers never being in the way when they was
wanted, she’d have given him in charge, she would.

‘If they greased their whiskers less, and minded the duties which
they’re paid so heavy for, a little more,’ she observed, ‘no one needn’t
be drove mad by scrouding so!’

She had been grievously knocked about, no doubt, for her bonnet was bent
into the shape of a cocked hat. Being a fat little woman, too, she was
in a state of great exhaustion and intense heat. Instead of pursuing the
altercation, therefore, Tom civilly inquired what boat she wanted to go
on board of?

‘I suppose,’ returned the lady, ‘as nobody but yourself can want to look
at a steam package, without wanting to go a-boarding of it, can they!
Booby!’

‘Which one do you want to look at then?’ said Tom. ‘We’ll make room for
you if we can. Don’t be so ill-tempered.’

‘No blessed creetur as ever I was with in trying times,’ returned the
lady, somewhat softened, ‘and they’re a many in their numbers, ever
brought it as a charge again myself that I was anythin’ but mild and
equal in my spirits. Never mind a contradicting of me, if you seem
to feel it does you good, ma’am, I often says, for well you know that
Sairey may be trusted not to give it back again. But I will not denige
that I am worrited and wexed this day, and with good reagion, Lord
forbid!’

By this time, Mrs Gamp (for it was no other than that experienced
practitioner) had, with Tom’s assistance, squeezed and worked herself
into a small corner between Ruth and the rail; where, after breathing
very hard for some little time, and performing a short series of
dangerous evolutions with her umbrella, she managed to establish herself
pretty comfortably.

‘And which of all them smoking monsters is the Ankworks boat, I wonder.
Goodness me!’ cried Mrs Gamp.

‘What boat did you want?’ asked Ruth.

‘The Ankworks package,’ Mrs Gamp replied. ‘I will not deceive you, my
sweet. Why should I?’

‘That is the Antwerp packet in the middle,’ said Ruth.

‘And I wish it was in Jonadge’s belly, I do,’ cried Mrs Gamp; appearing
to confound the prophet with the whale in this miraculous aspiration.

Ruth said nothing in reply; but, as Mrs Gamp, laying her chin against
the cool iron of the rail, continued to look intently at the Antwerp
boat, and every now and then to give a little groan, she inquired
whether any child of hers was going aboard that morning? Or perhaps her
husband, she said kindly.

‘Which shows,’ said Mrs Gamp, casting up her eyes, ‘what a little way
you’ve travelled into this wale of life, my dear young creetur! As a
good friend of mine has frequent made remark to me, which her name,
my love, is Harris, Mrs Harris through the square and up the steps
a-turnin’ round by the tobacker shop, “Oh Sairey, Sairey, little do we
know wot lays afore us!” “Mrs Harris, ma’am,” I says, “not much, it’s
true, but more than you suppoge. Our calcilations, ma’am,” I says,
“respectin’ wot the number of a family will be, comes most times within
one, and oftener than you would suppoge, exact.” “Sairey,” says Mrs
Harris, in a awful way, “Tell me wot is my indiwidgle number.” “No, Mrs
Harris,” I says to her, “ex-cuge me, if you please. My own,” I says,
“has fallen out of three-pair backs, and had damp doorsteps settled
on their lungs, and one was turned up smilin’ in a bedstead unbeknown.
Therefore, ma’am,” I says, “seek not to proticipate, but take ‘em as
they come and as they go.” Mine,’ says Mrs Gamp, ‘mine is all gone, my
dear young chick. And as to husbands, there’s a wooden leg gone likeways
home to its account, which in its constancy of walkin’ into wine vaults,
and never comin’ out again ‘till fetched by force, was quite as weak as
flesh, if not weaker.’

When she had delivered this oration, Mrs Gamp leaned her chin upon the
cool iron again; and looking intently at the Antwerp packet, shook her
head and groaned.

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘I wouldn’t be a man and have such a think
upon my mind!--but nobody as owned the name of man, could do it!’

Tom and his sister glanced at each other; and Ruth, after a moment’s
hesitation, asked Mrs Gamp what troubled her so much.

‘My dear,’ returned that lady, dropping her voice, ‘you are single,
ain’t you?’

Ruth laughed blushed, and said ‘Yes.’

‘Worse luck,’ proceeded Mrs Gamp, ‘for all parties! But others is
married, and in the marriage state; and there is a dear young creetur
a-comin’ down this mornin’ to that very package, which is no more fit to
trust herself to sea, than nothin’ is!’

She paused here to look over the deck of the packet in question, and on
the steps leading down to it, and on the gangways. Seeming to have
thus assured herself that the object of her commiseration had not yet
arrived, she raised her eyes gradually up to the top of the escape-pipe,
and indignantly apostrophised the vessel:

‘Oh, drat you!’ said Mrs Gamp, shaking her umbrella at it, ‘you’re a
nice spluttering nisy monster for a delicate young creetur to go and
be a passinger by; ain’t you! YOU never do no harm in that way, do
you? With your hammering, and roaring, and hissing, and lamp-iling, you
brute! Them Confugion steamers,’ said Mrs Gamp, shaking her umbrella
again, ‘has done more to throw us out of our reg’lar work and bring
ewents on at times when nobody counted on ‘em (especially them
screeching railroad ones), than all the other frights that ever was
took. I have heerd of one young man, a guard upon a railway, only three
years opened--well does Mrs Harris know him, which indeed he is her own
relation by her sister’s marriage with a master sawyer--as is godfather
at this present time to six-and-twenty blessed little strangers, equally
unexpected, and all on ‘um named after the Ingeines as was the cause.
Ugh!’ said Mrs Gamp, resuming her apostrophe, ‘one might easy know you
was a man’s inwention, from your disregardlessness of the weakness of
our naturs, so one might, you brute!’

It would not have been unnatural to suppose, from the first part of Mrs
Gamp’s lamentations, that she was connected with the stage-coaching or
post-horsing trade. She had no means of judging of the effect of her
concluding remarks upon her young companion; for she interrupted herself
at this point, and exclaimed:

‘There she identically goes! Poor sweet young creetur, there she goes,
like a lamb to the sacrifige! If there’s any illness when that wessel
gets to sea,’ said Mrs Gamp, prophetically, ‘it’s murder, and I’m the
witness for the persecution.’

She was so very earnest on the subject, that Tom’s sister (being as kind
as Tom himself) could not help saying something to her in reply.

‘Pray, which is the lady,’ she inquired, ‘in whom you are so much
interested?’

‘There!’ groaned Mrs Gamp. ‘There she goes! A-crossin’ the little wooden
bridge at this minute. She’s a-slippin’ on a bit of orangepeel!’ tightly
clutching her umbrella. ‘What a turn it give me.’

‘Do you mean the lady who is with that man wrapped up from head to foot
in a large cloak, so that his face is almost hidden?’

‘Well he may hide it!’ Mrs Gamp replied. ‘He’s good call to be ashamed
of himself. Did you see him a-jerking of her wrist, then?’

‘He seems to be hasty with her, indeed.’

‘Now he’s a-taking of her down into the close cabin!’ said Mrs Gamp,
impatiently. ‘What’s the man about! The deuce is in him, I think. Why
can’t he leave her in the open air?’

He did not, whatever his reason was, but led her quickly down and
disappeared himself, without loosening his cloak, or pausing on the
crowded deck one moment longer than was necessary to clear their way to
that part of the vessel.

Tom had not heard this little dialogue; for his attention had been
engaged in an unexpected manner. A hand upon his sleeve had caused
him to look round, just when Mrs Gamp concluded her apostrophe to the
steam-engine; and on his right arm, Ruth being on his left, he found
their landlord, to his great surprise.

He was not so much surprised at the man’s being there, as at his having
got close to him so quietly and swiftly; for another person had been
at his elbow one instant before; and he had not in the meantime been
conscious of any change or pressure in the knot of people among whom he
stood. He and Ruth had frequently remarked how noiselessly this landlord
of theirs came into and went out of his own house; but Tom was not the
less amazed to see him at his elbow now.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Pinch,’ he said in his ear. ‘I am rather infirm,
and out of breath, and my eyes are not very good. I am not as young as I
was, sir. You don’t see a gentleman in a large cloak down yonder, with a
lady on his arm; a lady in a veil and a black shawl; do you?’

If HE did not, it was curious that in speaking he should have singled
out from all the crowd the very people whom he described; and should
have glanced hastily from them to Tom, as if he were burning to direct
his wandering eyes.

‘A gentleman in a large cloak!’ said Tom, ‘and a lady in a black shawl!
Let me see!’

‘Yes, yes!’ replied the other, with keen impatience. ‘A gentleman
muffled up from head to foot--strangely muffled up for such a morning
as this--like an invalid, with his hand to his face at this minute,
perhaps. No, no, no! not there,’ he added, following Tom’s gaze; ‘the
other way; in that direction; down yonder.’ Again he indicated, but this
time in his hurry, with his outstretched finger, the very spot on which
the progress of these persons was checked at that moment.

‘There are so many people, and so much motion, and so many objects,’
said Tom, ‘that I find it difficult to--no, I really don’t see a
gentleman in a large cloak, and a lady in a black shawl. There’s a lady
in a red shawl over there!’

‘No, no, no!’ cried his landlord, pointing eagerly again, ‘not there.
The other way; the other way. Look at the cabin steps. To the left. They
must be near the cabin steps. Do you see the cabin steps? There’s the
bell ringing already! DO you see the steps?’

‘Stay!’ said Tom, ‘you’re right. Look! there they go now. Is that the
gentleman you mean? Descending at this minute, with the folds of a great
cloak trailing down after him?’

‘The very man!’ returned the other, not looking at what Tom pointed out,
however, but at Tom’s own face. ‘Will you do me a kindness, sir, a great
kindness? Will you put that letter in his hand? Only give him that!
He expects it. I am charged to do it by my employers, but I am late in
finding him, and, not being as young as I have been, should never be
able to make my way on board and off the deck again in time. Will you
pardon my boldness, and do me that great kindness?’

His hands shook, and his face bespoke the utmost interest and agitation,
as he pressed the letter upon Tom, and pointed to its destination, like
the Tempter in some grim old carving.

To hesitate in the performance of a good-natured or compassionate office
was not in Tom’s way. He took the letter; whispered Ruth to wait till
he returned, which would be immediately; and ran down the steps with all
the expedition he could make. There were so many people going down, so
many others coming up, such heavy goods in course of transit to and
fro, such a ringing of bell, blowing-off of steam, and shouting of men’s
voices, that he had much ado to force his way, or keep in mind to which
boat he was going. But he reached the right one with good speed, and
going down the cabin-stairs immediately, described the object of his
search standing at the upper end of the saloon, with his back towards
him, reading some notice which was hung against the wall. As Tom
advanced to give him the letter, he started, hearing footsteps, and
turned round.

What was Tom’s astonishment to find in him the man with whom he had had
the conflict in the field--poor Mercy’s husband. Jonas!

Tom understood him to say, what the devil did he want; but it was not
easy to make out what he said; he spoke so indistinctly.

‘I want nothing with you for myself,’ said Tom; ‘I was asked, a moment
since, to give you this letter. You were pointed out to me, but I didn’t
know you in your strange dress. Take it!’

He did so, opened it, and read the writing on the inside. The contents
were evidently very brief; not more perhaps than one line; but they
struck upon him like a stone from a sling. He reeled back as he read.

His emotion was so different from any Tom had ever seen before that he
stopped involuntarily. Momentary as his state of indecision was, the
bell ceased while he stood there, and a hoarse voice calling down the
steps, inquired if there was any to go ashore?

‘Yes,’ cried Jonas, ‘I--I am coming. Give me time. Where’s that woman!
Come back; come back here.’

He threw open another door as he spoke, and dragged, rather than led,
her forth. She was pale and frightened, and amazed to see her old
acquaintance; but had no time to speak, for they were making a great
stir above; and Jonas drew her rapidly towards the deck.

‘Where are we going? What is the matter?’

‘We are going back,’ said Jonas. ‘I have changed my mind. I can’t go.
Don’t question me, or I shall be the death of you, or some one else.
Stop there! Stop! We’re for the shore. Do you hear? We’re for the
shore!’

He turned, even in the madness of his hurry, and scowling darkly back
at Tom, shook his clenched hand at him. There are not many human faces
capable of the expression with which he accompanied that gesture.

He dragged her up, and Tom followed them. Across the deck, over the
side, along the crazy plank, and up the steps, he dragged her fiercely;
not bestowing any look on her, but gazing upwards all the while among
the faces on the wharf. Suddenly he turned again, and said to Tom with a
tremendous oath:

‘Where is he?’

Before Tom, in his indignation and amazement, could return an answer to
a question he so little understood, a gentleman approached Tom behind,
and saluted Jonas Chuzzlewit by name. He has a gentleman of foreign
appearance, with a black moustache and whiskers; and addressed him with
a polite composure, strangely different from his own distracted and
desperate manner.

‘Chuzzlewit, my good fellow!’ said the gentleman, raising his hat in
compliment to Mrs Chuzzlewit, ‘I ask your pardon twenty thousand times.
I am most unwilling to interfere between you and a domestic trip of this
nature (always so very charming and refreshing, I know, although I
have not the happiness to be a domestic man myself, which is the great
infelicity of my existence); but the beehive, my dear friend, the
beehive--will you introduce me?’

‘This is Mr Montague,’ said Jonas, whom the words appeared to choke.

‘The most unhappy and most penitent of men, Mrs Chuzzlewit,’ pursued
that gentleman, ‘for having been the means of spoiling this excursion;
but as I tell my friend, the beehive, the beehive. You projected a short
little continental trip, my dear friend, of course?’

Jonas maintained a dogged silence.

‘May I die,’ cried Montague, ‘but I am shocked! Upon my soul I am
shocked. But that confounded beehive of ours in the city must be
paramount to every other consideration, when there is honey to be made;
and that is my best excuse. Here is a very singular old female dropping
curtseys on my right,’ said Montague, breaking off in his discourse,
and looking at Mrs Gamp, ‘who is not a friend of mine. Does anybody know
her?’

‘Ah! Well they knows me, bless their precious hearts!’ said Mrs Gamp,
‘not forgettin’ your own merry one, sir, and long may it be so! Wishin’
as every one’ (she delivered this in the form of a toast or sentiment)
‘was as merry, and as handsome-lookin’, as a little bird has whispered
me a certain gent is, which I will not name for fear I give offence
where none is doo! My precious lady,’ here she stopped short in her
merriment, for she had until now affected to be vastly entertained,
‘you’re too pale by half!’

‘YOU are here too, are you?’ muttered Jonas. ‘Ecod, there are enough of
you.’

‘I hope, sir,’ returned Mrs Gamp, dropping an indignant curtsey, ‘as no
bones is broke by me and Mrs Harris a-walkin’ down upon a public wharf.
Which was the very words she says to me (although they was the last
I ever had to speak) was these: “Sairey,” she says, “is it a public
wharf?” “Mrs Harris,” I makes answer, “can you doubt it? You have know’d
me now, ma’am, eight and thirty year; and did you ever know me go, or
wish to go, where I was not made welcome, say the words.” “No, Sairey,”
 Mrs Harris says, “contrairy quite.” And well she knows it too. I am but
a poor woman, but I’ve been sought after, sir, though you may not think
it. I’ve been knocked up at all hours of the night, and warned out by
a many landlords, in consequence of being mistook for Fire. I goes out
workin’ for my bread, ‘tis true, but I maintains my independency, with
your kind leave, and which I will till death. I has my feelins as a
woman, sir, and I have been a mother likeways; but touch a pipkin as
belongs to me, or make the least remarks on what I eats or drinks, and
though you was the favouritest young for’ard hussy of a servant-gal as
ever come into a house, either you leaves the place, or me. My earnins
is not great, sir, but I will not be impoged upon. Bless the babe, and
save the mother, is my mortar, sir; but I makes so free as add to that,
Don’t try no impogician with the Nuss, for she will not abear it!’

Mrs Gamp concluded by drawing her shawl tightly over herself with both
hands, and, as usual, referring to Mrs Harris for full corroboration of
these particulars. She had that peculiar trembling of the head which,
in ladies of her excitable nature, may be taken as a sure indication
of their breaking out again very shortly; when Jonas made a timely
interposition.

‘As you ARE here,’ he said, ‘you had better see to her, and take her
home. I am otherwise engaged.’ He said nothing more; but looked at
Montague as if to give him notice that he was ready to attend him.

‘I am sorry to take you away,’ said Montague.

Jonas gave him a sinister look, which long lived in Tom’s memory, and
which he often recalled afterwards.

‘I am, upon my life,’ said Montague. ‘Why did you make it necessary?’

With the same dark glance as before, Jonas replied, after a moment’s
silence:

‘The necessity is none of my making. You have brought it about
yourself.’

He said nothing more. He said even this as if he were bound, and in the
other’s power, but had a sullen and suppressed devil within him, which
he could not quite resist. His very gait, as they walked away together,
was like that of a fettered man; but, striving to work out at his
clenched hands, knitted brows, and fast-set lips, was the same
imprisoned devil still.

They got into a handsome cabriolet which was waiting for them and drove
away.

The whole of this extraordinary scene had passed so rapidly and the
tumult which prevailed around as so unconscious of any impression from
it, that, although Tom had been one of the chief actors, it was like
a dream. No one had noticed him after they had left the packet. He had
stood behind Jonas, and so near him, that he could not help hearing all
that passed. He had stood there, with his sister on his arm, expecting
and hoping to have an opportunity of explaining his strange share in
this yet stranger business. But Jonas had not raised his eyes from the
ground; no one else had even looked towards him; and before he could
resolve on any course of action, they were all gone.

He gazed round for his landlord. But he had done that more than once
already, and no such man was to be seen. He was still pursuing this
search with his eyes, when he saw a hand beckoning to him from a
hackney-coach; and hurrying towards it, found it was Merry’s. She
addressed him hurriedly, but bent out of the window, that she might not
be overheard by her companion, Mrs Gamp.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Good heaven, what is it? Why did he tell me
last night to prepare for a long journey, and why have you brought us
back like criminals? Dear Mr Pinch!’ she clasped her hands distractedly,
‘be merciful to us. Whatever this dreadful secret is, be merciful, and
God will bless you!’

‘If any power of mercy lay with me,’ cried Tom, ‘trust me, you shouldn’t
ask in vain. But I am far more ignorant and weak than you.’

She withdrew into the coach again, and he saw the hand waving towards
him for a moment; but whether in reproachfulness or incredulity or
misery, or grief, or sad adieu, or what else, he could not, being so
hurried, understand. SHE was gone now; and Ruth and he were left to walk
away, and wonder.

Had Mr Nadgett appointed the man who never came, to meet him upon London
Bridge that morning? He was certainly looking over the parapet, and
down upon the steamboat-wharf at that moment. It could not have been
for pleasure; he never took pleasure. No. He must have had some business
there.



CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

MR JONAS AND HIS FRIEND, ARRIVING AT A PLEASANT UNDERSTANDING, SET FORTH
UPON AN ENTERPRISE


The office of the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance
Company being near at hand, and Mr Montague driving Jonas straight
there, they had very little way to go. But the journey might have been
one of several hours’ duration, without provoking a remark from either;
for it was clear that Jonas did not mean to break the silence which
prevailed between them, and that it was not, as yet, his dear friend’s
cue to tempt them into conversation.

He had thrown aside his cloak, as having now no motive for concealment,
and with that garment huddled on his knees, sat as far removed from his
companion as the limited space in such a carriage would allow. There
was a striking difference in his manner, compared with what it had been,
within a few minutes, when Tom encountered him so unexpectedly on board
the packet, or when the ugly change had fallen on him in Mr Montague’s
dressing-room. He had the aspect of a man found out and held at bay;
of being baffled, hunted, and beset; but there was now a dawning and
increasing purpose in his face, which changed it very much. It was
gloomy, distrustful, lowering; pale with anger and defeat; it still was
humbled, abject, cowardly and mean; but, let the conflict go on as it
would, there was one strong purpose wrestling with every emotion of his
mind, and casting the whole series down as they arose.

Not prepossessing in appearance at the best of times, it may be readily
supposed that he was not so now. He had left deep marks of his front
teeth in his nether lip; and those tokens of the agitation he had lately
undergone improved his looks as little as the heavy corrugations in his
forehead. But he was self-possessed now; unnaturally self-possessed,
indeed, as men quite otherwise than brave are known to be in desperate
extremities; and when the carriage stopped, he waited for no invitation,
but leapt hardily out, and went upstairs.

The chairman followed him; and closing the board-room door as soon as
they had entered, threw himself upon a sofa. Jonas stood before the
window, looking down into the street; and leaned against the sash,
resting his head upon his arms.

‘This is not handsome, Chuzzlewit!’ said Montague at length. ‘Not
handsome upon my soul!’

‘What would you have me do?’ he answered, looking round abruptly; ‘What
do you expect?’

‘Confidence, my good fellow. Some confidence!’ said Montague in an
injured tone.

‘Ecod! You show great confidence in me,’ retorted Jonas. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Do I not?’ said his companion, raising his head, and looking at him,
but he had turned again. ‘Do I not? Have I not confided to you the easy
schemes I have formed for our advantage; OUR advantage, mind; not mine
alone; and what is my return? Attempted flight!’

‘How do you know that? Who said I meant to fly?’

‘Who said? Come, come. A foreign boat, my friend, an early hour, a
figure wrapped up for disguise! Who said? If you didn’t mean to jilt
me, why were you there? If you didn’t mean to jilt me, why did you come
back?’

‘I came back,’ said Jonas, ‘to avoid disturbance.’

‘You were wise,’ rejoined his friend.

Jonas stood quite silent; still looking down into the street, and
resting his head upon his arms.

‘Now, Chuzzlewit,’ said Montague, ‘notwithstanding what has passed I
will be plain with you. Are you attending to me there? I only see your
back.’

‘I hear you. Go on!’

‘I say that notwithstanding what has passed, I will be plain with you.’

‘You said that before. And I have told you once I heard you say it. Go
on.’

‘You are a little chafed, but I can make allowance for that, and am,
fortunately, myself in the very best of tempers. Now, let us see how
circumstances stand. A day or two ago, I mentioned to you, my dear
fellow, that I thought I had discovered--’

‘Will you hold your tongue?’ said Jonas, looking fiercely round, and
glancing at the door.

‘Well, well!’ said Montague. ‘Judicious! Quite correct! My discoveries
being published, would be like many other men’s discoveries in this
honest world; of no further use to me. You see, Chuzzlewit, how
ingenuous and frank I am in showing you the weakness of my own position!
To return. I make, or think I make, a certain discovery which I take
an early opportunity of mentioning in your ear, in that spirit of
confidence which I really hoped did prevail between us, and was
reciprocated by you. Perhaps there is something in it; perhaps there is
nothing. I have my knowledge and opinion on the subject. You have yours.
We will not discuss the question. But, my good fellow, you have been
weak; what I wish to point out to you is, that you have been weak. I may
desire to turn this little incident to my account (indeed, I do--I’ll
not deny it), but my account does not lie in probing it, or using it
against you.’

‘What do you call using it against me?’ asked Jonas, who had not yet
changed his attitude.

‘Oh!’ said Montague, with a laugh. ‘We’ll not enter into that.’

‘Using it to make a beggar of me. Is that the use you mean?’

‘No.’

‘Ecod,’ muttered Jonas, bitterly. ‘That’s the use in which your account
DOES lie. You speak the truth there.’

‘I wish you to venture (it’s a very safe venture) a little more with
us, certainly, and to keep quiet,’ said Montague. ‘You promised me you
would; and you must. I say it plainly, Chuzzlewit, you MUST. Reason the
matter. If you don’t, my secret is worthless to me: and being so, it
may as well become the public property as mine; better, for I shall
gain some credit, bringing it to light. I want you, besides, to act as a
decoy in a case I have already told you of. You don’t mind that, I know.
You care nothing for the man (you care nothing for any man; you are
too sharp; so am I, I hope); and could bear any loss of his with
pious fortitude. Ha, ha, ha! You have tried to escape from the first
consequence. You cannot escape it, I assure you. I have shown you that
to-day. Now, I am not a moral man, you know. I am not the least in the
world affected by anything you may have done; by any little indiscretion
you may have committed; but I wish to profit by it if I can; and to a
man of your intelligence I make that free confession. I am not at all
singular in that infirmity. Everybody profits by the indiscretion of his
neighbour; and the people in the best repute, the most. Why do you give
me this trouble? It must come to a friendly agreement, or an unfriendly
crash. It must. If the former, you are very little hurt. If the
latter--well! you know best what is likely to happen then.’

Jonas left the window, and walked up close to him. He did not look
him in the face; it was not his habit to do that; but he kept his eyes
towards him--on his breast, or thereabouts--and was at great pains
to speak slowly and distinctly in reply. Just as a man in a state of
conscious drunkenness might be.

‘Lying is of no use now,’ he said. ‘I DID think of getting away this
morning, and making better terms with you from a distance.’

‘To be sure! to be sure!’ replied Montague. ‘Nothing more natural. I
foresaw that, and provided against it. But I am afraid I am interrupting
you.’

‘How the devil,’ pursued Jonas, with a still greater effort, ‘you made
choice of your messenger, and where you found him, I’ll not ask you. I
owed him one good turn before to-day. If you are so careless of men in
general, as you said you were just now, you are quite indifferent to
what becomes of such a crop-tailed cur as that, and will leave me to
settle my account with him in my own manner.’

If he had raised his eyes to his companion’s face, he would have seen
that Montague was evidently unable to comprehend his meaning. But
continuing to stand before him, with his furtive gaze directed as
before, and pausing here only to moisten his dry lips with his tongue,
the fact was lost upon him. It might have struck a close observer that
this fixed and steady glance of Jonas’s was a part of the alteration
which had taken place in his demeanour. He kept it riveted on one spot,
with which his thoughts had manifestly nothing to do; like as a juggler
walking on a cord or wire to any dangerous end, holds some object in his
sight to steady him, and never wanders from it, lest he trip.

Montague was quick in his rejoinder, though he made it at a venture.
There was no difference of opinion between him and his friend on THAT
point. Not the least.

‘Your great discovery,’ Jonas proceeded, with a savage sneer that
got the better of him for the moment, ‘may be true, and may be false.
Whichever it is, I dare say I’m no worse than other men.’

‘Not a bit,’ said Tigg. ‘Not a bit. We’re all alike--or nearly so.’

‘I want to know this,’ Jonas went on to say; ‘is it your own? You’ll not
wonder at my asking the question.’

‘My own!’ repeated Montague.

‘Aye!’ returned the other, gruffly. ‘Is it known to anybody else? Come!
Don’t waver about that.’

‘No!’ said Montague, without the smallest hesitation. ‘What would it be
worth, do you think, unless I had the keeping of it?’

Now, for the first time, Jonas looked at him. After a pause, he put out
his hand, and said, with a laugh:

‘Come! make things easy to me, and I’m yours. I don’t know that I may
not be better off here, after all, than if I had gone away this morning.
But here I am, and here I’ll stay now. Take your oath!’

He cleared his throat, for he was speaking hoarsely and said in a
lighter tone:

‘Shall I go to Pecksniff? When? Say when!’

‘Immediately!’ cried Montague. ‘He cannot be enticed too soon.’

‘Ecod!’ cried Jonas, with a wild laugh. ‘There’s some fun in catching
that old hypocrite. I hate him. Shall I go to-night?’

‘Aye! This,’ said Montague, ecstatically, ‘is like business! We
understand each other now! To-night, my good fellow, by all means.’

‘Come with me,’ cried Jonas. ‘We must make a dash; go down in state, and
carry documents, for he’s a deep file to deal with, and must be drawn
on with an artful hand, or he’ll not follow. I know him. As I can’t
take your lodgings or your dinners down, I must take you. Will you come
to-night?’

His friend appeared to hesitate; and neither to have anticipated this
proposal, nor to relish it very much.

‘We can concert our plans upon the road,’ said Jonas. ‘We must not go
direct to him, but cross over from some other place, and turn out of our
way to see him. I may not want to introduce you, but I must have you on
the spot. I know the man, I tell you.’

‘But what if the man knows me?’ said Montague, shrugging his shoulders.

‘He know!’ cried Jonas. ‘Don’t you run that risk with fifty men a day!
Would your father know you? Did I know you? Ecod! You were another
figure when I saw you first. Ha, ha, ha! I see the rents and patches
now! No false hair then, no black dye! You were another sort of joker
in those days, you were! You even spoke different then. You’ve acted
the gentleman so seriously since, that you’ve taken in yourself. If he
should know you, what does it matter? Such a change is a proof of your
success. You know that, or you would not have made yourself known to me.
Will you come?’

‘My good fellow,’ said Montague, still hesitating, ‘I can trust you
alone.’

‘Trust me! Ecod, you may trust me now, far enough. I’ll try to go away
no more--no more!’ He stopped, and added in a more sober tone, ‘I can’t
get on without you. Will you come?’

‘I will,’ said Montague, ‘if that’s your opinion.’ And they shook hands
upon it.

The boisterous manner which Jonas had exhibited during the latter part
of this conversation, and which had gone on rapidly increasing with
almost every word he had spoken, from the time when he looked his
honourable friend in the face until now, did not now subside, but,
remaining at its height, abided by him. Most unusual with him at any
period; most inconsistent with his temper and constitution; especially
unnatural it would appear in one so darkly circumstanced; it abided by
him. It was not like the effect of wine, or any ardent drink, for he was
perfectly coherent. It even made him proof against the usual influence
of such means of excitement; for, although he drank deeply several times
that day, with no reserve or caution, he remained exactly the same man,
and his spirits neither rose nor fell in the least observable degree.

Deciding, after some discussion, to travel at night, in order that the
day’s business might not be broken in upon, they took counsel together
in reference to the means. Mr Montague being of opinion that four horses
were advisable, at all events for the first stage, as throwing a great
deal of dust into people’s eyes, in more senses than one, a travelling
chariot and four lay under orders for nine o’clock. Jonas did not go
home; observing, that his being obliged to leave town on business in
so great a hurry, would be a good excuse for having turned back so
unexpectedly in the morning. So he wrote a note for his portmanteau, and
sent it by a messenger, who duly brought his luggage back, with a short
note from that other piece of luggage, his wife, expressive of her wish
to be allowed to come and see him for a moment. To this request he sent
for answer, ‘she had better;’ and one such threatening affirmative being
sufficient, in defiance of the English grammar, to express a negative,
she kept away.

Mr Montague being much engaged in the course of the day, Jonas bestowed
his spirits chiefly on the doctor, with whom he lunched in the medical
officer’s own room. On his way thither, encountering Mr Nadgett in the
outer room, he bantered that stealthy gentleman on always appearing
anxious to avoid him, and inquired if he were afraid of him. Mr Nadgett
slyly answered, ‘No, but he believed it must be his way as he had been
charged with much the same kind of thing before.’

Mr Montague was listening to, or, to speak with greater elegance, he
overheard, this dialogue. As soon as Jonas was gone he beckoned Nadgett
to him with the feather of his pen, and whispered in his ear.

‘Who gave him my letter this morning?’

‘My lodger, sir,’ said Nadgett, behind the palm of his hand.

‘How came that about?’

‘I found him on the wharf, sir. Being so much hurried, and you not
arrived, it was necessary to do something. It fortunately occurred to
me, that if I gave it him myself I could be of no further use. I should
have been blown upon immediately.’

‘Mr Nadgett, you are a jewel,’ said Montague, patting him on the back.
‘What’s your lodger’s name?’

‘Pinch, sir. Thomas Pinch.’

Montague reflected for a little while, and then asked:

‘From the country, do you know?’

‘From Wiltshire, sir, he told me.’

They parted without another word. To see Mr Nadgett’s bow when Montague
and he next met, and to see Mr Montague acknowledge it, anybody might
have undertaken to swear that they had never spoken to each other
confidentially in all their lives.

In the meanwhile, Mr Jonas and the doctor made themselves very
comfortable upstairs, over a bottle of the old Madeira and some
sandwiches; for the doctor having been already invited to dine below at
six o’clock, preferred a light repast for lunch. It was advisable, he
said, in two points of view: First, as being healthy in itself. Secondly
as being the better preparation for dinner.

‘And you are bound for all our sakes to take particular care of your
digestion, Mr Chuzzlewit, my dear sir,’ said the doctor smacking his
lips after a glass of wine; ‘for depend upon it, it is worth preserving.
It must be in admirable condition, sir; perfect chronometer-work.
Otherwise your spirits could not be so remarkable. Your bosom’s lord
sits lightly on its throne, Mr Chuzzlewit, as what’s-his-name says in
the play. I wish he said it in a play which did anything like common
justice to our profession, by the bye. There is an apothecary in
that drama, sir, which is a low thing; vulgar, sir; out of nature
altogether.’

Mr Jobling pulled out his shirt-frill of fine linen, as though he would
have said, ‘This is what I call nature in a medical man, sir;’ and
looked at Jonas for an observation.

Jonas not being in a condition to pursue the subject, took up a case of
lancets that was lying on the table, and opened it.

‘Ah!’ said the doctor, leaning back in his chair, ‘I always take ‘em out
of my pocket before I eat. My pockets are rather tight. Ha, ha, ha!’

Jonas had opened one of the shining little instruments; and was
scrutinizing it with a look as sharp and eager as its own bright edge.

‘Good steel, doctor. Good steel! Eh!’

‘Ye-es,’ replied the doctor, with the faltering modesty of ownership.
‘One might open a vein pretty dexterously with that, Mr Chuzzlewit.’

‘It has opened a good many in its time, I suppose?’ said Jonas looking
at it with a growing interest.

‘Not a few, my dear sir, not a few. It has been engaged in a--in a
pretty good practice, I believe I may say,’ replied the doctor, coughing
as if the matter-of-fact were so very dry and literal that he couldn’t
help it. ‘In a pretty good practice,’ repeated the doctor, putting
another glass of wine to his lips.

‘Now, could you cut a man’s throat with such a thing as this?’ demanded
Jonas.

‘Oh certainly, certainly, if you took him in the right place,’ returned
the doctor. ‘It all depends upon that.’

‘Where you have your hand now, hey?’ cried Jonas, bending forward to
look at it.

‘Yes,’ said the doctor; ‘that’s the jugular.’

Jonas, in his vivacity, made a sudden sawing in the air, so close behind
the doctor’s jugular that he turned quite red. Then Jonas (in the same
strange spirit of vivacity) burst into a loud discordant laugh.

‘No, no,’ said the doctor, shaking his head; ‘edge tools, edge tools;
never play with ‘em. A very remarkable instance of the skillful use of
edge-tools, by the way, occurs to me at this moment. It was a case of
murder. I am afraid it was a case of murder, committed by a member of
our profession; it was so artistically done.’

‘Aye!’ said Jonas. ‘How was that?’

‘Why, sir,’ returned Jobling, ‘the thing lies in a nutshell. A certain
gentleman was found, one morning, in an obscure street, lying in
an angle of a doorway--I should rather say, leaning, in an upright
position, in the angle of a doorway, and supported consequently by the
doorway. Upon his waistcoat there was one solitary drop of blood. He was
dead and cold; and had been murdered, sir.’

‘Only one drop of blood!’ said Jonas.

‘Sir, that man,’ replied the doctor, ‘had been stabbed to the heart.
Had been stabbed to the heart with such dexterity, sir, that he had
died instantly, and had bled internally. It was supposed that a
medical friend of his (to whom suspicion attached) had engaged him in
conversation on some pretence; had taken him, very likely, by the button
in a conversational manner; had examined his ground at leisure with
his other hand; had marked the exact spot; drawn out the instrument,
whatever it was, when he was quite prepared; and--’

‘And done the trick,’ suggested Jonas.

‘Exactly so,’ replied the doctor. ‘It was quite an operation in its way,
and very neat. The medical friend never turned up; and, as I tell you,
he had the credit of it. Whether he did it or not I can’t say.
But, having had the honour to be called in with two or three of my
professional brethren on the occasion, and having assisted to make a
careful examination of the wound, I have no hesitation in saying that
it would have reflected credit on any medical man; and that in an
unprofessional person it could not but be considered, either as an
extraordinary work of art, or the result of a still more extraordinary,
happy, and favourable conjunction of circumstances.’

His hearer was so much interested in this case, that the doctor went
on to elucidate it with the assistance of his own finger and thumb and
waistcoat; and at Jonas’s request, he took the further trouble of going
into a corner of the room, and alternately representing the murdered
man and the murderer; which he did with great effect. The bottle being
emptied and the story done, Jonas was in precisely the same boisterous
and unusual state as when they had sat down. If, as Jobling theorized,
his good digestion were the cause, he must have been a very ostrich.

At dinner it was just the same; and after dinner too; though wine was
drunk in abundance, and various rich meats eaten. At nine o’clock it was
still the same. There being a lamp in the carriage, he swore they would
take a pack of cards, and a bottle of wine; and with these things under
his cloak, went down to the door.

‘Out of the way, Tom Thumb, and get to bed!’

This was the salutation he bestowed on Mr Bailey, who, booted and
wrapped up, stood at the carriage door to help him in.

‘To bed, sir! I’m a-going, too,’ said Bailey.

He alighted quickly, and walked back into the hall, where Montague was
lighting a cigar; conducting Mr Bailey with him, by the collar.

‘You are not a-going to take this monkey of a boy, are you?’

‘Yes,’ said Montague.

He gave the boy a shake, and threw him roughly aside. There was more of
his familiar self in the action, than in anything he had done that day;
but he broke out laughing immediately afterwards, and making a thrust
at the doctor with his hand, in imitation of his representation of the
medical friend, went out to the carriage again, and took his seat. His
companion followed immediately. Mr Bailey climbed into the rumble. ‘It
will be a stormy night!’ exclaimed the doctor, as they started.



CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CONTINUATION OF THE ENTERPRISE OF MR JONAS AND HIS FRIEND


The doctor’s prognostication in reference to the weather was speedily
verified. Although the weather was not a patient of his, and no third
party had required him to give an opinion on the case, the quick
fulfilment of his prophecy may be taken as an instance of his
professional tact; for, unless the threatening aspect of the night
had been perfectly plain and unmistakable, Mr Jobling would never have
compromised his reputation by delivering any sentiments on the subject.
He used this principle in Medicine with too much success to be unmindful
of it in his commonest transactions.

It was one of those hot, silent nights, when people sit at windows
listening for the thunder which they know will shortly break; when
they recall dismal tales of hurricanes and earthquakes; and of lonely
travellers on open plains, and lonely ships at sea, struck by lightning.
Lightning flashed and quivered on the black horizon even now; and hollow
murmurings were in the wind, as though it had been blowing where the
thunder rolled, and still was charged with its exhausted echoes. But the
storm, though gathering swiftly, had not yet come up; and the prevailing
stillness was the more solemn, from the dull intelligence that seemed to
hover in the air, of noise and conflict afar off.

It was very dark; but in the murky sky there were masses of cloud which
shone with a lurid light, like monstrous heaps of copper that had been
heated in a furnace, and were growing cold. These had been advancing
steadily and slowly, but they were now motionless, or nearly so. As the
carriage clattered round the corners of the streets, it passed at every
one a knot of persons who had come there--many from their houses close
at hand, without hats--to look up at that quarter of the sky. And now a
very few large drops of rain began to fall, and thunder rumbled in the
distance.

Jonas sat in a corner of the carriage with his bottle resting on his
knee, and gripped as tightly in his hand as if he would have ground its
neck to powder if he could. Instinctively attracted by the night, he
had laid aside the pack of cards upon the cushion; and with the same
involuntary impulse, so intelligible to both of them as not to occasion
a remark on either side, his companion had extinguished the lamp. The
front glasses were down; and they sat looking silently out upon the
gloomy scene before them.

They were clear of London, or as clear of it as travellers can be whose
way lies on the Western Road, within a stage of that enormous city.
Occasionally they encountered a foot-passenger, hurrying to the nearest
place of shelter; or some unwieldy cart proceeding onward at a heavy
trot, with the same end in view. Little clusters of such vehicles were
gathered round the stable-yard or baiting-place of every wayside tavern;
while their drivers watched the weather from the doors and open windows,
or made merry within. Everywhere the people were disposed to bear each
other company rather than sit alone; so that groups of watchful faces
seemed to be looking out upon the night AND THEM, from almost every
house they passed.

It may appear strange that this should have disturbed Jonas, or rendered
him uneasy; but it did. After muttering to himself, and often changing
his position, he drew up the blind on his side of the carriage, and
turned his shoulder sulkily towards it. But he neither looked at his
companion, nor broke the silence which prevailed between them, and which
had fallen so suddenly upon himself, by addressing a word to him.

The thunder rolled, the lightning flashed; the rain poured down like
Heaven’s wrath. Surrounded at one moment by intolerable light, and
at the next by pitchy darkness, they still pressed forward on their
journey. Even when they arrived at the end of the stage, and might have
tarried, they did not; but ordered horses out immediately. Nor had this
any reference to some five minutes’ lull, which at that time seemed to
promise a cessation of the storm. They held their course as if they were
impelled and driven by its fury. Although they had not exchanged a dozen
words, and might have tarried very well, they seemed to feel, by joint
consent, that onward they must go.

Louder and louder the deep thunder rolled, as through the myriad
halls of some vast temple in the sky; fiercer and brighter became the
lightning, more and more heavily the rain poured down. The horses (they
were travelling now with a single pair) plunged and started from the
rills of quivering fire that seemed to wind along the ground before
them; but there these two men sat, and forward they went as if they were
led on by an invisible attraction.

The eye, partaking of the quickness of the flashing light, saw in its
every gleam a multitude of objects which it could not see at steady noon
in fifty times that period. Bells in steeples, with the rope and wheel
that moved them; ragged nests of birds in cornices and nooks; faces full
of consternation in the tilted waggons that came tearing past; their
frightened teams ringing out a warning which the thunder drowned;
harrows and ploughs left out in fields; miles upon miles of
hedge-divided country, with the distant fringe of trees as obvious as
the scarecrow in the bean-field close at hand; in a trembling, vivid,
flickering instant, everything was clear and plain; then came a flush
of red into the yellow light; a change to blue; a brightness so
intense that there was nothing else but light; and then the deepest and
profoundest darkness.

The lightning being very crooked and very dazzling may have presented
or assisted a curious optical illusion, which suddenly rose before the
startled eyes of Montague in the carriage, and as rapidly disappeared.
He thought he saw Jonas with his hand lifted, and the bottle clenched in
it like a hammer, making as if he would aim a blow at his head. At the
same time he observed (or so believed) an expression in his face--a
combination of the unnatural excitement he had shown all day, with a
wild hatred and fear--which might have rendered a wolf a less terrible
companion.

He uttered an involuntary exclamation, and called to the driver, who
brought his horses to a stop with all speed.

It could hardly have been as he supposed, for although he had not taken
his eyes off his companion, and had not seen him move, he sat reclining
in his corner as before.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Jonas. ‘Is that your general way of waking out
of your sleep?’

‘I could swear,’ returned the other, ‘that I have not closed my eyes!’

‘When you have sworn it,’ said Jonas, composedly, ‘we had better go on
again, if you have only stopped for that.’

He uncorked the bottle with the help of his teeth; and putting it to his
lips, took a long draught.

‘I wish we had never started on this journey. This is not,’ said
Montague, recoiling instinctively, and speaking in a voice that betrayed
his agitation; ‘this is not a night to travel in.’

‘Ecod! you’re right there,’ returned Jonas, ‘and we shouldn’t be out
in it but for you. If you hadn’t kept me waiting all day, we might have
been at Salisbury by this time; snug abed and fast asleep. What are we
stopping for?’

His companion put his head out of window for a moment, and drawing it in
again, observed (as if that were his cause of anxiety), that the boy was
drenched to the skin.

‘Serve him right,’ said Jonas. ‘I’m glad of it. What the devil are we
stopping for? Are you going to spread him out to dry?’

‘I have half a mind to take him inside,’ observed the other with some
hesitation.

‘Oh! thankee!’ said Jonas. ‘We don’t want any damp boys here; especially
a young imp like him. Let him be where he is. He ain’t afraid of a
little thunder and lightning, I dare say; whoever else is. Go on,
driver. We had better have HIM inside perhaps,’ he muttered with a
laugh; ‘and the horses!’

‘Don’t go too fast,’ cried Montague to the postillion; ‘and take care
how you go. You were nearly in the ditch when I called to you.’

This was not true; and Jonas bluntly said so, as they moved forward
again. Montague took little or no heed of what he said, but repeated
that it was not a night for travelling, and showed himself, both then
and afterwards, unusually anxious.

From this time Jonas recovered his former spirits, if such a term may be
employed to express the state in which he had left the city. He had his
bottle often at his mouth; roared out snatches of songs, without the
least regard to time or tune or voice, or anything but loud discordance;
and urged his silent friend to be merry with him.

‘You’re the best company in the world, my good fellow,’ said Montague
with an effort, ‘and in general irresistible; but to-night--do you hear
it?’

‘Ecod! I hear and see it too,’ cried Jonas, shading his eyes, for the
moment, from the lightning which was flashing, not in any one direction,
but all around them. ‘What of that? It don’t change you, nor me, nor our
affairs. Chorus, chorus,

              It may lighten and storm,
              Till it hunt the red worm
     From the grass where the gibbet is driven;
              But it can’t hurt the dead,
              And it won’t save the head
     That is doom’d to be rifled and riven.

That must be a precious old song,’ he added with an oath, as he stopped
short in a kind of wonder at himself. ‘I haven’t heard it since I was
a boy, and how it comes into my head now, unless the lightning put it
there, I don’t know. “Can’t hurt the dead”! No, no. “And won’t save the
head”! No, no. No! Ha, ha, ha!’

His mirth was of such a savage and extraordinary character, and was,
in an inexplicable way, at once so suited to the night, and yet such
a coarse intrusion on its terrors, that his fellow-traveller, always
a coward, shrunk from him in positive fear. Instead of Jonas being his
tool and instrument, their places seemed to be reversed. But there was
reason for this too, Montague thought; since the sense of his debasement
might naturally inspire such a man with the wish to assert a noisy
independence, and in that licence to forget his real condition. Being
quick enough, in reference to such subjects of contemplation, he was not
long in taking this argument into account and giving it its full weight.
But still, he felt a vague sense of alarm, and was depressed and uneasy.

He was certain he had not been asleep; but his eyes might have deceived
him; for, looking at Jonas now in any interval of darkness, he could
represent his figure to himself in any attitude his state of mind
suggested. On the other hand, he knew full well that Jonas had no
reason to love him; and even taking the piece of pantomime which had
so impressed his mind to be a real gesture, and not the working of
his fancy, the most that could be said of it was, that it was quite in
keeping with the rest of his diabolical fun, and had the same impotent
expression of truth in it. ‘If he could kill me with a wish,’ thought
the swindler, ‘I should not live long.’

He resolved that when he should have had his use of Jonas, he would
restrain him with an iron curb; in the meantime, that he could not do
better than leave him to take his own way, and preserve his own peculiar
description of good-humour, after his own uncommon manner. It was no
great sacrifice to bear with him; ‘for when all is got that can be got,’
thought Montague, ‘I shall decamp across the water, and have the laugh
on my side--and the gains.’

Such were his reflections from hour to hour; his state of mind being one
in which the same thoughts constantly present themselves over and
over again in wearisome repetition; while Jonas, who appeared to have
dismissed reflection altogether, entertained himself as before.
They agreed that they would go to Salisbury, and would cross to Mr
Pecksniff’s in the morning; and at the prospect of deluding that worthy
gentleman, the spirits of his amiable son-in-law became more boisterous
than ever.

As the night wore on, the thunder died away, but still rolled
gloomily and mournfully in the distance. The lightning too, though now
comparatively harmless, was yet bright and frequent. The rain was quite
as violent as it had ever been.

It was their ill-fortune, at about the time of dawn and in the last
stage of their journey, to have a restive pair of horses. These animals
had been greatly terrified in their stable by the tempest; and coming
out into the dreary interval between night and morning, when the glare
of the lightning was yet unsubdued by day, and the various objects in
their view were presented in indistinct and exaggerated shapes which
they would not have worn by night, they gradually became less and less
capable of control; until, taking a sudden fright at something by the
roadside, they dashed off wildly down a steep hill, flung the driver
from his saddle, drew the carriage to the brink of a ditch, stumbled
headlong down, and threw it crashing over.

The travellers had opened the carriage door, and had either jumped or
fallen out. Jonas was the first to stagger to his feet. He felt sick and
weak, and very giddy, and reeling to a five-barred gate, stood holding
by it; looking drowsily about as the whole landscape swam before his
eyes. But, by degrees, he grew more conscious, and presently observed
that Montague was lying senseless in the road, within a few feet of the
horses.

In an instant, as if his own faint body were suddenly animated by a
demon, he ran to the horses’ heads; and pulling at their bridles with
all his force, set them struggling and plunging with such mad violence
as brought their hoofs at every effort nearer to the skull of the
prostrate man; and must have led in half a minute to his brains being
dashed out on the highway.

As he did this, he fought and contended with them like a man possessed,
making them wilder by his cries.

‘Whoop!’ cried Jonas. ‘Whoop! again! another! A little more, a little
more! Up, ye devils! Hillo!’

As he heard the driver, who had risen and was hurrying up, crying to him
to desist, his violence increased.

‘Hiilo! Hillo!’ cried Jonas.

‘For God’s sake!’ cried the driver. ‘The gentleman--in the road--he’ll
be killed!’

The same shouts and the same struggles were his only answer. But the man
darting in at the peril of his own life, saved Montague’s, by dragging
him through the mire and water out of the reach of present harm. That
done, he ran to Jonas; and with the aid of his knife they very shortly
disengaged the horses from the broken chariot, and got them, cut and
bleeding, on their legs again. The postillion and Jonas had now leisure
to look at each other, which they had not had yet.

‘Presence of mind, presence of mind!’ cried Jonas, throwing up his hands
wildly. ‘What would you have done without me?’

‘The other gentleman would have done badly without ME,’ returned the
man, shaking his head. ‘You should have moved him first. I gave him up
for dead.’

‘Presence of mind, you croaker, presence of mind’ cried Jonas with a
harsh loud laugh. ‘Was he struck, do you think?’

They both turned to look at him. Jonas muttered something to himself,
when he saw him sitting up beneath the hedge, looking vacantly around.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Montague. ‘Is anybody hurt?’

‘Ecod!’ said Jonas, ‘it don’t seem so. There are no bones broken, after
all.’

They raised him, and he tried to walk. He was a good deal shaken, and
trembled very much. But with the exception of a few cuts and bruises
this was all the damage he had sustained.

‘Cuts and bruises, eh?’ said Jonas. ‘We’ve all got them. Only cuts and
bruises, eh?’

‘I wouldn’t have given sixpence for the gentleman’s head in half-a-dozen
seconds more, for all he’s only cut and bruised,’ observed the post-boy.
‘If ever you’re in an accident of this sort again, sir; which I hope
you won’t be; never you pull at the bridle of a horse that’s down, when
there’s a man’s head in the way. That can’t be done twice without there
being a dead man in the case; it would have ended in that, this time, as
sure as ever you were born, if I hadn’t come up just when I did.’

Jonas replied by advising him with a curse to hold his tongue, and to go
somewhere, whither he was not very likely to go of his own accord. But
Montague, who had listened eagerly to every word, himself diverted the
subject, by exclaiming: ‘Where’s the boy?’

‘Ecod! I forgot that monkey,’ said Jonas. ‘What’s become of him?’ A very
brief search settled that question. The unfortunate Mr Bailey had been
thrown sheer over the hedge or the five-barred gate; and was lying in
the neighbouring field, to all appearance dead.

‘When I said to-night, that I wished I had never started on this
journey,’ cried his master, ‘I knew it was an ill-fated one. Look at
this boy!’

‘Is that all?’ growled Jonas. ‘If you call THAT a sign of it--’

‘Why, what should I call a sign of it?’ asked Montague, hurriedly. ‘What
do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ said Jonas, stooping down over the body, ‘that I never heard
you were his father, or had any particular reason to care much about
him. Halloa. Hold up there!’

But the boy was past holding up, or being held up, or giving any other
sign of life than a faint and fitful beating of the heart. After some
discussion the driver mounted the horse which had been least injured,
and took the lad in his arms as well as he could; while Montague and
Jonas, leading the other horse, and carrying a trunk between them,
walked by his side towards Salisbury.

‘You’d get there in a few minutes, and be able to send assistance to
meet us, if you went forward, post-boy,’ said Jonas. ‘Trot on!’

‘No, no,’ cried Montague; ‘we’ll keep together.’

‘Why, what a chicken you are! You are not afraid of being robbed; are
you?’ said Jonas.

‘I am not afraid of anything,’ replied the other, whose looks and manner
were in flat contradiction to his words. ‘But we’ll keep together.’

‘You were mighty anxious about the boy, a minute ago,’ said Jonas. ‘I
suppose you know that he may die in the meantime?’

‘Aye, aye. I know. But we’ll keep together.’

As it was clear that he was not to be moved from this determination,
Jonas made no other rejoinder than such as his face expressed; and they
proceeded in company. They had three or four good miles to travel; and
the way was not made easier by the state of the road, the burden by
which they were embarrassed, or their own stiff and sore condition.
After a sufficiently long and painful walk, they arrived at the Inn; and
having knocked the people up (it being yet very early in the morning),
sent out messengers to see to the carriage and its contents, and roused
a surgeon from his bed to tend the chief sufferer. All the service he
could render, he rendered promptly and skillfully. But he gave it as
his opinion that the boy was labouring under a severe concussion of the
brain, and that Mr Bailey’s mortal course was run.

If Montague’s strong interest in the announcement could have been
considered as unselfish in any degree, it might have been a redeeming
trait in a character that had no such lineaments to spare. But it was
not difficult to see that, for some unexpressed reason best appreciated
by himself, he attached a strange value to the company and presence of
this mere child. When, after receiving some assistance from the surgeon
himself, he retired to the bedroom prepared for him, and it was broad
day, his mind was still dwelling on this theme.

‘I would rather have lost,’ he said, ‘a thousand pounds than lost the
boy just now. But I’ll return home alone. I am resolved upon that.
Chuzzlewit shall go forward first, and I will follow in my own time.
I’ll have no more of this,’ he added, wiping his damp forehead.
‘Twenty-four hours of this would turn my hair grey!’

After examining his chamber, and looking under the bed, and in the
cupboards, and even behind the curtains, with unusual caution (although
it was, as has been said, broad day), he double-locked the door by which
he had entered, and retired to rest. There was another door in the
room, but it was locked on the outer side; and with what place it
communicated, he knew not.

His fears or evil conscience reproduced this door in all his dreams. He
dreamed that a dreadful secret was connected with it; a secret which he
knew, and yet did not know, for although he was heavily responsible
for it, and a party to it, he was harassed even in his vision by
a distracting uncertainty in reference to its import. Incoherently
entwined with this dream was another, which represented it as the
hiding-place of an enemy, a shadow, a phantom; and made it the business
of his life to keep the terrible creature closed up, and prevent it
from forcing its way in upon him. With this view Nadgett, and he, and a
strange man with a bloody smear upon his head (who told him that he
had been his playfellow, and told him, too, the real name of an old
schoolmate, forgotten until then), worked with iron plates and nails to
make the door secure; but though they worked never so hard, it was all
in vain, for the nails broke, or changed to soft twigs, or what was
worse, to worms, between their fingers; the wood of the door splintered
and crumbled, so that even nails would not remain in it; and the iron
plates curled up like hot paper. All this time the creature on the other
side--whether it was in the shape of man, or beast, he neither knew nor
sought to know--was gaining on them. But his greatest terror was when
the man with the bloody smear upon his head demanded of him if he knew
this creatures name, and said that he would whisper it. At this the
dreamer fell upon his knees, his whole blood thrilling with inexplicable
fear, and held his ears. But looking at the speaker’s lips, he saw that
they formed the utterance of the letter ‘J’; and crying out aloud that
the secret was discovered, and they were all lost, he awoke.

Awoke to find Jonas standing at his bedside watching him. And that very
door wide open.

As their eyes met, Jonas retreated a few paces, and Montague sprang out
of bed.

‘Heyday!’ said Jonas. ‘You’re all alive this morning.’

‘Alive!’ the other stammered, as he pulled the bell-rope violently.
‘What are you doing here?’

‘It’s your room to be sure,’ said Jonas; ‘but I’m almost inclined to ask
you what YOU are doing here? My room is on the other side of that
door. No one told me last night not to open it. I thought it led into a
passage, and was coming out to order breakfast. There’s--there’s no bell
in my room.’

Montague had in the meantime admitted the man with his hot water and
boots, who hearing this, said, yes, there was; and passed into the
adjoining room to point it out, at the head of the bed.

‘I couldn’t find it, then,’ said Jonas; ‘it’s all the same. Shall I
order breakfast?’

Montague answered in the affirmative. When Jonas had retired, whistling,
through his own room, he opened the door of communication, to take out
the key and fasten it on the inner side. But it was taken out already.

He dragged a table against the door, and sat down to collect himself, as
if his dreams still had some influence upon his mind.

‘An evil journey,’ he repeated several times. ‘An evil journey. But I’ll
travel home alone. I’ll have no more of this.’

His presentiment, or superstition, that it was an evil journey, did
not at all deter him from doing the evil for which the journey was
undertaken. With this in view, he dressed himself more carefully than
usual to make a favourable impression on Mr Pecksniff; and, reassured by
his own appearance, the beauty of the morning, and the flashing of
the wet boughs outside his window in the merry sunshine, was soon
sufficiently inspirited to swear a few round oaths, and hum the fag-end
of a song.

But he still muttered to himself at intervals, for all that: ‘I’ll
travel home alone!’



CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

HAS AN INFLUENCE ON THE FORTUNES OF SEVERAL PEOPLE. MR PECKSNIFF IS
EXHIBITED IN THE PLENITUDE OF POWER; AND WIELDS THE SAME WITH FORTITUDE
AND MAGNANIMITY


On the night of the storm, Mrs Lupin, hostess of the Blue Dragon, sat by
herself in her little bar. Her solitary condition, or the bad weather,
or both united, made Mrs Lupin thoughtful, not to say sorrowful. As she
sat with her chin upon her hand, looking out through a low back lattice,
rendered dim in the brightest day-time by clustering vine-leaves, she
shook her head very often, and said, ‘Dear me! Oh, dear, dear me!’

It was a melancholy time, even in the snugness of the Dragon bar.
The rich expanse of corn-field, pasture-land, green slope, and gentle
undulation, with its sparkling brooks, its many hedgerows, and its
clumps of beautiful trees, was black and dreary, from the diamond panes
of the lattice away to the far horizon, where the thunder seemed to roll
along the hills. The heavy rain beat down the tender branches of vine
and jessamine, and trampled on them in its fury; and when the lightning
gleamed it showed the tearful leaves shivering and cowering together at
the window, and tapping at it urgently, as if beseeching to be sheltered
from the dismal night.

As a mark of her respect for the lightning, Mrs Lupin had removed her
candle to the chimney-piece. Her basket of needle-work stood unheeded
at her elbow; her supper, spread on a round table not far off, was
untasted; and the knives had been removed for fear of attraction. She
had sat for a long time with her chin upon her hand, saying to herself
at intervals, ‘Dear me! Ah, dear, dear me!’

She was on the eve of saying so, once more, when the latch of the
house-door (closed to keep the rain out), rattled on its well-worn
catch, and a traveller came in, who, shutting it after him, and walking
straight up to the half-door of the bar, said, rather gruffly:

‘A pint of the best old beer here.’

He had some reason to be gruff, for if he had passed the day in a
waterfall, he could scarcely have been wetter than he was. He was
wrapped up to the eyes in a rough blue sailor’s coat, and had an
oil-skin hat on, from the capacious brim of which the rain fell
trickling down upon his breast, and back, and shoulders. Judging from a
certain liveliness of chin--he had so pulled down his hat, and pulled up
his collar, to defend himself from the weather, that she could only
see his chin, and even across that he drew the wet sleeve of his shaggy
coat, as she looked at him--Mrs Lupin set him down for a good-natured
fellow, too.

‘A bad night!’ observed the hostess cheerfully.

The traveller shook himself like a Newfoundland dog, and said it was,
rather.

‘There’s a fire in the kitchen,’ said Mrs Lupin, ‘and very good company
there. Hadn’t you better go and dry yourself?’

‘No, thankee,’ said the man, glancing towards the kitchen as he spoke;
he seemed to know the way.

‘It’s enough to give you your death of cold,’ observed the hostess.

‘I don’t take my death easy,’ returned the traveller; ‘or I should most
likely have took it afore to-night. Your health, ma’am!’

Mrs Lupin thanked him; but in the act of lifting the tankard to his
mouth, he changed his mind, and put it down again. Throwing his body
back, and looking about him stiffly, as a man does who is wrapped up,
and has his hat low down over his eyes, he said:

‘What do you call this house? Not the Dragon, do you?’

Mrs Lupin complacently made answer, ‘Yes, the Dragon.’

‘Why, then, you’ve got a sort of a relation of mine here, ma’am,’ said
the traveller; ‘a young man of the name of Tapley. What! Mark, my boy!’
apostrophizing the premises, ‘have I come upon you at last, old buck!’

This was touching Mrs Lupin on a tender point. She turned to trim
the candle on the chimney-piece, and said, with her back towards the
traveller:

‘Nobody should be made more welcome at the Dragon, master, than any one
who brought me news of Mark. But it’s many and many a long day and month
since he left here and England. And whether he’s alive or dead, poor
fellow, Heaven above us only knows!’

She shook her head, and her voice trembled; her hand must have done so
too, for the light required a deal of trimming.

‘Where did he go, ma’am?’ asked the traveller, in a gentler voice.

‘He went,’ said Mrs Lupin, with increased distress, ‘to America. He was
always tender-hearted and kind, and perhaps at this moment may be lying
in prison under sentence of death, for taking pity on some miserable
black, and helping the poor runaway creetur to escape. How could he ever
go to America! Why didn’t he go to some of those countries where the
savages eat each other fairly, and give an equal chance to every one!’

Quite subdued by this time, Mrs Lupin sobbed, and was retiring to a
chair to give her grief free vent, when the traveller caught her in his
arms, and she uttered a glad cry of recognition.

‘Yes, I will!’ cried Mark, ‘another--one more--twenty more! You
didn’t know me in that hat and coat? I thought you would have known me
anywheres! Ten more!’

‘So I should have known you, if I could have seen you; but I couldn’t,
and you spoke so gruff. I didn’t think you could speak gruff to me,
Mark, at first coming back.’

‘Fifteen more!’ said Mr Tapley. ‘How handsome and how young you look!
Six more! The last half-dozen warn’t a fair one, and must be done over
again. Lord bless you, what a treat it is to see you! One more! Well, I
never was so jolly. Just a few more, on account of there not being any
credit in it!’

When Mr Tapley stopped in these calculations in simple addition, he did
it, not because he was at all tired of the exercise, but because he was
out of breath. The pause reminded him of other duties.

‘Mr Martin Chuzzlewit’s outside,’ he said. ‘I left him under the
cartshed, while I came on to see if there was anybody here. We want to
keep quiet to-night, till we know the news from you, and what it’s best
for us to do.’

‘There’s not a soul in the house, except the kitchen company,’ returned
the hostess. ‘If they were to know you had come back, Mark, they’d have
a bonfire in the street, late as it is.’

‘But they mustn’t know it to-night, my precious soul,’ said Mark; ‘so
have the house shut, and the kitchen fire made up; and when it’s all
ready, put a light in the winder, and we’ll come in. One more! I long
to hear about old friends. You’ll tell me all about ‘em, won’t you; Mr
Pinch, and the butcher’s dog down the street, and the terrier over the
way, and the wheelwright’s, and every one of ‘em. When I first caught
sight of the church to-night, I thought the steeple would have choked
me, I did. One more! Won’t you? Not a very little one to finish off
with?’

‘You have had plenty, I am sure,’ said the hostess. ‘Go along with your
foreign manners!’

‘That ain’t foreign, bless you!’ cried Mark. ‘Native as oysters, that
is! One more, because it’s native! As a mark of respect for the land we
live in! This don’t count as between you and me, you understand,’ said
Mr Tapley. ‘I ain’t a-kissing you now, you’ll observe. I have been among
the patriots; I’m a-kissin’ my country.’

It would have been very unreasonable to complain of the exhibition of
his patriotism with which he followed up this explanation, that it was
at all lukewarm or indifferent. When he had given full expression to his
nationality, he hurried off to Martin; while Mrs Lupin, in a state of
great agitation and excitement, prepared for their reception.

The company soon came tumbling out; insisting to each other that the
Dragon clock was half an hour too fast, and that the thunder must have
affected it. Impatient, wet, and weary though they were, Martin and Mark
were overjoyed to see these old faces, and watched them with delighted
interest as they departed from the house, and passed close by them.

‘There’s the old tailor, Mark!’ whispered Martin.

‘There he goes, sir! A little bandier than he was, I think, sir, ain’t
he? His figure’s so far altered, as it seems to me, that you might wheel
a rather larger barrow between his legs as he walks, than you could have
done conveniently when we know’d him. There’s Sam a-coming out, sir.’

‘Ah, to be sure!’ cried Martin; ‘Sam, the hostler. I wonder whether that
horse of Pecksniff’s is alive still?’

‘Not a doubt on it, sir,’ returned Mark. ‘That’s a description of
animal, sir, as will go on in a bony way peculiar to himself for a long
time, and get into the newspapers at last under the title of “Sing’lar
Tenacity of Life in a Quadruped.” As if he had ever been alive in all
his life, worth mentioning! There’s the clerk, sir--wery drunk, as
usual.’

‘I see him!’ said Martin, laughing. ‘But, my life, how wet you are,
Mark!’

‘I am! What do you consider yourself, sir?’

‘Oh, not half as bad,’ said his fellow-traveller, with an air of great
vexation. ‘I told you not to keep on the windy side, Mark, but to let us
change and change about. The rain has been beating on you ever since it
began.’

‘You don’t know how it pleases me, sir,’ said Mark, after a short
silence, ‘if I may make so bold as say so, to hear you a-going on in
that there uncommon considerate way of yours; which I don’t mean to
attend to, never, but which, ever since that time when I was floored in
Eden, you have showed.’

‘Ah, Mark!’ sighed Martin, ‘the less we say of that the better. Do I see
the light yonder?’

‘That’s the light!’ cried Mark. ‘Lord bless her, what briskness she
possesses! Now for it, sir. Neat wines, good beds, and first-rate
entertainment for man or beast.’

The kitchen fire burnt clear and red, the table was spread out, the
kettle boiled; the slippers were there, the boot-jack too, sheets of
ham were there, cooking on the gridiron; half-a-dozen eggs were there,
poaching in the frying-pan; a plethoric cherry-brandy bottle was there,
winking at a foaming jug of beer upon the table; rare provisions were
there, dangling from the rafters as if you had only to open your mouth,
and something exquisitely ripe and good would be glad of the excuse for
tumbling into it. Mrs Lupin, who for their sakes had dislodged the
very cook, high priestess of the temple, with her own genial hands was
dressing their repast.

It was impossible to help it--a ghost must have hugged her. The Atlantic
Ocean and the Red Sea being, in that respect, all one, Martin hugged
her instantly. Mr Tapley (as if the idea were quite novel, and had never
occurred to him before), followed, with much gravity, on the same side.

‘Little did I ever think,’ said Mrs Lupin, adjusting her cap and
laughing heartily; yes, and blushing too; ‘often as I have said that Mr
Pecksniff’s young gentlemen were the life and soul of the Dragon, and
that without them it would be too dull to live in--little did I ever
think I am sure, that any one of them would ever make so free as you, Mr
Martin! And still less that I shouldn’t be angry with him, but should be
glad with all my heart to be the first to welcome him home from America,
with Mark Tapley for his--’

‘For his friend, Mrs Lupin,’ interposed Martin.

‘For his friend,’ said the hostess, evidently gratified by this
distinction, but at the same time admonishing Mr Tapley with a fork
to remain at a respectful distance. ‘Little did I ever think that! But
still less, that I should ever have the changes to relate that I shall
have to tell you of, when you have done your supper!’

‘Good Heaven!’ cried Martin, changing colour, ‘what changes?’

‘SHE,’ said the hostess, ‘is quite well, and now at Mr Pecksniff’s.
Don’t be at all alarmed about her. She is everything you could wish.
It’s of no use mincing matters, or making secrets, is it?’ added Mrs
Lupin. ‘I know all about it, you see!’

‘My good creature,’ returned Martin, ‘you are exactly the person who
ought to know all about it. I am delighted to think you DO know about
that! But what changes do you hint at? Has any death occurred?’

‘No, no!’ said the hostess. ‘Not as bad as that. But I declare now that
I will not be drawn into saying another word till you have had your
supper. If you ask me fifty questions in the meantime, I won’t answer
one.’

She was so positive, that there was nothing for it but to get the supper
over as quickly as possible; and as they had been walking a great many
miles, and had fasted since the middle of the day, they did no great
violence to their own inclinations in falling on it tooth and nail. It
took rather longer to get through than might have been expected; for,
half-a-dozen times, when they thought they had finished, Mrs Lupin
exposed the fallacy of that impression triumphantly. But at last, in
the course of time and nature, they gave in. Then, sitting with
their slippered feet stretched out upon the kitchen hearth (which was
wonderfully comforting, for the night had grown by this time raw and
chilly), and looking with involuntary admiration at their dimpled,
buxom, blooming hostess, as the firelight sparkled in her eyes and
glimmered in her raven hair, they composed themselves to listen to her
news.

Many were the exclamations of surprise which interrupted her, when she
told them of the separation between Mr Pecksniff and his daughters, and
between the same good gentleman and Mr Pinch. But these were nothing to
the indignant demonstrations of Martin, when she related, as the common
talk of the neighbourhood, what entire possession he had obtained
over the mind and person of old Mr Chuzzlewit, and what high honour he
designed for Mary. On receipt of this intelligence, Martin’s slippers
flew off in a twinkling, and he began pulling on his wet boots with that
indefinite intention of going somewhere instantly, and doing something
to somebody, which is the first safety-valve of a hot temper.

‘He!’ said Martin, ‘smooth-tongued villain that he is! He! Give me that
other boot, Mark?’

‘Where was you a-thinking of going to, sir?’ inquired Mr Tapley drying
the sole at the fire, and looking coolly at it as he spoke, as if it
were a slice of toast.

‘Where!’ repeated Martin. ‘You don’t suppose I am going to remain here,
do you?’

The imperturbable Mark confessed that he did.

You do!’ retorted Martin angrily. ‘I am much obliged to you. What do you
take me for?’

‘I take you for what you are, sir,’ said Mark; ‘and, consequently, am
quite sure that whatever you do will be right and sensible. The boot,
sir.’

Martin darted an impatient look at him, without taking it, and walked
rapidly up and down the kitchen several times, with one boot and a
stocking on. But, mindful of his Eden resolution, he had already gained
many victories over himself when Mark was in the case, and he resolved
to conquer now. So he came back to the book-jack, laid his hand on
Mark’s shoulder to steady himself, pulled the boot off, picked up his
slippers, put them on, and sat down again. He could not help thrusting
his hands to the very bottom of his pockets, and muttering at intervals,
‘Pecksniff too! That fellow! Upon my soul! In-deed! What next?’ and so
forth; nor could he help occasionally shaking his fist at the chimney,
with a very threatening countenance; but this did not last long; and he
heard Mrs Lupin out, if not with composure, at all events in silence.

‘As to Mr Pecksniff himself,’ observed the hostess in conclusion,
spreading out the skirts of her gown with both hands, and nodding
her head a great many times as she did so, ‘I don’t know what to
say. Somebody must have poisoned his mind, or influenced him in some
extraordinary way. I cannot believe that such a noble-spoken gentleman
would go and do wrong of his own accord!’

A noble-spoken gentleman! How many people are there in the world, who,
for no better reason, uphold their Pecksniffs to the last and abandon
virtuous men, when Pecksniffs breathe upon them!

‘As to Mr Pinch,’ pursued the landlady, ‘if ever there was a dear, good,
pleasant, worthy soul alive, Pinch, and no other, is his name. But
how do we know that old Mr Chuzzlewit himself was not the cause of
difference arising between him and Mr Pecksniff? No one but themselves
can tell; for Mr Pinch has a proud spirit, though he has such a quiet
way; and when he left us, and was so sorry to go, he scorned to make his
story good, even to me.’

‘Poor old Tom!’ said Martin, in a tone that sounded like remorse.

‘It’s a comfort to know,’ resumed the landlady, ‘that he has his sister
living with him, and is doing well. Only yesterday he sent me back, by
post, a little’--here the colour came into her cheeks--‘a little trifle
I was bold enough to lend him when he went away; saying, with many
thanks, that he had good employment, and didn’t want it. It was the same
note; he hadn’t broken it. I never thought I could have been so little
pleased to see a bank-note come back to me as I was to see that.’

‘Kindly said, and heartily!’ said Martin. ‘Is it not, Mark?’

‘She can’t say anything as does not possess them qualities,’ returned
Mr Tapley; ‘which as much belongs to the Dragon as its licence. And now
that we have got quite cool and fresh, to the subject again, sir;
what will you do? If you’re not proud, and can make up your mind to go
through with what you spoke of, coming along, that’s the course for
you to take. If you started wrong with your grandfather (which, you’ll
excuse my taking the liberty of saying, appears to have been the case),
up with you, sir, and tell him so, and make an appeal to his affections.
Don’t stand out. He’s a great deal older than you, and if he was hasty,
you was hasty too. Give way, sir, give way.’

The eloquence of Mr Tapley was not without its effect on Martin but he
still hesitated, and expressed his reason thus:

‘That’s all very true, and perfectly correct, Mark; and if it were a
mere question of humbling myself before HIM, I would not consider it
twice. But don’t you see, that being wholly under this hypocrite’s
government, and having (if what we hear be true) no mind or will of his
own, I throw myself, in fact, not at his feet, but at the feet of
Mr Pecksniff? And when I am rejected and spurned away,’ said Martin,
turning crimson at the thought, ‘it is not by him; my own blood stirred
against me; but by Pecksniff--Pecksniff, Mark!’

‘Well, but we know beforehand,’ returned the politic Mr Tapley, ‘that
Pecksniff is a wagabond, a scoundrel, and a willain.’

‘A most pernicious villain!’ said Martin.

‘A most pernicious willain. We know that beforehand, sir; and,
consequently, it’s no shame to be defeated by Pecksniff. Blow
Pecksniff!’ cried Mr Tapley, in the fervour of his eloquence. ‘Who’s he!
It’s not in the natur of Pecksniff to shame US, unless he agreed with
us, or done us a service; and, in case he offered any audacity of that
description, we could express our sentiments in the English language,
I hope. Pecksniff!’ repeated Mr Tapley, with ineffable disdain. ‘What’s
Pecksniff, who’s Pecksniff, where’s Pecksniff, that he’s to be so much
considered? We’re not a-calculating for ourselves;’ he laid uncommon
emphasis on the last syllable of that word, and looked full in Martin’s
face; ‘we’re making a effort for a young lady likewise as has undergone
her share; and whatever little hope we have, this here Pecksniff is not
to stand in its way, I expect. I never heard of any act of Parliament,
as was made by Pecksniff. Pecksniff! Why, I wouldn’t see the man myself;
I wouldn’t hear him; I wouldn’t choose to know he was in company. I’d
scrape my shoes on the scraper of the door, and call that Pecksniff, if
you liked; but I wouldn’t condescend no further.’

The amazement of Mrs Lupin, and indeed of Mr Tapley himself for that
matter, at this impassioned flow of language, was immense. But Martin,
after looking thoughtfully at the fire for a short time, said:

‘You are right, Mark. Right or wrong, it shall be done. I’ll do it.’

‘One word more, sir,’ returned Mark. ‘Only think of him so far as not to
give him a handle against you. Don’t you do anything secret that he
can report before you get there. Don’t you even see Miss Mary in the
morning, but let this here dear friend of ours’--Mr Tapley bestowed a
smile upon the hostess--‘prepare her for what’s a-going to happen, and
carry any little message as may be agreeable. She knows how. Don’t you?’
Mrs Lupin laughed and tossed her head. ‘Then you go in, bold and free as
a gentleman should. “I haven’t done nothing under-handed,” says you. “I
haven’t been skulking about the premises, here I am, for-give me, I ask
your pardon, God Bless You!”’

Martin smiled, but felt that it was good advice notwithstanding, and
resolved to act upon it. When they had ascertained from Mrs Lupin that
Pecksniff had already returned from the great ceremonial at which they
had beheld him in his glory; and when they had fully arranged the order
of their proceedings; they went to bed, intent upon the morrow.

In pursuance of their project as agreed upon at this discussion, Mr
Tapley issued forth next morning, after breakfast, charged with a letter
from Martin to his grandfather, requesting leave to wait upon him for a
few minutes. And postponing as he went along the congratulations of his
numerous friends until a more convenient season, he soon arrived at Mr
Pecksniff’s house. At that gentleman’s door; with a face so immovable
that it would have been next to an impossibility for the most acute
physiognomist to determine what he was thinking about, or whether he was
thinking at all; he straightway knocked.

A person of Mr Tapley’s observation could not long remain insensible
to the fact that Mr Pecksniff was making the end of his nose very
blunt against the glass of the parlour window, in an angular attempt to
discover who had knocked at the door. Nor was Mr Tapley slow to baffle
this movement on the part of the enemy, by perching himself on the
top step, and presenting the crown of his hat in that direction. But
possibly Mr Pecksniff had already seen him, for Mark soon heard his
shoes creaking, as he advanced to open the door with his own hands.

Mr Pecksniff was as cheerful as ever, and sang a little song in the
passage.

‘How d’ye do, sir?’ said Mark.

‘Oh!’ cried Mr Pecksniff. ‘Tapley, I believe? The Prodigal returned! We
don’t want any beer, my friend.’

‘Thankee, sir,’ said Mark. ‘I couldn’t accommodate you if you did. A
letter, sir. Wait for an answer.’

‘For me?’ cried Mr Pecksniff. ‘And an answer, eh?’

‘Not for you, I think, sir,’ said Mark, pointing out the direction.
‘Chuzzlewit, I believe the name is, sir.’

‘Oh!’ returned Mr Pecksniff. ‘Thank you. Yes. Who’s it from, my good
young man?’

‘The gentleman it comes from wrote his name inside, sir,’ returned Mr
Tapley with extreme politeness. ‘I see him a-signing of it at the end,
while I was a-waitin’.’

‘And he said he wanted an answer, did he?’ asked Mr Pecksniff in his
most persuasive manner.

Mark replied in the affirmative.

‘He shall have an answer. Certainly,’ said Mr Pecksniff, tearing the
letter into small pieces, as mildly as if that were the most flattering
attention a correspondent could receive. ‘Have the goodness to give him
that, with my compliments, if you please. Good morning!’ Whereupon he
handed Mark the scraps; retired, and shut the door.

Mark thought it prudent to subdue his personal emotions, and return to
Martin at the Dragon. They were not unprepared for such a reception,
and suffered an hour or so to elapse before making another attempt.
When this interval had gone by, they returned to Mr Pecksniff’s house in
company. Martin knocked this time, while Mr Tapley prepared himself to
keep the door open with his foot and shoulder, when anybody came, and by
that means secure an enforced parley. But this precaution was needless,
for the servant-girl appeared almost immediately. Brushing quickly past
her as he had resolved in such a case to do, Martin (closely followed
by his faithful ally) opened the door of that parlour in which he knew
a visitor was most likely to be found; passed at once into the room; and
stood, without a word of notice or announcement, in the presence of his
grandfather.

Mr Pecksniff also was in the room; and Mary. In the swift instant of
their mutual recognition, Martin saw the old man droop his grey head,
and hide his face in his hands.

It smote him to the heart. In his most selfish and most careless day,
this lingering remnant of the old man’s ancient love, this buttress of a
ruined tower he had built up in the time gone by, with so much pride and
hope, would have caused a pang in Martin’s heart. But now, changed for
the better in his worst respect; looking through an altered medium on
his former friend, the guardian of his childhood, so broken and bowed
down; resentment, sullenness, self-confidence, and pride, were all swept
away, before the starting tears upon the withered cheeks. He could not
bear to see them. He could not bear to think they fell at sight of
him. He could not bear to view reflected in them, the reproachful and
irrevocable Past.

He hurriedly advanced to seize the old man’s hand in his, when Mr
Pecksniff interposed himself between them.

‘No, young man!’ said Mr Pecksniff, striking himself upon the breast,
and stretching out his other arm towards his guest as if it were a wing
to shelter him. ‘No, sir. None of that. Strike here, sir, here! Launch
your arrows at me, sir, if you’ll have the goodness; not at Him!’

‘Grandfather!’ cried Martin. ‘Hear me! I implore you, let me speak!’

‘Would you, sir? Would you?’ said Mr Pecksniff, dodging about, so as to
keep himself always between them. ‘Is it not enough, sir, that you come
into my house like a thief in the night, or I should rather say, for we
can never be too particular on the subject of Truth, like a thief in
the day-time; bringing your dissolute companions with you, to plant
themselves with their backs against the insides of parlour doors, and
prevent the entrance or issuing forth of any of my household’--Mark had
taken up this position, and held it quite unmoved--‘but would you also
strike at venerable Virtue? Would you? Know that it is not defenceless.
I will be its shield, young man. Assail me. Come on, sir. Fire away!’

‘Pecksniff,’ said the old man, in a feeble voice. ‘Calm yourself. Be
quiet.’

‘I can’t be calm,’ cried Mr Pecksniff, ‘and I won’t be quiet. My
benefactor and my friend! Shall even my house be no refuge for your
hoary pillow!’

‘Stand aside!’ said the old man, stretching out his hand; ‘and let me
see what it is I used to love so dearly.’

‘It is right that you should see it, my friend,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘It
is well that you should see it, my noble sir. It is desirable that you
should contemplate it in its true proportions. Behold it! There it is,
sir. There it is!’

Martin could hardly be a mortal man, and not express in his face
something of the anger and disdain with which Mr Pecksniff inspired him.
But beyond this he evinced no knowledge whatever of that gentleman’s
presence or existence. True, he had once, and that at first, glanced at
him involuntarily, and with supreme contempt; but for any other heed he
took of him, there might have been nothing in his place save empty air.

As Mr Pecksniff withdrew from between them, agreeably to the wish just
now expressed (which he did during the delivery of the observations
last recorded), old Martin, who had taken Mary Graham’s hand in his, and
whispered kindly to her, as telling her she had no cause to be alarmed,
gently pushed her from him, behind his chair; and looked steadily at his
grandson.

‘And that,’ he said, ‘is he. Ah! that is he! Say what you wish to say.
But come no nearer,’

‘His sense of justice is so fine,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘that he will
hear even him, although he knows beforehand that nothing can come of it.
Ingenuous mind!’ Mr Pecksniff did not address himself immediately to
any person in saying this, but assuming the position of the Chorus in a
Greek Tragedy, delivered his opinion as a commentary on the proceedings.

‘Grandfather!’ said Martin, with great earnestness. ‘From a painful
journey, from a hard life, from a sick-bed, from privation and distress,
from gloom and disappointment, from almost hopelessness and despair, I
have come back to you.’

‘Rovers of this sort,’ observed Mr Pecksniff, as Chorus, ‘very commonly
come back when they find they don’t meet with the success they expected
in their marauding ravages.’

‘But for this faithful man,’ said Martin, turning towards Mark, ‘whom
I first knew in this place, and who went away with me voluntarily, as
a servant, but has been, throughout, my zealous and devoted friend; but
for him, I must have died abroad. Far from home, far from any help or
consolation; far from the probability even of my wretched fate being
ever known to any one who cared to hear it--oh, that you would let me
say, of being known to you!’

The old man looked at Mr Pecksniff. Mr Pecksniff looked at him. ‘Did
you speak, my worthy sir?’ said Mr Pecksniff, with a smile. The old man
answered in the negative. ‘I know what you thought,’ said Mr Pecksniff,
with another smile. ‘Let him go on my friend. The development of
self-interest in the human mind is always a curious study. Let him go
on, sir.’

‘Go on!’ observed the old man; in a mechanical obedience, it appeared,
to Mr Pecksniff’s suggestion.

‘I have been so wretched and so poor,’ said Martin, ‘that I am indebted
to the charitable help of a stranger, in a land of strangers, for the
means of returning here. All this tells against me in your mind, I know.
I have given you cause to think I have been driven here wholly by want,
and have not been led on, in any degree, by affection or regret. When
I parted from you, Grandfather, I deserved that suspicion, but I do not
now. I do not now.’

The Chorus put its hand in its waistcoat, and smiled. ‘Let him go on,
my worthy sir,’ it said. ‘I know what you are thinking of, but don’t
express it prematurely.’

Old Martin raised his eyes to Mr Pecksniff’s face, and appearing to
derive renewed instruction from his looks and words, said, once again:

‘Go on!’

‘I have little more to say,’ returned Martin. ‘And as I say it now, with
little or no hope, Grandfather; whatever dawn of hope I had on entering
the room; believe it to be true. At least, believe it to be true.’

‘Beautiful Truth!’ exclaimed the Chorus, looking upward. ‘How is your
name profaned by vicious persons! You don’t live in a well, my holy
principle, but on the lips of false mankind. It is hard to bear with
mankind, dear sir’--addressing the elder Mr Chuzzlewit; ‘but let us do
so meekly. It is our duty so to do. Let us be among the Few who do their
duty. If,’ pursued the Chorus, soaring up into a lofty flight, ‘as the
poet informs us, England expects Every man to do his duty, England is
the most sanguine country on the face of the earth, and will find itself
continually disappointed.’

‘Upon that subject,’ said Martin, looking calmly at the old man as
he spoke, but glancing once at Mary, whose face was now buried in her
hands, upon the back of his easy-chair; ‘upon that subject which first
occasioned a division between us, my mind and heart are incapable of
change. Whatever influence they have undergone, since that unhappy time,
has not been one to weaken but to strengthen me. I cannot profess sorrow
for that, nor irresolution in that, nor shame in that. Nor would you
wish me, I know. But that I might have trusted to your love, if I had
thrown myself manfully upon it; that I might have won you over with
ease, if I had been more yielding and more considerate; that I should
have best remembered myself in forgetting myself, and recollecting you;
reflection, solitude, and misery, have taught me. I came resolved to say
this, and to ask your forgiveness; not so much in hope for the future,
as in regret for the past; for all that I would ask of you is, that you
would aid me to live. Help me to get honest work to do, and I would do
it. My condition places me at the disadvantage of seeming to have only
my selfish ends to serve, but try if that be so or not. Try if I be
self-willed, obdurate, and haughty, as I was; or have been disciplined
in a rough school. Let the voice of nature and association plead between
us, Grandfather; and do not, for one fault, however thankless, quite
reject me!’

As he ceased, the grey head of the old man drooped again; and he
concealed his face behind his outspread fingers.

‘My dear sir,’ cried Mr Pecksniff, bending over him, ‘you must not give
way to this. It is very natural, and very amiable, but you must not
allow the shameless conduct of one whom you long ago cast off, to move
you so far. Rouse yourself. Think,’ said Pecksniff, ‘think of Me, my
friend.’

‘I will,’ returned old Martin, looking up into his face. ‘You recall me
to myself. I will.’

‘Why, what,’ said Mr Pecksniff, sitting down beside him in a chair which
he drew up for the purpose, and tapping him playfully on the arm, ‘what
is the matter with my strong-minded compatriot, if I may venture to take
the liberty of calling him by that endearing expression? Shall I have
to scold my coadjutor, or to reason with an intellect like this? I think
not.’

‘No, no. There is no occasion,’ said the old man. ‘A momentary feeling.
Nothing more.’

‘Indignation,’ observed Mr Pecksniff, ‘WILL bring the scalding tear
into the honest eye, I know’--he wiped his own elaborately. ‘But we
have highest duties to perform than that. Rouse yourself, Mr Chuzzlewit.
Shall I give expression to your thoughts, my friend?’

‘Yes,’ said old Martin, leaning back in his chair, and looking at him,
half in vacancy and half in admiration, as if he were fascinated by
the man. ‘Speak for me, Pecksniff, Thank you. You are true to me. Thank
you!’

‘Do not unman me, sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff, shaking his hand vigorously,
‘or I shall be unequal to the task. It is not agreeable to my feelings,
my good sir, to address the person who is now before us, for when I
ejected him from this house, after hearing of his unnatural conduct from
your lips, I renounced communication with him for ever. But you desire
it; and that is sufficient. Young man! The door is immediately behind
the companion of your infamy. Blush if you can; begone without a blush,
if you can’t.’

Martin looked as steadily at his grandfather as if there had been a
dead silence all this time. The old man looked no less steadily at Mr
Pecksniff.

‘When I ordered you to leave this house upon the last occasion of your
being dismissed from it with disgrace,’ said Mr Pecksniff; ‘when,
stung and stimulated beyond endurance by your shameless conduct to this
extraordinarily noble-minded individual, I exclaimed “Go forth!” I told
you that I wept for your depravity. Do not suppose that the tear which
stands in my eye at this moment, is shed for you. It is shed for him,
sir. It is shed for him.’

Here Mr Pecksniff, accidentally dropping the tear in question on a
bald part of Mr Chuzzlewit’s head, wiped the place with his
pocket-handkerchief, and begged pardon.

‘It is shed for him, sir, whom you seek to make the victim of your
arts,’ said Mr Pecksniff; ‘whom you seek to plunder, to deceive, and to
mislead. It is shed in sympathy with him, and admiration of him; not in
pity for him, for happily he knows what you are. You shall not wrong
him further, sir, in any way,’ said Mr Pecksniff, quite transported with
enthusiasm, ‘while I have life. You may bestride my senseless corse,
sir. That is very likely. I can imagine a mind like yours deriving great
satisfaction from any measure of that kind. But while I continue to be
called upon to exist, sir, you must strike at him through me. Awe!’ said
Mr Pecksniff, shaking his head at Martin with indignant jocularity; ‘and
in such a cause you will find me, my young sir, an Ugly Customer!’

Still Martin looked steadily and mildly at his grandfather. ‘Will you
give me no answer,’ he said, at length, ‘not a word?’

‘You hear what has been said,’ replied the old man, without averting his
eyes from the face of Mr Pecksniff; who nodded encouragingly.

‘I have not heard your voice. I have not heard your spirit,’ returned
Martin.

‘Tell him again,’ said the old man, still gazing up in Mr Pecksniff’s
face.

‘I only hear,’ replied Martin, strong in his purpose from the first, and
stronger in it as he felt how Pecksniff winced and shrunk beneath his
contempt; ‘I only hear what you say to me, grandfather.’

Perhaps it was well for Mr Pecksniff that his venerable friend found
in his (Mr Pecksniff’s) features an exclusive and engrossing object
of contemplation, for if his eyes had gone astray, and he had compared
young Martin’s bearing with that of his zealous defender, the latter
disinterested gentleman would scarcely have shown to greater advantage
than on the memorable afternoon when he took Tom Pinch’s last receipt
in full of all demands. One really might have thought there was some
quality in Mr Pecksniff--an emanation from the brightness and purity
within him perhaps--which set off and adorned his foes; they looked so
gallant and so manly beside him.

‘Not a word?’ said Martin, for the second time.

‘I remember that I have a word to say, Pecksniff,’ observed the old man.
‘But a word. You spoke of being indebted to the charitable help of some
stranger for the means of returning to England. Who is he? And what help
in money did he render you?’

Although he asked this question of Martin, he did not look towards him,
but kept his eyes on Mr Pecksniff as before. It appeared to have become
a habit with him, both in a literal and figurative sense, to look to Mr
Pecksniff alone.

Martin took out his pencil, tore a leaf from his pocket-book, and
hastily wrote down the particulars of his debt to Mr Bevan. The old man
stretched out his hand for the paper, and took it; but his eyes did not
wander from Mr Pecksniff’s face.

‘It would be a poor pride and a false humility,’ said Martin, in a
low voice, ‘to say, I do not wish that to be paid, or that I have any
present hope of being able to pay it. But I never felt my poverty so
deeply as I feel it now.’

‘Read it to me, Pecksniff,’ said the old man.

Mr Pecksniff, after approaching the perusal of the paper as if it were a
manuscript confession of a murder, complied.

‘I think, Pecksniff,’ said old Martin, ‘I could wish that to be
discharged. I should not like the lender, who was abroad, who had
no opportunity of making inquiry, and who did (as he thought) a kind
action, to suffer.’

‘An honourable sentiment, my dear sir. Your own entirely. But a
dangerous precedent,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘permit me to suggest.’

‘It shall not be a precedent,’ returned the old man. ‘It is the only
recognition of him. But we will talk of it again. You shall advise me.
There is nothing else?’

‘Nothing else,’ said Mr Pecksniff buoyantly, ‘but for you to recover
this intrusion--this cowardly and indefensible outrage on your
feelings--with all possible dispatch, and smile again.’

‘You have nothing more to say?’ inquired the old man, laying his hand
with unusual earnestness on Mr Pecksniff’s sleeve.

Mr Pecksniff would not say what rose to his lips. For reproaches he
observed, were useless.

‘You have nothing at all to urge? You are sure of that! If you have, no
matter what it is, speak freely. I will oppose nothing that you ask of
me,’ said the old man.

The tears rose in such abundance to Mr Pecksniff’s eyes at this proof
of unlimited confidence on the part of his friend, that he was fain to
clasp the bridge of his nose convulsively before he could at all compose
himself. When he had the power of utterance again, he said with great
emotion, that he hoped he should live to deserve this; and added, that
he had no other observation whatever to make.

For a few moments the old man sat looking at him, with that blank and
motionless expression which is not uncommon in the faces of those whose
faculties are on the wane, in age. But he rose up firmly too, and walked
towards the door, from which Mark withdrew to make way for him.

The obsequious Mr Pecksniff proffered his arm. The old man took it.
Turning at the door, he said to Martin, waving him off with his hand,

‘You have heard him. Go away. It is all over. Go!’

Mr Pecksniff murmured certain cheering expressions of sympathy and
encouragement as they retired; and Martin, awakening from the stupor
into which the closing portion of this scene had plunged him, to the
opportunity afforded by their departure, caught the innocent cause of
all in his embrace, and pressed her to his heart.

‘Dear girl!’ said Martin. ‘He has not changed you. Why, what an impotent
and harmless knave the fellow is!’

‘You have restrained yourself so nobly! You have borne so much!’

‘Restrained myself!’ cried Martin, cheerfully. ‘You were by, and were
unchanged, I knew. What more advantage did I want? The sight of me was
such a bitterness to the dog, that I had my triumph in his being forced
to endure it. But tell me, love--for the few hasty words we can exchange
now are precious--what is this which has been rumoured to me? Is it true
that you are persecuted by this knave’s addresses?’

‘I was, dear Martin, and to some extent am now; but my chief source
of unhappiness has been anxiety for you. Why did you leave us in such
terrible suspense?’

‘Sickness, distance; the dread of hinting at our real condition, the
impossibility of concealing it except in perfect silence; the knowledge
that the truth would have pained you infinitely more than uncertainty
and doubt,’ said Martin, hurriedly; as indeed everything else was done
and said, in those few hurried moments, ‘were the causes of my writing
only once. But Pecksniff? You needn’t fear to tell me the whole tale;
for you saw me with him face to face, hearing him speak, and not taking
him by the throat; what is the history of his pursuit of you? Is it
known to my grandfather?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he assists him in it?’

‘No,’ she answered eagerly.

‘Thank Heaven!’ cried Martin, ‘that it leaves his mind unclouded in that
one respect!’

‘I do not think,’ said Mary, ‘it was known to him at first. When
this man had sufficiently prepared his mind, he revealed it to him by
degrees. I think so, but I only know it from my own impression: now from
anything they told me. Then he spoke to me alone.’

‘My grandfather did?’ said Martin.

‘Yes--spoke to me alone, and told me--’

‘What the hound had said,’ cried Martin. ‘Don’t repeat it.’

‘And said I knew well what qualities he possessed; that he was
moderately rich; in good repute; and high in his favour and confidence.
But seeing me very much distressed, he said that he would not control
or force my inclinations, but would content himself with telling me the
fact. He would not pain me by dwelling on it, or reverting to it; nor
has he ever done so since, but has truly kept his word.’

‘The man himself?--’ asked Martin.

‘He has had few opportunities of pursuing his suit. I have never walked
out alone, or remained alone an instant in his presence. Dear Martin, I
must tell you,’ she continued, ‘that the kindness of your grandfather
to me remains unchanged. I am his companion still. An indescribable
tenderness and compassion seem to have mingled themselves with his old
regard; and if I were his only child, I could not have a gentler father.
What former fancy or old habit survives in this, when his heart has
turned so cold to you, is a mystery I cannot penetrate; but it has been,
and it is, a happiness to me, that I remained true to him; that if he
should wake from his delusion, even at the point of death, I am here,
love, to recall you to his thoughts.’

Martin looked with admiration on her glowing face, and pressed his lips
to hers.

‘I have sometimes heard, and read,’ she said, ‘that those whose powers
had been enfeebled long ago, and whose lives had faded, as it were, into
a dream, have been known to rouse themselves before death, and inquire
for familiar faces once very dear to them; but forgotten, unrecognized,
hated even, in the meantime. Think, if with his old impressions of this
man, he should suddenly resume his former self, and find in him his only
friend!’

‘I would not urge you to abandon him, dearest,’ said Martin, ‘though I
could count the years we are to wear out asunder. But the influence this
fellow exercises over him has steadily increased, I fear.’

She could not help admitting that. Steadily, imperceptibly, and surely,
until it was paramount and supreme. She herself had none; and yet
he treated her with more affection than at any previous time. Martin
thought the inconsistency a part of his weakness and decay.

‘Does the influence extend to fear?’ said Martin. ‘Is he timid of
asserting his own opinion in the presence of this infatuation? I fancied
so just now.’

‘I have thought so, often. Often when we are sitting alone, almost as
we used to do, and I have been reading a favourite book to him or he has
been talking quite cheerfully, I have observed that the entrance of
Mr Pecksniff has changed his whole demeanour. He has broken off
immediately, and become what you have seen to-day. When we first came
here he had his impetuous outbreaks, in which it was not easy for Mr
Pecksniff with his utmost plausibility to appease him. But these have
long since dwindled away. He defers to him in everything, and has no
opinion upon any question, but that which is forced upon him by this
treacherous man.’

Such was the account, rapidly furnished in whispers, and interrupted,
brief as it was, by many false alarms of Mr Pecksniff’s return;
which Martin received of his grandfather’s decline, and of that good
gentleman’s ascendancy. He heard of Tom Pinch too, and Jonas too, with
not a little about himself into the bargain; for though lovers are
remarkable for leaving a great deal unsaid on all occasions, and very
properly desiring to come back and say it, they are remarkable also for
a wonderful power of condensation, and can, in one way or other, give
utterance to more language--eloquent language--in any given short space
of time, than all the six hundred and fifty-eight members in the Commons
House of Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland;
who are strong lovers no doubt, but of their country only, which makes
all the difference; for in a passion of that kind (which is not always
returned), it is the custom to use as many words as possible, and
express nothing whatever.

A caution from Mr Tapley; a hasty interchange of farewells, and of
something else which the proverb says must not be told of afterwards;
a white hand held out to Mr Tapley himself, which he kissed with the
devotion of a knight-errant; more farewells, more something else’s; a
parting word from Martin that he would write from London and would do
great things there yet (Heaven knows what, but he quite believed it);
and Mark and he stood on the outside of the Pecksniffian halls.

‘A short interview after such an absence!’ said Martin, sorrowfully.
‘But we are well out of the house. We might have placed ourselves in a
false position by remaining there, even so long, Mark.’

‘I don’t know about ourselves, sir,’ he returned; ‘but somebody else
would have got into a false position, if he had happened to come back
again, while we was there. I had the door all ready, sir. If Pecksniff
had showed his head, or had only so much as listened behind it, I would
have caught him like a walnut. He’s the sort of man,’ added Mr Tapley,
musing, ‘as would squeeze soft, I know.’

A person who was evidently going to Mr Pecksniff’s house, passed them at
this moment. He raised his eyes at the mention of the architect’s name;
and when he had gone on a few yards, stopped and gazed at them. Mr
Tapley, also, looked over his shoulder, and so did Martin; for the
stranger, as he passed, had looked very sharply at them.

‘Who may that be, I wonder!’ said Martin. ‘The face seems familiar to
me, but I don’t know the man.’

‘He seems to have a amiable desire that his face should be tolerable
familiar to us,’ said Mr Tapley, ‘for he’s a-staring pretty hard. He’d
better not waste his beauty, for he ain’t got much to spare.’

Coming in sight of the Dragon, they saw a travelling carriage at the
door.

‘And a Salisbury carriage, eh?’ said Mr Tapley. ‘That’s what he came in
depend upon it. What’s in the wind now? A new pupil, I shouldn’t wonder.
P’raps it’s a order for another grammar-school, of the same pattern as
the last.’

Before they could enter at the door, Mrs Lupin came running out; and
beckoning them to the carriage showed them a portmanteau with the name
of CHUZZLEWIT upon it.

‘Miss Pecksniff’s husband that was,’ said the good woman to Martin. ‘I
didn’t know what terms you might be on, and was quite in a worry till
you came back.’

‘He and I have never interchanged a word yet,’ observed Martin; ‘and as
I have no wish to be better or worse acquainted with him, I will not put
myself in his way. We passed him on the road, I have no doubt. I am glad
he timed his coming as he did. Upon my word! Miss Pecksniff’s husband
travels gayly!’

‘A very fine-looking gentleman with him--in the best room now,’
whispered Mrs Lupin, glancing up at the window as they went into the
house. ‘He has ordered everything that can be got for dinner; and has
the glossiest moustaches and whiskers ever you saw.’

‘Has he?’ cried Martin, ‘why then we’ll endeavour to avoid him too, in
the hope that our self-denial may be strong enough for the sacrifice.
It is only for a few hours,’ said Martin, dropping wearily into a chair
behind the little screen in the bar. ‘Our visit has met with no success,
my dear Mrs Lupin, and I must go to London.’

‘Dear, dear!’ cried the hostess.

‘Yes, one foul wind no more makes a winter, than one swallow makes a
summer. I’ll try it again. Tom Pinch has succeeded. With his advice to
guide me, I may do the same. I took Tom under my protection once, God
save the mark!’ said Martin, with a melancholy smile; ‘and promised I
would make his fortune. Perhaps Tom will take me under HIS protection
now, and teach me how to earn my bread.’



CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

FURTHER CONTINUATION OF THE ENTERPRISE OF MR JONAS AND HIS FRIEND


It was a special quality, among the many admirable qualities possessed
by Mr Pecksniff, that the more he was found out, the more hypocrisy he
practised. Let him be discomfited in one quarter, and he refreshed and
recompensed himself by carrying the war into another. If his workings
and windings were detected by A, so much the greater reason was there
for practicing without loss of time on B, if it were only to keep his
hand in. He had never been such a saintly and improving spectacle to all
about him, as after his detection by Thomas Pinch. He had scarcely ever
been at once so tender in his humanity, and so dignified and exalted in
his virtue, as when young Martin’s scorn was fresh and hot upon him.

Having this large stock of superfluous sentiment and morality on hand
which must positively be cleared off at any sacrifice, Mr Pecksniff no
sooner heard his son-in-law announced, than he regarded him as a kind
of wholesale or general order, to be immediately executed. Descending,
therefore, swiftly to the parlour, and clasping the young man in
his arms, he exclaimed, with looks and gestures that denoted the
perturbation of his spirit:

‘Jonas. My child--she is well! There is nothing the matter?’

‘What, you’re at it again, are you?’ replied his son-in-law. ‘Even with
me? Get away with you, will you?’

‘Tell me she is well then,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Tell me she is well my
boy!’

‘She’s well enough,’ retorted Jonas, disengaging himself. ‘There’s
nothing the matter with HER.’

‘There is nothing the matter with her!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, sitting down
in the nearest chair, and rubbing up his hair. ‘Fie upon my weakness!
I cannot help it, Jonas. Thank you. I am better now. How is my other
child; my eldest; my Cherrywerrychigo?’ said Mr Pecksniff, inventing a
playful little name for her, in the restored lightness of his heart.

‘She’s much about the same as usual,’ returned Jonas. ‘She sticks
pretty close to the vinegar-bottle. You know she’s got a sweetheart, I
suppose?’

‘I have heard of it,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘from headquarters; from my
child herself I will not deny that it moved me to contemplate the loss
of my remaining daughter, Jonas--I am afraid we parents are selfish, I
am afraid we are--but it has ever been the study of my life to qualify
them for the domestic hearth; and it is a sphere which Cherry will
adorn.’

‘She need adorn some sphere or other,’ observed the son-in-law, for she
ain’t very ornamental in general.’

‘My girls are now provided for,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘They are now
happily provided for, and I have not laboured in vain!’

This is exactly what Mr Pecksniff would have said, if one of his
daughters had drawn a prize of thirty thousand pounds in the lottery, or
if the other had picked up a valuable purse in the street, which nobody
appeared to claim. In either of these cases he would have invoked a
patriarchal blessing on the fortunate head, with great solemnity, and
would have taken immense credit to himself, as having meant it from the
infant’s cradle.

‘Suppose we talk about something else, now,’ observed Jonas, drily.
‘just for a change. Are you quite agreeable?’

‘Quite,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Ah, you wag, you naughty wag! You laugh at
poor old fond papa. Well! He deserves it. And he don’t mind it either,
for his feelings are their own reward. You have come to stay with me,
Jonas?’

‘No. I’ve got a friend with me,’ said Jonas.

‘Bring your friend!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, in a gush of hospitality.
‘Bring any number of your friends!’

‘This ain’t the sort of man to be brought,’ said Jonas, contemptuously.
‘I think I see myself “bringing” him to your house, for a treat!
Thank’ee all the same; but he’s a little too near the top of the tree
for that, Pecksniff.’

The good man pricked up his ears; his interest was awakened. A position
near the top of the tree was greatness, virtue, goodness, sense, genius;
or, it should rather be said, a dispensation from all, and in itself
something immeasurably better than all; with Mr Pecksniff. A man who was
able to look down upon Mr Pecksniff could not be looked up at, by that
gentleman, with too great an amount of deference, or from a position of
too much humility. So it always is with great spirits.

‘I’ll tell you what you may do, if you like,’ said Jonas; ‘you may come
and dine with us at the Dragon. We were forced to come down to Salisbury
last night, on some business, and I got him to bring me over here this
morning, in his carriage; at least, not his own carriage, for we had
a breakdown in the night, but one we hired instead; it’s all the same.
Mind what you’re about, you know. He’s not used to all sorts; he only
mixes with the best!’

‘Some young nobleman who has been borrowing money of you at good
interest, eh?’ said Mr Pecksniff, shaking his forefinger facetiously. ‘I
shall be delighted to know the gay sprig.’

‘Borrowing!’ echoed Jonas. ‘Borrowing! When you’re a twentieth part as
rich as he is, you may shut up shop! We should be pretty well off if we
could buy his furniture, and plate, and pictures, by clubbing together.
A likely man to borrow: Mr Montague! Why since I was lucky enough (come!
and I’ll say, sharp enough, too) to get a share in the Assurance office
that he’s President of, I’ve made--never mind what I’ve made,’ said
Jonas, seeming to recover all at once his usual caution. ‘You know me
pretty well, and I don’t blab about such things. But, Ecod, I’ve made a
trifle.’

‘Really, my dear Jonas,’ cried Mr Pecksniff, with much warmth, ‘a
gentleman like this should receive some attention. Would he like to
see the church? or if he has a taste for the fine arts--which I have no
doubt he has, from the description you give of his circumstances--I can
send him down a few portfolios. Salisbury Cathedral, my dear Jonas,’
said Mr Pecksniff; the mention of the portfolios and his anxiety to
display himself to advantage, suggesting his usual phraseology in
that regard, ‘is an edifice replete with venerable associations,
and strikingly suggestive of the loftiest emotions. It is here we
contemplate the work of bygone ages. It is here we listen to the
swelling organ, as we stroll through the reverberating aisles. We have
drawings of this celebrated structure from the North, from the South,
from the East, from the West, from the South-East, from the Nor’West--’

During this digression, and indeed during the whole dialogue, Jonas had
been rocking on his chair, with his hands in his pockets and his head
thrown cunningly on one side. He looked at Mr Pecksniff now with such
shrewd meaning twinkling in his eyes, that Mr Pecksniff stopped, and
asked him what he was going to say.

‘Ecod!’ he answered. ‘Pecksniff if I knew how you meant to leave your
money, I could put you in the way of doubling it in no time. It wouldn’t
be bad to keep a chance like this snug in the family. But you’re such a
deep one!’

‘Jonas!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, much affected, ‘I am not a diplomatical
character; my heart is in my hand. By far the greater part of the
inconsiderable savings I have accumulated in the course of--I hope--a
not dishonourable or useless career, is already given, devised, and
bequeathed (correct me, my dear Jonas, if I am technically wrong), with
expressions of confidence, which I will not repeat; and in securities
which it is unnecessary to mention to a person whom I cannot, whom
I will not, whom I need not, name.’ Here he gave the hand of his
son-in-law a fervent squeeze, as if he would have added, ‘God bless you;
be very careful of it when you get it!’

Mr Jonas only shook his head and laughed, and, seeming to think better
of what he had had in his mind, said, ‘No. He would keep his own
counsel.’ But as he observed that he would take a walk, Mr Pecksniff
insisted on accompanying him, remarking that he could leave a card for
Mr Montague, as they went along, by way of gentleman-usher to himself at
dinner-time. Which he did.

In the course of their walk, Mr Jonas affected to maintain that close
reserve which had operated as a timely check upon him during the
foregoing dialogue. And as he made no attempt to conciliate Mr
Pecksniff, but, on the contrary, was more boorish and rude to him than
usual, that gentleman, so far from suspecting his real design, laid
himself out to be attacked with advantage. For it is in the nature of a
knave to think the tools with which he works indispensable to knavery;
and knowing what he would do himself in such a case, Mr Pecksniff
argued, ‘if this young man wanted anything of me for his own ends, he
would be polite and deferential.’

The more Jonas repelled him in his hints and inquiries, the more
solicitous, therefore, Mr Pecksniff became to be initiated into the
golden mysteries at which he had obscurely glanced. Why should there be
cold and worldly secrets, he observed, between relations? What was life
without confidence? If the chosen husband of his daughter, the man to
whom he had delivered her with so much pride and hope, such bounding
and such beaming joy; if he were not a green spot in the barren waste of
life, where was that oasis to be bound?

Little did Mr Pecksniff think on what a very green spot he planted one
foot at that moment! Little did he foresee when he said, ‘All is but
dust!’ how very shortly he would come down with his own!

Inch by inch, in his grudging and ill-conditioned way; sustained to the
life, for the hope of making Mr Pecksniff suffer in that tender place,
the pocket, where Jonas smarted so terribly himself, gave him an
additional and malicious interest in the wiles he was set on to
practise; inch by inch, and bit by bit, Jonas rather allowed the
dazzling prospects of the Anglo-Bengalee establishment to escape him,
than paraded them before his greedy listener. And in the same niggardly
spirit, he left Mr Pecksniff to infer, if he chose (which he DID choose,
of course), that a consciousness of not having any great natural gifts
of speech and manner himself, rendered him desirous to have the credit
of introducing to Mr Montague some one who was well endowed in those
respects, and so atone for his own deficiencies. Otherwise, he muttered
discontentedly, he would have seen his beloved father-in-law ‘far enough
off,’ before he would have taken him into his confidence.

Primed in this artful manner, Mr Pecksniff presented himself at
dinner-time in such a state of suavity, benevolence, cheerfulness,
politeness, and cordiality, as even he had perhaps never attained
before. The frankness of the country gentleman, the refinement of
the artist, the good-humoured allowance of the man of the world;
philanthropy, forbearance, piety, toleration, all blended together in a
flexible adaptability to anything and everything; were expressed in Mr
Pecksniff, as he shook hands with the great speculator and capitalist.

‘Welcome, respected sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘to our humble village! We
are a simple people; primitive clods, Mr Montague; but we can appreciate
the honour of your visit, as my dear son-in-law can testify. It is very
strange,’ said Mr Pecksniff, pressing his hand almost reverentially,
‘but I seem to know you. That towering forehead, my dear Jonas,’ said Mr
Pecksniff aside, ‘and those clustering masses of rich hair--I must have
seen you, my dear sir, in the sparkling throng.’

Nothing was more probable, they all agreed.

‘I could have wished,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘to have had the honour of
introducing you to an elderly inmate of our house: to the uncle of our
friend. Mr Chuzzlewit, sir, would have been proud indeed to have taken
you by the hand.’

‘Is the gentleman here now?’ asked Montague, turning deeply red. ‘He
is,’ said Mr Pecksniff.

‘You said nothing about that, Chuzzlewit.’

‘I didn’t suppose you’d care to hear of it,’ returned Jonas. ‘You
wouldn’t care to know him, I can promise you.’

‘Jonas! my dear Jonas!’ remonstrated Mr Pecksniff. ‘Really!’

‘Oh! it’s all very well for you to speak up for him,’ said Jonas. ‘You
have nailed him. You’ll get a fortune by him.’

‘Oho! Is the wind in that quarter?’ cried Montague. ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ and
here they all laughed--especially Mr Pecksniff.

‘No, no!’ said that gentleman, clapping his son-in-law playfully upon
the shoulder. ‘You must not believe all that my young relative says,
Mr Montague. You may believe him in official business, and trust him in
official business, but you must not attach importance to his flights of
fancy.’

‘Upon my life, Mr Pecksniff,’ cried Montague, ‘I attach the greatest
importance to that last observation of his. I trust and hope it’s true.
Money cannot be turned and turned again quickly enough in the ordinary
course, Mr Pecksniff. There is nothing like building our fortune on the
weaknesses of mankind.’

‘Oh fie! oh fie, for shame!’ cried Mr Pecksniff. But they all laughed
again--especially Mr Pecksniff.

‘I give you my honour that WE do it,’ said Montague.

‘Oh fie, fie!’ cried Mr Pecksniff. ‘You are very pleasant. That I am
sure you don’t! That I am sure you don’t! How CAN you, you know?’

Again they all laughed in concert; and again Mr Pecksniff laughed
especially.

This was very agreeable indeed. It was confidential, easy,
straight-forward; and still left Mr Pecksniff in the position of being
in a gentle way the Mentor of the party. The greatest achievements in
the article of cookery that the Dragon had ever performed, were set
before them; the oldest and best wines in the Dragon’s cellar saw the
light on that occasion; a thousand bubbles, indicative of the wealth and
station of Mr Montague in the depths of his pursuits, were constantly
rising to the surface of the conversation; and they were as frank and
merry as three honest men could be. Mr Pecksniff thought it a pity (he
said so) that Mr Montague should think lightly of mankind and their
weaknesses. He was anxious upon this subject; his mind ran upon it; in
one way or another he was constantly coming back to it; he must make
a convert of him, he said. And as often as Mr Montague repeated his
sentiment about building fortunes on the weaknesses of mankind, and
added frankly, ‘WE do it!’ just as often Mr Pecksniff repeated ‘Oh fie!
oh fie, for shame! I am sure you don’t. How CAN you, you know?’ laying a
greater stress each time on those last words.

The frequent repetition of this playful inquiry on the part of Mr
Pecksniff, led at last to playful answers on the part of Mr Montague;
but after some little sharp-shooting on both sides, Mr Pecksniff became
grave, almost to tears; observing that if Mr Montague would give
him leave, he would drink the health of his young kinsman, Mr Jonas;
congratulating him upon the valuable and distinguished friendship he
had formed, but envying him, he would confess, his usefulness to his
fellow-creatures. For, if he understood the objects of that Institution
with which he was newly and advantageously connected--knowing them
but imperfectly--they were calculated to do Good; and for his (Mr
Pecksniff’s) part, if he could in any way promote them, he thought
he would be able to lay his head upon his pillow every night, with an
absolute certainty of going to sleep at once.

The transition from this accidental remark (for it was quite accidental
and had fallen from Mr Pecksniff in the openness of his soul), to the
discussion of the subject as a matter of business, was easy. Books,
papers, statements, tables, calculations of various kinds, were soon
spread out before them; and as they were all framed with one object,
it is not surprising that they should all have tended to one end. But
still, whenever Montague enlarged upon the profits of the office, and
said that as long as there were gulls upon the wing it must succeed, Mr
Pecksniff mildly said ‘Oh fie!’--and might indeed have remonstrated
with him, but that he knew he was joking. Mr Pecksniff did know he was
joking; because he said so.

There never had been before, and there never would be again, such
an opportunity for the investment of a considerable sum (the rate of
advantage increased in proportion to the amount invested), as at that
moment. The only time that had at all approached it, was the time when
Jonas had come into the concern; which made him ill-natured now, and
inclined him to pick out a doubt in this place, and a flaw in that, and
grumbling to advise Mr Pecksniff to think better of it. The sum which
would complete the proprietorship in this snug concern, was nearly equal
to Mr Pecksniff’s whole hoard; not counting Mr Chuzzlewit, that is to
say, whom he looked upon as money in the Bank, the possession of which
inclined him the more to make a dash with his own private sprats for
the capture of such a whale as Mr Montague described. The returns
began almost immediately, and were immense. The end of it was, that
Mr Pecksniff agreed to become the last partner and proprietor in the
Anglo-Bengalee, and made an appointment to dine with Mr Montague, at
Salisbury, on the next day but one, then and there to complete the
negotiation.

It took so long to bring the subject to this head, that it was nearly
midnight when they parted. When Mr Pecksniff walked downstairs to the
door, he found Mrs Lupin standing there, looking out.

‘Ah, my good friend!’ he said; ‘not a-bed yet! Contemplating the stars,
Mrs Lupin?’

‘It’s a beautiful starlight night, sir.’

‘A beautiful starlight night,’ said Mr Pecksniff, looking up. ‘Behold
the planets, how they shine! Behold the--those two persons who were here
this morning have left your house, I hope, Mrs Lupin?’

‘Yes, sir. They are gone.’

‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Behold the wonders of the
firmament, Mrs Lupin! how glorious is the scene! When I look up at those
shining orbs, I think that each of them is winking to the other to
take notice of the vanity of men’s pursuits. My fellow-men!’ cried Mr
Pecksniff, shaking his head in pity; ‘you are much mistaken; my wormy
relatives, you are much deceived! The stars are perfectly contented (I
suppose so) in their several spheres. Why are not you? Oh! do not strive
and struggle to enrich yourselves, or to get the better of each other,
my deluded friends, but look up there, with me!’

Mrs Lupin shook her head, and heaved a sigh. It was very affecting.

‘Look up there, with me!’ repeated Mr Pecksniff, stretching out
his hand; ‘With me, a humble individual who is also an insect like
yourselves. Can silver, gold, or precious stones, sparkle like those
constellations! I think not. Then do not thirst for silver, gold, or
precious stones; but look up there, with me!’

With those words, the good man patted Mrs Lupin’s hand between his own,
as if he would have added ‘think of this, my good woman!’ and walked
away in a sort of ecstasy or rapture, with his hat under his arm.

Jonas sat in the attitude in which Mr Pecksniff had left him, gazing
moodily at his friend; who, surrounded by a heap of documents, was
writing something on an oblong slip of paper.

‘You mean to wait at Salisbury over the day after to-morrow, do you,
then?’ said Jonas.

‘You heard our appointment,’ returned Montague, without raising his
eyes. ‘In any case I should have waited to see after the boy.’

They appeared to have changed places again; Montague being in high
spirits; Jonas gloomy and lowering.

‘You don’t want me, I suppose?’ said Jonas.

‘I want you to put your name here,’ he returned, glancing at him with a
smile, ‘as soon as I have filled up the stamp. I may as well have your
note of hand for that extra capital. That’s all I want. If you wish
to go home, I can manage Mr Pecksniff now, alone. There is a perfect
understanding between us.’

Jonas sat scowling at him as he wrote, in silence. When he had
finished his writing, and had dried it on the blotting paper in his
travelling-desk; he looked up, and tossed the pen towards him.

‘What, not a day’s grace, not a day’s trust, eh?’ said Jonas bitterly.
‘Not after the pains I have taken with to-night’s work?’

‘To night’s work was a part of our bargain,’ replied Montague; ‘and so
was this.’

‘You drive a hard bargain,’ said Jonas, advancing to the table. ‘You
know best. Give it here!’

Montague gave him the paper. After pausing as if he could not make up
his mind to put his name to it, Jonas dipped his pen hastily in the
nearest inkstand, and began to write. But he had scarcely marked the
paper when he started back, in a panic.

‘Why, what the devil’s this?’ he said. ‘It’s bloody!’

He had dipped the pen, as another moment showed, into red ink. But he
attached a strange degree of importance to the mistake. He asked how it
had come there, who had brought it, why it had been brought; and looked
at Montague, at first, as if he thought he had put a trick upon him.
Even when he used a different pen, and the right ink, he made some
scratches on another paper first, as half believing they would turn red
also.

‘Black enough, this time,’ he said, handing the note to Montague.
‘Good-bye.’

‘Going now! how do you mean to get away from here?’

‘I shall cross early in the morning to the high road, before you are out
of bed; and catch the day-coach, going up. Good-bye!’

‘You are in a hurry!’

‘I have something to do,’ said Jonas. ‘Good-bye!’

His friend looked after him as he went out, in surprise, which gradually
gave place to an air of satisfaction and relief.

‘It happens all the better. It brings about what I wanted, without any
difficulty. I shall travel home alone.’



CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

IN WHICH TOM PINCH AND HIS SISTER TAKE A LITTLE PLEASURE; BUT QUITE IN A
DOMESTIC WAY, AND WITH NO CEREMONY ABOUT IT


Tom Pinch and his sister having to part, for the dispatch of the
morning’s business, immediately after the dispersion of the other actors
in the scene upon the wharf with which the reader has been already made
acquainted, had no opportunity of discussing the subject at that time.
But Tom, in his solitary office, and Ruth, in the triangular parlour,
thought about nothing else all day; and, when their hour of meeting in
the afternoon approached, they were very full of it, to be sure.

There was a little plot between them, that Tom should always come out
of the Temple by one way; and that was past the fountain. Coming through
Fountain Court, he was just to glance down the steps leading into Garden
Court, and to look once all round him; and if Ruth had come to meet him,
there he would see her; not sauntering, you understand (on account of
the clerks), but coming briskly up, with the best little laugh upon her
face that ever played in opposition to the fountain, and beat it all to
nothing. For, fifty to one, Tom had been looking for her in the wrong
direction, and had quite given her up, while she had been tripping
towards him from the first; jingling that little reticule of hers (with
all the keys in it) to attract his wandering observation.

Whether there was life enough left in the slow vegetation of Fountain
Court for the smoky shrubs to have any consciousness of the brightest
and purest-hearted little woman in the world, is a question for
gardeners, and those who are learned in the loves of plants. But, that
it was a good thing for that same paved yard to have such a delicate
little figure flitting through it; that it passed like a smile from the
grimy old houses, and the worn flagstones, and left them duller, darker,
sterner than before; there is no sort of doubt. The Temple fountain
might have leaped up twenty feet to greet the spring of hopeful
maidenhood, that in her person stole on, sparkling, through the dry and
dusty channels of the Law; the chirping sparrows, bred in Temple
chinks and crannies, might have held their peace to listen to imaginary
skylarks, as so fresh a little creature passed; the dingy boughs, unused
to droop, otherwise than in their puny growth, might have bent down in
a kindred gracefulness to shed their benedictions on her graceful head;
old love letters, shut up in iron boxes in the neighbouring offices, and
made of no account among the heaps of family papers into which they had
strayed, and of which, in their degeneracy, they formed a part, might
have stirred and fluttered with a moment’s recollection of their ancient
tenderness, as she went lightly by. Anything might have happened that
did not happen, and never will, for the love of Ruth.

Something happened, too, upon the afternoon of which the history treats.
Not for her love. Oh no! quite by accident, and without the least
reference to her at all.

Either she was a little too soon, or Tom was a little too late--she was
so precise in general, that she timed it to half a minute--but no Tom
was there. Well! But was anybody else there, that she blushed so deeply,
after looking round, and tripped off down the steps with such unusual
expedition?

Why, the fact is, that Mr Westlock was passing at that moment. The
Temple is a public thoroughfare; they may write up on the gates that it
is not, but so long as the gates are left open it is, and will be; and
Mr Westlock had as good a right to be there as anybody else. But why did
she run away, then? Not being ill dressed, for she was much too neat for
that, why did she run away? The brown hair that had fallen down beneath
her bonnet, and had one impertinent imp of a false flower clinging to
it, boastful of its licence before all men, THAT could not have been the
cause, for it looked charming. Oh! foolish, panting, frightened little
heart, why did she run away!

Merrily the tiny fountain played, and merrily the dimples sparkled on
its sunny face. John Westlock hurried after her. Softly the whispering
water broke and fell; as roguishly the dimples twinkled, as he stole
upon her footsteps.

Oh, foolish, panting, timid little heart, why did she feign to be
unconscious of his coming! Why wish herself so far away, yet be so
flutteringly happy there!

‘I felt sure it was you,’ said John, when he overtook her in the
sanctuary of Garden Court. ‘I knew I couldn’t be mistaken.’

She was SO surprised.

‘You are waiting for your brother,’ said John. ‘Let me bear you
company.’

So light was the touch of the coy little hand, that he glanced down to
assure himself he had it on his arm. But his glance, stopping for
an instant at the bright eyes, forgot its first design, and went no
farther.

They walked up and down three or four times, speaking about Tom and his
mysterious employment. Now that was a very natural and innocent subject,
surely. Then why, whenever Ruth lifted up her eyes, did she let them
fall again immediately, and seek the uncongenial pavement of the court?
They were not such eyes as shun the light; they were not such eyes
as require to be hoarded to enhance their value. They were much too
precious and too genuine to stand in need of arts like those. Somebody
must have been looking at them!

They found out Tom, though, quickly enough. This pair of eyes descried
him in the distance, the moment he appeared. He was staring about him,
as usual, in all directions but the right one; and was as obstinate
in not looking towards them, as if he had intended it. As it was plain
that, being left to himself, he would walk away home, John Westlock
darted off to stop him.

This made the approach of poor little Ruth, by herself, one of the
most embarrassing of circumstances. There was Tom, manifesting extreme
surprise (he had no presence of mind, that Tom, on small occasions);
there was John, making as light of it as he could, but explaining at the
same time with most unnecessary elaboration; and here was she, coming
towards them, with both of them looking at her, conscious of blushing to
a terrible extent, but trying to throw up her eyebrows carelessly, and
pout her rosy lips, as if she were the coolest and most unconcerned of
little women.

Merrily the fountain plashed and plashed, until the dimples, merging
into one another, swelled into a general smile, that covered the whole
surface of the basin.

‘What an extraordinary meeting!’ said Tom. ‘I should never have dreamed
of seeing you two together here.’

‘Quite accidental,’ John was heard to murmur.

‘Exactly,’ cried Tom; ‘that’s what I mean, you know. If it wasn’t
accidental, there would be nothing remarkable in it.’

‘To be sure,’ said John.

‘Such an out-of-the-way place for you to have met in,’ pursued Tom,
quite delighted. ‘Such an unlikely spot!’

John rather disputed that. On the contrary, he considered it a very
likely spot, indeed. He was constantly passing to and fro there, he
said. He shouldn’t wonder if it were to happen again. His only wonder
was, that it had never happened before.

By this time Ruth had got round on the farther side of her brother, and
had taken his arm. She was squeezing it now, as much as to say ‘Are you
going to stop here all day, you dear, old, blundering Tom?’

Tom answered the squeeze as if it had been a speech. ‘John,’ he said,
‘if you’ll give my sister your arm, we’ll take her between us, and walk
on. I have a curious circumstance to relate to you. Our meeting could
not have happened better.’

Merrily the fountain leaped and danced, and merrily the smiling dimples
twinkled and expanded more and more, until they broke into a laugh
against the basin’s rim, and vanished.

‘Tom,’ said his friend, as they turned into the noisy street, ‘I have a
proposition to make. It is, that you and your sister--if she will so far
honour a poor bachelor’s dwelling--give me a great pleasure, and come
and dine with me.’

‘What, to-day?’ cried Tom.

‘Yes, to-day. It’s close by, you know. Pray, Miss Pinch, insist upon it.
It will be very disinterested, for I have nothing to give you.’

‘Oh! you must not believe that, Ruth,’ said Tom. ‘He is the most
tremendous fellow, in his housekeeping, that I ever heard of, for a
single man. He ought to be Lord Mayor. Well! what do you say? Shall we
go?’

‘If you please, Tom,’ rejoined his dutiful little sister.

‘But I mean,’ said Tom, regarding her with smiling admiration; ‘is there
anything you ought to wear, and haven’t got? I am sure I don’t know,
John; she may not be able to take her bonnet off, for anything I can
tell.’

There was a great deal of laughing at this, and there were divers
compliments from John Westlock--not compliments HE said at least (and
really he was right), but good, plain, honest truths, which no one could
deny. Ruth laughed, and all that, but she made no objection; so it was
an engagement.

‘If I had known it a little sooner,’ said John, ‘I would have tried
another pudding. Not in rivalry; but merely to exalt that famous one. I
wouldn’t on any account have had it made with suet.’

‘Why not?’ asked Tom.

‘Because that cookery-book advises suet,’ said John Westlock; ‘and ours
was made with flour and eggs.’

‘Oh good gracious!’ cried Tom. ‘Ours was made with flour and eggs,
was it? Ha, ha, ha! A beefsteak pudding made with flour and eggs! Why
anybody knows better than that. I know better than that! Ha, ha, ha!’

It is unnecessary to say that Tom had been present at the making of the
pudding, and had been a devoted believer in it all through. But he was
so delighted to have this joke against his busy little sister and was
tickled to that degree at having found her out, that he stopped
in Temple Bar to laugh; and it was no more to Tom, that he was
anathematized and knocked about by the surly passengers, than it would
have been to a post; for he continued to exclaim with unabated good
humour, ‘flour and eggs! A beefsteak pudding made with flour and eggs!’
until John Westlock and his sister fairly ran away from him, and left
him to have his laugh out by himself; which he had, and then came
dodging across the crowded street to them, with such sweet temper and
tenderness (it was quite a tender joke of Tom’s) beaming in his face,
God bless it, that it might have purified the air, though Temple Bar had
been, as in the golden days gone by, embellished with a row of rotting
human heads.

There are snug chambers in those Inns where the bachelors live, and, for
the desolate fellows they pretend to be, it is quite surprising how well
they get on. John was very pathetic on the subject of his dreary life,
and the deplorable makeshifts and apologetic contrivances it involved,
but he really seemed to make himself pretty comfortable. His rooms were
the perfection of neatness and convenience at any rate; and if he were
anything but comfortable, the fault was certainly not theirs.

He had no sooner ushered Tom and his sister into his best room (where
there was a beautiful little vase of fresh flowers on the table, all
ready for Ruth. Just as if he had expected her, Tom said), than, seizing
his hat, he bustled out again, in his most energetically bustling, way;
and presently came hurrying back, as they saw through the half-opened
door, attended by a fiery-faced matron attired in a crunched bonnet,
with particularly long strings to it hanging down her back; in
conjunction with whom he instantly began to lay the cloth for dinner,
polishing up the wine-glasses with his own hands, brightening the silver
top of the pepper-caster on his coat-sleeve, drawing corks and filling
decanters, with a skill and expedition that were quite dazzling. And
as if, in the course of this rubbing and polishing, he had rubbed an
enchanted lamp or a magic ring, obedient to which there were twenty
thousand supernatural slaves at least, suddenly there appeared a being
in a white waistcoat, carrying under his arm a napkin, and attended by
another being with an oblong box upon his head, from which a banquet,
piping hot, was taken out and set upon the table.

Salmon, lamb, peas, innocent young potatoes, a cool salad, sliced
cucumber, a tender duckling, and a tart--all there. They all came at the
right time. Where they came from, didn’t appear; but the oblong box was
constantly going and coming, and making its arrival known to the man in
the white waistcoat by bumping modestly against the outside of the door;
for, after its first appearance, it entered the room no more. He
was never surprised, this man; he never seemed to wonder at the
extraordinary things he found in the box, but took them out with a face
expressive of a steady purpose and impenetrable character, and put
them on the table. He was a kind man; gentle in his manners, and much
interested in what they ate and drank. He was a learned man, and knew
the flavour of John Westlock’s private sauces, which he softly and
feelingly described, as he handed the little bottles round. He was a
grave man, and a noiseless; for dinner being done, and wine and fruit
arranged upon the board, he vanished, box and all, like something that
had never been.

‘Didn’t I say he was a tremendous fellow in his housekeeping?’ cried
Tom. ‘Bless my soul! It’s wonderful.’

‘Ah, Miss Pinch,’ said John. ‘This is the bright side of the life we
lead in such a place. It would be a dismal life, indeed, if it didn’t
brighten up to-day’

‘Don’t believe a word he says,’ cried Tom. ‘He lives here like a
monarch, and wouldn’t change his mode of life for any consideration. He
only pretends to grumble.’

No, John really did not appear to pretend; for he was uncommonly earnest
in his desire to have it understood that he was as dull, solitary, and
uncomfortable on ordinary occasions as an unfortunate young man could,
in reason, be. It was a wretched life, he said, a miserable life. He
thought of getting rid of the chambers as soon as possible; and meant,
in fact, to put a bill up very shortly.

‘Well’ said Tom Pinch, ‘I don’t know where you can go, John, to be more
comfortable. That’s all I can say. What do YOU say, Ruth?’

Ruth trifled with the cherries on her plate, and said that she thought
Mr Westlock ought to be quite happy, and that she had no doubt he was.

Ah, foolish, panting, frightened little heart, how timidly she said it!

‘But you are forgetting what you had to tell, Tom; what occurred this
morning,’ she added in the same breath.

‘So I am,’ said Tom. ‘We have been so talkative on other topics that I
declare I have not had time to think of it. I’ll tell it you at once,
John, in case I should forget it altogether.’

On Tom’s relating what had passed upon the wharf, his friend was very
much surprised, and took such a great interest in the narrative as
Tom could not quite understand. He believed he knew the old lady whose
acquaintance they had made, he said; and that he might venture to say,
from their description of her, that her name was Gamp. But of what
nature the communication could have been which Tom had borne so
unexpectedly; why its delivery had been entrusted to him; how it
happened that the parties were involved together; and what secret lay
at the bottom of the whole affair; perplexed him very much. Tom had been
sure of his taking some interest in the matter; but was not prepared for
the strong interest he showed. It held John Westlock to the subject even
after Ruth had left the room; and evidently made him anxious to pursue
it further than as a mere subject of conversation.

‘I shall remonstrate with my landlord, of course,’ said Tom; ‘though he
is a very singular secret sort of man, and not likely to afford me much
satisfaction; even if he knew what was in the letter.’

‘Which you may swear he did,’ John interposed.

‘You think so?’

‘I am certain of it.’

‘Well!’ said Tom, ‘I shall remonstrate with him when I see him (he
goes in and out in a strange way, but I will try to catch him tomorrow
morning), on his having asked me to execute such an unpleasant
commission. And I have been thinking, John, that if I went down to
Mrs What’s-her-name’s in the City, where I was before, you know--Mrs
Todgers’s--to-morrow morning, I might find poor Mercy Pecksniff there,
perhaps, and be able to explain to her how I came to have any hand in
the business.’

‘You are perfectly right, Tom,’ returned his friend, after a short
interval of reflection. ‘You cannot do better. It is quite clear to me
that whatever the business is, there is little good in it; and it is so
desirable for you to disentangle yourself from any appearance of willful
connection with it, that I would counsel you to see her husband, if you
can, and wash your hands of it by a plain statement of the facts. I have
a misgiving that there is something dark at work here, Tom. I will tell
you why, at another time; when I have made an inquiry or two myself.’

All this sounded very mysterious to Tom Pinch. But as he knew he could
rely upon his friend, he resolved to follow this advice.

Ah, but it would have been a good thing to have had a coat of
invisibility, wherein to have watched little Ruth, when she was left
to herself in John Westlock’s chambers, and John and her brother were
talking thus, over their wine! The gentle way in which she tried to get
up a little conversation with the fiery-faced matron in the crunched
bonnet, who was waiting to attend her; after making a desperate rally
in regard of her dress, and attiring herself in a washed-out yellow gown
with sprigs of the same upon it, so that it looked like a tesselated
work of pats of butter. That would have been pleasant. The grim and
griffin-like inflexibility with which the fiery-faced matron repelled
these engaging advances, as proceeding from a hostile and dangerous
power, who could have no business there, unless it were to deprive her
of a customer, or suggest what became of the self-consuming tea and
sugar, and other general trifles. That would have been agreeable. The
bashful, winning, glorious curiosity, with which little Ruth, when
fiery-face was gone, peeped into the books and nick-nacks that
were lying about, and had a particular interest in some delicate
paper-matches on the chimney-piece; wondering who could have made them.
That would have been worth seeing. The faltering hand with which she
tied those flowers together; with which, almost blushing at her own
fair self as imaged in the glass, she arranged them in her breast, and
looking at them with her head aside, now half resolved to take them out
again, now half resolved to leave them where they were. That would have
been delightful!

John seemed to think it all delightful; for coming in with Tom to
tea, he took his seat beside her like a man enchanted. And when the
tea-service had been removed, and Tom, sitting down at the piano, became
absorbed in some of his old organ tunes, he was still beside her at the
open window, looking out upon the twilight.

There is little enough to see in Furnival’s Inn. It is a shady, quiet
place, echoing to the footsteps of the stragglers who have business
there; and rather monotonous and gloomy on summer evenings. What gave it
such a charm to them, that they remained at the window as unconscious of
the flight of time as Tom himself, the dreamer, while the melodies which
had so often soothed his spirit were hovering again about him! What
power infused into the fading light, the gathering darkness; the stars
that here and there appeared; the evening air, the City’s hum and stir,
the very chiming of the old church clocks; such exquisite enthrallment,
that the divinest regions of the earth spread out before their eyes
could not have held them captive in a stronger chain?

The shadows deepened, deepened, and the room became quite dark. Still
Tom’s fingers wandered over the keys of the piano, and still the window
had its pair of tenants. At length, her hand upon his shoulder, and her
breath upon his forehead, roused Tom from his reverie.

‘Dear me!’ he cried, desisting with a start. ‘I am afraid I have been
very inconsiderate and unpolite.’

Tom little thought how much consideration and politeness he had shown!

‘Sing something to us, my dear,’ said Tom, ‘let us hear your voice.
Come!’

John Westlock added his entreaties with such earnestness that a flinty
heart alone could have resisted them. Hers was not a flinty heart. Oh,
dear no! Quite another thing.

So down she sat, and in a pleasant voice began to sing the ballads Tom
loved well. Old rhyming stories, with here and there a pause for a few
simple chords, such as a harper might have sounded in the ancient time
while looking upward for the current of some half-remembered legend;
words of old poets, wedded to such measures that the strain of music
might have been the poet’s breath, giving utterance and expression to
his thoughts; and now a melody so joyous and light-hearted, that the
singer seemed incapable of sadness, until in her inconstancy (oh wicked
little singer!) she relapsed, and broke the listeners’ hearts again;
these were the simple means she used to please them. And that these
simple means prevailed, and she DID please them, let the still darkened
chamber, and its long-deferred illumination witness.

The candles came at last, and it was time for moving homeward. Cutting
paper carefully, and rolling it about the stalks of those same flowers,
occasioned some delay; but even this was done in time, and Ruth was
ready.

‘Good night!’ said Tom. ‘A memorable and delightful visit, John! Good
night!’

John thought he would walk with them.

‘No, no. Don’t!’ said Tom. ‘What nonsense! We can get home very well
alone. I couldn’t think of taking you out.’

But John said he would rather.

‘Are you sure you would rather?’ said Tom. ‘I am afraid you only say so
out of politeness.’

John being quite sure, gave his arm to Ruth, and led her out.
Fiery-face, who was again in attendance, acknowledged her departure with
so cold a curtsey that it was hardly visible; and cut Tom, dead.

Their host was bent on walking the whole distance, and would not listen
to Tom’s dissuasions. Happy time, happy walk, happy parting, happy
dreams! But there are some sweet day-dreams, so there are that put the
visions of the night to shame.

Busily the Temple fountain murmured in the moonlight, while Ruth lay
sleeping, with her flowers beside her; and John Westlock sketched a
portrait--whose?--from memory.



CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

IN WHICH MISS PECKSNIFF MAKES LOVE, MR JONAS MAKES WRATH, MRS GAMP MAKES
TEA, AND MR CHUFFEY MAKES BUSINESS


On the next day’s official duties coming to a close, Tom hurried home
without losing any time by the way; and after dinner and a short rest
sallied out again, accompanied by Ruth, to pay his projected visit
to Todgers’s. Tom took Ruth with him, not only because it was a great
pleasure to him to have her for his companion whenever he could, but
because he wished her to cherish and comfort poor Merry; which she, for
her own part (having heard the wretched history of that young wife from
Tom), was all eagerness to do.

‘She was so glad to see me,’ said Tom, ‘that I am sure she will be
glad to see you. Your sympathy is certain to be much more delicate and
acceptable than mine.’

‘I am very far from being certain of that, Tom,’ she replied; ‘and
indeed you do yourself an injustice. Indeed you do. But I hope she may
like me, Tom.’

‘Oh, she is sure to do that!’ cried Tom, confidently.

‘What a number of friends I should have, if everybody was of your way of
thinking. Shouldn’t I, Tom, dear?’ said his little sister pinching him
upon the cheek.

Tom laughed, and said that with reference to this particular case he had
no doubt at all of finding a disciple in Merry. ‘For you women,’ said
Tom, ‘you women, my dear, are so kind, and in your kindness have such
nice perception; you know so well how to be affectionate and full of
solicitude without appearing to be; your gentleness of feeling is like
your touch so light and easy, that the one enables you to deal with
wounds of the mind as tenderly as the other enables you to deal with
wounds of the body. You are such--’

‘My goodness, Tom!’ his sister interposed. ‘You ought to fall in love
immediately.’

Tom put this observation off good humouredly, but somewhat gravely too;
and they were soon very chatty again on some other subject.

As they were passing through a street in the City, not very far from Mrs
Todgers’s place of residence, Ruth checked Tom before the window of
a large Upholstery and Furniture Warehouse, to call his attention to
something very magnificent and ingenious, displayed there to the best
advantage, for the admiration and temptation of the public. Tom had
hazarded some most erroneous and extravagantly wrong guess in relation
to the price of this article, and had joined his sister in laughing
heartily at his mistake, when he pressed her arm in his, and pointed to
two persons at a little distance, who were looking in at the same window
with a deep interest in the chests of drawers and tables.

‘Hush!’ Tom whispered. ‘Miss Pecksniff, and the young gentleman to whom
she is going to be married.’

‘Why does he look as if he was going to be buried, Tom?’ inquired his
little sister.

‘Why, he is naturally a dismal young gentleman, I believe,’ said Tom
‘but he is very civil and inoffensive.’

‘I suppose they are furnishing their house,’ whispered Ruth.

‘Yes, I suppose they are,’ replied Tom. ‘We had better avoid speaking to
them.’

They could not very well avoid looking at them, however, especially
as some obstruction on the pavement, at a little distance, happened to
detain them where they were for a few moments. Miss Pecksniff had quite
the air of having taken the unhappy Moddle captive, and brought him
up to the contemplation of the furniture like a lamb to the altar.
He offered no resistance, but was perfectly resigned and quiet. The
melancholy depicted in the turn of his languishing head, and in his
dejected attitude, was extreme; and though there was a full-sized
four-post bedstead in the window, such a tear stood trembling in his eye
as seemed to blot it out.

‘Augustus, my love,’ said Miss Pecksniff, ‘ask the price of the eight
rosewood chairs, and the loo table.’

‘Perhaps they are ordered already,’ said Augustus. ‘Perhaps they are
Another’s.’

‘They can make more like them, if they are,’ rejoined Miss Pecksniff.

‘No, no, they can’t,’ said Moddle. ‘It’s impossible!’

He appeared, for the moment, to be quite overwhelmed and stupefied by
the prospect of his approaching happiness; but recovering, entered the
shop. He returned immediately, saying in a tone of despair

‘Twenty-four pound ten!’

Miss Pecksniff, turning to receive this announcement, became conscious
of the observation of Tom Pinch and his sister.

‘Oh, really!’ cried Miss Pecksniff, glancing about her, as if for some
convenient means of sinking into the earth. ‘Upon my word, I--there
never was such a--to think that one should be so very--Mr Augustus
Moddle, Miss Pinch!’

Miss Pecksniff was quite gracious to Miss Pinch in this triumphant
introduction; exceedingly gracious. She was more than gracious; she was
kind and cordial. Whether the recollection of the old service Tom had
rendered her in knocking Mr Jonas on the head had wrought this change in
her opinions; or whether her separation from her parent had reconciled
her to all human-kind, or to all that interesting portion of human-kind
which was not friendly to him; or whether the delight of having some new
female acquaintance to whom to communicate her interesting prospects was
paramount to every other consideration; cordial and kind Miss Pecksniff
was. And twice Miss Pecksniff kissed Miss Pinch upon the cheek.

‘Augustus--Mr Pinch, you know. My dear girl!’ said Miss Pecksniff,
aside. ‘I never was so ashamed in my life.’

Ruth begged her not to think of it.

‘I mind your brother less than anybody else,’ simpered Miss Pecksniff.
‘But the indelicacy of meeting any gentleman under such circumstances!
Augustus, my child, did you--’

Here Miss Pecksniff whispered in his ear. The suffering Moddle repeated:

‘Twenty-four pound ten!’

‘Oh, you silly man! I don’t mean them,’ said Miss Pecksniff. ‘I am
speaking of the--’

Here she whispered him again.

‘If it’s the same patterned chintz as that in the window; thirty-two,
twelve, six,’ said Moddle, with a sigh. ‘And very dear.’

Miss Pecksniff stopped him from giving any further explanation by laying
her hand upon his lips, and betraying a soft embarrassment. She then
asked Tom Pinch which way he was going.

‘I was going to see if I could find your sister,’ answered Tom, ‘to whom
I wished to say a few words. We were going to Mrs Todgers’s, where I had
the pleasure of seeing her before.’

‘It’s of no use your going on, then,’ said Cherry, ‘for we have not
long left there; and I know she is not at home. But I’ll take you to my
sister’s house, if you please. Augustus--Mr Moddle, I mean--and myself,
are on our way to tea there, now. You needn’t think of HIM,’ she added,
nodding her head as she observed some hesitation on Tom’s part. ‘He is
not at home.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Tom.

‘Oh, I am quite sure of that. I don’t want any MORE revenge,’ said Miss
Pecksniff, expressively. ‘But, really, I must beg you two gentlemen to
walk on, and allow me to follow with Miss Pinch. My dear, I never was so
taken by surprise!’

In furtherance of this bashful arrangement, Moddle gave his arm to Tom;
and Miss Pecksniff linked her own in Ruth’s.

‘Of course, my love,’ said Miss Pecksniff, ‘it would be useless for me
to disguise, after what you have seen, that I am about to be united to
the gentleman who is walking with your brother. It would be in vain
to conceal it. What do you think of him? Pray, let me have your candid
opinion.’

Ruth intimated that, as far as she could judge, he was a very eligible
swain.

‘I am curious to know,’ said Miss Pecksniff, with loquacious frankness,
‘whether you have observed, or fancied, in this very short space of
time, that he is of a rather melancholy turn?’

‘So very short a time,’ Ruth pleaded.

‘No, no; but don’t let that interfere with your answer,’ returned Miss
Pecksniff. ‘I am curious to hear what you say.’

Ruth acknowledged that he had impressed her at first sight as looking
‘rather low.’

‘No, really?’ said Miss Pecksniff. ‘Well! that is quite remarkable!
Everybody says the same. Mrs Todgers says the same; and Augustus informs
me that it is quite a joke among the gentlemen in the house. Indeed, but
for the positive commands I have laid upon him, I believe it would have
been the occasion of loaded fire-arms being resorted to more than once.
What do you think is the cause of his appearance of depression?’

Ruth thought of several things; such as his digestion, his tailor, his
mother, and the like. But hesitating to give utterance to any one of
them, she refrained from expressing an opinion.

‘My dear,’ said Miss Pecksniff; ‘I shouldn’t wish it to be known, but I
don’t mind mentioning it to you, having known your brother for so many
years--I refused Augustus three times. He is of a most amiable and
sensitive nature, always ready to shed tears if you look at him, which
is extremely charming; and he has never recovered the effect of that
cruelty. For it WAS cruel,’ said Miss Pecksniff, with a self-conviction
candour that might have adorned the diadem of her own papa. ‘There is
no doubt of it. I look back upon my conduct now with blushes. I always
liked him. I felt that he was not to me what the crowd of young men who
had made proposals had been, but something very different. Then what
right had I to refuse him three times?’

‘It was a severe trial of his fidelity, no doubt,’ said Ruth.

‘My dear,’ returned Miss Pecksniff. ‘It was wrong. But such is the
caprice and thoughtlessness of our sex! Let me be a warning to you.
Don’t try the feelings of any one who makes you an offer, as I have
tried the feelings of Augustus; but if you ever feel towards a person
as I really felt towards him, at the very time when I was driving him
to distraction, let that feeling find expression, if that person throws
himself at your feet, as Augustus Moddle did at mine. Think,’ said Miss
Pecksniff, ‘what my feelings would have been, if I had goaded him to
suicide, and it had got into the papers!’

Ruth observed that she would have been full of remorse, no doubt.

‘Remorse!’ cried Miss Pecksniff, in a sort of snug and comfortable
penitence. ‘What my remorse is at this moment, even after making
reparation by accepting him, it would be impossible to tell you! Looking
back upon my giddy self, my dear, now that I am sobered down and
made thoughtful, by treading on the very brink of matrimony; and
contemplating myself as I was when I was like what you are now; I
shudder. I shudder. What is the consequence of my past conduct? Until
Augustus leads me to the altar he is not sure of me. I have blighted and
withered the affections of his heart to that extent that he is not sure
of me. I see that preying on his mind and feeding on his vitals. What
are the reproaches of my conscience, when I see this in the man I love!’

Ruth endeavoured to express some sense of her unbounded and flattering
confidence; and presumed that she was going to be married soon.

‘Very soon indeed,’ returned Miss Pecksniff. ‘As soon as our house is
ready. We are furnishing now as fast as we can.’

In the same vein of confidence Miss Pecksniff ran through a general
inventory of the articles that were already bought with the articles
that remained to be purchased; what garments she intended to be married
in, and where the ceremony was to be performed; and gave Miss Pinch, in
short (as she told her), early and exclusive information on all points
of interest connected with the event.

While this was going forward in the rear, Tom and Mr Moddle walked on,
arm in arm, in the front, in a state of profound silence, which Tom at
last broke; after thinking for a long time what he could say that should
refer to an indifferent topic, in respect of which he might rely, with
some degree of certainty, on Mr Moddle’s bosom being unruffled.

‘I wonder,’ said Tom, ‘that in these crowded streets the foot-passengers
are not oftener run over.’

Mr Moddle, with a dark look, replied:

‘The drivers won’t do it.’

‘Do you mean?’ Tom began--

‘That there are some men,’ interrupted Moddle, with a hollow laugh, ‘who
can’t get run over. They live a charmed life. Coal waggons recoil from
them, and even cabs refuse to run them down. Ah!’ said Augustus, marking
Tom’s astonishment. ‘There are such men. One of ‘em is a friend of
mine.’

‘Upon my word and honour,’ thought Tom, ‘this young gentleman is in
a state of mind which is very serious indeed!’ Abandoning all idea of
conversation, he did not venture to say another word, but he was careful
to keep a tight hold upon Augustus’s arm, lest he should fly into the
road, and making another and a more successful attempt, should get up a
private little Juggernaut before the eyes of his betrothed. Tom was
so afraid of his committing this rash act, that he had scarcely ever
experienced such mental relief as when they arrived in safety at Mrs
Jonas Chuzzlewit’s house.

‘Walk up, pray, Mr Pinch,’ said Miss Pecksniff. For Tom halted,
irresolutely, at the door.

‘I am doubtful whether I should be welcome,’ replied Tom, ‘or, I ought
rather to say, I have no doubt about it. I will send up a message, I
think.’

‘But what nonsense that is!’ returned Miss Pecksniff, speaking apart
to Tom. ‘He is not at home, I am certain. I know he is not; and Merry
hasn’t the least idea that you ever--’

‘No,’ interrupted Tom. ‘Nor would I have her know it, on any account. I
am not so proud of that scuffle, I assure you.’

‘Ah, but then you are so modest, you see,’ returned Miss Pecksniff, with
a smile. ‘But pray walk up. If you don’t wish her to know it, and do
wish to speak to her, pray walk up. Pray walk up, Miss Pinch. Don’t
stand here.’

Tom still hesitated for he felt that he was in an awkward position. But
Cherry passing him at this juncture, and leading his sister upstairs,
and the house-door being at the same time shut behind them, he followed
without quite knowing whether it was well or ill-judged so to do.

‘Merry, my darling!’ said the fair Miss Pecksniff, opening the door of
the usual sitting-room. ‘Here are Mr Pinch and his sister come to see
you! I thought we should find you here, Mrs Todgers! How do you do, Mrs
Gamp? And how do you do, Mr Chuffey, though it’s of no use asking you
the question, I am well aware.’

Honouring each of these parties, as she severally addressed them, with
an acid smile, Miss Charity presented ‘Mr Moddle.’

‘I believe you have seen HIM before,’ she pleasantly observed.
‘Augustus, my sweet child, bring me a chair.’

The sweet child did as he was told; and was then about to retire into a
corner to mourn in secret, when Miss Charity, calling him in an audible
whisper a ‘little pet,’ gave him leave to come and sit beside her. It
is to be hoped, for the general cheerfulness of mankind, that such a
doleful little pet was never seen as Mr Moddle looked when he complied.
So despondent was his temper, that he showed no outward thrill of
ecstasy when Miss Pecksniff placed her lily hand in his, and concealed
this mark of her favour from the vulgar gaze by covering it with a
corner of her shawl. Indeed, he was infinitely more rueful then than
he had been before; and, sitting uncomfortably upright in his chair,
surveyed the company with watery eyes, which seemed to say, without
the aid of language, ‘Oh, good gracious! look here! Won’t some kind
Christian help me!’

But the ecstasies of Mrs Gamp were sufficient to have furnished forth
a score of young lovers; and they were chiefly awakened by the sight of
Tom Pinch and his sister. Mrs Gamp was a lady of that happy temperament
which can be ecstatic without any other stimulating cause than a general
desire to establish a large and profitable connection. She added daily
so many strings to her bow, that she made a perfect harp of it; and upon
that instrument she now began to perform an extemporaneous concerto.

‘Why, goodness me!’ she said, ‘Mrs Chuzzlewit! To think as I should see
beneath this blessed ‘ouse, which well I know it, Miss Pecksniff, my
sweet young lady, to be a ‘ouse as there is not a many like, worse luck,
and wishin’ it were not so, which then this tearful walley would be
changed into a flowerin’ guardian, Mr Chuffey; to think as I should see
beneath this indiwidgle roof, identically comin’, Mr Pinch (I take the
liberty, though almost unbeknown), and do assure you of it, sir, the
smilinest and sweetest face as ever, Mrs Chuzzlewit, I see exceptin’
yourn, my dear good lady, and YOUR good lady’s too, sir, Mr Moddle, if
I may make so bold as speak so plain of what is plain enough to them as
needn’t look through millstones, Mrs Todgers, to find out wot is wrote
upon the wall behind. Which no offence is meant, ladies and gentlemen;
none bein’ took, I hope. To think as I should see that smilinest and
sweetest face which me and another friend of mine, took notice of among
the packages down London Bridge, in this promiscous place, is a surprige
in-deed!’

Having contrived, in this happy manner, to invest every member of her
audience with an individual share and immediate personal interest in
her address, Mrs Gamp dropped several curtseys to Ruth, and smilingly
shaking her head a great many times, pursued the thread of her
discourse:

‘Now, ain’t we rich in beauty this here joyful arternoon, I’m sure. I
knows a lady, which her name, I’ll not deceive you, Mrs Chuzzlewit, is
Harris, her husband’s brother bein’ six foot three, and marked with
a mad bull in Wellington boots upon his left arm, on account of his
precious mother havin’ been worrited by one into a shoemaker’s shop,
when in a sitiwation which blessed is the man as has his quiver full of
sech, as many times I’ve said to Gamp when words has roge betwixt us on
account of the expense--and often have I said to Mrs Harris, “Oh, Mrs
Harris, ma’am! your countenance is quite a angel’s!” Which, but
for Pimples, it would be. “No, Sairey Gamp,” says she, “you best of
hard-working and industrious creeturs as ever was underpaid at any
price, which underpaid you are, quite diff’rent. Harris had it done
afore marriage at ten and six,” she says, “and wore it faithful next his
heart till the colour run, when the money was declined to be give back,
and no arrangement could be come to. But he never said it was a angel’s,
Sairey, wotever he might have thought.” If Mrs Harris’s husband was
here now,’ said Mrs Gamp, looking round, and chuckling as she dropped
a general curtsey, ‘he’d speak out plain, he would, and his dear wife
would be the last to blame him! For if ever a woman lived as know’d not
wot it was to form a wish to pizon them as had good looks, and had no
reagion give her by the best of husbands, Mrs Harris is that ev’nly
dispogician!’

With these words the worthy woman, who appeared to have dropped in
to take tea as a delicate little attention, rather than to have any
engagement on the premises in an official capacity, crossed to Mr
Chuffey, who was seated in the same corner as of old, and shook him by
the shoulder.

‘Rouge yourself, and look up! Come!’ said Mrs Gamp. ‘Here’s company, Mr
Chuffey.’

‘I am sorry for it,’ cried the old man, looking humbly round the room.
‘I know I’m in the way. I ask pardon, but I’ve nowhere else to go to.
Where is she?’

Merry went to him.

‘Ah!’ said the old man, patting her on the check. ‘Here she is. Here she
is! She’s never hard on poor old Chuffey. Poor old Chuff!’

As she took her seat upon a low chair by the old man’s side, and put
herself within the reach of his hand, she looked up once at Tom. It
was a sad look that she cast upon him, though there was a faint smile
trembling on her face. It was a speaking look, and Tom knew what it
said. ‘You see how misery has changed me. I can feel for a dependant
NOW, and set some value on his attachment.’

‘Aye, aye!’ cried Chuffey in a soothing tone. ‘Aye, aye, aye! Never mind
him. It’s hard to hear, but never mind him. He’ll die one day. There
are three hundred and sixty-five days in the year--three hundred and
sixty-six in leap year--and he may die on any one of ‘em.’

‘You’re a wearing old soul, and that’s the sacred truth,’ said Mrs Gamp,
contemplating him from a little distance with anything but favour, as he
continued to mutter to himself. ‘It’s a pity that you don’t know wot you
say, for you’d tire your own patience out if you did, and fret yourself
into a happy releage for all as knows you.’

‘His son,’ murmured the old man, lifting up his hand. ‘His son!’

‘Well, I’m sure!’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘you’re a-settlin’ of it, Mr Chuffey.
To your satigefaction, sir, I hope. But I wouldn’t lay a new pincushion
on it myself, sir, though you ARE so well informed. Drat the old
creetur, he’s a-layin’ down the law tolerable confident, too! A deal he
knows of sons! or darters either! Suppose you was to favour us with some
remarks on twins, sir, WOULD you be so good!’

The bitter and indignant sarcasm which Mrs Gamp conveyed into these
taunts was altogether lost on the unconscious Chuffey, who appeared to
be as little cognizant of their delivery as of his having given Mrs
Gamp offence. But that high-minded woman being sensitively alive to any
invasion of her professional province, and imagining that Mr Chuffey had
given utterance to some prediction on the subject of sons, which ought
to have emanated in the first instance from herself as the only lawful
authority, or which should at least have been on no account proclaimed
without her sanction and concurrence, was not so easily appeased. She
continued to sidle at Mr Chuffey with looks of sharp hostility, and to
defy him with many other ironical remarks, uttered in that low key
which commonly denotes suppressed indignation; until the entrance of
the teaboard, and a request from Mrs Jonas that she would make tea at a
side-table for the party that had unexpectedly assembled, restored her
to herself. She smiled again, and entered on her ministration with her
own particular urbanity.

‘And quite a family it is to make tea for,’ said Mrs Gamp; ‘and wot a
happiness to do it! My good young ‘ooman’--to the servant-girl--‘p’raps
somebody would like to try a new-laid egg or two, not biled too hard.
Likeways, a few rounds o’ buttered toast, first cuttin’ off the crust,
in consequence of tender teeth, and not too many of ‘em; which Gamp
himself, Mrs Chuzzlewit, at one blow, being in liquor, struck out four,
two single, and two double, as was took by Mrs Harris for a keepsake,
and is carried in her pocket at this present hour, along with two
cramp-bones, a bit o’ ginger, and a grater like a blessed infant’s shoe,
in tin, with a little heel to put the nutmeg in; as many times I’ve seen
and said, and used for candle when required, within the month.’

As the privileges of the side-table--besides including the small
prerogatives of sitting next the toast, and taking two cups of tea to
other people’s one, and always taking them at a crisis, that is to
say, before putting fresh water into the tea-pot, and after it had been
standing for some time--also comprehended a full view of the company,
and an opportunity of addressing them as from a rostrum, Mrs Gamp
discharged the functions entrusted to her with extreme good-humour and
affability. Sometimes resting her saucer on the palm of her outspread
hand, and supporting her elbow on the table, she stopped between her
sips of tea to favour the circle with a smile, a wink, a roll of the
head, or some other mark of notice; and at those periods her countenance
was lighted up with a degree of intelligence and vivacity, which it was
almost impossible to separate from the benignant influence of distilled
waters.

But for Mrs Gamp, it would have been a curiously silent party. Miss
Pecksniff only spoke to her Augustus, and to him in whispers. Augustus
spoke to nobody, but sighed for every one, and occasionally gave himself
such a sounding slap upon the forehead as would make Mrs Todgers, who
was rather nervous, start in her chair with an involuntary exclamation.
Mrs Todgers was occupied in knitting, and seldom spoke. Poor Merry held
the hand of cheerful little Ruth between her own, and listening with
evident pleasure to all she said, but rarely speaking herself, sometimes
smiled, and sometimes kissed her on the cheek, and sometimes turned
aside to hide the tears that trembled in her eyes. Tom felt this change
in her so much, and was so glad to see how tenderly Ruth dealt with her,
and how she knew and answered to it, that he had not the heart to make
any movement towards their departure, although he had long since given
utterance to all he came to say.

The old clerk, subsiding into his usual state, remained profoundly
silent, while the rest of the little assembly were thus occupied, intent
upon the dreams, whatever they might be, which hardly seemed to stir
the surface of his sluggish thoughts. The bent of these dull fancies
combining probably with the silent feasting that was going on about him,
and some struggling recollection of the last approach to revelry he had
witnessed, suggested a strange question to his mind. He looked round
upon a sudden, and said:

‘Who’s lying dead upstairs?’

‘No one,’ said Merry, turning to him. ‘What is the matter? We are all
here.’

‘All here!’ cried the old man. ‘All here! Where is he then--my old
master, Mr Chuzzlewit, who had the only son? Where is he?’

‘Hush! Hush!’ said Merry, speaking kindly to him. ‘That happened long
ago. Don’t you recollect?’

‘Recollect!’ rejoined the old man, with a cry of grief. ‘As if I could
forget! As if I ever could forget!’

He put his hand up to his face for a moment; and then repeated turning
round exactly as before:

‘Who’s lying dead upstairs?’

‘No one!’ said Merry.

At first he gazed angrily upon her, as upon a stranger who endeavoured
to deceive him; but peering into her face, and seeing that it was indeed
she, he shook his head in sorrowful compassion.

‘You think not. But they don’t tell you. No, no, poor thing! They don’t
tell you. Who are these, and why are they merry-making here, if there is
no one dead? Foul play! Go see who it is!’

She made a sign to them not to speak to him, which indeed they had
little inclination to do; and remained silent herself. So did he for
a short time; but then he repeated the same question with an eagerness
that had a peculiar terror in it.

‘There’s some one dead,’ he said, ‘or dying; and I want to knows who it
is. Go see, go see! Where’s Jonas?’

‘In the country,’ she replied.

The old man gazed at her as if he doubted what she said, or had not
heard her; and, rising from his chair, walked across the room and
upstairs, whispering as he went, ‘Foul play!’ They heard his footsteps
overhead, going up into that corner of the room in which the bed stood
(it was there old Anthony had died); and then they heard him coming down
again immediately. His fancy was not so strong or wild that it pictured
to him anything in the deserted bedchamber which was not there; for he
returned much calmer, and appeared to have satisfied himself.

‘They don’t tell you,’ he said to Merry in his quavering voice, as
he sat down again, and patted her upon the head. ‘They don’t tell me
either; but I’ll watch, I’ll watch. They shall not hurt you; don’t be
frightened. When you have sat up watching, I have sat up watching too.
Aye, aye, I have!’ he piped out, clenching his weak, shrivelled hand.
‘Many a night I have been ready!’

He said this with such trembling gaps and pauses in his want of breath,
and said it in his jealous secrecy so closely in her ear, that little
or nothing of it was understood by the visitors. But they had heard
and seen enough of the old man to be disquieted, and to have left
their seats and gathered about him; thereby affording Mrs Gamp,
whose professional coolness was not so easily disturbed, an eligible
opportunity for concentrating the whole resources of her powerful mind
and appetite upon the toast and butter, tea and eggs. She had brought
them to bear upon those viands with such vigour that her face was in the
highest state of inflammation, when she now (there being nothing left to
eat or drink) saw fit to interpose.

‘Why, highty tighty, sir!’ cried Mrs Gamp, ‘is these your manners? You
want a pitcher of cold water throw’d over you to bring you round; that’s
my belief, and if you was under Betsey Prig you’d have it, too, I do
assure you, Mr Chuffey. Spanish Flies is the only thing to draw this
nonsense out of you; and if anybody wanted to do you a kindness, they’d
clap a blister of ‘em on your head, and put a mustard poultige on your
back. ‘Who’s dead, indeed! It wouldn’t be no grievous loss if some one
was, I think!’

‘He’s quiet now, Mrs Gamp,’ said Merry. ‘Don’t disturb him.’

‘Oh, bother the old wictim, Mrs Chuzzlewit,’ replied that zealous lady,
‘I ain’t no patience with him. You give him his own way too much by
half. A worritin’ wexagious creetur!’

No doubt with the view of carrying out the precepts she enforced, and
‘bothering the old wictim’ in practice as well as in theory, Mrs Gamp
took him by the collar of his coat, and gave him some dozen or two of
hearty shakes backward and forward in his chair; that exercise being
considered by the disciples of the Prig school of nursing (who are very
numerous among professional ladies) as exceedingly conducive to repose,
and highly beneficial to the performance of the nervous functions.
Its effect in this instance was to render the patient so giddy and
addle-headed, that he could say nothing more; which Mrs Gamp regarded as
the triumph of her art.

‘There!’ she said, loosening the old man’s cravat, in consequence of his
being rather black in the face, after this scientific treatment. ‘Now,
I hope, you’re easy in your mind. If you should turn at all faint we
can soon rewive you, sir, I promige you. Bite a person’s thumbs, or
turn their fingers the wrong way,’ said Mrs Gamp, smiling with the
consciousness of at once imparting pleasure and instruction to her
auditors, ‘and they comes to, wonderful, Lord bless you!’

As this excellent woman had been formerly entrusted with the care of Mr
Chuffey on a previous occasion, neither Mrs Jonas nor anybody else had
the resolution to interfere directly with her mode of treatment;
though all present (Tom Pinch and his sister especially) appeared to be
disposed to differ from her views. For such is the rash boldness of the
uninitiated, that they will frequently set up some monstrous abstract
principle, such as humanity, or tenderness, or the like idle folly, in
obstinate defiance of all precedent and usage; and will even venture to
maintain the same against the persons who have made the precedents
and established the usage, and who must therefore be the best and most
impartial judges of the subject.

‘Ah, Mr Pinch!’ said Miss Pecksniff. ‘It all comes of this unfortunate
marriage. If my sister had not been so precipitate, and had not united
herself to a Wretch, there would have been no Mr Chuffey in the house.’

‘Hush!’ cried Tom. ‘She’ll hear you.’

‘I should be very sorry if she did hear me, Mr Pinch,’ said Cherry,
raising her voice a little; ‘for it is not in my nature to add to the
uneasiness of any person; far less of my own sister. I know what a
sister’s duties are, Mr Pinch, and I hope I always showed it in my
practice. Augustus, my dear child, find my pocket-handkerchief, and give
it to me.’

Augustus obeyed, and took Mrs Todgers aside to pour his griefs into her
friendly bosom.

‘I am sure, Mr Pinch,’ said Charity, looking after her betrothed and
glancing at her sister, ‘that I ought to be very grateful for the
blessings I enjoy, and those which are yet in store for me. When I
contrast Augustus’--here she was modest and embarrased--‘who, I don’t
mind saying to you, is all softness, mildness, and devotion, with the
detestable man who is my sister’s husband; and when I think, Mr Pinch,
that in the dispensations of this world, our cases might have been
reversed; I have much to be thankful for, indeed, and much to make me
humble and contented.’

Contented she might have been, but humble she assuredly was not. Her
face and manner experienced something so widely different from humility,
that Tom could not help understanding and despising the base motives
that were working in her breast. He turned away, and said to Ruth, that
it was time for them to go.

‘I will write to your husband,’ said Tom to Merry, ‘and explain to him,
as I would have done if I had met him here, that if he has sustained any
inconvenience through my means, it is not my fault; a postman not being
more innocent of the news he brings, than I was when I handed him that
letter.’

‘I thank you!’ said Merry. ‘It may do some good.’

She parted tenderly from Ruth, who with her brother was in the act of
leaving the room, when a key was heard in the lock of the door below,
and immediately afterwards a quick footstep in the passage. Tom stopped,
and looked at Merry.

It was Jonas, she said timidly.

‘I had better not meet him on the stairs, perhaps,’ said Tom, drawing
his sister’s arm through his, and coming back a step or two. ‘I’ll wait
for him here, a moment.’

He had scarcely said it when the door opened, and Jonas entered. His
wife came forward to receive him; but he put her aside with his hand,
and said in a surly tone:

‘I didn’t know you’d got a party.’

As he looked, at the same time, either by accident or design, towards
Miss Pecksniff; and as Miss Pecksniff was only too delighted to quarrel
with him, she instantly resented it.

‘Oh dear!’ she said, rising. ‘Pray don’t let us intrude upon your
domestic happiness! That would be a pity. We have taken tea here, sir,
in your absence; but if you will have the goodness to send us a note of
the expense, receipted, we shall be happy to pay it. Augustus, my love,
we will go, if you please. Mrs Todgers, unless you wish to remain here,
we shall be happy to take you with us. It would be a pity, indeed, to
spoil the bliss which this gentleman always brings with him, especially
into his own home.’

‘Charity! Charity!’ remonstrated her sister, in such a heartfelt tone
that she might have been imploring her to show the cardinal virtue whose
name she bore.

‘Merry, my dear, I am much obliged to you for your advice,’ returned
Miss Pecksniff, with a stately scorn--by the way, she had not been
offered any--‘but I am not his slave--’

‘No, nor wouldn’t have been if you could,’ interrupted Jonas. ‘We know
all about it.’

‘WHAT did you say, sir?’ cried Miss Pecksniff, sharply.

‘Didn’t you hear?’ retorted Jonas, lounging down upon a chair. ‘I am not
a-going to say it again. If you like to stay, you may stay. If you like
to go, you may go. But if you stay, please to be civil.’

‘Beast!’ cried Miss Pecksniff, sweeping past him. ‘Augustus! He is
beneath your notice!’ Augustus had been making some faint and sickly
demonstration of shaking his fist. ‘Come away, child,’ screamed Miss
Pecksniff, ‘I command you!’

The scream was elicited from her by Augustus manifesting an intention to
return and grapple with him. But Miss Pecksniff giving the fiery youth
a pull, and Mrs Todgers giving him a push they all three tumbled out
of the room together, to the music of Miss Pecksniff’s shrill
remonstrances.

All this time Jonas had seen nothing of Tom and his sister; for they
were almost behind the door when he opened it, and he had sat down with
his back towards them, and had purposely kept his eyes upon the opposite
side of the street during his altercation with Miss Pecksniff, in order
that his seeming carelessness might increase the exasperation of that
wronged young damsel. His wife now faltered out that Tom had been
waiting to see him; and Tom advanced.

The instant he presented himself, Jonas got up from his chair, and
swearing a great oath, caught it in his grasp, as if he would have
felled Tom to the ground with it. As he most unquestionably would have
done, but that his very passion and surprise made him irresolute, and
gave Tom, in his calmness, an opportunity of being heard.

‘You have no cause to be violent, sir,’ said Tom. ‘Though what I wish to
say relates to your own affairs, I know nothing of them, and desire to
know nothing of them.’

Jonas was too enraged to speak. He held the door open; and stamping his
foot upon the ground, motioned Tom away.

‘As you cannot suppose,’ said Tom, ‘that I am here with any view of
conciliating you or pleasing myself, I am quite indifferent to your
reception of me, or your dismissal of me. Hear what I have to say, if
you are not a madman! I gave you a letter the other day, when you were
about to go abroad.’

‘You Thief, you did!’ retorted Jonas. ‘I’ll pay you for the carriage of
it one day, and settle an old score besides. I will!’

‘Tut, tut,’ said Tom, ‘you needn’t waste words or threats. I wish you
to understand--plainly because I would rather keep clear of you and
everything that concerns you: not because I have the least apprehension
of your doing me any injury: which would be weak indeed--that I am no
party to the contents of that letter. That I know nothing of it. That I
was not even aware that it was to be delivered to you; and that I had it
from--’

‘By the Lord!’ cried Jonas, fiercely catching up the chair, ‘I’ll knock
your brains out, if you speak another word.’

Tom, nevertheless, persisting in his intention, and opening his lips to
speak again, Jonas set upon him like a savage; and in the quickness and
ferocity of his attack would have surely done him some grievous injury,
defenceless as he was, and embarrassed by having his frightened sister
clinging to his arm, if Merry had not run between them, crying to
Tom for the love of Heaven to leave the house. The agony of this poor
creature, the terror of his sister, the impossibility of making himself
audible, and the equal impossibility of bearing up against Mrs Gamp, who
threw herself upon him like a feather-bed, and forced him backwards down
the stairs by the mere oppression of her dead weight, prevailed. Tom
shook the dust of that house off his feet, without having mentioned
Nadgett’s name.

If the name could have passed his lips; if Jonas, in the insolence of
his vile nature, had never roused him to do that old act of manliness,
for which (and not for his last offence) he hated him with such
malignity; if Jonas could have learned, as then he could and would have
learned, through Tom’s means, what unsuspected spy there was upon him;
he would have been saved from the commission of a Guilty Deed, then
drawing on towards its black accomplishment. But the fatality was of
his own working; the pit was of his own digging; the gloom that gathered
round him was the shadow of his own life.

His wife had closed the door, and thrown herself before it, on the
ground, upon her knees. She held up her hands to him now, and besought
him not to be harsh with her, for she had interposed in fear of
bloodshed.

‘So, so!’ said Jonas, looking down upon her, as he fetched his breath.
‘These are your friends, are they, when I am away? You plot and tamper
with this sort of people, do you?’

‘No, indeed! I have no knowledge of these secrets, and no clue to
their meaning. I have never seen him since I left home but once--but
twice--before to-day.’

‘Oh!’ sneered Jonas, catching at this correction. ‘But once, but twice,
eh? Which do you mean? Twice and once, perhaps. Three times! How many
more, you lying jade?’

As he made an angry motion with his hand, she shrunk down hastily. A
suggestive action! Full of a cruel truth!

‘How many more times?’ he repeated.

‘No more. The other morning, and to-day, and once besides.’

He was about to retort upon her, when the clock struck. He started
stopped, and listened; appearing to revert to some engagement, or to
some other subject, a secret within his own breast, recalled to him by
this record of the progress of the hours.

‘Don’t lie there! Get up!’

Having helped her to rise, or rather hauled her up by the arm, he went
on to say:

‘Listen to me, young lady; and don’t whine when you have no occasion, or
I may make some for you. If I find him in my house again, or find that
you have seen him in anybody else’s house, you’ll repent it. If you are
not deaf and dumb to everything that concerns me, unless you have my
leave to hear and speak, you’ll repent it. If you don’t obey exactly
what I order, you’ll repent it. Now, attend. What’s the time?’

‘It struck eight a minute ago.’

He looked towards her intently; and said, with a laboured distinctness,
as if he had got the words off by heart:

‘I have been travelling day and night, and am tired. I have lost some
money, and that don’t improve me. Put my supper in the little off-room
below, and have the truckle-bed made. I shall sleep there to-night, and
maybe to-morrow night; and if I can sleep all day to-morrow, so much
the better, for I’ve got trouble to sleep off, if I can. Keep the house
quiet, and don’t call me. Mind! Don’t call me. Don’t let anybody call
me. Let me lie there.’

She said it should be done. Was that all?

‘All what? You must be prying and questioning!’ he angrily retorted.
‘What more do you want to know?’

‘I want to know nothing, Jonas, but what you tell me. All hope of
confidence between us has long deserted me!’

‘Ecod, I should hope so!’ he muttered.

‘But if you will tell me what you wish, I will be obedient and will
try to please you. I make no merit of that, for I have no friend in
my father or my sister, but am quite alone. I am very humble and
submissive. You told me you would break my spirit, and you have done so.
Do not break my heart too!’

She ventured, as she said these words, to lay her hand upon his
shoulder. He suffered it to rest there, in his exultation; and the whole
mean, abject, sordid, pitiful soul of the man, looked at her, for the
moment, through his wicked eyes.

For the moment only; for, with the same hurried return to something
within himself, he bade her, in a surly tone, show her obedience by
executing his commands without delay. When she had withdrawn he paced
up and down the room several times; but always with his right hand
clenched, as if it held something; which it did not, being empty. When
he was tired of this, he threw himself into a chair, and thoughtfully
turned up the sleeve of his right arm, as if he were rather musing
about its strength than examining it; but, even then, he kept the hand
clenched.

He was brooding in this chair, with his eyes cast down upon the ground,
when Mrs Gamp came in to tell him that the little room was ready. Not
being quite sure of her reception after interfering in the quarrel, Mrs
Gamp, as a means of interesting and propitiating her patron, affected a
deep solicitude in Mr Chuffey.

‘How is he now, sir?’ she said.

‘Who?’ cried Jonas, raising his head, and staring at her.

‘To be sure!’ returned the matron with a smile and a curtsey. ‘What am I
thinking of! You wasn’t here, sir, when he was took so strange. I never
see a poor dear creetur took so strange in all my life, except a patient
much about the same age, as I once nussed, which his calling was the
custom-’us, and his name was Mrs Harris’s own father, as pleasant a
singer, Mr Chuzzlewit, as ever you heerd, with a voice like a Jew’s-harp
in the bass notes, that it took six men to hold at sech times, foaming
frightful.’

‘Chuffey, eh?’ said Jonas carelessly, seeing that she went up to the
old, clerk, and looked at him. ‘Ha!’

‘The creetur’s head’s so hot,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘that you might heat a
flat-iron at it. And no wonder I am sure, considerin’ the things he
said!’

‘Said!’ cried Jonas. ‘What did he say?’

Mrs Gamp laid her hand upon her heart, to put some check upon its
palpitations, and turning up her eyes replied in a faint voice:

‘The awfulest things, Mr Chuzzlewit, as ever I heerd! Which Mrs Harris’s
father never spoke a word when took so, some does and some don’t, except
sayin’ when he come round, “Where is Sairey Gamp?” But raly, sir, when
Mr Chuffey comes to ask who’s lyin’ dead upstairs, and--’

‘Who’s lying dead upstairs!’ repeated Jonas, standing aghast.

Mrs Gamp nodded, made as if she were swallowing, and went on.

‘Who’s lying dead upstairs; sech was his Bible language; and where was
Mr Chuzzlewit as had the only son; and when he goes upstairs a-looking
in the beds and wandering about the rooms, and comes down again
a-whisperin’ softly to his-self about foul play and that; it gives me
sech a turn, I don’t deny it, Mr Chuzzlewit, that I never could have kep
myself up but for a little drain o’ spirits, which I seldom touches, but
could always wish to know where to find, if so dispoged, never knowin’
wot may happen next, the world bein’ so uncertain.’

‘Why, the old fool’s mad!’ cried Jonas, much disturbed.

‘That’s my opinion, sir,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘and I will not deceive you. I
believe as Mr Chuffey, sir, rekwires attention (if I may make so bold),
and should not have his liberty to wex and worrit your sweet lady as he
does.’

‘Why, who minds what he says?’ retorted Jonas.

‘Still he is worritin’ sir,’ said Mrs Gamp. ‘No one don’t mind him, but
he IS a ill conwenience.’

‘Ecod you’re right,’ said Jonas, looking doubtfully at the subject of
this conversation. ‘I have half a mind to shut him up.’

Mrs Gamp rubbed her hands, and smiled, and shook her head, and sniffed
expressively, as scenting a job.

‘Could you--could you take care of such an idiot, now, in some spare
room upstairs?’ asked Jonas.

‘Me and a friend of mine, one off, one on, could do it, Mr Chuzzlewit,’
replied the nurse; ‘our charges not bein’ high, but wishin’ they was
lower, and allowance made considerin’ not strangers. Me and Betsey Prig,
sir, would undertake Mr Chuffey reasonable,’ said Mrs Gamp, looking at
him with her head on one side, as if he had been a piece of goods, for
which she was driving a bargain; ‘and give every satigefaction. Betsey
Prig has nussed a many lunacies, and well she knows their ways,
which puttin’ ‘em right close afore the fire, when fractious, is the
certainest and most compoging.’

While Mrs Gamp discoursed to this effect, Jonas was walking up and down
the room again, glancing covertly at the old clerk, as he did so. He now
made a stop, and said:

‘I must look after him, I suppose, or I may have him doing some
mischief. What say you?’

‘Nothin’ more likely!’ Mrs Gamp replied. ‘As well I have experienged, I
do assure you, sir.’

‘Well! Look after him for the present, and--let me see--three days from
this time let the other woman come here, and we’ll see if we can make
a bargain of it. About nine or ten o’clock at night, say. Keep your eye
upon him in the meanwhile, and don’t talk about it. He’s as mad as a
March hare!’

‘Madder!’ cried Mrs Gamp. ‘A deal madder!’

‘See to him, then; take care that he does no harm; and recollect what I
have told you.’

Leaving Mrs Gamp in the act of repeating all she had been told, and
of producing in support of her memory and trustworthiness, many
commendations selected from among the most remarkable opinions of the
celebrated Mrs Harris, he descended to the little room prepared for him,
and pulling off his coat and his boots, put them outside the door before
he locked it. In locking it, he was careful so to adjust the key as to
baffle any curious person who might try to peep in through the key-hole;
and when he had taken these precautions, he sat down to his supper.

‘Mr Chuff,’ he muttered, ‘it’ll be pretty easy to be even with YOU. It’s
of no use doing things by halves, and as long as I stop here, I’ll take
good care of you. When I’m off you may say what you please. But it’s
a d--d strange thing,’ he added, pushing away his untouched plate, and
striding moodily to and fro, ‘that his drivellings should have taken
this turn just now.’

After pacing the little room from end to end several times, he sat down
in another chair.

‘I say just now, but for anything I know, he may have been carrying on
the same game all along. Old dog! He shall be gagged!’

He paced the room again in the same restless and unsteady way; and then
sat down upon the bedstead, leaning his chin upon his hand, and looking
at the table. When he had looked at it for a long time, he remembered
his supper; and resuming the chair he had first occupied, began to eat
with great rapacity; not like a hungry man, but as if he were determined
to do it. He drank too, roundly; sometimes stopping in the middle of a
draught to walk, and change his seat and walk again, and dart back to
the table and fall to, in a ravenous hurry, as before.

It was now growing dark. As the gloom of evening, deepening into
night, came on, another dark shade emerging from within him seemed to
overspread his face, and slowly change it. Slowly, slowly; darker and
darker; more and more haggard; creeping over him by little and little,
until it was black night within him and without.

The room in which he had shut himself up, was on the ground floor, at
the back of the house. It was lighted by a dirty skylight, and had a
door in the wall, opening into a narrow covered passage or blind-alley,
very little frequented after five or six o’clock in the evening, and
not in much use as a thoroughfare at any hour. But it had an outlet in a
neighbouring street.

The ground on which this chamber stood had, at one time, not within his
recollection, been a yard; and had been converted to its present purpose
for use as an office. But the occasion for it died with the man who
built it; and saving that it had sometimes served as an apology for a
spare bedroom, and that the old clerk had once held it (but that was
years ago) as his recognized apartment, it had been little troubled by
Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son. It was a blotched, stained, mouldering room,
like a vault; and there were water-pipes running through it, which at
unexpected times in the night, when other things were quiet, clicked and
gurgled suddenly, as if they were choking.

The door into the court had not been open for a long, long time; but the
key had always hung in one place, and there it hung now. He was prepared
for its being rusty; for he had a little bottle of oil in his pocket and
the feather of a pen, with which he lubricated the key and the lock too,
carefully. All this while he had been without his coat, and had nothing
on his feet but his stockings. He now got softly into bed in the same
state, and tossed from side to side to tumble it. In his restless
condition that was easily done.

When he arose, he took from his portmanteau, which he had caused to be
carried into that place when he came home, a pair of clumsy shoes,
and put them on his feet; also a pair of leather leggings, such
as countrymen are used to wear, with straps to fasten them to the
waistband. In these he dressed himself at leisure. Lastly, he took out
a common frock of coarse dark jean, which he drew over his own
under-clothing; and a felt hat--he had purposely left his own upstairs.
He then sat himself down by the door, with the key in his hand, waiting.

He had no light; the time was dreary, long, and awful. The ringers were
practicing in a neighbouring church, and the clashing of the bells was
almost maddening. Curse the clamouring bells, they seemed to know that
he was listening at the door, and to proclaim it in a crowd of voices to
all the town! Would they never be still?

They ceased at last, and then the silence was so new and terrible that
it seemed the prelude to some dreadful noise. Footsteps in the court!
Two men. He fell back from the door on tiptoe, as if they could have
seen him through its wooden panels.

They passed on, talking (he could make out) about a skeleton which had
been dug up yesterday, in some work of excavation near at hand, and was
supposed to be that of a murdered man. ‘So murder is not always found
out, you see,’ they said to one another as they turned the corner.

Hush!

He put the key into the lock, and turned it. The door resisted for a
while, but soon came stiffly open; mingling with the sense of fever in
his mouth, a taste of rust, and dust, and earth, and rotting wood. He
looked out; passed out; locked it after him.

All was clear and quiet, as he fled away.



CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CONCLUSION OF THE ENTERPRISE OF MR JONAS AND HIS FRIEND


Did no men passing through the dim streets shrink without knowing why,
when he came stealing up behind them? As he glided on, had no child in
its sleep an indistinct perception of a guilty shadow falling on its
bed, that troubled its innocent rest? Did no dog howl, and strive to
break its rattling chain, that it might tear him; no burrowing rat,
scenting the work he had in hand, essay to gnaw a passage after him,
that it might hold a greedy revel at the feast of his providing? When he
looked back, across his shoulder, was it to see if his quick footsteps
still fell dry upon the dusty pavement, or were already moist and
clogged with the red mire that stained the naked feet of Cain!

He shaped his course for the main western road, and soon reached it;
riding a part of the way, then alighting and walking on again. He
travelled for a considerable distance upon the roof of a stage-coach,
which came up while he was afoot; and when it turned out of his road,
bribed the driver of a return post-chaise to take him on with him; and
then made across the country at a run, and saved a mile or two before he
struck again into the road. At last, as his plan was, he came up with a
certain lumbering, slow, night-coach, which stopped wherever it could,
and was stopping then at a public-house, while the guard and coachman
ate and drank within.

He bargained for a seat outside this coach, and took it. And he quitted
it no more until it was within a few miles of its destination, but
occupied the same place all night.

All night! It is a common fancy that nature seems to sleep by night. It
is a false fancy, as who should know better than he?

The fishes slumbered in the cold, bright, glistening streams and rivers,
perhaps; and the birds roosted on the branches of the trees; and in
their stalls and pastures beasts were quiet; and human creatures slept.
But what of that, when the solemn night was watching, when it never
winked, when its darkness watched no less than its light! The stately
trees, the moon and shining stars, the softly stirring wind, the
over-shadowed lane, the broad, bright countryside, they all kept watch.
There was not a blade of growing grass or corn, but watched; and the
quieter it was, the more intent and fixed its watch upon him seemed to
be.

And yet he slept. Riding on among those sentinels of God, he slept,
and did not change the purpose of his journey. If he forgot it in his
troubled dreams, it came up steadily, and woke him. But it never woke
him to remorse, or to abandonment of his design.

He dreamed at one time that he was lying calmly in his bed, thinking of
a moonlight night and the noise of wheels, when the old clerk put
his head in at the door, and beckoned him. At this signal he arose
immediately--being already dressed in the clothes he actually wore at
that time--and accompanied him into a strange city, where the names of
the streets were written on the walls in characters quite new to him;
which gave him no surprise or uneasiness, for he remembered in his dream
to have been there before. Although these streets were very precipitous,
insomuch that to get from one to another it was necessary to descend
great heights by ladders that were too short, and ropes that moved deep
bells, and swung and swayed as they were clung to, the danger gave him
little emotion beyond the first thrill of terror; his anxieties being
concentrated on his dress which was quite unfitted for some festival
that was about to be holden there, and in which he had come to take
a part. Already, great crowds began to fill the streets, and in
one direction myriads of people came rushing down an interminable
perspective, strewing flowers and making way for others on white horses,
when a terrible figure started from the throng, and cried out that it
was the Last Day for all the world. The cry being spread, there was a
wild hurrying on to Judgment; and the press became so great that he and
his companion (who was constantly changing, and was never the same man
two minutes together, though he never saw one man come or another go),
stood aside in a porch, fearfully surveying the multitude; in which
there were many faces that he knew, and many that he did not know, but
dreamed he did; when all at once a struggling head rose up among the
rest--livid and deadly, but the same as he had known it--and denounced
him as having appointed that direful day to happen. They closed
together. As he strove to free the hand in which he held a club, and
strike the blow he had so often thought of, he started to the knowledge
of his waking purpose and the rising of the sun.

The sun was welcome to him. There were life and motion, and a world
astir, to divide the attention of Day. It was the eye of Night--of
wakeful, watchful, silent, and attentive Night, with so much leisure for
the observation of his wicked thoughts--that he dreaded most. There is
no glare in the night. Even Glory shows to small advantage in the night,
upon a crowded battle-field. How then shows Glory’s blood-relation,
bastard Murder!

Aye! He made no compromise, and held no secret with himself now. Murder.
He had come to do it.

‘Let me get down here’ he said

‘Short of the town, eh!’ observed the coachman.

‘I may get down where I please, I suppose?’

‘You got up to please yourself, and may get down to please yourself. It
won’t break our hearts to lose you, and it wouldn’t have broken ‘em if
we’d never found you. Be a little quicker. That’s all.’

The guard had alighted, and was waiting in the road to take his money.
In the jealousy and distrust of what he contemplated, he thought this
man looked at him with more than common curiosity.

‘What are you staring at?’ said Jonas.

‘Not at a handsome man,’ returned the guard. ‘If you want your fortune
told, I’ll tell you a bit of it. You won’t be drowned. That’s a
consolation for you.’

Before he could retort or turn away, the coachman put an end to the
dialogue by giving him a cut with his whip, and bidding him get out for a
surly dog. The guard jumped up to his seat at the same moment, and they
drove off, laughing; leaving him to stand in the road and shake his fist
at them. He was not displeased though, on second thoughts, to have
been taken for an ill-conditioned common country fellow; but rather
congratulated himself upon it as a proof that he was well disguised.

Wandering into a copse by the road-side--but not in that place; two or
three miles off--he tore out from a fence a thick, hard, knotted stake;
and, sitting down beneath a hayrick, spent some time in shaping it, in
peeling off the bark, and fashioning its jagged head with his knife.

The day passed on. Noon, afternoon, evening. Sunset.

At that serene and peaceful time two men, riding in a gig, came out
of the city by a road not much frequented. It was the day on which Mr
Pecksniff had agreed to dine with Montague. He had kept his appointment,
and was now going home. His host was riding with him for a short
distance; meaning to return by a pleasant track, which Mr Pecksniff had
engaged to show him, through some fields. Jonas knew their plans. He had
hung about the inn-yard while they were at dinner and had heard their
orders given.

They were loud and merry in their conversation, and might have been
heard at some distance; far above the sound of their carriage wheels
or horses’ hoofs. They came on noisily, to where a stile and footpath
indicated their point of separation. Here they stopped.

‘It’s too soon. Much too soon,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘But this is the
place, my dear sir. Keep the path, and go straight through the little
wood you’ll come to. The path is narrower there, but you can’t miss it.
When shall I see you again? Soon I hope?’

‘I hope so,’ replied Montague.

‘Good night!’

‘Good night. And a pleasant ride!’

So long as Mr Pecksniff was in sight, and turned his head at intervals
to salute him, Montague stood in the road smiling, and waving his hand.
But when his new partner had disappeared, and this show was no longer
necessary, he sat down on the stile with looks so altered, that he might
have grown ten years older in the meantime.

He was flushed with wine, but not gay. His scheme had succeeded, but he
showed no triumph. The effort of sustaining his difficult part before
his late companion had fatigued him, perhaps, or it may be that the
evening whispered to his conscience, or it may be (as it HAS been) that
a shadowy veil was dropping round him, closing out all thoughts but the
presentiment and vague foreknowledge of impending doom.

If there be fluids, as we know there are, which, conscious of a coming
wind, or rain, or frost, will shrink and strive to hide themselves in
their glass arteries; may not that subtle liquor of the blood perceive,
by properties within itself, that hands are raised to waste and spill
it; and in the veins of men run cold and dull as his did, in that hour!

So cold, although the air was warm; so dull, although the sky was
bright; that he rose up shivering from his seat, and hastily resumed
his walk. He checked himself as hastily; undecided whether to pursue the
footpath, which was lonely and retired, or to go back by the road.

He took the footpath.

The glory of the departing sun was on his face. The music of the birds
was in his ears. Sweet wild flowers bloomed about him. Thatched roofs of
poor men’s homes were in the distance; and an old grey spire, surmounted
by a Cross, rose up between him and the coming night.

He had never read the lesson which these things conveyed; he had ever
mocked and turned away from it; but, before going down into a hollow
place, he looked round, once, upon the evening prospect, sorrowfully.
Then he went down, down, down, into the dell.

It brought him to the wood; a close, thick, shadowy wood, through which
the path went winding on, dwindling away into a slender sheep-track. He
paused before entering; for the stillness of this spot almost daunted
him.

The last rays of the sun were shining in, aslant, making a path of
golden light along the stems and branches in its range, which, even as
he looked, began to die away, yielding gently to the twilight that came
creeping on. It was so very quiet that the soft and stealthy moss about
the trunks of some old trees, seemed to have grown out of the silence,
and to be its proper offspring. Those other trees which were subdued
by blasts of wind in winter time, had not quite tumbled down, but being
caught by others, lay all bare and scathed across their leafy arms, as
if unwilling to disturb the general repose by the crash of their fall.
Vistas of silence opened everywhere, into the heart and innermost
recesses of the wood; beginning with the likeness of an aisle, a
cloister, or a ruin open to the sky; then tangling off into a deep green
rustling mystery, through which gnarled trunks, and twisted boughs, and
ivy-covered stems, and trembling leaves, and bark-stripped bodies of old
trees stretched out at length, were faintly seen in beautiful confusion.

As the sunlight died away, and evening fell upon the wood, he entered
it. Moving, here and there a bramble or a drooping bough which stretched
across his path, he slowly disappeared. At intervals a narrow opening
showed him passing on, or the sharp cracking of some tender branch
denoted where he went; then, he was seen or heard no more.

Never more beheld by mortal eye or heard by mortal ear; one man
excepted. That man, parting the leaves and branches on the other side,
near where the path emerged again, came leaping out soon afterwards.

What had he left within the wood, that he sprang out of it as if it were
a hell!

The body of a murdered man. In one thick solitary spot, it lay among
the last year’s leaves of oak and beech, just as it had fallen headlong
down. Sopping and soaking in among the leaves that formed its pillow;
oozing down into the boggy ground, as if to cover itself from human
sight; forcing its way between and through the curling leaves, as if
those senseless things rejected and forswore it and were coiled up in
abhorrence; went a dark, dark stain that dyed the whole summer night
from earth to heaven.

The doer of this deed came leaping from the wood so fiercely, that he
cast into the air a shower of fragments of young boughs, torn away
in his passage, and fell with violence upon the grass. But he quickly
gained his feet again, and keeping underneath a hedge with his body
bent, went running on towards the road. The road once reached, he fell
into a rapid walk, and set on toward London.

And he was not sorry for what he had done. He was frightened when he
thought of it--when did he not think of it!--but he was not sorry. He
had had a terror and dread of the wood when he was in it; but being
out of it, and having committed the crime, his fears were now diverted,
strangely, to the dark room he had left shut up at home. He had a
greater horror, infinitely greater, of that room than of the wood. Now
that he was on his return to it, it seemed beyond comparison more dismal
and more dreadful than the wood. His hideous secret was shut up in the
room, and all its terrors were there; to his thinking it was not in the
wood at all.

He walked on for ten miles; and then stopped at an ale-house for a
coach, which he knew would pass through, on its way to London, before
long; and which he also knew was not the coach he had travelled down by,
for it came from another place. He sat down outside the door here, on
a bench, beside a man who was smoking his pipe. Having called for some
beer, and drunk, he offered it to this companion, who thanked him, and
took a draught. He could not help thinking that, if the man had known
all, he might scarcely have relished drinking out of the same cup with
him.

‘A fine night, master!’ said this person. ‘And a rare sunset.’

‘I didn’t see it,’ was his hasty answer.

‘Didn’t see it?’ returned the man.

‘How the devil could I see it, if I was asleep?’

‘Asleep! Aye, aye.’ The man appeared surprised by his unexpected
irritability, and saying no more, smoked his pipe in silence. They had
not sat very long, when there was a knocking within.

‘What’s that?’ cried Jonas.

‘Can’t say, I’m sure,’ replied the man.

He made no further inquiry, for the last question had escaped him in
spite of himself. But he was thinking, at the moment, of the closed-up
room; of the possibility of their knocking at the door on some special
occasion; of their being alarmed at receiving no answer; of their
bursting it open; of their finding the room empty; of their fastening
the door into the court, and rendering it impossible for him to get into
the house without showing himself in the garb he wore, which would lead
to rumour, rumour to detection, detection to death. At that instant, as
if by some design and order of circumstances, the knocking had come.

It still continued; like a warning echo of the dread reality he had
conjured up. As he could not sit and hear it, he paid for his beer and
walked on again. And having slunk about, in places unknown to him all
day; and being out at night, in a lonely road, in an unusual dress and
in that wandering and unsettled frame of mind; he stopped more than once
to look about him, hoping he might be in a dream.

Still he was not sorry. No. He had hated the man too much, and had been
bent, too desperately and too long, on setting himself free. If the
thing could have come over again, he would have done it again. His
malignant and revengeful passions were not so easily laid. There was no
more penitence or remorse within him now than there had been while the
deed was brewing.

Dread and fear were upon him, to an extent he had never counted on, and
could not manage in the least degree. He was so horribly afraid of that
infernal room at home. This made him, in a gloomy murderous, mad way,
not only fearful FOR himself, but OF himself; for being, as it were, a
part of the room: a something supposed to be there, yet missing from it:
he invested himself with its mysterious terrors; and when he pictured in
his mind the ugly chamber, false and quiet, false and quiet, through the
dark hours of two nights; and the tumbled bed, and he not in it, though
believed to be; he became in a manner his own ghost and phantom, and was
at once the haunting spirit and the haunted man.

When the coach came up, which it soon did, he got a place outside and
was carried briskly onward towards home. Now, in taking his seat among
the people behind, who were chiefly country people, he conceived a fear
that they knew of the murder, and would tell him that the body had been
found; which, considering the time and place of the commission of the
crime, were events almost impossible to have happened yet, as he very
well knew. But although he did know it, and had therefore no reason
to regard their ignorance as anything but the natural sequence to
the facts, still this very ignorance of theirs encouraged him. So far
encouraged him, that he began to believe the body never would be found,
and began to speculate on that probability. Setting off from this point,
and measuring time by the rapid hurry of his guilty thoughts, and
what had gone before the bloodshed, and the troops of incoherent and
disordered images of which he was the constant prey; he came by
daylight to regard the murder as an old murder, and to think himself
comparatively safe because it had not been discovered yet. Yet! When the
sun which looked into the wood, and gilded with its rising light a dead
man’s lace, had seen that man alive, and sought to win him to a thought
of Heaven, on its going down last night!

But here were London streets again. Hush!

It was but five o’clock. He had time enough to reach his own house
unobserved, and before there were many people in the streets, if nothing
had happened so far, tending to his discovery. He slipped down from
the coach without troubling the driver to stop his horses; and hurrying
across the road, and in and out of every by-way that lay near his
course, at length approached his own dwelling. He used additional
caution in his immediate neighbourhood; halting first to look all
down the street before him; then gliding swiftly through that one, and
stopping to survey the next, and so on.

The passage-way was empty when his murderer’s face looked into it. He
stole on, to the door on tiptoe, as if he dreaded to disturb his own
imaginary rest.

He listened. Not a sound. As he turned the key with a trembling hand,
and pushed the door softly open with his knee, a monstrous fear beset
his mind.

What if the murdered man were there before him!

He cast a fearful glance all round. But there was nothing there.

He went in, locked the door, drew the key through and through the dust
and damp in the fire-place to sully it again, and hung it up as of old.
He took off his disguise, tied it up in a bundle ready for carrying away
and sinking in the river before night, and locked it up in a cupboard.
These precautions taken, he undressed and went to bed.

The raging thirst, the fire that burnt within him as he lay beneath the
clothes, the augmented horror of the room when they shut it out from his
view; the agony of listening, in which he paid enforced regard to every
sound, and thought the most unlikely one the prelude to that knocking
which should bring the news; the starts with which he left his couch,
and looking in the glass, imagined that his deed was broadly written
in his face, and lying down and burying himself once more beneath the
blankets, heard his own heart beating Murder, Murder, Murder, in the
bed; what words can paint tremendous truths like these!

The morning advanced. There were footsteps in the house. He heard the
blinds drawn up, and shutters opened; and now and then a stealthy tread
outside his own door. He tried to call out, more than once, but his
mouth was dry as if it had been filled with sand. At last he sat up in
his bed, and cried:

‘Who’s there?’

It was his wife.

He asked her what it was o’clock? Nine.

‘Did--did no one knock at my door yesterday?’ he faltered. ‘Something
disturbed me; but unless you had knocked the door down, you would have
got no notice from me.’

‘No one,’ she replied. That was well. He had waited, almost breathless,
for her answer. It was a relief to him, if anything could be.

‘Mr Nadgett wanted to see you,’ she said, ‘but I told him you were
tired, and had requested not to be disturbed. He said it was of little
consequence, and went away. As I was opening my window to let in the
cool air, I saw him passing through the street this morning, very early;
but he hasn’t been again.’

Passing through the street that morning? Very early! Jonas trembled at
the thought of having had a narrow chance of seeing him himself; even
him, who had no object but to avoid people, and sneak on unobserved, and
keep his own secrets; and who saw nothing.

He called to her to get his breakfast ready, and prepared to go
upstairs; attiring himself in the clothes he had taken off when he came
into that room, which had been, ever since, outside the door. In his
secret dread of meeting the household for the first time, after what he
had done, he lingered at the door on slight pretexts that they might see
him without looking in his face; and left it ajar while he dressed; and
called out to have the windows opened, and the pavement watered, that
they might become accustomed to his voice. Even when he had put off the
time, by one means or other, so that he had seen or spoken to them all,
he could not muster courage for a long while to go in among them,
but stood at his own door listening to the murmur of their distant
conversation.

He could not stop there for ever, and so joined them. His last glance at
the glass had seen a tell-tale face, but that might have been because
of his anxious looking in it. He dared not look at them to see if they
observed him, but he thought them very silent.

And whatsoever guard he kept upon himself, he could not help listening,
and showing that he listened. Whether he attended to their talk, or
tried to think of other things, or talked himself, or held his peace, or
resolutely counted the dull tickings of a hoarse clock at his back, he
always lapsed, as if a spell were on him, into eager listening. For
he knew it must come. And his present punishment, and torture and
distraction, were, to listen for its coming.

Hush!



CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

BEARS TIDINGS OF MARTIN AND OF MARK, AS WELL AS OF A THIRD PERSON NOT
QUITE UNKNOWN TO THE READER. EXHIBITS FILIAL PIETY IN AN UGLY ASPECT;
AND CASTS A DOUBTFUL RAY OF LIGHT UPON A VERY DARK PLACE


Tom Pinch and Ruth were sitting at their early breakfast, with the
window open, and a row of the freshest little plants ranged before it
on the inside by Ruth’s own hands; and Ruth had fastened a sprig of
geranium in Tom’s button-hole, to make him very smart and summer-like
for the day (it was obliged to be fastened in, or that dear old Tom
was certain to lose it); and people were crying flowers up and down the
street; and a blundering bee, who had got himself in between the
two sashes of the window, was bruising his head against the glass,
endeavouring to force himself out into the fine morning, and considering
himself enchanted because he couldn’t do it; and the morning was as fine
a morning as ever was seen; and the fragrant air was kissing Ruth and
rustling about Tom, as if it said, ‘how are you, my dears; I came all
this way on purpose to salute you;’ and it was one of those glad times
when we form, or ought to form, the wish that every one on earth were
able to be happy, and catching glimpses of the summer of the heart, to
feel the beauty of the summer of the year.

It was even a pleasanter breakfast than usual; and it was always a
pleasant one. For little Ruth had now two pupils to attend, each three
times a week; and each two hours at a time; and besides this, she had
painted some screens and card-racks, and, unknown to Tom (was there ever
anything so delightful!), had walked into a certain shop which dealt
in such articles, after often peeping through the window; and had taken
courage to ask the Mistress of that shop whether she would buy them. And
the mistress had not only bought them, but had ordered more, and that
very morning Ruth had made confession of these facts to Tom, and had
handed him the money in a little purse she had worked expressly for the
purpose. They had been in a flutter about this, and perhaps had shed a
happy tear or two for anything the history knows to the contrary; but
it was all over now; and a brighter face than Tom’s, or a brighter face
than Ruth’s, the bright sun had not looked on since he went to bed last
night.

‘My dear girl,’ said Tom, coming so abruptly on the subject, that he
interrupted himself in the act of cutting a slice of bread, and left
the knife sticking in the loaf, ‘what a queer fellow our landlord is!
I don’t believe he has been home once since he got me into that
unsatisfactory scrape. I begin to think he will never come home again.
What a mysterious life that man does lead, to be sure!’

‘Very strange. Is it not, Tom?’

‘Really,’ said Tom, ‘I hope it is only strange. I hope there may be
nothing wrong in it. Sometimes I begin to be doubtful of that. I must
have an explanation with him,’ said Tom, shaking his head as if this
were a most tremendous threat, ‘when I can catch him!’

A short double knock at the door put Tom’s menacing looks to flight, and
awakened an expression of surprise instead.

‘Heyday!’ said Tom. ‘An early hour for visitors! It must be John, I
suppose.’

‘I--I--don’t think it was his knock, Tom,’ observed his little sister.

‘No?’ said Tom. ‘It surely can’t be my employer suddenly arrived in
town; directed here by Mr Fips; and come for the key of the office. It’s
somebody inquiring for me, I declare! Come in, if you please!’

But when the person came in, Tom Pinch, instead of saying, ‘Did you
wish to speak with me, sir?’ or, ‘My name is Pinch, sir; what is your
business, may I ask?’ or addressing him in any such distant terms; cried
out, ‘Good gracious Heaven!’ and seized him by both hands, with the
liveliest manifestations of astonishment and pleasure.

The visitor was not less moved than Tom himself, and they shook hands a
great many times, without another word being spoken on either side. Tom
was the first to find his voice.

‘Mark Tapley, too!’ said Tom, running towards the door, and shaking
hands with somebody else. ‘My dear Mark, come in. How are you, Mark? He
don’t look a day older than he used to do at the Dragon. How ARE you,
Mark?’

‘Uncommonly jolly, sir, thank’ee,’ returned Mr Tapley, all smiles and
bows. ‘I hope I see you well, sir.’

‘Good gracious me!’ cried Tom, patting him tenderly on the back. ‘How
delightful it is to hear his old voice again! My dear Martin, sit down.
My sister, Martin. Mr Chuzzlewit, my love. Mark Tapley from the Dragon,
my dear. Good gracious me, what a surprise this is! Sit down. Lord,
bless me!’

Tom was in such a state of excitement that he couldn’t keep himself
still for a moment, but was constantly running between Mark and Martin,
shaking hands with them alternately, and presenting them over and over
again to his sister.

‘I remember the day we parted, Martin, as well as if it were yesterday,’
said Tom. ‘What a day it was! and what a passion you were in! And don’t
you remember my overtaking you in the road that morning, Mark, when I
was going to Salisbury in the gig to fetch him, and you were looking out
for a situation? And don’t you recollect the dinner we had at Salisbury,
Martin, with John Westlock, eh! Good gracious me! Ruth, my dear,
Mr Chuzzlewit. Mark Tapley, my love, from the Dragon. More cups and
saucers, if you please. Bless my soul, how glad I am to see you both!’

And then Tom (as John Westlock had done on his arrival) ran off to the
loaf to cut some bread and butter for them; and before he had spread a
single slice, remembered something else, and came running back again to
tell it; and then he shook hands with them again; and then he introduced
his sister again; and then he did everything he had done already all
over again; and nothing Tom could do, and nothing Tom could say, was
half sufficient to express his joy at their safe return.

Mr Tapley was the first to resume his composure. In a very short space
of time he was discovered to have somehow installed himself in office as
waiter, or attendant upon the party; a fact which was first suggested to
them by his temporary absence in the kitchen, and speedy return with a
kettle of boiling water, from which he replenished the tea-pot with a
self-possession that was quite his own.

‘Sit down, and take your breakfast, Mark,’ said Tom. ‘Make him sit down
and take his breakfast, Martin.’

‘Oh! I gave him up, long ago, as incorrigible,’ Martin replied. ‘He
takes his own way, Tom. You would excuse him, Miss Pinch, if you knew
his value.’

‘She knows it, bless you!’ said Tom. ‘I have told her all about Mark
Tapley. Have I not, Ruth?’

‘Yes, Tom.’

‘Not all,’ returned Martin, in a low voice. ‘The best of Mark Tapley is
only known to one man, Tom; and but for Mark he would hardly be alive to
tell it!’

‘Mark!’ said Tom Pinch energetically; ‘if you don’t sit down this
minute, I’ll swear at you!’

‘Well, sir,’ returned Mr Tapley, ‘sooner than you should do that, I’ll
com-ply. It’s a considerable invasion of a man’s jollity to be made so
partickler welcome, but a Werb is a word as signifies to be, to do,
or to suffer (which is all the grammar, and enough too, as ever I wos
taught); and if there’s a Werb alive, I’m it. For I’m always a-bein’,
sometimes a-doin’, and continually a-sufferin’.’

‘Not jolly yet?’ asked Tom, with a smile.

‘Why, I was rather so, over the water, sir,’ returned Mr Tapley; ‘and
not entirely without credit. But Human Natur’ is in a conspiracy again’
me; I can’t get on. I shall have to leave it in my will, sir, to be
wrote upon my tomb: “He was a man as might have come out strong if he
could have got a chance. But it was denied him.”’

Mr Tapley took this occasion of looking about him with a grin, and
subsequently attacking the breakfast, with an appetite not at all
expressive of blighted hopes, or insurmountable despondency.

In the meanwhile, Martin drew his chair a little nearer to Tom and his
sister, and related to them what had passed at Mr Pecksniff’s
house; adding in few words a general summary of the distresses and
disappointments he had undergone since he left England.

‘For your faithful stewardship in the trust I left with you, Tom,’ he
said, ‘and for all your goodness and disinterestedness, I can never
thank you enough. When I add Mary’s thanks to mine--’

Ah, Tom! The blood retreated from his cheeks, and came rushing back, so
violently, that it was pain to feel it; ease though, ease, compared with
the aching of his wounded heart.

‘When I add Mary’s thanks to mine,’ said Martin, ‘I have made the only
poor acknowledgment it is in our power to offer; but if you knew how
much we feel, Tom, you would set some store by it, I am sure.’

And if they had known how much Tom felt--but that no human creature ever
knew--they would have set some store by him. Indeed they would.

Tom changed the topic of discourse. He was sorry he could not pursue it,
as it gave Martin pleasure; but he was unable, at that moment. No drop
of envy or bitterness was in his soul; but he could not master the firm
utterance of her name.

He inquired what Martin’s projects were.

‘No longer to make your fortune, Tom,’ said Martin, ‘but to try to live.
I tried that once in London, Tom; and failed. If you will give me the
benefit of your advice and friendly counsel, I may succeed better under
your guidance. I will do anything Tom, anything, to gain a livelihood by
my own exertions. My hopes do not soar above that, now.’

High-hearted, noble Tom! Sorry to find the pride of his old companion
humbled, and to hear him speaking in this altered strain at once, at
once, he drove from his breast the inability to contend with its deep
emotions, and spoke out bravely.

‘Your hopes do not soar above that!’ cried Tom. ‘Yes they do. How can
you talk so! They soar up to the time when you will be happy with her,
Martin. They soar up to the time when you will be able to claim her,
Martin. They soar up to the time when you will not be able to believe
that you were ever cast down in spirit, or poor in pocket, Martin.
Advice, and friendly counsel! Why, of course. But you shall have better
advice and counsel (though you cannot have more friendly) than mine. You
shall consult John Westlock. We’ll go there immediately. It is yet so
early that I shall have time to take you to his chambers before I go to
business; they are in my way; and I can leave you there, to talk
over your affairs with him. So come along. Come along. I am a man of
occupation now, you know,’ said Tom, with his pleasantest smile; ‘and
have no time to lose. Your hopes don’t soar higher than that? I dare
say they don’t. I know you, pretty well. They’ll be soaring out of sight
soon, Martin, and leaving all the rest of us leagues behind.’

‘Aye! But I may be a little changed,’ said Martin, ‘since you knew me
pretty well, Tom.’

‘What nonsense!’ exclaimed Tom. ‘Why should you be changed? You talk
as if you were an old man. I never heard such a fellow! Come to John
Westlock’s, come. Come along, Mark Tapley. It’s Mark’s doing, I have
no doubt; and it serves you right for having such a grumbler for your
companion.’

‘There’s no credit to be got through being jolly with YOU, Mr Pinch,
anyways,’ said Mark, with his face all wrinkled up with grins. ‘A parish
doctor might be jolly with you. There’s nothing short of goin’ to the
U-nited States for a second trip, as would make it at all creditable to
be jolly, arter seein’ you again!’

Tom laughed, and taking leave of his sister, hurried Mark and Martin out
into the street, and away to John Westlock’s by the nearest road; for
his hour of business was very near at hand, and he prided himself on
always being exact to his time.

John Westlock was at home, but, strange to say, was rather embarrassed
to see them; and when Tom was about to go into the room where he
was breakfasting, said he had a stranger there. It appeared to be a
mysterious stranger, for John shut that door as he said it, and led them
into the next room.

He was very much delighted, though, to see Mark Tapley; and received
Martin with his own frank courtesy. But Martin felt that he did not
inspire John Westlock with any unusual interest; and twice or
thrice observed that he looked at Tom Pinch doubtfully; not to say
compassionately. He thought, and blushed to think, that he knew the
cause of this.

‘I apprehend you are engaged,’ said Martin, when Tom had announced the
purport of their visit. ‘If you will allow me to come again at your own
time, I shall be glad to do so.’

‘I AM engaged,’ replied John, with some reluctance; ‘but the matter on
which I am engaged is one, to say the truth, more immediately demanding
your knowledge than mine.’

‘Indeed!’ cried Martin.

‘It relates to a member of your family, and is of a serious nature. If
you will have the kindness to remain here, it will be a satisfaction to
me to have it privately communicated to you, in order that you may judge
of its importance for yourself.’

‘And in the meantime,’ said Tom, ‘I must really take myself off, without
any further ceremony.’

‘Is your business so very particular,’ asked Martin, ‘that you cannot
remain with us for half an hour? I wish you could. What IS your
business, Tom?’

It was Tom’s turn to be embarrassed now; but he plainly said, after a
little hesitation:

‘Why, I am not at liberty to say what it is, Martin; though I hope
soon to be in a condition to do so, and am aware of no other reason
to prevent my doing so now, than the request of my employer. It’s an
awkward position to be placed in,’ said Tom, with an uneasy sense of
seeming to doubt his friend, ‘as I feel every day; but I really cannot
help it, can I, John?’

John Westlock replied in the negative; and Martin, expressing himself
perfectly satisfied, begged them not to say another word; though he
could not help wondering very much what curious office Tom held, and why
he was so secret, and embarrassed, and unlike himself, in reference to
it. Nor could he help reverting to it, in his own mind, several times
after Tom went away, which he did as soon as this conversation was
ended, taking Mr Tapley with him, who, as he laughingly said, might
accompany him as far as Fleet Street without injury.

‘And what do you mean to do, Mark?’ asked Tom, as they walked on
together.

‘Mean to do, sir?’ returned Mr Tapley.

‘Aye. What course of life do you mean to pursue?’

‘Well, sir,’ said Mr Tapley. ‘The fact is, that I have been a-thinking
rather of the matrimonial line, sir.’

‘You don’t say so, Mark!’ cried Tom.

‘Yes, sir. I’ve been a-turnin’ of it over.’

‘And who is the lady, Mark?’

‘The which, sir?’ said Mr Tapley.

‘The lady. Come! You know what I said,’ replied Tom, laughing, ‘as well
as I do!’

Mr Tapley suppressed his own inclination to laugh; and with one of his
most whimsically-twisted looks, replied:

‘You couldn’t guess, I suppose, Mr Pinch?’

‘How is it possible?’ said Tom. ‘I don’t know any of your flames, Mark.
Except Mrs Lupin, indeed.’

‘Well, sir!’ retorted Mr Tapley. ‘And supposing it was her!’

Tom stopping in the street to look at him, Mr Tapley for a moment
presented to his view an utterly stolid and expressionless face; a
perfect dead wall of countenance. But opening window after window in
it with astonishing rapidity, and lighting them all up as for a general
illumination, he repeated:

‘Supposin’, for the sake of argument, as it was her, sir!’

‘Why I thought such a connection wouldn’t suit you, Mark, on any terms!’
cried Tom.

‘Well, sir! I used to think so myself, once,’ said Mark. ‘But I ain’t so
clear about it now. A dear, sweet creetur, sir!’

‘A dear, sweet creature? To be sure she is,’ cried Tom. ‘But she always
was a dear, sweet creature, was she not?’

‘WAS she not!’ assented Mr Tapley.

‘Then why on earth didn’t you marry her at first, Mark, instead of
wandering abroad, and losing all this time, and leaving her alone by
herself, liable to be courted by other people?’

‘Why, sir,’ retorted Mr Tapley, in a spirit of unbounded confidence,
‘I’ll tell you how it come about. You know me, Mr Pinch, sir; there
ain’t a gentleman alive as knows me better. You’re acquainted with my
constitution, and you’re acquainted with my weakness. My constitution
is, to be jolly; and my weakness is, to wish to find a credit in it.
Wery good, sir. In this state of mind, I gets a notion in my head that
she looks on me with a eye of--with what you may call a favourable sort
of a eye in fact,’ said Mr Tapley, with modest hesitation.

‘No doubt,’ replied Tom. ‘We knew that perfectly well when we spoke on
this subject long ago; before you left the Dragon.’

Mr Tapley nodded assent. ‘Well, sir! But bein’ at that time full of
hopeful wisions, I arrives at the conclusion that no credit is to be got
out of such a way of life as that, where everything agreeable would be
ready to one’s hand. Lookin’ on the bright side of human life in short,
one of my hopeful wisions is, that there’s a deal of misery awaitin’ for
me; in the midst of which I may come out tolerable strong, and be jolly
under circumstances as reflects some credit. I goes into the world, sir,
wery boyant, and I tries this. I goes aboard ship first, and wery soon
discovers (by the ease with which I’m jolly, mind you) as there’s no
credit to be got THERE. I might have took warning by this, and gave it
up; but I didn’t. I gets to the U-nited States; and then I DO begin, I
won’t deny it, to feel some little credit in sustaining my spirits. What
follows? Jest as I’m a-beginning to come out, and am a-treadin’ on the
werge, my master deceives me.’

‘Deceives you!’ cried Tom.

‘Swindles me,’ retorted Mr Tapley with a beaming face. ‘Turns his back
on everything as made his service a creditable one, and leaves me high
and dry, without a leg to stand upon. In which state I returns home.
Wery good. Then all my hopeful wisions bein’ crushed; and findin’ that
there ain’t no credit for me nowhere; I abandons myself to despair,
and says, “Let me do that as has the least credit in it of all; marry a
dear, sweet creetur, as is wery fond of me; me bein’, at the same time,
wery fond of her; lead a happy life, and struggle no more again’ the
blight which settles on my prospects.”’

‘If your philosophy, Mark,’ said Tom, who laughed heartily at this
speech, ‘be the oddest I ever heard of, it is not the least wise. Mrs
Lupin has said “yes,” of course?’

‘Why, no, sir,’ replied Mr Tapley; ‘she hasn’t gone so far as that yet.
Which I attribute principally to my not havin’ asked her. But we was
wery agreeable together--comfortable, I may say--the night I come home.
It’s all right, sir.’

‘Well!’ said Tom, stopping at the Temple Gate. ‘I wish you joy, Mark,
with all my heart. I shall see you again to-day, I dare say. Good-bye
for the present.’

‘Good-bye, sir! Good-bye, Mr Pinch!’ he added by way of soliloquy, as
he stood looking after him. ‘Although you ARE a damper to a honourable
ambition. You little think it, but you was the first to dash my hopes.
Pecksniff would have built me up for life, but your sweet temper pulled
me down. Good-bye, Mr Pinch!’

While these confidences were interchanged between Tom Pinch and Mark,
Martin and John Westlock were very differently engaged. They were no
sooner left alone together than Martin said, with an effort he could not
disguise:

‘Mr Westlock, we have met only once before, but you have known Tom a
long while, and that seems to render you familiar to me. I cannot
talk freely with you on any subject unless I relieve my mind of what
oppresses it just now. I see with pain that you so far mistrust me that
you think me likely to impose on Tom’s regardlessness of himself, or on
his kind nature, or some of his good qualities.’

‘I had no intention,’ replied John, ‘of conveying any such impression to
you, and am exceedingly sorry to have done so.’

‘But you entertain it?’ said Martin.

‘You ask me so pointedly and directly,’ returned the other, ‘that I
cannot deny the having accustomed myself to regard you as one who,
not in wantonness but in mere thoughtlessness of character, did not
sufficiently consider his nature and did not quite treat it as it
deserves to be treated. It is much easier to slight than to appreciate
Tom Pinch.’

This was not said warmly, but was energetically spoken too; for there
was no subject in the world (but one) on which the speaker felt so
strongly.

‘I grew into the knowledge of Tom,’ he pursued, ‘as I grew towards
manhood; and I have learned to love him as something, infinitely better
than myself. I did not think that you understood him when we met before.
I did not think that you greatly cared to understand him. The instances
of this which I observed in you were, like my opportunities for
observation, very trivial--and were very harmless, I dare say. But they
were not agreeable to me, and they forced themselves upon me; for I was
not upon the watch for them, believe me. You will say,’ added John, with
a smile, as he subsided into more of his accustomed manner, ‘that I am
not by any means agreeable to you. I can only assure you, in reply, that
I would not have originated this topic on any account.’

‘I originated it,’ said Martin; ‘and so far from having any complaint
to make against you, highly esteem the friendship you entertain for
Tom, and the very many proofs you have given him of it. Why should
I endeavour to conceal from you’--he coloured deeply though--‘that
I neither understood him nor cared to understand him when I was his
companion; and that I am very truly sorry for it now!’

It was so sincerely said, at once so modestly and manfully, that John
offered him his hand as if he had not done so before; and Martin giving
his in the same open spirit, all constraint between the young men
vanished.

‘Now pray,’ said John, ‘when I tire your patience very much in what I
am going to say, recollect that it has an end to it, and that the end is
the point of the story.’

With this preface, he related all the circumstances connected with his
having presided over the illness and slow recovery of the patient at the
Bull; and tacked on to the skirts of that narrative Tom’s own account of
the business on the wharf. Martin was not a little puzzled when he came
to an end, for the two stories seemed to have no connection with each
other, and to leave him, as the phrase is, all abroad.

‘If you will excuse me for one moment,’ said John, rising, ‘I will beg
you almost immediately to come into the next room.’

Upon that, he left Martin to himself, in a state of considerable
astonishment; and soon came back again to fulfil his promise.
Accompanying him into the next room, Martin found there a third person;
no doubt the stranger of whom his host had spoken when Tom Pinch
introduced him.

He was a young man; with deep black hair and eyes. He was gaunt and
pale; and evidently had not long recovered from a severe illness. He
stood as Martin entered, but sat again at John’s desire. His eyes were
cast downward; and but for one glance at them both, half in humiliation
and half in entreaty, he kept them so, and sat quite still and silent.

‘This person’s name is Lewsome,’ said John Westlock, ‘whom I have
mentioned to you as having been seized with an illness at the inn near
here, and undergone so much. He has had a very hard time of it, ever
since he began to recover; but, as you see, he is now doing well.’

As he did not move or speak, and John Westlock made a pause, Martin, not
knowing what to say, said that he was glad to hear it.

‘The short statement that I wish you to hear from his own lips, Mr
Chuzzlewit,’ John pursued--looking attentively at him, and not at
Martin--‘he made to me for the first time yesterday, and repeated to me
this morning, without the least variation of any essential particular. I
have already told you that he informed me before he was removed from the
Inn, that he had a secret to disclose to me which lay heavy on his mind.
But, fluctuating between sickness and health and between his desire to
relieve himself of it, and his dread of involving himself by revealing
it, he has, until yesterday, avoided the disclosure. I never pressed
him for it (having no idea of its weight or import, or of my right to do
so), until within a few days past; when, understanding from him, on his
own voluntary avowal, in a letter from the country, that it related to a
person whose name was Jonas Chuzzlewit; and thinking that it might throw
some light on that little mystery which made Tom anxious now and then; I
urged the point upon him, and heard his statement, as you will now,
from his own lips. It is due to him to say, that in the apprehension
of death, he committed it to writing sometime since, and folded it in a
sealed paper, addressed to me; which he could not resolve, however,
to place of his own act in my hands. He has the paper in his breast, I
believe, at this moment.’

The young man touched it hastily; in corroboration of the fact.

‘It will be well to leave that in our charge, perhaps,’ said John. ‘But
do not mind it now.’

As he said this, he held up his hand to bespeak Martin’s attention. It
was already fixed upon the man before him, who, after a short silence
said, in a low, weak, hollow voice:

‘What relation was Mr Anthony Chuzzlewit, who--’

‘--Who died--to me?’ said Martin. ‘He was my grandfather’s brother.’

‘I fear he was made away with. Murdered!’

‘My God!’ said Martin. ‘By whom?’

The young man, Lewsome, looked up in his face, and casting down his eyes
again, replied:

‘I fear, by me.’

‘By you?’ cried Martin.

‘Not by my act, but I fear by my means.’

‘Speak out!’ said Martin, ‘and speak the truth.’

‘I fear this IS the truth.’

Martin was about to interrupt him again, but John Westlock saying
softly, ‘Let him tell his story in his own way,’ Lewsome went on thus:

‘I have been bred a surgeon, and for the last few years have served a
general practitioner in the City, as his assistant. While I was in
his employment I became acquainted with Jonas Chuzzlewit. He is the
principal in this deed.’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Martin, sternly. ‘Do you know he is the son
of the old man of whom you have spoken?’

‘I do,’ he answered.

He remained silent for some moments, when he resumed at the point where
he had left off.

‘I have reason to know it; for I have often heard him wish his old
father dead, and complain of his being wearisome to him, and a drag
upon him. He was in the habit of doing so, at a place of meeting we
had--three or four of us--at night. There was no good in the place you
may suppose, when you hear that he was the chief of the party. I wish I
had died myself, and never seen it!’

He stopped again; and again resumed as before.

‘We met to drink and game; not for large sums, but for sums that were
large to us. He generally won. Whether or no, he lent money at interest
to those who lost; and in this way, though I think we all secretly hated
him, he came to be the master of us. To propitiate him we made a jest of
his father; it began with his debtors; I was one; and we used to toast
a quicker journey to the old man, and a swift inheritance to the young
one.’

He paused again.

‘One night he came there in a very bad humour. He had been greatly
tried, he said, by the old man that day. He and I were alone together;
and he angrily told me, that the old man was in his second childhood;
that he was weak, imbecile, and drivelling; as unbearable to himself as
he was to other people; and that it would be a charity to put him out of
the way. He swore that he had often thought of mixing something with the
stuff he took for his cough, which should help him to die easily. People
were sometimes smothered who were bitten by mad dogs, he said; and why
not help these lingering old men out of their troubles too? He looked
full at me as he said so, and I looked full at him; but it went no
farther that night.’

He stopped once more, and was silent for so long an interval that John
Westlock said ‘Go on.’ Martin had never removed his eyes from his face,
but was so absorbed in horror and astonishment that he could not speak.

‘It may have been a week after that, or it may have been less or
more--the matter was in my mind all the time, but I cannot recollect the
time, as I should any other period--when he spoke to me again. We were
alone then, too; being there before the usual hour of assembling. There
was no appointment between us; but I think I went there to meet him, and
I know he came there to meet me. He was there first. He was reading
a newspaper when I went in, and nodded to me without looking up, or
leaving off reading. I sat down opposite and close to him. He said,
immediately, that he wanted me to get him some of two sorts of drugs.
One that was instantaneous in its effect; of which he wanted very
little. One that was slow and not suspicious in appearance; of which he
wanted more. While he was speaking to me he still read the newspaper. He
said “Drugs,” and never used any other word. Neither did I.’

‘This all agrees with what I have heard before,’ observed John Westlock.

‘I asked him what he wanted the drugs for? He said for no harm; to
physic cats; what did it matter to me? I was going out to a distant
colony (I had recently got the appointment, which, as Mr Westlock
knows, I have since lost by my sickness, and which was my only hope of
salvation from ruin), and what did it matter to me? He could get them
without my aid at half a hundred places, but not so easily as he could
get them of me. This was true. He might not want them at all, he said,
and he had no present idea of using them; but he wished to have them
by him. All this time he still read the newspaper. We talked about the
price. He was to forgive me a small debt--I was quite in his power--and
to pay me five pounds; and there the matter dropped, through others
coming in. But, next night, under exactly similar circumstances, I gave
him the drugs, on his saying I was a fool to think that he should ever
use them for any harm; and he gave me the money. We have never met
since. I only know that the poor old father died soon afterwards, just
as he would have died from this cause; and that I have undergone, and
suffer now, intolerable misery. Nothing’ he added, stretching out his
hands, ‘can paint my misery! It is well deserved, but nothing can paint
it.’

With that he hung his head, and said no more, wasted and wretched, he
was not a creature upon whom to heap reproaches that were unavailing.

‘Let him remain at hand,’ said Martin, turning from him; ‘but out of
sight, in Heaven’s name!’

‘He will remain here,’ John whispered. ‘Come with me!’ Softly turning
the key upon him as they went out, he conducted Martin into the
adjoining room, in which they had been before.

Martin was so amazed, so shocked, and confounded by what he had heard
that it was some time before he could reduce it to any order in his
mind, or could sufficiently comprehend the bearing of one part upon
another, to take in all the details at one view. When he, at length, had
the whole narrative clearly before him, John Westlock went on to point
out the great probability of the guilt of Jonas being known to other
people, who traded in it for their own benefit, and who were, by
such means, able to exert that control over him which Tom Pinch had
accidentally witnessed, and unconsciously assisted. This appeared so
plain, that they agreed upon it without difficulty; but instead of
deriving the least assistance from this source, they found that it
embarrassed them the more.

They knew nothing of the real parties who possessed this power. The only
person before them was Tom’s landlord. They had no right to question
Tom’s landlord, even if they could find him, which, according to Tom’s
account, it would not be easy to do. And granting that they did question
him, and he answered (which was taking a good deal for granted), he had
only to say, with reference to the adventure on the wharf, that he had
been sent from such and such a place to summon Jonas back on urgent
business, and there was an end of it.

Besides, there was the great difficulty and responsibility of moving at
all in the matter. Lewsome’s story might be false; in his wretched state
it might be greatly heightened by a diseased brain; or admitting it
to be entirely true, the old man might have died a natural death. Mr
Pecksniff had been there at the time; as Tom immediately remembered,
when he came back in the afternoon, and shared their counsels; and there
had been no secrecy about it. Martin’s grandfather was of right the
person to decide upon the course that should be taken; but to get at his
views would be impossible, for Mr Pecksniff’s views were certain to
be his. And the nature of Mr Pecksniff’s views in reference to his own
son-in-law might be easily reckoned upon.

Apart from these considerations, Martin could not endure the thought
of seeming to grasp at this unnatural charge against his relative, and
using it as a stepping-stone to his grandfather’s favour. But that he
would seem to do so, if he presented himself before his grandfather in
Mr Pecksniff’s house again, for the purpose of declaring it; and that
Mr Pecksniff, of all men, would represent his conduct in that despicable
light, he perfectly well knew. On the other hand to be in possession of
such a statement, and take no measures of further inquiry in reference
to it, was tantamount to being a partner in the guilt it professed to
disclose.

In a word, they were wholly unable to discover any outlet from this maze
of difficulty, which did not lie through some perplexed and entangled
thicket. And although Mr Tapley was promptly taken into their
confidence; and the fertile imagination of that gentleman suggested many
bold expedients, which, to do him justice, he was quite ready to carry
into instant operation on his own personal responsibility; still ‘bating
the general zeal of Mr Tapley’s nature, nothing was made particularly
clearer by these offers of service.

It was in this position of affairs that Tom’s account of the strange
behaviour of the decayed clerk, on the night of the tea-party, became
of great moment, and finally convinced them that to arrive at a more
accurate knowledge of the workings of that old man’s mind and memory,
would be to take a most important stride in their pursuit of the truth.
So, having first satisfied themselves that no communication had ever
taken place between Lewsome and Mr Chuffey (which would have accounted
at once for any suspicions the latter might entertain), they unanimously
resolved that the old clerk was the man they wanted.

But, like the unanimous resolution of a public meeting, which will
oftentimes declare that this or that grievance is not to be borne
a moment longer, which is nevertheless borne for a century or two
afterwards, without any modification, they only reached in this the
conclusion that they were all of one mind. For it was one thing to want
Mr Chuffey, and another thing to get at him; and to do that without
alarming him, or without alarming Jonas, or without being discomfited
by the difficulty of striking, in an instrument so out of tune and so
unused, the note they sought, was an end as far from their reach as
ever.

The question then became, who of those about the old clerk had had most
influence with him that night? Tom said his young mistress clearly.
But Tom and all of them shrunk from the thought of entrapping her,
and making her the innocent means of bringing retribution on her cruel
husband. Was there nobody else? Why yes. In a very different way, Tom
said, he was influenced by Mrs Gamp, the nurse; who had once had the
control of him, as he understood, for some time.

They caught at this immediately. Here was a new way out, developed in a
quarter until then overlooked. John Westlock knew Mrs Gamp; he had given
her employment; he was acquainted with her place of residence: for that
good lady had obligingly furnished him, at parting, with a pack of her
professional cards for general distribution. It was decided that Mrs
Gamp should be approached with caution, but approached without delay;
and that the depths of that discreet matron’s knowledge of Mr Chuffey,
and means of bringing them, or one of them, into communication with him,
should be carefully sounded.

On this service, Martin and John Westlock determined to proceed that
night; waiting on Mrs Gamp first, at her lodgings; and taking their
chance of finding her in the repose of private life, or of having to
seek her out, elsewhere, in the exercise of her professional duties. Tom
returned home, that he might lose no opportunity of having an interview
with Nadgett, by being absent in the event of his reappearance. And Mr
Tapley remained (by his own particular desire) for the time being in
Furnival’s Inn, to look after Lewsome; who might safely have been left
to himself, however, for any thought he seemed to entertain of giving
them the slip.

Before they parted on their several errands, they caused him to read
aloud, in the presence of them all, the paper which he had about him,
and the declaration he had attached to it, which was to the effect that
he had written it voluntarily, in the fear of death and in the torture
of his mind. And when he had done so, they all signed it, and taking it
from him, of his free will, locked it in a place of safety.

Martin also wrote, by John’s advice, a letter to the trustees of the
famous Grammar School, boldly claiming the successful design as his,
and charging Mr Pecksniff with the fraud he had committed. In this
proceeding also, John was hotly interested; observing, with his usual
irreverance, that Mr Pecksniff had been a successful rascal all his
life through, and that it would be a lasting source of happiness to him
(John) if he could help to do him justice in the smallest particular.

A busy day! But Martin had no lodgings yet; so when these matters were
disposed of, he excused himself from dining with John Westlock and was
fain to wander out alone, and look for some. He succeeded, after great
trouble, in engaging two garrets for himself and Mark, situated in a
court in the Strand, not far from Temple Bar. Their luggage, which was
waiting for them at a coach-office, he conveyed to this new place of
refuge; and it was with a glow of satisfaction, which as a selfish man
he never could have known and never had, that, thinking how much pains
and trouble he had saved Mark, and how pleased and astonished Mark would
be, he afterwards walked up and down, in the Temple, eating a meat-pie
for his dinner.



CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

IN WHICH MRS HARRIS ASSISTED BY A TEAPOT, IS THE CAUSE OF A DIVISION
BETWEEN FRIENDS


Mrs Gamp’s apartment in Kingsgate Street, High Holborn, wore,
metaphorically speaking, a robe of state. It was swept and garnished for
the reception of a visitor. That visitor was Betsey Prig; Mrs Prig, of
Bartlemy’s; or as some said Barklemy’s, or as some said Bardlemy’s; for
by all these endearing and familiar appellations, had the hospital of
Saint Bartholomew become a household word among the sisterhood which
Betsey Prig adorned.

Mrs Gamp’s apartment was not a spacious one, but, to a contented mind,
a closet is a palace; and the first-floor front at Mr Sweedlepipe’s may
have been, in the imagination of Mrs Gamp, a stately pile. If it were
not exactly that, to restless intellects, it at least comprised as much
accommodation as any person, not sanguine to insanity, could have looked
for in a room of its dimensions. For only keep the bedstead always in
your mind; and you were safe. That was the grand secret. Remembering the
bedstead, you might even stoop to look under the little round table
for anything you had dropped, without hurting yourself much against the
chest of drawers, or qualifying as a patient of Saint Bartholomew, by
falling into the fire.

Visitors were much assisted in their cautious efforts to preserve an
unflagging recollection of this piece of furniture, by its size; which
was great. It was not a turn-up bedstead, nor yet a French bedstead,
nor yet a four-post bedstead, but what is poetically called a tent; the
sacking whereof was low and bulgy, insomuch that Mrs Gamp’s box would
not go under it, but stopped half-way, in a manner which, while it did
violence to the reason, likewise endangered the legs of a stranger. The
frame too, which would have supported the canopy and hangings if there
had been any, was ornamented with divers pippins carved in timber,
which on the slightest provocation, and frequently on none at all, came
tumbling down; harassing the peaceful guest with inexplicable terrors.

The bed itself was decorated with a patchwork quilt of great antiquity;
and at the upper end, upon the side nearest to the door, hung a scanty
curtain of blue check, which prevented the Zephyrs that were abroad in
Kingsgate Street, from visiting Mrs Gamp’s head too roughly. Some rusty
gowns and other articles of that lady’s wardrobe depended from the
posts; and these had so adapted themselves by long usage to her figure,
that more than one impatient husband coming in precipitately, at about
the time of twilight, had been for an instant stricken dumb by the
supposed discovery that Mrs Gamp had hanged herself. One gentleman,
coming on the usual hasty errand, had said indeed, that they looked like
guardian angels ‘watching of her in her sleep.’ But that, as Mrs Gamp
said, ‘was his first;’ and he never repeated the sentiment, though he
often repeated his visit.

The chairs in Mrs Gamp’s apartment were extremely large and
broad-backed, which was more than a sufficient reason for there being
but two in number. They were both elbow-chairs, of ancient mahogany; and
were chiefly valuable for the slippery nature of their seats, which had
been originally horsehair, but were now covered with a shiny substance
of a bluish tint, from which the visitor began to slide away with a
dismayed countenance, immediately after sitting down. What Mrs Gamp
wanted in chairs she made up in bandboxes; of which she had a great
collection, devoted to the reception of various miscellaneous valuables,
which were not, however, as well protected as the good woman, by a
pleasant fiction, seemed to think; for, though every bandbox had a
carefully closed lid, not one among them had a bottom; owing to which
cause the property within was merely, as it were, extinguished. The
chest of drawers having been originally made to stand upon the top of
another chest, had a dwarfish, elfin look, alone; but in regard of its
security it had a great advantage over the bandboxes, for as all the
handles had been long ago pulled off, it was very difficult to get at
its contents. This indeed was only to be done by one or two devices;
either by tilting the whole structure forward until all the drawers fell
out together, or by opening them singly with knives, like oysters.

Mrs Gamp stored all her household matters in a little cupboard by the
fire-place; beginning below the surface (as in nature) with the coals,
and mounting gradually upwards to the spirits, which, from motives of
delicacy, she kept in a teapot. The chimney-piece was ornamented with
a small almanack, marked here and there in Mrs Gamp’s own hand with a
memorandum of the date at which some lady was expected to fall due. It
was also embellished with three profiles: one, in colours, of Mrs Gamp
herself in early life; one, in bronze, of a lady in feathers, supposed
to be Mrs Harris, as she appeared when dressed for a ball; and one, in
black, of Mr Gamp, deceased. The last was a full length, in order
that the likeness might be rendered more obvious and forcible by the
introduction of the wooden leg.

A pair of bellows, a pair of pattens, a toasting-fork, a kettle, a
pap-boat, a spoon for the administration of medicine to the refractory,
and lastly, Mrs Gamp’s umbrella, which as something of great price
and rarity, was displayed with particular ostentation, completed the
decorations of the chimney-piece and adjacent wall. Towards these
objects Mrs Gamp raised her eyes in satisfaction when she had arranged
the tea-board, and had concluded her arrangements for the reception
of Betsey Prig, even unto the setting forth of two pounds of Newcastle
salmon, intensely pickled.

‘There! Now drat you, Betsey, don’t be long!’ said Mrs Gamp,
apostrophizing her absent friend. ‘For I can’t abear to wait, I do
assure you. To wotever place I goes, I sticks to this one mortar, “I’m
easy pleased; it is but little as I wants; but I must have that little
of the best, and to the minute when the clock strikes, else we do not
part as I could wish, but bearin’ malice in our arts.”’

Her own preparations were of the best, for they comprehended a delicate
new loaf, a plate of fresh butter, a basin of fine white sugar, and
other arrangements on the same scale. Even the snuff with which she
now refreshed herself, was so choice in quality that she took a second
pinch.

‘There’s the little bell a-ringing now,’ said Mrs Gamp, hurrying to
the stair-head and looking over. ‘Betsey Prig, my--why it’s that there
disapintin’ Sweedlepipes, I do believe.’

‘Yes, it’s me,’ said the barber in a faint voice; ‘I’ve just come in.’

‘You’re always a-comin’ in, I think,’ muttered Mrs Gamp to herself,
‘except wen you’re a-goin’ out. I ha’n’t no patience with that man!’

‘Mrs Gamp,’ said the barber. ‘I say! Mrs Gamp!’

‘Well,’ cried Mrs Gamp, impatiently, as she descended the stairs. ‘What
is it? Is the Thames a-fire, and cooking its own fish, Mr Sweedlepipes?
Why wot’s the man gone and been a-doin’ of to himself? He’s as white as
chalk!’

She added the latter clause of inquiry, when she got downstairs, and
found him seated in the shaving-chair, pale and disconsolate.

‘You recollect,’ said Poll. ‘You recollect young--’

‘Not young Wilkins!’ cried Mrs Gamp. ‘Don’t say young Wilkins, wotever
you do. If young Wilkins’s wife is took--’

‘It isn’t anybody’s wife,’ exclaimed the little barber. ‘Bailey, young
Bailey!’

‘Why, wot do you mean to say that chit’s been a-doin’ of?’ retorted Mrs
Gamp, sharply. ‘Stuff and nonsense, Mrs Sweedlepipes!’

‘He hasn’t been a-doing anything!’ exclaimed poor Poll, quite desperate.
‘What do you catch me up so short for, when you see me put out to that
extent that I can hardly speak? He’ll never do anything again. He’s done
for. He’s killed. The first time I ever see that boy,’ said Poll, ‘I
charged him too much for a red-poll. I asked him three-halfpence for a
penny one, because I was afraid he’d beat me down. But he didn’t.
And now he’s dead; and if you was to crowd all the steam-engines and
electric fluids that ever was, into this shop, and set ‘em every one to
work their hardest, they couldn’t square the account, though it’s only a
ha’penny!’

Mr Sweedlepipe turned aside to the towel, and wiped his eyes with it.

‘And what a clever boy he was!’ he said. ‘What a surprising young chap
he was! How he talked! and what a deal he know’d! Shaved in this very
chair he was; only for fun; it was all his fun; he was full of it. Ah!
to think that he’ll never be shaved in earnest! The birds might every
one have died, and welcome,’ cried the little barber, looking round him
at the cages, and again applying to the towel, ‘sooner than I’d have
heard this news!’

‘How did you ever come to hear it?’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘who told you?’

‘I went out,’ returned the little barber, ‘into the City, to meet a
sporting gent upon the Stock Exchange, that wanted a few slow pigeons to
practice at; and when I’d done with him, I went to get a little drop
of beer, and there I heard everybody a-talking about it. It’s in the
papers.’

‘You are in a nice state of confugion, Mr Sweedlepipes, you are!’ said
Mrs Gamp, shaking her head; ‘and my opinion is, as half-a-dudgeon fresh
young lively leeches on your temples, wouldn’t be too much to clear your
mind, which so I tell you. Wot were they a-talkin’ on, and wot was in
the papers?’

‘All about it!’ cried the barber. ‘What else do you suppose? Him and his
master were upset on a journey, and he was carried to Salisbury, and
was breathing his last when the account came away. He never spoke
afterwards. Not a single word. That’s the worst of it to me; but that
ain’t all. His master can’t be found. The other manager of their office
in the city, Crimple, David Crimple, has gone off with the money, and is
advertised for, with a reward, upon the walls. Mr Montague, poor young
Bailey’s master (what a boy he was!) is advertised for, too. Some say
he’s slipped off, to join his friend abroad; some say he mayn’t have got
away yet; and they’re looking for him high and low. Their office is a
smash; a swindle altogether. But what’s a Life Assurance office to a
Life! And what a Life Young Bailey’s was!’

‘He was born into a wale,’ said Mrs Gamp, with philosophical coolness.
‘and he lived in a wale; and he must take the consequences of sech a
sitiwation. But don’t you hear nothink of Mr Chuzzlewit in all this?’

‘No,’ said Poll, ‘nothing to speak of. His name wasn’t printed as one of
the board, though some people say it was just going to be. Some believe
he was took in, and some believe he was one of the takers-in; but
however that may be, they can’t prove nothing against him. This morning
he went up of his own accord afore the Lord Mayor or some of them City
big-wigs, and complained that he’d been swindled, and that these two
persons had gone off and cheated him, and that he had just found out
that Montague’s name wasn’t even Montague, but something else. And they
do say that he looked like Death, owing to his losses. But, Lord
forgive me,’ cried the barber, coming back again to the subject of
his individual grief, ‘what’s his looks to me! He might have died and
welcome, fifty times, and not been such a loss as Bailey!’

At this juncture the little bell rang, and the deep voice of Mrs Prig
struck into the conversation.

‘Oh! You’re a-talkin’ about it, are you!’ observed that lady. ‘Well, I
hope you’ve got it over, for I ain’t interested in it myself.’

‘My precious Betsey,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘how late you are!’

The worthy Mrs Prig replied, with some asperity, ‘that if perwerse
people went off dead, when they was least expected, it warn’t no fault
of her’n.’ And further, ‘that it was quite aggrawation enough to be made
late when one was dropping for one’s tea, without hearing on it again.’

Mrs Gamp, deriving from this exhibition of repartee some clue to the
state of Mrs Prig’s feelings, instantly conducted her upstairs; deeming
that the sight of pickled salmon might work a softening change.

But Betsey Prig expected pickled salmon. It was obvious that she did;
for her first words, after glancing at the table, were:

‘I know’d she wouldn’t have a cowcumber!’

Mrs Gamp changed colour, and sat down upon the bedstead.

‘Lord bless you, Betsey Prig, your words is true. I quite forgot it!’

Mrs Prig, looking steadfastly at her friend, put her hand in her
pocket, and with an air of surly triumph drew forth either the oldest of
lettuces or youngest of cabbages, but at any rate, a green vegetable of
an expansive nature, and of such magnificent proportions that she was
obliged to shut it up like an umbrella before she could pull it out.
She also produced a handful of mustard and cress, a trifle of the herb
called dandelion, three bunches of radishes, an onion rather larger than
an average turnip, three substantial slices of beetroot, and a short
prong or antler of celery; the whole of this garden-stuff having been
publicly exhibited, but a short time before, as a twopenny salad, and
purchased by Mrs Prig on condition that the vendor could get it all into
her pocket. Which had been happily accomplished, in High Holborn, to
the breathless interest of a hackney-coach stand. And she laid so little
stress on this surprising forethought, that she did not even smile, but
returning her pocket into its accustomed sphere, merely recommended
that these productions of nature should be sliced up, for immediate
consumption, in plenty of vinegar.

‘And don’t go a-droppin’ none of your snuff in it,’ said Mrs Prig.
‘In gruel, barley-water, apple-tea, mutton-broth, and that, it don’t
signify. It stimulates a patient. But I don’t relish it myself.’

‘Why, Betsey Prig!’ cried Mrs Gamp, ‘how CAN you talk so!’

‘Why, ain’t your patients, wotever their diseases is, always asneezin’
their wery heads off, along of your snuff?’ said Mrs Prig.

‘And wot if they are!’ said Mrs Gamp

‘Nothing if they are,’ said Mrs Prig. ‘But don’t deny it, Sairah.’

‘Who deniges of it?’ Mrs Gamp inquired.

Mrs Prig returned no answer.

‘WHO deniges of it, Betsey?’ Mrs Gamp inquired again. Then Mrs Gamp, by
reversing the question, imparted a deeper and more awful character of
solemnity to the same. ‘Betsey, who deniges of it?’

It was the nearest possible approach to a very decided difference of
opinion between these ladies; but Mrs Prig’s impatience for the meal
being greater at the moment than her impatience of contradiction, she
replied, for the present, ‘Nobody, if you don’t, Sairah,’ and prepared
herself for tea. For a quarrel can be taken up at any time, but a
limited quantity of salmon cannot.

Her toilet was simple. She had merely to ‘chuck’ her bonnet and shawl
upon the bed; give her hair two pulls, one upon the right side and one
upon the left, as if she were ringing a couple of bells; and all was
done. The tea was already made, Mrs Gamp was not long over the salad,
and they were soon at the height of their repast.

The temper of both parties was improved, for the time being, by the
enjoyments of the table. When the meal came to a termination (which it
was pretty long in doing), and Mrs Gamp having cleared away, produced
the teapot from the top shelf, simultaneously with a couple of
wine-glasses, they were quite amiable.

‘Betsey,’ said Mrs Gamp, filling her own glass and passing the teapot,
‘I will now propoge a toast. My frequent pardner, Betsey Prig!’

‘Which, altering the name to Sairah Gamp; I drink,’ said Mrs Prig, ‘with
love and tenderness.’

From this moment symptoms of inflammation began to lurk in the nose of
each lady; and perhaps, notwithstanding all appearances to the contrary,
in the temper also.

‘Now, Sairah,’ said Mrs Prig, ‘joining business with pleasure, wot is
this case in which you wants me?’

Mrs Gamp betraying in her face some intention of returning an evasive
answer, Betsey added:

‘IS it Mrs Harris?’

‘No, Betsey Prig, it ain’t,’ was Mrs Gamp’s reply.

‘Well!’ said Mrs Prig, with a short laugh. ‘I’m glad of that, at any
rate.’

‘Why should you be glad of that, Betsey?’ Mrs Gamp retorted, warmly.
‘She is unbeknown to you except by hearsay, why should you be glad? If
you have anythink to say contrairy to the character of Mrs Harris, which
well I knows behind her back, afore her face, or anywheres, is not to be
impeaged, out with it, Betsey. I have know’d that sweetest and best of
women,’ said Mrs Gamp, shaking her head, and shedding tears, ‘ever since
afore her First, which Mr Harris who was dreadful timid went and stopped
his ears in a empty dog-kennel, and never took his hands away or come
out once till he was showed the baby, wen bein’ took with fits, the
doctor collared him and laid him on his back upon the airy stones, and
she was told to ease her mind, his owls was organs. And I have know’d
her, Betsey Prig, when he has hurt her feelin’ art by sayin’ of his
Ninth that it was one too many, if not two, while that dear innocent was
cooin’ in his face, which thrive it did though bandy, but I have never
know’d as you had occagion to be glad, Betsey, on accounts of Mrs Harris
not requiring you. Require she never will, depend upon it, for her
constant words in sickness is, and will be, “Send for Sairey?”’

During this touching address, Mrs Prig adroitly feigning to be the
victim of that absence of mind which has its origin in excessive
attention to one topic, helped herself from the teapot without appearing
to observe it. Mrs Gamp observed it, however, and came to a premature
close in consequence.

‘Well, it ain’t her, it seems,’ said Mrs Prig, coldly; ‘who is it then?’

‘You have heerd me mention, Betsey,’ Mrs Gamp replied, after glancing in
an expressive and marked manner at the tea-pot, ‘a person as I took
care on at the time as you and me was pardners off and on, in that there
fever at the Bull?’

‘Old Snuffey,’ Mrs Prig observed.

Sarah Gamp looked at her with an eye of fire, for she saw in this
mistake of Mrs Prig, another willful and malignant stab at that same
weakness or custom of hers, an ungenerous allusion to which, on the part
of Betsey, had first disturbed their harmony that evening. And she saw
it still more clearly, when, politely but firmly correcting that lady
by the distinct enunciation of the word ‘Chuffey,’ Mrs Prig received the
correction with a diabolical laugh.

The best among us have their failings, and it must be conceded of Mrs
Prig, that if there were a blemish in the goodness of her disposition,
it was a habit she had of not bestowing all its sharp and acid
properties upon her patients (as a thoroughly amiable woman would have
done), but of keeping a considerable remainder for the service of her
friends. Highly pickled salmon, and lettuces chopped up in vinegar,
may, as viands possessing some acidity of their own, have encouraged and
increased this failing in Mrs Prig; and every application to the teapot
certainly did; for it was often remarked of her by her friends, that
she was most contradictory when most elevated. It is certain that her
countenance became about this time derisive and defiant, and that she
sat with her arms folded, and one eye shut up, in a somewhat offensive,
because obstrusively intelligent, manner.

Mrs Gamp observing this, felt it the more necessary that Mrs Prig should
know her place, and be made sensible of her exact station in society, as
well as of her obligations to herself. She therefore assumed an air of
greater patronage and importance, as she went on to answer Mrs Prig a
little more in detail.

‘Mr Chuffey, Betsey,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘is weak in his mind. Excuge me
if I makes remark, that he may neither be so weak as people thinks, nor
people may not think he is so weak as they pretends, and what I knows,
I knows; and what you don’t, you don’t; so do not ask me, Betsey. But Mr
Chuffey’s friends has made propojals for his bein’ took care on, and has
said to me, “Mrs Gamp, WILL you undertake it? We couldn’t think,” they
says, “of trusting him to nobody but you, for, Sairey, you are gold as
has passed the furnage. Will you undertake it, at your own price, day
and night, and by your own self?” “No,” I says, “I will not. Do not
reckon on it. There is,” I says, “but one creetur in the world as I would
undertake on sech terms, and her name is Harris. But,” I says, “I
am acquainted with a friend, whose name is Betsey Prig, that I can
recommend, and will assist me. Betsey,” I says, “is always to be trusted
under me, and will be guided as I could desire.”’

Here Mrs Prig, without any abatement of her offensive manner again
counterfeited abstraction of mind, and stretched out her hand to the
teapot. It was more than Mrs Gamp could bear. She stopped the hand of
Mrs Prig with her own, and said, with great feeling:

‘No, Betsey! Drink fair, wotever you do!’

Mrs Prig, thus baffled, threw herself back in her chair, and closing the
same eye more emphatically, and folding her arms tighter, suffered her
head to roll slowly from side to side, while she surveyed her friend
with a contemptuous smile.

Mrs Gamp resumed:

‘Mrs Harris, Betsey--’

‘Bother Mrs Harris!’ said Betsey Prig.

Mrs Gamp looked at her with amazement, incredulity, and indignation;
when Mrs Prig, shutting her eye still closer, and folding her arms still
tighter, uttered these memorable and tremendous words:

‘I don’t believe there’s no sich a person!’

After the utterance of which expressions, she leaned forward, and
snapped her fingers once, twice, thrice; each time nearer to the face of
Mrs Gamp, and then rose to put on her bonnet, as one who felt that there
was now a gulf between them, which nothing could ever bridge across.

The shock of this blow was so violent and sudden, that Mrs Gamp sat
staring at nothing with uplifted eyes, and her mouth open as if she
were gasping for breath, until Betsey Prig had put on her bonnet and
her shawl, and was gathering the latter about her throat. Then Mrs Gamp
rose--morally and physically rose--and denounced her.

‘What!’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘you bage creetur, have I know’d Mrs Harris five
and thirty year, to be told at last that there ain’t no sech a person
livin’! Have I stood her friend in all her troubles, great and small,
for it to come at last to sech a end as this, which her own sweet picter
hanging up afore you all the time, to shame your Bragian words! But well
you mayn’t believe there’s no sech a creetur, for she wouldn’t demean
herself to look at you, and often has she said, when I have made mention
of your name, which, to my sinful sorrow, I have done, “What, Sairey
Gamp! debage yourself to HER!” Go along with you!’

‘I’m a-goin’, ma’am, ain’t I?’ said Mrs Prig, stopping as she said it.

‘You had better, ma’am,’ said Mrs Gamp.

‘Do you know who you’re talking to, ma’am?’ inquired her visitor.

‘Aperiently,’ said Mrs Gamp, surveying her with scorn from head to foot,
‘to Betsey Prig. Aperiently so. I know her. No one better. Go along with
you!’

‘And YOU was a-goin’ to take me under you!’ cried Mrs Prig, surveying
Mrs Gamp from head to foot in her turn. ‘YOU was, was you? Oh, how kind!
Why, deuce take your imperence,’ said Mrs Prig, with a rapid change from
banter to ferocity, ‘what do you mean?’

‘Go along with you!’ said Mrs Gamp. ‘I blush for you.’

‘You had better blush a little for yourself, while you ARE about it!’
said Mrs Prig. ‘You and your Chuffeys! What, the poor old creetur isn’t
mad enough, isn’t he? Aha!’

‘He’d very soon be mad enough, if you had anything to do with him,’ said
Mrs Gamp.

‘And that’s what I was wanted for, is it?’ cried Mrs Prig, triumphantly.
‘Yes. But you’ll find yourself deceived. I won’t go near him. We shall
see how you get on without me. I won’t have nothink to do with him.’

‘You never spoke a truer word than that!’ said Mrs Gamp. ‘Go along with
you!’

She was prevented from witnessing the actual retirement of Mrs Prig from
the room, notwithstanding the great desire she had expressed to behold
it, by that lady, in her angry withdrawal, coming into contact with the
bedstead, and bringing down the previously mentioned pippins; three or
four of which came rattling on the head of Mrs Gamp so smartly, that
when she recovered from this wooden shower-bath, Mrs Prig was gone.

She had the satisfaction, however, of hearing the deep voice of Betsey,
proclaiming her injuries and her determination to have nothing to do
with Mr Chuffey, down the stairs, and along the passage, and even out in
Kingsgate Street. Likewise of seeing in her own apartment, in the place
of Mrs Prig, Mr Sweedlepipe and two gentlemen.

‘Why, bless my life!’ exclaimed the little barber, ‘what’s amiss? The
noise you ladies have been making, Mrs Gamp! Why, these two gentlemen
have been standing on the stairs, outside the door, nearly all the time,
trying to make you hear, while you were pelting away, hammer and tongs!
It’ll be the death of the little bullfinch in the shop, that draws his
own water. In his fright, he’s been a-straining himself all to bits,
drawing more water than he could drink in a twelvemonth. He must have
thought it was Fire!’

Mrs Gamp had in the meanwhile sunk into her chair, from whence, turning
up her overflowing eyes, and clasping her hands, she delivered the
following lamentation:

‘Oh, Mr Sweedlepipes, which Mr Westlock also, if my eyes do not deceive,
and a friend not havin’ the pleasure of bein’ beknown, wot I have took
from Betsey Prig this blessed night, no mortial creetur knows! If she
had abuged me, bein’ in liquor, which I thought I smelt her wen she
come, but could not so believe, not bein’ used myself’--Mrs Gamp, by the
way, was pretty far gone, and the fragrance of the teapot was strong in
the room--‘I could have bore it with a thankful art. But the words she
spoke of Mrs Harris, lambs could not forgive. No, Betsey!’ said Mrs
Gamp, in a violent burst of feeling, ‘nor worms forget!’

The little barber scratched his head, and shook it, and looked at the
teapot, and gradually got out of the room. John Westlock, taking a
chair, sat down on one side of Mrs Gamp. Martin, taking the foot of the
bed, supported her on the other.

‘You wonder what we want, I daresay,’ observed John. ‘I’ll tell you
presently, when you have recovered. It’s not pressing, for a few minutes
or so. How do you find yourself? Better?’

Mrs Gamp shed more tears, shook her head and feebly pronounced Mrs
Harris’s name.

‘Have a little--’ John was at a loss what to call it.

‘Tea,’ suggested Martin.

‘It ain’t tea,’ said Mrs Gamp.

‘Physic of some sort, I suppose,’ cried John. ‘Have a little.’

Mrs Gamp was prevailed upon to take a glassful. ‘On condition,’ she
passionately observed, ‘as Betsey never has another stroke of work from
me.’

‘Certainly not,’ said John. ‘She shall never help to nurse ME.’

‘To think,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘as she should ever have helped to nuss that
friend of yourn, and been so near of hearing things that--Ah!’

John looked at Martin.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That was a narrow escape, Mrs Gamp.’

‘Narrer, in-deed!’ she returned. ‘It was only my having the night, and
hearin’ of him in his wanderins; and her the day, that saved it. Wot
would she have said and done, if she had know’d what I know; that
perfeejus wretch! Yet, oh good gracious me!’ cried Mrs Gamp, trampling
on the floor, in the absence of Mrs Prig, ‘that I should hear from that
same woman’s lips what I have heerd her speak of Mrs Harris!’

‘Never mind,’ said John. ‘You know it is not true.’

‘Isn’t true!’ cried Mrs Gamp. ‘True! Don’t I know as that dear woman
is expecting of me at this minnit, Mr Westlock, and is a-lookin’ out of
window down the street, with little Tommy Harris in her arms, as calls
me his own Gammy, and truly calls, for bless the mottled little legs
of that there precious child (like Canterbury Brawn his own dear father
says, which so they are) his own I have been, ever since I found him,
Mr Westlock, with his small red worsted shoe a-gurglin’ in his throat,
where he had put it in his play, a chick, wile they was leavin’ of
him on the floor a-lookin’ for it through the ouse and him a-choakin’
sweetly in the parlour! Oh, Betsey Prig, what wickedness you’ve showed
this night, but never shall you darken Sairey’s doors agen, you twining
serpiant!’

‘You were always so kind to her, too!’ said John, consolingly.

‘That’s the cutting part. That’s where it hurts me, Mr Westlock,’ Mrs
Gamp replied; holding out her glass unconsciously, while Martin filled
it.

‘Chosen to help you with Mr Lewsome!’ said John. ‘Chosen to help you
with Mr Chuffey!’

‘Chose once, but chose no more,’ cried Mrs Gamp. ‘No pardnership with
Betsey Prig agen, sir!’

‘No, no,’ said John. ‘That would never do.’

‘I don’t know as it ever would have done, sir,’ Mrs Gamp replied, with
a solemnity peculiar to a certain stage of intoxication. ‘Now that the
marks,’ by which Mrs Gamp is supposed to have meant mask, ‘is off
that creetur’s face, I do not think it ever would have done. There
are reagions in families for keeping things a secret, Mr Westlock, and
havin’ only them about you as you knows you can repoge in. Who could
repoge in Betsey Prig, arter her words of Mrs Harris, setting in that
chair afore my eyes!’

‘Quite true,’ said John; ‘quite. I hope you have time to find another
assistant, Mrs Gamp?’

Between her indignation and the teapot, her powers of comprehending what
was said to her began to fail. She looked at John with tearful eyes, and
murmuring the well-remembered name which Mrs Prig had challenged--as if
it were a talisman against all earthly sorrows--seemed to wander in her
mind.

‘I hope,’ repeated John, ‘that you have time to find another assistant?’

‘Which short it is, indeed,’ cried Mrs Gamp, turning up her languid
eyes, and clasping Mr Westlock’s wrist with matronly affection.
‘To-morrow evenin’, sir, I waits upon his friends. Mr Chuzzlewit apinted
it from nine to ten.’

‘From nine to ten,’ said John, with a significant glance at Martin. ‘and
then Mr Chuffey retires into safe keeping, does he?’

‘He needs to be kep safe, I do assure you,’ Mrs Gamp replied with a
mysterious air. ‘Other people besides me has had a happy deliverance
from Betsey Prig. I little know’d that woman. She’d have let it out!’

‘Let HIM out, you mean,’ said John.

‘Do I!’ retorted Mrs Gamp. ‘Oh!’

The severely ironical character of this reply was strengthened by a very
slow nod, and a still slower drawing down of the corners of Mrs Gamp’s
mouth. She added with extreme stateliness of manner after indulging in a
short doze:

‘But I am a-keepin’ of you gentlemen, and time is precious.’

Mingling with that delusion of the teapot which inspired her with
the belief that they wanted her to go somewhere immediately, a shrewd
avoidance of any further reference to the topics into which she had
lately strayed, Mrs Gamp rose; and putting away the teapot in its
accustomed place, and locking the cupboard with much gravity proceeded
to attire herself for a professional visit.

This preparation was easily made, as it required nothing more than
the snuffy black bonnet, the snuffy black shawl, the pattens and
the indispensable umbrella, without which neither a lying-in nor a
laying-out could by any possibility be attempted. When Mrs Gamp had
invested herself with these appendages she returned to her chair, and
sitting down again, declared herself quite ready.

‘It’s a ‘appiness to know as one can benefit the poor sweet creetur,’
she observed, ‘I’m sure. It isn’t all as can. The torters Betsey Prig
inflicts is frightful!’

Closing her eyes as she made this remark, in the acuteness of her
commiseration for Betsey’s patients, she forgot to open them again until
she dropped a patten. Her nap was also broken at intervals like the
fabled slumbers of Friar Bacon, by the dropping of the other patten,
and of the umbrella. But when she had got rid of those incumbrances, her
sleep was peaceful.

The two young men looked at each other, ludicrously enough; and Martin,
stifling his disposition to laugh, whispered in John Westlock’s ear,

‘What shall we do now?’

‘Stay here,’ he replied.

Mrs Gamp was heard to murmur ‘Mrs Harris’ in her sleep.

‘Rely upon it,’ whispered John, looking cautiously towards her, ‘that
you shall question this old clerk, though you go as Mrs Harris herself.
We know quite enough to carry her our own way now, at all events; thanks
to this quarrel, which confirms the old saying that when rogues fall
out, honest people get what they want. Let Jonas Chuzzlewit look to
himself; and let her sleep as long as she likes. We shall gain our end
in good time.’



CHAPTER FIFTY

SURPRISES TOM PINCH VERY MUCH, AND SHOWS HOW CERTAIN CONFIDENCES PASSED
BETWEEN HIM AND HIS SISTER


It was the next evening; and Tom and his sister were sitting together
before tea, talking, in their usual quiet way, about a great many
things, but not at all about Lewsome’s story or anything connected with
it; for John Westlock--really John, for so young a man, was one of the
most considerate fellows in the world--had particularly advised Tom not
to mention it to his sister just yet, in case it should disquiet her.
‘And I wouldn’t, Tom,’ he said, with a little hesitation, ‘I wouldn’t
have a shadow on her happy face, or an uneasy thought in her gentle
heart, for all the wealth and honours of the universe!’ Really John was
uncommonly kind; extraordinarily kind. If he had been her father, Tom
said, he could not have taken a greater interest in her.

But although Tom and his sister were extremely conversational, they were
less lively, and less cheerful, than usual. Tom had no idea that this
originated with Ruth, but took it for granted that he was rather dull
himself. In truth he was; for the lightest cloud upon the Heaven of her
quiet mind, cast its shadow upon Tom.

And there was a cloud on little Ruth that evening. Yes, indeed. When Tom
was looking in another direction, her bright eyes, stealing on towards
his face, would sparkle still more brightly than their custom was, and
then grow dim. When Tom was silent, looking out upon the summer weather,
she would sometimes make a hasty movement, as if she were about to throw
herself upon his neck; then check the impulse, and when he looked
round, show a laughing face, and speak to him very merrily; when she had
anything to give Tom, or had any excuse for coming near him, she would
flutter about him, and lay her bashful hand upon his shoulder, and not
be willing to withdraw it; and would show by all such means that there
was something on her heart which in her great love she longed to say to
him, but had not the courage to utter.

So they were sitting, she with her work before her, but not working, and
Tom with his book beside him, but not reading, when Martin knocked
at the door. Anticipating who it was, Tom went to open it; and he and
Martin came back into the room together. Tom looked surprised, for in
answer to his cordial greeting Martin had hardly spoken a word.

Ruth also saw that there was something strange in the manner of their
visitor, and raised her eyes inquiringly to Tom’s face, as if she were
seeking an explanation there. Tom shook his head, and made the same mute
appeal to Martin.

Martin did not sit down but walked up to the window, and stood there
looking out. He turned round after a few moments to speak, but hastily
averted his head again, without doing so.

‘What has happened, Martin?’ Tom anxiously inquired. ‘My dear fellow,
what bad news do you bring?’

‘Oh, Tom!’ replied Martin, in a tone of deep reproach. ‘To hear you
feign that interest in anything that happens to me, hurts me even more
than your ungenerous dealing.’

‘My ungenerous dealing! Martin! My--’ Tom could say no more.

‘How could you, Tom, how could you suffer me to thank you so fervently
and sincerely for your friendship; and not tell me, like a man, that you
had deserted me! Was it true, Tom! Was it honest! Was it worthy of what
you used to be--of what I am sure you used to be--to tempt me, when you
had turned against me, into pouring out my heart! Oh, Tom!’

His tone was one of such strong injury and yet of so much grief for the
loss of a friend he had trusted in--it expressed such high past love
for Tom, and so much sorrow and compassion for his supposed
unworthiness--that Tom, for a moment, put his hand before his face, and
had no more power of justifying himself, than if he had been a monster
of deceit and falsehood.

‘I protest, as I must die,’ said Martin, ‘that I grieve over the loss
of what I thought you; and have no anger in the recollection of my own
injuries. It is only at such a time, and after such a discovery, that we
know the full measure of our old regard for the subject of it. I swear,
little as I showed it--little as I know I showed it--that when I had the
least consideration for you, Tom, I loved you like a brother.’

Tom was composed by this time, and might have been the Spirit of Truth,
in a homely dress--it very often wears a homely dress, thank God!--when
he replied to him.

‘Martin,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what is in your mind, or who has abused
it, or by what extraordinary means. But the means are false. There is
no truth whatever in the impression under which you labour. It is a
delusion from first to last; and I warn you that you will deeply regret
the wrong you do me. I can honestly say that I have been true to you,
and to myself. You will be very sorry for this. Indeed, you will be very
sorry for it, Martin.’

‘I AM sorry,’ returned Martin, shaking his head. ‘I think I never knew
what it was to be sorry in my heart, until now.’

‘At least,’ said Tom, ‘if I had always been what you charge me with
being now, and had never had a place in your regard, but had always been
despised by you, and had always deserved it, you should tell me in what
you have found me to be treacherous; and on what grounds you proceed. I
do not intreat you, therefore, to give me that satisfaction as a favour,
Martin, but I ask it of you as a right.’

‘My own eyes are my witnesses,’ returned Martin. ‘Am I to believe them?’

‘No,’ said Tom, calmly. ‘Not if they accuse me.’

‘Your own words. Your own manner,’ pursued Martin. ‘Am I to believe
THEM?’

‘No,’ replied Tom, calmly. ‘Not if they accuse me. But they never have
accused me. Whoever has perverted them to such a purpose, has wronged
me almost as cruelly’--his calmness rather failed him here--‘as you have
done.’

‘I came here,’ said Martin; ‘and I appeal to your good sister to hear
me--’

‘Not to her,’ interrupted Tom. ‘Pray, do not appeal to her. She will
never believe you.’

He drew her arm through his own, as he said it.

‘I believe it, Tom!’

‘No, no,’ cried Tom, ‘of course not. I said so. Why, tut, tut, tut. What
a silly little thing you are!’

‘I never meant,’ said Martin, hastily, ‘to appeal to you against your
brother. Do not think me so unmanly and unkind. I merely appealed to you
to hear my declaration, that I came here for no purpose of reproach--I
have not one reproach to vent--but in deep regret. You could not know in
what bitterness of regret, unless you knew how often I have thought of
Tom; how long in almost hopeless circumstances, I have looked forward
to the better estimation of his friendship; and how steadfastly I have
believed and trusted in him.’

‘Tut, tut,’ said Tom, stopping her as she was about to speak. ‘He is
mistaken. He is deceived. Why should you mind? He is sure to be set
right at last.’

‘Heaven bless the day that sets me right!’ cried Martin, ‘if it could
ever come!’

‘Amen!’ said Tom. ‘And it will!’

Martin paused, and then said in a still milder voice:

‘You have chosen for yourself, Tom, and will be relieved by our parting.
It is not an angry one. There is no anger on my side--’

‘There is none on mine,’ said Tom.

‘--It is merely what you have brought about, and worked to bring about.
I say again, you have chosen for yourself. You have made the choice that
might have been expected in most people situated as you are, but which I
did not expect in you. For that, perhaps, I should blame my own judgment
more than you. There is wealth and favour worth having, on one side; and
there is the worthless friendship of an abandoned, struggling fellow, on
the other. You were free to make your election, and you made it; and the
choice was not difficult. But those who have not the courage to resist
such temptations, should have the courage to avow what they have yielded
to them; and I DO blame you for this, Tom: that you received me with a
show of warmth, encouraged me to be frank and plain-spoken, tempted me
to confide in you, and professed that you were able to be mine; when
you had sold yourself to others. I do not believe,’ said Martin, with
emotion--‘hear me say it from my heart--I CANNOT believe, Tom, now that
I am standing face to face with you, that it would have been in your
nature to do me any serious harm, even though I had not discovered, by
chance, in whose employment you were. But I should have encumbered you;
I should have led you into more double-dealing; I should have hazarded
your retaining the favour for which you have paid so high a price,
bartering away your former self; and it is best for both of us that I
have found out what you so much desired to keep secret.’

‘Be just,’ said Tom; who, had not removed his mild gaze from Martin’s
face since the commencement of this last address; ‘be just even in
your injustice, Martin. You forget. You have not yet told me what your
accusation is!’

‘Why should I?’ returned Martin, waving his hand, and moving towards
the door. ‘You could not know it the better for my dwelling on it, and
though it would be really none the worse, it might seem to me to be.
No, Tom. Bygones shall be bygones between us. I can take leave of you
at this moment, and in this place--in which you are so amiable and so
good--as heartily, if not as cheerfully, as ever I have done since we
first met. All good go with you, Tom!--I--’

‘You leave me so? You can leave me so, can you?’ said Tom.

‘I--you--you have chosen for yourself, Tom! I--I hope it was a rash
choice,’ Martin faltered. ‘I think it was. I am sure it was! Good-bye!’

And he was gone.

Tom led his little sister to her chair, and sat down in his own. He took
his book, and read, or seemed to read. Presently he said aloud, turning
a leaf as he spoke: ‘He will be very sorry for this.’ And a tear stole
down his face, and dropped upon the page.

Ruth nestled down beside him on her knees, and clasped her arms about
his neck.

‘No, Tom! No, no! Be comforted! Dear Tom!’

‘I am quite--comforted,’ said Tom. ‘It will be set right.’

‘Such a cruel, bad return!’ cried Ruth.

‘No, no,’ said Tom. ‘He believes it. I cannot imagine why. But it will
be set right.’

More closely yet, she nestled down about him; and wept as if her heart
would break.

‘Don’t. Don’t,’ said Tom. ‘Why do you hide your face, my dear!’

Then in a burst of tears, it all broke out at last.

‘Oh Tom, dear Tom, I know your secret heart. I have found it out; you
couldn’t hide the truth from me. Why didn’t you tell me? I am sure I
could have made you happier, if you had! You love her, Tom, so dearly!’

Tom made a motion with his hand as if he would have put his sister
hurriedly away; but it clasped upon hers, and all his little history
was written in the action. All its pathetic eloquence was in the silent
touch.

‘In spite of that,’ said Ruth, ‘you have been so faithful and so good,
dear; in spite of that, you have been so true and self-denying, and have
struggled with yourself; in spite of that, you have been so gentle,
and so kind, and even-tempered, that I have never seen you give a hasty
look, or heard you say one irritable word. In spite of all, you have
been so cruelly mistaken. Oh Tom, dear Tom, will THIS be set right too!
Will it, Tom? Will you always have this sorrow in your breast; you who
deserve to be so happy; or is there any hope?’

And still she hid her face from Tom, and clasped him round the neck,
and wept for him, and poured out all her woman’s heart and soul in the
relief and pain of this disclosure.

It was not very long before she and Tom were sitting side by side, and
she was looking with an earnest quietness in Tom’s face. Then Tom spoke
to her thus, cheerily, though gravely:

‘I am very glad, my dear, that this has passed between us. Not because
it assures me of your tender affection (for I was well assured of that
before), but because it relieves my mind of a great weight.’

Tom’s eyes glistened when he spoke of her affection; and he kissed her
on the cheek.

‘My dear girl,’ said Tom; ‘with whatever feeling I regard her’--they
seemed to avoid the name by mutual consent--‘I have long ago--I am sure
I may say from the very first--looked upon it as a dream. As something
that might possibly have happened under very different circumstances,
but which can never be. Now, tell me. What would you have set right?’

She gave Tom such a significant little look, that he was obliged to take
it for an answer whether he would or no; and to go on.

‘By her own choice and free consent, my love, she is betrothed to
Martin; and was, long before either of them knew of my existence. You
would have her betrothed to me?’

‘Yes,’ she said directly.

‘Yes,’ rejoined Tom, ‘but that might be setting it wrong, instead of
right. Do you think,’ said Tom, with a grave smile, ‘that even if she
had never seen him, it is very likely she would have fallen in love with
Me?’

‘Why not, dear Tom?’

Tom shook his head, and smiled again.

‘You think of me, Ruth,’ said Tom, ‘and it is very natural that you
should, as if I were a character in a book; and you make it a sort of
poetical justice that I should, by some impossible means or other, come,
at last, to marry the person I love. But there is a much higher justice
than poetical justice, my dear, and it does not order events upon the
same principle. Accordingly, people who read about heroes in books, and
choose to make heroes of themselves out of books, consider it a very
fine thing to be discontented and gloomy, and misanthropical, and
perhaps a little blasphemous, because they cannot have everything
ordered for their individual accommodation. Would you like me to become
one of that sort of people?’

‘No, Tom. But still I know,’ she added timidly, ‘that this is a sorrow
to you in your own better way.’

Tom thought of disputing the position. But it would have been mere
folly, and he gave it up.

‘My dear,’ said Tom, ‘I will repay your affection with the Truth and all
the Truth. It is a sorrow to me. I have proved it to be so sometimes,
though I have always striven against it. But somebody who is precious to
you may die, and you may dream that you are in heaven with the departed
spirit, and you may find it a sorrow to wake to the life on earth, which
is no harder to be borne than when you fell asleep. It is sorrowful to
me to contemplate my dream which I always knew was a dream, even when
it first presented itself; but the realities about me are not to blame.
They are the same as they were. My sister, my sweet companion, who makes
this place so dear, is she less devoted to me, Ruth, than she would
have been, if this vision had never troubled me? My old friend John, who
might so easily have treated me with coldness and neglect, is he less
cordial to me? The world about me, is there less good in that? Are my
words to be harsh and my looks to be sour, and is my heart to grow cold,
because there has fallen in my way a good and beautiful creature, who
but for the selfish regret that I cannot call her my own, would, like
all other good and beautiful creatures, make me happier and better!
No, my dear sister. No,’ said Tom stoutly. ‘Remembering all my means of
happiness, I hardly dare to call this lurking something a sorrow; but
whatever name it may justly bear, I thank Heaven that it renders me more
sensible of affection and attachment, and softens me in fifty ways. Not
less happy. Not less happy, Ruth!’

She could not speak to him, but she loved him, as he well deserved. Even
as he deserved, she loved him.

‘She will open Martin’s eyes,’ said Tom, with a glow of pride, ‘and that
(which is indeed wrong) will be set right. Nothing will persuade her, I
know, that I have betrayed him. It will be set right through her, and he
will be very sorry for it. Our secret, Ruth, is our own, and lives and
dies with us. I don’t believe I ever could have told it you,’ said Tom,
with a smile, ‘but how glad I am to think you have found it out!’

They had never taken such a pleasant walk as they took that night. Tom
told her all so freely and so simply, and was so desirous to return
her tenderness with his fullest confidence, that they prolonged it far
beyond their usual hour, and sat up late when they came home. And
when they parted for the night there was such a tranquil, beautiful
expression in Tom’s face, that she could not bear to shut it out, but
going back on tiptoe to his chamber-door, looked in and stood there till
he saw her, and then embracing him again, withdrew. And in her prayers
and in her sleep--good times to be remembered with such fervour,
Tom!--his name was uppermost.

When he was left alone, Tom pondered very much on this discovery of
hers, and greatly wondered what had led her to it. ‘Because,’ thought
Tom, ‘I have been so very careful. It was foolish and unnecessary in
me, as I clearly see now, when I am so relieved by her knowing it; but I
have been so very careful to conceal it from her. Of course I knew that
she was intelligent and quick, and for that reason was more upon my
guard; but I was not in the least prepared for this. I am sure her
discovery has been sudden too. Dear me!’ said Tom. ‘It’s a most singular
instance of penetration!’

Tom could not get it out of his head. There it was, when his head was on
his pillow.

‘How she trembled when she began to tell me she knew it!’ thought Tom,
recalling all the little incidents and circumstances; ‘and how her
face flushed! But that was natural! Oh, quite natural! That needs no
accounting for.’

Tom little thought how natural it was. Tom little knew that there was
that in Ruth’s own heart, but newly set there, which had helped her to
the reading of his mystery. Ah, Tom! He didn’t understand the whispers
of the Temple Fountain, though he passed it every day.

Who so lively and cheerful as busy Ruth next morning! Her early tap at
Tom’s door, and her light foot outside, would have been music to him
though she had not spoken. But she said it was the brightest morning
ever seen; and so it was; and if it had been otherwise, she would have
made it so to Tom.

She was ready with his neat breakfast when he went downstairs, and had
her bonnet ready for the early walk, and was so full of news, that Tom
was lost in wonder. She might have been up all night, collecting it for
his entertainment. There was Mr Nadgett not come home yet, and there was
bread down a penny a loaf, and there was twice as much strength in this
tea as in the last, and the milk-woman’s husband had come out of the
hospital cured, and the curly-headed child over the way had been lost
all yesterday, and she was going to make all sorts of preserves in a
desperate hurry, and there happened to be a saucepan in the house which
was the very saucepan for the purpose; and she knew all about the last
book Tom had brought home, all through, though it was a teaser to read;
and she had so much to tell him that she had finished breakfast first.
Then she had her little bonnet on, and the tea and sugar locked up, and
the keys in her reticule, and the flower, as usual, in Tom’s coat, and
was in all respects quite ready to accompany him, before Tom knew she
had begun to prepare. And in short, as Tom said, with a confidence in
his own assertion which amounted to a defiance of the public in general,
there never was such a little woman.

She made Tom talkative. It was impossible to resist her. She put such
enticing questions to him; about books, and about dates of churches,
and about organs and about the Temple, and about all kinds of things.
Indeed, she lightened the way (and Tom’s heart with it) to that degree,
that the Temple looked quite blank and solitary when he parted from her
at the gate.

‘No Mr Fips’s friend to-day, I suppose,’ thought Tom, as he ascended the
stairs.

Not yet, at any rate, for the door was closed as usual, and Tom opened
it with his key. He had got the books into perfect order now, and
had mended the torn leaves, and had pasted up the broken backs, and
substituted neat labels for the worn-out letterings. It looked a
different place, it was so orderly and neat. Tom felt some pride in
comtemplating the change he had wrought, though there was no one to
approve or disapprove of it.

He was at present occupied in making a fair copy of his draught of
the catalogue; on which, as there was no hurry, he was painfully
concentrating all the ingenious and laborious neatness he had ever
expended on map or plan in Mr Pecksniff’s workroom. It was a very marvel
of a catalogue; for Tom sometimes thought he was really getting his
money too easily, and he had determined within himself that this
document should take a little of his superfluous leisure out of him.

So with pens and ruler, and compasses and india-rubber, and pencil, and
black ink, and red ink, Tom worked away all the morning. He thought a
good deal about Martin, and their interview of yesterday, and would have
been far easier in his mind if he could have resolved to confide it
to his friend John, and to have taken his opinion on the subject.
But besides that he knew what John’s boiling indignation would be, he
bethought himself that he was helping Martin now in a matter of great
moment, and that to deprive the latter of his assistance at such a
crisis of affairs, would be to inflict a serious injury upon him.

‘So I’ll keep it to myself,’ said Tom, with a sigh. ‘I’ll keep it to
myself.’

And to work he went again, more assiduously than ever, with the pens,
and the ruler, and the india-rubber, and the pencils, and the red ink,
that he might forget it.

He had laboured away another hour or more, when he heard a footstep in
the entry, down below.

‘Ah!’ said Tom, looking towards the door; ‘time was, not long ago
either, when that would have set me wondering and expecting. But I have
left off now.’

The footstep came on, up the stairs.

‘Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,’ said Tom, counting. ‘Now
you’ll stop. Nobody ever comes past the thirty-eighth stair.’

The person did, certainly, but only to take breath; for up the footstep
came again. Forty, forty-one, forty-two, and so on.

The door stood open. As the tread advanced, Tom looked impatiently and
eagerly towards it. When a figure came upon the landing, and arriving
in the doorway, stopped and gazed at him, he rose up from his chair, and
half believed he saw a spirit.

Old Martin Chuzzlewit! The same whom he had left at Mr Pecksniff’s, weak
and sinking!

The same? No, not the same, for this old man, though old, was strong,
and leaned upon his stick with a vigorous hand, while with the other
he signed to Tom to make no noise. One glance at the resolute face, the
watchful eye, the vigorous hand upon the staff, the triumphant purpose
in the figure, and such a light broke in on Tom as blinded him.

‘You have expected me,’ said Martin, ‘a long time.’

‘I was told that my employer would arrive soon,’ said Tom; ‘but--’

‘I know. You were ignorant who he was. It was my desire. I am glad it
has been so well observed. I intended to have been with you much sooner.
I thought the time had come. I thought I could know no more, and no
worse, of him, than I did on that day when I saw you last. But I was
wrong.’

He had by this time come up to Tom, and now he grasped his hand.

‘I have lived in his house, Pinch, and had him fawning on me days and
weeks and months. You know it. I have suffered him to treat me like
his tool and instrument. You know it; you have seen me there. I have
undergone ten thousand times as much as I could have endured if I had
been the miserable weak old man he took me for. You know it. I have seen
him offer love to Mary. You know it; who better--who better, my true
heart! I have had his base soul bare before me, day by day, and have not
betrayed myself once. I never could have undergone such torture but for
looking forward to this time.’

He stopped, even in the passion of his speech--if that can be called
passion which was so resolute and steady--to press Tom’s hand again.
Then he said, in great excitement:

‘Close the door, close the door. He will not be long after me, but
may come too soon. The time now drawing on,’ said the old man,
hurriedly--his eyes and whole face brightening as he spoke--‘will make
amends for all. I wouldn’t have him die or hang himself, for millions of
golden pieces! Close the door!’

Tom did so; hardly knowing yet whether he was awake or in a dream.



CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

SHEDS NEW AND BRIGHTER LIGHT UPON THE VERY DARK PLACE; AND CONTAINS THE
SEQUEL OF THE ENTERPRISE OF MR JONAS AND HIS FRIEND


The night had now come, when the old clerk was to be delivered over
to his keepers. In the midst of his guilty distractions, Jonas had not
forgotten it.

It was a part of his guilty state of mind to remember it; for on his
persistence in the scheme depended one of his precautions for his own
safety. A hint, a word, from the old man, uttered at such a moment in
attentive ears, might fire the train of suspicion, and destroy him. His
watchfulness of every avenue by which the discovery of his guilt might
be approached, sharpened with his sense of the danger by which he was
encompassed. With murder on his soul, and its innumerable alarms and
terrors dragging at him night and day, he would have repeated the crime,
if he had seen a path of safety stretching out beyond. It was in his
punishment; it was in his guilty condition. The very deed which his
fears rendered insupportable, his fears would have impelled him to
commit again.

But keeping the old man close, according to his design, would serve his
turn. His purpose was to escape, when the first alarm and wonder had
subsided; and when he could make the attempt without awakening instant
suspicion. In the meanwhile these women would keep him quiet; and if
the talking humour came upon him, would not be easily startled. He knew
their trade.

Nor had he spoken idly when he said the old man should be gagged. He had
resolved to ensure his silence; and he looked to the end, not the means.
He had been rough and rude and cruel to the old man all his life; and
violence was natural to his mind in connection with him. ‘He shall be
gagged if he speaks, and pinioned if he writes,’ said Jonas, looking at
him; for they sat alone together. ‘He is mad enough for that; I’ll go
through with it!’

Hush!

Still listening! To every sound. He had listened ever since, and it
had not come yet. The exposure of the Assurance office; the flight of
Crimple and Bullamy with the plunder, and among the rest, as he feared,
with his own bill, which he had not found in the pocket-book of the
murdered man, and which with Mr Pecksniff’s money had probably been
remitted to one or other of those trusty friends for safe deposit at the
banker’s; his immense losses, and peril of being still called to account
as a partner in the broken firm; all these things rose in his mind at
one time and always, but he could not contemplate them. He was aware of
their presence, and of the rage, discomfiture, and despair, they brought
along with them; but he thought--of his own controlling power and
direction he thought--of the one dread question only. When they would
find the body in the wood.

He tried--he had never left off trying--not to forget it was there, for
that was impossible, but to forget to weary himself by drawing vivid
pictures of it in his fancy; by going softly about it and about it
among the leaves, approaching it nearer and nearer through a gap in the
boughs, and startling the very flies that were thickly sprinkled all
over it, like heaps of dried currants. His mind was fixed and fastened
on the discovery, for intelligence of which he listened intently to
every cry and shout; listened when any one came in or went out; watched
from the window the people who passed up and down the street; mistrusted
his own looks and words. And the more his thoughts were set upon the
discovery, the stronger was the fascination which attracted them to
the thing itself; lying alone in the wood. He was for ever showing and
presenting it, as it were, to every creature whom he saw. ‘Look here!
Do you know of this? Is it found? Do you suspect ME?’ If he had been
condemned to bear the body in his arms, and lay it down for recognition
at the feet of every one he met, it could not have been more constantly
with him, or a cause of more monotonous and dismal occupation than it
was in this state of his mind.

Still he was not sorry. It was no contrition or remorse for what he had
done that moved him; it was nothing but alarm for his own security. The
vague consciousness he possessed of having wrecked his fortune in the
murderous venture, intensified his hatred and revenge, and made him set
the greater store by what he had gained The man was dead; nothing could
undo that. He felt a triumph yet, in the reflection.

He had kept a jealous watch on Chuffey ever since the deed; seldom
leaving him but on compulsion, and then for as short intervals as
possible. They were alone together now. It was twilight, and the
appointed time drew near at hand. Jonas walked up and down the room. The
old man sat in his accustomed corner.

The slightest circumstance was matter of disquiet to the murderer, and
he was made uneasy at this time by the absence of his wife, who had left
home early in the afternoon, and had not returned yet. No tenderness
for her was at the bottom of this; but he had a misgiving that she
might have been waylaid, and tempted into saying something that would
criminate him when the news came. For anything he knew, she might have
knocked at the door of his room, while he was away, and discovered his
plot. Confound her, it was like her pale face to be wandering up and
down the house! Where was she now?

‘She went to her good friend, Mrs Todgers,’ said the old man, when he
asked the question with an angry oath.

Aye! To be sure! Always stealing away into the company of that woman.
She was no friend of his. Who could tell what devil’s mischief they
might hatch together! Let her be fetched home directly.

The old man, muttering some words softly, rose as if he would have gone
himself, but Jonas thrust him back into his chair with an impatient
imprecation, and sent a servant-girl to fetch her. When he had charged
her with her errand he walked to and fro again, and never stopped till
she came back, which she did pretty soon; the way being short, and the
woman having made good haste.

Well! Where was she? Had she come?

No. She had left there, full three hours.

‘Left there! Alone?’

The messenger had not asked; taking that for granted.

‘Curse you for a fool. Bring candles!’

She had scarcely left the room when the old clerk, who had been
unusually observant of him ever since he had asked about his wife, came
suddenly upon him.

‘Give her up!’ cried the old man. ‘Come! Give her up to me! Tell me what
you have done with her. Quick! I have made no promises on that score.
Tell me what you have done with her.’

He laid his hands upon his collar as he spoke, and grasped it; tightly
too.

‘You shall not leave me!’ cried the old man. ‘I am strong enough to cry
out to the neighbours, and I will, unless you give her up. Give her up
to me!’

Jonas was so dismayed and conscience-stricken, that he had not even
hardihood enough to unclench the old man’s hands with his own; but stood
looking at him as well as he could in the darkness, without moving a
finger. It was as much as he could do to ask him what he meant.

‘I will know what you have done with her!’ retorted Chuffey. ‘If you
hurt a hair of her head, you shall answer it. Poor thing! Poor thing!
Where is she?’

‘Why, you old madman!’ said Jonas, in a low voice, and with trembling
lips. ‘What Bedlam fit has come upon you now?’

‘It is enough to make me mad, seeing what I have seen in this house!’
cried Chuffey. ‘Where is my dear old master! Where is his only son that
I have nursed upon my knee, a child! Where is she, she who was the last;
she that I’ve seen pining day by day, and heard weeping in the dead of
night! She was the last, the last of all my friends! Heaven help me, she
was the very last!’

Seeing that the tears were stealing down his face, Jonas mustered
courage to unclench his hands, and push him off before he answered:

‘Did you hear me ask for her? Did you hear me send for her? How can I
give you up what I haven’t got, idiot! Ecod, I’d give her up to you and
welcome, if I could; and a precious pair you’d be!’

‘If she has come to any harm,’ cried Chuffey, ‘mind! I’m old and silly;
but I have my memory sometimes; and if she has come to any harm--’

‘Devil take you,’ interrupted Jonas, but in a suppressed voice still;
‘what harm do you suppose she has come to? I know no more where she is
than you do; I wish I did. Wait till she comes home, and see; she can’t
be long. Will that content you?’

‘Mind!’ exclaimed the old man. ‘Not a hair of her head! not a hair of
her head ill-used! I won’t bear it. I--I--have borne it too long Jonas.
I am silent, but I--I--I can speak. I--I--I can speak--’ he stammered,
as he crept back to his chair, and turned a threatening, though a
feeble, look upon him.

‘You can speak, can you!’ thought Jonas. ‘So, so, we’ll stop your
speaking. It’s well I knew of this in good time. Prevention is better
than cure.’

He had made a poor show of playing the bully and evincing a desire to
conciliate at the same time, but was so afraid of the old man that
great drops had started out upon his brow; and they stood there yet. His
unusual tone of voice and agitated manner had sufficiently expressed his
fear; but his face would have done so now, without that aid, as he again
walked to and fro, glancing at him by the candelight.

He stopped at the window to think. An opposite shop was lighted up; and
the tradesman and a customer were reading some printed bill together
across the counter. The sight brought him back, instantly, to the
occupation he had forgotten. ‘Look here! Do you know of this? Is it
found? Do you suspect ME?’

A hand upon the door. ‘What’s that!’

‘A pleasant evenin’,’ said the voice of Mrs Gamp, ‘though warm, which,
bless you, Mr Chuzzlewit, we must expect when cowcumbers is three for
twopence. How does Mr Chuffey find his self to-night, sir?’

Mrs Gamp kept particularly close to the door in saying this, and
curtseyed more than usual. She did not appear to be quite so much at her
ease as she generally was.

‘Get him to his room,’ said Jonas, walking up to her, and speaking in
her ear. ‘He has been raving to-night--stark mad. Don’t talk while he’s
here, but come down again.’

‘Poor sweet dear!’ cried Mrs Gamp, with uncommon tenderness. ‘He’s all
of a tremble.’

‘Well he may be,’ said Jonas, ‘after the mad fit he has had. Get him
upstairs.’

She was by this time assisting him to rise.

‘There’s my blessed old chick!’ cried Mrs Gamp, in a tone that was at
once soothing and encouraging. ‘There’s my darlin’ Mr Chuffey! Now come
up to your own room, sir, and lay down on your bed a bit; for you’re
a-shakin’ all over, as if your precious jints was hung upon wires.
That’s a good creetur! Come with Sairey!’

‘Is she come home?’ inquired the old man.

‘She’ll be here directly minit,’ returned Mrs Gamp. ‘Come with Sairey,
Mr Chuffey. Come with your own Sairey!’

The good woman had no reference to any female in the world in promising
this speedy advent of the person for whom Mr Chuffey inquired, but
merely threw it out as a means of pacifying the old man. It had its
effect, for he permitted her to lead him away; and they quitted the room
together.

Jonas looked out of the window again. They were still reading the
printed paper in the shop opposite, and a third man had joined in the
perusal. What could it be, to interest them so?’

A dispute or discussion seemed to arise among them, for they all looked
up from their reading together, and one of the three, who had been
glancing over the shoulder of another, stepped back to explain or
illustrate some action by his gestures.

Horror! How like the blow he had struck in the wood!

It beat him from the window as if it had lighted on himself. As he
staggered into a chair, he thought of the change in Mrs Gamp exhibited
in her new-born tenderness to her charge. Was that because it was
found?--because she knew of it?--because she suspected him?

‘Mr Chuffey is a-lyin’ down,’ said Mrs Gamp, returning, ‘and much good
may it do him, Mr Chuzzlewit, which harm it can’t and good it may; be
joyful!’

‘Sit down,’ said Jonas, hoarsely, ‘and let us get this business done.
Where is the other woman?’

‘The other person’s with him now,’ she answered.

‘That’s right,’ said Jonas. ‘He is not fit to be left to himself. Why,
he fastened on me to-night; here, upon my coat; like a savage dog. Old
as he is, and feeble as he is usually, I had some trouble to shake him
off. You--Hush!--It’s nothing. You told me the other woman’s name. I
forget it.’

‘I mentioned Betsey Prig,’ said Mrs Gamp.

‘She is to be trusted, is she?’

‘That she ain’t!’ said Mrs Gamp; ‘nor have I brought her, Mr Chuzzlewit.
I’ve brought another, which engages to give every satigefaction.’

‘What is her name?’ asked Jonas.

Mrs Gamp looked at him in an odd way without returning any answer, but
appeared to understand the question too.

‘What is her name?’ repeated Jonas.

‘Her name,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘is Harris.’

It was extraordinary how much effort it cost Mrs Gamp to pronounce the
name she was commonly so ready with. She made some three or four gasps
before she could get it out; and, when she had uttered it, pressed her
hand upon her side, and turned up her eyes, as if she were going to
faint away. But, knowing her to labour under a complication of internal
disorders, which rendered a few drops of spirits indispensable at
certain times to her existence, and which came on very strong when that
remedy was not at hand, Jonas merely supposed her to be the victim of
one of these attacks.

‘Well!’ he said, hastily, for he felt how incapable he was of confining
his wandering attention to the subject. ‘You and she have arranged to
take care of him, have you?’

Mrs Gamp replied in the affirmative, and softly discharged herself of
her familiar phrase, ‘Turn and turn about; one off, one on.’ But
she spoke so tremulously that she felt called upon to add, ‘which
fiddle-strings is weakness to expredge my nerves this night!’

Jonas stopped to listen. Then said, hurriedly:

‘We shall not quarrel about terms. Let them be the same as they were
before. Keep him close, and keep him quiet. He must be restrained.
He has got it in his head to-night that my wife’s dead, and has been
attacking me as if I had killed her. It’s--it’s common with mad people
to take the worst fancies of those they like best. Isn’t it?’

Mrs Gamp assented with a short groan.

‘Keep him close, then, or in one of his fits he’ll be doing me a
mischief. And don’t trust him at any time; for when he seems most
rational, he’s wildest in his talk. But that you know already. Let me
see the other.’

‘The t’other person, sir?’ said Mrs Gamp.

‘Aye! Go you to him and send the other. Quick! I’m busy.’

Mrs Gamp took two or three backward steps towards the door, and stopped
there.

‘It is your wishes, Mr Chuzzlewit,’ she said, in a sort of quavering
croak, ‘to see the t’other person. Is it?’

But the ghastly change in Jonas told her that the other person was
already seen. Before she could look round towards the door, she was put
aside by old Martin’s hand; and Chuffey and John Westlock entered with
him.

‘Let no one leave the house,’ said Martin. ‘This man is my brother’s
son. Ill-met, ill-trained, ill-begotten. If he moves from the spot on
which he stands, or speaks a word above his breath to any person here,
open the window, and call for help!’

‘What right have you to give such directions in this house?’ asked Jonas
faintly.

‘The right of your wrong-doing. Come in there!’

An irrepressible exclamation burst from the lips of Jonas, as Lewsome
entered at the door. It was not a groan, or a shriek, or a word, but was
wholly unlike any sound that had ever fallen on the ears of those who
heard it, while at the same time it was the most sharp and terrible
expression of what was working in his guilty breast, that nature could
have invented.

He had done murder for this! He had girdled himself about with perils,
agonies of mind, innumerable fears, for this! He had hidden his secret
in the wood; pressed and stamped it down into the bloody ground; and
here it started up when least expected, miles upon miles away; known to
many; proclaiming itself from the lips of an old man who had renewed his
strength and vigour as by a miracle, to give it voice against him!

He leaned his hand on the back of a chair, and looked at them. It was
in vain to try to do so scornfully, or with his usual insolence. He
required the chair for his support. But he made a struggle for it.

‘I know that fellow,’ he said, fetching his breath at every word, and
pointing his trembling finger towards Lewsome. ‘He’s the greatest liar
alive. What’s his last tale? Ha, ha! You’re rare fellows, too! Why, that
uncle of mine is childish; he’s even a greater child than his brother,
my father, was, in his old age; or than Chuffey is. What the devil do
you mean,’ he added, looking fiercely at John Westlock and Mark Tapley
(the latter had entered with Lewsome), ‘by coming here, and bringing
two idiots and a knave with you to take my house by storm? Hallo, there!
Open the door! Turn these strangers out!’

‘I tell you what,’ cried Mr Tapley, coming forward, ‘if it wasn’t
for your name, I’d drag you through the streets of my own accord, and
single-handed I would! Ah, I would! Don’t try and look bold at me.
You can’t do it! Now go on, sir,’ this was to old Martin. ‘Bring the
murderin’ wagabond upon his knees! If he wants noise, he shall have
enough of it; for as sure as he’s a shiverin’ from head to foot I’ll
raise a uproar at this winder that shall bring half London in. Go on,
sir! Let him try me once, and see whether I’m a man of my word or not.’

With that, Mark folded his arms, and took his seat upon the
window-ledge, with an air of general preparation for anything, which
seemed to imply that he was equally ready to jump out himself, or to
throw Jonas out, upon receiving the slightest hint that it would be
agreeable to the company.

Old Martin turned to Lewsome:

‘This is the man,’ he said, extending his hand towards Jonas. ‘Is it?’

‘You need do no more than look at him to be sure of that, or of the
truth of what I have said,’ was the reply. ‘He is my witness.’

‘Oh, brother!’ cried old Martin, clasping his hands and lifting up his
eyes. ‘Oh, brother, brother! Were we strangers half our lives that you
might breed a wretch like this, and I make life a desert by withering
every flower that grew about me! Is it the natural end of your precepts
and mine, that this should be the creature of your rearing, training,
teaching, hoarding, striving for; and I the means of bringing him to
punishment, when nothing can repair the wasted past!’

He sat down upon a chair as he spoke, and turning away his face, was
silent for a few moments. Then with recovered energy he proceeded:

‘But the accursed harvest of our mistaken lives shall be trodden down.
It is not too late for that. You are confronted with this man, you
monster there; not to be spared, but to be dealt with justly. Hear what
he says! Reply, be silent, contradict, repeat, defy, do what you please.
My course will be the same. Go on! And you,’ he said to Chuffey, ‘for
the love of your old friend, speak out, good fellow!’

‘I have been silent for his love!’ cried the old man. ‘He urged me to
it. He made me promise it upon his dying bed. I never would have spoken,
but for your finding out so much. I have thought about it ever since;
I couldn’t help that; and sometimes I have had it all before me in
a dream; but in the day-time, not in sleep. Is there such a kind of
dream?’ said Chuffey, looking anxiously in old Martin’s face.

As Martin made him an encouraging reply, he listened attentively to his
voice, and smiled.

‘Ah, aye!’ he cried. ‘He often spoke to me like that. We were at school
together, he and I. I couldn’t turn against his son, you know--his only
son, Mr Chuzzlewit!’

‘I would to Heaven you had been his son!’ said Martin.

‘You speak so like my dear old master,’ cried the old man with a
childish delight, ‘that I almost think I hear him. I can hear you quite
as well as I used to hear him. It makes me young again. He never spoke
unkindly to me, and I always understood him. I could always see him too,
though my sight was dim. Well, well! He’s dead, he’s dead. He was very
good to me, my dear old master!’

He shook his head mournfully over the brother’s hand. At this moment
Mark, who had been glancing out of the window, left the room.

‘I couldn’t turn against his only son, you know,’ said Chuffey. ‘He has
nearly driven me to do it sometimes; he very nearly did tonight. Ah!’
cried the old man, with a sudden recollection of the cause. ‘Where is
she? She’s not come home!’

‘Do you mean his wife?’ said Mr Chuzzlewit.

‘Yes.’

‘I have removed her. She is in my care, and will be spared the present
knowledge of what is passing here. She has known misery enough, without
that addition.’

Jonas heard this with a sinking heart. He knew that they were on his
heels, and felt that they were resolute to run him to destruction. Inch
by inch the ground beneath him was sliding from his feet; faster and
faster the encircling ruin contracted and contracted towards himself,
its wicked centre, until it should close in and crush him.

And now he heard the voice of his accomplice stating to his face,
with every circumstance of time and place and incident; and openly
proclaiming, with no reserve, suppression, passion, or concealment; all
the truth. The truth, which nothing would keep down; which blood
would not smother, and earth would not hide; the truth, whose terrible
inspiration seemed to change dotards into strong men; and on whose
avenging wings, one whom he had supposed to be at the extremest corner
of the earth came swooping down upon him.

He tried to deny it, but his tongue would not move. He conceived some
desperate thought of rushing away, and tearing through the streets; but
his limbs would as little answer to his will as his stark, stiff staring
face. All this time the voice went slowly on, denouncing him. It was as
if every drop of blood in the wood had found a voice to jeer him with.

When it ceased, another voice took up the tale, but strangely; for the
old clerk, who had watched, and listened to the whole, and had wrung his
hands from time to time, as if he knew its truth and could confirm it,
broke in with these words:

‘No, no, no! you’re wrong; you’re wrong--all wrong together! Have
patience, for the truth is only known to me!’

‘How can that be,’ said his old master’s brother, ‘after what you have
heard? Besides, you said just now, above-stairs, when I told you of the
accusation against him, that you knew he was his father’s murderer.’

‘Aye, yes! and so he was!’ cried Chuffey, wildly. ‘But not as you
suppose--not as you suppose. Stay! Give me a moment’s time. I have
it all here--all here! It was foul, foul, cruel, bad; but not as you
suppose. Stay, stay!’

He put his hands up to his head, as if it throbbed or pained him. After
looking about him in a wandering and vacant manner for some moments, his
eyes rested upon Jonas, when they kindled up with sudden recollection
and intelligence.

‘Yes!’ cried old Chuffey, ‘yes! That’s how it was. It’s all upon me now.
He--he got up from his bed before he died, to be sure, to say that he
forgave him; and he came down with me into this room; and when he saw
him--his only son, the son he loved--his speech forsook him; he had
no speech for what he knew--and no one understood him except me. But I
did--I did!’

Old Martin regarded him in amazement; so did his companions. Mrs Gamp,
who had said nothing yet; but had kept two-thirds of herself behind the
door, ready for escape, and one-third in the room, ready for siding with
the strongest party; came a little further in and remarked, with a sob,
that Mr Chuffey was ‘the sweetest old creetur goin’.’

‘He bought the stuff,’ said Chuffey, stretching out his arm towards
Jonas while an unwonted fire shone in his eye, and lightened up his
face; ‘he bought the stuff, no doubt, as you have heard, and brought it
home. He mixed the stuff--look at him!--with some sweetmeat in a jar,
exactly as the medicine for his father’s cough was mixed, and put it
in a drawer; in that drawer yonder in the desk; he knows which drawer
I mean! He kept it there locked up. But his courage failed him or his
heart was touched--my God! I hope it was his heart! He was his only
son!--and he did not put it in the usual place, where my old master
would have taken it twenty times a day.’

The trembling figure of the old man shook with the strong emotions that
possessed him. But, with the same light in his eye, and with his arm
outstretched, and with his grey hair stirring on his head, he seemed to
grow in size, and was like a man inspired. Jonas shrunk from looking at
him, and cowered down into the chair by which he had held. It seemed as
if this tremendous Truth could make the dumb speak.

‘I know it every word now!’ cried Chuffey. ‘Every word! He put it in
that drawer, as I have said. He went so often there, and was so secret,
that his father took notice of it; and when he was out, had it opened.
We were there together, and we found the mixture--Mr Chuzzlewit and I.
He took it into his possession, and made light of it at the time; but in
the night he came to my bedside, weeping, and told me that his own son
had it in his mind to poison him. “Oh, Chuff,” he said, “oh, dear old
Chuff! a voice came into my room to-night, and told me that this crime
began with me. It began when I taught him to be too covetous of what I
have to leave, and made the expectation of it his great business!” Those
were his words; aye, they are his very words! If he was a hard man now
and then, it was for his only son. He loved his only son, and he was
always good to me!’

Jonas listened with increased attention. Hope was breaking in upon him.

‘“He shall not weary for my death, Chuff;” that was what he said next,’
pursued the old clerk, as he wiped his eyes; ‘that was what he said
next, crying like a little child: “He shall not weary for my death,
Chuff. He shall have it now; he shall marry where he has a fancy, Chuff,
although it don’t please me; and you and I will go away and live upon a
little. I always loved him; perhaps he’ll love me then. It’s a dreadful
thing to have my own child thirsting for my death. But I might have
known it. I have sown, and I must reap. He shall believe that I am
taking this; and when I see that he is sorry, and has all he wants, I’ll
tell him that I found it out, and I’ll forgive him. He’ll make a better
man of his own son, and be a better man himself, perhaps, Chuff!”’

Poor Chuffey paused to dry his eyes again. Old Martin’s face was hidden
in his hands. Jonas listened still more keenly, and his breast heaved
like a swollen water, but with hope. With growing hope.

‘My dear old master made believe next day,’ said Chuffey, ‘that he had
opened the drawer by mistake with a key from the bunch, which happened
to fit it (we had one made and hung upon it); and that he had been
surprised to find his fresh supply of cough medicine in such a place,
but supposed it had been put there in a hurry when the drawer stood
open. We burnt it; but his son believed that he was taking it--he knows
he did. Once Mr Chuzzlewit, to try him, took heart to say it had a
strange taste; and he got up directly, and went out.’

Jonas gave a short, dry cough; and, changing his position for an easier
one, folded his arms without looking at them, though they could now see
his face.

‘Mr Chuzzlewit wrote to her father; I mean the father of the poor thing
who’s his wife,’ said Chuffey; ‘and got him to come up, intending to
hasten on the marriage. But his mind, like mine, went a little wrong
through grief, and then his heart broke. He sank and altered from the
time when he came to me in the night; and never held up his head again.
It was only a few days, but he had never changed so much in twice the
years. “Spare him, Chuff!” he said, before he died. They were the only
words he could speak. “Spare him, Chuff!” I promised him I would. I’ve
tried to do it. He’s his only son.’

On his recollection of the last scene in his old friend’s life, poor
Chuffey’s voice, which had grown weaker and weaker, quite deserted him.
Making a motion with his hand, as if he would have said that Anthony had
taken it, and had died with it in his, he retreated to the corner where
he usually concealed his sorrows; and was silent.

Jonas could look at his company now, and vauntingly too. ‘Well!’ he
said, after a pause. ‘Are you satisfied? or have you any more of your
plots to broach? Why that fellow, Lewsome, can invent ‘em for you by the
score. Is this all? Have you nothing else?’

Old Martin looked at him steadily.

‘Whether you are what you seemed to be at Pecksniff’s, or are something
else and a mountebank, I don’t know and I don’t care,’ said Jonas,
looking downward with a smile, ‘but I don’t want you here. You were here
so often when your brother was alive, and were always so fond of him
(your dear, dear brother, and you would have been cuffing one another
before this, ecod!), that I am not surprised at your being attached to
the place; but the place is not attached to you, and you can’t leave it
too soon, though you may leave it too late. And for my wife, old man,
send her home straight, or it will be the worse for her. Ha, ha! You
carry it with a high hand, too! But it isn’t hanging yet for a man to
keep a penn’orth of poison for his own purposes, and have it taken from
him by two old crazy jolter-heads who go and act a play about it. Ha,
ha! Do you see the door?’

His base triumph, struggling with his cowardice, and shame, and guilt,
was so detestable, that they turned away from him, as if he were some
obscene and filthy animal, repugnant to the sight. And here that last
black crime was busy with him too; working within him to his perdition.
But for that, the old clerk’s story might have touched him, though never
so lightly; but for that, the sudden removal of so great a load might
have brought about some wholesome change even in him. With that deed
done, however; with that unnecessary wasteful danger haunting him;
despair was in his very triumph and relief; wild, ungovernable, raging
despair, for the uselessness of the peril into which he had plunged;
despair that hardened him and maddened him, and set his teeth a-grinding
in a moment of his exultation.

‘My good friend!’ said old Martin, laying his hand on Chuffey’s sleeve.
‘This is no place for you to remain in. Come with me.’

‘Just his old way!’ cried Chuffey, looking up into his face. ‘I almost
believe it’s Mr Chuzzlewit alive again. Yes! Take me with you! Stay,
though, stay.’

‘For what?’ asked old Martin.

‘I can’t leave her, poor thing!’ said Chuffey. ‘She has been very good
to me. I can’t leave her, Mr Chuzzlewit. Thank you kindly. I’ll remain
here. I haven’t long to remain; it’s no great matter.’

As he meekly shook his poor, grey head, and thanked old Martin in these
words, Mrs Gamp, now entirely in the room, was affected to tears.

‘The mercy as it is!’ she said, ‘as sech a dear, good, reverend creetur
never got into the clutches of Betsey Prig, which but for me he would
have done, undoubted; facts bein’ stubborn and not easy drove!’

‘You heard me speak to you just now, old man,’ said Jonas to his uncle.
‘I’ll have no more tampering with my people, man or woman. Do you see
the door?’

‘Do YOU see the door?’ returned the voice of Mark, coming from that
direction. ‘Look at it!’

He looked, and his gaze was nailed there. Fatal, ill-omened blighted
threshold, cursed by his father’s footsteps in his dying hour, cursed by
his young wife’s sorrowing tread, cursed by the daily shadow of the old
clerk’s figure, cursed by the crossing of his murderer’s feet--what men
were standing in the door way!

Nadgett foremost.

Hark! It came on, roaring like a sea! Hawkers burst into the street,
crying it up and down; windows were thrown open that the inhabitants
might hear it; people stopped to listen in the road and on the pavement;
the bells, the same bells, began to ring; tumbling over one another in a
dance of boisterous joy at the discovery (that was the sound they had in
his distempered thoughts), and making their airy play-ground rock.

‘That is the man,’ said Nadgett. ‘By the window!’

Three others came in, laid hands upon him, and secured him. It was so
quickly done, that he had not lost sight of the informer’s face for an
instant when his wrists were manacled together.

‘Murder,’ said Nadgett, looking round on the astonished group. ‘Let no
one interfere.’

The sounding street repeated Murder; barbarous and dreadful Murder.
Murder, Murder, Murder. Rolling on from house to house, and echoing from
stone to stone, until the voices died away into the distant hum, which
seemed to mutter the same word!

They all stood silent: listening, and gazing in each other’s faces, as
the noise passed on.

Old Martin was the first to speak. ‘What terrible history is this?’ he
demanded.

‘Ask HIM,’ said Nadgett. ‘You’re his friend, sir. He can tell you, if he
will. He knows more of it than I do, though I know much.’

‘How do you know much?’

‘I have not been watching him so long for nothing,’ returned Nadgett. ‘I
never watched a man so close as I have watched him.’

Another of the phantom forms of this terrific Truth! Another of the many
shapes in which it started up about him, out of vacancy. This man, of
all men in the world, a spy upon him; this man, changing his identity;
casting off his shrinking, purblind, unobservant character, and
springing up into a watchful enemy! The dead man might have come out of
his grave, and not confounded and appalled him more.

The game was up. The race was at an end; the rope was woven for his
neck. If, by a miracle, he could escape from this strait, he had but to
turn his face another way, no matter where, and there would rise some
new avenger front to front with him; some infant in an hour grown old,
or old man in an hour grown young, or blind man with his sight restored,
or deaf man with his hearing given him. There was no chance. He sank
down in a heap against the wall, and never hoped again from that moment.

‘I am not his friend, although I have the honour to be his relative,’
said Mr Chuzzlewit. ‘You may speak to me. Where have you watched, and
what have you seen?’

‘I have watched in many places,’ returned Nadgett, ‘night and day. I
have watched him lately, almost without rest or relief;’ his anxious
face and bloodshot eyes confirmed it. ‘I little thought to what my
watching was to lead. As little as he did when he slipped out in the
night, dressed in those clothes which he afterwards sunk in a bundle at
London Bridge!’

Jonas moved upon the ground like a man in bodily torture. He uttered a
suppressed groan, as if he had been wounded by some cruel weapon; and
plucked at the iron band upon his wrists, as though (his hands being
free) he would have torn himself.

‘Steady, kinsman!’ said the chief officer of the party. ‘Don’t be
violent.’

‘Whom do you call kinsman?’ asked old Martin sternly.

‘You,’ said the man, ‘among others.’

Martin turned his scrutinizing gaze upon him. He was sitting lazily
across a chair with his arms resting on the back; eating nuts, and
throwing the shells out of window as he cracked them, which he still
continued to do while speaking.

‘Aye,’ he said, with a sulky nod. ‘You may deny your nephews till you
die; but Chevy Slyme is Chevy Slyme still, all the world over. Perhaps
even you may feel it some disgrace to your own blood to be employed in
this way. I’m to be bought off.’

‘At every turn!’ cried Martin. ‘Self, self, self. Every one among them
for himself!’

‘You had better save one or two among them the trouble then and be for
them as well as YOURself,’ replied his nephew. ‘Look here at me! Can you
see the man of your family who has more talent in his little finger than
all the rest in their united brains, dressed as a police officer without
being ashamed? I took up with this trade on purpose to shame you. I
didn’t think I should have to make a capture in the family, though.’

‘If your debauchery, and that of your chosen friends, has really brought
you to this level,’ returned the old man, ‘keep it. You are living
honestly, I hope, and that’s something.’

‘Don’t be hard upon my chosen friends,’ returned Slyme, ‘for they were
sometimes your chosen friends too. Don’t say you never employed my
friend Tigg, for I know better. We quarrelled upon it.’

‘I hired the fellow,’ retorted Mr Chuzzlewit, ‘and I paid him.’

‘It’s well you paid him,’ said his nephew, ‘for it would be too late to
do so now. He has given his receipt in full; or had it forced from him
rather.’

The old man looked at him as if he were curious to know what he meant,
but scorned to prolong the conversation.

‘I have always expected that he and I would be brought together again in
the course of business,’ said Slyme, taking a fresh handful of nuts from
his pocket; ‘but I thought he would be wanted for some swindling job; it
never entered my head that I should hold a warrant for the apprehension
of his murderer.’

‘HIS murderer!’ cried Mr Chuzzlewit, looking from one to another.

‘His or Mr Montague’s,’ said Nadgett. ‘They are the same, I am told.
I accuse him yonder of the murder of Mr Montague, who was found last
night, killed, in a wood. You will ask me why I accuse him as you have
already asked me how I know so much. I’ll tell you. It can’t remain a
secret long.’

The ruling passion of the man expressed itself even then, in the tone of
regret in which he deplored the approaching publicity of what he knew.

‘I told you I had watched him,’ he proceeded. ‘I was instructed to do
so by Mr Montague, in whose employment I have been for some time. We had
our suspicions of him; and you know what they pointed at, for you have
been discussing it since we have been waiting here, outside the room. If
you care to hear, now it’s all over, in what our suspicions began, I’ll
tell you plainly: in a quarrel (it first came to our ears through a hint
of his own) between him and another office in which his father’s life
was insured, and which had so much doubt and distrust upon the subject,
that he compounded with them, and took half the money; and was glad to
do it. Bit by bit, I ferreted out more circumstances against him, and
not a few. It required a little patience, but it’s my calling. I found
the nurse--here she is to confirm me; I found the doctor, I found
the undertaker, I found the undertaker’s man. I found out how the old
gentleman there, Mr Chuffey, had behaved at the funeral; and I found out
what this man,’ touching Lewsome on the arm, ‘had talked about in his
fever. I found out how he conducted himself before his father’s death,
and how since and how at the time; and writing it all down, and putting
it carefully together, made case enough for Mr Montague to tax him
with the crime, which (as he himself believed until to-night) he had
committed. I was by when this was done. You see him now. He is only
worse than he was then.’

Oh, miserable, miserable fool! oh, insupportable, excruciating torture!
To find alive and active--a party to it all--the brain and right-hand
of the secret he had thought to crush! In whom, though he had walled the
murdered man up, by enchantment in a rock, the story would have lived
and walked abroad! He tried to stop his ears with his fettered arms,
that he might shut out the rest.

As he crouched upon the floor, they drew away from him as if a
pestilence were in his breath. They fell off, one by one, from that part
of the room, leaving him alone upon the ground. Even those who had him
in their keeping shunned him, and (with the exception of Slyme, who was
still occupied with his nuts) kept apart.

‘From that garret-window opposite,’ said Nadgett, pointing across the
narrow street, ‘I have watched this house and him for days and nights.
From that garret-window opposite I saw him return home, alone, from a
journey on which he had set out with Mr Montague. That was my token that
Mr Montague’s end was gained; and I might rest easy on my watch, though
I was not to leave it until he dismissed me. But, standing at the door
opposite, after dark that same night, I saw a countryman steal out of
this house, by a side-door in the court, who had never entered it.
I knew his walk, and that it was himself, disguised. I followed him
immediately. I lost him on the western road, still travelling westward.’

Jonas looked up at him for an instant, and muttered an oath.

‘I could not comprehend what this meant,’ said Nadgett; ‘but, having
seen so much, I resolved to see it out, and through. And I did.
Learning, on inquiry at his house from his wife, that he was supposed
to be sleeping in the room from which I had seen him go out, and that he
had given strict orders not to be disturbed, I knew that he was
coming back; and for his coming back I watched. I kept my watch in
the street--in doorways, and such places--all that night; at the same
window, all next day; and when night came on again, in the street once
more. For I knew he would come back, as he had gone out, when this part
of the town was empty. He did. Early in the morning, the same countryman
came creeping, creeping, creeping home.’

‘Look sharp!’ interposed Slyme, who had now finished his nuts. ‘This is
quite irregular, Mr Nadgett.’

‘I kept at the window all day,’ said Nadgett, without heeding him.
‘I think I never closed my eyes. At night, I saw him come out with a
bundle. I followed him again. He went down the steps at London Bridge,
and sunk it in the river. I now began to entertain some serious fears,
and made a communication to the Police, which caused that bundle to
be--’

‘To be fished up,’ interrupted Slyme. ‘Be alive, Mr Nadgett.’

‘It contained the dress I had seen him wear,’ said Nadgett; ‘stained
with clay, and spotted with blood. Information of the murder was
received in town last night. The wearer of that dress is already
known to have been seen near the place; to have been lurking in that
neighbourhood; and to have alighted from a coach coming from that part
of the country, at a time exactly tallying with the very minute when
I saw him returning home. The warrant has been out, and these officers
have been with me, some hours. We chose our time; and seeing you come
in, and seeing this person at the window--’

‘Beckoned to him,’ said Mark, taking up the thread of the narrative, on
hearing this allusion to himself, ‘to open the door; which he did with a
deal of pleasure.’

‘That’s all at present,’ said Nadgett, putting up his great pocketbook,
which from mere habit he had produced when he began his revelation, and
had kept in his hand all the time; ‘but there is plenty more to come.
You asked me for the facts, so far I have related them, and need not
detain these gentlemen any longer. Are you ready, Mr Slyme?’

‘And something more,’ replied that worthy, rising. ‘If you walk round to
the office, we shall be there as soon as you. Tom! Get a coach!’

The officer to whom he spoke departed for that purpose. Old Martin
lingered for a few moments, as if he would have addressed some words
to Jonas; but looking round, and seeing him still seated on the floor,
rocking himself in a savage manner to and fro, took Chuffey’s arm, and
slowly followed Nadgett out. John Westlock and Mark Tapley accompanied
them. Mrs Gamp had tottered out first, for the better display of her
feelings, in a kind of walking swoon; for Mrs Gamp performed swoons of
different sorts, upon a moderate notice, as Mr Mould did Funerals.

‘Ha!’ muttered Slyme, looking after them. ‘Upon my soul! As insensible
of being disgraced by having such a nephew as myself, in such a
situation, as he was of my being an honour and a credit to the family!
That’s the return I get for having humbled my spirit--such a spirit as
mine--to earn a livelihood, is it?’

He got up from his chair, and kicked it away indignantly.

‘And such a livelihood too! When there are hundreds of men, not fit to
hold a candle to me, rolling in carriages and living on their fortunes.
Upon my soul it’s a nice world!’

His eyes encountered Jonas, who looked earnestly towards him, and moved
his lips as if he were whispering.

‘Eh?’ said Slyme.

Jonas glanced at the attendant whose back was towards him, and made a
clumsy motion with his bound hands towards the door.

‘Humph!’ said Slyme, thoughtfully. ‘I couldn’t hope to disgrace him into
anything when you have shot so far ahead of me though. I forgot that.’

Jonas repeated the same look and gesture.

‘Jack!’ said Slyme.

‘Hallo!’ returned his man.

‘Go down to the door, ready for the coach. Call out when it comes. I’d
rather have you there. Now then,’ he added, turning hastily to Jonas,
when the man was gone. ‘What’s the matter?’

Jonas essayed to rise.

‘Stop a bit,’ said Slyme. ‘It’s not so easy when your wrists are tight
together. Now then! Up! What is it?’

‘Put your hand in my pocket. Here! The breast pocket, on the left!’ said
Jonas.

He did so; and drew out a purse.

‘There’s a hundred pound in it,’ said Jonas, whose words were almost
unintelligible; as his face, in its pallor and agony, was scarcely
human.

Slyme looked at him; gave it into his hands; and shook his head.

‘I can’t. I daren’t. I couldn’t if I dared. Those fellows below--’

‘Escape’s impossible,’ said Jonas. ‘I know it. One hundred pound for
only five minutes in the next room!’

‘What to do?’ he asked.

The face of his prisoner as he advanced to whisper in his ear, made him
recoil involuntarily. But he stopped and listened to him. The words were
few, but his own face changed as he heard them.

‘I have it about me,’ said Jonas, putting his hands to his throat, as
though whatever he referred to were hidden in his neckerchief. ‘How
should you know of it? How could you know? A hundred pound for only five
minutes in the next room! The time’s passing. Speak!’

‘It would be more--more creditable to the family,’ observed Slyme, with
trembling lips. ‘I wish you hadn’t told me half so much. Less would have
served your purpose. You might have kept it to yourself.’

‘A hundred pound for only five minutes in the next room! Speak!’ cried
Jonas, desperately.

He took the purse. Jonas, with a wild unsteady step, retreated to the
door in the glass partition.

‘Stop!’ cried Slyme, catching at his skirts. ‘I don’t know about this.
Yet it must end so at last. Are you guilty?’

‘Yes!’ said Jonas.

‘Are the proofs as they were told just now?’

‘Yes!’ said Jonas.

‘Will you--will you engage to say a--a Prayer, now, or something of that
sort?’ faltered Slyme.

Jonas broke from him without replying, and closed the door between them.

Slyme listened at the keyhole. After that, he crept away on tiptoe, as
far off as he could; and looked awfully towards the place. He was roused
by the arrival of the coach, and their letting down the steps.

‘He’s getting a few things together,’ he said, leaning out of window,
and speaking to the two men below, who stood in the full light of a
street-lamp. ‘Keep your eye upon the back, one of you, for form’s sake.’

One of the men withdrew into the court. The other, seating himself self
on the steps of the coach, remained in conversation with Slyme at the
window who perhaps had risen to be his superior, in virtue of his old
propensity (one so much lauded by the murdered man) of being always
round the corner. A useful habit in his present calling.

‘Where is he?’ asked the man.

Slyme looked into the room for an instant and gave his head a jerk as
much as to say, ‘Close at hand. I see him.’

‘He’s booked,’ observed the man.

‘Through,’ said Slyme.

They looked at each other, and up and down the street. The man on
the coach-steps took his hat off, and put it on again, and whistled a
little.

‘I say! He’s taking his time!’ he remonstrated.

‘I allowed him five minutes,’ said Slyme. ‘Time’s more than up, though.
I’ll bring him down.’

He withdrew from the window accordingly, and walked on tiptoe to the
door in the partition. He listened. There was not a sound within. He set
the candles near it, that they might shine through the glass.

It was not easy, he found, to make up his mind to the opening of
the door. But he flung it wide open suddenly, and with a noise; then
retreated. After peeping in and listening again, he entered.

He started back as his eyes met those of Jonas, standing in an angle of
the wall, and staring at him. His neckerchief was off; his face was ashy
pale.

‘You’re too soon,’ said Jonas, with an abject whimper. ‘I’ve not had
time. I have not been able to do it. I--five minutes more--two minutes
more!--only one!’

Slyme gave him no reply, but thrusting the purse upon him and forcing it
back into his pocket, called up his men.

He whined, and cried, and cursed, and entreated them, and struggled, and
submitted, in the same breath, and had no power to stand. They got him
away and into the coach, where they put him on a seat; but he soon fell
moaning down among the straw at the bottom, and lay there.

The two men were with him. Slyme being on the box with the driver; and
they let him lie. Happening to pass a fruiterer’s on their way; the door
of which was open, though the shop was by this time shut; one of them
remarked how faint the peaches smelled.

The other assented at the moment, but presently stooped down in quick
alarm, and looked at the prisoner.

‘Stop the coach! He has poisoned himself! The smell comes from this
bottle in his hand!’

The hand had shut upon it tight. With that rigidity of grasp with which
no living man, in the full strength and energy of life, can clutch a
prize he has won.

They dragged him out into the dark street; but jury, judge, and hangman,
could have done no more, and could do nothing now. Dead, dead, dead.



CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

IN WHICH THE TABLES ARE TURNED, COMPLETELY UPSIDE DOWN


Old Martin’s cherished projects, so long hidden in his own breast, so
frequently in danger of abrupt disclosure through the bursting forth
of the indignation he had hoarded up during his residence with Mr
Pecksniff, were retarded, but not beyond a few hours, by the occurrences
just now related. Stunned, as he had been at first by the intelligence
conveyed to him through Tom Pinch and John Westlock, of the supposed
manner of his brother’s death; overwhelmed as he was by the subsequent
narratives of Chuffey and Nadgett, and the forging of that chain of
circumstances ending in the death of Jonas, of which catastrophe he was
immediately informed; scattered as his purposes and hopes were for the
moment, by the crowding in of all these incidents between him and his
end; still their very intensity and the tumult of their assemblage
nerved him to the rapid and unyielding execution of his scheme. In every
single circumstance, whether it were cruel, cowardly, or false, he
saw the flowering of the same pregnant seed. Self; grasping, eager,
narrow-ranging, overreaching self; with its long train of suspicions,
lusts, deceits, and all their growing consequences; was the root of the
vile tree. Mr Pecksniff had so presented his character before the old
man’s eyes, that he--the good, the tolerant, enduring Pecksniff--had
become the incarnation of all selfishness and treachery; and the more
odious the shapes in which those vices ranged themselves before him now,
the sterner consolation he had in his design of setting Mr Pecksniff
right and Mr Pecksniff’s victims too.

To this work he brought, not only the energy and determination natural
to his character (which, as the reader may have observed in the
beginning of his or her acquaintance with this gentleman, was remarkable
for the strong development of those qualities), but all the forced and
unnaturally nurtured energy consequent upon their long suppression. And
these two tides of resolution setting into one and sweeping on, became
so strong and vigorous, that, to prevent themselves from being carried
away before it, Heaven knows where, was as much as John Westlock and
Mark Tapley together (though they were tolerably energetic too) could
manage to effect.

He had sent for John Westlock immediately on his arrival; and John,
under the conduct of Tom Pinch, had waited on him. Having a lively
recollection of Mr Tapley, he had caused that gentleman’s attendance to
be secured, through John’s means, without delay; and thus, as we have
seen, they had all repaired together to the City. But his grandson he
had refused to see until to-morrow, when Mr Tapley was instructed to
summon him to the Temple at ten o’clock in the forenoon. Tom he would
not allow to be employed in anything, lest he should be wrongfully
suspected; but he was a party to all their proceedings, and was with
them until late at night--until after they knew of the death of Jonas;
when he went home to tell all these wonders to little Ruth, and to
prepare her for accompanying him to the Temple in the morning, agreeably
to Mr Chuzzlewit’s particular injunction.

It was characteristic of old Martin, and his looking on to something
which he had distinctly before him, that he communicated to them nothing
of his intentions, beyond such hints of reprisal on Mr Pecksniff as they
gathered from the game he had played in that gentleman’s house, and the
brightening of his eyes whenever his name was mentioned. Even to John
Westlock, in whom he was evidently disposed to place great confidence
(which may indeed be said of every one of them), he gave no explanation
whatever. He merely requested him to return in the morning; and with
this for their utmost satisfaction, they left him, when the night was
far advanced, alone.

The events of such a day might have worn out the body and spirit of
a much younger man than he, but he sat in deep and painful meditation
until the morning was bright. Nor did he even then seek any prolonged
repose, but merely slumbered in his chair, until seven o’clock, when Mr
Tapley had appointed to come to him by his desire; and came--as fresh
and clean and cheerful as the morning itself.

‘You are punctual,’ said Mr Chuzzlewit, opening the door to him in reply
to his light knock, which had roused him instantly.

‘My wishes, sir,’ replied Mr Tapley, whose mind would appear from the
context to have been running on the matrimonial service, ‘is to love,
honour, and obey. The clock’s a-striking now, sir.’

‘Come in!’

‘Thank’ee, sir,’ rejoined Mr Tapley, ‘what could I do for you first,
sir?’

‘You gave my message to Martin?’ said the old man, bending his eyes upon
him.

‘I did, sir,’ returned Mark; ‘and you never see a gentleman more
surprised in all your born days than he was.’

‘What more did you tell him?’ Mr Chuzzlewit inquired.

‘Why, sir,’ said Mr Tapley, smiling, ‘I should have liked to tell him a
deal more, but not being able, sir, I didn’t tell it him.’

‘You told him all you knew?’

‘But it was precious little, sir,’ retorted Mr Tapley. ‘There was very
little respectin’ you that I was able to tell him, sir. I only mentioned
my opinion that Mr Pecksniff would find himself deceived, sir, and
that you would find yourself deceived, and that he would find himself
deceived, sir.’

‘In what?’ asked Mr Chuzzlewit.

‘Meaning him, sir?’

‘Meaning both him and me.’

‘Well, sir,’ said Mr Tapley. ‘In your old opinions of each other. As
to him, sir, and his opinions, I know he’s a altered man. I know it.
I know’d it long afore he spoke to you t’other day, and I must say it.
Nobody don’t know half as much of him as I do. Nobody can’t. There
was always a deal of good in him, but a little of it got crusted over,
somehow. I can’t say who rolled the paste of that ‘ere crust myself,
but--’

‘Go on,’ said Martin. ‘Why do you stop?’

‘But it--well! I beg your pardon, but I think it may have been you, sir.
Unintentional I think it may have been you. I don’t believe that neither
of you gave the other quite a fair chance. There! Now I’ve got rid on
it,’ said Mr Tapley in a fit of desperation: ‘I can’t go a-carryin’ it
about in my own mind, bustin’ myself with it; yesterday was quite long
enough. It’s out now. I can’t help it. I’m sorry for it. Don’t wisit on
him, sir, that’s all.’

It was clear that Mark expected to be ordered out immediately, and was
quite prepared to go.

‘So you think,’ said Martin, ‘that his old faults are, in some degree,
of my creation, do you?’

‘Well, sir,’ retorted Mr Tapley, ‘I’m werry sorry, but I can’t unsay it.
It’s hardly fair of you, sir, to make a ignorant man conwict himself in
this way, but I DO think so. I am as respectful disposed to you, sir, as
a man can be; but I DO think so.’

The light of a faint smile seemed to break through the dull steadiness
of Martin’s face, as he looked attentively at him, without replying.

‘Yet you are an ignorant man, you say,’ he observed after a long pause.

‘Werry much so,’ Mr Tapley replied.

‘And I a learned, well-instructed man, you think?’

‘Likewise wery much so,’ Mr Tapley answered.

The old man, with his chin resting on his hand, paced the room twice or
thrice before he added:

‘You have left him this morning?’

‘Come straight from him now, sir.’

‘For what does he suppose?’

‘He don’t know what to suppose, sir, no more than myself. I told him
jest wot passed yesterday, sir, and that you had said to me, “Can you be
here by seven in the morning?” and that you had said to him, through me,
“Can you be here by ten in the morning?” and that I had said “Yes” to
both. That’s all, sir.’

His frankness was so genuine that it plainly WAS all.

‘Perhaps,’ said Martin, ‘he may think you are going to desert him, and
to serve me?’

‘I have served him in that sort of way, sir,’ replied Mark, without the
loss of any atom of his self-possession; ‘and we have been that sort of
companions in misfortune, that my opinion is, he don’t believe a word on
it. No more than you do, sir.’

‘Will you help me to dress, and get me some breakfast from the hotel?’
asked Martin.

‘With pleasure, sir,’ said Mark.

‘And by-and-bye,’ said Martin, ‘remaining in the room, as I wish you to
do, will you attend to the door yonder--give admission to visitors, I
mean, when they knock?’

‘Certainly, sir,’ said Mr Tapley.

‘You will not find it necessary to express surprise at their
appearance,’ Martin suggested.

‘Oh dear no, sir!’ said Mr Tapley, ‘not at all.’

Although he pledged himself to this with perfect confidence, he was in a
state of unbounded astonishment even now. Martin appeared to observe it,
and to have some sense of the ludicrous bearing of Mr Tapley under these
perplexing circumstances; for, in spite of the composure of his voice
and the gravity of his face, the same indistinct light flickered on the
latter several times. Mark bestirred himself, however, to execute the
offices with which he was entrusted; and soon lost all tendency to any
outward expression of his surprise, in the occupation of being brisk and
busy.

But when he had put Mr Chuzzlewit’s clothes in good order for dressing,
and when that gentleman was dressed and sitting at his breakfast,
Mr Tapley’s feelings of wonder began to return upon him with great
violence; and, standing beside the old man with a napkin under his
arm (it was as natural and easy to joke to Mark to be a butler in the
Temple, as it had been to volunteer as cook on board the Screw), he
found it difficult to resist the temptation of casting sidelong glances
at him very often. Nay, he found it impossible; and accordingly yielded
to this impulse so often, that Martin caught him in the fact some fifty
times. The extraordinary things Mr Tapley did with his own face when
any of these detections occurred; the sudden occasions he had to rub
his eyes or his nose or his chin; the look of wisdom with which he
immediately plunged into the deepest thought, or became intensely
interested in the habits and customs of the flies upon the ceiling, or
the sparrows out of doors; or the overwhelming politeness with which
he endeavoured to hide his confusion by handing the muffin; may not
unreasonably be assumed to have exercised the utmost power of feature
that even Martin Chuzzlewit the elder possessed.

But he sat perfectly quiet and took his breakfast at his leisure, or
made a show of doing so, for he scarcely ate or drank, and frequently
lapsed into long intervals of musing. When he had finished, Mark sat
down to his breakfast at the same table; and Mr Chuzzlewit, quite silent
still, walked up and down the room.

Mark cleared away in due course, and set a chair out for him, in which,
as the time drew on towards ten o’clock, he took his seat, leaning his
hands upon his stick, and clenching them upon the handle, and resting
his chin on them again. All his impatience and abstraction of manner had
vanished now; and as he sat there, looking, with his keen eyes, steadily
towards the door, Mark could not help thinking what a firm, square,
powerful face it was; or exulting in the thought that Mr Pecksniff,
after playing a pretty long game of bowls with its owner, seemed to be
at last in a very fair way of coming in for a rubber or two.

Mark’s uncertainty in respect of what was going to be done or said, and
by whom to whom, would have excited him in itself. But knowing for
a certainty besides, that young Martin was coming, and in a very few
minutes must arrive, he found it by no means easy to remain quiet and
silent. But, excepting that he occasionally coughed in a hollow and
unnatural manner to relieve himself, he behaved with great decorum
through the longest ten minutes he had ever known.

A knock at the door. Mr Westlock. Mr Tapley, in admitting him, raised
his eyebrows to the highest possible pitch, implying thereby that he
considered himself in an unsatisfactory position. Mr Chuzzlewit received
him very courteously.

Mark waited at the door for Tom Pinch and his sister, who were coming up
the stairs. The old man went to meet them; took their hands in his;
and kissed her on the cheek. As this looked promising, Mr Tapley smiled
benignantly.

Mr Chuzzlewit had resumed his chair before young Martin, who was close
behind them, entered. The old man, scarcely looking at him, pointed to
a distant seat. This was less encouraging; and Mr Tapley’s spirits fell
again.

He was quickly summoned to the door by another knock. He did not start,
or cry, or tumble down, at sight of Miss Graham and Mrs Lupin, but he
drew a very long breath, and came back perfectly resigned, looking on
them and on the rest with an expression which seemed to say that nothing
could surprise him any more; and that he was rather glad to have done
with that sensation for ever.

The old man received Mary no less tenderly than he had received Tom
Pinch’s sister. A look of friendly recognition passed between himself
and Mrs Lupin, which implied the existence of a perfect understanding
between them. It engendered no astonishment in Mr Tapley; for, as he
afterwards observed, he had retired from the business, and sold off the
stock.

Not the least curious feature in this assemblage was, that everybody
present was so much surprised and embarrassed by the sight of everybody
else, that nobody ventured to speak. Mr Chuzzlewit alone broke silence.

‘Set the door open, Mark!’ he said; ‘and come here.’

Mark obeyed.

The last appointed footstep sounded now upon the stairs. They all knew
it. It was Mr Pecksniff’s; and Mr Pecksniff was in a hurry too, for he
came bounding up with such uncommon expedition that he stumbled twice or
thrice.

‘Where is my venerable friend?’ he cried upon the upper landing; and
then with open arms came darting in.

Old Martin merely looked at him; but Mr Pecksniff started back as if he
had received the charge from an electric battery.

‘My venerable friend is well?’ cried Mr Pecksniff.

‘Quite well.’

It seemed to reassure the anxious inquirer. He clasped his hands and,
looking upwards with a pious joy, silently expressed his gratitude.
He then looked round on the assembled group, and shook his head
reproachfully. For such a man severely, quite severely.

‘Oh, vermin!’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Oh, bloodsuckers! Is it not enough
that you have embittered the existence of an individual wholly
unparalleled in the biographical records of amiable persons, but must
you now, even now, when he has made his election, and reposed his trust
in a Numble, but at least sincere and disinterested relative; must
you now, vermin and swarmers (I regret to make use of these strong
expressions, my dear sir, but there are times when honest indignation
will not be controlled), must you now, vermin and swarmers (for I WILL
repeat it), take advantage of his unprotected state, assemble round
him from all quarters, as wolves and vultures, and other animals of
the feathered tribe assemble round--I will not say round carrion or a
carcass, for Mr Chuzzlewit is quite the contrary--but round their prey;
their prey; to rifle and despoil; gorging their voracious maws, and
staining their offensive beaks, with every description of carnivorous
enjoyment!’

As he stopped to fetch his breath, he waved them off, in a solemn
manner, with his hand.

‘Horde of unnatural plunderers and robbers!’ he continued; ‘leave him!
leave him, I say! Begone! Abscond! You had better be off! Wander over
the face of the earth, young sirs, like vagabonds as you are, and do not
presume to remain in a spot which is hallowed by the grey hairs of the
patriarchal gentleman to whose tottering limbs I have the honour to act
as an unworthy, but I hope an unassuming, prop and staff. And you, my
tender sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff, addressing himself in a tone of gentle
remonstrance to the old man, ‘how could you ever leave me, though even
for this short period! You have absented yourself, I do not doubt, upon
some act of kindness to me; bless you for it; but you must not do it;
you must not be so venturesome. I should really be angry with you if I
could, my friend!’

He advanced with outstretched arms to take the old man’s hand. But he
had not seen how the hand clasped and clutched the stick within its
grasp. As he came smiling on, and got within his reach, old Martin, with
his burning indignation crowded into one vehement burst, and flashing
out of every line and wrinkle in his face, rose up, and struck him down
upon the ground.

With such a well-directed nervous blow, that down he went, as heavily
and true as if the charge of a Life-Guardsman had tumbled him out of a
saddle. And whether he was stunned by the shock, or only confused by the
wonder and novelty of this warm reception, he did not offer to get up
again; but lay there, looking about him with a disconcerted meekness
in his face so enormously ridiculous, that neither Mark Tapley nor John
Westlock could repress a smile, though both were actively interposing to
prevent a repetition of the blow; which the old man’s gleaming eyes and
vigorous attitude seemed to render one of the most probable events in
the world.

‘Drag him away! Take him out of my reach!’ said Martin; ‘or I can’t help
it. The strong restraint I have put upon my hands has been enough to
palsy them. I am not master of myself while he is within their range.
Drag him away!’

Seeing that he still did not rise, Mr Tapley, without any compromise
about it, actually did drag him away, and stick him up on the floor,
with his back against the opposite wall.

‘Hear me, rascal!’ said Mr Chuzzlewit. ‘I have summoned you here to
witness your own work. I have summoned you here to witness it, because
I know it will be gall and wormwood to you! I have summoned you here to
witness it, because I know the sight of everybody here must be a dagger
in your mean, false heart! What! do you know me as I am, at last!’

Mr Pecksniff had cause to stare at him, for the triumph in his face and
speech and figure was a sight to stare at.

‘Look there!’ said the old man, pointing at him, and appealing to the
rest. ‘Look there! And then--come hither, my dear Martin--look here!
here! here!’ At every repetition of the word he pressed his grandson
closer to his breast.

‘The passion I felt, Martin, when I dared not do this,’ he said, ‘was
in the blow I struck just now. Why did we ever part! How could we ever
part! How could you ever fly from me to him!’

Martin was about to answer, but he stopped him, and went on.

‘The fault was mine no less than yours. Mark has told me so today, and
I have known it long; though not so long as I might have done. Mary, my
love, come here.’

As she trembled and was very pale, he sat her in his own chair, and
stood beside it with her hand in his; and Martin standing by him.

‘The curse of our house,’ said the old man, looking kindly down upon
her, ‘has been the love of self; has ever been the love of self. How
often have I said so, when I never knew that I had wrought it upon
others.’

He drew one hand through Martin’s arm, and standing so, between them,
proceeded thus:

‘You all know how I bred this orphan up, to tend me. None of you can
know by what degrees I have come to regard her as a daughter; for
she has won upon me, by her self-forgetfulness, her tenderness, her
patience, all the goodness of her nature, when Heaven is her witness
that I took but little pains to draw it forth. It blossomed without
cultivation, and it ripened without heat. I cannot find it in my heart
to say that I am sorry for it now, or yonder fellow might be holding up
his head.’

Mr Pecksniff put his hand into his waistcoat, and slightly shook that
part of him to which allusion had been made; as if to signify that it
was still uppermost.

‘There is a kind of selfishness,’ said Martin--‘I have learned it in my
own experience of my own breast--which is constantly upon the watch for
selfishness in others; and holding others at a distance, by suspicions
and distrusts, wonders why they don’t approach, and don’t confide, and
calls that selfishness in them. Thus I once doubted those about me--not
without reason in the beginning--and thus I once doubted you, Martin.’

‘Not without reason,’ Martin answered, ‘either.’

‘Listen, hypocrite! Listen, smooth-tongued, servile, crawling knave!’
said Martin. ‘Listen, you shallow dog. What! When I was seeking him, you
had already spread your nets; you were already fishing for him, were ye?
When I lay ill in this good woman’s house and your meek spirit pleaded
for my grandson, you had already caught him, had ye? Counting on the
restoration of the love you knew I bore him, you designed him for one
of your two daughters did ye? Or failing that, you traded in him as a
speculation which at any rate should blind me with the lustre of your
charity, and found a claim upon me! Why, even then I knew you, and I
told you so. Did I tell you that I knew you, even then?’

‘I am not angry, sir,’ said Mr Pecksniff, softly. ‘I can bear a great
deal from you. I will never contradict you, Mr Chuzzlewit.’

‘Observe!’ said Martin, looking round. ‘I put myself in that man’s
hands on terms as mean and base, and as degrading to himself, as I could
render them in words. I stated them at length to him, before his own
children, syllable by syllable, as coarsely as I could, and with as much
offence, and with as plain an exposition of my contempt, as words--not
looks and manner merely--could convey. If I had only called the angry
blood into his face, I would have wavered in my purpose. If I had only
stung him into being a man for a minute I would have abandoned it. If he
had offered me one word of remonstrance, in favour of the grandson whom
he supposed I had disinherited; if he had pleaded with me, though never
so faintly, against my appeal to him to abandon him to misery and
cast him from his house; I think I could have borne with him for ever
afterwards. But not a word, not a word. Pandering to the worst of human
passions was the office of his nature; and faithfully he did his work!’

‘I am not angry,’ observed Mr Pecksniff. ‘I am hurt, Mr Chuzzlewit;
wounded in my feelings; but I am not angry, my good sir.’

Mr Chuzzlewit resumed.

‘Once resolved to try him, I was resolute to pursue the trial to the
end; but while I was bent on fathoming the depth of his duplicity, I
made a sacred compact with myself that I would give him credit on the
other side for any latent spark of goodness, honour, forbearance--any
virtue--that might glimmer in him. For first to last there has been no
such thing. Not once. He cannot say I have not given him opportunity.
He cannot say I have ever led him on. He cannot say I have not left
him freely to himself in all things; or that I have not been a passive
instrument in his hands, which he might have used for good as easily as
evil. Or if he can, he Lies! And that’s his nature, too.’

‘Mr Chuzzlewit,’ interrupted Pecksniff, shedding tears. ‘I am not angry,
sir. I cannot be angry with you. But did you never, my dear sir,
express a desire that the unnatural young man who by his wicked arts has
estranged your good opinion from me, for the time being; only for the
time being; that your grandson, Mr Chuzzlewit, should be dismissed my
house? Recollect yourself, my Christian friend.’

‘I have said so, have I not?’ retorted the old man, sternly. ‘I could
not tell how far your specious hypocrisy had deceived him, knave; and
knew no better way of opening his eyes than by presenting you before him
in your own servile character. Yes. I did express that desire. And you
leaped to meet it; and you met it; and turning in an instant on the
hand you had licked and beslavered, as only such hounds can, you
strengthened, and confirmed, and justified me in my scheme.’

Mr Pecksniff made a bow; a submissive, not to say a grovelling and an
abject bow. If he had been complimented on his practice of the loftiest
virtues, he never could have bowed as he bowed then.

‘The wretched man who has been murdered,’ Mr Chuzzlewit went on to say;
‘then passing by the name of--’

‘Tigg,’ suggested Mark.

‘Of Tigg; brought begging messages to me on behalf of a friend of his,
and an unworthy relative of mine; and finding him a man well enough
suited to my purpose, I employed him to glean some news of you, Martin,
for me. It was from him I learned that you had taken up your abode with
yonder fellow. It was he, who meeting you here in town, one evening--you
remember where?’

‘At the pawnbroker’s shop,’ said Martin.

‘Yes; watched you to your lodging, and enabled me to send you a
bank-note.’

‘I little thought,’ said Martin, greatly moved, ‘that it had come from
you; I little thought that you were interested in my fate. If I had--’

‘If you had,’ returned the old man, sorrowfully, ‘you would have shown
less knowledge of me as I seemed to be, and as I really was. I hoped to
bring you back, Martin, penitent and humbled. I hoped to distress you
into coming back to me. Much as I loved you, I had that to acknowledge
which I could not reconcile it to myself to avow, then, unless you
made submission to me first. Thus it was I lost you. If I have had,
indirectly, any act or part in the fate of that unhappy man, by putting
means, however small, within his reach, Heaven forgive me! I might have
known, perhaps, that he would misuse money; that it was ill-bestowed
upon him; and that sown by his hands it could engender mischief only.
But I never thought of him at that time as having the disposition or
ability to be a serious impostor, or otherwise than as a thoughtless,
idle-humoured, dissipated spendthrift, sinning more against himself than
others, and frequenting low haunts and indulging vicious tastes, to his
own ruin only.’

‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir,’ said Mr Tapley, who had Mrs Lupin on his
arm by this time, quite agreeably; ‘if I may make so bold as say so, my
opinion is, as you was quite correct, and that he turned out perfectly
nat’ral for all that. There’s surprisin’ number of men sir, who as long
as they’ve only got their own shoes and stockings to depend upon, will
walk down hill, along the gutters quiet enough and by themselves, and
not do much harm. But set any on ‘em up with a coach and horses, sir;
and it’s wonderful what a knowledge of drivin’ he’ll show, and how he’ll
fill his wehicle with passengers, and start off in the middle of the
road, neck or nothing, to the Devil! Bless your heart, sir, there’s ever
so many Tiggs a-passin’ this here Temple-gate any hour in the day, that
only want a chance to turn out full-blown Montagues every one!’

‘Your ignorance, as you call it, Mark,’ said Mr Chuzzlewit, ‘is wiser
than some men’s enlightenment, and mine among them. You are right; not
for the first time to-day. Now hear me out, my dears. And hear me, you,
who, if what I have been told be accurately stated, are Bankrupt in
pocket no less than in good name! And when you have heard me, leave this
place, and poison my sight no more!’

Mr Pecksniff laid his hand upon his breast, and bowed again.

‘The penance I have done in this house,’ said Mr Chuzzlewit, ‘has earned
this reflection with it constantly, above all others. That if it had
pleased Heaven to visit such infirmity on my old age as really had
reduced me to the state in which I feigned to be, I should have brought
its misery upon myself. Oh, you whose wealth, like mine, has been a
source of continual unhappiness, leading you to distrust the nearest and
dearest, and to dig yourself a living grave of suspicion and reserve;
take heed that, having cast off all whom you might have bound to you,
and tenderly, you do not become in your decay the instrument of such a
man as this, and waken in another world to the knowledge of such wrong
as would embitter Heaven itself, if wrong or you could ever reach it!’

And then he told them how he had sometimes thought, in the beginning,
that love might grow up between Mary and Martin; and how he had pleased
his fancy with the picture of observing it when it was new, and taking
them to task, apart, in counterfeited doubt, and then confessing to them
that it had been an object dear to his heart; and by his sympathy with
them, and generous provision for their young fortunes, establishing a
claim on their affection and regard which nothing should wither, and
which should surround his old age with means of happiness. How in the
first dawn of this design, and when the pleasure of such a scheme for
the happiness of others was new and indistinct within him, Martin had
come to tell him that he had already chosen for himself; knowing that
he, the old man, had some faint project on that head, but ignorant whom
it concerned. How it was little comfort to him to know that Martin
had chosen Her, because the grace of his design was lost, and because
finding that she had returned his love, he tortured himself with
the reflection that they, so young, to whom he had been so kind a
benefactor, were already like the world, and bent on their own selfish,
stealthy ends. How in the bitterness of this impression, and of his past
experience, he had reproached Martin so harshly (forgetting that he had
never invited his confidence on such a point, and confounding what
he had meant to do with what he had done), that high words sprung up
between them, and they separated in wrath. How he loved him still, and
hoped he would return. How on the night of his illness at the Dragon,
he had secretly written tenderly of him, and made him his heir, and
sanctioned his marriage with Mary; and how, after his interview with Mr
Pecksniff, he had distrusted him again, and burnt the paper to ashes,
and had lain down in his bed distracted by suspicions, doubts, and
regrets.

And then he told them how, resolved to probe this Pecksniff, and to
prove the constancy and truth of Mary (to himself no less than
Martin), he had conceived and entered on his plan; and how, beneath her
gentleness and patience, he had softened more and more; still more and
more beneath the goodness and simplicity, the honour and the manly faith
of Tom. And when he spoke of Tom, he said God bless him; and the tears
were in his eyes; for he said that Tom, mistrusted and disliked by him
at first, had come like summer rain upon his heart; and had disposed it
to believe in better things. And Martin took him by the hand, and Mary
too, and John, his old friend, stoutly too; and Mark, and Mrs Lupin,
and his sister, little Ruth. And peace of mind, deep, tranquil peace of
mind, was in Tom’s heart.

The old man then related how nobly Mr Pecksniff had performed the duty
in which he stood indebted to society, in the matter of Tom’s
dismissal; and how, having often heard disparagement of Mr Westlock from
Pecksniffian lips, and knowing him to be a friend to Tom, he had used,
through his confidential agent and solicitor, that little artifice which
had kept him in readiness to receive his unknown friend in London. And
he called on Mr Pecksniff (by the name of Scoundrel) to remember that
there again he had not trapped him to do evil, but that he had done it
of his own free will and agency; nay, that he had cautioned him against
it. And once again he called on Mr Pecksniff (by the name of Hang-dog)
to remember that when Martin coming home at last, an altered man, had
sued for the forgiveness which awaited him, he, Pecksniff, had rejected
him in language of his own, and had remorsely stepped in between him and
the least touch of natural tenderness. ‘For which,’ said the old man,
‘if the bending of my finger would remove a halter from your neck, I
wouldn’t bend it!’

‘Martin,’ he added, ‘your rival has not been a dangerous one, but Mrs
Lupin here has played duenna for some weeks; not so much to watch your
love as to watch her lover. For that Ghoul’--his fertility in finding
names for Mr Pecksniff was astonishing--‘would have crawled into her
daily walks otherwise, and polluted the fresh air. What’s this? Her hand
is trembling strangely. See if you can hold it.’

Hold it! If he clasped it half as tightly as he did her waist. Well,
well!

But it was good in him that even then, in his high fortune and
happiness, with her lips nearly printed on his own, and her proud young
beauty in his close embrace, he had a hand still left to stretch out to
Tom Pinch.

‘Oh, Tom! Dear Tom! I saw you, accidentally, coming here. Forgive me!’

‘Forgive!’ cried Tom. ‘I’ll never forgive you as long as I live, Martin,
if you say another syllable about it. Joy to you both! Joy, my dear
fellow, fifty thousand times.’

Joy! There is not a blessing on earth that Tom did not wish them. There
is not a blessing on earth that Tom would not have bestowed upon them,
if he could.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Mr Tapley, stepping forward, ‘but yow was
mentionin’, just now, a lady of the name of Lupin, sir.’

‘I was,’ returned old Martin

‘Yes, sir. It’s a pretty name, sir?’

‘A very good name,’ said Martin.

‘It seems a’most a pity to change such a name into Tapley. Don’t it,
sir?’ said Mark.

‘That depends upon the lady. What is HER opinion?’

‘Why, sir,’ said Mr Tapley, retiring, with a bow, towards the buxom
hostess, ‘her opinion is as the name ain’t a change for the better, but
the indiwidual may be, and, therefore, if nobody ain’t acquainted
with no jest cause or impediment, et cetrer, the Blue Dragon will be
con-werted into the Jolly Tapley. A sign of my own inwention, sir. Wery
new, conwivial, and expressive!’

The whole of these proceedings were so agreeable to Mr Pecksniff that
he stood with his eyes fixed upon the floor and his hands clasping one
another alternately, as if a host of penal sentences were being passed
upon him. Not only did his figure appear to have shrunk, but his
discomfiture seemed to have extended itself even to his dress. His
clothes seemed to have grown shabbier, his linen to have turned yellow,
his hair to have become lank and frowsy; his very boots looked villanous
and dim, as if their gloss had departed with his own.

Feeling, rather than seeing, that the old man now pointed to the door,
he raised his eyes, picked up his hat, and thus addressed him:

‘Mr Chuzzlewit, sir! you have partaken of my hospitality.’

‘And paid for it,’ he observed.

‘Thank you. That savours,’ said Mr Pecksniff, taking out his
pocket-handkerchief, ‘of your old familiar frankness. You have paid for
it. I was about to make the remark. You have deceived me, sir. Thank you
again. I am glad of it. To see you in the possession of your health and
faculties on any terms, is, in itself, a sufficient recompense. To have
been deceived implies a trusting nature. Mine is a trusting nature. I
am thankful for it. I would rather have a trusting nature, do you know,
sir, than a doubting one!’

Here Mr Pecksniff, with a sad smile, bowed, and wiped his eyes.

‘There is hardly any person present, Mr Chuzzlewit,’ said Pecksniff,
‘by whom I have not been deceived. I have forgiven those persons on the
spot. That was my duty; and, of course, I have done it. Whether it was
worthy of you to partake of my hospitality, and to act the part you
did act in my house, that, sir, is a question which I leave to your own
conscience. And your conscience does not acquit you. No, sir, no!’

Pronouncing these last words in a loud and solemn voice, Mr Pecksniff
was not so absolutely lost in his own fervour as to be unmindful of the
expediency of getting a little nearer to the door.

‘I have been struck this day,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘with a walking
stick (which I have every reason to believe has knobs upon it), on that
delicate and exquisite portion of the human anatomy--the brain. Several
blows have been inflicted, sir, without a walking-stick, upon that
tenderer portion of my frame--my heart. You have mentioned, sir,
my being bankrupt in my purse. Yes, sir, I am. By an unfortunate
speculation, combined with treachery, I find myself reduced to poverty;
at a time, sir, when the child of my bosom is widowed, and affliction
and disgrace are in my family.’

Here Mr Pecksniff wiped his eyes again, and gave himself two or three
little knocks upon the breast, as if he were answering two or three
other little knocks from within, given by the tinkling hammer of his
conscience, to express ‘Cheer up, my boy!’

‘I know the human mind, although I trust it. That is my weakness. Do I
not know, sir’--here he became exceedingly plaintive and was observed to
glance towards Tom Pinch--‘that my misfortunes bring this treatment on
me? Do I not know, sir, that but for them I never should have heard what
I have heard to-day? Do I not know that in the silence and the solitude
of night, a little voice will whisper in your ear, Mr Chuzzlewit, “This
was not well. This was not well, sir!” Think of this, sir (if you will
have the goodness), remote from the impulses of passion, and apart from
the specialities, if I may use that strong remark, of prejudice. And if
you ever contemplate the silent tomb, sir, which you will excuse me for
entertaining some doubt of your doing, after the conduct into which you
have allowed yourself to be betrayed this day; if you ever contemplate
the silent tomb sir, think of me. If you find yourself approaching to
the silent tomb, sir, think of me. If you should wish to have anything
inscribed upon your silent tomb, sir, let it be, that I--ah, my
remorseful sir! that I--the humble individual who has now the honour of
reproaching you, forgave you. That I forgave you when my injuries were
fresh, and when my bosom was newly wrung. It may be bitterness to you to
hear it now, sir, but you will live to seek a consolation in it. May you
find a consolation in it when you want it, sir! Good morning!’

With this sublime address, Mr Pecksniff departed. But the effect of
his departure was much impaired by his being immediately afterwards run
against, and nearly knocked down, by a monstrously excited little man in
velveteen shorts and a very tall hat; who came bursting up the stairs,
and straight into the chambers of Mr Chuzzlewit, as if he were deranged.

‘Is there anybody here that knows him?’ cried the little man. ‘Is there
anybody here that knows him? Oh, my stars, is there anybody here that
knows him?’

They looked at each other for an explanation; but nobody knew anything
more than that here was an excited little man with a very tall hat on,
running in and out of the room as hard as he could go; making his single
pair of bright blue stockings appear at least a dozen; and constantly
repeating in a shrill voice, ‘IS there anybody here that knows him?’

‘If your brains is not turned topjy turjey, Mr Sweedlepipes!’ exclaimed
another voice, ‘hold that there nige of yourn, I beg you, sir.’

At the same time Mrs Gamp was seen in the doorway; out of breath from
coming up so many stairs, and panting fearfully; but dropping curtseys
to the last.

‘Excuge the weakness of the man,’ said Mrs Gamp, eyeing Mr Sweedlepipe
with great indignation; ‘and well I might expect it, as I should have
know’d, and wishin’ he was drownded in the Thames afore I had brought
him here, which not a blessed hour ago he nearly shaved the noge off
from the father of as lovely a family as ever, Mr Chuzzlewit, was born
three sets of twins, and would have done it, only he see it a-goin’ in
the glass, and dodged the rager. And never, Mr Sweedlepipes, I do assure
you, sir, did I so well know what a misfortun it was to be acquainted
with you, as now I do, which so I say, sir, and I don’t deceive you!’

‘I ask your pardon, ladies and gentlemen all,’ cried the little barber,
taking off his hat, ‘and yours too, Mrs Gamp. But--but,’ he added this
half laughing and half crying, ‘IS there anybody here that knows him?’

As the barber said these words, a something in top-boots, with its head
bandaged up, staggered into the room, and began going round and round
and round, apparently under the impression that it was walking straight
forward.

‘Look at him!’ cried the excited little barber. ‘Here he is! That’ll
soon wear off, and then he’ll be all right again. He’s no more dead than
I am. He’s all alive and hearty. Aint you, Bailey?’

‘R--r--reether so, Poll!’ replied that gentleman.

‘Look here!’ cried the little barber, laughing and crying in the same
breath. ‘When I steady him he comes all right. There! He’s all right
now. Nothing’s the matter with him now, except that he’s a little shook
and rather giddy; is there, Bailey?’

‘R--r--reether shook, Poll--reether so!’ said Mr Bailey. ‘What, my
lovely Sairey! There you air!’

‘What a boy he is!’ cried the tender-hearted Poll, actually sobbing
over him. ‘I never see sech a boy! It’s all his fun. He’s full of it.
He shall go into the business along with me. I am determined he shall.
We’ll make it Sweedlepipe and Bailey. He shall have the sporting branch
(what a one he’ll be for the matches!) and me the shavin’. I’ll make
over the birds to him as soon as ever he’s well enough. He shall have
the little bullfinch in the shop, and all. He’s sech a boy! I ask your
pardon, ladies and gentlemen, but I thought there might be some one here
that know’d him!’

Mrs Gamp had observed, not without jealousy and scorn, that a favourable
impression appeared to exist in behalf of Mr Sweedlepipe and his
young friend; and that she had fallen rather into the background in
consequence. She now struggled to the front, therefore, and stated her
business.

‘Which, Mr Chuzzlewit,’ she said, ‘is well beknown to Mrs Harris as has
one sweet infant (though she DO not wish it known) in her own family by
the mother’s side, kep in spirits in a bottle; and that sweet babe she
see at Greenwich Fair, a-travelling in company with a pink-eyed lady,
Prooshan dwarf, and livin’ skelinton, which judge her feelings when the
barrel organ played, and she was showed her own dear sister’s child, the
same not bein’ expected from the outside picter, where it was painted
quite contrairy in a livin’ state, a many sizes larger, and performing
beautiful upon the Arp, which never did that dear child know or do;
since breathe it never did, to speak on in this wale! And Mrs Harris, Mr
Chuzzlewit, has knowed me many year, and can give you information that
the lady which is widdered can’t do better and may do worse, than let me
wait upon her, which I hope to do. Permittin’ the sweet faces as I see
afore me.’

‘Oh!’ said Mr Chuzzlewit. ‘Is that your business? Was this good person
paid for the trouble we gave her?’

‘I paid her, sir,’ returned Mark Tapley; ‘liberal.’

‘The young man’s words is true,’ said Mrs Gamp, ‘and thank you kindly.’

‘Then here we will close our acquaintance, Mrs Gamp,’ retorted Mr
Chuzzlewit. ‘And Mr Sweedlepipe--is that your name?’

‘That is my name, sir,’ replied Poll, accepting with a profusion of
gratitude, some chinking pieces which the old man slipped into his hand.

‘Mr Sweedlepipe, take as much care of your lady-lodger as you can, and
give her a word or two of good advice now and then. Such,’ said old
Martin, looking gravely at the astonished Mrs Gamp, ‘as hinting at the
expediency of a little less liquor, and a little more humanity, and
a little less regard for herself, and a little more regard for her
patients, and perhaps a trifle of additional honesty. Or when Mrs Gamp
gets into trouble, Mr Sweedlepipe, it had better not be at a time when I
am near enough to the Old Bailey to volunteer myself as a witness to her
character. Endeavour to impress that upon her at your leisure, if you
please.’

Mrs Gamp clasped her hands, turned up her eyes until they were quite
invisible, threw back her bonnet for the admission of fresh air to her
heated brow; and in the act of saying faintly--‘Less liquor!--Sairey
Gamp--Bottle on the chimney-piece, and let me put my lips to it, when I
am so dispoged!’--fell into one of the walking swoons; in which pitiable
state she was conducted forth by Mr Sweedlepipe, who, between his two
patients, the swooning Mrs Gamp and the revolving Bailey, had enough to
do, poor fellow.

The old man looked about him, with a smile, until his eyes rested on Tom
Pinch’s sister; when he smiled the more.

‘We will all dine here together,’ he said; ‘and as you and Mary have
enough to talk of, Martin, you shall keep house for us until the
afternoon, with Mr and Mrs Tapley. I must see your lodgings in the
meanwhile, Tom.’

Tom was quite delighted. So was Ruth. She would go with them.

‘Thank you, my love,’ said Mr Chuzzlewit. ‘But I am afraid I must take
Tom a little out of the way, on business. Suppose you go on first, my
dear?’

Pretty little Ruth was equally delighted to do that.

‘But not alone,’ said Martin, ‘not alone. Mr Westlock, I dare say, will
escort you.’

Why, of course he would: what else had Mr Westlock in his mind? How dull
these old men are!

‘You are sure you have no engagement?’ he persisted.

Engagement! As if he could have any engagement!

So they went off arm-in-arm. When Tom and Mr Chuzzlewit went off
arm-in-arm a few minutes after them, the latter was still smiling; and
really, for a gentleman of his habits, in rather a knowing manner.



CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

WHAT JOHN WESTLOCK SAID TO TOM PINCH’S SISTER; WHAT TOM PINCH’S SISTER
SAID TO JOHN WESTLOCK; WHAT TOM PINCH SAID TO BOTH OF THEM; AND HOW THEY
ALL PASSED THE REMAINDER OF THE DAY


Brilliantly the Temple Fountain sparkled in the sun, and laughingly
its liquid music played, and merrily the idle drops of water danced and
danced, and peeping out in sport among the trees, plunged lightly down
to hide themselves, as little Ruth and her companion came toward it.

And why they came toward the Fountain at all is a mystery; for they had
no business there. It was not in their way. It was quite out of their
way. They had no more to do with the Fountain, bless you, than they had
with--with Love, or any out-of-the-way thing of that sort.

It was all very well for Tom and his sister to make appointments by the
Fountain, but that was quite another affair. Because, of course, when
she had to wait a minute or two, it would have been very awkward for her
to have had to wait in any but a tolerably quiet spot; but that was as
quiet a spot, everything considered, as they could choose. But when she
had John Westlock to take care of her, and was going home with her arm
in his (home being in a different direction altogether), their coming
anywhere near that Fountain was quite extraordinary.

However, there they found themselves. And another extraordinary part
of the matter was, that they seemed to have come there, by a silent
understanding. Yet when they got there, they were a little confused
by being there, which was the strangest part of all; because there is
nothing naturally confusing in a Fountain. We all know that.

‘What a good old place it was!’ John said. With quite an earnest affection
for it.

‘A pleasant place indeed,’ said little Ruth. ‘So shady!’

Oh wicked little Ruth!

They came to a stop when John began to praise it. The day was exquisite;
and stopping at all, it was quite natural--nothing could be more
so--that they should glance down Garden Court; because Garden Court ends
in the Garden, and the Garden ends in the River, and that glimpse is
very bright and fresh and shining on a summer’s day. Then, oh, little
Ruth, why not look boldly at it! Why fit that tiny, precious, blessed
little foot into the cracked corner of an insensible old flagstone in
the pavement; and be so very anxious to adjust it to a nicety!

If the Fiery-faced matron in the crunched bonnet could have seen them
as they walked away, how many years’ purchase might Fiery Face have been
disposed to take for her situation in Furnival’s Inn as laundress to Mr
Westlock!

They went away, but not through London’s streets! Through some enchanted
city, where the pavements were of air; where all the rough sounds of
a stirring town were softened into gentle music; where everything
was happy; where there was no distance, and no time. There were two
good-tempered burly draymen letting down big butts of beer into a
cellar, somewhere; and when John helped her--almost lifted her--the
lightest, easiest, neatest thing you ever saw--across the rope, they
said he owed them a good turn for giving him the chance. Celestial
draymen!

Green pastures in the summer tide, deep-littered straw yards in the
winter, no start of corn and clover, ever, to that noble horse who WOULD
dance on the pavement with a gig behind him, and who frightened her, and
made her clasp his arm with both hands (both hands meeting one upon the
another so endearingly!), and caused her to implore him to take
refuge in the pastry-cook’s, and afterwards to peep out at the door so
shrinkingly; and then, looking at him with those eyes, to ask him was
he sure--now was he sure--they might go safely on! Oh for a string of
rampant horses! For a lion, for a bear, for a mad bull, for anything to
bring the little hands together on his arm again!

They talked, of course. They talked of Tom, and all these changes and
the attachment Mr Chuzzlewit had conceived for him, and the bright
prospects he had in such a friend, and a great deal more to the same
purpose. The more they talked, the more afraid this fluttering little
Ruth became of any pause; and sooner than have a pause she would say the
same things over again; and if she hadn’t courage or presence of mind
enough for that (to say the truth she very seldom had), she was ten
thousand times more charming and irresistible than she had been before.

‘Martin will be married very soon now, I suppose?’ said John.

She supposed he would. Never did a bewitching little woman suppose
anything in such a faint voice as Ruth supposed that.

But seeing that another of those alarming pauses was approaching, she
remarked that he would have a beautiful wife. Didn’t Mr Westlock think
so?

‘Ye--yes,’ said John, ‘oh, yes.’

She feared he was rather hard to please, he spoke so coldly.

‘Rather say already pleased,’ said John. ‘I have scarcely seen her. I
had no care to see her. I had no eyes for HER, this morning.’

Oh, good gracious!

It was well they had reached their destination. She never could have
gone any further. It would have been impossible to walk in such a
tremble.

Tom had not come in. They entered the triangular parlour together, and
alone. Fiery Face, Fiery Face, how many years’ purchase NOW!

She sat down on the little sofa, and untied her bonnet-strings. He sat
down by her side, and very near her; very, very near her. Oh rapid,
swelling, bursting little heart, you knew that it would come to this,
and hoped it would. Why beat so wildly, heart!

‘Dear Ruth! Sweet Ruth! If I had loved you less, I could have told you
that I loved you, long ago. I have loved you from the first. There never
was a creature in the world more truly loved than you, dear Ruth, by
me!’

She clasped her little hands before her face. The gushing tears of joy,
and pride, and hope, and innocent affection, would not be restrained.
Fresh from her full young heart they came to answer him.

‘My dear love! If this is--I almost dare to hope it is, now--not painful
or distressing to you, you make me happier than I can tell, or you
imagine. Darling Ruth! My own good, gentle, winning Ruth! I hope I know
the value of your heart, I hope I know the worth of your angel nature.
Let me try and show you that I do; and you will make me happier, Ruth--’

‘Not happier,’ she sobbed, ‘than you make me. No one can be happier,
John, than you make me!’

Fiery Face, provide yourself! The usual wages or the usual warning. It’s
all over, Fiery Face. We needn’t trouble you any further.

The little hands could meet each other now, without a rampant horse
to urge them. There was no occasion for lions, bears, or mad bulls. It
could all be done, and infinitely better, without their assistance.
No burly drayman or big butts of beer, were wanted for apologies. No
apology at all was wanted. The soft light touch fell coyly, but quite
naturally, upon the lover’s shoulder; the delicate waist, the drooping
head, the blushing cheek, the beautiful eyes, the exquisite mouth
itself, were all as natural as possible. If all the horses in Araby had
run away at once, they couldn’t have improved upon it.

They soon began to talk of Tom again.

‘I hope he will be glad to hear of it!’ said John, with sparkling eyes.

Ruth drew the little hands a little tighter when he said it, and looked
up seriously into his face.

‘I am never to leave him, AM I, dear? I could never leave Tom. I am sure
you know that.’

‘Do you think I would ask you?’ he returned, with a--well! Never mind
with what.

‘I am sure you never would,’ she answered, the bright tears standing in
her eyes.

‘And I will swear it, Ruth, my darling, if you please. Leave Tom! That
would be a strange beginning. Leave Tom, dear! If Tom and we be not
inseparable, and Tom (God bless him) have not all honour and all love
in our home, my little wife, may that home never be! And that’s a strong
oath, Ruth.’

Shall it be recorded how she thanked him? Yes, it shall. In all
simplicity and innocence and purity of heart, yet with a timid,
graceful, half-determined hesitation, she set a little rosy seal upon
the vow, whose colour was reflected in her face, and flashed up to the
braiding of her dark brown hair.

‘Tom will be so happy, and so proud, and glad,’ she said, clasping her
little hands. ‘But so surprised! I am sure he had never thought of such
a thing.’

Of course John asked her immediately--because you know they were in that
foolish state when great allowances must be made--when SHE had begun to
think of such a thing, and this made a little diversion in their talk; a
charming diversion to them, but not so interesting to us; at the end of
which, they came back to Tom again.

‘Ah! dear Tom!’ said Ruth. ‘I suppose I ought to tell you everything
now. I should have no secrets from you. Should I, John, love?’

It is of no use saying how that preposterous John answered her, because
he answered in a manner which is untranslatable on paper though highly
satisfactory in itself. But what he conveyed was, No no no, sweet Ruth;
or something to that effect.

Then she told him Tom’s great secret; not exactly saying how she had
found it out, but leaving him to understand it if he liked; and John was
sadly grieved to hear it, and was full of sympathy and sorrow. But they
would try, he said, only the more, on this account to make him happy,
and to beguile him with his favourite pursuits. And then, in all the
confidence of such a time, he told her how he had a capital opportunity
of establishing himself in his old profession in the country; and how he
had been thinking, in the event of that happiness coming upon him which
had actually come--there was another slight diversion here--how he had
been thinking that it would afford occupation to Tom, and enable them to
live together in the easiest manner, without any sense of dependence on
Tom’s part; and to be as happy as the day was long. And Ruth receiving
this with joy, they went on catering for Tom to that extent that they
had already purchased him a select library and built him an organ, on
which he was performing with the greatest satisfaction, when they heard
him knocking at the door.

Though she longed to tell him what had happened, poor little Ruth was
greatly agitated by his arrival; the more so because she knew that Mr
Chuzzlewit was with him. So she said, all in a tremble:

‘What shall I do, dear John! I can’t bear that he should hear it from
any one but me, and I could not tell him, unless we were alone.’

‘Do, my love,’ said John, ‘whatever is natural to you on the impulse of
the moment, and I am sure it will be right.’

He had hardly time to say thus much, and Ruth had hardly time to--just
to get a little farther off--upon the sofa, when Tom and Mr Chuzzlewit
came in. Mr Chuzzlewit came first, and Tom was a few seconds behind him.

Now Ruth had hastily resolved that she would beckon Tom upstairs after
a short time, and would tell him in his little bedroom. But when she saw
his dear old face come in, her heart was so touched that she ran into
his arms, and laid her head down on his breast and sobbed out, ‘Bless
me, Tom! My dearest brother!’

Tom looked up, in surprise, and saw John Westlock close beside him,
holding out his hand.

‘John!’ cried Tom. ‘John!’

‘Dear Tom,’ said his friend, ‘give me your hand. We are brothers, Tom.’

Tom wrung it with all his force, embraced his sister fervently, and put
her in John Westlock’s arms.

‘Don’t speak to me, John. Heaven is very good to us. I--’ Tom could find
no further utterance, but left the room; and Ruth went after him.

And when they came back, which they did by-and-bye, she looked more
beautiful, and Tom more good and true (if that were possible) than ever.
And though Tom could not speak upon the subject even now; being yet
too newly glad, he put both his hands in both of John’s with emphasis
sufficient for the best speech ever spoken.

‘I am glad you chose to-day,’ said Mr Chuzzlewit to John; with the same
knowing smile as when they had left him. ‘I thought you would. I hoped
Tom and I lingered behind a discreet time. It’s so long since I had
any practical knowledge of these subjects, that I have been anxious, I
assure you.’

‘Your knowledge is still pretty accurate, sir,’ returned John, laughing,
‘if it led you to foresee what would happen to-day.’

‘Why, I am not sure, Mr Westlock,’ said the old man, ‘that any great
spirit of prophecy was needed, after seeing you and Ruth together. Come
hither, pretty one. See what Tom and I purchased this morning, while you
were dealing in exchange with that young merchant there.’

The old man’s way of seating her beside him, and humouring his voice as
if she were a child, was whimsical enough, but full of tenderness, and
not ill adapted, somehow, to little Ruth.

‘See here!’ he said, taking a case from his pocket, ‘what a beautiful
necklace. Ah! How it glitters! Earrings, too, and bracelets, and a zone
for your waist. This set is yours, and Mary has another like it. Tom
couldn’t understand why I wanted two. What a short-sighted Tom! Earrings
and bracelets, and a zone for your waist! Ah! Beautiful! Let us see how
brave they look. Ask Mr Westlock to clasp them on.’

It was the prettiest thing to see her holding out her round, white arm;
and John (oh deep, deep John!) pretending that the bracelet was very
hard to fasten; it was the prettiest thing to see her girding on the
precious little zone, and yet obliged to have assistance because her
fingers were in such terrible perplexity; it was the prettiest thing
to see her so confused and bashful, with the smiles and blushes playing
brightly on her face, like the sparkling light upon the jewels; it was
the prettiest thing that you would see, in the common experiences of a
twelvemonth, rely upon it.

‘The set of jewels and the wearer are so well matched,’ said the old
man, ‘that I don’t know which becomes the other most. Mr Westlock could
tell me, I have no doubt, but I’ll not ask him, for he is bribed. Health
to wear them, my dear, and happiness to make you forgetful of them,
except as a remembrance from a loving friend!’

He patted her upon the cheek, and said to Tom:

‘I must play the part of a father here, Tom, also. There are not many
fathers who marry two such daughters on the same day; but we will
overlook the improbability for the gratification of an old man’s fancy.
I may claim that much indulgence,’ he added, ‘for I have gratified few
fancies enough in my life tending to the happiness of others, Heaven
knows!’

These various proceedings had occupied so much time, and they fell into
such a pleasant conversation now, that it was within a quarter of an
hour of the time appointed for dinner before any of them thought about
it. A hackney-coach soon carried them to the Temple, however; and there
they found everything prepared for their reception.

Mr Tapley having been furnished with unlimited credentials relative to
the ordering of dinner, had so exerted himself for the honour of the
party, that a prodigious banquet was served, under the joint direction
of himself and his Intended. Mr Chuzzlewit would have had them of the
party, and Martin urgently seconded his wish, but Mark could by no means
be persuaded to sit down at table; observing, that in having the honour
of attending to their comforts, he felt himself, indeed, the landlord of
the Jolly Tapley, and could almost delude himself into the belief that
the entertainment was actually being held under the Jolly Tapley’s roof.

For the better encouragement of himself in this fable, Mr Tapley took
it upon him to issue divers general directions to the waiters from the
hotel, relative to the disposal of the dishes and so forth; and as they
were usually in direct opposition to all precedent, and were always
issued in his most facetious form of thought and speech, they occasioned
great merriment among those attendants; in which Mr Tapley participated,
with an infinite enjoyment of his own humour. He likewise entertained
them with short anecdotes of his travels appropriate to the occasion;
and now and then with some comic passage or other between himself and
Mrs Lupin; so that explosive laughs were constantly issuing from the
side-board, and from the backs of chairs; and the head-waiter (who wore
powder, and knee-smalls, and was usually a grave man) got to be a bright
scarlet in the face, and broke his waistcoat-strings audibly.

Young Martin sat at the head of the table, and Tom Pinch at the foot;
and if there were a genial face at that board, it was Tom’s. They all
took their tone from Tom. Everybody drank to him, everybody looked to
him, everybody thought of him, everybody loved him. If he so much as
laid down his knife and fork, somebody put out a hand to shake with him.
Martin and Mary had taken him aside before dinner, and spoken to him so
heartily of the time to come, laying such fervent stress upon the trust
they had in his completion of their felicity, by his society and closest
friendship, that Tom was positively moved to tears. He couldn’t bear it.
His heart was full, he said, of happiness. And so it was. Tom spoke the
honest truth. It was. Large as thy heart was, dear Tom Pinch, it had no
room that day for anything but happiness and sympathy!

And there was Fips, old Fips of Austin Friars, present at the dinner,
and turning out to be the jolliest old dog that ever did violence to his
convivial sentiments by shutting himself up in a dark office. ‘Where is
he?’ said Fips, when he came in. And then he pounced on Tom, and told
him that he wanted to relieve himself of all his old constraint; and in
the first place shook him by one hand, and in the second place shook him
by the other, and in the third place nudged him in the waistcoat, and in
the fourth place said, ‘How are you?’ and in a great many other places
did a great many other things to show his friendliness and joy. And he
sang songs, did Fips; and made speeches, did Fips; and knocked off his
wine pretty handsomely, did Fips; and in short, he showed himself a
perfect Trump, did Fips, in all respects.

But ah! the happiness of strolling home at night--obstinate little Ruth,
she wouldn’t hear of riding!--as they had done on that dear night, from
Furnival’s Inn! The happiness of being able to talk about it, and to
confide their happiness to each other! The happiness of stating all
their little plans to Tom, and seeing his bright face grow brighter as
they spoke!

When they reached home, Tom left John and his sister in the parlour, and
went upstairs into his own room, under pretence of seeking a book. And
Tom actually winked to himself when he got upstairs; he thought it such
a deep thing to have done.

‘They like to be by themselves, of course,’ said Tom; ‘and I came away
so naturally, that I have no doubt they are expecting me, every moment,
to return. That’s capital!’

But he had not sat reading very long, when he heard a tap at his door.

‘May I come in?’ said John.

‘Oh, surely!’ Tom replied.

‘Don’t leave us, Tom. Don’t sit by yourself. We want to make you merry;
not melancholy.’

‘My dear friend,’ said Tom, with a cheerful smile.

‘Brother, Tom. Brother.’

‘My dear brother,’ said Tom; ‘there is no danger of my being melancholy,
how can I be melancholy, when I know that you and Ruth are so blest in
each other! I think I can find my tongue tonight, John,’ he added, after
a moment’s pause. ‘But I never can tell you what unutterable joy this
day has given me. It would be unjust to you to speak of your having
chosen a portionless girl, for I feel that you know her worth; I am sure
you know her worth. Nor will it diminish in your estimation, John, which
money might.’

‘Which money would, Tom,’ he returned. ‘Her worth! Oh, who could see her
here, and not love her! Who could know her, Tom, and not honour her! Who
could ever stand possessed of such a heart as hers, and grow indifferent
to the treasure! Who could feel the rapture that I feel to-day, and love
as I love her, Tom, without knowing something of her worth! Your joy
unutterable! No, no, Tom. It’s mine, it’s mine.

‘No, no, John,’ said Tom. ‘It’s mine, it’s mine.’

Their friendly contention was brought to a close by little Ruth herself,
who came peeping in at the door. And oh, the look, the glorious,
half-proud, half-timid look she gave Tom, when her lover drew her to his
side! As much as to say, ‘Yes, indeed, Tom, he will do it. But then he
has a right, you know. Because I AM fond of him, Tom.’

As to Tom, he was perfectly delighted. He could have sat and looked at
them, just as they were, for hours.

‘I have told Tom, love, as we agreed, that we are not going to permit
him to run away, and that we cannot possibly allow it. The loss of one
person, and such a person as Tom, too, out of our small household of
three, is not to be endured; and so I have told him. Whether he is
considerate, or whether he is only selfish, I don’t know. But he needn’t
be considerate, for he is not the least restraint upon us. Is he,
dearest Ruth?’

Well! He really did not seem to be any particular restraint upon them.
Judging from what ensued.

Was it folly in Tom to be so pleased by their remembrance of him at
such a time? Was their graceful love a folly, were their dear caresses
follies, was their lengthened parting folly? Was it folly in him to
watch her window from the street, and rate its scantiest gleam of light
above all diamonds; folly in her to breathe his name upon her knees, and
pour out her pure heart before that Being from whom such hearts and such
affections come?

If these be follies, then Fiery Face go on and prosper! If they be not,
then Fiery Face avaunt! But set the crunched bonnet at some other single
gentleman, in any case, for one is lost to thee for ever!



CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

GIVES THE AUTHOR GREAT CONCERN. FOR IT IS THE LAST IN THE BOOK


Todger’s was in high feather, and mighty preparations for a late
breakfast were astir in its commercial bowers. The blissful morning
had arrived when Miss Pecksniff was to be united in holy matrimony, to
Augustus.

Miss Pecksniff was in a frame of mind equally becoming to herself and
the occasion. She was full of clemency and conciliation. She had laid
in several caldrons of live coals, and was prepared to heap them on the
heads of her enemies. She bore no spite nor malice in her heart. Not the
least.

Quarrels, Miss Pecksniff said, were dreadful things in families; and
though she never could forgive her dear papa, she was willing to receive
her other relations. They had been separated, she observed, too long.
It was enough to call down a judgment upon the family. She believed the
death of Jonas WAS a judgment on them for their internal dissensions.
And Miss Pecksniff was confirmed in this belief, by the lightness with
which the visitation had fallen on herself.

By way of doing sacrifice--not in triumph; not, of course, in triumph,
but in humiliation of spirit--this amiable young person wrote,
therefore, to her kinswoman of the strong mind, and informed her that
her nuptials would take place on such a day. That she had been much hurt
by the unnatural conduct of herself and daughters, and hoped they might
not have suffered in their consciences. That, being desirous to forgive
her enemies, and make her peace with the world before entering into the
most solemn of covenants with the most devoted of men, she now held out
the hand of friendship. That if the strong-minded women took that hand,
in the temper in which it was extended to her, she, Miss Pecksniff,
did invite her to be present at the ceremony of her marriage, and did
furthermore invite the three red-nosed spinsters, her daughters
(but Miss Pecksniff did not particularize their noses), to attend as
bridesmaids.

The strong-minded women returned for answer, that herself and daughters
were, as regarded their consciences, in the enjoyment of robust health,
which she knew Miss Pecksniff would be glad to hear. That she had
received Miss Pecksniff’s note with unalloyed delight, because she
never had attached the least importance to the paltry and insignificant
jealousies with which herself and circle had been assailed; otherwise
than as she had found them, in the contemplation, a harmless source of
innocent mirth. That she would joyfully attend Miss Pecksniff’s bridal;
and that her three dear daughters would be happy to assist, on so
interesting, and SO VERY UNEXPECTED--which the strong-minded woman
underlined--SO VERY UNEXPECTED an occasion.

On the receipt of this gracious reply, Miss Pecksniff extended her
forgiveness and her invitations to Mr and Mrs Spottletoe; to Mr George
Chuzzlewit the bachelor cousin; to the solitary female who usually had
the toothache; and to the hairy young gentleman with the outline of
a face; surviving remnants of the party that had once assembled in Mr
Pecksniff’s parlour. After which Miss Pecksniff remarked that there was
a sweetness in doing our duty, which neutralized the bitter in our cups.

The wedding guests had not yet assembled, and indeed it was so early
that Miss Pecksniff herself was in the act of dressing at her leisure,
when a carriage stopped near the Monument; and Mark, dismounting from
the rumble, assisted Mr Chuzzlewit to alight. The carriage remained in
waiting; so did Mr Tapley. Mr Chuzzlewit betook himself to Todger’s.

He was shown, by the degenerate successor of Mr Bailey, into the
dining-parlour; where--for his visit was expected--Mrs Todgers
immediately appeared.

‘You are dressed, I see, for the wedding,’ he said.

Mrs Todgers, who was greatly flurried by the preparations, replied in
the affirmative.

‘It goes against my wishes to have it in progress just now, I assure
you, sir,’ said Mrs Todgers; ‘but Miss Pecksniff’s mind was set upon it,
and it really is time that Miss Pecksniff was married. That cannot be
denied, sir.’

‘No,’ said Mr Chuzzlewit, ‘assuredly not. Her sister takes no part in
the proceedings?’

‘Oh, dear no, sir. Poor thing!’ said Mrs Todgers, shaking her head, and
dropping her voice. ‘Since she has known the worst, she has never left
my room; the next room.’

‘Is she prepared to see me?’ he inquired.

‘Quite prepared, sir.’

‘Then let us lose no time.’

Mrs Todgers conducted him into the little back chamber commanding the
prospect of the cistern; and there, sadly different from when it had
first been her lodging, sat poor Merry, in mourning weeds. The room
looked very dark and sorrowful; and so did she; but she had one friend
beside her, faithful to the last. Old Chuffey.

When Mr Chuzzlewit sat down at her side, she took his hand and put it
to her lips. She was in great grief. He too was agitated; for he had not
seen her since their parting in the churchyard.

‘I judged you hastily,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘I fear I judged you
cruelly. Let me know that I have your forgiveness.’

She kissed his hand again; and retaining it in hers, thanked him in a
broken voice, for all his kindness to her since.

‘Tom Pinch,’ said Martin, ‘has faithfully related to me all that you
desired him to convey; at a time when he deemed it very improbable that
he would ever have an opportunity of delivering your message. Believe
me, that if I ever deal again with an ill-advised and unawakened
nature, hiding the strength it thinks its weakness, I will have long and
merciful consideration for it.’

‘You had for me; even for me,’ she answered. ‘I quite believe it. I said
the words you have repeated, when my distress was very sharp and hard to
bear; I say them now for others; but I cannot urge them for myself.
You spoke to me after you had seen and watched me day by day. There
was great consideration in that. You might have spoken, perhaps,
more kindly; you might have tried to invite my confidence by greater
gentleness; but the end would have been the same.’

He shook his head in doubt, and not without some inward self-reproach.

‘How can I hope,’ she said, ‘that your interposition would have
prevailed with me, when I know how obdurate I was! I never thought at
all; dear Mr Chuzzlewit, I never thought at all; I had no thought,
no heart, no care to find one; at that time. It has grown out of my
trouble. I have felt it in my trouble. I wouldn’t recall my trouble such
as it is and has been--and it is light in comparison with trials which
hundreds of good people suffer every day, I know--I wouldn’t recall
it to-morrow, if I could. It has been my friend, for without it no one
could have changed me; nothing could have changed me. Do not mistrust me
because of these tears; I cannot help them. I am grateful for it, in my
soul. Indeed I am!’

‘Indeed she is!’ said Mrs Todgers. ‘I believe it, sir.’

‘And so do I!’ said Mr Chuzzlewit. ‘Now, attend to me, my dear. Your
late husband’s estate, if not wasted by the confession of a large debt
to the broken office (which document, being useless to the runaways,
has been sent over to England by them; not so much for the sake of the
creditors as for the gratification of their dislike to him, whom they
suppose to be still living), will be seized upon by law; for it is not
exempt, as I learn, from the claims of those who have suffered by the
fraud in which he was engaged. Your father’s property was all, or nearly
all, embarked in the same transaction. If there be any left, it will be
seized on, in like manner. There is no home THERE.’

‘I couldn’t return to him,’ she said, with an instinctive reference to
his having forced her marriage on. ‘I could not return to him.’

‘I know it,’ Mr Chuzzlewit resumed; ‘and I am here because I know
it. Come with me! From all who are about me, you are certain (I
have ascertained it) of a generous welcome. But until your health is
re-established, and you are sufficiently composed to bear that welcome,
you shall have your abode in any quiet retreat of your own choosing,
near London; not so far removed but that this kind-hearted lady may
still visit you as often as she pleases. You have suffered much; but you
are young, and have a brighter and a better future stretching out before
you. Come with me. Your sister is careless of you, I know. She hurries
on and publishes her marriage, in a spirit which (to say no more of it)
is barely decent, is unsisterly, and bad. Leave the house before her
guests arrive. She means to give you pain. Spare her the offence, and
come with me!’

Mrs Todgers, though most unwilling to part with her, added her
persuasions. Even poor old Chuffey (of course included in the project)
added his. She hurriedly attired herself, and was ready to depart, when
Miss Pecksniff dashed into the room.

Miss Pecksniff dashed in so suddenly, that she was placed in an
embarrassing position. For though she had completed her bridal toilette
as to her head, on which she wore a bridal bonnet with orange flowers,
she had not completed it as to her skirts, which displayed no choicer
decoration than a dimity bedgown. She had dashed in, in fact, about
half-way through, to console her sister, in her affliction, with a sight
of the aforesaid bonnet; and being quite unconscious of the presence of
a visitor, until she found Mr Chuzzlewit standing face to face with her,
her surprise was an uncomfortable one.

‘So, young lady!’ said the old man, eyeing her with strong disfavour.
‘You are to be married to-day!’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Miss Pecksniff, modestly. ‘I am. I--my dress is
rather--really, Mrs Todgers!’

‘Your delicacy,’ said old Martin, ‘is troubled, I perceive. I am not
surprised to find it so. You have chosen the period of your marriage
unfortunately.’

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Chuzzlewit,’ retorted Cherry; very red and angry
in a moment; ‘but if you have anything to say on that subject, I must
beg to refer you to Augustus. You will scarcely think it manly, I hope,
to force an argument on me, when Augustus is at all times ready to
discuss it with you. I have nothing to do with any deceptions that may
have been practiced on my parent,’ said Miss Pecksniff, pointedly; ‘and
as I wish to be on good terms with everybody at such a time, I should
have been glad if you would have favoured us with your company at
breakfast. But I will not ask you as it is; seeing that you have been
prepossessed and set against me in another quarter. I hope I have my
natural affections for another quarter, and my natural pity for
another quarter; but I cannot always submit to be subservient to it, Mr
Chuzzlewit. That would be a little too much. I trust I have more respect
for myself, as well as for the man who claims me as his Bride.’

‘Your sister, meeting--as I think; not as she says, for she has said
nothing about it--with little consideration from you, is going away with
me,’ said Mr Chuzzlewit.

‘I am very happy to find that she has some good fortune at last,’
returned Miss Pecksniff, tossing her head. ‘I congratulate her, I
am sure. I am not surprised that this event should be painful to
her--painful to her--but I can’t help that, Mr Chuzzlewit. It’s not my
fault.’

‘Come, Miss Pecksniff!’ said the old man, quietly. ‘I should like to see
a better parting between you. I should like to see a better parting on
your side, in such circumstances. It would make me your friend. You may
want a friend one day or other.’

‘Every relation of life, Mr Chuzzlewit, begging your pardon; and every
friend in life,’ returned Miss Pecksniff, with dignity, ‘is now bound up
and cemented in Augustus. So long as Augustus is my own, I cannot want
a friend. When you speak of friends, sir, I must beg, once for all, to
refer you to Augustus. That is my impression of the religious ceremony
in which I am so soon to take a part at that altar to which Augustus
will conduct me. I bear no malice at any time, much less in a moment of
triumph, towards any one; much less towards my sister. On the contrary,
I congratulate her. If you didn’t hear me say so, I am not to blame.
And as I owe it to Augustus, to be punctual on an occasion when he may
naturally be supposed to be--to be impatient--really, Mrs Todgers!--I
must beg your leave, sir, to retire.’

After these words the bridal bonnet disappeared; with as much state as
the dimity bedgown left in it.

Old Martin gave his arm to the younger sister without speaking; and led
her out. Mrs Todgers, with her holiday garments fluttering in the wind,
accompanied them to the carriage, clung round Merry’s neck at parting,
and ran back to her own dingy house, crying the whole way. She had
a lean, lank body, Mrs Todgers, but a well-conditioned soul within.
Perhaps the good Samaritan was lean and lank, and found it hard to live.
Who knows!

Mr Chuzzlewit followed her so closely with his eyes, that, until she had
shut her own door, they did not encounter Mr Tapley’s face.

‘Why, Mark!’ he said, as soon as he observed it, ‘what’s the matter?’

‘The wonderfulest ewent, sir!’ returned Mark, pumping at his voice in
a most laborious manner, and hardly able to articulate with all his
efforts. ‘A coincidence as never was equalled! I’m blessed if here ain’t
two old neighbours of ourn, sir!’

‘What neighbours?’ cried old Martin, looking out of window. ‘Where?’

‘I was a-walkin’ up and down not five yards from this spot,’ said Mr
Tapley, breathless, ‘and they come upon me like their own ghosts, as I
thought they was! It’s the wonderfulest ewent that ever happened. Bring
a feather, somebody, and knock me down with it!’

‘What do you mean!’ exclaimed old Martin, quite as much excited by
the spectacle of Mark’s excitement as that strange person was himself.
‘Neighbours, where?’

‘Here, sir!’ replied Mr Tapley. ‘Here in the city of London! Here upon
these very stones! Here they are, sir! Don’t I know ‘em? Lord love their
welcome faces, don’t I know ‘em!’

With which ejaculations Mr Tapley not only pointed to a decent-looking
man and woman standing by, but commenced embracing them alternately,
over and over again, in Monument Yard.

‘Neighbours, WHERE? old Martin shouted; almost maddened by his
ineffectual efforts to get out at the coach-door.

‘Neighbours in America! Neighbours in Eden!’ cried Mark. ‘Neighbours in
the swamp, neighbours in the bush, neighbours in the fever. Didn’t she
nurse us! Didn’t he help us! Shouldn’t we both have died without ‘em!
Haven’t they come a-strugglin’ back, without a single child for their
consolation! And talk to me of neighbours!’

Away he went again, in a perfectly wild state, hugging them, and
skipping round them, and cutting in between them, as if he were
performing some frantic and outlandish dance.

Mr Chuzzlewit no sooner gathered who these people were, than he burst
open the coach-door somehow or other, and came tumbling out among them;
and as if the lunacy of Mr Tapley were contagious, he immediately began
to shake hands too, and exhibit every demonstration of the liveliest
joy.

‘Get up, behind!’ he said. ‘Get up in the rumble. Come along with me! Go
you on the box, Mark. Home! Home!’

‘Home!’ cried Mr Tapley, seizing the old man’s hand in a burst of
enthusiasm. ‘Exactly my opinion, sir. Home for ever! Excuse the liberty,
sir, I can’t help it. Success to the Jolly Tapley! There’s nothin’ in
the house they shan’t have for the askin’ for, except a bill. Home to be
sure! Hurrah!’

Home they rolled accordingly, when he had got the old man in again, as
fast as they could go; Mark abating nothing of his fervour by the way,
by allowing it to vent itself as unrestrainedly as if he had been on
Salisbury Plain.

And now the wedding party began to assemble at Todgers’s. Mr Jinkins,
the only boarder invited, was on the ground first. He wore a white
favour in his button-hole, and a bran new extra super double-milled blue
saxony dress coat (that was its description in the bill), with a variety
of tortuous embellishments about the pockets, invented by the artist
to do honour to the day. The miserable Augustus no longer felt strongly
even on the subject of Jinkins. He hadn’t strength of mind enough to do
it. ‘Let him come!’ he had said, in answer to Miss Pecksniff, when she
urged the point. ‘Let him come! He has ever been my rock ahead through
life. ‘Tis meet he should be there. Ha, ha! Oh, yes! let Jinkins come!’

Jinkins had come with all the pleasure in life, and there he was. For
some few minutes he had no companion but the breakfast, which was set
forth in the drawing-room, with unusual taste and ceremony. But Mrs
Todgers soon joined him; and the bachelor cousin, the hairy young
gentleman, and Mr and Mrs Spottletoe, arrived in quick succession.

Mr Spottletoe honoured Jinkins with an encouraging bow. ‘Glad to know
you, sir,’ he said. ‘Give you joy!’ Under the impression that Jinkins
was the happy man.

Mr Jinkins explained. He was merely doing the honours for his friend
Moddle, who had ceased to reside in the house, and had not yet arrived.

‘Not arrived, sir!’ exclaimed Spottletoe, in a great heat.

‘Not yet,’ said Mr Jinkins.

‘Upon my soul!’ cried Spottletoe. ‘He begins well! Upon my life and
honour this young man begins well! But I should very much like to know
how it is that every one who comes into contact with this family is
guilty of some gross insult to it. Death! Not arrived yet. Not here to
receive us!’

The nephew with the outline of a countenance, suggested that perhaps he
had ordered a new pair of boots, and they hadn’t come home.

‘Don’t talk to me of Boots, sir!’ retorted Spottletoe, with immense
indignation. ‘He is bound to come here in his slippers then; he is bound
to come here barefoot. Don’t offer such a wretched and evasive plea to
me on behalf of your friend, as Boots, sir.’

‘He is not MY friend,’ said the nephew. ‘I never saw him.’

‘Very well, sir,’ returned the fiery Spottletoe. ‘Then don’t talk to
me!’

The door was thrown open at this juncture, and Miss Pecksniff entered,
tottering, and supported by her three bridesmaids. The strong-minded
woman brought up the rear; having waited outside until now, for the
purpose of spoiling the effect.

‘How do you do, ma’am!’ said Spottletoe to the strong-minded woman in a
tone of defiance. ‘I believe you see Mrs Spottletoe, ma’am?’

The strong-minded woman with an air of great interest in Mrs
Spottletoe’s health, regretted that she was not more easily seen. Nature
erring, in that lady’s case, upon the slim side.

‘Mrs Spottletoe is at least more easily seen than the bridegroom,
ma’am,’ returned that lady’s husband. ‘That is, unless he has confined
his attentions to any particular part or branch of this family, which
would be quite in keeping with its usual proceedings.’

‘If you allude to me, sir--’ the strong-minded woman began.

‘Pray,’ interposed Miss Pecksniff, ‘do not allow Augustus, at this awful
moment of his life and mine, to be the means of disturbing that harmony
which it is ever Augustus’s and my wish to maintain. Augustus has not
been introduced to any of my relations now present. He preferred not.’

‘Why, then, I venture to assert,’ cried Mr Spottletoe, ‘that the man who
aspires to join this family, and “prefers not” to be introduced to its
members, is an impertinent Puppy. That is my opinion of HIM!’

The strong-minded woman remarked with great suavity, that she was afraid
he must be. Her three daughters observed aloud that it was ‘Shameful!’

‘You do not know Augustus,’ said Miss Pecksniff, tearfully, ‘indeed you
do not know him. Augustus is all mildness and humility. Wait till you
see Augustus, and I am sure he will conciliate your affections.’

‘The question arises,’ said Spottletoe, folding his arms: ‘How long we
are to wait. I am not accustomed to wait; that’s the fact. And I want to
know how long we are expected to wait.’

‘Mrs Todgers!’ said Charity, ‘Mr Jinkins! I am afraid there must be some
mistake. I think Augustus must have gone straight to the Altar!’

As such a thing was possible, and the church was close at hand, Mr
Jinkins ran off to see, accompanied by Mr George Chuzzlewit the bachelor
cousin, who preferred anything to the aggravation of sitting near the
breakfast, without being able to eat it. But they came back with no
other tidings than a familiar message from the clerk, importing that if
they wanted to be married that morning they had better look sharp, as
the curate wasn’t going to wait there all day.

The bride was now alarmed; seriously alarmed. Good Heavens, what could
have happened! Augustus! Dear Augustus!

Mr Jinkins volunteered to take a cab, and seek him at the
newly-furnished house. The strong-minded woman administered comfort to
Miss Pecksniff. ‘It was a specimen of what she had to expect. It would
do her good. It would dispel the romance of the affair.’ The red-nosed
daughters also administered the kindest comfort. ‘Perhaps he’d come,’
they said. The sketchy nephew hinted that he might have fallen off a
bridge. The wrath of Mr Spottletoe resisted all the entreaties of his
wife. Everybody spoke at once, and Miss Pecksniff, with clasped hands,
sought consolation everywhere and found it nowhere, when Jinkins, having
met the postman at the door, came back with a letter, which he put into
her hand.

Miss Pecksniff opened it, uttered a piercing shriek, threw it down upon
the ground, and fainted away.

They picked it up; and crowding round, and looking over one another’s
shoulders, read, in the words and dashes following, this communication:


‘OFF GRAVESEND.

‘CLIPPER SCHOONER, CUPID

‘Wednesday night

‘EVER INJURED MISS PECKSNIFF--Ere this reaches you, the undersigned
will be--if not a corpse--on the way to Van Dieman’s Land. Send not in
pursuit. I never will be taken alive!

‘The burden--300 tons per register--forgive, if in my distraction,
I allude to the ship--on my mind--has been truly dreadful.
Frequently--when you have sought to soothe my brow with kisses--has
self-destruction flashed across me. Frequently--incredible as it may
seem--have I abandoned the idea.

‘I love another. She is Another’s. Everything appears to be somebody
else’s. Nothing in the world is mine--not even my Situation--which I
have forfeited--by my rash conduct--in running away.

‘If you ever loved me, hear my last appeal! The last appeal of a
miserable and blighted exile. Forward the inclosed--it is the key of my
desk--to the office--by hand. Please address to Bobbs and Cholberry--I
mean to Chobbs and Bolberry--but my mind is totally unhinged. I left a
penknife--with a buckhorn handle--in your work-box. It will repay the
messenger. May it make him happier than ever it did me!

‘Oh, Miss Pecksniff, why didn’t you leave me alone! Was it not cruel,
CRUEL! Oh, my goodness, have you not been a witness of my feelings--have
you not seen them flowing from my eyes--did you not, yourself, reproach
me with weeping more than usual on that dreadful night when last we
met--in that house--where I once was peaceful--though blighted--in the
society of Mrs Todgers!

‘But it was written--in the Talmud--that you should involve yourself in
the inscrutable and gloomy Fate which it is my mission to accomplish,
and which wreathes itself--e’en now--about in temples. I will not
reproach, for I have wronged you. May the Furniture make some amends!

‘Farewell! Be the proud bride of a ducal coronet, and forget me!
Long may it be before you know the anguish with which I now subscribe
myself--amid the tempestuous howlings of the--sailors,

‘Unalterably,

‘Never yours,

‘AUGUSTUS.’


They thought as little of Miss Pecksniff, while they greedily perused
this letter, as if she were the very last person on earth whom it
concerned. But Miss Pecksniff really had fainted away. The bitterness of
her mortification; the bitterness of having summoned witnesses, and
such witnesses, to behold it; the bitterness of knowing that the
strong-minded women and the red-nosed daughters towered triumphant in
this hour of their anticipated overthrow; was too much to be borne. Miss
Pecksniff had fainted away in earnest.


What sounds are these that fall so grandly on the ear! What darkening
room is this!

And that mild figure seated at an organ, who is he! Ah Tom, dear Tom,
old friend!

Thy head is prematurely grey, though Time has passed thee and our old
association, Tom. But, in those sounds with which it is thy wont to bear
the twilight company, the music of thy heart speaks out--the story of
thy life relates itself.

Thy life is tranquil, calm, and happy, Tom. In the soft strain which
ever and again comes stealing back upon the ear, the memory of thine
old love may find a voice perhaps; but it is a pleasant, softened,
whispering memory, like that in which we sometimes hold the dead, and
does not pain or grieve thee, God be thanked.

Touch the notes lightly, Tom, as lightly as thou wilt, but never will
thine hand fall half so lightly on that Instrument as on the head of
thine old tyrant brought down very, very low; and never will it make as
hollow a response to any touch of thine, as he does always.

For a drunken, begging, squalid, letter-writing man, called Pecksniff,
with a shrewish daughter, haunts thee, Tom; and when he makes appeals to
thee for cash, reminds thee that he built thy fortunes better than his
own; and when he spends it, entertains the alehouse company with tales
of thine ingratitude and his munificence towards thee once upon a time;
and then he shows his elbows worn in holes, and puts his soleless
shoes up on a bench, and begs his auditors look there, while thou art
comfortably housed and clothed. All known to thee, and yet all borne
with, Tom!

So, with a smile upon thy face, thou passest gently to another
measure--to a quicker and more joyful one--and little feet are used to
dance about thee at the sound, and bright young eyes to glance up
into thine. And there is one slight creature, Tom--her child; not
Ruth’s--whom thine eyes follow in the romp and dance; who, wondering
sometimes to see thee look so thoughtful, runs to climb up on thy knee,
and put her cheek to thine; who loves thee, Tom, above the rest, if that
can be; and falling sick once, chose thee for her nurse, and never knew
impatience, Tom, when thou wert by her side.

Thou glidest, now, into a graver air; an air devoted to old friends and
bygone times; and in thy lingering touch upon the keys, and the rich
swelling of the mellow harmony, they rise before thee. The spirit of
that old man dead, who delighted to anticipate thy wants, and never
ceased to honour thee, is there, among the rest; repeating, with a face
composed and calm, the words he said to thee upon his bed, and blessing
thee!

And coming from a garden, Tom, bestrewn with flowers by children’s
hands, thy sister, little Ruth, as light of foot and heart as in old
days, sits down beside thee. From the Present, and the Past, with which
she is so tenderly entwined in all thy thoughts, thy strain soars onward
to the Future. As it resounds within thee and without, the noble music,
rolling round ye both, shuts out the grosser prospect of an earthly
parting, and uplifts ye both to Heaven!





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Title: David Copperfield

Author: Charles Dickens

Release Date: December, 1996  [Etext #766]
Posting Date: November 24, 2009
Last Updated: September 25, 2016

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAVID COPPERFIELD ***




Produced by Jo Churcher





DAVID COPPERFIELD


By Charles Dickens



               AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED TO
               THE HON.  Mr. AND Mrs. RICHARD WATSON,
               OF ROCKINGHAM, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE.


CONTENTS


     I.      I Am Born
     II.     I Observe
     III.    I Have a Change
     IV.     I Fall into Disgrace
     V.      I Am Sent Away
     VI.     I Enlarge My Circle of Acquaintance
     VII.    My ‘First Half’ at Salem House
     VIII.   My Holidays.  Especially One Happy Afternoon
     IX.     I Have a Memorable Birthday
     X.      I Become Neglected, and Am Provided For
     XI.     I Begin Life on My Own Account, and Don’t Like It
     XII.    Liking Life on My Own Account No Better, I Form a Great Resolution
     XIII.   The Sequel of My Resolution
     XIV.    My Aunt Makes up Her Mind About Me
     XV.     I Make Another Beginning
     XVI.    I Am a New Boy in More Senses Than One
     XVII.   Somebody Turns Up
     XVIII.  A Retrospect
     XIX.    I Look About Me and Make a Discovery
     XX.     Steerforth’s Home
     XXI.    Little Em’ly
     XXII.   Some Old Scenes, and Some New People
     XXIII.  I Corroborate Mr. Dick, and Choose a Profession
     XXIV.   My First Dissipation
     XXV.    Good and Bad Angels
     XXVI.   I Fall into Captivity
     XXVII.  Tommy Traddles
     XXVIII. Mr. Micawber’s Gauntlet
     XXIX.   I Visit Steerforth at His Home, Again
     XXX.    A Loss
     XXXI.   A Greater Loss
     XXXII.  The Beginning of a Long Journey
     XXXIII. Blissful
     XXXIV.  My Aunt Astonishes Me
     XXXV.   Depression
     XXXVI.  Enthusiasm
     XXXVII.  A Little Cold Water
     XXXVIII. A Dissolution of Partnership
     XXXIX.   Wickfield and Heep
     XL.      The Wanderer
     XLI.     Dora’s Aunts
     XLII.    Mischief
     XLIII.   Another Retrospect
     XLIV.    Our Housekeeping
     XLV.     Mr. Dick Fulfils My Aunt’s Predictions
     XLVI.    Intelligence
     XLVII.   Martha
     XLVIII.  Domestic
     XLIX.    I Am Involved in Mystery
     L.       Mr. Peggotty’s Dream Comes True
     LI.      The Beginning of a Longer Journey
     LII.     I Assist at an Explosion
     LIII.    Another Retrospect
     LIV.     Mr. Micawber’s Transactions
     LV.      Tempest
     LVI.     The New Wound, and the Old
     LVII.    The Emigrants
     LVIII.   Absence
     LIX.     Return
     LX.      Agnes
     LXI.     I Am Shown Two Interesting Penitents
     LXII.    A Light Shines on My Way
     LXIII.   A Visitor
     LXIV.    A Last Retrospect




PREFACE TO 1850 EDITION


I do not find it easy to get sufficiently far away from this Book, in
the first sensations of having finished it, to refer to it with the
composure which this formal heading would seem to require. My interest
in it, is so recent and strong; and my mind is so divided between
pleasure and regret--pleasure in the achievement of a long design,
regret in the separation from many companions--that I am in danger of
wearying the reader whom I love, with personal confidences, and private
emotions.

Besides which, all that I could say of the Story, to any purpose, I have
endeavoured to say in it.

It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know, how sorrowfully
the pen is laid down at the close of a two-years’ imaginative task; or
how an Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself
into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain
are going from him for ever. Yet, I have nothing else to tell; unless,
indeed, I were to confess (which might be of less moment still) that no
one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I have
believed it in the writing.

Instead of looking back, therefore, I will look forward. I cannot close
this Volume more agreeably to myself, than with a hopeful glance towards
the time when I shall again put forth my two green leaves once a month,
and with a faithful remembrance of the genial sun and showers that have
fallen on these leaves of David Copperfield, and made me happy.

     London, October, 1850.




PREFACE TO THE CHARLES DICKENS EDITION


I REMARKED in the original Preface to this Book, that I did not find it
easy to get sufficiently far away from it, in the first sensations of
having finished it, to refer to it with the composure which this formal
heading would seem to require. My interest in it was so recent and
strong, and my mind was so divided between pleasure and regret--pleasure
in the achievement of a long design, regret in the separation from many
companions--that I was in danger of wearying the reader with personal
confidences and private emotions.

Besides which, all that I could have said of the Story to any purpose, I
had endeavoured to say in it.

It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how sorrowfully the
pen is laid down at the close of a two-years’ imaginative task; or how
an Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into
the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going
from him for ever. Yet, I had nothing else to tell; unless, indeed, I
were to confess (which might be of less moment still), that no one can
ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I believed it in
the writing.

So true are these avowals at the present day, that I can now only take
the reader into one confidence more. Of all my books, I like this the
best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child
of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I
love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a
favourite child. And his name is

DAVID COPPERFIELD.

     1869




THE PERSONAL HISTORY AND EXPERIENCE OF DAVID COPPERFIELD THE YOUNGER



CHAPTER 1. I AM BORN



Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that
station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my
life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have
been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night.
It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry,
simultaneously.

In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by
the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a
lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility
of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be
unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and
spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to
all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a
Friday night.

I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can show
better than my history whether that prediction was verified or falsified
by the result. On the second branch of the question, I will only remark,
that unless I ran through that part of my inheritance while I was still
a baby, I have not come into it yet. But I do not at all complain of
having been kept out of this property; and if anybody else should be in
the present enjoyment of it, he is heartily welcome to keep it.

I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the
newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas. Whether sea-going
people were short of money about that time, or were short of faith and
preferred cork jackets, I don’t know; all I know is, that there was but
one solitary bidding, and that was from an attorney connected with the
bill-broking business, who offered two pounds in cash, and the balance
in sherry, but declined to be guaranteed from drowning on any higher
bargain. Consequently the advertisement was withdrawn at a dead
loss--for as to sherry, my poor dear mother’s own sherry was in the
market then--and ten years afterwards, the caul was put up in a raffle
down in our part of the country, to fifty members at half-a-crown a
head, the winner to spend five shillings. I was present myself, and I
remember to have felt quite uncomfortable and confused, at a part of
myself being disposed of in that way. The caul was won, I recollect, by
an old lady with a hand-basket, who, very reluctantly, produced from it
the stipulated five shillings, all in halfpence, and twopence halfpenny
short--as it took an immense time and a great waste of arithmetic, to
endeavour without any effect to prove to her. It is a fact which will
be long remembered as remarkable down there, that she was never drowned,
but died triumphantly in bed, at ninety-two. I have understood that it
was, to the last, her proudest boast, that she never had been on the
water in her life, except upon a bridge; and that over her tea (to which
she was extremely partial) she, to the last, expressed her indignation
at the impiety of mariners and others, who had the presumption to go
‘meandering’ about the world. It was in vain to represent to her
that some conveniences, tea perhaps included, resulted from this
objectionable practice. She always returned, with greater emphasis and
with an instinctive knowledge of the strength of her objection, ‘Let us
have no meandering.’

Not to meander myself, at present, I will go back to my birth.

I was born at Blunderstone, in Suffolk, or ‘there by’, as they say in
Scotland. I was a posthumous child. My father’s eyes had closed upon
the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it. There is
something strange to me, even now, in the reflection that he never saw
me; and something stranger yet in the shadowy remembrance that I have
of my first childish associations with his white grave-stone in the
churchyard, and of the indefinable compassion I used to feel for it
lying out alone there in the dark night, when our little parlour
was warm and bright with fire and candle, and the doors of our house
were--almost cruelly, it seemed to me sometimes--bolted and locked
against it.

An aunt of my father’s, and consequently a great-aunt of mine, of whom
I shall have more to relate by and by, was the principal magnate of our
family. Miss Trotwood, or Miss Betsey, as my poor mother always called
her, when she sufficiently overcame her dread of this formidable
personage to mention her at all (which was seldom), had been married
to a husband younger than herself, who was very handsome, except in the
sense of the homely adage, ‘handsome is, that handsome does’--for he
was strongly suspected of having beaten Miss Betsey, and even of having
once, on a disputed question of supplies, made some hasty but determined
arrangements to throw her out of a two pair of stairs’ window. These
evidences of an incompatibility of temper induced Miss Betsey to pay him
off, and effect a separation by mutual consent. He went to India with
his capital, and there, according to a wild legend in our family, he was
once seen riding on an elephant, in company with a Baboon; but I think
it must have been a Baboo--or a Begum. Anyhow, from India tidings of his
death reached home, within ten years. How they affected my aunt, nobody
knew; for immediately upon the separation, she took her maiden name
again, bought a cottage in a hamlet on the sea-coast a long way off,
established herself there as a single woman with one servant, and
was understood to live secluded, ever afterwards, in an inflexible
retirement.

My father had once been a favourite of hers, I believe; but she was
mortally affronted by his marriage, on the ground that my mother was ‘a
wax doll’. She had never seen my mother, but she knew her to be not
yet twenty. My father and Miss Betsey never met again. He was double
my mother’s age when he married, and of but a delicate constitution. He
died a year afterwards, and, as I have said, six months before I came
into the world.

This was the state of matters, on the afternoon of, what I may be
excused for calling, that eventful and important Friday. I can make no
claim therefore to have known, at that time, how matters stood; or to
have any remembrance, founded on the evidence of my own senses, of what
follows.

My mother was sitting by the fire, but poorly in health, and very low in
spirits, looking at it through her tears, and desponding heavily about
herself and the fatherless little stranger, who was already welcomed by
some grosses of prophetic pins, in a drawer upstairs, to a world not at
all excited on the subject of his arrival; my mother, I say, was sitting
by the fire, that bright, windy March afternoon, very timid and sad, and
very doubtful of ever coming alive out of the trial that was before her,
when, lifting her eyes as she dried them, to the window opposite, she
saw a strange lady coming up the garden.

My mother had a sure foreboding at the second glance, that it was
Miss Betsey. The setting sun was glowing on the strange lady, over the
garden-fence, and she came walking up to the door with a fell rigidity
of figure and composure of countenance that could have belonged to
nobody else.

When she reached the house, she gave another proof of her identity.
My father had often hinted that she seldom conducted herself like any
ordinary Christian; and now, instead of ringing the bell, she came and
looked in at that identical window, pressing the end of her nose against
the glass to that extent, that my poor dear mother used to say it became
perfectly flat and white in a moment.

She gave my mother such a turn, that I have always been convinced I am
indebted to Miss Betsey for having been born on a Friday.

My mother had left her chair in her agitation, and gone behind it in
the corner. Miss Betsey, looking round the room, slowly and inquiringly,
began on the other side, and carried her eyes on, like a Saracen’s Head
in a Dutch clock, until they reached my mother. Then she made a frown
and a gesture to my mother, like one who was accustomed to be obeyed, to
come and open the door. My mother went.

‘Mrs. David Copperfield, I think,’ said Miss Betsey; the emphasis
referring, perhaps, to my mother’s mourning weeds, and her condition.

‘Yes,’ said my mother, faintly.

‘Miss Trotwood,’ said the visitor. ‘You have heard of her, I dare say?’

My mother answered she had had that pleasure. And she had a disagreeable
consciousness of not appearing to imply that it had been an overpowering
pleasure.

‘Now you see her,’ said Miss Betsey. My mother bent her head, and begged
her to walk in.

They went into the parlour my mother had come from, the fire in the best
room on the other side of the passage not being lighted--not having
been lighted, indeed, since my father’s funeral; and when they were both
seated, and Miss Betsey said nothing, my mother, after vainly trying to
restrain herself, began to cry. ‘Oh tut, tut, tut!’ said Miss Betsey, in
a hurry. ‘Don’t do that! Come, come!’

My mother couldn’t help it notwithstanding, so she cried until she had
had her cry out.

‘Take off your cap, child,’ said Miss Betsey, ‘and let me see you.’

My mother was too much afraid of her to refuse compliance with this odd
request, if she had any disposition to do so. Therefore she did as she
was told, and did it with such nervous hands that her hair (which was
luxuriant and beautiful) fell all about her face.

‘Why, bless my heart!’ exclaimed Miss Betsey. ‘You are a very Baby!’

My mother was, no doubt, unusually youthful in appearance even for her
years; she hung her head, as if it were her fault, poor thing, and said,
sobbing, that indeed she was afraid she was but a childish widow, and
would be but a childish mother if she lived. In a short pause which
ensued, she had a fancy that she felt Miss Betsey touch her hair, and
that with no ungentle hand; but, looking at her, in her timid hope, she
found that lady sitting with the skirt of her dress tucked up, her hands
folded on one knee, and her feet upon the fender, frowning at the fire.

‘In the name of Heaven,’ said Miss Betsey, suddenly, ‘why Rookery?’

‘Do you mean the house, ma’am?’ asked my mother.

‘Why Rookery?’ said Miss Betsey. ‘Cookery would have been more to the
purpose, if you had had any practical ideas of life, either of you.’

‘The name was Mr. Copperfield’s choice,’ returned my mother. ‘When he
bought the house, he liked to think that there were rooks about it.’

The evening wind made such a disturbance just now, among some tall old
elm-trees at the bottom of the garden, that neither my mother nor Miss
Betsey could forbear glancing that way. As the elms bent to one another,
like giants who were whispering secrets, and after a few seconds of such
repose, fell into a violent flurry, tossing their wild arms about, as if
their late confidences were really too wicked for their peace of mind,
some weatherbeaten ragged old rooks’-nests, burdening their higher
branches, swung like wrecks upon a stormy sea.

‘Where are the birds?’ asked Miss Betsey.

‘The--?’ My mother had been thinking of something else.

‘The rooks--what has become of them?’ asked Miss Betsey.

‘There have not been any since we have lived here,’ said my mother. ‘We
thought--Mr. Copperfield thought--it was quite a large rookery; but
the nests were very old ones, and the birds have deserted them a long
while.’

‘David Copperfield all over!’ cried Miss Betsey. ‘David Copperfield from
head to foot! Calls a house a rookery when there’s not a rook near it,
and takes the birds on trust, because he sees the nests!’

‘Mr. Copperfield,’ returned my mother, ‘is dead, and if you dare to
speak unkindly of him to me--’

My poor dear mother, I suppose, had some momentary intention of
committing an assault and battery upon my aunt, who could easily have
settled her with one hand, even if my mother had been in far better
training for such an encounter than she was that evening. But it passed
with the action of rising from her chair; and she sat down again very
meekly, and fainted.

When she came to herself, or when Miss Betsey had restored her,
whichever it was, she found the latter standing at the window. The
twilight was by this time shading down into darkness; and dimly as they
saw each other, they could not have done that without the aid of the
fire.

‘Well?’ said Miss Betsey, coming back to her chair, as if she had only
been taking a casual look at the prospect; ‘and when do you expect--’

‘I am all in a tremble,’ faltered my mother. ‘I don’t know what’s the
matter. I shall die, I am sure!’

‘No, no, no,’ said Miss Betsey. ‘Have some tea.’

‘Oh dear me, dear me, do you think it will do me any good?’ cried my
mother in a helpless manner.

‘Of course it will,’ said Miss Betsey. ‘It’s nothing but fancy. What do
you call your girl?’

‘I don’t know that it will be a girl, yet, ma’am,’ said my mother
innocently.

‘Bless the Baby!’ exclaimed Miss Betsey, unconsciously quoting the
second sentiment of the pincushion in the drawer upstairs, but
applying it to my mother instead of me, ‘I don’t mean that. I mean your
servant-girl.’

‘Peggotty,’ said my mother.

‘Peggotty!’ repeated Miss Betsey, with some indignation. ‘Do you mean to
say, child, that any human being has gone into a Christian church,
and got herself named Peggotty?’ ‘It’s her surname,’ said my mother,
faintly. ‘Mr. Copperfield called her by it, because her Christian name
was the same as mine.’

‘Here! Peggotty!’ cried Miss Betsey, opening the parlour door. ‘Tea.
Your mistress is a little unwell. Don’t dawdle.’

Having issued this mandate with as much potentiality as if she had been
a recognized authority in the house ever since it had been a house,
and having looked out to confront the amazed Peggotty coming along the
passage with a candle at the sound of a strange voice, Miss Betsey shut
the door again, and sat down as before: with her feet on the fender, the
skirt of her dress tucked up, and her hands folded on one knee.

‘You were speaking about its being a girl,’ said Miss Betsey. ‘I have no
doubt it will be a girl. I have a presentiment that it must be a girl.
Now child, from the moment of the birth of this girl--’

‘Perhaps boy,’ my mother took the liberty of putting in.

‘I tell you I have a presentiment that it must be a girl,’ returned Miss
Betsey. ‘Don’t contradict. From the moment of this girl’s birth, child,
I intend to be her friend. I intend to be her godmother, and I beg
you’ll call her Betsey Trotwood Copperfield. There must be no mistakes
in life with THIS Betsey Trotwood. There must be no trifling with HER
affections, poor dear. She must be well brought up, and well guarded
from reposing any foolish confidences where they are not deserved. I
must make that MY care.’

There was a twitch of Miss Betsey’s head, after each of these sentences,
as if her own old wrongs were working within her, and she repressed any
plainer reference to them by strong constraint. So my mother suspected,
at least, as she observed her by the low glimmer of the fire: too
much scared by Miss Betsey, too uneasy in herself, and too subdued and
bewildered altogether, to observe anything very clearly, or to know what
to say.

‘And was David good to you, child?’ asked Miss Betsey, when she had been
silent for a little while, and these motions of her head had gradually
ceased. ‘Were you comfortable together?’

‘We were very happy,’ said my mother. ‘Mr. Copperfield was only too good
to me.’

‘What, he spoilt you, I suppose?’ returned Miss Betsey.

‘For being quite alone and dependent on myself in this rough world
again, yes, I fear he did indeed,’ sobbed my mother.

‘Well! Don’t cry!’ said Miss Betsey. ‘You were not equally matched,
child--if any two people can be equally matched--and so I asked the
question. You were an orphan, weren’t you?’ ‘Yes.’

‘And a governess?’

‘I was nursery-governess in a family where Mr. Copperfield came to
visit. Mr. Copperfield was very kind to me, and took a great deal of
notice of me, and paid me a good deal of attention, and at last proposed
to me. And I accepted him. And so we were married,’ said my mother
simply.

‘Ha! Poor Baby!’ mused Miss Betsey, with her frown still bent upon the
fire. ‘Do you know anything?’

‘I beg your pardon, ma’am,’ faltered my mother.

‘About keeping house, for instance,’ said Miss Betsey.

‘Not much, I fear,’ returned my mother. ‘Not so much as I could wish.
But Mr. Copperfield was teaching me--’

[‘Much he knew about it himself!’) said Miss Betsey in a parenthesis.
--‘And I hope I should have improved, being very anxious to learn, and
he very patient to teach me, if the great misfortune of his death’--my
mother broke down again here, and could get no farther.

‘Well, well!’ said Miss Betsey. --‘I kept my housekeeping-book
regularly, and balanced it with Mr. Copperfield every night,’ cried my
mother in another burst of distress, and breaking down again.

‘Well, well!’ said Miss Betsey. ‘Don’t cry any more.’ --‘And I am
sure we never had a word of difference respecting it, except when Mr.
Copperfield objected to my threes and fives being too much like each
other, or to my putting curly tails to my sevens and nines,’ resumed my
mother in another burst, and breaking down again.

‘You’ll make yourself ill,’ said Miss Betsey, ‘and you know that will
not be good either for you or for my god-daughter. Come! You mustn’t do
it!’

This argument had some share in quieting my mother, though her
increasing indisposition had a larger one. There was an interval of
silence, only broken by Miss Betsey’s occasionally ejaculating ‘Ha!’ as
she sat with her feet upon the fender.

‘David had bought an annuity for himself with his money, I know,’ said
she, by and by. ‘What did he do for you?’

‘Mr. Copperfield,’ said my mother, answering with some difficulty, ‘was
so considerate and good as to secure the reversion of a part of it to
me.’

‘How much?’ asked Miss Betsey.

‘A hundred and five pounds a year,’ said my mother.

‘He might have done worse,’ said my aunt.

The word was appropriate to the moment. My mother was so much worse
that Peggotty, coming in with the teaboard and candles, and seeing at a
glance how ill she was,--as Miss Betsey might have done sooner if there
had been light enough,--conveyed her upstairs to her own room with all
speed; and immediately dispatched Ham Peggotty, her nephew, who had been
for some days past secreted in the house, unknown to my mother, as a
special messenger in case of emergency, to fetch the nurse and doctor.

Those allied powers were considerably astonished, when they arrived
within a few minutes of each other, to find an unknown lady of
portentous appearance, sitting before the fire, with her bonnet tied
over her left arm, stopping her ears with jewellers’ cotton. Peggotty
knowing nothing about her, and my mother saying nothing about her,
she was quite a mystery in the parlour; and the fact of her having a
magazine of jewellers’ cotton in her pocket, and sticking the article
in her ears in that way, did not detract from the solemnity of her
presence.

The doctor having been upstairs and come down again, and having
satisfied himself, I suppose, that there was a probability of this
unknown lady and himself having to sit there, face to face, for some
hours, laid himself out to be polite and social. He was the meekest of
his sex, the mildest of little men. He sidled in and out of a room, to
take up the less space. He walked as softly as the Ghost in Hamlet,
and more slowly. He carried his head on one side, partly in modest
depreciation of himself, partly in modest propitiation of everybody
else. It is nothing to say that he hadn’t a word to throw at a dog. He
couldn’t have thrown a word at a mad dog. He might have offered him one
gently, or half a one, or a fragment of one; for he spoke as slowly as
he walked; but he wouldn’t have been rude to him, and he couldn’t have
been quick with him, for any earthly consideration.

Mr. Chillip, looking mildly at my aunt with his head on one side, and
making her a little bow, said, in allusion to the jewellers’ cotton, as
he softly touched his left ear:

‘Some local irritation, ma’am?’

‘What!’ replied my aunt, pulling the cotton out of one ear like a cork.

Mr. Chillip was so alarmed by her abruptness--as he told my mother
afterwards--that it was a mercy he didn’t lose his presence of mind. But
he repeated sweetly:

‘Some local irritation, ma’am?’

‘Nonsense!’ replied my aunt, and corked herself again, at one blow.

Mr. Chillip could do nothing after this, but sit and look at her feebly,
as she sat and looked at the fire, until he was called upstairs again.
After some quarter of an hour’s absence, he returned.

‘Well?’ said my aunt, taking the cotton out of the ear nearest to him.

‘Well, ma’am,’ returned Mr. Chillip, ‘we are--we are progressing slowly,
ma’am.’

‘Ba--a--ah!’ said my aunt, with a perfect shake on the contemptuous
interjection. And corked herself as before.

Really--really--as Mr. Chillip told my mother, he was almost shocked;
speaking in a professional point of view alone, he was almost shocked.
But he sat and looked at her, notwithstanding, for nearly two hours,
as she sat looking at the fire, until he was again called out. After
another absence, he again returned.

‘Well?’ said my aunt, taking out the cotton on that side again.

‘Well, ma’am,’ returned Mr. Chillip, ‘we are--we are progressing slowly,
ma’am.’

‘Ya--a--ah!’ said my aunt. With such a snarl at him, that Mr. Chillip
absolutely could not bear it. It was really calculated to break his
spirit, he said afterwards. He preferred to go and sit upon the stairs,
in the dark and a strong draught, until he was again sent for.

Ham Peggotty, who went to the national school, and was a very dragon at
his catechism, and who may therefore be regarded as a credible witness,
reported next day, that happening to peep in at the parlour-door an hour
after this, he was instantly descried by Miss Betsey, then walking to
and fro in a state of agitation, and pounced upon before he could make
his escape. That there were now occasional sounds of feet and voices
overhead which he inferred the cotton did not exclude, from the
circumstance of his evidently being clutched by the lady as a victim on
whom to expend her superabundant agitation when the sounds were loudest.
That, marching him constantly up and down by the collar (as if he had
been taking too much laudanum), she, at those times, shook him, rumpled
his hair, made light of his linen, stopped his ears as if she confounded
them with her own, and otherwise tousled and maltreated him. This was
in part confirmed by his aunt, who saw him at half past twelve o’clock,
soon after his release, and affirmed that he was then as red as I was.

The mild Mr. Chillip could not possibly bear malice at such a time, if
at any time. He sidled into the parlour as soon as he was at liberty,
and said to my aunt in his meekest manner:

‘Well, ma’am, I am happy to congratulate you.’

‘What upon?’ said my aunt, sharply.

Mr. Chillip was fluttered again, by the extreme severity of my aunt’s
manner; so he made her a little bow and gave her a little smile, to
mollify her.

‘Mercy on the man, what’s he doing!’ cried my aunt, impatiently. ‘Can’t
he speak?’

‘Be calm, my dear ma’am,’ said Mr. Chillip, in his softest accents.

‘There is no longer any occasion for uneasiness, ma’am. Be calm.’

It has since been considered almost a miracle that my aunt didn’t shake
him, and shake what he had to say, out of him. She only shook her own
head at him, but in a way that made him quail.

‘Well, ma’am,’ resumed Mr. Chillip, as soon as he had courage, ‘I am
happy to congratulate you. All is now over, ma’am, and well over.’

During the five minutes or so that Mr. Chillip devoted to the delivery
of this oration, my aunt eyed him narrowly.

‘How is she?’ said my aunt, folding her arms with her bonnet still tied
on one of them.

‘Well, ma’am, she will soon be quite comfortable, I hope,’ returned Mr.
Chillip. ‘Quite as comfortable as we can expect a young mother to be,
under these melancholy domestic circumstances. There cannot be any
objection to your seeing her presently, ma’am. It may do her good.’

‘And SHE. How is SHE?’ said my aunt, sharply.

Mr. Chillip laid his head a little more on one side, and looked at my
aunt like an amiable bird.

‘The baby,’ said my aunt. ‘How is she?’

‘Ma’am,’ returned Mr. Chillip, ‘I apprehended you had known. It’s a
boy.’

My aunt said never a word, but took her bonnet by the strings, in the
manner of a sling, aimed a blow at Mr. Chillip’s head with it, put it on
bent, walked out, and never came back. She vanished like a discontented
fairy; or like one of those supernatural beings, whom it was popularly
supposed I was entitled to see; and never came back any more.

No. I lay in my basket, and my mother lay in her bed; but Betsey
Trotwood Copperfield was for ever in the land of dreams and shadows, the
tremendous region whence I had so lately travelled; and the light upon
the window of our room shone out upon the earthly bourne of all such
travellers, and the mound above the ashes and the dust that once was he,
without whom I had never been.



CHAPTER 2. I OBSERVE


The first objects that assume a distinct presence before me, as I look
far back, into the blank of my infancy, are my mother with her pretty
hair and youthful shape, and Peggotty with no shape at all, and eyes so
dark that they seemed to darken their whole neighbourhood in her face,
and cheeks and arms so hard and red that I wondered the birds didn’t
peck her in preference to apples.

I believe I can remember these two at a little distance apart, dwarfed
to my sight by stooping down or kneeling on the floor, and I going
unsteadily from the one to the other. I have an impression on my mind
which I cannot distinguish from actual remembrance, of the touch of
Peggotty’s forefinger as she used to hold it out to me, and of its being
roughened by needlework, like a pocket nutmeg-grater.

This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go
farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe
the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite
wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most
grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety
be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the
rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness,
and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an
inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.

I might have a misgiving that I am ‘meandering’ in stopping to say this,
but that it brings me to remark that I build these conclusions, in part
upon my own experience of myself; and if it should appear from
anything I may set down in this narrative that I was a child of close
observation, or that as a man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I
undoubtedly lay claim to both of these characteristics.

Looking back, as I was saying, into the blank of my infancy, the first
objects I can remember as standing out by themselves from a confusion of
things, are my mother and Peggotty. What else do I remember? Let me see.


There comes out of the cloud, our house--not new to me, but quite
familiar, in its earliest remembrance. On the ground-floor is Peggotty’s
kitchen, opening into a back yard; with a pigeon-house on a pole, in
the centre, without any pigeons in it; a great dog-kennel in a corner,
without any dog; and a quantity of fowls that look terribly tall to me,
walking about, in a menacing and ferocious manner. There is one cock who
gets upon a post to crow, and seems to take particular notice of me as
I look at him through the kitchen window, who makes me shiver, he is so
fierce. Of the geese outside the side-gate who come waddling after
me with their long necks stretched out when I go that way, I dream at
night: as a man environed by wild beasts might dream of lions.

Here is a long passage--what an enormous perspective I make of
it!--leading from Peggotty’s kitchen to the front door. A dark
store-room opens out of it, and that is a place to be run past at
night; for I don’t know what may be among those tubs and jars and old
tea-chests, when there is nobody in there with a dimly-burning light,
letting a mouldy air come out of the door, in which there is the smell
of soap, pickles, pepper, candles, and coffee, all at one whiff. Then
there are the two parlours: the parlour in which we sit of an evening,
my mother and I and Peggotty--for Peggotty is quite our companion, when
her work is done and we are alone--and the best parlour where we sit
on a Sunday; grandly, but not so comfortably. There is something of a
doleful air about that room to me, for Peggotty has told me--I don’t
know when, but apparently ages ago--about my father’s funeral, and the
company having their black cloaks put on. One Sunday night my mother
reads to Peggotty and me in there, how Lazarus was raised up from the
dead. And I am so frightened that they are afterwards obliged to take me
out of bed, and show me the quiet churchyard out of the bedroom window,
with the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon.

There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere, as the grass of
that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so
quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up,
early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother’s
room, to look out at it; and I see the red light shining on the
sun-dial, and think within myself, ‘Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that
it can tell the time again?’

Here is our pew in the church. What a high-backed pew! With a window
near it, out of which our house can be seen, and IS seen many times
during the morning’s service, by Peggotty, who likes to make herself
as sure as she can that it’s not being robbed, or is not in flames. But
though Peggotty’s eye wanders, she is much offended if mine does,
and frowns to me, as I stand upon the seat, that I am to look at the
clergyman. But I can’t always look at him--I know him without that white
thing on, and I am afraid of his wondering why I stare so, and perhaps
stopping the service to inquire--and what am I to do? It’s a dreadful
thing to gape, but I must do something. I look at my mother, but she
pretends not to see me. I look at a boy in the aisle, and he makes faces
at me. I look at the sunlight coming in at the open door through
the porch, and there I see a stray sheep--I don’t mean a sinner, but
mutton--half making up his mind to come into the church. I feel that
if I looked at him any longer, I might be tempted to say something out
loud; and what would become of me then! I look up at the monumental
tablets on the wall, and try to think of Mr. Bodgers late of this
parish, and what the feelings of Mrs. Bodgers must have been, when
affliction sore, long time Mr. Bodgers bore, and physicians were in
vain. I wonder whether they called in Mr. Chillip, and he was in vain;
and if so, how he likes to be reminded of it once a week. I look from
Mr. Chillip, in his Sunday neckcloth, to the pulpit; and think what a
good place it would be to play in, and what a castle it would make, with
another boy coming up the stairs to attack it, and having the velvet
cushion with the tassels thrown down on his head. In time my eyes
gradually shut up; and, from seeming to hear the clergyman singing a
drowsy song in the heat, I hear nothing, until I fall off the seat with
a crash, and am taken out, more dead than alive, by Peggotty.

And now I see the outside of our house, with the latticed
bedroom-windows standing open to let in the sweet-smelling air, and the
ragged old rooks’-nests still dangling in the elm-trees at the bottom
of the front garden. Now I am in the garden at the back, beyond the
yard where the empty pigeon-house and dog-kennel are--a very preserve
of butterflies, as I remember it, with a high fence, and a gate and
padlock; where the fruit clusters on the trees, riper and richer than
fruit has ever been since, in any other garden, and where my
mother gathers some in a basket, while I stand by, bolting furtive
gooseberries, and trying to look unmoved. A great wind rises, and the
summer is gone in a moment. We are playing in the winter twilight,
dancing about the parlour. When my mother is out of breath and rests
herself in an elbow-chair, I watch her winding her bright curls round
her fingers, and straitening her waist, and nobody knows better than I
do that she likes to look so well, and is proud of being so pretty.

That is among my very earliest impressions. That, and a sense that we
were both a little afraid of Peggotty, and submitted ourselves in most
things to her direction, were among the first opinions--if they may be
so called--that I ever derived from what I saw.

Peggotty and I were sitting one night by the parlour fire, alone. I
had been reading to Peggotty about crocodiles. I must have read very
perspicuously, or the poor soul must have been deeply interested, for I
remember she had a cloudy impression, after I had done, that they were
a sort of vegetable. I was tired of reading, and dead sleepy; but
having leave, as a high treat, to sit up until my mother came home from
spending the evening at a neighbour’s, I would rather have died upon
my post (of course) than have gone to bed. I had reached that stage of
sleepiness when Peggotty seemed to swell and grow immensely large.
I propped my eyelids open with my two forefingers, and looked
perseveringly at her as she sat at work; at the little bit of wax-candle
she kept for her thread--how old it looked, being so wrinkled in
all directions!--at the little house with a thatched roof, where the
yard-measure lived; at her work-box with a sliding lid, with a view of
St. Paul’s Cathedral (with a pink dome) painted on the top; at the brass
thimble on her finger; at herself, whom I thought lovely. I felt so
sleepy, that I knew if I lost sight of anything for a moment, I was
gone.

‘Peggotty,’ says I, suddenly, ‘were you ever married?’

‘Lord, Master Davy,’ replied Peggotty. ‘What’s put marriage in your
head?’

She answered with such a start, that it quite awoke me. And then she
stopped in her work, and looked at me, with her needle drawn out to its
thread’s length.

‘But WERE you ever married, Peggotty?’ says I. ‘You are a very handsome
woman, an’t you?’

I thought her in a different style from my mother, certainly; but of
another school of beauty, I considered her a perfect example. There
was a red velvet footstool in the best parlour, on which my mother
had painted a nosegay. The ground-work of that stool, and Peggotty’s
complexion appeared to me to be one and the same thing. The stool was
smooth, and Peggotty was rough, but that made no difference.

‘Me handsome, Davy!’ said Peggotty. ‘Lawk, no, my dear! But what put
marriage in your head?’

‘I don’t know!--You mustn’t marry more than one person at a time, may
you, Peggotty?’

‘Certainly not,’ says Peggotty, with the promptest decision.

‘But if you marry a person, and the person dies, why then you may marry
another person, mayn’t you, Peggotty?’

‘YOU MAY,’ says Peggotty, ‘if you choose, my dear. That’s a matter of
opinion.’

‘But what is your opinion, Peggotty?’ said I.

I asked her, and looked curiously at her, because she looked so
curiously at me.

‘My opinion is,’ said Peggotty, taking her eyes from me, after a little
indecision and going on with her work, ‘that I never was married myself,
Master Davy, and that I don’t expect to be. That’s all I know about the
subject.’

‘You an’t cross, I suppose, Peggotty, are you?’ said I, after sitting
quiet for a minute.

I really thought she was, she had been so short with me; but I was quite
mistaken: for she laid aside her work (which was a stocking of her own),
and opening her arms wide, took my curly head within them, and gave it
a good squeeze. I know it was a good squeeze, because, being very plump,
whenever she made any little exertion after she was dressed, some of the
buttons on the back of her gown flew off. And I recollect two bursting
to the opposite side of the parlour, while she was hugging me.

‘Now let me hear some more about the Crorkindills,’ said Peggotty, who
was not quite right in the name yet, ‘for I an’t heard half enough.’

I couldn’t quite understand why Peggotty looked so queer, or why she
was so ready to go back to the crocodiles. However, we returned to those
monsters, with fresh wakefulness on my part, and we left their eggs in
the sand for the sun to hatch; and we ran away from them, and baffled
them by constantly turning, which they were unable to do quickly, on
account of their unwieldy make; and we went into the water after them,
as natives, and put sharp pieces of timber down their throats; and in
short we ran the whole crocodile gauntlet. I did, at least; but I had
my doubts of Peggotty, who was thoughtfully sticking her needle into
various parts of her face and arms, all the time.

We had exhausted the crocodiles, and begun with the alligators, when
the garden-bell rang. We went out to the door; and there was my mother,
looking unusually pretty, I thought, and with her a gentleman with
beautiful black hair and whiskers, who had walked home with us from
church last Sunday.

As my mother stooped down on the threshold to take me in her arms and
kiss me, the gentleman said I was a more highly privileged little fellow
than a monarch--or something like that; for my later understanding
comes, I am sensible, to my aid here.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked him, over her shoulder.

He patted me on the head; but somehow, I didn’t like him or his deep
voice, and I was jealous that his hand should touch my mother’s in
touching me--which it did. I put it away, as well as I could.

‘Oh, Davy!’ remonstrated my mother.

‘Dear boy!’ said the gentleman. ‘I cannot wonder at his devotion!’

I never saw such a beautiful colour on my mother’s face before. She
gently chid me for being rude; and, keeping me close to her shawl,
turned to thank the gentleman for taking so much trouble as to bring her
home. She put out her hand to him as she spoke, and, as he met it with
his own, she glanced, I thought, at me.

‘Let us say “good night”, my fine boy,’ said the gentleman, when he had
bent his head--I saw him!--over my mother’s little glove.

‘Good night!’ said I.

‘Come! Let us be the best friends in the world!’ said the gentleman,
laughing. ‘Shake hands!’

My right hand was in my mother’s left, so I gave him the other.

‘Why, that’s the Wrong hand, Davy!’ laughed the gentleman.

My mother drew my right hand forward, but I was resolved, for my former
reason, not to give it him, and I did not. I gave him the other, and he
shook it heartily, and said I was a brave fellow, and went away.

At this minute I see him turn round in the garden, and give us a last
look with his ill-omened black eyes, before the door was shut.

Peggotty, who had not said a word or moved a finger, secured the
fastenings instantly, and we all went into the parlour. My mother,
contrary to her usual habit, instead of coming to the elbow-chair by the
fire, remained at the other end of the room, and sat singing to herself.
--‘Hope you have had a pleasant evening, ma’am,’ said Peggotty, standing
as stiff as a barrel in the centre of the room, with a candlestick in
her hand.

‘Much obliged to you, Peggotty,’ returned my mother, in a cheerful
voice, ‘I have had a VERY pleasant evening.’

‘A stranger or so makes an agreeable change,’ suggested Peggotty.

‘A very agreeable change, indeed,’ returned my mother.

Peggotty continuing to stand motionless in the middle of the room, and
my mother resuming her singing, I fell asleep, though I was not so sound
asleep but that I could hear voices, without hearing what they said.
When I half awoke from this uncomfortable doze, I found Peggotty and my
mother both in tears, and both talking.

‘Not such a one as this, Mr. Copperfield wouldn’t have liked,’ said
Peggotty. ‘That I say, and that I swear!’

‘Good Heavens!’ cried my mother, ‘you’ll drive me mad! Was ever any
poor girl so ill-used by her servants as I am! Why do I do myself
the injustice of calling myself a girl? Have I never been married,
Peggotty?’

‘God knows you have, ma’am,’ returned Peggotty. ‘Then, how can you
dare,’ said my mother--‘you know I don’t mean how can you dare,
Peggotty, but how can you have the heart--to make me so uncomfortable
and say such bitter things to me, when you are well aware that I
haven’t, out of this place, a single friend to turn to?’

‘The more’s the reason,’ returned Peggotty, ‘for saying that it won’t
do. No! That it won’t do. No! No price could make it do. No!’--I thought
Peggotty would have thrown the candlestick away, she was so emphatic
with it.

‘How can you be so aggravating,’ said my mother, shedding more tears
than before, ‘as to talk in such an unjust manner! How can you go on as
if it was all settled and arranged, Peggotty, when I tell you over
and over again, you cruel thing, that beyond the commonest civilities
nothing has passed! You talk of admiration. What am I to do? If people
are so silly as to indulge the sentiment, is it my fault? What am I to
do, I ask you? Would you wish me to shave my head and black my face, or
disfigure myself with a burn, or a scald, or something of that sort? I
dare say you would, Peggotty. I dare say you’d quite enjoy it.’

Peggotty seemed to take this aspersion very much to heart, I thought.

‘And my dear boy,’ cried my mother, coming to the elbow-chair in which
I was, and caressing me, ‘my own little Davy! Is it to be hinted to me
that I am wanting in affection for my precious treasure, the dearest
little fellow that ever was!’

‘Nobody never went and hinted no such a thing,’ said Peggotty.

‘You did, Peggotty!’ returned my mother. ‘You know you did. What else
was it possible to infer from what you said, you unkind creature,
when you know as well as I do, that on his account only last quarter I
wouldn’t buy myself a new parasol, though that old green one is frayed
the whole way up, and the fringe is perfectly mangy? You know it is,
Peggotty. You can’t deny it.’ Then, turning affectionately to me, with
her cheek against mine, ‘Am I a naughty mama to you, Davy? Am I a nasty,
cruel, selfish, bad mama? Say I am, my child; say “yes”, dear boy, and
Peggotty will love you; and Peggotty’s love is a great deal better than
mine, Davy. I don’t love you at all, do I?’

At this, we all fell a-crying together. I think I was the loudest of
the party, but I am sure we were all sincere about it. I was quite
heart-broken myself, and am afraid that in the first transports of
wounded tenderness I called Peggotty a ‘Beast’. That honest creature was
in deep affliction, I remember, and must have become quite buttonless
on the occasion; for a little volley of those explosives went off,
when, after having made it up with my mother, she kneeled down by the
elbow-chair, and made it up with me.

We went to bed greatly dejected. My sobs kept waking me, for a long
time; and when one very strong sob quite hoisted me up in bed, I found
my mother sitting on the coverlet, and leaning over me. I fell asleep in
her arms, after that, and slept soundly.

Whether it was the following Sunday when I saw the gentleman again,
or whether there was any greater lapse of time before he reappeared,
I cannot recall. I don’t profess to be clear about dates. But there he
was, in church, and he walked home with us afterwards. He came in, too,
to look at a famous geranium we had, in the parlour-window. It did not
appear to me that he took much notice of it, but before he went he asked
my mother to give him a bit of the blossom. She begged him to choose it
for himself, but he refused to do that--I could not understand why--so
she plucked it for him, and gave it into his hand. He said he would
never, never part with it any more; and I thought he must be quite a
fool not to know that it would fall to pieces in a day or two.

Peggotty began to be less with us, of an evening, than she had always
been. My mother deferred to her very much--more than usual, it occurred
to me--and we were all three excellent friends; still we were different
from what we used to be, and were not so comfortable among ourselves.
Sometimes I fancied that Peggotty perhaps objected to my mother’s
wearing all the pretty dresses she had in her drawers, or to her
going so often to visit at that neighbour’s; but I couldn’t, to my
satisfaction, make out how it was.

Gradually, I became used to seeing the gentleman with the black
whiskers. I liked him no better than at first, and had the same uneasy
jealousy of him; but if I had any reason for it beyond a child’s
instinctive dislike, and a general idea that Peggotty and I could make
much of my mother without any help, it certainly was not THE reason that
I might have found if I had been older. No such thing came into my mind,
or near it. I could observe, in little pieces, as it were; but as to
making a net of a number of these pieces, and catching anybody in it,
that was, as yet, beyond me.

One autumn morning I was with my mother in the front garden, when Mr.
Murdstone--I knew him by that name now--came by, on horseback. He reined
up his horse to salute my mother, and said he was going to Lowestoft to
see some friends who were there with a yacht, and merrily proposed to
take me on the saddle before him if I would like the ride.

The air was so clear and pleasant, and the horse seemed to like the
idea of the ride so much himself, as he stood snorting and pawing at the
garden-gate, that I had a great desire to go. So I was sent upstairs
to Peggotty to be made spruce; and in the meantime Mr. Murdstone
dismounted, and, with his horse’s bridle drawn over his arm, walked
slowly up and down on the outer side of the sweetbriar fence, while my
mother walked slowly up and down on the inner to keep him company. I
recollect Peggotty and I peeping out at them from my little window; I
recollect how closely they seemed to be examining the sweetbriar between
them, as they strolled along; and how, from being in a perfectly angelic
temper, Peggotty turned cross in a moment, and brushed my hair the wrong
way, excessively hard.

Mr. Murdstone and I were soon off, and trotting along on the green turf
by the side of the road. He held me quite easily with one arm, and I
don’t think I was restless usually; but I could not make up my mind to
sit in front of him without turning my head sometimes, and looking up in
his face. He had that kind of shallow black eye--I want a better word to
express an eye that has no depth in it to be looked into--which, when
it is abstracted, seems from some peculiarity of light to be disfigured,
for a moment at a time, by a cast. Several times when I glanced at him,
I observed that appearance with a sort of awe, and wondered what he
was thinking about so closely. His hair and whiskers were blacker and
thicker, looked at so near, than even I had given them credit for being.
A squareness about the lower part of his face, and the dotted indication
of the strong black beard he shaved close every day, reminded me of
the wax-work that had travelled into our neighbourhood some half-a-year
before. This, his regular eyebrows, and the rich white, and black, and
brown, of his complexion--confound his complexion, and his memory!--made
me think him, in spite of my misgivings, a very handsome man. I have no
doubt that my poor dear mother thought him so too.

We went to an hotel by the sea, where two gentlemen were smoking cigars
in a room by themselves. Each of them was lying on at least four chairs,
and had a large rough jacket on. In a corner was a heap of coats and
boat-cloaks, and a flag, all bundled up together.

They both rolled on to their feet in an untidy sort of manner, when we
came in, and said, ‘Halloa, Murdstone! We thought you were dead!’

‘Not yet,’ said Mr. Murdstone.

‘And who’s this shaver?’ said one of the gentlemen, taking hold of me.

‘That’s Davy,’ returned Mr. Murdstone.

‘Davy who?’ said the gentleman. ‘Jones?’

‘Copperfield,’ said Mr. Murdstone.

‘What! Bewitching Mrs. Copperfield’s encumbrance?’ cried the gentleman.
‘The pretty little widow?’

‘Quinion,’ said Mr. Murdstone, ‘take care, if you please. Somebody’s
sharp.’

‘Who is?’ asked the gentleman, laughing. I looked up, quickly; being
curious to know.

‘Only Brooks of Sheffield,’ said Mr. Murdstone.

I was quite relieved to find that it was only Brooks of Sheffield; for,
at first, I really thought it was I.

There seemed to be something very comical in the reputation of Mr.
Brooks of Sheffield, for both the gentlemen laughed heartily when he
was mentioned, and Mr. Murdstone was a good deal amused also. After some
laughing, the gentleman whom he had called Quinion, said:

‘And what is the opinion of Brooks of Sheffield, in reference to the
projected business?’

‘Why, I don’t know that Brooks understands much about it at present,’
replied Mr. Murdstone; ‘but he is not generally favourable, I believe.’

There was more laughter at this, and Mr. Quinion said he would ring the
bell for some sherry in which to drink to Brooks. This he did; and when
the wine came, he made me have a little, with a biscuit, and, before
I drank it, stand up and say, ‘Confusion to Brooks of Sheffield!’ The
toast was received with great applause, and such hearty laughter that
it made me laugh too; at which they laughed the more. In short, we quite
enjoyed ourselves.

We walked about on the cliff after that, and sat on the grass, and
looked at things through a telescope--I could make out nothing myself
when it was put to my eye, but I pretended I could--and then we came
back to the hotel to an early dinner. All the time we were out, the two
gentlemen smoked incessantly--which, I thought, if I might judge from
the smell of their rough coats, they must have been doing, ever since
the coats had first come home from the tailor’s. I must not forget that
we went on board the yacht, where they all three descended into the
cabin, and were busy with some papers. I saw them quite hard at work,
when I looked down through the open skylight. They left me, during this
time, with a very nice man with a very large head of red hair and a very
small shiny hat upon it, who had got a cross-barred shirt or waistcoat
on, with ‘Skylark’ in capital letters across the chest. I thought it was
his name; and that as he lived on board ship and hadn’t a street door
to put his name on, he put it there instead; but when I called him Mr.
Skylark, he said it meant the vessel.

I observed all day that Mr. Murdstone was graver and steadier than the
two gentlemen. They were very gay and careless. They joked freely with
one another, but seldom with him. It appeared to me that he was
more clever and cold than they were, and that they regarded him with
something of my own feeling. I remarked that, once or twice when Mr.
Quinion was talking, he looked at Mr. Murdstone sideways, as if to make
sure of his not being displeased; and that once when Mr. Passnidge (the
other gentleman) was in high spirits, he trod upon his foot, and gave
him a secret caution with his eyes, to observe Mr. Murdstone, who was
sitting stern and silent. Nor do I recollect that Mr. Murdstone laughed
at all that day, except at the Sheffield joke--and that, by the by, was
his own.

We went home early in the evening. It was a very fine evening, and my
mother and he had another stroll by the sweetbriar, while I was sent in
to get my tea. When he was gone, my mother asked me all about the day I
had had, and what they had said and done. I mentioned what they had said
about her, and she laughed, and told me they were impudent fellows who
talked nonsense--but I knew it pleased her. I knew it quite as well as
I know it now. I took the opportunity of asking if she was at all
acquainted with Mr. Brooks of Sheffield, but she answered No, only she
supposed he must be a manufacturer in the knife and fork way.

Can I say of her face--altered as I have reason to remember it, perished
as I know it is--that it is gone, when here it comes before me at this
instant, as distinct as any face that I may choose to look on in a
crowded street? Can I say of her innocent and girlish beauty, that it
faded, and was no more, when its breath falls on my cheek now, as it
fell that night? Can I say she ever changed, when my remembrance brings
her back to life, thus only; and, truer to its loving youth than I have
been, or man ever is, still holds fast what it cherished then?

I write of her just as she was when I had gone to bed after this talk,
and she came to bid me good night. She kneeled down playfully by the
side of the bed, and laying her chin upon her hands, and laughing, said:

‘What was it they said, Davy? Tell me again. I can’t believe it.’

‘“Bewitching--“’ I began.

My mother put her hands upon my lips to stop me.

‘It was never bewitching,’ she said, laughing. ‘It never could have been
bewitching, Davy. Now I know it wasn’t!’

‘Yes, it was. “Bewitching Mrs. Copperfield”,’ I repeated stoutly. ‘And,
“pretty.”’

‘No, no, it was never pretty. Not pretty,’ interposed my mother, laying
her fingers on my lips again.

‘Yes it was. “Pretty little widow.”’

‘What foolish, impudent creatures!’ cried my mother, laughing and
covering her face. ‘What ridiculous men! An’t they? Davy dear--’

‘Well, Ma.’

‘Don’t tell Peggotty; she might be angry with them. I am dreadfully
angry with them myself; but I would rather Peggotty didn’t know.’

I promised, of course; and we kissed one another over and over again,
and I soon fell fast asleep.

It seems to me, at this distance of time, as if it were the next day
when Peggotty broached the striking and adventurous proposition I am
about to mention; but it was probably about two months afterwards.

We were sitting as before, one evening (when my mother was out as
before), in company with the stocking and the yard-measure, and the bit
of wax, and the box with St. Paul’s on the lid, and the crocodile book,
when Peggotty, after looking at me several times, and opening her mouth
as if she were going to speak, without doing it--which I thought was
merely gaping, or I should have been rather alarmed--said coaxingly:

‘Master Davy, how should you like to go along with me and spend a
fortnight at my brother’s at Yarmouth? Wouldn’t that be a treat?’

‘Is your brother an agreeable man, Peggotty?’ I inquired, provisionally.

‘Oh, what an agreeable man he is!’ cried Peggotty, holding up her hands.
‘Then there’s the sea; and the boats and ships; and the fishermen; and
the beach; and Am to play with--’

Peggotty meant her nephew Ham, mentioned in my first chapter; but she
spoke of him as a morsel of English Grammar.

I was flushed by her summary of delights, and replied that it would
indeed be a treat, but what would my mother say?

‘Why then I’ll as good as bet a guinea,’ said Peggotty, intent upon my
face, ‘that she’ll let us go. I’ll ask her, if you like, as soon as ever
she comes home. There now!’

‘But what’s she to do while we’re away?’ said I, putting my small elbows
on the table to argue the point. ‘She can’t live by herself.’

If Peggotty were looking for a hole, all of a sudden, in the heel of
that stocking, it must have been a very little one indeed, and not worth
darning.

‘I say! Peggotty! She can’t live by herself, you know.’

‘Oh, bless you!’ said Peggotty, looking at me again at last. ‘Don’t
you know? She’s going to stay for a fortnight with Mrs. Grayper. Mrs.
Grayper’s going to have a lot of company.’

Oh! If that was it, I was quite ready to go. I waited, in the utmost
impatience, until my mother came home from Mrs. Grayper’s (for it was
that identical neighbour), to ascertain if we could get leave to carry
out this great idea. Without being nearly so much surprised as I had
expected, my mother entered into it readily; and it was all arranged
that night, and my board and lodging during the visit were to be paid
for.

The day soon came for our going. It was such an early day that it came
soon, even to me, who was in a fever of expectation, and half afraid
that an earthquake or a fiery mountain, or some other great convulsion
of nature, might interpose to stop the expedition. We were to go in a
carrier’s cart, which departed in the morning after breakfast. I would
have given any money to have been allowed to wrap myself up over-night,
and sleep in my hat and boots.

It touches me nearly now, although I tell it lightly, to recollect how
eager I was to leave my happy home; to think how little I suspected what
I did leave for ever.

I am glad to recollect that when the carrier’s cart was at the gate, and
my mother stood there kissing me, a grateful fondness for her and for
the old place I had never turned my back upon before, made me cry. I am
glad to know that my mother cried too, and that I felt her heart beat
against mine.

I am glad to recollect that when the carrier began to move, my mother
ran out at the gate, and called to him to stop, that she might kiss me
once more. I am glad to dwell upon the earnestness and love with which
she lifted up her face to mine, and did so.

As we left her standing in the road, Mr. Murdstone came up to where
she was, and seemed to expostulate with her for being so moved. I was
looking back round the awning of the cart, and wondered what business
it was of his. Peggotty, who was also looking back on the other side,
seemed anything but satisfied; as the face she brought back in the cart
denoted.

I sat looking at Peggotty for some time, in a reverie on this
supposititious case: whether, if she were employed to lose me like the
boy in the fairy tale, I should be able to track my way home again by
the buttons she would shed.



CHAPTER 3. I HAVE A CHANGE


The carrier’s horse was the laziest horse in the world, I should hope,
and shuffled along, with his head down, as if he liked to keep people
waiting to whom the packages were directed. I fancied, indeed, that he
sometimes chuckled audibly over this reflection, but the carrier said
he was only troubled with a cough. The carrier had a way of keeping his
head down, like his horse, and of drooping sleepily forward as he drove,
with one of his arms on each of his knees. I say ‘drove’, but it struck
me that the cart would have gone to Yarmouth quite as well without him,
for the horse did all that; and as to conversation, he had no idea of it
but whistling.

Peggotty had a basket of refreshments on her knee, which would have
lasted us out handsomely, if we had been going to London by the same
conveyance. We ate a good deal, and slept a good deal. Peggotty always
went to sleep with her chin upon the handle of the basket, her hold of
which never relaxed; and I could not have believed unless I had heard
her do it, that one defenceless woman could have snored so much.

We made so many deviations up and down lanes, and were such a long time
delivering a bedstead at a public-house, and calling at other places,
that I was quite tired, and very glad, when we saw Yarmouth. It looked
rather spongy and soppy, I thought, as I carried my eye over the great
dull waste that lay across the river; and I could not help wondering, if
the world were really as round as my geography book said, how any
part of it came to be so flat. But I reflected that Yarmouth might be
situated at one of the poles; which would account for it.

As we drew a little nearer, and saw the whole adjacent prospect lying a
straight low line under the sky, I hinted to Peggotty that a mound or so
might have improved it; and also that if the land had been a little more
separated from the sea, and the town and the tide had not been quite
so much mixed up, like toast and water, it would have been nicer. But
Peggotty said, with greater emphasis than usual, that we must take
things as we found them, and that, for her part, she was proud to call
herself a Yarmouth Bloater.

When we got into the street (which was strange enough to me) and smelt
the fish, and pitch, and oakum, and tar, and saw the sailors walking
about, and the carts jingling up and down over the stones, I felt that I
had done so busy a place an injustice; and said as much to Peggotty, who
heard my expressions of delight with great complacency, and told me it
was well known (I suppose to those who had the good fortune to be born
Bloaters) that Yarmouth was, upon the whole, the finest place in the
universe.

‘Here’s my Am!’ screamed Peggotty, ‘growed out of knowledge!’

He was waiting for us, in fact, at the public-house; and asked me how I
found myself, like an old acquaintance. I did not feel, at first, that
I knew him as well as he knew me, because he had never come to our house
since the night I was born, and naturally he had the advantage of me.
But our intimacy was much advanced by his taking me on his back to carry
me home. He was, now, a huge, strong fellow of six feet high, broad in
proportion, and round-shouldered; but with a simpering boy’s face and
curly light hair that gave him quite a sheepish look. He was dressed in
a canvas jacket, and a pair of such very stiff trousers that they
would have stood quite as well alone, without any legs in them. And you
couldn’t so properly have said he wore a hat, as that he was covered in
a-top, like an old building, with something pitchy.

Ham carrying me on his back and a small box of ours under his arm,
and Peggotty carrying another small box of ours, we turned down lanes
bestrewn with bits of chips and little hillocks of sand, and went
past gas-works, rope-walks, boat-builders’ yards, shipwrights’ yards,
ship-breakers’ yards, caulkers’ yards, riggers’ lofts, smiths’ forges,
and a great litter of such places, until we came out upon the dull waste
I had already seen at a distance; when Ham said,

‘Yon’s our house, Mas’r Davy!’

I looked in all directions, as far as I could stare over the wilderness,
and away at the sea, and away at the river, but no house could I make
out. There was a black barge, or some other kind of superannuated boat,
not far off, high and dry on the ground, with an iron funnel sticking
out of it for a chimney and smoking very cosily; but nothing else in the
way of a habitation that was visible to me.

‘That’s not it?’ said I. ‘That ship-looking thing?’

‘That’s it, Mas’r Davy,’ returned Ham.

If it had been Aladdin’s palace, roc’s egg and all, I suppose I could
not have been more charmed with the romantic idea of living in it. There
was a delightful door cut in the side, and it was roofed in, and there
were little windows in it; but the wonderful charm of it was, that
it was a real boat which had no doubt been upon the water hundreds of
times, and which had never been intended to be lived in, on dry land.
That was the captivation of it to me. If it had ever been meant to be
lived in, I might have thought it small, or inconvenient, or lonely; but
never having been designed for any such use, it became a perfect abode.

It was beautifully clean inside, and as tidy as possible. There was a
table, and a Dutch clock, and a chest of drawers, and on the chest of
drawers there was a tea-tray with a painting on it of a lady with a
parasol, taking a walk with a military-looking child who was trundling a
hoop. The tray was kept from tumbling down, by a bible; and the tray, if
it had tumbled down, would have smashed a quantity of cups and saucers
and a teapot that were grouped around the book. On the walls there were
some common coloured pictures, framed and glazed, of scripture subjects;
such as I have never seen since in the hands of pedlars, without seeing
the whole interior of Peggotty’s brother’s house again, at one view.
Abraham in red going to sacrifice Isaac in blue, and Daniel in yellow
cast into a den of green lions, were the most prominent of these. Over
the little mantelshelf, was a picture of the ‘Sarah Jane’ lugger, built
at Sunderland, with a real little wooden stern stuck on to it; a work of
art, combining composition with carpentry, which I considered to be one
of the most enviable possessions that the world could afford. There
were some hooks in the beams of the ceiling, the use of which I did not
divine then; and some lockers and boxes and conveniences of that sort,
which served for seats and eked out the chairs.

All this I saw in the first glance after I crossed the
threshold--child-like, according to my theory--and then Peggotty opened
a little door and showed me my bedroom. It was the completest and most
desirable bedroom ever seen--in the stern of the vessel; with a little
window, where the rudder used to go through; a little looking-glass,
just the right height for me, nailed against the wall, and framed with
oyster-shells; a little bed, which there was just room enough to get
into; and a nosegay of seaweed in a blue mug on the table. The walls
were whitewashed as white as milk, and the patchwork counterpane made my
eyes quite ache with its brightness. One thing I particularly noticed
in this delightful house, was the smell of fish; which was so searching,
that when I took out my pocket-handkerchief to wipe my nose, I found it
smelt exactly as if it had wrapped up a lobster. On my imparting this
discovery in confidence to Peggotty, she informed me that her brother
dealt in lobsters, crabs, and crawfish; and I afterwards found that a
heap of these creatures, in a state of wonderful conglomeration with one
another, and never leaving off pinching whatever they laid hold of,
were usually to be found in a little wooden outhouse where the pots and
kettles were kept.

We were welcomed by a very civil woman in a white apron, whom I had seen
curtseying at the door when I was on Ham’s back, about a quarter of a
mile off. Likewise by a most beautiful little girl (or I thought her so)
with a necklace of blue beads on, who wouldn’t let me kiss her when I
offered to, but ran away and hid herself. By and by, when we had dined
in a sumptuous manner off boiled dabs, melted butter, and potatoes, with
a chop for me, a hairy man with a very good-natured face came home. As
he called Peggotty ‘Lass’, and gave her a hearty smack on the cheek, I
had no doubt, from the general propriety of her conduct, that he was her
brother; and so he turned out--being presently introduced to me as Mr.
Peggotty, the master of the house.

‘Glad to see you, sir,’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘You’ll find us rough, sir,
but you’ll find us ready.’

I thanked him, and replied that I was sure I should be happy in such a
delightful place.

‘How’s your Ma, sir?’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘Did you leave her pretty
jolly?’

I gave Mr. Peggotty to understand that she was as jolly as I could wish,
and that she desired her compliments--which was a polite fiction on my
part.

‘I’m much obleeged to her, I’m sure,’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘Well, sir,
if you can make out here, fur a fortnut, ‘long wi’ her,’ nodding at his
sister, ‘and Ham, and little Em’ly, we shall be proud of your company.’

Having done the honours of his house in this hospitable manner, Mr.
Peggotty went out to wash himself in a kettleful of hot water, remarking
that ‘cold would never get his muck off’. He soon returned, greatly
improved in appearance; but so rubicund, that I couldn’t help
thinking his face had this in common with the lobsters, crabs, and
crawfish,--that it went into the hot water very black, and came out very
red.

After tea, when the door was shut and all was made snug (the nights
being cold and misty now), it seemed to me the most delicious retreat
that the imagination of man could conceive. To hear the wind getting
up out at sea, to know that the fog was creeping over the desolate flat
outside, and to look at the fire, and think that there was no house near
but this one, and this one a boat, was like enchantment. Little Em’ly
had overcome her shyness, and was sitting by my side upon the lowest and
least of the lockers, which was just large enough for us two, and just
fitted into the chimney corner. Mrs. Peggotty with the white apron, was
knitting on the opposite side of the fire. Peggotty at her needlework
was as much at home with St. Paul’s and the bit of wax-candle, as if
they had never known any other roof. Ham, who had been giving me my
first lesson in all-fours, was trying to recollect a scheme of telling
fortunes with the dirty cards, and was printing off fishy impressions of
his thumb on all the cards he turned. Mr. Peggotty was smoking his pipe.
I felt it was a time for conversation and confidence.

‘Mr. Peggotty!’ says I.

‘Sir,’ says he.

‘Did you give your son the name of Ham, because you lived in a sort of
ark?’

Mr. Peggotty seemed to think it a deep idea, but answered:

‘No, sir. I never giv him no name.’

‘Who gave him that name, then?’ said I, putting question number two of
the catechism to Mr. Peggotty.

‘Why, sir, his father giv it him,’ said Mr. Peggotty.

‘I thought you were his father!’

‘My brother Joe was his father,’ said Mr. Peggotty.

‘Dead, Mr. Peggotty?’ I hinted, after a respectful pause.

‘Drowndead,’ said Mr. Peggotty.

I was very much surprised that Mr. Peggotty was not Ham’s father, and
began to wonder whether I was mistaken about his relationship to anybody
else there. I was so curious to know, that I made up my mind to have it
out with Mr. Peggotty.

‘Little Em’ly,’ I said, glancing at her. ‘She is your daughter, isn’t
she, Mr. Peggotty?’

‘No, sir. My brother-in-law, Tom, was her father.’

I couldn’t help it. ‘--Dead, Mr. Peggotty?’ I hinted, after another
respectful silence.

‘Drowndead,’ said Mr. Peggotty.

I felt the difficulty of resuming the subject, but had not got to the
bottom of it yet, and must get to the bottom somehow. So I said:

‘Haven’t you ANY children, Mr. Peggotty?’

‘No, master,’ he answered with a short laugh. ‘I’m a bacheldore.’

‘A bachelor!’ I said, astonished. ‘Why, who’s that, Mr. Peggotty?’
pointing to the person in the apron who was knitting.

‘That’s Missis Gummidge,’ said Mr. Peggotty.

‘Gummidge, Mr. Peggotty?’

But at this point Peggotty--I mean my own peculiar Peggotty--made such
impressive motions to me not to ask any more questions, that I could
only sit and look at all the silent company, until it was time to go to
bed. Then, in the privacy of my own little cabin, she informed me that
Ham and Em’ly were an orphan nephew and niece, whom my host had
at different times adopted in their childhood, when they were left
destitute: and that Mrs. Gummidge was the widow of his partner in
a boat, who had died very poor. He was but a poor man himself, said
Peggotty, but as good as gold and as true as steel--those were her
similes. The only subject, she informed me, on which he ever showed a
violent temper or swore an oath, was this generosity of his; and if it
were ever referred to, by any one of them, he struck the table a heavy
blow with his right hand (had split it on one such occasion), and swore
a dreadful oath that he would be ‘Gormed’ if he didn’t cut and run
for good, if it was ever mentioned again. It appeared, in answer to
my inquiries, that nobody had the least idea of the etymology of this
terrible verb passive to be gormed; but that they all regarded it as
constituting a most solemn imprecation.

I was very sensible of my entertainer’s goodness, and listened to the
women’s going to bed in another little crib like mine at the opposite
end of the boat, and to him and Ham hanging up two hammocks for
themselves on the hooks I had noticed in the roof, in a very luxurious
state of mind, enhanced by my being sleepy. As slumber gradually stole
upon me, I heard the wind howling out at sea and coming on across the
flat so fiercely, that I had a lazy apprehension of the great deep
rising in the night. But I bethought myself that I was in a boat, after
all; and that a man like Mr. Peggotty was not a bad person to have on
board if anything did happen.

Nothing happened, however, worse than morning. Almost as soon as it
shone upon the oyster-shell frame of my mirror I was out of bed, and out
with little Em’ly, picking up stones upon the beach.

‘You’re quite a sailor, I suppose?’ I said to Em’ly. I don’t know that I
supposed anything of the kind, but I felt it an act of gallantry to
say something; and a shining sail close to us made such a pretty little
image of itself, at the moment, in her bright eye, that it came into my
head to say this.

‘No,’ replied Em’ly, shaking her head, ‘I’m afraid of the sea.’

‘Afraid!’ I said, with a becoming air of boldness, and looking very big
at the mighty ocean. ‘I an’t!’

‘Ah! but it’s cruel,’ said Em’ly. ‘I have seen it very cruel to some of
our men. I have seen it tear a boat as big as our house, all to pieces.’

‘I hope it wasn’t the boat that--’

‘That father was drownded in?’ said Em’ly. ‘No. Not that one, I never
see that boat.’

‘Nor him?’ I asked her.

Little Em’ly shook her head. ‘Not to remember!’

Here was a coincidence! I immediately went into an explanation how I had
never seen my own father; and how my mother and I had always lived
by ourselves in the happiest state imaginable, and lived so then, and
always meant to live so; and how my father’s grave was in the churchyard
near our house, and shaded by a tree, beneath the boughs of which I had
walked and heard the birds sing many a pleasant morning. But there were
some differences between Em’ly’s orphanhood and mine, it appeared. She
had lost her mother before her father; and where her father’s grave was
no one knew, except that it was somewhere in the depths of the sea.

‘Besides,’ said Em’ly, as she looked about for shells and pebbles, ‘your
father was a gentleman and your mother is a lady; and my father was a
fisherman and my mother was a fisherman’s daughter, and my uncle Dan is
a fisherman.’

‘Dan is Mr. Peggotty, is he?’ said I.

‘Uncle Dan--yonder,’ answered Em’ly, nodding at the boat-house.

‘Yes. I mean him. He must be very good, I should think?’

‘Good?’ said Em’ly. ‘If I was ever to be a lady, I’d give him a sky-blue
coat with diamond buttons, nankeen trousers, a red velvet waistcoat, a
cocked hat, a large gold watch, a silver pipe, and a box of money.’

I said I had no doubt that Mr. Peggotty well deserved these treasures.
I must acknowledge that I felt it difficult to picture him quite at his
ease in the raiment proposed for him by his grateful little niece, and
that I was particularly doubtful of the policy of the cocked hat; but I
kept these sentiments to myself.

Little Em’ly had stopped and looked up at the sky in her enumeration
of these articles, as if they were a glorious vision. We went on again,
picking up shells and pebbles.

‘You would like to be a lady?’ I said.

Emily looked at me, and laughed and nodded ‘yes’.

‘I should like it very much. We would all be gentlefolks together, then.
Me, and uncle, and Ham, and Mrs. Gummidge. We wouldn’t mind then, when
there comes stormy weather.---Not for our own sakes, I mean. We would
for the poor fishermen’s, to be sure, and we’d help ‘em with money when
they come to any hurt.’ This seemed to me to be a very satisfactory and
therefore not at all improbable picture. I expressed my pleasure in the
contemplation of it, and little Em’ly was emboldened to say, shyly,

‘Don’t you think you are afraid of the sea, now?’

It was quiet enough to reassure me, but I have no doubt if I had seen a
moderately large wave come tumbling in, I should have taken to my heels,
with an awful recollection of her drowned relations. However, I said
‘No,’ and I added, ‘You don’t seem to be either, though you say you
are,’--for she was walking much too near the brink of a sort of old
jetty or wooden causeway we had strolled upon, and I was afraid of her
falling over.

‘I’m not afraid in this way,’ said little Em’ly. ‘But I wake when it
blows, and tremble to think of Uncle Dan and Ham and believe I hear ‘em
crying out for help. That’s why I should like so much to be a lady. But
I’m not afraid in this way. Not a bit. Look here!’

She started from my side, and ran along a jagged timber which protruded
from the place we stood upon, and overhung the deep water at some
height, without the least defence. The incident is so impressed on my
remembrance, that if I were a draughtsman I could draw its form here,
I dare say, accurately as it was that day, and little Em’ly springing
forward to her destruction (as it appeared to me), with a look that I
have never forgotten, directed far out to sea.

The light, bold, fluttering little figure turned and came back safe
to me, and I soon laughed at my fears, and at the cry I had uttered;
fruitlessly in any case, for there was no one near. But there have been
times since, in my manhood, many times there have been, when I have
thought, Is it possible, among the possibilities of hidden things, that
in the sudden rashness of the child and her wild look so far off, there
was any merciful attraction of her into danger, any tempting her towards
him permitted on the part of her dead father, that her life might have
a chance of ending that day? There has been a time since when I have
wondered whether, if the life before her could have been revealed to me
at a glance, and so revealed as that a child could fully comprehend it,
and if her preservation could have depended on a motion of my hand, I
ought to have held it up to save her. There has been a time since--I do
not say it lasted long, but it has been--when I have asked myself the
question, would it have been better for little Em’ly to have had the
waters close above her head that morning in my sight; and when I have
answered Yes, it would have been.

This may be premature. I have set it down too soon, perhaps. But let it
stand.

We strolled a long way, and loaded ourselves with things that we thought
curious, and put some stranded starfish carefully back into the water--I
hardly know enough of the race at this moment to be quite certain
whether they had reason to feel obliged to us for doing so, or the
reverse--and then made our way home to Mr. Peggotty’s dwelling. We
stopped under the lee of the lobster-outhouse to exchange an innocent
kiss, and went in to breakfast glowing with health and pleasure.

‘Like two young mavishes,’ Mr. Peggotty said. I knew this meant, in our
local dialect, like two young thrushes, and received it as a compliment.

Of course I was in love with little Em’ly. I am sure I loved that
baby quite as truly, quite as tenderly, with greater purity and more
disinterestedness, than can enter into the best love of a later time
of life, high and ennobling as it is. I am sure my fancy raised up
something round that blue-eyed mite of a child, which etherealized,
and made a very angel of her. If, any sunny forenoon, she had spread
a little pair of wings and flown away before my eyes, I don’t think I
should have regarded it as much more than I had had reason to expect.

We used to walk about that dim old flat at Yarmouth in a loving manner,
hours and hours. The days sported by us, as if Time had not grown up
himself yet, but were a child too, and always at play. I told Em’ly
I adored her, and that unless she confessed she adored me I should be
reduced to the necessity of killing myself with a sword. She said she
did, and I have no doubt she did.

As to any sense of inequality, or youthfulness, or other difficulty
in our way, little Em’ly and I had no such trouble, because we had no
future. We made no more provision for growing older, than we did for
growing younger. We were the admiration of Mrs. Gummidge and Peggotty,
who used to whisper of an evening when we sat, lovingly, on our little
locker side by side, ‘Lor! wasn’t it beautiful!’ Mr. Peggotty smiled at
us from behind his pipe, and Ham grinned all the evening and did nothing
else. They had something of the sort of pleasure in us, I suppose, that
they might have had in a pretty toy, or a pocket model of the Colosseum.

I soon found out that Mrs. Gummidge did not always make herself so
agreeable as she might have been expected to do, under the circumstances
of her residence with Mr. Peggotty. Mrs. Gummidge’s was rather a fretful
disposition, and she whimpered more sometimes than was comfortable for
other parties in so small an establishment. I was very sorry for
her; but there were moments when it would have been more agreeable, I
thought, if Mrs. Gummidge had had a convenient apartment of her own to
retire to, and had stopped there until her spirits revived.

Mr. Peggotty went occasionally to a public-house called The Willing
Mind. I discovered this, by his being out on the second or third evening
of our visit, and by Mrs. Gummidge’s looking up at the Dutch clock,
between eight and nine, and saying he was there, and that, what was
more, she had known in the morning he would go there.

Mrs. Gummidge had been in a low state all day, and had burst into tears
in the forenoon, when the fire smoked. ‘I am a lone lorn creetur’,’ were
Mrs. Gummidge’s words, when that unpleasant occurrence took place, ‘and
everythink goes contrary with me.’

‘Oh, it’ll soon leave off,’ said Peggotty--I again mean our
Peggotty--‘and besides, you know, it’s not more disagreeable to you than
to us.’

‘I feel it more,’ said Mrs. Gummidge.

It was a very cold day, with cutting blasts of wind. Mrs. Gummidge’s
peculiar corner of the fireside seemed to me to be the warmest and
snuggest in the place, as her chair was certainly the easiest, but it
didn’t suit her that day at all. She was constantly complaining of the
cold, and of its occasioning a visitation in her back which she called
‘the creeps’. At last she shed tears on that subject, and said again
that she was ‘a lone lorn creetur’ and everythink went contrary with
her’.

‘It is certainly very cold,’ said Peggotty. ‘Everybody must feel it so.’

‘I feel it more than other people,’ said Mrs. Gummidge.

So at dinner; when Mrs. Gummidge was always helped immediately after me,
to whom the preference was given as a visitor of distinction. The
fish were small and bony, and the potatoes were a little burnt. We all
acknowledged that we felt this something of a disappointment; but Mrs.
Gummidge said she felt it more than we did, and shed tears again, and
made that former declaration with great bitterness.

Accordingly, when Mr. Peggotty came home about nine o’clock, this
unfortunate Mrs. Gummidge was knitting in her corner, in a very wretched
and miserable condition. Peggotty had been working cheerfully. Ham had
been patching up a great pair of waterboots; and I, with little Em’ly
by my side, had been reading to them. Mrs. Gummidge had never made any
other remark than a forlorn sigh, and had never raised her eyes since
tea.

‘Well, Mates,’ said Mr. Peggotty, taking his seat, ‘and how are you?’

We all said something, or looked something, to welcome him, except Mrs.
Gummidge, who only shook her head over her knitting.

‘What’s amiss?’ said Mr. Peggotty, with a clap of his hands. ‘Cheer up,
old Mawther!’ (Mr. Peggotty meant old girl.)

Mrs. Gummidge did not appear to be able to cheer up. She took out an old
black silk handkerchief and wiped her eyes; but instead of putting it
in her pocket, kept it out, and wiped them again, and still kept it out,
ready for use.

‘What’s amiss, dame?’ said Mr. Peggotty.

‘Nothing,’ returned Mrs. Gummidge. ‘You’ve come from The Willing Mind,
Dan’l?’

‘Why yes, I’ve took a short spell at The Willing Mind tonight,’ said Mr.
Peggotty.

‘I’m sorry I should drive you there,’ said Mrs. Gummidge.

‘Drive! I don’t want no driving,’ returned Mr. Peggotty with an honest
laugh. ‘I only go too ready.’

‘Very ready,’ said Mrs. Gummidge, shaking her head, and wiping her eyes.
‘Yes, yes, very ready. I am sorry it should be along of me that you’re
so ready.’

‘Along o’ you! It an’t along o’ you!’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘Don’t ye
believe a bit on it.’

‘Yes, yes, it is,’ cried Mrs. Gummidge. ‘I know what I am. I know that I
am a lone lorn creetur’, and not only that everythink goes contrary with
me, but that I go contrary with everybody. Yes, yes. I feel more than
other people do, and I show it more. It’s my misfortun’.’

I really couldn’t help thinking, as I sat taking in all this, that the
misfortune extended to some other members of that family besides Mrs.
Gummidge. But Mr. Peggotty made no such retort, only answering with
another entreaty to Mrs. Gummidge to cheer up.

‘I an’t what I could wish myself to be,’ said Mrs. Gummidge. ‘I am far
from it. I know what I am. My troubles has made me contrary. I feel my
troubles, and they make me contrary. I wish I didn’t feel ‘em, but I
do. I wish I could be hardened to ‘em, but I an’t. I make the house
uncomfortable. I don’t wonder at it. I’ve made your sister so all day,
and Master Davy.’

Here I was suddenly melted, and roared out, ‘No, you haven’t, Mrs.
Gummidge,’ in great mental distress.

‘It’s far from right that I should do it,’ said Mrs. Gummidge. ‘It an’t
a fit return. I had better go into the house and die. I am a lone lorn
creetur’, and had much better not make myself contrary here. If thinks
must go contrary with me, and I must go contrary myself, let me go
contrary in my parish. Dan’l, I’d better go into the house, and die and
be a riddance!’

Mrs. Gummidge retired with these words, and betook herself to bed. When
she was gone, Mr. Peggotty, who had not exhibited a trace of any feeling
but the profoundest sympathy, looked round upon us, and nodding his head
with a lively expression of that sentiment still animating his face,
said in a whisper:

‘She’s been thinking of the old ‘un!’

I did not quite understand what old one Mrs. Gummidge was supposed to
have fixed her mind upon, until Peggotty, on seeing me to bed, explained
that it was the late Mr. Gummidge; and that her brother always took that
for a received truth on such occasions, and that it always had a moving
effect upon him. Some time after he was in his hammock that night, I
heard him myself repeat to Ham, ‘Poor thing! She’s been thinking of the
old ‘un!’ And whenever Mrs. Gummidge was overcome in a similar manner
during the remainder of our stay (which happened some few times), he
always said the same thing in extenuation of the circumstance, and
always with the tenderest commiseration.

So the fortnight slipped away, varied by nothing but the variation of
the tide, which altered Mr. Peggotty’s times of going out and coming in,
and altered Ham’s engagements also. When the latter was unemployed, he
sometimes walked with us to show us the boats and ships, and once
or twice he took us for a row. I don’t know why one slight set of
impressions should be more particularly associated with a place than
another, though I believe this obtains with most people, in reference
especially to the associations of their childhood. I never hear the
name, or read the name, of Yarmouth, but I am reminded of a certain
Sunday morning on the beach, the bells ringing for church, little Em’ly
leaning on my shoulder, Ham lazily dropping stones into the water, and
the sun, away at sea, just breaking through the heavy mist, and showing
us the ships, like their own shadows.

At last the day came for going home. I bore up against the separation
from Mr. Peggotty and Mrs. Gummidge, but my agony of mind at leaving
little Em’ly was piercing. We went arm-in-arm to the public-house where
the carrier put up, and I promised, on the road, to write to her. (I
redeemed that promise afterwards, in characters larger than those in
which apartments are usually announced in manuscript, as being to let.)
We were greatly overcome at parting; and if ever, in my life, I have had
a void made in my heart, I had one made that day.

Now, all the time I had been on my visit, I had been ungrateful to my
home again, and had thought little or nothing about it. But I was no
sooner turned towards it, than my reproachful young conscience seemed
to point that way with a ready finger; and I felt, all the more for the
sinking of my spirits, that it was my nest, and that my mother was my
comforter and friend.

This gained upon me as we went along; so that the nearer we drew, the
more familiar the objects became that we passed, the more excited I was
to get there, and to run into her arms. But Peggotty, instead of sharing
in those transports, tried to check them (though very kindly), and
looked confused and out of sorts.

Blunderstone Rookery would come, however, in spite of her, when the
carrier’s horse pleased--and did. How well I recollect it, on a cold
grey afternoon, with a dull sky, threatening rain!

The door opened, and I looked, half laughing and half crying in my
pleasant agitation, for my mother. It was not she, but a strange
servant.

‘Why, Peggotty!’ I said, ruefully, ‘isn’t she come home?’

‘Yes, yes, Master Davy,’ said Peggotty. ‘She’s come home. Wait a bit,
Master Davy, and I’ll--I’ll tell you something.’

Between her agitation, and her natural awkwardness in getting out of the
cart, Peggotty was making a most extraordinary festoon of herself, but
I felt too blank and strange to tell her so. When she had got down, she
took me by the hand; led me, wondering, into the kitchen; and shut the
door.

‘Peggotty!’ said I, quite frightened. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter, bless you, Master Davy dear!’ she answered,
assuming an air of sprightliness.

‘Something’s the matter, I’m sure. Where’s mama?’

‘Where’s mama, Master Davy?’ repeated Peggotty.

‘Yes. Why hasn’t she come out to the gate, and what have we come in here
for? Oh, Peggotty!’ My eyes were full, and I felt as if I were going to
tumble down.

‘Bless the precious boy!’ cried Peggotty, taking hold of me. ‘What is
it? Speak, my pet!’

‘Not dead, too! Oh, she’s not dead, Peggotty?’

Peggotty cried out No! with an astonishing volume of voice; and then sat
down, and began to pant, and said I had given her a turn.

I gave her a hug to take away the turn, or to give her another turn
in the right direction, and then stood before her, looking at her in
anxious inquiry.

‘You see, dear, I should have told you before now,’ said Peggotty,
‘but I hadn’t an opportunity. I ought to have made it, perhaps, but
I couldn’t azackly’--that was always the substitute for exactly, in
Peggotty’s militia of words--‘bring my mind to it.’

‘Go on, Peggotty,’ said I, more frightened than before.

‘Master Davy,’ said Peggotty, untying her bonnet with a shaking hand,
and speaking in a breathless sort of way. ‘What do you think? You have
got a Pa!’

I trembled, and turned white. Something--I don’t know what, or
how--connected with the grave in the churchyard, and the raising of the
dead, seemed to strike me like an unwholesome wind.

‘A new one,’ said Peggotty.

‘A new one?’ I repeated.

Peggotty gave a gasp, as if she were swallowing something that was very
hard, and, putting out her hand, said:

‘Come and see him.’

‘I don’t want to see him.’ --‘And your mama,’ said Peggotty.

I ceased to draw back, and we went straight to the best parlour, where
she left me. On one side of the fire, sat my mother; on the other, Mr.
Murdstone. My mother dropped her work, and arose hurriedly, but timidly
I thought.

‘Now, Clara my dear,’ said Mr. Murdstone. ‘Recollect! control yourself,
always control yourself! Davy boy, how do you do?’

I gave him my hand. After a moment of suspense, I went and kissed my
mother: she kissed me, patted me gently on the shoulder, and sat down
again to her work. I could not look at her, I could not look at him,
I knew quite well that he was looking at us both; and I turned to the
window and looked out there, at some shrubs that were drooping their
heads in the cold.

As soon as I could creep away, I crept upstairs. My old dear bedroom was
changed, and I was to lie a long way off. I rambled downstairs to find
anything that was like itself, so altered it all seemed; and roamed into
the yard. I very soon started back from there, for the empty dog-kennel
was filled up with a great dog--deep mouthed and black-haired like
Him--and he was very angry at the sight of me, and sprang out to get at
me.



CHAPTER 4. I FALL INTO DISGRACE


If the room to which my bed was removed were a sentient thing that could
give evidence, I might appeal to it at this day--who sleeps there now,
I wonder!--to bear witness for me what a heavy heart I carried to it.
I went up there, hearing the dog in the yard bark after me all the way
while I climbed the stairs; and, looking as blank and strange upon the
room as the room looked upon me, sat down with my small hands crossed,
and thought.

I thought of the oddest things. Of the shape of the room, of the
cracks in the ceiling, of the paper on the walls, of the flaws in
the window-glass making ripples and dimples on the prospect, of the
washing-stand being rickety on its three legs, and having a discontented
something about it, which reminded me of Mrs. Gummidge under the
influence of the old one. I was crying all the time, but, except that I
was conscious of being cold and dejected, I am sure I never thought
why I cried. At last in my desolation I began to consider that I was
dreadfully in love with little Em’ly, and had been torn away from her to
come here where no one seemed to want me, or to care about me, half as
much as she did. This made such a very miserable piece of business of
it, that I rolled myself up in a corner of the counterpane, and cried
myself to sleep.

I was awoke by somebody saying ‘Here he is!’ and uncovering my hot head.
My mother and Peggotty had come to look for me, and it was one of them
who had done it.

‘Davy,’ said my mother. ‘What’s the matter?’

I thought it was very strange that she should ask me, and answered,
‘Nothing.’ I turned over on my face, I recollect, to hide my trembling
lip, which answered her with greater truth. ‘Davy,’ said my mother.
‘Davy, my child!’

I dare say no words she could have uttered would have affected me
so much, then, as her calling me her child. I hid my tears in the
bedclothes, and pressed her from me with my hand, when she would have
raised me up.

‘This is your doing, Peggotty, you cruel thing!’ said my mother. ‘I have
no doubt at all about it. How can you reconcile it to your conscience,
I wonder, to prejudice my own boy against me, or against anybody who is
dear to me? What do you mean by it, Peggotty?’

Poor Peggotty lifted up her hands and eyes, and only answered, in a
sort of paraphrase of the grace I usually repeated after dinner, ‘Lord
forgive you, Mrs. Copperfield, and for what you have said this minute,
may you never be truly sorry!’

‘It’s enough to distract me,’ cried my mother. ‘In my honeymoon, too,
when my most inveterate enemy might relent, one would think, and not
envy me a little peace of mind and happiness. Davy, you naughty boy!
Peggotty, you savage creature! Oh, dear me!’ cried my mother, turning
from one of us to the other, in her pettish wilful manner, ‘what a
troublesome world this is, when one has the most right to expect it to
be as agreeable as possible!’

I felt the touch of a hand that I knew was neither hers nor Peggotty’s,
and slipped to my feet at the bed-side. It was Mr. Murdstone’s hand, and
he kept it on my arm as he said:

‘What’s this? Clara, my love, have you forgotten?--Firmness, my dear!’

‘I am very sorry, Edward,’ said my mother. ‘I meant to be very good, but
I am so uncomfortable.’

‘Indeed!’ he answered. ‘That’s a bad hearing, so soon, Clara.’

‘I say it’s very hard I should be made so now,’ returned my mother,
pouting; ‘and it is--very hard--isn’t it?’

He drew her to him, whispered in her ear, and kissed her. I knew as
well, when I saw my mother’s head lean down upon his shoulder, and her
arm touch his neck--I knew as well that he could mould her pliant nature
into any form he chose, as I know, now, that he did it.

‘Go you below, my love,’ said Mr. Murdstone. ‘David and I will come
down, together. My friend,’ turning a darkening face on Peggotty, when
he had watched my mother out, and dismissed her with a nod and a smile;
‘do you know your mistress’s name?’

‘She has been my mistress a long time, sir,’ answered Peggotty, ‘I ought
to know it.’ ‘That’s true,’ he answered. ‘But I thought I heard you, as
I came upstairs, address her by a name that is not hers. She has taken
mine, you know. Will you remember that?’

Peggotty, with some uneasy glances at me, curtseyed herself out of the
room without replying; seeing, I suppose, that she was expected to go,
and had no excuse for remaining. When we two were left alone, he shut
the door, and sitting on a chair, and holding me standing before him,
looked steadily into my eyes. I felt my own attracted, no less steadily,
to his. As I recall our being opposed thus, face to face, I seem again
to hear my heart beat fast and high.

‘David,’ he said, making his lips thin, by pressing them together, ‘if I
have an obstinate horse or dog to deal with, what do you think I do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I beat him.’

I had answered in a kind of breathless whisper, but I felt, in my
silence, that my breath was shorter now.

‘I make him wince, and smart. I say to myself, “I’ll conquer that
fellow”; and if it were to cost him all the blood he had, I should do
it. What is that upon your face?’

‘Dirt,’ I said.

He knew it was the mark of tears as well as I. But if he had asked the
question twenty times, each time with twenty blows, I believe my baby
heart would have burst before I would have told him so.

‘You have a good deal of intelligence for a little fellow,’ he said,
with a grave smile that belonged to him, ‘and you understood me very
well, I see. Wash that face, sir, and come down with me.’

He pointed to the washing-stand, which I had made out to be like Mrs.
Gummidge, and motioned me with his head to obey him directly. I had
little doubt then, and I have less doubt now, that he would have knocked
me down without the least compunction, if I had hesitated.

‘Clara, my dear,’ he said, when I had done his bidding, and he walked me
into the parlour, with his hand still on my arm; ‘you will not be made
uncomfortable any more, I hope. We shall soon improve our youthful
humours.’

God help me, I might have been improved for my whole life, I might have
been made another creature perhaps, for life, by a kind word at that
season. A word of encouragement and explanation, of pity for my childish
ignorance, of welcome home, of reassurance to me that it was home, might
have made me dutiful to him in my heart henceforth, instead of in my
hypocritical outside, and might have made me respect instead of hate
him. I thought my mother was sorry to see me standing in the room so
scared and strange, and that, presently, when I stole to a chair, she
followed me with her eyes more sorrowfully still--missing, perhaps, some
freedom in my childish tread--but the word was not spoken, and the time
for it was gone.

We dined alone, we three together. He seemed to be very fond of my
mother--I am afraid I liked him none the better for that--and she was
very fond of him. I gathered from what they said, that an elder sister
of his was coming to stay with them, and that she was expected that
evening. I am not certain whether I found out then, or afterwards, that,
without being actively concerned in any business, he had some share in,
or some annual charge upon the profits of, a wine-merchant’s house
in London, with which his family had been connected from his
great-grandfather’s time, and in which his sister had a similar
interest; but I may mention it in this place, whether or no.

After dinner, when we were sitting by the fire, and I was meditating an
escape to Peggotty without having the hardihood to slip away, lest
it should offend the master of the house, a coach drove up to the
garden-gate and he went out to receive the visitor. My mother followed
him. I was timidly following her, when she turned round at the parlour
door, in the dusk, and taking me in her embrace as she had been used to
do, whispered me to love my new father and be obedient to him. She did
this hurriedly and secretly, as if it were wrong, but tenderly; and,
putting out her hand behind her, held mine in it, until we came near
to where he was standing in the garden, where she let mine go, and drew
hers through his arm.

It was Miss Murdstone who was arrived, and a gloomy-looking lady she
was; dark, like her brother, whom she greatly resembled in face and
voice; and with very heavy eyebrows, nearly meeting over her large nose,
as if, being disabled by the wrongs of her sex from wearing whiskers,
she had carried them to that account. She brought with her two
uncompromising hard black boxes, with her initials on the lids in hard
brass nails. When she paid the coachman she took her money out of a hard
steel purse, and she kept the purse in a very jail of a bag which hung
upon her arm by a heavy chain, and shut up like a bite. I had never, at
that time, seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone was.

She was brought into the parlour with many tokens of welcome, and there
formally recognized my mother as a new and near relation. Then she
looked at me, and said:

‘Is that your boy, sister-in-law?’

My mother acknowledged me.

‘Generally speaking,’ said Miss Murdstone, ‘I don’t like boys. How d’ye
do, boy?’

Under these encouraging circumstances, I replied that I was very well,
and that I hoped she was the same; with such an indifferent grace, that
Miss Murdstone disposed of me in two words:

‘Wants manner!’

Having uttered which, with great distinctness, she begged the favour of
being shown to her room, which became to me from that time forth a place
of awe and dread, wherein the two black boxes were never seen open or
known to be left unlocked, and where (for I peeped in once or twice when
she was out) numerous little steel fetters and rivets, with which Miss
Murdstone embellished herself when she was dressed, generally hung upon
the looking-glass in formidable array.

As well as I could make out, she had come for good, and had no intention
of ever going again. She began to ‘help’ my mother next morning, and was
in and out of the store-closet all day, putting things to rights, and
making havoc in the old arrangements. Almost the first remarkable thing
I observed in Miss Murdstone was, her being constantly haunted by
a suspicion that the servants had a man secreted somewhere on the
premises. Under the influence of this delusion, she dived into the
coal-cellar at the most untimely hours, and scarcely ever opened the
door of a dark cupboard without clapping it to again, in the belief that
she had got him.

Though there was nothing very airy about Miss Murdstone, she was a
perfect Lark in point of getting up. She was up (and, as I believe
to this hour, looking for that man) before anybody in the house was
stirring. Peggotty gave it as her opinion that she even slept with one
eye open; but I could not concur in this idea; for I tried it myself
after hearing the suggestion thrown out, and found it couldn’t be done.

On the very first morning after her arrival she was up and ringing her
bell at cock-crow. When my mother came down to breakfast and was going
to make the tea, Miss Murdstone gave her a kind of peck on the cheek,
which was her nearest approach to a kiss, and said:

‘Now, Clara, my dear, I am come here, you know, to relieve you of all
the trouble I can. You’re much too pretty and thoughtless’--my mother
blushed but laughed, and seemed not to dislike this character--‘to have
any duties imposed upon you that can be undertaken by me. If you’ll be
so good as give me your keys, my dear, I’ll attend to all this sort of
thing in future.’

From that time, Miss Murdstone kept the keys in her own little jail all
day, and under her pillow all night, and my mother had no more to do
with them than I had.

My mother did not suffer her authority to pass from her without a shadow
of protest. One night when Miss Murdstone had been developing certain
household plans to her brother, of which he signified his approbation,
my mother suddenly began to cry, and said she thought she might have
been consulted.

‘Clara!’ said Mr. Murdstone sternly. ‘Clara! I wonder at you.’

‘Oh, it’s very well to say you wonder, Edward!’ cried my mother, ‘and
it’s very well for you to talk about firmness, but you wouldn’t like it
yourself.’

Firmness, I may observe, was the grand quality on which both Mr. and
Miss Murdstone took their stand. However I might have expressed
my comprehension of it at that time, if I had been called upon, I
nevertheless did clearly comprehend in my own way, that it was another
name for tyranny; and for a certain gloomy, arrogant, devil’s humour,
that was in them both. The creed, as I should state it now, was this.
Mr. Murdstone was firm; nobody in his world was to be so firm as Mr.
Murdstone; nobody else in his world was to be firm at all, for everybody
was to be bent to his firmness. Miss Murdstone was an exception.
She might be firm, but only by relationship, and in an inferior and
tributary degree. My mother was another exception. She might be firm,
and must be; but only in bearing their firmness, and firmly believing
there was no other firmness upon earth.

‘It’s very hard,’ said my mother, ‘that in my own house--’

‘My own house?’ repeated Mr. Murdstone. ‘Clara!’

‘OUR own house, I mean,’ faltered my mother, evidently frightened--‘I
hope you must know what I mean, Edward--it’s very hard that in YOUR own
house I may not have a word to say about domestic matters. I am sure
I managed very well before we were married. There’s evidence,’ said my
mother, sobbing; ‘ask Peggotty if I didn’t do very well when I wasn’t
interfered with!’

‘Edward,’ said Miss Murdstone, ‘let there be an end of this. I go
tomorrow.’

‘Jane Murdstone,’ said her brother, ‘be silent! How dare you to
insinuate that you don’t know my character better than your words
imply?’

‘I am sure,’ my poor mother went on, at a grievous disadvantage, and
with many tears, ‘I don’t want anybody to go. I should be very
miserable and unhappy if anybody was to go. I don’t ask much. I am not
unreasonable. I only want to be consulted sometimes. I am very much
obliged to anybody who assists me, and I only want to be consulted as a
mere form, sometimes. I thought you were pleased, once, with my being a
little inexperienced and girlish, Edward--I am sure you said so--but you
seem to hate me for it now, you are so severe.’

‘Edward,’ said Miss Murdstone, again, ‘let there be an end of this. I go
tomorrow.’

‘Jane Murdstone,’ thundered Mr. Murdstone. ‘Will you be silent? How dare
you?’

Miss Murdstone made a jail-delivery of her pocket-handkerchief, and held
it before her eyes.

‘Clara,’ he continued, looking at my mother, ‘you surprise me! You
astound me! Yes, I had a satisfaction in the thought of marrying
an inexperienced and artless person, and forming her character, and
infusing into it some amount of that firmness and decision of which
it stood in need. But when Jane Murdstone is kind enough to come to my
assistance in this endeavour, and to assume, for my sake, a condition
something like a housekeeper’s, and when she meets with a base return--’

‘Oh, pray, pray, Edward,’ cried my mother, ‘don’t accuse me of being
ungrateful. I am sure I am not ungrateful. No one ever said I was
before. I have many faults, but not that. Oh, don’t, my dear!’

‘When Jane Murdstone meets, I say,’ he went on, after waiting until my
mother was silent, ‘with a base return, that feeling of mine is chilled
and altered.’

‘Don’t, my love, say that!’ implored my mother very piteously.
‘Oh, don’t, Edward! I can’t bear to hear it. Whatever I am, I am
affectionate. I know I am affectionate. I wouldn’t say it, if I
wasn’t sure that I am. Ask Peggotty. I am sure she’ll tell you I’m
affectionate.’

‘There is no extent of mere weakness, Clara,’ said Mr. Murdstone in
reply, ‘that can have the least weight with me. You lose breath.’

‘Pray let us be friends,’ said my mother, ‘I couldn’t live under
coldness or unkindness. I am so sorry. I have a great many defects, I
know, and it’s very good of you, Edward, with your strength of mind, to
endeavour to correct them for me. Jane, I don’t object to anything. I
should be quite broken-hearted if you thought of leaving--’ My mother
was too much overcome to go on.

‘Jane Murdstone,’ said Mr. Murdstone to his sister, ‘any harsh words
between us are, I hope, uncommon. It is not my fault that so unusual an
occurrence has taken place tonight. I was betrayed into it by another.
Nor is it your fault. You were betrayed into it by another. Let us both
try to forget it. And as this,’ he added, after these magnanimous words,
‘is not a fit scene for the boy--David, go to bed!’

I could hardly find the door, through the tears that stood in my eyes.
I was so sorry for my mother’s distress; but I groped my way out, and
groped my way up to my room in the dark, without even having the heart
to say good night to Peggotty, or to get a candle from her. When her
coming up to look for me, an hour or so afterwards, awoke me, she said
that my mother had gone to bed poorly, and that Mr. and Miss Murdstone
were sitting alone.

Going down next morning rather earlier than usual, I paused outside the
parlour door, on hearing my mother’s voice. She was very earnestly and
humbly entreating Miss Murdstone’s pardon, which that lady granted, and
a perfect reconciliation took place. I never knew my mother afterwards
to give an opinion on any matter, without first appealing to Miss
Murdstone, or without having first ascertained by some sure means, what
Miss Murdstone’s opinion was; and I never saw Miss Murdstone, when out
of temper (she was infirm that way), move her hand towards her bag as
if she were going to take out the keys and offer to resign them to my
mother, without seeing that my mother was in a terrible fright.

The gloomy taint that was in the Murdstone blood, darkened the Murdstone
religion, which was austere and wrathful. I have thought, since,
that its assuming that character was a necessary consequence of Mr.
Murdstone’s firmness, which wouldn’t allow him to let anybody off from
the utmost weight of the severest penalties he could find any excuse
for. Be this as it may, I well remember the tremendous visages with
which we used to go to church, and the changed air of the place. Again,
the dreaded Sunday comes round, and I file into the old pew first, like
a guarded captive brought to a condemned service. Again, Miss Murdstone,
in a black velvet gown, that looks as if it had been made out of a pall,
follows close upon me; then my mother; then her husband. There is no
Peggotty now, as in the old time. Again, I listen to Miss Murdstone
mumbling the responses, and emphasizing all the dread words with a cruel
relish. Again, I see her dark eyes roll round the church when she says
‘miserable sinners’, as if she were calling all the congregation names.
Again, I catch rare glimpses of my mother, moving her lips timidly
between the two, with one of them muttering at each ear like low
thunder. Again, I wonder with a sudden fear whether it is likely that
our good old clergyman can be wrong, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone right,
and that all the angels in Heaven can be destroying angels. Again, if I
move a finger or relax a muscle of my face, Miss Murdstone pokes me with
her prayer-book, and makes my side ache.

Yes, and again, as we walk home, I note some neighbours looking at my
mother and at me, and whispering. Again, as the three go on arm-in-arm,
and I linger behind alone, I follow some of those looks, and wonder if
my mother’s step be really not so light as I have seen it, and if the
gaiety of her beauty be really almost worried away. Again, I wonder
whether any of the neighbours call to mind, as I do, how we used to
walk home together, she and I; and I wonder stupidly about that, all the
dreary dismal day.

There had been some talk on occasions of my going to boarding-school.
Mr. and Miss Murdstone had originated it, and my mother had of course
agreed with them. Nothing, however, was concluded on the subject yet.
In the meantime, I learnt lessons at home. Shall I ever forget those
lessons! They were presided over nominally by my mother, but really by
Mr. Murdstone and his sister, who were always present, and found them
a favourable occasion for giving my mother lessons in that miscalled
firmness, which was the bane of both our lives. I believe I was kept
at home for that purpose. I had been apt enough to learn, and willing
enough, when my mother and I had lived alone together. I can faintly
remember learning the alphabet at her knee. To this day, when I look
upon the fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their
shapes, and the easy good-nature of O and Q and S, seem to present
themselves again before me as they used to do. But they recall no
feeling of disgust or reluctance. On the contrary, I seem to have walked
along a path of flowers as far as the crocodile-book, and to have been
cheered by the gentleness of my mother’s voice and manner all the
way. But these solemn lessons which succeeded those, I remember as the
death-blow of my peace, and a grievous daily drudgery and misery. They
were very long, very numerous, very hard--perfectly unintelligible,
some of them, to me--and I was generally as much bewildered by them as I
believe my poor mother was herself.

Let me remember how it used to be, and bring one morning back again.

I come into the second-best parlour after breakfast, with my books,
and an exercise-book, and a slate. My mother is ready for me at her
writing-desk, but not half so ready as Mr. Murdstone in his easy-chair
by the window (though he pretends to be reading a book), or as Miss
Murdstone, sitting near my mother stringing steel beads. The very sight
of these two has such an influence over me, that I begin to feel the
words I have been at infinite pains to get into my head, all sliding
away, and going I don’t know where. I wonder where they do go, by the
by?

I hand the first book to my mother. Perhaps it is a grammar, perhaps a
history, or geography. I take a last drowning look at the page as I give
it into her hand, and start off aloud at a racing pace while I have
got it fresh. I trip over a word. Mr. Murdstone looks up. I trip
over another word. Miss Murdstone looks up. I redden, tumble over
half-a-dozen words, and stop. I think my mother would show me the book
if she dared, but she does not dare, and she says softly:

‘Oh, Davy, Davy!’

‘Now, Clara,’ says Mr. Murdstone, ‘be firm with the boy. Don’t say, “Oh,
Davy, Davy!” That’s childish. He knows his lesson, or he does not know
it.’

‘He does NOT know it,’ Miss Murdstone interposes awfully.

‘I am really afraid he does not,’ says my mother.

‘Then, you see, Clara,’ returns Miss Murdstone, ‘you should just give
him the book back, and make him know it.’

‘Yes, certainly,’ says my mother; ‘that is what I intend to do, my dear
Jane. Now, Davy, try once more, and don’t be stupid.’

I obey the first clause of the injunction by trying once more, but am
not so successful with the second, for I am very stupid. I tumble down
before I get to the old place, at a point where I was all right before,
and stop to think. But I can’t think about the lesson. I think of the
number of yards of net in Miss Murdstone’s cap, or of the price of Mr.
Murdstone’s dressing-gown, or any such ridiculous problem that I have
no business with, and don’t want to have anything at all to do with. Mr.
Murdstone makes a movement of impatience which I have been expecting
for a long time. Miss Murdstone does the same. My mother glances
submissively at them, shuts the book, and lays it by as an arrear to be
worked out when my other tasks are done.

There is a pile of these arrears very soon, and it swells like a rolling
snowball. The bigger it gets, the more stupid I get. The case is so
hopeless, and I feel that I am wallowing in such a bog of nonsense, that
I give up all idea of getting out, and abandon myself to my fate. The
despairing way in which my mother and I look at each other, as I blunder
on, is truly melancholy. But the greatest effect in these miserable
lessons is when my mother (thinking nobody is observing her) tries
to give me the cue by the motion of her lips. At that instant, Miss
Murdstone, who has been lying in wait for nothing else all along, says
in a deep warning voice:

‘Clara!’

My mother starts, colours, and smiles faintly. Mr. Murdstone comes out
of his chair, takes the book, throws it at me or boxes my ears with it,
and turns me out of the room by the shoulders.

Even when the lessons are done, the worst is yet to happen, in the shape
of an appalling sum. This is invented for me, and delivered to me orally
by Mr. Murdstone, and begins, ‘If I go into a cheesemonger’s shop, and
buy five thousand double-Gloucester cheeses at fourpence-halfpenny each,
present payment’--at which I see Miss Murdstone secretly overjoyed.
I pore over these cheeses without any result or enlightenment until
dinner-time, when, having made a Mulatto of myself by getting the dirt
of the slate into the pores of my skin, I have a slice of bread to help
me out with the cheeses, and am considered in disgrace for the rest of
the evening.

It seems to me, at this distance of time, as if my unfortunate studies
generally took this course. I could have done very well if I had been
without the Murdstones; but the influence of the Murdstones upon me was
like the fascination of two snakes on a wretched young bird. Even when
I did get through the morning with tolerable credit, there was not
much gained but dinner; for Miss Murdstone never could endure to see me
untasked, and if I rashly made any show of being unemployed, called her
brother’s attention to me by saying, ‘Clara, my dear, there’s nothing
like work--give your boy an exercise’; which caused me to be clapped
down to some new labour, there and then. As to any recreation with other
children of my age, I had very little of that; for the gloomy theology
of the Murdstones made all children out to be a swarm of little vipers
(though there WAS a child once set in the midst of the Disciples), and
held that they contaminated one another.

The natural result of this treatment, continued, I suppose, for some six
months or more, was to make me sullen, dull, and dogged. I was not
made the less so by my sense of being daily more and more shut out and
alienated from my mother. I believe I should have been almost stupefied
but for one circumstance.

It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a little
room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which
nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room,
Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the
Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came
out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and
my hope of something beyond that place and time,--they, and the Arabian
Nights, and the Tales of the Genii,--and did me no harm; for whatever
harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. It
is astonishing to me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings
and blunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did. It
is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my
small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my
favourite characters in them--as I did--and by putting Mr. and Miss
Murdstone into all the bad ones--which I did too. I have been Tom Jones
(a child’s Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have
sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I
verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of Voyages and
Travels--I forget what, now--that were on those shelves; and for days
and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house,
armed with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees--the perfect
realization of Captain Somebody, of the Royal British Navy, in danger of
being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great price.
The Captain never lost dignity, from having his ears boxed with the
Latin Grammar. I did; but the Captain was a Captain and a hero, in
despite of all the grammars of all the languages in the world, dead or
alive.

This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the
picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play
in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.
Every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every
foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own, in my mind,
connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in
them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church-steeple; I have
watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself
upon the wicket-gate; and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that club
with Mr. Pickle, in the parlour of our little village alehouse.

The reader now understands, as well as I do, what I was when I came to
that point of my youthful history to which I am now coming again.

One morning when I went into the parlour with my books, I found my
mother looking anxious, Miss Murdstone looking firm, and Mr. Murdstone
binding something round the bottom of a cane--a lithe and limber cane,
which he left off binding when I came in, and poised and switched in the
air.

‘I tell you, Clara,’ said Mr. Murdstone, ‘I have been often flogged
myself.’

‘To be sure; of course,’ said Miss Murdstone.

‘Certainly, my dear Jane,’ faltered my mother, meekly. ‘But--but do you
think it did Edward good?’

‘Do you think it did Edward harm, Clara?’ asked Mr. Murdstone, gravely.

‘That’s the point,’ said his sister.

To this my mother returned, ‘Certainly, my dear Jane,’ and said no more.

I felt apprehensive that I was personally interested in this dialogue,
and sought Mr. Murdstone’s eye as it lighted on mine.

‘Now, David,’ he said--and I saw that cast again as he said it--‘you
must be far more careful today than usual.’ He gave the cane another
poise, and another switch; and having finished his preparation of it,
laid it down beside him, with an impressive look, and took up his book.

This was a good freshener to my presence of mind, as a beginning. I felt
the words of my lessons slipping off, not one by one, or line by line,
but by the entire page; I tried to lay hold of them; but they seemed,
if I may so express it, to have put skates on, and to skim away from me
with a smoothness there was no checking.

We began badly, and went on worse. I had come in with an idea of
distinguishing myself rather, conceiving that I was very well prepared;
but it turned out to be quite a mistake. Book after book was added to
the heap of failures, Miss Murdstone being firmly watchful of us all the
time. And when we came at last to the five thousand cheeses (canes he
made it that day, I remember), my mother burst out crying.

‘Clara!’ said Miss Murdstone, in her warning voice.

‘I am not quite well, my dear Jane, I think,’ said my mother.

I saw him wink, solemnly, at his sister, as he rose and said, taking up
the cane:

‘Why, Jane, we can hardly expect Clara to bear, with perfect firmness,
the worry and torment that David has occasioned her today. That would be
stoical. Clara is greatly strengthened and improved, but we can hardly
expect so much from her. David, you and I will go upstairs, boy.’

As he took me out at the door, my mother ran towards us. Miss Murdstone
said, ‘Clara! are you a perfect fool?’ and interfered. I saw my mother
stop her ears then, and I heard her crying.

He walked me up to my room slowly and gravely--I am certain he had a
delight in that formal parade of executing justice--and when we got
there, suddenly twisted my head under his arm.

‘Mr. Murdstone! Sir!’ I cried to him. ‘Don’t! Pray don’t beat me! I have
tried to learn, sir, but I can’t learn while you and Miss Murdstone are
by. I can’t indeed!’

‘Can’t you, indeed, David?’ he said. ‘We’ll try that.’

He had my head as in a vice, but I twined round him somehow, and stopped
him for a moment, entreating him not to beat me. It was only a moment
that I stopped him, for he cut me heavily an instant afterwards, and in
the same instant I caught the hand with which he held me in my mouth,
between my teeth, and bit it through. It sets my teeth on edge to think
of it.

He beat me then, as if he would have beaten me to death. Above all the
noise we made, I heard them running up the stairs, and crying out--I
heard my mother crying out--and Peggotty. Then he was gone; and the
door was locked outside; and I was lying, fevered and hot, and torn, and
sore, and raging in my puny way, upon the floor.

How well I recollect, when I became quiet, what an unnatural stillness
seemed to reign through the whole house! How well I remember, when my
smart and passion began to cool, how wicked I began to feel!

I sat listening for a long while, but there was not a sound. I crawled
up from the floor, and saw my face in the glass, so swollen, red, and
ugly that it almost frightened me. My stripes were sore and stiff, and
made me cry afresh, when I moved; but they were nothing to the guilt I
felt. It lay heavier on my breast than if I had been a most atrocious
criminal, I dare say.

It had begun to grow dark, and I had shut the window (I had been lying,
for the most part, with my head upon the sill, by turns crying, dozing,
and looking listlessly out), when the key was turned, and Miss Murdstone
came in with some bread and meat, and milk. These she put down upon the
table without a word, glaring at me the while with exemplary firmness,
and then retired, locking the door after her.

Long after it was dark I sat there, wondering whether anybody else would
come. When this appeared improbable for that night, I undressed, and
went to bed; and, there, I began to wonder fearfully what would be done
to me. Whether it was a criminal act that I had committed? Whether I
should be taken into custody, and sent to prison? Whether I was at all
in danger of being hanged?

I never shall forget the waking, next morning; the being cheerful and
fresh for the first moment, and then the being weighed down by the stale
and dismal oppression of remembrance. Miss Murdstone reappeared before
I was out of bed; told me, in so many words, that I was free to walk in
the garden for half an hour and no longer; and retired, leaving the door
open, that I might avail myself of that permission.

I did so, and did so every morning of my imprisonment, which lasted five
days. If I could have seen my mother alone, I should have gone down on
my knees to her and besought her forgiveness; but I saw no one, Miss
Murdstone excepted, during the whole time--except at evening prayers in
the parlour; to which I was escorted by Miss Murdstone after everybody
else was placed; where I was stationed, a young outlaw, all alone by
myself near the door; and whence I was solemnly conducted by my jailer,
before any one arose from the devotional posture. I only observed that
my mother was as far off from me as she could be, and kept her face
another way so that I never saw it; and that Mr. Murdstone’s hand was
bound up in a large linen wrapper.

The length of those five days I can convey no idea of to any one. They
occupy the place of years in my remembrance. The way in which I listened
to all the incidents of the house that made themselves audible to me;
the ringing of bells, the opening and shutting of doors, the murmuring
of voices, the footsteps on the stairs; to any laughing, whistling, or
singing, outside, which seemed more dismal than anything else to me in
my solitude and disgrace--the uncertain pace of the hours, especially
at night, when I would wake thinking it was morning, and find that the
family were not yet gone to bed, and that all the length of night had
yet to come--the depressed dreams and nightmares I had--the return of
day, noon, afternoon, evening, when the boys played in the churchyard,
and I watched them from a distance within the room, being ashamed to
show myself at the window lest they should know I was a prisoner--the
strange sensation of never hearing myself speak--the fleeting intervals
of something like cheerfulness, which came with eating and drinking,
and went away with it--the setting in of rain one evening, with a fresh
smell, and its coming down faster and faster between me and the church,
until it and gathering night seemed to quench me in gloom, and fear, and
remorse--all this appears to have gone round and round for years instead
of days, it is so vividly and strongly stamped on my remembrance. On the
last night of my restraint, I was awakened by hearing my own name spoken
in a whisper. I started up in bed, and putting out my arms in the dark,
said:

‘Is that you, Peggotty?’

There was no immediate answer, but presently I heard my name again, in a
tone so very mysterious and awful, that I think I should have gone into
a fit, if it had not occurred to me that it must have come through the
keyhole.

I groped my way to the door, and putting my own lips to the keyhole,
whispered: ‘Is that you, Peggotty dear?’

‘Yes, my own precious Davy,’ she replied. ‘Be as soft as a mouse, or the
Cat’ll hear us.’

I understood this to mean Miss Murdstone, and was sensible of the
urgency of the case; her room being close by.

‘How’s mama, dear Peggotty? Is she very angry with me?’

I could hear Peggotty crying softly on her side of the keyhole, as I was
doing on mine, before she answered. ‘No. Not very.’

‘What is going to be done with me, Peggotty dear? Do you know?’

‘School. Near London,’ was Peggotty’s answer. I was obliged to get her
to repeat it, for she spoke it the first time quite down my throat,
in consequence of my having forgotten to take my mouth away from the
keyhole and put my ear there; and though her words tickled me a good
deal, I didn’t hear them.

‘When, Peggotty?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Is that the reason why Miss Murdstone took the clothes out of my
drawers?’ which she had done, though I have forgotten to mention it.

‘Yes,’ said Peggotty. ‘Box.’

‘Shan’t I see mama?’

‘Yes,’ said Peggotty. ‘Morning.’

Then Peggotty fitted her mouth close to the keyhole, and delivered these
words through it with as much feeling and earnestness as a keyhole
has ever been the medium of communicating, I will venture to assert:
shooting in each broken little sentence in a convulsive little burst of
its own.

‘Davy, dear. If I ain’t been azackly as intimate with you. Lately, as I
used to be. It ain’t because I don’t love you. Just as well and more, my
pretty poppet. It’s because I thought it better for you. And for someone
else besides. Davy, my darling, are you listening? Can you hear?’

‘Ye-ye-ye-yes, Peggotty!’ I sobbed.

‘My own!’ said Peggotty, with infinite compassion. ‘What I want to say,
is. That you must never forget me. For I’ll never forget you. And I’ll
take as much care of your mama, Davy. As ever I took of you. And I won’t
leave her. The day may come when she’ll be glad to lay her poor head.
On her stupid, cross old Peggotty’s arm again. And I’ll write to you,
my dear. Though I ain’t no scholar. And I’ll--I’ll--’ Peggotty fell to
kissing the keyhole, as she couldn’t kiss me.

‘Thank you, dear Peggotty!’ said I. ‘Oh, thank you! Thank you! Will you
promise me one thing, Peggotty? Will you write and tell Mr. Peggotty and
little Em’ly, and Mrs. Gummidge and Ham, that I am not so bad as they
might suppose, and that I sent ‘em all my love--especially to little
Em’ly? Will you, if you please, Peggotty?’

The kind soul promised, and we both of us kissed the keyhole with the
greatest affection--I patted it with my hand, I recollect, as if it had
been her honest face--and parted. From that night there grew up in my
breast a feeling for Peggotty which I cannot very well define. She did
not replace my mother; no one could do that; but she came into a vacancy
in my heart, which closed upon her, and I felt towards her something
I have never felt for any other human being. It was a sort of comical
affection, too; and yet if she had died, I cannot think what I should
have done, or how I should have acted out the tragedy it would have been
to me.

In the morning Miss Murdstone appeared as usual, and told me I was going
to school; which was not altogether such news to me as she supposed. She
also informed me that when I was dressed, I was to come downstairs into
the parlour, and have my breakfast. There, I found my mother, very pale
and with red eyes: into whose arms I ran, and begged her pardon from my
suffering soul.

‘Oh, Davy!’ she said. ‘That you could hurt anyone I love! Try to be
better, pray to be better! I forgive you; but I am so grieved, Davy,
that you should have such bad passions in your heart.’

They had persuaded her that I was a wicked fellow, and she was more
sorry for that than for my going away. I felt it sorely. I tried to eat
my parting breakfast, but my tears dropped upon my bread-and-butter,
and trickled into my tea. I saw my mother look at me sometimes, and then
glance at the watchful Miss Murdstone, and than look down, or look away.

‘Master Copperfield’s box there!’ said Miss Murdstone, when wheels were
heard at the gate.

I looked for Peggotty, but it was not she; neither she nor Mr. Murdstone
appeared. My former acquaintance, the carrier, was at the door. The box
was taken out to his cart, and lifted in.

‘Clara!’ said Miss Murdstone, in her warning note.

‘Ready, my dear Jane,’ returned my mother. ‘Good-bye, Davy. You are
going for your own good. Good-bye, my child. You will come home in the
holidays, and be a better boy.’

‘Clara!’ Miss Murdstone repeated.

‘Certainly, my dear Jane,’ replied my mother, who was holding me. ‘I
forgive you, my dear boy. God bless you!’

‘Clara!’ Miss Murdstone repeated.

Miss Murdstone was good enough to take me out to the cart, and to say on
the way that she hoped I would repent, before I came to a bad end; and
then I got into the cart, and the lazy horse walked off with it.



CHAPTER 5. I AM SENT AWAY FROM HOME


We might have gone about half a mile, and my pocket-handkerchief was
quite wet through, when the carrier stopped short. Looking out to
ascertain for what, I saw, to My amazement, Peggotty burst from a hedge
and climb into the cart. She took me in both her arms, and squeezed me
to her stays until the pressure on my nose was extremely painful, though
I never thought of that till afterwards when I found it very tender. Not
a single word did Peggotty speak. Releasing one of her arms, she put
it down in her pocket to the elbow, and brought out some paper bags of
cakes which she crammed into my pockets, and a purse which she put into
my hand, but not one word did she say. After another and a final squeeze
with both arms, she got down from the cart and ran away; and, my belief
is, and has always been, without a solitary button on her gown. I
picked up one, of several that were rolling about, and treasured it as a
keepsake for a long time.

The carrier looked at me, as if to inquire if she were coming back. I
shook my head, and said I thought not. ‘Then come up,’ said the carrier
to the lazy horse; who came up accordingly.

Having by this time cried as much as I possibly could, I began to think
it was of no use crying any more, especially as neither Roderick Random,
nor that Captain in the Royal British Navy, had ever cried, that I
could remember, in trying situations. The carrier, seeing me in this
resolution, proposed that my pocket-handkerchief should be spread upon
the horse’s back to dry. I thanked him, and assented; and particularly
small it looked, under those circumstances.

I had now leisure to examine the purse. It was a stiff leather purse,
with a snap, and had three bright shillings in it, which Peggotty had
evidently polished up with whitening, for my greater delight. But its
most precious contents were two half-crowns folded together in a bit
of paper, on which was written, in my mother’s hand, ‘For Davy. With my
love.’ I was so overcome by this, that I asked the carrier to be so good
as to reach me my pocket-handkerchief again; but he said he thought I
had better do without it, and I thought I really had, so I wiped my eyes
on my sleeve and stopped myself.

For good, too; though, in consequence of my previous emotions, I was
still occasionally seized with a stormy sob. After we had jogged on for
some little time, I asked the carrier if he was going all the way.

‘All the way where?’ inquired the carrier.

‘There,’ I said.

‘Where’s there?’ inquired the carrier.

‘Near London,’ I said.

‘Why that horse,’ said the carrier, jerking the rein to point him out,
‘would be deader than pork afore he got over half the ground.’

‘Are you only going to Yarmouth then?’ I asked.

‘That’s about it,’ said the carrier. ‘And there I shall take you to the
stage-cutch, and the stage-cutch that’ll take you to--wherever it is.’

As this was a great deal for the carrier (whose name was Mr. Barkis)
to say--he being, as I observed in a former chapter, of a phlegmatic
temperament, and not at all conversational--I offered him a cake as a
mark of attention, which he ate at one gulp, exactly like an elephant,
and which made no more impression on his big face than it would have
done on an elephant’s.

‘Did SHE make ‘em, now?’ said Mr. Barkis, always leaning forward, in his
slouching way, on the footboard of the cart with an arm on each knee.

‘Peggotty, do you mean, sir?’

‘Ah!’ said Mr. Barkis. ‘Her.’

‘Yes. She makes all our pastry, and does all our cooking.’

‘Do she though?’ said Mr. Barkis. He made up his mouth as if to whistle,
but he didn’t whistle. He sat looking at the horse’s ears, as if he saw
something new there; and sat so, for a considerable time. By and by, he
said:

‘No sweethearts, I b’lieve?’

‘Sweetmeats did you say, Mr. Barkis?’ For I thought he wanted
something else to eat, and had pointedly alluded to that description of
refreshment.

‘Hearts,’ said Mr. Barkis. ‘Sweet hearts; no person walks with her!’

‘With Peggotty?’

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Her.’

‘Oh, no. She never had a sweetheart.’

‘Didn’t she, though!’ said Mr. Barkis.

Again he made up his mouth to whistle, and again he didn’t whistle, but
sat looking at the horse’s ears.

‘So she makes,’ said Mr. Barkis, after a long interval of reflection,
‘all the apple parsties, and doos all the cooking, do she?’

I replied that such was the fact.

‘Well. I’ll tell you what,’ said Mr. Barkis. ‘P’raps you might be
writin’ to her?’

‘I shall certainly write to her,’ I rejoined.

‘Ah!’ he said, slowly turning his eyes towards me. ‘Well! If you was
writin’ to her, p’raps you’d recollect to say that Barkis was willin’;
would you?’

‘That Barkis is willing,’ I repeated, innocently. ‘Is that all the
message?’

‘Ye-es,’ he said, considering. ‘Ye-es. Barkis is willin’.’

‘But you will be at Blunderstone again tomorrow, Mr. Barkis,’ I said,
faltering a little at the idea of my being far away from it then, and
could give your own message so much better.’

As he repudiated this suggestion, however, with a jerk of his head,
and once more confirmed his previous request by saying, with profound
gravity, ‘Barkis is willin’. That’s the message,’ I readily undertook
its transmission. While I was waiting for the coach in the hotel
at Yarmouth that very afternoon, I procured a sheet of paper and
an inkstand, and wrote a note to Peggotty, which ran thus: ‘My dear
Peggotty. I have come here safe. Barkis is willing. My love to mama.
Yours affectionately. P.S. He says he particularly wants you to
know--BARKIS IS WILLING.’

When I had taken this commission on myself prospectively, Mr. Barkis
relapsed into perfect silence; and I, feeling quite worn out by all that
had happened lately, lay down on a sack in the cart and fell asleep. I
slept soundly until we got to Yarmouth; which was so entirely new
and strange to me in the inn-yard to which we drove, that I at once
abandoned a latent hope I had had of meeting with some of Mr. Peggotty’s
family there, perhaps even with little Em’ly herself.

The coach was in the yard, shining very much all over, but without any
horses to it as yet; and it looked in that state as if nothing was
more unlikely than its ever going to London. I was thinking this, and
wondering what would ultimately become of my box, which Mr. Barkis had
put down on the yard-pavement by the pole (he having driven up the yard
to turn his cart), and also what would ultimately become of me, when a
lady looked out of a bow-window where some fowls and joints of meat were
hanging up, and said:

‘Is that the little gentleman from Blunderstone?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said.

‘What name?’ inquired the lady.

‘Copperfield, ma’am,’ I said.

‘That won’t do,’ returned the lady. ‘Nobody’s dinner is paid for here,
in that name.’

‘Is it Murdstone, ma’am?’ I said.

‘If you’re Master Murdstone,’ said the lady, ‘why do you go and give
another name, first?’

I explained to the lady how it was, who than rang a bell, and called
out, ‘William! show the coffee-room!’ upon which a waiter came running
out of a kitchen on the opposite side of the yard to show it, and seemed
a good deal surprised when he was only to show it to me.

It was a large long room with some large maps in it. I doubt if I could
have felt much stranger if the maps had been real foreign countries, and
I cast away in the middle of them. I felt it was taking a liberty to
sit down, with my cap in my hand, on the corner of the chair nearest the
door; and when the waiter laid a cloth on purpose for me, and put a set
of castors on it, I think I must have turned red all over with modesty.

He brought me some chops, and vegetables, and took the covers off in
such a bouncing manner that I was afraid I must have given him some
offence. But he greatly relieved my mind by putting a chair for me at
the table, and saying, very affably, ‘Now, six-foot! come on!’

I thanked him, and took my seat at the board; but found it extremely
difficult to handle my knife and fork with anything like dexterity,
or to avoid splashing myself with the gravy, while he was standing
opposite, staring so hard, and making me blush in the most dreadful
manner every time I caught his eye. After watching me into the second
chop, he said:

‘There’s half a pint of ale for you. Will you have it now?’

I thanked him and said, ‘Yes.’ Upon which he poured it out of a jug
into a large tumbler, and held it up against the light, and made it look
beautiful.

‘My eye!’ he said. ‘It seems a good deal, don’t it?’

‘It does seem a good deal,’ I answered with a smile. For it was quite
delightful to me, to find him so pleasant. He was a twinkling-eyed,
pimple-faced man, with his hair standing upright all over his head; and
as he stood with one arm a-kimbo, holding up the glass to the light with
the other hand, he looked quite friendly.

‘There was a gentleman here, yesterday,’ he said--‘a stout gentleman, by
the name of Topsawyer--perhaps you know him?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think--’

‘In breeches and gaiters, broad-brimmed hat, grey coat, speckled
choker,’ said the waiter.

‘No,’ I said bashfully, ‘I haven’t the pleasure--’

‘He came in here,’ said the waiter, looking at the light through the
tumbler, ‘ordered a glass of this ale--WOULD order it--I told him
not--drank it, and fell dead. It was too old for him. It oughtn’t to be
drawn; that’s the fact.’

I was very much shocked to hear of this melancholy accident, and said I
thought I had better have some water.

‘Why you see,’ said the waiter, still looking at the light through the
tumbler, with one of his eyes shut up, ‘our people don’t like things
being ordered and left. It offends ‘em. But I’ll drink it, if you like.
I’m used to it, and use is everything. I don’t think it’ll hurt me, if I
throw my head back, and take it off quick. Shall I?’

I replied that he would much oblige me by drinking it, if he thought
he could do it safely, but by no means otherwise. When he did throw his
head back, and take it off quick, I had a horrible fear, I confess,
of seeing him meet the fate of the lamented Mr. Topsawyer, and fall
lifeless on the carpet. But it didn’t hurt him. On the contrary, I
thought he seemed the fresher for it.

‘What have we got here?’ he said, putting a fork into my dish. ‘Not
chops?’

‘Chops,’ I said.

‘Lord bless my soul!’ he exclaimed, ‘I didn’t know they were chops. Why,
a chop’s the very thing to take off the bad effects of that beer! Ain’t
it lucky?’

So he took a chop by the bone in one hand, and a potato in the other,
and ate away with a very good appetite, to my extreme satisfaction.
He afterwards took another chop, and another potato; and after that,
another chop and another potato. When we had done, he brought me a
pudding, and having set it before me, seemed to ruminate, and to become
absent in his mind for some moments.

‘How’s the pie?’ he said, rousing himself.

‘It’s a pudding,’ I made answer.

‘Pudding!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, bless me, so it is! What!’ looking at it
nearer. ‘You don’t mean to say it’s a batter-pudding!’

‘Yes, it is indeed.’

‘Why, a batter-pudding,’ he said, taking up a table-spoon, ‘is my
favourite pudding! Ain’t that lucky? Come on, little ‘un, and let’s see
who’ll get most.’

The waiter certainly got most. He entreated me more than once to come in
and win, but what with his table-spoon to my tea-spoon, his dispatch to
my dispatch, and his appetite to my appetite, I was left far behind at
the first mouthful, and had no chance with him. I never saw anyone enjoy
a pudding so much, I think; and he laughed, when it was all gone, as if
his enjoyment of it lasted still.

Finding him so very friendly and companionable, it was then that I asked
for the pen and ink and paper, to write to Peggotty. He not only brought
it immediately, but was good enough to look over me while I wrote the
letter. When I had finished it, he asked me where I was going to school.

I said, ‘Near London,’ which was all I knew.

‘Oh! my eye!’ he said, looking very low-spirited, ‘I am sorry for that.’

‘Why?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, Lord!’ he said, shaking his head, ‘that’s the school where they
broke the boy’s ribs--two ribs--a little boy he was. I should say he
was--let me see--how old are you, about?’

I told him between eight and nine.

‘That’s just his age,’ he said. ‘He was eight years and six months old
when they broke his first rib; eight years and eight months old when
they broke his second, and did for him.’

I could not disguise from myself, or from the waiter, that this was an
uncomfortable coincidence, and inquired how it was done. His answer was
not cheering to my spirits, for it consisted of two dismal words, ‘With
whopping.’

The blowing of the coach-horn in the yard was a seasonable diversion,
which made me get up and hesitatingly inquire, in the mingled pride and
diffidence of having a purse (which I took out of my pocket), if there
were anything to pay.

‘There’s a sheet of letter-paper,’ he returned. ‘Did you ever buy a
sheet of letter-paper?’

I could not remember that I ever had.

‘It’s dear,’ he said, ‘on account of the duty. Threepence. That’s
the way we’re taxed in this country. There’s nothing else, except the
waiter. Never mind the ink. I lose by that.’

‘What should you--what should I--how much ought I to--what would it be
right to pay the waiter, if you please?’ I stammered, blushing.

‘If I hadn’t a family, and that family hadn’t the cowpock,’ said the
waiter, ‘I wouldn’t take a sixpence. If I didn’t support a aged pairint,
and a lovely sister,’--here the waiter was greatly agitated--‘I wouldn’t
take a farthing. If I had a good place, and was treated well here, I
should beg acceptance of a trifle, instead of taking of it. But I live
on broken wittles--and I sleep on the coals’--here the waiter burst into
tears.

I was very much concerned for his misfortunes, and felt that any
recognition short of ninepence would be mere brutality and hardness of
heart. Therefore I gave him one of my three bright shillings, which he
received with much humility and veneration, and spun up with his thumb,
directly afterwards, to try the goodness of.

It was a little disconcerting to me, to find, when I was being helped
up behind the coach, that I was supposed to have eaten all the dinner
without any assistance. I discovered this, from overhearing the lady in
the bow-window say to the guard, ‘Take care of that child, George, or
he’ll burst!’ and from observing that the women-servants who were about
the place came out to look and giggle at me as a young phenomenon. My
unfortunate friend the waiter, who had quite recovered his spirits, did
not appear to be disturbed by this, but joined in the general admiration
without being at all confused. If I had any doubt of him, I suppose
this half awakened it; but I am inclined to believe that with the simple
confidence of a child, and the natural reliance of a child upon superior
years (qualities I am very sorry any children should prematurely change
for worldly wisdom), I had no serious mistrust of him on the whole, even
then.

I felt it rather hard, I must own, to be made, without deserving it, the
subject of jokes between the coachman and guard as to the coach drawing
heavy behind, on account of my sitting there, and as to the greater
expediency of my travelling by waggon. The story of my supposed appetite
getting wind among the outside passengers, they were merry upon it
likewise; and asked me whether I was going to be paid for, at school,
as two brothers or three, and whether I was contracted for, or went upon
the regular terms; with other pleasant questions. But the worst of
it was, that I knew I should be ashamed to eat anything, when an
opportunity offered, and that, after a rather light dinner, I should
remain hungry all night--for I had left my cakes behind, at the hotel,
in my hurry. My apprehensions were realized. When we stopped for supper
I couldn’t muster courage to take any, though I should have liked it
very much, but sat by the fire and said I didn’t want anything. This did
not save me from more jokes, either; for a husky-voiced gentleman with
a rough face, who had been eating out of a sandwich-box nearly all the
way, except when he had been drinking out of a bottle, said I was like
a boa-constrictor who took enough at one meal to last him a long time;
after which, he actually brought a rash out upon himself with boiled
beef.

We had started from Yarmouth at three o’clock in the afternoon, and we
were due in London about eight next morning. It was Mid-summer weather,
and the evening was very pleasant. When we passed through a village, I
pictured to myself what the insides of the houses were like, and what
the inhabitants were about; and when boys came running after us, and
got up behind and swung there for a little way, I wondered whether their
fathers were alive, and whether they were happy at home. I had plenty to
think of, therefore, besides my mind running continually on the kind
of place I was going to--which was an awful speculation. Sometimes, I
remember, I resigned myself to thoughts of home and Peggotty; and to
endeavouring, in a confused blind way, to recall how I had felt, and
what sort of boy I used to be, before I bit Mr. Murdstone: which I
couldn’t satisfy myself about by any means, I seemed to have bitten him
in such a remote antiquity.

The night was not so pleasant as the evening, for it got chilly; and
being put between two gentlemen (the rough-faced one and another) to
prevent my tumbling off the coach, I was nearly smothered by their
falling asleep, and completely blocking me up. They squeezed me so hard
sometimes, that I could not help crying out, ‘Oh! If you please!’--which
they didn’t like at all, because it woke them. Opposite me was an
elderly lady in a great fur cloak, who looked in the dark more like a
haystack than a lady, she was wrapped up to such a degree. This lady had
a basket with her, and she hadn’t known what to do with it, for a long
time, until she found that on account of my legs being short, it could
go underneath me. It cramped and hurt me so, that it made me perfectly
miserable; but if I moved in the least, and made a glass that was in the
basket rattle against something else (as it was sure to do), she gave
me the cruellest poke with her foot, and said, ‘Come, don’t YOU fidget.
YOUR bones are young enough, I’m sure!’

At last the sun rose, and then my companions seemed to sleep easier.
The difficulties under which they had laboured all night, and which had
found utterance in the most terrific gasps and snorts, are not to be
conceived. As the sun got higher, their sleep became lighter, and so
they gradually one by one awoke. I recollect being very much surprised
by the feint everybody made, then, of not having been to sleep at all,
and by the uncommon indignation with which everyone repelled the
charge. I labour under the same kind of astonishment to this day, having
invariably observed that of all human weaknesses, the one to which our
common nature is the least disposed to confess (I cannot imagine why) is
the weakness of having gone to sleep in a coach.

What an amazing place London was to me when I saw it in the distance,
and how I believed all the adventures of all my favourite heroes to be
constantly enacting and re-enacting there, and how I vaguely made it
out in my own mind to be fuller of wonders and wickedness than all the
cities of the earth, I need not stop here to relate. We approached it by
degrees, and got, in due time, to the inn in the Whitechapel district,
for which we were bound. I forget whether it was the Blue Bull, or the
Blue Boar; but I know it was the Blue Something, and that its likeness
was painted up on the back of the coach.

The guard’s eye lighted on me as he was getting down, and he said at the
booking-office door:

‘Is there anybody here for a yoongster booked in the name of Murdstone,
from Bloonderstone, Sooffolk, to be left till called for?’

Nobody answered.

‘Try Copperfield, if you please, sir,’ said I, looking helplessly down.

‘Is there anybody here for a yoongster, booked in the name of Murdstone,
from Bloonderstone, Sooffolk, but owning to the name of Copperfield, to
be left till called for?’ said the guard. ‘Come! IS there anybody?’

No. There was nobody. I looked anxiously around; but the inquiry made no
impression on any of the bystanders, if I except a man in gaiters, with
one eye, who suggested that they had better put a brass collar round my
neck, and tie me up in the stable.

A ladder was brought, and I got down after the lady, who was like a
haystack: not daring to stir, until her basket was removed. The coach
was clear of passengers by that time, the luggage was very soon cleared
out, the horses had been taken out before the luggage, and now the coach
itself was wheeled and backed off by some hostlers, out of the way.
Still, nobody appeared, to claim the dusty youngster from Blunderstone,
Suffolk.

More solitary than Robinson Crusoe, who had nobody to look at him
and see that he was solitary, I went into the booking-office, and, by
invitation of the clerk on duty, passed behind the counter, and sat down
on the scale at which they weighed the luggage. Here, as I sat looking
at the parcels, packages, and books, and inhaling the smell of stables
(ever since associated with that morning), a procession of most
tremendous considerations began to march through my mind. Supposing
nobody should ever fetch me, how long would they consent to keep me
there? Would they keep me long enough to spend seven shillings? Should I
sleep at night in one of those wooden bins, with the other luggage,
and wash myself at the pump in the yard in the morning; or should I
be turned out every night, and expected to come again to be left till
called for, when the office opened next day? Supposing there was no
mistake in the case, and Mr. Murdstone had devised this plan to get rid
of me, what should I do? If they allowed me to remain there until my
seven shillings were spent, I couldn’t hope to remain there when I began
to starve. That would obviously be inconvenient and unpleasant to the
customers, besides entailing on the Blue Whatever-it-was, the risk of
funeral expenses. If I started off at once, and tried to walk back home,
how could I ever find my way, how could I ever hope to walk so far, how
could I make sure of anyone but Peggotty, even if I got back? If I
found out the nearest proper authorities, and offered myself to go for a
soldier, or a sailor, I was such a little fellow that it was most likely
they wouldn’t take me in. These thoughts, and a hundred other such
thoughts, turned me burning hot, and made me giddy with apprehension and
dismay. I was in the height of my fever when a man entered and whispered
to the clerk, who presently slanted me off the scale, and pushed me over
to him, as if I were weighed, bought, delivered, and paid for.

As I went out of the office, hand in hand with this new acquaintance,
I stole a look at him. He was a gaunt, sallow young man, with hollow
cheeks, and a chin almost as black as Mr. Murdstone’s; but there the
likeness ended, for his whiskers were shaved off, and his hair, instead
of being glossy, was rusty and dry. He was dressed in a suit of black
clothes which were rather rusty and dry too, and rather short in the
sleeves and legs; and he had a white neck-kerchief on, that was not
over-clean. I did not, and do not, suppose that this neck-kerchief was
all the linen he wore, but it was all he showed or gave any hint of.

‘You’re the new boy?’ he said. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

I supposed I was. I didn’t know.

‘I’m one of the masters at Salem House,’ he said.

I made him a bow and felt very much overawed. I was so ashamed to allude
to a commonplace thing like my box, to a scholar and a master at Salem
House, that we had gone some little distance from the yard before I had
the hardihood to mention it. We turned back, on my humbly insinuating
that it might be useful to me hereafter; and he told the clerk that the
carrier had instructions to call for it at noon.

‘If you please, sir,’ I said, when we had accomplished about the same
distance as before, ‘is it far?’

‘It’s down by Blackheath,’ he said.

‘Is that far, sir?’ I diffidently asked.

‘It’s a good step,’ he said. ‘We shall go by the stage-coach. It’s about
six miles.’

I was so faint and tired, that the idea of holding out for six miles
more, was too much for me. I took heart to tell him that I had had
nothing all night, and that if he would allow me to buy something to
eat, I should be very much obliged to him. He appeared surprised at
this--I see him stop and look at me now--and after considering for a few
moments, said he wanted to call on an old person who lived not far off,
and that the best way would be for me to buy some bread, or whatever I
liked best that was wholesome, and make my breakfast at her house, where
we could get some milk.

Accordingly we looked in at a baker’s window, and after I had made a
series of proposals to buy everything that was bilious in the shop, and
he had rejected them one by one, we decided in favour of a nice little
loaf of brown bread, which cost me threepence. Then, at a grocer’s shop,
we bought an egg and a slice of streaky bacon; which still left what
I thought a good deal of change, out of the second of the bright
shillings, and made me consider London a very cheap place. These
provisions laid in, we went on through a great noise and uproar that
confused my weary head beyond description, and over a bridge which, no
doubt, was London Bridge (indeed I think he told me so, but I was half
asleep), until we came to the poor person’s house, which was a part of
some alms-houses, as I knew by their look, and by an inscription on a
stone over the gate which said they were established for twenty-five
poor women.

The Master at Salem House lifted the latch of one of a number of little
black doors that were all alike, and had each a little diamond-paned
window on one side, and another little diamond--paned window above; and
we went into the little house of one of these poor old women, who was
blowing a fire to make a little saucepan boil. On seeing the master
enter, the old woman stopped with the bellows on her knee, and said
something that I thought sounded like ‘My Charley!’ but on seeing me
come in too, she got up, and rubbing her hands made a confused sort of
half curtsey.

‘Can you cook this young gentleman’s breakfast for him, if you please?’
said the Master at Salem House.

‘Can I?’ said the old woman. ‘Yes can I, sure!’

‘How’s Mrs. Fibbitson today?’ said the Master, looking at another old
woman in a large chair by the fire, who was such a bundle of clothes
that I feel grateful to this hour for not having sat upon her by
mistake.

‘Ah, she’s poorly,’ said the first old woman. ‘It’s one of her bad days.
If the fire was to go out, through any accident, I verily believe she’d
go out too, and never come to life again.’

As they looked at her, I looked at her also. Although it was a warm day,
she seemed to think of nothing but the fire. I fancied she was jealous
even of the saucepan on it; and I have reason to know that she took its
impressment into the service of boiling my egg and broiling my bacon, in
dudgeon; for I saw her, with my own discomfited eyes, shake her fist at
me once, when those culinary operations were going on, and no one else
was looking. The sun streamed in at the little window, but she sat with
her own back and the back of the large chair towards it, screening the
fire as if she were sedulously keeping IT warm, instead of it keeping
her warm, and watching it in a most distrustful manner. The completion
of the preparations for my breakfast, by relieving the fire, gave her
such extreme joy that she laughed aloud--and a very unmelodious laugh
she had, I must say.

I sat down to my brown loaf, my egg, and my rasher of bacon, with a
basin of milk besides, and made a most delicious meal. While I was yet
in the full enjoyment of it, the old woman of the house said to the
Master:

‘Have you got your flute with you?’

‘Yes,’ he returned.

‘Have a blow at it,’ said the old woman, coaxingly. ‘Do!’

The Master, upon this, put his hand underneath the skirts of his coat,
and brought out his flute in three pieces, which he screwed together,
and began immediately to play. My impression is, after many years of
consideration, that there never can have been anybody in the world who
played worse. He made the most dismal sounds I have ever heard produced
by any means, natural or artificial. I don’t know what the tunes
were--if there were such things in the performance at all, which I
doubt--but the influence of the strain upon me was, first, to make me
think of all my sorrows until I could hardly keep my tears back; then to
take away my appetite; and lastly, to make me so sleepy that I couldn’t
keep my eyes open. They begin to close again, and I begin to nod, as the
recollection rises fresh upon me. Once more the little room, with its
open corner cupboard, and its square-backed chairs, and its angular
little staircase leading to the room above, and its three peacock’s
feathers displayed over the mantelpiece--I remember wondering when I
first went in, what that peacock would have thought if he had known what
his finery was doomed to come to--fades from before me, and I nod, and
sleep. The flute becomes inaudible, the wheels of the coach are heard
instead, and I am on my journey. The coach jolts, I wake with a start,
and the flute has come back again, and the Master at Salem House is
sitting with his legs crossed, playing it dolefully, while the old woman
of the house looks on delighted. She fades in her turn, and he fades,
and all fades, and there is no flute, no Master, no Salem House, no
David Copperfield, no anything but heavy sleep.

I dreamed, I thought, that once while he was blowing into this dismal
flute, the old woman of the house, who had gone nearer and nearer to him
in her ecstatic admiration, leaned over the back of his chair and gave
him an affectionate squeeze round the neck, which stopped his playing
for a moment. I was in the middle state between sleeping and waking,
either then or immediately afterwards; for, as he resumed--it was a real
fact that he had stopped playing--I saw and heard the same old woman ask
Mrs. Fibbitson if it wasn’t delicious (meaning the flute), to which Mrs.
Fibbitson replied, ‘Ay, ay! yes!’ and nodded at the fire: to which, I am
persuaded, she gave the credit of the whole performance.

When I seemed to have been dozing a long while, the Master at Salem
House unscrewed his flute into the three pieces, put them up as before,
and took me away. We found the coach very near at hand, and got upon the
roof; but I was so dead sleepy, that when we stopped on the road to take
up somebody else, they put me inside where there were no passengers, and
where I slept profoundly, until I found the coach going at a footpace up
a steep hill among green leaves. Presently, it stopped, and had come to
its destination.

A short walk brought us--I mean the Master and me--to Salem House, which
was enclosed with a high brick wall, and looked very dull. Over a door
in this wall was a board with SALEM HOUSE upon it; and through a grating
in this door we were surveyed when we rang the bell by a surly face,
which I found, on the door being opened, belonged to a stout man with a
bull-neck, a wooden leg, overhanging temples, and his hair cut close all
round his head.

‘The new boy,’ said the Master.

The man with the wooden leg eyed me all over--it didn’t take long, for
there was not much of me--and locked the gate behind us, and took out
the key. We were going up to the house, among some dark heavy trees,
when he called after my conductor. ‘Hallo!’

We looked back, and he was standing at the door of a little lodge, where
he lived, with a pair of boots in his hand.

‘Here! The cobbler’s been,’ he said, ‘since you’ve been out, Mr. Mell,
and he says he can’t mend ‘em any more. He says there ain’t a bit of the
original boot left, and he wonders you expect it.’

With these words he threw the boots towards Mr. Mell, who went back a
few paces to pick them up, and looked at them (very disconsolately,
I was afraid), as we went on together. I observed then, for the first
time, that the boots he had on were a good deal the worse for wear, and
that his stocking was just breaking out in one place, like a bud.

Salem House was a square brick building with wings; of a bare and
unfurnished appearance. All about it was so very quiet, that I said to
Mr. Mell I supposed the boys were out; but he seemed surprised at my
not knowing that it was holiday-time. That all the boys were at their
several homes. That Mr. Creakle, the proprietor, was down by the
sea-side with Mrs. and Miss Creakle; and that I was sent in holiday-time
as a punishment for my misdoing, all of which he explained to me as we
went along.

I gazed upon the schoolroom into which he took me, as the most forlorn
and desolate place I had ever seen. I see it now. A long room with three
long rows of desks, and six of forms, and bristling all round with pegs
for hats and slates. Scraps of old copy-books and exercises litter the
dirty floor. Some silkworms’ houses, made of the same materials, are
scattered over the desks. Two miserable little white mice, left behind
by their owner, are running up and down in a fusty castle made of
pasteboard and wire, looking in all the corners with their red eyes
for anything to eat. A bird, in a cage very little bigger than himself,
makes a mournful rattle now and then in hopping on his perch, two inches
high, or dropping from it; but neither sings nor chirps. There is a
strange unwholesome smell upon the room, like mildewed corduroys, sweet
apples wanting air, and rotten books. There could not well be more ink
splashed about it, if it had been roofless from its first construction,
and the skies had rained, snowed, hailed, and blown ink through the
varying seasons of the year.

Mr. Mell having left me while he took his irreparable boots upstairs, I
went softly to the upper end of the room, observing all this as I crept
along. Suddenly I came upon a pasteboard placard, beautifully written,
which was lying on the desk, and bore these words: ‘TAKE CARE OF HIM. HE
BITES.’

I got upon the desk immediately, apprehensive of at least a great dog
underneath. But, though I looked all round with anxious eyes, I could
see nothing of him. I was still engaged in peering about, when Mr. Mell
came back, and asked me what I did up there?

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ says I, ‘if you please, I’m looking for the
dog.’

‘Dog?’ he says. ‘What dog?’

‘Isn’t it a dog, sir?’

‘Isn’t what a dog?’

‘That’s to be taken care of, sir; that bites.’

‘No, Copperfield,’ says he, gravely, ‘that’s not a dog. That’s a boy.
My instructions are, Copperfield, to put this placard on your back. I am
sorry to make such a beginning with you, but I must do it.’ With that he
took me down, and tied the placard, which was neatly constructed for
the purpose, on my shoulders like a knapsack; and wherever I went,
afterwards, I had the consolation of carrying it.

What I suffered from that placard, nobody can imagine. Whether it was
possible for people to see me or not, I always fancied that somebody was
reading it. It was no relief to turn round and find nobody; for wherever
my back was, there I imagined somebody always to be. That cruel man with
the wooden leg aggravated my sufferings. He was in authority; and if he
ever saw me leaning against a tree, or a wall, or the house, he roared
out from his lodge door in a stupendous voice, ‘Hallo, you sir! You
Copperfield! Show that badge conspicuous, or I’ll report you!’ The
playground was a bare gravelled yard, open to all the back of the house
and the offices; and I knew that the servants read it, and the butcher
read it, and the baker read it; that everybody, in a word, who came
backwards and forwards to the house, of a morning when I was ordered to
walk there, read that I was to be taken care of, for I bit, I recollect
that I positively began to have a dread of myself, as a kind of wild boy
who did bite.

There was an old door in this playground, on which the boys had a
custom of carving their names. It was completely covered with such
inscriptions. In my dread of the end of the vacation and their coming
back, I could not read a boy’s name, without inquiring in what tone and
with what emphasis HE would read, ‘Take care of him. He bites.’ There
was one boy--a certain J. Steerforth--who cut his name very deep and
very often, who, I conceived, would read it in a rather strong voice,
and afterwards pull my hair. There was another boy, one Tommy Traddles,
who I dreaded would make game of it, and pretend to be dreadfully
frightened of me. There was a third, George Demple, who I fancied would
sing it. I have looked, a little shrinking creature, at that door, until
the owners of all the names--there were five-and-forty of them in the
school then, Mr. Mell said--seemed to send me to Coventry by general
acclamation, and to cry out, each in his own way, ‘Take care of him. He
bites!’

It was the same with the places at the desks and forms. It was the same
with the groves of deserted bedsteads I peeped at, on my way to, and
when I was in, my own bed. I remember dreaming night after night, of
being with my mother as she used to be, or of going to a party at Mr.
Peggotty’s, or of travelling outside the stage-coach, or of dining again
with my unfortunate friend the waiter, and in all these circumstances
making people scream and stare, by the unhappy disclosure that I had
nothing on but my little night-shirt, and that placard.

In the monotony of my life, and in my constant apprehension of the
re-opening of the school, it was such an insupportable affliction! I had
long tasks every day to do with Mr. Mell; but I did them, there being
no Mr. and Miss Murdstone here, and got through them without disgrace.
Before, and after them, I walked about--supervised, as I have mentioned,
by the man with the wooden leg. How vividly I call to mind the damp
about the house, the green cracked flagstones in the court, an old leaky
water-butt, and the discoloured trunks of some of the grim trees, which
seemed to have dripped more in the rain than other trees, and to have
blown less in the sun! At one we dined, Mr. Mell and I, at the upper end
of a long bare dining-room, full of deal tables, and smelling of fat.
Then, we had more tasks until tea, which Mr. Mell drank out of a blue
teacup, and I out of a tin pot. All day long, and until seven or eight
in the evening, Mr. Mell, at his own detached desk in the schoolroom,
worked hard with pen, ink, ruler, books, and writing-paper, making out
the bills (as I found) for last half-year. When he had put up his things
for the night he took out his flute, and blew at it, until I almost
thought he would gradually blow his whole being into the large hole at
the top, and ooze away at the keys.

I picture my small self in the dimly-lighted rooms, sitting with my
head upon my hand, listening to the doleful performance of Mr. Mell,
and conning tomorrow’s lessons. I picture myself with my books shut up,
still listening to the doleful performance of Mr. Mell, and listening
through it to what used to be at home, and to the blowing of the wind
on Yarmouth flats, and feeling very sad and solitary. I picture myself
going up to bed, among the unused rooms, and sitting on my bed-side
crying for a comfortable word from Peggotty. I picture myself coming
downstairs in the morning, and looking through a long ghastly gash of a
staircase window at the school-bell hanging on the top of an out-house
with a weathercock above it; and dreading the time when it shall ring J.
Steerforth and the rest to work: which is only second, in my foreboding
apprehensions, to the time when the man with the wooden leg shall unlock
the rusty gate to give admission to the awful Mr. Creakle. I cannot
think I was a very dangerous character in any of these aspects, but in
all of them I carried the same warning on my back.

Mr. Mell never said much to me, but he was never harsh to me. I suppose
we were company to each other, without talking. I forgot to mention that
he would talk to himself sometimes, and grin, and clench his fist, and
grind his teeth, and pull his hair in an unaccountable manner. But he
had these peculiarities: and at first they frightened me, though I soon
got used to them.



CHAPTER 6. I ENLARGE MY CIRCLE OF ACQUAINTANCE


I HAD led this life about a month, when the man with the wooden leg
began to stump about with a mop and a bucket of water, from which I
inferred that preparations were making to receive Mr. Creakle and the
boys. I was not mistaken; for the mop came into the schoolroom before
long, and turned out Mr. Mell and me, who lived where we could, and got
on how we could, for some days, during which we were always in the way
of two or three young women, who had rarely shown themselves before, and
were so continually in the midst of dust that I sneezed almost as much
as if Salem House had been a great snuff-box.

One day I was informed by Mr. Mell that Mr. Creakle would be home that
evening. In the evening, after tea, I heard that he was come. Before
bedtime, I was fetched by the man with the wooden leg to appear before
him.

Mr. Creakle’s part of the house was a good deal more comfortable than
ours, and he had a snug bit of garden that looked pleasant after the
dusty playground, which was such a desert in miniature, that I thought
no one but a camel, or a dromedary, could have felt at home in it. It
seemed to me a bold thing even to take notice that the passage looked
comfortable, as I went on my way, trembling, to Mr. Creakle’s presence:
which so abashed me, when I was ushered into it, that I hardly saw
Mrs. Creakle or Miss Creakle (who were both there, in the parlour), or
anything but Mr. Creakle, a stout gentleman with a bunch of watch-chain
and seals, in an arm-chair, with a tumbler and bottle beside him.

‘So!’ said Mr. Creakle. ‘This is the young gentleman whose teeth are to
be filed! Turn him round.’

The wooden-legged man turned me about so as to exhibit the placard; and
having afforded time for a full survey of it, turned me about again,
with my face to Mr. Creakle, and posted himself at Mr. Creakle’s side.
Mr. Creakle’s face was fiery, and his eyes were small, and deep in his
head; he had thick veins in his forehead, a little nose, and a large
chin. He was bald on the top of his head; and had some thin wet-looking
hair that was just turning grey, brushed across each temple, so that
the two sides interlaced on his forehead. But the circumstance about
him which impressed me most, was, that he had no voice, but spoke in a
whisper. The exertion this cost him, or the consciousness of talking in
that feeble way, made his angry face so much more angry, and his thick
veins so much thicker, when he spoke, that I am not surprised, on
looking back, at this peculiarity striking me as his chief one. ‘Now,’
said Mr. Creakle. ‘What’s the report of this boy?’

‘There’s nothing against him yet,’ returned the man with the wooden leg.
‘There has been no opportunity.’

I thought Mr. Creakle was disappointed. I thought Mrs. and Miss Creakle
(at whom I now glanced for the first time, and who were, both, thin and
quiet) were not disappointed.

‘Come here, sir!’ said Mr. Creakle, beckoning to me.

‘Come here!’ said the man with the wooden leg, repeating the gesture.

‘I have the happiness of knowing your father-in-law,’ whispered Mr.
Creakle, taking me by the ear; ‘and a worthy man he is, and a man of
a strong character. He knows me, and I know him. Do YOU know me? Hey?’
said Mr. Creakle, pinching my ear with ferocious playfulness.

‘Not yet, sir,’ I said, flinching with the pain.

‘Not yet? Hey?’ repeated Mr. Creakle. ‘But you will soon. Hey?’

‘You will soon. Hey?’ repeated the man with the wooden leg. I afterwards
found that he generally acted, with his strong voice, as Mr. Creakle’s
interpreter to the boys.

I was very much frightened, and said, I hoped so, if he pleased. I felt,
all this while, as if my ear were blazing; he pinched it so hard.

‘I’ll tell you what I am,’ whispered Mr. Creakle, letting it go at last,
with a screw at parting that brought the water into my eyes. ‘I’m a
Tartar.’

‘A Tartar,’ said the man with the wooden leg.

‘When I say I’ll do a thing, I do it,’ said Mr. Creakle; ‘and when I say
I will have a thing done, I will have it done.’

‘--Will have a thing done, I will have it done,’ repeated the man with
the wooden leg.

‘I am a determined character,’ said Mr. Creakle. ‘That’s what I am. I
do my duty. That’s what I do. My flesh and blood’--he looked at Mrs.
Creakle as he said this--‘when it rises against me, is not my flesh
and blood. I discard it. Has that fellow’--to the man with the wooden
leg--‘been here again?’

‘No,’ was the answer.

‘No,’ said Mr. Creakle. ‘He knows better. He knows me. Let him keep
away. I say let him keep away,’ said Mr. Creakle, striking his hand upon
the table, and looking at Mrs. Creakle, ‘for he knows me. Now you have
begun to know me too, my young friend, and you may go. Take him away.’

I was very glad to be ordered away, for Mrs. and Miss Creakle were both
wiping their eyes, and I felt as uncomfortable for them as I did for
myself. But I had a petition on my mind which concerned me so nearly,
that I couldn’t help saying, though I wondered at my own courage:

‘If you please, sir--’

Mr. Creakle whispered, ‘Hah! What’s this?’ and bent his eyes upon me, as
if he would have burnt me up with them.

‘If you please, sir,’ I faltered, ‘if I might be allowed (I am very
sorry indeed, sir, for what I did) to take this writing off, before the
boys come back--’

Whether Mr. Creakle was in earnest, or whether he only did it to
frighten me, I don’t know, but he made a burst out of his chair, before
which I precipitately retreated, without waiting for the escort of the
man with the wooden leg, and never once stopped until I reached my own
bedroom, where, finding I was not pursued, I went to bed, as it was
time, and lay quaking, for a couple of hours.

Next morning Mr. Sharp came back. Mr. Sharp was the first master, and
superior to Mr. Mell. Mr. Mell took his meals with the boys, but
Mr. Sharp dined and supped at Mr. Creakle’s table. He was a limp,
delicate-looking gentleman, I thought, with a good deal of nose, and a
way of carrying his head on one side, as if it were a little too heavy
for him. His hair was very smooth and wavy; but I was informed by the
very first boy who came back that it was a wig (a second-hand one HE
said), and that Mr. Sharp went out every Saturday afternoon to get it
curled.

It was no other than Tommy Traddles who gave me this piece of
intelligence. He was the first boy who returned. He introduced himself
by informing me that I should find his name on the right-hand corner of
the gate, over the top-bolt; upon that I said, ‘Traddles?’ to which he
replied, ‘The same,’ and then he asked me for a full account of myself
and family.

It was a happy circumstance for me that Traddles came back first. He
enjoyed my placard so much, that he saved me from the embarrassment of
either disclosure or concealment, by presenting me to every other boy
who came back, great or small, immediately on his arrival, in this form
of introduction, ‘Look here! Here’s a game!’ Happily, too, the greater
part of the boys came back low-spirited, and were not so boisterous at
my expense as I had expected. Some of them certainly did dance about me
like wild Indians, and the greater part could not resist the temptation
of pretending that I was a dog, and patting and soothing me, lest I
should bite, and saying, ‘Lie down, sir!’ and calling me Towzer. This
was naturally confusing, among so many strangers, and cost me some
tears, but on the whole it was much better than I had anticipated.

I was not considered as being formally received into the school,
however, until J. Steerforth arrived. Before this boy, who was
reputed to be a great scholar, and was very good-looking, and at least
half-a-dozen years my senior, I was carried as before a magistrate. He
inquired, under a shed in the playground, into the particulars of my
punishment, and was pleased to express his opinion that it was ‘a jolly
shame’; for which I became bound to him ever afterwards.

‘What money have you got, Copperfield?’ he said, walking aside with
me when he had disposed of my affair in these terms. I told him seven
shillings.

‘You had better give it to me to take care of,’ he said. ‘At least, you
can if you like. You needn’t if you don’t like.’

I hastened to comply with his friendly suggestion, and opening
Peggotty’s purse, turned it upside down into his hand.

‘Do you want to spend anything now?’ he asked me.

‘No thank you,’ I replied.

‘You can, if you like, you know,’ said Steerforth. ‘Say the word.’

‘No, thank you, sir,’ I repeated.

‘Perhaps you’d like to spend a couple of shillings or so, in a bottle of
currant wine by and by, up in the bedroom?’ said Steerforth. ‘You belong
to my bedroom, I find.’

It certainly had not occurred to me before, but I said, Yes, I should
like that.

‘Very good,’ said Steerforth. ‘You’ll be glad to spend another shilling
or so, in almond cakes, I dare say?’

I said, Yes, I should like that, too.

‘And another shilling or so in biscuits, and another in fruit, eh?’ said
Steerforth. ‘I say, young Copperfield, you’re going it!’

I smiled because he smiled, but I was a little troubled in my mind, too.

‘Well!’ said Steerforth. ‘We must make it stretch as far as we can;
that’s all. I’ll do the best in my power for you. I can go out when I
like, and I’ll smuggle the prog in.’ With these words he put the money
in his pocket, and kindly told me not to make myself uneasy; he would
take care it should be all right. He was as good as his word, if that
were all right which I had a secret misgiving was nearly all wrong--for
I feared it was a waste of my mother’s two half-crowns--though I had
preserved the piece of paper they were wrapped in: which was a precious
saving. When we went upstairs to bed, he produced the whole seven
shillings’ worth, and laid it out on my bed in the moonlight, saying:

‘There you are, young Copperfield, and a royal spread you’ve got.’

I couldn’t think of doing the honours of the feast, at my time of life,
while he was by; my hand shook at the very thought of it. I begged him
to do me the favour of presiding; and my request being seconded by the
other boys who were in that room, he acceded to it, and sat upon my
pillow, handing round the viands--with perfect fairness, I must say--and
dispensing the currant wine in a little glass without a foot, which was
his own property. As to me, I sat on his left hand, and the rest were
grouped about us, on the nearest beds and on the floor.

How well I recollect our sitting there, talking in whispers; or their
talking, and my respectfully listening, I ought rather to say; the
moonlight falling a little way into the room, through the window,
painting a pale window on the floor, and the greater part of us in
shadow, except when Steerforth dipped a match into a phosphorus-box,
when he wanted to look for anything on the board, and shed a blue glare
over us that was gone directly! A certain mysterious feeling, consequent
on the darkness, the secrecy of the revel, and the whisper in which
everything was said, steals over me again, and I listen to all they tell
me with a vague feeling of solemnity and awe, which makes me glad that
they are all so near, and frightens me (though I feign to laugh) when
Traddles pretends to see a ghost in the corner.

I heard all kinds of things about the school and all belonging to it.
I heard that Mr. Creakle had not preferred his claim to being a Tartar
without reason; that he was the sternest and most severe of masters;
that he laid about him, right and left, every day of his life, charging
in among the boys like a trooper, and slashing away, unmercifully. That
he knew nothing himself, but the art of slashing, being more ignorant
(J. Steerforth said) than the lowest boy in the school; that he had
been, a good many years ago, a small hop-dealer in the Borough, and had
taken to the schooling business after being bankrupt in hops, and making
away with Mrs. Creakle’s money. With a good deal more of that sort,
which I wondered how they knew.

I heard that the man with the wooden leg, whose name was Tungay, was an
obstinate barbarian who had formerly assisted in the hop business, but
had come into the scholastic line with Mr. Creakle, in consequence,
as was supposed among the boys, of his having broken his leg in Mr.
Creakle’s service, and having done a deal of dishonest work for him,
and knowing his secrets. I heard that with the single exception of Mr.
Creakle, Tungay considered the whole establishment, masters and boys,
as his natural enemies, and that the only delight of his life was to be
sour and malicious. I heard that Mr. Creakle had a son, who had not been
Tungay’s friend, and who, assisting in the school, had once held some
remonstrance with his father on an occasion when its discipline was very
cruelly exercised, and was supposed, besides, to have protested against
his father’s usage of his mother. I heard that Mr. Creakle had turned
him out of doors, in consequence; and that Mrs. and Miss Creakle had
been in a sad way, ever since.

But the greatest wonder that I heard of Mr. Creakle was, there being one
boy in the school on whom he never ventured to lay a hand, and that
boy being J. Steerforth. Steerforth himself confirmed this when it was
stated, and said that he should like to begin to see him do it. On being
asked by a mild boy (not me) how he would proceed if he did begin to see
him do it, he dipped a match into his phosphorus-box on purpose to shed
a glare over his reply, and said he would commence by knocking him down
with a blow on the forehead from the seven-and-sixpenny ink-bottle
that was always on the mantelpiece. We sat in the dark for some time,
breathless.

I heard that Mr. Sharp and Mr. Mell were both supposed to be wretchedly
paid; and that when there was hot and cold meat for dinner at Mr.
Creakle’s table, Mr. Sharp was always expected to say he preferred cold;
which was again corroborated by J. Steerforth, the only parlour-boarder.
I heard that Mr. Sharp’s wig didn’t fit him; and that he needn’t be so
‘bounceable’--somebody else said ‘bumptious’--about it, because his own
red hair was very plainly to be seen behind.

I heard that one boy, who was a coal-merchant’s son, came as a set-off
against the coal-bill, and was called, on that account, ‘Exchange or
Barter’--a name selected from the arithmetic book as expressing this
arrangement. I heard that the table beer was a robbery of parents, and
the pudding an imposition. I heard that Miss Creakle was regarded by the
school in general as being in love with Steerforth; and I am sure, as I
sat in the dark, thinking of his nice voice, and his fine face, and his
easy manner, and his curling hair, I thought it very likely. I heard
that Mr. Mell was not a bad sort of fellow, but hadn’t a sixpence to
bless himself with; and that there was no doubt that old Mrs. Mell, his
mother, was as poor as job. I thought of my breakfast then, and what had
sounded like ‘My Charley!’ but I was, I am glad to remember, as mute as
a mouse about it.

The hearing of all this, and a good deal more, outlasted the banquet
some time. The greater part of the guests had gone to bed as soon as the
eating and drinking were over; and we, who had remained whispering and
listening half-undressed, at last betook ourselves to bed, too.

‘Good night, young Copperfield,’ said Steerforth. ‘I’ll take care of
you.’ ‘You’re very kind,’ I gratefully returned. ‘I am very much obliged
to you.’

‘You haven’t got a sister, have you?’ said Steerforth, yawning.

‘No,’ I answered.

‘That’s a pity,’ said Steerforth. ‘If you had had one, I should think
she would have been a pretty, timid, little, bright-eyed sort of girl. I
should have liked to know her. Good night, young Copperfield.’

‘Good night, sir,’ I replied.

I thought of him very much after I went to bed, and raised myself,
I recollect, to look at him where he lay in the moonlight, with his
handsome face turned up, and his head reclining easily on his arm. He
was a person of great power in my eyes; that was, of course, the reason
of my mind running on him. No veiled future dimly glanced upon him in
the moonbeams. There was no shadowy picture of his footsteps, in the
garden that I dreamed of walking in all night.



CHAPTER 7. MY ‘FIRST HALF’ AT SALEM HOUSE


School began in earnest next day. A profound impression was made
upon me, I remember, by the roar of voices in the schoolroom suddenly
becoming hushed as death when Mr. Creakle entered after breakfast, and
stood in the doorway looking round upon us like a giant in a story-book
surveying his captives.

Tungay stood at Mr. Creakle’s elbow. He had no occasion, I thought,
to cry out ‘Silence!’ so ferociously, for the boys were all struck
speechless and motionless.

Mr. Creakle was seen to speak, and Tungay was heard, to this effect.

‘Now, boys, this is a new half. Take care what you’re about, in this new
half. Come fresh up to the lessons, I advise you, for I come fresh up
to the punishment. I won’t flinch. It will be of no use your rubbing
yourselves; you won’t rub the marks out that I shall give you. Now get
to work, every boy!’

When this dreadful exordium was over, and Tungay had stumped out again,
Mr. Creakle came to where I sat, and told me that if I were famous for
biting, he was famous for biting, too. He then showed me the cane, and
asked me what I thought of THAT, for a tooth? Was it a sharp tooth, hey?
Was it a double tooth, hey? Had it a deep prong, hey? Did it bite, hey?
Did it bite? At every question he gave me a fleshy cut with it that made
me writhe; so I was very soon made free of Salem House (as Steerforth
said), and was very soon in tears also.

Not that I mean to say these were special marks of distinction,
which only I received. On the contrary, a large majority of the boys
(especially the smaller ones) were visited with similar instances
of notice, as Mr. Creakle made the round of the schoolroom. Half the
establishment was writhing and crying, before the day’s work began; and
how much of it had writhed and cried before the day’s work was over, I
am really afraid to recollect, lest I should seem to exaggerate.

I should think there never can have been a man who enjoyed his
profession more than Mr. Creakle did. He had a delight in cutting at
the boys, which was like the satisfaction of a craving appetite. I am
confident that he couldn’t resist a chubby boy, especially; that there
was a fascination in such a subject, which made him restless in his
mind, until he had scored and marked him for the day. I was chubby
myself, and ought to know. I am sure when I think of the fellow now, my
blood rises against him with the disinterested indignation I should
feel if I could have known all about him without having ever been in his
power; but it rises hotly, because I know him to have been an incapable
brute, who had no more right to be possessed of the great trust he held,
than to be Lord High Admiral, or Commander-in-Chief--in either of
which capacities it is probable that he would have done infinitely less
mischief.

Miserable little propitiators of a remorseless Idol, how abject we were
to him! What a launch in life I think it now, on looking back, to be so
mean and servile to a man of such parts and pretensions!

Here I sit at the desk again, watching his eye--humbly watching his eye,
as he rules a ciphering-book for another victim whose hands have just
been flattened by that identical ruler, and who is trying to wipe the
sting out with a pocket-handkerchief. I have plenty to do. I don’t watch
his eye in idleness, but because I am morbidly attracted to it, in a
dread desire to know what he will do next, and whether it will be my
turn to suffer, or somebody else’s. A lane of small boys beyond me, with
the same interest in his eye, watch it too. I think he knows it,
though he pretends he don’t. He makes dreadful mouths as he rules the
ciphering-book; and now he throws his eye sideways down our lane, and we
all droop over our books and tremble. A moment afterwards we are again
eyeing him. An unhappy culprit, found guilty of imperfect exercise,
approaches at his command. The culprit falters excuses, and professes a
determination to do better tomorrow. Mr. Creakle cuts a joke before he
beats him, and we laugh at it,--miserable little dogs, we laugh, with
our visages as white as ashes, and our hearts sinking into our boots.

Here I sit at the desk again, on a drowsy summer afternoon. A buzz and
hum go up around me, as if the boys were so many bluebottles. A cloggy
sensation of the lukewarm fat of meat is upon me (we dined an hour or
two ago), and my head is as heavy as so much lead. I would give the
world to go to sleep. I sit with my eye on Mr. Creakle, blinking at him
like a young owl; when sleep overpowers me for a minute, he still looms
through my slumber, ruling those ciphering-books, until he softly comes
behind me and wakes me to plainer perception of him, with a red ridge
across my back.

Here I am in the playground, with my eye still fascinated by him, though
I can’t see him. The window at a little distance from which I know he is
having his dinner, stands for him, and I eye that instead. If he shows
his face near it, mine assumes an imploring and submissive expression.
If he looks out through the glass, the boldest boy (Steerforth excepted)
stops in the middle of a shout or yell, and becomes contemplative. One
day, Traddles (the most unfortunate boy in the world) breaks that window
accidentally, with a ball. I shudder at this moment with the tremendous
sensation of seeing it done, and feeling that the ball has bounded on to
Mr. Creakle’s sacred head.

Poor Traddles! In a tight sky-blue suit that made his arms and legs like
German sausages, or roly-poly puddings, he was the merriest and most
miserable of all the boys. He was always being caned--I think he was
caned every day that half-year, except one holiday Monday when he was
only ruler’d on both hands--and was always going to write to his uncle
about it, and never did. After laying his head on the desk for a little
while, he would cheer up, somehow, begin to laugh again, and draw
skeletons all over his slate, before his eyes were dry. I used at first
to wonder what comfort Traddles found in drawing skeletons; and for some
time looked upon him as a sort of hermit, who reminded himself by those
symbols of mortality that caning couldn’t last for ever. But I believe
he only did it because they were easy, and didn’t want any features.

He was very honourable, Traddles was, and held it as a solemn duty
in the boys to stand by one another. He suffered for this on several
occasions; and particularly once, when Steerforth laughed in church,
and the Beadle thought it was Traddles, and took him out. I see him now,
going away in custody, despised by the congregation. He never said
who was the real offender, though he smarted for it next day, and was
imprisoned so many hours that he came forth with a whole churchyard-full
of skeletons swarming all over his Latin Dictionary. But he had his
reward. Steerforth said there was nothing of the sneak in Traddles, and
we all felt that to be the highest praise. For my part, I could have
gone through a good deal (though I was much less brave than Traddles,
and nothing like so old) to have won such a recompense.

To see Steerforth walk to church before us, arm-in-arm with Miss
Creakle, was one of the great sights of my life. I didn’t think Miss
Creakle equal to little Em’ly in point of beauty, and I didn’t love
her (I didn’t dare); but I thought her a young lady of extraordinary
attractions, and in point of gentility not to be surpassed. When
Steerforth, in white trousers, carried her parasol for her, I felt proud
to know him; and believed that she could not choose but adore him with
all her heart. Mr. Sharp and Mr. Mell were both notable personages in my
eyes; but Steerforth was to them what the sun was to two stars.

Steerforth continued his protection of me, and proved a very useful
friend; since nobody dared to annoy one whom he honoured with his
countenance. He couldn’t--or at all events he didn’t--defend me from Mr.
Creakle, who was very severe with me; but whenever I had been treated
worse than usual, he always told me that I wanted a little of his pluck,
and that he wouldn’t have stood it himself; which I felt he intended
for encouragement, and considered to be very kind of him. There was one
advantage, and only one that I know of, in Mr. Creakle’s severity. He
found my placard in his way when he came up or down behind the form on
which I sat, and wanted to make a cut at me in passing; for this reason
it was soon taken off, and I saw it no more.

An accidental circumstance cemented the intimacy between Steerforth
and me, in a manner that inspired me with great pride and satisfaction,
though it sometimes led to inconvenience. It happened on one occasion,
when he was doing me the honour of talking to me in the playground, that
I hazarded the observation that something or somebody--I forget what
now--was like something or somebody in Peregrine Pickle. He said nothing
at the time; but when I was going to bed at night, asked me if I had got
that book?

I told him no, and explained how it was that I had read it, and all
those other books of which I have made mention.

‘And do you recollect them?’ Steerforth said.

‘Oh yes,’ I replied; I had a good memory, and I believed I recollected
them very well.

‘Then I tell you what, young Copperfield,’ said Steerforth, ‘you
shall tell ‘em to me. I can’t get to sleep very early at night, and I
generally wake rather early in the morning. We’ll go over ‘em one after
another. We’ll make some regular Arabian Nights of it.’

I felt extremely flattered by this arrangement, and we commenced
carrying it into execution that very evening. What ravages I committed
on my favourite authors in the course of my interpretation of them, I am
not in a condition to say, and should be very unwilling to know; but
I had a profound faith in them, and I had, to the best of my belief,
a simple, earnest manner of narrating what I did narrate; and these
qualities went a long way.

The drawback was, that I was often sleepy at night, or out of spirits
and indisposed to resume the story; and then it was rather hard work,
and it must be done; for to disappoint or to displease Steerforth was of
course out of the question. In the morning, too, when I felt weary, and
should have enjoyed another hour’s repose very much, it was a tiresome
thing to be roused, like the Sultana Scheherazade, and forced into a
long story before the getting-up bell rang; but Steerforth was resolute;
and as he explained to me, in return, my sums and exercises, and
anything in my tasks that was too hard for me, I was no loser by the
transaction. Let me do myself justice, however. I was moved by no
interested or selfish motive, nor was I moved by fear of him. I admired
and loved him, and his approval was return enough. It was so precious to
me that I look back on these trifles, now, with an aching heart.

Steerforth was considerate, too; and showed his consideration, in
one particular instance, in an unflinching manner that was a little
tantalizing, I suspect, to poor Traddles and the rest. Peggotty’s
promised letter--what a comfortable letter it was!--arrived before
‘the half’ was many weeks old; and with it a cake in a perfect nest
of oranges, and two bottles of cowslip wine. This treasure, as in duty
bound, I laid at the feet of Steerforth, and begged him to dispense.

‘Now, I’ll tell you what, young Copperfield,’ said he: ‘the wine shall
be kept to wet your whistle when you are story-telling.’

I blushed at the idea, and begged him, in my modesty, not to think of
it. But he said he had observed I was sometimes hoarse--a little roopy
was his exact expression--and it should be, every drop, devoted to the
purpose he had mentioned. Accordingly, it was locked up in his box, and
drawn off by himself in a phial, and administered to me through a
piece of quill in the cork, when I was supposed to be in want of a
restorative. Sometimes, to make it a more sovereign specific, he was so
kind as to squeeze orange juice into it, or to stir it up with ginger,
or dissolve a peppermint drop in it; and although I cannot assert that
the flavour was improved by these experiments, or that it was exactly
the compound one would have chosen for a stomachic, the last thing at
night and the first thing in the morning, I drank it gratefully and was
very sensible of his attention.

We seem, to me, to have been months over Peregrine, and months more over
the other stories. The institution never flagged for want of a story, I
am certain; and the wine lasted out almost as well as the matter. Poor
Traddles--I never think of that boy but with a strange disposition to
laugh, and with tears in my eyes--was a sort of chorus, in general;
and affected to be convulsed with mirth at the comic parts, and to be
overcome with fear when there was any passage of an alarming character
in the narrative. This rather put me out, very often. It was a great
jest of his, I recollect, to pretend that he couldn’t keep his teeth
from chattering, whenever mention was made of an Alguazill in connexion
with the adventures of Gil Blas; and I remember that when Gil Blas met
the captain of the robbers in Madrid, this unlucky joker counterfeited
such an ague of terror, that he was overheard by Mr. Creakle, who
was prowling about the passage, and handsomely flogged for disorderly
conduct in the bedroom. Whatever I had within me that was romantic and
dreamy, was encouraged by so much story-telling in the dark; and in that
respect the pursuit may not have been very profitable to me. But the
being cherished as a kind of plaything in my room, and the consciousness
that this accomplishment of mine was bruited about among the boys, and
attracted a good deal of notice to me though I was the youngest there,
stimulated me to exertion. In a school carried on by sheer cruelty,
whether it is presided over by a dunce or not, there is not likely to
be much learnt. I believe our boys were, generally, as ignorant a set
as any schoolboys in existence; they were too much troubled and knocked
about to learn; they could no more do that to advantage, than any one
can do anything to advantage in a life of constant misfortune, torment,
and worry. But my little vanity, and Steerforth’s help, urged me on
somehow; and without saving me from much, if anything, in the way of
punishment, made me, for the time I was there, an exception to the
general body, insomuch that I did steadily pick up some crumbs of
knowledge.

In this I was much assisted by Mr. Mell, who had a liking for me that
I am grateful to remember. It always gave me pain to observe that
Steerforth treated him with systematic disparagement, and seldom lost
an occasion of wounding his feelings, or inducing others to do so.
This troubled me the more for a long time, because I had soon told
Steerforth, from whom I could no more keep such a secret, than I could
keep a cake or any other tangible possession, about the two old women
Mr. Mell had taken me to see; and I was always afraid that Steerforth
would let it out, and twit him with it.

We little thought, any one of us, I dare say, when I ate my breakfast
that first morning, and went to sleep under the shadow of the peacock’s
feathers to the sound of the flute, what consequences would come of the
introduction into those alms-houses of my insignificant person. But the
visit had its unforeseen consequences; and of a serious sort, too, in
their way.

One day when Mr. Creakle kept the house from indisposition, which
naturally diffused a lively joy through the school, there was a good
deal of noise in the course of the morning’s work. The great relief and
satisfaction experienced by the boys made them difficult to manage; and
though the dreaded Tungay brought his wooden leg in twice or thrice, and
took notes of the principal offenders’ names, no great impression was
made by it, as they were pretty sure of getting into trouble tomorrow,
do what they would, and thought it wise, no doubt, to enjoy themselves
today.

It was, properly, a half-holiday; being Saturday. But as the noise in
the playground would have disturbed Mr. Creakle, and the weather was
not favourable for going out walking, we were ordered into school in the
afternoon, and set some lighter tasks than usual, which were made for
the occasion. It was the day of the week on which Mr. Sharp went out to
get his wig curled; so Mr. Mell, who always did the drudgery, whatever
it was, kept school by himself. If I could associate the idea of a bull
or a bear with anyone so mild as Mr. Mell, I should think of him, in
connexion with that afternoon when the uproar was at its height, as of
one of those animals, baited by a thousand dogs. I recall him bending
his aching head, supported on his bony hand, over the book on his desk,
and wretchedly endeavouring to get on with his tiresome work, amidst an
uproar that might have made the Speaker of the House of Commons giddy.
Boys started in and out of their places, playing at puss in the corner
with other boys; there were laughing boys, singing boys, talking boys,
dancing boys, howling boys; boys shuffled with their feet, boys whirled
about him, grinning, making faces, mimicking him behind his back and
before his eyes; mimicking his poverty, his boots, his coat, his mother,
everything belonging to him that they should have had consideration for.

‘Silence!’ cried Mr. Mell, suddenly rising up, and striking his desk
with the book. ‘What does this mean! It’s impossible to bear it. It’s
maddening. How can you do it to me, boys?’

It was my book that he struck his desk with; and as I stood beside him,
following his eye as it glanced round the room, I saw the boys all stop,
some suddenly surprised, some half afraid, and some sorry perhaps.

Steerforth’s place was at the bottom of the school, at the opposite end
of the long room. He was lounging with his back against the wall, and
his hands in his pockets, and looked at Mr. Mell with his mouth shut up
as if he were whistling, when Mr. Mell looked at him.

‘Silence, Mr. Steerforth!’ said Mr. Mell.

‘Silence yourself,’ said Steerforth, turning red. ‘Whom are you talking
to?’

‘Sit down,’ said Mr. Mell.

‘Sit down yourself,’ said Steerforth, ‘and mind your business.’

There was a titter, and some applause; but Mr. Mell was so white, that
silence immediately succeeded; and one boy, who had darted out behind
him to imitate his mother again, changed his mind, and pretended to want
a pen mended.

‘If you think, Steerforth,’ said Mr. Mell, ‘that I am not acquainted
with the power you can establish over any mind here’--he laid his hand,
without considering what he did (as I supposed), upon my head--‘or that
I have not observed you, within a few minutes, urging your juniors on to
every sort of outrage against me, you are mistaken.’

‘I don’t give myself the trouble of thinking at all about you,’ said
Steerforth, coolly; ‘so I’m not mistaken, as it happens.’

‘And when you make use of your position of favouritism here, sir,’
pursued Mr. Mell, with his lip trembling very much, ‘to insult a
gentleman--’

‘A what?--where is he?’ said Steerforth.

Here somebody cried out, ‘Shame, J. Steerforth! Too bad!’ It was
Traddles; whom Mr. Mell instantly discomfited by bidding him hold his
tongue. --‘To insult one who is not fortunate in life, sir, and who
never gave you the least offence, and the many reasons for not insulting
whom you are old enough and wise enough to understand,’ said Mr. Mell,
with his lips trembling more and more, ‘you commit a mean and base
action. You can sit down or stand up as you please, sir. Copperfield, go
on.’

‘Young Copperfield,’ said Steerforth, coming forward up the room,
‘stop a bit. I tell you what, Mr. Mell, once for all. When you take the
liberty of calling me mean or base, or anything of that sort, you are
an impudent beggar. You are always a beggar, you know; but when you do
that, you are an impudent beggar.’

I am not clear whether he was going to strike Mr. Mell, or Mr. Mell was
going to strike him, or there was any such intention on either side.
I saw a rigidity come upon the whole school as if they had been turned
into stone, and found Mr. Creakle in the midst of us, with Tungay at his
side, and Mrs. and Miss Creakle looking in at the door as if they were
frightened. Mr. Mell, with his elbows on his desk and his face in his
hands, sat, for some moments, quite still.

‘Mr. Mell,’ said Mr. Creakle, shaking him by the arm; and his whisper
was so audible now, that Tungay felt it unnecessary to repeat his words;
‘you have not forgotten yourself, I hope?’

‘No, sir, no,’ returned the Master, showing his face, and shaking his
head, and rubbing his hands in great agitation. ‘No, sir. No. I have
remembered myself, I--no, Mr. Creakle, I have not forgotten myself, I--I
have remembered myself, sir. I--I--could wish you had remembered me a
little sooner, Mr. Creakle. It--it--would have been more kind, sir, more
just, sir. It would have saved me something, sir.’

Mr. Creakle, looking hard at Mr. Mell, put his hand on Tungay’s
shoulder, and got his feet upon the form close by, and sat upon the
desk. After still looking hard at Mr. Mell from his throne, as he
shook his head, and rubbed his hands, and remained in the same state of
agitation, Mr. Creakle turned to Steerforth, and said:

‘Now, sir, as he don’t condescend to tell me, what is this?’

Steerforth evaded the question for a little while; looking in scorn and
anger on his opponent, and remaining silent. I could not help thinking
even in that interval, I remember, what a noble fellow he was in
appearance, and how homely and plain Mr. Mell looked opposed to him.

‘What did he mean by talking about favourites, then?’ said Steerforth at
length.

‘Favourites?’ repeated Mr. Creakle, with the veins in his forehead
swelling quickly. ‘Who talked about favourites?’

‘He did,’ said Steerforth.

‘And pray, what did you mean by that, sir?’ demanded Mr. Creakle,
turning angrily on his assistant.

‘I meant, Mr. Creakle,’ he returned in a low voice, ‘as I said; that
no pupil had a right to avail himself of his position of favouritism to
degrade me.’

‘To degrade YOU?’ said Mr. Creakle. ‘My stars! But give me leave to ask
you, Mr. What’s-your-name’; and here Mr. Creakle folded his arms, cane
and all, upon his chest, and made such a knot of his brows that his
little eyes were hardly visible below them; ‘whether, when you talk
about favourites, you showed proper respect to me? To me, sir,’ said Mr.
Creakle, darting his head at him suddenly, and drawing it back again,
‘the principal of this establishment, and your employer.’

‘It was not judicious, sir, I am willing to admit,’ said Mr. Mell. ‘I
should not have done so, if I had been cool.’

Here Steerforth struck in.

‘Then he said I was mean, and then he said I was base, and then I called
him a beggar. If I had been cool, perhaps I shouldn’t have called him a
beggar. But I did, and I am ready to take the consequences of it.’

Without considering, perhaps, whether there were any consequences to
be taken, I felt quite in a glow at this gallant speech. It made an
impression on the boys too, for there was a low stir among them, though
no one spoke a word.

‘I am surprised, Steerforth--although your candour does you honour,’
said Mr. Creakle, ‘does you honour, certainly--I am surprised,
Steerforth, I must say, that you should attach such an epithet to any
person employed and paid in Salem House, sir.’

Steerforth gave a short laugh.

‘That’s not an answer, sir,’ said Mr. Creakle, ‘to my remark. I expect
more than that from you, Steerforth.’

If Mr. Mell looked homely, in my eyes, before the handsome boy, it would
be quite impossible to say how homely Mr. Creakle looked. ‘Let him deny
it,’ said Steerforth.

‘Deny that he is a beggar, Steerforth?’ cried Mr. Creakle. ‘Why, where
does he go a-begging?’

‘If he is not a beggar himself, his near relation’s one,’ said
Steerforth. ‘It’s all the same.’

He glanced at me, and Mr. Mell’s hand gently patted me upon the
shoulder. I looked up with a flush upon my face and remorse in my heart,
but Mr. Mell’s eyes were fixed on Steerforth. He continued to pat me
kindly on the shoulder, but he looked at him.

‘Since you expect me, Mr. Creakle, to justify myself,’ said Steerforth,
‘and to say what I mean,--what I have to say is, that his mother lives
on charity in an alms-house.’

Mr. Mell still looked at him, and still patted me kindly on the
shoulder, and said to himself, in a whisper, if I heard right: ‘Yes, I
thought so.’

Mr. Creakle turned to his assistant, with a severe frown and laboured
politeness:

‘Now, you hear what this gentleman says, Mr. Mell. Have the goodness, if
you please, to set him right before the assembled school.’

‘He is right, sir, without correction,’ returned Mr. Mell, in the midst
of a dead silence; ‘what he has said is true.’

‘Be so good then as declare publicly, will you,’ said Mr. Creakle,
putting his head on one side, and rolling his eyes round the school,
‘whether it ever came to my knowledge until this moment?’

‘I believe not directly,’ he returned.

‘Why, you know not,’ said Mr. Creakle. ‘Don’t you, man?’

‘I apprehend you never supposed my worldly circumstances to be very
good,’ replied the assistant. ‘You know what my position is, and always
has been, here.’

‘I apprehend, if you come to that,’ said Mr. Creakle, with his veins
swelling again bigger than ever, ‘that you’ve been in a wrong position
altogether, and mistook this for a charity school. Mr. Mell, we’ll part,
if you please. The sooner the better.’

‘There is no time,’ answered Mr. Mell, rising, ‘like the present.’

‘Sir, to you!’ said Mr. Creakle.

‘I take my leave of you, Mr. Creakle, and all of you,’ said Mr. Mell,
glancing round the room, and again patting me gently on the shoulders.
‘James Steerforth, the best wish I can leave you is that you may come to
be ashamed of what you have done today. At present I would prefer to see
you anything rather than a friend, to me, or to anyone in whom I feel an
interest.’

Once more he laid his hand upon my shoulder; and then taking his
flute and a few books from his desk, and leaving the key in it for his
successor, he went out of the school, with his property under his arm.
Mr. Creakle then made a speech, through Tungay, in which he thanked
Steerforth for asserting (though perhaps too warmly) the independence
and respectability of Salem House; and which he wound up by shaking
hands with Steerforth, while we gave three cheers--I did not quite know
what for, but I supposed for Steerforth, and so joined in them ardently,
though I felt miserable. Mr. Creakle then caned Tommy Traddles for
being discovered in tears, instead of cheers, on account of Mr. Mell’s
departure; and went back to his sofa, or his bed, or wherever he had
come from.

We were left to ourselves now, and looked very blank, I recollect, on
one another. For myself, I felt so much self-reproach and contrition for
my part in what had happened, that nothing would have enabled me to keep
back my tears but the fear that Steerforth, who often looked at me, I
saw, might think it unfriendly--or, I should rather say, considering our
relative ages, and the feeling with which I regarded him, undutiful--if
I showed the emotion which distressed me. He was very angry with
Traddles, and said he was glad he had caught it.

Poor Traddles, who had passed the stage of lying with his head upon the
desk, and was relieving himself as usual with a burst of skeletons, said
he didn’t care. Mr. Mell was ill-used.

‘Who has ill-used him, you girl?’ said Steerforth.

‘Why, you have,’ returned Traddles.

‘What have I done?’ said Steerforth.

‘What have you done?’ retorted Traddles. ‘Hurt his feelings, and lost
him his situation.’

‘His feelings?’ repeated Steerforth disdainfully. ‘His feelings will
soon get the better of it, I’ll be bound. His feelings are not like
yours, Miss Traddles. As to his situation--which was a precious one,
wasn’t it?--do you suppose I am not going to write home, and take care
that he gets some money? Polly?’

We thought this intention very noble in Steerforth, whose mother was
a widow, and rich, and would do almost anything, it was said, that he
asked her. We were all extremely glad to see Traddles so put down,
and exalted Steerforth to the skies: especially when he told us, as he
condescended to do, that what he had done had been done expressly for
us, and for our cause; and that he had conferred a great boon upon us
by unselfishly doing it. But I must say that when I was going on with a
story in the dark that night, Mr. Mell’s old flute seemed more than once
to sound mournfully in my ears; and that when at last Steerforth was
tired, and I lay down in my bed, I fancied it playing so sorrowfully
somewhere, that I was quite wretched.

I soon forgot him in the contemplation of Steerforth, who, in an easy
amateur way, and without any book (he seemed to me to know everything by
heart), took some of his classes until a new master was found. The new
master came from a grammar school; and before he entered on his duties,
dined in the parlour one day, to be introduced to Steerforth. Steerforth
approved of him highly, and told us he was a Brick. Without exactly
understanding what learned distinction was meant by this, I respected
him greatly for it, and had no doubt whatever of his superior knowledge:
though he never took the pains with me--not that I was anybody--that Mr.
Mell had taken.

There was only one other event in this half-year, out of the daily
school-life, that made an impression upon me which still survives. It
survives for many reasons.

One afternoon, when we were all harassed into a state of dire confusion,
and Mr. Creakle was laying about him dreadfully, Tungay came in, and
called out in his usual strong way: ‘Visitors for Copperfield!’

A few words were interchanged between him and Mr. Creakle, as, who the
visitors were, and what room they were to be shown into; and then I, who
had, according to custom, stood up on the announcement being made, and
felt quite faint with astonishment, was told to go by the back stairs
and get a clean frill on, before I repaired to the dining-room. These
orders I obeyed, in such a flutter and hurry of my young spirits as
I had never known before; and when I got to the parlour door, and the
thought came into my head that it might be my mother--I had only thought
of Mr. or Miss Murdstone until then--I drew back my hand from the lock,
and stopped to have a sob before I went in.

At first I saw nobody; but feeling a pressure against the door, I looked
round it, and there, to my amazement, were Mr. Peggotty and Ham, ducking
at me with their hats, and squeezing one another against the wall. I
could not help laughing; but it was much more in the pleasure of seeing
them, than at the appearance they made. We shook hands in a very
cordial way; and I laughed and laughed, until I pulled out my
pocket-handkerchief and wiped my eyes.

Mr. Peggotty (who never shut his mouth once, I remember, during the
visit) showed great concern when he saw me do this, and nudged Ham to
say something.

‘Cheer up, Mas’r Davy bor’!’ said Ham, in his simpering way. ‘Why, how
you have growed!’

‘Am I grown?’ I said, drying my eyes. I was not crying at anything
in particular that I know of; but somehow it made me cry, to see old
friends.

‘Growed, Mas’r Davy bor’? Ain’t he growed!’ said Ham.

‘Ain’t he growed!’ said Mr. Peggotty.

They made me laugh again by laughing at each other, and then we all
three laughed until I was in danger of crying again.

‘Do you know how mama is, Mr. Peggotty?’ I said. ‘And how my dear, dear,
old Peggotty is?’

‘Oncommon,’ said Mr. Peggotty.

‘And little Em’ly, and Mrs. Gummidge?’

‘On--common,’ said Mr. Peggotty.

There was a silence. Mr. Peggotty, to relieve it, took two prodigious
lobsters, and an enormous crab, and a large canvas bag of shrimps, out
of his pockets, and piled them up in Ham’s arms.

‘You see,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘knowing as you was partial to a little
relish with your wittles when you was along with us, we took the
liberty. The old Mawther biled ‘em, she did. Mrs. Gummidge biled ‘em.
Yes,’ said Mr. Peggotty, slowly, who I thought appeared to stick to the
subject on account of having no other subject ready, ‘Mrs. Gummidge, I
do assure you, she biled ‘em.’

I expressed my thanks; and Mr. Peggotty, after looking at Ham, who stood
smiling sheepishly over the shellfish, without making any attempt to
help him, said:

‘We come, you see, the wind and tide making in our favour, in one of our
Yarmouth lugs to Gravesen’. My sister she wrote to me the name of this
here place, and wrote to me as if ever I chanced to come to Gravesen’,
I was to come over and inquire for Mas’r Davy and give her dooty,
humbly wishing him well and reporting of the fam’ly as they was oncommon
toe-be-sure. Little Em’ly, you see, she’ll write to my sister when I go
back, as I see you and as you was similarly oncommon, and so we make it
quite a merry-go-rounder.’

I was obliged to consider a little before I understood what Mr. Peggotty
meant by this figure, expressive of a complete circle of intelligence. I
then thanked him heartily; and said, with a consciousness of reddening,
that I supposed little Em’ly was altered too, since we used to pick up
shells and pebbles on the beach?

‘She’s getting to be a woman, that’s wot she’s getting to be,’ said Mr.
Peggotty. ‘Ask HIM.’ He meant Ham, who beamed with delight and assent
over the bag of shrimps.

‘Her pretty face!’ said Mr. Peggotty, with his own shining like a light.

‘Her learning!’ said Ham.

‘Her writing!’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘Why it’s as black as jet! And so
large it is, you might see it anywheres.’

It was perfectly delightful to behold with what enthusiasm Mr. Peggotty
became inspired when he thought of his little favourite. He stands
before me again, his bluff hairy face irradiating with a joyful love and
pride, for which I can find no description. His honest eyes fire up, and
sparkle, as if their depths were stirred by something bright. His broad
chest heaves with pleasure. His strong loose hands clench themselves,
in his earnestness; and he emphasizes what he says with a right arm that
shows, in my pigmy view, like a sledge-hammer.

Ham was quite as earnest as he. I dare say they would have said much
more about her, if they had not been abashed by the unexpected coming in
of Steerforth, who, seeing me in a corner speaking with two strangers,
stopped in a song he was singing, and said: ‘I didn’t know you were
here, young Copperfield!’ (for it was not the usual visiting room) and
crossed by us on his way out.

I am not sure whether it was in the pride of having such a friend as
Steerforth, or in the desire to explain to him how I came to have such a
friend as Mr. Peggotty, that I called to him as he was going away. But I
said, modestly--Good Heaven, how it all comes back to me this long time
afterwards--!

‘Don’t go, Steerforth, if you please. These are two Yarmouth
boatmen--very kind, good people--who are relations of my nurse, and have
come from Gravesend to see me.’

‘Aye, aye?’ said Steerforth, returning. ‘I am glad to see them. How are
you both?’

There was an ease in his manner--a gay and light manner it was, but not
swaggering--which I still believe to have borne a kind of enchantment
with it. I still believe him, in virtue of this carriage, his animal
spirits, his delightful voice, his handsome face and figure, and, for
aught I know, of some inborn power of attraction besides (which I think
a few people possess), to have carried a spell with him to which it was
a natural weakness to yield, and which not many persons could withstand.
I could not but see how pleased they were with him, and how they seemed
to open their hearts to him in a moment.

‘You must let them know at home, if you please, Mr. Peggotty,’ I said,
‘when that letter is sent, that Mr. Steerforth is very kind to me, and
that I don’t know what I should ever do here without him.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Steerforth, laughing. ‘You mustn’t tell them anything
of the sort.’

‘And if Mr. Steerforth ever comes into Norfolk or Suffolk, Mr.
Peggotty,’ I said, ‘while I am there, you may depend upon it I shall
bring him to Yarmouth, if he will let me, to see your house. You never
saw such a good house, Steerforth. It’s made out of a boat!’

‘Made out of a boat, is it?’ said Steerforth. ‘It’s the right sort of a
house for such a thorough-built boatman.’

‘So ‘tis, sir, so ‘tis, sir,’ said Ham, grinning. ‘You’re right, young
gen’l’m’n! Mas’r Davy bor’, gen’l’m’n’s right. A thorough-built boatman!
Hor, hor! That’s what he is, too!’

Mr. Peggotty was no less pleased than his nephew, though his modesty
forbade him to claim a personal compliment so vociferously.

‘Well, sir,’ he said, bowing and chuckling, and tucking in the ends
of his neckerchief at his breast: ‘I thankee, sir, I thankee! I do my
endeavours in my line of life, sir.’

‘The best of men can do no more, Mr. Peggotty,’ said Steerforth. He had
got his name already.

‘I’ll pound it, it’s wot you do yourself, sir,’ said Mr. Peggotty,
shaking his head, ‘and wot you do well--right well! I thankee, sir. I’m
obleeged to you, sir, for your welcoming manner of me. I’m rough, sir,
but I’m ready--least ways, I hope I’m ready, you unnerstand. My house
ain’t much for to see, sir, but it’s hearty at your service if ever you
should come along with Mas’r Davy to see it. I’m a reg’lar Dodman,
I am,’ said Mr. Peggotty, by which he meant snail, and this was in
allusion to his being slow to go, for he had attempted to go after every
sentence, and had somehow or other come back again; ‘but I wish you both
well, and I wish you happy!’

Ham echoed this sentiment, and we parted with them in the heartiest
manner. I was almost tempted that evening to tell Steerforth about
pretty little Em’ly, but I was too timid of mentioning her name, and
too much afraid of his laughing at me. I remember that I thought a good
deal, and in an uneasy sort of way, about Mr. Peggotty having said that
she was getting on to be a woman; but I decided that was nonsense.

We transported the shellfish, or the ‘relish’ as Mr. Peggotty had
modestly called it, up into our room unobserved, and made a great supper
that evening. But Traddles couldn’t get happily out of it. He was too
unfortunate even to come through a supper like anybody else. He was
taken ill in the night--quite prostrate he was--in consequence of Crab;
and after being drugged with black draughts and blue pills, to an extent
which Demple (whose father was a doctor) said was enough to undermine
a horse’s constitution, received a caning and six chapters of Greek
Testament for refusing to confess.

The rest of the half-year is a jumble in my recollection of the daily
strife and struggle of our lives; of the waning summer and the changing
season; of the frosty mornings when we were rung out of bed, and the
cold, cold smell of the dark nights when we were rung into bed again; of
the evening schoolroom dimly lighted and indifferently warmed, and the
morning schoolroom which was nothing but a great shivering-machine; of
the alternation of boiled beef with roast beef, and boiled mutton with
roast mutton; of clods of bread-and-butter, dog’s-eared lesson-books,
cracked slates, tear-blotted copy-books, canings, rulerings,
hair-cuttings, rainy Sundays, suet-puddings, and a dirty atmosphere of
ink, surrounding all.

I well remember though, how the distant idea of the holidays, after
seeming for an immense time to be a stationary speck, began to come
towards us, and to grow and grow. How from counting months, we came to
weeks, and then to days; and how I then began to be afraid that I should
not be sent for and when I learnt from Steerforth that I had been sent
for, and was certainly to go home, had dim forebodings that I might
break my leg first. How the breaking-up day changed its place fast, at
last, from the week after next to next week, this week, the day after
tomorrow, tomorrow, today, tonight--when I was inside the Yarmouth mail,
and going home.

I had many a broken sleep inside the Yarmouth mail, and many an
incoherent dream of all these things. But when I awoke at intervals, the
ground outside the window was not the playground of Salem House, and the
sound in my ears was not the sound of Mr. Creakle giving it to Traddles,
but the sound of the coachman touching up the horses.



CHAPTER 8. MY HOLIDAYS. ESPECIALLY ONE HAPPY AFTERNOON


When we arrived before day at the inn where the mail stopped, which was
not the inn where my friend the waiter lived, I was shown up to a nice
little bedroom, with DOLPHIN painted on the door. Very cold I was, I
know, notwithstanding the hot tea they had given me before a large fire
downstairs; and very glad I was to turn into the Dolphin’s bed, pull the
Dolphin’s blankets round my head, and go to sleep.

Mr. Barkis the carrier was to call for me in the morning at nine
o’clock. I got up at eight, a little giddy from the shortness of my
night’s rest, and was ready for him before the appointed time. He
received me exactly as if not five minutes had elapsed since we were
last together, and I had only been into the hotel to get change for
sixpence, or something of that sort.

As soon as I and my box were in the cart, and the carrier seated, the
lazy horse walked away with us all at his accustomed pace.

‘You look very well, Mr. Barkis,’ I said, thinking he would like to know
it.

Mr. Barkis rubbed his cheek with his cuff, and then looked at his cuff
as if he expected to find some of the bloom upon it; but made no other
acknowledgement of the compliment.

‘I gave your message, Mr. Barkis,’ I said: ‘I wrote to Peggotty.’

‘Ah!’ said Mr. Barkis.

Mr. Barkis seemed gruff, and answered drily.

‘Wasn’t it right, Mr. Barkis?’ I asked, after a little hesitation.

‘Why, no,’ said Mr. Barkis.

‘Not the message?’

‘The message was right enough, perhaps,’ said Mr. Barkis; ‘but it come
to an end there.’

Not understanding what he meant, I repeated inquisitively: ‘Came to an
end, Mr. Barkis?’

‘Nothing come of it,’ he explained, looking at me sideways. ‘No answer.’

‘There was an answer expected, was there, Mr. Barkis?’ said I, opening
my eyes. For this was a new light to me.

‘When a man says he’s willin’,’ said Mr. Barkis, turning his glance
slowly on me again, ‘it’s as much as to say, that man’s a-waitin’ for a
answer.’

‘Well, Mr. Barkis?’

‘Well,’ said Mr. Barkis, carrying his eyes back to his horse’s ears;
‘that man’s been a-waitin’ for a answer ever since.’

‘Have you told her so, Mr. Barkis?’

‘No--no,’ growled Mr. Barkis, reflecting about it. ‘I ain’t got no call
to go and tell her so. I never said six words to her myself, I ain’t
a-goin’ to tell her so.’

‘Would you like me to do it, Mr. Barkis?’ said I, doubtfully. ‘You might
tell her, if you would,’ said Mr. Barkis, with another slow look at me,
‘that Barkis was a-waitin’ for a answer. Says you--what name is it?’

‘Her name?’

‘Ah!’ said Mr. Barkis, with a nod of his head.

‘Peggotty.’

‘Chrisen name? Or nat’ral name?’ said Mr. Barkis.

‘Oh, it’s not her Christian name. Her Christian name is Clara.’

‘Is it though?’ said Mr. Barkis.

He seemed to find an immense fund of reflection in this circumstance,
and sat pondering and inwardly whistling for some time.

‘Well!’ he resumed at length. ‘Says you, “Peggotty! Barkis is waitin’
for a answer.” Says she, perhaps, “Answer to what?” Says you, “To what I
told you.” “What is that?” says she. “Barkis is willin’,” says you.’

This extremely artful suggestion Mr. Barkis accompanied with a nudge
of his elbow that gave me quite a stitch in my side. After that, he
slouched over his horse in his usual manner; and made no other reference
to the subject except, half an hour afterwards, taking a piece of chalk
from his pocket, and writing up, inside the tilt of the cart, ‘Clara
Peggotty’--apparently as a private memorandum.

Ah, what a strange feeling it was to be going home when it was not home,
and to find that every object I looked at, reminded me of the happy old
home, which was like a dream I could never dream again! The days when my
mother and I and Peggotty were all in all to one another, and there was
no one to come between us, rose up before me so sorrowfully on the road,
that I am not sure I was glad to be there--not sure but that I would
rather have remained away, and forgotten it in Steerforth’s company. But
there I was; and soon I was at our house, where the bare old elm-trees
wrung their many hands in the bleak wintry air, and shreds of the old
rooks’-nests drifted away upon the wind.

The carrier put my box down at the garden-gate, and left me. I walked
along the path towards the house, glancing at the windows, and fearing
at every step to see Mr. Murdstone or Miss Murdstone lowering out of
one of them. No face appeared, however; and being come to the house, and
knowing how to open the door, before dark, without knocking, I went in
with a quiet, timid step.

God knows how infantine the memory may have been, that was awakened
within me by the sound of my mother’s voice in the old parlour, when I
set foot in the hall. She was singing in a low tone. I think I must have
lain in her arms, and heard her singing so to me when I was but a baby.
The strain was new to me, and yet it was so old that it filled my heart
brim-full; like a friend come back from a long absence.

I believed, from the solitary and thoughtful way in which my mother
murmured her song, that she was alone. And I went softly into the room.
She was sitting by the fire, suckling an infant, whose tiny hand she
held against her neck. Her eyes were looking down upon its face, and she
sat singing to it. I was so far right, that she had no other companion.

I spoke to her, and she started, and cried out. But seeing me, she
called me her dear Davy, her own boy! and coming half across the room
to meet me, kneeled down upon the ground and kissed me, and laid my head
down on her bosom near the little creature that was nestling there, and
put its hand to my lips.

I wish I had died. I wish I had died then, with that feeling in my
heart! I should have been more fit for Heaven than I ever have been
since.

‘He is your brother,’ said my mother, fondling me. ‘Davy, my pretty boy!
My poor child!’ Then she kissed me more and more, and clasped me round
the neck. This she was doing when Peggotty came running in, and bounced
down on the ground beside us, and went mad about us both for a quarter
of an hour.

It seemed that I had not been expected so soon, the carrier being much
before his usual time. It seemed, too, that Mr. and Miss Murdstone had
gone out upon a visit in the neighbourhood, and would not return before
night. I had never hoped for this. I had never thought it possible that
we three could be together undisturbed, once more; and I felt, for the
time, as if the old days were come back.

We dined together by the fireside. Peggotty was in attendance to wait
upon us, but my mother wouldn’t let her do it, and made her dine with
us. I had my own old plate, with a brown view of a man-of-war in full
sail upon it, which Peggotty had hoarded somewhere all the time I
had been away, and would not have had broken, she said, for a hundred
pounds. I had my own old mug with David on it, and my own old little
knife and fork that wouldn’t cut.

While we were at table, I thought it a favourable occasion to tell
Peggotty about Mr. Barkis, who, before I had finished what I had to tell
her, began to laugh, and throw her apron over her face.

‘Peggotty,’ said my mother. ‘What’s the matter?’

Peggotty only laughed the more, and held her apron tight over her face
when my mother tried to pull it away, and sat as if her head were in a
bag.

‘What are you doing, you stupid creature?’ said my mother, laughing.

‘Oh, drat the man!’ cried Peggotty. ‘He wants to marry me.’

‘It would be a very good match for you; wouldn’t it?’ said my mother.

‘Oh! I don’t know,’ said Peggotty. ‘Don’t ask me. I wouldn’t have him if
he was made of gold. Nor I wouldn’t have anybody.’

‘Then, why don’t you tell him so, you ridiculous thing?’ said my mother.

‘Tell him so,’ retorted Peggotty, looking out of her apron. ‘He has
never said a word to me about it. He knows better. If he was to make so
bold as say a word to me, I should slap his face.’

Her own was as red as ever I saw it, or any other face, I think; but she
only covered it again, for a few moments at a time, when she was taken
with a violent fit of laughter; and after two or three of those attacks,
went on with her dinner.

I remarked that my mother, though she smiled when Peggotty looked at
her, became more serious and thoughtful. I had seen at first that she
was changed. Her face was very pretty still, but it looked careworn, and
too delicate; and her hand was so thin and white that it seemed to me
to be almost transparent. But the change to which I now refer was
superadded to this: it was in her manner, which became anxious and
fluttered. At last she said, putting out her hand, and laying it
affectionately on the hand of her old servant,

‘Peggotty, dear, you are not going to be married?’

‘Me, ma’am?’ returned Peggotty, staring. ‘Lord bless you, no!’

‘Not just yet?’ said my mother, tenderly.

‘Never!’ cried Peggotty.

My mother took her hand, and said:

‘Don’t leave me, Peggotty. Stay with me. It will not be for long,
perhaps. What should I ever do without you!’

‘Me leave you, my precious!’ cried Peggotty. ‘Not for all the world and
his wife. Why, what’s put that in your silly little head?’--For Peggotty
had been used of old to talk to my mother sometimes like a child.

But my mother made no answer, except to thank her, and Peggotty went
running on in her own fashion.

‘Me leave you? I think I see myself. Peggotty go away from you? I should
like to catch her at it! No, no, no,’ said Peggotty, shaking her head,
and folding her arms; ‘not she, my dear. It isn’t that there ain’t some
Cats that would be well enough pleased if she did, but they sha’n’t be
pleased. They shall be aggravated. I’ll stay with you till I am a cross
cranky old woman. And when I’m too deaf, and too lame, and too blind,
and too mumbly for want of teeth, to be of any use at all, even to be
found fault with, than I shall go to my Davy, and ask him to take me
in.’

‘And, Peggotty,’ says I, ‘I shall be glad to see you, and I’ll make you
as welcome as a queen.’

‘Bless your dear heart!’ cried Peggotty. ‘I know you will!’ And she
kissed me beforehand, in grateful acknowledgement of my hospitality.
After that, she covered her head up with her apron again and had another
laugh about Mr. Barkis. After that, she took the baby out of its little
cradle, and nursed it. After that, she cleared the dinner table;
after that, came in with another cap on, and her work-box, and the
yard-measure, and the bit of wax-candle, all just the same as ever.

We sat round the fire, and talked delightfully. I told them what a hard
master Mr. Creakle was, and they pitied me very much. I told them what a
fine fellow Steerforth was, and what a patron of mine, and Peggotty said
she would walk a score of miles to see him. I took the little baby in
my arms when it was awake, and nursed it lovingly. When it was asleep
again, I crept close to my mother’s side according to my old custom,
broken now a long time, and sat with my arms embracing her waist, and my
little red cheek on her shoulder, and once more felt her beautiful
hair drooping over me--like an angel’s wing as I used to think, I
recollect--and was very happy indeed.

While I sat thus, looking at the fire, and seeing pictures in the
red-hot coals, I almost believed that I had never been away; that Mr.
and Miss Murdstone were such pictures, and would vanish when the fire
got low; and that there was nothing real in all that I remembered, save
my mother, Peggotty, and I.

Peggotty darned away at a stocking as long as she could see, and then
sat with it drawn on her left hand like a glove, and her needle in her
right, ready to take another stitch whenever there was a blaze. I cannot
conceive whose stockings they can have been that Peggotty was always
darning, or where such an unfailing supply of stockings in want of
darning can have come from. From my earliest infancy she seems to have
been always employed in that class of needlework, and never by any
chance in any other.

‘I wonder,’ said Peggotty, who was sometimes seized with a fit of
wondering on some most unexpected topic, ‘what’s become of Davy’s
great-aunt?’ ‘Lor, Peggotty!’ observed my mother, rousing herself from a
reverie, ‘what nonsense you talk!’

‘Well, but I really do wonder, ma’am,’ said Peggotty.

‘What can have put such a person in your head?’ inquired my mother. ‘Is
there nobody else in the world to come there?’

‘I don’t know how it is,’ said Peggotty, ‘unless it’s on account of
being stupid, but my head never can pick and choose its people. They
come and they go, and they don’t come and they don’t go, just as they
like. I wonder what’s become of her?’

‘How absurd you are, Peggotty!’ returned my mother. ‘One would suppose
you wanted a second visit from her.’

‘Lord forbid!’ cried Peggotty.

‘Well then, don’t talk about such uncomfortable things, there’s a good
soul,’ said my mother. ‘Miss Betsey is shut up in her cottage by the
sea, no doubt, and will remain there. At all events, she is not likely
ever to trouble us again.’

‘No!’ mused Peggotty. ‘No, that ain’t likely at all.---I wonder, if she
was to die, whether she’d leave Davy anything?’

‘Good gracious me, Peggotty,’ returned my mother, ‘what a nonsensical
woman you are! when you know that she took offence at the poor dear
boy’s ever being born at all.’

‘I suppose she wouldn’t be inclined to forgive him now,’ hinted
Peggotty.

‘Why should she be inclined to forgive him now?’ said my mother, rather
sharply.

‘Now that he’s got a brother, I mean,’ said Peggotty.

My mother immediately began to cry, and wondered how Peggotty dared to
say such a thing.

‘As if this poor little innocent in its cradle had ever done any harm to
you or anybody else, you jealous thing!’ said she. ‘You had much better
go and marry Mr. Barkis, the carrier. Why don’t you?’

‘I should make Miss Murdstone happy, if I was to,’ said Peggotty.

‘What a bad disposition you have, Peggotty!’ returned my mother. ‘You
are as jealous of Miss Murdstone as it is possible for a ridiculous
creature to be. You want to keep the keys yourself, and give out all the
things, I suppose? I shouldn’t be surprised if you did. When you know
that she only does it out of kindness and the best intentions! You know
she does, Peggotty--you know it well.’

Peggotty muttered something to the effect of ‘Bother the best
intentions!’ and something else to the effect that there was a little
too much of the best intentions going on.

‘I know what you mean, you cross thing,’ said my mother. ‘I understand
you, Peggotty, perfectly. You know I do, and I wonder you don’t colour
up like fire. But one point at a time. Miss Murdstone is the point now,
Peggotty, and you sha’n’t escape from it. Haven’t you heard her
say, over and over again, that she thinks I am too thoughtless and
too--a--a--’

‘Pretty,’ suggested Peggotty.

‘Well,’ returned my mother, half laughing, ‘and if she is so silly as to
say so, can I be blamed for it?’

‘No one says you can,’ said Peggotty.

‘No, I should hope not, indeed!’ returned my mother. ‘Haven’t you heard
her say, over and over again, that on this account she wished to spare
me a great deal of trouble, which she thinks I am not suited for, and
which I really don’t know myself that I AM suited for; and isn’t she up
early and late, and going to and fro continually--and doesn’t she do
all sorts of things, and grope into all sorts of places, coal-holes and
pantries and I don’t know where, that can’t be very agreeable--and do
you mean to insinuate that there is not a sort of devotion in that?’

‘I don’t insinuate at all,’ said Peggotty.

‘You do, Peggotty,’ returned my mother. ‘You never do anything else,
except your work. You are always insinuating. You revel in it. And when
you talk of Mr. Murdstone’s good intentions--’

‘I never talked of ‘em,’ said Peggotty.

‘No, Peggotty,’ returned my mother, ‘but you insinuated. That’s what I
told you just now. That’s the worst of you. You WILL insinuate. I said,
at the moment, that I understood you, and you see I did. When you talk
of Mr. Murdstone’s good intentions, and pretend to slight them (for I
don’t believe you really do, in your heart, Peggotty), you must be as
well convinced as I am how good they are, and how they actuate him in
everything. If he seems to have been at all stern with a certain person,
Peggotty--you understand, and so I am sure does Davy, that I am not
alluding to anybody present--it is solely because he is satisfied that
it is for a certain person’s benefit. He naturally loves a certain
person, on my account; and acts solely for a certain person’s good. He
is better able to judge of it than I am; for I very well know that I am
a weak, light, girlish creature, and that he is a firm, grave, serious
man. And he takes,’ said my mother, with the tears which were engendered
in her affectionate nature, stealing down her face, ‘he takes great
pains with me; and I ought to be very thankful to him, and very
submissive to him even in my thoughts; and when I am not, Peggotty, I
worry and condemn myself, and feel doubtful of my own heart, and don’t
know what to do.’

Peggotty sat with her chin on the foot of the stocking, looking silently
at the fire.

‘There, Peggotty,’ said my mother, changing her tone, ‘don’t let us fall
out with one another, for I couldn’t bear it. You are my true friend, I
know, if I have any in the world. When I call you a ridiculous creature,
or a vexatious thing, or anything of that sort, Peggotty, I only mean
that you are my true friend, and always have been, ever since the night
when Mr. Copperfield first brought me home here, and you came out to the
gate to meet me.’

Peggotty was not slow to respond, and ratify the treaty of friendship by
giving me one of her best hugs. I think I had some glimpses of the real
character of this conversation at the time; but I am sure, now, that
the good creature originated it, and took her part in it, merely that
my mother might comfort herself with the little contradictory summary in
which she had indulged. The design was efficacious; for I remember that
my mother seemed more at ease during the rest of the evening, and that
Peggotty observed her less.

When we had had our tea, and the ashes were thrown up, and the candles
snuffed, I read Peggotty a chapter out of the Crocodile Book, in
remembrance of old times--she took it out of her pocket: I don’t know
whether she had kept it there ever since--and then we talked about Salem
House, which brought me round again to Steerforth, who was my great
subject. We were very happy; and that evening, as the last of its race,
and destined evermore to close that volume of my life, will never pass
out of my memory.

It was almost ten o’clock before we heard the sound of wheels. We all
got up then; and my mother said hurriedly that, as it was so late, and
Mr. and Miss Murdstone approved of early hours for young people, perhaps
I had better go to bed. I kissed her, and went upstairs with my candle
directly, before they came in. It appeared to my childish fancy, as I
ascended to the bedroom where I had been imprisoned, that they brought
a cold blast of air into the house which blew away the old familiar
feeling like a feather.

I felt uncomfortable about going down to breakfast in the morning, as
I had never set eyes on Mr. Murdstone since the day when I committed my
memorable offence. However, as it must be done, I went down, after two
or three false starts half-way, and as many runs back on tiptoe to my
own room, and presented myself in the parlour.

He was standing before the fire with his back to it, while Miss
Murdstone made the tea. He looked at me steadily as I entered, but made
no sign of recognition whatever. I went up to him, after a moment of
confusion, and said: ‘I beg your pardon, sir. I am very sorry for what I
did, and I hope you will forgive me.’

‘I am glad to hear you are sorry, David,’ he replied.

The hand he gave me was the hand I had bitten. I could not restrain my
eye from resting for an instant on a red spot upon it; but it was not so
red as I turned, when I met that sinister expression in his face.

‘How do you do, ma’am?’ I said to Miss Murdstone.

‘Ah, dear me!’ sighed Miss Murdstone, giving me the tea-caddy scoop
instead of her fingers. ‘How long are the holidays?’

‘A month, ma’am.’

‘Counting from when?’

‘From today, ma’am.’

‘Oh!’ said Miss Murdstone. ‘Then here’s one day off.’

She kept a calendar of the holidays in this way, and every morning
checked a day off in exactly the same manner. She did it gloomily until
she came to ten, but when she got into two figures she became more
hopeful, and, as the time advanced, even jocular.

It was on this very first day that I had the misfortune to throw her,
though she was not subject to such weakness in general, into a state of
violent consternation. I came into the room where she and my mother
were sitting; and the baby (who was only a few weeks old) being on
my mother’s lap, I took it very carefully in my arms. Suddenly Miss
Murdstone gave such a scream that I all but dropped it.

‘My dear Jane!’ cried my mother.

‘Good heavens, Clara, do you see?’ exclaimed Miss Murdstone.

‘See what, my dear Jane?’ said my mother; ‘where?’

‘He’s got it!’ cried Miss Murdstone. ‘The boy has got the baby!’

She was limp with horror; but stiffened herself to make a dart at me,
and take it out of my arms. Then, she turned faint; and was so very
ill that they were obliged to give her cherry brandy. I was solemnly
interdicted by her, on her recovery, from touching my brother any more
on any pretence whatever; and my poor mother, who, I could see, wished
otherwise, meekly confirmed the interdict, by saying: ‘No doubt you are
right, my dear Jane.’

On another occasion, when we three were together, this same dear
baby--it was truly dear to me, for our mother’s sake--was the innocent
occasion of Miss Murdstone’s going into a passion. My mother, who had
been looking at its eyes as it lay upon her lap, said:

‘Davy! come here!’ and looked at mine.

I saw Miss Murdstone lay her beads down.

‘I declare,’ said my mother, gently, ‘they are exactly alike. I suppose
they are mine. I think they are the colour of mine. But they are
wonderfully alike.’

‘What are you talking about, Clara?’ said Miss Murdstone.

‘My dear Jane,’ faltered my mother, a little abashed by the harsh tone
of this inquiry, ‘I find that the baby’s eyes and Davy’s are exactly
alike.’

‘Clara!’ said Miss Murdstone, rising angrily, ‘you are a positive fool
sometimes.’

‘My dear Jane,’ remonstrated my mother.

‘A positive fool,’ said Miss Murdstone. ‘Who else could compare my
brother’s baby with your boy? They are not at all alike. They are
exactly unlike. They are utterly dissimilar in all respects. I hope
they will ever remain so. I will not sit here, and hear such comparisons
made.’ With that she stalked out, and made the door bang after her.

In short, I was not a favourite with Miss Murdstone. In short, I was not
a favourite there with anybody, not even with myself; for those who did
like me could not show it, and those who did not, showed it so plainly
that I had a sensitive consciousness of always appearing constrained,
boorish, and dull.

I felt that I made them as uncomfortable as they made me. If I came into
the room where they were, and they were talking together and my mother
seemed cheerful, an anxious cloud would steal over her face from the
moment of my entrance. If Mr. Murdstone were in his best humour, I
checked him. If Miss Murdstone were in her worst, I intensified it. I
had perception enough to know that my mother was the victim always; that
she was afraid to speak to me or to be kind to me, lest she should
give them some offence by her manner of doing so, and receive a
lecture afterwards; that she was not only ceaselessly afraid of her own
offending, but of my offending, and uneasily watched their looks if I
only moved. Therefore I resolved to keep myself as much out of their way
as I could; and many a wintry hour did I hear the church clock strike,
when I was sitting in my cheerless bedroom, wrapped in my little
great-coat, poring over a book.

In the evening, sometimes, I went and sat with Peggotty in the kitchen.
There I was comfortable, and not afraid of being myself. But neither of
these resources was approved of in the parlour. The tormenting humour
which was dominant there stopped them both. I was still held to be
necessary to my poor mother’s training, and, as one of her trials, could
not be suffered to absent myself.

‘David,’ said Mr. Murdstone, one day after dinner when I was going to
leave the room as usual; ‘I am sorry to observe that you are of a sullen
disposition.’

‘As sulky as a bear!’ said Miss Murdstone.

I stood still, and hung my head.

‘Now, David,’ said Mr. Murdstone, ‘a sullen obdurate disposition is, of
all tempers, the worst.’

‘And the boy’s is, of all such dispositions that ever I have seen,’
remarked his sister, ‘the most confirmed and stubborn. I think, my dear
Clara, even you must observe it?’

‘I beg your pardon, my dear Jane,’ said my mother, ‘but are you quite
sure--I am certain you’ll excuse me, my dear Jane--that you understand
Davy?’

‘I should be somewhat ashamed of myself, Clara,’ returned Miss
Murdstone, ‘if I could not understand the boy, or any boy. I don’t
profess to be profound; but I do lay claim to common sense.’

‘No doubt, my dear Jane,’ returned my mother, ‘your understanding is
very vigorous--’

‘Oh dear, no! Pray don’t say that, Clara,’ interposed Miss Murdstone,
angrily.

‘But I am sure it is,’ resumed my mother; ‘and everybody knows it is. I
profit so much by it myself, in many ways--at least I ought to--that no
one can be more convinced of it than myself; and therefore I speak with
great diffidence, my dear Jane, I assure you.’

‘We’ll say I don’t understand the boy, Clara,’ returned Miss Murdstone,
arranging the little fetters on her wrists. ‘We’ll agree, if you please,
that I don’t understand him at all. He is much too deep for me. But
perhaps my brother’s penetration may enable him to have some insight
into his character. And I believe my brother was speaking on the subject
when we--not very decently--interrupted him.’

‘I think, Clara,’ said Mr. Murdstone, in a low grave voice, ‘that there
may be better and more dispassionate judges of such a question than
you.’

‘Edward,’ replied my mother, timidly, ‘you are a far better judge of all
questions than I pretend to be. Both you and Jane are. I only said--’

‘You only said something weak and inconsiderate,’ he replied. ‘Try not
to do it again, my dear Clara, and keep a watch upon yourself.’

My mother’s lips moved, as if she answered ‘Yes, my dear Edward,’ but
she said nothing aloud.

‘I was sorry, David, I remarked,’ said Mr. Murdstone, turning his head
and his eyes stiffly towards me, ‘to observe that you are of a sullen
disposition. This is not a character that I can suffer to develop itself
beneath my eyes without an effort at improvement. You must endeavour,
sir, to change it. We must endeavour to change it for you.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ I faltered. ‘I have never meant to be sullen
since I came back.’

‘Don’t take refuge in a lie, sir!’ he returned so fiercely, that I saw
my mother involuntarily put out her trembling hand as if to interpose
between us. ‘You have withdrawn yourself in your sullenness to your own
room. You have kept your own room when you ought to have been here. You
know now, once for all, that I require you to be here, and not there.
Further, that I require you to bring obedience here. You know me, David.
I will have it done.’

Miss Murdstone gave a hoarse chuckle.

‘I will have a respectful, prompt, and ready bearing towards myself,’ he
continued, ‘and towards Jane Murdstone, and towards your mother. I will
not have this room shunned as if it were infected, at the pleasure of a
child. Sit down.’

He ordered me like a dog, and I obeyed like a dog.

‘One thing more,’ he said. ‘I observe that you have an attachment to low
and common company. You are not to associate with servants. The
kitchen will not improve you, in the many respects in which you need
improvement. Of the woman who abets you, I say nothing--since you,
Clara,’ addressing my mother in a lower voice, ‘from old associations
and long-established fancies, have a weakness respecting her which is
not yet overcome.’

‘A most unaccountable delusion it is!’ cried Miss Murdstone.

‘I only say,’ he resumed, addressing me, ‘that I disapprove of your
preferring such company as Mistress Peggotty, and that it is to be
abandoned. Now, David, you understand me, and you know what will be the
consequence if you fail to obey me to the letter.’

I knew well--better perhaps than he thought, as far as my poor mother
was concerned--and I obeyed him to the letter. I retreated to my own
room no more; I took refuge with Peggotty no more; but sat wearily in
the parlour day after day, looking forward to night, and bedtime.

What irksome constraint I underwent, sitting in the same attitude hours
upon hours, afraid to move an arm or a leg lest Miss Murdstone should
complain (as she did on the least pretence) of my restlessness, and
afraid to move an eye lest she should light on some look of dislike
or scrutiny that would find new cause for complaint in mine! What
intolerable dulness to sit listening to the ticking of the clock; and
watching Miss Murdstone’s little shiny steel beads as she strung them;
and wondering whether she would ever be married, and if so, to what
sort of unhappy man; and counting the divisions in the moulding of the
chimney-piece; and wandering away, with my eyes, to the ceiling, among
the curls and corkscrews in the paper on the wall!

What walks I took alone, down muddy lanes, in the bad winter weather,
carrying that parlour, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone in it, everywhere: a
monstrous load that I was obliged to bear, a daymare that there was
no possibility of breaking in, a weight that brooded on my wits, and
blunted them!

What meals I had in silence and embarrassment, always feeling that there
were a knife and fork too many, and that mine; an appetite too many, and
that mine; a plate and chair too many, and those mine; a somebody too
many, and that I!

What evenings, when the candles came, and I was expected to employ
myself, but, not daring to read an entertaining book, pored over some
hard-headed, harder-hearted treatise on arithmetic; when the tables of
weights and measures set themselves to tunes, as ‘Rule Britannia’, or
‘Away with Melancholy’; when they wouldn’t stand still to be learnt, but
would go threading my grandmother’s needle through my unfortunate head,
in at one ear and out at the other! What yawns and dozes I lapsed into,
in spite of all my care; what starts I came out of concealed sleeps
with; what answers I never got, to little observations that I rarely
made; what a blank space I seemed, which everybody overlooked, and
yet was in everybody’s way; what a heavy relief it was to hear Miss
Murdstone hail the first stroke of nine at night, and order me to bed!

Thus the holidays lagged away, until the morning came when Miss
Murdstone said: ‘Here’s the last day off!’ and gave me the closing cup
of tea of the vacation.

I was not sorry to go. I had lapsed into a stupid state; but I was
recovering a little and looking forward to Steerforth, albeit Mr.
Creakle loomed behind him. Again Mr. Barkis appeared at the gate, and
again Miss Murdstone in her warning voice, said: ‘Clara!’ when my mother
bent over me, to bid me farewell.

I kissed her, and my baby brother, and was very sorry then; but not
sorry to go away, for the gulf between us was there, and the parting was
there, every day. And it is not so much the embrace she gave me, that
lives in my mind, though it was as fervent as could be, as what followed
the embrace.

I was in the carrier’s cart when I heard her calling to me. I looked
out, and she stood at the garden-gate alone, holding her baby up in her
arms for me to see. It was cold still weather; and not a hair of her
head, nor a fold of her dress, was stirred, as she looked intently at
me, holding up her child.

So I lost her. So I saw her afterwards, in my sleep at school--a silent
presence near my bed--looking at me with the same intent face--holding
up her baby in her arms.



CHAPTER 9. I HAVE A MEMORABLE BIRTHDAY


I PASS over all that happened at school, until the anniversary of my
birthday came round in March. Except that Steerforth was more to be
admired than ever, I remember nothing. He was going away at the end of
the half-year, if not sooner, and was more spirited and independent than
before in my eyes, and therefore more engaging than before; but beyond
this I remember nothing. The great remembrance by which that time is
marked in my mind, seems to have swallowed up all lesser recollections,
and to exist alone.

It is even difficult for me to believe that there was a gap of full
two months between my return to Salem House and the arrival of that
birthday. I can only understand that the fact was so, because I know it
must have been so; otherwise I should feel convinced that there was no
interval, and that the one occasion trod upon the other’s heels.

How well I recollect the kind of day it was! I smell the fog that hung
about the place; I see the hoar frost, ghostly, through it; I feel my
rimy hair fall clammy on my cheek; I look along the dim perspective of
the schoolroom, with a sputtering candle here and there to light up the
foggy morning, and the breath of the boys wreathing and smoking in the
raw cold as they blow upon their fingers, and tap their feet upon the
floor. It was after breakfast, and we had been summoned in from the
playground, when Mr. Sharp entered and said:

‘David Copperfield is to go into the parlour.’

I expected a hamper from Peggotty, and brightened at the order. Some
of the boys about me put in their claim not to be forgotten in the
distribution of the good things, as I got out of my seat with great
alacrity.

‘Don’t hurry, David,’ said Mr. Sharp. ‘There’s time enough, my boy,
don’t hurry.’

I might have been surprised by the feeling tone in which he spoke, if I
had given it a thought; but I gave it none until afterwards. I hurried
away to the parlour; and there I found Mr. Creakle, sitting at his
breakfast with the cane and a newspaper before him, and Mrs. Creakle
with an opened letter in her hand. But no hamper.

‘David Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Creakle, leading me to a sofa, and
sitting down beside me. ‘I want to speak to you very particularly. I
have something to tell you, my child.’

Mr. Creakle, at whom of course I looked, shook his head without looking
at me, and stopped up a sigh with a very large piece of buttered toast.

‘You are too young to know how the world changes every day,’ said Mrs.
Creakle, ‘and how the people in it pass away. But we all have to learn
it, David; some of us when we are young, some of us when we are old,
some of us at all times of our lives.’

I looked at her earnestly.

‘When you came away from home at the end of the vacation,’ said Mrs.
Creakle, after a pause, ‘were they all well?’ After another pause, ‘Was
your mama well?’

I trembled without distinctly knowing why, and still looked at her
earnestly, making no attempt to answer.

‘Because,’ said she, ‘I grieve to tell you that I hear this morning your
mama is very ill.’

A mist rose between Mrs. Creakle and me, and her figure seemed to move
in it for an instant. Then I felt the burning tears run down my face,
and it was steady again.

‘She is very dangerously ill,’ she added.

I knew all now.

‘She is dead.’

There was no need to tell me so. I had already broken out into a
desolate cry, and felt an orphan in the wide world.

She was very kind to me. She kept me there all day, and left me alone
sometimes; and I cried, and wore myself to sleep, and awoke and
cried again. When I could cry no more, I began to think; and then the
oppression on my breast was heaviest, and my grief a dull pain that
there was no ease for.

And yet my thoughts were idle; not intent on the calamity that weighed
upon my heart, but idly loitering near it. I thought of our house shut
up and hushed. I thought of the little baby, who, Mrs. Creakle said, had
been pining away for some time, and who, they believed, would die too. I
thought of my father’s grave in the churchyard, by our house, and of my
mother lying there beneath the tree I knew so well. I stood upon a chair
when I was left alone, and looked into the glass to see how red my eyes
were, and how sorrowful my face. I considered, after some hours were
gone, if my tears were really hard to flow now, as they seemed to be,
what, in connexion with my loss, it would affect me most to think
of when I drew near home--for I was going home to the funeral. I am
sensible of having felt that a dignity attached to me among the rest of
the boys, and that I was important in my affliction.

If ever child were stricken with sincere grief, I was. But I remember
that this importance was a kind of satisfaction to me, when I walked in
the playground that afternoon while the boys were in school. When I
saw them glancing at me out of the windows, as they went up to their
classes, I felt distinguished, and looked more melancholy, and walked
slower. When school was over, and they came out and spoke to me, I felt
it rather good in myself not to be proud to any of them, and to take
exactly the same notice of them all, as before.

I was to go home next night; not by the mail, but by the heavy
night-coach, which was called the Farmer, and was principally used by
country-people travelling short intermediate distances upon the road. We
had no story-telling that evening, and Traddles insisted on lending me
his pillow. I don’t know what good he thought it would do me, for I
had one of my own: but it was all he had to lend, poor fellow, except a
sheet of letter-paper full of skeletons; and that he gave me at parting,
as a soother of my sorrows and a contribution to my peace of mind.

I left Salem House upon the morrow afternoon. I little thought then that
I left it, never to return. We travelled very slowly all night, and
did not get into Yarmouth before nine or ten o’clock in the morning. I
looked out for Mr. Barkis, but he was not there; and instead of him a
fat, short-winded, merry-looking, little old man in black, with rusty
little bunches of ribbons at the knees of his breeches, black stockings,
and a broad-brimmed hat, came puffing up to the coach window, and said:

‘Master Copperfield?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Will you come with me, young sir, if you please,’ he said, opening the
door, ‘and I shall have the pleasure of taking you home.’

I put my hand in his, wondering who he was, and we walked away to a
shop in a narrow street, on which was written OMER, DRAPER, TAILOR,
HABERDASHER, FUNERAL FURNISHER, &c. It was a close and stifling little
shop; full of all sorts of clothing, made and unmade, including
one window full of beaver-hats and bonnets. We went into a little
back-parlour behind the shop, where we found three young women at work
on a quantity of black materials, which were heaped upon the table,
and little bits and cuttings of which were littered all over the floor.
There was a good fire in the room, and a breathless smell of warm black
crape--I did not know what the smell was then, but I know now.

The three young women, who appeared to be very industrious and
comfortable, raised their heads to look at me, and then went on with
their work. Stitch, stitch, stitch. At the same time there came from
a workshop across a little yard outside the window, a regular sound
of hammering that kept a kind of tune: RAT--tat-tat, RAT--tat-tat,
RAT--tat-tat, without any variation.

‘Well,’ said my conductor to one of the three young women. ‘How do you
get on, Minnie?’

‘We shall be ready by the trying-on time,’ she replied gaily, without
looking up. ‘Don’t you be afraid, father.’

Mr. Omer took off his broad-brimmed hat, and sat down and panted. He was
so fat that he was obliged to pant some time before he could say:

‘That’s right.’

‘Father!’ said Minnie, playfully. ‘What a porpoise you do grow!’

‘Well, I don’t know how it is, my dear,’ he replied, considering about
it. ‘I am rather so.’

‘You are such a comfortable man, you see,’ said Minnie. ‘You take things
so easy.’

‘No use taking ‘em otherwise, my dear,’ said Mr. Omer.

‘No, indeed,’ returned his daughter. ‘We are all pretty gay here, thank
Heaven! Ain’t we, father?’

‘I hope so, my dear,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘As I have got my breath now, I
think I’ll measure this young scholar. Would you walk into the shop,
Master Copperfield?’

I preceded Mr. Omer, in compliance with his request; and after showing
me a roll of cloth which he said was extra super, and too good mourning
for anything short of parents, he took my various dimensions, and put
them down in a book. While he was recording them he called my attention
to his stock in trade, and to certain fashions which he said had ‘just
come up’, and to certain other fashions which he said had ‘just gone
out’.

‘And by that sort of thing we very often lose a little mint of money,’
said Mr. Omer. ‘But fashions are like human beings. They come in, nobody
knows when, why, or how; and they go out, nobody knows when, why, or
how. Everything is like life, in my opinion, if you look at it in that
point of view.’

I was too sorrowful to discuss the question, which would possibly have
been beyond me under any circumstances; and Mr. Omer took me back into
the parlour, breathing with some difficulty on the way.

He then called down a little break-neck range of steps behind a door:
‘Bring up that tea and bread-and-butter!’ which, after some time,
during which I sat looking about me and thinking, and listening to the
stitching in the room and the tune that was being hammered across the
yard, appeared on a tray, and turned out to be for me.

‘I have been acquainted with you,’ said Mr. Omer, after watching me
for some minutes, during which I had not made much impression on the
breakfast, for the black things destroyed my appetite, ‘I have been
acquainted with you a long time, my young friend.’

‘Have you, sir?’

‘All your life,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘I may say before it. I knew your
father before you. He was five foot nine and a half, and he lays in
five-and-twen-ty foot of ground.’

‘RAT--tat-tat, RAT--tat-tat, RAT--tat-tat,’ across the yard.

‘He lays in five and twen-ty foot of ground, if he lays in a fraction,’
said Mr. Omer, pleasantly. ‘It was either his request or her direction,
I forget which.’

‘Do you know how my little brother is, sir?’ I inquired.

Mr. Omer shook his head.

‘RAT--tat-tat, RAT--tat-tat, RAT--tat-tat.’

‘He is in his mother’s arms,’ said he.

‘Oh, poor little fellow! Is he dead?’

‘Don’t mind it more than you can help,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘Yes. The baby’s
dead.’

My wounds broke out afresh at this intelligence. I left the
scarcely-tasted breakfast, and went and rested my head on another table,
in a corner of the little room, which Minnie hastily cleared, lest I
should spot the mourning that was lying there with my tears. She was
a pretty, good-natured girl, and put my hair away from my eyes with a
soft, kind touch; but she was very cheerful at having nearly finished
her work and being in good time, and was so different from me!

Presently the tune left off, and a good-looking young fellow came across
the yard into the room. He had a hammer in his hand, and his mouth was
full of little nails, which he was obliged to take out before he could
speak.

‘Well, Joram!’ said Mr. Omer. ‘How do you get on?’

‘All right,’ said Joram. ‘Done, sir.’

Minnie coloured a little, and the other two girls smiled at one another.

‘What! you were at it by candle-light last night, when I was at the
club, then? Were you?’ said Mr. Omer, shutting up one eye.

‘Yes,’ said Joram. ‘As you said we could make a little trip of it, and
go over together, if it was done, Minnie and me--and you.’

‘Oh! I thought you were going to leave me out altogether,’ said Mr.
Omer, laughing till he coughed.

‘--As you was so good as to say that,’ resumed the young man, ‘why I
turned to with a will, you see. Will you give me your opinion of it?’

‘I will,’ said Mr. Omer, rising. ‘My dear’; and he stopped and turned to
me: ‘would you like to see your--’

‘No, father,’ Minnie interposed.

‘I thought it might be agreeable, my dear,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘But perhaps
you’re right.’

I can’t say how I knew it was my dear, dear mother’s coffin that they
went to look at. I had never heard one making; I had never seen one that
I know of.--but it came into my mind what the noise was, while it was
going on; and when the young man entered, I am sure I knew what he had
been doing.

The work being now finished, the two girls, whose names I had not heard,
brushed the shreds and threads from their dresses, and went into the
shop to put that to rights, and wait for customers. Minnie stayed behind
to fold up what they had made, and pack it in two baskets. This she did
upon her knees, humming a lively little tune the while. Joram, who I had
no doubt was her lover, came in and stole a kiss from her while she was
busy (he didn’t appear to mind me, at all), and said her father was gone
for the chaise, and he must make haste and get himself ready. Then he
went out again; and then she put her thimble and scissors in her pocket,
and stuck a needle threaded with black thread neatly in the bosom of her
gown, and put on her outer clothing smartly, at a little glass behind
the door, in which I saw the reflection of her pleased face.

All this I observed, sitting at the table in the corner with my head
leaning on my hand, and my thoughts running on very different things.
The chaise soon came round to the front of the shop, and the baskets
being put in first, I was put in next, and those three followed. I
remember it as a kind of half chaise-cart, half pianoforte-van, painted
of a sombre colour, and drawn by a black horse with a long tail. There
was plenty of room for us all.

I do not think I have ever experienced so strange a feeling in my life
(I am wiser now, perhaps) as that of being with them, remembering how
they had been employed, and seeing them enjoy the ride. I was not angry
with them; I was more afraid of them, as if I were cast away among
creatures with whom I had no community of nature. They were very
cheerful. The old man sat in front to drive, and the two young people
sat behind him, and whenever he spoke to them leaned forward, the one on
one side of his chubby face and the other on the other, and made a great
deal of him. They would have talked to me too, but I held back, and
moped in my corner; scared by their love-making and hilarity, though
it was far from boisterous, and almost wondering that no judgement came
upon them for their hardness of heart.

So, when they stopped to bait the horse, and ate and drank and enjoyed
themselves, I could touch nothing that they touched, but kept my fast
unbroken. So, when we reached home, I dropped out of the chaise behind,
as quickly as possible, that I might not be in their company before
those solemn windows, looking blindly on me like closed eyes once
bright. And oh, how little need I had had to think what would move me to
tears when I came back--seeing the window of my mother’s room, and next
it that which, in the better time, was mine!

I was in Peggotty’s arms before I got to the door, and she took me into
the house. Her grief burst out when she first saw me; but she controlled
it soon, and spoke in whispers, and walked softly, as if the dead could
be disturbed. She had not been in bed, I found, for a long time. She
sat up at night still, and watched. As long as her poor dear pretty was
above the ground, she said, she would never desert her.

Mr. Murdstone took no heed of me when I went into the parlour where he
was, but sat by the fireside, weeping silently, and pondering in his
elbow-chair. Miss Murdstone, who was busy at her writing-desk, which
was covered with letters and papers, gave me her cold finger-nails, and
asked me, in an iron whisper, if I had been measured for my mourning.

I said: ‘Yes.’

‘And your shirts,’ said Miss Murdstone; ‘have you brought ‘em home?’

‘Yes, ma’am. I have brought home all my clothes.’

This was all the consolation that her firmness administered to me. I do
not doubt that she had a choice pleasure in exhibiting what she called
her self-command, and her firmness, and her strength of mind, and
her common sense, and the whole diabolical catalogue of her unamiable
qualities, on such an occasion. She was particularly proud of her turn
for business; and she showed it now in reducing everything to pen and
ink, and being moved by nothing. All the rest of that day, and from
morning to night afterwards, she sat at that desk, scratching composedly
with a hard pen, speaking in the same imperturbable whisper to
everybody; never relaxing a muscle of her face, or softening a tone of
her voice, or appearing with an atom of her dress astray.

Her brother took a book sometimes, but never read it that I saw. He
would open it and look at it as if he were reading, but would remain for
a whole hour without turning the leaf, and then put it down and walk to
and fro in the room. I used to sit with folded hands watching him, and
counting his footsteps, hour after hour. He very seldom spoke to her,
and never to me. He seemed to be the only restless thing, except the
clocks, in the whole motionless house.

In these days before the funeral, I saw but little of Peggotty, except
that, in passing up or down stairs, I always found her close to the room
where my mother and her baby lay, and except that she came to me every
night, and sat by my bed’s head while I went to sleep. A day or
two before the burial--I think it was a day or two before, but I am
conscious of confusion in my mind about that heavy time, with nothing
to mark its progress--she took me into the room. I only recollect that
underneath some white covering on the bed, with a beautiful cleanliness
and freshness all around it, there seemed to me to lie embodied the
solemn stillness that was in the house; and that when she would have
turned the cover gently back, I cried: ‘Oh no! oh no!’ and held her
hand.

If the funeral had been yesterday, I could not recollect it better. The
very air of the best parlour, when I went in at the door, the bright
condition of the fire, the shining of the wine in the decanters, the
patterns of the glasses and plates, the faint sweet smell of cake, the
odour of Miss Murdstone’s dress, and our black clothes. Mr. Chillip is
in the room, and comes to speak to me.

‘And how is Master David?’ he says, kindly.

I cannot tell him very well. I give him my hand, which he holds in his.

‘Dear me!’ says Mr. Chillip, meekly smiling, with something shining in
his eye. ‘Our little friends grow up around us. They grow out of our
knowledge, ma’am?’ This is to Miss Murdstone, who makes no reply.

‘There is a great improvement here, ma’am?’ says Mr. Chillip.

Miss Murdstone merely answers with a frown and a formal bend: Mr.
Chillip, discomfited, goes into a corner, keeping me with him, and opens
his mouth no more.

I remark this, because I remark everything that happens, not because
I care about myself, or have done since I came home. And now the bell
begins to sound, and Mr. Omer and another come to make us ready. As
Peggotty was wont to tell me, long ago, the followers of my father to
the same grave were made ready in the same room.

There are Mr. Murdstone, our neighbour Mr. Grayper, Mr. Chillip, and
I. When we go out to the door, the Bearers and their load are in the
garden; and they move before us down the path, and past the elms, and
through the gate, and into the churchyard, where I have so often heard
the birds sing on a summer morning.

We stand around the grave. The day seems different to me from every
other day, and the light not of the same colour--of a sadder colour.
Now there is a solemn hush, which we have brought from home with what is
resting in the mould; and while we stand bareheaded, I hear the voice
of the clergyman, sounding remote in the open air, and yet distinct and
plain, saying: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord!’
Then I hear sobs; and, standing apart among the lookers-on, I see that
good and faithful servant, whom of all the people upon earth I love the
best, and unto whom my childish heart is certain that the Lord will one
day say: ‘Well done.’

There are many faces that I know, among the little crowd; faces that I
knew in church, when mine was always wondering there; faces that first
saw my mother, when she came to the village in her youthful bloom. I do
not mind them--I mind nothing but my grief--and yet I see and know them
all; and even in the background, far away, see Minnie looking on, and
her eye glancing on her sweetheart, who is near me.

It is over, and the earth is filled in, and we turn to come away. Before
us stands our house, so pretty and unchanged, so linked in my mind with
the young idea of what is gone, that all my sorrow has been nothing to
the sorrow it calls forth. But they take me on; and Mr. Chillip talks to
me; and when we get home, puts some water to my lips; and when I ask his
leave to go up to my room, dismisses me with the gentleness of a woman.

All this, I say, is yesterday’s event. Events of later date have floated
from me to the shore where all forgotten things will reappear, but this
stands like a high rock in the ocean.

I knew that Peggotty would come to me in my room. The Sabbath stillness
of the time (the day was so like Sunday! I have forgotten that) was
suited to us both. She sat down by my side upon my little bed; and
holding my hand, and sometimes putting it to her lips, and sometimes
smoothing it with hers, as she might have comforted my little brother,
told me, in her way, all that she had to tell concerning what had
happened.

‘She was never well,’ said Peggotty, ‘for a long time. She was uncertain
in her mind, and not happy. When her baby was born, I thought at first
she would get better, but she was more delicate, and sunk a little every
day. She used to like to sit alone before her baby came, and then she
cried; but afterwards she used to sing to it--so soft, that I once
thought, when I heard her, it was like a voice up in the air, that was
rising away.

‘I think she got to be more timid, and more frightened-like, of late;
and that a hard word was like a blow to her. But she was always the same
to me. She never changed to her foolish Peggotty, didn’t my sweet girl.’

Here Peggotty stopped, and softly beat upon my hand a little while.

‘The last time that I saw her like her own old self, was the night when
you came home, my dear. The day you went away, she said to me, “I never
shall see my pretty darling again. Something tells me so, that tells the
truth, I know.”

‘She tried to hold up after that; and many a time, when they told her
she was thoughtless and light-hearted, made believe to be so; but it was
all a bygone then. She never told her husband what she had told me--she
was afraid of saying it to anybody else--till one night, a little more
than a week before it happened, when she said to him: “My dear, I think
I am dying.”

‘“It’s off my mind now, Peggotty,” she told me, when I laid her in her
bed that night. “He will believe it more and more, poor fellow, every
day for a few days to come; and then it will be past. I am very tired.
If this is sleep, sit by me while I sleep: don’t leave me. God bless
both my children! God protect and keep my fatherless boy!”

‘I never left her afterwards,’ said Peggotty. ‘She often talked to them
two downstairs--for she loved them; she couldn’t bear not to love anyone
who was about her--but when they went away from her bed-side, she always
turned to me, as if there was rest where Peggotty was, and never fell
asleep in any other way.

‘On the last night, in the evening, she kissed me, and said: “If my baby
should die too, Peggotty, please let them lay him in my arms, and bury
us together.” (It was done; for the poor lamb lived but a day beyond
her.) “Let my dearest boy go with us to our resting-place,” she said,
“and tell him that his mother, when she lay here, blessed him not once,
but a thousand times.”’

Another silence followed this, and another gentle beating on my hand.

‘It was pretty far in the night,’ said Peggotty, ‘when she asked me for
some drink; and when she had taken it, gave me such a patient smile, the
dear!--so beautiful!

‘Daybreak had come, and the sun was rising, when she said to me, how
kind and considerate Mr. Copperfield had always been to her, and how
he had borne with her, and told her, when she doubted herself, that
a loving heart was better and stronger than wisdom, and that he was a
happy man in hers. “Peggotty, my dear,” she said then, “put me nearer to
you,” for she was very weak. “Lay your good arm underneath my neck,” she
said, “and turn me to you, for your face is going far off, and I want it
to be near.” I put it as she asked; and oh Davy! the time had come when
my first parting words to you were true--when she was glad to lay her
poor head on her stupid cross old Peggotty’s arm--and she died like a
child that had gone to sleep!’


Thus ended Peggotty’s narration. From the moment of my knowing of the
death of my mother, the idea of her as she had been of late had vanished
from me. I remembered her, from that instant, only as the young mother
of my earliest impressions, who had been used to wind her bright curls
round and round her finger, and to dance with me at twilight in the
parlour. What Peggotty had told me now, was so far from bringing me back
to the later period, that it rooted the earlier image in my mind. It may
be curious, but it is true. In her death she winged her way back to her
calm untroubled youth, and cancelled all the rest.

The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the
little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for
ever on her bosom.



CHAPTER 10. I BECOME NEGLECTED, AND AM PROVIDED FOR


The first act of business Miss Murdstone performed when the day of the
solemnity was over, and light was freely admitted into the house, was
to give Peggotty a month’s warning. Much as Peggotty would have disliked
such a service, I believe she would have retained it, for my sake, in
preference to the best upon earth. She told me we must part, and told me
why; and we condoled with one another, in all sincerity.

As to me or my future, not a word was said, or a step taken. Happy
they would have been, I dare say, if they could have dismissed me at a
month’s warning too. I mustered courage once, to ask Miss Murdstone when
I was going back to school; and she answered dryly, she believed I was
not going back at all. I was told nothing more. I was very anxious to
know what was going to be done with me, and so was Peggotty; but neither
she nor I could pick up any information on the subject.

There was one change in my condition, which, while it relieved me of
a great deal of present uneasiness, might have made me, if I had been
capable of considering it closely, yet more uncomfortable about the
future. It was this. The constraint that had been put upon me, was quite
abandoned. I was so far from being required to keep my dull post in
the parlour, that on several occasions, when I took my seat there, Miss
Murdstone frowned to me to go away. I was so far from being warned off
from Peggotty’s society, that, provided I was not in Mr. Murdstone’s, I
was never sought out or inquired for. At first I was in daily dread of
his taking my education in hand again, or of Miss Murdstone’s
devoting herself to it; but I soon began to think that such fears were
groundless, and that all I had to anticipate was neglect.

I do not conceive that this discovery gave me much pain then. I was
still giddy with the shock of my mother’s death, and in a kind of
stunned state as to all tributary things. I can recollect, indeed, to
have speculated, at odd times, on the possibility of my not being taught
any more, or cared for any more; and growing up to be a shabby, moody
man, lounging an idle life away, about the village; as well as on the
feasibility of my getting rid of this picture by going away somewhere,
like the hero in a story, to seek my fortune: but these were transient
visions, daydreams I sat looking at sometimes, as if they were faintly
painted or written on the wall of my room, and which, as they melted
away, left the wall blank again.

‘Peggotty,’ I said in a thoughtful whisper, one evening, when I was
warming my hands at the kitchen fire, ‘Mr. Murdstone likes me less than
he used to. He never liked me much, Peggotty; but he would rather not
even see me now, if he can help it.’

‘Perhaps it’s his sorrow,’ said Peggotty, stroking my hair.

‘I am sure, Peggotty, I am sorry too. If I believed it was his sorrow,
I should not think of it at all. But it’s not that; oh, no, it’s not
that.’

‘How do you know it’s not that?’ said Peggotty, after a silence.

‘Oh, his sorrow is another and quite a different thing. He is sorry at
this moment, sitting by the fireside with Miss Murdstone; but if I was
to go in, Peggotty, he would be something besides.’

‘What would he be?’ said Peggotty.

‘Angry,’ I answered, with an involuntary imitation of his dark frown.
‘If he was only sorry, he wouldn’t look at me as he does. I am only
sorry, and it makes me feel kinder.’

Peggotty said nothing for a little while; and I warmed my hands, as
silent as she.

‘Davy,’ she said at length.

‘Yes, Peggotty?’ ‘I have tried, my dear, all ways I could think of--all
the ways there are, and all the ways there ain’t, in short--to get a
suitable service here, in Blunderstone; but there’s no such a thing, my
love.’

‘And what do you mean to do, Peggotty,’ says I, wistfully. ‘Do you mean
to go and seek your fortune?’

‘I expect I shall be forced to go to Yarmouth,’ replied Peggotty, ‘and
live there.’

‘You might have gone farther off,’ I said, brightening a little, ‘and
been as bad as lost. I shall see you sometimes, my dear old Peggotty,
there. You won’t be quite at the other end of the world, will you?’

‘Contrary ways, please God!’ cried Peggotty, with great animation. ‘As
long as you are here, my pet, I shall come over every week of my life to
see you. One day, every week of my life!’

I felt a great weight taken off my mind by this promise: but even this
was not all, for Peggotty went on to say:

‘I’m a-going, Davy, you see, to my brother’s, first, for another
fortnight’s visit--just till I have had time to look about me, and
get to be something like myself again. Now, I have been thinking that
perhaps, as they don’t want you here at present, you might be let to go
along with me.’

If anything, short of being in a different relation to every one about
me, Peggotty excepted, could have given me a sense of pleasure at that
time, it would have been this project of all others. The idea of being
again surrounded by those honest faces, shining welcome on me; of
renewing the peacefulness of the sweet Sunday morning, when the bells
were ringing, the stones dropping in the water, and the shadowy ships
breaking through the mist; of roaming up and down with little Em’ly,
telling her my troubles, and finding charms against them in the shells
and pebbles on the beach; made a calm in my heart. It was ruffled next
moment, to be sure, by a doubt of Miss Murdstone’s giving her consent;
but even that was set at rest soon, for she came out to take an evening
grope in the store-closet while we were yet in conversation, and
Peggotty, with a boldness that amazed me, broached the topic on the
spot.

‘The boy will be idle there,’ said Miss Murdstone, looking into a
pickle-jar, ‘and idleness is the root of all evil. But, to be sure, he
would be idle here--or anywhere, in my opinion.’

Peggotty had an angry answer ready, I could see; but she swallowed it
for my sake, and remained silent.

‘Humph!’ said Miss Murdstone, still keeping her eye on the pickles;
‘it is of more importance than anything else--it is of paramount
importance--that my brother should not be disturbed or made
uncomfortable. I suppose I had better say yes.’

I thanked her, without making any demonstration of joy, lest it should
induce her to withdraw her assent. Nor could I help thinking this a
prudent course, since she looked at me out of the pickle-jar, with
as great an access of sourness as if her black eyes had absorbed its
contents. However, the permission was given, and was never retracted;
for when the month was out, Peggotty and I were ready to depart.

Mr. Barkis came into the house for Peggotty’s boxes. I had never known
him to pass the garden-gate before, but on this occasion he came into
the house. And he gave me a look as he shouldered the largest box and
went out, which I thought had meaning in it, if meaning could ever be
said to find its way into Mr. Barkis’s visage.

Peggotty was naturally in low spirits at leaving what had been her home
so many years, and where the two strong attachments of her life--for
my mother and myself--had been formed. She had been walking in the
churchyard, too, very early; and she got into the cart, and sat in it
with her handkerchief at her eyes.

So long as she remained in this condition, Mr. Barkis gave no sign
of life whatever. He sat in his usual place and attitude like a great
stuffed figure. But when she began to look about her, and to speak to
me, he nodded his head and grinned several times. I have not the least
notion at whom, or what he meant by it.

‘It’s a beautiful day, Mr. Barkis!’ I said, as an act of politeness.

‘It ain’t bad,’ said Mr. Barkis, who generally qualified his speech, and
rarely committed himself.

‘Peggotty is quite comfortable now, Mr. Barkis,’ I remarked, for his
satisfaction.

‘Is she, though?’ said Mr. Barkis.

After reflecting about it, with a sagacious air, Mr. Barkis eyed her,
and said:

‘ARE you pretty comfortable?’

Peggotty laughed, and answered in the affirmative.

‘But really and truly, you know. Are you?’ growled Mr. Barkis, sliding
nearer to her on the seat, and nudging her with his elbow. ‘Are you?
Really and truly pretty comfortable? Are you? Eh?’

At each of these inquiries Mr. Barkis shuffled nearer to her, and gave
her another nudge; so that at last we were all crowded together in the
left-hand corner of the cart, and I was so squeezed that I could hardly
bear it.

Peggotty calling his attention to my sufferings, Mr. Barkis gave me a
little more room at once, and got away by degrees. But I could not help
observing that he seemed to think he had hit upon a wonderful expedient
for expressing himself in a neat, agreeable, and pointed manner, without
the inconvenience of inventing conversation. He manifestly chuckled over
it for some time. By and by he turned to Peggotty again, and repeating,
‘Are you pretty comfortable though?’ bore down upon us as before, until
the breath was nearly edged out of my body. By and by he made another
descent upon us with the same inquiry, and the same result. At length,
I got up whenever I saw him coming, and standing on the foot-board,
pretended to look at the prospect; after which I did very well.

He was so polite as to stop at a public-house, expressly on our account,
and entertain us with broiled mutton and beer. Even when Peggotty was
in the act of drinking, he was seized with one of those approaches, and
almost choked her. But as we drew nearer to the end of our journey, he
had more to do and less time for gallantry; and when we got on Yarmouth
pavement, we were all too much shaken and jolted, I apprehend, to have
any leisure for anything else.

Mr. Peggotty and Ham waited for us at the old place. They received me
and Peggotty in an affectionate manner, and shook hands with Mr. Barkis,
who, with his hat on the very back of his head, and a shame-faced leer
upon his countenance, and pervading his very legs, presented but a
vacant appearance, I thought. They each took one of Peggotty’s trunks,
and we were going away, when Mr. Barkis solemnly made a sign to me with
his forefinger to come under an archway.

‘I say,’ growled Mr. Barkis, ‘it was all right.’

I looked up into his face, and answered, with an attempt to be very
profound: ‘Oh!’

‘It didn’t come to a end there,’ said Mr. Barkis, nodding
confidentially. ‘It was all right.’

Again I answered, ‘Oh!’

‘You know who was willin’,’ said my friend. ‘It was Barkis, and Barkis
only.’

I nodded assent.

‘It’s all right,’ said Mr. Barkis, shaking hands; ‘I’m a friend of
your’n. You made it all right, first. It’s all right.’

In his attempts to be particularly lucid, Mr. Barkis was so extremely
mysterious, that I might have stood looking in his face for an hour, and
most assuredly should have got as much information out of it as out
of the face of a clock that had stopped, but for Peggotty’s calling me
away. As we were going along, she asked me what he had said; and I told
her he had said it was all right.

‘Like his impudence,’ said Peggotty, ‘but I don’t mind that! Davy dear,
what should you think if I was to think of being married?’

‘Why--I suppose you would like me as much then, Peggotty, as you do
now?’ I returned, after a little consideration.

Greatly to the astonishment of the passengers in the street, as well as
of her relations going on before, the good soul was obliged to stop and
embrace me on the spot, with many protestations of her unalterable love.

‘Tell me what should you say, darling?’ she asked again, when this was
over, and we were walking on.

‘If you were thinking of being married--to Mr. Barkis, Peggotty?’

‘Yes,’ said Peggotty.

‘I should think it would be a very good thing. For then you know,
Peggotty, you would always have the horse and cart to bring you over to
see me, and could come for nothing, and be sure of coming.’

‘The sense of the dear!’ cried Peggotty. ‘What I have been thinking
of, this month back! Yes, my precious; and I think I should be more
independent altogether, you see; let alone my working with a better
heart in my own house, than I could in anybody else’s now. I don’t know
what I might be fit for, now, as a servant to a stranger. And I shall be
always near my pretty’s resting-place,’ said Peggotty, musing, ‘and be
able to see it when I like; and when I lie down to rest, I may be laid
not far off from my darling girl!’

We neither of us said anything for a little while.

‘But I wouldn’t so much as give it another thought,’ said Peggotty,
cheerily ‘if my Davy was anyways against it--not if I had been asked in
church thirty times three times over, and was wearing out the ring in my
pocket.’

‘Look at me, Peggotty,’ I replied; ‘and see if I am not really glad, and
don’t truly wish it!’ As indeed I did, with all my heart.

‘Well, my life,’ said Peggotty, giving me a squeeze, ‘I have thought of
it night and day, every way I can, and I hope the right way; but I’ll
think of it again, and speak to my brother about it, and in the meantime
we’ll keep it to ourselves, Davy, you and me. Barkis is a good plain
creature,’ said Peggotty, ‘and if I tried to do my duty by him, I think
it would be my fault if I wasn’t--if I wasn’t pretty comfortable,’
said Peggotty, laughing heartily. This quotation from Mr. Barkis was
so appropriate, and tickled us both so much, that we laughed again and
again, and were quite in a pleasant humour when we came within view of
Mr. Peggotty’s cottage.

It looked just the same, except that it may, perhaps, have shrunk a
little in my eyes; and Mrs. Gummidge was waiting at the door as if she
had stood there ever since. All within was the same, down to the seaweed
in the blue mug in my bedroom. I went into the out-house to look about
me; and the very same lobsters, crabs, and crawfish possessed by the
same desire to pinch the world in general, appeared to be in the same
state of conglomeration in the same old corner.

But there was no little Em’ly to be seen, so I asked Mr. Peggotty where
she was.

‘She’s at school, sir,’ said Mr. Peggotty, wiping the heat consequent
on the porterage of Peggotty’s box from his forehead; ‘she’ll be home,’
looking at the Dutch clock, ‘in from twenty minutes to half-an-hour’s
time. We all on us feel the loss of her, bless ye!’

Mrs. Gummidge moaned.

‘Cheer up, Mawther!’ cried Mr. Peggotty.

‘I feel it more than anybody else,’ said Mrs. Gummidge; ‘I’m a lone
lorn creetur’, and she used to be a’most the only thing that didn’t go
contrary with me.’

Mrs. Gummidge, whimpering and shaking her head, applied herself to
blowing the fire. Mr. Peggotty, looking round upon us while she was so
engaged, said in a low voice, which he shaded with his hand: ‘The old
‘un!’ From this I rightly conjectured that no improvement had taken
place since my last visit in the state of Mrs. Gummidge’s spirits.

Now, the whole place was, or it should have been, quite as delightful
a place as ever; and yet it did not impress me in the same way. I felt
rather disappointed with it. Perhaps it was because little Em’ly was
not at home. I knew the way by which she would come, and presently found
myself strolling along the path to meet her.

A figure appeared in the distance before long, and I soon knew it to be
Em’ly, who was a little creature still in stature, though she was grown.
But when she drew nearer, and I saw her blue eyes looking bluer, and her
dimpled face looking brighter, and her whole self prettier and gayer, a
curious feeling came over me that made me pretend not to know her, and
pass by as if I were looking at something a long way off. I have done
such a thing since in later life, or I am mistaken.

Little Em’ly didn’t care a bit. She saw me well enough; but instead of
turning round and calling after me, ran away laughing. This obliged me
to run after her, and she ran so fast that we were very near the cottage
before I caught her.

‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ said little Em’ly.

‘Why, you knew who it was, Em’ly,’ said I.

‘And didn’t YOU know who it was?’ said Em’ly. I was going to kiss her,
but she covered her cherry lips with her hands, and said she wasn’t a
baby now, and ran away, laughing more than ever, into the house.

She seemed to delight in teasing me, which was a change in her I
wondered at very much. The tea table was ready, and our little locker
was put out in its old place, but instead of coming to sit by me, she
went and bestowed her company upon that grumbling Mrs. Gummidge: and on
Mr. Peggotty’s inquiring why, rumpled her hair all over her face to hide
it, and could do nothing but laugh.

‘A little puss, it is!’ said Mr. Peggotty, patting her with his great
hand.

‘So sh’ is! so sh’ is!’ cried Ham. ‘Mas’r Davy bor’, so sh’ is!’ and he
sat and chuckled at her for some time, in a state of mingled admiration
and delight, that made his face a burning red.

Little Em’ly was spoiled by them all, in fact; and by no one more than
Mr. Peggotty himself, whom she could have coaxed into anything, by
only going and laying her cheek against his rough whisker. That was my
opinion, at least, when I saw her do it; and I held Mr. Peggotty to be
thoroughly in the right. But she was so affectionate and sweet-natured,
and had such a pleasant manner of being both sly and shy at once, that
she captivated me more than ever.

She was tender-hearted, too; for when, as we sat round the fire after
tea, an allusion was made by Mr. Peggotty over his pipe to the loss
I had sustained, the tears stood in her eyes, and she looked at me so
kindly across the table, that I felt quite thankful to her.

‘Ah!’ said Mr. Peggotty, taking up her curls, and running them over his
hand like water, ‘here’s another orphan, you see, sir. And here,’ said
Mr. Peggotty, giving Ham a backhanded knock in the chest, ‘is another of
‘em, though he don’t look much like it.’

‘If I had you for my guardian, Mr. Peggotty,’ said I, shaking my head,
‘I don’t think I should FEEL much like it.’

‘Well said, Mas’r Davy bor’!’ cried Ham, in an ecstasy. ‘Hoorah! Well
said! Nor more you wouldn’t! Hor! Hor!’--Here he returned Mr. Peggotty’s
back-hander, and little Em’ly got up and kissed Mr. Peggotty. ‘And how’s
your friend, sir?’ said Mr. Peggotty to me.

‘Steerforth?’ said I.

‘That’s the name!’ cried Mr. Peggotty, turning to Ham. ‘I knowed it was
something in our way.’

‘You said it was Rudderford,’ observed Ham, laughing.

‘Well!’ retorted Mr. Peggotty. ‘And ye steer with a rudder, don’t ye? It
ain’t fur off. How is he, sir?’

‘He was very well indeed when I came away, Mr. Peggotty.’

‘There’s a friend!’ said Mr. Peggotty, stretching out his pipe. ‘There’s
a friend, if you talk of friends! Why, Lord love my heart alive, if it
ain’t a treat to look at him!’

‘He is very handsome, is he not?’ said I, my heart warming with this
praise.

‘Handsome!’ cried Mr. Peggotty. ‘He stands up to you like--like a--why I
don’t know what he don’t stand up to you like. He’s so bold!’

‘Yes! That’s just his character,’ said I. ‘He’s as brave as a lion, and
you can’t think how frank he is, Mr. Peggotty.’

‘And I do suppose, now,’ said Mr. Peggotty, looking at me through the
smoke of his pipe, ‘that in the way of book-larning he’d take the wind
out of a’most anything.’

‘Yes,’ said I, delighted; ‘he knows everything. He is astonishingly
clever.’

‘There’s a friend!’ murmured Mr. Peggotty, with a grave toss of his
head.

‘Nothing seems to cost him any trouble,’ said I. ‘He knows a task if he
only looks at it. He is the best cricketer you ever saw. He will give
you almost as many men as you like at draughts, and beat you easily.’

Mr. Peggotty gave his head another toss, as much as to say: ‘Of course
he will.’

‘He is such a speaker,’ I pursued, ‘that he can win anybody over; and I
don’t know what you’d say if you were to hear him sing, Mr. Peggotty.’

Mr. Peggotty gave his head another toss, as much as to say: ‘I have no
doubt of it.’

‘Then, he’s such a generous, fine, noble fellow,’ said I, quite carried
away by my favourite theme, ‘that it’s hardly possible to give him as
much praise as he deserves. I am sure I can never feel thankful enough
for the generosity with which he has protected me, so much younger and
lower in the school than himself.’

I was running on, very fast indeed, when my eyes rested on little
Em’ly’s face, which was bent forward over the table, listening with the
deepest attention, her breath held, her blue eyes sparkling like jewels,
and the colour mantling in her cheeks. She looked so extraordinarily
earnest and pretty, that I stopped in a sort of wonder; and they all
observed her at the same time, for as I stopped, they laughed and looked
at her.

‘Em’ly is like me,’ said Peggotty, ‘and would like to see him.’

Em’ly was confused by our all observing her, and hung down her head,
and her face was covered with blushes. Glancing up presently through her
stray curls, and seeing that we were all looking at her still (I am sure
I, for one, could have looked at her for hours), she ran away, and kept
away till it was nearly bedtime.

I lay down in the old little bed in the stern of the boat, and the wind
came moaning on across the flat as it had done before. But I could not
help fancying, now, that it moaned of those who were gone; and instead
of thinking that the sea might rise in the night and float the boat
away, I thought of the sea that had risen, since I last heard those
sounds, and drowned my happy home. I recollect, as the wind and water
began to sound fainter in my ears, putting a short clause into my
prayers, petitioning that I might grow up to marry little Em’ly, and so
dropping lovingly asleep.

The days passed pretty much as they had passed before, except--it was
a great exception--that little Em’ly and I seldom wandered on the beach
now. She had tasks to learn, and needle-work to do; and was absent
during a great part of each day. But I felt that we should not have had
those old wanderings, even if it had been otherwise. Wild and full of
childish whims as Em’ly was, she was more of a little woman than I
had supposed. She seemed to have got a great distance away from me,
in little more than a year. She liked me, but she laughed at me, and
tormented me; and when I went to meet her, stole home another way, and
was laughing at the door when I came back, disappointed. The best times
were when she sat quietly at work in the doorway, and I sat on the
wooden step at her feet, reading to her. It seems to me, at this
hour, that I have never seen such sunlight as on those bright April
afternoons; that I have never seen such a sunny little figure as I used
to see, sitting in the doorway of the old boat; that I have never beheld
such sky, such water, such glorified ships sailing away into golden air.

On the very first evening after our arrival, Mr. Barkis appeared in an
exceedingly vacant and awkward condition, and with a bundle of oranges
tied up in a handkerchief. As he made no allusion of any kind to this
property, he was supposed to have left it behind him by accident when
he went away; until Ham, running after him to restore it, came back with
the information that it was intended for Peggotty. After that occasion
he appeared every evening at exactly the same hour, and always with a
little bundle, to which he never alluded, and which he regularly put
behind the door and left there. These offerings of affection were of a
most various and eccentric description. Among them I remember a double
set of pigs’ trotters, a huge pin-cushion, half a bushel or so of
apples, a pair of jet earrings, some Spanish onions, a box of dominoes,
a canary bird and cage, and a leg of pickled pork.

Mr. Barkis’s wooing, as I remember it, was altogether of a peculiar
kind. He very seldom said anything; but would sit by the fire in much
the same attitude as he sat in his cart, and stare heavily at Peggotty,
who was opposite. One night, being, as I suppose, inspired by love, he
made a dart at the bit of wax-candle she kept for her thread, and put
it in his waistcoat-pocket and carried it off. After that, his great
delight was to produce it when it was wanted, sticking to the lining of
his pocket, in a partially melted state, and pocket it again when it was
done with. He seemed to enjoy himself very much, and not to feel at all
called upon to talk. Even when he took Peggotty out for a walk on the
flats, he had no uneasiness on that head, I believe; contenting himself
with now and then asking her if she was pretty comfortable; and I
remember that sometimes, after he was gone, Peggotty would throw her
apron over her face, and laugh for half-an-hour. Indeed, we were
all more or less amused, except that miserable Mrs. Gummidge, whose
courtship would appear to have been of an exactly parallel nature, she
was so continually reminded by these transactions of the old one.

At length, when the term of my visit was nearly expired, it was given
out that Peggotty and Mr. Barkis were going to make a day’s holiday
together, and that little Em’ly and I were to accompany them. I had but
a broken sleep the night before, in anticipation of the pleasure of
a whole day with Em’ly. We were all astir betimes in the morning; and
while we were yet at breakfast, Mr. Barkis appeared in the distance,
driving a chaise-cart towards the object of his affections.

Peggotty was dressed as usual, in her neat and quiet mourning; but Mr.
Barkis bloomed in a new blue coat, of which the tailor had given him
such good measure, that the cuffs would have rendered gloves unnecessary
in the coldest weather, while the collar was so high that it pushed his
hair up on end on the top of his head. His bright buttons, too, were
of the largest size. Rendered complete by drab pantaloons and a buff
waistcoat, I thought Mr. Barkis a phenomenon of respectability.

When we were all in a bustle outside the door, I found that Mr. Peggotty
was prepared with an old shoe, which was to be thrown after us for luck,
and which he offered to Mrs. Gummidge for that purpose.

‘No. It had better be done by somebody else, Dan’l,’ said Mrs. Gummidge.
‘I’m a lone lorn creetur’ myself, and everythink that reminds me of
creetur’s that ain’t lone and lorn, goes contrary with me.’

‘Come, old gal!’ cried Mr. Peggotty. ‘Take and heave it.’

‘No, Dan’l,’ returned Mrs. Gummidge, whimpering and shaking her head.
‘If I felt less, I could do more. You don’t feel like me, Dan’l; thinks
don’t go contrary with you, nor you with them; you had better do it
yourself.’

But here Peggotty, who had been going about from one to another in a
hurried way, kissing everybody, called out from the cart, in which we
all were by this time (Em’ly and I on two little chairs, side by side),
that Mrs. Gummidge must do it. So Mrs. Gummidge did it; and, I am sorry
to relate, cast a damp upon the festive character of our departure, by
immediately bursting into tears, and sinking subdued into the arms of
Ham, with the declaration that she knowed she was a burden, and had
better be carried to the House at once. Which I really thought was a
sensible idea, that Ham might have acted on.

Away we went, however, on our holiday excursion; and the first thing
we did was to stop at a church, where Mr. Barkis tied the horse to some
rails, and went in with Peggotty, leaving little Em’ly and me alone in
the chaise. I took that occasion to put my arm round Em’ly’s waist, and
propose that as I was going away so very soon now, we should determine
to be very affectionate to one another, and very happy, all day. Little
Em’ly consenting, and allowing me to kiss her, I became desperate;
informing her, I recollect, that I never could love another, and that
I was prepared to shed the blood of anybody who should aspire to her
affections.

How merry little Em’ly made herself about it! With what a demure
assumption of being immensely older and wiser than I, the fairy little
woman said I was ‘a silly boy’; and then laughed so charmingly that
I forgot the pain of being called by that disparaging name, in the
pleasure of looking at her.

Mr. Barkis and Peggotty were a good while in the church, but came out at
last, and then we drove away into the country. As we were going along,
Mr. Barkis turned to me, and said, with a wink,--by the by, I should
hardly have thought, before, that he could wink:

‘What name was it as I wrote up in the cart?’

‘Clara Peggotty,’ I answered.

‘What name would it be as I should write up now, if there was a tilt
here?’

‘Clara Peggotty, again?’ I suggested.

‘Clara Peggotty BARKIS!’ he returned, and burst into a roar of laughter
that shook the chaise.

In a word, they were married, and had gone into the church for no other
purpose. Peggotty was resolved that it should be quietly done; and
the clerk had given her away, and there had been no witnesses of the
ceremony. She was a little confused when Mr. Barkis made this abrupt
announcement of their union, and could not hug me enough in token of her
unimpaired affection; but she soon became herself again, and said she
was very glad it was over.

We drove to a little inn in a by-road, where we were expected, and
where we had a very comfortable dinner, and passed the day with great
satisfaction. If Peggotty had been married every day for the last ten
years, she could hardly have been more at her ease about it; it made no
sort of difference in her: she was just the same as ever, and went
out for a stroll with little Em’ly and me before tea, while Mr. Barkis
philosophically smoked his pipe, and enjoyed himself, I suppose, with
the contemplation of his happiness. If so, it sharpened his appetite;
for I distinctly call to mind that, although he had eaten a good deal of
pork and greens at dinner, and had finished off with a fowl or two, he
was obliged to have cold boiled bacon for tea, and disposed of a large
quantity without any emotion.

I have often thought, since, what an odd, innocent, out-of-the-way kind
of wedding it must have been! We got into the chaise again soon after
dark, and drove cosily back, looking up at the stars, and talking about
them. I was their chief exponent, and opened Mr. Barkis’s mind to
an amazing extent. I told him all I knew, but he would have believed
anything I might have taken it into my head to impart to him; for he
had a profound veneration for my abilities, and informed his wife in my
hearing, on that very occasion, that I was ‘a young Roeshus’--by which I
think he meant prodigy.

When we had exhausted the subject of the stars, or rather when I had
exhausted the mental faculties of Mr. Barkis, little Em’ly and I made a
cloak of an old wrapper, and sat under it for the rest of the journey.
Ah, how I loved her! What happiness (I thought) if we were married,
and were going away anywhere to live among the trees and in the fields,
never growing older, never growing wiser, children ever, rambling hand
in hand through sunshine and among flowery meadows, laying down our
heads on moss at night, in a sweet sleep of purity and peace, and buried
by the birds when we were dead! Some such picture, with no real world in
it, bright with the light of our innocence, and vague as the stars afar
off, was in my mind all the way. I am glad to think there were two such
guileless hearts at Peggotty’s marriage as little Em’ly’s and mine. I
am glad to think the Loves and Graces took such airy forms in its homely
procession.

Well, we came to the old boat again in good time at night; and there
Mr. and Mrs. Barkis bade us good-bye, and drove away snugly to their
own home. I felt then, for the first time, that I had lost Peggotty. I
should have gone to bed with a sore heart indeed under any other roof
but that which sheltered little Em’ly’s head.

Mr. Peggotty and Ham knew what was in my thoughts as well as I did, and
were ready with some supper and their hospitable faces to drive it away.
Little Em’ly came and sat beside me on the locker for the only time in
all that visit; and it was altogether a wonderful close to a wonderful
day.

It was a night tide; and soon after we went to bed, Mr. Peggotty and Ham
went out to fish. I felt very brave at being left alone in the solitary
house, the protector of Em’ly and Mrs. Gummidge, and only wished that
a lion or a serpent, or any ill-disposed monster, would make an attack
upon us, that I might destroy him, and cover myself with glory. But as
nothing of the sort happened to be walking about on Yarmouth flats that
night, I provided the best substitute I could by dreaming of dragons
until morning.

With morning came Peggotty; who called to me, as usual, under my window
as if Mr. Barkis the carrier had been from first to last a dream too.
After breakfast she took me to her own home, and a beautiful little
home it was. Of all the moveables in it, I must have been impressed by
a certain old bureau of some dark wood in the parlour (the tile-floored
kitchen was the general sitting-room), with a retreating top which
opened, let down, and became a desk, within which was a large quarto
edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. This precious volume, of which I do
not recollect one word, I immediately discovered and immediately applied
myself to; and I never visited the house afterwards, but I kneeled on
a chair, opened the casket where this gem was enshrined, spread my arms
over the desk, and fell to devouring the book afresh. I was chiefly
edified, I am afraid, by the pictures, which were numerous, and
represented all kinds of dismal horrors; but the Martyrs and Peggotty’s
house have been inseparable in my mind ever since, and are now.

I took leave of Mr. Peggotty, and Ham, and Mrs. Gummidge, and little
Em’ly, that day; and passed the night at Peggotty’s, in a little room
in the roof (with the Crocodile Book on a shelf by the bed’s head) which
was to be always mine, Peggotty said, and should always be kept for me
in exactly the same state.

‘Young or old, Davy dear, as long as I am alive and have this house over
my head,’ said Peggotty, ‘you shall find it as if I expected you here
directly minute. I shall keep it every day, as I used to keep your old
little room, my darling; and if you was to go to China, you might think
of it as being kept just the same, all the time you were away.’

I felt the truth and constancy of my dear old nurse, with all my heart,
and thanked her as well as I could. That was not very well, for she
spoke to me thus, with her arms round my neck, in the morning, and I was
going home in the morning, and I went home in the morning, with herself
and Mr. Barkis in the cart. They left me at the gate, not easily or
lightly; and it was a strange sight to me to see the cart go on, taking
Peggotty away, and leaving me under the old elm-trees looking at the
house, in which there was no face to look on mine with love or liking
any more.

And now I fell into a state of neglect, which I cannot look back upon
without compassion. I fell at once into a solitary condition,--apart
from all friendly notice, apart from the society of all other boys of
my own age, apart from all companionship but my own spiritless
thoughts,--which seems to cast its gloom upon this paper as I write.

What would I have given, to have been sent to the hardest school that
ever was kept!--to have been taught something, anyhow, anywhere! No
such hope dawned upon me. They disliked me; and they sullenly, sternly,
steadily, overlooked me. I think Mr. Murdstone’s means were straitened
at about this time; but it is little to the purpose. He could not bear
me; and in putting me from him he tried, as I believe, to put away the
notion that I had any claim upon him--and succeeded.

I was not actively ill-used. I was not beaten, or starved; but the wrong
that was done to me had no intervals of relenting, and was done in a
systematic, passionless manner. Day after day, week after week, month
after month, I was coldly neglected. I wonder sometimes, when I think
of it, what they would have done if I had been taken with an illness;
whether I should have lain down in my lonely room, and languished
through it in my usual solitary way, or whether anybody would have
helped me out.

When Mr. and Miss Murdstone were at home, I took my meals with them; in
their absence, I ate and drank by myself. At all times I lounged about
the house and neighbourhood quite disregarded, except that they were
jealous of my making any friends: thinking, perhaps, that if I did, I
might complain to someone. For this reason, though Mr. Chillip often
asked me to go and see him (he was a widower, having, some years before
that, lost a little small light-haired wife, whom I can just remember
connecting in my own thoughts with a pale tortoise-shell cat), it was
but seldom that I enjoyed the happiness of passing an afternoon in his
closet of a surgery; reading some book that was new to me, with
the smell of the whole Pharmacopoeia coming up my nose, or pounding
something in a mortar under his mild directions.

For the same reason, added no doubt to the old dislike of her, I was
seldom allowed to visit Peggotty. Faithful to her promise, she either
came to see me, or met me somewhere near, once every week, and never
empty-handed; but many and bitter were the disappointments I had, in
being refused permission to pay a visit to her at her house. Some few
times, however, at long intervals, I was allowed to go there; and then
I found out that Mr. Barkis was something of a miser, or as Peggotty
dutifully expressed it, was ‘a little near’, and kept a heap of money
in a box under his bed, which he pretended was only full of coats
and trousers. In this coffer, his riches hid themselves with such a
tenacious modesty, that the smallest instalments could only be tempted
out by artifice; so that Peggotty had to prepare a long and elaborate
scheme, a very Gunpowder Plot, for every Saturday’s expenses.

All this time I was so conscious of the waste of any promise I had
given, and of my being utterly neglected, that I should have been
perfectly miserable, I have no doubt, but for the old books. They were
my only comfort; and I was as true to them as they were to me, and read
them over and over I don’t know how many times more.

I now approach a period of my life, which I can never lose the
remembrance of, while I remember anything: and the recollection of
which has often, without my invocation, come before me like a ghost, and
haunted happier times.

I had been out, one day, loitering somewhere, in the listless,
meditative manner that my way of life engendered, when, turning the
corner of a lane near our house, I came upon Mr. Murdstone walking with
a gentleman. I was confused, and was going by them, when the gentleman
cried:

‘What! Brooks!’

‘No, sir, David Copperfield,’ I said.

‘Don’t tell me. You are Brooks,’ said the gentleman. ‘You are Brooks of
Sheffield. That’s your name.’

At these words, I observed the gentleman more attentively. His laugh
coming to my remembrance too, I knew him to be Mr. Quinion, whom I
had gone over to Lowestoft with Mr. Murdstone to see, before--it is no
matter--I need not recall when.

‘And how do you get on, and where are you being educated, Brooks?’ said
Mr. Quinion.

He had put his hand upon my shoulder, and turned me about, to walk
with them. I did not know what to reply, and glanced dubiously at Mr.
Murdstone.

‘He is at home at present,’ said the latter. ‘He is not being educated
anywhere. I don’t know what to do with him. He is a difficult subject.’

That old, double look was on me for a moment; and then his eyes darkened
with a frown, as it turned, in its aversion, elsewhere.

‘Humph!’ said Mr. Quinion, looking at us both, I thought. ‘Fine
weather!’

Silence ensued, and I was considering how I could best disengage my
shoulder from his hand, and go away, when he said:

‘I suppose you are a pretty sharp fellow still? Eh, Brooks?’

‘Aye! He is sharp enough,’ said Mr. Murdstone, impatiently. ‘You had
better let him go. He will not thank you for troubling him.’

On this hint, Mr. Quinion released me, and I made the best of my
way home. Looking back as I turned into the front garden, I saw Mr.
Murdstone leaning against the wicket of the churchyard, and Mr. Quinion
talking to him. They were both looking after me, and I felt that they
were speaking of me.

Mr. Quinion lay at our house that night. After breakfast, the next
morning, I had put my chair away, and was going out of the room, when
Mr. Murdstone called me back. He then gravely repaired to another table,
where his sister sat herself at her desk. Mr. Quinion, with his hands
in his pockets, stood looking out of window; and I stood looking at them
all.

‘David,’ said Mr. Murdstone, ‘to the young this is a world for action;
not for moping and droning in.’ --‘As you do,’ added his sister.

‘Jane Murdstone, leave it to me, if you please. I say, David, to the
young this is a world for action, and not for moping and droning in. It
is especially so for a young boy of your disposition, which requires a
great deal of correcting; and to which no greater service can be done
than to force it to conform to the ways of the working world, and to
bend it and break it.’

‘For stubbornness won’t do here,’ said his sister ‘What it wants is, to
be crushed. And crushed it must be. Shall be, too!’

He gave her a look, half in remonstrance, half in approval, and went on:

‘I suppose you know, David, that I am not rich. At any rate, you know it
now. You have received some considerable education already. Education is
costly; and even if it were not, and I could afford it, I am of opinion
that it would not be at all advantageous to you to be kept at school.
What is before you, is a fight with the world; and the sooner you begin
it, the better.’

I think it occurred to me that I had already begun it, in my poor way:
but it occurs to me now, whether or no.

‘You have heard the “counting-house” mentioned sometimes,’ said Mr.
Murdstone.

‘The counting-house, sir?’ I repeated. ‘Of Murdstone and Grinby, in the
wine trade,’ he replied.

I suppose I looked uncertain, for he went on hastily:

‘You have heard the “counting-house” mentioned, or the business, or the
cellars, or the wharf, or something about it.’

‘I think I have heard the business mentioned, sir,’ I said, remembering
what I vaguely knew of his and his sister’s resources. ‘But I don’t know
when.’

‘It does not matter when,’ he returned. ‘Mr. Quinion manages that
business.’

I glanced at the latter deferentially as he stood looking out of window.

‘Mr. Quinion suggests that it gives employment to some other boys,
and that he sees no reason why it shouldn’t, on the same terms, give
employment to you.’

‘He having,’ Mr. Quinion observed in a low voice, and half turning
round, ‘no other prospect, Murdstone.’

Mr. Murdstone, with an impatient, even an angry gesture, resumed,
without noticing what he had said:

‘Those terms are, that you will earn enough for yourself to provide for
your eating and drinking, and pocket-money. Your lodging (which I have
arranged for) will be paid by me. So will your washing--’

‘--Which will be kept down to my estimate,’ said his sister.

‘Your clothes will be looked after for you, too,’ said Mr. Murdstone;
‘as you will not be able, yet awhile, to get them for yourself. So you
are now going to London, David, with Mr. Quinion, to begin the world on
your own account.’

‘In short, you are provided for,’ observed his sister; ‘and will please
to do your duty.’

Though I quite understood that the purpose of this announcement was
to get rid of me, I have no distinct remembrance whether it pleased
or frightened me. My impression is, that I was in a state of confusion
about it, and, oscillating between the two points, touched neither. Nor
had I much time for the clearing of my thoughts, as Mr. Quinion was to
go upon the morrow.

Behold me, on the morrow, in a much-worn little white hat, with a black
crape round it for my mother, a black jacket, and a pair of hard, stiff
corduroy trousers--which Miss Murdstone considered the best armour for
the legs in that fight with the world which was now to come off. Behold
me so attired, and with my little worldly all before me in a small
trunk, sitting, a lone lorn child (as Mrs. Gummidge might have said),
in the post-chaise that was carrying Mr. Quinion to the London coach at
Yarmouth! See, how our house and church are lessening in the distance;
how the grave beneath the tree is blotted out by intervening objects;
how the spire points upwards from my old playground no more, and the sky
is empty!



CHAPTER 11. I BEGIN LIFE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT, AND DON’T LIKE IT


I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of
being much surprised by anything; but it is matter of some surprise to
me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age.
A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation,
quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems
wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But
none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind
in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.

Murdstone and Grinby’s warehouse was at the waterside. It was down in
Blackfriars. Modern improvements have altered the place; but it was the
last house at the bottom of a narrow street, curving down hill to the
river, with some stairs at the end, where people took boat. It was a
crazy old house with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the
tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, and literally overrun
with rats. Its panelled rooms, discoloured with the dirt and smoke of
a hundred years, I dare say; its decaying floors and staircase; the
squeaking and scuffling of the old grey rats down in the cellars; and
the dirt and rottenness of the place; are things, not of many years ago,
in my mind, but of the present instant. They are all before me, just as
they were in the evil hour when I went among them for the first time,
with my trembling hand in Mr. Quinion’s.

Murdstone and Grinby’s trade was among a good many kinds of people, but
an important branch of it was the supply of wines and spirits to certain
packet ships. I forget now where they chiefly went, but I think there
were some among them that made voyages both to the East and West Indies.
I know that a great many empty bottles were one of the consequences of
this traffic, and that certain men and boys were employed to examine
them against the light, and reject those that were flawed, and to rinse
and wash them. When the empty bottles ran short, there were labels to be
pasted on full ones, or corks to be fitted to them, or seals to be put
upon the corks, or finished bottles to be packed in casks. All this work
was my work, and of the boys employed upon it I was one.

There were three or four of us, counting me. My working place was
established in a corner of the warehouse, where Mr. Quinion could see
me, when he chose to stand up on the bottom rail of his stool in the
counting-house, and look at me through a window above the desk. Hither,
on the first morning of my so auspiciously beginning life on my own
account, the oldest of the regular boys was summoned to show me my
business. His name was Mick Walker, and he wore a ragged apron and a
paper cap. He informed me that his father was a bargeman, and walked, in
a black velvet head-dress, in the Lord Mayor’s Show. He also informed me
that our principal associate would be another boy whom he introduced by
the--to me--extraordinary name of Mealy Potatoes. I discovered, however,
that this youth had not been christened by that name, but that it had
been bestowed upon him in the warehouse, on account of his complexion,
which was pale or mealy. Mealy’s father was a waterman, who had the
additional distinction of being a fireman, and was engaged as such at
one of the large theatres; where some young relation of Mealy’s--I think
his little sister--did Imps in the Pantomimes.

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
companionship; compared these henceforth everyday associates with those
of my happier childhood--not to say with Steerforth, Traddles, and the
rest of those boys; and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned
and distinguished man, crushed in my bosom. The deep remembrance of the
sense I had, of being utterly without hope now; of the shame I felt in
my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that day
by day what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my
fancy and my emulation up by, would pass away from me, little by little,
never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. As often as Mick
Walker went away in the course of that forenoon, I mingled my tears with
the water in which I was washing the bottles; and sobbed as if there
were a flaw in my own breast, and it were in danger of bursting.

The counting-house clock was at half past twelve, and there was
general preparation for going to dinner, when Mr. Quinion tapped at the
counting-house window, and beckoned to me to go in. I went in, and
found there a stoutish, middle-aged person, in a brown surtout and black
tights and shoes, with no more hair upon his head (which was a large
one, and very shining) than there is upon an egg, and with a very
extensive face, which he turned full upon me. His clothes were shabby,
but he had an imposing shirt-collar on. He carried a jaunty sort of a
stick, with a large pair of rusty tassels to it; and a quizzing-glass
hung outside his coat,--for ornament, I afterwards found, as he very
seldom looked through it, and couldn’t see anything when he did.

‘This,’ said Mr. Quinion, in allusion to myself, ‘is he.’

‘This,’ said the stranger, with a certain condescending roll in his
voice, and a certain indescribable air of doing something genteel, which
impressed me very much, ‘is Master Copperfield. I hope I see you well,
sir?’

I said I was very well, and hoped he was. I was sufficiently ill at
ease, Heaven knows; but it was not in my nature to complain much at that
time of my life, so I said I was very well, and hoped he was.

‘I am,’ said the stranger, ‘thank Heaven, quite well. I have received a
letter from Mr. Murdstone, in which he mentions that he would desire
me to receive into an apartment in the rear of my house, which is at
present unoccupied--and is, in short, to be let as a--in short,’
said the stranger, with a smile and in a burst of confidence, ‘as a
bedroom--the young beginner whom I have now the pleasure to--’ and the
stranger waved his hand, and settled his chin in his shirt-collar.

‘This is Mr. Micawber,’ said Mr. Quinion to me.

‘Ahem!’ said the stranger, ‘that is my name.’

‘Mr. Micawber,’ said Mr. Quinion, ‘is known to Mr. Murdstone. He takes
orders for us on commission, when he can get any. He has been written to
by Mr. Murdstone, on the subject of your lodgings, and he will receive
you as a lodger.’

‘My address,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘is Windsor Terrace, City Road. I--in
short,’ said Mr. Micawber, with the same genteel air, and in another
burst of confidence--‘I live there.’

I made him a bow.

‘Under the impression,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘that your peregrinations in
this metropolis have not as yet been extensive, and that you might have
some difficulty in penetrating the arcana of the Modern Babylon in the
direction of the City Road,--in short,’ said Mr. Micawber, in another
burst of confidence, ‘that you might lose yourself--I shall be happy to
call this evening, and install you in the knowledge of the nearest way.’

I thanked him with all my heart, for it was friendly in him to offer to
take that trouble.

‘At what hour,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘shall I--’

‘At about eight,’ said Mr. Quinion.

‘At about eight,’ said Mr. Micawber. ‘I beg to wish you good day, Mr.
Quinion. I will intrude no longer.’

So he put on his hat, and went out with his cane under his arm: very
upright, and humming a tune when he was clear of the counting-house.

Mr. Quinion then formally engaged me to be as useful as I could in
the warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby, at a salary, I think, of six
shillings a week. I am not clear whether it was six or seven. I am
inclined to believe, from my uncertainty on this head, that it was six
at first and seven afterwards. He paid me a week down (from his own
pocket, I believe), and I gave Mealy sixpence out of it to get my
trunk carried to Windsor Terrace that night: it being too heavy for my
strength, small as it was. I paid sixpence more for my dinner, which was
a meat pie and a turn at a neighbouring pump; and passed the hour which
was allowed for that meal, in walking about the streets.

At the appointed time in the evening, Mr. Micawber reappeared. I washed
my hands and face, to do the greater honour to his gentility, and we
walked to our house, as I suppose I must now call it, together; Mr.
Micawber impressing the name of streets, and the shapes of corner houses
upon me, as we went along, that I might find my way back, easily, in the
morning.

Arrived at this house in Windsor Terrace (which I noticed was shabby
like himself, but also, like himself, made all the show it could), he
presented me to Mrs. Micawber, a thin and faded lady, not at all
young, who was sitting in the parlour (the first floor was altogether
unfurnished, and the blinds were kept down to delude the neighbours),
with a baby at her breast. This baby was one of twins; and I may remark
here that I hardly ever, in all my experience of the family, saw both
the twins detached from Mrs. Micawber at the same time. One of them was
always taking refreshment.

There were two other children; Master Micawber, aged about four, and
Miss Micawber, aged about three. These, and a dark-complexioned young
woman, with a habit of snorting, who was servant to the family, and
informed me, before half an hour had expired, that she was ‘a Orfling’,
and came from St. Luke’s workhouse, in the neighbourhood, completed the
establishment. My room was at the top of the house, at the back: a close
chamber; stencilled all over with an ornament which my young imagination
represented as a blue muffin; and very scantily furnished.

‘I never thought,’ said Mrs. Micawber, when she came up, twin and all,
to show me the apartment, and sat down to take breath, ‘before I was
married, when I lived with papa and mama, that I should ever find it
necessary to take a lodger. But Mr. Micawber being in difficulties, all
considerations of private feeling must give way.’

I said: ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Mr. Micawber’s difficulties are almost overwhelming just at present,’
said Mrs. Micawber; ‘and whether it is possible to bring him through
them, I don’t know. When I lived at home with papa and mama, I really
should have hardly understood what the word meant, in the sense in which
I now employ it, but experientia does it,--as papa used to say.’

I cannot satisfy myself whether she told me that Mr. Micawber had been
an officer in the Marines, or whether I have imagined it. I only know
that I believe to this hour that he WAS in the Marines once upon a time,
without knowing why. He was a sort of town traveller for a number
of miscellaneous houses, now; but made little or nothing of it, I am
afraid.

‘If Mr. Micawber’s creditors will not give him time,’ said Mrs.
Micawber, ‘they must take the consequences; and the sooner they bring it
to an issue the better. Blood cannot be obtained from a stone, neither
can anything on account be obtained at present (not to mention law
expenses) from Mr. Micawber.’

I never can quite understand whether my precocious self-dependence
confused Mrs. Micawber in reference to my age, or whether she was so
full of the subject that she would have talked about it to the very
twins if there had been nobody else to communicate with, but this was
the strain in which she began, and she went on accordingly all the time
I knew her.

Poor Mrs. Micawber! She said she had tried to exert herself, and so,
I have no doubt, she had. The centre of the street door was perfectly
covered with a great brass-plate, on which was engraved ‘Mrs. Micawber’s
Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies’: but I never found that any
young lady had ever been to school there; or that any young lady ever
came, or proposed to come; or that the least preparation was ever made
to receive any young lady. The only visitors I ever saw, or heard of,
were creditors. THEY used to come at all hours, and some of them were
quite ferocious. One dirty-faced man, I think he was a boot-maker,
used to edge himself into the passage as early as seven o’clock in the
morning, and call up the stairs to Mr. Micawber--‘Come! You ain’t out
yet, you know. Pay us, will you? Don’t hide, you know; that’s mean. I
wouldn’t be mean if I was you. Pay us, will you? You just pay us, d’ye
hear? Come!’ Receiving no answer to these taunts, he would mount in
his wrath to the words ‘swindlers’ and ‘robbers’; and these being
ineffectual too, would sometimes go to the extremity of crossing the
street, and roaring up at the windows of the second floor, where he knew
Mr. Micawber was. At these times, Mr. Micawber would be transported with
grief and mortification, even to the length (as I was once made aware by
a scream from his wife) of making motions at himself with a razor;
but within half-an-hour afterwards, he would polish up his shoes with
extraordinary pains, and go out, humming a tune with a greater air of
gentility than ever. Mrs. Micawber was quite as elastic. I have known
her to be thrown into fainting fits by the king’s taxes at three
o’clock, and to eat lamb chops, breaded, and drink warm ale (paid for
with two tea-spoons that had gone to the pawnbroker’s) at four. On one
occasion, when an execution had just been put in, coming home through
some chance as early as six o’clock, I saw her lying (of course with a
twin) under the grate in a swoon, with her hair all torn about her face;
but I never knew her more cheerful than she was, that very same night,
over a veal cutlet before the kitchen fire, telling me stories about her
papa and mama, and the company they used to keep.

In this house, and with this family, I passed my leisure time. My own
exclusive breakfast of a penny loaf and a pennyworth of milk, I provided
myself. I kept another small loaf, and a modicum of cheese, on a
particular shelf of a particular cupboard, to make my supper on when I
came back at night. This made a hole in the six or seven shillings, I
know well; and I was out at the warehouse all day, and had to support
myself on that money all the week. From Monday morning until Saturday
night, I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation,
no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to
mind, as I hope to go to heaven!

I was so young and childish, and so little qualified--how could I be
otherwise?--to undertake the whole charge of my own existence, that
often, in going to Murdstone and Grinby’s, of a morning, I could
not resist the stale pastry put out for sale at half-price at the
pastrycooks’ doors, and spent in that the money I should have kept for
my dinner. Then, I went without my dinner, or bought a roll or a slice
of pudding. I remember two pudding shops, between which I was divided,
according to my finances. One was in a court close to St. Martin’s
Church--at the back of the church,--which is now removed altogether.
The pudding at that shop was made of currants, and was rather a special
pudding, but was dear, twopennyworth not being larger than a pennyworth
of more ordinary pudding. A good shop for the latter was in the
Strand--somewhere in that part which has been rebuilt since. It was a
stout pale pudding, heavy and flabby, and with great flat raisins in it,
stuck in whole at wide distances apart. It came up hot at about my time
every day, and many a day did I dine off it. When I dined regularly and
handsomely, I had a saveloy and a penny loaf, or a fourpenny plate of
red beef from a cook’s shop; or a plate of bread and cheese and a
glass of beer, from a miserable old public-house opposite our place of
business, called the Lion, or the Lion and something else that I have
forgotten. Once, I remember carrying my own bread (which I had brought
from home in the morning) under my arm, wrapped in a piece of paper,
like a book, and going to a famous alamode beef-house near Drury Lane,
and ordering a ‘small plate’ of that delicacy to eat with it. What the
waiter thought of such a strange little apparition coming in all alone,
I don’t know; but I can see him now, staring at me as I ate my dinner,
and bringing up the other waiter to look. I gave him a halfpenny for
himself, and I wish he hadn’t taken it.

We had half-an-hour, I think, for tea. When I had money enough, I used
to get half-a-pint of ready-made coffee and a slice of bread and butter.
When I had none, I used to look at a venison shop in Fleet Street; or
I have strolled, at such a time, as far as Covent Garden Market, and
stared at the pineapples. I was fond of wandering about the Adelphi,
because it was a mysterious place, with those dark arches. I see myself
emerging one evening from some of these arches, on a little public-house
close to the river, with an open space before it, where some
coal-heavers were dancing; to look at whom I sat down upon a bench. I
wonder what they thought of me!

I was such a child, and so little, that frequently when I went into the
bar of a strange public-house for a glass of ale or porter, to moisten
what I had had for dinner, they were afraid to give it me. I remember
one hot evening I went into the bar of a public-house, and said to the
landlord: ‘What is your best--your very best--ale a glass?’ For it was a
special occasion. I don’t know what. It may have been my birthday.

‘Twopence-halfpenny,’ says the landlord, ‘is the price of the Genuine
Stunning ale.’

‘Then,’ says I, producing the money, ‘just draw me a glass of the
Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head to it.’

The landlord looked at me in return over the bar, from head to foot,
with a strange smile on his face; and instead of drawing the beer,
looked round the screen and said something to his wife. She came out
from behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying
me. Here we stand, all three, before me now. The landlord in his
shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar window-frame; his wife looking
over the little half-door; and I, in some confusion, looking up at them
from outside the partition. They asked me a good many questions; as,
what my name was, how old I was, where I lived, how I was employed,
and how I came there. To all of which, that I might commit nobody, I
invented, I am afraid, appropriate answers. They served me with the ale,
though I suspect it was not the Genuine Stunning; and the landlord’s
wife, opening the little half-door of the bar, and bending down, gave
me my money back, and gave me a kiss that was half admiring and half
compassionate, but all womanly and good, I am sure.

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the
scantiness of my resources or the difficulties of my life. I know that
if a shilling were given me by Mr. Quinion at any time, I spent it in
a dinner or a tea. I know that I worked, from morning until night, with
common men and boys, a shabby child. I know that I lounged about the
streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for
the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken
of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.

Yet I held some station at Murdstone and Grinby’s too. Besides that Mr.
Quinion did what a careless man so occupied, and dealing with a thing so
anomalous, could, to treat me as one upon a different footing from the
rest, I never said, to man or boy, how it was that I came to be there,
or gave the least indication of being sorry that I was there. That I
suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew
but I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly
beyond my power to tell. But I kept my own counsel, and I did my work.
I knew from the first, that, if I could not do my work as well as any
of the rest, I could not hold myself above slight and contempt. I soon
became at least as expeditious and as skilful as either of the other
boys. Though perfectly familiar with them, my conduct and manner were
different enough from theirs to place a space between us. They and
the men generally spoke of me as ‘the little gent’, or ‘the young
Suffolker.’ A certain man named Gregory, who was foreman of the packers,
and another named Tipp, who was the carman, and wore a red jacket, used
to address me sometimes as ‘David’: but I think it was mostly when we
were very confidential, and when I had made some efforts to entertain
them, over our work, with some results of the old readings; which were
fast perishing out of my remembrance. Mealy Potatoes uprose once, and
rebelled against my being so distinguished; but Mick Walker settled him
in no time.

My rescue from this kind of existence I considered quite hopeless, and
abandoned, as such, altogether. I am solemnly convinced that I never for
one hour was reconciled to it, or was otherwise than miserably unhappy;
but I bore it; and even to Peggotty, partly for the love of her and
partly for shame, never in any letter (though many passed between us)
revealed the truth.

Mr. Micawber’s difficulties were an addition to the distressed state of
my mind. In my forlorn state I became quite attached to the family, and
used to walk about, busy with Mrs. Micawber’s calculations of ways and
means, and heavy with the weight of Mr. Micawber’s debts. On a Saturday
night, which was my grand treat,--partly because it was a great thing
to walk home with six or seven shillings in my pocket, looking into the
shops and thinking what such a sum would buy, and partly because I went
home early,--Mrs. Micawber would make the most heart-rending confidences
to me; also on a Sunday morning, when I mixed the portion of tea or
coffee I had bought over-night, in a little shaving-pot, and sat late
at my breakfast. It was nothing at all unusual for Mr. Micawber to sob
violently at the beginning of one of these Saturday night conversations,
and sing about Jack’s delight being his lovely Nan, towards the end of
it. I have known him come home to supper with a flood of tears, and a
declaration that nothing was now left but a jail; and go to bed making a
calculation of the expense of putting bow-windows to the house, ‘in
case anything turned up’, which was his favourite expression. And Mrs.
Micawber was just the same.

A curious equality of friendship, originating, I suppose, in our
respective circumstances, sprung up between me and these people,
notwithstanding the ludicrous disparity in our years. But I never
allowed myself to be prevailed upon to accept any invitation to eat and
drink with them out of their stock (knowing that they got on badly with
the butcher and baker, and had often not too much for themselves),
until Mrs. Micawber took me into her entire confidence. This she did one
evening as follows:

‘Master Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘I make no stranger of you,
and therefore do not hesitate to say that Mr. Micawber’s difficulties
are coming to a crisis.’

It made me very miserable to hear it, and I looked at Mrs. Micawber’s
red eyes with the utmost sympathy.

‘With the exception of the heel of a Dutch cheese--which is not adapted
to the wants of a young family’--said Mrs. Micawber, ‘there is really
not a scrap of anything in the larder. I was accustomed to speak of
the larder when I lived with papa and mama, and I use the word almost
unconsciously. What I mean to express is, that there is nothing to eat
in the house.’

‘Dear me!’ I said, in great concern.

I had two or three shillings of my week’s money in my pocket--from which
I presume that it must have been on a Wednesday night when we held this
conversation--and I hastily produced them, and with heartfelt emotion
begged Mrs. Micawber to accept of them as a loan. But that lady, kissing
me, and making me put them back in my pocket, replied that she couldn’t
think of it.

‘No, my dear Master Copperfield,’ said she, ‘far be it from my thoughts!
But you have a discretion beyond your years, and can render me another
kind of service, if you will; and a service I will thankfully accept
of.’

I begged Mrs. Micawber to name it.

‘I have parted with the plate myself,’ said Mrs. Micawber. ‘Six tea, two
salt, and a pair of sugars, I have at different times borrowed money on,
in secret, with my own hands. But the twins are a great tie; and to me,
with my recollections, of papa and mama, these transactions are very
painful. There are still a few trifles that we could part with. Mr.
Micawber’s feelings would never allow him to dispose of them; and
Clickett’--this was the girl from the workhouse--‘being of a vulgar
mind, would take painful liberties if so much confidence was reposed in
her. Master Copperfield, if I might ask you--’

I understood Mrs. Micawber now, and begged her to make use of me to any
extent. I began to dispose of the more portable articles of property
that very evening; and went out on a similar expedition almost every
morning, before I went to Murdstone and Grinby’s.

Mr. Micawber had a few books on a little chiffonier, which he called the
library; and those went first. I carried them, one after another, to
a bookstall in the City Road--one part of which, near our house, was
almost all bookstalls and bird shops then--and sold them for whatever
they would bring. The keeper of this bookstall, who lived in a little
house behind it, used to get tipsy every night, and to be violently
scolded by his wife every morning. More than once, when I went there
early, I had audience of him in a turn-up bedstead, with a cut in his
forehead or a black eye, bearing witness to his excesses over-night (I
am afraid he was quarrelsome in his drink), and he, with a shaking
hand, endeavouring to find the needful shillings in one or other of the
pockets of his clothes, which lay upon the floor, while his wife, with a
baby in her arms and her shoes down at heel, never left off rating him.
Sometimes he had lost his money, and then he would ask me to call again;
but his wife had always got some--had taken his, I dare say, while he
was drunk--and secretly completed the bargain on the stairs, as we went
down together. At the pawnbroker’s shop, too, I began to be very well
known. The principal gentleman who officiated behind the counter, took
a good deal of notice of me; and often got me, I recollect, to decline a
Latin noun or adjective, or to conjugate a Latin verb, in his ear, while
he transacted my business. After all these occasions Mrs. Micawber made
a little treat, which was generally a supper; and there was a peculiar
relish in these meals which I well remember.

At last Mr. Micawber’s difficulties came to a crisis, and he was
arrested early one morning, and carried over to the King’s Bench Prison
in the Borough. He told me, as he went out of the house, that the God
of day had now gone down upon him--and I really thought his heart was
broken and mine too. But I heard, afterwards, that he was seen to play a
lively game at skittles, before noon.

On the first Sunday after he was taken there, I was to go and see him,
and have dinner with him. I was to ask my way to such a place, and just
short of that place I should see such another place, and just short of
that I should see a yard, which I was to cross, and keep straight on
until I saw a turnkey. All this I did; and when at last I did see a
turnkey (poor little fellow that I was!), and thought how, when Roderick
Random was in a debtors’ prison, there was a man there with nothing
on him but an old rug, the turnkey swam before my dimmed eyes and my
beating heart.

Mr. Micawber was waiting for me within the gate, and we went up to his
room (top story but one), and cried very much. He solemnly conjured me,
I remember, to take warning by his fate; and to observe that if a man
had twenty pounds a-year for his income, and spent nineteen pounds
nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that if he
spent twenty pounds one he would be miserable. After which he borrowed a
shilling of me for porter, gave me a written order on Mrs. Micawber for
the amount, and put away his pocket-handkerchief, and cheered up.

We sat before a little fire, with two bricks put within the rusted
grate, one on each side, to prevent its burning too many coals; until
another debtor, who shared the room with Mr. Micawber, came in from the
bakehouse with the loin of mutton which was our joint-stock repast.
Then I was sent up to ‘Captain Hopkins’ in the room overhead, with Mr.
Micawber’s compliments, and I was his young friend, and would Captain
Hopkins lend me a knife and fork.

Captain Hopkins lent me the knife and fork, with his compliments to Mr.
Micawber. There was a very dirty lady in his little room, and two wan
girls, his daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought it was better
to borrow Captain Hopkins’s knife and fork, than Captain Hopkins’s comb.
The Captain himself was in the last extremity of shabbiness, with large
whiskers, and an old, old brown great-coat with no other coat below it.
I saw his bed rolled up in a corner; and what plates and dishes and pots
he had, on a shelf; and I divined (God knows how) that though the two
girls with the shock heads of hair were Captain Hopkins’s children, the
dirty lady was not married to Captain Hopkins. My timid station on his
threshold was not occupied more than a couple of minutes at most; but
I came down again with all this in my knowledge, as surely as the knife
and fork were in my hand.

There was something gipsy-like and agreeable in the dinner, after all.
I took back Captain Hopkins’s knife and fork early in the afternoon,
and went home to comfort Mrs. Micawber with an account of my visit.
She fainted when she saw me return, and made a little jug of egg-hot
afterwards to console us while we talked it over.

I don’t know how the household furniture came to be sold for the family
benefit, or who sold it, except that I did not. Sold it was, however,
and carried away in a van; except the bed, a few chairs, and the kitchen
table. With these possessions we encamped, as it were, in the two
parlours of the emptied house in Windsor Terrace; Mrs. Micawber, the
children, the Orfling, and myself; and lived in those rooms night and
day. I have no idea for how long, though it seems to me for a long
time. At last Mrs. Micawber resolved to move into the prison, where Mr.
Micawber had now secured a room to himself. So I took the key of the
house to the landlord, who was very glad to get it; and the beds were
sent over to the King’s Bench, except mine, for which a little room was
hired outside the walls in the neighbourhood of that Institution, very
much to my satisfaction, since the Micawbers and I had become too used
to one another, in our troubles, to part. The Orfling was likewise
accommodated with an inexpensive lodging in the same neighbourhood.
Mine was a quiet back-garret with a sloping roof, commanding a pleasant
prospect of a timberyard; and when I took possession of it, with the
reflection that Mr. Micawber’s troubles had come to a crisis at last, I
thought it quite a paradise.

All this time I was working at Murdstone and Grinby’s in the same common
way, and with the same common companions, and with the same sense of
unmerited degradation as at first. But I never, happily for me no doubt,
made a single acquaintance, or spoke to any of the many boys whom I
saw daily in going to the warehouse, in coming from it, and in prowling
about the streets at meal-times. I led the same secretly unhappy life;
but I led it in the same lonely, self-reliant manner. The only changes
I am conscious of are, firstly, that I had grown more shabby, and
secondly, that I was now relieved of much of the weight of Mr. and Mrs.
Micawber’s cares; for some relatives or friends had engaged to help them
at their present pass, and they lived more comfortably in the prison
than they had lived for a long while out of it. I used to breakfast with
them now, in virtue of some arrangement, of which I have forgotten
the details. I forget, too, at what hour the gates were opened in the
morning, admitting of my going in; but I know that I was often up at six
o’clock, and that my favourite lounging-place in the interval was old
London Bridge, where I was wont to sit in one of the stone recesses,
watching the people going by, or to look over the balustrades at the sun
shining in the water, and lighting up the golden flame on the top of the
Monument. The Orfling met me here sometimes, to be told some astonishing
fictions respecting the wharves and the Tower; of which I can say no
more than that I hope I believed them myself. In the evening I used
to go back to the prison, and walk up and down the parade with Mr.
Micawber; or play casino with Mrs. Micawber, and hear reminiscences of
her papa and mama. Whether Mr. Murdstone knew where I was, I am unable
to say. I never told them at Murdstone and Grinby’s.

Mr. Micawber’s affairs, although past their crisis, were very much
involved by reason of a certain ‘Deed’, of which I used to hear a great
deal, and which I suppose, now, to have been some former composition
with his creditors, though I was so far from being clear about it
then, that I am conscious of having confounded it with those demoniacal
parchments which are held to have, once upon a time, obtained to a great
extent in Germany. At last this document appeared to be got out of the
way, somehow; at all events it ceased to be the rock-ahead it had been;
and Mrs. Micawber informed me that ‘her family’ had decided that Mr.
Micawber should apply for his release under the Insolvent Debtors Act,
which would set him free, she expected, in about six weeks.

‘And then,’ said Mr. Micawber, who was present, ‘I have no doubt I
shall, please Heaven, begin to be beforehand with the world, and to live
in a perfectly new manner, if--in short, if anything turns up.’

By way of going in for anything that might be on the cards, I call to
mind that Mr. Micawber, about this time, composed a petition to the
House of Commons, praying for an alteration in the law of imprisonment
for debt. I set down this remembrance here, because it is an instance to
myself of the manner in which I fitted my old books to my altered life,
and made stories for myself, out of the streets, and out of men and
women; and how some main points in the character I shall unconsciously
develop, I suppose, in writing my life, were gradually forming all this
while.

There was a club in the prison, in which Mr. Micawber, as a gentleman,
was a great authority. Mr. Micawber had stated his idea of this petition
to the club, and the club had strongly approved of the same. Wherefore
Mr. Micawber (who was a thoroughly good-natured man, and as active a
creature about everything but his own affairs as ever existed, and never
so happy as when he was busy about something that could never be of any
profit to him) set to work at the petition, invented it, engrossed it
on an immense sheet of paper, spread it out on a table, and appointed a
time for all the club, and all within the walls if they chose, to come
up to his room and sign it.

When I heard of this approaching ceremony, I was so anxious to see them
all come in, one after another, though I knew the greater part of
them already, and they me, that I got an hour’s leave of absence from
Murdstone and Grinby’s, and established myself in a corner for that
purpose. As many of the principal members of the club as could be got
into the small room without filling it, supported Mr. Micawber in front
of the petition, while my old friend Captain Hopkins (who had washed
himself, to do honour to so solemn an occasion) stationed himself close
to it, to read it to all who were unacquainted with its contents. The
door was then thrown open, and the general population began to come in,
in a long file: several waiting outside, while one entered, affixed his
signature, and went out. To everybody in succession, Captain Hopkins
said: ‘Have you read it?’--‘No.’---‘Would you like to hear it read?’ If
he weakly showed the least disposition to hear it, Captain Hopkins, in
a loud sonorous voice, gave him every word of it. The Captain would
have read it twenty thousand times, if twenty thousand people would have
heard him, one by one. I remember a certain luscious roll he gave to
such phrases as ‘The people’s representatives in Parliament assembled,’
‘Your petitioners therefore humbly approach your honourable house,’ ‘His
gracious Majesty’s unfortunate subjects,’ as if the words were something
real in his mouth, and delicious to taste; Mr. Micawber, meanwhile,
listening with a little of an author’s vanity, and contemplating (not
severely) the spikes on the opposite wall.

As I walked to and fro daily between Southwark and Blackfriars, and
lounged about at meal-times in obscure streets, the stones of which
may, for anything I know, be worn at this moment by my childish feet, I
wonder how many of these people were wanting in the crowd that used to
come filing before me in review again, to the echo of Captain Hopkins’s
voice! When my thoughts go back, now, to that slow agony of my youth, I
wonder how much of the histories I invented for such people hangs like a
mist of fancy over well-remembered facts! When I tread the old ground,
I do not wonder that I seem to see and pity, going on before me, an
innocent romantic boy, making his imaginative world out of such strange
experiences and sordid things!



CHAPTER 12. LIKING LIFE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT NO BETTER, I FORM A GREAT RESOLUTION


In due time, Mr. Micawber’s petition was ripe for hearing; and that
gentleman was ordered to be discharged under the Act, to my great joy.
His creditors were not implacable; and Mrs. Micawber informed me that
even the revengeful boot-maker had declared in open court that he bore
him no malice, but that when money was owing to him he liked to be paid.
He said he thought it was human nature.

Mr. Micawber returned to the King’s Bench when his case was over, as
some fees were to be settled, and some formalities observed, before he
could be actually released. The club received him with transport, and
held an harmonic meeting that evening in his honour; while Mrs. Micawber
and I had a lamb’s fry in private, surrounded by the sleeping family.

‘On such an occasion I will give you, Master Copperfield,’ said Mrs.
Micawber, ‘in a little more flip,’ for we had been having some already,
‘the memory of my papa and mama.’

‘Are they dead, ma’am?’ I inquired, after drinking the toast in a
wine-glass.

‘My mama departed this life,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘before Mr. Micawber’s
difficulties commenced, or at least before they became pressing. My papa
lived to bail Mr. Micawber several times, and then expired, regretted by
a numerous circle.’

Mrs. Micawber shook her head, and dropped a pious tear upon the twin who
happened to be in hand.

As I could hardly hope for a more favourable opportunity of putting a
question in which I had a near interest, I said to Mrs. Micawber:

‘May I ask, ma’am, what you and Mr. Micawber intend to do, now that Mr.
Micawber is out of his difficulties, and at liberty? Have you settled
yet?’

‘My family,’ said Mrs. Micawber, who always said those two words with an
air, though I never could discover who came under the denomination, ‘my
family are of opinion that Mr. Micawber should quit London, and exert
his talents in the country. Mr. Micawber is a man of great talent,
Master Copperfield.’

I said I was sure of that.

‘Of great talent,’ repeated Mrs. Micawber. ‘My family are of opinion,
that, with a little interest, something might be done for a man of his
ability in the Custom House. The influence of my family being local, it
is their wish that Mr. Micawber should go down to Plymouth. They think
it indispensable that he should be upon the spot.’

‘That he may be ready?’ I suggested.

‘Exactly,’ returned Mrs. Micawber. ‘That he may be ready--in case of
anything turning up.’

‘And do you go too, ma’am?’

The events of the day, in combination with the twins, if not with the
flip, had made Mrs. Micawber hysterical, and she shed tears as she
replied:

‘I never will desert Mr. Micawber. Mr. Micawber may have concealed his
difficulties from me in the first instance, but his sanguine temper may
have led him to expect that he would overcome them. The pearl necklace
and bracelets which I inherited from mama, have been disposed of for
less than half their value; and the set of coral, which was the wedding
gift of my papa, has been actually thrown away for nothing. But I never
will desert Mr. Micawber. No!’ cried Mrs. Micawber, more affected than
before, ‘I never will do it! It’s of no use asking me!’

I felt quite uncomfortable--as if Mrs. Micawber supposed I had asked her
to do anything of the sort!--and sat looking at her in alarm.

‘Mr. Micawber has his faults. I do not deny that he is improvident. I
do not deny that he has kept me in the dark as to his resources and his
liabilities both,’ she went on, looking at the wall; ‘but I never will
desert Mr. Micawber!’

Mrs. Micawber having now raised her voice into a perfect scream, I
was so frightened that I ran off to the club-room, and disturbed Mr.
Micawber in the act of presiding at a long table, and leading the chorus
of

     Gee up, Dobbin,
     Gee ho, Dobbin,
     Gee up, Dobbin,
     Gee up, and gee ho--o--o!

with the tidings that Mrs. Micawber was in an alarming state, upon
which he immediately burst into tears, and came away with me with his
waistcoat full of the heads and tails of shrimps, of which he had been
partaking.

‘Emma, my angel!’ cried Mr. Micawber, running into the room; ‘what is
the matter?’

‘I never will desert you, Micawber!’ she exclaimed.

‘My life!’ said Mr. Micawber, taking her in his arms. ‘I am perfectly
aware of it.’

‘He is the parent of my children! He is the father of my twins! He is
the husband of my affections,’ cried Mrs. Micawber, struggling; ‘and I
ne--ver--will--desert Mr. Micawber!’

Mr. Micawber was so deeply affected by this proof of her devotion (as
to me, I was dissolved in tears), that he hung over her in a passionate
manner, imploring her to look up, and to be calm. But the more he asked
Mrs. Micawber to look up, the more she fixed her eyes on nothing;
and the more he asked her to compose herself, the more she wouldn’t.
Consequently Mr. Micawber was soon so overcome, that he mingled his
tears with hers and mine; until he begged me to do him the favour of
taking a chair on the staircase, while he got her into bed. I would have
taken my leave for the night, but he would not hear of my doing that
until the strangers’ bell should ring. So I sat at the staircase window,
until he came out with another chair and joined me.

‘How is Mrs. Micawber now, sir?’ I said.

‘Very low,’ said Mr. Micawber, shaking his head; ‘reaction. Ah, this has
been a dreadful day! We stand alone now--everything is gone from us!’

Mr. Micawber pressed my hand, and groaned, and afterwards shed tears.
I was greatly touched, and disappointed too, for I had expected that we
should be quite gay on this happy and long-looked-for occasion. But Mr.
and Mrs. Micawber were so used to their old difficulties, I think, that
they felt quite shipwrecked when they came to consider that they were
released from them. All their elasticity was departed, and I never saw
them half so wretched as on this night; insomuch that when the bell
rang, and Mr. Micawber walked with me to the lodge, and parted from me
there with a blessing, I felt quite afraid to leave him by himself, he
was so profoundly miserable.

But through all the confusion and lowness of spirits in which we had
been, so unexpectedly to me, involved, I plainly discerned that Mr. and
Mrs. Micawber and their family were going away from London, and that a
parting between us was near at hand. It was in my walk home that night,
and in the sleepless hours which followed when I lay in bed, that the
thought first occurred to me--though I don’t know how it came into my
head--which afterwards shaped itself into a settled resolution.

I had grown to be so accustomed to the Micawbers, and had been so
intimate with them in their distresses, and was so utterly friendless
without them, that the prospect of being thrown upon some new shift for
a lodging, and going once more among unknown people, was like being that
moment turned adrift into my present life, with such a knowledge of it
ready made as experience had given me. All the sensitive feelings it
wounded so cruelly, all the shame and misery it kept alive within my
breast, became more poignant as I thought of this; and I determined that
the life was unendurable.

That there was no hope of escape from it, unless the escape was my own
act, I knew quite well. I rarely heard from Miss Murdstone, and never
from Mr. Murdstone: but two or three parcels of made or mended clothes
had come up for me, consigned to Mr. Quinion, and in each there was
a scrap of paper to the effect that J. M. trusted D. C. was applying
himself to business, and devoting himself wholly to his duties--not the
least hint of my ever being anything else than the common drudge into
which I was fast settling down.

The very next day showed me, while my mind was in the first agitation of
what it had conceived, that Mrs. Micawber had not spoken of their going
away without warrant. They took a lodging in the house where I lived,
for a week; at the expiration of which time they were to start for
Plymouth. Mr. Micawber himself came down to the counting-house, in the
afternoon, to tell Mr. Quinion that he must relinquish me on the day
of his departure, and to give me a high character, which I am sure I
deserved. And Mr. Quinion, calling in Tipp the carman, who was a married
man, and had a room to let, quartered me prospectively on him--by our
mutual consent, as he had every reason to think; for I said nothing,
though my resolution was now taken.

I passed my evenings with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, during the remaining
term of our residence under the same roof; and I think we became fonder
of one another as the time went on. On the last Sunday, they invited me
to dinner; and we had a loin of pork and apple sauce, and a pudding. I
had bought a spotted wooden horse over-night as a parting gift to little
Wilkins Micawber--that was the boy--and a doll for little Emma. I had
also bestowed a shilling on the Orfling, who was about to be disbanded.

We had a very pleasant day, though we were all in a tender state about
our approaching separation.

‘I shall never, Master Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘revert to the
period when Mr. Micawber was in difficulties, without thinking of
you. Your conduct has always been of the most delicate and obliging
description. You have never been a lodger. You have been a friend.’

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Micawber; ‘Copperfield,’ for so he had been
accustomed to call me, of late, ‘has a heart to feel for the distresses
of his fellow-creatures when they are behind a cloud, and a head to
plan, and a hand to--in short, a general ability to dispose of such
available property as could be made away with.’

I expressed my sense of this commendation, and said I was very sorry we
were going to lose one another.

‘My dear young friend,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘I am older than you; a man
of some experience in life, and--and of some experience, in short, in
difficulties, generally speaking. At present, and until something turns
up (which I am, I may say, hourly expecting), I have nothing to bestow
but advice. Still my advice is so far worth taking, that--in short, that
I have never taken it myself, and am the’--here Mr. Micawber, who had
been beaming and smiling, all over his head and face, up to the present
moment, checked himself and frowned--‘the miserable wretch you behold.’

‘My dear Micawber!’ urged his wife.

‘I say,’ returned Mr. Micawber, quite forgetting himself, and smiling
again, ‘the miserable wretch you behold. My advice is, never do tomorrow
what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar
him!’

‘My poor papa’s maxim,’ Mrs. Micawber observed.

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘your papa was very well in his way, and
Heaven forbid that I should disparage him. Take him for all in all, we
ne’er shall--in short, make the acquaintance, probably, of anybody else
possessing, at his time of life, the same legs for gaiters, and able to
read the same description of print, without spectacles. But he applied
that maxim to our marriage, my dear; and that was so far prematurely
entered into, in consequence, that I never recovered the expense.’ Mr.
Micawber looked aside at Mrs. Micawber, and added: ‘Not that I am sorry
for it. Quite the contrary, my love.’ After which, he was grave for a
minute or so.

‘My other piece of advice, Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘you know.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and
six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure
twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted,
the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene,
and--and in short you are for ever floored. As I am!’

To make his example the more impressive, Mr. Micawber drank a glass of
punch with an air of great enjoyment and satisfaction, and whistled the
College Hornpipe.

I did not fail to assure him that I would store these precepts in my
mind, though indeed I had no need to do so, for, at the time, they
affected me visibly. Next morning I met the whole family at the coach
office, and saw them, with a desolate heart, take their places outside,
at the back.

‘Master Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘God bless you! I never can
forget all that, you know, and I never would if I could.’

‘Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘farewell! Every happiness and
prosperity! If, in the progress of revolving years, I could persuade
myself that my blighted destiny had been a warning to you, I should feel
that I had not occupied another man’s place in existence altogether in
vain. In case of anything turning up (of which I am rather confident),
I shall be extremely happy if it should be in my power to improve your
prospects.’

I think, as Mrs. Micawber sat at the back of the coach, with the
children, and I stood in the road looking wistfully at them, a mist
cleared from her eyes, and she saw what a little creature I really was.
I think so, because she beckoned to me to climb up, with quite a new and
motherly expression in her face, and put her arm round my neck, and gave
me just such a kiss as she might have given to her own boy. I had barely
time to get down again before the coach started, and I could hardly see
the family for the handkerchiefs they waved. It was gone in a minute.
The Orfling and I stood looking vacantly at each other in the middle
of the road, and then shook hands and said good-bye; she going back,
I suppose, to St. Luke’s workhouse, as I went to begin my weary day at
Murdstone and Grinby’s.

But with no intention of passing many more weary days there. No. I had
resolved to run away.---To go, by some means or other, down into the
country, to the only relation I had in the world, and tell my story to
my aunt, Miss Betsey. I have already observed that I don’t know how this
desperate idea came into my brain. But, once there, it remained there;
and hardened into a purpose than which I have never entertained a more
determined purpose in my life. I am far from sure that I believed there
was anything hopeful in it, but my mind was thoroughly made up that it
must be carried into execution.

Again, and again, and a hundred times again, since the night when the
thought had first occurred to me and banished sleep, I had gone over
that old story of my poor mother’s about my birth, which it had been one
of my great delights in the old time to hear her tell, and which I knew
by heart. My aunt walked into that story, and walked out of it, a dread
and awful personage; but there was one little trait in her behaviour
which I liked to dwell on, and which gave me some faint shadow of
encouragement. I could not forget how my mother had thought that she
felt her touch her pretty hair with no ungentle hand; and though it
might have been altogether my mother’s fancy, and might have had no
foundation whatever in fact, I made a little picture, out of it, of my
terrible aunt relenting towards the girlish beauty that I recollected so
well and loved so much, which softened the whole narrative. It is very
possible that it had been in my mind a long time, and had gradually
engendered my determination.

As I did not even know where Miss Betsey lived, I wrote a long letter
to Peggotty, and asked her, incidentally, if she remembered; pretending
that I had heard of such a lady living at a certain place I named at
random, and had a curiosity to know if it were the same. In the course
of that letter, I told Peggotty that I had a particular occasion for
half a guinea; and that if she could lend me that sum until I could
repay it, I should be very much obliged to her, and would tell her
afterwards what I had wanted it for.

Peggotty’s answer soon arrived, and was, as usual, full of affectionate
devotion. She enclosed the half guinea (I was afraid she must have had
a world of trouble to get it out of Mr. Barkis’s box), and told me that
Miss Betsey lived near Dover, but whether at Dover itself, at Hythe,
Sandgate, or Folkestone, she could not say. One of our men, however,
informing me on my asking him about these places, that they were all
close together, I deemed this enough for my object, and resolved to set
out at the end of that week.

Being a very honest little creature, and unwilling to disgrace the
memory I was going to leave behind me at Murdstone and Grinby’s, I
considered myself bound to remain until Saturday night; and, as I had
been paid a week’s wages in advance when I first came there, not to
present myself in the counting-house at the usual hour, to receive my
stipend. For this express reason, I had borrowed the half-guinea, that
I might not be without a fund for my travelling-expenses. Accordingly,
when the Saturday night came, and we were all waiting in the warehouse
to be paid, and Tipp the carman, who always took precedence, went in
first to draw his money, I shook Mick Walker by the hand; asked him,
when it came to his turn to be paid, to say to Mr. Quinion that I had
gone to move my box to Tipp’s; and, bidding a last good night to Mealy
Potatoes, ran away.

My box was at my old lodging, over the water, and I had written a
direction for it on the back of one of our address cards that we nailed
on the casks: ‘Master David, to be left till called for, at the Coach
Office, Dover.’ This I had in my pocket ready to put on the box, after I
should have got it out of the house; and as I went towards my lodging,
I looked about me for someone who would help me to carry it to the
booking-office.

There was a long-legged young man with a very little empty donkey-cart,
standing near the Obelisk, in the Blackfriars Road, whose eye I caught
as I was going by, and who, addressing me as ‘Sixpenn’orth of bad
ha’pence,’ hoped ‘I should know him agin to swear to’--in allusion, I
have no doubt, to my staring at him. I stopped to assure him that I had
not done so in bad manners, but uncertain whether he might or might not
like a job.

‘Wot job?’ said the long-legged young man.

‘To move a box,’ I answered.

‘Wot box?’ said the long-legged young man.

I told him mine, which was down that street there, and which I wanted
him to take to the Dover coach office for sixpence.

‘Done with you for a tanner!’ said the long-legged young man, and
directly got upon his cart, which was nothing but a large wooden tray on
wheels, and rattled away at such a rate, that it was as much as I could
do to keep pace with the donkey.

There was a defiant manner about this young man, and particularly about
the way in which he chewed straw as he spoke to me, that I did not much
like; as the bargain was made, however, I took him upstairs to the room
I was leaving, and we brought the box down, and put it on his cart.
Now, I was unwilling to put the direction-card on there, lest any of my
landlord’s family should fathom what I was doing, and detain me; so
I said to the young man that I would be glad if he would stop for a
minute, when he came to the dead-wall of the King’s Bench prison. The
words were no sooner out of my mouth, than he rattled away as if he, my
box, the cart, and the donkey, were all equally mad; and I was quite out
of breath with running and calling after him, when I caught him at the
place appointed.

Being much flushed and excited, I tumbled my half-guinea out of my
pocket in pulling the card out. I put it in my mouth for safety, and
though my hands trembled a good deal, had just tied the card on very
much to my satisfaction, when I felt myself violently chucked under the
chin by the long-legged young man, and saw my half-guinea fly out of my
mouth into his hand.

‘Wot!’ said the young man, seizing me by my jacket collar, with a
frightful grin. ‘This is a pollis case, is it? You’re a-going to bolt,
are you? Come to the pollis, you young warmin, come to the pollis!’

‘You give me my money back, if you please,’ said I, very much
frightened; ‘and leave me alone.’

‘Come to the pollis!’ said the young man. ‘You shall prove it yourn to
the pollis.’

‘Give me my box and money, will you,’ I cried, bursting into tears.

The young man still replied: ‘Come to the pollis!’ and was dragging me
against the donkey in a violent manner, as if there were any affinity
between that animal and a magistrate, when he changed his mind, jumped
into the cart, sat upon my box, and, exclaiming that he would drive to
the pollis straight, rattled away harder than ever.

I ran after him as fast as I could, but I had no breath to call out
with, and should not have dared to call out, now, if I had. I narrowly
escaped being run over, twenty times at least, in half a mile. Now I
lost him, now I saw him, now I lost him, now I was cut at with a whip,
now shouted at, now down in the mud, now up again, now running into
somebody’s arms, now running headlong at a post. At length, confused by
fright and heat, and doubting whether half London might not by this time
be turning out for my apprehension, I left the young man to go where
he would with my box and money; and, panting and crying, but never
stopping, faced about for Greenwich, which I had understood was on
the Dover Road: taking very little more out of the world, towards the
retreat of my aunt, Miss Betsey, than I had brought into it, on the
night when my arrival gave her so much umbrage.



CHAPTER 13. THE SEQUEL OF MY RESOLUTION


For anything I know, I may have had some wild idea of running all the
way to Dover, when I gave up the pursuit of the young man with the
donkey-cart, and started for Greenwich. My scattered senses were soon
collected as to that point, if I had; for I came to a stop in the Kent
Road, at a terrace with a piece of water before it, and a great foolish
image in the middle, blowing a dry shell. Here I sat down on a doorstep,
quite spent and exhausted with the efforts I had already made, and with
hardly breath enough to cry for the loss of my box and half-guinea.

It was by this time dark; I heard the clocks strike ten, as I sat
resting. But it was a summer night, fortunately, and fine weather. When
I had recovered my breath, and had got rid of a stifling sensation in
my throat, I rose up and went on. In the midst of my distress, I had no
notion of going back. I doubt if I should have had any, though there had
been a Swiss snow-drift in the Kent Road.

But my standing possessed of only three-halfpence in the world (and I
am sure I wonder how they came to be left in my pocket on a Saturday
night!) troubled me none the less because I went on. I began to picture
to myself, as a scrap of newspaper intelligence, my being found dead in
a day or two, under some hedge; and I trudged on miserably, though as
fast as I could, until I happened to pass a little shop, where it was
written up that ladies’ and gentlemen’s wardrobes were bought, and that
the best price was given for rags, bones, and kitchen-stuff. The master
of this shop was sitting at the door in his shirt-sleeves, smoking; and
as there were a great many coats and pairs of trousers dangling from
the low ceiling, and only two feeble candles burning inside to show
what they were, I fancied that he looked like a man of a revengeful
disposition, who had hung all his enemies, and was enjoying himself.

My late experiences with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber suggested to me that here
might be a means of keeping off the wolf for a little while. I went up
the next by-street, took off my waistcoat, rolled it neatly under my
arm, and came back to the shop door.

‘If you please, sir,’ I said, ‘I am to sell this for a fair price.’

Mr. Dolloby--Dolloby was the name over the shop door, at least--took the
waistcoat, stood his pipe on its head, against the door-post, went into
the shop, followed by me, snuffed the two candles with his fingers,
spread the waistcoat on the counter, and looked at it there, held it up
against the light, and looked at it there, and ultimately said:

‘What do you call a price, now, for this here little weskit?’

‘Oh! you know best, sir,’ I returned modestly.

‘I can’t be buyer and seller too,’ said Mr. Dolloby. ‘Put a price on
this here little weskit.’

‘Would eighteenpence be?’--I hinted, after some hesitation.

Mr. Dolloby rolled it up again, and gave it me back. ‘I should rob my
family,’ he said, ‘if I was to offer ninepence for it.’

This was a disagreeable way of putting the business; because it imposed
upon me, a perfect stranger, the unpleasantness of asking Mr. Dolloby to
rob his family on my account. My circumstances being so very pressing,
however, I said I would take ninepence for it, if he pleased. Mr.
Dolloby, not without some grumbling, gave ninepence. I wished him good
night, and walked out of the shop the richer by that sum, and the
poorer by a waistcoat. But when I buttoned my jacket, that was not much.
Indeed, I foresaw pretty clearly that my jacket would go next, and that
I should have to make the best of my way to Dover in a shirt and a pair
of trousers, and might deem myself lucky if I got there even in that
trim. But my mind did not run so much on this as might be supposed.
Beyond a general impression of the distance before me, and of the young
man with the donkey-cart having used me cruelly, I think I had no
very urgent sense of my difficulties when I once again set off with my
ninepence in my pocket.

A plan had occurred to me for passing the night, which I was going to
carry into execution. This was, to lie behind the wall at the back of my
old school, in a corner where there used to be a haystack. I imagined
it would be a kind of company to have the boys, and the bedroom where
I used to tell the stories, so near me: although the boys would know
nothing of my being there, and the bedroom would yield me no shelter.

I had had a hard day’s work, and was pretty well jaded when I came
climbing out, at last, upon the level of Blackheath. It cost me some
trouble to find out Salem House; but I found it, and I found a haystack
in the corner, and I lay down by it; having first walked round the wall,
and looked up at the windows, and seen that all was dark and silent
within. Never shall I forget the lonely sensation of first lying down,
without a roof above my head!

Sleep came upon me as it came on many other outcasts, against whom
house-doors were locked, and house-dogs barked, that night--and I
dreamed of lying on my old school-bed, talking to the boys in my room;
and found myself sitting upright, with Steerforth’s name upon my lips,
looking wildly at the stars that were glistening and glimmering above
me. When I remembered where I was at that untimely hour, a feeling
stole upon me that made me get up, afraid of I don’t know what, and walk
about. But the fainter glimmering of the stars, and the pale light in
the sky where the day was coming, reassured me: and my eyes being very
heavy, I lay down again and slept--though with a knowledge in my sleep
that it was cold--until the warm beams of the sun, and the ringing of
the getting-up bell at Salem House, awoke me. If I could have hoped that
Steerforth was there, I would have lurked about until he came out
alone; but I knew he must have left long since. Traddles still remained,
perhaps, but it was very doubtful; and I had not sufficient confidence
in his discretion or good luck, however strong my reliance was on his
good nature, to wish to trust him with my situation. So I crept away
from the wall as Mr. Creakle’s boys were getting up, and struck into the
long dusty track which I had first known to be the Dover Road when I was
one of them, and when I little expected that any eyes would ever see me
the wayfarer I was now, upon it.

What a different Sunday morning from the old Sunday morning at Yarmouth!
In due time I heard the church-bells ringing, as I plodded on; and I met
people who were going to church; and I passed a church or two where the
congregation were inside, and the sound of singing came out into the
sunshine, while the beadle sat and cooled himself in the shade of the
porch, or stood beneath the yew-tree, with his hand to his forehead,
glowering at me going by. But the peace and rest of the old Sunday
morning were on everything, except me. That was the difference. I felt
quite wicked in my dirt and dust, with my tangled hair. But for the
quiet picture I had conjured up, of my mother in her youth and beauty,
weeping by the fire, and my aunt relenting to her, I hardly think I
should have had the courage to go on until next day. But it always went
before me, and I followed.

I got, that Sunday, through three-and-twenty miles on the straight
road, though not very easily, for I was new to that kind of toil. I
see myself, as evening closes in, coming over the bridge at Rochester,
footsore and tired, and eating bread that I had bought for supper.
One or two little houses, with the notice, ‘Lodgings for Travellers’,
hanging out, had tempted me; but I was afraid of spending the few pence
I had, and was even more afraid of the vicious looks of the trampers I
had met or overtaken. I sought no shelter, therefore, but the sky; and
toiling into Chatham,--which, in that night’s aspect, is a mere dream of
chalk, and drawbridges, and mastless ships in a muddy river, roofed
like Noah’s arks,--crept, at last, upon a sort of grass-grown battery
overhanging a lane, where a sentry was walking to and fro. Here I
lay down, near a cannon; and, happy in the society of the sentry’s
footsteps, though he knew no more of my being above him than the boys
at Salem House had known of my lying by the wall, slept soundly until
morning.

Very stiff and sore of foot I was in the morning, and quite dazed by the
beating of drums and marching of troops, which seemed to hem me in on
every side when I went down towards the long narrow street. Feeling
that I could go but a very little way that day, if I were to reserve any
strength for getting to my journey’s end, I resolved to make the sale
of my jacket its principal business. Accordingly, I took the jacket off,
that I might learn to do without it; and carrying it under my arm, began
a tour of inspection of the various slop-shops.

It was a likely place to sell a jacket in; for the dealers in
second-hand clothes were numerous, and were, generally speaking, on the
look-out for customers at their shop doors. But as most of them had,
hanging up among their stock, an officer’s coat or two, epaulettes and
all, I was rendered timid by the costly nature of their dealings, and
walked about for a long time without offering my merchandise to anyone.

This modesty of mine directed my attention to the marine-store shops,
and such shops as Mr. Dolloby’s, in preference to the regular dealers.
At last I found one that I thought looked promising, at the corner of a
dirty lane, ending in an enclosure full of stinging-nettles, against the
palings of which some second-hand sailors’ clothes, that seemed to have
overflowed the shop, were fluttering among some cots, and rusty guns,
and oilskin hats, and certain trays full of so many old rusty keys of so
many sizes that they seemed various enough to open all the doors in the
world.

Into this shop, which was low and small, and which was darkened
rather than lighted by a little window, overhung with clothes, and was
descended into by some steps, I went with a palpitating heart; which was
not relieved when an ugly old man, with the lower part of his face all
covered with a stubbly grey beard, rushed out of a dirty den behind it,
and seized me by the hair of my head. He was a dreadful old man to look
at, in a filthy flannel waistcoat, and smelling terribly of rum. His
bedstead, covered with a tumbled and ragged piece of patchwork, was in
the den he had come from, where another little window showed a prospect
of more stinging-nettles, and a lame donkey.

‘Oh, what do you want?’ grinned this old man, in a fierce, monotonous
whine. ‘Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver,
what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!’

I was so much dismayed by these words, and particularly by the
repetition of the last unknown one, which was a kind of rattle in his
throat, that I could make no answer; hereupon the old man, still holding
me by the hair, repeated:

‘Oh, what do you want? Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my
lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo!’--which he screwed out of
himself, with an energy that made his eyes start in his head.

‘I wanted to know,’ I said, trembling, ‘if you would buy a jacket.’

‘Oh, let’s see the jacket!’ cried the old man. ‘Oh, my heart on fire,
show the jacket to us! Oh, my eyes and limbs, bring the jacket out!’

With that he took his trembling hands, which were like the claws of a
great bird, out of my hair; and put on a pair of spectacles, not at all
ornamental to his inflamed eyes.

‘Oh, how much for the jacket?’ cried the old man, after examining it.
‘Oh--goroo!--how much for the jacket?’

‘Half-a-crown,’ I answered, recovering myself.

‘Oh, my lungs and liver,’ cried the old man, ‘no! Oh, my eyes, no! Oh,
my limbs, no! Eighteenpence. Goroo!’

Every time he uttered this ejaculation, his eyes seemed to be in danger
of starting out; and every sentence he spoke, he delivered in a sort
of tune, always exactly the same, and more like a gust of wind, which
begins low, mounts up high, and falls again, than any other comparison I
can find for it.

‘Well,’ said I, glad to have closed the bargain, ‘I’ll take
eighteenpence.’

‘Oh, my liver!’ cried the old man, throwing the jacket on a shelf. ‘Get
out of the shop! Oh, my lungs, get out of the shop! Oh, my eyes and
limbs--goroo!--don’t ask for money; make it an exchange.’ I never was
so frightened in my life, before or since; but I told him humbly that
I wanted money, and that nothing else was of any use to me, but that I
would wait for it, as he desired, outside, and had no wish to hurry
him. So I went outside, and sat down in the shade in a corner. And I sat
there so many hours, that the shade became sunlight, and the sunlight
became shade again, and still I sat there waiting for the money.

There never was such another drunken madman in that line of business,
I hope. That he was well known in the neighbourhood, and enjoyed the
reputation of having sold himself to the devil, I soon understood from
the visits he received from the boys, who continually came skirmishing
about the shop, shouting that legend, and calling to him to bring out
his gold. ‘You ain’t poor, you know, Charley, as you pretend. Bring out
your gold. Bring out some of the gold you sold yourself to the devil
for. Come! It’s in the lining of the mattress, Charley. Rip it open
and let’s have some!’ This, and many offers to lend him a knife for
the purpose, exasperated him to such a degree, that the whole day was a
succession of rushes on his part, and flights on the part of the boys.
Sometimes in his rage he would take me for one of them, and come at me,
mouthing as if he were going to tear me in pieces; then, remembering
me, just in time, would dive into the shop, and lie upon his bed, as I
thought from the sound of his voice, yelling in a frantic way, to his
own windy tune, the ‘Death of Nelson’; with an Oh! before every line,
and innumerable Goroos interspersed. As if this were not bad enough for
me, the boys, connecting me with the establishment, on account of the
patience and perseverance with which I sat outside, half-dressed, pelted
me, and used me very ill all day.

He made many attempts to induce me to consent to an exchange; at one
time coming out with a fishing-rod, at another with a fiddle, at another
with a cocked hat, at another with a flute. But I resisted all these
overtures, and sat there in desperation; each time asking him, with
tears in my eyes, for my money or my jacket. At last he began to pay me
in halfpence at a time; and was full two hours getting by easy stages to
a shilling.

‘Oh, my eyes and limbs!’ he then cried, peeping hideously out of the
shop, after a long pause, ‘will you go for twopence more?’

‘I can’t,’ I said; ‘I shall be starved.’

‘Oh, my lungs and liver, will you go for threepence?’

‘I would go for nothing, if I could,’ I said, ‘but I want the money
badly.’

‘Oh, go-roo!’ (it is really impossible to express how he twisted this
ejaculation out of himself, as he peeped round the door-post at me,
showing nothing but his crafty old head); ‘will you go for fourpence?’

I was so faint and weary that I closed with this offer; and taking the
money out of his claw, not without trembling, went away more hungry and
thirsty than I had ever been, a little before sunset. But at an expense
of threepence I soon refreshed myself completely; and, being in better
spirits then, limped seven miles upon my road.

My bed at night was under another haystack, where I rested comfortably,
after having washed my blistered feet in a stream, and dressed them as
well as I was able, with some cool leaves. When I took the road again
next morning, I found that it lay through a succession of hop-grounds
and orchards. It was sufficiently late in the year for the orchards
to be ruddy with ripe apples; and in a few places the hop-pickers were
already at work. I thought it all extremely beautiful, and made up
my mind to sleep among the hops that night: imagining some cheerful
companionship in the long perspectives of poles, with the graceful
leaves twining round them.

The trampers were worse than ever that day, and inspired me with a
dread that is yet quite fresh in my mind. Some of them were most
ferocious-looking ruffians, who stared at me as I went by; and stopped,
perhaps, and called after me to come back and speak to them, and when I
took to my heels, stoned me. I recollect one young fellow--a tinker, I
suppose, from his wallet and brazier--who had a woman with him, and
who faced about and stared at me thus; and then roared to me in such a
tremendous voice to come back, that I halted and looked round.

‘Come here, when you’re called,’ said the tinker, ‘or I’ll rip your
young body open.’

I thought it best to go back. As I drew nearer to them, trying to
propitiate the tinker by my looks, I observed that the woman had a black
eye.

‘Where are you going?’ said the tinker, gripping the bosom of my shirt
with his blackened hand.

‘I am going to Dover,’ I said.

‘Where do you come from?’ asked the tinker, giving his hand another turn
in my shirt, to hold me more securely.

‘I come from London,’ I said.

‘What lay are you upon?’ asked the tinker. ‘Are you a prig?’

‘N-no,’ I said.

‘Ain’t you, by G--? If you make a brag of your honesty to me,’ said the
tinker, ‘I’ll knock your brains out.’

With his disengaged hand he made a menace of striking me, and then
looked at me from head to foot.

‘Have you got the price of a pint of beer about you?’ said the tinker.
‘If you have, out with it, afore I take it away!’

I should certainly have produced it, but that I met the woman’s look,
and saw her very slightly shake her head, and form ‘No!’ with her lips.

‘I am very poor,’ I said, attempting to smile, ‘and have got no money.’

‘Why, what do you mean?’ said the tinker, looking so sternly at me, that
I almost feared he saw the money in my pocket.

‘Sir!’ I stammered.

‘What do you mean,’ said the tinker, ‘by wearing my brother’s silk
handkerchief! Give it over here!’ And he had mine off my neck in a
moment, and tossed it to the woman.

The woman burst into a fit of laughter, as if she thought this a joke,
and tossed it back to me, nodded once, as slightly as before, and made
the word ‘Go!’ with her lips. Before I could obey, however, the tinker
seized the handkerchief out of my hand with a roughness that threw me
away like a feather, and putting it loosely round his own neck, turned
upon the woman with an oath, and knocked her down. I never shall forget
seeing her fall backward on the hard road, and lie there with her bonnet
tumbled off, and her hair all whitened in the dust; nor, when I looked
back from a distance, seeing her sitting on the pathway, which was a
bank by the roadside, wiping the blood from her face with a corner of
her shawl, while he went on ahead.

This adventure frightened me so, that, afterwards, when I saw any of
these people coming, I turned back until I could find a hiding-place,
where I remained until they had gone out of sight; which happened so
often, that I was very seriously delayed. But under this difficulty, as
under all the other difficulties of my journey, I seemed to be sustained
and led on by my fanciful picture of my mother in her youth, before I
came into the world. It always kept me company. It was there, among
the hops, when I lay down to sleep; it was with me on my waking in the
morning; it went before me all day. I have associated it, ever since,
with the sunny street of Canterbury, dozing as it were in the hot light;
and with the sight of its old houses and gateways, and the stately,
grey Cathedral, with the rooks sailing round the towers. When I came,
at last, upon the bare, wide downs near Dover, it relieved the solitary
aspect of the scene with hope; and not until I reached that first great
aim of my journey, and actually set foot in the town itself, on the
sixth day of my flight, did it desert me. But then, strange to say,
when I stood with my ragged shoes, and my dusty, sunburnt, half-clothed
figure, in the place so long desired, it seemed to vanish like a dream,
and to leave me helpless and dispirited.

I inquired about my aunt among the boatmen first, and received various
answers. One said she lived in the South Foreland Light, and had singed
her whiskers by doing so; another, that she was made fast to the great
buoy outside the harbour, and could only be visited at half-tide; a
third, that she was locked up in Maidstone jail for child-stealing; a
fourth, that she was seen to mount a broom in the last high wind, and
make direct for Calais. The fly-drivers, among whom I inquired next,
were equally jocose and equally disrespectful; and the shopkeepers, not
liking my appearance, generally replied, without hearing what I had
to say, that they had got nothing for me. I felt more miserable and
destitute than I had done at any period of my running away. My money was
all gone, I had nothing left to dispose of; I was hungry, thirsty, and
worn out; and seemed as distant from my end as if I had remained in
London.

The morning had worn away in these inquiries, and I was sitting on
the step of an empty shop at a street corner, near the market-place,
deliberating upon wandering towards those other places which had been
mentioned, when a fly-driver, coming by with his carriage, dropped a
horsecloth. Something good-natured in the man’s face, as I handed it up,
encouraged me to ask him if he could tell me where Miss Trotwood lived;
though I had asked the question so often, that it almost died upon my
lips.

‘Trotwood,’ said he. ‘Let me see. I know the name, too. Old lady?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘rather.’

‘Pretty stiff in the back?’ said he, making himself upright.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I should think it very likely.’

‘Carries a bag?’ said he--‘bag with a good deal of room in it--is
gruffish, and comes down upon you, sharp?’

My heart sank within me as I acknowledged the undoubted accuracy of this
description.

‘Why then, I tell you what,’ said he. ‘If you go up there,’ pointing
with his whip towards the heights, ‘and keep right on till you come to
some houses facing the sea, I think you’ll hear of her. My opinion is
she won’t stand anything, so here’s a penny for you.’

I accepted the gift thankfully, and bought a loaf with it. Dispatching
this refreshment by the way, I went in the direction my friend had
indicated, and walked on a good distance without coming to the houses
he had mentioned. At length I saw some before me; and approaching them,
went into a little shop (it was what we used to call a general shop,
at home), and inquired if they could have the goodness to tell me where
Miss Trotwood lived. I addressed myself to a man behind the counter,
who was weighing some rice for a young woman; but the latter, taking the
inquiry to herself, turned round quickly.

‘My mistress?’ she said. ‘What do you want with her, boy?’

‘I want,’ I replied, ‘to speak to her, if you please.’

‘To beg of her, you mean,’ retorted the damsel.

‘No,’ I said, ‘indeed.’ But suddenly remembering that in truth I came
for no other purpose, I held my peace in confusion, and felt my face
burn.

My aunt’s handmaid, as I supposed she was from what she had said, put
her rice in a little basket and walked out of the shop; telling me that
I could follow her, if I wanted to know where Miss Trotwood lived. I
needed no second permission; though I was by this time in such a state
of consternation and agitation, that my legs shook under me. I followed
the young woman, and we soon came to a very neat little cottage with
cheerful bow-windows: in front of it, a small square gravelled court or
garden full of flowers, carefully tended, and smelling deliciously.

‘This is Miss Trotwood’s,’ said the young woman. ‘Now you know; and
that’s all I have got to say.’ With which words she hurried into the
house, as if to shake off the responsibility of my appearance; and left
me standing at the garden-gate, looking disconsolately over the top of
it towards the parlour window, where a muslin curtain partly undrawn
in the middle, a large round green screen or fan fastened on to the
windowsill, a small table, and a great chair, suggested to me that my
aunt might be at that moment seated in awful state.

My shoes were by this time in a woeful condition. The soles had shed
themselves bit by bit, and the upper leathers had broken and burst until
the very shape and form of shoes had departed from them. My hat (which
had served me for a night-cap, too) was so crushed and bent, that no old
battered handleless saucepan on a dunghill need have been ashamed to vie
with it. My shirt and trousers, stained with heat, dew, grass, and
the Kentish soil on which I had slept--and torn besides--might have
frightened the birds from my aunt’s garden, as I stood at the gate. My
hair had known no comb or brush since I left London. My face, neck, and
hands, from unaccustomed exposure to the air and sun, were burnt to a
berry-brown. From head to foot I was powdered almost as white with chalk
and dust, as if I had come out of a lime-kiln. In this plight, and with
a strong consciousness of it, I waited to introduce myself to, and make
my first impression on, my formidable aunt.

The unbroken stillness of the parlour window leading me to infer, after
a while, that she was not there, I lifted up my eyes to the window above
it, where I saw a florid, pleasant-looking gentleman, with a grey head,
who shut up one eye in a grotesque manner, nodded his head at me several
times, shook it at me as often, laughed, and went away.

I had been discomposed enough before; but I was so much the more
discomposed by this unexpected behaviour, that I was on the point of
slinking off, to think how I had best proceed, when there came out of
the house a lady with her handkerchief tied over her cap, and a pair
of gardening gloves on her hands, wearing a gardening pocket like a
toll-man’s apron, and carrying a great knife. I knew her immediately
to be Miss Betsey, for she came stalking out of the house exactly as
my poor mother had so often described her stalking up our garden at
Blunderstone Rookery.

‘Go away!’ said Miss Betsey, shaking her head, and making a distant chop
in the air with her knife. ‘Go along! No boys here!’

I watched her, with my heart at my lips, as she marched to a corner of
her garden, and stooped to dig up some little root there. Then, without
a scrap of courage, but with a great deal of desperation, I went softly
in and stood beside her, touching her with my finger.

‘If you please, ma’am,’ I began.

She started and looked up.

‘If you please, aunt.’

‘EH?’ exclaimed Miss Betsey, in a tone of amazement I have never heard
approached.

‘If you please, aunt, I am your nephew.’

‘Oh, Lord!’ said my aunt. And sat flat down in the garden-path.

‘I am David Copperfield, of Blunderstone, in Suffolk--where you came,
on the night when I was born, and saw my dear mama. I have been very
unhappy since she died. I have been slighted, and taught nothing, and
thrown upon myself, and put to work not fit for me. It made me run away
to you. I was robbed at first setting out, and have walked all the
way, and have never slept in a bed since I began the journey.’ Here
my self-support gave way all at once; and with a movement of my hands,
intended to show her my ragged state, and call it to witness that I had
suffered something, I broke into a passion of crying, which I suppose
had been pent up within me all the week.

My aunt, with every sort of expression but wonder discharged from her
countenance, sat on the gravel, staring at me, until I began to cry;
when she got up in a great hurry, collared me, and took me into the
parlour. Her first proceeding there was to unlock a tall press, bring
out several bottles, and pour some of the contents of each into my
mouth. I think they must have been taken out at random, for I am sure
I tasted aniseed water, anchovy sauce, and salad dressing. When she had
administered these restoratives, as I was still quite hysterical, and
unable to control my sobs, she put me on the sofa, with a shawl under
my head, and the handkerchief from her own head under my feet, lest I
should sully the cover; and then, sitting herself down behind the green
fan or screen I have already mentioned, so that I could not see her
face, ejaculated at intervals, ‘Mercy on us!’ letting those exclamations
off like minute guns.

After a time she rang the bell. ‘Janet,’ said my aunt, when her servant
came in. ‘Go upstairs, give my compliments to Mr. Dick, and say I wish
to speak to him.’

Janet looked a little surprised to see me lying stiffly on the sofa (I
was afraid to move lest it should be displeasing to my aunt), but went
on her errand. My aunt, with her hands behind her, walked up and down
the room, until the gentleman who had squinted at me from the upper
window came in laughing.

‘Mr. Dick,’ said my aunt, ‘don’t be a fool, because nobody can be more
discreet than you can, when you choose. We all know that. So don’t be a
fool, whatever you are.’

The gentleman was serious immediately, and looked at me, I thought, as
if he would entreat me to say nothing about the window.

‘Mr. Dick,’ said my aunt, ‘you have heard me mention David Copperfield?
Now don’t pretend not to have a memory, because you and I know better.’

‘David Copperfield?’ said Mr. Dick, who did not appear to me to
remember much about it. ‘David Copperfield? Oh yes, to be sure. David,
certainly.’

‘Well,’ said my aunt, ‘this is his boy--his son. He would be as like his
father as it’s possible to be, if he was not so like his mother, too.’

‘His son?’ said Mr. Dick. ‘David’s son? Indeed!’

‘Yes,’ pursued my aunt, ‘and he has done a pretty piece of business.
He has run away. Ah! His sister, Betsey Trotwood, never would have run
away.’ My aunt shook her head firmly, confident in the character and
behaviour of the girl who never was born.

‘Oh! you think she wouldn’t have run away?’ said Mr. Dick.

‘Bless and save the man,’ exclaimed my aunt, sharply, ‘how he talks!
Don’t I know she wouldn’t? She would have lived with her god-mother,
and we should have been devoted to one another. Where, in the name of
wonder, should his sister, Betsey Trotwood, have run from, or to?’

‘Nowhere,’ said Mr. Dick.

‘Well then,’ returned my aunt, softened by the reply, ‘how can you
pretend to be wool-gathering, Dick, when you are as sharp as a surgeon’s
lancet? Now, here you see young David Copperfield, and the question I
put to you is, what shall I do with him?’

‘What shall you do with him?’ said Mr. Dick, feebly, scratching his
head. ‘Oh! do with him?’

‘Yes,’ said my aunt, with a grave look, and her forefinger held up.
‘Come! I want some very sound advice.’

‘Why, if I was you,’ said Mr. Dick, considering, and looking vacantly
at me, ‘I should--’ The contemplation of me seemed to inspire him with a
sudden idea, and he added, briskly, ‘I should wash him!’

‘Janet,’ said my aunt, turning round with a quiet triumph, which I did
not then understand, ‘Mr. Dick sets us all right. Heat the bath!’

Although I was deeply interested in this dialogue, I could not help
observing my aunt, Mr. Dick, and Janet, while it was in progress, and
completing a survey I had already been engaged in making of the room.

My aunt was a tall, hard-featured lady, but by no means ill-looking.
There was an inflexibility in her face, in her voice, in her gait and
carriage, amply sufficient to account for the effect she had made upon
a gentle creature like my mother; but her features were rather handsome
than otherwise, though unbending and austere. I particularly noticed
that she had a very quick, bright eye. Her hair, which was grey, was
arranged in two plain divisions, under what I believe would be called a
mob-cap; I mean a cap, much more common then than now, with side-pieces
fastening under the chin. Her dress was of a lavender colour, and
perfectly neat; but scantily made, as if she desired to be as little
encumbered as possible. I remember that I thought it, in form, more like
a riding-habit with the superfluous skirt cut off, than anything else.
She wore at her side a gentleman’s gold watch, if I might judge from its
size and make, with an appropriate chain and seals; she had some linen
at her throat not unlike a shirt-collar, and things at her wrists like
little shirt-wristbands.

Mr. Dick, as I have already said, was grey-headed, and florid: I should
have said all about him, in saying so, had not his head been curiously
bowed--not by age; it reminded me of one of Mr. Creakle’s boys’ heads
after a beating--and his grey eyes prominent and large, with a strange
kind of watery brightness in them that made me, in combination with his
vacant manner, his submission to my aunt, and his childish delight when
she praised him, suspect him of being a little mad; though, if he were
mad, how he came to be there puzzled me extremely. He was dressed
like any other ordinary gentleman, in a loose grey morning coat and
waistcoat, and white trousers; and had his watch in his fob, and his
money in his pockets: which he rattled as if he were very proud of it.

Janet was a pretty blooming girl, of about nineteen or twenty, and a
perfect picture of neatness. Though I made no further observation of
her at the moment, I may mention here what I did not discover until
afterwards, namely, that she was one of a series of protegees whom my
aunt had taken into her service expressly to educate in a renouncement
of mankind, and who had generally completed their abjuration by marrying
the baker.

The room was as neat as Janet or my aunt. As I laid down my pen, a
moment since, to think of it, the air from the sea came blowing
in again, mixed with the perfume of the flowers; and I saw the
old-fashioned furniture brightly rubbed and polished, my aunt’s
inviolable chair and table by the round green fan in the bow-window, the
drugget-covered carpet, the cat, the kettle-holder, the two canaries,
the old china, the punchbowl full of dried rose-leaves, the tall press
guarding all sorts of bottles and pots, and, wonderfully out of keeping
with the rest, my dusty self upon the sofa, taking note of everything.

Janet had gone away to get the bath ready, when my aunt, to my great
alarm, became in one moment rigid with indignation, and had hardly voice
to cry out, ‘Janet! Donkeys!’

Upon which, Janet came running up the stairs as if the house were in
flames, darted out on a little piece of green in front, and warned off
two saddle-donkeys, lady-ridden, that had presumed to set hoof upon it;
while my aunt, rushing out of the house, seized the bridle of a third
animal laden with a bestriding child, turned him, led him forth from
those sacred precincts, and boxed the ears of the unlucky urchin in
attendance who had dared to profane that hallowed ground.

To this hour I don’t know whether my aunt had any lawful right of way
over that patch of green; but she had settled it in her own mind that
she had, and it was all the same to her. The one great outrage of her
life, demanding to be constantly avenged, was the passage of a donkey
over that immaculate spot. In whatever occupation she was engaged,
however interesting to her the conversation in which she was taking
part, a donkey turned the current of her ideas in a moment, and she was
upon him straight. Jugs of water, and watering-pots, were kept in secret
places ready to be discharged on the offending boys; sticks were laid
in ambush behind the door; sallies were made at all hours; and
incessant war prevailed. Perhaps this was an agreeable excitement to the
donkey-boys; or perhaps the more sagacious of the donkeys, understanding
how the case stood, delighted with constitutional obstinacy in coming
that way. I only know that there were three alarms before the bath was
ready; and that on the occasion of the last and most desperate of all,
I saw my aunt engage, single-handed, with a sandy-headed lad of fifteen,
and bump his sandy head against her own gate, before he seemed to
comprehend what was the matter. These interruptions were of the more
ridiculous to me, because she was giving me broth out of a table-spoon
at the time (having firmly persuaded herself that I was actually
starving, and must receive nourishment at first in very small
quantities), and, while my mouth was yet open to receive the spoon, she
would put it back into the basin, cry ‘Janet! Donkeys!’ and go out to
the assault.

The bath was a great comfort. For I began to be sensible of acute pains
in my limbs from lying out in the fields, and was now so tired and low
that I could hardly keep myself awake for five minutes together. When I
had bathed, they (I mean my aunt and Janet) enrobed me in a shirt and a
pair of trousers belonging to Mr. Dick, and tied me up in two or three
great shawls. What sort of bundle I looked like, I don’t know, but I
felt a very hot one. Feeling also very faint and drowsy, I soon lay down
on the sofa again and fell asleep.

It might have been a dream, originating in the fancy which had occupied
my mind so long, but I awoke with the impression that my aunt had come
and bent over me, and had put my hair away from my face, and laid my
head more comfortably, and had then stood looking at me. The words,
‘Pretty fellow,’ or ‘Poor fellow,’ seemed to be in my ears, too; but
certainly there was nothing else, when I awoke, to lead me to believe
that they had been uttered by my aunt, who sat in the bow-window gazing
at the sea from behind the green fan, which was mounted on a kind of
swivel, and turned any way.

We dined soon after I awoke, off a roast fowl and a pudding; I sitting
at table, not unlike a trussed bird myself, and moving my arms with
considerable difficulty. But as my aunt had swathed me up, I made no
complaint of being inconvenienced. All this time I was deeply anxious
to know what she was going to do with me; but she took her dinner in
profound silence, except when she occasionally fixed her eyes on me
sitting opposite, and said, ‘Mercy upon us!’ which did not by any means
relieve my anxiety.

The cloth being drawn, and some sherry put upon the table (of which I
had a glass), my aunt sent up for Mr. Dick again, who joined us, and
looked as wise as he could when she requested him to attend to my story,
which she elicited from me, gradually, by a course of questions. During
my recital, she kept her eyes on Mr. Dick, who I thought would have gone
to sleep but for that, and who, whensoever he lapsed into a smile, was
checked by a frown from my aunt.

‘Whatever possessed that poor unfortunate Baby, that she must go and be
married again,’ said my aunt, when I had finished, ‘I can’t conceive.’

‘Perhaps she fell in love with her second husband,’ Mr. Dick suggested.

‘Fell in love!’ repeated my aunt. ‘What do you mean? What business had
she to do it?’

‘Perhaps,’ Mr. Dick simpered, after thinking a little, ‘she did it for
pleasure.’

‘Pleasure, indeed!’ replied my aunt. ‘A mighty pleasure for the poor
Baby to fix her simple faith upon any dog of a fellow, certain to
ill-use her in some way or other. What did she propose to herself,
I should like to know! She had had one husband. She had seen David
Copperfield out of the world, who was always running after wax dolls
from his cradle. She had got a baby--oh, there were a pair of babies
when she gave birth to this child sitting here, that Friday night!--and
what more did she want?’

Mr. Dick secretly shook his head at me, as if he thought there was no
getting over this.

‘She couldn’t even have a baby like anybody else,’ said my aunt. ‘Where
was this child’s sister, Betsey Trotwood? Not forthcoming. Don’t tell
me!’

Mr. Dick seemed quite frightened.

‘That little man of a doctor, with his head on one side,’ said my aunt,
‘Jellips, or whatever his name was, what was he about? All he could do,
was to say to me, like a robin redbreast--as he is--“It’s a boy.” A boy!
Yah, the imbecility of the whole set of ‘em!’

The heartiness of the ejaculation startled Mr. Dick exceedingly; and me,
too, if I am to tell the truth.

‘And then, as if this was not enough, and she had not stood sufficiently
in the light of this child’s sister, Betsey Trotwood,’ said my aunt,
‘she marries a second time--goes and marries a Murderer--or a man with
a name like it--and stands in THIS child’s light! And the natural
consequence is, as anybody but a baby might have foreseen, that he
prowls and wanders. He’s as like Cain before he was grown up, as he can
be.’

Mr. Dick looked hard at me, as if to identify me in this character.

‘And then there’s that woman with the Pagan name,’ said my aunt, ‘that
Peggotty, she goes and gets married next. Because she has not seen
enough of the evil attending such things, she goes and gets married
next, as the child relates. I only hope,’ said my aunt, shaking her
head, ‘that her husband is one of those Poker husbands who abound in the
newspapers, and will beat her well with one.’

I could not bear to hear my old nurse so decried, and made the subject
of such a wish. I told my aunt that indeed she was mistaken. That
Peggotty was the best, the truest, the most faithful, most devoted, and
most self-denying friend and servant in the world; who had ever loved
me dearly, who had ever loved my mother dearly; who had held my mother’s
dying head upon her arm, on whose face my mother had imprinted her last
grateful kiss. And my remembrance of them both, choking me, I broke down
as I was trying to say that her home was my home, and that all she had
was mine, and that I would have gone to her for shelter, but for her
humble station, which made me fear that I might bring some trouble on
her--I broke down, I say, as I was trying to say so, and laid my face in
my hands upon the table.

‘Well, well!’ said my aunt, ‘the child is right to stand by those who
have stood by him--Janet! Donkeys!’

I thoroughly believe that but for those unfortunate donkeys, we should
have come to a good understanding; for my aunt had laid her hand on my
shoulder, and the impulse was upon me, thus emboldened, to embrace her
and beseech her protection. But the interruption, and the disorder she
was thrown into by the struggle outside, put an end to all softer ideas
for the present, and kept my aunt indignantly declaiming to Mr. Dick
about her determination to appeal for redress to the laws of her
country, and to bring actions for trespass against the whole donkey
proprietorship of Dover, until tea-time.

After tea, we sat at the window--on the look-out, as I imagined, from
my aunt’s sharp expression of face, for more invaders--until dusk, when
Janet set candles, and a backgammon-board, on the table, and pulled down
the blinds.

‘Now, Mr. Dick,’ said my aunt, with her grave look, and her forefinger
up as before, ‘I am going to ask you another question. Look at this
child.’

‘David’s son?’ said Mr. Dick, with an attentive, puzzled face.

‘Exactly so,’ returned my aunt. ‘What would you do with him, now?’

‘Do with David’s son?’ said Mr. Dick.

‘Ay,’ replied my aunt, ‘with David’s son.’

‘Oh!’ said Mr. Dick. ‘Yes. Do with--I should put him to bed.’

‘Janet!’ cried my aunt, with the same complacent triumph that I had
remarked before. ‘Mr. Dick sets us all right. If the bed is ready, we’ll
take him up to it.’

Janet reporting it to be quite ready, I was taken up to it; kindly, but
in some sort like a prisoner; my aunt going in front and Janet bringing
up the rear. The only circumstance which gave me any new hope, was my
aunt’s stopping on the stairs to inquire about a smell of fire that was
prevalent there; and janet’s replying that she had been making tinder
down in the kitchen, of my old shirt. But there were no other clothes in
my room than the odd heap of things I wore; and when I was left there,
with a little taper which my aunt forewarned me would burn exactly five
minutes, I heard them lock my door on the outside. Turning these things
over in my mind I deemed it possible that my aunt, who could know
nothing of me, might suspect I had a habit of running away, and took
precautions, on that account, to have me in safe keeping.

The room was a pleasant one, at the top of the house, overlooking the
sea, on which the moon was shining brilliantly. After I had said my
prayers, and the candle had burnt out, I remember how I still sat
looking at the moonlight on the water, as if I could hope to read my
fortune in it, as in a bright book; or to see my mother with her child,
coming from Heaven, along that shining path, to look upon me as she had
looked when I last saw her sweet face. I remember how the solemn feeling
with which at length I turned my eyes away, yielded to the sensation of
gratitude and rest which the sight of the white-curtained bed--and how
much more the lying softly down upon it, nestling in the snow-white
sheets!--inspired. I remember how I thought of all the solitary places
under the night sky where I had slept, and how I prayed that I never
might be houseless any more, and never might forget the houseless. I
remember how I seemed to float, then, down the melancholy glory of that
track upon the sea, away into the world of dreams.



CHAPTER 14. MY AUNT MAKES UP HER MIND ABOUT ME


On going down in the morning, I found my aunt musing so profoundly over
the breakfast table, with her elbow on the tray, that the contents of
the urn had overflowed the teapot and were laying the whole table-cloth
under water, when my entrance put her meditations to flight. I felt sure
that I had been the subject of her reflections, and was more than ever
anxious to know her intentions towards me. Yet I dared not express my
anxiety, lest it should give her offence.

My eyes, however, not being so much under control as my tongue, were
attracted towards my aunt very often during breakfast. I never could
look at her for a few moments together but I found her looking at me--in
an odd thoughtful manner, as if I were an immense way off, instead of
being on the other side of the small round table. When she had finished
her breakfast, my aunt very deliberately leaned back in her chair,
knitted her brows, folded her arms, and contemplated me at her leisure,
with such a fixedness of attention that I was quite overpowered by
embarrassment. Not having as yet finished my own breakfast, I attempted
to hide my confusion by proceeding with it; but my knife tumbled over my
fork, my fork tripped up my knife, I chipped bits of bacon a surprising
height into the air instead of cutting them for my own eating, and
choked myself with my tea, which persisted in going the wrong way
instead of the right one, until I gave in altogether, and sat blushing
under my aunt’s close scrutiny.

‘Hallo!’ said my aunt, after a long time.

I looked up, and met her sharp bright glance respectfully.

‘I have written to him,’ said my aunt.

‘To--?’

‘To your father-in-law,’ said my aunt. ‘I have sent him a letter that
I’ll trouble him to attend to, or he and I will fall out, I can tell
him!’

‘Does he know where I am, aunt?’ I inquired, alarmed.

‘I have told him,’ said my aunt, with a nod.

‘Shall I--be--given up to him?’ I faltered.

‘I don’t know,’ said my aunt. ‘We shall see.’

‘Oh! I can’t think what I shall do,’ I exclaimed, ‘if I have to go back
to Mr. Murdstone!’

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said my aunt, shaking her head. ‘I
can’t say, I am sure. We shall see.’

My spirits sank under these words, and I became very downcast and heavy
of heart. My aunt, without appearing to take much heed of me, put on a
coarse apron with a bib, which she took out of the press; washed up the
teacups with her own hands; and, when everything was washed and set in
the tray again, and the cloth folded and put on the top of the whole,
rang for Janet to remove it. She next swept up the crumbs with a little
broom (putting on a pair of gloves first), until there did not appear
to be one microscopic speck left on the carpet; next dusted and arranged
the room, which was dusted and arranged to a hair’s breadth already.
When all these tasks were performed to her satisfaction, she took off
the gloves and apron, folded them up, put them in the particular corner
of the press from which they had been taken, brought out her work-box
to her own table in the open window, and sat down, with the green fan
between her and the light, to work.

‘I wish you’d go upstairs,’ said my aunt, as she threaded her needle,
‘and give my compliments to Mr. Dick, and I’ll be glad to know how he
gets on with his Memorial.’

I rose with all alacrity, to acquit myself of this commission.

‘I suppose,’ said my aunt, eyeing me as narrowly as she had eyed the
needle in threading it, ‘you think Mr. Dick a short name, eh?’

‘I thought it was rather a short name, yesterday,’ I confessed.

‘You are not to suppose that he hasn’t got a longer name, if he chose
to use it,’ said my aunt, with a loftier air. ‘Babley--Mr. Richard
Babley--that’s the gentleman’s true name.’

I was going to suggest, with a modest sense of my youth and the
familiarity I had been already guilty of, that I had better give him the
full benefit of that name, when my aunt went on to say:

‘But don’t you call him by it, whatever you do. He can’t bear his name.
That’s a peculiarity of his. Though I don’t know that it’s much of a
peculiarity, either; for he has been ill-used enough, by some that bear
it, to have a mortal antipathy for it, Heaven knows. Mr. Dick is his
name here, and everywhere else, now--if he ever went anywhere else,
which he don’t. So take care, child, you don’t call him anything BUT Mr.
Dick.’

I promised to obey, and went upstairs with my message; thinking, as I
went, that if Mr. Dick had been working at his Memorial long, at the
same rate as I had seen him working at it, through the open door, when
I came down, he was probably getting on very well indeed. I found him
still driving at it with a long pen, and his head almost laid upon the
paper. He was so intent upon it, that I had ample leisure to observe the
large paper kite in a corner, the confusion of bundles of manuscript,
the number of pens, and, above all, the quantity of ink (which he seemed
to have in, in half-gallon jars by the dozen), before he observed my
being present.

‘Ha! Phoebus!’ said Mr. Dick, laying down his pen. ‘How does the world
go? I’ll tell you what,’ he added, in a lower tone, ‘I shouldn’t wish it
to be mentioned, but it’s a--’ here he beckoned to me, and put his lips
close to my ear--‘it’s a mad world. Mad as Bedlam, boy!’ said Mr. Dick,
taking snuff from a round box on the table, and laughing heartily.

Without presuming to give my opinion on this question, I delivered my
message.

‘Well,’ said Mr. Dick, in answer, ‘my compliments to her, and I--I
believe I have made a start. I think I have made a start,’ said Mr.
Dick, passing his hand among his grey hair, and casting anything but a
confident look at his manuscript. ‘You have been to school?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I answered; ‘for a short time.’

‘Do you recollect the date,’ said Mr. Dick, looking earnestly at me, and
taking up his pen to note it down, ‘when King Charles the First had his
head cut off?’ I said I believed it happened in the year sixteen hundred
and forty-nine.

‘Well,’ returned Mr. Dick, scratching his ear with his pen, and looking
dubiously at me. ‘So the books say; but I don’t see how that can be.
Because, if it was so long ago, how could the people about him have made
that mistake of putting some of the trouble out of his head, after it
was taken off, into mine?’

I was very much surprised by the inquiry; but could give no information
on this point.

‘It’s very strange,’ said Mr. Dick, with a despondent look upon his
papers, and with his hand among his hair again, ‘that I never can get
that quite right. I never can make that perfectly clear. But no matter,
no matter!’ he said cheerfully, and rousing himself, ‘there’s time
enough! My compliments to Miss Trotwood, I am getting on very well
indeed.’

I was going away, when he directed my attention to the kite.

‘What do you think of that for a kite?’ he said.

I answered that it was a beautiful one. I should think it must have been
as much as seven feet high.

‘I made it. We’ll go and fly it, you and I,’ said Mr. Dick. ‘Do you see
this?’

He showed me that it was covered with manuscript, very closely and
laboriously written; but so plainly, that as I looked along the lines,
I thought I saw some allusion to King Charles the First’s head again, in
one or two places.

‘There’s plenty of string,’ said Mr. Dick, ‘and when it flies high, it
takes the facts a long way. That’s my manner of diffusing ‘em. I don’t
know where they may come down. It’s according to circumstances, and the
wind, and so forth; but I take my chance of that.’

His face was so very mild and pleasant, and had something so reverend in
it, though it was hale and hearty, that I was not sure but that he was
having a good-humoured jest with me. So I laughed, and he laughed, and
we parted the best friends possible.

‘Well, child,’ said my aunt, when I went downstairs. ‘And what of Mr.
Dick, this morning?’

I informed her that he sent his compliments, and was getting on very
well indeed.

‘What do you think of him?’ said my aunt.

I had some shadowy idea of endeavouring to evade the question, by
replying that I thought him a very nice gentleman; but my aunt was
not to be so put off, for she laid her work down in her lap, and said,
folding her hands upon it:

‘Come! Your sister Betsey Trotwood would have told me what she thought
of anyone, directly. Be as like your sister as you can, and speak out!’

‘Is he--is Mr. Dick--I ask because I don’t know, aunt--is he at all out
of his mind, then?’ I stammered; for I felt I was on dangerous ground.

‘Not a morsel,’ said my aunt.

‘Oh, indeed!’ I observed faintly.

‘If there is anything in the world,’ said my aunt, with great decision
and force of manner, ‘that Mr. Dick is not, it’s that.’

I had nothing better to offer, than another timid, ‘Oh, indeed!’

‘He has been CALLED mad,’ said my aunt. ‘I have a selfish pleasure in
saying he has been called mad, or I should not have had the benefit of
his society and advice for these last ten years and upwards--in fact,
ever since your sister, Betsey Trotwood, disappointed me.’

‘So long as that?’ I said.

‘And nice people they were, who had the audacity to call him mad,’
pursued my aunt. ‘Mr. Dick is a sort of distant connexion of mine--it
doesn’t matter how; I needn’t enter into that. If it hadn’t been for me,
his own brother would have shut him up for life. That’s all.’

I am afraid it was hypocritical in me, but seeing that my aunt felt
strongly on the subject, I tried to look as if I felt strongly too.

‘A proud fool!’ said my aunt. ‘Because his brother was a little
eccentric--though he is not half so eccentric as a good many people--he
didn’t like to have him visible about his house, and sent him away to
some private asylum-place: though he had been left to his particular
care by their deceased father, who thought him almost a natural. And a
wise man he must have been to think so! Mad himself, no doubt.’

Again, as my aunt looked quite convinced, I endeavoured to look quite
convinced also.

‘So I stepped in,’ said my aunt, ‘and made him an offer. I said, “Your
brother’s sane--a great deal more sane than you are, or ever will be, it
is to be hoped. Let him have his little income, and come and live with
me. I am not afraid of him, I am not proud, I am ready to take care
of him, and shall not ill-treat him as some people (besides the
asylum-folks) have done.” After a good deal of squabbling,’ said my
aunt, ‘I got him; and he has been here ever since. He is the most
friendly and amenable creature in existence; and as for advice!--But
nobody knows what that man’s mind is, except myself.’

My aunt smoothed her dress and shook her head, as if she smoothed
defiance of the whole world out of the one, and shook it out of the
other.

‘He had a favourite sister,’ said my aunt, ‘a good creature, and very
kind to him. But she did what they all do--took a husband. And HE did
what they all do--made her wretched. It had such an effect upon the mind
of Mr. Dick (that’s not madness, I hope!) that, combined with his fear
of his brother, and his sense of his unkindness, it threw him into a
fever. That was before he came to me, but the recollection of it is
oppressive to him even now. Did he say anything to you about King
Charles the First, child?’

‘Yes, aunt.’

‘Ah!’ said my aunt, rubbing her nose as if she were a little vexed.
‘That’s his allegorical way of expressing it. He connects his illness
with great disturbance and agitation, naturally, and that’s the figure,
or the simile, or whatever it’s called, which he chooses to use. And why
shouldn’t he, if he thinks proper!’

I said: ‘Certainly, aunt.’

‘It’s not a business-like way of speaking,’ said my aunt, ‘nor a worldly
way. I am aware of that; and that’s the reason why I insist upon it,
that there shan’t be a word about it in his Memorial.’

‘Is it a Memorial about his own history that he is writing, aunt?’

‘Yes, child,’ said my aunt, rubbing her nose again. ‘He is memorializing
the Lord Chancellor, or the Lord Somebody or other--one of those people,
at all events, who are paid to be memorialized--about his affairs. I
suppose it will go in, one of these days. He hasn’t been able to draw
it up yet, without introducing that mode of expressing himself; but it
don’t signify; it keeps him employed.’

In fact, I found out afterwards that Mr. Dick had been for upwards
of ten years endeavouring to keep King Charles the First out of the
Memorial; but he had been constantly getting into it, and was there now.

‘I say again,’ said my aunt, ‘nobody knows what that man’s mind is
except myself; and he’s the most amenable and friendly creature in
existence. If he likes to fly a kite sometimes, what of that! Franklin
used to fly a kite. He was a Quaker, or something of that sort, if I
am not mistaken. And a Quaker flying a kite is a much more ridiculous
object than anybody else.’

If I could have supposed that my aunt had recounted these particulars
for my especial behoof, and as a piece of confidence in me, I should
have felt very much distinguished, and should have augured favourably
from such a mark of her good opinion. But I could hardly help observing
that she had launched into them, chiefly because the question was raised
in her own mind, and with very little reference to me, though she had
addressed herself to me in the absence of anybody else.

At the same time, I must say that the generosity of her championship
of poor harmless Mr. Dick, not only inspired my young breast with
some selfish hope for myself, but warmed it unselfishly towards her.
I believe that I began to know that there was something about my aunt,
notwithstanding her many eccentricities and odd humours, to be honoured
and trusted in. Though she was just as sharp that day as on the day
before, and was in and out about the donkeys just as often, and was
thrown into a tremendous state of indignation, when a young man, going
by, ogled Janet at a window (which was one of the gravest misdemeanours
that could be committed against my aunt’s dignity), she seemed to me to
command more of my respect, if not less of my fear.

The anxiety I underwent, in the interval which necessarily elapsed
before a reply could be received to her letter to Mr. Murdstone, was
extreme; but I made an endeavour to suppress it, and to be as agreeable
as I could in a quiet way, both to my aunt and Mr. Dick. The latter and
I would have gone out to fly the great kite; but that I had still no
other clothes than the anything but ornamental garments with which I
had been decorated on the first day, and which confined me to the house,
except for an hour after dark, when my aunt, for my health’s sake,
paraded me up and down on the cliff outside, before going to bed. At
length the reply from Mr. Murdstone came, and my aunt informed me, to my
infinite terror, that he was coming to speak to her herself on the next
day. On the next day, still bundled up in my curious habiliments, I sat
counting the time, flushed and heated by the conflict of sinking hopes
and rising fears within me; and waiting to be startled by the sight of
the gloomy face, whose non-arrival startled me every minute.

My aunt was a little more imperious and stern than usual, but I observed
no other token of her preparing herself to receive the visitor so much
dreaded by me. She sat at work in the window, and I sat by, with my
thoughts running astray on all possible and impossible results of Mr.
Murdstone’s visit, until pretty late in the afternoon. Our dinner had
been indefinitely postponed; but it was growing so late, that my aunt
had ordered it to be got ready, when she gave a sudden alarm of donkeys,
and to my consternation and amazement, I beheld Miss Murdstone, on a
side-saddle, ride deliberately over the sacred piece of green, and stop
in front of the house, looking about her.

‘Go along with you!’ cried my aunt, shaking her head and her fist at the
window. ‘You have no business there. How dare you trespass? Go along!
Oh! you bold-faced thing!’

My aunt was so exasperated by the coolness with which Miss Murdstone
looked about her, that I really believe she was motionless, and unable
for the moment to dart out according to custom. I seized the opportunity
to inform her who it was; and that the gentleman now coming near the
offender (for the way up was very steep, and he had dropped behind), was
Mr. Murdstone himself.

‘I don’t care who it is!’ cried my aunt, still shaking her head and
gesticulating anything but welcome from the bow-window. ‘I won’t be
trespassed upon. I won’t allow it. Go away! Janet, turn him round.
Lead him off!’ and I saw, from behind my aunt, a sort of hurried
battle-piece, in which the donkey stood resisting everybody, with all
his four legs planted different ways, while Janet tried to pull him
round by the bridle, Mr. Murdstone tried to lead him on, Miss Murdstone
struck at Janet with a parasol, and several boys, who had come to see
the engagement, shouted vigorously. But my aunt, suddenly descrying
among them the young malefactor who was the donkey’s guardian, and who
was one of the most inveterate offenders against her, though hardly in
his teens, rushed out to the scene of action, pounced upon him, captured
him, dragged him, with his jacket over his head, and his heels grinding
the ground, into the garden, and, calling upon Janet to fetch the
constables and justices, that he might be taken, tried, and executed on
the spot, held him at bay there. This part of the business, however, did
not last long; for the young rascal, being expert at a variety of feints
and dodges, of which my aunt had no conception, soon went whooping away,
leaving some deep impressions of his nailed boots in the flower-beds,
and taking his donkey in triumph with him.

Miss Murdstone, during the latter portion of the contest, had
dismounted, and was now waiting with her brother at the bottom of the
steps, until my aunt should be at leisure to receive them. My aunt, a
little ruffled by the combat, marched past them into the house, with
great dignity, and took no notice of their presence, until they were
announced by Janet.

‘Shall I go away, aunt?’ I asked, trembling.

‘No, sir,’ said my aunt. ‘Certainly not!’ With which she pushed me into
a corner near her, and fenced Me in with a chair, as if it were a prison
or a bar of justice. This position I continued to occupy during the
whole interview, and from it I now saw Mr. and Miss Murdstone enter the
room.

‘Oh!’ said my aunt, ‘I was not aware at first to whom I had the pleasure
of objecting. But I don’t allow anybody to ride over that turf. I make
no exceptions. I don’t allow anybody to do it.’

‘Your regulation is rather awkward to strangers,’ said Miss Murdstone.

‘Is it!’ said my aunt.

Mr. Murdstone seemed afraid of a renewal of hostilities, and interposing
began:

‘Miss Trotwood!’

‘I beg your pardon,’ observed my aunt with a keen look. ‘You are the Mr.
Murdstone who married the widow of my late nephew, David Copperfield, of
Blunderstone Rookery!--Though why Rookery, I don’t know!’

‘I am,’ said Mr. Murdstone.

‘You’ll excuse my saying, sir,’ returned my aunt, ‘that I think it would
have been a much better and happier thing if you had left that poor
child alone.’

‘I so far agree with what Miss Trotwood has remarked,’ observed Miss
Murdstone, bridling, ‘that I consider our lamented Clara to have been,
in all essential respects, a mere child.’

‘It is a comfort to you and me, ma’am,’ said my aunt, ‘who are getting
on in life, and are not likely to be made unhappy by our personal
attractions, that nobody can say the same of us.’

‘No doubt!’ returned Miss Murdstone, though, I thought, not with a very
ready or gracious assent. ‘And it certainly might have been, as you say,
a better and happier thing for my brother if he had never entered into
such a marriage. I have always been of that opinion.’

‘I have no doubt you have,’ said my aunt. ‘Janet,’ ringing the bell, ‘my
compliments to Mr. Dick, and beg him to come down.’

Until he came, my aunt sat perfectly upright and stiff, frowning at the
wall. When he came, my aunt performed the ceremony of introduction.

‘Mr. Dick. An old and intimate friend. On whose judgement,’ said my
aunt, with emphasis, as an admonition to Mr. Dick, who was biting his
forefinger and looking rather foolish, ‘I rely.’

Mr. Dick took his finger out of his mouth, on this hint, and stood among
the group, with a grave and attentive expression of face.

My aunt inclined her head to Mr. Murdstone, who went on:

‘Miss Trotwood: on the receipt of your letter, I considered it an act of
greater justice to myself, and perhaps of more respect to you--’

‘Thank you,’ said my aunt, still eyeing him keenly. ‘You needn’t mind
me.’

‘To answer it in person, however inconvenient the journey,’ pursued Mr.
Murdstone, ‘rather than by letter. This unhappy boy who has run away
from his friends and his occupation--’

‘And whose appearance,’ interposed his sister, directing general
attention to me in my indefinable costume, ‘is perfectly scandalous and
disgraceful.’

‘Jane Murdstone,’ said her brother, ‘have the goodness not to interrupt
me. This unhappy boy, Miss Trotwood, has been the occasion of much
domestic trouble and uneasiness; both during the lifetime of my late
dear wife, and since. He has a sullen, rebellious spirit; a violent
temper; and an untoward, intractable disposition. Both my sister and
myself have endeavoured to correct his vices, but ineffectually. And
I have felt--we both have felt, I may say; my sister being fully in
my confidence--that it is right you should receive this grave and
dispassionate assurance from our lips.’

‘It can hardly be necessary for me to confirm anything stated by my
brother,’ said Miss Murdstone; ‘but I beg to observe, that, of all the
boys in the world, I believe this is the worst boy.’

‘Strong!’ said my aunt, shortly.

‘But not at all too strong for the facts,’ returned Miss Murdstone.

‘Ha!’ said my aunt. ‘Well, sir?’

‘I have my own opinions,’ resumed Mr. Murdstone, whose face darkened
more and more, the more he and my aunt observed each other, which they
did very narrowly, ‘as to the best mode of bringing him up; they are
founded, in part, on my knowledge of him, and in part on my knowledge of
my own means and resources. I am responsible for them to myself, I act
upon them, and I say no more about them. It is enough that I place this
boy under the eye of a friend of my own, in a respectable business;
that it does not please him; that he runs away from it; makes himself a
common vagabond about the country; and comes here, in rags, to appeal
to you, Miss Trotwood. I wish to set before you, honourably, the exact
consequences--so far as they are within my knowledge--of your abetting
him in this appeal.’

‘But about the respectable business first,’ said my aunt. ‘If he had
been your own boy, you would have put him to it, just the same, I
suppose?’

‘If he had been my brother’s own boy,’ returned Miss Murdstone, striking
in, ‘his character, I trust, would have been altogether different.’

‘Or if the poor child, his mother, had been alive, he would still have
gone into the respectable business, would he?’ said my aunt.

‘I believe,’ said Mr. Murdstone, with an inclination of his head,
‘that Clara would have disputed nothing which myself and my sister Jane
Murdstone were agreed was for the best.’

Miss Murdstone confirmed this with an audible murmur.

‘Humph!’ said my aunt. ‘Unfortunate baby!’

Mr. Dick, who had been rattling his money all this time, was rattling it
so loudly now, that my aunt felt it necessary to check him with a look,
before saying:

‘The poor child’s annuity died with her?’

‘Died with her,’ replied Mr. Murdstone.

‘And there was no settlement of the little property--the house and
garden--the what’s-its-name Rookery without any rooks in it--upon her
boy?’

‘It had been left to her, unconditionally, by her first husband,’
Mr. Murdstone began, when my aunt caught him up with the greatest
irascibility and impatience.

‘Good Lord, man, there’s no occasion to say that. Left to her
unconditionally! I think I see David Copperfield looking forward to any
condition of any sort or kind, though it stared him point-blank in the
face! Of course it was left to her unconditionally. But when she married
again--when she took that most disastrous step of marrying you, in
short,’ said my aunt, ‘to be plain--did no one put in a word for the boy
at that time?’

‘My late wife loved her second husband, ma’am,’ said Mr. Murdstone, ‘and
trusted implicitly in him.’

‘Your late wife, sir, was a most unworldly, most unhappy, most
unfortunate baby,’ returned my aunt, shaking her head at him. ‘That’s
what she was. And now, what have you got to say next?’

‘Merely this, Miss Trotwood,’ he returned. ‘I am here to take David
back--to take him back unconditionally, to dispose of him as I think
proper, and to deal with him as I think right. I am not here to make any
promise, or give any pledge to anybody. You may possibly have some
idea, Miss Trotwood, of abetting him in his running away, and in his
complaints to you. Your manner, which I must say does not seem intended
to propitiate, induces me to think it possible. Now I must caution you
that if you abet him once, you abet him for good and all; if you step
in between him and me, now, you must step in, Miss Trotwood, for ever.
I cannot trifle, or be trifled with. I am here, for the first and last
time, to take him away. Is he ready to go? If he is not--and you tell me
he is not; on any pretence; it is indifferent to me what--my doors are
shut against him henceforth, and yours, I take it for granted, are open
to him.’

To this address, my aunt had listened with the closest attention,
sitting perfectly upright, with her hands folded on one knee, and
looking grimly on the speaker. When he had finished, she turned her
eyes so as to command Miss Murdstone, without otherwise disturbing her
attitude, and said:

‘Well, ma’am, have YOU got anything to remark?’

‘Indeed, Miss Trotwood,’ said Miss Murdstone, ‘all that I could say has
been so well said by my brother, and all that I know to be the fact
has been so plainly stated by him, that I have nothing to add except my
thanks for your politeness. For your very great politeness, I am sure,’
said Miss Murdstone; with an irony which no more affected my aunt, than
it discomposed the cannon I had slept by at Chatham.

‘And what does the boy say?’ said my aunt. ‘Are you ready to go, David?’

I answered no, and entreated her not to let me go. I said that neither
Mr. nor Miss Murdstone had ever liked me, or had ever been kind to me.
That they had made my mama, who always loved me dearly, unhappy about
me, and that I knew it well, and that Peggotty knew it. I said that I
had been more miserable than I thought anybody could believe, who only
knew how young I was. And I begged and prayed my aunt--I forget in
what terms now, but I remember that they affected me very much then--to
befriend and protect me, for my father’s sake.

‘Mr. Dick,’ said my aunt, ‘what shall I do with this child?’

Mr. Dick considered, hesitated, brightened, and rejoined, ‘Have him
measured for a suit of clothes directly.’

‘Mr. Dick,’ said my aunt triumphantly, ‘give me your hand, for your
common sense is invaluable.’ Having shaken it with great cordiality, she
pulled me towards her and said to Mr. Murdstone:

‘You can go when you like; I’ll take my chance with the boy. If he’s all
you say he is, at least I can do as much for him then, as you have done.
But I don’t believe a word of it.’

‘Miss Trotwood,’ rejoined Mr. Murdstone, shrugging his shoulders, as he
rose, ‘if you were a gentleman--’

‘Bah! Stuff and nonsense!’ said my aunt. ‘Don’t talk to me!’

‘How exquisitely polite!’ exclaimed Miss Murdstone, rising.
‘Overpowering, really!’

‘Do you think I don’t know,’ said my aunt, turning a deaf ear to the
sister, and continuing to address the brother, and to shake her head at
him with infinite expression, ‘what kind of life you must have led that
poor, unhappy, misdirected baby? Do you think I don’t know what a woeful
day it was for the soft little creature when you first came in her
way--smirking and making great eyes at her, I’ll be bound, as if you
couldn’t say boh! to a goose!’

‘I never heard anything so elegant!’ said Miss Murdstone.

‘Do you think I can’t understand you as well as if I had seen you,’
pursued my aunt, ‘now that I DO see and hear you--which, I tell you
candidly, is anything but a pleasure to me? Oh yes, bless us! who so
smooth and silky as Mr. Murdstone at first! The poor, benighted innocent
had never seen such a man. He was made of sweetness. He worshipped her.
He doted on her boy--tenderly doted on him! He was to be another father
to him, and they were all to live together in a garden of roses, weren’t
they? Ugh! Get along with you, do!’ said my aunt.

‘I never heard anything like this person in my life!’ exclaimed Miss
Murdstone.

‘And when you had made sure of the poor little fool,’ said my aunt--‘God
forgive me that I should call her so, and she gone where YOU won’t go in
a hurry--because you had not done wrong enough to her and hers, you
must begin to train her, must you? begin to break her, like a poor
caged bird, and wear her deluded life away, in teaching her to sing YOUR
notes?’

‘This is either insanity or intoxication,’ said Miss Murdstone, in a
perfect agony at not being able to turn the current of my aunt’s address
towards herself; ‘and my suspicion is that it’s intoxication.’

Miss Betsey, without taking the least notice of the interruption,
continued to address herself to Mr. Murdstone as if there had been no
such thing.

‘Mr. Murdstone,’ she said, shaking her finger at him, ‘you were a tyrant
to the simple baby, and you broke her heart. She was a loving baby--I
know that; I knew it, years before you ever saw her--and through the
best part of her weakness you gave her the wounds she died of. There
is the truth for your comfort, however you like it. And you and your
instruments may make the most of it.’

‘Allow me to inquire, Miss Trotwood,’ interposed Miss Murdstone,
‘whom you are pleased to call, in a choice of words in which I am not
experienced, my brother’s instruments?’

‘It was clear enough, as I have told you, years before YOU ever saw
her--and why, in the mysterious dispensations of Providence, you ever
did see her, is more than humanity can comprehend--it was clear enough
that the poor soft little thing would marry somebody, at some time or
other; but I did hope it wouldn’t have been as bad as it has turned out.
That was the time, Mr. Murdstone, when she gave birth to her boy here,’
said my aunt; ‘to the poor child you sometimes tormented her through
afterwards, which is a disagreeable remembrance and makes the sight of
him odious now. Aye, aye! you needn’t wince!’ said my aunt. ‘I know it’s
true without that.’

He had stood by the door, all this while, observant of her with a smile
upon his face, though his black eyebrows were heavily contracted. I
remarked now, that, though the smile was on his face still, his colour
had gone in a moment, and he seemed to breathe as if he had been
running.

‘Good day, sir,’ said my aunt, ‘and good-bye! Good day to you, too,
ma’am,’ said my aunt, turning suddenly upon his sister. ‘Let me see you
ride a donkey over my green again, and as sure as you have a head upon
your shoulders, I’ll knock your bonnet off, and tread upon it!’

It would require a painter, and no common painter too, to depict my
aunt’s face as she delivered herself of this very unexpected sentiment,
and Miss Murdstone’s face as she heard it. But the manner of the speech,
no less than the matter, was so fiery, that Miss Murdstone, without a
word in answer, discreetly put her arm through her brother’s, and walked
haughtily out of the cottage; my aunt remaining in the window looking
after them; prepared, I have no doubt, in case of the donkey’s
reappearance, to carry her threat into instant execution.

No attempt at defiance being made, however, her face gradually relaxed,
and became so pleasant, that I was emboldened to kiss and thank her;
which I did with great heartiness, and with both my arms clasped round
her neck. I then shook hands with Mr. Dick, who shook hands with me a
great many times, and hailed this happy close of the proceedings with
repeated bursts of laughter.

‘You’ll consider yourself guardian, jointly with me, of this child, Mr.
Dick,’ said my aunt.

‘I shall be delighted,’ said Mr. Dick, ‘to be the guardian of David’s
son.’

‘Very good,’ returned my aunt, ‘that’s settled. I have been thinking, do
you know, Mr. Dick, that I might call him Trotwood?’

‘Certainly, certainly. Call him Trotwood, certainly,’ said Mr. Dick.
‘David’s son’s Trotwood.’

‘Trotwood Copperfield, you mean,’ returned my aunt.

‘Yes, to be sure. Yes. Trotwood Copperfield,’ said Mr. Dick, a little
abashed.

My aunt took so kindly to the notion, that some ready-made clothes,
which were purchased for me that afternoon, were marked ‘Trotwood
Copperfield’, in her own handwriting, and in indelible marking-ink,
before I put them on; and it was settled that all the other clothes
which were ordered to be made for me (a complete outfit was bespoke that
afternoon) should be marked in the same way.

Thus I began my new life, in a new name, and with everything new about
me. Now that the state of doubt was over, I felt, for many days,
like one in a dream. I never thought that I had a curious couple of
guardians, in my aunt and Mr. Dick. I never thought of anything about
myself, distinctly. The two things clearest in my mind were, that a
remoteness had come upon the old Blunderstone life--which seemed to lie
in the haze of an immeasurable distance; and that a curtain had for ever
fallen on my life at Murdstone and Grinby’s. No one has ever raised that
curtain since. I have lifted it for a moment, even in this narrative,
with a reluctant hand, and dropped it gladly. The remembrance of that
life is fraught with so much pain to me, with so much mental suffering
and want of hope, that I have never had the courage even to examine how
long I was doomed to lead it. Whether it lasted for a year, or more, or
less, I do not know. I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that
I have written, and there I leave it.



CHAPTER 15. I MAKE ANOTHER BEGINNING


Mr. Dick and I soon became the best of friends, and very often, when his
day’s work was done, went out together to fly the great kite. Every day
of his life he had a long sitting at the Memorial, which never made the
least progress, however hard he laboured, for King Charles the First
always strayed into it, sooner or later, and then it was thrown aside,
and another one begun. The patience and hope with which he bore these
perpetual disappointments, the mild perception he had that there was
something wrong about King Charles the First, the feeble efforts he made
to keep him out, and the certainty with which he came in, and tumbled
the Memorial out of all shape, made a deep impression on me. What Mr.
Dick supposed would come of the Memorial, if it were completed; where he
thought it was to go, or what he thought it was to do; he knew no more
than anybody else, I believe. Nor was it at all necessary that he should
trouble himself with such questions, for if anything were certain under
the sun, it was certain that the Memorial never would be finished. It
was quite an affecting sight, I used to think, to see him with the kite
when it was up a great height in the air. What he had told me, in his
room, about his belief in its disseminating the statements pasted on it,
which were nothing but old leaves of abortive Memorials, might have been
a fancy with him sometimes; but not when he was out, looking up at
the kite in the sky, and feeling it pull and tug at his hand. He never
looked so serene as he did then. I used to fancy, as I sat by him of an
evening, on a green slope, and saw him watch the kite high in the quiet
air, that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore it (such was
my boyish thought) into the skies. As he wound the string in and it came
lower and lower down out of the beautiful light, until it fluttered to
the ground, and lay there like a dead thing, he seemed to wake gradually
out of a dream; and I remember to have seen him take it up, and look
about him in a lost way, as if they had both come down together, so that
I pitied him with all my heart.

While I advanced in friendship and intimacy with Mr. Dick, I did not
go backward in the favour of his staunch friend, my aunt. She took
so kindly to me, that, in the course of a few weeks, she shortened my
adopted name of Trotwood into Trot; and even encouraged me to hope, that
if I went on as I had begun, I might take equal rank in her affections
with my sister Betsey Trotwood.

‘Trot,’ said my aunt one evening, when the backgammon-board was placed
as usual for herself and Mr. Dick, ‘we must not forget your education.’

This was my only subject of anxiety, and I felt quite delighted by her
referring to it.

‘Should you like to go to school at Canterbury?’ said my aunt.

I replied that I should like it very much, as it was so near her.

‘Good,’ said my aunt. ‘Should you like to go tomorrow?’

Being already no stranger to the general rapidity of my aunt’s
evolutions, I was not surprised by the suddenness of the proposal, and
said: ‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ said my aunt again. ‘Janet, hire the grey pony and chaise
tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, and pack up Master Trotwood’s clothes
tonight.’

I was greatly elated by these orders; but my heart smote me for my
selfishness, when I witnessed their effect on Mr. Dick, who was so
low-spirited at the prospect of our separation, and played so ill in
consequence, that my aunt, after giving him several admonitory raps on
the knuckles with her dice-box, shut up the board, and declined to play
with him any more. But, on hearing from my aunt that I should sometimes
come over on a Saturday, and that he could sometimes come and see me
on a Wednesday, he revived; and vowed to make another kite for those
occasions, of proportions greatly surpassing the present one. In the
morning he was downhearted again, and would have sustained himself by
giving me all the money he had in his possession, gold and silver too,
if my aunt had not interposed, and limited the gift to five shillings,
which, at his earnest petition, were afterwards increased to ten. We
parted at the garden-gate in a most affectionate manner, and Mr. Dick
did not go into the house until my aunt had driven me out of sight of
it.

My aunt, who was perfectly indifferent to public opinion, drove the grey
pony through Dover in a masterly manner; sitting high and stiff like
a state coachman, keeping a steady eye upon him wherever he went, and
making a point of not letting him have his own way in any respect. When
we came into the country road, she permitted him to relax a little,
however; and looking at me down in a valley of cushion by her side,
asked me whether I was happy?

‘Very happy indeed, thank you, aunt,’ I said.

She was much gratified; and both her hands being occupied, patted me on
the head with her whip.

‘Is it a large school, aunt?’ I asked.

‘Why, I don’t know,’ said my aunt. ‘We are going to Mr. Wickfield’s
first.’

‘Does he keep a school?’ I asked.

‘No, Trot,’ said my aunt. ‘He keeps an office.’

I asked for no more information about Mr. Wickfield, as she offered
none, and we conversed on other subjects until we came to Canterbury,
where, as it was market-day, my aunt had a great opportunity of
insinuating the grey pony among carts, baskets, vegetables, and
huckster’s goods. The hair-breadth turns and twists we made, drew down
upon us a variety of speeches from the people standing about, which
were not always complimentary; but my aunt drove on with perfect
indifference, and I dare say would have taken her own way with as much
coolness through an enemy’s country.

At length we stopped before a very old house bulging out over the road;
a house with long low lattice-windows bulging out still farther, and
beams with carved heads on the ends bulging out too, so that I fancied
the whole house was leaning forward, trying to see who was passing on
the narrow pavement below. It was quite spotless in its cleanliness.
The old-fashioned brass knocker on the low arched door, ornamented with
carved garlands of fruit and flowers, twinkled like a star; the two
stone steps descending to the door were as white as if they had been
covered with fair linen; and all the angles and corners, and carvings
and mouldings, and quaint little panes of glass, and quainter little
windows, though as old as the hills, were as pure as any snow that ever
fell upon the hills.

When the pony-chaise stopped at the door, and my eyes were intent upon
the house, I saw a cadaverous face appear at a small window on the
ground floor (in a little round tower that formed one side of the
house), and quickly disappear. The low arched door then opened, and
the face came out. It was quite as cadaverous as it had looked in the
window, though in the grain of it there was that tinge of red which is
sometimes to be observed in the skins of red-haired people. It belonged
to a red-haired person--a youth of fifteen, as I take it now, but
looking much older--whose hair was cropped as close as the closest
stubble; who had hardly any eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and eyes of a
red-brown, so unsheltered and unshaded, that I remember wondering how he
went to sleep. He was high-shouldered and bony; dressed in decent black,
with a white wisp of a neckcloth; buttoned up to the throat; and had a
long, lank, skeleton hand, which particularly attracted my attention, as
he stood at the pony’s head, rubbing his chin with it, and looking up at
us in the chaise.

‘Is Mr. Wickfield at home, Uriah Heep?’ said my aunt.

‘Mr. Wickfield’s at home, ma’am,’ said Uriah Heep, ‘if you’ll please to
walk in there’--pointing with his long hand to the room he meant.

We got out; and leaving him to hold the pony, went into a long low
parlour looking towards the street, from the window of which I caught a
glimpse, as I went in, of Uriah Heep breathing into the pony’s nostrils,
and immediately covering them with his hand, as if he were putting
some spell upon him. Opposite to the tall old chimney-piece were two
portraits: one of a gentleman with grey hair (though not by any means
an old man) and black eyebrows, who was looking over some papers tied
together with red tape; the other, of a lady, with a very placid and
sweet expression of face, who was looking at me.

I believe I was turning about in search of Uriah’s picture, when, a door
at the farther end of the room opening, a gentleman entered, at sight of
whom I turned to the first-mentioned portrait again, to make quite sure
that it had not come out of its frame. But it was stationary; and as the
gentleman advanced into the light, I saw that he was some years older
than when he had had his picture painted.

‘Miss Betsey Trotwood,’ said the gentleman, ‘pray walk in. I was engaged
for a moment, but you’ll excuse my being busy. You know my motive. I
have but one in life.’

Miss Betsey thanked him, and we went into his room, which was furnished
as an office, with books, papers, tin boxes, and so forth. It looked
into a garden, and had an iron safe let into the wall; so immediately
over the mantelshelf, that I wondered, as I sat down, how the sweeps got
round it when they swept the chimney.

‘Well, Miss Trotwood,’ said Mr. Wickfield; for I soon found that it
was he, and that he was a lawyer, and steward of the estates of a rich
gentleman of the county; ‘what wind blows you here? Not an ill wind, I
hope?’

‘No,’ replied my aunt. ‘I have not come for any law.’

‘That’s right, ma’am,’ said Mr. Wickfield. ‘You had better come for
anything else.’ His hair was quite white now, though his eyebrows were
still black. He had a very agreeable face, and, I thought, was handsome.
There was a certain richness in his complexion, which I had been long
accustomed, under Peggotty’s tuition, to connect with port wine; and I
fancied it was in his voice too, and referred his growing corpulency
to the same cause. He was very cleanly dressed, in a blue coat, striped
waistcoat, and nankeen trousers; and his fine frilled shirt and cambric
neckcloth looked unusually soft and white, reminding my strolling fancy
(I call to mind) of the plumage on the breast of a swan.

‘This is my nephew,’ said my aunt.

‘Wasn’t aware you had one, Miss Trotwood,’ said Mr. Wickfield.

‘My grand-nephew, that is to say,’ observed my aunt.

‘Wasn’t aware you had a grand-nephew, I give you my word,’ said Mr.
Wickfield.

‘I have adopted him,’ said my aunt, with a wave of her hand, importing
that his knowledge and his ignorance were all one to her, ‘and I have
brought him here, to put to a school where he may be thoroughly well
taught, and well treated. Now tell me where that school is, and what it
is, and all about it.’

‘Before I can advise you properly,’ said Mr. Wickfield--‘the old
question, you know. What’s your motive in this?’

‘Deuce take the man!’ exclaimed my aunt. ‘Always fishing for motives,
when they’re on the surface! Why, to make the child happy and useful.’

‘It must be a mixed motive, I think,’ said Mr. Wickfield, shaking his
head and smiling incredulously.

‘A mixed fiddlestick,’ returned my aunt. ‘You claim to have one plain
motive in all you do yourself. You don’t suppose, I hope, that you are
the only plain dealer in the world?’

‘Ay, but I have only one motive in life, Miss Trotwood,’ he rejoined,
smiling. ‘Other people have dozens, scores, hundreds. I have only one.
There’s the difference. However, that’s beside the question. The best
school? Whatever the motive, you want the best?’

My aunt nodded assent.

‘At the best we have,’ said Mr. Wickfield, considering, ‘your nephew
couldn’t board just now.’

‘But he could board somewhere else, I suppose?’ suggested my aunt.

Mr. Wickfield thought I could. After a little discussion, he proposed to
take my aunt to the school, that she might see it and judge for herself;
also, to take her, with the same object, to two or three houses where he
thought I could be boarded. My aunt embracing the proposal, we were all
three going out together, when he stopped and said:

‘Our little friend here might have some motive, perhaps, for objecting
to the arrangements. I think we had better leave him behind?’

My aunt seemed disposed to contest the point; but to facilitate matters
I said I would gladly remain behind, if they pleased; and returned into
Mr. Wickfield’s office, where I sat down again, in the chair I had first
occupied, to await their return.

It so happened that this chair was opposite a narrow passage, which
ended in the little circular room where I had seen Uriah Heep’s pale
face looking out of the window. Uriah, having taken the pony to a
neighbouring stable, was at work at a desk in this room, which had a
brass frame on the top to hang paper upon, and on which the writing he
was making a copy of was then hanging. Though his face was towards me, I
thought, for some time, the writing being between us, that he could not
see me; but looking that way more attentively, it made me uncomfortable
to observe that, every now and then, his sleepless eyes would come below
the writing, like two red suns, and stealthily stare at me for I dare
say a whole minute at a time, during which his pen went, or pretended
to go, as cleverly as ever. I made several attempts to get out of their
way--such as standing on a chair to look at a map on the other side of
the room, and poring over the columns of a Kentish newspaper--but they
always attracted me back again; and whenever I looked towards those two
red suns, I was sure to find them, either just rising or just setting.

At length, much to my relief, my aunt and Mr. Wickfield came back,
after a pretty long absence. They were not so successful as I could have
wished; for though the advantages of the school were undeniable, my aunt
had not approved of any of the boarding-houses proposed for me.

‘It’s very unfortunate,’ said my aunt. ‘I don’t know what to do, Trot.’

‘It does happen unfortunately,’ said Mr. Wickfield. ‘But I’ll tell you
what you can do, Miss Trotwood.’

‘What’s that?’ inquired my aunt.

‘Leave your nephew here, for the present. He’s a quiet fellow. He
won’t disturb me at all. It’s a capital house for study. As quiet as a
monastery, and almost as roomy. Leave him here.’

My aunt evidently liked the offer, though she was delicate of accepting
it. So did I. ‘Come, Miss Trotwood,’ said Mr. Wickfield. ‘This is the
way out of the difficulty. It’s only a temporary arrangement, you know.
If it don’t act well, or don’t quite accord with our mutual convenience,
he can easily go to the right-about. There will be time to find some
better place for him in the meanwhile. You had better determine to leave
him here for the present!’

‘I am very much obliged to you,’ said my aunt; ‘and so is he, I see;
but--’

‘Come! I know what you mean,’ cried Mr. Wickfield. ‘You shall not be
oppressed by the receipt of favours, Miss Trotwood. You may pay for
him, if you like. We won’t be hard about terms, but you shall pay if you
will.’

‘On that understanding,’ said my aunt, ‘though it doesn’t lessen the
real obligation, I shall be very glad to leave him.’

‘Then come and see my little housekeeper,’ said Mr. Wickfield.

We accordingly went up a wonderful old staircase; with a balustrade
so broad that we might have gone up that, almost as easily; and into
a shady old drawing-room, lighted by some three or four of the quaint
windows I had looked up at from the street: which had old oak seats
in them, that seemed to have come of the same trees as the shining oak
floor, and the great beams in the ceiling. It was a prettily furnished
room, with a piano and some lively furniture in red and green, and some
flowers. It seemed to be all old nooks and corners; and in every nook
and corner there was some queer little table, or cupboard, or bookcase,
or seat, or something or other, that made me think there was not such
another good corner in the room; until I looked at the next one, and
found it equal to it, if not better. On everything there was the same
air of retirement and cleanliness that marked the house outside.

Mr. Wickfield tapped at a door in a corner of the panelled wall, and a
girl of about my own age came quickly out and kissed him. On her face,
I saw immediately the placid and sweet expression of the lady whose
picture had looked at me downstairs. It seemed to my imagination as
if the portrait had grown womanly, and the original remained a child.
Although her face was quite bright and happy, there was a tranquillity
about it, and about her--a quiet, good, calm spirit--that I never have
forgotten; that I shall never forget. This was his little housekeeper,
his daughter Agnes, Mr. Wickfield said. When I heard how he said it, and
saw how he held her hand, I guessed what the one motive of his life was.

She had a little basket-trifle hanging at her side, with keys in it; and
she looked as staid and as discreet a housekeeper as the old house
could have. She listened to her father as he told her about me, with a
pleasant face; and when he had concluded, proposed to my aunt that we
should go upstairs and see my room. We all went together, she before us:
and a glorious old room it was, with more oak beams, and diamond panes;
and the broad balustrade going all the way up to it.

I cannot call to mind where or when, in my childhood, I had seen a
stained glass window in a church. Nor do I recollect its subject. But
I know that when I saw her turn round, in the grave light of the old
staircase, and wait for us, above, I thought of that window; and I
associated something of its tranquil brightness with Agnes Wickfield
ever afterwards.

My aunt was as happy as I was, in the arrangement made for me; and we
went down to the drawing-room again, well pleased and gratified. As she
would not hear of staying to dinner, lest she should by any chance fail
to arrive at home with the grey pony before dark; and as I apprehend Mr.
Wickfield knew her too well to argue any point with her; some lunch was
provided for her there, and Agnes went back to her governess, and Mr.
Wickfield to his office. So we were left to take leave of one another
without any restraint.

She told me that everything would be arranged for me by Mr. Wickfield,
and that I should want for nothing, and gave me the kindest words and
the best advice.

‘Trot,’ said my aunt in conclusion, ‘be a credit to yourself, to me, and
Mr. Dick, and Heaven be with you!’

I was greatly overcome, and could only thank her, again and again, and
send my love to Mr. Dick.

‘Never,’ said my aunt, ‘be mean in anything; never be false; never be
cruel. Avoid those three vices, Trot, and I can always be hopeful of
you.’

I promised, as well as I could, that I would not abuse her kindness or
forget her admonition.

‘The pony’s at the door,’ said my aunt, ‘and I am off! Stay here.’ With
these words she embraced me hastily, and went out of the room, shutting
the door after her. At first I was startled by so abrupt a departure,
and almost feared I had displeased her; but when I looked into the
street, and saw how dejectedly she got into the chaise, and drove away
without looking up, I understood her better and did not do her that
injustice.

By five o’clock, which was Mr. Wickfield’s dinner-hour, I had mustered
up my spirits again, and was ready for my knife and fork. The cloth was
only laid for us two; but Agnes was waiting in the drawing-room before
dinner, went down with her father, and sat opposite to him at table. I
doubted whether he could have dined without her.

We did not stay there, after dinner, but came upstairs into the
drawing-room again: in one snug corner of which, Agnes set glasses for
her father, and a decanter of port wine. I thought he would have missed
its usual flavour, if it had been put there for him by any other hands.

There he sat, taking his wine, and taking a good deal of it, for two
hours; while Agnes played on the piano, worked, and talked to him and
me. He was, for the most part, gay and cheerful with us; but sometimes
his eyes rested on her, and he fell into a brooding state, and was
silent. She always observed this quickly, I thought, and always roused
him with a question or caress. Then he came out of his meditation, and
drank more wine.

Agnes made the tea, and presided over it; and the time passed away after
it, as after dinner, until she went to bed; when her father took her
in his arms and kissed her, and, she being gone, ordered candles in his
office. Then I went to bed too.

But in the course of the evening I had rambled down to the door, and a
little way along the street, that I might have another peep at the old
houses, and the grey Cathedral; and might think of my coming through
that old city on my journey, and of my passing the very house I lived
in, without knowing it. As I came back, I saw Uriah Heep shutting up
the office; and feeling friendly towards everybody, went in and spoke
to him, and at parting, gave him my hand. But oh, what a clammy hand his
was! as ghostly to the touch as to the sight! I rubbed mine afterwards,
to warm it, AND TO RUB HIS OFF.

It was such an uncomfortable hand, that, when I went to my room, it was
still cold and wet upon my memory. Leaning out of the window, and seeing
one of the faces on the beam-ends looking at me sideways, I fancied it
was Uriah Heep got up there somehow, and shut him out in a hurry.



CHAPTER 16. I AM A NEW BOY IN MORE SENSES THAN ONE


Next morning, after breakfast, I entered on school life again. I went,
accompanied by Mr. Wickfield, to the scene of my future studies--a grave
building in a courtyard, with a learned air about it that seemed very
well suited to the stray rooks and jackdaws who came down from the
Cathedral towers to walk with a clerkly bearing on the grass-plot--and
was introduced to my new master, Doctor Strong.

Doctor Strong looked almost as rusty, to my thinking, as the tall iron
rails and gates outside the house; and almost as stiff and heavy as the
great stone urns that flanked them, and were set up, on the top of
the red-brick wall, at regular distances all round the court, like
sublimated skittles, for Time to play at. He was in his library (I mean
Doctor Strong was), with his clothes not particularly well brushed, and
his hair not particularly well combed; his knee-smalls unbraced; his
long black gaiters unbuttoned; and his shoes yawning like two caverns on
the hearth-rug. Turning upon me a lustreless eye, that reminded me of
a long-forgotten blind old horse who once used to crop the grass, and
tumble over the graves, in Blunderstone churchyard, he said he was glad
to see me: and then he gave me his hand; which I didn’t know what to do
with, as it did nothing for itself.

But, sitting at work, not far from Doctor Strong, was a very pretty
young lady--whom he called Annie, and who was his daughter, I
supposed--who got me out of my difficulty by kneeling down to put Doctor
Strong’s shoes on, and button his gaiters, which she did with great
cheerfulness and quickness. When she had finished, and we were going
out to the schoolroom, I was much surprised to hear Mr. Wickfield,
in bidding her good morning, address her as ‘Mrs. Strong’; and I was
wondering could she be Doctor Strong’s son’s wife, or could she be Mrs.
Doctor Strong, when Doctor Strong himself unconsciously enlightened me.

‘By the by, Wickfield,’ he said, stopping in a passage with his hand on
my shoulder; ‘you have not found any suitable provision for my wife’s
cousin yet?’

‘No,’ said Mr. Wickfield. ‘No. Not yet.’

‘I could wish it done as soon as it can be done, Wickfield,’ said
Doctor Strong, ‘for Jack Maldon is needy, and idle; and of those two
bad things, worse things sometimes come. What does Doctor Watts say,’ he
added, looking at me, and moving his head to the time of his quotation,
‘“Satan finds some mischief still, for idle hands to do.”’

‘Egad, Doctor,’ returned Mr. Wickfield, ‘if Doctor Watts knew mankind,
he might have written, with as much truth, “Satan finds some mischief
still, for busy hands to do.” The busy people achieve their full share
of mischief in the world, you may rely upon it. What have the people
been about, who have been the busiest in getting money, and in getting
power, this century or two? No mischief?’

‘Jack Maldon will never be very busy in getting either, I expect,’ said
Doctor Strong, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

‘Perhaps not,’ said Mr. Wickfield; ‘and you bring me back to the
question, with an apology for digressing. No, I have not been able
to dispose of Mr. Jack Maldon yet. I believe,’ he said this with some
hesitation, ‘I penetrate your motive, and it makes the thing more
difficult.’

‘My motive,’ returned Doctor Strong, ‘is to make some suitable provision
for a cousin, and an old playfellow, of Annie’s.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Mr. Wickfield; ‘at home or abroad.’

‘Aye!’ replied the Doctor, apparently wondering why he emphasized those
words so much. ‘At home or abroad.’

‘Your own expression, you know,’ said Mr. Wickfield. ‘Or abroad.’

‘Surely,’ the Doctor answered. ‘Surely. One or other.’

‘One or other? Have you no choice?’ asked Mr. Wickfield.

‘No,’ returned the Doctor.

‘No?’ with astonishment.

‘Not the least.’

‘No motive,’ said Mr. Wickfield, ‘for meaning abroad, and not at home?’

‘No,’ returned the Doctor.

‘I am bound to believe you, and of course I do believe you,’ said Mr.
Wickfield. ‘It might have simplified my office very much, if I had known
it before. But I confess I entertained another impression.’

Doctor Strong regarded him with a puzzled and doubting look,
which almost immediately subsided into a smile that gave me great
encouragement; for it was full of amiability and sweetness, and there
was a simplicity in it, and indeed in his whole manner, when the
studious, pondering frost upon it was got through, very attractive and
hopeful to a young scholar like me. Repeating ‘no’, and ‘not the least’,
and other short assurances to the same purport, Doctor Strong jogged
on before us, at a queer, uneven pace; and we followed: Mr. Wickfield,
looking grave, I observed, and shaking his head to himself, without
knowing that I saw him.

The schoolroom was a pretty large hall, on the quietest side of the
house, confronted by the stately stare of some half-dozen of the great
urns, and commanding a peep of an old secluded garden belonging to the
Doctor, where the peaches were ripening on the sunny south wall. There
were two great aloes, in tubs, on the turf outside the windows; the
broad hard leaves of which plant (looking as if they were made of
painted tin) have ever since, by association, been symbolical to me
of silence and retirement. About five-and-twenty boys were studiously
engaged at their books when we went in, but they rose to give the Doctor
good morning, and remained standing when they saw Mr. Wickfield and me.

‘A new boy, young gentlemen,’ said the Doctor; ‘Trotwood Copperfield.’

One Adams, who was the head-boy, then stepped out of his place and
welcomed me. He looked like a young clergyman, in his white cravat, but
he was very affable and good-humoured; and he showed me my place, and
presented me to the masters, in a gentlemanly way that would have put me
at my ease, if anything could.

It seemed to me so long, however, since I had been among such boys,
or among any companions of my own age, except Mick Walker and Mealy
Potatoes, that I felt as strange as ever I have done in my life. I was
so conscious of having passed through scenes of which they could have
no knowledge, and of having acquired experiences foreign to my age,
appearance, and condition as one of them, that I half believed it was an
imposture to come there as an ordinary little schoolboy. I had become,
in the Murdstone and Grinby time, however short or long it may have
been, so unused to the sports and games of boys, that I knew I was
awkward and inexperienced in the commonest things belonging to them.
Whatever I had learnt, had so slipped away from me in the sordid cares
of my life from day to night, that now, when I was examined about what
I knew, I knew nothing, and was put into the lowest form of the school.
But, troubled as I was, by my want of boyish skill, and of book-learning
too, I was made infinitely more uncomfortable by the consideration,
that, in what I did know, I was much farther removed from my companions
than in what I did not. My mind ran upon what they would think, if they
knew of my familiar acquaintance with the King’s Bench Prison? Was there
anything about me which would reveal my proceedings in connexion with
the Micawber family--all those pawnings, and sellings, and suppers--in
spite of myself? Suppose some of the boys had seen me coming through
Canterbury, wayworn and ragged, and should find me out? What would they
say, who made so light of money, if they could know how I had scraped my
halfpence together, for the purchase of my daily saveloy and beer, or
my slices of pudding? How would it affect them, who were so innocent of
London life, and London streets, to discover how knowing I was (and was
ashamed to be) in some of the meanest phases of both? All this ran in
my head so much, on that first day at Doctor Strong’s, that I felt
distrustful of my slightest look and gesture; shrunk within myself
whensoever I was approached by one of my new schoolfellows; and hurried
off the minute school was over, afraid of committing myself in my
response to any friendly notice or advance.

But there was such an influence in Mr. Wickfield’s old house, that when
I knocked at it, with my new school-books under my arm, I began to feel
my uneasiness softening away. As I went up to my airy old room, the
grave shadow of the staircase seemed to fall upon my doubts and fears,
and to make the past more indistinct. I sat there, sturdily conning my
books, until dinner-time (we were out of school for good at three); and
went down, hopeful of becoming a passable sort of boy yet.

Agnes was in the drawing-room, waiting for her father, who was detained
by someone in his office. She met me with her pleasant smile, and asked
me how I liked the school. I told her I should like it very much, I
hoped; but I was a little strange to it at first.

‘You have never been to school,’ I said, ‘have you?’ ‘Oh yes! Every
day.’

‘Ah, but you mean here, at your own home?’

‘Papa couldn’t spare me to go anywhere else,’ she answered, smiling and
shaking her head. ‘His housekeeper must be in his house, you know.’

‘He is very fond of you, I am sure,’ I said.

She nodded ‘Yes,’ and went to the door to listen for his coming up, that
she might meet him on the stairs. But, as he was not there, she came
back again.

‘Mama has been dead ever since I was born,’ she said, in her quiet way.
‘I only know her picture, downstairs. I saw you looking at it yesterday.
Did you think whose it was?’

I told her yes, because it was so like herself.

‘Papa says so, too,’ said Agnes, pleased. ‘Hark! That’s papa now!’

Her bright calm face lighted up with pleasure as she went to meet him,
and as they came in, hand in hand. He greeted me cordially; and told
me I should certainly be happy under Doctor Strong, who was one of the
gentlest of men.

‘There may be some, perhaps--I don’t know that there are--who abuse
his kindness,’ said Mr. Wickfield. ‘Never be one of those, Trotwood, in
anything. He is the least suspicious of mankind; and whether that’s
a merit, or whether it’s a blemish, it deserves consideration in all
dealings with the Doctor, great or small.’

He spoke, I thought, as if he were weary, or dissatisfied with
something; but I did not pursue the question in my mind, for dinner was
just then announced, and we went down and took the same seats as before.

We had scarcely done so, when Uriah Heep put in his red head and his
lank hand at the door, and said:

‘Here’s Mr. Maldon begs the favour of a word, sir.’

‘I am but this moment quit of Mr. Maldon,’ said his master.

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Uriah; ‘but Mr. Maldon has come back, and he begs
the favour of a word.’

As he held the door open with his hand, Uriah looked at me, and looked
at Agnes, and looked at the dishes, and looked at the plates, and looked
at every object in the room, I thought,--yet seemed to look at nothing;
he made such an appearance all the while of keeping his red eyes
dutifully on his master. ‘I beg your pardon. It’s only to say, on
reflection,’ observed a voice behind Uriah, as Uriah’s head was
pushed away, and the speaker’s substituted--‘pray excuse me for this
intrusion--that as it seems I have no choice in the matter, the sooner
I go abroad the better. My cousin Annie did say, when we talked of it,
that she liked to have her friends within reach rather than to have them
banished, and the old Doctor--’

‘Doctor Strong, was that?’ Mr. Wickfield interposed, gravely.

‘Doctor Strong, of course,’ returned the other; ‘I call him the old
Doctor; it’s all the same, you know.’

‘I don’t know,’ returned Mr. Wickfield.

‘Well, Doctor Strong,’ said the other--‘Doctor Strong was of the same
mind, I believed. But as it appears from the course you take with me he
has changed his mind, why there’s no more to be said, except that the
sooner I am off, the better. Therefore, I thought I’d come back and say,
that the sooner I am off the better. When a plunge is to be made into
the water, it’s of no use lingering on the bank.’

‘There shall be as little lingering as possible, in your case, Mr.
Maldon, you may depend upon it,’ said Mr. Wickfield.

‘Thank’ee,’ said the other. ‘Much obliged. I don’t want to look a
gift-horse in the mouth, which is not a gracious thing to do; otherwise,
I dare say, my cousin Annie could easily arrange it in her own way. I
suppose Annie would only have to say to the old Doctor--’

‘Meaning that Mrs. Strong would only have to say to her husband--do I
follow you?’ said Mr. Wickfield.

‘Quite so,’ returned the other, ‘--would only have to say, that she
wanted such and such a thing to be so and so; and it would be so and so,
as a matter of course.’

‘And why as a matter of course, Mr. Maldon?’ asked Mr. Wickfield,
sedately eating his dinner.

‘Why, because Annie’s a charming young girl, and the old Doctor--Doctor
Strong, I mean--is not quite a charming young boy,’ said Mr. Jack
Maldon, laughing. ‘No offence to anybody, Mr. Wickfield. I only mean
that I suppose some compensation is fair and reasonable in that sort of
marriage.’

‘Compensation to the lady, sir?’ asked Mr. Wickfield gravely.

‘To the lady, sir,’ Mr. Jack Maldon answered, laughing. But appearing
to remark that Mr. Wickfield went on with his dinner in the same sedate,
immovable manner, and that there was no hope of making him relax a
muscle of his face, he added: ‘However, I have said what I came to say,
and, with another apology for this intrusion, I may take myself off. Of
course I shall observe your directions, in considering the matter as one
to be arranged between you and me solely, and not to be referred to, up
at the Doctor’s.’

‘Have you dined?’ asked Mr. Wickfield, with a motion of his hand towards
the table.

‘Thank’ee. I am going to dine,’ said Mr. Maldon, ‘with my cousin Annie.
Good-bye!’

Mr. Wickfield, without rising, looked after him thoughtfully as he went
out. He was rather a shallow sort of young gentleman, I thought, with
a handsome face, a rapid utterance, and a confident, bold air. And this
was the first I ever saw of Mr. Jack Maldon; whom I had not expected to
see so soon, when I heard the Doctor speak of him that morning.

When we had dined, we went upstairs again, where everything went on
exactly as on the previous day. Agnes set the glasses and decanters in
the same corner, and Mr. Wickfield sat down to drink, and drank a good
deal. Agnes played the piano to him, sat by him, and worked and talked,
and played some games at dominoes with me. In good time she made tea;
and afterwards, when I brought down my books, looked into them, and
showed me what she knew of them (which was no slight matter, though she
said it was), and what was the best way to learn and understand them.
I see her, with her modest, orderly, placid manner, and I hear her
beautiful calm voice, as I write these words. The influence for all
good, which she came to exercise over me at a later time, begins
already to descend upon my breast. I love little Em’ly, and I don’t love
Agnes--no, not at all in that way--but I feel that there are goodness,
peace, and truth, wherever Agnes is; and that the soft light of the
coloured window in the church, seen long ago, falls on her always, and
on me when I am near her, and on everything around.

The time having come for her withdrawal for the night, and she having
left us, I gave Mr. Wickfield my hand, preparatory to going away myself.
But he checked me and said: ‘Should you like to stay with us, Trotwood,
or to go elsewhere?’

‘To stay,’ I answered, quickly.

‘You are sure?’

‘If you please. If I may!’

‘Why, it’s but a dull life that we lead here, boy, I am afraid,’ he
said.

‘Not more dull for me than Agnes, sir. Not dull at all!’

‘Than Agnes,’ he repeated, walking slowly to the great chimney-piece,
and leaning against it. ‘Than Agnes!’

He had drank wine that evening (or I fancied it), until his eyes were
bloodshot. Not that I could see them now, for they were cast down, and
shaded by his hand; but I had noticed them a little while before.

‘Now I wonder,’ he muttered, ‘whether my Agnes tires of me. When should
I ever tire of her! But that’s different, that’s quite different.’

He was musing, not speaking to me; so I remained quiet.

‘A dull old house,’ he said, ‘and a monotonous life; but I must have
her near me. I must keep her near me. If the thought that I may die and
leave my darling, or that my darling may die and leave me, comes like a
spectre, to distress my happiest hours, and is only to be drowned in--’

He did not supply the word; but pacing slowly to the place where he had
sat, and mechanically going through the action of pouring wine from the
empty decanter, set it down and paced back again.

‘If it is miserable to bear, when she is here,’ he said, ‘what would it
be, and she away? No, no, no. I cannot try that.’

He leaned against the chimney-piece, brooding so long that I could not
decide whether to run the risk of disturbing him by going, or to remain
quietly where I was, until he should come out of his reverie. At length
he aroused himself, and looked about the room until his eyes encountered
mine.

‘Stay with us, Trotwood, eh?’ he said in his usual manner, and as if
he were answering something I had just said. ‘I am glad of it. You are
company to us both. It is wholesome to have you here. Wholesome for me,
wholesome for Agnes, wholesome perhaps for all of us.’

‘I am sure it is for me, sir,’ I said. ‘I am so glad to be here.’

‘That’s a fine fellow!’ said Mr. Wickfield. ‘As long as you are glad
to be here, you shall stay here.’ He shook hands with me upon it, and
clapped me on the back; and told me that when I had anything to do
at night after Agnes had left us, or when I wished to read for my own
pleasure, I was free to come down to his room, if he were there and if
I desired it for company’s sake, and to sit with him. I thanked him for
his consideration; and, as he went down soon afterwards, and I was
not tired, went down too, with a book in my hand, to avail myself, for
half-an-hour, of his permission.

But, seeing a light in the little round office, and immediately feeling
myself attracted towards Uriah Heep, who had a sort of fascination for
me, I went in there instead. I found Uriah reading a great fat book,
with such demonstrative attention, that his lank forefinger followed up
every line as he read, and made clammy tracks along the page (or so I
fully believed) like a snail.

‘You are working late tonight, Uriah,’ says I.

‘Yes, Master Copperfield,’ says Uriah.

As I was getting on the stool opposite, to talk to him more
conveniently, I observed that he had not such a thing as a smile about
him, and that he could only widen his mouth and make two hard creases
down his cheeks, one on each side, to stand for one.

‘I am not doing office-work, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah.

‘What work, then?’ I asked.

‘I am improving my legal knowledge, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah. ‘I
am going through Tidd’s Practice. Oh, what a writer Mr. Tidd is, Master
Copperfield!’

My stool was such a tower of observation, that as I watched him reading
on again, after this rapturous exclamation, and following up the lines
with his forefinger, I observed that his nostrils, which were thin and
pointed, with sharp dints in them, had a singular and most uncomfortable
way of expanding and contracting themselves--that they seemed to twinkle
instead of his eyes, which hardly ever twinkled at all.

‘I suppose you are quite a great lawyer?’ I said, after looking at him
for some time.

‘Me, Master Copperfield?’ said Uriah. ‘Oh, no! I’m a very umble person.’

It was no fancy of mine about his hands, I observed; for he frequently
ground the palms against each other as if to squeeze them dry and
warm, besides often wiping them, in a stealthy way, on his
pocket-handkerchief.

‘I am well aware that I am the umblest person going,’ said Uriah Heep,
modestly; ‘let the other be where he may. My mother is likewise a very
umble person. We live in a numble abode, Master Copperfield, but have
much to be thankful for. My father’s former calling was umble. He was a
sexton.’

‘What is he now?’ I asked.

‘He is a partaker of glory at present, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah
Heep. ‘But we have much to be thankful for. How much have I to be
thankful for in living with Mr. Wickfield!’

I asked Uriah if he had been with Mr. Wickfield long?

‘I have been with him, going on four year, Master Copperfield,’ said
Uriah; shutting up his book, after carefully marking the place where he
had left off. ‘Since a year after my father’s death. How much have I
to be thankful for, in that! How much have I to be thankful for, in Mr.
Wickfield’s kind intention to give me my articles, which would otherwise
not lay within the umble means of mother and self!’

‘Then, when your articled time is over, you’ll be a regular lawyer, I
suppose?’ said I.

‘With the blessing of Providence, Master Copperfield,’ returned Uriah.

‘Perhaps you’ll be a partner in Mr. Wickfield’s business, one of these
days,’ I said, to make myself agreeable; ‘and it will be Wickfield and
Heep, or Heep late Wickfield.’

‘Oh no, Master Copperfield,’ returned Uriah, shaking his head, ‘I am
much too umble for that!’

He certainly did look uncommonly like the carved face on the beam
outside my window, as he sat, in his humility, eyeing me sideways, with
his mouth widened, and the creases in his cheeks.

‘Mr. Wickfield is a most excellent man, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah.
‘If you have known him long, you know it, I am sure, much better than I
can inform you.’

I replied that I was certain he was; but that I had not known him long
myself, though he was a friend of my aunt’s.

‘Oh, indeed, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah. ‘Your aunt is a sweet
lady, Master Copperfield!’

He had a way of writhing when he wanted to express enthusiasm, which was
very ugly; and which diverted my attention from the compliment he had
paid my relation, to the snaky twistings of his throat and body.

‘A sweet lady, Master Copperfield!’ said Uriah Heep. ‘She has a great
admiration for Miss Agnes, Master Copperfield, I believe?’

I said, ‘Yes,’ boldly; not that I knew anything about it, Heaven forgive
me!

‘I hope you have, too, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah. ‘But I am sure
you must have.’

‘Everybody must have,’ I returned.

‘Oh, thank you, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah Heep, ‘for that remark!
It is so true! Umble as I am, I know it is so true! Oh, thank you,
Master Copperfield!’ He writhed himself quite off his stool in the
excitement of his feelings, and, being off, began to make arrangements
for going home.

‘Mother will be expecting me,’ he said, referring to a pale,
inexpressive-faced watch in his pocket, ‘and getting uneasy; for though
we are very umble, Master Copperfield, we are much attached to one
another. If you would come and see us, any afternoon, and take a cup of
tea at our lowly dwelling, mother would be as proud of your company as I
should be.’

I said I should be glad to come.

‘Thank you, Master Copperfield,’ returned Uriah, putting his book
away upon the shelf--‘I suppose you stop here, some time, Master
Copperfield?’

I said I was going to be brought up there, I believed, as long as I
remained at school.

‘Oh, indeed!’ exclaimed Uriah. ‘I should think YOU would come into the
business at last, Master Copperfield!’

I protested that I had no views of that sort, and that no such scheme
was entertained in my behalf by anybody; but Uriah insisted on blandly
replying to all my assurances, ‘Oh, yes, Master Copperfield, I should
think you would, indeed!’ and, ‘Oh, indeed, Master Copperfield, I should
think you would, certainly!’ over and over again. Being, at last, ready
to leave the office for the night, he asked me if it would suit my
convenience to have the light put out; and on my answering ‘Yes,’
instantly extinguished it. After shaking hands with me--his hand felt
like a fish, in the dark--he opened the door into the street a very
little, and crept out, and shut it, leaving me to grope my way back into
the house: which cost me some trouble and a fall over his stool. This
was the proximate cause, I suppose, of my dreaming about him, for what
appeared to me to be half the night; and dreaming, among other things,
that he had launched Mr. Peggotty’s house on a piratical expedition,
with a black flag at the masthead, bearing the inscription ‘Tidd’s
Practice’, under which diabolical ensign he was carrying me and little
Em’ly to the Spanish Main, to be drowned.

I got a little the better of my uneasiness when I went to school
next day, and a good deal the better next day, and so shook it off by
degrees, that in less than a fortnight I was quite at home, and happy,
among my new companions. I was awkward enough in their games, and
backward enough in their studies; but custom would improve me in the
first respect, I hoped, and hard work in the second. Accordingly, I
went to work very hard, both in play and in earnest, and gained great
commendation. And, in a very little while, the Murdstone and Grinby life
became so strange to me that I hardly believed in it, while my present
life grew so familiar, that I seemed to have been leading it a long
time.

Doctor Strong’s was an excellent school; as different from Mr. Creakle’s
as good is from evil. It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and
on a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to the honour and good
faith of the boys, and an avowed intention to rely on their possession
of those qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy of it, which
worked wonders. We all felt that we had a part in the management of
the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity. Hence, we soon
became warmly attached to it--I am sure I did for one, and I never knew,
in all my time, of any other boy being otherwise--and learnt with a good
will, desiring to do it credit. We had noble games out of hours, and
plenty of liberty; but even then, as I remember, we were well spoken of
in the town, and rarely did any disgrace, by our appearance or manner,
to the reputation of Doctor Strong and Doctor Strong’s boys.

Some of the higher scholars boarded in the Doctor’s house, and through
them I learned, at second hand, some particulars of the Doctor’s
history--as, how he had not yet been married twelve months to the
beautiful young lady I had seen in the study, whom he had married for
love; for she had not a sixpence, and had a world of poor relations (so
our fellows said) ready to swarm the Doctor out of house and home. Also,
how the Doctor’s cogitating manner was attributable to his being always
engaged in looking out for Greek roots; which, in my innocence and
ignorance, I supposed to be a botanical furor on the Doctor’s part,
especially as he always looked at the ground when he walked about,
until I understood that they were roots of words, with a view to a new
Dictionary which he had in contemplation. Adams, our head-boy, who had
a turn for mathematics, had made a calculation, I was informed, of the
time this Dictionary would take in completing, on the Doctor’s plan, and
at the Doctor’s rate of going. He considered that it might be done
in one thousand six hundred and forty-nine years, counting from the
Doctor’s last, or sixty-second, birthday.

But the Doctor himself was the idol of the whole school: and it must
have been a badly composed school if he had been anything else, for
he was the kindest of men; with a simple faith in him that might have
touched the stone hearts of the very urns upon the wall. As he walked up
and down that part of the courtyard which was at the side of the house,
with the stray rooks and jackdaws looking after him with their heads
cocked slyly, as if they knew how much more knowing they were in worldly
affairs than he, if any sort of vagabond could only get near enough to
his creaking shoes to attract his attention to one sentence of a tale
of distress, that vagabond was made for the next two days. It was so
notorious in the house, that the masters and head-boys took pains to cut
these marauders off at angles, and to get out of windows, and turn them
out of the courtyard, before they could make the Doctor aware of their
presence; which was sometimes happily effected within a few yards of
him, without his knowing anything of the matter, as he jogged to and
fro. Outside his own domain, and unprotected, he was a very sheep for
the shearers. He would have taken his gaiters off his legs, to give
away. In fact, there was a story current among us (I have no idea, and
never had, on what authority, but I have believed it for so many
years that I feel quite certain it is true), that on a frosty day, one
winter-time, he actually did bestow his gaiters on a beggar-woman, who
occasioned some scandal in the neighbourhood by exhibiting a fine infant
from door to door, wrapped in those garments, which were universally
recognized, being as well known in the vicinity as the Cathedral. The
legend added that the only person who did not identify them was the
Doctor himself, who, when they were shortly afterwards displayed at the
door of a little second-hand shop of no very good repute, where such
things were taken in exchange for gin, was more than once observed to
handle them approvingly, as if admiring some curious novelty in the
pattern, and considering them an improvement on his own.

It was very pleasant to see the Doctor with his pretty young wife. He
had a fatherly, benignant way of showing his fondness for her, which
seemed in itself to express a good man. I often saw them walking in the
garden where the peaches were, and I sometimes had a nearer observation
of them in the study or the parlour. She appeared to me to take great
care of the Doctor, and to like him very much, though I never thought
her vitally interested in the Dictionary: some cumbrous fragments of
which work the Doctor always carried in his pockets, and in the lining
of his hat, and generally seemed to be expounding to her as they walked
about.

I saw a good deal of Mrs. Strong, both because she had taken a liking
for me on the morning of my introduction to the Doctor, and was always
afterwards kind to me, and interested in me; and because she was very
fond of Agnes, and was often backwards and forwards at our house. There
was a curious constraint between her and Mr. Wickfield, I thought (of
whom she seemed to be afraid), that never wore off. When she came there
of an evening, she always shrunk from accepting his escort home, and ran
away with me instead. And sometimes, as we were running gaily across
the Cathedral yard together, expecting to meet nobody, we would meet Mr.
Jack Maldon, who was always surprised to see us.

Mrs. Strong’s mama was a lady I took great delight in. Her name was Mrs.
Markleham; but our boys used to call her the Old Soldier, on account of
her generalship, and the skill with which she marshalled great forces
of relations against the Doctor. She was a little, sharp-eyed woman,
who used to wear, when she was dressed, one unchangeable cap, ornamented
with some artificial flowers, and two artificial butterflies supposed
to be hovering above the flowers. There was a superstition among us
that this cap had come from France, and could only originate in the
workmanship of that ingenious nation: but all I certainly know about it,
is, that it always made its appearance of an evening, wheresoever Mrs.
Markleham made HER appearance; that it was carried about to friendly
meetings in a Hindoo basket; that the butterflies had the gift of
trembling constantly; and that they improved the shining hours at Doctor
Strong’s expense, like busy bees.

I observed the Old Soldier--not to adopt the name disrespectfully--to
pretty good advantage, on a night which is made memorable to me by
something else I shall relate. It was the night of a little party at the
Doctor’s, which was given on the occasion of Mr. Jack Maldon’s departure
for India, whither he was going as a cadet, or something of that kind:
Mr. Wickfield having at length arranged the business. It happened to be
the Doctor’s birthday, too. We had had a holiday, had made presents to
him in the morning, had made a speech to him through the head-boy, and
had cheered him until we were hoarse, and until he had shed tears. And
now, in the evening, Mr. Wickfield, Agnes, and I, went to have tea with
him in his private capacity.

Mr. Jack Maldon was there, before us. Mrs. Strong, dressed in white,
with cherry-coloured ribbons, was playing the piano, when we went in;
and he was leaning over her to turn the leaves. The clear red and
white of her complexion was not so blooming and flower-like as usual, I
thought, when she turned round; but she looked very pretty, Wonderfully
pretty.

‘I have forgotten, Doctor,’ said Mrs. Strong’s mama, when we were
seated, ‘to pay you the compliments of the day--though they are, as you
may suppose, very far from being mere compliments in my case. Allow me
to wish you many happy returns.’

‘I thank you, ma’am,’ replied the Doctor.

‘Many, many, many, happy returns,’ said the Old Soldier. ‘Not only
for your own sake, but for Annie’s, and John Maldon’s, and many other
people’s. It seems but yesterday to me, John, when you were a little
creature, a head shorter than Master Copperfield, making baby love to
Annie behind the gooseberry bushes in the back-garden.’

‘My dear mama,’ said Mrs. Strong, ‘never mind that now.’

‘Annie, don’t be absurd,’ returned her mother. ‘If you are to blush to
hear of such things now you are an old married woman, when are you not
to blush to hear of them?’

‘Old?’ exclaimed Mr. Jack Maldon. ‘Annie? Come!’

‘Yes, John,’ returned the Soldier. ‘Virtually, an old married woman.
Although not old by years--for when did you ever hear me say, or who has
ever heard me say, that a girl of twenty was old by years!--your cousin
is the wife of the Doctor, and, as such, what I have described her. It
is well for you, John, that your cousin is the wife of the Doctor. You
have found in him an influential and kind friend, who will be kinder
yet, I venture to predict, if you deserve it. I have no false pride.
I never hesitate to admit, frankly, that there are some members of our
family who want a friend. You were one yourself, before your cousin’s
influence raised up one for you.’

The Doctor, in the goodness of his heart, waved his hand as if to make
light of it, and save Mr. Jack Maldon from any further reminder. But
Mrs. Markleham changed her chair for one next the Doctor’s, and putting
her fan on his coat-sleeve, said:

‘No, really, my dear Doctor, you must excuse me if I appear to dwell
on this rather, because I feel so very strongly. I call it quite my
monomania, it is such a subject of mine. You are a blessing to us. You
really are a Boon, you know.’

‘Nonsense, nonsense,’ said the Doctor.

‘No, no, I beg your pardon,’ retorted the Old Soldier. ‘With nobody
present, but our dear and confidential friend Mr. Wickfield, I cannot
consent to be put down. I shall begin to assert the privileges of a
mother-in-law, if you go on like that, and scold you. I am perfectly
honest and outspoken. What I am saying, is what I said when you first
overpowered me with surprise--you remember how surprised I was?--by
proposing for Annie. Not that there was anything so very much out of
the way, in the mere fact of the proposal--it would be ridiculous to say
that!--but because, you having known her poor father, and having known
her from a baby six months old, I hadn’t thought of you in such a light
at all, or indeed as a marrying man in any way,--simply that, you know.’

‘Aye, aye,’ returned the Doctor, good-humouredly. ‘Never mind.’

‘But I DO mind,’ said the Old Soldier, laying her fan upon his lips. ‘I
mind very much. I recall these things that I may be contradicted if I am
wrong. Well! Then I spoke to Annie, and I told her what had happened.
I said, “My dear, here’s Doctor Strong has positively been and made you
the subject of a handsome declaration and an offer.” Did I press it in
the least? No. I said, “Now, Annie, tell me the truth this moment; is
your heart free?” “Mama,” she said crying, “I am extremely young”--which
was perfectly true--“and I hardly know if I have a heart at all.” “Then,
my dear,” I said, “you may rely upon it, it’s free. At all events, my
love,” said I, “Doctor Strong is in an agitated state of mind, and
must be answered. He cannot be kept in his present state of suspense.”
 “Mama,” said Annie, still crying, “would he be unhappy without me? If he
would, I honour and respect him so much, that I think I will have him.”
 So it was settled. And then, and not till then, I said to Annie, “Annie,
Doctor Strong will not only be your husband, but he will represent your
late father: he will represent the head of our family, he will represent
the wisdom and station, and I may say the means, of our family; and will
be, in short, a Boon to it.” I used the word at the time, and I have
used it again, today. If I have any merit it is consistency.’

The daughter had sat quite silent and still during this speech, with her
eyes fixed on the ground; her cousin standing near her, and looking on
the ground too. She now said very softly, in a trembling voice:

‘Mama, I hope you have finished?’ ‘No, my dear Annie,’ returned the Old
Soldier, ‘I have not quite finished. Since you ask me, my love, I reply
that I have not. I complain that you really are a little unnatural
towards your own family; and, as it is of no use complaining to you. I
mean to complain to your husband. Now, my dear Doctor, do look at that
silly wife of yours.’

As the Doctor turned his kind face, with its smile of simplicity and
gentleness, towards her, she drooped her head more. I noticed that Mr.
Wickfield looked at her steadily.

‘When I happened to say to that naughty thing, the other day,’ pursued
her mother, shaking her head and her fan at her, playfully, ‘that there
was a family circumstance she might mention to you--indeed, I think, was
bound to mention--she said, that to mention it was to ask a favour;
and that, as you were too generous, and as for her to ask was always to
have, she wouldn’t.’

‘Annie, my dear,’ said the Doctor. ‘That was wrong. It robbed me of a
pleasure.’

‘Almost the very words I said to her!’ exclaimed her mother. ‘Now
really, another time, when I know what she would tell you but for this
reason, and won’t, I have a great mind, my dear Doctor, to tell you
myself.’

‘I shall be glad if you will,’ returned the Doctor.

‘Shall I?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Well, then, I will!’ said the Old Soldier. ‘That’s a bargain.’ And
having, I suppose, carried her point, she tapped the Doctor’s hand
several times with her fan (which she kissed first), and returned
triumphantly to her former station.

Some more company coming in, among whom were the two masters and Adams,
the talk became general; and it naturally turned on Mr. Jack Maldon, and
his voyage, and the country he was going to, and his various plans and
prospects. He was to leave that night, after supper, in a post-chaise,
for Gravesend; where the ship, in which he was to make the voyage, lay;
and was to be gone--unless he came home on leave, or for his health--I
don’t know how many years. I recollect it was settled by general
consent that India was quite a misrepresented country, and had nothing
objectionable in it, but a tiger or two, and a little heat in the warm
part of the day. For my own part, I looked on Mr. Jack Maldon as a
modern Sindbad, and pictured him the bosom friend of all the Rajahs in
the East, sitting under canopies, smoking curly golden pipes--a mile
long, if they could be straightened out.

Mrs. Strong was a very pretty singer: as I knew, who often heard her
singing by herself. But, whether she was afraid of singing before
people, or was out of voice that evening, it was certain that she
couldn’t sing at all. She tried a duet, once, with her cousin Maldon,
but could not so much as begin; and afterwards, when she tried to sing
by herself, although she began sweetly, her voice died away on a sudden,
and left her quite distressed, with her head hanging down over the keys.
The good Doctor said she was nervous, and, to relieve her, proposed a
round game at cards; of which he knew as much as of the art of playing
the trombone. But I remarked that the Old Soldier took him into custody
directly, for her partner; and instructed him, as the first preliminary
of initiation, to give her all the silver he had in his pocket.

We had a merry game, not made the less merry by the Doctor’s mistakes,
of which he committed an innumerable quantity, in spite of the
watchfulness of the butterflies, and to their great aggravation. Mrs.
Strong had declined to play, on the ground of not feeling very well; and
her cousin Maldon had excused himself because he had some packing to
do. When he had done it, however, he returned, and they sat together,
talking, on the sofa. From time to time she came and looked over the
Doctor’s hand, and told him what to play. She was very pale, as she
bent over him, and I thought her finger trembled as she pointed out
the cards; but the Doctor was quite happy in her attention, and took no
notice of this, if it were so.

At supper, we were hardly so gay. Everyone appeared to feel that a
parting of that sort was an awkward thing, and that the nearer it
approached, the more awkward it was. Mr. Jack Maldon tried to be very
talkative, but was not at his ease, and made matters worse. And they
were not improved, as it appeared to me, by the Old Soldier: who
continually recalled passages of Mr. Jack Maldon’s youth.

The Doctor, however, who felt, I am sure, that he was making everybody
happy, was well pleased, and had no suspicion but that we were all at
the utmost height of enjoyment.

‘Annie, my dear,’ said he, looking at his watch, and filling his glass,
‘it is past your cousin Jack’s time, and we must not detain him, since
time and tide--both concerned in this case--wait for no man. Mr. Jack
Maldon, you have a long voyage, and a strange country, before you; but
many men have had both, and many men will have both, to the end of time.
The winds you are going to tempt, have wafted thousands upon thousands
to fortune, and brought thousands upon thousands happily back.’

‘It’s an affecting thing,’ said Mrs. Markleham--‘however it’s viewed,
it’s affecting, to see a fine young man one has known from an infant,
going away to the other end of the world, leaving all he knows behind,
and not knowing what’s before him. A young man really well deserves
constant support and patronage,’ looking at the Doctor, ‘who makes such
sacrifices.’

‘Time will go fast with you, Mr. Jack Maldon,’ pursued the Doctor,
‘and fast with all of us. Some of us can hardly expect, perhaps, in the
natural course of things, to greet you on your return. The next best
thing is to hope to do it, and that’s my case. I shall not weary you
with good advice. You have long had a good model before you, in your
cousin Annie. Imitate her virtues as nearly as you can.’

Mrs. Markleham fanned herself, and shook her head.

‘Farewell, Mr. Jack,’ said the Doctor, standing up; on which we all
stood up. ‘A prosperous voyage out, a thriving career abroad, and a
happy return home!’

We all drank the toast, and all shook hands with Mr. Jack Maldon; after
which he hastily took leave of the ladies who were there, and hurried
to the door, where he was received, as he got into the chaise, with a
tremendous broadside of cheers discharged by our boys, who had assembled
on the lawn for the purpose. Running in among them to swell the ranks,
I was very near the chaise when it rolled away; and I had a lively
impression made upon me, in the midst of the noise and dust, of having
seen Mr. Jack Maldon rattle past with an agitated face, and something
cherry-coloured in his hand.

After another broadside for the Doctor, and another for the Doctor’s
wife, the boys dispersed, and I went back into the house, where I found
the guests all standing in a group about the Doctor, discussing how Mr.
Jack Maldon had gone away, and how he had borne it, and how he had
felt it, and all the rest of it. In the midst of these remarks, Mrs.
Markleham cried: ‘Where’s Annie?’

No Annie was there; and when they called to her, no Annie replied. But
all pressing out of the room, in a crowd, to see what was the matter, we
found her lying on the hall floor. There was great alarm at first, until
it was found that she was in a swoon, and that the swoon was yielding
to the usual means of recovery; when the Doctor, who had lifted her
head upon his knee, put her curls aside with his hand, and said, looking
around:

‘Poor Annie! She’s so faithful and tender-hearted! It’s the parting from
her old playfellow and friend--her favourite cousin--that has done this.
Ah! It’s a pity! I am very sorry!’

When she opened her eyes, and saw where she was, and that we were all
standing about her, she arose with assistance: turning her head, as she
did so, to lay it on the Doctor’s shoulder--or to hide it, I don’t know
which. We went into the drawing-room, to leave her with the Doctor and
her mother; but she said, it seemed, that she was better than she had
been since morning, and that she would rather be brought among us; so
they brought her in, looking very white and weak, I thought, and sat her
on a sofa.

‘Annie, my dear,’ said her mother, doing something to her dress. ‘See
here! You have lost a bow. Will anybody be so good as find a ribbon; a
cherry-coloured ribbon?’

It was the one she had worn at her bosom. We all looked for it; I myself
looked everywhere, I am certain--but nobody could find it.

‘Do you recollect where you had it last, Annie?’ said her mother.

I wondered how I could have thought she looked white, or anything but
burning red, when she answered that she had had it safe, a little while
ago, she thought, but it was not worth looking for.

Nevertheless, it was looked for again, and still not found. She
entreated that there might be no more searching; but it was still sought
for, in a desultory way, until she was quite well, and the company took
their departure.

We walked very slowly home, Mr. Wickfield, Agnes, and I--Agnes and I
admiring the moonlight, and Mr. Wickfield scarcely raising his eyes from
the ground. When we, at last, reached our own door, Agnes discovered
that she had left her little reticule behind. Delighted to be of any
service to her, I ran back to fetch it.

I went into the supper-room where it had been left, which was deserted
and dark. But a door of communication between that and the Doctor’s
study, where there was a light, being open, I passed on there, to say
what I wanted, and to get a candle.

The Doctor was sitting in his easy-chair by the fireside, and his young
wife was on a stool at his feet. The Doctor, with a complacent smile,
was reading aloud some manuscript explanation or statement of a theory
out of that interminable Dictionary, and she was looking up at him. But
with such a face as I never saw. It was so beautiful in its form, it was
so ashy pale, it was so fixed in its abstraction, it was so full of a
wild, sleep-walking, dreamy horror of I don’t know what. The eyes
were wide open, and her brown hair fell in two rich clusters on her
shoulders, and on her white dress, disordered by the want of the lost
ribbon. Distinctly as I recollect her look, I cannot say of what it was
expressive, I cannot even say of what it is expressive to me now, rising
again before my older judgement. Penitence, humiliation, shame, pride,
love, and trustfulness--I see them all; and in them all, I see that
horror of I don’t know what.

My entrance, and my saying what I wanted, roused her. It disturbed the
Doctor too, for when I went back to replace the candle I had taken from
the table, he was patting her head, in his fatherly way, and saying he
was a merciless drone to let her tempt him into reading on; and he would
have her go to bed.

But she asked him, in a rapid, urgent manner, to let her stay--to let
her feel assured (I heard her murmur some broken words to this effect)
that she was in his confidence that night. And, as she turned again
towards him, after glancing at me as I left the room and went out at the
door, I saw her cross her hands upon his knee, and look up at him with
the same face, something quieted, as he resumed his reading.

It made a great impression on me, and I remembered it a long time
afterwards; as I shall have occasion to narrate when the time comes.



CHAPTER 17. SOMEBODY TURNS UP


It has not occurred to me to mention Peggotty since I ran away; but, of
course, I wrote her a letter almost as soon as I was housed at Dover,
and another, and a longer letter, containing all particulars fully
related, when my aunt took me formally under her protection. On my being
settled at Doctor Strong’s I wrote to her again, detailing my happy
condition and prospects. I never could have derived anything like the
pleasure from spending the money Mr. Dick had given me, that I felt in
sending a gold half-guinea to Peggotty, per post, enclosed in this last
letter, to discharge the sum I had borrowed of her: in which epistle,
not before, I mentioned about the young man with the donkey-cart.

To these communications Peggotty replied as promptly, if not as
concisely, as a merchant’s clerk. Her utmost powers of expression (which
were certainly not great in ink) were exhausted in the attempt to write
what she felt on the subject of my journey. Four sides of incoherent and
interjectional beginnings of sentences, that had no end, except blots,
were inadequate to afford her any relief. But the blots were more
expressive to me than the best composition; for they showed me that
Peggotty had been crying all over the paper, and what could I have
desired more?

I made out, without much difficulty, that she could not take quite
kindly to my aunt yet. The notice was too short after so long a
prepossession the other way. We never knew a person, she wrote; but to
think that Miss Betsey should seem to be so different from what she had
been thought to be, was a Moral!--that was her word. She was evidently
still afraid of Miss Betsey, for she sent her grateful duty to her but
timidly; and she was evidently afraid of me, too, and entertained the
probability of my running away again soon: if I might judge from the
repeated hints she threw out, that the coach-fare to Yarmouth was always
to be had of her for the asking.

She gave me one piece of intelligence which affected me very much,
namely, that there had been a sale of the furniture at our old home, and
that Mr. and Miss Murdstone were gone away, and the house was shut up,
to be let or sold. God knows I had no part in it while they remained
there, but it pained me to think of the dear old place as altogether
abandoned; of the weeds growing tall in the garden, and the fallen
leaves lying thick and wet upon the paths. I imagined how the winds
of winter would howl round it, how the cold rain would beat upon the
window-glass, how the moon would make ghosts on the walls of the empty
rooms, watching their solitude all night. I thought afresh of the grave
in the churchyard, underneath the tree: and it seemed as if the house
were dead too, now, and all connected with my father and mother were
faded away.

There was no other news in Peggotty’s letters. Mr. Barkis was an
excellent husband, she said, though still a little near; but we all had
our faults, and she had plenty (though I am sure I don’t know what they
were); and he sent his duty, and my little bedroom was always ready for
me. Mr. Peggotty was well, and Ham was well, and Mrs. Gummidge was but
poorly, and little Em’ly wouldn’t send her love, but said that Peggotty
might send it, if she liked.

All this intelligence I dutifully imparted to my aunt, only reserving
to myself the mention of little Em’ly, to whom I instinctively felt
that she would not very tenderly incline. While I was yet new at Doctor
Strong’s, she made several excursions over to Canterbury to see me, and
always at unseasonable hours: with the view, I suppose, of taking me by
surprise. But, finding me well employed, and bearing a good character,
and hearing on all hands that I rose fast in the school, she soon
discontinued these visits. I saw her on a Saturday, every third or
fourth week, when I went over to Dover for a treat; and I saw Mr. Dick
every alternate Wednesday, when he arrived by stage-coach at noon, to
stay until next morning.

On these occasions Mr. Dick never travelled without a leathern
writing-desk, containing a supply of stationery and the Memorial; in
relation to which document he had a notion that time was beginning to
press now, and that it really must be got out of hand.

Mr. Dick was very partial to gingerbread. To render his visits the more
agreeable, my aunt had instructed me to open a credit for him at a cake
shop, which was hampered with the stipulation that he should not be
served with more than one shilling’s-worth in the course of any one day.
This, and the reference of all his little bills at the county inn where
he slept, to my aunt, before they were paid, induced me to suspect that
he was only allowed to rattle his money, and not to spend it. I found
on further investigation that this was so, or at least there was an
agreement between him and my aunt that he should account to her for
all his disbursements. As he had no idea of deceiving her, and always
desired to please her, he was thus made chary of launching into expense.
On this point, as well as on all other possible points, Mr. Dick was
convinced that my aunt was the wisest and most wonderful of women; as he
repeatedly told me with infinite secrecy, and always in a whisper.

‘Trotwood,’ said Mr. Dick, with an air of mystery, after imparting this
confidence to me, one Wednesday; ‘who’s the man that hides near our
house and frightens her?’

‘Frightens my aunt, sir?’

Mr. Dick nodded. ‘I thought nothing would have frightened her,’ he said,
‘for she’s--’ here he whispered softly, ‘don’t mention it--the wisest
and most wonderful of women.’ Having said which, he drew back, to
observe the effect which this description of her made upon me.

‘The first time he came,’ said Mr. Dick, ‘was--let me see--sixteen
hundred and forty-nine was the date of King Charles’s execution. I think
you said sixteen hundred and forty-nine?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I don’t know how it can be,’ said Mr. Dick, sorely puzzled and shaking
his head. ‘I don’t think I am as old as that.’

‘Was it in that year that the man appeared, sir?’ I asked.

‘Why, really’ said Mr. Dick, ‘I don’t see how it can have been in that
year, Trotwood. Did you get that date out of history?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I suppose history never lies, does it?’ said Mr. Dick, with a gleam of
hope.

‘Oh dear, no, sir!’ I replied, most decisively. I was ingenuous and
young, and I thought so.

‘I can’t make it out,’ said Mr. Dick, shaking his head. ‘There’s
something wrong, somewhere. However, it was very soon after the mistake
was made of putting some of the trouble out of King Charles’s head into
my head, that the man first came. I was walking out with Miss Trotwood
after tea, just at dark, and there he was, close to our house.’

‘Walking about?’ I inquired.

‘Walking about?’ repeated Mr. Dick. ‘Let me see, I must recollect a bit.
N-no, no; he was not walking about.’

I asked, as the shortest way to get at it, what he WAS doing.

‘Well, he wasn’t there at all,’ said Mr. Dick, ‘until he came up behind
her, and whispered. Then she turned round and fainted, and I stood still
and looked at him, and he walked away; but that he should have
been hiding ever since (in the ground or somewhere), is the most
extraordinary thing!’

‘HAS he been hiding ever since?’ I asked.

‘To be sure he has,’ retorted Mr. Dick, nodding his head gravely. ‘Never
came out, till last night! We were walking last night, and he came up
behind her again, and I knew him again.’

‘And did he frighten my aunt again?’

‘All of a shiver,’ said Mr. Dick, counterfeiting that affection and
making his teeth chatter. ‘Held by the palings. Cried. But, Trotwood,
come here,’ getting me close to him, that he might whisper very softly;
‘why did she give him money, boy, in the moonlight?’

‘He was a beggar, perhaps.’

Mr. Dick shook his head, as utterly renouncing the suggestion; and
having replied a great many times, and with great confidence, ‘No
beggar, no beggar, no beggar, sir!’ went on to say, that from his window
he had afterwards, and late at night, seen my aunt give this person
money outside the garden rails in the moonlight, who then slunk
away--into the ground again, as he thought probable--and was seen no
more: while my aunt came hurriedly and secretly back into the house, and
had, even that morning, been quite different from her usual self; which
preyed on Mr. Dick’s mind.

I had not the least belief, in the outset of this story, that the
unknown was anything but a delusion of Mr. Dick’s, and one of the line
of that ill-fated Prince who occasioned him so much difficulty; but
after some reflection I began to entertain the question whether an
attempt, or threat of an attempt, might have been twice made to take
poor Mr. Dick himself from under my aunt’s protection, and whether
my aunt, the strength of whose kind feeling towards him I knew from
herself, might have been induced to pay a price for his peace and quiet.
As I was already much attached to Mr. Dick, and very solicitous for his
welfare, my fears favoured this supposition; and for a long time his
Wednesday hardly ever came round, without my entertaining a misgiving
that he would not be on the coach-box as usual. There he always
appeared, however, grey-headed, laughing, and happy; and he never had
anything more to tell of the man who could frighten my aunt.

These Wednesdays were the happiest days of Mr. Dick’s life; they were
far from being the least happy of mine. He soon became known to every
boy in the school; and though he never took an active part in any game
but kite-flying, was as deeply interested in all our sports as anyone
among us. How often have I seen him, intent upon a match at marbles
or pegtop, looking on with a face of unutterable interest, and hardly
breathing at the critical times! How often, at hare and hounds, have
I seen him mounted on a little knoll, cheering the whole field on
to action, and waving his hat above his grey head, oblivious of King
Charles the Martyr’s head, and all belonging to it! How many a
summer hour have I known to be but blissful minutes to him in
the cricket-field! How many winter days have I seen him, standing
blue-nosed, in the snow and east wind, looking at the boys going down
the long slide, and clapping his worsted gloves in rapture!

He was an universal favourite, and his ingenuity in little things was
transcendent. He could cut oranges into such devices as none of us had
an idea of. He could make a boat out of anything, from a skewer upwards.
He could turn cramp-bones into chessmen; fashion Roman chariots from old
court cards; make spoked wheels out of cotton reels, and bird-cages of
old wire. But he was greatest of all, perhaps, in the articles of string
and straw; with which we were all persuaded he could do anything that
could be done by hands.

Mr. Dick’s renown was not long confined to us. After a few Wednesdays,
Doctor Strong himself made some inquiries of me about him, and I told
him all my aunt had told me; which interested the Doctor so much that
he requested, on the occasion of his next visit, to be presented to him.
This ceremony I performed; and the Doctor begging Mr. Dick, whensoever
he should not find me at the coach office, to come on there, and rest
himself until our morning’s work was over, it soon passed into a custom
for Mr. Dick to come on as a matter of course, and, if we were a little
late, as often happened on a Wednesday, to walk about the courtyard,
waiting for me. Here he made the acquaintance of the Doctor’s beautiful
young wife (paler than formerly, all this time; more rarely seen by
me or anyone, I think; and not so gay, but not less beautiful), and so
became more and more familiar by degrees, until, at last, he would come
into the school and wait. He always sat in a particular corner, on a
particular stool, which was called ‘Dick’, after him; here he would sit,
with his grey head bent forward, attentively listening to whatever might
be going on, with a profound veneration for the learning he had never
been able to acquire.

This veneration Mr. Dick extended to the Doctor, whom he thought the
most subtle and accomplished philosopher of any age. It was long before
Mr. Dick ever spoke to him otherwise than bareheaded; and even when he
and the Doctor had struck up quite a friendship, and would walk together
by the hour, on that side of the courtyard which was known among us as
The Doctor’s Walk, Mr. Dick would pull off his hat at intervals to show
his respect for wisdom and knowledge. How it ever came about that the
Doctor began to read out scraps of the famous Dictionary, in these
walks, I never knew; perhaps he felt it all the same, at first, as
reading to himself. However, it passed into a custom too; and Mr. Dick,
listening with a face shining with pride and pleasure, in his heart of
hearts believed the Dictionary to be the most delightful book in the
world.

As I think of them going up and down before those schoolroom
windows--the Doctor reading with his complacent smile, an occasional
flourish of the manuscript, or grave motion of his head; and Mr. Dick
listening, enchained by interest, with his poor wits calmly wandering
God knows where, upon the wings of hard words--I think of it as one of
the pleasantest things, in a quiet way, that I have ever seen. I feel
as if they might go walking to and fro for ever, and the world might
somehow be the better for it--as if a thousand things it makes a noise
about, were not one half so good for it, or me.

Agnes was one of Mr. Dick’s friends, very soon; and in often coming
to the house, he made acquaintance with Uriah. The friendship between
himself and me increased continually, and it was maintained on this odd
footing: that, while Mr. Dick came professedly to look after me as my
guardian, he always consulted me in any little matter of doubt that
arose, and invariably guided himself by my advice; not only having a
high respect for my native sagacity, but considering that I inherited a
good deal from my aunt.

One Thursday morning, when I was about to walk with Mr. Dick from the
hotel to the coach office before going back to school (for we had an
hour’s school before breakfast), I met Uriah in the street, who reminded
me of the promise I had made to take tea with himself and his mother:
adding, with a writhe, ‘But I didn’t expect you to keep it, Master
Copperfield, we’re so very umble.’

I really had not yet been able to make up my mind whether I liked Uriah
or detested him; and I was very doubtful about it still, as I stood
looking him in the face in the street. But I felt it quite an affront to
be supposed proud, and said I only wanted to be asked.

‘Oh, if that’s all, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah, ‘and it really
isn’t our umbleness that prevents you, will you come this evening?
But if it is our umbleness, I hope you won’t mind owning to it, Master
Copperfield; for we are well aware of our condition.’

I said I would mention it to Mr. Wickfield, and if he approved, as I had
no doubt he would, I would come with pleasure. So, at six o’clock that
evening, which was one of the early office evenings, I announced myself
as ready, to Uriah.

‘Mother will be proud, indeed,’ he said, as we walked away together. ‘Or
she would be proud, if it wasn’t sinful, Master Copperfield.’

‘Yet you didn’t mind supposing I was proud this morning,’ I returned.

‘Oh dear, no, Master Copperfield!’ returned Uriah. ‘Oh, believe me, no!
Such a thought never came into my head! I shouldn’t have deemed it at
all proud if you had thought US too umble for you. Because we are so
very umble.’

‘Have you been studying much law lately?’ I asked, to change the
subject.

‘Oh, Master Copperfield,’ he said, with an air of self-denial, ‘my
reading is hardly to be called study. I have passed an hour or two in
the evening, sometimes, with Mr. Tidd.’

‘Rather hard, I suppose?’ said I. ‘He is hard to me sometimes,’ returned
Uriah. ‘But I don’t know what he might be to a gifted person.’

After beating a little tune on his chin as he walked on, with the two
forefingers of his skeleton right hand, he added:

‘There are expressions, you see, Master Copperfield--Latin words
and terms--in Mr. Tidd, that are trying to a reader of my umble
attainments.’

‘Would you like to be taught Latin?’ I said briskly. ‘I will teach it
you with pleasure, as I learn it.’

‘Oh, thank you, Master Copperfield,’ he answered, shaking his head. ‘I
am sure it’s very kind of you to make the offer, but I am much too umble
to accept it.’

‘What nonsense, Uriah!’

‘Oh, indeed you must excuse me, Master Copperfield! I am greatly
obliged, and I should like it of all things, I assure you; but I am far
too umble. There are people enough to tread upon me in my lowly state,
without my doing outrage to their feelings by possessing learning.
Learning ain’t for me. A person like myself had better not aspire. If he
is to get on in life, he must get on umbly, Master Copperfield!’

I never saw his mouth so wide, or the creases in his cheeks so deep, as
when he delivered himself of these sentiments: shaking his head all the
time, and writhing modestly.

‘I think you are wrong, Uriah,’ I said. ‘I dare say there are several
things that I could teach you, if you would like to learn them.’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt that, Master Copperfield,’ he answered; ‘not in the
least. But not being umble yourself, you don’t judge well, perhaps, for
them that are. I won’t provoke my betters with knowledge, thank you. I’m
much too umble. Here is my umble dwelling, Master Copperfield!’

We entered a low, old-fashioned room, walked straight into from the
street, and found there Mrs. Heep, who was the dead image of Uriah, only
short. She received me with the utmost humility, and apologized to me
for giving her son a kiss, observing that, lowly as they were, they
had their natural affections, which they hoped would give no offence to
anyone. It was a perfectly decent room, half parlour and half kitchen,
but not at all a snug room. The tea-things were set upon the table, and
the kettle was boiling on the hob. There was a chest of drawers with an
escritoire top, for Uriah to read or write at of an evening; there was
Uriah’s blue bag lying down and vomiting papers; there was a company of
Uriah’s books commanded by Mr. Tidd; there was a corner cupboard: and
there were the usual articles of furniture. I don’t remember that any
individual object had a bare, pinched, spare look; but I do remember
that the whole place had.

It was perhaps a part of Mrs. Heep’s humility, that she still wore
weeds. Notwithstanding the lapse of time that had occurred since Mr.
Heep’s decease, she still wore weeds. I think there was some compromise
in the cap; but otherwise she was as weedy as in the early days of her
mourning.

‘This is a day to be remembered, my Uriah, I am sure,’ said Mrs. Heep,
making the tea, ‘when Master Copperfield pays us a visit.’

‘I said you’d think so, mother,’ said Uriah.

‘If I could have wished father to remain among us for any reason,’ said
Mrs. Heep, ‘it would have been, that he might have known his company
this afternoon.’

I felt embarrassed by these compliments; but I was sensible, too, of
being entertained as an honoured guest, and I thought Mrs. Heep an
agreeable woman.

‘My Uriah,’ said Mrs. Heep, ‘has looked forward to this, sir, a long
while. He had his fears that our umbleness stood in the way, and I
joined in them myself. Umble we are, umble we have been, umble we shall
ever be,’ said Mrs. Heep.

‘I am sure you have no occasion to be so, ma’am,’ I said, ‘unless you
like.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ retorted Mrs. Heep. ‘We know our station and are
thankful in it.’

I found that Mrs. Heep gradually got nearer to me, and that Uriah
gradually got opposite to me, and that they respectfully plied me
with the choicest of the eatables on the table. There was nothing
particularly choice there, to be sure; but I took the will for the deed,
and felt that they were very attentive. Presently they began to talk
about aunts, and then I told them about mine; and about fathers and
mothers, and then I told them about mine; and then Mrs. Heep began to
talk about fathers-in-law, and then I began to tell her about mine--but
stopped, because my aunt had advised me to observe a silence on that
subject. A tender young cork, however, would have had no more chance
against a pair of corkscrews, or a tender young tooth against a pair of
dentists, or a little shuttlecock against two battledores, than I had
against Uriah and Mrs. Heep. They did just what they liked with me; and
wormed things out of me that I had no desire to tell, with a certainty
I blush to think of, the more especially, as in my juvenile frankness, I
took some credit to myself for being so confidential and felt that I was
quite the patron of my two respectful entertainers.

They were very fond of one another: that was certain. I take it, that
had its effect upon me, as a touch of nature; but the skill with which
the one followed up whatever the other said, was a touch of art which I
was still less proof against. When there was nothing more to be got
out of me about myself (for on the Murdstone and Grinby life, and on my
journey, I was dumb), they began about Mr. Wickfield and Agnes. Uriah
threw the ball to Mrs. Heep, Mrs. Heep caught it and threw it back to
Uriah, Uriah kept it up a little while, then sent it back to Mrs. Heep,
and so they went on tossing it about until I had no idea who had got it,
and was quite bewildered. The ball itself was always changing too. Now
it was Mr. Wickfield, now Agnes, now the excellence of Mr. Wickfield,
now my admiration of Agnes; now the extent of Mr. Wickfield’s business
and resources, now our domestic life after dinner; now, the wine that
Mr. Wickfield took, the reason why he took it, and the pity that it was
he took so much; now one thing, now another, then everything at once;
and all the time, without appearing to speak very often, or to do
anything but sometimes encourage them a little, for fear they should be
overcome by their humility and the honour of my company, I found myself
perpetually letting out something or other that I had no business to
let out and seeing the effect of it in the twinkling of Uriah’s dinted
nostrils.

I had begun to be a little uncomfortable, and to wish myself well out
of the visit, when a figure coming down the street passed the door--it
stood open to air the room, which was warm, the weather being close for
the time of year--came back again, looked in, and walked in, exclaiming
loudly, ‘Copperfield! Is it possible?’

It was Mr. Micawber! It was Mr. Micawber, with his eye-glass, and
his walking-stick, and his shirt-collar, and his genteel air, and the
condescending roll in his voice, all complete!

‘My dear Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, putting out his hand, ‘this is
indeed a meeting which is calculated to impress the mind with a sense
of the instability and uncertainty of all human--in short, it is a most
extraordinary meeting. Walking along the street, reflecting upon the
probability of something turning up (of which I am at present rather
sanguine), I find a young but valued friend turn up, who is connected
with the most eventful period of my life; I may say, with the
turning-point of my existence. Copperfield, my dear fellow, how do you
do?’

I cannot say--I really cannot say--that I was glad to see Mr. Micawber
there; but I was glad to see him too, and shook hands with him,
heartily, inquiring how Mrs. Micawber was.

‘Thank you,’ said Mr. Micawber, waving his hand as of old, and settling
his chin in his shirt-collar. ‘She is tolerably convalescent. The twins
no longer derive their sustenance from Nature’s founts--in short,’ said
Mr. Micawber, in one of his bursts of confidence, ‘they are weaned--and
Mrs. Micawber is, at present, my travelling companion. She will be
rejoiced, Copperfield, to renew her acquaintance with one who has
proved himself in all respects a worthy minister at the sacred altar of
friendship.’

I said I should be delighted to see her.

‘You are very good,’ said Mr. Micawber.

Mr. Micawber then smiled, settled his chin again, and looked about him.

‘I have discovered my friend Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber genteelly,
and without addressing himself particularly to anyone, ‘not in solitude,
but partaking of a social meal in company with a widow lady, and one who
is apparently her offspring--in short,’ said Mr. Micawber, in another
of his bursts of confidence, ‘her son. I shall esteem it an honour to be
presented.’

I could do no less, under these circumstances, than make Mr. Micawber
known to Uriah Heep and his mother; which I accordingly did. As they
abased themselves before him, Mr. Micawber took a seat, and waved his
hand in his most courtly manner.

‘Any friend of my friend Copperfield’s,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘has a
personal claim upon myself.’

‘We are too umble, sir,’ said Mrs. Heep, ‘my son and me, to be the
friends of Master Copperfield. He has been so good as take his tea with
us, and we are thankful to him for his company, also to you, sir, for
your notice.’

‘Ma’am,’ returned Mr. Micawber, with a bow, ‘you are very obliging: and
what are you doing, Copperfield? Still in the wine trade?’

I was excessively anxious to get Mr. Micawber away; and replied, with my
hat in my hand, and a very red face, I have no doubt, that I was a pupil
at Doctor Strong’s.

‘A pupil?’ said Mr. Micawber, raising his eyebrows. ‘I am extremely
happy to hear it. Although a mind like my friend Copperfield’s’--to
Uriah and Mrs. Heep--‘does not require that cultivation which, without
his knowledge of men and things, it would require, still it is a rich
soil teeming with latent vegetation--in short,’ said Mr. Micawber,
smiling, in another burst of confidence, ‘it is an intellect capable of
getting up the classics to any extent.’

Uriah, with his long hands slowly twining over one another, made a
ghastly writhe from the waist upwards, to express his concurrence in
this estimation of me.

‘Shall we go and see Mrs. Micawber, sir?’ I said, to get Mr. Micawber
away.

‘If you will do her that favour, Copperfield,’ replied Mr. Micawber,
rising. ‘I have no scruple in saying, in the presence of our friends
here, that I am a man who has, for some years, contended against the
pressure of pecuniary difficulties.’ I knew he was certain to say
something of this kind; he always would be so boastful about his
difficulties. ‘Sometimes I have risen superior to my difficulties.
Sometimes my difficulties have--in short, have floored me. There have
been times when I have administered a succession of facers to them;
there have been times when they have been too many for me, and I have
given in, and said to Mrs. Micawber, in the words of Cato, “Plato, thou
reasonest well. It’s all up now. I can show fight no more.” But at no
time of my life,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘have I enjoyed a higher degree of
satisfaction than in pouring my griefs (if I may describe difficulties,
chiefly arising out of warrants of attorney and promissory notes at two
and four months, by that word) into the bosom of my friend Copperfield.’

Mr. Micawber closed this handsome tribute by saying, ‘Mr. Heep! Good
evening. Mrs. Heep! Your servant,’ and then walking out with me in his
most fashionable manner, making a good deal of noise on the pavement
with his shoes, and humming a tune as we went.

It was a little inn where Mr. Micawber put up, and he occupied a little
room in it, partitioned off from the commercial room, and strongly
flavoured with tobacco-smoke. I think it was over the kitchen, because
a warm greasy smell appeared to come up through the chinks in the floor,
and there was a flabby perspiration on the walls. I know it was near the
bar, on account of the smell of spirits and jingling of glasses. Here,
recumbent on a small sofa, underneath a picture of a race-horse, with
her head close to the fire, and her feet pushing the mustard off the
dumb-waiter at the other end of the room, was Mrs. Micawber, to whom Mr.
Micawber entered first, saying, ‘My dear, allow me to introduce to you a
pupil of Doctor Strong’s.’

I noticed, by the by, that although Mr. Micawber was just as much
confused as ever about my age and standing, he always remembered, as a
genteel thing, that I was a pupil of Doctor Strong’s.

Mrs. Micawber was amazed, but very glad to see me. I was very glad to
see her too, and, after an affectionate greeting on both sides, sat down
on the small sofa near her.

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘if you will mention to Copperfield what
our present position is, which I have no doubt he will like to know, I
will go and look at the paper the while, and see whether anything turns
up among the advertisements.’

‘I thought you were at Plymouth, ma’am,’ I said to Mrs. Micawber, as he
went out.

‘My dear Master Copperfield,’ she replied, ‘we went to Plymouth.’

‘To be on the spot,’ I hinted.

‘Just so,’ said Mrs. Micawber. ‘To be on the spot. But, the truth is,
talent is not wanted in the Custom House. The local influence of my
family was quite unavailing to obtain any employment in that department,
for a man of Mr. Micawber’s abilities. They would rather NOT have a man
of Mr. Micawber’s abilities. He would only show the deficiency of the
others. Apart from which,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘I will not disguise
from you, my dear Master Copperfield, that when that branch of my
family which is settled in Plymouth, became aware that Mr. Micawber was
accompanied by myself, and by little Wilkins and his sister, and by the
twins, they did not receive him with that ardour which he might have
expected, being so newly released from captivity. In fact,’ said Mrs.
Micawber, lowering her voice,--‘this is between ourselves--our reception
was cool.’

‘Dear me!’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Micawber. ‘It is truly painful to contemplate mankind
in such an aspect, Master Copperfield, but our reception was, decidedly,
cool. There is no doubt about it. In fact, that branch of my family
which is settled in Plymouth became quite personal to Mr. Micawber,
before we had been there a week.’

I said, and thought, that they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

‘Still, so it was,’ continued Mrs. Micawber. ‘Under such circumstances,
what could a man of Mr. Micawber’s spirit do? But one obvious course
was left. To borrow, of that branch of my family, the money to return to
London, and to return at any sacrifice.’

‘Then you all came back again, ma’am?’ I said.

‘We all came back again,’ replied Mrs. Micawber. ‘Since then, I have
consulted other branches of my family on the course which it is most
expedient for Mr. Micawber to take--for I maintain that he must take
some course, Master Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber, argumentatively.
‘It is clear that a family of six, not including a domestic, cannot live
upon air.’

‘Certainly, ma’am,’ said I.

‘The opinion of those other branches of my family,’ pursued Mrs.
Micawber, ‘is, that Mr. Micawber should immediately turn his attention
to coals.’

‘To what, ma’am?’

‘To coals,’ said Mrs. Micawber. ‘To the coal trade. Mr. Micawber was
induced to think, on inquiry, that there might be an opening for a
man of his talent in the Medway Coal Trade. Then, as Mr. Micawber very
properly said, the first step to be taken clearly was, to come and see
the Medway. Which we came and saw. I say “we”, Master Copperfield; for
I never will,’ said Mrs. Micawber with emotion, ‘I never will desert Mr.
Micawber.’

I murmured my admiration and approbation.

‘We came,’ repeated Mrs. Micawber, ‘and saw the Medway. My opinion of
the coal trade on that river is, that it may require talent, but that
it certainly requires capital. Talent, Mr. Micawber has; capital, Mr.
Micawber has not. We saw, I think, the greater part of the Medway; and
that is my individual conclusion. Being so near here, Mr. Micawber was
of opinion that it would be rash not to come on, and see the Cathedral.
Firstly, on account of its being so well worth seeing, and our never
having seen it; and secondly, on account of the great probability of
something turning up in a cathedral town. We have been here,’ said Mrs.
Micawber, ‘three days. Nothing has, as yet, turned up; and it may
not surprise you, my dear Master Copperfield, so much as it would a
stranger, to know that we are at present waiting for a remittance from
London, to discharge our pecuniary obligations at this hotel. Until the
arrival of that remittance,’ said Mrs. Micawber with much feeling, ‘I am
cut off from my home (I allude to lodgings in Pentonville), from my boy
and girl, and from my twins.’

I felt the utmost sympathy for Mr. and Mrs. Micawber in this anxious
extremity, and said as much to Mr. Micawber, who now returned: adding
that I only wished I had money enough, to lend them the amount they
needed. Mr. Micawber’s answer expressed the disturbance of his mind. He
said, shaking hands with me, ‘Copperfield, you are a true friend; but
when the worst comes to the worst, no man is without a friend who is
possessed of shaving materials.’ At this dreadful hint Mrs. Micawber
threw her arms round Mr. Micawber’s neck and entreated him to be calm.
He wept; but so far recovered, almost immediately, as to ring the bell
for the waiter, and bespeak a hot kidney pudding and a plate of shrimps
for breakfast in the morning.

When I took my leave of them, they both pressed me so much to come and
dine before they went away, that I could not refuse. But, as I knew I
could not come next day, when I should have a good deal to prepare in
the evening, Mr. Micawber arranged that he would call at Doctor Strong’s
in the course of the morning (having a presentiment that the remittance
would arrive by that post), and propose the day after, if it would suit
me better. Accordingly I was called out of school next forenoon, and
found Mr. Micawber in the parlour; who had called to say that the dinner
would take place as proposed. When I asked him if the remittance had
come, he pressed my hand and departed.

As I was looking out of window that same evening, it surprised me, and
made me rather uneasy, to see Mr. Micawber and Uriah Heep walk past, arm
in arm: Uriah humbly sensible of the honour that was done him, and Mr.
Micawber taking a bland delight in extending his patronage to Uriah. But
I was still more surprised, when I went to the little hotel next day at
the appointed dinner-hour, which was four o’clock, to find, from what
Mr. Micawber said, that he had gone home with Uriah, and had drunk
brandy-and-water at Mrs. Heep’s.

‘And I’ll tell you what, my dear Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘your
friend Heep is a young fellow who might be attorney-general. If I had
known that young man, at the period when my difficulties came to a
crisis, all I can say is, that I believe my creditors would have been a
great deal better managed than they were.’

I hardly understood how this could have been, seeing that Mr. Micawber
had paid them nothing at all as it was; but I did not like to
ask. Neither did I like to say, that I hoped he had not been too
communicative to Uriah; or to inquire if they had talked much about me.
I was afraid of hurting Mr. Micawber’s feelings, or, at all events, Mrs.
Micawber’s, she being very sensitive; but I was uncomfortable about it,
too, and often thought about it afterwards.

We had a beautiful little dinner. Quite an elegant dish of fish; the
kidney-end of a loin of veal, roasted; fried sausage-meat; a partridge,
and a pudding. There was wine, and there was strong ale; and after
dinner Mrs. Micawber made us a bowl of hot punch with her own hands.

Mr. Micawber was uncommonly convivial. I never saw him such good
company. He made his face shine with the punch, so that it looked as if
it had been varnished all over. He got cheerfully sentimental about
the town, and proposed success to it; observing that Mrs. Micawber and
himself had been made extremely snug and comfortable there and that he
never should forget the agreeable hours they had passed in Canterbury.
He proposed me afterwards; and he, and Mrs. Micawber, and I, took a
review of our past acquaintance, in the course of which we sold the
property all over again. Then I proposed Mrs. Micawber: or, at least,
said, modestly, ‘If you’ll allow me, Mrs. Micawber, I shall now have
the pleasure of drinking your health, ma’am.’ On which Mr. Micawber
delivered an eulogium on Mrs. Micawber’s character, and said she
had ever been his guide, philosopher, and friend, and that he would
recommend me, when I came to a marrying time of life, to marry such
another woman, if such another woman could be found.

As the punch disappeared, Mr. Micawber became still more friendly and
convivial. Mrs. Micawber’s spirits becoming elevated, too, we sang ‘Auld
Lang Syne’. When we came to ‘Here’s a hand, my trusty frere’, we all
joined hands round the table; and when we declared we would ‘take a
right gude Willie Waught’, and hadn’t the least idea what it meant, we
were really affected.

In a word, I never saw anybody so thoroughly jovial as Mr. Micawber
was, down to the very last moment of the evening, when I took a hearty
farewell of himself and his amiable wife. Consequently, I was not
prepared, at seven o’clock next morning, to receive the following
communication, dated half past nine in the evening; a quarter of an hour
after I had left him:--

‘My DEAR YOUNG FRIEND,

‘The die is cast--all is over. Hiding the ravages of care with a sickly
mask of mirth, I have not informed you, this evening, that there is no
hope of the remittance! Under these circumstances, alike humiliating to
endure, humiliating to contemplate, and humiliating to relate, I have
discharged the pecuniary liability contracted at this establishment,
by giving a note of hand, made payable fourteen days after date, at
my residence, Pentonville, London. When it becomes due, it will not be
taken up. The result is destruction. The bolt is impending, and the tree
must fall.

‘Let the wretched man who now addresses you, my dear Copperfield, be a
beacon to you through life. He writes with that intention, and in that
hope. If he could think himself of so much use, one gleam of day might,
by possibility, penetrate into the cheerless dungeon of his remaining
existence--though his longevity is, at present (to say the least of it),
extremely problematical.

‘This is the last communication, my dear Copperfield, you will ever
receive

                         ‘From

                              ‘The

                                   ‘Beggared Outcast,

                                        ‘WILKINS MICAWBER.’


I was so shocked by the contents of this heart-rending letter, that I
ran off directly towards the little hotel with the intention of taking
it on my way to Doctor Strong’s, and trying to soothe Mr. Micawber with
a word of comfort. But, half-way there, I met the London coach with Mr.
and Mrs. Micawber up behind; Mr. Micawber, the very picture of tranquil
enjoyment, smiling at Mrs. Micawber’s conversation, eating walnuts out
of a paper bag, with a bottle sticking out of his breast pocket. As they
did not see me, I thought it best, all things considered, not to
see them. So, with a great weight taken off my mind, I turned into a
by-street that was the nearest way to school, and felt, upon the whole,
relieved that they were gone; though I still liked them very much,
nevertheless.



CHAPTER 18. A RETROSPECT


My school-days! The silent gliding on of my existence--the unseen,
unfelt progress of my life--from childhood up to youth! Let me think,
as I look back upon that flowing water, now a dry channel overgrown with
leaves, whether there are any marks along its course, by which I can
remember how it ran.

A moment, and I occupy my place in the Cathedral, where we all went
together, every Sunday morning, assembling first at school for that
purpose. The earthy smell, the sunless air, the sensation of the world
being shut out, the resounding of the organ through the black and white
arched galleries and aisles, are wings that take me back, and hold me
hovering above those days, in a half-sleeping and half-waking dream.

I am not the last boy in the school. I have risen in a few months, over
several heads. But the first boy seems to me a mighty creature, dwelling
afar off, whose giddy height is unattainable. Agnes says ‘No,’ but I say
‘Yes,’ and tell her that she little thinks what stores of knowledge have
been mastered by the wonderful Being, at whose place she thinks I, even
I, weak aspirant, may arrive in time. He is not my private friend
and public patron, as Steerforth was, but I hold him in a reverential
respect. I chiefly wonder what he’ll be, when he leaves Doctor Strong’s,
and what mankind will do to maintain any place against him.

But who is this that breaks upon me? This is Miss Shepherd, whom I love.

Miss Shepherd is a boarder at the Misses Nettingalls’ establishment. I
adore Miss Shepherd. She is a little girl, in a spencer, with a round
face and curly flaxen hair. The Misses Nettingalls’ young ladies come to
the Cathedral too. I cannot look upon my book, for I must look upon
Miss Shepherd. When the choristers chaunt, I hear Miss Shepherd. In the
service I mentally insert Miss Shepherd’s name--I put her in among the
Royal Family. At home, in my own room, I am sometimes moved to cry out,
‘Oh, Miss Shepherd!’ in a transport of love.

For some time, I am doubtful of Miss Shepherd’s feelings, but, at
length, Fate being propitious, we meet at the dancing-school. I have
Miss Shepherd for my partner. I touch Miss Shepherd’s glove, and feel a
thrill go up the right arm of my jacket, and come out at my hair. I say
nothing to Miss Shepherd, but we understand each other. Miss Shepherd
and myself live but to be united.

Why do I secretly give Miss Shepherd twelve Brazil nuts for a present, I
wonder? They are not expressive of affection, they are difficult to pack
into a parcel of any regular shape, they are hard to crack, even in
room doors, and they are oily when cracked; yet I feel that they are
appropriate to Miss Shepherd. Soft, seedy biscuits, also, I bestow upon
Miss Shepherd; and oranges innumerable. Once, I kiss Miss Shepherd in
the cloak-room. Ecstasy! What are my agony and indignation next day,
when I hear a flying rumour that the Misses Nettingall have stood Miss
Shepherd in the stocks for turning in her toes!

Miss Shepherd being the one pervading theme and vision of my life, how
do I ever come to break with her? I can’t conceive. And yet a coolness
grows between Miss Shepherd and myself. Whispers reach me of Miss
Shepherd having said she wished I wouldn’t stare so, and having avowed a
preference for Master Jones--for Jones! a boy of no merit whatever! The
gulf between me and Miss Shepherd widens. At last, one day, I meet the
Misses Nettingalls’ establishment out walking. Miss Shepherd makes
a face as she goes by, and laughs to her companion. All is over. The
devotion of a life--it seems a life, it is all the same--is at an end;
Miss Shepherd comes out of the morning service, and the Royal Family
know her no more.

I am higher in the school, and no one breaks my peace. I am not at all
polite, now, to the Misses Nettingalls’ young ladies, and shouldn’t
dote on any of them, if they were twice as many and twenty times as
beautiful. I think the dancing-school a tiresome affair, and wonder why
the girls can’t dance by themselves and leave us alone. I am growing
great in Latin verses, and neglect the laces of my boots. Doctor Strong
refers to me in public as a promising young scholar. Mr. Dick is wild
with joy, and my aunt remits me a guinea by the next post.

The shade of a young butcher rises, like the apparition of an armed head
in Macbeth. Who is this young butcher? He is the terror of the youth
of Canterbury. There is a vague belief abroad, that the beef suet with
which he anoints his hair gives him unnatural strength, and that he is
a match for a man. He is a broad-faced, bull-necked, young butcher, with
rough red cheeks, an ill-conditioned mind, and an injurious tongue.
His main use of this tongue, is, to disparage Doctor Strong’s young
gentlemen. He says, publicly, that if they want anything he’ll give it
‘em. He names individuals among them (myself included), whom he could
undertake to settle with one hand, and the other tied behind him. He
waylays the smaller boys to punch their unprotected heads, and calls
challenges after me in the open streets. For these sufficient reasons I
resolve to fight the butcher.

It is a summer evening, down in a green hollow, at the corner of a wall.
I meet the butcher by appointment. I am attended by a select body of our
boys; the butcher, by two other butchers, a young publican, and a sweep.
The preliminaries are adjusted, and the butcher and myself stand face to
face. In a moment the butcher lights ten thousand candles out of my left
eyebrow. In another moment, I don’t know where the wall is, or where
I am, or where anybody is. I hardly know which is myself and which the
butcher, we are always in such a tangle and tussle, knocking about upon
the trodden grass. Sometimes I see the butcher, bloody but confident;
sometimes I see nothing, and sit gasping on my second’s knee; sometimes
I go in at the butcher madly, and cut my knuckles open against his face,
without appearing to discompose him at all. At last I awake, very queer
about the head, as from a giddy sleep, and see the butcher walking off,
congratulated by the two other butchers and the sweep and publican, and
putting on his coat as he goes; from which I augur, justly, that the
victory is his.

I am taken home in a sad plight, and I have beef-steaks put to my eyes,
and am rubbed with vinegar and brandy, and find a great puffy place
bursting out on my upper lip, which swells immoderately. For three or
four days I remain at home, a very ill-looking subject, with a green
shade over my eyes; and I should be very dull, but that Agnes is a
sister to me, and condoles with me, and reads to me, and makes the time
light and happy. Agnes has my confidence completely, always; I tell her
all about the butcher, and the wrongs he has heaped upon me; she thinks
I couldn’t have done otherwise than fight the butcher, while she shrinks
and trembles at my having fought him.

Time has stolen on unobserved, for Adams is not the head-boy in the days
that are come now, nor has he been this many and many a day. Adams has
left the school so long, that when he comes back, on a visit to Doctor
Strong, there are not many there, besides myself, who know him. Adams is
going to be called to the bar almost directly, and is to be an advocate,
and to wear a wig. I am surprised to find him a meeker man than I had
thought, and less imposing in appearance. He has not staggered the world
yet, either; for it goes on (as well as I can make out) pretty much the
same as if he had never joined it.

A blank, through which the warriors of poetry and history march on in
stately hosts that seem to have no end--and what comes next! I am
the head-boy, now! I look down on the line of boys below me, with a
condescending interest in such of them as bring to my mind the boy I was
myself, when I first came there. That little fellow seems to be no part
of me; I remember him as something left behind upon the road of life--as
something I have passed, rather than have actually been--and almost
think of him as of someone else.

And the little girl I saw on that first day at Mr. Wickfield’s, where
is she? Gone also. In her stead, the perfect likeness of the picture,
a child likeness no more, moves about the house; and Agnes--my sweet
sister, as I call her in my thoughts, my counsellor and friend, the
better angel of the lives of all who come within her calm, good,
self-denying influence--is quite a woman.

What other changes have come upon me, besides the changes in my growth
and looks, and in the knowledge I have garnered all this while? I wear
a gold watch and chain, a ring upon my little finger, and a long-tailed
coat; and I use a great deal of bear’s grease--which, taken in
conjunction with the ring, looks bad. Am I in love again? I am. I
worship the eldest Miss Larkins.

The eldest Miss Larkins is not a little girl. She is a tall, dark,
black-eyed, fine figure of a woman. The eldest Miss Larkins is not a
chicken; for the youngest Miss Larkins is not that, and the eldest must
be three or four years older. Perhaps the eldest Miss Larkins may be
about thirty. My passion for her is beyond all bounds.

The eldest Miss Larkins knows officers. It is an awful thing to bear. I
see them speaking to her in the street. I see them cross the way to meet
her, when her bonnet (she has a bright taste in bonnets) is seen coming
down the pavement, accompanied by her sister’s bonnet. She laughs and
talks, and seems to like it. I spend a good deal of my own spare time in
walking up and down to meet her. If I can bow to her once in the day (I
know her to bow to, knowing Mr. Larkins), I am happier. I deserve a bow
now and then. The raging agonies I suffer on the night of the Race Ball,
where I know the eldest Miss Larkins will be dancing with the military,
ought to have some compensation, if there be even-handed justice in the
world.

My passion takes away my appetite, and makes me wear my newest silk
neckerchief continually. I have no relief but in putting on my best
clothes, and having my boots cleaned over and over again. I seem, then,
to be worthier of the eldest Miss Larkins. Everything that belongs to
her, or is connected with her, is precious to me. Mr. Larkins (a gruff
old gentleman with a double chin, and one of his eyes immovable in his
head) is fraught with interest to me. When I can’t meet his daughter,
I go where I am likely to meet him. To say ‘How do you do, Mr. Larkins?
Are the young ladies and all the family quite well?’ seems so pointed,
that I blush.

I think continually about my age. Say I am seventeen, and say that
seventeen is young for the eldest Miss Larkins, what of that? Besides,
I shall be one-and-twenty in no time almost. I regularly take walks
outside Mr. Larkins’s house in the evening, though it cuts me to the
heart to see the officers go in, or to hear them up in the drawing-room,
where the eldest Miss Larkins plays the harp. I even walk, on two or
three occasions, in a sickly, spoony manner, round and round the house
after the family are gone to bed, wondering which is the eldest Miss
Larkins’s chamber (and pitching, I dare say now, on Mr. Larkins’s
instead); wishing that a fire would burst out; that the assembled crowd
would stand appalled; that I, dashing through them with a ladder, might
rear it against her window, save her in my arms, go back for something
she had left behind, and perish in the flames. For I am generally
disinterested in my love, and think I could be content to make a figure
before Miss Larkins, and expire.

Generally, but not always. Sometimes brighter visions rise before me.
When I dress (the occupation of two hours), for a great ball given at
the Larkins’s (the anticipation of three weeks), I indulge my fancy with
pleasing images. I picture myself taking courage to make a declaration
to Miss Larkins. I picture Miss Larkins sinking her head upon my
shoulder, and saying, ‘Oh, Mr. Copperfield, can I believe my ears!’ I
picture Mr. Larkins waiting on me next morning, and saying, ‘My dear
Copperfield, my daughter has told me all. Youth is no objection. Here
are twenty thousand pounds. Be happy!’ I picture my aunt relenting,
and blessing us; and Mr. Dick and Doctor Strong being present at the
marriage ceremony. I am a sensible fellow, I believe--I believe,
on looking back, I mean--and modest I am sure; but all this goes on
notwithstanding. I repair to the enchanted house, where there are
lights, chattering, music, flowers, officers (I am sorry to see), and
the eldest Miss Larkins, a blaze of beauty. She is dressed in blue, with
blue flowers in her hair--forget-me-nots--as if SHE had any need to wear
forget-me-nots. It is the first really grown-up party that I have ever
been invited to, and I am a little uncomfortable; for I appear not to
belong to anybody, and nobody appears to have anything to say to me,
except Mr. Larkins, who asks me how my schoolfellows are, which he
needn’t do, as I have not come there to be insulted.

But after I have stood in the doorway for some time, and feasted my eyes
upon the goddess of my heart, she approaches me--she, the eldest Miss
Larkins!--and asks me pleasantly, if I dance?

I stammer, with a bow, ‘With you, Miss Larkins.’

‘With no one else?’ inquires Miss Larkins.

‘I should have no pleasure in dancing with anyone else.’

Miss Larkins laughs and blushes (or I think she blushes), and says,
‘Next time but one, I shall be very glad.’

The time arrives. ‘It is a waltz, I think,’ Miss Larkins doubtfully
observes, when I present myself. ‘Do you waltz? If not, Captain
Bailey--’

But I do waltz (pretty well, too, as it happens), and I take Miss
Larkins out. I take her sternly from the side of Captain Bailey. He
is wretched, I have no doubt; but he is nothing to me. I have been
wretched, too. I waltz with the eldest Miss Larkins! I don’t know where,
among whom, or how long. I only know that I swim about in space, with a
blue angel, in a state of blissful delirium, until I find myself alone
with her in a little room, resting on a sofa. She admires a flower (pink
camellia japonica, price half-a-crown), in my button-hole. I give it
her, and say:

‘I ask an inestimable price for it, Miss Larkins.’

‘Indeed! What is that?’ returns Miss Larkins.

‘A flower of yours, that I may treasure it as a miser does gold.’

‘You’re a bold boy,’ says Miss Larkins. ‘There.’

She gives it me, not displeased; and I put it to my lips, and then into
my breast. Miss Larkins, laughing, draws her hand through my arm, and
says, ‘Now take me back to Captain Bailey.’

I am lost in the recollection of this delicious interview, and the
waltz, when she comes to me again, with a plain elderly gentleman who
has been playing whist all night, upon her arm, and says:

‘Oh! here is my bold friend! Mr. Chestle wants to know you, Mr.
Copperfield.’

I feel at once that he is a friend of the family, and am much gratified.

‘I admire your taste, sir,’ says Mr. Chestle. ‘It does you credit. I
suppose you don’t take much interest in hops; but I am a pretty
large grower myself; and if you ever like to come over to our
neighbourhood--neighbourhood of Ashford--and take a run about our
place,--we shall be glad for you to stop as long as you like.’

I thank Mr. Chestle warmly, and shake hands. I think I am in a happy
dream. I waltz with the eldest Miss Larkins once again. She says I
waltz so well! I go home in a state of unspeakable bliss, and waltz in
imagination, all night long, with my arm round the blue waist of my dear
divinity. For some days afterwards, I am lost in rapturous reflections;
but I neither see her in the street, nor when I call. I am imperfectly
consoled for this disappointment by the sacred pledge, the perished
flower.

‘Trotwood,’ says Agnes, one day after dinner. ‘Who do you think is going
to be married tomorrow? Someone you admire.’

‘Not you, I suppose, Agnes?’

‘Not me!’ raising her cheerful face from the music she is copying. ‘Do
you hear him, Papa?--The eldest Miss Larkins.’

‘To--to Captain Bailey?’ I have just enough power to ask.

‘No; to no Captain. To Mr. Chestle, a hop-grower.’

I am terribly dejected for about a week or two. I take off my ring, I
wear my worst clothes, I use no bear’s grease, and I frequently lament
over the late Miss Larkins’s faded flower. Being, by that time, rather
tired of this kind of life, and having received new provocation from
the butcher, I throw the flower away, go out with the butcher, and
gloriously defeat him.

This, and the resumption of my ring, as well as of the bear’s grease
in moderation, are the last marks I can discern, now, in my progress to
seventeen.



CHAPTER 19. I LOOK ABOUT ME, AND MAKE A DISCOVERY


I am doubtful whether I was at heart glad or sorry, when my school-days
drew to an end, and the time came for my leaving Doctor Strong’s. I had
been very happy there, I had a great attachment for the Doctor, and I
was eminent and distinguished in that little world. For these reasons
I was sorry to go; but for other reasons, unsubstantial enough, I
was glad. Misty ideas of being a young man at my own disposal, of
the importance attaching to a young man at his own disposal, of the
wonderful things to be seen and done by that magnificent animal, and the
wonderful effects he could not fail to make upon society, lured me away.
So powerful were these visionary considerations in my boyish mind, that
I seem, according to my present way of thinking, to have left school
without natural regret. The separation has not made the impression on
me, that other separations have. I try in vain to recall how I felt
about it, and what its circumstances were; but it is not momentous in my
recollection. I suppose the opening prospect confused me. I know that my
juvenile experiences went for little or nothing then; and that life was
more like a great fairy story, which I was just about to begin to read,
than anything else.

My aunt and I had held many grave deliberations on the calling to which
I should be devoted. For a year or more I had endeavoured to find a
satisfactory answer to her often-repeated question, ‘What I would like
to be?’ But I had no particular liking, that I could discover, for
anything. If I could have been inspired with a knowledge of the science
of navigation, taken the command of a fast-sailing expedition, and gone
round the world on a triumphant voyage of discovery, I think I might
have considered myself completely suited. But, in the absence of any
such miraculous provision, my desire was to apply myself to some pursuit
that would not lie too heavily upon her purse; and to do my duty in it,
whatever it might be.

Mr. Dick had regularly assisted at our councils, with a meditative
and sage demeanour. He never made a suggestion but once; and on that
occasion (I don’t know what put it in his head), he suddenly proposed
that I should be ‘a Brazier’. My aunt received this proposal so very
ungraciously, that he never ventured on a second; but ever afterwards
confined himself to looking watchfully at her for her suggestions, and
rattling his money.

‘Trot, I tell you what, my dear,’ said my aunt, one morning in the
Christmas season when I left school: ‘as this knotty point is still
unsettled, and as we must not make a mistake in our decision if we can
help it, I think we had better take a little breathing-time. In the
meanwhile, you must try to look at it from a new point of view, and not
as a schoolboy.’

‘I will, aunt.’

‘It has occurred to me,’ pursued my aunt, ‘that a little change, and a
glimpse of life out of doors, may be useful in helping you to know your
own mind, and form a cooler judgement. Suppose you were to go down into
the old part of the country again, for instance, and see that--that
out-of-the-way woman with the savagest of names,’ said my aunt, rubbing
her nose, for she could never thoroughly forgive Peggotty for being so
called.

‘Of all things in the world, aunt, I should like it best!’

‘Well,’ said my aunt, ‘that’s lucky, for I should like it too. But
it’s natural and rational that you should like it. And I am very
well persuaded that whatever you do, Trot, will always be natural and
rational.’

‘I hope so, aunt.’

‘Your sister, Betsey Trotwood,’ said my aunt, ‘would have been as
natural and rational a girl as ever breathed. You’ll be worthy of her,
won’t you?’

‘I hope I shall be worthy of YOU, aunt. That will be enough for me.’

‘It’s a mercy that poor dear baby of a mother of yours didn’t live,’
said my aunt, looking at me approvingly, ‘or she’d have been so vain
of her boy by this time, that her soft little head would have been
completely turned, if there was anything of it left to turn.’ (My aunt
always excused any weakness of her own in my behalf, by transferring it
in this way to my poor mother.) ‘Bless me, Trotwood, how you do remind
me of her!’

‘Pleasantly, I hope, aunt?’ said I.

‘He’s as like her, Dick,’ said my aunt, emphatically, ‘he’s as like her,
as she was that afternoon before she began to fret--bless my heart, he’s
as like her, as he can look at me out of his two eyes!’

‘Is he indeed?’ said Mr. Dick.

‘And he’s like David, too,’ said my aunt, decisively.

‘He is very like David!’ said Mr. Dick.

‘But what I want you to be, Trot,’ resumed my aunt, ‘--I don’t mean
physically, but morally; you are very well physically--is, a firm
fellow. A fine firm fellow, with a will of your own. With resolution,’
said my aunt, shaking her cap at me, and clenching her hand. ‘With
determination. With character, Trot--with strength of character that is
not to be influenced, except on good reason, by anybody, or by anything.
That’s what I want you to be. That’s what your father and mother might
both have been, Heaven knows, and been the better for it.’

I intimated that I hoped I should be what she described.

‘That you may begin, in a small way, to have a reliance upon yourself,
and to act for yourself,’ said my aunt, ‘I shall send you upon your
trip, alone. I did think, once, of Mr. Dick’s going with you; but, on
second thoughts, I shall keep him to take care of me.’

Mr. Dick, for a moment, looked a little disappointed; until the honour
and dignity of having to take care of the most wonderful woman in the
world, restored the sunshine to his face.

‘Besides,’ said my aunt, ‘there’s the Memorial--’

‘Oh, certainly,’ said Mr. Dick, in a hurry, ‘I intend, Trotwood, to get
that done immediately--it really must be done immediately! And then it
will go in, you know--and then--’ said Mr. Dick, after checking himself,
and pausing a long time, ‘there’ll be a pretty kettle of fish!’

In pursuance of my aunt’s kind scheme, I was shortly afterwards fitted
out with a handsome purse of money, and a portmanteau, and tenderly
dismissed upon my expedition. At parting, my aunt gave me some good
advice, and a good many kisses; and said that as her object was that I
should look about me, and should think a little, she would recommend me
to stay a few days in London, if I liked it, either on my way down into
Suffolk, or in coming back. In a word, I was at liberty to do what I
would, for three weeks or a month; and no other conditions were imposed
upon my freedom than the before-mentioned thinking and looking about me,
and a pledge to write three times a week and faithfully report myself.

I went to Canterbury first, that I might take leave of Agnes and Mr.
Wickfield (my old room in whose house I had not yet relinquished), and
also of the good Doctor. Agnes was very glad to see me, and told me that
the house had not been like itself since I had left it.

‘I am sure I am not like myself when I am away,’ said I. ‘I seem to
want my right hand, when I miss you. Though that’s not saying much; for
there’s no head in my right hand, and no heart. Everyone who knows you,
consults with you, and is guided by you, Agnes.’

‘Everyone who knows me, spoils me, I believe,’ she answered, smiling.

‘No. It’s because you are like no one else. You are so good, and so
sweet-tempered. You have such a gentle nature, and you are always
right.’

‘You talk,’ said Agnes, breaking into a pleasant laugh, as she sat at
work, ‘as if I were the late Miss Larkins.’

‘Come! It’s not fair to abuse my confidence,’ I answered, reddening at
the recollection of my blue enslaver. ‘But I shall confide in you, just
the same, Agnes. I can never grow out of that. Whenever I fall into
trouble, or fall in love, I shall always tell you, if you’ll let
me--even when I come to fall in love in earnest.’

‘Why, you have always been in earnest!’ said Agnes, laughing again.

‘Oh! that was as a child, or a schoolboy,’ said I, laughing in my turn,
not without being a little shame-faced. ‘Times are altering now, and I
suppose I shall be in a terrible state of earnestness one day or other.
My wonder is, that you are not in earnest yourself, by this time,
Agnes.’

Agnes laughed again, and shook her head.

‘Oh, I know you are not!’ said I, ‘because if you had been you would
have told me. Or at least’--for I saw a faint blush in her face, ‘you
would have let me find it out for myself. But there is no one that I
know of, who deserves to love you, Agnes. Someone of a nobler character,
and more worthy altogether than anyone I have ever seen here, must rise
up, before I give my consent. In the time to come, I shall have a wary
eye on all admirers; and shall exact a great deal from the successful
one, I assure you.’

We had gone on, so far, in a mixture of confidential jest and earnest,
that had long grown naturally out of our familiar relations, begun as
mere children. But Agnes, now suddenly lifting up her eyes to mine, and
speaking in a different manner, said:

‘Trotwood, there is something that I want to ask you, and that I may not
have another opportunity of asking for a long time, perhaps--something
I would ask, I think, of no one else. Have you observed any gradual
alteration in Papa?’

I had observed it, and had often wondered whether she had too. I must
have shown as much, now, in my face; for her eyes were in a moment cast
down, and I saw tears in them.

‘Tell me what it is,’ she said, in a low voice.

‘I think--shall I be quite plain, Agnes, liking him so much?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I think he does himself no good by the habit that has increased upon
him since I first came here. He is often very nervous--or I fancy so.’

‘It is not fancy,’ said Agnes, shaking her head.

‘His hand trembles, his speech is not plain, and his eyes look wild. I
have remarked that at those times, and when he is least like himself, he
is most certain to be wanted on some business.’

‘By Uriah,’ said Agnes.

‘Yes; and the sense of being unfit for it, or of not having understood
it, or of having shown his condition in spite of himself, seems to make
him so uneasy, that next day he is worse, and next day worse, and so he
becomes jaded and haggard. Do not be alarmed by what I say, Agnes, but
in this state I saw him, only the other evening, lay down his head upon
his desk, and shed tears like a child.’

Her hand passed softly before my lips while I was yet speaking, and in
a moment she had met her father at the door of the room, and was hanging
on his shoulder. The expression of her face, as they both looked towards
me, I felt to be very touching. There was such deep fondness for him,
and gratitude to him for all his love and care, in her beautiful look;
and there was such a fervent appeal to me to deal tenderly by him, even
in my inmost thoughts, and to let no harsh construction find any place
against him; she was, at once, so proud of him and devoted to him, yet
so compassionate and sorry, and so reliant upon me to be so, too; that
nothing she could have said would have expressed more to me, or moved me
more.

We were to drink tea at the Doctor’s. We went there at the usual hour;
and round the study fireside found the Doctor, and his young wife, and
her mother. The Doctor, who made as much of my going away as if I were
going to China, received me as an honoured guest; and called for a log
of wood to be thrown on the fire, that he might see the face of his old
pupil reddening in the blaze.

‘I shall not see many more new faces in Trotwood’s stead, Wickfield,’
said the Doctor, warming his hands; ‘I am getting lazy, and want ease.
I shall relinquish all my young people in another six months, and lead a
quieter life.’

‘You have said so, any time these ten years, Doctor,’ Mr. Wickfield
answered.

‘But now I mean to do it,’ returned the Doctor. ‘My first master will
succeed me--I am in earnest at last--so you’ll soon have to arrange our
contracts, and to bind us firmly to them, like a couple of knaves.’

‘And to take care,’ said Mr. Wickfield, ‘that you’re not imposed on, eh?
As you certainly would be, in any contract you should make for yourself.
Well! I am ready. There are worse tasks than that, in my calling.’

‘I shall have nothing to think of then,’ said the Doctor, with a smile,
‘but my Dictionary; and this other contract-bargain--Annie.’

As Mr. Wickfield glanced towards her, sitting at the tea table by Agnes,
she seemed to me to avoid his look with such unwonted hesitation and
timidity, that his attention became fixed upon her, as if something were
suggested to his thoughts.

‘There is a post come in from India, I observe,’ he said, after a short
silence.

‘By the by! and letters from Mr. Jack Maldon!’ said the Doctor.

‘Indeed!’ ‘Poor dear Jack!’ said Mrs. Markleham, shaking her head. ‘That
trying climate!--like living, they tell me, on a sand-heap, underneath
a burning-glass! He looked strong, but he wasn’t. My dear Doctor, it was
his spirit, not his constitution, that he ventured on so boldly. Annie,
my dear, I am sure you must perfectly recollect that your cousin
never was strong--not what can be called ROBUST, you know,’ said Mrs.
Markleham, with emphasis, and looking round upon us generally, ‘--from
the time when my daughter and himself were children together, and
walking about, arm-in-arm, the livelong day.’

Annie, thus addressed, made no reply.

‘Do I gather from what you say, ma’am, that Mr. Maldon is ill?’ asked
Mr. Wickfield.

‘Ill!’ replied the Old Soldier. ‘My dear sir, he’s all sorts of things.’

‘Except well?’ said Mr. Wickfield.

‘Except well, indeed!’ said the Old Soldier. ‘He has had dreadful
strokes of the sun, no doubt, and jungle fevers and agues, and every
kind of thing you can mention. As to his liver,’ said the Old Soldier
resignedly, ‘that, of course, he gave up altogether, when he first went
out!’

‘Does he say all this?’ asked Mr. Wickfield.

‘Say? My dear sir,’ returned Mrs. Markleham, shaking her head and her
fan, ‘you little know my poor Jack Maldon when you ask that question.
Say? Not he. You might drag him at the heels of four wild horses first.’

‘Mama!’ said Mrs. Strong.

‘Annie, my dear,’ returned her mother, ‘once for all, I must really beg
that you will not interfere with me, unless it is to confirm what I say.
You know as well as I do that your cousin Maldon would be dragged at the
heels of any number of wild horses--why should I confine myself to four!
I WON’T confine myself to four--eight, sixteen, two-and-thirty, rather
than say anything calculated to overturn the Doctor’s plans.’

‘Wickfield’s plans,’ said the Doctor, stroking his face, and looking
penitently at his adviser. ‘That is to say, our joint plans for him. I
said myself, abroad or at home.’

‘And I said’ added Mr. Wickfield gravely, ‘abroad. I was the means of
sending him abroad. It’s my responsibility.’

‘Oh! Responsibility!’ said the Old Soldier. ‘Everything was done for
the best, my dear Mr. Wickfield; everything was done for the kindest and
best, we know. But if the dear fellow can’t live there, he can’t live
there. And if he can’t live there, he’ll die there, sooner than he’ll
overturn the Doctor’s plans. I know him,’ said the Old Soldier, fanning
herself, in a sort of calm prophetic agony, ‘and I know he’ll die there,
sooner than he’ll overturn the Doctor’s plans.’

‘Well, well, ma’am,’ said the Doctor cheerfully, ‘I am not bigoted to
my plans, and I can overturn them myself. I can substitute some other
plans. If Mr. Jack Maldon comes home on account of ill health, he must
not be allowed to go back, and we must endeavour to make some more
suitable and fortunate provision for him in this country.’

Mrs. Markleham was so overcome by this generous speech--which, I need
not say, she had not at all expected or led up to--that she could only
tell the Doctor it was like himself, and go several times through that
operation of kissing the sticks of her fan, and then tapping his hand
with it. After which she gently chid her daughter Annie, for not being
more demonstrative when such kindnesses were showered, for her sake, on
her old playfellow; and entertained us with some particulars concerning
other deserving members of her family, whom it was desirable to set on
their deserving legs.

All this time, her daughter Annie never once spoke, or lifted up her
eyes. All this time, Mr. Wickfield had his glance upon her as she sat
by his own daughter’s side. It appeared to me that he never thought of
being observed by anyone; but was so intent upon her, and upon his own
thoughts in connexion with her, as to be quite absorbed. He now asked
what Mr. Jack Maldon had actually written in reference to himself, and
to whom he had written?

‘Why, here,’ said Mrs. Markleham, taking a letter from the chimney-piece
above the Doctor’s head, ‘the dear fellow says to the Doctor
himself--where is it? Oh!--“I am sorry to inform you that my health is
suffering severely, and that I fear I may be reduced to the necessity
of returning home for a time, as the only hope of restoration.” That’s
pretty plain, poor fellow! His only hope of restoration! But Annie’s
letter is plainer still. Annie, show me that letter again.’

‘Not now, mama,’ she pleaded in a low tone.

‘My dear, you absolutely are, on some subjects, one of the most
ridiculous persons in the world,’ returned her mother, ‘and perhaps the
most unnatural to the claims of your own family. We never should have
heard of the letter at all, I believe, unless I had asked for it myself.
Do you call that confidence, my love, towards Doctor Strong? I am
surprised. You ought to know better.’

The letter was reluctantly produced; and as I handed it to the old lady,
I saw how the unwilling hand from which I took it, trembled.

‘Now let us see,’ said Mrs. Markleham, putting her glass to her eye,
‘where the passage is. “The remembrance of old times, my dearest
Annie”--and so forth--it’s not there. “The amiable old Proctor”--who’s
he? Dear me, Annie, how illegibly your cousin Maldon writes, and how
stupid I am! “Doctor,” of course. Ah! amiable indeed!’ Here she left
off, to kiss her fan again, and shake it at the Doctor, who was looking
at us in a state of placid satisfaction. ‘Now I have found it. “You may
not be surprised to hear, Annie,”--no, to be sure, knowing that he never
was really strong; what did I say just now?--“that I have undergone
so much in this distant place, as to have decided to leave it at all
hazards; on sick leave, if I can; on total resignation, if that is
not to be obtained. What I have endured, and do endure here, is
insupportable.” And but for the promptitude of that best of creatures,’
said Mrs. Markleham, telegraphing the Doctor as before, and refolding
the letter, ‘it would be insupportable to me to think of.’

Mr. Wickfield said not one word, though the old lady looked to him as if
for his commentary on this intelligence; but sat severely silent, with
his eyes fixed on the ground. Long after the subject was dismissed,
and other topics occupied us, he remained so; seldom raising his eyes,
unless to rest them for a moment, with a thoughtful frown, upon the
Doctor, or his wife, or both.

The Doctor was very fond of music. Agnes sang with great sweetness and
expression, and so did Mrs. Strong. They sang together, and played duets
together, and we had quite a little concert. But I remarked two things:
first, that though Annie soon recovered her composure, and was quite
herself, there was a blank between her and Mr. Wickfield which separated
them wholly from each other; secondly, that Mr. Wickfield seemed
to dislike the intimacy between her and Agnes, and to watch it with
uneasiness. And now, I must confess, the recollection of what I had seen
on that night when Mr. Maldon went away, first began to return upon me
with a meaning it had never had, and to trouble me. The innocent beauty
of her face was not as innocent to me as it had been; I mistrusted the
natural grace and charm of her manner; and when I looked at Agnes by her
side, and thought how good and true Agnes was, suspicions arose within
me that it was an ill-assorted friendship.

She was so happy in it herself, however, and the other was so happy too,
that they made the evening fly away as if it were but an hour. It closed
in an incident which I well remember. They were taking leave of each
other, and Agnes was going to embrace her and kiss her, when Mr.
Wickfield stepped between them, as if by accident, and drew Agnes
quickly away. Then I saw, as though all the intervening time had been
cancelled, and I were still standing in the doorway on the night of the
departure, the expression of that night in the face of Mrs. Strong, as
it confronted his.

I cannot say what an impression this made upon me, or how impossible I
found it, when I thought of her afterwards, to separate her from this
look, and remember her face in its innocent loveliness again. It haunted
me when I got home. I seemed to have left the Doctor’s roof with a dark
cloud lowering on it. The reverence that I had for his grey head, was
mingled with commiseration for his faith in those who were treacherous
to him, and with resentment against those who injured him. The impending
shadow of a great affliction, and a great disgrace that had no distinct
form in it yet, fell like a stain upon the quiet place where I had
worked and played as a boy, and did it a cruel wrong. I had no pleasure
in thinking, any more, of the grave old broad-leaved aloe-trees, which
remained shut up in themselves a hundred years together, and of the trim
smooth grass-plot, and the stone urns, and the Doctor’s walk, and the
congenial sound of the Cathedral bell hovering above them all. It was as
if the tranquil sanctuary of my boyhood had been sacked before my face,
and its peace and honour given to the winds.

But morning brought with it my parting from the old house, which Agnes
had filled with her influence; and that occupied my mind sufficiently.
I should be there again soon, no doubt; I might sleep again--perhaps
often--in my old room; but the days of my inhabiting there were gone,
and the old time was past. I was heavier at heart when I packed up such
of my books and clothes as still remained there to be sent to Dover,
than I cared to show to Uriah Heep; who was so officious to help me,
that I uncharitably thought him mighty glad that I was going.

I got away from Agnes and her father, somehow, with an indifferent show
of being very manly, and took my seat upon the box of the London coach.
I was so softened and forgiving, going through the town, that I had half
a mind to nod to my old enemy the butcher, and throw him five shillings
to drink. But he looked such a very obdurate butcher as he stood
scraping the great block in the shop, and moreover, his appearance was
so little improved by the loss of a front tooth which I had knocked out,
that I thought it best to make no advances.

The main object on my mind, I remember, when we got fairly on the road,
was to appear as old as possible to the coachman, and to speak extremely
gruff. The latter point I achieved at great personal inconvenience; but
I stuck to it, because I felt it was a grown-up sort of thing.

‘You are going through, sir?’ said the coachman.

‘Yes, William,’ I said, condescendingly (I knew him); ‘I am going to
London. I shall go down into Suffolk afterwards.’

‘Shooting, sir?’ said the coachman.

He knew as well as I did that it was just as likely, at that time of
year, I was going down there whaling; but I felt complimented, too.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, pretending to be undecided, ‘whether I shall
take a shot or not.’ ‘Birds is got wery shy, I’m told,’ said William.

‘So I understand,’ said I.

‘Is Suffolk your county, sir?’ asked William.

‘Yes,’ I said, with some importance. ‘Suffolk’s my county.’

‘I’m told the dumplings is uncommon fine down there,’ said William.

I was not aware of it myself, but I felt it necessary to uphold the
institutions of my county, and to evince a familiarity with them; so I
shook my head, as much as to say, ‘I believe you!’

‘And the Punches,’ said William. ‘There’s cattle! A Suffolk Punch, when
he’s a good un, is worth his weight in gold. Did you ever breed any
Suffolk Punches yourself, sir?’

‘N-no,’ I said, ‘not exactly.’

‘Here’s a gen’lm’n behind me, I’ll pound it,’ said William, ‘as has bred
‘em by wholesale.’

The gentleman spoken of was a gentleman with a very unpromising squint,
and a prominent chin, who had a tall white hat on with a narrow flat
brim, and whose close-fitting drab trousers seemed to button all the way
up outside his legs from his boots to his hips. His chin was cocked over
the coachman’s shoulder, so near to me, that his breath quite tickled
the back of my head; and as I looked at him, he leered at the leaders
with the eye with which he didn’t squint, in a very knowing manner.

‘Ain’t you?’ asked William.

‘Ain’t I what?’ said the gentleman behind.

‘Bred them Suffolk Punches by wholesale?’

‘I should think so,’ said the gentleman. ‘There ain’t no sort of orse
that I ain’t bred, and no sort of dorg. Orses and dorgs is some
men’s fancy. They’re wittles and drink to me--lodging, wife, and
children--reading, writing, and Arithmetic--snuff, tobacker, and sleep.’

‘That ain’t a sort of man to see sitting behind a coach-box, is it
though?’ said William in my ear, as he handled the reins.

I construed this remark into an indication of a wish that he should have
my place, so I blushingly offered to resign it.

‘Well, if you don’t mind, sir,’ said William, ‘I think it would be more
correct.’

I have always considered this as the first fall I had in life. When I
booked my place at the coach office I had had ‘Box Seat’ written against
the entry, and had given the book-keeper half-a-crown. I was got up in
a special great-coat and shawl, expressly to do honour to that
distinguished eminence; had glorified myself upon it a good deal; and
had felt that I was a credit to the coach. And here, in the very first
stage, I was supplanted by a shabby man with a squint, who had no other
merit than smelling like a livery-stables, and being able to walk across
me, more like a fly than a human being, while the horses were at a
canter!

A distrust of myself, which has often beset me in life on small
occasions, when it would have been better away, was assuredly not
stopped in its growth by this little incident outside the Canterbury
coach. It was in vain to take refuge in gruffness of speech. I spoke
from the pit of my stomach for the rest of the journey, but I felt
completely extinguished, and dreadfully young.

It was curious and interesting, nevertheless, to be sitting up there
behind four horses: well educated, well dressed, and with plenty of
money in my pocket; and to look out for the places where I had slept on
my weary journey. I had abundant occupation for my thoughts, in every
conspicuous landmark on the road. When I looked down at the trampers
whom we passed, and saw that well-remembered style of face turned up,
I felt as if the tinker’s blackened hand were in the bosom of my shirt
again. When we clattered through the narrow street of Chatham, and I
caught a glimpse, in passing, of the lane where the old monster lived
who had bought my jacket, I stretched my neck eagerly to look for the
place where I had sat, in the sun and in the shade, waiting for my
money. When we came, at last, within a stage of London, and passed the
veritable Salem House where Mr. Creakle had laid about him with a heavy
hand, I would have given all I had, for lawful permission to get down
and thrash him, and let all the boys out like so many caged sparrows.

We went to the Golden Cross at Charing Cross, then a mouldy sort of
establishment in a close neighbourhood. A waiter showed me into the
coffee-room; and a chambermaid introduced me to my small bedchamber,
which smelt like a hackney-coach, and was shut up like a family vault.
I was still painfully conscious of my youth, for nobody stood in any awe
of me at all: the chambermaid being utterly indifferent to my opinions
on any subject, and the waiter being familiar with me, and offering
advice to my inexperience.

‘Well now,’ said the waiter, in a tone of confidence, ‘what would you
like for dinner? Young gentlemen likes poultry in general: have a fowl!’

I told him, as majestically as I could, that I wasn’t in the humour for
a fowl.

‘Ain’t you?’ said the waiter. ‘Young gentlemen is generally tired of
beef and mutton: have a weal cutlet!’

I assented to this proposal, in default of being able to suggest
anything else.

‘Do you care for taters?’ said the waiter, with an insinuating smile,
and his head on one side. ‘Young gentlemen generally has been overdosed
with taters.’

I commanded him, in my deepest voice, to order a veal cutlet and
potatoes, and all things fitting; and to inquire at the bar if there
were any letters for Trotwood Copperfield, Esquire--which I knew there
were not, and couldn’t be, but thought it manly to appear to expect.

He soon came back to say that there were none (at which I was much
surprised) and began to lay the cloth for my dinner in a box by the
fire. While he was so engaged, he asked me what I would take with it;
and on my replying ‘Half a pint of sherry,’ thought it a favourable
opportunity, I am afraid, to extract that measure of wine from the
stale leavings at the bottoms of several small decanters. I am of this
opinion, because, while I was reading the newspaper, I observed him
behind a low wooden partition, which was his private apartment, very
busy pouring out of a number of those vessels into one, like a chemist
and druggist making up a prescription. When the wine came, too, I
thought it flat; and it certainly had more English crumbs in it, than
were to be expected in a foreign wine in anything like a pure state, but
I was bashful enough to drink it, and say nothing.

Being then in a pleasant frame of mind (from which I infer that
poisoning is not always disagreeable in some stages of the process), I
resolved to go to the play. It was Covent Garden Theatre that I chose;
and there, from the back of a centre box, I saw Julius Caesar and the
new Pantomime. To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and
walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern
taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful
effect. But the mingled reality and mystery of the whole show, the
influence upon me of the poetry, the lights, the music, the company, the
smooth stupendous changes of glittering and brilliant scenery, were so
dazzling, and opened up such illimitable regions of delight, that when I
came out into the rainy street, at twelve o’clock at night, I felt as if
I had come from the clouds, where I had been leading a romantic life
for ages, to a bawling, splashing, link-lighted, umbrella-struggling,
hackney-coach-jostling, patten-clinking, muddy, miserable world.

I had emerged by another door, and stood in the street for a little
while, as if I really were a stranger upon earth: but the unceremonious
pushing and hustling that I received, soon recalled me to myself, and
put me in the road back to the hotel; whither I went, revolving the
glorious vision all the way; and where, after some porter and oysters,
I sat revolving it still, at past one o’clock, with my eyes on the
coffee-room fire.

I was so filled with the play, and with the past--for it was, in a
manner, like a shining transparency, through which I saw my earlier
life moving along--that I don’t know when the figure of a handsome
well-formed young man dressed with a tasteful easy negligence which I
have reason to remember very well, became a real presence to me. But
I recollect being conscious of his company without having noticed his
coming in--and my still sitting, musing, over the coffee-room fire.

At last I rose to go to bed, much to the relief of the sleepy waiter,
who had got the fidgets in his legs, and was twisting them, and hitting
them, and putting them through all kinds of contortions in his small
pantry. In going towards the door, I passed the person who had come in,
and saw him plainly. I turned directly, came back, and looked again. He
did not know me, but I knew him in a moment.

At another time I might have wanted the confidence or the decision to
speak to him, and might have put it off until next day, and might have
lost him. But, in the then condition of my mind, where the play was
still running high, his former protection of me appeared so deserving
of my gratitude, and my old love for him overflowed my breast so freshly
and spontaneously, that I went up to him at once, with a fast-beating
heart, and said:

‘Steerforth! won’t you speak to me?’

He looked at me--just as he used to look, sometimes--but I saw no
recognition in his face.

‘You don’t remember me, I am afraid,’ said I.

‘My God!’ he suddenly exclaimed. ‘It’s little Copperfield!’

I grasped him by both hands, and could not let them go. But for very
shame, and the fear that it might displease him, I could have held him
round the neck and cried.

‘I never, never, never was so glad! My dear Steerforth, I am so
overjoyed to see you!’

‘And I am rejoiced to see you, too!’ he said, shaking my hands heartily.
‘Why, Copperfield, old boy, don’t be overpowered!’ And yet he was glad,
too, I thought, to see how the delight I had in meeting him affected me.

I brushed away the tears that my utmost resolution had not been able to
keep back, and I made a clumsy laugh of it, and we sat down together,
side by side.

‘Why, how do you come to be here?’ said Steerforth, clapping me on the
shoulder.

‘I came here by the Canterbury coach, today. I have been adopted by
an aunt down in that part of the country, and have just finished my
education there. How do YOU come to be here, Steerforth?’

‘Well, I am what they call an Oxford man,’ he returned; ‘that is to say,
I get bored to death down there, periodically--and I am on my way now to
my mother’s. You’re a devilish amiable-looking fellow, Copperfield. Just
what you used to be, now I look at you! Not altered in the least!’

‘I knew you immediately,’ I said; ‘but you are more easily remembered.’

He laughed as he ran his hand through the clustering curls of his hair,
and said gaily:

‘Yes, I am on an expedition of duty. My mother lives a little way out of
town; and the roads being in a beastly condition, and our house tedious
enough, I remained here tonight instead of going on. I have not been in
town half-a-dozen hours, and those I have been dozing and grumbling away
at the play.’

‘I have been at the play, too,’ said I. ‘At Covent Garden. What a
delightful and magnificent entertainment, Steerforth!’

Steerforth laughed heartily.

‘My dear young Davy,’ he said, clapping me on the shoulder again, ‘you
are a very Daisy. The daisy of the field, at sunrise, is not fresher
than you are. I have been at Covent Garden, too, and there never was a
more miserable business. Holloa, you sir!’

This was addressed to the waiter, who had been very attentive to our
recognition, at a distance, and now came forward deferentially.

‘Where have you put my friend, Mr. Copperfield?’ said Steerforth.

‘Beg your pardon, sir?’

‘Where does he sleep? What’s his number? You know what I mean,’ said
Steerforth.

‘Well, sir,’ said the waiter, with an apologetic air. ‘Mr. Copperfield
is at present in forty-four, sir.’

‘And what the devil do you mean,’ retorted Steerforth, ‘by putting Mr.
Copperfield into a little loft over a stable?’

‘Why, you see we wasn’t aware, sir,’ returned the waiter, still
apologetically, ‘as Mr. Copperfield was anyways particular. We can give
Mr. Copperfield seventy-two, sir, if it would be preferred. Next you,
sir.’

‘Of course it would be preferred,’ said Steerforth. ‘And do it at once.’
The waiter immediately withdrew to make the exchange. Steerforth, very
much amused at my having been put into forty-four, laughed again, and
clapped me on the shoulder again, and invited me to breakfast with him
next morning at ten o’clock--an invitation I was only too proud and
happy to accept. It being now pretty late, we took our candles and went
upstairs, where we parted with friendly heartiness at his door, and
where I found my new room a great improvement on my old one, it not
being at all musty, and having an immense four-post bedstead in it,
which was quite a little landed estate. Here, among pillows enough for
six, I soon fell asleep in a blissful condition, and dreamed of ancient
Rome, Steerforth, and friendship, until the early morning coaches,
rumbling out of the archway underneath, made me dream of thunder and the
gods.



CHAPTER 20. STEERFORTH’S HOME


When the chambermaid tapped at my door at eight o’clock, and informed
me that my shaving-water was outside, I felt severely the having no
occasion for it, and blushed in my bed. The suspicion that she laughed
too, when she said it, preyed upon my mind all the time I was dressing;
and gave me, I was conscious, a sneaking and guilty air when I passed
her on the staircase, as I was going down to breakfast. I was so
sensitively aware, indeed, of being younger than I could have wished,
that for some time I could not make up my mind to pass her at all, under
the ignoble circumstances of the case; but, hearing her there with
a broom, stood peeping out of window at King Charles on horseback,
surrounded by a maze of hackney-coaches, and looking anything but regal
in a drizzling rain and a dark-brown fog, until I was admonished by the
waiter that the gentleman was waiting for me.

It was not in the coffee-room that I found Steerforth expecting me, but
in a snug private apartment, red-curtained and Turkey-carpeted, where
the fire burnt bright, and a fine hot breakfast was set forth on a table
covered with a clean cloth; and a cheerful miniature of the room, the
fire, the breakfast, Steerforth, and all, was shining in the little
round mirror over the sideboard. I was rather bashful at first,
Steerforth being so self-possessed, and elegant, and superior to me in
all respects (age included); but his easy patronage soon put that to
rights, and made me quite at home. I could not enough admire the change
he had wrought in the Golden Cross; or compare the dull forlorn state
I had held yesterday, with this morning’s comfort and this morning’s
entertainment. As to the waiter’s familiarity, it was quenched as if it
had never been. He attended on us, as I may say, in sackcloth and ashes.

‘Now, Copperfield,’ said Steerforth, when we were alone, ‘I should like
to hear what you are doing, and where you are going, and all about you.
I feel as if you were my property.’ Glowing with pleasure to find that
he had still this interest in me, I told him how my aunt had proposed
the little expedition that I had before me, and whither it tended.

‘As you are in no hurry, then,’ said Steerforth, ‘come home with me to
Highgate, and stay a day or two. You will be pleased with my mother--she
is a little vain and prosy about me, but that you can forgive her--and
she will be pleased with you.’

‘I should like to be as sure of that, as you are kind enough to say you
are,’ I answered, smiling.

‘Oh!’ said Steerforth, ‘everyone who likes me, has a claim on her that
is sure to be acknowledged.’

‘Then I think I shall be a favourite,’ said I.

‘Good!’ said Steerforth. ‘Come and prove it. We will go and see the
lions for an hour or two--it’s something to have a fresh fellow like you
to show them to, Copperfield--and then we’ll journey out to Highgate by
the coach.’

I could hardly believe but that I was in a dream, and that I should wake
presently in number forty-four, to the solitary box in the coffee-room
and the familiar waiter again. After I had written to my aunt and told
her of my fortunate meeting with my admired old schoolfellow, and my
acceptance of his invitation, we went out in a hackney-chariot, and saw
a Panorama and some other sights, and took a walk through the Museum,
where I could not help observing how much Steerforth knew, on an
infinite variety of subjects, and of how little account he seemed to
make his knowledge.

‘You’ll take a high degree at college, Steerforth,’ said I, ‘if you have
not done so already; and they will have good reason to be proud of you.’

‘I take a degree!’ cried Steerforth. ‘Not I! my dear Daisy--will you
mind my calling you Daisy?’

‘Not at all!’ said I.

‘That’s a good fellow! My dear Daisy,’ said Steerforth, laughing. ‘I
have not the least desire or intention to distinguish myself in that
way. I have done quite sufficient for my purpose. I find that I am heavy
company enough for myself as I am.’

‘But the fame--’ I was beginning.

‘You romantic Daisy!’ said Steerforth, laughing still more heartily:
‘why should I trouble myself, that a parcel of heavy-headed fellows may
gape and hold up their hands? Let them do it at some other man. There’s
fame for him, and he’s welcome to it.’

I was abashed at having made so great a mistake, and was glad to change
the subject. Fortunately it was not difficult to do, for Steerforth
could always pass from one subject to another with a carelessness and
lightness that were his own.

Lunch succeeded to our sight-seeing, and the short winter day wore away
so fast, that it was dusk when the stage-coach stopped with us at an
old brick house at Highgate on the summit of the hill. An elderly lady,
though not very far advanced in years, with a proud carriage and
a handsome face, was in the doorway as we alighted; and greeting
Steerforth as ‘My dearest James,’ folded him in her arms. To this lady
he presented me as his mother, and she gave me a stately welcome.

It was a genteel old-fashioned house, very quiet and orderly. From the
windows of my room I saw all London lying in the distance like a great
vapour, with here and there some lights twinkling through it. I had only
time, in dressing, to glance at the solid furniture, the framed pieces
of work (done, I supposed, by Steerforth’s mother when she was a girl),
and some pictures in crayons of ladies with powdered hair and bodices,
coming and going on the walls, as the newly-kindled fire crackled and
sputtered, when I was called to dinner.

There was a second lady in the dining-room, of a slight short figure,
dark, and not agreeable to look at, but with some appearance of good
looks too, who attracted my attention: perhaps because I had not
expected to see her; perhaps because I found myself sitting opposite
to her; perhaps because of something really remarkable in her. She had
black hair and eager black eyes, and was thin, and had a scar upon her
lip. It was an old scar--I should rather call it seam, for it was not
discoloured, and had healed years ago--which had once cut through her
mouth, downward towards the chin, but was now barely visible across
the table, except above and on her upper lip, the shape of which it had
altered. I concluded in my own mind that she was about thirty years
of age, and that she wished to be married. She was a little
dilapidated--like a house--with having been so long to let; yet had, as
I have said, an appearance of good looks. Her thinness seemed to be the
effect of some wasting fire within her, which found a vent in her gaunt
eyes.

She was introduced as Miss Dartle, and both Steerforth and his mother
called her Rosa. I found that she lived there, and had been for a long
time Mrs. Steerforth’s companion. It appeared to me that she never said
anything she wanted to say, outright; but hinted it, and made a great
deal more of it by this practice. For example, when Mrs. Steerforth
observed, more in jest than earnest, that she feared her son led but a
wild life at college, Miss Dartle put in thus:

‘Oh, really? You know how ignorant I am, and that I only ask for
information, but isn’t it always so? I thought that kind of life was
on all hands understood to be--eh?’ ‘It is education for a very grave
profession, if you mean that, Rosa,’ Mrs. Steerforth answered with some
coldness.

‘Oh! Yes! That’s very true,’ returned Miss Dartle. ‘But isn’t it,
though?--I want to be put right, if I am wrong--isn’t it, really?’

‘Really what?’ said Mrs. Steerforth.

‘Oh! You mean it’s not!’ returned Miss Dartle. ‘Well, I’m very glad to
hear it! Now, I know what to do! That’s the advantage of asking. I shall
never allow people to talk before me about wastefulness and profligacy,
and so forth, in connexion with that life, any more.’

‘And you will be right,’ said Mrs. Steerforth. ‘My son’s tutor is a
conscientious gentleman; and if I had not implicit reliance on my son, I
should have reliance on him.’

‘Should you?’ said Miss Dartle. ‘Dear me! Conscientious, is he? Really
conscientious, now?’

‘Yes, I am convinced of it,’ said Mrs. Steerforth.

‘How very nice!’ exclaimed Miss Dartle. ‘What a comfort! Really
conscientious? Then he’s not--but of course he can’t be, if he’s really
conscientious. Well, I shall be quite happy in my opinion of him, from
this time. You can’t think how it elevates him in my opinion, to know
for certain that he’s really conscientious!’

Her own views of every question, and her correction of everything that
was said to which she was opposed, Miss Dartle insinuated in the same
way: sometimes, I could not conceal from myself, with great power,
though in contradiction even of Steerforth. An instance happened before
dinner was done. Mrs. Steerforth speaking to me about my intention
of going down into Suffolk, I said at hazard how glad I should be, if
Steerforth would only go there with me; and explaining to him that I was
going to see my old nurse, and Mr. Peggotty’s family, I reminded him of
the boatman whom he had seen at school.

‘Oh! That bluff fellow!’ said Steerforth. ‘He had a son with him, hadn’t
he?’

‘No. That was his nephew,’ I replied; ‘whom he adopted, though, as
a son. He has a very pretty little niece too, whom he adopted as a
daughter. In short, his house--or rather his boat, for he lives in one,
on dry land--is full of people who are objects of his generosity and
kindness. You would be delighted to see that household.’

‘Should I?’ said Steerforth. ‘Well, I think I should. I must see what
can be done. It would be worth a journey (not to mention the pleasure of
a journey with you, Daisy), to see that sort of people together, and to
make one of ‘em.’

My heart leaped with a new hope of pleasure. But it was in reference
to the tone in which he had spoken of ‘that sort of people’, that Miss
Dartle, whose sparkling eyes had been watchful of us, now broke in
again.

‘Oh, but, really? Do tell me. Are they, though?’ she said.

‘Are they what? And are who what?’ said Steerforth.

‘That sort of people.---Are they really animals and clods, and beings of
another order? I want to know SO much.’

‘Why, there’s a pretty wide separation between them and us,’ said
Steerforth, with indifference. ‘They are not to be expected to be
as sensitive as we are. Their delicacy is not to be shocked, or hurt
easily. They are wonderfully virtuous, I dare say--some people contend
for that, at least; and I am sure I don’t want to contradict them--but
they have not very fine natures, and they may be thankful that, like
their coarse rough skins, they are not easily wounded.’

‘Really!’ said Miss Dartle. ‘Well, I don’t know, now, when I have been
better pleased than to hear that. It’s so consoling! It’s such a delight
to know that, when they suffer, they don’t feel! Sometimes I have been
quite uneasy for that sort of people; but now I shall just dismiss the
idea of them, altogether. Live and learn. I had my doubts, I confess,
but now they’re cleared up. I didn’t know, and now I do know, and that
shows the advantage of asking--don’t it?’

I believed that Steerforth had said what he had, in jest, or to draw
Miss Dartle out; and I expected him to say as much when she was gone,
and we two were sitting before the fire. But he merely asked me what I
thought of her.

‘She is very clever, is she not?’ I asked.

‘Clever! She brings everything to a grindstone,’ said Steerforth, and
sharpens it, as she has sharpened her own face and figure these years
past. She has worn herself away by constant sharpening. She is all
edge.’

‘What a remarkable scar that is upon her lip!’ I said.

Steerforth’s face fell, and he paused a moment.

‘Why, the fact is,’ he returned, ‘I did that.’

‘By an unfortunate accident!’

‘No. I was a young boy, and she exasperated me, and I threw a hammer at
her. A promising young angel I must have been!’ I was deeply sorry to
have touched on such a painful theme, but that was useless now.

‘She has borne the mark ever since, as you see,’ said Steerforth; ‘and
she’ll bear it to her grave, if she ever rests in one--though I can
hardly believe she will ever rest anywhere. She was the motherless child
of a sort of cousin of my father’s. He died one day. My mother, who was
then a widow, brought her here to be company to her. She has a couple of
thousand pounds of her own, and saves the interest of it every year, to
add to the principal. There’s the history of Miss Rosa Dartle for you.’

‘And I have no doubt she loves you like a brother?’ said I.

‘Humph!’ retorted Steerforth, looking at the fire. ‘Some brothers are
not loved over much; and some love--but help yourself, Copperfield!
We’ll drink the daisies of the field, in compliment to you; and the
lilies of the valley that toil not, neither do they spin, in compliment
to me--the more shame for me!’ A moody smile that had overspread his
features cleared off as he said this merrily, and he was his own frank,
winning self again.

I could not help glancing at the scar with a painful interest when we
went in to tea. It was not long before I observed that it was the most
susceptible part of her face, and that, when she turned pale, that mark
altered first, and became a dull, lead-coloured streak, lengthening out
to its full extent, like a mark in invisible ink brought to the fire.
There was a little altercation between her and Steerforth about a cast
of the dice at backgammon--when I thought her, for one moment, in a
storm of rage; and then I saw it start forth like the old writing on the
wall.

It was no matter of wonder to me to find Mrs. Steerforth devoted to her
son. She seemed to be able to speak or think about nothing else. She
showed me his picture as an infant, in a locket, with some of his
baby-hair in it; she showed me his picture as he had been when I first
knew him; and she wore at her breast his picture as he was now. All the
letters he had ever written to her, she kept in a cabinet near her own
chair by the fire; and she would have read me some of them, and I should
have been very glad to hear them too, if he had not interposed, and
coaxed her out of the design.

‘It was at Mr. Creakle’s, my son tells me, that you first became
acquainted,’ said Mrs. Steerforth, as she and I were talking at one
table, while they played backgammon at another. ‘Indeed, I recollect his
speaking, at that time, of a pupil younger than himself who had taken
his fancy there; but your name, as you may suppose, has not lived in my
memory.’

‘He was very generous and noble to me in those days, I assure you,
ma’am,’ said I, ‘and I stood in need of such a friend. I should have
been quite crushed without him.’

‘He is always generous and noble,’ said Mrs. Steerforth, proudly.

I subscribed to this with all my heart, God knows. She knew I did; for
the stateliness of her manner already abated towards me, except when she
spoke in praise of him, and then her air was always lofty.

‘It was not a fit school generally for my son,’ said she; ‘far from it;
but there were particular circumstances to be considered at the time, of
more importance even than that selection. My son’s high spirit made
it desirable that he should be placed with some man who felt its
superiority, and would be content to bow himself before it; and we found
such a man there.’

I knew that, knowing the fellow. And yet I did not despise him the more
for it, but thought it a redeeming quality in him if he could be allowed
any grace for not resisting one so irresistible as Steerforth.

‘My son’s great capacity was tempted on, there, by a feeling of
voluntary emulation and conscious pride,’ the fond lady went on to say.
‘He would have risen against all constraint; but he found himself the
monarch of the place, and he haughtily determined to be worthy of his
station. It was like himself.’

I echoed, with all my heart and soul, that it was like himself.

‘So my son took, of his own will, and on no compulsion, to the course
in which he can always, when it is his pleasure, outstrip every
competitor,’ she pursued. ‘My son informs me, Mr. Copperfield, that
you were quite devoted to him, and that when you met yesterday you made
yourself known to him with tears of joy. I should be an affected woman
if I made any pretence of being surprised by my son’s inspiring such
emotions; but I cannot be indifferent to anyone who is so sensible of
his merit, and I am very glad to see you here, and can assure you that
he feels an unusual friendship for you, and that you may rely on his
protection.’

Miss Dartle played backgammon as eagerly as she did everything else.
If I had seen her, first, at the board, I should have fancied that her
figure had got thin, and her eyes had got large, over that pursuit, and
no other in the world. But I am very much mistaken if she missed a
word of this, or lost a look of mine as I received it with the utmost
pleasure, and honoured by Mrs. Steerforth’s confidence, felt older than
I had done since I left Canterbury.

When the evening was pretty far spent, and a tray of glasses and
decanters came in, Steerforth promised, over the fire, that he would
seriously think of going down into the country with me. There was no
hurry, he said; a week hence would do; and his mother hospitably said
the same. While we were talking, he more than once called me Daisy;
which brought Miss Dartle out again.

‘But really, Mr. Copperfield,’ she asked, ‘is it a nickname? And
why does he give it you? Is it--eh?--because he thinks you young and
innocent? I am so stupid in these things.’

I coloured in replying that I believed it was.

‘Oh!’ said Miss Dartle. ‘Now I am glad to know that! I ask for
information, and I am glad to know it. He thinks you young and innocent;
and so you are his friend. Well, that’s quite delightful!’

She went to bed soon after this, and Mrs. Steerforth retired too.
Steerforth and I, after lingering for half-an-hour over the fire,
talking about Traddles and all the rest of them at old Salem House, went
upstairs together. Steerforth’s room was next to mine, and I went in to
look at it. It was a picture of comfort, full of easy-chairs, cushions
and footstools, worked by his mother’s hand, and with no sort of thing
omitted that could help to render it complete. Finally, her handsome
features looked down on her darling from a portrait on the wall, as if
it were even something to her that her likeness should watch him while
he slept.

I found the fire burning clear enough in my room by this time, and the
curtains drawn before the windows and round the bed, giving it a very
snug appearance. I sat down in a great chair upon the hearth to meditate
on my happiness; and had enjoyed the contemplation of it for some time,
when I found a likeness of Miss Dartle looking eagerly at me from above
the chimney-piece.

It was a startling likeness, and necessarily had a startling look. The
painter hadn’t made the scar, but I made it; and there it was, coming
and going; now confined to the upper lip as I had seen it at dinner, and
now showing the whole extent of the wound inflicted by the hammer, as I
had seen it when she was passionate.

I wondered peevishly why they couldn’t put her anywhere else instead
of quartering her on me. To get rid of her, I undressed quickly,
extinguished my light, and went to bed. But, as I fell asleep, I could
not forget that she was still there looking, ‘Is it really, though?
I want to know’; and when I awoke in the night, I found that I was
uneasily asking all sorts of people in my dreams whether it really was
or not--without knowing what I meant.



CHAPTER 21. LITTLE EM’LY


There was a servant in that house, a man who, I understood, was usually
with Steerforth, and had come into his service at the University, who
was in appearance a pattern of respectability. I believe there never
existed in his station a more respectable-looking man. He was taciturn,
soft-footed, very quiet in his manner, deferential, observant, always at
hand when wanted, and never near when not wanted; but his great claim to
consideration was his respectability. He had not a pliant face, he had
rather a stiff neck, rather a tight smooth head with short hair clinging
to it at the sides, a soft way of speaking, with a peculiar habit of
whispering the letter S so distinctly, that he seemed to use it
oftener than any other man; but every peculiarity that he had he made
respectable. If his nose had been upside-down, he would have made that
respectable. He surrounded himself with an atmosphere of respectability,
and walked secure in it. It would have been next to impossible to
suspect him of anything wrong, he was so thoroughly respectable.
Nobody could have thought of putting him in a livery, he was so highly
respectable. To have imposed any derogatory work upon him, would have
been to inflict a wanton insult on the feelings of a most respectable
man. And of this, I noticed--the women-servants in the household were
so intuitively conscious, that they always did such work themselves, and
generally while he read the paper by the pantry fire.

Such a self-contained man I never saw. But in that quality, as in every
other he possessed, he only seemed to be the more respectable. Even the
fact that no one knew his Christian name, seemed to form a part of his
respectability. Nothing could be objected against his surname, Littimer,
by which he was known. Peter might have been hanged, or Tom transported;
but Littimer was perfectly respectable.

It was occasioned, I suppose, by the reverend nature of respectability
in the abstract, but I felt particularly young in this man’s presence.
How old he was himself, I could not guess--and that again went to his
credit on the same score; for in the calmness of respectability he might
have numbered fifty years as well as thirty.

Littimer was in my room in the morning before I was up, to bring me that
reproachful shaving-water, and to put out my clothes. When I undrew the
curtains and looked out of bed, I saw him, in an equable temperature
of respectability, unaffected by the east wind of January, and not
even breathing frostily, standing my boots right and left in the first
dancing position, and blowing specks of dust off my coat as he laid it
down like a baby.

I gave him good morning, and asked him what o’clock it was. He took
out of his pocket the most respectable hunting-watch I ever saw, and
preventing the spring with his thumb from opening far, looked in at the
face as if he were consulting an oracular oyster, shut it up again, and
said, if I pleased, it was half past eight.

‘Mr. Steerforth will be glad to hear how you have rested, sir.’

‘Thank you,’ said I, ‘very well indeed. Is Mr. Steerforth quite well?’

‘Thank you, sir, Mr. Steerforth is tolerably well.’ Another of his
characteristics--no use of superlatives. A cool calm medium always.

‘Is there anything more I can have the honour of doing for you, sir? The
warning-bell will ring at nine; the family take breakfast at half past
nine.’

‘Nothing, I thank you.’

‘I thank YOU, sir, if you please’; and with that, and with a little
inclination of his head when he passed the bed-side, as an apology for
correcting me, he went out, shutting the door as delicately as if I had
just fallen into a sweet sleep on which my life depended.

Every morning we held exactly this conversation: never any more, and
never any less: and yet, invariably, however far I might have been
lifted out of myself over-night, and advanced towards maturer years,
by Steerforth’s companionship, or Mrs. Steerforth’s confidence, or Miss
Dartle’s conversation, in the presence of this most respectable man I
became, as our smaller poets sing, ‘a boy again’.

He got horses for us; and Steerforth, who knew everything, gave me
lessons in riding. He provided foils for us, and Steerforth gave me
lessons in fencing--gloves, and I began, of the same master, to improve
in boxing. It gave me no manner of concern that Steerforth should find
me a novice in these sciences, but I never could bear to show my want of
skill before the respectable Littimer. I had no reason to believe
that Littimer understood such arts himself; he never led me to suppose
anything of the kind, by so much as the vibration of one of his
respectable eyelashes; yet whenever he was by, while we were practising,
I felt myself the greenest and most inexperienced of mortals.

I am particular about this man, because he made a particular effect on
me at that time, and because of what took place thereafter.

The week passed away in a most delightful manner. It passed rapidly, as
may be supposed, to one entranced as I was; and yet it gave me so many
occasions for knowing Steerforth better, and admiring him more in a
thousand respects, that at its close I seemed to have been with him
for a much longer time. A dashing way he had of treating me like a
plaything, was more agreeable to me than any behaviour he could have
adopted. It reminded me of our old acquaintance; it seemed the natural
sequel of it; it showed me that he was unchanged; it relieved me of
any uneasiness I might have felt, in comparing my merits with his, and
measuring my claims upon his friendship by any equal standard; above
all, it was a familiar, unrestrained, affectionate demeanour that he
used towards no one else. As he had treated me at school differently
from all the rest, I joyfully believed that he treated me in life unlike
any other friend he had. I believed that I was nearer to his heart than
any other friend, and my own heart warmed with attachment to him. He
made up his mind to go with me into the country, and the day arrived for
our departure. He had been doubtful at first whether to take Littimer
or not, but decided to leave him at home. The respectable creature,
satisfied with his lot whatever it was, arranged our portmanteaux on
the little carriage that was to take us into London, as if they were
intended to defy the shocks of ages, and received my modestly proffered
donation with perfect tranquillity.

We bade adieu to Mrs. Steerforth and Miss Dartle, with many thanks on
my part, and much kindness on the devoted mother’s. The last thing I
saw was Littimer’s unruffled eye; fraught, as I fancied, with the silent
conviction that I was very young indeed.

What I felt, in returning so auspiciously to the old familiar places,
I shall not endeavour to describe. We went down by the Mail. I was
so concerned, I recollect, even for the honour of Yarmouth, that when
Steerforth said, as we drove through its dark streets to the inn, that,
as well as he could make out, it was a good, queer, out-of-the-way kind
of hole, I was highly pleased. We went to bed on our arrival (I observed
a pair of dirty shoes and gaiters in connexion with my old friend the
Dolphin as we passed that door), and breakfasted late in the morning.
Steerforth, who was in great spirits, had been strolling about the
beach before I was up, and had made acquaintance, he said, with half the
boatmen in the place. Moreover, he had seen, in the distance, what he
was sure must be the identical house of Mr. Peggotty, with smoke coming
out of the chimney; and had had a great mind, he told me, to walk in and
swear he was myself grown out of knowledge.

‘When do you propose to introduce me there, Daisy?’ he said. ‘I am at
your disposal. Make your own arrangements.’

‘Why, I was thinking that this evening would be a good time, Steerforth,
when they are all sitting round the fire. I should like you to see it
when it’s snug, it’s such a curious place.’

‘So be it!’ returned Steerforth. ‘This evening.’

‘I shall not give them any notice that we are here, you know,’ said I,
delighted. ‘We must take them by surprise.’

‘Oh, of course! It’s no fun,’ said Steerforth, ‘unless we take them by
surprise. Let us see the natives in their aboriginal condition.’

‘Though they ARE that sort of people that you mentioned,’ I returned.

‘Aha! What! you recollect my skirmishes with Rosa, do you?’ he exclaimed
with a quick look. ‘Confound the girl, I am half afraid of her. She’s
like a goblin to me. But never mind her. Now what are you going to do?
You are going to see your nurse, I suppose?’

‘Why, yes,’ I said, ‘I must see Peggotty first of all.’

‘Well,’ replied Steerforth, looking at his watch. ‘Suppose I deliver you
up to be cried over for a couple of hours. Is that long enough?’

I answered, laughing, that I thought we might get through it in that
time, but that he must come also; for he would find that his renown had
preceded him, and that he was almost as great a personage as I was.

‘I’ll come anywhere you like,’ said Steerforth, ‘or do anything you
like. Tell me where to come to; and in two hours I’ll produce myself in
any state you please, sentimental or comical.’

I gave him minute directions for finding the residence of Mr. Barkis,
carrier to Blunderstone and elsewhere; and, on this understanding, went
out alone. There was a sharp bracing air; the ground was dry; the sea
was crisp and clear; the sun was diffusing abundance of light, if not
much warmth; and everything was fresh and lively. I was so fresh and
lively myself, in the pleasure of being there, that I could have stopped
the people in the streets and shaken hands with them.

The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we have only seen
as children always do, I believe, when we go back to them. But I had
forgotten nothing in them, and found nothing changed, until I came to
Mr. Omer’s shop. OMER AND Joram was now written up, where OMER used to
be; but the inscription, DRAPER, TAILOR, HABERDASHER, FUNERAL FURNISHER,
&c., remained as it was.

My footsteps seemed to tend so naturally to the shop door, after I had
read these words from over the way, that I went across the road and
looked in. There was a pretty woman at the back of the shop, dancing
a little child in her arms, while another little fellow clung to her
apron. I had no difficulty in recognizing either Minnie or Minnie’s
children. The glass door of the parlour was not open; but in the
workshop across the yard I could faintly hear the old tune playing, as
if it had never left off.

‘Is Mr. Omer at home?’ said I, entering. ‘I should like to see him, for
a moment, if he is.’

‘Oh yes, sir, he is at home,’ said Minnie; ‘the weather don’t suit his
asthma out of doors. Joe, call your grandfather!’

The little fellow, who was holding her apron, gave such a lusty shout,
that the sound of it made him bashful, and he buried his face in her
skirts, to her great admiration. I heard a heavy puffing and blowing
coming towards us, and soon Mr. Omer, shorter-winded than of yore, but
not much older-looking, stood before me.

‘Servant, sir,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘What can I do for you, sir?’ ‘You can
shake hands with me, Mr. Omer, if you please,’ said I, putting out my
own. ‘You were very good-natured to me once, when I am afraid I didn’t
show that I thought so.’

‘Was I though?’ returned the old man. ‘I’m glad to hear it, but I don’t
remember when. Are you sure it was me?’

‘Quite.’

‘I think my memory has got as short as my breath,’ said Mr. Omer,
looking at me and shaking his head; ‘for I don’t remember you.’

‘Don’t you remember your coming to the coach to meet me, and my having
breakfast here, and our riding out to Blunderstone together: you, and I,
and Mrs. Joram, and Mr. Joram too--who wasn’t her husband then?’

‘Why, Lord bless my soul!’ exclaimed Mr. Omer, after being thrown by his
surprise into a fit of coughing, ‘you don’t say so! Minnie, my dear, you
recollect? Dear me, yes; the party was a lady, I think?’

‘My mother,’ I rejoined.

‘To--be--sure,’ said Mr. Omer, touching my waistcoat with his
forefinger, ‘and there was a little child too! There was two parties.
The little party was laid along with the other party. Over at
Blunderstone it was, of course. Dear me! And how have you been since?’

Very well, I thanked him, as I hoped he had been too.

‘Oh! nothing to grumble at, you know,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘I find my breath
gets short, but it seldom gets longer as a man gets older. I take it as
it comes, and make the most of it. That’s the best way, ain’t it?’

Mr. Omer coughed again, in consequence of laughing, and was assisted out
of his fit by his daughter, who now stood close beside us, dancing her
smallest child on the counter.

‘Dear me!’ said Mr. Omer. ‘Yes, to be sure. Two parties! Why, in that
very ride, if you’ll believe me, the day was named for my Minnie to
marry Joram. “Do name it, sir,” says Joram. “Yes, do, father,” says
Minnie. And now he’s come into the business. And look here! The
youngest!’

Minnie laughed, and stroked her banded hair upon her temples, as her
father put one of his fat fingers into the hand of the child she was
dancing on the counter.

‘Two parties, of course!’ said Mr. Omer, nodding his head
retrospectively. ‘Ex-actly so! And Joram’s at work, at this minute, on
a grey one with silver nails, not this measurement’--the measurement of
the dancing child upon the counter--‘by a good two inches.---Will you
take something?’

I thanked him, but declined.

‘Let me see,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘Barkis’s the carrier’s wife--Peggotty’s
the boatman’s sister--she had something to do with your family? She was
in service there, sure?’

My answering in the affirmative gave him great satisfaction.

‘I believe my breath will get long next, my memory’s getting so much
so,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘Well, sir, we’ve got a young relation of hers here,
under articles to us, that has as elegant a taste in the dress-making
business--I assure you I don’t believe there’s a Duchess in England can
touch her.’

‘Not little Em’ly?’ said I, involuntarily.

‘Em’ly’s her name,’ said Mr. Omer, ‘and she’s little too. But if you’ll
believe me, she has such a face of her own that half the women in this
town are mad against her.’

‘Nonsense, father!’ cried Minnie.

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Omer, ‘I don’t say it’s the case with you,’ winking
at me, ‘but I say that half the women in Yarmouth--ah! and in five mile
round--are mad against that girl.’

‘Then she should have kept to her own station in life, father,’ said
Minnie, ‘and not have given them any hold to talk about her, and then
they couldn’t have done it.’

‘Couldn’t have done it, my dear!’ retorted Mr. Omer. ‘Couldn’t have
done it! Is that YOUR knowledge of life? What is there that any woman
couldn’t do, that she shouldn’t do--especially on the subject of another
woman’s good looks?’

I really thought it was all over with Mr. Omer, after he had uttered
this libellous pleasantry. He coughed to that extent, and his breath
eluded all his attempts to recover it with that obstinacy, that I fully
expected to see his head go down behind the counter, and his little
black breeches, with the rusty little bunches of ribbons at the knees,
come quivering up in a last ineffectual struggle. At length, however,
he got better, though he still panted hard, and was so exhausted that he
was obliged to sit on the stool of the shop-desk.

‘You see,’ he said, wiping his head, and breathing with difficulty, ‘she
hasn’t taken much to any companions here; she hasn’t taken kindly to
any particular acquaintances and friends, not to mention sweethearts. In
consequence, an ill-natured story got about, that Em’ly wanted to be a
lady. Now my opinion is, that it came into circulation principally on
account of her sometimes saying, at the school, that if she was a lady
she would like to do so-and-so for her uncle--don’t you see?--and buy
him such-and-such fine things.’

‘I assure you, Mr. Omer, she has said so to me,’ I returned eagerly,
‘when we were both children.’

Mr. Omer nodded his head and rubbed his chin. ‘Just so. Then out of a
very little, she could dress herself, you see, better than most others
could out of a deal, and that made things unpleasant. Moreover, she was
rather what might be called wayward--I’ll go so far as to say what I
should call wayward myself,’ said Mr. Omer; ‘--didn’t know her own mind
quite--a little spoiled--and couldn’t, at first, exactly bind herself
down. No more than that was ever said against her, Minnie?’

‘No, father,’ said Mrs. Joram. ‘That’s the worst, I believe.’

‘So when she got a situation,’ said Mr. Omer, ‘to keep a fractious old
lady company, they didn’t very well agree, and she didn’t stop. At last
she came here, apprenticed for three years. Nearly two of ‘em are over,
and she has been as good a girl as ever was. Worth any six! Minnie, is
she worth any six, now?’

‘Yes, father,’ replied Minnie. ‘Never say I detracted from her!’

‘Very good,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘That’s right. And so, young gentleman,’ he
added, after a few moments’ further rubbing of his chin, ‘that you may
not consider me long-winded as well as short-breathed, I believe that’s
all about it.’

As they had spoken in a subdued tone, while speaking of Em’ly, I had no
doubt that she was near. On my asking now, if that were not so, Mr.
Omer nodded yes, and nodded towards the door of the parlour. My hurried
inquiry if I might peep in, was answered with a free permission; and,
looking through the glass, I saw her sitting at her work. I saw her, a
most beautiful little creature, with the cloudless blue eyes, that had
looked into my childish heart, turned laughingly upon another child
of Minnie’s who was playing near her; with enough of wilfulness in her
bright face to justify what I had heard; with much of the old capricious
coyness lurking in it; but with nothing in her pretty looks, I am sure,
but what was meant for goodness and for happiness, and what was on a
good and happy course.

The tune across the yard that seemed as if it never had left off--alas!
it was the tune that never DOES leave off--was beating, softly, all the
while.

‘Wouldn’t you like to step in,’ said Mr. Omer, ‘and speak to her? Walk
in and speak to her, sir! Make yourself at home!’

I was too bashful to do so then--I was afraid of confusing her, and I
was no less afraid of confusing myself.--but I informed myself of the
hour at which she left of an evening, in order that our visit might
be timed accordingly; and taking leave of Mr. Omer, and his pretty
daughter, and her little children, went away to my dear old Peggotty’s.

Here she was, in the tiled kitchen, cooking dinner! The moment I knocked
at the door she opened it, and asked me what I pleased to want. I looked
at her with a smile, but she gave me no smile in return. I had never
ceased to write to her, but it must have been seven years since we had
met.

‘Is Mr. Barkis at home, ma’am?’ I said, feigning to speak roughly to
her.

‘He’s at home, sir,’ returned Peggotty, ‘but he’s bad abed with the
rheumatics.’

‘Don’t he go over to Blunderstone now?’ I asked.

‘When he’s well he do,’ she answered.

‘Do YOU ever go there, Mrs. Barkis?’

She looked at me more attentively, and I noticed a quick movement of her
hands towards each other.

‘Because I want to ask a question about a house there, that they call
the--what is it?--the Rookery,’ said I.

She took a step backward, and put out her hands in an undecided
frightened way, as if to keep me off.

‘Peggotty!’ I cried to her.

She cried, ‘My darling boy!’ and we both burst into tears, and were
locked in one another’s arms.

What extravagances she committed; what laughing and crying over me; what
pride she showed, what joy, what sorrow that she whose pride and joy I
might have been, could never hold me in a fond embrace; I have not the
heart to tell. I was troubled with no misgiving that it was young in
me to respond to her emotions. I had never laughed and cried in all my
life, I dare say--not even to her--more freely than I did that morning.

‘Barkis will be so glad,’ said Peggotty, wiping her eyes with her apron,
‘that it’ll do him more good than pints of liniment. May I go and tell
him you are here? Will you come up and see him, my dear?’

Of course I would. But Peggotty could not get out of the room as easily
as she meant to, for as often as she got to the door and looked round
at me, she came back again to have another laugh and another cry upon my
shoulder. At last, to make the matter easier, I went upstairs with
her; and having waited outside for a minute, while she said a word of
preparation to Mr. Barkis, presented myself before that invalid.

He received me with absolute enthusiasm. He was too rheumatic to be
shaken hands with, but he begged me to shake the tassel on the top of
his nightcap, which I did most cordially. When I sat down by the side
of the bed, he said that it did him a world of good to feel as if he
was driving me on the Blunderstone road again. As he lay in bed, face
upward, and so covered, with that exception, that he seemed to be
nothing but a face--like a conventional cherubim--he looked the queerest
object I ever beheld.

‘What name was it, as I wrote up in the cart, sir?’ said Mr. Barkis,
with a slow rheumatic smile.

‘Ah! Mr. Barkis, we had some grave talks about that matter, hadn’t we?’

‘I was willin’ a long time, sir?’ said Mr. Barkis.

‘A long time,’ said I.

‘And I don’t regret it,’ said Mr. Barkis. ‘Do you remember what you
told me once, about her making all the apple parsties and doing all the
cooking?’

‘Yes, very well,’ I returned.

‘It was as true,’ said Mr. Barkis, ‘as turnips is. It was as true,’ said
Mr. Barkis, nodding his nightcap, which was his only means of emphasis,
‘as taxes is. And nothing’s truer than them.’

Mr. Barkis turned his eyes upon me, as if for my assent to this result
of his reflections in bed; and I gave it.

‘Nothing’s truer than them,’ repeated Mr. Barkis; ‘a man as poor as I
am, finds that out in his mind when he’s laid up. I’m a very poor man,
sir!’

‘I am sorry to hear it, Mr. Barkis.’

‘A very poor man, indeed I am,’ said Mr. Barkis.

Here his right hand came slowly and feebly from under the bedclothes,
and with a purposeless uncertain grasp took hold of a stick which was
loosely tied to the side of the bed. After some poking about with
this instrument, in the course of which his face assumed a variety of
distracted expressions, Mr. Barkis poked it against a box, an end
of which had been visible to me all the time. Then his face became
composed.

‘Old clothes,’ said Mr. Barkis.

‘Oh!’ said I.

‘I wish it was Money, sir,’ said Mr. Barkis.

‘I wish it was, indeed,’ said I.

‘But it AIN’T,’ said Mr. Barkis, opening both his eyes as wide as he
possibly could.

I expressed myself quite sure of that, and Mr. Barkis, turning his eyes
more gently to his wife, said:

‘She’s the usefullest and best of women, C. P. Barkis. All the praise
that anyone can give to C. P. Barkis, she deserves, and more! My dear,
you’ll get a dinner today, for company; something good to eat and drink,
will you?’

I should have protested against this unnecessary demonstration in
my honour, but that I saw Peggotty, on the opposite side of the bed,
extremely anxious I should not. So I held my peace.

‘I have got a trifle of money somewhere about me, my dear,’ said Mr.
Barkis, ‘but I’m a little tired. If you and Mr. David will leave me for
a short nap, I’ll try and find it when I wake.’

We left the room, in compliance with this request. When we got outside
the door, Peggotty informed me that Mr. Barkis, being now ‘a little
nearer’ than he used to be, always resorted to this same device before
producing a single coin from his store; and that he endured unheard-of
agonies in crawling out of bed alone, and taking it from that unlucky
box. In effect, we presently heard him uttering suppressed groans of the
most dismal nature, as this magpie proceeding racked him in every joint;
but while Peggotty’s eyes were full of compassion for him, she said his
generous impulse would do him good, and it was better not to check it.
So he groaned on, until he had got into bed again, suffering, I have no
doubt, a martyrdom; and then called us in, pretending to have just
woke up from a refreshing sleep, and to produce a guinea from under his
pillow. His satisfaction in which happy imposition on us, and in
having preserved the impenetrable secret of the box, appeared to be a
sufficient compensation to him for all his tortures.

I prepared Peggotty for Steerforth’s arrival and it was not long before
he came. I am persuaded she knew no difference between his having been a
personal benefactor of hers, and a kind friend to me, and that she would
have received him with the utmost gratitude and devotion in any case.
But his easy, spirited good humour; his genial manner, his handsome
looks, his natural gift of adapting himself to whomsoever he pleased,
and making direct, when he cared to do it, to the main point of interest
in anybody’s heart; bound her to him wholly in five minutes. His
manner to me, alone, would have won her. But, through all these causes
combined, I sincerely believe she had a kind of adoration for him before
he left the house that night.

He stayed there with me to dinner--if I were to say willingly, I should
not half express how readily and gaily. He went into Mr. Barkis’s room
like light and air, brightening and refreshing it as if he were healthy
weather. There was no noise, no effort, no consciousness, in anything
he did; but in everything an indescribable lightness, a seeming
impossibility of doing anything else, or doing anything better, which
was so graceful, so natural, and agreeable, that it overcomes me, even
now, in the remembrance.

We made merry in the little parlour, where the Book of Martyrs,
unthumbed since my time, was laid out upon the desk as of old, and where
I now turned over its terrific pictures, remembering the old sensations
they had awakened, but not feeling them. When Peggotty spoke of what
she called my room, and of its being ready for me at night, and of her
hoping I would occupy it, before I could so much as look at Steerforth,
hesitating, he was possessed of the whole case.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘You’ll sleep here, while we stay, and I shall
sleep at the hotel.’

‘But to bring you so far,’ I returned, ‘and to separate, seems bad
companionship, Steerforth.’

‘Why, in the name of Heaven, where do you naturally belong?’ he said.
‘What is “seems”, compared to that?’ It was settled at once.

He maintained all his delightful qualities to the last, until we started
forth, at eight o’clock, for Mr. Peggotty’s boat. Indeed, they were more
and more brightly exhibited as the hours went on; for I thought even
then, and I have no doubt now, that the consciousness of success in his
determination to please, inspired him with a new delicacy of perception,
and made it, subtle as it was, more easy to him. If anyone had told me,
then, that all this was a brilliant game, played for the excitement of
the moment, for the employment of high spirits, in the thoughtless love
of superiority, in a mere wasteful careless course of winning what was
worthless to him, and next minute thrown away--I say, if anyone had told
me such a lie that night, I wonder in what manner of receiving it my
indignation would have found a vent! Probably only in an increase, had
that been possible, of the romantic feelings of fidelity and friendship
with which I walked beside him, over the dark wintry sands towards the
old boat; the wind sighing around us even more mournfully, than it had
sighed and moaned upon the night when I first darkened Mr. Peggotty’s
door.

‘This is a wild kind of place, Steerforth, is it not?’

‘Dismal enough in the dark,’ he said: ‘and the sea roars as if it were
hungry for us. Is that the boat, where I see a light yonder?’ ‘That’s
the boat,’ said I.

‘And it’s the same I saw this morning,’ he returned. ‘I came straight to
it, by instinct, I suppose.’

We said no more as we approached the light, but made softly for the
door. I laid my hand upon the latch; and whispering Steerforth to keep
close to me, went in.

A murmur of voices had been audible on the outside, and, at the
moment of our entrance, a clapping of hands: which latter noise, I
was surprised to see, proceeded from the generally disconsolate Mrs.
Gummidge. But Mrs. Gummidge was not the only person there who was
unusually excited. Mr. Peggotty, his face lighted up with uncommon
satisfaction, and laughing with all his might, held his rough arms
wide open, as if for little Em’ly to run into them; Ham, with a mixed
expression in his face of admiration, exultation, and a lumbering sort
of bashfulness that sat upon him very well, held little Em’ly by
the hand, as if he were presenting her to Mr. Peggotty; little Em’ly
herself, blushing and shy, but delighted with Mr. Peggotty’s delight, as
her joyous eyes expressed, was stopped by our entrance (for she saw us
first) in the very act of springing from Ham to nestle in Mr. Peggotty’s
embrace. In the first glimpse we had of them all, and at the moment of
our passing from the dark cold night into the warm light room, this
was the way in which they were all employed: Mrs. Gummidge in the
background, clapping her hands like a madwoman.

The little picture was so instantaneously dissolved by our going in,
that one might have doubted whether it had ever been. I was in the midst
of the astonished family, face to face with Mr. Peggotty, and holding
out my hand to him, when Ham shouted:

‘Mas’r Davy! It’s Mas’r Davy!’

In a moment we were all shaking hands with one another, and asking one
another how we did, and telling one another how glad we were to meet,
and all talking at once. Mr. Peggotty was so proud and overjoyed to see
us, that he did not know what to say or do, but kept over and over again
shaking hands with me, and then with Steerforth, and then with me, and
then ruffling his shaggy hair all over his head, and laughing with such
glee and triumph, that it was a treat to see him.

‘Why, that you two gent’lmen--gent’lmen growed--should come to this here
roof tonight, of all nights in my life,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘is such a
thing as never happened afore, I do rightly believe! Em’ly, my darling,
come here! Come here, my little witch! There’s Mas’r Davy’s friend, my
dear! There’s the gent’lman as you’ve heerd on, Em’ly. He comes to see
you, along with Mas’r Davy, on the brightest night of your uncle’s life
as ever was or will be, Gorm the t’other one, and horroar for it!’

After delivering this speech all in a breath, and with extraordinary
animation and pleasure, Mr. Peggotty put one of his large hands
rapturously on each side of his niece’s face, and kissing it a dozen
times, laid it with a gentle pride and love upon his broad chest, and
patted it as if his hand had been a lady’s. Then he let her go; and as
she ran into the little chamber where I used to sleep, looked round upon
us, quite hot and out of breath with his uncommon satisfaction.

‘If you two gent’lmen--gent’lmen growed now, and such gent’lmen--’ said
Mr. Peggotty.

‘So th’ are, so th’ are!’ cried Ham. ‘Well said! So th’ are. Mas’r Davy
bor’--gent’lmen growed--so th’ are!’

‘If you two gent’lmen, gent’lmen growed,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘don’t
ex-cuse me for being in a state of mind, when you understand matters,
I’ll arks your pardon. Em’ly, my dear!--She knows I’m a going to tell,’
here his delight broke out again, ‘and has made off. Would you be so
good as look arter her, Mawther, for a minute?’

Mrs. Gummidge nodded and disappeared.

‘If this ain’t,’ said Mr. Peggotty, sitting down among us by the fire,
‘the brightest night o’ my life, I’m a shellfish--biled too--and more I
can’t say. This here little Em’ly, sir,’ in a low voice to Steerforth,
‘--her as you see a blushing here just now--’

Steerforth only nodded; but with such a pleased expression of interest,
and of participation in Mr. Peggotty’s feelings, that the latter
answered him as if he had spoken.

‘To be sure,’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘That’s her, and so she is. Thankee,
sir.’

Ham nodded to me several times, as if he would have said so too.

‘This here little Em’ly of ours,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘has been, in our
house, what I suppose (I’m a ignorant man, but that’s my belief) no one
but a little bright-eyed creetur can be in a house. She ain’t my
child; I never had one; but I couldn’t love her more. You understand! I
couldn’t do it!’

‘I quite understand,’ said Steerforth.

‘I know you do, sir,’ returned Mr. Peggotty, ‘and thankee again. Mas’r
Davy, he can remember what she was; you may judge for your own self what
she is; but neither of you can’t fully know what she has been, is, and
will be, to my loving art. I am rough, sir,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘I am as
rough as a Sea Porkypine; but no one, unless, mayhap, it is a woman, can
know, I think, what our little Em’ly is to me. And betwixt ourselves,’
sinking his voice lower yet, ‘that woman’s name ain’t Missis Gummidge
neither, though she has a world of merits.’ Mr. Peggotty ruffled his
hair again, with both hands, as a further preparation for what he was
going to say, and went on, with a hand upon each of his knees:

‘There was a certain person as had know’d our Em’ly, from the time when
her father was drownded; as had seen her constant; when a babby, when
a young gal, when a woman. Not much of a person to look at, he warn’t,’
said Mr. Peggotty, ‘something o’ my own build--rough--a good deal o’
the sou’-wester in him--wery salt--but, on the whole, a honest sort of a
chap, with his art in the right place.’

I thought I had never seen Ham grin to anything like the extent to which
he sat grinning at us now.

‘What does this here blessed tarpaulin go and do,’ said Mr. Peggotty,
with his face one high noon of enjoyment, ‘but he loses that there art
of his to our little Em’ly. He follers her about, he makes hisself a
sort o’ servant to her, he loses in a great measure his relish for his
wittles, and in the long-run he makes it clear to me wot’s amiss. Now I
could wish myself, you see, that our little Em’ly was in a fair way of
being married. I could wish to see her, at all ewents, under articles to
a honest man as had a right to defend her. I don’t know how long I may
live, or how soon I may die; but I know that if I was capsized, any
night, in a gale of wind in Yarmouth Roads here, and was to see the
town-lights shining for the last time over the rollers as I couldn’t
make no head against, I could go down quieter for thinking “There’s a
man ashore there, iron-true to my little Em’ly, God bless her, and no
wrong can touch my Em’ly while so be as that man lives.”’

Mr. Peggotty, in simple earnestness, waved his right arm, as if he were
waving it at the town-lights for the last time, and then, exchanging a
nod with Ham, whose eye he caught, proceeded as before.

‘Well! I counsels him to speak to Em’ly. He’s big enough, but he’s
bashfuller than a little un, and he don’t like. So I speak. “What! Him!”
 says Em’ly. “Him that I’ve know’d so intimate so many years, and like so
much. Oh, Uncle! I never can have him. He’s such a good fellow!” I gives
her a kiss, and I says no more to her than, “My dear, you’re right to
speak out, you’re to choose for yourself, you’re as free as a little
bird.” Then I aways to him, and I says, “I wish it could have been so,
but it can’t. But you can both be as you was, and wot I say to you is,
Be as you was with her, like a man.” He says to me, a-shaking of my
hand, “I will!” he says. And he was--honourable and manful--for two year
going on, and we was just the same at home here as afore.’

Mr. Peggotty’s face, which had varied in its expression with the various
stages of his narrative, now resumed all its former triumphant delight,
as he laid a hand upon my knee and a hand upon Steerforth’s (previously
wetting them both, for the greater emphasis of the action), and divided
the following speech between us:

‘All of a sudden, one evening--as it might be tonight--comes little
Em’ly from her work, and him with her! There ain’t so much in that,
you’ll say. No, because he takes care on her, like a brother, arter
dark, and indeed afore dark, and at all times. But this tarpaulin chap,
he takes hold of her hand, and he cries out to me, joyful, “Look here!
This is to be my little wife!” And she says, half bold and half shy, and
half a laughing and half a crying, “Yes, Uncle! If you please.”--If I
please!’ cried Mr. Peggotty, rolling his head in an ecstasy at the idea;
‘Lord, as if I should do anythink else!--“If you please, I am steadier
now, and I have thought better of it, and I’ll be as good a little wife
as I can to him, for he’s a dear, good fellow!” Then Missis Gummidge,
she claps her hands like a play, and you come in. Theer! the murder’s
out!’ said Mr. Peggotty--‘You come in! It took place this here present
hour; and here’s the man that’ll marry her, the minute she’s out of her
time.’

Ham staggered, as well he might, under the blow Mr. Peggotty dealt
him in his unbounded joy, as a mark of confidence and friendship; but
feeling called upon to say something to us, he said, with much faltering
and great difficulty:

‘She warn’t no higher than you was, Mas’r Davy--when you first
come--when I thought what she’d grow up to be. I see her grown
up--gent’lmen--like a flower. I’d lay down my life for
her--Mas’r Davy--Oh! most content and cheerful! She’s more to
me--gent’lmen--than--she’s all to me that ever I can want, and more
than ever I--than ever I could say. I--I love her true. There ain’t a
gent’lman in all the land--nor yet sailing upon all the sea--that
can love his lady more than I love her, though there’s many a common
man--would say better--what he meant.’

I thought it affecting to see such a sturdy fellow as Ham was now,
trembling in the strength of what he felt for the pretty little creature
who had won his heart. I thought the simple confidence reposed in us by
Mr. Peggotty and by himself, was, in itself, affecting. I was affected
by the story altogether. How far my emotions were influenced by the
recollections of my childhood, I don’t know. Whether I had come there
with any lingering fancy that I was still to love little Em’ly, I don’t
know. I know that I was filled with pleasure by all this; but, at first,
with an indescribably sensitive pleasure, that a very little would have
changed to pain.

Therefore, if it had depended upon me to touch the prevailing chord
among them with any skill, I should have made a poor hand of it. But it
depended upon Steerforth; and he did it with such address, that in a few
minutes we were all as easy and as happy as it was possible to be.

‘Mr. Peggotty,’ he said, ‘you are a thoroughly good fellow, and deserve
to be as happy as you are tonight. My hand upon it! Ham, I give you
joy, my boy. My hand upon that, too! Daisy, stir the fire, and make it a
brisk one! and Mr. Peggotty, unless you can induce your gentle niece to
come back (for whom I vacate this seat in the corner), I shall go.
Any gap at your fireside on such a night--such a gap least of all--I
wouldn’t make, for the wealth of the Indies!’

So Mr. Peggotty went into my old room to fetch little Em’ly. At first
little Em’ly didn’t like to come, and then Ham went. Presently they
brought her to the fireside, very much confused, and very shy,--but
she soon became more assured when she found how gently and respectfully
Steerforth spoke to her; how skilfully he avoided anything that would
embarrass her; how he talked to Mr. Peggotty of boats, and ships, and
tides, and fish; how he referred to me about the time when he had seen
Mr. Peggotty at Salem House; how delighted he was with the boat and all
belonging to it; how lightly and easily he carried on, until he brought
us, by degrees, into a charmed circle, and we were all talking away
without any reserve.

Em’ly, indeed, said little all the evening; but she looked, and
listened, and her face got animated, and she was charming. Steerforth
told a story of a dismal shipwreck (which arose out of his talk with Mr.
Peggotty), as if he saw it all before him--and little Em’ly’s eyes were
fastened on him all the time, as if she saw it too. He told us a merry
adventure of his own, as a relief to that, with as much gaiety as if the
narrative were as fresh to him as it was to us--and little Em’ly
laughed until the boat rang with the musical sounds, and we all laughed
(Steerforth too), in irresistible sympathy with what was so pleasant and
light-hearted. He got Mr. Peggotty to sing, or rather to roar, ‘When
the stormy winds do blow, do blow, do blow’; and he sang a sailor’s
song himself, so pathetically and beautifully, that I could have almost
fancied that the real wind creeping sorrowfully round the house, and
murmuring low through our unbroken silence, was there to listen.

As to Mrs. Gummidge, he roused that victim of despondency with a success
never attained by anyone else (so Mr. Peggotty informed me), since
the decease of the old one. He left her so little leisure for being
miserable, that she said next day she thought she must have been
bewitched.

But he set up no monopoly of the general attention, or the conversation.
When little Em’ly grew more courageous, and talked (but still bashfully)
across the fire to me, of our old wanderings upon the beach, to pick up
shells and pebbles; and when I asked her if she recollected how I used
to be devoted to her; and when we both laughed and reddened, casting
these looks back on the pleasant old times, so unreal to look at now; he
was silent and attentive, and observed us thoughtfully. She sat, at this
time, and all the evening, on the old locker in her old little corner
by the fire--Ham beside her, where I used to sit. I could not satisfy
myself whether it was in her own little tormenting way, or in a maidenly
reserve before us, that she kept quite close to the wall, and away from
him; but I observed that she did so, all the evening.

As I remember, it was almost midnight when we took our leave. We had had
some biscuit and dried fish for supper, and Steerforth had produced from
his pocket a full flask of Hollands, which we men (I may say we men,
now, without a blush) had emptied. We parted merrily; and as they all
stood crowded round the door to light us as far as they could upon our
road, I saw the sweet blue eyes of little Em’ly peeping after us, from
behind Ham, and heard her soft voice calling to us to be careful how we
went.

‘A most engaging little Beauty!’ said Steerforth, taking my arm. ‘Well!
It’s a quaint place, and they are quaint company, and it’s quite a new
sensation to mix with them.’

‘How fortunate we are, too,’ I returned, ‘to have arrived to witness
their happiness in that intended marriage! I never saw people so happy.
How delightful to see it, and to be made the sharers in their honest
joy, as we have been!’

‘That’s rather a chuckle-headed fellow for the girl; isn’t he?’ said
Steerforth.

He had been so hearty with him, and with them all, that I felt a shock
in this unexpected and cold reply. But turning quickly upon him, and
seeing a laugh in his eyes, I answered, much relieved:

‘Ah, Steerforth! It’s well for you to joke about the poor! You may
skirmish with Miss Dartle, or try to hide your sympathies in jest from
me, but I know better. When I see how perfectly you understand them, how
exquisitely you can enter into happiness like this plain fisherman’s,
or humour a love like my old nurse’s, I know that there is not a joy or
sorrow, not an emotion, of such people, that can be indifferent to you.
And I admire and love you for it, Steerforth, twenty times the more!’

He stopped, and, looking in my face, said, ‘Daisy, I believe you are
in earnest, and are good. I wish we all were!’ Next moment he was
gaily singing Mr. Peggotty’s song, as we walked at a round pace back to
Yarmouth.



CHAPTER 22. SOME OLD SCENES, AND SOME NEW PEOPLE


Steerforth and I stayed for more than a fortnight in that part of the
country. We were very much together, I need not say; but occasionally we
were asunder for some hours at a time. He was a good sailor, and I was
but an indifferent one; and when he went out boating with Mr. Peggotty,
which was a favourite amusement of his, I generally remained ashore. My
occupation of Peggotty’s spare-room put a constraint upon me, from which
he was free: for, knowing how assiduously she attended on Mr. Barkis
all day, I did not like to remain out late at night; whereas Steerforth,
lying at the Inn, had nothing to consult but his own humour. Thus it
came about, that I heard of his making little treats for the fishermen
at Mr. Peggotty’s house of call, ‘The Willing Mind’, after I was in bed,
and of his being afloat, wrapped in fishermen’s clothes, whole moonlight
nights, and coming back when the morning tide was at flood. By this
time, however, I knew that his restless nature and bold spirits
delighted to find a vent in rough toil and hard weather, as in any other
means of excitement that presented itself freshly to him; so none of his
proceedings surprised me.

Another cause of our being sometimes apart, was, that I had naturally an
interest in going over to Blunderstone, and revisiting the old familiar
scenes of my childhood; while Steerforth, after being there once, had
naturally no great interest in going there again. Hence, on three or
four days that I can at once recall, we went our several ways after an
early breakfast, and met again at a late dinner. I had no idea how he
employed his time in the interval, beyond a general knowledge that
he was very popular in the place, and had twenty means of actively
diverting himself where another man might not have found one.

For my own part, my occupation in my solitary pilgrimages was to recall
every yard of the old road as I went along it, and to haunt the old
spots, of which I never tired. I haunted them, as my memory had often
done, and lingered among them as my younger thoughts had lingered when I
was far away. The grave beneath the tree, where both my parents lay--on
which I had looked out, when it was my father’s only, with such curious
feelings of compassion, and by which I had stood, so desolate, when it
was opened to receive my pretty mother and her baby--the grave which
Peggotty’s own faithful care had ever since kept neat, and made a garden
of, I walked near, by the hour. It lay a little off the churchyard path,
in a quiet corner, not so far removed but I could read the names
upon the stone as I walked to and fro, startled by the sound of the
church-bell when it struck the hour, for it was like a departed voice to
me. My reflections at these times were always associated with the figure
I was to make in life, and the distinguished things I was to do. My
echoing footsteps went to no other tune, but were as constant to that as
if I had come home to build my castles in the air at a living mother’s
side.

There were great changes in my old home. The ragged nests, so long
deserted by the rooks, were gone; and the trees were lopped and topped
out of their remembered shapes. The garden had run wild, and half the
windows of the house were shut up. It was occupied, but only by a poor
lunatic gentleman, and the people who took care of him. He was always
sitting at my little window, looking out into the churchyard; and I
wondered whether his rambling thoughts ever went upon any of the fancies
that used to occupy mine, on the rosy mornings when I peeped out of
that same little window in my night-clothes, and saw the sheep quietly
feeding in the light of the rising sun.

Our old neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Grayper, were gone to South America,
and the rain had made its way through the roof of their empty house,
and stained the outer walls. Mr. Chillip was married again to a tall,
raw-boned, high-nosed wife; and they had a weazen little baby, with a
heavy head that it couldn’t hold up, and two weak staring eyes, with
which it seemed to be always wondering why it had ever been born.

It was with a singular jumble of sadness and pleasure that I used to
linger about my native place, until the reddening winter sun admonished
me that it was time to start on my returning walk. But, when the place
was left behind, and especially when Steerforth and I were happily
seated over our dinner by a blazing fire, it was delicious to think of
having been there. So it was, though in a softened degree, when I
went to my neat room at night; and, turning over the leaves of the
crocodile-book (which was always there, upon a little table), remembered
with a grateful heart how blest I was in having such a friend as
Steerforth, such a friend as Peggotty, and such a substitute for what I
had lost as my excellent and generous aunt.

MY nearest way to Yarmouth, in coming back from these long walks, was by
a ferry. It landed me on the flat between the town and the sea, which I
could make straight across, and so save myself a considerable circuit by
the high road. Mr. Peggotty’s house being on that waste-place, and not
a hundred yards out of my track, I always looked in as I went by.
Steerforth was pretty sure to be there expecting me, and we went on
together through the frosty air and gathering fog towards the twinkling
lights of the town.

One dark evening, when I was later than usual--for I had, that day, been
making my parting visit to Blunderstone, as we were now about to return
home--I found him alone in Mr. Peggotty’s house, sitting thoughtfully
before the fire. He was so intent upon his own reflections that he was
quite unconscious of my approach. This, indeed, he might easily have
been if he had been less absorbed, for footsteps fell noiselessly on the
sandy ground outside; but even my entrance failed to rouse him. I was
standing close to him, looking at him; and still, with a heavy brow, he
was lost in his meditations.

He gave such a start when I put my hand upon his shoulder, that he made
me start too.

‘You come upon me,’ he said, almost angrily, ‘like a reproachful ghost!’

‘I was obliged to announce myself, somehow,’ I replied. ‘Have I called
you down from the stars?’

‘No,’ he answered. ‘No.’

‘Up from anywhere, then?’ said I, taking my seat near him.

‘I was looking at the pictures in the fire,’ he returned.

‘But you are spoiling them for me,’ said I, as he stirred it quickly
with a piece of burning wood, striking out of it a train of red-hot
sparks that went careering up the little chimney, and roaring out into
the air.

‘You would not have seen them,’ he returned. ‘I detest this mongrel
time, neither day nor night. How late you are! Where have you been?’

‘I have been taking leave of my usual walk,’ said I.

‘And I have been sitting here,’ said Steerforth, glancing round the
room, ‘thinking that all the people we found so glad on the night of
our coming down, might--to judge from the present wasted air of the
place--be dispersed, or dead, or come to I don’t know what harm. David,
I wish to God I had had a judicious father these last twenty years!’

‘My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?’

‘I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!’ he exclaimed. ‘I
wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!’

There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed me. He
was more unlike himself than I could have supposed possible.

‘It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a nephew,’
he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimney-piece, with
his face towards the fire, ‘than to be myself, twenty times richer and
twenty times wiser, and be the torment to myself that I have been, in
this Devil’s bark of a boat, within the last half-hour!’

I was so confounded by the alteration in him, that at first I could only
observe him in silence, as he stood leaning his head upon his hand, and
looking gloomily down at the fire. At length I begged him, with all
the earnestness I felt, to tell me what had occurred to cross him so
unusually, and to let me sympathize with him, if I could not hope to
advise him. Before I had well concluded, he began to laugh--fretfully at
first, but soon with returning gaiety.

‘Tut, it’s nothing, Daisy! nothing!’ he replied. ‘I told you at the
inn in London, I am heavy company for myself, sometimes. I have been a
nightmare to myself, just now--must have had one, I think. At odd dull
times, nursery tales come up into the memory, unrecognized for what
they are. I believe I have been confounding myself with the bad boy who
“didn’t care”, and became food for lions--a grander kind of going to
the dogs, I suppose. What old women call the horrors, have been creeping
over me from head to foot. I have been afraid of myself.’

‘You are afraid of nothing else, I think,’ said I.

‘Perhaps not, and yet may have enough to be afraid of too,’ he answered.
‘Well! So it goes by! I am not about to be hipped again, David; but I
tell you, my good fellow, once more, that it would have been well for me
(and for more than me) if I had had a steadfast and judicious father!’

His face was always full of expression, but I never saw it express such
a dark kind of earnestness as when he said these words, with his glance
bent on the fire.

‘So much for that!’ he said, making as if he tossed something light
into the air, with his hand. “‘Why, being gone, I am a man again,” like
Macbeth. And now for dinner! If I have not (Macbeth-like) broken up the
feast with most admired disorder, Daisy.’

‘But where are they all, I wonder!’ said I.

‘God knows,’ said Steerforth. ‘After strolling to the ferry looking
for you, I strolled in here and found the place deserted. That set me
thinking, and you found me thinking.’

The advent of Mrs. Gummidge with a basket, explained how the house had
happened to be empty. She had hurried out to buy something that was
needed, against Mr. Peggotty’s return with the tide; and had left the
door open in the meanwhile, lest Ham and little Em’ly, with whom it was
an early night, should come home while she was gone. Steerforth, after
very much improving Mrs. Gummidge’s spirits by a cheerful salutation and
a jocose embrace, took my arm, and hurried me away.

He had improved his own spirits, no less than Mrs. Gummidge’s, for
they were again at their usual flow, and he was full of vivacious
conversation as we went along.

‘And so,’ he said, gaily, ‘we abandon this buccaneer life tomorrow, do
we?’

‘So we agreed,’ I returned. ‘And our places by the coach are taken, you
know.’

‘Ay! there’s no help for it, I suppose,’ said Steerforth. ‘I have
almost forgotten that there is anything to do in the world but to go out
tossing on the sea here. I wish there was not.’

‘As long as the novelty should last,’ said I, laughing.

‘Like enough,’ he returned; ‘though there’s a sarcastic meaning in that
observation for an amiable piece of innocence like my young friend.
Well! I dare say I am a capricious fellow, David. I know I am; but
while the iron is hot, I can strike it vigorously too. I could pass
a reasonably good examination already, as a pilot in these waters, I
think.’

‘Mr. Peggotty says you are a wonder,’ I returned.

‘A nautical phenomenon, eh?’ laughed Steerforth.

‘Indeed he does, and you know how truly; I know how ardent you are
in any pursuit you follow, and how easily you can master it. And that
amazes me most in you, Steerforth--that you should be contented with
such fitful uses of your powers.’

‘Contented?’ he answered, merrily. ‘I am never contented, except with
your freshness, my gentle Daisy. As to fitfulness, I have never learnt
the art of binding myself to any of the wheels on which the Ixions of
these days are turning round and round. I missed it somehow in a bad
apprenticeship, and now don’t care about it.---You know I have bought a
boat down here?’

‘What an extraordinary fellow you are, Steerforth!’ I exclaimed,
stopping--for this was the first I had heard of it. ‘When you may never
care to come near the place again!’

‘I don’t know that,’ he returned. ‘I have taken a fancy to the place. At
all events,’ walking me briskly on, ‘I have bought a boat that was for
sale--a clipper, Mr. Peggotty says; and so she is--and Mr. Peggotty will
be master of her in my absence.’

‘Now I understand you, Steerforth!’ said I, exultingly. ‘You pretend
to have bought it for yourself, but you have really done so to confer
a benefit on him. I might have known as much at first, knowing you.
My dear kind Steerforth, how can I tell you what I think of your
generosity?’

‘Tush!’ he answered, turning red. ‘The less said, the better.’

‘Didn’t I know?’ cried I, ‘didn’t I say that there was not a joy, or
sorrow, or any emotion of such honest hearts that was indifferent to
you?’

‘Aye, aye,’ he answered, ‘you told me all that. There let it rest. We
have said enough!’

Afraid of offending him by pursuing the subject when he made so light
of it, I only pursued it in my thoughts as we went on at even a quicker
pace than before.

‘She must be newly rigged,’ said Steerforth, ‘and I shall leave Littimer
behind to see it done, that I may know she is quite complete. Did I tell
you Littimer had come down?’

‘No.’

‘Oh yes! came down this morning, with a letter from my mother.’

As our looks met, I observed that he was pale even to his lips, though
he looked very steadily at me. I feared that some difference between him
and his mother might have led to his being in the frame of mind in which
I had found him at the solitary fireside. I hinted so.

‘Oh no!’ he said, shaking his head, and giving a slight laugh. ‘Nothing
of the sort! Yes. He is come down, that man of mine.’

‘The same as ever?’ said I.

‘The same as ever,’ said Steerforth. ‘Distant and quiet as the North
Pole. He shall see to the boat being fresh named. She’s the “Stormy
Petrel” now. What does Mr. Peggotty care for Stormy Petrels! I’ll have
her christened again.’

‘By what name?’ I asked.

‘The “Little Em’ly”.’

As he had continued to look steadily at me, I took it as a reminder that
he objected to being extolled for his consideration. I could not help
showing in my face how much it pleased me, but I said little, and he
resumed his usual smile, and seemed relieved.

‘But see here,’ he said, looking before us, ‘where the original little
Em’ly comes! And that fellow with her, eh? Upon my soul, he’s a true
knight. He never leaves her!’

Ham was a boat-builder in these days, having improved a natural
ingenuity in that handicraft, until he had become a skilled workman. He
was in his working-dress, and looked rugged enough, but manly withal,
and a very fit protector for the blooming little creature at his
side. Indeed, there was a frankness in his face, an honesty, and an
undisguised show of his pride in her, and his love for her, which were,
to me, the best of good looks. I thought, as they came towards us, that
they were well matched even in that particular.

She withdrew her hand timidly from his arm as we stopped to speak to
them, and blushed as she gave it to Steerforth and to me. When they
passed on, after we had exchanged a few words, she did not like to
replace that hand, but, still appearing timid and constrained, walked
by herself. I thought all this very pretty and engaging, and Steerforth
seemed to think so too, as we looked after them fading away in the light
of a young moon.

Suddenly there passed us--evidently following them--a young woman whose
approach we had not observed, but whose face I saw as she went by, and
thought I had a faint remembrance of. She was lightly dressed; looked
bold, and haggard, and flaunting, and poor; but seemed, for the time, to
have given all that to the wind which was blowing, and to have nothing
in her mind but going after them. As the dark distant level, absorbing
their figures into itself, left but itself visible between us and the
sea and clouds, her figure disappeared in like manner, still no nearer
to them than before.

‘That is a black shadow to be following the girl,’ said Steerforth,
standing still; ‘what does it mean?’

He spoke in a low voice that sounded almost strange to Me.

‘She must have it in her mind to beg of them, I think,’ said I.

‘A beggar would be no novelty,’ said Steerforth; ‘but it is a strange
thing that the beggar should take that shape tonight.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘For no better reason, truly, than because I was thinking,’ he said,
after a pause, ‘of something like it, when it came by. Where the Devil
did it come from, I wonder!’

‘From the shadow of this wall, I think,’ said I, as we emerged upon a
road on which a wall abutted.

‘It’s gone!’ he returned, looking over his shoulder. ‘And all ill go
with it. Now for our dinner!’

But he looked again over his shoulder towards the sea-line glimmering
afar off, and yet again. And he wondered about it, in some broken
expressions, several times, in the short remainder of our walk; and only
seemed to forget it when the light of fire and candle shone upon us,
seated warm and merry, at table.

Littimer was there, and had his usual effect upon me. When I said to
him that I hoped Mrs. Steerforth and Miss Dartle were well, he answered
respectfully (and of course respectably), that they were tolerably well,
he thanked me, and had sent their compliments. This was all, and yet he
seemed to me to say as plainly as a man could say: ‘You are very young,
sir; you are exceedingly young.’

We had almost finished dinner, when taking a step or two towards the
table, from the corner where he kept watch upon us, or rather upon me,
as I felt, he said to his master:

‘I beg your pardon, sir. Miss Mowcher is down here.’

‘Who?’ cried Steerforth, much astonished.

‘Miss Mowcher, sir.’

‘Why, what on earth does she do here?’ said Steerforth.

‘It appears to be her native part of the country, sir. She informs me
that she makes one of her professional visits here, every year, sir.
I met her in the street this afternoon, and she wished to know if she
might have the honour of waiting on you after dinner, sir.’

‘Do you know the Giantess in question, Daisy?’ inquired Steerforth.

I was obliged to confess--I felt ashamed, even of being at this
disadvantage before Littimer--that Miss Mowcher and I were wholly
unacquainted.

‘Then you shall know her,’ said Steerforth, ‘for she is one of the seven
wonders of the world. When Miss Mowcher comes, show her in.’

I felt some curiosity and excitement about this lady, especially as
Steerforth burst into a fit of laughing when I referred to her, and
positively refused to answer any question of which I made her the
subject. I remained, therefore, in a state of considerable expectation
until the cloth had been removed some half an hour, and we were sitting
over our decanter of wine before the fire, when the door opened, and
Littimer, with his habitual serenity quite undisturbed, announced:

‘Miss Mowcher!’

I looked at the doorway and saw nothing. I was still looking at
the doorway, thinking that Miss Mowcher was a long while making her
appearance, when, to my infinite astonishment, there came waddling round
a sofa which stood between me and it, a pursy dwarf, of about forty
or forty-five, with a very large head and face, a pair of roguish grey
eyes, and such extremely little arms, that, to enable herself to lay a
finger archly against her snub nose, as she ogled Steerforth, she was
obliged to meet the finger half-way, and lay her nose against it.
Her chin, which was what is called a double chin, was so fat that it
entirely swallowed up the strings of her bonnet, bow and all. Throat she
had none; waist she had none; legs she had none, worth mentioning; for
though she was more than full-sized down to where her waist would have
been, if she had had any, and though she terminated, as human beings
generally do, in a pair of feet, she was so short that she stood at a
common-sized chair as at a table, resting a bag she carried on the seat.
This lady--dressed in an off-hand, easy style; bringing her nose and her
forefinger together, with the difficulty I have described; standing with
her head necessarily on one side, and, with one of her sharp eyes shut
up, making an uncommonly knowing face--after ogling Steerforth for a few
moments, broke into a torrent of words.

‘What! My flower!’ she pleasantly began, shaking her large head at him.
‘You’re there, are you! Oh, you naughty boy, fie for shame, what do you
do so far away from home? Up to mischief, I’ll be bound. Oh, you’re a
downy fellow, Steerforth, so you are, and I’m another, ain’t I? Ha, ha,
ha! You’d have betted a hundred pound to five, now, that you wouldn’t
have seen me here, wouldn’t you? Bless you, man alive, I’m everywhere.
I’m here and there, and where not, like the conjurer’s half-crown in the
lady’s handkercher. Talking of handkerchers--and talking of ladies--what
a comfort you are to your blessed mother, ain’t you, my dear boy, over
one of my shoulders, and I don’t say which!’

Miss Mowcher untied her bonnet, at this passage of her discourse, threw
back the strings, and sat down, panting, on a footstool in front of
the fire--making a kind of arbour of the dining table, which spread its
mahogany shelter above her head.

‘Oh my stars and what’s-their-names!’ she went on, clapping a hand on
each of her little knees, and glancing shrewdly at me, ‘I’m of too full
a habit, that’s the fact, Steerforth. After a flight of stairs, it gives
me as much trouble to draw every breath I want, as if it was a bucket of
water. If you saw me looking out of an upper window, you’d think I was a
fine woman, wouldn’t you?’

‘I should think that, wherever I saw you,’ replied Steerforth.

‘Go along, you dog, do!’ cried the little creature, making a whisk at
him with the handkerchief with which she was wiping her face, ‘and don’t
be impudent! But I give you my word and honour I was at Lady Mithers’s
last week--THERE’S a woman! How SHE wears!--and Mithers himself came
into the room where I was waiting for her--THERE’S a man! How HE wears!
and his wig too, for he’s had it these ten years--and he went on at
that rate in the complimentary line, that I began to think I should be
obliged to ring the bell. Ha! ha! ha! He’s a pleasant wretch, but he
wants principle.’

‘What were you doing for Lady Mithers?’ asked Steerforth.

‘That’s tellings, my blessed infant,’ she retorted, tapping her nose
again, screwing up her face, and twinkling her eyes like an imp of
supernatural intelligence. ‘Never YOU mind! You’d like to know whether
I stop her hair from falling off, or dye it, or touch up her
complexion, or improve her eyebrows, wouldn’t you? And so you shall, my
darling--when I tell you! Do you know what my great grandfather’s name
was?’

‘No,’ said Steerforth.

‘It was Walker, my sweet pet,’ replied Miss Mowcher, ‘and he came of a
long line of Walkers, that I inherit all the Hookey estates from.’

I never beheld anything approaching to Miss Mowcher’s wink except Miss
Mowcher’s self-possession. She had a wonderful way too, when listening
to what was said to her, or when waiting for an answer to what she had
said herself, of pausing with her head cunningly on one side, and one
eye turned up like a magpie’s. Altogether I was lost in amazement,
and sat staring at her, quite oblivious, I am afraid, of the laws of
politeness.

She had by this time drawn the chair to her side, and was busily engaged
in producing from the bag (plunging in her short arm to the shoulder, at
every dive) a number of small bottles, sponges, combs, brushes, bits of
flannel, little pairs of curling-irons, and other instruments, which
she tumbled in a heap upon the chair. From this employment she suddenly
desisted, and said to Steerforth, much to my confusion:

‘Who’s your friend?’

‘Mr. Copperfield,’ said Steerforth; ‘he wants to know you.’

‘Well, then, he shall! I thought he looked as if he did!’ returned Miss
Mowcher, waddling up to me, bag in hand, and laughing on me as she came.
‘Face like a peach!’ standing on tiptoe to pinch my cheek as I
sat. ‘Quite tempting! I’m very fond of peaches. Happy to make your
acquaintance, Mr. Copperfield, I’m sure.’

I said that I congratulated myself on having the honour to make hers,
and that the happiness was mutual.

‘Oh, my goodness, how polite we are!’ exclaimed Miss Mowcher, making a
preposterous attempt to cover her large face with her morsel of a hand.
‘What a world of gammon and spinnage it is, though, ain’t it!’

This was addressed confidentially to both of us, as the morsel of a
hand came away from the face, and buried itself, arm and all, in the bag
again.

‘What do you mean, Miss Mowcher?’ said Steerforth.

‘Ha! ha! ha! What a refreshing set of humbugs we are, to be sure, ain’t
we, my sweet child?’ replied that morsel of a woman, feeling in the bag
with her head on one side and her eye in the air. ‘Look here!’ taking
something out. ‘Scraps of the Russian Prince’s nails. Prince Alphabet
turned topsy-turvy, I call him, for his name’s got all the letters in
it, higgledy-piggledy.’

‘The Russian Prince is a client of yours, is he?’ said Steerforth.

‘I believe you, my pet,’ replied Miss Mowcher. ‘I keep his nails in
order for him. Twice a week! Fingers and toes.’

‘He pays well, I hope?’ said Steerforth.

‘Pays, as he speaks, my dear child--through the nose,’ replied Miss
Mowcher. ‘None of your close shavers the Prince ain’t. You’d say so, if
you saw his moustachios. Red by nature, black by art.’

‘By your art, of course,’ said Steerforth.

Miss Mowcher winked assent. ‘Forced to send for me. Couldn’t help it.
The climate affected his dye; it did very well in Russia, but it was no
go here. You never saw such a rusty Prince in all your born days as he
was. Like old iron!’ ‘Is that why you called him a humbug, just now?’
inquired Steerforth.

‘Oh, you’re a broth of a boy, ain’t you?’ returned Miss Mowcher, shaking
her head violently. ‘I said, what a set of humbugs we were in general,
and I showed you the scraps of the Prince’s nails to prove it. The
Prince’s nails do more for me in private families of the genteel sort,
than all my talents put together. I always carry ‘em about. They’re the
best introduction. If Miss Mowcher cuts the Prince’s nails, she must be
all right. I give ‘em away to the young ladies. They put ‘em in albums,
I believe. Ha! ha! ha! Upon my life, “the whole social system” (as
the men call it when they make speeches in Parliament) is a system of
Prince’s nails!’ said this least of women, trying to fold her short
arms, and nodding her large head.

Steerforth laughed heartily, and I laughed too. Miss Mowcher continuing
all the time to shake her head (which was very much on one side), and to
look into the air with one eye, and to wink with the other.

‘Well, well!’ she said, smiting her small knees, and rising, ‘this is
not business. Come, Steerforth, let’s explore the polar regions, and
have it over.’

She then selected two or three of the little instruments, and a
little bottle, and asked (to my surprise) if the table would bear. On
Steerforth’s replying in the affirmative, she pushed a chair against it,
and begging the assistance of my hand, mounted up, pretty nimbly, to the
top, as if it were a stage.

‘If either of you saw my ankles,’ she said, when she was safely
elevated, ‘say so, and I’ll go home and destroy myself!’

‘I did not,’ said Steerforth.

‘I did not,’ said I.

‘Well then,’ cried Miss Mowcher, ‘I’ll consent to live. Now, ducky,
ducky, ducky, come to Mrs. Bond and be killed.’

This was an invocation to Steerforth to place himself under her hands;
who, accordingly, sat himself down, with his back to the table, and
his laughing face towards me, and submitted his head to her inspection,
evidently for no other purpose than our entertainment. To see Miss
Mowcher standing over him, looking at his rich profusion of brown
hair through a large round magnifying glass, which she took out of her
pocket, was a most amazing spectacle.

‘You’re a pretty fellow!’ said Miss Mowcher, after a brief inspection.
‘You’d be as bald as a friar on the top of your head in twelve months,
but for me. Just half a minute, my young friend, and we’ll give you a
polishing that shall keep your curls on for the next ten years!’

With this, she tilted some of the contents of the little bottle on to
one of the little bits of flannel, and, again imparting some of the
virtues of that preparation to one of the little brushes, began rubbing
and scraping away with both on the crown of Steerforth’s head in the
busiest manner I ever witnessed, talking all the time.

‘There’s Charley Pyegrave, the duke’s son,’ she said. ‘You know
Charley?’ peeping round into his face.

‘A little,’ said Steerforth.

‘What a man HE is! THERE’S a whisker! As to Charley’s legs, if they
were only a pair (which they ain’t), they’d defy competition. Would you
believe he tried to do without me--in the Life-Guards, too?’

‘Mad!’ said Steerforth.

‘It looks like it. However, mad or sane, he tried,’ returned Miss
Mowcher. ‘What does he do, but, lo and behold you, he goes into a
perfumer’s shop, and wants to buy a bottle of the Madagascar Liquid.’

‘Charley does?’ said Steerforth.

‘Charley does. But they haven’t got any of the Madagascar Liquid.’

‘What is it? Something to drink?’ asked Steerforth.

‘To drink?’ returned Miss Mowcher, stopping to slap his cheek. ‘To
doctor his own moustachios with, you know. There was a woman in the
shop--elderly female--quite a Griffin--who had never even heard of it
by name. “Begging pardon, sir,” said the Griffin to Charley, “it’s
not--not--not ROUGE, is it?” “Rouge,” said Charley to the Griffin. “What
the unmentionable to ears polite, do you think I want with rouge?” “No
offence, sir,” said the Griffin; “we have it asked for by so many names,
I thought it might be.” Now that, my child,’ continued Miss Mowcher,
rubbing all the time as busily as ever, ‘is another instance of
the refreshing humbug I was speaking of. I do something in that way
myself--perhaps a good deal--perhaps a little--sharp’s the word, my dear
boy--never mind!’

‘In what way do you mean? In the rouge way?’ said Steerforth.

‘Put this and that together, my tender pupil,’ returned the wary
Mowcher, touching her nose, ‘work it by the rule of Secrets in all
trades, and the product will give you the desired result. I say I do a
little in that way myself. One Dowager, SHE calls it lip-salve. Another,
SHE calls it gloves. Another, SHE calls it tucker-edging. Another, SHE
calls it a fan. I call it whatever THEY call it. I supply it for ‘em,
but we keep up the trick so, to one another, and make believe with
such a face, that they’d as soon think of laying it on, before a whole
drawing-room, as before me. And when I wait upon ‘em, they’ll say to
me sometimes--WITH IT ON--thick, and no mistake--“How am I looking,
Mowcher? Am I pale?” Ha! ha! ha! ha! Isn’t THAT refreshing, my young
friend!’

I never did in my days behold anything like Mowcher as she stood upon
the dining table, intensely enjoying this refreshment, rubbing busily at
Steerforth’s head, and winking at me over it.

‘Ah!’ she said. ‘Such things are not much in demand hereabouts. That
sets me off again! I haven’t seen a pretty woman since I’ve been here,
jemmy.’

‘No?’ said Steerforth.

‘Not the ghost of one,’ replied Miss Mowcher.

‘We could show her the substance of one, I think?’ said Steerforth,
addressing his eyes to mine. ‘Eh, Daisy?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said I.

‘Aha?’ cried the little creature, glancing sharply at my face, and then
peeping round at Steerforth’s. ‘Umph?’

The first exclamation sounded like a question put to both of us, and the
second like a question put to Steerforth only. She seemed to have found
no answer to either, but continued to rub, with her head on one side and
her eye turned up, as if she were looking for an answer in the air and
were confident of its appearing presently.

‘A sister of yours, Mr. Copperfield?’ she cried, after a pause, and
still keeping the same look-out. ‘Aye, aye?’

‘No,’ said Steerforth, before I could reply. ‘Nothing of the sort. On
the contrary, Mr. Copperfield used--or I am much mistaken--to have a
great admiration for her.’

‘Why, hasn’t he now?’ returned Miss Mowcher. ‘Is he fickle? Oh, for
shame! Did he sip every flower, and change every hour, until Polly his
passion requited?--Is her name Polly?’

The Elfin suddenness with which she pounced upon me with this question,
and a searching look, quite disconcerted me for a moment.

‘No, Miss Mowcher,’ I replied. ‘Her name is Emily.’

‘Aha?’ she cried exactly as before. ‘Umph? What a rattle I am! Mr.
Copperfield, ain’t I volatile?’

Her tone and look implied something that was not agreeable to me in
connexion with the subject. So I said, in a graver manner than any of us
had yet assumed: ‘She is as virtuous as she is pretty. She is engaged
to be married to a most worthy and deserving man in her own station of
life. I esteem her for her good sense, as much as I admire her for her
good looks.’

‘Well said!’ cried Steerforth. ‘Hear, hear, hear! Now I’ll quench the
curiosity of this little Fatima, my dear Daisy, by leaving her nothing
to guess at. She is at present apprenticed, Miss Mowcher, or articled,
or whatever it may be, to Omer and Joram, Haberdashers, Milliners, and
so forth, in this town. Do you observe? Omer and Joram. The promise of
which my friend has spoken, is made and entered into with her cousin;
Christian name, Ham; surname, Peggotty; occupation, boat-builder;
also of this town. She lives with a relative; Christian name, unknown;
surname, Peggotty; occupation, seafaring; also of this town. She is the
prettiest and most engaging little fairy in the world. I admire her--as
my friend does--exceedingly. If it were not that I might appear to
disparage her Intended, which I know my friend would not like, I would
add, that to me she seems to be throwing herself away; that I am sure
she might do better; and that I swear she was born to be a lady.’

Miss Mowcher listened to these words, which were very slowly and
distinctly spoken, with her head on one side, and her eye in the air
as if she were still looking for that answer. When he ceased she became
brisk again in an instant, and rattled away with surprising volubility.

‘Oh! And that’s all about it, is it?’ she exclaimed, trimming his
whiskers with a little restless pair of scissors, that went glancing
round his head in all directions. ‘Very well: very well! Quite a long
story. Ought to end “and they lived happy ever afterwards”; oughtn’t
it? Ah! What’s that game at forfeits? I love my love with an E, because
she’s enticing; I hate her with an E, because she’s engaged. I took her
to the sign of the exquisite, and treated her with an elopement, her
name’s Emily, and she lives in the east? Ha! ha! ha! Mr. Copperfield,
ain’t I volatile?’

Merely looking at me with extravagant slyness, and not waiting for any
reply, she continued, without drawing breath:

‘There! If ever any scapegrace was trimmed and touched up to perfection,
you are, Steerforth. If I understand any noddle in the world, I
understand yours. Do you hear me when I tell you that, my darling? I
understand yours,’ peeping down into his face. ‘Now you may mizzle,
jemmy (as we say at Court), and if Mr. Copperfield will take the chair
I’ll operate on him.’

‘What do you say, Daisy?’ inquired Steerforth, laughing, and resigning
his seat. ‘Will you be improved?’

‘Thank you, Miss Mowcher, not this evening.’

‘Don’t say no,’ returned the little woman, looking at me with the aspect
of a connoisseur; ‘a little bit more eyebrow?’

‘Thank you,’ I returned, ‘some other time.’

‘Have it carried half a quarter of an inch towards the temple,’ said
Miss Mowcher. ‘We can do it in a fortnight.’

‘No, I thank you. Not at present.’

‘Go in for a tip,’ she urged. ‘No? Let’s get the scaffolding up, then,
for a pair of whiskers. Come!’

I could not help blushing as I declined, for I felt we were on my weak
point, now. But Miss Mowcher, finding that I was not at present disposed
for any decoration within the range of her art, and that I was, for the
time being, proof against the blandishments of the small bottle which
she held up before one eye to enforce her persuasions, said we would
make a beginning on an early day, and requested the aid of my hand to
descend from her elevated station. Thus assisted, she skipped down with
much agility, and began to tie her double chin into her bonnet.

‘The fee,’ said Steerforth, ‘is--’

‘Five bob,’ replied Miss Mowcher, ‘and dirt cheap, my chicken. Ain’t I
volatile, Mr. Copperfield?’

I replied politely: ‘Not at all.’ But I thought she was rather so, when
she tossed up his two half-crowns like a goblin pieman, caught them,
dropped them in her pocket, and gave it a loud slap.

‘That’s the Till!’ observed Miss Mowcher, standing at the chair again,
and replacing in the bag a miscellaneous collection of little objects
she had emptied out of it. ‘Have I got all my traps? It seems so. It
won’t do to be like long Ned Beadwood, when they took him to church “to
marry him to somebody”, as he says, and left the bride behind. Ha! ha!
ha! A wicked rascal, Ned, but droll! Now, I know I’m going to break
your hearts, but I am forced to leave you. You must call up all your
fortitude, and try to bear it. Good-bye, Mr. Copperfield! Take care of
yourself, jockey of Norfolk! How I have been rattling on! It’s all
the fault of you two wretches. I forgive you! “Bob swore!”--as the
Englishman said for “Good night”, when he first learnt French, and
thought it so like English. “Bob swore,” my ducks!’

With the bag slung over her arm, and rattling as she waddled away, she
waddled to the door, where she stopped to inquire if she should leave
us a lock of her hair. ‘Ain’t I volatile?’ she added, as a commentary on
this offer, and, with her finger on her nose, departed.

Steerforth laughed to that degree, that it was impossible for me to help
laughing too; though I am not sure I should have done so, but for this
inducement. When we had had our laugh quite out, which was after some
time, he told me that Miss Mowcher had quite an extensive connexion, and
made herself useful to a variety of people in a variety of ways. Some
people trifled with her as a mere oddity, he said; but she was as
shrewdly and sharply observant as anyone he knew, and as long-headed as
she was short-armed. He told me that what she had said of being here,
and there, and everywhere, was true enough; for she made little darts
into the provinces, and seemed to pick up customers everywhere, and to
know everybody. I asked him what her disposition was: whether it was at
all mischievous, and if her sympathies were generally on the right side
of things: but, not succeeding in attracting his attention to these
questions after two or three attempts, I forbore or forgot to repeat
them. He told me instead, with much rapidity, a good deal about her
skill, and her profits; and about her being a scientific cupper, if I
should ever have occasion for her service in that capacity.

She was the principal theme of our conversation during the evening:
and when we parted for the night Steerforth called after me over the
banisters, ‘Bob swore!’ as I went downstairs.

I was surprised, when I came to Mr. Barkis’s house, to find Ham walking
up and down in front of it, and still more surprised to learn from him
that little Em’ly was inside. I naturally inquired why he was not there
too, instead of pacing the streets by himself?

‘Why, you see, Mas’r Davy,’ he rejoined, in a hesitating manner, ‘Em’ly,
she’s talking to some ‘un in here.’

‘I should have thought,’ said I, smiling, ‘that that was a reason for
your being in here too, Ham.’

‘Well, Mas’r Davy, in a general way, so ‘t would be,’ he returned;
‘but look’ee here, Mas’r Davy,’ lowering his voice, and speaking very
gravely. ‘It’s a young woman, sir--a young woman, that Em’ly knowed
once, and doen’t ought to know no more.’

When I heard these words, a light began to fall upon the figure I had
seen following them, some hours ago.

‘It’s a poor wurem, Mas’r Davy,’ said Ham, ‘as is trod under foot by all
the town. Up street and down street. The mowld o’ the churchyard don’t
hold any that the folk shrink away from, more.’

‘Did I see her tonight, Ham, on the sand, after we met you?’

‘Keeping us in sight?’ said Ham. ‘It’s like you did, Mas’r Davy. Not
that I know’d then, she was theer, sir, but along of her creeping soon
arterwards under Em’ly’s little winder, when she see the light come,
and whispering “Em’ly, Em’ly, for Christ’s sake, have a woman’s heart
towards me. I was once like you!” Those was solemn words, Mas’r Davy,
fur to hear!’

‘They were indeed, Ham. What did Em’ly do?’ ‘Says Em’ly, “Martha, is
it you? Oh, Martha, can it be you?”--for they had sat at work together,
many a day, at Mr. Omer’s.’

‘I recollect her now!’ cried I, recalling one of the two girls I had
seen when I first went there. ‘I recollect her quite well!’

‘Martha Endell,’ said Ham. ‘Two or three year older than Em’ly, but was
at the school with her.’

‘I never heard her name,’ said I. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt you.’

‘For the matter o’ that, Mas’r Davy,’ replied Ham, ‘all’s told a’most
in them words, “Em’ly, Em’ly, for Christ’s sake, have a woman’s heart
towards me. I was once like you!” She wanted to speak to Em’ly. Em’ly
couldn’t speak to her theer, for her loving uncle was come home, and
he wouldn’t--no, Mas’r Davy,’ said Ham, with great earnestness, ‘he
couldn’t, kind-natur’d, tender-hearted as he is, see them two together,
side by side, for all the treasures that’s wrecked in the sea.’

I felt how true this was. I knew it, on the instant, quite as well as
Ham.

‘So Em’ly writes in pencil on a bit of paper,’ he pursued, ‘and gives it
to her out o’ winder to bring here. “Show that,” she says, “to my aunt,
Mrs. Barkis, and she’ll set you down by her fire, for the love of me,
till uncle is gone out, and I can come.” By and by she tells me what
I tell you, Mas’r Davy, and asks me to bring her. What can I do? She
doen’t ought to know any such, but I can’t deny her, when the tears is
on her face.’

He put his hand into the breast of his shaggy jacket, and took out with
great care a pretty little purse.

‘And if I could deny her when the tears was on her face, Mas’r Davy,’
said Ham, tenderly adjusting it on the rough palm of his hand, ‘how
could I deny her when she give me this to carry for her--knowing what
she brought it for? Such a toy as it is!’ said Ham, thoughtfully looking
on it. ‘With such a little money in it, Em’ly my dear.’

I shook him warmly by the hand when he had put it away again--for that
was more satisfactory to me than saying anything--and we walked up
and down, for a minute or two, in silence. The door opened then, and
Peggotty appeared, beckoning to Ham to come in. I would have kept away,
but she came after me, entreating me to come in too. Even then, I
would have avoided the room where they all were, but for its being the
neat-tiled kitchen I have mentioned more than once. The door opening
immediately into it, I found myself among them before I considered
whither I was going.

The girl--the same I had seen upon the sands--was near the fire. She
was sitting on the ground, with her head and one arm lying on a chair.
I fancied, from the disposition of her figure, that Em’ly had but newly
risen from the chair, and that the forlorn head might perhaps have been
lying on her lap. I saw but little of the girl’s face, over which her
hair fell loose and scattered, as if she had been disordering it with
her own hands; but I saw that she was young, and of a fair complexion.
Peggotty had been crying. So had little Em’ly. Not a word was spoken
when we first went in; and the Dutch clock by the dresser seemed, in the
silence, to tick twice as loud as usual. Em’ly spoke first.

‘Martha wants,’ she said to Ham, ‘to go to London.’

‘Why to London?’ returned Ham.

He stood between them, looking on the prostrate girl with a mixture of
compassion for her, and of jealousy of her holding any companionship
with her whom he loved so well, which I have always remembered
distinctly. They both spoke as if she were ill; in a soft, suppressed
tone that was plainly heard, although it hardly rose above a whisper.

‘Better there than here,’ said a third voice aloud--Martha’s, though she
did not move. ‘No one knows me there. Everybody knows me here.’

‘What will she do there?’ inquired Ham.

She lifted up her head, and looked darkly round at him for a moment;
then laid it down again, and curved her right arm about her neck, as
a woman in a fever, or in an agony of pain from a shot, might twist
herself.

‘She will try to do well,’ said little Em’ly. ‘You don’t know what she
has said to us. Does he--do they--aunt?’

Peggotty shook her head compassionately.

‘I’ll try,’ said Martha, ‘if you’ll help me away. I never can do worse
than I have done here. I may do better. Oh!’ with a dreadful shiver,
‘take me out of these streets, where the whole town knows me from a
child!’

As Em’ly held out her hand to Ham, I saw him put in it a little canvas
bag. She took it, as if she thought it were her purse, and made a step
or two forward; but finding her mistake, came back to where he had
retired near me, and showed it to him.

‘It’s all yourn, Em’ly,’ I could hear him say. ‘I haven’t nowt in all
the wureld that ain’t yourn, my dear. It ain’t of no delight to me,
except for you!’

The tears rose freshly in her eyes, but she turned away and went to
Martha. What she gave her, I don’t know. I saw her stooping over her,
and putting money in her bosom. She whispered something, as she asked
was that enough? ‘More than enough,’ the other said, and took her hand
and kissed it.

Then Martha arose, and gathering her shawl about her, covering her
face with it, and weeping aloud, went slowly to the door. She stopped
a moment before going out, as if she would have uttered something or
turned back; but no word passed her lips. Making the same low, dreary,
wretched moaning in her shawl, she went away.

As the door closed, little Em’ly looked at us three in a hurried manner
and then hid her face in her hands, and fell to sobbing.

‘Doen’t, Em’ly!’ said Ham, tapping her gently on the shoulder. ‘Doen’t,
my dear! You doen’t ought to cry so, pretty!’

‘Oh, Ham!’ she exclaimed, still weeping pitifully, ‘I am not so good a
girl as I ought to be! I know I have not the thankful heart, sometimes,
I ought to have!’

‘Yes, yes, you have, I’m sure,’ said Ham.

‘No! no! no!’ cried little Em’ly, sobbing, and shaking her head. ‘I am
not as good a girl as I ought to be. Not near! not near!’ And still she
cried, as if her heart would break.

‘I try your love too much. I know I do!’ she sobbed. ‘I’m often cross to
you, and changeable with you, when I ought to be far different. You are
never so to me. Why am I ever so to you, when I should think of nothing
but how to be grateful, and to make you happy!’

‘You always make me so,’ said Ham, ‘my dear! I am happy in the sight of
you. I am happy, all day long, in the thoughts of you.’

‘Ah! that’s not enough!’ she cried. ‘That is because you are good; not
because I am! Oh, my dear, it might have been a better fortune for
you, if you had been fond of someone else--of someone steadier and
much worthier than me, who was all bound up in you, and never vain and
changeable like me!’

‘Poor little tender-heart,’ said Ham, in a low voice. ‘Martha has
overset her, altogether.’

‘Please, aunt,’ sobbed Em’ly, ‘come here, and let me lay my head upon
you. Oh, I am very miserable tonight, aunt! Oh, I am not as good a girl
as I ought to be. I am not, I know!’

Peggotty had hastened to the chair before the fire. Em’ly, with her
arms around her neck, kneeled by her, looking up most earnestly into her
face.

‘Oh, pray, aunt, try to help me! Ham, dear, try to help me! Mr. David,
for the sake of old times, do, please, try to help me! I want to be a
better girl than I am. I want to feel a hundred times more thankful than
I do. I want to feel more, what a blessed thing it is to be the wife of
a good man, and to lead a peaceful life. Oh me, oh me! Oh my heart, my
heart!’

She dropped her face on my old nurse’s breast, and, ceasing this
supplication, which in its agony and grief was half a woman’s, half a
child’s, as all her manner was (being, in that, more natural, and better
suited to her beauty, as I thought, than any other manner could have
been), wept silently, while my old nurse hushed her like an infant.

She got calmer by degrees, and then we soothed her; now talking
encouragingly, and now jesting a little with her, until she began to
raise her head and speak to us. So we got on, until she was able to
smile, and then to laugh, and then to sit up, half ashamed; while
Peggotty recalled her stray ringlets, dried her eyes, and made her neat
again, lest her uncle should wonder, when she got home, why his darling
had been crying.

I saw her do, that night, what I had never seen her do before. I saw her
innocently kiss her chosen husband on the cheek, and creep close to his
bluff form as if it were her best support. When they went away together,
in the waning moonlight, and I looked after them, comparing their
departure in my mind with Martha’s, I saw that she held his arm with
both her hands, and still kept close to him.



CHAPTER 23. I CORROBORATE Mr. DICK, AND CHOOSE A PROFESSION


When I awoke in the morning I thought very much of little Em’ly, and her
emotion last night, after Martha had left. I felt as if I had come into
the knowledge of those domestic weaknesses and tendernesses in a sacred
confidence, and that to disclose them, even to Steerforth, would be
wrong. I had no gentler feeling towards anyone than towards the
pretty creature who had been my playmate, and whom I have always been
persuaded, and shall always be persuaded, to my dying day, I then
devotedly loved. The repetition to any ears--even to Steerforth’s--of
what she had been unable to repress when her heart lay open to me by an
accident, I felt would be a rough deed, unworthy of myself, unworthy of
the light of our pure childhood, which I always saw encircling her head.
I made a resolution, therefore, to keep it in my own breast; and there
it gave her image a new grace.

While we were at breakfast, a letter was delivered to me from my aunt.
As it contained matter on which I thought Steerforth could advise me
as well as anyone, and on which I knew I should be delighted to consult
him, I resolved to make it a subject of discussion on our journey home.
For the present we had enough to do, in taking leave of all our friends.
Mr. Barkis was far from being the last among them, in his regret at
our departure; and I believe would even have opened the box again, and
sacrificed another guinea, if it would have kept us eight-and-forty
hours in Yarmouth. Peggotty and all her family were full of grief at our
going. The whole house of Omer and Joram turned out to bid us good-bye;
and there were so many seafaring volunteers in attendance on Steerforth,
when our portmanteaux went to the coach, that if we had had the baggage
of a regiment with us, we should hardly have wanted porters to carry it.
In a word, we departed to the regret and admiration of all concerned,
and left a great many people very sorry behind US.

‘Do you stay long here, Littimer?’ said I, as he stood waiting to see the
coach start.

‘No, sir,’ he replied; ‘probably not very long, sir.’

‘He can hardly say, just now,’ observed Steerforth, carelessly. ‘He
knows what he has to do, and he’ll do it.’

‘That I am sure he will,’ said I.

Littimer touched his hat in acknowledgement of my good opinion, and I
felt about eight years old. He touched it once more, wishing us a good
journey; and we left him standing on the pavement, as respectable a
mystery as any pyramid in Egypt.

For some little time we held no conversation, Steerforth being unusually
silent, and I being sufficiently engaged in wondering, within myself,
when I should see the old places again, and what new changes might
happen to me or them in the meanwhile. At length Steerforth, becoming
gay and talkative in a moment, as he could become anything he liked at
any moment, pulled me by the arm:

‘Find a voice, David. What about that letter you were speaking of at
breakfast?’

‘Oh!’ said I, taking it out of my pocket. ‘It’s from my aunt.’

‘And what does she say, requiring consideration?’

‘Why, she reminds me, Steerforth,’ said I, ‘that I came out on this
expedition to look about me, and to think a little.’

‘Which, of course, you have done?’

‘Indeed I can’t say I have, particularly. To tell you the truth, I am
afraid I have forgotten it.’

‘Well! look about you now, and make up for your negligence,’ said
Steerforth. ‘Look to the right, and you’ll see a flat country, with a
good deal of marsh in it; look to the left, and you’ll see the same.
Look to the front, and you’ll find no difference; look to the rear,
and there it is still.’ I laughed, and replied that I saw no suitable
profession in the whole prospect; which was perhaps to be attributed to
its flatness.

‘What says our aunt on the subject?’ inquired Steerforth, glancing at
the letter in my hand. ‘Does she suggest anything?’

‘Why, yes,’ said I. ‘She asks me, here, if I think I should like to be a
proctor? What do you think of it?’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ replied Steerforth, coolly. ‘You may as well do
that as anything else, I suppose?’

I could not help laughing again, at his balancing all callings and
professions so equally; and I told him so.

‘What is a proctor, Steerforth?’ said I.

‘Why, he is a sort of monkish attorney,’ replied Steerforth. ‘He is, to
some faded courts held in Doctors’ Commons,--a lazy old nook near St.
Paul’s Churchyard--what solicitors are to the courts of law and equity.
He is a functionary whose existence, in the natural course of things,
would have terminated about two hundred years ago. I can tell you best
what he is, by telling you what Doctors’ Commons is. It’s a
little out-of-the-way place, where they administer what is called
ecclesiastical law, and play all kinds of tricks with obsolete old
monsters of acts of Parliament, which three-fourths of the world know
nothing about, and the other fourth supposes to have been dug up, in
a fossil state, in the days of the Edwards. It’s a place that has an
ancient monopoly in suits about people’s wills and people’s marriages,
and disputes among ships and boats.’

‘Nonsense, Steerforth!’ I exclaimed. ‘You don’t mean to say that there
is any affinity between nautical matters and ecclesiastical matters?’

‘I don’t, indeed, my dear boy,’ he returned; ‘but I mean to say that
they are managed and decided by the same set of people, down in that
same Doctors’ Commons. You shall go there one day, and find them
blundering through half the nautical terms in Young’s Dictionary,
apropos of the “Nancy” having run down the “Sarah Jane”, or Mr. Peggotty
and the Yarmouth boatmen having put off in a gale of wind with an anchor
and cable to the “Nelson” Indiaman in distress; and you shall go there
another day, and find them deep in the evidence, pro and con, respecting
a clergyman who has misbehaved himself; and you shall find the judge
in the nautical case, the advocate in the clergyman’s case, or
contrariwise. They are like actors: now a man’s a judge, and now he is
not a judge; now he’s one thing, now he’s another; now he’s something
else, change and change about; but it’s always a very pleasant,
profitable little affair of private theatricals, presented to an
uncommonly select audience.’

‘But advocates and proctors are not one and the same?’ said I, a little
puzzled. ‘Are they?’

‘No,’ returned Steerforth, ‘the advocates are civilians--men who have
taken a doctor’s degree at college--which is the first reason of my
knowing anything about it. The proctors employ the advocates. Both get
very comfortable fees, and altogether they make a mighty snug little
party. On the whole, I would recommend you to take to Doctors’ Commons
kindly, David. They plume themselves on their gentility there, I can
tell you, if that’s any satisfaction.’

I made allowance for Steerforth’s light way of treating the subject,
and, considering it with reference to the staid air of gravity and
antiquity which I associated with that ‘lazy old nook near St. Paul’s
Churchyard’, did not feel indisposed towards my aunt’s suggestion; which
she left to my free decision, making no scruple of telling me that it
had occurred to her, on her lately visiting her own proctor in Doctors’
Commons for the purpose of settling her will in my favour.

‘That’s a laudable proceeding on the part of our aunt, at all events,’
said Steerforth, when I mentioned it; ‘and one deserving of all
encouragement. Daisy, my advice is that you take kindly to Doctors’
Commons.’

I quite made up my mind to do so. I then told Steerforth that my aunt
was in town awaiting me (as I found from her letter), and that she had
taken lodgings for a week at a kind of private hotel at Lincoln’s Inn
Fields, where there was a stone staircase, and a convenient door in
the roof; my aunt being firmly persuaded that every house in London was
going to be burnt down every night.

We achieved the rest of our journey pleasantly, sometimes recurring to
Doctors’ Commons, and anticipating the distant days when I should be a
proctor there, which Steerforth pictured in a variety of humorous and
whimsical lights, that made us both merry. When we came to our journey’s
end, he went home, engaging to call upon me next day but one; and I
drove to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where I found my aunt up, and waiting
supper.

If I had been round the world since we parted, we could hardly have been
better pleased to meet again. My aunt cried outright as she embraced me;
and said, pretending to laugh, that if my poor mother had been alive,
that silly little creature would have shed tears, she had no doubt.

‘So you have left Mr. Dick behind, aunt?’ said I. ‘I am sorry for that.
Ah, Janet, how do you do?’

As Janet curtsied, hoping I was well, I observed my aunt’s visage
lengthen very much.

‘I am sorry for it, too,’ said my aunt, rubbing her nose. ‘I have had
no peace of mind, Trot, since I have been here.’ Before I could ask why,
she told me.

‘I am convinced,’ said my aunt, laying her hand with melancholy firmness
on the table, ‘that Dick’s character is not a character to keep the
donkeys off. I am confident he wants strength of purpose. I ought to
have left Janet at home, instead, and then my mind might perhaps have
been at ease. If ever there was a donkey trespassing on my green,’ said
my aunt, with emphasis, ‘there was one this afternoon at four o’clock.
A cold feeling came over me from head to foot, and I know it was a
donkey!’

I tried to comfort her on this point, but she rejected consolation.

‘It was a donkey,’ said my aunt; ‘and it was the one with the stumpy
tail which that Murdering sister of a woman rode, when she came to my
house.’ This had been, ever since, the only name my aunt knew for Miss
Murdstone. ‘If there is any Donkey in Dover, whose audacity it is harder
to me to bear than another’s, that,’ said my aunt, striking the table,
‘is the animal!’

Janet ventured to suggest that my aunt might be disturbing herself
unnecessarily, and that she believed the donkey in question was then
engaged in the sand-and-gravel line of business, and was not available
for purposes of trespass. But my aunt wouldn’t hear of it.

Supper was comfortably served and hot, though my aunt’s rooms were very
high up--whether that she might have more stone stairs for her money, or
might be nearer to the door in the roof, I don’t know--and consisted of
a roast fowl, a steak, and some vegetables, to all of which I did ample
justice, and which were all excellent. But my aunt had her own ideas
concerning London provision, and ate but little.

‘I suppose this unfortunate fowl was born and brought up in a cellar,’
said my aunt, ‘and never took the air except on a hackney coach-stand. I
hope the steak may be beef, but I don’t believe it. Nothing’s genuine in
the place, in my opinion, but the dirt.’

‘Don’t you think the fowl may have come out of the country, aunt?’ I
hinted.

‘Certainly not,’ returned my aunt. ‘It would be no pleasure to a London
tradesman to sell anything which was what he pretended it was.’

I did not venture to controvert this opinion, but I made a good supper,
which it greatly satisfied her to see me do. When the table was cleared,
Janet assisted her to arrange her hair, to put on her nightcap, which
was of a smarter construction than usual [‘in case of fire’, my aunt
said), and to fold her gown back over her knees, these being her usual
preparations for warming herself before going to bed. I then made her,
according to certain established regulations from which no deviation,
however slight, could ever be permitted, a glass of hot wine and
water, and a slice of toast cut into long thin strips. With these
accompaniments we were left alone to finish the evening, my aunt sitting
opposite to me drinking her wine and water; soaking her strips of toast
in it, one by one, before eating them; and looking benignantly on me,
from among the borders of her nightcap.

‘Well, Trot,’ she began, ‘what do you think of the proctor plan? Or have
you not begun to think about it yet?’

‘I have thought a good deal about it, my dear aunt, and I have talked a
good deal about it with Steerforth. I like it very much indeed. I like
it exceedingly.’

‘Come!’ said my aunt. ‘That’s cheering!’

‘I have only one difficulty, aunt.’

‘Say what it is, Trot,’ she returned.

‘Why, I want to ask, aunt, as this seems, from what I understand, to
be a limited profession, whether my entrance into it would not be very
expensive?’

‘It will cost,’ returned my aunt, ‘to article you, just a thousand
pounds.’

‘Now, my dear aunt,’ said I, drawing my chair nearer, ‘I am uneasy in
my mind about that. It’s a large sum of money. You have expended a
great deal on my education, and have always been as liberal to me in all
things as it was possible to be. You have been the soul of generosity.
Surely there are some ways in which I might begin life with hardly any
outlay, and yet begin with a good hope of getting on by resolution and
exertion. Are you sure that it would not be better to try that course?
Are you certain that you can afford to part with so much money, and that
it is right that it should be so expended? I only ask you, my second
mother, to consider. Are you certain?’

My aunt finished eating the piece of toast on which she was then
engaged, looking me full in the face all the while; and then setting
her glass on the chimney-piece, and folding her hands upon her folded
skirts, replied as follows:

‘Trot, my child, if I have any object in life, it is to provide for
your being a good, a sensible, and a happy man. I am bent upon it--so is
Dick. I should like some people that I know to hear Dick’s conversation
on the subject. Its sagacity is wonderful. But no one knows the
resources of that man’s intellect, except myself!’

She stopped for a moment to take my hand between hers, and went on:

‘It’s in vain, Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some influence
upon the present. Perhaps I might have been better friends with your
poor father. Perhaps I might have been better friends with that poor
child your mother, even after your sister Betsey Trotwood disappointed
me. When you came to me, a little runaway boy, all dusty and way-worn,
perhaps I thought so. From that time until now, Trot, you have ever been
a credit to me and a pride and a pleasure. I have no other claim upon
my means; at least’--here to my surprise she hesitated, and was
confused--‘no, I have no other claim upon my means--and you are my
adopted child. Only be a loving child to me in my age, and bear with my
whims and fancies; and you will do more for an old woman whose prime of
life was not so happy or conciliating as it might have been, than ever
that old woman did for you.’

It was the first time I had heard my aunt refer to her past history.
There was a magnanimity in her quiet way of doing so, and of dismissing
it, which would have exalted her in my respect and affection, if
anything could.

‘All is agreed and understood between us, now, Trot,’ said my aunt,
‘and we need talk of this no more. Give me a kiss, and we’ll go to the
Commons after breakfast tomorrow.’

We had a long chat by the fire before we went to bed. I slept in a room
on the same floor with my aunt’s, and was a little disturbed in the
course of the night by her knocking at my door as often as she was
agitated by a distant sound of hackney-coaches or market-carts, and
inquiring, ‘if I heard the engines?’ But towards morning she slept
better, and suffered me to do so too.

At about mid-day, we set out for the office of Messrs Spenlow and
Jorkins, in Doctors’ Commons. My aunt, who had this other general
opinion in reference to London, that every man she saw was a pickpocket,
gave me her purse to carry for her, which had ten guineas in it and some
silver.

We made a pause at the toy shop in Fleet Street, to see the giants of
Saint Dunstan’s strike upon the bells--we had timed our going, so as to
catch them at it, at twelve o’clock--and then went on towards Ludgate
Hill, and St. Paul’s Churchyard. We were crossing to the former place,
when I found that my aunt greatly accelerated her speed, and looked
frightened. I observed, at the same time, that a lowering ill-dressed
man who had stopped and stared at us in passing, a little before, was
coming so close after us as to brush against her.

‘Trot! My dear Trot!’ cried my aunt, in a terrified whisper, and
pressing my arm. ‘I don’t know what I am to do.’

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ said I. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. Step into
a shop, and I’ll soon get rid of this fellow.’

‘No, no, child!’ she returned. ‘Don’t speak to him for the world. I
entreat, I order you!’

‘Good Heaven, aunt!’ said I. ‘He is nothing but a sturdy beggar.’

‘You don’t know what he is!’ replied my aunt. ‘You don’t know who he is!
You don’t know what you say!’

We had stopped in an empty door-way, while this was passing, and he had
stopped too.

‘Don’t look at him!’ said my aunt, as I turned my head indignantly, ‘but
get me a coach, my dear, and wait for me in St. Paul’s Churchyard.’

‘Wait for you?’ I replied.

‘Yes,’ rejoined my aunt. ‘I must go alone. I must go with him.’

‘With him, aunt? This man?’

‘I am in my senses,’ she replied, ‘and I tell you I must. Get me a
coach!’

However much astonished I might be, I was sensible that I had no right
to refuse compliance with such a peremptory command. I hurried away a
few paces, and called a hackney-chariot which was passing empty. Almost
before I could let down the steps, my aunt sprang in, I don’t know how,
and the man followed. She waved her hand to me to go away, so earnestly,
that, all confounded as I was, I turned from them at once. In doing so,
I heard her say to the coachman, ‘Drive anywhere! Drive straight on!’
and presently the chariot passed me, going up the hill.

What Mr. Dick had told me, and what I had supposed to be a delusion of
his, now came into my mind. I could not doubt that this person was the
person of whom he had made such mysterious mention, though what the
nature of his hold upon my aunt could possibly be, I was quite unable
to imagine. After half an hour’s cooling in the churchyard, I saw the
chariot coming back. The driver stopped beside me, and my aunt was
sitting in it alone.

She had not yet sufficiently recovered from her agitation to be quite
prepared for the visit we had to make. She desired me to get into the
chariot, and to tell the coachman to drive slowly up and down a little
while. She said no more, except, ‘My dear child, never ask me what
it was, and don’t refer to it,’ until she had perfectly regained her
composure, when she told me she was quite herself now, and we might get
out. On her giving me her purse to pay the driver, I found that all the
guineas were gone, and only the loose silver remained.

Doctors’ Commons was approached by a little low archway. Before we had
taken many paces down the street beyond it, the noise of the city seemed
to melt, as if by magic, into a softened distance. A few dull courts
and narrow ways brought us to the sky-lighted offices of Spenlow and
Jorkins; in the vestibule of which temple, accessible to pilgrims
without the ceremony of knocking, three or four clerks were at work as
copyists. One of these, a little dry man, sitting by himself, who wore
a stiff brown wig that looked as if it were made of gingerbread, rose to
receive my aunt, and show us into Mr. Spenlow’s room.

‘Mr. Spenlow’s in Court, ma’am,’ said the dry man; ‘it’s an Arches day;
but it’s close by, and I’ll send for him directly.’

As we were left to look about us while Mr. Spenlow was fetched, I
availed myself of the opportunity. The furniture of the room was
old-fashioned and dusty; and the green baize on the top of the
writing-table had lost all its colour, and was as withered and pale as
an old pauper. There were a great many bundles of papers on it, some
endorsed as Allegations, and some (to my surprise) as Libels, and some
as being in the Consistory Court, and some in the Arches Court, and some
in the Prerogative Court, and some in the Admiralty Court, and some in
the Delegates’ Court; giving me occasion to wonder much, how many Courts
there might be in the gross, and how long it would take to understand
them all. Besides these, there were sundry immense manuscript Books
of Evidence taken on affidavit, strongly bound, and tied together in
massive sets, a set to each cause, as if every cause were a history in
ten or twenty volumes. All this looked tolerably expensive, I thought,
and gave me an agreeable notion of a proctor’s business. I was casting
my eyes with increasing complacency over these and many similar objects,
when hasty footsteps were heard in the room outside, and Mr. Spenlow,
in a black gown trimmed with white fur, came hurrying in, taking off his
hat as he came.

He was a little light-haired gentleman, with undeniable boots, and the
stiffest of white cravats and shirt-collars. He was buttoned up, mighty
trim and tight, and must have taken a great deal of pains with his
whiskers, which were accurately curled. His gold watch-chain was so
massive, that a fancy came across me, that he ought to have a sinewy
golden arm, to draw it out with, like those which are put up over the
goldbeaters’ shops. He was got up with such care, and was so stiff, that
he could hardly bend himself; being obliged, when he glanced at some
papers on his desk, after sitting down in his chair, to move his whole
body, from the bottom of his spine, like Punch.

I had previously been presented by my aunt, and had been courteously
received. He now said:

‘And so, Mr. Copperfield, you think of entering into our profession?
I casually mentioned to Miss Trotwood, when I had the pleasure of an
interview with her the other day,’--with another inclination of his
body--Punch again--‘that there was a vacancy here. Miss Trotwood was
good enough to mention that she had a nephew who was her peculiar care,
and for whom she was seeking to provide genteelly in life. That
nephew, I believe, I have now the pleasure of’--Punch again. I bowed my
acknowledgements, and said, my aunt had mentioned to me that there was
that opening, and that I believed I should like it very much. That I was
strongly inclined to like it, and had taken immediately to the proposal.
That I could not absolutely pledge myself to like it, until I knew
something more about it. That although it was little else than a matter
of form, I presumed I should have an opportunity of trying how I liked
it, before I bound myself to it irrevocably.

‘Oh surely! surely!’ said Mr. Spenlow. ‘We always, in this house,
propose a month--an initiatory month. I should be happy, myself, to
propose two months--three--an indefinite period, in fact--but I have a
partner. Mr. Jorkins.’

‘And the premium, sir,’ I returned, ‘is a thousand pounds?’

‘And the premium, Stamp included, is a thousand pounds,’ said Mr.
Spenlow. ‘As I have mentioned to Miss Trotwood, I am actuated by no
mercenary considerations; few men are less so, I believe; but Mr.
Jorkins has his opinions on these subjects, and I am bound to respect
Mr. Jorkins’s opinions. Mr. Jorkins thinks a thousand pounds too little,
in short.’

‘I suppose, sir,’ said I, still desiring to spare my aunt, ‘that it is
not the custom here, if an articled clerk were particularly useful,
and made himself a perfect master of his profession’--I could not help
blushing, this looked so like praising myself--‘I suppose it is not the
custom, in the later years of his time, to allow him any--’

Mr. Spenlow, by a great effort, just lifted his head far enough out of
his cravat to shake it, and answered, anticipating the word ‘salary’:

‘No. I will not say what consideration I might give to that point
myself, Mr. Copperfield, if I were unfettered. Mr. Jorkins is
immovable.’

I was quite dismayed by the idea of this terrible Jorkins. But I found
out afterwards that he was a mild man of a heavy temperament, whose
place in the business was to keep himself in the background, and be
constantly exhibited by name as the most obdurate and ruthless of men.
If a clerk wanted his salary raised, Mr. Jorkins wouldn’t listen to such
a proposition. If a client were slow to settle his bill of costs, Mr.
Jorkins was resolved to have it paid; and however painful these things
might be (and always were) to the feelings of Mr. Spenlow, Mr. Jorkins
would have his bond. The heart and hand of the good angel Spenlow would
have been always open, but for the restraining demon Jorkins. As I have
grown older, I think I have had experience of some other houses doing
business on the principle of Spenlow and Jorkins!

It was settled that I should begin my month’s probation as soon as I
pleased, and that my aunt need neither remain in town nor return at
its expiration, as the articles of agreement, of which I was to be the
subject, could easily be sent to her at home for her signature. When
we had got so far, Mr. Spenlow offered to take me into Court then and
there, and show me what sort of place it was. As I was willing enough
to know, we went out with this object, leaving my aunt behind; who would
trust herself, she said, in no such place, and who, I think, regarded
all Courts of Law as a sort of powder-mills that might blow up at any
time.

Mr. Spenlow conducted me through a paved courtyard formed of grave brick
houses, which I inferred, from the Doctors’ names upon the doors, to be
the official abiding-places of the learned advocates of whom Steerforth
had told me; and into a large dull room, not unlike a chapel to my
thinking, on the left hand. The upper part of this room was fenced off
from the rest; and there, on the two sides of a raised platform of the
horse-shoe form, sitting on easy old-fashioned dining-room chairs, were
sundry gentlemen in red gowns and grey wigs, whom I found to be the
Doctors aforesaid. Blinking over a little desk like a pulpit-desk, in
the curve of the horse-shoe, was an old gentleman, whom, if I had seen
him in an aviary, I should certainly have taken for an owl, but who, I
learned, was the presiding judge. In the space within the horse-shoe,
lower than these, that is to say, on about the level of the floor, were
sundry other gentlemen, of Mr. Spenlow’s rank, and dressed like him in
black gowns with white fur upon them, sitting at a long green table.
Their cravats were in general stiff, I thought, and their looks haughty;
but in this last respect I presently conceived I had done them an
injustice, for when two or three of them had to rise and answer a
question of the presiding dignitary, I never saw anything more sheepish.
The public, represented by a boy with a comforter, and a shabby-genteel
man secretly eating crumbs out of his coat pockets, was warming itself
at a stove in the centre of the Court. The languid stillness of the
place was only broken by the chirping of this fire and by the voice of
one of the Doctors, who was wandering slowly through a perfect library
of evidence, and stopping to put up, from time to time, at little
roadside inns of argument on the journey. Altogether, I have never,
on any occasion, made one at such a cosey, dosey, old-fashioned,
time-forgotten, sleepy-headed little family-party in all my life; and
I felt it would be quite a soothing opiate to belong to it in any
character--except perhaps as a suitor.

Very well satisfied with the dreamy nature of this retreat, I informed
Mr. Spenlow that I had seen enough for that time, and we rejoined
my aunt; in company with whom I presently departed from the Commons,
feeling very young when I went out of Spenlow and Jorkins’s, on account
of the clerks poking one another with their pens to point me out.

We arrived at Lincoln’s Inn Fields without any new adventures, except
encountering an unlucky donkey in a costermonger’s cart, who suggested
painful associations to my aunt. We had another long talk about my
plans, when we were safely housed; and as I knew she was anxious to
get home, and, between fire, food, and pickpockets, could never be
considered at her ease for half-an-hour in London, I urged her not to be
uncomfortable on my account, but to leave me to take care of myself.

‘I have not been here a week tomorrow, without considering that too, my
dear,’ she returned. ‘There is a furnished little set of chambers to be
let in the Adelphi, Trot, which ought to suit you to a marvel.’

With this brief introduction, she produced from her pocket an
advertisement, carefully cut out of a newspaper, setting forth that in
Buckingham Street in the Adelphi there was to be let furnished, with a
view of the river, a singularly desirable, and compact set of chambers,
forming a genteel residence for a young gentleman, a member of one
of the Inns of Court, or otherwise, with immediate possession. Terms
moderate, and could be taken for a month only, if required.

‘Why, this is the very thing, aunt!’ said I, flushed with the possible
dignity of living in chambers.

‘Then come,’ replied my aunt, immediately resuming the bonnet she had a
minute before laid aside. ‘We’ll go and look at ‘em.’

Away we went. The advertisement directed us to apply to Mrs. Crupp
on the premises, and we rung the area bell, which we supposed to
communicate with Mrs. Crupp. It was not until we had rung three or four
times that we could prevail on Mrs. Crupp to communicate with us, but
at last she appeared, being a stout lady with a flounce of flannel
petticoat below a nankeen gown.

‘Let us see these chambers of yours, if you please, ma’am,’ said my
aunt.

‘For this gentleman?’ said Mrs. Crupp, feeling in her pocket for her
keys.

‘Yes, for my nephew,’ said my aunt.

‘And a sweet set they is for sich!’ said Mrs. Crupp.

So we went upstairs.

They were on the top of the house--a great point with my aunt, being
near the fire-escape--and consisted of a little half-blind entry where
you could see hardly anything, a little stone-blind pantry where you
could see nothing at all, a sitting-room, and a bedroom. The furniture
was rather faded, but quite good enough for me; and, sure enough, the
river was outside the windows.

As I was delighted with the place, my aunt and Mrs. Crupp withdrew into
the pantry to discuss the terms, while I remained on the sitting-room
sofa, hardly daring to think it possible that I could be destined to
live in such a noble residence. After a single combat of some duration
they returned, and I saw, to my joy, both in Mrs. Crupp’s countenance
and in my aunt’s, that the deed was done.

‘Is it the last occupant’s furniture?’ inquired my aunt.

‘Yes, it is, ma’am,’ said Mrs. Crupp.

‘What’s become of him?’ asked my aunt.

Mrs. Crupp was taken with a troublesome cough, in the midst of which
she articulated with much difficulty. ‘He was took ill here, ma’am,
and--ugh! ugh! ugh! dear me!--and he died!’

‘Hey! What did he die of?’ asked my aunt.

‘Well, ma’am, he died of drink,’ said Mrs. Crupp, in confidence. ‘And
smoke.’

‘Smoke? You don’t mean chimneys?’ said my aunt.

‘No, ma’am,’ returned Mrs. Crupp. ‘Cigars and pipes.’

‘That’s not catching, Trot, at any rate,’ remarked my aunt, turning to
me.

‘No, indeed,’ said I.

In short, my aunt, seeing how enraptured I was with the premises, took
them for a month, with leave to remain for twelve months when that
time was out. Mrs. Crupp was to find linen, and to cook; every other
necessary was already provided; and Mrs. Crupp expressly intimated that
she should always yearn towards me as a son. I was to take possession
the day after tomorrow, and Mrs. Crupp said, thank Heaven she had now
found summun she could care for!

On our way back, my aunt informed me how she confidently trusted that
the life I was now to lead would make me firm and self-reliant, which
was all I wanted. She repeated this several times next day, in the
intervals of our arranging for the transmission of my clothes and books
from Mr. Wickfield’s; relative to which, and to all my late holiday, I
wrote a long letter to Agnes, of which my aunt took charge, as she was
to leave on the succeeding day. Not to lengthen these particulars, I
need only add, that she made a handsome provision for all my
possible wants during my month of trial; that Steerforth, to my great
disappointment and hers too, did not make his appearance before she went
away; that I saw her safely seated in the Dover coach, exulting in the
coming discomfiture of the vagrant donkeys, with Janet at her side; and
that when the coach was gone, I turned my face to the Adelphi, pondering
on the old days when I used to roam about its subterranean arches, and
on the happy changes which had brought me to the surface.



CHAPTER 24. MY FIRST DISSIPATION


It was a wonderfully fine thing to have that lofty castle to myself, and
to feel, when I shut my outer door, like Robinson Crusoe, when he had
got into his fortification, and pulled his ladder up after him. It was a
wonderfully fine thing to walk about town with the key of my house in my
pocket, and to know that I could ask any fellow to come home, and make
quite sure of its being inconvenient to nobody, if it were not so to me.
It was a wonderfully fine thing to let myself in and out, and to come
and go without a word to anyone, and to ring Mrs. Crupp up, gasping,
from the depths of the earth, when I wanted her--and when she was
disposed to come. All this, I say, was wonderfully fine; but I must say,
too, that there were times when it was very dreary.

It was fine in the morning, particularly in the fine mornings. It looked
a very fresh, free life, by daylight: still fresher, and more free, by
sunlight. But as the day declined, the life seemed to go down too. I
don’t know how it was; it seldom looked well by candle-light. I wanted
somebody to talk to, then. I missed Agnes. I found a tremendous blank,
in the place of that smiling repository of my confidence. Mrs. Crupp
appeared to be a long way off. I thought about my predecessor, who had
died of drink and smoke; and I could have wished he had been so good as
to live, and not bother me with his decease.

After two days and nights, I felt as if I had lived there for a year,
and yet I was not an hour older, but was quite as much tormented by my
own youthfulness as ever.

Steerforth not yet appearing, which induced me to apprehend that he must
be ill, I left the Commons early on the third day, and walked out to
Highgate. Mrs. Steerforth was very glad to see me, and said that he had
gone away with one of his Oxford friends to see another who lived near
St. Albans, but that she expected him to return tomorrow. I was so fond
of him, that I felt quite jealous of his Oxford friends.

As she pressed me to stay to dinner, I remained, and I believe we talked
about nothing but him all day. I told her how much the people liked him
at Yarmouth, and what a delightful companion he had been. Miss Dartle
was full of hints and mysterious questions, but took a great interest
in all our proceedings there, and said, ‘Was it really though?’ and so
forth, so often, that she got everything out of me she wanted to know.
Her appearance was exactly what I have described it, when I first saw
her; but the society of the two ladies was so agreeable, and came so
natural to me, that I felt myself falling a little in love with her. I
could not help thinking, several times in the course of the evening, and
particularly when I walked home at night, what delightful company she
would be in Buckingham Street.

I was taking my coffee and roll in the morning, before going to the
Commons--and I may observe in this place that it is surprising how
much coffee Mrs. Crupp used, and how weak it was, considering--when
Steerforth himself walked in, to my unbounded joy.

‘My dear Steerforth,’ cried I, ‘I began to think I should never see you
again!’

‘I was carried off, by force of arms,’ said Steerforth, ‘the very next
morning after I got home. Why, Daisy, what a rare old bachelor you are
here!’

I showed him over the establishment, not omitting the pantry, with no
little pride, and he commended it highly. ‘I tell you what, old boy,’ he
added, ‘I shall make quite a town-house of this place, unless you give
me notice to quit.’

This was a delightful hearing. I told him if he waited for that, he
would have to wait till doomsday.

‘But you shall have some breakfast!’ said I, with my hand on the
bell-rope, ‘and Mrs. Crupp shall make you some fresh coffee, and I’ll
toast you some bacon in a bachelor’s Dutch-oven, that I have got here.’

‘No, no!’ said Steerforth. ‘Don’t ring! I can’t! I am going to breakfast
with one of these fellows who is at the Piazza Hotel, in Covent Garden.’

‘But you’ll come back to dinner?’ said I.

‘I can’t, upon my life. There’s nothing I should like better, but I must
remain with these two fellows. We are all three off together tomorrow
morning.’

‘Then bring them here to dinner,’ I returned. ‘Do you think they would
come?’

‘Oh! they would come fast enough,’ said Steerforth; ‘but we should
inconvenience you. You had better come and dine with us somewhere.’

I would not by any means consent to this, for it occurred to me that I
really ought to have a little house-warming, and that there never
could be a better opportunity. I had a new pride in my rooms after
his approval of them, and burned with a desire to develop their utmost
resources. I therefore made him promise positively in the names of his
two friends, and we appointed six o’clock as the dinner-hour.

When he was gone, I rang for Mrs. Crupp, and acquainted her with my
desperate design. Mrs. Crupp said, in the first place, of course it was
well known she couldn’t be expected to wait, but she knew a handy young
man, who she thought could be prevailed upon to do it, and whose terms
would be five shillings, and what I pleased. I said, certainly we would
have him. Next Mrs. Crupp said it was clear she couldn’t be in two
places at once (which I felt to be reasonable), and that ‘a young gal’
stationed in the pantry with a bedroom candle, there never to desist
from washing plates, would be indispensable. I said, what would be
the expense of this young female? and Mrs. Crupp said she supposed
eighteenpence would neither make me nor break me. I said I supposed not;
and THAT was settled. Then Mrs. Crupp said, Now about the dinner.

It was a remarkable instance of want of forethought on the part of the
ironmonger who had made Mrs. Crupp’s kitchen fireplace, that it was
capable of cooking nothing but chops and mashed potatoes. As to a
fish-kittle, Mrs. Crupp said, well! would I only come and look at the
range? She couldn’t say fairer than that. Would I come and look at
it? As I should not have been much the wiser if I HAD looked at it, I
declined, and said, ‘Never mind fish.’ But Mrs. Crupp said, Don’t say
that; oysters was in, why not them? So THAT was settled. Mrs. Crupp
then said what she would recommend would be this. A pair of hot
roast fowls--from the pastry-cook’s; a dish of stewed beef, with
vegetables--from the pastry-cook’s; two little corner things, as a
raised pie and a dish of kidneys--from the pastrycook’s; a tart, and (if
I liked) a shape of jelly--from the pastrycook’s. This, Mrs. Crupp said,
would leave her at full liberty to concentrate her mind on the potatoes,
and to serve up the cheese and celery as she could wish to see it done.

I acted on Mrs. Crupp’s opinion, and gave the order at the pastry-cook’s
myself. Walking along the Strand, afterwards, and observing a hard
mottled substance in the window of a ham and beef shop, which resembled
marble, but was labelled ‘Mock Turtle’, I went in and bought a slab of
it, which I have since seen reason to believe would have sufficed for
fifteen people. This preparation, Mrs. Crupp, after some difficulty,
consented to warm up; and it shrunk so much in a liquid state, that we
found it what Steerforth called ‘rather a tight fit’ for four.

These preparations happily completed, I bought a little dessert in
Covent Garden Market, and gave a rather extensive order at a retail
wine-merchant’s in that vicinity. When I came home in the afternoon, and
saw the bottles drawn up in a square on the pantry floor, they looked
so numerous (though there were two missing, which made Mrs. Crupp very
uncomfortable), that I was absolutely frightened at them.

One of Steerforth’s friends was named Grainger, and the other Markham.
They were both very gay and lively fellows; Grainger, something older
than Steerforth; Markham, youthful-looking, and I should say not
more than twenty. I observed that the latter always spoke of himself
indefinitely, as ‘a man’, and seldom or never in the first person
singular.

‘A man might get on very well here, Mr. Copperfield,’ said
Markham--meaning himself.

‘It’s not a bad situation,’ said I, ‘and the rooms are really
commodious.’

‘I hope you have both brought appetites with you?’ said Steerforth.

‘Upon my honour,’ returned Markham, ‘town seems to sharpen a man’s
appetite. A man is hungry all day long. A man is perpetually eating.’

Being a little embarrassed at first, and feeling much too young to
preside, I made Steerforth take the head of the table when dinner was
announced, and seated myself opposite to him. Everything was very good;
we did not spare the wine; and he exerted himself so brilliantly to make
the thing pass off well, that there was no pause in our festivity. I was
not quite such good company during dinner as I could have wished to be,
for my chair was opposite the door, and my attention was distracted by
observing that the handy young man went out of the room very often, and
that his shadow always presented itself, immediately afterwards, on the
wall of the entry, with a bottle at its mouth. The ‘young gal’ likewise
occasioned me some uneasiness: not so much by neglecting to wash the
plates, as by breaking them. For being of an inquisitive disposition,
and unable to confine herself (as her positive instructions were) to the
pantry, she was constantly peering in at us, and constantly imagining
herself detected; in which belief, she several times retired upon the
plates (with which she had carefully paved the floor), and did a great
deal of destruction.

These, however, were small drawbacks, and easily forgotten when the
cloth was cleared, and the dessert put on the table; at which period of
the entertainment the handy young man was discovered to be speechless.
Giving him private directions to seek the society of Mrs. Crupp, and
to remove the ‘young gal’ to the basement also, I abandoned myself to
enjoyment.

I began, by being singularly cheerful and light-hearted; all sorts of
half-forgotten things to talk about, came rushing into my mind, and made
me hold forth in a most unwonted manner. I laughed heartily at my own
jokes, and everybody else’s; called Steerforth to order for not passing
the wine; made several engagements to go to Oxford; announced that
I meant to have a dinner-party exactly like that, once a week, until
further notice; and madly took so much snuff out of Grainger’s box, that
I was obliged to go into the pantry, and have a private fit of sneezing
ten minutes long.

I went on, by passing the wine faster and faster yet, and continually
starting up with a corkscrew to open more wine, long before any was
needed. I proposed Steerforth’s health. I said he was my dearest friend,
the protector of my boyhood, and the companion of my prime. I said I was
delighted to propose his health. I said I owed him more obligations than
I could ever repay, and held him in a higher admiration than I could
ever express. I finished by saying, ‘I’ll give you Steerforth! God bless
him! Hurrah!’ We gave him three times three, and another, and a good one
to finish with. I broke my glass in going round the table to shake
hands with him, and I said (in two words)

‘Steerforth--you’retheguidingstarofmyexistence.’

I went on, by finding suddenly that somebody was in the middle of a
song. Markham was the singer, and he sang ‘When the heart of a man is
depressed with care’. He said, when he had sung it, he would give us
‘Woman!’ I took objection to that, and I couldn’t allow it. I said
it was not a respectful way of proposing the toast, and I would never
permit that toast to be drunk in my house otherwise than as ‘The
Ladies!’ I was very high with him, mainly I think because I saw
Steerforth and Grainger laughing at me--or at him--or at both of us. He
said a man was not to be dictated to. I said a man was. He said a man
was not to be insulted, then. I said he was right there--never under
my roof, where the Lares were sacred, and the laws of hospitality
paramount. He said it was no derogation from a man’s dignity to confess
that I was a devilish good fellow. I instantly proposed his health.

Somebody was smoking. We were all smoking. I was smoking, and trying
to suppress a rising tendency to shudder. Steerforth had made a speech
about me, in the course of which I had been affected almost to tears.
I returned thanks, and hoped the present company would dine with me
tomorrow, and the day after--each day at five o’clock, that we might
enjoy the pleasures of conversation and society through a long evening.
I felt called upon to propose an individual. I would give them my aunt.
Miss Betsey Trotwood, the best of her sex!

Somebody was leaning out of my bedroom window, refreshing his forehead
against the cool stone of the parapet, and feeling the air upon his
face. It was myself. I was addressing myself as ‘Copperfield’, and
saying, ‘Why did you try to smoke? You might have known you couldn’t
do it.’ Now, somebody was unsteadily contemplating his features in the
looking-glass. That was I too. I was very pale in the looking-glass;
my eyes had a vacant appearance; and my hair--only my hair, nothing
else--looked drunk.

Somebody said to me, ‘Let us go to the theatre, Copperfield!’ There was
no bedroom before me, but again the jingling table covered with glasses;
the lamp; Grainger on my right hand, Markham on my left, and Steerforth
opposite--all sitting in a mist, and a long way off. The theatre? To
be sure. The very thing. Come along! But they must excuse me if I saw
everybody out first, and turned the lamp off--in case of fire.

Owing to some confusion in the dark, the door was gone. I was feeling
for it in the window-curtains, when Steerforth, laughing, took me by
the arm and led me out. We went downstairs, one behind another. Near
the bottom, somebody fell, and rolled down. Somebody else said it was
Copperfield. I was angry at that false report, until, finding myself on
my back in the passage, I began to think there might be some foundation
for it.

A very foggy night, with great rings round the lamps in the streets!
There was an indistinct talk of its being wet. I considered it frosty.
Steerforth dusted me under a lamp-post, and put my hat into shape, which
somebody produced from somewhere in a most extraordinary manner, for
I hadn’t had it on before. Steerforth then said, ‘You are all right,
Copperfield, are you not?’ and I told him, ‘Neverberrer.’

A man, sitting in a pigeon-hole-place, looked out of the fog, and took
money from somebody, inquiring if I was one of the gentlemen paid for,
and appearing rather doubtful (as I remember in the glimpse I had of
him) whether to take the money for me or not. Shortly afterwards, we
were very high up in a very hot theatre, looking down into a large pit,
that seemed to me to smoke; the people with whom it was crammed were so
indistinct. There was a great stage, too, looking very clean and
smooth after the streets; and there were people upon it, talking about
something or other, but not at all intelligibly. There was an abundance
of bright lights, and there was music, and there were ladies down in the
boxes, and I don’t know what more. The whole building looked to me as if
it were learning to swim; it conducted itself in such an unaccountable
manner, when I tried to steady it.

On somebody’s motion, we resolved to go downstairs to the dress-boxes,
where the ladies were. A gentleman lounging, full dressed, on a sofa,
with an opera-glass in his hand, passed before my view, and also my own
figure at full length in a glass. Then I was being ushered into one of
these boxes, and found myself saying something as I sat down, and people
about me crying ‘Silence!’ to somebody, and ladies casting indignant
glances at me, and--what! yes!--Agnes, sitting on the seat before me, in
the same box, with a lady and gentleman beside her, whom I didn’t
know. I see her face now, better than I did then, I dare say, with its
indelible look of regret and wonder turned upon me.

‘Agnes!’ I said, thickly, ‘Lorblessmer! Agnes!’

‘Hush! Pray!’ she answered, I could not conceive why. ‘You disturb the
company. Look at the stage!’

I tried, on her injunction, to fix it, and to hear something of what was
going on there, but quite in vain. I looked at her again by and by, and
saw her shrink into her corner, and put her gloved hand to her forehead.

‘Agnes!’ I said. ‘I’mafraidyou’renorwell.’

‘Yes, yes. Do not mind me, Trotwood,’ she returned. ‘Listen! Are you
going away soon?’

‘Amigoarawaysoo?’ I repeated.

‘Yes.’

I had a stupid intention of replying that I was going to wait, to hand
her downstairs. I suppose I expressed it, somehow; for after she had
looked at me attentively for a little while, she appeared to understand,
and replied in a low tone:

‘I know you will do as I ask you, if I tell you I am very earnest in
it. Go away now, Trotwood, for my sake, and ask your friends to take you
home.’

She had so far improved me, for the time, that though I was angry with
her, I felt ashamed, and with a short ‘Goori!’ (which I intended for
‘Good night!’) got up and went away. They followed, and I stepped at
once out of the box-door into my bedroom, where only Steerforth was with
me, helping me to undress, and where I was by turns telling him that
Agnes was my sister, and adjuring him to bring the corkscrew, that I
might open another bottle of wine.

How somebody, lying in my bed, lay saying and doing all this over again,
at cross purposes, in a feverish dream all night--the bed a rocking sea
that was never still! How, as that somebody slowly settled down into
myself, did I begin to parch, and feel as if my outer covering of skin
were a hard board; my tongue the bottom of an empty kettle, furred with
long service, and burning up over a slow fire; the palms of my hands,
hot plates of metal which no ice could cool!

But the agony of mind, the remorse, and shame I felt when I became
conscious next day! My horror of having committed a thousand offences I
had forgotten, and which nothing could ever expiate--my recollection
of that indelible look which Agnes had given me--the torturing
impossibility of communicating with her, not knowing, Beast that I was,
how she came to be in London, or where she stayed--my disgust of
the very sight of the room where the revel had been held--my racking
head--the smell of smoke, the sight of glasses, the impossibility of
going out, or even getting up! Oh, what a day it was!

Oh, what an evening, when I sat down by my fire to a basin of mutton
broth, dimpled all over with fat, and thought I was going the way of my
predecessor, and should succeed to his dismal story as well as to his
chambers, and had half a mind to rush express to Dover and reveal
all! What an evening, when Mrs. Crupp, coming in to take away the
broth-basin, produced one kidney on a cheese-plate as the entire remains
of yesterday’s feast, and I was really inclined to fall upon her nankeen
breast and say, in heartfelt penitence, ‘Oh, Mrs. Crupp, Mrs. Crupp,
never mind the broken meats! I am very miserable!’--only that I doubted,
even at that pass, if Mrs. Crupp were quite the sort of woman to confide
in!


CHAPTER 25. GOOD AND BAD ANGELS


I was going out at my door on the morning after that deplorable day of
headache, sickness, and repentance, with an odd confusion in my mind
relative to the date of my dinner-party, as if a body of Titans had
taken an enormous lever and pushed the day before yesterday some months
back, when I saw a ticket-porter coming upstairs, with a letter in his
hand. He was taking his time about his errand, then; but when he saw me
on the top of the staircase, looking at him over the banisters, he swung
into a trot, and came up panting as if he had run himself into a state
of exhaustion.

‘T. Copperfield, Esquire,’ said the ticket-porter, touching his hat with
his little cane.

I could scarcely lay claim to the name: I was so disturbed by the
conviction that the letter came from Agnes. However, I told him I was T.
Copperfield, Esquire, and he believed it, and gave me the letter, which
he said required an answer. I shut him out on the landing to wait for
the answer, and went into my chambers again, in such a nervous state
that I was fain to lay the letter down on my breakfast table, and
familiarize myself with the outside of it a little, before I could
resolve to break the seal.

I found, when I did open it, that it was a very kind note, containing
no reference to my condition at the theatre. All it said was, ‘My dear
Trotwood. I am staying at the house of papa’s agent, Mr. Waterbrook, in
Ely Place, Holborn. Will you come and see me today, at any time you like
to appoint? Ever yours affectionately, AGNES.’

It took me such a long time to write an answer at all to my
satisfaction, that I don’t know what the ticket-porter can have
thought, unless he thought I was learning to write. I must have written
half-a-dozen answers at least. I began one, ‘How can I ever hope,
my dear Agnes, to efface from your remembrance the disgusting
impression’--there I didn’t like it, and then I tore it up. I began
another, ‘Shakespeare has observed, my dear Agnes, how strange it is
that a man should put an enemy into his mouth’--that reminded me of
Markham, and it got no farther. I even tried poetry. I began one note,
in a six-syllable line, ‘Oh, do not remember’--but that associated
itself with the fifth of November, and became an absurdity. After many
attempts, I wrote, ‘My dear Agnes. Your letter is like you, and what
could I say of it that would be higher praise than that? I will come at
four o’clock. Affectionately and sorrowfully, T.C.’ With this missive
(which I was in twenty minds at once about recalling, as soon as it was
out of my hands), the ticket-porter at last departed.

If the day were half as tremendous to any other professional gentleman
in Doctors’ Commons as it was to me, I sincerely believe he made some
expiation for his share in that rotten old ecclesiastical cheese.
Although I left the office at half past three, and was prowling about
the place of appointment within a few minutes afterwards, the appointed
time was exceeded by a full quarter of an hour, according to the
clock of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, before I could muster up sufficient
desperation to pull the private bell-handle let into the left-hand
door-post of Mr. Waterbrook’s house.

The professional business of Mr. Waterbrook’s establishment was done on
the ground-floor, and the genteel business (of which there was a good
deal) in the upper part of the building. I was shown into a pretty but
rather close drawing-room, and there sat Agnes, netting a purse.

She looked so quiet and good, and reminded me so strongly of my airy
fresh school days at Canterbury, and the sodden, smoky, stupid wretch
I had been the other night, that, nobody being by, I yielded to my
self-reproach and shame, and--in short, made a fool of myself. I cannot
deny that I shed tears. To this hour I am undecided whether it was upon
the whole the wisest thing I could have done, or the most ridiculous.

‘If it had been anyone but you, Agnes,’ said I, turning away my head, ‘I
should not have minded it half so much. But that it should have been you
who saw me! I almost wish I had been dead, first.’

She put her hand--its touch was like no other hand--upon my arm for a
moment; and I felt so befriended and comforted, that I could not help
moving it to my lips, and gratefully kissing it.

‘Sit down,’ said Agnes, cheerfully. ‘Don’t be unhappy, Trotwood. If you
cannot confidently trust me, whom will you trust?’

‘Ah, Agnes!’ I returned. ‘You are my good Angel!’

She smiled rather sadly, I thought, and shook her head.

‘Yes, Agnes, my good Angel! Always my good Angel!’

‘If I were, indeed, Trotwood,’ she returned, ‘there is one thing that I
should set my heart on very much.’

I looked at her inquiringly; but already with a foreknowledge of her
meaning.

‘On warning you,’ said Agnes, with a steady glance, ‘against your bad
Angel.’

‘My dear Agnes,’ I began, ‘if you mean Steerforth--’

‘I do, Trotwood,’ she returned. ‘Then, Agnes, you wrong him very much.
He my bad Angel, or anyone’s! He, anything but a guide, a support, and
a friend to me! My dear Agnes! Now, is it not unjust, and unlike you, to
judge him from what you saw of me the other night?’

‘I do not judge him from what I saw of you the other night,’ she quietly
replied.

‘From what, then?’

‘From many things--trifles in themselves, but they do not seem to me to
be so, when they are put together. I judge him, partly from your account
of him, Trotwood, and your character, and the influence he has over
you.’

There was always something in her modest voice that seemed to touch a
chord within me, answering to that sound alone. It was always earnest;
but when it was very earnest, as it was now, there was a thrill in it
that quite subdued me. I sat looking at her as she cast her eyes down on
her work; I sat seeming still to listen to her; and Steerforth, in spite
of all my attachment to him, darkened in that tone.

‘It is very bold in me,’ said Agnes, looking up again, ‘who have lived
in such seclusion, and can know so little of the world, to give you my
advice so confidently, or even to have this strong opinion. But I know
in what it is engendered, Trotwood,--in how true a remembrance of our
having grown up together, and in how true an interest in all relating
to you. It is that which makes me bold. I am certain that what I say is
right. I am quite sure it is. I feel as if it were someone else speaking
to you, and not I, when I caution you that you have made a dangerous
friend.’

Again I looked at her, again I listened to her after she was silent, and
again his image, though it was still fixed in my heart, darkened.

‘I am not so unreasonable as to expect,’ said Agnes, resuming her usual
tone, after a little while, ‘that you will, or that you can, at once,
change any sentiment that has become a conviction to you; least of all
a sentiment that is rooted in your trusting disposition. You ought not
hastily to do that. I only ask you, Trotwood, if you ever think of me--I
mean,’ with a quiet smile, for I was going to interrupt her, and she
knew why, ‘as often as you think of me--to think of what I have said. Do
you forgive me for all this?’

‘I will forgive you, Agnes,’ I replied, ‘when you come to do Steerforth
justice, and to like him as well as I do.’

‘Not until then?’ said Agnes.

I saw a passing shadow on her face when I made this mention of him, but
she returned my smile, and we were again as unreserved in our mutual
confidence as of old.

‘And when, Agnes,’ said I, ‘will you forgive me the other night?’

‘When I recall it,’ said Agnes.

She would have dismissed the subject so, but I was too full of it to
allow that, and insisted on telling her how it happened that I had
disgraced myself, and what chain of accidental circumstances had had the
theatre for its final link. It was a great relief to me to do this, and
to enlarge on the obligation that I owed to Steerforth for his care of
me when I was unable to take care of myself.

‘You must not forget,’ said Agnes, calmly changing the conversation as
soon as I had concluded, ‘that you are always to tell me, not only when
you fall into trouble, but when you fall in love. Who has succeeded to
Miss Larkins, Trotwood?’

‘No one, Agnes.’

‘Someone, Trotwood,’ said Agnes, laughing, and holding up her finger.

‘No, Agnes, upon my word! There is a lady, certainly, at Mrs.
Steerforth’s house, who is very clever, and whom I like to talk to--Miss
Dartle--but I don’t adore her.’

Agnes laughed again at her own penetration, and told me that if I were
faithful to her in my confidence she thought she should keep a little
register of my violent attachments, with the date, duration, and
termination of each, like the table of the reigns of the kings and
queens, in the History of England. Then she asked me if I had seen
Uriah.

‘Uriah Heep?’ said I. ‘No. Is he in London?’

‘He comes to the office downstairs, every day,’ returned Agnes. ‘He
was in London a week before me. I am afraid on disagreeable business,
Trotwood.’

‘On some business that makes you uneasy, Agnes, I see,’ said I. ‘What
can that be?’

Agnes laid aside her work, and replied, folding her hands upon one
another, and looking pensively at me out of those beautiful soft eyes of
hers:

‘I believe he is going to enter into partnership with papa.’

‘What? Uriah? That mean, fawning fellow, worm himself into such
promotion!’ I cried, indignantly. ‘Have you made no remonstrance about
it, Agnes? Consider what a connexion it is likely to be. You must speak
out. You must not allow your father to take such a mad step. You must
prevent it, Agnes, while there’s time.’

Still looking at me, Agnes shook her head while I was speaking, with a
faint smile at my warmth: and then replied:

‘You remember our last conversation about papa? It was not long after
that--not more than two or three days--when he gave me the first
intimation of what I tell you. It was sad to see him struggling between
his desire to represent it to me as a matter of choice on his part,
and his inability to conceal that it was forced upon him. I felt very
sorry.’

‘Forced upon him, Agnes! Who forces it upon him?’

‘Uriah,’ she replied, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘has made himself
indispensable to papa. He is subtle and watchful. He has mastered papa’s
weaknesses, fostered them, and taken advantage of them, until--to say
all that I mean in a word, Trotwood,--until papa is afraid of him.’

There was more that she might have said; more that she knew, or that she
suspected; I clearly saw. I could not give her pain by asking what it
was, for I knew that she withheld it from me, to spare her father. It
had long been going on to this, I was sensible: yes, I could not but
feel, on the least reflection, that it had been going on to this for a
long time. I remained silent.

‘His ascendancy over papa,’ said Agnes, ‘is very great. He professes
humility and gratitude--with truth, perhaps: I hope so--but his position
is really one of power, and I fear he makes a hard use of his power.’

I said he was a hound, which, at the moment, was a great satisfaction to
me.

‘At the time I speak of, as the time when papa spoke to me,’ pursued
Agnes, ‘he had told papa that he was going away; that he was very sorry,
and unwilling to leave, but that he had better prospects. Papa was very
much depressed then, and more bowed down by care than ever you or I have
seen him; but he seemed relieved by this expedient of the partnership,
though at the same time he seemed hurt by it and ashamed of it.’

‘And how did you receive it, Agnes?’

‘I did, Trotwood,’ she replied, ‘what I hope was right. Feeling sure
that it was necessary for papa’s peace that the sacrifice should be
made, I entreated him to make it. I said it would lighten the load
of his life--I hope it will!--and that it would give me increased
opportunities of being his companion. Oh, Trotwood!’ cried Agnes,
putting her hands before her face, as her tears started on it, ‘I almost
feel as if I had been papa’s enemy, instead of his loving child. For
I know how he has altered, in his devotion to me. I know how he has
narrowed the circle of his sympathies and duties, in the concentration
of his whole mind upon me. I know what a multitude of things he has shut
out for my sake, and how his anxious thoughts of me have shadowed his
life, and weakened his strength and energy, by turning them always upon
one idea. If I could ever set this right! If I could ever work out his
restoration, as I have so innocently been the cause of his decline!’

I had never before seen Agnes cry. I had seen tears in her eyes when I
had brought new honours home from school, and I had seen them there when
we last spoke about her father, and I had seen her turn her gentle head
aside when we took leave of one another; but I had never seen her grieve
like this. It made me so sorry that I could only say, in a foolish,
helpless manner, ‘Pray, Agnes, don’t! Don’t, my dear sister!’

But Agnes was too superior to me in character and purpose, as I know
well now, whatever I might know or not know then, to be long in need of
my entreaties. The beautiful, calm manner, which makes her so different
in my remembrance from everybody else, came back again, as if a cloud
had passed from a serene sky.

‘We are not likely to remain alone much longer,’ said Agnes, ‘and while
I have an opportunity, let me earnestly entreat you, Trotwood, to be
friendly to Uriah. Don’t repel him. Don’t resent (as I think you have a
general disposition to do) what may be uncongenial to you in him. He may
not deserve it, for we know no certain ill of him. In any case, think
first of papa and me!’

Agnes had no time to say more, for the room door opened, and Mrs.
Waterbrook, who was a large lady--or who wore a large dress: I don’t
exactly know which, for I don’t know which was dress and which was
lady--came sailing in. I had a dim recollection of having seen her
at the theatre, as if I had seen her in a pale magic lantern; but she
appeared to remember me perfectly, and still to suspect me of being in a
state of intoxication.

Finding by degrees, however, that I was sober, and (I hope) that I was
a modest young gentleman, Mrs. Waterbrook softened towards me
considerably, and inquired, firstly, if I went much into the parks,
and secondly, if I went much into society. On my replying to both these
questions in the negative, it occurred to me that I fell again in her
good opinion; but she concealed the fact gracefully, and invited me to
dinner next day. I accepted the invitation, and took my leave, making a
call on Uriah in the office as I went out, and leaving a card for him in
his absence.

When I went to dinner next day, and on the street door being opened,
plunged into a vapour-bath of haunch of mutton, I divined that I was
not the only guest, for I immediately identified the ticket-porter in
disguise, assisting the family servant, and waiting at the foot of the
stairs to carry up my name. He looked, to the best of his ability, when
he asked me for it confidentially, as if he had never seen me before;
but well did I know him, and well did he know me. Conscience made
cowards of us both.

I found Mr. Waterbrook to be a middle-aged gentleman, with a short
throat, and a good deal of shirt-collar, who only wanted a black nose to
be the portrait of a pug-dog. He told me he was happy to have the
honour of making my acquaintance; and when I had paid my homage to Mrs.
Waterbrook, presented me, with much ceremony, to a very awful lady in
a black velvet dress, and a great black velvet hat, whom I remember as
looking like a near relation of Hamlet’s--say his aunt.

Mrs. Henry Spiker was this lady’s name; and her husband was there
too: so cold a man, that his head, instead of being grey, seemed to
be sprinkled with hoar-frost. Immense deference was shown to the Henry
Spikers, male and female; which Agnes told me was on account of Mr.
Henry Spiker being solicitor to something or to somebody, I forget what
or which, remotely connected with the Treasury.

I found Uriah Heep among the company, in a suit of black, and in deep
humility. He told me, when I shook hands with him, that he was proud
to be noticed by me, and that he really felt obliged to me for my
condescension. I could have wished he had been less obliged to me, for
he hovered about me in his gratitude all the rest of the evening; and
whenever I said a word to Agnes, was sure, with his shadowless eyes and
cadaverous face, to be looking gauntly down upon us from behind.

There were other guests--all iced for the occasion, as it struck me,
like the wine. But there was one who attracted my attention before he
came in, on account of my hearing him announced as Mr. Traddles! My mind
flew back to Salem House; and could it be Tommy, I thought, who used to
draw the skeletons!

I looked for Mr. Traddles with unusual interest. He was a sober,
steady-looking young man of retiring manners, with a comic head of hair,
and eyes that were rather wide open; and he got into an obscure corner
so soon, that I had some difficulty in making him out. At length I had
a good view of him, and either my vision deceived me, or it was the old
unfortunate Tommy.

I made my way to Mr. Waterbrook, and said, that I believed I had the
pleasure of seeing an old schoolfellow there.

‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Waterbrook, surprised. ‘You are too young to have
been at school with Mr. Henry Spiker?’

‘Oh, I don’t mean him!’ I returned. ‘I mean the gentleman named
Traddles.’

‘Oh! Aye, aye! Indeed!’ said my host, with much diminished interest.
‘Possibly.’

‘If it’s really the same person,’ said I, glancing towards him, ‘it
was at a place called Salem House where we were together, and he was an
excellent fellow.’

‘Oh yes. Traddles is a good fellow,’ returned my host nodding his head
with an air of toleration. ‘Traddles is quite a good fellow.’

‘It’s a curious coincidence,’ said I.

‘It is really,’ returned my host, ‘quite a coincidence, that Traddles
should be here at all: as Traddles was only invited this morning, when
the place at table, intended to be occupied by Mrs. Henry Spiker’s
brother, became vacant, in consequence of his indisposition. A very
gentlemanly man, Mrs. Henry Spiker’s brother, Mr. Copperfield.’

I murmured an assent, which was full of feeling, considering that I
knew nothing at all about him; and I inquired what Mr. Traddles was by
profession.

‘Traddles,’ returned Mr. Waterbrook, ‘is a young man reading for the
bar. Yes. He is quite a good fellow--nobody’s enemy but his own.’

‘Is he his own enemy?’ said I, sorry to hear this.

‘Well,’ returned Mr. Waterbrook, pursing up his mouth, and playing with
his watch-chain, in a comfortable, prosperous sort of way. ‘I should say
he was one of those men who stand in their own light. Yes, I should say
he would never, for example, be worth five hundred pound. Traddles was
recommended to me by a professional friend. Oh yes. Yes. He has a kind
of talent for drawing briefs, and stating a case in writing, plainly. I
am able to throw something in Traddles’s way, in the course of the year;
something--for him--considerable. Oh yes. Yes.’

I was much impressed by the extremely comfortable and satisfied manner
in which Mr. Waterbrook delivered himself of this little word ‘Yes’,
every now and then. There was wonderful expression in it. It completely
conveyed the idea of a man who had been born, not to say with a silver
spoon, but with a scaling-ladder, and had gone on mounting all the
heights of life one after another, until now he looked, from the top of
the fortifications, with the eye of a philosopher and a patron, on the
people down in the trenches.

My reflections on this theme were still in progress when dinner was
announced. Mr. Waterbrook went down with Hamlet’s aunt. Mr. Henry Spiker
took Mrs. Waterbrook. Agnes, whom I should have liked to take myself,
was given to a simpering fellow with weak legs. Uriah, Traddles, and I,
as the junior part of the company, went down last, how we could. I was
not so vexed at losing Agnes as I might have been, since it gave me
an opportunity of making myself known to Traddles on the stairs, who
greeted me with great fervour; while Uriah writhed with such obtrusive
satisfaction and self-abasement, that I could gladly have pitched
him over the banisters. Traddles and I were separated at table, being
billeted in two remote corners: he in the glare of a red velvet lady;
I, in the gloom of Hamlet’s aunt. The dinner was very long, and the
conversation was about the Aristocracy--and Blood. Mrs. Waterbrook
repeatedly told us, that if she had a weakness, it was Blood.

It occurred to me several times that we should have got on better, if we
had not been quite so genteel. We were so exceedingly genteel, that our
scope was very limited. A Mr. and Mrs. Gulpidge were of the party, who
had something to do at second-hand (at least, Mr. Gulpidge had) with
the law business of the Bank; and what with the Bank, and what with
the Treasury, we were as exclusive as the Court Circular. To mend the
matter, Hamlet’s aunt had the family failing of indulging in soliloquy,
and held forth in a desultory manner, by herself, on every topic that
was introduced. These were few enough, to be sure; but as we always fell
back upon Blood, she had as wide a field for abstract speculation as her
nephew himself.

We might have been a party of Ogres, the conversation assumed such a
sanguine complexion.

‘I confess I am of Mrs. Waterbrook’s opinion,’ said Mr. Waterbrook, with
his wine-glass at his eye. ‘Other things are all very well in their way,
but give me Blood!’

‘Oh! There is nothing,’ observed Hamlet’s aunt, ‘so satisfactory to one!
There is nothing that is so much one’s beau-ideal of--of all that sort
of thing, speaking generally. There are some low minds (not many, I am
happy to believe, but there are some) that would prefer to do what I
should call bow down before idols. Positively Idols! Before service,
intellect, and so on. But these are intangible points. Blood is not so.
We see Blood in a nose, and we know it. We meet with it in a chin, and
we say, “There it is! That’s Blood!” It is an actual matter of fact. We
point it out. It admits of no doubt.’

The simpering fellow with the weak legs, who had taken Agnes down,
stated the question more decisively yet, I thought.

‘Oh, you know, deuce take it,’ said this gentleman, looking round the
board with an imbecile smile, ‘we can’t forego Blood, you know. We must
have Blood, you know. Some young fellows, you know, may be a little
behind their station, perhaps, in point of education and behaviour, and
may go a little wrong, you know, and get themselves and other people
into a variety of fixes--and all that--but deuce take it, it’s
delightful to reflect that they’ve got Blood in ‘em! Myself, I’d rather
at any time be knocked down by a man who had got Blood in him, than I’d
be picked up by a man who hadn’t!’

This sentiment, as compressing the general question into a nutshell,
gave the utmost satisfaction, and brought the gentleman into great
notice until the ladies retired. After that, I observed that Mr.
Gulpidge and Mr. Henry Spiker, who had hitherto been very distant,
entered into a defensive alliance against us, the common enemy, and
exchanged a mysterious dialogue across the table for our defeat and
overthrow.

‘That affair of the first bond for four thousand five hundred pounds has
not taken the course that was expected, Spiker,’ said Mr. Gulpidge.

‘Do you mean the D. of A.’s?’ said Mr. Spiker.

‘The C. of B.’s!’ said Mr. Gulpidge.

Mr. Spiker raised his eyebrows, and looked much concerned.

‘When the question was referred to Lord--I needn’t name him,’ said Mr.
Gulpidge, checking himself--

‘I understand,’ said Mr. Spiker, ‘N.’

Mr. Gulpidge darkly nodded--‘was referred to him, his answer was,
“Money, or no release.”’

‘Lord bless my soul!’ cried Mr. Spiker.

“‘Money, or no release,”’ repeated Mr. Gulpidge, firmly. ‘The next in
reversion--you understand me?’

‘K.,’ said Mr. Spiker, with an ominous look.

‘--K. then positively refused to sign. He was attended at Newmarket for
that purpose, and he point-blank refused to do it.’

Mr. Spiker was so interested, that he became quite stony.

‘So the matter rests at this hour,’ said Mr. Gulpidge, throwing himself
back in his chair. ‘Our friend Waterbrook will excuse me if I forbear to
explain myself generally, on account of the magnitude of the interests
involved.’

Mr. Waterbrook was only too happy, as it appeared to me, to have such
interests, and such names, even hinted at, across his table. He assumed
an expression of gloomy intelligence (though I am persuaded he knew
no more about the discussion than I did), and highly approved of the
discretion that had been observed. Mr. Spiker, after the receipt of such
a confidence, naturally desired to favour his friend with a confidence
of his own; therefore the foregoing dialogue was succeeded by another,
in which it was Mr. Gulpidge’s turn to be surprised, and that by another
in which the surprise came round to Mr. Spiker’s turn again, and so on,
turn and turn about. All this time we, the outsiders, remained oppressed
by the tremendous interests involved in the conversation; and our
host regarded us with pride, as the victims of a salutary awe and
astonishment. I was very glad indeed to get upstairs to Agnes, and to
talk with her in a corner, and to introduce Traddles to her, who was
shy, but agreeable, and the same good-natured creature still. As he
was obliged to leave early, on account of going away next morning for
a month, I had not nearly so much conversation with him as I could have
wished; but we exchanged addresses, and promised ourselves the pleasure
of another meeting when he should come back to town. He was greatly
interested to hear that I knew Steerforth, and spoke of him with such
warmth that I made him tell Agnes what he thought of him. But Agnes only
looked at me the while, and very slightly shook her head when only I
observed her.

As she was not among people with whom I believed she could be very much
at home, I was almost glad to hear that she was going away within a few
days, though I was sorry at the prospect of parting from her again
so soon. This caused me to remain until all the company were gone.
Conversing with her, and hearing her sing, was such a delightful
reminder to me of my happy life in the grave old house she had made so
beautiful, that I could have remained there half the night; but, having
no excuse for staying any longer, when the lights of Mr. Waterbrook’s
society were all snuffed out, I took my leave very much against my
inclination. I felt then, more than ever, that she was my better Angel;
and if I thought of her sweet face and placid smile, as though they had
shone on me from some removed being, like an Angel, I hope I thought no
harm.

I have said that the company were all gone; but I ought to have excepted
Uriah, whom I don’t include in that denomination, and who had never
ceased to hover near us. He was close behind me when I went downstairs.
He was close beside me, when I walked away from the house, slowly
fitting his long skeleton fingers into the still longer fingers of a
great Guy Fawkes pair of gloves.

It was in no disposition for Uriah’s company, but in remembrance of the
entreaty Agnes had made to me, that I asked him if he would come home to
my rooms, and have some coffee.

‘Oh, really, Master Copperfield,’ he rejoined--‘I beg your pardon,
Mister Copperfield, but the other comes so natural, I don’t like that
you should put a constraint upon yourself to ask a numble person like me
to your ouse.’

‘There is no constraint in the case,’ said I. ‘Will you come?’

‘I should like to, very much,’ replied Uriah, with a writhe.

‘Well, then, come along!’ said I.

I could not help being rather short with him, but he appeared not to
mind it. We went the nearest way, without conversing much upon the road;
and he was so humble in respect of those scarecrow gloves, that he
was still putting them on, and seemed to have made no advance in that
labour, when we got to my place.

I led him up the dark stairs, to prevent his knocking his head against
anything, and really his damp cold hand felt so like a frog in mine,
that I was tempted to drop it and run away. Agnes and hospitality
prevailed, however, and I conducted him to my fireside. When I lighted
my candles, he fell into meek transports with the room that was revealed
to him; and when I heated the coffee in an unassuming block-tin vessel
in which Mrs. Crupp delighted to prepare it (chiefly, I believe, because
it was not intended for the purpose, being a shaving-pot, and because
there was a patent invention of great price mouldering away in the
pantry), he professed so much emotion, that I could joyfully have
scalded him.

‘Oh, really, Master Copperfield,--I mean Mister Copperfield,’ said
Uriah, ‘to see you waiting upon me is what I never could have expected!
But, one way and another, so many things happen to me which I never
could have expected, I am sure, in my umble station, that it seems
to rain blessings on my ed. You have heard something, I des-say, of a
change in my expectations, Master Copperfield,--I should say, Mister
Copperfield?’

As he sat on my sofa, with his long knees drawn up under his coffee-cup,
his hat and gloves upon the ground close to him, his spoon going softly
round and round, his shadowless red eyes, which looked as if they had
scorched their lashes off, turned towards me without looking at me, the
disagreeable dints I have formerly described in his nostrils coming and
going with his breath, and a snaky undulation pervading his frame from
his chin to his boots, I decided in my own mind that I disliked him
intensely. It made me very uncomfortable to have him for a guest, for I
was young then, and unused to disguise what I so strongly felt.

‘You have heard something, I des-say, of a change in my expectations,
Master Copperfield,--I should say, Mister Copperfield?’ observed Uriah.

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘something.’

‘Ah! I thought Miss Agnes would know of it!’ he quietly returned. ‘I’m
glad to find Miss Agnes knows of it. Oh, thank you, Master--Mister
Copperfield!’

I could have thrown my bootjack at him (it lay ready on the rug), for
having entrapped me into the disclosure of anything concerning Agnes,
however immaterial. But I only drank my coffee.

‘What a prophet you have shown yourself, Mister Copperfield!’ pursued
Uriah. ‘Dear me, what a prophet you have proved yourself to be! Don’t
you remember saying to me once, that perhaps I should be a partner in
Mr. Wickfield’s business, and perhaps it might be Wickfield and
Heep? You may not recollect it; but when a person is umble, Master
Copperfield, a person treasures such things up!’

‘I recollect talking about it,’ said I, ‘though I certainly did not
think it very likely then.’ ‘Oh! who would have thought it likely,
Mister Copperfield!’ returned Uriah, enthusiastically. ‘I am sure I
didn’t myself. I recollect saying with my own lips that I was much too
umble. So I considered myself really and truly.’

He sat, with that carved grin on his face, looking at the fire, as I
looked at him.

‘But the umblest persons, Master Copperfield,’ he presently resumed,
‘may be the instruments of good. I am glad to think I have been the
instrument of good to Mr. Wickfield, and that I may be more so. Oh what
a worthy man he is, Mister Copperfield, but how imprudent he has been!’

‘I am sorry to hear it,’ said I. I could not help adding, rather
pointedly, ‘on all accounts.’

‘Decidedly so, Mister Copperfield,’ replied Uriah. ‘On all accounts.
Miss Agnes’s above all! You don’t remember your own eloquent
expressions, Master Copperfield; but I remember how you said one day
that everybody must admire her, and how I thanked you for it! You have
forgot that, I have no doubt, Master Copperfield?’

‘No,’ said I, drily.

‘Oh how glad I am you have not!’ exclaimed Uriah. ‘To think that you
should be the first to kindle the sparks of ambition in my umble breast,
and that you’ve not forgot it! Oh!--Would you excuse me asking for a cup
more coffee?’

Something in the emphasis he laid upon the kindling of those sparks,
and something in the glance he directed at me as he said it, had made me
start as if I had seen him illuminated by a blaze of light. Recalled by
his request, preferred in quite another tone of voice, I did the honours
of the shaving-pot; but I did them with an unsteadiness of hand, a
sudden sense of being no match for him, and a perplexed suspicious
anxiety as to what he might be going to say next, which I felt could not
escape his observation.

He said nothing at all. He stirred his coffee round and round, he sipped
it, he felt his chin softly with his grisly hand, he looked at the fire,
he looked about the room, he gasped rather than smiled at me, he writhed
and undulated about, in his deferential servility, he stirred and sipped
again, but he left the renewal of the conversation to me.

‘So, Mr. Wickfield,’ said I, at last, ‘who is worth five hundred of
you--or me’; for my life, I think, I could not have helped dividing that
part of the sentence with an awkward jerk; ‘has been imprudent, has he,
Mr. Heep?’

‘Oh, very imprudent indeed, Master Copperfield,’ returned Uriah, sighing
modestly. ‘Oh, very much so! But I wish you’d call me Uriah, if you
please. It’s like old times.’

‘Well! Uriah,’ said I, bolting it out with some difficulty.

‘Thank you,’ he returned, with fervour. ‘Thank you, Master Copperfield!
It’s like the blowing of old breezes or the ringing of old bellses to
hear YOU say Uriah. I beg your pardon. Was I making any observation?’

‘About Mr. Wickfield,’ I suggested.

‘Oh! Yes, truly,’ said Uriah. ‘Ah! Great imprudence, Master Copperfield.
It’s a topic that I wouldn’t touch upon, to any soul but you. Even to
you I can only touch upon it, and no more. If anyone else had been in
my place during the last few years, by this time he would have had Mr.
Wickfield (oh, what a worthy man he is, Master Copperfield, too!) under
his thumb. Un--der--his thumb,’ said Uriah, very slowly, as he stretched
out his cruel-looking hand above my table, and pressed his own thumb
upon it, until it shook, and shook the room.

If I had been obliged to look at him with him splay foot on Mr.
Wickfield’s head, I think I could scarcely have hated him more.

‘Oh, dear, yes, Master Copperfield,’ he proceeded, in a soft voice,
most remarkably contrasting with the action of his thumb, which did not
diminish its hard pressure in the least degree, ‘there’s no doubt of
it. There would have been loss, disgrace, I don’t know what at all. Mr.
Wickfield knows it. I am the umble instrument of umbly serving him,
and he puts me on an eminence I hardly could have hoped to reach. How
thankful should I be!’ With his face turned towards me, as he finished,
but without looking at me, he took his crooked thumb off the spot where
he had planted it, and slowly and thoughtfully scraped his lank jaw with
it, as if he were shaving himself.

I recollect well how indignantly my heart beat, as I saw his crafty
face, with the appropriately red light of the fire upon it, preparing
for something else.

‘Master Copperfield,’ he began--‘but am I keeping you up?’

‘You are not keeping me up. I generally go to bed late.’

‘Thank you, Master Copperfield! I have risen from my umble station since
first you used to address me, it is true; but I am umble still. I hope I
never shall be otherwise than umble. You will not think the worse of
my umbleness, if I make a little confidence to you, Master Copperfield?
Will you?’

‘Oh no,’ said I, with an effort.

‘Thank you!’ He took out his pocket-handkerchief, and began wiping the
palms of his hands. ‘Miss Agnes, Master Copperfield--’ ‘Well, Uriah?’

‘Oh, how pleasant to be called Uriah, spontaneously!’ he cried; and gave
himself a jerk, like a convulsive fish. ‘You thought her looking very
beautiful tonight, Master Copperfield?’

‘I thought her looking as she always does: superior, in all respects, to
everyone around her,’ I returned.

‘Oh, thank you! It’s so true!’ he cried. ‘Oh, thank you very much for
that!’

‘Not at all,’ I said, loftily. ‘There is no reason why you should thank
me.’

‘Why that, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah, ‘is, in fact, the confidence
that I am going to take the liberty of reposing. Umble as I am,’ he
wiped his hands harder, and looked at them and at the fire by turns,
‘umble as my mother is, and lowly as our poor but honest roof has ever
been, the image of Miss Agnes (I don’t mind trusting you with my secret,
Master Copperfield, for I have always overflowed towards you since the
first moment I had the pleasure of beholding you in a pony-shay) has
been in my breast for years. Oh, Master Copperfield, with what a pure
affection do I love the ground my Agnes walks on!’

I believe I had a delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out of
the fire, and running him through with it. It went from me with a shock,
like a ball fired from a rifle: but the image of Agnes, outraged by so
much as a thought of this red-headed animal’s, remained in my mind when
I looked at him, sitting all awry as if his mean soul griped his body,
and made me giddy. He seemed to swell and grow before my eyes; the room
seemed full of the echoes of his voice; and the strange feeling (to
which, perhaps, no one is quite a stranger) that all this had occurred
before, at some indefinite time, and that I knew what he was going to
say next, took possession of me.

A timely observation of the sense of power that there was in his face,
did more to bring back to my remembrance the entreaty of Agnes, in
its full force, than any effort I could have made. I asked him, with
a better appearance of composure than I could have thought possible a
minute before, whether he had made his feelings known to Agnes.

‘Oh no, Master Copperfield!’ he returned; ‘oh dear, no! Not to anyone
but you. You see I am only just emerging from my lowly station. I rest a
good deal of hope on her observing how useful I am to her father (for
I trust to be very useful to him indeed, Master Copperfield), and how I
smooth the way for him, and keep him straight. She’s so much attached
to her father, Master Copperfield (oh, what a lovely thing it is in a
daughter!), that I think she may come, on his account, to be kind to
me.’

I fathomed the depth of the rascal’s whole scheme, and understood why he
laid it bare.

‘If you’ll have the goodness to keep my secret, Master Copperfield,’ he
pursued, ‘and not, in general, to go against me, I shall take it as a
particular favour. You wouldn’t wish to make unpleasantness. I know
what a friendly heart you’ve got; but having only known me on my umble
footing (on my umblest I should say, for I am very umble still), you
might, unbeknown, go against me rather, with my Agnes. I call her mine,
you see, Master Copperfield. There’s a song that says, “I’d crowns
resign, to call her mine!” I hope to do it, one of these days.’

Dear Agnes! So much too loving and too good for anyone that I could
think of, was it possible that she was reserved to be the wife of such a
wretch as this!

‘There’s no hurry at present, you know, Master Copperfield,’ Uriah
proceeded, in his slimy way, as I sat gazing at him, with this thought
in my mind. ‘My Agnes is very young still; and mother and me will have
to work our way upwards, and make a good many new arrangements, before
it would be quite convenient. So I shall have time gradually to make her
familiar with my hopes, as opportunities offer. Oh, I’m so much obliged
to you for this confidence! Oh, it’s such a relief, you can’t think, to
know that you understand our situation, and are certain (as you wouldn’t
wish to make unpleasantness in the family) not to go against me!’

He took the hand which I dared not withhold, and having given it a damp
squeeze, referred to his pale-faced watch.

‘Dear me!’ he said, ‘it’s past one. The moments slip away so, in the
confidence of old times, Master Copperfield, that it’s almost half past
one!’

I answered that I had thought it was later. Not that I had really
thought so, but because my conversational powers were effectually
scattered.

‘Dear me!’ he said, considering. ‘The ouse that I am stopping at--a sort
of a private hotel and boarding ouse, Master Copperfield, near the New
River ed--will have gone to bed these two hours.’

‘I am sorry,’ I returned, ‘that there is only one bed here, and that
I--’

‘Oh, don’t think of mentioning beds, Master Copperfield!’ he rejoined
ecstatically, drawing up one leg. ‘But would you have any objections to
my laying down before the fire?’

‘If it comes to that,’ I said, ‘pray take my bed, and I’ll lie down
before the fire.’

His repudiation of this offer was almost shrill enough, in the excess of
its surprise and humility, to have penetrated to the ears of Mrs. Crupp,
then sleeping, I suppose, in a distant chamber, situated at about the
level of low-water mark, soothed in her slumbers by the ticking of an
incorrigible clock, to which she always referred me when we had any
little difference on the score of punctuality, and which was never less
than three-quarters of an hour too slow, and had always been put right
in the morning by the best authorities. As no arguments I could urge,
in my bewildered condition, had the least effect upon his modesty
in inducing him to accept my bedroom, I was obliged to make the best
arrangements I could, for his repose before the fire. The mattress of
the sofa (which was a great deal too short for his lank figure), the
sofa pillows, a blanket, the table-cover, a clean breakfast-cloth, and
a great-coat, made him a bed and covering, for which he was more than
thankful. Having lent him a night-cap, which he put on at once, and in
which he made such an awful figure, that I have never worn one since, I
left him to his rest.

I never shall forget that night. I never shall forget how I turned
and tumbled; how I wearied myself with thinking about Agnes and this
creature; how I considered what could I do, and what ought I to do; how
I could come to no other conclusion than that the best course for her
peace was to do nothing, and to keep to myself what I had heard. If
I went to sleep for a few moments, the image of Agnes with her tender
eyes, and of her father looking fondly on her, as I had so often seen
him look, arose before me with appealing faces, and filled me with vague
terrors. When I awoke, the recollection that Uriah was lying in the next
room, sat heavy on me like a waking nightmare; and oppressed me with a
leaden dread, as if I had had some meaner quality of devil for a lodger.

The poker got into my dozing thoughts besides, and wouldn’t come out. I
thought, between sleeping and waking, that it was still red hot, and I
had snatched it out of the fire, and run him through the body. I was so
haunted at last by the idea, though I knew there was nothing in it, that
I stole into the next room to look at him. There I saw him, lying on his
back, with his legs extending to I don’t know where, gurglings taking
place in his throat, stoppages in his nose, and his mouth open like
a post-office. He was so much worse in reality than in my distempered
fancy, that afterwards I was attracted to him in very repulsion, and
could not help wandering in and out every half-hour or so, and taking
another look at him. Still, the long, long night seemed heavy and
hopeless as ever, and no promise of day was in the murky sky.

When I saw him going downstairs early in the morning (for, thank Heaven!
he would not stay to breakfast), it appeared to me as if the night was
going away in his person. When I went out to the Commons, I charged
Mrs. Crupp with particular directions to leave the windows open, that my
sitting-room might be aired, and purged of his presence.



CHAPTER 26. I FALL INTO CAPTIVITY


I saw no more of Uriah Heep, until the day when Agnes left town. I was
at the coach office to take leave of her and see her go; and there was
he, returning to Canterbury by the same conveyance. It was some small
satisfaction to me to observe his spare, short-waisted, high-shouldered,
mulberry-coloured great-coat perched up, in company with an umbrella
like a small tent, on the edge of the back seat on the roof, while
Agnes was, of course, inside; but what I underwent in my efforts to be
friendly with him, while Agnes looked on, perhaps deserved that little
recompense. At the coach window, as at the dinner-party, he hovered
about us without a moment’s intermission, like a great vulture: gorging
himself on every syllable that I said to Agnes, or Agnes said to me.

In the state of trouble into which his disclosure by my fire had thrown
me, I had thought very much of the words Agnes had used in reference to
the partnership. ‘I did what I hope was right. Feeling sure that it
was necessary for papa’s peace that the sacrifice should be made, I
entreated him to make it.’ A miserable foreboding that she would
yield to, and sustain herself by, the same feeling in reference to any
sacrifice for his sake, had oppressed me ever since. I knew how she
loved him. I knew what the devotion of her nature was. I knew from her
own lips that she regarded herself as the innocent cause of his errors,
and as owing him a great debt she ardently desired to pay. I had no
consolation in seeing how different she was from this detestable Rufus
with the mulberry-coloured great-coat, for I felt that in the very
difference between them, in the self-denial of her pure soul and the
sordid baseness of his, the greatest danger lay. All this, doubtless, he
knew thoroughly, and had, in his cunning, considered well.

Yet I was so certain that the prospect of such a sacrifice afar off,
must destroy the happiness of Agnes; and I was so sure, from her manner,
of its being unseen by her then, and having cast no shadow on her yet;
that I could as soon have injured her, as given her any warning of what
impended. Thus it was that we parted without explanation: she waving
her hand and smiling farewell from the coach window; her evil genius
writhing on the roof, as if he had her in his clutches and triumphed.

I could not get over this farewell glimpse of them for a long time. When
Agnes wrote to tell me of her safe arrival, I was as miserable as when
I saw her going away. Whenever I fell into a thoughtful state, this
subject was sure to present itself, and all my uneasiness was sure to be
redoubled. Hardly a night passed without my dreaming of it. It became a
part of my life, and as inseparable from my life as my own head.

I had ample leisure to refine upon my uneasiness: for Steerforth was at
Oxford, as he wrote to me, and when I was not at the Commons, I was
very much alone. I believe I had at this time some lurking distrust of
Steerforth. I wrote to him most affectionately in reply to his, but I
think I was glad, upon the whole, that he could not come to London just
then. I suspect the truth to be, that the influence of Agnes was upon
me, undisturbed by the sight of him; and that it was the more powerful
with me, because she had so large a share in my thoughts and interest.

In the meantime, days and weeks slipped away. I was articled to Spenlow
and Jorkins. I had ninety pounds a year (exclusive of my house-rent
and sundry collateral matters) from my aunt. My rooms were engaged
for twelve months certain: and though I still found them dreary of an
evening, and the evenings long, I could settle down into a state of
equable low spirits, and resign myself to coffee; which I seem, on
looking back, to have taken by the gallon at about this period of my
existence. At about this time, too, I made three discoveries: first,
that Mrs. Crupp was a martyr to a curious disorder called ‘the
spazzums’, which was generally accompanied with inflammation of the
nose, and required to be constantly treated with peppermint; secondly,
that something peculiar in the temperature of my pantry, made the
brandy-bottles burst; thirdly, that I was alone in the world, and much
given to record that circumstance in fragments of English versification.

On the day when I was articled, no festivity took place, beyond my
having sandwiches and sherry into the office for the clerks, and going
alone to the theatre at night. I went to see The Stranger, as a Doctors’
Commons sort of play, and was so dreadfully cut up, that I hardly knew
myself in my own glass when I got home. Mr. Spenlow remarked, on this
occasion, when we concluded our business, that he should have been
happy to have seen me at his house at Norwood to celebrate our becoming
connected, but for his domestic arrangements being in some disorder,
on account of the expected return of his daughter from finishing her
education at Paris. But, he intimated that when she came home he should
hope to have the pleasure of entertaining me. I knew that he was a
widower with one daughter, and expressed my acknowledgements.

Mr. Spenlow was as good as his word. In a week or two, he referred to
this engagement, and said, that if I would do him the favour to come
down next Saturday, and stay till Monday, he would be extremely happy.
Of course I said I would do him the favour; and he was to drive me down
in his phaeton, and to bring me back.

When the day arrived, my very carpet-bag was an object of veneration
to the stipendiary clerks, to whom the house at Norwood was a sacred
mystery. One of them informed me that he had heard that Mr. Spenlow
ate entirely off plate and china; and another hinted at champagne being
constantly on draught, after the usual custom of table-beer. The old
clerk with the wig, whose name was Mr. Tiffey, had been down on business
several times in the course of his career, and had on each occasion
penetrated to the breakfast-parlour. He described it as an apartment of
the most sumptuous nature, and said that he had drunk brown East India
sherry there, of a quality so precious as to make a man wink. We had
an adjourned cause in the Consistory that day--about excommunicating a
baker who had been objecting in a vestry to a paving-rate--and as the
evidence was just twice the length of Robinson Crusoe, according to a
calculation I made, it was rather late in the day before we finished.
However, we got him excommunicated for six weeks, and sentenced in
no end of costs; and then the baker’s proctor, and the judge, and the
advocates on both sides (who were all nearly related), went out of town
together, and Mr. Spenlow and I drove away in the phaeton.

The phaeton was a very handsome affair; the horses arched their necks
and lifted up their legs as if they knew they belonged to Doctors’
Commons. There was a good deal of competition in the Commons on all
points of display, and it turned out some very choice equipages then;
though I always have considered, and always shall consider, that in my
time the great article of competition there was starch: which I think
was worn among the proctors to as great an extent as it is in the nature
of man to bear.

We were very pleasant, going down, and Mr. Spenlow gave me some hints in
reference to my profession. He said it was the genteelest profession in
the world, and must on no account be confounded with the profession of a
solicitor: being quite another sort of thing, infinitely more exclusive,
less mechanical, and more profitable. We took things much more easily
in the Commons than they could be taken anywhere else, he observed, and
that set us, as a privileged class, apart. He said it was impossible
to conceal the disagreeable fact, that we were chiefly employed by
solicitors; but he gave me to understand that they were an inferior race
of men, universally looked down upon by all proctors of any pretensions.

I asked Mr. Spenlow what he considered the best sort of professional
business? He replied, that a good case of a disputed will, where there
was a neat little estate of thirty or forty thousand pounds, was,
perhaps, the best of all. In such a case, he said, not only were there
very pretty pickings, in the way of arguments at every stage of the
proceedings, and mountains upon mountains of evidence on interrogatory
and counter-interrogatory (to say nothing of an appeal lying, first to
the Delegates, and then to the Lords), but, the costs being pretty sure
to come out of the estate at last, both sides went at it in a lively
and spirited manner, and expense was no consideration. Then, he launched
into a general eulogium on the Commons. What was to be particularly
admired (he said) in the Commons, was its compactness. It was the most
conveniently organized place in the world. It was the complete idea of
snugness. It lay in a nutshell. For example: You brought a divorce case,
or a restitution case, into the Consistory. Very good. You tried it in
the Consistory. You made a quiet little round game of it, among a family
group, and you played it out at leisure. Suppose you were not satisfied
with the Consistory, what did you do then? Why, you went into the
Arches. What was the Arches? The same court, in the same room, with the
same bar, and the same practitioners, but another judge, for there the
Consistory judge could plead any court-day as an advocate. Well, you
played your round game out again. Still you were not satisfied. Very
good. What did you do then? Why, you went to the Delegates. Who were the
Delegates? Why, the Ecclesiastical Delegates were the advocates without
any business, who had looked on at the round game when it was playing in
both courts, and had seen the cards shuffled, and cut, and played, and
had talked to all the players about it, and now came fresh, as judges,
to settle the matter to the satisfaction of everybody! Discontented
people might talk of corruption in the Commons, closeness in the
Commons, and the necessity of reforming the Commons, said Mr. Spenlow
solemnly, in conclusion; but when the price of wheat per bushel had been
highest, the Commons had been busiest; and a man might lay his hand upon
his heart, and say this to the whole world,--‘Touch the Commons, and
down comes the country!’

I listened to all this with attention; and though, I must say, I had my
doubts whether the country was quite as much obliged to the Commons as
Mr. Spenlow made out, I respectfully deferred to his opinion. That
about the price of wheat per bushel, I modestly felt was too much for
my strength, and quite settled the question. I have never, to this hour,
got the better of that bushel of wheat. It has reappeared to annihilate
me, all through my life, in connexion with all kinds of subjects. I
don’t know now, exactly, what it has to do with me, or what right it has
to crush me, on an infinite variety of occasions; but whenever I see my
old friend the bushel brought in by the head and shoulders (as he always
is, I observe), I give up a subject for lost.

This is a digression. I was not the man to touch the Commons, and
bring down the country. I submissively expressed, by my silence, my
acquiescence in all I had heard from my superior in years and knowledge;
and we talked about The Stranger and the Drama, and the pairs of horses,
until we came to Mr. Spenlow’s gate.

There was a lovely garden to Mr. Spenlow’s house; and though that was
not the best time of the year for seeing a garden, it was so beautifully
kept, that I was quite enchanted. There was a charming lawn, there were
clusters of trees, and there were perspective walks that I could just
distinguish in the dark, arched over with trellis-work, on which shrubs
and flowers grew in the growing season. ‘Here Miss Spenlow walks by
herself,’ I thought. ‘Dear me!’

We went into the house, which was cheerfully lighted up, and into a hall
where there were all sorts of hats, caps, great-coats, plaids, gloves,
whips, and walking-sticks. ‘Where is Miss Dora?’ said Mr. Spenlow to the
servant. ‘Dora!’ I thought. ‘What a beautiful name!’

We turned into a room near at hand (I think it was the identical
breakfast-room, made memorable by the brown East Indian sherry), and I
heard a voice say, ‘Mr. Copperfield, my daughter Dora, and my daughter
Dora’s confidential friend!’ It was, no doubt, Mr. Spenlow’s voice,
but I didn’t know it, and I didn’t care whose it was. All was over in a
moment. I had fulfilled my destiny. I was a captive and a slave. I loved
Dora Spenlow to distraction!

She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don’t
know what she was--anything that no one ever saw, and everything that
everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an
instant. There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down, or looking
back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.

‘I,’ observed a well-remembered voice, when I had bowed and murmured
something, ‘have seen Mr. Copperfield before.’

The speaker was not Dora. No; the confidential friend, Miss Murdstone!

I don’t think I was much astonished. To the best of my judgement,
no capacity of astonishment was left in me. There was nothing worth
mentioning in the material world, but Dora Spenlow, to be astonished
about. I said, ‘How do you do, Miss Murdstone? I hope you are well.’ She
answered, ‘Very well.’ I said, ‘How is Mr. Murdstone?’ She replied, ‘My
brother is robust, I am obliged to you.’

Mr. Spenlow, who, I suppose, had been surprised to see us recognize each
other, then put in his word.

‘I am glad to find,’ he said, ‘Copperfield, that you and Miss Murdstone
are already acquainted.’

‘Mr. Copperfield and myself,’ said Miss Murdstone, with severe
composure, ‘are connexions. We were once slightly acquainted. It was in
his childish days. Circumstances have separated us since. I should not
have known him.’

I replied that I should have known her, anywhere. Which was true enough.

‘Miss Murdstone has had the goodness,’ said Mr. Spenlow to me, ‘to
accept the office--if I may so describe it--of my daughter Dora’s
confidential friend. My daughter Dora having, unhappily, no mother, Miss
Murdstone is obliging enough to become her companion and protector.’

A passing thought occurred to me that Miss Murdstone, like the pocket
instrument called a life-preserver, was not so much designed for
purposes of protection as of assault. But as I had none but passing
thoughts for any subject save Dora, I glanced at her, directly
afterwards, and was thinking that I saw, in her prettily pettish manner,
that she was not very much inclined to be particularly confidential to
her companion and protector, when a bell rang, which Mr. Spenlow said
was the first dinner-bell, and so carried me off to dress.

The idea of dressing one’s self, or doing anything in the way of action,
in that state of love, was a little too ridiculous. I could only sit
down before my fire, biting the key of my carpet-bag, and think of the
captivating, girlish, bright-eyed lovely Dora. What a form she had, what
a face she had, what a graceful, variable, enchanting manner!

The bell rang again so soon that I made a mere scramble of my dressing,
instead of the careful operation I could have wished under the
circumstances, and went downstairs. There was some company. Dora was
talking to an old gentleman with a grey head. Grey as he was--and a
great-grandfather into the bargain, for he said so--I was madly jealous
of him.

What a state of mind I was in! I was jealous of everybody. I couldn’t
bear the idea of anybody knowing Mr. Spenlow better than I did. It was
torturing to me to hear them talk of occurrences in which I had had no
share. When a most amiable person, with a highly polished bald head,
asked me across the dinner table, if that were the first occasion of my
seeing the grounds, I could have done anything to him that was savage
and revengeful.

I don’t remember who was there, except Dora. I have not the least idea
what we had for dinner, besides Dora. My impression is, that I dined off
Dora, entirely, and sent away half-a-dozen plates untouched. I sat next
to her. I talked to her. She had the most delightful little voice, the
gayest little laugh, the pleasantest and most fascinating little
ways, that ever led a lost youth into hopeless slavery. She was rather
diminutive altogether. So much the more precious, I thought.

When she went out of the room with Miss Murdstone (no other ladies
were of the party), I fell into a reverie, only disturbed by the cruel
apprehension that Miss Murdstone would disparage me to her. The amiable
creature with the polished head told me a long story, which I think was
about gardening. I think I heard him say, ‘my gardener’, several times.
I seemed to pay the deepest attention to him, but I was wandering in a
garden of Eden all the while, with Dora.

My apprehensions of being disparaged to the object of my engrossing
affection were revived when we went into the drawing-room, by the grim
and distant aspect of Miss Murdstone. But I was relieved of them in an
unexpected manner.

‘David Copperfield,’ said Miss Murdstone, beckoning me aside into a
window. ‘A word.’

I confronted Miss Murdstone alone.

‘David Copperfield,’ said Miss Murdstone, ‘I need not enlarge upon
family circumstances. They are not a tempting subject.’ ‘Far from it,
ma’am,’ I returned.

‘Far from it,’ assented Miss Murdstone. ‘I do not wish to revive
the memory of past differences, or of past outrages. I have received
outrages from a person--a female I am sorry to say, for the credit of my
sex--who is not to be mentioned without scorn and disgust; and therefore
I would rather not mention her.’

I felt very fiery on my aunt’s account; but I said it would certainly be
better, if Miss Murdstone pleased, not to mention her. I could not hear
her disrespectfully mentioned, I added, without expressing my opinion in
a decided tone.

Miss Murdstone shut her eyes, and disdainfully inclined her head; then,
slowly opening her eyes, resumed:

‘David Copperfield, I shall not attempt to disguise the fact, that I
formed an unfavourable opinion of you in your childhood. It may have
been a mistaken one, or you may have ceased to justify it. That is not
in question between us now. I belong to a family remarkable, I believe,
for some firmness; and I am not the creature of circumstance or change.
I may have my opinion of you. You may have your opinion of me.’

I inclined my head, in my turn.

‘But it is not necessary,’ said Miss Murdstone, ‘that these opinions
should come into collision here. Under existing circumstances, it is as
well on all accounts that they should not. As the chances of life have
brought us together again, and may bring us together on other occasions,
I would say, let us meet here as distant acquaintances. Family
circumstances are a sufficient reason for our only meeting on that
footing, and it is quite unnecessary that either of us should make the
other the subject of remark. Do you approve of this?’

‘Miss Murdstone,’ I returned, ‘I think you and Mr. Murdstone used me
very cruelly, and treated my mother with great unkindness. I shall
always think so, as long as I live. But I quite agree in what you
propose.’

Miss Murdstone shut her eyes again, and bent her head. Then, just
touching the back of my hand with the tips of her cold, stiff fingers,
she walked away, arranging the little fetters on her wrists and round
her neck; which seemed to be the same set, in exactly the same state,
as when I had seen her last. These reminded me, in reference to Miss
Murdstone’s nature, of the fetters over a jail door; suggesting on the
outside, to all beholders, what was to be expected within.

All I know of the rest of the evening is, that I heard the empress of
my heart sing enchanted ballads in the French language, generally to the
effect that, whatever was the matter, we ought always to dance, Ta ra
la, Ta ra la! accompanying herself on a glorified instrument, resembling
a guitar. That I was lost in blissful delirium. That I refused
refreshment. That my soul recoiled from punch particularly. That when
Miss Murdstone took her into custody and led her away, she smiled and
gave me her delicious hand. That I caught a view of myself in a mirror,
looking perfectly imbecile and idiotic. That I retired to bed in a most
maudlin state of mind, and got up in a crisis of feeble infatuation.

It was a fine morning, and early, and I thought I would go and take a
stroll down one of those wire-arched walks, and indulge my passion by
dwelling on her image. On my way through the hall, I encountered her
little dog, who was called Jip--short for Gipsy. I approached him
tenderly, for I loved even him; but he showed his whole set of teeth,
got under a chair expressly to snarl, and wouldn’t hear of the least
familiarity.

The garden was cool and solitary. I walked about, wondering what my
feelings of happiness would be, if I could ever become engaged to this
dear wonder. As to marriage, and fortune, and all that, I believe I was
almost as innocently undesigning then, as when I loved little Em’ly. To
be allowed to call her ‘Dora’, to write to her, to dote upon and worship
her, to have reason to think that when she was with other people she was
yet mindful of me, seemed to me the summit of human ambition--I am
sure it was the summit of mine. There is no doubt whatever that I was
a lackadaisical young spooney; but there was a purity of heart in all
this, that prevents my having quite a contemptuous recollection of it,
let me laugh as I may.

I had not been walking long, when I turned a corner, and met her. I
tingle again from head to foot as my recollection turns that corner, and
my pen shakes in my hand.

‘You--are--out early, Miss Spenlow,’ said I.

‘It’s so stupid at home,’ she replied, ‘and Miss Murdstone is so absurd!
She talks such nonsense about its being necessary for the day to be
aired, before I come out. Aired!’ (She laughed, here, in the most
melodious manner.) ‘On a Sunday morning, when I don’t practise, I must
do something. So I told papa last night I must come out. Besides, it’s
the brightest time of the whole day. Don’t you think so?’

I hazarded a bold flight, and said (not without stammering) that it
was very bright to me then, though it had been very dark to me a minute
before.

‘Do you mean a compliment?’ said Dora, ‘or that the weather has really
changed?’

I stammered worse than before, in replying that I meant no compliment,
but the plain truth; though I was not aware of any change having taken
place in the weather. It was in the state of my own feelings, I added
bashfully: to clench the explanation.

I never saw such curls--how could I, for there never were such
curls!--as those she shook out to hide her blushes. As to the straw hat
and blue ribbons which was on the top of the curls, if I could only have
hung it up in my room in Buckingham Street, what a priceless possession
it would have been!

‘You have just come home from Paris,’ said I.

‘Yes,’ said she. ‘Have you ever been there?’

‘No.’

‘Oh! I hope you’ll go soon! You would like it so much!’

Traces of deep-seated anguish appeared in my countenance. That she
should hope I would go, that she should think it possible I could go,
was insupportable. I depreciated Paris; I depreciated France. I said I
wouldn’t leave England, under existing circumstances, for any earthly
consideration. Nothing should induce me. In short, she was shaking the
curls again, when the little dog came running along the walk to our
relief.

He was mortally jealous of me, and persisted in barking at me. She took
him up in her arms--oh my goodness!--and caressed him, but he persisted
upon barking still. He wouldn’t let me touch him, when I tried; and then
she beat him. It increased my sufferings greatly to see the pats she
gave him for punishment on the bridge of his blunt nose, while he winked
his eyes, and licked her hand, and still growled within himself like a
little double-bass. At length he was quiet--well he might be with her
dimpled chin upon his head!--and we walked away to look at a greenhouse.

‘You are not very intimate with Miss Murdstone, are you?’ said Dora.
--‘My pet.’

(The two last words were to the dog. Oh, if they had only been to me!)

‘No,’ I replied. ‘Not at all so.’

‘She is a tiresome creature,’ said Dora, pouting. ‘I can’t think what
papa can have been about, when he chose such a vexatious thing to be my
companion. Who wants a protector? I am sure I don’t want a protector.
Jip can protect me a great deal better than Miss Murdstone,--can’t you,
Jip, dear?’

He only winked lazily, when she kissed his ball of a head.

‘Papa calls her my confidential friend, but I am sure she is no such
thing--is she, Jip? We are not going to confide in any such cross
people, Jip and I. We mean to bestow our confidence where we like,
and to find out our own friends, instead of having them found out for
us--don’t we, Jip?’

Jip made a comfortable noise, in answer, a little like a tea-kettle when
it sings. As for me, every word was a new heap of fetters, riveted above
the last.

‘It is very hard, because we have not a kind Mama, that we are to have,
instead, a sulky, gloomy old thing like Miss Murdstone, always following
us about--isn’t it, Jip? Never mind, Jip. We won’t be confidential, and
we’ll make ourselves as happy as we can in spite of her, and we’ll tease
her, and not please her--won’t we, Jip?’

If it had lasted any longer, I think I must have gone down on my knees
on the gravel, with the probability before me of grazing them, and of
being presently ejected from the premises besides. But, by good fortune
the greenhouse was not far off, and these words brought us to it.

It contained quite a show of beautiful geraniums. We loitered along in
front of them, and Dora often stopped to admire this one or that one,
and I stopped to admire the same one, and Dora, laughing, held the dog
up childishly, to smell the flowers; and if we were not all three in
Fairyland, certainly I was. The scent of a geranium leaf, at this day,
strikes me with a half comical half serious wonder as to what change has
come over me in a moment; and then I see a straw hat and blue ribbons,
and a quantity of curls, and a little black dog being held up, in two
slender arms, against a bank of blossoms and bright leaves.

Miss Murdstone had been looking for us. She found us here; and presented
her uncongenial cheek, the little wrinkles in it filled with hair
powder, to Dora to be kissed. Then she took Dora’s arm in hers, and
marched us into breakfast as if it were a soldier’s funeral.

How many cups of tea I drank, because Dora made it, I don’t know. But,
I perfectly remember that I sat swilling tea until my whole nervous
system, if I had had any in those days, must have gone by the board. By
and by we went to church. Miss Murdstone was between Dora and me in the
pew; but I heard her sing, and the congregation vanished. A sermon was
delivered--about Dora, of course--and I am afraid that is all I know of
the service.

We had a quiet day. No company, a walk, a family dinner of four, and an
evening of looking over books and pictures; Miss Murdstone with a homily
before her, and her eye upon us, keeping guard vigilantly. Ah! little
did Mr. Spenlow imagine, when he sat opposite to me after dinner that
day, with his pocket-handkerchief over his head, how fervently I was
embracing him, in my fancy, as his son-in-law! Little did he think, when
I took leave of him at night, that he had just given his full consent to
my being engaged to Dora, and that I was invoking blessings on his head!

We departed early in the morning, for we had a Salvage case coming on in
the Admiralty Court, requiring a rather accurate knowledge of the whole
science of navigation, in which (as we couldn’t be expected to know
much about those matters in the Commons) the judge had entreated two old
Trinity Masters, for charity’s sake, to come and help him out. Dora was
at the breakfast-table to make the tea again, however; and I had the
melancholy pleasure of taking off my hat to her in the phaeton, as she
stood on the door-step with Jip in her arms.

What the Admiralty was to me that day; what nonsense I made of our case
in my mind, as I listened to it; how I saw ‘DORA’ engraved upon the
blade of the silver oar which they lay upon the table, as the emblem
of that high jurisdiction; and how I felt when Mr. Spenlow went home
without me (I had had an insane hope that he might take me back again),
as if I were a mariner myself, and the ship to which I belonged had
sailed away and left me on a desert island; I shall make no fruitless
effort to describe. If that sleepy old court could rouse itself, and
present in any visible form the daydreams I have had in it about Dora,
it would reveal my truth.

I don’t mean the dreams that I dreamed on that day alone, but day after
day, from week to week, and term to term. I went there, not to attend to
what was going on, but to think about Dora. If ever I bestowed a thought
upon the cases, as they dragged their slow length before me, it was only
to wonder, in the matrimonial cases (remembering Dora), how it was
that married people could ever be otherwise than happy; and, in the
Prerogative cases, to consider, if the money in question had been left
to me, what were the foremost steps I should immediately have taken
in regard to Dora. Within the first week of my passion, I bought four
sumptuous waistcoats--not for myself; I had no pride in them; for
Dora--and took to wearing straw-coloured kid gloves in the streets, and
laid the foundations of all the corns I have ever had. If the boots I
wore at that period could only be produced and compared with the natural
size of my feet, they would show what the state of my heart was, in a
most affecting manner.

And yet, wretched cripple as I made myself by this act of homage to
Dora, I walked miles upon miles daily in the hope of seeing her. Not
only was I soon as well known on the Norwood Road as the postmen on that
beat, but I pervaded London likewise. I walked about the streets where
the best shops for ladies were, I haunted the Bazaar like an unquiet
spirit, I fagged through the Park again and again, long after I was
quite knocked up. Sometimes, at long intervals and on rare occasions, I
saw her. Perhaps I saw her glove waved in a carriage window; perhaps I
met her, walked with her and Miss Murdstone a little way, and spoke to
her. In the latter case I was always very miserable afterwards, to think
that I had said nothing to the purpose; or that she had no idea of the
extent of my devotion, or that she cared nothing about me. I was always
looking out, as may be supposed, for another invitation to Mr. Spenlow’s
house. I was always being disappointed, for I got none.

Mrs. Crupp must have been a woman of penetration; for when this
attachment was but a few weeks old, and I had not had the courage
to write more explicitly even to Agnes, than that I had been to Mr.
Spenlow’s house, ‘whose family,’ I added, ‘consists of one daughter’;--I
say Mrs. Crupp must have been a woman of penetration, for, even in that
early stage, she found it out. She came up to me one evening, when I
was very low, to ask (she being then afflicted with the disorder I have
mentioned) if I could oblige her with a little tincture of cardamums
mixed with rhubarb, and flavoured with seven drops of the essence of
cloves, which was the best remedy for her complaint;--or, if I had not
such a thing by me, with a little brandy, which was the next best. It
was not, she remarked, so palatable to her, but it was the next best. As
I had never even heard of the first remedy, and always had the second in
the closet, I gave Mrs. Crupp a glass of the second, which (that I might
have no suspicion of its being devoted to any improper use) she began to
take in my presence.

‘Cheer up, sir,’ said Mrs. Crupp. ‘I can’t abear to see you so, sir: I’m
a mother myself.’

I did not quite perceive the application of this fact to myself, but I
smiled on Mrs. Crupp, as benignly as was in my power.

‘Come, sir,’ said Mrs. Crupp. ‘Excuse me. I know what it is, sir.
There’s a lady in the case.’

‘Mrs. Crupp?’ I returned, reddening.

‘Oh, bless you! Keep a good heart, sir!’ said Mrs. Crupp, nodding
encouragement. ‘Never say die, sir! If She don’t smile upon you,
there’s a many as will. You are a young gentleman to be smiled on, Mr.
Copperfull, and you must learn your walue, sir.’

Mrs. Crupp always called me Mr. Copperfull: firstly, no doubt, because
it was not my name; and secondly, I am inclined to think, in some
indistinct association with a washing-day.

‘What makes you suppose there is any young lady in the case, Mrs.
Crupp?’ said I.

‘Mr. Copperfull,’ said Mrs. Crupp, with a great deal of feeling, ‘I’m a
mother myself.’

For some time Mrs. Crupp could only lay her hand upon her nankeen bosom,
and fortify herself against returning pain with sips of her medicine. At
length she spoke again.

‘When the present set were took for you by your dear aunt, Mr.
Copperfull,’ said Mrs. Crupp, ‘my remark were, I had now found summun
I could care for. “Thank Ev’in!” were the expression, “I have now found
summun I can care for!”--You don’t eat enough, sir, nor yet drink.’

‘Is that what you found your supposition on, Mrs. Crupp?’ said I.

‘Sir,’ said Mrs. Crupp, in a tone approaching to severity, ‘I’ve
laundressed other young gentlemen besides yourself. A young gentleman
may be over-careful of himself, or he may be under-careful of himself.
He may brush his hair too regular, or too un-regular. He may wear his
boots much too large for him, or much too small. That is according as
the young gentleman has his original character formed. But let him go to
which extreme he may, sir, there’s a young lady in both of ‘em.’

Mrs. Crupp shook her head in such a determined manner, that I had not an
inch of vantage-ground left.

‘It was but the gentleman which died here before yourself,’ said Mrs.
Crupp, ‘that fell in love--with a barmaid--and had his waistcoats took
in directly, though much swelled by drinking.’

‘Mrs. Crupp,’ said I, ‘I must beg you not to connect the young lady in
my case with a barmaid, or anything of that sort, if you please.’

‘Mr. Copperfull,’ returned Mrs. Crupp, ‘I’m a mother myself, and not
likely. I ask your pardon, sir, if I intrude. I should never wish to
intrude where I were not welcome. But you are a young gentleman, Mr.
Copperfull, and my adwice to you is, to cheer up, sir, to keep a good
heart, and to know your own walue. If you was to take to something,
sir,’ said Mrs. Crupp, ‘if you was to take to skittles, now, which is
healthy, you might find it divert your mind, and do you good.’

With these words, Mrs. Crupp, affecting to be very careful of the
brandy--which was all gone--thanked me with a majestic curtsey, and
retired. As her figure disappeared into the gloom of the entry, this
counsel certainly presented itself to my mind in the light of a slight
liberty on Mrs. Crupp’s part; but, at the same time, I was content
to receive it, in another point of view, as a word to the wise, and a
warning in future to keep my secret better.



CHAPTER 27. TOMMY TRADDLES


It may have been in consequence of Mrs. Crupp’s advice, and, perhaps,
for no better reason than because there was a certain similarity in the
sound of the word skittles and Traddles, that it came into my head, next
day, to go and look after Traddles. The time he had mentioned was more
than out, and he lived in a little street near the Veterinary College
at Camden Town, which was principally tenanted, as one of our clerks who
lived in that direction informed me, by gentlemen students, who bought
live donkeys, and made experiments on those quadrupeds in their private
apartments. Having obtained from this clerk a direction to the academic
grove in question, I set out, the same afternoon, to visit my old
schoolfellow.

I found that the street was not as desirable a one as I could have
wished it to be, for the sake of Traddles. The inhabitants appeared to
have a propensity to throw any little trifles they were not in want of,
into the road: which not only made it rank and sloppy, but untidy too,
on account of the cabbage-leaves. The refuse was not wholly vegetable
either, for I myself saw a shoe, a doubled-up saucepan, a black bonnet,
and an umbrella, in various stages of decomposition, as I was looking
out for the number I wanted.

The general air of the place reminded me forcibly of the days when I
lived with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. An indescribable character of faded
gentility that attached to the house I sought, and made it unlike
all the other houses in the street--though they were all built on one
monotonous pattern, and looked like the early copies of a blundering boy
who was learning to make houses, and had not yet got out of his cramped
brick-and-mortar pothooks--reminded me still more of Mr. and Mrs.
Micawber. Happening to arrive at the door as it was opened to the
afternoon milkman, I was reminded of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber more forcibly
yet.

‘Now,’ said the milkman to a very youthful servant girl. ‘Has that there
little bill of mine been heerd on?’

‘Oh, master says he’ll attend to it immediate,’ was the reply.

‘Because,’ said the milkman, going on as if he had received no answer,
and speaking, as I judged from his tone, rather for the edification of
somebody within the house, than of the youthful servant--an
impression which was strengthened by his manner of glaring down the
passage--‘because that there little bill has been running so long, that
I begin to believe it’s run away altogether, and never won’t be heerd
of. Now, I’m not a going to stand it, you know!’ said the milkman, still
throwing his voice into the house, and glaring down the passage.

As to his dealing in the mild article of milk, by the by, there never
was a greater anomaly. His deportment would have been fierce in a
butcher or a brandy-merchant.

The voice of the youthful servant became faint, but she seemed to me,
from the action of her lips, again to murmur that it would be attended
to immediate.

‘I tell you what,’ said the milkman, looking hard at her for the first
time, and taking her by the chin, ‘are you fond of milk?’

‘Yes, I likes it,’ she replied. ‘Good,’ said the milkman. ‘Then you
won’t have none tomorrow. D’ye hear? Not a fragment of milk you won’t
have tomorrow.’

I thought she seemed, upon the whole, relieved by the prospect of having
any today. The milkman, after shaking his head at her darkly, released
her chin, and with anything rather than good-will opened his can, and
deposited the usual quantity in the family jug. This done, he went away,
muttering, and uttered the cry of his trade next door, in a vindictive
shriek.

‘Does Mr. Traddles live here?’ I then inquired.

A mysterious voice from the end of the passage replied ‘Yes.’ Upon which
the youthful servant replied ‘Yes.’

‘Is he at home?’ said I.

Again the mysterious voice replied in the affirmative, and again the
servant echoed it. Upon this, I walked in, and in pursuance of the
servant’s directions walked upstairs; conscious, as I passed the
back parlour-door, that I was surveyed by a mysterious eye, probably
belonging to the mysterious voice.

When I got to the top of the stairs--the house was only a story high
above the ground floor--Traddles was on the landing to meet me. He was
delighted to see me, and gave me welcome, with great heartiness, to
his little room. It was in the front of the house, and extremely neat,
though sparely furnished. It was his only room, I saw; for there was a
sofa-bedstead in it, and his blacking-brushes and blacking were among
his books--on the top shelf, behind a dictionary. His table was covered
with papers, and he was hard at work in an old coat. I looked at
nothing, that I know of, but I saw everything, even to the prospect of
a church upon his china inkstand, as I sat down--and this, too, was a
faculty confirmed in me in the old Micawber times. Various ingenious
arrangements he had made, for the disguise of his chest of drawers,
and the accommodation of his boots, his shaving-glass, and so forth,
particularly impressed themselves upon me, as evidences of the same
Traddles who used to make models of elephants’ dens in writing-paper to
put flies in; and to comfort himself under ill usage, with the memorable
works of art I have so often mentioned.

In a corner of the room was something neatly covered up with a large
white cloth. I could not make out what that was.

‘Traddles,’ said I, shaking hands with him again, after I had sat down,
‘I am delighted to see you.’

‘I am delighted to see YOU, Copperfield,’ he returned. ‘I am very glad
indeed to see you. It was because I was thoroughly glad to see you when
we met in Ely Place, and was sure you were thoroughly glad to see me,
that I gave you this address instead of my address at chambers.’ ‘Oh!
You have chambers?’ said I.

‘Why, I have the fourth of a room and a passage, and the fourth of a
clerk,’ returned Traddles. ‘Three others and myself unite to have a
set of chambers--to look business-like--and we quarter the clerk too.
Half-a-crown a week he costs me.’

His old simple character and good temper, and something of his old
unlucky fortune also, I thought, smiled at me in the smile with which he
made this explanation.

‘It’s not because I have the least pride, Copperfield, you understand,’
said Traddles, ‘that I don’t usually give my address here. It’s only on
account of those who come to me, who might not like to come here. For
myself, I am fighting my way on in the world against difficulties, and
it would be ridiculous if I made a pretence of doing anything else.’

‘You are reading for the bar, Mr. Waterbrook informed me?’ said I.

‘Why, yes,’ said Traddles, rubbing his hands slowly over one another. ‘I
am reading for the bar. The fact is, I have just begun to keep my terms,
after rather a long delay. It’s some time since I was articled, but the
payment of that hundred pounds was a great pull. A great pull!’ said
Traddles, with a wince, as if he had had a tooth out.

‘Do you know what I can’t help thinking of, Traddles, as I sit here
looking at you?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ said he.

‘That sky-blue suit you used to wear.’

‘Lord, to be sure!’ cried Traddles, laughing. ‘Tight in the arms and
legs, you know? Dear me! Well! Those were happy times, weren’t they?’

‘I think our schoolmaster might have made them happier, without doing
any harm to any of us, I acknowledge,’ I returned.

‘Perhaps he might,’ said Traddles. ‘But dear me, there was a good deal
of fun going on. Do you remember the nights in the bedroom? When we used
to have the suppers? And when you used to tell the stories? Ha, ha,
ha! And do you remember when I got caned for crying about Mr. Mell? Old
Creakle! I should like to see him again, too!’

‘He was a brute to you, Traddles,’ said I, indignantly; for his good
humour made me feel as if I had seen him beaten but yesterday.

‘Do you think so?’ returned Traddles. ‘Really? Perhaps he was rather.
But it’s all over, a long while. Old Creakle!’

‘You were brought up by an uncle, then?’ said I.

‘Of course I was!’ said Traddles. ‘The one I was always going to write
to. And always didn’t, eh! Ha, ha, ha! Yes, I had an uncle then. He died
soon after I left school.’

‘Indeed!’

‘Yes. He was a retired--what do you call
it!--draper--cloth-merchant--and had made me his heir. But he didn’t
like me when I grew up.’

‘Do you really mean that?’ said I. He was so composed, that I fancied he
must have some other meaning.

‘Oh dear, yes, Copperfield! I mean it,’ replied Traddles. ‘It was an
unfortunate thing, but he didn’t like me at all. He said I wasn’t at all
what he expected, and so he married his housekeeper.’

‘And what did you do?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t do anything in particular,’ said Traddles. ‘I lived with them,
waiting to be put out in the world, until his gout unfortunately flew
to his stomach--and so he died, and so she married a young man, and so I
wasn’t provided for.’

‘Did you get nothing, Traddles, after all?’

‘Oh dear, yes!’ said Traddles. ‘I got fifty pounds. I had never been
brought up to any profession, and at first I was at a loss what to
do for myself. However, I began, with the assistance of the son of a
professional man, who had been to Salem House--Yawler, with his nose on
one side. Do you recollect him?’

No. He had not been there with me; all the noses were straight in my
day.

‘It don’t matter,’ said Traddles. ‘I began, by means of his assistance,
to copy law writings. That didn’t answer very well; and then I began to
state cases for them, and make abstracts, and that sort of work. For
I am a plodding kind of fellow, Copperfield, and had learnt the way of
doing such things pithily. Well! That put it in my head to enter myself
as a law student; and that ran away with all that was left of the fifty
pounds. Yawler recommended me to one or two other offices, however--Mr.
Waterbrook’s for one--and I got a good many jobs. I was fortunate
enough, too, to become acquainted with a person in the publishing way,
who was getting up an Encyclopaedia, and he set me to work; and, indeed’
(glancing at his table), ‘I am at work for him at this minute. I am not
a bad compiler, Copperfield,’ said Traddles, preserving the same air of
cheerful confidence in all he said, ‘but I have no invention at all; not
a particle. I suppose there never was a young man with less originality
than I have.’

As Traddles seemed to expect that I should assent to this as a matter
of course, I nodded; and he went on, with the same sprightly patience--I
can find no better expression--as before.

‘So, by little and little, and not living high, I managed to scrape up
the hundred pounds at last,’ said Traddles; ‘and thank Heaven that’s
paid--though it was--though it certainly was,’ said Traddles, wincing
again as if he had had another tooth out, ‘a pull. I am living by the
sort of work I have mentioned, still, and I hope, one of these days, to
get connected with some newspaper: which would almost be the making of
my fortune. Now, Copperfield, you are so exactly what you used to
be, with that agreeable face, and it’s so pleasant to see you, that I
sha’n’t conceal anything. Therefore you must know that I am engaged.’

Engaged! Oh, Dora!

‘She is a curate’s daughter,’ said Traddles; ‘one of ten, down in
Devonshire. Yes!’ For he saw me glance, involuntarily, at the prospect
on the inkstand. ‘That’s the church! You come round here to the left,
out of this gate,’ tracing his finger along the inkstand, ‘and exactly
where I hold this pen, there stands the house--facing, you understand,
towards the church.’

The delight with which he entered into these particulars, did not fully
present itself to me until afterwards; for my selfish thoughts were
making a ground-plan of Mr. Spenlow’s house and garden at the same
moment.

‘She is such a dear girl!’ said Traddles; ‘a little older than me, but
the dearest girl! I told you I was going out of town? I have been down
there. I walked there, and I walked back, and I had the most delightful
time! I dare say ours is likely to be a rather long engagement, but our
motto is “Wait and hope!” We always say that. “Wait and hope,” we always
say. And she would wait, Copperfield, till she was sixty--any age you
can mention--for me!’

Traddles rose from his chair, and, with a triumphant smile, put his hand
upon the white cloth I had observed.

‘However,’ he said, ‘it’s not that we haven’t made a beginning towards
housekeeping. No, no; we have begun. We must get on by degrees, but we
have begun. Here,’ drawing the cloth off with great pride and care, ‘are
two pieces of furniture to commence with. This flower-pot and stand,
she bought herself. You put that in a parlour window,’ said Traddles,
falling a little back from it to survey it with the greater admiration,
‘with a plant in it, and--and there you are! This little round table
with the marble top (it’s two feet ten in circumference), I bought. You
want to lay a book down, you know, or somebody comes to see you or your
wife, and wants a place to stand a cup of tea upon, and--and there you
are again!’ said Traddles. ‘It’s an admirable piece of workmanship--firm
as a rock!’ I praised them both, highly, and Traddles replaced the
covering as carefully as he had removed it.

‘It’s not a great deal towards the furnishing,’ said Traddles, ‘but
it’s something. The table-cloths, and pillow-cases, and articles of
that kind, are what discourage me most, Copperfield. So does
the ironmongery--candle-boxes, and gridirons, and that sort of
necessaries--because those things tell, and mount up. However, “wait and
hope!” And I assure you she’s the dearest girl!’

‘I am quite certain of it,’ said I.

‘In the meantime,’ said Traddles, coming back to his chair; ‘and this is
the end of my prosing about myself, I get on as well as I can. I don’t
make much, but I don’t spend much. In general, I board with the people
downstairs, who are very agreeable people indeed. Both Mr. and Mrs.
Micawber have seen a good deal of life, and are excellent company.’

‘My dear Traddles!’ I quickly exclaimed. ‘What are you talking about?’

Traddles looked at me, as if he wondered what I was talking about.

‘Mr. and Mrs. Micawber!’ I repeated. ‘Why, I am intimately acquainted
with them!’

An opportune double knock at the door, which I knew well from old
experience in Windsor Terrace, and which nobody but Mr. Micawber could
ever have knocked at that door, resolved any doubt in my mind as to
their being my old friends. I begged Traddles to ask his landlord
to walk up. Traddles accordingly did so, over the banister; and Mr.
Micawber, not a bit changed--his tights, his stick, his shirt-collar,
and his eye-glass, all the same as ever--came into the room with a
genteel and youthful air.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Traddles,’ said Mr. Micawber, with the old roll
in his voice, as he checked himself in humming a soft tune. ‘I was not
aware that there was any individual, alien to this tenement, in your
sanctum.’

Mr. Micawber slightly bowed to me, and pulled up his shirt-collar.

‘How do you do, Mr. Micawber?’ said I.

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘you are exceedingly obliging. I am in statu
quo.’

‘And Mrs. Micawber?’ I pursued.

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘she is also, thank God, in statu quo.’

‘And the children, Mr. Micawber?’

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘I rejoice to reply that they are, likewise,
in the enjoyment of salubrity.’

All this time, Mr. Micawber had not known me in the least, though he
had stood face to face with me. But now, seeing me smile, he examined my
features with more attention, fell back, cried, ‘Is it possible! Have I
the pleasure of again beholding Copperfield!’ and shook me by both hands
with the utmost fervour.

‘Good Heaven, Mr. Traddles!’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘to think that I should
find you acquainted with the friend of my youth, the companion of
earlier days! My dear!’ calling over the banisters to Mrs. Micawber,
while Traddles looked (with reason) not a little amazed at this
description of me. ‘Here is a gentleman in Mr. Traddles’s apartment,
whom he wishes to have the pleasure of presenting to you, my love!’

Mr. Micawber immediately reappeared, and shook hands with me again.

‘And how is our good friend the Doctor, Copperfield?’ said Mr. Micawber,
‘and all the circle at Canterbury?’

‘I have none but good accounts of them,’ said I.

‘I am most delighted to hear it,’ said Mr. Micawber. ‘It was at
Canterbury where we last met. Within the shadow, I may figuratively say,
of that religious edifice immortalized by Chaucer, which was anciently
the resort of Pilgrims from the remotest corners of--in short,’ said Mr.
Micawber, ‘in the immediate neighbourhood of the Cathedral.’

I replied that it was. Mr. Micawber continued talking as volubly as he
could; but not, I thought, without showing, by some marks of concern in
his countenance, that he was sensible of sounds in the next room, as
of Mrs. Micawber washing her hands, and hurriedly opening and shutting
drawers that were uneasy in their action.

‘You find us, Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, with one eye on Traddles,
‘at present established, on what may be designated as a small and
unassuming scale; but, you are aware that I have, in the course of my
career, surmounted difficulties, and conquered obstacles. You are no
stranger to the fact, that there have been periods of my life, when it
has been requisite that I should pause, until certain expected events
should turn up; when it has been necessary that I should fall back,
before making what I trust I shall not be accused of presumption in
terming--a spring. The present is one of those momentous stages in the
life of man. You find me, fallen back, FOR a spring; and I have every
reason to believe that a vigorous leap will shortly be the result.’

I was expressing my satisfaction, when Mrs. Micawber came in; a little
more slatternly than she used to be, or so she seemed now, to my
unaccustomed eyes, but still with some preparation of herself for
company, and with a pair of brown gloves on.

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Micawber, leading her towards me, ‘here is
a gentleman of the name of Copperfield, who wishes to renew his
acquaintance with you.’

It would have been better, as it turned out, to have led gently up
to this announcement, for Mrs. Micawber, being in a delicate state of
health, was overcome by it, and was taken so unwell, that Mr. Micawber
was obliged, in great trepidation, to run down to the water-butt in
the backyard, and draw a basinful to lave her brow with. She
presently revived, however, and was really pleased to see me. We had
half-an-hour’s talk, all together; and I asked her about the twins,
who, she said, were ‘grown great creatures’; and after Master and Miss
Micawber, whom she described as ‘absolute giants’, but they were not
produced on that occasion.

Mr. Micawber was very anxious that I should stay to dinner. I should not
have been averse to do so, but that I imagined I detected trouble, and
calculation relative to the extent of the cold meat, in Mrs. Micawber’s
eye. I therefore pleaded another engagement; and observing that Mrs.
Micawber’s spirits were immediately lightened, I resisted all persuasion
to forego it.

But I told Traddles, and Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, that before I could
think of leaving, they must appoint a day when they would come and dine
with me. The occupations to which Traddles stood pledged, rendered it
necessary to fix a somewhat distant one; but an appointment was made for
the purpose, that suited us all, and then I took my leave.

Mr. Micawber, under pretence of showing me a nearer way than that by
which I had come, accompanied me to the corner of the street; being
anxious (he explained to me) to say a few words to an old friend, in
confidence.

‘My dear Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘I need hardly tell you that
to have beneath our roof, under existing circumstances, a mind like that
which gleams--if I may be allowed the expression--which gleams--in your
friend Traddles, is an unspeakable comfort. With a washerwoman, who
exposes hard-bake for sale in her parlour-window, dwelling next door,
and a Bow-street officer residing over the way, you may imagine that his
society is a source of consolation to myself and to Mrs. Micawber. I
am at present, my dear Copperfield, engaged in the sale of corn upon
commission. It is not an avocation of a remunerative description--in
other words, it does not pay--and some temporary embarrassments of a
pecuniary nature have been the consequence. I am, however, delighted to
add that I have now an immediate prospect of something turning up (I am
not at liberty to say in what direction), which I trust will enable me
to provide, permanently, both for myself and for your friend Traddles,
in whom I have an unaffected interest. You may, perhaps, be prepared
to hear that Mrs. Micawber is in a state of health which renders it
not wholly improbable that an addition may be ultimately made to those
pledges of affection which--in short, to the infantine group. Mrs.
Micawber’s family have been so good as to express their dissatisfaction
at this state of things. I have merely to observe, that I am not aware
that it is any business of theirs, and that I repel that exhibition of
feeling with scorn, and with defiance!’

Mr. Micawber then shook hands with me again, and left me.



CHAPTER 28. Mr. MICAWBER’S GAUNTLET


Until the day arrived on which I was to entertain my newly-found
old friends, I lived principally on Dora and coffee. In my love-lorn
condition, my appetite languished; and I was glad of it, for I felt
as though it would have been an act of perfidy towards Dora to have a
natural relish for my dinner. The quantity of walking exercise I took,
was not in this respect attended with its usual consequence, as the
disappointment counteracted the fresh air. I have my doubts, too,
founded on the acute experience acquired at this period of my life,
whether a sound enjoyment of animal food can develop itself freely in
any human subject who is always in torment from tight boots. I think
the extremities require to be at peace before the stomach will conduct
itself with vigour.

On the occasion of this domestic little party, I did not repeat my
former extensive preparations. I merely provided a pair of soles,
a small leg of mutton, and a pigeon-pie. Mrs. Crupp broke out into
rebellion on my first bashful hint in reference to the cooking of the
fish and joint, and said, with a dignified sense of injury, ‘No! No,
sir! You will not ask me sich a thing, for you are better acquainted
with me than to suppose me capable of doing what I cannot do with ampial
satisfaction to my own feelings!’ But, in the end, a compromise was
effected; and Mrs. Crupp consented to achieve this feat, on condition
that I dined from home for a fortnight afterwards.

And here I may remark, that what I underwent from Mrs. Crupp, in
consequence of the tyranny she established over me, was dreadful. I
never was so much afraid of anyone. We made a compromise of everything.
If I hesitated, she was taken with that wonderful disorder which was
always lying in ambush in her system, ready, at the shortest notice, to
prey upon her vitals. If I rang the bell impatiently, after half-a-dozen
unavailing modest pulls, and she appeared at last--which was not by any
means to be relied upon--she would appear with a reproachful aspect,
sink breathless on a chair near the door, lay her hand upon her nankeen
bosom, and become so ill, that I was glad, at any sacrifice of brandy or
anything else, to get rid of her. If I objected to having my bed made at
five o’clock in the afternoon--which I do still think an uncomfortable
arrangement--one motion of her hand towards the same nankeen region of
wounded sensibility was enough to make me falter an apology. In short,
I would have done anything in an honourable way rather than give Mrs.
Crupp offence; and she was the terror of my life.

I bought a second-hand dumb-waiter for this dinner-party, in preference
to re-engaging the handy young man; against whom I had conceived a
prejudice, in consequence of meeting him in the Strand, one Sunday
morning, in a waistcoat remarkably like one of mine, which had been
missing since the former occasion. The ‘young gal’ was re-engaged; but
on the stipulation that she should only bring in the dishes, and then
withdraw to the landing-place, beyond the outer door; where a habit of
sniffing she had contracted would be lost upon the guests, and where her
retiring on the plates would be a physical impossibility.

Having laid in the materials for a bowl of punch, to be compounded
by Mr. Micawber; having provided a bottle of lavender-water, two
wax-candles, a paper of mixed pins, and a pincushion, to assist Mrs.
Micawber in her toilette at my dressing-table; having also caused the
fire in my bedroom to be lighted for Mrs. Micawber’s convenience; and
having laid the cloth with my own hands, I awaited the result with
composure.

At the appointed time, my three visitors arrived together. Mr. Micawber
with more shirt-collar than usual, and a new ribbon to his eye-glass;
Mrs. Micawber with her cap in a whitey-brown paper parcel; Traddles
carrying the parcel, and supporting Mrs. Micawber on his arm. They were
all delighted with my residence. When I conducted Mrs. Micawber to my
dressing-table, and she saw the scale on which it was prepared for her,
she was in such raptures, that she called Mr. Micawber to come in and
look.

‘My dear Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘this is luxurious. This is a
way of life which reminds me of the period when I was myself in a state
of celibacy, and Mrs. Micawber had not yet been solicited to plight her
faith at the Hymeneal altar.’

‘He means, solicited by him, Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber,
archly. ‘He cannot answer for others.’

‘My dear,’ returned Mr. Micawber with sudden seriousness, ‘I have no
desire to answer for others. I am too well aware that when, in the
inscrutable decrees of Fate, you were reserved for me, it is possible
you may have been reserved for one, destined, after a protracted
struggle, at length to fall a victim to pecuniary involvements of a
complicated nature. I understand your allusion, my love. I regret it,
but I can bear it.’

‘Micawber!’ exclaimed Mrs. Micawber, in tears. ‘Have I deserved this! I,
who never have deserted you; who never WILL desert you, Micawber!’ ‘My
love,’ said Mr. Micawber, much affected, ‘you will forgive, and our old
and tried friend Copperfield will, I am sure, forgive, the momentary
laceration of a wounded spirit, made sensitive by a recent collision
with the Minion of Power--in other words, with a ribald Turncock
attached to the water-works--and will pity, not condemn, its excesses.’

Mr. Micawber then embraced Mrs. Micawber, and pressed my hand; leaving
me to infer from this broken allusion that his domestic supply of
water had been cut off that afternoon, in consequence of default in the
payment of the company’s rates.

To divert his thoughts from this melancholy subject, I informed Mr.
Micawber that I relied upon him for a bowl of punch, and led him to
the lemons. His recent despondency, not to say despair, was gone in a
moment. I never saw a man so thoroughly enjoy himself amid the fragrance
of lemon-peel and sugar, the odour of burning rum, and the steam of
boiling water, as Mr. Micawber did that afternoon. It was wonderful to
see his face shining at us out of a thin cloud of these delicate fumes,
as he stirred, and mixed, and tasted, and looked as if he were making,
instead of punch, a fortune for his family down to the latest posterity.
As to Mrs. Micawber, I don’t know whether it was the effect of the cap,
or the lavender-water, or the pins, or the fire, or the wax-candles, but
she came out of my room, comparatively speaking, lovely. And the lark
was never gayer than that excellent woman.

I suppose--I never ventured to inquire, but I suppose--that Mrs. Crupp,
after frying the soles, was taken ill. Because we broke down at that
point. The leg of mutton came up very red within, and very pale without:
besides having a foreign substance of a gritty nature sprinkled over
it, as if if had had a fall into the ashes of that remarkable kitchen
fireplace. But we were not in condition to judge of this fact from the
appearance of the gravy, forasmuch as the ‘young gal’ had dropped it all
upon the stairs--where it remained, by the by, in a long train, until it
was worn out. The pigeon-pie was not bad, but it was a delusive pie: the
crust being like a disappointing head, phrenologically speaking: full
of lumps and bumps, with nothing particular underneath. In short, the
banquet was such a failure that I should have been quite unhappy--about
the failure, I mean, for I was always unhappy about Dora--if I had not
been relieved by the great good humour of my company, and by a bright
suggestion from Mr. Micawber.

‘My dear friend Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘accidents will occur
in the best-regulated families; and in families not regulated by that
pervading influence which sanctifies while it enhances the--a--I would
say, in short, by the influence of Woman, in the lofty character of
Wife, they may be expected with confidence, and must be borne with
philosophy. If you will allow me to take the liberty of remarking that
there are few comestibles better, in their way, than a Devil, and that
I believe, with a little division of labour, we could accomplish a good
one if the young person in attendance could produce a gridiron, I would
put it to you, that this little misfortune may be easily repaired.’

There was a gridiron in the pantry, on which my morning rasher of
bacon was cooked. We had it in, in a twinkling, and immediately applied
ourselves to carrying Mr. Micawber’s idea into effect. The division of
labour to which he had referred was this:--Traddles cut the mutton into
slices; Mr. Micawber (who could do anything of this sort to perfection)
covered them with pepper, mustard, salt, and cayenne; I put them on
the gridiron, turned them with a fork, and took them off, under Mr.
Micawber’s direction; and Mrs. Micawber heated, and continually stirred,
some mushroom ketchup in a little saucepan. When we had slices enough
done to begin upon, we fell-to, with our sleeves still tucked up at the
wrist, more slices sputtering and blazing on the fire, and our attention
divided between the mutton on our plates, and the mutton then preparing.

What with the novelty of this cookery, the excellence of it, the bustle
of it, the frequent starting up to look after it, the frequent sitting
down to dispose of it as the crisp slices came off the gridiron hot and
hot, the being so busy, so flushed with the fire, so amused, and in the
midst of such a tempting noise and savour, we reduced the leg of mutton
to the bone. My own appetite came back miraculously. I am ashamed to
record it, but I really believe I forgot Dora for a little while. I am
satisfied that Mr. and Mrs. Micawber could not have enjoyed the
feast more, if they had sold a bed to provide it. Traddles laughed as
heartily, almost the whole time, as he ate and worked. Indeed we all
did, all at once; and I dare say there was never a greater success.

We were at the height of our enjoyment, and were all busily engaged, in
our several departments, endeavouring to bring the last batch of slices
to a state of perfection that should crown the feast, when I was aware
of a strange presence in the room, and my eyes encountered those of the
staid Littimer, standing hat in hand before me.

‘What’s the matter?’ I involuntarily asked.

‘I beg your pardon, sir, I was directed to come in. Is my master not
here, sir?’

‘No.’

‘Have you not seen him, sir?’

‘No; don’t you come from him?’

‘Not immediately so, sir.’

‘Did he tell you you would find him here?’

‘Not exactly so, sir. But I should think he might be here tomorrow, as
he has not been here today.’ ‘Is he coming up from Oxford?’

‘I beg, sir,’ he returned respectfully, ‘that you will be seated, and
allow me to do this.’ With which he took the fork from my unresisting
hand, and bent over the gridiron, as if his whole attention were
concentrated on it.

We should not have been much discomposed, I dare say, by the appearance
of Steerforth himself, but we became in a moment the meekest of the meek
before his respectable serving-man. Mr. Micawber, humming a tune, to
show that he was quite at ease, subsided into his chair, with the handle
of a hastily concealed fork sticking out of the bosom of his coat, as
if he had stabbed himself. Mrs. Micawber put on her brown gloves, and
assumed a genteel languor. Traddles ran his greasy hands through
his hair, and stood it bolt upright, and stared in confusion on the
table-cloth. As for me, I was a mere infant at the head of my own table;
and hardly ventured to glance at the respectable phenomenon, who had
come from Heaven knows where, to put my establishment to rights.

Meanwhile he took the mutton off the gridiron, and gravely handed it
round. We all took some, but our appreciation of it was gone, and we
merely made a show of eating it. As we severally pushed away our plates,
he noiselessly removed them, and set on the cheese. He took that off,
too, when it was done with; cleared the table; piled everything on the
dumb-waiter; gave us our wine-glasses; and, of his own accord, wheeled
the dumb-waiter into the pantry. All this was done in a perfect manner,
and he never raised his eyes from what he was about. Yet his very
elbows, when he had his back towards me, seemed to teem with the
expression of his fixed opinion that I was extremely young.

‘Can I do anything more, sir?’

I thanked him and said, No; but would he take no dinner himself?

‘None, I am obliged to you, sir.’

‘Is Mr. Steerforth coming from Oxford?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘Is Mr. Steerforth coming from Oxford?’

‘I should imagine that he might be here tomorrow, sir. I rather thought
he might have been here today, sir. The mistake is mine, no doubt, sir.’

‘If you should see him first--’ said I.

‘If you’ll excuse me, sir, I don’t think I shall see him first.’

‘In case you do,’ said I, ‘pray say that I am sorry he was not here
today, as an old schoolfellow of his was here.’

‘Indeed, sir!’ and he divided a bow between me and Traddles, with a
glance at the latter.

He was moving softly to the door, when, in a forlorn hope of saying
something naturally--which I never could, to this man--I said:

‘Oh! Littimer!’

‘Sir!’

‘Did you remain long at Yarmouth, that time?’

‘Not particularly so, sir.’

‘You saw the boat completed?’

‘Yes, sir. I remained behind on purpose to see the boat completed.’

‘I know!’ He raised his eyes to mine respectfully.

‘Mr. Steerforth has not seen it yet, I suppose?’

‘I really can’t say, sir. I think--but I really can’t say, sir. I wish
you good night, sir.’

He comprehended everybody present, in the respectful bow with which he
followed these words, and disappeared. My visitors seemed to breathe
more freely when he was gone; but my own relief was very great, for
besides the constraint, arising from that extraordinary sense of
being at a disadvantage which I always had in this man’s presence, my
conscience had embarrassed me with whispers that I had mistrusted his
master, and I could not repress a vague uneasy dread that he might
find it out. How was it, having so little in reality to conceal, that I
always DID feel as if this man were finding me out?

Mr. Micawber roused me from this reflection, which was blended with
a certain remorseful apprehension of seeing Steerforth himself, by
bestowing many encomiums on the absent Littimer as a most respectable
fellow, and a thoroughly admirable servant. Mr. Micawber, I may remark,
had taken his full share of the general bow, and had received it with
infinite condescension.

‘But punch, my dear Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, tasting it, ‘like
time and tide, waits for no man. Ah! it is at the present moment in high
flavour. My love, will you give me your opinion?’

Mrs. Micawber pronounced it excellent.

‘Then I will drink,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘if my friend Copperfield
will permit me to take that social liberty, to the days when my friend
Copperfield and myself were younger, and fought our way in the world
side by side. I may say, of myself and Copperfield, in words we have
sung together before now, that

    We twa hae run about the braes
    And pu’d the gowans’ fine
--in a figurative point of view--on several occasions. I am not exactly
aware,’ said Mr. Micawber, with the old roll in his voice, and the old
indescribable air of saying something genteel, ‘what gowans may be, but
I have no doubt that Copperfield and myself would frequently have taken
a pull at them, if it had been feasible.’

Mr. Micawber, at the then present moment, took a pull at his punch. So
we all did: Traddles evidently lost in wondering at what distant time
Mr. Micawber and I could have been comrades in the battle of the world.

‘Ahem!’ said Mr. Micawber, clearing his throat, and warming with the
punch and with the fire. ‘My dear, another glass?’

Mrs. Micawber said it must be very little; but we couldn’t allow that,
so it was a glassful.

‘As we are quite confidential here, Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mrs.
Micawber, sipping her punch, ‘Mr. Traddles being a part of our
domesticity, I should much like to have your opinion on Mr. Micawber’s
prospects. For corn,’ said Mrs. Micawber argumentatively, ‘as I have
repeatedly said to Mr. Micawber, may be gentlemanly, but it is not
remunerative. Commission to the extent of two and ninepence in
a fortnight cannot, however limited our ideas, be considered
remunerative.’

We were all agreed upon that.

‘Then,’ said Mrs. Micawber, who prided herself on taking a clear view of
things, and keeping Mr. Micawber straight by her woman’s wisdom, when he
might otherwise go a little crooked, ‘then I ask myself this question.
If corn is not to be relied upon, what is? Are coals to be relied upon?
Not at all. We have turned our attention to that experiment, on the
suggestion of my family, and we find it fallacious.’

Mr. Micawber, leaning back in his chair with his hands in his pockets,
eyed us aside, and nodded his head, as much as to say that the case was
very clearly put.

‘The articles of corn and coals,’ said Mrs. Micawber, still more
argumentatively, ‘being equally out of the question, Mr. Copperfield,
I naturally look round the world, and say, “What is there in which a
person of Mr. Micawber’s talent is likely to succeed?” And I exclude
the doing anything on commission, because commission is not a certainty.
What is best suited to a person of Mr. Micawber’s peculiar temperament
is, I am convinced, a certainty.’

Traddles and I both expressed, by a feeling murmur, that this great
discovery was no doubt true of Mr. Micawber, and that it did him much
credit.

‘I will not conceal from you, my dear Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mrs.
Micawber, ‘that I have long felt the Brewing business to be particularly
adapted to Mr. Micawber. Look at Barclay and Perkins! Look at Truman,
Hanbury, and Buxton! It is on that extensive footing that Mr. Micawber,
I know from my own knowledge of him, is calculated to shine; and the
profits, I am told, are e-NOR-MOUS! But if Mr. Micawber cannot get into
those firms--which decline to answer his letters, when he offers his
services even in an inferior capacity--what is the use of dwelling upon
that idea? None. I may have a conviction that Mr. Micawber’s manners--’

‘Hem! Really, my dear,’ interposed Mr. Micawber.

‘My love, be silent,’ said Mrs. Micawber, laying her brown glove on his
hand. ‘I may have a conviction, Mr. Copperfield, that Mr. Micawber’s
manners peculiarly qualify him for the Banking business. I may argue
within myself, that if I had a deposit at a banking-house, the manners
of Mr. Micawber, as representing that banking-house, would inspire
confidence, and must extend the connexion. But if the various
banking-houses refuse to avail themselves of Mr. Micawber’s abilities,
or receive the offer of them with contumely, what is the use of dwelling
upon THAT idea? None. As to originating a banking-business, I may know
that there are members of my family who, if they chose to place their
money in Mr. Micawber’s hands, might found an establishment of that
description. But if they do NOT choose to place their money in Mr.
Micawber’s hands--which they don’t--what is the use of that? Again I
contend that we are no farther advanced than we were before.’

I shook my head, and said, ‘Not a bit.’ Traddles also shook his head,
and said, ‘Not a bit.’

‘What do I deduce from this?’ Mrs. Micawber went on to say, still with
the same air of putting a case lucidly. ‘What is the conclusion, my
dear Mr. Copperfield, to which I am irresistibly brought? Am I wrong in
saying, it is clear that we must live?’

I answered ‘Not at all!’ and Traddles answered ‘Not at all!’ and I found
myself afterwards sagely adding, alone, that a person must either live
or die.

‘Just so,’ returned Mrs. Micawber, ‘It is precisely that. And the fact
is, my dear Mr. Copperfield, that we can not live without something
widely different from existing circumstances shortly turning up. Now
I am convinced, myself, and this I have pointed out to Mr. Micawber
several times of late, that things cannot be expected to turn up of
themselves. We must, in a measure, assist to turn them up. I may be
wrong, but I have formed that opinion.’

Both Traddles and I applauded it highly.

‘Very well,’ said Mrs. Micawber. ‘Then what do I recommend? Here is Mr.
Micawber with a variety of qualifications--with great talent--’

‘Really, my love,’ said Mr. Micawber.

‘Pray, my dear, allow me to conclude. Here is Mr. Micawber, with a
variety of qualifications, with great talent--I should say, with genius,
but that may be the partiality of a wife--’

Traddles and I both murmured ‘No.’

‘And here is Mr. Micawber without any suitable position or employment.
Where does that responsibility rest? Clearly on society. Then I would
make a fact so disgraceful known, and boldly challenge society to set it
right. It appears to me, my dear Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber,
forcibly, ‘that what Mr. Micawber has to do, is to throw down the
gauntlet to society, and say, in effect, “Show me who will take that up.
Let the party immediately step forward.”’

I ventured to ask Mrs. Micawber how this was to be done.

‘By advertising,’ said Mrs. Micawber--‘in all the papers. It appears to
me, that what Mr. Micawber has to do, in justice to himself, in justice
to his family, and I will even go so far as to say in justice to
society, by which he has been hitherto overlooked, is to advertise in
all the papers; to describe himself plainly as so-and-so, with such and
such qualifications and to put it thus: “Now employ me, on remunerative
terms, and address, post-paid, to W. M., Post Office, Camden Town.”’

‘This idea of Mrs. Micawber’s, my dear Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber,
making his shirt-collar meet in front of his chin, and glancing at me
sideways, ‘is, in fact, the Leap to which I alluded, when I last had the
pleasure of seeing you.’

‘Advertising is rather expensive,’ I remarked, dubiously.

‘Exactly so!’ said Mrs. Micawber, preserving the same logical air.
‘Quite true, my dear Mr. Copperfield! I have made the identical
observation to Mr. Micawber. It is for that reason especially, that I
think Mr. Micawber ought (as I have already said, in justice to himself,
in justice to his family, and in justice to society) to raise a certain
sum of money--on a bill.’

Mr. Micawber, leaning back in his chair, trifled with his eye-glass
and cast his eyes up at the ceiling; but I thought him observant of
Traddles, too, who was looking at the fire.

‘If no member of my family,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘is possessed of
sufficient natural feeling to negotiate that bill--I believe there is a
better business-term to express what I mean--’

Mr. Micawber, with his eyes still cast up at the ceiling, suggested
‘Discount.’

‘To discount that bill,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘then my opinion is, that
Mr. Micawber should go into the City, should take that bill into the
Money Market, and should dispose of it for what he can get. If the
individuals in the Money Market oblige Mr. Micawber to sustain a great
sacrifice, that is between themselves and their consciences. I view
it, steadily, as an investment. I recommend Mr. Micawber, my dear Mr.
Copperfield, to do the same; to regard it as an investment which is sure
of return, and to make up his mind to any sacrifice.’

I felt, but I am sure I don’t know why, that this was self-denying
and devoted in Mrs. Micawber, and I uttered a murmur to that effect.
Traddles, who took his tone from me, did likewise, still looking at the
fire.

‘I will not,’ said Mrs. Micawber, finishing her punch, and gathering her
scarf about her shoulders, preparatory to her withdrawal to my bedroom:
‘I will not protract these remarks on the subject of Mr. Micawber’s
pecuniary affairs. At your fireside, my dear Mr. Copperfield, and in the
presence of Mr. Traddles, who, though not so old a friend, is quite one
of ourselves, I could not refrain from making you acquainted with the
course I advise Mr. Micawber to take. I feel that the time is arrived
when Mr. Micawber should exert himself and--I will add--assert himself,
and it appears to me that these are the means. I am aware that I am
merely a female, and that a masculine judgement is usually considered
more competent to the discussion of such questions; still I must not
forget that, when I lived at home with my papa and mama, my papa was in
the habit of saying, “Emma’s form is fragile, but her grasp of a subject
is inferior to none.” That my papa was too partial, I well know; but
that he was an observer of character in some degree, my duty and my
reason equally forbid me to doubt.’

With these words, and resisting our entreaties that she would grace
the remaining circulation of the punch with her presence, Mrs. Micawber
retired to my bedroom. And really I felt that she was a noble woman--the
sort of woman who might have been a Roman matron, and done all manner of
heroic things, in times of public trouble.

In the fervour of this impression, I congratulated Mr. Micawber on the
treasure he possessed. So did Traddles. Mr. Micawber extended his
hand to each of us in succession, and then covered his face with his
pocket-handkerchief, which I think had more snuff upon it than he
was aware of. He then returned to the punch, in the highest state of
exhilaration.

He was full of eloquence. He gave us to understand that in our children
we lived again, and that, under the pressure of pecuniary difficulties,
any accession to their number was doubly welcome. He said that Mrs.
Micawber had latterly had her doubts on this point, but that he had
dispelled them, and reassured her. As to her family, they were totally
unworthy of her, and their sentiments were utterly indifferent to him,
and they might--I quote his own expression--go to the Devil.

Mr. Micawber then delivered a warm eulogy on Traddles. He said
Traddles’s was a character, to the steady virtues of which he (Mr.
Micawber) could lay no claim, but which, he thanked Heaven, he could
admire. He feelingly alluded to the young lady, unknown, whom Traddles
had honoured with his affection, and who had reciprocated that affection
by honouring and blessing Traddles with her affection. Mr. Micawber
pledged her. So did I. Traddles thanked us both, by saying, with a
simplicity and honesty I had sense enough to be quite charmed with,
‘I am very much obliged to you indeed. And I do assure you, she’s the
dearest girl!--’

Mr. Micawber took an early opportunity, after that, of hinting, with the
utmost delicacy and ceremony, at the state of my affections. Nothing
but the serious assurance of his friend Copperfield to the contrary,
he observed, could deprive him of the impression that his friend
Copperfield loved and was beloved. After feeling very hot and
uncomfortable for some time, and after a good deal of blushing,
stammering, and denying, I said, having my glass in my hand, ‘Well! I
would give them D.!’ which so excited and gratified Mr. Micawber,
that he ran with a glass of punch into my bedroom, in order that Mrs.
Micawber might drink D., who drank it with enthusiasm, crying from
within, in a shrill voice, ‘Hear, hear! My dear Mr. Copperfield, I am
delighted. Hear!’ and tapping at the wall, by way of applause.

Our conversation, afterwards, took a more worldly turn; Mr. Micawber
telling us that he found Camden Town inconvenient, and that the first
thing he contemplated doing, when the advertisement should have been the
cause of something satisfactory turning up, was to move. He mentioned
a terrace at the western end of Oxford Street, fronting Hyde Park, on
which he had always had his eye, but which he did not expect to attain
immediately, as it would require a large establishment. There would
probably be an interval, he explained, in which he should content
himself with the upper part of a house, over some respectable place of
business--say in Piccadilly,--which would be a cheerful situation for
Mrs. Micawber; and where, by throwing out a bow-window, or carrying up
the roof another story, or making some little alteration of that sort,
they might live, comfortably and reputably, for a few years. Whatever
was reserved for him, he expressly said, or wherever his abode might be,
we might rely on this--there would always be a room for Traddles, and a
knife and fork for me. We acknowledged his kindness; and he begged us
to forgive his having launched into these practical and business-like
details, and to excuse it as natural in one who was making entirely new
arrangements in life.

Mrs. Micawber, tapping at the wall again to know if tea were ready,
broke up this particular phase of our friendly conversation. She made
tea for us in a most agreeable manner; and, whenever I went near her, in
handing about the tea-cups and bread-and-butter, asked me, in a whisper,
whether D. was fair, or dark, or whether she was short, or tall: or
something of that kind; which I think I liked. After tea, we discussed a
variety of topics before the fire; and Mrs. Micawber was good enough
to sing us (in a small, thin, flat voice, which I remembered to have
considered, when I first knew her, the very table-beer of acoustics) the
favourite ballads of ‘The Dashing White Sergeant’, and ‘Little Tafflin’.
For both of these songs Mrs. Micawber had been famous when she lived at
home with her papa and mama. Mr. Micawber told us, that when he heard
her sing the first one, on the first occasion of his seeing her beneath
the parental roof, she had attracted his attention in an extraordinary
degree; but that when it came to Little Tafflin, he had resolved to win
that woman or perish in the attempt.

It was between ten and eleven o’clock when Mrs. Micawber rose to replace
her cap in the whitey-brown paper parcel, and to put on her bonnet. Mr.
Micawber took the opportunity of Traddles putting on his great-coat, to
slip a letter into my hand, with a whispered request that I would read
it at my leisure. I also took the opportunity of my holding a candle
over the banisters to light them down, when Mr. Micawber was going
first, leading Mrs. Micawber, and Traddles was following with the cap,
to detain Traddles for a moment on the top of the stairs.

‘Traddles,’ said I, ‘Mr. Micawber don’t mean any harm, poor fellow: but,
if I were you, I wouldn’t lend him anything.’

‘My dear Copperfield,’ returned Traddles, smiling, ‘I haven’t got
anything to lend.’

‘You have got a name, you know,’ said I.

‘Oh! You call THAT something to lend?’ returned Traddles, with a
thoughtful look.

‘Certainly.’

‘Oh!’ said Traddles. ‘Yes, to be sure! I am very much obliged to you,
Copperfield; but--I am afraid I have lent him that already.’

‘For the bill that is to be a certain investment?’ I inquired.

‘No,’ said Traddles. ‘Not for that one. This is the first I have heard
of that one. I have been thinking that he will most likely propose that
one, on the way home. Mine’s another.’

‘I hope there will be nothing wrong about it,’ said I. ‘I hope not,’
said Traddles. ‘I should think not, though, because he told me, only the
other day, that it was provided for. That was Mr. Micawber’s expression,
“Provided for.”’

Mr. Micawber looking up at this juncture to where we were standing, I
had only time to repeat my caution. Traddles thanked me, and descended.
But I was much afraid, when I observed the good-natured manner in which
he went down with the cap in his hand, and gave Mrs. Micawber his arm,
that he would be carried into the Money Market neck and heels.

I returned to my fireside, and was musing, half gravely and half
laughing, on the character of Mr. Micawber and the old relations between
us, when I heard a quick step ascending the stairs. At first, I thought
it was Traddles coming back for something Mrs. Micawber had left behind;
but as the step approached, I knew it, and felt my heart beat high, and
the blood rush to my face, for it was Steerforth’s.

I was never unmindful of Agnes, and she never left that sanctuary in my
thoughts--if I may call it so--where I had placed her from the first.
But when he entered, and stood before me with his hand out, the darkness
that had fallen on him changed to light, and I felt confounded and
ashamed of having doubted one I loved so heartily. I loved her none the
less; I thought of her as the same benignant, gentle angel in my life; I
reproached myself, not her, with having done him an injury; and I would
have made him any atonement if I had known what to make, and how to make
it.

‘Why, Daisy, old boy, dumb-foundered!’ laughed Steerforth, shaking
my hand heartily, and throwing it gaily away. ‘Have I detected you in
another feast, you Sybarite! These Doctors’ Commons fellows are the
gayest men in town, I believe, and beat us sober Oxford people all to
nothing!’ His bright glance went merrily round the room, as he took
the seat on the sofa opposite to me, which Mrs. Micawber had recently
vacated, and stirred the fire into a blaze.

‘I was so surprised at first,’ said I, giving him welcome with all
the cordiality I felt, ‘that I had hardly breath to greet you with,
Steerforth.’

‘Well, the sight of me is good for sore eyes, as the Scotch say,’
replied Steerforth, ‘and so is the sight of you, Daisy, in full bloom.
How are you, my Bacchanal?’

‘I am very well,’ said I; ‘and not at all Bacchanalian tonight, though I
confess to another party of three.’

‘All of whom I met in the street, talking loud in your praise,’ returned
Steerforth. ‘Who’s our friend in the tights?’

I gave him the best idea I could, in a few words, of Mr. Micawber. He
laughed heartily at my feeble portrait of that gentleman, and said he
was a man to know, and he must know him. ‘But who do you suppose our
other friend is?’ said I, in my turn.

‘Heaven knows,’ said Steerforth. ‘Not a bore, I hope? I thought he
looked a little like one.’

‘Traddles!’ I replied, triumphantly.

‘Who’s he?’ asked Steerforth, in his careless way.

‘Don’t you remember Traddles? Traddles in our room at Salem House?’

‘Oh! That fellow!’ said Steerforth, beating a lump of coal on the top
of the fire, with the poker. ‘Is he as soft as ever? And where the deuce
did you pick him up?’

I extolled Traddles in reply, as highly as I could; for I felt that
Steerforth rather slighted him. Steerforth, dismissing the subject with
a light nod, and a smile, and the remark that he would be glad to see
the old fellow too, for he had always been an odd fish, inquired if I
could give him anything to eat? During most of this short dialogue, when
he had not been speaking in a wild vivacious manner, he had sat idly
beating on the lump of coal with the poker. I observed that he did the
same thing while I was getting out the remains of the pigeon-pie, and so
forth.

‘Why, Daisy, here’s a supper for a king!’ he exclaimed, starting out of
his silence with a burst, and taking his seat at the table. ‘I shall do
it justice, for I have come from Yarmouth.’

‘I thought you came from Oxford?’ I returned.

‘Not I,’ said Steerforth. ‘I have been seafaring--better employed.’

‘Littimer was here today, to inquire for you,’ I remarked, ‘and I
understood him that you were at Oxford; though, now I think of it, he
certainly did not say so.’

‘Littimer is a greater fool than I thought him, to have been inquiring
for me at all,’ said Steerforth, jovially pouring out a glass of wine,
and drinking to me. ‘As to understanding him, you are a cleverer fellow
than most of us, Daisy, if you can do that.’

‘That’s true, indeed,’ said I, moving my chair to the table. ‘So you
have been at Yarmouth, Steerforth!’ interested to know all about it.
‘Have you been there long?’

‘No,’ he returned. ‘An escapade of a week or so.’

‘And how are they all? Of course, little Emily is not married yet?’

‘Not yet. Going to be, I believe--in so many weeks, or months, or
something or other. I have not seen much of ‘em. By the by’; he laid
down his knife and fork, which he had been using with great diligence,
and began feeling in his pockets; ‘I have a letter for you.’

‘From whom?’

‘Why, from your old nurse,’ he returned, taking some papers out of his
breast pocket. “‘J. Steerforth, Esquire, debtor, to The Willing
Mind”; that’s not it. Patience, and we’ll find it presently. Old
what’s-his-name’s in a bad way, and it’s about that, I believe.’

‘Barkis, do you mean?’

‘Yes!’ still feeling in his pockets, and looking over their contents:
‘it’s all over with poor Barkis, I am afraid. I saw a little apothecary
there--surgeon, or whatever he is--who brought your worship into the
world. He was mighty learned about the case, to me; but the upshot of
his opinion was, that the carrier was making his last journey rather
fast.---Put your hand into the breast pocket of my great-coat on the
chair yonder, and I think you’ll find the letter. Is it there?’

‘Here it is!’ said I.

‘That’s right!’

It was from Peggotty; something less legible than usual, and brief. It
informed me of her husband’s hopeless state, and hinted at his being
‘a little nearer’ than heretofore, and consequently more difficult
to manage for his own comfort. It said nothing of her weariness
and watching, and praised him highly. It was written with a plain,
unaffected, homely piety that I knew to be genuine, and ended with ‘my
duty to my ever darling’--meaning myself.

While I deciphered it, Steerforth continued to eat and drink.

‘It’s a bad job,’ he said, when I had done; ‘but the sun sets every day,
and people die every minute, and we mustn’t be scared by the common lot.
If we failed to hold our own, because that equal foot at all men’s doors
was heard knocking somewhere, every object in this world would slip from
us. No! Ride on! Rough-shod if need be, smooth-shod if that will do, but
ride on! Ride on over all obstacles, and win the race!’

‘And win what race?’ said I.

‘The race that one has started in,’ said he. ‘Ride on!’

I noticed, I remember, as he paused, looking at me with his handsome
head a little thrown back, and his glass raised in his hand, that,
though the freshness of the sea-wind was on his face, and it was ruddy,
there were traces in it, made since I last saw it, as if he had applied
himself to some habitual strain of the fervent energy which, when
roused, was so passionately roused within him. I had it in my thoughts
to remonstrate with him upon his desperate way of pursuing any fancy
that he took--such as this buffeting of rough seas, and braving of hard
weather, for example--when my mind glanced off to the immediate subject
of our conversation again, and pursued that instead.

‘I tell you what, Steerforth,’ said I, ‘if your high spirits will listen
to me--’

‘They are potent spirits, and will do whatever you like,’ he answered,
moving from the table to the fireside again.

‘Then I tell you what, Steerforth. I think I will go down and see my
old nurse. It is not that I can do her any good, or render her any real
service; but she is so attached to me that my visit will have as much
effect on her, as if I could do both. She will take it so kindly that it
will be a comfort and support to her. It is no great effort to make,
I am sure, for such a friend as she has been to me. Wouldn’t you go a
day’s journey, if you were in my place?’

His face was thoughtful, and he sat considering a little before he
answered, in a low voice, ‘Well! Go. You can do no harm.’

‘You have just come back,’ said I, ‘and it would be in vain to ask you
to go with me?’

‘Quite,’ he returned. ‘I am for Highgate tonight. I have not seen
my mother this long time, and it lies upon my conscience, for
it’s something to be loved as she loves her prodigal son.---Bah!
Nonsense!--You mean to go tomorrow, I suppose?’ he said, holding me out
at arm’s length, with a hand on each of my shoulders.

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Well, then, don’t go till next day. I wanted you to come and stay a
few days with us. Here I am, on purpose to bid you, and you fly off to
Yarmouth!’

‘You are a nice fellow to talk of flying off, Steerforth, who are always
running wild on some unknown expedition or other!’

He looked at me for a moment without speaking, and then rejoined, still
holding me as before, and giving me a shake:

‘Come! Say the next day, and pass as much of tomorrow as you can with
us! Who knows when we may meet again, else? Come! Say the next day! I
want you to stand between Rosa Dartle and me, and keep us asunder.’

‘Would you love each other too much, without me?’

‘Yes; or hate,’ laughed Steerforth; ‘no matter which. Come! Say the next
day!’

I said the next day; and he put on his great-coat and lighted his cigar,
and set off to walk home. Finding him in this intention, I put on my own
great-coat (but did not light my own cigar, having had enough of that
for one while) and walked with him as far as the open road: a dull road,
then, at night. He was in great spirits all the way; and when we parted,
and I looked after him going so gallantly and airily homeward, I thought
of his saying, ‘Ride on over all obstacles, and win the race!’ and
wished, for the first time, that he had some worthy race to run.

I was undressing in my own room, when Mr. Micawber’s letter tumbled on
the floor. Thus reminded of it, I broke the seal and read as follows. It
was dated an hour and a half before dinner. I am not sure whether I
have mentioned that, when Mr. Micawber was at any particularly desperate
crisis, he used a sort of legal phraseology, which he seemed to think
equivalent to winding up his affairs.


‘SIR--for I dare not say my dear Copperfield,

‘It is expedient that I should inform you that the undersigned is
Crushed. Some flickering efforts to spare you the premature knowledge of
his calamitous position, you may observe in him this day; but hope has
sunk beneath the horizon, and the undersigned is Crushed.

‘The present communication is penned within the personal range (I cannot
call it the society) of an individual, in a state closely bordering
on intoxication, employed by a broker. That individual is in legal
possession of the premises, under a distress for rent. His inventory
includes, not only the chattels and effects of every description
belonging to the undersigned, as yearly tenant of this habitation, but
also those appertaining to Mr. Thomas Traddles, lodger, a member of the
Honourable Society of the Inner Temple.

‘If any drop of gloom were wanting in the overflowing cup, which is now
“commended” (in the language of an immortal Writer) to the lips of the
undersigned, it would be found in the fact, that a friendly acceptance
granted to the undersigned, by the before-mentioned Mr. Thomas Traddles,
for the sum Of 23l 4s 9 1/2d is over due, and is NOT provided for. Also,
in the fact that the living responsibilities clinging to the undersigned
will, in the course of nature, be increased by the sum of one more
helpless victim; whose miserable appearance may be looked for--in round
numbers--at the expiration of a period not exceeding six lunar months
from the present date.

‘After premising thus much, it would be a work of supererogation to add,
that dust and ashes are for ever scattered

               ‘On
                    ‘The
                         ‘Head
                              ‘Of
                                   ‘WILKINS MICAWBER.’


Poor Traddles! I knew enough of Mr. Micawber by this time, to foresee
that he might be expected to recover the blow; but my night’s rest was
sorely distressed by thoughts of Traddles, and of the curate’s daughter,
who was one of ten, down in Devonshire, and who was such a dear girl,
and who would wait for Traddles (ominous praise!) until she was sixty,
or any age that could be mentioned.



CHAPTER 29. I VISIT STEERFORTH AT HIS HOME, AGAIN


I mentioned to Mr. Spenlow in the morning, that I wanted leave of
absence for a short time; and as I was not in the receipt of any salary,
and consequently was not obnoxious to the implacable Jorkins, there was
no difficulty about it. I took that opportunity, with my voice sticking
in my throat, and my sight failing as I uttered the words, to express
my hope that Miss Spenlow was quite well; to which Mr. Spenlow replied,
with no more emotion than if he had been speaking of an ordinary human
being, that he was much obliged to me, and she was very well.

We articled clerks, as germs of the patrician order of proctors, were
treated with so much consideration, that I was almost my own master at
all times. As I did not care, however, to get to Highgate before one
or two o’clock in the day, and as we had another little excommunication
case in court that morning, which was called The office of the judge
promoted by Tipkins against Bullock for his soul’s correction, I passed
an hour or two in attendance on it with Mr. Spenlow very agreeably.
It arose out of a scuffle between two churchwardens, one of whom was
alleged to have pushed the other against a pump; the handle of which
pump projecting into a school-house, which school-house was under a
gable of the church-roof, made the push an ecclesiastical offence.
It was an amusing case; and sent me up to Highgate, on the box of the
stage-coach, thinking about the Commons, and what Mr. Spenlow had said
about touching the Commons and bringing down the country.

Mrs. Steerforth was pleased to see me, and so was Rosa Dartle. I was
agreeably surprised to find that Littimer was not there, and that we
were attended by a modest little parlour-maid, with blue ribbons in her
cap, whose eye it was much more pleasant, and much less disconcerting,
to catch by accident, than the eye of that respectable man. But what I
particularly observed, before I had been half-an-hour in the house, was
the close and attentive watch Miss Dartle kept upon me; and the lurking
manner in which she seemed to compare my face with Steerforth’s, and
Steerforth’s with mine, and to lie in wait for something to come out
between the two. So surely as I looked towards her, did I see that eager
visage, with its gaunt black eyes and searching brow, intent on mine; or
passing suddenly from mine to Steerforth’s; or comprehending both of us
at once. In this lynx-like scrutiny she was so far from faltering when
she saw I observed it, that at such a time she only fixed her piercing
look upon me with a more intent expression still. Blameless as I was,
and knew that I was, in reference to any wrong she could possibly
suspect me of, I shrunk before her strange eyes, quite unable to endure
their hungry lustre.

All day, she seemed to pervade the whole house. If I talked to
Steerforth in his room, I heard her dress rustle in the little gallery
outside. When he and I engaged in some of our old exercises on the lawn
behind the house, I saw her face pass from window to window, like a
wandering light, until it fixed itself in one, and watched us. When we
all four went out walking in the afternoon, she closed her thin hand on
my arm like a spring, to keep me back, while Steerforth and his mother
went on out of hearing: and then spoke to me.

‘You have been a long time,’ she said, ‘without coming here. Is your
profession really so engaging and interesting as to absorb your whole
attention? I ask because I always want to be informed, when I am
ignorant. Is it really, though?’

I replied that I liked it well enough, but that I certainly could not
claim so much for it.

‘Oh! I am glad to know that, because I always like to be put right when
I am wrong,’ said Rosa Dartle. ‘You mean it is a little dry, perhaps?’

‘Well,’ I replied; ‘perhaps it was a little dry.’

‘Oh! and that’s a reason why you want relief and change--excitement and
all that?’ said she. ‘Ah! very true! But isn’t it a little--Eh?--for
him; I don’t mean you?’

A quick glance of her eye towards the spot where Steerforth was walking,
with his mother leaning on his arm, showed me whom she meant; but beyond
that, I was quite lost. And I looked so, I have no doubt.

‘Don’t it--I don’t say that it does, mind I want to know--don’t it
rather engross him? Don’t it make him, perhaps, a little more remiss
than usual in his visits to his blindly-doting--eh?’ With another
quick glance at them, and such a glance at me as seemed to look into my
innermost thoughts.

‘Miss Dartle,’ I returned, ‘pray do not think--’

‘I don’t!’ she said. ‘Oh dear me, don’t suppose that I think anything!
I am not suspicious. I only ask a question. I don’t state any opinion. I
want to found an opinion on what you tell me. Then, it’s not so? Well! I
am very glad to know it.’

‘It certainly is not the fact,’ said I, perplexed, ‘that I am
accountable for Steerforth’s having been away from home longer than
usual--if he has been: which I really don’t know at this moment, unless
I understand it from you. I have not seen him this long while, until
last night.’

‘No?’

‘Indeed, Miss Dartle, no!’

As she looked full at me, I saw her face grow sharper and paler, and the
marks of the old wound lengthen out until it cut through the disfigured
lip, and deep into the nether lip, and slanted down the face. There was
something positively awful to me in this, and in the brightness of her
eyes, as she said, looking fixedly at me:

‘What is he doing?’

I repeated the words, more to myself than her, being so amazed.

‘What is he doing?’ she said, with an eagerness that seemed enough to
consume her like a fire. ‘In what is that man assisting him, who never
looks at me without an inscrutable falsehood in his eyes? If you are
honourable and faithful, I don’t ask you to betray your friend. I ask
you only to tell me, is it anger, is it hatred, is it pride, is it
restlessness, is it some wild fancy, is it love, what is it, that is
leading him?’

‘Miss Dartle,’ I returned, ‘how shall I tell you, so that you will
believe me, that I know of nothing in Steerforth different from what
there was when I first came here? I can think of nothing. I firmly
believe there is nothing. I hardly understand even what you mean.’

As she still stood looking fixedly at me, a twitching or throbbing,
from which I could not dissociate the idea of pain, came into that cruel
mark; and lifted up the corner of her lip as if with scorn, or with a
pity that despised its object. She put her hand upon it hurriedly--a
hand so thin and delicate, that when I had seen her hold it up before
the fire to shade her face, I had compared it in my thoughts to fine
porcelain--and saying, in a quick, fierce, passionate way, ‘I swear you
to secrecy about this!’ said not a word more.

Mrs. Steerforth was particularly happy in her son’s society, and
Steerforth was, on this occasion, particularly attentive and respectful
to her. It was very interesting to me to see them together, not only on
account of their mutual affection, but because of the strong personal
resemblance between them, and the manner in which what was haughty or
impetuous in him was softened by age and sex, in her, to a gracious
dignity. I thought, more than once, that it was well no serious cause of
division had ever come between them; or two such natures--I ought rather
to express it, two such shades of the same nature--might have been
harder to reconcile than the two extremest opposites in creation. The
idea did not originate in my own discernment, I am bound to confess, but
in a speech of Rosa Dartle’s.

She said at dinner:

‘Oh, but do tell me, though, somebody, because I have been thinking
about it all day, and I want to know.’

‘You want to know what, Rosa?’ returned Mrs. Steerforth. ‘Pray, pray,
Rosa, do not be mysterious.’

‘Mysterious!’ she cried. ‘Oh! really? Do you consider me so?’

‘Do I constantly entreat you,’ said Mrs. Steerforth, ‘to speak plainly,
in your own natural manner?’

‘Oh! then this is not my natural manner?’ she rejoined. ‘Now you must
really bear with me, because I ask for information. We never know
ourselves.’

‘It has become a second nature,’ said Mrs. Steerforth, without any
displeasure; ‘but I remember,--and so must you, I think,--when your
manner was different, Rosa; when it was not so guarded, and was more
trustful.’

‘I am sure you are right,’ she returned; ‘and so it is that bad habits
grow upon one! Really? Less guarded and more trustful? How can I,
imperceptibly, have changed, I wonder! Well, that’s very odd! I must
study to regain my former self.’

‘I wish you would,’ said Mrs. Steerforth, with a smile.

‘Oh! I really will, you know!’ she answered. ‘I will learn frankness
from--let me see--from James.’

‘You cannot learn frankness, Rosa,’ said Mrs. Steerforth quickly--for
there was always some effect of sarcasm in what Rosa Dartle said,
though it was said, as this was, in the most unconscious manner in the
world--‘in a better school.’

‘That I am sure of,’ she answered, with uncommon fervour. ‘If I am sure
of anything, of course, you know, I am sure of that.’

Mrs. Steerforth appeared to me to regret having been a little nettled;
for she presently said, in a kind tone:

‘Well, my dear Rosa, we have not heard what it is that you want to be
satisfied about?’

‘That I want to be satisfied about?’ she replied, with provoking
coldness. ‘Oh! It was only whether people, who are like each other in
their moral constitution--is that the phrase?’

‘It’s as good a phrase as another,’ said Steerforth.

‘Thank you:--whether people, who are like each other in their moral
constitution, are in greater danger than people not so circumstanced,
supposing any serious cause of variance to arise between them, of being
divided angrily and deeply?’

‘I should say yes,’ said Steerforth.

‘Should you?’ she retorted. ‘Dear me! Supposing then, for instance--any
unlikely thing will do for a supposition--that you and your mother were
to have a serious quarrel.’

‘My dear Rosa,’ interposed Mrs. Steerforth, laughing good-naturedly,
‘suggest some other supposition! James and I know our duty to each other
better, I pray Heaven!’

‘Oh!’ said Miss Dartle, nodding her head thoughtfully. ‘To be sure. That
would prevent it? Why, of course it would. Exactly. Now, I am glad I
have been so foolish as to put the case, for it is so very good to know
that your duty to each other would prevent it! Thank you very much.’

One other little circumstance connected with Miss Dartle I must
not omit; for I had reason to remember it thereafter, when all the
irremediable past was rendered plain. During the whole of this day, but
especially from this period of it, Steerforth exerted himself with his
utmost skill, and that was with his utmost ease, to charm this singular
creature into a pleasant and pleased companion. That he should succeed,
was no matter of surprise to me. That she should struggle against the
fascinating influence of his delightful art--delightful nature I thought
it then--did not surprise me either; for I knew that she was sometimes
jaundiced and perverse. I saw her features and her manner slowly change;
I saw her look at him with growing admiration; I saw her try, more and
more faintly, but always angrily, as if she condemned a weakness in
herself, to resist the captivating power that he possessed; and finally,
I saw her sharp glance soften, and her smile become quite gentle, and I
ceased to be afraid of her as I had really been all day, and we all sat
about the fire, talking and laughing together, with as little reserve as
if we had been children.

Whether it was because we had sat there so long, or because Steerforth
was resolved not to lose the advantage he had gained, I do not know; but
we did not remain in the dining-room more than five minutes after her
departure. ‘She is playing her harp,’ said Steerforth, softly, at the
drawing-room door, ‘and nobody but my mother has heard her do that, I
believe, these three years.’ He said it with a curious smile, which was
gone directly; and we went into the room and found her alone.

‘Don’t get up,’ said Steerforth (which she had already done)’ my dear
Rosa, don’t! Be kind for once, and sing us an Irish song.’

‘What do you care for an Irish song?’ she returned.

‘Much!’ said Steerforth. ‘Much more than for any other. Here is Daisy,
too, loves music from his soul. Sing us an Irish song, Rosa! and let me
sit and listen as I used to do.’

He did not touch her, or the chair from which she had risen, but sat
himself near the harp. She stood beside it for some little while, in a
curious way, going through the motion of playing it with her right hand,
but not sounding it. At length she sat down, and drew it to her with one
sudden action, and played and sang.

I don’t know what it was, in her touch or voice, that made that song the
most unearthly I have ever heard in my life, or can imagine. There was
something fearful in the reality of it. It was as if it had never been
written, or set to music, but sprung out of passion within her; which
found imperfect utterance in the low sounds of her voice, and crouched
again when all was still. I was dumb when she leaned beside the harp
again, playing it, but not sounding it, with her right hand.

A minute more, and this had roused me from my trance:--Steerforth had
left his seat, and gone to her, and had put his arm laughingly about
her, and had said, ‘Come, Rosa, for the future we will love each other
very much!’ And she had struck him, and had thrown him off with the fury
of a wild cat, and had burst out of the room.

‘What is the matter with Rosa?’ said Mrs. Steerforth, coming in.

‘She has been an angel, mother,’ returned Steerforth, ‘for a little
while; and has run into the opposite extreme, since, by way of
compensation.’

‘You should be careful not to irritate her, James. Her temper has been
soured, remember, and ought not to be tried.’

Rosa did not come back; and no other mention was made of her, until I
went with Steerforth into his room to say Good night. Then he laughed
about her, and asked me if I had ever seen such a fierce little piece of
incomprehensibility.

I expressed as much of my astonishment as was then capable of
expression, and asked if he could guess what it was that she had taken
so much amiss, so suddenly.

‘Oh, Heaven knows,’ said Steerforth. ‘Anything you like--or nothing!
I told you she took everything, herself included, to a grindstone, and
sharpened it. She is an edge-tool, and requires great care in dealing
with. She is always dangerous. Good night!’

‘Good night!’ said I, ‘my dear Steerforth! I shall be gone before you
wake in the morning. Good night!’

He was unwilling to let me go; and stood, holding me out, with a hand on
each of my shoulders, as he had done in my own room.

‘Daisy,’ he said, with a smile--‘for though that’s not the name your
godfathers and godmothers gave you, it’s the name I like best to call
you by--and I wish, I wish, I wish, you could give it to me!’

‘Why so I can, if I choose,’ said I.

‘Daisy, if anything should ever separate us, you must think of me at my
best, old boy. Come! Let us make that bargain. Think of me at my best,
if circumstances should ever part us!’

‘You have no best to me, Steerforth,’ said I, ‘and no worst. You are
always equally loved, and cherished in my heart.’

So much compunction for having ever wronged him, even by a shapeless
thought, did I feel within me, that the confession of having done so was
rising to my lips. But for the reluctance I had to betray the confidence
of Agnes, but for my uncertainty how to approach the subject with no
risk of doing so, it would have reached them before he said, ‘God bless
you, Daisy, and good night!’ In my doubt, it did NOT reach them; and we
shook hands, and we parted.

I was up with the dull dawn, and, having dressed as quietly as I could,
looked into his room. He was fast asleep; lying, easily, with his head
upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.

The time came in its season, and that was very soon, when I almost
wondered that nothing troubled his repose, as I looked at him. But he
slept--let me think of him so again--as I had often seen him sleep at
school; and thus, in this silent hour, I left him. --Never more, oh
God forgive you, Steerforth! to touch that passive hand in love and
friendship. Never, never more!



CHAPTER 30. A LOSS


I got down to Yarmouth in the evening, and went to the inn. I knew that
Peggotty’s spare room--my room--was likely to have occupation enough
in a little while, if that great Visitor, before whose presence all
the living must give place, were not already in the house; so I betook
myself to the inn, and dined there, and engaged my bed.

It was ten o’clock when I went out. Many of the shops were shut, and the
town was dull. When I came to Omer and Joram’s, I found the shutters up,
but the shop door standing open. As I could obtain a perspective view
of Mr. Omer inside, smoking his pipe by the parlour door, I entered, and
asked him how he was.

‘Why, bless my life and soul!’ said Mr. Omer, ‘how do you find yourself?
Take a seat.---Smoke not disagreeable, I hope?’

‘By no means,’ said I. ‘I like it--in somebody else’s pipe.’

‘What, not in your own, eh?’ Mr. Omer returned, laughing. ‘All the
better, sir. Bad habit for a young man. Take a seat. I smoke, myself,
for the asthma.’

Mr. Omer had made room for me, and placed a chair. He now sat down again
very much out of breath, gasping at his pipe as if it contained a supply
of that necessary, without which he must perish.

‘I am sorry to have heard bad news of Mr. Barkis,’ said I.

Mr. Omer looked at me, with a steady countenance, and shook his head.

‘Do you know how he is tonight?’ I asked.

‘The very question I should have put to you, sir,’ returned Mr. Omer,
‘but on account of delicacy. It’s one of the drawbacks of our line of
business. When a party’s ill, we can’t ask how the party is.’

The difficulty had not occurred to me; though I had had my apprehensions
too, when I went in, of hearing the old tune. On its being mentioned, I
recognized it, however, and said as much.

‘Yes, yes, you understand,’ said Mr. Omer, nodding his head. ‘We dursn’t
do it. Bless you, it would be a shock that the generality of parties
mightn’t recover, to say “Omer and Joram’s compliments, and how do you
find yourself this morning?”--or this afternoon--as it may be.’

Mr. Omer and I nodded at each other, and Mr. Omer recruited his wind by
the aid of his pipe.

‘It’s one of the things that cut the trade off from attentions they
could often wish to show,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘Take myself. If I have known
Barkis a year, to move to as he went by, I have known him forty years.
But I can’t go and say, “how is he?”’

I felt it was rather hard on Mr. Omer, and I told him so.

‘I’m not more self-interested, I hope, than another man,’ said Mr. Omer.
‘Look at me! My wind may fail me at any moment, and it ain’t
likely that, to my own knowledge, I’d be self-interested under such
circumstances. I say it ain’t likely, in a man who knows his wind will
go, when it DOES go, as if a pair of bellows was cut open; and that man
a grandfather,’ said Mr. Omer.

I said, ‘Not at all.’

‘It ain’t that I complain of my line of business,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘It
ain’t that. Some good and some bad goes, no doubt, to all callings. What
I wish is, that parties was brought up stronger-minded.’

Mr. Omer, with a very complacent and amiable face, took several puffs in
silence; and then said, resuming his first point:

‘Accordingly we’re obleeged, in ascertaining how Barkis goes on, to
limit ourselves to Em’ly. She knows what our real objects are, and she
don’t have any more alarms or suspicions about us, than if we was so
many lambs. Minnie and Joram have just stepped down to the house, in
fact (she’s there, after hours, helping her aunt a bit), to ask her how
he is tonight; and if you was to please to wait till they come back,
they’d give you full partic’lers. Will you take something? A glass of
srub and water, now? I smoke on srub and water, myself,’ said Mr. Omer,
taking up his glass, ‘because it’s considered softening to the passages,
by which this troublesome breath of mine gets into action. But, Lord
bless you,’ said Mr. Omer, huskily, ‘it ain’t the passages that’s out of
order! “Give me breath enough,” said I to my daughter Minnie, “and I’ll
find passages, my dear.”’

He really had no breath to spare, and it was very alarming to see him
laugh. When he was again in a condition to be talked to, I thanked
him for the proffered refreshment, which I declined, as I had just had
dinner; and, observing that I would wait, since he was so good as to
invite me, until his daughter and his son-in-law came back, I inquired
how little Emily was?

‘Well, sir,’ said Mr. Omer, removing his pipe, that he might rub his
chin: ‘I tell you truly, I shall be glad when her marriage has taken
place.’

‘Why so?’ I inquired.

‘Well, she’s unsettled at present,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘It ain’t that she’s
not as pretty as ever, for she’s prettier--I do assure you, she is
prettier. It ain’t that she don’t work as well as ever, for she does.
She WAS worth any six, and she IS worth any six. But somehow she wants
heart. If you understand,’ said Mr. Omer, after rubbing his chin again,
and smoking a little, ‘what I mean in a general way by the expression,
“A long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull altogether, my hearties,
hurrah!” I should say to you, that that was--in a general way--what I
miss in Em’ly.’

Mr. Omer’s face and manner went for so much, that I could
conscientiously nod my head, as divining his meaning. My quickness of
apprehension seemed to please him, and he went on: ‘Now I consider this
is principally on account of her being in an unsettled state, you
see. We have talked it over a good deal, her uncle and myself, and her
sweetheart and myself, after business; and I consider it is principally
on account of her being unsettled. You must always recollect of Em’ly,’
said Mr. Omer, shaking his head gently, ‘that she’s a most extraordinary
affectionate little thing. The proverb says, “You can’t make a silk
purse out of a sow’s ear.” Well, I don’t know about that. I rather think
you may, if you begin early in life. She has made a home out of that old
boat, sir, that stone and marble couldn’t beat.’

‘I am sure she has!’ said I.

‘To see the clinging of that pretty little thing to her uncle,’ said
Mr. Omer; ‘to see the way she holds on to him, tighter and tighter, and
closer and closer, every day, is to see a sight. Now, you know, there’s
a struggle going on when that’s the case. Why should it be made a longer
one than is needful?’

I listened attentively to the good old fellow, and acquiesced, with all
my heart, in what he said.

‘Therefore, I mentioned to them,’ said Mr. Omer, in a comfortable,
easy-going tone, ‘this. I said, “Now, don’t consider Em’ly nailed down
in point of time, at all. Make it your own time. Her services have been
more valuable than was supposed; her learning has been quicker than was
supposed; Omer and Joram can run their pen through what remains; and
she’s free when you wish. If she likes to make any little arrangement,
afterwards, in the way of doing any little thing for us at home,
very well. If she don’t, very well still. We’re no losers, anyhow.”
 For--don’t you see,’ said Mr. Omer, touching me with his pipe, ‘it ain’t
likely that a man so short of breath as myself, and a grandfather too,
would go and strain points with a little bit of a blue-eyed blossom,
like her?’

‘Not at all, I am certain,’ said I.

‘Not at all! You’re right!’ said Mr. Omer. ‘Well, sir, her cousin--you
know it’s a cousin she’s going to be married to?’

‘Oh yes,’ I replied. ‘I know him well.’

‘Of course you do,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘Well, sir! Her cousin being, as it
appears, in good work, and well to do, thanked me in a very manly sort
of manner for this (conducting himself altogether, I must say, in a way
that gives me a high opinion of him), and went and took as comfortable
a little house as you or I could wish to clap eyes on. That little
house is now furnished right through, as neat and complete as a doll’s
parlour; and but for Barkis’s illness having taken this bad turn, poor
fellow, they would have been man and wife--I dare say, by this time. As
it is, there’s a postponement.’

‘And Emily, Mr. Omer?’ I inquired. ‘Has she become more settled?’

‘Why that, you know,’ he returned, rubbing his double chin again, ‘can’t
naturally be expected. The prospect of the change and separation, and
all that, is, as one may say, close to her and far away from her, both
at once. Barkis’s death needn’t put it off much, but his lingering
might. Anyway, it’s an uncertain state of matters, you see.’

‘I see,’ said I.

‘Consequently,’ pursued Mr. Omer, ‘Em’ly’s still a little down, and a
little fluttered; perhaps, upon the whole, she’s more so than she was.
Every day she seems to get fonder and fonder of her uncle, and more loth
to part from all of us. A kind word from me brings the tears into her
eyes; and if you was to see her with my daughter Minnie’s little girl,
you’d never forget it. Bless my heart alive!’ said Mr. Omer, pondering,
‘how she loves that child!’

Having so favourable an opportunity, it occurred to me to ask Mr. Omer,
before our conversation should be interrupted by the return of his
daughter and her husband, whether he knew anything of Martha.

‘Ah!’ he rejoined, shaking his head, and looking very much dejected.
‘No good. A sad story, sir, however you come to know it. I never thought
there was harm in the girl. I wouldn’t wish to mention it before my
daughter Minnie--for she’d take me up directly--but I never did. None of
us ever did.’

Mr. Omer, hearing his daughter’s footstep before I heard it, touched me
with his pipe, and shut up one eye, as a caution. She and her husband
came in immediately afterwards.

Their report was, that Mr. Barkis was ‘as bad as bad could be’; that he
was quite unconscious; and that Mr. Chillip had mournfully said in the
kitchen, on going away just now, that the College of Physicians, the
College of Surgeons, and Apothecaries’ Hall, if they were all called
in together, couldn’t help him. He was past both Colleges, Mr. Chillip
said, and the Hall could only poison him.

Hearing this, and learning that Mr. Peggotty was there, I determined to
go to the house at once. I bade good night to Mr. Omer, and to Mr. and
Mrs. Joram; and directed my steps thither, with a solemn feeling, which
made Mr. Barkis quite a new and different creature.

My low tap at the door was answered by Mr. Peggotty. He was not so much
surprised to see me as I had expected. I remarked this in Peggotty,
too, when she came down; and I have seen it since; and I think, in the
expectation of that dread surprise, all other changes and surprises
dwindle into nothing.

I shook hands with Mr. Peggotty, and passed into the kitchen, while he
softly closed the door. Little Emily was sitting by the fire, with her
hands before her face. Ham was standing near her.

We spoke in whispers; listening, between whiles, for any sound in the
room above. I had not thought of it on the occasion of my last visit,
but how strange it was to me, now, to miss Mr. Barkis out of the
kitchen!

‘This is very kind of you, Mas’r Davy,’ said Mr. Peggotty.

‘It’s oncommon kind,’ said Ham.

‘Em’ly, my dear,’ cried Mr. Peggotty. ‘See here! Here’s Mas’r Davy come!
What, cheer up, pretty! Not a wured to Mas’r Davy?’

There was a trembling upon her, that I can see now. The coldness of her
hand when I touched it, I can feel yet. Its only sign of animation was
to shrink from mine; and then she glided from the chair, and creeping
to the other side of her uncle, bowed herself, silently and trembling
still, upon his breast.

‘It’s such a loving art,’ said Mr. Peggotty, smoothing her rich hair
with his great hard hand, ‘that it can’t abear the sorrer of this.
It’s nat’ral in young folk, Mas’r Davy, when they’re new to these here
trials, and timid, like my little bird,--it’s nat’ral.’

She clung the closer to him, but neither lifted up her face, nor spoke a
word.

‘It’s getting late, my dear,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘and here’s Ham come
fur to take you home. Theer! Go along with t’other loving art! What’
Em’ly? Eh, my pretty?’

The sound of her voice had not reached me, but he bent his head as if he
listened to her, and then said:

‘Let you stay with your uncle? Why, you doen’t mean to ask me that! Stay
with your uncle, Moppet? When your husband that’ll be so soon, is here
fur to take you home? Now a person wouldn’t think it, fur to see this
little thing alongside a rough-weather chap like me,’ said Mr. Peggotty,
looking round at both of us, with infinite pride; ‘but the sea ain’t
more salt in it than she has fondness in her for her uncle--a foolish
little Em’ly!’

‘Em’ly’s in the right in that, Mas’r Davy!’ said Ham. ‘Lookee here! As
Em’ly wishes of it, and as she’s hurried and frightened, like, besides,
I’ll leave her till morning. Let me stay too!’

‘No, no,’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘You doen’t ought--a married man like
you--or what’s as good--to take and hull away a day’s work. And you
doen’t ought to watch and work both. That won’t do. You go home and turn
in. You ain’t afeerd of Em’ly not being took good care on, I know.’

Ham yielded to this persuasion, and took his hat to go. Even when he
kissed her--and I never saw him approach her, but I felt that nature
had given him the soul of a gentleman--she seemed to cling closer to
her uncle, even to the avoidance of her chosen husband. I shut the
door after him, that it might cause no disturbance of the quiet that
prevailed; and when I turned back, I found Mr. Peggotty still talking to
her.

‘Now, I’m a going upstairs to tell your aunt as Mas’r Davy’s here, and
that’ll cheer her up a bit,’ he said. ‘Sit ye down by the fire, the
while, my dear, and warm those mortal cold hands. You doen’t need to be
so fearsome, and take on so much. What? You’ll go along with me?--Well!
come along with me--come! If her uncle was turned out of house and home,
and forced to lay down in a dyke, Mas’r Davy,’ said Mr. Peggotty, with
no less pride than before, ‘it’s my belief she’d go along with him, now!
But there’ll be someone else, soon,--someone else, soon, Em’ly!’

Afterwards, when I went upstairs, as I passed the door of my little
chamber, which was dark, I had an indistinct impression of her being
within it, cast down upon the floor. But, whether it was really she, or
whether it was a confusion of the shadows in the room, I don’t know now.

I had leisure to think, before the kitchen fire, of pretty little
Emily’s dread of death--which, added to what Mr. Omer had told me, I
took to be the cause of her being so unlike herself--and I had leisure,
before Peggotty came down, even to think more leniently of the weakness
of it: as I sat counting the ticking of the clock, and deepening my
sense of the solemn hush around me. Peggotty took me in her arms, and
blessed and thanked me over and over again for being such a comfort to
her (that was what she said) in her distress. She then entreated me to
come upstairs, sobbing that Mr. Barkis had always liked me and admired
me; that he had often talked of me, before he fell into a stupor; and
that she believed, in case of his coming to himself again, he would
brighten up at sight of me, if he could brighten up at any earthly
thing.

The probability of his ever doing so, appeared to me, when I saw him, to
be very small. He was lying with his head and shoulders out of bed, in
an uncomfortable attitude, half resting on the box which had cost him so
much pain and trouble. I learned, that, when he was past creeping out of
bed to open it, and past assuring himself of its safety by means of the
divining rod I had seen him use, he had required to have it placed on
the chair at the bed-side, where he had ever since embraced it, night
and day. His arm lay on it now. Time and the world were slipping from
beneath him, but the box was there; and the last words he had uttered
were (in an explanatory tone) ‘Old clothes!’

‘Barkis, my dear!’ said Peggotty, almost cheerfully: bending over him,
while her brother and I stood at the bed’s foot. ‘Here’s my dear boy--my
dear boy, Master Davy, who brought us together, Barkis! That you sent
messages by, you know! Won’t you speak to Master Davy?’

He was as mute and senseless as the box, from which his form derived the
only expression it had.

‘He’s a going out with the tide,’ said Mr. Peggotty to me, behind his
hand.

My eyes were dim and so were Mr. Peggotty’s; but I repeated in a
whisper, ‘With the tide?’

‘People can’t die, along the coast,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘except when
the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless it’s pretty nigh
in--not properly born, till flood. He’s a going out with the tide. It’s
ebb at half-arter three, slack water half an hour. If he lives till it
turns, he’ll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with the next
tide.’

We remained there, watching him, a long time--hours. What mysterious
influence my presence had upon him in that state of his senses, I shall
not pretend to say; but when he at last began to wander feebly, it is
certain he was muttering about driving me to school.

‘He’s coming to himself,’ said Peggotty.

Mr. Peggotty touched me, and whispered with much awe and reverence.
‘They are both a-going out fast.’

‘Barkis, my dear!’ said Peggotty.

‘C. P. Barkis,’ he cried faintly. ‘No better woman anywhere!’

‘Look! Here’s Master Davy!’ said Peggotty. For he now opened his eyes.

I was on the point of asking him if he knew me, when he tried to stretch
out his arm, and said to me, distinctly, with a pleasant smile:

‘Barkis is willin’!’

And, it being low water, he went out with the tide.



CHAPTER 31. A GREATER LOSS


It was not difficult for me, on Peggotty’s solicitation, to resolve to
stay where I was, until after the remains of the poor carrier should
have made their last journey to Blunderstone. She had long ago bought,
out of her own savings, a little piece of ground in our old churchyard
near the grave of ‘her sweet girl’, as she always called my mother; and
there they were to rest.

In keeping Peggotty company, and doing all I could for her (little
enough at the utmost), I was as grateful, I rejoice to think, as even
now I could wish myself to have been. But I am afraid I had a supreme
satisfaction, of a personal and professional nature, in taking charge of
Mr. Barkis’s will, and expounding its contents.

I may claim the merit of having originated the suggestion that the will
should be looked for in the box. After some search, it was found in the
box, at the bottom of a horse’s nose-bag; wherein (besides hay) there
was discovered an old gold watch, with chain and seals, which Mr. Barkis
had worn on his wedding-day, and which had never been seen before or
since; a silver tobacco-stopper, in the form of a leg; an imitation
lemon, full of minute cups and saucers, which I have some idea Mr.
Barkis must have purchased to present to me when I was a child, and
afterwards found himself unable to part with; eighty-seven guineas and
a half, in guineas and half-guineas; two hundred and ten pounds, in
perfectly clean Bank notes; certain receipts for Bank of England
stock; an old horseshoe, a bad shilling, a piece of camphor, and an
oyster-shell. From the circumstance of the latter article having
been much polished, and displaying prismatic colours on the inside,
I conclude that Mr. Barkis had some general ideas about pearls, which
never resolved themselves into anything definite.

For years and years, Mr. Barkis had carried this box, on all his
journeys, every day. That it might the better escape notice, he had
invented a fiction that it belonged to ‘Mr. Blackboy’, and was ‘to be
left with Barkis till called for’; a fable he had elaborately written on
the lid, in characters now scarcely legible.

He had hoarded, all these years, I found, to good purpose. His property
in money amounted to nearly three thousand pounds. Of this he bequeathed
the interest of one thousand to Mr. Peggotty for his life; on his
decease, the principal to be equally divided between Peggotty, little
Emily, and me, or the survivor or survivors of us, share and share
alike. All the rest he died possessed of, he bequeathed to Peggotty;
whom he left residuary legatee, and sole executrix of that his last will
and testament.

I felt myself quite a proctor when I read this document aloud with all
possible ceremony, and set forth its provisions, any number of times,
to those whom they concerned. I began to think there was more in the
Commons than I had supposed. I examined the will with the deepest
attention, pronounced it perfectly formal in all respects, made a
pencil-mark or so in the margin, and thought it rather extraordinary
that I knew so much.

In this abstruse pursuit; in making an account for Peggotty, of all the
property into which she had come; in arranging all the affairs in an
orderly manner; and in being her referee and adviser on every point, to
our joint delight; I passed the week before the funeral. I did not see
little Emily in that interval, but they told me she was to be quietly
married in a fortnight.

I did not attend the funeral in character, if I may venture to say so.
I mean I was not dressed up in a black coat and a streamer, to frighten
the birds; but I walked over to Blunderstone early in the morning, and
was in the churchyard when it came, attended only by Peggotty and her
brother. The mad gentleman looked on, out of my little window; Mr.
Chillip’s baby wagged its heavy head, and rolled its goggle eyes, at
the clergyman, over its nurse’s shoulder; Mr. Omer breathed short in
the background; no one else was there; and it was very quiet. We walked
about the churchyard for an hour, after all was over; and pulled some
young leaves from the tree above my mother’s grave.

A dread falls on me here. A cloud is lowering on the distant town,
towards which I retraced my solitary steps. I fear to approach it. I
cannot bear to think of what did come, upon that memorable night; of
what must come again, if I go on.

It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I
stopped my most unwilling hand. It is done. Nothing can undo it; nothing
can make it otherwise than as it was.

My old nurse was to go to London with me next day, on the business of
the will. Little Emily was passing that day at Mr. Omer’s. We were all
to meet in the old boathouse that night. Ham would bring Emily at the
usual hour. I would walk back at my leisure. The brother and sister
would return as they had come, and be expecting us, when the day closed
in, at the fireside.

I parted from them at the wicket-gate, where visionary Strap had rested
with Roderick Random’s knapsack in the days of yore; and, instead of
going straight back, walked a little distance on the road to Lowestoft.
Then I turned, and walked back towards Yarmouth. I stayed to dine at
a decent alehouse, some mile or two from the Ferry I have mentioned
before; and thus the day wore away, and it was evening when I reached
it. Rain was falling heavily by that time, and it was a wild night; but
there was a moon behind the clouds, and it was not dark.

I was soon within sight of Mr. Peggotty’s house, and of the light within
it shining through the window. A little floundering across the sand,
which was heavy, brought me to the door, and I went in.

It looked very comfortable indeed. Mr. Peggotty had smoked his evening
pipe and there were preparations for some supper by and by. The fire was
bright, the ashes were thrown up, the locker was ready for little Emily
in her old place. In her own old place sat Peggotty, once more, looking
(but for her dress) as if she had never left it. She had fallen back,
already, on the society of the work-box with St. Paul’s upon the lid,
the yard-measure in the cottage, and the bit of wax-candle; and there
they all were, just as if they had never been disturbed. Mrs. Gummidge
appeared to be fretting a little, in her old corner; and consequently
looked quite natural, too.

‘You’re first of the lot, Mas’r Davy!’ said Mr. Peggotty with a happy
face. ‘Doen’t keep in that coat, sir, if it’s wet.’

‘Thank you, Mr. Peggotty,’ said I, giving him my outer coat to hang up.
‘It’s quite dry.’

‘So ‘tis!’ said Mr. Peggotty, feeling my shoulders. ‘As a chip! Sit ye
down, sir. It ain’t o’ no use saying welcome to you, but you’re welcome,
kind and hearty.’

‘Thank you, Mr. Peggotty, I am sure of that. Well, Peggotty!’ said I,
giving her a kiss. ‘And how are you, old woman?’

‘Ha, ha!’ laughed Mr. Peggotty, sitting down beside us, and rubbing his
hands in his sense of relief from recent trouble, and in the genuine
heartiness of his nature; ‘there’s not a woman in the wureld, sir--as I
tell her--that need to feel more easy in her mind than her! She done her
dooty by the departed, and the departed know’d it; and the departed
done what was right by her, as she done what was right by the
departed;--and--and--and it’s all right!’

Mrs. Gummidge groaned.

‘Cheer up, my pritty mawther!’ said Mr. Peggotty. (But he shook his head
aside at us, evidently sensible of the tendency of the late occurrences
to recall the memory of the old one.) ‘Doen’t be down! Cheer up, for
your own self, on’y a little bit, and see if a good deal more doen’t
come nat’ral!’

‘Not to me, Dan’l,’ returned Mrs. Gummidge. ‘Nothink’s nat’ral to me but
to be lone and lorn.’

‘No, no,’ said Mr. Peggotty, soothing her sorrows.

‘Yes, yes, Dan’l!’ said Mrs. Gummidge. ‘I ain’t a person to live with
them as has had money left. Things go too contrary with me. I had better
be a riddance.’

‘Why, how should I ever spend it without you?’ said Mr. Peggotty, with
an air of serious remonstrance. ‘What are you a talking on? Doen’t I
want you more now, than ever I did?’

‘I know’d I was never wanted before!’ cried Mrs. Gummidge, with a
pitiable whimper, ‘and now I’m told so! How could I expect to be wanted,
being so lone and lorn, and so contrary!’

Mr. Peggotty seemed very much shocked at himself for having made a
speech capable of this unfeeling construction, but was prevented from
replying, by Peggotty’s pulling his sleeve, and shaking her head. After
looking at Mrs. Gummidge for some moments, in sore distress of mind, he
glanced at the Dutch clock, rose, snuffed the candle, and put it in the
window.

‘Theer!’ said Mr. Peggotty, cheerily. ‘Theer we are, Missis Gummidge!’
Mrs. Gummidge slightly groaned. ‘Lighted up, accordin’ to custom! You’re
a wonderin’ what that’s fur, sir! Well, it’s fur our little Em’ly. You
see, the path ain’t over light or cheerful arter dark; and when I’m
here at the hour as she’s a comin’ home, I puts the light in the winder.
That, you see,’ said Mr. Peggotty, bending over me with great glee,
‘meets two objects. She says, says Em’ly, “Theer’s home!” she says. And
likewise, says Em’ly, “My uncle’s theer!” Fur if I ain’t theer, I never
have no light showed.’

‘You’re a baby!’ said Peggotty; very fond of him for it, if she thought
so.

‘Well,’ returned Mr. Peggotty, standing with his legs pretty wide apart,
and rubbing his hands up and down them in his comfortable satisfaction,
as he looked alternately at us and at the fire. ‘I doen’t know but I am.
Not, you see, to look at.’

‘Not azackly,’ observed Peggotty.

‘No,’ laughed Mr. Peggotty, ‘not to look at, but to--to consider on, you
know. I doen’t care, bless you! Now I tell you. When I go a looking and
looking about that theer pritty house of our Em’ly’s, I’m--I’m Gormed,’
said Mr. Peggotty, with sudden emphasis--‘theer! I can’t say more--if
I doen’t feel as if the littlest things was her, a’most. I takes ‘em up
and I put ‘em down, and I touches of ‘em as delicate as if they was our
Em’ly. So ‘tis with her little bonnets and that. I couldn’t see one on
‘em rough used a purpose--not fur the whole wureld. There’s a babby fur
you, in the form of a great Sea Porkypine!’ said Mr. Peggotty, relieving
his earnestness with a roar of laughter.

Peggotty and I both laughed, but not so loud.

‘It’s my opinion, you see,’ said Mr. Peggotty, with a delighted face,
after some further rubbing of his legs, ‘as this is along of my havin’
played with her so much, and made believe as we was Turks, and French,
and sharks, and every wariety of forinners--bless you, yes; and lions
and whales, and I doen’t know what all!--when she warn’t no higher than
my knee. I’ve got into the way on it, you know. Why, this here candle,
now!’ said Mr. Peggotty, gleefully holding out his hand towards it,
‘I know wery well that arter she’s married and gone, I shall put that
candle theer, just the same as now. I know wery well that when I’m
here o’ nights (and where else should I live, bless your arts, whatever
fortun’ I come into!) and she ain’t here or I ain’t theer, I shall
put the candle in the winder, and sit afore the fire, pretending I’m
expecting of her, like I’m a doing now. THERE’S a babby for you,’ said
Mr. Peggotty, with another roar, ‘in the form of a Sea Porkypine! Why,
at the present minute, when I see the candle sparkle up, I says to
myself, “She’s a looking at it! Em’ly’s a coming!” THERE’S a babby
for you, in the form of a Sea Porkypine! Right for all that,’ said Mr.
Peggotty, stopping in his roar, and smiting his hands together; ‘fur
here she is!’

It was only Ham. The night should have turned more wet since I came in,
for he had a large sou’wester hat on, slouched over his face.

‘Wheer’s Em’ly?’ said Mr. Peggotty.

Ham made a motion with his head, as if she were outside. Mr. Peggotty
took the light from the window, trimmed it, put it on the table, and was
busily stirring the fire, when Ham, who had not moved, said:

‘Mas’r Davy, will you come out a minute, and see what Em’ly and me has
got to show you?’

We went out. As I passed him at the door, I saw, to my astonishment and
fright, that he was deadly pale. He pushed me hastily into the open air,
and closed the door upon us. Only upon us two.

‘Ham! what’s the matter?’

‘Mas’r Davy!--’ Oh, for his broken heart, how dreadfully he wept!

I was paralysed by the sight of such grief. I don’t know what I thought,
or what I dreaded. I could only look at him.

‘Ham! Poor good fellow! For Heaven’s sake, tell me what’s the matter!’

‘My love, Mas’r Davy--the pride and hope of my art--her that I’d have
died for, and would die for now--she’s gone!’

‘Gone!’

‘Em’ly’s run away! Oh, Mas’r Davy, think HOW she’s run away, when I
pray my good and gracious God to kill her (her that is so dear above all
things) sooner than let her come to ruin and disgrace!’

The face he turned up to the troubled sky, the quivering of his clasped
hands, the agony of his figure, remain associated with the lonely waste,
in my remembrance, to this hour. It is always night there, and he is the
only object in the scene.

‘You’re a scholar,’ he said, hurriedly, ‘and know what’s right and
best. What am I to say, indoors? How am I ever to break it to him, Mas’r
Davy?’

I saw the door move, and instinctively tried to hold the latch on the
outside, to gain a moment’s time. It was too late. Mr. Peggotty thrust
forth his face; and never could I forget the change that came upon it
when he saw us, if I were to live five hundred years.

I remember a great wail and cry, and the women hanging about him, and we
all standing in the room; I with a paper in my hand, which Ham had given
me; Mr. Peggotty, with his vest torn open, his hair wild, his face and
lips quite white, and blood trickling down his bosom (it had sprung from
his mouth, I think), looking fixedly at me.

‘Read it, sir,’ he said, in a low shivering voice. ‘Slow, please. I
doen’t know as I can understand.’

In the midst of the silence of death, I read thus, from a blotted
letter:


‘“When you, who love me so much better than I ever have deserved, even
when my mind was innocent, see this, I shall be far away.”’


‘I shall be fur away,’ he repeated slowly. ‘Stop! Em’ly fur away. Well!’


‘“When I leave my dear home--my dear home--oh, my dear home!--in the
morning,”’

the letter bore date on the previous night:


’”--it will be never to come back, unless he brings me back a lady. This
will be found at night, many hours after, instead of me. Oh, if you knew
how my heart is torn. If even you, that I have wronged so much, that
never can forgive me, could only know what I suffer! I am too wicked to
write about myself! Oh, take comfort in thinking that I am so bad. Oh,
for mercy’s sake, tell uncle that I never loved him half so dear as
now. Oh, don’t remember how affectionate and kind you have all been to
me--don’t remember we were ever to be married--but try to think as if I
died when I was little, and was buried somewhere. Pray Heaven that I
am going away from, have compassion on my uncle! Tell him that I never
loved him half so dear. Be his comfort. Love some good girl that will
be what I was once to uncle, and be true to you, and worthy of you, and
know no shame but me. God bless all! I’ll pray for all, often, on my
knees. If he don’t bring me back a lady, and I don’t pray for my own
self, I’ll pray for all. My parting love to uncle. My last tears, and my
last thanks, for uncle!”’

That was all.

He stood, long after I had ceased to read, still looking at me. At
length I ventured to take his hand, and to entreat him, as well as
I could, to endeavour to get some command of himself. He replied, ‘I
thankee, sir, I thankee!’ without moving.

Ham spoke to him. Mr. Peggotty was so far sensible of HIS affliction,
that he wrung his hand; but, otherwise, he remained in the same state,
and no one dared to disturb him.

Slowly, at last, he moved his eyes from my face, as if he were waking
from a vision, and cast them round the room. Then he said, in a low
voice:

‘Who’s the man? I want to know his name.’

Ham glanced at me, and suddenly I felt a shock that struck me back.

‘There’s a man suspected,’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘Who is it?’

‘Mas’r Davy!’ implored Ham. ‘Go out a bit, and let me tell him what I
must. You doen’t ought to hear it, sir.’

I felt the shock again. I sank down in a chair, and tried to utter some
reply; but my tongue was fettered, and my sight was weak.

‘I want to know his name!’ I heard said once more.

‘For some time past,’ Ham faltered, ‘there’s been a servant about here,
at odd times. There’s been a gen’lm’n too. Both of ‘em belonged to one
another.’

Mr. Peggotty stood fixed as before, but now looking at him.

‘The servant,’ pursued Ham, ‘was seen along with--our poor girl--last
night. He’s been in hiding about here, this week or over. He was thought
to have gone, but he was hiding. Doen’t stay, Mas’r Davy, doen’t!’

I felt Peggotty’s arm round my neck, but I could not have moved if the
house had been about to fall upon me.

‘A strange chay and hosses was outside town, this morning, on the
Norwich road, a’most afore the day broke,’ Ham went on. ‘The servant
went to it, and come from it, and went to it again. When he went to it
again, Em’ly was nigh him. The t’other was inside. He’s the man.’

‘For the Lord’s love,’ said Mr. Peggotty, falling back, and putting out
his hand, as if to keep off what he dreaded. ‘Doen’t tell me his name’s
Steerforth!’

‘Mas’r Davy,’ exclaimed Ham, in a broken voice, ‘it ain’t no fault
of yourn--and I am far from laying of it to you--but his name is
Steerforth, and he’s a damned villain!’

Mr. Peggotty uttered no cry, and shed no tear, and moved no more, until
he seemed to wake again, all at once, and pulled down his rough coat
from its peg in a corner.

‘Bear a hand with this! I’m struck of a heap, and can’t do it,’ he said,
impatiently. ‘Bear a hand and help me. Well!’ when somebody had done so.
‘Now give me that theer hat!’

Ham asked him whither he was going.

‘I’m a going to seek my niece. I’m a going to seek my Em’ly. I’m a
going, first, to stave in that theer boat, and sink it where I would
have drownded him, as I’m a living soul, if I had had one thought of
what was in him! As he sat afore me,’ he said, wildly, holding out his
clenched right hand, ‘as he sat afore me, face to face, strike me down
dead, but I’d have drownded him, and thought it right!--I’m a going to
seek my niece.’

‘Where?’ cried Ham, interposing himself before the door.

‘Anywhere! I’m a going to seek my niece through the wureld. I’m a going
to find my poor niece in her shame, and bring her back. No one stop me!
I tell you I’m a going to seek my niece!’

‘No, no!’ cried Mrs. Gummidge, coming between them, in a fit of crying.
‘No, no, Dan’l, not as you are now. Seek her in a little while, my lone
lorn Dan’l, and that’ll be but right! but not as you are now. Sit ye
down, and give me your forgiveness for having ever been a worrit to you,
Dan’l--what have my contraries ever been to this!--and let us speak a
word about them times when she was first an orphan, and when Ham was
too, and when I was a poor widder woman, and you took me in. It’ll
soften your poor heart, Dan’l,’ laying her head upon his shoulder, ‘and
you’ll bear your sorrow better; for you know the promise, Dan’l, “As
you have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto
me”,--and that can never fail under this roof, that’s been our shelter
for so many, many year!’

He was quite passive now; and when I heard him crying, the impulse that
had been upon me to go down upon my knees, and ask their pardon for the
desolation I had caused, and curse Steerforth, yielded to a better
feeling. My overcharged heart found the same relief, and I cried too.



CHAPTER 32. THE BEGINNING OF A LONG JOURNEY


What is natural in me, is natural in many other men, I infer, and so
I am not afraid to write that I never had loved Steerforth better than
when the ties that bound me to him were broken. In the keen distress
of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought more of all that was
brilliant in him, I softened more towards all that was good in him, I
did more justice to the qualities that might have made him a man of a
noble nature and a great name, than ever I had done in the height of
my devotion to him. Deeply as I felt my own unconscious part in his
pollution of an honest home, I believed that if I had been brought face
to face with him, I could not have uttered one reproach. I should have
loved him so well still--though he fascinated me no longer--I should
have held in so much tenderness the memory of my affection for him, that
I think I should have been as weak as a spirit-wounded child, in all
but the entertainment of a thought that we could ever be re-united.
That thought I never had. I felt, as he had felt, that all was at an end
between us. What his remembrances of me were, I have never known--they
were light enough, perhaps, and easily dismissed--but mine of him were
as the remembrances of a cherished friend, who was dead.

Yes, Steerforth, long removed from the scenes of this poor history! My
sorrow may bear involuntary witness against you at the judgement Throne;
but my angry thoughts or my reproaches never will, I know!

The news of what had happened soon spread through the town; insomuch
that as I passed along the streets next morning, I overheard the people
speaking of it at their doors. Many were hard upon her, some few were
hard upon him, but towards her second father and her lover there was
but one sentiment. Among all kinds of people a respect for them in
their distress prevailed, which was full of gentleness and delicacy. The
seafaring men kept apart, when those two were seen early, walking with
slow steps on the beach; and stood in knots, talking compassionately
among themselves.

It was on the beach, close down by the sea, that I found them. It would
have been easy to perceive that they had not slept all last night, even
if Peggotty had failed to tell me of their still sitting just as I
left them, when it was broad day. They looked worn; and I thought Mr.
Peggotty’s head was bowed in one night more than in all the years I had
known him. But they were both as grave and steady as the sea itself,
then lying beneath a dark sky, waveless--yet with a heavy roll upon it,
as if it breathed in its rest--and touched, on the horizon, with a strip
of silvery light from the unseen sun.

‘We have had a mort of talk, sir,’ said Mr. Peggotty to me, when we had
all three walked a little while in silence, ‘of what we ought and doen’t
ought to do. But we see our course now.’

I happened to glance at Ham, then looking out to sea upon the distant
light, and a frightful thought came into my mind--not that his face
was angry, for it was not; I recall nothing but an expression of stern
determination in it--that if ever he encountered Steerforth, he would
kill him.

‘My dooty here, sir,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘is done. I’m a going to seek
my--’ he stopped, and went on in a firmer voice: ‘I’m a going to seek
her. That’s my dooty evermore.’

He shook his head when I asked him where he would seek her, and inquired
if I were going to London tomorrow? I told him I had not gone today,
fearing to lose the chance of being of any service to him; but that I
was ready to go when he would.

‘I’ll go along with you, sir,’ he rejoined, ‘if you’re agreeable,
tomorrow.’

We walked again, for a while, in silence.

‘Ham,’ he presently resumed, ‘he’ll hold to his present work, and go and
live along with my sister. The old boat yonder--’

‘Will you desert the old boat, Mr. Peggotty?’ I gently interposed.

‘My station, Mas’r Davy,’ he returned, ‘ain’t there no longer; and if
ever a boat foundered, since there was darkness on the face of the deep,
that one’s gone down. But no, sir, no; I doen’t mean as it should be
deserted. Fur from that.’

We walked again for a while, as before, until he explained:

‘My wishes is, sir, as it shall look, day and night, winter and summer,
as it has always looked, since she fust know’d it. If ever she should
come a wandering back, I wouldn’t have the old place seem to cast her
off, you understand, but seem to tempt her to draw nigher to ‘t, and to
peep in, maybe, like a ghost, out of the wind and rain, through the old
winder, at the old seat by the fire. Then, maybe, Mas’r Davy, seein’
none but Missis Gummidge there, she might take heart to creep in,
trembling; and might come to be laid down in her old bed, and rest her
weary head where it was once so gay.’

I could not speak to him in reply, though I tried.

‘Every night,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘as reg’lar as the night comes, the
candle must be stood in its old pane of glass, that if ever she should
see it, it may seem to say “Come back, my child, come back!” If ever
there’s a knock, Ham (partic’ler a soft knock), arter dark, at your
aunt’s door, doen’t you go nigh it. Let it be her--not you--that sees my
fallen child!’

He walked a little in front of us, and kept before us for some minutes.
During this interval, I glanced at Ham again, and observing the same
expression on his face, and his eyes still directed to the distant
light, I touched his arm.

Twice I called him by his name, in the tone in which I might have tried
to rouse a sleeper, before he heeded me. When I at last inquired on what
his thoughts were so bent, he replied:

‘On what’s afore me, Mas’r Davy; and over yon.’ ‘On the life before you,
do you mean?’ He had pointed confusedly out to sea.

‘Ay, Mas’r Davy. I doen’t rightly know how ‘tis, but from over yon there
seemed to me to come--the end of it like,’ looking at me as if he were
waking, but with the same determined face.

‘What end?’ I asked, possessed by my former fear.

‘I doen’t know,’ he said, thoughtfully; ‘I was calling to mind that the
beginning of it all did take place here--and then the end come. But it’s
gone! Mas’r Davy,’ he added; answering, as I think, my look; ‘you han’t
no call to be afeerd of me: but I’m kiender muddled; I don’t fare to
feel no matters,’--which was as much as to say that he was not himself,
and quite confounded.

Mr. Peggotty stopping for us to join him: we did so, and said no more.
The remembrance of this, in connexion with my former thought, however,
haunted me at intervals, even until the inexorable end came at its
appointed time.

We insensibly approached the old boat, and entered. Mrs. Gummidge, no
longer moping in her especial corner, was busy preparing breakfast.
She took Mr. Peggotty’s hat, and placed his seat for him, and spoke so
comfortably and softly, that I hardly knew her.

‘Dan’l, my good man,’ said she, ‘you must eat and drink, and keep up
your strength, for without it you’ll do nowt. Try, that’s a dear soul!
An if I disturb you with my clicketten,’ she meant her chattering, ‘tell
me so, Dan’l, and I won’t.’

When she had served us all, she withdrew to the window, where she
sedulously employed herself in repairing some shirts and other clothes
belonging to Mr. Peggotty, and neatly folding and packing them in an old
oilskin bag, such as sailors carry. Meanwhile, she continued talking, in
the same quiet manner:

‘All times and seasons, you know, Dan’l,’ said Mrs. Gummidge, ‘I shall
be allus here, and everythink will look accordin’ to your wishes. I’m a
poor scholar, but I shall write to you, odd times, when you’re away, and
send my letters to Mas’r Davy. Maybe you’ll write to me too, Dan’l, odd
times, and tell me how you fare to feel upon your lone lorn journies.’

‘You’ll be a solitary woman heer, I’m afeerd!’ said Mr. Peggotty.

‘No, no, Dan’l,’ she returned, ‘I shan’t be that. Doen’t you mind me. I
shall have enough to do to keep a Beein for you’ (Mrs. Gummidge meant a
home), ‘again you come back--to keep a Beein here for any that may hap
to come back, Dan’l. In the fine time, I shall set outside the door as I
used to do. If any should come nigh, they shall see the old widder woman
true to ‘em, a long way off.’

What a change in Mrs. Gummidge in a little time! She was another woman.
She was so devoted, she had such a quick perception of what it would
be well to say, and what it would be well to leave unsaid; she was so
forgetful of herself, and so regardful of the sorrow about her, that I
held her in a sort of veneration. The work she did that day! There
were many things to be brought up from the beach and stored in the
outhouse--as oars, nets, sails, cordage, spars, lobster-pots, bags of
ballast, and the like; and though there was abundance of assistance
rendered, there being not a pair of working hands on all that shore but
would have laboured hard for Mr. Peggotty, and been well paid in being
asked to do it, yet she persisted, all day long, in toiling under
weights that she was quite unequal to, and fagging to and fro on all
sorts of unnecessary errands. As to deploring her misfortunes, she
appeared to have entirely lost the recollection of ever having had any.
She preserved an equable cheerfulness in the midst of her sympathy,
which was not the least astonishing part of the change that had come
over her. Querulousness was out of the question. I did not even observe
her voice to falter, or a tear to escape from her eyes, the whole day
through, until twilight; when she and I and Mr. Peggotty being alone
together, and he having fallen asleep in perfect exhaustion, she broke
into a half-suppressed fit of sobbing and crying, and taking me to the
door, said, ‘Ever bless you, Mas’r Davy, be a friend to him, poor dear!’
Then, she immediately ran out of the house to wash her face, in order
that she might sit quietly beside him, and be found at work there, when
he should awake. In short I left her, when I went away at night, the
prop and staff of Mr. Peggotty’s affliction; and I could not meditate
enough upon the lesson that I read in Mrs. Gummidge, and the new
experience she unfolded to me.

It was between nine and ten o’clock when, strolling in a melancholy
manner through the town, I stopped at Mr. Omer’s door. Mr. Omer had
taken it so much to heart, his daughter told me, that he had been very
low and poorly all day, and had gone to bed without his pipe.

‘A deceitful, bad-hearted girl,’ said Mrs. Joram. ‘There was no good in
her, ever!’

‘Don’t say so,’ I returned. ‘You don’t think so.’

‘Yes, I do!’ cried Mrs. Joram, angrily.

‘No, no,’ said I.

Mrs. Joram tossed her head, endeavouring to be very stern and cross; but
she could not command her softer self, and began to cry. I was young,
to be sure; but I thought much the better of her for this sympathy, and
fancied it became her, as a virtuous wife and mother, very well indeed.

‘What will she ever do!’ sobbed Minnie. ‘Where will she go! What will
become of her! Oh, how could she be so cruel, to herself and him!’

I remembered the time when Minnie was a young and pretty girl; and I was
glad she remembered it too, so feelingly.

‘My little Minnie,’ said Mrs. Joram, ‘has only just now been got to
sleep. Even in her sleep she is sobbing for Em’ly. All day long, little
Minnie has cried for her, and asked me, over and over again, whether
Em’ly was wicked? What can I say to her, when Em’ly tied a ribbon off
her own neck round little Minnie’s the last night she was here, and laid
her head down on the pillow beside her till she was fast asleep! The
ribbon’s round my little Minnie’s neck now. It ought not to be, perhaps,
but what can I do? Em’ly is very bad, but they were fond of one another.
And the child knows nothing!’

Mrs. Joram was so unhappy that her husband came out to take care of
her. Leaving them together, I went home to Peggotty’s; more melancholy
myself, if possible, than I had been yet.

That good creature--I mean Peggotty--all untired by her late anxieties
and sleepless nights, was at her brother’s, where she meant to stay till
morning. An old woman, who had been employed about the house for some
weeks past, while Peggotty had been unable to attend to it, was the
house’s only other occupant besides myself. As I had no occasion for her
services, I sent her to bed, by no means against her will, and sat down
before the kitchen fire a little while, to think about all this.

I was blending it with the deathbed of the late Mr. Barkis, and was
driving out with the tide towards the distance at which Ham had looked
so singularly in the morning, when I was recalled from my wanderings by
a knock at the door. There was a knocker upon the door, but it was not
that which made the sound. The tap was from a hand, and low down upon
the door, as if it were given by a child.

It made me start as much as if it had been the knock of a footman to a
person of distinction. I opened the door; and at first looked down,
to my amazement, on nothing but a great umbrella that appeared to be
walking about of itself. But presently I discovered underneath it, Miss
Mowcher.

I might not have been prepared to give the little creature a very kind
reception, if, on her removing the umbrella, which her utmost efforts
were unable to shut up, she had shown me the ‘volatile’ expression of
face which had made so great an impression on me at our first and last
meeting. But her face, as she turned it up to mine, was so earnest;
and when I relieved her of the umbrella (which would have been an
inconvenient one for the Irish Giant), she wrung her little hands in
such an afflicted manner; that I rather inclined towards her.

‘Miss Mowcher!’ said I, after glancing up and down the empty street,
without distinctly knowing what I expected to see besides; ‘how do you
come here? What is the matter?’ She motioned to me with her short right
arm, to shut the umbrella for her; and passing me hurriedly, went into
the kitchen. When I had closed the door, and followed, with the umbrella
in my hand, I found her sitting on the corner of the fender--it was a
low iron one, with two flat bars at top to stand plates upon--in the
shadow of the boiler, swaying herself backwards and forwards, and
chafing her hands upon her knees like a person in pain.

Quite alarmed at being the only recipient of this untimely visit, and
the only spectator of this portentous behaviour, I exclaimed again,
‘Pray tell me, Miss Mowcher, what is the matter! are you ill?’

‘My dear young soul,’ returned Miss Mowcher, squeezing her hands upon
her heart one over the other. ‘I am ill here, I am very ill. To think
that it should come to this, when I might have known it and perhaps
prevented it, if I hadn’t been a thoughtless fool!’

Again her large bonnet (very disproportionate to the figure) went
backwards and forwards, in her swaying of her little body to and fro;
while a most gigantic bonnet rocked, in unison with it, upon the wall.

‘I am surprised,’ I began, ‘to see you so distressed and serious’--when
she interrupted me.

‘Yes, it’s always so!’ she said. ‘They are all surprised, these
inconsiderate young people, fairly and full grown, to see any natural
feeling in a little thing like me! They make a plaything of me, use me
for their amusement, throw me away when they are tired, and wonder that
I feel more than a toy horse or a wooden soldier! Yes, yes, that’s the
way. The old way!’

‘It may be, with others,’ I returned, ‘but I do assure you it is not
with me. Perhaps I ought not to be at all surprised to see you as you
are now: I know so little of you. I said, without consideration, what I
thought.’

‘What can I do?’ returned the little woman, standing up, and holding out
her arms to show herself. ‘See! What I am, my father was; and my sister
is; and my brother is. I have worked for sister and brother these many
years--hard, Mr. Copperfield--all day. I must live. I do no harm. If
there are people so unreflecting or so cruel, as to make a jest of
me, what is left for me to do but to make a jest of myself, them, and
everything? If I do so, for the time, whose fault is that? Mine?’

No. Not Miss Mowcher’s, I perceived.

‘If I had shown myself a sensitive dwarf to your false friend,’ pursued
the little woman, shaking her head at me, with reproachful earnestness,
‘how much of his help or good will do you think I should ever have had?
If little Mowcher (who had no hand, young gentleman, in the making of
herself) addressed herself to him, or the like of him, because of her
misfortunes, when do you suppose her small voice would have been heard?
Little Mowcher would have as much need to live, if she was the bitterest
and dullest of pigmies; but she couldn’t do it. No. She might whistle
for her bread and butter till she died of Air.’

Miss Mowcher sat down on the fender again, and took out her
handkerchief, and wiped her eyes.

‘Be thankful for me, if you have a kind heart, as I think you have,’ she
said, ‘that while I know well what I am, I can be cheerful and endure it
all. I am thankful for myself, at any rate, that I can find my tiny way
through the world, without being beholden to anyone; and that in return
for all that is thrown at me, in folly or vanity, as I go along, I can
throw bubbles back. If I don’t brood over all I want, it is the better
for me, and not the worse for anyone. If I am a plaything for you
giants, be gentle with me.’

Miss Mowcher replaced her handkerchief in her pocket, looking at me with
very intent expression all the while, and pursued:

‘I saw you in the street just now. You may suppose I am not able to
walk as fast as you, with my short legs and short breath, and I couldn’t
overtake you; but I guessed where you came, and came after you. I have
been here before, today, but the good woman wasn’t at home.’

‘Do you know her?’ I demanded.

‘I know of her, and about her,’ she replied, ‘from Omer and Joram. I
was there at seven o’clock this morning. Do you remember what Steerforth
said to me about this unfortunate girl, that time when I saw you both at
the inn?’

The great bonnet on Miss Mowcher’s head, and the greater bonnet on
the wall, began to go backwards and forwards again when she asked this
question.

I remembered very well what she referred to, having had it in my
thoughts many times that day. I told her so.

‘May the Father of all Evil confound him,’ said the little woman,
holding up her forefinger between me and her sparkling eyes, ‘and ten
times more confound that wicked servant; but I believed it was YOU who
had a boyish passion for her!’

‘I?’ I repeated.

‘Child, child! In the name of blind ill-fortune,’ cried Miss Mowcher,
wringing her hands impatiently, as she went to and fro again upon the
fender, ‘why did you praise her so, and blush, and look disturbed?’

I could not conceal from myself that I had done this, though for a
reason very different from her supposition.

‘What did I know?’ said Miss Mowcher, taking out her handkerchief again,
and giving one little stamp on the ground whenever, at short intervals,
she applied it to her eyes with both hands at once. ‘He was crossing you
and wheedling you, I saw; and you were soft wax in his hands, I saw. Had
I left the room a minute, when his man told me that “Young Innocence”
 (so he called you, and you may call him “Old Guilt” all the days of your
life) had set his heart upon her, and she was giddy and liked him, but
his master was resolved that no harm should come of it--more for your
sake than for hers--and that that was their business here? How could I
BUT believe him? I saw Steerforth soothe and please you by his praise
of her! You were the first to mention her name. You owned to an old
admiration of her. You were hot and cold, and red and white, all at once
when I spoke to you of her. What could I think--what DID I think--but
that you were a young libertine in everything but experience, and had
fallen into hands that had experience enough, and could manage you
(having the fancy) for your own good? Oh! oh! oh! They were afraid of my
finding out the truth,’ exclaimed Miss Mowcher, getting off the
fender, and trotting up and down the kitchen with her two short arms
distressfully lifted up, ‘because I am a sharp little thing--I need be,
to get through the world at all!--and they deceived me altogether, and
I gave the poor unfortunate girl a letter, which I fully believe was
the beginning of her ever speaking to Littimer, who was left behind on
purpose!’

I stood amazed at the revelation of all this perfidy, looking at Miss
Mowcher as she walked up and down the kitchen until she was out of
breath: when she sat upon the fender again, and, drying her face with
her handkerchief, shook her head for a long time, without otherwise
moving, and without breaking silence.

‘My country rounds,’ she added at length, ‘brought me to Norwich, Mr.
Copperfield, the night before last. What I happened to find there,
about their secret way of coming and going, without you--which was
strange--led to my suspecting something wrong. I got into the coach
from London last night, as it came through Norwich, and was here this
morning. Oh, oh, oh! too late!’

Poor little Mowcher turned so chilly after all her crying and fretting,
that she turned round on the fender, putting her poor little wet feet in
among the ashes to warm them, and sat looking at the fire, like a large
doll. I sat in a chair on the other side of the hearth, lost in unhappy
reflections, and looking at the fire too, and sometimes at her.

‘I must go,’ she said at last, rising as she spoke. ‘It’s late. You
don’t mistrust me?’

Meeting her sharp glance, which was as sharp as ever when she asked me,
I could not on that short challenge answer no, quite frankly.

‘Come!’ said she, accepting the offer of my hand to help her over the
fender, and looking wistfully up into my face, ‘you know you wouldn’t
mistrust me, if I was a full-sized woman!’

I felt that there was much truth in this; and I felt rather ashamed of
myself.

‘You are a young man,’ she said, nodding. ‘Take a word of advice,
even from three foot nothing. Try not to associate bodily defects with
mental, my good friend, except for a solid reason.’

She had got over the fender now, and I had got over my suspicion. I told
her that I believed she had given me a faithful account of herself,
and that we had both been hapless instruments in designing hands. She
thanked me, and said I was a good fellow.

‘Now, mind!’ she exclaimed, turning back on her way to the door, and
looking shrewdly at me, with her forefinger up again.--‘I have some
reason to suspect, from what I have heard--my ears are always open; I
can’t afford to spare what powers I have--that they are gone abroad. But
if ever they return, if ever any one of them returns, while I am alive,
I am more likely than another, going about as I do, to find it out soon.
Whatever I know, you shall know. If ever I can do anything to serve the
poor betrayed girl, I will do it faithfully, please Heaven! And Littimer
had better have a bloodhound at his back, than little Mowcher!’

I placed implicit faith in this last statement, when I marked the look
with which it was accompanied.

‘Trust me no more, but trust me no less, than you would trust a
full-sized woman,’ said the little creature, touching me appealingly
on the wrist. ‘If ever you see me again, unlike what I am now, and like
what I was when you first saw me, observe what company I am in. Call to
mind that I am a very helpless and defenceless little thing. Think of
me at home with my brother like myself and sister like myself, when my
day’s work is done. Perhaps you won’t, then, be very hard upon me, or
surprised if I can be distressed and serious. Good night!’

I gave Miss Mowcher my hand, with a very different opinion of her from
that which I had hitherto entertained, and opened the door to let her
out. It was not a trifling business to get the great umbrella up, and
properly balanced in her grasp; but at last I successfully accomplished
this, and saw it go bobbing down the street through the rain, without
the least appearance of having anybody underneath it, except when a
heavier fall than usual from some over-charged water-spout sent it
toppling over, on one side, and discovered Miss Mowcher struggling
violently to get it right. After making one or two sallies to her
relief, which were rendered futile by the umbrella’s hopping on again,
like an immense bird, before I could reach it, I came in, went to bed,
and slept till morning.

In the morning I was joined by Mr. Peggotty and by my old nurse, and we
went at an early hour to the coach office, where Mrs. Gummidge and Ham
were waiting to take leave of us.

‘Mas’r Davy,’ Ham whispered, drawing me aside, while Mr. Peggotty was
stowing his bag among the luggage, ‘his life is quite broke up. He
doen’t know wheer he’s going; he doen’t know--what’s afore him; he’s
bound upon a voyage that’ll last, on and off, all the rest of his days,
take my wured for ‘t, unless he finds what he’s a seeking of. I am sure
you’ll be a friend to him, Mas’r Davy?’

‘Trust me, I will indeed,’ said I, shaking hands with Ham earnestly.

‘Thankee. Thankee, very kind, sir. One thing furder. I’m in good employ,
you know, Mas’r Davy, and I han’t no way now of spending what I gets.
Money’s of no use to me no more, except to live. If you can lay it out
for him, I shall do my work with a better art. Though as to that, sir,’
and he spoke very steadily and mildly, ‘you’re not to think but I shall
work at all times, like a man, and act the best that lays in my power!’

I told him I was well convinced of it; and I hinted that I hoped the
time might even come, when he would cease to lead the lonely life he
naturally contemplated now.

‘No, sir,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘all that’s past and over with me,
sir. No one can never fill the place that’s empty. But you’ll bear in
mind about the money, as theer’s at all times some laying by for him?’

Reminding him of the fact, that Mr. Peggotty derived a steady,
though certainly a very moderate income from the bequest of his late
brother-in-law, I promised to do so. We then took leave of each other. I
cannot leave him even now, without remembering with a pang, at once his
modest fortitude and his great sorrow.

As to Mrs. Gummidge, if I were to endeavour to describe how she ran down
the street by the side of the coach, seeing nothing but Mr. Peggotty on
the roof, through the tears she tried to repress, and dashing herself
against the people who were coming in the opposite direction, I should
enter on a task of some difficulty. Therefore I had better leave her
sitting on a baker’s door-step, out of breath, with no shape at all
remaining in her bonnet, and one of her shoes off, lying on the pavement
at a considerable distance.

When we got to our journey’s end, our first pursuit was to look about
for a little lodging for Peggotty, where her brother could have a
bed. We were so fortunate as to find one, of a very clean and cheap
description, over a chandler’s shop, only two streets removed from
me. When we had engaged this domicile, I bought some cold meat at an
eating-house, and took my fellow-travellers home to tea; a proceeding,
I regret to state, which did not meet with Mrs. Crupp’s approval, but
quite the contrary. I ought to observe, however, in explanation of that
lady’s state of mind, that she was much offended by Peggotty’s tucking
up her widow’s gown before she had been ten minutes in the place, and
setting to work to dust my bedroom. This Mrs. Crupp regarded in the
light of a liberty, and a liberty, she said, was a thing she never
allowed.

Mr. Peggotty had made a communication to me on the way to London for
which I was not unprepared. It was, that he purposed first seeing Mrs.
Steerforth. As I felt bound to assist him in this, and also to mediate
between them; with the view of sparing the mother’s feelings as much
as possible, I wrote to her that night. I told her as mildly as I could
what his wrong was, and what my own share in his injury. I said he was a
man in very common life, but of a most gentle and upright character; and
that I ventured to express a hope that she would not refuse to see him
in his heavy trouble. I mentioned two o’clock in the afternoon as the
hour of our coming, and I sent the letter myself by the first coach in
the morning.

At the appointed time, we stood at the door--the door of that house
where I had been, a few days since, so happy: where my youthful
confidence and warmth of heart had been yielded up so freely: which was
closed against me henceforth: which was now a waste, a ruin.

No Littimer appeared. The pleasanter face which had replaced his, on the
occasion of my last visit, answered to our summons, and went before
us to the drawing-room. Mrs. Steerforth was sitting there. Rosa Dartle
glided, as we went in, from another part of the room and stood behind
her chair.

I saw, directly, in his mother’s face, that she knew from himself what
he had done. It was very pale; and bore the traces of deeper emotion
than my letter alone, weakened by the doubts her fondness would have
raised upon it, would have been likely to create. I thought her more
like him than ever I had thought her; and I felt, rather than saw, that
the resemblance was not lost on my companion.

She sat upright in her arm-chair, with a stately, immovable, passionless
air, that it seemed as if nothing could disturb. She looked very
steadfastly at Mr. Peggotty when he stood before her; and he looked
quite as steadfastly at her. Rosa Dartle’s keen glance comprehended all
of us. For some moments not a word was spoken.

She motioned to Mr. Peggotty to be seated. He said, in a low voice, ‘I
shouldn’t feel it nat’ral, ma’am, to sit down in this house. I’d sooner
stand.’ And this was succeeded by another silence, which she broke thus:

‘I know, with deep regret, what has brought you here. What do you want
of me? What do you ask me to do?’

He put his hat under his arm, and feeling in his breast for Emily’s
letter, took it out, unfolded it, and gave it to her. ‘Please to read
that, ma’am. That’s my niece’s hand!’

She read it, in the same stately and impassive way,--untouched by its
contents, as far as I could see,--and returned it to him.

‘“Unless he brings me back a lady,”’ said Mr. Peggotty, tracing out that
part with his finger. ‘I come to know, ma’am, whether he will keep his
wured?’

‘No,’ she returned.

‘Why not?’ said Mr. Peggotty.

‘It is impossible. He would disgrace himself. You cannot fail to know
that she is far below him.’

‘Raise her up!’ said Mr. Peggotty.

‘She is uneducated and ignorant.’

‘Maybe she’s not; maybe she is,’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘I think not, ma’am;
but I’m no judge of them things. Teach her better!’

‘Since you oblige me to speak more plainly, which I am very unwilling
to do, her humble connexions would render such a thing impossible, if
nothing else did.’

‘Hark to this, ma’am,’ he returned, slowly and quietly. ‘You know what
it is to love your child. So do I. If she was a hundred times my child,
I couldn’t love her more. You doen’t know what it is to lose your child.
I do. All the heaps of riches in the wureld would be nowt to me (if they
was mine) to buy her back! But, save her from this disgrace, and she
shall never be disgraced by us. Not one of us that she’s growed up
among, not one of us that’s lived along with her and had her for their
all in all, these many year, will ever look upon her pritty face again.
We’ll be content to let her be; we’ll be content to think of her, far
off, as if she was underneath another sun and sky; we’ll be content to
trust her to her husband,--to her little children, p’raps,--and bide the
time when all of us shall be alike in quality afore our God!’

The rugged eloquence with which he spoke, was not devoid of all effect.
She still preserved her proud manner, but there was a touch of softness
in her voice, as she answered:

‘I justify nothing. I make no counter-accusations. But I am sorry to
repeat, it is impossible. Such a marriage would irretrievably blight my
son’s career, and ruin his prospects. Nothing is more certain than
that it never can take place, and never will. If there is any other
compensation--’

‘I am looking at the likeness of the face,’ interrupted Mr. Peggotty,
with a steady but a kindling eye, ‘that has looked at me, in my home, at
my fireside, in my boat--wheer not?---smiling and friendly, when it was
so treacherous, that I go half wild when I think of it. If the likeness
of that face don’t turn to burning fire, at the thought of offering
money to me for my child’s blight and ruin, it’s as bad. I doen’t know,
being a lady’s, but what it’s worse.’

She changed now, in a moment. An angry flush overspread her features;
and she said, in an intolerant manner, grasping the arm-chair tightly
with her hands:

‘What compensation can you make to ME for opening such a pit between me
and my son? What is your love to mine? What is your separation to ours?’

Miss Dartle softly touched her, and bent down her head to whisper, but
she would not hear a word.

‘No, Rosa, not a word! Let the man listen to what I say! My son, who has
been the object of my life, to whom its every thought has been devoted,
whom I have gratified from a child in every wish, from whom I have had
no separate existence since his birth,--to take up in a moment with a
miserable girl, and avoid me! To repay my confidence with systematic
deception, for her sake, and quit me for her! To set this wretched
fancy, against his mother’s claims upon his duty, love, respect,
gratitude--claims that every day and hour of his life should have
strengthened into ties that nothing could be proof against! Is this no
injury?’

Again Rosa Dartle tried to soothe her; again ineffectually.

‘I say, Rosa, not a word! If he can stake his all upon the lightest
object, I can stake my all upon a greater purpose. Let him go where he
will, with the means that my love has secured to him! Does he think to
reduce me by long absence? He knows his mother very little if he does.
Let him put away his whim now, and he is welcome back. Let him not put
her away now, and he never shall come near me, living or dying, while
I can raise my hand to make a sign against it, unless, being rid of her
for ever, he comes humbly to me and begs for my forgiveness. This is my
right. This is the acknowledgement I WILL HAVE. This is the separation
that there is between us! And is this,’ she added, looking at her
visitor with the proud intolerant air with which she had begun, ‘no
injury?’

While I heard and saw the mother as she said these words, I seemed to
hear and see the son, defying them. All that I had ever seen in him of
an unyielding, wilful spirit, I saw in her. All the understanding that
I had now of his misdirected energy, became an understanding of her
character too, and a perception that it was, in its strongest springs,
the same.

She now observed to me, aloud, resuming her former restraint, that it
was useless to hear more, or to say more, and that she begged to put an
end to the interview. She rose with an air of dignity to leave the room,
when Mr. Peggotty signified that it was needless.

‘Doen’t fear me being any hindrance to you, I have no more to say,
ma’am,’ he remarked, as he moved towards the door. ‘I come heer with no
hope, and I take away no hope. I have done what I thowt should be done,
but I never looked fur any good to come of my stan’ning where I do.
This has been too evil a house fur me and mine, fur me to be in my right
senses and expect it.’

With this, we departed; leaving her standing by her elbow-chair, a
picture of a noble presence and a handsome face.

We had, on our way out, to cross a paved hall, with glass sides and
roof, over which a vine was trained. Its leaves and shoots were green
then, and the day being sunny, a pair of glass doors leading to the
garden were thrown open. Rosa Dartle, entering this way with a noiseless
step, when we were close to them, addressed herself to me:

‘You do well,’ she said, ‘indeed, to bring this fellow here!’

Such a concentration of rage and scorn as darkened her face, and flashed
in her jet-black eyes, I could not have thought compressible even into
that face. The scar made by the hammer was, as usual in this excited
state of her features, strongly marked. When the throbbing I had seen
before, came into it as I looked at her, she absolutely lifted up her
hand, and struck it.

‘This is a fellow,’ she said, ‘to champion and bring here, is he not?
You are a true man!’

‘Miss Dartle,’ I returned, ‘you are surely not so unjust as to condemn
ME!’

‘Why do you bring division between these two mad creatures?’ she
returned. ‘Don’t you know that they are both mad with their own
self-will and pride?’

‘Is it my doing?’ I returned.

‘Is it your doing!’ she retorted. ‘Why do you bring this man here?’

‘He is a deeply-injured man, Miss Dartle,’ I replied. ‘You may not know
it.’

‘I know that James Steerforth,’ she said, with her hand on her bosom, as
if to prevent the storm that was raging there, from being loud, ‘has
a false, corrupt heart, and is a traitor. But what need I know or care
about this fellow, and his common niece?’

‘Miss Dartle,’ I returned, ‘you deepen the injury. It is sufficient
already. I will only say, at parting, that you do him a great wrong.’

‘I do him no wrong,’ she returned. ‘They are a depraved, worthless set.
I would have her whipped!’

Mr. Peggotty passed on, without a word, and went out at the door.

‘Oh, shame, Miss Dartle! shame!’ I said indignantly. ‘How can you bear
to trample on his undeserved affliction!’

‘I would trample on them all,’ she answered. ‘I would have his house
pulled down. I would have her branded on the face, dressed in rags,
and cast out in the streets to starve. If I had the power to sit in
judgement on her, I would see it done. See it done? I would do it! I
detest her. If I ever could reproach her with her infamous condition, I
would go anywhere to do so. If I could hunt her to her grave, I would.
If there was any word of comfort that would be a solace to her in her
dying hour, and only I possessed it, I wouldn’t part with it for Life
itself.’

The mere vehemence of her words can convey, I am sensible, but a weak
impression of the passion by which she was possessed, and which made
itself articulate in her whole figure, though her voice, instead of
being raised, was lower than usual. No description I could give of her
would do justice to my recollection of her, or to her entire deliverance
of herself to her anger. I have seen passion in many forms, but I have
never seen it in such a form as that.

When I joined Mr. Peggotty, he was walking slowly and thoughtfully down
the hill. He told me, as soon as I came up with him, that having now
discharged his mind of what he had purposed doing in London, he meant
‘to set out on his travels’, that night. I asked him where he meant to
go? He only answered, ‘I’m a going, sir, to seek my niece.’

We went back to the little lodging over the chandler’s shop, and there
I found an opportunity of repeating to Peggotty what he had said to
me. She informed me, in return, that he had said the same to her that
morning. She knew no more than I did, where he was going, but she
thought he had some project shaped out in his mind.

I did not like to leave him, under such circumstances, and we all three
dined together off a beefsteak pie--which was one of the many good
things for which Peggotty was famous--and which was curiously flavoured
on this occasion, I recollect well, by a miscellaneous taste of tea,
coffee, butter, bacon, cheese, new loaves, firewood, candles, and walnut
ketchup, continually ascending from the shop. After dinner we sat for an
hour or so near the window, without talking much; and then Mr. Peggotty
got up, and brought his oilskin bag and his stout stick, and laid them
on the table.

He accepted, from his sister’s stock of ready money, a small sum on
account of his legacy; barely enough, I should have thought, to keep him
for a month. He promised to communicate with me, when anything befell
him; and he slung his bag about him, took his hat and stick, and bade us
both ‘Good-bye!’

‘All good attend you, dear old woman,’ he said, embracing Peggotty, ‘and
you too, Mas’r Davy!’ shaking hands with me. ‘I’m a-going to seek her,
fur and wide. If she should come home while I’m away--but ah, that ain’t
like to be!--or if I should bring her back, my meaning is, that she
and me shall live and die where no one can’t reproach her. If any hurt
should come to me, remember that the last words I left for her was, “My
unchanged love is with my darling child, and I forgive her!”’

He said this solemnly, bare-headed; then, putting on his hat, he went
down the stairs, and away. We followed to the door. It was a warm, dusty
evening, just the time when, in the great main thoroughfare out of which
that by-way turned, there was a temporary lull in the eternal tread of
feet upon the pavement, and a strong red sunshine. He turned, alone, at
the corner of our shady street, into a glow of light, in which we lost
him.

Rarely did that hour of the evening come, rarely did I wake at night,
rarely did I look up at the moon, or stars, or watch the falling rain,
or hear the wind, but I thought of his solitary figure toiling on, poor
pilgrim, and recalled the words:

‘I’m a going to seek her, fur and wide. If any hurt should come to me,
remember that the last words I left for her was, “My unchanged love is
with my darling child, and I forgive her!”’



CHAPTER 33. BLISSFUL


All this time, I had gone on loving Dora, harder than ever. Her idea was
my refuge in disappointment and distress, and made some amends to me,
even for the loss of my friend. The more I pitied myself, or pitied
others, the more I sought for consolation in the image of Dora. The
greater the accumulation of deceit and trouble in the world, the
brighter and the purer shone the star of Dora high above the world. I
don’t think I had any definite idea where Dora came from, or in what
degree she was related to a higher order of beings; but I am quite sure
I should have scouted the notion of her being simply human, like any
other young lady, with indignation and contempt.

If I may so express it, I was steeped in Dora. I was not merely over
head and ears in love with her, but I was saturated through and through.
Enough love might have been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking,
to drown anybody in; and yet there would have remained enough within me,
and all over me, to pervade my entire existence.

The first thing I did, on my own account, when I came back, was to take
a night-walk to Norwood, and, like the subject of a venerable riddle of
my childhood, to go ‘round and round the house, without ever
touching the house’, thinking about Dora. I believe the theme of this
incomprehensible conundrum was the moon. No matter what it was, I, the
moon-struck slave of Dora, perambulated round and round the house and
garden for two hours, looking through crevices in the palings, getting
my chin by dint of violent exertion above the rusty nails on the top,
blowing kisses at the lights in the windows, and romantically calling
on the night, at intervals, to shield my Dora--I don’t exactly know what
from, I suppose from fire. Perhaps from mice, to which she had a great
objection.

My love was so much in my mind and it was so natural to me to confide in
Peggotty, when I found her again by my side of an evening with the old
set of industrial implements, busily making the tour of my wardrobe,
that I imparted to her, in a sufficiently roundabout way, my great
secret. Peggotty was strongly interested, but I could not get her into
my view of the case at all. She was audaciously prejudiced in my favour,
and quite unable to understand why I should have any misgivings, or be
low-spirited about it. ‘The young lady might think herself well off,’
she observed, ‘to have such a beau. And as to her Pa,’ she said, ‘what
did the gentleman expect, for gracious sake!’

I observed, however, that Mr. Spenlow’s proctorial gown and stiff cravat
took Peggotty down a little, and inspired her with a greater reverence
for the man who was gradually becoming more and more etherealized in my
eyes every day, and about whom a reflected radiance seemed to me to beam
when he sat erect in Court among his papers, like a little lighthouse in
a sea of stationery. And by the by, it used to be uncommonly strange
to me to consider, I remember, as I sat in Court too, how those dim old
judges and doctors wouldn’t have cared for Dora, if they had known
her; how they wouldn’t have gone out of their senses with rapture, if
marriage with Dora had been proposed to them; how Dora might have sung,
and played upon that glorified guitar, until she led me to the verge of
madness, yet not have tempted one of those slow-goers an inch out of his
road!

I despised them, to a man. Frozen-out old gardeners in the flower-beds
of the heart, I took a personal offence against them all. The Bench
was nothing to me but an insensible blunderer. The Bar had no more
tenderness or poetry in it, than the bar of a public-house.

Taking the management of Peggotty’s affairs into my own hands, with
no little pride, I proved the will, and came to a settlement with the
Legacy Duty-office, and took her to the Bank, and soon got everything
into an orderly train. We varied the legal character of these
proceedings by going to see some perspiring Wax-work, in Fleet Street
(melted, I should hope, these twenty years); and by visiting Miss
Linwood’s Exhibition, which I remember as a Mausoleum of needlework,
favourable to self-examination and repentance; and by inspecting the
Tower of London; and going to the top of St. Paul’s. All these wonders
afforded Peggotty as much pleasure as she was able to enjoy, under
existing circumstances: except, I think, St. Paul’s, which, from her
long attachment to her work-box, became a rival of the picture on the
lid, and was, in some particulars, vanquished, she considered, by that
work of art.

Peggotty’s business, which was what we used to call ‘common-form
business’ in the Commons (and very light and lucrative the common-form
business was), being settled, I took her down to the office one morning
to pay her bill. Mr. Spenlow had stepped out, old Tiffey said, to get a
gentleman sworn for a marriage licence; but as I knew he would be
back directly, our place lying close to the Surrogate’s, and to the
Vicar-General’s office too, I told Peggotty to wait.

We were a little like undertakers, in the Commons, as regarded Probate
transactions; generally making it a rule to look more or less cut up,
when we had to deal with clients in mourning. In a similar feeling
of delicacy, we were always blithe and light-hearted with the licence
clients. Therefore I hinted to Peggotty that she would find Mr. Spenlow
much recovered from the shock of Mr. Barkis’s decease; and indeed he
came in like a bridegroom.

But neither Peggotty nor I had eyes for him, when we saw, in company
with him, Mr. Murdstone. He was very little changed. His hair looked as
thick, and was certainly as black, as ever; and his glance was as little
to be trusted as of old.

‘Ah, Copperfield?’ said Mr. Spenlow. ‘You know this gentleman, I
believe?’

I made my gentleman a distant bow, and Peggotty barely recognized him.
He was, at first, somewhat disconcerted to meet us two together; but
quickly decided what to do, and came up to me.

‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that you are doing well?’

‘It can hardly be interesting to you,’ said I. ‘Yes, if you wish to
know.’

We looked at each other, and he addressed himself to Peggotty.

‘And you,’ said he. ‘I am sorry to observe that you have lost your
husband.’

‘It’s not the first loss I have had in my life, Mr. Murdstone,’ replied
Peggotty, trembling from head to foot. ‘I am glad to hope that there is
nobody to blame for this one,--nobody to answer for it.’

‘Ha!’ said he; ‘that’s a comfortable reflection. You have done your
duty?’

‘I have not worn anybody’s life away,’ said Peggotty, ‘I am thankful to
think! No, Mr. Murdstone, I have not worrited and frightened any sweet
creetur to an early grave!’

He eyed her gloomily--remorsefully I thought--for an instant; and said,
turning his head towards me, but looking at my feet instead of my face:

‘We are not likely to encounter soon again;--a source of satisfaction to
us both, no doubt, for such meetings as this can never be agreeable. I
do not expect that you, who always rebelled against my just authority,
exerted for your benefit and reformation, should owe me any good-will
now. There is an antipathy between us--’

‘An old one, I believe?’ said I, interrupting him.

He smiled, and shot as evil a glance at me as could come from his dark
eyes.

‘It rankled in your baby breast,’ he said. ‘It embittered the life of
your poor mother. You are right. I hope you may do better, yet; I hope
you may correct yourself.’

Here he ended the dialogue, which had been carried on in a low voice,
in a corner of the outer office, by passing into Mr. Spenlow’s room, and
saying aloud, in his smoothest manner:

‘Gentlemen of Mr. Spenlow’s profession are accustomed to family
differences, and know how complicated and difficult they always are!’
With that, he paid the money for his licence; and, receiving it neatly
folded from Mr. Spenlow, together with a shake of the hand, and a polite
wish for his happiness and the lady’s, went out of the office.

I might have had more difficulty in constraining myself to be silent
under his words, if I had had less difficulty in impressing upon
Peggotty (who was only angry on my account, good creature!) that we were
not in a place for recrimination, and that I besought her to hold her
peace. She was so unusually roused, that I was glad to compound for
an affectionate hug, elicited by this revival in her mind of our old
injuries, and to make the best I could of it, before Mr. Spenlow and the
clerks.

Mr. Spenlow did not appear to know what the connexion between Mr.
Murdstone and myself was; which I was glad of, for I could not bear to
acknowledge him, even in my own breast, remembering what I did of the
history of my poor mother. Mr. Spenlow seemed to think, if he thought
anything about the matter, that my aunt was the leader of the state
party in our family, and that there was a rebel party commanded by
somebody else--so I gathered at least from what he said, while we were
waiting for Mr. Tiffey to make out Peggotty’s bill of costs.

‘Miss Trotwood,’ he remarked, ‘is very firm, no doubt, and not likely
to give way to opposition. I have an admiration for her character, and
I may congratulate you, Copperfield, on being on the right side.
Differences between relations are much to be deplored--but they are
extremely general--and the great thing is, to be on the right side’:
meaning, I take it, on the side of the moneyed interest.

‘Rather a good marriage this, I believe?’ said Mr. Spenlow.

I explained that I knew nothing about it.

‘Indeed!’ he said. ‘Speaking from the few words Mr. Murdstone
dropped--as a man frequently does on these occasions--and from what Miss
Murdstone let fall, I should say it was rather a good marriage.’

‘Do you mean that there is money, sir?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Spenlow, ‘I understand there’s money. Beauty too, I am
told.’

‘Indeed! Is his new wife young?’

‘Just of age,’ said Mr. Spenlow. ‘So lately, that I should think they
had been waiting for that.’

‘Lord deliver her!’ said Peggotty. So very emphatically and
unexpectedly, that we were all three discomposed; until Tiffey came in
with the bill.

Old Tiffey soon appeared, however, and handed it to Mr. Spenlow, to
look over. Mr. Spenlow, settling his chin in his cravat and rubbing it
softly, went over the items with a deprecatory air--as if it were all
Jorkins’s doing--and handed it back to Tiffey with a bland sigh.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s right. Quite right. I should have been extremely
happy, Copperfield, to have limited these charges to the actual
expenditure out of pocket, but it is an irksome incident in my
professional life, that I am not at liberty to consult my own wishes. I
have a partner--Mr. Jorkins.’

As he said this with a gentle melancholy, which was the next thing to
making no charge at all, I expressed my acknowledgements on Peggotty’s
behalf, and paid Tiffey in banknotes. Peggotty then retired to
her lodging, and Mr. Spenlow and I went into Court, where we had a
divorce-suit coming on, under an ingenious little statute (repealed
now, I believe, but in virtue of which I have seen several marriages
annulled), of which the merits were these. The husband, whose name was
Thomas Benjamin, had taken out his marriage licence as Thomas only;
suppressing the Benjamin, in case he should not find himself as
comfortable as he expected. NOT finding himself as comfortable as he
expected, or being a little fatigued with his wife, poor fellow, he
now came forward, by a friend, after being married a year or two, and
declared that his name was Thomas Benjamin, and therefore he was not
married at all. Which the Court confirmed, to his great satisfaction.

I must say that I had my doubts about the strict justice of this,
and was not even frightened out of them by the bushel of wheat which
reconciles all anomalies. But Mr. Spenlow argued the matter with me. He
said, Look at the world, there was good and evil in that; look at the
ecclesiastical law, there was good and evil in THAT. It was all part of
a system. Very good. There you were!

I had not the hardihood to suggest to Dora’s father that possibly
we might even improve the world a little, if we got up early in the
morning, and took off our coats to the work; but I confessed that I
thought we might improve the Commons. Mr. Spenlow replied that he would
particularly advise me to dismiss that idea from my mind, as not being
worthy of my gentlemanly character; but that he would be glad to hear
from me of what improvement I thought the Commons susceptible?

Taking that part of the Commons which happened to be nearest to us--for
our man was unmarried by this time, and we were out of Court, and
strolling past the Prerogative Office--I submitted that I thought the
Prerogative Office rather a queerly managed institution. Mr. Spenlow
inquired in what respect? I replied, with all due deference to his
experience (but with more deference, I am afraid, to his being Dora’s
father), that perhaps it was a little nonsensical that the Registry of
that Court, containing the original wills of all persons leaving effects
within the immense province of Canterbury, for three whole centuries,
should be an accidental building, never designed for the purpose, leased
by the registrars for their Own private emolument, unsafe, not even
ascertained to be fire-proof, choked with the important documents
it held, and positively, from the roof to the basement, a mercenary
speculation of the registrars, who took great fees from the public, and
crammed the public’s wills away anyhow and anywhere, having no other
object than to get rid of them cheaply. That, perhaps, it was a little
unreasonable that these registrars in the receipt of profits amounting
to eight or nine thousand pounds a year (to say nothing of the profits
of the deputy registrars, and clerks of seats), should not be obliged to
spend a little of that money, in finding a reasonably safe place for the
important documents which all classes of people were compelled to hand
over to them, whether they would or no. That, perhaps, it was a little
unjust, that all the great offices in this great office should be
magnificent sinecures, while the unfortunate working-clerks in the cold
dark room upstairs were the worst rewarded, and the least considered
men, doing important services, in London. That perhaps it was a little
indecent that the principal registrar of all, whose duty it was to
find the public, constantly resorting to this place, all needful
accommodation, should be an enormous sinecurist in virtue of that post
(and might be, besides, a clergyman, a pluralist, the holder of a
staff in a cathedral, and what not),--while the public was put to the
inconvenience of which we had a specimen every afternoon when the office
was busy, and which we knew to be quite monstrous. That, perhaps,
in short, this Prerogative Office of the diocese of Canterbury was
altogether such a pestilent job, and such a pernicious absurdity, that
but for its being squeezed away in a corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard,
which few people knew, it must have been turned completely inside out,
and upside down, long ago.

Mr. Spenlow smiled as I became modestly warm on the subject, and then
argued this question with me as he had argued the other. He said, what
was it after all? It was a question of feeling. If the public felt
that their wills were in safe keeping, and took it for granted that the
office was not to be made better, who was the worse for it? Nobody. Who
was the better for it? All the Sinecurists. Very well. Then the good
predominated. It might not be a perfect system; nothing was perfect;
but what he objected to, was, the insertion of the wedge. Under the
Prerogative Office, the country had been glorious. Insert the wedge into
the Prerogative Office, and the country would cease to be glorious. He
considered it the principle of a gentleman to take things as he found
them; and he had no doubt the Prerogative Office would last our time. I
deferred to his opinion, though I had great doubts of it myself. I find
he was right, however; for it has not only lasted to the present moment,
but has done so in the teeth of a great parliamentary report made (not
too willingly) eighteen years ago, when all these objections of mine
were set forth in detail, and when the existing stowage for wills was
described as equal to the accumulation of only two years and a half
more. What they have done with them since; whether they have lost many,
or whether they sell any, now and then, to the butter shops; I don’t
know. I am glad mine is not there, and I hope it may not go there, yet
awhile.

I have set all this down, in my present blissful chapter, because here
it comes into its natural place. Mr. Spenlow and I falling into this
conversation, prolonged it and our saunter to and fro, until we diverged
into general topics. And so it came about, in the end, that Mr. Spenlow
told me this day week was Dora’s birthday, and he would be glad if I
would come down and join a little picnic on the occasion. I went out of
my senses immediately; became a mere driveller next day, on receipt of
a little lace-edged sheet of note-paper, ‘Favoured by papa. To remind’;
and passed the intervening period in a state of dotage.

I think I committed every possible absurdity in the way of preparation
for this blessed event. I turn hot when I remember the cravat I bought.
My boots might be placed in any collection of instruments of torture.
I provided, and sent down by the Norwood coach the night before, a
delicate little hamper, amounting in itself, I thought, almost to a
declaration. There were crackers in it with the tenderest mottoes that
could be got for money. At six in the morning, I was in Covent Garden
Market, buying a bouquet for Dora. At ten I was on horseback (I hired a
gallant grey, for the occasion), with the bouquet in my hat, to keep it
fresh, trotting down to Norwood.

I suppose that when I saw Dora in the garden and pretended not to see
her, and rode past the house pretending to be anxiously looking for
it, I committed two small fooleries which other young gentlemen in my
circumstances might have committed--because they came so very natural
to me. But oh! when I DID find the house, and DID dismount at the
garden-gate, and drag those stony-hearted boots across the lawn to Dora
sitting on a garden-seat under a lilac tree, what a spectacle she was,
upon that beautiful morning, among the butterflies, in a white chip
bonnet and a dress of celestial blue! There was a young lady with
her--comparatively stricken in years--almost twenty, I should say. Her
name was Miss Mills. And Dora called her Julia. She was the bosom friend
of Dora. Happy Miss Mills!

Jip was there, and Jip WOULD bark at me again. When I presented my
bouquet, he gnashed his teeth with jealousy. Well he might. If he had
the least idea how I adored his mistress, well he might!

‘Oh, thank you, Mr. Copperfield! What dear flowers!’ said Dora.

I had had an intention of saying (and had been studying the best form of
words for three miles) that I thought them beautiful before I saw them
so near HER. But I couldn’t manage it. She was too bewildering. To see
her lay the flowers against her little dimpled chin, was to lose all
presence of mind and power of language in a feeble ecstasy. I wonder I
didn’t say, ‘Kill me, if you have a heart, Miss Mills. Let me die here!’

Then Dora held my flowers to Jip to smell. Then Jip growled, and
wouldn’t smell them. Then Dora laughed, and held them a little closer
to Jip, to make him. Then Jip laid hold of a bit of geranium with his
teeth, and worried imaginary cats in it. Then Dora beat him, and pouted,
and said, ‘My poor beautiful flowers!’ as compassionately, I thought, as
if Jip had laid hold of me. I wished he had!

‘You’ll be so glad to hear, Mr. Copperfield,’ said Dora, ‘that that
cross Miss Murdstone is not here. She has gone to her brother’s
marriage, and will be away at least three weeks. Isn’t that delightful?’

I said I was sure it must be delightful to her, and all that was
delightful to her was delightful to me. Miss Mills, with an air of
superior wisdom and benevolence, smiled upon us.

‘She is the most disagreeable thing I ever saw,’ said Dora. ‘You can’t
believe how ill-tempered and shocking she is, Julia.’

‘Yes, I can, my dear!’ said Julia.

‘YOU can, perhaps, love,’ returned Dora, with her hand on Julia’s.
‘Forgive my not excepting you, my dear, at first.’

I learnt, from this, that Miss Mills had had her trials in the course
of a chequered existence; and that to these, perhaps, I might refer that
wise benignity of manner which I had already noticed. I found, in
the course of the day, that this was the case: Miss Mills having been
unhappy in a misplaced affection, and being understood to have retired
from the world on her awful stock of experience, but still to take a
calm interest in the unblighted hopes and loves of youth.

But now Mr. Spenlow came out of the house, and Dora went to him,
saying, ‘Look, papa, what beautiful flowers!’ And Miss Mills smiled
thoughtfully, as who should say, ‘Ye Mayflies, enjoy your brief
existence in the bright morning of life!’ And we all walked from the
lawn towards the carriage, which was getting ready.

I shall never have such a ride again. I have never had such another.
There were only those three, their hamper, my hamper, and the
guitar-case, in the phaeton; and, of course, the phaeton was open; and
I rode behind it, and Dora sat with her back to the horses, looking
towards me. She kept the bouquet close to her on the cushion, and
wouldn’t allow Jip to sit on that side of her at all, for fear he should
crush it. She often carried it in her hand, often refreshed herself
with its fragrance. Our eyes at those times often met; and my great
astonishment is that I didn’t go over the head of my gallant grey into
the carriage.

There was dust, I believe. There was a good deal of dust, I believe. I
have a faint impression that Mr. Spenlow remonstrated with me for riding
in it; but I knew of none. I was sensible of a mist of love and beauty
about Dora, but of nothing else. He stood up sometimes, and asked me
what I thought of the prospect. I said it was delightful, and I dare
say it was; but it was all Dora to me. The sun shone Dora, and the birds
sang Dora. The south wind blew Dora, and the wild flowers in the hedges
were all Doras, to a bud. My comfort is, Miss Mills understood me. Miss
Mills alone could enter into my feelings thoroughly.

I don’t know how long we were going, and to this hour I know as little
where we went. Perhaps it was near Guildford. Perhaps some Arabian-night
magician, opened up the place for the day, and shut it up for ever when
we came away. It was a green spot, on a hill, carpeted with soft turf.
There were shady trees, and heather, and, as far as the eye could see, a
rich landscape.

It was a trying thing to find people here, waiting for us; and my
jealousy, even of the ladies, knew no bounds. But all of my own
sex--especially one impostor, three or four years my elder, with a red
whisker, on which he established an amount of presumption not to be
endured--were my mortal foes.

We all unpacked our baskets, and employed ourselves in getting dinner
ready. Red Whisker pretended he could make a salad (which I don’t
believe), and obtruded himself on public notice. Some of the young
ladies washed the lettuces for him, and sliced them under his
directions. Dora was among these. I felt that fate had pitted me against
this man, and one of us must fall.

Red Whisker made his salad (I wondered how they could eat it. Nothing
should have induced ME to touch it!) and voted himself into the charge
of the wine-cellar, which he constructed, being an ingenious beast, in
the hollow trunk of a tree. By and by, I saw him, with the majority of a
lobster on his plate, eating his dinner at the feet of Dora!

I have but an indistinct idea of what happened for some time after this
baleful object presented itself to my view. I was very merry, I know;
but it was hollow merriment. I attached myself to a young creature in
pink, with little eyes, and flirted with her desperately. She received
my attentions with favour; but whether on my account solely, or because
she had any designs on Red Whisker, I can’t say. Dora’s health was
drunk. When I drank it, I affected to interrupt my conversation for that
purpose, and to resume it immediately afterwards. I caught Dora’s eye as
I bowed to her, and I thought it looked appealing. But it looked at me
over the head of Red Whisker, and I was adamant.

The young creature in pink had a mother in green; and I rather think the
latter separated us from motives of policy. Howbeit, there was a general
breaking up of the party, while the remnants of the dinner were being
put away; and I strolled off by myself among the trees, in a raging and
remorseful state. I was debating whether I should pretend that I was not
well, and fly--I don’t know where--upon my gallant grey, when Dora and
Miss Mills met me.

‘Mr. Copperfield,’ said Miss Mills, ‘you are dull.’

I begged her pardon. Not at all.

‘And Dora,’ said Miss Mills, ‘YOU are dull.’

Oh dear no! Not in the least.

‘Mr. Copperfield and Dora,’ said Miss Mills, with an almost venerable
air. ‘Enough of this. Do not allow a trivial misunderstanding to wither
the blossoms of spring, which, once put forth and blighted, cannot be
renewed. I speak,’ said Miss Mills, ‘from experience of the past--the
remote, irrevocable past. The gushing fountains which sparkle in the
sun, must not be stopped in mere caprice; the oasis in the desert of
Sahara must not be plucked up idly.’

I hardly knew what I did, I was burning all over to that extraordinary
extent; but I took Dora’s little hand and kissed it--and she let me!
I kissed Miss Mills’s hand; and we all seemed, to my thinking, to go
straight up to the seventh heaven. We did not come down again. We stayed
up there all the evening. At first we strayed to and fro among the
trees: I with Dora’s shy arm drawn through mine: and Heaven knows,
folly as it all was, it would have been a happy fate to have been struck
immortal with those foolish feelings, and have stayed among the trees
for ever!

But, much too soon, we heard the others laughing and talking, and
calling ‘where’s Dora?’ So we went back, and they wanted Dora to sing.
Red Whisker would have got the guitar-case out of the carriage, but Dora
told him nobody knew where it was, but I. So Red Whisker was done for
in a moment; and I got it, and I unlocked it, and I took the guitar out,
and I sat by her, and I held her handkerchief and gloves, and I drank in
every note of her dear voice, and she sang to ME who loved her, and all
the others might applaud as much as they liked, but they had nothing to
do with it!

I was intoxicated with joy. I was afraid it was too happy to be real,
and that I should wake in Buckingham Street presently, and hear Mrs.
Crupp clinking the teacups in getting breakfast ready. But Dora sang,
and others sang, and Miss Mills sang--about the slumbering echoes in the
caverns of Memory; as if she were a hundred years old--and the evening
came on; and we had tea, with the kettle boiling gipsy-fashion; and I
was still as happy as ever.

I was happier than ever when the party broke up, and the other people,
defeated Red Whisker and all, went their several ways, and we went ours
through the still evening and the dying light, with sweet scents
rising up around us. Mr. Spenlow being a little drowsy after the
champagne--honour to the soil that grew the grape, to the grape that
made the wine, to the sun that ripened it, and to the merchant who
adulterated it!--and being fast asleep in a corner of the carriage, I
rode by the side and talked to Dora. She admired my horse and patted
him--oh, what a dear little hand it looked upon a horse!--and her shawl
would not keep right, and now and then I drew it round her with my arm;
and I even fancied that Jip began to see how it was, and to understand
that he must make up his mind to be friends with me.

That sagacious Miss Mills, too; that amiable, though quite used up,
recluse; that little patriarch of something less than twenty, who had
done with the world, and mustn’t on any account have the slumbering
echoes in the caverns of Memory awakened; what a kind thing she did!

‘Mr. Copperfield,’ said Miss Mills, ‘come to this side of the carriage a
moment--if you can spare a moment. I want to speak to you.’

Behold me, on my gallant grey, bending at the side of Miss Mills, with
my hand upon the carriage door!

‘Dora is coming to stay with me. She is coming home with me the day
after tomorrow. If you would like to call, I am sure papa would be
happy to see you.’ What could I do but invoke a silent blessing on Miss
Mills’s head, and store Miss Mills’s address in the securest corner of
my memory! What could I do but tell Miss Mills, with grateful looks
and fervent words, how much I appreciated her good offices, and what an
inestimable value I set upon her friendship!

Then Miss Mills benignantly dismissed me, saying, ‘Go back to Dora!’ and
I went; and Dora leaned out of the carriage to talk to me, and we talked
all the rest of the way; and I rode my gallant grey so close to the
wheel that I grazed his near fore leg against it, and ‘took the bark
off’, as his owner told me, ‘to the tune of three pun’ sivin’--which I
paid, and thought extremely cheap for so much joy. What time Miss Mills
sat looking at the moon, murmuring verses--and recalling, I suppose, the
ancient days when she and earth had anything in common.

Norwood was many miles too near, and we reached it many hours too soon;
but Mr. Spenlow came to himself a little short of it, and said,
‘You must come in, Copperfield, and rest!’ and I consenting, we had
sandwiches and wine-and-water. In the light room, Dora blushing looked
so lovely, that I could not tear myself away, but sat there staring, in
a dream, until the snoring of Mr. Spenlow inspired me with sufficient
consciousness to take my leave. So we parted; I riding all the way
to London with the farewell touch of Dora’s hand still light on mine,
recalling every incident and word ten thousand times; lying down in my
own bed at last, as enraptured a young noodle as ever was carried out of
his five wits by love.

When I awoke next morning, I was resolute to declare my passion to Dora,
and know my fate. Happiness or misery was now the question. There was no
other question that I knew of in the world, and only Dora could give the
answer to it. I passed three days in a luxury of wretchedness, torturing
myself by putting every conceivable variety of discouraging construction
on all that ever had taken place between Dora and me. At last, arrayed
for the purpose at a vast expense, I went to Miss Mills’s, fraught with
a declaration.

How many times I went up and down the street, and round the
square--painfully aware of being a much better answer to the old riddle
than the original one--before I could persuade myself to go up the steps
and knock, is no matter now. Even when, at last, I had knocked, and was
waiting at the door, I had some flurried thought of asking if that
were Mr. Blackboy’s (in imitation of poor Barkis), begging pardon, and
retreating. But I kept my ground.

Mr. Mills was not at home. I did not expect he would be. Nobody wanted
HIM. Miss Mills was at home. Miss Mills would do.

I was shown into a room upstairs, where Miss Mills and Dora were. Jip
was there. Miss Mills was copying music (I recollect, it was a new song,
called ‘Affection’s Dirge’), and Dora was painting flowers. What were my
feelings, when I recognized my own flowers; the identical Covent Garden
Market purchase! I cannot say that they were very like, or that
they particularly resembled any flowers that have ever come under my
observation; but I knew from the paper round them which was accurately
copied, what the composition was.

Miss Mills was very glad to see me, and very sorry her papa was not at
home: though I thought we all bore that with fortitude. Miss Mills was
conversational for a few minutes, and then, laying down her pen upon
‘Affection’s Dirge’, got up, and left the room.

I began to think I would put it off till tomorrow.

‘I hope your poor horse was not tired, when he got home at night,’ said
Dora, lifting up her beautiful eyes. ‘It was a long way for him.’

I began to think I would do it today.

‘It was a long way for him,’ said I, ‘for he had nothing to uphold him
on the journey.’

‘Wasn’t he fed, poor thing?’ asked Dora.

I began to think I would put it off till tomorrow.

‘Ye-yes,’ I said, ‘he was well taken care of. I mean he had not the
unutterable happiness that I had in being so near you.’

Dora bent her head over her drawing and said, after a little while--I
had sat, in the interval, in a burning fever, and with my legs in a very
rigid state--

‘You didn’t seem to be sensible of that happiness yourself, at one time
of the day.’

I saw now that I was in for it, and it must be done on the spot.

‘You didn’t care for that happiness in the least,’ said Dora, slightly
raising her eyebrows, and shaking her head, ‘when you were sitting by
Miss Kitt.’

Kitt, I should observe, was the name of the creature in pink, with the
little eyes.

‘Though certainly I don’t know why you should,’ said Dora, ‘or why you
should call it a happiness at all. But of course you don’t mean what you
say. And I am sure no one doubts your being at liberty to do whatever
you like. Jip, you naughty boy, come here!’

I don’t know how I did it. I did it in a moment. I intercepted Jip.
I had Dora in my arms. I was full of eloquence. I never stopped for a
word. I told her how I loved her. I told her I should die without her.
I told her that I idolized and worshipped her. Jip barked madly all the
time.

When Dora hung her head and cried, and trembled, my eloquence increased
so much the more. If she would like me to die for her, she had but to
say the word, and I was ready. Life without Dora’s love was not a thing
to have on any terms. I couldn’t bear it, and I wouldn’t. I had loved
her every minute, day and night, since I first saw her. I loved her at
that minute to distraction. I should always love her, every minute, to
distraction. Lovers had loved before, and lovers would love again; but
no lover had loved, might, could, would, or should ever love, as I loved
Dora. The more I raved, the more Jip barked. Each of us, in his own way,
got more mad every moment.

Well, well! Dora and I were sitting on the sofa by and by, quiet enough,
and Jip was lying in her lap, winking peacefully at me. It was off my
mind. I was in a state of perfect rapture. Dora and I were engaged.

I suppose we had some notion that this was to end in marriage. We must
have had some, because Dora stipulated that we were never to be married
without her papa’s consent. But, in our youthful ecstasy, I don’t think
that we really looked before us or behind us; or had any aspiration
beyond the ignorant present. We were to keep our secret from Mr.
Spenlow; but I am sure the idea never entered my head, then, that there
was anything dishonourable in that.

Miss Mills was more than usually pensive when Dora, going to find her,
brought her back;--I apprehend, because there was a tendency in what had
passed to awaken the slumbering echoes in the caverns of Memory. But she
gave us her blessing, and the assurance of her lasting friendship, and
spoke to us, generally, as became a Voice from the Cloister.

What an idle time it was! What an insubstantial, happy, foolish time it
was!

When I measured Dora’s finger for a ring that was to be made of
Forget-me-nots, and when the jeweller, to whom I took the measure, found
me out, and laughed over his order-book, and charged me anything he
liked for the pretty little toy, with its blue stones--so associated
in my remembrance with Dora’s hand, that yesterday, when I saw such
another, by chance, on the finger of my own daughter, there was a
momentary stirring in my heart, like pain!

When I walked about, exalted with my secret, and full of my own
interest, and felt the dignity of loving Dora, and of being beloved, so
much, that if I had walked the air, I could not have been more above the
people not so situated, who were creeping on the earth!

When we had those meetings in the garden of the square, and sat within
the dingy summer-house, so happy, that I love the London sparrows to
this hour, for nothing else, and see the plumage of the tropics in their
smoky feathers! When we had our first great quarrel (within a week
of our betrothal), and when Dora sent me back the ring, enclosed in a
despairing cocked-hat note, wherein she used the terrible expression
that ‘our love had begun in folly, and ended in madness!’ which dreadful
words occasioned me to tear my hair, and cry that all was over!

When, under cover of the night, I flew to Miss Mills, whom I saw by
stealth in a back kitchen where there was a mangle, and implored Miss
Mills to interpose between us and avert insanity. When Miss Mills
undertook the office and returned with Dora, exhorting us, from the
pulpit of her own bitter youth, to mutual concession, and the avoidance
of the Desert of Sahara!

When we cried, and made it up, and were so blest again, that the back
kitchen, mangle and all, changed to Love’s own temple, where we arranged
a plan of correspondence through Miss Mills, always to comprehend at
least one letter on each side every day!

What an idle time! What an insubstantial, happy, foolish time! Of all
the times of mine that Time has in his grip, there is none that in one
retrospect I can smile at half so much, and think of half so tenderly.



CHAPTER 34. MY AUNT ASTONISHES ME


I wrote to Agnes as soon as Dora and I were engaged. I wrote her a long
letter, in which I tried to make her comprehend how blest I was, and
what a darling Dora was. I entreated Agnes not to regard this as a
thoughtless passion which could ever yield to any other, or had the
least resemblance to the boyish fancies that we used to joke about. I
assured her that its profundity was quite unfathomable, and expressed my
belief that nothing like it had ever been known.

Somehow, as I wrote to Agnes on a fine evening by my open window, and
the remembrance of her clear calm eyes and gentle face came stealing
over me, it shed such a peaceful influence upon the hurry and agitation
in which I had been living lately, and of which my very happiness
partook in some degree, that it soothed me into tears. I remember that
I sat resting my head upon my hand, when the letter was half done,
cherishing a general fancy as if Agnes were one of the elements of my
natural home. As if, in the retirement of the house made almost sacred
to me by her presence, Dora and I must be happier than anywhere. As if,
in love, joy, sorrow, hope, or disappointment; in all emotions; my heart
turned naturally there, and found its refuge and best friend.

Of Steerforth I said nothing. I only told her there had been sad grief
at Yarmouth, on account of Emily’s flight; and that on me it made a
double wound, by reason of the circumstances attending it. I knew how
quick she always was to divine the truth, and that she would never be
the first to breathe his name.

To this letter, I received an answer by return of post. As I read it, I
seemed to hear Agnes speaking to me. It was like her cordial voice in my
ears. What can I say more!

While I had been away from home lately, Traddles had called twice or
thrice. Finding Peggotty within, and being informed by Peggotty (who
always volunteered that information to whomsoever would receive
it), that she was my old nurse, he had established a good-humoured
acquaintance with her, and had stayed to have a little chat with her
about me. So Peggotty said; but I am afraid the chat was all on her
own side, and of immoderate length, as she was very difficult indeed to
stop, God bless her! when she had me for her theme.

This reminds me, not only that I expected Traddles on a certain
afternoon of his own appointing, which was now come, but that Mrs. Crupp
had resigned everything appertaining to her office (the salary excepted)
until Peggotty should cease to present herself. Mrs. Crupp, after
holding divers conversations respecting Peggotty, in a very high-pitched
voice, on the staircase--with some invisible Familiar it would appear,
for corporeally speaking she was quite alone at those times--addressed a
letter to me, developing her views. Beginning it with that statement
of universal application, which fitted every occurrence of her life,
namely, that she was a mother herself, she went on to inform me that
she had once seen very different days, but that at all periods of her
existence she had had a constitutional objection to spies, intruders,
and informers. She named no names, she said; let them the cap fitted,
wear it; but spies, intruders, and informers, especially in widders’
weeds (this clause was underlined), she had ever accustomed herself to
look down upon. If a gentleman was the victim of spies, intruders, and
informers (but still naming no names), that was his own pleasure. He
had a right to please himself; so let him do. All that she, Mrs. Crupp,
stipulated for, was, that she should not be ‘brought in contract’
with such persons. Therefore she begged to be excused from any further
attendance on the top set, until things were as they formerly was, and
as they could be wished to be; and further mentioned that her little
book would be found upon the breakfast-table every Saturday morning,
when she requested an immediate settlement of the same, with the
benevolent view of saving trouble ‘and an ill-conwenience’ to all
parties.

After this, Mrs. Crupp confined herself to making pitfalls on the
stairs, principally with pitchers, and endeavouring to delude Peggotty
into breaking her legs. I found it rather harassing to live in this
state of siege, but was too much afraid of Mrs. Crupp to see any way out
of it.

‘My dear Copperfield,’ cried Traddles, punctually appearing at my door,
in spite of all these obstacles, ‘how do you do?’

‘My dear Traddles,’ said I, ‘I am delighted to see you at last, and very
sorry I have not been at home before. But I have been so much engaged--’

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ said Traddles, ‘of course. Yours lives in London, I
think.’

‘What did you say?’

‘She--excuse me--Miss D., you know,’ said Traddles, colouring in his
great delicacy, ‘lives in London, I believe?’

‘Oh yes. Near London.’

‘Mine, perhaps you recollect,’ said Traddles, with a serious look,
‘lives down in Devonshire--one of ten. Consequently, I am not so much
engaged as you--in that sense.’

‘I wonder you can bear,’ I returned, ‘to see her so seldom.’

‘Hah!’ said Traddles, thoughtfully. ‘It does seem a wonder. I suppose it
is, Copperfield, because there is no help for it?’

‘I suppose so,’ I replied with a smile, and not without a blush. ‘And
because you have so much constancy and patience, Traddles.’

‘Dear me!’ said Traddles, considering about it, ‘do I strike you in that
way, Copperfield? Really I didn’t know that I had. But she is such
an extraordinarily dear girl herself, that it’s possible she may
have imparted something of those virtues to me. Now you mention it,
Copperfield, I shouldn’t wonder at all. I assure you she is always
forgetting herself, and taking care of the other nine.’

‘Is she the eldest?’ I inquired.

‘Oh dear, no,’ said Traddles. ‘The eldest is a Beauty.’

He saw, I suppose, that I could not help smiling at the simplicity of
this reply; and added, with a smile upon his own ingenuous face:

‘Not, of course, but that my Sophy--pretty name, Copperfield, I always
think?’

‘Very pretty!’ said I.

‘Not, of course, but that Sophy is beautiful too in my eyes, and would
be one of the dearest girls that ever was, in anybody’s eyes (I should
think). But when I say the eldest is a Beauty, I mean she really is
a--’ he seemed to be describing clouds about himself, with both hands:
‘Splendid, you know,’ said Traddles, energetically. ‘Indeed!’ said I.

‘Oh, I assure you,’ said Traddles, ‘something very uncommon, indeed!
Then, you know, being formed for society and admiration, and not being
able to enjoy much of it in consequence of their limited means, she
naturally gets a little irritable and exacting, sometimes. Sophy puts
her in good humour!’

‘Is Sophy the youngest?’ I hazarded.

‘Oh dear, no!’ said Traddles, stroking his chin. ‘The two youngest are
only nine and ten. Sophy educates ‘em.’

‘The second daughter, perhaps?’ I hazarded.

‘No,’ said Traddles. ‘Sarah’s the second. Sarah has something the matter
with her spine, poor girl. The malady will wear out by and by, the
doctors say, but in the meantime she has to lie down for a twelvemonth.
Sophy nurses her. Sophy’s the fourth.’

‘Is the mother living?’ I inquired.

‘Oh yes,’ said Traddles, ‘she is alive. She is a very superior woman
indeed, but the damp country is not adapted to her constitution, and--in
fact, she has lost the use of her limbs.’

‘Dear me!’ said I.

‘Very sad, is it not?’ returned Traddles. ‘But in a merely domestic view
it is not so bad as it might be, because Sophy takes her place. She is
quite as much a mother to her mother, as she is to the other nine.’

I felt the greatest admiration for the virtues of this young lady; and,
honestly with the view of doing my best to prevent the good-nature
of Traddles from being imposed upon, to the detriment of their joint
prospects in life, inquired how Mr. Micawber was?

‘He is quite well, Copperfield, thank you,’ said Traddles. ‘I am not
living with him at present.’

‘No?’

‘No. You see the truth is,’ said Traddles, in a whisper, ‘he had changed
his name to Mortimer, in consequence of his temporary embarrassments;
and he don’t come out till after dark--and then in spectacles. There was
an execution put into our house, for rent. Mrs. Micawber was in such
a dreadful state that I really couldn’t resist giving my name to that
second bill we spoke of here. You may imagine how delightful it was to
my feelings, Copperfield, to see the matter settled with it, and Mrs.
Micawber recover her spirits.’

‘Hum!’ said I. ‘Not that her happiness was of long duration,’ pursued
Traddles, ‘for, unfortunately, within a week another execution came
in. It broke up the establishment. I have been living in a furnished
apartment since then, and the Mortimers have been very private indeed.
I hope you won’t think it selfish, Copperfield, if I mention that
the broker carried off my little round table with the marble top, and
Sophy’s flower-pot and stand?’

‘What a hard thing!’ I exclaimed indignantly.

‘It was a--it was a pull,’ said Traddles, with his usual wince at that
expression. ‘I don’t mention it reproachfully, however, but with a
motive. The fact is, Copperfield, I was unable to repurchase them at the
time of their seizure; in the first place, because the broker, having an
idea that I wanted them, ran the price up to an extravagant extent; and,
in the second place, because I--hadn’t any money. Now, I have kept
my eye since, upon the broker’s shop,’ said Traddles, with a great
enjoyment of his mystery, ‘which is up at the top of Tottenham Court
Road, and, at last, today I find them put out for sale. I have only
noticed them from over the way, because if the broker saw me, bless you,
he’d ask any price for them! What has occurred to me, having now the
money, is, that perhaps you wouldn’t object to ask that good nurse of
yours to come with me to the shop--I can show it her from round the
corner of the next street--and make the best bargain for them, as if
they were for herself, that she can!’

The delight with which Traddles propounded this plan to me, and the
sense he had of its uncommon artfulness, are among the freshest things
in my remembrance.

I told him that my old nurse would be delighted to assist him, and that
we would all three take the field together, but on one condition. That
condition was, that he should make a solemn resolution to grant no more
loans of his name, or anything else, to Mr. Micawber.

‘My dear Copperfield,’ said Traddles, ‘I have already done so, because
I begin to feel that I have not only been inconsiderate, but that I have
been positively unjust to Sophy. My word being passed to myself, there
is no longer any apprehension; but I pledge it to you, too, with the
greatest readiness. That first unlucky obligation, I have paid. I have
no doubt Mr. Micawber would have paid it if he could, but he could not.
One thing I ought to mention, which I like very much in Mr. Micawber,
Copperfield. It refers to the second obligation, which is not yet due.
He don’t tell me that it is provided for, but he says it WILL BE. Now, I
think there is something very fair and honest about that!’

I was unwilling to damp my good friend’s confidence, and therefore
assented. After a little further conversation, we went round to the
chandler’s shop, to enlist Peggotty; Traddles declining to pass the
evening with me, both because he endured the liveliest apprehensions
that his property would be bought by somebody else before he could
re-purchase it, and because it was the evening he always devoted to
writing to the dearest girl in the world.

I never shall forget him peeping round the corner of the street in
Tottenham Court Road, while Peggotty was bargaining for the precious
articles; or his agitation when she came slowly towards us after vainly
offering a price, and was hailed by the relenting broker, and went back
again. The end of the negotiation was, that she bought the property on
tolerably easy terms, and Traddles was transported with pleasure.

‘I am very much obliged to you, indeed,’ said Traddles, on hearing it
was to be sent to where he lived, that night. ‘If I might ask one other
favour, I hope you would not think it absurd, Copperfield?’

I said beforehand, certainly not.

‘Then if you WOULD be good enough,’ said Traddles to Peggotty, ‘to
get the flower-pot now, I think I should like (it being Sophy’s,
Copperfield) to carry it home myself!’

Peggotty was glad to get it for him, and he overwhelmed her with thanks,
and went his way up Tottenham Court Road, carrying the flower-pot
affectionately in his arms, with one of the most delighted expressions
of countenance I ever saw.

We then turned back towards my chambers. As the shops had charms for
Peggotty which I never knew them possess in the same degree for anybody
else, I sauntered easily along, amused by her staring in at the windows,
and waiting for her as often as she chose. We were thus a good while in
getting to the Adelphi.

On our way upstairs, I called her attention to the sudden disappearance
of Mrs. Crupp’s pitfalls, and also to the prints of recent footsteps. We
were both very much surprised, coming higher up, to find my outer door
standing open (which I had shut) and to hear voices inside.

We looked at one another, without knowing what to make of this, and went
into the sitting-room. What was my amazement to find, of all people upon
earth, my aunt there, and Mr. Dick! My aunt sitting on a quantity of
luggage, with her two birds before her, and her cat on her knee, like a
female Robinson Crusoe, drinking tea. Mr. Dick leaning thoughtfully on
a great kite, such as we had often been out together to fly, with more
luggage piled about him!

‘My dear aunt!’ cried I. ‘Why, what an unexpected pleasure!’

We cordially embraced; and Mr. Dick and I cordially shook hands; and
Mrs. Crupp, who was busy making tea, and could not be too attentive,
cordially said she had knowed well as Mr. Copperfull would have his
heart in his mouth, when he see his dear relations.

‘Holloa!’ said my aunt to Peggotty, who quailed before her awful
presence. ‘How are YOU?’

‘You remember my aunt, Peggotty?’ said I.

‘For the love of goodness, child,’ exclaimed my aunt, ‘don’t call the
woman by that South Sea Island name! If she married and got rid of
it, which was the best thing she could do, why don’t you give her the
benefit of the change? What’s your name now,--P?’ said my aunt, as a
compromise for the obnoxious appellation.

‘Barkis, ma’am,’ said Peggotty, with a curtsey.

‘Well! That’s human,’ said my aunt. ‘It sounds less as if you wanted a
missionary. How d’ye do, Barkis? I hope you’re well?’

Encouraged by these gracious words, and by my aunt’s extending her
hand, Barkis came forward, and took the hand, and curtseyed her
acknowledgements.

‘We are older than we were, I see,’ said my aunt. ‘We have only met each
other once before, you know. A nice business we made of it then! Trot,
my dear, another cup.’

I handed it dutifully to my aunt, who was in her usual inflexible state
of figure; and ventured a remonstrance with her on the subject of her
sitting on a box.

‘Let me draw the sofa here, or the easy-chair, aunt,’ said I. ‘Why
should you be so uncomfortable?’

‘Thank you, Trot,’ replied my aunt, ‘I prefer to sit upon my property.’
Here my aunt looked hard at Mrs. Crupp, and observed, ‘We needn’t
trouble you to wait, ma’am.’

‘Shall I put a little more tea in the pot afore I go, ma’am?’ said Mrs.
Crupp.

‘No, I thank you, ma’am,’ replied my aunt.

‘Would you let me fetch another pat of butter, ma’am?’ said Mrs. Crupp.
‘Or would you be persuaded to try a new-laid hegg? or should I brile
a rasher? Ain’t there nothing I could do for your dear aunt, Mr.
Copperfull?’

‘Nothing, ma’am,’ returned my aunt. ‘I shall do very well, I thank you.’

Mrs. Crupp, who had been incessantly smiling to express sweet temper,
and incessantly holding her head on one side, to express a general
feebleness of constitution, and incessantly rubbing her hands, to
express a desire to be of service to all deserving objects, gradually
smiled herself, one-sided herself, and rubbed herself, out of the room.
‘Dick!’ said my aunt. ‘You know what I told you about time-servers and
wealth-worshippers?’

Mr. Dick--with rather a scared look, as if he had forgotten it--returned
a hasty answer in the affirmative.

‘Mrs. Crupp is one of them,’ said my aunt. ‘Barkis, I’ll trouble you to
look after the tea, and let me have another cup, for I don’t fancy that
woman’s pouring-out!’

I knew my aunt sufficiently well to know that she had something of
importance on her mind, and that there was far more matter in this
arrival than a stranger might have supposed. I noticed how her eye
lighted on me, when she thought my attention otherwise occupied; and
what a curious process of hesitation appeared to be going on within
her, while she preserved her outward stiffness and composure. I began
to reflect whether I had done anything to offend her; and my conscience
whispered me that I had not yet told her about Dora. Could it by any
means be that, I wondered!

As I knew she would only speak in her own good time, I sat down near
her, and spoke to the birds, and played with the cat, and was as easy
as I could be. But I was very far from being really easy; and I should
still have been so, even if Mr. Dick, leaning over the great kite behind
my aunt, had not taken every secret opportunity of shaking his head
darkly at me, and pointing at her.

‘Trot,’ said my aunt at last, when she had finished her tea, and
carefully smoothed down her dress, and wiped her lips--‘you needn’t go,
Barkis!--Trot, have you got to be firm and self-reliant?’

‘I hope so, aunt.’

‘What do you think?’ inquired Miss Betsey.

‘I think so, aunt.’

‘Then why, my love,’ said my aunt, looking earnestly at me, ‘why do you
think I prefer to sit upon this property of mine tonight?’

I shook my head, unable to guess.

‘Because,’ said my aunt, ‘it’s all I have. Because I’m ruined, my dear!’

If the house, and every one of us, had tumbled out into the river
together, I could hardly have received a greater shock.

‘Dick knows it,’ said my aunt, laying her hand calmly on my shoulder. ‘I
am ruined, my dear Trot! All I have in the world is in this room, except
the cottage; and that I have left Janet to let. Barkis, I want to get a
bed for this gentleman tonight. To save expense, perhaps you can make
up something here for myself. Anything will do. It’s only for tonight.
We’ll talk about this, more, tomorrow.’

I was roused from my amazement, and concern for her--I am sure, for
her--by her falling on my neck, for a moment, and crying that she only
grieved for me. In another moment she suppressed this emotion; and said
with an aspect more triumphant than dejected:

‘We must meet reverses boldly, and not suffer them to frighten us, my
dear. We must learn to act the play out. We must live misfortune down,
Trot!’



CHAPTER 35. DEPRESSION


As soon as I could recover my presence of mind, which quite deserted me
in the first overpowering shock of my aunt’s intelligence, I proposed
to Mr. Dick to come round to the chandler’s shop, and take possession of
the bed which Mr. Peggotty had lately vacated. The chandler’s shop being
in Hungerford Market, and Hungerford Market being a very different place
in those days, there was a low wooden colonnade before the door (not
very unlike that before the house where the little man and woman used
to live, in the old weather-glass), which pleased Mr. Dick mightily. The
glory of lodging over this structure would have compensated him, I dare
say, for many inconveniences; but, as there were really few to bear,
beyond the compound of flavours I have already mentioned, and perhaps
the want of a little more elbow-room, he was perfectly charmed with his
accommodation. Mrs. Crupp had indignantly assured him that there wasn’t
room to swing a cat there; but, as Mr. Dick justly observed to me,
sitting down on the foot of the bed, nursing his leg, ‘You know,
Trotwood, I don’t want to swing a cat. I never do swing a cat.
Therefore, what does that signify to ME!’

I tried to ascertain whether Mr. Dick had any understanding of the
causes of this sudden and great change in my aunt’s affairs. As I might
have expected, he had none at all. The only account he could give of it
was, that my aunt had said to him, the day before yesterday, ‘Now, Dick,
are you really and truly the philosopher I take you for?’ That then
he had said, Yes, he hoped so. That then my aunt had said, ‘Dick, I
am ruined.’ That then he had said, ‘Oh, indeed!’ That then my aunt had
praised him highly, which he was glad of. And that then they had come to
me, and had had bottled porter and sandwiches on the road.

Mr. Dick was so very complacent, sitting on the foot of the bed, nursing
his leg, and telling me this, with his eyes wide open and a surprised
smile, that I am sorry to say I was provoked into explaining to him
that ruin meant distress, want, and starvation; but I was soon bitterly
reproved for this harshness, by seeing his face turn pale, and tears
course down his lengthened cheeks, while he fixed upon me a look of such
unutterable woe, that it might have softened a far harder heart than
mine. I took infinitely greater pains to cheer him up again than I had
taken to depress him; and I soon understood (as I ought to have known at
first) that he had been so confident, merely because of his faith in
the wisest and most wonderful of women, and his unbounded reliance on my
intellectual resources. The latter, I believe, he considered a match for
any kind of disaster not absolutely mortal.

‘What can we do, Trotwood?’ said Mr. Dick. ‘There’s the Memorial-’

‘To be sure there is,’ said I. ‘But all we can do just now, Mr. Dick,
is to keep a cheerful countenance, and not let my aunt see that we are
thinking about it.’

He assented to this in the most earnest manner; and implored me, if I
should see him wandering an inch out of the right course, to recall him
by some of those superior methods which were always at my command. But I
regret to state that the fright I had given him proved too much for his
best attempts at concealment. All the evening his eyes wandered to my
aunt’s face, with an expression of the most dismal apprehension, as if
he saw her growing thin on the spot. He was conscious of this, and put
a constraint upon his head; but his keeping that immovable, and sitting
rolling his eyes like a piece of machinery, did not mend the matter at
all. I saw him look at the loaf at supper (which happened to be a small
one), as if nothing else stood between us and famine; and when my aunt
insisted on his making his customary repast, I detected him in the act
of pocketing fragments of his bread and cheese; I have no doubt for the
purpose of reviving us with those savings, when we should have reached
an advanced stage of attenuation.

My aunt, on the other hand, was in a composed frame of mind, which was
a lesson to all of us--to me, I am sure. She was extremely gracious
to Peggotty, except when I inadvertently called her by that name; and,
strange as I knew she felt in London, appeared quite at home. She was
to have my bed, and I was to lie in the sitting-room, to keep guard over
her. She made a great point of being so near the river, in case of a
conflagration; and I suppose really did find some satisfaction in that
circumstance.

‘Trot, my dear,’ said my aunt, when she saw me making preparations for
compounding her usual night-draught, ‘No!’

‘Nothing, aunt?’

‘Not wine, my dear. Ale.’

‘But there is wine here, aunt. And you always have it made of wine.’

‘Keep that, in case of sickness,’ said my aunt. ‘We mustn’t use it
carelessly, Trot. Ale for me. Half a pint.’

I thought Mr. Dick would have fallen, insensible. My aunt being
resolute, I went out and got the ale myself. As it was growing late,
Peggotty and Mr. Dick took that opportunity of repairing to the
chandler’s shop together. I parted from him, poor fellow, at the corner
of the street, with his great kite at his back, a very monument of human
misery.

My aunt was walking up and down the room when I returned, crimping the
borders of her nightcap with her fingers. I warmed the ale and made the
toast on the usual infallible principles. When it was ready for her, she
was ready for it, with her nightcap on, and the skirt of her gown turned
back on her knees.

‘My dear,’ said my aunt, after taking a spoonful of it; ‘it’s a great
deal better than wine. Not half so bilious.’

I suppose I looked doubtful, for she added:

‘Tut, tut, child. If nothing worse than Ale happens to us, we are well
off.’

‘I should think so myself, aunt, I am sure,’ said I.

‘Well, then, why DON’T you think so?’ said my aunt.

‘Because you and I are very different people,’ I returned.

‘Stuff and nonsense, Trot!’ replied my aunt.

My aunt went on with a quiet enjoyment, in which there was very little
affectation, if any; drinking the warm ale with a tea-spoon, and soaking
her strips of toast in it.

‘Trot,’ said she, ‘I don’t care for strange faces in general, but I
rather like that Barkis of yours, do you know!’

‘It’s better than a hundred pounds to hear you say so!’ said I.

‘It’s a most extraordinary world,’ observed my aunt, rubbing her nose;
‘how that woman ever got into it with that name, is unaccountable to me.
It would be much more easy to be born a Jackson, or something of that
sort, one would think.’

‘Perhaps she thinks so, too; it’s not her fault,’ said I.

‘I suppose not,’ returned my aunt, rather grudging the admission; ‘but
it’s very aggravating. However, she’s Barkis now. That’s some comfort.
Barkis is uncommonly fond of you, Trot.’

‘There is nothing she would leave undone to prove it,’ said I.

‘Nothing, I believe,’ returned my aunt. ‘Here, the poor fool has been
begging and praying about handing over some of her money--because she
has got too much of it. A simpleton!’

My aunt’s tears of pleasure were positively trickling down into the warm
ale.

‘She’s the most ridiculous creature that ever was born,’ said my aunt.
‘I knew, from the first moment when I saw her with that poor dear
blessed baby of a mother of yours, that she was the most ridiculous of
mortals. But there are good points in Barkis!’

Affecting to laugh, she got an opportunity of putting her hand to
her eyes. Having availed herself of it, she resumed her toast and her
discourse together.

‘Ah! Mercy upon us!’ sighed my aunt. ‘I know all about it, Trot! Barkis
and myself had quite a gossip while you were out with Dick. I know all
about it. I don’t know where these wretched girls expect to go to, for
my part. I wonder they don’t knock out their brains against--against
mantelpieces,’ said my aunt; an idea which was probably suggested to her
by her contemplation of mine.

‘Poor Emily!’ said I.

‘Oh, don’t talk to me about poor,’ returned my aunt. ‘She should have
thought of that, before she caused so much misery! Give me a kiss, Trot.
I am sorry for your early experience.’

As I bent forward, she put her tumbler on my knee to detain me, and
said:

‘Oh, Trot, Trot! And so you fancy yourself in love! Do you?’

‘Fancy, aunt!’ I exclaimed, as red as I could be. ‘I adore her with my
whole soul!’

‘Dora, indeed!’ returned my aunt. ‘And you mean to say the little thing
is very fascinating, I suppose?’

‘My dear aunt,’ I replied, ‘no one can form the least idea what she is!’

‘Ah! And not silly?’ said my aunt.

‘Silly, aunt!’

I seriously believe it had never once entered my head for a single
moment, to consider whether she was or not. I resented the idea, of
course; but I was in a manner struck by it, as a new one altogether.

‘Not light-headed?’ said my aunt.

‘Light-headed, aunt!’ I could only repeat this daring speculation
with the same kind of feeling with which I had repeated the preceding
question.

‘Well, well!’ said my aunt. ‘I only ask. I don’t depreciate her. Poor
little couple! And so you think you were formed for one another, and are
to go through a party-supper-table kind of life, like two pretty pieces
of confectionery, do you, Trot?’

She asked me this so kindly, and with such a gentle air, half playful
and half sorrowful, that I was quite touched.

‘We are young and inexperienced, aunt, I know,’ I replied; ‘and I dare
say we say and think a good deal that is rather foolish. But we love
one another truly, I am sure. If I thought Dora could ever love anybody
else, or cease to love me; or that I could ever love anybody else, or
cease to love her; I don’t know what I should do--go out of my mind, I
think!’

‘Ah, Trot!’ said my aunt, shaking her head, and smiling gravely; ‘blind,
blind, blind!’

‘Someone that I know, Trot,’ my aunt pursued, after a pause, ‘though of
a very pliant disposition, has an earnestness of affection in him that
reminds me of poor Baby. Earnestness is what that Somebody must look
for, to sustain him and improve him, Trot. Deep, downright, faithful
earnestness.’

‘If you only knew the earnestness of Dora, aunt!’ I cried.

‘Oh, Trot!’ she said again; ‘blind, blind!’ and without knowing why,
I felt a vague unhappy loss or want of something overshadow me like a
cloud.

‘However,’ said my aunt, ‘I don’t want to put two young creatures out
of conceit with themselves, or to make them unhappy; so, though it is a
girl and boy attachment, and girl and boy attachments very often--mind!
I don’t say always!--come to nothing, still we’ll be serious about it,
and hope for a prosperous issue one of these days. There’s time enough
for it to come to anything!’

This was not upon the whole very comforting to a rapturous lover; but
I was glad to have my aunt in my confidence, and I was mindful of
her being fatigued. So I thanked her ardently for this mark of her
affection, and for all her other kindnesses towards me; and after a
tender good night, she took her nightcap into my bedroom.

How miserable I was, when I lay down! How I thought and thought about my
being poor, in Mr. Spenlow’s eyes; about my not being what I thought I
was, when I proposed to Dora; about the chivalrous necessity of
telling Dora what my worldly condition was, and releasing her from her
engagement if she thought fit; about how I should contrive to live,
during the long term of my articles, when I was earning nothing; about
doing something to assist my aunt, and seeing no way of doing anything;
about coming down to have no money in my pocket, and to wear a shabby
coat, and to be able to carry Dora no little presents, and to ride no
gallant greys, and to show myself in no agreeable light! Sordid and
selfish as I knew it was, and as I tortured myself by knowing that it
was, to let my mind run on my own distress so much, I was so devoted
to Dora that I could not help it. I knew that it was base in me not to
think more of my aunt, and less of myself; but, so far, selfishness
was inseparable from Dora, and I could not put Dora on one side for any
mortal creature. How exceedingly miserable I was, that night!

As to sleep, I had dreams of poverty in all sorts of shapes, but I
seemed to dream without the previous ceremony of going to sleep. Now I
was ragged, wanting to sell Dora matches, six bundles for a halfpenny;
now I was at the office in a nightgown and boots, remonstrated with by
Mr. Spenlow on appearing before the clients in that airy attire; now
I was hungrily picking up the crumbs that fell from old Tiffey’s
daily biscuit, regularly eaten when St. Paul’s struck one; now I was
hopelessly endeavouring to get a licence to marry Dora, having nothing
but one of Uriah Heep’s gloves to offer in exchange, which the whole
Commons rejected; and still, more or less conscious of my own room, I
was always tossing about like a distressed ship in a sea of bed-clothes.

My aunt was restless, too, for I frequently heard her walking to and
fro. Two or three times in the course of the night, attired in a long
flannel wrapper in which she looked seven feet high, she appeared, like
a disturbed ghost, in my room, and came to the side of the sofa on which
I lay. On the first occasion I started up in alarm, to learn that she
inferred from a particular light in the sky, that Westminster Abbey
was on fire; and to be consulted in reference to the probability of its
igniting Buckingham Street, in case the wind changed. Lying still, after
that, I found that she sat down near me, whispering to herself ‘Poor
boy!’ And then it made me twenty times more wretched, to know how
unselfishly mindful she was of me, and how selfishly mindful I was of
myself.

It was difficult to believe that a night so long to me, could be short
to anybody else. This consideration set me thinking and thinking of an
imaginary party where people were dancing the hours away, until that
became a dream too, and I heard the music incessantly playing one tune,
and saw Dora incessantly dancing one dance, without taking the least
notice of me. The man who had been playing the harp all night, was
trying in vain to cover it with an ordinary-sized nightcap, when I
awoke; or I should rather say, when I left off trying to go to sleep,
and saw the sun shining in through the window at last.

There was an old Roman bath in those days at the bottom of one of the
streets out of the Strand--it may be there still--in which I have had
many a cold plunge. Dressing myself as quietly as I could, and leaving
Peggotty to look after my aunt, I tumbled head foremost into it,
and then went for a walk to Hampstead. I had a hope that this brisk
treatment might freshen my wits a little; and I think it did them good,
for I soon came to the conclusion that the first step I ought to take
was, to try if my articles could be cancelled and the premium recovered.
I got some breakfast on the Heath, and walked back to Doctors’ Commons,
along the watered roads and through a pleasant smell of summer flowers,
growing in gardens and carried into town on hucksters’ heads, intent on
this first effort to meet our altered circumstances.

I arrived at the office so soon, after all, that I had half an hour’s
loitering about the Commons, before old Tiffey, who was always first,
appeared with his key. Then I sat down in my shady corner, looking up
at the sunlight on the opposite chimney-pots, and thinking about Dora;
until Mr. Spenlow came in, crisp and curly.

‘How are you, Copperfield?’ said he. ‘Fine morning!’

‘Beautiful morning, sir,’ said I. ‘Could I say a word to you before you
go into Court?’

‘By all means,’ said he. ‘Come into my room.’

I followed him into his room, and he began putting on his gown, and
touching himself up before a little glass he had, hanging inside a
closet door.

‘I am sorry to say,’ said I, ‘that I have some rather disheartening
intelligence from my aunt.’

‘No!’ said he. ‘Dear me! Not paralysis, I hope?’

‘It has no reference to her health, sir,’ I replied. ‘She has met with
some large losses. In fact, she has very little left, indeed.’

‘You as-tound me, Copperfield!’ cried Mr. Spenlow.

I shook my head. ‘Indeed, sir,’ said I, ‘her affairs are so changed,
that I wished to ask you whether it would be possible--at a sacrifice on
our part of some portion of the premium, of course,’ I put in this, on
the spur of the moment, warned by the blank expression of his face--‘to
cancel my articles?’

What it cost me to make this proposal, nobody knows. It was like asking,
as a favour, to be sentenced to transportation from Dora.

‘To cancel your articles, Copperfield? Cancel?’

I explained with tolerable firmness, that I really did not know where
my means of subsistence were to come from, unless I could earn them for
myself. I had no fear for the future, I said--and I laid great emphasis
on that, as if to imply that I should still be decidedly eligible for a
son-in-law one of these days--but, for the present, I was thrown upon
my own resources. ‘I am extremely sorry to hear this, Copperfield,’ said
Mr. Spenlow. ‘Extremely sorry. It is not usual to cancel articles for
any such reason. It is not a professional course of proceeding. It is
not a convenient precedent at all. Far from it. At the same time--’

‘You are very good, sir,’ I murmured, anticipating a concession.

‘Not at all. Don’t mention it,’ said Mr. Spenlow. ‘At the same time, I
was going to say, if it had been my lot to have my hands unfettered--if
I had not a partner--Mr. Jorkins--’

My hopes were dashed in a moment, but I made another effort.

‘Do you think, sir,’ said I, ‘if I were to mention it to Mr. Jorkins--’

Mr. Spenlow shook his head discouragingly. ‘Heaven forbid, Copperfield,’
he replied, ‘that I should do any man an injustice: still less, Mr.
Jorkins. But I know my partner, Copperfield. Mr. Jorkins is not a man
to respond to a proposition of this peculiar nature. Mr. Jorkins is very
difficult to move from the beaten track. You know what he is!’

I am sure I knew nothing about him, except that he had originally been
alone in the business, and now lived by himself in a house near Montagu
Square, which was fearfully in want of painting; that he came very
late of a day, and went away very early; that he never appeared to be
consulted about anything; and that he had a dingy little black-hole of
his own upstairs, where no business was ever done, and where there was
a yellow old cartridge-paper pad upon his desk, unsoiled by ink, and
reported to be twenty years of age.

‘Would you object to my mentioning it to him, sir?’ I asked.

‘By no means,’ said Mr. Spenlow. ‘But I have some experience of Mr.
Jorkins, Copperfield. I wish it were otherwise, for I should be happy
to meet your views in any respect. I cannot have the objection to your
mentioning it to Mr. Jorkins, Copperfield, if you think it worth while.’

Availing myself of this permission, which was given with a warm shake
of the hand, I sat thinking about Dora, and looking at the sunlight
stealing from the chimney-pots down the wall of the opposite house,
until Mr. Jorkins came. I then went up to Mr. Jorkins’s room, and
evidently astonished Mr. Jorkins very much by making my appearance
there.

‘Come in, Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mr. Jorkins. ‘Come in!’

I went in, and sat down; and stated my case to Mr. Jorkins pretty much
as I had stated it to Mr. Spenlow. Mr. Jorkins was not by any means the
awful creature one might have expected, but a large, mild, smooth-faced
man of sixty, who took so much snuff that there was a tradition in the
Commons that he lived principally on that stimulant, having little room
in his system for any other article of diet.

‘You have mentioned this to Mr. Spenlow, I suppose?’ said Mr. Jorkins;
when he had heard me, very restlessly, to an end.

I answered Yes, and told him that Mr. Spenlow had introduced his name.

‘He said I should object?’ asked Mr. Jorkins.

I was obliged to admit that Mr. Spenlow had considered it probable.

‘I am sorry to say, Mr. Copperfield, I can’t advance your object,’ said
Mr. Jorkins, nervously. ‘The fact is--but I have an appointment at the
Bank, if you’ll have the goodness to excuse me.’

With that he rose in a great hurry, and was going out of the room, when
I made bold to say that I feared, then, there was no way of arranging
the matter?

‘No!’ said Mr. Jorkins, stopping at the door to shake his head. ‘Oh, no!
I object, you know,’ which he said very rapidly, and went out. ‘You must
be aware, Mr. Copperfield,’ he added, looking restlessly in at the door
again, ‘if Mr. Spenlow objects--’

‘Personally, he does not object, sir,’ said I.

‘Oh! Personally!’ repeated Mr. Jorkins, in an impatient manner. ‘I
assure you there’s an objection, Mr. Copperfield. Hopeless! What you
wish to be done, can’t be done. I--I really have got an appointment
at the Bank.’ With that he fairly ran away; and to the best of my
knowledge, it was three days before he showed himself in the Commons
again.

Being very anxious to leave no stone unturned, I waited until Mr.
Spenlow came in, and then described what had passed; giving him to
understand that I was not hopeless of his being able to soften the
adamantine Jorkins, if he would undertake the task.

‘Copperfield,’ returned Mr. Spenlow, with a gracious smile, ‘you have
not known my partner, Mr. Jorkins, as long as I have. Nothing is
farther from my thoughts than to attribute any degree of artifice to Mr.
Jorkins. But Mr. Jorkins has a way of stating his objections which often
deceives people. No, Copperfield!’ shaking his head. ‘Mr. Jorkins is not
to be moved, believe me!’

I was completely bewildered between Mr. Spenlow and Mr. Jorkins, as
to which of them really was the objecting partner; but I saw with
sufficient clearness that there was obduracy somewhere in the firm, and
that the recovery of my aunt’s thousand pounds was out of the
question. In a state of despondency, which I remember with anything
but satisfaction, for I know it still had too much reference to myself
(though always in connexion with Dora), I left the office, and went
homeward.

I was trying to familiarize my mind with the worst, and to present to
myself the arrangements we should have to make for the future in their
sternest aspect, when a hackney-chariot coming after me, and stopping at
my very feet, occasioned me to look up. A fair hand was stretched forth
to me from the window; and the face I had never seen without a feeling
of serenity and happiness, from the moment when it first turned back
on the old oak staircase with the great broad balustrade, and when I
associated its softened beauty with the stained-glass window in the
church, was smiling on me.

‘Agnes!’ I joyfully exclaimed. ‘Oh, my dear Agnes, of all people in the
world, what a pleasure to see you!’

‘Is it, indeed?’ she said, in her cordial voice.

‘I want to talk to you so much!’ said I. ‘It’s such a lightening of my
heart, only to look at you! If I had had a conjuror’s cap, there is no
one I should have wished for but you!’

‘What?’ returned Agnes.

‘Well! perhaps Dora first,’ I admitted, with a blush.

‘Certainly, Dora first, I hope,’ said Agnes, laughing.

‘But you next!’ said I. ‘Where are you going?’

She was going to my rooms to see my aunt. The day being very fine, she
was glad to come out of the chariot, which smelt (I had my head in it
all this time) like a stable put under a cucumber-frame. I dismissed the
coachman, and she took my arm, and we walked on together. She was like
Hope embodied, to me. How different I felt in one short minute, having
Agnes at my side!

My aunt had written her one of the odd, abrupt notes--very little longer
than a Bank note--to which her epistolary efforts were usually limited.
She had stated therein that she had fallen into adversity, and was
leaving Dover for good, but had quite made up her mind to it, and was
so well that nobody need be uncomfortable about her. Agnes had come to
London to see my aunt, between whom and herself there had been a mutual
liking these many years: indeed, it dated from the time of my taking up
my residence in Mr. Wickfield’s house. She was not alone, she said. Her
papa was with her--and Uriah Heep.

‘And now they are partners,’ said I. ‘Confound him!’

‘Yes,’ said Agnes. ‘They have some business here; and I took advantage
of their coming, to come too. You must not think my visit all friendly
and disinterested, Trotwood, for--I am afraid I may be cruelly
prejudiced--I do not like to let papa go away alone, with him.’ ‘Does he
exercise the same influence over Mr. Wickfield still, Agnes?’

Agnes shook her head. ‘There is such a change at home,’ said she, ‘that
you would scarcely know the dear old house. They live with us now.’

‘They?’ said I.

‘Mr. Heep and his mother. He sleeps in your old room,’ said Agnes,
looking up into my face.

‘I wish I had the ordering of his dreams,’ said I. ‘He wouldn’t sleep
there long.’

‘I keep my own little room,’ said Agnes, ‘where I used to learn my
lessons. How the time goes! You remember? The little panelled room that
opens from the drawing-room?’

‘Remember, Agnes? When I saw you, for the first time, coming out at the
door, with your quaint little basket of keys hanging at your side?’

‘It is just the same,’ said Agnes, smiling. ‘I am glad you think of it
so pleasantly. We were very happy.’

‘We were, indeed,’ said I.

‘I keep that room to myself still; but I cannot always desert Mrs. Heep,
you know. And so,’ said Agnes, quietly, ‘I feel obliged to bear her
company, when I might prefer to be alone. But I have no other reason to
complain of her. If she tires me, sometimes, by her praises of her son,
it is only natural in a mother. He is a very good son to her.’

I looked at Agnes when she said these words, without detecting in her
any consciousness of Uriah’s design. Her mild but earnest eyes met
mine with their own beautiful frankness, and there was no change in her
gentle face.

‘The chief evil of their presence in the house,’ said Agnes, ‘is that I
cannot be as near papa as I could wish--Uriah Heep being so much between
us--and cannot watch over him, if that is not too bold a thing to say,
as closely as I would. But if any fraud or treachery is practising
against him, I hope that simple love and truth will be strong in the
end. I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any
evil or misfortune in the world.’

A certain bright smile, which I never saw on any other face, died away,
even while I thought how good it was, and how familiar it had once been
to me; and she asked me, with a quick change of expression (we were
drawing very near my street), if I knew how the reverse in my aunt’s
circumstances had been brought about. On my replying no, she had not
told me yet, Agnes became thoughtful, and I fancied I felt her arm
tremble in mine.

We found my aunt alone, in a state of some excitement. A difference
of opinion had arisen between herself and Mrs. Crupp, on an abstract
question (the propriety of chambers being inhabited by the gentler sex);
and my aunt, utterly indifferent to spasms on the part of Mrs. Crupp,
had cut the dispute short, by informing that lady that she smelt of
my brandy, and that she would trouble her to walk out. Both of these
expressions Mrs. Crupp considered actionable, and had expressed her
intention of bringing before a ‘British Judy’--meaning, it was supposed,
the bulwark of our national liberties.

My aunt, however, having had time to cool, while Peggotty was out
showing Mr. Dick the soldiers at the Horse Guards--and being, besides,
greatly pleased to see Agnes--rather plumed herself on the affair than
otherwise, and received us with unimpaired good humour. When Agnes laid
her bonnet on the table, and sat down beside her, I could not but think,
looking on her mild eyes and her radiant forehead, how natural it
seemed to have her there; how trustfully, although she was so young and
inexperienced, my aunt confided in her; how strong she was, indeed, in
simple love and truth.

We began to talk about my aunt’s losses, and I told them what I had
tried to do that morning.

‘Which was injudicious, Trot,’ said my aunt, ‘but well meant. You are
a generous boy--I suppose I must say, young man, now--and I am proud of
you, my dear. So far, so good. Now, Trot and Agnes, let us look the case
of Betsey Trotwood in the face, and see how it stands.’

I observed Agnes turn pale, as she looked very attentively at my aunt.
My aunt, patting her cat, looked very attentively at Agnes.

‘Betsey Trotwood,’ said my aunt, who had always kept her money matters
to herself. ‘--I don’t mean your sister, Trot, my dear, but myself--had
a certain property. It don’t matter how much; enough to live on. More;
for she had saved a little, and added to it. Betsey funded her property
for some time, and then, by the advice of her man of business, laid
it out on landed security. That did very well, and returned very good
interest, till Betsey was paid off. I am talking of Betsey as if she
was a man-of-war. Well! Then, Betsey had to look about her, for a new
investment. She thought she was wiser, now, than her man of business,
who was not such a good man of business by this time, as he used to
be--I am alluding to your father, Agnes--and she took it into her head
to lay it out for herself. So she took her pigs,’ said my aunt, ‘to a
foreign market; and a very bad market it turned out to be. First, she
lost in the mining way, and then she lost in the diving way--fishing up
treasure, or some such Tom Tiddler nonsense,’ explained my aunt, rubbing
her nose; ‘and then she lost in the mining way again, and, last of all,
to set the thing entirely to rights, she lost in the banking way. I
don’t know what the Bank shares were worth for a little while,’ said my
aunt; ‘cent per cent was the lowest of it, I believe; but the Bank was
at the other end of the world, and tumbled into space, for what I know;
anyhow, it fell to pieces, and never will and never can pay sixpence;
and Betsey’s sixpences were all there, and there’s an end of them. Least
said, soonest mended!’

My aunt concluded this philosophical summary, by fixing her eyes with a
kind of triumph on Agnes, whose colour was gradually returning.

‘Dear Miss Trotwood, is that all the history?’ said Agnes.

‘I hope it’s enough, child,’ said my aunt. ‘If there had been more
money to lose, it wouldn’t have been all, I dare say. Betsey would have
contrived to throw that after the rest, and make another chapter, I have
little doubt. But there was no more money, and there’s no more story.’

Agnes had listened at first with suspended breath. Her colour still came
and went, but she breathed more freely. I thought I knew why. I thought
she had had some fear that her unhappy father might be in some way to
blame for what had happened. My aunt took her hand in hers, and laughed.

‘Is that all?’ repeated my aunt. ‘Why, yes, that’s all, except, “And she
lived happy ever afterwards.” Perhaps I may add that of Betsey yet, one
of these days. Now, Agnes, you have a wise head. So have you, Trot, in
some things, though I can’t compliment you always’; and here my aunt
shook her own at me, with an energy peculiar to herself. ‘What’s to be
done? Here’s the cottage, taking one time with another, will produce
say seventy pounds a year. I think we may safely put it down at
that. Well!--That’s all we’ve got,’ said my aunt; with whom it was an
idiosyncrasy, as it is with some horses, to stop very short when she
appeared to be in a fair way of going on for a long while.

‘Then,’ said my aunt, after a rest, ‘there’s Dick. He’s good for a
hundred a-year, but of course that must be expended on himself. I would
sooner send him away, though I know I am the only person who appreciates
him, than have him, and not spend his money on himself. How can Trot and
I do best, upon our means? What do you say, Agnes?’

‘I say, aunt,’ I interposed, ‘that I must do something!’

‘Go for a soldier, do you mean?’ returned my aunt, alarmed; ‘or go to
sea? I won’t hear of it. You are to be a proctor. We’re not going to
have any knockings on the head in THIS family, if you please, sir.’

I was about to explain that I was not desirous of introducing that mode
of provision into the family, when Agnes inquired if my rooms were held
for any long term?

‘You come to the point, my dear,’ said my aunt. ‘They are not to be got
rid of, for six months at least, unless they could be underlet, and that
I don’t believe. The last man died here. Five people out of six would
die--of course--of that woman in nankeen with the flannel petticoat. I
have a little ready money; and I agree with you, the best thing we can
do, is, to live the term out here, and get a bedroom hard by.’

I thought it my duty to hint at the discomfort my aunt would sustain,
from living in a continual state of guerilla warfare with Mrs. Crupp;
but she disposed of that objection summarily by declaring that, on the
first demonstration of hostilities, she was prepared to astonish Mrs.
Crupp for the whole remainder of her natural life.

‘I have been thinking, Trotwood,’ said Agnes, diffidently, ‘that if you
had time--’

‘I have a good deal of time, Agnes. I am always disengaged after four
or five o’clock, and I have time early in the morning. In one way and
another,’ said I, conscious of reddening a little as I thought of the
hours and hours I had devoted to fagging about town, and to and fro upon
the Norwood Road, ‘I have abundance of time.’

‘I know you would not mind,’ said Agnes, coming to me, and speaking in
a low voice, so full of sweet and hopeful consideration that I hear it
now, ‘the duties of a secretary.’

‘Mind, my dear Agnes?’

‘Because,’ continued Agnes, ‘Doctor Strong has acted on his intention of
retiring, and has come to live in London; and he asked papa, I know,
if he could recommend him one. Don’t you think he would rather have his
favourite old pupil near him, than anybody else?’

‘Dear Agnes!’ said I. ‘What should I do without you! You are always my
good angel. I told you so. I never think of you in any other light.’

Agnes answered with her pleasant laugh, that one good Angel (meaning
Dora) was enough; and went on to remind me that the Doctor had been
used to occupy himself in his study, early in the morning, and in the
evening--and that probably my leisure would suit his requirements very
well. I was scarcely more delighted with the prospect of earning my own
bread, than with the hope of earning it under my old master; in short,
acting on the advice of Agnes, I sat down and wrote a letter to the
Doctor, stating my object, and appointing to call on him next day at
ten in the forenoon. This I addressed to Highgate--for in that place, so
memorable to me, he lived--and went and posted, myself, without losing a
minute.

Wherever Agnes was, some agreeable token of her noiseless presence
seemed inseparable from the place. When I came back, I found my aunt’s
birds hanging, just as they had hung so long in the parlour window of
the cottage; and my easy-chair imitating my aunt’s much easier chair in
its position at the open window; and even the round green fan, which my
aunt had brought away with her, screwed on to the window-sill. I knew
who had done all this, by its seeming to have quietly done itself; and I
should have known in a moment who had arranged my neglected books in the
old order of my school days, even if I had supposed Agnes to be miles
away, instead of seeing her busy with them, and smiling at the disorder
into which they had fallen.

My aunt was quite gracious on the subject of the Thames (it really did
look very well with the sun upon it, though not like the sea before the
cottage), but she could not relent towards the London smoke, which, she
said, ‘peppered everything’. A complete revolution, in which Peggotty
bore a prominent part, was being effected in every corner of my rooms,
in regard of this pepper; and I was looking on, thinking how little even
Peggotty seemed to do with a good deal of bustle, and how much Agnes did
without any bustle at all, when a knock came at the door.

‘I think,’ said Agnes, turning pale, ‘it’s papa. He promised me that he
would come.’

I opened the door, and admitted, not only Mr. Wickfield, but Uriah Heep.
I had not seen Mr. Wickfield for some time. I was prepared for a great
change in him, after what I had heard from Agnes, but his appearance
shocked me.

It was not that he looked many years older, though still dressed
with the old scrupulous cleanliness; or that there was an unwholesome
ruddiness upon his face; or that his eyes were full and bloodshot; or
that there was a nervous trembling in his hand, the cause of which I
knew, and had for some years seen at work. It was not that he had lost
his good looks, or his old bearing of a gentleman--for that he had
not--but the thing that struck me most, was, that with the evidences of
his native superiority still upon him, he should submit himself to that
crawling impersonation of meanness, Uriah Heep. The reversal of the
two natures, in their relative positions, Uriah’s of power and Mr.
Wickfield’s of dependence, was a sight more painful to me than I can
express. If I had seen an Ape taking command of a Man, I should hardly
have thought it a more degrading spectacle.

He appeared to be only too conscious of it himself. When he came in, he
stood still; and with his head bowed, as if he felt it. This was
only for a moment; for Agnes softly said to him, ‘Papa! Here is Miss
Trotwood--and Trotwood, whom you have not seen for a long while!’ and
then he approached, and constrainedly gave my aunt his hand, and shook
hands more cordially with me. In the moment’s pause I speak of, I saw
Uriah’s countenance form itself into a most ill-favoured smile. Agnes
saw it too, I think, for she shrank from him.

What my aunt saw, or did not see, I defy the science of physiognomy
to have made out, without her own consent. I believe there never was
anybody with such an imperturbable countenance when she chose. Her face
might have been a dead-wall on the occasion in question, for any light
it threw upon her thoughts; until she broke silence with her usual
abruptness.

‘Well, Wickfield!’ said my aunt; and he looked up at her for the first
time. ‘I have been telling your daughter how well I have been disposing
of my money for myself, because I couldn’t trust it to you, as you were
growing rusty in business matters. We have been taking counsel together,
and getting on very well, all things considered. Agnes is worth the
whole firm, in my opinion.’

‘If I may umbly make the remark,’ said Uriah Heep, with a writhe, ‘I
fully agree with Miss Betsey Trotwood, and should be only too appy if
Miss Agnes was a partner.’

‘You’re a partner yourself, you know,’ returned my aunt, ‘and that’s
about enough for you, I expect. How do you find yourself, sir?’

In acknowledgement of this question, addressed to him with extraordinary
curtness, Mr. Heep, uncomfortably clutching the blue bag he carried,
replied that he was pretty well, he thanked my aunt, and hoped she was
the same.

‘And you, Master--I should say, Mister Copperfield,’ pursued Uriah. ‘I
hope I see you well! I am rejoiced to see you, Mister Copperfield, even
under present circumstances.’ I believed that; for he seemed to relish
them very much. ‘Present circumstances is not what your friends would
wish for you, Mister Copperfield, but it isn’t money makes the man:
it’s--I am really unequal with my umble powers to express what it is,’
said Uriah, with a fawning jerk, ‘but it isn’t money!’

Here he shook hands with me: not in the common way, but standing at
a good distance from me, and lifting my hand up and down like a pump
handle, that he was a little afraid of.

‘And how do you think we are looking, Master Copperfield,--I should
say, Mister?’ fawned Uriah. ‘Don’t you find Mr. Wickfield blooming, sir?
Years don’t tell much in our firm, Master Copperfield, except in raising
up the umble, namely, mother and self--and in developing,’ he added, as
an afterthought, ‘the beautiful, namely, Miss Agnes.’

He jerked himself about, after this compliment, in such an intolerable
manner, that my aunt, who had sat looking straight at him, lost all
patience.

‘Deuce take the man!’ said my aunt, sternly, ‘what’s he about? Don’t be
galvanic, sir!’

‘I ask your pardon, Miss Trotwood,’ returned Uriah; ‘I’m aware you’re
nervous.’

‘Go along with you, sir!’ said my aunt, anything but appeased. ‘Don’t
presume to say so! I am nothing of the sort. If you’re an eel, sir,
conduct yourself like one. If you’re a man, control your limbs, sir!
Good God!’ said my aunt, with great indignation, ‘I am not going to be
serpentined and corkscrewed out of my senses!’

Mr. Heep was rather abashed, as most people might have been, by this
explosion; which derived great additional force from the indignant
manner in which my aunt afterwards moved in her chair, and shook her
head as if she were making snaps or bounces at him. But he said to me
aside in a meek voice:

‘I am well aware, Master Copperfield, that Miss Trotwood, though an
excellent lady, has a quick temper (indeed I think I had the pleasure
of knowing her, when I was a numble clerk, before you did, Master
Copperfield), and it’s only natural, I am sure, that it should be made
quicker by present circumstances. The wonder is, that it isn’t much
worse! I only called to say that if there was anything we could do, in
present circumstances, mother or self, or Wickfield and Heep,--we should
be really glad. I may go so far?’ said Uriah, with a sickly smile at his
partner.

‘Uriah Heep,’ said Mr. Wickfield, in a monotonous forced way, ‘is active
in the business, Trotwood. What he says, I quite concur in. You know
I had an old interest in you. Apart from that, what Uriah says I quite
concur in!’

‘Oh, what a reward it is,’ said Uriah, drawing up one leg, at the risk
of bringing down upon himself another visitation from my aunt, ‘to be so
trusted in! But I hope I am able to do something to relieve him from the
fatigues of business, Master Copperfield!’

‘Uriah Heep is a great relief to me,’ said Mr. Wickfield, in the same
dull voice. ‘It’s a load off my mind, Trotwood, to have such a partner.’

The red fox made him say all this, I knew, to exhibit him to me in the
light he had indicated on the night when he poisoned my rest. I saw the
same ill-favoured smile upon his face again, and saw how he watched me.

‘You are not going, papa?’ said Agnes, anxiously. ‘Will you not walk
back with Trotwood and me?’

He would have looked to Uriah, I believe, before replying, if that
worthy had not anticipated him.

‘I am bespoke myself,’ said Uriah, ‘on business; otherwise I should
have been appy to have kept with my friends. But I leave my partner to
represent the firm. Miss Agnes, ever yours! I wish you good-day, Master
Copperfield, and leave my umble respects for Miss Betsey Trotwood.’

With those words, he retired, kissing his great hand, and leering at us
like a mask.

We sat there, talking about our pleasant old Canterbury days, an hour
or two. Mr. Wickfield, left to Agnes, soon became more like his former
self; though there was a settled depression upon him, which he never
shook off. For all that, he brightened; and had an evident pleasure in
hearing us recall the little incidents of our old life, many of which he
remembered very well. He said it was like those times, to be alone with
Agnes and me again; and he wished to Heaven they had never changed. I am
sure there was an influence in the placid face of Agnes, and in the very
touch of her hand upon his arm, that did wonders for him.

My aunt (who was busy nearly all this while with Peggotty, in the inner
room) would not accompany us to the place where they were staying, but
insisted on my going; and I went. We dined together. After dinner, Agnes
sat beside him, as of old, and poured out his wine. He took what she
gave him, and no more--like a child--and we all three sat together at a
window as the evening gathered in. When it was almost dark, he lay down
on a sofa, Agnes pillowing his head and bending over him a little while;
and when she came back to the window, it was not so dark but I could see
tears glittering in her eyes.

I pray Heaven that I never may forget the dear girl in her love and
truth, at that time of my life; for if I should, I must be drawing near
the end, and then I would desire to remember her best! She filled my
heart with such good resolutions, strengthened my weakness so, by her
example, so directed--I know not how, she was too modest and gentle
to advise me in many words--the wandering ardour and unsettled purpose
within me, that all the little good I have done, and all the harm I have
forborne, I solemnly believe I may refer to her.

And how she spoke to me of Dora, sitting at the window in the dark;
listened to my praises of her; praised again; and round the little
fairy-figure shed some glimpses of her own pure light, that made it yet
more precious and more innocent to me! Oh, Agnes, sister of my boyhood,
if I had known then, what I knew long afterwards--!

There was a beggar in the street, when I went down; and as I turned my
head towards the window, thinking of her calm seraphic eyes, he made me
start by muttering, as if he were an echo of the morning: ‘Blind! Blind!
Blind!’



CHAPTER 36. ENTHUSIASM

I began the next day with another dive into the Roman bath, and then
started for Highgate. I was not dispirited now. I was not afraid of the
shabby coat, and had no yearnings after gallant greys. My whole manner
of thinking of our late misfortune was changed. What I had to do, was,
to show my aunt that her past goodness to me had not been thrown away
on an insensible, ungrateful object. What I had to do, was, to turn the
painful discipline of my younger days to account, by going to work with
a resolute and steady heart. What I had to do, was, to take my woodman’s
axe in my hand, and clear my own way through the forest of difficulty,
by cutting down the trees until I came to Dora. And I went on at a
mighty rate, as if it could be done by walking.

When I found myself on the familiar Highgate road, pursuing such a
different errand from that old one of pleasure, with which it was
associated, it seemed as if a complete change had come on my whole life.
But that did not discourage me. With the new life, came new purpose,
new intention. Great was the labour; priceless the reward. Dora was the
reward, and Dora must be won.

I got into such a transport, that I felt quite sorry my coat was not
a little shabby already. I wanted to be cutting at those trees in the
forest of difficulty, under circumstances that should prove my strength.
I had a good mind to ask an old man, in wire spectacles, who was
breaking stones upon the road, to lend me his hammer for a little while,
and let me begin to beat a path to Dora out of granite. I stimulated
myself into such a heat, and got so out of breath, that I felt as if I
had been earning I don’t know how much.

In this state, I went into a cottage that I saw was to let, and examined
it narrowly,--for I felt it necessary to be practical. It would do for
me and Dora admirably: with a little front garden for Jip to run about
in, and bark at the tradespeople through the railings, and a capital
room upstairs for my aunt. I came out again, hotter and faster than
ever, and dashed up to Highgate, at such a rate that I was there an
hour too early; and, though I had not been, should have been obliged to
stroll about to cool myself, before I was at all presentable.

My first care, after putting myself under this necessary course of
preparation, was to find the Doctor’s house. It was not in that part of
Highgate where Mrs. Steerforth lived, but quite on the opposite side
of the little town. When I had made this discovery, I went back, in
an attraction I could not resist, to a lane by Mrs. Steerforth’s, and
looked over the corner of the garden wall. His room was shut up close.
The conservatory doors were standing open, and Rosa Dartle was walking,
bareheaded, with a quick, impetuous step, up and down a gravel walk on
one side of the lawn. She gave me the idea of some fierce thing, that
was dragging the length of its chain to and fro upon a beaten track, and
wearing its heart out.

I came softly away from my place of observation, and avoiding that part
of the neighbourhood, and wishing I had not gone near it, strolled about
until it was ten o’clock. The church with the slender spire, that stands
on the top of the hill now, was not there then to tell me the time. An
old red-brick mansion, used as a school, was in its place; and a fine
old house it must have been to go to school at, as I recollect it.

When I approached the Doctor’s cottage--a pretty old place, on which
he seemed to have expended some money, if I might judge from the
embellishments and repairs that had the look of being just completed--I
saw him walking in the garden at the side, gaiters and all, as if he
had never left off walking since the days of my pupilage. He had his old
companions about him, too; for there were plenty of high trees in the
neighbourhood, and two or three rooks were on the grass, looking after
him, as if they had been written to about him by the Canterbury rooks,
and were observing him closely in consequence.

Knowing the utter hopelessness of attracting his attention from that
distance, I made bold to open the gate, and walk after him, so as to
meet him when he should turn round. When he did, and came towards me, he
looked at me thoughtfully for a few moments, evidently without thinking
about me at all; and then his benevolent face expressed extraordinary
pleasure, and he took me by both hands.

‘Why, my dear Copperfield,’ said the Doctor, ‘you are a man! How do you
do? I am delighted to see you. My dear Copperfield, how very much you
have improved! You are quite--yes--dear me!’

I hoped he was well, and Mrs. Strong too.

‘Oh dear, yes!’ said the Doctor; ‘Annie’s quite well, and she’ll be
delighted to see you. You were always her favourite. She said so,
last night, when I showed her your letter. And--yes, to be sure--you
recollect Mr. Jack Maldon, Copperfield?’

‘Perfectly, sir.’

‘Of course,’ said the Doctor. ‘To be sure. He’s pretty well, too.’

‘Has he come home, sir?’ I inquired.

‘From India?’ said the Doctor. ‘Yes. Mr. Jack Maldon couldn’t bear
the climate, my dear. Mrs. Markleham--you have not forgotten Mrs.
Markleham?’

Forgotten the Old Soldier! And in that short time!

‘Mrs. Markleham,’ said the Doctor, ‘was quite vexed about him, poor
thing; so we have got him at home again; and we have bought him a little
Patent place, which agrees with him much better.’ I knew enough of Mr.
Jack Maldon to suspect from this account that it was a place where there
was not much to do, and which was pretty well paid. The Doctor, walking
up and down with his hand on my shoulder, and his kind face turned
encouragingly to mine, went on:

‘Now, my dear Copperfield, in reference to this proposal of yours. It’s
very gratifying and agreeable to me, I am sure; but don’t you think you
could do better? You achieved distinction, you know, when you were with
us. You are qualified for many good things. You have laid a foundation
that any edifice may be raised upon; and is it not a pity that you
should devote the spring-time of your life to such a poor pursuit as I
can offer?’

I became very glowing again, and, expressing myself in a rhapsodical
style, I am afraid, urged my request strongly; reminding the Doctor that
I had already a profession.

‘Well, well,’ said the Doctor, ‘that’s true. Certainly, your having
a profession, and being actually engaged in studying it, makes a
difference. But, my good young friend, what’s seventy pounds a year?’

‘It doubles our income, Doctor Strong,’ said I.

‘Dear me!’ replied the Doctor. ‘To think of that! Not that I mean to
say it’s rigidly limited to seventy pounds a-year, because I have always
contemplated making any young friend I might thus employ, a present too.
Undoubtedly,’ said the Doctor, still walking me up and down with
his hand on my shoulder. ‘I have always taken an annual present into
account.’

‘My dear tutor,’ said I (now, really, without any nonsense), ‘to whom I
owe more obligations already than I ever can acknowledge--’

‘No, no,’ interposed the Doctor. ‘Pardon me!’

‘If you will take such time as I have, and that is my mornings and
evenings, and can think it worth seventy pounds a year, you will do me
such a service as I cannot express.’

‘Dear me!’ said the Doctor, innocently. ‘To think that so little should
go for so much! Dear, dear! And when you can do better, you will? On
your word, now?’ said the Doctor,--which he had always made a very grave
appeal to the honour of us boys.

‘On my word, sir!’ I returned, answering in our old school manner.

‘Then be it so,’ said the Doctor, clapping me on the shoulder, and still
keeping his hand there, as we still walked up and down.

‘And I shall be twenty times happier, sir,’ said I, with a little--I
hope innocent--flattery, ‘if my employment is to be on the Dictionary.’

The Doctor stopped, smilingly clapped me on the shoulder again, and
exclaimed, with a triumph most delightful to behold, as if I had
penetrated to the profoundest depths of mortal sagacity, ‘My dear young
friend, you have hit it. It IS the Dictionary!’

How could it be anything else! His pockets were as full of it as his
head. It was sticking out of him in all directions. He told me that
since his retirement from scholastic life, he had been advancing with
it wonderfully; and that nothing could suit him better than the proposed
arrangements for morning and evening work, as it was his custom to walk
about in the daytime with his considering cap on. His papers were in
a little confusion, in consequence of Mr. Jack Maldon having lately
proffered his occasional services as an amanuensis, and not being
accustomed to that occupation; but we should soon put right what was
amiss, and go on swimmingly. Afterwards, when we were fairly at our
work, I found Mr. Jack Maldon’s efforts more troublesome to me than
I had expected, as he had not confined himself to making numerous
mistakes, but had sketched so many soldiers, and ladies’ heads, over
the Doctor’s manuscript, that I often became involved in labyrinths of
obscurity.

The Doctor was quite happy in the prospect of our going to work together
on that wonderful performance, and we settled to begin next morning at
seven o’clock. We were to work two hours every morning, and two or three
hours every night, except on Saturdays, when I was to rest. On Sundays,
of course, I was to rest also, and I considered these very easy terms.

Our plans being thus arranged to our mutual satisfaction, the Doctor
took me into the house to present me to Mrs. Strong, whom we found in
the Doctor’s new study, dusting his books,--a freedom which he never
permitted anybody else to take with those sacred favourites.

They had postponed their breakfast on my account, and we sat down to
table together. We had not been seated long, when I saw an approaching
arrival in Mrs. Strong’s face, before I heard any sound of it. A
gentleman on horseback came to the gate, and leading his horse into the
little court, with the bridle over his arm, as if he were quite at home,
tied him to a ring in the empty coach-house wall, and came into the
breakfast parlour, whip in hand. It was Mr. Jack Maldon; and Mr. Jack
Maldon was not at all improved by India, I thought. I was in a state
of ferocious virtue, however, as to young men who were not cutting down
trees in the forest of difficulty; and my impression must be received
with due allowance.

‘Mr. Jack!’ said the Doctor. ‘Copperfield!’

Mr. Jack Maldon shook hands with me; but not very warmly, I believed;
and with an air of languid patronage, at which I secretly took great
umbrage. But his languor altogether was quite a wonderful sight; except
when he addressed himself to his cousin Annie. ‘Have you breakfasted
this morning, Mr. Jack?’ said the Doctor.

‘I hardly ever take breakfast, sir,’ he replied, with his head thrown
back in an easy-chair. ‘I find it bores me.’

‘Is there any news today?’ inquired the Doctor.

‘Nothing at all, sir,’ replied Mr. Maldon. ‘There’s an account about
the people being hungry and discontented down in the North, but they are
always being hungry and discontented somewhere.’

The Doctor looked grave, and said, as though he wished to change the
subject, ‘Then there’s no news at all; and no news, they say, is good
news.’

‘There’s a long statement in the papers, sir, about a murder,’ observed
Mr. Maldon. ‘But somebody is always being murdered, and I didn’t read
it.’

A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of mankind was
not supposed to be such a distinguished quality at that time, I think,
as I have observed it to be considered since. I have known it very
fashionable indeed. I have seen it displayed with such success, that I
have encountered some fine ladies and gentlemen who might as well have
been born caterpillars. Perhaps it impressed me the more then, because
it was new to me, but it certainly did not tend to exalt my opinion of,
or to strengthen my confidence in, Mr. Jack Maldon.

‘I came out to inquire whether Annie would like to go to the opera
tonight,’ said Mr. Maldon, turning to her. ‘It’s the last good night
there will be, this season; and there’s a singer there, whom she really
ought to hear. She is perfectly exquisite. Besides which, she is so
charmingly ugly,’ relapsing into languor.

The Doctor, ever pleased with what was likely to please his young wife,
turned to her and said:

‘You must go, Annie. You must go.’

‘I would rather not,’ she said to the Doctor. ‘I prefer to remain at
home. I would much rather remain at home.’

Without looking at her cousin, she then addressed me, and asked me about
Agnes, and whether she should see her, and whether she was not likely to
come that day; and was so much disturbed, that I wondered how even the
Doctor, buttering his toast, could be blind to what was so obvious.

But he saw nothing. He told her, good-naturedly, that she was young and
ought to be amused and entertained, and must not allow herself to be
made dull by a dull old fellow. Moreover, he said, he wanted to hear her
sing all the new singer’s songs to him; and how could she do that well,
unless she went? So the Doctor persisted in making the engagement for
her, and Mr. Jack Maldon was to come back to dinner. This concluded, he
went to his Patent place, I suppose; but at all events went away on his
horse, looking very idle.

I was curious to find out next morning, whether she had been. She had
not, but had sent into London to put her cousin off; and had gone out in
the afternoon to see Agnes, and had prevailed upon the Doctor to go with
her; and they had walked home by the fields, the Doctor told me, the
evening being delightful. I wondered then, whether she would have gone
if Agnes had not been in town, and whether Agnes had some good influence
over her too!

She did not look very happy, I thought; but it was a good face, or a
very false one. I often glanced at it, for she sat in the window all the
time we were at work; and made our breakfast, which we took by snatches
as we were employed. When I left, at nine o’clock, she was kneeling on
the ground at the Doctor’s feet, putting on his shoes and gaiters for
him. There was a softened shade upon her face, thrown from some green
leaves overhanging the open window of the low room; and I thought all
the way to Doctors’ Commons, of the night when I had seen it looking at
him as he read.

I was pretty busy now; up at five in the morning, and home at nine
or ten at night. But I had infinite satisfaction in being so
closely engaged, and never walked slowly on any account, and felt
enthusiastically that the more I tired myself, the more I was doing to
deserve Dora. I had not revealed myself in my altered character to
Dora yet, because she was coming to see Miss Mills in a few days, and
I deferred all I had to tell her until then; merely informing her in
my letters (all our communications were secretly forwarded through Miss
Mills), that I had much to tell her. In the meantime, I put myself on
a short allowance of bear’s grease, wholly abandoned scented soap and
lavender water, and sold off three waistcoats at a prodigious sacrifice,
as being too luxurious for my stern career.

Not satisfied with all these proceedings, but burning with impatience
to do something more, I went to see Traddles, now lodging up behind the
parapet of a house in Castle Street, Holborn. Mr. Dick, who had been
with me to Highgate twice already, and had resumed his companionship
with the Doctor, I took with me.

I took Mr. Dick with me, because, acutely sensitive to my aunt’s
reverses, and sincerely believing that no galley-slave or convict worked
as I did, he had begun to fret and worry himself out of spirits and
appetite, as having nothing useful to do. In this condition, he felt
more incapable of finishing the Memorial than ever; and the harder he
worked at it, the oftener that unlucky head of King Charles the First
got into it. Seriously apprehending that his malady would increase,
unless we put some innocent deception upon him and caused him to believe
that he was useful, or unless we could put him in the way of being
really useful (which would be better), I made up my mind to try
if Traddles could help us. Before we went, I wrote Traddles a full
statement of all that had happened, and Traddles wrote me back a capital
answer, expressive of his sympathy and friendship.

We found him hard at work with his inkstand and papers, refreshed by the
sight of the flower-pot stand and the little round table in a corner of
the small apartment. He received us cordially, and made friends with
Mr. Dick in a moment. Mr. Dick professed an absolute certainty of having
seen him before, and we both said, ‘Very likely.’

The first subject on which I had to consult Traddles was this,--I had
heard that many men distinguished in various pursuits had begun life
by reporting the debates in Parliament. Traddles having mentioned
newspapers to me, as one of his hopes, I had put the two things
together, and told Traddles in my letter that I wished to know how I
could qualify myself for this pursuit. Traddles now informed me, as the
result of his inquiries, that the mere mechanical acquisition necessary,
except in rare cases, for thorough excellence in it, that is to say,
a perfect and entire command of the mystery of short-hand writing and
reading, was about equal in difficulty to the mastery of six languages;
and that it might perhaps be attained, by dint of perseverance, in the
course of a few years. Traddles reasonably supposed that this would
settle the business; but I, only feeling that here indeed were a few
tall trees to be hewn down, immediately resolved to work my way on to
Dora through this thicket, axe in hand.

‘I am very much obliged to you, my dear Traddles!’ said I. ‘I’ll begin
tomorrow.’

Traddles looked astonished, as he well might; but he had no notion as
yet of my rapturous condition.

‘I’ll buy a book,’ said I, ‘with a good scheme of this art in it; I’ll
work at it at the Commons, where I haven’t half enough to do; I’ll take
down the speeches in our court for practice--Traddles, my dear fellow,
I’ll master it!’

‘Dear me,’ said Traddles, opening his eyes, ‘I had no idea you were such
a determined character, Copperfield!’

I don’t know how he should have had, for it was new enough to me. I
passed that off, and brought Mr. Dick on the carpet.

‘You see,’ said Mr. Dick, wistfully, ‘if I could exert myself, Mr.
Traddles--if I could beat a drum--or blow anything!’

Poor fellow! I have little doubt he would have preferred such an
employment in his heart to all others. Traddles, who would not have
smiled for the world, replied composedly:

‘But you are a very good penman, sir. You told me so, Copperfield?’
‘Excellent!’ said I. And indeed he was. He wrote with extraordinary
neatness.

‘Don’t you think,’ said Traddles, ‘you could copy writings, sir, if I
got them for you?’

Mr. Dick looked doubtfully at me. ‘Eh, Trotwood?’

I shook my head. Mr. Dick shook his, and sighed. ‘Tell him about the
Memorial,’ said Mr. Dick.

I explained to Traddles that there was a difficulty in keeping King
Charles the First out of Mr. Dick’s manuscripts; Mr. Dick in the
meanwhile looking very deferentially and seriously at Traddles, and
sucking his thumb.

‘But these writings, you know, that I speak of, are already drawn up
and finished,’ said Traddles after a little consideration. ‘Mr. Dick has
nothing to do with them. Wouldn’t that make a difference, Copperfield?
At all events, wouldn’t it be well to try?’

This gave us new hope. Traddles and I laying our heads together apart,
while Mr. Dick anxiously watched us from his chair, we concocted a
scheme in virtue of which we got him to work next day, with triumphant
success.

On a table by the window in Buckingham Street, we set out the work
Traddles procured for him--which was to make, I forget how many copies
of a legal document about some right of way--and on another table
we spread the last unfinished original of the great Memorial. Our
instructions to Mr. Dick were that he should copy exactly what he had
before him, without the least departure from the original; and that when
he felt it necessary to make the slightest allusion to King Charles the
First, he should fly to the Memorial. We exhorted him to be resolute
in this, and left my aunt to observe him. My aunt reported to us,
afterwards, that, at first, he was like a man playing the kettle-drums,
and constantly divided his attentions between the two; but that, finding
this confuse and fatigue him, and having his copy there, plainly before
his eyes, he soon sat at it in an orderly business-like manner, and
postponed the Memorial to a more convenient time. In a word, although we
took great care that he should have no more to do than was good for him,
and although he did not begin with the beginning of a week, he earned
by the following Saturday night ten shillings and nine-pence; and never,
while I live, shall I forget his going about to all the shops in the
neighbourhood to change this treasure into sixpences, or his bringing
them to my aunt arranged in the form of a heart upon a waiter, with
tears of joy and pride in his eyes. He was like one under the propitious
influence of a charm, from the moment of his being usefully employed;
and if there were a happy man in the world, that Saturday night, it was
the grateful creature who thought my aunt the most wonderful woman in
existence, and me the most wonderful young man.

‘No starving now, Trotwood,’ said Mr. Dick, shaking hands with me in a
corner. ‘I’ll provide for her, Sir!’ and he flourished his ten fingers
in the air, as if they were ten banks.

I hardly know which was the better pleased, Traddles or I. ‘It really,’
said Traddles, suddenly, taking a letter out of his pocket, and giving
it to me, ‘put Mr. Micawber quite out of my head!’

The letter (Mr. Micawber never missed any possible opportunity of
writing a letter) was addressed to me, ‘By the kindness of T. Traddles,
Esquire, of the Inner Temple.’ It ran thus:--


‘MY DEAR COPPERFIELD,

‘You may possibly not be unprepared to receive the intimation that
something has turned up. I may have mentioned to you on a former
occasion that I was in expectation of such an event.

‘I am about to establish myself in one of the provincial towns of our
favoured island (where the society may be described as a happy admixture
of the agricultural and the clerical), in immediate connexion with
one of the learned professions. Mrs. Micawber and our offspring will
accompany me. Our ashes, at a future period, will probably be found
commingled in the cemetery attached to a venerable pile, for which the
spot to which I refer has acquired a reputation, shall I say from China
to Peru?

‘In bidding adieu to the modern Babylon, where we have undergone many
vicissitudes, I trust not ignobly, Mrs. Micawber and myself cannot
disguise from our minds that we part, it may be for years and it may be
for ever, with an individual linked by strong associations to the altar
of our domestic life. If, on the eve of such a departure, you will
accompany our mutual friend, Mr. Thomas Traddles, to our present abode,
and there reciprocate the wishes natural to the occasion, you will
confer a Boon

               ‘On
                    ‘One
                         ‘Who
                              ‘Is
                                   ‘Ever yours,
                                        ‘WILKINS MICAWBER.’


I was glad to find that Mr. Micawber had got rid of his dust and ashes,
and that something really had turned up at last. Learning from Traddles
that the invitation referred to the evening then wearing away, I
expressed my readiness to do honour to it; and we went off together to
the lodging which Mr. Micawber occupied as Mr. Mortimer, and which was
situated near the top of the Gray’s Inn Road.

The resources of this lodging were so limited, that we found the twins,
now some eight or nine years old, reposing in a turn-up bedstead in
the family sitting-room, where Mr. Micawber had prepared, in a
wash-hand-stand jug, what he called ‘a Brew’ of the agreeable beverage
for which he was famous. I had the pleasure, on this occasion, of
renewing the acquaintance of Master Micawber, whom I found a promising
boy of about twelve or thirteen, very subject to that restlessness of
limb which is not an unfrequent phenomenon in youths of his age. I also
became once more known to his sister, Miss Micawber, in whom, as Mr.
Micawber told us, ‘her mother renewed her youth, like the Phoenix’.

‘My dear Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘yourself and Mr. Traddles
find us on the brink of migration, and will excuse any little
discomforts incidental to that position.’

Glancing round as I made a suitable reply, I observed that the family
effects were already packed, and that the amount of luggage was by no
means overwhelming. I congratulated Mrs. Micawber on the approaching
change.

‘My dear Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘of your friendly
interest in all our affairs, I am well assured. My family may consider
it banishment, if they please; but I am a wife and mother, and I never
will desert Mr. Micawber.’

Traddles, appealed to by Mrs. Micawber’s eye, feelingly acquiesced.

‘That,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘that, at least, is my view, my dear Mr.
Copperfield and Mr. Traddles, of the obligation which I took upon myself
when I repeated the irrevocable words, “I, Emma, take thee, Wilkins.” I
read the service over with a flat-candle on the previous night, and
the conclusion I derived from it was, that I never could desert Mr.
Micawber. And,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘though it is possible I may be
mistaken in my view of the ceremony, I never will!’

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Micawber, a little impatiently, ‘I am not conscious
that you are expected to do anything of the sort.’

‘I am aware, my dear Mr. Copperfield,’ pursued Mrs. Micawber, ‘that I am
now about to cast my lot among strangers; and I am also aware that the
various members of my family, to whom Mr. Micawber has written in the
most gentlemanly terms, announcing that fact, have not taken the least
notice of Mr. Micawber’s communication. Indeed I may be superstitious,’
said Mrs. Micawber, ‘but it appears to me that Mr. Micawber is destined
never to receive any answers whatever to the great majority of the
communications he writes. I may augur, from the silence of my family,
that they object to the resolution I have taken; but I should not allow
myself to be swerved from the path of duty, Mr. Copperfield, even by my
papa and mama, were they still living.’

I expressed my opinion that this was going in the right direction. ‘It
may be a sacrifice,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘to immure one’s-self in a
Cathedral town; but surely, Mr. Copperfield, if it is a sacrifice in me,
it is much more a sacrifice in a man of Mr. Micawber’s abilities.’

‘Oh! You are going to a Cathedral town?’ said I.

Mr. Micawber, who had been helping us all, out of the wash-hand-stand
jug, replied:

‘To Canterbury. In fact, my dear Copperfield, I have entered into
arrangements, by virtue of which I stand pledged and contracted to our
friend Heep, to assist and serve him in the capacity of--and to be--his
confidential clerk.’

I stared at Mr. Micawber, who greatly enjoyed my surprise.

‘I am bound to state to you,’ he said, with an official air, ‘that the
business habits, and the prudent suggestions, of Mrs. Micawber, have
in a great measure conduced to this result. The gauntlet, to which Mrs.
Micawber referred upon a former occasion, being thrown down in the form
of an advertisement, was taken up by my friend Heep, and led to a mutual
recognition. Of my friend Heep,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘who is a man of
remarkable shrewdness, I desire to speak with all possible respect.
My friend Heep has not fixed the positive remuneration at too high a
figure, but he has made a great deal, in the way of extrication from
the pressure of pecuniary difficulties, contingent on the value of
my services; and on the value of those services I pin my faith. Such
address and intelligence as I chance to possess,’ said Mr. Micawber,
boastfully disparaging himself, with the old genteel air, ‘will be
devoted to my friend Heep’s service. I have already some acquaintance
with the law--as a defendant on civil process--and I shall immediately
apply myself to the Commentaries of one of the most eminent and
remarkable of our English jurists. I believe it is unnecessary to add
that I allude to Mr. justice Blackstone.’

These observations, and indeed the greater part of the observations
made that evening, were interrupted by Mrs. Micawber’s discovering that
Master Micawber was sitting on his boots, or holding his head on with
both arms as if he felt it loose, or accidentally kicking Traddles under
the table, or shuffling his feet over one another, or producing them
at distances from himself apparently outrageous to nature, or lying
sideways with his hair among the wine-glasses, or developing his
restlessness of limb in some other form incompatible with the general
interests of society; and by Master Micawber’s receiving those
discoveries in a resentful spirit. I sat all the while, amazed by Mr.
Micawber’s disclosure, and wondering what it meant; until Mrs. Micawber
resumed the thread of the discourse, and claimed my attention.

‘What I particularly request Mr. Micawber to be careful of, is,’ said
Mrs. Micawber, ‘that he does not, my dear Mr. Copperfield, in applying
himself to this subordinate branch of the law, place it out of his power
to rise, ultimately, to the top of the tree. I am convinced that Mr.
Micawber, giving his mind to a profession so adapted to his fertile
resources, and his flow of language, must distinguish himself. Now, for
example, Mr. Traddles,’ said Mrs. Micawber, assuming a profound air, ‘a
judge, or even say a Chancellor. Does an individual place himself beyond
the pale of those preferments by entering on such an office as Mr.
Micawber has accepted?’

‘My dear,’ observed Mr. Micawber--but glancing inquisitively at
Traddles, too; ‘we have time enough before us, for the consideration of
those questions.’

‘Micawber,’ she returned, ‘no! Your mistake in life is, that you do not
look forward far enough. You are bound, in justice to your family, if
not to yourself, to take in at a comprehensive glance the extremest
point in the horizon to which your abilities may lead you.’

Mr. Micawber coughed, and drank his punch with an air of exceeding
satisfaction--still glancing at Traddles, as if he desired to have his
opinion.

‘Why, the plain state of the case, Mrs. Micawber,’ said Traddles, mildly
breaking the truth to her. ‘I mean the real prosaic fact, you know--’

‘Just so,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘my dear Mr. Traddles, I wish to be as
prosaic and literal as possible on a subject of so much importance.’

‘--Is,’ said Traddles, ‘that this branch of the law, even if Mr.
Micawber were a regular solicitor--’

‘Exactly so,’ returned Mrs. Micawber. [‘Wilkins, you are squinting, and
will not be able to get your eyes back.’)

‘--Has nothing,’ pursued Traddles, ‘to do with that. Only a barrister
is eligible for such preferments; and Mr. Micawber could not be a
barrister, without being entered at an inn of court as a student, for
five years.’

‘Do I follow you?’ said Mrs. Micawber, with her most affable air
of business. ‘Do I understand, my dear Mr. Traddles, that, at the
expiration of that period, Mr. Micawber would be eligible as a Judge or
Chancellor?’

‘He would be ELIGIBLE,’ returned Traddles, with a strong emphasis on
that word.

‘Thank you,’ said Mrs. Micawber. ‘That is quite sufficient. If such is
the case, and Mr. Micawber forfeits no privilege by entering on these
duties, my anxiety is set at rest. I speak,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘as a
female, necessarily; but I have always been of opinion that Mr. Micawber
possesses what I have heard my papa call, when I lived at home, the
judicial mind; and I hope Mr. Micawber is now entering on a field where
that mind will develop itself, and take a commanding station.’

I quite believe that Mr. Micawber saw himself, in his judicial mind’s
eye, on the woolsack. He passed his hand complacently over his bald
head, and said with ostentatious resignation:

‘My dear, we will not anticipate the decrees of fortune. If I am
reserved to wear a wig, I am at least prepared, externally,’ in allusion
to his baldness, ‘for that distinction. I do not,’ said Mr. Micawber,
‘regret my hair, and I may have been deprived of it for a specific
purpose. I cannot say. It is my intention, my dear Copperfield, to
educate my son for the Church; I will not deny that I should be happy,
on his account, to attain to eminence.’

‘For the Church?’ said I, still pondering, between whiles, on Uriah
Heep.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Micawber. ‘He has a remarkable head-voice, and will
commence as a chorister. Our residence at Canterbury, and our local
connexion, will, no doubt, enable him to take advantage of any vacancy
that may arise in the Cathedral corps.’

On looking at Master Micawber again, I saw that he had a certain
expression of face, as if his voice were behind his eyebrows; where it
presently appeared to be, on his singing us (as an alternative between
that and bed) ‘The Wood-Pecker tapping’. After many compliments on this
performance, we fell into some general conversation; and as I was too
full of my desperate intentions to keep my altered circumstances to
myself, I made them known to Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. I cannot express how
extremely delighted they both were, by the idea of my aunt’s being in
difficulties; and how comfortable and friendly it made them.

When we were nearly come to the last round of the punch, I addressed
myself to Traddles, and reminded him that we must not separate, without
wishing our friends health, happiness, and success in their new career.
I begged Mr. Micawber to fill us bumpers, and proposed the toast in
due form: shaking hands with him across the table, and kissing Mrs.
Micawber, to commemorate that eventful occasion. Traddles imitated me
in the first particular, but did not consider himself a sufficiently old
friend to venture on the second.

‘My dear Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, rising with one of his thumbs
in each of his waistcoat pockets, ‘the companion of my youth: if I may
be allowed the expression--and my esteemed friend Traddles: if I may be
permitted to call him so--will allow me, on the part of Mrs. Micawber,
myself, and our offspring, to thank them in the warmest and most
uncompromising terms for their good wishes. It may be expected that
on the eve of a migration which will consign us to a perfectly new
existence,’ Mr. Micawber spoke as if they were going five hundred
thousand miles, ‘I should offer a few valedictory remarks to two such
friends as I see before me. But all that I have to say in this way, I
have said. Whatever station in society I may attain, through the medium
of the learned profession of which I am about to become an unworthy
member, I shall endeavour not to disgrace, and Mrs. Micawber will be
safe to adorn. Under the temporary pressure of pecuniary liabilities,
contracted with a view to their immediate liquidation, but remaining
unliquidated through a combination of circumstances, I have been
under the necessity of assuming a garb from which my natural instincts
recoil--I allude to spectacles--and possessing myself of a cognomen, to
which I can establish no legitimate pretensions. All I have to say on
that score is, that the cloud has passed from the dreary scene, and the
God of Day is once more high upon the mountain tops. On Monday next, on
the arrival of the four o’clock afternoon coach at Canterbury, my foot
will be on my native heath--my name, Micawber!’

Mr. Micawber resumed his seat on the close of these remarks, and
drank two glasses of punch in grave succession. He then said with much
solemnity:

‘One thing more I have to do, before this separation is complete, and
that is to perform an act of justice. My friend Mr. Thomas Traddles
has, on two several occasions, “put his name”, if I may use a common
expression, to bills of exchange for my accommodation. On the first
occasion Mr. Thomas Traddles was left--let me say, in short, in the
lurch. The fulfilment of the second has not yet arrived. The amount of
the first obligation,’ here Mr. Micawber carefully referred to papers,
‘was, I believe, twenty-three, four, nine and a half, of the second,
according to my entry of that transaction, eighteen, six, two. These
sums, united, make a total, if my calculation is correct, amounting to
forty-one, ten, eleven and a half. My friend Copperfield will perhaps do
me the favour to check that total?’

I did so and found it correct.

‘To leave this metropolis,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘and my friend Mr.
Thomas Traddles, without acquitting myself of the pecuniary part of this
obligation, would weigh upon my mind to an insupportable extent. I have,
therefore, prepared for my friend Mr. Thomas Traddles, and I now hold
in my hand, a document, which accomplishes the desired object. I beg
to hand to my friend Mr. Thomas Traddles my I.O.U. for forty-one, ten,
eleven and a half, and I am happy to recover my moral dignity, and to
know that I can once more walk erect before my fellow man!’

With this introduction (which greatly affected him), Mr. Micawber placed
his I.O.U. in the hands of Traddles, and said he wished him well in
every relation of life. I am persuaded, not only that this was quite
the same to Mr. Micawber as paying the money, but that Traddles himself
hardly knew the difference until he had had time to think about it. Mr.
Micawber walked so erect before his fellow man, on the strength of
this virtuous action, that his chest looked half as broad again when he
lighted us downstairs. We parted with great heartiness on both sides;
and when I had seen Traddles to his own door, and was going home alone,
I thought, among the other odd and contradictory things I mused upon,
that, slippery as Mr. Micawber was, I was probably indebted to some
compassionate recollection he retained of me as his boy-lodger, for
never having been asked by him for money. I certainly should not have
had the moral courage to refuse it; and I have no doubt he knew that (to
his credit be it written), quite as well as I did.



CHAPTER 37. A LITTLE COLD WATER


My new life had lasted for more than a week, and I was stronger than
ever in those tremendous practical resolutions that I felt the crisis
required. I continued to walk extremely fast, and to have a general idea
that I was getting on. I made it a rule to take as much out of myself
as I possibly could, in my way of doing everything to which I applied
my energies. I made a perfect victim of myself. I even entertained some
idea of putting myself on a vegetable diet, vaguely conceiving that, in
becoming a graminivorous animal, I should sacrifice to Dora.

As yet, little Dora was quite unconscious of my desperate firmness,
otherwise than as my letters darkly shadowed it forth. But another
Saturday came, and on that Saturday evening she was to be at Miss
Mills’s; and when Mr. Mills had gone to his whist-club (telegraphed to
me in the street, by a bird-cage in the drawing-room middle window), I
was to go there to tea.

By this time, we were quite settled down in Buckingham Street, where Mr.
Dick continued his copying in a state of absolute felicity. My aunt had
obtained a signal victory over Mrs. Crupp, by paying her off, throwing
the first pitcher she planted on the stairs out of window, and
protecting in person, up and down the staircase, a supernumerary whom
she engaged from the outer world. These vigorous measures struck such
terror to the breast of Mrs. Crupp, that she subsided into her own
kitchen, under the impression that my aunt was mad. My aunt being
supremely indifferent to Mrs. Crupp’s opinion and everybody else’s, and
rather favouring than discouraging the idea, Mrs. Crupp, of late the
bold, became within a few days so faint-hearted, that rather than
encounter my aunt upon the staircase, she would endeavour to hide her
portly form behind doors--leaving visible, however, a wide margin of
flannel petticoat--or would shrink into dark corners. This gave my aunt
such unspeakable satisfaction, that I believe she took a delight in
prowling up and down, with her bonnet insanely perched on the top of her
head, at times when Mrs. Crupp was likely to be in the way.

My aunt, being uncommonly neat and ingenious, made so many little
improvements in our domestic arrangements, that I seemed to be richer
instead of poorer. Among the rest, she converted the pantry into a
dressing-room for me; and purchased and embellished a bedstead for my
occupation, which looked as like a bookcase in the daytime as a bedstead
could. I was the object of her constant solicitude; and my poor mother
herself could not have loved me better, or studied more how to make me
happy.

Peggotty had considered herself highly privileged in being allowed to
participate in these labours; and, although she still retained something
of her old sentiment of awe in reference to my aunt, had received so
many marks of encouragement and confidence, that they were the best
friends possible. But the time had now come (I am speaking of the
Saturday when I was to take tea at Miss Mills’s) when it was necessary
for her to return home, and enter on the discharge of the duties she had
undertaken in behalf of Ham. ‘So good-bye, Barkis,’ said my aunt, ‘and
take care of yourself! I am sure I never thought I could be sorry to
lose you!’

I took Peggotty to the coach office and saw her off. She cried at
parting, and confided her brother to my friendship as Ham had done. We
had heard nothing of him since he went away, that sunny afternoon.

‘And now, my own dear Davy,’ said Peggotty, ‘if, while you’re a
prentice, you should want any money to spend; or if, when you’re out of
your time, my dear, you should want any to set you up (and you must do
one or other, or both, my darling); who has such a good right to ask
leave to lend it you, as my sweet girl’s own old stupid me!’

I was not so savagely independent as to say anything in reply, but that
if ever I borrowed money of anyone, I would borrow it of her. Next to
accepting a large sum on the spot, I believe this gave Peggotty more
comfort than anything I could have done.

‘And, my dear!’ whispered Peggotty, ‘tell the pretty little angel that
I should so have liked to see her, only for a minute! And tell her that
before she marries my boy, I’ll come and make your house so beautiful
for you, if you’ll let me!’

I declared that nobody else should touch it; and this gave Peggotty such
delight that she went away in good spirits.

I fatigued myself as much as I possibly could in the Commons all day, by
a variety of devices, and at the appointed time in the evening repaired
to Mr. Mills’s street. Mr. Mills, who was a terrible fellow to fall
asleep after dinner, had not yet gone out, and there was no bird-cage in
the middle window.

He kept me waiting so long, that I fervently hoped the Club would fine
him for being late. At last he came out; and then I saw my own Dora hang
up the bird-cage, and peep into the balcony to look for me, and run
in again when she saw I was there, while Jip remained behind, to bark
injuriously at an immense butcher’s dog in the street, who could have
taken him like a pill.

Dora came to the drawing-room door to meet me; and Jip came scrambling
out, tumbling over his own growls, under the impression that I was a
Bandit; and we all three went in, as happy and loving as could be. I
soon carried desolation into the bosom of our joys--not that I meant to
do it, but that I was so full of the subject--by asking Dora, without
the smallest preparation, if she could love a beggar?

My pretty, little, startled Dora! Her only association with the word was
a yellow face and a nightcap, or a pair of crutches, or a wooden leg, or
a dog with a decanter-stand in his mouth, or something of that kind; and
she stared at me with the most delightful wonder.

‘How can you ask me anything so foolish?’ pouted Dora. ‘Love a beggar!’

‘Dora, my own dearest!’ said I. ‘I am a beggar!’

‘How can you be such a silly thing,’ replied Dora, slapping my hand, ‘as
to sit there, telling such stories? I’ll make Jip bite you!’

Her childish way was the most delicious way in the world to me, but it
was necessary to be explicit, and I solemnly repeated:

‘Dora, my own life, I am your ruined David!’

‘I declare I’ll make Jip bite you!’ said Dora, shaking her curls, ‘if
you are so ridiculous.’

But I looked so serious, that Dora left off shaking her curls, and laid
her trembling little hand upon my shoulder, and first looked scared
and anxious, then began to cry. That was dreadful. I fell upon my knees
before the sofa, caressing her, and imploring her not to rend my heart;
but, for some time, poor little Dora did nothing but exclaim Oh dear! Oh
dear! And oh, she was so frightened! And where was Julia Mills! And oh,
take her to Julia Mills, and go away, please! until I was almost beside
myself.

At last, after an agony of supplication and protestation, I got Dora
to look at me, with a horrified expression of face, which I gradually
soothed until it was only loving, and her soft, pretty cheek was lying
against mine. Then I told her, with my arms clasped round her, how I
loved her, so dearly, and so dearly; how I felt it right to offer to
release her from her engagement, because now I was poor; how I never
could bear it, or recover it, if I lost her; how I had no fears of
poverty, if she had none, my arm being nerved and my heart inspired by
her; how I was already working with a courage such as none but lovers
knew; how I had begun to be practical, and look into the future; how a
crust well earned was sweeter far than a feast inherited; and much
more to the same purpose, which I delivered in a burst of passionate
eloquence quite surprising to myself, though I had been thinking about
it, day and night, ever since my aunt had astonished me.

‘Is your heart mine still, dear Dora?’ said I, rapturously, for I knew
by her clinging to me that it was.

‘Oh, yes!’ cried Dora. ‘Oh, yes, it’s all yours. Oh, don’t be dreadful!’

I dreadful! To Dora!

‘Don’t talk about being poor, and working hard!’ said Dora, nestling
closer to me. ‘Oh, don’t, don’t!’

‘My dearest love,’ said I, ‘the crust well-earned--’

‘Oh, yes; but I don’t want to hear any more about crusts!’ said Dora.
‘And Jip must have a mutton-chop every day at twelve, or he’ll die.’

I was charmed with her childish, winning way. I fondly explained to Dora
that Jip should have his mutton-chop with his accustomed regularity.
I drew a picture of our frugal home, made independent by my
labour--sketching in the little house I had seen at Highgate, and my
aunt in her room upstairs.

‘I am not dreadful now, Dora?’ said I, tenderly.

‘Oh, no, no!’ cried Dora. ‘But I hope your aunt will keep in her own
room a good deal. And I hope she’s not a scolding old thing!’

If it were possible for me to love Dora more than ever, I am sure I did.
But I felt she was a little impracticable. It damped my new-born ardour,
to find that ardour so difficult of communication to her. I made another
trial. When she was quite herself again, and was curling Jip’s ears, as
he lay upon her lap, I became grave, and said:

‘My own! May I mention something?’

‘Oh, please don’t be practical!’ said Dora, coaxingly. ‘Because it
frightens me so!’

‘Sweetheart!’ I returned; ‘there is nothing to alarm you in all this. I
want you to think of it quite differently. I want to make it nerve you,
and inspire you, Dora!’

‘Oh, but that’s so shocking!’ cried Dora.

‘My love, no. Perseverance and strength of character will enable us to
bear much worse things.’ ‘But I haven’t got any strength at all,’
said Dora, shaking her curls. ‘Have I, Jip? Oh, do kiss Jip, and be
agreeable!’

It was impossible to resist kissing Jip, when she held him up to me for
that purpose, putting her own bright, rosy little mouth into kissing
form, as she directed the operation, which she insisted should be
performed symmetrically, on the centre of his nose. I did as she bade
me--rewarding myself afterwards for my obedience--and she charmed me out
of my graver character for I don’t know how long.

‘But, Dora, my beloved!’ said I, at last resuming it; ‘I was going to
mention something.’

The judge of the Prerogative Court might have fallen in love with her,
to see her fold her little hands and hold them up, begging and praying
me not to be dreadful any more.

‘Indeed I am not going to be, my darling!’ I assured her. ‘But, Dora, my
love, if you will sometimes think,--not despondingly, you know; far from
that!--but if you will sometimes think--just to encourage yourself--that
you are engaged to a poor man--’

‘Don’t, don’t! Pray don’t!’ cried Dora. ‘It’s so very dreadful!’

‘My soul, not at all!’ said I, cheerfully. ‘If you will sometimes think
of that, and look about now and then at your papa’s housekeeping, and
endeavour to acquire a little habit--of accounts, for instance--’

Poor little Dora received this suggestion with something that was half a
sob and half a scream.

‘--It would be so useful to us afterwards,’ I went on. ‘And if you would
promise me to read a little--a little Cookery Book that I would send
you, it would be so excellent for both of us. For our path in life, my
Dora,’ said I, warming with the subject, ‘is stony and rugged now, and
it rests with us to smooth it. We must fight our way onward. We must be
brave. There are obstacles to be met, and we must meet, and crush them!’

I was going on at a great rate, with a clenched hand, and a most
enthusiastic countenance; but it was quite unnecessary to proceed. I had
said enough. I had done it again. Oh, she was so frightened! Oh, where
was Julia Mills! Oh, take her to Julia Mills, and go away, please!
So that, in short, I was quite distracted, and raved about the
drawing-room.

I thought I had killed her, this time. I sprinkled water on her face.
I went down on my knees. I plucked at my hair. I denounced myself as a
remorseless brute and a ruthless beast. I implored her forgiveness.
I besought her to look up. I ravaged Miss Mills’s work-box for a
smelling-bottle, and in my agony of mind applied an ivory needle-case
instead, and dropped all the needles over Dora. I shook my fists at Jip,
who was as frantic as myself. I did every wild extravagance that could
be done, and was a long way beyond the end of my wits when Miss Mills
came into the room.

‘Who has done this?’ exclaimed Miss Mills, succouring her friend.

I replied, ‘I, Miss Mills! I have done it! Behold the destroyer!’--or
words to that effect--and hid my face from the light, in the sofa
cushion.

At first Miss Mills thought it was a quarrel, and that we were verging
on the Desert of Sahara; but she soon found out how matters stood, for
my dear affectionate little Dora, embracing her, began exclaiming that I
was ‘a poor labourer’; and then cried for me, and embraced me, and asked
me would I let her give me all her money to keep, and then fell on Miss
Mills’s neck, sobbing as if her tender heart were broken.

Miss Mills must have been born to be a blessing to us. She ascertained
from me in a few words what it was all about, comforted Dora, and
gradually convinced her that I was not a labourer--from my manner of
stating the case I believe Dora concluded that I was a navigator,
and went balancing myself up and down a plank all day with a
wheelbarrow--and so brought us together in peace. When we were quite
composed, and Dora had gone up-stairs to put some rose-water to her
eyes, Miss Mills rang for tea. In the ensuing interval, I told Miss
Mills that she was evermore my friend, and that my heart must cease to
vibrate ere I could forget her sympathy.

I then expounded to Miss Mills what I had endeavoured, so very
unsuccessfully, to expound to Dora. Miss Mills replied, on general
principles, that the Cottage of content was better than the Palace of
cold splendour, and that where love was, all was.

I said to Miss Mills that this was very true, and who should know
it better than I, who loved Dora with a love that never mortal had
experienced yet? But on Miss Mills observing, with despondency, that
it were well indeed for some hearts if this were so, I explained that
I begged leave to restrict the observation to mortals of the masculine
gender.

I then put it to Miss Mills, to say whether she considered that there
was or was not any practical merit in the suggestion I had been anxious
to make, concerning the accounts, the housekeeping, and the Cookery
Book?

Miss Mills, after some consideration, thus replied:

‘Mr. Copperfield, I will be plain with you. Mental suffering and trial
supply, in some natures, the place of years, and I will be as plain with
you as if I were a Lady Abbess. No. The suggestion is not appropriate
to our Dora. Our dearest Dora is a favourite child of nature. She is a
thing of light, and airiness, and joy. I am free to confess that if it
could be done, it might be well, but--’ And Miss Mills shook her head.

I was encouraged by this closing admission on the part of Miss Mills to
ask her, whether, for Dora’s sake, if she had any opportunity of luring
her attention to such preparations for an earnest life, she would avail
herself of it? Miss Mills replied in the affirmative so readily, that I
further asked her if she would take charge of the Cookery Book; and, if
she ever could insinuate it upon Dora’s acceptance, without frightening
her, undertake to do me that crowning service. Miss Mills accepted this
trust, too; but was not sanguine.

And Dora returned, looking such a lovely little creature, that I really
doubted whether she ought to be troubled with anything so ordinary. And
she loved me so much, and was so captivating (particularly when she made
Jip stand on his hind legs for toast, and when she pretended to hold
that nose of his against the hot teapot for punishment because he
wouldn’t), that I felt like a sort of Monster who had got into a Fairy’s
bower, when I thought of having frightened her, and made her cry.

After tea we had the guitar; and Dora sang those same dear old French
songs about the impossibility of ever on any account leaving off
dancing, La ra la, La ra la, until I felt a much greater Monster than
before.

We had only one check to our pleasure, and that happened a little while
before I took my leave, when, Miss Mills chancing to make some allusion
to tomorrow morning, I unluckily let out that, being obliged to exert
myself now, I got up at five o’clock. Whether Dora had any idea that
I was a Private Watchman, I am unable to say; but it made a great
impression on her, and she neither played nor sang any more.

It was still on her mind when I bade her adieu; and she said to me, in
her pretty coaxing way--as if I were a doll, I used to think:

‘Now don’t get up at five o’clock, you naughty boy. It’s so
nonsensical!’

‘My love,’ said I, ‘I have work to do.’

‘But don’t do it!’ returned Dora. ‘Why should you?’

It was impossible to say to that sweet little surprised face, otherwise
than lightly and playfully, that we must work to live.

‘Oh! How ridiculous!’ cried Dora.

‘How shall we live without, Dora?’ said I.

‘How? Any how!’ said Dora.

She seemed to think she had quite settled the question, and gave me such
a triumphant little kiss, direct from her innocent heart, that I would
hardly have put her out of conceit with her answer, for a fortune.

Well! I loved her, and I went on loving her, most absorbingly, entirely,
and completely. But going on, too, working pretty hard, and busily
keeping red-hot all the irons I now had in the fire, I would sit
sometimes of a night, opposite my aunt, thinking how I had frightened
Dora that time, and how I could best make my way with a guitar-case
through the forest of difficulty, until I used to fancy that my head was
turning quite grey.



CHAPTER 38. A DISSOLUTION OF PARTNERSHIP


I did not allow my resolution, with respect to the Parliamentary
Debates, to cool. It was one of the irons I began to heat immediately,
and one of the irons I kept hot, and hammered at, with a perseverance
I may honestly admire. I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and
mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence); and plunged
into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the
confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which
in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position
something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were
played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from
marks like flies’ legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong
place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in
my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly, through these difficulties,
and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian Temple in itself,
there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary
characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who
insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb,
meant expectation, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket, stood for
disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found
that they had driven everything else out of it; then, beginning again, I
forgot them; while I was picking them up, I dropped the other fragments
of the system; in short, it was almost heart-breaking.

It might have been quite heart-breaking, but for Dora, who was the stay
and anchor of my tempest-driven bark. Every scratch in the scheme was
a gnarled oak in the forest of difficulty, and I went on cutting them
down, one after another, with such vigour, that in three or four months
I was in a condition to make an experiment on one of our crack speakers
in the Commons. Shall I ever forget how the crack speaker walked off
from me before I began, and left my imbecile pencil staggering about the
paper as if it were in a fit!

This would not do, it was quite clear. I was flying too high, and should
never get on, so. I resorted to Traddles for advice; who suggested
that he should dictate speeches to me, at a pace, and with occasional
stoppages, adapted to my weakness. Very grateful for this friendly aid,
I accepted the proposal; and night after night, almost every night, for
a long time, we had a sort of Private Parliament in Buckingham Street,
after I came home from the Doctor’s.

I should like to see such a Parliament anywhere else! My aunt and Mr.
Dick represented the Government or the Opposition (as the case might
be), and Traddles, with the assistance of Enfield’s Speakers, or a
volume of parliamentary orations, thundered astonishing invectives
against them. Standing by the table, with his finger in the page to keep
the place, and his right arm flourishing above his head, Traddles, as
Mr. Pitt, Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Burke, Lord Castlereagh, Viscount
Sidmouth, or Mr. Canning, would work himself into the most violent
heats, and deliver the most withering denunciations of the profligacy
and corruption of my aunt and Mr. Dick; while I used to sit, at a little
distance, with my notebook on my knee, fagging after him with all my
might and main. The inconsistency and recklessness of Traddles were not
to be exceeded by any real politician. He was for any description of
policy, in the compass of a week; and nailed all sorts of colours to
every denomination of mast. My aunt, looking very like an immovable
Chancellor of the Exchequer, would occasionally throw in an interruption
or two, as ‘Hear!’ or ‘No!’ or ‘Oh!’ when the text seemed to require it:
which was always a signal to Mr. Dick (a perfect country gentleman)
to follow lustily with the same cry. But Mr. Dick got taxed with
such things in the course of his Parliamentary career, and was made
responsible for such awful consequences, that he became uncomfortable in
his mind sometimes. I believe he actually began to be afraid he really
had been doing something, tending to the annihilation of the British
constitution, and the ruin of the country.

Often and often we pursued these debates until the clock pointed to
midnight, and the candles were burning down. The result of so much good
practice was, that by and by I began to keep pace with Traddles pretty
well, and should have been quite triumphant if I had had the least idea
what my notes were about. But, as to reading them after I had got them,
I might as well have copied the Chinese inscriptions of an immense
collection of tea-chests, or the golden characters on all the great red
and green bottles in the chemists’ shops!

There was nothing for it, but to turn back and begin all over again. It
was very hard, but I turned back, though with a heavy heart, and began
laboriously and methodically to plod over the same tedious ground at a
snail’s pace; stopping to examine minutely every speck in the way, on
all sides, and making the most desperate efforts to know these elusive
characters by sight wherever I met them. I was always punctual at
the office; at the Doctor’s too: and I really did work, as the common
expression is, like a cart-horse. One day, when I went to the Commons as
usual, I found Mr. Spenlow in the doorway looking extremely grave, and
talking to himself. As he was in the habit of complaining of pains in
his head--he had naturally a short throat, and I do seriously believe
he over-starched himself--I was at first alarmed by the idea that he was
not quite right in that direction; but he soon relieved my uneasiness.

Instead of returning my ‘Good morning’ with his usual affability, he
looked at me in a distant, ceremonious manner, and coldly requested me
to accompany him to a certain coffee-house, which, in those days, had
a door opening into the Commons, just within the little archway in St.
Paul’s Churchyard. I complied, in a very uncomfortable state, and with a
warm shooting all over me, as if my apprehensions were breaking out into
buds. When I allowed him to go on a little before, on account of the
narrowness of the way, I observed that he carried his head with a lofty
air that was particularly unpromising; and my mind misgave me that he
had found out about my darling Dora.

If I had not guessed this, on the way to the coffee-house, I could
hardly have failed to know what was the matter when I followed him
into an upstairs room, and found Miss Murdstone there, supported by
a background of sideboard, on which were several inverted tumblers
sustaining lemons, and two of those extraordinary boxes, all corners and
flutings, for sticking knives and forks in, which, happily for mankind,
are now obsolete.

Miss Murdstone gave me her chilly finger-nails, and sat severely rigid.
Mr. Spenlow shut the door, motioned me to a chair, and stood on the
hearth-rug in front of the fireplace.

‘Have the goodness to show Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mr. Spenlow, what you
have in your reticule, Miss Murdstone.’

I believe it was the old identical steel-clasped reticule of my
childhood, that shut up like a bite. Compressing her lips, in sympathy
with the snap, Miss Murdstone opened it--opening her mouth a little
at the same time--and produced my last letter to Dora, teeming with
expressions of devoted affection.

‘I believe that is your writing, Mr. Copperfield?’ said Mr. Spenlow.

I was very hot, and the voice I heard was very unlike mine, when I said,
‘It is, sir!’

‘If I am not mistaken,’ said Mr. Spenlow, as Miss Murdstone brought a
parcel of letters out of her reticule, tied round with the dearest bit
of blue ribbon, ‘those are also from your pen, Mr. Copperfield?’

I took them from her with a most desolate sensation; and, glancing at
such phrases at the top, as ‘My ever dearest and own Dora,’ ‘My best
beloved angel,’ ‘My blessed one for ever,’ and the like, blushed deeply,
and inclined my head.

‘No, thank you!’ said Mr. Spenlow, coldly, as I mechanically offered
them back to him. ‘I will not deprive you of them. Miss Murdstone, be so
good as to proceed!’

That gentle creature, after a moment’s thoughtful survey of the carpet,
delivered herself with much dry unction as follows.

‘I must confess to having entertained my suspicions of Miss Spenlow, in
reference to David Copperfield, for some time. I observed Miss Spenlow
and David Copperfield, when they first met; and the impression made upon
me then was not agreeable. The depravity of the human heart is such--’

‘You will oblige me, ma’am,’ interrupted Mr. Spenlow, ‘by confining
yourself to facts.’

Miss Murdstone cast down her eyes, shook her head as if protesting
against this unseemly interruption, and with frowning dignity resumed:

‘Since I am to confine myself to facts, I will state them as dryly as I
can. Perhaps that will be considered an acceptable course of proceeding.
I have already said, sir, that I have had my suspicions of Miss Spenlow,
in reference to David Copperfield, for some time. I have frequently
endeavoured to find decisive corroboration of those suspicions, but
without effect. I have therefore forborne to mention them to Miss
Spenlow’s father’; looking severely at him--‘knowing how little
disposition there usually is in such cases, to acknowledge the
conscientious discharge of duty.’

Mr. Spenlow seemed quite cowed by the gentlemanly sternness of Miss
Murdstone’s manner, and deprecated her severity with a conciliatory
little wave of his hand.

‘On my return to Norwood, after the period of absence occasioned by my
brother’s marriage,’ pursued Miss Murdstone in a disdainful voice, ‘and
on the return of Miss Spenlow from her visit to her friend Miss Mills,
I imagined that the manner of Miss Spenlow gave me greater occasion for
suspicion than before. Therefore I watched Miss Spenlow closely.’

Dear, tender little Dora, so unconscious of this Dragon’s eye!

‘Still,’ resumed Miss Murdstone, ‘I found no proof until last night.
It appeared to me that Miss Spenlow received too many letters from her
friend Miss Mills; but Miss Mills being her friend with her father’s
full concurrence,’ another telling blow at Mr. Spenlow, ‘it was not
for me to interfere. If I may not be permitted to allude to the natural
depravity of the human heart, at least I may--I must--be permitted, so
far to refer to misplaced confidence.’

Mr. Spenlow apologetically murmured his assent.

‘Last evening after tea,’ pursued Miss Murdstone, ‘I observed the little
dog starting, rolling, and growling about the drawing-room, worrying
something. I said to Miss Spenlow, “Dora, what is that the dog has in
his mouth? It’s paper.” Miss Spenlow immediately put her hand to her
frock, gave a sudden cry, and ran to the dog. I interposed, and said,
“Dora, my love, you must permit me.”’

Oh Jip, miserable Spaniel, this wretchedness, then, was your work!

‘Miss Spenlow endeavoured,’ said Miss Murdstone, ‘to bribe me with
kisses, work-boxes, and small articles of jewellery--that, of course,
I pass over. The little dog retreated under the sofa on my approaching
him, and was with great difficulty dislodged by the fire-irons. Even
when dislodged, he still kept the letter in his mouth; and on my
endeavouring to take it from him, at the imminent risk of being bitten,
he kept it between his teeth so pertinaciously as to suffer himself
to be held suspended in the air by means of the document. At length I
obtained possession of it. After perusing it, I taxed Miss Spenlow with
having many such letters in her possession; and ultimately obtained from
her the packet which is now in David Copperfield’s hand.’

Here she ceased; and snapping her reticule again, and shutting her
mouth, looked as if she might be broken, but could never be bent.

‘You have heard Miss Murdstone,’ said Mr. Spenlow, turning to me. ‘I beg
to ask, Mr. Copperfield, if you have anything to say in reply?’

The picture I had before me, of the beautiful little treasure of my
heart, sobbing and crying all night--of her being alone, frightened,
and wretched, then--of her having so piteously begged and prayed that
stony-hearted woman to forgive her--of her having vainly offered her
those kisses, work-boxes, and trinkets--of her being in such grievous
distress, and all for me--very much impaired the little dignity I had
been able to muster. I am afraid I was in a tremulous state for a minute
or so, though I did my best to disguise it.

‘There is nothing I can say, sir,’ I returned, ‘except that all the
blame is mine. Dora--’

‘Miss Spenlow, if you please,’ said her father, majestically.

‘--was induced and persuaded by me,’ I went on, swallowing that colder
designation, ‘to consent to this concealment, and I bitterly regret it.’

‘You are very much to blame, sir,’ said Mr. Spenlow, walking to and fro
upon the hearth-rug, and emphasizing what he said with his whole body
instead of his head, on account of the stiffness of his cravat and
spine. ‘You have done a stealthy and unbecoming action, Mr. Copperfield.
When I take a gentleman to my house, no matter whether he is nineteen,
twenty-nine, or ninety, I take him there in a spirit of confidence.
If he abuses my confidence, he commits a dishonourable action, Mr.
Copperfield.’

‘I feel it, sir, I assure you,’ I returned. ‘But I never thought so,
before. Sincerely, honestly, indeed, Mr. Spenlow, I never thought so,
before. I love Miss Spenlow to that extent--’

‘Pooh! nonsense!’ said Mr. Spenlow, reddening. ‘Pray don’t tell me to my
face that you love my daughter, Mr. Copperfield!’

‘Could I defend my conduct if I did not, sir?’ I returned, with all
humility.

‘Can you defend your conduct if you do, sir?’ said Mr. Spenlow, stopping
short upon the hearth-rug. ‘Have you considered your years, and my
daughter’s years, Mr. Copperfield? Have you considered what it is to
undermine the confidence that should subsist between my daughter and
myself? Have you considered my daughter’s station in life, the projects
I may contemplate for her advancement, the testamentary intentions I
may have with reference to her? Have you considered anything, Mr.
Copperfield?’

‘Very little, sir, I am afraid;’ I answered, speaking to him as
respectfully and sorrowfully as I felt; ‘but pray believe me, I have
considered my own worldly position. When I explained it to you, we were
already engaged--’

‘I BEG,’ said Mr. Spenlow, more like Punch than I had ever seen him,
as he energetically struck one hand upon the other--I could not help
noticing that even in my despair; ‘that YOU Will NOT talk to me of
engagements, Mr. Copperfield!’

The otherwise immovable Miss Murdstone laughed contemptuously in one
short syllable.

‘When I explained my altered position to you, sir,’ I began again,
substituting a new form of expression for what was so unpalatable to
him, ‘this concealment, into which I am so unhappy as to have led Miss
Spenlow, had begun. Since I have been in that altered position, I have
strained every nerve, I have exerted every energy, to improve it. I am
sure I shall improve it in time. Will you grant me time--any length of
time? We are both so young, sir,--’

‘You are right,’ interrupted Mr. Spenlow, nodding his head a great
many times, and frowning very much, ‘you are both very young. It’s all
nonsense. Let there be an end of the nonsense. Take away those letters,
and throw them in the fire. Give me Miss Spenlow’s letters to throw in
the fire; and although our future intercourse must, you are aware, be
restricted to the Commons here, we will agree to make no further mention
of the past. Come, Mr. Copperfield, you don’t want sense; and this is
the sensible course.’

No. I couldn’t think of agreeing to it. I was very sorry, but there
was a higher consideration than sense. Love was above all earthly
considerations, and I loved Dora to idolatry, and Dora loved me. I
didn’t exactly say so; I softened it down as much as I could; but I
implied it, and I was resolute upon it. I don’t think I made myself very
ridiculous, but I know I was resolute.

‘Very well, Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mr. Spenlow, ‘I must try my influence
with my daughter.’

Miss Murdstone, by an expressive sound, a long drawn respiration, which
was neither a sigh nor a moan, but was like both, gave it as her opinion
that he should have done this at first.

‘I must try,’ said Mr. Spenlow, confirmed by this support, ‘my
influence with my daughter. Do you decline to take those letters, Mr.
Copperfield?’ For I had laid them on the table.

Yes. I told him I hoped he would not think it wrong, but I couldn’t
possibly take them from Miss Murdstone.

‘Nor from me?’ said Mr. Spenlow.

No, I replied with the profoundest respect; nor from him.

‘Very well!’ said Mr. Spenlow.

A silence succeeding, I was undecided whether to go or stay. At length
I was moving quietly towards the door, with the intention of saying that
perhaps I should consult his feelings best by withdrawing: when he said,
with his hands in his coat pockets, into which it was as much as he
could do to get them; and with what I should call, upon the whole, a
decidedly pious air:

‘You are probably aware, Mr. Copperfield, that I am not altogether
destitute of worldly possessions, and that my daughter is my nearest and
dearest relative?’

I hurriedly made him a reply to the effect, that I hoped the error into
which I had been betrayed by the desperate nature of my love, did not
induce him to think me mercenary too?

‘I don’t allude to the matter in that light,’ said Mr. Spenlow. ‘It
would be better for yourself, and all of us, if you WERE mercenary, Mr.
Copperfield--I mean, if you were more discreet and less influenced by
all this youthful nonsense. No. I merely say, with quite another view,
you are probably aware I have some property to bequeath to my child?’

I certainly supposed so.

‘And you can hardly think,’ said Mr. Spenlow, ‘having experience of what
we see, in the Commons here, every day, of the various unaccountable
and negligent proceedings of men, in respect of their testamentary
arrangements--of all subjects, the one on which perhaps the strangest
revelations of human inconsistency are to be met with--but that mine are
made?’

I inclined my head in acquiescence.

‘I should not allow,’ said Mr. Spenlow, with an evident increase of
pious sentiment, and slowly shaking his head as he poised himself upon
his toes and heels alternately, ‘my suitable provision for my child to
be influenced by a piece of youthful folly like the present. It is mere
folly. Mere nonsense. In a little while, it will weigh lighter than
any feather. But I might--I might--if this silly business were not
completely relinquished altogether, be induced in some anxious moment
to guard her from, and surround her with protections against, the
consequences of any foolish step in the way of marriage. Now, Mr.
Copperfield, I hope that you will not render it necessary for me to
open, even for a quarter of an hour, that closed page in the book of
life, and unsettle, even for a quarter of an hour, grave affairs long
since composed.’

There was a serenity, a tranquillity, a calm sunset air about him, which
quite affected me. He was so peaceful and resigned--clearly had his
affairs in such perfect train, and so systematically wound up--that he
was a man to feel touched in the contemplation of. I really think I saw
tears rise to his eyes, from the depth of his own feeling of all this.

But what could I do? I could not deny Dora and my own heart. When he
told me I had better take a week to consider of what he had said, how
could I say I wouldn’t take a week, yet how could I fail to know that no
amount of weeks could influence such love as mine?

‘In the meantime, confer with Miss Trotwood, or with any person with
any knowledge of life,’ said Mr. Spenlow, adjusting his cravat with both
hands. ‘Take a week, Mr. Copperfield.’

I submitted; and, with a countenance as expressive as I was able to
make it of dejected and despairing constancy, came out of the room. Miss
Murdstone’s heavy eyebrows followed me to the door--I say her eyebrows
rather than her eyes, because they were much more important in her
face--and she looked so exactly as she used to look, at about that
hour of the morning, in our parlour at Blunderstone, that I could have
fancied I had been breaking down in my lessons again, and that the
dead weight on my mind was that horrible old spelling-book, with
oval woodcuts, shaped, to my youthful fancy, like the glasses out of
spectacles.

When I got to the office, and, shutting out old Tiffey and the rest of
them with my hands, sat at my desk, in my own particular nook, thinking
of this earthquake that had taken place so unexpectedly, and in the
bitterness of my spirit cursing Jip, I fell into such a state of torment
about Dora, that I wonder I did not take up my hat and rush insanely to
Norwood. The idea of their frightening her, and making her cry, and of
my not being there to comfort her, was so excruciating, that it impelled
me to write a wild letter to Mr. Spenlow, beseeching him not to visit
upon her the consequences of my awful destiny. I implored him to spare
her gentle nature--not to crush a fragile flower--and addressed him
generally, to the best of my remembrance, as if, instead of being her
father, he had been an Ogre, or the Dragon of Wantley. This letter I
sealed and laid upon his desk before he returned; and when he came in,
I saw him, through the half-opened door of his room, take it up and read
it.

He said nothing about it all the morning; but before he went away in the
afternoon he called me in, and told me that I need not make myself at
all uneasy about his daughter’s happiness. He had assured her, he said,
that it was all nonsense; and he had nothing more to say to her. He
believed he was an indulgent father (as indeed he was), and I might
spare myself any solicitude on her account.

‘You may make it necessary, if you are foolish or obstinate, Mr.
Copperfield,’ he observed, ‘for me to send my daughter abroad again,
for a term; but I have a better opinion of you. I hope you will be wiser
than that, in a few days. As to Miss Murdstone,’ for I had alluded to
her in the letter, ‘I respect that lady’s vigilance, and feel obliged to
her; but she has strict charge to avoid the subject. All I desire, Mr.
Copperfield, is, that it should be forgotten. All you have got to do,
Mr. Copperfield, is to forget it.’

All! In the note I wrote to Miss Mills, I bitterly quoted this
sentiment. All I had to do, I said, with gloomy sarcasm, was to forget
Dora. That was all, and what was that! I entreated Miss Mills to see
me, that evening. If it could not be done with Mr. Mills’s sanction
and concurrence, I besought a clandestine interview in the back kitchen
where the Mangle was. I informed her that my reason was tottering on
its throne, and only she, Miss Mills, could prevent its being deposed.
I signed myself, hers distractedly; and I couldn’t help feeling, while
I read this composition over, before sending it by a porter, that it was
something in the style of Mr. Micawber.

However, I sent it. At night I repaired to Miss Mills’s street, and
walked up and down, until I was stealthily fetched in by Miss Mills’s
maid, and taken the area way to the back kitchen. I have since seen
reason to believe that there was nothing on earth to prevent my going in
at the front door, and being shown up into the drawing-room, except Miss
Mills’s love of the romantic and mysterious.

In the back kitchen, I raved as became me. I went there, I suppose,
to make a fool of myself, and I am quite sure I did it. Miss Mills had
received a hasty note from Dora, telling her that all was discovered,
and saying. ‘Oh pray come to me, Julia, do, do!’ But Miss Mills,
mistrusting the acceptability of her presence to the higher powers, had
not yet gone; and we were all benighted in the Desert of Sahara.

Miss Mills had a wonderful flow of words, and liked to pour them out. I
could not help feeling, though she mingled her tears with mine, that she
had a dreadful luxury in our afflictions. She petted them, as I may say,
and made the most of them. A deep gulf, she observed, had opened between
Dora and me, and Love could only span it with its rainbow. Love must
suffer in this stern world; it ever had been so, it ever would be so. No
matter, Miss Mills remarked. Hearts confined by cobwebs would burst at
last, and then Love was avenged.

This was small consolation, but Miss Mills wouldn’t encourage fallacious
hopes. She made me much more wretched than I was before, and I felt (and
told her with the deepest gratitude) that she was indeed a friend. We
resolved that she should go to Dora the first thing in the morning,
and find some means of assuring her, either by looks or words, of my
devotion and misery. We parted, overwhelmed with grief; and I think Miss
Mills enjoyed herself completely.

I confided all to my aunt when I got home; and in spite of all she could
say to me, went to bed despairing. I got up despairing, and went out
despairing. It was Saturday morning, and I went straight to the Commons.

I was surprised, when I came within sight of our office-door, to see the
ticket-porters standing outside talking together, and some half-dozen
stragglers gazing at the windows which were shut up. I quickened my
pace, and, passing among them, wondering at their looks, went hurriedly
in.

The clerks were there, but nobody was doing anything. Old Tiffey, for
the first time in his life I should think, was sitting on somebody
else’s stool, and had not hung up his hat.

‘This is a dreadful calamity, Mr. Copperfield,’ said he, as I entered.

‘What is?’ I exclaimed. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Don’t you know?’ cried Tiffey, and all the rest of them, coming round
me.

‘No!’ said I, looking from face to face.

‘Mr. Spenlow,’ said Tiffey.

‘What about him!’

‘Dead!’ I thought it was the office reeling, and not I, as one of
the clerks caught hold of me. They sat me down in a chair, untied my
neck-cloth, and brought me some water. I have no idea whether this took
any time.

‘Dead?’ said I.

‘He dined in town yesterday, and drove down in the phaeton by himself,’
said Tiffey, ‘having sent his own groom home by the coach, as he
sometimes did, you know--’

‘Well?’

‘The phaeton went home without him. The horses stopped at the
stable-gate. The man went out with a lantern. Nobody in the carriage.’

‘Had they run away?’

‘They were not hot,’ said Tiffey, putting on his glasses; ‘no hotter, I
understand, than they would have been, going down at the usual pace. The
reins were broken, but they had been dragging on the ground. The house
was roused up directly, and three of them went out along the road. They
found him a mile off.’

‘More than a mile off, Mr. Tiffey,’ interposed a junior.

‘Was it? I believe you are right,’ said Tiffey,--‘more than a mile
off--not far from the church--lying partly on the roadside, and partly
on the path, upon his face. Whether he fell out in a fit, or got out,
feeling ill before the fit came on--or even whether he was quite dead
then, though there is no doubt he was quite insensible--no one appears
to know. If he breathed, certainly he never spoke. Medical assistance
was got as soon as possible, but it was quite useless.’

I cannot describe the state of mind into which I was thrown by this
intelligence. The shock of such an event happening so suddenly, and
happening to one with whom I had been in any respect at variance--the
appalling vacancy in the room he had occupied so lately, where his chair
and table seemed to wait for him, and his handwriting of yesterday was
like a ghost--the indefinable impossibility of separating him from the
place, and feeling, when the door opened, as if he might come in--the
lazy hush and rest there was in the office, and the insatiable relish
with which our people talked about it, and other people came in and
out all day, and gorged themselves with the subject--this is easily
intelligible to anyone. What I cannot describe is, how, in the innermost
recesses of my own heart, I had a lurking jealousy even of Death. How
I felt as if its might would push me from my ground in Dora’s thoughts.
How I was, in a grudging way I have no words for, envious of her grief.
How it made me restless to think of her weeping to others, or being
consoled by others. How I had a grasping, avaricious wish to shut out
everybody from her but myself, and to be all in all to her, at that
unseasonable time of all times.

In the trouble of this state of mind--not exclusively my own, I hope,
but known to others--I went down to Norwood that night; and finding from
one of the servants, when I made my inquiries at the door, that Miss
Mills was there, got my aunt to direct a letter to her, which I wrote.
I deplored the untimely death of Mr. Spenlow, most sincerely, and shed
tears in doing so. I entreated her to tell Dora, if Dora were in a
state to hear it, that he had spoken to me with the utmost kindness and
consideration; and had coupled nothing but tenderness, not a single or
reproachful word, with her name. I know I did this selfishly, to have my
name brought before her; but I tried to believe it was an act of justice
to his memory. Perhaps I did believe it.

My aunt received a few lines next day in reply; addressed, outside, to
her; within, to me. Dora was overcome by grief; and when her friend had
asked her should she send her love to me, had only cried, as she was
always crying, ‘Oh, dear papa! oh, poor papa!’ But she had not said No,
and that I made the most of.

Mr. Jorkins, who had been at Norwood since the occurrence, came to the
office a few days afterwards. He and Tiffey were closeted together for
some few moments, and then Tiffey looked out at the door and beckoned me
in.

‘Oh!’ said Mr. Jorkins. ‘Mr. Tiffey and myself, Mr. Copperfield, are
about to examine the desks, the drawers, and other such repositories
of the deceased, with the view of sealing up his private papers, and
searching for a Will. There is no trace of any, elsewhere. It may be as
well for you to assist us, if you please.’

I had been in agony to obtain some knowledge of the circumstances
in which my Dora would be placed--as, in whose guardianship, and so
forth--and this was something towards it. We began the search at once;
Mr. Jorkins unlocking the drawers and desks, and we all taking out the
papers. The office-papers we placed on one side, and the private papers
(which were not numerous) on the other. We were very grave; and when we
came to a stray seal, or pencil-case, or ring, or any little article of
that kind which we associated personally with him, we spoke very low.

We had sealed up several packets; and were still going on dustily and
quietly, when Mr. Jorkins said to us, applying exactly the same words to
his late partner as his late partner had applied to him:

‘Mr. Spenlow was very difficult to move from the beaten track. You know
what he was! I am disposed to think he had made no will.’

‘Oh, I know he had!’ said I.

They both stopped and looked at me. ‘On the very day when I last saw
him,’ said I, ‘he told me that he had, and that his affairs were long
since settled.’

Mr. Jorkins and old Tiffey shook their heads with one accord.

‘That looks unpromising,’ said Tiffey.

‘Very unpromising,’ said Mr. Jorkins.

‘Surely you don’t doubt--’ I began.

‘My good Mr. Copperfield!’ said Tiffey, laying his hand upon my arm, and
shutting up both his eyes as he shook his head: ‘if you had been in the
Commons as long as I have, you would know that there is no subject on
which men are so inconsistent, and so little to be trusted.’

‘Why, bless my soul, he made that very remark!’ I replied persistently.

‘I should call that almost final,’ observed Tiffey. ‘My opinion is--no
will.’

It appeared a wonderful thing to me, but it turned out that there was
no will. He had never so much as thought of making one, so far as his
papers afforded any evidence; for there was no kind of hint, sketch, or
memorandum, of any testamentary intention whatever. What was scarcely
less astonishing to me, was, that his affairs were in a most disordered
state. It was extremely difficult, I heard, to make out what he owed, or
what he had paid, or of what he died possessed. It was considered likely
that for years he could have had no clear opinion on these subjects
himself. By little and little it came out, that, in the competition on
all points of appearance and gentility then running high in the Commons,
he had spent more than his professional income, which was not a very
large one, and had reduced his private means, if they ever had been
great (which was exceedingly doubtful), to a very low ebb indeed. There
was a sale of the furniture and lease, at Norwood; and Tiffey told me,
little thinking how interested I was in the story, that, paying all the
just debts of the deceased, and deducting his share of outstanding bad
and doubtful debts due to the firm, he wouldn’t give a thousand pounds
for all the assets remaining.

This was at the expiration of about six weeks. I had suffered tortures
all the time; and thought I really must have laid violent hands upon
myself, when Miss Mills still reported to me, that my broken-hearted
little Dora would say nothing, when I was mentioned, but ‘Oh, poor papa!
Oh, dear papa!’ Also, that she had no other relations than two aunts,
maiden sisters of Mr. Spenlow, who lived at Putney, and who had not held
any other than chance communication with their brother for many years.
Not that they had ever quarrelled (Miss Mills informed me); but that
having been, on the occasion of Dora’s christening, invited to tea, when
they considered themselves privileged to be invited to dinner, they
had expressed their opinion in writing, that it was ‘better for the
happiness of all parties’ that they should stay away. Since which they
had gone their road, and their brother had gone his.

These two ladies now emerged from their retirement, and proposed to
take Dora to live at Putney. Dora, clinging to them both, and weeping,
exclaimed, ‘O yes, aunts! Please take Julia Mills and me and Jip to
Putney!’ So they went, very soon after the funeral.

How I found time to haunt Putney, I am sure I don’t know; but I
contrived, by some means or other, to prowl about the neighbourhood
pretty often. Miss Mills, for the more exact discharge of the duties of
friendship, kept a journal; and she used to meet me sometimes, on the
Common, and read it, or (if she had not time to do that) lend it to me.
How I treasured up the entries, of which I subjoin a sample--!

‘Monday. My sweet D. still much depressed. Headache. Called attention to
J. as being beautifully sleek. D. fondled J. Associations thus awakened,
opened floodgates of sorrow. Rush of grief admitted. (Are tears the
dewdrops of the heart? J. M.)

‘Tuesday. D. weak and nervous. Beautiful in pallor. (Do we not remark
this in moon likewise? J. M.) D., J. M. and J. took airing in carriage.
J. looking out of window, and barking violently at dustman, occasioned
smile to overspread features of D. (Of such slight links is chain of
life composed! J. M.)

‘Wednesday. D. comparatively cheerful. Sang to her, as congenial melody,
“Evening Bells”. Effect not soothing, but reverse. D. inexpressibly
affected. Found sobbing afterwards, in own room. Quoted verses
respecting self and young Gazelle. Ineffectually. Also referred to
Patience on Monument. (Qy. Why on monument? J. M.)

‘Thursday. D. certainly improved. Better night. Slight tinge of damask
revisiting cheek. Resolved to mention name of D. C. Introduced same,
cautiously, in course of airing. D. immediately overcome. “Oh, dear,
dear Julia! Oh, I have been a naughty and undutiful child!” Soothed
and caressed. Drew ideal picture of D. C. on verge of tomb. D. again
overcome. “Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do? Oh, take me somewhere!”
 Much alarmed. Fainting of D. and glass of water from public-house.
(Poetical affinity. Chequered sign on door-post; chequered human life.
Alas! J. M.)

‘Friday. Day of incident. Man appears in kitchen, with blue bag, “for
lady’s boots left out to heel”. Cook replies, “No such orders.” Man
argues point. Cook withdraws to inquire, leaving man alone with J. On
Cook’s return, man still argues point, but ultimately goes. J. missing.
D. distracted. Information sent to police. Man to be identified by
broad nose, and legs like balustrades of bridge. Search made in
every direction. No J. D. weeping bitterly, and inconsolable. Renewed
reference to young Gazelle. Appropriate, but unavailing. Towards
evening, strange boy calls. Brought into parlour. Broad nose, but no
balustrades. Says he wants a pound, and knows a dog. Declines to explain
further, though much pressed. Pound being produced by D. takes Cook
to little house, where J. alone tied up to leg of table. Joy of D.
who dances round J. while he eats his supper. Emboldened by this happy
change, mention D. C. upstairs. D. weeps afresh, cries piteously, “Oh,
don’t, don’t, don’t! It is so wicked to think of anything but poor
papa!”--embraces J. and sobs herself to sleep. (Must not D. C. confine
himself to the broad pinions of Time? J. M.)’

Miss Mills and her journal were my sole consolation at this period.
To see her, who had seen Dora but a little while before--to trace the
initial letter of Dora’s name through her sympathetic pages--to be made
more and more miserable by her--were my only comforts. I felt as if I
had been living in a palace of cards, which had tumbled down, leaving
only Miss Mills and me among the ruins; I felt as if some grim enchanter
had drawn a magic circle round the innocent goddess of my heart, which
nothing indeed but those same strong pinions, capable of carrying so
many people over so much, would enable me to enter!



CHAPTER 39. WICKFIELD AND HEEP


My aunt, beginning, I imagine, to be made seriously uncomfortable by my
prolonged dejection, made a pretence of being anxious that I should go
to Dover, to see that all was working well at the cottage, which was
let; and to conclude an agreement, with the same tenant, for a longer
term of occupation. Janet was drafted into the service of Mrs. Strong,
where I saw her every day. She had been undecided, on leaving Dover,
whether or no to give the finishing touch to that renunciation of
mankind in which she had been educated, by marrying a pilot; but she
decided against that venture. Not so much for the sake of principle, I
believe, as because she happened not to like him.

Although it required an effort to leave Miss Mills, I fell rather
willingly into my aunt’s pretence, as a means of enabling me to pass a
few tranquil hours with Agnes. I consulted the good Doctor relative
to an absence of three days; and the Doctor wishing me to take that
relaxation,--he wished me to take more; but my energy could not bear
that,--I made up my mind to go.

As to the Commons, I had no great occasion to be particular about my
duties in that quarter. To say the truth, we were getting in no very
good odour among the tip-top proctors, and were rapidly sliding down
to but a doubtful position. The business had been indifferent under Mr.
Jorkins, before Mr. Spenlow’s time; and although it had been quickened
by the infusion of new blood, and by the display which Mr. Spenlow made,
still it was not established on a sufficiently strong basis to bear,
without being shaken, such a blow as the sudden loss of its active
manager. It fell off very much. Mr. Jorkins, notwithstanding his
reputation in the firm, was an easy-going, incapable sort of man, whose
reputation out of doors was not calculated to back it up. I was turned
over to him now, and when I saw him take his snuff and let the business
go, I regretted my aunt’s thousand pounds more than ever.

But this was not the worst of it. There were a number of hangers-on and
outsiders about the Commons, who, without being proctors themselves,
dabbled in common-form business, and got it done by real proctors, who
lent their names in consideration of a share in the spoil;--and there
were a good many of these too. As our house now wanted business on any
terms, we joined this noble band; and threw out lures to the hangers-on
and outsiders, to bring their business to us. Marriage licences and
small probates were what we all looked for, and what paid us best;
and the competition for these ran very high indeed. Kidnappers and
inveiglers were planted in all the avenues of entrance to the Commons,
with instructions to do their utmost to cut off all persons in mourning,
and all gentlemen with anything bashful in their appearance, and entice
them to the offices in which their respective employers were interested;
which instructions were so well observed, that I myself, before I was
known by sight, was twice hustled into the premises of our principal
opponent. The conflicting interests of these touting gentlemen being of
a nature to irritate their feelings, personal collisions took place;
and the Commons was even scandalized by our principal inveigler (who
had formerly been in the wine trade, and afterwards in the sworn brokery
line) walking about for some days with a black eye. Any one of these
scouts used to think nothing of politely assisting an old lady in
black out of a vehicle, killing any proctor whom she inquired for,
representing his employer as the lawful successor and representative of
that proctor, and bearing the old lady off (sometimes greatly affected)
to his employer’s office. Many captives were brought to me in this way.
As to marriage licences, the competition rose to such a pitch, that a
shy gentleman in want of one, had nothing to do but submit himself
to the first inveigler, or be fought for, and become the prey of the
strongest. One of our clerks, who was an outsider, used, in the height
of this contest, to sit with his hat on, that he might be ready to rush
out and swear before a surrogate any victim who was brought in. The
system of inveigling continues, I believe, to this day. The last time I
was in the Commons, a civil able-bodied person in a white apron pounced
out upon me from a doorway, and whispering the word ‘Marriage-licence’
in my ear, was with great difficulty prevented from taking me up in
his arms and lifting me into a proctor’s. From this digression, let me
proceed to Dover.

I found everything in a satisfactory state at the cottage; and was
enabled to gratify my aunt exceedingly by reporting that the tenant
inherited her feud, and waged incessant war against donkeys. Having
settled the little business I had to transact there, and slept there one
night, I walked on to Canterbury early in the morning. It was now
winter again; and the fresh, cold windy day, and the sweeping downland,
brightened up my hopes a little.

Coming into Canterbury, I loitered through the old streets with a sober
pleasure that calmed my spirits, and eased my heart. There were the old
signs, the old names over the shops, the old people serving in them. It
appeared so long, since I had been a schoolboy there, that I wondered
the place was so little changed, until I reflected how little I
was changed myself. Strange to say, that quiet influence which was
inseparable in my mind from Agnes, seemed to pervade even the city where
she dwelt. The venerable cathedral towers, and the old jackdaws and
rooks whose airy voices made them more retired than perfect silence
would have done; the battered gateways, one stuck full with statues,
long thrown down, and crumbled away, like the reverential pilgrims
who had gazed upon them; the still nooks, where the ivied growth of
centuries crept over gabled ends and ruined walls; the ancient houses,
the pastoral landscape of field, orchard, and garden; everywhere--on
everything--I felt the same serener air, the same calm, thoughtful,
softening spirit.

Arrived at Mr. Wickfield’s house, I found, in the little lower room on
the ground floor, where Uriah Heep had been of old accustomed to sit,
Mr. Micawber plying his pen with great assiduity. He was dressed in a
legal-looking suit of black, and loomed, burly and large, in that small
office.

Mr. Micawber was extremely glad to see me, but a little confused too.
He would have conducted me immediately into the presence of Uriah, but I
declined.

‘I know the house of old, you recollect,’ said I, ‘and will find my way
upstairs. How do you like the law, Mr. Micawber?’

‘My dear Copperfield,’ he replied. ‘To a man possessed of the higher
imaginative powers, the objection to legal studies is the amount of
detail which they involve. Even in our professional correspondence,’
said Mr. Micawber, glancing at some letters he was writing, ‘the mind is
not at liberty to soar to any exalted form of expression. Still, it is a
great pursuit. A great pursuit!’

He then told me that he had become the tenant of Uriah Heep’s old house;
and that Mrs. Micawber would be delighted to receive me, once more,
under her own roof.

‘It is humble,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘--to quote a favourite expression
of my friend Heep; but it may prove the stepping-stone to more ambitious
domiciliary accommodation.’

I asked him whether he had reason, so far, to be satisfied with his
friend Heep’s treatment of him? He got up to ascertain if the door were
close shut, before he replied, in a lower voice:

‘My dear Copperfield, a man who labours under the pressure of pecuniary
embarrassments, is, with the generality of people, at a disadvantage.
That disadvantage is not diminished, when that pressure necessitates the
drawing of stipendiary emoluments, before those emoluments are strictly
due and payable. All I can say is, that my friend Heep has responded
to appeals to which I need not more particularly refer, in a manner
calculated to redound equally to the honour of his head, and of his
heart.’

‘I should not have supposed him to be very free with his money either,’
I observed.

‘Pardon me!’ said Mr. Micawber, with an air of constraint, ‘I speak of
my friend Heep as I have experience.’

‘I am glad your experience is so favourable,’ I returned.

‘You are very obliging, my dear Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber; and
hummed a tune.

‘Do you see much of Mr. Wickfield?’ I asked, to change the subject.

‘Not much,’ said Mr. Micawber, slightingly. ‘Mr. Wickfield is, I dare
say, a man of very excellent intentions; but he is--in short, he is
obsolete.’

‘I am afraid his partner seeks to make him so,’ said I.

‘My dear Copperfield!’ returned Mr. Micawber, after some uneasy
evolutions on his stool, ‘allow me to offer a remark! I am here, in
a capacity of confidence. I am here, in a position of trust. The
discussion of some topics, even with Mrs. Micawber herself (so long the
partner of my various vicissitudes, and a woman of a remarkable lucidity
of intellect), is, I am led to consider, incompatible with the functions
now devolving on me. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting
that in our friendly intercourse--which I trust will never be
disturbed!--we draw a line. On one side of this line,’ said Mr.
Micawber, representing it on the desk with the office ruler, ‘is the
whole range of the human intellect, with a trifling exception; on
the other, IS that exception; that is to say, the affairs of Messrs
Wickfield and Heep, with all belonging and appertaining thereunto. I
trust I give no offence to the companion of my youth, in submitting this
proposition to his cooler judgement?’

Though I saw an uneasy change in Mr. Micawber, which sat tightly on
him, as if his new duties were a misfit, I felt I had no right to be
offended. My telling him so, appeared to relieve him; and he shook hands
with me.

‘I am charmed, Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘let me assure you, with
Miss Wickfield. She is a very superior young lady, of very remarkable
attractions, graces, and virtues. Upon my honour,’ said Mr. Micawber,
indefinitely kissing his hand and bowing with his genteelest air, ‘I do
Homage to Miss Wickfield! Hem!’ ‘I am glad of that, at least,’ said I.

‘If you had not assured us, my dear Copperfield, on the occasion of that
agreeable afternoon we had the happiness of passing with you, that D.
was your favourite letter,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘I should unquestionably
have supposed that A. had been so.’

We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us
occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done
before, in a remote time--of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago,
by the same faces, objects, and circumstances--of our knowing perfectly
what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it! I never had
this mysterious impression more strongly in my life, than before he
uttered those words.

I took my leave of Mr. Micawber, for the time, charging him with my best
remembrances to all at home. As I left him, resuming his stool and his
pen, and rolling his head in his stock, to get it into easier writing
order, I clearly perceived that there was something interposed between
him and me, since he had come into his new functions, which prevented
our getting at each other as we used to do, and quite altered the
character of our intercourse.

There was no one in the quaint old drawing-room, though it presented
tokens of Mrs. Heep’s whereabouts. I looked into the room still
belonging to Agnes, and saw her sitting by the fire, at a pretty
old-fashioned desk she had, writing.

My darkening the light made her look up. What a pleasure to be the cause
of that bright change in her attentive face, and the object of that
sweet regard and welcome!

‘Ah, Agnes!’ said I, when we were sitting together, side by side; ‘I
have missed you so much, lately!’

‘Indeed?’ she replied. ‘Again! And so soon?’

I shook my head.

‘I don’t know how it is, Agnes; I seem to want some faculty of mind that
I ought to have. You were so much in the habit of thinking for me, in
the happy old days here, and I came so naturally to you for counsel and
support, that I really think I have missed acquiring it.’

‘And what is it?’ said Agnes, cheerfully.

‘I don’t know what to call it,’ I replied. ‘I think I am earnest and
persevering?’

‘I am sure of it,’ said Agnes.

‘And patient, Agnes?’ I inquired, with a little hesitation.

‘Yes,’ returned Agnes, laughing. ‘Pretty well.’

‘And yet,’ said I, ‘I get so miserable and worried, and am so unsteady
and irresolute in my power of assuring myself, that I know I must
want--shall I call it--reliance, of some kind?’

‘Call it so, if you will,’ said Agnes.

‘Well!’ I returned. ‘See here! You come to London, I rely on you, and I
have an object and a course at once. I am driven out of it, I come
here, and in a moment I feel an altered person. The circumstances that
distressed me are not changed, since I came into this room; but an
influence comes over me in that short interval that alters me, oh, how
much for the better! What is it? What is your secret, Agnes?’

Her head was bent down, looking at the fire.

‘It’s the old story,’ said I. ‘Don’t laugh, when I say it was always
the same in little things as it is in greater ones. My old troubles were
nonsense, and now they are serious; but whenever I have gone away from
my adopted sister--’

Agnes looked up--with such a Heavenly face!--and gave me her hand, which
I kissed.

‘Whenever I have not had you, Agnes, to advise and approve in the
beginning, I have seemed to go wild, and to get into all sorts of
difficulty. When I have come to you, at last (as I have always done),
I have come to peace and happiness. I come home, now, like a tired
traveller, and find such a blessed sense of rest!’

I felt so deeply what I said, it affected me so sincerely, that my voice
failed, and I covered my face with my hand, and broke into tears. I
write the truth. Whatever contradictions and inconsistencies there were
within me, as there are within so many of us; whatever might have been
so different, and so much better; whatever I had done, in which I had
perversely wandered away from the voice of my own heart; I knew nothing
of. I only knew that I was fervently in earnest, when I felt the rest
and peace of having Agnes near me.

In her placid sisterly manner; with her beaming eyes; with her tender
voice; and with that sweet composure, which had long ago made the house
that held her quite a sacred place to me; she soon won me from this
weakness, and led me on to tell all that had happened since our last
meeting.

‘And there is not another word to tell, Agnes,’ said I, when I had made
an end of my confidence. ‘Now, my reliance is on you.’

‘But it must not be on me, Trotwood,’ returned Agnes, with a pleasant
smile. ‘It must be on someone else.’

‘On Dora?’ said I.

‘Assuredly.’

‘Why, I have not mentioned, Agnes,’ said I, a little embarrassed, ‘that
Dora is rather difficult to--I would not, for the world, say, to rely
upon, because she is the soul of purity and truth--but rather difficult
to--I hardly know how to express it, really, Agnes. She is a timid
little thing, and easily disturbed and frightened. Some time ago, before
her father’s death, when I thought it right to mention to her--but I’ll
tell you, if you will bear with me, how it was.’

Accordingly, I told Agnes about my declaration of poverty, about the
cookery-book, the housekeeping accounts, and all the rest of it.

‘Oh, Trotwood!’ she remonstrated, with a smile. ‘Just your old headlong
way! You might have been in earnest in striving to get on in the world,
without being so very sudden with a timid, loving, inexperienced girl.
Poor Dora!’

I never heard such sweet forbearing kindness expressed in a voice,
as she expressed in making this reply. It was as if I had seen her
admiringly and tenderly embracing Dora, and tacitly reproving me, by
her considerate protection, for my hot haste in fluttering that little
heart. It was as if I had seen Dora, in all her fascinating artlessness,
caressing Agnes, and thanking her, and coaxingly appealing against me,
and loving me with all her childish innocence.

I felt so grateful to Agnes, and admired her so! I saw those two
together, in a bright perspective, such well-associated friends, each
adorning the other so much!

‘What ought I to do then, Agnes?’ I inquired, after looking at the fire
a little while. ‘What would it be right to do?’

‘I think,’ said Agnes, ‘that the honourable course to take, would be to
write to those two ladies. Don’t you think that any secret course is an
unworthy one?’

‘Yes. If YOU think so,’ said I.

‘I am poorly qualified to judge of such matters,’ replied Agnes, with
a modest hesitation, ‘but I certainly feel--in short, I feel that your
being secret and clandestine, is not being like yourself.’

‘Like myself, in the too high opinion you have of me, Agnes, I am
afraid,’ said I.

‘Like yourself, in the candour of your nature,’ she returned; ‘and
therefore I would write to those two ladies. I would relate, as plainly
and as openly as possible, all that has taken place; and I would ask
their permission to visit sometimes, at their house. Considering that
you are young, and striving for a place in life, I think it would be
well to say that you would readily abide by any conditions they might
impose upon you. I would entreat them not to dismiss your request,
without a reference to Dora; and to discuss it with her when they should
think the time suitable. I would not be too vehement,’ said Agnes,
gently, ‘or propose too much. I would trust to my fidelity and
perseverance--and to Dora.’

‘But if they were to frighten Dora again, Agnes, by speaking to her,’
said I. ‘And if Dora were to cry, and say nothing about me!’

‘Is that likely?’ inquired Agnes, with the same sweet consideration in
her face.

‘God bless her, she is as easily scared as a bird,’ said I. ‘It might
be! Or if the two Miss Spenlows (elderly ladies of that sort are odd
characters sometimes) should not be likely persons to address in that
way!’

‘I don’t think, Trotwood,’ returned Agnes, raising her soft eyes
to mine, ‘I would consider that. Perhaps it would be better only to
consider whether it is right to do this; and, if it is, to do it.’

I had no longer any doubt on the subject. With a lightened heart, though
with a profound sense of the weighty importance of my task, I devoted
the whole afternoon to the composition of the draft of this letter; for
which great purpose, Agnes relinquished her desk to me. But first I went
downstairs to see Mr. Wickfield and Uriah Heep.

I found Uriah in possession of a new, plaster-smelling office, built out
in the garden; looking extraordinarily mean, in the midst of a quantity
of books and papers. He received me in his usual fawning way, and
pretended not to have heard of my arrival from Mr. Micawber; a
pretence I took the liberty of disbelieving. He accompanied me into Mr.
Wickfield’s room, which was the shadow of its former self--having been
divested of a variety of conveniences, for the accommodation of the new
partner--and stood before the fire, warming his back, and shaving his
chin with his bony hand, while Mr. Wickfield and I exchanged greetings.

‘You stay with us, Trotwood, while you remain in Canterbury?’ said Mr.
Wickfield, not without a glance at Uriah for his approval.

‘Is there room for me?’ said I.

‘I am sure, Master Copperfield--I should say Mister, but the other
comes so natural,’ said Uriah,--‘I would turn out of your old room with
pleasure, if it would be agreeable.’

‘No, no,’ said Mr. Wickfield. ‘Why should you be inconvenienced? There’s
another room. There’s another room.’ ‘Oh, but you know,’ returned Uriah,
with a grin, ‘I should really be delighted!’

To cut the matter short, I said I would have the other room or none at
all; so it was settled that I should have the other room; and, taking my
leave of the firm until dinner, I went upstairs again.

I had hoped to have no other companion than Agnes. But Mrs. Heep had
asked permission to bring herself and her knitting near the fire, in
that room; on pretence of its having an aspect more favourable for
her rheumatics, as the wind then was, than the drawing-room or
dining-parlour. Though I could almost have consigned her to the mercies
of the wind on the topmost pinnacle of the Cathedral, without remorse, I
made a virtue of necessity, and gave her a friendly salutation.

‘I’m umbly thankful to you, sir,’ said Mrs. Heep, in acknowledgement of
my inquiries concerning her health, ‘but I’m only pretty well. I haven’t
much to boast of. If I could see my Uriah well settled in life, I
couldn’t expect much more I think. How do you think my Ury looking,
sir?’

I thought him looking as villainous as ever, and I replied that I saw no
change in him.

‘Oh, don’t you think he’s changed?’ said Mrs. Heep. ‘There I must umbly
beg leave to differ from you. Don’t you see a thinness in him?’

‘Not more than usual,’ I replied.

‘Don’t you though!’ said Mrs. Heep. ‘But you don’t take notice of him
with a mother’s eye!’

His mother’s eye was an evil eye to the rest of the world, I thought as
it met mine, howsoever affectionate to him; and I believe she and her
son were devoted to one another. It passed me, and went on to Agnes.

‘Don’t YOU see a wasting and a wearing in him, Miss Wickfield?’ inquired
Mrs. Heep.

‘No,’ said Agnes, quietly pursuing the work on which she was engaged.
‘You are too solicitous about him. He is very well.’

Mrs. Heep, with a prodigious sniff, resumed her knitting.

She never left off, or left us for a moment. I had arrived early in the
day, and we had still three or four hours before dinner; but she sat
there, plying her knitting-needles as monotonously as an hour-glass
might have poured out its sands. She sat on one side of the fire; I sat
at the desk in front of it; a little beyond me, on the other side, sat
Agnes. Whensoever, slowly pondering over my letter, I lifted up my
eyes, and meeting the thoughtful face of Agnes, saw it clear, and beam
encouragement upon me, with its own angelic expression, I was conscious
presently of the evil eye passing me, and going on to her, and coming
back to me again, and dropping furtively upon the knitting. What the
knitting was, I don’t know, not being learned in that art; but it looked
like a net; and as she worked away with those Chinese chopsticks of
knitting-needles, she showed in the firelight like an ill-looking
enchantress, baulked as yet by the radiant goodness opposite, but
getting ready for a cast of her net by and by.

At dinner she maintained her watch, with the same unwinking eyes. After
dinner, her son took his turn; and when Mr. Wickfield, himself, and I
were left alone together, leered at me, and writhed until I could hardly
bear it. In the drawing-room, there was the mother knitting and watching
again. All the time that Agnes sang and played, the mother sat at the
piano. Once she asked for a particular ballad, which she said her Ury
(who was yawning in a great chair) doted on; and at intervals she looked
round at him, and reported to Agnes that he was in raptures with the
music. But she hardly ever spoke--I question if she ever did--without
making some mention of him. It was evident to me that this was the duty
assigned to her.

This lasted until bedtime. To have seen the mother and son, like two
great bats hanging over the whole house, and darkening it with their
ugly forms, made me so uncomfortable, that I would rather have remained
downstairs, knitting and all, than gone to bed. I hardly got any sleep.
Next day the knitting and watching began again, and lasted all day.

I had not an opportunity of speaking to Agnes, for ten minutes. I could
barely show her my letter. I proposed to her to walk out with me; but
Mrs. Heep repeatedly complaining that she was worse, Agnes charitably
remained within, to bear her company. Towards the twilight I went out
by myself, musing on what I ought to do, and whether I was justified
in withholding from Agnes, any longer, what Uriah Heep had told me in
London; for that began to trouble me again, very much.

I had not walked out far enough to be quite clear of the town, upon the
Ramsgate road, where there was a good path, when I was hailed, through
the dust, by somebody behind me. The shambling figure, and the scanty
great-coat, were not to be mistaken. I stopped, and Uriah Heep came up.

‘Well?’ said I.

‘How fast you walk!’ said he. ‘My legs are pretty long, but you’ve given
‘em quite a job.’

‘Where are you going?’ said I.

‘I am going with you, Master Copperfield, if you’ll allow me the
pleasure of a walk with an old acquaintance.’ Saying this, with a jerk
of his body, which might have been either propitiatory or derisive, he
fell into step beside me.

‘Uriah!’ said I, as civilly as I could, after a silence.

‘Master Copperfield!’ said Uriah.

‘To tell you the truth (at which you will not be offended), I came Out
to walk alone, because I have had so much company.’

He looked at me sideways, and said with his hardest grin, ‘You mean
mother.’

‘Why yes, I do,’ said I.

‘Ah! But you know we’re so very umble,’ he returned. ‘And having such a
knowledge of our own umbleness, we must really take care that we’re not
pushed to the wall by them as isn’t umble. All stratagems are fair in
love, sir.’

Raising his great hands until they touched his chin, he rubbed them
softly, and softly chuckled; looking as like a malevolent baboon, I
thought, as anything human could look.

‘You see,’ he said, still hugging himself in that unpleasant way,
and shaking his head at me, ‘you’re quite a dangerous rival, Master
Copperfield. You always was, you know.’

‘Do you set a watch upon Miss Wickfield, and make her home no home,
because of me?’ said I.

‘Oh! Master Copperfield! Those are very arsh words,’ he replied.

‘Put my meaning into any words you like,’ said I. ‘You know what it is,
Uriah, as well as I do.’

‘Oh no! You must put it into words,’ he said. ‘Oh, really! I couldn’t
myself.’

‘Do you suppose,’ said I, constraining myself to be very temperate
and quiet with him, on account of Agnes, ‘that I regard Miss Wickfield
otherwise than as a very dear sister?’

‘Well, Master Copperfield,’ he replied, ‘you perceive I am not bound
to answer that question. You may not, you know. But then, you see, you
may!’

Anything to equal the low cunning of his visage, and of his shadowless
eyes without the ghost of an eyelash, I never saw.

‘Come then!’ said I. ‘For the sake of Miss Wickfield--’

‘My Agnes!’ he exclaimed, with a sickly, angular contortion of himself.
‘Would you be so good as call her Agnes, Master Copperfield!’

‘For the sake of Agnes Wickfield--Heaven bless her!’

‘Thank you for that blessing, Master Copperfield!’ he interposed.

‘I will tell you what I should, under any other circumstances, as soon
have thought of telling to--Jack Ketch.’

‘To who, sir?’ said Uriah, stretching out his neck, and shading his ear
with his hand.

‘To the hangman,’ I returned. ‘The most unlikely person I could think
of,’--though his own face had suggested the allusion quite as a natural
sequence. ‘I am engaged to another young lady. I hope that contents
you.’

‘Upon your soul?’ said Uriah.

I was about indignantly to give my assertion the confirmation he
required, when he caught hold of my hand, and gave it a squeeze.

‘Oh, Master Copperfield!’ he said. ‘If you had only had the
condescension to return my confidence when I poured out the fulness of
my art, the night I put you so much out of the way by sleeping before
your sitting-room fire, I never should have doubted you. As it is, I’m
sure I’ll take off mother directly, and only too appy. I know you’ll
excuse the precautions of affection, won’t you? What a pity, Master
Copperfield, that you didn’t condescend to return my confidence! I’m
sure I gave you every opportunity. But you never have condescended to
me, as much as I could have wished. I know you have never liked me, as I
have liked you!’

All this time he was squeezing my hand with his damp fishy fingers,
while I made every effort I decently could to get it away. But I was
quite unsuccessful. He drew it under the sleeve of his mulberry-coloured
great-coat, and I walked on, almost upon compulsion, arm-in-arm with
him.

‘Shall we turn?’ said Uriah, by and by wheeling me face about towards
the town, on which the early moon was now shining, silvering the distant
windows.

‘Before we leave the subject, you ought to understand,’ said I, breaking
a pretty long silence, ‘that I believe Agnes Wickfield to be as far
above you, and as far removed from all your aspirations, as that moon
herself!’

‘Peaceful! Ain’t she!’ said Uriah. ‘Very! Now confess, Master
Copperfield, that you haven’t liked me quite as I have liked you. All
along you’ve thought me too umble now, I shouldn’t wonder?’

‘I am not fond of professions of humility,’ I returned, ‘or professions
of anything else.’ ‘There now!’ said Uriah, looking flabby and
lead-coloured in the moonlight. ‘Didn’t I know it! But how little
you think of the rightful umbleness of a person in my station, Master
Copperfield! Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school
for boys; and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of
charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of umbleness--not
much else that I know of, from morning to night. We was to be umble to
this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and
to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves
before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the
monitor-medal by being umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by
being umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being
such a well-behaved man, that they were determined to bring him in. “Be
umble, Uriah,” says father to me, “and you’ll get on. It was what was
always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best.
Be umble,” says father, “and you’ll do!” And really it ain’t done bad!’

It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable
cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I
had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed.

‘When I was quite a young boy,’ said Uriah, ‘I got to know what
umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate umble pie with an appetite. I
stopped at the umble point of my learning, and says I, “Hold hard!” When
you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. “People like to be above
you,” says father, “keep yourself down.” I am very umble to the present
moment, Master Copperfield, but I’ve got a little power!’

And he said all this--I knew, as I saw his face in the moonlight--that
I might understand he was resolved to recompense himself by using his
power. I had never doubted his meanness, his craft and malice; but I
fully comprehended now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting,
and revengeful spirit, must have been engendered by this early, and this
long, suppression.

His account of himself was so far attended with an agreeable result,
that it led to his withdrawing his hand in order that he might have
another hug of himself under the chin. Once apart from him, I was
determined to keep apart; and we walked back, side by side, saying
very little more by the way. Whether his spirits were elevated by the
communication I had made to him, or by his having indulged in this
retrospect, I don’t know; but they were raised by some influence. He
talked more at dinner than was usual with him; asked his mother (off
duty, from the moment of our re-entering the house) whether he was not
growing too old for a bachelor; and once looked at Agnes so, that I
would have given all I had, for leave to knock him down.

When we three males were left alone after dinner, he got into a more
adventurous state. He had taken little or no wine; and I presume it was
the mere insolence of triumph that was upon him, flushed perhaps by the
temptation my presence furnished to its exhibition.

I had observed yesterday, that he tried to entice Mr. Wickfield to
drink; and, interpreting the look which Agnes had given me as she went
out, had limited myself to one glass, and then proposed that we should
follow her. I would have done so again today; but Uriah was too quick
for me.

‘We seldom see our present visitor, sir,’ he said, addressing Mr.
Wickfield, sitting, such a contrast to him, at the end of the table,
‘and I should propose to give him welcome in another glass or two
of wine, if you have no objections. Mr. Copperfield, your elth and
appiness!’

I was obliged to make a show of taking the hand he stretched across
to me; and then, with very different emotions, I took the hand of the
broken gentleman, his partner.

‘Come, fellow-partner,’ said Uriah, ‘if I may take the liberty,--now,
suppose you give us something or another appropriate to Copperfield!’

I pass over Mr. Wickfield’s proposing my aunt, his proposing Mr. Dick,
his proposing Doctors’ Commons, his proposing Uriah, his drinking
everything twice; his consciousness of his own weakness, the ineffectual
effort that he made against it; the struggle between his shame in
Uriah’s deportment, and his desire to conciliate him; the manifest
exultation with which Uriah twisted and turned, and held him up before
me. It made me sick at heart to see, and my hand recoils from writing
it.

‘Come, fellow-partner!’ said Uriah, at last, ‘I’ll give you another one,
and I umbly ask for bumpers, seeing I intend to make it the divinest of
her sex.’

Her father had his empty glass in his hand. I saw him set it down, look
at the picture she was so like, put his hand to his forehead, and shrink
back in his elbow-chair.

‘I’m an umble individual to give you her elth,’ proceeded Uriah, ‘but I
admire--adore her.’

No physical pain that her father’s grey head could have borne, I think,
could have been more terrible to me, than the mental endurance I saw
compressed now within both his hands.

‘Agnes,’ said Uriah, either not regarding him, or not knowing what the
nature of his action was, ‘Agnes Wickfield is, I am safe to say, the
divinest of her sex. May I speak out, among friends? To be her father is
a proud distinction, but to be her usband--’

Spare me from ever again hearing such a cry, as that with which her
father rose up from the table! ‘What’s the matter?’ said Uriah, turning
of a deadly colour. ‘You are not gone mad, after all, Mr. Wickfield, I
hope? If I say I’ve an ambition to make your Agnes my Agnes, I have as
good a right to it as another man. I have a better right to it than any
other man!’

I had my arms round Mr. Wickfield, imploring him by everything that I
could think of, oftenest of all by his love for Agnes, to calm himself
a little. He was mad for the moment; tearing out his hair, beating his
head, trying to force me from him, and to force himself from me, not
answering a word, not looking at or seeing anyone; blindly striving
for he knew not what, his face all staring and distorted--a frightful
spectacle.

I conjured him, incoherently, but in the most impassioned manner, not
to abandon himself to this wildness, but to hear me. I besought him to
think of Agnes, to connect me with Agnes, to recollect how Agnes and I
had grown up together, how I honoured her and loved her, how she was his
pride and joy. I tried to bring her idea before him in any form; I even
reproached him with not having firmness to spare her the knowledge of
such a scene as this. I may have effected something, or his wildness may
have spent itself; but by degrees he struggled less, and began to look
at me--strangely at first, then with recognition in his eyes. At length
he said, ‘I know, Trotwood! My darling child and you--I know! But look
at him!’

He pointed to Uriah, pale and glowering in a corner, evidently very much
out in his calculations, and taken by surprise.

‘Look at my torturer,’ he replied. ‘Before him I have step by step
abandoned name and reputation, peace and quiet, house and home.’

‘I have kept your name and reputation for you, and your peace and
quiet, and your house and home too,’ said Uriah, with a sulky, hurried,
defeated air of compromise. ‘Don’t be foolish, Mr. Wickfield. If I
have gone a little beyond what you were prepared for, I can go back, I
suppose? There’s no harm done.’

‘I looked for single motives in everyone,’ said Mr. Wickfield, ‘and I was
satisfied I had bound him to me by motives of interest. But see what he
is--oh, see what he is!’

‘You had better stop him, Copperfield, if you can,’ cried Uriah,
with his long forefinger pointing towards me. ‘He’ll say something
presently--mind you!--he’ll be sorry to have said afterwards, and you’ll
be sorry to have heard!’

‘I’ll say anything!’ cried Mr. Wickfield, with a desperate air. ‘Why
should I not be in all the world’s power if I am in yours?’

‘Mind! I tell you!’ said Uriah, continuing to warn me. ‘If you don’t
stop his mouth, you’re not his friend! Why shouldn’t you be in all the
world’s power, Mr. Wickfield? Because you have got a daughter. You and
me know what we know, don’t we? Let sleeping dogs lie--who wants to
rouse ‘em? I don’t. Can’t you see I am as umble as I can be? I tell you,
if I’ve gone too far, I’m sorry. What would you have, sir?’

‘Oh, Trotwood, Trotwood!’ exclaimed Mr. Wickfield, wringing his hands.
‘What I have come down to be, since I first saw you in this house! I was
on my downward way then, but the dreary, dreary road I have traversed
since! Weak indulgence has ruined me. Indulgence in remembrance, and
indulgence in forgetfulness. My natural grief for my child’s mother
turned to disease; my natural love for my child turned to disease. I
have infected everything I touched. I have brought misery on what I
dearly love, I know--you know! I thought it possible that I could truly
love one creature in the world, and not love the rest; I thought it
possible that I could truly mourn for one creature gone out of the
world, and not have some part in the grief of all who mourned. Thus the
lessons of my life have been perverted! I have preyed on my own morbid
coward heart, and it has preyed on me. Sordid in my grief, sordid in my
love, sordid in my miserable escape from the darker side of both, oh see
the ruin I am, and hate me, shun me!’

He dropped into a chair, and weakly sobbed. The excitement into which he
had been roused was leaving him. Uriah came out of his corner.

‘I don’t know all I have done, in my fatuity,’ said Mr. Wickfield,
putting out his hands, as if to deprecate my condemnation. ‘He knows
best,’ meaning Uriah Heep, ‘for he has always been at my elbow,
whispering me. You see the millstone that he is about my neck. You
find him in my house, you find him in my business. You heard him, but a
little time ago. What need have I to say more!’

‘You haven’t need to say so much, nor half so much, nor anything at
all,’ observed Uriah, half defiant, and half fawning. ‘You wouldn’t have
took it up so, if it hadn’t been for the wine. You’ll think better of
it tomorrow, sir. If I have said too much, or more than I meant, what of
it? I haven’t stood by it!’

The door opened, and Agnes, gliding in, without a vestige of colour in
her face, put her arm round his neck, and steadily said, ‘Papa, you are
not well. Come with me!’

He laid his head upon her shoulder, as if he were oppressed with heavy
shame, and went out with her. Her eyes met mine for but an instant, yet
I saw how much she knew of what had passed.

‘I didn’t expect he’d cut up so rough, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah.
‘But it’s nothing. I’ll be friends with him tomorrow. It’s for his good.
I’m umbly anxious for his good.’

I gave him no answer, and went upstairs into the quiet room where Agnes
had so often sat beside me at my books. Nobody came near me until late
at night. I took up a book, and tried to read. I heard the clocks strike
twelve, and was still reading, without knowing what I read, when Agnes
touched me.

‘You will be going early in the morning, Trotwood! Let us say good-bye,
now!’

She had been weeping, but her face then was so calm and beautiful!

‘Heaven bless you!’ she said, giving me her hand.

‘Dearest Agnes!’ I returned, ‘I see you ask me not to speak of
tonight--but is there nothing to be done?’

‘There is God to trust in!’ she replied.

‘Can I do nothing--I, who come to you with my poor sorrows?’

‘And make mine so much lighter,’ she replied. ‘Dear Trotwood, no!’

‘Dear Agnes,’ I said, ‘it is presumptuous for me, who am so poor in all
in which you are so rich--goodness, resolution, all noble qualities--to
doubt or direct you; but you know how much I love you, and how much I
owe you. You will never sacrifice yourself to a mistaken sense of duty,
Agnes?’

More agitated for a moment than I had ever seen her, she took her hands
from me, and moved a step back.

‘Say you have no such thought, dear Agnes! Much more than sister!
Think of the priceless gift of such a heart as yours, of such a love as
yours!’

Oh! long, long afterwards, I saw that face rise up before me, with its
momentary look, not wondering, not accusing, not regretting. Oh, long,
long afterwards, I saw that look subside, as it did now, into the lovely
smile, with which she told me she had no fear for herself--I need have
none for her--and parted from me by the name of Brother, and was gone!

It was dark in the morning, when I got upon the coach at the inn door.
The day was just breaking when we were about to start, and then, as
I sat thinking of her, came struggling up the coach side, through the
mingled day and night, Uriah’s head.

‘Copperfield!’ said he, in a croaking whisper, as he hung by the iron
on the roof, ‘I thought you’d be glad to hear before you went off, that
there are no squares broke between us. I’ve been into his room already,
and we’ve made it all smooth. Why, though I’m umble, I’m useful to him,
you know; and he understands his interest when he isn’t in liquor! What
an agreeable man he is, after all, Master Copperfield!’

I obliged myself to say that I was glad he had made his apology.

‘Oh, to be sure!’ said Uriah. ‘When a person’s umble, you know, what’s
an apology? So easy! I say! I suppose,’ with a jerk, ‘you have sometimes
plucked a pear before it was ripe, Master Copperfield?’

‘I suppose I have,’ I replied.

‘I did that last night,’ said Uriah; ‘but it’ll ripen yet! It only wants
attending to. I can wait!’

Profuse in his farewells, he got down again as the coachman got up. For
anything I know, he was eating something to keep the raw morning
air out; but he made motions with his mouth as if the pear were ripe
already, and he were smacking his lips over it.



CHAPTER 40. THE WANDERER


We had a very serious conversation in Buckingham Street that night,
about the domestic occurrences I have detailed in the last chapter. My
aunt was deeply interested in them, and walked up and down the room with
her arms folded, for more than two hours afterwards. Whenever she was
particularly discomposed, she always performed one of these pedestrian
feats; and the amount of her discomposure might always be estimated by
the duration of her walk. On this occasion she was so much disturbed in
mind as to find it necessary to open the bedroom door, and make a course
for herself, comprising the full extent of the bedrooms from wall to
wall; and while Mr. Dick and I sat quietly by the fire, she kept passing
in and out, along this measured track, at an unchanging pace, with the
regularity of a clock-pendulum.

When my aunt and I were left to ourselves by Mr. Dick’s going out to
bed, I sat down to write my letter to the two old ladies. By that time
she was tired of walking, and sat by the fire with her dress tucked up
as usual. But instead of sitting in her usual manner, holding her glass
upon her knee, she suffered it to stand neglected on the chimney-piece;
and, resting her left elbow on her right arm, and her chin on her left
hand, looked thoughtfully at me. As often as I raised my eyes from what
I was about, I met hers. ‘I am in the lovingest of tempers, my dear,’
she would assure me with a nod, ‘but I am fidgeted and sorry!’

I had been too busy to observe, until after she was gone to bed, that
she had left her night-mixture, as she always called it, untasted on
the chimney-piece. She came to her door, with even more than her usual
affection of manner, when I knocked to acquaint her with this discovery;
but only said, ‘I have not the heart to take it, Trot, tonight,’ and
shook her head, and went in again.

She read my letter to the two old ladies, in the morning, and approved
of it. I posted it, and had nothing to do then, but wait, as patiently
as I could, for the reply. I was still in this state of expectation, and
had been, for nearly a week; when I left the Doctor’s one snowy night,
to walk home.

It had been a bitter day, and a cutting north-east wind had blown for
some time. The wind had gone down with the light, and so the snow had
come on. It was a heavy, settled fall, I recollect, in great flakes; and
it lay thick. The noise of wheels and tread of people were as hushed, as
if the streets had been strewn that depth with feathers.

My shortest way home,--and I naturally took the shortest way on such a
night--was through St. Martin’s Lane. Now, the church which gives its
name to the lane, stood in a less free situation at that time; there
being no open space before it, and the lane winding down to the Strand.
As I passed the steps of the portico, I encountered, at the corner,
a woman’s face. It looked in mine, passed across the narrow lane,
and disappeared. I knew it. I had seen it somewhere. But I could not
remember where. I had some association with it, that struck upon my
heart directly; but I was thinking of anything else when it came upon
me, and was confused.

On the steps of the church, there was the stooping figure of a man, who
had put down some burden on the smooth snow, to adjust it; my seeing the
face, and my seeing him, were simultaneous. I don’t think I had stopped
in my surprise; but, in any case, as I went on, he rose, turned, and
came down towards me. I stood face to face with Mr. Peggotty!

Then I remembered the woman. It was Martha, to whom Emily had given the
money that night in the kitchen. Martha Endell--side by side with whom,
he would not have seen his dear niece, Ham had told me, for all the
treasures wrecked in the sea.

We shook hands heartily. At first, neither of us could speak a word.

‘Mas’r Davy!’ he said, gripping me tight, ‘it do my art good to see you,
sir. Well met, well met!’

‘Well met, my dear old friend!’ said I.

‘I had my thowts o’ coming to make inquiration for you, sir, tonight,’
he said, ‘but knowing as your aunt was living along wi’ you--fur I’ve
been down yonder--Yarmouth way--I was afeerd it was too late. I should
have come early in the morning, sir, afore going away.’

‘Again?’ said I.

‘Yes, sir,’ he replied, patiently shaking his head, ‘I’m away tomorrow.’

‘Where were you going now?’ I asked.

‘Well!’ he replied, shaking the snow out of his long hair, ‘I was
a-going to turn in somewheers.’

In those days there was a side-entrance to the stable-yard of the Golden
Cross, the inn so memorable to me in connexion with his misfortune,
nearly opposite to where we stood. I pointed out the gateway, put my arm
through his, and we went across. Two or three public-rooms opened out of
the stable-yard; and looking into one of them, and finding it empty, and
a good fire burning, I took him in there.

When I saw him in the light, I observed, not only that his hair was long
and ragged, but that his face was burnt dark by the sun. He was greyer,
the lines in his face and forehead were deeper, and he had every
appearance of having toiled and wandered through all varieties
of weather; but he looked very strong, and like a man upheld by
steadfastness of purpose, whom nothing could tire out. He shook the snow
from his hat and clothes, and brushed it away from his face, while I was
inwardly making these remarks. As he sat down opposite to me at a table,
with his back to the door by which we had entered, he put out his rough
hand again, and grasped mine warmly.

‘I’ll tell you, Mas’r Davy,’ he said,--‘wheer all I’ve been, and
what-all we’ve heerd. I’ve been fur, and we’ve heerd little; but I’ll
tell you!’

I rang the bell for something hot to drink. He would have nothing
stronger than ale; and while it was being brought, and being warmed
at the fire, he sat thinking. There was a fine, massive gravity in his
face, I did not venture to disturb.

‘When she was a child,’ he said, lifting up his head soon after we were
left alone, ‘she used to talk to me a deal about the sea, and about
them coasts where the sea got to be dark blue, and to lay a-shining and
a-shining in the sun. I thowt, odd times, as her father being drownded
made her think on it so much. I doen’t know, you see, but maybe she
believed--or hoped--he had drifted out to them parts, where the flowers
is always a-blowing, and the country bright.’

‘It is likely to have been a childish fancy,’ I replied.

‘When she was--lost,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘I know’d in my mind, as he
would take her to them countries. I know’d in my mind, as he’d have told
her wonders of ‘em, and how she was to be a lady theer, and how he got
her to listen to him fust, along o’ sech like. When we see his mother,
I know’d quite well as I was right. I went across-channel to France, and
landed theer, as if I’d fell down from the sky.’

I saw the door move, and the snow drift in. I saw it move a little more,
and a hand softly interpose to keep it open.

‘I found out an English gen’leman as was in authority,’ said Mr.
Peggotty, ‘and told him I was a-going to seek my niece. He got me them
papers as I wanted fur to carry me through--I doen’t rightly know how
they’re called--and he would have give me money, but that I was thankful
to have no need on. I thank him kind, for all he done, I’m sure! “I’ve
wrote afore you,” he says to me, “and I shall speak to many as will come
that way, and many will know you, fur distant from here, when you’re
a-travelling alone.” I told him, best as I was able, what my gratitoode
was, and went away through France.’

‘Alone, and on foot?’ said I.

‘Mostly a-foot,’ he rejoined; ‘sometimes in carts along with people
going to market; sometimes in empty coaches. Many mile a day a-foot, and
often with some poor soldier or another, travelling to see his friends.
I couldn’t talk to him,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘nor he to me; but we was
company for one another, too, along the dusty roads.’

I should have known that by his friendly tone.

‘When I come to any town,’ he pursued, ‘I found the inn, and waited
about the yard till someone turned up (someone mostly did) as know’d
English. Then I told how that I was on my way to seek my niece, and they
told me what manner of gentlefolks was in the house, and I waited to see
any as seemed like her, going in or out. When it warn’t Em’ly, I went on
agen. By little and little, when I come to a new village or that, among
the poor people, I found they know’d about me. They would set me down at
their cottage doors, and give me what-not fur to eat and drink, and show
me where to sleep; and many a woman, Mas’r Davy, as has had a daughter
of about Em’ly’s age, I’ve found a-waiting fur me, at Our Saviour’s
Cross outside the village, fur to do me sim’lar kindnesses. Some has had
daughters as was dead. And God only knows how good them mothers was to
me!’

It was Martha at the door. I saw her haggard, listening face distinctly.
My dread was lest he should turn his head, and see her too.

‘They would often put their children--particular their little girls,’
said Mr. Peggotty, ‘upon my knee; and many a time you might have seen
me sitting at their doors, when night was coming in, a’most as if they’d
been my Darling’s children. Oh, my Darling!’

Overpowered by sudden grief, he sobbed aloud. I laid my trembling hand
upon the hand he put before his face. ‘Thankee, sir,’ he said, ‘doen’t
take no notice.’

In a very little while he took his hand away and put it on his breast,
and went on with his story. ‘They often walked with me,’ he said, ‘in
the morning, maybe a mile or two upon my road; and when we parted, and
I said, “I’m very thankful to you! God bless you!” they always seemed to
understand, and answered pleasant. At last I come to the sea. It warn’t
hard, you may suppose, for a seafaring man like me to work his way
over to Italy. When I got theer, I wandered on as I had done afore. The
people was just as good to me, and I should have gone from town to town,
maybe the country through, but that I got news of her being seen among
them Swiss mountains yonder. One as know’d his servant see ‘em there,
all three, and told me how they travelled, and where they was. I made
fur them mountains, Mas’r Davy, day and night. Ever so fur as I went,
ever so fur the mountains seemed to shift away from me. But I come up
with ‘em, and I crossed ‘em. When I got nigh the place as I had been
told of, I began to think within my own self, “What shall I do when I
see her?”’

The listening face, insensible to the inclement night, still drooped at
the door, and the hands begged me--prayed me--not to cast it forth.

‘I never doubted her,’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘No! Not a bit! On’y let her
see my face--on’y let her heer my voice--on’y let my stanning still
afore her bring to her thoughts the home she had fled away from, and the
child she had been--and if she had growed to be a royal lady, she’d have
fell down at my feet! I know’d it well! Many a time in my sleep had I
heerd her cry out, “Uncle!” and seen her fall like death afore me. Many
a time in my sleep had I raised her up, and whispered to her, “Em’ly, my
dear, I am come fur to bring forgiveness, and to take you home!”’

He stopped and shook his head, and went on with a sigh.

‘He was nowt to me now. Em’ly was all. I bought a country dress to put
upon her; and I know’d that, once found, she would walk beside me over
them stony roads, go where I would, and never, never, leave me more. To
put that dress upon her, and to cast off what she wore--to take her on
my arm again, and wander towards home--to stop sometimes upon the road,
and heal her bruised feet and her worse-bruised heart--was all that I
thowt of now. I doen’t believe I should have done so much as look at
him. But, Mas’r Davy, it warn’t to be--not yet! I was too late, and they
was gone. Wheer, I couldn’t learn. Some said heer, some said theer.
I travelled heer, and I travelled theer, but I found no Em’ly, and I
travelled home.’

‘How long ago?’ I asked.

‘A matter o’ fower days,’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘I sighted the old boat
arter dark, and the light a-shining in the winder. When I come nigh and
looked in through the glass, I see the faithful creetur Missis Gummidge
sittin’ by the fire, as we had fixed upon, alone. I called out, “Doen’t
be afeerd! It’s Dan’l!” and I went in. I never could have thowt the old
boat would have been so strange!’ From some pocket in his breast, he
took out, with a very careful hand a small paper bundle containing two
or three letters or little packets, which he laid upon the table.

‘This fust one come,’ he said, selecting it from the rest, ‘afore I had
been gone a week. A fifty pound Bank note, in a sheet of paper, directed
to me, and put underneath the door in the night. She tried to hide her
writing, but she couldn’t hide it from Me!’

He folded up the note again, with great patience and care, in exactly
the same form, and laid it on one side.

‘This come to Missis Gummidge,’ he said, opening another, ‘two or three
months ago.’ After looking at it for some moments, he gave it to me, and
added in a low voice, ‘Be so good as read it, sir.’

I read as follows:


‘Oh what will you feel when you see this writing, and know it comes from
my wicked hand! But try, try--not for my sake, but for uncle’s goodness,
try to let your heart soften to me, only for a little little time! Try,
pray do, to relent towards a miserable girl, and write down on a bit of
paper whether he is well, and what he said about me before you left off
ever naming me among yourselves--and whether, of a night, when it is my
old time of coming home, you ever see him look as if he thought of one
he used to love so dear. Oh, my heart is breaking when I think about
it! I am kneeling down to you, begging and praying you not to be as
hard with me as I deserve--as I well, well, know I deserve--but to be so
gentle and so good, as to write down something of him, and to send it to
me. You need not call me Little, you need not call me by the name I have
disgraced; but oh, listen to my agony, and have mercy on me so far as to
write me some word of uncle, never, never to be seen in this world by my
eyes again!

‘Dear, if your heart is hard towards me--justly hard, I know--but,
listen, if it is hard, dear, ask him I have wronged the most--him whose
wife I was to have been--before you quite decide against my poor poor
prayer! If he should be so compassionate as to say that you might write
something for me to read--I think he would, oh, I think he would, if you
would only ask him, for he always was so brave and so forgiving--tell
him then (but not else), that when I hear the wind blowing at night,
I feel as if it was passing angrily from seeing him and uncle, and was
going up to God against me. Tell him that if I was to die tomorrow (and
oh, if I was fit, I would be so glad to die!) I would bless him and
uncle with my last words, and pray for his happy home with my last
breath!’


Some money was enclosed in this letter also. Five pounds. It was
untouched like the previous sum, and he refolded it in the same way.
Detailed instructions were added relative to the address of a reply,
which, although they betrayed the intervention of several hands, and
made it difficult to arrive at any very probable conclusion in reference
to her place of concealment, made it at least not unlikely that she had
written from that spot where she was stated to have been seen.

‘What answer was sent?’ I inquired of Mr. Peggotty.

‘Missis Gummidge,’ he returned, ‘not being a good scholar, sir, Ham
kindly drawed it out, and she made a copy on it. They told her I was
gone to seek her, and what my parting words was.’

‘Is that another letter in your hand?’ said I.

‘It’s money, sir,’ said Mr. Peggotty, unfolding it a little way. ‘Ten
pound, you see. And wrote inside, “From a true friend,” like the fust.
But the fust was put underneath the door, and this come by the post, day
afore yesterday. I’m a-going to seek her at the post-mark.’

He showed it to me. It was a town on the Upper Rhine. He had found out,
at Yarmouth, some foreign dealers who knew that country, and they had
drawn him a rude map on paper, which he could very well understand. He
laid it between us on the table; and, with his chin resting on one hand,
tracked his course upon it with the other.

I asked him how Ham was? He shook his head.

‘He works,’ he said, ‘as bold as a man can. His name’s as good, in all
that part, as any man’s is, anywheres in the wureld. Anyone’s hand is
ready to help him, you understand, and his is ready to help them. He’s
never been heerd fur to complain. But my sister’s belief is [‘twixt
ourselves) as it has cut him deep.’

‘Poor fellow, I can believe it!’

‘He ain’t no care, Mas’r Davy,’ said Mr. Peggotty in a solemn
whisper--‘kinder no care no-how for his life. When a man’s wanted for
rough sarvice in rough weather, he’s theer. When there’s hard duty to
be done with danger in it, he steps for’ard afore all his mates. And yet
he’s as gentle as any child. There ain’t a child in Yarmouth that doen’t
know him.’

He gathered up the letters thoughtfully, smoothing them with his hand;
put them into their little bundle; and placed it tenderly in his breast
again. The face was gone from the door. I still saw the snow drifting
in; but nothing else was there.

‘Well!’ he said, looking to his bag, ‘having seen you tonight, Mas’r
Davy (and that doos me good!), I shall away betimes tomorrow morning.
You have seen what I’ve got heer’; putting his hand on where the little
packet lay; ‘all that troubles me is, to think that any harm might come
to me, afore that money was give back. If I was to die, and it was lost,
or stole, or elseways made away with, and it was never know’d by him
but what I’d took it, I believe the t’other wureld wouldn’t hold me! I
believe I must come back!’

He rose, and I rose too; we grasped each other by the hand again, before
going out.

‘I’d go ten thousand mile,’ he said, ‘I’d go till I dropped dead, to lay
that money down afore him. If I do that, and find my Em’ly, I’m content.
If I doen’t find her, maybe she’ll come to hear, sometime, as her loving
uncle only ended his search for her when he ended his life; and if I
know her, even that will turn her home at last!’

As he went out into the rigorous night, I saw the lonely figure flit
away before us. I turned him hastily on some pretence, and held him in
conversation until it was gone.

He spoke of a traveller’s house on the Dover Road, where he knew he
could find a clean, plain lodging for the night. I went with him over
Westminster Bridge, and parted from him on the Surrey shore. Everything
seemed, to my imagination, to be hushed in reverence for him, as he
resumed his solitary journey through the snow.

I returned to the inn yard, and, impressed by my remembrance of the
face, looked awfully around for it. It was not there. The snow had
covered our late footprints; my new track was the only one to be seen;
and even that began to die away (it snowed so fast) as I looked back
over my shoulder.



CHAPTER 41. DORA’S AUNTS


At last, an answer came from the two old ladies. They presented their
compliments to Mr. Copperfield, and informed him that they had given his
letter their best consideration, ‘with a view to the happiness of
both parties’--which I thought rather an alarming expression, not
only because of the use they had made of it in relation to the family
difference before-mentioned, but because I had (and have all my life)
observed that conventional phrases are a sort of fireworks, easily let
off, and liable to take a great variety of shapes and colours not at
all suggested by their original form. The Misses Spenlow added that they
begged to forbear expressing, ‘through the medium of correspondence’, an
opinion on the subject of Mr. Copperfield’s communication; but that if
Mr. Copperfield would do them the favour to call, upon a certain day
(accompanied, if he thought proper, by a confidential friend), they
would be happy to hold some conversation on the subject.

To this favour, Mr. Copperfield immediately replied, with his respectful
compliments, that he would have the honour of waiting on the Misses
Spenlow, at the time appointed; accompanied, in accordance with their
kind permission, by his friend Mr. Thomas Traddles of the Inner Temple.
Having dispatched which missive, Mr. Copperfield fell into a condition
of strong nervous agitation; and so remained until the day arrived.

It was a great augmentation of my uneasiness to be bereaved, at this
eventful crisis, of the inestimable services of Miss Mills. But Mr.
Mills, who was always doing something or other to annoy me--or I felt
as if he were, which was the same thing--had brought his conduct to a
climax, by taking it into his head that he would go to India. Why should
he go to India, except to harass me? To be sure he had nothing to do
with any other part of the world, and had a good deal to do with that
part; being entirely in the India trade, whatever that was (I had
floating dreams myself concerning golden shawls and elephants’ teeth);
having been at Calcutta in his youth; and designing now to go out there
again, in the capacity of resident partner. But this was nothing to me.
However, it was so much to him that for India he was bound, and
Julia with him; and Julia went into the country to take leave of
her relations; and the house was put into a perfect suit of bills,
announcing that it was to be let or sold, and that the furniture (Mangle
and all) was to be taken at a valuation. So, here was another earthquake
of which I became the sport, before I had recovered from the shock of
its predecessor!

I was in several minds how to dress myself on the important day; being
divided between my desire to appear to advantage, and my apprehensions
of putting on anything that might impair my severely practical character
in the eyes of the Misses Spenlow. I endeavoured to hit a happy medium
between these two extremes; my aunt approved the result; and Mr. Dick
threw one of his shoes after Traddles and me, for luck, as we went
downstairs.

Excellent fellow as I knew Traddles to be, and warmly attached to him as
I was, I could not help wishing, on that delicate occasion, that he had
never contracted the habit of brushing his hair so very upright. It
gave him a surprised look--not to say a hearth-broomy kind of
expression--which, my apprehensions whispered, might be fatal to us.

I took the liberty of mentioning it to Traddles, as we were walking to
Putney; and saying that if he WOULD smooth it down a little--

‘My dear Copperfield,’ said Traddles, lifting off his hat, and rubbing
his hair all kinds of ways, ‘nothing would give me greater pleasure. But
it won’t.’

‘Won’t be smoothed down?’ said I.

‘No,’ said Traddles. ‘Nothing will induce it. If I was to carry a
half-hundred-weight upon it, all the way to Putney, it would be up again
the moment the weight was taken off. You have no idea what obstinate
hair mine is, Copperfield. I am quite a fretful porcupine.’

I was a little disappointed, I must confess, but thoroughly charmed by
his good-nature too. I told him how I esteemed his good-nature; and said
that his hair must have taken all the obstinacy out of his character,
for he had none.

‘Oh!’ returned Traddles, laughing. ‘I assure you, it’s quite an old
story, my unfortunate hair. My uncle’s wife couldn’t bear it. She said
it exasperated her. It stood very much in my way, too, when I first fell
in love with Sophy. Very much!’

‘Did she object to it?’

‘SHE didn’t,’ rejoined Traddles; ‘but her eldest sister--the one that’s
the Beauty--quite made game of it, I understand. In fact, all the
sisters laugh at it.’

‘Agreeable!’ said I.

‘Yes,’ returned Traddles with perfect innocence, ‘it’s a joke for us.
They pretend that Sophy has a lock of it in her desk, and is obliged to
shut it in a clasped book, to keep it down. We laugh about it.’

‘By the by, my dear Traddles,’ said I, ‘your experience may suggest
something to me. When you became engaged to the young lady whom you have
just mentioned, did you make a regular proposal to her family? Was there
anything like--what we are going through today, for instance?’ I added,
nervously.

‘Why,’ replied Traddles, on whose attentive face a thoughtful shade had
stolen, ‘it was rather a painful transaction, Copperfield, in my case.
You see, Sophy being of so much use in the family, none of them could
endure the thought of her ever being married. Indeed, they had quite
settled among themselves that she never was to be married, and they
called her the old maid. Accordingly, when I mentioned it, with the
greatest precaution, to Mrs. Crewler--’

‘The mama?’ said I.

‘The mama,’ said Traddles--‘Reverend Horace Crewler--when I mentioned it
with every possible precaution to Mrs. Crewler, the effect upon her was
such that she gave a scream and became insensible. I couldn’t approach
the subject again, for months.’

‘You did at last?’ said I.

‘Well, the Reverend Horace did,’ said Traddles. ‘He is an excellent man,
most exemplary in every way; and he pointed out to her that she ought,
as a Christian, to reconcile herself to the sacrifice (especially as it
was so uncertain), and to bear no uncharitable feeling towards me. As to
myself, Copperfield, I give you my word, I felt a perfect bird of prey
towards the family.’

‘The sisters took your part, I hope, Traddles?’

‘Why, I can’t say they did,’ he returned. ‘When we had comparatively
reconciled Mrs. Crewler to it, we had to break it to Sarah. You
recollect my mentioning Sarah, as the one that has something the matter
with her spine?’

‘Perfectly!’

‘She clenched both her hands,’ said Traddles, looking at me in dismay;
‘shut her eyes; turned lead-colour; became perfectly stiff; and
took nothing for two days but toast-and-water, administered with a
tea-spoon.’

‘What a very unpleasant girl, Traddles!’ I remarked.

‘Oh, I beg your pardon, Copperfield!’ said Traddles. ‘She is a very
charming girl, but she has a great deal of feeling. In fact, they all
have. Sophy told me afterwards, that the self-reproach she underwent
while she was in attendance upon Sarah, no words could describe. I know
it must have been severe, by my own feelings, Copperfield; which were
like a criminal’s. After Sarah was restored, we still had to break it
to the other eight; and it produced various effects upon them of a most
pathetic nature. The two little ones, whom Sophy educates, have only
just left off de-testing me.’

‘At any rate, they are all reconciled to it now, I hope?’ said I.

‘Ye-yes, I should say they were, on the whole, resigned to it,’ said
Traddles, doubtfully. ‘The fact is, we avoid mentioning the subject;
and my unsettled prospects and indifferent circumstances are a great
consolation to them. There will be a deplorable scene, whenever we
are married. It will be much more like a funeral, than a wedding. And
they’ll all hate me for taking her away!’

His honest face, as he looked at me with a serio-comic shake of his
head, impresses me more in the remembrance than it did in the reality,
for I was by this time in a state of such excessive trepidation
and wandering of mind, as to be quite unable to fix my attention on
anything. On our approaching the house where the Misses Spenlow lived,
I was at such a discount in respect of my personal looks and presence of
mind, that Traddles proposed a gentle stimulant in the form of a glass
of ale. This having been administered at a neighbouring public-house, he
conducted me, with tottering steps, to the Misses Spenlow’s door.

I had a vague sensation of being, as it were, on view, when the maid
opened it; and of wavering, somehow, across a hall with a weather-glass
in it, into a quiet little drawing-room on the ground-floor, commanding
a neat garden. Also of sitting down here, on a sofa, and seeing
Traddles’s hair start up, now his hat was removed, like one of those
obtrusive little figures made of springs, that fly out of fictitious
snuff-boxes when the lid is taken off. Also of hearing an old-fashioned
clock ticking away on the chimney-piece, and trying to make it keep time
to the jerking of my heart,--which it wouldn’t. Also of looking round
the room for any sign of Dora, and seeing none. Also of thinking that
Jip once barked in the distance, and was instantly choked by somebody.
Ultimately I found myself backing Traddles into the fireplace, and
bowing in great confusion to two dry little elderly ladies, dressed in
black, and each looking wonderfully like a preparation in chip or tan of
the late Mr. Spenlow.

‘Pray,’ said one of the two little ladies, ‘be seated.’

When I had done tumbling over Traddles, and had sat upon something which
was not a cat--my first seat was--I so far recovered my sight, as to
perceive that Mr. Spenlow had evidently been the youngest of the
family; that there was a disparity of six or eight years between the
two sisters; and that the younger appeared to be the manager of the
conference, inasmuch as she had my letter in her hand--so familiar as
it looked to me, and yet so odd!--and was referring to it through an
eye-glass. They were dressed alike, but this sister wore her dress with
a more youthful air than the other; and perhaps had a trifle more frill,
or tucker, or brooch, or bracelet, or some little thing of that kind,
which made her look more lively. They were both upright in their
carriage, formal, precise, composed, and quiet. The sister who had
not my letter, had her arms crossed on her breast, and resting on each
other, like an Idol.

‘Mr. Copperfield, I believe,’ said the sister who had got my letter,
addressing herself to Traddles.

This was a frightful beginning. Traddles had to indicate that I was Mr.
Copperfield, and I had to lay claim to myself, and they had to divest
themselves of a preconceived opinion that Traddles was Mr. Copperfield,
and altogether we were in a nice condition. To improve it, we all
distinctly heard Jip give two short barks, and receive another choke.

‘Mr. Copperfield!’ said the sister with the letter.

I did something--bowed, I suppose--and was all attention, when the other
sister struck in.

‘My sister Lavinia,’ said she ‘being conversant with matters of this
nature, will state what we consider most calculated to promote the
happiness of both parties.’

I discovered afterwards that Miss Lavinia was an authority in affairs
of the heart, by reason of there having anciently existed a certain Mr.
Pidger, who played short whist, and was supposed to have been enamoured
of her. My private opinion is, that this was entirely a gratuitous
assumption, and that Pidger was altogether innocent of any such
sentiments--to which he had never given any sort of expression that
I could ever hear of. Both Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa had a
superstition, however, that he would have declared his passion, if he
had not been cut short in his youth (at about sixty) by over-drinking
his constitution, and over-doing an attempt to set it right again by
swilling Bath water. They had a lurking suspicion even, that he died of
secret love; though I must say there was a picture of him in the house
with a damask nose, which concealment did not appear to have ever preyed
upon.

‘We will not,’ said Miss Lavinia, ‘enter on the past history of this
matter. Our poor brother Francis’s death has cancelled that.’

‘We had not,’ said Miss Clarissa, ‘been in the habit of frequent
association with our brother Francis; but there was no decided division
or disunion between us. Francis took his road; we took ours. We
considered it conducive to the happiness of all parties that it should
be so. And it was so.’

Each of the sisters leaned a little forward to speak, shook her head
after speaking, and became upright again when silent. Miss Clarissa
never moved her arms. She sometimes played tunes upon them with her
fingers--minuets and marches I should think--but never moved them.

‘Our niece’s position, or supposed position, is much changed by our
brother Francis’s death,’ said Miss Lavinia; ‘and therefore we consider
our brother’s opinions as regarded her position as being changed too. We
have no reason to doubt, Mr. Copperfield, that you are a young gentleman
possessed of good qualities and honourable character; or that you have
an affection--or are fully persuaded that you have an affection--for our
niece.’

I replied, as I usually did whenever I had a chance, that nobody had
ever loved anybody else as I loved Dora. Traddles came to my assistance
with a confirmatory murmur.

Miss Lavinia was going on to make some rejoinder, when Miss Clarissa,
who appeared to be incessantly beset by a desire to refer to her brother
Francis, struck in again:

‘If Dora’s mama,’ she said, ‘when she married our brother Francis, had
at once said that there was not room for the family at the dinner-table,
it would have been better for the happiness of all parties.’

‘Sister Clarissa,’ said Miss Lavinia. ‘Perhaps we needn’t mind that
now.’

‘Sister Lavinia,’ said Miss Clarissa, ‘it belongs to the subject. With
your branch of the subject, on which alone you are competent to speak, I
should not think of interfering. On this branch of the subject I have a
voice and an opinion. It would have been better for the happiness of
all parties, if Dora’s mama, when she married our brother Francis, had
mentioned plainly what her intentions were. We should then have known
what we had to expect. We should have said “Pray do not invite us,
at any time”; and all possibility of misunderstanding would have been
avoided.’

When Miss Clarissa had shaken her head, Miss Lavinia resumed: again
referring to my letter through her eye-glass. They both had little
bright round twinkling eyes, by the way, which were like birds’ eyes.
They were not unlike birds, altogether; having a sharp, brisk, sudden
manner, and a little short, spruce way of adjusting themselves, like
canaries.

Miss Lavinia, as I have said, resumed:

‘You ask permission of my sister Clarissa and myself, Mr. Copperfield,
to visit here, as the accepted suitor of our niece.’

‘If our brother Francis,’ said Miss Clarissa, breaking out again, if I
may call anything so calm a breaking out, ‘wished to surround himself
with an atmosphere of Doctors’ Commons, and of Doctors’ Commons only,
what right or desire had we to object? None, I am sure. We have ever
been far from wishing to obtrude ourselves on anyone. But why not say
so? Let our brother Francis and his wife have their society. Let
my sister Lavinia and myself have our society. We can find it for
ourselves, I hope.’

As this appeared to be addressed to Traddles and me, both Traddles and
I made some sort of reply. Traddles was inaudible. I think I observed,
myself, that it was highly creditable to all concerned. I don’t in the
least know what I meant.

‘Sister Lavinia,’ said Miss Clarissa, having now relieved her mind, ‘you
can go on, my dear.’

Miss Lavinia proceeded:

‘Mr. Copperfield, my sister Clarissa and I have been very careful
indeed in considering this letter; and we have not considered it without
finally showing it to our niece, and discussing it with our niece. We
have no doubt that you think you like her very much.’

‘Think, ma’am,’ I rapturously began, ‘oh!--’

But Miss Clarissa giving me a look (just like a sharp canary), as
requesting that I would not interrupt the oracle, I begged pardon.

‘Affection,’ said Miss Lavinia, glancing at her sister for
corroboration, which she gave in the form of a little nod to every
clause, ‘mature affection, homage, devotion, does not easily express
itself. Its voice is low. It is modest and retiring, it lies in ambush,
waits and waits. Such is the mature fruit. Sometimes a life glides away,
and finds it still ripening in the shade.’

Of course I did not understand then that this was an allusion to her
supposed experience of the stricken Pidger; but I saw, from the gravity
with which Miss Clarissa nodded her head, that great weight was attached
to these words.

‘The light--for I call them, in comparison with such sentiments, the
light--inclinations of very young people,’ pursued Miss Lavinia, ‘are
dust, compared to rocks. It is owing to the difficulty of knowing
whether they are likely to endure or have any real foundation, that
my sister Clarissa and myself have been very undecided how to act, Mr.
Copperfield, and Mr.--’

‘Traddles,’ said my friend, finding himself looked at.

‘I beg pardon. Of the Inner Temple, I believe?’ said Miss Clarissa,
again glancing at my letter.

Traddles said ‘Exactly so,’ and became pretty red in the face.

Now, although I had not received any express encouragement as yet, I
fancied that I saw in the two little sisters, and particularly in Miss
Lavinia, an intensified enjoyment of this new and fruitful subject of
domestic interest, a settling down to make the most of it, a disposition
to pet it, in which there was a good bright ray of hope. I thought
I perceived that Miss Lavinia would have uncommon satisfaction in
superintending two young lovers, like Dora and me; and that Miss
Clarissa would have hardly less satisfaction in seeing her superintend
us, and in chiming in with her own particular department of the subject
whenever that impulse was strong upon her. This gave me courage to
protest most vehemently that I loved Dora better than I could tell, or
anyone believe; that all my friends knew how I loved her; that my aunt,
Agnes, Traddles, everyone who knew me, knew how I loved her, and how
earnest my love had made me. For the truth of this, I appealed to
Traddles. And Traddles, firing up as if he were plunging into a
Parliamentary Debate, really did come out nobly: confirming me in good
round terms, and in a plain sensible practical manner, that evidently
made a favourable impression.

‘I speak, if I may presume to say so, as one who has some little
experience of such things,’ said Traddles, ‘being myself engaged to a
young lady--one of ten, down in Devonshire--and seeing no probability,
at present, of our engagement coming to a termination.’

‘You may be able to confirm what I have said, Mr. Traddles,’ observed
Miss Lavinia, evidently taking a new interest in him, ‘of the affection
that is modest and retiring; that waits and waits?’

‘Entirely, ma’am,’ said Traddles.

Miss Clarissa looked at Miss Lavinia, and shook her head gravely. Miss
Lavinia looked consciously at Miss Clarissa, and heaved a little sigh.
‘Sister Lavinia,’ said Miss Clarissa, ‘take my smelling-bottle.’

Miss Lavinia revived herself with a few whiffs of aromatic
vinegar--Traddles and I looking on with great solicitude the while; and
then went on to say, rather faintly:

‘My sister and myself have been in great doubt, Mr. Traddles, what
course we ought to take in reference to the likings, or imaginary
likings, of such very young people as your friend Mr. Copperfield and
our niece.’

‘Our brother Francis’s child,’ remarked Miss Clarissa. ‘If our brother
Francis’s wife had found it convenient in her lifetime (though she had
an unquestionable right to act as she thought best) to invite the family
to her dinner-table, we might have known our brother Francis’s child
better at the present moment. Sister Lavinia, proceed.’

Miss Lavinia turned my letter, so as to bring the superscription towards
herself, and referred through her eye-glass to some orderly-looking
notes she had made on that part of it.

‘It seems to us,’ said she, ‘prudent, Mr. Traddles, to bring these
feelings to the test of our own observation. At present we know nothing
of them, and are not in a situation to judge how much reality there
may be in them. Therefore we are inclined so far to accede to Mr.
Copperfield’s proposal, as to admit his visits here.’

‘I shall never, dear ladies,’ I exclaimed, relieved of an immense load
of apprehension, ‘forget your kindness!’

‘But,’ pursued Miss Lavinia,--‘but, we would prefer to regard those
visits, Mr. Traddles, as made, at present, to us. We must guard
ourselves from recognizing any positive engagement between Mr.
Copperfield and our niece, until we have had an opportunity--’

‘Until YOU have had an opportunity, sister Lavinia,’ said Miss Clarissa.

‘Be it so,’ assented Miss Lavinia, with a sigh--‘until I have had an
opportunity of observing them.’

‘Copperfield,’ said Traddles, turning to me, ‘you feel, I am sure, that
nothing could be more reasonable or considerate.’

‘Nothing!’ cried I. ‘I am deeply sensible of it.’

‘In this position of affairs,’ said Miss Lavinia, again referring to
her notes, ‘and admitting his visits on this understanding only, we
must require from Mr. Copperfield a distinct assurance, on his word of
honour, that no communication of any kind shall take place between him
and our niece without our knowledge. That no project whatever shall be
entertained with regard to our niece, without being first submitted to
us--’ ‘To you, sister Lavinia,’ Miss Clarissa interposed.

‘Be it so, Clarissa!’ assented Miss Lavinia resignedly--‘to me--and
receiving our concurrence. We must make this a most express and serious
stipulation, not to be broken on any account. We wished Mr. Copperfield
to be accompanied by some confidential friend today,’ with an
inclination of her head towards Traddles, who bowed, ‘in order that
there might be no doubt or misconception on this subject. If Mr.
Copperfield, or if you, Mr. Traddles, feel the least scruple, in giving
this promise, I beg you to take time to consider it.’

I exclaimed, in a state of high ecstatic fervour, that not a moment’s
consideration could be necessary. I bound myself by the required
promise, in a most impassioned manner; called upon Traddles to witness
it; and denounced myself as the most atrocious of characters if I ever
swerved from it in the least degree.

‘Stay!’ said Miss Lavinia, holding up her hand; ‘we resolved, before we
had the pleasure of receiving you two gentlemen, to leave you alone
for a quarter of an hour, to consider this point. You will allow us to
retire.’

It was in vain for me to say that no consideration was necessary. They
persisted in withdrawing for the specified time. Accordingly, these
little birds hopped out with great dignity; leaving me to receive the
congratulations of Traddles, and to feel as if I were translated to
regions of exquisite happiness. Exactly at the expiration of the
quarter of an hour, they reappeared with no less dignity than they had
disappeared. They had gone rustling away as if their little dresses were
made of autumn-leaves: and they came rustling back, in like manner.

I then bound myself once more to the prescribed conditions.

‘Sister Clarissa,’ said Miss Lavinia, ‘the rest is with you.’

Miss Clarissa, unfolding her arms for the first time, took the notes and
glanced at them.

‘We shall be happy,’ said Miss Clarissa, ‘to see Mr. Copperfield to
dinner, every Sunday, if it should suit his convenience. Our hour is
three.’

I bowed.

‘In the course of the week,’ said Miss Clarissa, ‘we shall be happy to
see Mr. Copperfield to tea. Our hour is half-past six.’

I bowed again.

‘Twice in the week,’ said Miss Clarissa, ‘but, as a rule, not oftener.’

I bowed again.

‘Miss Trotwood,’ said Miss Clarissa, ‘mentioned in Mr. Copperfield’s
letter, will perhaps call upon us. When visiting is better for the
happiness of all parties, we are glad to receive visits, and return
them. When it is better for the happiness of all parties that no
visiting should take place, (as in the case of our brother Francis, and
his establishment) that is quite different.’

I intimated that my aunt would be proud and delighted to make their
acquaintance; though I must say I was not quite sure of their getting
on very satisfactorily together. The conditions being now closed, I
expressed my acknowledgements in the warmest manner; and, taking the
hand, first of Miss Clarissa, and then of Miss Lavinia, pressed it, in
each case, to my lips.

Miss Lavinia then arose, and begging Mr. Traddles to excuse us for a
minute, requested me to follow her. I obeyed, all in a tremble, and was
conducted into another room. There I found my blessed darling stopping
her ears behind the door, with her dear little face against the wall;
and Jip in the plate-warmer with his head tied up in a towel.

Oh! How beautiful she was in her black frock, and how she sobbed and
cried at first, and wouldn’t come out from behind the door! How fond we
were of one another, when she did come out at last; and what a state of
bliss I was in, when we took Jip out of the plate-warmer, and restored
him to the light, sneezing very much, and were all three reunited!

‘My dearest Dora! Now, indeed, my own for ever!’

‘Oh, DON’T!’ pleaded Dora. ‘Please!’

‘Are you not my own for ever, Dora?’

‘Oh yes, of course I am!’ cried Dora, ‘but I am so frightened!’

‘Frightened, my own?’

‘Oh yes! I don’t like him,’ said Dora. ‘Why don’t he go?’

‘Who, my life?’

‘Your friend,’ said Dora. ‘It isn’t any business of his. What a stupid
he must be!’

‘My love!’ (There never was anything so coaxing as her childish ways.)
‘He is the best creature!’

‘Oh, but we don’t want any best creatures!’ pouted Dora.

‘My dear,’ I argued, ‘you will soon know him well, and like him of all
things. And here is my aunt coming soon; and you’ll like her of all
things too, when you know her.’

‘No, please don’t bring her!’ said Dora, giving me a horrified
little kiss, and folding her hands. ‘Don’t. I know she’s a naughty,
mischief-making old thing! Don’t let her come here, Doady!’ which was a
corruption of David.

Remonstrance was of no use, then; so I laughed, and admired, and was
very much in love and very happy; and she showed me Jip’s new trick of
standing on his hind legs in a corner--which he did for about the space
of a flash of lightning, and then fell down--and I don’t know how long I
should have stayed there, oblivious of Traddles, if Miss Lavinia had not
come in to take me away. Miss Lavinia was very fond of Dora (she told
me Dora was exactly like what she had been herself at her age--she must
have altered a good deal), and she treated Dora just as if she had been
a toy. I wanted to persuade Dora to come and see Traddles, but on my
proposing it she ran off to her own room and locked herself in; so I
went to Traddles without her, and walked away with him on air.

‘Nothing could be more satisfactory,’ said Traddles; ‘and they are very
agreeable old ladies, I am sure. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if you
were to be married years before me, Copperfield.’

‘Does your Sophy play on any instrument, Traddles?’ I inquired, in the
pride of my heart.

‘She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters,’ said
Traddles.

‘Does she sing at all?’ I asked.

‘Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little
when they’re out of spirits,’ said Traddles. ‘Nothing scientific.’

‘She doesn’t sing to the guitar?’ said I.

‘Oh dear no!’ said Traddles.

‘Paint at all?’

‘Not at all,’ said Traddles.

I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of her
flower-painting. He said he should like it very much, and we went home
arm in arm in great good humour and delight. I encouraged him to talk
about Sophy, on the way; which he did with a loving reliance on her
that I very much admired. I compared her in my mind with Dora, with
considerable inward satisfaction; but I candidly admitted to myself that
she seemed to be an excellent kind of girl for Traddles, too.

Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the successful
issue of the conference, and with all that had been said and done in the
course of it. She was happy to see me so happy, and promised to call on
Dora’s aunts without loss of time. But she took such a long walk up and
down our rooms that night, while I was writing to Agnes, that I began to
think she meant to walk till morning.

My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all the
good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. She wrote,
by return of post, to me. Her letter was hopeful, earnest, and cheerful.
She was always cheerful from that time.

I had my hands more full than ever, now. My daily journeys to Highgate
considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally wanted to go
there as often as I could. The proposed tea-drinkings being quite
impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for permission to visit
every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to my privileged Sundays.
So, the close of every week was a delicious time for me; and I got
through the rest of the week by looking forward to it.

I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora’s aunts
rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could have
expected. My aunt made her promised visit within a few days of the
conference; and within a few more days, Dora’s aunts called upon her,
in due state and form. Similar but more friendly exchanges took place
afterwards, usually at intervals of three or four weeks. I know that my
aunt distressed Dora’s aunts very much, by utterly setting at naught the
dignity of fly-conveyance, and walking out to Putney at extraordinary
times, as shortly after breakfast or just before tea; likewise by
wearing her bonnet in any manner that happened to be comfortable to her
head, without at all deferring to the prejudices of civilization on that
subject. But Dora’s aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric
and somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although
my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora’s aunts, by expressing
heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she loved me too
well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities to the general
harmony.

The only member of our small society who positively refused to adapt
himself to circumstances, was Jip. He never saw my aunt without
immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring under a chair,
and growling incessantly: with now and then a doleful howl, as if she
really were too much for his feelings. All kinds of treatment were tried
with him, coaxing, scolding, slapping, bringing him to Buckingham
Street (where he instantly dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all
beholders); but he never could prevail upon himself to bear my
aunt’s society. He would sometimes think he had got the better of his
objection, and be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his
snub nose, and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but
to blind him and put him in the plate-warmer. At length, Dora regularly
muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was
reported at the door.

One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet train.
It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like a pretty toy
or plaything. My aunt, with whom she gradually became familiar, always
called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of Miss Lavinia’s life was
to wait upon her, curl her hair, make ornaments for her, and treat her
like a pet child. What Miss Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of
course. It was very odd to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her
degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his.

I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we were
out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a while, to
go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished she could get
them to behave towards her differently.

‘Because you know, my darling,’ I remonstrated, ‘you are not a child.’

‘There!’ said Dora. ‘Now you’re going to be cross!’

‘Cross, my love?’

‘I am sure they’re very kind to me,’ said Dora, ‘and I am very happy--’

‘Well! But my dearest life!’ said I, ‘you might be very happy, and yet
be treated rationally.’

Dora gave me a reproachful look--the prettiest look!--and then began to
sob, saying, if I didn’t like her, why had I ever wanted so much to be
engaged to her? And why didn’t I go away, now, if I couldn’t bear her?

What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted on
her, after that!

‘I am sure I am very affectionate,’ said Dora; ‘you oughtn’t to be cruel
to me, Doady!’

‘Cruel, my precious love! As if I would--or could--be cruel to you, for
the world!’

‘Then don’t find fault with me,’ said Dora, making a rosebud of her
mouth; ‘and I’ll be good.’

I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give
her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep
accounts as I had once promised I would. I brought the volume with me on
my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to make it look less dry
and more inviting); and as we strolled about the Common, I showed her an
old housekeeping-book of my aunt’s, and gave her a set of tablets, and
a pretty little pencil-case and box of leads, to practise housekeeping
with.

But the cookery-book made Dora’s head ache, and the figures made her
cry. They wouldn’t add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew
little nosegays and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets.

Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as we
walked about on a Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, for example, when we
passed a butcher’s shop, I would say:

‘Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to buy a
shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?’

My pretty little Dora’s face would fall, and she would make her mouth
into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut mine with a
kiss.

‘Would you know how to buy it, my darling?’ I would repeat, perhaps, if
I were very inflexible.

Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great triumph:

‘Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need I know? Oh,
you silly boy!’

So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what she
would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like a nice
Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to make it; and
then clapped her little hands together across my arm, and laughed in
such a charming manner that she was more delightful than ever.

Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was devoted,
was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. But Dora was so
pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it without offering to
come off, and at the same time to hold the pencil-case in his mouth,
that I was very glad I had bought it.

And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the
songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as happy as
the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss
Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like
a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it were, wondering to find that
I had fallen into the general fault, and treated her like a plaything
too--but not often.



CHAPTER 42. MISCHIEF

I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript
is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous
short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of
responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have
already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a
patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me,
and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any
strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my
success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have
worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could
have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order,
and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one
object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon
its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit
of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine,
in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man
indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents
neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted
feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I
do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My
meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have
tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself
to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in
small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed
it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from
the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and
hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this
earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the
two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that
ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no
substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never
to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and
never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now,
to have been my golden rules.

How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to Agnes,
I will not repeat here. My narrative proceeds to Agnes, with a thankful
love.

She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor’s. Mr. Wickfield was
the Doctor’s old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with him, and
do him good. It had been matter of conversation with Agnes when she was
last in town, and this visit was the result. She and her father came
together. I was not much surprised to hear from her that she had engaged
to find a lodging in the neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic
complaint required change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in
such company. Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah,
like a dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession.

‘You see, Master Copperfield,’ said he, as he forced himself upon my
company for a turn in the Doctor’s garden, ‘where a person loves, a
person is a little jealous--leastways, anxious to keep an eye on the
beloved one.’

‘Of whom are you jealous, now?’ said I.

‘Thanks to you, Master Copperfield,’ he returned, ‘of no one in
particular just at present--no male person, at least.’

‘Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?’

He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and laughed.

‘Really, Master Copperfield,’ he said, ‘--I should say Mister, but I
know you’ll excuse the abit I’ve got into--you’re so insinuating, that
you draw me like a corkscrew! Well, I don’t mind telling you,’ putting
his fish-like hand on mine, ‘I’m not a lady’s man in general, sir, and I
never was, with Mrs. Strong.’

His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally cunning.

‘What do you mean?’ said I.

‘Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield,’ he replied, with a dry
grin, ‘I mean, just at present, what I say.’

‘And what do you mean by your look?’ I retorted, quietly.

‘By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that’s sharp practice! What do I mean
by my look?’

‘Yes,’ said I. ‘By your look.’

He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his
nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went
on to say, with his eyes cast downward--still scraping, very slowly:

‘When I was but an umble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was
for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was
for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far
beneath her, myself, to be noticed.’

‘Well?’ said I; ‘suppose you were!’

‘--And beneath him too,’ pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a
meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin.

‘Don’t you know the Doctor better,’ said I, ‘than to suppose him
conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?’

He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made
his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as
he answered:

‘Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr.
Maldon!’

My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on
that subject, all the Doctor’s happiness and peace, all the mingled
possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I
saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow’s twisting.

‘He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me
about,’ said Uriah. ‘One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek
and umble--and I am. But I didn’t like that sort of thing--and I don’t!’

He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they
seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the
while.

‘She is one of your lovely women, she is,’ he pursued, when he had
slowly restored his face to its natural form; ‘and ready to be no friend
to such as me, I know. She’s just the person as would put my Agnes up
to higher sort of game. Now, I ain’t one of your lady’s men, Master
Copperfield; but I’ve had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We
umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking--and we look out of ‘em.’

I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in
his face, with poor success.

‘Now, I’m not a-going to let myself be run down, Copperfield,’ he
continued, raising that part of his countenance, where his red eyebrows
would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, ‘and I shall
do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don’t approve of it.
I don’t mind acknowledging to you that I’ve got rather a grudging
disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain’t a-going, if I
know it, to run the risk of being plotted against.’

‘You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that
everybody else is doing the like, I think,’ said I.

‘Perhaps so, Master Copperfield,’ he replied. ‘But I’ve got a motive, as
my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and nail. I mustn’t
be put upon, as a numble person, too much. I can’t allow people in my
way. Really they must come out of the cart, Master Copperfield!’

‘I don’t understand you,’ said I.

‘Don’t you, though?’ he returned, with one of his jerks. ‘I’m astonished
at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! I’ll try to be
plainer, another time.---Is that Mr. Maldon a-norseback, ringing at the
gate, sir?’

‘It looks like him,’ I replied, as carelessly as I could.

Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and
doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not
a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour,
particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any
ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a
scarecrow in want of support.

It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next evening
but one, which was a Sunday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. I had
arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes was
expected to tea.

I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little
betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her. All the way to
Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I pictured
Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so well; now
making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly as she looked
at such a time, and then doubting whether I should not prefer her
looking as she looked at such another time; and almost worrying myself
into a fever about it.

I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case; but
it fell out that I had never seen her look so well. She was not in the
drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts, but was shyly
keeping out of the way. I knew where to look for her, now; and sure
enough I found her stopping her ears again, behind the same dull old
door.

At first she wouldn’t come at all; and then she pleaded for five minutes
by my watch. When at length she put her arm through mine, to be taken
to the drawing-room, her charming little face was flushed, and had never
been so pretty. But, when we went into the room, and it turned pale, she
was ten thousand times prettier yet.

Dora was afraid of Agnes. She had told me that she knew Agnes was
‘too clever’. But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and so
earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little cry of
pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round Agnes’s neck,
and laid her innocent cheek against her face.

I never was so happy. I never was so pleased as when I saw those two sit
down together, side by side. As when I saw my little darling looking up
so naturally to those cordial eyes. As when I saw the tender, beautiful
regard which Agnes cast upon her.

Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was
the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut
and handed the sweet seed-cake--the little sisters had a bird-like
fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked
on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and
we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another.

The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts. Her quiet
interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of making
acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her pleasant way, when
Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat by me; her modest grace
and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing little marks of confidence from
Dora; seemed to make our circle quite complete.

‘I am so glad,’ said Dora, after tea, ‘that you like me. I didn’t think
you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia Mills is
gone.’

I have omitted to mention it, by the by. Miss Mills had sailed, and Dora
and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend to see her;
and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other delicacies of that
sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills weeping on a camp-stool on
the quarter-deck, with a large new diary under her arm, in which the
original reflections awakened by the contemplation of Ocean were to be
recorded under lock and key.

Agnes said she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising
character; but Dora corrected that directly.

‘Oh no!’ she said, shaking her curls at me; ‘it was all praise. He
thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it.’

‘My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people whom he
knows,’ said Agnes, with a smile; ‘it is not worth their having.’

‘But please let me have it,’ said Dora, in her coaxing way, ‘if you
can!’

We made merry about Dora’s wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a
goose, and she didn’t like me at any rate, and the short evening flew
away on gossamer-wings. The time was at hand when the coach was to call
for us. I was standing alone before the fire, when Dora came stealing
softly in, to give me that usual precious little kiss before I went.

‘Don’t you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago, Doady,’
said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right
hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, ‘I might
have been more clever perhaps?’

‘My love!’ said I, ‘what nonsense!’

‘Do you think it is nonsense?’ returned Dora, without looking at me.
‘Are you sure it is?’

‘Of course I am!’ ‘I have forgotten,’ said Dora, still turning the
button round and round, ‘what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad
boy.’

‘No blood-relation,’ I replied; ‘but we were brought up together, like
brother and sister.’

‘I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?’ said Dora, beginning on
another button of my coat.

‘Perhaps because I couldn’t see you, and not love you, Dora!’

‘Suppose you had never seen me at all,’ said Dora, going to another
button.

‘Suppose we had never been born!’ said I, gaily.

I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence
at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and
at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of
her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At
length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to
give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss--once,
twice, three times--and went out of the room.

They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora’s
unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved
to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came.
They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip’s
reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door.
There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself;
and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being
foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a
second parting at the coach door, and a third when Dora, in spite of
the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to
remind Agnes at the coach window about writing, and to shake her curls
at me on the box.

The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we were
to take another stage-coach for Highgate. I was impatient for the short
walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. Ah! what
praise it was! How lovingly and fervently did it commend the pretty
creature I had won, with all her artless graces best displayed, to my
most gentle care! How thoughtfully remind me, yet with no pretence of
doing so, of the trust in which I held the orphan child!

Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her that
night. When we had again alighted, and were walking in the starlight
along the quiet road that led to the Doctor’s house, I told Agnes it was
her doing.

‘When you were sitting by her,’ said I, ‘you seemed to be no less her
guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes.’

‘A poor angel,’ she returned, ‘but faithful.’

The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it natural
to me to say:

‘The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else that
ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed today, that I have
begun to hope you are happier at home?’

‘I am happier in myself,’ she said; ‘I am quite cheerful and
light-hearted.’

I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the
stars that made it seem so noble.

‘There has been no change at home,’ said Agnes, after a few moments.

‘No fresh reference,’ said I, ‘to--I wouldn’t distress you, Agnes, but I
cannot help asking--to what we spoke of, when we parted last?’

‘No, none,’ she answered.

‘I have thought so much about it.’

‘You must think less about it. Remember that I confide in simple love
and truth at last. Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood,’ she added,
after a moment; ‘the step you dread my taking, I shall never take.’

Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of cool
reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this assurance
from her own truthful lips. I told her so, earnestly.

‘And when this visit is over,’ said I,--‘for we may not be alone another
time,--how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before you come to
London again?’

‘Probably a long time,’ she replied; ‘I think it will be best--for
papa’s sake--to remain at home. We are not likely to meet often, for
some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of Dora’s, and we
shall frequently hear of one another that way.’

We were now within the little courtyard of the Doctor’s cottage. It was
growing late. There was a light in the window of Mrs. Strong’s chamber,
and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night.

‘Do not be troubled,’ she said, giving me her hand, ‘by our misfortunes
and anxieties. I can be happier in nothing than in your happiness. If
you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will ask you for it. God
bless you always!’ In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her
cheerful voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her
company. I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars, with
a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly forth. I had
engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was going out at the
gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a light in the Doctor’s
study. A half-reproachful fancy came into my mind, that he had been
working at the Dictionary without my help. With the view of seeing if
this were so, and, in any case, of bidding him good night, if he were
yet sitting among his books, I turned back, and going softly across the
hall, and gently opening the door, looked in.

The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of the
shaded lamp, was Uriah. He was standing close beside it, with one of
his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on the Doctor’s
table. The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering his face with his
hands. Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and distressed, was leaning
forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor’s arm.

For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill. I hastily advanced a
step under that impression, when I met Uriah’s eye, and saw what was the
matter. I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor made a gesture to detain
me, and I remained.

‘At any rate,’ observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly person, ‘we
may keep the door shut. We needn’t make it known to ALL the town.’

Saying which, he went on his toes to the door, which I had left open,
and carefully closed it. He then came back, and took up his former
position. There was an obtrusive show of compassionate zeal in his voice
and manner, more intolerable--at least to me--than any demeanour he
could have assumed.

‘I have felt it incumbent upon me, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah, ‘to
point out to Doctor Strong what you and me have already talked about.
You didn’t exactly understand me, though?’

I gave him a look, but no other answer; and, going to my good old
master, said a few words that I meant to be words of comfort and
encouragement. He put his hand upon my shoulder, as it had been his
custom to do when I was quite a little fellow, but did not lift his grey
head.

‘As you didn’t understand me, Master Copperfield,’ resumed Uriah in
the same officious manner, ‘I may take the liberty of umbly mentioning,
being among friends, that I have called Doctor Strong’s attention to the
goings-on of Mrs. Strong. It’s much against the grain with me, I assure
you, Copperfield, to be concerned in anything so unpleasant; but really,
as it is, we’re all mixing ourselves up with what oughtn’t to be. That
was what my meaning was, sir, when you didn’t understand me.’ I wonder
now, when I recall his leer, that I did not collar him, and try to shake
the breath out of his body.

‘I dare say I didn’t make myself very clear,’ he went on, ‘nor you
neither. Naturally, we was both of us inclined to give such a subject
a wide berth. Hows’ever, at last I have made up my mind to speak plain;
and I have mentioned to Doctor Strong that--did you speak, sir?’

This was to the Doctor, who had moaned. The sound might have touched any
heart, I thought, but it had no effect upon Uriah’s.

‘--mentioned to Doctor Strong,’ he proceeded, ‘that anyone may see that
Mr. Maldon, and the lovely and agreeable lady as is Doctor Strong’s
wife, are too sweet on one another. Really the time is come (we being at
present all mixing ourselves up with what oughtn’t to be), when Doctor
Strong must be told that this was full as plain to everybody as the sun,
before Mr. Maldon went to India; that Mr. Maldon made excuses to come
back, for nothing else; and that he’s always here, for nothing else.
When you come in, sir, I was just putting it to my fellow-partner,’
towards whom he turned, ‘to say to Doctor Strong upon his word and
honour, whether he’d ever been of this opinion long ago, or not. Come,
Mr. Wickfield, sir! Would you be so good as tell us? Yes or no, sir?
Come, partner!’

‘For God’s sake, my dear Doctor,’ said Mr. Wickfield again laying his
irresolute hand upon the Doctor’s arm, ‘don’t attach too much weight to
any suspicions I may have entertained.’

‘There!’ cried Uriah, shaking his head. ‘What a melancholy confirmation:
ain’t it? Him! Such an old friend! Bless your soul, when I was nothing
but a clerk in his office, Copperfield, I’ve seen him twenty times, if
I’ve seen him once, quite in a taking about it--quite put out, you know
(and very proper in him as a father; I’m sure I can’t blame him), to
think that Miss Agnes was mixing herself up with what oughtn’t to be.’

‘My dear Strong,’ said Mr. Wickfield in a tremulous voice, ‘my good
friend, I needn’t tell you that it has been my vice to look for some one
master motive in everybody, and to try all actions by one narrow test. I
may have fallen into such doubts as I have had, through this mistake.’

‘You have had doubts, Wickfield,’ said the Doctor, without lifting up
his head. ‘You have had doubts.’

‘Speak up, fellow-partner,’ urged Uriah.

‘I had, at one time, certainly,’ said Mr. Wickfield. ‘I--God forgive
me--I thought YOU had.’

‘No, no, no!’ returned the Doctor, in a tone of most pathetic grief.
‘I thought, at one time,’ said Mr. Wickfield, ‘that you wished to send
Maldon abroad to effect a desirable separation.’

‘No, no, no!’ returned the Doctor. ‘To give Annie pleasure, by making
some provision for the companion of her childhood. Nothing else.’

‘So I found,’ said Mr. Wickfield. ‘I couldn’t doubt it, when you told
me so. But I thought--I implore you to remember the narrow construction
which has been my besetting sin--that, in a case where there was so much
disparity in point of years--’

‘That’s the way to put it, you see, Master Copperfield!’ observed Uriah,
with fawning and offensive pity.

‘--a lady of such youth, and such attractions, however real her
respect for you, might have been influenced in marrying, by worldly
considerations only. I make no allowance for innumerable feelings
and circumstances that may have all tended to good. For Heaven’s sake
remember that!’

‘How kind he puts it!’ said Uriah, shaking his head.

‘Always observing her from one point of view,’ said Mr. Wickfield; ‘but
by all that is dear to you, my old friend, I entreat you to consider
what it was; I am forced to confess now, having no escape-’

‘No! There’s no way out of it, Mr. Wickfield, sir,’ observed Uriah,
‘when it’s got to this.’

‘--that I did,’ said Mr. Wickfield, glancing helplessly and distractedly
at his partner, ‘that I did doubt her, and think her wanting in her
duty to you; and that I did sometimes, if I must say all, feel averse
to Agnes being in such a familiar relation towards her, as to see what I
saw, or in my diseased theory fancied that I saw. I never mentioned
this to anyone. I never meant it to be known to anyone. And though it
is terrible to you to hear,’ said Mr. Wickfield, quite subdued, ‘if you
knew how terrible it is for me to tell, you would feel compassion for
me!’

The Doctor, in the perfect goodness of his nature, put out his hand. Mr.
Wickfield held it for a little while in his, with his head bowed down.

‘I am sure,’ said Uriah, writhing himself into the silence like a
Conger-eel, ‘that this is a subject full of unpleasantness to everybody.
But since we have got so far, I ought to take the liberty of mentioning
that Copperfield has noticed it too.’

I turned upon him, and asked him how he dared refer to me!

‘Oh! it’s very kind of you, Copperfield,’ returned Uriah, undulating all
over, ‘and we all know what an amiable character yours is; but you know
that the moment I spoke to you the other night, you knew what I meant.
You know you knew what I meant, Copperfield. Don’t deny it! You deny it
with the best intentions; but don’t do it, Copperfield.’

I saw the mild eye of the good old Doctor turned upon me for a moment,
and I felt that the confession of my old misgivings and remembrances
was too plainly written in my face to be overlooked. It was of no use
raging. I could not undo that. Say what I would, I could not unsay it.

We were silent again, and remained so, until the Doctor rose and walked
twice or thrice across the room. Presently he returned to where his
chair stood; and, leaning on the back of it, and occasionally putting
his handkerchief to his eyes, with a simple honesty that did him more
honour, to my thinking, than any disguise he could have effected, said:

‘I have been much to blame. I believe I have been very much to blame.
I have exposed one whom I hold in my heart, to trials and aspersions--I
call them aspersions, even to have been conceived in anybody’s inmost
mind--of which she never, but for me, could have been the object.’

Uriah Heep gave a kind of snivel. I think to express sympathy.

‘Of which my Annie,’ said the Doctor, ‘never, but for me, could have
been the object. Gentlemen, I am old now, as you know; I do not feel,
tonight, that I have much to live for. But my life--my Life--upon the
truth and honour of the dear lady who has been the subject of this
conversation!’

I do not think that the best embodiment of chivalry, the realization of
the handsomest and most romantic figure ever imagined by painter, could
have said this, with a more impressive and affecting dignity than the
plain old Doctor did.

‘But I am not prepared,’ he went on, ‘to deny--perhaps I may have been,
without knowing it, in some degree prepared to admit--that I may have
unwittingly ensnared that lady into an unhappy marriage. I am a man
quite unaccustomed to observe; and I cannot but believe that the
observation of several people, of different ages and positions, all too
plainly tending in one direction (and that so natural), is better than
mine.’

I had often admired, as I have elsewhere described, his benignant manner
towards his youthful wife; but the respectful tenderness he manifested
in every reference to her on this occasion, and the almost reverential
manner in which he put away from him the lightest doubt of her
integrity, exalted him, in my eyes, beyond description.

‘I married that lady,’ said the Doctor, ‘when she was extremely young. I
took her to myself when her character was scarcely formed. So far as it
was developed, it had been my happiness to form it. I knew her father
well. I knew her well. I had taught her what I could, for the love of
all her beautiful and virtuous qualities. If I did her wrong; as I fear
I did, in taking advantage (but I never meant it) of her gratitude and
her affection; I ask pardon of that lady, in my heart!’

He walked across the room, and came back to the same place; holding
the chair with a grasp that trembled, like his subdued voice, in its
earnestness.

‘I regarded myself as a refuge, for her, from the dangers and
vicissitudes of life. I persuaded myself that, unequal though we were in
years, she would live tranquilly and contentedly with me. I did not shut
out of my consideration the time when I should leave her free, and still
young and still beautiful, but with her judgement more matured--no,
gentlemen--upon my truth!’

His homely figure seemed to be lightened up by his fidelity and
generosity. Every word he uttered had a force that no other grace could
have imparted to it.

‘My life with this lady has been very happy. Until tonight, I have
had uninterrupted occasion to bless the day on which I did her great
injustice.’

His voice, more and more faltering in the utterance of these words,
stopped for a few moments; then he went on:

‘Once awakened from my dream--I have been a poor dreamer, in one way or
other, all my life--I see how natural it is that she should have some
regretful feeling towards her old companion and her equal. That she does
regard him with some innocent regret, with some blameless thoughts of
what might have been, but for me, is, I fear, too true. Much that I have
seen, but not noted, has come back upon me with new meaning, during
this last trying hour. But, beyond this, gentlemen, the dear lady’s name
never must be coupled with a word, a breath, of doubt.’

For a little while, his eye kindled and his voice was firm; for a little
while he was again silent. Presently, he proceeded as before:

‘It only remains for me, to bear the knowledge of the unhappiness I have
occasioned, as submissively as I can. It is she who should reproach; not
I. To save her from misconstruction, cruel misconstruction, that even my
friends have not been able to avoid, becomes my duty. The more retired
we live, the better I shall discharge it. And when the time comes--may
it come soon, if it be His merciful pleasure!--when my death shall
release her from constraint, I shall close my eyes upon her honoured
face, with unbounded confidence and love; and leave her, with no sorrow
then, to happier and brighter days.’

I could not see him for the tears which his earnestness and goodness,
so adorned by, and so adorning, the perfect simplicity of his manner,
brought into my eyes. He had moved to the door, when he added:

‘Gentlemen, I have shown you my heart. I am sure you will respect it.
What we have said tonight is never to be said more. Wickfield, give me
an old friend’s arm upstairs!’

Mr. Wickfield hastened to him. Without interchanging a word they went
slowly out of the room together, Uriah looking after them.

‘Well, Master Copperfield!’ said Uriah, meekly turning to me. ‘The thing
hasn’t took quite the turn that might have been expected, for the old
Scholar--what an excellent man!--is as blind as a brickbat; but this
family’s out of the cart, I think!’

I needed but the sound of his voice to be so madly enraged as I never
was before, and never have been since.

‘You villain,’ said I, ‘what do you mean by entrapping me into your
schemes? How dare you appeal to me just now, you false rascal, as if we
had been in discussion together?’

As we stood, front to front, I saw so plainly, in the stealthy
exultation of his face, what I already so plainly knew; I mean that he
forced his confidence upon me, expressly to make me miserable, and had
set a deliberate trap for me in this very matter; that I couldn’t bear
it. The whole of his lank cheek was invitingly before me, and I struck
it with my open hand with that force that my fingers tingled as if I had
burnt them.

He caught the hand in his, and we stood in that connexion, looking at
each other. We stood so, a long time; long enough for me to see the
white marks of my fingers die out of the deep red of his cheek, and
leave it a deeper red.

‘Copperfield,’ he said at length, in a breathless voice, ‘have you taken
leave of your senses?’

‘I have taken leave of you,’ said I, wresting my hand away. ‘You dog,
I’ll know no more of you.’

‘Won’t you?’ said he, constrained by the pain of his cheek to put his
hand there. ‘Perhaps you won’t be able to help it. Isn’t this ungrateful
of you, now?’

‘I have shown you often enough,’ said I, ‘that I despise you. I have
shown you now, more plainly, that I do. Why should I dread your doing
your worst to all about you? What else do you ever do?’

He perfectly understood this allusion to the considerations that had
hitherto restrained me in my communications with him. I rather think
that neither the blow, nor the allusion, would have escaped me, but for
the assurance I had had from Agnes that night. It is no matter.

There was another long pause. His eyes, as he looked at me, seemed to
take every shade of colour that could make eyes ugly.

‘Copperfield,’ he said, removing his hand from his cheek, ‘you have
always gone against me. I know you always used to be against me at Mr.
Wickfield’s.’

‘You may think what you like,’ said I, still in a towering rage. ‘If it
is not true, so much the worthier you.’

‘And yet I always liked you, Copperfield!’ he rejoined.

I deigned to make him no reply; and, taking up my hat, was going out to
bed, when he came between me and the door.

‘Copperfield,’ he said, ‘there must be two parties to a quarrel. I won’t
be one.’

‘You may go to the devil!’ said I.

‘Don’t say that!’ he replied. ‘I know you’ll be sorry afterwards. How
can you make yourself so inferior to me, as to show such a bad spirit?
But I forgive you.’

‘You forgive me!’ I repeated disdainfully.

‘I do, and you can’t help yourself,’ replied Uriah. ‘To think of your
going and attacking me, that have always been a friend to you! But there
can’t be a quarrel without two parties, and I won’t be one. I will be
a friend to you, in spite of you. So now you know what you’ve got to
expect.’

The necessity of carrying on this dialogue (his part in which was
very slow; mine very quick) in a low tone, that the house might not be
disturbed at an unseasonable hour, did not improve my temper; though my
passion was cooling down. Merely telling him that I should expect from
him what I always had expected, and had never yet been disappointed in,
I opened the door upon him, as if he had been a great walnut put there
to be cracked, and went out of the house. But he slept out of the house
too, at his mother’s lodging; and before I had gone many hundred yards,
came up with me.

‘You know, Copperfield,’ he said, in my ear (I did not turn my head),
‘you’re in quite a wrong position’; which I felt to be true, and that
made me chafe the more; ‘you can’t make this a brave thing, and you
can’t help being forgiven. I don’t intend to mention it to mother, nor
to any living soul. I’m determined to forgive you. But I do wonder
that you should lift your hand against a person that you knew to be so
umble!’

I felt only less mean than he. He knew me better than I knew myself. If
he had retorted or openly exasperated me, it would have been a relief
and a justification; but he had put me on a slow fire, on which I lay
tormented half the night.

In the morning, when I came out, the early church-bell was ringing,
and he was walking up and down with his mother. He addressed me as if
nothing had happened, and I could do no less than reply. I had struck
him hard enough to give him the toothache, I suppose. At all events
his face was tied up in a black silk handkerchief, which, with his hat
perched on the top of it, was far from improving his appearance. I heard
that he went to a dentist’s in London on the Monday morning, and had a
tooth out. I hope it was a double one.

The Doctor gave out that he was not quite well; and remained alone, for
a considerable part of every day, during the remainder of the visit.
Agnes and her father had been gone a week, before we resumed our usual
work. On the day preceding its resumption, the Doctor gave me with his
own hands a folded note not sealed. It was addressed to myself; and laid
an injunction on me, in a few affectionate words, never to refer to the
subject of that evening. I had confided it to my aunt, but to no
one else. It was not a subject I could discuss with Agnes, and Agnes
certainly had not the least suspicion of what had passed.

Neither, I felt convinced, had Mrs. Strong then. Several weeks elapsed
before I saw the least change in her. It came on slowly, like a cloud
when there is no wind. At first, she seemed to wonder at the gentle
compassion with which the Doctor spoke to her, and at his wish that she
should have her mother with her, to relieve the dull monotony of her
life. Often, when we were at work, and she was sitting by, I would see
her pausing and looking at him with that memorable face. Afterwards, I
sometimes observed her rise, with her eyes full of tears, and go out
of the room. Gradually, an unhappy shadow fell upon her beauty, and
deepened every day. Mrs. Markleham was a regular inmate of the cottage
then; but she talked and talked, and saw nothing.

As this change stole on Annie, once like sunshine in the Doctor’s house,
the Doctor became older in appearance, and more grave; but the sweetness
of his temper, the placid kindness of his manner, and his benevolent
solicitude for her, if they were capable of any increase, were
increased. I saw him once, early on the morning of her birthday, when
she came to sit in the window while we were at work (which she had
always done, but now began to do with a timid and uncertain air that I
thought very touching), take her forehead between his hands, kiss it,
and go hurriedly away, too much moved to remain. I saw her stand where
he had left her, like a statue; and then bend down her head, and clasp
her hands, and weep, I cannot say how sorrowfully.

Sometimes, after that, I fancied that she tried to speak even to me,
in intervals when we were left alone. But she never uttered a word. The
Doctor always had some new project for her participating in amusements
away from home, with her mother; and Mrs. Markleham, who was very fond
of amusements, and very easily dissatisfied with anything else, entered
into them with great good-will, and was loud in her commendations. But
Annie, in a spiritless unhappy way, only went whither she was led, and
seemed to have no care for anything.

I did not know what to think. Neither did my aunt; who must have walked,
at various times, a hundred miles in her uncertainty. What was strangest
of all was, that the only real relief which seemed to make its way into
the secret region of this domestic unhappiness, made its way there in
the person of Mr. Dick.

What his thoughts were on the subject, or what his observation was, I am
as unable to explain, as I dare say he would have been to assist me in
the task. But, as I have recorded in the narrative of my school days,
his veneration for the Doctor was unbounded; and there is a subtlety of
perception in real attachment, even when it is borne towards man by one
of the lower animals, which leaves the highest intellect behind. To this
mind of the heart, if I may call it so, in Mr. Dick, some bright ray of
the truth shot straight.

He had proudly resumed his privilege, in many of his spare hours,
of walking up and down the garden with the Doctor; as he had been
accustomed to pace up and down The Doctor’s Walk at Canterbury. But
matters were no sooner in this state, than he devoted all his spare time
(and got up earlier to make it more) to these perambulations. If he had
never been so happy as when the Doctor read that marvellous performance,
the Dictionary, to him; he was now quite miserable unless the Doctor
pulled it out of his pocket, and began. When the Doctor and I were
engaged, he now fell into the custom of walking up and down with Mrs.
Strong, and helping her to trim her favourite flowers, or weed the
beds. I dare say he rarely spoke a dozen words in an hour: but his quiet
interest, and his wistful face, found immediate response in both their
breasts; each knew that the other liked him, and that he loved both; and
he became what no one else could be--a link between them.

When I think of him, with his impenetrably wise face, walking up and
down with the Doctor, delighted to be battered by the hard words in the
Dictionary; when I think of him carrying huge watering-pots after Annie;
kneeling down, in very paws of gloves, at patient microscopic work among
the little leaves; expressing as no philosopher could have expressed,
in everything he did, a delicate desire to be her friend; showering
sympathy, trustfulness, and affection, out of every hole in the
watering-pot; when I think of him never wandering in that better mind
of his to which unhappiness addressed itself, never bringing the
unfortunate King Charles into the garden, never wavering in his grateful
service, never diverted from his knowledge that there was something
wrong, or from his wish to set it right--I really feel almost ashamed
of having known that he was not quite in his wits, taking account of the
utmost I have done with mine.

‘Nobody but myself, Trot, knows what that man is!’ my aunt would proudly
remark, when we conversed about it. ‘Dick will distinguish himself yet!’

I must refer to one other topic before I close this chapter. While the
visit at the Doctor’s was still in progress, I observed that the postman
brought two or three letters every morning for Uriah Heep, who remained
at Highgate until the rest went back, it being a leisure time; and that
these were always directed in a business-like manner by Mr. Micawber,
who now assumed a round legal hand. I was glad to infer, from these
slight premises, that Mr. Micawber was doing well; and consequently was
much surprised to receive, about this time, the following letter from
his amiable wife.



                         ‘CANTERBURY, Monday Evening.

‘You will doubtless be surprised, my dear Mr. Copperfield, to receive
this communication. Still more so, by its contents. Still more so, by
the stipulation of implicit confidence which I beg to impose. But my
feelings as a wife and mother require relief; and as I do not wish to
consult my family (already obnoxious to the feelings of Mr. Micawber),
I know no one of whom I can better ask advice than my friend and former
lodger.

‘You may be aware, my dear Mr. Copperfield, that between myself and Mr.
Micawber (whom I will never desert), there has always been preserved a
spirit of mutual confidence. Mr. Micawber may have occasionally given
a bill without consulting me, or he may have misled me as to the period
when that obligation would become due. This has actually happened.
But, in general, Mr. Micawber has had no secrets from the bosom of
affection--I allude to his wife--and has invariably, on our retirement
to rest, recalled the events of the day.

‘You will picture to yourself, my dear Mr. Copperfield, what the
poignancy of my feelings must be, when I inform you that Mr. Micawber is
entirely changed. He is reserved. He is secret. His life is a mystery to
the partner of his joys and sorrows--I again allude to his wife--and if
I should assure you that beyond knowing that it is passed from morning
to night at the office, I now know less of it than I do of the man in
the south, connected with whose mouth the thoughtless children repeat
an idle tale respecting cold plum porridge, I should adopt a popular
fallacy to express an actual fact.

‘But this is not all. Mr. Micawber is morose. He is severe. He is
estranged from our eldest son and daughter, he has no pride in his
twins, he looks with an eye of coldness even on the unoffending stranger
who last became a member of our circle. The pecuniary means of meeting
our expenses, kept down to the utmost farthing, are obtained from him
with great difficulty, and even under fearful threats that he will
Settle himself (the exact expression); and he inexorably refuses to give
any explanation whatever of this distracting policy.

‘This is hard to bear. This is heart-breaking. If you will advise me,
knowing my feeble powers such as they are, how you think it will be best
to exert them in a dilemma so unwonted, you will add another friendly
obligation to the many you have already rendered me. With loves from the
children, and a smile from the happily-unconscious stranger, I remain,
dear Mr. Copperfield,

                              Your afflicted,

                                   ‘EMMA MICAWBER.’


I did not feel justified in giving a wife of Mrs. Micawber’s experience
any other recommendation, than that she should try to reclaim Mr.
Micawber by patience and kindness (as I knew she would in any case); but
the letter set me thinking about him very much.



CHAPTER 43. ANOTHER RETROSPECT


Once again, let me pause upon a memorable period of my life. Let me
stand aside, to see the phantoms of those days go by me, accompanying
the shadow of myself, in dim procession.

Weeks, months, seasons, pass along. They seem little more than a summer
day and a winter evening. Now, the Common where I walk with Dora is all
in bloom, a field of bright gold; and now the unseen heather lies in
mounds and bunches underneath a covering of snow. In a breath, the river
that flows through our Sunday walks is sparkling in the summer sun, is
ruffled by the winter wind, or thickened with drifting heaps of ice.
Faster than ever river ran towards the sea, it flashes, darkens, and
rolls away.

Not a thread changes, in the house of the two little bird-like ladies.
The clock ticks over the fireplace, the weather-glass hangs in the hall.
Neither clock nor weather-glass is ever right; but we believe in both,
devoutly.

I have come legally to man’s estate. I have attained the dignity of
twenty-one. But this is a sort of dignity that may be thrust upon one.
Let me think what I have achieved.

I have tamed that savage stenographic mystery. I make a respectable
income by it. I am in high repute for my accomplishment in all
pertaining to the art, and am joined with eleven others in reporting
the debates in Parliament for a Morning Newspaper. Night after night, I
record predictions that never come to pass, professions that are never
fulfilled, explanations that are only meant to mystify. I wallow in
words. Britannia, that unfortunate female, is always before me, like a
trussed fowl: skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound
hand and foot with red tape. I am sufficiently behind the scenes to know
the worth of political life. I am quite an Infidel about it, and shall
never be converted.

My dear old Traddles has tried his hand at the same pursuit, but it
is not in Traddles’s way. He is perfectly good-humoured respecting his
failure, and reminds me that he always did consider himself slow. He has
occasional employment on the same newspaper, in getting up the facts of
dry subjects, to be written about and embellished by more fertile minds.
He is called to the bar; and with admirable industry and self-denial
has scraped another hundred pounds together, to fee a Conveyancer whose
chambers he attends. A great deal of very hot port wine was consumed at
his call; and, considering the figure, I should think the Inner Temple
must have made a profit by it.

I have come out in another way. I have taken with fear and trembling
to authorship. I wrote a little something, in secret, and sent it to a
magazine, and it was published in the magazine. Since then, I have taken
heart to write a good many trifling pieces. Now, I am regularly paid for
them. Altogether, I am well off, when I tell my income on the fingers
of my left hand, I pass the third finger and take in the fourth to the
middle joint.

We have removed, from Buckingham Street, to a pleasant little cottage
very near the one I looked at, when my enthusiasm first came on. My
aunt, however (who has sold the house at Dover, to good advantage), is
not going to remain here, but intends removing herself to a still more
tiny cottage close at hand. What does this portend? My marriage? Yes!

Yes! I am going to be married to Dora! Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa
have given their consent; and if ever canary birds were in a flutter,
they are. Miss Lavinia, self-charged with the superintendence of my
darling’s wardrobe, is constantly cutting out brown-paper cuirasses, and
differing in opinion from a highly respectable young man, with a long
bundle, and a yard measure under his arm. A dressmaker, always stabbed
in the breast with a needle and thread, boards and lodges in the house;
and seems to me, eating, drinking, or sleeping, never to take her
thimble off. They make a lay-figure of my dear. They are always sending
for her to come and try something on. We can’t be happy together for
five minutes in the evening, but some intrusive female knocks at the
door, and says, ‘Oh, if you please, Miss Dora, would you step upstairs!’

Miss Clarissa and my aunt roam all over London, to find out articles of
furniture for Dora and me to look at. It would be better for them to buy
the goods at once, without this ceremony of inspection; for, when we go
to see a kitchen fender and meat-screen, Dora sees a Chinese house for
Jip, with little bells on the top, and prefers that. And it takes a
long time to accustom Jip to his new residence, after we have bought it;
whenever he goes in or out, he makes all the little bells ring, and is
horribly frightened.

Peggotty comes up to make herself useful, and falls to work immediately.
Her department appears to be, to clean everything over and over again.
She rubs everything that can be rubbed, until it shines, like her own
honest forehead, with perpetual friction. And now it is, that I begin to
see her solitary brother passing through the dark streets at night, and
looking, as he goes, among the wandering faces. I never speak to him at
such an hour. I know too well, as his grave figure passes onward, what
he seeks, and what he dreads.

Why does Traddles look so important when he calls upon me this afternoon
in the Commons--where I still occasionally attend, for form’s sake, when
I have time? The realization of my boyish day-dreams is at hand. I am
going to take out the licence.

It is a little document to do so much; and Traddles contemplates it,
as it lies upon my desk, half in admiration, half in awe. There are the
names, in the sweet old visionary connexion, David Copperfield and Dora
Spenlow; and there, in the corner, is that Parental Institution,
the Stamp Office, which is so benignantly interested in the various
transactions of human life, looking down upon our Union; and there is
the Archbishop of Canterbury invoking a blessing on us in print, and
doing it as cheap as could possibly be expected.

Nevertheless, I am in a dream, a flustered, happy, hurried dream. I
can’t believe that it is going to be; and yet I can’t believe but that
everyone I pass in the street, must have some kind of perception, that I
am to be married the day after tomorrow. The Surrogate knows me, when
I go down to be sworn; and disposes of me easily, as if there were a
Masonic understanding between us. Traddles is not at all wanted, but is
in attendance as my general backer.

‘I hope the next time you come here, my dear fellow,’ I say to Traddles,
‘it will be on the same errand for yourself. And I hope it will be
soon.’

‘Thank you for your good wishes, my dear Copperfield,’ he replies. ‘I
hope so too. It’s a satisfaction to know that she’ll wait for me any
length of time, and that she really is the dearest girl--’

‘When are you to meet her at the coach?’ I ask.

‘At seven,’ says Traddles, looking at his plain old silver watch--the
very watch he once took a wheel out of, at school, to make a water-mill.
‘That is about Miss Wickfield’s time, is it not?’

‘A little earlier. Her time is half past eight.’ ‘I assure you, my dear
boy,’ says Traddles, ‘I am almost as pleased as if I were going to
be married myself, to think that this event is coming to such a happy
termination. And really the great friendship and consideration of
personally associating Sophy with the joyful occasion, and inviting
her to be a bridesmaid in conjunction with Miss Wickfield, demands my
warmest thanks. I am extremely sensible of it.’

I hear him, and shake hands with him; and we talk, and walk, and dine,
and so on; but I don’t believe it. Nothing is real.

Sophy arrives at the house of Dora’s aunts, in due course. She has the
most agreeable of faces,--not absolutely beautiful, but extraordinarily
pleasant,--and is one of the most genial, unaffected, frank, engaging
creatures I have ever seen. Traddles presents her to us with great
pride; and rubs his hands for ten minutes by the clock, with every
individual hair upon his head standing on tiptoe, when I congratulate
him in a corner on his choice.

I have brought Agnes from the Canterbury coach, and her cheerful and
beautiful face is among us for the second time. Agnes has a great liking
for Traddles, and it is capital to see them meet, and to observe the
glory of Traddles as he commends the dearest girl in the world to her
acquaintance.

Still I don’t believe it. We have a delightful evening, and are
supremely happy; but I don’t believe it yet. I can’t collect myself. I
can’t check off my happiness as it takes place. I feel in a misty and
unsettled kind of state; as if I had got up very early in the morning a
week or two ago, and had never been to bed since. I can’t make out when
yesterday was. I seem to have been carrying the licence about, in my
pocket, many months.

Next day, too, when we all go in a flock to see the house--our
house--Dora’s and mine--I am quite unable to regard myself as its
master. I seem to be there, by permission of somebody else. I half
expect the real master to come home presently, and say he is glad to see
me. Such a beautiful little house as it is, with everything so bright
and new; with the flowers on the carpets looking as if freshly gathered,
and the green leaves on the paper as if they had just come out; with the
spotless muslin curtains, and the blushing rose-coloured furniture, and
Dora’s garden hat with the blue ribbon--do I remember, now, how I loved
her in such another hat when I first knew her!--already hanging on its
little peg; the guitar-case quite at home on its heels in a corner;
and everybody tumbling over Jip’s pagoda, which is much too big for the
establishment. Another happy evening, quite as unreal as all the rest
of it, and I steal into the usual room before going away. Dora is not
there. I suppose they have not done trying on yet. Miss Lavinia peeps
in, and tells me mysteriously that she will not be long. She is rather
long, notwithstanding; but by and by I hear a rustling at the door, and
someone taps.

I say, ‘Come in!’ but someone taps again.

I go to the door, wondering who it is; there, I meet a pair of bright
eyes, and a blushing face; they are Dora’s eyes and face, and Miss
Lavinia has dressed her in tomorrow’s dress, bonnet and all, for me to
see. I take my little wife to my heart; and Miss Lavinia gives a little
scream because I tumble the bonnet, and Dora laughs and cries at once,
because I am so pleased; and I believe it less than ever.

‘Do you think it pretty, Doady?’ says Dora.

Pretty! I should rather think I did.

‘And are you sure you like me very much?’ says Dora.

The topic is fraught with such danger to the bonnet, that Miss Lavinia
gives another little scream, and begs me to understand that Dora is only
to be looked at, and on no account to be touched. So Dora stands in a
delightful state of confusion for a minute or two, to be admired; and
then takes off her bonnet--looking so natural without it!--and runs away
with it in her hand; and comes dancing down again in her own familiar
dress, and asks Jip if I have got a beautiful little wife, and whether
he’ll forgive her for being married, and kneels down to make him stand
upon the cookery-book, for the last time in her single life.

I go home, more incredulous than ever, to a lodging that I have hard by;
and get up very early in the morning, to ride to the Highgate road and
fetch my aunt.

I have never seen my aunt in such state. She is dressed in
lavender-coloured silk, and has a white bonnet on, and is amazing. Janet
has dressed her, and is there to look at me. Peggotty is ready to go to
church, intending to behold the ceremony from the gallery. Mr. Dick,
who is to give my darling to me at the altar, has had his hair curled.
Traddles, whom I have taken up by appointment at the turnpike, presents
a dazzling combination of cream colour and light blue; and both he and
Mr. Dick have a general effect about them of being all gloves.

No doubt I see this, because I know it is so; but I am astray, and seem
to see nothing. Nor do I believe anything whatever. Still, as we drive
along in an open carriage, this fairy marriage is real enough to fill
me with a sort of wondering pity for the unfortunate people who have
no part in it, but are sweeping out the shops, and going to their daily
occupations.

My aunt sits with my hand in hers all the way. When we stop a little way
short of the church, to put down Peggotty, whom we have brought on the
box, she gives it a squeeze, and me a kiss.

‘God bless you, Trot! My own boy never could be dearer. I think of poor
dear Baby this morning.’ ‘So do I. And of all I owe to you, dear aunt.’

‘Tut, child!’ says my aunt; and gives her hand in overflowing cordiality
to Traddles, who then gives his to Mr. Dick, who then gives his to me,
who then gives mine to Traddles, and then we come to the church door.

The church is calm enough, I am sure; but it might be a steam-power loom
in full action, for any sedative effect it has on me. I am too far gone
for that.

The rest is all a more or less incoherent dream.

A dream of their coming in with Dora; of the pew-opener arranging us,
like a drill-sergeant, before the altar rails; of my wondering, even
then, why pew-openers must always be the most disagreeable females
procurable, and whether there is any religious dread of a disastrous
infection of good-humour which renders it indispensable to set those
vessels of vinegar upon the road to Heaven.

Of the clergyman and clerk appearing; of a few boatmen and some
other people strolling in; of an ancient mariner behind me, strongly
flavouring the church with rum; of the service beginning in a deep
voice, and our all being very attentive.

Of Miss Lavinia, who acts as a semi-auxiliary bridesmaid, being the
first to cry, and of her doing homage (as I take it) to the memory of
Pidger, in sobs; of Miss Clarissa applying a smelling-bottle; of Agnes
taking care of Dora; of my aunt endeavouring to represent herself as
a model of sternness, with tears rolling down her face; of little Dora
trembling very much, and making her responses in faint whispers.

Of our kneeling down together, side by side; of Dora’s trembling less
and less, but always clasping Agnes by the hand; of the service being
got through, quietly and gravely; of our all looking at each other in an
April state of smiles and tears, when it is over; of my young wife being
hysterical in the vestry, and crying for her poor papa, her dear papa.

Of her soon cheering up again, and our signing the register all round.
Of my going into the gallery for Peggotty to bring her to sign it; of
Peggotty’s hugging me in a corner, and telling me she saw my own dear
mother married; of its being over, and our going away.

Of my walking so proudly and lovingly down the aisle with my sweet wife
upon my arm, through a mist of half-seen people, pulpits, monuments,
pews, fonts, organs, and church windows, in which there flutter faint
airs of association with my childish church at home, so long ago.

Of their whispering, as we pass, what a youthful couple we are, and what
a pretty little wife she is. Of our all being so merry and talkative in
the carriage going back. Of Sophy telling us that when she saw Traddles
(whom I had entrusted with the licence) asked for it, she almost
fainted, having been convinced that he would contrive to lose it, or to
have his pocket picked. Of Agnes laughing gaily; and of Dora being so
fond of Agnes that she will not be separated from her, but still keeps
her hand.

Of there being a breakfast, with abundance of things, pretty and
substantial, to eat and drink, whereof I partake, as I should do in any
other dream, without the least perception of their flavour; eating
and drinking, as I may say, nothing but love and marriage, and no more
believing in the viands than in anything else.

Of my making a speech in the same dreamy fashion, without having an idea
of what I want to say, beyond such as may be comprehended in the full
conviction that I haven’t said it. Of our being very sociably and simply
happy (always in a dream though); and of Jip’s having wedding cake, and
its not agreeing with him afterwards.

Of the pair of hired post-horses being ready, and of Dora’s going away
to change her dress. Of my aunt and Miss Clarissa remaining with us; and
our walking in the garden; and my aunt, who has made quite a speech at
breakfast touching Dora’s aunts, being mightily amused with herself, but
a little proud of it too.

Of Dora’s being ready, and of Miss Lavinia’s hovering about her, loth to
lose the pretty toy that has given her so much pleasant occupation.
Of Dora’s making a long series of surprised discoveries that she
has forgotten all sorts of little things; and of everybody’s running
everywhere to fetch them.

Of their all closing about Dora, when at last she begins to say
good-bye, looking, with their bright colours and ribbons, like a bed
of flowers. Of my darling being almost smothered among the flowers, and
coming out, laughing and crying both together, to my jealous arms.

Of my wanting to carry Jip (who is to go along with us), and Dora’s
saying no, that she must carry him, or else he’ll think she don’t like
him any more, now she is married, and will break his heart. Of our
going, arm in arm, and Dora stopping and looking back, and saying, ‘If
I have ever been cross or ungrateful to anybody, don’t remember it!’ and
bursting into tears.

Of her waving her little hand, and our going away once more. Of her
once more stopping, and looking back, and hurrying to Agnes, and giving
Agnes, above all the others, her last kisses and farewells.

We drive away together, and I awake from the dream. I believe it at
last. It is my dear, dear, little wife beside me, whom I love so well!

‘Are you happy now, you foolish boy?’ says Dora, ‘and sure you don’t
repent?’


I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are
gone, and I resume the journey of my story.



CHAPTER 44. OUR HOUSEKEEPING


It was a strange condition of things, the honeymoon being over, and the
bridesmaids gone home, when I found myself sitting down in my own
small house with Dora; quite thrown out of employment, as I may say, in
respect of the delicious old occupation of making love.

It seemed such an extraordinary thing to have Dora always there. It was
so unaccountable not to be obliged to go out to see her, not to have any
occasion to be tormenting myself about her, not to have to write to her,
not to be scheming and devising opportunities of being alone with her.
Sometimes of an evening, when I looked up from my writing, and saw her
seated opposite, I would lean back in my chair, and think how queer it
was that there we were, alone together as a matter of course--nobody’s
business any more--all the romance of our engagement put away upon a
shelf, to rust--no one to please but one another--one another to please,
for life.

When there was a debate, and I was kept out very late, it seemed so
strange to me, as I was walking home, to think that Dora was at home! It
was such a wonderful thing, at first, to have her coming softly down to
talk to me as I ate my supper. It was such a stupendous thing to know
for certain that she put her hair in papers. It was altogether such an
astonishing event to see her do it!

I doubt whether two young birds could have known less about keeping
house, than I and my pretty Dora did. We had a servant, of course. She
kept house for us. I have still a latent belief that she must have been
Mrs. Crupp’s daughter in disguise, we had such an awful time of it with
Mary Anne.

Her name was Paragon. Her nature was represented to us, when we engaged
her, as being feebly expressed in her name. She had a written character,
as large as a proclamation; and, according to this document, could do
everything of a domestic nature that ever I heard of, and a great many
things that I never did hear of. She was a woman in the prime of life;
of a severe countenance; and subject (particularly in the arms) to
a sort of perpetual measles or fiery rash. She had a cousin in the
Life-Guards, with such long legs that he looked like the afternoon
shadow of somebody else. His shell-jacket was as much too little for him
as he was too big for the premises. He made the cottage smaller than it
need have been, by being so very much out of proportion to it. Besides
which, the walls were not thick, and, whenever he passed the evening at
our house, we always knew of it by hearing one continual growl in the
kitchen.

Our treasure was warranted sober and honest. I am therefore willing to
believe that she was in a fit when we found her under the boiler; and
that the deficient tea-spoons were attributable to the dustman.

But she preyed upon our minds dreadfully. We felt our inexperience, and
were unable to help ourselves. We should have been at her mercy, if she
had had any; but she was a remorseless woman, and had none. She was the
cause of our first little quarrel.

‘My dearest life,’ I said one day to Dora, ‘do you think Mary Anne has
any idea of time?’

‘Why, Doady?’ inquired Dora, looking up, innocently, from her drawing.

‘My love, because it’s five, and we were to have dined at four.’

Dora glanced wistfully at the clock, and hinted that she thought it was
too fast.

‘On the contrary, my love,’ said I, referring to my watch, ‘it’s a few
minutes too slow.’

My little wife came and sat upon my knee, to coax me to be quiet, and
drew a line with her pencil down the middle of my nose; but I couldn’t
dine off that, though it was very agreeable.

‘Don’t you think, my dear,’ said I, ‘it would be better for you to
remonstrate with Mary Anne?’

‘Oh no, please! I couldn’t, Doady!’ said Dora.

‘Why not, my love?’ I gently asked.

‘Oh, because I am such a little goose,’ said Dora, ‘and she knows I am!’

I thought this sentiment so incompatible with the establishment of any
system of check on Mary Anne, that I frowned a little.

‘Oh, what ugly wrinkles in my bad boy’s forehead!’ said Dora, and still
being on my knee, she traced them with her pencil; putting it to her
rosy lips to make it mark blacker, and working at my forehead with a
quaint little mockery of being industrious, that quite delighted me in
spite of myself.

‘There’s a good child,’ said Dora, ‘it makes its face so much prettier
to laugh.’ ‘But, my love,’ said I.

‘No, no! please!’ cried Dora, with a kiss, ‘don’t be a naughty Blue
Beard! Don’t be serious!’

‘My precious wife,’ said I, ‘we must be serious sometimes. Come! Sit
down on this chair, close beside me! Give me the pencil! There! Now let
us talk sensibly. You know, dear’; what a little hand it was to hold,
and what a tiny wedding-ring it was to see! ‘You know, my love, it is
not exactly comfortable to have to go out without one’s dinner. Now, is
it?’

‘N-n-no!’ replied Dora, faintly.

‘My love, how you tremble!’

‘Because I KNOW you’re going to scold me,’ exclaimed Dora, in a piteous
voice.

‘My sweet, I am only going to reason.’

‘Oh, but reasoning is worse than scolding!’ exclaimed Dora, in despair.
‘I didn’t marry to be reasoned with. If you meant to reason with such a
poor little thing as I am, you ought to have told me so, you cruel boy!’

I tried to pacify Dora, but she turned away her face, and shook her
curls from side to side, and said, ‘You cruel, cruel boy!’ so many
times, that I really did not exactly know what to do: so I took a few
turns up and down the room in my uncertainty, and came back again.

‘Dora, my darling!’

‘No, I am not your darling. Because you must be sorry that you married
me, or else you wouldn’t reason with me!’ returned Dora.

I felt so injured by the inconsequential nature of this charge, that it
gave me courage to be grave.

‘Now, my own Dora,’ said I, ‘you are very childish, and are talking
nonsense. You must remember, I am sure, that I was obliged to go out
yesterday when dinner was half over; and that, the day before, I was
made quite unwell by being obliged to eat underdone veal in a hurry;
today, I don’t dine at all--and I am afraid to say how long we waited
for breakfast--and then the water didn’t boil. I don’t mean to reproach
you, my dear, but this is not comfortable.’

‘Oh, you cruel, cruel boy, to say I am a disagreeable wife!’ cried Dora.

‘Now, my dear Dora, you must know that I never said that!’

‘You said, I wasn’t comfortable!’ cried Dora. ‘I said the housekeeping
was not comfortable!’

‘It’s exactly the same thing!’ cried Dora. And she evidently thought so,
for she wept most grievously.

I took another turn across the room, full of love for my pretty wife,
and distracted by self-accusatory inclinations to knock my head against
the door. I sat down again, and said:

‘I am not blaming you, Dora. We have both a great deal to learn. I am
only trying to show you, my dear, that you must--you really must’ (I
was resolved not to give this up)--‘accustom yourself to look after Mary
Anne. Likewise to act a little for yourself, and me.’

‘I wonder, I do, at your making such ungrateful speeches,’ sobbed Dora.
‘When you know that the other day, when you said you would like a little
bit of fish, I went out myself, miles and miles, and ordered it, to
surprise you.’

‘And it was very kind of you, my own darling,’ said I. ‘I felt it so
much that I wouldn’t on any account have even mentioned that you
bought a Salmon--which was too much for two. Or that it cost one pound
six--which was more than we can afford.’

‘You enjoyed it very much,’ sobbed Dora. ‘And you said I was a Mouse.’

‘And I’ll say so again, my love,’ I returned, ‘a thousand times!’

But I had wounded Dora’s soft little heart, and she was not to be
comforted. She was so pathetic in her sobbing and bewailing, that I felt
as if I had said I don’t know what to hurt her. I was obliged to hurry
away; I was kept out late; and I felt all night such pangs of remorse as
made me miserable. I had the conscience of an assassin, and was haunted
by a vague sense of enormous wickedness.

It was two or three hours past midnight when I got home. I found my
aunt, in our house, sitting up for me.

‘Is anything the matter, aunt?’ said I, alarmed.

‘Nothing, Trot,’ she replied. ‘Sit down, sit down. Little Blossom has
been rather out of spirits, and I have been keeping her company. That’s
all.’

I leaned my head upon my hand; and felt more sorry and downcast, as I
sat looking at the fire, than I could have supposed possible so soon
after the fulfilment of my brightest hopes. As I sat thinking, I
happened to meet my aunt’s eyes, which were resting on my face. There
was an anxious expression in them, but it cleared directly.

‘I assure you, aunt,’ said I, ‘I have been quite unhappy myself all
night, to think of Dora’s being so. But I had no other intention than to
speak to her tenderly and lovingly about our home-affairs.’

My aunt nodded encouragement.

‘You must have patience, Trot,’ said she.

‘Of course. Heaven knows I don’t mean to be unreasonable, aunt!’

‘No, no,’ said my aunt. ‘But Little Blossom is a very tender little
blossom, and the wind must be gentle with her.’

I thanked my good aunt, in my heart, for her tenderness towards my wife;
and I was sure that she knew I did.

‘Don’t you think, aunt,’ said I, after some further contemplation of the
fire, ‘that you could advise and counsel Dora a little, for our mutual
advantage, now and then?’

‘Trot,’ returned my aunt, with some emotion, ‘no! Don’t ask me such a
thing.’

Her tone was so very earnest that I raised my eyes in surprise.

‘I look back on my life, child,’ said my aunt, ‘and I think of some who
are in their graves, with whom I might have been on kinder terms. If I
judged harshly of other people’s mistakes in marriage, it may have been
because I had bitter reason to judge harshly of my own. Let that pass. I
have been a grumpy, frumpy, wayward sort of a woman, a good many years.
I am still, and I always shall be. But you and I have done one another
some good, Trot,--at all events, you have done me good, my dear; and
division must not come between us, at this time of day.’

‘Division between us!’ cried I.

‘Child, child!’ said my aunt, smoothing her dress, ‘how soon it might
come between us, or how unhappy I might make our Little Blossom, if I
meddled in anything, a prophet couldn’t say. I want our pet to like me,
and be as gay as a butterfly. Remember your own home, in that second
marriage; and never do both me and her the injury you have hinted at!’

I comprehended, at once, that my aunt was right; and I comprehended the
full extent of her generous feeling towards my dear wife.

‘These are early days, Trot,’ she pursued, ‘and Rome was not built in a
day, nor in a year. You have chosen freely for yourself’; a cloud passed
over her face for a moment, I thought; ‘and you have chosen a very
pretty and a very affectionate creature. It will be your duty, and it
will be your pleasure too--of course I know that; I am not delivering
a lecture--to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities she has,
and not by the qualities she may not have. The latter you must develop
in her, if you can. And if you cannot, child,’ here my aunt rubbed her
nose, ‘you must just accustom yourself to do without ‘em. But remember,
my dear, your future is between you two. No one can assist you; you are
to work it out for yourselves. This is marriage, Trot; and Heaven bless
you both, in it, for a pair of babes in the wood as you are!’

My aunt said this in a sprightly way, and gave me a kiss to ratify the
blessing.

‘Now,’ said she, ‘light my little lantern, and see me into my bandbox by
the garden path’; for there was a communication between our cottages in
that direction. ‘Give Betsey Trotwood’s love to Blossom, when you come
back; and whatever you do, Trot, never dream of setting Betsey up as a
scarecrow, for if I ever saw her in the glass, she’s quite grim enough
and gaunt enough in her private capacity!’

With this my aunt tied her head up in a handkerchief, with which she was
accustomed to make a bundle of it on such occasions; and I escorted her
home. As she stood in her garden, holding up her little lantern to light
me back, I thought her observation of me had an anxious air again; but
I was too much occupied in pondering on what she had said, and too much
impressed--for the first time, in reality--by the conviction that Dora
and I had indeed to work out our future for ourselves, and that no one
could assist us, to take much notice of it.

Dora came stealing down in her little slippers, to meet me, now that I
was alone; and cried upon my shoulder, and said I had been hard-hearted
and she had been naughty; and I said much the same thing in effect, I
believe; and we made it up, and agreed that our first little difference
was to be our last, and that we were never to have another if we lived a
hundred years.

The next domestic trial we went through, was the Ordeal of Servants.
Mary Anne’s cousin deserted into our coal-hole, and was brought out, to
our great amazement, by a piquet of his companions in arms, who took
him away handcuffed in a procession that covered our front-garden with
ignominy. This nerved me to get rid of Mary Anne, who went so mildly,
on receipt of wages, that I was surprised, until I found out about the
tea-spoons, and also about the little sums she had borrowed in my
name of the tradespeople without authority. After an interval of Mrs.
Kidgerbury--the oldest inhabitant of Kentish Town, I believe, who went
out charing, but was too feeble to execute her conceptions of that
art--we found another treasure, who was one of the most amiable of
women, but who generally made a point of falling either up or down the
kitchen stairs with the tray, and almost plunged into the parlour,
as into a bath, with the tea-things. The ravages committed by this
unfortunate, rendering her dismissal necessary, she was succeeded (with
intervals of Mrs. Kidgerbury) by a long line of Incapables; terminating
in a young person of genteel appearance, who went to Greenwich Fair in
Dora’s bonnet. After whom I remember nothing but an average equality of
failure.

Everybody we had anything to do with seemed to cheat us. Our appearance
in a shop was a signal for the damaged goods to be brought out
immediately. If we bought a lobster, it was full of water. All our meat
turned out to be tough, and there was hardly any crust to our loaves.
In search of the principle on which joints ought to be roasted, to be
roasted enough, and not too much, I myself referred to the Cookery Book,
and found it there established as the allowance of a quarter of an hour
to every pound, and say a quarter over. But the principle always failed
us by some curious fatality, and we never could hit any medium between
redness and cinders.

I had reason to believe that in accomplishing these failures we incurred
a far greater expense than if we had achieved a series of triumphs. It
appeared to me, on looking over the tradesmen’s books, as if we might
have kept the basement storey paved with butter, such was the extensive
scale of our consumption of that article. I don’t know whether the
Excise returns of the period may have exhibited any increase in the
demand for pepper; but if our performances did not affect the market,
I should say several families must have left off using it. And the most
wonderful fact of all was, that we never had anything in the house.

As to the washerwoman pawning the clothes, and coming in a state of
penitent intoxication to apologize, I suppose that might have happened
several times to anybody. Also the chimney on fire, the parish engine,
and perjury on the part of the Beadle. But I apprehend that we were
personally fortunate in engaging a servant with a taste for cordials,
who swelled our running account for porter at the public-house by such
inexplicable items as ‘quartern rum shrub (Mrs. C.)’; ‘Half-quartern
gin and cloves (Mrs. C.)’; ‘Glass rum and peppermint (Mrs. C.)’--the
parentheses always referring to Dora, who was supposed, it appeared on
explanation, to have imbibed the whole of these refreshments.

One of our first feats in the housekeeping way was a little dinner to
Traddles. I met him in town, and asked him to walk out with me that
afternoon. He readily consenting, I wrote to Dora, saying I would bring
him home. It was pleasant weather, and on the road we made my domestic
happiness the theme of conversation. Traddles was very full of it; and
said, that, picturing himself with such a home, and Sophy waiting and
preparing for him, he could think of nothing wanting to complete his
bliss.

I could not have wished for a prettier little wife at the opposite end
of the table, but I certainly could have wished, when we sat down, for a
little more room. I did not know how it was, but though there were only
two of us, we were at once always cramped for room, and yet had always
room enough to lose everything in. I suspect it may have been because
nothing had a place of its own, except Jip’s pagoda, which invariably
blocked up the main thoroughfare. On the present occasion, Traddles
was so hemmed in by the pagoda and the guitar-case, and Dora’s
flower-painting, and my writing-table, that I had serious doubts of the
possibility of his using his knife and fork; but he protested, with his
own good-humour, ‘Oceans of room, Copperfield! I assure you, Oceans!’

There was another thing I could have wished, namely, that Jip had never
been encouraged to walk about the tablecloth during dinner. I began to
think there was something disorderly in his being there at all, even
if he had not been in the habit of putting his foot in the salt or the
melted butter. On this occasion he seemed to think he was introduced
expressly to keep Traddles at bay; and he barked at my old friend, and
made short runs at his plate, with such undaunted pertinacity, that he
may be said to have engrossed the conversation.

However, as I knew how tender-hearted my dear Dora was, and how
sensitive she would be to any slight upon her favourite, I hinted no
objection. For similar reasons I made no allusion to the skirmishing
plates upon the floor; or to the disreputable appearance of the castors,
which were all at sixes and sevens, and looked drunk; or to the further
blockade of Traddles by wandering vegetable dishes and jugs. I could
not help wondering in my own mind, as I contemplated the boiled leg of
mutton before me, previous to carving it, how it came to pass that
our joints of meat were of such extraordinary shapes--and whether our
butcher contracted for all the deformed sheep that came into the world;
but I kept my reflections to myself.

‘My love,’ said I to Dora, ‘what have you got in that dish?’

I could not imagine why Dora had been making tempting little faces at
me, as if she wanted to kiss me.

‘Oysters, dear,’ said Dora, timidly.

‘Was that YOUR thought?’ said I, delighted.

‘Ye-yes, Doady,’ said Dora.

‘There never was a happier one!’ I exclaimed, laying down the
carving-knife and fork. ‘There is nothing Traddles likes so much!’

‘Ye-yes, Doady,’ said Dora, ‘and so I bought a beautiful little barrel
of them, and the man said they were very good. But I--I am afraid
there’s something the matter with them. They don’t seem right.’ Here
Dora shook her head, and diamonds twinkled in her eyes.

‘They are only opened in both shells,’ said I. ‘Take the top one off, my
love.’

‘But it won’t come off!’ said Dora, trying very hard, and looking very
much distressed.

‘Do you know, Copperfield,’ said Traddles, cheerfully examining the
dish, ‘I think it is in consequence--they are capital oysters, but I
think it is in consequence--of their never having been opened.’

They never had been opened; and we had no oyster-knives--and couldn’t
have used them if we had; so we looked at the oysters and ate the
mutton. At least we ate as much of it as was done, and made up with
capers. If I had permitted him, I am satisfied that Traddles would have
made a perfect savage of himself, and eaten a plateful of raw meat, to
express enjoyment of the repast; but I would hear of no such immolation
on the altar of friendship, and we had a course of bacon instead; there
happening, by good fortune, to be cold bacon in the larder.

My poor little wife was in such affliction when she thought I should be
annoyed, and in such a state of joy when she found I was not, that the
discomfiture I had subdued, very soon vanished, and we passed a happy
evening; Dora sitting with her arm on my chair while Traddles and I
discussed a glass of wine, and taking every opportunity of whispering
in my ear that it was so good of me not to be a cruel, cross old boy. By
and by she made tea for us; which it was so pretty to see her do, as if
she was busying herself with a set of doll’s tea-things, that I was not
particular about the quality of the beverage. Then Traddles and I played
a game or two at cribbage; and Dora singing to the guitar the while,
it seemed to me as if our courtship and marriage were a tender dream
of mine, and the night when I first listened to her voice were not yet
over.

When Traddles went away, and I came back into the parlour from seeing
him out, my wife planted her chair close to mine, and sat down by my
side. ‘I am very sorry,’ she said. ‘Will you try to teach me, Doady?’

‘I must teach myself first, Dora,’ said I. ‘I am as bad as you, love.’

‘Ah! But you can learn,’ she returned; ‘and you are a clever, clever
man!’

‘Nonsense, mouse!’ said I.

‘I wish,’ resumed my wife, after a long silence, ‘that I could have gone
down into the country for a whole year, and lived with Agnes!’

Her hands were clasped upon my shoulder, and her chin rested on them,
and her blue eyes looked quietly into mine.

‘Why so?’ I asked.

‘I think she might have improved me, and I think I might have learned
from her,’ said Dora.

‘All in good time, my love. Agnes has had her father to take care of for
these many years, you should remember. Even when she was quite a child,
she was the Agnes whom we know,’ said I.

‘Will you call me a name I want you to call me?’ inquired Dora, without
moving.

‘What is it?’ I asked with a smile.

‘It’s a stupid name,’ she said, shaking her curls for a moment.
‘Child-wife.’

I laughingly asked my child-wife what her fancy was in desiring to be so
called. She answered without moving, otherwise than as the arm I twined
about her may have brought her blue eyes nearer to me:

‘I don’t mean, you silly fellow, that you should use the name instead
of Dora. I only mean that you should think of me that way. When you are
going to be angry with me, say to yourself, “it’s only my child-wife!”
 When I am very disappointing, say, “I knew, a long time ago, that she
would make but a child-wife!” When you miss what I should like to be,
and I think can never be, say, “still my foolish child-wife loves me!”
 For indeed I do.’

I had not been serious with her; having no idea until now, that she was
serious herself. But her affectionate nature was so happy in what I now
said to her with my whole heart, that her face became a laughing one
before her glittering eyes were dry. She was soon my child-wife indeed;
sitting down on the floor outside the Chinese House, ringing all
the little bells one after another, to punish Jip for his recent bad
behaviour; while Jip lay blinking in the doorway with his head out, even
too lazy to be teased.

This appeal of Dora’s made a strong impression on me. I look back on the
time I write of; I invoke the innocent figure that I dearly loved, to
come out from the mists and shadows of the past, and turn its gentle
head towards me once again; and I can still declare that this one little
speech was constantly in my memory. I may not have used it to the best
account; I was young and inexperienced; but I never turned a deaf ear to
its artless pleading.

Dora told me, shortly afterwards, that she was going to be a wonderful
housekeeper. Accordingly, she polished the tablets, pointed the pencil,
bought an immense account-book, carefully stitched up with a needle and
thread all the leaves of the Cookery Book which Jip had torn, and made
quite a desperate little attempt ‘to be good’, as she called it. But the
figures had the old obstinate propensity--they WOULD NOT add up. When
she had entered two or three laborious items in the account-book, Jip
would walk over the page, wagging his tail, and smear them all out. Her
own little right-hand middle finger got steeped to the very bone in ink;
and I think that was the only decided result obtained.

Sometimes, of an evening, when I was at home and at work--for I wrote
a good deal now, and was beginning in a small way to be known as a
writer--I would lay down my pen, and watch my child-wife trying to be
good. First of all, she would bring out the immense account-book, and
lay it down upon the table, with a deep sigh. Then she would open it at
the place where Jip had made it illegible last night, and call Jip
up, to look at his misdeeds. This would occasion a diversion in Jip’s
favour, and some inking of his nose, perhaps, as a penalty. Then she
would tell Jip to lie down on the table instantly, ‘like a lion’--which
was one of his tricks, though I cannot say the likeness was
striking--and, if he were in an obedient humour, he would obey. Then she
would take up a pen, and begin to write, and find a hair in it. Then
she would take up another pen, and begin to write, and find that it
spluttered. Then she would take up another pen, and begin to write, and
say in a low voice, ‘Oh, it’s a talking pen, and will disturb Doady!’
And then she would give it up as a bad job, and put the account-book
away, after pretending to crush the lion with it.

Or, if she were in a very sedate and serious state of mind, she would
sit down with the tablets, and a little basket of bills and other
documents, which looked more like curl-papers than anything else, and
endeavour to get some result out of them. After severely comparing one
with another, and making entries on the tablets, and blotting them
out, and counting all the fingers of her left hand over and over again,
backwards and forwards, she would be so vexed and discouraged, and
would look so unhappy, that it gave me pain to see her bright face
clouded--and for me!--and I would go softly to her, and say:

‘What’s the matter, Dora?’

Dora would look up hopelessly, and reply, ‘They won’t come right. They
make my head ache so. And they won’t do anything I want!’

Then I would say, ‘Now let us try together. Let me show you, Dora.’

Then I would commence a practical demonstration, to which Dora would pay
profound attention, perhaps for five minutes; when she would begin to be
dreadfully tired, and would lighten the subject by curling my hair,
or trying the effect of my face with my shirt-collar turned down. If
I tacitly checked this playfulness, and persisted, she would look so
scared and disconsolate, as she became more and more bewildered, that
the remembrance of her natural gaiety when I first strayed into her
path, and of her being my child-wife, would come reproachfully upon me;
and I would lay the pencil down, and call for the guitar.

I had a great deal of work to do, and had many anxieties, but the same
considerations made me keep them to myself. I am far from sure, now,
that it was right to do this, but I did it for my child-wife’s sake. I
search my breast, and I commit its secrets, if I know them, without any
reservation to this paper. The old unhappy loss or want of something
had, I am conscious, some place in my heart; but not to the embitterment
of my life. When I walked alone in the fine weather, and thought of the
summer days when all the air had been filled with my boyish enchantment,
I did miss something of the realization of my dreams; but I thought it
was a softened glory of the Past, which nothing could have thrown upon
the present time. I did feel, sometimes, for a little while, that I
could have wished my wife had been my counsellor; had had more character
and purpose, to sustain me and improve me by; had been endowed with
power to fill up the void which somewhere seemed to be about me; but
I felt as if this were an unearthly consummation of my happiness, that
never had been meant to be, and never could have been.

I was a boyish husband as to years. I had known the softening influence
of no other sorrows or experiences than those recorded in these leaves.
If I did any wrong, as I may have done much, I did it in mistaken love,
and in my want of wisdom. I write the exact truth. It would avail me
nothing to extenuate it now.

Thus it was that I took upon myself the toils and cares of our life,
and had no partner in them. We lived much as before, in reference to our
scrambling household arrangements; but I had got used to those, and Dora
I was pleased to see was seldom vexed now. She was bright and cheerful
in the old childish way, loved me dearly, and was happy with her old
trifles.

When the debates were heavy--I mean as to length, not quality, for in
the last respect they were not often otherwise--and I went home late,
Dora would never rest when she heard my footsteps, but would always come
downstairs to meet me. When my evenings were unoccupied by the pursuit
for which I had qualified myself with so much pains, and I was engaged
in writing at home, she would sit quietly near me, however late the
hour, and be so mute, that I would often think she had dropped asleep.
But generally, when I raised my head, I saw her blue eyes looking at me
with the quiet attention of which I have already spoken.

‘Oh, what a weary boy!’ said Dora one night, when I met her eyes as I
was shutting up my desk.

‘What a weary girl!’ said I. ‘That’s more to the purpose. You must go to
bed another time, my love. It’s far too late for you.’

‘No, don’t send me to bed!’ pleaded Dora, coming to my side. ‘Pray,
don’t do that!’

‘Dora!’ To my amazement she was sobbing on my neck. ‘Not well, my dear!
not happy!’

‘Yes! quite well, and very happy!’ said Dora. ‘But say you’ll let me
stop, and see you write.’

‘Why, what a sight for such bright eyes at midnight!’ I replied.

‘Are they bright, though?’ returned Dora, laughing. ‘I’m so glad they’re
bright.’ ‘Little Vanity!’ said I.

But it was not vanity; it was only harmless delight in my admiration. I
knew that very well, before she told me so.

‘If you think them pretty, say I may always stop, and see you write!’
said Dora. ‘Do you think them pretty?’

‘Very pretty.’

‘Then let me always stop and see you write.’

‘I am afraid that won’t improve their brightness, Dora.’

‘Yes, it will! Because, you clever boy, you’ll not forget me then, while
you are full of silent fancies. Will you mind it, if I say something
very, very silly?---more than usual?’ inquired Dora, peeping over my
shoulder into my face.

‘What wonderful thing is that?’ said I.

‘Please let me hold the pens,’ said Dora. ‘I want to have something to
do with all those many hours when you are so industrious. May I hold the
pens?’

The remembrance of her pretty joy when I said yes, brings tears into my
eyes. The next time I sat down to write, and regularly afterwards,
she sat in her old place, with a spare bundle of pens at her side. Her
triumph in this connexion with my work, and her delight when I wanted a
new pen--which I very often feigned to do--suggested to me a new way of
pleasing my child-wife. I occasionally made a pretence of wanting a
page or two of manuscript copied. Then Dora was in her glory. The
preparations she made for this great work, the aprons she put on, the
bibs she borrowed from the kitchen to keep off the ink, the time she
took, the innumerable stoppages she made to have a laugh with Jip as if
he understood it all, her conviction that her work was incomplete unless
she signed her name at the end, and the way in which she would bring it
to me, like a school-copy, and then, when I praised it, clasp me round
the neck, are touching recollections to me, simple as they might appear
to other men.

She took possession of the keys soon after this, and went jingling about
the house with the whole bunch in a little basket, tied to her slender
waist. I seldom found that the places to which they belonged were
locked, or that they were of any use except as a plaything for Jip--but
Dora was pleased, and that pleased me. She was quite satisfied that a
good deal was effected by this make-belief of housekeeping; and was as
merry as if we had been keeping a baby-house, for a joke.

So we went on. Dora was hardly less affectionate to my aunt than to me,
and often told her of the time when she was afraid she was ‘a cross old
thing’. I never saw my aunt unbend more systematically to anyone. She
courted Jip, though Jip never responded; listened, day after day, to the
guitar, though I am afraid she had no taste for music; never attacked
the Incapables, though the temptation must have been severe; went
wonderful distances on foot to purchase, as surprises, any trifles that
she found out Dora wanted; and never came in by the garden, and missed
her from the room, but she would call out, at the foot of the stairs, in
a voice that sounded cheerfully all over the house:

‘Where’s Little Blossom?’



CHAPTER 45. MR. DICK FULFILS MY AUNT’S PREDICTIONS


It was some time now, since I had left the Doctor. Living in his
neighbourhood, I saw him frequently; and we all went to his house on two
or three occasions to dinner or tea. The Old Soldier was in permanent
quarters under the Doctor’s roof. She was exactly the same as ever, and
the same immortal butterflies hovered over her cap.

Like some other mothers, whom I have known in the course of my life,
Mrs. Markleham was far more fond of pleasure than her daughter was.
She required a great deal of amusement, and, like a deep old soldier,
pretended, in consulting her own inclinations, to be devoting herself
to her child. The Doctor’s desire that Annie should be entertained,
was therefore particularly acceptable to this excellent parent; who
expressed unqualified approval of his discretion.

I have no doubt, indeed, that she probed the Doctor’s wound without
knowing it. Meaning nothing but a certain matured frivolity and
selfishness, not always inseparable from full-blown years, I think she
confirmed him in his fear that he was a constraint upon his young
wife, and that there was no congeniality of feeling between them, by so
strongly commending his design of lightening the load of her life.

‘My dear soul,’ she said to him one day when I was present, ‘you know
there is no doubt it would be a little pokey for Annie to be always shut
up here.’

The Doctor nodded his benevolent head. ‘When she comes to her mother’s
age,’ said Mrs. Markleham, with a flourish of her fan, ‘then it’ll be
another thing. You might put ME into a Jail, with genteel society and
a rubber, and I should never care to come out. But I am not Annie, you
know; and Annie is not her mother.’

‘Surely, surely,’ said the Doctor.

‘You are the best of creatures--no, I beg your pardon!’ for the Doctor
made a gesture of deprecation, ‘I must say before your face, as I always
say behind your back, you are the best of creatures; but of course you
don’t--now do you?---enter into the same pursuits and fancies as Annie?’

‘No,’ said the Doctor, in a sorrowful tone.

‘No, of course not,’ retorted the Old Soldier. ‘Take your Dictionary,
for example. What a useful work a Dictionary is! What a necessary work!
The meanings of words! Without Doctor Johnson, or somebody of that sort,
we might have been at this present moment calling an Italian-iron,
a bedstead. But we can’t expect a Dictionary--especially when it’s
making--to interest Annie, can we?’

The Doctor shook his head.

‘And that’s why I so much approve,’ said Mrs. Markleham, tapping him
on the shoulder with her shut-up fan, ‘of your thoughtfulness. It shows
that you don’t expect, as many elderly people do expect, old heads on
young shoulders. You have studied Annie’s character, and you understand
it. That’s what I find so charming!’

Even the calm and patient face of Doctor Strong expressed some little
sense of pain, I thought, under the infliction of these compliments.

‘Therefore, my dear Doctor,’ said the Old Soldier, giving him several
affectionate taps, ‘you may command me, at all times and seasons. Now,
do understand that I am entirely at your service. I am ready to go with
Annie to operas, concerts, exhibitions, all kinds of places; and you
shall never find that I am tired. Duty, my dear Doctor, before every
consideration in the universe!’

She was as good as her word. She was one of those people who can bear
a great deal of pleasure, and she never flinched in her perseverance
in the cause. She seldom got hold of the newspaper (which she settled
herself down in the softest chair in the house to read through an
eye-glass, every day, for two hours), but she found out something that
she was certain Annie would like to see. It was in vain for Annie to
protest that she was weary of such things. Her mother’s remonstrance
always was, ‘Now, my dear Annie, I am sure you know better; and I must
tell you, my love, that you are not making a proper return for the
kindness of Doctor Strong.’

This was usually said in the Doctor’s presence, and appeared to me to
constitute Annie’s principal inducement for withdrawing her objections
when she made any. But in general she resigned herself to her mother,
and went where the Old Soldier would.

It rarely happened now that Mr. Maldon accompanied them. Sometimes
my aunt and Dora were invited to do so, and accepted the invitation.
Sometimes Dora only was asked. The time had been, when I should have
been uneasy in her going; but reflection on what had passed that
former night in the Doctor’s study, had made a change in my mistrust. I
believed that the Doctor was right, and I had no worse suspicions.

My aunt rubbed her nose sometimes when she happened to be alone with
me, and said she couldn’t make it out; she wished they were happier; she
didn’t think our military friend (so she always called the Old Soldier)
mended the matter at all. My aunt further expressed her opinion, ‘that
if our military friend would cut off those butterflies, and give ‘em to
the chimney-sweepers for May-day, it would look like the beginning of
something sensible on her part.’

But her abiding reliance was on Mr. Dick. That man had evidently an
idea in his head, she said; and if he could only once pen it up into a
corner, which was his great difficulty, he would distinguish himself in
some extraordinary manner.

Unconscious of this prediction, Mr. Dick continued to occupy precisely
the same ground in reference to the Doctor and to Mrs. Strong. He seemed
neither to advance nor to recede. He appeared to have settled into his
original foundation, like a building; and I must confess that my faith
in his ever Moving, was not much greater than if he had been a building.

But one night, when I had been married some months, Mr. Dick put his
head into the parlour, where I was writing alone (Dora having gone out
with my aunt to take tea with the two little birds), and said, with a
significant cough:

‘You couldn’t speak to me without inconveniencing yourself, Trotwood, I
am afraid?’

‘Certainly, Mr. Dick,’ said I; ‘come in!’

‘Trotwood,’ said Mr. Dick, laying his finger on the side of his nose,
after he had shaken hands with me. ‘Before I sit down, I wish to make an
observation. You know your aunt?’

‘A little,’ I replied.

‘She is the most wonderful woman in the world, sir!’

After the delivery of this communication, which he shot out of himself
as if he were loaded with it, Mr. Dick sat down with greater gravity
than usual, and looked at me.

‘Now, boy,’ said Mr. Dick, ‘I am going to put a question to you.’

‘As many as you please,’ said I.

‘What do you consider me, sir?’ asked Mr. Dick, folding his arms.

‘A dear old friend,’ said I. ‘Thank you, Trotwood,’ returned Mr. Dick,
laughing, and reaching across in high glee to shake hands with me. ‘But
I mean, boy,’ resuming his gravity, ‘what do you consider me in this
respect?’ touching his forehead.

I was puzzled how to answer, but he helped me with a word.

‘Weak?’ said Mr. Dick.

‘Well,’ I replied, dubiously. ‘Rather so.’

‘Exactly!’ cried Mr. Dick, who seemed quite enchanted by my reply. ‘That
is, Trotwood, when they took some of the trouble out of you-know-who’s
head, and put it you know where, there was a--’ Mr. Dick made his two
hands revolve very fast about each other a great number of times, and
then brought them into collision, and rolled them over and over one
another, to express confusion. ‘There was that sort of thing done to me
somehow. Eh?’

I nodded at him, and he nodded back again.

‘In short, boy,’ said Mr. Dick, dropping his voice to a whisper, ‘I am
simple.’

I would have qualified that conclusion, but he stopped me.

‘Yes, I am! She pretends I am not. She won’t hear of it; but I am. I
know I am. If she hadn’t stood my friend, sir, I should have been shut
up, to lead a dismal life these many years. But I’ll provide for her!
I never spend the copying money. I put it in a box. I have made a will.
I’ll leave it all to her. She shall be rich--noble!’

Mr. Dick took out his pocket-handkerchief, and wiped his eyes. He then
folded it up with great care, pressed it smooth between his two hands,
put it in his pocket, and seemed to put my aunt away with it.

‘Now you are a scholar, Trotwood,’ said Mr. Dick. ‘You are a fine
scholar. You know what a learned man, what a great man, the Doctor is.
You know what honour he has always done me. Not proud in his wisdom.
Humble, humble--condescending even to poor Dick, who is simple and knows
nothing. I have sent his name up, on a scrap of paper, to the kite,
along the string, when it has been in the sky, among the larks. The kite
has been glad to receive it, sir, and the sky has been brighter with
it.’

I delighted him by saying, most heartily, that the Doctor was deserving
of our best respect and highest esteem.

‘And his beautiful wife is a star,’ said Mr. Dick. ‘A shining star. I
have seen her shine, sir. But,’ bringing his chair nearer, and laying
one hand upon my knee--‘clouds, sir--clouds.’

I answered the solicitude which his face expressed, by conveying the
same expression into my own, and shaking my head.

‘What clouds?’ said Mr. Dick.

He looked so wistfully into my face, and was so anxious to understand,
that I took great pains to answer him slowly and distinctly, as I might
have entered on an explanation to a child.

‘There is some unfortunate division between them,’ I replied. ‘Some
unhappy cause of separation. A secret. It may be inseparable from the
discrepancy in their years. It may have grown up out of almost nothing.’

Mr. Dick, who had told off every sentence with a thoughtful nod, paused
when I had done, and sat considering, with his eyes upon my face, and
his hand upon my knee.

‘Doctor not angry with her, Trotwood?’ he said, after some time.

‘No. Devoted to her.’

‘Then, I have got it, boy!’ said Mr. Dick.

The sudden exultation with which he slapped me on the knee, and leaned
back in his chair, with his eyebrows lifted up as high as he could
possibly lift them, made me think him farther out of his wits than
ever. He became as suddenly grave again, and leaning forward as before,
said--first respectfully taking out his pocket-handkerchief, as if it
really did represent my aunt:

‘Most wonderful woman in the world, Trotwood. Why has she done nothing
to set things right?’

‘Too delicate and difficult a subject for such interference,’ I replied.

‘Fine scholar,’ said Mr. Dick, touching me with his finger. ‘Why has HE
done nothing?’

‘For the same reason,’ I returned.

‘Then, I have got it, boy!’ said Mr. Dick. And he stood up before me,
more exultingly than before, nodding his head, and striking himself
repeatedly upon the breast, until one might have supposed that he had
nearly nodded and struck all the breath out of his body.

‘A poor fellow with a craze, sir,’ said Mr. Dick, ‘a simpleton, a
weak-minded person--present company, you know!’ striking himself again,
‘may do what wonderful people may not do. I’ll bring them together, boy.
I’ll try. They’ll not blame me. They’ll not object to me. They’ll not
mind what I do, if it’s wrong. I’m only Mr. Dick. And who minds Dick?
Dick’s nobody! Whoo!’ He blew a slight, contemptuous breath, as if he
blew himself away.

It was fortunate he had proceeded so far with his mystery, for we heard
the coach stop at the little garden gate, which brought my aunt and Dora
home.

‘Not a word, boy!’ he pursued in a whisper; ‘leave all the blame with
Dick--simple Dick--mad Dick. I have been thinking, sir, for some time,
that I was getting it, and now I have got it. After what you have said
to me, I am sure I have got it. All right!’ Not another word did Mr.
Dick utter on the subject; but he made a very telegraph of himself for
the next half-hour (to the great disturbance of my aunt’s mind), to
enjoin inviolable secrecy on me.

To my surprise, I heard no more about it for some two or three weeks,
though I was sufficiently interested in the result of his endeavours;
descrying a strange gleam of good sense--I say nothing of good feeling,
for that he always exhibited--in the conclusion to which he had come. At
last I began to believe, that, in the flighty and unsettled state of his
mind, he had either forgotten his intention or abandoned it.

One fair evening, when Dora was not inclined to go out, my aunt and I
strolled up to the Doctor’s cottage. It was autumn, when there were no
debates to vex the evening air; and I remember how the leaves smelt like
our garden at Blunderstone as we trod them under foot, and how the old,
unhappy feeling, seemed to go by, on the sighing wind.

It was twilight when we reached the cottage. Mrs. Strong was just coming
out of the garden, where Mr. Dick yet lingered, busy with his knife,
helping the gardener to point some stakes. The Doctor was engaged with
someone in his study; but the visitor would be gone directly, Mrs.
Strong said, and begged us to remain and see him. We went into the
drawing-room with her, and sat down by the darkening window. There was
never any ceremony about the visits of such old friends and neighbours
as we were.

We had not sat here many minutes, when Mrs. Markleham, who usually
contrived to be in a fuss about something, came bustling in, with her
newspaper in her hand, and said, out of breath, ‘My goodness gracious,
Annie, why didn’t you tell me there was someone in the Study!’

‘My dear mama,’ she quietly returned, ‘how could I know that you desired
the information?’

‘Desired the information!’ said Mrs. Markleham, sinking on the sofa. ‘I
never had such a turn in all my life!’

‘Have you been to the Study, then, mama?’ asked Annie.

‘BEEN to the Study, my dear!’ she returned emphatically. ‘Indeed I have!
I came upon the amiable creature--if you’ll imagine my feelings, Miss
Trotwood and David--in the act of making his will.’

Her daughter looked round from the window quickly.

‘In the act, my dear Annie,’ repeated Mrs. Markleham, spreading the
newspaper on her lap like a table-cloth, and patting her hands upon it,
‘of making his last Will and Testament. The foresight and affection of
the dear! I must tell you how it was. I really must, in justice to the
darling--for he is nothing less!--tell you how it was. Perhaps you know,
Miss Trotwood, that there is never a candle lighted in this house, until
one’s eyes are literally falling out of one’s head with being stretched
to read the paper. And that there is not a chair in this house, in which
a paper can be what I call, read, except one in the Study. This took me
to the Study, where I saw a light. I opened the door. In company with
the dear Doctor were two professional people, evidently connected with
the law, and they were all three standing at the table: the
darling Doctor pen in hand. “This simply expresses then,” said the
Doctor--Annie, my love, attend to the very words--“this simply expresses
then, gentlemen, the confidence I have in Mrs. Strong, and gives her all
unconditionally?” One of the professional people replied, “And gives her
all unconditionally.” Upon that, with the natural feelings of a mother,
I said, “Good God, I beg your pardon!” fell over the door-step, and came
away through the little back passage where the pantry is.’

Mrs. Strong opened the window, and went out into the verandah, where she
stood leaning against a pillar.

‘But now isn’t it, Miss Trotwood, isn’t it, David, invigorating,’ said
Mrs. Markleham, mechanically following her with her eyes, ‘to find a man
at Doctor Strong’s time of life, with the strength of mind to do this
kind of thing? It only shows how right I was. I said to Annie, when
Doctor Strong paid a very flattering visit to myself, and made her the
subject of a declaration and an offer, I said, “My dear, there is no
doubt whatever, in my opinion, with reference to a suitable provision
for you, that Doctor Strong will do more than he binds himself to do.”’

Here the bell rang, and we heard the sound of the visitors’ feet as they
went out.

‘It’s all over, no doubt,’ said the Old Soldier, after listening; ‘the
dear creature has signed, sealed, and delivered, and his mind’s at rest.
Well it may be! What a mind! Annie, my love, I am going to the Study
with my paper, for I am a poor creature without news. Miss Trotwood,
David, pray come and see the Doctor.’

I was conscious of Mr. Dick’s standing in the shadow of the room,
shutting up his knife, when we accompanied her to the Study; and of my
aunt’s rubbing her nose violently, by the way, as a mild vent for her
intolerance of our military friend; but who got first into the Study, or
how Mrs. Markleham settled herself in a moment in her easy-chair, or how
my aunt and I came to be left together near the door (unless her eyes
were quicker than mine, and she held me back), I have forgotten, if I
ever knew. But this I know,--that we saw the Doctor before he saw us,
sitting at his table, among the folio volumes in which he delighted,
resting his head calmly on his hand. That, in the same moment, we saw
Mrs. Strong glide in, pale and trembling. That Mr. Dick supported her on
his arm. That he laid his other hand upon the Doctor’s arm, causing him
to look up with an abstracted air. That, as the Doctor moved his head,
his wife dropped down on one knee at his feet, and, with her hands
imploringly lifted, fixed upon his face the memorable look I had never
forgotten. That at this sight Mrs. Markleham dropped the newspaper,
and stared more like a figure-head intended for a ship to be called The
Astonishment, than anything else I can think of.

The gentleness of the Doctor’s manner and surprise, the dignity that
mingled with the supplicating attitude of his wife, the amiable concern
of Mr. Dick, and the earnestness with which my aunt said to herself,
‘That man mad!’ (triumphantly expressive of the misery from which she
had saved him)--I see and hear, rather than remember, as I write about
it.

‘Doctor!’ said Mr. Dick. ‘What is it that’s amiss? Look here!’

‘Annie!’ cried the Doctor. ‘Not at my feet, my dear!’

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘I beg and pray that no one will leave the room! Oh, my
husband and father, break this long silence. Let us both know what it is
that has come between us!’

Mrs. Markleham, by this time recovering the power of speech, and seeming
to swell with family pride and motherly indignation, here exclaimed,
‘Annie, get up immediately, and don’t disgrace everybody belonging to
you by humbling yourself like that, unless you wish to see me go out of
my mind on the spot!’

‘Mama!’ returned Annie. ‘Waste no words on me, for my appeal is to my
husband, and even you are nothing here.’

‘Nothing!’ exclaimed Mrs. Markleham. ‘Me, nothing! The child has taken
leave of her senses. Please to get me a glass of water!’

I was too attentive to the Doctor and his wife, to give any heed to this
request; and it made no impression on anybody else; so Mrs. Markleham
panted, stared, and fanned herself.

‘Annie!’ said the Doctor, tenderly taking her in his hands. ‘My dear!
If any unavoidable change has come, in the sequence of time, upon our
married life, you are not to blame. The fault is mine, and only mine.
There is no change in my affection, admiration, and respect. I wish to
make you happy. I truly love and honour you. Rise, Annie, pray!’

But she did not rise. After looking at him for a little while, she sank
down closer to him, laid her arm across his knee, and dropping her head
upon it, said:

‘If I have any friend here, who can speak one word for me, or for my
husband in this matter; if I have any friend here, who can give a voice
to any suspicion that my heart has sometimes whispered to me; if I have
any friend here, who honours my husband, or has ever cared for me, and
has anything within his knowledge, no matter what it is, that may help
to mediate between us, I implore that friend to speak!’

There was a profound silence. After a few moments of painful hesitation,
I broke the silence.

‘Mrs. Strong,’ I said, ‘there is something within my knowledge, which
I have been earnestly entreated by Doctor Strong to conceal, and have
concealed until tonight. But, I believe the time has come when it would
be mistaken faith and delicacy to conceal it any longer, and when your
appeal absolves me from his injunction.’

She turned her face towards me for a moment, and I knew that I was
right. I could not have resisted its entreaty, if the assurance that it
gave me had been less convincing.

‘Our future peace,’ she said, ‘may be in your hands. I trust it
confidently to your not suppressing anything. I know beforehand that
nothing you, or anyone, can tell me, will show my husband’s noble heart
in any other light than one. Howsoever it may seem to you to touch me,
disregard that. I will speak for myself, before him, and before God
afterwards.’

Thus earnestly besought, I made no reference to the Doctor for his
permission, but, without any other compromise of the truth than a little
softening of the coarseness of Uriah Heep, related plainly what had
passed in that same room that night. The staring of Mrs. Markleham
during the whole narration, and the shrill, sharp interjections with
which she occasionally interrupted it, defy description.

When I had finished, Annie remained, for some few moments, silent, with
her head bent down, as I have described. Then, she took the Doctor’s
hand (he was sitting in the same attitude as when we had entered the
room), and pressed it to her breast, and kissed it. Mr. Dick softly
raised her; and she stood, when she began to speak, leaning on him, and
looking down upon her husband--from whom she never turned her eyes.

‘All that has ever been in my mind, since I was married,’ she said in a
low, submissive, tender voice, ‘I will lay bare before you. I could not
live and have one reservation, knowing what I know now.’

‘Nay, Annie,’ said the Doctor, mildly, ‘I have never doubted you, my
child. There is no need; indeed there is no need, my dear.’

‘There is great need,’ she answered, in the same way, ‘that I should
open my whole heart before the soul of generosity and truth, whom, year
by year, and day by day, I have loved and venerated more and more, as
Heaven knows!’

‘Really,’ interrupted Mrs. Markleham, ‘if I have any discretion at
all--’

[‘Which you haven’t, you Marplot,’ observed my aunt, in an indignant
whisper.) --‘I must be permitted to observe that it cannot be requisite
to enter into these details.’

‘No one but my husband can judge of that, mama,’ said Annie without
removing her eyes from his face, ‘and he will hear me. If I say anything
to give you pain, mama, forgive me. I have borne pain first, often and
long, myself.’

‘Upon my word!’ gasped Mrs. Markleham.

‘When I was very young,’ said Annie, ‘quite a little child, my first
associations with knowledge of any kind were inseparable from a patient
friend and teacher--the friend of my dead father--who was always dear
to me. I can remember nothing that I know, without remembering him. He
stored my mind with its first treasures, and stamped his character upon
them all. They never could have been, I think, as good as they have been
to me, if I had taken them from any other hands.’

‘Makes her mother nothing!’ exclaimed Mrs. Markleham.

‘Not so mama,’ said Annie; ‘but I make him what he was. I must do that.
As I grew up, he occupied the same place still. I was proud of his
interest: deeply, fondly, gratefully attached to him. I looked up to
him, I can hardly describe how--as a father, as a guide, as one whose
praise was different from all other praise, as one in whom I could have
trusted and confided, if I had doubted all the world. You know, mama,
how young and inexperienced I was, when you presented him before me, of
a sudden, as a lover.’

‘I have mentioned the fact, fifty times at least, to everybody here!’
said Mrs. Markleham.

[‘Then hold your tongue, for the Lord’s sake, and don’t mention it any
more!’ muttered my aunt.)

‘It was so great a change: so great a loss, I felt it, at first,’ said
Annie, still preserving the same look and tone, ‘that I was agitated
and distressed. I was but a girl; and when so great a change came in the
character in which I had so long looked up to him, I think I was sorry.
But nothing could have made him what he used to be again; and I was
proud that he should think me so worthy, and we were married.’ ‘--At
Saint Alphage, Canterbury,’ observed Mrs. Markleham.

[‘Confound the woman!’ said my aunt, ‘she WON’T be quiet!’)

‘I never thought,’ proceeded Annie, with a heightened colour, ‘of any
worldly gain that my husband would bring to me. My young heart had no
room in its homage for any such poor reference. Mama, forgive me when
I say that it was you who first presented to my mind the thought that
anyone could wrong me, and wrong him, by such a cruel suspicion.’

‘Me!’ cried Mrs. Markleham.

[‘Ah! You, to be sure!’ observed my aunt, ‘and you can’t fan it away, my
military friend!’)

‘It was the first unhappiness of my new life,’ said Annie. ‘It was the
first occasion of every unhappy moment I have known. These moments have
been more, of late, than I can count; but not--my generous husband!--not
for the reason you suppose; for in my heart there is not a thought, a
recollection, or a hope, that any power could separate from you!’

She raised her eyes, and clasped her hands, and looked as beautiful and
true, I thought, as any Spirit. The Doctor looked on her, henceforth, as
steadfastly as she on him.

‘Mama is blameless,’ she went on, ‘of having ever urged you for herself,
and she is blameless in intention every way, I am sure,--but when I saw
how many importunate claims were pressed upon you in my name; how you
were traded on in my name; how generous you were, and how Mr. Wickfield,
who had your welfare very much at heart, resented it; the first sense
of my exposure to the mean suspicion that my tenderness was bought--and
sold to you, of all men on earth--fell upon me like unmerited disgrace,
in which I forced you to participate. I cannot tell you what it
was--mama cannot imagine what it was--to have this dread and trouble
always on my mind, yet know in my own soul that on my marriage-day I
crowned the love and honour of my life!’

‘A specimen of the thanks one gets,’ cried Mrs. Markleham, in tears,
‘for taking care of one’s family! I wish I was a Turk!’

[‘I wish you were, with all my heart--and in your native country!’ said
my aunt.)

‘It was at that time that mama was most solicitous about my Cousin
Maldon. I had liked him’: she spoke softly, but without any hesitation:
‘very much. We had been little lovers once. If circumstances had not
happened otherwise, I might have come to persuade myself that I really
loved him, and might have married him, and been most wretched. There can
be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.’

I pondered on those words, even while I was studiously attending to
what followed, as if they had some particular interest, or some strange
application that I could not divine. ‘There can be no disparity in
marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose’--‘no disparity in
marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.’

‘There is nothing,’ said Annie, ‘that we have in common. I have long
found that there is nothing. If I were thankful to my husband for no
more, instead of for so much, I should be thankful to him for having
saved me from the first mistaken impulse of my undisciplined heart.’

She stood quite still, before the Doctor, and spoke with an earnestness
that thrilled me. Yet her voice was just as quiet as before.

‘When he was waiting to be the object of your munificence, so freely
bestowed for my sake, and when I was unhappy in the mercenary shape
I was made to wear, I thought it would have become him better to have
worked his own way on. I thought that if I had been he, I would have
tried to do it, at the cost of almost any hardship. But I thought no
worse of him, until the night of his departure for India. That night I
knew he had a false and thankless heart. I saw a double meaning, then,
in Mr. Wickfield’s scrutiny of me. I perceived, for the first time, the
dark suspicion that shadowed my life.’

‘Suspicion, Annie!’ said the Doctor. ‘No, no, no!’

‘In your mind there was none, I know, my husband!’ she returned. ‘And
when I came to you, that night, to lay down all my load of shame and
grief, and knew that I had to tell that, underneath your roof, one of my
own kindred, to whom you had been a benefactor, for the love of me, had
spoken to me words that should have found no utterance, even if I had
been the weak and mercenary wretch he thought me--my mind revolted from
the taint the very tale conveyed. It died upon my lips, and from that
hour till now has never passed them.’

Mrs. Markleham, with a short groan, leaned back in her easy-chair; and
retired behind her fan, as if she were never coming out any more.

‘I have never, but in your presence, interchanged a word with him from
that time; then, only when it has been necessary for the avoidance of
this explanation. Years have passed since he knew, from me, what his
situation here was. The kindnesses you have secretly done for his
advancement, and then disclosed to me, for my surprise and pleasure,
have been, you will believe, but aggravations of the unhappiness and
burden of my secret.’

She sunk down gently at the Doctor’s feet, though he did his utmost to
prevent her; and said, looking up, tearfully, into his face:

‘Do not speak to me yet! Let me say a little more! Right or wrong, if
this were to be done again, I think I should do just the same. You never
can know what it was to be devoted to you, with those old associations;
to find that anyone could be so hard as to suppose that the truth of my
heart was bartered away, and to be surrounded by appearances confirming
that belief. I was very young, and had no adviser. Between mama and
me, in all relating to you, there was a wide division. If I shrunk into
myself, hiding the disrespect I had undergone, it was because I honoured
you so much, and so much wished that you should honour me!’

‘Annie, my pure heart!’ said the Doctor, ‘my dear girl!’

‘A little more! a very few words more! I used to think there were so
many whom you might have married, who would not have brought such charge
and trouble on you, and who would have made your home a worthier home. I
used to be afraid that I had better have remained your pupil, and almost
your child. I used to fear that I was so unsuited to your learning and
wisdom. If all this made me shrink within myself (as indeed it did),
when I had that to tell, it was still because I honoured you so much,
and hoped that you might one day honour me.’

‘That day has shone this long time, Annie,’ said the Doctor, ‘and can
have but one long night, my dear.’

‘Another word! I afterwards meant--steadfastly meant, and purposed to
myself--to bear the whole weight of knowing the unworthiness of one
to whom you had been so good. And now a last word, dearest and best of
friends! The cause of the late change in you, which I have seen with
so much pain and sorrow, and have sometimes referred to my old
apprehension--at other times to lingering suppositions nearer to the
truth--has been made clear tonight; and by an accident I have also come
to know, tonight, the full measure of your noble trust in me, even
under that mistake. I do not hope that any love and duty I may render in
return, will ever make me worthy of your priceless confidence; but with
all this knowledge fresh upon me, I can lift my eyes to this dear
face, revered as a father’s, loved as a husband’s, sacred to me in
my childhood as a friend’s, and solemnly declare that in my lightest
thought I have never wronged you; never wavered in the love and the
fidelity I owe you!’

She had her arms around the Doctor’s neck, and he leant his head down
over her, mingling his grey hair with her dark brown tresses.

‘Oh, hold me to your heart, my husband! Never cast me out! Do not think
or speak of disparity between us, for there is none, except in all my
many imperfections. Every succeeding year I have known this better, as I
have esteemed you more and more. Oh, take me to your heart, my husband,
for my love was founded on a rock, and it endures!’

In the silence that ensued, my aunt walked gravely up to Mr. Dick,
without at all hurrying herself, and gave him a hug and a sounding kiss.
And it was very fortunate, with a view to his credit, that she did so;
for I am confident that I detected him at that moment in the act of
making preparations to stand on one leg, as an appropriate expression of
delight.

‘You are a very remarkable man, Dick!’ said my aunt, with an air of
unqualified approbation; ‘and never pretend to be anything else, for I
know better!’

With that, my aunt pulled him by the sleeve, and nodded to me; and we
three stole quietly out of the room, and came away.

‘That’s a settler for our military friend, at any rate,’ said my aunt,
on the way home. ‘I should sleep the better for that, if there was
nothing else to be glad of!’

‘She was quite overcome, I am afraid,’ said Mr. Dick, with great
commiseration.

‘What! Did you ever see a crocodile overcome?’ inquired my aunt.

‘I don’t think I ever saw a crocodile,’ returned Mr. Dick, mildly.

‘There never would have been anything the matter, if it hadn’t been for
that old Animal,’ said my aunt, with strong emphasis. ‘It’s very much
to be wished that some mothers would leave their daughters alone after
marriage, and not be so violently affectionate. They seem to think the
only return that can be made them for bringing an unfortunate young
woman into the world--God bless my soul, as if she asked to be brought,
or wanted to come!--is full liberty to worry her out of it again. What
are you thinking of, Trot?’

I was thinking of all that had been said. My mind was still running on
some of the expressions used. ‘There can be no disparity in marriage
like unsuitability of mind and purpose.’ ‘The first mistaken impulse of
an undisciplined heart.’ ‘My love was founded on a rock.’ But we were at
home; and the trodden leaves were lying under-foot, and the autumn wind
was blowing.



CHAPTER 46. INTELLIGENCE


I must have been married, if I may trust to my imperfect memory for
dates, about a year or so, when one evening, as I was returning from a
solitary walk, thinking of the book I was then writing--for my success
had steadily increased with my steady application, and I was engaged at
that time upon my first work of fiction--I came past Mrs. Steerforth’s
house. I had often passed it before, during my residence in that
neighbourhood, though never when I could choose another road. Howbeit,
it did sometimes happen that it was not easy to find another, without
making a long circuit; and so I had passed that way, upon the whole,
pretty often.

I had never done more than glance at the house, as I went by with a
quickened step. It had been uniformly gloomy and dull. None of the best
rooms abutted on the road; and the narrow, heavily-framed old-fashioned
windows, never cheerful under any circumstances, looked very dismal,
close shut, and with their blinds always drawn down. There was a covered
way across a little paved court, to an entrance that was never used; and
there was one round staircase window, at odds with all the rest, and the
only one unshaded by a blind, which had the same unoccupied blank look.
I do not remember that I ever saw a light in all the house. If I had
been a casual passer-by, I should have probably supposed that some
childless person lay dead in it. If I had happily possessed no knowledge
of the place, and had seen it often in that changeless state, I should
have pleased my fancy with many ingenious speculations, I dare say.

As it was, I thought as little of it as I might. But my mind could not
go by it and leave it, as my body did; and it usually awakened a long
train of meditations. Coming before me, on this particular evening that
I mention, mingled with the childish recollections and later fancies,
the ghosts of half-formed hopes, the broken shadows of disappointments
dimly seen and understood, the blending of experience and imagination,
incidental to the occupation with which my thoughts had been busy, it
was more than commonly suggestive. I fell into a brown study as I walked
on, and a voice at my side made me start.

It was a woman’s voice, too. I was not long in recollecting Mrs.
Steerforth’s little parlour-maid, who had formerly worn blue ribbons in
her cap. She had taken them out now, to adapt herself, I suppose, to
the altered character of the house; and wore but one or two disconsolate
bows of sober brown.

‘If you please, sir, would you have the goodness to walk in, and speak
to Miss Dartle?’

‘Has Miss Dartle sent you for me?’ I inquired.

‘Not tonight, sir, but it’s just the same. Miss Dartle saw you pass a
night or two ago; and I was to sit at work on the staircase, and when I
saw you pass again, to ask you to step in and speak to her.’

I turned back, and inquired of my conductor, as we went along, how Mrs.
Steerforth was. She said her lady was but poorly, and kept her own room
a good deal.

When we arrived at the house, I was directed to Miss Dartle in the
garden, and left to make my presence known to her myself. She was
sitting on a seat at one end of a kind of terrace, overlooking the great
city. It was a sombre evening, with a lurid light in the sky; and as
I saw the prospect scowling in the distance, with here and there some
larger object starting up into the sullen glare, I fancied it was no
inapt companion to the memory of this fierce woman.

She saw me as I advanced, and rose for a moment to receive me. I thought
her, then, still more colourless and thin than when I had seen her last;
the flashing eyes still brighter, and the scar still plainer.

Our meeting was not cordial. We had parted angrily on the last occasion;
and there was an air of disdain about her, which she took no pains to
conceal.

‘I am told you wish to speak to me, Miss Dartle,’ said I, standing near
her, with my hand upon the back of the seat, and declining her gesture
of invitation to sit down.

‘If you please,’ said she. ‘Pray has this girl been found?’

‘No.’

‘And yet she has run away!’

I saw her thin lips working while she looked at me, as if they were
eager to load her with reproaches.

‘Run away?’ I repeated.

‘Yes! From him,’ she said, with a laugh. ‘If she is not found, perhaps
she never will be found. She may be dead!’

The vaunting cruelty with which she met my glance, I never saw expressed
in any other face that ever I have seen.

‘To wish her dead,’ said I, ‘may be the kindest wish that one of her own
sex could bestow upon her. I am glad that time has softened you so much,
Miss Dartle.’

She condescended to make no reply, but, turning on me with another
scornful laugh, said:

‘The friends of this excellent and much-injured young lady are friends
of yours. You are their champion, and assert their rights. Do you wish
to know what is known of her?’

‘Yes,’ said I.

She rose with an ill-favoured smile, and taking a few steps towards
a wall of holly that was near at hand, dividing the lawn from a
kitchen-garden, said, in a louder voice, ‘Come here!’--as if she were
calling to some unclean beast.

‘You will restrain any demonstrative championship or vengeance in this
place, of course, Mr. Copperfield?’ said she, looking over her shoulder
at me with the same expression.

I inclined my head, without knowing what she meant; and she said, ‘Come
here!’ again; and returned, followed by the respectable Mr. Littimer,
who, with undiminished respectability, made me a bow, and took up his
position behind her. The air of wicked grace: of triumph, in which,
strange to say, there was yet something feminine and alluring: with
which she reclined upon the seat between us, and looked at me, was
worthy of a cruel Princess in a Legend.

‘Now,’ said she, imperiously, without glancing at him, and touching
the old wound as it throbbed: perhaps, in this instance, with pleasure
rather than pain. ‘Tell Mr. Copperfield about the flight.’

‘Mr. James and myself, ma’am--’

‘Don’t address yourself to me!’ she interrupted with a frown.

‘Mr. James and myself, sir--’

‘Nor to me, if you please,’ said I.

Mr. Littimer, without being at all discomposed, signified by a slight
obeisance, that anything that was most agreeable to us was most
agreeable to him; and began again.

‘Mr. James and myself have been abroad with the young woman, ever
since she left Yarmouth under Mr. James’s protection. We have been in a
variety of places, and seen a deal of foreign country. We have been in
France, Switzerland, Italy, in fact, almost all parts.’

He looked at the back of the seat, as if he were addressing himself to
that; and softly played upon it with his hands, as if he were striking
chords upon a dumb piano.

‘Mr. James took quite uncommonly to the young woman; and was more
settled, for a length of time, than I have known him to be since I have
been in his service. The young woman was very improvable, and spoke the
languages; and wouldn’t have been known for the same country-person. I
noticed that she was much admired wherever we went.’

Miss Dartle put her hand upon her side. I saw him steal a glance at her,
and slightly smile to himself.

‘Very much admired, indeed, the young woman was. What with her dress;
what with the air and sun; what with being made so much of; what with
this, that, and the other; her merits really attracted general notice.’

He made a short pause. Her eyes wandered restlessly over the distant
prospect, and she bit her nether lip to stop that busy mouth.

Taking his hands from the seat, and placing one of them within the
other, as he settled himself on one leg, Mr. Littimer proceeded, with
his eyes cast down, and his respectable head a little advanced, and a
little on one side:

‘The young woman went on in this manner for some time, being
occasionally low in her spirits, until I think she began to weary Mr.
James by giving way to her low spirits and tempers of that kind; and
things were not so comfortable. Mr. James he began to be restless again.
The more restless he got, the worse she got; and I must say, for myself,
that I had a very difficult time of it indeed between the two. Still
matters were patched up here, and made good there, over and over again;
and altogether lasted, I am sure, for a longer time than anybody could
have expected.’

Recalling her eyes from the distance, she looked at me again now, with
her former air. Mr. Littimer, clearing his throat behind his hand with a
respectable short cough, changed legs, and went on:

‘At last, when there had been, upon the whole, a good many words and
reproaches, Mr. James he set off one morning, from the neighbourhood of
Naples, where we had a villa (the young woman being very partial to
the sea), and, under pretence of coming back in a day or so, left it in
charge with me to break it out, that, for the general happiness of all
concerned, he was’--here an interruption of the short cough--‘gone. But
Mr. James, I must say, certainly did behave extremely honourable; for
he proposed that the young woman should marry a very respectable person,
who was fully prepared to overlook the past, and who was, at least, as
good as anybody the young woman could have aspired to in a regular way:
her connexions being very common.’

He changed legs again, and wetted his lips. I was convinced that the
scoundrel spoke of himself, and I saw my conviction reflected in Miss
Dartle’s face.

‘This I also had it in charge to communicate. I was willing to do
anything to relieve Mr. James from his difficulty, and to restore
harmony between himself and an affectionate parent, who has undergone
so much on his account. Therefore I undertook the commission. The
young woman’s violence when she came to, after I broke the fact of his
departure, was beyond all expectations. She was quite mad, and had to
be held by force; or, if she couldn’t have got to a knife, or got to the
sea, she’d have beaten her head against the marble floor.’

Miss Dartle, leaning back upon the seat, with a light of exultation in
her face, seemed almost to caress the sounds this fellow had uttered.

‘But when I came to the second part of what had been entrusted to me,’
said Mr. Littimer, rubbing his hands uneasily, ‘which anybody might
have supposed would have been, at all events, appreciated as a kind
intention, then the young woman came out in her true colours. A more
outrageous person I never did see. Her conduct was surprisingly bad. She
had no more gratitude, no more feeling, no more patience, no more reason
in her, than a stock or a stone. If I hadn’t been upon my guard, I am
convinced she would have had my blood.’

‘I think the better of her for it,’ said I, indignantly.

Mr. Littimer bent his head, as much as to say, ‘Indeed, sir? But you’re
young!’ and resumed his narrative.

‘It was necessary, in short, for a time, to take away everything nigh
her, that she could do herself, or anybody else, an injury with, and
to shut her up close. Notwithstanding which, she got out in the night;
forced the lattice of a window, that I had nailed up myself; dropped on
a vine that was trailed below; and never has been seen or heard of, to
my knowledge, since.’

‘She is dead, perhaps,’ said Miss Dartle, with a smile, as if she could
have spurned the body of the ruined girl.

‘She may have drowned herself, miss,’ returned Mr. Littimer, catching at
an excuse for addressing himself to somebody. ‘It’s very possible. Or,
she may have had assistance from the boatmen, and the boatmen’s wives
and children. Being given to low company, she was very much in the
habit of talking to them on the beach, Miss Dartle, and sitting by their
boats. I have known her do it, when Mr. James has been away, whole days.
Mr. James was far from pleased to find out, once, that she had told the
children she was a boatman’s daughter, and that in her own country, long
ago, she had roamed about the beach, like them.’

Oh, Emily! Unhappy beauty! What a picture rose before me of her sitting
on the far-off shore, among the children like herself when she was
innocent, listening to little voices such as might have called her
Mother had she been a poor man’s wife; and to the great voice of the
sea, with its eternal ‘Never more!’

‘When it was clear that nothing could be done, Miss Dartle--’

‘Did I tell you not to speak to me?’ she said, with stern contempt.

‘You spoke to me, miss,’ he replied. ‘I beg your pardon. But it is my
service to obey.’

‘Do your service,’ she returned. ‘Finish your story, and go!’

‘When it was clear,’ he said, with infinite respectability and an
obedient bow, ‘that she was not to be found, I went to Mr. James, at the
place where it had been agreed that I should write to him, and informed
him of what had occurred. Words passed between us in consequence, and
I felt it due to my character to leave him. I could bear, and I have
borne, a great deal from Mr. James; but he insulted me too far. He hurt
me. Knowing the unfortunate difference between himself and his mother,
and what her anxiety of mind was likely to be, I took the liberty of
coming home to England, and relating--’

‘For money which I paid him,’ said Miss Dartle to me.

‘Just so, ma’am--and relating what I knew. I am not aware,’ said Mr.
Littimer, after a moment’s reflection, ‘that there is anything else.
I am at present out of employment, and should be happy to meet with a
respectable situation.’

Miss Dartle glanced at me, as though she would inquire if there were
anything that I desired to ask. As there was something which had
occurred to my mind, I said in reply:

‘I could wish to know from this--creature,’ I could not bring myself
to utter any more conciliatory word, ‘whether they intercepted a letter
that was written to her from home, or whether he supposes that she
received it.’

He remained calm and silent, with his eyes fixed on the ground, and the
tip of every finger of his right hand delicately poised against the tip
of every finger of his left.

Miss Dartle turned her head disdainfully towards him.

‘I beg your pardon, miss,’ he said, awakening from his abstraction,
‘but, however submissive to you, I have my position, though a servant.
Mr. Copperfield and you, miss, are different people. If Mr. Copperfield
wishes to know anything from me, I take the liberty of reminding Mr.
Copperfield that he can put a question to me. I have a character to
maintain.’

After a momentary struggle with myself, I turned my eyes upon him, and
said, ‘You have heard my question. Consider it addressed to yourself, if
you choose. What answer do you make?’

‘Sir,’ he rejoined, with an occasional separation and reunion of those
delicate tips, ‘my answer must be qualified; because, to betray Mr.
James’s confidence to his mother, and to betray it to you, are two
different actions. It is not probable, I consider, that Mr. James would
encourage the receipt of letters likely to increase low spirits and
unpleasantness; but further than that, sir, I should wish to avoid
going.’

‘Is that all?’ inquired Miss Dartle of me.

I indicated that I had nothing more to say. ‘Except,’ I added, as I
saw him moving off, ‘that I understand this fellow’s part in the wicked
story, and that, as I shall make it known to the honest man who has been
her father from her childhood, I would recommend him to avoid going too
much into public.’

He had stopped the moment I began, and had listened with his usual
repose of manner.

‘Thank you, sir. But you’ll excuse me if I say, sir, that there are
neither slaves nor slave-drivers in this country, and that people are
not allowed to take the law into their own hands. If they do, it is
more to their own peril, I believe, than to other people’s. Consequently
speaking, I am not at all afraid of going wherever I may wish, sir.’

With that, he made a polite bow; and, with another to Miss Dartle, went
away through the arch in the wall of holly by which he had come. Miss
Dartle and I regarded each other for a little while in silence; her
manner being exactly what it was, when she had produced the man.

‘He says besides,’ she observed, with a slow curling of her lip, ‘that
his master, as he hears, is coasting Spain; and this done, is away
to gratify his seafaring tastes till he is weary. But this is of no
interest to you. Between these two proud persons, mother and son, there
is a wider breach than before, and little hope of its healing, for they
are one at heart, and time makes each more obstinate and imperious.
Neither is this of any interest to you; but it introduces what I wish to
say. This devil whom you make an angel of. I mean this low girl whom he
picked out of the tide-mud,’ with her black eyes full upon me, and her
passionate finger up, ‘may be alive,--for I believe some common things
are hard to die. If she is, you will desire to have a pearl of such
price found and taken care of. We desire that, too; that he may not
by any chance be made her prey again. So far, we are united in one
interest; and that is why I, who would do her any mischief that so
coarse a wretch is capable of feeling, have sent for you to hear what
you have heard.’

I saw, by the change in her face, that someone was advancing behind me.
It was Mrs. Steerforth, who gave me her hand more coldly than of yore,
and with an augmentation of her former stateliness of manner, but still,
I perceived--and I was touched by it--with an ineffaceable remembrance
of my old love for her son. She was greatly altered. Her fine figure was
far less upright, her handsome face was deeply marked, and her hair was
almost white. But when she sat down on the seat, she was a handsome lady
still; and well I knew the bright eye with its lofty look, that had been
a light in my very dreams at school.

‘Is Mr. Copperfield informed of everything, Rosa?’

‘Yes.’

‘And has he heard Littimer himself?’

‘Yes; I have told him why you wished it.’ ‘You are a good girl. I have
had some slight correspondence with your former friend, sir,’ addressing
me, ‘but it has not restored his sense of duty or natural obligation.
Therefore I have no other object in this, than what Rosa has mentioned.
If, by the course which may relieve the mind of the decent man you
brought here (for whom I am sorry--I can say no more), my son may be
saved from again falling into the snares of a designing enemy, well!’

She drew herself up, and sat looking straight before her, far away.

‘Madam,’ I said respectfully, ‘I understand. I assure you I am in no
danger of putting any strained construction on your motives. But I must
say, even to you, having known this injured family from childhood,
that if you suppose the girl, so deeply wronged, has not been cruelly
deluded, and would not rather die a hundred deaths than take a cup of
water from your son’s hand now, you cherish a terrible mistake.’

‘Well, Rosa, well!’ said Mrs. Steerforth, as the other was about to
interpose, ‘it is no matter. Let it be. You are married, sir, I am
told?’

I answered that I had been some time married.

‘And are doing well? I hear little in the quiet life I lead, but I
understand you are beginning to be famous.’

‘I have been very fortunate,’ I said, ‘and find my name connected with
some praise.’

‘You have no mother?’--in a softened voice.

‘No.’

‘It is a pity,’ she returned. ‘She would have been proud of you. Good
night!’

I took the hand she held out with a dignified, unbending air, and it
was as calm in mine as if her breast had been at peace. Her pride could
still its very pulses, it appeared, and draw the placid veil before
her face, through which she sat looking straight before her on the far
distance.

As I moved away from them along the terrace, I could not help observing
how steadily they both sat gazing on the prospect, and how it thickened
and closed around them. Here and there, some early lamps were seen to
twinkle in the distant city; and in the eastern quarter of the sky
the lurid light still hovered. But, from the greater part of the broad
valley interposed, a mist was rising like a sea, which, mingling with
the darkness, made it seem as if the gathering waters would encompass
them. I have reason to remember this, and think of it with awe; for
before I looked upon those two again, a stormy sea had risen to their
feet.

Reflecting on what had been thus told me, I felt it right that it should
be communicated to Mr. Peggotty. On the following evening I went into
London in quest of him. He was always wandering about from place to
place, with his one object of recovering his niece before him; but was
more in London than elsewhere. Often and often, now, had I seen him in
the dead of night passing along the streets, searching, among the few
who loitered out of doors at those untimely hours, for what he dreaded
to find.

He kept a lodging over the little chandler’s shop in Hungerford Market,
which I have had occasion to mention more than once, and from which he
first went forth upon his errand of mercy. Hither I directed my walk. On
making inquiry for him, I learned from the people of the house that he
had not gone out yet, and I should find him in his room upstairs.

He was sitting reading by a window in which he kept a few plants. The
room was very neat and orderly. I saw in a moment that it was always
kept prepared for her reception, and that he never went out but he
thought it possible he might bring her home. He had not heard my tap
at the door, and only raised his eyes when I laid my hand upon his
shoulder.

‘Mas’r Davy! Thankee, sir! thankee hearty, for this visit! Sit ye down.
You’re kindly welcome, sir!’

‘Mr. Peggotty,’ said I, taking the chair he handed me, ‘don’t expect
much! I have heard some news.’

‘Of Em’ly!’

He put his hand, in a nervous manner, on his mouth, and turned pale, as
he fixed his eyes on mine.

‘It gives no clue to where she is; but she is not with him.’

He sat down, looking intently at me, and listened in profound silence
to all I had to tell. I well remember the sense of dignity, beauty even,
with which the patient gravity of his face impressed me, when, having
gradually removed his eyes from mine, he sat looking downward, leaning
his forehead on his hand. He offered no interruption, but remained
throughout perfectly still. He seemed to pursue her figure through
the narrative, and to let every other shape go by him, as if it were
nothing.

When I had done, he shaded his face, and continued silent. I looked out
of the window for a little while, and occupied myself with the plants.

‘How do you fare to feel about it, Mas’r Davy?’ he inquired at length.

‘I think that she is living,’ I replied.

‘I doen’t know. Maybe the first shock was too rough, and in the wildness
of her art--! That there blue water as she used to speak on. Could she
have thowt o’ that so many year, because it was to be her grave!’

He said this, musing, in a low, frightened voice; and walked across the
little room.

‘And yet,’ he added, ‘Mas’r Davy, I have felt so sure as she was
living--I have know’d, awake and sleeping, as it was so trew that I
should find her--I have been so led on by it, and held up by it--that I
doen’t believe I can have been deceived. No! Em’ly’s alive!’

He put his hand down firmly on the table, and set his sunburnt face into
a resolute expression.

‘My niece, Em’ly, is alive, sir!’ he said, steadfastly. ‘I doen’t know
wheer it comes from, or how ‘tis, but I am told as she’s alive!’

He looked almost like a man inspired, as he said it. I waited for a
few moments, until he could give me his undivided attention; and then
proceeded to explain the precaution, that, it had occurred to me last
night, it would be wise to take.

‘Now, my dear friend--‘I began.

‘Thankee, thankee, kind sir,’ he said, grasping my hand in both of his.

‘If she should make her way to London, which is likely--for where could
she lose herself so readily as in this vast city; and what would she
wish to do, but lose and hide herself, if she does not go home?--’

‘And she won’t go home,’ he interposed, shaking his head mournfully. ‘If
she had left of her own accord, she might; not as It was, sir.’

‘If she should come here,’ said I, ‘I believe there is one person,
here, more likely to discover her than any other in the world. Do
you remember--hear what I say, with fortitude--think of your great
object!--do you remember Martha?’

‘Of our town?’

I needed no other answer than his face.

‘Do you know that she is in London?’

‘I have seen her in the streets,’ he answered, with a shiver.

‘But you don’t know,’ said I, ‘that Emily was charitable to her, with
Ham’s help, long before she fled from home. Nor, that, when we met one
night, and spoke together in the room yonder, over the way, she listened
at the door.’

‘Mas’r Davy!’ he replied in astonishment. ‘That night when it snew so
hard?’

‘That night. I have never seen her since. I went back, after parting
from you, to speak to her, but she was gone. I was unwilling to mention
her to you then, and I am now; but she is the person of whom I speak,
and with whom I think we should communicate. Do you understand?’

‘Too well, sir,’ he replied. We had sunk our voices, almost to a
whisper, and continued to speak in that tone.

‘You say you have seen her. Do you think that you could find her? I
could only hope to do so by chance.’

‘I think, Mas’r Davy, I know wheer to look.’

‘It is dark. Being together, shall we go out now, and try to find her
tonight?’

He assented, and prepared to accompany me. Without appearing to observe
what he was doing, I saw how carefully he adjusted the little room,
put a candle ready and the means of lighting it, arranged the bed, and
finally took out of a drawer one of her dresses (I remember to have
seen her wear it), neatly folded with some other garments, and a bonnet,
which he placed upon a chair. He made no allusion to these clothes,
neither did I. There they had been waiting for her, many and many a
night, no doubt.

‘The time was, Mas’r Davy,’ he said, as we came downstairs, ‘when I
thowt this girl, Martha, a’most like the dirt underneath my Em’ly’s
feet. God forgive me, theer’s a difference now!’

As we went along, partly to hold him in conversation, and partly to
satisfy myself, I asked him about Ham. He said, almost in the same words
as formerly, that Ham was just the same, ‘wearing away his life with
kiender no care nohow for ‘t; but never murmuring, and liked by all’.

I asked him what he thought Ham’s state of mind was, in reference to the
cause of their misfortunes? Whether he believed it was dangerous? What
he supposed, for example, Ham would do, if he and Steerforth ever should
encounter?

‘I doen’t know, sir,’ he replied. ‘I have thowt of it oftentimes, but I
can’t awize myself of it, no matters.’

I recalled to his remembrance the morning after her departure, when we
were all three on the beach. ‘Do you recollect,’ said I, ‘a certain wild
way in which he looked out to sea, and spoke about “the end of it”?’

‘Sure I do!’ said he.

‘What do you suppose he meant?’

‘Mas’r Davy,’ he replied, ‘I’ve put the question to myself a mort o’
times, and never found no answer. And theer’s one curious thing--that,
though he is so pleasant, I wouldn’t fare to feel comfortable to try and
get his mind upon ‘t. He never said a wured to me as warn’t as dootiful
as dootiful could be, and it ain’t likely as he’d begin to speak any
other ways now; but it’s fur from being fleet water in his mind, where
them thowts lays. It’s deep, sir, and I can’t see down.’

‘You are right,’ said I, ‘and that has sometimes made me anxious.’

‘And me too, Mas’r Davy,’ he rejoined. ‘Even more so, I do assure you,
than his ventersome ways, though both belongs to the alteration in him.
I doen’t know as he’d do violence under any circumstances, but I hope as
them two may be kep asunders.’

We had come, through Temple Bar, into the city. Conversing no more now,
and walking at my side, he yielded himself up to the one aim of his
devoted life, and went on, with that hushed concentration of his
faculties which would have made his figure solitary in a multitude.
We were not far from Blackfriars Bridge, when he turned his head and
pointed to a solitary female figure flitting along the opposite side of
the street. I knew it, readily, to be the figure that we sought.

We crossed the road, and were pressing on towards her, when it occurred
to me that she might be more disposed to feel a woman’s interest in the
lost girl, if we spoke to her in a quieter place, aloof from the crowd,
and where we should be less observed. I advised my companion, therefore,
that we should not address her yet, but follow her; consulting in this,
likewise, an indistinct desire I had, to know where she went.

He acquiescing, we followed at a distance: never losing sight of her,
but never caring to come very near, as she frequently looked about.
Once, she stopped to listen to a band of music; and then we stopped too.

She went on a long way. Still we went on. It was evident, from the
manner in which she held her course, that she was going to some fixed
destination; and this, and her keeping in the busy streets, and I
suppose the strange fascination in the secrecy and mystery of so
following anyone, made me adhere to my first purpose. At length she
turned into a dull, dark street, where the noise and crowd were lost;
and I said, ‘We may speak to her now’; and, mending our pace, we went
after her.


CHAPTER 47. MARTHA


We were now down in Westminster. We had turned back to follow her,
having encountered her coming towards us; and Westminster Abbey was
the point at which she passed from the lights and noise of the leading
streets. She proceeded so quickly, when she got free of the two currents
of passengers setting towards and from the bridge, that, between this
and the advance she had of us when she struck off, we were in the narrow
water-side street by Millbank before we came up with her. At that moment
she crossed the road, as if to avoid the footsteps that she heard so
close behind; and, without looking back, passed on even more rapidly.

A glimpse of the river through a dull gateway, where some waggons were
housed for the night, seemed to arrest my feet. I touched my companion
without speaking, and we both forbore to cross after her, and both
followed on that opposite side of the way; keeping as quietly as we
could in the shadow of the houses, but keeping very near her.

There was, and is when I write, at the end of that low-lying street,
a dilapidated little wooden building, probably an obsolete old
ferry-house. Its position is just at that point where the street ceases,
and the road begins to lie between a row of houses and the river. As
soon as she came here, and saw the water, she stopped as if she had come
to her destination; and presently went slowly along by the brink of the
river, looking intently at it.

All the way here, I had supposed that she was going to some house;
indeed, I had vaguely entertained the hope that the house might be in
some way associated with the lost girl. But that one dark glimpse of the
river, through the gateway, had instinctively prepared me for her going
no farther.

The neighbourhood was a dreary one at that time; as oppressive, sad, and
solitary by night, as any about London. There were neither wharves nor
houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A
sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and
rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one
part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished,
rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron
monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles,
anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange
objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust,
underneath which--having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet
weather--they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves.
The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, arose
by night to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke that
poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among
old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like
green hair, and the rags of last year’s handbills offering rewards for
drowned men fluttering above high-water mark, led down through the ooze
and slush to the ebb-tide. There was a story that one of the pits
dug for the dead in the time of the Great Plague was hereabout; and
a blighting influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the whole
place. Or else it looked as if it had gradually decomposed into that
nightmare condition, out of the overflowings of the polluted stream.

As if she were a part of the refuse it had cast out, and left to
corruption and decay, the girl we had followed strayed down to the
river’s brink, and stood in the midst of this night-picture, lonely and
still, looking at the water.

There were some boats and barges astrand in the mud, and these enabled
us to come within a few yards of her without being seen. I then signed
to Mr. Peggotty to remain where he was, and emerged from their shade to
speak to her. I did not approach her solitary figure without trembling;
for this gloomy end to her determined walk, and the way in which she
stood, almost within the cavernous shadow of the iron bridge, looking
at the lights crookedly reflected in the strong tide, inspired a dread
within me.

I think she was talking to herself. I am sure, although absorbed in
gazing at the water, that her shawl was off her shoulders, and that she
was muffling her hands in it, in an unsettled and bewildered way, more
like the action of a sleep-walker than a waking person. I know, and
never can forget, that there was that in her wild manner which gave me
no assurance but that she would sink before my eyes, until I had her arm
within my grasp.

At the same moment I said ‘Martha!’

She uttered a terrified scream, and struggled with me with such strength
that I doubt if I could have held her alone. But a stronger hand than
mine was laid upon her; and when she raised her frightened eyes and saw
whose it was, she made but one more effort and dropped down between us.
We carried her away from the water to where there were some dry stones,
and there laid her down, crying and moaning. In a little while she sat
among the stones, holding her wretched head with both her hands.

‘Oh, the river!’ she cried passionately. ‘Oh, the river!’

‘Hush, hush!’ said I. ‘Calm yourself.’

But she still repeated the same words, continually exclaiming, ‘Oh, the
river!’ over and over again.

‘I know it’s like me!’ she exclaimed. ‘I know that I belong to it.
I know that it’s the natural company of such as I am! It comes from
country places, where there was once no harm in it--and it creeps
through the dismal streets, defiled and miserable--and it goes away,
like my life, to a great sea, that is always troubled--and I feel that
I must go with it!’ I have never known what despair was, except in the
tone of those words.

‘I can’t keep away from it. I can’t forget it. It haunts me day and
night. It’s the only thing in all the world that I am fit for, or that’s
fit for me. Oh, the dreadful river!’

The thought passed through my mind that in the face of my companion,
as he looked upon her without speech or motion, I might have read his
niece’s history, if I had known nothing of it. I never saw, in any
painting or reality, horror and compassion so impressively blended. He
shook as if he would have fallen; and his hand--I touched it with my
own, for his appearance alarmed me--was deadly cold.

‘She is in a state of frenzy,’ I whispered to him. ‘She will speak
differently in a little time.’

I don’t know what he would have said in answer. He made some motion with
his mouth, and seemed to think he had spoken; but he had only pointed to
her with his outstretched hand.

A new burst of crying came upon her now, in which she once more hid
her face among the stones, and lay before us, a prostrate image of
humiliation and ruin. Knowing that this state must pass, before we could
speak to her with any hope, I ventured to restrain him when he would
have raised her, and we stood by in silence until she became more
tranquil.

‘Martha,’ said I then, leaning down, and helping her to rise--she seemed
to want to rise as if with the intention of going away, but she was
weak, and leaned against a boat. ‘Do you know who this is, who is with
me?’

She said faintly, ‘Yes.’

‘Do you know that we have followed you a long way tonight?’

She shook her head. She looked neither at him nor at me, but stood in
a humble attitude, holding her bonnet and shawl in one hand, without
appearing conscious of them, and pressing the other, clenched, against
her forehead.

‘Are you composed enough,’ said I, ‘to speak on the subject which so
interested you--I hope Heaven may remember it!--that snowy night?’

Her sobs broke out afresh, and she murmured some inarticulate thanks to
me for not having driven her away from the door.

‘I want to say nothing for myself,’ she said, after a few moments. ‘I
am bad, I am lost. I have no hope at all. But tell him, sir,’ she had
shrunk away from him, ‘if you don’t feel too hard to me to do it, that
I never was in any way the cause of his misfortune.’ ‘It has never been
attributed to you,’ I returned, earnestly responding to her earnestness.

‘It was you, if I don’t deceive myself,’ she said, in a broken voice,
‘that came into the kitchen, the night she took such pity on me; was so
gentle to me; didn’t shrink away from me like all the rest, and gave me
such kind help! Was it you, sir?’

‘It was,’ said I.

‘I should have been in the river long ago,’ she said, glancing at it
with a terrible expression, ‘if any wrong to her had been upon my mind.
I never could have kept out of it a single winter’s night, if I had not
been free of any share in that!’

‘The cause of her flight is too well understood,’ I said. ‘You are
innocent of any part in it, we thoroughly believe,--we know.’

‘Oh, I might have been much the better for her, if I had had a better
heart!’ exclaimed the girl, with most forlorn regret; ‘for she was
always good to me! She never spoke a word to me but what was pleasant
and right. Is it likely I would try to make her what I am myself,
knowing what I am myself, so well? When I lost everything that makes
life dear, the worst of all my thoughts was that I was parted for ever
from her!’

Mr. Peggotty, standing with one hand on the gunwale of the boat, and his
eyes cast down, put his disengaged hand before his face.

‘And when I heard what had happened before that snowy night, from some
belonging to our town,’ cried Martha, ‘the bitterest thought in all my
mind was, that the people would remember she once kept company with me,
and would say I had corrupted her! When, Heaven knows, I would have died
to have brought back her good name!’

Long unused to any self-control, the piercing agony of her remorse and
grief was terrible.

‘To have died, would not have been much--what can I say?---I would
have lived!’ she cried. ‘I would have lived to be old, in the wretched
streets--and to wander about, avoided, in the dark--and to see the day
break on the ghastly line of houses, and remember how the same sun used
to shine into my room, and wake me once--I would have done even that, to
save her!’

Sinking on the stones, she took some in each hand, and clenched them
up, as if she would have ground them. She writhed into some new posture
constantly: stiffening her arms, twisting them before her face, as
though to shut out from her eyes the little light there was, and
drooping her head, as if it were heavy with insupportable recollections.

‘What shall I ever do!’ she said, fighting thus with her despair. ‘How
can I go on as I am, a solitary curse to myself, a living disgrace to
everyone I come near!’ Suddenly she turned to my companion. ‘Stamp upon
me, kill me! When she was your pride, you would have thought I had
done her harm if I had brushed against her in the street. You can’t
believe--why should you?---a syllable that comes out of my lips. It
would be a burning shame upon you, even now, if she and I exchanged a
word. I don’t complain. I don’t say she and I are alike--I know there
is a long, long way between us. I only say, with all my guilt and
wretchedness upon my head, that I am grateful to her from my soul, and
love her. Oh, don’t think that all the power I had of loving anything is
quite worn out! Throw me away, as all the world does. Kill me for being
what I am, and having ever known her; but don’t think that of me!’

He looked upon her, while she made this supplication, in a wild
distracted manner; and, when she was silent, gently raised her.

‘Martha,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘God forbid as I should judge you. Forbid
as I, of all men, should do that, my girl! You doen’t know half the
change that’s come, in course of time, upon me, when you think it
likely. Well!’ he paused a moment, then went on. ‘You doen’t understand
how ‘tis that this here gentleman and me has wished to speak to you. You
doen’t understand what ‘tis we has afore us. Listen now!’

His influence upon her was complete. She stood, shrinkingly, before him,
as if she were afraid to meet his eyes; but her passionate sorrow was
quite hushed and mute.

‘If you heerd,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘owt of what passed between Mas’r
Davy and me, th’ night when it snew so hard, you know as I have
been--wheer not--fur to seek my dear niece. My dear niece,’ he repeated
steadily. ‘Fur she’s more dear to me now, Martha, than she was dear
afore.’

She put her hands before her face; but otherwise remained quiet.

‘I have heerd her tell,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘as you was early left
fatherless and motherless, with no friend fur to take, in a rough
seafaring-way, their place. Maybe you can guess that if you’d had such
a friend, you’d have got into a way of being fond of him in course of
time, and that my niece was kiender daughter-like to me.’

As she was silently trembling, he put her shawl carefully about her,
taking it up from the ground for that purpose.

‘Whereby,’ said he, ‘I know, both as she would go to the wureld’s
furdest end with me, if she could once see me again; and that she would
fly to the wureld’s furdest end to keep off seeing me. For though she
ain’t no call to doubt my love, and doen’t--and doen’t,’ he repeated,
with a quiet assurance of the truth of what he said, ‘there’s shame
steps in, and keeps betwixt us.’

I read, in every word of his plain impressive way of delivering himself,
new evidence of his having thought of this one topic, in every feature
it presented.

‘According to our reckoning,’ he proceeded, ‘Mas’r Davy’s here, and
mine, she is like, one day, to make her own poor solitary course to
London. We believe--Mas’r Davy, me, and all of us--that you are as
innocent of everything that has befell her, as the unborn child. You’ve
spoke of her being pleasant, kind, and gentle to you. Bless her, I knew
she was! I knew she always was, to all. You’re thankful to her, and you
love her. Help us all you can to find her, and may Heaven reward you!’

She looked at him hastily, and for the first time, as if she were
doubtful of what he had said.

‘Will you trust me?’ she asked, in a low voice of astonishment.

‘Full and free!’ said Mr. Peggotty.

‘To speak to her, if I should ever find her; shelter her, if I have any
shelter to divide with her; and then, without her knowledge, come to
you, and bring you to her?’ she asked hurriedly.

We both replied together, ‘Yes!’

She lifted up her eyes, and solemnly declared that she would devote
herself to this task, fervently and faithfully. That she would never
waver in it, never be diverted from it, never relinquish it, while there
was any chance of hope. If she were not true to it, might the object
she now had in life, which bound her to something devoid of evil, in its
passing away from her, leave her more forlorn and more despairing, if
that were possible, than she had been upon the river’s brink that night;
and then might all help, human and Divine, renounce her evermore!

She did not raise her voice above her breath, or address us, but said
this to the night sky; then stood profoundly quiet, looking at the
gloomy water.

We judged it expedient, now, to tell her all we knew; which I recounted
at length. She listened with great attention, and with a face that often
changed, but had the same purpose in all its varying expressions. Her
eyes occasionally filled with tears, but those she repressed. It seemed
as if her spirit were quite altered, and she could not be too quiet.

She asked, when all was told, where we were to be communicated with, if
occasion should arise. Under a dull lamp in the road, I wrote our two
addresses on a leaf of my pocket-book, which I tore out and gave to
her, and which she put in her poor bosom. I asked her where she lived
herself. She said, after a pause, in no place long. It were better not
to know.

Mr. Peggotty suggesting to me, in a whisper, what had already occurred
to myself, I took out my purse; but I could not prevail upon her to
accept any money, nor could I exact any promise from her that she would
do so at another time. I represented to her that Mr. Peggotty could
not be called, for one in his condition, poor; and that the idea of her
engaging in this search, while depending on her own resources, shocked
us both. She continued steadfast. In this particular, his influence
upon her was equally powerless with mine. She gratefully thanked him but
remained inexorable.

‘There may be work to be got,’ she said. ‘I’ll try.’

‘At least take some assistance,’ I returned, ‘until you have tried.’

‘I could not do what I have promised, for money,’ she replied. ‘I could
not take it, if I was starving. To give me money would be to take away
your trust, to take away the object that you have given me, to take away
the only certain thing that saves me from the river.’

‘In the name of the great judge,’ said I, ‘before whom you and all of us
must stand at His dread time, dismiss that terrible idea! We can all do
some good, if we will.’

She trembled, and her lip shook, and her face was paler, as she
answered:

‘It has been put into your hearts, perhaps, to save a wretched creature
for repentance. I am afraid to think so; it seems too bold. If any good
should come of me, I might begin to hope; for nothing but harm has ever
come of my deeds yet. I am to be trusted, for the first time in a long
while, with my miserable life, on account of what you have given me to
try for. I know no more, and I can say no more.’

Again she repressed the tears that had begun to flow; and, putting out
her trembling hand, and touching Mr. Peggotty, as if there was some
healing virtue in him, went away along the desolate road. She had been
ill, probably for a long time. I observed, upon that closer opportunity
of observation, that she was worn and haggard, and that her sunken eyes
expressed privation and endurance.

We followed her at a short distance, our way lying in the same
direction, until we came back into the lighted and populous streets. I
had such implicit confidence in her declaration, that I then put it to
Mr. Peggotty, whether it would not seem, in the onset, like distrusting
her, to follow her any farther. He being of the same mind, and equally
reliant on her, we suffered her to take her own road, and took ours,
which was towards Highgate. He accompanied me a good part of the way;
and when we parted, with a prayer for the success of this fresh effort,
there was a new and thoughtful compassion in him that I was at no loss
to interpret.

It was midnight when I arrived at home. I had reached my own gate, and
was standing listening for the deep bell of St. Paul’s, the sound
of which I thought had been borne towards me among the multitude of
striking clocks, when I was rather surprised to see that the door of my
aunt’s cottage was open, and that a faint light in the entry was shining
out across the road.

Thinking that my aunt might have relapsed into one of her old alarms,
and might be watching the progress of some imaginary conflagration in
the distance, I went to speak to her. It was with very great surprise
that I saw a man standing in her little garden.

He had a glass and bottle in his hand, and was in the act of drinking. I
stopped short, among the thick foliage outside, for the moon was up now,
though obscured; and I recognized the man whom I had once supposed to be
a delusion of Mr. Dick’s, and had once encountered with my aunt in the
streets of the city.

He was eating as well as drinking, and seemed to eat with a hungry
appetite. He seemed curious regarding the cottage, too, as if it were
the first time he had seen it. After stooping to put the bottle on the
ground, he looked up at the windows, and looked about; though with a
covert and impatient air, as if he was anxious to be gone.

The light in the passage was obscured for a moment, and my aunt came
out. She was agitated, and told some money into his hand. I heard it
chink.

‘What’s the use of this?’ he demanded.

‘I can spare no more,’ returned my aunt.

‘Then I can’t go,’ said he. ‘Here! You may take it back!’

‘You bad man,’ returned my aunt, with great emotion; ‘how can you use me
so? But why do I ask? It is because you know how weak I am! What have
I to do, to free myself for ever of your visits, but to abandon you to
your deserts?’

‘And why don’t you abandon me to my deserts?’ said he.

‘You ask me why!’ returned my aunt. ‘What a heart you must have!’

He stood moodily rattling the money, and shaking his head, until at
length he said:

‘Is this all you mean to give me, then?’

‘It is all I CAN give you,’ said my aunt. ‘You know I have had losses,
and am poorer than I used to be. I have told you so. Having got it, why
do you give me the pain of looking at you for another moment, and seeing
what you have become?’

‘I have become shabby enough, if you mean that,’ he said. ‘I lead the
life of an owl.’

‘You stripped me of the greater part of all I ever had,’ said my aunt.
‘You closed my heart against the whole world, years and years. You
treated me falsely, ungratefully, and cruelly. Go, and repent of it.
Don’t add new injuries to the long, long list of injuries you have done
me!’

‘Aye!’ he returned. ‘It’s all very fine--Well! I must do the best I can,
for the present, I suppose.’

In spite of himself, he appeared abashed by my aunt’s indignant tears,
and came slouching out of the garden. Taking two or three quick steps,
as if I had just come up, I met him at the gate, and went in as he came
out. We eyed one another narrowly in passing, and with no favour.

‘Aunt,’ said I, hurriedly. ‘This man alarming you again! Let me speak to
him. Who is he?’

‘Child,’ returned my aunt, taking my arm, ‘come in, and don’t speak to
me for ten minutes.’

We sat down in her little parlour. My aunt retired behind the round
green fan of former days, which was screwed on the back of a chair, and
occasionally wiped her eyes, for about a quarter of an hour. Then she
came out, and took a seat beside me.

‘Trot,’ said my aunt, calmly, ‘it’s my husband.’

‘Your husband, aunt? I thought he had been dead!’

‘Dead to me,’ returned my aunt, ‘but living.’

I sat in silent amazement.

‘Betsey Trotwood don’t look a likely subject for the tender passion,’
said my aunt, composedly, ‘but the time was, Trot, when she believed in
that man most entirely. When she loved him, Trot, right well. When there
was no proof of attachment and affection that she would not have given
him. He repaid her by breaking her fortune, and nearly breaking her
heart. So she put all that sort of sentiment, once and for ever, in a
grave, and filled it up, and flattened it down.’

‘My dear, good aunt!’

‘I left him,’ my aunt proceeded, laying her hand as usual on the back of
mine, ‘generously. I may say at this distance of time, Trot, that I left
him generously. He had been so cruel to me, that I might have effected
a separation on easy terms for myself; but I did not. He soon made ducks
and drakes of what I gave him, sank lower and lower, married another
woman, I believe, became an adventurer, a gambler, and a cheat. What he
is now, you see. But he was a fine-looking man when I married him,’ said
my aunt, with an echo of her old pride and admiration in her tone; ‘and
I believed him--I was a fool!--to be the soul of honour!’

She gave my hand a squeeze, and shook her head.

‘He is nothing to me now, Trot--less than nothing. But, sooner than have
him punished for his offences (as he would be if he prowled about in
this country), I give him more money than I can afford, at intervals
when he reappears, to go away. I was a fool when I married him; and I am
so far an incurable fool on that subject, that, for the sake of what
I once believed him to be, I wouldn’t have even this shadow of my idle
fancy hardly dealt with. For I was in earnest, Trot, if ever a woman
was.’

My aunt dismissed the matter with a heavy sigh, and smoothed her dress.

‘There, my dear!’ she said. ‘Now you know the beginning, middle, and
end, and all about it. We won’t mention the subject to one another any
more; neither, of course, will you mention it to anybody else. This is
my grumpy, frumpy story, and we’ll keep it to ourselves, Trot!’



CHAPTER 48. DOMESTIC


I laboured hard at my book, without allowing it to interfere with the
punctual discharge of my newspaper duties; and it came out and was very
successful. I was not stunned by the praise which sounded in my ears,
notwithstanding that I was keenly alive to it, and thought better of
my own performance, I have little doubt, than anybody else did. It has
always been in my observation of human nature, that a man who has any
good reason to believe in himself never flourishes himself before the
faces of other people in order that they may believe in him. For this
reason, I retained my modesty in very self-respect; and the more praise
I got, the more I tried to deserve.

It is not my purpose, in this record, though in all other essentials
it is my written memory, to pursue the history of my own fictions. They
express themselves, and I leave them to themselves. When I refer to
them, incidentally, it is only as a part of my progress.

Having some foundation for believing, by this time, that nature and
accident had made me an author, I pursued my vocation with confidence.
Without such assurance I should certainly have left it alone, and
bestowed my energy on some other endeavour. I should have tried to find
out what nature and accident really had made me, and to be that, and
nothing else. I had been writing, in the newspaper and elsewhere, so
prosperously, that when my new success was achieved, I considered myself
reasonably entitled to escape from the dreary debates. One joyful night,
therefore, I noted down the music of the parliamentary bagpipes for the
last time, and I have never heard it since; though I still recognize the
old drone in the newspapers, without any substantial variation (except,
perhaps, that there is more of it), all the livelong session.

I now write of the time when I had been married, I suppose, about a year
and a half. After several varieties of experiment, we had given up the
housekeeping as a bad job. The house kept itself, and we kept a page.
The principal function of this retainer was to quarrel with the cook;
in which respect he was a perfect Whittington, without his cat, or the
remotest chance of being made Lord Mayor.

He appears to me to have lived in a hail of saucepan-lids. His whole
existence was a scuffle. He would shriek for help on the most improper
occasions,--as when we had a little dinner-party, or a few friends in
the evening,--and would come tumbling out of the kitchen, with iron
missiles flying after him. We wanted to get rid of him, but he was very
much attached to us, and wouldn’t go. He was a tearful boy, and broke
into such deplorable lamentations, when a cessation of our connexion
was hinted at, that we were obliged to keep him. He had no mother--no
anything in the way of a relative, that I could discover, except a
sister, who fled to America the moment we had taken him off her hands;
and he became quartered on us like a horrible young changeling. He had
a lively perception of his own unfortunate state, and was always rubbing
his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket, or stooping to blow his nose on
the extreme corner of a little pocket-handkerchief, which he never would
take completely out of his pocket, but always economized and secreted.

This unlucky page, engaged in an evil hour at six pounds ten per annum,
was a source of continual trouble to me. I watched him as he grew--and
he grew like scarlet beans--with painful apprehensions of the time when
he would begin to shave; even of the days when he would be bald or grey.
I saw no prospect of ever getting rid of him; and, projecting myself
into the future, used to think what an inconvenience he would be when he
was an old man.

I never expected anything less, than this unfortunate’s manner of
getting me out of my difficulty. He stole Dora’s watch, which, like
everything else belonging to us, had no particular place of its own;
and, converting it into money, spent the produce (he was always a
weak-minded boy) in incessantly riding up and down between London and
Uxbridge outside the coach. He was taken to Bow Street, as well as
I remember, on the completion of his fifteenth journey; when
four-and-sixpence, and a second-hand fife which he couldn’t play, were
found upon his person.

The surprise and its consequences would have been much less disagreeable
to me if he had not been penitent. But he was very penitent indeed, and
in a peculiar way--not in the lump, but by instalments. For example:
the day after that on which I was obliged to appear against him, he made
certain revelations touching a hamper in the cellar, which we believed
to be full of wine, but which had nothing in it except bottles and
corks. We supposed he had now eased his mind, and told the worst he knew
of the cook; but, a day or two afterwards, his conscience sustained a
new twinge, and he disclosed how she had a little girl, who, early every
morning, took away our bread; and also how he himself had been suborned
to maintain the milkman in coals. In two or three days more, I was
informed by the authorities of his having led to the discovery of
sirloins of beef among the kitchen-stuff, and sheets in the rag-bag. A
little while afterwards, he broke out in an entirely new direction, and
confessed to a knowledge of burglarious intentions as to our premises,
on the part of the pot-boy, who was immediately taken up. I got to be so
ashamed of being such a victim, that I would have given him any money
to hold his tongue, or would have offered a round bribe for his being
permitted to run away. It was an aggravating circumstance in the case
that he had no idea of this, but conceived that he was making me amends
in every new discovery: not to say, heaping obligations on my head.

At last I ran away myself, whenever I saw an emissary of the police
approaching with some new intelligence; and lived a stealthy life until
he was tried and ordered to be transported. Even then he couldn’t be
quiet, but was always writing us letters; and wanted so much to see Dora
before he went away, that Dora went to visit him, and fainted when she
found herself inside the iron bars. In short, I had no peace of my life
until he was expatriated, and made (as I afterwards heard) a shepherd
of, ‘up the country’ somewhere; I have no geographical idea where.

All this led me into some serious reflections, and presented our
mistakes in a new aspect; as I could not help communicating to Dora one
evening, in spite of my tenderness for her.

‘My love,’ said I, ‘it is very painful to me to think that our want of
system and management, involves not only ourselves (which we have got
used to), but other people.’

‘You have been silent for a long time, and now you are going to be
cross!’ said Dora.

‘No, my dear, indeed! Let me explain to you what I mean.’

‘I think I don’t want to know,’ said Dora.

‘But I want you to know, my love. Put Jip down.’

Dora put his nose to mine, and said ‘Boh!’ to drive my seriousness away;
but, not succeeding, ordered him into his Pagoda, and sat looking at
me, with her hands folded, and a most resigned little expression of
countenance.

‘The fact is, my dear,’ I began, ‘there is contagion in us. We infect
everyone about us.’

I might have gone on in this figurative manner, if Dora’s face had not
admonished me that she was wondering with all her might whether I was
going to propose any new kind of vaccination, or other medical remedy,
for this unwholesome state of ours. Therefore I checked myself, and made
my meaning plainer.

‘It is not merely, my pet,’ said I, ‘that we lose money and comfort, and
even temper sometimes, by not learning to be more careful; but that we
incur the serious responsibility of spoiling everyone who comes into
our service, or has any dealings with us. I begin to be afraid that the
fault is not entirely on one side, but that these people all turn out
ill because we don’t turn out very well ourselves.’

‘Oh, what an accusation,’ exclaimed Dora, opening her eyes wide; ‘to say
that you ever saw me take gold watches! Oh!’

‘My dearest,’ I remonstrated, ‘don’t talk preposterous nonsense! Who has
made the least allusion to gold watches?’

‘You did,’ returned Dora. ‘You know you did. You said I hadn’t turned
out well, and compared me to him.’

‘To whom?’ I asked.

‘To the page,’ sobbed Dora. ‘Oh, you cruel fellow, to compare your
affectionate wife to a transported page! Why didn’t you tell me
your opinion of me before we were married? Why didn’t you say,
you hard-hearted thing, that you were convinced I was worse than a
transported page? Oh, what a dreadful opinion to have of me! Oh, my
goodness!’

‘Now, Dora, my love,’ I returned, gently trying to remove the
handkerchief she pressed to her eyes, ‘this is not only very ridiculous
of you, but very wrong. In the first place, it’s not true.’

‘You always said he was a story-teller,’ sobbed Dora. ‘And now you say
the same of me! Oh, what shall I do! What shall I do!’

‘My darling girl,’ I retorted, ‘I really must entreat you to be
reasonable, and listen to what I did say, and do say. My dear Dora,
unless we learn to do our duty to those whom we employ, they will never
learn to do their duty to us. I am afraid we present opportunities to
people to do wrong, that never ought to be presented. Even if we were
as lax as we are, in all our arrangements, by choice--which we are
not--even if we liked it, and found it agreeable to be so--which we
don’t--I am persuaded we should have no right to go on in this way. We
are positively corrupting people. We are bound to think of that. I can’t
help thinking of it, Dora. It is a reflection I am unable to dismiss,
and it sometimes makes me very uneasy. There, dear, that’s all. Come
now. Don’t be foolish!’

Dora would not allow me, for a long time, to remove the handkerchief.
She sat sobbing and murmuring behind it, that, if I was uneasy, why had
I ever been married? Why hadn’t I said, even the day before we went to
church, that I knew I should be uneasy, and I would rather not? If I
couldn’t bear her, why didn’t I send her away to her aunts at Putney, or
to Julia Mills in India? Julia would be glad to see her, and would not
call her a transported page; Julia never had called her anything of the
sort. In short, Dora was so afflicted, and so afflicted me by being
in that condition, that I felt it was of no use repeating this kind of
effort, though never so mildly, and I must take some other course.

What other course was left to take? To ‘form her mind’? This was a
common phrase of words which had a fair and promising sound, and I
resolved to form Dora’s mind.

I began immediately. When Dora was very childish, and I would
have infinitely preferred to humour her, I tried to be grave--and
disconcerted her, and myself too. I talked to her on the subjects which
occupied my thoughts; and I read Shakespeare to her--and fatigued her
to the last degree. I accustomed myself to giving her, as it were quite
casually, little scraps of useful information, or sound opinion--and she
started from them when I let them off, as if they had been crackers.
No matter how incidentally or naturally I endeavoured to form my little
wife’s mind, I could not help seeing that she always had an instinctive
perception of what I was about, and became a prey to the keenest
apprehensions. In particular, it was clear to me, that she thought
Shakespeare a terrible fellow. The formation went on very slowly.

I pressed Traddles into the service without his knowledge; and whenever
he came to see us, exploded my mines upon him for the edification of
Dora at second hand. The amount of practical wisdom I bestowed upon
Traddles in this manner was immense, and of the best quality; but it
had no other effect upon Dora than to depress her spirits, and make her
always nervous with the dread that it would be her turn next. I found
myself in the condition of a schoolmaster, a trap, a pitfall; of always
playing spider to Dora’s fly, and always pouncing out of my hole to her
infinite disturbance.

Still, looking forward through this intermediate stage, to the time
when there should be a perfect sympathy between Dora and me, and when I
should have ‘formed her mind’ to my entire satisfaction, I persevered,
even for months. Finding at last, however, that, although I had been
all this time a very porcupine or hedgehog, bristling all over with
determination, I had effected nothing, it began to occur to me that
perhaps Dora’s mind was already formed.

On further consideration this appeared so likely, that I abandoned
my scheme, which had had a more promising appearance in words than in
action; resolving henceforth to be satisfied with my child-wife, and to
try to change her into nothing else by any process. I was heartily tired
of being sagacious and prudent by myself, and of seeing my darling under
restraint; so I bought a pretty pair of ear-rings for her, and a collar
for Jip, and went home one day to make myself agreeable.

Dora was delighted with the little presents, and kissed me joyfully; but
there was a shadow between us, however slight, and I had made up my mind
that it should not be there. If there must be such a shadow anywhere, I
would keep it for the future in my own breast.

I sat down by my wife on the sofa, and put the ear-rings in her ears;
and then I told her that I feared we had not been quite as good company
lately, as we used to be, and that the fault was mine. Which I sincerely
felt, and which indeed it was.

‘The truth is, Dora, my life,’ I said; ‘I have been trying to be wise.’

‘And to make me wise too,’ said Dora, timidly. ‘Haven’t you, Doady?’

I nodded assent to the pretty inquiry of the raised eyebrows, and kissed
the parted lips.

‘It’s of not a bit of use,’ said Dora, shaking her head, until the
ear-rings rang again. ‘You know what a little thing I am, and what I
wanted you to call me from the first. If you can’t do so, I am afraid
you’ll never like me. Are you sure you don’t think, sometimes, it would
have been better to have--’

‘Done what, my dear?’ For she made no effort to proceed.

‘Nothing!’ said Dora.

‘Nothing?’ I repeated.

She put her arms round my neck, and laughed, and called herself by her
favourite name of a goose, and hid her face on my shoulder in such a
profusion of curls that it was quite a task to clear them away and see
it.

‘Don’t I think it would have been better to have done nothing, than to
have tried to form my little wife’s mind?’ said I, laughing at myself.
‘Is that the question? Yes, indeed, I do.’

‘Is that what you have been trying?’ cried Dora. ‘Oh what a shocking
boy!’

‘But I shall never try any more,’ said I. ‘For I love her dearly as she
is.’

‘Without a story--really?’ inquired Dora, creeping closer to me.

‘Why should I seek to change,’ said I, ‘what has been so precious to me
for so long! You never can show better than as your own natural self, my
sweet Dora; and we’ll try no conceited experiments, but go back to our
old way, and be happy.’

‘And be happy!’ returned Dora. ‘Yes! All day! And you won’t mind things
going a tiny morsel wrong, sometimes?’

‘No, no,’ said I. ‘We must do the best we can.’

‘And you won’t tell me, any more, that we make other people bad,’ coaxed
Dora; ‘will you? Because you know it’s so dreadfully cross!’

‘No, no,’ said I.

‘It’s better for me to be stupid than uncomfortable, isn’t it?’ said
Dora.

‘Better to be naturally Dora than anything else in the world.’

‘In the world! Ah, Doady, it’s a large place!’

She shook her head, turned her delighted bright eyes up to mine, kissed
me, broke into a merry laugh, and sprang away to put on Jip’s new
collar.

So ended my last attempt to make any change in Dora. I had been unhappy
in trying it; I could not endure my own solitary wisdom; I could not
reconcile it with her former appeal to me as my child-wife. I resolved
to do what I could, in a quiet way, to improve our proceedings myself,
but I foresaw that my utmost would be very little, or I must degenerate
into the spider again, and be for ever lying in wait.

And the shadow I have mentioned, that was not to be between us any more,
but was to rest wholly on my own heart? How did that fall?

The old unhappy feeling pervaded my life. It was deepened, if it were
changed at all; but it was as undefined as ever, and addressed me like
a strain of sorrowful music faintly heard in the night. I loved my wife
dearly, and I was happy; but the happiness I had vaguely anticipated,
once, was not the happiness I enjoyed, and there was always something
wanting.

In fulfilment of the compact I have made with myself, to reflect my mind
on this paper, I again examine it, closely, and bring its secrets to the
light. What I missed, I still regarded--I always regarded--as something
that had been a dream of my youthful fancy; that was incapable of
realization; that I was now discovering to be so, with some natural
pain, as all men did. But that it would have been better for me if my
wife could have helped me more, and shared the many thoughts in which I
had no partner; and that this might have been; I knew.

Between these two irreconcilable conclusions: the one, that what I felt
was general and unavoidable; the other, that it was particular to me,
and might have been different: I balanced curiously, with no distinct
sense of their opposition to each other. When I thought of the airy
dreams of youth that are incapable of realization, I thought of the
better state preceding manhood that I had outgrown; and then the
contented days with Agnes, in the dear old house, arose before me, like
spectres of the dead, that might have some renewal in another world, but
never more could be reanimated here.

Sometimes, the speculation came into my thoughts, What might have
happened, or what would have happened, if Dora and I had never known
each other? But she was so incorporated with my existence, that it
was the idlest of all fancies, and would soon rise out of my reach and
sight, like gossamer floating in the air.

I always loved her. What I am describing, slumbered, and half awoke, and
slept again, in the innermost recesses of my mind. There was no evidence
of it in me; I know of no influence it had in anything I said or did. I
bore the weight of all our little cares, and all my projects; Dora held
the pens; and we both felt that our shares were adjusted as the case
required. She was truly fond of me, and proud of me; and when Agnes
wrote a few earnest words in her letters to Dora, of the pride and
interest with which my old friends heard of my growing reputation, and
read my book as if they heard me speaking its contents, Dora read them
out to me with tears of joy in her bright eyes, and said I was a dear
old clever, famous boy.

‘The first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart.’ Those words of
Mrs. Strong’s were constantly recurring to me, at this time; were almost
always present to my mind. I awoke with them, often, in the night; I
remember to have even read them, in dreams, inscribed upon the walls
of houses. For I knew, now, that my own heart was undisciplined when it
first loved Dora; and that if it had been disciplined, it never
could have felt, when we were married, what it had felt in its secret
experience.

‘There can be no disparity in marriage, like unsuitability of mind and
purpose.’ Those words I remembered too. I had endeavoured to adapt
Dora to myself, and found it impracticable. It remained for me to adapt
myself to Dora; to share with her what I could, and be happy; to bear
on my own shoulders what I must, and be happy still. This was the
discipline to which I tried to bring my heart, when I began to think.
It made my second year much happier than my first; and, what was better
still, made Dora’s life all sunshine.

But, as that year wore on, Dora was not strong. I had hoped that lighter
hands than mine would help to mould her character, and that a baby-smile
upon her breast might change my child-wife to a woman. It was not to be.
The spirit fluttered for a moment on the threshold of its little prison,
and, unconscious of captivity, took wing.

‘When I can run about again, as I used to do, aunt,’ said Dora, ‘I shall
make Jip race. He is getting quite slow and lazy.’

‘I suspect, my dear,’ said my aunt quietly working by her side, ‘he has
a worse disorder than that. Age, Dora.’

‘Do you think he is old?’ said Dora, astonished. ‘Oh, how strange it
seems that Jip should be old!’

‘It’s a complaint we are all liable to, Little One, as we get on in
life,’ said my aunt, cheerfully; ‘I don’t feel more free from it than I
used to be, I assure you.’

‘But Jip,’ said Dora, looking at him with compassion, ‘even little Jip!
Oh, poor fellow!’

‘I dare say he’ll last a long time yet, Blossom,’ said my aunt, patting
Dora on the cheek, as she leaned out of her couch to look at Jip, who
responded by standing on his hind legs, and baulking himself in various
asthmatic attempts to scramble up by the head and shoulders. ‘He must
have a piece of flannel in his house this winter, and I shouldn’t wonder
if he came out quite fresh again, with the flowers in the spring. Bless
the little dog!’ exclaimed my aunt, ‘if he had as many lives as a cat,
and was on the point of losing ‘em all, he’d bark at me with his last
breath, I believe!’

Dora had helped him up on the sofa; where he really was defying my aunt
to such a furious extent, that he couldn’t keep straight, but barked
himself sideways. The more my aunt looked at him, the more he reproached
her; for she had lately taken to spectacles, and for some inscrutable
reason he considered the glasses personal.

Dora made him lie down by her, with a good deal of persuasion; and when
he was quiet, drew one of his long ears through and through her hand,
repeating thoughtfully, ‘Even little Jip! Oh, poor fellow!’

‘His lungs are good enough,’ said my aunt, gaily, ‘and his dislikes are
not at all feeble. He has a good many years before him, no doubt. But if
you want a dog to race with, Little Blossom, he has lived too well for
that, and I’ll give you one.’

‘Thank you, aunt,’ said Dora, faintly. ‘But don’t, please!’

‘No?’ said my aunt, taking off her spectacles.

‘I couldn’t have any other dog but Jip,’ said Dora. ‘It would be so
unkind to Jip! Besides, I couldn’t be such friends with any other dog
but Jip; because he wouldn’t have known me before I was married,
and wouldn’t have barked at Doady when he first came to our house. I
couldn’t care for any other dog but Jip, I am afraid, aunt.’

‘To be sure!’ said my aunt, patting her cheek again. ‘You are right.’

‘You are not offended,’ said Dora. ‘Are you?’

‘Why, what a sensitive pet it is!’ cried my aunt, bending over her
affectionately. ‘To think that I could be offended!’

‘No, no, I didn’t really think so,’ returned Dora; ‘but I am a little
tired, and it made me silly for a moment--I am always a silly little
thing, you know, but it made me more silly--to talk about Jip. He
has known me in all that has happened to me, haven’t you, Jip? And I
couldn’t bear to slight him, because he was a little altered--could I,
Jip?’

Jip nestled closer to his mistress, and lazily licked her hand.

‘You are not so old, Jip, are you, that you’ll leave your mistress yet?’
said Dora. ‘We may keep one another company a little longer!’

My pretty Dora! When she came down to dinner on the ensuing Sunday, and
was so glad to see old Traddles (who always dined with us on Sunday), we
thought she would be ‘running about as she used to do’, in a few days.
But they said, wait a few days more; and then, wait a few days more; and
still she neither ran nor walked. She looked very pretty, and was very
merry; but the little feet that used to be so nimble when they danced
round Jip, were dull and motionless.

I began to carry her downstairs every morning, and upstairs every night.
She would clasp me round the neck and laugh, the while, as if I did it
for a wager. Jip would bark and caper round us, and go on before, and
look back on the landing, breathing short, to see that we were coming.
My aunt, the best and most cheerful of nurses, would trudge after us, a
moving mass of shawls and pillows. Mr. Dick would not have relinquished
his post of candle-bearer to anyone alive. Traddles would be often at
the bottom of the staircase, looking on, and taking charge of sportive
messages from Dora to the dearest girl in the world. We made quite a gay
procession of it, and my child-wife was the gayest there.

But, sometimes, when I took her up, and felt that she was lighter in
my arms, a dead blank feeling came upon me, as if I were approaching
to some frozen region yet unseen, that numbed my life. I avoided the
recognition of this feeling by any name, or by any communing with
myself; until one night, when it was very strong upon me, and my aunt
had left her with a parting cry of ‘Good night, Little Blossom,’ I sat
down at my desk alone, and tried to think, Oh what a fatal name it was,
and how the blossom withered in its bloom upon the tree!


CHAPTER 49. I AM INVOLVED IN MYSTERY


I received one morning by the post, the following letter, dated
Canterbury, and addressed to me at Doctor’s Commons; which I read with
some surprise:


‘MY DEAR SIR,

‘Circumstances beyond my individual control have, for a considerable
lapse of time, effected a severance of that intimacy which, in the
limited opportunities conceded to me in the midst of my professional
duties, of contemplating the scenes and events of the past, tinged by
the prismatic hues of memory, has ever afforded me, as it ever must
continue to afford, gratifying emotions of no common description. This
fact, my dear sir, combined with the distinguished elevation to which
your talents have raised you, deters me from presuming to aspire to
the liberty of addressing the companion of my youth, by the familiar
appellation of Copperfield! It is sufficient to know that the name to
which I do myself the honour to refer, will ever be treasured among
the muniments of our house (I allude to the archives connected with our
former lodgers, preserved by Mrs. Micawber), with sentiments of personal
esteem amounting to affection.

‘It is not for one, situated, through his original errors and a
fortuitous combination of unpropitious events, as is the foundered Bark
(if he may be allowed to assume so maritime a denomination), who
now takes up the pen to address you--it is not, I repeat, for one
so circumstanced, to adopt the language of compliment, or of
congratulation. That he leaves to abler and to purer hands.

‘If your more important avocations should admit of your ever tracing
these imperfect characters thus far--which may be, or may not be, as
circumstances arise--you will naturally inquire by what object am I
influenced, then, in inditing the present missive? Allow me to say that
I fully defer to the reasonable character of that inquiry, and proceed
to develop it; premising that it is not an object of a pecuniary nature.

‘Without more directly referring to any latent ability that may
possibly exist on my part, of wielding the thunderbolt, or directing
the devouring and avenging flame in any quarter, I may be permitted
to observe, in passing, that my brightest visions are for ever
dispelled--that my peace is shattered and my power of enjoyment
destroyed--that my heart is no longer in the right place--and that I no
more walk erect before my fellow man. The canker is in the flower.
The cup is bitter to the brim. The worm is at his work, and will soon
dispose of his victim. The sooner the better. But I will not digress.
‘Placed in a mental position of peculiar painfulness, beyond the
assuaging reach even of Mrs. Micawber’s influence, though exercised in
the tripartite character of woman, wife, and mother, it is my intention
to fly from myself for a short period, and devote a respite of
eight-and-forty hours to revisiting some metropolitan scenes of past
enjoyment. Among other havens of domestic tranquillity and peace of
mind, my feet will naturally tend towards the King’s Bench Prison. In
stating that I shall be (D. V.) on the outside of the south wall of
that place of incarceration on civil process, the day after tomorrow,
at seven in the evening, precisely, my object in this epistolary
communication is accomplished.

‘I do not feel warranted in soliciting my former friend Mr. Copperfield,
or my former friend Mr. Thomas Traddles of the Inner Temple, if that
gentleman is still existent and forthcoming, to condescend to meet me,
and renew (so far as may be) our past relations of the olden time. I
confine myself to throwing out the observation, that, at the hour and
place I have indicated, may be found such ruined vestiges as yet

               ‘Remain,
                    ‘Of
                         ‘A
                              ‘Fallen Tower,
                                   ‘WILKINS MICAWBER.

‘P.S. It may be advisable to superadd to the above, the statement that
Mrs. Micawber is not in confidential possession of my intentions.’


I read the letter over several times. Making due allowance for Mr.
Micawber’s lofty style of composition, and for the extraordinary relish
with which he sat down and wrote long letters on all possible and
impossible occasions, I still believed that something important lay
hidden at the bottom of this roundabout communication. I put it down,
to think about it; and took it up again, to read it once more; and
was still pursuing it, when Traddles found me in the height of my
perplexity.

‘My dear fellow,’ said I, ‘I never was better pleased to see you. You
come to give me the benefit of your sober judgement at a most opportune
time. I have received a very singular letter, Traddles, from Mr.
Micawber.’

‘No?’ cried Traddles. ‘You don’t say so? And I have received one from
Mrs. Micawber!’

With that, Traddles, who was flushed with walking, and whose hair, under
the combined effects of exercise and excitement, stood on end as if he
saw a cheerful ghost, produced his letter and made an exchange with me.
I watched him into the heart of Mr. Micawber’s letter, and returned the
elevation of eyebrows with which he said “‘Wielding the thunderbolt,
or directing the devouring and avenging flame!” Bless me,
Copperfield!’--and then entered on the perusal of Mrs. Micawber’s
epistle.

It ran thus:


‘My best regards to Mr. Thomas Traddles, and if he should still remember
one who formerly had the happiness of being well acquainted with him,
may I beg a few moments of his leisure time? I assure Mr. T. T. that I
would not intrude upon his kindness, were I in any other position than
on the confines of distraction.

‘Though harrowing to myself to mention, the alienation of Mr. Micawber
(formerly so domesticated) from his wife and family, is the cause of my
addressing my unhappy appeal to Mr. Traddles, and soliciting his best
indulgence. Mr. T. can form no adequate idea of the change in Mr.
Micawber’s conduct, of his wildness, of his violence. It has gradually
augmented, until it assumes the appearance of aberration of intellect.
Scarcely a day passes, I assure Mr. Traddles, on which some paroxysm
does not take place. Mr. T. will not require me to depict my feelings,
when I inform him that I have become accustomed to hear Mr. Micawber
assert that he has sold himself to the D. Mystery and secrecy have
long been his principal characteristic, have long replaced unlimited
confidence. The slightest provocation, even being asked if there is
anything he would prefer for dinner, causes him to express a wish for a
separation. Last night, on being childishly solicited for twopence, to
buy ‘lemon-stunners’--a local sweetmeat--he presented an oyster-knife at
the twins!

‘I entreat Mr. Traddles to bear with me in entering into these details.
Without them, Mr. T. would indeed find it difficult to form the faintest
conception of my heart-rending situation.

‘May I now venture to confide to Mr. T. the purport of my letter? Will
he now allow me to throw myself on his friendly consideration? Oh yes,
for I know his heart!

‘The quick eye of affection is not easily blinded, when of the female
sex. Mr. Micawber is going to London. Though he studiously concealed his
hand, this morning before breakfast, in writing the direction-card which
he attached to the little brown valise of happier days, the eagle-glance
of matrimonial anxiety detected, d, o, n, distinctly traced. The
West-End destination of the coach, is the Golden Cross. Dare I fervently
implore Mr. T. to see my misguided husband, and to reason with him?
Dare I ask Mr. T. to endeavour to step in between Mr. Micawber and his
agonized family? Oh no, for that would be too much!

‘If Mr. Copperfield should yet remember one unknown to fame, will Mr.
T. take charge of my unalterable regards and similar entreaties? In
any case, he will have the benevolence to consider this communication
strictly private, and on no account whatever to be alluded to, however
distantly, in the presence of Mr. Micawber. If Mr. T. should ever
reply to it (which I cannot but feel to be most improbable), a letter
addressed to M. E., Post Office, Canterbury, will be fraught with
less painful consequences than any addressed immediately to one, who
subscribes herself, in extreme distress,

‘Mr. Thomas Traddles’s respectful friend and suppliant,

                                   ‘EMMA MICAWBER.’


‘What do you think of that letter?’ said Traddles, casting his eyes upon
me, when I had read it twice.

‘What do you think of the other?’ said I. For he was still reading it
with knitted brows.

‘I think that the two together, Copperfield,’ replied Traddles,
‘mean more than Mr. and Mrs. Micawber usually mean in their
correspondence--but I don’t know what. They are both written in good
faith, I have no doubt, and without any collusion. Poor thing!’ he was
now alluding to Mrs. Micawber’s letter, and we were standing side by
side comparing the two; ‘it will be a charity to write to her, at all
events, and tell her that we will not fail to see Mr. Micawber.’

I acceded to this the more readily, because I now reproached myself with
having treated her former letter rather lightly. It had set me thinking
a good deal at the time, as I have mentioned in its place; but my
absorption in my own affairs, my experience of the family, and my
hearing nothing more, had gradually ended in my dismissing the subject.
I had often thought of the Micawbers, but chiefly to wonder what
‘pecuniary liabilities’ they were establishing in Canterbury, and to
recall how shy Mr. Micawber was of me when he became clerk to Uriah
Heep.

However, I now wrote a comforting letter to Mrs. Micawber, in our
joint names, and we both signed it. As we walked into town to post it,
Traddles and I held a long conference, and launched into a number of
speculations, which I need not repeat. We took my aunt into our counsels
in the afternoon; but our only decided conclusion was, that we would be
very punctual in keeping Mr. Micawber’s appointment.

Although we appeared at the stipulated place a quarter of an hour before
the time, we found Mr. Micawber already there. He was standing with his
arms folded, over against the wall, looking at the spikes on the top,
with a sentimental expression, as if they were the interlacing boughs of
trees that had shaded him in his youth.

When we accosted him, his manner was something more confused, and
something less genteel, than of yore. He had relinquished his legal suit
of black for the purposes of this excursion, and wore the old surtout
and tights, but not quite with the old air. He gradually picked up more
and more of it as we conversed with him; but, his very eye-glass seemed
to hang less easily, and his shirt-collar, though still of the old
formidable dimensions, rather drooped.

‘Gentlemen!’ said Mr. Micawber, after the first salutations, ‘you are
friends in need, and friends indeed. Allow me to offer my inquiries with
reference to the physical welfare of Mrs. Copperfield in esse, and
Mrs. Traddles in posse,--presuming, that is to say, that my friend Mr.
Traddles is not yet united to the object of his affections, for weal and
for woe.’

We acknowledged his politeness, and made suitable replies. He then
directed our attention to the wall, and was beginning, ‘I assure you,
gentlemen,’ when I ventured to object to that ceremonious form of
address, and to beg that he would speak to us in the old way.

‘My dear Copperfield,’ he returned, pressing my hand, ‘your cordiality
overpowers me. This reception of a shattered fragment of the Temple once
called Man--if I may be permitted so to express myself--bespeaks a heart
that is an honour to our common nature. I was about to observe that
I again behold the serene spot where some of the happiest hours of my
existence fleeted by.’

‘Made so, I am sure, by Mrs. Micawber,’ said I. ‘I hope she is well?’

‘Thank you,’ returned Mr. Micawber, whose face clouded at this
reference, ‘she is but so-so. And this,’ said Mr. Micawber, nodding
his head sorrowfully, ‘is the Bench! Where, for the first time in many
revolving years, the overwhelming pressure of pecuniary liabilities was
not proclaimed, from day to day, by importune voices declining to vacate
the passage; where there was no knocker on the door for any creditor
to appeal to; where personal service of process was not required, and
detainees were merely lodged at the gate! Gentlemen,’ said Mr. Micawber,
‘when the shadow of that iron-work on the summit of the brick structure
has been reflected on the gravel of the Parade, I have seen my children
thread the mazes of the intricate pattern, avoiding the dark marks. I
have been familiar with every stone in the place. If I betray weakness,
you will know how to excuse me.’

‘We have all got on in life since then, Mr. Micawber,’ said I.

‘Mr. Copperfield,’ returned Mr. Micawber, bitterly, ‘when I was an
inmate of that retreat I could look my fellow-man in the face, and punch
his head if he offended me. My fellow-man and myself are no longer on
those glorious terms!’

Turning from the building in a downcast manner, Mr. Micawber accepted
my proffered arm on one side, and the proffered arm of Traddles on the
other, and walked away between us.

‘There are some landmarks,’ observed Mr. Micawber, looking fondly back
over his shoulder, ‘on the road to the tomb, which, but for the impiety
of the aspiration, a man would wish never to have passed. Such is the
Bench in my chequered career.’

‘Oh, you are in low spirits, Mr. Micawber,’ said Traddles.

‘I am, sir,’ interposed Mr. Micawber.

‘I hope,’ said Traddles, ‘it is not because you have conceived a dislike
to the law--for I am a lawyer myself, you know.’

Mr. Micawber answered not a word.

‘How is our friend Heep, Mr. Micawber?’ said I, after a silence.

‘My dear Copperfield,’ returned Mr. Micawber, bursting into a state of
much excitement, and turning pale, ‘if you ask after my employer as
YOUR friend, I am sorry for it; if you ask after him as MY friend,
I sardonically smile at it. In whatever capacity you ask after my
employer, I beg, without offence to you, to limit my reply to this--that
whatever his state of health may be, his appearance is foxy: not to
say diabolical. You will allow me, as a private individual, to
decline pursuing a subject which has lashed me to the utmost verge of
desperation in my professional capacity.’

I expressed my regret for having innocently touched upon a theme
that roused him so much. ‘May I ask,’ said I, ‘without any hazard of
repeating the mistake, how my old friends Mr. and Miss Wickfield are?’

‘Miss Wickfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, now turning red, ‘is, as she always
is, a pattern, and a bright example. My dear Copperfield, she is the
only starry spot in a miserable existence. My respect for that young
lady, my admiration of her character, my devotion to her for her love
and truth, and goodness!--Take me,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘down a turning,
for, upon my soul, in my present state of mind I am not equal to this!’

We wheeled him off into a narrow street, where he took out his
pocket-handkerchief, and stood with his back to a wall. If I looked as
gravely at him as Traddles did, he must have found our company by no
means inspiriting.

‘It is my fate,’ said Mr. Micawber, unfeignedly sobbing, but doing even
that, with a shadow of the old expression of doing something genteel;
‘it is my fate, gentlemen, that the finer feelings of our nature have
become reproaches to me. My homage to Miss Wickfield, is a flight of
arrows in my bosom. You had better leave me, if you please, to walk the
earth as a vagabond. The worm will settle my business in double-quick
time.’

Without attending to this invocation, we stood by, until he put up his
pocket-handkerchief, pulled up his shirt-collar, and, to delude any
person in the neighbourhood who might have been observing him, hummed a
tune with his hat very much on one side. I then mentioned--not knowing
what might be lost if we lost sight of him yet--that it would give me
great pleasure to introduce him to my aunt, if he would ride out to
Highgate, where a bed was at his service.

‘You shall make us a glass of your own punch, Mr. Micawber,’ said
I, ‘and forget whatever you have on your mind, in pleasanter
reminiscences.’

‘Or, if confiding anything to friends will be more likely to relieve
you, you shall impart it to us, Mr. Micawber,’ said Traddles, prudently.

‘Gentlemen,’ returned Mr. Micawber, ‘do with me as you will! I am a
straw upon the surface of the deep, and am tossed in all directions by
the elephants--I beg your pardon; I should have said the elements.’

We walked on, arm-in-arm, again; found the coach in the act of starting;
and arrived at Highgate without encountering any difficulties by the
way. I was very uneasy and very uncertain in my mind what to say or do
for the best--so was Traddles, evidently. Mr. Micawber was for the most
part plunged into deep gloom. He occasionally made an attempt to smarten
himself, and hum the fag-end of a tune; but his relapses into profound
melancholy were only made the more impressive by the mockery of a hat
exceedingly on one side, and a shirt-collar pulled up to his eyes.

We went to my aunt’s house rather than to mine, because of Dora’s not
being well. My aunt presented herself on being sent for, and welcomed
Mr. Micawber with gracious cordiality. Mr. Micawber kissed her hand,
retired to the window, and pulling out his pocket-handkerchief, had a
mental wrestle with himself.

Mr. Dick was at home. He was by nature so exceedingly compassionate of
anyone who seemed to be ill at ease, and was so quick to find any such
person out, that he shook hands with Mr. Micawber, at least half-a-dozen
times in five minutes. To Mr. Micawber, in his trouble, this warmth, on
the part of a stranger, was so extremely touching, that he could
only say, on the occasion of each successive shake, ‘My dear sir, you
overpower me!’ Which gratified Mr. Dick so much, that he went at it
again with greater vigour than before.

‘The friendliness of this gentleman,’ said Mr. Micawber to my aunt, ‘if
you will allow me, ma’am, to cull a figure of speech from the vocabulary
of our coarser national sports--floors me. To a man who is struggling
with a complicated burden of perplexity and disquiet, such a reception
is trying, I assure you.’

‘My friend Mr. Dick,’ replied my aunt proudly, ‘is not a common man.’

‘That I am convinced of,’ said Mr. Micawber. ‘My dear sir!’ for Mr.
Dick was shaking hands with him again; ‘I am deeply sensible of your
cordiality!’

‘How do you find yourself?’ said Mr. Dick, with an anxious look.

‘Indifferent, my dear sir,’ returned Mr. Micawber, sighing.

‘You must keep up your spirits,’ said Mr. Dick, ‘and make yourself as
comfortable as possible.’

Mr. Micawber was quite overcome by these friendly words, and by finding
Mr. Dick’s hand again within his own. ‘It has been my lot,’ he observed,
‘to meet, in the diversified panorama of human existence, with an
occasional oasis, but never with one so green, so gushing, as the
present!’

At another time I should have been amused by this; but I felt that
we were all constrained and uneasy, and I watched Mr. Micawber so
anxiously, in his vacillations between an evident disposition to reveal
something, and a counter-disposition to reveal nothing, that I was in a
perfect fever. Traddles, sitting on the edge of his chair, with his eyes
wide open, and his hair more emphatically erect than ever, stared by
turns at the ground and at Mr. Micawber, without so much as attempting
to put in a word. My aunt, though I saw that her shrewdest observation
was concentrated on her new guest, had more useful possession of her
wits than either of us; for she held him in conversation, and made it
necessary for him to talk, whether he liked it or not.

‘You are a very old friend of my nephew’s, Mr. Micawber,’ said my aunt.
‘I wish I had had the pleasure of seeing you before.’

‘Madam,’ returned Mr. Micawber, ‘I wish I had had the honour of knowing
you at an earlier period. I was not always the wreck you at present
behold.’

‘I hope Mrs. Micawber and your family are well, sir,’ said my aunt.

Mr. Micawber inclined his head. ‘They are as well, ma’am,’ he
desperately observed after a pause, ‘as Aliens and Outcasts can ever
hope to be.’

‘Lord bless you, sir!’ exclaimed my aunt, in her abrupt way. ‘What are
you talking about?’

‘The subsistence of my family, ma’am,’ returned Mr. Micawber, ‘trembles
in the balance. My employer--’

Here Mr. Micawber provokingly left off; and began to peel the lemons
that had been under my directions set before him, together with all the
other appliances he used in making punch.

‘Your employer, you know,’ said Mr. Dick, jogging his arm as a gentle
reminder.

‘My good sir,’ returned Mr. Micawber, ‘you recall me, I am obliged to
you.’ They shook hands again. ‘My employer, ma’am--Mr. Heep--once did
me the favour to observe to me, that if I were not in the receipt of the
stipendiary emoluments appertaining to my engagement with him, I should
probably be a mountebank about the country, swallowing a sword-blade,
and eating the devouring element. For anything that I can perceive to
the contrary, it is still probable that my children may be reduced to
seek a livelihood by personal contortion, while Mrs. Micawber abets
their unnatural feats by playing the barrel-organ.’

Mr. Micawber, with a random but expressive flourish of his knife,
signified that these performances might be expected to take place after
he was no more; then resumed his peeling with a desperate air.

My aunt leaned her elbow on the little round table that she usually kept
beside her, and eyed him attentively. Notwithstanding the aversion with
which I regarded the idea of entrapping him into any disclosure he was
not prepared to make voluntarily, I should have taken him up at this
point, but for the strange proceedings in which I saw him engaged;
whereof his putting the lemon-peel into the kettle, the sugar into the
snuffer-tray, the spirit into the empty jug, and confidently attempting
to pour boiling water out of a candlestick, were among the most
remarkable. I saw that a crisis was at hand, and it came. He clattered
all his means and implements together, rose from his chair, pulled out
his pocket-handkerchief, and burst into tears.

‘My dear Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, behind his handkerchief,
‘this is an occupation, of all others, requiring an untroubled mind, and
self-respect. I cannot perform it. It is out of the question.’

‘Mr. Micawber,’ said I, ‘what is the matter? Pray speak out. You are
among friends.’

‘Among friends, sir!’ repeated Mr. Micawber; and all he had reserved
came breaking out of him. ‘Good heavens, it is principally because I AM
among friends that my state of mind is what it is. What is the matter,
gentlemen? What is NOT the matter? Villainy is the matter; baseness is
the matter; deception, fraud, conspiracy, are the matter; and the name
of the whole atrocious mass is--HEEP!’

My aunt clapped her hands, and we all started up as if we were
possessed.

‘The struggle is over!’ said Mr. Micawber violently gesticulating with
his pocket-handkerchief, and fairly striking out from time to time with
both arms, as if he were swimming under superhuman difficulties. ‘I will
lead this life no longer. I am a wretched being, cut off from everything
that makes life tolerable. I have been under a Taboo in that infernal
scoundrel’s service. Give me back my wife, give me back my family,
substitute Micawber for the petty wretch who walks about in the boots
at present on my feet, and call upon me to swallow a sword tomorrow, and
I’ll do it. With an appetite!’

I never saw a man so hot in my life. I tried to calm him, that we might
come to something rational; but he got hotter and hotter, and wouldn’t
hear a word.

‘I’ll put my hand in no man’s hand,’ said Mr. Micawber, gasping,
puffing, and sobbing, to that degree that he was like a man
fighting with cold water, ‘until I have--blown to
fragments--the--a--detestable--serpent--HEEP! I’ll partake of no
one’s hospitality, until I have--a--moved Mount Vesuvius--to
eruption--on--a--the abandoned rascal--HEEP! Refreshment--a--underneath
this roof--particularly punch--would--a--choke me--unless--I
had--previously--choked the eyes--out of the head--a--of--interminable
cheat, and liar--HEEP! I--a--I’ll know nobody--and--a--say
nothing--and--a--live nowhere--until I have
crushed--to--a--undiscoverable atoms--the--transcendent and immortal
hypocrite and perjurer--HEEP!’

I really had some fear of Mr. Micawber’s dying on the spot. The manner
in which he struggled through these inarticulate sentences, and,
whenever he found himself getting near the name of Heep, fought his way
on to it, dashed at it in a fainting state, and brought it out with a
vehemence little less than marvellous, was frightful; but now, when
he sank into a chair, steaming, and looked at us, with every possible
colour in his face that had no business there, and an endless procession
of lumps following one another in hot haste up his throat, whence they
seemed to shoot into his forehead, he had the appearance of being in
the last extremity. I would have gone to his assistance, but he waved me
off, and wouldn’t hear a word.

‘No, Copperfield!--No communication--a--until--Miss
Wickfield--a--redress from wrongs inflicted by consummate
scoundrel--HEEP!’ (I am quite convinced he could not have uttered three
words, but for the amazing energy with which this word inspired him when
he felt it coming.) ‘Inviolable secret--a--from the whole world--a--no
exceptions--this day week--a--at breakfast-time--a--everybody
present--including aunt--a--and extremely friendly gentleman--to be at
the hotel at Canterbury--a--where--Mrs. Micawber and myself--Auld Lang
Syne in chorus--and--a--will expose intolerable ruffian--HEEP! No more
to say--a--or listen to persuasion--go immediately--not capable--a--bear
society--upon the track of devoted and doomed traitor--HEEP!’

With this last repetition of the magic word that had kept him going at
all, and in which he surpassed all his previous efforts, Mr. Micawber
rushed out of the house; leaving us in a state of excitement, hope, and
wonder, that reduced us to a condition little better than his own. But
even then his passion for writing letters was too strong to be resisted;
for while we were yet in the height of our excitement, hope, and wonder,
the following pastoral note was brought to me from a neighbouring
tavern, at which he had called to write it:--


          ‘Most secret and confidential.
‘MY DEAR SIR,

‘I beg to be allowed to convey, through you, my apologies to your
excellent aunt for my late excitement. An explosion of a smouldering
volcano long suppressed, was the result of an internal contest more
easily conceived than described.

‘I trust I rendered tolerably intelligible my appointment for the
morning of this day week, at the house of public entertainment at
Canterbury, where Mrs. Micawber and myself had once the honour of
uniting our voices to yours, in the well-known strain of the Immortal
exciseman nurtured beyond the Tweed.

‘The duty done, and act of reparation performed, which can alone enable
me to contemplate my fellow mortal, I shall be known no more. I shall
simply require to be deposited in that place of universal resort, where

     Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
     The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,

                    ‘--With the plain Inscription,

                         ‘WILKINS MICAWBER.’



CHAPTER 50. Mr. PEGGOTTY’S DREAM COMES TRUE


By this time, some months had passed since our interview on the bank
of the river with Martha. I had never seen her since, but she had
communicated with Mr. Peggotty on several occasions. Nothing had come of
her zealous intervention; nor could I infer, from what he told me, that
any clue had been obtained, for a moment, to Emily’s fate. I confess
that I began to despair of her recovery, and gradually to sink deeper
and deeper into the belief that she was dead.

His conviction remained unchanged. So far as I know--and I believe
his honest heart was transparent to me--he never wavered again, in his
solemn certainty of finding her. His patience never tired. And, although
I trembled for the agony it might one day be to him to have his strong
assurance shivered at a blow, there was something so religious in it, so
affectingly expressive of its anchor being in the purest depths of
his fine nature, that the respect and honour in which I held him were
exalted every day.

His was not a lazy trustfulness that hoped, and did no more. He had
been a man of sturdy action all his life, and he knew that in all things
wherein he wanted help he must do his own part faithfully, and help
himself. I have known him set out in the night, on a misgiving that the
light might not be, by some accident, in the window of the old boat,
and walk to Yarmouth. I have known him, on reading something in the
newspaper that might apply to her, take up his stick, and go forth on a
journey of three--or four-score miles. He made his way by sea to Naples,
and back, after hearing the narrative to which Miss Dartle had assisted
me. All his journeys were ruggedly performed; for he was always
steadfast in a purpose of saving money for Emily’s sake, when she should
be found. In all this long pursuit, I never heard him repine; I never
heard him say he was fatigued, or out of heart.

Dora had often seen him since our marriage, and was quite fond of him.
I fancy his figure before me now, standing near her sofa, with his rough
cap in his hand, and the blue eyes of my child-wife raised, with a timid
wonder, to his face. Sometimes of an evening, about twilight, when
he came to talk with me, I would induce him to smoke his pipe in the
garden, as we slowly paced to and fro together; and then, the picture
of his deserted home, and the comfortable air it used to have in my
childish eyes of an evening when the fire was burning, and the wind
moaning round it, came most vividly into my mind.

One evening, at this hour, he told me that he had found Martha waiting
near his lodging on the preceding night when he came out, and that she
had asked him not to leave London on any account, until he should have
seen her again.

‘Did she tell you why?’ I inquired.

‘I asked her, Mas’r Davy,’ he replied, ‘but it is but few words as she
ever says, and she on’y got my promise and so went away.’

‘Did she say when you might expect to see her again?’ I demanded.

‘No, Mas’r Davy,’ he returned, drawing his hand thoughtfully down his
face. ‘I asked that too; but it was more (she said) than she could
tell.’

As I had long forborne to encourage him with hopes that hung on threads,
I made no other comment on this information than that I supposed he
would see her soon. Such speculations as it engendered within me I kept
to myself, and those were faint enough.

I was walking alone in the garden, one evening, about a fortnight
afterwards. I remember that evening well. It was the second in Mr.
Micawber’s week of suspense. There had been rain all day, and there was
a damp feeling in the air. The leaves were thick upon the trees, and
heavy with wet; but the rain had ceased, though the sky was still dark;
and the hopeful birds were singing cheerfully. As I walked to and fro
in the garden, and the twilight began to close around me, their little
voices were hushed; and that peculiar silence which belongs to such an
evening in the country when the lightest trees are quite still, save for
the occasional droppings from their boughs, prevailed.

There was a little green perspective of trellis-work and ivy at the side
of our cottage, through which I could see, from the garden where I was
walking, into the road before the house. I happened to turn my eyes
towards this place, as I was thinking of many things; and I saw a figure
beyond, dressed in a plain cloak. It was bending eagerly towards me, and
beckoning.

‘Martha!’ said I, going to it.

‘Can you come with me?’ she inquired, in an agitated whisper. ‘I have
been to him, and he is not at home. I wrote down where he was to come,
and left it on his table with my own hand. They said he would not be out
long. I have tidings for him. Can you come directly?’

My answer was, to pass out at the gate immediately. She made a hasty
gesture with her hand, as if to entreat my patience and my silence,
and turned towards London, whence, as her dress betokened, she had come
expeditiously on foot.

I asked her if that were not our destination? On her motioning Yes,
with the same hasty gesture as before, I stopped an empty coach that was
coming by, and we got into it. When I asked her where the coachman was
to drive, she answered, ‘Anywhere near Golden Square! And quick!’--then
shrunk into a corner, with one trembling hand before her face, and the
other making the former gesture, as if she could not bear a voice.

Now much disturbed, and dazzled with conflicting gleams of hope and
dread, I looked at her for some explanation. But seeing how strongly
she desired to remain quiet, and feeling that it was my own natural
inclination too, at such a time, I did not attempt to break the silence.
We proceeded without a word being spoken. Sometimes she glanced out of
the window, as though she thought we were going slowly, though indeed we
were going fast; but otherwise remained exactly as at first.

We alighted at one of the entrances to the Square she had mentioned,
where I directed the coach to wait, not knowing but that we might have
some occasion for it. She laid her hand on my arm, and hurried me on
to one of the sombre streets, of which there are several in that part,
where the houses were once fair dwellings in the occupation of single
families, but have, and had, long degenerated into poor lodgings let off
in rooms. Entering at the open door of one of these, and releasing my
arm, she beckoned me to follow her up the common staircase, which was
like a tributary channel to the street.

The house swarmed with inmates. As we went up, doors of rooms were
opened and people’s heads put out; and we passed other people on the
stairs, who were coming down. In glancing up from the outside, before
we entered, I had seen women and children lolling at the windows over
flower-pots; and we seemed to have attracted their curiosity, for these
were principally the observers who looked out of their doors. It was a
broad panelled staircase, with massive balustrades of some dark wood;
cornices above the doors, ornamented with carved fruit and flowers; and
broad seats in the windows. But all these tokens of past grandeur
were miserably decayed and dirty; rot, damp, and age, had weakened
the flooring, which in many places was unsound and even unsafe. Some
attempts had been made, I noticed, to infuse new blood into this
dwindling frame, by repairing the costly old wood-work here and there
with common deal; but it was like the marriage of a reduced old noble to
a plebeian pauper, and each party to the ill-assorted union shrunk away
from the other. Several of the back windows on the staircase had
been darkened or wholly blocked up. In those that remained, there was
scarcely any glass; and, through the crumbling frames by which the bad
air seemed always to come in, and never to go out, I saw, through other
glassless windows, into other houses in a similar condition, and looked
giddily down into a wretched yard, which was the common dust-heap of the
mansion.

We proceeded to the top-storey of the house. Two or three times, by the
way, I thought I observed in the indistinct light the skirts of a female
figure going up before us. As we turned to ascend the last flight of
stairs between us and the roof, we caught a full view of this figure
pausing for a moment, at a door. Then it turned the handle, and went in.

‘What’s this!’ said Martha, in a whisper. ‘She has gone into my room. I
don’t know her!’

I knew her. I had recognized her with amazement, for Miss Dartle.

I said something to the effect that it was a lady whom I had seen
before, in a few words, to my conductress; and had scarcely done so,
when we heard her voice in the room, though not, from where we stood,
what she was saying. Martha, with an astonished look, repeated her
former action, and softly led me up the stairs; and then, by a little
back-door which seemed to have no lock, and which she pushed open with a
touch, into a small empty garret with a low sloping roof, little better
than a cupboard. Between this, and the room she had called hers,
there was a small door of communication, standing partly open. Here we
stopped, breathless with our ascent, and she placed her hand lightly on
my lips. I could only see, of the room beyond, that it was pretty large;
that there was a bed in it; and that there were some common pictures of
ships upon the walls. I could not see Miss Dartle, or the person whom
we had heard her address. Certainly, my companion could not, for my
position was the best. A dead silence prevailed for some moments. Martha
kept one hand on my lips, and raised the other in a listening attitude.

‘It matters little to me her not being at home,’ said Rosa Dartle
haughtily, ‘I know nothing of her. It is you I come to see.’

‘Me?’ replied a soft voice.

At the sound of it, a thrill went through my frame. For it was Emily’s!

‘Yes,’ returned Miss Dartle, ‘I have come to look at you. What? You are
not ashamed of the face that has done so much?’

The resolute and unrelenting hatred of her tone, its cold stern
sharpness, and its mastered rage, presented her before me, as if I had
seen her standing in the light. I saw the flashing black eyes, and the
passion-wasted figure; and I saw the scar, with its white track cutting
through her lips, quivering and throbbing as she spoke.

‘I have come to see,’ she said, ‘James Steerforth’s fancy; the girl who
ran away with him, and is the town-talk of the commonest people of her
native place; the bold, flaunting, practised companion of persons like
James Steerforth. I want to know what such a thing is like.’

There was a rustle, as if the unhappy girl, on whom she heaped these
taunts, ran towards the door, and the speaker swiftly interposed herself
before it. It was succeeded by a moment’s pause.

When Miss Dartle spoke again, it was through her set teeth, and with a
stamp upon the ground.

‘Stay there!’ she said, ‘or I’ll proclaim you to the house, and the
whole street! If you try to evade me, I’ll stop you, if it’s by the
hair, and raise the very stones against you!’

A frightened murmur was the only reply that reached my ears. A silence
succeeded. I did not know what to do. Much as I desired to put an end to
the interview, I felt that I had no right to present myself; that it was
for Mr. Peggotty alone to see her and recover her. Would he never come?
I thought impatiently.

‘So!’ said Rosa Dartle, with a contemptuous laugh, ‘I see her at last!
Why, he was a poor creature to be taken by that delicate mock-modesty,
and that hanging head!’

‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake, spare me!’ exclaimed Emily. ‘Whoever you are,
you know my pitiable story, and for Heaven’s sake spare me, if you would
be spared yourself!’

‘If I would be spared!’ returned the other fiercely; ‘what is there in
common between US, do you think!’

‘Nothing but our sex,’ said Emily, with a burst of tears.

‘And that,’ said Rosa Dartle, ‘is so strong a claim, preferred by one
so infamous, that if I had any feeling in my breast but scorn and
abhorrence of you, it would freeze it up. Our sex! You are an honour to
our sex!’

‘I have deserved this,’ said Emily, ‘but it’s dreadful! Dear, dear lady,
think what I have suffered, and how I am fallen! Oh, Martha, come back!
Oh, home, home!’

Miss Dartle placed herself in a chair, within view of the door, and
looked downward, as if Emily were crouching on the floor before her.
Being now between me and the light, I could see her curled lip, and her
cruel eyes intently fixed on one place, with a greedy triumph.

‘Listen to what I say!’ she said; ‘and reserve your false arts for your
dupes. Do you hope to move me by your tears? No more than you could
charm me by your smiles, you purchased slave.’

‘Oh, have some mercy on me!’ cried Emily. ‘Show me some compassion, or I
shall die mad!’

‘It would be no great penance,’ said Rosa Dartle, ‘for your crimes. Do
you know what you have done? Do you ever think of the home you have laid
waste?’

‘Oh, is there ever night or day, when I don’t think of it!’ cried Emily;
and now I could just see her, on her knees, with her head thrown back,
her pale face looking upward, her hands wildly clasped and held out,
and her hair streaming about her. ‘Has there ever been a single minute,
waking or sleeping, when it hasn’t been before me, just as it used to
be in the lost days when I turned my back upon it for ever and for ever!
Oh, home, home! Oh dear, dear uncle, if you ever could have known the
agony your love would cause me when I fell away from good, you never
would have shown it to me so constant, much as you felt it; but would
have been angry to me, at least once in my life, that I might have had
some comfort! I have none, none, no comfort upon earth, for all of them
were always fond of me!’ She dropped on her face, before the imperious
figure in the chair, with an imploring effort to clasp the skirt of her
dress.

Rosa Dartle sat looking down upon her, as inflexible as a figure of
brass. Her lips were tightly compressed, as if she knew that she
must keep a strong constraint upon herself--I write what I sincerely
believe--or she would be tempted to strike the beautiful form with
her foot. I saw her, distinctly, and the whole power of her face and
character seemed forced into that expression.---Would he never come?

‘The miserable vanity of these earth-worms!’ she said, when she had so
far controlled the angry heavings of her breast, that she could trust
herself to speak. ‘YOUR home! Do you imagine that I bestow a thought
on it, or suppose you could do any harm to that low place, which money
would not pay for, and handsomely? YOUR home! You were a part of the
trade of your home, and were bought and sold like any other vendible
thing your people dealt in.’

‘Oh, not that!’ cried Emily. ‘Say anything of me; but don’t visit
my disgrace and shame, more than I have done, on folks who are as
honourable as you! Have some respect for them, as you are a lady, if you
have no mercy for me.’

‘I speak,’ she said, not deigning to take any heed of this appeal, and
drawing away her dress from the contamination of Emily’s touch, ‘I speak
of HIS home--where I live. Here,’ she said, stretching out her hand with
her contemptuous laugh, and looking down upon the prostrate girl, ‘is a
worthy cause of division between lady-mother and gentleman-son; of grief
in a house where she wouldn’t have been admitted as a kitchen-girl; of
anger, and repining, and reproach. This piece of pollution, picked up
from the water-side, to be made much of for an hour, and then tossed
back to her original place!’

‘No! no!’ cried Emily, clasping her hands together. ‘When he first came
into my way--that the day had never dawned upon me, and he had met me
being carried to my grave!--I had been brought up as virtuous as you or
any lady, and was going to be the wife of as good a man as you or any
lady in the world can ever marry. If you live in his home and know him,
you know, perhaps, what his power with a weak, vain girl might be. I
don’t defend myself, but I know well, and he knows well, or he will know
when he comes to die, and his mind is troubled with it, that he used all
his power to deceive me, and that I believed him, trusted him, and loved
him!’

Rosa Dartle sprang up from her seat; recoiled; and in recoiling struck
at her, with a face of such malignity, so darkened and disfigured by
passion, that I had almost thrown myself between them. The blow, which
had no aim, fell upon the air. As she now stood panting, looking at
her with the utmost detestation that she was capable of expressing, and
trembling from head to foot with rage and scorn, I thought I had never
seen such a sight, and never could see such another.

‘YOU love him? You?’ she cried, with her clenched hand, quivering as if
it only wanted a weapon to stab the object of her wrath.

Emily had shrunk out of my view. There was no reply.

‘And tell that to ME,’ she added, ‘with your shameful lips? Why don’t
they whip these creatures? If I could order it to be done, I would have
this girl whipped to death.’

And so she would, I have no doubt. I would not have trusted her with the
rack itself, while that furious look lasted. She slowly, very slowly,
broke into a laugh, and pointed at Emily with her hand, as if she were a
sight of shame for gods and men.

‘SHE love!’ she said. ‘THAT carrion! And he ever cared for her, she’d
tell me. Ha, ha! The liars that these traders are!’

Her mockery was worse than her undisguised rage. Of the two, I would
have much preferred to be the object of the latter. But, when she
suffered it to break loose, it was only for a moment. She had chained
it up again, and however it might tear her within, she subdued it to
herself.

‘I came here, you pure fountain of love,’ she said, ‘to see--as I began
by telling you--what such a thing as you was like. I was curious. I am
satisfied. Also to tell you, that you had best seek that home of yours,
with all speed, and hide your head among those excellent people who are
expecting you, and whom your money will console. When it’s all gone, you
can believe, and trust, and love again, you know! I thought you a broken
toy that had lasted its time; a worthless spangle that was tarnished,
and thrown away. But, finding you true gold, a very lady, and
an ill-used innocent, with a fresh heart full of love and
trustfulness--which you look like, and is quite consistent with your
story!--I have something more to say. Attend to it; for what I say I’ll
do. Do you hear me, you fairy spirit? What I say, I mean to do!’

Her rage got the better of her again, for a moment; but it passed over
her face like a spasm, and left her smiling.

‘Hide yourself,’ she pursued, ‘if not at home, somewhere. Let it be
somewhere beyond reach; in some obscure life--or, better still, in some
obscure death. I wonder, if your loving heart will not break, you have
found no way of helping it to be still! I have heard of such means
sometimes. I believe they may be easily found.’

A low crying, on the part of Emily, interrupted her here. She stopped,
and listened to it as if it were music.

‘I am of a strange nature, perhaps,’ Rosa Dartle went on; ‘but I can’t
breathe freely in the air you breathe. I find it sickly. Therefore, I
will have it cleared; I will have it purified of you. If you live here
tomorrow, I’ll have your story and your character proclaimed on the
common stair. There are decent women in the house, I am told; and it
is a pity such a light as you should be among them, and concealed. If,
leaving here, you seek any refuge in this town in any character but your
true one (which you are welcome to bear, without molestation from me),
the same service shall be done you, if I hear of your retreat. Being
assisted by a gentleman who not long ago aspired to the favour of your
hand, I am sanguine as to that.’

Would he never, never come? How long was I to bear this? How long could
I bear it? ‘Oh me, oh me!’ exclaimed the wretched Emily, in a tone that
might have touched the hardest heart, I should have thought; but there
was no relenting in Rosa Dartle’s smile. ‘What, what, shall I do!’

‘Do?’ returned the other. ‘Live happy in your own reflections!
Consecrate your existence to the recollection of James Steerforth’s
tenderness--he would have made you his serving-man’s wife, would he
not?---or to feeling grateful to the upright and deserving creature who
would have taken you as his gift. Or, if those proud remembrances, and
the consciousness of your own virtues, and the honourable position to
which they have raised you in the eyes of everything that wears the
human shape, will not sustain you, marry that good man, and be happy in
his condescension. If this will not do either, die! There are doorways
and dust-heaps for such deaths, and such despair--find one, and take
your flight to Heaven!’

I heard a distant foot upon the stairs. I knew it, I was certain. It was
his, thank God!

She moved slowly from before the door when she said this, and passed out
of my sight.

‘But mark!’ she added, slowly and sternly, opening the other door to
go away, ‘I am resolved, for reasons that I have and hatreds that
I entertain, to cast you out, unless you withdraw from my reach
altogether, or drop your pretty mask. This is what I had to say; and
what I say, I mean to do!’

The foot upon the stairs came nearer--nearer--passed her as she went
down--rushed into the room!

‘Uncle!’

A fearful cry followed the word. I paused a moment, and looking in, saw
him supporting her insensible figure in his arms. He gazed for a few
seconds in the face; then stooped to kiss it--oh, how tenderly!--and
drew a handkerchief before it.

‘Mas’r Davy,’ he said, in a low tremulous voice, when it was covered, ‘I
thank my Heav’nly Father as my dream’s come true! I thank Him hearty for
having guided of me, in His own ways, to my darling!’

With those words he took her up in his arms; and, with the veiled
face lying on his bosom, and addressed towards his own, carried her,
motionless and unconscious, down the stairs.



CHAPTER 51. THE BEGINNING OF A LONGER JOURNEY


It was yet early in the morning of the following day, when, as I was
walking in my garden with my aunt (who took little other exercise
now, being so much in attendance on my dear Dora), I was told that Mr.
Peggotty desired to speak with me. He came into the garden to meet me
half-way, on my going towards the gate; and bared his head, as it was
always his custom to do when he saw my aunt, for whom he had a high
respect. I had been telling her all that had happened overnight. Without
saying a word, she walked up with a cordial face, shook hands with him,
and patted him on the arm. It was so expressively done, that she had no
need to say a word. Mr. Peggotty understood her quite as well as if she
had said a thousand.

‘I’ll go in now, Trot,’ said my aunt, ‘and look after Little Blossom,
who will be getting up presently.’

‘Not along of my being heer, ma’am, I hope?’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘Unless
my wits is gone a bahd’s neezing’--by which Mr. Peggotty meant to say,
bird’s-nesting--‘this morning, ‘tis along of me as you’re a-going to
quit us?’

‘You have something to say, my good friend,’ returned my aunt, ‘and will
do better without me.’

‘By your leave, ma’am,’ returned Mr. Peggotty, ‘I should take it kind,
pervising you doen’t mind my clicketten, if you’d bide heer.’

‘Would you?’ said my aunt, with short good-nature. ‘Then I am sure I
will!’

So, she drew her arm through Mr. Peggotty’s, and walked with him to a
leafy little summer-house there was at the bottom of the garden, where
she sat down on a bench, and I beside her. There was a seat for Mr.
Peggotty too, but he preferred to stand, leaning his hand on the small
rustic table. As he stood, looking at his cap for a little while before
beginning to speak, I could not help observing what power and force
of character his sinewy hand expressed, and what a good and trusty
companion it was to his honest brow and iron-grey hair.

‘I took my dear child away last night,’ Mr. Peggotty began, as he
raised his eyes to ours, ‘to my lodging, wheer I have a long time been
expecting of her and preparing fur her. It was hours afore she knowed me
right; and when she did, she kneeled down at my feet, and kiender said
to me, as if it was her prayers, how it all come to be. You may believe
me, when I heerd her voice, as I had heerd at home so playful--and see
her humbled, as it might be in the dust our Saviour wrote in with his
blessed hand--I felt a wownd go to my ‘art, in the midst of all its
thankfulness.’

He drew his sleeve across his face, without any pretence of concealing
why; and then cleared his voice.

‘It warn’t for long as I felt that; for she was found. I had on’y to
think as she was found, and it was gone. I doen’t know why I do so much
as mention of it now, I’m sure. I didn’t have it in my mind a minute
ago, to say a word about myself; but it come up so nat’ral, that I
yielded to it afore I was aweer.’

‘You are a self-denying soul,’ said my aunt, ‘and will have your
reward.’

Mr. Peggotty, with the shadows of the leaves playing athwart his
face, made a surprised inclination of the head towards my aunt, as an
acknowledgement of her good opinion; then took up the thread he had
relinquished.

‘When my Em’ly took flight,’ he said, in stern wrath for the moment,
‘from the house wheer she was made a prisoner by that theer spotted
snake as Mas’r Davy see,--and his story’s trew, and may GOD confound
him!--she took flight in the night. It was a dark night, with a many
stars a-shining. She was wild. She ran along the sea beach, believing
the old boat was theer; and calling out to us to turn away our faces,
for she was a-coming by. She heerd herself a-crying out, like as if
it was another person; and cut herself on them sharp-pinted stones and
rocks, and felt it no more than if she had been rock herself. Ever so
fur she run, and there was fire afore her eyes, and roarings in her
ears. Of a sudden--or so she thowt, you unnerstand--the day broke, wet
and windy, and she was lying b’low a heap of stone upon the shore, and
a woman was a-speaking to her, saying, in the language of that country,
what was it as had gone so much amiss?’

He saw everything he related. It passed before him, as he spoke, so
vividly, that, in the intensity of his earnestness, he presented what
he described to me, with greater distinctness than I can express. I can
hardly believe, writing now long afterwards, but that I was actually
present in these scenes; they are impressed upon me with such an
astonishing air of fidelity.

‘As Em’ly’s eyes--which was heavy--see this woman better,’ Mr. Peggotty
went on, ‘she know’d as she was one of them as she had often talked to
on the beach. Fur, though she had run (as I have said) ever so fur in
the night, she had oftentimes wandered long ways, partly afoot, partly
in boats and carriages, and know’d all that country, ‘long the coast,
miles and miles. She hadn’t no children of her own, this woman, being
a young wife; but she was a-looking to have one afore long. And may
my prayers go up to Heaven that ‘twill be a happiness to her, and a
comfort, and a honour, all her life! May it love her and be dootiful to
her, in her old age; helpful of her at the last; a Angel to her heer,
and heerafter!’

‘Amen!’ said my aunt.

‘She had been summat timorous and down,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘and had sat,
at first, a little way off, at her spinning, or such work as it was,
when Em’ly talked to the children. But Em’ly had took notice of her,
and had gone and spoke to her; and as the young woman was partial to
the children herself, they had soon made friends. Sermuchser, that when
Em’ly went that way, she always giv Em’ly flowers. This was her as
now asked what it was that had gone so much amiss. Em’ly told her,
and she--took her home. She did indeed. She took her home,’ said Mr.
Peggotty, covering his face.

He was more affected by this act of kindness, than I had ever seen him
affected by anything since the night she went away. My aunt and I did
not attempt to disturb him.

‘It was a little cottage, you may suppose,’ he said, presently, ‘but she
found space for Em’ly in it,--her husband was away at sea,--and she kep
it secret, and prevailed upon such neighbours as she had (they was not
many near) to keep it secret too. Em’ly was took bad with fever,
and, what is very strange to me is,--maybe ‘tis not so strange to
scholars,--the language of that country went out of her head, and she
could only speak her own, that no one unnerstood. She recollects, as if
she had dreamed it, that she lay there always a-talking her own tongue,
always believing as the old boat was round the next pint in the bay, and
begging and imploring of ‘em to send theer and tell how she was dying,
and bring back a message of forgiveness, if it was on’y a wured. A’most
the whole time, she thowt,--now, that him as I made mention on just now
was lurking for her unnerneath the winder; now that him as had brought
her to this was in the room,--and cried to the good young woman not to
give her up, and know’d, at the same time, that she couldn’t unnerstand,
and dreaded that she must be took away. Likewise the fire was afore
her eyes, and the roarings in her ears; and theer was no today, nor
yesterday, nor yet tomorrow; but everything in her life as ever had
been, or as ever could be, and everything as never had been, and as
never could be, was a crowding on her all at once, and nothing clear nor
welcome, and yet she sang and laughed about it! How long this lasted, I
doen’t know; but then theer come a sleep; and in that sleep, from being
a many times stronger than her own self, she fell into the weakness of
the littlest child.’

Here he stopped, as if for relief from the terrors of his own
description. After being silent for a few moments, he pursued his story.

‘It was a pleasant arternoon when she awoke; and so quiet, that there
warn’t a sound but the rippling of that blue sea without a tide, upon
the shore. It was her belief, at first, that she was at home upon a
Sunday morning; but the vine leaves as she see at the winder, and the
hills beyond, warn’t home, and contradicted of her. Then, come in her
friend to watch alongside of her bed; and then she know’d as the old
boat warn’t round that next pint in the bay no more, but was fur off;
and know’d where she was, and why; and broke out a-crying on that good
young woman’s bosom, wheer I hope her baby is a-lying now, a-cheering of
her with its pretty eyes!’

He could not speak of this good friend of Emily’s without a flow of
tears. It was in vain to try. He broke down again, endeavouring to bless
her!

‘That done my Em’ly good,’ he resumed, after such emotion as I could
not behold without sharing in; and as to my aunt, she wept with all her
heart; ‘that done Em’ly good, and she begun to mend. But, the language
of that country was quite gone from her, and she was forced to make
signs. So she went on, getting better from day to day, slow, but sure,
and trying to learn the names of common things--names as she seemed
never to have heerd in all her life--till one evening come, when she
was a-setting at her window, looking at a little girl at play upon the
beach. And of a sudden this child held out her hand, and said, what
would be in English, “Fisherman’s daughter, here’s a shell!”--for you
are to unnerstand that they used at first to call her “Pretty lady”, as
the general way in that country is, and that she had taught ‘em to
call her “Fisherman’s daughter” instead. The child says of a sudden,
“Fisherman’s daughter, here’s a shell!” Then Em’ly unnerstands her; and
she answers, bursting out a-crying; and it all comes back!

‘When Em’ly got strong again,’ said Mr. Peggotty, after another short
interval of silence, ‘she cast about to leave that good young creetur,
and get to her own country. The husband was come home, then; and the two
together put her aboard a small trader bound to Leghorn, and from that
to France. She had a little money, but it was less than little as they
would take for all they done. I’m a’most glad on it, though they was
so poor! What they done, is laid up wheer neither moth or rust doth
corrupt, and wheer thieves do not break through nor steal. Mas’r Davy,
it’ll outlast all the treasure in the wureld.

‘Em’ly got to France, and took service to wait on travelling ladies at a
inn in the port. Theer, theer come, one day, that snake. --Let him never
come nigh me. I doen’t know what hurt I might do him!--Soon as she see
him, without him seeing her, all her fear and wildness returned upon
her, and she fled afore the very breath he draw’d. She come to England,
and was set ashore at Dover.

‘I doen’t know,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘for sure, when her ‘art begun to
fail her; but all the way to England she had thowt to come to her dear
home. Soon as she got to England she turned her face tow’rds it. But,
fear of not being forgiv, fear of being pinted at, fear of some of
us being dead along of her, fear of many things, turned her from it,
kiender by force, upon the road: “Uncle, uncle,” she says to me, “the
fear of not being worthy to do what my torn and bleeding breast so
longed to do, was the most fright’ning fear of all! I turned back, when
my ‘art was full of prayers that I might crawl to the old door-step, in
the night, kiss it, lay my wicked face upon it, and theer be found dead
in the morning.”

‘She come,’ said Mr. Peggotty, dropping his voice to an
awe-stricken whisper, ‘to London. She--as had never seen it in her
life--alone--without a penny--young--so pretty--come to London. A’most
the moment as she lighted heer, all so desolate, she found (as she
believed) a friend; a decent woman as spoke to her about the needle-work
as she had been brought up to do, about finding plenty of it fur her,
about a lodging fur the night, and making secret inquiration concerning
of me and all at home, tomorrow. When my child,’ he said aloud, and with
an energy of gratitude that shook him from head to foot, ‘stood upon the
brink of more than I can say or think on--Martha, trew to her promise,
saved her.’

I could not repress a cry of joy.

‘Mas’r Davy!’ said he, gripping my hand in that strong hand of his,
‘it was you as first made mention of her to me. I thankee, sir! She was
arnest. She had know’d of her bitter knowledge wheer to watch and what
to do. She had done it. And the Lord was above all! She come, white and
hurried, upon Em’ly in her sleep. She says to her, “Rise up from worse
than death, and come with me!” Them belonging to the house would have
stopped her, but they might as soon have stopped the sea. “Stand away
from me,” she says, “I am a ghost that calls her from beside her open
grave!” She told Em’ly she had seen me, and know’d I loved her, and
forgive her. She wrapped her, hasty, in her clothes. She took her, faint
and trembling, on her arm. She heeded no more what they said, than if
she had had no ears. She walked among ‘em with my child, minding only
her; and brought her safe out, in the dead of the night, from that black
pit of ruin!

‘She attended on Em’ly,’ said Mr. Peggotty, who had released my hand,
and put his own hand on his heaving chest; ‘she attended to my Em’ly,
lying wearied out, and wandering betwixt whiles, till late next day.
Then she went in search of me; then in search of you, Mas’r Davy. She
didn’t tell Em’ly what she come out fur, lest her ‘art should fail, and
she should think of hiding of herself. How the cruel lady know’d of
her being theer, I can’t say. Whether him as I have spoke so much of,
chanced to see ‘em going theer, or whether (which is most like, to my
thinking) he had heerd it from the woman, I doen’t greatly ask myself.
My niece is found.

‘All night long,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘we have been together, Em’ly
and me. ‘Tis little (considering the time) as she has said, in wureds,
through them broken-hearted tears; ‘tis less as I have seen of her dear
face, as grow’d into a woman’s at my hearth. But, all night long, her
arms has been about my neck; and her head has laid heer; and we knows
full well, as we can put our trust in one another, ever more.’

He ceased to speak, and his hand upon the table rested there in perfect
repose, with a resolution in it that might have conquered lions.

‘It was a gleam of light upon me, Trot,’ said my aunt, drying her eyes,
‘when I formed the resolution of being godmother to your sister Betsey
Trotwood, who disappointed me; but, next to that, hardly anything would
have given me greater pleasure, than to be godmother to that good young
creature’s baby!’

Mr. Peggotty nodded his understanding of my aunt’s feelings, but could
not trust himself with any verbal reference to the subject of her
commendation. We all remained silent, and occupied with our own
reflections (my aunt drying her eyes, and now sobbing convulsively, and
now laughing and calling herself a fool); until I spoke.

‘You have quite made up your mind,’ said I to Mr. Peggotty, ‘as to the
future, good friend? I need scarcely ask you.’

‘Quite, Mas’r Davy,’ he returned; ‘and told Em’ly. Theer’s mighty
countries, fur from heer. Our future life lays over the sea.’

‘They will emigrate together, aunt,’ said I.

‘Yes!’ said Mr. Peggotty, with a hopeful smile. ‘No one can’t reproach
my darling in Australia. We will begin a new life over theer!’

I asked him if he yet proposed to himself any time for going away.

‘I was down at the Docks early this morning, sir,’ he returned, ‘to get
information concerning of them ships. In about six weeks or two
months from now, there’ll be one sailing--I see her this morning--went
aboard--and we shall take our passage in her.’

‘Quite alone?’ I asked.

‘Aye, Mas’r Davy!’ he returned. ‘My sister, you see, she’s that fond
of you and yourn, and that accustomed to think on’y of her own country,
that it wouldn’t be hardly fair to let her go. Besides which, theer’s
one she has in charge, Mas’r Davy, as doen’t ought to be forgot.’

‘Poor Ham!’ said I.

‘My good sister takes care of his house, you see, ma’am, and he takes
kindly to her,’ Mr. Peggotty explained for my aunt’s better information.
‘He’ll set and talk to her, with a calm spirit, wen it’s like he
couldn’t bring himself to open his lips to another. Poor fellow!’ said
Mr. Peggotty, shaking his head, ‘theer’s not so much left him, that he
could spare the little as he has!’

‘And Mrs. Gummidge?’ said I.

‘Well, I’ve had a mort of consideration, I do tell you,’ returned Mr.
Peggotty, with a perplexed look which gradually cleared as he went
on, ‘concerning of Missis Gummidge. You see, wen Missis Gummidge falls
a-thinking of the old ‘un, she an’t what you may call good company.
Betwixt you and me, Mas’r Davy--and you, ma’am--wen Mrs. Gummidge takes
to wimicking,’--our old country word for crying,--‘she’s liable to be
considered to be, by them as didn’t know the old ‘un, peevish-like. Now
I DID know the old ‘un,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘and I know’d his merits,
so I unnerstan’ her; but ‘tan’t entirely so, you see, with
others--nat’rally can’t be!’

My aunt and I both acquiesced.

‘Wheerby,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘my sister might--I doen’t say she would,
but might--find Missis Gummidge give her a leetle trouble now-and-again.
Theerfur ‘tan’t my intentions to moor Missis Gummidge ‘long with them,
but to find a Beein’ fur her wheer she can fisherate for herself.’
(A Beein’ signifies, in that dialect, a home, and to fisherate is to
provide.) ‘Fur which purpose,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘I means to make her
a ‘lowance afore I go, as’ll leave her pretty comfort’ble. She’s the
faithfullest of creeturs. ‘Tan’t to be expected, of course, at her
time of life, and being lone and lorn, as the good old Mawther is to
be knocked about aboardship, and in the woods and wilds of a new and
fur-away country. So that’s what I’m a-going to do with her.’

He forgot nobody. He thought of everybody’s claims and strivings, but
his own.

‘Em’ly,’ he continued, ‘will keep along with me--poor child, she’s sore
in need of peace and rest!--until such time as we goes upon our voyage.
She’ll work at them clothes, as must be made; and I hope her troubles
will begin to seem longer ago than they was, wen she finds herself once
more by her rough but loving uncle.’

My aunt nodded confirmation of this hope, and imparted great
satisfaction to Mr. Peggotty.

‘Theer’s one thing furder, Mas’r Davy,’ said he, putting his hand in his
breast-pocket, and gravely taking out the little paper bundle I had
seen before, which he unrolled on the table. ‘Theer’s these here
banknotes--fifty pound, and ten. To them I wish to add the money as she
come away with. I’ve asked her about that (but not saying why), and have
added of it up. I an’t a scholar. Would you be so kind as see how ‘tis?’

He handed me, apologetically for his scholarship, a piece of paper, and
observed me while I looked it over. It was quite right.

‘Thankee, sir,’ he said, taking it back. ‘This money, if you doen’t
see objections, Mas’r Davy, I shall put up jest afore I go, in a cover
directed to him; and put that up in another, directed to his mother.
I shall tell her, in no more wureds than I speak to you, what it’s the
price on; and that I’m gone, and past receiving of it back.’

I told him that I thought it would be right to do so--that I was
thoroughly convinced it would be, since he felt it to be right.

‘I said that theer was on’y one thing furder,’ he proceeded with a grave
smile, when he had made up his little bundle again, and put it in his
pocket; ‘but theer was two. I warn’t sure in my mind, wen I come out
this morning, as I could go and break to Ham, of my own self, what had
so thankfully happened. So I writ a letter while I was out, and put
it in the post-office, telling of ‘em how all was as ‘tis; and that I
should come down tomorrow to unload my mind of what little needs a-doing
of down theer, and, most-like, take my farewell leave of Yarmouth.’

‘And do you wish me to go with you?’ said I, seeing that he left
something unsaid.

‘If you could do me that kind favour, Mas’r Davy,’ he replied. ‘I know
the sight on you would cheer ‘em up a bit.’

My little Dora being in good spirits, and very desirous that I should
go--as I found on talking it over with her--I readily pledged myself to
accompany him in accordance with his wish. Next morning, consequently,
we were on the Yarmouth coach, and again travelling over the old ground.

As we passed along the familiar street at night--Mr. Peggotty, in
despite of all my remonstrances, carrying my bag--I glanced into Omer
and Joram’s shop, and saw my old friend Mr. Omer there, smoking his
pipe. I felt reluctant to be present, when Mr. Peggotty first met his
sister and Ham; and made Mr. Omer my excuse for lingering behind.

‘How is Mr. Omer, after this long time?’ said I, going in.

He fanned away the smoke of his pipe, that he might get a better view of
me, and soon recognized me with great delight.

‘I should get up, sir, to acknowledge such an honour as this visit,’
said he, ‘only my limbs are rather out of sorts, and I am wheeled about.
With the exception of my limbs and my breath, howsoever, I am as hearty
as a man can be, I’m thankful to say.’

I congratulated him on his contented looks and his good spirits, and
saw, now, that his easy-chair went on wheels.

‘It’s an ingenious thing, ain’t it?’ he inquired, following the
direction of my glance, and polishing the elbow with his arm. ‘It runs
as light as a feather, and tracks as true as a mail-coach. Bless you,
my little Minnie--my grand-daughter you know, Minnie’s child--puts her
little strength against the back, gives it a shove, and away we go, as
clever and merry as ever you see anything! And I tell you what--it’s a
most uncommon chair to smoke a pipe in.’

I never saw such a good old fellow to make the best of a thing, and
find out the enjoyment of it, as Mr. Omer. He was as radiant, as if
his chair, his asthma, and the failure of his limbs, were the various
branches of a great invention for enhancing the luxury of a pipe.

‘I see more of the world, I can assure you,’ said Mr. Omer, ‘in this
chair, than ever I see out of it. You’d be surprised at the number of
people that looks in of a day to have a chat. You really would! There’s
twice as much in the newspaper, since I’ve taken to this chair, as there
used to be. As to general reading, dear me, what a lot of it I do get
through! That’s what I feel so strong, you know! If it had been my eyes,
what should I have done? If it had been my ears, what should I have
done? Being my limbs, what does it signify? Why, my limbs only made my
breath shorter when I used ‘em. And now, if I want to go out into
the street or down to the sands, I’ve only got to call Dick, Joram’s
youngest ‘prentice, and away I go in my own carriage, like the Lord
Mayor of London.’

He half suffocated himself with laughing here.

‘Lord bless you!’ said Mr. Omer, resuming his pipe, ‘a man must take
the fat with the lean; that’s what he must make up his mind to, in this
life. Joram does a fine business. Ex-cellent business!’

‘I am very glad to hear it,’ said I.

‘I knew you would be,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘And Joram and Minnie are like
Valentines. What more can a man expect? What’s his limbs to that!’

His supreme contempt for his own limbs, as he sat smoking, was one of
the pleasantest oddities I have ever encountered.

‘And since I’ve took to general reading, you’ve took to general writing,
eh, sir?’ said Mr. Omer, surveying me admiringly. ‘What a lovely work
that was of yours! What expressions in it! I read it every word--every
word. And as to feeling sleepy! Not at all!’

I laughingly expressed my satisfaction, but I must confess that I
thought this association of ideas significant.

‘I give you my word and honour, sir,’ said Mr. Omer, ‘that when I lay
that book upon the table, and look at it outside; compact in three
separate and indiwidual wollumes--one, two, three; I am as proud as
Punch to think that I once had the honour of being connected with
your family. And dear me, it’s a long time ago, now, ain’t it? Over
at Blunderstone. With a pretty little party laid along with the other
party. And you quite a small party then, yourself. Dear, dear!’

I changed the subject by referring to Emily. After assuring him that I
did not forget how interested he had always been in her, and how
kindly he had always treated her, I gave him a general account of her
restoration to her uncle by the aid of Martha; which I knew would please
the old man. He listened with the utmost attention, and said, feelingly,
when I had done:

‘I am rejoiced at it, sir! It’s the best news I have heard for many
a day. Dear, dear, dear! And what’s going to be undertook for that
unfortunate young woman, Martha, now?’

‘You touch a point that my thoughts have been dwelling on since
yesterday,’ said I, ‘but on which I can give you no information yet, Mr.
Omer. Mr. Peggotty has not alluded to it, and I have a delicacy in
doing so. I am sure he has not forgotten it. He forgets nothing that is
disinterested and good.’

‘Because you know,’ said Mr. Omer, taking himself up, where he had left
off, ‘whatever is done, I should wish to be a member of. Put me down for
anything you may consider right, and let me know. I never could think
the girl all bad, and I am glad to find she’s not. So will my daughter
Minnie be. Young women are contradictory creatures in some things--her
mother was just the same as her--but their hearts are soft and kind.
It’s all show with Minnie, about Martha. Why she should consider it
necessary to make any show, I don’t undertake to tell you. But it’s all
show, bless you. She’d do her any kindness in private. So, put me down
for whatever you may consider right, will you be so good? and drop me
a line where to forward it. Dear me!’ said Mr. Omer, ‘when a man is
drawing on to a time of life, where the two ends of life meet; when he
finds himself, however hearty he is, being wheeled about for the second
time, in a speeches of go-cart; he should be over-rejoiced to do a
kindness if he can. He wants plenty. And I don’t speak of myself,
particular,’ said Mr. Omer, ‘because, sir, the way I look at it is, that
we are all drawing on to the bottom of the hill, whatever age we are,
on account of time never standing still for a single moment. So let us
always do a kindness, and be over-rejoiced. To be sure!’

He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and put it on a ledge in the back
of his chair, expressly made for its reception.

‘There’s Em’ly’s cousin, him that she was to have been married to,’ said
Mr. Omer, rubbing his hands feebly, ‘as fine a fellow as there is in
Yarmouth! He’ll come and talk or read to me, in the evening, for an hour
together sometimes. That’s a kindness, I should call it! All his life’s
a kindness.’

‘I am going to see him now,’ said I.

‘Are you?’ said Mr. Omer. ‘Tell him I was hearty, and sent my respects.
Minnie and Joram’s at a ball. They would be as proud to see you as I
am, if they was at home. Minnie won’t hardly go out at all, you see, “on
account of father”, as she says. So I swore tonight, that if she didn’t
go, I’d go to bed at six. In consequence of which,’ Mr. Omer shook
himself and his chair with laughter at the success of his device, ‘she
and Joram’s at a ball.’

I shook hands with him, and wished him good night.

‘Half a minute, sir,’ said Mr. Omer. ‘If you was to go without seeing
my little elephant, you’d lose the best of sights. You never see such
a sight! Minnie!’ A musical little voice answered, from somewhere
upstairs, ‘I am coming, grandfather!’ and a pretty little girl with
long, flaxen, curling hair, soon came running into the shop.

‘This is my little elephant, sir,’ said Mr. Omer, fondling the child.
‘Siamese breed, sir. Now, little elephant!’

The little elephant set the door of the parlour open, enabling me to see
that, in these latter days, it was converted into a bedroom for Mr.
Omer who could not be easily conveyed upstairs; and then hid her pretty
forehead, and tumbled her long hair, against the back of Mr. Omer’s
chair.

‘The elephant butts, you know, sir,’ said Mr. Omer, winking, ‘when he
goes at a object. Once, elephant. Twice. Three times!’

At this signal, the little elephant, with a dexterity that was next to
marvellous in so small an animal, whisked the chair round with Mr. Omer
in it, and rattled it off, pell-mell, into the parlour, without touching
the door-post: Mr. Omer indescribably enjoying the performance, and
looking back at me on the road as if it were the triumphant issue of his
life’s exertions.

After a stroll about the town I went to Ham’s house. Peggotty had now
removed here for good; and had let her own house to the successor of
Mr. Barkis in the carrying business, who had paid her very well for the
good-will, cart, and horse. I believe the very same slow horse that Mr.
Barkis drove was still at work.

I found them in the neat kitchen, accompanied by Mrs. Gummidge, who had
been fetched from the old boat by Mr. Peggotty himself. I doubt if
she could have been induced to desert her post, by anyone else. He
had evidently told them all. Both Peggotty and Mrs. Gummidge had their
aprons to their eyes, and Ham had just stepped out ‘to take a turn on
the beach’. He presently came home, very glad to see me; and I hope they
were all the better for my being there. We spoke, with some approach to
cheerfulness, of Mr. Peggotty’s growing rich in a new country, and of
the wonders he would describe in his letters. We said nothing of Emily
by name, but distantly referred to her more than once. Ham was the
serenest of the party.

But, Peggotty told me, when she lighted me to a little chamber where the
Crocodile book was lying ready for me on the table, that he always was
the same. She believed (she told me, crying) that he was broken-hearted;
though he was as full of courage as of sweetness, and worked harder and
better than any boat-builder in any yard in all that part. There were
times, she said, of an evening, when he talked of their old life in
the boat-house; and then he mentioned Emily as a child. But, he never
mentioned her as a woman.

I thought I had read in his face that he would like to speak to me
alone. I therefore resolved to put myself in his way next evening, as he
came home from his work. Having settled this with myself, I fell asleep.
That night, for the first time in all those many nights, the candle was
taken out of the window, Mr. Peggotty swung in his old hammock in the
old boat, and the wind murmured with the old sound round his head.

All next day, he was occupied in disposing of his fishing-boat and
tackle; in packing up, and sending to London by waggon, such of his
little domestic possessions as he thought would be useful to him; and in
parting with the rest, or bestowing them on Mrs. Gummidge. She was with
him all day. As I had a sorrowful wish to see the old place once more,
before it was locked up, I engaged to meet them there in the evening.
But I so arranged it, as that I should meet Ham first.

It was easy to come in his way, as I knew where he worked. I met him
at a retired part of the sands, which I knew he would cross, and turned
back with him, that he might have leisure to speak to me if he really
wished. I had not mistaken the expression of his face. We had walked but
a little way together, when he said, without looking at me:

‘Mas’r Davy, have you seen her?’

‘Only for a moment, when she was in a swoon,’ I softly answered.

We walked a little farther, and he said:

‘Mas’r Davy, shall you see her, d’ye think?’

‘It would be too painful to her, perhaps,’ said I.

‘I have thowt of that,’ he replied. ‘So ‘twould, sir, so ‘twould.’

‘But, Ham,’ said I, gently, ‘if there is anything that I could write
to her, for you, in case I could not tell it; if there is anything
you would wish to make known to her through me; I should consider it a
sacred trust.’

‘I am sure on’t. I thankee, sir, most kind! I think theer is something I
could wish said or wrote.’

‘What is it?’

We walked a little farther in silence, and then he spoke.

‘’Tan’t that I forgive her. ‘Tan’t that so much. ‘Tis more as I beg of
her to forgive me, for having pressed my affections upon her. Odd times,
I think that if I hadn’t had her promise fur to marry me, sir, she was
that trustful of me, in a friendly way, that she’d have told me what was
struggling in her mind, and would have counselled with me, and I might
have saved her.’

I pressed his hand. ‘Is that all?’ ‘Theer’s yet a something else,’ he
returned, ‘if I can say it, Mas’r Davy.’

We walked on, farther than we had walked yet, before he spoke again. He
was not crying when he made the pauses I shall express by lines. He was
merely collecting himself to speak very plainly.

‘I loved her--and I love the mem’ry of her--too deep--to be able to
lead her to believe of my own self as I’m a happy man. I could only be
happy--by forgetting of her--and I’m afeerd I couldn’t hardly bear as
she should be told I done that. But if you, being so full of learning,
Mas’r Davy, could think of anything to say as might bring her to believe
I wasn’t greatly hurt: still loving of her, and mourning for her:
anything as might bring her to believe as I was not tired of my life,
and yet was hoping fur to see her without blame, wheer the wicked cease
from troubling and the weary are at rest--anything as would ease her
sorrowful mind, and yet not make her think as I could ever marry, or as
‘twas possible that anyone could ever be to me what she was--I should
ask of you to say that--with my prayers for her--that was so dear.’

I pressed his manly hand again, and told him I would charge myself to do
this as well as I could.

‘I thankee, sir,’ he answered. ‘’Twas kind of you to meet me. ‘Twas kind
of you to bear him company down. Mas’r Davy, I unnerstan’ very well,
though my aunt will come to Lon’on afore they sail, and they’ll unite
once more, that I am not like to see him agen. I fare to feel sure on’t.
We doen’t say so, but so ‘twill be, and better so. The last you see on
him--the very last--will you give him the lovingest duty and thanks of
the orphan, as he was ever more than a father to?’

This I also promised, faithfully.

‘I thankee agen, sir,’ he said, heartily shaking hands. ‘I know wheer
you’re a-going. Good-bye!’

With a slight wave of his hand, as though to explain to me that he could
not enter the old place, he turned away. As I looked after his figure,
crossing the waste in the moonlight, I saw him turn his face towards a
strip of silvery light upon the sea, and pass on, looking at it, until
he was a shadow in the distance.

The door of the boat-house stood open when I approached; and, on
entering, I found it emptied of all its furniture, saving one of the old
lockers, on which Mrs. Gummidge, with a basket on her knee, was seated,
looking at Mr. Peggotty. He leaned his elbow on the rough chimney-piece,
and gazed upon a few expiring embers in the grate; but he raised his
head, hopefully, on my coming in, and spoke in a cheery manner.

‘Come, according to promise, to bid farewell to ‘t, eh, Mas’r Davy?’
he said, taking up the candle. ‘Bare enough, now, an’t it?’ ‘Indeed you
have made good use of the time,’ said I.

‘Why, we have not been idle, sir. Missis Gummidge has worked like a--I
doen’t know what Missis Gummidge an’t worked like,’ said Mr. Peggotty,
looking at her, at a loss for a sufficiently approving simile.

Mrs. Gummidge, leaning on her basket, made no observation.

‘Theer’s the very locker that you used to sit on, ‘long with Em’ly!’
said Mr. Peggotty, in a whisper. ‘I’m a-going to carry it away with me,
last of all. And heer’s your old little bedroom, see, Mas’r Davy! A’most
as bleak tonight, as ‘art could wish!’

In truth, the wind, though it was low, had a solemn sound, and crept
around the deserted house with a whispered wailing that was very
mournful. Everything was gone, down to the little mirror with the
oyster-shell frame. I thought of myself, lying here, when that first
great change was being wrought at home. I thought of the blue-eyed child
who had enchanted me. I thought of Steerforth: and a foolish, fearful
fancy came upon me of his being near at hand, and liable to be met at
any turn.

‘’Tis like to be long,’ said Mr. Peggotty, in a low voice, ‘afore
the boat finds new tenants. They look upon ‘t, down heer, as being
unfortunate now!’

‘Does it belong to anybody in the neighbourhood?’ I asked.

‘To a mast-maker up town,’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘I’m a-going to give the
key to him tonight.’

We looked into the other little room, and came back to Mrs. Gummidge,
sitting on the locker, whom Mr. Peggotty, putting the light on the
chimney-piece, requested to rise, that he might carry it outside the
door before extinguishing the candle.

‘Dan’l,’ said Mrs. Gummidge, suddenly deserting her basket, and clinging
to his arm ‘my dear Dan’l, the parting words I speak in this house is, I
mustn’t be left behind. Doen’t ye think of leaving me behind, Dan’l! Oh,
doen’t ye ever do it!’

Mr. Peggotty, taken aback, looked from Mrs. Gummidge to me, and from me
to Mrs. Gummidge, as if he had been awakened from a sleep.

‘Doen’t ye, dearest Dan’l, doen’t ye!’ cried Mrs. Gummidge, fervently.
‘Take me ‘long with you, Dan’l, take me ‘long with you and Em’ly! I’ll
be your servant, constant and trew. If there’s slaves in them parts
where you’re a-going, I’ll be bound to you for one, and happy, but
doen’t ye leave me behind, Dan’l, that’s a deary dear!’

‘My good soul,’ said Mr. Peggotty, shaking his head, ‘you doen’t know
what a long voyage, and what a hard life ‘tis!’ ‘Yes, I do, Dan’l! I can
guess!’ cried Mrs. Gummidge. ‘But my parting words under this roof is,
I shall go into the house and die, if I am not took. I can dig, Dan’l.
I can work. I can live hard. I can be loving and patient now--more than
you think, Dan’l, if you’ll on’y try me. I wouldn’t touch the ‘lowance,
not if I was dying of want, Dan’l Peggotty; but I’ll go with you and
Em’ly, if you’ll on’y let me, to the world’s end! I know how ‘tis; I
know you think that I am lone and lorn; but, deary love, ‘tan’t so no
more! I ain’t sat here, so long, a-watching, and a-thinking of your
trials, without some good being done me. Mas’r Davy, speak to him for
me! I knows his ways, and Em’ly’s, and I knows their sorrows, and can be
a comfort to ‘em, some odd times, and labour for ‘em allus! Dan’l, deary
Dan’l, let me go ‘long with you!’

And Mrs. Gummidge took his hand, and kissed it with a homely pathos and
affection, in a homely rapture of devotion and gratitude, that he well
deserved.

We brought the locker out, extinguished the candle, fastened the door
on the outside, and left the old boat close shut up, a dark speck in
the cloudy night. Next day, when we were returning to London outside the
coach, Mrs. Gummidge and her basket were on the seat behind, and Mrs.
Gummidge was happy.



CHAPTER 52. I ASSIST AT AN EXPLOSION


When the time Mr. Micawber had appointed so mysteriously, was within
four-and-twenty hours of being come, my aunt and I consulted how we
should proceed; for my aunt was very unwilling to leave Dora. Ah! how
easily I carried Dora up and down stairs, now!

We were disposed, notwithstanding Mr. Micawber’s stipulation for my
aunt’s attendance, to arrange that she should stay at home, and be
represented by Mr. Dick and me. In short, we had resolved to take this
course, when Dora again unsettled us by declaring that she never
would forgive herself, and never would forgive her bad boy, if my aunt
remained behind, on any pretence.

‘I won’t speak to you,’ said Dora, shaking her curls at my aunt. ‘I’ll
be disagreeable! I’ll make Jip bark at you all day. I shall be sure that
you really are a cross old thing, if you don’t go!’

‘Tut, Blossom!’ laughed my aunt. ‘You know you can’t do without me!’

‘Yes, I can,’ said Dora. ‘You are no use to me at all. You never run up
and down stairs for me, all day long. You never sit and tell me stories
about Doady, when his shoes were worn out, and he was covered with
dust--oh, what a poor little mite of a fellow! You never do anything at
all to please me, do you, dear?’ Dora made haste to kiss my aunt, and
say, ‘Yes, you do! I’m only joking!’-lest my aunt should think she
really meant it.

‘But, aunt,’ said Dora, coaxingly, ‘now listen. You must go. I shall
tease you, ‘till you let me have my own way about it. I shall lead my
naughty boy such a life, if he don’t make you go. I shall make myself
so disagreeable--and so will Jip! You’ll wish you had gone, like a good
thing, for ever and ever so long, if you don’t go. Besides,’ said Dora,
putting back her hair, and looking wonderingly at my aunt and me, ‘why
shouldn’t you both go? I am not very ill indeed. Am I?’

‘Why, what a question!’ cried my aunt.

‘What a fancy!’ said I.

‘Yes! I know I am a silly little thing!’ said Dora, slowly looking from
one of us to the other, and then putting up her pretty lips to kiss us
as she lay upon her couch. ‘Well, then, you must both go, or I shall not
believe you; and then I shall cry!’

I saw, in my aunt’s face, that she began to give way now, and Dora
brightened again, as she saw it too.

‘You’ll come back with so much to tell me, that it’ll take at least
a week to make me understand!’ said Dora. ‘Because I know I shan’t
understand, for a length of time, if there’s any business in it. And
there’s sure to be some business in it! If there’s anything to add up,
besides, I don’t know when I shall make it out; and my bad boy will look
so miserable all the time. There! Now you’ll go, won’t you? You’ll only
be gone one night, and Jip will take care of me while you are gone.
Doady will carry me upstairs before you go, and I won’t come down again
till you come back; and you shall take Agnes a dreadfully scolding
letter from me, because she has never been to see us!’

We agreed, without any more consultation, that we would both go, and
that Dora was a little Impostor, who feigned to be rather unwell,
because she liked to be petted. She was greatly pleased, and very merry;
and we four, that is to say, my aunt, Mr. Dick, Traddles, and I, went
down to Canterbury by the Dover mail that night.

At the hotel where Mr. Micawber had requested us to await him, which
we got into, with some trouble, in the middle of the night, I found a
letter, importing that he would appear in the morning punctually at half
past nine. After which, we went shivering, at that uncomfortable hour,
to our respective beds, through various close passages; which smelt as
if they had been steeped, for ages, in a solution of soup and stables.

Early in the morning, I sauntered through the dear old tranquil streets,
and again mingled with the shadows of the venerable gateways and
churches. The rooks were sailing about the cathedral towers; and the
towers themselves, overlooking many a long unaltered mile of the rich
country and its pleasant streams, were cutting the bright morning air,
as if there were no such thing as change on earth. Yet the bells, when
they sounded, told me sorrowfully of change in everything; told me of
their own age, and my pretty Dora’s youth; and of the many, never old,
who had lived and loved and died, while the reverberations of the bells
had hummed through the rusty armour of the Black Prince hanging up
within, and, motes upon the deep of Time, had lost themselves in air, as
circles do in water.

I looked at the old house from the corner of the street, but did not go
nearer to it, lest, being observed, I might unwittingly do any harm to
the design I had come to aid. The early sun was striking edgewise on its
gables and lattice-windows, touching them with gold; and some beams of
its old peace seemed to touch my heart.

I strolled into the country for an hour or so, and then returned by
the main street, which in the interval had shaken off its last night’s
sleep. Among those who were stirring in the shops, I saw my ancient
enemy the butcher, now advanced to top-boots and a baby, and in business
for himself. He was nursing the baby, and appeared to be a benignant
member of society.

We all became very anxious and impatient, when we sat down to breakfast.
As it approached nearer and nearer to half past nine o’clock, our
restless expectation of Mr. Micawber increased. At last we made no more
pretence of attending to the meal, which, except with Mr. Dick, had been
a mere form from the first; but my aunt walked up and down the room.
Traddles sat upon the sofa affecting to read the paper with his eyes on
the ceiling; and I looked out of the window to give early notice of Mr.
Micawber’s coming. Nor had I long to watch, for, at the first chime of
the half hour, he appeared in the street.

‘Here he is,’ said I, ‘and not in his legal attire!’

My aunt tied the strings of her bonnet (she had come down to breakfast
in it), and put on her shawl, as if she were ready for anything that
was resolute and uncompromising. Traddles buttoned his coat with a
determined air. Mr. Dick, disturbed by these formidable appearances, but
feeling it necessary to imitate them, pulled his hat, with both hands,
as firmly over his ears as he possibly could; and instantly took it off
again, to welcome Mr. Micawber.

‘Gentlemen, and madam,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘good morning! My dear sir,’
to Mr. Dick, who shook hands with him violently, ‘you are extremely
good.’

‘Have you breakfasted?’ said Mr. Dick. ‘Have a chop!’

‘Not for the world, my good sir!’ cried Mr. Micawber, stopping him on
his way to the bell; ‘appetite and myself, Mr. Dixon, have long been
strangers.’

Mr. Dixon was so well pleased with his new name, and appeared to think
it so obliging in Mr. Micawber to confer it upon him, that he shook
hands with him again, and laughed rather childishly.

‘Dick,’ said my aunt, ‘attention!’

Mr. Dick recovered himself, with a blush.

‘Now, sir,’ said my aunt to Mr. Micawber, as she put on her gloves, ‘we
are ready for Mount Vesuvius, or anything else, as soon as YOU please.’

‘Madam,’ returned Mr. Micawber, ‘I trust you will shortly witness an
eruption. Mr. Traddles, I have your permission, I believe, to mention
here that we have been in communication together?’

‘It is undoubtedly the fact, Copperfield,’ said Traddles, to whom I
looked in surprise. ‘Mr. Micawber has consulted me in reference to
what he has in contemplation; and I have advised him to the best of my
judgement.’

‘Unless I deceive myself, Mr. Traddles,’ pursued Mr. Micawber, ‘what I
contemplate is a disclosure of an important nature.’

‘Highly so,’ said Traddles.

‘Perhaps, under such circumstances, madam and gentlemen,’ said Mr.
Micawber, ‘you will do me the favour to submit yourselves, for the
moment, to the direction of one who, however unworthy to be regarded in
any other light but as a Waif and Stray upon the shore of human nature,
is still your fellow-man, though crushed out of his original form
by individual errors, and the accumulative force of a combination of
circumstances?’

‘We have perfect confidence in you, Mr. Micawber,’ said I, ‘and will do
what you please.’

‘Mr. Copperfield,’ returned Mr. Micawber, ‘your confidence is not, at
the existing juncture, ill-bestowed. I would beg to be allowed a start
of five minutes by the clock; and then to receive the present company,
inquiring for Miss Wickfield, at the office of Wickfield and Heep, whose
Stipendiary I am.’

My aunt and I looked at Traddles, who nodded his approval.

‘I have no more,’ observed Mr. Micawber, ‘to say at present.’

With which, to my infinite surprise, he included us all in a
comprehensive bow, and disappeared; his manner being extremely distant,
and his face extremely pale.

Traddles only smiled, and shook his head (with his hair standing upright
on the top of it), when I looked to him for an explanation; so I took
out my watch, and, as a last resource, counted off the five minutes. My
aunt, with her own watch in her hand, did the like. When the time was
expired, Traddles gave her his arm; and we all went out together to the
old house, without saying one word on the way.

We found Mr. Micawber at his desk, in the turret office on the
ground floor, either writing, or pretending to write, hard. The large
office-ruler was stuck into his waistcoat, and was not so well concealed
but that a foot or more of that instrument protruded from his bosom,
like a new kind of shirt-frill.

As it appeared to me that I was expected to speak, I said aloud:

‘How do you do, Mr. Micawber?’

‘Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, gravely, ‘I hope I see you well?’

‘Is Miss Wickfield at home?’ said I.

‘Mr. Wickfield is unwell in bed, sir, of a rheumatic fever,’ he
returned; ‘but Miss Wickfield, I have no doubt, will be happy to see old
friends. Will you walk in, sir?’

He preceded us to the dining-room--the first room I had entered in that
house--and flinging open the door of Mr. Wickfield’s former office,
said, in a sonorous voice:

‘Miss Trotwood, Mr. David Copperfield, Mr. Thomas Traddles, and Mr.
Dixon!’

I had not seen Uriah Heep since the time of the blow. Our visit
astonished him, evidently; not the less, I dare say, because it
astonished ourselves. He did not gather his eyebrows together, for he
had none worth mentioning; but he frowned to that degree that he almost
closed his small eyes, while the hurried raising of his grisly hand to
his chin betrayed some trepidation or surprise. This was only when we
were in the act of entering his room, and when I caught a glance at him
over my aunt’s shoulder. A moment afterwards, he was as fawning and as
humble as ever.

‘Well, I am sure,’ he said. ‘This is indeed an unexpected pleasure! To
have, as I may say, all friends round St. Paul’s at once, is a treat
unlooked for! Mr. Copperfield, I hope I see you well, and--if I may
umbly express myself so--friendly towards them as is ever your friends,
whether or not. Mrs. Copperfield, sir, I hope she’s getting on. We have
been made quite uneasy by the poor accounts we have had of her state,
lately, I do assure you.’

I felt ashamed to let him take my hand, but I did not know yet what else
to do.

‘Things are changed in this office, Miss Trotwood, since I was an umble
clerk, and held your pony; ain’t they?’ said Uriah, with his sickliest
smile. ‘But I am not changed, Miss Trotwood.’

‘Well, sir,’ returned my aunt, ‘to tell you the truth, I think you are
pretty constant to the promise of your youth; if that’s any satisfaction
to you.’

‘Thank you, Miss Trotwood,’ said Uriah, writhing in his ungainly manner,
‘for your good opinion! Micawber, tell ‘em to let Miss Agnes know--and
mother. Mother will be quite in a state, when she sees the present
company!’ said Uriah, setting chairs.

‘You are not busy, Mr. Heep?’ said Traddles, whose eye the cunning red
eye accidentally caught, as it at once scrutinized and evaded us.

‘No, Mr. Traddles,’ replied Uriah, resuming his official seat, and
squeezing his bony hands, laid palm to palm between his bony knees. ‘Not
so much so as I could wish. But lawyers, sharks, and leeches, are not
easily satisfied, you know! Not but what myself and Micawber have our
hands pretty full, in general, on account of Mr. Wickfield’s being
hardly fit for any occupation, sir. But it’s a pleasure as well as a
duty, I am sure, to work for him. You’ve not been intimate with Mr.
Wickfield, I think, Mr. Traddles? I believe I’ve only had the honour of
seeing you once myself?’

‘No, I have not been intimate with Mr. Wickfield,’ returned Traddles;
‘or I might perhaps have waited on you long ago, Mr. Heep.’

There was something in the tone of this reply, which made Uriah look at
the speaker again, with a very sinister and suspicious expression. But,
seeing only Traddles, with his good-natured face, simple manner, and
hair on end, he dismissed it as he replied, with a jerk of his whole
body, but especially his throat:

‘I am sorry for that, Mr. Traddles. You would have admired him as much
as we all do. His little failings would only have endeared him to you
the more. But if you would like to hear my fellow-partner eloquently
spoken of, I should refer you to Copperfield. The family is a subject
he’s very strong upon, if you never heard him.’

I was prevented from disclaiming the compliment (if I should have
done so, in any case), by the entrance of Agnes, now ushered in by Mr.
Micawber. She was not quite so self-possessed as usual, I thought; and
had evidently undergone anxiety and fatigue. But her earnest cordiality,
and her quiet beauty, shone with the gentler lustre for it.

I saw Uriah watch her while she greeted us; and he reminded me of an
ugly and rebellious genie watching a good spirit. In the meanwhile,
some slight sign passed between Mr. Micawber and Traddles; and Traddles,
unobserved except by me, went out.

‘Don’t wait, Micawber,’ said Uriah.

Mr. Micawber, with his hand upon the ruler in his breast, stood erect
before the door, most unmistakably contemplating one of his fellow-men,
and that man his employer.

‘What are you waiting for?’ said Uriah. ‘Micawber! did you hear me tell
you not to wait?’

‘Yes!’ replied the immovable Mr. Micawber.

‘Then why DO you wait?’ said Uriah.

‘Because I--in short, choose,’ replied Mr. Micawber, with a burst.

Uriah’s cheeks lost colour, and an unwholesome paleness, still faintly
tinged by his pervading red, overspread them. He looked at Mr. Micawber
attentively, with his whole face breathing short and quick in every
feature.

‘You are a dissipated fellow, as all the world knows,’ he said, with an
effort at a smile, ‘and I am afraid you’ll oblige me to get rid of you.
Go along! I’ll talk to you presently.’

‘If there is a scoundrel on this earth,’ said Mr. Micawber, suddenly
breaking out again with the utmost vehemence, ‘with whom I have already
talked too much, that scoundrel’s name is--HEEP!’

Uriah fell back, as if he had been struck or stung. Looking slowly round
upon us with the darkest and wickedest expression that his face could
wear, he said, in a lower voice:

‘Oho! This is a conspiracy! You have met here by appointment! You are
playing Booty with my clerk, are you, Copperfield? Now, take care.
You’ll make nothing of this. We understand each other, you and me.
There’s no love between us. You were always a puppy with a proud
stomach, from your first coming here; and you envy me my rise, do you?
None of your plots against me; I’ll counterplot you! Micawber, you be
off. I’ll talk to you presently.’

‘Mr. Micawber,’ said I, ‘there is a sudden change in this fellow, in
more respects than the extraordinary one of his speaking the truth in
one particular, which assures me that he is brought to bay. Deal with
him as he deserves!’

‘You are a precious set of people, ain’t you?’ said Uriah, in the same
low voice, and breaking out into a clammy heat, which he wiped from his
forehead, with his long lean hand, ‘to buy over my clerk, who is the
very scum of society,--as you yourself were, Copperfield, you know it,
before anyone had charity on you,--to defame me with his lies? Miss
Trotwood, you had better stop this; or I’ll stop your husband shorter
than will be pleasant to you. I won’t know your story professionally,
for nothing, old lady! Miss Wickfield, if you have any love for your
father, you had better not join that gang. I’ll ruin him, if you do.
Now, come! I have got some of you under the harrow. Think twice, before
it goes over you. Think twice, you, Micawber, if you don’t want to
be crushed. I recommend you to take yourself off, and be talked to
presently, you fool! while there’s time to retreat. Where’s mother?’ he
said, suddenly appearing to notice, with alarm, the absence of Traddles,
and pulling down the bell-rope. ‘Fine doings in a person’s own house!’

‘Mrs. Heep is here, sir,’ said Traddles, returning with that worthy
mother of a worthy son. ‘I have taken the liberty of making myself known
to her.’

‘Who are you to make yourself known?’ retorted Uriah. ‘And what do you
want here?’

‘I am the agent and friend of Mr. Wickfield, sir,’ said Traddles, in a
composed and business-like way. ‘And I have a power of attorney from him
in my pocket, to act for him in all matters.’

‘The old ass has drunk himself into a state of dotage,’ said Uriah,
turning uglier than before, ‘and it has been got from him by fraud!’

‘Something has been got from him by fraud, I know,’ returned Traddles
quietly; ‘and so do you, Mr. Heep. We will refer that question, if you
please, to Mr. Micawber.’

‘Ury--!’ Mrs. Heep began, with an anxious gesture.

‘YOU hold your tongue, mother,’ he returned; ‘least said, soonest
mended.’

‘But, my Ury--’

‘Will you hold your tongue, mother, and leave it to me?’

Though I had long known that his servility was false, and all his
pretences knavish and hollow, I had had no adequate conception of the
extent of his hypocrisy, until I now saw him with his mask off. The
suddenness with which he dropped it, when he perceived that it was
useless to him; the malice, insolence, and hatred, he revealed; the leer
with which he exulted, even at this moment, in the evil he had done--all
this time being desperate too, and at his wits’ end for the means
of getting the better of us--though perfectly consistent with the
experience I had of him, at first took even me by surprise, who had
known him so long, and disliked him so heartily.

I say nothing of the look he conferred on me, as he stood eyeing us,
one after another; for I had always understood that he hated me, and I
remembered the marks of my hand upon his cheek. But when his eyes passed
on to Agnes, and I saw the rage with which he felt his power over her
slipping away, and the exhibition, in their disappointment, of the
odious passions that had led him to aspire to one whose virtues he could
never appreciate or care for, I was shocked by the mere thought of her
having lived, an hour, within sight of such a man.

After some rubbing of the lower part of his face, and some looking at us
with those bad eyes, over his grisly fingers, he made one more address
to me, half whining, and half abusive.

‘You think it justifiable, do you, Copperfield, you who pride yourself
so much on your honour and all the rest of it, to sneak about my place,
eaves-dropping with my clerk? If it had been ME, I shouldn’t have
wondered; for I don’t make myself out a gentleman (though I never was
in the streets either, as you were, according to Micawber), but being
you!--And you’re not afraid of doing this, either? You don’t think at
all of what I shall do, in return; or of getting yourself into
trouble for conspiracy and so forth? Very well. We shall see! Mr.
What’s-your-name, you were going to refer some question to Micawber.
There’s your referee. Why don’t you make him speak? He has learnt his
lesson, I see.’

Seeing that what he said had no effect on me or any of us, he sat on the
edge of his table with his hands in his pockets, and one of his splay
feet twisted round the other leg, waiting doggedly for what might
follow.

Mr. Micawber, whose impetuosity I had restrained thus far with the
greatest difficulty, and who had repeatedly interposed with the first
syllable of SCOUN-drel! without getting to the second, now burst
forward, drew the ruler from his breast (apparently as a defensive
weapon), and produced from his pocket a foolscap document, folded in the
form of a large letter. Opening this packet, with his old flourish, and
glancing at the contents, as if he cherished an artistic admiration of
their style of composition, he began to read as follows:


‘“Dear Miss Trotwood and gentlemen--“’

‘Bless and save the man!’ exclaimed my aunt in a low voice. ‘He’d write
letters by the ream, if it was a capital offence!’

Mr. Micawber, without hearing her, went on.

‘“In appearing before you to denounce probably the most consummate
Villain that has ever existed,”’ Mr. Micawber, without looking off the
letter, pointed the ruler, like a ghostly truncheon, at Uriah Heep,
‘“I ask no consideration for myself. The victim, from my cradle, of
pecuniary liabilities to which I have been unable to respond, I have
ever been the sport and toy of debasing circumstances. Ignominy,
Want, Despair, and Madness, have, collectively or separately, been the
attendants of my career.”’

The relish with which Mr. Micawber described himself as a prey to these
dismal calamities, was only to be equalled by the emphasis with which he
read his letter; and the kind of homage he rendered to it with a roll of
his head, when he thought he had hit a sentence very hard indeed.

‘“In an accumulation of Ignominy, Want, Despair, and Madness, I entered
the office--or, as our lively neighbour the Gaul would term it, the
Bureau--of the Firm, nominally conducted under the appellation of
Wickfield and--HEEP, but in reality, wielded by--HEEP alone. HEEP, and
only HEEP, is the mainspring of that machine. HEEP, and only HEEP, is
the Forger and the Cheat.”’

Uriah, more blue than white at these words, made a dart at the letter,
as if to tear it in pieces. Mr. Micawber, with a perfect miracle of
dexterity or luck, caught his advancing knuckles with the ruler, and
disabled his right hand. It dropped at the wrist, as if it were broken.
The blow sounded as if it had fallen on wood.

‘The Devil take you!’ said Uriah, writhing in a new way with pain. ‘I’ll
be even with you.’

‘Approach me again, you--you--you HEEP of infamy,’ gasped Mr. Micawber,
‘and if your head is human, I’ll break it. Come on, come on!’

I think I never saw anything more ridiculous--I was sensible of it, even
at the time--than Mr. Micawber making broad-sword guards with the ruler,
and crying, ‘Come on!’ while Traddles and I pushed him back into a
corner, from which, as often as we got him into it, he persisted in
emerging again.

His enemy, muttering to himself, after wringing his wounded hand for
sometime, slowly drew off his neck-kerchief and bound it up; then
held it in his other hand, and sat upon his table with his sullen face
looking down.

Mr. Micawber, when he was sufficiently cool, proceeded with his letter.

‘“The stipendiary emoluments in consideration of which I entered into
the service of--HEEP,”’ always pausing before that word and uttering
it with astonishing vigour, ‘“were not defined, beyond the pittance of
twenty-two shillings and six per week. The rest was left contingent on
the value of my professional exertions; in other and more expressive
words, on the baseness of my nature, the cupidity of my motives, the
poverty of my family, the general moral (or rather immoral) resemblance
between myself and--HEEP. Need I say, that it soon became necessary for
me to solicit from--HEEP--pecuniary advances towards the support of
Mrs. Micawber, and our blighted but rising family? Need I say that this
necessity had been foreseen by--HEEP? That those advances were secured
by I.O.U.’s and other similar acknowledgements, known to the legal
institutions of this country? And that I thus became immeshed in the web
he had spun for my reception?”’

Mr. Micawber’s enjoyment of his epistolary powers, in describing this
unfortunate state of things, really seemed to outweigh any pain or
anxiety that the reality could have caused him. He read on:

‘“Then it was that--HEEP--began to favour me with just so much of his
confidence, as was necessary to the discharge of his infernal business.
Then it was that I began, if I may so Shakespearianly express myself, to
dwindle, peak, and pine. I found that my services were constantly
called into requisition for the falsification of business, and the
mystification of an individual whom I will designate as Mr. W. That Mr.
W. was imposed upon, kept in ignorance, and deluded, in every possible
way; yet, that all this while, the ruffian--HEEP--was professing
unbounded gratitude to, and unbounded friendship for, that much-abused
gentleman. This was bad enough; but, as the philosophic Dane observes,
with that universal applicability which distinguishes the illustrious
ornament of the Elizabethan Era, worse remains behind!”’

Mr. Micawber was so very much struck by this happy rounding off with a
quotation, that he indulged himself, and us, with a second reading of
the sentence, under pretence of having lost his place.

‘“It is not my intention,”’ he continued reading on, ‘“to enter on a
detailed list, within the compass of the present epistle (though it
is ready elsewhere), of the various malpractices of a minor nature,
affecting the individual whom I have denominated Mr. W., to which I
have been a tacitly consenting party. My object, when the contest within
myself between stipend and no stipend, baker and no baker, existence
and non-existence, ceased, was to take advantage of my opportunities
to discover and expose the major malpractices committed, to that
gentleman’s grievous wrong and injury, by--HEEP. Stimulated by the
silent monitor within, and by a no less touching and appealing monitor
without--to whom I will briefly refer as Miss W.--I entered on a not
unlaborious task of clandestine investigation, protracted--now, to the
best of my knowledge, information, and belief, over a period exceeding
twelve calendar months.”’

He read this passage as if it were from an Act of Parliament; and
appeared majestically refreshed by the sound of the words.

‘“My charges against--HEEP,”’ he read on, glancing at him, and drawing
the ruler into a convenient position under his left arm, in case of
need, ‘“are as follows.”’

We all held our breath, I think. I am sure Uriah held his.

‘“First,”’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘“When Mr. W.’s faculties and memory
for business became, through causes into which it is not necessary or
expedient for me to enter, weakened and confused,--HEEP--designedly
perplexed and complicated the whole of the official transactions. When
Mr. W. was least fit to enter on business,--HEEP was always at hand
to force him to enter on it. He obtained Mr. W.’s signature under such
circumstances to documents of importance, representing them to be other
documents of no importance. He induced Mr. W. to empower him to draw
out, thus, one particular sum of trust-money, amounting to twelve six
fourteen, two and nine, and employed it to meet pretended business
charges and deficiencies which were either already provided for, or
had never really existed. He gave this proceeding, throughout, the
appearance of having originated in Mr. W.’s own dishonest intention, and
of having been accomplished by Mr. W.’s own dishonest act; and has used
it, ever since, to torture and constrain him.”’

‘You shall prove this, you Copperfield!’ said Uriah, with a threatening
shake of the head. ‘All in good time!’

‘Ask--HEEP--Mr. Traddles, who lived in his house after him,’ said Mr.
Micawber, breaking off from the letter; ‘will you?’

‘The fool himself--and lives there now,’ said Uriah, disdainfully.

‘Ask--HEEP--if he ever kept a pocket-book in that house,’ said Mr.
Micawber; ‘will you?’

I saw Uriah’s lank hand stop, involuntarily, in the scraping of his
chin.

‘Or ask him,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘if he ever burnt one there. If he says
yes, and asks you where the ashes are, refer him to Wilkins Micawber,
and he will hear of something not at all to his advantage!’

The triumphant flourish with which Mr. Micawber delivered himself of
these words, had a powerful effect in alarming the mother; who cried
out, in much agitation:

‘Ury, Ury! Be umble, and make terms, my dear!’

‘Mother!’ he retorted, ‘will you keep quiet? You’re in a fright, and
don’t know what you say or mean. Umble!’ he repeated, looking at me,
with a snarl; ‘I’ve umbled some of ‘em for a pretty long time back,
umble as I was!’

Mr. Micawber, genteelly adjusting his chin in his cravat, presently
proceeded with his composition.

‘“Second. HEEP has, on several occasions, to the best of my knowledge,
information, and belief--“’

‘But that won’t do,’ muttered Uriah, relieved. ‘Mother, you keep quiet.’

‘We will endeavour to provide something that WILL do, and do for you
finally, sir, very shortly,’ replied Mr. Micawber.

‘“Second. HEEP has, on several occasions, to the best of my knowledge,
information, and belief, systematically forged, to various entries,
books, and documents, the signature of Mr. W.; and has distinctly done
so in one instance, capable of proof by me. To wit, in manner following,
that is to say:”’

Again, Mr. Micawber had a relish in this formal piling up of words,
which, however ludicrously displayed in his case, was, I must say, not
at all peculiar to him. I have observed it, in the course of my life,
in numbers of men. It seems to me to be a general rule. In the taking of
legal oaths, for instance, deponents seem to enjoy themselves mightily
when they come to several good words in succession, for the expression
of one idea; as, that they utterly detest, abominate, and abjure, or so
forth; and the old anathemas were made relishing on the same principle.
We talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannize over them
too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to
wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds
well. As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on
state occasions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so, the
meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration, if there
be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get into trouble by
making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too
numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a
nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many
greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words.

Mr. Micawber read on, almost smacking his lips:

‘“To wit, in manner following, that is to say. Mr. W. being infirm, and
it being within the bounds of probability that his decease might lead
to some discoveries, and to the downfall of--HEEP’S--power over the W.
family,--as I, Wilkins Micawber, the undersigned, assume--unless the
filial affection of his daughter could be secretly influenced from
allowing any investigation of the partnership affairs to be ever made,
the said--HEEP--deemed it expedient to have a bond ready by him, as from
Mr. W., for the before-mentioned sum of twelve six fourteen, two and
nine, with interest, stated therein to have been advanced by--HEEP--to
Mr. W. to save Mr. W. from dishonour; though really the sum was never
advanced by him, and has long been replaced. The signatures to this
instrument purporting to be executed by Mr. W. and attested by Wilkins
Micawber, are forgeries by--HEEP. I have, in my possession, in his hand
and pocket-book, several similar imitations of Mr. W.’s signature, here
and there defaced by fire, but legible to anyone. I never attested any
such document. And I have the document itself, in my possession.”’ Uriah
Heep, with a start, took out of his pocket a bunch of keys, and opened
a certain drawer; then, suddenly bethought himself of what he was about,
and turned again towards us, without looking in it.

‘“And I have the document,”’ Mr. Micawber read again, looking about as
if it were the text of a sermon, ‘“in my possession,--that is to say,
I had, early this morning, when this was written, but have since
relinquished it to Mr. Traddles.”’

‘It is quite true,’ assented Traddles.

‘Ury, Ury!’ cried the mother, ‘be umble and make terms. I know my
son will be umble, gentlemen, if you’ll give him time to think. Mr.
Copperfield, I’m sure you know that he was always very umble, sir!’

It was singular to see how the mother still held to the old trick, when
the son had abandoned it as useless.

‘Mother,’ he said, with an impatient bite at the handkerchief in which
his hand was wrapped, ‘you had better take and fire a loaded gun at me.’

‘But I love you, Ury,’ cried Mrs. Heep. And I have no doubt she did; or
that he loved her, however strange it may appear; though, to be sure,
they were a congenial couple. ‘And I can’t bear to hear you provoking
the gentlemen, and endangering of yourself more. I told the gentleman
at first, when he told me upstairs it was come to light, that I would
answer for your being umble, and making amends. Oh, see how umble I am,
gentlemen, and don’t mind him!’

‘Why, there’s Copperfield, mother,’ he angrily retorted, pointing his
lean finger at me, against whom all his animosity was levelled, as the
prime mover in the discovery; and I did not undeceive him; ‘there’s
Copperfield, would have given you a hundred pound to say less than
you’ve blurted out!’

‘I can’t help it, Ury,’ cried his mother. ‘I can’t see you running into
danger, through carrying your head so high. Better be umble, as you
always was.’

He remained for a little, biting the handkerchief, and then said to me
with a scowl:

‘What more have you got to bring forward? If anything, go on with it.
What do you look at me for?’

Mr. Micawber promptly resumed his letter, glad to revert to a
performance with which he was so highly satisfied.

‘“Third. And last. I am now in a condition to show, by--HEEP’S--false
books, and--HEEP’S--real memoranda, beginning with the partially
destroyed pocket-book (which I was unable to comprehend, at the time of
its accidental discovery by Mrs. Micawber, on our taking possession of
our present abode, in the locker or bin devoted to the reception of the
ashes calcined on our domestic hearth), that the weaknesses, the faults,
the very virtues, the parental affections, and the sense of honour, of
the unhappy Mr. W. have been for years acted on by, and warped to the
base purposes of--HEEP. That Mr. W. has been for years deluded and
plundered, in every conceivable manner, to the pecuniary aggrandisement
of the avaricious, false, and grasping--HEEP. That the engrossing object
of--HEEP--was, next to gain, to subdue Mr. and Miss W. (of his ulterior
views in reference to the latter I say nothing) entirely to himself.
That his last act, completed but a few months since, was to induce Mr.
W. to execute a relinquishment of his share in the partnership, and even
a bill of sale on the very furniture of his house, in consideration of a
certain annuity, to be well and truly paid by--HEEP--on the four common
quarter-days in each and every year. That these meshes; beginning with
alarming and falsified accounts of the estate of which Mr. W. is the
receiver, at a period when Mr. W. had launched into imprudent and
ill-judged speculations, and may not have had the money, for which he
was morally and legally responsible, in hand; going on with pretended
borrowings of money at enormous interest, really coming from--HEEP--and
by--HEEP--fraudulently obtained or withheld from Mr. W. himself,
on pretence of such speculations or otherwise; perpetuated by a
miscellaneous catalogue of unscrupulous chicaneries--gradually
thickened, until the unhappy Mr. W. could see no world beyond. Bankrupt,
as he believed, alike in circumstances, in all other hope, and
in honour, his sole reliance was upon the monster in the garb of
man,”’--Mr. Micawber made a good deal of this, as a new turn of
expression,--‘“who, by making himself necessary to him, had achieved his
destruction. All this I undertake to show. Probably much more!”’

I whispered a few words to Agnes, who was weeping, half joyfully, half
sorrowfully, at my side; and there was a movement among us, as if Mr.
Micawber had finished. He said, with exceeding gravity, ‘Pardon me,’
and proceeded, with a mixture of the lowest spirits and the most intense
enjoyment, to the peroration of his letter.

‘“I have now concluded. It merely remains for me to substantiate these
accusations; and then, with my ill-starred family, to disappear from the
landscape on which we appear to be an encumbrance. That is soon done. It
may be reasonably inferred that our baby will first expire of inanition,
as being the frailest member of our circle; and that our twins will
follow next in order. So be it! For myself, my Canterbury Pilgrimage has
done much; imprisonment on civil process, and want, will soon do more.
I trust that the labour and hazard of an investigation--of which the
smallest results have been slowly pieced together, in the pressure of
arduous avocations, under grinding penurious apprehensions, at rise of
morn, at dewy eve, in the shadows of night, under the watchful eye of
one whom it were superfluous to call Demon--combined with the struggle
of parental Poverty to turn it, when completed, to the right account,
may be as the sprinkling of a few drops of sweet water on my funeral
pyre. I ask no more. Let it be, in justice, merely said of me, as of a
gallant and eminent naval Hero, with whom I have no pretensions to
cope, that what I have done, I did, in despite of mercenary and selfish
objects,

     For England, home, and Beauty.

     ‘“Remaining always, &c.  &c., WILKINS MICAWBER.”’


Much affected, but still intensely enjoying himself, Mr. Micawber folded
up his letter, and handed it with a bow to my aunt, as something she
might like to keep.

There was, as I had noticed on my first visit long ago, an iron safe in
the room. The key was in it. A hasty suspicion seemed to strike Uriah;
and, with a glance at Mr. Micawber, he went to it, and threw the doors
clanking open. It was empty.

‘Where are the books?’ he cried, with a frightful face. ‘Some thief has
stolen the books!’

Mr. Micawber tapped himself with the ruler. ‘I did, when I got the key
from you as usual--but a little earlier--and opened it this morning.’

‘Don’t be uneasy,’ said Traddles. ‘They have come into my possession. I
will take care of them, under the authority I mentioned.’

‘You receive stolen goods, do you?’ cried Uriah.

‘Under such circumstances,’ answered Traddles, ‘yes.’

What was my astonishment when I beheld my aunt, who had been profoundly
quiet and attentive, make a dart at Uriah Heep, and seize him by the
collar with both hands!

‘You know what I want?’ said my aunt.

‘A strait-waistcoat,’ said he.

‘No. My property!’ returned my aunt. ‘Agnes, my dear, as long as
I believed it had been really made away with by your father, I
wouldn’t--and, my dear, I didn’t, even to Trot, as he knows--breathe a
syllable of its having been placed here for investment. But, now I know
this fellow’s answerable for it, and I’ll have it! Trot, come and take
it away from him!’

Whether my aunt supposed, for the moment, that he kept her property in
his neck-kerchief, I am sure I don’t know; but she certainly pulled at
it as if she thought so. I hastened to put myself between them, and to
assure her that we would all take care that he should make the utmost
restitution of everything he had wrongly got. This, and a few moments’
reflection, pacified her; but she was not at all disconcerted by what
she had done (though I cannot say as much for her bonnet) and resumed
her seat composedly.

During the last few minutes, Mrs. Heep had been clamouring to her son
to be ‘umble’; and had been going down on her knees to all of us in
succession, and making the wildest promises. Her son sat her down in his
chair; and, standing sulkily by her, holding her arm with his hand, but
not rudely, said to me, with a ferocious look:

‘What do you want done?’

‘I will tell you what must be done,’ said Traddles.

‘Has that Copperfield no tongue?’ muttered Uriah, ‘I would do a good
deal for you if you could tell me, without lying, that somebody had cut
it out.’

‘My Uriah means to be umble!’ cried his mother. ‘Don’t mind what he
says, good gentlemen!’

‘What must be done,’ said Traddles, ‘is this. First, the deed of
relinquishment, that we have heard of, must be given over to me
now--here.’

‘Suppose I haven’t got it,’ he interrupted.

‘But you have,’ said Traddles; ‘therefore, you know, we won’t suppose
so.’ And I cannot help avowing that this was the first occasion on
which I really did justice to the clear head, and the plain, patient,
practical good sense, of my old schoolfellow. ‘Then,’ said Traddles,
‘you must prepare to disgorge all that your rapacity has become
possessed of, and to make restoration to the last farthing. All the
partnership books and papers must remain in our possession; all your
books and papers; all money accounts and securities, of both kinds. In
short, everything here.’

‘Must it? I don’t know that,’ said Uriah. ‘I must have time to think
about that.’

‘Certainly,’ replied Traddles; ‘but, in the meanwhile, and until
everything is done to our satisfaction, we shall maintain possession
of these things; and beg you--in short, compel you--to keep to your own
room, and hold no communication with anyone.’

‘I won’t do it!’ said Uriah, with an oath.

‘Maidstone jail is a safer place of detention,’ observed Traddles; ‘and
though the law may be longer in righting us, and may not be able to
right us so completely as you can, there is no doubt of its punishing
YOU. Dear me, you know that quite as well as I! Copperfield, will you go
round to the Guildhall, and bring a couple of officers?’

Here, Mrs. Heep broke out again, crying on her knees to Agnes to
interfere in their behalf, exclaiming that he was very humble, and it
was all true, and if he didn’t do what we wanted, she would, and much
more to the same purpose; being half frantic with fears for her darling.
To inquire what he might have done, if he had had any boldness, would
be like inquiring what a mongrel cur might do, if it had the spirit of
a tiger. He was a coward, from head to foot; and showed his dastardly
nature through his sullenness and mortification, as much as at any time
of his mean life.

‘Stop!’ he growled to me; and wiped his hot face with his hand. ‘Mother,
hold your noise. Well! Let ‘em have that deed. Go and fetch it!’

‘Do you help her, Mr. Dick,’ said Traddles, ‘if you please.’

Proud of his commission, and understanding it, Mr. Dick accompanied her
as a shepherd’s dog might accompany a sheep. But, Mrs. Heep gave him
little trouble; for she not only returned with the deed, but with the
box in which it was, where we found a banker’s book and some other
papers that were afterwards serviceable.

‘Good!’ said Traddles, when this was brought. ‘Now, Mr. Heep, you can
retire to think: particularly observing, if you please, that I declare
to you, on the part of all present, that there is only one thing to be
done; that it is what I have explained; and that it must be done without
delay.’

Uriah, without lifting his eyes from the ground, shuffled across the
room with his hand to his chin, and pausing at the door, said:

‘Copperfield, I have always hated you. You’ve always been an upstart,
and you’ve always been against me.’

‘As I think I told you once before,’ said I, ‘it is you who have been,
in your greed and cunning, against all the world. It may be profitable
to you to reflect, in future, that there never were greed and cunning in
the world yet, that did not do too much, and overreach themselves. It is
as certain as death.’

‘Or as certain as they used to teach at school (the same school where I
picked up so much umbleness), from nine o’clock to eleven, that labour
was a curse; and from eleven o’clock to one, that it was a blessing and
a cheerfulness, and a dignity, and I don’t know what all, eh?’ said
he with a sneer. ‘You preach, about as consistent as they did.
Won’t umbleness go down? I shouldn’t have got round my gentleman
fellow-partner without it, I think. --Micawber, you old bully, I’ll pay
YOU!’

Mr. Micawber, supremely defiant of him and his extended finger, and
making a great deal of his chest until he had slunk out at the door,
then addressed himself to me, and proffered me the satisfaction of
‘witnessing the re-establishment of mutual confidence between himself
and Mrs. Micawber’. After which, he invited the company generally to the
contemplation of that affecting spectacle.

‘The veil that has long been interposed between Mrs. Micawber and
myself, is now withdrawn,’ said Mr. Micawber; ‘and my children and the
Author of their Being can once more come in contact on equal terms.’

As we were all very grateful to him, and all desirous to show that we
were, as well as the hurry and disorder of our spirits would permit, I
dare say we should all have gone, but that it was necessary for Agnes to
return to her father, as yet unable to bear more than the dawn of
hope; and for someone else to hold Uriah in safe keeping. So, Traddles
remained for the latter purpose, to be presently relieved by Mr. Dick;
and Mr. Dick, my aunt, and I, went home with Mr. Micawber. As I parted
hurriedly from the dear girl to whom I owed so much, and thought from
what she had been saved, perhaps, that morning--her better resolution
notwithstanding--I felt devoutly thankful for the miseries of my younger
days which had brought me to the knowledge of Mr. Micawber.

His house was not far off; and as the street door opened into the
sitting-room, and he bolted in with a precipitation quite his own,
we found ourselves at once in the bosom of the family. Mr. Micawber
exclaiming, ‘Emma! my life!’ rushed into Mrs. Micawber’s arms. Mrs.
Micawber shrieked, and folded Mr. Micawber in her embrace. Miss
Micawber, nursing the unconscious stranger of Mrs. Micawber’s last
letter to me, was sensibly affected. The stranger leaped. The twins
testified their joy by several inconvenient but innocent demonstrations.
Master Micawber, whose disposition appeared to have been soured by
early disappointment, and whose aspect had become morose, yielded to his
better feelings, and blubbered.

‘Emma!’ said Mr. Micawber. ‘The cloud is past from my mind. Mutual
confidence, so long preserved between us once, is restored, to know
no further interruption. Now, welcome poverty!’ cried Mr. Micawber,
shedding tears. ‘Welcome misery, welcome houselessness, welcome hunger,
rags, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the
end!’

With these expressions, Mr. Micawber placed Mrs. Micawber in a chair,
and embraced the family all round; welcoming a variety of bleak
prospects, which appeared, to the best of my judgement, to be anything
but welcome to them; and calling upon them to come out into Canterbury
and sing a chorus, as nothing else was left for their support.

But Mrs. Micawber having, in the strength of her emotions, fainted away,
the first thing to be done, even before the chorus could be considered
complete, was to recover her. This my aunt and Mr. Micawber did; and
then my aunt was introduced, and Mrs. Micawber recognized me.

‘Excuse me, dear Mr. Copperfield,’ said the poor lady, giving me her
hand, ‘but I am not strong; and the removal of the late misunderstanding
between Mr. Micawber and myself was at first too much for me.’

‘Is this all your family, ma’am?’ said my aunt.

‘There are no more at present,’ returned Mrs. Micawber.

‘Good gracious, I didn’t mean that, ma’am,’ said my aunt. ‘I mean, are
all these yours?’

‘Madam,’ replied Mr. Micawber, ‘it is a true bill.’

‘And that eldest young gentleman, now,’ said my aunt, musing, ‘what has
he been brought up to?’

‘It was my hope when I came here,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘to have got
Wilkins into the Church: or perhaps I shall express my meaning more
strictly, if I say the Choir. But there was no vacancy for a tenor in
the venerable Pile for which this city is so justly eminent; and he
has--in short, he has contracted a habit of singing in public-houses,
rather than in sacred edifices.’

‘But he means well,’ said Mrs. Micawber, tenderly.

‘I dare say, my love,’ rejoined Mr. Micawber, ‘that he means
particularly well; but I have not yet found that he carries out his
meaning, in any given direction whatsoever.’

Master Micawber’s moroseness of aspect returned upon him again, and he
demanded, with some temper, what he was to do? Whether he had been born
a carpenter, or a coach-painter, any more than he had been born a bird?
Whether he could go into the next street, and open a chemist’s shop?
Whether he could rush to the next assizes, and proclaim himself a
lawyer? Whether he could come out by force at the opera, and succeed
by violence? Whether he could do anything, without being brought up to
something?

My aunt mused a little while, and then said:

‘Mr. Micawber, I wonder you have never turned your thoughts to
emigration.’

‘Madam,’ returned Mr. Micawber, ‘it was the dream of my youth, and the
fallacious aspiration of my riper years.’ I am thoroughly persuaded, by
the by, that he had never thought of it in his life.

‘Aye?’ said my aunt, with a glance at me. ‘Why, what a thing it would
be for yourselves and your family, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, if you were to
emigrate now.’

‘Capital, madam, capital,’ urged Mr. Micawber, gloomily.

‘That is the principal, I may say the only difficulty, my dear Mr.
Copperfield,’ assented his wife.

‘Capital?’ cried my aunt. ‘But you are doing us a great service--have
done us a great service, I may say, for surely much will come out of
the fire--and what could we do for you, that would be half so good as to
find the capital?’

‘I could not receive it as a gift,’ said Mr. Micawber, full of fire and
animation, ‘but if a sufficient sum could be advanced, say at five per
cent interest, per annum, upon my personal liability--say my notes of
hand, at twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four months, respectively, to
allow time for something to turn up--’

‘Could be? Can be and shall be, on your own terms,’ returned my aunt,
‘if you say the word. Think of this now, both of you. Here are some
people David knows, going out to Australia shortly. If you decide to go,
why shouldn’t you go in the same ship? You may help each other. Think of
this now, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. Take your time, and weigh it well.’

‘There is but one question, my dear ma’am, I could wish to ask,’ said
Mrs. Micawber. ‘The climate, I believe, is healthy?’

‘Finest in the world!’ said my aunt.

‘Just so,’ returned Mrs. Micawber. ‘Then my question arises. Now, are
the circumstances of the country such, that a man of Mr. Micawber’s
abilities would have a fair chance of rising in the social scale? I will
not say, at present, might he aspire to be Governor, or anything of that
sort; but would there be a reasonable opening for his talents to
develop themselves--that would be amply sufficient--and find their own
expansion?’

‘No better opening anywhere,’ said my aunt, ‘for a man who conducts
himself well, and is industrious.’

‘For a man who conducts himself well,’ repeated Mrs. Micawber, with her
clearest business manner, ‘and is industrious. Precisely. It is
evident to me that Australia is the legitimate sphere of action for Mr.
Micawber!’

‘I entertain the conviction, my dear madam,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘that
it is, under existing circumstances, the land, the only land, for myself
and family; and that something of an extraordinary nature will turn up
on that shore. It is no distance--comparatively speaking; and though
consideration is due to the kindness of your proposal, I assure you that
is a mere matter of form.’

Shall I ever forget how, in a moment, he was the most sanguine of men,
looking on to fortune; or how Mrs. Micawber presently discoursed
about the habits of the kangaroo! Shall I ever recall that street of
Canterbury on a market-day, without recalling him, as he walked
back with us; expressing, in the hardy roving manner he assumed, the
unsettled habits of a temporary sojourner in the land; and looking at
the bullocks, as they came by, with the eye of an Australian farmer!



CHAPTER 53. ANOTHER RETROSPECT


I must pause yet once again. O, my child-wife, there is a figure in the
moving crowd before my memory, quiet and still, saying in its innocent
love and childish beauty, Stop to think of me--turn to look upon the
Little Blossom, as it flutters to the ground!

I do. All else grows dim, and fades away. I am again with Dora, in our
cottage. I do not know how long she has been ill. I am so used to it in
feeling, that I cannot count the time. It is not really long, in weeks
or months; but, in my usage and experience, it is a weary, weary while.

They have left off telling me to ‘wait a few days more’. I have begun
to fear, remotely, that the day may never shine, when I shall see my
child-wife running in the sunlight with her old friend Jip.

He is, as it were suddenly, grown very old. It may be that he misses in
his mistress, something that enlivened him and made him younger; but he
mopes, and his sight is weak, and his limbs are feeble, and my aunt is
sorry that he objects to her no more, but creeps near her as he lies on
Dora’s bed--she sitting at the bedside--and mildly licks her hand.

Dora lies smiling on us, and is beautiful, and utters no hasty or
complaining word. She says that we are very good to her; that her dear
old careful boy is tiring himself out, she knows; that my aunt has no
sleep, yet is always wakeful, active, and kind. Sometimes, the
little bird-like ladies come to see her; and then we talk about our
wedding-day, and all that happy time.

What a strange rest and pause in my life there seems to be--and in all
life, within doors and without--when I sit in the quiet, shaded, orderly
room, with the blue eyes of my child-wife turned towards me, and her
little fingers twining round my hand! Many and many an hour I sit thus;
but, of all those times, three times come the freshest on my mind.


It is morning; and Dora, made so trim by my aunt’s hands, shows me how
her pretty hair will curl upon the pillow yet, an how long and bright it
is, and how she likes to have it loosely gathered in that net she wears.

‘Not that I am vain of it, now, you mocking boy,’ she says, when I
smile; ‘but because you used to say you thought it so beautiful; and
because, when I first began to think about you, I used to peep in the
glass, and wonder whether you would like very much to have a lock of it.
Oh what a foolish fellow you were, Doady, when I gave you one!’

‘That was on the day when you were painting the flowers I had given you,
Dora, and when I told you how much in love I was.’

‘Ah! but I didn’t like to tell you,’ says Dora, ‘then, how I had cried
over them, because I believed you really liked me! When I can run about
again as I used to do, Doady, let us go and see those places where we
were such a silly couple, shall we? And take some of the old walks? And
not forget poor papa?’

‘Yes, we will, and have some happy days. So you must make haste to get
well, my dear.’

‘Oh, I shall soon do that! I am so much better, you don’t know!’


It is evening; and I sit in the same chair, by the same bed, with the
same face turned towards me. We have been silent, and there is a smile
upon her face. I have ceased to carry my light burden up and down stairs
now. She lies here all the day.

‘Doady!’

‘My dear Dora!’

‘You won’t think what I am going to say, unreasonable, after what you
told me, such a little while ago, of Mr. Wickfield’s not being well? I
want to see Agnes. Very much I want to see her.’

‘I will write to her, my dear.’

‘Will you?’

‘Directly.’

‘What a good, kind boy! Doady, take me on your arm. Indeed, my dear,
it’s not a whim. It’s not a foolish fancy. I want, very much indeed, to
see her!’

‘I am certain of it. I have only to tell her so, and she is sure to
come.’

‘You are very lonely when you go downstairs, now?’ Dora whispers, with
her arm about my neck.

‘How can I be otherwise, my own love, when I see your empty chair?’

‘My empty chair!’ She clings to me for a little while, in silence. ‘And
you really miss me, Doady?’ looking up, and brightly smiling. ‘Even
poor, giddy, stupid me?’

‘My heart, who is there upon earth that I could miss so much?’

‘Oh, husband! I am so glad, yet so sorry!’ creeping closer to me, and
folding me in both her arms. She laughs and sobs, and then is quiet, and
quite happy.

‘Quite!’ she says. ‘Only give Agnes my dear love, and tell her that I
want very, very, much to see her; and I have nothing left to wish for.’

‘Except to get well again, Dora.’

‘Ah, Doady! Sometimes I think--you know I always was a silly little
thing!--that that will never be!’

‘Don’t say so, Dora! Dearest love, don’t think so!’

‘I won’t, if I can help it, Doady. But I am very happy; though my dear
boy is so lonely by himself, before his child-wife’s empty chair!’


It is night; and I am with her still. Agnes has arrived; has been among
us for a whole day and an evening. She, my aunt, and I, have sat with
Dora since the morning, all together. We have not talked much, but Dora
has been perfectly contented and cheerful. We are now alone.

Do I know, now, that my child-wife will soon leave me? They have told me
so; they have told me nothing new to my thoughts--but I am far from
sure that I have taken that truth to heart. I cannot master it. I have
withdrawn by myself, many times today, to weep. I have remembered Who
wept for a parting between the living and the dead. I have bethought me
of all that gracious and compassionate history. I have tried to resign
myself, and to console myself; and that, I hope, I may have done
imperfectly; but what I cannot firmly settle in my mind is, that the end
will absolutely come. I hold her hand in mine, I hold her heart in mine,
I see her love for me, alive in all its strength. I cannot shut out a
pale lingering shadow of belief that she will be spared.

‘I am going to speak to you, Doady. I am going to say something I have
often thought of saying, lately. You won’t mind?’ with a gentle look.

‘Mind, my darling?’

‘Because I don’t know what you will think, or what you may have thought
sometimes. Perhaps you have often thought the same. Doady, dear, I am
afraid I was too young.’

I lay my face upon the pillow by her, and she looks into my eyes, and
speaks very softly. Gradually, as she goes on, I feel, with a stricken
heart, that she is speaking of herself as past.

‘I am afraid, dear, I was too young. I don’t mean in years only, but
in experience, and thoughts, and everything. I was such a silly little
creature! I am afraid it would have been better, if we had only loved
each other as a boy and girl, and forgotten it. I have begun to think I
was not fit to be a wife.’

I try to stay my tears, and to reply, ‘Oh, Dora, love, as fit as I to be
a husband!’

‘I don’t know,’ with the old shake of her curls. ‘Perhaps! But if I had
been more fit to be married I might have made you more so, too. Besides,
you are very clever, and I never was.’

‘We have been very happy, my sweet Dora.’

‘I was very happy, very. But, as years went on, my dear boy would have
wearied of his child-wife. She would have been less and less a companion
for him. He would have been more and more sensible of what was wanting
in his home. She wouldn’t have improved. It is better as it is.’

‘Oh, Dora, dearest, dearest, do not speak to me so. Every word seems a
reproach!’

‘No, not a syllable!’ she answers, kissing me. ‘Oh, my dear, you never
deserved it, and I loved you far too well to say a reproachful word to
you, in earnest--it was all the merit I had, except being pretty--or you
thought me so. Is it lonely, down-stairs, Doady?’

‘Very! Very!’

‘Don’t cry! Is my chair there?’

‘In its old place.’

‘Oh, how my poor boy cries! Hush, hush! Now, make me one promise. I want
to speak to Agnes. When you go downstairs, tell Agnes so, and send her
up to me; and while I speak to her, let no one come--not even aunt.
I want to speak to Agnes by herself. I want to speak to Agnes, quite
alone.’

I promise that she shall, immediately; but I cannot leave her, for my
grief.

‘I said that it was better as it is!’ she whispers, as she holds me in
her arms. ‘Oh, Doady, after more years, you never could have loved your
child-wife better than you do; and, after more years, she would so have
tried and disappointed you, that you might not have been able to love
her half so well! I know I was too young and foolish. It is much better
as it is!’

Agnes is downstairs, when I go into the parlour; and I give her the
message. She disappears, leaving me alone with Jip.

His Chinese house is by the fire; and he lies within it, on his bed of
flannel, querulously trying to sleep. The bright moon is high and clear.
As I look out on the night, my tears fall fast, and my undisciplined
heart is chastened heavily--heavily.

I sit down by the fire, thinking with a blind remorse of all those
secret feelings I have nourished since my marriage. I think of every
little trifle between me and Dora, and feel the truth, that trifles
make the sum of life. Ever rising from the sea of my remembrance, is the
image of the dear child as I knew her first, graced by my young love,
and by her own, with every fascination wherein such love is rich. Would
it, indeed, have been better if we had loved each other as a boy and a
girl, and forgotten it? Undisciplined heart, reply!

How the time wears, I know not; until I am recalled by my child-wife’s
old companion. More restless than he was, he crawls out of his house,
and looks at me, and wanders to the door, and whines to go upstairs.

‘Not tonight, Jip! Not tonight!’

He comes very slowly back to me, licks my hand, and lifts his dim eyes
to my face.

‘Oh, Jip! It may be, never again!’

He lies down at my feet, stretches himself out as if to sleep, and with
a plaintive cry, is dead.

‘Oh, Agnes! Look, look, here!’ --That face, so full of pity, and of
grief, that rain of tears, that awful mute appeal to me, that solemn
hand upraised towards Heaven!

‘Agnes?’

It is over. Darkness comes before my eyes; and, for a time, all things
are blotted out of my remembrance.



CHAPTER 54. Mr. MICAWBER’S TRANSACTIONS


This is not the time at which I am to enter on the state of my mind
beneath its load of sorrow. I came to think that the Future was walled
up before me, that the energy and action of my life were at an end, that
I never could find any refuge but in the grave. I came to think so, I
say, but not in the first shock of my grief. It slowly grew to that.
If the events I go on to relate, had not thickened around me, in the
beginning to confuse, and in the end to augment, my affliction, it is
possible (though I think not probable), that I might have fallen at once
into this condition. As it was, an interval occurred before I fully knew
my own distress; an interval, in which I even supposed that its sharpest
pangs were past; and when my mind could soothe itself by resting on
all that was most innocent and beautiful, in the tender story that was
closed for ever.

When it was first proposed that I should go abroad, or how it came to be
agreed among us that I was to seek the restoration of my peace in change
and travel, I do not, even now, distinctly know. The spirit of Agnes so
pervaded all we thought, and said, and did, in that time of sorrow, that
I assume I may refer the project to her influence. But her influence was
so quiet that I know no more.

And now, indeed, I began to think that in my old association of her with
the stained-glass window in the church, a prophetic foreshadowing of
what she would be to me, in the calamity that was to happen in the
fullness of time, had found a way into my mind. In all that sorrow, from
the moment, never to be forgotten, when she stood before me with her
upraised hand, she was like a sacred presence in my lonely house. When
the Angel of Death alighted there, my child-wife fell asleep--they told
me so when I could bear to hear it--on her bosom, with a smile. From my
swoon, I first awoke to a consciousness of her compassionate tears, her
words of hope and peace, her gentle face bending down as from a purer
region nearer Heaven, over my undisciplined heart, and softening its
pain.

Let me go on.

I was to go abroad. That seemed to have been determined among us from
the first. The ground now covering all that could perish of my
departed wife, I waited only for what Mr. Micawber called the ‘final
pulverization of Heep’; and for the departure of the emigrants.

At the request of Traddles, most affectionate and devoted of friends in
my trouble, we returned to Canterbury: I mean my aunt, Agnes, and I. We
proceeded by appointment straight to Mr. Micawber’s house; where, and at
Mr. Wickfield’s, my friend had been labouring ever since our explosive
meeting. When poor Mrs. Micawber saw me come in, in my black clothes,
she was sensibly affected. There was a great deal of good in Mrs.
Micawber’s heart, which had not been dunned out of it in all those many
years.

‘Well, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber,’ was my aunt’s first salutation after we
were seated. ‘Pray, have you thought about that emigration proposal of
mine?’

‘My dear madam,’ returned Mr. Micawber, ‘perhaps I cannot better express
the conclusion at which Mrs. Micawber, your humble servant, and I may
add our children, have jointly and severally arrived, than by borrowing
the language of an illustrious poet, to reply that our Boat is on the
shore, and our Bark is on the sea.’

‘That’s right,’ said my aunt. ‘I augur all sort of good from your
sensible decision.’

‘Madam, you do us a great deal of honour,’ he rejoined. He then referred
to a memorandum. ‘With respect to the pecuniary assistance enabling
us to launch our frail canoe on the ocean of enterprise, I have
reconsidered that important business-point; and would beg to propose
my notes of hand--drawn, it is needless to stipulate, on stamps of the
amounts respectively required by the various Acts of Parliament applying
to such securities--at eighteen, twenty-four, and thirty months.
The proposition I originally submitted, was twelve, eighteen, and
twenty-four; but I am apprehensive that such an arrangement might not
allow sufficient time for the requisite amount of--Something--to turn
up. We might not,’ said Mr. Micawber, looking round the room as if it
represented several hundred acres of highly cultivated land, ‘on the
first responsibility becoming due, have been successful in our harvest,
or we might not have got our harvest in. Labour, I believe, is sometimes
difficult to obtain in that portion of our colonial possessions where it
will be our lot to combat with the teeming soil.’

‘Arrange it in any way you please, sir,’ said my aunt.

‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘Mrs. Micawber and myself are deeply sensible of
the very considerate kindness of our friends and patrons. What I wish
is, to be perfectly business-like, and perfectly punctual. Turning over,
as we are about to turn over, an entirely new leaf; and falling back,
as we are now in the act of falling back, for a Spring of no common
magnitude; it is important to my sense of self-respect, besides being
an example to my son, that these arrangements should be concluded as
between man and man.’

I don’t know that Mr. Micawber attached any meaning to this last phrase;
I don’t know that anybody ever does, or did; but he appeared to relish
it uncommonly, and repeated, with an impressive cough, ‘as between man
and man’.

‘I propose,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘Bills--a convenience to the mercantile
world, for which, I believe, we are originally indebted to the Jews, who
appear to me to have had a devilish deal too much to do with them
ever since--because they are negotiable. But if a Bond, or any other
description of security, would be preferred, I should be happy to
execute any such instrument. As between man and man.’

My aunt observed, that in a case where both parties were willing to
agree to anything, she took it for granted there would be no difficulty
in settling this point. Mr. Micawber was of her opinion.

‘In reference to our domestic preparations, madam,’ said Mr. Micawber,
with some pride, ‘for meeting the destiny to which we are now understood
to be self-devoted, I beg to report them. My eldest daughter attends
at five every morning in a neighbouring establishment, to acquire
the process--if process it may be called--of milking cows. My younger
children are instructed to observe, as closely as circumstances will
permit, the habits of the pigs and poultry maintained in the poorer
parts of this city: a pursuit from which they have, on two occasions,
been brought home, within an inch of being run over. I have myself
directed some attention, during the past week, to the art of baking; and
my son Wilkins has issued forth with a walking-stick and driven cattle,
when permitted, by the rugged hirelings who had them in charge, to
render any voluntary service in that direction--which I regret to say,
for the credit of our nature, was not often; he being generally warned,
with imprecations, to desist.’

‘All very right indeed,’ said my aunt, encouragingly. ‘Mrs. Micawber has
been busy, too, I have no doubt.’

‘My dear madam,’ returned Mrs. Micawber, with her business-like air.
‘I am free to confess that I have not been actively engaged in pursuits
immediately connected with cultivation or with stock, though well aware
that both will claim my attention on a foreign shore. Such opportunities
as I have been enabled to alienate from my domestic duties, I have
devoted to corresponding at some length with my family. For I own it
seems to me, my dear Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber, who always
fell back on me, I suppose from old habit, to whomsoever else she might
address her discourse at starting, ‘that the time is come when the past
should be buried in oblivion; when my family should take Mr. Micawber by
the hand, and Mr. Micawber should take my family by the hand; when the
lion should lie down with the lamb, and my family be on terms with Mr.
Micawber.’

I said I thought so too.

‘This, at least, is the light, my dear Mr. Copperfield,’ pursued Mrs.
Micawber, ‘in which I view the subject. When I lived at home with my
papa and mama, my papa was accustomed to ask, when any point was under
discussion in our limited circle, “In what light does my Emma view the
subject?” That my papa was too partial, I know; still, on such a point
as the frigid coldness which has ever subsisted between Mr. Micawber and
my family, I necessarily have formed an opinion, delusive though it may
be.’

‘No doubt. Of course you have, ma’am,’ said my aunt.

‘Precisely so,’ assented Mrs. Micawber. ‘Now, I may be wrong in my
conclusions; it is very likely that I am, but my individual impression
is, that the gulf between my family and Mr. Micawber may be traced to an
apprehension, on the part of my family, that Mr. Micawber would require
pecuniary accommodation. I cannot help thinking,’ said Mrs. Micawber,
with an air of deep sagacity, ‘that there are members of my family who
have been apprehensive that Mr. Micawber would solicit them for their
names.---I do not mean to be conferred in Baptism upon our children,
but to be inscribed on Bills of Exchange, and negotiated in the Money
Market.’

The look of penetration with which Mrs. Micawber announced this
discovery, as if no one had ever thought of it before, seemed rather to
astonish my aunt; who abruptly replied, ‘Well, ma’am, upon the whole, I
shouldn’t wonder if you were right!’

‘Mr. Micawber being now on the eve of casting off the pecuniary
shackles that have so long enthralled him,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘and of
commencing a new career in a country where there is sufficient range
for his abilities,--which, in my opinion, is exceedingly important; Mr.
Micawber’s abilities peculiarly requiring space,--it seems to me that
my family should signalize the occasion by coming forward. What I could
wish to see, would be a meeting between Mr. Micawber and my family at
a festive entertainment, to be given at my family’s expense; where Mr.
Micawber’s health and prosperity being proposed, by some leading member
of my family, Mr. Micawber might have an opportunity of developing his
views.’

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Micawber, with some heat, ‘it may be better for me
to state distinctly, at once, that if I were to develop my views to that
assembled group, they would possibly be found of an offensive nature:
my impression being that your family are, in the aggregate, impertinent
Snobs; and, in detail, unmitigated Ruffians.’

‘Micawber,’ said Mrs. Micawber, shaking her head, ‘no! You have never
understood them, and they have never understood you.’

Mr. Micawber coughed.

‘They have never understood you, Micawber,’ said his wife. ‘They may
be incapable of it. If so, that is their misfortune. I can pity their
misfortune.’

‘I am extremely sorry, my dear Emma,’ said Mr. Micawber, relenting, ‘to
have been betrayed into any expressions that might, even remotely, have
the appearance of being strong expressions. All I would say is, that
I can go abroad without your family coming forward to favour me,--in
short, with a parting Shove of their cold shoulders; and that, upon the
whole, I would rather leave England with such impetus as I possess, than
derive any acceleration of it from that quarter. At the same time, my
dear, if they should condescend to reply to your communications--which
our joint experience renders most improbable--far be it from me to be a
barrier to your wishes.’

The matter being thus amicably settled, Mr. Micawber gave Mrs. Micawber
his arm, and glancing at the heap of books and papers lying before
Traddles on the table, said they would leave us to ourselves; which they
ceremoniously did.

‘My dear Copperfield,’ said Traddles, leaning back in his chair when
they were gone, and looking at me with an affection that made his eyes
red, and his hair all kinds of shapes, ‘I don’t make any excuse for
troubling you with business, because I know you are deeply interested
in it, and it may divert your thoughts. My dear boy, I hope you are not
worn out?’

‘I am quite myself,’ said I, after a pause. ‘We have more cause to think
of my aunt than of anyone. You know how much she has done.’

‘Surely, surely,’ answered Traddles. ‘Who can forget it!’

‘But even that is not all,’ said I. ‘During the last fortnight, some new
trouble has vexed her; and she has been in and out of London every day.
Several times she has gone out early, and been absent until evening.
Last night, Traddles, with this journey before her, it was almost
midnight before she came home. You know what her consideration for
others is. She will not tell me what has happened to distress her.’

My aunt, very pale, and with deep lines in her face, sat immovable until
I had finished; when some stray tears found their way to her cheeks, and
she put her hand on mine.

‘It’s nothing, Trot; it’s nothing. There will be no more of it. You
shall know by and by. Now Agnes, my dear, let us attend to these
affairs.’

‘I must do Mr. Micawber the justice to say,’ Traddles began, ‘that
although he would appear not to have worked to any good account for
himself, he is a most untiring man when he works for other people. I
never saw such a fellow. If he always goes on in the same way, he must
be, virtually, about two hundred years old, at present. The heat into
which he has been continually putting himself; and the distracted and
impetuous manner in which he has been diving, day and night, among
papers and books; to say nothing of the immense number of letters he has
written me between this house and Mr. Wickfield’s, and often across the
table when he has been sitting opposite, and might much more easily have
spoken; is quite extraordinary.’

‘Letters!’ cried my aunt. ‘I believe he dreams in letters!’

‘There’s Mr. Dick, too,’ said Traddles, ‘has been doing wonders! As soon
as he was released from overlooking Uriah Heep, whom he kept in such
charge as I never saw exceeded, he began to devote himself to Mr.
Wickfield. And really his anxiety to be of use in the investigations we
have been making, and his real usefulness in extracting, and copying,
and fetching, and carrying, have been quite stimulating to us.’

‘Dick is a very remarkable man,’ exclaimed my aunt; ‘and I always said
he was. Trot, you know it.’

‘I am happy to say, Miss Wickfield,’ pursued Traddles, at once with
great delicacy and with great earnestness, ‘that in your absence Mr.
Wickfield has considerably improved. Relieved of the incubus that had
fastened upon him for so long a time, and of the dreadful apprehensions
under which he had lived, he is hardly the same person. At times,
even his impaired power of concentrating his memory and attention on
particular points of business, has recovered itself very much; and he
has been able to assist us in making some things clear, that we should
have found very difficult indeed, if not hopeless, without him. But
what I have to do is to come to results; which are short enough; not
to gossip on all the hopeful circumstances I have observed, or I shall
never have done.’ His natural manner and agreeable simplicity made it
transparent that he said this to put us in good heart, and to enable
Agnes to hear her father mentioned with greater confidence; but it was
not the less pleasant for that.

‘Now, let me see,’ said Traddles, looking among the papers on the
table. ‘Having counted our funds, and reduced to order a great mass of
unintentional confusion in the first place, and of wilful confusion and
falsification in the second, we take it to be clear that Mr. Wickfield
might now wind up his business, and his agency-trust, and exhibit no
deficiency or defalcation whatever.’

‘Oh, thank Heaven!’ cried Agnes, fervently.

‘But,’ said Traddles, ‘the surplus that would be left as his means of
support--and I suppose the house to be sold, even in saying this--would
be so small, not exceeding in all probability some hundreds of pounds,
that perhaps, Miss Wickfield, it would be best to consider whether he
might not retain his agency of the estate to which he has so long been
receiver. His friends might advise him, you know; now he is free. You
yourself, Miss Wickfield--Copperfield--I--’

‘I have considered it, Trotwood,’ said Agnes, looking to me, ‘and I feel
that it ought not to be, and must not be; even on the recommendation of
a friend to whom I am so grateful, and owe so much.’

‘I will not say that I recommend it,’ observed Traddles. ‘I think it
right to suggest it. No more.’

‘I am happy to hear you say so,’ answered Agnes, steadily, ‘for it gives
me hope, almost assurance, that we think alike. Dear Mr. Traddles and
dear Trotwood, papa once free with honour, what could I wish for! I have
always aspired, if I could have released him from the toils in which he
was held, to render back some little portion of the love and care I owe
him, and to devote my life to him. It has been, for years, the utmost
height of my hopes. To take our future on myself, will be the next
great happiness--the next to his release from all trust and
responsibility--that I can know.’

‘Have you thought how, Agnes?’

‘Often! I am not afraid, dear Trotwood. I am certain of success. So many
people know me here, and think kindly of me, that I am certain. Don’t
mistrust me. Our wants are not many. If I rent the dear old house, and
keep a school, I shall be useful and happy.’

The calm fervour of her cheerful voice brought back so vividly, first
the dear old house itself, and then my solitary home, that my heart was
too full for speech. Traddles pretended for a little while to be busily
looking among the papers.

‘Next, Miss Trotwood,’ said Traddles, ‘that property of yours.’

‘Well, sir,’ sighed my aunt. ‘All I have got to say about it is, that if
it’s gone, I can bear it; and if it’s not gone, I shall be glad to get
it back.’

‘It was originally, I think, eight thousand pounds, Consols?’ said
Traddles.

‘Right!’ replied my aunt.

‘I can’t account for more than five,’ said Traddles, with an air of
perplexity.

‘--thousand, do you mean?’ inquired my aunt, with uncommon composure,
‘or pounds?’

‘Five thousand pounds,’ said Traddles.

‘It was all there was,’ returned my aunt. ‘I sold three, myself. One, I
paid for your articles, Trot, my dear; and the other two I have by me.
When I lost the rest, I thought it wise to say nothing about that sum,
but to keep it secretly for a rainy day. I wanted to see how you would
come out of the trial, Trot; and you came out nobly--persevering,
self-reliant, self-denying! So did Dick. Don’t speak to me, for I find
my nerves a little shaken!’

Nobody would have thought so, to see her sitting upright, with her arms
folded; but she had wonderful self-command.

‘Then I am delighted to say,’ cried Traddles, beaming with joy, ‘that we
have recovered the whole money!’

‘Don’t congratulate me, anybody!’ exclaimed my aunt. ‘How so, sir?’

‘You believed it had been misappropriated by Mr. Wickfield?’ said
Traddles.

‘Of course I did,’ said my aunt, ‘and was therefore easily silenced.
Agnes, not a word!’

‘And indeed,’ said Traddles, ‘it was sold, by virtue of the power of
management he held from you; but I needn’t say by whom sold, or on whose
actual signature. It was afterwards pretended to Mr. Wickfield, by that
rascal,--and proved, too, by figures,--that he had possessed himself of
the money (on general instructions, he said) to keep other deficiencies
and difficulties from the light. Mr. Wickfield, being so weak and
helpless in his hands as to pay you, afterwards, several sums of
interest on a pretended principal which he knew did not exist, made
himself, unhappily, a party to the fraud.’

‘And at last took the blame upon himself,’ added my aunt; ‘and wrote me
a mad letter, charging himself with robbery, and wrong unheard of. Upon
which I paid him a visit early one morning, called for a candle, burnt
the letter, and told him if he ever could right me and himself, to
do it; and if he couldn’t, to keep his own counsel for his daughter’s
sake.---If anybody speaks to me, I’ll leave the house!’

We all remained quiet; Agnes covering her face.

‘Well, my dear friend,’ said my aunt, after a pause, ‘and you have
really extorted the money back from him?’

‘Why, the fact is,’ returned Traddles, ‘Mr. Micawber had so completely
hemmed him in, and was always ready with so many new points if an
old one failed, that he could not escape from us. A most remarkable
circumstance is, that I really don’t think he grasped this sum even so
much for the gratification of his avarice, which was inordinate, as in
the hatred he felt for Copperfield. He said so to me, plainly. He said
he would even have spent as much, to baulk or injure Copperfield.’

‘Ha!’ said my aunt, knitting her brows thoughtfully, and glancing at
Agnes. ‘And what’s become of him?’

‘I don’t know. He left here,’ said Traddles, ‘with his mother, who had
been clamouring, and beseeching, and disclosing, the whole time. They
went away by one of the London night coaches, and I know no more about
him; except that his malevolence to me at parting was audacious. He
seemed to consider himself hardly less indebted to me, than to Mr.
Micawber; which I consider (as I told him) quite a compliment.’

‘Do you suppose he has any money, Traddles?’ I asked.

‘Oh dear, yes, I should think so,’ he replied, shaking his head,
seriously. ‘I should say he must have pocketed a good deal, in one
way or other. But, I think you would find, Copperfield, if you had an
opportunity of observing his course, that money would never keep that
man out of mischief. He is such an incarnate hypocrite, that whatever
object he pursues, he must pursue crookedly. It’s his only compensation
for the outward restraints he puts upon himself. Always creeping along
the ground to some small end or other, he will always magnify every
object in the way; and consequently will hate and suspect everybody that
comes, in the most innocent manner, between him and it. So the crooked
courses will become crookeder, at any moment, for the least reason,
or for none. It’s only necessary to consider his history here,’ said
Traddles, ‘to know that.’

‘He’s a monster of meanness!’ said my aunt.

‘Really I don’t know about that,’ observed Traddles thoughtfully. ‘Many
people can be very mean, when they give their minds to it.’

‘And now, touching Mr. Micawber,’ said my aunt.

‘Well, really,’ said Traddles, cheerfully, ‘I must, once more, give Mr.
Micawber high praise. But for his having been so patient and persevering
for so long a time, we never could have hoped to do anything worth
speaking of. And I think we ought to consider that Mr. Micawber did
right, for right’s sake, when we reflect what terms he might have made
with Uriah Heep himself, for his silence.’

‘I think so too,’ said I.

‘Now, what would you give him?’ inquired my aunt.

‘Oh! Before you come to that,’ said Traddles, a little disconcerted,
‘I am afraid I thought it discreet to omit (not being able to carry
everything before me) two points, in making this lawless adjustment--for
it’s perfectly lawless from beginning to end--of a difficult affair.
Those I.O.U.’s, and so forth, which Mr. Micawber gave him for the
advances he had--’

‘Well! They must be paid,’ said my aunt.

‘Yes, but I don’t know when they may be proceeded on, or where they
are,’ rejoined Traddles, opening his eyes; ‘and I anticipate, that,
between this time and his departure, Mr. Micawber will be constantly
arrested, or taken in execution.’

‘Then he must be constantly set free again, and taken out of execution,’
said my aunt. ‘What’s the amount altogether?’

‘Why, Mr. Micawber has entered the transactions--he calls them
transactions--with great form, in a book,’ rejoined Traddles, smiling;
‘and he makes the amount a hundred and three pounds, five.’

‘Now, what shall we give him, that sum included?’ said my aunt. ‘Agnes,
my dear, you and I can talk about division of it afterwards. What should
it be? Five hundred pounds?’

Upon this, Traddles and I both struck in at once. We both recommended
a small sum in money, and the payment, without stipulation to Mr.
Micawber, of the Uriah claims as they came in. We proposed that the
family should have their passage and their outfit, and a hundred pounds;
and that Mr. Micawber’s arrangement for the repayment of the advances
should be gravely entered into, as it might be wholesome for him
to suppose himself under that responsibility. To this, I added the
suggestion, that I should give some explanation of his character and
history to Mr. Peggotty, who I knew could be relied on; and that to Mr.
Peggotty should be quietly entrusted the discretion of advancing another
hundred. I further proposed to interest Mr. Micawber in Mr. Peggotty,
by confiding so much of Mr. Peggotty’s story to him as I might feel
justified in relating, or might think expedient; and to endeavour to
bring each of them to bear upon the other, for the common advantage. We
all entered warmly into these views; and I may mention at once, that the
principals themselves did so, shortly afterwards, with perfect good will
and harmony.

Seeing that Traddles now glanced anxiously at my aunt again, I reminded
him of the second and last point to which he had adverted.

‘You and your aunt will excuse me, Copperfield, if I touch upon a
painful theme, as I greatly fear I shall,’ said Traddles, hesitating;
‘but I think it necessary to bring it to your recollection. On the day
of Mr. Micawber’s memorable denunciation a threatening allusion was made
by Uriah Heep to your aunt’s--husband.’

My aunt, retaining her stiff position, and apparent composure, assented
with a nod.

‘Perhaps,’ observed Traddles, ‘it was mere purposeless impertinence?’

‘No,’ returned my aunt.

‘There was--pardon me--really such a person, and at all in his power?’
hinted Traddles.

‘Yes, my good friend,’ said my aunt.

Traddles, with a perceptible lengthening of his face, explained that he
had not been able to approach this subject; that it had shared the fate
of Mr. Micawber’s liabilities, in not being comprehended in the terms he
had made; that we were no longer of any authority with Uriah Heep; and
that if he could do us, or any of us, any injury or annoyance, no doubt
he would.

My aunt remained quiet; until again some stray tears found their way to
her cheeks. ‘You are quite right,’ she said. ‘It was very thoughtful to
mention it.’

‘Can I--or Copperfield--do anything?’ asked Traddles, gently.

‘Nothing,’ said my aunt. ‘I thank you many times. Trot, my dear, a vain
threat! Let us have Mr. and Mrs. Micawber back. And don’t any of you
speak to me!’ With that she smoothed her dress, and sat, with her
upright carriage, looking at the door.

‘Well, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber!’ said my aunt, when they entered. ‘We have
been discussing your emigration, with many apologies to you for keeping
you out of the room so long; and I’ll tell you what arrangements we
propose.’

These she explained to the unbounded satisfaction of the
family,--children and all being then present,--and so much to the
awakening of Mr. Micawber’s punctual habits in the opening stage of
all bill transactions, that he could not be dissuaded from immediately
rushing out, in the highest spirits, to buy the stamps for his notes of
hand. But, his joy received a sudden check; for within five minutes,
he returned in the custody of a sheriff ‘s officer, informing us, in
a flood of tears, that all was lost. We, being quite prepared for this
event, which was of course a proceeding of Uriah Heep’s, soon paid the
money; and in five minutes more Mr. Micawber was seated at the table,
filling up the stamps with an expression of perfect joy, which only
that congenial employment, or the making of punch, could impart in full
completeness to his shining face. To see him at work on the stamps, with
the relish of an artist, touching them like pictures, looking at them
sideways, taking weighty notes of dates and amounts in his pocket-book,
and contemplating them when finished, with a high sense of their
precious value, was a sight indeed.

‘Now, the best thing you can do, sir, if you’ll allow me to advise
you,’ said my aunt, after silently observing him, ‘is to abjure that
occupation for evermore.’

‘Madam,’ replied Mr. Micawber, ‘it is my intention to register such a
vow on the virgin page of the future. Mrs. Micawber will attest it. I
trust,’ said Mr. Micawber, solemnly, ‘that my son Wilkins will ever bear
in mind, that he had infinitely better put his fist in the fire, than
use it to handle the serpents that have poisoned the life-blood of his
unhappy parent!’ Deeply affected, and changed in a moment to the image
of despair, Mr. Micawber regarded the serpents with a look of gloomy
abhorrence (in which his late admiration of them was not quite subdued),
folded them up and put them in his pocket.

This closed the proceedings of the evening. We were weary with sorrow
and fatigue, and my aunt and I were to return to London on the morrow.
It was arranged that the Micawbers should follow us, after effecting a
sale of their goods to a broker; that Mr. Wickfield’s affairs should be
brought to a settlement, with all convenient speed, under the direction
of Traddles; and that Agnes should also come to London, pending those
arrangements. We passed the night at the old house, which, freed from
the presence of the Heeps, seemed purged of a disease; and I lay in my
old room, like a shipwrecked wanderer come home.

We went back next day to my aunt’s house--not to mine--and when she and
I sat alone, as of old, before going to bed, she said:

‘Trot, do you really wish to know what I have had upon my mind lately?’

‘Indeed I do, aunt. If there ever was a time when I felt unwilling that
you should have a sorrow or anxiety which I could not share, it is now.’

‘You have had sorrow enough, child,’ said my aunt, affectionately,
‘without the addition of my little miseries. I could have no other
motive, Trot, in keeping anything from you.’

‘I know that well,’ said I. ‘But tell me now.’

‘Would you ride with me a little way tomorrow morning?’ asked my aunt.

‘Of course.’

‘At nine,’ said she. ‘I’ll tell you then, my dear.’

At nine, accordingly, we went out in a little chariot, and drove to
London. We drove a long way through the streets, until we came to one of
the large hospitals. Standing hard by the building was a plain hearse.
The driver recognized my aunt, and, in obedience to a motion of her hand
at the window, drove slowly off; we following.

‘You understand it now, Trot,’ said my aunt. ‘He is gone!’

‘Did he die in the hospital?’

‘Yes.’

She sat immovable beside me; but, again I saw the stray tears on her
face.

‘He was there once before,’ said my aunt presently. ‘He was ailing a
long time--a shattered, broken man, these many years. When he knew his
state in this last illness, he asked them to send for me. He was sorry
then. Very sorry.’

‘You went, I know, aunt.’

‘I went. I was with him a good deal afterwards.’

‘He died the night before we went to Canterbury?’ said I. My aunt
nodded. ‘No one can harm him now,’ she said. ‘It was a vain threat.’

We drove away, out of town, to the churchyard at Hornsey. ‘Better here
than in the streets,’ said my aunt. ‘He was born here.’

We alighted; and followed the plain coffin to a corner I remember well,
where the service was read consigning it to the dust.

‘Six-and-thirty years ago, this day, my dear,’ said my aunt, as we
walked back to the chariot, ‘I was married. God forgive us all!’ We took
our seats in silence; and so she sat beside me for a long time, holding
my hand. At length she suddenly burst into tears, and said:

‘He was a fine-looking man when I married him, Trot--and he was sadly
changed!’

It did not last long. After the relief of tears, she soon became
composed, and even cheerful. Her nerves were a little shaken, she said,
or she would not have given way to it. God forgive us all!

So we rode back to her little cottage at Highgate, where we found the
following short note, which had arrived by that morning’s post from Mr.
Micawber:


          ‘Canterbury,

               ‘Friday.

‘My dear Madam, and Copperfield,

‘The fair land of promise lately looming on the horizon is again
enveloped in impenetrable mists, and for ever withdrawn from the eyes of
a drifting wretch whose Doom is sealed!

‘Another writ has been issued (in His Majesty’s High Court of King’s
Bench at Westminster), in another cause of HEEP V. MICAWBER, and
the defendant in that cause is the prey of the sheriff having legal
jurisdiction in this bailiwick.

     ‘Now’s the day, and now’s the hour,
     See the front of battle lower,
     See approach proud EDWARD’S power--
     Chains and slavery!

‘Consigned to which, and to a speedy end (for mental torture is not
supportable beyond a certain point, and that point I feel I have
attained), my course is run. Bless you, bless you! Some future
traveller, visiting, from motives of curiosity, not unmingled, let us
hope, with sympathy, the place of confinement allotted to debtors in
this city, may, and I trust will, Ponder, as he traces on its wall,
inscribed with a rusty nail,

                              ‘The obscure initials,

                                   ‘W. M.

‘P.S. I re-open this to say that our common friend, Mr. Thomas Traddles
(who has not yet left us, and is looking extremely well), has paid the
debt and costs, in the noble name of Miss Trotwood; and that myself and
family are at the height of earthly bliss.’



CHAPTER 55. TEMPEST


I now approach an event in my life, so indelible, so awful, so bound by
an infinite variety of ties to all that has preceded it, in these pages,
that, from the beginning of my narrative, I have seen it growing larger
and larger as I advanced, like a great tower in a plain, and throwing
its fore-cast shadow even on the incidents of my childish days.

For years after it occurred, I dreamed of it often. I have started up so
vividly impressed by it, that its fury has yet seemed raging in my quiet
room, in the still night. I dream of it sometimes, though at lengthened
and uncertain intervals, to this hour. I have an association between it
and a stormy wind, or the lightest mention of a sea-shore, as strong as
any of which my mind is conscious. As plainly as I behold what happened,
I will try to write it down. I do not recall it, but see it done; for it
happens again before me.

The time drawing on rapidly for the sailing of the emigrant-ship, my
good old nurse (almost broken-hearted for me, when we first met) came up
to London. I was constantly with her, and her brother, and the Micawbers
(they being very much together); but Emily I never saw.

One evening when the time was close at hand, I was alone with Peggotty
and her brother. Our conversation turned on Ham. She described to us how
tenderly he had taken leave of her, and how manfully and quietly he
had borne himself. Most of all, of late, when she believed he was most
tried. It was a subject of which the affectionate creature never tired;
and our interest in hearing the many examples which she, who was so much
with him, had to relate, was equal to hers in relating them.

My aunt and I were at that time vacating the two cottages at Highgate; I
intending to go abroad, and she to return to her house at Dover. We had
a temporary lodging in Covent Garden. As I walked home to it, after this
evening’s conversation, reflecting on what had passed between Ham and
myself when I was last at Yarmouth, I wavered in the original purpose
I had formed, of leaving a letter for Emily when I should take leave of
her uncle on board the ship, and thought it would be better to write to
her now. She might desire, I thought, after receiving my communication,
to send some parting word by me to her unhappy lover. I ought to give
her the opportunity.

I therefore sat down in my room, before going to bed, and wrote to her.
I told her that I had seen him, and that he had requested me to tell her
what I have already written in its place in these sheets. I faithfully
repeated it. I had no need to enlarge upon it, if I had had the right.
Its deep fidelity and goodness were not to be adorned by me or any
man. I left it out, to be sent round in the morning; with a line to Mr.
Peggotty, requesting him to give it to her; and went to bed at daybreak.

I was weaker than I knew then; and, not falling asleep until the sun
was up, lay late, and unrefreshed, next day. I was roused by the silent
presence of my aunt at my bedside. I felt it in my sleep, as I suppose
we all do feel such things.

‘Trot, my dear,’ she said, when I opened my eyes, ‘I couldn’t make up my
mind to disturb you. Mr. Peggotty is here; shall he come up?’

I replied yes, and he soon appeared.

‘Mas’r Davy,’ he said, when we had shaken hands, ‘I giv Em’ly your
letter, sir, and she writ this heer; and begged of me fur to ask you
to read it, and if you see no hurt in’t, to be so kind as take charge
on’t.’

‘Have you read it?’ said I.

He nodded sorrowfully. I opened it, and read as follows:


‘I have got your message. Oh, what can I write, to thank you for your
good and blessed kindness to me!

‘I have put the words close to my heart. I shall keep them till I die.
They are sharp thorns, but they are such comfort. I have prayed over
them, oh, I have prayed so much. When I find what you are, and what
uncle is, I think what God must be, and can cry to him.

‘Good-bye for ever. Now, my dear, my friend, good-bye for ever in this
world. In another world, if I am forgiven, I may wake a child and come
to you. All thanks and blessings. Farewell, evermore.’


This, blotted with tears, was the letter.

‘May I tell her as you doen’t see no hurt in’t, and as you’ll be so kind
as take charge on’t, Mas’r Davy?’ said Mr. Peggotty, when I had read it.
‘Unquestionably,’ said I--‘but I am thinking--’

‘Yes, Mas’r Davy?’

‘I am thinking,’ said I, ‘that I’ll go down again to Yarmouth. There’s
time, and to spare, for me to go and come back before the ship sails. My
mind is constantly running on him, in his solitude; to put this letter
of her writing in his hand at this time, and to enable you to tell her,
in the moment of parting, that he has got it, will be a kindness to
both of them. I solemnly accepted his commission, dear good fellow, and
cannot discharge it too completely. The journey is nothing to me. I am
restless, and shall be better in motion. I’ll go down tonight.’

Though he anxiously endeavoured to dissuade me, I saw that he was of my
mind; and this, if I had required to be confirmed in my intention, would
have had the effect. He went round to the coach office, at my request,
and took the box-seat for me on the mail. In the evening I started,
by that conveyance, down the road I had traversed under so many
vicissitudes.

‘Don’t you think that,’ I asked the coachman, in the first stage out of
London, ‘a very remarkable sky? I don’t remember to have seen one like
it.’

‘Nor I--not equal to it,’ he replied. ‘That’s wind, sir. There’ll be
mischief done at sea, I expect, before long.’

It was a murky confusion--here and there blotted with a colour like the
colour of the smoke from damp fuel--of flying clouds, tossed up into
most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than
there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the
earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in
a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were
frightened. There had been a wind all day; and it was rising then, with
an extraordinary great sound. In another hour it had much increased, and
the sky was more overcast, and blew hard.

But, as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely
over-spreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to blow, harder
and harder. It still increased, until our horses could scarcely face
the wind. Many times, in the dark part of the night (it was then late in
September, when the nights were not short), the leaders turned about, or
came to a dead stop; and we were often in serious apprehension that the
coach would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up before this
storm, like showers of steel; and, at those times, when there was any
shelter of trees or lee walls to be got, we were fain to stop, in a
sheer impossibility of continuing the struggle.

When the day broke, it blew harder and harder. I had been in Yarmouth
when the seamen said it blew great guns, but I had never known the like
of this, or anything approaching to it. We came to Ipswich--very late,
having had to fight every inch of ground since we were ten miles out of
London; and found a cluster of people in the market-place, who had
risen from their beds in the night, fearful of falling chimneys. Some of
these, congregating about the inn-yard while we changed horses, told us
of great sheets of lead having been ripped off a high church-tower, and
flung into a by-street, which they then blocked up. Others had to tell
of country people, coming in from neighbouring villages, who had seen
great trees lying torn out of the earth, and whole ricks scattered about
the roads and fields. Still, there was no abatement in the storm, but it
blew harder.

As we struggled on, nearer and nearer to the sea, from which this mighty
wind was blowing dead on shore, its force became more and more terrific.
Long before we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips, and showered
salt rain upon us. The water was out, over miles and miles of the flat
country adjacent to Yarmouth; and every sheet and puddle lashed its
banks, and had its stress of little breakers setting heavily towards us.
When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught
at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another
shore with towers and buildings. When at last we got into the town, the
people came out to their doors, all aslant, and with streaming hair,
making a wonder of the mail that had come through such a night.

I put up at the old inn, and went down to look at the sea; staggering
along the street, which was strewn with sand and seaweed, and with
flying blotches of sea-foam; afraid of falling slates and tiles; and
holding by people I met, at angry corners. Coming near the beach, I saw,
not only the boatmen, but half the people of the town, lurking behind
buildings; some, now and then braving the fury of the storm to look
away to sea, and blown sheer out of their course in trying to get zigzag
back.

Joining these groups, I found bewailing women whose husbands were away
in herring or oyster boats, which there was too much reason to think
might have foundered before they could run in anywhere for safety.
Grizzled old sailors were among the people, shaking their heads, as they
looked from water to sky, and muttering to one another; ship-owners,
excited and uneasy; children, huddling together, and peering into older
faces; even stout mariners, disturbed and anxious, levelling their
glasses at the sea from behind places of shelter, as if they were
surveying an enemy.

The tremendous sea itself, when I could find sufficient pause to look at
it, in the agitation of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand,
and the awful noise, confounded me. As the high watery walls came
rolling in, and, at their highest, tumbled into surf, they looked as if
the least would engulf the town. As the receding wave swept back with a
hoarse roar, it seemed to scoop out deep caves in the beach, as if its
purpose were to undermine the earth. When some white-headed billows
thundered on, and dashed themselves to pieces before they reached the
land, every fragment of the late whole seemed possessed by the full
might of its wrath, rushing to be gathered to the composition of another
monster. Undulating hills were changed to valleys, undulating valleys
(with a solitary storm-bird sometimes skimming through them) were lifted
up to hills; masses of water shivered and shook the beach with a booming
sound; every shape tumultuously rolled on, as soon as made, to change
its shape and place, and beat another shape and place away; the ideal
shore on the horizon, with its towers and buildings, rose and fell; the
clouds fell fast and thick; I seemed to see a rending and upheaving of
all nature.

Not finding Ham among the people whom this memorable wind--for it is
still remembered down there, as the greatest ever known to blow upon
that coast--had brought together, I made my way to his house. It was
shut; and as no one answered to my knocking, I went, by back ways and
by-lanes, to the yard where he worked. I learned, there, that he had
gone to Lowestoft, to meet some sudden exigency of ship-repairing
in which his skill was required; but that he would be back tomorrow
morning, in good time.

I went back to the inn; and when I had washed and dressed, and tried to
sleep, but in vain, it was five o’clock in the afternoon. I had not sat
five minutes by the coffee-room fire, when the waiter, coming to stir
it, as an excuse for talking, told me that two colliers had gone down,
with all hands, a few miles away; and that some other ships had been
seen labouring hard in the Roads, and trying, in great distress, to keep
off shore. Mercy on them, and on all poor sailors, said he, if we had
another night like the last!

I was very much depressed in spirits; very solitary; and felt an
uneasiness in Ham’s not being there, disproportionate to the occasion. I
was seriously affected, without knowing how much, by late events; and my
long exposure to the fierce wind had confused me. There was that jumble
in my thoughts and recollections, that I had lost the clear arrangement
of time and distance. Thus, if I had gone out into the town, I should
not have been surprised, I think, to encounter someone who I knew must
be then in London. So to speak, there was in these respects a curious
inattention in my mind. Yet it was busy, too, with all the remembrances
the place naturally awakened; and they were particularly distinct and
vivid.

In this state, the waiter’s dismal intelligence about the ships
immediately connected itself, without any effort of my volition, with my
uneasiness about Ham. I was persuaded that I had an apprehension of his
returning from Lowestoft by sea, and being lost. This grew so strong
with me, that I resolved to go back to the yard before I took my dinner,
and ask the boat-builder if he thought his attempting to return by sea
at all likely? If he gave me the least reason to think so, I would go
over to Lowestoft and prevent it by bringing him with me.

I hastily ordered my dinner, and went back to the yard. I was none too
soon; for the boat-builder, with a lantern in his hand, was locking
the yard-gate. He quite laughed when I asked him the question, and said
there was no fear; no man in his senses, or out of them, would put off
in such a gale of wind, least of all Ham Peggotty, who had been born to
seafaring.

So sensible of this, beforehand, that I had really felt ashamed of doing
what I was nevertheless impelled to do, I went back to the inn. If
such a wind could rise, I think it was rising. The howl and roar, the
rattling of the doors and windows, the rumbling in the chimneys, the
apparent rocking of the very house that sheltered me, and the prodigious
tumult of the sea, were more fearful than in the morning. But there
was now a great darkness besides; and that invested the storm with new
terrors, real and fanciful.

I could not eat, I could not sit still, I could not continue steadfast
to anything. Something within me, faintly answering to the storm
without, tossed up the depths of my memory and made a tumult in them.
Yet, in all the hurry of my thoughts, wild running with the thundering
sea,--the storm, and my uneasiness regarding Ham were always in the
fore-ground.

My dinner went away almost untasted, and I tried to refresh myself with
a glass or two of wine. In vain. I fell into a dull slumber before
the fire, without losing my consciousness, either of the uproar out of
doors, or of the place in which I was. Both became overshadowed by a new
and indefinable horror; and when I awoke--or rather when I shook off
the lethargy that bound me in my chair--my whole frame thrilled with
objectless and unintelligible fear.

I walked to and fro, tried to read an old gazetteer, listened to the
awful noises: looked at faces, scenes, and figures in the fire.
At length, the steady ticking of the undisturbed clock on the wall
tormented me to that degree that I resolved to go to bed.

It was reassuring, on such a night, to be told that some of the
inn-servants had agreed together to sit up until morning. I went to bed,
exceedingly weary and heavy; but, on my lying down, all such sensations
vanished, as if by magic, and I was broad awake, with every sense
refined.

For hours I lay there, listening to the wind and water; imagining, now,
that I heard shrieks out at sea; now, that I distinctly heard the firing
of signal guns; and now, the fall of houses in the town. I got up,
several times, and looked out; but could see nothing, except the
reflection in the window-panes of the faint candle I had left burning,
and of my own haggard face looking in at me from the black void.

At length, my restlessness attained to such a pitch, that I hurried on
my clothes, and went downstairs. In the large kitchen, where I dimly
saw bacon and ropes of onions hanging from the beams, the watchers were
clustered together, in various attitudes, about a table, purposely moved
away from the great chimney, and brought near the door. A pretty girl,
who had her ears stopped with her apron, and her eyes upon the door,
screamed when I appeared, supposing me to be a spirit; but the others
had more presence of mind, and were glad of an addition to their
company. One man, referring to the topic they had been discussing, asked
me whether I thought the souls of the collier-crews who had gone down,
were out in the storm?

I remained there, I dare say, two hours. Once, I opened the yard-gate,
and looked into the empty street. The sand, the sea-weed, and the flakes
of foam, were driving by; and I was obliged to call for assistance
before I could shut the gate again, and make it fast against the wind.

There was a dark gloom in my solitary chamber, when I at length returned
to it; but I was tired now, and, getting into bed again, fell--off
a tower and down a precipice--into the depths of sleep. I have an
impression that for a long time, though I dreamed of being elsewhere and
in a variety of scenes, it was always blowing in my dream. At length,
I lost that feeble hold upon reality, and was engaged with two dear
friends, but who they were I don’t know, at the siege of some town in a
roar of cannonading.

The thunder of the cannon was so loud and incessant, that I could not
hear something I much desired to hear, until I made a great exertion
and awoke. It was broad day--eight or nine o’clock; the storm raging, in
lieu of the batteries; and someone knocking and calling at my door.

‘What is the matter?’ I cried.

‘A wreck! Close by!’

I sprung out of bed, and asked, what wreck?

‘A schooner, from Spain or Portugal, laden with fruit and wine. Make
haste, sir, if you want to see her! It’s thought, down on the beach,
she’ll go to pieces every moment.’

The excited voice went clamouring along the staircase; and I wrapped
myself in my clothes as quickly as I could, and ran into the street.

Numbers of people were there before me, all running in one direction, to
the beach. I ran the same way, outstripping a good many, and soon came
facing the wild sea.

The wind might by this time have lulled a little, though not more
sensibly than if the cannonading I had dreamed of, had been diminished
by the silencing of half-a-dozen guns out of hundreds. But the sea,
having upon it the additional agitation of the whole night, was
infinitely more terrific than when I had seen it last. Every appearance
it had then presented, bore the expression of being swelled; and the
height to which the breakers rose, and, looking over one another,
bore one another down, and rolled in, in interminable hosts, was most
appalling. In the difficulty of hearing anything but wind and waves,
and in the crowd, and the unspeakable confusion, and my first breathless
efforts to stand against the weather, I was so confused that I looked
out to sea for the wreck, and saw nothing but the foaming heads of the
great waves. A half-dressed boatman, standing next me, pointed with his
bare arm (a tattoo’d arrow on it, pointing in the same direction) to the
left. Then, O great Heaven, I saw it, close in upon us!

One mast was broken short off, six or eight feet from the deck, and lay
over the side, entangled in a maze of sail and rigging; and all that
ruin, as the ship rolled and beat--which she did without a moment’s
pause, and with a violence quite inconceivable--beat the side as if it
would stave it in. Some efforts were even then being made, to cut this
portion of the wreck away; for, as the ship, which was broadside on,
turned towards us in her rolling, I plainly descried her people at
work with axes, especially one active figure with long curling hair,
conspicuous among the rest. But a great cry, which was audible even
above the wind and water, rose from the shore at this moment; the sea,
sweeping over the rolling wreck, made a clean breach, and carried men,
spars, casks, planks, bulwarks, heaps of such toys, into the boiling
surge.

The second mast was yet standing, with the rags of a rent sail, and
a wild confusion of broken cordage flapping to and fro. The ship had
struck once, the same boatman hoarsely said in my ear, and then lifted
in and struck again. I understood him to add that she was parting
amidships, and I could readily suppose so, for the rolling and beating
were too tremendous for any human work to suffer long. As he spoke,
there was another great cry of pity from the beach; four men arose with
the wreck out of the deep, clinging to the rigging of the remaining
mast; uppermost, the active figure with the curling hair.

There was a bell on board; and as the ship rolled and dashed, like a
desperate creature driven mad, now showing us the whole sweep of her
deck, as she turned on her beam-ends towards the shore, now nothing but
her keel, as she sprung wildly over and turned towards the sea, the bell
rang; and its sound, the knell of those unhappy men, was borne towards
us on the wind. Again we lost her, and again she rose. Two men were
gone. The agony on the shore increased. Men groaned, and clasped their
hands; women shrieked, and turned away their faces. Some ran wildly
up and down along the beach, crying for help where no help could be. I
found myself one of these, frantically imploring a knot of sailors whom
I knew, not to let those two lost creatures perish before our eyes.

They were making out to me, in an agitated way--I don’t know how,
for the little I could hear I was scarcely composed enough to
understand--that the lifeboat had been bravely manned an hour ago, and
could do nothing; and that as no man would be so desperate as to attempt
to wade off with a rope, and establish a communication with the shore,
there was nothing left to try; when I noticed that some new sensation
moved the people on the beach, and saw them part, and Ham come breaking
through them to the front.

I ran to him--as well as I know, to repeat my appeal for help. But,
distracted though I was, by a sight so new to me and terrible, the
determination in his face, and his look out to sea--exactly the same
look as I remembered in connexion with the morning after Emily’s
flight--awoke me to a knowledge of his danger. I held him back with both
arms; and implored the men with whom I had been speaking, not to listen
to him, not to do murder, not to let him stir from off that sand!

Another cry arose on shore; and looking to the wreck, we saw the cruel
sail, with blow on blow, beat off the lower of the two men, and fly up
in triumph round the active figure left alone upon the mast.

Against such a sight, and against such determination as that of the
calmly desperate man who was already accustomed to lead half the people
present, I might as hopefully have entreated the wind. ‘Mas’r Davy,’
he said, cheerily grasping me by both hands, ‘if my time is come, ‘tis
come. If ‘tan’t, I’ll bide it. Lord above bless you, and bless all!
Mates, make me ready! I’m a-going off!’

I was swept away, but not unkindly, to some distance, where the people
around me made me stay; urging, as I confusedly perceived, that he was
bent on going, with help or without, and that I should endanger the
precautions for his safety by troubling those with whom they rested. I
don’t know what I answered, or what they rejoined; but I saw hurry on
the beach, and men running with ropes from a capstan that was there, and
penetrating into a circle of figures that hid him from me. Then, I saw
him standing alone, in a seaman’s frock and trousers: a rope in his
hand, or slung to his wrist: another round his body: and several of the
best men holding, at a little distance, to the latter, which he laid out
himself, slack upon the shore, at his feet.

The wreck, even to my unpractised eye, was breaking up. I saw that she
was parting in the middle, and that the life of the solitary man upon
the mast hung by a thread. Still, he clung to it. He had a singular red
cap on,--not like a sailor’s cap, but of a finer colour; and as the few
yielding planks between him and destruction rolled and bulged, and his
anticipative death-knell rung, he was seen by all of us to wave it. I
saw him do it now, and thought I was going distracted, when his action
brought an old remembrance to my mind of a once dear friend.

Ham watched the sea, standing alone, with the silence of suspended
breath behind him, and the storm before, until there was a great
retiring wave, when, with a backward glance at those who held the rope
which was made fast round his body, he dashed in after it, and in a
moment was buffeting with the water; rising with the hills, falling
with the valleys, lost beneath the foam; then drawn again to land. They
hauled in hastily.

He was hurt. I saw blood on his face, from where I stood; but he took
no thought of that. He seemed hurriedly to give them some directions for
leaving him more free--or so I judged from the motion of his arm--and
was gone as before.

And now he made for the wreck, rising with the hills, falling with the
valleys, lost beneath the rugged foam, borne in towards the shore,
borne on towards the ship, striving hard and valiantly. The distance was
nothing, but the power of the sea and wind made the strife deadly. At
length he neared the wreck. He was so near, that with one more of his
vigorous strokes he would be clinging to it,--when a high, green, vast
hill-side of water, moving on shoreward, from beyond the ship, he seemed
to leap up into it with a mighty bound, and the ship was gone!

Some eddying fragments I saw in the sea, as if a mere cask had been
broken, in running to the spot where they were hauling in. Consternation
was in every face. They drew him to my very feet--insensible--dead.
He was carried to the nearest house; and, no one preventing me now, I
remained near him, busy, while every means of restoration were tried;
but he had been beaten to death by the great wave, and his generous
heart was stilled for ever.

As I sat beside the bed, when hope was abandoned and all was done, a
fisherman, who had known me when Emily and I were children, and ever
since, whispered my name at the door.

‘Sir,’ said he, with tears starting to his weather-beaten face, which,
with his trembling lips, was ashy pale, ‘will you come over yonder?’

The old remembrance that had been recalled to me, was in his look. I
asked him, terror-stricken, leaning on the arm he held out to support
me:

‘Has a body come ashore?’

He said, ‘Yes.’

‘Do I know it?’ I asked then.

He answered nothing.

But he led me to the shore. And on that part of it where she and I had
looked for shells, two children--on that part of it where some lighter
fragments of the old boat, blown down last night, had been scattered by
the wind--among the ruins of the home he had wronged--I saw him lying
with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.



CHAPTER 56. THE NEW WOUND, AND THE OLD

No need, O Steerforth, to have said, when we last spoke together, in
that hour which I so little deemed to be our parting-hour--no need to
have said, ‘Think of me at my best!’ I had done that ever; and could I
change now, looking on this sight!

They brought a hand-bier, and laid him on it, and covered him with a
flag, and took him up and bore him on towards the houses. All the men
who carried him had known him, and gone sailing with him, and seen him
merry and bold. They carried him through the wild roar, a hush in the
midst of all the tumult; and took him to the cottage where Death was
already.

But when they set the bier down on the threshold, they looked at one
another, and at me, and whispered. I knew why. They felt as if it were
not right to lay him down in the same quiet room.

We went into the town, and took our burden to the inn. So soon as I
could at all collect my thoughts, I sent for Joram, and begged him to
provide me a conveyance in which it could be got to London in the night.
I knew that the care of it, and the hard duty of preparing his mother to
receive it, could only rest with me; and I was anxious to discharge that
duty as faithfully as I could.

I chose the night for the journey, that there might be less curiosity
when I left the town. But, although it was nearly midnight when I came
out of the yard in a chaise, followed by what I had in charge, there
were many people waiting. At intervals, along the town, and even a
little way out upon the road, I saw more: but at length only the bleak
night and the open country were around me, and the ashes of my youthful
friendship.

Upon a mellow autumn day, about noon, when the ground was perfumed by
fallen leaves, and many more, in beautiful tints of yellow, red, and
brown, yet hung upon the trees, through which the sun was shining, I
arrived at Highgate. I walked the last mile, thinking as I went along of
what I had to do; and left the carriage that had followed me all through
the night, awaiting orders to advance.

The house, when I came up to it, looked just the same. Not a blind was
raised; no sign of life was in the dull paved court, with its covered
way leading to the disused door. The wind had quite gone down, and
nothing moved.

I had not, at first, the courage to ring at the gate; and when I did
ring, my errand seemed to me to be expressed in the very sound of the
bell. The little parlour-maid came out, with the key in her hand; and
looking earnestly at me as she unlocked the gate, said:

‘I beg your pardon, sir. Are you ill?’

‘I have been much agitated, and am fatigued.’

‘Is anything the matter, sir?---Mr. James?--’ ‘Hush!’ said I. ‘Yes,
something has happened, that I have to break to Mrs. Steerforth. She is
at home?’

The girl anxiously replied that her mistress was very seldom out now,
even in a carriage; that she kept her room; that she saw no company, but
would see me. Her mistress was up, she said, and Miss Dartle was with
her. What message should she take upstairs?

Giving her a strict charge to be careful of her manner, and only to
carry in my card and say I waited, I sat down in the drawing-room (which
we had now reached) until she should come back. Its former pleasant air
of occupation was gone, and the shutters were half closed. The harp had
not been used for many and many a day. His picture, as a boy, was
there. The cabinet in which his mother had kept his letters was there. I
wondered if she ever read them now; if she would ever read them more!

The house was so still that I heard the girl’s light step upstairs. On
her return, she brought a message, to the effect that Mrs. Steerforth
was an invalid and could not come down; but that if I would excuse her
being in her chamber, she would be glad to see me. In a few moments I
stood before her.

She was in his room; not in her own. I felt, of course, that she had
taken to occupy it, in remembrance of him; and that the many tokens
of his old sports and accomplishments, by which she was surrounded,
remained there, just as he had left them, for the same reason. She
murmured, however, even in her reception of me, that she was out of her
own chamber because its aspect was unsuited to her infirmity; and with
her stately look repelled the least suspicion of the truth.

At her chair, as usual, was Rosa Dartle. From the first moment of
her dark eyes resting on me, I saw she knew I was the bearer of evil
tidings. The scar sprung into view that instant. She withdrew herself
a step behind the chair, to keep her own face out of Mrs. Steerforth’s
observation; and scrutinized me with a piercing gaze that never
faltered, never shrunk.

‘I am sorry to observe you are in mourning, sir,’ said Mrs. Steerforth.

‘I am unhappily a widower,’ said I.

‘You are very young to know so great a loss,’ she returned. ‘I am
grieved to hear it. I am grieved to hear it. I hope Time will be good to
you.’

‘I hope Time,’ said I, looking at her, ‘will be good to all of us.
Dear Mrs. Steerforth, we must all trust to that, in our heaviest
misfortunes.’

The earnestness of my manner, and the tears in my eyes, alarmed her. The
whole course of her thoughts appeared to stop, and change.

I tried to command my voice in gently saying his name, but it trembled.
She repeated it to herself, two or three times, in a low tone. Then,
addressing me, she said, with enforced calmness:

‘My son is ill.’

‘Very ill.’

‘You have seen him?’

‘I have.’

‘Are you reconciled?’

I could not say Yes, I could not say No. She slightly turned her head
towards the spot where Rosa Dartle had been standing at her elbow, and
in that moment I said, by the motion of my lips, to Rosa, ‘Dead!’

That Mrs. Steerforth might not be induced to look behind her, and read,
plainly written, what she was not yet prepared to know, I met her look
quickly; but I had seen Rosa Dartle throw her hands up in the air with
vehemence of despair and horror, and then clasp them on her face.

The handsome lady--so like, oh so like!--regarded me with a fixed look,
and put her hand to her forehead. I besought her to be calm, and prepare
herself to bear what I had to tell; but I should rather have entreated
her to weep, for she sat like a stone figure.

‘When I was last here,’ I faltered, ‘Miss Dartle told me he was sailing
here and there. The night before last was a dreadful one at sea. If he
were at sea that night, and near a dangerous coast, as it is said he
was; and if the vessel that was seen should really be the ship which--’

‘Rosa!’ said Mrs. Steerforth, ‘come to me!’

She came, but with no sympathy or gentleness. Her eyes gleamed like fire
as she confronted his mother, and broke into a frightful laugh.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘is your pride appeased, you madwoman? Now has he made
atonement to you--with his life! Do you hear?---His life!’

Mrs. Steerforth, fallen back stiffly in her chair, and making no sound
but a moan, cast her eyes upon her with a wide stare.

‘Aye!’ cried Rosa, smiting herself passionately on the breast, ‘look at
me! Moan, and groan, and look at me! Look here!’ striking the scar, ‘at
your dead child’s handiwork!’

The moan the mother uttered, from time to time, went to My heart. Always
the same. Always inarticulate and stifled. Always accompanied with
an incapable motion of the head, but with no change of face. Always
proceeding from a rigid mouth and closed teeth, as if the jaw were
locked and the face frozen up in pain.

‘Do you remember when he did this?’ she proceeded. ‘Do you remember
when, in his inheritance of your nature, and in your pampering of his
pride and passion, he did this, and disfigured me for life? Look at me,
marked until I die with his high displeasure; and moan and groan for
what you made him!’

‘Miss Dartle,’ I entreated her. ‘For Heaven’s sake--’

‘I WILL speak!’ she said, turning on me with her lightning eyes. ‘Be
silent, you! Look at me, I say, proud mother of a proud, false son! Moan
for your nurture of him, moan for your corruption of him, moan for your
loss of him, moan for mine!’

She clenched her hand, and trembled through her spare, worn figure, as
if her passion were killing her by inches.

‘You, resent his self-will!’ she exclaimed. ‘You, injured by his haughty
temper! You, who opposed to both, when your hair was grey, the qualities
which made both when you gave him birth! YOU, who from his cradle reared
him to be what he was, and stunted what he should have been! Are you
rewarded, now, for your years of trouble?’

‘Oh, Miss Dartle, shame! Oh cruel!’

‘I tell you,’ she returned, ‘I WILL speak to her. No power on earth
should stop me, while I was standing here! Have I been silent all these
years, and shall I not speak now? I loved him better than you ever loved
him!’ turning on her fiercely. ‘I could have loved him, and asked no
return. If I had been his wife, I could have been the slave of his
caprices for a word of love a year. I should have been. Who knows it
better than I? You were exacting, proud, punctilious, selfish. My love
would have been devoted--would have trod your paltry whimpering under
foot!’

With flashing eyes, she stamped upon the ground as if she actually did
it.

‘Look here!’ she said, striking the scar again, with a relentless hand.
‘When he grew into the better understanding of what he had done, he saw
it, and repented of it! I could sing to him, and talk to him, and show
the ardour that I felt in all he did, and attain with labour to such
knowledge as most interested him; and I attracted him. When he was
freshest and truest, he loved me. Yes, he did! Many a time, when you
were put off with a slight word, he has taken Me to his heart!’

She said it with a taunting pride in the midst of her frenzy--for it
was little less--yet with an eager remembrance of it, in which the
smouldering embers of a gentler feeling kindled for the moment.

‘I descended--as I might have known I should, but that he fascinated me
with his boyish courtship--into a doll, a trifle for the occupation
of an idle hour, to be dropped, and taken up, and trifled with, as the
inconstant humour took him. When he grew weary, I grew weary. As his
fancy died out, I would no more have tried to strengthen any power I
had, than I would have married him on his being forced to take me for
his wife. We fell away from one another without a word. Perhaps you saw
it, and were not sorry. Since then, I have been a mere disfigured piece
of furniture between you both; having no eyes, no ears, no feelings,
no remembrances. Moan? Moan for what you made him; not for your love. I
tell you that the time was, when I loved him better than you ever did!’

She stood with her bright angry eyes confronting the wide stare, and the
set face; and softened no more, when the moaning was repeated, than if
the face had been a picture.

‘Miss Dartle,’ said I, ‘if you can be so obdurate as not to feel for
this afflicted mother--’

‘Who feels for me?’ she sharply retorted. ‘She has sown this. Let her
moan for the harvest that she reaps today!’

‘And if his faults--’ I began.

‘Faults!’ she cried, bursting into passionate tears. ‘Who dares malign
him? He had a soul worth millions of the friends to whom he stooped!’

‘No one can have loved him better, no one can hold him in dearer
remembrance than I,’ I replied. ‘I meant to say, if you have no
compassion for his mother; or if his faults--you have been bitter on
them--’

‘It’s false,’ she cried, tearing her black hair; ‘I loved him!’

‘--if his faults cannot,’ I went on, ‘be banished from your remembrance,
in such an hour; look at that figure, even as one you have never seen
before, and render it some help!’

All this time, the figure was unchanged, and looked unchangeable.
Motionless, rigid, staring; moaning in the same dumb way from time to
time, with the same helpless motion of the head; but giving no other
sign of life. Miss Dartle suddenly kneeled down before it, and began to
loosen the dress.

‘A curse upon you!’ she said, looking round at me, with a mingled
expression of rage and grief. ‘It was in an evil hour that you ever came
here! A curse upon you! Go!’

After passing out of the room, I hurried back to ring the bell, the
sooner to alarm the servants. She had then taken the impassive figure
in her arms, and, still upon her knees, was weeping over it, kissing it,
calling to it, rocking it to and fro upon her bosom like a child, and
trying every tender means to rouse the dormant senses. No longer afraid
of leaving her, I noiselessly turned back again; and alarmed the house
as I went out.

Later in the day, I returned, and we laid him in his mother’s room. She
was just the same, they told me; Miss Dartle never left her; doctors
were in attendance, many things had been tried; but she lay like a
statue, except for the low sound now and then.

I went through the dreary house, and darkened the windows. The windows
of the chamber where he lay, I darkened last. I lifted up the leaden
hand, and held it to my heart; and all the world seemed death and
silence, broken only by his mother’s moaning.



CHAPTER 57. THE EMIGRANTS


One thing more, I had to do, before yielding myself to the shock of
these emotions. It was, to conceal what had occurred, from those who
were going away; and to dismiss them on their voyage in happy ignorance.
In this, no time was to be lost.

I took Mr. Micawber aside that same night, and confided to him the
task of standing between Mr. Peggotty and intelligence of the late
catastrophe. He zealously undertook to do so, and to intercept any
newspaper through which it might, without such precautions, reach him.

‘If it penetrates to him, sir,’ said Mr. Micawber, striking himself on
the breast, ‘it shall first pass through this body!’

Mr. Micawber, I must observe, in his adaptation of himself to a new
state of society, had acquired a bold buccaneering air, not absolutely
lawless, but defensive and prompt. One might have supposed him a child
of the wilderness, long accustomed to live out of the confines of
civilization, and about to return to his native wilds.

He had provided himself, among other things, with a complete suit of
oilskin, and a straw hat with a very low crown, pitched or caulked on
the outside. In this rough clothing, with a common mariner’s telescope
under his arm, and a shrewd trick of casting up his eye at the sky
as looking out for dirty weather, he was far more nautical, after his
manner, than Mr. Peggotty. His whole family, if I may so express it,
were cleared for action. I found Mrs. Micawber in the closest and most
uncompromising of bonnets, made fast under the chin; and in a shawl
which tied her up (as I had been tied up, when my aunt first received
me) like a bundle, and was secured behind at the waist, in a strong
knot. Miss Micawber I found made snug for stormy weather, in the same
manner; with nothing superfluous about her. Master Micawber was hardly
visible in a Guernsey shirt, and the shaggiest suit of slops I ever
saw; and the children were done up, like preserved meats, in impervious
cases. Both Mr. Micawber and his eldest son wore their sleeves loosely
turned back at the wrists, as being ready to lend a hand in any
direction, and to ‘tumble up’, or sing out, ‘Yeo--Heave--Yeo!’ on the
shortest notice.

Thus Traddles and I found them at nightfall, assembled on the wooden
steps, at that time known as Hungerford Stairs, watching the departure
of a boat with some of their property on board. I had told Traddles of
the terrible event, and it had greatly shocked him; but there could be
no doubt of the kindness of keeping it a secret, and he had come to help
me in this last service. It was here that I took Mr. Micawber aside, and
received his promise.

The Micawber family were lodged in a little, dirty, tumble-down
public-house, which in those days was close to the stairs, and whose
protruding wooden rooms overhung the river. The family, as emigrants,
being objects of some interest in and about Hungerford, attracted so
many beholders, that we were glad to take refuge in their room. It was
one of the wooden chambers upstairs, with the tide flowing underneath.
My aunt and Agnes were there, busily making some little extra comforts,
in the way of dress, for the children. Peggotty was quietly assisting,
with the old insensible work-box, yard-measure, and bit of wax-candle
before her, that had now outlived so much.

It was not easy to answer her inquiries; still less to whisper Mr.
Peggotty, when Mr. Micawber brought him in, that I had given the letter,
and all was well. But I did both, and made them happy. If I showed any
trace of what I felt, my own sorrows were sufficient to account for it.

‘And when does the ship sail, Mr. Micawber?’ asked my aunt.

Mr. Micawber considered it necessary to prepare either my aunt or his
wife, by degrees, and said, sooner than he had expected yesterday.

‘The boat brought you word, I suppose?’ said my aunt.

‘It did, ma’am,’ he returned.

‘Well?’ said my aunt. ‘And she sails--’

‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘I am informed that we must positively be on board
before seven tomorrow morning.’

‘Heyday!’ said my aunt, ‘that’s soon. Is it a sea-going fact, Mr.
Peggotty?’ ‘’Tis so, ma’am. She’ll drop down the river with that theer
tide. If Mas’r Davy and my sister comes aboard at Gravesen’, arternoon
o’ next day, they’ll see the last on us.’

‘And that we shall do,’ said I, ‘be sure!’

‘Until then, and until we are at sea,’ observed Mr. Micawber, with a
glance of intelligence at me, ‘Mr. Peggotty and myself will constantly
keep a double look-out together, on our goods and chattels. Emma, my
love,’ said Mr. Micawber, clearing his throat in his magnificent way,
‘my friend Mr. Thomas Traddles is so obliging as to solicit, in my ear,
that he should have the privilege of ordering the ingredients necessary
to the composition of a moderate portion of that Beverage which is
peculiarly associated, in our minds, with the Roast Beef of Old England.
I allude to--in short, Punch. Under ordinary circumstances, I should
scruple to entreat the indulgence of Miss Trotwood and Miss Wickfield,
but-’

‘I can only say for myself,’ said my aunt, ‘that I will drink all
happiness and success to you, Mr. Micawber, with the utmost pleasure.’

‘And I too!’ said Agnes, with a smile.

Mr. Micawber immediately descended to the bar, where he appeared to be
quite at home; and in due time returned with a steaming jug. I could
not but observe that he had been peeling the lemons with his own
clasp-knife, which, as became the knife of a practical settler, was
about a foot long; and which he wiped, not wholly without ostentation,
on the sleeve of his coat. Mrs. Micawber and the two elder members
of the family I now found to be provided with similar formidable
instruments, while every child had its own wooden spoon attached to its
body by a strong line. In a similar anticipation of life afloat, and in
the Bush, Mr. Micawber, instead of helping Mrs. Micawber and his eldest
son and daughter to punch, in wine-glasses, which he might easily have
done, for there was a shelf-full in the room, served it out to them in a
series of villainous little tin pots; and I never saw him enjoy anything
so much as drinking out of his own particular pint pot, and putting it
in his pocket at the close of the evening.

‘The luxuries of the old country,’ said Mr. Micawber, with an intense
satisfaction in their renouncement, ‘we abandon. The denizens of the
forest cannot, of course, expect to participate in the refinements of
the land of the Free.’

Here, a boy came in to say that Mr. Micawber was wanted downstairs.

‘I have a presentiment,’ said Mrs. Micawber, setting down her tin pot,
‘that it is a member of my family!’

‘If so, my dear,’ observed Mr. Micawber, with his usual suddenness of
warmth on that subject, ‘as the member of your family--whoever he, she,
or it, may be--has kept us waiting for a considerable period, perhaps
the Member may now wait MY convenience.’

‘Micawber,’ said his wife, in a low tone, ‘at such a time as this--’

‘“It is not meet,”’ said Mr. Micawber, rising, ‘“that every nice offence
should bear its comment!” Emma, I stand reproved.’

‘The loss, Micawber,’ observed his wife, ‘has been my family’s, not
yours. If my family are at length sensible of the deprivation to which
their own conduct has, in the past, exposed them, and now desire to
extend the hand of fellowship, let it not be repulsed.’

‘My dear,’ he returned, ‘so be it!’

‘If not for their sakes; for mine, Micawber,’ said his wife.

‘Emma,’ he returned, ‘that view of the question is, at such a moment,
irresistible. I cannot, even now, distinctly pledge myself to fall
upon your family’s neck; but the member of your family, who is now in
attendance, shall have no genial warmth frozen by me.’

Mr. Micawber withdrew, and was absent some little time; in the course of
which Mrs. Micawber was not wholly free from an apprehension that words
might have arisen between him and the Member. At length the same boy
reappeared, and presented me with a note written in pencil, and headed,
in a legal manner, ‘Heep v. Micawber’. From this document, I learned
that Mr. Micawber being again arrested, ‘Was in a final paroxysm of
despair; and that he begged me to send him his knife and pint pot, by
bearer, as they might prove serviceable during the brief remainder of
his existence, in jail. He also requested, as a last act of friendship,
that I would see his family to the Parish Workhouse, and forget that
such a Being ever lived.

Of course I answered this note by going down with the boy to pay the
money, where I found Mr. Micawber sitting in a corner, looking darkly at
the Sheriff ‘s Officer who had effected the capture. On his release,
he embraced me with the utmost fervour; and made an entry of the
transaction in his pocket-book--being very particular, I recollect,
about a halfpenny I inadvertently omitted from my statement of the
total.

This momentous pocket-book was a timely reminder to him of another
transaction. On our return to the room upstairs (where he accounted for
his absence by saying that it had been occasioned by circumstances over
which he had no control), he took out of it a large sheet of paper,
folded small, and quite covered with long sums, carefully worked. From
the glimpse I had of them, I should say that I never saw such sums
out of a school ciphering-book. These, it seemed, were calculations of
compound interest on what he called ‘the principal amount of forty-one,
ten, eleven and a half’, for various periods. After a careful
consideration of these, and an elaborate estimate of his resources,
he had come to the conclusion to select that sum which represented the
amount with compound interest to two years, fifteen calendar months, and
fourteen days, from that date. For this he had drawn a note-of-hand
with great neatness, which he handed over to Traddles on the spot,
a discharge of his debt in full (as between man and man), with many
acknowledgements.

‘I have still a presentiment,’ said Mrs. Micawber, pensively shaking her
head, ‘that my family will appear on board, before we finally depart.’

Mr. Micawber evidently had his presentiment on the subject too, but he
put it in his tin pot and swallowed it.

‘If you have any opportunity of sending letters home, on your passage,
Mrs. Micawber,’ said my aunt, ‘you must let us hear from you, you know.’

‘My dear Miss Trotwood,’ she replied, ‘I shall only be too happy
to think that anyone expects to hear from us. I shall not fail to
correspond. Mr. Copperfield, I trust, as an old and familiar friend,
will not object to receive occasional intelligence, himself, from one
who knew him when the twins were yet unconscious?’

I said that I should hope to hear, whenever she had an opportunity of
writing.

‘Please Heaven, there will be many such opportunities,’ said Mr.
Micawber. ‘The ocean, in these times, is a perfect fleet of ships; and
we can hardly fail to encounter many, in running over. It is merely
crossing,’ said Mr. Micawber, trifling with his eye-glass, ‘merely
crossing. The distance is quite imaginary.’

I think, now, how odd it was, but how wonderfully like Mr. Micawber,
that, when he went from London to Canterbury, he should have talked as
if he were going to the farthest limits of the earth; and, when he went
from England to Australia, as if he were going for a little trip across
the channel.

‘On the voyage, I shall endeavour,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘occasionally
to spin them a yarn; and the melody of my son Wilkins will, I trust,
be acceptable at the galley-fire. When Mrs. Micawber has her
sea-legs on--an expression in which I hope there is no conventional
impropriety--she will give them, I dare say, “Little Tafflin”. Porpoises
and dolphins, I believe, will be frequently observed athwart our
Bows; and, either on the starboard or the larboard quarter, objects of
interest will be continually descried. In short,’ said Mr. Micawber,
with the old genteel air, ‘the probability is, all will be found so
exciting, alow and aloft, that when the lookout, stationed in the
main-top, cries Land-oh! we shall be very considerably astonished!’

With that he flourished off the contents of his little tin pot, as if he
had made the voyage, and had passed a first-class examination before the
highest naval authorities.

‘What I chiefly hope, my dear Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber,
‘is, that in some branches of our family we may live again in the old
country. Do not frown, Micawber! I do not now refer to my own family,
but to our children’s children. However vigorous the sapling,’ said Mrs.
Micawber, shaking her head, ‘I cannot forget the parent-tree; and when
our race attains to eminence and fortune, I own I should wish that
fortune to flow into the coffers of Britannia.’

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘Britannia must take her chance. I am
bound to say that she has never done much for me, and that I have no
particular wish upon the subject.’

‘Micawber,’ returned Mrs. Micawber, ‘there, you are wrong. You are going
out, Micawber, to this distant clime, to strengthen, not to weaken, the
connexion between yourself and Albion.’

‘The connexion in question, my love,’ rejoined Mr. Micawber, ‘has not
laid me, I repeat, under that load of personal obligation, that I am at
all sensitive as to the formation of another connexion.’

‘Micawber,’ returned Mrs. Micawber. ‘There, I again say, you are wrong.
You do not know your power, Micawber. It is that which will strengthen,
even in this step you are about to take, the connexion between yourself
and Albion.’

Mr. Micawber sat in his elbow-chair, with his eyebrows raised; half
receiving and half repudiating Mrs. Micawber’s views as they were
stated, but very sensible of their foresight.

‘My dear Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘I wish Mr. Micawber to
feel his position. It appears to me highly important that Mr. Micawber
should, from the hour of his embarkation, feel his position. Your old
knowledge of me, my dear Mr. Copperfield, will have told you that I have
not the sanguine disposition of Mr. Micawber. My disposition is, if I
may say so, eminently practical. I know that this is a long voyage. I
know that it will involve many privations and inconveniences. I cannot
shut my eyes to those facts. But I also know what Mr. Micawber is.
I know the latent power of Mr. Micawber. And therefore I consider it
vitally important that Mr. Micawber should feel his position.’

‘My love,’ he observed, ‘perhaps you will allow me to remark that it is
barely possible that I DO feel my position at the present moment.’

‘I think not, Micawber,’ she rejoined. ‘Not fully. My dear Mr.
Copperfield, Mr. Micawber’s is not a common case. Mr. Micawber is going
to a distant country expressly in order that he may be fully understood
and appreciated for the first time. I wish Mr. Micawber to take his
stand upon that vessel’s prow, and firmly say, “This country I am
come to conquer! Have you honours? Have you riches? Have you posts of
profitable pecuniary emolument? Let them be brought forward. They are
mine!”’

Mr. Micawber, glancing at us all, seemed to think there was a good deal
in this idea.

‘I wish Mr. Micawber, if I make myself understood,’ said Mrs. Micawber,
in her argumentative tone, ‘to be the Caesar of his own fortunes. That,
my dear Mr. Copperfield, appears to me to be his true position. From
the first moment of this voyage, I wish Mr. Micawber to stand upon
that vessel’s prow and say, “Enough of delay: enough of disappointment:
enough of limited means. That was in the old country. This is the new.
Produce your reparation. Bring it forward!”’

Mr. Micawber folded his arms in a resolute manner, as if he were then
stationed on the figure-head.

‘And doing that,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘--feeling his position--am I not
right in saying that Mr. Micawber will strengthen, and not weaken, his
connexion with Britain? An important public character arising in that
hemisphere, shall I be told that its influence will not be felt at home?
Can I be so weak as to imagine that Mr. Micawber, wielding the rod of
talent and of power in Australia, will be nothing in England? I am but
a woman; but I should be unworthy of myself and of my papa, if I were
guilty of such absurd weakness.’

Mrs. Micawber’s conviction that her arguments were unanswerable, gave
a moral elevation to her tone which I think I had never heard in it
before.

‘And therefore it is,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘that I the more wish, that,
at a future period, we may live again on the parent soil. Mr. Micawber
may be--I cannot disguise from myself that the probability is, Mr.
Micawber will be--a page of History; and he ought then to be represented
in the country which gave him birth, and did NOT give him employment!’

‘My love,’ observed Mr. Micawber, ‘it is impossible for me not to be
touched by your affection. I am always willing to defer to your good
sense. What will be--will be. Heaven forbid that I should grudge my
native country any portion of the wealth that may be accumulated by our
descendants!’

‘That’s well,’ said my aunt, nodding towards Mr. Peggotty, ‘and I drink
my love to you all, and every blessing and success attend you!’

Mr. Peggotty put down the two children he had been nursing, one on each
knee, to join Mr. and Mrs. Micawber in drinking to all of us in return;
and when he and the Micawbers cordially shook hands as comrades, and his
brown face brightened with a smile, I felt that he would make his way,
establish a good name, and be beloved, go where he would.

Even the children were instructed, each to dip a wooden spoon into Mr.
Micawber’s pot, and pledge us in its contents. When this was done, my
aunt and Agnes rose, and parted from the emigrants. It was a sorrowful
farewell. They were all crying; the children hung about Agnes to the
last; and we left poor Mrs. Micawber in a very distressed condition,
sobbing and weeping by a dim candle, that must have made the room look,
from the river, like a miserable light-house.

I went down again next morning to see that they were away. They had
departed, in a boat, as early as five o’clock. It was a wonderful
instance to me of the gap such partings make, that although my
association of them with the tumble-down public-house and the wooden
stairs dated only from last night, both seemed dreary and deserted, now
that they were gone.

In the afternoon of the next day, my old nurse and I went down to
Gravesend. We found the ship in the river, surrounded by a crowd
of boats; a favourable wind blowing; the signal for sailing at her
mast-head. I hired a boat directly, and we put off to her; and getting
through the little vortex of confusion of which she was the centre, went
on board.

Mr. Peggotty was waiting for us on deck. He told me that Mr. Micawber
had just now been arrested again (and for the last time) at the suit of
Heep, and that, in compliance with a request I had made to him, he had
paid the money, which I repaid him. He then took us down between decks;
and there, any lingering fears I had of his having heard any rumours of
what had happened, were dispelled by Mr. Micawber’s coming out of the
gloom, taking his arm with an air of friendship and protection, and
telling me that they had scarcely been asunder for a moment, since the
night before last.

It was such a strange scene to me, and so confined and dark, that, at
first, I could make out hardly anything; but, by degrees, it cleared, as
my eyes became more accustomed to the gloom, and I seemed to stand in
a picture by OSTADE. Among the great beams, bulks, and ringbolts of the
ship, and the emigrant-berths, and chests, and bundles, and barrels, and
heaps of miscellaneous baggage--‘lighted up, here and there, by dangling
lanterns; and elsewhere by the yellow daylight straying down a windsail
or a hatchway--were crowded groups of people, making new friendships,
taking leave of one another, talking, laughing, crying, eating and
drinking; some, already settled down into the possession of their few
feet of space, with their little households arranged, and tiny children
established on stools, or in dwarf elbow-chairs; others, despairing of
a resting-place, and wandering disconsolately. From babies who had but a
week or two of life behind them, to crooked old men and women who seemed
to have but a week or two of life before them; and from ploughmen bodily
carrying out soil of England on their boots, to smiths taking away
samples of its soot and smoke upon their skins; every age and occupation
appeared to be crammed into the narrow compass of the ‘tween decks.

As my eye glanced round this place, I thought I saw sitting, by an open
port, with one of the Micawber children near her, a figure like Emily’s;
it first attracted my attention, by another figure parting from it with
a kiss; and as it glided calmly away through the disorder, reminding
me of--Agnes! But in the rapid motion and confusion, and in the
unsettlement of my own thoughts, I lost it again; and only knew that
the time was come when all visitors were being warned to leave the ship;
that my nurse was crying on a chest beside me; and that Mrs. Gummidge,
assisted by some younger stooping woman in black, was busily arranging
Mr. Peggotty’s goods.

‘Is there any last wured, Mas’r Davy?’ said he. ‘Is there any one
forgotten thing afore we parts?’

‘One thing!’ said I. ‘Martha!’

He touched the younger woman I have mentioned on the shoulder, and
Martha stood before me.

‘Heaven bless you, you good man!’ cried I. ‘You take her with you!’

She answered for him, with a burst of tears. I could speak no more at
that time, but I wrung his hand; and if ever I have loved and honoured
any man, I loved and honoured that man in my soul.

The ship was clearing fast of strangers. The greatest trial that I had,
remained. I told him what the noble spirit that was gone, had given me
in charge to say at parting. It moved him deeply. But when he charged
me, in return, with many messages of affection and regret for those deaf
ears, he moved me more.

The time was come. I embraced him, took my weeping nurse upon my arm,
and hurried away. On deck, I took leave of poor Mrs. Micawber. She was
looking distractedly about for her family, even then; and her last words
to me were, that she never would desert Mr. Micawber.

We went over the side into our boat, and lay at a little distance, to
see the ship wafted on her course. It was then calm, radiant sunset.
She lay between us, and the red light; and every taper line and spar was
visible against the glow. A sight at once so beautiful, so mournful, and
so hopeful, as the glorious ship, lying, still, on the flushed water,
with all the life on board her crowded at the bulwarks, and there
clustering, for a moment, bare-headed and silent, I never saw.

Silent, only for a moment. As the sails rose to the wind, and the ship
began to move, there broke from all the boats three resounding cheers,
which those on board took up, and echoed back, and which were echoed
and re-echoed. My heart burst out when I heard the sound, and beheld the
waving of the hats and handkerchiefs--and then I saw her!

Then I saw her, at her uncle’s side, and trembling on his shoulder. He
pointed to us with an eager hand; and she saw us, and waved her last
good-bye to me. Aye, Emily, beautiful and drooping, cling to him with
the utmost trust of thy bruised heart; for he has clung to thee, with
all the might of his great love!

Surrounded by the rosy light, and standing high upon the deck, apart
together, she clinging to him, and he holding her, they solemnly passed
away. The night had fallen on the Kentish hills when we were rowed
ashore--and fallen darkly upon me.



CHAPTER 58. ABSENCE


It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the
ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many
unavailing sorrows and regrets.

I went away from England; not knowing, even then, how great the shock
was, that I had to bear. I left all who were dear to me, and went away;
and believed that I had borne it, and it was past. As a man upon a
field of battle will receive a mortal hurt, and scarcely know that he is
struck, so I, when I was left alone with my undisciplined heart, had no
conception of the wound with which it had to strive.

The knowledge came upon me, not quickly, but little by little, and grain
by grain. The desolate feeling with which I went abroad, deepened
and widened hourly. At first it was a heavy sense of loss and sorrow,
wherein I could distinguish little else. By imperceptible degrees,
it became a hopeless consciousness of all that I had lost--love,
friendship, interest; of all that had been shattered--my first trust,
my first affection, the whole airy castle of my life; of all that
remained--a ruined blank and waste, lying wide around me, unbroken, to
the dark horizon.

If my grief were selfish, I did not know it to be so. I mourned for my
child-wife, taken from her blooming world, so young. I mourned for him
who might have won the love and admiration of thousands, as he had won
mine long ago. I mourned for the broken heart that had found rest in the
stormy sea; and for the wandering remnants of the simple home, where I
had heard the night-wind blowing, when I was a child.

From the accumulated sadness into which I fell, I had at length no hope
of ever issuing again. I roamed from place to place, carrying my burden
with me everywhere. I felt its whole weight now; and I drooped beneath
it, and I said in my heart that it could never be lightened.

When this despondency was at its worst, I believed that I should die.
Sometimes, I thought that I would like to die at home; and actually
turned back on my road, that I might get there soon. At other times, I
passed on farther away,--from city to city, seeking I know not what, and
trying to leave I know not what behind.

It is not in my power to retrace, one by one, all the weary phases of
distress of mind through which I passed. There are some dreams that can
only be imperfectly and vaguely described; and when I oblige myself to
look back on this time of my life, I seem to be recalling such a dream.
I see myself passing on among the novelties of foreign towns, palaces,
cathedrals, temples, pictures, castles, tombs, fantastic streets--the
old abiding places of History and Fancy--as a dreamer might; bearing my
painful load through all, and hardly conscious of the objects as they
fade before me. Listlessness to everything, but brooding sorrow, was the
night that fell on my undisciplined heart. Let me look up from it--as
at last I did, thank Heaven!--and from its long, sad, wretched dream, to
dawn.

For many months I travelled with this ever-darkening cloud upon my
mind. Some blind reasons that I had for not returning home--reasons then
struggling within me, vainly, for more distinct expression--kept me
on my pilgrimage. Sometimes, I had proceeded restlessly from place to
place, stopping nowhere; sometimes, I had lingered long in one spot. I
had had no purpose, no sustaining soul within me, anywhere.

I was in Switzerland. I had come out of Italy, over one of the great
passes of the Alps, and had since wandered with a guide among the
by-ways of the mountains. If those awful solitudes had spoken to my
heart, I did not know it. I had found sublimity and wonder in the dread
heights and precipices, in the roaring torrents, and the wastes of ice
and snow; but as yet, they had taught me nothing else.

I came, one evening before sunset, down into a valley, where I was to
rest. In the course of my descent to it, by the winding track along
the mountain-side, from which I saw it shining far below, I think some
long-unwonted sense of beauty and tranquillity, some softening influence
awakened by its peace, moved faintly in my breast. I remember pausing
once, with a kind of sorrow that was not all oppressive, not quite
despairing. I remember almost hoping that some better change was
possible within me.

I came into the valley, as the evening sun was shining on the remote
heights of snow, that closed it in, like eternal clouds. The bases of
the mountains forming the gorge in which the little village lay, were
richly green; and high above this gentler vegetation, grew forests of
dark fir, cleaving the wintry snow-drift, wedge-like, and stemming the
avalanche. Above these, were range upon range of craggy steeps, grey
rock, bright ice, and smooth verdure-specks of pasture, all gradually
blending with the crowning snow. Dotted here and there on the
mountain’s-side, each tiny dot a home, were lonely wooden cottages, so
dwarfed by the towering heights that they appeared too small for toys.
So did even the clustered village in the valley, with its wooden bridge
across the stream, where the stream tumbled over broken rocks, and
roared away among the trees. In the quiet air, there was a sound of
distant singing--shepherd voices; but, as one bright evening cloud
floated midway along the mountain’s-side, I could almost have believed
it came from there, and was not earthly music. All at once, in this
serenity, great Nature spoke to me; and soothed me to lay down my weary
head upon the grass, and weep as I had not wept yet, since Dora died!

I had found a packet of letters awaiting me but a few minutes before,
and had strolled out of the village to read them while my supper was
making ready. Other packets had missed me, and I had received none for a
long time. Beyond a line or two, to say that I was well, and had arrived
at such a place, I had not had fortitude or constancy to write a letter
since I left home.

The packet was in my hand. I opened it, and read the writing of Agnes.

She was happy and useful, was prospering as she had hoped. That was all
she told me of herself. The rest referred to me.

She gave me no advice; she urged no duty on me; she only told me, in her
own fervent manner, what her trust in me was. She knew (she said) how
such a nature as mine would turn affliction to good. She knew how trial
and emotion would exalt and strengthen it. She was sure that in my every
purpose I should gain a firmer and a higher tendency, through the grief
I had undergone. She, who so gloried in my fame, and so looked forward
to its augmentation, well knew that I would labour on. She knew that in
me, sorrow could not be weakness, but must be strength. As the endurance
of my childish days had done its part to make me what I was, so greater
calamities would nerve me on, to be yet better than I was; and so, as
they had taught me, would I teach others. She commended me to God, who
had taken my innocent darling to His rest; and in her sisterly affection
cherished me always, and was always at my side go where I would; proud
of what I had done, but infinitely prouder yet of what I was reserved to
do.

I put the letter in my breast, and thought what had I been an hour ago!
When I heard the voices die away, and saw the quiet evening cloud grow
dim, and all the colours in the valley fade, and the golden snow upon
the mountain-tops become a remote part of the pale night sky, yet felt
that the night was passing from my mind, and all its shadows clearing,
there was no name for the love I bore her, dearer to me, henceforward,
than ever until then.

I read her letter many times. I wrote to her before I slept. I told her
that I had been in sore need of her help; that without her I was not,
and I never had been, what she thought me; but that she inspired me to
be that, and I would try.

I did try. In three months more, a year would have passed since the
beginning of my sorrow. I determined to make no resolutions until the
expiration of those three months, but to try. I lived in that valley,
and its neighbourhood, all the time.

The three months gone, I resolved to remain away from home for some
time longer; to settle myself for the present in Switzerland, which was
growing dear to me in the remembrance of that evening; to resume my pen;
to work.

I resorted humbly whither Agnes had commended me; I sought out Nature,
never sought in vain; and I admitted to my breast the human interest
I had lately shrunk from. It was not long, before I had almost as many
friends in the valley as in Yarmouth: and when I left it, before the
winter set in, for Geneva, and came back in the spring, their cordial
greetings had a homely sound to me, although they were not conveyed in
English words.

I worked early and late, patiently and hard. I wrote a Story, with a
purpose growing, not remotely, out of my experience, and sent it to
Traddles, and he arranged for its publication very advantageously for
me; and the tidings of my growing reputation began to reach me from
travellers whom I encountered by chance. After some rest and change, I
fell to work, in my old ardent way, on a new fancy, which took strong
possession of me. As I advanced in the execution of this task, I felt it
more and more, and roused my utmost energies to do it well. This was my
third work of fiction. It was not half written, when, in an interval of
rest, I thought of returning home.

For a long time, though studying and working patiently, I had accustomed
myself to robust exercise. My health, severely impaired when I left
England, was quite restored. I had seen much. I had been in many
countries, and I hope I had improved my store of knowledge.

I have now recalled all that I think it needful to recall here, of this
term of absence--with one reservation. I have made it, thus far, with
no purpose of suppressing any of my thoughts; for, as I have elsewhere
said, this narrative is my written memory. I have desired to keep the
most secret current of my mind apart, and to the last. I enter on it
now. I cannot so completely penetrate the mystery of my own heart, as
to know when I began to think that I might have set its earliest and
brightest hopes on Agnes. I cannot say at what stage of my grief
it first became associated with the reflection, that, in my wayward
boyhood, I had thrown away the treasure of her love. I believe I may
have heard some whisper of that distant thought, in the old unhappy loss
or want of something never to be realized, of which I had been sensible.
But the thought came into my mind as a new reproach and new regret, when
I was left so sad and lonely in the world.

If, at that time, I had been much with her, I should, in the weakness of
my desolation, have betrayed this. It was what I remotely dreaded when I
was first impelled to stay away from England. I could not have borne
to lose the smallest portion of her sisterly affection; yet, in that
betrayal, I should have set a constraint between us hitherto unknown.

I could not forget that the feeling with which she now regarded me had
grown up in my own free choice and course. That if she had ever loved me
with another love--and I sometimes thought the time was when she might
have done so--I had cast it away. It was nothing, now, that I had
accustomed myself to think of her, when we were both mere children,
as one who was far removed from my wild fancies. I had bestowed my
passionate tenderness upon another object; and what I might have done,
I had not done; and what Agnes was to me, I and her own noble heart had
made her.

In the beginning of the change that gradually worked in me, when I
tried to get a better understanding of myself and be a better man, I
did glance, through some indefinite probation, to a period when I might
possibly hope to cancel the mistaken past, and to be so blessed as
to marry her. But, as time wore on, this shadowy prospect faded, and
departed from me. If she had ever loved me, then, I should hold her
the more sacred; remembering the confidences I had reposed in her, her
knowledge of my errant heart, the sacrifice she must have made to be my
friend and sister, and the victory she had won. If she had never loved
me, could I believe that she would love me now?

I had always felt my weakness, in comparison with her constancy and
fortitude; and now I felt it more and more. Whatever I might have been
to her, or she to me, if I had been more worthy of her long ago, I was
not now, and she was not. The time was past. I had let it go by, and had
deservedly lost her.

That I suffered much in these contentions, that they filled me with
unhappiness and remorse, and yet that I had a sustaining sense that it
was required of me, in right and honour, to keep away from myself, with
shame, the thought of turning to the dear girl in the withering of my
hopes, from whom I had frivolously turned when they were bright and
fresh--which consideration was at the root of every thought I had
concerning her--is all equally true. I made no effort to conceal from
myself, now, that I loved her, that I was devoted to her; but I brought
the assurance home to myself, that it was now too late, and that our
long-subsisting relation must be undisturbed.

I had thought, much and often, of my Dora’s shadowing out to me what
might have happened, in those years that were destined not to try us;
I had considered how the things that never happen, are often as much
realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished. The
very years she spoke of, were realities now, for my correction; and
would have been, one day, a little later perhaps, though we had parted
in our earliest folly. I endeavoured to convert what might have been
between myself and Agnes, into a means of making me more self-denying,
more resolved, more conscious of myself, and my defects and errors.
Thus, through the reflection that it might have been, I arrived at the
conviction that it could never be.

These, with their perplexities and inconsistencies, were the shifting
quicksands of my mind, from the time of my departure to the time of my
return home, three years afterwards. Three years had elapsed since the
sailing of the emigrant ship; when, at that same hour of sunset, and in
the same place, I stood on the deck of the packet vessel that brought me
home, looking on the rosy water where I had seen the image of that ship
reflected.

Three years. Long in the aggregate, though short as they went by. And
home was very dear to me, and Agnes too--but she was not mine--she was
never to be mine. She might have been, but that was past!



CHAPTER 59. RETURN


I landed in London on a wintry autumn evening. It was dark and raining,
and I saw more fog and mud in a minute than I had seen in a year. I
walked from the Custom House to the Monument before I found a coach;
and although the very house-fronts, looking on the swollen gutters, were
like old friends to me, I could not but admit that they were very dingy
friends.

I have often remarked--I suppose everybody has--that one’s going away
from a familiar place, would seem to be the signal for change in it.
As I looked out of the coach window, and observed that an old house on
Fish-street Hill, which had stood untouched by painter, carpenter, or
bricklayer, for a century, had been pulled down in my absence; and that
a neighbouring street, of time-honoured insalubrity and inconvenience,
was being drained and widened; I half expected to find St. Paul’s
Cathedral looking older.

For some changes in the fortunes of my friends, I was prepared. My aunt
had long been re-established at Dover, and Traddles had begun to get
into some little practice at the Bar, in the very first term after my
departure. He had chambers in Gray’s Inn, now; and had told me, in his
last letters, that he was not without hopes of being soon united to the
dearest girl in the world.

They expected me home before Christmas; but had no idea of my returning
so soon. I had purposely misled them, that I might have the pleasure of
taking them by surprise. And yet, I was perverse enough to feel a chill
and disappointment in receiving no welcome, and rattling, alone and
silent, through the misty streets.

The well-known shops, however, with their cheerful lights, did something
for me; and when I alighted at the door of the Gray’s Inn Coffee-house,
I had recovered my spirits. It recalled, at first, that so-different
time when I had put up at the Golden Cross, and reminded me of the
changes that had come to pass since then; but that was natural.

‘Do you know where Mr. Traddles lives in the Inn?’ I asked the waiter,
as I warmed myself by the coffee-room fire.

‘Holborn Court, sir. Number two.’

‘Mr. Traddles has a rising reputation among the lawyers, I believe?’
said I.

‘Well, sir,’ returned the waiter, ‘probably he has, sir; but I am not
aware of it myself.’

This waiter, who was middle-aged and spare, looked for help to a waiter
of more authority--a stout, potential old man, with a double chin,
in black breeches and stockings, who came out of a place like a
churchwarden’s pew, at the end of the coffee-room, where he kept company
with a cash-box, a Directory, a Law-list, and other books and papers.

‘Mr. Traddles,’ said the spare waiter. ‘Number two in the Court.’

The potential waiter waved him away, and turned, gravely, to me.

‘I was inquiring,’ said I, ‘whether Mr. Traddles, at number two in the
Court, has not a rising reputation among the lawyers?’

‘Never heard his name,’ said the waiter, in a rich husky voice.

I felt quite apologetic for Traddles.

‘He’s a young man, sure?’ said the portentous waiter, fixing his eyes
severely on me. ‘How long has he been in the Inn?’

‘Not above three years,’ said I.

The waiter, who I supposed had lived in his churchwarden’s pew for forty
years, could not pursue such an insignificant subject. He asked me what
I would have for dinner?

I felt I was in England again, and really was quite cast down on
Traddles’s account. There seemed to be no hope for him. I meekly ordered
a bit of fish and a steak, and stood before the fire musing on his
obscurity.

As I followed the chief waiter with my eyes, I could not help thinking
that the garden in which he had gradually blown to be the flower he
was, was an arduous place to rise in. It had such a prescriptive,
stiff-necked, long-established, solemn, elderly air. I glanced about the
room, which had had its sanded floor sanded, no doubt, in exactly the
same manner when the chief waiter was a boy--if he ever was a boy,
which appeared improbable; and at the shining tables, where I saw
myself reflected, in unruffled depths of old mahogany; and at the lamps,
without a flaw in their trimming or cleaning; and at the comfortable
green curtains, with their pure brass rods, snugly enclosing the boxes;
and at the two large coal fires, brightly burning; and at the rows of
decanters, burly as if with the consciousness of pipes of expensive old
port wine below; and both England, and the law, appeared to me to be
very difficult indeed to be taken by storm. I went up to my bedroom
to change my wet clothes; and the vast extent of that old wainscoted
apartment (which was over the archway leading to the Inn, I remember),
and the sedate immensity of the four-post bedstead, and the indomitable
gravity of the chests of drawers, all seemed to unite in sternly
frowning on the fortunes of Traddles, or on any such daring youth. I
came down again to my dinner; and even the slow comfort of the meal,
and the orderly silence of the place--which was bare of guests, the Long
Vacation not yet being over--were eloquent on the audacity of Traddles,
and his small hopes of a livelihood for twenty years to come.

I had seen nothing like this since I went away, and it quite dashed my
hopes for my friend. The chief waiter had had enough of me. He came near
me no more; but devoted himself to an old gentleman in long gaiters, to
meet whom a pint of special port seemed to come out of the cellar of its
own accord, for he gave no order. The second waiter informed me, in a
whisper, that this old gentleman was a retired conveyancer living in the
Square, and worth a mint of money, which it was expected he would leave
to his laundress’s daughter; likewise that it was rumoured that he had
a service of plate in a bureau, all tarnished with lying by, though more
than one spoon and a fork had never yet been beheld in his chambers
by mortal vision. By this time, I quite gave Traddles up for lost; and
settled in my own mind that there was no hope for him.

Being very anxious to see the dear old fellow, nevertheless, I
dispatched my dinner, in a manner not at all calculated to raise me in
the opinion of the chief waiter, and hurried out by the back way. Number
two in the Court was soon reached; and an inscription on the door-post
informing me that Mr. Traddles occupied a set of chambers on the top
storey, I ascended the staircase. A crazy old staircase I found it to
be, feebly lighted on each landing by a club-headed little oil wick,
dying away in a little dungeon of dirty glass.

In the course of my stumbling upstairs, I fancied I heard a pleasant
sound of laughter; and not the laughter of an attorney or barrister, or
attorney’s clerk or barrister’s clerk, but of two or three merry girls.
Happening, however, as I stopped to listen, to put my foot in a hole
where the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn had left a plank deficient,
I fell down with some noise, and when I recovered my footing all was
silent.

Groping my way more carefully, for the rest of the journey, my heart
beat high when I found the outer door, which had Mr. TRADDLES painted on
it, open. I knocked. A considerable scuffling within ensued, but nothing
else. I therefore knocked again.

A small sharp-looking lad, half-footboy and half-clerk, who was very
much out of breath, but who looked at me as if he defied me to prove it
legally, presented himself.

‘Is Mr. Traddles within?’ I said.

‘Yes, sir, but he’s engaged.’

‘I want to see him.’

After a moment’s survey of me, the sharp-looking lad decided to let me
in; and opening the door wider for that purpose, admitted me, first,
into a little closet of a hall, and next into a little sitting-room;
where I came into the presence of my old friend (also out of breath),
seated at a table, and bending over papers.

‘Good God!’ cried Traddles, looking up. ‘It’s Copperfield!’ and rushed
into my arms, where I held him tight.

‘All well, my dear Traddles?’

‘All well, my dear, dear Copperfield, and nothing but good news!’

We cried with pleasure, both of us.

‘My dear fellow,’ said Traddles, rumpling his hair in his excitement,
which was a most unnecessary operation, ‘my dearest Copperfield, my
long-lost and most welcome friend, how glad I am to see you! How
brown you are! How glad I am! Upon my life and honour, I never was so
rejoiced, my beloved Copperfield, never!’

I was equally at a loss to express my emotions. I was quite unable to
speak, at first.

‘My dear fellow!’ said Traddles. ‘And grown so famous! My glorious
Copperfield! Good gracious me, WHEN did you come, WHERE have you come
from, WHAT have you been doing?’

Never pausing for an answer to anything he said, Traddles, who had
clapped me into an easy-chair by the fire, all this time impetuously
stirred the fire with one hand, and pulled at my neck-kerchief with
the other, under some wild delusion that it was a great-coat. Without
putting down the poker, he now hugged me again; and I hugged him; and,
both laughing, and both wiping our eyes, we both sat down, and shook
hands across the hearth.

‘To think,’ said Traddles, ‘that you should have been so nearly coming
home as you must have been, my dear old boy, and not at the ceremony!’

‘What ceremony, my dear Traddles?’

‘Good gracious me!’ cried Traddles, opening his eyes in his old way.
‘Didn’t you get my last letter?’

‘Certainly not, if it referred to any ceremony.’

‘Why, my dear Copperfield,’ said Traddles, sticking his hair upright
with both hands, and then putting his hands on my knees, ‘I am married!’

‘Married!’ I cried joyfully.

‘Lord bless me, yes!’ said Traddles--‘by the Reverend Horace--to
Sophy--down in Devonshire. Why, my dear boy, she’s behind the window
curtain! Look here!’

To my amazement, the dearest girl in the world came at that same
instant, laughing and blushing, from her place of concealment. And a
more cheerful, amiable, honest, happy, bright-looking bride, I believe
(as I could not help saying on the spot) the world never saw. I kissed
her as an old acquaintance should, and wished them joy with all my might
of heart.

‘Dear me,’ said Traddles, ‘what a delightful re-union this is! You are
so extremely brown, my dear Copperfield! God bless my soul, how happy I
am!’

‘And so am I,’ said I.

‘And I am sure I am!’ said the blushing and laughing Sophy.

‘We are all as happy as possible!’ said Traddles. ‘Even the girls are
happy. Dear me, I declare I forgot them!’

‘Forgot?’ said I.

‘The girls,’ said Traddles. ‘Sophy’s sisters. They are staying with us.
They have come to have a peep at London. The fact is, when--was it you
that tumbled upstairs, Copperfield?’

‘It was,’ said I, laughing.

‘Well then, when you tumbled upstairs,’ said Traddles, ‘I was romping
with the girls. In point of fact, we were playing at Puss in the Corner.
But as that wouldn’t do in Westminster Hall, and as it wouldn’t look
quite professional if they were seen by a client, they decamped. And
they are now--listening, I have no doubt,’ said Traddles, glancing at
the door of another room.

‘I am sorry,’ said I, laughing afresh, ‘to have occasioned such a
dispersion.’

‘Upon my word,’ rejoined Traddles, greatly delighted, ‘if you had seen
them running away, and running back again, after you had knocked, to
pick up the combs they had dropped out of their hair, and going on in
the maddest manner, you wouldn’t have said so. My love, will you fetch
the girls?’

Sophy tripped away, and we heard her received in the adjoining room with
a peal of laughter.

‘Really musical, isn’t it, my dear Copperfield?’ said Traddles. ‘It’s
very agreeable to hear. It quite lights up these old rooms. To an
unfortunate bachelor of a fellow who has lived alone all his life, you
know, it’s positively delicious. It’s charming. Poor things, they have
had a great loss in Sophy--who, I do assure you, Copperfield is, and
ever was, the dearest girl!--and it gratifies me beyond expression
to find them in such good spirits. The society of girls is a very
delightful thing, Copperfield. It’s not professional, but it’s very
delightful.’

Observing that he slightly faltered, and comprehending that in the
goodness of his heart he was fearful of giving me some pain by what he
had said, I expressed my concurrence with a heartiness that evidently
relieved and pleased him greatly.

‘But then,’ said Traddles, ‘our domestic arrangements are, to say
the truth, quite unprofessional altogether, my dear Copperfield. Even
Sophy’s being here, is unprofessional. And we have no other place of
abode. We have put to sea in a cockboat, but we are quite prepared to
rough it. And Sophy’s an extraordinary manager! You’ll be surprised how
those girls are stowed away. I am sure I hardly know how it’s done!’

‘Are many of the young ladies with you?’ I inquired.

‘The eldest, the Beauty is here,’ said Traddles, in a low confidential
voice, ‘Caroline. And Sarah’s here--the one I mentioned to you as having
something the matter with her spine, you know. Immensely better! And the
two youngest that Sophy educated are with us. And Louisa’s here.’

‘Indeed!’ cried I.

‘Yes,’ said Traddles. ‘Now the whole set--I mean the chambers--is only
three rooms; but Sophy arranges for the girls in the most wonderful way,
and they sleep as comfortably as possible. Three in that room,’ said
Traddles, pointing. ‘Two in that.’

I could not help glancing round, in search of the accommodation
remaining for Mr. and Mrs. Traddles. Traddles understood me.

‘Well!’ said Traddles, ‘we are prepared to rough it, as I said just now,
and we did improvise a bed last week, upon the floor here. But there’s
a little room in the roof--a very nice room, when you’re up there--which
Sophy papered herself, to surprise me; and that’s our room at present.
It’s a capital little gipsy sort of place. There’s quite a view from
it.’

‘And you are happily married at last, my dear Traddles!’ said I. ‘How
rejoiced I am!’

‘Thank you, my dear Copperfield,’ said Traddles, as we shook hands
once more. ‘Yes, I am as happy as it’s possible to be. There’s your old
friend, you see,’ said Traddles, nodding triumphantly at the flower-pot
and stand; ‘and there’s the table with the marble top! All the other
furniture is plain and serviceable, you perceive. And as to plate, Lord
bless you, we haven’t so much as a tea-spoon.’

‘All to be earned?’ said I, cheerfully.

‘Exactly so,’ replied Traddles, ‘all to be earned. Of course we have
something in the shape of tea-spoons, because we stir our tea. But
they’re Britannia metal.’

‘The silver will be the brighter when it comes,’ said I.

‘The very thing we say!’ cried Traddles. ‘You see, my dear Copperfield,’
falling again into the low confidential tone, ‘after I had delivered my
argument in DOE dem. JIPES versus WIGZIELL, which did me great service
with the profession, I went down into Devonshire, and had some serious
conversation in private with the Reverend Horace. I dwelt upon the fact
that Sophy--who I do assure you, Copperfield, is the dearest girl!--’

‘I am certain she is!’ said I.

‘She is, indeed!’ rejoined Traddles. ‘But I am afraid I am wandering
from the subject. Did I mention the Reverend Horace?’

‘You said that you dwelt upon the fact--’

‘True! Upon the fact that Sophy and I had been engaged for a long
period, and that Sophy, with the permission of her parents, was more
than content to take me--in short,’ said Traddles, with his old frank
smile, ‘on our present Britannia-metal footing. Very well. I then
proposed to the Reverend Horace--who is a most excellent clergyman,
Copperfield, and ought to be a Bishop; or at least ought to have enough
to live upon, without pinching himself--that if I could turn the corner,
say of two hundred and fifty pounds, in one year; and could see my
way pretty clearly to that, or something better, next year; and could
plainly furnish a little place like this, besides; then, and in that
case, Sophy and I should be united. I took the liberty of representing
that we had been patient for a good many years; and that the
circumstance of Sophy’s being extraordinarily useful at home, ought not
to operate with her affectionate parents, against her establishment in
life--don’t you see?’

‘Certainly it ought not,’ said I.

‘I am glad you think so, Copperfield,’ rejoined Traddles, ‘because,
without any imputation on the Reverend Horace, I do think parents, and
brothers, and so forth, are sometimes rather selfish in such cases.
Well! I also pointed out, that my most earnest desire was, to be useful
to the family; and that if I got on in the world, and anything should
happen to him--I refer to the Reverend Horace--’

‘I understand,’ said I.

‘--Or to Mrs. Crewler--it would be the utmost gratification of my
wishes, to be a parent to the girls. He replied in a most admirable
manner, exceedingly flattering to my feelings, and undertook to obtain
the consent of Mrs. Crewler to this arrangement. They had a dreadful
time of it with her. It mounted from her legs into her chest, and then
into her head--’

‘What mounted?’ I asked.

‘Her grief,’ replied Traddles, with a serious look. ‘Her feelings
generally. As I mentioned on a former occasion, she is a very superior
woman, but has lost the use of her limbs. Whatever occurs to harass
her, usually settles in her legs; but on this occasion it mounted to the
chest, and then to the head, and, in short, pervaded the whole system
in a most alarming manner. However, they brought her through it by
unremitting and affectionate attention; and we were married yesterday
six weeks. You have no idea what a Monster I felt, Copperfield, when I
saw the whole family crying and fainting away in every direction! Mrs.
Crewler couldn’t see me before we left--couldn’t forgive me, then, for
depriving her of her child--but she is a good creature, and has done so
since. I had a delightful letter from her, only this morning.’

‘And in short, my dear friend,’ said I, ‘you feel as blest as you
deserve to feel!’

‘Oh! That’s your partiality!’ laughed Traddles. ‘But, indeed, I am in a
most enviable state. I work hard, and read Law insatiably. I get up at
five every morning, and don’t mind it at all. I hide the girls in the
daytime, and make merry with them in the evening. And I assure you I am
quite sorry that they are going home on Tuesday, which is the day before
the first day of Michaelmas Term. But here,’ said Traddles, breaking off
in his confidence, and speaking aloud, ‘ARE the girls! Mr. Copperfield,
Miss Crewler--Miss Sarah--Miss Louisa--Margaret and Lucy!’

They were a perfect nest of roses; they looked so wholesome and fresh.
They were all pretty, and Miss Caroline was very handsome; but there was
a loving, cheerful, fireside quality in Sophy’s bright looks, which was
better than that, and which assured me that my friend had chosen well.
We all sat round the fire; while the sharp boy, who I now divined had
lost his breath in putting the papers out, cleared them away again, and
produced the tea-things. After that, he retired for the night, shutting
the outer door upon us with a bang. Mrs. Traddles, with perfect pleasure
and composure beaming from her household eyes, having made the tea, then
quietly made the toast as she sat in a corner by the fire.

She had seen Agnes, she told me while she was toasting. ‘Tom’ had taken
her down into Kent for a wedding trip, and there she had seen my aunt,
too; and both my aunt and Agnes were well, and they had all talked of
nothing but me. ‘Tom’ had never had me out of his thoughts, she really
believed, all the time I had been away. ‘Tom’ was the authority for
everything. ‘Tom’ was evidently the idol of her life; never to be shaken
on his pedestal by any commotion; always to be believed in, and done
homage to with the whole faith of her heart, come what might.

The deference which both she and Traddles showed towards the Beauty,
pleased me very much. I don’t know that I thought it very reasonable;
but I thought it very delightful, and essentially a part of their
character. If Traddles ever for an instant missed the tea-spoons that
were still to be won, I have no doubt it was when he handed the Beauty
her tea. If his sweet-tempered wife could have got up any self-assertion
against anyone, I am satisfied it could only have been because she was
the Beauty’s sister. A few slight indications of a rather petted and
capricious manner, which I observed in the Beauty, were manifestly
considered, by Traddles and his wife, as her birthright and natural
endowment. If she had been born a Queen Bee, and they labouring Bees,
they could not have been more satisfied of that.

But their self-forgetfulness charmed me. Their pride in these girls, and
their submission of themselves to all their whims, was the pleasantest
little testimony to their own worth I could have desired to see. If
Traddles were addressed as ‘a darling’, once in the course of that
evening; and besought to bring something here, or carry something there,
or take something up, or put something down, or find something, or fetch
something, he was so addressed, by one or other of his sisters-in-law,
at least twelve times in an hour. Neither could they do anything without
Sophy. Somebody’s hair fell down, and nobody but Sophy could put it up.
Somebody forgot how a particular tune went, and nobody but Sophy could
hum that tune right. Somebody wanted to recall the name of a place in
Devonshire, and only Sophy knew it. Something was wanted to be written
home, and Sophy alone could be trusted to write before breakfast in
the morning. Somebody broke down in a piece of knitting, and no one but
Sophy was able to put the defaulter in the right direction. They were
entire mistresses of the place, and Sophy and Traddles waited on them.
How many children Sophy could have taken care of in her time, I can’t
imagine; but she seemed to be famous for knowing every sort of song that
ever was addressed to a child in the English tongue; and she sang dozens
to order with the clearest little voice in the world, one after another
(every sister issuing directions for a different tune, and the Beauty
generally striking in last), so that I was quite fascinated. The best
of all was, that, in the midst of their exactions, all the sisters had
a great tenderness and respect both for Sophy and Traddles. I am sure,
when I took my leave, and Traddles was coming out to walk with me to the
coffee-house, I thought I had never seen an obstinate head of hair, or
any other head of hair, rolling about in such a shower of kisses.

Altogether, it was a scene I could not help dwelling on with pleasure,
for a long time after I got back and had wished Traddles good night. If
I had beheld a thousand roses blowing in a top set of chambers, in that
withered Gray’s Inn, they could not have brightened it half so much.
The idea of those Devonshire girls, among the dry law-stationers and the
attorneys’ offices; and of the tea and toast, and children’s songs, in
that grim atmosphere of pounce and parchment, red-tape, dusty wafers,
ink-jars, brief and draft paper, law reports, writs, declarations, and
bills of costs; seemed almost as pleasantly fanciful as if I had
dreamed that the Sultan’s famous family had been admitted on the roll of
attorneys, and had brought the talking bird, the singing tree, and the
golden water into Gray’s Inn Hall. Somehow, I found that I had taken
leave of Traddles for the night, and come back to the coffee-house, with
a great change in my despondency about him. I began to think he would
get on, in spite of all the many orders of chief waiters in England.

Drawing a chair before one of the coffee-room fires to think about him
at my leisure, I gradually fell from the consideration of his happiness
to tracing prospects in the live-coals, and to thinking, as they broke
and changed, of the principal vicissitudes and separations that had
marked my life. I had not seen a coal fire, since I had left England
three years ago: though many a wood fire had I watched, as it crumbled
into hoary ashes, and mingled with the feathery heap upon the hearth,
which not inaptly figured to me, in my despondency, my own dead hopes.

I could think of the past now, gravely, but not bitterly; and could
contemplate the future in a brave spirit. Home, in its best sense, was
for me no more. She in whom I might have inspired a dearer love, I had
taught to be my sister. She would marry, and would have new claimants on
her tenderness; and in doing it, would never know the love for her that
had grown up in my heart. It was right that I should pay the forfeit of
my headlong passion. What I reaped, I had sown.

I was thinking. And had I truly disciplined my heart to this, and could
I resolutely bear it, and calmly hold the place in her home which she
had calmly held in mine,--when I found my eyes resting on a countenance
that might have arisen out of the fire, in its association with my early
remembrances.

Little Mr. Chillip the Doctor, to whose good offices I was indebted in
the very first chapter of this history, sat reading a newspaper in the
shadow of an opposite corner. He was tolerably stricken in years by this
time; but, being a mild, meek, calm little man, had worn so easily, that
I thought he looked at that moment just as he might have looked when he
sat in our parlour, waiting for me to be born.

Mr. Chillip had left Blunderstone six or seven years ago, and I had
never seen him since. He sat placidly perusing the newspaper, with his
little head on one side, and a glass of warm sherry negus at his
elbow. He was so extremely conciliatory in his manner that he seemed to
apologize to the very newspaper for taking the liberty of reading it.

I walked up to where he was sitting, and said, ‘How do you do, Mr.
Chillip?’

He was greatly fluttered by this unexpected address from a stranger, and
replied, in his slow way, ‘I thank you, sir, you are very good. Thank
you, sir. I hope YOU are well.’

‘You don’t remember me?’ said I.

‘Well, sir,’ returned Mr. Chillip, smiling very meekly, and shaking his
head as he surveyed me, ‘I have a kind of an impression that something
in your countenance is familiar to me, sir; but I couldn’t lay my hand
upon your name, really.’

‘And yet you knew it, long before I knew it myself,’ I returned.

‘Did I indeed, sir?’ said Mr. Chillip. ‘Is it possible that I had the
honour, sir, of officiating when--?’

‘Yes,’ said I.

‘Dear me!’ cried Mr. Chillip. ‘But no doubt you are a good deal changed
since then, sir?’

‘Probably,’ said I.

‘Well, sir,’ observed Mr. Chillip, ‘I hope you’ll excuse me, if I am
compelled to ask the favour of your name?’

On my telling him my name, he was really moved. He quite shook hands
with me--which was a violent proceeding for him, his usual course being
to slide a tepid little fish-slice, an inch or two in advance of his
hip, and evince the greatest discomposure when anybody grappled with
it. Even now, he put his hand in his coat-pocket as soon as he could
disengage it, and seemed relieved when he had got it safe back.

‘Dear me, sir!’ said Mr. Chillip, surveying me with his head on one
side. ‘And it’s Mr. Copperfield, is it? Well, sir, I think I should have
known you, if I had taken the liberty of looking more closely at you.
There’s a strong resemblance between you and your poor father, sir.’

‘I never had the happiness of seeing my father,’ I observed.

‘Very true, sir,’ said Mr. Chillip, in a soothing tone. ‘And very much
to be deplored it was, on all accounts! We are not ignorant, sir,’ said
Mr. Chillip, slowly shaking his little head again, ‘down in our part of
the country, of your fame. There must be great excitement here, sir,’
said Mr. Chillip, tapping himself on the forehead with his forefinger.
‘You must find it a trying occupation, sir!’

‘What is your part of the country now?’ I asked, seating myself near
him.

‘I am established within a few miles of Bury St. Edmund’s, sir,’ said
Mr. Chillip. ‘Mrs. Chillip, coming into a little property in that
neighbourhood, under her father’s will, I bought a practice down there,
in which you will be glad to hear I am doing well. My daughter is
growing quite a tall lass now, sir,’ said Mr. Chillip, giving his little
head another little shake. ‘Her mother let down two tucks in her frocks
only last week. Such is time, you see, sir!’

As the little man put his now empty glass to his lips, when he made this
reflection, I proposed to him to have it refilled, and I would keep him
company with another. ‘Well, sir,’ he returned, in his slow way, ‘it’s
more than I am accustomed to; but I can’t deny myself the pleasure
of your conversation. It seems but yesterday that I had the honour of
attending you in the measles. You came through them charmingly, sir!’

I acknowledged this compliment, and ordered the negus, which was soon
produced. ‘Quite an uncommon dissipation!’ said Mr. Chillip, stirring
it, ‘but I can’t resist so extraordinary an occasion. You have no
family, sir?’

I shook my head.

‘I was aware that you sustained a bereavement, sir, some time ago,’ said
Mr. Chillip. ‘I heard it from your father-in-law’s sister. Very decided
character there, sir?’

‘Why, yes,’ said I, ‘decided enough. Where did you see her, Mr.
Chillip?’

‘Are you not aware, sir,’ returned Mr. Chillip, with his placidest
smile, ‘that your father-in-law is again a neighbour of mine?’

‘No,’ said I.

‘He is indeed, sir!’ said Mr. Chillip. ‘Married a young lady of that
part, with a very good little property, poor thing.---And this action
of the brain now, sir? Don’t you find it fatigue you?’ said Mr. Chillip,
looking at me like an admiring Robin.

I waived that question, and returned to the Murdstones. ‘I was aware of
his being married again. Do you attend the family?’ I asked.

‘Not regularly. I have been called in,’ he replied. ‘Strong
phrenological developments of the organ of firmness, in Mr. Murdstone
and his sister, sir.’

I replied with such an expressive look, that Mr. Chillip was emboldened
by that, and the negus together, to give his head several short shakes,
and thoughtfully exclaim, ‘Ah, dear me! We remember old times, Mr.
Copperfield!’

‘And the brother and sister are pursuing their old course, are they?’
said I.

‘Well, sir,’ replied Mr. Chillip, ‘a medical man, being so much in
families, ought to have neither eyes nor ears for anything but his
profession. Still, I must say, they are very severe, sir: both as to
this life and the next.’

‘The next will be regulated without much reference to them, I dare say,’
I returned: ‘what are they doing as to this?’

Mr. Chillip shook his head, stirred his negus, and sipped it.

‘She was a charming woman, sir!’ he observed in a plaintive manner.

‘The present Mrs. Murdstone?’

‘A charming woman indeed, sir,’ said Mr. Chillip; ‘as amiable, I am sure,
as it was possible to be! Mrs. Chillip’s opinion is, that her spirit
has been entirely broken since her marriage, and that she is all but
melancholy mad. And the ladies,’ observed Mr. Chillip, timorously, ‘are
great observers, sir.’

‘I suppose she was to be subdued and broken to their detestable mould,
Heaven help her!’ said I. ‘And she has been.’

‘Well, sir, there were violent quarrels at first, I assure you,’ said
Mr. Chillip; ‘but she is quite a shadow now. Would it be considered
forward if I was to say to you, sir, in confidence, that since the
sister came to help, the brother and sister between them have nearly
reduced her to a state of imbecility?’

I told him I could easily believe it.

‘I have no hesitation in saying,’ said Mr. Chillip, fortifying himself
with another sip of negus, ‘between you and me, sir, that her mother
died of it--or that tyranny, gloom, and worry have made Mrs. Murdstone
nearly imbecile. She was a lively young woman, sir, before marriage, and
their gloom and austerity destroyed her. They go about with her, now,
more like her keepers than her husband and sister-in-law. That was
Mrs. Chillip’s remark to me, only last week. And I assure you, sir, the
ladies are great observers. Mrs. Chillip herself is a great observer!’

‘Does he gloomily profess to be (I am ashamed to use the word in such
association) religious still?’ I inquired.

‘You anticipate, sir,’ said Mr. Chillip, his eyelids getting quite
red with the unwonted stimulus in which he was indulging. ‘One of Mrs.
Chillip’s most impressive remarks. Mrs. Chillip,’ he proceeded, in the
calmest and slowest manner, ‘quite electrified me, by pointing out
that Mr. Murdstone sets up an image of himself, and calls it the Divine
Nature. You might have knocked me down on the flat of my back, sir,
with the feather of a pen, I assure you, when Mrs. Chillip said so. The
ladies are great observers, sir?’

‘Intuitively,’ said I, to his extreme delight.

‘I am very happy to receive such support in my opinion, sir,’ he
rejoined. ‘It is not often that I venture to give a non-medical opinion,
I assure you. Mr. Murdstone delivers public addresses sometimes, and it
is said,--in short, sir, it is said by Mrs. Chillip,--that the darker
tyrant he has lately been, the more ferocious is his doctrine.’

‘I believe Mrs. Chillip to be perfectly right,’ said I.

‘Mrs. Chillip does go so far as to say,’ pursued the meekest of little
men, much encouraged, ‘that what such people miscall their religion, is
a vent for their bad humours and arrogance. And do you know I must say,
sir,’ he continued, mildly laying his head on one side, ‘that I DON’T
find authority for Mr. and Miss Murdstone in the New Testament?’

‘I never found it either!’ said I.

‘In the meantime, sir,’ said Mr. Chillip, ‘they are much disliked;
and as they are very free in consigning everybody who dislikes them
to perdition, we really have a good deal of perdition going on in
our neighbourhood! However, as Mrs. Chillip says, sir, they undergo a
continual punishment; for they are turned inward, to feed upon their own
hearts, and their own hearts are very bad feeding. Now, sir, about that
brain of yours, if you’ll excuse my returning to it. Don’t you expose it
to a good deal of excitement, sir?’

I found it not difficult, in the excitement of Mr. Chillip’s own brain,
under his potations of negus, to divert his attention from this topic
to his own affairs, on which, for the next half-hour, he was quite
loquacious; giving me to understand, among other pieces of information,
that he was then at the Gray’s Inn Coffee-house to lay his professional
evidence before a Commission of Lunacy, touching the state of mind of a
patient who had become deranged from excessive drinking. ‘And I assure
you, sir,’ he said, ‘I am extremely nervous on such occasions. I could
not support being what is called Bullied, sir. It would quite unman
me. Do you know it was some time before I recovered the conduct of that
alarming lady, on the night of your birth, Mr. Copperfield?’

I told him that I was going down to my aunt, the Dragon of that night,
early in the morning; and that she was one of the most tender-hearted
and excellent of women, as he would know full well if he knew her
better. The mere notion of the possibility of his ever seeing her again,
appeared to terrify him. He replied with a small pale smile, ‘Is she so,
indeed, sir? Really?’ and almost immediately called for a candle, and
went to bed, as if he were not quite safe anywhere else. He did not
actually stagger under the negus; but I should think his placid little
pulse must have made two or three more beats in a minute, than it had
done since the great night of my aunt’s disappointment, when she struck
at him with her bonnet.

Thoroughly tired, I went to bed too, at midnight; passed the next day on
the Dover coach; burst safe and sound into my aunt’s old parlour while
she was at tea (she wore spectacles now); and was received by her, and
Mr. Dick, and dear old Peggotty, who acted as housekeeper, with open
arms and tears of joy. My aunt was mightily amused, when we began to
talk composedly, by my account of my meeting with Mr. Chillip, and of
his holding her in such dread remembrance; and both she and Peggotty
had a great deal to say about my poor mother’s second husband, and ‘that
murdering woman of a sister’,--on whom I think no pain or penalty would
have induced my aunt to bestow any Christian or Proper Name, or any
other designation.



CHAPTER 60. AGNES


My aunt and I, when we were left alone, talked far into the night. How
the emigrants never wrote home, otherwise than cheerfully and hopefully;
how Mr. Micawber had actually remitted divers small sums of money, on
account of those ‘pecuniary liabilities’, in reference to which he had
been so business-like as between man and man; how Janet, returning into
my aunt’s service when she came back to Dover, had finally carried out
her renunciation of mankind by entering into wedlock with a thriving
tavern-keeper; and how my aunt had finally set her seal on the same
great principle, by aiding and abetting the bride, and crowning the
marriage-ceremony with her presence; were among our topics--already
more or less familiar to me through the letters I had had. Mr. Dick,
as usual, was not forgotten. My aunt informed me how he incessantly
occupied himself in copying everything he could lay his hands on, and
kept King Charles the First at a respectful distance by that semblance
of employment; how it was one of the main joys and rewards of her life
that he was free and happy, instead of pining in monotonous restraint;
and how (as a novel general conclusion) nobody but she could ever fully
know what he was.

‘And when, Trot,’ said my aunt, patting the back of my hand, as we sat
in our old way before the fire, ‘when are you going over to Canterbury?’

‘I shall get a horse, and ride over tomorrow morning, aunt, unless you
will go with me?’

‘No!’ said my aunt, in her short abrupt way. ‘I mean to stay where I
am.’

Then, I should ride, I said. I could not have come through Canterbury
today without stopping, if I had been coming to anyone but her.

She was pleased, but answered, ‘Tut, Trot; MY old bones would have
kept till tomorrow!’ and softly patted my hand again, as I sat looking
thoughtfully at the fire.

Thoughtfully, for I could not be here once more, and so near Agnes,
without the revival of those regrets with which I had so long been
occupied. Softened regrets they might be, teaching me what I had failed
to learn when my younger life was all before me, but not the less
regrets. ‘Oh, Trot,’ I seemed to hear my aunt say once more; and I
understood her better now--‘Blind, blind, blind!’

We both kept silence for some minutes. When I raised my eyes, I found
that she was steadily observant of me. Perhaps she had followed the
current of my mind; for it seemed to me an easy one to track now, wilful
as it had been once.

‘You will find her father a white-haired old man,’ said my aunt, ‘though
a better man in all other respects--a reclaimed man. Neither will you
find him measuring all human interests, and joys, and sorrows, with his
one poor little inch-rule now. Trust me, child, such things must shrink
very much, before they can be measured off in that way.’

‘Indeed they must,’ said I.

‘You will find her,’ pursued my aunt, ‘as good, as beautiful, as
earnest, as disinterested, as she has always been. If I knew higher
praise, Trot, I would bestow it on her.’

There was no higher praise for her; no higher reproach for me. Oh, how
had I strayed so far away!

‘If she trains the young girls whom she has about her, to be like
herself,’ said my aunt, earnest even to the filling of her eyes with
tears, ‘Heaven knows, her life will be well employed! Useful and happy,
as she said that day! How could she be otherwise than useful and happy!’

‘Has Agnes any--’ I was thinking aloud, rather than speaking.

‘Well? Hey? Any what?’ said my aunt, sharply.

‘Any lover,’ said I.

‘A score,’ cried my aunt, with a kind of indignant pride. ‘She might
have married twenty times, my dear, since you have been gone!’

‘No doubt,’ said I. ‘No doubt. But has she any lover who is worthy of
her? Agnes could care for no other.’

My aunt sat musing for a little while, with her chin upon her hand.
Slowly raising her eyes to mine, she said:

‘I suspect she has an attachment, Trot.’

‘A prosperous one?’ said I.

‘Trot,’ returned my aunt gravely, ‘I can’t say. I have no right to tell
you even so much. She has never confided it to me, but I suspect it.’

She looked so attentively and anxiously at me (I even saw her tremble),
that I felt now, more than ever, that she had followed my late thoughts.
I summoned all the resolutions I had made, in all those many days and
nights, and all those many conflicts of my heart.

‘If it should be so,’ I began, ‘and I hope it is-’

‘I don’t know that it is,’ said my aunt curtly. ‘You must not be ruled
by my suspicions. You must keep them secret. They are very slight,
perhaps. I have no right to speak.’

‘If it should be so,’ I repeated, ‘Agnes will tell me at her own good
time. A sister to whom I have confided so much, aunt, will not be
reluctant to confide in me.’

My aunt withdrew her eyes from mine, as slowly as she had turned them
upon me; and covered them thoughtfully with her hand. By and by she
put her other hand on my shoulder; and so we both sat, looking into the
past, without saying another word, until we parted for the night.

I rode away, early in the morning, for the scene of my old school-days.
I cannot say that I was yet quite happy, in the hope that I was gaining
a victory over myself; even in the prospect of so soon looking on her
face again.

The well-remembered ground was soon traversed, and I came into the quiet
streets, where every stone was a boy’s book to me. I went on foot to the
old house, and went away with a heart too full to enter. I returned; and
looking, as I passed, through the low window of the turret-room where
first Uriah Heep, and afterwards Mr. Micawber, had been wont to sit,
saw that it was a little parlour now, and that there was no office.
Otherwise the staid old house was, as to its cleanliness and order,
still just as it had been when I first saw it. I requested the new maid
who admitted me, to tell Miss Wickfield that a gentleman who waited on
her from a friend abroad, was there; and I was shown up the grave old
staircase (cautioned of the steps I knew so well), into the unchanged
drawing-room. The books that Agnes and I had read together, were on
their shelves; and the desk where I had laboured at my lessons, many
a night, stood yet at the same old corner of the table. All the little
changes that had crept in when the Heeps were there, were changed again.
Everything was as it used to be, in the happy time.

I stood in a window, and looked across the ancient street at the
opposite houses, recalling how I had watched them on wet afternoons,
when I first came there; and how I had used to speculate about the
people who appeared at any of the windows, and had followed them with my
eyes up and down stairs, while women went clicking along the pavement in
pattens, and the dull rain fell in slanting lines, and poured out of the
water-spout yonder, and flowed into the road. The feeling with which
I used to watch the tramps, as they came into the town on those wet
evenings, at dusk, and limped past, with their bundles drooping over
their shoulders at the ends of sticks, came freshly back to me; fraught,
as then, with the smell of damp earth, and wet leaves and briar, and the
sensation of the very airs that blew upon me in my own toilsome journey.

The opening of the little door in the panelled wall made me start and
turn. Her beautiful serene eyes met mine as she came towards me. She
stopped and laid her hand upon her bosom, and I caught her in my arms.

‘Agnes! my dear girl! I have come too suddenly upon you.’

‘No, no! I am so rejoiced to see you, Trotwood!’

‘Dear Agnes, the happiness it is to me, to see you once again!’

I folded her to my heart, and, for a little while, we were both silent.
Presently we sat down, side by side; and her angel-face was turned upon
me with the welcome I had dreamed of, waking and sleeping, for whole
years.

She was so true, she was so beautiful, she was so good,--I owed her so
much gratitude, she was so dear to me, that I could find no utterance
for what I felt. I tried to bless her, tried to thank her, tried to tell
her (as I had often done in letters) what an influence she had upon me;
but all my efforts were in vain. My love and joy were dumb.

With her own sweet tranquillity, she calmed my agitation; led me back to
the time of our parting; spoke to me of Emily, whom she had visited,
in secret, many times; spoke to me tenderly of Dora’s grave. With the
unerring instinct of her noble heart, she touched the chords of my
memory so softly and harmoniously, that not one jarred within me; I
could listen to the sorrowful, distant music, and desire to shrink from
nothing it awoke. How could I, when, blended with it all, was her dear
self, the better angel of my life?

‘And you, Agnes,’ I said, by and by. ‘Tell me of yourself. You have
hardly ever told me of your own life, in all this lapse of time!’

‘What should I tell?’ she answered, with her radiant smile. ‘Papa is
well. You see us here, quiet in our own home; our anxieties set at rest,
our home restored to us; and knowing that, dear Trotwood, you know all.’

‘All, Agnes?’ said I.

She looked at me, with some fluttering wonder in her face.

‘Is there nothing else, Sister?’ I said.

Her colour, which had just now faded, returned, and faded again. She
smiled; with a quiet sadness, I thought; and shook her head.

I had sought to lead her to what my aunt had hinted at; for, sharply
painful to me as it must be to receive that confidence, I was to
discipline my heart, and do my duty to her. I saw, however, that she was
uneasy, and I let it pass.

‘You have much to do, dear Agnes?’

‘With my school?’ said she, looking up again, in all her bright
composure.

‘Yes. It is laborious, is it not?’

‘The labour is so pleasant,’ she returned, ‘that it is scarcely grateful
in me to call it by that name.’

‘Nothing good is difficult to you,’ said I.

Her colour came and went once more; and once more, as she bent her head,
I saw the same sad smile.

‘You will wait and see papa,’ said Agnes, cheerfully, ‘and pass the
day with us? Perhaps you will sleep in your own room? We always call it
yours.’

I could not do that, having promised to ride back to my aunt’s at night;
but I would pass the day there, joyfully.

‘I must be a prisoner for a little while,’ said Agnes, ‘but here are the
old books, Trotwood, and the old music.’

‘Even the old flowers are here,’ said I, looking round; ‘or the old
kinds.’

‘I have found a pleasure,’ returned Agnes, smiling, ‘while you have been
absent, in keeping everything as it used to be when we were children.
For we were very happy then, I think.’

‘Heaven knows we were!’ said I.

‘And every little thing that has reminded me of my brother,’ said Agnes,
with her cordial eyes turned cheerfully upon me, ‘has been a welcome
companion. Even this,’ showing me the basket-trifle, full of keys, still
hanging at her side, ‘seems to jingle a kind of old tune!’

She smiled again, and went out at the door by which she had come.

It was for me to guard this sisterly affection with religious care. It
was all that I had left myself, and it was a treasure. If I once shook
the foundations of the sacred confidence and usage, in virtue of which
it was given to me, it was lost, and could never be recovered. I set
this steadily before myself. The better I loved her, the more it behoved
me never to forget it.

I walked through the streets; and, once more seeing my old adversary the
butcher--now a constable, with his staff hanging up in the shop--went
down to look at the place where I had fought him; and there meditated
on Miss Shepherd and the eldest Miss Larkins, and all the idle loves and
likings, and dislikings, of that time. Nothing seemed to have survived
that time but Agnes; and she, ever a star above me, was brighter and
higher.

When I returned, Mr. Wickfield had come home, from a garden he had, a
couple of miles or so out of town, where he now employed himself almost
every day. I found him as my aunt had described him. We sat down to
dinner, with some half-dozen little girls; and he seemed but the shadow
of his handsome picture on the wall.

The tranquillity and peace belonging, of old, to that quiet ground in my
memory, pervaded it again. When dinner was done, Mr. Wickfield taking no
wine, and I desiring none, we went up-stairs; where Agnes and her little
charges sang and played, and worked. After tea the children left us; and
we three sat together, talking of the bygone days.

‘My part in them,’ said Mr. Wickfield, shaking his white head, ‘has much
matter for regret--for deep regret, and deep contrition, Trotwood, you
well know. But I would not cancel it, if it were in my power.’

I could readily believe that, looking at the face beside him.

‘I should cancel with it,’ he pursued, ‘such patience and devotion, such
fidelity, such a child’s love, as I must not forget, no! even to forget
myself.’

‘I understand you, sir,’ I softly said. ‘I hold it--I have always held
it--in veneration.’

‘But no one knows, not even you,’ he returned, ‘how much she has done,
how much she has undergone, how hard she has striven. Dear Agnes!’

She had put her hand entreatingly on his arm, to stop him; and was very,
very pale.

‘Well, well!’ he said with a sigh, dismissing, as I then saw, some trial
she had borne, or was yet to bear, in connexion with what my aunt had
told me. ‘Well! I have never told you, Trotwood, of her mother. Has
anyone?’

‘Never, sir.’

‘It’s not much--though it was much to suffer. She married me in
opposition to her father’s wish, and he renounced her. She prayed him
to forgive her, before my Agnes came into this world. He was a very hard
man, and her mother had long been dead. He repulsed her. He broke her
heart.’

Agnes leaned upon his shoulder, and stole her arm about his neck.

‘She had an affectionate and gentle heart,’ he said; ‘and it was broken.
I knew its tender nature very well. No one could, if I did not. She
loved me dearly, but was never happy. She was always labouring, in
secret, under this distress; and being delicate and downcast at the time
of his last repulse--for it was not the first, by many--pined away
and died. She left me Agnes, two weeks old; and the grey hair that you
recollect me with, when you first came.’ He kissed Agnes on her cheek.

‘My love for my dear child was a diseased love, but my mind was all
unhealthy then. I say no more of that. I am not speaking of myself,
Trotwood, but of her mother, and of her. If I give you any clue to what
I am, or to what I have been, you will unravel it, I know. What Agnes
is, I need not say. I have always read something of her poor mother’s
story, in her character; and so I tell it you tonight, when we three are
again together, after such great changes. I have told it all.’

His bowed head, and her angel-face and filial duty, derived a more
pathetic meaning from it than they had had before. If I had wanted
anything by which to mark this night of our re-union, I should have
found it in this.

Agnes rose up from her father’s side, before long; and going softly to
her piano, played some of the old airs to which we had often listened in
that place.

‘Have you any intention of going away again?’ Agnes asked me, as I was
standing by.

‘What does my sister say to that?’

‘I hope not.’

‘Then I have no such intention, Agnes.’

‘I think you ought not, Trotwood, since you ask me,’ she said, mildly.
‘Your growing reputation and success enlarge your power of doing good;
and if I could spare my brother,’ with her eyes upon me, ‘perhaps the
time could not.’

‘What I am, you have made me, Agnes. You should know best.’

‘I made you, Trotwood?’

‘Yes! Agnes, my dear girl!’ I said, bending over her. ‘I tried to tell
you, when we met today, something that has been in my thoughts since
Dora died. You remember, when you came down to me in our little
room--pointing upward, Agnes?’

‘Oh, Trotwood!’ she returned, her eyes filled with tears. ‘So loving, so
confiding, and so young! Can I ever forget?’

‘As you were then, my sister, I have often thought since, you have ever
been to me. Ever pointing upward, Agnes; ever leading me to something
better; ever directing me to higher things!’

She only shook her head; through her tears I saw the same sad quiet
smile.

‘And I am so grateful to you for it, Agnes, so bound to you, that there
is no name for the affection of my heart. I want you to know, yet don’t
know how to tell you, that all my life long I shall look up to you,
and be guided by you, as I have been through the darkness that is past.
Whatever betides, whatever new ties you may form, whatever changes may
come between us, I shall always look to you, and love you, as I do now,
and have always done. You will always be my solace and resource, as you
have always been. Until I die, my dearest sister, I shall see you always
before me, pointing upward!’

She put her hand in mine, and told me she was proud of me, and of what I
said; although I praised her very far beyond her worth. Then she went
on softly playing, but without removing her eyes from me. ‘Do you know,
what I have heard tonight, Agnes,’ said I, strangely seems to be a part
of the feeling with which I regarded you when I saw you first--with
which I sat beside you in my rough school-days?’

‘You knew I had no mother,’ she replied with a smile, ‘and felt kindly
towards me.’

‘More than that, Agnes, I knew, almost as if I had known this story,
that there was something inexplicably gentle and softened, surrounding
you; something that might have been sorrowful in someone else (as I can
now understand it was), but was not so in you.’

She softly played on, looking at me still.

‘Will you laugh at my cherishing such fancies, Agnes?’

‘No!’

‘Or at my saying that I really believe I felt, even then, that you could
be faithfully affectionate against all discouragement, and never cease
to be so, until you ceased to live?---Will you laugh at such a dream?’

‘Oh, no! Oh, no!’

For an instant, a distressful shadow crossed her face; but, even in the
start it gave me, it was gone; and she was playing on, and looking at me
with her own calm smile.

As I rode back in the lonely night, the wind going by me like a restless
memory, I thought of this, and feared she was not happy. I was not
happy; but, thus far, I had faithfully set the seal upon the Past, and,
thinking of her, pointing upward, thought of her as pointing to that
sky above me, where, in the mystery to come, I might yet love her with
a love unknown on earth, and tell her what the strife had been within me
when I loved her here.



CHAPTER 61. I AM SHOWN TWO INTERESTING PENITENTS


For a time--at all events until my book should be completed, which would
be the work of several months--I took up my abode in my aunt’s house at
Dover; and there, sitting in the window from which I had looked out at
the moon upon the sea, when that roof first gave me shelter, I quietly
pursued my task.

In pursuance of my intention of referring to my own fictions only when
their course should incidentally connect itself with the progress of my
story, I do not enter on the aspirations, the delights, anxieties, and
triumphs of my art. That I truly devoted myself to it with my strongest
earnestness, and bestowed upon it every energy of my soul, I have
already said. If the books I have written be of any worth, they will
supply the rest. I shall otherwise have written to poor purpose, and the
rest will be of interest to no one.

Occasionally, I went to London; to lose myself in the swarm of life
there, or to consult with Traddles on some business point. He had
managed for me, in my absence, with the soundest judgement; and my
worldly affairs were prospering. As my notoriety began to bring upon
me an enormous quantity of letters from people of whom I had no
knowledge--chiefly about nothing, and extremely difficult to answer--I
agreed with Traddles to have my name painted up on his door. There, the
devoted postman on that beat delivered bushels of letters for me; and
there, at intervals, I laboured through them, like a Home Secretary of
State without the salary.

Among this correspondence, there dropped in, every now and then, an
obliging proposal from one of the numerous outsiders always lurking
about the Commons, to practise under cover of my name (if I would take
the necessary steps remaining to make a proctor of myself), and pay me
a percentage on the profits. But I declined these offers; being already
aware that there were plenty of such covert practitioners in existence,
and considering the Commons quite bad enough, without my doing anything
to make it worse.

The girls had gone home, when my name burst into bloom on Traddles’s
door; and the sharp boy looked, all day, as if he had never heard of
Sophy, shut up in a back room, glancing down from her work into a sooty
little strip of garden with a pump in it. But there I always found her,
the same bright housewife; often humming her Devonshire ballads when no
strange foot was coming up the stairs, and blunting the sharp boy in his
official closet with melody.

I wondered, at first, why I so often found Sophy writing in a copy-book;
and why she always shut it up when I appeared, and hurried it into the
table-drawer. But the secret soon came out. One day, Traddles (who had
just come home through the drizzling sleet from Court) took a paper out
of his desk, and asked me what I thought of that handwriting?

‘Oh, DON’T, Tom!’ cried Sophy, who was warming his slippers before the
fire.

‘My dear,’ returned Tom, in a delighted state, ‘why not? What do you say
to that writing, Copperfield?’

‘It’s extraordinarily legal and formal,’ said I. ‘I don’t think I ever
saw such a stiff hand.’

‘Not like a lady’s hand, is it?’ said Traddles.

‘A lady’s!’ I repeated. ‘Bricks and mortar are more like a lady’s hand!’

Traddles broke into a rapturous laugh, and informed me that it was
Sophy’s writing; that Sophy had vowed and declared he would need a
copying-clerk soon, and she would be that clerk; that she had acquired
this hand from a pattern; and that she could throw off--I forget how
many folios an hour. Sophy was very much confused by my being told all
this, and said that when ‘Tom’ was made a judge he wouldn’t be so ready
to proclaim it. Which ‘Tom’ denied; averring that he should always be
equally proud of it, under all circumstances.

‘What a thoroughly good and charming wife she is, my dear Traddles!’
said I, when she had gone away, laughing.

‘My dear Copperfield,’ returned Traddles, ‘she is, without any
exception, the dearest girl! The way she manages this place; her
punctuality, domestic knowledge, economy, and order; her cheerfulness,
Copperfield!’

‘Indeed, you have reason to commend her!’ I returned. ‘You are a happy
fellow. I believe you make yourselves, and each other, two of the
happiest people in the world.’

‘I am sure we ARE two of the happiest people,’ returned Traddles. ‘I
admit that, at all events. Bless my soul, when I see her getting up
by candle-light on these dark mornings, busying herself in the day’s
arrangements, going out to market before the clerks come into the Inn,
caring for no weather, devising the most capital little dinners out of
the plainest materials, making puddings and pies, keeping everything in
its right place, always so neat and ornamental herself, sitting up
at night with me if it’s ever so late, sweet-tempered and encouraging
always, and all for me, I positively sometimes can’t believe it,
Copperfield!’

He was tender of the very slippers she had been warming, as he put them
on, and stretched his feet enjoyingly upon the fender.

‘I positively sometimes can’t believe it,’ said Traddles. ‘Then our
pleasures! Dear me, they are inexpensive, but they are quite wonderful!
When we are at home here, of an evening, and shut the outer door, and
draw those curtains--which she made--where could we be more snug? When
it’s fine, and we go out for a walk in the evening, the streets
abound in enjoyment for us. We look into the glittering windows of the
jewellers’ shops; and I show Sophy which of the diamond-eyed serpents,
coiled up on white satin rising grounds, I would give her if I could
afford it; and Sophy shows me which of the gold watches that are
capped and jewelled and engine-turned, and possessed of the horizontal
lever-escape-movement, and all sorts of things, she would buy for me if
she could afford it; and we pick out the spoons and forks, fish-slices,
butter-knives, and sugar-tongs, we should both prefer if we could both
afford it; and really we go away as if we had got them! Then, when we
stroll into the squares, and great streets, and see a house to let,
sometimes we look up at it, and say, how would THAT do, if I was made
a judge? And we parcel it out--such a room for us, such rooms for the
girls, and so forth; until we settle to our satisfaction that it
would do, or it wouldn’t do, as the case may be. Sometimes, we go at
half-price to the pit of the theatre--the very smell of which is cheap,
in my opinion, at the money--and there we thoroughly enjoy the play:
which Sophy believes every word of, and so do I. In walking home,
perhaps we buy a little bit of something at a cook’s-shop, or a little
lobster at the fishmongers, and bring it here, and make a splendid
supper, chatting about what we have seen. Now, you know, Copperfield, if
I was Lord Chancellor, we couldn’t do this!’

‘You would do something, whatever you were, my dear Traddles,’ thought
I, ‘that would be pleasant and amiable. And by the way,’ I said aloud,
‘I suppose you never draw any skeletons now?’

‘Really,’ replied Traddles, laughing, and reddening, ‘I can’t wholly
deny that I do, my dear Copperfield. For being in one of the back rows
of the King’s Bench the other day, with a pen in my hand, the fancy came
into my head to try how I had preserved that accomplishment. And I am
afraid there’s a skeleton--in a wig--on the ledge of the desk.’

After we had both laughed heartily, Traddles wound up by looking with a
smile at the fire, and saying, in his forgiving way, ‘Old Creakle!’

‘I have a letter from that old--Rascal here,’ said I. For I never was
less disposed to forgive him the way he used to batter Traddles, than
when I saw Traddles so ready to forgive him himself.

‘From Creakle the schoolmaster?’ exclaimed Traddles. ‘No!’

‘Among the persons who are attracted to me in my rising fame and
fortune,’ said I, looking over my letters, ‘and who discover that they
were always much attached to me, is the self-same Creakle. He is not
a schoolmaster now, Traddles. He is retired. He is a Middlesex
Magistrate.’

I thought Traddles might be surprised to hear it, but he was not so at
all.

‘How do you suppose he comes to be a Middlesex Magistrate?’ said I.

‘Oh dear me!’ replied Traddles, ‘it would be very difficult to answer
that question. Perhaps he voted for somebody, or lent money to somebody,
or bought something of somebody, or otherwise obliged somebody, or
jobbed for somebody, who knew somebody who got the lieutenant of the
county to nominate him for the commission.’

‘On the commission he is, at any rate,’ said I. ‘And he writes to me
here, that he will be glad to show me, in operation, the only true
system of prison discipline; the only unchallengeable way of making
sincere and lasting converts and penitents--which, you know, is by
solitary confinement. What do you say?’

‘To the system?’ inquired Traddles, looking grave.

‘No. To my accepting the offer, and your going with me?’

‘I don’t object,’ said Traddles.

‘Then I’ll write to say so. You remember (to say nothing of our
treatment) this same Creakle turning his son out of doors, I suppose,
and the life he used to lead his wife and daughter?’

‘Perfectly,’ said Traddles.

‘Yet, if you’ll read his letter, you’ll find he is the tenderest of
men to prisoners convicted of the whole calendar of felonies,’ said I;
‘though I can’t find that his tenderness extends to any other class of
created beings.’

Traddles shrugged his shoulders, and was not at all surprised. I had not
expected him to be, and was not surprised myself; or my observation of
similar practical satires would have been but scanty. We arranged the
time of our visit, and I wrote accordingly to Mr. Creakle that evening.

On the appointed day--I think it was the next day, but no
matter--Traddles and I repaired to the prison where Mr. Creakle was
powerful. It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast
expense. I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what
an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had
proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an
industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving
old.

In an office that might have been on the ground-floor of the Tower of
Babel, it was so massively constructed, we were presented to our old
schoolmaster; who was one of a group, composed of two or three of the
busier sort of magistrates, and some visitors they had brought. He
received me, like a man who had formed my mind in bygone years, and
had always loved me tenderly. On my introducing Traddles, Mr. Creakle
expressed, in like manner, but in an inferior degree, that he had always
been Traddles’s guide, philosopher, and friend. Our venerable instructor
was a great deal older, and not improved in appearance. His face was
as fiery as ever; his eyes were as small, and rather deeper set. The
scanty, wet-looking grey hair, by which I remembered him, was almost
gone; and the thick veins in his bald head were none the more agreeable
to look at.

After some conversation among these gentlemen, from which I might have
supposed that there was nothing in the world to be legitimately taken
into account but the supreme comfort of prisoners, at any expense, and
nothing on the wide earth to be done outside prison-doors, we began
our inspection. It being then just dinner-time, we went, first into the
great kitchen, where every prisoner’s dinner was in course of being set
out separately (to be handed to him in his cell), with the regularity
and precision of clock-work. I said aside, to Traddles, that I wondered
whether it occurred to anybody, that there was a striking contrast
between these plentiful repasts of choice quality, and the dinners, not
to say of paupers, but of soldiers, sailors, labourers, the great bulk
of the honest, working community; of whom not one man in five hundred
ever dined half so well. But I learned that the ‘system’ required high
living; and, in short, to dispose of the system, once for all, I found
that on that head and on all others, ‘the system’ put an end to all
doubts, and disposed of all anomalies. Nobody appeared to have the least
idea that there was any other system, but THE system, to be considered.

As we were going through some of the magnificent passages, I inquired of
Mr. Creakle and his friends what were supposed to be the main advantages
of this all-governing and universally over-riding system? I found
them to be the perfect isolation of prisoners--so that no one man in
confinement there, knew anything about another; and the reduction of
prisoners to a wholesome state of mind, leading to sincere contrition
and repentance.

Now, it struck me, when we began to visit individuals in their cells,
and to traverse the passages in which those cells were, and to have the
manner of the going to chapel and so forth, explained to us, that there
was a strong probability of the prisoners knowing a good deal about each
other, and of their carrying on a pretty complete system of intercourse.
This, at the time I write, has been proved, I believe, to be the case;
but, as it would have been flat blasphemy against the system to have
hinted such a doubt then, I looked out for the penitence as diligently
as I could.

And here again, I had great misgivings. I found as prevalent a fashion
in the form of the penitence, as I had left outside in the forms of the
coats and waistcoats in the windows of the tailors’ shops. I found a
vast amount of profession, varying very little in character: varying
very little (which I thought exceedingly suspicious), even in words. I
found a great many foxes, disparaging whole vineyards of inaccessible
grapes; but I found very few foxes whom I would have trusted within
reach of a bunch. Above all, I found that the most professing men were
the greatest objects of interest; and that their conceit, their vanity,
their want of excitement, and their love of deception (which many
of them possessed to an almost incredible extent, as their histories
showed), all prompted to these professions, and were all gratified by
them.

However, I heard so repeatedly, in the course of our goings to and fro,
of a certain Number Twenty Seven, who was the Favourite, and who really
appeared to be a Model Prisoner, that I resolved to suspend my judgement
until I should see Twenty Seven. Twenty Eight, I understood, was also
a bright particular star; but it was his misfortune to have his glory
a little dimmed by the extraordinary lustre of Twenty Seven. I heard so
much of Twenty Seven, of his pious admonitions to everybody around him,
and of the beautiful letters he constantly wrote to his mother (whom he
seemed to consider in a very bad way), that I became quite impatient to
see him.

I had to restrain my impatience for some time, on account of Twenty
Seven being reserved for a concluding effect. But, at last, we came to
the door of his cell; and Mr. Creakle, looking through a little hole in
it, reported to us, in a state of the greatest admiration, that he was
reading a Hymn Book.

There was such a rush of heads immediately, to see Number Twenty Seven
reading his Hymn Book, that the little hole was blocked up, six or seven
heads deep. To remedy this inconvenience, and give us an opportunity of
conversing with Twenty Seven in all his purity, Mr. Creakle directed the
door of the cell to be unlocked, and Twenty Seven to be invited out into
the passage. This was done; and whom should Traddles and I then behold,
to our amazement, in this converted Number Twenty Seven, but Uriah Heep!

He knew us directly; and said, as he came out--with the old writhe,--

‘How do you do, Mr. Copperfield? How do you do, Mr. Traddles?’

This recognition caused a general admiration in the party. I rather
thought that everyone was struck by his not being proud, and taking
notice of us.

‘Well, Twenty Seven,’ said Mr. Creakle, mournfully admiring him. ‘How do
you find yourself today?’

‘I am very umble, sir!’ replied Uriah Heep.

‘You are always so, Twenty Seven,’ said Mr. Creakle.

Here, another gentleman asked, with extreme anxiety: ‘Are you quite
comfortable?’

‘Yes, I thank you, sir!’ said Uriah Heep, looking in that direction.
‘Far more comfortable here, than ever I was outside. I see my follies,
now, sir. That’s what makes me comfortable.’

Several gentlemen were much affected; and a third questioner, forcing
himself to the front, inquired with extreme feeling: ‘How do you find
the beef?’

‘Thank you, sir,’ replied Uriah, glancing in the new direction of this
voice, ‘it was tougher yesterday than I could wish; but it’s my duty to
bear. I have committed follies, gentlemen,’ said Uriah, looking round
with a meek smile, ‘and I ought to bear the consequences without
repining.’ A murmur, partly of gratification at Twenty Seven’s celestial
state of mind, and partly of indignation against the Contractor who had
given him any cause of complaint (a note of which was immediately made
by Mr. Creakle), having subsided, Twenty Seven stood in the midst of
us, as if he felt himself the principal object of merit in a highly
meritorious museum. That we, the neophytes, might have an excess of
light shining upon us all at once, orders were given to let out Twenty
Eight.

I had been so much astonished already, that I only felt a kind of
resigned wonder when Mr. Littimer walked forth, reading a good book!

‘Twenty Eight,’ said a gentleman in spectacles, who had not yet spoken,
‘you complained last week, my good fellow, of the cocoa. How has it been
since?’

‘I thank you, sir,’ said Mr. Littimer, ‘it has been better made. If I
might take the liberty of saying so, sir, I don’t think the milk which
is boiled with it is quite genuine; but I am aware, sir, that there is
a great adulteration of milk, in London, and that the article in a pure
state is difficult to be obtained.’

It appeared to me that the gentleman in spectacles backed his Twenty
Eight against Mr. Creakle’s Twenty Seven, for each of them took his own
man in hand.

‘What is your state of mind, Twenty Eight?’ said the questioner in
spectacles.

‘I thank you, sir,’ returned Mr. Littimer; ‘I see my follies now, sir.
I am a good deal troubled when I think of the sins of my former
companions, sir; but I trust they may find forgiveness.’

‘You are quite happy yourself?’ said the questioner, nodding
encouragement.

‘I am much obliged to you, sir,’ returned Mr. Littimer. ‘Perfectly so.’

‘Is there anything at all on your mind now?’ said the questioner. ‘If
so, mention it, Twenty Eight.’

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Littimer, without looking up, ‘if my eyes have not
deceived me, there is a gentleman present who was acquainted with me
in my former life. It may be profitable to that gentleman to know, sir,
that I attribute my past follies, entirely to having lived a thoughtless
life in the service of young men; and to having allowed myself to be led
by them into weaknesses, which I had not the strength to resist. I hope
that gentleman will take warning, sir, and will not be offended at my
freedom. It is for his good. I am conscious of my own past follies. I
hope he may repent of all the wickedness and sin to which he has been a
party.’

I observed that several gentlemen were shading their eyes, each with one
hand, as if they had just come into church.

‘This does you credit, Twenty Eight,’ returned the questioner. ‘I should
have expected it of you. Is there anything else?’

‘Sir,’ returned Mr. Littimer, slightly lifting up his eyebrows, but not
his eyes, ‘there was a young woman who fell into dissolute courses, that
I endeavoured to save, sir, but could not rescue. I beg that gentleman,
if he has it in his power, to inform that young woman from me that
I forgive her her bad conduct towards myself, and that I call her to
repentance--if he will be so good.’

‘I have no doubt, Twenty Eight,’ returned the questioner, ‘that the
gentleman you refer to feels very strongly--as we all must--what you
have so properly said. We will not detain you.’

‘I thank you, sir,’ said Mr. Littimer. ‘Gentlemen, I wish you a good
day, and hoping you and your families will also see your wickedness, and
amend!’

With this, Number Twenty Eight retired, after a glance between him and
Uriah; as if they were not altogether unknown to each other, through
some medium of communication; and a murmur went round the group, as his
door shut upon him, that he was a most respectable man, and a beautiful
case.

‘Now, Twenty Seven,’ said Mr. Creakle, entering on a clear stage with
his man, ‘is there anything that anyone can do for you? If so, mention
it.’

‘I would umbly ask, sir,’ returned Uriah, with a jerk of his malevolent
head, ‘for leave to write again to mother.’

‘It shall certainly be granted,’ said Mr. Creakle.

‘Thank you, sir! I am anxious about mother. I am afraid she ain’t safe.’

Somebody incautiously asked, what from? But there was a scandalized
whisper of ‘Hush!’

‘Immortally safe, sir,’ returned Uriah, writhing in the direction of
the voice. ‘I should wish mother to be got into my state. I never should
have been got into my present state if I hadn’t come here. I wish mother
had come here. It would be better for everybody, if they got took up,
and was brought here.’

This sentiment gave unbounded satisfaction--greater satisfaction, I
think, than anything that had passed yet.

‘Before I come here,’ said Uriah, stealing a look at us, as if he would
have blighted the outer world to which we belonged, if he could, ‘I was
given to follies; but now I am sensible of my follies. There’s a deal
of sin outside. There’s a deal of sin in mother. There’s nothing but sin
everywhere--except here.’

‘You are quite changed?’ said Mr. Creakle.

‘Oh dear, yes, sir!’ cried this hopeful penitent.

‘You wouldn’t relapse, if you were going out?’ asked somebody else.

‘Oh de-ar no, sir!’

‘Well!’ said Mr. Creakle, ‘this is very gratifying. You have addressed
Mr. Copperfield, Twenty Seven. Do you wish to say anything further to
him?’

‘You knew me, a long time before I came here and was changed, Mr.
Copperfield,’ said Uriah, looking at me; and a more villainous look
I never saw, even on his visage. ‘You knew me when, in spite of my
follies, I was umble among them that was proud, and meek among them that
was violent--you was violent to me yourself, Mr. Copperfield. Once, you
struck me a blow in the face, you know.’

General commiseration. Several indignant glances directed at me.

‘But I forgive you, Mr. Copperfield,’ said Uriah, making his forgiving
nature the subject of a most impious and awful parallel, which I shall
not record. ‘I forgive everybody. It would ill become me to bear malice.
I freely forgive you, and I hope you’ll curb your passions in future. I
hope Mr. W. will repent, and Miss W., and all of that sinful lot. You’ve
been visited with affliction, and I hope it may do you good; but you’d
better have come here. Mr. W. had better have come here, and Miss W.
too. The best wish I could give you, Mr. Copperfield, and give all of
you gentlemen, is, that you could be took up and brought here. When I
think of my past follies, and my present state, I am sure it would be
best for you. I pity all who ain’t brought here!’

He sneaked back into his cell, amidst a little chorus of approbation;
and both Traddles and I experienced a great relief when he was locked
in.

It was a characteristic feature in this repentance, that I was fain to
ask what these two men had done, to be there at all. That appeared to be
the last thing about which they had anything to say. I addressed
myself to one of the two warders, who, I suspected from certain latent
indications in their faces, knew pretty well what all this stir was
worth.

‘Do you know,’ said I, as we walked along the passage, ‘what felony was
Number Twenty Seven’s last “folly”?’

The answer was that it was a Bank case.

‘A fraud on the Bank of England?’ I asked. ‘Yes, sir. Fraud, forgery,
and conspiracy. He and some others. He set the others on. It was a deep
plot for a large sum. Sentence, transportation for life. Twenty Seven
was the knowingest bird of the lot, and had very nearly kept himself
safe; but not quite. The Bank was just able to put salt upon his
tail--and only just.’

‘Do you know Twenty Eight’s offence?’

‘Twenty Eight,’ returned my informant, speaking throughout in a low
tone, and looking over his shoulder as we walked along the passage, to
guard himself from being overheard, in such an unlawful reference
to these Immaculates, by Creakle and the rest; ‘Twenty Eight (also
transportation) got a place, and robbed a young master of a matter of
two hundred and fifty pounds in money and valuables, the night before
they were going abroad. I particularly recollect his case, from his
being took by a dwarf.’

‘A what?’

‘A little woman. I have forgot her name?’

‘Not Mowcher?’

‘That’s it! He had eluded pursuit, and was going to America in a flaxen
wig, and whiskers, and such a complete disguise as never you see in all
your born days; when the little woman, being in Southampton, met
him walking along the street--picked him out with her sharp eye in a
moment--ran betwixt his legs to upset him--and held on to him like grim
Death.’

‘Excellent Miss Mowcher!’ cried I.

‘You’d have said so, if you had seen her, standing on a chair in the
witness-box at the trial, as I did,’ said my friend. ‘He cut her face
right open, and pounded her in the most brutal manner, when she took
him; but she never loosed her hold till he was locked up. She held so
tight to him, in fact, that the officers were obliged to take ‘em
both together. She gave her evidence in the gamest way, and was highly
complimented by the Bench, and cheered right home to her lodgings. She
said in Court that she’d have took him single-handed (on account of what
she knew concerning him), if he had been Samson. And it’s my belief she
would!’

It was mine too, and I highly respected Miss Mowcher for it.

We had now seen all there was to see. It would have been in vain to
represent to such a man as the Worshipful Mr. Creakle, that Twenty Seven
and Twenty Eight were perfectly consistent and unchanged; that exactly
what they were then, they had always been; that the hypocritical knaves
were just the subjects to make that sort of profession in such a place;
that they knew its market-value at least as well as we did, in the
immediate service it would do them when they were expatriated; in
a word, that it was a rotten, hollow, painfully suggestive piece of
business altogether. We left them to their system and themselves, and
went home wondering.

‘Perhaps it’s a good thing, Traddles,’ said I, ‘to have an unsound Hobby
ridden hard; for it’s the sooner ridden to death.’

‘I hope so,’ replied Traddles.



CHAPTER 62. A LIGHT SHINES ON MY WAY


The year came round to Christmas-time, and I had been at home above
two months. I had seen Agnes frequently. However loud the general voice
might be in giving me encouragement, and however fervent the emotions
and endeavours to which it roused me, I heard her lightest word of
praise as I heard nothing else.

At least once a week, and sometimes oftener, I rode over there, and
passed the evening. I usually rode back at night; for the old unhappy
sense was always hovering about me now--most sorrowfully when I left
her--and I was glad to be up and out, rather than wandering over the
past in weary wakefulness or miserable dreams. I wore away the longest
part of many wild sad nights, in those rides; reviving, as I went, the
thoughts that had occupied me in my long absence.

Or, if I were to say rather that I listened to the echoes of those
thoughts, I should better express the truth. They spoke to me from afar
off. I had put them at a distance, and accepted my inevitable place.
When I read to Agnes what I wrote; when I saw her listening face; moved
her to smiles or tears; and heard her cordial voice so earnest on the
shadowy events of that imaginative world in which I lived; I thought
what a fate mine might have been--but only thought so, as I had thought
after I was married to Dora, what I could have wished my wife to be.

My duty to Agnes, who loved me with a love, which, if I disquieted, I
wronged most selfishly and poorly, and could never restore; my matured
assurance that I, who had worked out my own destiny, and won what I
had impetuously set my heart on, had no right to murmur, and must bear;
comprised what I felt and what I had learned. But I loved her: and now
it even became some consolation to me, vaguely to conceive a distant day
when I might blamelessly avow it; when all this should be over; when I
could say ‘Agnes, so it was when I came home; and now I am old, and I
never have loved since!’

She did not once show me any change in herself. What she always had been
to me, she still was; wholly unaltered.

Between my aunt and me there had been something, in this connexion,
since the night of my return, which I cannot call a restraint, or an
avoidance of the subject, so much as an implied understanding that we
thought of it together, but did not shape our thoughts into words. When,
according to our old custom, we sat before the fire at night, we often
fell into this train; as naturally, and as consciously to each other, as
if we had unreservedly said so. But we preserved an unbroken silence. I
believed that she had read, or partly read, my thoughts that night; and
that she fully comprehended why I gave mine no more distinct expression.

This Christmas-time being come, and Agnes having reposed no new
confidence in me, a doubt that had several times arisen in my
mind--whether she could have that perception of the true state of
my breast, which restrained her with the apprehension of giving me
pain--began to oppress me heavily. If that were so, my sacrifice was
nothing; my plainest obligation to her unfulfilled; and every poor
action I had shrunk from, I was hourly doing. I resolved to set this
right beyond all doubt;--if such a barrier were between us, to break it
down at once with a determined hand.

It was--what lasting reason have I to remember it!--a cold, harsh,
winter day. There had been snow, some hours before; and it lay, not
deep, but hard-frozen on the ground. Out at sea, beyond my window, the
wind blew ruggedly from the north. I had been thinking of it, sweeping
over those mountain wastes of snow in Switzerland, then inaccessible to
any human foot; and had been speculating which was the lonelier, those
solitary regions, or a deserted ocean.

‘Riding today, Trot?’ said my aunt, putting her head in at the door.

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I am going over to Canterbury. It’s a good day for a
ride.’

‘I hope your horse may think so too,’ said my aunt; ‘but at present he
is holding down his head and his ears, standing before the door there,
as if he thought his stable preferable.’

My aunt, I may observe, allowed my horse on the forbidden ground, but
had not at all relented towards the donkeys.

‘He will be fresh enough, presently!’ said I.

‘The ride will do his master good, at all events,’ observed my aunt,
glancing at the papers on my table. ‘Ah, child, you pass a good many
hours here! I never thought, when I used to read books, what work it was
to write them.’

‘It’s work enough to read them, sometimes,’ I returned. ‘As to the
writing, it has its own charms, aunt.’

‘Ah! I see!’ said my aunt. ‘Ambition, love of approbation, sympathy, and
much more, I suppose? Well: go along with you!’

‘Do you know anything more,’ said I, standing composedly before her--she
had patted me on the shoulder, and sat down in my chair--‘of that
attachment of Agnes?’

She looked up in my face a little while, before replying:

‘I think I do, Trot.’

‘Are you confirmed in your impression?’ I inquired.

‘I think I am, Trot.’

She looked so steadfastly at me: with a kind of doubt, or pity, or
suspense in her affection: that I summoned the stronger determination to
show her a perfectly cheerful face.

‘And what is more, Trot--’ said my aunt.

‘Yes!’

‘I think Agnes is going to be married.’

‘God bless her!’ said I, cheerfully.

‘God bless her!’ said my aunt, ‘and her husband too!’

I echoed it, parted from my aunt, and went lightly downstairs, mounted,
and rode away. There was greater reason than before to do what I had
resolved to do.

How well I recollect the wintry ride! The frozen particles of ice,
brushed from the blades of grass by the wind, and borne across my face;
the hard clatter of the horse’s hoofs, beating a tune upon the ground;
the stiff-tilled soil; the snowdrift, lightly eddying in the chalk-pit
as the breeze ruffled it; the smoking team with the waggon of old hay,
stopping to breathe on the hill-top, and shaking their bells musically;
the whitened slopes and sweeps of Down-land lying against the dark sky,
as if they were drawn on a huge slate!

I found Agnes alone. The little girls had gone to their own homes now,
and she was alone by the fire, reading. She put down her book on seeing
me come in; and having welcomed me as usual, took her work-basket and
sat in one of the old-fashioned windows.

I sat beside her on the window-seat, and we talked of what I was doing,
and when it would be done, and of the progress I had made since my last
visit. Agnes was very cheerful; and laughingly predicted that I should
soon become too famous to be talked to, on such subjects.

‘So I make the most of the present time, you see,’ said Agnes, ‘and talk
to you while I may.’

As I looked at her beautiful face, observant of her work, she raised her
mild clear eyes, and saw that I was looking at her.

‘You are thoughtful today, Trotwood!’

‘Agnes, shall I tell you what about? I came to tell you.’

She put aside her work, as she was used to do when we were seriously
discussing anything; and gave me her whole attention.

‘My dear Agnes, do you doubt my being true to you?’

‘No!’ she answered, with a look of astonishment.

‘Do you doubt my being what I always have been to you?’

‘No!’ she answered, as before.

‘Do you remember that I tried to tell you, when I came home, what a debt
of gratitude I owed you, dearest Agnes, and how fervently I felt towards
you?’

‘I remember it,’ she said, gently, ‘very well.’

‘You have a secret,’ said I. ‘Let me share it, Agnes.’

She cast down her eyes, and trembled.

‘I could hardly fail to know, even if I had not heard--but from other
lips than yours, Agnes, which seems strange--that there is someone upon
whom you have bestowed the treasure of your love. Do not shut me out of
what concerns your happiness so nearly! If you can trust me, as you say
you can, and as I know you may, let me be your friend, your brother, in
this matter, of all others!’

With an appealing, almost a reproachful, glance, she rose from the
window; and hurrying across the room as if without knowing where, put
her hands before her face, and burst into such tears as smote me to the
heart.

And yet they awakened something in me, bringing promise to my heart.
Without my knowing why, these tears allied themselves with the quietly
sad smile which was so fixed in my remembrance, and shook me more with
hope than fear or sorrow.

‘Agnes! Sister! Dearest! What have I done?’

‘Let me go away, Trotwood. I am not well. I am not myself. I will speak
to you by and by--another time. I will write to you. Don’t speak to me
now. Don’t! don’t!’

I sought to recollect what she had said, when I had spoken to her on
that former night, of her affection needing no return. It seemed a very
world that I must search through in a moment. ‘Agnes, I cannot bear
to see you so, and think that I have been the cause. My dearest girl,
dearer to me than anything in life, if you are unhappy, let me share
your unhappiness. If you are in need of help or counsel, let me try to
give it to you. If you have indeed a burden on your heart, let me try to
lighten it. For whom do I live now, Agnes, if it is not for you!’

‘Oh, spare me! I am not myself! Another time!’ was all I could
distinguish.

Was it a selfish error that was leading me away? Or, having once a clue
to hope, was there something opening to me that I had not dared to think
of?

‘I must say more. I cannot let you leave me so! For Heaven’s sake,
Agnes, let us not mistake each other after all these years, and all
that has come and gone with them! I must speak plainly. If you have any
lingering thought that I could envy the happiness you will confer; that
I could not resign you to a dearer protector, of your own choosing; that
I could not, from my removed place, be a contented witness of your joy;
dismiss it, for I don’t deserve it! I have not suffered quite in vain.
You have not taught me quite in vain. There is no alloy of self in what
I feel for you.’

She was quiet now. In a little time, she turned her pale face towards
me, and said in a low voice, broken here and there, but very clear:

‘I owe it to your pure friendship for me, Trotwood--which, indeed, I do
not doubt--to tell you, you are mistaken. I can do no more. If I have
sometimes, in the course of years, wanted help and counsel, they have
come to me. If I have sometimes been unhappy, the feeling has passed
away. If I have ever had a burden on my heart, it has been lightened
for me. If I have any secret, it is--no new one; and is--not what you
suppose. I cannot reveal it, or divide it. It has long been mine, and
must remain mine.’

‘Agnes! Stay! A moment!’

She was going away, but I detained her. I clasped my arm about her
waist. ‘In the course of years!’ ‘It is not a new one!’ New thoughts and
hopes were whirling through my mind, and all the colours of my life were
changing.

‘Dearest Agnes! Whom I so respect and honour--whom I so devotedly love!
When I came here today, I thought that nothing could have wrested this
confession from me. I thought I could have kept it in my bosom all our
lives, till we were old. But, Agnes, if I have indeed any new-born hope
that I may ever call you something more than Sister, widely different
from Sister!--’

Her tears fell fast; but they were not like those she had lately shed,
and I saw my hope brighten in them.

‘Agnes! Ever my guide, and best support! If you had been more mindful
of yourself, and less of me, when we grew up here together, I think my
heedless fancy never would have wandered from you. But you were so
much better than I, so necessary to me in every boyish hope and
disappointment, that to have you to confide in, and rely upon in
everything, became a second nature, supplanting for the time the first
and greater one of loving you as I do!’

Still weeping, but not sadly--joyfully! And clasped in my arms as she
had never been, as I had thought she never was to be!

‘When I loved Dora--fondly, Agnes, as you know--’

‘Yes!’ she cried, earnestly. ‘I am glad to know it!’

‘When I loved her--even then, my love would have been incomplete,
without your sympathy. I had it, and it was perfected. And when I lost
her, Agnes, what should I have been without you, still!’

Closer in my arms, nearer to my heart, her trembling hand upon my
shoulder, her sweet eyes shining through her tears, on mine!

‘I went away, dear Agnes, loving you. I stayed away, loving you. I
returned home, loving you!’

And now, I tried to tell her of the struggle I had had, and the
conclusion I had come to. I tried to lay my mind before her, truly, and
entirely. I tried to show her how I had hoped I had come into the better
knowledge of myself and of her; how I had resigned myself to what that
better knowledge brought; and how I had come there, even that day, in my
fidelity to this. If she did so love me (I said) that she could take me
for her husband, she could do so, on no deserving of mine, except upon
the truth of my love for her, and the trouble in which it had ripened to
be what it was; and hence it was that I revealed it. And O, Agnes, even
out of thy true eyes, in that same time, the spirit of my child-wife
looked upon me, saying it was well; and winning me, through thee, to
tenderest recollections of the Blossom that had withered in its bloom!

‘I am so blest, Trotwood--my heart is so overcharged--but there is one
thing I must say.’

‘Dearest, what?’

She laid her gentle hands upon my shoulders, and looked calmly in my
face.

‘Do you know, yet, what it is?’

‘I am afraid to speculate on what it is. Tell me, my dear.’

‘I have loved you all my life!’

O, we were happy, we were happy! Our tears were not for the trials (hers
so much the greater) through which we had come to be thus, but for the
rapture of being thus, never to be divided more!

We walked, that winter evening, in the fields together; and the blessed
calm within us seemed to be partaken by the frosty air. The early stars
began to shine while we were lingering on, and looking up to them, we
thanked our GOD for having guided us to this tranquillity.

We stood together in the same old-fashioned window at night, when the
moon was shining; Agnes with her quiet eyes raised up to it; I following
her glance. Long miles of road then opened out before my mind; and,
toiling on, I saw a ragged way-worn boy, forsaken and neglected, who
should come to call even the heart now beating against mine, his own.


It was nearly dinner-time next day when we appeared before my aunt. She
was up in my study, Peggotty said: which it was her pride to keep in
readiness and order for me. We found her, in her spectacles, sitting by
the fire.

‘Goodness me!’ said my aunt, peering through the dusk, ‘who’s this
you’re bringing home?’

‘Agnes,’ said I.

As we had arranged to say nothing at first, my aunt was not a little
discomfited. She darted a hopeful glance at me, when I said ‘Agnes’; but
seeing that I looked as usual, she took off her spectacles in despair,
and rubbed her nose with them.

She greeted Agnes heartily, nevertheless; and we were soon in the
lighted parlour downstairs, at dinner. My aunt put on her spectacles
twice or thrice, to take another look at me, but as often took them
off again, disappointed, and rubbed her nose with them. Much to the
discomfiture of Mr. Dick, who knew this to be a bad symptom.

‘By the by, aunt,’ said I, after dinner; ‘I have been speaking to Agnes
about what you told me.’

‘Then, Trot,’ said my aunt, turning scarlet, ‘you did wrong, and broke
your promise.’

‘You are not angry, aunt, I trust? I am sure you won’t be, when you
learn that Agnes is not unhappy in any attachment.’

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said my aunt.

As my aunt appeared to be annoyed, I thought the best way was to cut her
annoyance short. I took Agnes in my arm to the back of her chair, and we
both leaned over her. My aunt, with one clap of her hands, and one look
through her spectacles, immediately went into hysterics, for the first
and only time in all my knowledge of her.

The hysterics called up Peggotty. The moment my aunt was restored, she
flew at Peggotty, and calling her a silly old creature, hugged her with
all her might. After that, she hugged Mr. Dick (who was highly honoured,
but a good deal surprised); and after that, told them why. Then, we were
all happy together.

I could not discover whether my aunt, in her last short conversation
with me, had fallen on a pious fraud, or had really mistaken the state
of my mind. It was quite enough, she said, that she had told me Agnes
was going to be married; and that I now knew better than anyone how true
it was.


We were married within a fortnight. Traddles and Sophy, and Doctor and
Mrs. Strong, were the only guests at our quiet wedding. We left them
full of joy; and drove away together. Clasped in my embrace, I held the
source of every worthy aspiration I had ever had; the centre of myself,
the circle of my life, my own, my wife; my love of whom was founded on a
rock!

‘Dearest husband!’ said Agnes. ‘Now that I may call you by that name, I
have one thing more to tell you.’

‘Let me hear it, love.’

‘It grows out of the night when Dora died. She sent you for me.’

‘She did.’

‘She told me that she left me something. Can you think what it was?’

I believed I could. I drew the wife who had so long loved me, closer to
my side.

‘She told me that she made a last request to me, and left me a last
charge.’

‘And it was--’

‘That only I would occupy this vacant place.’

And Agnes laid her head upon my breast, and wept; and I wept with her,
though we were so happy.




CHAPTER 63. A VISITOR

What I have purposed to record is nearly finished; but there is yet an
incident conspicuous in my memory, on which it often rests with delight,
and without which one thread in the web I have spun would have a
ravelled end.

I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect, I had
been married ten happy years. Agnes and I were sitting by the fire, in
our house in London, one night in spring, and three of our children were
playing in the room, when I was told that a stranger wished to see me.

He had been asked if he came on business, and had answered No; he had
come for the pleasure of seeing me, and had come a long way. He was an
old man, my servant said, and looked like a farmer.

As this sounded mysterious to the children, and moreover was like the
beginning of a favourite story Agnes used to tell them, introductory
to the arrival of a wicked old Fairy in a cloak who hated everybody, it
produced some commotion. One of our boys laid his head in his mother’s
lap to be out of harm’s way, and little Agnes (our eldest child) left
her doll in a chair to represent her, and thrust out her little heap
of golden curls from between the window-curtains, to see what happened
next.

‘Let him come in here!’ said I.

There soon appeared, pausing in the dark doorway as he entered, a hale,
grey-haired old man. Little Agnes, attracted by his looks, had run to
bring him in, and I had not yet clearly seen his face, when my wife,
starting up, cried out to me, in a pleased and agitated voice, that it
was Mr. Peggotty!

It WAS Mr. Peggotty. An old man now, but in a ruddy, hearty, strong old
age. When our first emotion was over, and he sat before the fire with
the children on his knees, and the blaze shining on his face, he looked,
to me, as vigorous and robust, withal as handsome, an old man, as ever I
had seen.

‘Mas’r Davy,’ said he. And the old name in the old tone fell so
naturally on my ear! ‘Mas’r Davy, ‘tis a joyful hour as I see you, once
more, ‘long with your own trew wife!’

‘A joyful hour indeed, old friend!’ cried I.

‘And these heer pretty ones,’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘To look at these heer
flowers! Why, Mas’r Davy, you was but the heighth of the littlest of
these, when I first see you! When Em’ly warn’t no bigger, and our poor
lad were BUT a lad!’

‘Time has changed me more than it has changed you since then,’ said I.
‘But let these dear rogues go to bed; and as no house in England but
this must hold you, tell me where to send for your luggage (is the old
black bag among it, that went so far, I wonder!), and then, over a glass
of Yarmouth grog, we will have the tidings of ten years!’

‘Are you alone?’ asked Agnes.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, kissing her hand, ‘quite alone.’

We sat him between us, not knowing how to give him welcome enough; and
as I began to listen to his old familiar voice, I could have fancied he
was still pursuing his long journey in search of his darling niece.

‘It’s a mort of water,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘fur to come across, and
on’y stay a matter of fower weeks. But water [‘specially when ‘tis salt)
comes nat’ral to me; and friends is dear, and I am heer. --Which is
verse,’ said Mr. Peggotty, surprised to find it out, ‘though I hadn’t
such intentions.’

‘Are you going back those many thousand miles, so soon?’ asked Agnes.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he returned. ‘I giv the promise to Em’ly, afore I come
away. You see, I doen’t grow younger as the years comes round, and if
I hadn’t sailed as ‘twas, most like I shouldn’t never have done ‘t. And
it’s allus been on my mind, as I must come and see Mas’r Davy and your
own sweet blooming self, in your wedded happiness, afore I got to be too
old.’

He looked at us, as if he could never feast his eyes on us sufficiently.
Agnes laughingly put back some scattered locks of his grey hair, that he
might see us better.

‘And now tell us,’ said I, ‘everything relating to your fortunes.’

‘Our fortuns, Mas’r Davy,’ he rejoined, ‘is soon told. We haven’t fared
nohows, but fared to thrive. We’ve allus thrived. We’ve worked as we
ought to ‘t, and maybe we lived a leetle hard at first or so, but
we have allus thrived. What with sheep-farming, and what with
stock-farming, and what with one thing and what with t’other, we are as
well to do, as well could be. Theer’s been kiender a blessing fell upon
us,’ said Mr. Peggotty, reverentially inclining his head, ‘and we’ve
done nowt but prosper. That is, in the long run. If not yesterday, why
then today. If not today, why then tomorrow.’

‘And Emily?’ said Agnes and I, both together.

‘Em’ly,’ said he, ‘arter you left her, ma’am--and I never heerd her
saying of her prayers at night, t’other side the canvas screen, when we
was settled in the Bush, but what I heerd your name--and arter she and
me lost sight of Mas’r Davy, that theer shining sundown--was that low,
at first, that, if she had know’d then what Mas’r Davy kep from us so
kind and thowtful, ‘tis my opinion she’d have drooped away. But theer
was some poor folks aboard as had illness among ‘em, and she took care
of them; and theer was the children in our company, and she took care of
them; and so she got to be busy, and to be doing good, and that helped
her.’

‘When did she first hear of it?’ I asked.

‘I kep it from her arter I heerd on ‘t,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘going
on nigh a year. We was living then in a solitary place, but among the
beautifullest trees, and with the roses a-covering our Beein to the
roof. Theer come along one day, when I was out a-working on the land, a
traveller from our own Norfolk or Suffolk in England (I doen’t rightly
mind which), and of course we took him in, and giv him to eat and drink,
and made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over. He’d got an
old newspaper with him, and some other account in print of the storm.
That’s how she know’d it. When I came home at night, I found she know’d
it.’

He dropped his voice as he said these words, and the gravity I so well
remembered overspread his face.

‘Did it change her much?’ we asked.

‘Aye, for a good long time,’ he said, shaking his head; ‘if not to this
present hour. But I think the solitoode done her good. And she had a
deal to mind in the way of poultry and the like, and minded of it, and
come through. I wonder,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘if you could see my
Em’ly now, Mas’r Davy, whether you’d know her!’

‘Is she so altered?’ I inquired.

‘I doen’t know. I see her ev’ry day, and doen’t know; But, odd-times, I
have thowt so. A slight figure,’ said Mr. Peggotty, looking at the fire,
‘kiender worn; soft, sorrowful, blue eyes; a delicate face; a pritty
head, leaning a little down; a quiet voice and way--timid a’most. That’s
Em’ly!’

We silently observed him as he sat, still looking at the fire.

‘Some thinks,’ he said, ‘as her affection was ill-bestowed; some, as her
marriage was broken off by death. No one knows how ‘tis. She might have
married well, a mort of times, “but, uncle,” she says to me, “that’s
gone for ever.” Cheerful along with me; retired when others is by;
fond of going any distance fur to teach a child, or fur to tend a sick
person, or fur to do some kindness tow’rds a young girl’s wedding (and
she’s done a many, but has never seen one); fondly loving of her uncle;
patient; liked by young and old; sowt out by all that has any trouble.
That’s Em’ly!’

He drew his hand across his face, and with a half-suppressed sigh looked
up from the fire.

‘Is Martha with you yet?’ I asked.

‘Martha,’ he replied, ‘got married, Mas’r Davy, in the second year. A
young man, a farm-labourer, as come by us on his way to market with his
mas’r’s drays--a journey of over five hundred mile, theer and back--made
offers fur to take her fur his wife (wives is very scarce theer), and
then to set up fur their two selves in the Bush. She spoke to me fur to
tell him her trew story. I did. They was married, and they live fower
hundred mile away from any voices but their own and the singing birds.’

‘Mrs. Gummidge?’ I suggested.

It was a pleasant key to touch, for Mr. Peggotty suddenly burst into a
roar of laughter, and rubbed his hands up and down his legs, as he had
been accustomed to do when he enjoyed himself in the long-shipwrecked
boat.

‘Would you believe it!’ he said. ‘Why, someun even made offer fur to
marry her! If a ship’s cook that was turning settler, Mas’r Davy, didn’t
make offers fur to marry Missis Gummidge, I’m Gormed--and I can’t say no
fairer than that!’

I never saw Agnes laugh so. This sudden ecstasy on the part of Mr.
Peggotty was so delightful to her, that she could not leave off
laughing; and the more she laughed the more she made me laugh, and the
greater Mr. Peggotty’s ecstasy became, and the more he rubbed his legs.

‘And what did Mrs. Gummidge say?’ I asked, when I was grave enough.

‘If you’ll believe me,’ returned Mr. Peggotty, ‘Missis Gummidge, ‘stead
of saying “thank you, I’m much obleeged to you, I ain’t a-going fur
to change my condition at my time of life,” up’d with a bucket as was
standing by, and laid it over that theer ship’s cook’s head ‘till he
sung out fur help, and I went in and reskied of him.’

Mr. Peggotty burst into a great roar of laughter, and Agnes and I both
kept him company.

‘But I must say this, for the good creetur,’ he resumed, wiping his
face, when we were quite exhausted; ‘she has been all she said she’d
be to us, and more. She’s the willingest, the trewest, the
honestest-helping woman, Mas’r Davy, as ever draw’d the breath of life.
I have never know’d her to be lone and lorn, for a single minute,
not even when the colony was all afore us, and we was new to it. And
thinking of the old ‘un is a thing she never done, I do assure you,
since she left England!’

‘Now, last, not least, Mr. Micawber,’ said I. ‘He has paid off every
obligation he incurred here--even to Traddles’s bill, you remember my
dear Agnes--and therefore we may take it for granted that he is doing
well. But what is the latest news of him?’

Mr. Peggotty, with a smile, put his hand in his breast-pocket, and
produced a flat-folded, paper parcel, from which he took out, with much
care, a little odd-looking newspaper.

‘You are to understan’, Mas’r Davy,’ said he, ‘as we have left the
Bush now, being so well to do; and have gone right away round to Port
Middlebay Harbour, wheer theer’s what we call a town.’

‘Mr. Micawber was in the Bush near you?’ said I.

‘Bless you, yes,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘and turned to with a will. I never
wish to meet a better gen’l’man for turning to with a will. I’ve seen
that theer bald head of his a perspiring in the sun, Mas’r Davy, till I
a’most thowt it would have melted away. And now he’s a Magistrate.’

‘A Magistrate, eh?’ said I.

Mr. Peggotty pointed to a certain paragraph in the newspaper, where I
read aloud as follows, from the Port Middlebay Times:


‘The public dinner to our distinguished fellow-colonist and townsman,
WILKINS MICAWBER, ESQUIRE, Port Middlebay District Magistrate, came
off yesterday in the large room of the Hotel, which was crowded to
suffocation. It is estimated that not fewer than forty-seven persons
must have been accommodated with dinner at one time, exclusive of the
company in the passage and on the stairs. The beauty, fashion, and
exclusiveness of Port Middlebay, flocked to do honour to one so
deservedly esteemed, so highly talented, and so widely popular. Doctor
Mell (of Colonial Salem-House Grammar School, Port Middlebay) presided,
and on his right sat the distinguished guest. After the removal of the
cloth, and the singing of Non Nobis (beautifully executed, and in which
we were at no loss to distinguish the bell-like notes of that gifted
amateur, WILKINS MICAWBER, ESQUIRE, JUNIOR), the usual loyal and
patriotic toasts were severally given and rapturously received. Doctor
Mell, in a speech replete with feeling, then proposed “Our distinguished
Guest, the ornament of our town. May he never leave us but to better
himself, and may his success among us be such as to render his bettering
himself impossible!” The cheering with which the toast was received
defies description. Again and again it rose and fell, like the waves
of ocean. At length all was hushed, and WILKINS MICAWBER, ESQUIRE,
presented himself to return thanks. Far be it from us, in the present
comparatively imperfect state of the resources of our establishment,
to endeavour to follow our distinguished townsman through the
smoothly-flowing periods of his polished and highly-ornate address!
Suffice it to observe, that it was a masterpiece of eloquence; and that
those passages in which he more particularly traced his own successful
career to its source, and warned the younger portion of his auditory
from the shoals of ever incurring pecuniary liabilities which they were
unable to liquidate, brought a tear into the manliest eye present. The
remaining toasts were DOCTOR MELL; Mrs. MICAWBER (who gracefully bowed
her acknowledgements from the side-door, where a galaxy of beauty was
elevated on chairs, at once to witness and adorn the gratifying scene),
Mrs. RIDGER BEGS (late Miss Micawber); Mrs. MELL; WILKINS MICAWBER,
ESQUIRE, JUNIOR (who convulsed the assembly by humorously remarking that
he found himself unable to return thanks in a speech, but would do so,
with their permission, in a song); Mrs. MICAWBER’S FAMILY (well known,
it is needless to remark, in the mother-country), &c. &c. &c. At the
conclusion of the proceedings the tables were cleared as if by art-magic
for dancing. Among the votaries of TERPSICHORE, who disported themselves
until Sol gave warning for departure, Wilkins Micawber, Esquire, Junior,
and the lovely and accomplished Miss Helena, fourth daughter of Doctor
Mell, were particularly remarkable.’


I was looking back to the name of Doctor Mell, pleased to have
discovered, in these happier circumstances, Mr. Mell, formerly poor
pinched usher to my Middlesex magistrate, when Mr. Peggotty pointing
to another part of the paper, my eyes rested on my own name, and I read
thus:


‘TO DAVID COPPERFIELD, ESQUIRE,

‘THE EMINENT AUTHOR.

‘My Dear Sir,

‘Years have elapsed, since I had an opportunity of ocularly perusing the
lineaments, now familiar to the imaginations of a considerable portion
of the civilized world.

‘But, my dear Sir, though estranged (by the force of circumstances over
which I have had no control) from the personal society of the friend and
companion of my youth, I have not been unmindful of his soaring flight.
Nor have I been debarred,

     Though seas between us braid ha’ roared,

(BURNS) from participating in the intellectual feasts he has spread
before us.

‘I cannot, therefore, allow of the departure from this place of an
individual whom we mutually respect and esteem, without, my dear Sir,
taking this public opportunity of thanking you, on my own behalf, and,
I may undertake to add, on that of the whole of the Inhabitants of Port
Middlebay, for the gratification of which you are the ministering agent.

‘Go on, my dear Sir! You are not unknown here, you are not
unappreciated. Though “remote”, we are neither “unfriended”,
“melancholy”, nor (I may add) “slow”. Go on, my dear Sir, in your Eagle
course! The inhabitants of Port Middlebay may at least aspire to watch
it, with delight, with entertainment, with instruction!

‘Among the eyes elevated towards you from this portion of the globe,
will ever be found, while it has light and life,

               ‘The
                    ‘Eye
                         ‘Appertaining to

                              ‘WILKINS MICAWBER,
                                   ‘Magistrate.’


I found, on glancing at the remaining contents of the newspaper, that
Mr. Micawber was a diligent and esteemed correspondent of that journal.
There was another letter from him in the same paper, touching a bridge;
there was an advertisement of a collection of similar letters by him, to
be shortly republished, in a neat volume, ‘with considerable additions’;
and, unless I am very much mistaken, the Leading Article was his also.

We talked much of Mr. Micawber, on many other evenings while Mr.
Peggotty remained with us. He lived with us during the whole term of his
stay,--which, I think, was something less than a month,--and his sister
and my aunt came to London to see him. Agnes and I parted from him
aboard-ship, when he sailed; and we shall never part from him more, on
earth.

But before he left, he went with me to Yarmouth, to see a little tablet
I had put up in the churchyard to the memory of Ham. While I was copying
the plain inscription for him at his request, I saw him stoop, and
gather a tuft of grass from the grave and a little earth.

‘For Em’ly,’ he said, as he put it in his breast. ‘I promised, Mas’r
Davy.’



CHAPTER 64. A LAST RETROSPECT


And now my written story ends. I look back, once more--for the last
time--before I close these leaves.

I see myself, with Agnes at my side, journeying along the road of life.
I see our children and our friends around us; and I hear the roar of
many voices, not indifferent to me as I travel on.

What faces are the most distinct to me in the fleeting crowd? Lo, these;
all turning to me as I ask my thoughts the question!

Here is my aunt, in stronger spectacles, an old woman of four-score
years and more, but upright yet, and a steady walker of six miles at a
stretch in winter weather.

Always with her, here comes Peggotty, my good old nurse, likewise in
spectacles, accustomed to do needle-work at night very close to the
lamp, but never sitting down to it without a bit of wax candle, a
yard-measure in a little house, and a work-box with a picture of St.
Paul’s upon the lid.

The cheeks and arms of Peggotty, so hard and red in my childish days,
when I wondered why the birds didn’t peck her in preference to apples,
are shrivelled now; and her eyes, that used to darken their whole
neighbourhood in her face, are fainter (though they glitter still);
but her rough forefinger, which I once associated with a pocket
nutmeg-grater, is just the same, and when I see my least child catching
at it as it totters from my aunt to her, I think of our little parlour
at home, when I could scarcely walk. My aunt’s old disappointment is set
right, now. She is godmother to a real living Betsey Trotwood; and Dora
(the next in order) says she spoils her.

There is something bulky in Peggotty’s pocket. It is nothing smaller
than the Crocodile Book, which is in rather a dilapidated condition by
this time, with divers of the leaves torn and stitched across, but which
Peggotty exhibits to the children as a precious relic. I find it very
curious to see my own infant face, looking up at me from the Crocodile
stories; and to be reminded by it of my old acquaintance Brooks of
Sheffield.

Among my boys, this summer holiday time, I see an old man making giant
kites, and gazing at them in the air, with a delight for which there
are no words. He greets me rapturously, and whispers, with many nods
and winks, ‘Trotwood, you will be glad to hear that I shall finish the
Memorial when I have nothing else to do, and that your aunt’s the most
extraordinary woman in the world, sir!’

Who is this bent lady, supporting herself by a stick, and showing me
a countenance in which there are some traces of old pride and beauty,
feebly contending with a querulous, imbecile, fretful wandering of the
mind? She is in a garden; and near her stands a sharp, dark, withered
woman, with a white scar on her lip. Let me hear what they say.

‘Rosa, I have forgotten this gentleman’s name.’

Rosa bends over her, and calls to her, ‘Mr. Copperfield.’

‘I am glad to see you, sir. I am sorry to observe you are in mourning. I
hope Time will be good to you.’

Her impatient attendant scolds her, tells her I am not in mourning, bids
her look again, tries to rouse her.

‘You have seen my son, sir,’ says the elder lady. ‘Are you reconciled?’

Looking fixedly at me, she puts her hand to her forehead, and moans.
Suddenly, she cries, in a terrible voice, ‘Rosa, come to me. He is
dead!’ Rosa kneeling at her feet, by turns caresses her, and quarrels
with her; now fiercely telling her, ‘I loved him better than you ever
did!’--now soothing her to sleep on her breast, like a sick child. Thus
I leave them; thus I always find them; thus they wear their time away,
from year to year.

What ship comes sailing home from India, and what English lady is this,
married to a growling old Scotch Croesus with great flaps of ears? Can
this be Julia Mills?

Indeed it is Julia Mills, peevish and fine, with a black man to carry
cards and letters to her on a golden salver, and a copper-coloured woman
in linen, with a bright handkerchief round her head, to serve her Tiffin
in her dressing-room. But Julia keeps no diary in these days; never
sings Affection’s Dirge; eternally quarrels with the old Scotch Croesus,
who is a sort of yellow bear with a tanned hide. Julia is steeped in
money to the throat, and talks and thinks of nothing else. I liked her
better in the Desert of Sahara.

Or perhaps this IS the Desert of Sahara! For, though Julia has a stately
house, and mighty company, and sumptuous dinners every day, I see no
green growth near her; nothing that can ever come to fruit or flower.
What Julia calls ‘society’, I see; among it Mr. Jack Maldon, from his
Patent Place, sneering at the hand that gave it him, and speaking to me
of the Doctor as ‘so charmingly antique’. But when society is the name
for such hollow gentlemen and ladies, Julia, and when its breeding is
professed indifference to everything that can advance or can retard
mankind, I think we must have lost ourselves in that same Desert of
Sahara, and had better find the way out.

And lo, the Doctor, always our good friend, labouring at his Dictionary
(somewhere about the letter D), and happy in his home and wife. Also
the Old Soldier, on a considerably reduced footing, and by no means so
influential as in days of yore!

Working at his chambers in the Temple, with a busy aspect, and his hair
(where he is not bald) made more rebellious than ever by the constant
friction of his lawyer’s-wig, I come, in a later time, upon my dear old
Traddles. His table is covered with thick piles of papers; and I say, as
I look around me:

‘If Sophy were your clerk, now, Traddles, she would have enough to do!’

‘You may say that, my dear Copperfield! But those were capital days,
too, in Holborn Court! Were they not?’

‘When she told you you would be a judge? But it was not the town talk
then!’

‘At all events,’ says Traddles, ‘if I ever am one--’ ‘Why, you know you
will be.’

‘Well, my dear Copperfield, WHEN I am one, I shall tell the story, as I
said I would.’

We walk away, arm in arm. I am going to have a family dinner with
Traddles. It is Sophy’s birthday; and, on our road, Traddles discourses
to me of the good fortune he has enjoyed.

‘I really have been able, my dear Copperfield, to do all that I had most
at heart. There’s the Reverend Horace promoted to that living at four
hundred and fifty pounds a year; there are our two boys receiving the
very best education, and distinguishing themselves as steady scholars
and good fellows; there are three of the girls married very comfortably;
there are three more living with us; there are three more keeping house
for the Reverend Horace since Mrs. Crewler’s decease; and all of them
happy.’

‘Except--’ I suggest.

‘Except the Beauty,’ says Traddles. ‘Yes. It was very unfortunate that
she should marry such a vagabond. But there was a certain dash and glare
about him that caught her. However, now we have got her safe at our
house, and got rid of him, we must cheer her up again.’

Traddles’s house is one of the very houses--or it easily may have
been--which he and Sophy used to parcel out, in their evening walks. It
is a large house; but Traddles keeps his papers in his dressing-room
and his boots with his papers; and he and Sophy squeeze themselves into
upper rooms, reserving the best bedrooms for the Beauty and the girls.
There is no room to spare in the house; for more of ‘the girls’ are
here, and always are here, by some accident or other, than I know how
to count. Here, when we go in, is a crowd of them, running down to
the door, and handing Traddles about to be kissed, until he is out of
breath. Here, established in perpetuity, is the poor Beauty, a widow
with a little girl; here, at dinner on Sophy’s birthday, are the three
married girls with their three husbands, and one of the husband’s
brothers, and another husband’s cousin, and another husband’s sister,
who appears to me to be engaged to the cousin. Traddles, exactly the
same simple, unaffected fellow as he ever was, sits at the foot of the
large table like a Patriarch; and Sophy beams upon him, from the head,
across a cheerful space that is certainly not glittering with Britannia
metal.

And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger yet, these
faces fade away. But one face, shining on me like a Heavenly light by
which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond them all. And
that remains.

I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside me.

My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the dear
presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company.

O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life
indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows
which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!






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The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles
Dickens, Illustrated by Luke Fildes


This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org





Title: The Mystery of Edwin Drood


Author: Charles Dickens



Release Date: December 25, 2010  [eBook #564]
[This file was first posted on April 15, 1996]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD***


Transcribed from the Chapman and Hall, 1914 edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





                        THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD


                       [Picture: Rochester castle]




CHAPTER I—THE DAWN


An ancient English Cathedral Tower?  How can the ancient English
Cathedral tower be here!  The well-known massive gray square tower of its
old Cathedral?  How can that be here!  There is no spike of rusty iron in
the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect.
What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up?  Maybe it is
set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish
robbers, one by one.  It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by
to his palace in long procession.  Ten thousand scimitars flash in the
sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers.  Then,
follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and
infinite in number and attendants.  Still the Cathedral Tower rises in
the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on
the grim spike.  Stay!  Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on
the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry?  Some
vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of
this possibility.

Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus
fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his
trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around.  He is in the meanest
and closest of small rooms.  Through the ragged window-curtain, the light
of early day steals in from a miserable court.  He lies, dressed, across
a large unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the
weight upon it. Lying, also dressed and also across the bed, not
longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman.  The two first
are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to
kindle it.  And as she blows, and shading it with her lean hand,
concentrates its red spark of light, it serves in the dim morning as a
lamp to show him what he sees of her.

‘Another?’ says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper.  ‘Have
another?’

He looks about him, with his hand to his forehead.

‘Ye’ve smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight,’ the woman
goes on, as she chronically complains.  ‘Poor me, poor me, my head is so
bad.  Them two come in after ye.  Ah, poor me, the business is slack, is
slack!  Few Chinamen about the Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships
coming in, these say!  Here’s another ready for ye, deary.  Ye’ll
remember like a good soul, won’t ye, that the market price is dreffle
high just now?  More nor three shillings and sixpence for a thimbleful!
And ye’ll remember that nobody but me (and Jack Chinaman t’other side the
court; but he can’t do it as well as me) has the true secret of mixing
it?  Ye’ll pay up accordingly, deary, won’t ye?’

She blows at the pipe as she speaks, and, occasionally bubbling at it,
inhales much of its contents.

‘O me, O me, my lungs is weak, my lungs is bad!  It’s nearly ready for
ye, deary.  Ah, poor me, poor me, my poor hand shakes like to drop off!
I see ye coming-to, and I ses to my poor self, “I’ll have another ready
for him, and he’ll bear in mind the market price of opium, and pay
according.”  O my poor head!  I makes my pipes of old penny ink-bottles,
ye see, deary—this is one—and I fits-in a mouthpiece, this way, and I
takes my mixter out of this thimble with this little horn spoon; and so I
fills, deary.  Ah, my poor nerves!  I got Heavens-hard drunk for sixteen
year afore I took to this; but this don’t hurt me, not to speak of.  And
it takes away the hunger as well as wittles, deary.’

She hands him the nearly-emptied pipe, and sinks back, turning over on
her face.

He rises unsteadily from the bed, lays the pipe upon the hearth-stone,
draws back the ragged curtain, and looks with repugnance at his three
companions.  He notices that the woman has opium-smoked herself into a
strange likeness of the Chinaman.  His form of cheek, eye, and temple,
and his colour, are repeated in her.  Said Chinaman convulsively wrestles
with one of his many Gods or Devils, perhaps, and snarls horribly.  The
Lascar laughs and dribbles at the mouth.  The hostess is still.

                         [Picture: In the Court]

‘What visions can _she_ have?’ the waking man muses, as he turns her face
towards him, and stands looking down at it.  ‘Visions of many butchers’
shops, and public-houses, and much credit?  Of an increase of hideous
customers, and this horrible bedstead set upright again, and this
horrible court swept clean?  What can she rise to, under any quantity of
opium, higher than that!—Eh?’

He bends down his ear, to listen to her mutterings.

‘Unintelligible!’

As he watches the spasmodic shoots and darts that break out of her face
and limbs, like fitful lightning out of a dark sky, some contagion in
them seizes upon him: insomuch that he has to withdraw himself to a lean
arm-chair by the hearth—placed there, perhaps, for such emergencies—and
to sit in it, holding tight, until he has got the better of this unclean
spirit of imitation.

Then he comes back, pounces on the Chinaman, and seizing him with both
hands by the throat, turns him violently on the bed.  The Chinaman
clutches the aggressive hands, resists, gasps, and protests.

‘What do you say?’

A watchful pause.

‘Unintelligible!’

Slowly loosening his grasp as he listens to the incoherent jargon with an
attentive frown, he turns to the Lascar and fairly drags him forth upon
the floor.  As he falls, the Lascar starts into a half-risen attitude,
glares with his eyes, lashes about him fiercely with his arms, and draws
a phantom knife.  It then becomes apparent that the woman has taken
possession of this knife, for safety’s sake; for, she too starting up,
and restraining and expostulating with him, the knife is visible in her
dress, not in his, when they drowsily drop back, side by side.

There has been chattering and clattering enough between them, but to no
purpose.  When any distinct word has been flung into the air, it has had
no sense or sequence.  Wherefore ‘unintelligible!’ is again the comment
of the watcher, made with some reassured nodding of his head, and a
gloomy smile.  He then lays certain silver money on the table, finds his
hat, gropes his way down the broken stairs, gives a good morning to some
rat-ridden doorkeeper, in bed in a black hutch beneath the stairs, and
passes out.

                                * * * * *

That same afternoon, the massive gray square tower of an old Cathedral
rises before the sight of a jaded traveller.  The bells are going for
daily vesper service, and he must needs attend it, one would say, from
his haste to reach the open Cathedral door.  The choir are getting on
their sullied white robes, in a hurry, when he arrives among them, gets
on his own robe, and falls into the procession filing in to service.
Then, the Sacristan locks the iron-barred gates that divide the sanctuary
from the chancel, and all of the procession having scuttled into their
places, hide their faces; and then the intoned words, ‘WHEN THE WICKED
MAN—’ rise among groins of arches and beams of roof, awakening muttered
thunder.




CHAPTER II—A DEAN, AND A CHAPTER ALSO


Whosoever has observed that sedate and clerical bird, the rook, may
perhaps have noticed that when he wings his way homeward towards
nightfall, in a sedate and clerical company, two rooks will suddenly
detach themselves from the rest, will retrace their flight for some
distance, and will there poise and linger; conveying to mere men the
fancy that it is of some occult importance to the body politic, that this
artful couple should pretend to have renounced connection with it.

Similarly, service being over in the old Cathedral with the square tower,
and the choir scuffling out again, and divers venerable persons of
rook-like aspect dispersing, two of these latter retrace their steps, and
walk together in the echoing Close.

Not only is the day waning, but the year.  The low sun is fiery and yet
cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral
wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement.  There
has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little
pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees
as they shed a gust of tears.  Their fallen leaves lie strewn thickly
about.  Some of these leaves, in a timid rush, seek sanctuary within the
low arched Cathedral door; but two men coming out resist them, and cast
them forth again with their feet; this done, one of the two locks the
door with a goodly key, and the other flits away with a folio music-book.

‘Mr. Jasper was that, Tope?’

‘Yes, Mr. Dean.’

‘He has stayed late.’

‘Yes, Mr. Dean.  I have stayed for him, your Reverence.  He has been took
a little poorly.’

‘Say “taken,” Tope—to the Dean,’ the younger rook interposes in a low
tone with this touch of correction, as who should say: ‘You may offer bad
grammar to the laity, or the humbler clergy, not to the Dean.’

Mr. Tope, Chief Verger and Showman, and accustomed to be high with
excursion parties, declines with a silent loftiness to perceive that any
suggestion has been tendered to him.

‘And when and how has Mr. Jasper been taken—for, as Mr. Crisparkle has
remarked, it is better to say taken—taken—’ repeats the Dean; ‘when and
how has Mr. Jasper been Taken—’

‘Taken, sir,’ Tope deferentially murmurs.

‘—Poorly, Tope?’

‘Why, sir, Mr. Jasper was that breathed—’

‘I wouldn’t say “That breathed,” Tope,’ Mr. Crisparkle interposes with
the same touch as before.  ‘Not English—to the Dean.’

‘Breathed to that extent,’ the Dean (not unflattered by this indirect
homage) condescendingly remarks, ‘would be preferable.’

‘Mr. Jasper’s breathing was so remarkably short’—thus discreetly does Mr.
Tope work his way round the sunken rock—‘when he came in, that it
distressed him mightily to get his notes out: which was perhaps the cause
of his having a kind of fit on him after a little.  His memory grew
DAZED.’  Mr. Tope, with his eyes on the Reverend Mr. Crisparkle, shoots
this word out, as defying him to improve upon it: ‘and a dimness and
giddiness crept over him as strange as ever I saw: though he didn’t seem
to mind it particularly, himself.  However, a little time and a little
water brought him out of his DAZE.’  Mr. Tope repeats the word and its
emphasis, with the air of saying: ‘As I _have_ made a success, I’ll make
it again.’

‘And Mr. Jasper has gone home quite himself, has he?’ asked the Dean.

‘Your Reverence, he has gone home quite himself.  And I’m glad to see
he’s having his fire kindled up, for it’s chilly after the wet, and the
Cathedral had both a damp feel and a damp touch this afternoon, and he
was very shivery.’

They all three look towards an old stone gatehouse crossing the Close,
with an arched thoroughfare passing beneath it.  Through its latticed
window, a fire shines out upon the fast-darkening scene, involving in
shadow the pendent masses of ivy and creeper covering the building’s
front.  As the deep Cathedral-bell strikes the hour, a ripple of wind
goes through these at their distance, like a ripple of the solemn sound
that hums through tomb and tower, broken niche and defaced statue, in the
pile close at hand.

‘Is Mr. Jasper’s nephew with him?’ the Dean asks.

‘No, sir,’ replied the Verger, ‘but expected.  There’s his own solitary
shadow betwixt his two windows—the one looking this way, and the one
looking down into the High Street—drawing his own curtains now.’

‘Well, well,’ says the Dean, with a sprightly air of breaking up the
little conference, ‘I hope Mr. Jasper’s heart may not be too much set
upon his nephew.  Our affections, however laudable, in this transitory
world, should never master us; we should guide them, guide them.  I find
I am not disagreeably reminded of my dinner, by hearing my dinner-bell.
Perhaps, Mr. Crisparkle, you will, before going home, look in on Jasper?’

‘Certainly, Mr. Dean.  And tell him that you had the kindness to desire
to know how he was?’

‘Ay; do so, do so.  Certainly.  Wished to know how he was.  By all means.
Wished to know how he was.’

With a pleasant air of patronage, the Dean as nearly cocks his quaint hat
as a Dean in good spirits may, and directs his comely gaiters towards the
ruddy dining-room of the snug old red-brick house where he is at present,
‘in residence’ with Mrs. Dean and Miss Dean.

Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon, fair and rosy, and perpetually pitching
himself head-foremost into all the deep running water in the surrounding
country; Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon, early riser, musical, classical,
cheerful, kind, good-natured, social, contented, and boy-like; Mr.
Crisparkle, Minor Canon and good man, lately ‘Coach’ upon the chief Pagan
high roads, but since promoted by a patron (grateful for a well-taught
son) to his present Christian beat; betakes himself to the gatehouse, on
his way home to his early tea.

‘Sorry to hear from Tope that you have not been well, Jasper.’

‘O, it was nothing, nothing!’

‘You look a little worn.’

‘Do I?  O, I don’t think so.  What is better, I don’t feel so.  Tope has
made too much of it, I suspect.  It’s his trade to make the most of
everything appertaining to the Cathedral, you know.’

‘I may tell the Dean—I call expressly from the Dean—that you are all
right again?’

The reply, with a slight smile, is: ‘Certainly; with my respects and
thanks to the Dean.’

‘I’m glad to hear that you expect young Drood.’

‘I expect the dear fellow every moment.’

‘Ah!  He will do you more good than a doctor, Jasper.’

‘More good than a dozen doctors.  For I love him dearly, and I don’t love
doctors, or doctors’ stuff.’

Mr. Jasper is a dark man of some six-and-twenty, with thick, lustrous,
well-arranged black hair and whiskers.  He looks older than he is, as
dark men often do.  His voice is deep and good, his face and figure are
good, his manner is a little sombre.  His room is a little sombre, and
may have had its influence in forming his manner.  It is mostly in
shadow.  Even when the sun shines brilliantly, it seldom touches the
grand piano in the recess, or the folio music-books on the stand, or the
book-shelves on the wall, or the unfinished picture of a blooming
schoolgirl hanging over the chimneypiece; her flowing brown hair tied
with a blue riband, and her beauty remarkable for a quite childish,
almost babyish, touch of saucy discontent, comically conscious of itself.
(There is not the least artistic merit in this picture, which is a mere
daub; but it is clear that the painter has made it humorously—one might
almost say, revengefully—like the original.)

‘We shall miss you, Jasper, at the “Alternate Musical Wednesdays”
to-night; but no doubt you are best at home.  Good-night.  God bless you!
“Tell me, shep-herds, te-e-ell me; tell me-e-e, have you seen (have you
seen, have you seen, have you seen) my-y-y Flo-o-ora-a pass this way!”’
Melodiously good Minor Canon the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle thus
delivers himself, in musical rhythm, as he withdraws his amiable face
from the doorway and conveys it down-stairs.

Sounds of recognition and greeting pass between the Reverend Septimus and
somebody else, at the stair-foot.  Mr. Jasper listens, starts from his
chair, and catches a young fellow in his arms, exclaiming:

‘My dear Edwin!’

‘My dear Jack!  So glad to see you!’

‘Get off your greatcoat, bright boy, and sit down here in your own
corner.  Your feet are not wet?  Pull your boots off.  Do pull your boots
off.’

‘My dear Jack, I am as dry as a bone.  Don’t moddley-coddley, there’s a
good fellow.  I like anything better than being moddley-coddleyed.’

With the check upon him of being unsympathetically restrained in a genial
outburst of enthusiasm, Mr. Jasper stands still, and looks on intently at
the young fellow, divesting himself of his outward coat, hat, gloves, and
so forth.  Once for all, a look of intentness and intensity—a look of
hungry, exacting, watchful, and yet devoted affection—is always, now and
ever afterwards, on the Jasper face whenever the Jasper face is addressed
in this direction.  And whenever it is so addressed, it is never, on this
occasion or on any other, dividedly addressed; it is always concentrated.

‘Now I am right, and now I’ll take my corner, Jack.  Any dinner, Jack?’

Mr. Jasper opens a door at the upper end of the room, and discloses a
small inner room pleasantly lighted and prepared, wherein a comely dame
is in the act of setting dishes on table.

‘What a jolly old Jack it is!’ cries the young fellow, with a clap of his
hands.  ‘Look here, Jack; tell me; whose birthday is it?’

‘Not yours, I know,’ Mr. Jasper answers, pausing to consider.

‘Not mine, you know?  No; not mine, _I_ know!  Pussy’s!’

Fixed as the look the young fellow meets, is, there is yet in it some
strange power of suddenly including the sketch over the chimneypiece.

‘Pussy’s, Jack!  We must drink Many happy returns to her.  Come, uncle;
take your dutiful and sharp-set nephew in to dinner.’

As the boy (for he is little more) lays a hand on Jasper’s shoulder,
Jasper cordially and gaily lays a hand on _his_ shoulder, and so
Marseillaise-wise they go in to dinner.

‘And, Lord! here’s Mrs. Tope!’ cries the boy.  ‘Lovelier than ever!’

‘Never you mind me, Master Edwin,’ retorts the Verger’s wife; ‘I can take
care of myself.’

‘You can’t.  You’re much too handsome.  Give me a kiss because it’s
Pussy’s birthday.’

‘I’d Pussy you, young man, if I was Pussy, as you call her,’ Mrs. Tope
blushingly retorts, after being saluted.  ‘Your uncle’s too much wrapt up
in you, that’s where it is.  He makes so much of you, that it’s my
opinion you think you’ve only to call your Pussys by the dozen, to make
’em come.’

‘You forget, Mrs. Tope,’ Mr. Jasper interposes, taking his place at the
table with a genial smile, ‘and so do you, Ned, that Uncle and Nephew are
words prohibited here by common consent and express agreement.  For what
we are going to receive His holy name be praised!’

‘Done like the Dean!  Witness, Edwin Drood!  Please to carve, Jack, for I
can’t.’

This sally ushers in the dinner.  Little to the present purpose, or to
any purpose, is said, while it is in course of being disposed of.  At
length the cloth is drawn, and a dish of walnuts and a decanter of
rich-coloured sherry are placed upon the table.

‘I say!  Tell me, Jack,’ the young fellow then flows on: ‘do you really
and truly feel as if the mention of our relationship divided us at all?
_I_ don’t.’

‘Uncles as a rule, Ned, are so much older than their nephews,’ is the
reply, ‘that I have that feeling instinctively.’

‘As a rule!  Ah, may-be!  But what is a difference in age of half-a-dozen
years or so? And some uncles, in large families, are even younger than
their nephews.  By George, I wish it was the case with us!’

‘Why?’

‘Because if it was, I’d take the lead with you, Jack, and be as wise as
Begone, dull Care! that turned a young man gray, and Begone, dull Care!
that turned an old man to clay.—Halloa, Jack!  Don’t drink.’

‘Why not?’

‘Asks why not, on Pussy’s birthday, and no Happy returns proposed!
Pussy, Jack, and many of ’em!  Happy returns, I mean.’

Laying an affectionate and laughing touch on the boy’s extended hand, as
if it were at once his giddy head and his light heart, Mr. Jasper drinks
the toast in silence.

‘Hip, hip, hip, and nine times nine, and one to finish with, and all
that, understood.  Hooray, hooray, hooray!—And now, Jack, let’s have a
little talk about Pussy.  Two pairs of nut-crackers?  Pass me one, and
take the other.’  Crack.  ‘How’s Pussy getting on Jack?’

‘With her music?  Fairly.’

‘What a dreadfully conscientious fellow you are, Jack!  But _I_ know,
Lord bless you!  Inattentive, isn’t she?’

‘She can learn anything, if she will.’

‘_If_ she will!  Egad, that’s it.  But if she won’t?’

Crack!—on Mr. Jasper’s part.

‘How’s she looking, Jack?’

Mr. Jasper’s concentrated face again includes the portrait as he returns:
‘Very like your sketch indeed.’

‘I _am_ a little proud of it,’ says the young fellow, glancing up at the
sketch with complacency, and then shutting one eye, and taking a
corrected prospect of it over a level bridge of nut-crackers in the air:
‘Not badly hit off from memory.  But I ought to have caught that
expression pretty well, for I have seen it often enough.’

Crack!—on Edwin Drood’s part.

Crack!—on Mr. Jasper’s part.

‘In point of fact,’ the former resumes, after some silent dipping among
his fragments of walnut with an air of pique, ‘I see it whenever I go to
see Pussy.  If I don’t find it on her face, I leave it there.—You know I
do, Miss Scornful Pert.  Booh!’  With a twirl of the nut-crackers at the
portrait.

Crack! crack! crack.  Slowly, on Mr. Jasper’s part.

Crack.  Sharply on the part of Edwin Drood.

Silence on both sides.

‘Have you lost your tongue, Jack?’

‘Have you found yours, Ned?’

‘No, but really;—isn’t it, you know, after all—’

Mr. Jasper lifts his dark eyebrows inquiringly.

‘Isn’t it unsatisfactory to be cut off from choice in such a matter?
There, Jack!  I tell you!  If I could choose, I would choose Pussy from
all the pretty girls in the world.’

‘But you have not got to choose.’

‘That’s what I complain of.  My dead and gone father and Pussy’s dead and
gone father must needs marry us together by anticipation.  Why the—Devil,
I was going to say, if it had been respectful to their memory—couldn’t
they leave us alone?’

‘Tut, tut, dear boy,’ Mr. Jasper remonstrates, in a tone of gentle
deprecation.

‘Tut, tut?  Yes, Jack, it’s all very well for _you_.  _You_ can take it
easily.  _Your_ life is not laid down to scale, and lined and dotted out
for you, like a surveyor’s plan.  _You_ have no uncomfortable suspicion
that you are forced upon anybody, nor has anybody an uncomfortable
suspicion that she is forced upon you, or that you are forced upon her.
_You_ can choose for yourself.  Life, for _you_, is a plum with the
natural bloom on; it hasn’t been over-carefully wiped off for _you_—’

‘Don’t stop, dear fellow.  Go on.’

‘Can I anyhow have hurt your feelings, Jack?’

‘How can you have hurt my feelings?’

‘Good Heaven, Jack, you look frightfully ill!  There’s a strange film
come over your eyes.’

Mr. Jasper, with a forced smile, stretches out his right hand, as if at
once to disarm apprehension and gain time to get better.  After a while
he says faintly:

‘I have been taking opium for a pain—an agony—that sometimes overcomes
me.  The effects of the medicine steal over me like a blight or a cloud,
and pass.  You see them in the act of passing; they will be gone
directly.  Look away from me.  They will go all the sooner.’

With a scared face the younger man complies by casting his eyes downward
at the ashes on the hearth.  Not relaxing his own gaze on the fire, but
rather strengthening it with a fierce, firm grip upon his elbow-chair,
the elder sits for a few moments rigid, and then, with thick drops
standing on his forehead, and a sharp catch of his breath, becomes as he
was before.  On his so subsiding in his chair, his nephew gently and
assiduously tends him while he quite recovers.  When Jasper is restored,
he lays a tender hand upon his nephew’s shoulder, and, in a tone of voice
less troubled than the purport of his words—indeed with something of
raillery or banter in it—thus addresses him:

‘There is said to be a hidden skeleton in every house; but you thought
there was none in mine, dear Ned.’

‘Upon my life, Jack, I did think so.  However, when I come to consider
that even in Pussy’s house—if she had one—and in mine—if I had one—’

‘You were going to say (but that I interrupted you in spite of myself)
what a quiet life mine is.  No whirl and uproar around me, no distracting
commerce or calculation, no risk, no change of place, myself devoted to
the art I pursue, my business my pleasure.’

‘I really was going to say something of the kind, Jack; but you see, you,
speaking of yourself, almost necessarily leave out much that I should
have put in.  For instance: I should have put in the foreground your
being so much respected as Lay Precentor, or Lay Clerk, or whatever you
call it, of this Cathedral; your enjoying the reputation of having done
such wonders with the choir; your choosing your society, and holding such
an independent position in this queer old place; your gift of teaching
(why, even Pussy, who don’t like being taught, says there never was such
a Master as you are!), and your connexion.’

‘Yes; I saw what you were tending to.  I hate it.’

‘Hate it, Jack?’  (Much bewildered.)

‘I hate it.  The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the
grain.  How does our service sound to you?’

‘Beautiful!  Quite celestial!’

‘It often sounds to me quite devilish.  I am so weary of it.  The echoes
of my own voice among the arches seem to mock me with my daily drudging
round.  No wretched monk who droned his life away in that gloomy place,
before me, can have been more tired of it than I am.  He could take for
relief (and did take) to carving demons out of the stalls and seats and
desks.  What shall I do?  Must I take to carving them out of my heart?’

‘I thought you had so exactly found your niche in life, Jack,’ Edwin
Drood returns, astonished, bending forward in his chair to lay a
sympathetic hand on Jasper’s knee, and looking at him with an anxious
face.

‘I know you thought so.  They all think so.’

‘Well, I suppose they do,’ says Edwin, meditating aloud.  ‘Pussy thinks
so.’

‘When did she tell you that?’

‘The last time I was here.  You remember when.  Three months ago.’

‘How did she phrase it?’

‘O, she only said that she had become your pupil, and that you were made
for your vocation.’

The younger man glances at the portrait.  The elder sees it in him.

‘Anyhow, my dear Ned,’ Jasper resumes, as he shakes his head with a grave
cheerfulness, ‘I must subdue myself to my vocation: which is much the
same thing outwardly.  It’s too late to find another now.  This is a
confidence between us.’

‘It shall be sacredly preserved, Jack.’

‘I have reposed it in you, because—’

‘I feel it, I assure you.  Because we are fast friends, and because you
love and trust me, as I love and trust you.  Both hands, Jack.’

As each stands looking into the other’s eyes, and as the uncle holds the
nephew’s hands, the uncle thus proceeds:

‘You know now, don’t you, that even a poor monotonous chorister and
grinder of music—in his niche—may be troubled with some stray sort of
ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction, what shall we call
it?’

‘Yes, dear Jack.’

‘And you will remember?’

‘My dear Jack, I only ask you, am I likely to forget what you have said
with so much feeling?’

‘Take it as a warning, then.’

In the act of having his hands released, and of moving a step back, Edwin
pauses for an instant to consider the application of these last words.
The instant over, he says, sensibly touched:

‘I am afraid I am but a shallow, surface kind of fellow, Jack, and that
my headpiece is none of the best.  But I needn’t say I am young; and
perhaps I shall not grow worse as I grow older.  At all events, I hope I
have something impressible within me, which feels—deeply feels—the
disinterestedness of your painfully laying your inner self bare, as a
warning to me.’

Mr. Jasper’s steadiness of face and figure becomes so marvellous that his
breathing seems to have stopped.

‘I couldn’t fail to notice, Jack, that it cost you a great effort, and
that you were very much moved, and very unlike your usual self.  Of
course I knew that you were extremely fond of me, but I really was not
prepared for your, as I may say, sacrificing yourself to me in that way.’

Mr. Jasper, becoming a breathing man again without the smallest stage of
transition between the two extreme states, lifts his shoulders, laughs,
and waves his right arm.

‘No; don’t put the sentiment away, Jack; please don’t; for I am very much
in earnest.  I have no doubt that that unhealthy state of mind which you
have so powerfully described is attended with some real suffering, and is
hard to bear.  But let me reassure you, Jack, as to the chances of its
overcoming me.  I don’t think I am in the way of it.  In some few months
less than another year, you know, I shall carry Pussy off from school as
Mrs. Edwin Drood.  I shall then go engineering into the East, and Pussy
with me.  And although we have our little tiffs now, arising out of a
certain unavoidable flatness that attends our love-making, owing to its
end being all settled beforehand, still I have no doubt of our getting on
capitally then, when it’s done and can’t be helped.  In short, Jack, to
go back to the old song I was freely quoting at dinner (and who knows old
songs better than you?), my wife shall dance, and I will sing, so merrily
pass the day.  Of Pussy’s being beautiful there cannot be a doubt;—and
when you are good besides, Little Miss Impudence,’ once more
apostrophising the portrait, ‘I’ll burn your comic likeness, and paint
your music-master another.’

Mr. Jasper, with his hand to his chin, and with an expression of musing
benevolence on his face, has attentively watched every animated look and
gesture attending the delivery of these words.  He remains in that
attitude after they, are spoken, as if in a kind of fascination attendant
on his strong interest in the youthful spirit that he loves so well.
Then he says with a quiet smile:

‘You won’t be warned, then?’

‘No, Jack.’

‘You can’t be warned, then?’

‘No, Jack, not by you.  Besides that I don’t really consider myself in
danger, I don’t like your putting yourself in that position.’

‘Shall we go and walk in the churchyard?’

‘By all means.  You won’t mind my slipping out of it for half a moment to
the Nuns’ House, and leaving a parcel there?  Only gloves for Pussy; as
many pairs of gloves as she is years old to-day.  Rather poetical, Jack?’

Mr. Jasper, still in the same attitude, murmurs: ‘“Nothing half so sweet
in life,” Ned!’

‘Here’s the parcel in my greatcoat-pocket.  They must be presented
to-night, or the poetry is gone.  It’s against regulations for me to call
at night, but not to leave a packet.  I am ready, Jack!’

Mr. Jasper dissolves his attitude, and they go out together.




CHAPTER III—THE NUNS’ HOUSE


For sufficient reasons, which this narrative will itself unfold as it
advances, a fictitious name must be bestowed upon the old Cathedral town.
Let it stand in these pages as Cloisterham.  It was once possibly known
to the Druids by another name, and certainly to the Romans by another,
and to the Saxons by another, and to the Normans by another; and a name
more or less in the course of many centuries can be of little moment to
its dusty chronicles.

An ancient city, Cloisterham, and no meet dwelling-place for any one with
hankerings after the noisy world.  A monotonous, silent city, deriving an
earthy flavour throughout from its Cathedral crypt, and so abounding in
vestiges of monastic graves, that the Cloisterham children grow small
salad in the dust of abbots and abbesses, and make dirt-pies of nuns and
friars; while every ploughman in its outlying fields renders to once
puissant Lord Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops, and such-like, the
attention which the Ogre in the story-book desired to render to his
unbidden visitor, and grinds their bones to make his bread.

A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, with an
inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind it,
and that there are no more to come.  A queer moral to derive from
antiquity, yet older than any traceable antiquity.  So silent are the
streets of Cloisterham (though prone to echo on the smallest
provocation), that of a summer-day the sunblinds of its shops scarce dare
to flap in the south wind; while the sun-browned tramps, who pass along
and stare, quicken their limp a little, that they may the sooner get
beyond the confines of its oppressive respectability.  This is a feat not
difficult of achievement, seeing that the streets of Cloisterham city are
little more than one narrow street by which you get into it and get out
of it: the rest being mostly disappointing yards with pumps in them and
no thoroughfare—exception made of the Cathedral-close, and a paved Quaker
settlement, in colour and general confirmation very like a Quakeress’s
bonnet, up in a shady corner.

In a word, a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with its
hoarse Cathedral-bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the Cathedral
tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far beneath.
Fragments of old wall, saint’s chapel, chapter-house, convent and
monastery, have got incongruously or obstructively built into many of its
houses and gardens, much as kindred jumbled notions have become
incorporated into many of its citizens’ minds.  All things in it are of
the past.  Even its single pawnbroker takes in no pledges, nor has he for
a long time, but offers vainly an unredeemed stock for sale, of which the
costlier articles are dim and pale old watches apparently in a slow
perspiration, tarnished sugar-tongs with ineffectual legs, and odd
volumes of dismal books.  The most abundant and the most agreeable
evidences of progressing life in Cloisterham are the evidences of
vegetable life in many gardens; even its drooping and despondent little
theatre has its poor strip of garden, receiving the foul fiend, when he
ducks from its stage into the infernal regions, among scarlet-beans or
oyster-shells, according to the season of the year.

In the midst of Cloisterham stands the Nuns’ House: a venerable brick
edifice, whose present appellation is doubtless derived from the legend
of its conventual uses.  On the trim gate enclosing its old courtyard is
a resplendent brass plate flashing forth the legend: ‘Seminary for Young
Ladies.  Miss Twinkleton.’  The house-front is so old and worn, and the
brass plate is so shining and staring, that the general result has
reminded imaginative strangers of a battered old beau with a large modern
eye-glass stuck in his blind eye.

Whether the nuns of yore, being of a submissive rather than a
stiff-necked generation, habitually bent their contemplative heads to
avoid collision with the beams in the low ceilings of the many chambers
of their House; whether they sat in its long low windows telling their
beads for their mortification, instead of making necklaces of them for
their adornment; whether they were ever walled up alive in odd angles and
jutting gables of the building for having some ineradicable leaven of
busy mother Nature in them which has kept the fermenting world alive ever
since; these may be matters of interest to its haunting ghosts (if any),
but constitute no item in Miss Twinkleton’s half-yearly accounts.  They
are neither of Miss Twinkleton’s inclusive regulars, nor of her extras.
The lady who undertakes the poetical department of the establishment at
so much (or so little) a quarter has no pieces in her list of recitals
bearing on such unprofitable questions.

As, in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism,
there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of
which pursues its separate course as though it were continuous instead of
broken (thus, if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again
before I can remember where), so Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and
separate phases of being.  Every night, the moment the young ladies have
retired to rest, does Miss Twinkleton smarten up her curls a little,
brighten up her eyes a little, and become a sprightlier Miss Twinkleton
than the young ladies have ever seen.  Every night, at the same hour,
does Miss Twinkleton resume the topics of the previous night,
comprehending the tenderer scandal of Cloisterham, of which she has no
knowledge whatever by day, and references to a certain season at
Tunbridge Wells (airily called by Miss Twinkleton in this state of her
existence ‘The Wells’), notably the season wherein a certain finished
gentleman (compassionately called by Miss Twinkleton, in this stage of
her existence, ‘Foolish Mr. Porters’) revealed a homage of the heart,
whereof Miss Twinkleton, in her scholastic state of existence, is as
ignorant as a granite pillar.  Miss Twinkleton’s companion in both states
of existence, and equally adaptable to either, is one Mrs. Tisher: a
deferential widow with a weak back, a chronic sigh, and a suppressed
voice, who looks after the young ladies’ wardrobes, and leads them to
infer that she has seen better days.  Perhaps this is the reason why it
is an article of faith with the servants, handed down from race to race,
that the departed Tisher was a hairdresser.

The pet pupil of the Nuns’ House is Miss Rosa Bud, of course called
Rosebud; wonderfully pretty, wonderfully childish, wonderfully whimsical.
An awkward interest (awkward because romantic) attaches to Miss Bud in
the minds of the young ladies, on account of its being known to them that
a husband has been chosen for her by will and bequest, and that her
guardian is bound down to bestow her on that husband when he comes of
age.  Miss Twinkleton, in her seminarial state of existence, has combated
the romantic aspect of this destiny by affecting to shake her head over
it behind Miss Bud’s dimpled shoulders, and to brood on the unhappy lot
of that doomed little victim.  But with no better effect—possibly some
unfelt touch of foolish Mr. Porters has undermined the endeavour—than to
evoke from the young ladies an unanimous bedchamber cry of ‘O, what a
pretending old thing Miss Twinkleton is, my dear!’

The Nuns’ House is never in such a state of flutter as when this allotted
husband calls to see little Rosebud.  (It is unanimously understood by
the young ladies that he is lawfully entitled to this privilege, and that
if Miss Twinkleton disputed it, she would be instantly taken up and
transported.)  When his ring at the gate-bell is expected, or takes
place, every young lady who can, under any pretence, look out of window,
looks out of window; while every young lady who is ‘practising,’
practises out of time; and the French class becomes so demoralised that
the mark goes round as briskly as the bottle at a convivial party in the
last century.

On the afternoon of the day next after the dinner of two at the
gatehouse, the bell is rung with the usual fluttering results.

‘Mr. Edwin Drood to see Miss Rosa.’

This is the announcement of the parlour-maid in chief.  Miss Twinkleton,
with an exemplary air of melancholy on her, turns to the sacrifice, and
says, ‘You may go down, my dear.’  Miss Bud goes down, followed by all
eyes.

Mr. Edwin Drood is waiting in Miss Twinkleton’s own parlour: a dainty
room, with nothing more directly scholastic in it than a terrestrial and
a celestial globe.  These expressive machines imply (to parents and
guardians) that even when Miss Twinkleton retires into the bosom of
privacy, duty may at any moment compel her to become a sort of Wandering
Jewess, scouring the earth and soaring through the skies in search of
knowledge for her pupils.

The last new maid, who has never seen the young gentleman Miss Rosa is
engaged to, and who is making his acquaintance between the hinges of the
open door, left open for the purpose, stumbles guiltily down the kitchen
stairs, as a charming little apparition, with its face concealed by a
little silk apron thrown over its head, glides into the parlour.

‘O! _it is_ so ridiculous!’ says the apparition, stopping and shrinking.
‘Don’t, Eddy!’

‘Don’t what, Rosa?’

‘Don’t come any nearer, please.  It _is_ so absurd.’

‘What is absurd, Rosa?’

‘The whole thing is.  It _is_ so absurd to be an engaged orphan and it
_is_ so absurd to have the girls and the servants scuttling about after
one, like mice in the wainscot; and it _is_ so absurd to be called upon!’

The apparition appears to have a thumb in the corner of its mouth while
making this complaint.

‘You give me an affectionate reception, Pussy, I must say.’

‘Well, I will in a minute, Eddy, but I can’t just yet.  How are you?’
(very shortly.)

‘I am unable to reply that I am much the better for seeing you, Pussy,
inasmuch as I see nothing of you.’

This second remonstrance brings a dark, bright, pouting eye out from a
corner of the apron; but it swiftly becomes invisible again, as the
apparition exclaims: ‘O good gracious! you have had half your hair cut
off!’

‘I should have done better to have had my head cut off, I think,’ says
Edwin, rumpling the hair in question, with a fierce glance at the
looking-glass, and giving an impatient stamp.  ‘Shall I go?’

‘No; you needn’t go just yet, Eddy.  The girls would all be asking
questions why you went.’

‘Once for all, Rosa, will you uncover that ridiculous little head of
yours and give me a welcome?’

The apron is pulled off the childish head, as its wearer replies: ‘You’re
very welcome, Eddy.  There! I’m sure that’s nice.  Shake hands.  No, I
can’t kiss you, because I’ve got an acidulated drop in my mouth.’

‘Are you at all glad to see me, Pussy?’

‘O, yes, I’m dreadfully glad.—Go and sit down.—Miss Twinkleton.’

It is the custom of that excellent lady when these visits occur, to
appear every three minutes, either in her own person or in that of Mrs.
Tisher, and lay an offering on the shrine of Propriety by affecting to
look for some desiderated article.  On the present occasion Miss
Twinkleton, gracefully gliding in and out, says in passing: ‘How do you
do, Mr. Drood?  Very glad indeed to have the pleasure.  Pray excuse me.
Tweezers.  Thank you!’

‘I got the gloves last evening, Eddy, and I like them very much.  They
are beauties.’

‘Well, that’s something,’ the affianced replies, half grumbling.  ‘The
smallest encouragement thankfully received.  And how did you pass your
birthday, Pussy?’

‘Delightfully!  Everybody gave me a present.  And we had a feast.  And we
had a ball at night.’

‘A feast and a ball, eh?  These occasions seem to go off tolerably well
without me, Pussy.’

‘De-lightfully!’ cries Rosa, in a quite spontaneous manner, and without
the least pretence of reserve.

‘Hah!  And what was the feast?’

‘Tarts, oranges, jellies, and shrimps.’

‘Any partners at the ball?’

‘We danced with one another, of course, sir.  But some of the girls made
game to be their brothers.  It _was_ so droll!’

‘Did anybody make game to be—’

‘To be you?  O dear yes!’ cries Rosa, laughing with great enjoyment.
‘That was the first thing done.’

‘I hope she did it pretty well,’ says Edwin rather doubtfully.

‘O, it was excellent!—I wouldn’t dance with you, you know.’

Edwin scarcely seems to see the force of this; begs to know if he may
take the liberty to ask why?

‘Because I was so tired of you,’ returns Rosa.  But she quickly adds, and
pleadingly too, seeing displeasure in his face: ‘Dear Eddy, you were just
as tired of me, you know.’

‘Did I say so, Rosa?’

‘Say so!  Do you ever say so?  No, you only showed it.  O, she did it so
well!’ cries Rosa, in a sudden ecstasy with her counterfeit betrothed.

‘It strikes me that she must be a devilish impudent girl,’ says Edwin
Drood.  ‘And so, Pussy, you have passed your last birthday in this old
house.’

‘Ah, yes!’ Rosa clasps her hands, looks down with a sigh, and shakes her
head.

‘You seem to be sorry, Rosa.’

‘I am sorry for the poor old place.  Somehow, I feel as if it would miss
me, when I am gone so far away, so young.’

‘Perhaps we had better stop short, Rosa?’

She looks up at him with a swift bright look; next moment shakes her
head, sighs, and looks down again.

‘That is to say, is it, Pussy, that we are both resigned?’

She nods her head again, and after a short silence, quaintly bursts out
with: ‘You know we must be married, and married from here, Eddy, or the
poor girls will be so dreadfully disappointed!’

For the moment there is more of compassion, both for her and for himself,
in her affianced husband’s face, than there is of love.  He checks the
look, and asks: ‘Shall I take you out for a walk, Rosa dear?’

Rosa dear does not seem at all clear on this point, until her face, which
has been comically reflective, brightens.  ‘O, yes, Eddy; let us go for a
walk!  And I tell you what we’ll do.  You shall pretend that you are
engaged to somebody else, and I’ll pretend that I am not engaged to
anybody, and then we shan’t quarrel.’

‘Do you think that will prevent our falling out, Rosa?’

‘I know it will.  Hush!  Pretend to look out of window—Mrs. Tisher!’

Through a fortuitous concourse of accidents, the matronly Tisher heaves
in sight, says, in rustling through the room like the legendary ghost of
a dowager in silken skirts: ‘I hope I see Mr. Drood well; though I
needn’t ask, if I may judge from his complexion.  I trust I disturb no
one; but there _was_ a paper-knife—O, thank you, I am sure!’ and
disappears with her prize.

‘One other thing you must do, Eddy, to oblige me,’ says Rosebud.  ‘The
moment we get into the street, you must put me outside, and keep close to
the house yourself—squeeze and graze yourself against it.’

‘By all means, Rosa, if you wish it.  Might I ask why?’

‘O! because I don’t want the girls to see you.’

‘It’s a fine day; but would you like me to carry an umbrella up?’

‘Don’t be foolish, sir.  You haven’t got polished leather boots on,’
pouting, with one shoulder raised.

‘Perhaps that might escape the notice of the girls, even if they did see
me,’ remarks Edwin, looking down at his boots with a sudden distaste for
them.

‘Nothing escapes their notice, sir.  And then I know what would happen.
Some of them would begin reflecting on me by saying (for _they_ are free)
that they never will on any account engage themselves to lovers without
polished leather boots.  Hark!  Miss Twinkleton.  I’ll ask for leave.’

That discreet lady being indeed heard without, inquiring of nobody in a
blandly conversational tone as she advances: ‘Eh?  Indeed!  Are you quite
sure you saw my mother-of-pearl button-holder on the work-table in my
room?’ is at once solicited for walking leave, and graciously accords it.
And soon the young couple go out of the Nuns’ House, taking all
precautions against the discovery of the so vitally defective boots of
Mr. Edwin Drood: precautions, let us hope, effective for the peace of
Mrs. Edwin Drood that is to be.

‘Which way shall we take, Rosa?’

Rosa replies: ‘I want to go to the Lumps-of-Delight shop.’

‘To the—?’

‘A Turkish sweetmeat, sir.  My gracious me, don’t you understand
anything?  Call yourself an Engineer, and not know _that_?’

‘Why, how should I know it, Rosa?’

‘Because I am very fond of them.  But O! I forgot what we are to pretend.
No, you needn’t know anything about them; never mind.’

So he is gloomily borne off to the Lumps-of-Delight shop, where Rosa
makes her purchase, and, after offering some to him (which he rather
indignantly declines), begins to partake of it with great zest:
previously taking off and rolling up a pair of little pink gloves, like
rose-leaves, and occasionally putting her little pink fingers to her rosy
lips, to cleanse them from the Dust of Delight that comes off the Lumps.

‘Now, be a good-tempered Eddy, and pretend.  And so you are engaged?’

‘And so I am engaged.’

‘Is she nice?’

‘Charming.’

‘Tall?’

‘Immensely tall!’  Rosa being short.

‘Must be gawky, I should think,’ is Rosa’s quiet commentary.

‘I beg your pardon; not at all,’ contradiction rising in him.

‘What is termed a fine woman; a splendid woman.’

‘Big nose, no doubt,’ is the quiet commentary again.

‘Not a little one, certainly,’ is the quick reply, (Rosa’s being a little
one.)

‘Long pale nose, with a red knob in the middle.  I know the sort of
nose,’ says Rosa, with a satisfied nod, and tranquilly enjoying the
Lumps.

‘You _don’t_ know the sort of nose, Rosa,’ with some warmth; ‘because
it’s nothing of the kind.’

‘Not a pale nose, Eddy?’

‘No.’  Determined not to assent.

‘A red nose?  O! I don’t like red noses.  However; to be sure she can
always powder it.’

‘She would scorn to powder it,’ says Edwin, becoming heated.

‘Would she?  What a stupid thing she must be!  Is she stupid in
everything?’

‘No; in nothing.’

After a pause, in which the whimsically wicked face has not been
unobservant of him, Rosa says:

‘And this most sensible of creatures likes the idea of being carried off
to Egypt; does she, Eddy?’

‘Yes.  She takes a sensible interest in triumphs of engineering skill:
especially when they are to change the whole condition of an undeveloped
country.’

‘Lor!’ says Rosa, shrugging her shoulders, with a little laugh of wonder.

‘Do you object,’ Edwin inquires, with a majestic turn of his eyes
downward upon the fairy figure: ‘do you object, Rosa, to her feeling that
interest?’

‘Object? my dear Eddy!  But really, doesn’t she hate boilers and things?’

‘I can answer for her not being so idiotic as to hate Boilers,’ he
returns with angry emphasis; ‘though I cannot answer for her views about
Things; really not understanding what Things are meant.’

‘But don’t she hate Arabs, and Turks, and Fellahs, and people?’

‘Certainly not.’  Very firmly.

‘At least she _must_ hate the Pyramids?  Come, Eddy?’

‘Why should she be such a little—tall, I mean—goose, as to hate the
Pyramids, Rosa?’

‘Ah! you should hear Miss Twinkleton,’ often nodding her head, and much
enjoying the Lumps, ‘bore about them, and then you wouldn’t ask.
Tiresome old burying-grounds!  Isises, and Ibises, and Cheopses, and
Pharaohses; who cares about them?  And then there was Belzoni, or
somebody, dragged out by the legs, half-choked with bats and dust.  All
the girls say: Serve him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had
been quite choked.’

The two youthful figures, side by side, but not now arm-in-arm, wander
discontentedly about the old Close; and each sometimes stops and slowly
imprints a deeper footstep in the fallen leaves.

‘Well!’ says Edwin, after a lengthy silence.  ‘According to custom.  We
can’t get on, Rosa.’

Rosa tosses her head, and says she don’t want to get on.

‘That’s a pretty sentiment, Rosa, considering.’

‘Considering what?’

‘If I say what, you’ll go wrong again.’

‘_You’ll_ go wrong, you mean, Eddy.  Don’t be ungenerous.’

‘Ungenerous!  I like that!’

‘Then I _don’t_ like that, and so I tell you plainly,’ Rosa pouts.

‘Now, Rosa, I put it to you.  Who disparaged my profession, my
destination—’

‘You are not going to be buried in the Pyramids, I hope?’ she interrupts,
arching her delicate eyebrows.  ‘You never said you were.  If you are,
why haven’t you mentioned it to me?  I can’t find out your plans by
instinct.’

‘Now, Rosa, you know very well what I mean, my dear.’

‘Well then, why did you begin with your detestable red-nosed giantesses?
And she would, she would, she would, she would, she WOULD powder it!’
cries Rosa, in a little burst of comical contradictory spleen.

‘Somehow or other, I never can come right in these discussions,’ says
Edwin, sighing and becoming resigned.

‘How is it possible, sir, that you ever can come right when you’re always
wrong?  And as to Belzoni, I suppose he’s dead;—I’m sure I hope he is—and
how can his legs or his chokes concern you?’

‘It is nearly time for your return, Rosa.  We have not had a very happy
walk, have we?’

‘A happy walk?  A detestably unhappy walk, sir.  If I go up-stairs the
moment I get in and cry till I can’t take my dancing lesson, you are
responsible, mind!’

‘Let us be friends, Rosa.’

‘Ah!’ cries Rosa, shaking her head and bursting into real tears, ‘I wish
we _could_ be friends!  It’s because we can’t be friends, that we try one
another so.  I am a young little thing, Eddy, to have an old heartache;
but I really, really have, sometimes.  Don’t be angry.  I know you have
one yourself too often.  We should both of us have done better, if What
is to be had been left What might have been.  I am quite a little serious
thing now, and not teasing you.  Let each of us forbear, this one time,
on our own account, and on the other’s!’

Disarmed by this glimpse of a woman’s nature in the spoilt child, though
for an instant disposed to resent it as seeming to involve the enforced
infliction of himself upon her, Edwin Drood stands watching her as she
childishly cries and sobs, with both hands to the handkerchief at her
eyes, and then—she becoming more composed, and indeed beginning in her
young inconstancy to laugh at herself for having been so moved—leads her
to a seat hard by, under the elm-trees.

                        [Picture: Under the trees]

‘One clear word of understanding, Pussy dear.  I am not clever out of my
own line—now I come to think of it, I don’t know that I am particularly
clever in it—but I want to do right.  There is not—there may be—I really
don’t see my way to what I want to say, but I must say it before we
part—there is not any other young—’

‘O no, Eddy!  It’s generous of you to ask me; but no, no, no!’

They have come very near to the Cathedral windows, and at this moment the
organ and the choir sound out sublimely.  As they sit listening to the
solemn swell, the confidence of last night rises in young Edwin Drood’s
mind, and he thinks how unlike this music is to that discordance.

‘I fancy I can distinguish Jack’s voice,’ is his remark in a low tone in
connection with the train of thought.

‘Take me back at once, please,’ urges his Affianced, quickly laying her
light hand upon his wrist.  ‘They will all be coming out directly; let us
get away.  O, what a resounding chord!  But don’t let us stop to listen
to it; let us get away!’

Her hurry is over as soon as they have passed out of the Close.  They go
arm-in-arm now, gravely and deliberately enough, along the old
High-street, to the Nuns’ House.  At the gate, the street being within
sight empty, Edwin bends down his face to Rosebud’s.

She remonstrates, laughing, and is a childish schoolgirl again.

‘Eddy, no!  I’m too sticky to be kissed.  But give me your hand, and I’ll
blow a kiss into that.’

He does so.  She breathes a light breath into it and asks, retaining it
and looking into it:—

‘Now say, what do you see?’

‘See, Rosa?’

‘Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could look into a hand and see all
sorts of phantoms.  Can’t you see a happy Future?’

For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and
closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.




CHAPTER IV—MR. SAPSEA


Accepting the Jackass as the type of self-sufficient stupidity and
conceit—a custom, perhaps, like some few other customs, more conventional
than fair—then the purest jackass in Cloisterham is Mr. Thomas Sapsea,
Auctioneer.

Mr. Sapsea ‘dresses at’ the Dean; has been bowed to for the Dean, in
mistake; has even been spoken to in the street as My Lord, under the
impression that he was the Bishop come down unexpectedly, without his
chaplain.  Mr. Sapsea is very proud of this, and of his voice, and of his
style.  He has even (in selling landed property) tried the experiment of
slightly intoning in his pulpit, to make himself more like what he takes
to be the genuine ecclesiastical article.  So, in ending a Sale by Public
Auction, Mr. Sapsea finishes off with an air of bestowing a benediction
on the assembled brokers, which leaves the real Dean—a modest and worthy
gentleman—far behind.

Mr. Sapsea has many admirers; indeed, the proposition is carried by a
large local majority, even including non-believers in his wisdom, that he
is a credit to Cloisterham.  He possesses the great qualities of being
portentous and dull, and of having a roll in his speech, and another roll
in his gait; not to mention a certain gravely flowing action with his
hands, as if he were presently going to Confirm the individual with whom
he holds discourse.  Much nearer sixty years of age than fifty, with a
flowing outline of stomach, and horizontal creases in his waistcoat;
reputed to be rich; voting at elections in the strictly respectable
interest; morally satisfied that nothing but he himself has grown since
he was a baby; how can dunder-headed Mr. Sapsea be otherwise than a
credit to Cloisterham, and society?

Mr. Sapsea’s premises are in the High-street, over against the Nuns’
House.  They are of about the period of the Nuns’ House, irregularly
modernised here and there, as steadily deteriorating generations found,
more and more, that they preferred air and light to Fever and the Plague.
Over the doorway is a wooden effigy, about half life-size, representing
Mr. Sapsea’s father, in a curly wig and toga, in the act of selling.  The
chastity of the idea, and the natural appearance of the little finger,
hammer, and pulpit, have been much admired.

Mr. Sapsea sits in his dull ground-floor sitting-room, giving first on
his paved back yard; and then on his railed-off garden.  Mr. Sapsea has a
bottle of port wine on a table before the fire—the fire is an early
luxury, but pleasant on the cool, chilly autumn evening—and is
characteristically attended by his portrait, his eight-day clock, and his
weather-glass.  Characteristically, because he would uphold himself
against mankind, his weather-glass against weather, and his clock against
time.

By Mr. Sapsea’s side on the table are a writing-desk and writing
materials.  Glancing at a scrap of manuscript, Mr. Sapsea reads it to
himself with a lofty air, and then, slowly pacing the room with his
thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat, repeats it from memory: so
internally, though with much dignity, that the word ‘Ethelinda’ is alone
audible.

There are three clean wineglasses in a tray on the table.  His
serving-maid entering, and announcing ‘Mr. Jasper is come, sir,’ Mr.
Sapsea waves ‘Admit him,’ and draws two wineglasses from the rank, as
being claimed.

‘Glad to see you, sir.  I congratulate myself on having the honour of
receiving you here for the first time.’  Mr. Sapsea does the honours of
his house in this wise.

‘You are very good.  The honour is mine and the self-congratulation is
mine.’

‘You are pleased to say so, sir.  But I do assure you that it is a
satisfaction to me to receive you in my humble home.  And that is what I
would not say to everybody.’  Ineffable loftiness on Mr. Sapsea’s part
accompanies these words, as leaving the sentence to be understood: ‘You
will not easily believe that your society can be a satisfaction to a man
like myself; nevertheless, it is.’

‘I have for some time desired to know you, Mr. Sapsea.’

‘And I, sir, have long known you by reputation as a man of taste.  Let me
fill your glass.  I will give you, sir,’ says Mr. Sapsea, filling his
own:

    ‘When the French come over,
    May we meet them at Dover!’

This was a patriotic toast in Mr. Sapsea’s infancy, and he is therefore
fully convinced of its being appropriate to any subsequent era.

‘You can scarcely be ignorant, Mr. Sapsea,’ observes Jasper, watching the
auctioneer with a smile as the latter stretches out his legs before the
fire, ‘that you know the world.’

‘Well, sir,’ is the chuckling reply, ‘I think I know something of it;
something of it.’

‘Your reputation for that knowledge has always interested and surprised
me, and made me wish to know you.  For Cloisterham is a little place.
Cooped up in it myself, I know nothing beyond it, and feel it to be a
very little place.’

‘If I have not gone to foreign countries, young man,’ Mr. Sapsea begins,
and then stops:—‘You will excuse me calling you young man, Mr. Jasper?
You are much my junior.’

‘By all means.’

‘If I have not gone to foreign countries, young man, foreign countries
have come to me.  They have come to me in the way of business, and I have
improved upon my opportunities.  Put it that I take an inventory, or make
a catalogue.  I see a French clock.  I never saw him before, in my life,
but I instantly lay my finger on him and say “Paris!”  I see some cups
and saucers of Chinese make, equally strangers to me personally: I put my
finger on them, then and there, and I say “Pekin, Nankin, and Canton.”
It is the same with Japan, with Egypt, and with bamboo and sandalwood
from the East Indies; I put my finger on them all.  I have put my finger
on the North Pole before now, and said “Spear of Esquimaux make, for half
a pint of pale sherry!”’

‘Really?  A very remarkable way, Mr. Sapsea, of acquiring a knowledge of
men and things.’

‘I mention it, sir,’ Mr. Sapsea rejoins, with unspeakable complacency,
‘because, as I say, it don’t do to boast of what you are; but show how
you came to be it, and then you prove it.’

‘Most interesting.  We were to speak of the late Mrs. Sapsea.’

‘We were, sir.’  Mr. Sapsea fills both glasses, and takes the decanter
into safe keeping again.  ‘Before I consult your opinion as a man of
taste on this little trifle’—holding it up—‘which is _but_ a trifle, and
still has required some thought, sir, some little fever of the brow, I
ought perhaps to describe the character of the late Mrs. Sapsea, now dead
three quarters of a year.’

Mr. Jasper, in the act of yawning behind his wineglass, puts down that
screen and calls up a look of interest.  It is a little impaired in its
expressiveness by his having a shut-up gape still to dispose of, with
watering eyes.

‘Half a dozen years ago, or so,’ Mr. Sapsea proceeds, ‘when I had
enlarged my mind up to—I will not say to what it now is, for that might
seem to aim at too much, but up to the pitch of wanting another mind to
be absorbed in it—I cast my eye about me for a nuptial partner.  Because,
as I say, it is not good for man to be alone.’

Mr. Jasper appears to commit this original idea to memory.

‘Miss Brobity at that time kept, I will not call it the rival
establishment to the establishment at the Nuns’ House opposite, but I
will call it the other parallel establishment down town.  The world did
have it that she showed a passion for attending my sales, when they took
place on half holidays, or in vacation time.  The world did put it about,
that she admired my style.  The world did notice that as time flowed by,
my style became traceable in the dictation-exercises of Miss Brobity’s
pupils.  Young man, a whisper even sprang up in obscure malignity, that
one ignorant and besotted Churl (a parent) so committed himself as to
object to it by name.  But I do not believe this.  For is it likely that
any human creature in his right senses would so lay himself open to be
pointed at, by what I call the finger of scorn?’

Mr. Jasper shakes his head.  Not in the least likely.  Mr. Sapsea, in a
grandiloquent state of absence of mind, seems to refill his visitor’s
glass, which is full already; and does really refill his own, which is
empty.

‘Miss Brobity’s Being, young man, was deeply imbued with homage to Mind.
She revered Mind, when launched, or, as I say, precipitated, on an
extensive knowledge of the world.  When I made my proposal, she did me
the honour to be so overshadowed with a species of Awe, as to be able to
articulate only the two words, “O Thou!” meaning myself.  Her limpid blue
eyes were fixed upon me, her semi-transparent hands were clasped
together, pallor overspread her aquiline features, and, though encouraged
to proceed, she never did proceed a word further.  I disposed of the
parallel establishment by private contract, and we became as nearly one
as could be expected under the circumstances.  But she never could, and
she never did, find a phrase satisfactory to her perhaps-too-favourable
estimate of my intellect.  To the very last (feeble action of liver), she
addressed me in the same unfinished terms.’

Mr. Jasper has closed his eyes as the auctioneer has deepened his voice.
He now abruptly opens them, and says, in unison with the deepened voice
‘Ah!’—rather as if stopping himself on the extreme verge of adding—‘men!’

‘I have been since,’ says Mr. Sapsea, with his legs stretched out, and
solemnly enjoying himself with the wine and the fire, ‘what you behold
me; I have been since a solitary mourner; I have been since, as I say,
wasting my evening conversation on the desert air.  I will not say that I
have reproached myself; but there have been times when I have asked
myself the question: What if her husband had been nearer on a level with
her?  If she had not had to look up quite so high, what might the
stimulating action have been upon the liver?’

Mr. Jasper says, with an appearance of having fallen into dreadfully low
spirits, that he ‘supposes it was to be.’

‘We can only suppose so, sir,’ Mr. Sapsea coincides.  ‘As I say, Man
proposes, Heaven disposes.  It may or may not be putting the same thought
in another form; but that is the way I put it.’

Mr. Jasper murmurs assent.

‘And now, Mr. Jasper,’ resumes the auctioneer, producing his scrap of
manuscript, ‘Mrs. Sapsea’s monument having had full time to settle and
dry, let me take your opinion, as a man of taste, on the inscription I
have (as I before remarked, not without some little fever of the brow)
drawn out for it.  Take it in your own hand.  The setting out of the
lines requires to be followed with the eye, as well as the contents with
the mind.’

Mr. Jasper complying, sees and reads as follows:

                                 ETHELINDA,
                             Reverential Wife of
                             MR. THOMAS SAPSEA,
                   AUCTIONEER, VALUER, ESTATE AGENT, &c.,
                                OF THIS CITY.
                        Whose Knowledge of the World,
                         Though somewhat extensive,
                      Never brought him acquainted with
                                  A SPIRIT
                               More capable of
                             LOOKING UP TO HIM.
                               STRANGER, PAUSE
                        And ask thyself the Question,
                           CANST THOU DO LIKEWISE?
                                   If Not,
                            WITH A BLUSH RETIRE.

Mr. Sapsea having risen and stationed himself with his back to the fire,
for the purpose of observing the effect of these lines on the countenance
of a man of taste, consequently has his face towards the door, when his
serving-maid, again appearing, announces, ‘Durdles is come, sir!’  He
promptly draws forth and fills the third wineglass, as being now claimed,
and replies, ‘Show Durdles in.’

‘Admirable!’ quoth Mr. Jasper, handing back the paper.

‘You approve, sir?’

‘Impossible not to approve.  Striking, characteristic, and complete.’

The auctioneer inclines his head, as one accepting his due and giving a
receipt; and invites the entering Durdles to take off that glass of wine
(handing the same), for it will warm him.

Durdles is a stonemason; chiefly in the gravestone, tomb, and monument
way, and wholly of their colour from head to foot.  No man is better
known in Cloisterham.  He is the chartered libertine of the place.  Fame
trumpets him a wonderful workman—which, for aught that anybody knows, he
may be (as he never works); and a wonderful sot—which everybody knows he
is.  With the Cathedral crypt he is better acquainted than any living
authority; it may even be than any dead one.  It is said that the
intimacy of this acquaintance began in his habitually resorting to that
secret place, to lock-out the Cloisterham boy-populace, and sleep off
fumes of liquor: he having ready access to the Cathedral, as contractor
for rough repairs.  Be this as it may, he does know much about it, and,
in the demolition of impedimental fragments of wall, buttress, and
pavement, has seen strange sights.  He often speaks of himself in the
third person; perhaps, being a little misty as to his own identity, when
he narrates; perhaps impartially adopting the Cloisterham nomenclature in
reference to a character of acknowledged distinction.  Thus he will say,
touching his strange sights: ‘Durdles come upon the old chap,’ in
reference to a buried magnate of ancient time and high degree, ‘by
striking right into the coffin with his pick.  The old chap gave Durdles
a look with his open eyes, as much as to say, “Is your name Durdles?
Why, my man, I’ve been waiting for you a devil of a time!”  And then he
turned to powder.’  With a two-foot rule always in his pocket, and a
mason’s hammer all but always in his hand, Durdles goes continually
sounding and tapping all about and about the Cathedral; and whenever he
says to Tope: ‘Tope, here’s another old ’un in here!’  Tope announces it
to the Dean as an established discovery.

In a suit of coarse flannel with horn buttons, a yellow neckerchief with
draggled ends, an old hat more russet-coloured than black, and laced
boots of the hue of his stony calling, Durdles leads a hazy, gipsy sort
of life, carrying his dinner about with him in a small bundle, and
sitting on all manner of tombstones to dine.  This dinner of Durdles’s
has become quite a Cloisterham institution: not only because of his never
appearing in public without it, but because of its having been, on
certain renowned occasions, taken into custody along with Durdles (as
drunk and incapable), and exhibited before the Bench of justices at the
townhall.  These occasions, however, have been few and far apart: Durdles
being as seldom drunk as sober.  For the rest, he is an old bachelor, and
he lives in a little antiquated hole of a house that was never finished:
supposed to be built, so far, of stones stolen from the city wall.  To
this abode there is an approach, ankle-deep in stone chips, resembling a
petrified grove of tombstones, urns, draperies, and broken columns, in
all stages of sculpture.  Herein two journeymen incessantly chip, while
other two journeymen, who face each other, incessantly saw stone; dipping
as regularly in and out of their sheltering sentry-boxes, as if they were
mechanical figures emblematical of Time and Death.

To Durdles, when he had consumed his glass of port, Mr. Sapsea intrusts
that precious effort of his Muse.  Durdles unfeelingly takes out his
two-foot rule, and measures the lines calmly, alloying them with
stone-grit.

‘This is for the monument, is it, Mr. Sapsea?’

‘The Inscription.  Yes.’  Mr. Sapsea waits for its effect on a common
mind.

‘It’ll come in to a eighth of a inch,’ says Durdles.  ‘Your servant, Mr.
Jasper.  Hope I see you well.’

‘How are you Durdles?’

‘I’ve got a touch of the Tombatism on me, Mr. Jasper, but that I must
expect.’

‘You mean the Rheumatism,’ says Sapsea, in a sharp tone.  (He is nettled
by having his composition so mechanically received.)

‘No, I don’t.  I mean, Mr. Sapsea, the Tombatism.  It’s another sort from
Rheumatism.  Mr. Jasper knows what Durdles means.  You get among them
Tombs afore it’s well light on a winter morning, and keep on, as the
Catechism says, a-walking in the same all the days of your life, and
_you’ll_ know what Durdles means.’

‘It is a bitter cold place,’ Mr. Jasper assents, with an antipathetic
shiver.

‘And if it’s bitter cold for you, up in the chancel, with a lot of live
breath smoking out about you, what the bitterness is to Durdles, down in
the crypt among the earthy damps there, and the dead breath of the old
’uns,’ returns that individual, ‘Durdles leaves you to judge.—Is this to
be put in hand at once, Mr. Sapsea?’

Mr. Sapsea, with an Author’s anxiety to rush into publication, replies
that it cannot be out of hand too soon.

‘You had better let me have the key then,’ says Durdles.

‘Why, man, it is not to be put inside the monument!’

‘Durdles knows where it’s to be put, Mr. Sapsea; no man better.  Ask ’ere
a man in Cloisterham whether Durdles knows his work.’

Mr. Sapsea rises, takes a key from a drawer, unlocks an iron safe let
into the wall, and takes from it another key.

‘When Durdles puts a touch or a finish upon his work, no matter where,
inside or outside, Durdles likes to look at his work all round, and see
that his work is a-doing him credit,’ Durdles explains, doggedly.

The key proffered him by the bereaved widower being a large one, he slips
his two-foot rule into a side-pocket of his flannel trousers made for it,
and deliberately opens his flannel coat, and opens the mouth of a large
breast-pocket within it before taking the key to place it in that
repository.

‘Why, Durdles!’ exclaims Jasper, looking on amused, ‘you are undermined
with pockets!’

‘And I carries weight in ’em too, Mr. Jasper.  Feel those!’ producing two
other large keys.

‘Hand me Mr. Sapsea’s likewise.  Surely this is the heaviest of the
three.’

‘You’ll find ’em much of a muchness, I expect,’ says Durdles.  ‘They all
belong to monuments.  They all open Durdles’s work.  Durdles keeps the
keys of his work mostly.  Not that they’re much used.’

‘By the bye,’ it comes into Jasper’s mind to say, as he idly examines the
keys, ‘I have been going to ask you, many a day, and have always
forgotten.  You know they sometimes call you Stony Durdles, don’t you?’

‘Cloisterham knows me as Durdles, Mr. Jasper.’

‘I am aware of that, of course.  But the boys sometimes—’

‘O! if you mind them young imps of boys—’ Durdles gruffly interrupts.

‘I don’t mind them any more than you do.  But there was a discussion the
other day among the Choir, whether Stony stood for Tony;’ clinking one
key against another.

(‘Take care of the wards, Mr. Jasper.’)

‘Or whether Stony stood for Stephen;’ clinking with a change of keys.

(‘You can’t make a pitch pipe of ’em, Mr. Jasper.’)

‘Or whether the name comes from your trade.  How stands the fact?’

Mr. Jasper weighs the three keys in his hand, lifts his head from his
idly stooping attitude over the fire, and delivers the keys to Durdles
with an ingenuous and friendly face.

But the stony one is a gruff one likewise, and that hazy state of his is
always an uncertain state, highly conscious of its dignity, and prone to
take offence.  He drops his two keys back into his pocket one by one, and
buttons them up; he takes his dinner-bundle from the chair-back on which
he hung it when he came in; he distributes the weight he carries, by
tying the third key up in it, as though he were an Ostrich, and liked to
dine off cold iron; and he gets out of the room, deigning no word of
answer.

Mr. Sapsea then proposes a hit at backgammon, which, seasoned with his
own improving conversation, and terminating in a supper of cold roast
beef and salad, beguiles the golden evening until pretty late.  Mr.
Sapsea’s wisdom being, in its delivery to mortals, rather of the diffuse
than the epigrammatic order, is by no means expended even then; but his
visitor intimates that he will come back for more of the precious
commodity on future occasions, and Mr. Sapsea lets him off for the
present, to ponder on the instalment he carries away.




CHAPTER V—MR. DURDLES AND FRIEND


John Jasper, on his way home through the Close, is brought to a
stand-still by the spectacle of Stony Durdles, dinner-bundle and all,
leaning his back against the iron railing of the burial-ground enclosing
it from the old cloister-arches; and a hideous small boy in rags flinging
stones at him as a well-defined mark in the moonlight.  Sometimes the
stones hit him, and sometimes they miss him, but Durdles seems
indifferent to either fortune.  The hideous small boy, on the contrary,
whenever he hits Durdles, blows a whistle of triumph through a jagged
gap, convenient for the purpose, in the front of his mouth, where half
his teeth are wanting; and whenever he misses him, yelps out ‘Mulled
agin!’ and tries to atone for the failure by taking a more correct and
vicious aim.

‘What are you doing to the man?’ demands Jasper, stepping out into the
moonlight from the shade.

‘Making a cock-shy of him,’ replies the hideous small boy.

‘Give me those stones in your hand.’

‘Yes, I’ll give ’em you down your throat, if you come a-ketching hold of
me,’ says the small boy, shaking himself loose, and backing.  ‘I’ll smash
your eye, if you don’t look out!’

‘Baby-Devil that you are, what has the man done to you?’

‘He won’t go home.’

‘What is that to you?’

‘He gives me a ’apenny to pelt him home if I ketches him out too late,’
says the boy.  And then chants, like a little savage, half stumbling and
half dancing among the rags and laces of his dilapidated boots:—

    ‘Widdy widdy wen!
    I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten,
    Widdy widdy wy!
    Then—E—don’t—go—then—I—shy—
    Widdy Widdy Wake-cock warning!’

—with a comprehensive sweep on the last word, and one more delivery at
Durdles.

This would seem to be a poetical note of preparation, agreed upon, as a
caution to Durdles to stand clear if he can, or to betake himself
homeward.

John Jasper invites the boy with a beck of his head to follow him
(feeling it hopeless to drag him, or coax him), and crosses to the iron
railing where the Stony (and stoned) One is profoundly meditating.

‘Do you know this thing, this child?’ asks Jasper, at a loss for a word
that will define this thing.

‘Deputy,’ says Durdles, with a nod.

‘Is that its—his—name?’

‘Deputy,’ assents Durdles.

‘I’m man-servant up at the Travellers’ Twopenny in Gas Works Garding,’
this thing explains.  ‘All us man-servants at Travellers’ Lodgings is
named Deputy.  When we’re chock full and the Travellers is all a-bed I
come out for my ’elth.’  Then withdrawing into the road, and taking aim,
he resumes:—

    ‘Widdy widdy wen!
    I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—’

‘Hold your hand,’ cries Jasper, ‘and don’t throw while I stand so near
him, or I’ll kill you!  Come, Durdles; let me walk home with you
to-night.  Shall I carry your bundle?’

‘Not on any account,’ replies Durdles, adjusting it.  ‘Durdles was making
his reflections here when you come up, sir, surrounded by his works, like
a poplar Author.—Your own brother-in-law;’ introducing a sarcophagus
within the railing, white and cold in the moonlight.  ‘Mrs. Sapsea;’
introducing the monument of that devoted wife.  ‘Late Incumbent;’
introducing the Reverend Gentleman’s broken column.  ‘Departed Assessed
Taxes;’ introducing a vase and towel, standing on what might represent
the cake of soap.  ‘Former pastrycook and Muffin-maker, much respected;’
introducing gravestone.  ‘All safe and sound here, sir, and all Durdles’s
work.  Of the common folk, that is merely bundled up in turf and
brambles, the less said the better.  A poor lot, soon forgot.’

‘This creature, Deputy, is behind us,’ says Jasper, looking back.  ‘Is he
to follow us?’

The relations between Durdles and Deputy are of a capricious kind; for,
on Durdles’s turning himself about with the slow gravity of beery
suddenness, Deputy makes a pretty wide circuit into the road and stands
on the defensive.

‘You never cried Widdy Warning before you begun to-night,’ says Durdles,
unexpectedly reminded of, or imagining, an injury.

‘Yer lie, I did,’ says Deputy, in his only form of polite contradiction.

‘Own brother, sir,’ observes Durdles, turning himself about again, and as
unexpectedly forgetting his offence as he had recalled or conceived it;
‘own brother to Peter the Wild Boy!  But I gave him an object in life.’

‘At which he takes aim?’ Mr. Jasper suggests.

‘That’s it, sir,’ returns Durdles, quite satisfied; ‘at which he takes
aim.  I took him in hand and gave him an object.  What was he before?  A
destroyer.  What work did he do?  Nothing but destruction.  What did he
earn by it?  Short terms in Cloisterham jail.  Not a person, not a piece
of property, not a winder, not a horse, nor a dog, nor a cat, nor a bird,
nor a fowl, nor a pig, but what he stoned, for want of an enlightened
object.  I put that enlightened object before him, and now he can turn
his honest halfpenny by the three penn’orth a week.’

‘I wonder he has no competitors.’

‘He has plenty, Mr. Jasper, but he stones ’em all away.  Now, I don’t
know what this scheme of mine comes to,’ pursues Durdles, considering
about it with the same sodden gravity; ‘I don’t know what you may
precisely call it.  It ain’t a sort of a—scheme of a—National Education?’

‘I should say not,’ replies Jasper.

‘I should say not,’ assents Durdles; ‘then we won’t try to give it a
name.’

‘He still keeps behind us,’ repeats Jasper, looking over his shoulder;
‘is he to follow us?’

‘We can’t help going round by the Travellers’ Twopenny, if we go the
short way, which is the back way,’ Durdles answers, ‘and we’ll drop him
there.’

So they go on; Deputy, as a rear rank one, taking open order, and
invading the silence of the hour and place by stoning every wall, post,
pillar, and other inanimate object, by the deserted way.

‘Is there anything new down in the crypt, Durdles?’ asks John Jasper.

‘Anything old, I think you mean,’ growls Durdles.  ‘It ain’t a spot for
novelty.’

‘Any new discovery on your part, I meant.’

‘There’s a old ’un under the seventh pillar on the left as you go down
the broken steps of the little underground chapel as formerly was; I make
him out (so fur as I’ve made him out yet) to be one of them old ’uns with
a crook.  To judge from the size of the passages in the walls, and of the
steps and doors, by which they come and went, them crooks must have been
a good deal in the way of the old ’uns!  Two on ’em meeting promiscuous
must have hitched one another by the mitre pretty often, I should say.’

Without any endeavour to correct the literality of this opinion, Jasper
surveys his companion—covered from head to foot with old mortar, lime,
and stone grit—as though he, Jasper, were getting imbued with a romantic
interest in his weird life.

‘Yours is a curious existence.’

Without furnishing the least clue to the question, whether he receives
this as a compliment or as quite the reverse, Durdles gruffly answers:
‘Yours is another.’

‘Well! inasmuch as my lot is cast in the same old earthy, chilly,
never-changing place, Yes.  But there is much more mystery and interest
in your connection with the Cathedral than in mine.  Indeed, I am
beginning to have some idea of asking you to take me on as a sort of
student, or free ’prentice, under you, and to let me go about with you
sometimes, and see some of these odd nooks in which you pass your days.’

The Stony One replies, in a general way, ‘All right.  Everybody knows
where to find Durdles, when he’s wanted.’  Which, if not strictly true,
is approximately so, if taken to express that Durdles may always be found
in a state of vagabondage somewhere.

‘What I dwell upon most,’ says Jasper, pursuing his subject of romantic
interest, ‘is the remarkable accuracy with which you would seem to find
out where people are buried.—What is the matter?  That bundle is in your
way; let me hold it.’

Durdles has stopped and backed a little (Deputy, attentive to all his
movements, immediately skirmishing into the road), and was looking about
for some ledge or corner to place his bundle on, when thus relieved of
it.

‘Just you give me my hammer out of that,’ says Durdles, ‘and I’ll show
you.’

Clink, clink.  And his hammer is handed him.

‘Now, lookee here.  You pitch your note, don’t you, Mr. Jasper?’

‘Yes.’

‘So I sound for mine.  I take my hammer, and I tap.’  (Here he strikes
the pavement, and the attentive Deputy skirmishes at a rather wider
range, as supposing that his head may be in requisition.)  ‘I tap, tap,
tap.  Solid!  I go on tapping.  Solid still!  Tap again.  Holloa!
Hollow!  Tap again, persevering.  Solid in hollow!  Tap, tap, tap, to try
it better.  Solid in hollow; and inside solid, hollow again!  There you
are!  Old ’un crumbled away in stone coffin, in vault!’

‘Astonishing!’

‘I have even done this,’ says Durdles, drawing out his two-foot rule
(Deputy meanwhile skirmishing nearer, as suspecting that Treasure may be
about to be discovered, which may somehow lead to his own enrichment, and
the delicious treat of the discoverers being hanged by the neck, on his
evidence, until they are dead).  ‘Say that hammer of mine’s a wall—my
work.  Two; four; and two is six,’ measuring on the pavement.  ‘Six foot
inside that wall is Mrs. Sapsea.’

‘Not really Mrs. Sapsea?’

‘Say Mrs. Sapsea.  Her wall’s thicker, but say Mrs. Sapsea.  Durdles
taps, that wall represented by that hammer, and says, after good
sounding: “Something betwixt us!”  Sure enough, some rubbish has been
left in that same six-foot space by Durdles’s men!’

Jasper opines that such accuracy ‘is a gift.’

‘I wouldn’t have it at a gift,’ returns Durdles, by no means receiving
the observation in good part.  ‘I worked it out for myself.  Durdles
comes by _his_ knowledge through grubbing deep for it, and having it up
by the roots when it don’t want to come.—Holloa you Deputy!’

‘Widdy!’ is Deputy’s shrill response, standing off again.

‘Catch that ha’penny.  And don’t let me see any more of you to-night,
after we come to the Travellers’ Twopenny.’

‘Warning!’ returns Deputy, having caught the halfpenny, and appearing by
this mystic word to express his assent to the arrangement.

They have but to cross what was once the vineyard, belonging to what was
once the Monastery, to come into the narrow back lane wherein stands the
crazy wooden house of two low stories currently known as the Travellers’
Twopenny:—a house all warped and distorted, like the morals of the
travellers, with scant remains of a lattice-work porch over the door, and
also of a rustic fence before its stamped-out garden; by reason of the
travellers being so bound to the premises by a tender sentiment (or so
fond of having a fire by the roadside in the course of the day), that
they can never be persuaded or threatened into departure, without
violently possessing themselves of some wooden forget-me-not, and bearing
it off.

The semblance of an inn is attempted to be given to this wretched place
by fragments of conventional red curtaining in the windows, which rags
are made muddily transparent in the night-season by feeble lights of rush
or cotton dip burning dully in the close air of the inside.  As Durdles
and Jasper come near, they are addressed by an inscribed paper lantern
over the door, setting forth the purport of the house.  They are also
addressed by some half-dozen other hideous small boys—whether twopenny
lodgers or followers or hangers-on of such, who knows!—who, as if
attracted by some carrion-scent of Deputy in the air, start into the
moonlight, as vultures might gather in the desert, and instantly fall to
stoning him and one another.

‘Stop, you young brutes,’ cries Jasper angrily, ‘and let us go by!’

This remonstrance being received with yells and flying stones, according
to a custom of late years comfortably established among the police
regulations of our English communities, where Christians are stoned on
all sides, as if the days of Saint Stephen were revived, Durdles remarks
of the young savages, with some point, that ‘they haven’t got an object,’
and leads the way down the lane.

At the corner of the lane, Jasper, hotly enraged, checks his companion
and looks back.  All is silent.  Next moment, a stone coming rattling at
his hat, and a distant yell of ‘Wake-Cock!  Warning!’ followed by a crow,
as from some infernally-hatched Chanticleer, apprising him under whose
victorious fire he stands, he turns the corner into safety, and takes
Durdles home: Durdles stumbling among the litter of his stony yard as if
he were going to turn head foremost into one of the unfinished tombs.

John Jasper returns by another way to his gatehouse, and entering softly
with his key, finds his fire still burning.  He takes from a locked press
a peculiar-looking pipe, which he fills—but not with tobacco—and, having
adjusted the contents of the bowl, very carefully, with a little
instrument, ascends an inner staircase of only a few steps, leading to
two rooms.  One of these is his own sleeping chamber: the other is his
nephew’s.  There is a light in each.

His nephew lies asleep, calm and untroubled.  John Jasper stands looking
down upon him, his unlighted pipe in his hand, for some time, with a
fixed and deep attention.  Then, hushing his footsteps, he passes to his
own room, lights his pipe, and delivers himself to the Spectres it
invokes at midnight.




CHAPTER VI—PHILANTHROPY IN MINOR CANON CORNER


The Reverend Septimus Crisparkle (Septimus, because six little brother
Crisparkles before him went out, one by one, as they were born, like six
weak little rushlights, as they were lighted), having broken the thin
morning ice near Cloisterham Weir with his amiable head, much to the
invigoration of his frame, was now assisting his circulation by boxing at
a looking-glass with great science and prowess.  A fresh and healthy
portrait the looking-glass presented of the Reverend Septimus, feinting
and dodging with the utmost artfulness, and hitting out from the shoulder
with the utmost straightness, while his radiant features teemed with
innocence, and soft-hearted benevolence beamed from his boxing-gloves.

It was scarcely breakfast-time yet, for Mrs. Crisparkle—mother, not wife
of the Reverend Septimus—was only just down, and waiting for the urn.
Indeed, the Reverend Septimus left off at this very moment to take the
pretty old lady’s entering face between his boxing-gloves and kiss it.
Having done so with tenderness, the Reverend Septimus turned to again,
countering with his left, and putting in his right, in a tremendous
manner.

‘I say, every morning of my life, that you’ll do it at last, Sept,’
remarked the old lady, looking on; ‘and so you will.’

‘Do what, Ma dear?’

‘Break the pier-glass, or burst a blood-vessel.’

‘Neither, please God, Ma dear.  Here’s wind, Ma.  Look at this!’  In a
concluding round of great severity, the Reverend Septimus administered
and escaped all sorts of punishment, and wound up by getting the old
lady’s cap into Chancery—such is the technical term used in scientific
circles by the learned in the Noble Art—with a lightness of touch that
hardly stirred the lightest lavender or cherry riband on it.
Magnanimously releasing the defeated, just in time to get his gloves into
a drawer and feign to be looking out of window in a contemplative state
of mind when a servant entered, the Reverend Septimus then gave place to
the urn and other preparations for breakfast.  These completed, and the
two alone again, it was pleasant to see (or would have been, if there had
been any one to see it, which there never was), the old lady standing to
say the Lord’s Prayer aloud, and her son, Minor Canon nevertheless,
standing with bent head to hear it, he being within five years of forty:
much as he had stood to hear the same words from the same lips when he
was within five months of four.

What is prettier than an old lady—except a young lady—when her eyes are
bright, when her figure is trim and compact, when her face is cheerful
and calm, when her dress is as the dress of a china shepherdess: so
dainty in its colours, so individually assorted to herself, so neatly
moulded on her?  Nothing is prettier, thought the good Minor Canon
frequently, when taking his seat at table opposite his long-widowed
mother.  Her thought at such times may be condensed into the two words
that oftenest did duty together in all her conversations: ‘My Sept!’

They were a good pair to sit breakfasting together in Minor Canon Corner,
Cloisterham.  For Minor Canon Corner was a quiet place in the shadow of
the Cathedral, which the cawing of the rooks, the echoing footsteps of
rare passers, the sound of the Cathedral bell, or the roll of the
Cathedral organ, seemed to render more quiet than absolute silence.
Swaggering fighting men had had their centuries of ramping and raving
about Minor Canon Corner, and beaten serfs had had their centuries of
drudging and dying there, and powerful monks had had their centuries of
being sometimes useful and sometimes harmful there, and behold they were
all gone out of Minor Canon Corner, and so much the better.  Perhaps one
of the highest uses of their ever having been there, was, that there
might be left behind, that blessed air of tranquillity which pervaded
Minor Canon Corner, and that serenely romantic state of the
mind—productive for the most part of pity and forbearance—which is
engendered by a sorrowful story that is all told, or a pathetic play that
is played out.

Red-brick walls harmoniously toned down in colour by time, strong-rooted
ivy, latticed windows, panelled rooms, big oaken beams in little places,
and stone-walled gardens where annual fruit yet ripened upon monkish
trees, were the principal surroundings of pretty old Mrs. Crisparkle and
the Reverend Septimus as they sat at breakfast.

‘And what, Ma dear,’ inquired the Minor Canon, giving proof of a
wholesome and vigorous appetite, ‘does the letter say?’

The pretty old lady, after reading it, had just laid it down upon the
breakfast-cloth.  She handed it over to her son.

Now, the old lady was exceedingly proud of her bright eyes being so clear
that she could read writing without spectacles.  Her son was also so
proud of the circumstance, and so dutifully bent on her deriving the
utmost possible gratification from it, that he had invented the pretence
that he himself could _not_ read writing without spectacles.  Therefore
he now assumed a pair, of grave and prodigious proportions, which not
only seriously inconvenienced his nose and his breakfast, but seriously
impeded his perusal of the letter.  For, he had the eyes of a microscope
and a telescope combined, when they were unassisted.

‘It’s from Mr. Honeythunder, of course,’ said the old lady, folding her
arms.

‘Of course,’ assented her son.  He then lamely read on:

                                                  ‘“Haven of Philanthropy,
                                         Chief Offices, London, Wednesday.

‘“DEAR MADAM,

‘“I write in the—;”  In the what’s this?  What does he write in?’

‘In the chair,’ said the old lady.

The Reverend Septimus took off his spectacles, that he might see her
face, as he exclaimed:

‘Why, what should he write in?’

‘Bless me, bless me, Sept,’ returned the old lady, ‘you don’t see the
context!  Give it back to me, my dear.’

Glad to get his spectacles off (for they always made his eyes water), her
son obeyed: murmuring that his sight for reading manuscript got worse and
worse daily.

‘“I write,”’ his mother went on, reading very perspicuously and
precisely, ‘“from the chair, to which I shall probably be confined for
some hours.”’

Septimus looked at the row of chairs against the wall, with a
half-protesting and half-appealing countenance.

‘“We have,”’ the old lady read on with a little extra emphasis, ‘“a
meeting of our Convened Chief Composite Committee of Central and District
Philanthropists, at our Head Haven as above; and it is their unanimous
pleasure that I take the chair.”’

Septimus breathed more freely, and muttered: ‘O! if he comes to _that_,
let him.’

‘“Not to lose a day’s post, I take the opportunity of a long report being
read, denouncing a public miscreant—”’

‘It is a most extraordinary thing,’ interposed the gentle Minor Canon,
laying down his knife and fork to rub his ear in a vexed manner, ‘that
these Philanthropists are always denouncing somebody.  And it is another
most extraordinary thing that they are always so violently flush of
miscreants!’

‘“Denouncing a public miscreant—”’—the old lady resumed, ‘“to get our
little affair of business off my mind.  I have spoken with my two wards,
Neville and Helena Landless, on the subject of their defective education,
and they give in to the plan proposed; as I should have taken good care
they did, whether they liked it or not.”’

‘And it is another most extraordinary thing,’ remarked the Minor Canon in
the same tone as before, ‘that these philanthropists are so given to
seizing their fellow-creatures by the scruff of the neck, and (as one may
say) bumping them into the paths of peace.—I beg your pardon, Ma dear,
for interrupting.’

‘“Therefore, dear Madam, you will please prepare your son, the Rev. Mr.
Septimus, to expect Neville as an inmate to be read with, on Monday next.
On the same day Helena will accompany him to Cloisterham, to take up her
quarters at the Nuns’ House, the establishment recommended by yourself
and son jointly.  Please likewise to prepare for her reception and
tuition there.  The terms in both cases are understood to be exactly as
stated to me in writing by yourself, when I opened a correspondence with
you on this subject, after the honour of being introduced to you at your
sister’s house in town here.  With compliments to the Rev. Mr. Septimus,
I am, Dear Madam, Your affectionate brother (In Philanthropy), LUKE
HONEYTHUNDER.”’

‘Well, Ma,’ said Septimus, after a little more rubbing of his ear, ‘we
must try it.  There can be no doubt that we have room for an inmate, and
that I have time to bestow upon him, and inclination too.  I must confess
to feeling rather glad that he is not Mr. Honeythunder himself.  Though
that seems wretchedly prejudiced—does it not?—for I never saw him.  Is he
a large man, Ma?’

‘I should call him a large man, my dear,’ the old lady replied after some
hesitation, ‘but that his voice is so much larger.’

‘Than himself?’

‘Than anybody.’

‘Hah!’ said Septimus.  And finished his breakfast as if the flavour of
the Superior Family Souchong, and also of the ham and toast and eggs,
were a little on the wane.

Mrs. Crisparkle’s sister, another piece of Dresden china, and matching
her so neatly that they would have made a delightful pair of ornaments
for the two ends of any capacious old-fashioned chimneypiece, and by
right should never have been seen apart, was the childless wife of a
clergyman holding Corporation preferment in London City.  Mr.
Honeythunder in his public character of Professor of Philanthropy had
come to know Mrs. Crisparkle during the last re-matching of the china
ornaments (in other words during her last annual visit to her sister),
after a public occasion of a philanthropic nature, when certain devoted
orphans of tender years had been glutted with plum buns, and plump
bumptiousness.  These were all the antecedents known in Minor Canon
Corner of the coming pupils.

‘I am sure you will agree with me, Ma,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, after
thinking the matter over, ‘that the first thing to be done, is, to put
these young people as much at their ease as possible.  There is nothing
disinterested in the notion, because we cannot be at our ease with them
unless they are at their ease with us.  Now, Jasper’s nephew is down here
at present; and like takes to like, and youth takes to youth.  He is a
cordial young fellow, and we will have him to meet the brother and sister
at dinner.  That’s three.  We can’t think of asking him, without asking
Jasper.  That’s four.  Add Miss Twinkleton and the fairy bride that is to
be, and that’s six.  Add our two selves, and that’s eight.  Would eight
at a friendly dinner at all put you out, Ma?’

‘Nine would, Sept,’ returned the old lady, visibly nervous.

‘My dear Ma, I particularise eight.’

‘The exact size of the table and the room, my dear.’

So it was settled that way: and when Mr. Crisparkle called with his
mother upon Miss Twinkleton, to arrange for the reception of Miss Helena
Landless at the Nuns’ House, the two other invitations having reference
to that establishment were proffered and accepted.  Miss Twinkleton did,
indeed, glance at the globes, as regretting that they were not formed to
be taken out into society; but became reconciled to leaving them behind.
Instructions were then despatched to the Philanthropist for the departure
and arrival, in good time for dinner, of Mr. Neville and Miss Helena; and
stock for soup became fragrant in the air of Minor Canon Corner.

In those days there was no railway to Cloisterham, and Mr. Sapsea said
there never would be.  Mr. Sapsea said more; he said there never should
be.  And yet, marvellous to consider, it has come to pass, in these days,
that Express Trains don’t think Cloisterham worth stopping at, but yell
and whirl through it on their larger errands, casting the dust off their
wheels as a testimony against its insignificance.  Some remote fragment
of Main Line to somewhere else, there was, which was going to ruin the
Money Market if it failed, and Church and State if it succeeded, and (of
course), the Constitution, whether or no; but even that had already so
unsettled Cloisterham traffic, that the traffic, deserting the high road,
came sneaking in from an unprecedented part of the country by a back
stable-way, for many years labelled at the corner: ‘Beware of the Dog.’

To this ignominious avenue of approach, Mr. Crisparkle repaired, awaiting
the arrival of a short, squat omnibus, with a disproportionate heap of
luggage on the roof—like a little Elephant with infinitely too much
Castle—which was then the daily service between Cloisterham and external
mankind.  As this vehicle lumbered up, Mr. Crisparkle could hardly see
anything else of it for a large outside passenger seated on the box, with
his elbows squared, and his hands on his knees, compressing the driver
into a most uncomfortably small compass, and glowering about him with a
strongly-marked face.

‘Is this Cloisterham?’ demanded the passenger, in a tremendous voice.

‘It is,’ replied the driver, rubbing himself as if he ached, after
throwing the reins to the ostler.  ‘And I never was so glad to see it.’

‘Tell your master to make his box-seat wider, then,’ returned the
passenger.  ‘Your master is morally bound—and ought to be legally, under
ruinous penalties—to provide for the comfort of his fellow-man.’

The driver instituted, with the palms of his hands, a superficial
perquisition into the state of his skeleton; which seemed to make him
anxious.

‘Have I sat upon you?’ asked the passenger.

‘You have,’ said the driver, as if he didn’t like it at all.

‘Take that card, my friend.’

‘I think I won’t deprive you on it,’ returned the driver, casting his
eyes over it with no great favour, without taking it.  ‘What’s the good
of it to me?’

‘Be a Member of that Society,’ said the passenger.

‘What shall I get by it?’ asked the driver.

‘Brotherhood,’ returned the passenger, in a ferocious voice.

‘Thankee,’ said the driver, very deliberately, as he got down; ‘my mother
was contented with myself, and so am I.  I don’t want no brothers.’

‘But you must have them,’ replied the passenger, also descending,
‘whether you like it or not.  I am your brother.’

‘I say!’ expostulated the driver, becoming more chafed in temper, ‘not
too fur!  The worm _will_, when—’

But here, Mr. Crisparkle interposed, remonstrating aside, in a friendly
voice: ‘Joe, Joe, Joe! don’t forget yourself, Joe, my good fellow!’ and
then, when Joe peaceably touched his hat, accosting the passenger with:
‘Mr. Honeythunder?’

‘That is my name, sir.’

‘My name is Crisparkle.’

‘Reverend Mr. Septimus?  Glad to see you, sir.  Neville and Helena are
inside.  Having a little succumbed of late, under the pressure of my
public labours, I thought I would take a mouthful of fresh air, and come
down with them, and return at night.  So you are the Reverend Mr.
Septimus, are you?’ surveying him on the whole with disappointment, and
twisting a double eyeglass by its ribbon, as if he were roasting it, but
not otherwise using it.  ‘Hah!  I expected to see you older, sir.’

‘I hope you will,’ was the good-humoured reply.

‘Eh?’ demanded Mr. Honeythunder.

‘Only a poor little joke.  Not worth repeating.’

‘Joke?  Ay; I never see a joke,’ Mr. Honeythunder frowningly retorted.
‘A joke is wasted upon me, sir.  Where are they?  Helena and Neville,
come here!  Mr. Crisparkle has come down to meet you.’

An unusually handsome lithe young fellow, and an unusually handsome lithe
girl; much alike; both very dark, and very rich in colour; she of almost
the gipsy type; something untamed about them both; a certain air upon
them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a certain air of being the
objects of the chase, rather than the followers.  Slender, supple, quick
of eye and limb; half shy, half defiant; fierce of look; an indefinable
kind of pause coming and going on their whole expression, both of face
and form, which might be equally likened to the pause before a crouch or
a bound.  The rough mental notes made in the first five minutes by Mr.
Crisparkle would have read thus, _verbatim_.

He invited Mr. Honeythunder to dinner, with a troubled mind (for the
discomfiture of the dear old china shepherdess lay heavy on it), and gave
his arm to Helena Landless.  Both she and her brother, as they walked all
together through the ancient streets, took great delight in what he
pointed out of the Cathedral and the Monastery ruin, and wondered—so his
notes ran on—much as if they were beautiful barbaric captives brought
from some wild tropical dominion.  Mr. Honeythunder walked in the middle
of the road, shouldering the natives out of his way, and loudly
developing a scheme he had, for making a raid on all the unemployed
persons in the United Kingdom, laying them every one by the heels in
jail, and forcing them, on pain of prompt extermination, to become
philanthropists.

Mrs. Crisparkle had need of her own share of philanthropy when she beheld
this very large and very loud excrescence on the little party.  Always
something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of society, Mr.
Honeythunder expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon Corner.
Though it was not literally true, as was facetiously charged against him
by public unbelievers, that he called aloud to his fellow-creatures:
‘Curse your souls and bodies, come here and be blessed!’ still his
philanthropy was of that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it
and animosity was hard to determine.  You were to abolish military force,
but you were first to bring all commanding officers who had done their
duty, to trial by court-martial for that offence, and shoot them.  You
were to abolish war, but were to make converts by making war upon them,
and charging them with loving war as the apple of their eye.  You were to
have no capital punishment, but were first to sweep off the face of the
earth all legislators, jurists, and judges, who were of the contrary
opinion.  You were to have universal concord, and were to get it by
eliminating all the people who wouldn’t, or conscientiously couldn’t, be
concordant.  You were to love your brother as yourself, but after an
indefinite interval of maligning him (very much as if you hated him), and
calling him all manner of names.  Above all things, you were to do
nothing in private, or on your own account.  You were to go to the
offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, and put your name down as a Member
and a Professing Philanthropist.  Then, you were to pay up your
subscription, get your card of membership and your riband and medal, and
were evermore to live upon a platform, and evermore to say what Mr.
Honeythunder said, and what the Treasurer said, and what the
sub-Treasurer said, and what the Committee said, and what the
sub-Committee said, and what the Secretary said, and what the
Vice-Secretary said.  And this was usually said in the
unanimously-carried resolution under hand and seal, to the effect: ‘That
this assembled Body of Professing Philanthropists views, with indignant
scorn and contempt, not unmixed with utter detestation and loathing
abhorrence’—in short, the baseness of all those who do not belong to it,
and pledges itself to make as many obnoxious statements as possible about
them, without being at all particular as to facts.

The dinner was a most doleful breakdown.  The philanthropist deranged the
symmetry of the table, sat himself in the way of the waiting, blocked up
the thoroughfare, and drove Mr. Tope (who assisted the parlour-maid) to
the verge of distraction by passing plates and dishes on, over his own
head.  Nobody could talk to anybody, because he held forth to everybody
at once, as if the company had no individual existence, but were a
Meeting.  He impounded the Reverend Mr. Septimus, as an official
personage to be addressed, or kind of human peg to hang his oratorical
hat on, and fell into the exasperating habit, common among such orators,
of impersonating him as a wicked and weak opponent.  Thus, he would ask:
‘And will you, sir, now stultify yourself by telling me’—and so forth,
when the innocent man had not opened his lips, nor meant to open them.
Or he would say: ‘Now see, sir, to what a position you are reduced.  I
will leave you no escape.  After exhausting all the resources of fraud
and falsehood, during years upon years; after exhibiting a combination of
dastardly meanness with ensanguined daring, such as the world has not
often witnessed; you have now the hypocrisy to bend the knee before the
most degraded of mankind, and to sue and whine and howl for mercy!’
Whereat the unfortunate Minor Canon would look, in part indignant and in
part perplexed; while his worthy mother sat bridling, with tears in her
eyes, and the remainder of the party lapsed into a sort of gelatinous
state, in which there was no flavour or solidity, and very little
resistance.

But the gush of philanthropy that burst forth when the departure of Mr.
Honeythunder began to impend, must have been highly gratifying to the
feelings of that distinguished man.  His coffee was produced, by the
special activity of Mr. Tope, a full hour before he wanted it.  Mr.
Crisparkle sat with his watch in his hand for about the same period, lest
he should overstay his time.  The four young people were unanimous in
believing that the Cathedral clock struck three-quarters, when it
actually struck but one.  Miss Twinkleton estimated the distance to the
omnibus at five-and-twenty minutes’ walk, when it was really five.  The
affectionate kindness of the whole circle hustled him into his greatcoat,
and shoved him out into the moonlight, as if he were a fugitive traitor
with whom they sympathised, and a troop of horse were at the back door.
Mr. Crisparkle and his new charge, who took him to the omnibus, were so
fervent in their apprehensions of his catching cold, that they shut him
up in it instantly and left him, with still half-an-hour to spare.




CHAPTER VII—MORE CONFIDENCES THAN ONE


‘I know very little of that gentleman, sir,’ said Neville to the Minor
Canon as they turned back.

‘You know very little of your guardian?’ the Minor Canon repeated.

‘Almost nothing!’

‘How came he—’

‘To _be_ my guardian?  I’ll tell you, sir.  I suppose you know that we
come (my sister and I) from Ceylon?’

‘Indeed, no.’

‘I wonder at that.  We lived with a stepfather there.  Our mother died
there, when we were little children.  We have had a wretched existence.
She made him our guardian, and he was a miserly wretch who grudged us
food to eat, and clothes to wear.  At his death, he passed us over to
this man; for no better reason that I know of, than his being a friend or
connexion of his, whose name was always in print and catching his
attention.’

‘That was lately, I suppose?’

‘Quite lately, sir.  This stepfather of ours was a cruel brute as well as
a grinding one.  It is well he died when he did, or I might have killed
him.’

Mr. Crisparkle stopped short in the moonlight and looked at his hopeful
pupil in consternation.

‘I surprise you, sir?’ he said, with a quick change to a submissive
manner.

‘You shock me; unspeakably shock me.’

The pupil hung his head for a little while, as they walked on, and then
said: ‘You never saw him beat your sister.  I have seen him beat mine,
more than once or twice, and I never forgot it.’

‘Nothing,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘not even a beloved and beautiful
sister’s tears under dastardly ill-usage;’ he became less severe, in
spite of himself, as his indignation rose; ‘could justify those horrible
expressions that you used.’

‘I am sorry I used them, and especially to you, sir.  I beg to recall
them.  But permit me to set you right on one point.  You spoke of my
sister’s tears.  My sister would have let him tear her to pieces, before
she would have let him believe that he could make her shed a tear.’

Mr. Crisparkle reviewed those mental notes of his, and was neither at all
surprised to hear it, nor at all disposed to question it.

‘Perhaps you will think it strange, sir,’—this was said in a hesitating
voice—‘that I should so soon ask you to allow me to confide in you, and
to have the kindness to hear a word or two from me in my defence?’

‘Defence?’ Mr. Crisparkle repeated.  ‘You are not on your defence, Mr.
Neville.’

‘I think I am, sir.  At least I know I should be, if you were better
acquainted with my character.’

‘Well, Mr. Neville,’ was the rejoinder.  ‘What if you leave me to find it
out?’

‘Since it is your pleasure, sir,’ answered the young man, with a quick
change in his manner to sullen disappointment: ‘since it is your pleasure
to check me in my impulse, I must submit.’

There was that in the tone of this short speech which made the
conscientious man to whom it was addressed uneasy.  It hinted to him that
he might, without meaning it, turn aside a trustfulness beneficial to a
mis-shapen young mind and perhaps to his own power of directing and
improving it.  They were within sight of the lights in his windows, and
he stopped.

‘Let us turn back and take a turn or two up and down, Mr. Neville, or you
may not have time to finish what you wish to say to me.  You are hasty in
thinking that I mean to check you.  Quite the contrary.  I invite your
confidence.’

‘You have invited it, sir, without knowing it, ever since I came here.  I
say “ever since,” as if I had been here a week.  The truth is, we came
here (my sister and I) to quarrel with you, and affront you, and break
away again.’

‘Really?’ said Mr. Crisparkle, at a dead loss for anything else to say.

‘You see, we could not know what you were beforehand, sir; could we?’

‘Clearly not,’ said Mr. Crisparkle.

‘And having liked no one else with whom we have ever been brought into
contact, we had made up our minds not to like you.’

‘Really?’ said Mr. Crisparkle again.

‘But we do like you, sir, and we see an unmistakable difference between
your house and your reception of us, and anything else we have ever
known.  This—and my happening to be alone with you—and everything around
us seeming so quiet and peaceful after Mr. Honeythunder’s departure—and
Cloisterham being so old and grave and beautiful, with the moon shining
on it—these things inclined me to open my heart.’

‘I quite understand, Mr. Neville.  And it is salutary to listen to such
influences.’

‘In describing my own imperfections, sir, I must ask you not to suppose
that I am describing my sister’s.  She has come out of the disadvantages
of our miserable life, as much better than I am, as that Cathedral tower
is higher than those chimneys.’

Mr. Crisparkle in his own breast was not so sure of this.

‘I have had, sir, from my earliest remembrance, to suppress a deadly and
bitter hatred.  This has made me secret and revengeful.  I have been
always tyrannically held down by the strong hand.  This has driven me, in
my weakness, to the resource of being false and mean.  I have been
stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very necessaries of
life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, the commonest possessions of
youth.  This has caused me to be utterly wanting in I don’t know what
emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts—I have not even a name for
the thing, you see!—that you have had to work upon in other young men to
whom you have been accustomed.’

‘This is evidently true.  But this is not encouraging,’ thought Mr.
Crisparkle as they turned again.

‘And to finish with, sir: I have been brought up among abject and servile
dependents, of an inferior race, and I may easily have contracted some
affinity with them.  Sometimes, I don’t know but that it may be a drop of
what is tigerish in their blood.’

‘As in the case of that remark just now,’ thought Mr. Crisparkle.

‘In a last word of reference to my sister, sir (we are twin children),
you ought to know, to her honour, that nothing in our misery ever subdued
her, though it often cowed me.  When we ran away from it (we ran away
four times in six years, to be soon brought back and cruelly punished),
the flight was always of her planning and leading.  Each time she dressed
as a boy, and showed the daring of a man.  I take it we were seven years
old when we first decamped; but I remember, when I lost the pocket-knife
with which she was to have cut her hair short, how desperately she tried
to tear it out, or bite it off.  I have nothing further to say, sir,
except that I hope you will bear with me and make allowance for me.’

‘Of that, Mr. Neville, you may be sure,’ returned the Minor Canon.  ‘I
don’t preach more than I can help, and I will not repay your confidence
with a sermon.  But I entreat you to bear in mind, very seriously and
steadily, that if I am to do you any good, it can only be with your own
assistance; and that you can only render that, efficiently, by seeking
aid from Heaven.’

‘I will try to do my part, sir.’

‘And, Mr. Neville, I will try to do mine.  Here is my hand on it.  May
God bless our endeavours!’

They were now standing at his house-door, and a cheerful sound of voices
and laughter was heard within.

‘We will take one more turn before going in,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘for I
want to ask you a question.  When you said you were in a changed mind
concerning me, you spoke, not only for yourself, but for your sister
too?’

‘Undoubtedly I did, sir.’

‘Excuse me, Mr. Neville, but I think you have had no opportunity of
communicating with your sister, since I met you.  Mr. Honeythunder was
very eloquent; but perhaps I may venture to say, without ill-nature, that
he rather monopolised the occasion.  May you not have answered for your
sister without sufficient warrant?’

Neville shook his head with a proud smile.

‘You don’t know, sir, yet, what a complete understanding can exist
between my sister and me, though no spoken word—perhaps hardly as much as
a look—may have passed between us.  She not only feels as I have
described, but she very well knows that I am taking this opportunity of
speaking to you, both for her and for myself.’

Mr. Crisparkle looked in his face, with some incredulity; but his face
expressed such absolute and firm conviction of the truth of what he said,
that Mr. Crisparkle looked at the pavement, and mused, until they came to
his door again.

‘I will ask for one more turn, sir, this time,’ said the young man, with
a rather heightened colour rising in his face.  ‘But for Mr.
Honeythunder’s—I think you called it eloquence, sir?’ (somewhat slyly.)

‘I—yes, I called it eloquence,’ said Mr. Crisparkle.

‘But for Mr. Honeythunder’s eloquence, I might have had no need to ask
you what I am going to ask you.  This Mr. Edwin Drood, sir: I think
that’s the name?’

‘Quite correct,’ said Mr. Crisparkle.  ‘D-r-double o-d.’

‘Does he—or did he—read with you, sir?’

‘Never, Mr. Neville.  He comes here visiting his relation, Mr. Jasper.’

‘Is Miss Bud his relation too, sir?’

(‘Now, why should he ask that, with sudden superciliousness?’ thought Mr.
Crisparkle.)  Then he explained, aloud, what he knew of the little story
of their betrothal.

‘O! _that’s_ it, is it?’ said the young man.  ‘I understand his air of
proprietorship now!’

This was said so evidently to himself, or to anybody rather than Mr.
Crisparkle, that the latter instinctively felt as if to notice it would
be almost tantamount to noticing a passage in a letter which he had read
by chance over the writer’s shoulder.  A moment afterwards they
re-entered the house.

Mr. Jasper was seated at the piano as they came into his drawing-room,
and was accompanying Miss Rosebud while she sang.  It was a consequence
of his playing the accompaniment without notes, and of her being a
heedless little creature, very apt to go wrong, that he followed her lips
most attentively, with his eyes as well as hands; carefully and softly
hinting the key-note from time to time.  Standing with an arm drawn round
her, but with a face far more intent on Mr. Jasper than on her singing,
stood Helena, between whom and her brother an instantaneous recognition
passed, in which Mr. Crisparkle saw, or thought he saw, the understanding
that had been spoken of, flash out.  Mr. Neville then took his admiring
station, leaning against the piano, opposite the singer; Mr. Crisparkle
sat down by the china shepherdess; Edwin Drood gallantly furled and
unfurled Miss Twinkleton’s fan; and that lady passively claimed that sort
of exhibitor’s proprietorship in the accomplishment on view, which Mr.
Tope, the Verger, daily claimed in the Cathedral service.

                         [Picture: At the piano]

The song went on.  It was a sorrowful strain of parting, and the fresh
young voice was very plaintive and tender.  As Jasper watched the pretty
lips, and ever and again hinted the one note, as though it were a low
whisper from himself, the voice became less steady, until all at once the
singer broke into a burst of tears, and shrieked out, with her hands over
her eyes: ‘I can’t bear this!  I am frightened!  Take me away!’

With one swift turn of her lithe figures Helena laid the little beauty on
a sofa, as if she had never caught her up.  Then, on one knee beside her,
and with one hand upon her rosy mouth, while with the other she appealed
to all the rest, Helena said to them: ‘It’s nothing; it’s all over; don’t
speak to her for one minute, and she is well!’

Jasper’s hands had, in the same instant, lifted themselves from the keys,
and were now poised above them, as though he waited to resume.  In that
attitude he yet sat quiet: not even looking round, when all the rest had
changed their places and were reassuring one another.

‘Pussy’s not used to an audience; that’s the fact,’ said Edwin Drood.
‘She got nervous, and couldn’t hold out.  Besides, Jack, you are such a
conscientious master, and require so much, that I believe you make her
afraid of you.  No wonder.’

‘No wonder,’ repeated Helena.

‘There, Jack, you hear!  You would be afraid of him, under similar
circumstances, wouldn’t you, Miss Landless?’

‘Not under any circumstances,’ returned Helena.

Jasper brought down his hands, looked over his shoulder, and begged to
thank Miss Landless for her vindication of his character.  Then he fell
to dumbly playing, without striking the notes, while his little pupil was
taken to an open window for air, and was otherwise petted and restored.
When she was brought back, his place was empty.  ‘Jack’s gone, Pussy,’
Edwin told her.  ‘I am more than half afraid he didn’t like to be charged
with being the Monster who had frightened you.’  But she answered never a
word, and shivered, as if they had made her a little too cold.

Miss Twinkleton now opining that indeed these were late hours, Mrs.
Crisparkle, for finding ourselves outside the walls of the Nuns’ House,
and that we who undertook the formation of the future wives and mothers
of England (the last words in a lower voice, as requiring to be
communicated in confidence) were really bound (voice coming up again) to
set a better example than one of rakish habits, wrappers were put in
requisition, and the two young cavaliers volunteered to see the ladies
home.  It was soon done, and the gate of the Nuns’ House closed upon
them.

The boarders had retired, and only Mrs. Tisher in solitary vigil awaited
the new pupil.  Her bedroom being within Rosa’s, very little introduction
or explanation was necessary, before she was placed in charge of her new
friend, and left for the night.

‘This is a blessed relief, my dear,’ said Helena.  ‘I have been dreading
all day, that I should be brought to bay at this time.’

‘There are not many of us,’ returned Rosa, ‘and we are good-natured
girls; at least the others are; I can answer for them.’

‘I can answer for you,’ laughed Helena, searching the lovely little face
with her dark, fiery eyes, and tenderly caressing the small figure.  ‘You
will be a friend to me, won’t you?’

‘I hope so.  But the idea of my being a friend to you seems too absurd,
though.’

‘Why?’

‘O, I am such a mite of a thing, and you are so womanly and handsome.
You seem to have resolution and power enough to crush me.  I shrink into
nothing by the side of your presence even.’

‘I am a neglected creature, my dear, unacquainted with all
accomplishments, sensitively conscious that I have everything to learn,
and deeply ashamed to own my ignorance.’

‘And yet you acknowledge everything to me!’ said Rosa.

‘My pretty one, can I help it?  There is a fascination in you.’

‘O! is there though?’ pouted Rosa, half in jest and half in earnest.
‘What a pity Master Eddy doesn’t feel it more!’

Of course her relations towards that young gentleman had been already
imparted in Minor Canon Corner.

‘Why, surely he must love you with all his heart!’ cried Helena, with an
earnestness that threatened to blaze into ferocity if he didn’t.

‘Eh?  O, well, I suppose he does,’ said Rosa, pouting again; ‘I am sure I
have no right to say he doesn’t.  Perhaps it’s my fault.  Perhaps I am
not as nice to him as I ought to be.  I don’t think I am.  But it _is_ so
ridiculous!’

Helena’s eyes demanded what was.

‘_We_ are,’ said Rosa, answering as if she had spoken.  ‘We are such a
ridiculous couple.  And we are always quarrelling.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we both know we are ridiculous, my dear!’  Rosa gave that answer
as if it were the most conclusive answer in the world.

Helena’s masterful look was intent upon her face for a few moments, and
then she impulsively put out both her hands and said:

‘You will be my friend and help me?’

‘Indeed, my dear, I will,’ replied Rosa, in a tone of affectionate
childishness that went straight and true to her heart; ‘I will be as good
a friend as such a mite of a thing can be to such a noble creature as
you.  And be a friend to me, please; I don’t understand myself: and I
want a friend who can understand me, very much indeed.’

Helena Landless kissed her, and retaining both her hands said:

‘Who is Mr. Jasper?’

Rosa turned aside her head in answering: ‘Eddy’s uncle, and my
music-master.’

‘You do not love him?’

‘Ugh!’  She put her hands up to her face, and shook with fear or horror.

‘You know that he loves you?’

‘O, don’t, don’t, don’t!’ cried Rosa, dropping on her knees, and clinging
to her new resource.  ‘Don’t tell me of it!  He terrifies me.  He haunts
my thoughts, like a dreadful ghost.  I feel that I am never safe from
him.  I feel as if he could pass in through the wall when he is spoken
of.’  She actually did look round, as if she dreaded to see him standing
in the shadow behind her.

‘Try to tell me more about it, darling.’

‘Yes, I will, I will.  Because you are so strong.  But hold me the while,
and stay with me afterwards.’

‘My child!  You speak as if he had threatened you in some dark way.’

‘He has never spoken to me about—that.  Never.’

‘What has he done?’

‘He has made a slave of me with his looks.  He has forced me to
understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep
silence, without his uttering a threat.  When I play, he never moves his
eyes from my hands.  When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips.
When he corrects me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage,
he himself is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover,
and commanding me to keep his secret.  I avoid his eyes, but he forces me
to see them without looking at them.  Even when a glaze comes over them
(which is sometimes the case), and he seems to wander away into a
frightful sort of dream in which he threatens most, he obliges me to know
it, and to know that he is sitting close at my side, more terrible to me
than ever.’

‘What is this imagined threatening, pretty one?  What is threatened?’

‘I don’t know.  I have never even dared to think or wonder what it is.’

‘And was this all, to-night?’

‘This was all; except that to-night when he watched my lips so closely as
I was singing, besides feeling terrified I felt ashamed and passionately
hurt.  It was as if he kissed me, and I couldn’t bear it, but cried out.
You must never breathe this to any one.  Eddy is devoted to him.  But you
said to-night that you would not be afraid of him, under any
circumstances, and that gives me—who am so much afraid of him—courage to
tell only you.  Hold me!  Stay with me!  I am too frightened to be left
by myself.’

The lustrous gipsy-face drooped over the clinging arms and bosom, and the
wild black hair fell down protectingly over the childish form.  There was
a slumbering gleam of fire in the intense dark eyes, though they were
then softened with compassion and admiration.  Let whomsoever it most
concerned look well to it!




CHAPTER VIII—DAGGERS DRAWN


The two young men, having seen the damsels, their charges, enter the
courtyard of the Nuns’ House, and finding themselves coldly stared at by
the brazen door-plate, as if the battered old beau with the glass in his
eye were insolent, look at one another, look along the perspective of the
moonlit street, and slowly walk away together.

‘Do you stay here long, Mr. Drood?’ says Neville.

‘Not this time,’ is the careless answer.  ‘I leave for London again,
to-morrow.  But I shall be here, off and on, until next Midsummer; then I
shall take my leave of Cloisterham, and England too; for many a long day,
I expect.’

‘Are you going abroad?’

‘Going to wake up Egypt a little,’ is the condescending answer.

‘Are you reading?’

‘Reading?’ repeats Edwin Drood, with a touch of contempt.  ‘No.  Doing,
working, engineering.  My small patrimony was left a part of the capital
of the Firm I am with, by my father, a former partner; and I am a charge
upon the Firm until I come of age; and then I step into my modest share
in the concern.  Jack—you met him at dinner—is, until then, my guardian
and trustee.’

‘I heard from Mr. Crisparkle of your other good fortune.’

‘What do you mean by my other good fortune?’

Neville has made his remark in a watchfully advancing, and yet furtive
and shy manner, very expressive of that peculiar air already noticed, of
being at once hunter and hunted.  Edwin has made his retort with an
abruptness not at all polite.  They stop and interchange a rather heated
look.

‘I hope,’ says Neville, ‘there is no offence, Mr. Drood, in my innocently
referring to your betrothal?’

‘By George!’ cries Edwin, leading on again at a somewhat quicker pace;
‘everybody in this chattering old Cloisterham refers to it I wonder no
public-house has been set up, with my portrait for the sign of The
Betrothed’s Head.  Or Pussy’s portrait.  One or the other.’

‘I am not accountable for Mr. Crisparkle’s mentioning the matter to me,
quite openly,’ Neville begins.

‘No; that’s true; you are not,’ Edwin Drood assents.

‘But,’ resumes Neville, ‘I am accountable for mentioning it to you.  And
I did so, on the supposition that you could not fail to be highly proud
of it.’

Now, there are these two curious touches of human nature working the
secret springs of this dialogue.  Neville Landless is already enough
impressed by Little Rosebud, to feel indignant that Edwin Drood (far
below her) should hold his prize so lightly.  Edwin Drood is already
enough impressed by Helena, to feel indignant that Helena’s brother (far
below her) should dispose of him so coolly, and put him out of the way so
entirely.

However, the last remark had better be answered.  So, says Edwin:

‘I don’t know, Mr. Neville’ (adopting that mode of address from Mr.
Crisparkle), ‘that what people are proudest of, they usually talk most
about; I don’t know either, that what they are proudest of, they most
like other people to talk about.  But I live a busy life, and I speak
under correction by you readers, who ought to know everything, and I
daresay do.’

By this time they had both become savage; Mr. Neville out in the open;
Edwin Drood under the transparent cover of a popular tune, and a stop now
and then to pretend to admire picturesque effects in the moonlight before
him.

‘It does not seem to me very civil in you,’ remarks Neville, at length,
‘to reflect upon a stranger who comes here, not having had your
advantages, to try to make up for lost time.  But, to be sure, I was not
brought up in “busy life,” and my ideas of civility were formed among
Heathens.’

‘Perhaps, the best civility, whatever kind of people we are brought up
among,’ retorts Edwin Drood, ‘is to mind our own business.  If you will
set me that example, I promise to follow it.’

‘Do you know that you take a great deal too much upon yourself?’ is the
angry rejoinder, ‘and that in the part of the world I come from, you
would be called to account for it?’

‘By whom, for instance?’ asks Edwin Drood, coming to a halt, and
surveying the other with a look of disdain.

But, here a startling right hand is laid on Edwin’s shoulder, and Jasper
stands between them.  For, it would seem that he, too, has strolled round
by the Nuns’ House, and has come up behind them on the shadowy side of
the road.

‘Ned, Ned, Ned!’ he says; ‘we must have no more of this.  I don’t like
this.  I have overheard high words between you two.  Remember, my dear
boy, you are almost in the position of host to-night.  You belong, as it
were, to the place, and in a manner represent it towards a stranger.  Mr.
Neville is a stranger, and you should respect the obligations of
hospitality.  And, Mr. Neville,’ laying his left hand on the inner
shoulder of that young gentleman, and thus walking on between them, hand
to shoulder on either side: ‘you will pardon me; but I appeal to you to
govern your temper too.  Now, what is amiss?  But why ask!  Let there be
nothing amiss, and the question is superfluous.  We are all three on a
good understanding, are we not?’

After a silent struggle between the two young men who shall speak last,
Edwin Drood strikes in with: ‘So far as I am concerned, Jack, there is no
anger in me.’

‘Nor in me,’ says Neville Landless, though not so freely; or perhaps so
carelessly.  ‘But if Mr. Drood knew all that lies behind me, far away
from here, he might know better how it is that sharp-edged words have
sharp edges to wound me.’

‘Perhaps,’ says Jasper, in a soothing manner, ‘we had better not qualify
our good understanding.  We had better not say anything having the
appearance of a remonstrance or condition; it might not seem generous.
Frankly and freely, you see there is no anger in Ned.  Frankly and
freely, there is no anger in you, Mr. Neville?’

‘None at all, Mr. Jasper.’  Still, not quite so frankly or so freely; or,
be it said once again, not quite so carelessly perhaps.

‘All over then!  Now, my bachelor gatehouse is a few yards from here, and
the heater is on the fire, and the wine and glasses are on the table, and
it is not a stone’s throw from Minor Canon Corner.  Ned, you are up and
away to-morrow.  We will carry Mr. Neville in with us, to take a
stirrup-cup.’

‘With all my heart, Jack.’

‘And with all mine, Mr. Jasper.’  Neville feels it impossible to say
less, but would rather not go.  He has an impression upon him that he has
lost hold of his temper; feels that Edwin Drood’s coolness, so far from
being infectious, makes him red-hot.

Mr. Jasper, still walking in the centre, hand to shoulder on either side,
beautifully turns the Refrain of a drinking song, and they all go up to
his rooms.  There, the first object visible, when he adds the light of a
lamp to that of the fire, is the portrait over the chimneypicce.  It is
not an object calculated to improve the understanding between the two
young men, as rather awkwardly reviving the subject of their difference.
Accordingly, they both glance at it consciously, but say nothing.
Jasper, however (who would appear from his conduct to have gained but an
imperfect clue to the cause of their late high words), directly calls
attention to it.

‘You recognise that picture, Mr. Neville?’ shading the lamp to throw the
light upon it.

‘I recognise it, but it is far from flattering the original.’

‘O, you are hard upon it!  It was done by Ned, who made me a present of
it.’

‘I am sorry for that, Mr. Drood.’  Neville apologises, with a real
intention to apologise; ‘if I had known I was in the artist’s presence—’

‘O, a joke, sir, a mere joke,’ Edwin cuts in, with a provoking yawn.  ‘A
little humouring of Pussy’s points!  I’m going to paint her gravely, one
of these days, if she’s good.’

The air of leisurely patronage and indifference with which this is said,
as the speaker throws himself back in a chair and clasps his hands at the
back of his head, as a rest for it, is very exasperating to the excitable
and excited Neville.  Jasper looks observantly from the one to the other,
slightly smiles, and turns his back to mix a jug of mulled wine at the
fire.  It seems to require much mixing and compounding.

‘I suppose, Mr. Neville,’ says Edwin, quick to resent the indignant
protest against himself in the face of young Landless, which is fully as
visible as the portrait, or the fire, or the lamp: ‘I suppose that if you
painted the picture of your lady love—’

‘I can’t paint,’ is the hasty interruption.

‘That’s your misfortune, and not your fault.  You would if you could.
But if you could, I suppose you would make her (no matter what she was in
reality), Juno, Minerva, Diana, and Venus, all in one.  Eh?’

‘I have no lady love, and I can’t say.’

‘If I were to try my hand,’ says Edwin, with a boyish boastfulness
getting up in him, ‘on a portrait of Miss Landless—in earnest, mind you;
in earnest—you should see what I could do!’

‘My sister’s consent to sit for it being first got, I suppose?  As it
never will be got, I am afraid I shall never see what you can do.  I must
bear the loss.’

Jasper turns round from the fire, fills a large goblet glass for Neville,
fills a large goblet glass for Edwin, and hands each his own; then fills
for himself, saying:

‘Come, Mr. Neville, we are to drink to my nephew, Ned.  As it is his foot
that is in the stirrup—metaphorically—our stirrup-cup is to be devoted to
him.  Ned, my dearest fellow, my love!’

Jasper sets the example of nearly emptying his glass, and Neville follows
it.  Edwin Drood says, ‘Thank you both very much,’ and follows the double
example.

‘Look at him,’ cries Jasper, stretching out his hand admiringly and
tenderly, though rallyingly too.  ‘See where he lounges so easily, Mr.
Neville!  The world is all before him where to choose.  A life of
stirring work and interest, a life of change and excitement, a life of
domestic ease and love!  Look at him!’

Edwin Drood’s face has become quickly and remarkably flushed with the
wine; so has the face of Neville Landless.  Edwin still sits thrown back
in his chair, making that rest of clasped hands for his head.

‘See how little he heeds it all!’  Jasper proceeds in a bantering vein.
‘It is hardly worth his while to pluck the golden fruit that hangs ripe
on the tree for him.  And yet consider the contrast, Mr. Neville.  You
and I have no prospect of stirring work and interest, or of change and
excitement, or of domestic ease and love.  You and I have no prospect
(unless you are more fortunate than I am, which may easily be), but the
tedious unchanging round of this dull place.’

‘Upon my soul, Jack,’ says Edwin, complacently, ‘I feel quite apologetic
for having my way smoothed as you describe.  But you know what I know,
Jack, and it may not be so very easy as it seems, after all.  May it,
Pussy?’  To the portrait, with a snap of his thumb and finger.  ‘We have
got to hit it off yet; haven’t we, Pussy?  You know what I mean, Jack.’

                      [Picture: On dangerous ground]

His speech has become thick and indistinct.  Jasper, quiet and
self-possessed, looks to Neville, as expecting his answer or comment.
When Neville speaks, _his_ speech is also thick and indistinct.

‘It might have been better for Mr. Drood to have known some hardships,’
he says, defiantly.

‘Pray,’ retorts Edwin, turning merely his eyes in that direction, ‘pray
why might it have been better for Mr. Drood to have known some
hardships?’

‘Ay,’ Jasper assents, with an air of interest; ‘let us know why?’

‘Because they might have made him more sensible,’ says Neville, ‘of good
fortune that is not by any means necessarily the result of his own
merits.’

Mr. Jasper quickly looks to his nephew for his rejoinder.

‘Have _you_ known hardships, may I ask?’ says Edwin Drood, sitting
upright.

Mr. Jasper quickly looks to the other for his retort.

‘I have.’

‘And what have they made you sensible of?’

Mr. Jasper’s play of eyes between the two holds good throughout the
dialogue, to the end.

‘I have told you once before to-night.’

‘You have done nothing of the sort.’

‘I tell you I have.  That you take a great deal too much upon yourself.’

‘You added something else to that, if I remember?’

‘Yes, I did say something else.’

‘Say it again.’

‘I said that in the part of the world I come from, you would be called to
account for it.’

‘Only there?’ cries Edwin Drood, with a contemptuous laugh.  ‘A long way
off, I believe?  Yes; I see!  That part of the world is at a safe
distance.’

‘Say here, then,’ rejoins the other, rising in a fury.  ‘Say anywhere!
Your vanity is intolerable, your conceit is beyond endurance; you talk as
if you were some rare and precious prize, instead of a common boaster.
You are a common fellow, and a common boaster.’

‘Pooh, pooh,’ says Edwin Drood, equally furious, but more collected; ‘how
should you know?  You may know a black common fellow, or a black common
boaster, when you see him (and no doubt you have a large acquaintance
that way); but you are no judge of white men.’

This insulting allusion to his dark skin infuriates Neville to that
violent degree, that he flings the dregs of his wine at Edwin Drood, and
is in the act of flinging the goblet after it, when his arm is caught in
the nick of time by Jasper.

‘Ned, my dear fellow!’ he cries in a loud voice; ‘I entreat you, I
command you, to be still!’  There has been a rush of all the three, and a
clattering of glasses and overturning of chairs.  ‘Mr. Neville, for
shame!  Give this glass to me.  Open your hand, sir.  I WILL have it!’

But Neville throws him off, and pauses for an instant, in a raging
passion, with the goblet yet in his uplifted hand.  Then, he dashes it
down under the grate, with such force that the broken splinters fly out
again in a shower; and he leaves the house.

When he first emerges into the night air, nothing around him is still or
steady; nothing around him shows like what it is; he only knows that he
stands with a bare head in the midst of a blood-red whirl, waiting to be
struggled with, and to struggle to the death.

But, nothing happening, and the moon looking down upon him as if he were
dead after a fit of wrath, he holds his steam-hammer beating head and
heart, and staggers away.  Then, he becomes half-conscious of having
heard himself bolted and barred out, like a dangerous animal; and thinks
what shall he do?

Some wildly passionate ideas of the river dissolve under the spell of the
moonlight on the Cathedral and the graves, and the remembrance of his
sister, and the thought of what he owes to the good man who has but that
very day won his confidence and given him his pledge.  He repairs to
Minor Canon Corner, and knocks softly at the door.

It is Mr. Crisparkle’s custom to sit up last of the early household, very
softly touching his piano and practising his favourite parts in concerted
vocal music.  The south wind that goes where it lists, by way of Minor
Canon Corner on a still night, is not more subdued than Mr. Crisparkle at
such times, regardful of the slumbers of the china shepherdess.

His knock is immediately answered by Mr. Crisparkle himself.  When he
opens the door, candle in hand, his cheerful face falls, and disappointed
amazement is in it.

‘Mr. Neville!  In this disorder!  Where have you been?’

‘I have been to Mr. Jasper’s, sir.  With his nephew.’

‘Come in.’

The Minor Canon props him by the elbow with a strong hand (in a strictly
scientific manner, worthy of his morning trainings), and turns him into
his own little book-room, and shuts the door.’

‘I have begun ill, sir.  I have begun dreadfully ill.’

‘Too true.  You are not sober, Mr. Neville.’

‘I am afraid I am not, sir, though I can satisfy you at another time that
I have had a very little indeed to drink, and that it overcame me in the
strangest and most sudden manner.’

‘Mr. Neville, Mr. Neville,’ says the Minor Canon, shaking his head with a
sorrowful smile; ‘I have heard that said before.’

‘I think—my mind is much confused, but I think—it is equally true of Mr.
Jasper’s nephew, sir.’

‘Very likely,’ is the dry rejoinder.

‘We quarrelled, sir.  He insulted me most grossly.  He had heated that
tigerish blood I told you of to-day, before then.’

‘Mr. Neville,’ rejoins the Minor Canon, mildly, but firmly: ‘I request
you not to speak to me with that clenched right hand.  Unclench it, if
you please.’

‘He goaded me, sir,’ pursues the young man, instantly obeying, ‘beyond my
power of endurance.  I cannot say whether or no he meant it at first, but
he did it.  He certainly meant it at last.  In short, sir,’ with an
irrepressible outburst, ‘in the passion into which he lashed me, I would
have cut him down if I could, and I tried to do it.’

‘You have clenched that hand again,’ is Mr. Crisparkle’s quiet
commentary.

‘I beg your pardon, sir.’

‘You know your room, for I showed it you before dinner; but I will
accompany you to it once more.  Your arm, if you please.  Softly, for the
house is all a-bed.’

Scooping his hand into the same scientific elbow-rest as before, and
backing it up with the inert strength of his arm, as skilfully as a
Police Expert, and with an apparent repose quite unattainable by novices,
Mr. Crisparkle conducts his pupil to the pleasant and orderly old room
prepared for him.  Arrived there, the young man throws himself into a
chair, and, flinging his arms upon his reading-table, rests his head upon
them with an air of wretched self-reproach.

The gentle Minor Canon has had it in his thoughts to leave the room,
without a word.  But looking round at the door, and seeing this dejected
figure, he turns back to it, touches it with a mild hand, says ‘Good
night!’  A sob is his only acknowledgment.  He might have had many a
worse; perhaps, could have had few better.

Another soft knock at the outer door attracts his attention as he goes
down-stairs.  He opens it to Mr. Jasper, holding in his hand the pupil’s
hat.

‘We have had an awful scene with him,’ says Jasper, in a low voice.

‘Has it been so bad as that?’

‘Murderous!’

Mr. Crisparkle remonstrates: ‘No, no, no.  Do not use such strong words.’

‘He might have laid my dear boy dead at my feet.  It is no fault of his,
that he did not.  But that I was, through the mercy of God, swift and
strong with him, he would have cut him down on my hearth.’

The phrase smites home.  ‘Ah!’ thinks Mr. Crisparkle, ‘his own words!’

‘Seeing what I have seen to-night, and hearing what I have heard,’ adds
Jasper, with great earnestness, ‘I shall never know peace of mind when
there is danger of those two coming together, with no one else to
interfere.  It was horrible.  There is something of the tiger in his dark
blood.’

‘Ah!’ thinks Mr. Crisparkle, ‘so he said!’

‘You, my dear sir,’ pursues Jasper, taking his hand, ‘even you, have
accepted a dangerous charge.’

‘You need have no fear for me, Jasper,’ returns Mr. Crisparkle, with a
quiet smile.  ‘I have none for myself.’

‘I have none for myself,’ returns Jasper, with an emphasis on the last
pronoun, ‘because I am not, nor am I in the way of being, the object of
his hostility.  But you may be, and my dear boy has been.  Good night!’

Mr. Crisparkle goes in, with the hat that has so easily, so almost
imperceptibly, acquired the right to be hung up in his hall; hangs it up;
and goes thoughtfully to bed.




CHAPTER IX—BIRDS IN THE BUSH


Rosa, having no relation that she knew of in the world, had, from the
seventh year of her age, known no home but the Nuns’ House, and no mother
but Miss Twinkleton.  Her remembrance of her own mother was of a pretty
little creature like herself (not much older than herself it seemed to
her), who had been brought home in her father’s arms, drowned.  The fatal
accident had happened at a party of pleasure.  Every fold and colour in
the pretty summer dress, and even the long wet hair, with scattered
petals of ruined flowers still clinging to it, as the dead young figure,
in its sad, sad beauty lay upon the bed, were fixed indelibly in Rosa’s
recollection.  So were the wild despair and the subsequent bowed-down
grief of her poor young father, who died broken-hearted on the first
anniversary of that hard day.

The betrothal of Rosa grew out of the soothing of his year of mental
distress by his fast friend and old college companion, Drood: who
likewise had been left a widower in his youth.  But he, too, went the
silent road into which all earthly pilgrimages merge, some sooner, and
some later; and thus the young couple had come to be as they were.

The atmosphere of pity surrounding the little orphan girl when she first
came to Cloisterham, had never cleared away.  It had taken brighter hues
as she grew older, happier, prettier; now it had been golden, now
roseate, and now azure; but it had always adorned her with some soft
light of its own.  The general desire to console and caress her, had
caused her to be treated in the beginning as a child much younger than
her years; the same desire had caused her to be still petted when she was
a child no longer.  Who should be her favourite, who should anticipate
this or that small present, or do her this or that small service; who
should take her home for the holidays; who should write to her the
oftenest when they were separated, and whom she would most rejoice to see
again when they were reunited; even these gentle rivalries were not
without their slight dashes of bitterness in the Nuns’ House.  Well for
the poor Nuns in their day, if they hid no harder strife under their
veils and rosaries!

Thus Rosa had grown to be an amiable, giddy, wilful, winning little
creature; spoilt, in the sense of counting upon kindness from all around
her; but not in the sense of repaying it with indifference.  Possessing
an exhaustless well of affection in her nature, its sparkling waters had
freshened and brightened the Nuns’ House for years, and yet its depths
had never yet been moved: what might betide when that came to pass; what
developing changes might fall upon the heedless head, and light heart,
then; remained to be seen.

By what means the news that there had been a quarrel between the two
young men overnight, involving even some kind of onslaught by Mr. Neville
upon Edwin Drood, got into Miss Twinkleton’s establishment before
breakfast, it is impossible to say.  Whether it was brought in by the
birds of the air, or came blowing in with the very air itself, when the
casement windows were set open; whether the baker brought it kneaded into
the bread, or the milkman delivered it as part of the adulteration of his
milk; or the housemaids, beating the dust out of their mats against the
gateposts, received it in exchange deposited on the mats by the town
atmosphere; certain it is that the news permeated every gable of the old
building before Miss Twinkleton was down, and that Miss Twinkleton
herself received it through Mrs. Tisher, while yet in the act of
dressing; or (as she might have expressed the phrase to a parent or
guardian of a mythological turn) of sacrificing to the Graces.

Miss Landless’s brother had thrown a bottle at Mr. Edwin Drood.

Miss Landless’s brother had thrown a knife at Mr. Edwin Drood.

A knife became suggestive of a fork; and Miss Landless’s brother had
thrown a fork at Mr. Edwin Drood.

As in the governing precedence of Peter Piper, alleged to have picked the
peck of pickled pepper, it was held physically desirable to have evidence
of the existence of the peck of pickled pepper which Peter Piper was
alleged to have picked; so, in this case, it was held psychologically
important to know why Miss Landless’s brother threw a bottle, knife, or
fork-or bottle, knife, _and_ fork—for the cook had been given to
understand it was all three—at Mr. Edwin Drood?

Well, then.  Miss Landless’s brother had said he admired Miss Bud.  Mr.
Edwin Drood had said to Miss Landless’s brother that he had no business
to admire Miss Bud.  Miss Landless’s brother had then ‘up’d’ (this was
the cook’s exact information) with the bottle, knife, fork, and decanter
(the decanter now coolly flying at everybody’s head, without the least
introduction), and thrown them all at Mr. Edwin Drood.

Poor little Rosa put a forefinger into each of her ears when these
rumours began to circulate, and retired into a corner, beseeching not to
be told any more; but Miss Landless, begging permission of Miss
Twinkleton to go and speak with her brother, and pretty plainly showing
that she would take it if it were not given, struck out the more definite
course of going to Mr. Crisparkle’s for accurate intelligence.

When she came back (being first closeted with Miss Twinkleton, in order
that anything objectionable in her tidings might be retained by that
discreet filter), she imparted to Rosa only, what had taken place;
dwelling with a flushed cheek on the provocation her brother had
received, but almost limiting it to that last gross affront as crowning
‘some other words between them,’ and, out of consideration for her new
friend, passing lightly over the fact that the other words had originated
in her lover’s taking things in general so very easily.  To Rosa direct,
she brought a petition from her brother that she would forgive him; and,
having delivered it with sisterly earnestness, made an end of the
subject.

It was reserved for Miss Twinkleton to tone down the public mind of the
Nuns’ House.  That lady, therefore, entering in a stately manner what
plebeians might have called the school-room, but what, in the patrician
language of the head of the Nuns’ House, was euphuistically, not to say
round-aboutedly, denominated ‘the apartment allotted to study,’ and
saying with a forensic air, ‘Ladies!’ all rose.  Mrs. Tisher at the same
time grouped herself behind her chief, as representing Queen Elizabeth’s
first historical female friend at Tilbury fort.  Miss Twinkleton then
proceeded to remark that Rumour, Ladies, had been represented by the bard
of Avon—needless were it to mention the immortal SHAKESPEARE, also called
the Swan of his native river, not improbably with some reference to the
ancient superstition that that bird of graceful plumage (Miss Jennings
will please stand upright) sang sweetly on the approach of death, for
which we have no ornithological authority,—Rumour, Ladies, had been
represented by that bard—hem!—

          ‘who drew
    The celebrated Jew,’

as painted full of tongues.  Rumour in Cloisterham (Miss Ferdinand will
honour me with her attention) was no exception to the great limner’s
portrait of Rumour elsewhere.  A slight _fracas_ between two young
gentlemen occurring last night within a hundred miles of these peaceful
walls (Miss Ferdinand, being apparently incorrigible, will have the
kindness to write out this evening, in the original language, the first
four fables of our vivacious neighbour, Monsieur La Fontaine) had been
very grossly exaggerated by Rumour’s voice.  In the first alarm and
anxiety arising from our sympathy with a sweet young friend, not wholly
to be dissociated from one of the gladiators in the bloodless arena in
question (the impropriety of Miss Reynolds’s appearing to stab herself in
the hand with a pin, is far too obvious, and too glaringly unladylike, to
be pointed out), we descended from our maiden elevation to discuss this
uncongenial and this unfit theme.  Responsible inquiries having assured
us that it was but one of those ‘airy nothings’ pointed at by the Poet
(whose name and date of birth Miss Giggles will supply within half an
hour), we would now discard the subject, and concentrate our minds upon
the grateful labours of the day.

But the subject so survived all day, nevertheless, that Miss Ferdinand
got into new trouble by surreptitiously clapping on a paper moustache at
dinner-time, and going through the motions of aiming a water-bottle at
Miss Giggles, who drew a table-spoon in defence.

Now, Rosa thought of this unlucky quarrel a great deal, and thought of it
with an uncomfortable feeling that she was involved in it, as cause, or
consequence, or what not, through being in a false position altogether as
to her marriage engagement.  Never free from such uneasiness when she was
with her affianced husband, it was not likely that she would be free from
it when they were apart.  To-day, too, she was cast in upon herself, and
deprived of the relief of talking freely with her new friend, because the
quarrel had been with Helena’s brother, and Helena undisguisedly avoided
the subject as a delicate and difficult one to herself.  At this critical
time, of all times, Rosa’s guardian was announced as having come to see
her.

Mr. Grewgious had been well selected for his trust, as a man of
incorruptible integrity, but certainly for no other appropriate quality
discernible on the surface.  He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had
been put into a grinding-mill, looked as if he would have ground
immediately into high-dried snuff.  He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in
colour and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so
unlike hair, that it must have been a wig, but for the stupendous
improbability of anybody’s voluntarily sporting such a head.  The little
play of feature that his face presented, was cut deep into it, in a few
hard curves that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in
his forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them
into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away the
chisel, and said: ‘I really cannot be worried to finish off this man; let
him go as he is.’

With too great length of throat at his upper end, and too much ankle-bone
and heel at his lower; with an awkward and hesitating manner; with a
shambling walk; and with what is called a near sight—which perhaps
prevented his observing how much white cotton stocking he displayed to
the public eye, in contrast with his black suit—Mr. Grewgious still had
some strange capacity in him of making on the whole an agreeable
impression.

Mr. Grewgious was discovered by his ward, much discomfited by being in
Miss Twinkleton’s company in Miss Twinkleton’s own sacred room.  Dim
forebodings of being examined in something, and not coming well out of
it, seemed to oppress the poor gentleman when found in these
circumstances.

‘My dear, how do you do?  I am glad to see you.  My dear, how much
improved you are.  Permit me to hand you a chair, my dear.’

Miss Twinkleton rose at her little writing-table, saying, with general
sweetness, as to the polite Universe: ‘Will you permit me to retire?’

‘By no means, madam, on my account.  I beg that you will not move.’

‘I must entreat permission to _move_,’ returned Miss Twinkleton,
repeating the word with a charming grace; ‘but I will not withdraw, since
you are so obliging.  If I wheel my desk to this corner window, shall I
be in the way?’

‘Madam!  In the way!’

‘You are very kind.—Rosa, my dear, you will be under no restraint, I am
sure.’

Here Mr. Grewgious, left by the fire with Rosa, said again: ‘My dear, how
do you do?  I am glad to see you, my dear.’  And having waited for her to
sit down, sat down himself.

‘My visits,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘are, like those of the angels—not that
I compare myself to an angel.’

‘No, sir,’ said Rosa.

‘Not by any means,’ assented Mr. Grewgious.  ‘I merely refer to my
visits, which are few and far between.  The angels are, we know very
well, up-stairs.’

Miss Twinkleton looked round with a kind of stiff stare.

‘I refer, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious, laying his hand on Rosa’s, as the
possibility thrilled through his frame of his otherwise seeming to take
the awful liberty of calling Miss Twinkleton my dear; ‘I refer to the
other young ladies.’

Miss Twinkleton resumed her writing.

Mr. Grewgious, with a sense of not having managed his opening point quite
as neatly as he might have desired, smoothed his head from back to front
as if he had just dived, and were pressing the water out—this smoothing
action, however superfluous, was habitual with him—and took a pocket-book
from his coat-pocket, and a stump of black-lead pencil from his
waistcoat-pocket.

‘I made,’ he said, turning the leaves: ‘I made a guiding memorandum or
so—as I usually do, for I have no conversational powers whatever—to which
I will, with your permission, my dear, refer.  “Well and happy.”  Truly.
You are well and happy, my dear?  You look so.’

‘Yes, indeed, sir,’ answered Rosa.

‘For which,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with a bend of his head towards the
corner window, ‘our warmest acknowledgments are due, and I am sure are
rendered, to the maternal kindness and the constant care and
consideration of the lady whom I have now the honour to see before me.’

This point, again, made but a lame departure from Mr. Grewgious, and
never got to its destination; for, Miss Twinkleton, feeling that the
courtesies required her to be by this time quite outside the
conversation, was biting the end of her pen, and looking upward, as
waiting for the descent of an idea from any member of the Celestial Nine
who might have one to spare.

Mr. Grewgious smoothed his smooth head again, and then made another
reference to his pocket-book; lining out ‘well and happy,’ as disposed
of.

‘“Pounds, shillings, and pence,” is my next note.  A dry subject for a
young lady, but an important subject too.  Life is pounds, shillings, and
pence.  Death is—’  A sudden recollection of the death of her two parents
seemed to stop him, and he said in a softer tone, and evidently inserting
the negative as an after-thought: ‘Death is _not_ pounds, shillings, and
pence.’

His voice was as hard and dry as himself, and Fancy might have ground it
straight, like himself, into high-dried snuff.  And yet, through the very
limited means of expression that he possessed, he seemed to express
kindness.  If Nature had but finished him off, kindness might have been
recognisable in his face at this moment.  But if the notches in his
forehead wouldn’t fuse together, and if his face would work and couldn’t
play, what could he do, poor man!

‘“Pounds, shillings, and pence.”  You find your allowance always
sufficient for your wants, my dear?’

Rosa wanted for nothing, and therefore it was ample.

‘And you are not in debt?’

Rosa laughed at the idea of being in debt.  It seemed, to her
inexperience, a comical vagary of the imagination.  Mr. Grewgious
stretched his near sight to be sure that this was her view of the case.
‘Ah!’ he said, as comment, with a furtive glance towards Miss Twinkleton,
and lining out pounds, shillings, and pence: ‘I spoke of having got among
the angels!  So I did!’

Rosa felt what his next memorandum would prove to be, and was blushing
and folding a crease in her dress with one embarrassed hand, long before
he found it.

‘“Marriage.”  Hem!’  Mr. Grewgious carried his smoothing hand down over
his eyes and nose, and even chin, before drawing his chair a little
nearer, and speaking a little more confidentially: ‘I now touch, my dear,
upon the point that is the direct cause of my troubling you with the
present visit.  Othenwise, being a particularly Angular man, I should not
have intruded here.  I am the last man to intrude into a sphere for which
I am so entirely unfitted.  I feel, on these premises, as if I was a
bear—with the cramp—in a youthful Cotillon.’

His ungainliness gave him enough of the air of his simile to set Rosa off
laughing heartily.

‘It strikes you in the same light,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with perfect
calmness.  ‘Just so.  To return to my memorandum.  Mr. Edwin has been to
and fro here, as was arranged.  You have mentioned that, in your
quarterly letters to me.  And you like him, and he likes you.’

‘I _like_ him very much, sir,’ rejoined Rosa.

‘So I said, my dear,’ returned her guardian, for whose ear the timid
emphasis was much too fine.  ‘Good.  And you correspond.’

‘We write to one another,’ said Rosa, pouting, as she recalled their
epistolary differences.

‘Such is the meaning that I attach to the word “correspond” in this
application, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Good.  All goes well, time
works on, and at this next Christmas-time it will become necessary, as a
matter of form, to give the exemplary lady in the corner window, to whom
we are so much indebted, business notice of your departure in the ensuing
half-year.  Your relations with her are far more than business relations,
no doubt; but a residue of business remains in them, and business is
business ever.  I am a particularly Angular man,’ proceeded Mr.
Grewgious, as if it suddenly occurred to him to mention it, ‘and I am not
used to give anything away.  If, for these two reasons, some competent
Proxy would give _you_ away, I should take it very kindly.’

Rosa intimated, with her eyes on the ground, that she thought a
substitute might be found, if required.

‘Surely, surely,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘For instance, the gentleman who
teaches Dancing here—he would know how to do it with graceful propriety.
He would advance and retire in a manner satisfactory to the feelings of
the officiating clergyman, and of yourself, and the bridegroom, and all
parties concerned.  I am—I am a particularly Angular man,’ said Mr.
Grewgious, as if he had made up his mind to screw it out at last: ‘and
should only blunder.’

Rosa sat still and silent.  Perhaps her mind had not got quite so far as
the ceremony yet, but was lagging on the way there.

‘Memorandum, “Will.”  Now, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious, referring to his
notes, disposing of ‘Marriage’ with his pencil, and taking a paper from
his pocket; ‘although.  I have before possessed you with the contents of
your father’s will, I think it right at this time to leave a certified
copy of it in your hands.  And although Mr. Edwin is also aware of its
contents, I think it right at this time likewise to place a certified
copy of it in Mr. Jasper’s hand—’

‘Not in his own!’ asked Rosa, looking up quickly.  ‘Cannot the copy go to
Eddy himself?’

‘Why, yes, my dear, if you particularly wish it; but I spoke of Mr.
Jasper as being his trustee.’

‘I do particularly wish it, if you please,’ said Rosa, hurriedly and
earnestly; ‘I don’t like Mr. Jasper to come between us, in any way.’

‘It is natural, I suppose,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘that your young husband
should be all in all.  Yes.  You observe that I say, I suppose.  The fact
is, I am a particularly Unnatural man, and I don’t know from my own
knowledge.’

Rosa looked at him with some wonder.

‘I mean,’ he explained, ‘that young ways were never my ways.  I was the
only offspring of parents far advanced in life, and I half believe I was
born advanced in life myself.  No personality is intended towards the
name you will so soon change, when I remark that while the general growth
of people seem to have come into existence, buds, I seem to have come
into existence a chip.  I was a chip—and a very dry one—when I first
became aware of myself.  Respecting the other certified copy, your wish
shall be complied with.  Respecting your inheritance, I think you know
all.  It is an annuity of two hundred and fifty pounds.  The savings upon
that annuity, and some other items to your credit, all duly carried to
account, with vouchers, will place you in possession of a lump-sum of
money, rather exceeding Seventeen Hundred Pounds.  I am empowered to
advance the cost of your preparations for your marriage out of that fund.
All is told.’

‘Will you please tell me,’ said Rosa, taking the paper with a prettily
knitted brow, but not opening it: ‘whether I am right in what I am going
to say?  I can understand what you tell me, so very much better than what
I read in law-writings.  My poor papa and Eddy’s father made their
agreement together, as very dear and firm and fast friends, in order that
we, too, might be very dear and firm and fast friends after them?’

‘Just so.’

‘For the lasting good of both of us, and the lasting happiness of both of
us?’

‘Just so.’

‘That we might be to one another even much more than they had been to one
another?’

‘Just so.’

‘It was not bound upon Eddy, and it was not bound upon me, by any
forfeit, in case—’

‘Don’t be agitated, my dear.  In the case that it brings tears into your
affectionate eyes even to picture to yourself—in the case of your not
marrying one another—no, no forfeiture on either side.  You would then
have been my ward until you were of age.  No worse would have befallen
you.  Bad enough perhaps!’

‘And Eddy?’

‘He would have come into his partnership derived from his father, and
into its arrears to his credit (if any), on attaining his majority, just
as now.’

Rosa, with her perplexed face and knitted brow, bit the corner of her
attested copy, as she sat with her head on one side, looking abstractedly
on the floor, and smoothing it with her foot.

‘In short,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘this betrothal is a wish, a sentiment, a
friendly project, tenderly expressed on both sides.  That it was strongly
felt, and that there was a lively hope that it would prosper, there can
be no doubt.  When you were both children, you began to be accustomed to
it, and it _has_ prospered.  But circumstances alter cases; and I made
this visit to-day, partly, indeed principally, to discharge myself of the
duty of telling you, my dear, that two young people can only be betrothed
in marriage (except as a matter of convenience, and therefore mockery and
misery) of their own free will, their own attachment, and their own
assurance (it may or it may not prove a mistaken one, but we must take
our chance of that), that they are suited to each other, and will make
each other happy.  Is it to be supposed, for example, that if either of
your fathers were living now, and had any mistrust on that subject, his
mind would not be changed by the change of circumstances involved in the
change of your years?  Untenable, unreasonable, inconclusive, and
preposterous!’

Mr. Grewgious said all this, as if he were reading it aloud; or, still
more, as if he were repeating a lesson.  So expressionless of any
approach to spontaneity were his face and manner.

‘I have now, my dear,’ he added, blurring out ‘Will’ with his pencil,
‘discharged myself of what is doubtless a formal duty in this case, but
still a duty in such a case.  Memorandum, “Wishes.”  My dear, is there
any wish of yours that I can further?’

Rosa shook her head, with an almost plaintive air of hesitation in want
of help.

‘Is there any instruction that I can take from you with reference to your
affairs?’

‘I—I should like to settle them with Eddy first, if you please,’ said
Rosa, plaiting the crease in her dress.

‘Surely, surely,’ returned Mr. Grewgious.  ‘You two should be of one mind
in all things.  Is the young gentleman expected shortly?’

‘He has gone away only this morning.  He will be back at Christmas.’

‘Nothing could happen better.  You will, on his return at Christmas,
arrange all matters of detail with him; you will then communicate with
me; and I will discharge myself (as a mere business acquaintance) of my
business responsibilities towards the accomplished lady in the corner
window.  They will accrue at that season.’  Blurring pencil once again.
‘Memorandum, “Leave.”  Yes.  I will now, my dear, take my leave.’

‘Could I,’ said Rosa, rising, as he jerked out of his chair in his
ungainly way: ‘could I ask you, most kindly to come to me at Christmas,
if I had anything particular to say to you?’

‘Why, certainly, certainly,’ he rejoined; apparently—if such a word can
be used of one who had no apparent lights or shadows about
him—complimented by the question.  ‘As a particularly Angular man, I do
not fit smoothly into the social circle, and consequently I have no other
engagement at Christmas-time than to partake, on the twenty-fifth, of a
boiled turkey and celery sauce with a—with a particularly Angular clerk I
have the good fortune to possess, whose father, being a Norfolk farmer,
sends him up (the turkey up), as a present to me, from the neighbourhood
of Norwich.  I should be quite proud of your wishing to see me, my dear.
As a professional Receiver of rents, so very few people _do_ wish to see
me, that the novelty would be bracing.’

For his ready acquiescence, the grateful Rosa put her hands upon his
shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and instantly kissed him.

‘Lord bless me!’ cried Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Thank you, my dear!  The honour
is almost equal to the pleasure.  Miss Twinkleton, madam, I have had a
most satisfactory conversation with my ward, and I will now release you
from the incumbrance of my presence.’

‘Nay, sir,’ rejoined Miss Twinkleton, rising with a gracious
condescension: ‘say not incumbrance.  Not so, by any means.  I cannot
permit you to say so.’

‘Thank you, madam.  I have read in the newspapers,’ said Mr. Grewgious,
stammering a little, ‘that when a distinguished visitor (not that I am
one: far from it) goes to a school (not that this is one: far from it),
he asks for a holiday, or some sort of grace.  It being now the afternoon
in the—College—of which you are the eminent head, the young ladies might
gain nothing, except in name, by having the rest of the day allowed them.
But if there is any young lady at all under a cloud, might I solicit—’

‘Ah, Mr. Grewgious, Mr. Grewgious!’ cried Miss Twinkleton, with a
chastely-rallying forefinger.  ‘O you gentlemen, you gentlemen!  Fie for
shame, that you are so hard upon us poor maligned disciplinarians of our
sex, for your sakes!  But as Miss Ferdinand is at present weighed down by
an incubus’—Miss Twinkleton might have said a pen-and-ink-ubus of writing
out Monsieur La Fontaine—‘go to her, Rosa my dear, and tell her the
penalty is remitted, in deference to the intercession of your guardian,
Mr. Grewgious.’

Miss Twinkleton here achieved a curtsey, suggestive of marvels happening
to her respected legs, and which she came out of nobly, three yards
behind her starting-point.

As he held it incumbent upon him to call on Mr. Jasper before leaving
Cloisterham, Mr. Grewgious went to the gatehouse, and climbed its postern
stair.  But Mr. Jasper’s door being closed, and presenting on a slip of
paper the word ‘Cathedral,’ the fact of its being service-time was borne
into the mind of Mr. Grewgious.  So he descended the stair again, and,
crossing the Close, paused at the great western folding-door of the
Cathedral, which stood open on the fine and bright, though short-lived,
afternoon, for the airing of the place.

‘Dear me,’ said Mr. Grewgious, peeping in, ‘it’s like looking down the
throat of Old Time.’

Old Time heaved a mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault; and gloomy
shadows began to deepen in corners; and damps began to rise from green
patches of stone; and jewels, cast upon the pavement of the nave from
stained glass by the declining sun, began to perish.  Within the
grill-gate of the chancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the
fast-darkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble
voice, rising and falling in a cracked, monotonous mutter, could at
intervals be faintly heard.  In the free outer air, the river, the green
pastures, and the brown arable lands, the teeming hills and dales, were
reddened by the sunset: while the distant little windows in windmills and
farm homesteads, shone, patches of bright beaten gold.  In the Cathedral,
all became gray, murky, and sepulchral, and the cracked monotonous mutter
went on like a dying voice, until the organ and the choir burst forth,
and drowned it in a sea of music.  Then, the sea fell, and the dying
voice made another feeble effort, and then the sea rose high, and beat
its life out, and lashed the roof, and surged among the arches, and
pierced the heights of the great tower; and then the sea was dry, and all
was still.

Mr. Grewgious had by that time walked to the chancel-steps, where he met
the living waters coming out.

‘Nothing is the matter?’  Thus Jasper accosted him, rather quickly.  ‘You
have not been sent for?’

‘Not at all, not at all.  I came down of my own accord.  I have been to
my pretty ward’s, and am now homeward bound again.’

‘You found her thriving?’

‘Blooming indeed.  Most blooming.  I merely came to tell her, seriously,
what a betrothal by deceased parents is.’

‘And what is it—according to your judgment?’

Mr. Grewgious noticed the whiteness of the lips that asked the question,
and put it down to the chilling account of the Cathedral.

‘I merely came to tell her that it could not be considered binding,
against any such reason for its dissolution as a want of affection, or
want of disposition to carry it into effect, on the side of either
party.’

‘May I ask, had you any especial reason for telling her that?’

Mr. Grewgious answered somewhat sharply: ‘The especial reason of doing my
duty, sir.  Simply that.’  Then he added: ‘Come, Mr. Jasper; I know your
affection for your nephew, and that you are quick to feel on his behalf.
I assure you that this implies not the least doubt of, or disrespect to,
your nephew.’

‘You could not,’ returned Jasper, with a friendly pressure of his arm, as
they walked on side by side, ‘speak more handsomely.’

Mr. Grewgious pulled off his hat to smooth his head, and, having smoothed
it, nodded it contentedly, and put his hat on again.

‘I will wager,’ said Jasper, smiling—his lips were still so white that he
was conscious of it, and bit and moistened them while speaking: ‘I will
wager that she hinted no wish to be released from Ned.’

‘And you will win your wager, if you do,’ retorted Mr. Grewgious.  ‘We
should allow some margin for little maidenly delicacies in a young
motherless creature, under such circumstances, I suppose; it is not in my
line; what do you think?’

‘There can be no doubt of it.’

‘I am glad you say so.  Because,’ proceeded Mr. Grewgious, who had all
this time very knowingly felt his way round to action on his remembrance
of what she had said of Jasper himself: ‘because she seems to have some
little delicate instinct that all preliminary arrangements had best be
made between Mr. Edwin Drood and herself, don’t you see?  She don’t want
us, don’t you know?’

Jasper touched himself on the breast, and said, somewhat indistinctly:
‘You mean me.’

Mr. Grewgious touched himself on the breast, and said: ‘I mean us.
Therefore, let them have their little discussions and councils together,
when Mr. Edwin Drood comes back here at Christmas; and then you and I
will step in, and put the final touches to the business.’

‘So, you settled with her that you would come back at Christmas?’
observed Jasper.  ‘I see!  Mr. Grewgious, as you quite fairly said just
now, there is such an exceptional attachment between my nephew and me,
that I am more sensitive for the dear, fortunate, happy, happy fellow
than for myself.  But it is only right that the young lady should be
considered, as you have pointed out, and that I should accept my cue from
you.  I accept it.  I understand that at Christmas they will complete
their preparations for May, and that their marriage will be put in final
train by themselves, and that nothing will remain for us but to put
ourselves in train also, and have everything ready for our formal release
from our trusts, on Edwin’s birthday.’

‘That is my understanding,’ assented Mr. Grewgious, as they shook hands
to part.  ‘God bless them both!’

‘God save them both!’ cried Jasper.

‘I said, bless them,’ remarked the former, looking back over his
shoulder.

‘I said, save them,’ returned the latter.  ‘Is there any difference?’




CHAPTER X—SMOOTHING THE WAY


It has been often enough remarked that women have a curious power of
divining the characters of men, which would seem to be innate and
instinctive; seeing that it is arrived at through no patient process of
reasoning, that it can give no satisfactory or sufficient account of
itself, and that it pronounces in the most confident manner even against
accumulated observation on the part of the other sex.  But it has not
been quite so often remarked that this power (fallible, like every other
human attribute) is for the most part absolutely incapable of
self-revision; and that when it has delivered an adverse opinion which by
all human lights is subsequently proved to have failed, it is
undistinguishable from prejudice, in respect of its determination not to
be corrected.  Nay, the very possibility of contradiction or disproof,
however remote, communicates to this feminine judgment from the first, in
nine cases out of ten, the weakness attendant on the testimony of an
interested witness; so personally and strongly does the fair diviner
connect herself with her divination.

‘Now, don’t you think, Ma dear,’ said the Minor Canon to his mother one
day as she sat at her knitting in his little book-room, ‘that you are
rather hard on Mr. Neville?’

‘No, I do _not_, Sept,’ returned the old lady.

‘Let us discuss it, Ma.’

‘I have no objection to discuss it, Sept.  I trust, my dear, I am always
open to discussion.’  There was a vibration in the old lady’s cap, as
though she internally added: ‘and I should like to see the discussion
that would change _my_ mind!’

‘Very good, Ma,’ said her conciliatory son.  ‘There is nothing like being
open to discussion.’

‘I hope not, my dear,’ returned the old lady, evidently shut to it.

‘Well!  Mr. Neville, on that unfortunate occasion, commits himself under
provocation.’

‘And under mulled wine,’ added the old lady.

‘I must admit the wine.  Though I believe the two young men were much
alike in that regard.’

‘I don’t,’ said the old lady.

‘Why not, Ma?’

‘Because I _don’t_,’ said the old lady.  ‘Still, I am quite open to
discussion.’

‘But, my dear Ma, I cannot see how we are to discuss, if you take that
line.’

‘Blame Mr. Neville for it, Sept, and not me,’ said the old lady, with
stately severity.

‘My dear Ma! why Mr. Neville?’

‘Because,’ said Mrs. Crisparkle, retiring on first principles, ‘he came
home intoxicated, and did great discredit to this house, and showed great
disrespect to this family.’

‘That is not to be denied, Ma.  He was then, and he is now, very sorry
for it.’

‘But for Mr. Jasper’s well-bred consideration in coming up to me, next
day, after service, in the Nave itself, with his gown still on, and
expressing his hope that I had not been greatly alarmed or had my rest
violently broken, I believe I might never have heard of that disgraceful
transaction,’ said the old lady.

‘To be candid, Ma, I think I should have kept it from you if I could:
though I had not decidedly made up my mind.  I was following Jasper out,
to confer with him on the subject, and to consider the expediency of his
and my jointly hushing the thing up on all accounts, when I found him
speaking to you.  Then it was too late.’

‘Too late, indeed, Sept.  He was still as pale as gentlemanly ashes at
what had taken place in his rooms overnight.’

‘If I _had_ kept it from you, Ma, you may be sure it would have been for
your peace and quiet, and for the good of the young men, and in my best
discharge of my duty according to my lights.’

The old lady immediately walked across the room and kissed him: saying,
‘Of course, my dear Sept, I am sure of that.’

‘However, it became the town-talk,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, rubbing his ear,
as his mother resumed her seat, and her knitting, ‘and passed out of my
power.’

‘And I said then, Sept,’ returned the old lady, ‘that I thought ill of
Mr. Neville.  And I say now, that I think ill of Mr. Neville.  And I said
then, and I say now, that I hope Mr. Neville may come to good, but I
don’t believe he will.’  Here the cap vibrated again considerably.

‘I am sorry to hear you say so, Ma—’

‘I am sorry to say so, my dear,’ interposed the old lady, knitting on
firmly, ‘but I can’t help it.’

‘—For,’ pursued the Minor Canon, ‘it is undeniable that Mr. Neville is
exceedingly industrious and attentive, and that he improves apace, and
that he has—I hope I may say—an attachment to me.’

‘There is no merit in the last article, my dear,’ said the old lady,
quickly; ‘and if he says there is, I think the worse of him for the
boast.’

‘But, my dear Ma, he never said there was.’

‘Perhaps not,’ returned the old lady; ‘still, I don’t see that it greatly
signifies.’

There was no impatience in the pleasant look with which Mr. Crisparkle
contemplated the pretty old piece of china as it knitted; but there was,
certainly, a humorous sense of its not being a piece of china to argue
with very closely.

‘Besides, Sept, ask yourself what he would be without his sister.  You
know what an influence she has over him; you know what a capacity she
has; you know that whatever he reads with you, he reads with her.  Give
her her fair share of your praise, and how much do you leave for him?’

At these words Mr. Crisparkle fell into a little reverie, in which he
thought of several things.  He thought of the times he had seen the
brother and sister together in deep converse over one of his own old
college books; now, in the rimy mornings, when he made those sharpening
pilgrimages to Cloisterham Weir; now, in the sombre evenings, when he
faced the wind at sunset, having climbed his favourite outlook, a
beetling fragment of monastery ruin; and the two studious figures passed
below him along the margin of the river, in which the town fires and
lights already shone, making the landscape bleaker.  He thought how the
consciousness had stolen upon him that in teaching one, he was teaching
two; and how he had almost insensibly adapted his explanations to both
minds—that with which his own was daily in contact, and that which he
only approached through it.  He thought of the gossip that had reached
him from the Nuns’ House, to the effect that Helena, whom he had
mistrusted as so proud and fierce, submitted herself to the fairy-bride
(as he called her), and learnt from her what she knew.  He thought of the
picturesque alliance between those two, externally so very different.  He
thought—perhaps most of all—could it be that these things were yet but so
many weeks old, and had become an integral part of his life?

As, whenever the Reverend Septimus fell a-musing, his good mother took it
to be an infallible sign that he ‘wanted support,’ the blooming old lady
made all haste to the dining-room closet, to produce from it the support
embodied in a glass of Constantia and a home-made biscuit.  It was a most
wonderful closet, worthy of Cloisterham and of Minor Canon Corner.  Above
it, a portrait of Handel in a flowing wig beamed down at the spectator,
with a knowing air of being up to the contents of the closet, and a
musical air of intending to combine all its harmonies in one delicious
fugue.  No common closet with a vulgar door on hinges, openable all at
once, and leaving nothing to be disclosed by degrees, this rare closet
had a lock in mid-air, where two perpendicular slides met; the one
falling down, and the other pushing up.  The upper slide, on being pulled
down (leaving the lower a double mystery), revealed deep shelves of
pickle-jars, jam-pots, tin canisters, spice-boxes, and agreeably
outlandish vessels of blue and white, the luscious lodgings of preserved
tamarinds and ginger.  Every benevolent inhabitant of this retreat had
his name inscribed upon his stomach.  The pickles, in a uniform of rich
brown double-breasted buttoned coat, and yellow or sombre drab
continuations, announced their portly forms, in printed capitals, as
Walnut, Gherkin, Onion, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Mixed, and other members of
that noble family.  The jams, as being of a less masculine temperament,
and as wearing curlpapers, announced themselves in feminine caligraphy,
like a soft whisper, to be Raspberry, Gooseberry, Apricot, Plum, Damson,
Apple, and Peach.  The scene closing on these charmers, and the lower
slide ascending, oranges were revealed, attended by a mighty japanned
sugar-box, to temper their acerbity if unripe.  Home-made biscuits waited
at the Court of these Powers, accompanied by a goodly fragment of
plum-cake, and various slender ladies’ fingers, to be dipped into sweet
wine and kissed.  Lowest of all, a compact leaden-vault enshrined the
sweet wine and a stock of cordials: whence issued whispers of Seville
Orange, Lemon, Almond, and Caraway-seed.  There was a crowning air upon
this closet of closets, of having been for ages hummed through by the
Cathedral bell and organ, until those venerable bees had made sublimated
honey of everything in store; and it was always observed that every
dipper among the shelves (deep, as has been noticed, and swallowing up
head, shoulders, and elbows) came forth again mellow-faced, and seeming
to have undergone a saccharine transfiguration.

The Reverend Septimus yielded himself up quite as willing a victim to a
nauseous medicinal herb-closet, also presided over by the china
shepherdess, as to this glorious cupboard.  To what amazing infusions of
gentian, peppermint, gilliflower, sage, parsley, thyme, rue, rosemary,
and dandelion, did his courageous stomach submit itself!  In what
wonderful wrappers, enclosing layers of dried leaves, would he swathe his
rosy and contented face, if his mother suspected him of a toothache!
What botanical blotches would he cheerfully stick upon his cheek, or
forehead, if the dear old lady convicted him of an imperceptible pimple
there!  Into this herbaceous penitentiary, situated on an upper
staircase-landing: a low and narrow whitewashed cell, where bunches of
dried leaves hung from rusty hooks in the ceiling, and were spread out
upon shelves, in company with portentous bottles: would the Reverend
Septimus submissively be led, like the highly popular lamb who has so
long and unresistingly been led to the slaughter, and there would he,
unlike that lamb, bore nobody but himself.  Not even doing that much, so
that the old lady were busy and pleased, he would quietly swallow what
was given him, merely taking a corrective dip of hands and face into the
great bowl of dried rose-leaves, and into the other great bowl of dried
lavender, and then would go out, as confident in the sweetening powers of
Cloisterham Weir and a wholesome mind, as Lady Macbeth was hopeless of
those of all the seas that roll.

In the present instance the good Minor Canon took his glass of Constantia
with an excellent grace, and, so supported to his mother’s satisfaction,
applied himself to the remaining duties of the day.  In their orderly and
punctual progress they brought round Vesper Service and twilight.  The
Cathedral being very cold, he set off for a brisk trot after service; the
trot to end in a charge at his favourite fragment of ruin, which was to
be carried by storm, without a pause for breath.

He carried it in a masterly manner, and, not breathed even then, stood
looking down upon the river.  The river at Cloisterham is sufficiently
near the sea to throw up oftentimes a quantity of seaweed.  An unusual
quantity had come in with the last tide, and this, and the confusion of
the water, and the restless dipping and flapping of the noisy gulls, and
an angry light out seaward beyond the brown-sailed barges that were
turning black, foreshadowed a stormy night.  In his mind he was
contrasting the wild and noisy sea with the quiet harbour of Minor Canon
Corner, when Helena and Neville Landless passed below him.  He had had
the two together in his thoughts all day, and at once climbed down to
speak to them together.  The footing was rough in an uncertain light for
any tread save that of a good climber; but the Minor Canon was as good a
climber as most men, and stood beside them before many good climbers
would have been half-way down.

‘A wild evening, Miss Landless!  Do you not find your usual walk with
your brother too exposed and cold for the time of year?  Or at all
events, when the sun is down, and the weather is driving in from the
sea?’

Helena thought not.  It was their favourite walk.  It was very retired.

‘It is very retired,’ assented Mr. Crisparkle, laying hold of his
opportunity straightway, and walking on with them.  ‘It is a place of all
others where one can speak without interruption, as I wish to do.  Mr.
Neville, I believe you tell your sister everything that passes between
us?’

‘Everything, sir.’

‘Consequently,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘your sister is aware that I have
repeatedly urged you to make some kind of apology for that unfortunate
occurrence which befell on the night of your arrival here.’  In saying it
he looked to her, and not to him; therefore it was she, and not he, who
replied:

‘Yes.’

‘I call it unfortunate, Miss Helena,’ resumed Mr. Crisparkle, ‘forasmuch
as it certainly has engendered a prejudice against Neville.  There is a
notion about, that he is a dangerously passionate fellow, of an
uncontrollable and furious temper: he is really avoided as such.’

‘I have no doubt he is, poor fellow,’ said Helena, with a look of proud
compassion at her brother, expressing a deep sense of his being
ungenerously treated.  ‘I should be quite sure of it, from your saying
so; but what you tell me is confirmed by suppressed hints and references
that I meet with every day.’

‘Now,’ Mr. Crisparkle again resumed, in a tone of mild though firm
persuasion, ‘is not this to be regretted, and ought it not to be amended?
These are early days of Neville’s in Cloisterham, and I have no fear of
his outliving such a prejudice, and proving himself to have been
misunderstood.  But how much wiser to take action at once, than to trust
to uncertain time!  Besides, apart from its being politic, it is right.
For there can be no question that Neville was wrong.’

‘He was provoked,’ Helena submitted.

‘He was the assailant,’ Mr. Crisparkle submitted.

They walked on in silence, until Helena raised her eyes to the Minor
Canon’s face, and said, almost reproachfully: ‘O Mr. Crisparkle, would
you have Neville throw himself at young Drood’s feet, or at Mr. Jasper’s,
who maligns him every day?  In your heart you cannot mean it.  From your
heart you could not do it, if his case were yours.’

‘I have represented to Mr. Crisparkle, Helena,’ said Neville, with a
glance of deference towards his tutor, ‘that if I could do it from my
heart, I would.  But I cannot, and I revolt from the pretence.  You
forget however, that to put the case to Mr. Crisparkle as his own, is to
suppose to have done what I did.’

‘I ask his pardon,’ said Helena.

‘You see,’ remarked Mr. Crisparkle, again laying hold of his opportunity,
though with a moderate and delicate touch, ‘you both instinctively
acknowledge that Neville did wrong.  Then why stop short, and not
otherwise acknowledge it?’

‘Is there no difference,’ asked Helena, with a little faltering in her
manner; ‘between submission to a generous spirit, and submission to a
base or trivial one?’

Before the worthy Minor Canon was quite ready with his argument in
reference to this nice distinction, Neville struck in:

‘Help me to clear myself with Mr. Crisparkle, Helena.  Help me to
convince him that I cannot be the first to make concessions without
mockery and falsehood.  My nature must be changed before I can do so, and
it is not changed.  I am sensible of inexpressible affront, and
deliberate aggravation of inexpressible affront, and I am angry.  The
plain truth is, I am still as angry when I recall that night as I was
that night.’

‘Neville,’ hinted the Minor Canon, with a steady countenance, ‘you have
repeated that former action of your hands, which I so much dislike.’

‘I am sorry for it, sir, but it was involuntary.  I confessed that I was
still as angry.’

‘And I confess,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘that I hoped for better things.’

‘I am sorry to disappoint you, sir, but it would be far worse to deceive
you, and I should deceive you grossly if I pretended that you had
softened me in this respect.  The time may come when your powerful
influence will do even that with the difficult pupil whose antecedents
you know; but it has not come yet.  Is this so, and in spite of my
struggles against myself, Helena?’

She, whose dark eyes were watching the effect of what he said on Mr.
Crisparkle’s face, replied—to Mr. Crisparkle, not to him: ‘It is so.’
After a short pause, she answered the slightest look of inquiry
conceivable, in her brother’s eyes, with as slight an affirmative bend of
her own head; and he went on:

‘I have never yet had the courage to say to you, sir, what in full
openness I ought to have said when you first talked with me on this
subject.  It is not easy to say, and I have been withheld by a fear of
its seeming ridiculous, which is very strong upon me down to this last
moment, and might, but for my sister, prevent my being quite open with
you even now.—I admire Miss Bud, sir, so very much, that I cannot bear
her being treated with conceit or indifference; and even if I did not
feel that I had an injury against young Drood on my own account, I should
feel that I had an injury against him on hers.’

Mr. Crisparkle, in utter amazement, looked at Helena for corroboration,
and met in her expressive face full corroboration, and a plea for advice.

‘The young lady of whom you speak is, as you know, Mr. Neville, shortly
to be married,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, gravely; ‘therefore your admiration,
if it be of that special nature which you seem to indicate, is
outrageously misplaced.  Moreover, it is monstrous that you should take
upon yourself to be the young lady’s champion against her chosen husband.
Besides, you have seen them only once.  The young lady has become your
sister’s friend; and I wonder that your sister, even on her behalf, has
not checked you in this irrational and culpable fancy.’

‘She has tried, sir, but uselessly.  Husband or no husband, that fellow
is incapable of the feeling with which I am inspired towards the
beautiful young creature whom he treats like a doll.  I say he is as
incapable of it, as he is unworthy of her.  I say she is sacrificed in
being bestowed upon him.  I say that I love her, and despise and hate
him!’  This with a face so flushed, and a gesture so violent, that his
sister crossed to his side, and caught his arm, remonstrating, ‘Neville,
Neville!’

Thus recalled to himself, he quickly became sensible of having lost the
guard he had set upon his passionate tendency, and covered his face with
his hand, as one repentant and wretched.

Mr. Crisparkle, watching him attentively, and at the same time meditating
how to proceed, walked on for some paces in silence.  Then he spoke:

‘Mr. Neville, Mr. Neville, I am sorely grieved to see in you more traces
of a character as sullen, angry, and wild, as the night now closing in.
They are of too serious an aspect to leave me the resource of treating
the infatuation you have disclosed, as undeserving serious consideration.
I give it very serious consideration, and I speak to you accordingly.
This feud between you and young Drood must not go on.  I cannot permit it
to go on any longer, knowing what I now know from you, and you living
under my roof.  Whatever prejudiced and unauthorised constructions your
blind and envious wrath may put upon his character, it is a frank,
good-natured character.  I know I can trust to it for that.  Now, pray
observe what I am about to say.  On reflection, and on your sister’s
representation, I am willing to admit that, in making peace with young
Drood, you have a right to be met half-way.  I will engage that you shall
be, and even that young Drood shall make the first advance.  This
condition fulfilled, you will pledge me the honour of a Christian
gentleman that the quarrel is for ever at an end on your side.  What may
be in your heart when you give him your hand, can only be known to the
Searcher of all hearts; but it will never go well with you, if there be
any treachery there.  So far, as to that; next as to what I must again
speak of as your infatuation.  I understand it to have been confided to
me, and to be known to no other person save your sister and yourself.  Do
I understand aright?’

Helena answered in a low voice: ‘It is only known to us three who are
here together.’

‘It is not at all known to the young lady, your friend?’

‘On my soul, no!’

‘I require you, then, to give me your similar and solemn pledge, Mr.
Neville, that it shall remain the secret it is, and that you will take no
other action whatsoever upon it than endeavouring (and that most
earnestly) to erase it from your mind.  I will not tell you that it will
soon pass; I will not tell you that it is the fancy of the moment; I will
not tell you that such caprices have their rise and fall among the young
and ardent every hour; I will leave you undisturbed in the belief that it
has few parallels or none, that it will abide with you a long time, and
that it will be very difficult to conquer.  So much the more weight shall
I attach to the pledge I require from you, when it is unreservedly
given.’

The young man twice or thrice essayed to speak, but failed.

‘Let me leave you with your sister, whom it is time you took home,’ said
Mr. Crisparkle.  ‘You will find me alone in my room by-and-by.’

‘Pray do not leave us yet,’ Helena implored him.  ‘Another minute.’

‘I should not,’ said Neville, pressing his hand upon his face, ‘have
needed so much as another minute, if you had been less patient with me,
Mr. Crisparkle, less considerate of me, and less unpretendingly good and
true.  O, if in my childhood I had known such a guide!’

‘Follow your guide now, Neville,’ murmured Helena, ‘and follow him to
Heaven!’

There was that in her tone which broke the good Minor Canon’s voice, or
it would have repudiated her exaltation of him.  As it was, he laid a
finger on his lips, and looked towards her brother.

‘To say that I give both pledges, Mr. Crisparkle, out of my innermost
heart, and to say that there is no treachery in it, is to say nothing!’
Thus Neville, greatly moved.  ‘I beg your forgiveness for my miserable
lapse into a burst of passion.’

‘Not mine, Neville, not mine.  You know with whom forgiveness lies, as
the highest attribute conceivable.  Miss Helena, you and your brother are
twin children.  You came into this world with the same dispositions, and
you passed your younger days together surrounded by the same adverse
circumstances.  What you have overcome in yourself, can you not overcome
in him?  You see the rock that lies in his course.  Who but you can keep
him clear of it?’

‘Who but you, sir?’ replied Helena.  ‘What is my influence, or my weak
wisdom, compared with yours!’

‘You have the wisdom of Love,’ returned the Minor Canon, ‘and it was the
highest wisdom ever known upon this earth, remember.  As to mine—but the
less said of that commonplace commodity the better.  Good night!’

She took the hand he offered her, and gratefully and almost reverently
raised it to her lips.

‘Tut!’ said the Minor Canon softly, ‘I am much overpaid!’ and turned
away.

                  [Picture: Mr. Crisparkle is overpaid]

Retracing his steps towards the Cathedral Close, he tried, as he went
along in the dark, to think out the best means of bringing to pass what
he had promised to effect, and what must somehow be done.  ‘I shall
probably be asked to marry them,’ he reflected, ‘and I would they were
married and gone!  But this presses first.’

He debated principally whether he should write to young Drood, or whether
he should speak to Jasper.  The consciousness of being popular with the
whole Cathedral establishment inclined him to the latter course, and the
well-timed sight of the lighted gatehouse decided him to take it.  ‘I
will strike while the iron is hot,’ he said, ‘and see him now.’

Jasper was lying asleep on a couch before the fire, when, having ascended
the postern-stair, and received no answer to his knock at the door, Mr.
Crisparkle gently turned the handle and looked in.  Long afterwards he
had cause to remember how Jasper sprang from the couch in a delirious
state between sleeping and waking, and crying out: ‘What is the matter?
Who did it?’

‘It is only I, Jasper.  I am sorry to have disturbed you.’

The glare of his eyes settled down into a look of recognition, and he
moved a chair or two, to make a way to the fireside.

‘I was dreaming at a great rate, and am glad to be disturbed from an
indigestive after-dinner sleep.  Not to mention that you are always
welcome.’

‘Thank you.  I am not confident,’ returned Mr. Crisparkle, as he sat
himself down in the easy-chair placed for him, ‘that my subject will at
first sight be quite as welcome as myself; but I am a minister of peace,
and I pursue my subject in the interests of peace.  In a word, Jasper, I
want to establish peace between these two young fellows.’

A very perplexed expression took hold of Mr. Jasper’s face; a very
perplexing expression too, for Mr. Crisparkle could make nothing of it.

‘How?’ was Jasper’s inquiry, in a low and slow voice, after a silence.

‘For the “How” I come to you.  I want to ask you to do me the great
favour and service of interposing with your nephew (I have already
interposed with Mr. Neville), and getting him to write you a short note,
in his lively way, saying that he is willing to shake hands.  I know what
a good-natured fellow he is, and what influence you have with him.  And
without in the least defending Mr. Neville, we must all admit that he was
bitterly stung.’

Jasper turned that perplexed face towards the fire.  Mr. Crisparkle
continuing to observe it, found it even more perplexing than before,
inasmuch as it seemed to denote (which could hardly be) some close
internal calculation.

‘I know that you are not prepossessed in Mr. Neville’s favour,’ the Minor
Canon was going on, when Jasper stopped him:

‘You have cause to say so.  I am not, indeed.’

‘Undoubtedly; and I admit his lamentable violence of temper, though I
hope he and I will get the better of it between us.  But I have exacted a
very solemn promise from him as to his future demeanour towards your
nephew, if you do kindly interpose; and I am sure he will keep it.’

‘You are always responsible and trustworthy, Mr. Crisparkle.  Do you
really feel sure that you can answer for him so confidently?’

‘I do.’

The perplexed and perplexing look vanished.

‘Then you relieve my mind of a great dread, and a heavy weight,’ said
Jasper; ‘I will do it.’

Mr. Crisparkle, delighted by the swiftness and completeness of his
success, acknowledged it in the handsomest terms.

‘I will do it,’ repeated Jasper, ‘for the comfort of having your
guarantee against my vague and unfounded fears.  You will laugh—but do
you keep a Diary?’

‘A line for a day; not more.’

‘A line for a day would be quite as much as my uneventful life would
need, Heaven knows,’ said Jasper, taking a book from a desk, ‘but that my
Diary is, in fact, a Diary of Ned’s life too.  You will laugh at this
entry; you will guess when it was made:

    ‘“Past midnight.—After what I have just now seen, I have a morbid
    dread upon me of some horrible consequences resulting to my dear boy,
    that I cannot reason with or in any way contend against.  All my
    efforts are vain.  The demoniacal passion of this Neville Landless,
    his strength in his fury, and his savage rage for the destruction of
    its object, appal me.  So profound is the impression, that twice
    since I have gone into my dear boy’s room, to assure myself of his
    sleeping safely, and not lying dead in his blood.”

‘Here is another entry next morning:

    ‘“Ned up and away.  Light-hearted and unsuspicious as ever.  He
    laughed when I cautioned him, and said he was as good a man as
    Neville Landless any day.  I told him that might be, but he was not
    as bad a man.  He continued to make light of it, but I travelled with
    him as far as I could, and left him most unwillingly.  I am unable to
    shake off these dark intangible presentiments of evil—if feelings
    founded upon staring facts are to be so called.”

‘Again and again,’ said Jasper, in conclusion, twirling the leaves of the
book before putting it by, ‘I have relapsed into these moods, as other
entries show.  But I have now your assurance at my back, and shall put it
in my book, and make it an antidote to my black humours.’

‘Such an antidote, I hope,’ returned Mr. Crisparkle, ‘as will induce you
before long to consign the black humours to the flames.  I ought to be
the last to find any fault with you this evening, when you have met my
wishes so freely; but I must say, Jasper, that your devotion to your
nephew has made you exaggerative here.’

‘You are my witness,’ said Jasper, shrugging his shoulders, ‘what my
state of mind honestly was, that night, before I sat down to write, and
in what words I expressed it.  You remember objecting to a word I used,
as being too strong?  It was a stronger word than any in my Diary.’

‘Well, well.  Try the antidote,’ rejoined Mr. Crisparkle; ‘and may it
give you a brighter and better view of the case!  We will discuss it no
more now.  I have to thank you for myself, thank you sincerely.’

‘You shall find,’ said Jasper, as they shook hands, ‘that I will not do
the thing you wish me to do, by halves.  I will take care that Ned,
giving way at all, shall give way thoroughly.’

On the third day after this conversation, he called on Mr. Crisparkle
with the following letter:

    ‘MY DEAR JACK,

    ‘I am touched by your account of your interview with Mr. Crisparkle,
    whom I much respect and esteem.  At once I openly say that I forgot
    myself on that occasion quite as much as Mr. Landless did, and that I
    wish that bygone to be a bygone, and all to be right again.

    ‘Look here, dear old boy.  Ask Mr. Landless to dinner on Christmas
    Eve (the better the day the better the deed), and let there be only
    we three, and let us shake hands all round there and then, and say no
    more about it.

                                                            ‘My dear Jack,
                                             ‘Ever your most affectionate,
                                                             ‘EDWIN DROOD.

    ‘P.S.  Love to Miss Pussy at the next music-lesson.’

‘You expect Mr. Neville, then?’ said Mr. Crisparkle.

‘I count upon his coming,’ said Mr. Jasper.




CHAPTER XI—A PICTURE AND A RING


Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, London, where certain gabled
houses some centuries of age still stand looking on the public way, as if
disconsolately looking for the Old Bourne that has long run dry, is a
little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles, called Staple Inn.  It
is one of those nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street,
imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton in
his ears, and velvet soles on his boots.  It is one of those nooks where
a few smoky sparrows twitter in smoky trees, as though they called to one
another, ‘Let us play at country,’ and where a few feet of garden-mould
and a few yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to
their tiny understandings.  Moreover, it is one of those nooks which are
legal nooks; and it contains a little Hall, with a little lantern in its
roof: to what obstructive purposes devoted, and at whose expense, this
history knoweth not.

In the days when Cloisterham took offence at the existence of a railroad
afar off, as menacing that sensitive constitution, the property of us
Britons: the odd fortune of which sacred institution it is to be in
exactly equal degrees croaked about, trembled for, and boasted of,
whatever happens to anything, anywhere in the world: in those days no
neighbouring architecture of lofty proportions had arisen to overshadow
Staple Inn.  The westering sun bestowed bright glances on it, and the
south-west wind blew into it unimpeded.

Neither wind nor sun, however, favoured Staple Inn one December afternoon
towards six o’clock, when it was filled with fog, and candles shed murky
and blurred rays through the windows of all its then-occupied sets of
chambers; notably from a set of chambers in a corner house in the little
inner quadrangle, presenting in black and white over its ugly portal the
mysterious inscription:

            P
  J                  T
          1747

In which set of chambers, never having troubled his head about the
inscription, unless to bethink himself at odd times on glancing up at it,
that haply it might mean Perhaps John Thomas, or Perhaps Joe Tyler, sat
Mr. Grewgious writing by his fire.

Who could have told, by looking at Mr. Grewgious, whether he had ever
known ambition or disappointment?  He had been bred to the Bar, and had
laid himself out for chamber practice; to draw deeds; ‘convey the wise it
call,’ as Pistol says.  But Conveyancing and he had made such a very
indifferent marriage of it that they had separated by consent—if there
can be said to be separation where there has never been coming together.

No.  Coy Conveyancing would not come to Mr. Grewgious.  She was wooed,
not won, and they went their several ways.  But an Arbitration being
blown towards him by some unaccountable wind, and he gaining great credit
in it as one indefatigable in seeking out right and doing right, a pretty
fat Receivership was next blown into his pocket by a wind more traceable
to its source.  So, by chance, he had found his niche.  Receiver and
Agent now, to two rich estates, and deputing their legal business, in an
amount worth having, to a firm of solicitors on the floor below, he had
snuffed out his ambition (supposing him to have ever lighted it), and had
settled down with his snuffers for the rest of his life under the dry
vine and fig-tree of P. J. T., who planted in seventeen-forty-seven.

Many accounts and account-books, many files of correspondence, and
several strong boxes, garnished Mr. Grewgious’s room.  They can scarcely
be represented as having lumbered it, so conscientious and precise was
their orderly arrangement.  The apprehension of dying suddenly, and
leaving one fact or one figure with any incompleteness or obscurity
attaching to it, would have stretched Mr. Grewgious stone-dead any day.
The largest fidelity to a trust was the life-blood of the man.  There are
sorts of life-blood that course more quickly, more gaily, more
attractively; but there is no better sort in circulation.

There was no luxury in his room.  Even its comforts were limited to its
being dry and warm, and having a snug though faded fireside.  What may be
called its private life was confined to the hearth, and all easy-chair,
and an old-fashioned occasional round table that was brought out upon the
rug after business hours, from a corner where it elsewise remained turned
up like a shining mahogany shield.  Behind it, when standing thus on the
defensive, was a closet, usually containing something good to drink.  An
outer room was the clerk’s room; Mr. Grewgious’s sleeping-room was across
the common stair; and he held some not empty cellarage at the bottom of
the common stair.  Three hundred days in the year, at least, he crossed
over to the hotel in Furnival’s Inn for his dinner, and after dinner
crossed back again, to make the most of these simplicities until it
should become broad business day once more, with P. J. T., date
seventeen-forty-seven.

As Mr. Grewgious sat and wrote by his fire that afternoon, so did the
clerk of Mr. Grewgious sit and write by _his_ fire.  A pale, puffy-faced,
dark-haired person of thirty, with big dark eyes that wholly wanted
lustre, and a dissatisfied doughy complexion, that seemed to ask to be
sent to the baker’s, this attendant was a mysterious being, possessed of
some strange power over Mr. Grewgious.  As though he had been called into
existence, like a fabulous Familiar, by a magic spell which had failed
when required to dismiss him, he stuck tight to Mr. Grewgious’s stool,
although Mr. Grewgious’s comfort and convenience would manifestly have
been advanced by dispossessing him.  A gloomy person with tangled locks,
and a general air of having been reared under the shadow of that baleful
tree of Java which has given shelter to more lies than the whole
botanical kingdom, Mr. Grewgious, nevertheless, treated him with
unaccountable consideration.

‘Now, Bazzard,’ said Mr. Grewgious, on the entrance of his clerk: looking
up from his papers as he arranged them for the night: ‘what is in the
wind besides fog?’

‘Mr. Drood,’ said Bazzard.

‘What of him?’

‘Has called,’ said Bazzard.

‘You might have shown him in.’

‘I am doing it,’ said Bazzard.

The visitor came in accordingly.

‘Dear me!’ said Mr. Grewgious, looking round his pair of office candles.
‘I thought you had called and merely left your name and gone.  How do you
do, Mr. Edwin?  Dear me, you’re choking!’

‘It’s this fog,’ returned Edwin; ‘and it makes my eyes smart, like
Cayenne pepper.’

‘Is it really so bad as that?  Pray undo your wrappers.  It’s fortunate I
have so good a fire; but Mr. Bazzard has taken care of me.’

‘No I haven’t,’ said Mr. Bazzard at the door.

‘Ah! then it follows that I must have taken care of myself without
observing it,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Pray be seated in my chair.  No.  I
beg!  Coming out of such an atmosphere, in _my_ chair.’

Edwin took the easy-chair in the corner; and the fog he had brought in
with him, and the fog he took off with his greatcoat and neck-shawl, was
speedily licked up by the eager fire.

‘I look,’ said Edwin, smiling, ‘as if I had come to stop.’

‘—By the by,’ cried Mr. Grewgious; ‘excuse my interrupting you; do stop.
The fog may clear in an hour or two.  We can have dinner in from just
across Holborn.  You had better take your Cayenne pepper here than
outside; pray stop and dine.’

‘You are very kind,’ said Edwin, glancing about him as though attracted
by the notion of a new and relishing sort of gipsy-party.

‘Not at all,’ said Mr. Grewgious; ‘_you_ are very kind to join issue with
a bachelor in chambers, and take pot-luck.  And I’ll ask,’ said Mr.
Grewgious, dropping his voice, and speaking with a twinkling eye, as if
inspired with a bright thought: ‘I’ll ask Bazzard.  He mightn’t like it
else.—Bazzard!’

Bazzard reappeared.

‘Dine presently with Mr. Drood and me.’

‘If I am ordered to dine, of course I will, sir,’ was the gloomy answer.

‘Save the man!’ cried Mr. Grewgious.  ‘You’re not ordered; you’re
invited.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Bazzard; ‘in that case I don’t care if I do.’

‘That’s arranged.  And perhaps you wouldn’t mind,’ said Mr. Grewgious,
‘stepping over to the hotel in Furnival’s, and asking them to send in
materials for laying the cloth.  For dinner we’ll have a tureen of the
hottest and strongest soup available, and we’ll have the best made-dish
that can be recommended, and we’ll have a joint (such as a haunch of
mutton), and we’ll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing
of that sort that may happen to be in the bill of fare—in short, we’ll
have whatever there is on hand.’

These liberal directions Mr. Grewgious issued with his usual air of
reading an inventory, or repeating a lesson, or doing anything else by
rote.  Bazzard, after drawing out the round table, withdrew to execute
them.

‘I was a little delicate, you see,’ said Mr. Grewgious, in a lower tone,
after his clerk’s departure, ‘about employing him in the foraging or
commissariat department.  Because he mightn’t like it.’

‘He seems to have his own way, sir,’ remarked Edwin.

‘His own way?’ returned Mr. Grewgious.  ‘O dear no!  Poor fellow, you
quite mistake him.  If he had his own way, he wouldn’t be here.’

‘I wonder where he would be!’ Edwin thought.  But he only thought it,
because Mr. Grewgious came and stood himself with his back to the other
corner of the fire, and his shoulder-blades against the chimneypiece, and
collected his skirts for easy conversation.

‘I take it, without having the gift of prophecy, that you have done me
the favour of looking in to mention that you are going down yonder—where
I can tell you, you are expected—and to offer to execute any little
commission from me to my charming ward, and perhaps to sharpen me up a
bit in any proceedings?  Eh, Mr. Edwin?’

‘I called, sir, before going down, as an act of attention.’

‘Of attention!’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Ah! of course, not of impatience?’

‘Impatience, sir?’

Mr. Grewgious had meant to be arch—not that he in the remotest degree
expressed that meaning—and had brought himself into scarcely supportable
proximity with the fire, as if to burn the fullest effect of his archness
into himself, as other subtle impressions are burnt into hard metals.
But his archness suddenly flying before the composed face and manner of
his visitor, and only the fire remaining, he started and rubbed himself.

‘I have lately been down yonder,’ said Mr. Grewgious, rearranging his
skirts; ‘and that was what I referred to, when I said I could tell you
you are expected.’

‘Indeed, sir!  Yes; I knew that Pussy was looking out for me.’

‘Do you keep a cat down there?’ asked Mr. Grewgious.

Edwin coloured a little as he explained: ‘I call Rosa Pussy.’

‘O, really,’ said Mr. Grewgious, smoothing down his head; ‘that’s very
affable.’

Edwin glanced at his face, uncertain whether or no he seriously objected
to the appellation.  But Edwin might as well have glanced at the face of
a clock.

‘A pet name, sir,’ he explained again.

‘Umps,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with a nod.  But with such an extraordinary
compromise between an unqualified assent and a qualified dissent, that
his visitor was much disconcerted.

‘Did PRosa—’ Edwin began by way of recovering himself.

‘PRosa?’ repeated Mr. Grewgious.

‘I was going to say Pussy, and changed my mind;—did she tell you anything
about the Landlesses?’

‘No,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘What is the Landlesses?  An estate?  A villa?
A farm?’

‘A brother and sister.  The sister is at the Nuns’ House, and has become
a great friend of P—’

‘PRosa’s,’ Mr. Grewgious struck in, with a fixed face.

‘She is a strikingly handsome girl, sir, and I thought she might have
been described to you, or presented to you perhaps?’

‘Neither,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘But here is Bazzard.’

Bazzard returned, accompanied by two waiters—an immovable waiter, and a
flying waiter; and the three brought in with them as much fog as gave a
new roar to the fire.  The flying waiter, who had brought everything on
his shoulders, laid the cloth with amazing rapidity and dexterity; while
the immovable waiter, who had brought nothing, found fault with him.  The
flying waiter then highly polished all the glasses he had brought, and
the immovable waiter looked through them.  The flying waiter then flew
across Holborn for the soup, and flew back again, and then took another
flight for the made-dish, and flew back again, and then took another
flight for the joint and poultry, and flew back again, and between whiles
took supplementary flights for a great variety of articles, as it was
discovered from time to time that the immovable waiter had forgotten them
all.  But let the flying waiter cleave the air as he might, he was always
reproached on his return by the immovable waiter for bringing fog with
him, and being out of breath.  At the conclusion of the repast, by which
time the flying waiter was severely blown, the immovable waiter gathered
up the tablecloth under his arm with a grand air, and having sternly (not
to say with indignation) looked on at the flying waiter while he set the
clean glasses round, directed a valedictory glance towards Mr. Grewgious,
conveying: ‘Let it be clearly understood between us that the reward is
mine, and that Nil is the claim of this slave,’ and pushed the flying
waiter before him out of the room.

It was like a highly-finished miniature painting representing My Lords of
the Circumlocution Department, Commandership-in-Chief of any sort,
Government.  It was quite an edifying little picture to be hung on the
line in the National Gallery.

As the fog had been the proximate cause of this sumptuous repast, so the
fog served for its general sauce.  To hear the out-door clerks sneezing,
wheezing, and beating their feet on the gravel was a zest far surpassing
Doctor Kitchener’s.  To bid, with a shiver, the unfortunate flying waiter
shut the door before he had opened it, was a condiment of a profounder
flavour than Harvey.  And here let it be noticed, parenthetically, that
the leg of this young man, in its application to the door, evinced the
finest sense of touch: always preceding himself and tray (with something
of an angling air about it), by some seconds: and always lingering after
he and the tray had disappeared, like Macbeth’s leg when accompanying him
off the stage with reluctance to the assassination of Duncan.

The host had gone below to the cellar, and had brought up bottles of
ruby, straw-coloured, and golden drinks, which had ripened long ago in
lands where no fogs are, and had since lain slumbering in the shade.
Sparkling and tingling after so long a nap, they pushed at their corks to
help the corkscrew (like prisoners helping rioters to force their gates),
and danced out gaily.  If P. J. T. in seventeen-forty-seven, or in any
other year of his period, drank such wines—then, for a certainty, P. J.
T. was Pretty Jolly Too.

Externally, Mr. Grewgious showed no signs of being mellowed by these
glowing vintages.  Instead of his drinking them, they might have been
poured over him in his high-dried snuff form, and run to waste, for any
lights and shades they caused to flicker over his face.  Neither was his
manner influenced.  But, in his wooden way, he had observant eyes for
Edwin; and when at the end of dinner, he motioned Edwin back to his own
easy-chair in the fireside corner, and Edwin sank luxuriously into it
after very brief remonstrance, Mr. Grewgious, as he turned his seat round
towards the fire too, and smoothed his head and face, might have been
seen looking at his visitor between his smoothing fingers.

‘Bazzard!’ said Mr. Grewgious, suddenly turning to him.

‘I follow you, sir,’ returned Bazzard; who had done his work of consuming
meat and drink in a workmanlike manner, though mostly in speechlessness.

‘I drink to you, Bazzard; Mr. Edwin, success to Mr. Bazzard!’

‘Success to Mr. Bazzard!’ echoed Edwin, with a totally unfounded
appearance of enthusiasm, and with the unspoken addition: ‘What in, I
wonder!’

‘And May!’ pursued Mr. Grewgious—‘I am not at liberty to be
definite—May!—my conversational powers are so very limited that I know I
shall not come well out of this—May!—it ought to be put imaginatively,
but I have no imagination—May!—the thorn of anxiety is as nearly the mark
as I am likely to get—May it come out at last!’

Mr. Bazzard, with a frowning smile at the fire, put a hand into his
tangled locks, as if the thorn of anxiety were there; then into his
waistcoat, as if it were there; then into his pockets, as if it were
there.  In all these movements he was closely followed by the eyes of
Edwin, as if that young gentleman expected to see the thorn in action.
It was not produced, however, and Mr. Bazzard merely said: ‘I follow you,
sir, and I thank you.’

‘I am going,’ said Mr. Grewgious, jingling his glass on the table with
one hand, and bending aside under cover of the other, to whisper to
Edwin, ‘to drink to my ward.  But I put Bazzard first.  He mightn’t like
it else.’

This was said with a mysterious wink; or what would have been a wink, if,
in Mr. Grewgious’s hands, it could have been quick enough.  So Edwin
winked responsively, without the least idea what he meant by doing so.

‘And now,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘I devote a bumper to the fair and
fascinating Miss Rosa.  Bazzard, the fair and fascinating Miss Rosa!’

‘I follow you, sir,’ said Bazzard, ‘and I pledge you!’

‘And so do I!’ said Edwin.

‘Lord bless me,’ cried Mr. Grewgious, breaking the blank silence which of
course ensued: though why these pauses _should_ come upon us when we have
performed any small social rite, not directly inducive of
self-examination or mental despondency, who can tell?  ‘I am a
particularly Angular man, and yet I fancy (if I may use the word, not
having a morsel of fancy), that I could draw a picture of a true lover’s
state of mind, to-night.’

‘Let us follow you, sir,’ said Bazzard, ‘and have the picture.’

‘Mr. Edwin will correct it where it’s wrong,’ resumed Mr. Grewgious, ‘and
will throw in a few touches from the life.  I dare say it is wrong in
many particulars, and wants many touches from the life, for I was born a
Chip, and have neither soft sympathies nor soft experiences.  Well!  I
hazard the guess that the true lover’s mind is completely permeated by
the beloved object of his affections.  I hazard the guess that her dear
name is precious to him, cannot be heard or repeated without emotion, and
is preserved sacred.  If he has any distinguishing appellation of
fondness for her, it is reserved for her, and is not for common ears.  A
name that it would be a privilege to call her by, being alone with her
own bright self, it would be a liberty, a coldness, an insensibility,
almost a breach of good faith, to flaunt elsewhere.’

It was wonderful to see Mr. Grewgious sitting bolt upright, with his
hands on his knees, continuously chopping this discourse out of himself:
much as a charity boy with a very good memory might get his catechism
said: and evincing no correspondent emotion whatever, unless in a certain
occasional little tingling perceptible at the end of his nose.

‘My picture,’ Mr. Grewgious proceeded, ‘goes on to represent (under
correction from you, Mr. Edwin), the true lover as ever impatient to be
in the presence or vicinity of the beloved object of his affections; as
caring very little for his case in any other society; and as constantly
seeking that.  If I was to say seeking that, as a bird seeks its nest, I
should make an ass of myself, because that would trench upon what I
understand to be poetry; and I am so far from trenching upon poetry at
any time, that I never, to my knowledge, got within ten thousand miles of
it.  And I am besides totally unacquainted with the habits of birds,
except the birds of Staple Inn, who seek their nests on ledges, and in
gutter-pipes and chimneypots, not constructed for them by the beneficent
hand of Nature.  I beg, therefore, to be understood as foregoing the
bird’s-nest.  But my picture does represent the true lover as having no
existence separable from that of the beloved object of his affections,
and as living at once a doubled life and a halved life.  And if I do not
clearly express what I mean by that, it is either for the reason that
having no conversational powers, I cannot express what I mean, or that
having no meaning, I do not mean what I fail to express.  Which, to the
best of my belief, is not the case.’

Edwin had turned red and turned white, as certain points of this picture
came into the light.  He now sat looking at the fire, and bit his lip.

‘The speculations of an Angular man,’ resumed Mr. Grewgious, still
sitting and speaking exactly as before, ‘are probably erroneous on so
globular a topic.  But I figure to myself (subject, as before, to Mr.
Edwin’s correction), that there can be no coolness, no lassitude, no
doubt, no indifference, no half fire and half smoke state of mind, in a
real lover.  Pray am I at all near the mark in my picture?’

As abrupt in his conclusion as in his commencement and progress, he
jerked this inquiry at Edwin, and stopped when one might have supposed
him in the middle of his oration.

‘I should say, sir,’ stammered Edwin, ‘as you refer the question to me—’

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘I refer it to you, as an authority.’

‘I should say, then, sir,’ Edwin went on, embarrassed, ‘that the picture
you have drawn is generally correct; but I submit that perhaps you may be
rather hard upon the unlucky lover.’

‘Likely so,’ assented Mr. Grewgious, ‘likely so.  I am a hard man in the
grain.’

‘He may not show,’ said Edwin, ‘all he feels; or he may not—’

There he stopped so long, to find the rest of his sentence, that Mr.
Grewgious rendered his difficulty a thousand times the greater by
unexpectedly striking in with:

‘No to be sure; he _may_ not!’

After that, they all sat silent; the silence of Mr. Bazzard being
occasioned by slumber.

‘His responsibility is very great, though,’ said Mr. Grewgious at length,
with his eyes on the fire.

Edwin nodded assent, with _his_ eyes on the fire.

‘And let him be sure that he trifles with no one,’ said Mr. Grewgious;
‘neither with himself, nor with any other.’

Edwin bit his lip again, and still sat looking at the fire.

‘He must not make a plaything of a treasure.  Woe betide him if he does!
Let him take that well to heart,’ said Mr. Grewgious.

Though he said these things in short sentences, much as the
supposititious charity boy just now referred to might have repeated a
verse or two from the Book of Proverbs, there was something dreamy (for
so literal a man) in the way in which he now shook his right forefinger
at the live coals in the grate, and again fell silent.

But not for long.  As he sat upright and stiff in his chair, he suddenly
rapped his knees, like the carved image of some queer Joss or other
coming out of its reverie, and said: ‘We must finish this bottle, Mr.
Edwin.  Let me help you.  I’ll help Bazzard too, though he _is_ asleep.
He mightn’t like it else.’

He helped them both, and helped himself, and drained his glass, and stood
it bottom upward on the table, as though he had just caught a bluebottle
in it.

‘And now, Mr. Edwin,’ he proceeded, wiping his mouth and hands upon his
handkerchief: ‘to a little piece of business.  You received from me, the
other day, a certified copy of Miss Rosa’s father’s will.  You knew its
contents before, but you received it from me as a matter of business.  I
should have sent it to Mr. Jasper, but for Miss Rosa’s wishing it to come
straight to you, in preference.  You received it?’

‘Quite safely, sir.’

‘You should have acknowledged its receipt,’ said Mr. Grewgious; ‘business
being business all the world over.  However, you did not.’

‘I meant to have acknowledged it when I first came in this evening, sir.’

‘Not a business-like acknowledgment,’ returned Mr. Grewgious; ‘however,
let that pass.  Now, in that document you have observed a few words of
kindly allusion to its being left to me to discharge a little trust,
confided to me in conversation, at such time as I in my discretion may
think best.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Mr. Edwin, it came into my mind just now, when I was looking at the
fire, that I could, in my discretion, acquit myself of that trust at no
better time than the present.  Favour me with your attention, half a
minute.’

He took a bunch of keys from his pocket, singled out by the candle-light
the key he wanted, and then, with a candle in his hand, went to a bureau
or escritoire, unlocked it, touched the spring of a little secret drawer,
and took from it an ordinary ring-case made for a single ring.  With this
in his hand, he returned to his chair.  As he held it up for the young
man to see, his hand trembled.

‘Mr. Edwin, this rose of diamonds and rubies delicately set in gold, was
a ring belonging to Miss Rosa’s mother.  It was removed from her dead
hand, in my presence, with such distracted grief as I hope it may never
be my lot to contemplate again.  Hard man as I am, I am not hard enough
for that.  See how bright these stones shine!’ opening the case.  ‘And
yet the eyes that were so much brighter, and that so often looked upon
them with a light and a proud heart, have been ashes among ashes, and
dust among dust, some years!  If I had any imagination (which it is
needless to say I have not), I might imagine that the lasting beauty of
these stones was almost cruel.’

He closed the case again as he spoke.

‘This ring was given to the young lady who was drowned so early in her
beautiful and happy career, by her husband, when they first plighted
their faith to one another.  It was he who removed it from her
unconscious hand, and it was he who, when his death drew very near,
placed it in mine.  The trust in which I received it, was, that, you and
Miss Rosa growing to manhood and womanhood, and your betrothal prospering
and coming to maturity, I should give it to you to place upon her finger.
Failing those desired results, it was to remain in my possession.’

Some trouble was in the young man’s face, and some indecision was in the
action of his hand, as Mr. Grewgious, looking steadfastly at him, gave
him the ring.

‘Your placing it on her finger,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘will be the solemn
seal upon your strict fidelity to the living and the dead.  You are going
to her, to make the last irrevocable preparations for your marriage.
Take it with you.’

The young man took the little case, and placed it in his breast.

‘If anything should be amiss, if anything should be even slightly wrong,
between you; if you should have any secret consciousness that you are
committing yourself to this step for no higher reason than because you
have long been accustomed to look forward to it; then,’ said Mr.
Grewgious, ‘I charge you once more, by the living and by the dead, to
bring that ring back to me!’

Here Bazzard awoke himself by his own snoring; and, as is usual in such
cases, sat apoplectically staring at vacancy, as defying vacancy to
accuse him of having been asleep.

‘Bazzard!’ said Mr. Grewgious, harder than ever.

‘I follow you, sir,’ said Bazzard, ‘and I have been following you.’

‘In discharge of a trust, I have handed Mr. Edwin Drood a ring of
diamonds and rubies.  You see?’

Edwin reproduced the little case, and opened it; and Bazzard looked into
it.

‘I follow you both, sir,’ returned Bazzard, ‘and I witness the
transaction.’

Evidently anxious to get away and be alone, Edwin Drood now resumed his
outer clothing, muttering something about time and appointments.  The fog
was reported no clearer (by the flying waiter, who alighted from a
speculative flight in the coffee interest), but he went out into it; and
Bazzard, after his manner, ‘followed’ him.

Mr. Grewgious, left alone, walked softly and slowly to and fro, for an
hour and more.  He was restless to-night, and seemed dispirited.

‘I hope I have done right,’ he said.  ‘The appeal to him seemed
necessary.  It was hard to lose the ring, and yet it must have gone from
me very soon.’

He closed the empty little drawer with a sigh, and shut and locked the
escritoire, and came back to the solitary fireside.

‘Her ring,’ he went on.  ‘Will it come back to me?  My mind hangs about
her ring very uneasily to-night.  But that is explainable.  I have had it
so long, and I have prized it so much!  I wonder—’

He was in a wondering mood as well as a restless; for, though he checked
himself at that point, and took another walk, he resumed his wondering
when he sat down again.

‘I wonder (for the ten-thousandth time, and what a weak fool I, for what
can it signify now!) whether he confided the charge of their orphan child
to me, because he knew—Good God, how like her mother she has become!’

‘I wonder whether he ever so much as suspected that some one doted on
her, at a hopeless, speechless distance, when he struck in and won her.
I wonder whether it ever crept into his mind who that unfortunate some
one was!’

‘I wonder whether I shall sleep to-night!  At all events, I will shut out
the world with the bedclothes, and try.’

Mr. Grewgious crossed the staircase to his raw and foggy bedroom, and was
soon ready for bed.  Dimly catching sight of his face in the misty
looking-glass, he held his candle to it for a moment.

‘A likely some one, _you_, to come into anybody’s thoughts in such an
aspect!’ he exclaimed.  ‘There! there! there!  Get to bed, poor man, and
cease to jabber!’

With that, he extinguished his light, pulled up the bedclothes around
him, and with another sigh shut out the world.  And yet there are such
unexplored romantic nooks in the unlikeliest men, that even old tinderous
and touchwoody P. J. T. Possibly Jabbered Thus, at some odd times, in or
about seventeen-forty-seven.




CHAPTER XII—A NIGHT WITH DURDLES


When Mr. Sapsea has nothing better to do, towards evening, and finds the
contemplation of his own profundity becoming a little monotonous in spite
of the vastness of the subject, he often takes an airing in the Cathedral
Close and thereabout.  He likes to pass the churchyard with a swelling
air of proprietorship, and to encourage in his breast a sort of
benignant-landlord feeling, in that he has been bountiful towards that
meritorious tenant, Mrs. Sapsea, and has publicly given her a prize.  He
likes to see a stray face or two looking in through the railings, and
perhaps reading his inscription.  Should he meet a stranger coming from
the churchyard with a quick step, he is morally convinced that the
stranger is ‘with a blush retiring,’ as monumentally directed.

Mr. Sapsea’s importance has received enhancement, for he has become Mayor
of Cloisterham.  Without mayors, and many of them, it cannot be disputed
that the whole framework of society—Mr. Sapsea is confident that he
invented that forcible figure—would fall to pieces.  Mayors have been
knighted for ‘going up’ with addresses: explosive machines intrepidly
discharging shot and shell into the English Grammar.  Mr. Sapsea may ‘go
up’ with an address.  Rise, Sir Thomas Sapsea!  Of such is the salt of
the earth.

Mr. Sapsea has improved the acquaintance of Mr. Jasper, since their first
meeting to partake of port, epitaph, backgammon, beef, and salad.  Mr.
Sapsea has been received at the gatehouse with kindred hospitality; and
on that occasion Mr. Jasper seated himself at the piano, and sang to him,
tickling his ears—figuratively—long enough to present a considerable area
for tickling.  What Mr. Sapsea likes in that young man is, that he is
always ready to profit by the wisdom of his elders, and that he is sound,
sir, at the core.  In proof of which, he sang to Mr. Sapsea that evening,
no kickshaw ditties, favourites with national enemies, but gave him the
genuine George the Third home-brewed; exhorting him (as ‘my brave boys’)
to reduce to a smashed condition all other islands but this island, and
all continents, peninsulas, isthmuses, promontories, and other
geographical forms of land soever, besides sweeping the seas in all
directions.  In short, he rendered it pretty clear that Providence made a
distinct mistake in originating so small a nation of hearts of oak, and
so many other verminous peoples.

Mr. Sapsea, walking slowly this moist evening near the churchyard with
his hands behind him, on the look-out for a blushing and retiring
stranger, turns a corner, and comes instead into the goodly presence of
the Dean, conversing with the Verger and Mr. Jasper.  Mr. Sapsea makes
his obeisance, and is instantly stricken far more ecclesiastical than any
Archbishop of York or Canterbury.

‘You are evidently going to write a book about us, Mr. Jasper,’ quoth the
Dean; ‘to write a book about us.  Well!  We are very ancient, and we
ought to make a good book.  We are not so richly endowed in possessions
as in age; but perhaps you will put _that_ in your book, among other
things, and call attention to our wrongs.’

Mr. Tope, as in duty bound, is greatly entertained by this.

‘I really have no intention at all, sir,’ replies Jasper, ‘of turning
author or archæologist.  It is but a whim of mine.  And even for my whim,
Mr. Sapsea here is more accountable than I am.’

‘How so, Mr. Mayor?’ says the Dean, with a nod of good-natured
recognition of his Fetch.  ‘How is that, Mr. Mayor?’

‘I am not aware,’ Mr. Sapsea remarks, looking about him for information,
‘to what the Very Reverend the Dean does me the honour of referring.’
And then falls to studying his original in minute points of detail.

‘Durdles,’ Mr. Tope hints.

‘Ay!’ the Dean echoes; ‘Durdles, Durdles!’

‘The truth is, sir,’ explains Jasper, ‘that my curiosity in the man was
first really stimulated by Mr. Sapsea.  Mr. Sapsea’s knowledge of mankind
and power of drawing out whatever is recluse or odd around him, first led
to my bestowing a second thought upon the man: though of course I had met
him constantly about.  You would not be surprised by this, Mr. Dean, if
you had seen Mr. Sapsea deal with him in his own parlour, as I did.’

‘O!’ cries Sapsea, picking up the ball thrown to him with ineffable
complacency and pomposity; ‘yes, yes.  The Very Reverend the Dean refers
to that?  Yes.  I happened to bring Durdles and Mr. Jasper together.  I
regard Durdles as a Character.’

‘A character, Mr. Sapsea, that with a few skilful touches you turn inside
out,’ says Jasper.

‘Nay, not quite that,’ returns the lumbering auctioneer.  ‘I may have a
little influence over him, perhaps; and a little insight into his
character, perhaps.  The Very Reverend the Dean will please to bear in
mind that I have seen the world.’  Here Mr. Sapsea gets a little behind
the Dean, to inspect his coat-buttons.

‘Well!’ says the Dean, looking about him to see what has become of his
copyist: ‘I hope, Mr. Mayor, you will use your study and knowledge of
Durdles to the good purpose of exhorting him not to break our worthy and
respected Choir-Master’s neck; we cannot afford it; his head and voice
are much too valuable to us.’

Mr. Tope is again highly entertained, and, having fallen into respectful
convulsions of laughter, subsides into a deferential murmur, importing
that surely any gentleman would deem it a pleasure and an honour to have
his neck broken, in return for such a compliment from such a source.

‘I will take it upon myself, sir,’ observes Sapsea loftily, ‘to answer
for Mr. Jasper’s neck.  I will tell Durdles to be careful of it.  He will
mind what _I_ say.  How is it at present endangered?’ he inquires,
looking about him with magnificent patronage.

‘Only by my making a moonlight expedition with Durdles among the tombs,
vaults, towers, and ruins,’ returns Jasper.  ‘You remember suggesting,
when you brought us together, that, as a lover of the picturesque, it
might be worth my while?’

‘I remember!’ replies the auctioneer.  And the solemn idiot really
believes that he does remember.

‘Profiting by your hint,’ pursues Jasper, ‘I have had some day-rambles
with the extraordinary old fellow, and we are to make a moonlight
hole-and-corner exploration to-night.’

‘And here he is,’ says the Dean.

Durdles with his dinner-bundle in his hand, is indeed beheld slouching
towards them.  Slouching nearer, and perceiving the Dean, he pulls off
his hat, and is slouching away with it under his arm, when Mr. Sapsea
stops him.

‘Mind you take care of my friend,’ is the injunction Mr. Sapsea lays upon
him.

‘What friend o’ yourn is dead?’ asks Durdles.  ‘No orders has come in for
any friend o’ yourn.’

‘I mean my live friend there.’

‘O! him?’ says Durdles.  ‘He can take care of himself, can Mister
Jarsper.’

‘But do you take care of him too,’ says Sapsea.

Whom Durdles (there being command in his tone) surlily surveys from head
to foot.

‘With submission to his Reverence the Dean, if you’ll mind what concerns
you, Mr. Sapsea, Durdles he’ll mind what concerns him.’

‘You’re out of temper,’ says Mr. Sapsea, winking to the company to
observe how smoothly he will manage him.  ‘My friend concerns me, and Mr.
Jasper is my friend.  And you are my friend.’

‘Don’t you get into a bad habit of boasting,’ retorts Durdles, with a
grave cautionary nod.  ‘It’ll grow upon you.’

         [Picture: Durdles cautions Mr. Sapsea against boasting]

‘You are out of temper,’ says Sapsea again; reddening, but again sinking
to the company.

‘I own to it,’ returns Durdles; ‘I don’t like liberties.’

Mr. Sapsea winks a third wink to the company, as who should say: ‘I think
you will agree with me that I have settled _his_ business;’ and stalks
out of the controversy.

Durdles then gives the Dean a good evening, and adding, as he puts his
hat on, ‘You’ll find me at home, Mister Jarsper, as agreed, when you want
me; I’m a-going home to clean myself,’ soon slouches out of sight.  This
going home to clean himself is one of the man’s incomprehensible
compromises with inexorable facts; he, and his hat, and his boots, and
his clothes, never showing any trace of cleaning, but being uniformly in
one condition of dust and grit.

The lamplighter now dotting the quiet Close with specks of light, and
running at a great rate up and down his little ladder with that
object—his little ladder under the sacred shadow of whose inconvenience
generations had grown up, and which all Cloisterham would have stood
aghast at the idea of abolishing—the Dean withdraws to his dinner, Mr.
Tope to his tea, and Mr. Jasper to his piano.  There, with no light but
that of the fire, he sits chanting choir-music in a low and beautiful
voice, for two or three hours; in short, until it has been for some time
dark, and the moon is about to rise.

Then he closes his piano softly, softly changes his coat for a
pea-jacket, with a goodly wicker-cased bottle in its largest pocket, and
putting on a low-crowned, flap-brimmed hat, goes softly out.  Why does he
move so softly to-night?  No outward reason is apparent for it.  Can
there be any sympathetic reason crouching darkly within him?

Repairing to Durdles’s unfinished house, or hole in the city wall, and
seeing a light within it, he softly picks his course among the
gravestones, monuments, and stony lumber of the yard, already touched
here and there, sidewise, by the rising moon.  The two journeymen have
left their two great saws sticking in their blocks of stone; and two
skeleton journeymen out of the Dance of Death might be grinning in the
shadow of their sheltering sentry-boxes, about to slash away at cutting
out the gravestones of the next two people destined to die in
Cloisterham.  Likely enough, the two think little of that now, being
alive, and perhaps merry.  Curious, to make a guess at the two;—or say
one of the two!

‘Ho!  Durdles!’

The light moves, and he appears with it at the door.  He would seem to
have been ‘cleaning himself’ with the aid of a bottle, jug, and tumbler;
for no other cleansing instruments are visible in the bare brick room
with rafters overhead and no plastered ceiling, into which he shows his
visitor.

‘Are you ready?’

‘I am ready, Mister Jarsper.  Let the old ’uns come out if they dare,
when we go among their tombs.  My spirit is ready for ’em.’

‘Do you mean animal spirits, or ardent?’

‘The one’s the t’other,’ answers Durdles, ‘and I mean ’em both.’

He takes a lantern from a hook, puts a match or two in his pocket
wherewith to light it, should there be need; and they go out together,
dinner-bundle and all.

Surely an unaccountable sort of expedition!  That Durdles himself, who is
always prowling among old graves, and ruins, like a Ghoul—that he should
be stealing forth to climb, and dive, and wander without an object, is
nothing extraordinary; but that the Choir-Master or any one else should
hold it worth his while to be with him, and to study moonlight effects in
such company is another affair.  Surely an unaccountable sort of
expedition, therefore!

‘’Ware that there mound by the yard-gate, Mister Jarsper.’

‘I see it.  What is it?’

‘Lime.’

Mr. Jasper stops, and waits for him to come up, for he lags behind.
‘What you call quick-lime?’

‘Ay!’ says Durdles; ‘quick enough to eat your boots.  With a little handy
stirring, quick enough to eat your bones.’

They go on, presently passing the red windows of the Travellers’
Twopenny, and emerging into the clear moonlight of the Monks’ Vineyard.
This crossed, they come to Minor Canon Corner: of which the greater part
lies in shadow until the moon shall rise higher in the sky.

The sound of a closing house-door strikes their ears, and two men come
out.  These are Mr. Crisparkle and Neville.  Jasper, with a strange and
sudden smile upon his face, lays the palm of his hand upon the breast of
Durdles, stopping him where he stands.

At that end of Minor Canon Corner the shadow is profound in the existing
state of the light: at that end, too, there is a piece of old dwarf wall,
breast high, the only remaining boundary of what was once a garden, but
is now the thoroughfare.  Jasper and Durdles would have turned this wall
in another instant; but, stopping so short, stand behind it.

‘Those two are only sauntering,’ Jasper whispers; ‘they will go out into
the moonlight soon.  Let us keep quiet here, or they will detain us, or
want to join us, or what not.’

Durdles nods assent, and falls to munching some fragments from his
bundle.  Jasper folds his arms upon the top of the wall, and, with his
chin resting on them, watches.  He takes no note whatever of the Minor
Canon, but watches Neville, as though his eye were at the trigger of a
loaded rifle, and he had covered him, and were going to fire.  A sense of
destructive power is so expressed in his face, that even Durdles pauses
in his munching, and looks at him, with an unmunched something in his
cheek.

Meanwhile Mr. Crisparkle and Neville walk to and fro, quietly talking
together.  What they say, cannot be heard consecutively; but Mr. Jasper
has already distinguished his own name more than once.

‘This is the first day of the week,’ Mr. Crisparkle can be distinctly
heard to observe, as they turn back; ‘and the last day of the week is
Christmas Eve.’

‘You may be certain of me, sir.’

The echoes were favourable at those points, but as the two approach, the
sound of their talking becomes confused again.  The word ‘confidence,’
shattered by the echoes, but still capable of being pieced together, is
uttered by Mr. Crisparkle.  As they draw still nearer, this fragment of a
reply is heard: ‘Not deserved yet, but shall be, sir.’  As they turn away
again, Jasper again hears his own name, in connection with the words from
Mr. Crisparkle: ‘Remember that I said I answered for you confidently.’
Then the sound of their talk becomes confused again; they halting for a
little while, and some earnest action on the part of Neville succeeding.
When they move once more, Mr. Crisparkle is seen to look up at the sky,
and to point before him.  They then slowly disappear; passing out into
the moonlight at the opposite end of the Corner.

It is not until they are gone, that Mr. Jasper moves.  But then he turns
to Durdles, and bursts into a fit of laughter.  Durdles, who still has
that suspended something in his cheek, and who sees nothing to laugh at,
stares at him until Mr. Jasper lays his face down on his arms to have his
laugh out.  Then Durdles bolts the something, as if desperately resigning
himself to indigestion.

Among those secluded nooks there is very little stir or movement after
dark.  There is little enough in the high tide of the day, but there is
next to none at night.  Besides that the cheerfully frequented High
Street lies nearly parallel to the spot (the old Cathedral rising between
the two), and is the natural channel in which the Cloisterham traffic
flows, a certain awful hush pervades the ancient pile, the cloisters, and
the churchyard, after dark, which not many people care to encounter.  Ask
the first hundred citizens of Cloisterham, met at random in the streets
at noon, if they believed in Ghosts, they would tell you no; but put them
to choose at night between these eerie Precincts and the thoroughfare of
shops, and you would find that ninety-nine declared for the longer round
and the more frequented way.  The cause of this is not to be found in any
local superstition that attaches to the Precincts—albeit a mysterious
lady, with a child in her arms and a rope dangling from her neck, has
been seen flitting about there by sundry witnesses as intangible as
herself—but it is to be sought in the innate shrinking of dust with the
breath of life in it from dust out of which the breath of life has
passed; also, in the widely diffused, and almost as widely
unacknowledged, reflection: ‘If the dead do, under any circumstances,
become visible to the living, these are such likely surroundings for the
purpose that I, the living, will get out of them as soon as I can.’
Hence, when Mr. Jasper and Durdles pause to glance around them, before
descending into the crypt by a small side door, of which the latter has a
key, the whole expanse of moonlight in their view is utterly deserted.
One might fancy that the tide of life was stemmed by Mr. Jasper’s own
gatehouse.  The murmur of the tide is heard beyond; but no wave passes
the archway, over which his lamp burns red behind his curtain, as if the
building were a Lighthouse.

They enter, locking themselves in, descend the rugged steps, and are down
in the Crypt.  The lantern is not wanted, for the moonlight strikes in at
the groined windows, bare of glass, the broken frames for which cast
patterns on the ground.  The heavy pillars which support the roof
engender masses of black shade, but between them there are lanes of
light.  Up and down these lanes they walk, Durdles discoursing of the
‘old uns’ he yet counts on disinterring, and slapping a wall, in which he
considers ‘a whole family on ’em’ to be stoned and earthed up, just as if
he were a familiar friend of the family.  The taciturnity of Durdles is
for the time overcome by Mr. Jasper’s wicker bottle, which circulates
freely;—in the sense, that is to say, that its contents enter freely into
Mr. Durdles’s circulation, while Mr. Jasper only rinses his mouth once,
and casts forth the rinsing.

They are to ascend the great Tower.  On the steps by which they rise to
the Cathedral, Durdles pauses for new store of breath.  The steps are
very dark, but out of the darkness they can see the lanes of light they
have traversed.  Durdles seats himself upon a step.  Mr. Jasper seats
himself upon another.  The odour from the wicker bottle (which has
somehow passed into Durdles’s keeping) soon intimates that the cork has
been taken out; but this is not ascertainable through the sense of sight,
since neither can descry the other.  And yet, in talking, they turn to
one another, as though their faces could commune together.

‘This is good stuff, Mister Jarsper!’

‘It is very good stuff, I hope.—I bought it on purpose.’

‘They don’t show, you see, the old uns don’t, Mister Jarsper!’

‘It would be a more confused world than it is, if they could.’

‘Well, it _would_ lead towards a mixing of things,’ Durdles acquiesces:
pausing on the remark, as if the idea of ghosts had not previously
presented itself to him in a merely inconvenient light, domestically or
chronologically.  ‘But do you think there may be Ghosts of other things,
though not of men and women?’

‘What things?  Flower-beds and watering-pots? horses and harness?’

‘No.  Sounds.’

‘What sounds?’

‘Cries.’

‘What cries do you mean?  Chairs to mend?’

‘No.  I mean screeches.  Now I’ll tell you, Mr. Jarsper.  Wait a bit till
I put the bottle right.’  Here the cork is evidently taken out again, and
replaced again.  ‘There!  _Now_ it’s right!  This time last year, only a
few days later, I happened to have been doing what was correct by the
season, in the way of giving it the welcome it had a right to expect,
when them town-boys set on me at their worst.  At length I gave ’em the
slip, and turned in here.  And here I fell asleep.  And what woke me?
The ghost of a cry.  The ghost of one terrific shriek, which shriek was
followed by the ghost of the howl of a dog: a long, dismal, woeful howl,
such as a dog gives when a person’s dead.  That was _my_ last Christmas
Eve.’

‘What do you mean?’ is the very abrupt, and, one might say, fierce
retort.

‘I mean that I made inquiries everywhere about, and, that no living ears
but mine heard either that cry or that howl.  So I say they was both
ghosts; though why they came to me, I’ve never made out.’

‘I thought you were another kind of man,’ says Jasper, scornfully.

‘So I thought myself,’ answers Durdles with his usual composure; ‘and yet
I was picked out for it.’

Jasper had risen suddenly, when he asked him what he meant, and he now
says, ‘Come; we shall freeze here; lead the way.’

Durdles complies, not over-steadily; opens the door at the top of the
steps with the key he has already used; and so emerges on the Cathedral
level, in a passage at the side of the chancel.  Here, the moonlight is
so very bright again that the colours of the nearest stained-glass window
are thrown upon their faces.  The appearance of the unconscious Durdles,
holding the door open for his companion to follow, as if from the grave,
is ghastly enough, with a purple hand across his face, and a yellow
splash upon his brow; but he bears the close scrutiny of his companion in
an insensible way, although it is prolonged while the latter fumbles
among his pockets for a key confided to him that will open an iron gate,
so to enable them to pass to the staircase of the great tower.

‘That and the bottle are enough for you to carry,’ he says, giving it to
Durdles; ‘hand your bundle to me; I am younger and longer-winded than
you.’  Durdles hesitates for a moment between bundle and bottle; but
gives the preference to the bottle as being by far the better company,
and consigns the dry weight to his fellow-explorer.

Then they go up the winding staircase of the great tower, toilsomely,
turning and turning, and lowering their heads to avoid the stairs above,
or the rough stone pivot around which they twist.  Durdles has lighted
his lantern, by drawing from the cold, hard wall a spark of that
mysterious fire which lurks in everything, and, guided by this speck,
they clamber up among the cobwebs and the dust.  Their way lies through
strange places.  Twice or thrice they emerge into level, low-arched
galleries, whence they can look down into the moon-lit nave; and where
Durdles, waving his lantern, waves the dim angels’ heads upon the corbels
of the roof, seeming to watch their progress.  Anon they turn into
narrower and steeper staircases, and the night-air begins to blow upon
them, and the chirp of some startled jackdaw or frightened rook precedes
the heavy beating of wings in a confined space, and the beating down of
dust and straws upon their heads.  At last, leaving their light behind a
stair—for it blows fresh up here—they look down on Cloisterham, fair to
see in the moonlight: its ruined habitations and sanctuaries of the dead,
at the tower’s base: its moss-softened red-tiled roofs and red-brick
houses of the living, clustered beyond: its river winding down from the
mist on the horizon, as though that were its source, and already heaving
with a restless knowledge of its approach towards the sea.

Once again, an unaccountable expedition this!  Jasper (always moving
softly with no visible reason) contemplates the scene, and especially
that stillest part of it which the Cathedral overshadows.  But he
contemplates Durdles quite as curiously, and Durdles is by times
conscious of his watchful eyes.

Only by times, because Durdles is growing drowsy.  As aëronauts lighten
the load they carry, when they wish to rise, similarly Durdles has
lightened the wicker bottle in coming up.  Snatches of sleep surprise him
on his legs, and stop him in his talk.  A mild fit of calenture seizes
him, in which he deems that the ground so far below, is on a level with
the tower, and would as lief walk off the tower into the air as not.
Such is his state when they begin to come down.  And as aëronauts make
themselves heavier when they wish to descend, similarly Durdles charges
himself with more liquid from the wicker bottle, that he may come down
the better.

The iron gate attained and locked—but not before Durdles has tumbled
twice, and cut an eyebrow open once—they descend into the crypt again,
with the intent of issuing forth as they entered.  But, while returning
among those lanes of light, Durdles becomes so very uncertain, both of
foot and speech, that he half drops, half throws himself down, by one of
the heavy pillars, scarcely less heavy than itself, and indistinctly
appeals to his companion for forty winks of a second each.

‘If you will have it so, or must have it so,’ replies Jasper, ‘I’ll not
leave you here.  Take them, while I walk to and fro.’

Durdles is asleep at once; and in his sleep he dreams a dream.

It is not much of a dream, considering the vast extent of the domains of
dreamland, and their wonderful productions; it is only remarkable for
being unusually restless and unusually real.  He dreams of lying there,
asleep, and yet counting his companion’s footsteps as he walks to and
fro.  He dreams that the footsteps die away into distance of time and of
space, and that something touches him, and that something falls from his
hand.  Then something clinks and gropes about, and he dreams that he is
alone for so long a time, that the lanes of light take new directions as
the moon advances in her course.  From succeeding unconsciousness he
passes into a dream of slow uneasiness from cold; and painfully awakes to
a perception of the lanes of light—really changed, much as he had
dreamed—and Jasper walking among them, beating his hands and feet.

‘Holloa!’ Durdles cries out, unmeaningly alarmed.

‘Awake at last?’ says Jasper, coming up to him.  ‘Do you know that your
forties have stretched into thousands?’

‘No.’

‘They have though.’

‘What’s the time?’

‘Hark!  The bells are going in the Tower!’

They strike four quarters, and then the great bell strikes.

‘Two!’ cries Durdles, scrambling up; ‘why didn’t you try to wake me,
Mister Jarsper?’

‘I did.  I might as well have tried to wake the dead—your own family of
dead, up in the corner there.’

‘Did you touch me?’

‘Touch you!  Yes.  Shook you.’

As Durdles recalls that touching something in his dream, he looks down on
the pavement, and sees the key of the crypt door lying close to where he
himself lay.

‘I dropped you, did I?’ he says, picking it up, and recalling that part
of his dream.  As he gathers himself up again into an upright position,
or into a position as nearly upright as he ever maintains, he is again
conscious of being watched by his companion.

‘Well?’ says Jasper, smiling, ‘are you quite ready?  Pray don’t hurry.’

‘Let me get my bundle right, Mister Jarsper, and I’m with you.’  As he
ties it afresh, he is once more conscious that he is very narrowly
observed.

‘What do you suspect me of, Mister Jarsper?’ he asks, with drunken
displeasure.  ‘Let them as has any suspicions of Durdles name ’em.’

‘I’ve no suspicions of you, my good Mr. Durdles; but I have suspicions
that my bottle was filled with something stiffer than either of us
supposed.  And I also have suspicions,’ Jasper adds, taking it from the
pavement and turning it bottom upwards, ‘that it’s empty.’

Durdles condescends to laugh at this.  Continuing to chuckle when his
laugh is over, as though remonstrant with himself on his drinking powers,
he rolls to the door and unlocks it.  They both pass out, and Durdles
relocks it, and pockets his key.

‘A thousand thanks for a curious and interesting night,’ says Jasper,
giving him his hand; ‘you can make your own way home?’

‘I should think so!’ answers Durdles.  ‘If you was to offer Durdles the
affront to show him his way home, he wouldn’t go home.

    Durdles wouldn’t go home till morning;
    And _then_ Durdles wouldn’t go home,

Durdles wouldn’t.’  This with the utmost defiance.

‘Good-night, then.’

‘Good-night, Mister Jarsper.’

Each is turning his own way, when a sharp whistle rends the silence, and
the jargon is yelped out:

    Widdy widdy wen!
    I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten.
    Widdy widdy wy!
    Then—E—don’t—go—then—I—shy—
    Widdy Widdy Wake-cock warning!’

Instantly afterwards, a rapid fire of stones rattles at the Cathedral
wall, and the hideous small boy is beheld opposite, dancing in the
moonlight.

‘What!  Is that baby-devil on the watch there!’ cries Jasper in a fury:
so quickly roused, and so violent, that he seems an older devil himself.
‘I shall shed the blood of that impish wretch!  I know I shall do it!’
Regardless of the fire, though it hits him more than once, he rushes at
Deputy, collars him, and tries to bring him across.  But Deputy is not to
be so easily brought across.  With a diabolical insight into the
strongest part of his position, he is no sooner taken by the throat than
he curls up his legs, forces his assailant to hang him, as it were, and
gurgles in his throat, and screws his body, and twists, as already
undergoing the first agonies of strangulation.  There is nothing for it
but to drop him.  He instantly gets himself together, backs over to
Durdles, and cries to his assailant, gnashing the great gap in front of
his mouth with rage and malice:

‘I’ll blind yer, s’elp me!  I’ll stone yer eyes out, s’elp me!  If I
don’t have yer eyesight, bellows me!’  At the same time dodging behind
Durdles, and snarling at Jasper, now from this side of him, and now from
that: prepared, if pounced upon, to dart away in all manner of
curvilinear directions, and, if run down after all, to grovel in the
dust, and cry: ‘Now, hit me when I’m down!  Do it!’

‘Don’t hurt the boy, Mister Jarsper,’ urges Durdles, shielding him.
‘Recollect yourself.’

‘He followed us to-night, when we first came here!’

‘Yer lie, I didn’t!’ replies Deputy, in his one form of polite
contradiction.

‘He has been prowling near us ever since!’

‘Yer lie, I haven’t,’ returns Deputy.  ‘I’d only jist come out for my
’elth when I see you two a-coming out of the Kin-freederel.  If

    I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten!’

(with the usual rhythm and dance, though dodging behind Durdles), ‘it
ain’t _any_ fault, is it?’

‘Take him home, then,’ retorts Jasper, ferociously, though with a strong
check upon himself, ‘and let my eyes be rid of the sight of you!’

Deputy, with another sharp whistle, at once expressing his relief, and
his commencement of a milder stoning of Mr. Durdles, begins stoning that
respectable gentleman home, as if he were a reluctant ox.  Mr. Jasper
goes to his gatehouse, brooding.  And thus, as everything comes to an
end, the unaccountable expedition comes to an end—for the time.




CHAPTER XIII—BOTH AT THEIR BEST


Miss Twinkleton’s establishment was about to undergo a serene hush.  The
Christmas recess was at hand.  What had once, and at no remote period,
been called, even by the erudite Miss Twinkleton herself, ‘the half;’ but
what was now called, as being more elegant, and more strictly collegiate,
‘the term,’ would expire to-morrow.  A noticeable relaxation of
discipline had for some few days pervaded the Nuns’ House.  Club suppers
had occurred in the bedrooms, and a dressed tongue had been carved with a
pair of scissors, and handed round with the curling tongs.  Portions of
marmalade had likewise been distributed on a service of plates
constructed of curlpaper; and cowslip wine had been quaffed from the
small squat measuring glass in which little Rickitts (a junior of weakly
constitution) took her steel drops daily.  The housemaids had been bribed
with various fragments of riband, and sundry pairs of shoes more or less
down at heel, to make no mention of crumbs in the beds; the airiest
costumes had been worn on these festive occasions; and the daring Miss
Ferdinand had even surprised the company with a sprightly solo on the
comb-and-curlpaper, until suffocated in her own pillow by two
flowing-haired executioners.

Nor were these the only tokens of dispersal.  Boxes appeared in the
bedrooms (where they were capital at other times), and a surprising
amount of packing took place, out of all proportion to the amount packed.
Largess, in the form of odds and ends of cold cream and pomatum, and also
of hairpins, was freely distributed among the attendants.  On charges of
inviolable secrecy, confidences were interchanged respecting golden youth
of England expected to call, ‘at home,’ on the first opportunity.  Miss
Giggles (deficient in sentiment) did indeed profess that she, for her
part, acknowledged such homage by making faces at the golden youth; but
this young lady was outvoted by an immense majority.

On the last night before a recess, it was always expressly made a point
of honour that nobody should go to sleep, and that Ghosts should be
encouraged by all possible means.  This compact invariably broke down,
and all the young ladies went to sleep very soon, and got up very early.

The concluding ceremony came off at twelve o’clock on the day of
departure; when Miss Twinkleton, supported by Mrs. Tisher, held a
drawing-room in her own apartment (the globes already covered with brown
Holland), where glasses of white-wine and plates of cut pound-cake were
discovered on the table.  Miss Twinkleton then said: Ladies, another
revolving year had brought us round to that festive period at which the
first feelings of our nature bounded in our—Miss Twinkleton was annually
going to add ‘bosoms,’ but annually stopped on the brink of that
expression, and substituted ‘hearts.’  Hearts; our hearts.  Hem!  Again a
revolving year, ladies, had brought us to a pause in our studies—let us
hope our greatly advanced studies—and, like the mariner in his bark, the
warrior in his tent, the captive in his dungeon, and the traveller in his
various conveyances, we yearned for home.  Did we say, on such an
occasion, in the opening words of Mr. Addison’s impressive tragedy:

    ‘The dawn is overcast, the morning lowers,
    And heavily in clouds brings on the day,
    The great, th’ important day—?’

Not so.  From horizon to zenith all was _couleur de rose_, for all was
redolent of our relations and friends.  Might _we_ find _them_ prospering
as _we_ expected; might _they_ find _us_ prospering as _they_ expected!
Ladies, we would now, with our love to one another, wish one another
good-bye, and happiness, until we met again.  And when the time should
come for our resumption of those pursuits which (here a general
depression set in all round), pursuits which, pursuits which;—then let us
ever remember what was said by the Spartan General, in words too trite
for repetition, at the battle it were superfluous to specify.

The handmaidens of the establishment, in their best caps, then handed the
trays, and the young ladies sipped and crumbled, and the bespoken coaches
began to choke the street.  Then leave-taking was not long about; and
Miss Twinkleton, in saluting each young lady’s cheek, confided to her an
exceedingly neat letter, addressed to her next friend at law, ‘with Miss
Twinkleton’s best compliments’ in the corner.  This missive she handed
with an air as if it had not the least connexion with the bill, but were
something in the nature of a delicate and joyful surprise.

So many times had Rosa seen such dispersals, and so very little did she
know of any other Home, that she was contented to remain where she was,
and was even better contented than ever before, having her latest friend
with her.  And yet her latest friendship had a blank place in it of which
she could not fail to be sensible.  Helena Landless, having been a party
to her brother’s revelation about Rosa, and having entered into that
compact of silence with Mr. Crisparkle, shrank from any allusion to Edwin
Drood’s name.  Why she so avoided it, was mysterious to Rosa, but she
perfectly perceived the fact.  But for the fact, she might have relieved
her own little perplexed heart of some of its doubts and hesitations, by
taking Helena into her confidence.  As it was, she had no such vent: she
could only ponder on her own difficulties, and wonder more and more why
this avoidance of Edwin’s name should last, now that she knew—for so much
Helena had told her—that a good understanding was to be reëstablished
between the two young men, when Edwin came down.

It would have made a pretty picture, so many pretty girls kissing Rosa in
the cold porch of the Nuns’ House, and that sunny little creature peeping
out of it (unconscious of sly faces carved on spout and gable peeping at
her), and waving farewells to the departing coaches, as if she
represented the spirit of rosy youth abiding in the place to keep it
bright and warm in its desertion.  The hoarse High Street became musical
with the cry, in various silvery voices, ‘Good-bye, Rosebud darling!’ and
the effigy of Mr. Sapsea’s father over the opposite doorway seemed to say
to mankind: ‘Gentlemen, favour me with your attention to this charming
little last lot left behind, and bid with a spirit worthy of the
occasion!’  Then the staid street, so unwontedly sparkling, youthful, and
fresh for a few rippling moments, ran dry, and Cloisterham was itself
again.

                  [Picture: “Good-bye, Rosebud darling”]

If Rosebud in her bower now waited Edwin Drood’s coming with an uneasy
heart, Edwin for his part was uneasy too.  With far less force of purpose
in his composition than the childish beauty, crowned by acclamation fairy
queen of Miss Twinkleton’s establishment, he had a conscience, and Mr.
Grewgious had pricked it.  That gentleman’s steady convictions of what
was right and what was wrong in such a case as his, were neither to be
frowned aside nor laughed aside.  They would not be moved.  But for the
dinner in Staple Inn, and but for the ring he carried in the breast
pocket of his coat, he would have drifted into their wedding-day without
another pause for real thought, loosely trusting that all would go well,
left alone.  But that serious putting him on his truth to the living and
the dead had brought him to a check.  He must either give the ring to
Rosa, or he must take it back.  Once put into this narrowed way of
action, it was curious that he began to consider Rosa’s claims upon him
more unselfishly than he had ever considered them before, and began to be
less sure of himself than he had ever been in all his easy-going days.

‘I will be guided by what she says, and by how we get on,’ was his
decision, walking from the gatehouse to the Nuns’ House.  ‘Whatever comes
of it, I will bear his words in mind, and try to be true to the living
and the dead.’

Rosa was dressed for walking.  She expected him.  It was a bright, frosty
day, and Miss Twinkleton had already graciously sanctioned fresh air.
Thus they got out together before it became necessary for either Miss
Twinkleton, or the deputy high-priest Mrs. Tisher, to lay even so much as
one of those usual offerings on the shrine of Propriety.

‘My dear Eddy,’ said Rosa, when they had turned out of the High Street,
and had got among the quiet walks in the neighbourhood of the Cathedral
and the river: ‘I want to say something very serious to you.  I have been
thinking about it for a long, long time.’

‘I want to be serious with you too, Rosa dear.  I mean to be serious and
earnest.’

‘Thank you, Eddy.  And you will not think me unkind because I begin, will
you?  You will not think I speak for myself only, because I speak first?
That would not be generous, would it?  And I know you are generous!’

He said, ‘I hope I am not ungenerous to you, Rosa.’  He called her Pussy
no more.  Never again.

‘And there is no fear,’ pursued Rosa, ‘of our quarrelling, is there?
Because, Eddy,’ clasping her hand on his arm, ‘we have so much reason to
be very lenient to each other!’

‘We will be, Rosa.’

‘That’s a dear good boy!  Eddy, let us be courageous.  Let us change to
brother and sister from this day forth.’

‘Never be husband and wife?’

‘Never!’

Neither spoke again for a little while.  But after that pause he said,
with some effort:

‘Of course I know that this has been in both our minds, Rosa, and of
course I am in honour bound to confess freely that it does not originate
with you.’

‘No, nor with you, dear,’ she returned, with pathetic earnestness.  ‘That
sprung up between us.  You are not truly happy in our engagement; I am
not truly happy in it.  O, I am so sorry, so sorry!’  And there she broke
into tears.

‘I am deeply sorry too, Rosa.  Deeply sorry for you.’

‘And I for you, poor boy!  And I for you!’

This pure young feeling, this gentle and forbearing feeling of each
towards the other, brought with it its reward in a softening light that
seemed to shine on their position.  The relations between them did not
look wilful, or capricious, or a failure, in such a light; they became
elevated into something more self-denying, honourable, affectionate, and
true.

‘If we knew yesterday,’ said Rosa, as she dried her eyes, ‘and we did
know yesterday, and on many, many yesterdays, that we were far from right
together in those relations which were not of our own choosing, what
better could we do to-day than change them?  It is natural that we should
be sorry, and you see how sorry we both are; but how much better to be
sorry now than then!’

‘When, Rosa?’

‘When it would be too late.  And then we should be angry, besides.’

Another silence fell upon them.

‘And you know,’ said Rosa innocently, ‘you couldn’t like me then; and you
can always like me now, for I shall not be a drag upon you, or a worry to
you.  And I can always like you now, and your sister will not tease or
trifle with you.  I often did when I was not your sister, and I beg your
pardon for it.’

‘Don’t let us come to that, Rosa; or I shall want more pardoning than I
like to think of.’

‘No, indeed, Eddy; you are too hard, my generous boy, upon yourself.  Let
us sit down, brother, on these ruins, and let me tell you how it was with
us.  I think I know, for I have considered about it very much since you
were here last time.  You liked me, didn’t you?  You thought I was a nice
little thing?’

‘Everybody thinks that, Rosa.’

‘Do they?’  She knitted her brow musingly for a moment, and then flashed
out with the bright little induction: ‘Well, but say they do.  Surely it
was not enough that you should think of me only as other people did; now,
was it?’

The point was not to be got over.  It was not enough.

‘And that is just what I mean; that is just how it was with us,’ said
Rosa.  ‘You liked me very well, and you had grown used to me, and had
grown used to the idea of our being married.  You accepted the situation
as an inevitable kind of thing, didn’t you?  It was to be, you thought,
and why discuss or dispute it?’

It was new and strange to him to have himself presented to himself so
clearly, in a glass of her holding up.  He had always patronised her, in
his superiority to her share of woman’s wit.  Was that but another
instance of something radically amiss in the terms on which they had been
gliding towards a life-long bondage?

‘All this that I say of you is true of me as well, Eddy.  Unless it was,
I might not be bold enough to say it.  Only, the difference between us
was, that by little and little there crept into my mind a habit of
thinking about it, instead of dismissing it.  My life is not so busy as
yours, you see, and I have not so many things to think of.  So I thought
about it very much, and I cried about it very much too (though that was
not your fault, poor boy); when all at once my guardian came down, to
prepare for my leaving the Nuns’ House.  I tried to hint to him that I
was not quite settled in my mind, but I hesitated and failed, and he
didn’t understand me. But he is a good, good man.  And he put before me
so kindly, and yet so strongly, how seriously we ought to consider, in
our circumstances, that I resolved to speak to you the next moment we
were alone and grave.  And if I seemed to come to it easily just now,
because I came to it all at once, don’t think it was so really, Eddy, for
O, it was very, very hard, and O, I am very, very sorry!’

Her full heart broke into tears again.  He put his arm about her waist,
and they walked by the river-side together.

‘Your guardian has spoken to me too, Rosa dear.  I saw him before I left
London.’  His right hand was in his breast, seeking the ring; but he
checked it, as he thought: ‘If I am to take it back, why should I tell
her of it?’

‘And that made you more serious about it, didn’t it, Eddy?  And if I had
not spoken to you, as I have, you would have spoken to me?  I hope you
can tell me so?  I don’t like it to be _all_ my doing, though it _is_ so
much better for us.’

‘Yes, I should have spoken; I should have put everything before you; I
came intending to do it.  But I never could have spoken to you as you
have spoken to me, Rosa.’

‘Don’t say you mean so coldly or unkindly, Eddy, please, if you can help
it.’

‘I mean so sensibly and delicately, so wisely and affectionately.’

‘That’s my dear brother!’  She kissed his hand in a little rapture.  ‘The
dear girls will be dreadfully disappointed,’ added Rosa, laughing, with
the dewdrops glistening in her bright eyes.  ‘They have looked forward to
it so, poor pets!’

‘Ah! but I fear it will be a worse disappointment to Jack,’ said Edwin
Drood, with a start.  ‘I never thought of Jack!’

Her swift and intent look at him as he said the words could no more be
recalled than a flash of lightning can.  But it appeared as though she
would have instantly recalled it, if she could; for she looked down,
confused, and breathed quickly.

‘You don’t doubt its being a blow to Jack, Rosa?’

She merely replied, and that evasively and hurriedly: Why should she?
She had not thought about it.  He seemed, to her, to have so little to do
with it.

‘My dear child! can you suppose that any one so wrapped up in
another—Mrs. Tope’s expression: not mine—as Jack is in me, could fail to
be struck all of a heap by such a sudden and complete change in my life?
I say sudden, because it will be sudden to _him_, you know.’

She nodded twice or thrice, and her lips parted as if she would have
assented.  But she uttered no sound, and her breathing was no slower.

‘How shall I tell Jack?’ said Edwin, ruminating.  If he had been less
occupied with the thought, he must have seen her singular emotion.  ‘I
never thought of Jack.  It must be broken to him, before the town-crier
knows it.  I dine with the dear fellow to-morrow and next day—Christmas
Eve and Christmas Day—but it would never do to spoil his feast-days.  He
always worries about me, and moddley-coddleys in the merest trifles.  The
news is sure to overset him.  How on earth shall this be broken to Jack?’

‘He must be told, I suppose?’ said Rosa.

‘My dear Rosa! who ought to be in our confidence, if not Jack?’

‘My guardian promised to come down, if I should write and ask him.  I am
going to do so.  Would you like to leave it to him?’

‘A bright idea!’ cried Edwin.  ‘The other trustee.  Nothing more natural.
He comes down, he goes to Jack, he relates what we have agreed upon, and
he states our case better than we could.  He has already spoken feelingly
to you, he has already spoken feelingly to me, and he’ll put the whole
thing feelingly to Jack.  That’s it!  I am not a coward, Rosa, but to
tell you a secret, I am a little afraid of Jack.’

‘No, no! you are not afraid of him!’ cried Rosa, turning white, and
clasping her hands.

‘Why, sister Rosa, sister Rosa, what do you see from the turret?’ said
Edwin, rallying her.  ‘My dear girl!’

‘You frightened me.’

‘Most unintentionally, but I am as sorry as if I had meant to do it.
Could you possibly suppose for a moment, from any loose way of speaking
of mine, that I was literally afraid of the dear fond fellow?  What I
mean is, that he is subject to a kind of paroxysm, or fit—I saw him in it
once—and I don’t know but that so great a surprise, coming upon him
direct from me whom he is so wrapped up in, might bring it on perhaps.
Which—and this is the secret I was going to tell you—is another reason
for your guardian’s making the communication.  He is so steady, precise,
and exact, that he will talk Jack’s thoughts into shape, in no time:
whereas with me Jack is always impulsive and hurried, and, I may say,
almost womanish.’

Rosa seemed convinced.  Perhaps from her own very different point of view
of ‘Jack,’ she felt comforted and protected by the interposition of Mr.
Grewgious between herself and him.

And now, Edwin Drood’s right hand closed again upon the ring in its
little case, and again was checked by the consideration: ‘It is certain,
now, that I am to give it back to him; then why should I tell her of it?’
That pretty sympathetic nature which could be so sorry for him in the
blight of their childish hopes of happiness together, and could so
quietly find itself alone in a new world to weave fresh wreaths of such
flowers as it might prove to bear, the old world’s flowers being
withered, would be grieved by those sorrowful jewels; and to what
purpose?  Why should it be?  They were but a sign of broken joys and
baseless projects; in their very beauty they were (as the unlikeliest of
men had said) almost a cruel satire on the loves, hopes, plans, of
humanity, which are able to forecast nothing, and are so much brittle
dust.  Let them be.  He would restore them to her guardian when he came
down; he in his turn would restore them to the cabinet from which he had
unwillingly taken them; and there, like old letters or old vows, or other
records of old aspirations come to nothing, they would be disregarded,
until, being valuable, they were sold into circulation again, to repeat
their former round.

Let them be.  Let them lie unspoken of, in his breast.  However
distinctly or indistinctly he entertained these thoughts, he arrived at
the conclusion, Let them be.  Among the mighty store of wonderful chains
that are for ever forging, day and night, in the vast iron-works of time
and circumstance, there was one chain forged in the moment of that small
conclusion, riveted to the foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted
with invincible force to hold and drag.

They walked on by the river.  They began to speak of their separate
plans.  He would quicken his departure from England, and she would remain
where she was, at least as long as Helena remained.  The poor dear girls
should have their disappointment broken to them gently, and, as the first
preliminary, Miss Twinkleton should be confided in by Rosa, even in
advance of the reappearance of Mr. Grewgious.  It should be made clear in
all quarters that she and Edwin were the best of friends.  There had
never been so serene an understanding between them since they were first
affianced.  And yet there was one reservation on each side; on hers, that
she intended through her guardian to withdraw herself immediately from
the tuition of her music-master; on his, that he did already entertain
some wandering speculations whether it might ever come to pass that he
would know more of Miss Landless.

The bright, frosty day declined as they walked and spoke together.  The
sun dipped in the river far behind them, and the old city lay red before
them, as their walk drew to a close.  The moaning water cast its seaweed
duskily at their feet, when they turned to leave its margin; and the
rooks hovered above them with hoarse cries, darker splashes in the
darkening air.

‘I will prepare Jack for my flitting soon,’ said Edwin, in a low voice,
‘and I will but see your guardian when he comes, and then go before they
speak together.  It will be better done without my being by.  Don’t you
think so?’

‘Yes.’

‘We know we have done right, Rosa?’

‘Yes.’

‘We know we are better so, even now?’

‘And shall be far, far better so by-and-by.’

Still there was that lingering tenderness in their hearts towards the old
positions they were relinquishing, that they prolonged their parting.
When they came among the elm-trees by the Cathedral, where they had last
sat together, they stopped as by consent, and Rosa raised her face to
his, as she had never raised it in the old days;—for they were old
already.

‘God bless you, dear!  Good-bye!’

‘God bless you, dear!  Good-bye!’

They kissed each other fervently.

‘Now, please take me home, Eddy, and let me be by myself.’

‘Don’t look round, Rosa,’ he cautioned her, as he drew her arm through
his, and led her away.  ‘Didn’t you see Jack?’

‘No!  Where?’

‘Under the trees.  He saw us, as we took leave of each other.  Poor
fellow! he little thinks we have parted.  This will be a blow to him, I
am much afraid!’

She hurried on, without resting, and hurried on until they had passed
under the gatehouse into the street; once there, she asked:

‘Has he followed us?  You can look without seeming to.  Is he behind?’

‘No. Yes, he is!  He has just passed out under the gateway.  The dear,
sympathetic old fellow likes to keep us in sight.  I am afraid he will be
bitterly disappointed!’

She pulled hurriedly at the handle of the hoarse old bell, and the gate
soon opened.  Before going in, she gave him one last, wide, wondering
look, as if she would have asked him with imploring emphasis: ‘O! don’t
you understand?’  And out of that look he vanished from her view.




CHAPTER XIV—WHEN SHALL THESE THREE MEET AGAIN?


Christmas Eve in Cloisterham.  A few strange faces in the streets; a few
other faces, half strange and half familiar, once the faces of
Cloisterham children, now the faces of men and women who come back from
the outer world at long intervals to find the city wonderfully shrunken
in size, as if it had not washed by any means well in the meanwhile.  To
these, the striking of the Cathedral clock, and the cawing of the rooks
from the Cathedral tower, are like voices of their nursery time.  To such
as these, it has happened in their dying hours afar off, that they have
imagined their chamber-floor to be strewn with the autumnal leaves fallen
from the elm-trees in the Close: so have the rustling sounds and fresh
scents of their earliest impressions revived when the circle of their
lives was very nearly traced, and the beginning and the end were drawing
close together.

Seasonable tokens are about.  Red berries shine here and there in the
lattices of Minor Canon Corner; Mr. and Mrs. Tope are daintily sticking
sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces of the Cathedral stalls, as
if they were sticking them into the coat-button-holes of the Dean and
Chapter.  Lavish profusion is in the shops: particularly in the articles
of currants, raisins, spices, candied peel, and moist sugar.  An unusual
air of gallantry and dissipation is abroad; evinced in an immense bunch
of mistletoe hanging in the greengrocer’s shop doorway, and a poor little
Twelfth Cake, culminating in the figure of a Harlequin—such a very poor
little Twelfth Cake, that one would rather called it a Twenty-fourth Cake
or a Forty-eighth Cake—to be raffled for at the pastrycook’s, terms one
shilling per member.  Public amusements are not wanting.  The Wax-Work
which made so deep an impression on the reflective mind of the Emperor of
China is to be seen by particular desire during Christmas Week only, on
the premises of the bankrupt livery-stable-keeper up the lane; and a new
grand comic Christmas pantomime is to be produced at the Theatre: the
latter heralded by the portrait of Signor Jacksonini the clown, saying
‘How do you do to-morrow?’ quite as large as life, and almost as
miserably.  In short, Cloisterham is up and doing: though from this
description the High School and Miss Twinkleton’s are to be excluded.
From the former establishment the scholars have gone home, every one of
them in love with one of Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies (who knows
nothing about it); and only the handmaidens flutter occasionally in the
windows of the latter.  It is noticed, by the bye, that these damsels
become, within the limits of decorum, more skittish when thus intrusted
with the concrete representation of their sex, than when dividing the
representation with Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies.

Three are to meet at the gatehouse to-night.  How does each one of the
three get through the day?

                                * * * * *

Neville Landless, though absolved from his books for the time by Mr.
Crisparkle—whose fresh nature is by no means insensible to the charms of
a holiday—reads and writes in his quiet room, with a concentrated air,
until it is two hours past noon.  He then sets himself to clearing his
table, to arranging his books, and to tearing up and burning his stray
papers.  He makes a clean sweep of all untidy accumulations, puts all his
drawers in order, and leaves no note or scrap of paper undestroyed, save
such memoranda as bear directly on his studies.  This done, he turns to
his wardrobe, selects a few articles of ordinary wear—among them, change
of stout shoes and socks for walking—and packs these in a knapsack.  This
knapsack is new, and he bought it in the High Street yesterday.  He also
purchased, at the same time and at the same place, a heavy walking-stick;
strong in the handle for the grip of the hand, and iron-shod.  He tries
this, swings it, poises it, and lays it by, with the knapsack, on a
window-seat.  By this time his arrangements are complete.

He dresses for going out, and is in the act of going—indeed has left his
room, and has met the Minor Canon on the staircase, coming out of his
bedroom upon the same story—when he turns back again for his
walking-stick, thinking he will carry it now.  Mr. Crisparkle, who has
paused on the staircase, sees it in his hand on his immediately
reappearing, takes it from him, and asks him with a smile how he chooses
a stick?

‘Really I don’t know that I understand the subject,’ he answers.  ‘I
chose it for its weight.’

‘Much too heavy, Neville; _much_ too heavy.’

‘To rest upon in a long walk, sir?’

‘Rest upon?’ repeats Mr. Crisparkle, throwing himself into pedestrian
form.  ‘You don’t rest upon it; you merely balance with it.’

‘I shall know better, with practice, sir.  I have not lived in a walking
country, you know.’

‘True,’ says Mr. Crisparkle.  ‘Get into a little training, and we will
have a few score miles together.  I should leave you nowhere now.  Do you
come back before dinner?’

‘I think not, as we dine early.’

Mr. Crisparkle gives him a bright nod and a cheerful good-bye; expressing
(not without intention) absolute confidence and ease.

Neville repairs to the Nuns’ House, and requests that Miss Landless may
be informed that her brother is there, by appointment.  He waits at the
gate, not even crossing the threshold; for he is on his parole not to put
himself in Rosa’s way.

His sister is at least as mindful of the obligation they have taken on
themselves as he can be, and loses not a moment in joining him.  They
meet affectionately, avoid lingering there, and walk towards the upper
inland country.

‘I am not going to tread upon forbidden ground, Helena,’ says Neville,
when they have walked some distance and are turning; ‘you will understand
in another moment that I cannot help referring to—what shall I say?—my
infatuation.’

‘Had you not better avoid it, Neville?  You know that I can hear
nothing.’

‘You can hear, my dear, what Mr. Crisparkle has heard, and heard with
approval.’

‘Yes; I can hear so much.’

‘Well, it is this.  I am not only unsettled and unhappy myself, but I am
conscious of unsettling and interfering with other people.  How do I know
that, but for my unfortunate presence, you, and—and—the rest of that
former party, our engaging guardian excepted, might be dining cheerfully
in Minor Canon Corner to-morrow?  Indeed it probably would be so.  I can
see too well that I am not high in the old lady’s opinion, and it is easy
to understand what an irksome clog I must be upon the hospitalities of
her orderly house—especially at this time of year—when I must be kept
asunder from this person, and there is such a reason for my not being
brought into contact with that person, and an unfavourable reputation has
preceded me with such another person; and so on.  I have put this very
gently to Mr. Crisparkle, for you know his self-denying ways; but still I
have put it.  What I have laid much greater stress upon at the same time
is, that I am engaged in a miserable struggle with myself, and that a
little change and absence may enable me to come through it the better.
So, the weather being bright and hard, I am going on a walking
expedition, and intend taking myself out of everybody’s way (my own
included, I hope) to-morrow morning.’

‘When to come back?’

‘In a fortnight.’

‘And going quite alone?’

‘I am much better without company, even if there were any one but you to
bear me company, my dear Helena.’

‘Mr. Crisparkle entirely agrees, you say?’

‘Entirely.  I am not sure but that at first he was inclined to think it
rather a moody scheme, and one that might do a brooding mind harm.  But
we took a moonlight walk last Monday night, to talk it over at leisure,
and I represented the case to him as it really is.  I showed him that I
do want to conquer myself, and that, this evening well got over, it is
surely better that I should be away from here just now, than here.  I
could hardly help meeting certain people walking together here, and that
could do no good, and is certainly not the way to forget.  A fortnight
hence, that chance will probably be over, for the time; and when it again
arises for the last time, why, I can again go away.  Farther, I really do
feel hopeful of bracing exercise and wholesome fatigue.  You know that
Mr. Crisparkle allows such things their full weight in the preservation
of his own sound mind in his own sound body, and that his just spirit is
not likely to maintain one set of natural laws for himself and another
for me.  He yielded to my view of the matter, when convinced that I was
honestly in earnest; and so, with his full consent, I start to-morrow
morning.  Early enough to be not only out of the streets, but out of
hearing of the bells, when the good people go to church.’

Helena thinks it over, and thinks well of it.  Mr. Crisparkle doing so,
she would do so; but she does originally, out of her own mind, think well
of it, as a healthy project, denoting a sincere endeavour and an active
attempt at self-correction.  She is inclined to pity him, poor fellow,
for going away solitary on the great Christmas festival; but she feels it
much more to the purpose to encourage him.  And she does encourage him.

He will write to her?

He will write to her every alternate day, and tell her all his
adventures.

Does he send clothes on in advance of him?

‘My dear Helena, no.  Travel like a pilgrim, with wallet and staff.  My
wallet—or my knapsack—is packed, and ready for strapping on; and here is
my staff!’

He hands it to her; she makes the same remark as Mr. Crisparkle, that it
is very heavy; and gives it back to him, asking what wood it is?
Iron-wood.

Up to this point he has been extremely cheerful.  Perhaps, the having to
carry his case with her, and therefore to present it in its brightest
aspect, has roused his spirits.  Perhaps, the having done so with
success, is followed by a revulsion.  As the day closes in, and the
city-lights begin to spring up before them, he grows depressed.

‘I wish I were not going to this dinner, Helena.’

‘Dear Neville, is it worth while to care much about it?  Think how soon
it will be over.’

‘How soon it will be over!’ he repeats gloomily.  ‘Yes.  But I don’t like
it.’

There may be a moment’s awkwardness, she cheeringly represents to him,
but it can only last a moment.  He is quite sure of himself.

‘I wish I felt as sure of everything else, as I feel of myself,’ he
answers her.

‘How strangely you speak, dear!  What do you mean?’

‘Helena, I don’t know.  I only know that I don’t like it.  What a strange
dead weight there is in the air!’

She calls his attention to those copperous clouds beyond the river, and
says that the wind is rising.  He scarcely speaks again, until he takes
leave of her, at the gate of the Nuns’ House.  She does not immediately
enter, when they have parted, but remains looking after him along the
street.  Twice he passes the gatehouse, reluctant to enter.  At length,
the Cathedral clock chiming one quarter, with a rapid turn he hurries in.

And so _he_ goes up the postern stair.

                                * * * * *

Edwin Drood passes a solitary day.  Something of deeper moment than he
had thought, has gone out of his life; and in the silence of his own
chamber he wept for it last night.  Though the image of Miss Landless
still hovers in the background of his mind, the pretty little
affectionate creature, so much firmer and wiser than he had supposed,
occupies its stronghold.  It is with some misgiving of his own
unworthiness that he thinks of her, and of what they might have been to
one another, if he had been more in earnest some time ago; if he had set
a higher value on her; if, instead of accepting his lot in life as an
inheritance of course, he had studied the right way to its appreciation
and enhancement.  And still, for all this, and though there is a sharp
heartache in all this, the vanity and caprice of youth sustain that
handsome figure of Miss Landless in the background of his mind.

That was a curious look of Rosa’s when they parted at the gate.  Did it
mean that she saw below the surface of his thoughts, and down into their
twilight depths?  Scarcely that, for it was a look of astonished and keen
inquiry.  He decides that he cannot understand it, though it was
remarkably expressive.

As he only waits for Mr. Grewgious now, and will depart immediately after
having seen him, he takes a sauntering leave of the ancient city and its
neighbourhood.  He recalls the time when Rosa and he walked here or
there, mere children, full of the dignity of being engaged.  Poor
children! he thinks, with a pitying sadness.

Finding that his watch has stopped, he turns into the jeweller’s shop, to
have it wound and set.  The jeweller is knowing on the subject of a
bracelet, which he begs leave to submit, in a general and quite aimless
way.  It would suit (he considers) a young bride, to perfection;
especially if of a rather diminutive style of beauty.  Finding the
bracelet but coldly looked at, the jeweller invites attention to a tray
of rings for gentlemen; here is a style of ring, now, he remarks—a very
chaste signet—which gentlemen are much given to purchasing, when changing
their condition.  A ring of a very responsible appearance.  With the date
of their wedding-day engraved inside, several gentlemen have preferred it
to any other kind of memento.

The rings are as coldly viewed as the bracelet.  Edwin tells the tempter
that he wears no jewellery but his watch and chain, which were his
father’s; and his shirt-pin.

‘That I was aware of,’ is the jeweller’s reply, ‘for Mr. Jasper dropped
in for a watch-glass the other day, and, in fact, I showed these articles
to him, remarking that if he _should_ wish to make a present to a
gentleman relative, on any particular occasion—But he said with a smile
that he had an inventory in his mind of all the jewellery his gentleman
relative ever wore; namely, his watch and chain, and his shirt-pin.’
Still (the jeweller considers) that might not apply to all times, though
applying to the present time.  ‘Twenty minutes past two, Mr. Drood, I set
your watch at.  Let me recommend you not to let it run down, sir.’

Edwin takes his watch, puts it on, and goes out, thinking: ‘Dear old
Jack!  If I were to make an extra crease in my neckcloth, he would think
it worth noticing!’

He strolls about and about, to pass the time until the dinner-hour.  It
somehow happens that Cloisterham seems reproachful to him to-day; has
fault to find with him, as if he had not used it well; but is far more
pensive with him than angry.  His wonted carelessness is replaced by a
wistful looking at, and dwelling upon, all the old landmarks.  He will
soon be far away, and may never see them again, he thinks.  Poor youth!
Poor youth!

As dusk draws on, he paces the Monks’ Vineyard.  He has walked to and
fro, full half an hour by the Cathedral chimes, and it has closed in
dark, before he becomes quite aware of a woman crouching on the ground
near a wicket gate in a corner.  The gate commands a cross bye-path,
little used in the gloaming; and the figure must have been there all the
time, though he has but gradually and lately made it out.

He strikes into that path, and walks up to the wicket.  By the light of a
lamp near it, he sees that the woman is of a haggard appearance, and that
her weazen chin is resting on her hands, and that her eyes are
staring—with an unwinking, blind sort of steadfastness—before her.

Always kindly, but moved to be unusually kind this evening, and having
bestowed kind words on most of the children and aged people he has met,
he at once bends down, and speaks to this woman.

‘Are you ill?’

‘No, deary,’ she answers, without looking at him, and with no departure
from her strange blind stare.

‘Are you blind?’

‘No, deary.’

‘Are you lost, homeless, faint?  What is the matter, that you stay here
in the cold so long, without moving?’

By slow and stiff efforts, she appears to contract her vision until it
can rest upon him; and then a curious film passes over her, and she
begins to shake.

He straightens himself, recoils a step, and looks down at her in a dread
amazement; for he seems to know her.

‘Good Heaven!’ he thinks, next moment.  ‘Like Jack that night!’

As he looks down at her, she looks up at him, and whimpers: ‘My lungs is
weakly; my lungs is dreffle bad.  Poor me, poor me, my cough is rattling
dry!’ and coughs in confirmation horribly.

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Come from London, deary.’  (Her cough still rending her.)

‘Where are you going to?’

‘Back to London, deary.  I came here, looking for a needle in a haystack,
and I ain’t found it.  Look’ee, deary; give me three-and-sixpence, and
don’t you be afeard for me.  I’ll get back to London then, and trouble no
one.  I’m in a business.—Ah, me!  It’s slack, it’s slack, and times is
very bad!—but I can make a shift to live by it.’

‘Do you eat opium?’

‘Smokes it,’ she replies with difficulty, still racked by her cough.
‘Give me three-and-sixpence, and I’ll lay it out well, and get back.  If
you don’t give me three-and-sixpence, don’t give me a brass farden.  And
if you do give me three-and-sixpence, deary, I’ll tell you something.’

He counts the money from his pocket, and puts it in her hand.  She
instantly clutches it tight, and rises to her feet with a croaking laugh
of satisfaction.

‘Bless ye!  Hark’ee, dear genl’mn.  What’s your Chris’en name?’

‘Edwin.’

‘Edwin, Edwin, Edwin,’ she repeats, trailing off into a drowsy repetition
of the word; and then asks suddenly: ‘Is the short of that name Eddy?’

‘It is sometimes called so,’ he replies, with the colour starting to his
face.

‘Don’t sweethearts call it so?’ she asks, pondering.

‘How should I know?’

‘Haven’t you a sweetheart, upon your soul?’

‘None.’

She is moving away, with another ‘Bless ye, and thank’ee, deary!’ when he
adds: ‘You were to tell me something; you may as well do so.’

‘So I was, so I was.  Well, then.  Whisper.  You be thankful that your
name ain’t Ned.’

He looks at her quite steadily, as he asks: ‘Why?’

‘Because it’s a bad name to have just now.’

‘How a bad name?’

‘A threatened name.  A dangerous name.’

‘The proverb says that threatened men live long,’ he tells her, lightly.

‘Then Ned—so threatened is he, wherever he may be while I am a-talking to
you, deary—should live to all eternity!’ replies the woman.

She has leaned forward to say it in his ear, with her forefinger shaking
before his eyes, and now huddles herself together, and with another
‘Bless ye, and thank’ee!’ goes away in the direction of the Travellers’
Lodging House.

This is not an inspiriting close to a dull day.  Alone, in a sequestered
place, surrounded by vestiges of old time and decay, it rather has a
tendency to call a shudder into being.  He makes for the better-lighted
streets, and resolves as he walks on to say nothing of this to-night, but
to mention it to Jack (who alone calls him Ned), as an odd coincidence,
to-morrow; of course only as a coincidence, and not as anything better
worth remembering.

Still, it holds to him, as many things much better worth remembering
never did.  He has another mile or so, to linger out before the
dinner-hour; and, when he walks over the bridge and by the river, the
woman’s words are in the rising wind, in the angry sky, in the troubled
water, in the flickering lights.  There is some solemn echo of them even
in the Cathedral chime, which strikes a sudden surprise to his heart as
he turns in under the archway of the gatehouse.

And so _he_ goes up the postern stair.

                                * * * * *

John Jasper passes a more agreeable and cheerful day than either of his
guests.  Having no music-lessons to give in the holiday season, his time
is his own, but for the Cathedral services.  He is early among the
shopkeepers, ordering little table luxuries that his nephew likes.  His
nephew will not be with him long, he tells his provision-dealers, and so
must be petted and made much of.  While out on his hospitable
preparations, he looks in on Mr. Sapsea; and mentions that dear Ned, and
that inflammable young spark of Mr. Crisparkle’s, are to dine at the
gatehouse to-day, and make up their difference.  Mr. Sapsea is by no
means friendly towards the inflammable young spark.  He says that his
complexion is ‘Un-English.’  And when Mr. Sapsea has once declared
anything to be Un-English, he considers that thing everlastingly sunk in
the bottomless pit.

John Jasper is truly sorry to hear Mr. Sapsea speak thus, for he knows
right well that Mr. Sapsea never speaks without a meaning, and that he
has a subtle trick of being right.  Mr. Sapsea (by a very remarkable
coincidence) is of exactly that opinion.

Mr. Jasper is in beautiful voice this day.  In the pathetic supplication
to have his heart inclined to keep this law, he quite astonishes his
fellows by his melodious power.  He has never sung difficult music with
such skill and harmony, as in this day’s Anthem.  His nervous temperament
is occasionally prone to take difficult music a little too quickly;
to-day, his time is perfect.

These results are probably attained through a grand composure of the
spirits.  The mere mechanism of his throat is a little tender, for he
wears, both with his singing-robe and with his ordinary dress, a large
black scarf of strong close-woven silk, slung loosely round his neck.
But his composure is so noticeable, that Mr. Crisparkle speaks of it as
they come out from Vespers.

‘I must thank you, Jasper, for the pleasure with which I have heard you
to-day.  Beautiful!  Delightful!  You could not have so outdone yourself,
I hope, without being wonderfully well.’

‘I _am_ wonderfully well.’

‘Nothing unequal,’ says the Minor Canon, with a smooth motion of his
hand: ‘nothing unsteady, nothing forced, nothing avoided; all thoroughly
done in a masterly manner, with perfect self-command.’

‘Thank you.  I hope so, if it is not too much to say.’

‘One would think, Jasper, you had been trying a new medicine for that
occasional indisposition of yours.’

‘No, really?  That’s well observed; for I have.’

‘Then stick to it, my good fellow,’ says Mr. Crisparkle, clapping him on
the shoulder with friendly encouragement, ‘stick to it.’

‘I will.’

‘I congratulate you,’ Mr. Crisparkle pursues, as they come out of the
Cathedral, ‘on all accounts.’

‘Thank you again.  I will walk round to the Corner with you, if you don’t
object; I have plenty of time before my company come; and I want to say a
word to you, which I think you will not be displeased to hear.’

‘What is it?’

‘Well.  We were speaking, the other evening, of my black humours.’

Mr. Crisparkle’s face falls, and he shakes his head deploringly.

‘I said, you know, that I should make you an antidote to those black
humours; and you said you hoped I would consign them to the flames.’

‘And I still hope so, Jasper.’

‘With the best reason in the world!  I mean to burn this year’s Diary at
the year’s end.’

‘Because you—?’  Mr. Crisparkle brightens greatly as he thus begins.

‘You anticipate me.  Because I feel that I have been out of sorts,
gloomy, bilious, brain-oppressed, whatever it may be.  You said I had
been exaggerative.  So I have.’

Mr. Crisparkle’s brightened face brightens still more.

‘I couldn’t see it then, because I _was_ out of sorts; but I am in a
healthier state now, and I acknowledge it with genuine pleasure.  I made
a great deal of a very little; that’s the fact.’

‘It does me good,’ cries Mr. Crisparkle, ‘to hear you say it!’

‘A man leading a monotonous life,’ Jasper proceeds, ‘and getting his
nerves, or his stomach, out of order, dwells upon an idea until it loses
its proportions.  That was my case with the idea in question.  So I shall
burn the evidence of my case, when the book is full, and begin the next
volume with a clearer vision.’

‘This is better,’ says Mr. Crisparkle, stopping at the steps of his own
door to shake hands, ‘than I could have hoped.’

‘Why, naturally,’ returns Jasper.  ‘You had but little reason to hope
that I should become more like yourself.  You are always training
yourself to be, mind and body, as clear as crystal, and you always are,
and never change; whereas I am a muddy, solitary, moping weed.  However,
I have got over that mope.  Shall I wait, while you ask if Mr. Neville
has left for my place?  If not, he and I may walk round together.’

‘I think,’ says Mr. Crisparkle, opening the entrance-door with his key,
‘that he left some time ago; at least I know he left, and I think he has
not come back.  But I’ll inquire.  You won’t come in?’

‘My company wait,’ said Jasper, with a smile.

The Minor Canon disappears, and in a few moments returns.  As he thought,
Mr. Neville has not come back; indeed, as he remembers now, Mr. Neville
said he would probably go straight to the gatehouse.

‘Bad manners in a host!’ says Jasper.  ‘My company will be there before
me!  What will you bet that I don’t find my company embracing?’

‘I will bet—or I would, if ever I did bet,’ returns Mr. Crisparkle, ‘that
your company will have a gay entertainer this evening.’

Jasper nods, and laughs good-night!

He retraces his steps to the Cathedral door, and turns down past it to
the gatehouse.  He sings, in a low voice and with delicate expression, as
he walks along.  It still seems as if a false note were not within his
power to-night, and as if nothing could hurry or retard him.  Arriving
thus under the arched entrance of his dwelling, he pauses for an instant
in the shelter to pull off that great black scarf, and bang it in a loop
upon his arm.  For that brief time, his face is knitted and stern.  But
it immediately clears, as he resumes his singing, and his way.

And so _he_ goes up the postern stair.

                                * * * * *

The red light burns steadily all the evening in the lighthouse on the
margin of the tide of busy life.  Softened sounds and hum of traffic pass
it and flow on irregularly into the lonely Precincts; but very little
else goes by, save violent rushes of wind.  It comes on to blow a
boisterous gale.

The Precincts are never particularly well lighted; but the strong blasts
of wind blowing out many of the lamps (in some instances shattering the
frames too, and bringing the glass rattling to the ground), they are
unusually dark to-night.  The darkness is augmented and confused, by
flying dust from the earth, dry twigs from the trees, and great ragged
fragments from the rooks’ nests up in the tower.  The trees themselves so
toss and creak, as this tangible part of the darkness madly whirls about,
that they seem in peril of being torn out of the earth: while ever and
again a crack, and a rushing fall, denote that some large branch has
yielded to the storm.

Not such power of wind has blown for many a winter night.  Chimneys
topple in the streets, and people hold to posts and corners, and to one
another, to keep themselves upon their feet.  The violent rushes abate
not, but increase in frequency and fury until at midnight, when the
streets are empty, the storm goes thundering along them, rattling at all
the latches, and tearing at all the shutters, as if warning the people to
get up and fly with it, rather than have the roofs brought down upon
their brains.

Still, the red light burns steadily.  Nothing is steady but the red
light.

All through the night the wind blows, and abates not.  But early in the
morning, when there is barely enough light in the east to dim the stars,
it begins to lull.  From that time, with occasional wild charges, like a
wounded monster dying, it drops and sinks; and at full daylight it is
dead.

It is then seen that the hands of the Cathedral clock are torn off; that
lead from the roof has been stripped away, rolled up, and blown into the
Close; and that some stones have been displaced upon the summit of the
great tower.  Christmas morning though it be, it is necessary to send up
workmen, to ascertain the extent of the damage done.  These, led by
Durdles, go aloft; while Mr. Tope and a crowd of early idlers gather down
in Minor Canon Corner, shading their eyes and watching for their
appearance up there.

This cluster is suddenly broken and put aside by the hands of Mr. Jasper;
all the gazing eyes are brought down to the earth by his loudly inquiring
of Mr. Crisparkle, at an open window:

‘Where is my nephew?’

‘He has not been here.  Is he not with you?’

‘No.  He went down to the river last night, with Mr. Neville, to look at
the storm, and has not been back.  Call Mr. Neville!’

‘He left this morning, early.’

‘Left this morning early?  Let me in! let me in!’

There is no more looking up at the tower, now.  All the assembled eyes
are turned on Mr. Jasper, white, half-dressed, panting, and clinging to
the rail before the Minor Canon’s house.




CHAPTER XV—IMPEACHED


Neville Landless had started so early and walked at so good a pace, that
when the church-bells began to ring in Cloisterham for morning service,
he was eight miles away.  As he wanted his breakfast by that time, having
set forth on a crust of bread, he stopped at the next roadside tavern to
refresh.

Visitors in want of breakfast—unless they were horses or cattle, for
which class of guests there was preparation enough in the way of
water-trough and hay—were so unusual at the sign of The Tilted Wagon,
that it took a long time to get the wagon into the track of tea and toast
and bacon.  Neville in the interval, sitting in a sanded parlour,
wondering in how long a time after he had gone, the sneezy fire of damp
fagots would begin to make somebody else warm.

Indeed, The Tilted Wagon, as a cool establishment on the top of a hill,
where the ground before the door was puddled with damp hoofs and trodden
straw; where a scolding landlady slapped a moist baby (with one red sock
on and one wanting), in the bar; where the cheese was cast aground upon a
shelf, in company with a mouldy tablecloth and a green-handled knife, in
a sort of cast-iron canoe; where the pale-faced bread shed tears of crumb
over its shipwreck in another canoe; where the family linen, half washed
and half dried, led a public life of lying about; where everything to
drink was drunk out of mugs, and everything else was suggestive of a
rhyme to mugs; The Tilted Wagon, all these things considered, hardly kept
its painted promise of providing good entertainment for Man and Beast.
However, Man, in the present case, was not critical, but took what
entertainment he could get, and went on again after a longer rest than he
needed.

He stopped at some quarter of a mile from the house, hesitating whether
to pursue the road, or to follow a cart track between two high hedgerows,
which led across the slope of a breezy heath, and evidently struck into
the road again by-and-by.  He decided in favour of this latter track, and
pursued it with some toil; the rise being steep, and the way worn into
deep ruts.

He was labouring along, when he became aware of some other pedestrians
behind him.  As they were coming up at a faster pace than his, he stood
aside, against one of the high banks, to let them pass.  But their manner
was very curious.  Only four of them passed.  Other four slackened speed,
and loitered as intending to follow him when he should go on.  The
remainder of the party (half-a-dozen perhaps) turned, and went back at a
great rate.

He looked at the four behind him, and he looked at the four before him.
They all returned his look.  He resumed his way.  The four in advance
went on, constantly looking back; the four in the rear came closing up.

When they all ranged out from the narrow track upon the open slope of the
heath, and this order was maintained, let him diverge as he would to
either side, there was no longer room to doubt that he was beset by these
fellows.  He stopped, as a last test; and they all stopped.

‘Why do you attend upon me in this way?’ he asked the whole body.  ‘Are
you a pack of thieves?’

‘Don’t answer him,’ said one of the number; he did not see which.
‘Better be quiet.’

‘Better be quiet?’ repeated Neville.  ‘Who said so?’

Nobody replied.

‘It’s good advice, whichever of you skulkers gave it,’ he went on
angrily.  ‘I will not submit to be penned in between four men there, and
four men there.  I wish to pass, and I mean to pass, those four in
front.’

They were all standing still; himself included.

‘If eight men, or four men, or two men, set upon one,’ he proceeded,
growing more enraged, ‘the one has no chance but to set his mark upon
some of them.  And, by the Lord, I’ll do it, if I am interrupted any
farther!’

Shouldering his heavy stick, and quickening his pace, he shot on to pass
the four ahead.  The largest and strongest man of the number changed
swiftly to the side on which he came up, and dexterously closed with him
and went down with him; but not before the heavy stick had descended
smartly.

‘Let him be!’ said this man in a suppressed voice, as they struggled
together on the grass.  ‘Fair play!  His is the build of a girl to mine,
and he’s got a weight strapped to his back besides.  Let him alone.  I’ll
manage him.’

After a little rolling about, in a close scuffle which caused the faces
of both to be besmeared with blood, the man took his knee from Neville’s
chest, and rose, saying: ‘There!  Now take him arm-in-arm, any two of
you!’

It was immediately done.

‘As to our being a pack of thieves, Mr. Landless,’ said the man, as he
spat out some blood, and wiped more from his face; ‘you know better than
that at midday.  We wouldn’t have touched you if you hadn’t forced us.
We’re going to take you round to the high road, anyhow, and you’ll find
help enough against thieves there, if you want it.—Wipe his face,
somebody; see how it’s a-trickling down him!’

When his face was cleansed, Neville recognised in the speaker, Joe,
driver of the Cloisterham omnibus, whom he had seen but once, and that on
the day of his arrival.

‘And what I recommend you for the present, is, don’t talk, Mr. Landless.
You’ll find a friend waiting for you, at the high road—gone ahead by the
other way when we split into two parties—and you had much better say
nothing till you come up with him.  Bring that stick along, somebody
else, and let’s be moving!’

Utterly bewildered, Neville stared around him and said not a word.
Walking between his two conductors, who held his arms in theirs, he went
on, as in a dream, until they came again into the high road, and into the
midst of a little group of people.  The men who had turned back were
among the group; and its central figures were Mr. Jasper and Mr.
Crisparkle.  Neville’s conductors took him up to the Minor Canon, and
there released him, as an act of deference to that gentleman.

‘What is all this, sir?  What is the matter?  I feel as if I had lost my
senses!’ cried Neville, the group closing in around him.

‘Where is my nephew?’ asked Mr. Jasper, wildly.

‘Where is your nephew?’ repeated Neville, ‘Why do you ask me?’

‘I ask you,’ retorted Jasper, ‘because you were the last person in his
company, and he is not to be found.’

‘Not to be found!’ cried Neville, aghast.

‘Stay, stay,’ said Mr. Crisparkle.  ‘Permit me, Jasper.  Mr. Neville, you
are confounded; collect your thoughts; it is of great importance that you
should collect your thoughts; attend to me.’

‘I will try, sir, but I seem mad.’

‘You left Mr. Jasper last night with Edwin Drood?’

‘Yes.’

‘At what hour?’

‘Was it at twelve o’clock?’ asked Neville, with his hand to his confused
head, and appealing to Jasper.

‘Quite right,’ said Mr. Crisparkle; ‘the hour Mr. Jasper has already
named to me.  You went down to the river together?’

‘Undoubtedly.  To see the action of the wind there.’

‘What followed?  How long did you stay there?’

‘About ten minutes; I should say not more.  We then walked together to
your house, and he took leave of me at the door.’

‘Did he say that he was going down to the river again?’

‘No.  He said that he was going straight back.’

The bystanders looked at one another, and at Mr. Crisparkle.  To whom Mr.
Jasper, who had been intensely watching Neville, said, in a low,
distinct, suspicious voice: ‘What are those stains upon his dress?’

All eyes were turned towards the blood upon his clothes.

‘And here are the same stains upon this stick!’ said Jasper, taking it
from the hand of the man who held it.  ‘I know the stick to be his, and
he carried it last night.  What does this mean?’

‘In the name of God, say what it means, Neville!’ urged Mr. Crisparkle.

‘That man and I,’ said Neville, pointing out his late adversary, ‘had a
struggle for the stick just now, and you may see the same marks on him,
sir.  What was I to suppose, when I found myself molested by eight
people?  Could I dream of the true reason when they would give me none at
all?’

They admitted that they had thought it discreet to be silent, and that
the struggle had taken place.  And yet the very men who had seen it
looked darkly at the smears which the bright cold air had already dried.

‘We must return, Neville,’ said Mr. Crisparkle; ‘of course you will be
glad to come back to clear yourself?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘Mr. Landless will walk at my side,’ the Minor Canon continued, looking
around him.  ‘Come, Neville!’

They set forth on the walk back; and the others, with one exception,
straggled after them at various distances.  Jasper walked on the other
side of Neville, and never quitted that position.  He was silent, while
Mr. Crisparkle more than once repeated his former questions, and while
Neville repeated his former answers; also, while they both hazarded some
explanatory conjectures.  He was obstinately silent, because Mr.
Crisparkle’s manner directly appealed to him to take some part in the
discussion, and no appeal would move his fixed face.  When they drew near
to the city, and it was suggested by the Minor Canon that they might do
well in calling on the Mayor at once, he assented with a stern nod; but
he spake no word until they stood in Mr. Sapsea’s parlour.

Mr. Sapsea being informed by Mr. Crisparkle of the circumstances under
which they desired to make a voluntary statement before him, Mr. Jasper
broke silence by declaring that he placed his whole reliance, humanly
speaking, on Mr. Sapsea’s penetration.  There was no conceivable reason
why his nephew should have suddenly absconded, unless Mr. Sapsea could
suggest one, and then he would defer.  There was no intelligible
likelihood of his having returned to the river, and been accidentally
drowned in the dark, unless it should appear likely to Mr. Sapsea, and
then again he would defer.  He washed his hands as clean as he could of
all horrible suspicions, unless it should appear to Mr. Sapsea that some
such were inseparable from his last companion before his disappearance
(not on good terms with previously), and then, once more, he would defer.
His own state of mind, he being distracted with doubts, and labouring
under dismal apprehensions, was not to be safely trusted; but Mr.
Sapsea’s was.

Mr. Sapsea expressed his opinion that the case had a dark look; in short
(and here his eyes rested full on Neville’s countenance), an Un-English
complexion.  Having made this grand point, he wandered into a denser haze
and maze of nonsense than even a mayor might have been expected to
disport himself in, and came out of it with the brilliant discovery that
to take the life of a fellow-creature was to take something that didn’t
belong to you.  He wavered whether or no he should at once issue his
warrant for the committal of Neville Landless to jail, under
circumstances of grave suspicion; and he might have gone so far as to do
it but for the indignant protest of the Minor Canon: who undertook for
the young man’s remaining in his own house, and being produced by his own
hands, whenever demanded.  Mr. Jasper then understood Mr. Sapsea to
suggest that the river should be dragged, that its banks should be
rigidly examined, that particulars of the disappearance should be sent to
all outlying places and to London, and that placards and advertisements
should be widely circulated imploring Edwin Drood, if for any unknown
reason he had withdrawn himself from his uncle’s home and society, to
take pity on that loving kinsman’s sore bereavement and distress, and
somehow inform him that he was yet alive.  Mr. Sapsea was perfectly
understood, for this was exactly his meaning (though he had said nothing
about it); and measures were taken towards all these ends immediately.

It would be difficult to determine which was the more oppressed with
horror and amazement: Neville Landless, or John Jasper.  But that
Jasper’s position forced him to be active, while Neville’s forced him to
be passive, there would have been nothing to choose between them.  Each
was bowed down and broken.

With the earliest light of the next morning, men were at work upon the
river, and other men—most of whom volunteered for the service—were
examining the banks.  All the livelong day the search went on; upon the
river, with barge and pole, and drag and net; upon the muddy and rushy
shore, with jack-boots, hatchet, spade, rope, dogs, and all imaginable
appliances.  Even at night, the river was specked with lanterns, and
lurid with fires; far-off creeks, into which the tide washed as it
changed, had their knots of watchers, listening to the lapping of the
stream, and looking out for any burden it might bear; remote shingly
causeways near the sea, and lonely points off which there was a race of
water, had their unwonted flaring cressets and rough-coated figures when
the next day dawned; but no trace of Edwin Drood revisited the light of
the sun.

All that day, again, the search went on.  Now, in barge and boat; and now
ashore among the osiers, or tramping amidst mud and stakes and jagged
stones in low-lying places, where solitary watermarks and signals of
strange shapes showed like spectres, John Jasper worked and toiled.  But
to no purpose; for still no trace of Edwin Drood revisited the light of
the sun.

Setting his watches for that night again, so that vigilant eyes should be
kept on every change of tide, he went home exhausted.  Unkempt and
disordered, bedaubed with mud that had dried upon him, and with much of
his clothing torn to rags, he had but just dropped into his easy-chair,
when Mr. Grewgious stood before him.

‘This is strange news,’ said Mr. Grewgious.

‘Strange and fearful news.’

Jasper had merely lifted up his heavy eyes to say it, and now dropped
them again as he drooped, worn out, over one side of his easy-chair.

Mr. Grewgious smoothed his head and face, and stood looking at the fire.

‘How is your ward?’ asked Jasper, after a time, in a faint, fatigued
voice.

‘Poor little thing!  You may imagine her condition.’

‘Have you seen his sister?’ inquired Jasper, as before.

‘Whose?’

The curtness of the counter-question, and the cool, slow manner in which,
as he put it, Mr. Grewgious moved his eyes from the fire to his
companion’s face, might at any other time have been exasperating.  In his
depression and exhaustion, Jasper merely opened his eyes to say: ‘The
suspected young man’s.’

‘Do you suspect him?’ asked Mr. Grewgious.

‘I don’t know what to think.  I cannot make up my mind.’

‘Nor I,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘But as you spoke of him as the suspected
young man, I thought you _had_ made up your mind.—I have just left Miss
Landless.’

               [Picture: Mr. Grewgious has his suspicions]

‘What is her state?’

‘Defiance of all suspicion, and unbounded faith in her brother.’

‘Poor thing!’

‘However,’ pursued Mr. Grewgious, ‘it is not of her that I came to speak.
It is of my ward.  I have a communication to make that will surprise you.
At least, it has surprised me.’

Jasper, with a groaning sigh, turned wearily in his chair.

‘Shall I put it off till to-morrow?’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Mind, I warn
you, that I think it will surprise you!’

More attention and concentration came into John Jasper’s eyes as they
caught sight of Mr. Grewgious smoothing his head again, and again looking
at the fire; but now, with a compressed and determined mouth.

‘What is it?’ demanded Jasper, becoming upright in his chair.

‘To be sure,’ said Mr. Grewgious, provokingly slowly and internally, as
he kept his eyes on the fire: ‘I might have known it sooner; she gave me
the opening; but I am such an exceedingly Angular man, that it never
occurred to me; I took all for granted.’

‘What is it?’ demanded Jasper once more.

Mr. Grewgious, alternately opening and shutting the palms of his hands as
he warmed them at the fire, and looking fixedly at him sideways, and
never changing either his action or his look in all that followed, went
on to reply.

‘This young couple, the lost youth and Miss Rosa, my ward, though so long
betrothed, and so long recognising their betrothal, and so near being
married—’

Mr. Grewgious saw a staring white face, and two quivering white lips, in
the easy-chair, and saw two muddy hands gripping its sides.  But for the
hands, he might have thought he had never seen the face.

‘—This young couple came gradually to the discovery (made on both sides
pretty equally, I think), that they would be happier and better, both in
their present and their future lives, as affectionate friends, or say
rather as brother and sister, than as husband and wife.’

Mr. Grewgious saw a lead-coloured face in the easy-chair, and on its
surface dreadful starting drops or bubbles, as if of steel.

‘This young couple formed at length the healthy resolution of
interchanging their discoveries, openly, sensibly, and tenderly.  They
met for that purpose.  After some innocent and generous talk, they agreed
to dissolve their existing, and their intended, relations, for ever and
ever.’

Mr. Grewgious saw a ghastly figure rise, open-mouthed, from the
easy-chair, and lift its outspread hands towards its head.

‘One of this young couple, and that one your nephew, fearful, however,
that in the tenderness of your affection for him you would be bitterly
disappointed by so wide a departure from his projected life, forbore to
tell you the secret, for a few days, and left it to be disclosed by me,
when I should come down to speak to you, and he would be gone.  I speak
to you, and he is gone.’

Mr. Grewgious saw the ghastly figure throw back its head, clutch its hair
with its hands, and turn with a writhing action from him.

‘I have now said all I have to say: except that this young couple parted,
firmly, though not without tears and sorrow, on the evening when you last
saw them together.’

Mr. Grewgious heard a terrible shriek, and saw no ghastly figure, sitting
or standing; saw nothing but a heap of torn and miry clothes upon the
floor.

Not changing his action even then, he opened and shut the palms of his
hands as he warmed them, and looked down at it.




CHAPTER XVI—DEVOTED


When John Jasper recovered from his fit or swoon, he found himself being
tended by Mr. and Mrs. Tope, whom his visitor had summoned for the
purpose.  His visitor, wooden of aspect, sat stiffly in a chair, with his
hands upon his knees, watching his recovery.

‘There!  You’ve come to nicely now, sir,’ said the tearful Mrs. Tope;
‘you were thoroughly worn out, and no wonder!’

‘A man,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with his usual air of repeating a lesson,
‘cannot have his rest broken, and his mind cruelly tormented, and his
body overtaxed by fatigue, without being thoroughly worn out.’

‘I fear I have alarmed you?’ Jasper apologised faintly, when he was
helped into his easy-chair.

‘Not at all, I thank you,’ answered Mr. Grewgious.

‘You are too considerate.’

‘Not at all, I thank you,’ answered Mr. Grewgious again.

‘You must take some wine, sir,’ said Mrs. Tope, ‘and the jelly that I had
ready for you, and that you wouldn’t put your lips to at noon, though I
warned you what would come of it, you know, and you not breakfasted; and
you must have a wing of the roast fowl that has been put back twenty
times if it’s been put back once.  It shall all be on table in five
minutes, and this good gentleman belike will stop and see you take it.’

This good gentleman replied with a snort, which might mean yes, or no, or
anything or nothing, and which Mrs. Tope would have found highly
mystifying, but that her attention was divided by the service of the
table.

‘You will take something with me?’ said Jasper, as the cloth was laid.

‘I couldn’t get a morsel down my throat, I thank you,’ answered Mr.
Grewgious.

Jasper both ate and drank almost voraciously.  Combined with the hurry in
his mode of doing it, was an evident indifference to the taste of what he
took, suggesting that he ate and drank to fortify himself against any
other failure of the spirits, far more than to gratify his palate.  Mr.
Grewgious in the meantime sat upright, with no expression in his face,
and a hard kind of imperturbably polite protest all over him: as though
he would have said, in reply to some invitation to discourse; ‘I couldn’t
originate the faintest approach to an observation on any subject
whatever, I thank you.’

‘Do you know,’ said Jasper, when he had pushed away his plate and glass,
and had sat meditating for a few minutes: ‘do you know that I find some
crumbs of comfort in the communication with which you have so much amazed
me?’

‘_Do_ you?’ returned Mr. Grewgious, pretty plainly adding the unspoken
clause: ‘I don’t, I thank you!’

‘After recovering from the shock of a piece of news of my dear boy, so
entirely unexpected, and so destructive of all the castles I had built
for him; and after having had time to think of it; yes.’

‘I shall be glad to pick up your crumbs,’ said Mr. Grewgious, dryly.

‘Is there not, or is there—if I deceive myself, tell me so, and shorten
my pain—is there not, or is there, hope that, finding himself in this new
position, and becoming sensitively alive to the awkward burden of
explanation, in this quarter, and that, and the other, with which it
would load him, he avoided the awkwardness, and took to flight?’

‘Such a thing might be,’ said Mr. Grewgious, pondering.

‘Such a thing has been.  I have read of cases in which people, rather
than face a seven days’ wonder, and have to account for themselves to the
idle and impertinent, have taken themselves away, and been long unheard
of.’

‘I believe such things have happened,’ said Mr. Grewgious, pondering
still.

‘When I had, and could have, no suspicion,’ pursued Jasper, eagerly
following the new track, ‘that the dear lost boy had withheld anything
from me—most of all, such a leading matter as this—what gleam of light
was there for me in the whole black sky?  When I supposed that his
intended wife was here, and his marriage close at hand, how could I
entertain the possibility of his voluntarily leaving this place, in a
manner that would be so unaccountable, capricious, and cruel?  But now
that I know what you have told me, is there no little chink through which
day pierces?  Supposing him to have disappeared of his own act, is not
his disappearance more accountable and less cruel?  The fact of his
having just parted from your ward, is in itself a sort of reason for his
going away.  It does not make his mysterious departure the less cruel to
me, it is true; but it relieves it of cruelty to her.’

Mr. Grewgious could not but assent to this.

‘And even as to me,’ continued Jasper, still pursuing the new track, with
ardour, and, as he did so, brightening with hope: ‘he knew that you were
coming to me; he knew that you were intrusted to tell me what you have
told me; if your doing so has awakened a new train of thought in my
perplexed mind, it reasonably follows that, from the same premises, he
might have foreseen the inferences that I should draw.  Grant that he did
foresee them; and even the cruelty to me—and who am I!—John Jasper, Music
Master, vanishes!’—

Once more, Mr. Grewgious could not but assent to this.

‘I have had my distrusts, and terrible distrusts they have been,’ said
Jasper; ‘but your disclosure, overpowering as it was at first—showing me
that my own dear boy had had a great disappointing reservation from me,
who so fondly loved him, kindles hope within me.  You do not extinguish
it when I state it, but admit it to be a reasonable hope.  I begin to
believe it possible:’ here he clasped his hands: ‘that he may have
disappeared from among us of his own accord, and that he may yet be alive
and well.’

Mr. Crisparkle came in at the moment.  To whom Mr. Jasper repeated:

‘I begin to believe it possible that he may have disappeared of his own
accord, and may yet be alive and well.’

Mr. Crisparkle taking a seat, and inquiring: ‘Why so?’  Mr. Jasper
repeated the arguments he had just set forth.  If they had been less
plausible than they were, the good Minor Canon’s mind would have been in
a state of preparation to receive them, as exculpatory of his unfortunate
pupil.  But he, too, did really attach great importance to the lost young
man’s having been, so immediately before his disappearance, placed in a
new and embarrassing relation towards every one acquainted with his
projects and affairs; and the fact seemed to him to present the question
in a new light.

‘I stated to Mr. Sapsea, when we waited on him,’ said Jasper: as he
really had done: ‘that there was no quarrel or difference between the two
young men at their last meeting.  We all know that their first meeting
was unfortunately very far from amicable; but all went smoothly and
quietly when they were last together at my house.  My dear boy was not in
his usual spirits; he was depressed—I noticed that—and I am bound
henceforth to dwell upon the circumstance the more, now that I know there
was a special reason for his being depressed: a reason, moreover, which
may possibly have induced him to absent himself.’

‘I pray to Heaven it may turn out so!’ exclaimed Mr. Crisparkle.

‘_I_ pray to Heaven it may turn out so!’ repeated Jasper.  ‘You know—and
Mr. Grewgious should now know likewise—that I took a great prepossession
against Mr. Neville Landless, arising out of his furious conduct on that
first occasion.  You know that I came to you, extremely apprehensive, on
my dear boy’s behalf, of his mad violence.  You know that I even entered
in my Diary, and showed the entry to you, that I had dark forebodings
against him.  Mr. Grewgious ought to be possessed of the whole case.  He
shall not, through any suppression of mine, be informed of a part of it,
and kept in ignorance of another part of it.  I wish him to be good
enough to understand that the communication he has made to me has
hopefully influenced my mind, in spite of its having been, before this
mysterious occurrence took place, profoundly impressed against young
Landless.’

This fairness troubled the Minor Canon much.  He felt that he was not as
open in his own dealing.  He charged against himself reproachfully that
he had suppressed, so far, the two points of a second strong outbreak of
temper against Edwin Drood on the part of Neville, and of the passion of
jealousy having, to his own certain knowledge, flamed up in Neville’s
breast against him.  He was convinced of Neville’s innocence of any part
in the ugly disappearance; and yet so many little circumstances combined
so wofully against him, that he dreaded to add two more to their
cumulative weight.  He was among the truest of men; but he had been
balancing in his mind, much to its distress, whether his volunteering to
tell these two fragments of truth, at this time, would not be tantamount
to a piecing together of falsehood in the place of truth.

However, here was a model before him.  He hesitated no longer.
Addressing Mr. Grewgious, as one placed in authority by the revelation he
had brought to bear on the mystery (and surpassingly Angular Mr.
Grewgious became when he found himself in that unexpected position), Mr.
Crisparkle bore his testimony to Mr. Jasper’s strict sense of justice,
and, expressing his absolute confidence in the complete clearance of his
pupil from the least taint of suspicion, sooner or later, avowed that his
confidence in that young gentleman had been formed, in spite of his
confidential knowledge that his temper was of the hottest and fiercest,
and that it was directly incensed against Mr. Jasper’s nephew, by the
circumstance of his romantically supposing himself to be enamoured of the
same young lady.  The sanguine reaction manifest in Mr. Jasper was proof
even against this unlooked-for declaration.  It turned him paler; but he
repeated that he would cling to the hope he had derived from Mr.
Grewgious; and that if no trace of his dear boy were found, leading to
the dreadful inference that he had been made away with, he would cherish
unto the last stretch of possibility the idea, that he might have
absconded of his own wild will.

Now, it fell out that Mr. Crisparkle, going away from this conference
still very uneasy in his mind, and very much troubled on behalf of the
young man whom he held as a kind of prisoner in his own house, took a
memorable night walk.

He walked to Cloisterham Weir.

He often did so, and consequently there was nothing remarkable in his
footsteps tending that way.  But the preoccupation of his mind so
hindered him from planning any walk, or taking heed of the objects he
passed, that his first consciousness of being near the Weir, was derived
from the sound of the falling water close at hand.

‘How did I come here!’ was his first thought, as he stopped.

‘Why did I come here!’ was his second.

Then, he stood intently listening to the water.  A familiar passage in
his reading, about airy tongues that syllable men’s names, rose so
unbidden to his ear, that he put it from him with his hand, as if it were
tangible.

It was starlight.  The Weir was full two miles above the spot to which
the young men had repaired to watch the storm.  No search had been made
up here, for the tide had been running strongly down, at that time of the
night of Christmas Eve, and the likeliest places for the discovery of a
body, if a fatal accident had happened under such circumstances, all
lay—both when the tide ebbed, and when it flowed again—between that spot
and the sea.  The water came over the Weir, with its usual sound on a
cold starlight night, and little could be seen of it; yet Mr. Crisparkle
had a strange idea that something unusual hung about the place.

He reasoned with himself: What was it?  Where was it?  Put it to the
proof.  Which sense did it address?

No sense reported anything unusual there.  He listened again, and his
sense of hearing again checked the water coming over the Weir, with its
usual sound on a cold starlight night.

Knowing very well that the mystery with which his mind was occupied,
might of itself give the place this haunted air, he strained those hawk’s
eyes of his for the correction of his sight.  He got closer to the Weir,
and peered at its well-known posts and timbers.  Nothing in the least
unusual was remotely shadowed forth.  But he resolved that he would come
back early in the morning.

The Weir ran through his broken sleep, all night, and he was back again
at sunrise.  It was a bright frosty morning.  The whole composition
before him, when he stood where he had stood last night, was clearly
discernible in its minutest details.  He had surveyed it closely for some
minutes, and was about to withdraw his eyes, when they were attracted
keenly to one spot.

He turned his back upon the Weir, and looked far away at the sky, and at
the earth, and then looked again at that one spot.  It caught his sight
again immediately, and he concentrated his vision upon it.  He could not
lose it now, though it was but such a speck in the landscape.  It
fascinated his sight.  His hands began plucking off his coat.  For it
struck him that at that spot—a corner of the Weir—something glistened,
which did not move and come over with the glistening water-drops, but
remained stationary.

He assured himself of this, he threw off his clothes, he plunged into the
icy water, and swam for the spot.  Climbing the timbers, he took from
them, caught among their interstices by its chain, a gold watch, bearing
engraved upon its back E. D.

He brought the watch to the bank, swam to the Weir again, climbed it, and
dived off.  He knew every hole and corner of all the depths, and dived
and dived and dived, until he could bear the cold no more.  His notion
was, that he would find the body; he only found a shirt-pin sticking in
some mud and ooze.

With these discoveries he returned to Cloisterham, and, taking Neville
Landless with him, went straight to the Mayor.  Mr. Jasper was sent for,
the watch and shirt-pin were identified, Neville was detained, and the
wildest frenzy and fatuity of evil report rose against him.  He was of
that vindictive and violent nature, that but for his poor sister, who
alone had influence over him, and out of whose sight he was never to be
trusted, he would be in the daily commission of murder.  Before coming to
England he had caused to be whipped to death sundry ‘Natives’—nomadic
persons, encamping now in Asia, now in Africa, now in the West Indies,
and now at the North Pole—vaguely supposed in Cloisterham to be always
black, always of great virtue, always calling themselves Me, and
everybody else Massa or Missie (according to sex), and always reading
tracts of the obscurest meaning, in broken English, but always accurately
understanding them in the purest mother tongue.  He had nearly brought
Mrs. Crisparkle’s grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.  (Those original
expressions were Mr. Sapsea’s.)  He had repeatedly said he would have Mr.
Crisparkle’s life.  He had repeatedly said he would have everybody’s
life, and become in effect the last man.  He had been brought down to
Cloisterham, from London, by an eminent Philanthropist, and why?  Because
that Philanthropist had expressly declared: ‘I owe it to my
fellow-creatures that he should be, in the words of BENTHAM, where he is
the cause of the greatest danger to the smallest number.’

These dropping shots from the blunderbusses of blunderheadedness might
not have hit him in a vital place.  But he had to stand against a trained
and well-directed fire of arms of precision too.  He had notoriously
threatened the lost young man, and had, according to the showing of his
own faithful friend and tutor who strove so hard for him, a cause of
bitter animosity (created by himself, and stated by himself), against
that ill-starred fellow.  He had armed himself with an offensive weapon
for the fatal night, and he had gone off early in the morning, after
making preparations for departure.  He had been found with traces of
blood on him; truly, they might have been wholly caused as he
represented, but they might not, also.  On a search-warrant being issued
for the examination of his room, clothes, and so forth, it was discovered
that he had destroyed all his papers, and rearranged all his possessions,
on the very afternoon of the disappearance.  The watch found at the Weir
was challenged by the jeweller as one he had wound and set for Edwin
Drood, at twenty minutes past two on that same afternoon; and it had run
down, before being cast into the water; and it was the jeweller’s
positive opinion that it had never been re-wound.  This would justify the
hypothesis that the watch was taken from him not long after he left Mr.
Jasper’s house at midnight, in company with the last person seen with
him, and that it had been thrown away after being retained some hours.
Why thrown away?  If he had been murdered, and so artfully disfigured, or
concealed, or both, as that the murderer hoped identification to be
impossible, except from something that he wore, assuredly the murderer
would seek to remove from the body the most lasting, the best known, and
the most easily recognisable, things upon it.  Those things would be the
watch and shirt-pin.  As to his opportunities of casting them into the
river; if he were the object of these suspicions, they were easy.  For,
he had been seen by many persons, wandering about on that side of the
city—indeed on all sides of it—in a miserable and seemingly
half-distracted manner.  As to the choice of the spot, obviously such
criminating evidence had better take its chance of being found anywhere,
rather than upon himself, or in his possession.  Concerning the
reconciliatory nature of the appointed meeting between the two young men,
very little could be made of that in young Landless’s favour; for it
distinctly appeared that the meeting originated, not with him, but with
Mr. Crisparkle, and that it had been urged on by Mr. Crisparkle; and who
could say how unwillingly, or in what ill-conditioned mood, his enforced
pupil had gone to it?  The more his case was looked into, the weaker it
became in every point.  Even the broad suggestion that the lost young man
had absconded, was rendered additionally improbable on the showing of the
young lady from whom he had so lately parted; for; what did she say, with
great earnestness and sorrow, when interrogated?  That he had, expressly
and enthusiastically, planned with her, that he would await the arrival
of her guardian, Mr. Grewgious.  And yet, be it observed, he disappeared
before that gentleman appeared.

On the suspicions thus urged and supported, Neville was detained, and
re-detained, and the search was pressed on every hand, and Jasper
laboured night and day.  But nothing more was found.  No discovery being
made, which proved the lost man to be dead, it at length became necessary
to release the person suspected of having made away with him.  Neville
was set at large.  Then, a consequence ensued which Mr. Crisparkle had
too well foreseen.  Neville must leave the place, for the place shunned
him and cast him out.  Even had it not been so, the dear old china
shepherdess would have worried herself to death with fears for her son,
and with general trepidation occasioned by their having such an inmate.
Even had that not been so, the authority to which the Minor Canon
deferred officially, would have settled the point.

‘Mr. Crisparkle,’ quoth the Dean, ‘human justice may err, but it must act
according to its lights.  The days of taking sanctuary are past.  This
young man must not take sanctuary with us.’

‘You mean that he must leave my house, sir?’

‘Mr. Crisparkle,’ returned the prudent Dean, ‘I claim no authority in
your house.  I merely confer with you, on the painful necessity you find
yourself under, of depriving this young man of the great advantages of
your counsel and instruction.’

‘It is very lamentable, sir,’ Mr. Crisparkle represented.

‘Very much so,’ the Dean assented.

‘And if it be a necessity—’ Mr. Crisparkle faltered.

‘As you unfortunately find it to be,’ returned the Dean.

Mr. Crisparkle bowed submissively: ‘It is hard to prejudge his case, sir,
but I am sensible that—’

‘Just so.  Perfectly.  As you say, Mr. Crisparkle,’ interposed the Dean,
nodding his head smoothly, ‘there is nothing else to be done.  No doubt,
no doubt.  There is no alternative, as your good sense has discovered.’

‘I am entirely satisfied of his perfect innocence, sir, nevertheless.’

‘We-e-ell!’ said the Dean, in a more confidential tone, and slightly
glancing around him, ‘I would not say so, generally.  Not generally.
Enough of suspicion attaches to him to—no, I think I would not say so,
generally.’

Mr. Crisparkle bowed again.

‘It does not become us, perhaps,’ pursued the Dean, ‘to be partisans.
Not partisans.  We clergy keep our hearts warm and our heads cool, and we
hold a judicious middle course.’

‘I hope you do not object, sir, to my having stated in public,
emphatically, that he will reappear here, whenever any new suspicion may
be awakened, or any new circumstance may come to light in this
extraordinary matter?’

‘Not at all,’ returned the Dean.  ‘And yet, do you know, I don’t think,’
with a very nice and neat emphasis on those two words: ‘I _don’t think_ I
would state it emphatically.  State it?  Ye-e-es!  But emphatically?
No-o-o.  I _think_ not.  In point of fact, Mr. Crisparkle, keeping our
hearts warm and our heads cool, we clergy need do nothing emphatically.’

So Minor Canon Row knew Neville Landless no more; and he went
whithersoever he would, or could, with a blight upon his name and fame.

It was not until then that John Jasper silently resumed his place in the
choir.  Haggard and red-eyed, his hopes plainly had deserted him, his
sanguine mood was gone, and all his worst misgivings had come back.  A
day or two afterwards, while unrobing, he took his Diary from a pocket of
his coat, turned the leaves, and with an impressive look, and without one
spoken word, handed this entry to Mr. Crisparkle to read:

‘My dear boy is murdered.  The discovery of the watch and shirt-pin
convinces me that he was murdered that night, and that his jewellery was
taken from him to prevent identification by its means.  All the delusive
hopes I had founded on his separation from his betrothed wife, I give to
the winds.  They perish before this fatal discovery.  I now swear, and
record the oath on this page, That I nevermore will discuss this mystery
with any human creature until I hold the clue to it in my hand.  That I
never will relax in my secrecy or in my search.  That I will fasten the
crime of the murder of my dear dead boy upon the murderer.  And, That I
devote myself to his destruction.’




CHAPTER XVII—PHILANTHROPY, PROFESSIONAL AND UNPROFESSIONAL


Full half a year had come and gone, and Mr. Crisparkle sat in a
waiting-room in the London chief offices of the Haven of Philanthropy,
until he could have audience of Mr. Honeythunder.

In his college days of athletic exercises, Mr. Crisparkle had known
professors of the Noble Art of fisticuffs, and had attended two or three
of their gloved gatherings.  He had now an opportunity of observing that
as to the phrenological formation of the backs of their heads, the
Professing Philanthropists were uncommonly like the Pugilists.  In the
development of all those organs which constitute, or attend, a propensity
to ‘pitch into’ your fellow-creatures, the Philanthropists were
remarkably favoured.  There were several Professors passing in and out,
with exactly the aggressive air upon them of being ready for a turn-up
with any Novice who might happen to be on hand, that Mr. Crisparkle well
remembered in the circles of the Fancy.  Preparations were in progress
for a moral little Mill somewhere on the rural circuit, and other
Professors were backing this or that Heavy-Weight as good for such or
such speech-making hits, so very much after the manner of the sporting
publicans, that the intended Resolutions might have been Rounds.  In an
official manager of these displays much celebrated for his platform
tactics, Mr. Crisparkle recognised (in a suit of black) the counterpart
of a deceased benefactor of his species, an eminent public character,
once known to fame as Frosty-faced Fogo, who in days of yore
superintended the formation of the magic circle with the ropes and
stakes.  There were only three conditions of resemblance wanting between
these Professors and those.  Firstly, the Philanthropists were in very
bad training: much too fleshy, and presenting, both in face and figure, a
superabundance of what is known to Pugilistic Experts as Suet Pudding.
Secondly, the Philanthropists had not the good temper of the Pugilists,
and used worse language.  Thirdly, their fighting code stood in great
need of revision, as empowering them not only to bore their man to the
ropes, but to bore him to the confines of distraction; also to hit him
when he was down, hit him anywhere and anyhow, kick him, stamp upon him,
gouge him, and maul him behind his back without mercy.  In these last
particulars the Professors of the Noble Art were much nobler than the
Professors of Philanthropy.

Mr. Crisparkle was so completely lost in musing on these similarities and
dissimilarities, at the same time watching the crowd which came and went
by, always, as it seemed, on errands of antagonistically snatching
something from somebody, and never giving anything to anybody, that his
name was called before he heard it.  On his at length responding, he was
shown by a miserably shabby and underpaid stipendiary Philanthropist (who
could hardly have done worse if he had taken service with a declared
enemy of the human race) to Mr. Honeythunder’s room.

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Honeythunder, in his tremendous voice, like a
schoolmaster issuing orders to a boy of whom he had a bad opinion, ‘sit
down.’

Mr. Crisparkle seated himself.

Mr. Honeythunder having signed the remaining few score of a few thousand
circulars, calling upon a corresponding number of families without means
to come forward, stump up instantly, and be Philanthropists, or go to the
Devil, another shabby stipendiary Philanthropist (highly disinterested,
if in earnest) gathered these into a basket and walked off with them.

‘Now, Mr. Crisparkle,’ said Mr. Honeythunder, turning his chair half
round towards him when they were alone, and squaring his arms with his
hands on his knees, and his brows knitted, as if he added, I am going to
make short work of _you_: ‘Now, Mr. Crisparkle, we entertain different
views, you and I, sir, of the sanctity of human life.’

‘Do we?’ returned the Minor Canon.

‘We do, sir?’

‘Might I ask you,’ said the Minor Canon: ‘what are your views on that
subject?’

‘That human life is a thing to be held sacred, sir.’

‘Might I ask you,’ pursued the Minor Canon as before: ‘what you suppose
to be my views on that subject?’

‘By George, sir!’ returned the Philanthropist, squaring his arms still
more, as he frowned on Mr. Crisparkle: ‘they are best known to yourself.’

‘Readily admitted.  But you began by saying that we took different views,
you know.  Therefore (or you could not say so) you must have set up some
views as mine.  Pray, what views _have_ you set up as mine?’

‘Here is a man—and a young man,’ said Mr. Honeythunder, as if that made
the matter infinitely worse, and he could have easily borne the loss of
an old one, ‘swept off the face of the earth by a deed of violence.  What
do you call that?’

‘Murder,’ said the Minor Canon.

‘What do you call the doer of that deed, sir?

‘A murderer,’ said the Minor Canon.

‘I am glad to hear you admit so much, sir,’ retorted Mr. Honeythunder, in
his most offensive manner; ‘and I candidly tell you that I didn’t expect
it.’  Here he lowered heavily at Mr. Crisparkle again.

‘Be so good as to explain what you mean by those very unjustifiable
expressions.’

‘I don’t sit here, sir,’ returned the Philanthropist, raising his voice
to a roar, ‘to be browbeaten.’

‘As the only other person present, no one can possibly know that better
than I do,’ returned the Minor Canon very quietly.  ‘But I interrupt your
explanation.’

‘Murder!’ proceeded Mr. Honeythunder, in a kind of boisterous reverie,
with his platform folding of his arms, and his platform nod of abhorrent
reflection after each short sentiment of a word.  ‘Bloodshed!  Abel!
Cain!  I hold no terms with Cain.  I repudiate with a shudder the red
hand when it is offered me.’

Instead of instantly leaping into his chair and cheering himself hoarse,
as the Brotherhood in public meeting assembled would infallibly have done
on this cue, Mr. Crisparkle merely reversed the quiet crossing of his
legs, and said mildly: ‘Don’t let me interrupt your explanation—when you
begin it.’

‘The Commandments say, no murder.  NO murder, sir!’ proceeded Mr.
Honeythunder, platformally pausing as if he took Mr. Crisparkle to task
for having distinctly asserted that they said: You may do a little
murder, and then leave off.

‘And they also say, you shall bear no false witness,’ observed Mr.
Crisparkle.

‘Enough!’ bellowed Mr. Honeythunder, with a solemnity and severity that
would have brought the house down at a meeting, ‘E-e-nough!  My late
wards being now of age, and I being released from a trust which I cannot
contemplate without a thrill of horror, there are the accounts which you
have undertaken to accept on their behalf, and there is a statement of
the balance which you have undertaken to receive, and which you cannot
receive too soon.  And let me tell you, sir, I wish that, as a man and a
Minor Canon, you were better employed,’ with a nod.  ‘Better employed,’
with another nod.  ‘Bet-ter em-ployed!’ with another and the three nods
added up.

Mr. Crisparkle rose; a little heated in the face, but with perfect
command of himself.

‘Mr. Honeythunder,’ he said, taking up the papers referred to: ‘my being
better or worse employed than I am at present is a matter of taste and
opinion.  You might think me better employed in enrolling myself a member
of your Society.’

‘Ay, indeed, sir!’ retorted Mr. Honeythunder, shaking his head in a
threatening manner.  ‘It would have been better for you if you had done
that long ago!’

‘I think otherwise.’

‘Or,’ said Mr. Honeythunder, shaking his head again, ‘I might think one
of your profession better employed in devoting himself to the discovery
and punishment of guilt than in leaving that duty to be undertaken by a
layman.’

‘I may regard my profession from a point of view which teaches me that
its first duty is towards those who are in necessity and tribulation, who
are desolate and oppressed,’ said Mr. Crisparkle.  ‘However, as I have
quite clearly satisfied myself that it is no part of my profession to
make professions, I say no more of that.  But I owe it to Mr. Neville,
and to Mr. Neville’s sister (and in a much lower degree to myself), to
say to you that I _know_ I was in the full possession and understanding
of Mr. Neville’s mind and heart at the time of this occurrence; and that,
without in the least colouring or concealing what was to be deplored in
him and required to be corrected, I feel certain that his tale is true.
Feeling that certainty, I befriend him.  As long as that certainty shall
last, I will befriend him.  And if any consideration could shake me in
this resolve, I should be so ashamed of myself for my meanness, that no
man’s good opinion—no, nor no woman’s—so gained, could compensate me for
the loss of my own.’

Good fellow! manly fellow!  And he was so modest, too.  There was no more
self-assertion in the Minor Canon than in the schoolboy who had stood in
the breezy playing-fields keeping a wicket.  He was simply and staunchly
true to his duty alike in the large case and in the small.  So all true
souls ever are.  So every true soul ever was, ever is, and ever will be.
There is nothing little to the really great in spirit.

‘Then who do you make out did the deed?’ asked Mr. Honeythunder, turning
on him abruptly.

‘Heaven forbid,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘that in my desire to clear one man
I should lightly criminate another!  I accuse no one.’

‘Tcha!’ ejaculated Mr. Honeythunder with great disgust; for this was by
no means the principle on which the Philanthropic Brotherhood usually
proceeded.  ‘And, sir, you are not a disinterested witness, we must bear
in mind.’

‘How am I an interested one?’ inquired Mr. Crisparkle, smiling
innocently, at a loss to imagine.

‘There was a certain stipend, sir, paid to you for your pupil, which may
have warped your judgment a bit,’ said Mr. Honeythunder, coarsely.

‘Perhaps I expect to retain it still?’  Mr. Crisparkle returned,
enlightened; ‘do you mean that too?’

‘Well, sir,’ returned the professional Philanthropist, getting up and
thrusting his hands down into his trousers-pockets, ‘I don’t go about
measuring people for caps.  If people find I have any about me that fit
’em, they can put ’em on and wear ’em, if they like.  That’s their look
out: not mine.’

Mr. Crisparkle eyed him with a just indignation, and took him to task
thus:

‘Mr. Honeythunder, I hoped when I came in here that I might be under no
necessity of commenting on the introduction of platform manners or
platform manœuvres among the decent forbearances of private life.  But
you have given me such a specimen of both, that I should be a fit subject
for both if I remained silent respecting them.  They are detestable.’

‘They don’t suit _you_, I dare say, sir.’

‘They are,’ repeated Mr. Crisparkle, without noticing the interruption,
‘detestable.  They violate equally the justice that should belong to
Christians, and the restraints that should belong to gentlemen.  You
assume a great crime to have been committed by one whom I, acquainted
with the attendant circumstances, and having numerous reasons on my side,
devoutly believe to be innocent of it.  Because I differ from you on that
vital point, what is your platform resource?  Instantly to turn upon me,
charging that I have no sense of the enormity of the crime itself, but am
its aider and abettor!  So, another time—taking me as representing your
opponent in other cases—you set up a platform credulity; a moved and
seconded and carried-unanimously profession of faith in some ridiculous
delusion or mischievous imposition.  I decline to believe it, and you
fall back upon your platform resource of proclaiming that I believe
nothing; that because I will not bow down to a false God of your making,
I deny the true God!  Another time you make the platform discovery that
War is a calamity, and you propose to abolish it by a string of twisted
resolutions tossed into the air like the tail of a kite.  I do not admit
the discovery to be yours in the least, and I have not a grain of faith
in your remedy.  Again, your platform resource of representing me as
revelling in the horrors of a battle-field like a fiend incarnate!
Another time, in another of your undiscriminating platform rushes, you
would punish the sober for the drunken.  I claim consideration for the
comfort, convenience, and refreshment of the sober; and you presently
make platform proclamation that I have a depraved desire to turn Heaven’s
creatures into swine and wild beasts!  In all such cases your movers, and
your seconders, and your supporters—your regular Professors of all
degrees, run amuck like so many mad Malays; habitually attributing the
lowest and basest motives with the utmost recklessness (let me call your
attention to a recent instance in yourself for which you should blush),
and quoting figures which you know to be as wilfully onesided as a
statement of any complicated account that should be all Creditor side and
no Debtor, or all Debtor side and no Creditor.  Therefore it is, Mr.
Honeythunder, that I consider the platform a sufficiently bad example and
a sufficiently bad school, even in public life; but hold that, carried
into private life, it becomes an unendurable nuisance.’

‘These are strong words, sir!’ exclaimed the Philanthropist.

‘I hope so,’ said Mr. Crisparkle.  ‘Good morning.’

He walked out of the Haven at a great rate, but soon fell into his
regular brisk pace, and soon had a smile upon his face as he went along,
wondering what the china shepherdess would have said if she had seen him
pounding Mr. Honeythunder in the late little lively affair.  For Mr.
Crisparkle had just enough of harmless vanity to hope that he had hit
hard, and to glow with the belief that he had trimmed the Philanthropic
Jacket pretty handsomely.

He took himself to Staple Inn, but not to P. J. T. and Mr. Grewgious.
Full many a creaking stair he climbed before he reached some attic rooms
in a corner, turned the latch of their unbolted door, and stood beside
the table of Neville Landless.

An air of retreat and solitude hung about the rooms and about their
inhabitant.  He was much worn, and so were they.  Their sloping ceilings,
cumbrous rusty locks and grates, and heavy wooden bins and beams, slowly
mouldering withal, had a prisonous look, and he had the haggard face of a
prisoner.  Yet the sunlight shone in at the ugly garret-window, which had
a penthouse to itself thrust out among the tiles; and on the cracked and
smoke-blackened parapet beyond, some of the deluded sparrows of the place
rheumatically hopped, like little feathered cripples who had left their
crutches in their nests; and there was a play of living leaves at hand
that changed the air, and made an imperfect sort of music in it that
would have been melody in the country.

The rooms were sparely furnished, but with good store of books.
Everything expressed the abode of a poor student.  That Mr. Crisparkle
had been either chooser, lender, or donor of the books, or that he
combined the three characters, might have been easily seen in the
friendly beam of his eyes upon them as he entered.

‘How goes it, Neville?’

‘I am in good heart, Mr. Crisparkle, and working away.’

‘I wish your eyes were not quite so large and not quite so bright,’ said
the Minor Canon, slowly releasing the hand he had taken in his.

‘They brighten at the sight of you,’ returned Neville.  ‘If you were to
fall away from me, they would soon be dull enough.’

‘Rally, rally!’ urged the other, in a stimulating tone.  ‘Fight for it,
Neville!’

‘If I were dying, I feel as if a word from you would rally me; if my
pulse had stopped, I feel as if your touch would make it beat again,’
said Neville.  ‘But I _have_ rallied, and am doing famously.’

Mr. Crisparkle turned him with his face a little more towards the light.

‘I want to see a ruddier touch here, Neville,’ he said, indicating his
own healthy cheek by way of pattern.  ‘I want more sun to shine upon
you.’

Neville drooped suddenly, as he replied in a lowered voice: ‘I am not
hardy enough for that, yet.  I may become so, but I cannot bear it yet.
If you had gone through those Cloisterham streets as I did; if you had
seen, as I did, those averted eyes, and the better sort of people
silently giving me too much room to pass, that I might not touch them or
come near them, you wouldn’t think it quite unreasonable that I cannot go
about in the daylight.’

‘My poor fellow!’ said the Minor Canon, in a tone so purely sympathetic
that the young man caught his hand, ‘I never said it was unreasonable;
never thought so.  But I should like you to do it.’

‘And that would give me the strongest motive to do it.  But I cannot yet.
I cannot persuade myself that the eyes of even the stream of strangers I
pass in this vast city look at me without suspicion.  I feel marked and
tainted, even when I go out—as I do only—at night.  But the darkness
covers me then, and I take courage from it.’

Mr. Crisparkle laid a hand upon his shoulder, and stood looking down at
him.

‘If I could have changed my name,’ said Neville, ‘I would have done so.
But as you wisely pointed out to me, I can’t do that, for it would look
like guilt.  If I could have gone to some distant place, I might have
found relief in that, but the thing is not to be thought of, for the same
reason.  Hiding and escaping would be the construction in either case.
It seems a little hard to be so tied to a stake, and innocent; but I
don’t complain.’

‘And you must expect no miracle to help you, Neville,’ said Mr.
Crisparkle, compassionately.

‘No, sir, I know that.  The ordinary fulness of time and circumstances is
all I have to trust to.’

‘It will right you at last, Neville.’

‘So I believe, and I hope I may live to know it.’

But perceiving that the despondent mood into which he was falling cast a
shadow on the Minor Canon, and (it may be) feeling that the broad hand
upon his shoulder was not then quite as steady as its own natural
strength had rendered it when it first touched him just now, he
brightened and said:

‘Excellent circumstances for study, anyhow! and you know, Mr. Crisparkle,
what need I have of study in all ways.  Not to mention that you have
advised me to study for the difficult profession of the law, specially,
and that of course I am guiding myself by the advice of such a friend and
helper.  Such a good friend and helper!’

He took the fortifying hand from his shoulder, and kissed it.  Mr.
Crisparkle beamed at the books, but not so brightly as when he had
entered.

‘I gather from your silence on the subject that my late guardian is
adverse, Mr. Crisparkle?’

The Minor Canon answered: ‘Your late guardian is a—a most unreasonable
person, and it signifies nothing to any reasonable person whether he is
_ad_verse, _per_verse, or the _re_verse.’

‘Well for me that I have enough with economy to live upon,’ sighed
Neville, half wearily and half cheerily, ‘while I wait to be learned, and
wait to be righted!  Else I might have proved the proverb, that while the
grass grows, the steed starves!’

He opened some books as he said it, and was soon immersed in their
interleaved and annotated passages; while Mr. Crisparkle sat beside him,
expounding, correcting, and advising.  The Minor Canon’s Cathedral duties
made these visits of his difficult to accomplish, and only to be
compassed at intervals of many weeks.  But they were as serviceable as
they were precious to Neville Landless.

When they had got through such studies as they had in hand, they stood
leaning on the window-sill, and looking down upon the patch of garden.
‘Next week,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘you will cease to be alone, and will
have a devoted companion.’

‘And yet,’ returned Neville, ‘this seems an uncongenial place to bring my
sister to.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said the Minor Canon.  ‘There is duty to be done
here; and there are womanly feeling, sense, and courage wanted here.’

‘I meant,’ explained Neville, ‘that the surroundings are so dull and
unwomanly, and that Helena can have no suitable friend or society here.’

‘You have only to remember,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘that you are here
yourself, and that she has to draw you into the sunlight.’

They were silent for a little while, and then Mr. Crisparkle began anew.

‘When we first spoke together, Neville, you told me that your sister had
risen out of the disadvantages of your past lives as superior to you as
the tower of Cloisterham Cathedral is higher than the chimneys of Minor
Canon Corner.  Do you remember that?’

‘Right well!’

‘I was inclined to think it at the time an enthusiastic flight.  No
matter what I think it now.  What I would emphasise is, that under the
head of Pride your sister is a great and opportune example to you.’

‘Under _all_ heads that are included in the composition of a fine
character, she is.’

‘Say so; but take this one.  Your sister has learnt how to govern what is
proud in her nature.  She can dominate it even when it is wounded through
her sympathy with you.  No doubt she has suffered deeply in those same
streets where you suffered deeply.  No doubt her life is darkened by the
cloud that darkens yours.  But bending her pride into a grand composure
that is not haughty or aggressive, but is a sustained confidence in you
and in the truth, she has won her way through those streets until she
passes along them as high in the general respect as any one who treads
them.  Every day and hour of her life since Edwin Drood’s disappearance,
she has faced malignity and folly—for you—as only a brave nature well
directed can.  So it will be with her to the end.  Another and weaker
kind of pride might sink broken-hearted, but never such a pride as hers:
which knows no shrinking, and can get no mastery over her.’

The pale cheek beside him flushed under the comparison, and the hint
implied in it.

‘I will do all I can to imitate her,’ said Neville.

‘Do so, and be a truly brave man, as she is a truly brave woman,’
answered Mr. Crisparkle stoutly.  ‘It is growing dark.  Will you go my
way with me, when it is quite dark?  Mind! it is not I who wait for
darkness.’

Neville replied, that he would accompany him directly.  But Mr.
Crisparkle said he had a moment’s call to make on Mr. Grewgious as an act
of courtesy, and would run across to that gentleman’s chambers, and
rejoin Neville on his own doorstep, if he would come down there to meet
him.

Mr. Grewgious, bolt upright as usual, sat taking his wine in the dusk at
his open window; his wineglass and decanter on the round table at his
elbow; himself and his legs on the window-seat; only one hinge in his
whole body, like a bootjack.

‘How do you do, reverend sir?’ said Mr. Grewgious, with abundant offers
of hospitality, which were as cordially declined as made.  ‘And how is
your charge getting on over the way in the set that I had the pleasure of
recommending to you as vacant and eligible?’

Mr. Crisparkle replied suitably.

‘I am glad you approve of them,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘because I entertain
a sort of fancy for having him under my eye.’

As Mr. Grewgious had to turn his eye up considerably before he could see
the chambers, the phrase was to be taken figuratively and not literally.

‘And how did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir?’ said Mr. Grewgious.

Mr. Crisparkle had left him pretty well.

‘And where did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir?’  Mr. Crisparkle had
left him at Cloisterham.

‘And when did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir?’  That morning.

‘Umps!’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘He didn’t say he was coming, perhaps?’

‘Coming where?’

‘Anywhere, for instance?’ said Mr. Grewgious.

‘No.’

‘Because here he is,’ said Mr. Grewgious, who had asked all these
questions, with his preoccupied glance directed out at window.  ‘And he
don’t look agreeable, does he?’

Mr. Crisparkle was craning towards the window, when Mr. Grewgious added:

‘If you will kindly step round here behind me, in the gloom of the room,
and will cast your eye at the second-floor landing window in yonder
house, I think you will hardly fail to see a slinking individual in whom
I recognise our local friend.’

‘You are right!’ cried Mr. Crisparkle.

‘Umps!’ said Mr. Grewgious.  Then he added, turning his face so abruptly
that his head nearly came into collision with Mr. Crisparkle’s: ‘what
should you say that our local friend was up to?’

The last passage he had been shown in the Diary returned on Mr.
Crisparkle’s mind with the force of a strong recoil, and he asked Mr.
Grewgious if he thought it possible that Neville was to be harassed by
the keeping of a watch upon him?

‘A watch?’ repeated Mr. Grewgious musingly.  ‘Ay!’

‘Which would not only of itself haunt and torture his life,’ said Mr.
Crisparkle warmly, ‘but would expose him to the torment of a perpetually
reviving suspicion, whatever he might do, or wherever he might go.’

‘Ay!’ said Mr. Grewgious musingly still.  ‘Do I see him waiting for you?’

‘No doubt you do.’

‘Then _would_ you have the goodness to excuse my getting up to see you
out, and to go out to join him, and to go the way that you were going,
and to take no notice of our local friend?’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘I
entertain a sort of fancy for having _him_ under my eye to-night, do you
know?’

Mr. Crisparkle, with a significant need complied; and rejoining Neville,
went away with him.  They dined together, and parted at the yet
unfinished and undeveloped railway station: Mr. Crisparkle to get home;
Neville to walk the streets, cross the bridges, make a wide round of the
city in the friendly darkness, and tire himself out.

It was midnight when he returned from his solitary expedition and climbed
his staircase.  The night was hot, and the windows of the staircase were
all wide open.  Coming to the top, it gave him a passing chill of
surprise (there being no rooms but his up there) to find a stranger
sitting on the window-sill, more after the manner of a venturesome
glazier than an amateur ordinarily careful of his neck; in fact, so much
more outside the window than inside, as to suggest the thought that he
must have come up by the water-spout instead of the stairs.

The stranger said nothing until Neville put his key in his door; then,
seeming to make sure of his identity from the action, he spoke:

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, coming from the window with a frank and
smiling air, and a prepossessing address; ‘the beans.’

Neville was quite at a loss.

‘Runners,’ said the visitor.  ‘Scarlet.  Next door at the back.’

‘O,’ returned Neville.  ‘And the mignonette and wall-flower?’

‘The same,’ said the visitor.

‘Pray walk in.’

‘Thank you.’

Neville lighted his candles, and the visitor sat down.  A handsome
gentleman, with a young face, but with an older figure in its robustness
and its breadth of shoulder; say a man of eight-and-twenty, or at the
utmost thirty; so extremely sunburnt that the contrast between his brown
visage and the white forehead shaded out of doors by his hat, and the
glimpses of white throat below the neckerchief, would have been almost
ludicrous but for his broad temples, bright blue eyes, clustering brown
hair, and laughing teeth.

‘I have noticed,’ said he; ‘—my name is Tartar.’

Neville inclined his head.

‘I have noticed (excuse me) that you shut yourself up a good deal, and
that you seem to like my garden aloft here.  If you would like a little
more of it, I could throw out a few lines and stays between my windows
and yours, which the runners would take to directly.  And I have some
boxes, both of mignonette and wall-flower, that I could shove on along
the gutter (with a boathook I have by me) to your windows, and draw back
again when they wanted watering or gardening, and shove on again when
they were ship-shape; so that they would cause you no trouble.  I
couldn’t take this liberty without asking your permission, so I venture
to ask it.  Tartar, corresponding set, next door.’

‘You are very kind.’

‘Not at all.  I ought to apologise for looking in so late.  But having
noticed (excuse me) that you generally walk out at night, I thought I
should inconvenience you least by awaiting your return.  I am always
afraid of inconveniencing busy men, being an idle man.’

‘I should not have thought so, from your appearance.’

‘No?  I take it as a compliment.  In fact, I was bred in the Royal Navy,
and was First Lieutenant when I quitted it.  But, an uncle disappointed
in the service leaving me his property on condition that I left the Navy,
I accepted the fortune, and resigned my commission.’

‘Lately, I presume?’

‘Well, I had had twelve or fifteen years of knocking about first.  I came
here some nine months before you; I had had one crop before you came.  I
chose this place, because, having served last in a little corvette, I
knew I should feel more at home where I had a constant opportunity of
knocking my head against the ceiling.  Besides, it would never do for a
man who had been aboard ship from his boyhood to turn luxurious all at
once.  Besides, again; having been accustomed to a very short allowance
of land all my life, I thought I’d feel my way to the command of a landed
estate, by beginning in boxes.’

Whimsically as this was said, there was a touch of merry earnestness in
it that made it doubly whimsical.

‘However,’ said the Lieutenant, ‘I have talked quite enough about myself.
It is not my way, I hope; it has merely been to present myself to you
naturally.  If you will allow me to take the liberty I have described, it
will be a charity, for it will give me something more to do.  And you are
not to suppose that it will entail any interruption or intrusion on you,
for that is far from my intention.’

Neville replied that he was greatly obliged, and that he thankfully
accepted the kind proposal.

‘I am very glad to take your windows in tow,’ said the Lieutenant.  ‘From
what I have seen of you when I have been gardening at mine, and you have
been looking on, I have thought you (excuse me) rather too studious and
delicate.  May I ask, is your health at all affected?’

‘I have undergone some mental distress,’ said Neville, confused, ‘which
has stood me in the stead of illness.’

‘Pardon me,’ said Mr. Tartar.

With the greatest delicacy he shifted his ground to the windows again,
and asked if he could look at one of them.  On Neville’s opening it, he
immediately sprang out, as if he were going aloft with a whole watch in
an emergency, and were setting a bright example.

‘For Heaven’s sake,’ cried Neville, ‘don’t do that!  Where are you going
Mr. Tartar?  You’ll be dashed to pieces!’

‘All well!’ said the Lieutenant, coolly looking about him on the
housetop.  ‘All taut and trim here.  Those lines and stays shall be
rigged before you turn out in the morning.  May I take this short cut
home, and say good-night?’

‘Mr. Tartar!’ urged Neville.  ‘Pray!  It makes me giddy to see you!’

But Mr. Tartar, with a wave of his hand and the deftness of a cat, had
already dipped through his scuttle of scarlet runners without breaking a
leaf, and ‘gone below.’

Mr. Grewgious, his bedroom window-blind held aside with his hand,
happened at the moment to have Neville’s chambers under his eye for the
last time that night.  Fortunately his eye was on the front of the house
and not the back, or this remarkable appearance and disappearance might
have broken his rest as a phenomenon.  But Mr. Grewgious seeing nothing
there, not even a light in the windows, his gaze wandered from the
windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was
hidden from him.  Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much
as know our letters in the stars yet—or seem likely to do it, in this
state of existence—and few languages can be read until their alphabets
are mastered.




CHAPTER XVIII—A SETTLER IN CLOISTERHAM


At about this time a stranger appeared in Cloisterham; a white-haired
personage, with black eyebrows.  Being buttoned up in a tightish blue
surtout, with a buff waistcoat and gray trousers, he had something of a
military air, but he announced himself at the Crozier (the orthodox
hotel, where he put up with a portmanteau) as an idle dog who lived upon
his means; and he farther announced that he had a mind to take a lodging
in the picturesque old city for a month or two, with a view of settling
down there altogether.  Both announcements were made in the coffee-room
of the Crozier, to all whom it might or might not concern, by the
stranger as he stood with his back to the empty fireplace, waiting for
his fried sole, veal cutlet, and pint of sherry.  And the waiter
(business being chronically slack at the Crozier) represented all whom it
might or might not concern, and absorbed the whole of the information.

This gentleman’s white head was unusually large, and his shock of white
hair was unusually thick and ample.  ‘I suppose, waiter,’ he said,
shaking his shock of hair, as a Newfoundland dog might shake his before
sitting down to dinner, ‘that a fair lodging for a single buffer might be
found in these parts, eh?’

The waiter had no doubt of it.

‘Something old,’ said the gentleman.  ‘Take my hat down for a moment from
that peg, will you?  No, I don’t want it; look into it.  What do you see
written there?’

The waiter read: ‘Datchery.’

‘Now you know my name,’ said the gentleman; ‘Dick Datchery.  Hang it up
again.  I was saying something old is what I should prefer, something odd
and out of the way; something venerable, architectural, and
inconvenient.’

‘We have a good choice of inconvenient lodgings in the town, sir, I
think,’ replied the waiter, with modest confidence in its resources that
way; ‘indeed, I have no doubt that we could suit you that far, however
particular you might be.  But a architectural lodging!’  That seemed to
trouble the waiter’s head, and he shook it.

‘Anything Cathedraly, now,’ Mr. Datchery suggested.

‘Mr. Tope,’ said the waiter, brightening, as he rubbed his chin with his
hand, ‘would be the likeliest party to inform in that line.’

‘Who is Mr. Tope?’ inquired Dick Datchery.

The waiter explained that he was the Verger, and that Mrs. Tope had
indeed once upon a time let lodgings herself or offered to let them; but
that as nobody had ever taken them, Mrs. Tope’s window-bill, long a
Cloisterham Institution, had disappeared; probably had tumbled down one
day, and never been put up again.

‘I’ll call on Mrs. Tope,’ said Mr. Datchery, ‘after dinner.’

So when he had done his dinner, he was duly directed to the spot, and
sallied out for it.  But the Crozier being an hotel of a most retiring
disposition, and the waiter’s directions being fatally precise, he soon
became bewildered, and went boggling about and about the Cathedral Tower,
whenever he could catch a glimpse of it, with a general impression on his
mind that Mrs. Tope’s was somewhere very near it, and that, like the
children in the game of hot boiled beans and very good butter, he was
warm in his search when he saw the Tower, and cold when he didn’t see it.

He was getting very cold indeed when he came upon a fragment of
burial-ground in which an unhappy sheep was grazing.  Unhappy, because a
hideous small boy was stoning it through the railings, and had already
lamed it in one leg, and was much excited by the benevolent sportsmanlike
purpose of breaking its other three legs, and bringing it down.

‘’It ’im agin!’ cried the boy, as the poor creature leaped; ‘and made a
dint in his wool.’

‘Let him be!’ said Mr. Datchery.  ‘Don’t you see you have lamed him?’

‘Yer lie,’ returned the sportsman.  ‘’E went and lamed isself.  I see ’im
do it, and I giv’ ’im a shy as a Widdy-warning to ’im not to go
a-bruisin’ ’is master’s mutton any more.’

‘Come here.’

‘I won’t; I’ll come when yer can ketch me.’

‘Stay there then, and show me which is Mr. Tope’s.’

‘Ow can I stay here and show you which is Topeseses, when Topeseses is
t’other side the Kinfreederal, and over the crossings, and round ever so
many comers?  Stoo-pid!  Ya-a-ah!’

‘Show me where it is, and I’ll give you something.’

‘Come on, then.’

This brisk dialogue concluded, the boy led the way, and by-and-by stopped
at some distance from an arched passage, pointing.

‘Lookie yonder.  You see that there winder and door?’

‘That’s Tope’s?’

‘Yer lie; it ain’t.  That’s Jarsper’s.’

‘Indeed?’ said Mr. Datchery, with a second look of some interest.

‘Yes, and I ain’t a-goin’ no nearer ’IM, I tell yer.’

‘Why not?’

‘’Cos I ain’t a-goin’ to be lifted off my legs and ’ave my braces bust
and be choked; not if I knows it, and not by ‘Im.  Wait till I set a
jolly good flint a-flyin’ at the back o’ ’is jolly old ’ed some day!  Now
look t’other side the harch; not the side where Jarsper’s door is;
t’other side.’

‘I see.’

‘A little way in, o’ that side, there’s a low door, down two steps.
That’s Topeseses with ’is name on a hoval plate.’

‘Good.  See here,’ said Mr. Datchery, producing a shilling.  ‘You owe me
half of this.’

‘Yer lie!  I don’t owe yer nothing; I never seen yer.’

‘I tell you you owe me half of this, because I have no sixpence in my
pocket.  So the next time you meet me you shall do something else for me,
to pay me.’

‘All right, give us ’old.’

‘What is your name, and where do you live?’

‘Deputy.  Travellers’ Twopenny, ’cross the green.’

The boy instantly darted off with the shilling, lest Mr. Datchery should
repent, but stopped at a safe distance, on the happy chance of his being
uneasy in his mind about it, to goad him with a demon dance expressive of
its irrevocability.

Mr. Datchery, taking off his hat to give that shock of white hair of his
another shake, seemed quite resigned, and betook himself whither he had
been directed.

Mr. Tope’s official dwelling, communicating by an upper stair with Mr.
Jasper’s (hence Mrs. Tope’s attendance on that gentleman), was of very
modest proportions, and partook of the character of a cool dungeon.  Its
ancient walls were massive, and its rooms rather seemed to have been dug
out of them, than to have been designed beforehand with any reference to
them.  The main door opened at once on a chamber of no describable shape,
with a groined roof, which in its turn opened on another chamber of no
describable shape, with another groined roof: their windows small, and in
the thickness of the walls.  These two chambers, close as to their
atmosphere, and swarthy as to their illumination by natural light, were
the apartments which Mrs. Tope had so long offered to an unappreciative
city.  Mr. Datchery, however, was more appreciative.  He found that if he
sat with the main door open he would enjoy the passing society of all
comers to and fro by the gateway, and would have light enough.  He found
that if Mr. and Mrs. Tope, living overhead, used for their own egress and
ingress a little side stair that came plump into the Precincts by a door
opening outward, to the surprise and inconvenience of a limited public of
pedestrians in a narrow way, he would be alone, as in a separate
residence.  He found the rent moderate, and everything as quaintly
inconvenient as he could desire.  He agreed, therefore, to take the
lodging then and there, and money down, possession to be had next
evening, on condition that reference was permitted him to Mr. Jasper as
occupying the gatehouse, of which on the other side of the gateway, the
Verger’s hole-in-the-wall was an appanage or subsidiary part.

The poor dear gentleman was very solitary and very sad, Mrs. Tope said,
but she had no doubt he would ‘speak for her.’  Perhaps Mr. Datchery had
heard something of what had occurred there last winter?

Mr. Datchery had as confused a knowledge of the event in question, on
trying to recall it, as he well could have.  He begged Mrs. Tope’s pardon
when she found it incumbent on her to correct him in every detail of his
summary of the facts, but pleaded that he was merely a single buffer
getting through life upon his means as idly as he could, and that so many
people were so constantly making away with so many other people, as to
render it difficult for a buffer of an easy temper to preserve the
circumstances of the several cases unmixed in his mind.

Mr. Jasper proving willing to speak for Mrs. Tope, Mr. Datchery, who had
sent up his card, was invited to ascend the postern staircase.  The Mayor
was there, Mr. Tope said; but he was not to be regarded in the light of
company, as he and Mr. Jasper were great friends.

‘I beg pardon,’ said Mr. Datchery, making a leg with his hat under his
arm, as he addressed himself equally to both gentlemen; ‘a selfish
precaution on my part, and not personally interesting to anybody but
myself.  But as a buffer living on his means, and having an idea of doing
it in this lovely place in peace and quiet, for remaining span of life, I
beg to ask if the Tope family are quite respectable?’

Mr. Jasper could answer for that without the slightest hesitation.

‘That is enough, sir,’ said Mr. Datchery.

‘My friend the Mayor,’ added Mr. Jasper, presenting Mr. Datchery with a
courtly motion of his hand towards that potentate; ‘whose recommendation
is actually much more important to a stranger than that of an obscure
person like myself, will testify in their behalf, I am sure.’

‘The Worshipful the Mayor,’ said Mr. Datchery, with a low bow, ‘places me
under an infinite obligation.’

‘Very good people, sir, Mr. and Mrs. Tope,’ said Mr. Sapsea, with
condescension.  ‘Very good opinions.  Very well behaved.  Very
respectful.  Much approved by the Dean and Chapter.’

‘The Worshipful the Mayor gives them a character,’ said Mr. Datchery, ‘of
which they may indeed be proud.  I would ask His Honour (if I might be
permitted) whether there are not many objects of great interest in the
city which is under his beneficent sway?’

‘We are, sir,’ returned Mr. Sapsea, ‘an ancient city, and an
ecclesiastical city.  We are a constitutional city, as it becomes such a
city to be, and we uphold and maintain our glorious privileges.’

‘His Honour,’ said Mr. Datchery, bowing, ‘inspires me with a desire to
know more of the city, and confirms me in my inclination to end my days
in the city.’

‘Retired from the Army, sir?’ suggested Mr. Sapsea.

‘His Honour the Mayor does me too much credit,’ returned Mr. Datchery.

‘Navy, sir?’ suggested Mr. Sapsea.

‘Again,’ repeated Mr. Datchery, ‘His Honour the Mayor does me too much
credit.’

‘Diplomacy is a fine profession,’ said Mr. Sapsea, as a general remark.

‘There, I confess, His Honour the Mayor is too many for me,’ said Mr.
Datchery, with an ingenious smile and bow; ‘even a diplomatic bird must
fall to such a gun.’

Now this was very soothing.  Here was a gentleman of a great, not to say
a grand, address, accustomed to rank and dignity, really setting a fine
example how to behave to a Mayor.  There was something in that
third-person style of being spoken to, that Mr. Sapsea found particularly
recognisant of his merits and position.

‘But I crave pardon,’ said Mr. Datchery.  ‘His Honour the Mayor will bear
with me, if for a moment I have been deluded into occupying his time, and
have forgotten the humble claims upon my own, of my hotel, the Crozier.’

‘Not at all, sir,’ said Mr. Sapsea.  ‘I am returning home, and if you
would like to take the exterior of our Cathedral in your way, I shall be
glad to point it out.’

‘His Honour the Mayor,’ said Mr. Datchery, ‘is more than kind and
gracious.’

As Mr. Datchery, when he had made his acknowledgments to Mr. Jasper,
could not be induced to go out of the room before the Worshipful, the
Worshipful led the way down-stairs; Mr. Datchery following with his hat
under his arm, and his shock of white hair streaming in the evening
breeze.

‘Might I ask His Honour,’ said Mr. Datchery, ‘whether that gentleman we
have just left is the gentleman of whom I have heard in the neighbourhood
as being much afflicted by the loss of a nephew, and concentrating his
life on avenging the loss?’

‘That is the gentleman.  John Jasper, sir.’

‘Would His Honour allow me to inquire whether there are strong suspicions
of any one?’

‘More than suspicions, sir,’ returned Mr. Sapsea; ‘all but certainties.’

‘Only think now!’ cried Mr. Datchery.

‘But proof, sir, proof must be built up stone by stone,’ said the Mayor.
‘As I say, the end crowns the work.  It is not enough that justice should
be morally certain; she must be immorally certain—legally, that is.’

‘His Honour,’ said Mr. Datchery, ‘reminds me of the nature of the law.
Immoral.  How true!’

‘As I say, sir,’ pompously went on the Mayor, ‘the arm of the law is a
strong arm, and a long arm.  That is the may I put it.  A strong arm and
a long arm.’

‘How forcible!—And yet, again, how true!’ murmured Mr. Datchery.

‘And without betraying, what I call the secrets of the prison-house,’
said Mr. Sapsea; ‘the secrets of the prison-house is the term I used on
the bench.’

‘And what other term than His Honour’s would express it?’ said Mr.
Datchery.

‘Without, I say, betraying them, I predict to you, knowing the iron will
of the gentleman we have just left (I take the bold step of calling it
iron, on account of its strength), that in this case the long arm will
reach, and the strong arm will strike.—This is our Cathedral, sir.  The
best judges are pleased to admire it, and the best among our townsmen own
to being a little vain of it.’

All this time Mr. Datchery had walked with his hat under his arm, and his
white hair streaming.  He had an odd momentary appearance upon him of
having forgotten his hat, when Mr. Sapsea now touched it; and he clapped
his hand up to his head as if with some vague expectation of finding
another hat upon it.

‘Pray be covered, sir,’ entreated Mr. Sapsea; magnificently plying: ‘I
shall not mind it, I assure you.’

‘His Honour is very good, but I do it for coolness,’ said Mr. Datchery.

Then Mr. Datchery admired the Cathedral, and Mr. Sapsea pointed it out as
if he himself had invented and built it: there were a few details indeed
of which he did not approve, but those he glossed over, as if the workmen
had made mistakes in his absence.  The Cathedral disposed of, he led the
way by the churchyard, and stopped to extol the beauty of the evening—by
chance—in the immediate vicinity of Mrs. Sapsea’s epitaph.

‘And by the by,’ said Mr. Sapsea, appearing to descend from an elevation
to remember it all of a sudden; like Apollo shooting down from Olympus to
pick up his forgotten lyre; ‘_that_ is one of our small lions.  The
partiality of our people has made it so, and strangers have been seen
taking a copy of it now and then.  I am not a judge of it myself, for it
is a little work of my own.  But it was troublesome to turn, sir; I may
say, difficult to turn with elegance.’

Mr. Datchery became so ecstatic over Mr. Sapsea’s composition, that, in
spite of his intention to end his days in Cloisterham, and therefore his
probably having in reserve many opportunities of copying it, he would
have transcribed it into his pocket-book on the spot, but for the
slouching towards them of its material producer and perpetuator, Durdles,
whom Mr. Sapsea hailed, not sorry to show him a bright example of
behaviour to superiors.

‘Ah, Durdles!  This is the mason, sir; one of our Cloisterham worthies;
everybody here knows Durdles.  Mr. Datchery, Durdles a gentleman who is
going to settle here.’

‘I wouldn’t do it if I was him,’ growled Durdles.  ‘We’re a heavy lot.’

‘You surely don’t speak for yourself, Mr. Durdles,’ returned Mr.
Datchery, ‘any more than for His Honour.’

‘Who’s His Honour?’ demanded Durdles.

‘His Honour the Mayor.’

‘I never was brought afore him,’ said Durdles, with anything but the look
of a loyal subject of the mayoralty, ‘and it’ll be time enough for me to
Honour him when I am.  Until which, and when, and where,

    “Mister Sapsea is his name,
       England is his nation,
    Cloisterham’s his dwelling-place,
       Aukshneer’s his occupation.”’

Here, Deputy (preceded by a flying oyster-shell) appeared upon the scene,
and requested to have the sum of threepence instantly ‘chucked’ to him by
Mr. Durdles, whom he had been vainly seeking up and down, as lawful wages
overdue.  While that gentleman, with his bundle under his arm, slowly
found and counted out the money, Mr. Sapsea informed the new settler of
Durdles’s habits, pursuits, abode, and reputation.  ‘I suppose a curious
stranger might come to see you, and your works, Mr. Durdles, at any odd
time?’ said Mr. Datchery upon that.

‘Any gentleman is welcome to come and see me any evening if he brings
liquor for two with him,’ returned Durdles, with a penny between his
teeth and certain halfpence in his hands; ‘or if he likes to make it
twice two, he’ll be doubly welcome.’

‘I shall come.  Master Deputy, what do you owe me?’

‘A job.’

‘Mind you pay me honestly with the job of showing me Mr. Durdles’s house
when I want to go there.’

Deputy, with a piercing broadside of whistle through the whole gap in his
mouth, as a receipt in full for all arrears, vanished.

The Worshipful and the Worshipper then passed on together until they
parted, with many ceremonies, at the Worshipful’s door; even then the
Worshipper carried his hat under his arm, and gave his streaming white
hair to the breeze.

Said Mr. Datchery to himself that night, as he looked at his white hair
in the gas-lighted looking-glass over the coffee-room chimneypiece at the
Crozier, and shook it out: ‘For a single buffer, of an easy temper,
living idly on his means, I have had a rather busy afternoon!’




CHAPTER XIX—SHADOW ON THE SUN-DIAL


Again Miss Twinkleton has delivered her valedictory address, with the
accompaniments of white-wine and pound-cake, and again the young ladies
have departed to their several homes.  Helena Landless has left the Nuns’
House to attend her brother’s fortunes, and pretty Rosa is alone.

Cloisterham is so bright and sunny in these summer days, that the
Cathedral and the monastery-ruin show as if their strong walls were
transparent.  A soft glow seems to shine from within them, rather than
upon them from without, such is their mellowness as they look forth on
the hot corn-fields and the smoking roads that distantly wind among them.
The Cloisterham gardens blush with ripening fruit.  Time was when
travel-stained pilgrims rode in clattering parties through the city’s
welcome shades; time is when wayfarers, leading a gipsy life between
haymaking time and harvest, and looking as if they were just made of the
dust of the earth, so very dusty are they, lounge about on cool
door-steps, trying to mend their unmendable shoes, or giving them to the
city kennels as a hopeless job, and seeking others in the bundles that
they carry, along with their yet unused sickles swathed in bands of
straw.  At all the more public pumps there is much cooling of bare feet,
together with much bubbling and gurgling of drinking with hand to spout
on the part of these Bedouins; the Cloisterham police meanwhile looking
askant from their beats with suspicion, and manifest impatience that the
intruders should depart from within the civic bounds, and once more fry
themselves on the simmering high-roads.

On the afternoon of such a day, when the last Cathedral service is done,
and when that side of the High Street on which the Nuns’ House stands is
in grateful shade, save where its quaint old garden opens to the west
between the boughs of trees, a servant informs Rosa, to her terror, that
Mr. Jasper desires to see her.

If he had chosen his time for finding her at a disadvantage, he could
have done no better.  Perhaps he has chosen it.  Helena Landless is gone,
Mrs. Tisher is absent on leave, Miss Twinkleton (in her amateur state of
existence) has contributed herself and a veal pie to a picnic.

‘O why, why, why, did you say I was at home!’ cried Rosa, helplessly.

The maid replies, that Mr. Jasper never asked the question.

That he said he knew she was at home, and begged she might be told that
he asked to see her.

‘What shall I do! what shall I do!’ thinks Rosa, clasping her hands.

Possessed by a kind of desperation, she adds in the next breath, that she
will come to Mr. Jasper in the garden.  She shudders at the thought of
being shut up with him in the house; but many of its windows command the
garden, and she can be seen as well as heard there, and can shriek in the
free air and run away.  Such is the wild idea that flutters through her
mind.

She has never seen him since the fatal night, except when she was
questioned before the Mayor, and then he was present in gloomy
watchfulness, as representing his lost nephew and burning to avenge him.
She hangs her garden-hat on her arm, and goes out.  The moment she sees
him from the porch, leaning on the sun-dial, the old horrible feeling of
being compelled by him, asserts its hold upon her.  She feels that she
would even then go back, but that he draws her feet towards him.  She
cannot resist, and sits down, with her head bent, on the garden-seat
beside the sun-dial.  She cannot look up at him for abhorrence, but she
has perceived that he is dressed in deep mourning.  So is she.  It was
not so at first; but the lost has long been given up, and mourned for, as
dead.

He would begin by touching her hand.  She feels the intention, and draws
her hand back.  His eyes are then fixed upon her, she knows, though her
own see nothing but the grass.

‘I have been waiting,’ he begins, ‘for some time, to be summoned back to
my duty near you.’

After several times forming her lips, which she knows he is closely
watching, into the shape of some other hesitating reply, and then into
none, she answers: ‘Duty, sir?’

‘The duty of teaching you, serving you as your faithful music-master.’

‘I have left off that study.’

‘Not left off, I think.  Discontinued.  I was told by your guardian that
you discontinued it under the shock that we have all felt so acutely.
When will you resume?’

‘Never, sir.’

‘Never?  You could have done no more if you had loved my dear boy.’

‘I did love him!’ cried Rosa, with a flash of anger.

‘Yes; but not quite—not quite in the right way, shall I say?  Not in the
intended and expected way.  Much as my dear boy was, unhappily, too
self-conscious and self-satisfied (I’ll draw no parallel between him and
you in that respect) to love as he should have loved, or as any one in
his place would have loved—must have loved!’

She sits in the same still attitude, but shrinking a little more.

‘Then, to be told that you discontinued your study with me, was to be
politely told that you abandoned it altogether?’ he suggested.

‘Yes,’ says Rosa, with sudden spirit, ‘The politeness was my guardian’s,
not mine.  I told him that I was resolved to leave off, and that I was
determined to stand by my resolution.’

‘And you still are?’

‘I still am, sir.  And I beg not to be questioned any more about it.  At
all events, I will not answer any more; I have that in my power.’

She is so conscious of his looking at her with a gloating admiration of
the touch of anger on her, and the fire and animation it brings with it,
that even as her spirit rises, it falls again, and she struggles with a
sense of shame, affront, and fear, much as she did that night at the
piano.

‘I will not question you any more, since you object to it so much; I will
confess—’

‘I do not wish to hear you, sir,’ cries Rosa, rising.

This time he does touch her with his outstretched hand.  In shrinking
from it, she shrinks into her seat again.

‘We must sometimes act in opposition to our wishes,’ he tells her in a
low voice.  ‘You must do so now, or do more harm to others than you can
ever set right.’

‘What harm?’

‘Presently, presently.  You question _me_, you see, and surely that’s not
fair when you forbid me to question you.  Nevertheless, I will answer the
question presently.  Dearest Rosa! Charming Rosa!’

She starts up again.

This time he does not touch her.  But his face looks so wicked and
menacing, as he stands leaning against the sun-dial-setting, as it were,
his black mark upon the very face of day—that her flight is arrested by
horror as she looks at him.

‘I do not forget how many windows command a view of us,’ he says,
glancing towards them.  ‘I will not touch you again; I will come no
nearer to you than I am.  Sit down, and there will be no mighty wonder in
your music-master’s leaning idly against a pedestal and speaking with
you, remembering all that has happened, and our shares in it.  Sit down,
my beloved.’

She would have gone once more—was all but gone—and once more his face,
darkly threatening what would follow if she went, has stopped her.
Looking at him with the expression of the instant frozen on her face, she
sits down on the seat again.

‘Rosa, even when my dear boy was affianced to you, I loved you madly;
even when I thought his happiness in having you for his wife was certain,
I loved you madly; even when I strove to make him more ardently devoted
to you, I loved you madly; even when he gave me the picture of your
lovely face so carelessly traduced by him, which I feigned to hang always
in my sight for his sake, but worshipped in torment for years, I loved
you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of
the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and
Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I
loved you madly.’

If anything could make his words more hideous to her than they are in
themselves, it would be the contrast between the violence of his look and
delivery, and the composure of his assumed attitude.

‘I endured it all in silence.  So long as you were his, or so long as I
supposed you to be his, I hid my secret loyally.  Did I not?’

This lie, so gross, while the mere words in which it is told are so true,
is more than Rosa can endure.  She answers with kindling indignation:
‘You were as false throughout, sir, as you are now.  You were false to
him, daily and hourly.  You know that you made my life unhappy by your
pursuit of me.  You know that you made me afraid to open his generous
eyes, and that you forced me, for his own trusting, good, good sake, to
keep the truth from him, that you were a bad, bad man!’

His preservation of his easy attitude rendering his working features and
his convulsive hands absolutely diabolical, he returns, with a fierce
extreme of admiration:

‘How beautiful you are!  You are more beautiful in anger than in repose.
I don’t ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give me
yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting
scorn; it will be enough for me.’

Impatient tears rise to the eyes of the trembling little beauty, and her
face flames; but as she again rises to leave him in indignation, and seek
protection within the house, he stretches out his hand towards the porch,
as though he invited her to enter it.

‘I told you, you rare charmer, you sweet witch, that you must stay and
hear me, or do more harm than can ever be undone.  You asked me what
harm.  Stay, and I will tell you.  Go, and I will do it!’

Again Rosa quails before his threatening face, though innocent of its
meaning, and she remains.  Her panting breathing comes and goes as if it
would choke her; but with a repressive hand upon her bosom, she remains.

‘I have made my confession that my love is mad.  It is so mad, that had
the ties between me and my dear lost boy been one silken thread less
strong, I might have swept even him from your side, when you favoured
him.’

A film comes over the eyes she raises for an instant, as though he had
turned her faint.

‘Even him,’ he repeats.  ‘Yes, even him!  Rosa, you see me and you hear
me.  Judge for yourself whether any other admirer shall love you and
live, whose life is in my hand.’

‘What do you mean, sir?’

‘I mean to show you how mad my love is.  It was hawked through the late
inquiries by Mr. Crisparkle, that young Landless had confessed to him
that he was a rival of my lost boy.  That is an inexpiable offence in my
eyes.  The same Mr. Crisparkle knows under my hand that I have devoted
myself to the murderer’s discovery and destruction, be he whom he might,
and that I determined to discuss the mystery with no one until I should
hold the clue in which to entangle the murderer as in a net.  I have
since worked patiently to wind and wind it round him; and it is slowly
winding as I speak.’

                      [Picture: Jasper’s sacrifices]

‘Your belief, if you believe in the criminality of Mr. Landless, is not
Mr. Crisparkle’s belief, and he is a good man,’ Rosa retorts.

‘My belief is my own; and I reserve it, worshipped of my soul!
Circumstances may accumulate so strongly _even against an innocent man_,
that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him.  One wanting
link discovered by perseverance against a guilty man, proves his guilt,
however slight its evidence before, and he dies.  Young Landless stands
in deadly peril either way.’

‘If you really suppose,’ Rosa pleads with him, turning paler, ‘that I
favour Mr. Landless, or that Mr. Landless has ever in any way addressed
himself to me, you are wrong.’

He puts that from him with a slighting action of his hand and a curled
lip.

‘I was going to show you how madly I love you.  More madly now than ever,
for I am willing to renounce the second object that has arisen in my life
to divide it with you; and henceforth to have no object in existence but
you only.  Miss Landless has become your bosom friend.  You care for her
peace of mind?’

‘I love her dearly.’

‘You care for her good name?’

‘I have said, sir, I love her dearly.’

‘I am unconsciously,’ he observes with a smile, as he folds his hands
upon the sun-dial and leans his chin upon them, so that his talk would
seem from the windows (faces occasionally come and go there) to be of the
airiest and playfullest—‘I am unconsciously giving offence by questioning
again.  I will simply make statements, therefore, and not put questions.
You do care for your bosom friend’s good name, and you do care for her
peace of mind.  Then remove the shadow of the gallows from her, dear
one!’

‘You dare propose to me to—’

‘Darling, I dare propose to you.  Stop there.  If it be bad to idolise
you, I am the worst of men; if it be good, I am the best.  My love for
you is above all other love, and my truth to you is above all other
truth.  Let me have hope and favour, and I am a forsworn man for your
sake.’

Rosa puts her hands to her temples, and, pushing back her hair, looks
wildly and abhorrently at him, as though she were trying to piece
together what it is his deep purpose to present to her only in fragments.

‘Reckon up nothing at this moment, angel, but the sacrifices that I lay
at those dear feet, which I could fall down among the vilest ashes and
kiss, and put upon my head as a poor savage might.  There is my fidelity
to my dear boy after death.  Tread upon it!’

With an action of his hands, as though he cast down something precious.

‘There is the inexpiable offence against my adoration of you.  Spurn it!’

With a similar action.

‘There are my labours in the cause of a just vengeance for six toiling
months.  Crush them!’

With another repetition of the action.

‘There is my past and my present wasted life.  There is the desolation of
my heart and my soul.  There is my peace; there is my despair.  Stamp
them into the dust; so that you take me, were it even mortally hating
me!’

The frightful vehemence of the man, now reaching its full height, so
additionally terrifies her as to break the spell that has held her to the
spot.  She swiftly moves towards the porch; but in an instant he is at
her side, and speaking in her ear.

‘Rosa, I am self-repressed again.  I am walking calmly beside you to the
house.  I shall wait for some encouragement and hope.  I shall not strike
too soon.  Give me a sign that you attend to me.’

She slightly and constrainedly moves her hand.

‘Not a word of this to any one, or it will bring down the blow, as
certainly as night follows day.  Another sign that you attend to me.’

She moves her hand once more.

‘I love you, love you, love you!  If you were to cast me off now—but you
will not—you would never be rid of me.  No one should come between us.  I
would pursue you to the death.’

The handmaid coming out to open the gate for him, he quietly pulls off
his hat as a parting salute, and goes away with no greater show of
agitation than is visible in the effigy of Mr. Sapsea’s father opposite.
Rosa faints in going up-stairs, and is carefully carried to her room and
laid down on her bed.  A thunderstorm is coming on, the maids say, and
the hot and stifling air has overset the pretty dear: no wonder; they
have felt their own knees all of a tremble all day long.




CHAPTER XX—A FLIGHT


Rosa no sooner came to herself than the whole of the late interview was
before her.  It even seemed as if it had pursued her into her
insensibility, and she had not had a moment’s unconsciousness of it.
What to do, she was at a frightened loss to know: the only one clear
thought in her mind was, that she must fly from this terrible man.

But where could she take refuge, and how could she go?  She had never
breathed her dread of him to any one but Helena.  If she went to Helena,
and told her what had passed, that very act might bring down the
irreparable mischief that he threatened he had the power, and that she
knew he had the will, to do.  The more fearful he appeared to her excited
memory and imagination, the more alarming her responsibility appeared;
seeing that a slight mistake on her part, either in action or delay,
might let his malevolence loose on Helena’s brother.

Rosa’s mind throughout the last six months had been stormily confused.  A
half-formed, wholly unexpressed suspicion tossed in it, now heaving
itself up, and now sinking into the deep; now gaining palpability, and
now losing it.  Jasper’s self-absorption in his nephew when he was alive,
and his unceasing pursuit of the inquiry how he came by his death, if he
were dead, were themes so rife in the place, that no one appeared able to
suspect the possibility of foul play at his hands.  She had asked herself
the question, ‘Am I so wicked in my thoughts as to conceive a wickedness
that others cannot imagine?’  Then she had considered, Did the suspicion
come of her previous recoiling from him before the fact?  And if so, was
not that a proof of its baselessness?  Then she had reflected, ‘What
motive could he have, according to my accusation?’  She was ashamed to
answer in her mind, ‘The motive of gaining _me_!’  And covered her face,
as if the lightest shadow of the idea of founding murder on such an idle
vanity were a crime almost as great.

She ran over in her mind again, all that he had said by the sun-dial in
the garden.  He had persisted in treating the disappearance as murder,
consistently with his whole public course since the finding of the watch
and shirt-pin.  If he were afraid of the crime being traced out, would he
not rather encourage the idea of a voluntary disappearance?  He had even
declared that if the ties between him and his nephew had been less
strong, he might have swept ‘even him’ away from her side.  Was that like
his having really done so?  He had spoken of laying his six months’
labours in the cause of a just vengeance at her feet.  Would he have done
that, with that violence of passion, if they were a pretence?  Would he
have ranged them with his desolate heart and soul, his wasted life, his
peace and his despair?  The very first sacrifice that he represented
himself as making for her, was his fidelity to his dear boy after death.
Surely these facts were strong against a fancy that scarcely dared to
hint itself.  And yet he was so terrible a man!  In short, the poor girl
(for what could she know of the criminal intellect, which its own
professed students perpetually misread, because they persist in trying to
reconcile it with the average intellect of average men, instead of
identifying it as a horrible wonder apart) could get by no road to any
other conclusion than that he _was_ a terrible man, and must be fled
from.

She had been Helena’s stay and comfort during the whole time.  She had
constantly assured her of her full belief in her brother’s innocence, and
of her sympathy with him in his misery.  But she had never seen him since
the disappearance, nor had Helena ever spoken one word of his avowal to
Mr. Crisparkle in regard of Rosa, though as a part of the interest of the
case it was well known far and wide.  He was Helena’s unfortunate
brother, to her, and nothing more.  The assurance she had given her
odious suitor was strictly true, though it would have been better (she
considered now) if she could have restrained herself from so giving it.
Afraid of him as the bright and delicate little creature was, her spirit
swelled at the thought of his knowing it from her own lips.

But where was she to go?  Anywhere beyond his reach, was no reply to the
question.  Somewhere must be thought of.  She determined to go to her
guardian, and to go immediately.  The feeling she had imparted to Helena
on the night of their first confidence, was so strong upon her—the
feeling of not being safe from him, and of the solid walls of the old
convent being powerless to keep out his ghostly following of her—that no
reasoning of her own could calm her terrors.  The fascination of
repulsion had been upon her so long, and now culminated so darkly, that
she felt as if he had power to bind her by a spell.  Glancing out at
window, even now, as she rose to dress, the sight of the sun-dial on
which he had leaned when he declared himself, turned her cold, and made
her shrink from it, as though he had invested it with some awful quality
from his own nature.

She wrote a hurried note to Miss Twinkleton, saying that she had sudden
reason for wishing to see her guardian promptly, and had gone to him;
also, entreating the good lady not to be uneasy, for all was well with
her.  She hurried a few quite useless articles into a very little bag,
left the note in a conspicuous place, and went out, softly closing the
gate after her.

It was the first time she had ever been even in Cloisterham High Street
alone.  But knowing all its ways and windings very well, she hurried
straight to the corner from which the omnibus departed.  It was, at that
very moment, going off.

‘Stop and take me, if you please, Joe.  I am obliged to go to London.’

In less than another minute she was on her road to the railway, under
Joe’s protection. Joe waited on her when she got there, put her safely
into the railway carriage, and handed in the very little bag after her,
as though it were some enormous trunk, hundredweights heavy, which she
must on no account endeavour to lift.

‘Can you go round when you get back, and tell Miss Twinkleton that you
saw me safely off, Joe?’

‘It shall be done, Miss.’

‘With my love, please, Joe.’

‘Yes, Miss—and I wouldn’t mind having it myself!’  But Joe did not
articulate the last clause; only thought it.

Now that she was whirling away for London in real earnest, Rosa was at
leisure to resume the thoughts which her personal hurry had checked.  The
indignant thought that his declaration of love soiled her; that she could
only be cleansed from the stain of its impurity by appealing to the
honest and true; supported her for a time against her fears, and
confirmed her in her hasty resolution.  But as the evening grew darker
and darker, and the great city impended nearer and nearer, the doubts
usual in such cases began to arise.  Whether this was not a wild
proceeding, after all; how Mr. Grewgious might regard it; whether she
should find him at the journey’s end; how she would act if he were
absent; what might become of her, alone, in a place so strange and
crowded; how if she had but waited and taken counsel first; whether, if
she could now go back, she would not do it thankfully; a multitude of
such uneasy speculations disturbed her, more and more as they
accumulated.  At length the train came into London over the housetops;
and down below lay the gritty streets with their yet un-needed lamps
a-glow, on a hot, light, summer night.

‘Hiram Grewgious, Esquire, Staple Inn, London.’  This was all Rosa knew
of her destination; but it was enough to send her rattling away again in
a cab, through deserts of gritty streets, where many people crowded at
the corner of courts and byways to get some air, and where many other
people walked with a miserably monotonous noise of shuffling of feet on
hot paving-stones, and where all the people and all their surroundings
were so gritty and so shabby!

There was music playing here and there, but it did not enliven the case.
No barrel-organ mended the matter, and no big drum beat dull care away.
Like the chapel bells that were also going here and there, they only
seemed to evoke echoes from brick surfaces, and dust from everything.  As
to the flat wind-instruments, they seemed to have cracked their hearts
and souls in pining for the country.

Her jingling conveyance stopped at last at a fast-closed gateway, which
appeared to belong to somebody who had gone to bed very early, and was
much afraid of housebreakers; Rosa, discharging her conveyance, timidly
knocked at this gateway, and was let in, very little bag and all, by a
watchman.

‘Does Mr. Grewgious live here?’

‘Mr. Grewgious lives there, Miss,’ said the watchman, pointing further
in.

So Rosa went further in, and, when the clocks were striking ten, stood on
P. J. T.’s doorsteps, wondering what P. J. T. had done with his
street-door.

Guided by the painted name of Mr. Grewgious, she went up-stairs and
softly tapped and tapped several times.  But no one answering, and Mr.
Grewgious’s door-handle yielding to her touch, she went in, and saw her
guardian sitting on a window-seat at an open window, with a shaded lamp
placed far from him on a table in a corner.

Rosa drew nearer to him in the twilight of the room.  He saw her, and he
said, in an undertone: ‘Good Heaven!’

Rosa fell upon his neck, with tears, and then he said, returning her
embrace:

‘My child, my child!  I thought you were your mother!—But what, what,
what,’ he added, soothingly, ‘has happened?  My dear, what has brought
you here?  Who has brought you here?’

‘No one.  I came alone.’

‘Lord bless me!’ ejaculated Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Came alone!  Why didn’t you
write to me to come and fetch you?’

‘I had no time.  I took a sudden resolution.  Poor, poor Eddy!’

‘Ah, poor fellow, poor fellow!’

‘His uncle has made love to me.  I cannot bear it,’ said Rosa, at once
with a burst of tears, and a stamp of her little foot; ‘I shudder with
horror of him, and I have come to you to protect me and all of us from
him, if you will?’

‘I will,’ cried Mr. Grewgious, with a sudden rush of amazing energy.
‘Damn him!

    “Confound his politics!
    Frustrate his knavish tricks!
    On Thee his hopes to fix?
          Damn him again!”’

After this most extraordinary outburst, Mr. Grewgious, quite beside
himself, plunged about the room, to all appearance undecided whether he
was in a fit of loyal enthusiasm, or combative denunciation.

He stopped and said, wiping his face: ‘I beg your pardon, my dear, but
you will be glad to know I feel better.  Tell me no more just now, or I
might do it again.  You must be refreshed and cheered.  What did you take
last?  Was it breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, or supper?  And what will
you take next?  Shall it be breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, or supper?’

The respectful tenderness with which, on one knee before her, he helped
her to remove her hat, and disentangle her pretty hair from it, was quite
a chivalrous sight.  Yet who, knowing him only on the surface, would have
expected chivalry—and of the true sort, too; not the spurious—from Mr.
Grewgious?

‘Your rest too must be provided for,’ he went on; ‘and you shall have the
prettiest chamber in Furnival’s.  Your toilet must be provided for, and
you shall have everything that an unlimited head chambermaid—by which
expression I mean a head chambermaid not limited as to outlay—can
procure.  Is that a bag?’ he looked hard at it; sooth to say, it required
hard looking at to be seen at all in a dimly lighted room: ‘and is it
your property, my dear?’

‘Yes, sir.  I brought it with me.’

‘It is not an extensive bag,’ said Mr. Grewgious, candidly, ‘though
admirably calculated to contain a day’s provision for a canary-bird.
Perhaps you brought a canary-bird?’

Rosa smiled and shook her head.

‘If you had, he should have been made welcome,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘and
I think he would have been pleased to be hung upon a nail outside and pit
himself against our Staple sparrows; whose execution must be admitted to
be not quite equal to their intention.  Which is the case with so many of
us!  You didn’t say what meal, my dear.  Have a nice jumble of all
meals.’

Rosa thanked him, but said she could only take a cup of tea.  Mr.
Grewgious, after several times running out, and in again, to mention such
supplementary items as marmalade, eggs, watercresses, salted fish, and
frizzled ham, ran across to Furnival’s without his hat, to give his
various directions.  And soon afterwards they were realised in practice,
and the board was spread.

‘Lord bless my soul,’ cried Mr. Grewgious, putting the lamp upon it, and
taking his seat opposite Rosa; ‘what a new sensation for a poor old
Angular bachelor, to be sure!’

           [Picture: Mr. Grewgious experiences a new sensation]

Rosa’s expressive little eyebrows asked him what he meant?

‘The sensation of having a sweet young presence in the place, that
whitewashes it, paints it, papers it, decorates it with gilding, and
makes it Glorious!’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Ah me!  Ah me!’

As there was something mournful in his sigh, Rosa, in touching him with
her tea-cup, ventured to touch him with her small hand too.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Ahem!  Let’s talk!’

‘Do you always live here, sir?’ asked Rosa.

‘Yes, my dear.’

‘And always alone?’

‘Always alone; except that I have daily company in a gentleman by the
name of Bazzard, my clerk.’

‘_He_ doesn’t live here?’

‘No, he goes his way, after office hours.  In fact, he is off duty here,
altogether, just at present; and a firm down-stairs, with which I have
business relations, lend me a substitute.  But it would be extremely
difficult to replace Mr. Bazzard.’

‘He must be very fond of you,’ said Rosa.

‘He bears up against it with commendable fortitude if he is,’ returned
Mr. Grewgious, after considering the matter.  ‘But I doubt if he is.  Not
particularly so.  You see, he is discontented, poor fellow.’

‘Why isn’t he contented?’ was the natural inquiry.

‘Misplaced,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with great mystery.

Rosa’s eyebrows resumed their inquisitive and perplexed expression.

‘So misplaced,’ Mr. Grewgious went on, ‘that I feel constantly apologetic
towards him.  And he feels (though he doesn’t mention it) that I have
reason to be.’

Mr. Grewgious had by this time grown so very mysterious, that Rosa did
not know how to go on.  While she was thinking about it Mr. Grewgious
suddenly jerked out of himself for the second time:

‘Let’s talk.  We were speaking of Mr. Bazzard.  It’s a secret, and
moreover it is Mr. Bazzard’s secret; but the sweet presence at my table
makes me so unusually expansive, that I feel I must impart it in
inviolable confidence.  What do you think Mr. Bazzard has done?’

‘O dear!’ cried Rosa, drawing her chair a little nearer, and her mind
reverting to Jasper, ‘nothing dreadful, I hope?’

‘He has written a play,’ said Mr. Grewgious, in a solemn whisper.  ‘A
tragedy.’

Rosa seemed much relieved.

‘And nobody,’ pursued Mr. Grewgious in the same tone, ‘will hear, on any
account whatever, of bringing it out.’

Rosa looked reflective, and nodded her head slowly; as who should say,
‘Such things are, and why are they!’

‘Now, you know,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘_I_ couldn’t write a play.’

‘Not a bad one, sir?’ said Rosa, innocently, with her eyebrows again in
action.

‘No.  If I was under sentence of decapitation, and was about to be
instantly decapitated, and an express arrived with a pardon for the
condemned convict Grewgious if he wrote a play, I should be under the
necessity of resuming the block, and begging the executioner to proceed
to extremities,—meaning,’ said Mr. Grewgious, passing his hand under his
chin, ‘the singular number, and this extremity.’

Rosa appeared to consider what she would do if the awkward supposititious
case were hers.

‘Consequently,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘Mr. Bazzard would have a sense of my
inferiority to himself under any circumstances; but when I am his master,
you know, the case is greatly aggravated.’

Mr. Grewgious shook his head seriously, as if he felt the offence to be a
little too much, though of his own committing.

‘How came you to be his master, sir?’ asked Rosa.

‘A question that naturally follows,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Let’s talk.
Mr. Bazzard’s father, being a Norfolk farmer, would have furiously laid
about him with a flail, a pitch-fork, and every agricultural implement
available for assaulting purposes, on the slightest hint of his son’s
having written a play.  So the son, bringing to me the father’s rent
(which I receive), imparted his secret, and pointed out that he was
determined to pursue his genius, and that it would put him in peril of
starvation, and that he was not formed for it.’

‘For pursuing his genius, sir?’

‘No, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘for starvation.  It was impossible to
deny the position, that Mr. Bazzard was not formed to be starved, and Mr.
Bazzard then pointed out that it was desirable that I should stand
between him and a fate so perfectly unsuited to his formation.  In that
way Mr. Bazzard became my clerk, and he feels it very much.’

‘I am glad he is grateful,’ said Rosa.

‘I didn’t quite mean that, my dear.  I mean, that he feels the
degradation.  There are some other geniuses that Mr. Bazzard has become
acquainted with, who have also written tragedies, which likewise nobody
will on any account whatever hear of bringing out, and these choice
spirits dedicate their plays to one another in a highly panegyrical
manner.  Mr. Bazzard has been the subject of one of these dedications.
Now, you know, I never had a play dedicated to _me_!’

Rosa looked at him as if she would have liked him to be the recipient of
a thousand dedications.

‘Which again, naturally, rubs against the grain of Mr. Bazzard,’ said Mr.
Grewgious.  ‘He is very short with me sometimes, and then I feel that he
is meditating, “This blockhead is my master!  A fellow who couldn’t write
a tragedy on pain of death, and who will never have one dedicated to him
with the most complimentary congratulations on the high position he has
taken in the eyes of posterity!”  Very trying, very trying.  However, in
giving him directions, I reflect beforehand: “Perhaps he may not like
this,” or “He might take it ill if I asked that;” and so we get on very
well.  Indeed, better than I could have expected.’

‘Is the tragedy named, sir?’ asked Rosa.

‘Strictly between ourselves,’ answered Mr. Grewgious, ‘it has a
dreadfully appropriate name.  It is called The Thorn of Anxiety.  But Mr.
Bazzard hopes—and I hope—that it will come out at last.’

It was not hard to divine that Mr. Grewgious had related the Bazzard
history thus fully, at least quite as much for the recreation of his
ward’s mind from the subject that had driven her there, as for the
gratification of his own tendency to be social and communicative.

‘And now, my dear,’ he said at this point, ‘if you are not too tired to
tell me more of what passed to-day—but only if you feel quite able—I
should be glad to hear it.  I may digest it the better, if I sleep on it
to-night.’

Rosa, composed now, gave him a faithful account of the interview.  Mr.
Grewgious often smoothed his head while it was in progress, and begged to
be told a second time those parts which bore on Helena and Neville.  When
Rosa had finished, he sat grave, silent, and meditative for a while.

‘Clearly narrated,’ was his only remark at last, ‘and, I hope, clearly
put away here,’ smoothing his head again.  ‘See, my dear,’ taking her to
the open window, ‘where they live!  The dark windows over yonder.’

‘I may go to Helena to-morrow?’ asked Rosa.

‘I should like to sleep on that question to-night,’ he answered
doubtfully.  ‘But let me take you to your own rest, for you must need
it.’

With that Mr. Grewgious helped her to get her hat on again, and hung upon
his arm the very little bag that was of no earthly use, and led her by
the hand (with a certain stately awkwardness, as if he were going to walk
a minuet) across Holborn, and into Furnival’s Inn.  At the hotel door, he
confided her to the Unlimited head chambermaid, and said that while she
went up to see her room, he would remain below, in case she should wish
it exchanged for another, or should find that there was anything she
wanted.

Rosa’s room was airy, clean, comfortable, almost gay.  The Unlimited had
laid in everything omitted from the very little bag (that is to say,
everything she could possibly need), and Rosa tripped down the great many
stairs again, to thank her guardian for his thoughtful and affectionate
care of her.

‘Not at all, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious, infinitely gratified; ‘it is I
who thank you for your charming confidence and for your charming company.
Your breakfast will be provided for you in a neat, compact, and graceful
little sitting-room (appropriate to your figure), and I will come to you
at ten o’clock in the morning.  I hope you don’t feel very strange
indeed, in this strange place.’

‘O no, I feel so safe!’

‘Yes, you may be sure that the stairs are fire-proof,’ said Mr.
Grewgious, ‘and that any outbreak of the devouring element would be
perceived and suppressed by the watchmen.’

‘I did not mean that,’ Rosa replied.  ‘I mean, I feel so safe from him.’

‘There is a stout gate of iron bars to keep him out,’ said Mr. Grewgious,
smiling; ‘and Furnival’s is fire-proof, and specially watched and
lighted, and _I_ live over the way!’  In the stoutness of his
knight-errantry, he seemed to think the last-named protection all
sufficient.  In the same spirit he said to the gate-porter as he went
out, ‘If some one staying in the hotel should wish to send across the
road to me in the night, a crown will be ready for the messenger.’  In
the same spirit, he walked up and down outside the iron gate for the best
part of an hour, with some solicitude; occasionally looking in between
the bars, as if he had laid a dove in a high roost in a cage of lions,
and had it on his mind that she might tumble out.




CHAPTER XXI—A RECOGNITION


Nothing occurred in the night to flutter the tired dove; and the dove
arose refreshed.  With Mr. Grewgious, when the clock struck ten in the
morning, came Mr. Crisparkle, who had come at one plunge out of the river
at Cloisterham.

‘Miss Twinkleton was so uneasy, Miss Rosa,’ he explained to her, ‘and
came round to Ma and me with your note, in such a state of wonder, that,
to quiet her, I volunteered on this service by the very first train to be
caught in the morning.  I wished at the time that you had come to me; but
now I think it best that you did _as_ you did, and came to your
guardian.’

‘I did think of you,’ Rosa told him; ‘but Minor Canon Corner was so near
him—’

‘I understand.  It was quite natural.’

‘I have told Mr. Crisparkle,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘all that you told me
last night, my dear.  Of course I should have written it to him
immediately; but his coming was most opportune.  And it was particularly
kind of him to come, for he had but just gone.’

‘Have you settled,’ asked Rosa, appealing to them both, ‘what is to be
done for Helena and her brother?’

‘Why really,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘I am in great perplexity.  If even
Mr. Grewgious, whose head is much longer than mine, and who is a whole
night’s cogitation in advance of me, is undecided, what must I be!’

The Unlimited here put her head in at the door—after having rapped, and
been authorised to present herself—announcing that a gentleman wished for
a word with another gentleman named Crisparkle, if any such gentleman
were there.  If no such gentleman were there, he begged pardon for being
mistaken.

‘Such a gentleman is here,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘but is engaged just
now.’

‘Is it a dark gentleman?’ interposed Rosa, retreating on her guardian.

‘No, Miss, more of a brown gentleman.’

‘You are sure not with black hair?’ asked Rosa, taking courage.

‘Quite sure of that, Miss.  Brown hair and blue eyes.’

‘Perhaps,’ hinted Mr. Grewgious, with habitual caution, ‘it might be well
to see him, reverend sir, if you don’t object.  When one is in a
difficulty or at a loss, one never knows in what direction a way out may
chance to open.  It is a business principle of mine, in such a case, not
to close up any direction, but to keep an eye on every direction that may
present itself.  I could relate an anecdote in point, but that it would
be premature.’

‘If Miss Rosa will allow me, then?  Let the gentleman come in,’ said Mr.
Crisparkle.

The gentleman came in; apologised, with a frank but modest grace, for not
finding Mr. Crisparkle alone; turned to Mr. Crisparkle, and smilingly
asked the unexpected question: ‘Who am I?’

‘You are the gentleman I saw smoking under the trees in Staple Inn, a few
minutes ago.’

‘True.  There I saw you.  Who else am I?’

Mr. Crisparkle concentrated his attention on a handsome face, much
sunburnt; and the ghost of some departed boy seemed to rise, gradually
and dimly, in the room.

The gentleman saw a struggling recollection lighten up the Minor Canon’s
features, and smiling again, said: ‘What will you have for breakfast this
morning?  You are out of jam.’

‘Wait a moment!’ cried Mr. Crisparkle, raising his right hand.  ‘Give me
another instant!  Tartar!’

The two shook hands with the greatest heartiness, and then went the
wonderful length—for Englishmen—of laying their hands each on the other’s
shoulders, and looking joyfully each into the other’s face.

‘My old fag!’ said Mr. Crisparkle.

‘My old master!’ said Mr. Tartar.

‘You saved me from drowning!’ said Mr. Crisparkle.

‘After which you took to swimming, you know!’ said Mr. Tartar.

‘God bless my soul!’ said Mr. Crisparkle.

‘Amen!’ said Mr. Tartar.

And then they fell to shaking hands most heartily again.

‘Imagine,’ exclaimed Mr. Crisparkle, with glistening eyes: ‘Miss Rosa Bud
and Mr. Grewgious, imagine Mr. Tartar, when he was the smallest of
juniors, diving for me, catching me, a big heavy senior, by the hair of
the head, and striking out for the shore with me like a water-giant!’

‘Imagine my not letting him sink, as I was his fag!’ said Mr. Tartar.
‘But the truth being that he was my best protector and friend, and did me
more good than all the masters put together, an irrational impulse seized
me to pick him up, or go down with him.’

‘Hem!  Permit me, sir, to have the honour,’ said Mr. Grewgious, advancing
with extended hand, ‘for an honour I truly esteem it.  I am proud to make
your acquaintance.  I hope you didn’t take cold.  I hope you were not
inconvenienced by swallowing too much water.  How have you been since?’

It was by no means apparent that Mr. Grewgious knew what he said, though
it was very apparent that he meant to say something highly friendly and
appreciative.

If Heaven, Rosa thought, had but sent such courage and skill to her poor
mother’s aid!  And he to have been so slight and young then!

‘I don’t wish to be complimented upon it, I thank you; but I think I have
an idea,’ Mr. Grewgious announced, after taking a jog-trot or two across
the room, so unexpected and unaccountable that they all stared at him,
doubtful whether he was choking or had the cramp—‘I _think_ I have an
idea.  I believe I have had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Tartar’s name as
tenant of the top set in the house next the top set in the corner?’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mr. Tartar.  ‘You are right so far.’

‘I am right so far,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Tick that off;’ which he did,
with his right thumb on his left.  ‘Might you happen to know the name of
your neighbour in the top set on the other side of the party-wall?’
coming very close to Mr. Tartar, to lose nothing of his face, in his
shortness of sight.

‘Landless.’

‘Tick that off,’ said Mr. Grewgious, taking another trot, and then coming
back.  ‘No personal knowledge, I suppose, sir?’

‘Slight, but some.’

‘Tick that off,’ said Mr. Grewgious, taking another trot, and again
coming back.  ‘Nature of knowledge, Mr. Tartar?’

‘I thought he seemed to be a young fellow in a poor way, and I asked his
leave—only within a day or so—to share my flowers up there with him; that
is to say, to extend my flower-garden to his windows.’

‘Would you have the kindness to take seats?’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘I
_have_ an idea!’

They complied; Mr. Tartar none the less readily, for being all abroad;
and Mr. Grewgious, seated in the centre, with his hands upon his knees,
thus stated his idea, with his usual manner of having got the statement
by heart.

‘I cannot as yet make up my mind whether it is prudent to hold open
communication under present circumstances, and on the part of the fair
member of the present company, with Mr. Neville or Miss Helena.  I have
reason to know that a local friend of ours (on whom I beg to bestow a
passing but a hearty malediction, with the kind permission of my reverend
friend) sneaks to and fro, and dodges up and down.  When not doing so
himself, he may have some informant skulking about, in the person of a
watchman, porter, or such-like hanger-on of Staple.  On the other hand,
Miss Rosa very naturally wishes to see her friend Miss Helena, and it
would seem important that at least Miss Helena (if not her brother too,
through her) should privately know from Miss Rosa’s lips what has
occurred, and what has been threatened.  Am I agreed with generally in
the views I take?’

‘I entirely coincide with them,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, who had been very
attentive.

‘As I have no doubt I should,’ added Mr. Tartar, smiling, ‘if I
understood them.’

‘Fair and softly, sir,’ said Mr. Grewgious; ‘we shall fully confide in
you directly, if you will favour us with your permission.  Now, if our
local friend should have any informant on the spot, it is tolerably clear
that such informant can only be set to watch the chambers in the
occupation of Mr. Neville.  He reporting, to our local friend, who comes
and goes there, our local friend would supply for himself, from his own
previous knowledge, the identity of the parties.  Nobody can be set to
watch all Staple, or to concern himself with comers and goers to other
sets of chambers: unless, indeed, mine.’

‘I begin to understand to what you tend,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘and
highly approve of your caution.’

‘I needn’t repeat that I know nothing yet of the why and wherefore,’ said
Mr. Tartar; ‘but I also understand to what you tend, so let me say at
once that my chambers are freely at your disposal.’

‘There!’ cried Mr. Grewgious, smoothing his head triumphantly, ‘now we
have all got the idea.  You have it, my dear?’

‘I think I have,’ said Rosa, blushing a little as Mr. Tartar looked
quickly towards her.

‘You see, you go over to Staple with Mr. Crisparkle and Mr. Tartar,’ said
Mr. Grewgious; ‘I going in and out, and out and in alone, in my usual
way; you go up with those gentlemen to Mr. Tartar’s rooms; you look into
Mr. Tartar’s flower-garden; you wait for Miss Helena’s appearance there,
or you signify to Miss Helena that you are close by; and you communicate
with her freely, and no spy can be the wiser.’

‘I am very much afraid I shall be—’

‘Be what, my dear?’ asked Mr. Grewgious, as she hesitated.  ‘Not
frightened?’

‘No, not that,’ said Rosa, shyly; ‘in Mr. Tartar’s way.  We seem to be
appropriating Mr. Tartar’s residence so very coolly.’

‘I protest to you,’ returned that gentleman, ‘that I shall think the
better of it for evermore, if your voice sounds in it only once.’

Rosa, not quite knowing what to say about that, cast down her eyes, and
turning to Mr. Grewgious, dutifully asked if she should put her hat on?
Mr. Grewgious being of opinion that she could not do better, she withdrew
for the purpose.  Mr. Crisparkle took the opportunity of giving Mr.
Tartar a summary of the distresses of Neville and his sister; the
opportunity was quite long enough, as the hat happened to require a
little extra fitting on.

Mr. Tartar gave his arm to Rosa, and Mr. Crisparkle walked, detached, in
front.

‘Poor, poor Eddy!’ thought Rosa, as they went along.

Mr. Tartar waved his right hand as he bent his head down over Rosa,
talking in an animated way.

‘It was not so powerful or so sun-browned when it saved Mr. Crisparkle,’
thought Rosa, glancing at it; ‘but it must have been very steady and
determined even then.’

Mr. Tartar told her he had been a sailor, roving everywhere for years and
years.

‘When are you going to sea again?’ asked Rosa.

‘Never!’

Rosa wondered what the girls would say if they could see her crossing the
wide street on the sailor’s arm.  And she fancied that the passers-by
must think her very little and very helpless, contrasted with the strong
figure that could have caught her up and carried her out of any danger,
miles and miles without resting.

She was thinking further, that his far-seeing blue eyes looked as if they
had been used to watch danger afar off, and to watch it without
flinching, drawing nearer and nearer: when, happening to raise her own
eyes, she found that he seemed to be thinking something about _them_.

This a little confused Rosebud, and may account for her never afterwards
quite knowing how she ascended (with his help) to his garden in the air,
and seemed to get into a marvellous country that came into sudden bloom
like the country on the summit of the magic bean-stalk.  May it flourish
for ever!




CHAPTER XXII—A GRITTY STATE OF THINGS COMES ON


Mr. Tartar’s chambers were the neatest, the cleanest, and the
best-ordered chambers ever seen under the sun, moon, and stars.  The
floors were scrubbed to that extent, that you might have supposed the
London blacks emancipated for ever, and gone out of the land for good.
Every inch of brass-work in Mr. Tartar’s possession was polished and
burnished, till it shone like a brazen mirror.  No speck, nor spot, nor
spatter soiled the purity of any of Mr. Tartar’s household gods, large,
small, or middle-sized.  His sitting-room was like the admiral’s cabin,
his bath-room was like a dairy, his sleeping-chamber, fitted all about
with lockers and drawers, was like a seedsman’s shop; and his
nicely-balanced cot just stirred in the midst, as if it breathed.
Everything belonging to Mr. Tartar had quarters of its own assigned to
it: his maps and charts had their quarters; his books had theirs; his
brushes had theirs; his boots had theirs; his clothes had theirs; his
case-bottles had theirs; his telescopes and other instruments had theirs.
Everything was readily accessible.  Shelf, bracket, locker, hook, and
drawer were equally within reach, and were equally contrived with a view
to avoiding waste of room, and providing some snug inches of stowage for
something that would have exactly fitted nowhere else.  His gleaming
little service of plate was so arranged upon his sideboard as that a
slack salt-spoon would have instantly betrayed itself; his toilet
implements were so arranged upon his dressing-table as that a toothpick
of slovenly deportment could have been reported at a glance.  So with the
curiosities he had brought home from various voyages.  Stuffed, dried,
repolished, or otherwise preserved, according to their kind; birds,
fishes, reptiles, arms, articles of dress, shells, seaweeds, grasses, or
memorials of coral reef; each was displayed in its especial place, and
each could have been displayed in no better place.  Paint and varnish
seemed to be kept somewhere out of sight, in constant readiness to
obliterate stray finger-marks wherever any might become perceptible in
Mr. Tartar’s chambers.  No man-of-war was ever kept more spick and span
from careless touch.  On this bright summer day, a neat awning was rigged
over Mr. Tartar’s flower-garden as only a sailor can rig it, and there
was a sea-going air upon the whole effect, so delightfully complete, that
the flower-garden might have appertained to stern-windows afloat, and the
whole concern might have bowled away gallantly with all on board, if Mr.
Tartar had only clapped to his lips the speaking-trumpet that was slung
in a corner, and given hoarse orders to heave the anchor up, look alive
there, men, and get all sail upon her!

Mr. Tartar doing the honours of this gallant craft was of a piece with
the rest.  When a man rides an amiable hobby that shies at nothing and
kicks nobody, it is only agreeable to find him riding it with a humorous
sense of the droll side of the creature.  When the man is a cordial and
an earnest man by nature, and withal is perfectly fresh and genuine, it
may be doubted whether he is ever seen to greater advantage than at such
a time.  So Rosa would have naturally thought (even if she hadn’t been
conducted over the ship with all the homage due to the First Lady of the
Admiralty, or First Fairy of the Sea), that it was charming to see and
hear Mr. Tartar half laughing at, and half rejoicing in, his various
contrivances.  So Rosa would have naturally thought, anyhow, that the
sunburnt sailor showed to great advantage when, the inspection finished,
he delicately withdrew out of his admiral’s cabin, beseeching her to
consider herself its Queen, and waving her free of his flower-garden with
the hand that had had Mr. Crisparkle’s life in it.

‘Helena!  Helena Landless!  Are you there?’

‘Who speaks to me?  Not Rosa?’  Then a second handsome face appearing.

‘Yes, my darling!’

‘Why, how did you come here, dearest?’

‘I—I don’t quite know,’ said Rosa with a blush; ‘unless I am dreaming!’

Why with a blush?  For their two faces were alone with the other flowers.
Are blushes among the fruits of the country of the magic bean-stalk?

‘_I_ am not dreaming,’ said Helena, smiling.  ‘I should take more for
granted if I were.  How do we come together—or so near together—so very
unexpectedly?’

Unexpectedly indeed, among the dingy gables and chimney-pots of P. J.
T.’s connection, and the flowers that had sprung from the salt sea.  But
Rosa, waking, told in a hurry how they came to be together, and all the
why and wherefore of that matter.

‘And Mr. Crisparkle is here,’ said Rosa, in rapid conclusion; ‘and, could
you believe it? long ago he saved his life!’

‘I could believe any such thing of Mr. Crisparkle,’ returned Helena, with
a mantling face.

(More blushes in the bean-stalk country!)

‘Yes, but it wasn’t Crisparkle,’ said Rosa, quickly putting in the
correction.

‘I don’t understand, love.’

‘It was very nice of Mr. Crisparkle to be saved,’ said Rosa, ‘and he
couldn’t have shown his high opinion of Mr. Tartar more expressively.
But it was Mr. Tartar who saved him.’

Helena’s dark eyes looked very earnestly at the bright face among the
leaves, and she asked, in a slower and more thoughtful tone:

‘Is Mr. Tartar with you now, dear?’

‘No; because he has given up his rooms to me—to us, I mean.  It is such a
beautiful place!’

‘Is it?’

‘It is like the inside of the most exquisite ship that ever sailed.  It
is like—it is like—’

‘Like a dream?’ suggested Helena.

Rosa answered with a little nod, and smelled the flowers.

Helena resumed, after a short pause of silence, during which she seemed
(or it was Rosa’s fancy) to compassionate somebody: ‘My poor Neville is
reading in his own room, the sun being so very bright on this side just
now.  I think he had better not know that you are so near.’

‘O, I think so too!’ cried Rosa very readily.

‘I suppose,’ pursued Helena, doubtfully, ‘that he must know by-and-by all
you have told me; but I am not sure.  Ask Mr. Crisparkle’s advice, my
darling.  Ask him whether I may tell Neville as much or as little of what
you have told me as I think best.’

Rosa subsided into her state-cabin, and propounded the question.  The
Minor Canon was for the free exercise of Helena’s judgment.

‘I thank him very much,’ said Helena, when Rosa emerged again with her
report.  ‘Ask him whether it would be best to wait until any more
maligning and pursuing of Neville on the part of this wretch shall
disclose itself, or to try to anticipate it: I mean, so far as to find
out whether any such goes on darkly about us?’

The Minor Canon found this point so difficult to give a confident opinion
on, that, after two or three attempts and failures, he suggested a
reference to Mr. Grewgious.  Helena acquiescing, he betook himself (with
a most unsuccessful assumption of lounging indifference) across the
quadrangle to P. J. T.’s, and stated it.  Mr. Grewgious held decidedly to
the general principle, that if you could steal a march upon a brigand or
a wild beast, you had better do it; and he also held decidedly to the
special case, that John Jasper was a brigand and a wild beast in
combination.

Thus advised, Mr. Crisparkle came back again and reported to Rosa, who in
her turn reported to Helena.  She now steadily pursuing her train of
thought at her window, considered thereupon.

‘We may count on Mr. Tartar’s readiness to help us, Rosa?’ she inquired.

O yes!  Rosa shyly thought so.  O yes, Rosa shyly believed she could
almost answer for it.  But should she ask Mr. Crisparkle?  ‘I think your
authority on the point as good as his, my dear,’ said Helena, sedately,
‘and you needn’t disappear again for that.’  Odd of Helena!

‘You see, Neville,’ Helena pursued after more reflection, ‘knows no one
else here: he has not so much as exchanged a word with any one else here.
If Mr. Tartar would call to see him openly and often; if he would spare a
minute for the purpose, frequently; if he would even do so, almost daily;
something might come of it.’

‘Something might come of it, dear?’ repeated Rosa, surveying her friend’s
beauty with a highly perplexed face.  ‘Something might?’

‘If Neville’s movements are really watched, and if the purpose really is
to isolate him from all friends and acquaintance and wear his daily life
out grain by grain (which would seem to be the threat to you), does it
not appear likely,’ said Helena, ‘that his enemy would in some way
communicate with Mr. Tartar to warn him off from Neville?  In which case,
we might not only know the fact, but might know from Mr. Tartar what the
terms of the communication were.’

‘I see!’ cried Rosa.  And immediately darted into her state-cabin again.

Presently her pretty face reappeared, with a greatly heightened colour,
and she said that she had told Mr. Crisparkle, and that Mr. Crisparkle
had fetched in Mr. Tartar, and that Mr. Tartar—‘who is waiting now, in
case you want him,’ added Rosa, with a half look back, and in not a
little confusion between the inside of the state-cabin and out—had
declared his readiness to act as she had suggested, and to enter on his
task that very day.

‘I thank him from my heart,’ said Helena.  ‘Pray tell him so.’

Again not a little confused between the Flower-garden and the Cabin, Rosa
dipped in with her message, and dipped out again with more assurances
from Mr. Tartar, and stood wavering in a divided state between Helena and
him, which proved that confusion is not always necessarily awkward, but
may sometimes present a very pleasant appearance.

‘And now, darling,’ said Helena, ‘we will be mindful of the caution that
has restricted us to this interview for the present, and will part.  I
hear Neville moving too.  Are you going back?’

‘To Miss Twinkleton’s?’ asked Rosa.

‘Yes.’

‘O, I could never go there any more.  I couldn’t indeed, after that
dreadful interview!’ said Rosa.

‘Then where _are_ you going, pretty one?’

‘Now I come to think of it, I don’t know,’ said Rosa.  ‘I have settled
nothing at all yet, but my guardian will take care of me.  Don’t be
uneasy, dear.  I shall be sure to be somewhere.’

(It did seem likely.)

‘And I shall hear of my Rosebud from Mr. Tartar?’ inquired Helena.

‘Yes, I suppose so; from—’ Rosa looked back again in a flutter, instead
of supplying the name.  ‘But tell me one thing before we part, dearest
Helena.  Tell me—that you are sure, sure, sure, I couldn’t help it.’

‘Help it, love?’

‘Help making him malicious and revengeful.  I couldn’t hold any terms
with him, could I?’

‘You know how I love you, darling,’ answered Helena, with indignation;
‘but I would sooner see you dead at his wicked feet.’

‘That’s a great comfort to me!  And you will tell your poor brother so,
won’t you?  And you will give him my remembrance and my sympathy?  And
you will ask him not to hate me?’

With a mournful shake of the head, as if that would be quite a
superfluous entreaty, Helena lovingly kissed her two hands to her friend,
and her friend’s two hands were kissed to her; and then she saw a third
hand (a brown one) appear among the flowers and leaves, and help her
friend out of sight.

The refection that Mr. Tartar produced in the Admiral’s Cabin by merely
touching the spring knob of a locker and the handle of a drawer, was a
dazzling enchanted repast.  Wonderful macaroons, glittering liqueurs,
magically-preserved tropical spices, and jellies of celestial tropical
fruits, displayed themselves profusely at an instant’s notice.  But Mr.
Tartar could not make time stand still; and time, with his hard-hearted
fleetness, strode on so fast, that Rosa was obliged to come down from the
bean-stalk country to earth and her guardian’s chambers.

‘And now, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘what is to be done next?  To put
the same thought in another form; what is to be done with you?’

Rosa could only look apologetically sensible of being very much in her
own way and in everybody else’s.  Some passing idea of living, fireproof,
up a good many stairs in Furnival’s Inn for the rest of her life, was the
only thing in the nature of a plan that occurred to her.

‘It has come into my thoughts,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘that as the
respected lady, Miss Twinkleton, occasionally repairs to London in the
recess, with the view of extending her connection, and being available
for interviews with metropolitan parents, if any—whether, until we have
time in which to turn ourselves round, we might invite Miss Twinkleton to
come and stay with you for a month?’

‘Stay where, sir?’

‘Whether,’ explained Mr. Grewgious, ‘we might take a furnished lodging in
town for a month, and invite Miss Twinkleton to assume the charge of you
in it for that period?’

‘And afterwards?’ hinted Rosa.

‘And afterwards,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘we should be no worse off than we
are now.’

‘I think that might smooth the way,’ assented Rosa.

‘Then let us,’ said Mr. Grewgious, rising, ‘go and look for a furnished
lodging.  Nothing could be more acceptable to me than the sweet presence
of last evening, for all the remaining evenings of my existence; but
these are not fit surroundings for a young lady.  Let us set out in quest
of adventures, and look for a furnished lodging.  In the meantime, Mr.
Crisparkle here, about to return home immediately, will no doubt kindly
see Miss Twinkleton, and invite that lady to co-operate in our plan.’

Mr. Crisparkle, willingly accepting the commission, took his departure;
Mr. Grewgious and his ward set forth on their expedition.

As Mr. Grewgious’s idea of looking at a furnished lodging was to get on
the opposite side of the street to a house with a suitable bill in the
window, and stare at it; and then work his way tortuously to the back of
the house, and stare at that; and then not go in, but make similar trials
of another house, with the same result; their progress was but slow.  At
length he bethought himself of a widowed cousin, divers times removed, of
Mr. Bazzard’s, who had once solicited his influence in the lodger world,
and who lived in Southampton Street, Bloomsbury Square.  This lady’s
name, stated in uncompromising capitals of considerable size on a brass
door-plate, and yet not lucidly as to sex or condition, was BILLICKIN.

Personal faintness, and an overpowering personal candour, were the
distinguishing features of Mrs. Billickin’s organisation.  She came
languishing out of her own exclusive back parlour, with the air of having
been expressly brought-to for the purpose, from an accumulation of
several swoons.

‘I hope I see you well, sir,’ said Mrs. Billickin, recognising her
visitor with a bend.

‘Thank you, quite well.  And you, ma’am?’ returned Mr. Grewgious.

‘I am as well,’ said Mrs. Billickin, becoming aspirational with excess of
faintness, ‘as I hever ham.’

‘My ward and an elderly lady,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘wish to find a
genteel lodging for a month or so.  Have you any apartments available,
ma’am?’

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ returned Mrs. Billickin, ‘I will not deceive you; far
from it.  I _have_ apartments available.’

This with the air of adding: ‘Convey me to the stake, if you will; but
while I live, I will be candid.’

‘And now, what apartments, ma’am?’ asked Mr. Grewgious, cosily.  To tame
a certain severity apparent on the part of Mrs. Billickin.

‘There is this sitting-room—which, call it what you will, it is the front
parlour, Miss,’ said Mrs. Billickin, impressing Rosa into the
conversation: ‘the back parlour being what I cling to and never part
with; and there is two bedrooms at the top of the ’ouse with gas laid on.
I do not tell you that your bedroom floors is firm, for firm they are
not.  The gas-fitter himself allowed, that to make a firm job, he must go
right under your jistes, and it were not worth the outlay as a yearly
tenant so to do.  The piping is carried above your jistes, and it is best
that it should be made known to you.’

Mr. Grewgious and Rosa exchanged looks of some dismay, though they had
not the least idea what latent horrors this carriage of the piping might
involve.  Mrs. Billickin put her hand to her heart, as having eased it of
a load.

‘Well!  The roof is all right, no doubt,’ said Mr. Grewgious, plucking up
a little.

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ returned Mrs. Billickin, ‘if I was to tell you, sir,
that to have nothink above you is to have a floor above you, I should put
a deception upon you which I will not do.  No, sir.  Your slates WILL
rattle loose at that elewation in windy weather, do your utmost, best or
worst!  I defy you, sir, be you what you may, to keep your slates tight,
try how you can.’  Here Mrs. Billickin, having been warm with Mr.
Grewgious, cooled a little, not to abuse the moral power she held over
him.  ‘Consequent,’ proceeded Mrs. Billickin, more mildly, but still
firmly in her incorruptible candour: ‘consequent it would be worse than
of no use for me to trapse and travel up to the top of the ’ouse with
you, and for you to say, “Mrs. Billickin, what stain do I notice in the
ceiling, for a stain I do consider it?” and for me to answer, “I do not
understand you, sir.”  No, sir, I will not be so underhand.  I _do_
understand you before you pint it out.  It is the wet, sir.  It do come
in, and it do not come in.  You may lay dry there half your lifetime; but
the time will come, and it is best that you should know it, when a
dripping sop would be no name for you.’

Mr. Grewgious looked much disgraced by being prefigured in this pickle.

‘Have you any other apartments, ma’am?’ he asked.

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ returned Mrs. Billickin, with much solemnity, ‘I have.
You ask me have I, and my open and my honest answer air, I have.  The
first and second floors is wacant, and sweet rooms.’

‘Come, come!  There’s nothing against _them_,’ said Mr. Grewgious,
comforting himself.

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ replied Mrs. Billickin, ‘pardon me, there is the stairs.
Unless your mind is prepared for the stairs, it will lead to inevitable
disappointment.  You cannot, Miss,’ said Mrs. Billickin, addressing Rosa
reproachfully, ‘place a first floor, and far less a second, on the level
footing ‘of a parlour.  No, you cannot do it, Miss, it is beyond your
power, and wherefore try?’

Mrs. Billickin put it very feelingly, as if Rosa had shown a headstrong
determination to hold the untenable position.

‘Can we see these rooms, ma’am?’ inquired her guardian.

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ returned Mrs. Billickin, ‘you can.  I will not disguise
it from you, sir; you can.’

Mrs. Billickin then sent into her back parlour for her shawl (it being a
state fiction, dating from immemorial antiquity, that she could never go
anywhere without being wrapped up), and having been enrolled by her
attendant, led the way.  She made various genteel pauses on the stairs
for breath, and clutched at her heart in the drawing-room as if it had
very nearly got loose, and she had caught it in the act of taking wing.

‘And the second floor?’ said Mr. Grewgious, on finding the first
satisfactory.

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ replied Mrs. Billickin, turning upon him with ceremony,
as if the time had now come when a distinct understanding on a difficult
point must be arrived at, and a solemn confidence established, ‘the
second floor is over this.’

‘Can we see that too, ma’am?’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mrs. Billickin, ‘it is open as the day.’

That also proving satisfactory, Mr. Grewgious retired into a window with
Rosa for a few words of consultation, and then asking for pen and ink,
sketched out a line or two of agreement.  In the meantime Mrs. Billickin
took a seat, and delivered a kind of Index to, or Abstract of, the
general question.

‘Five-and-forty shillings per week by the month certain at the time of
year,’ said Mrs. Billickin, ‘is only reasonable to both parties.  It is
not Bond Street nor yet St. James’s Palace; but it is not pretended that
it is.  Neither is it attempted to be denied—for why should it?—that the
Arching leads to a mews.  Mewses must exist.  Respecting attendance; two
is kep’, at liberal wages.  Words _has_ arisen as to tradesmen, but dirty
shoes on fresh hearth-stoning was attributable, and no wish for a
commission on your orders.  Coals is either _by_ the fire, or _per_ the
scuttle.’  She emphasised the prepositions as marking a subtle but
immense difference.  ‘Dogs is not viewed with favour.  Besides litter,
they gets stole, and sharing suspicions is apt to creep in, and
unpleasantness takes place.’

By this time Mr. Grewgious had his agreement-lines, and his
earnest-money, ready.  ‘I have signed it for the ladies, ma’am,’ he said,
‘and you’ll have the goodness to sign it for yourself, Christian and
Surname, there, if you please.’

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ said Mrs. Billickin in a new burst of candour, ‘no, sir!
You must excuse the Christian name.’

Mr. Grewgious stared at her.

‘The door-plate is used as a protection,’ said Mrs. Billickin, ‘and acts
as such, and go from it I will not.’

Mr. Grewgious stared at Rosa.

‘No, Mr. Grewgious, you must excuse me.  So long as this ’ouse is known
indefinite as Billickin’s, and so long as it is a doubt with the
riff-raff where Billickin may be hidin’, near the street-door or down the
airy, and what his weight and size, so long I feel safe.  But commit
myself to a solitary female statement, no, Miss!  Nor would you for a
moment wish,’ said Mrs. Billickin, with a strong sense of injury, ‘to
take that advantage of your sex, if you were not brought to it by
inconsiderate example.’

Rosa reddening as if she had made some most disgraceful attempt to
overreach the good lady, besought Mr. Grewgious to rest content with any
signature.  And accordingly, in a baronial way, the sign-manual BILLICKIN
got appended to the document.

Details were then settled for taking possession on the next day but one,
when Miss Twinkleton might be reasonably expected; and Rosa went back to
Furnival’s Inn on her guardian’s arm.

Behold Mr. Tartar walking up and down Furnival’s Inn, checking himself
when he saw them coming, and advancing towards them!

‘It occurred to me,’ hinted Mr. Tartar, ‘that we might go up the river,
the weather being so delicious and the tide serving.  I have a boat of my
own at the Temple Stairs.’

‘I have not been up the river for this many a day,’ said Mr. Grewgious,
tempted.

‘I was never up the river,’ added Rosa.

Within half an hour they were setting this matter right by going up the
river.  The tide was running with them, the afternoon was charming.  Mr.
Tartar’s boat was perfect.  Mr. Tartar and Lobley (Mr. Tartar’s man)
pulled a pair of oars.  Mr. Tartar had a yacht, it seemed, lying
somewhere down by Greenhithe; and Mr. Tartar’s man had charge of this
yacht, and was detached upon his present service.  He was a
jolly-favoured man, with tawny hair and whiskers, and a big red face.  He
was the dead image of the sun in old woodcuts, his hair and whiskers
answering for rays all around him.  Resplendent in the bow of the boat,
he was a shining sight, with a man-of-war’s man’s shirt on—or off,
according to opinion—and his arms and breast tattooed all sorts of
patterns.  Lobley seemed to take it easily, and so did Mr. Tartar; yet
their oars bent as they pulled, and the boat bounded under them.  Mr.
Tartar talked as if he were doing nothing, to Rosa who was really doing
nothing, and to Mr. Grewgious who was doing this much that he steered all
wrong; but what did that matter, when a turn of Mr. Tartar’s skilful
wrist, or a mere grin of Mr. Lobley’s over the bow, put all to rights!
The tide bore them on in the gayest and most sparkling manner, until they
stopped to dine in some ever-lastingly-green garden, needing no
matter-of-fact identification here; and then the tide obligingly
turned—being devoted to that party alone for that day; and as they
floated idly among some osier-beds, Rosa tried what she could do in the
rowing way, and came off splendidly, being much assisted; and Mr.
Grewgious tried what he could do, and came off on his back, doubled up
with an oar under his chin, being not assisted at all.  Then there was an
interval of rest under boughs (such rest!) what time Mr. Lobley mopped,
and, arranging cushions, stretchers, and the like, danced the tight-rope
the whole length of the boat like a man to whom shoes were a superstition
and stockings slavery; and then came the sweet return among delicious
odours of limes in bloom, and musical ripplings; and, all too soon, the
great black city cast its shadow on the waters, and its dark bridges
spanned them as death spans life, and the everlastingly-green garden
seemed to be left for everlasting, unregainable and far away.

                         [Picture: Up the river]

‘Cannot people get through life without gritty stages, I wonder?’ Rosa
thought next day, when the town was very gritty again, and everything had
a strange and an uncomfortable appearance of seeming to wait for
something that wouldn’t come.  NO.  She began to think, that, now the
Cloisterham school-days had glided past and gone, the gritty stages would
begin to set in at intervals and make themselves wearily known!

Yet what did Rosa expect?  Did she expect Miss Twinkleton?  Miss
Twinkleton duly came.  Forth from her back parlour issued the Billickin
to receive Miss Twinkleton, and War was in the Billickin’s eye from that
fell moment.

Miss Twinkleton brought a quantity of luggage with her, having all Rosa’s
as well as her own.  The Billickin took it ill that Miss Twinkleton’s
mind, being sorely disturbed by this luggage, failed to take in her
personal identity with that clearness of perception which was due to its
demands.  Stateliness mounted her gloomy throne upon the Billickin’s brow
in consequence.  And when Miss Twinkleton, in agitation taking stock of
her trunks and packages, of which she had seventeen, particularly counted
in the Billickin herself as number eleven, the B. found it necessary to
repudiate.

‘Things cannot too soon be put upon the footing,’ said she, with a
candour so demonstrative as to be almost obtrusive, ‘that the person of
the ’ouse is not a box nor yet a bundle, nor a carpet-bag.  No, I am ’ily
obleeged to you, Miss Twinkleton, nor yet a beggar.’

This last disclaimer had reference to Miss Twinkleton’s distractedly
pressing two-and-sixpence on her, instead of the cabman.

Thus cast off, Miss Twinkleton wildly inquired, ‘which gentleman’ was to
be paid?  There being two gentlemen in that position (Miss Twinkleton
having arrived with two cabs), each gentleman on being paid held forth
his two-and-sixpence on the flat of his open hand, and, with a speechless
stare and a dropped jaw, displayed his wrong to heaven and earth.
Terrified by this alarming spectacle, Miss Twinkleton placed another
shilling in each hand; at the same time appealing to the law in flurried
accents, and recounting her luggage this time with the two gentlemen in,
who caused the total to come out complicated.  Meanwhile the two
gentlemen, each looking very hard at the last shilling grumblingly, as if
it might become eighteen-pence if he kept his eyes on it, descended the
doorsteps, ascended their carriages, and drove away, leaving Miss
Twinkleton on a bonnet-box in tears.

The Billickin beheld this manifestation of weakness without sympathy, and
gave directions for ‘a young man to be got in’ to wrestle with the
luggage.  When that gladiator had disappeared from the arena, peace
ensued, and the new lodgers dined.

But the Billickin had somehow come to the knowledge that Miss Twinkleton
kept a school.  The leap from that knowledge to the inference that Miss
Twinkleton set herself to teach _her_ something, was easy.  ‘But you
don’t do it,’ soliloquised the Billickin; ‘I am not your pupil, whatever
she,’ meaning Rosa, ‘may be, poor thing!’

Miss Twinkleton, on the other hand, having changed her dress and
recovered her spirits, was animated by a bland desire to improve the
occasion in all ways, and to be as serene a model as possible.  In a
happy compromise between her two states of existence, she had already
become, with her workbasket before her, the equably vivacious companion
with a slight judicious flavouring of information, when the Billickin
announced herself.

‘I will not hide from you, ladies,’ said the B., enveloped in the shawl
of state, ‘for it is not my character to hide neither my motives nor my
actions, that I take the liberty to look in upon you to express a ’ope
that your dinner was to your liking.  Though not Professed but Plain,
still her wages should be a sufficient object to her to stimilate to soar
above mere roast and biled.’

‘We dined very well indeed,’ said Rosa, ‘thank you.’

‘Accustomed,’ said Miss Twinkleton with a gracious air, which to the
jealous ears of the Billickin seemed to add ‘my good woman’—‘accustomed
to a liberal and nutritious, yet plain and salutary diet, we have found
no reason to bemoan our absence from the ancient city, and the methodical
household, in which the quiet routine of our lot has been hitherto cast.’

‘I did think it well to mention to my cook,’ observed the Billickin with
a gush of candour, ‘which I ’ope you will agree with, Miss Twinkleton,
was a right precaution, that the young lady being used to what we should
consider here but poor diet, had better be brought forward by degrees.
For, a rush from scanty feeding to generous feeding, and from what you
may call messing to what you may call method, do require a power of
constitution which is not often found in youth, particular when
undermined by boarding-school!’

It will be seen that the Billickin now openly pitted herself against Miss
Twinkleton, as one whom she had fully ascertained to be her natural
enemy.

‘Your remarks,’ returned Miss Twinkleton, from a remote moral eminence,
‘are well meant, I have no doubt; but you will permit me to observe that
they develop a mistaken view of the subject, which can only be imputed to
your extreme want of accurate information.’

‘My informiation,’ retorted the Billickin, throwing in an extra syllable
for the sake of emphasis at once polite and powerful—‘my informiation,
Miss Twinkleton, were my own experience, which I believe is usually
considered to be good guidance.  But whether so or not, I was put in
youth to a very genteel boarding-school, the mistress being no less a
lady than yourself, of about your own age or it may be some years
younger, and a poorness of blood flowed from the table which has run
through my life.’

‘Very likely,’ said Miss Twinkleton, still from her distant eminence;
‘and very much to be deplored.—Rosa, my dear, how are you getting on with
your work?’

‘Miss Twinkleton,’ resumed the Billickin, in a courtly manner, ‘before
retiring on the ’int, as a lady should, I wish to ask of yourself, as a
lady, whether I am to consider that my words is doubted?’

‘I am not aware on what ground you cherish such a supposition,’ began
Miss Twinkleton, when the Billickin neatly stopped her.

‘Do not, if you please, put suppositions betwixt my lips where none such
have been imparted by myself.  Your flow of words is great, Miss
Twinkleton, and no doubt is expected from you by your pupils, and no
doubt is considered worth the money.  _No_ doubt, I am sure.  But not
paying for flows of words, and not asking to be favoured with them here,
I wish to repeat my question.’

‘If you refer to the poverty of your circulation,’ began Miss Twinkleton,
when again the Billickin neatly stopped her.

‘I have used no such expressions.’

‘If you refer, then, to the poorness of your blood—’

‘Brought upon me,’ stipulated the Billickin, expressly, ‘at a
boarding-school—’

‘Then,’ resumed Miss Twinkleton, ‘all I can say is, that I am bound to
believe, on your asseveration, that it is very poor indeed.  I cannot
forbear adding, that if that unfortunate circumstance influences your
conversation, it is much to be lamented, and it is eminently desirable
that your blood were richer.—Rosa, my dear, how are you getting on with
your work?’

‘Hem!  Before retiring, Miss,’ proclaimed the Billickin to Rosa, loftily
cancelling Miss Twinkleton, ‘I should wish it to be understood between
yourself and me that my transactions in future is with you alone.  I know
no elderly lady here, Miss, none older than yourself.’

‘A highly desirable arrangement, Rosa my dear,’ observed Miss Twinkleton.

‘It is not, Miss,’ said the Billickin, with a sarcastic smile, ‘that I
possess the Mill I have heard of, in which old single ladies could be
ground up young (what a gift it would be to some of us), but that I limit
myself to you totally.’

‘When I have any desire to communicate a request to the person of the
house, Rosa my dear,’ observed Miss Twinkleton with majestic
cheerfulness, ‘I will make it known to you, and you will kindly
undertake, I am sure, that it is conveyed to the proper quarter.’

‘Good-evening, Miss,’ said the Billickin, at once affectionately and
distantly.  ‘Being alone in my eyes, I wish you good-evening with best
wishes, and do not find myself drove, I am truly ’appy to say, into
expressing my contempt for an indiwidual, unfortunately for yourself,
belonging to you.’

The Billickin gracefully withdrew with this parting speech, and from that
time Rosa occupied the restless position of shuttlecock between these two
battledores.  Nothing could be done without a smart match being played
out.  Thus, on the daily-arising question of dinner, Miss Twinkleton
would say, the three being present together:

‘Perhaps, my love, you will consult with the person of the house, whether
she can procure us a lamb’s fry; or, failing that, a roast fowl.’

On which the Billickin would retort (Rosa not having spoken a word), ‘If
you was better accustomed to butcher’s meat, Miss, you would not
entertain the idea of a lamb’s fry.  Firstly, because lambs has long been
sheep, and secondly, because there is such things as killing-days, and
there is not.  As to roast fowls, Miss, why you must be quite surfeited
with roast fowls, letting alone your buying, when you market for
yourself, the agedest of poultry with the scaliest of legs, quite as if
you was accustomed to picking ’em out for cheapness.  Try a little
inwention, Miss.  Use yourself to ’ousekeeping a bit.  Come now, think of
somethink else.’

To this encouragement, offered with the indulgent toleration of a wise
and liberal expert, Miss Twinkleton would rejoin, reddening:

‘Or, my dear, you might propose to the person of the house a duck.’

‘Well, Miss!’ the Billickin would exclaim (still no word being spoken by
Rosa), ‘you do surprise me when you speak of ducks!  Not to mention that
they’re getting out of season and very dear, it really strikes to my
heart to see you have a duck; for the breast, which is the only delicate
cuts in a duck, always goes in a direction which I cannot imagine where,
and your own plate comes down so miserably skin-and-bony!  Try again,
Miss.  Think more of yourself, and less of others.  A dish of sweetbreads
now, or a bit of mutton.  Something at which you can get your equal
chance.’

Occasionally the game would wax very brisk indeed, and would be kept up
with a smartness rendering such an encounter as this quite tame.  But the
Billickin almost invariably made by far the higher score; and would come
in with side hits of the most unexpected and extraordinary description,
when she seemed without a chance.

All this did not improve the gritty state of things in London, or the air
that London had acquired in Rosa’s eyes of waiting for something that
never came.  Tired of working, and conversing with Miss Twinkleton, she
suggested working and reading: to which Miss Twinkleton readily assented,
as an admirable reader, of tried powers.  But Rosa soon made the
discovery that Miss Twinkleton didn’t read fairly.  She cut the
love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and was
guilty of other glaring pious frauds.  As an instance in point, take the
glowing passage: ‘Ever dearest and best adored,—said Edward, clasping the
dear head to his breast, and drawing the silken hair through his
caressing fingers, from which he suffered it to fall like golden
rain,—ever dearest and best adored, let us fly from the unsympathetic
world and the sterile coldness of the stony-hearted, to the rich warm
Paradise of Trust and Love.’  Miss Twinkleton’s fraudulent version tamely
ran thus: ‘Ever engaged to me with the consent of our parents on both
sides, and the approbation of the silver-haired rector of the
district,—said Edward, respectfully raising to his lips the taper fingers
so skilful in embroidery, tambour, crochet, and other truly feminine
arts,—let me call on thy papa ere to-morrow’s dawn has sunk into the
west, and propose a suburban establishment, lowly it may be, but within
our means, where he will be always welcome as an evening guest, and where
every arrangement shall invest economy, and constant interchange of
scholastic acquirements with the attributes of the ministering angel to
domestic bliss.’

As the days crept on and nothing happened, the neighbours began to say
that the pretty girl at Billickin’s, who looked so wistfully and so much
out of the gritty windows of the drawing-room, seemed to be losing her
spirits.  The pretty girl might have lost them but for the accident of
lighting on some books of voyages and sea-adventure.  As a compensation
against their romance, Miss Twinkleton, reading aloud, made the most of
all the latitudes and longitudes, bearings, winds, currents, offsets, and
other statistics (which she felt to be none the less improving because
they expressed nothing whatever to her); while Rosa, listening intently,
made the most of what was nearest to her heart.  So they both did better
than before.




CHAPTER XXIII—THE DAWN AGAIN


Although Mr. Crisparkle and John Jasper met daily under the Cathedral
roof, nothing at any time passed between them having reference to Edwin
Drood, after the time, more than half a year gone by, when Jasper mutely
showed the Minor Canon the conclusion and the resolution entered in his
Diary.  It is not likely that they ever met, though so often, without the
thoughts of each reverting to the subject.  It is not likely that they
ever met, though so often, without a sensation on the part of each that
the other was a perplexing secret to him. Jasper as the denouncer and
pursuer of Neville Landless, and Mr. Crisparkle as his consistent
advocate and protector, must at least have stood sufficiently in
opposition to have speculated with keen interest on the steadiness and
next direction of the other’s designs.  But neither ever broached the
theme.

False pretence not being in the Minor Canon’s nature, he doubtless
displayed openly that he would at any time have revived the subject, and
even desired to discuss it.  The determined reticence of Jasper, however,
was not to be so approached.  Impassive, moody, solitary, resolute, so
concentrated on one idea, and on its attendant fixed purpose, that he
would share it with no fellow-creature, he lived apart from human life.
Constantly exercising an Art which brought him into mechanical harmony
with others, and which could not have been pursued unless he and they had
been in the nicest mechanical relations and unison, it is curious to
consider that the spirit of the man was in moral accordance or
interchange with nothing around him.  This indeed he had confided to his
lost nephew, before the occasion for his present inflexibility arose.

That he must know of Rosa’s abrupt departure, and that he must divine its
cause, was not to be doubted.  Did he suppose that he had terrified her
into silence? or did he suppose that she had imparted to any one—to Mr.
Crisparkle himself, for instance—the particulars of his last interview
with her?  Mr. Crisparkle could not determine this in his mind.  He could
not but admit, however, as a just man, that it was not, of itself, a
crime to fall in love with Rosa, any more than it was a crime to offer to
set love above revenge.

The dreadful suspicion of Jasper, which Rosa was so shocked to have
received into her imagination, appeared to have no harbour in Mr.
Crisparkle’s.  If it ever haunted Helena’s thoughts or Neville’s, neither
gave it one spoken word of utterance.  Mr. Grewgious took no pains to
conceal his implacable dislike of Jasper, yet he never referred it,
however distantly, to such a source.  But he was a reticent as well as an
eccentric man; and he made no mention of a certain evening when he warmed
his hands at the gatehouse fire, and looked steadily down upon a certain
heap of torn and miry clothes upon the floor.

Drowsy Cloisterham, whenever it awoke to a passing reconsideration of a
story above six months old and dismissed by the bench of magistrates, was
pretty equally divided in opinion whether John Jasper’s beloved nephew
had been killed by his treacherously passionate rival, or in an open
struggle; or had, for his own purposes, spirited himself away.  It then
lifted up its head, to notice that the bereaved Jasper was still ever
devoted to discovery and revenge; and then dozed off again.  This was the
condition of matters, all round, at the period to which the present
history has now attained.

The Cathedral doors have closed for the night; and the Choir-master, on a
short leave of absence for two or three services, sets his face towards
London.  He travels thither by the means by which Rosa travelled, and
arrives, as Rosa arrived, on a hot, dusty evening.

His travelling baggage is easily carried in his hand, and he repairs with
it on foot, to a hybrid hotel in a little square behind Aldersgate
Street, near the General Post Office.  It is hotel, boarding-house, or
lodging-house, at its visitor’s option.  It announces itself, in the new
Railway Advertisers, as a novel enterprise, timidly beginning to spring
up.  It bashfully, almost apologetically, gives the traveller to
understand that it does not expect him, on the good old constitutional
hotel plan, to order a pint of sweet blacking for his drinking, and throw
it away; but insinuates that he may have his boots blacked instead of his
stomach, and maybe also have bed, breakfast, attendance, and a porter up
all night, for a certain fixed charge.  From these and similar premises,
many true Britons in the lowest spirits deduce that the times are
levelling times, except in the article of high roads, of which there will
shortly be not one in England.

He eats without appetite, and soon goes forth again.  Eastward and still
eastward through the stale streets he takes his way, until he reaches his
destination: a miserable court, specially miserable among many such.

He ascends a broken staircase, opens a door, looks into a dark stifling
room, and says: ‘Are you alone here?’

‘Alone, deary; worse luck for me, and better for you,’ replies a croaking
voice.  ‘Come in, come in, whoever you be: I can’t see you till I light a
match, yet I seem to know the sound of your speaking.  I’m acquainted
with you, ain’t I?’

‘Light your match, and try.’

‘So I will, deary, so I will; but my hand that shakes, as I can’t lay it
on a match all in a moment.  And I cough so, that, put my matches where I
may, I never find ’em there.  They jump and start, as I cough and cough,
like live things.  Are you off a voyage, deary?’

‘No.’

‘Not seafaring?’

‘No.’

‘Well, there’s land customers, and there’s water customers.  I’m a mother
to both.  Different from Jack Chinaman t’other side the court.  He ain’t
a father to neither.  It ain’t in him.  And he ain’t got the true secret
of mixing, though he charges as much as me that has, and more if he can
get it.  Here’s a match, and now where’s the candle?  If my cough takes
me, I shall cough out twenty matches afore I gets a light.’

But she finds the candle, and lights it, before the cough comes on.  It
seizes her in the moment of success, and she sits down rocking herself to
and fro, and gasping at intervals: ‘O, my lungs is awful bad! my lungs is
wore away to cabbage-nets!’ until the fit is over.  During its
continuance she has had no power of sight, or any other power not
absorbed in the struggle; but as it leaves her, she begins to strain her
eyes, and as soon as she is able to articulate, she cries, staring:

‘Why, it’s you!’

‘Are you so surprised to see me?’

‘I thought I never should have seen you again, deary.  I thought you was
dead, and gone to Heaven.’

‘Why?’

‘I didn’t suppose you could have kept away, alive, so long, from the poor
old soul with the real receipt for mixing it.  And you are in mourning
too!  Why didn’t you come and have a pipe or two of comfort?  Did they
leave you money, perhaps, and so you didn’t want comfort?’

‘No.’

‘Who was they as died, deary?’

‘A relative.’

‘Died of what, lovey?’

‘Probably, Death.’

‘We are short to-night!’ cries the woman, with a propitiatory laugh.
‘Short and snappish we are!  But we’re out of sorts for want of a smoke.
We’ve got the all-overs, haven’t us, deary?  But this is the place to
cure ’em in; this is the place where the all-overs is smoked off.’

‘You may make ready, then,’ replies the visitor, ‘as soon as you like.’

He divests himself of his shoes, loosens his cravat, and lies across the
foot of the squalid bed, with his head resting on his left hand.

‘Now you begin to look like yourself,’ says the woman approvingly.  ‘Now
I begin to know my old customer indeed!  Been trying to mix for yourself
this long time, poppet?’

‘I have been taking it now and then in my own way.’

‘Never take it your own way.  It ain’t good for trade, and it ain’t good
for you.  Where’s my ink-bottle, and where’s my thimble, and where’s my
little spoon?  He’s going to take it in a artful form now, my deary
dear!’

Entering on her process, and beginning to bubble and blow at the faint
spark enclosed in the hollow of her hands, she speaks from time to time,
in a tone of snuffling satisfaction, without leaving off.  When he
speaks, he does so without looking at her, and as if his thoughts were
already roaming away by anticipation.

‘I’ve got a pretty many smokes ready for you, first and last, haven’t I,
chuckey?’

‘A good many.’

‘When you first come, you was quite new to it; warn’t ye?’

‘Yes, I was easily disposed of, then.’

‘But you got on in the world, and was able by-and-by to take your pipe
with the best of ’em, warn’t ye?’

‘Ah; and the worst.’

‘It’s just ready for you.  What a sweet singer you was when you first
come!  Used to drop your head, and sing yourself off like a bird!  It’s
ready for you now, deary.’

He takes it from her with great care, and puts the mouthpiece to his
lips.  She seats herself beside him, ready to refill the pipe.

After inhaling a few whiffs in silence, he doubtingly accosts her with:

‘Is it as potent as it used to be?’

‘What do you speak of, deary?’

‘What should I speak of, but what I have in my mouth?’

‘It’s just the same.  Always the identical same.’

‘It doesn’t taste so.  And it’s slower.’

‘You’ve got more used to it, you see.’

‘That may be the cause, certainly.  Look here.’  He stops, becomes
dreamy, and seems to forget that he has invited her attention.  She bends
over him, and speaks in his ear.

‘I’m attending to you.  Says you just now, Look here.  Says I now, I’m
attending to ye.  We was talking just before of your being used to it.’

‘I know all that.  I was only thinking.  Look here.  Suppose you had
something in your mind; something you were going to do.’

‘Yes, deary; something I was going to do?’

‘But had not quite determined to do.’

‘Yes, deary.’

‘Might or might not do, you understand.’

‘Yes.’  With the point of a needle she stirs the contents of the bowl.

‘Should you do it in your fancy, when you were lying here doing this?’

She nods her head.  ‘Over and over again.’

‘Just like me!  I did it over and over again.  I have done it hundreds of
thousands of times in this room.’

‘It’s to be hoped it was pleasant to do, deary.’

‘It _was_ pleasant to do!’

He says this with a savage air, and a spring or start at her.  Quite
unmoved she retouches and replenishes the contents of the bowl with her
little spatula.  Seeing her intent upon the occupation, he sinks into his
former attitude.

‘It was a journey, a difficult and dangerous journey.  That was the
subject in my mind.  A hazardous and perilous journey, over abysses where
a slip would be destruction.  Look down, look down!  You see what lies at
the bottom there?’

He has darted forward to say it, and to point at the ground, as though at
some imaginary object far beneath.  The woman looks at him, as his
spasmodic face approaches close to hers, and not at his pointing.  She
seems to know what the influence of her perfect quietude would be; if so,
she has not miscalculated it, for he subsides again.

‘Well; I have told you I did it here hundreds of thousands of times.
What do I say?  I did it millions and billions of times.  I did it so
often, and through such vast expanses of time, that when it was really
done, it seemed not worth the doing, it was done so soon.’

‘That’s the journey you have been away upon,’ she quietly remarks.

He glares at her as he smokes; and then, his eyes becoming filmy,
answers: ‘That’s the journey.’

Silence ensues.  His eyes are sometimes closed and sometimes open.  The
woman sits beside him, very attentive to the pipe, which is all the while
at his lips.

‘I’ll warrant,’ she observes, when he has been looking fixedly at her for
some consecutive moments, with a singular appearance in his eyes of
seeming to see her a long way off, instead of so near him: ‘I’ll warrant
you made the journey in a many ways, when you made it so often?’

‘No, always in one way.’

‘Always in the same way?’

‘Ay.’

‘In the way in which it was really made at last?’

‘Ay.’

‘And always took the same pleasure in harping on it?’

‘Ay.’

For the time he appears unequal to any other reply than this lazy
monosyllabic assent.  Probably to assure herself that it is not the
assent of a mere automaton, she reverses the form of her next sentence.

‘Did you never get tired of it, deary, and try to call up something else
for a change?’

He struggles into a sitting posture, and retorts upon her: ‘What do you
mean?  What did I want?  What did I come for?’

She gently lays him back again, and before returning him the instrument
he has dropped, revives the fire in it with her own breath; then says to
him, coaxingly:

‘Sure, sure, sure!  Yes, yes, yes!  Now I go along with you.  You was too
quick for me.  I see now.  You come o’ purpose to take the journey.  Why,
I might have known it, through its standing by you so.’

He answers first with a laugh, and then with a passionate setting of his
teeth: ‘Yes, I came on purpose.  When I could not bear my life, I came to
get the relief, and I got it.  It WAS one!  It WAS one!’  This repetition
with extraordinary vehemence, and the snarl of a wolf.

She observes him very cautiously, as though mentally feeling her way to
her next remark.  It is: ‘There was a fellow-traveller, deary.’

‘Ha, ha, ha!’  He breaks into a ringing laugh, or rather yell.

‘To think,’ he cries, ‘how often fellow-traveller, and yet not know it!
To think how many times he went the journey, and never saw the road!’

The woman kneels upon the floor, with her arms crossed on the coverlet of
the bed, close by him, and her chin upon them.  In this crouching
attitude she watches him.  The pipe is falling from his mouth.  She puts
it back, and laying her hand upon his chest, moves him slightly from side
to side.  Upon that he speaks, as if she had spoken.

‘Yes!  I always made the journey first, before the changes of colours and
the great landscapes and glittering processions began.  They couldn’t
begin till it was off my mind.  I had no room till then for anything
else.’

Once more he lapses into silence.  Once more she lays her hand upon his
chest, and moves him slightly to and fro, as a cat might stimulate a
half-slain mouse.  Once more he speaks, as if she had spoken.

                        [Picture: Sleeping it off]

‘What?  I told you so.  When it comes to be real at last, it is so short
that it seems unreal for the first time.  Hark!’

‘Yes, deary.  I’m listening.’

‘Time and place are both at hand.’

He is on his feet, speaking in a whisper, and as if in the dark.

‘Time, place, and fellow-traveller,’ she suggests, adopting his tone, and
holding him softly by the arm.

‘How could the time be at hand unless the fellow-traveller was?  Hush!
The journey’s made.  It’s over.’

‘So soon?’

‘That’s what I said to you.  So soon.  Wait a little.  This is a vision.
I shall sleep it off.  It has been too short and easy.  I must have a
better vision than this; this is the poorest of all.  No struggle, no
consciousness of peril, no entreaty—and yet I never saw _that_ before.’
With a start.

‘Saw what, deary?’

‘Look at it!  Look what a poor, mean, miserable thing it is!  _That_ must
be real.  It’s over.’

He has accompanied this incoherence with some wild unmeaning gestures;
but they trail off into the progressive inaction of stupor, and he lies a
log upon the bed.

The woman, however, is still inquisitive.  With a repetition of her
cat-like action she slightly stirs his body again, and listens; stirs
again, and listens; whispers to it, and listens.  Finding it past all
rousing for the time, she slowly gets upon her feet, with an air of
disappointment, and flicks the face with the back of her hand in turning
from it.

But she goes no further away from it than the chair upon the hearth.  She
sits in it, with an elbow on one of its arms, and her chin upon her hand,
intent upon him.  ‘I heard ye say once,’ she croaks under her breath, ‘I
heard ye say once, when I was lying where you’re lying, and you were
making your speculations upon me, “Unintelligible!”  I heard you say so,
of two more than me.  But don’t ye be too sure always; don’t be ye too
sure, beauty!’

Unwinking, cat-like, and intent, she presently adds: ‘Not so potent as it
once was?  Ah!  Perhaps not at first.  You may be more right there.
Practice makes perfect.  I may have learned the secret how to make ye
talk, deary.’

He talks no more, whether or no.  Twitching in an ugly way from time to
time, both as to his face and limbs, he lies heavy and silent.  The
wretched candle burns down; the woman takes its expiring end between her
fingers, lights another at it, crams the guttering frying morsel deep
into the candlestick, and rams it home with the new candle, as if she
were loading some ill-savoured and unseemly weapon of witchcraft; the new
candle in its turn burns down; and still he lies insensible.  At length
what remains of the last candle is blown out, and daylight looks into the
room.

It has not looked very long, when he sits up, chilled and shaking, slowly
recovers consciousness of where he is, and makes himself ready to depart.
The woman receives what he pays her with a grateful, ‘Bless ye, bless ye,
deary!’ and seems, tired out, to begin making herself ready for sleep as
he leaves the room.

But seeming may be false or true.  It is false in this case; for, the
moment the stairs have ceased to creak under his tread, she glides after
him, muttering emphatically: ‘I’ll not miss ye twice!’

There is no egress from the court but by its entrance.  With a weird peep
from the doorway, she watches for his looking back.  He does not look
back before disappearing, with a wavering step.  She follows him, peeps
from the court, sees him still faltering on without looking back, and
holds him in view.

He repairs to the back of Aldersgate Street, where a door immediately
opens to his knocking.  She crouches in another doorway, watching that
one, and easily comprehending that he puts up temporarily at that house.
Her patience is unexhausted by hours.  For sustenance she can, and does,
buy bread within a hundred yards, and milk as it is carried past her.

He comes forth again at noon, having changed his dress, but carrying
nothing in his hand, and having nothing carried for him.  He is not going
back into the country, therefore, just yet.  She follows him a little
way, hesitates, instantaneously turns confidently, and goes straight into
the house he has quitted.

‘Is the gentleman from Cloisterham indoors?

‘Just gone out.’

‘Unlucky.  When does the gentleman return to Cloisterham?’

‘At six this evening.’

‘Bless ye and thank ye.  May the Lord prosper a business where a civil
question, even from a poor soul, is so civilly answered!’

‘I’ll not miss ye twice!’ repeats the poor soul in the street, and not so
civilly.  ‘I lost ye last, where that omnibus you got into nigh your
journey’s end plied betwixt the station and the place.  I wasn’t so much
as certain that you even went right on to the place.  Now I know ye did.
My gentleman from Cloisterham, I’ll be there before ye, and bide your
coming.  I’ve swore my oath that I’ll not miss ye twice!’

Accordingly, that same evening the poor soul stands in Cloisterham High
Street, looking at the many quaint gables of the Nuns’ House, and getting
through the time as she best can until nine o’clock; at which hour she
has reason to suppose that the arriving omnibus passengers may have some
interest for her.  The friendly darkness, at that hour, renders it easy
for her to ascertain whether this be so or not; and it is so, for the
passenger not to be missed twice arrives among the rest.

‘Now let me see what becomes of you.  Go on!’

An observation addressed to the air, and yet it might be addressed to the
passenger, so compliantly does he go on along the High Street until he
comes to an arched gateway, at which he unexpectedly vanishes.  The poor
soul quickens her pace; is swift, and close upon him entering under the
gateway; but only sees a postern staircase on one side of it, and on the
other side an ancient vaulted room, in which a large-headed, gray-haired
gentleman is writing, under the odd circumstances of sitting open to the
thoroughfare and eyeing all who pass, as if he were toll-taker of the
gateway: though the way is free.

‘Halloa!’ he cries in a low voice, seeing her brought to a stand-still:
‘who are you looking for?’

‘There was a gentleman passed in here this minute, sir.’

‘Of course there was.  What do you want with him?’

‘Where do he live, deary?’

‘Live?  Up that staircase.’

‘Bless ye!  Whisper.  What’s his name, deary?’

‘Surname Jasper, Christian name John.  Mr. John Jasper.’

‘Has he a calling, good gentleman?’

‘Calling?  Yes.  Sings in the choir.’

‘In the spire?’

‘Choir.’

‘What’s that?’

Mr. Datchery rises from his papers, and comes to his doorstep.  ‘Do you
know what a cathedral is?’ he asks, jocosely.

The woman nods.

‘What is it?’

She looks puzzled, casting about in her mind to find a definition, when
it occurs to her that it is easier to point out the substantial object
itself, massive against the dark-blue sky and the early stars.

‘That’s the answer.  Go in there at seven to-morrow morning, and you may
see Mr. John Jasper, and hear him too.’

‘Thank ye!  Thank ye!’

The burst of triumph in which she thanks him does not escape the notice
of the single buffer of an easy temper living idly on his means.  He
glances at her; clasps his hands behind him, as the wont of such buffers
is; and lounges along the echoing Precincts at her side.

‘Or,’ he suggests, with a backward hitch of his head, ‘you can go up at
once to Mr. Jasper’s rooms there.’

The woman eyes him with a cunning smile, and shakes her head.

‘O! you don’t want to speak to him?’

She repeats her dumb reply, and forms with her lips a soundless ‘No.’

‘You can admire him at a distance three times a day, whenever you like.
It’s a long way to come for that, though.’

The woman looks up quickly.  If Mr. Datchery thinks she is to be so
induced to declare where she comes from, he is of a much easier temper
than she is.  But she acquits him of such an artful thought, as he
lounges along, like the chartered bore of the city, with his uncovered
gray hair blowing about, and his purposeless hands rattling the loose
money in the pockets of his trousers.

The chink of the money has an attraction for her greedy ears.  ‘Wouldn’t
you help me to pay for my traveller’s lodging, dear gentleman, and to pay
my way along?  I am a poor soul, I am indeed, and troubled with a
grievous cough.’

‘You know the travellers’ lodging, I perceive, and are making directly
for it,’ is Mr. Datchery’s bland comment, still rattling his loose money.
‘Been here often, my good woman?’

‘Once in all my life.’

‘Ay, ay?’

They have arrived at the entrance to the Monks’ Vineyard.  An appropriate
remembrance, presenting an exemplary model for imitation, is revived in
the woman’s mind by the sight of the place.  She stops at the gate, and
says energetically:

‘By this token, though you mayn’t believe it, That a young gentleman gave
me three-and-sixpence as I was coughing my breath away on this very
grass.  I asked him for three-and-sixpence, and he gave it me.’

‘Wasn’t it a little cool to name your sum?’ hints Mr. Datchery, still
rattling.  ‘Isn’t it customary to leave the amount open?  Mightn’t it
have had the appearance, to the young gentleman—only the appearance—that
he was rather dictated to?’

‘Look’ee here, deary,’ she replies, in a confidential and persuasive
tone, ‘I wanted the money to lay it out on a medicine as does me good,
and as I deal in.  I told the young gentleman so, and he gave it me, and
I laid it out honest to the last brass farden.  I want to lay out the
same sum in the same way now; and if you’ll give it me, I’ll lay it out
honest to the last brass farden again, upon my soul!’

‘What’s the medicine?’

‘I’ll be honest with you beforehand, as well as after.  It’s opium.’

Mr. Datchery, with a sudden change of countenance, gives her a sudden
look.

‘It’s opium, deary.  Neither more nor less.  And it’s like a human
creetur so far, that you always hear what can be said against it, but
seldom what can be said in its praise.’

Mr. Datchery begins very slowly to count out the sum demanded of him.
Greedily watching his hands, she continues to hold forth on the great
example set him.

‘It was last Christmas Eve, just arter dark, the once that I was here
afore, when the young gentleman gave me the three-and-six.’  Mr. Datchery
stops in his counting, finds he has counted wrong, shakes his money
together, and begins again.

‘And the young gentleman’s name,’ she adds, ‘was Edwin.’

Mr. Datchery drops some money, stoops to pick it up, and reddens with the
exertion as he asks:

‘How do you know the young gentleman’s name?’

‘I asked him for it, and he told it me.  I only asked him the two
questions, what was his Chris’en name, and whether he’d a sweetheart?
And he answered, Edwin, and he hadn’t.’

Mr. Datchery pauses with the selected coins in his hand, rather as if he
were falling into a brown study of their value, and couldn’t bear to part
with them.  The woman looks at him distrustfully, and with her anger
brewing for the event of his thinking better of the gift; but he bestows
it on her as if he were abstracting his mind from the sacrifice, and with
many servile thanks she goes her way.

John Jasper’s lamp is kindled, and his lighthouse is shining when Mr.
Datchery returns alone towards it.  As mariners on a dangerous voyage,
approaching an iron-bound coast, may look along the beams of the warning
light to the haven lying beyond it that may never be reached, so Mr.
Datchery’s wistful gaze is directed to this beacon, and beyond.

His object in now revisiting his lodging is merely to put on the hat
which seems so superfluous an article in his wardrobe.  It is half-past
ten by the Cathedral clock when he walks out into the Precincts again; he
lingers and looks about him, as though, the enchanted hour when Mr.
Durdles may be stoned home having struck, he had some expectation of
seeing the Imp who is appointed to the mission of stoning him.

In effect, that Power of Evil is abroad.  Having nothing living to stone
at the moment, he is discovered by Mr. Datchery in the unholy office of
stoning the dead, through the railings of the churchyard.  The Imp finds
this a relishing and piquing pursuit; firstly, because their
resting-place is announced to be sacred; and secondly, because the tall
headstones are sufficiently like themselves, on their beat in the dark,
to justify the delicious fancy that they are hurt when hit.

Mr. Datchery hails with him: ‘Halloa, Winks!’

He acknowledges the hail with: ‘Halloa, Dick!’  Their acquaintance
seemingly having been established on a familiar footing.

‘But, I say,’ he remonstrates, ‘don’t yer go a-making my name public.  I
never means to plead to no name, mind yer.  When they says to me in the
Lock-up, a-going to put me down in the book, “What’s your name?” I says
to them, “Find out.”  Likewise when they says, “What’s your religion?” I
says, “Find out.”’

Which, it may be observed in passing, it would be immensely difficult for
the State, however statistical, to do.

‘Asides which,’ adds the boy, ‘there ain’t no family of Winkses.’

‘I think there must be.’

‘Yer lie, there ain’t.  The travellers give me the name on account of my
getting no settled sleep and being knocked up all night; whereby I gets
one eye roused open afore I’ve shut the other.  That’s what Winks means.
Deputy’s the nighest name to indict me by: but yer wouldn’t catch me
pleading to that, neither.’

‘Deputy be it always, then.  We two are good friends; eh, Deputy?’

‘Jolly good.’

‘I forgave you the debt you owed me when we first became acquainted, and
many of my sixpences have come your way since; eh, Deputy?’

‘Ah!  And what’s more, yer ain’t no friend o’ Jarsper’s.  What did he go
a-histing me off my legs for?’

‘What indeed!  But never mind him now.  A shilling of mine is going your
way to-night, Deputy.  You have just taken in a lodger I have been
speaking to; an infirm woman with a cough.’

‘Puffer,’ assents Deputy, with a shrewd leer of recognition, and smoking
an imaginary pipe, with his head very much on one side and his eyes very
much out of their places: ‘Hopeum Puffer.’

‘What is her name?’

‘’Er Royal Highness the Princess Puffer.’

‘She has some other name than that; where does she live?’

‘Up in London.  Among the Jacks.’

‘The sailors?’

‘I said so; Jacks; and Chayner men: and hother Knifers.’

‘I should like to know, through you, exactly where she lives.’

‘All right.  Give us ’old.’

A shilling passes; and, in that spirit of confidence which should pervade
all business transactions between principals of honour, this piece of
business is considered done.

‘But here’s a lark!’ cries Deputy.  ‘Where did yer think ‘Er Royal
Highness is a-goin’ to to-morrow morning?  Blest if she ain’t a-goin’ to
the KIN-FREE-DER-EL!’  He greatly prolongs the word in his ecstasy, and
smites his leg, and doubles himself up in a fit of shrill laughter.

‘How do you know that, Deputy?’

‘Cos she told me so just now.  She said she must be hup and hout o’
purpose.  She ses, “Deputy, I must ’ave a early wash, and make myself as
swell as I can, for I’m a-goin’ to take a turn at the KIN-FREE-DER-EL!”’
He separates the syllables with his former zest, and, not finding his
sense of the ludicrous sufficiently relieved by stamping about on the
pavement, breaks into a slow and stately dance, perhaps supposed to be
performed by the Dean.

Mr. Datchery receives the communication with a well-satisfied though
pondering face, and breaks up the conference.  Returning to his quaint
lodging, and sitting long over the supper of bread-and-cheese and salad
and ale which Mrs. Tope has left prepared for him, he still sits when his
supper is finished.  At length he rises, throws open the door of a corner
cupboard, and refers to a few uncouth chalked strokes on its inner side.

‘I like,’ says Mr. Datchery, ‘the old tavern way of keeping scores.
Illegible except to the scorer.  The scorer not committed, the scored
debited with what is against him.  Hum; ha!  A very small score this; a
very poor score!’

He sighs over the contemplation of its poverty, takes a bit of chalk from
one of the cupboard shelves, and pauses with it in his hand, uncertain
what addition to make to the account.

‘I think a moderate stroke,’ he concludes, ‘is all I am justified in
scoring up;’ so, suits the action to the word, closes the cupboard, and
goes to bed.

A brilliant morning shines on the old city.  Its antiquities and ruins
are surpassingly beautiful, with a lusty ivy gleaming in the sun, and the
rich trees waving in the balmy air.  Changes of glorious light from
moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods, and fields—or,
rather, from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its
yielding time—penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and
preach the Resurrection and the Life.  The cold stone tombs of centuries
ago grow warm; and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble
corners of the building, fluttering there like wings.

Comes Mr. Tope with his large keys, and yawningly unlocks and sets open.
Come Mrs. Tope and attendant sweeping sprites.  Come, in due time,
organist and bellows-boy, peeping down from the red curtains in the loft,
fearlessly flapping dust from books up at that remote elevation, and
whisking it from stops and pedals.  Come sundry rooks, from various
quarters of the sky, back to the great tower; who may be presumed to
enjoy vibration, and to know that bell and organ are going to give it
them.  Come a very small and straggling congregation indeed: chiefly from
Minor Canon Corner and the Precincts.  Come Mr. Crisparkle, fresh and
bright; and his ministering brethren, not quite so fresh and bright.
Come the Choir in a hurry (always in a hurry, and struggling into their
nightgowns at the last moment, like children shirking bed), and comes
John Jasper leading their line.  Last of all comes Mr. Datchery into a
stall, one of a choice empty collection very much at his service, and
glancing about him for Her Royal Highness the Princess Puffer.

The service is pretty well advanced before Mr. Datchery can discern Her
Royal Highness.  But by that time he has made her out, in the shade.  She
is behind a pillar, carefully withdrawn from the Choir-master’s view, but
regards him with the closest attention.  All unconscious of her presence,
he chants and sings.  She grins when he is most musically fervid,
and—yes, Mr. Datchery sees her do it!—shakes her fist at him behind the
pillar’s friendly shelter.

Mr. Datchery looks again, to convince himself.  Yes, again!  As ugly and
withered as one of the fantastic carvings on the under brackets of the
stall seats, as malignant as the Evil One, as hard as the big brass eagle
holding the sacred books upon his wings (and, according to the sculptor’s
representation of his ferocious attributes, not at all converted by
them), she hugs herself in her lean arms, and then shakes both fists at
the leader of the Choir.

And at that moment, outside the grated door of the Choir, having eluded
the vigilance of Mr. Tope by shifty resources in which he is an adept,
Deputy peeps, sharp-eyed, through the bars, and stares astounded from the
threatener to the threatened.

The service comes to an end, and the servitors disperse to breakfast.
Mr. Datchery accosts his last new acquaintance outside, when the Choir
(as much in a hurry to get their bedgowns off, as they were but now to
get them on) have scuffled away.

‘Well, mistress.  Good morning.  You have seen him?’

‘_I’ve_ seen him, deary; _I’ve_ seen him!’

‘And you know him?’

‘Know him!  Better far than all the Reverend Parsons put together know
him.’

Mrs. Tope’s care has spread a very neat, clean breakfast ready for her
lodger.  Before sitting down to it, he opens his corner-cupboard door;
takes his bit of chalk from its shelf; adds one thick line to the score,
extending from the top of the cupboard door to the bottom; and then falls
to with an appetite.




APPENDIX: FRAGMENT OF “THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD”


When Forster was just finishing his biography of Dickens, he found among
the leaves of one of the novelist’s other manuscripts certain loose slips
in his writing, “on paper only half the size of that used for the tale,
so cramped, interlined, and blotted as to be nearly illegible.”  These
proved, upon examination, to contain a suggested chapter for _Edwin
Drood_, in which Sapsea, the auctioneer, appears as the principal figure,
surrounded by a group of characters new to the story.  That chapter,
being among the last things Dickens wrote, seems to contain so much of
interest that it may be well to reprint it here.—ED.



HOW MR. SAPSEA CEASED TO BE A MEMBER OF THE EIGHT CLUB
TOLD BY HIMSELF


Wishing to take the air, I proceeded by a circuitous route to the Club,
it being our weekly night of meeting.  I found that we mustered our full
strength.  We were enrolled under the denomination of the Eight Club.  We
were eight in number; we met at eight o’clock during eight months of the
year; we played eight games of four-handed cribbage, at eightpence the
game; our frugal supper was composed of eight rolls, eight mutton chops,
eight pork sausages, eight baked potatoes, eight marrow-bones, with eight
toasts, and eight bottles of ale.  There may, or may not, be a certain
harmony of colour in the ruling idea of this (to adopt a phrase of our
lively neighbours) reunion.  It was a little idea of mine.

 [Picture: Facsimile of a page of the manuscript of “The Mystery of Edwin
                                 Drood”]

A somewhat popular member of the Eight Club, was a member by the name of
Kimber.  By profession, a dancing-master.  A commonplace, hopeful sort of
man, wholly destitute of dignity or knowledge of the world.

As I entered the Club-room, Kimber was making the remark: “And he still
half-believes him to be very high in the Church.”

In the act of hanging up my hat on the eighth peg by the door, I caught
Kimber’s visual ray.  He lowered it, and passed a remark on the next
change of the moon.  I did not take particular notice of this at the
moment, because the world was often pleased to be a little shy of
ecclesiastical topics in my presence.  For I felt that I was picked out
(though perhaps only through a coincidence) to a certain extent to
represent what I call our glorious constitution in Church and State.  The
phrase may be objected to by cautious minds; but I own to it as mine.  I
threw it off in argument some little time back.  I said: “OUR GLORIOUS
CONSTITUTION in CHURCH and STATE.”

Another member of the Eight Club was Peartree; also member of the Royal
College of Surgeons.  Mr. Peartree is not accountable to me for his
opinions, and I say no more of them here than that he attends the poor
gratis whenever they want him, and is not the parish doctor.  Mr.
Peartree may justify it to the grasp of _his_ mind thus to do his
republican utmost to bring an appointed officer into contempt.  Suffice
it that Mr. Peartree can never justify it to the grasp of _mine_.

Between Peartree and Kimber there was a sickly sort of feeble-minded
alliance.  It came under my particular notice when I sold off Kimber by
auction.  (Goods taken in execution.)  He was a widower in a white
under-waistcoat, and slight shoes with bows, and had two daughters not
ill-looking.  Indeed the reverse.  Both daughters taught dancing in
scholastic establishments for Young Ladies—had done so at Mrs. Sapsea’s;
nay, Twinkleton’s—and both, in giving lessons, presented the unwomanly
spectacle of having little fiddles tucked under their chins.  In spite of
which, the younger one might, if I am correctly informed—I will raise the
veil so far as to say I KNOW she might—have soared for life from this
degrading taint, but for having the class of mind allotted to what I call
the common herd, and being so incredibly devoid of veneration as to
become painfully ludicrous.

When I sold off Kimber without reserve, Peartree (as poor as he can hold
together) had several prime household lots knocked down to him.  I am not
to be blinded; and of course it was as plain to me what he was going to
do with them, as it was that he was a brown hulking sort of revolutionary
subject who had been in India with the soldiers, and ought (for the sake
of society) to have his neck broke.  I saw the lots shortly afterwards in
Kimber’s lodgings—through the window—and I easily made out that there had
been a sneaking pretence of lending them till better times.  A man with a
smaller knowledge of the world than myself might have been led to suspect
that Kimber had held back money from his creditors, and fraudulently
bought the goods.  But, besides that I knew for certain he had no money,
I knew that this would involve a species of forethought not to be made
compatible with the frivolity of a caperer, inoculating other people with
capering, for his bread.

As it was the first time I had seen either of those two since the sale, I
kept myself in what I call Abeyance.  When selling him up, I had
delivered a few remarks—shall I say a little homily?—concerning Kimber,
which the world did regard as more than usually worth notice.  I had come
up into my pulpit, it was said, uncommonly like—and a murmur of
recognition had repeated his (I will not name whose) title, before I
spoke.  I had then gone on to say that all present would find, in the
first page of the catalogue that was lying before them, in the last
paragraph before the first lot, the following words: “Sold in pursuance
of a writ of execution issued by a creditor.”  I had then proceeded to
remind my friends, that however frivolous, not to say contemptible, the
business by which a man got his goods together, still his goods were as
dear to him, and as cheap to society (if sold without reserve), as though
his pursuits had been of a character that would bear serious
contemplation.  I had then divided my text (if I may be allowed so to
call it) into three heads: firstly, Sold; secondly, In pursuance of a
writ of execution; thirdly, Issued by a creditor; with a few moral
reflections on each, and winding up with, “Now to the first lot” in a
manner that was complimented when I afterwards mingled with my hearers.

So, not being certain on what terms I and Kimber stood, I was grave, I
was chilling.  Kimber, however, moving to me, I moved to Kimber.  (I was
the creditor who had issued the writ.  Not that it matters.)

“I was alluding, Mr. Sapsea,” said Kimber, “to a stranger who entered
into conversation with me in the street as I came to the Club.  He had
been speaking to you just before, it seemed, by the churchyard; and
though you had told him who you were, I could hardly persuade him that
you were not high in the Church.”

“Idiot?” said Peartree.

“Ass!” said Kimber.

“Idiot and Ass!” said the other five members.

“Idiot and Ass, gentlemen,” I remonstrated, looking around me, “are
strong expressions to apply to a young man of good appearance and
address.”  My generosity was roused; I own it.

“You’ll admit that he must be a Fool,” said Peartree.

“You can’t deny that he must be a Blockhead,” said Kimber.

Their tone of disgust amounted to being offensive.  Why should the young
man be so calumniated?  What had he done?  He had only made an innocent
and natural mistake.  I controlled my generous indignation, and said so.

“Natural?” repeated Kimber.  “_He’s_ a Natural!”

The remaining six members of the Eight Club laughed unanimously.  It
stung me.  It was a scornful laugh.  My anger was roused in behalf of an
absent, friendless stranger.  I rose (for I had been sitting down).

“Gentlemen,” I said with dignity, “I will not remain one of this Club
allowing opprobrium to be cast on an unoffending person in his absence.
I will not so violate what I call the sacred rites of hospitality.
Gentlemen, until you know how to behave yourselves better, I leave you.
Gentlemen, until then I withdraw, from this place of meeting, whatever
personal qualifications I may have brought into it.  Gentlemen, until
then you cease to be the Eight Club, and must make the best you can of
becoming the Seven.”

I put on my hat and retired.  As I went down stairs I distinctly heard
them give a suppressed cheer.  Such is the power of demeanour and
knowledge of mankind.  I had forced it out of them.



II


Whom should I meet in the street, within a few yards of the door of the
inn where the Club was held, but the self-same young man whoso cause I
had felt it my duty so warmly—and I will add so disinterestedly—to take
up.

“Is it Mr. Sapsea,” he said doubtfully, “or is it—”

“It is Mr. Sapsea,” I replied.

“Pardon me, Mr. Sapsea; you appear warm, sir.”

“I have been warm,” I said, “and on your account.”  Having stated the
circumstances at some length (my generosity almost overpowered him), I
asked him his name.

“Mr. Sapsea,” he answered, looking down, “your penetration is so acute,
your glance into the souls of your fellow men is so penetrating, that if
I was hardly enough to deny that my name is Poker, what would it avail
me?”

I don’t know that I had quite exactly made out to a fraction that his
name _was_ Poker, but I daresay I had been pretty near doing it.

“Well, well,” said I, trying to put him at his ease by nodding my head in
a soothing way.  “Your name is Poker, and there is no harm in being named
Poker.”

“Oh, Mr. Sapsea!” cried the young man, in a very well-behaved manner.
“Bless you for those words!”  He then, as if ashamed of having given way
to his feelings, looked down again.

“Come Poker,” said I, “let me hear more about you.  Tell me.  Where are
you going to, Poker? and where do you come from?”

“Ah Mr. Sapsea!” exclaimed the young man.  “Disguise from you is
impossible.  You know already that I come from somewhere, and am going
somewhere else.  If I was to deny it, what would it avail me?”

“Then don’t deny it,” was my remark.

“Or,” pursued Poker, in a kind of despondent rapture, “or if I was to
deny that I came to this town to see and hear you, sir, what would it
avail me?  Or if I was to deny—”




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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

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Title: Great Expectations

Author: Charles Dickens

Posting Date: August 20, 2008 [EBook #1400]
Release Date: July, 1998
Last Updated: March 4, 2018

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT EXPECTATIONS ***




Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer





GREAT EXPECTATIONS

[1867 Edition]

by Charles Dickens


[Project Gutenberg Editor's Note: There is also another version of
this work etext98/grexp10.txt scanned from a different edition]




Chapter I

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my
infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit
than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his
tombstone and my sister,--Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith.
As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness
of either of them (for their days were long before the days of
photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were
unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on
my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man,
with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription,
“Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that
my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each
about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside
their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of
mine,--who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in
that universal struggle,--I am indebted for a belief I religiously
entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands
in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of
existence.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river
wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression
of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable
raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain
that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and
that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the
above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham,
Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead
and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard,
intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle
feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond
was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was
rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid
of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from
among the graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you
little devil, or I'll cut your throat!”

A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man
with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his
head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and
lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by
briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose
teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

“Oh! Don't cut my throat, sir,” I pleaded in terror. “Pray don't do it,
sir.”

“Tell us your name!” said the man. “Quick!”

“Pip, sir.”

“Once more,” said the man, staring at me. “Give it mouth!”

“Pip. Pip, sir.”

“Show us where you live,” said the man. “Pint out the place!”

I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat in-shore among the
alder-trees and pollards, a mile or more from the church.

The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and
emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When
the church came to itself,--for he was so sudden and strong that he
made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my
feet,--when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high
tombstone, trembling while he ate the bread ravenously.

“You young dog,” said the man, licking his lips, “what fat cheeks you
ha' got.”

I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized for my
years, and not strong.

“Darn me if I couldn't eat em,” said the man, with a threatening shake
of his head, “and if I han't half a mind to't!”

I earnestly expressed my hope that he wouldn't, and held tighter to
the tombstone on which he had put me; partly, to keep myself upon it;
partly, to keep myself from crying.

“Now lookee here!” said the man. “Where's your mother?”

“There, sir!” said I.

He started, made a short run, and stopped and looked over his shoulder.

“There, sir!” I timidly explained. “Also Georgiana. That's my mother.”

“Oh!” said he, coming back. “And is that your father alonger your
mother?”

“Yes, sir,” said I; “him too; late of this parish.”

“Ha!” he muttered then, considering. “Who d'ye live with,--supposin'
you're kindly let to live, which I han't made up my mind about?”

“My sister, sir,--Mrs. Joe Gargery,--wife of Joe Gargery, the
blacksmith, sir.”

“Blacksmith, eh?” said he. And looked down at his leg.

After darkly looking at his leg and me several times, he came closer
to my tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he
could hold me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine,
and mine looked most helplessly up into his.

“Now lookee here,” he said, “the question being whether you're to be let
to live. You know what a file is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you know what wittles is?”

“Yes, sir.”

After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give me a
greater sense of helplessness and danger.

“You get me a file.” He tilted me again. “And you get me wittles.” He
tilted me again. “You bring 'em both to me.” He tilted me again. “Or
I'll have your heart and liver out.” He tilted me again.

I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him with both
hands, and said, “If you would kindly please to let me keep upright,
sir, perhaps I shouldn't be sick, and perhaps I could attend more.”

He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll, so that the church jumped
over its own weathercock. Then, he held me by the arms, in an upright
position on the top of the stone, and went on in these fearful terms:--

“You bring me, to-morrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You
bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it, and you
never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having
seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to
live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how
small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted,
and ate. Now, I ain't alone, as you may think I am. There's a young man
hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young
man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar
to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It
is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A
boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw
the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but
that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him
open. I am a keeping that young man from harming of you at the present
moment, with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young
man off of your inside. Now, what do you say?”

I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what broken
bits of food I could, and I would come to him at the Battery, early in
the morning.

“Say Lord strike you dead if you don't!” said the man.

I said so, and he took me down.

“Now,” he pursued, “you remember what you've undertook, and you remember
that young man, and you get home!”

“Goo-good night, sir,” I faltered.

“Much of that!” said he, glancing about him over the cold wet flat. “I
wish I was a frog. Or a eel!”

At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his
arms,--clasping himself, as if to hold himself together,--and limped
towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the
nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked
in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people,
stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his
ankle and pull him in.

When he came to the low church wall, he got over it, like a man whose
legs were numbed and stiff, and then turned round to look for me. When I
saw him turning, I set my face towards home, and made the best use of
my legs. But presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on
again towards the river, still hugging himself in both arms, and picking
his way with his sore feet among the great stones dropped into the
marshes here and there, for stepping-places when the rains were heavy or
the tide was in.

The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped
to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not
nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long
angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the
river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the
prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon
by which the sailors steered,--like an unhooped cask upon a pole,--an
ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with some chains
hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on
towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come
down, and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me a terrible
turn when I thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting their heads to
gaze after him, I wondered whether they thought so too. I looked all
round for the horrible young man, and could see no signs of him. But now
I was frightened again, and ran home without stopping.




Chapter II

My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I,
and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbors
because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out
for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and
heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as
well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up
by hand.

She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general
impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe
was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth
face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed
to have somehow got mixed with their own whites. He was a mild,
good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow,--a sort
of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.

My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing
redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible
she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall
and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her
figure behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib in
front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful
merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this
apron so much. Though I really see no reason why she should have worn it
at all; or why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it
off, every day of her life.

Joe's forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden house, as many of the
dwellings in our country were,--most of them, at that time. When I ran
home from the churchyard, the forge was shut up, and Joe was sitting
alone in the kitchen. Joe and I being fellow-sufferers, and having
confidences as such, Joe imparted a confidence to me, the moment I
raised the latch of the door and peeped in at him opposite to it,
sitting in the chimney corner.

“Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip. And she's
out now, making it a baker's dozen.”

“Is she?”

“Yes, Pip,” said Joe; “and what's worse, she's got Tickler with her.”

At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on my waistcoat
round and round, and looked in great depression at the fire. Tickler
was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled
frame.

“She sot down,” said Joe, “and she got up, and she made a grab at
Tickler, and she Ram-paged out. That's what she did,” said Joe, slowly
clearing the fire between the lower bars with the poker, and looking at
it; “she Ram-paged out, Pip.”

“Has she been gone long, Joe?” I always treated him as a larger species
of child, and as no more than my equal.

“Well,” said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock, “she's been on the
Ram-page, this last spell, about five minutes, Pip. She's a coming! Get
behind the door, old chap, and have the jack-towel betwixt you.”

I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open,
and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately divined the cause, and
applied Tickler to its further investigation. She concluded by throwing
me--I often served as a connubial missile--at Joe, who, glad to get hold
of me on any terms, passed me on into the chimney and quietly fenced me
up there with his great leg.

“Where have you been, you young monkey?” said Mrs. Joe, stamping her
foot. “Tell me directly what you've been doing to wear me away with fret
and fright and worrit, or I'd have you out of that corner if you was
fifty Pips, and he was five hundred Gargerys.”

“I have only been to the churchyard,” said I, from my stool, crying and
rubbing myself.

“Churchyard!” repeated my sister. “If it warn't for me you'd have been
to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you up by
hand?”

“You did,” said I.

“And why did I do it, I should like to know?” exclaimed my sister.

I whimpered, “I don't know.”

“I don't!” said my sister. “I'd never do it again! I know that. I may
truly say I've never had this apron of mine off since born you were.
It's bad enough to be a blacksmith's wife (and him a Gargery) without
being your mother.”

My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked disconsolately at
the fire. For the fugitive out on the marshes with the ironed leg, the
mysterious young man, the file, the food, and the dreadful pledge I was
under to commit a larceny on those sheltering premises, rose before me
in the avenging coals.

“Hah!” said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to his station. “Churchyard,
indeed! You may well say churchyard, you two.” One of us, by the by, had
not said it at all. “You'll drive me to the churchyard betwixt you, one
of these days, and O, a pr-r-recious pair you'd be without me!”

As she applied herself to set the tea-things, Joe peeped down at me
over his leg, as if he were mentally casting me and himself up, and
calculating what kind of pair we practically should make, under the
grievous circumstances foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his
right-side flaxen curls and whisker, and following Mrs. Joe about with
his blue eyes, as his manner always was at squally times.

My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread and butter for us,
that never varied. First, with her left hand she jammed the loaf hard
and fast against her bib,--where it sometimes got a pin into it, and
sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she
took some butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in
an apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a plaster,--using both
sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and moulding
the butter off round the crust. Then, she gave the knife a final smart
wipe on the edge of the plaster, and then sawed a very thick round off
the loaf: which she finally, before separating from the loaf, hewed into
two halves, of which Joe got one, and I the other.

On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared not eat my
slice. I felt that I must have something in reserve for my dreadful
acquaintance, and his ally the still more dreadful young man. I knew
Mrs. Joe's housekeeping to be of the strictest kind, and that my
larcenous researches might find nothing available in the safe. Therefore
I resolved to put my hunk of bread and butter down the leg of my
trousers.

The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of this purpose I
found to be quite awful. It was as if I had to make up my mind to leap
from the top of a high house, or plunge into a great depth of water.
And it was made the more difficult by the unconscious Joe. In
our already-mentioned freemasonry as fellow-sufferers, and in his
good-natured companionship with me, it was our evening habit to compare
the way we bit through our slices, by silently holding them up to each
other's admiration now and then,--which stimulated us to new exertions.
To-night, Joe several times invited me, by the display of his fast
diminishing slice, to enter upon our usual friendly competition; but
he found me, each time, with my yellow mug of tea on one knee, and
my untouched bread and butter on the other. At last, I desperately
considered that the thing I contemplated must be done, and that it
had best be done in the least improbable manner consistent with the
circumstances. I took advantage of a moment when Joe had just looked at
me, and got my bread and butter down my leg.

Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he supposed to be my loss
of appetite, and took a thoughtful bite out of his slice, which he
didn't seem to enjoy. He turned it about in his mouth much longer than
usual, pondering over it a good deal, and after all gulped it down like
a pill. He was about to take another bite, and had just got his head on
one side for a good purchase on it, when his eye fell on me, and he saw
that my bread and butter was gone.

The wonder and consternation with which Joe stopped on the threshold
of his bite and stared at me, were too evident to escape my sister's
observation.

“What's the matter now?” said she, smartly, as she put down her cup.

“I say, you know!” muttered Joe, shaking his head at me in very serious
remonstrance. “Pip, old chap! You'll do yourself a mischief. It'll stick
somewhere. You can't have chawed it, Pip.”

“What's the matter now?” repeated my sister, more sharply than before.

“If you can cough any trifle on it up, Pip, I'd recommend you to do it,”
 said Joe, all aghast. “Manners is manners, but still your elth's your
elth.”

By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced on Joe,
and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his head for a little while
against the wall behind him, while I sat in the corner, looking guiltily
on.

“Now, perhaps you'll mention what's the matter,” said my sister, out of
breath, “you staring great stuck pig.”

Joe looked at her in a helpless way, then took a helpless bite, and
looked at me again.

“You know, Pip,” said Joe, solemnly, with his last bite in his cheek,
and speaking in a confidential voice, as if we two were quite alone,
“you and me is always friends, and I'd be the last to tell upon you,
any time. But such a--” he moved his chair and looked about the floor
between us, and then again at me--“such a most oncommon Bolt as that!”

“Been bolting his food, has he?” cried my sister.

“You know, old chap,” said Joe, looking at me, and not at Mrs. Joe,
with his bite still in his cheek, “I Bolted, myself, when I was your
age--frequent--and as a boy I've been among a many Bolters; but I never
see your Bolting equal yet, Pip, and it's a mercy you ain't Bolted
dead.”

My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the hair, saying
nothing more than the awful words, “You come along and be dosed.”

Some medical beast had revived Tar-water in those days as a fine
medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard;
having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the
best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a choice
restorative, that I was conscious of going about, smelling like a new
fence. On this particular evening the urgency of my case demanded a
pint of this mixture, which was poured down my throat, for my greater
comfort, while Mrs. Joe held my head under her arm, as a boot would
be held in a bootjack. Joe got off with half a pint; but was made to
swallow that (much to his disturbance, as he sat slowly munching and
meditating before the fire), “because he had had a turn.” Judging from
myself, I should say he certainly had a turn afterwards, if he had had
none before.

Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy; but when, in
the case of a boy, that secret burden co-operates with another secret
burden down the leg of his trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great
punishment. The guilty knowledge that I was going to rob Mrs. Joe--I
never thought I was going to rob Joe, for I never thought of any of the
housekeeping property as his--united to the necessity of always keeping
one hand on my bread and butter as I sat, or when I was ordered about
the kitchen on any small errand, almost drove me out of my mind. Then,
as the marsh winds made the fire glow and flare, I thought I heard the
voice outside, of the man with the iron on his leg who had sworn me to
secrecy, declaring that he couldn't and wouldn't starve until to-morrow,
but must be fed now. At other times, I thought, What if the young man
who was with so much difficulty restrained from imbruing his hands in me
should yield to a constitutional impatience, or should mistake the time,
and should think himself accredited to my heart and liver to-night,
instead of to-morrow! If ever anybody's hair stood on end with terror,
mine must have done so then. But, perhaps, nobody's ever did?

It was Christmas Eve, and I had to stir the pudding for next day, with
a copper-stick, from seven to eight by the Dutch clock. I tried it with
the load upon my leg (and that made me think afresh of the man with the
load on HIS leg), and found the tendency of exercise to bring the bread
and butter out at my ankle, quite unmanageable. Happily I slipped away,
and deposited that part of my conscience in my garret bedroom.

“Hark!” said I, when I had done my stirring, and was taking a final warm
in the chimney corner before being sent up to bed; “was that great guns,
Joe?”

“Ah!” said Joe. “There's another conwict off.”

“What does that mean, Joe?” said I.

Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself, said, snappishly,
“Escaped. Escaped.” Administering the definition like Tar-water.

While Mrs. Joe sat with her head bending over her needlework, I put my
mouth into the forms of saying to Joe, “What's a convict?” Joe put his
mouth into the forms of returning such a highly elaborate answer, that I
could make out nothing of it but the single word “Pip.”

“There was a conwict off last night,” said Joe, aloud, “after
sunset-gun. And they fired warning of him. And now it appears they're
firing warning of another.”

“Who's firing?” said I.

“Drat that boy,” interposed my sister, frowning at me over her work,
“what a questioner he is. Ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies.”

It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply that I should be
told lies by her even if I did ask questions. But she never was polite
unless there was company.

At this point Joe greatly augmented my curiosity by taking the utmost
pains to open his mouth very wide, and to put it into the form of a word
that looked to me like “sulks.” Therefore, I naturally pointed to Mrs.
Joe, and put my mouth into the form of saying, “her?” But Joe wouldn't
hear of that, at all, and again opened his mouth very wide, and shook
the form of a most emphatic word out of it. But I could make nothing of
the word.

“Mrs. Joe,” said I, as a last resort, “I should like to know--if you
wouldn't much mind--where the firing comes from?”

“Lord bless the boy!” exclaimed my sister, as if she didn't quite mean
that but rather the contrary. “From the Hulks!”

“Oh-h!” said I, looking at Joe. “Hulks!”

Joe gave a reproachful cough, as much as to say, “Well, I told you so.”

“And please, what's Hulks?” said I.

“That's the way with this boy!” exclaimed my sister, pointing me out
with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. “Answer him one
question, and he'll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison-ships,
right 'cross th' meshes.” We always used that name for marshes, in our
country.

“I wonder who's put into prison-ships, and why they're put there?” said
I, in a general way, and with quiet desperation.

It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. “I tell you what,
young fellow,” said she, “I didn't bring you up by hand to badger
people's lives out. It would be blame to me and not praise, if I had.
People are put in the Hulks because they murder, and because they rob,
and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they always begin by asking
questions. Now, you get along to bed!”

I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went upstairs
in the dark, with my head tingling,--from Mrs. Joe's thimble
having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words,--I
felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the hulks were
handy for me. I was clearly on my way there. I had begun by asking
questions, and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe.

Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought
that few people know what secrecy there is in the young under terror.
No matter how unreasonable the terror, so that it be terror. I was in
mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart and liver; I was
in mortal terror of my interlocutor with the iron leg; I was in mortal
terror of myself, from whom an awful promise had been extracted; I had
no hope of deliverance through my all-powerful sister, who repulsed
me at every turn; I am afraid to think of what I might have done on
requirement, in the secrecy of my terror.

If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting
down the river on a strong spring-tide, to the Hulks; a ghostly
pirate calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the
gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be hanged there at
once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had been
inclined, for I knew that at the first faint dawn of morning I must rob
the pantry. There was no doing it in the night, for there was no getting
a light by easy friction then; to have got one I must have struck it out
of flint and steel, and have made a noise like the very pirate himself
rattling his chains.

As soon as the great black velvet pall outside my little window was shot
with gray, I got up and went downstairs; every board upon the way, and
every crack in every board calling after me, “Stop thief!” and “Get up,
Mrs. Joe!” In the pantry, which was far more abundantly supplied than
usual, owing to the season, I was very much alarmed by a hare hanging
up by the heels, whom I rather thought I caught, when my back was half
turned, winking. I had no time for verification, no time for selection,
no time for anything, for I had no time to spare. I stole some bread,
some rind of cheese, about half a jar of mincemeat (which I tied up in
my pocket-handkerchief with my last night's slice), some brandy from a
stone bottle (which I decanted into a glass bottle I had secretly used
for making that intoxicating fluid, Spanish-liquorice-water, up in my
room: diluting the stone bottle from a jug in the kitchen cupboard),
a meat bone with very little on it, and a beautiful round compact pork
pie. I was nearly going away without the pie, but I was tempted to mount
upon a shelf, to look what it was that was put away so carefully in a
covered earthenware dish in a corner, and I found it was the pie, and
I took it in the hope that it was not intended for early use, and would
not be missed for some time.

There was a door in the kitchen, communicating with the forge; I
unlocked and unbolted that door, and got a file from among Joe's tools.
Then I put the fastenings as I had found them, opened the door at which
I had entered when I ran home last night, shut it, and ran for the misty
marshes.




Chapter III

It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the
outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all
night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw the
damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of
spiders' webs; hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade. On
every rail and gate, wet lay clammy, and the marsh mist was so thick,
that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village--a
direction which they never accepted, for they never came there--was
invisible to me until I was quite close under it. Then, as I looked up
at it, while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a
phantom devoting me to the Hulks.

The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that
instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me.
This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dikes and
banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly
as could be, “A boy with somebody else's pork pie! Stop him!” The
cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring out of their eyes,
and steaming out of their nostrils, “Halloa, young thief!” One black
ox, with a white cravat on,--who even had to my awakened conscience
something of a clerical air,--fixed me so obstinately with his eyes,
and moved his blunt head round in such an accusatory manner as I moved
round, that I blubbered out to him, “I couldn't help it, sir! It wasn't
for myself I took it!” Upon which he put down his head, blew a cloud of
smoke out of his nose, and vanished with a kick-up of his hind-legs and
a flourish of his tail.

All this time, I was getting on towards the river; but however fast I
went, I couldn't warm my feet, to which the damp cold seemed riveted, as
the iron was riveted to the leg of the man I was running to meet. I knew
my way to the Battery, pretty straight, for I had been down there on a
Sunday with Joe, and Joe, sitting on an old gun, had told me that when
I was 'prentice to him, regularly bound, we would have such Larks there!
However, in the confusion of the mist, I found myself at last too far to
the right, and consequently had to try back along the river-side, on the
bank of loose stones above the mud and the stakes that staked the tide
out. Making my way along here with all despatch, I had just crossed a
ditch which I knew to be very near the Battery, and had just scrambled
up the mound beyond the ditch, when I saw the man sitting before me.
His back was towards me, and he had his arms folded, and was nodding
forward, heavy with sleep.

I thought he would be more glad if I came upon him with his breakfast,
in that unexpected manner, so I went forward softly and touched him on
the shoulder. He instantly jumped up, and it was not the same man, but
another man!

And yet this man was dressed in coarse gray, too, and had a great iron
on his leg, and was lame, and hoarse, and cold, and was everything that
the other man was; except that he had not the same face, and had a flat
broad-brimmed low-crowned felt hat on. All this I saw in a moment, for
I had only a moment to see it in: he swore an oath at me, made a hit at
me,--it was a round weak blow that missed me and almost knocked himself
down, for it made him stumble,--and then he ran into the mist, stumbling
twice as he went, and I lost him.

“It's the young man!” I thought, feeling my heart shoot as I identified
him. I dare say I should have felt a pain in my liver, too, if I had
known where it was.

I was soon at the Battery after that, and there was the right
man,--hugging himself and limping to and fro, as if he had never all
night left off hugging and limping,--waiting for me. He was awfully
cold, to be sure. I half expected to see him drop down before my face
and die of deadly cold. His eyes looked so awfully hungry too, that when
I handed him the file and he laid it down on the grass, it occurred to
me he would have tried to eat it, if he had not seen my bundle. He did
not turn me upside down this time to get at what I had, but left me
right side upwards while I opened the bundle and emptied my pockets.

“What's in the bottle, boy?” said he.

“Brandy,” said I.

He was already handing mincemeat down his throat in the most curious
manner,--more like a man who was putting it away somewhere in a violent
hurry, than a man who was eating it,--but he left off to take some of
the liquor. He shivered all the while so violently, that it was quite
as much as he could do to keep the neck of the bottle between his teeth,
without biting it off.

“I think you have got the ague,” said I.

“I'm much of your opinion, boy,” said he.

“It's bad about here,” I told him. “You've been lying out on the meshes,
and they're dreadful aguish. Rheumatic too.”

“I'll eat my breakfast afore they're the death of me,” said he. “I'd do
that, if I was going to be strung up to that there gallows as there is
over there, directly afterwards. I'll beat the shivers so far, I'll bet
you.”

He was gobbling mincemeat, meatbone, bread, cheese, and pork pie, all
at once: staring distrustfully while he did so at the mist all round
us, and often stopping--even stopping his jaws--to listen. Some real or
fancied sound, some clink upon the river or breathing of beast upon the
marsh, now gave him a start, and he said, suddenly,--

“You're not a deceiving imp? You brought no one with you?”

“No, sir! No!”

“Nor giv' no one the office to follow you?”

“No!”

“Well,” said he, “I believe you. You'd be but a fierce young hound
indeed, if at your time of life you could help to hunt a wretched
warmint hunted as near death and dunghill as this poor wretched warmint
is!”

Something clicked in his throat as if he had works in him like a clock,
and was going to strike. And he smeared his ragged rough sleeve over his
eyes.

Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled down
upon the pie, I made bold to say, “I am glad you enjoy it.”

“Did you speak?”

“I said I was glad you enjoyed it.”

“Thankee, my boy. I do.”

I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now
noticed a decided similarity between the dog's way of eating, and the
man's. The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He
swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast;
and he looked sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought
there was danger in every direction of somebody's coming to take the pie
away. He was altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to appreciate
it comfortably I thought, or to have anybody to dine with him, without
making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all of which particulars
he was very like the dog.

“I am afraid you won't leave any of it for him,” said I, timidly; after
a silence during which I had hesitated as to the politeness of making
the remark. “There's no more to be got where that came from.” It was the
certainty of this fact that impelled me to offer the hint.

“Leave any for him? Who's him?” said my friend, stopping in his
crunching of pie-crust.

“The young man. That you spoke of. That was hid with you.”

“Oh ah!” he returned, with something like a gruff laugh. “Him? Yes, yes!
He don't want no wittles.”

“I thought he looked as if he did,” said I.

The man stopped eating, and regarded me with the keenest scrutiny and
the greatest surprise.

“Looked? When?”

“Just now.”

“Where?”

“Yonder,” said I, pointing; “over there, where I found him nodding
asleep, and thought it was you.”

He held me by the collar and stared at me so, that I began to think his
first idea about cutting my throat had revived.

“Dressed like you, you know, only with a hat,” I explained, trembling;
“and--and”--I was very anxious to put this delicately--“and with--the
same reason for wanting to borrow a file. Didn't you hear the cannon
last night?”

“Then there was firing!” he said to himself.

“I wonder you shouldn't have been sure of that,” I returned, “for
we heard it up at home, and that's farther away, and we were shut in
besides.”

“Why, see now!” said he. “When a man's alone on these flats, with a
light head and a light stomach, perishing of cold and want, he hears
nothin' all night, but guns firing, and voices calling. Hears? He sees
the soldiers, with their red coats lighted up by the torches carried
afore, closing in round him. Hears his number called, hears himself
challenged, hears the rattle of the muskets, hears the orders 'Make
ready! Present! Cover him steady, men!' and is laid hands on--and
there's nothin'! Why, if I see one pursuing party last night--coming up
in order, Damn 'em, with their tramp, tramp--I see a hundred. And as to
firing! Why, I see the mist shake with the cannon, arter it was broad
day,--But this man”; he had said all the rest, as if he had forgotten my
being there; “did you notice anything in him?”

“He had a badly bruised face,” said I, recalling what I hardly knew I
knew.

“Not here?” exclaimed the man, striking his left cheek mercilessly, with
the flat of his hand.

“Yes, there!”

“Where is he?” He crammed what little food was left, into the breast of
his gray jacket. “Show me the way he went. I'll pull him down, like a
bloodhound. Curse this iron on my sore leg! Give us hold of the file,
boy.”

I indicated in what direction the mist had shrouded the other man,
and he looked up at it for an instant. But he was down on the rank wet
grass, filing at his iron like a madman, and not minding me or minding
his own leg, which had an old chafe upon it and was bloody, but which he
handled as roughly as if it had no more feeling in it than the file. I
was very much afraid of him again, now that he had worked himself into
this fierce hurry, and I was likewise very much afraid of keeping away
from home any longer. I told him I must go, but he took no notice, so
I thought the best thing I could do was to slip off. The last I saw
of him, his head was bent over his knee and he was working hard at his
fetter, muttering impatient imprecations at it and at his leg. The last
I heard of him, I stopped in the mist to listen, and the file was still
going.




Chapter IV

I fully expected to find a Constable in the kitchen, waiting to take me
up. But not only was there no Constable there, but no discovery had yet
been made of the robbery. Mrs. Joe was prodigiously busy in getting the
house ready for the festivities of the day, and Joe had been put upon
the kitchen doorstep to keep him out of the dust-pan,--an article into
which his destiny always led him, sooner or later, when my sister was
vigorously reaping the floors of her establishment.

“And where the deuce ha' you been?” was Mrs. Joe's Christmas salutation,
when I and my conscience showed ourselves.

I said I had been down to hear the Carols. “Ah! well!” observed Mrs.
Joe. “You might ha' done worse.” Not a doubt of that I thought.

“Perhaps if I warn't a blacksmith's wife, and (what's the same thing) a
slave with her apron never off, I should have been to hear the Carols,”
 said Mrs. Joe. “I'm rather partial to Carols, myself, and that's the
best of reasons for my never hearing any.”

Joe, who had ventured into the kitchen after me as the dustpan had
retired before us, drew the back of his hand across his nose with a
conciliatory air, when Mrs. Joe darted a look at him, and, when her eyes
were withdrawn, secretly crossed his two forefingers, and exhibited them
to me, as our token that Mrs. Joe was in a cross temper. This was so
much her normal state, that Joe and I would often, for weeks together,
be, as to our fingers, like monumental Crusaders as to their legs.

We were to have a superb dinner, consisting of a leg of pickled pork and
greens, and a pair of roast stuffed fowls. A handsome mince-pie had
been made yesterday morning (which accounted for the mincemeat not
being missed), and the pudding was already on the boil. These extensive
arrangements occasioned us to be cut off unceremoniously in respect of
breakfast; “for I ain't,” said Mrs. Joe,--“I ain't a going to have
no formal cramming and busting and washing up now, with what I've got
before me, I promise you!”

So, we had our slices served out, as if we were two thousand troops on a
forced march instead of a man and boy at home; and we took gulps of milk
and water, with apologetic countenances, from a jug on the dresser. In
the meantime, Mrs. Joe put clean white curtains up, and tacked a new
flowered flounce across the wide chimney to replace the old one, and
uncovered the little state parlor across the passage, which was never
uncovered at any other time, but passed the rest of the year in a cool
haze of silver paper, which even extended to the four little white
crockery poodles on the mantel-shelf, each with a black nose and a
basket of flowers in his mouth, and each the counterpart of the other.
Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of
making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt
itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by
their religion.

My sister, having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that
is to say, Joe and I were going. In his working-clothes, Joe was a
well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday clothes,
he was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else.
Nothing that he wore then fitted him or seemed to belong to him; and
everything that he wore then grazed him. On the present festive occasion
he emerged from his room, when the blithe bells were going, the picture
of misery, in a full suit of Sunday penitentials. As to me, I think my
sister must have had some general idea that I was a young offender whom
an Accoucheur Policeman had taken up (on my birthday) and delivered over
to her, to be dealt with according to the outraged majesty of the law.
I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born in opposition
to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the
dissuading arguments of my best friends. Even when I was taken to have
a new suit of clothes, the tailor had orders to make them like a kind of
Reformatory, and on no account to let me have the free use of my limbs.

Joe and I going to church, therefore, must have been a moving spectacle
for compassionate minds. Yet, what I suffered outside was nothing to
what I underwent within. The terrors that had assailed me whenever
Mrs. Joe had gone near the pantry, or out of the room, were only to be
equalled by the remorse with which my mind dwelt on what my hands had
done. Under the weight of my wicked secret, I pondered whether the
Church would be powerful enough to shield me from the vengeance of the
terrible young man, if I divulged to that establishment. I conceived the
idea that the time when the banns were read and when the clergyman said,
“Ye are now to declare it!” would be the time for me to rise and propose
a private conference in the vestry. I am far from being sure that I
might not have astonished our small congregation by resorting to this
extreme measure, but for its being Christmas Day and no Sunday.

Mr. Wopsle, the clerk at church, was to dine with us; and Mr. Hubble
the wheelwright and Mrs. Hubble; and Uncle Pumblechook (Joe's uncle,
but Mrs. Joe appropriated him), who was a well-to-do cornchandler in
the nearest town, and drove his own chaise-cart. The dinner hour was
half-past one. When Joe and I got home, we found the table laid, and
Mrs. Joe dressed, and the dinner dressing, and the front door unlocked
(it never was at any other time) for the company to enter by, and
everything most splendid. And still, not a word of the robbery.

The time came, without bringing with it any relief to my feelings, and
the company came. Mr. Wopsle, united to a Roman nose and a large shining
bald forehead, had a deep voice which he was uncommonly proud of; indeed
it was understood among his acquaintance that if you could only give him
his head, he would read the clergyman into fits; he himself confessed
that if the Church was “thrown open,” meaning to competition, he would
not despair of making his mark in it. The Church not being “thrown
open,” he was, as I have said, our clerk. But he punished the Amens
tremendously; and when he gave out the psalm,--always giving the whole
verse,--he looked all round the congregation first, as much as to say,
“You have heard my friend overhead; oblige me with your opinion of this
style!”

I opened the door to the company,--making believe that it was a habit
of ours to open that door,--and I opened it first to Mr. Wopsle, next
to Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, and last of all to Uncle Pumblechook. N.B. I was
not allowed to call him uncle, under the severest penalties.

“Mrs. Joe,” said Uncle Pumblechook, a large hard-breathing middle-aged
slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair
standing upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had just been
all but choked, and had that moment come to, “I have brought you as the
compliments of the season--I have brought you, Mum, a bottle of sherry
wine--and I have brought you, Mum, a bottle of port wine.”

Every Christmas Day he presented himself, as a profound novelty, with
exactly the same words, and carrying the two bottles like dumb-bells.
Every Christmas Day, Mrs. Joe replied, as she now replied, “O, Un--cle
Pum-ble--chook! This is kind!” Every Christmas Day, he retorted, as
he now retorted, “It's no more than your merits. And now are you all
bobbish, and how's Sixpennorth of halfpence?” meaning me.

We dined on these occasions in the kitchen, and adjourned, for the nuts
and oranges and apples to the parlor; which was a change very like
Joe's change from his working-clothes to his Sunday dress. My sister was
uncommonly lively on the present occasion, and indeed was generally more
gracious in the society of Mrs. Hubble than in other company. I remember
Mrs. Hubble as a little curly sharp-edged person in sky-blue, who held a
conventionally juvenile position, because she had married Mr. Hubble,--I
don't know at what remote period,--when she was much younger than he. I
remember Mr Hubble as a tough, high-shouldered, stooping old man, of a
sawdusty fragrance, with his legs extraordinarily wide apart: so that in
my short days I always saw some miles of open country between them when
I met him coming up the lane.

Among this good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadn't
robbed the pantry, in a false position. Not because I was squeezed in
at an acute angle of the tablecloth, with the table in my chest, and the
Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I was not allowed to speak
(I didn't want to speak), nor because I was regaled with the scaly tips
of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork
of which the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain. No;
I should not have minded that, if they would only have left me alone.
But they wouldn't leave me alone. They seemed to think the opportunity
lost, if they failed to point the conversation at me, every now and
then, and stick the point into me. I might have been an unfortunate
little bull in a Spanish arena, I got so smartingly touched up by these
moral goads.

It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle said grace with
theatrical declamation,--as it now appears to me, something like a
religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the Third,--and
ended with the very proper aspiration that we might be truly grateful.
Upon which my sister fixed me with her eye, and said, in a low
reproachful voice, “Do you hear that? Be grateful.”

“Especially,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “be grateful, boy, to them which
brought you up by hand.”

Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful
presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, “Why is it that the
young are never grateful?” This moral mystery seemed too much for
the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, “Naterally
wicious.” Everybody then murmured “True!” and looked at me in a
particularly unpleasant and personal manner.

Joe's station and influence were something feebler (if possible) when
there was company than when there was none. But he always aided and
comforted me when he could, in some way of his own, and he always did so
at dinner-time by giving me gravy, if there were any. There being plenty
of gravy to-day, Joe spooned into my plate, at this point, about half a
pint.

A little later on in the dinner, Mr. Wopsle reviewed the sermon with
some severity, and intimated--in the usual hypothetical case of the
Church being “thrown open”--what kind of sermon he would have given
them. After favoring them with some heads of that discourse, he remarked
that he considered the subject of the day's homily, ill chosen; which
was the less excusable, he added, when there were so many subjects
“going about.”

“True again,” said Uncle Pumblechook. “You've hit it, sir! Plenty of
subjects going about, for them that know how to put salt upon their
tails. That's what's wanted. A man needn't go far to find a subject,
if he's ready with his salt-box.” Mr. Pumblechook added, after a short
interval of reflection, “Look at Pork alone. There's a subject! If you
want a subject, look at Pork!”

“True, sir. Many a moral for the young,” returned Mr. Wopsle,--and I
knew he was going to lug me in, before he said it; “might be deduced
from that text.”

(“You listen to this,” said my sister to me, in a severe parenthesis.)

Joe gave me some more gravy.

“Swine,” pursued Mr. Wopsle, in his deepest voice, and pointing his fork
at my blushes, as if he were mentioning my Christian name,--“swine were
the companions of the prodigal. The gluttony of Swine is put before us,
as an example to the young.” (I thought this pretty well in him who
had been praising up the pork for being so plump and juicy.) “What is
detestable in a pig is more detestable in a boy.”

“Or girl,” suggested Mr. Hubble.

“Of course, or girl, Mr. Hubble,” assented Mr. Wopsle, rather irritably,
“but there is no girl present.”

“Besides,” said Mr. Pumblechook, turning sharp on me, “think what you've
got to be grateful for. If you'd been born a Squeaker--”

“He was, if ever a child was,” said my sister, most emphatically.

Joe gave me some more gravy.

“Well, but I mean a four-footed Squeaker,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “If you
had been born such, would you have been here now? Not you--”

“Unless in that form,” said Mr. Wopsle, nodding towards the dish.

“But I don't mean in that form, sir,” returned Mr. Pumblechook, who had
an objection to being interrupted; “I mean, enjoying himself with his
elders and betters, and improving himself with their conversation, and
rolling in the lap of luxury. Would he have been doing that? No, he
wouldn't. And what would have been your destination?” turning on me
again. “You would have been disposed of for so many shillings according
to the market price of the article, and Dunstable the butcher would have
come up to you as you lay in your straw, and he would have whipped you
under his left arm, and with his right he would have tucked up his frock
to get a penknife from out of his waistcoat-pocket, and he would have
shed your blood and had your life. No bringing up by hand then. Not a
bit of it!”

Joe offered me more gravy, which I was afraid to take.

“He was a world of trouble to you, ma'am,” said Mrs. Hubble,
commiserating my sister.

“Trouble?” echoed my sister; “trouble?” and then entered on a fearful
catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all the acts
of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I had tumbled
from, and all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the injuries I
had done myself, and all the times she had wished me in my grave, and I
had contumaciously refused to go there.

I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much, with
their noses. Perhaps, they became the restless people they were, in
consequence. Anyhow, Mr. Wopsle's Roman nose so aggravated me, during
the recital of my misdemeanours, that I should have liked to pull it
until he howled. But, all I had endured up to this time was nothing in
comparison with the awful feelings that took possession of me when the
pause was broken which ensued upon my sister's recital, and in which
pause everybody had looked at me (as I felt painfully conscious) with
indignation and abhorrence.

“Yet,” said Mr. Pumblechook, leading the company gently back to the
theme from which they had strayed, “Pork--regarded as biled--is rich,
too; ain't it?”

“Have a little brandy, uncle,” said my sister.

O Heavens, it had come at last! He would find it was weak, he would say
it was weak, and I was lost! I held tight to the leg of the table under
the cloth, with both hands, and awaited my fate.

My sister went for the stone bottle, came back with the stone bottle,
and poured his brandy out: no one else taking any. The wretched man
trifled with his glass,--took it up, looked at it through the light,
put it down,--prolonged my misery. All this time Mrs. Joe and Joe were
briskly clearing the table for the pie and pudding.

I couldn't keep my eyes off him. Always holding tight by the leg of the
table with my hands and feet, I saw the miserable creature finger his
glass playfully, take it up, smile, throw his head back, and drink
the brandy off. Instantly afterwards, the company were seized with
unspeakable consternation, owing to his springing to his feet, turning
round several times in an appalling spasmodic whooping-cough dance,
and rushing out at the door; he then became visible through the window,
violently plunging and expectorating, making the most hideous faces, and
apparently out of his mind.

I held on tight, while Mrs. Joe and Joe ran to him. I didn't know how
I had done it, but I had no doubt I had murdered him somehow. In my
dreadful situation, it was a relief when he was brought back, and
surveying the company all round as if they had disagreed with him, sank
down into his chair with the one significant gasp, “Tar!”

I had filled up the bottle from the tar-water jug. I knew he would be
worse by and by. I moved the table, like a Medium of the present day, by
the vigor of my unseen hold upon it.

“Tar!” cried my sister, in amazement. “Why, how ever could Tar come
there?”

But, Uncle Pumblechook, who was omnipotent in that kitchen, wouldn't
hear the word, wouldn't hear of the subject, imperiously waved it all
away with his hand, and asked for hot gin and water. My sister, who had
begun to be alarmingly meditative, had to employ herself actively in
getting the gin, the hot water, the sugar, and the lemon-peel, and mixing
them. For the time being at least, I was saved. I still held on to the
leg of the table, but clutched it now with the fervor of gratitude.

By degrees, I became calm enough to release my grasp and partake of
pudding. Mr. Pumblechook partook of pudding. All partook of pudding.
The course terminated, and Mr. Pumblechook had begun to beam under the
genial influence of gin and water. I began to think I should get over
the day, when my sister said to Joe, “Clean plates,--cold.”

I clutched the leg of the table again immediately, and pressed it to my
bosom as if it had been the companion of my youth and friend of my soul.
I foresaw what was coming, and I felt that this time I really was gone.

“You must taste,” said my sister, addressing the guests with her best
grace--“you must taste, to finish with, such a delightful and delicious
present of Uncle Pumblechook's!”

Must they! Let them not hope to taste it!

“You must know,” said my sister, rising, “it's a pie; a savory pork
pie.”

The company murmured their compliments. Uncle Pumblechook, sensible of
having deserved well of his fellow-creatures, said,--quite vivaciously,
all things considered,--“Well, Mrs. Joe, we'll do our best endeavors;
let us have a cut at this same pie.”

My sister went out to get it. I heard her steps proceed to the pantry. I
saw Mr. Pumblechook balance his knife. I saw reawakening appetite in the
Roman nostrils of Mr. Wopsle. I heard Mr. Hubble remark that “a bit of
savory pork pie would lay atop of anything you could mention, and do
no harm,” and I heard Joe say, “You shall have some, Pip.” I have never
been absolutely certain whether I uttered a shrill yell of terror,
merely in spirit, or in the bodily hearing of the company. I felt that I
could bear no more, and that I must run away. I released the leg of the
table, and ran for my life.

But I ran no farther than the house door, for there I ran head-foremost
into a party of soldiers with their muskets, one of whom held out a pair
of handcuffs to me, saying, “Here you are, look sharp, come on!”




Chapter V

The apparition of a file of soldiers ringing down the but-ends of their
loaded muskets on our door-step, caused the dinner-party to rise
from table in confusion, and caused Mrs. Joe re-entering the kitchen
empty-handed, to stop short and stare, in her wondering lament of
“Gracious goodness gracious me, what's gone--with the--pie!”

The sergeant and I were in the kitchen when Mrs. Joe stood staring;
at which crisis I partially recovered the use of my senses. It was
the sergeant who had spoken to me, and he was now looking round at the
company, with his handcuffs invitingly extended towards them in his
right hand, and his left on my shoulder.

“Excuse me, ladies and gentleman,” said the sergeant, “but as I have
mentioned at the door to this smart young shaver,” (which he hadn't), “I
am on a chase in the name of the king, and I want the blacksmith.”

“And pray what might you want with him?” retorted my sister, quick to
resent his being wanted at all.

“Missis,” returned the gallant sergeant, “speaking for myself, I should
reply, the honor and pleasure of his fine wife's acquaintance; speaking
for the king, I answer, a little job done.”

This was received as rather neat in the sergeant; insomuch that Mr.
Pumblechook cried audibly, “Good again!”

“You see, blacksmith,” said the sergeant, who had by this time picked
out Joe with his eye, “we have had an accident with these, and I find
the lock of one of 'em goes wrong, and the coupling don't act pretty.
As they are wanted for immediate service, will you throw your eye over
them?”

Joe threw his eye over them, and pronounced that the job would
necessitate the lighting of his forge fire, and would take nearer
two hours than one. “Will it? Then will you set about it at once,
blacksmith?” said the off-hand sergeant, “as it's on his Majesty's
service. And if my men can bear a hand anywhere, they'll make themselves
useful.” With that, he called to his men, who came trooping into the
kitchen one after another, and piled their arms in a corner. And then
they stood about, as soldiers do; now, with their hands loosely clasped
before them; now, resting a knee or a shoulder; now, easing a belt or a
pouch; now, opening the door to spit stiffly over their high stocks, out
into the yard.

All these things I saw without then knowing that I saw them, for I
was in an agony of apprehension. But beginning to perceive that the
handcuffs were not for me, and that the military had so far got the
better of the pie as to put it in the background, I collected a little
more of my scattered wits.

“Would you give me the time?” said the sergeant, addressing himself to
Mr. Pumblechook, as to a man whose appreciative powers justified the
inference that he was equal to the time.

“It's just gone half past two.”

“That's not so bad,” said the sergeant, reflecting; “even if I was
forced to halt here nigh two hours, that'll do. How far might you call
yourselves from the marshes, hereabouts? Not above a mile, I reckon?”

“Just a mile,” said Mrs. Joe.

“That'll do. We begin to close in upon 'em about dusk. A little before
dusk, my orders are. That'll do.”

“Convicts, sergeant?” asked Mr. Wopsle, in a matter-of-course way.

“Ay!” returned the sergeant, “two. They're pretty well known to be out
on the marshes still, and they won't try to get clear of 'em before
dusk. Anybody here seen anything of any such game?”

Everybody, myself excepted, said no, with confidence. Nobody thought of
me.

“Well!” said the sergeant, “they'll find themselves trapped in a circle,
I expect, sooner than they count on. Now, blacksmith! If you're ready,
his Majesty the King is.”

Joe had got his coat and waistcoat and cravat off, and his leather apron
on, and passed into the forge. One of the soldiers opened its wooden
windows, another lighted the fire, another turned to at the bellows, the
rest stood round the blaze, which was soon roaring. Then Joe began to
hammer and clink, hammer and clink, and we all looked on.

The interest of the impending pursuit not only absorbed the general
attention, but even made my sister liberal. She drew a pitcher of beer
from the cask for the soldiers, and invited the sergeant to take a glass
of brandy. But Mr. Pumblechook said, sharply, “Give him wine, Mum. I'll
engage there's no tar in that:” so, the sergeant thanked him and said
that as he preferred his drink without tar, he would take wine, if it
was equally convenient. When it was given him, he drank his Majesty's
health and compliments of the season, and took it all at a mouthful and
smacked his lips.

“Good stuff, eh, sergeant?” said Mr. Pumblechook.

“I'll tell you something,” returned the sergeant; “I suspect that
stuff's of your providing.”

Mr. Pumblechook, with a fat sort of laugh, said, “Ay, ay? Why?”

“Because,” returned the sergeant, clapping him on the shoulder, “you're
a man that knows what's what.”

“D'ye think so?” said Mr. Pumblechook, with his former laugh. “Have
another glass!”

“With you. Hob and nob,” returned the sergeant. “The top of mine to the
foot of yours,--the foot of yours to the top of mine,--Ring once, ring
twice,--the best tune on the Musical Glasses! Your health. May you live
a thousand years, and never be a worse judge of the right sort than you
are at the present moment of your life!”

The sergeant tossed off his glass again and seemed quite ready for
another glass. I noticed that Mr. Pumblechook in his hospitality
appeared to forget that he had made a present of the wine, but took the
bottle from Mrs. Joe and had all the credit of handing it about in a
gush of joviality. Even I got some. And he was so very free of the wine
that he even called for the other bottle, and handed that about with the
same liberality, when the first was gone.

As I watched them while they all stood clustering about the forge,
enjoying themselves so much, I thought what terrible good sauce for
a dinner my fugitive friend on the marshes was. They had not enjoyed
themselves a quarter so much, before the entertainment was brightened
with the excitement he furnished. And now, when they were all in lively
anticipation of “the two villains” being taken, and when the bellows
seemed to roar for the fugitives, the fire to flare for them, the smoke
to hurry away in pursuit of them, Joe to hammer and clink for them,
and all the murky shadows on the wall to shake at them in menace as the
blaze rose and sank, and the red-hot sparks dropped and died, the pale
afternoon outside almost seemed in my pitying young fancy to have turned
pale on their account, poor wretches.

At last, Joe's job was done, and the ringing and roaring stopped. As Joe
got on his coat, he mustered courage to propose that some of us should
go down with the soldiers and see what came of the hunt. Mr. Pumblechook
and Mr. Hubble declined, on the plea of a pipe and ladies' society; but
Mr. Wopsle said he would go, if Joe would. Joe said he was agreeable,
and would take me, if Mrs. Joe approved. We never should have got leave
to go, I am sure, but for Mrs. Joe's curiosity to know all about it and
how it ended. As it was, she merely stipulated, “If you bring the boy
back with his head blown to bits by a musket, don't look to me to put it
together again.”

The sergeant took a polite leave of the ladies, and parted from Mr.
Pumblechook as from a comrade; though I doubt if he were quite as fully
sensible of that gentleman's merits under arid conditions, as when
something moist was going. His men resumed their muskets and fell in.
Mr. Wopsle, Joe, and I, received strict charge to keep in the rear, and
to speak no word after we reached the marshes. When we were all out in
the raw air and were steadily moving towards our business, I treasonably
whispered to Joe, “I hope, Joe, we shan't find them.” and Joe whispered
to me, “I'd give a shilling if they had cut and run, Pip.”

We were joined by no stragglers from the village, for the weather was
cold and threatening, the way dreary, the footing bad, darkness coming
on, and the people had good fires in-doors and were keeping the day. A
few faces hurried to glowing windows and looked after us, but none came
out. We passed the finger-post, and held straight on to the churchyard.
There we were stopped a few minutes by a signal from the sergeant's
hand, while two or three of his men dispersed themselves among the
graves, and also examined the porch. They came in again without finding
anything, and then we struck out on the open marshes, through the gate
at the side of the churchyard. A bitter sleet came rattling against us
here on the east wind, and Joe took me on his back.

Now that we were out upon the dismal wilderness where they little
thought I had been within eight or nine hours and had seen both men
hiding, I considered for the first time, with great dread, if we should
come upon them, would my particular convict suppose that it was I who
had brought the soldiers there? He had asked me if I was a deceiving
imp, and he had said I should be a fierce young hound if I joined the
hunt against him. Would he believe that I was both imp and hound in
treacherous earnest, and had betrayed him?

It was of no use asking myself this question now. There I was, on Joe's
back, and there was Joe beneath me, charging at the ditches like a
hunter, and stimulating Mr. Wopsle not to tumble on his Roman nose, and
to keep up with us. The soldiers were in front of us, extending into a
pretty wide line with an interval between man and man. We were taking
the course I had begun with, and from which I had diverged in the mist.
Either the mist was not out again yet, or the wind had dispelled it.
Under the low red glare of sunset, the beacon, and the gibbet, and the
mound of the Battery, and the opposite shore of the river, were plain,
though all of a watery lead color.

With my heart thumping like a blacksmith at Joe's broad shoulder, I
looked all about for any sign of the convicts. I could see none, I could
hear none. Mr. Wopsle had greatly alarmed me more than once, by his
blowing and hard breathing; but I knew the sounds by this time, and
could dissociate them from the object of pursuit. I got a dreadful
start, when I thought I heard the file still going; but it was only a
sheep-bell. The sheep stopped in their eating and looked timidly at
us; and the cattle, their heads turned from the wind and sleet, stared
angrily as if they held us responsible for both annoyances; but, except
these things, and the shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass,
there was no break in the bleak stillness of the marshes.

The soldiers were moving on in the direction of the old Battery, and we
were moving on a little way behind them, when, all of a sudden, we all
stopped. For there had reached us on the wings of the wind and rain, a
long shout. It was repeated. It was at a distance towards the east, but
it was long and loud. Nay, there seemed to be two or more shouts raised
together,--if one might judge from a confusion in the sound.

To this effect the sergeant and the nearest men were speaking under
their breath, when Joe and I came up. After another moment's listening,
Joe (who was a good judge) agreed, and Mr. Wopsle (who was a bad judge)
agreed. The sergeant, a decisive man, ordered that the sound should not
be answered, but that the course should be changed, and that his men
should make towards it “at the double.” So we slanted to the right
(where the East was), and Joe pounded away so wonderfully, that I had to
hold on tight to keep my seat.

It was a run indeed now, and what Joe called, in the only two words he
spoke all the time, “a Winder.” Down banks and up banks, and over gates,
and splashing into dikes, and breaking among coarse rushes: no man cared
where he went. As we came nearer to the shouting, it became more and
more apparent that it was made by more than one voice. Sometimes, it
seemed to stop altogether, and then the soldiers stopped. When it broke
out again, the soldiers made for it at a greater rate than ever, and we
after them. After a while, we had so run it down, that we could hear one
voice calling “Murder!” and another voice, “Convicts! Runaways! Guard!
This way for the runaway convicts!” Then both voices would seem to be
stifled in a struggle, and then would break out again. And when it had
come to this, the soldiers ran like deer, and Joe too.

The sergeant ran in first, when we had run the noise quite down, and two
of his men ran in close upon him. Their pieces were cocked and levelled
when we all ran in.

“Here are both men!” panted the sergeant, struggling at the bottom of a
ditch. “Surrender, you two! and confound you for two wild beasts! Come
asunder!”

Water was splashing, and mud was flying, and oaths were being sworn, and
blows were being struck, when some more men went down into the ditch to
help the sergeant, and dragged out, separately, my convict and the other
one. Both were bleeding and panting and execrating and struggling; but
of course I knew them both directly.

“Mind!” said my convict, wiping blood from his face with his ragged
sleeves, and shaking torn hair from his fingers: “I took him! I give him
up to you! Mind that!”

“It's not much to be particular about,” said the sergeant; “it'll do you
small good, my man, being in the same plight yourself. Handcuffs there!”

“I don't expect it to do me any good. I don't want it to do me more good
than it does now,” said my convict, with a greedy laugh. “I took him. He
knows it. That's enough for me.”

The other convict was livid to look at, and, in addition to the old
bruised left side of his face, seemed to be bruised and torn all over.
He could not so much as get his breath to speak, until they were both
separately handcuffed, but leaned upon a soldier to keep himself from
falling.

“Take notice, guard,--he tried to murder me,” were his first words.

“Tried to murder him?” said my convict, disdainfully. “Try, and not
do it? I took him, and giv' him up; that's what I done. I not only
prevented him getting off the marshes, but I dragged him here,--dragged
him this far on his way back. He's a gentleman, if you please, this
villain. Now, the Hulks has got its gentleman again, through me. Murder
him? Worth my while, too, to murder him, when I could do worse and drag
him back!”

The other one still gasped, “He tried--he tried-to--murder me.
Bear--bear witness.”

“Lookee here!” said my convict to the sergeant. “Single-handed I got
clear of the prison-ship; I made a dash and I done it. I could ha' got
clear of these death-cold flats likewise--look at my leg: you won't find
much iron on it--if I hadn't made the discovery that he was here. Let
him go free? Let him profit by the means as I found out? Let him make a
tool of me afresh and again? Once more? No, no, no. If I had died at
the bottom there,” and he made an emphatic swing at the ditch with his
manacled hands, “I'd have held to him with that grip, that you should
have been safe to find him in my hold.”

The other fugitive, who was evidently in extreme horror of his
companion, repeated, “He tried to murder me. I should have been a dead
man if you had not come up.”

“He lies!” said my convict, with fierce energy. “He's a liar born, and
he'll die a liar. Look at his face; ain't it written there? Let him turn
those eyes of his on me. I defy him to do it.”

The other, with an effort at a scornful smile, which could not, however,
collect the nervous working of his mouth into any set expression, looked
at the soldiers, and looked about at the marshes and at the sky, but
certainly did not look at the speaker.

“Do you see him?” pursued my convict. “Do you see what a villain he is?
Do you see those grovelling and wandering eyes? That's how he looked
when we were tried together. He never looked at me.”

The other, always working and working his dry lips and turning his eyes
restlessly about him far and near, did at last turn them for a moment on
the speaker, with the words, “You are not much to look at,” and with
a half-taunting glance at the bound hands. At that point, my convict
became so frantically exasperated, that he would have rushed upon him
but for the interposition of the soldiers. “Didn't I tell you,” said the
other convict then, “that he would murder me, if he could?” And any one
could see that he shook with fear, and that there broke out upon his
lips curious white flakes, like thin snow.

“Enough of this parley,” said the sergeant. “Light those torches.”

As one of the soldiers, who carried a basket in lieu of a gun, went down
on his knee to open it, my convict looked round him for the first time,
and saw me. I had alighted from Joe's back on the brink of the ditch
when we came up, and had not moved since. I looked at him eagerly when
he looked at me, and slightly moved my hands and shook my head. I had
been waiting for him to see me that I might try to assure him of my
innocence. It was not at all expressed to me that he even comprehended
my intention, for he gave me a look that I did not understand, and it
all passed in a moment. But if he had looked at me for an hour or for
a day, I could not have remembered his face ever afterwards, as having
been more attentive.

The soldier with the basket soon got a light, and lighted three or four
torches, and took one himself and distributed the others. It had been
almost dark before, but now it seemed quite dark, and soon afterwards
very dark. Before we departed from that spot, four soldiers standing in
a ring, fired twice into the air. Presently we saw other torches kindled
at some distance behind us, and others on the marshes on the opposite
bank of the river. “All right,” said the sergeant. “March.”

We had not gone far when three cannon were fired ahead of us with a
sound that seemed to burst something inside my ear. “You are expected
on board,” said the sergeant to my convict; “they know you are coming.
Don't straggle, my man. Close up here.”

The two were kept apart, and each walked surrounded by a separate guard.
I had hold of Joe's hand now, and Joe carried one of the torches. Mr.
Wopsle had been for going back, but Joe was resolved to see it out, so
we went on with the party. There was a reasonably good path now, mostly
on the edge of the river, with a divergence here and there where a dike
came, with a miniature windmill on it and a muddy sluice-gate. When
I looked round, I could see the other lights coming in after us. The
torches we carried dropped great blotches of fire upon the track, and
I could see those, too, lying smoking and flaring. I could see nothing
else but black darkness. Our lights warmed the air about us with their
pitchy blaze, and the two prisoners seemed rather to like that, as they
limped along in the midst of the muskets. We could not go fast, because
of their lameness; and they were so spent, that two or three times we
had to halt while they rested.

After an hour or so of this travelling, we came to a rough wooden hut
and a landing-place. There was a guard in the hut, and they challenged,
and the sergeant answered. Then, we went into the hut, where there was
a smell of tobacco and whitewash, and a bright fire, and a lamp, and
a stand of muskets, and a drum, and a low wooden bedstead, like an
overgrown mangle without the machinery, capable of holding about a dozen
soldiers all at once. Three or four soldiers who lay upon it in their
great-coats were not much interested in us, but just lifted their heads
and took a sleepy stare, and then lay down again. The sergeant made some
kind of report, and some entry in a book, and then the convict whom I
call the other convict was drafted off with his guard, to go on board
first.

My convict never looked at me, except that once. While we stood in the
hut, he stood before the fire looking thoughtfully at it, or putting up
his feet by turns upon the hob, and looking thoughtfully at them as if
he pitied them for their recent adventures. Suddenly, he turned to the
sergeant, and remarked,--

“I wish to say something respecting this escape. It may prevent some
persons laying under suspicion alonger me.”

“You can say what you like,” returned the sergeant, standing coolly
looking at him with his arms folded, “but you have no call to say it
here. You'll have opportunity enough to say about it, and hear about it,
before it's done with, you know.”

“I know, but this is another pint, a separate matter. A man can't
starve; at least I can't. I took some wittles, up at the willage over
yonder,--where the church stands a'most out on the marshes.”

“You mean stole,” said the sergeant.

“And I'll tell you where from. From the blacksmith's.”

“Halloa!” said the sergeant, staring at Joe.

“Halloa, Pip!” said Joe, staring at me.

“It was some broken wittles--that's what it was--and a dram of liquor,
and a pie.”

“Have you happened to miss such an article as a pie, blacksmith?” asked
the sergeant, confidentially.

“My wife did, at the very moment when you came in. Don't you know, Pip?”

“So,” said my convict, turning his eyes on Joe in a moody manner, and
without the least glance at me,--“so you're the blacksmith, are you?
Than I'm sorry to say, I've eat your pie.”

“God knows you're welcome to it,--so far as it was ever mine,” returned
Joe, with a saving remembrance of Mrs. Joe. “We don't know what you have
done, but we wouldn't have you starved to death for it, poor miserable
fellow-creatur.--Would us, Pip?”

The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the man's throat
again, and he turned his back. The boat had returned, and his guard were
ready, so we followed him to the landing-place made of rough stakes
and stones, and saw him put into the boat, which was rowed by a crew of
convicts like himself. No one seemed surprised to see him, or interested
in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to see him, or spoke a word,
except that somebody in the boat growled as if to dogs, “Give way,
you!” which was the signal for the dip of the oars. By the light of the
torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of
the shore, like a wicked Noah's ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by
massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes to be
ironed like the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside, and we saw
him taken up the side and disappear. Then, the ends of the torches were
flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with
him.




Chapter VI

My state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had been so
unexpectedly exonerated did not impel me to frank disclosure; but I hope
it had some dregs of good at the bottom of it.

I do not recall that I felt any tenderness of conscience in reference
to Mrs. Joe, when the fear of being found out was lifted off me. But
I loved Joe,--perhaps for no better reason in those early days than
because the dear fellow let me love him,--and, as to him, my inner self
was not so easily composed. It was much upon my mind (particularly when
I first saw him looking about for his file) that I ought to tell Joe the
whole truth. Yet I did not, and for the reason that I mistrusted that
if I did, he would think me worse than I was. The fear of losing Joe's
confidence, and of thenceforth sitting in the chimney corner at night
staring drearily at my forever lost companion and friend, tied up my
tongue. I morbidly represented to myself that if Joe knew it, I never
afterwards could see him at the fireside feeling his fair whisker,
without thinking that he was meditating on it. That, if Joe knew it, I
never afterwards could see him glance, however casually, at yesterday's
meat or pudding when it came on to-day's table, without thinking that he
was debating whether I had been in the pantry. That, if Joe knew it, and
at any subsequent period of our joint domestic life remarked that his
beer was flat or thick, the conviction that he suspected tar in it,
would bring a rush of blood to my face. In a word, I was too cowardly
to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing
what I knew to be wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at
that time, and I imitated none of its many inhabitants who act in this
manner. Quite an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the line of
action for myself.

As I was sleepy before we were far away from the prison-ship, Joe took
me on his back again and carried me home. He must have had a tiresome
journey of it, for Mr. Wopsle, being knocked up, was in such a very bad
temper that if the Church had been thrown open, he would probably have
excommunicated the whole expedition, beginning with Joe and myself. In
his lay capacity, he persisted in sitting down in the damp to such
an insane extent, that when his coat was taken off to be dried at the
kitchen fire, the circumstantial evidence on his trousers would have
hanged him, if it had been a capital offence.

By that time, I was staggering on the kitchen floor like a little
drunkard, through having been newly set upon my feet, and through having
been fast asleep, and through waking in the heat and lights and noise of
tongues. As I came to myself (with the aid of a heavy thump between the
shoulders, and the restorative exclamation “Yah! Was there ever such
a boy as this!” from my sister,) I found Joe telling them about the
convict's confession, and all the visitors suggesting different ways
by which he had got into the pantry. Mr. Pumblechook made out, after
carefully surveying the premises, that he had first got upon the roof of
the forge, and had then got upon the roof of the house, and had then let
himself down the kitchen chimney by a rope made of his bedding cut
into strips; and as Mr. Pumblechook was very positive and drove his
own chaise-cart--over everybody--it was agreed that it must be so. Mr.
Wopsle, indeed, wildly cried out, “No!” with the feeble malice of a
tired man; but, as he had no theory, and no coat on, he was unanimously
set at naught,--not to mention his smoking hard behind, as he stood
with his back to the kitchen fire to draw the damp out: which was not
calculated to inspire confidence.

This was all I heard that night before my sister clutched me, as a
slumberous offence to the company's eyesight, and assisted me up to bed
with such a strong hand that I seemed to have fifty boots on, and to be
dangling them all against the edges of the stairs. My state of mind, as
I have described it, began before I was up in the morning, and lasted
long after the subject had died out, and had ceased to be mentioned
saving on exceptional occasions.




Chapter VII

At the time when I stood in the churchyard reading the family
tombstones, I had just enough learning to be able to spell them out. My
construction even of their simple meaning was not very correct, for I
read “wife of the Above” as a complimentary reference to my father's
exaltation to a better world; and if any one of my deceased relations
had been referred to as “Below,” I have no doubt I should have formed
the worst opinions of that member of the family. Neither were my notions
of the theological positions to which my Catechism bound me, at
all accurate; for, I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my
declaration that I was to “walk in the same all the days of my life,”
 laid me under an obligation always to go through the village from our
house in one particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down
by the wheelwright's or up by the mill.

When I was old enough, I was to be apprenticed to Joe, and until I could
assume that dignity I was not to be what Mrs. Joe called “Pompeyed,” or
(as I render it) pampered. Therefore, I was not only odd-boy about the
forge, but if any neighbor happened to want an extra boy to frighten
birds, or pick up stones, or do any such job, I was favored with the
employment. In order, however, that our superior position might not be
compromised thereby, a money-box was kept on the kitchen mantel-shelf,
into which it was publicly made known that all my earnings were
dropped. I have an impression that they were to be contributed
eventually towards the liquidation of the National Debt, but I know I
had no hope of any personal participation in the treasure.

Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is
to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited
infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in
the society of youth who paid two pence per week each, for the improving
opportunity of seeing her do it. She rented a small cottage, and Mr.
Wopsle had the room upstairs, where we students used to overhear him
reading aloud in a most dignified and terrific manner, and occasionally
bumping on the ceiling. There was a fiction that Mr. Wopsle “examined”
 the scholars once a quarter. What he did on those occasions was to turn
up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us Mark Antony's oration over
the body of Caesar. This was always followed by Collins's Ode on
the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge
throwing his blood-stained sword in thunder down, and taking the
War-denouncing trumpet with a withering look. It was not with me then,
as it was in later life, when I fell into the society of the Passions,
and compared them with Collins and Wopsle, rather to the disadvantage of
both gentlemen.

Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, besides keeping this Educational Institution,
kept in the same room--a little general shop. She had no idea what stock
she had, or what the price of anything in it was; but there was a little
greasy memorandum-book kept in a drawer, which served as a Catalogue
of Prices, and by this oracle Biddy arranged all the shop transactions.
Biddy was Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's granddaughter; I confess myself
quite unequal to the working out of the problem, what relation she was
to Mr. Wopsle. She was an orphan like myself; like me, too, had been
brought up by hand. She was most noticeable, I thought, in respect of
her extremities; for, her hair always wanted brushing, her hands always
wanted washing, and her shoes always wanted mending and pulling up at
heel. This description must be received with a week-day limitation. On
Sundays, she went to church elaborated.

Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr.
Wopsle's great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been
a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every
letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who
seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and
baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to
read, write, and cipher, on the very smallest scale.

One night I was sitting in the chimney corner with my slate, expending
great efforts on the production of a letter to Joe. I think it must have
been a full year after our hunt upon the marshes, for it was a long
time after, and it was winter and a hard frost. With an alphabet on the
hearth at my feet for reference, I contrived in an hour or two to print
and smear this epistle:--

“MI DEER JO i OPE U R KRWITE WELL i OPE i SHAL SON B HABELL 4 2 TEEDGE
U JO AN THEN WE SHORL B SO GLODD AN WEN i M PRENGTD 2 U JO WOT LARX AN
BLEVE ME INF XN PIP.”

There was no indispensable necessity for my communicating with Joe by
letter, inasmuch as he sat beside me and we were alone. But I delivered
this written communication (slate and all) with my own hand, and Joe
received it as a miracle of erudition.

“I say, Pip, old chap!” cried Joe, opening his blue eyes wide, “what a
scholar you are! An't you?”

“I should like to be,” said I, glancing at the slate as he held it; with
a misgiving that the writing was rather hilly.

“Why, here's a J,” said Joe, “and a O equal to anythink! Here's a J and
a O, Pip, and a J-O, Joe.”

I had never heard Joe read aloud to any greater extent than this
monosyllable, and I had observed at church last Sunday, when I
accidentally held our Prayer-Book upside down, that it seemed to suit
his convenience quite as well as if it had been all right. Wishing to
embrace the present occasion of finding out whether in teaching Joe, I
should have to begin quite at the beginning, I said, “Ah! But read the
rest, Jo.”

“The rest, eh, Pip?” said Joe, looking at it with a slow, searching eye,
“One, two, three. Why, here's three Js, and three Os, and three J-O,
Joes in it, Pip!”

I leaned over Joe, and, with the aid of my forefinger read him the whole
letter.

“Astonishing!” said Joe, when I had finished. “You ARE a scholar.”

“How do you spell Gargery, Joe?” I asked him, with a modest patronage.

“I don't spell it at all,” said Joe.

“But supposing you did?”

“It can't be supposed,” said Joe. “Tho' I'm uncommon fond of reading,
too.”

“Are you, Joe?”

“On-common. Give me,” said Joe, “a good book, or a good newspaper, and
sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!” he continued,
after rubbing his knees a little, “when you do come to a J and a O, and
says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!”

I derived from this, that Joe's education, like Steam, was yet in its
infancy. Pursuing the subject, I inquired,--

“Didn't you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”

“No, Pip.”

“Why didn't you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”

“Well, Pip,” said Joe, taking up the poker, and settling himself to
his usual occupation when he was thoughtful, of slowly raking the fire
between the lower bars; “I'll tell you. My father, Pip, he were given
to drink, and when he were overtook with drink, he hammered away at
my mother, most onmerciful. It were a'most the only hammering he did,
indeed, 'xcepting at myself. And he hammered at me with a wigor only
to be equalled by the wigor with which he didn't hammer at his
anwil.--You're a listening and understanding, Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“'Consequence, my mother and me we ran away from my father several
times; and then my mother she'd go out to work, and she'd say, “Joe,”
 she'd say, “now, please God, you shall have some schooling, child,” and
she'd put me to school. But my father were that good in his hart that
he couldn't abear to be without us. So, he'd come with a most tremenjous
crowd and make such a row at the doors of the houses where we was, that
they used to be obligated to have no more to do with us and to give us
up to him. And then he took us home and hammered us. Which, you see,
Pip,” said Joe, pausing in his meditative raking of the fire, and
looking at me, “were a drawback on my learning.”

“Certainly, poor Joe!”

“Though mind you, Pip,” said Joe, with a judicial touch or two of the
poker on the top bar, “rendering unto all their doo, and maintaining
equal justice betwixt man and man, my father were that good in his hart,
don't you see?”

I didn't see; but I didn't say so.

“Well!” Joe pursued, “somebody must keep the pot a biling, Pip, or the
pot won't bile, don't you know?”

I saw that, and said so.

“'Consequence, my father didn't make objections to my going to work; so
I went to work at my present calling, which were his too, if he
would have followed it, and I worked tolerable hard, I assure you, Pip.
In time I were able to keep him, and I kep him till he went off in a
purple leptic fit. And it were my intentions to have had put upon his
tombstone that, Whatsume'er the failings on his part, Remember reader he
were that good in his heart.”

Joe recited this couplet with such manifest pride and careful
perspicuity, that I asked him if he had made it himself.

“I made it,” said Joe, “my own self. I made it in a moment. It was like
striking out a horseshoe complete, in a single blow. I never was so much
surprised in all my life,--couldn't credit my own ed,--to tell you the
truth, hardly believed it were my own ed. As I was saying, Pip, it were
my intentions to have had it cut over him; but poetry costs money, cut
it how you will, small or large, and it were not done. Not to mention
bearers, all the money that could be spared were wanted for my mother.
She were in poor elth, and quite broke. She weren't long of following,
poor soul, and her share of peace come round at last.”

Joe's blue eyes turned a little watery; he rubbed first one of them, and
then the other, in a most uncongenial and uncomfortable manner, with the
round knob on the top of the poker.

“It were but lonesome then,” said Joe, “living here alone, and I got
acquainted with your sister. Now, Pip,”--Joe looked firmly at me as
if he knew I was not going to agree with him;--“your sister is a fine
figure of a woman.”

I could not help looking at the fire, in an obvious state of doubt.

“Whatever family opinions, or whatever the world's opinions, on that
subject may be, Pip, your sister is,” Joe tapped the top bar with the
poker after every word following, “a-fine-figure--of--a--woman!”

I could think of nothing better to say than “I am glad you think so,
Joe.”

“So am I,” returned Joe, catching me up. “I am glad I think so, Pip. A
little redness or a little matter of Bone, here or there, what does it
signify to Me?”

I sagaciously observed, if it didn't signify to him, to whom did it
signify?

“Certainly!” assented Joe. “That's it. You're right, old chap! When I
got acquainted with your sister, it were the talk how she was bringing
you up by hand. Very kind of her too, all the folks said, and I said,
along with all the folks. As to you,” Joe pursued with a countenance
expressive of seeing something very nasty indeed, “if you could have
been aware how small and flabby and mean you was, dear me, you'd have
formed the most contemptible opinion of yourself!”

Not exactly relishing this, I said, “Never mind me, Joe.”

“But I did mind you, Pip,” he returned with tender simplicity. “When
I offered to your sister to keep company, and to be asked in church at
such times as she was willing and ready to come to the forge, I said to
her, 'And bring the poor little child. God bless the poor little child,'
I said to your sister, 'there's room for him at the forge!'”

I broke out crying and begging pardon, and hugged Joe round the neck:
who dropped the poker to hug me, and to say, “Ever the best of friends;
an't us, Pip? Don't cry, old chap!”

When this little interruption was over, Joe resumed:--

“Well, you see, Pip, and here we are! That's about where it lights; here
we are! Now, when you take me in hand in my learning, Pip (and I tell
you beforehand I am awful dull, most awful dull), Mrs. Joe mustn't see
too much of what we're up to. It must be done, as I may say, on the sly.
And why on the sly? I'll tell you why, Pip.”

He had taken up the poker again; without which, I doubt if he could have
proceeded in his demonstration.

“Your sister is given to government.”

“Given to government, Joe?” I was startled, for I had some shadowy idea
(and I am afraid I must add, hope) that Joe had divorced her in a favor
of the Lords of the Admiralty, or Treasury.

“Given to government,” said Joe. “Which I meantersay the government of
you and myself.”

“Oh!”

“And she an't over partial to having scholars on the premises,” Joe
continued, “and in partickler would not be over partial to my being a
scholar, for fear as I might rise. Like a sort of rebel, don't you see?”

I was going to retort with an inquiry, and had got as far as “Why--”
 when Joe stopped me.

“Stay a bit. I know what you're a going to say, Pip; stay a bit! I don't
deny that your sister comes the Mo-gul over us, now and again. I don't
deny that she do throw us back-falls, and that she do drop down upon us
heavy. At such times as when your sister is on the Ram-page, Pip,” Joe
sank his voice to a whisper and glanced at the door, “candor compels fur
to admit that she is a Buster.”

Joe pronounced this word, as if it began with at least twelve capital
Bs.

“Why don't I rise? That were your observation when I broke it off, Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“Well,” said Joe, passing the poker in to his left hand, that he might
feel his whisker; and I had no hope of him whenever he took to that
placid occupation; “your sister's a master-mind. A master-mind.”

“What's that?” I asked, in some hope of bringing him to a stand. But
Joe was readier with his definition than I had expected, and completely
stopped me by arguing circularly, and answering with a fixed look,
“Her.”

“And I ain't a master-mind,” Joe resumed, when he had unfixed his look,
and got back to his whisker. “And last of all, Pip,--and this I want to
say very serious to you, old chap,--I see so much in my poor mother,
of a woman drudging and slaving and breaking her honest hart and never
getting no peace in her mortal days, that I'm dead afeerd of going wrong
in the way of not doing what's right by a woman, and I'd fur rather
of the two go wrong the t'other way, and be a little ill-conwenienced
myself. I wish it was only me that got put out, Pip; I wish there warn't
no Tickler for you, old chap; I wish I could take it all on myself;
but this is the up-and-down-and-straight on it, Pip, and I hope you'll
overlook shortcomings.”

Young as I was, I believe that I dated a new admiration of Joe from that
night. We were equals afterwards, as we had been before; but, afterwards
at quiet times when I sat looking at Joe and thinking about him, I had
a new sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe in my
heart.

“However,” said Joe, rising to replenish the fire; “here's the
Dutch-clock a working himself up to being equal to strike Eight of 'em,
and she's not come home yet! I hope Uncle Pumblechook's mare mayn't have
set a forefoot on a piece o' ice, and gone down.”

Mrs. Joe made occasional trips with Uncle Pumblechook on market-days,
to assist him in buying such household stuffs and goods as required a
woman's judgment; Uncle Pumblechook being a bachelor and reposing no
confidences in his domestic servant. This was market-day, and Mrs. Joe
was out on one of these expeditions.

Joe made the fire and swept the hearth, and then we went to the door to
listen for the chaise-cart. It was a dry cold night, and the wind blew
keenly, and the frost was white and hard. A man would die to-night of
lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and
considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them
as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering
multitude.

“Here comes the mare,” said Joe, “ringing like a peal of bells!”

The sound of her iron shoes upon the hard road was quite musical, as she
came along at a much brisker trot than usual. We got a chair out, ready
for Mrs. Joe's alighting, and stirred up the fire that they might see a
bright window, and took a final survey of the kitchen that nothing might
be out of its place. When we had completed these preparations, they
drove up, wrapped to the eyes. Mrs. Joe was soon landed, and Uncle
Pumblechook was soon down too, covering the mare with a cloth, and we
were soon all in the kitchen, carrying so much cold air in with us that
it seemed to drive all the heat out of the fire.

“Now,” said Mrs. Joe, unwrapping herself with haste and excitement, and
throwing her bonnet back on her shoulders where it hung by the strings,
“if this boy ain't grateful this night, he never will be!”

I looked as grateful as any boy possibly could, who was wholly
uninformed why he ought to assume that expression.

“It's only to be hoped,” said my sister, “that he won't be Pompeyed. But
I have my fears.”

“She ain't in that line, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “She knows better.”

She? I looked at Joe, making the motion with my lips and eyebrows,
“She?” Joe looked at me, making the motion with his lips and eyebrows,
“She?” My sister catching him in the act, he drew the back of his hand
across his nose with his usual conciliatory air on such occasions, and
looked at her.

“Well?” said my sister, in her snappish way. “What are you staring at?
Is the house afire?”

“--Which some individual,” Joe politely hinted, “mentioned--she.”

“And she is a she, I suppose?” said my sister. “Unless you call Miss
Havisham a he. And I doubt if even you'll go so far as that.”

“Miss Havisham, up town?” said Joe.

“Is there any Miss Havisham down town?” returned my sister.

“She wants this boy to go and play there. And of course he's going. And
he had better play there,” said my sister, shaking her head at me as an
encouragement to be extremely light and sportive, “or I'll work him.”

I had heard of Miss Havisham up town,--everybody for miles round had
heard of Miss Havisham up town,--as an immensely rich and grim lady who
lived in a large and dismal house barricaded against robbers, and who
led a life of seclusion.

“Well to be sure!” said Joe, astounded. “I wonder how she come to know
Pip!”

“Noodle!” cried my sister. “Who said she knew him?”

“--Which some individual,” Joe again politely hinted, “mentioned that
she wanted him to go and play there.”

“And couldn't she ask Uncle Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go and
play there? Isn't it just barely possible that Uncle Pumblechook may be
a tenant of hers, and that he may sometimes--we won't say quarterly
or half-yearly, for that would be requiring too much of you--but
sometimes--go there to pay his rent? And couldn't she then ask Uncle
Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go and play there? And couldn't Uncle
Pumblechook, being always considerate and thoughtful for us--though you
may not think it, Joseph,” in a tone of the deepest reproach, as if
he were the most callous of nephews, “then mention this boy, standing
Prancing here”--which I solemnly declare I was not doing--“that I have
for ever been a willing slave to?”

“Good again!” cried Uncle Pumblechook. “Well put! Prettily pointed! Good
indeed! Now Joseph, you know the case.”

“No, Joseph,” said my sister, still in a reproachful manner, while Joe
apologetically drew the back of his hand across and across his nose,
“you do not yet--though you may not think it--know the case. You may
consider that you do, but you do not, Joseph. For you do not know that
Uncle Pumblechook, being sensible that for anything we can tell, this
boy's fortune may be made by his going to Miss Havisham's, has offered
to take him into town to-night in his own chaise-cart, and to keep
him to-night, and to take him with his own hands to Miss Havisham's
to-morrow morning. And Lor-a-mussy me!” cried my sister, casting off her
bonnet in sudden desperation, “here I stand talking to mere Mooncalfs,
with Uncle Pumblechook waiting, and the mare catching cold at the door,
and the boy grimed with crock and dirt from the hair of his head to the
sole of his foot!”

With that, she pounced upon me, like an eagle on a lamb, and my face was
squeezed into wooden bowls in sinks, and my head was put under taps of
water-butts, and I was soaped, and kneaded, and towelled, and thumped,
and harrowed, and rasped, until I really was quite beside myself. (I
may here remark that I suppose myself to be better acquainted than
any living authority, with the ridgy effect of a wedding-ring, passing
unsympathetically over the human countenance.)

When my ablutions were completed, I was put into clean linen of the
stiffest character, like a young penitent into sackcloth, and was
trussed up in my tightest and fearfullest suit. I was then delivered
over to Mr. Pumblechook, who formally received me as if he were the
Sheriff, and who let off upon me the speech that I knew he had been
dying to make all along: “Boy, be forever grateful to all friends, but
especially unto them which brought you up by hand!”

“Good-bye, Joe!”

“God bless you, Pip, old chap!”

I had never parted from him before, and what with my feelings and what
with soapsuds, I could at first see no stars from the chaise-cart.
But they twinkled out one by one, without throwing any light on the
questions why on earth I was going to play at Miss Havisham's, and what
on earth I was expected to play at.




Chapter VIII

Mr. Pumblechook's premises in the High Street of the market town,
were of a peppercorny and farinaceous character, as the premises of a
cornchandler and seedsman should be. It appeared to me that he must be a
very happy man indeed, to have so many little drawers in his shop; and
I wondered when I peeped into one or two on the lower tiers, and saw the
tied-up brown paper packets inside, whether the flower-seeds and bulbs
ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails, and bloom.

It was in the early morning after my arrival that I entertained this
speculation. On the previous night, I had been sent straight to bed in
an attic with a sloping roof, which was so low in the corner where the
bedstead was, that I calculated the tiles as being within a foot of my
eyebrows. In the same early morning, I discovered a singular affinity
between seeds and corduroys. Mr. Pumblechook wore corduroys, and so did
his shopman; and somehow, there was a general air and flavor about the
corduroys, so much in the nature of seeds, and a general air and flavor
about the seeds, so much in the nature of corduroys, that I hardly knew
which was which. The same opportunity served me for noticing that Mr.
Pumblechook appeared to conduct his business by looking across the
street at the saddler, who appeared to transact his business by keeping
his eye on the coachmaker, who appeared to get on in life by putting his
hands in his pockets and contemplating the baker, who in his turn folded
his arms and stared at the grocer, who stood at his door and yawned at
the chemist. The watchmaker, always poring over a little desk with
a magnifying-glass at his eye, and always inspected by a group of
smock-frocks poring over him through the glass of his shop-window,
seemed to be about the only person in the High Street whose trade
engaged his attention.

Mr. Pumblechook and I breakfasted at eight o'clock in the parlor behind
the shop, while the shopman took his mug of tea and hunch of bread
and butter on a sack of peas in the front premises. I considered Mr.
Pumblechook wretched company. Besides being possessed by my sister's
idea that a mortifying and penitential character ought to be imparted
to my diet,--besides giving me as much crumb as possible in combination
with as little butter, and putting such a quantity of warm water into
my milk that it would have been more candid to have left the milk out
altogether,--his conversation consisted of nothing but arithmetic. On
my politely bidding him Good morning, he said, pompously, “Seven times
nine, boy?” And how should I be able to answer, dodged in that way, in
a strange place, on an empty stomach! I was hungry, but before I had
swallowed a morsel, he began a running sum that lasted all through the
breakfast. “Seven?” “And four?” “And eight?” “And six?” “And two?” “And
ten?” And so on. And after each figure was disposed of, it was as much
as I could do to get a bite or a sup, before the next came; while he sat
at his ease guessing nothing, and eating bacon and hot roll, in (if I
may be allowed the expression) a gorging and gormandizing manner.

For such reasons, I was very glad when ten o'clock came and we started
for Miss Havisham's; though I was not at all at my ease regarding the
manner in which I should acquit myself under that lady's roof. Within
a quarter of an hour we came to Miss Havisham's house, which was of old
brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the
windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were
rustily barred. There was a courtyard in front, and that was barred; so
we had to wait, after ringing the bell, until some one should come
to open it. While we waited at the gate, I peeped in (even then Mr.
Pumblechook said, “And fourteen?” but I pretended not to hear him), and
saw that at the side of the house there was a large brewery. No brewing
was going on in it, and none seemed to have gone on for a long long
time.

A window was raised, and a clear voice demanded “What name?” To which my
conductor replied, “Pumblechook.” The voice returned, “Quite right,” and
the window was shut again, and a young lady came across the court-yard,
with keys in her hand.

“This,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “is Pip.”

“This is Pip, is it?” returned the young lady, who was very pretty and
seemed very proud; “come in, Pip.”

Mr. Pumblechook was coming in also, when she stopped him with the gate.

“Oh!” she said. “Did you wish to see Miss Havisham?”

“If Miss Havisham wished to see me,” returned Mr. Pumblechook,
discomfited.

“Ah!” said the girl; “but you see she don't.”

She said it so finally, and in such an undiscussible way, that Mr.
Pumblechook, though in a condition of ruffled dignity, could not
protest. But he eyed me severely,--as if I had done anything to
him!--and departed with the words reproachfully delivered: “Boy! Let
your behavior here be a credit unto them which brought you up by hand!”
 I was not free from apprehension that he would come back to propound
through the gate, “And sixteen?” But he didn't.

My young conductress locked the gate, and we went across the courtyard.
It was paved and clean, but grass was growing in every crevice. The
brewery buildings had a little lane of communication with it, and the
wooden gates of that lane stood open, and all the brewery beyond stood
open, away to the high enclosing wall; and all was empty and disused.
The cold wind seemed to blow colder there than outside the gate; and
it made a shrill noise in howling in and out at the open sides of the
brewery, like the noise of wind in the rigging of a ship at sea.

She saw me looking at it, and she said, “You could drink without hurt
all the strong beer that's brewed there now, boy.”

“I should think I could, miss,” said I, in a shy way.

“Better not try to brew beer there now, or it would turn out sour, boy;
don't you think so?”

“It looks like it, miss.”

“Not that anybody means to try,” she added, “for that's all done with,
and the place will stand as idle as it is till it falls. As to strong
beer, there's enough of it in the cellars already, to drown the Manor
House.”

“Is that the name of this house, miss?”

“One of its names, boy.”

“It has more than one, then, miss?”

“One more. Its other name was Satis; which is Greek, or Latin, or
Hebrew, or all three--or all one to me--for enough.”

“Enough House,” said I; “that's a curious name, miss.”

“Yes,” she replied; “but it meant more than it said. It meant, when it
was given, that whoever had this house could want nothing else. They
must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think. But don't
loiter, boy.”

Though she called me “boy” so often, and with a carelessness that was
far from complimentary, she was of about my own age. She seemed much
older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed;
and she was as scornful of me as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a
queen.

We went into the house by a side door, the great front entrance had two
chains across it outside,--and the first thing I noticed was, that the
passages were all dark, and that she had left a candle burning there.
She took it up, and we went through more passages and up a staircase,
and still it was all dark, and only the candle lighted us.

At last we came to the door of a room, and she said, “Go in.”

I answered, more in shyness than politeness, “After you, miss.”

To this she returned: “Don't be ridiculous, boy; I am not going in.” And
scornfully walked away, and--what was worse--took the candle with her.

This was very uncomfortable, and I was half afraid. However, the only
thing to be done being to knock at the door, I knocked, and was told
from within to enter. I entered, therefore, and found myself in a pretty
large room, well lighted with wax candles. No glimpse of daylight was to
be seen in it. It was a dressing-room, as I supposed from the furniture,
though much of it was of forms and uses then quite unknown to me. But
prominent in it was a draped table with a gilded looking-glass, and that
I made out at first sight to be a fine lady's dressing-table.

Whether I should have made out this object so soon if there had been no
fine lady sitting at it, I cannot say. In an arm-chair, with an
elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that hand, sat the
strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see.

She was dressed in rich materials,--satins, and lace, and silks,--all
of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent
from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was
white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and
some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid
than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about.
She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on,--the
other was on the table near her hand,--her veil was but half arranged,
her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay
with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and
some flowers, and a Prayer-Book all confusedly heaped about the
looking-glass.

It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things, though
I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed. But I
saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been
white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. I saw
that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and
like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her
sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure
of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had
shrunk to skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly
waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage
lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches
to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress that had been dug out of
a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to
have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if
I could.

“Who is it?” said the lady at the table.

“Pip, ma'am.”

“Pip?”

“Mr. Pumblechook's boy, ma'am. Come--to play.”

“Come nearer; let me look at you. Come close.”

It was when I stood before her, avoiding her eyes, that I took note of
the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped
at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at
twenty minutes to nine.

“Look at me,” said Miss Havisham. “You are not afraid of a woman who has
never seen the sun since you were born?”

I regret to state that I was not afraid of telling the enormous lie
comprehended in the answer “No.”

“Do you know what I touch here?” she said, laying her hands, one upon
the other, on her left side.

“Yes, ma'am.” (It made me think of the young man.)

“What do I touch?”

“Your heart.”

“Broken!”

She uttered the word with an eager look, and with strong emphasis, and
with a weird smile that had a kind of boast in it. Afterwards she kept
her hands there for a little while, and slowly took them away as if they
were heavy.

“I am tired,” said Miss Havisham. “I want diversion, and I have done
with men and women. Play.”

I think it will be conceded by my most disputatious reader, that she
could hardly have directed an unfortunate boy to do anything in the wide
world more difficult to be done under the circumstances.

“I sometimes have sick fancies,” she went on, “and I have a sick fancy
that I want to see some play. There, there!” with an impatient movement
of the fingers of her right hand; “play, play, play!”

For a moment, with the fear of my sister's working me before my eyes, I
had a desperate idea of starting round the room in the assumed character
of Mr. Pumblechook's chaise-cart. But I felt myself so unequal to the
performance that I gave it up, and stood looking at Miss Havisham in
what I suppose she took for a dogged manner, inasmuch as she said, when
we had taken a good look at each other,--

“Are you sullen and obstinate?”

“No, ma'am, I am very sorry for you, and very sorry I can't play just
now. If you complain of me I shall get into trouble with my sister, so
I would do it if I could; but it's so new here, and so strange, and so
fine,--and melancholy--.” I stopped, fearing I might say too much, or
had already said it, and we took another look at each other.

Before she spoke again, she turned her eyes from me, and looked at the
dress she wore, and at the dressing-table, and finally at herself in the
looking-glass.

“So new to him,” she muttered, “so old to me; so strange to him, so
familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us! Call Estella.”

As she was still looking at the reflection of herself, I thought she was
still talking to herself, and kept quiet.

“Call Estella,” she repeated, flashing a look at me. “You can do that.
Call Estella. At the door.”

To stand in the dark in a mysterious passage of an unknown house,
bawling Estella to a scornful young lady neither visible nor responsive,
and feeling it a dreadful liberty so to roar out her name, was almost
as bad as playing to order. But she answered at last, and her light came
along the dark passage like a star.

Miss Havisham beckoned her to come close, and took up a jewel from the
table, and tried its effect upon her fair young bosom and against her
pretty brown hair. “Your own, one day, my dear, and you will use it
well. Let me see you play cards with this boy.”

“With this boy? Why, he is a common laboring boy!”

I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer,--only it seemed so
unlikely,--“Well? You can break his heart.”

“What do you play, boy?” asked Estella of myself, with the greatest
disdain.

“Nothing but beggar my neighbor, miss.”

“Beggar him,” said Miss Havisham to Estella. So we sat down to cards.

It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had
stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed that
Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from which she had
taken it up. As Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at the dressing-table
again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once white, now yellow, had never
been worn. I glanced down at the foot from which the shoe was absent,
and saw that the silk stocking on it, once white, now yellow, had been
trodden ragged. Without this arrest of everything, this standing still
of all the pale decayed objects, not even the withered bridal dress on
the collapsed form could have looked so like grave-clothes, or the long
veil so like a shroud.

So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the frillings and
trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper. I knew nothing
then of the discoveries that are occasionally made of bodies buried in
ancient times, which fall to powder in the moment of being distinctly
seen; but, I have often thought since, that she must have looked as if
the admission of the natural light of day would have struck her to dust.

“He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!” said Estella with disdain, before
our first game was out. “And what coarse hands he has! And what thick
boots!”

I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began
to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me was so
strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.

She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural, when I
knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong; and she denounced me for
a stupid, clumsy laboring-boy.

“You say nothing of her,” remarked Miss Havisham to me, as she looked
on. “She says many hard things of you, but you say nothing of her. What
do you think of her?”

“I don't like to say,” I stammered.

“Tell me in my ear,” said Miss Havisham, bending down.

“I think she is very proud,” I replied, in a whisper.

“Anything else?”

“I think she is very pretty.”

“Anything else?”

“I think she is very insulting.” (She was looking at me then with a look
of supreme aversion.)

“Anything else?”

“I think I should like to go home.”

“And never see her again, though she is so pretty?”

“I am not sure that I shouldn't like to see her again, but I should like
to go home now.”

“You shall go soon,” said Miss Havisham, aloud. “Play the game out.”

Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should have felt almost
sure that Miss Havisham's face could not smile. It had dropped into a
watchful and brooding expression,--most likely when all the things about
her had become transfixed,--and it looked as if nothing could ever lift
it up again. Her chest had dropped, so that she stooped; and her voice
had dropped, so that she spoke low, and with a dead lull upon her;
altogether, she had the appearance of having dropped body and soul,
within and without, under the weight of a crushing blow.

I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me. She
threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if she
despised them for having been won of me.

“When shall I have you here again?” said Miss Havisham. “Let me think.”

I was beginning to remind her that to-day was Wednesday, when she
checked me with her former impatient movement of the fingers of her
right hand.

“There, there! I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing of
weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You hear?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him roam
and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip.”

I followed the candle down, as I had followed the candle up, and she
stood it in the place where we had found it. Until she opened the
side entrance, I had fancied, without thinking about it, that it must
necessarily be night-time. The rush of the daylight quite confounded me,
and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight of the strange room
many hours.

“You are to wait here, you boy,” said Estella; and disappeared and
closed the door.

I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard to look at my
coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was
not favorable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled
me now, as vulgar appendages. I determined to ask Joe why he had ever
taught me to call those picture-cards Jacks, which ought to be called
knaves. I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and then
I should have been so too.

She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer. She
put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread
and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a dog in
disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry,--I
cannot hit upon the right name for the smart--God knows what its name
was,--that tears started to my eyes. The moment they sprang there, the
girl looked at me with a quick delight in having been the cause of them.
This gave me power to keep them back and to look at her: so, she gave a
contemptuous toss--but with a sense, I thought, of having made too sure
that I was so wounded--and left me.

But when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my face
in, and got behind one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and leaned my
sleeve against the wall there, and leaned my forehead on it and cried.
As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist at my hair; so
bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart without a name, that
needed counteraction.

My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in
which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is
nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be
only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child
is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many
hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within
myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with
injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my
sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had
cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand gave her
no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces,
fasts, and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed
this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and
unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid
and very sensitive.

I got rid of my injured feelings for the time by kicking them into the
brewery wall, and twisting them out of my hair, and then I smoothed my
face with my sleeve, and came from behind the gate. The bread and meat
were acceptable, and the beer was warming and tingling, and I was soon
in spirits to look about me.

To be sure, it was a deserted place, down to the pigeon-house in the
brewery-yard, which had been blown crooked on its pole by some high
wind, and would have made the pigeons think themselves at sea, if there
had been any pigeons there to be rocked by it. But there were no pigeons
in the dove-cot, no horses in the stable, no pigs in the sty, no malt in
the storehouse, no smells of grains and beer in the copper or the vat.
All the uses and scents of the brewery might have evaporated with its
last reek of smoke. In a by-yard, there was a wilderness of empty casks,
which had a certain sour remembrance of better days lingering about
them; but it was too sour to be accepted as a sample of the beer that
was gone,--and in this respect I remember those recluses as being like
most others.

Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden with an old
wall; not so high but that I could struggle up and hold on long enough
to look over it, and see that the rank garden was the garden of the
house, and that it was overgrown with tangled weeds, but that there was
a track upon the green and yellow paths, as if some one sometimes walked
there, and that Estella was walking away from me even then. But she
seemed to be everywhere. For when I yielded to the temptation presented
by the casks, and began to walk on them, I saw her walking on them at
the end of the yard of casks. She had her back towards me, and held her
pretty brown hair spread out in her two hands, and never looked round,
and passed out of my view directly. So, in the brewery itself,--by which
I mean the large paved lofty place in which they used to make the beer,
and where the brewing utensils still were. When I first went into it,
and, rather oppressed by its gloom, stood near the door looking about
me, I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and ascend some light
iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead, as if she were going
out into the sky.

It was in this place, and at this moment, that a strange thing happened
to my fancy. I thought it a strange thing then, and I thought it a
stranger thing long afterwards. I turned my eyes--a little dimmed by
looking up at the frosty light--towards a great wooden beam in a low
nook of the building near me on my right hand, and I saw a figure
hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white, with but
one shoe to the feet; and it hung so, that I could see that the faded
trimmings of the dress were like earthy paper, and that the face was
Miss Havisham's, with a movement going over the whole countenance as if
she were trying to call to me. In the terror of seeing the figure,
and in the terror of being certain that it had not been there a moment
before, I at first ran from it, and then ran towards it. And my terror
was greatest of all when I found no figure there.

Nothing less than the frosty light of the cheerful sky, the sight of
people passing beyond the bars of the court-yard gate, and the reviving
influence of the rest of the bread and meat and beer, would have brought
me round. Even with those aids, I might not have come to myself as soon
as I did, but that I saw Estella approaching with the keys, to let
me out. She would have some fair reason for looking down upon me, I
thought, if she saw me frightened; and she would have no fair reason.

She gave me a triumphant glance in passing me, as if she rejoiced that
my hands were so coarse and my boots were so thick, and she opened the
gate, and stood holding it. I was passing out without looking at her,
when she touched me with a taunting hand.

“Why don't you cry?”

“Because I don't want to.”

“You do,” said she. “You have been crying till you are half blind, and
you are near crying again now.”

She laughed contemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon me.
I went straight to Mr. Pumblechook's, and was immensely relieved to find
him not at home. So, leaving word with the shopman on what day I was
wanted at Miss Havisham's again, I set off on the four-mile walk to
our forge; pondering, as I went along, on all I had seen, and deeply
revolving that I was a common laboring-boy; that my hands were coarse;
that my boots were thick; that I had fallen into a despicable habit
of calling knaves Jacks; that I was much more ignorant than I had
considered myself last night, and generally that I was in a low-lived
bad way.




Chapter IX

When I reached home, my sister was very curious to know all about Miss
Havisham's, and asked a number of questions. And I soon found myself
getting heavily bumped from behind in the nape of the neck and the small
of the back, and having my face ignominiously shoved against the kitchen
wall, because I did not answer those questions at sufficient length.

If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other
young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden
in mine,--which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason
to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity,--it is the key to many
reservations. I felt convinced that if I described Miss Havisham's as my
eyes had seen it, I should not be understood. Not only that, but I felt
convinced that Miss Havisham too would not be understood; and although
she was perfectly incomprehensible to me, I entertained an impression
that there would be something coarse and treacherous in my dragging
her as she really was (to say nothing of Miss Estella) before the
contemplation of Mrs. Joe. Consequently, I said as little as I could,
and had my face shoved against the kitchen wall.

The worst of it was that that bullying old Pumblechook, preyed upon by
a devouring curiosity to be informed of all I had seen and heard, came
gaping over in his chaise-cart at tea-time, to have the details divulged
to him. And the mere sight of the torment, with his fishy eyes and mouth
open, his sandy hair inquisitively on end, and his waistcoat heaving
with windy arithmetic, made me vicious in my reticence.

“Well, boy,” Uncle Pumblechook began, as soon as he was seated in the
chair of honor by the fire. “How did you get on up town?”

I answered, “Pretty well, sir,” and my sister shook her fist at me.

“Pretty well?” Mr. Pumblechook repeated. “Pretty well is no answer. Tell
us what you mean by pretty well, boy?”

Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy
perhaps. Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall on my forehead, my
obstinacy was adamantine. I reflected for some time, and then answered
as if I had discovered a new idea, “I mean pretty well.”

My sister with an exclamation of impatience was going to fly at me,--I
had no shadow of defence, for Joe was busy in the forge,--when Mr.
Pumblechook interposed with “No! Don't lose your temper. Leave this
lad to me, ma'am; leave this lad to me.” Mr. Pumblechook then turned me
towards him, as if he were going to cut my hair, and said,--

“First (to get our thoughts in order): Forty-three pence?”

I calculated the consequences of replying “Four Hundred Pound,” and
finding them against me, went as near the answer as I could--which was
somewhere about eightpence off. Mr. Pumblechook then put me through my
pence-table from “twelve pence make one shilling,” up to “forty pence
make three and fourpence,” and then triumphantly demanded, as if he had
done for me, “Now! How much is forty-three pence?” To which I replied,
after a long interval of reflection, “I don't know.” And I was so
aggravated that I almost doubt if I did know.

Mr. Pumblechook worked his head like a screw to screw it out of me,
and said, “Is forty-three pence seven and sixpence three fardens, for
instance?”

“Yes!” said I. And although my sister instantly boxed my ears, it was
highly gratifying to me to see that the answer spoilt his joke, and
brought him to a dead stop.

“Boy! What like is Miss Havisham?” Mr. Pumblechook began again when
he had recovered; folding his arms tight on his chest and applying the
screw.

“Very tall and dark,” I told him.

“Is she, uncle?” asked my sister.

Mr. Pumblechook winked assent; from which I at once inferred that he had
never seen Miss Havisham, for she was nothing of the kind.

“Good!” said Mr. Pumblechook conceitedly. (“This is the way to have him!
We are beginning to hold our own, I think, Mum?”)

“I am sure, uncle,” returned Mrs. Joe, “I wish you had him always; you
know so well how to deal with him.”

“Now, boy! What was she a doing of, when you went in today?” asked Mr.
Pumblechook.

“She was sitting,” I answered, “in a black velvet coach.”

Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another--as they well
might--and both repeated, “In a black velvet coach?”

“Yes,” said I. “And Miss Estella--that's her niece, I think--handed her
in cake and wine at the coach-window, on a gold plate. And we all had
cake and wine on gold plates. And I got up behind the coach to eat mine,
because she told me to.”

“Was anybody else there?” asked Mr. Pumblechook.

“Four dogs,” said I.

“Large or small?”

“Immense,” said I. “And they fought for veal-cutlets out of a silver
basket.”

Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another again, in utter
amazement. I was perfectly frantic,--a reckless witness under the
torture,--and would have told them anything.

“Where was this coach, in the name of gracious?” asked my sister.

“In Miss Havisham's room.” They stared again. “But there weren't any
horses to it.” I added this saving clause, in the moment of rejecting
four richly caparisoned coursers which I had had wild thoughts of
harnessing.

“Can this be possible, uncle?” asked Mrs. Joe. “What can the boy mean?”

“I'll tell you, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “My opinion is, it's a
sedan-chair. She's flighty, you know,--very flighty,--quite flighty
enough to pass her days in a sedan-chair.”

“Did you ever see her in it, uncle?” asked Mrs. Joe.

“How could I,” he returned, forced to the admission, “when I never see
her in my life? Never clapped eyes upon her!”

“Goodness, uncle! And yet you have spoken to her?”

“Why, don't you know,” said Mr. Pumblechook, testily, “that when I have
been there, I have been took up to the outside of her door, and the door
has stood ajar, and she has spoke to me that way. Don't say you don't
know that, Mum. Howsever, the boy went there to play. What did you play
at, boy?”

“We played with flags,” I said. (I beg to observe that I think of myself
with amazement, when I recall the lies I told on this occasion.)

“Flags!” echoed my sister.

“Yes,” said I. “Estella waved a blue flag, and I waved a red one, and
Miss Havisham waved one sprinkled all over with little gold stars, out
at the coach-window. And then we all waved our swords and hurrahed.”

“Swords!” repeated my sister. “Where did you get swords from?”

“Out of a cupboard,” said I. “And I saw pistols in it,--and jam,--and
pills. And there was no daylight in the room, but it was all lighted up
with candles.”

“That's true, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook, with a grave nod. “That's the
state of the case, for that much I've seen myself.” And then they
both stared at me, and I, with an obtrusive show of artlessness on my
countenance, stared at them, and plaited the right leg of my trousers
with my right hand.

If they had asked me any more questions, I should undoubtedly have
betrayed myself, for I was even then on the point of mentioning that
there was a balloon in the yard, and should have hazarded the statement
but for my invention being divided between that phenomenon and a bear
in the brewery. They were so much occupied, however, in discussing the
marvels I had already presented for their consideration, that I escaped.
The subject still held them when Joe came in from his work to have a cup
of tea. To whom my sister, more for the relief of her own mind than for
the gratification of his, related my pretended experiences.

Now, when I saw Joe open his blue eyes and roll them all round the
kitchen in helpless amazement, I was overtaken by penitence; but only as
regarded him,--not in the least as regarded the other two. Towards
Joe, and Joe only, I considered myself a young monster, while they sat
debating what results would come to me from Miss Havisham's acquaintance
and favor. They had no doubt that Miss Havisham would “do something”
 for me; their doubts related to the form that something would take.
My sister stood out for “property.” Mr. Pumblechook was in favor of a
handsome premium for binding me apprentice to some genteel trade,--say,
the corn and seed trade, for instance. Joe fell into the deepest
disgrace with both, for offering the bright suggestion that I might only
be presented with one of the dogs who had fought for the veal-cutlets.
“If a fool's head can't express better opinions than that,” said my
sister, “and you have got any work to do, you had better go and do it.”
 So he went.

After Mr. Pumblechook had driven off, and when my sister was washing up,
I stole into the forge to Joe, and remained by him until he had done for
the night. Then I said, “Before the fire goes out, Joe, I should like to
tell you something.”

“Should you, Pip?” said Joe, drawing his shoeing-stool near the forge.
“Then tell us. What is it, Pip?”

“Joe,” said I, taking hold of his rolled-up shirt sleeve, and twisting
it between my finger and thumb, “you remember all that about Miss
Havisham's?”

“Remember?” said Joe. “I believe you! Wonderful!”

“It's a terrible thing, Joe; it ain't true.”

“What are you telling of, Pip?” cried Joe, falling back in the greatest
amazement. “You don't mean to say it's--”

“Yes I do; it's lies, Joe.”

“But not all of it? Why sure you don't mean to say, Pip, that there was
no black welwet co--eh?” For, I stood shaking my head. “But at least
there was dogs, Pip? Come, Pip,” said Joe, persuasively, “if there
warn't no weal-cutlets, at least there was dogs?”

“No, Joe.”

“A dog?” said Joe. “A puppy? Come?”

“No, Joe, there was nothing at all of the kind.”

As I fixed my eyes hopelessly on Joe, Joe contemplated me in dismay.
“Pip, old chap! This won't do, old fellow! I say! Where do you expect to
go to?”

“It's terrible, Joe; ain't it?”

“Terrible?” cried Joe. “Awful! What possessed you?”

“I don't know what possessed me, Joe,” I replied, letting his shirt
sleeve go, and sitting down in the ashes at his feet, hanging my head;
“but I wish you hadn't taught me to call Knaves at cards Jacks; and I
wish my boots weren't so thick nor my hands so coarse.”

And then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, and that I hadn't been
able to explain myself to Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, who were so rude to
me, and that there had been a beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's
who was dreadfully proud, and that she had said I was common, and that I
knew I was common, and that I wished I was not common, and that the lies
had come of it somehow, though I didn't know how.

This was a case of metaphysics, at least as difficult for Joe to deal
with as for me. But Joe took the case altogether out of the region of
metaphysics, and by that means vanquished it.

“There's one thing you may be sure of, Pip,” said Joe, after some
rumination, “namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they didn't
ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and work round to
the same. Don't you tell no more of 'em, Pip. That ain't the way to get
out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don't make
it out at all clear. You are oncommon in some things. You're oncommon
small. Likewise you're a oncommon scholar.”

“No, I am ignorant and backward, Joe.”

“Why, see what a letter you wrote last night! Wrote in print even! I've
seen letters--Ah! and from gentlefolks!--that I'll swear weren't wrote
in print,” said Joe.

“I have learnt next to nothing, Joe. You think much of me. It's only
that.”

“Well, Pip,” said Joe, “be it so or be it son't, you must be a common
scholar afore you can be a oncommon one, I should hope! The king upon
his throne, with his crown upon his ed, can't sit and write his acts
of Parliament in print, without having begun, when he were a unpromoted
Prince, with the alphabet.--Ah!” added Joe, with a shake of the head
that was full of meaning, “and begun at A too, and worked his way to Z.
And I know what that is to do, though I can't say I've exactly done it.”

There was some hope in this piece of wisdom, and it rather encouraged
me.

“Whether common ones as to callings and earnings,” pursued Joe,
reflectively, “mightn't be the better of continuing for to keep
company with common ones, instead of going out to play with oncommon
ones,--which reminds me to hope that there were a flag, perhaps?”

“No, Joe.”

“(I'm sorry there weren't a flag, Pip). Whether that might be or
mightn't be, is a thing as can't be looked into now, without putting
your sister on the Rampage; and that's a thing not to be thought of as
being done intentional. Lookee here, Pip, at what is said to you by a
true friend. Which this to you the true friend say. If you can't get to
be oncommon through going straight, you'll never get to do it through
going crooked. So don't tell no more on 'em, Pip, and live well and die
happy.”

“You are not angry with me, Joe?”

“No, old chap. But bearing in mind that them were which I meantersay
of a stunning and outdacious sort,--alluding to them which bordered on
weal-cutlets and dog-fighting,--a sincere well-wisher would adwise, Pip,
their being dropped into your meditations, when you go upstairs to bed.
That's all, old chap, and don't never do it no more.”

When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I did not forget
Joe's recommendation, and yet my young mind was in that disturbed and
unthankful state, that I thought long after I laid me down, how common
Estella would consider Joe, a mere blacksmith; how thick his boots, and
how coarse his hands. I thought how Joe and my sister were then sitting
in the kitchen, and how I had come up to bed from the kitchen, and how
Miss Havisham and Estella never sat in a kitchen, but were far above the
level of such common doings. I fell asleep recalling what I “used to
do” when I was at Miss Havisham's; as though I had been there weeks or
months, instead of hours; and as though it were quite an old subject of
remembrance, instead of one that had arisen only that day.

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it
is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it,
and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read
this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold,
of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the
formation of the first link on one memorable day.




Chapter X

The felicitous idea occurred to me a morning or two later when I woke,
that the best step I could take towards making myself uncommon was to
get out of Biddy everything she knew. In pursuance of this luminous
conception I mentioned to Biddy when I went to Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's
at night, that I had a particular reason for wishing to get on in life,
and that I should feel very much obliged to her if she would impart
all her learning to me. Biddy, who was the most obliging of girls,
immediately said she would, and indeed began to carry out her promise
within five minutes.

The Educational scheme or Course established by Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt
may be resolved into the following synopsis. The pupils ate apples
and put straws down one another's backs, until Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt
collected her energies, and made an indiscriminate totter at them with
a birch-rod. After receiving the charge with every mark of derision, the
pupils formed in line and buzzingly passed a ragged book from hand to
hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some figures and tables, and
a little spelling,--that is to say, it had had once. As soon as this
volume began to circulate, Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt fell into a state of
coma, arising either from sleep or a rheumatic paroxysm. The pupils then
entered among themselves upon a competitive examination on the subject
of Boots, with the view of ascertaining who could tread the hardest upon
whose toes. This mental exercise lasted until Biddy made a rush at
them and distributed three defaced Bibles (shaped as if they had been
unskilfully cut off the chump end of something), more illegibly printed
at the best than any curiosities of literature I have since met with,
speckled all over with ironmould, and having various specimens of the
insect world smashed between their leaves. This part of the Course was
usually lightened by several single combats between Biddy and refractory
students. When the fights were over, Biddy gave out the number of a
page, and then we all read aloud what we could,--or what we couldn't--in
a frightful chorus; Biddy leading with a high, shrill, monotonous voice,
and none of us having the least notion of, or reverence for, what we
were reading about. When this horrible din had lasted a certain time,
it mechanically awoke Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, who staggered at a boy
fortuitously, and pulled his ears. This was understood to terminate
the Course for the evening, and we emerged into the air with shrieks of
intellectual victory. It is fair to remark that there was no prohibition
against any pupil's entertaining himself with a slate or even with the
ink (when there was any), but that it was not easy to pursue that branch
of study in the winter season, on account of the little general shop
in which the classes were holden--and which was also Mr. Wopsle's
great-aunt's sitting-room and bedchamber--being but faintly illuminated
through the agency of one low-spirited dip-candle and no snuffers.

It appeared to me that it would take time to become uncommon, under
these circumstances: nevertheless, I resolved to try it, and that
very evening Biddy entered on our special agreement, by imparting some
information from her little catalogue of Prices, under the head of moist
sugar, and lending me, to copy at home, a large old English D which she
had imitated from the heading of some newspaper, and which I supposed,
until she told me what it was, to be a design for a buckle.

Of course there was a public-house in the village, and of course Joe
liked sometimes to smoke his pipe there. I had received strict orders
from my sister to call for him at the Three Jolly Bargemen, that
evening, on my way from school, and bring him home at my peril. To the
Three Jolly Bargemen, therefore, I directed my steps.

There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some alarmingly long chalk
scores in it on the wall at the side of the door, which seemed to me to
be never paid off. They had been there ever since I could remember, and
had grown more than I had. But there was a quantity of chalk about our
country, and perhaps the people neglected no opportunity of turning it
to account.

It being Saturday night, I found the landlord looking rather grimly
at these records; but as my business was with Joe and not with him, I
merely wished him good evening, and passed into the common room at the
end of the passage, where there was a bright large kitchen fire,
and where Joe was smoking his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle and a
stranger. Joe greeted me as usual with “Halloa, Pip, old chap!” and the
moment he said that, the stranger turned his head and looked at me.

He was a secret-looking man whom I had never seen before. His head was
all on one side, and one of his eyes was half shut up, as if he were
taking aim at something with an invisible gun. He had a pipe in his
mouth, and he took it out, and, after slowly blowing all his smoke away
and looking hard at me all the time, nodded. So, I nodded, and then he
nodded again, and made room on the settle beside him that I might sit
down there.

But as I was used to sit beside Joe whenever I entered that place of
resort, I said “No, thank you, sir,” and fell into the space Joe made
for me on the opposite settle. The strange man, after glancing at Joe,
and seeing that his attention was otherwise engaged, nodded to me again
when I had taken my seat, and then rubbed his leg--in a very odd way, as
it struck me.

“You was saying,” said the strange man, turning to Joe, “that you was a
blacksmith.”

“Yes. I said it, you know,” said Joe.

“What'll you drink, Mr.--? You didn't mention your name, by the bye.”

Joe mentioned it now, and the strange man called him by it. “What'll you
drink, Mr. Gargery? At my expense? To top up with?”

“Well,” said Joe, “to tell you the truth, I ain't much in the habit of
drinking at anybody's expense but my own.”

“Habit? No,” returned the stranger, “but once and away, and on a
Saturday night too. Come! Put a name to it, Mr. Gargery.”

“I wouldn't wish to be stiff company,” said Joe. “Rum.”

“Rum,” repeated the stranger. “And will the other gentleman originate a
sentiment.”

“Rum,” said Mr. Wopsle.

“Three Rums!” cried the stranger, calling to the landlord. “Glasses
round!”

“This other gentleman,” observed Joe, by way of introducing Mr. Wopsle,
“is a gentleman that you would like to hear give it out. Our clerk at
church.”

“Aha!” said the stranger, quickly, and cocking his eye at me. “The
lonely church, right out on the marshes, with graves round it!”

“That's it,” said Joe.

The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over his pipe, put
his legs up on the settle that he had to himself. He wore a flapping
broad-brimmed traveller's hat, and under it a handkerchief tied over his
head in the manner of a cap: so that he showed no hair. As he looked
at the fire, I thought I saw a cunning expression, followed by a
half-laugh, come into his face.

“I am not acquainted with this country, gentlemen, but it seems a
solitary country towards the river.”

“Most marshes is solitary,” said Joe.

“No doubt, no doubt. Do you find any gypsies, now, or tramps, or
vagrants of any sort, out there?”

“No,” said Joe; “none but a runaway convict now and then. And we don't
find them, easy. Eh, Mr. Wopsle?”

Mr. Wopsle, with a majestic remembrance of old discomfiture, assented;
but not warmly.

“Seems you have been out after such?” asked the stranger.

“Once,” returned Joe. “Not that we wanted to take them, you understand;
we went out as lookers on; me, and Mr. Wopsle, and Pip. Didn't us, Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

The stranger looked at me again,--still cocking his eye, as if he were
expressly taking aim at me with his invisible gun,--and said, “He's a
likely young parcel of bones that. What is it you call him?”

“Pip,” said Joe.

“Christened Pip?”

“No, not christened Pip.”

“Surname Pip?”

“No,” said Joe, “it's a kind of family name what he gave himself when a
infant, and is called by.”

“Son of yours?”

“Well,” said Joe, meditatively, not, of course, that it could be in
anywise necessary to consider about it, but because it was the way at
the Jolly Bargemen to seem to consider deeply about everything that was
discussed over pipes,--“well--no. No, he ain't.”

“Nevvy?” said the strange man.

“Well,” said Joe, with the same appearance of profound cogitation, “he
is not--no, not to deceive you, he is not--my nevvy.”

“What the Blue Blazes is he?” asked the stranger. Which appeared to me
to be an inquiry of unnecessary strength.

Mr. Wopsle struck in upon that; as one who knew all about relationships,
having professional occasion to bear in mind what female relations a man
might not marry; and expounded the ties between me and Joe. Having
his hand in, Mr. Wopsle finished off with a most terrifically snarling
passage from Richard the Third, and seemed to think he had done quite
enough to account for it when he added, “--as the poet says.”

And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he considered
it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and poke it into
my eyes. I cannot conceive why everybody of his standing who visited
at our house should always have put me through the same inflammatory
process under similar circumstances. Yet I do not call to mind that I
was ever in my earlier youth the subject of remark in our social family
circle, but some large-handed person took some such ophthalmic steps to
patronize me.

All this while, the strange man looked at nobody but me, and looked at
me as if he were determined to have a shot at me at last, and bring me
down. But he said nothing after offering his Blue Blazes observation,
until the glasses of rum and water were brought; and then he made his
shot, and a most extraordinary shot it was.

It was not a verbal remark, but a proceeding in dumb-show, and was
pointedly addressed to me. He stirred his rum and water pointedly at me,
and he tasted his rum and water pointedly at me. And he stirred it and
he tasted it; not with a spoon that was brought to him, but with a file.

He did this so that nobody but I saw the file; and when he had done it
he wiped the file and put it in a breast-pocket. I knew it to be
Joe's file, and I knew that he knew my convict, the moment I saw the
instrument. I sat gazing at him, spell-bound. But he now reclined on his
settle, taking very little notice of me, and talking principally about
turnips.

There was a delicious sense of cleaning-up and making a quiet pause
before going on in life afresh, in our village on Saturday nights, which
stimulated Joe to dare to stay out half an hour longer on Saturdays
than at other times. The half-hour and the rum and water running out
together, Joe got up to go, and took me by the hand.

“Stop half a moment, Mr. Gargery,” said the strange man. “I think I've
got a bright new shilling somewhere in my pocket, and if I have, the boy
shall have it.”

He looked it out from a handful of small change, folded it in some
crumpled paper, and gave it to me. “Yours!” said he. “Mind! Your own.”

I thanked him, staring at him far beyond the bounds of good manners,
and holding tight to Joe. He gave Joe good-night, and he gave Mr. Wopsle
good-night (who went out with us), and he gave me only a look with his
aiming eye,--no, not a look, for he shut it up, but wonders may be done
with an eye by hiding it.

On the way home, if I had been in a humor for talking, the talk must
have been all on my side, for Mr. Wopsle parted from us at the door of
the Jolly Bargemen, and Joe went all the way home with his mouth wide
open, to rinse the rum out with as much air as possible. But I was in
a manner stupefied by this turning up of my old misdeed and old
acquaintance, and could think of nothing else.

My sister was not in a very bad temper when we presented ourselves in
the kitchen, and Joe was encouraged by that unusual circumstance to tell
her about the bright shilling. “A bad un, I'll be bound,” said Mrs. Joe
triumphantly, “or he wouldn't have given it to the boy! Let's look at
it.”

I took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good one. “But what's
this?” said Mrs. Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching up the
paper. “Two One-Pound notes?”

Nothing less than two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have
been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle-markets in
the county. Joe caught up his hat again, and ran with them to the Jolly
Bargemen to restore them to their owner. While he was gone, I sat down
on my usual stool and looked vacantly at my sister, feeling pretty sure
that the man would not be there.

Presently, Joe came back, saying that the man was gone, but that he,
Joe, had left word at the Three Jolly Bargemen concerning the notes.
Then my sister sealed them up in a piece of paper, and put them under
some dried rose-leaves in an ornamental teapot on the top of a press in
the state parlor. There they remained, a nightmare to me, many and many
a night and day.

I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed, through thinking of the
strange man taking aim at me with his invisible gun, and of the guiltily
coarse and common thing it was, to be on secret terms of conspiracy with
convicts,--a feature in my low career that I had previously forgotten.
I was haunted by the file too. A dread possessed me that when I least
expected it, the file would reappear. I coaxed myself to sleep by
thinking of Miss Havisham's, next Wednesday; and in my sleep I saw
the file coming at me out of a door, without seeing who held it, and I
screamed myself awake.




Chapter XI

At the appointed time I returned to Miss Havisham's, and my hesitating
ring at the gate brought out Estella. She locked it after admitting
me, as she had done before, and again preceded me into the dark passage
where her candle stood. She took no notice of me until she had the
candle in her hand, when she looked over her shoulder, superciliously
saying, “You are to come this way to-day,” and took me to quite another
part of the house.

The passage was a long one, and seemed to pervade the whole square
basement of the Manor House. We traversed but one side of the square,
however, and at the end of it she stopped, and put her candle down and
opened a door. Here, the daylight reappeared, and I found myself in
a small paved courtyard, the opposite side of which was formed by a
detached dwelling-house, that looked as if it had once belonged to the
manager or head clerk of the extinct brewery. There was a clock in the
outer wall of this house. Like the clock in Miss Havisham's room, and
like Miss Havisham's watch, it had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.

We went in at the door, which stood open, and into a gloomy room with a
low ceiling, on the ground-floor at the back. There was some company in
the room, and Estella said to me as she joined it, “You are to go and
stand there boy, till you are wanted.” “There”, being the window, I
crossed to it, and stood “there,” in a very uncomfortable state of mind,
looking out.

It opened to the ground, and looked into a most miserable corner of the
neglected garden, upon a rank ruin of cabbage-stalks, and one box-tree
that had been clipped round long ago, like a pudding, and had a new
growth at the top of it, out of shape and of a different color, as if
that part of the pudding had stuck to the saucepan and got burnt. This
was my homely thought, as I contemplated the box-tree. There had been
some light snow, overnight, and it lay nowhere else to my knowledge;
but, it had not quite melted from the cold shadow of this bit of garden,
and the wind caught it up in little eddies and threw it at the window,
as if it pelted me for coming there.

I divined that my coming had stopped conversation in the room, and that
its other occupants were looking at me. I could see nothing of the room
except the shining of the fire in the window-glass, but I stiffened in
all my joints with the consciousness that I was under close inspection.

There were three ladies in the room and one gentleman. Before I had been
standing at the window five minutes, they somehow conveyed to me that
they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not
to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the admission
that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to be a toady
and humbug.

They all had a listless and dreary air of waiting somebody's pleasure,
and the most talkative of the ladies had to speak quite rigidly to
repress a yawn. This lady, whose name was Camilla, very much reminded
me of my sister, with the difference that she was older, and (as I found
when I caught sight of her) of a blunter cast of features. Indeed, when
I knew her better I began to think it was a Mercy she had any features
at all, so very blank and high was the dead wall of her face.

“Poor dear soul!” said this lady, with an abruptness of manner quite my
sister's. “Nobody's enemy but his own!”

“It would be much more commendable to be somebody else's enemy,” said
the gentleman; “far more natural.”

“Cousin Raymond,” observed another lady, “we are to love our neighbor.”

“Sarah Pocket,” returned Cousin Raymond, “if a man is not his own
neighbor, who is?”

Miss Pocket laughed, and Camilla laughed and said (checking a yawn),
“The idea!” But I thought they seemed to think it rather a good
idea too. The other lady, who had not spoken yet, said gravely and
emphatically, “Very true!”

“Poor soul!” Camilla presently went on (I knew they had all been looking
at me in the mean time), “he is so very strange! Would anyone believe
that when Tom's wife died, he actually could not be induced to see the
importance of the children's having the deepest of trimmings to their
mourning? 'Good Lord!' says he, 'Camilla, what can it signify so long
as the poor bereaved little things are in black?' So like Matthew! The
idea!”

“Good points in him, good points in him,” said Cousin Raymond; “Heaven
forbid I should deny good points in him; but he never had, and he never
will have, any sense of the proprieties.”

“You know I was obliged,” said Camilla,--“I was obliged to be firm. I
said, 'It WILL NOT DO, for the credit of the family.' I told him that,
without deep trimmings, the family was disgraced. I cried about it from
breakfast till dinner. I injured my digestion. And at last he flung out
in his violent way, and said, with a D, 'Then do as you like.' Thank
Goodness it will always be a consolation to me to know that I instantly
went out in a pouring rain and bought the things.”

“He paid for them, did he not?” asked Estella.

“It's not the question, my dear child, who paid for them,” returned
Camilla. “I bought them. And I shall often think of that with peace,
when I wake up in the night.”

The ringing of a distant bell, combined with the echoing of some cry or
call along the passage by which I had come, interrupted the conversation
and caused Estella to say to me, “Now, boy!” On my turning round, they
all looked at me with the utmost contempt, and, as I went out, I heard
Sarah Pocket say, “Well I am sure! What next!” and Camilla add, with
indignation, “Was there ever such a fancy! The i-de-a!”

As we were going with our candle along the dark passage, Estella stopped
all of a sudden, and, facing round, said in her taunting manner, with
her face quite close to mine,--

“Well?”

“Well, miss?” I answered, almost falling over her and checking myself.

She stood looking at me, and, of course, I stood looking at her.

“Am I pretty?”

“Yes; I think you are very pretty.”

“Am I insulting?”

“Not so much so as you were last time,” said I.

“Not so much so?”

“No.”

She fired when she asked the last question, and she slapped my face with
such force as she had, when I answered it.

“Now?” said she. “You little coarse monster, what do you think of me
now?”

“I shall not tell you.”

“Because you are going to tell upstairs. Is that it?”

“No,” said I, “that's not it.”

“Why don't you cry again, you little wretch?”

“Because I'll never cry for you again,” said I. Which was, I suppose, as
false a declaration as ever was made; for I was inwardly crying for her
then, and I know what I know of the pain she cost me afterwards.

We went on our way upstairs after this episode; and, as we were going
up, we met a gentleman groping his way down.

“Whom have we here?” asked the gentleman, stopping and looking at me.

“A boy,” said Estella.

He was a burly man of an exceedingly dark complexion, with an
exceedingly large head, and a corresponding large hand. He took my chin
in his large hand and turned up my face to have a look at me by the
light of the candle. He was prematurely bald on the top of his head, and
had bushy black eyebrows that wouldn't lie down but stood up bristling.
His eyes were set very deep in his head, and were disagreeably sharp and
suspicious. He had a large watch-chain, and strong black dots where his
beard and whiskers would have been if he had let them. He was nothing
to me, and I could have had no foresight then, that he ever would be
anything to me, but it happened that I had this opportunity of observing
him well.

“Boy of the neighborhood? Hey?” said he.

“Yes, sir,” said I.

“How do you come here?”

“Miss Havisham sent for me, sir,” I explained.

“Well! Behave yourself. I have a pretty large experience of boys, and
you're a bad set of fellows. Now mind!” said he, biting the side of his
great forefinger as he frowned at me, “you behave yourself!”

With those words, he released me--which I was glad of, for his hand
smelt of scented soap--and went his way downstairs. I wondered whether
he could be a doctor; but no, I thought; he couldn't be a doctor, or he
would have a quieter and more persuasive manner. There was not much time
to consider the subject, for we were soon in Miss Havisham's room, where
she and everything else were just as I had left them. Estella left me
standing near the door, and I stood there until Miss Havisham cast her
eyes upon me from the dressing-table.

“So!” she said, without being startled or surprised: “the days have worn
away, have they?”

“Yes, ma'am. To-day is--”

“There, there, there!” with the impatient movement of her fingers. “I
don't want to know. Are you ready to play?”

I was obliged to answer in some confusion, “I don't think I am, ma'am.”

“Not at cards again?” she demanded, with a searching look.

“Yes, ma'am; I could do that, if I was wanted.”

“Since this house strikes you old and grave, boy,” said Miss Havisham,
impatiently, “and you are unwilling to play, are you willing to work?”

I could answer this inquiry with a better heart than I had been able to
find for the other question, and I said I was quite willing.

“Then go into that opposite room,” said she, pointing at the door behind
me with her withered hand, “and wait there till I come.”

I crossed the staircase landing, and entered the room she indicated.
From that room, too, the daylight was completely excluded, and it had an
airless smell that was oppressive. A fire had been lately kindled in
the damp old-fashioned grate, and it was more disposed to go out than
to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed colder
than the clearer air,--like our own marsh mist. Certain wintry branches
of candles on the high chimney-piece faintly lighted the chamber; or it
would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness. It was
spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible
thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The
most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it,
as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all
stopped together. An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the
middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its
form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow
expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black
fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home
to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest
public importance had just transpired in the spider community.

I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same
occurrence were important to their interests. But the black beetles took
no notice of the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a ponderous
elderly way, as if they were short-sighted and hard of hearing, and not
on terms with one another.

These crawling things had fascinated my attention, and I was watching
them from a distance, when Miss Havisham laid a hand upon my shoulder.
In her other hand she had a crutch-headed stick on which she leaned, and
she looked like the Witch of the place.

“This,” said she, pointing to the long table with her stick, “is where I
will be laid when I am dead. They shall come and look at me here.”

With some vague misgiving that she might get upon the table then and
there and die at once, the complete realization of the ghastly waxwork
at the Fair, I shrank under her touch.

“What do you think that is?” she asked me, again pointing with her
stick; “that, where those cobwebs are?”

“I can't guess what it is, ma'am.”

“It's a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!”

She looked all round the room in a glaring manner, and then said,
leaning on me while her hand twitched my shoulder, “Come, come, come!
Walk me, walk me!”

I made out from this, that the work I had to do, was to walk Miss
Havisham round and round the room. Accordingly, I started at once, and
she leaned upon my shoulder, and we went away at a pace that might have
been an imitation (founded on my first impulse under that roof) of Mr.
Pumblechook's chaise-cart.

She was not physically strong, and after a little time said, “Slower!”
 Still, we went at an impatient fitful speed, and as we went, she
twitched the hand upon my shoulder, and worked her mouth, and led me to
believe that we were going fast because her thoughts went fast. After a
while she said, “Call Estella!” so I went out on the landing and
roared that name as I had done on the previous occasion. When her light
appeared, I returned to Miss Havisham, and we started away again round
and round the room.

If only Estella had come to be a spectator of our proceedings, I should
have felt sufficiently discontented; but as she brought with her the
three ladies and the gentleman whom I had seen below, I didn't know
what to do. In my politeness, I would have stopped; but Miss
Havisham twitched my shoulder, and we posted on,--with a shame-faced
consciousness on my part that they would think it was all my doing.

“Dear Miss Havisham,” said Miss Sarah Pocket. “How well you look!”

“I do not,” returned Miss Havisham. “I am yellow skin and bone.”

Camilla brightened when Miss Pocket met with this rebuff; and she
murmured, as she plaintively contemplated Miss Havisham, “Poor dear
soul! Certainly not to be expected to look well, poor thing. The idea!”

“And how are you?” said Miss Havisham to Camilla. As we were close to
Camilla then, I would have stopped as a matter of course, only Miss
Havisham wouldn't stop. We swept on, and I felt that I was highly
obnoxious to Camilla.

“Thank you, Miss Havisham,” she returned, “I am as well as can be
expected.”

“Why, what's the matter with you?” asked Miss Havisham, with exceeding
sharpness.

“Nothing worth mentioning,” replied Camilla. “I don't wish to make a
display of my feelings, but I have habitually thought of you more in the
night than I am quite equal to.”

“Then don't think of me,” retorted Miss Havisham.

“Very easily said!” remarked Camilla, amiably repressing a sob, while a
hitch came into her upper lip, and her tears overflowed. “Raymond is a
witness what ginger and sal volatile I am obliged to take in the night.
Raymond is a witness what nervous jerkings I have in my legs. Chokings
and nervous jerkings, however, are nothing new to me when I think with
anxiety of those I love. If I could be less affectionate and sensitive,
I should have a better digestion and an iron set of nerves. I am sure
I wish it could be so. But as to not thinking of you in the night--The
idea!” Here, a burst of tears.

The Raymond referred to, I understood to be the gentleman present, and
him I understood to be Mr. Camilla. He came to the rescue at this point,
and said in a consolatory and complimentary voice, “Camilla, my dear, it
is well known that your family feelings are gradually undermining you to
the extent of making one of your legs shorter than the other.”

“I am not aware,” observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard but
once, “that to think of any person is to make a great claim upon that
person, my dear.”

Miss Sarah Pocket, whom I now saw to be a little dry, brown, corrugated
old woman, with a small face that might have been made of walnut-shells,
and a large mouth like a cat's without the whiskers, supported this
position by saying, “No, indeed, my dear. Hem!”

“Thinking is easy enough,” said the grave lady.

“What is easier, you know?” assented Miss Sarah Pocket.

“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Camilla, whose fermenting feelings appeared to
rise from her legs to her bosom. “It's all very true! It's a weakness
to be so affectionate, but I can't help it. No doubt my health would be
much better if it was otherwise, still I wouldn't change my disposition
if I could. It's the cause of much suffering, but it's a consolation to
know I posses it, when I wake up in the night.” Here another burst of
feeling.

Miss Havisham and I had never stopped all this time, but kept going
round and round the room; now brushing against the skirts of the
visitors, now giving them the whole length of the dismal chamber.

“There's Matthew!” said Camilla. “Never mixing with any natural ties,
never coming here to see how Miss Havisham is! I have taken to the sofa
with my staylace cut, and have lain there hours insensible, with my head
over the side, and my hair all down, and my feet I don't know where--”

(“Much higher than your head, my love,” said Mr. Camilla.)

“I have gone off into that state, hours and hours, on account of
Matthew's strange and inexplicable conduct, and nobody has thanked me.”

“Really I must say I should think not!” interposed the grave lady.

“You see, my dear,” added Miss Sarah Pocket (a blandly vicious
personage), “the question to put to yourself is, who did you expect to
thank you, my love?”

“Without expecting any thanks, or anything of the sort,” resumed
Camilla, “I have remained in that state, hours and hours, and Raymond
is a witness of the extent to which I have choked, and what the total
inefficacy of ginger has been, and I have been heard at the piano-forte
tuner's across the street, where the poor mistaken children have even
supposed it to be pigeons cooing at a distance,--and now to be told--”
 Here Camilla put her hand to her throat, and began to be quite chemical
as to the formation of new combinations there.

When this same Matthew was mentioned, Miss Havisham stopped me and
herself, and stood looking at the speaker. This change had a great
influence in bringing Camilla's chemistry to a sudden end.

“Matthew will come and see me at last,” said Miss Havisham, sternly,
“when I am laid on that table. That will be his place,--there,” striking
the table with her stick, “at my head! And yours will be there! And your
husband's there! And Sarah Pocket's there! And Georgiana's there! Now
you all know where to take your stations when you come to feast upon me.
And now go!”

At the mention of each name, she had struck the table with her stick in
a new place. She now said, “Walk me, walk me!” and we went on again.

“I suppose there's nothing to be done,” exclaimed Camilla, “but comply
and depart. It's something to have seen the object of one's love and
duty for even so short a time. I shall think of it with a melancholy
satisfaction when I wake up in the night. I wish Matthew could have
that comfort, but he sets it at defiance. I am determined not to make a
display of my feelings, but it's very hard to be told one wants to feast
on one's relations,--as if one was a Giant,--and to be told to go. The
bare idea!”

Mr. Camilla interposing, as Mrs. Camilla laid her hand upon her heaving
bosom, that lady assumed an unnatural fortitude of manner which I
supposed to be expressive of an intention to drop and choke when out of
view, and kissing her hand to Miss Havisham, was escorted forth. Sarah
Pocket and Georgiana contended who should remain last; but Sarah was
too knowing to be outdone, and ambled round Georgiana with that artful
slipperiness that the latter was obliged to take precedence. Sarah
Pocket then made her separate effect of departing with, “Bless you, Miss
Havisham dear!” and with a smile of forgiving pity on her walnut-shell
countenance for the weaknesses of the rest.

While Estella was away lighting them down, Miss Havisham still walked
with her hand on my shoulder, but more and more slowly. At last she
stopped before the fire, and said, after muttering and looking at it
some seconds,--

“This is my birthday, Pip.”

I was going to wish her many happy returns, when she lifted her stick.

“I don't suffer it to be spoken of. I don't suffer those who were here
just now, or any one to speak of it. They come here on the day, but they
dare not refer to it.”

Of course I made no further effort to refer to it.

“On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of
decay,” stabbing with her crutched stick at the pile of cobwebs on the
table, but not touching it, “was brought here. It and I have worn away
together. The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of
mice have gnawed at me.”

She held the head of her stick against her heart as she stood looking
at the table; she in her once white dress, all yellow and withered; the
once white cloth all yellow and withered; everything around in a state
to crumble under a touch.

“When the ruin is complete,” said she, with a ghastly look, “and when
they lay me dead, in my bride's dress on the bride's table,--which shall
be done, and which will be the finished curse upon him,--so much the
better if it is done on this day!”

She stood looking at the table as if she stood looking at her own figure
lying there. I remained quiet. Estella returned, and she too remained
quiet. It seemed to me that we continued thus for a long time. In
the heavy air of the room, and the heavy darkness that brooded in its
remoter corners, I even had an alarming fancy that Estella and I might
presently begin to decay.

At length, not coming out of her distraught state by degrees, but in an
instant, Miss Havisham said, “Let me see you two play cards; why have
you not begun?” With that, we returned to her room, and sat down as
before; I was beggared, as before; and again, as before, Miss Havisham
watched us all the time, directed my attention to Estella's beauty, and
made me notice it the more by trying her jewels on Estella's breast and
hair.

Estella, for her part, likewise treated me as before, except that she
did not condescend to speak. When we had played some half-dozen games,
a day was appointed for my return, and I was taken down into the yard
to be fed in the former dog-like manner. There, too, I was again left to
wander about as I liked.

It is not much to the purpose whether a gate in that garden wall which
I had scrambled up to peep over on the last occasion was, on that last
occasion, open or shut. Enough that I saw no gate then, and that I
saw one now. As it stood open, and as I knew that Estella had let
the visitors out,--for she had returned with the keys in her hand,--I
strolled into the garden, and strolled all over it. It was quite a
wilderness, and there were old melon-frames and cucumber-frames in it,
which seemed in their decline to have produced a spontaneous growth of
weak attempts at pieces of old hats and boots, with now and then a weedy
offshoot into the likeness of a battered saucepan.

When I had exhausted the garden and a greenhouse with nothing in it but
a fallen-down grape-vine and some bottles, I found myself in the dismal
corner upon which I had looked out of the window. Never questioning for
a moment that the house was now empty, I looked in at another window,
and found myself, to my great surprise, exchanging a broad stare with a
pale young gentleman with red eyelids and light hair.

This pale young gentleman quickly disappeared, and reappeared beside me.
He had been at his books when I had found myself staring at him, and I
now saw that he was inky.

“Halloa!” said he, “young fellow!”

Halloa being a general observation which I had usually observed to
be best answered by itself, I said, “Halloa!” politely omitting young
fellow.

“Who let you in?” said he.

“Miss Estella.”

“Who gave you leave to prowl about?”

“Miss Estella.”

“Come and fight,” said the pale young gentleman.

What could I do but follow him? I have often asked myself the question
since; but what else could I do? His manner was so final, and I was
so astonished, that I followed where he led, as if I had been under a
spell.

“Stop a minute, though,” he said, wheeling round before we had gone many
paces. “I ought to give you a reason for fighting, too. There it is!”
 In a most irritating manner he instantly slapped his hands against one
another, daintily flung one of his legs up behind him, pulled my hair,
slapped his hands again, dipped his head, and butted it into my stomach.

The bull-like proceeding last mentioned, besides that it was
unquestionably to be regarded in the light of a liberty, was
particularly disagreeable just after bread and meat. I therefore hit out
at him and was going to hit out again, when he said, “Aha! Would you?”
 and began dancing backwards and forwards in a manner quite unparalleled
within my limited experience.

“Laws of the game!” said he. Here, he skipped from his left leg on to
his right. “Regular rules!” Here, he skipped from his right leg on to
his left. “Come to the ground, and go through the preliminaries!” Here,
he dodged backwards and forwards, and did all sorts of things while I
looked helplessly at him.

I was secretly afraid of him when I saw him so dexterous; but I felt
morally and physically convinced that his light head of hair could have
had no business in the pit of my stomach, and that I had a right to
consider it irrelevant when so obtruded on my attention. Therefore, I
followed him without a word, to a retired nook of the garden, formed by
the junction of two walls and screened by some rubbish. On his asking me
if I was satisfied with the ground, and on my replying Yes, he begged my
leave to absent himself for a moment, and quickly returned with a bottle
of water and a sponge dipped in vinegar. “Available for both,” he said,
placing these against the wall. And then fell to pulling off, not
only his jacket and waistcoat, but his shirt too, in a manner at once
light-hearted, business-like, and bloodthirsty.

Although he did not look very healthy,--having pimples on his face, and
a breaking out at his mouth,--these dreadful preparations quite appalled
me. I judged him to be about my own age, but he was much taller, and he
had a way of spinning himself about that was full of appearance. For
the rest, he was a young gentleman in a gray suit (when not denuded
for battle), with his elbows, knees, wrists, and heels considerably in
advance of the rest of him as to development.

My heart failed me when I saw him squaring at me with every
demonstration of mechanical nicety, and eyeing my anatomy as if he were
minutely choosing his bone. I never have been so surprised in my life,
as I was when I let out the first blow, and saw him lying on his
back, looking up at me with a bloody nose and his face exceedingly
fore-shortened.

But, he was on his feet directly, and after sponging himself with
a great show of dexterity began squaring again. The second greatest
surprise I have ever had in my life was seeing him on his back again,
looking up at me out of a black eye.

His spirit inspired me with great respect. He seemed to have no
strength, and he never once hit me hard, and he was always knocked down;
but he would be up again in a moment, sponging himself or drinking out
of the water-bottle, with the greatest satisfaction in seconding himself
according to form, and then came at me with an air and a show that made
me believe he really was going to do for me at last. He got heavily
bruised, for I am sorry to record that the more I hit him, the harder I
hit him; but he came up again and again and again, until at last he got
a bad fall with the back of his head against the wall. Even after that
crisis in our affairs, he got up and turned round and round confusedly a
few times, not knowing where I was; but finally went on his knees to his
sponge and threw it up: at the same time panting out, “That means you
have won.”

He seemed so brave and innocent, that although I had not proposed the
contest, I felt but a gloomy satisfaction in my victory. Indeed, I go
so far as to hope that I regarded myself while dressing as a species of
savage young wolf or other wild beast. However, I got dressed, darkly
wiping my sanguinary face at intervals, and I said, “Can I help you?”
 and he said “No thankee,” and I said “Good afternoon,” and he said “Same
to you.”

When I got into the courtyard, I found Estella waiting with the keys.
But she neither asked me where I had been, nor why I had kept her
waiting; and there was a bright flush upon her face, as though something
had happened to delight her. Instead of going straight to the gate, too,
she stepped back into the passage, and beckoned me.

“Come here! You may kiss me, if you like.”

I kissed her cheek as she turned it to me. I think I would have gone
through a great deal to kiss her cheek. But I felt that the kiss was
given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and
that it was worth nothing.

What with the birthday visitors, and what with the cards, and what with
the fight, my stay had lasted so long, that when I neared home the light
on the spit of sand off the point on the marshes was gleaming against
a black night-sky, and Joe's furnace was flinging a path of fire across
the road.




Chapter XII

My mind grew very uneasy on the subject of the pale young gentleman. The
more I thought of the fight, and recalled the pale young gentleman on
his back in various stages of puffy and incrimsoned countenance, the
more certain it appeared that something would be done to me. I felt that
the pale young gentleman's blood was on my head, and that the Law would
avenge it. Without having any definite idea of the penalties I had
incurred, it was clear to me that village boys could not go stalking
about the country, ravaging the houses of gentlefolks and pitching into
the studious youth of England, without laying themselves open to severe
punishment. For some days, I even kept close at home, and looked out at
the kitchen door with the greatest caution and trepidation before going
on an errand, lest the officers of the County Jail should pounce upon
me. The pale young gentleman's nose had stained my trousers, and I tried
to wash out that evidence of my guilt in the dead of night. I had cut
my knuckles against the pale young gentleman's teeth, and I twisted my
imagination into a thousand tangles, as I devised incredible ways of
accounting for that damnatory circumstance when I should be haled before
the Judges.

When the day came round for my return to the scene of the deed of
violence, my terrors reached their height. Whether myrmidons of Justice,
specially sent down from London, would be lying in ambush behind the
gate;--whether Miss Havisham, preferring to take personal vengeance for
an outrage done to her house, might rise in those grave-clothes of hers,
draw a pistol, and shoot me dead:--whether suborned boys--a numerous
band of mercenaries--might be engaged to fall upon me in the brewery,
and cuff me until I was no more;--it was high testimony to my confidence
in the spirit of the pale young gentleman, that I never imagined him
accessory to these retaliations; they always came into my mind as the
acts of injudicious relatives of his, goaded on by the state of his
visage and an indignant sympathy with the family features.

However, go to Miss Havisham's I must, and go I did. And behold! nothing
came of the late struggle. It was not alluded to in any way, and no pale
young gentleman was to be discovered on the premises. I found the same
gate open, and I explored the garden, and even looked in at the windows
of the detached house; but my view was suddenly stopped by the closed
shutters within, and all was lifeless. Only in the corner where
the combat had taken place could I detect any evidence of the young
gentleman's existence. There were traces of his gore in that spot, and I
covered them with garden-mould from the eye of man.

On the broad landing between Miss Havisham's own room and that other
room in which the long table was laid out, I saw a garden-chair,--a
light chair on wheels, that you pushed from behind. It had been placed
there since my last visit, and I entered, that same day, on a regular
occupation of pushing Miss Havisham in this chair (when she was tired of
walking with her hand upon my shoulder) round her own room, and across
the landing, and round the other room. Over and over and over again,
we would make these journeys, and sometimes they would last as long as
three hours at a stretch. I insensibly fall into a general mention of
these journeys as numerous, because it was at once settled that I should
return every alternate day at noon for these purposes, and because I am
now going to sum up a period of at least eight or ten months.

As we began to be more used to one another, Miss Havisham talked more
to me, and asked me such questions as what had I learnt and what was
I going to be? I told her I was going to be apprenticed to Joe, I
believed; and I enlarged upon my knowing nothing and wanting to know
everything, in the hope that she might offer some help towards that
desirable end. But she did not; on the contrary, she seemed to prefer my
being ignorant. Neither did she ever give me any money,--or anything
but my daily dinner,--nor ever stipulate that I should be paid for my
services.

Estella was always about, and always let me in and out, but never told
me I might kiss her again. Sometimes, she would coldly tolerate me;
sometimes, she would condescend to me; sometimes, she would be quite
familiar with me; sometimes, she would tell me energetically that she
hated me. Miss Havisham would often ask me in a whisper, or when we were
alone, “Does she grow prettier and prettier, Pip?” And when I said yes
(for indeed she did), would seem to enjoy it greedily. Also, when we
played at cards Miss Havisham would look on, with a miserly relish of
Estella's moods, whatever they were. And sometimes, when her moods were
so many and so contradictory of one another that I was puzzled what
to say or do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish fondness,
murmuring something in her ear that sounded like “Break their hearts my
pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!”

There was a song Joe used to hum fragments of at the forge, of which the
burden was Old Clem. This was not a very ceremonious way of rendering
homage to a patron saint, but I believe Old Clem stood in that relation
towards smiths. It was a song that imitated the measure of beating upon
iron, and was a mere lyrical excuse for the introduction of Old Clem's
respected name. Thus, you were to hammer boys round--Old Clem! With a
thump and a sound--Old Clem! Beat it out, beat it out--Old Clem! With a
clink for the stout--Old Clem! Blow the fire, blow the fire--Old
Clem! Roaring dryer, soaring higher--Old Clem! One day soon after the
appearance of the chair, Miss Havisham suddenly saying to me, with the
impatient movement of her fingers, “There, there, there! Sing!” I was
surprised into crooning this ditty as I pushed her over the floor. It
happened so to catch her fancy that she took it up in a low brooding
voice as if she were singing in her sleep. After that, it became
customary with us to have it as we moved about, and Estella would often
join in; though the whole strain was so subdued, even when there were
three of us, that it made less noise in the grim old house than the
lightest breath of wind.

What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail
to be influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were
dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the natural light from the
misty yellow rooms?

Perhaps I might have told Joe about the pale young gentleman, if I had
not previously been betrayed into those enormous inventions to which
I had confessed. Under the circumstances, I felt that Joe could hardly
fail to discern in the pale young gentleman, an appropriate passenger
to be put into the black velvet coach; therefore, I said nothing of him.
Besides, that shrinking from having Miss Havisham and Estella discussed,
which had come upon me in the beginning, grew much more potent as time
went on. I reposed complete confidence in no one but Biddy; but I told
poor Biddy everything. Why it came natural to me to do so, and why Biddy
had a deep concern in everything I told her, I did not know then, though
I think I know now.

Meanwhile, councils went on in the kitchen at home, fraught with
almost insupportable aggravation to my exasperated spirit. That ass,
Pumblechook, used often to come over of a night for the purpose of
discussing my prospects with my sister; and I really do believe (to
this hour with less penitence than I ought to feel), that if these hands
could have taken a linchpin out of his chaise-cart, they would have done
it. The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity of mind, that
he could not discuss my prospects without having me before him,--as it
were, to operate upon,--and he would drag me up from my stool (usually
by the collar) where I was quiet in a corner, and, putting me before the
fire as if I were going to be cooked, would begin by saying, “Now, Mum,
here is this boy! Here is this boy which you brought up by hand. Hold up
your head, boy, and be forever grateful unto them which so did do. Now,
Mum, with respections to this boy!” And then he would rumple my hair
the wrong way,--which from my earliest remembrance, as already hinted,
I have in my soul denied the right of any fellow-creature to do,--and
would hold me before him by the sleeve,--a spectacle of imbecility only
to be equalled by himself.

Then, he and my sister would pair off in such nonsensical speculations
about Miss Havisham, and about what she would do with me and for me,
that I used to want--quite painfully--to burst into spiteful tears, fly
at Pumblechook, and pummel him all over. In these dialogues, my sister
spoke to me as if she were morally wrenching one of my teeth out at
every reference; while Pumblechook himself, self-constituted my patron,
would sit supervising me with a depreciatory eye, like the architect of
my fortunes who thought himself engaged on a very unremunerative job.

In these discussions, Joe bore no part. But he was often talked at,
while they were in progress, by reason of Mrs. Joe's perceiving that
he was not favorable to my being taken from the forge. I was fully old
enough now to be apprenticed to Joe; and when Joe sat with the poker on
his knees thoughtfully raking out the ashes between the lower bars, my
sister would so distinctly construe that innocent action into opposition
on his part, that she would dive at him, take the poker out of his
hands, shake him, and put it away. There was a most irritating end to
every one of these debates. All in a moment, with nothing to lead up to
it, my sister would stop herself in a yawn, and catching sight of me as
it were incidentally, would swoop upon me with, “Come! there's enough of
you! You get along to bed; you've given trouble enough for one night, I
hope!” As if I had besought them as a favor to bother my life out.

We went on in this way for a long time, and it seemed likely that we
should continue to go on in this way for a long time, when one day Miss
Havisham stopped short as she and I were walking, she leaning on my
shoulder; and said with some displeasure,--

“You are growing tall, Pip!”

I thought it best to hint, through the medium of a meditative look, that
this might be occasioned by circumstances over which I had no control.

She said no more at the time; but she presently stopped and looked at me
again; and presently again; and after that, looked frowning and moody.
On the next day of my attendance, when our usual exercise was over, and
I had landed her at her dressing-table, she stayed me with a movement of
her impatient fingers:--

“Tell me the name again of that blacksmith of yours.”

“Joe Gargery, ma'am.”

“Meaning the master you were to be apprenticed to?”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

“You had better be apprenticed at once. Would Gargery come here with
you, and bring your indentures, do you think?”

I signified that I had no doubt he would take it as an honor to be
asked.

“Then let him come.”

“At any particular time, Miss Havisham?”

“There, there! I know nothing about times. Let him come soon, and come
along with you.”

When I got home at night, and delivered this message for Joe, my sister
“went on the Rampage,” in a more alarming degree than at any previous
period. She asked me and Joe whether we supposed she was door-mats under
our feet, and how we dared to use her so, and what company we graciously
thought she was fit for? When she had exhausted a torrent of such
inquiries, she threw a candlestick at Joe, burst into a loud sobbing,
got out the dustpan,--which was always a very bad sign,--put on her
coarse apron, and began cleaning up to a terrible extent. Not satisfied
with a dry cleaning, she took to a pail and scrubbing-brush, and cleaned
us out of house and home, so that we stood shivering in the back-yard.
It was ten o'clock at night before we ventured to creep in again, and
then she asked Joe why he hadn't married a Negress Slave at once?
Joe offered no answer, poor fellow, but stood feeling his whisker and
looking dejectedly at me, as if he thought it really might have been a
better speculation.




Chapter XIII

It was a trial to my feelings, on the next day but one, to see
Joe arraying himself in his Sunday clothes to accompany me to Miss
Havisham's. However, as he thought his court-suit necessary to the
occasion, it was not for me to tell him that he looked far better in his
working-dress; the rather, because I knew he made himself so dreadfully
uncomfortable, entirely on my account, and that it was for me he pulled
up his shirt-collar so very high behind, that it made the hair on the
crown of his head stand up like a tuft of feathers.

At breakfast-time my sister declared her intention of going to town with
us, and being left at Uncle Pumblechook's and called for “when we had
done with our fine ladies”--a way of putting the case, from which Joe
appeared inclined to augur the worst. The forge was shut up for the day,
and Joe inscribed in chalk upon the door (as it was his custom to do on
the very rare occasions when he was not at work) the monosyllable
HOUT, accompanied by a sketch of an arrow supposed to be flying in the
direction he had taken.

We walked to town, my sister leading the way in a very large beaver
bonnet, and carrying a basket like the Great Seal of England in plaited
Straw, a pair of pattens, a spare shawl, and an umbrella, though it
was a fine bright day. I am not quite clear whether these articles were
carried penitentially or ostentatiously; but I rather think they were
displayed as articles of property,--much as Cleopatra or any other
sovereign lady on the Rampage might exhibit her wealth in a pageant or
procession.

When we came to Pumblechook's, my sister bounced in and left us. As it
was almost noon, Joe and I held straight on to Miss Havisham's house.
Estella opened the gate as usual, and, the moment she appeared, Joe took
his hat off and stood weighing it by the brim in both his hands; as if
he had some urgent reason in his mind for being particular to half a
quarter of an ounce.

Estella took no notice of either of us, but led us the way that I knew
so well. I followed next to her, and Joe came last. When I looked back
at Joe in the long passage, he was still weighing his hat with the
greatest care, and was coming after us in long strides on the tips of
his toes.

Estella told me we were both to go in, so I took Joe by the coat-cuff
and conducted him into Miss Havisham's presence. She was seated at her
dressing-table, and looked round at us immediately.

“Oh!” said she to Joe. “You are the husband of the sister of this boy?”

I could hardly have imagined dear old Joe looking so unlike himself or
so like some extraordinary bird; standing as he did speechless, with his
tuft of feathers ruffled, and his mouth open as if he wanted a worm.

“You are the husband,” repeated Miss Havisham, “of the sister of this
boy?”

It was very aggravating; but, throughout the interview, Joe persisted in
addressing Me instead of Miss Havisham.

“Which I meantersay, Pip,” Joe now observed in a manner that was at
once expressive of forcible argumentation, strict confidence, and great
politeness, “as I hup and married your sister, and I were at the time
what you might call (if you was anyways inclined) a single man.”

“Well!” said Miss Havisham. “And you have reared the boy, with the
intention of taking him for your apprentice; is that so, Mr. Gargery?”

“You know, Pip,” replied Joe, “as you and me were ever friends, and it
were looked for'ard to betwixt us, as being calc'lated to lead to
larks. Not but what, Pip, if you had ever made objections to the
business,--such as its being open to black and sut, or such-like,--not
but what they would have been attended to, don't you see?”

“Has the boy,” said Miss Havisham, “ever made any objection? Does he
like the trade?”

“Which it is well beknown to yourself, Pip,” returned Joe, strengthening
his former mixture of argumentation, confidence, and politeness, “that
it were the wish of your own hart.” (I saw the idea suddenly break upon
him that he would adapt his epitaph to the occasion, before he went on
to say) “And there weren't no objection on your part, and Pip it were
the great wish of your hart!”

It was quite in vain for me to endeavor to make him sensible that he
ought to speak to Miss Havisham. The more I made faces and gestures
to him to do it, the more confidential, argumentative, and polite, he
persisted in being to Me.

“Have you brought his indentures with you?” asked Miss Havisham.

“Well, Pip, you know,” replied Joe, as if that were a little
unreasonable, “you yourself see me put 'em in my 'at, and therefore you
know as they are here.” With which he took them out, and gave them, not
to Miss Havisham, but to me. I am afraid I was ashamed of the dear good
fellow,--I know I was ashamed of him,--when I saw that Estella stood
at the back of Miss Havisham's chair, and that her eyes laughed
mischievously. I took the indentures out of his hand and gave them to
Miss Havisham.

“You expected,” said Miss Havisham, as she looked them over, “no premium
with the boy?”

“Joe!” I remonstrated, for he made no reply at all. “Why don't you
answer--”

“Pip,” returned Joe, cutting me short as if he were hurt, “which I
meantersay that were not a question requiring a answer betwixt yourself
and me, and which you know the answer to be full well No. You know it to
be No, Pip, and wherefore should I say it?”

Miss Havisham glanced at him as if she understood what he really was
better than I had thought possible, seeing what he was there; and took
up a little bag from the table beside her.

“Pip has earned a premium here,” she said, “and here it is. There are
five-and-twenty guineas in this bag. Give it to your master, Pip.”

As if he were absolutely out of his mind with the wonder awakened in
him by her strange figure and the strange room, Joe, even at this pass,
persisted in addressing me.

“This is wery liberal on your part, Pip,” said Joe, “and it is as such
received and grateful welcome, though never looked for, far nor near,
nor nowheres. And now, old chap,” said Joe, conveying to me a sensation,
first of burning and then of freezing, for I felt as if that familiar
expression were applied to Miss Havisham,--“and now, old chap, may we
do our duty! May you and me do our duty, both on us, by one and another,
and by them which your liberal present--have-conweyed--to be--for the
satisfaction of mind-of--them as never--” here Joe showed that he felt
he had fallen into frightful difficulties, until he triumphantly rescued
himself with the words, “and from myself far be it!” These words had
such a round and convincing sound for him that he said them twice.

“Good-bye, Pip!” said Miss Havisham. “Let them out, Estella.”

“Am I to come again, Miss Havisham?” I asked.

“No. Gargery is your master now. Gargery! One word!”

Thus calling him back as I went out of the door, I heard her say to Joe
in a distinct emphatic voice, “The boy has been a good boy here, and
that is his reward. Of course, as an honest man, you will expect no
other and no more.”

How Joe got out of the room, I have never been able to determine; but
I know that when he did get out he was steadily proceeding upstairs
instead of coming down, and was deaf to all remonstrances until I went
after him and laid hold of him. In another minute we were outside the
gate, and it was locked, and Estella was gone. When we stood in the
daylight alone again, Joe backed up against a wall, and said to me,
“Astonishing!” And there he remained so long saying, “Astonishing” at
intervals, so often, that I began to think his senses were never coming
back. At length he prolonged his remark into “Pip, I do assure you this
is as-TON-ishing!” and so, by degrees, became conversational and able to
walk away.

I have reason to think that Joe's intellects were brightened by the
encounter they had passed through, and that on our way to Pumblechook's
he invented a subtle and deep design. My reason is to be found in
what took place in Mr. Pumblechook's parlor: where, on our presenting
ourselves, my sister sat in conference with that detested seedsman.

“Well?” cried my sister, addressing us both at once. “And what's
happened to you? I wonder you condescend to come back to such poor
society as this, I am sure I do!”

“Miss Havisham,” said Joe, with a fixed look at me, like an effort of
remembrance, “made it wery partick'ler that we should give her--were it
compliments or respects, Pip?”

“Compliments,” I said.

“Which that were my own belief,” answered Joe; “her compliments to Mrs.
J. Gargery--”

“Much good they'll do me!” observed my sister; but rather gratified too.

“And wishing,” pursued Joe, with another fixed look at me, like another
effort of remembrance, “that the state of Miss Havisham's elth were
sitch as would have--allowed, were it, Pip?”

“Of her having the pleasure,” I added.

“Of ladies' company,” said Joe. And drew a long breath.

“Well!” cried my sister, with a mollified glance at Mr. Pumblechook.
“She might have had the politeness to send that message at first, but
it's better late than never. And what did she give young Rantipole
here?”

“She giv' him,” said Joe, “nothing.”

Mrs. Joe was going to break out, but Joe went on.

“What she giv',” said Joe, “she giv' to his friends. 'And by his
friends,' were her explanation, 'I mean into the hands of his sister
Mrs. J. Gargery.' Them were her words; 'Mrs. J. Gargery.' She mayn't
have know'd,” added Joe, with an appearance of reflection, “whether it
were Joe, or Jorge.”

My sister looked at Pumblechook: who smoothed the elbows of his wooden
arm-chair, and nodded at her and at the fire, as if he had known all
about it beforehand.

“And how much have you got?” asked my sister, laughing. Positively
laughing!

“What would present company say to ten pound?” demanded Joe.

“They'd say,” returned my sister, curtly, “pretty well. Not too much,
but pretty well.”

“It's more than that, then,” said Joe.

That fearful Impostor, Pumblechook, immediately nodded, and said, as he
rubbed the arms of his chair, “It's more than that, Mum.”

“Why, you don't mean to say--” began my sister.

“Yes I do, Mum,” said Pumblechook; “but wait a bit. Go on, Joseph. Good
in you! Go on!”

“What would present company say,” proceeded Joe, “to twenty pound?”

“Handsome would be the word,” returned my sister.

“Well, then,” said Joe, “It's more than twenty pound.”

That abject hypocrite, Pumblechook, nodded again, and said, with a
patronizing laugh, “It's more than that, Mum. Good again! Follow her up,
Joseph!”

“Then to make an end of it,” said Joe, delightedly handing the bag to my
sister; “it's five-and-twenty pound.”

“It's five-and-twenty pound, Mum,” echoed that basest of swindlers,
Pumblechook, rising to shake hands with her; “and it's no more than your
merits (as I said when my opinion was asked), and I wish you joy of the
money!”

If the villain had stopped here, his case would have been sufficiently
awful, but he blackened his guilt by proceeding to take me into custody,
with a right of patronage that left all his former criminality far
behind.

“Now you see, Joseph and wife,” said Pumblechook, as he took me by the
arm above the elbow, “I am one of them that always go right through with
what they've begun. This boy must be bound, out of hand. That's my way.
Bound out of hand.”

“Goodness knows, Uncle Pumblechook,” said my sister (grasping the
money), “we're deeply beholden to you.”

“Never mind me, Mum,” returned that diabolical cornchandler. “A
pleasure's a pleasure all the world over. But this boy, you know; we
must have him bound. I said I'd see to it--to tell you the truth.”

The Justices were sitting in the Town Hall near at hand, and we at
once went over to have me bound apprentice to Joe in the Magisterial
presence. I say we went over, but I was pushed over by Pumblechook,
exactly as if I had that moment picked a pocket or fired a rick; indeed,
it was the general impression in Court that I had been taken red-handed;
for, as Pumblechook shoved me before him through the crowd, I heard some
people say, “What's he done?” and others, “He's a young 'un, too, but
looks bad, don't he?” One person of mild and benevolent aspect even gave
me a tract ornamented with a woodcut of a malevolent young man fitted
up with a perfect sausage-shop of fetters, and entitled TO BE READ IN MY
CELL.

The Hall was a queer place, I thought, with higher pews in it than a
church,--and with people hanging over the pews looking on,--and with
mighty Justices (one with a powdered head) leaning back in chairs, with
folded arms, or taking snuff, or going to sleep, or writing, or reading
the newspapers,--and with some shining black portraits on the walls,
which my unartistic eye regarded as a composition of hardbake and
sticking-plaster. Here, in a corner my indentures were duly signed and
attested, and I was “bound”; Mr. Pumblechook holding me all the while
as if we had looked in on our way to the scaffold, to have those little
preliminaries disposed of.

When we had come out again, and had got rid of the boys who had been put
into great spirits by the expectation of seeing me publicly tortured,
and who were much disappointed to find that my friends were merely
rallying round me, we went back to Pumblechook's. And there my sister
became so excited by the twenty-five guineas, that nothing would serve
her but we must have a dinner out of that windfall at the Blue Boar, and
that Pumblechook must go over in his chaise-cart, and bring the Hubbles
and Mr. Wopsle.

It was agreed to be done; and a most melancholy day I passed. For,
it inscrutably appeared to stand to reason, in the minds of the whole
company, that I was an excrescence on the entertainment. And to make it
worse, they all asked me from time to time,--in short, whenever they
had nothing else to do,--why I didn't enjoy myself? And what could I
possibly do then, but say I was enjoying myself,--when I wasn't!

However, they were grown up and had their own way, and they made the
most of it. That swindling Pumblechook, exalted into the beneficent
contriver of the whole occasion, actually took the top of the table;
and, when he addressed them on the subject of my being bound, and had
fiendishly congratulated them on my being liable to imprisonment if I
played at cards, drank strong liquors, kept late hours or bad company,
or indulged in other vagaries which the form of my indentures appeared
to contemplate as next to inevitable, he placed me standing on a chair
beside him to illustrate his remarks.

My only other remembrances of the great festival are, That they wouldn't
let me go to sleep, but whenever they saw me dropping off, woke me up
and told me to enjoy myself. That, rather late in the evening Mr. Wopsle
gave us Collins's ode, and threw his bloodstained sword in thunder
down, with such effect, that a waiter came in and said, “The Commercials
underneath sent up their compliments, and it wasn't the Tumblers' Arms.”
 That, they were all in excellent spirits on the road home, and sang, O
Lady Fair! Mr. Wopsle taking the bass, and asserting with a tremendously
strong voice (in reply to the inquisitive bore who leads that piece
of music in a most impertinent manner, by wanting to know all about
everybody's private affairs) that he was the man with his white locks
flowing, and that he was upon the whole the weakest pilgrim going.

Finally, I remember that when I got into my little bedroom, I was truly
wretched, and had a strong conviction on me that I should never like
Joe's trade. I had liked it once, but once was not now.




Chapter XIV

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black
ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well
deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.

Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister's
temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had
believed in the best parlor as a most elegant saloon; I had believed
in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose
solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had
believed in the kitchen as a chaste though not magnificent apartment;
I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and
independence. Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all
coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella
see it on any account.

How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own fault,
how much Miss Havisham's, how much my sister's, is now of no moment to
me or to any one. The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or
ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.

Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my
shirt-sleeves and go into the forge, Joe's 'prentice, I should be
distinguished and happy. Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt
that I was dusty with the dust of small-coal, and that I had a weight
upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil was a feather. There have
been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have
felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest
and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more.
Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in
life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly entered road
of apprenticeship to Joe.

I remember that at a later period of my “time,” I used to stand about
the churchyard on Sunday evenings when night was falling, comparing my
own perspective with the windy marsh view, and making out some likeness
between them by thinking how flat and low both were, and how on both
there came an unknown way and a dark mist and then the sea. I was quite
as dejected on the first working-day of my apprenticeship as in that
after-time; but I am glad to know that I never breathed a murmur to Joe
while my indentures lasted. It is about the only thing I am glad to know
of myself in that connection.

For, though it includes what I proceed to add, all the merit of what I
proceed to add was Joe's. It was not because I was faithful, but because
Joe was faithful, that I never ran away and went for a soldier or
a sailor. It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of
industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry,
that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain. It is not possible
to know how far the influence of any amiable honest-hearted duty-doing
man flies out into the world; but it is very possible to know how it has
touched one's self in going by, and I know right well that any good that
intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe,
and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me.

What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew? What
I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my grimiest and
commonest, should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one
of the wooden windows of the forge. I was haunted by the fear that she
would, sooner or later, find me out, with a black face and hands, doing
the coarsest part of my work, and would exult over me and despise me.
Often after dark, when I was pulling the bellows for Joe, and we were
singing Old Clem, and when the thought how we used to sing it at Miss
Havisham's would seem to show me Estella's face in the fire, with her
pretty hair fluttering in the wind and her eyes scorning me,--often at
such a time I would look towards those panels of black night in the wall
which the wooden windows then were, and would fancy that I saw her just
drawing her face away, and would believe that she had come at last.

After that, when we went into supper, the place and the meal would have
a more homely look than ever, and I would feel more ashamed of home than
ever, in my own ungracious breast.




Chapter XV

As I was getting too big for Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's room, my
education under that preposterous female terminated. Not, however, until
Biddy had imparted to me everything she knew, from the little catalogue
of prices, to a comic song she had once bought for a half-penny.
Although the only coherent part of the latter piece of literature were
the opening lines.

     When I went to Lunnon town sirs,
     Too rul loo rul
     Too rul loo rul
     Wasn't I done very brown sirs?
     Too rul loo rul
     Too rul loo rul

--still, in my desire to be wiser, I got this composition by heart with the utmost gravity; nor do I recollect that I questioned its merit, except that I
thought (as I still do) the amount of Too rul somewhat in excess of the
poetry. In my hunger for information, I made proposals to Mr. Wopsle to
bestow some intellectual crumbs upon me, with which he kindly complied.
As it turned out, however, that he only wanted me for a dramatic
lay-figure, to be contradicted and embraced and wept over and bullied
and clutched and stabbed and knocked about in a variety of ways, I soon
declined that course of instruction; though not until Mr. Wopsle in his
poetic fury had severely mauled me.

Whatever I acquired, I tried to impart to Joe. This statement sounds so
well, that I cannot in my conscience let it pass unexplained. I wanted
to make Joe less ignorant and common, that he might be worthier of my
society and less open to Estella's reproach.

The old Battery out on the marshes was our place of study, and a broken
slate and a short piece of slate-pencil were our educational implements:
to which Joe always added a pipe of tobacco. I never knew Joe to
remember anything from one Sunday to another, or to acquire, under my
tuition, any piece of information whatever. Yet he would smoke his pipe
at the Battery with a far more sagacious air than anywhere else,--even
with a learned air,--as if he considered himself to be advancing
immensely. Dear fellow, I hope he did.

It was pleasant and quiet, out there with the sails on the river passing
beyond the earthwork, and sometimes, when the tide was low, looking
as if they belonged to sunken ships that were still sailing on at the
bottom of the water. Whenever I watched the vessels standing out to sea
with their white sails spread, I somehow thought of Miss Havisham and
Estella; and whenever the light struck aslant, afar off, upon a cloud
or sail or green hillside or water-line, it was just the same.--Miss
Havisham and Estella and the strange house and the strange life appeared
to have something to do with everything that was picturesque.

One Sunday when Joe, greatly enjoying his pipe, had so plumed himself on
being “most awful dull,” that I had given him up for the day, I lay on
the earthwork for some time with my chin on my hand, descrying traces of
Miss Havisham and Estella all over the prospect, in the sky and in the
water, until at last I resolved to mention a thought concerning them
that had been much in my head.

“Joe,” said I; “don't you think I ought to make Miss Havisham a visit?”

“Well, Pip,” returned Joe, slowly considering. “What for?”

“What for, Joe? What is any visit made for?”

“There is some wisits p'r'aps,” said Joe, “as for ever remains open to
the question, Pip. But in regard to wisiting Miss Havisham. She might
think you wanted something,--expected something of her.”

“Don't you think I might say that I did not, Joe?”

“You might, old chap,” said Joe. “And she might credit it. Similarly she
mightn't.”

Joe felt, as I did, that he had made a point there, and he pulled hard
at his pipe to keep himself from weakening it by repetition.

“You see, Pip,” Joe pursued, as soon as he was past that danger, “Miss
Havisham done the handsome thing by you. When Miss Havisham done the
handsome thing by you, she called me back to say to me as that were
all.”

“Yes, Joe. I heard her.”

“ALL,” Joe repeated, very emphatically.

“Yes, Joe. I tell you, I heard her.”

“Which I meantersay, Pip, it might be that her meaning were,--Make a
end on it!--As you was!--Me to the North, and you to the South!--Keep in
sunders!”

I had thought of that too, and it was very far from comforting to me
to find that he had thought of it; for it seemed to render it more
probable.

“But, Joe.”

“Yes, old chap.”

“Here am I, getting on in the first year of my time, and, since the day
of my being bound, I have never thanked Miss Havisham, or asked after
her, or shown that I remember her.”

“That's true, Pip; and unless you was to turn her out a set of shoes
all four round,--and which I meantersay as even a set of shoes all
four round might not be acceptable as a present, in a total wacancy of
hoofs--”

“I don't mean that sort of remembrance, Joe; I don't mean a present.”

But Joe had got the idea of a present in his head and must harp upon it.
“Or even,” said he, “if you was helped to knocking her up a new chain
for the front door,--or say a gross or two of shark-headed screws for
general use,--or some light fancy article, such as a toasting-fork
when she took her muffins,--or a gridiron when she took a sprat or such
like--”

“I don't mean any present at all, Joe,” I interposed.

“Well,” said Joe, still harping on it as though I had particularly
pressed it, “if I was yourself, Pip, I wouldn't. No, I would not. For
what's a door-chain when she's got one always up? And shark-headers is
open to misrepresentations. And if it was a toasting-fork, you'd go into
brass and do yourself no credit. And the oncommonest workman can't show
himself oncommon in a gridiron,--for a gridiron IS a gridiron,” said
Joe, steadfastly impressing it upon me, as if he were endeavouring to
rouse me from a fixed delusion, “and you may haim at what you like, but
a gridiron it will come out, either by your leave or again your leave,
and you can't help yourself--”

“My dear Joe,” I cried, in desperation, taking hold of his coat, “don't
go on in that way. I never thought of making Miss Havisham any present.”

“No, Pip,” Joe assented, as if he had been contending for that, all
along; “and what I say to you is, you are right, Pip.”

“Yes, Joe; but what I wanted to say, was, that as we are rather slack
just now, if you would give me a half-holiday to-morrow, I think I would
go uptown and make a call on Miss Est--Havisham.”

“Which her name,” said Joe, gravely, “ain't Estavisham, Pip, unless she
have been rechris'ened.”

“I know, Joe, I know. It was a slip of mine. What do you think of it,
Joe?”

In brief, Joe thought that if I thought well of it, he thought well of
it. But, he was particular in stipulating that if I were not received
with cordiality, or if I were not encouraged to repeat my visit as a
visit which had no ulterior object but was simply one of gratitude for a
favor received, then this experimental trip should have no successor. By
these conditions I promised to abide.

Now, Joe kept a journeyman at weekly wages whose name was Orlick.
He pretended that his Christian name was Dolge,--a clear
Impossibility,--but he was a fellow of that obstinate disposition that I
believe him to have been the prey of no delusion in this particular, but
wilfully to have imposed that name upon the village as an affront to its
understanding. He was a broadshouldered loose-limbed swarthy fellow of
great strength, never in a hurry, and always slouching. He never even
seemed to come to his work on purpose, but would slouch in as if by mere
accident; and when he went to the Jolly Bargemen to eat his dinner, or
went away at night, he would slouch out, like Cain or the Wandering Jew,
as if he had no idea where he was going and no intention of ever
coming back. He lodged at a sluice-keeper's out on the marshes, and on
working-days would come slouching from his hermitage, with his hands in
his pockets and his dinner loosely tied in a bundle round his neck
and dangling on his back. On Sundays he mostly lay all day on the
sluice-gates, or stood against ricks and barns. He always slouched,
locomotively, with his eyes on the ground; and, when accosted or
otherwise required to raise them, he looked up in a half-resentful,
half-puzzled way, as though the only thought he ever had was, that it
was rather an odd and injurious fact that he should never be thinking.

This morose journeyman had no liking for me. When I was very small and
timid, he gave me to understand that the Devil lived in a black corner
of the forge, and that he knew the fiend very well: also that it was
necessary to make up the fire, once in seven years, with a live boy, and
that I might consider myself fuel. When I became Joe's 'prentice, Orlick
was perhaps confirmed in some suspicion that I should displace him;
howbeit, he liked me still less. Not that he ever said anything, or did
anything, openly importing hostility; I only noticed that he always beat
his sparks in my direction, and that whenever I sang Old Clem, he came
in out of time.

Dolge Orlick was at work and present, next day, when I reminded Joe of
my half-holiday. He said nothing at the moment, for he and Joe had just
got a piece of hot iron between them, and I was at the bellows; but by
and by he said, leaning on his hammer,--

“Now, master! Sure you're not a going to favor only one of us. If Young
Pip has a half-holiday, do as much for Old Orlick.” I suppose he was
about five-and-twenty, but he usually spoke of himself as an ancient
person.

“Why, what'll you do with a half-holiday, if you get it?” said Joe.

“What'll I do with it! What'll he do with it? I'll do as much with it as
him,” said Orlick.

“As to Pip, he's going up town,” said Joe.

“Well then, as to Old Orlick, he's a going up town,” retorted that
worthy. “Two can go up town. Tain't only one wot can go up town.

“Don't lose your temper,” said Joe.

“Shall if I like,” growled Orlick. “Some and their uptowning! Now,
master! Come. No favoring in this shop. Be a man!”

The master refusing to entertain the subject until the journeyman was in
a better temper, Orlick plunged at the furnace, drew out a red-hot
bar, made at me with it as if he were going to run it through my body,
whisked it round my head, laid it on the anvil, hammered it out,--as
if it were I, I thought, and the sparks were my spirting blood,--and
finally said, when he had hammered himself hot and the iron cold, and he
again leaned on his hammer,--

“Now, master!”

“Are you all right now?” demanded Joe.

“Ah! I am all right,” said gruff Old Orlick.

“Then, as in general you stick to your work as well as most men,” said
Joe, “let it be a half-holiday for all.”

My sister had been standing silent in the yard, within hearing,--she was
a most unscrupulous spy and listener,--and she instantly looked in at
one of the windows.

“Like you, you fool!” said she to Joe, “giving holidays to great idle
hulkers like that. You are a rich man, upon my life, to waste wages in
that way. I wish I was his master!”

“You'd be everybody's master, if you durst,” retorted Orlick, with an
ill-favored grin.

(“Let her alone,” said Joe.)

“I'd be a match for all noodles and all rogues,” returned my sister,
beginning to work herself into a mighty rage. “And I couldn't be a
match for the noodles, without being a match for your master, who's the
dunder-headed king of the noodles. And I couldn't be a match for the
rogues, without being a match for you, who are the blackest-looking and
the worst rogue between this and France. Now!”

“You're a foul shrew, Mother Gargery,” growled the journeyman. “If that
makes a judge of rogues, you ought to be a good'un.”

(“Let her alone, will you?” said Joe.)

“What did you say?” cried my sister, beginning to scream. “What did you
say? What did that fellow Orlick say to me, Pip? What did he call me,
with my husband standing by? Oh! oh! oh!” Each of these exclamations was
a shriek; and I must remark of my sister, what is equally true of all
the violent women I have ever seen, that passion was no excuse for
her, because it is undeniable that instead of lapsing into passion, she
consciously and deliberately took extraordinary pains to force herself
into it, and became blindly furious by regular stages; “what was the
name he gave me before the base man who swore to defend me? Oh! Hold me!
Oh!”

“Ah-h-h!” growled the journeyman, between his teeth, “I'd hold you, if
you was my wife. I'd hold you under the pump, and choke it out of you.”

(“I tell you, let her alone,” said Joe.)

“Oh! To hear him!” cried my sister, with a clap of her hands and a
scream together,--which was her next stage. “To hear the names he's
giving me! That Orlick! In my own house! Me, a married woman! With my
husband standing by! Oh! Oh!” Here my sister, after a fit of clappings
and screamings, beat her hands upon her bosom and upon her knees, and
threw her cap off, and pulled her hair down,--which were the last stages
on her road to frenzy. Being by this time a perfect Fury and a complete
success, she made a dash at the door which I had fortunately locked.

What could the wretched Joe do now, after his disregarded parenthetical
interruptions, but stand up to his journeyman, and ask him what he meant
by interfering betwixt himself and Mrs. Joe; and further whether he was
man enough to come on? Old Orlick felt that the situation admitted of
nothing less than coming on, and was on his defence straightway; so,
without so much as pulling off their singed and burnt aprons, they went
at one another, like two giants. But, if any man in that neighborhood
could stand uplong against Joe, I never saw the man. Orlick, as if he
had been of no more account than the pale young gentleman, was very
soon among the coal-dust, and in no hurry to come out of it. Then Joe
unlocked the door and picked up my sister, who had dropped insensible
at the window (but who had seen the fight first, I think), and who was
carried into the house and laid down, and who was recommended to revive,
and would do nothing but struggle and clench her hands in Joe's hair.
Then came that singular calm and silence which succeed all uproars; and
then, with the vague sensation which I have always connected with such
a lull,--namely, that it was Sunday, and somebody was dead,--I went upstairs
to dress myself.

When I came down again, I found Joe and Orlick sweeping up, without any
other traces of discomposure than a slit in one of Orlick's nostrils,
which was neither expressive nor ornamental. A pot of beer had appeared
from the Jolly Bargemen, and they were sharing it by turns in a
peaceable manner. The lull had a sedative and philosophical influence on
Joe, who followed me out into the road to say, as a parting observation
that might do me good, “On the Rampage, Pip, and off the Rampage,
Pip:--such is Life!”

With what absurd emotions (for we think the feelings that are very
serious in a man quite comical in a boy) I found myself again going to
Miss Havisham's, matters little here. Nor, how I passed and repassed
the gate many times before I could make up my mind to ring. Nor, how
I debated whether I should go away without ringing; nor, how I should
undoubtedly have gone, if my time had been my own, to come back.

Miss Sarah Pocket came to the gate. No Estella.

“How, then? You here again?” said Miss Pocket. “What do you want?”

When I said that I only came to see how Miss Havisham was, Sarah
evidently deliberated whether or no she should send me about my
business. But unwilling to hazard the responsibility, she let me in, and
presently brought the sharp message that I was to “come up.”

Everything was unchanged, and Miss Havisham was alone.

“Well?” said she, fixing her eyes upon me. “I hope you want nothing?
You'll get nothing.”

“No indeed, Miss Havisham. I only wanted you to know that I am doing
very well in my apprenticeship, and am always much obliged to you.”

“There, there!” with the old restless fingers. “Come now and then; come
on your birthday.--Ay!” she cried suddenly, turning herself and her
chair towards me, “You are looking round for Estella? Hey?”

I had been looking round,--in fact, for Estella,--and I stammered that I
hoped she was well.

“Abroad,” said Miss Havisham; “educating for a lady; far out of reach;
prettier than ever; admired by all who see her. Do you feel that you
have lost her?”

There was such a malignant enjoyment in her utterance of the last words,
and she broke into such a disagreeable laugh, that I was at a loss what
to say. She spared me the trouble of considering, by dismissing me. When
the gate was closed upon me by Sarah of the walnut-shell countenance, I
felt more than ever dissatisfied with my home and with my trade and with
everything; and that was all I took by that motion.

As I was loitering along the High Street, looking in disconsolately at
the shop windows, and thinking what I would buy if I were a gentleman,
who should come out of the bookshop but Mr. Wopsle. Mr. Wopsle had in
his hand the affecting tragedy of George Barnwell, in which he had that
moment invested sixpence, with the view of heaping every word of it on
the head of Pumblechook, with whom he was going to drink tea. No sooner
did he see me, than he appeared to consider that a special Providence
had put a 'prentice in his way to be read at; and he laid hold of me,
and insisted on my accompanying him to the Pumblechookian parlor. As I
knew it would be miserable at home, and as the nights were dark and the
way was dreary, and almost any companionship on the road was better
than none, I made no great resistance; consequently, we turned into
Pumblechook's just as the street and the shops were lighting up.

As I never assisted at any other representation of George Barnwell, I
don't know how long it may usually take; but I know very well that it
took until half-past nine o' clock that night, and that when Mr. Wopsle
got into Newgate, I thought he never would go to the scaffold, he became
so much slower than at any former period of his disgraceful career. I
thought it a little too much that he should complain of being cut short
in his flower after all, as if he had not been running to seed, leaf
after leaf, ever since his course began. This, however, was a
mere question of length and wearisomeness. What stung me, was the
identification of the whole affair with my unoffending self. When
Barnwell began to go wrong, I declare that I felt positively apologetic,
Pumblechook's indignant stare so taxed me with it. Wopsle, too, took
pains to present me in the worst light. At once ferocious and maudlin, I
was made to murder my uncle with no extenuating circumstances whatever;
Millwood put me down in argument, on every occasion; it became sheer
monomania in my master's daughter to care a button for me; and all I can
say for my gasping and procrastinating conduct on the fatal morning, is,
that it was worthy of the general feebleness of my character. Even after
I was happily hanged and Wopsle had closed the book, Pumblechook sat
staring at me, and shaking his head, and saying, “Take warning, boy,
take warning!” as if it were a well-known fact that I contemplated
murdering a near relation, provided I could only induce one to have the
weakness to become my benefactor.

It was a very dark night when it was all over, and when I set out with
Mr. Wopsle on the walk home. Beyond town, we found a heavy mist out, and
it fell wet and thick. The turnpike lamp was a blur, quite out of the
lamp's usual place apparently, and its rays looked solid substance on
the fog. We were noticing this, and saying how that the mist rose with a
change of wind from a certain quarter of our marshes, when we came upon
a man, slouching under the lee of the turnpike house.

“Halloa!” we said, stopping. “Orlick there?”

“Ah!” he answered, slouching out. “I was standing by a minute, on the
chance of company.”

“You are late,” I remarked.

Orlick not unnaturally answered, “Well? And you're late.”

“We have been,” said Mr. Wopsle, exalted with his late performance,--“we
have been indulging, Mr. Orlick, in an intellectual evening.”

Old Orlick growled, as if he had nothing to say about that, and we all
went on together. I asked him presently whether he had been spending his
half-holiday up and down town?

“Yes,” said he, “all of it. I come in behind yourself. I didn't see you,
but I must have been pretty close behind you. By the by, the guns is
going again.”

“At the Hulks?” said I.

“Ay! There's some of the birds flown from the cages. The guns have been
going since dark, about. You'll hear one presently.”

In effect, we had not walked many yards further, when the
well-remembered boom came towards us, deadened by the mist, and heavily
rolled away along the low grounds by the river, as if it were pursuing
and threatening the fugitives.

“A good night for cutting off in,” said Orlick. “We'd be puzzled how to
bring down a jail-bird on the wing, to-night.”

The subject was a suggestive one to me, and I thought about it in
silence. Mr. Wopsle, as the ill-requited uncle of the evening's tragedy,
fell to meditating aloud in his garden at Camberwell. Orlick, with his
hands in his pockets, slouched heavily at my side. It was very dark,
very wet, very muddy, and so we splashed along. Now and then, the sound
of the signal cannon broke upon us again, and again rolled sulkily along
the course of the river. I kept myself to myself and my thoughts. Mr.
Wopsle died amiably at Camberwell, and exceedingly game on Bosworth
Field, and in the greatest agonies at Glastonbury. Orlick sometimes
growled, “Beat it out, beat it out,--Old Clem! With a clink for the
stout,--Old Clem!” I thought he had been drinking, but he was not drunk.

Thus, we came to the village. The way by which we approached it took us
past the Three Jolly Bargemen, which we were surprised to find--it being
eleven o'clock--in a state of commotion, with the door wide open, and
unwonted lights that had been hastily caught up and put down scattered
about. Mr. Wopsle dropped into ask what was the matter (surmising that
a convict had been taken), but came running out in a great hurry.

“There's something wrong,” said he, without stopping, “up at your place,
Pip. Run all!”

“What is it?” I asked, keeping up with him. So did Orlick, at my side.

“I can't quite understand. The house seems to have been violently
entered when Joe Gargery was out. Supposed by convicts. Somebody has
been attacked and hurt.”

We were running too fast to admit of more being said, and we made no
stop until we got into our kitchen. It was full of people; the whole
village was there, or in the yard; and there was a surgeon, and there
was Joe, and there were a group of women, all on the floor in the midst
of the kitchen. The unemployed bystanders drew back when they saw me,
and so I became aware of my sister,--lying without sense or movement on
the bare boards where she had been knocked down by a tremendous blow
on the back of the head, dealt by some unknown hand when her face was
turned towards the fire,--destined never to be on the Rampage again,
while she was the wife of Joe.




Chapter XVI

With my head full of George Barnwell, I was at first disposed to believe
that I must have had some hand in the attack upon my sister, or at
all events that as her near relation, popularly known to be under
obligations to her, I was a more legitimate object of suspicion than
any one else. But when, in the clearer light of next morning, I began to
reconsider the matter and to hear it discussed around me on all sides, I
took another view of the case, which was more reasonable.

Joe had been at the Three Jolly Bargemen, smoking his pipe, from a
quarter after eight o'clock to a quarter before ten. While he was there,
my sister had been seen standing at the kitchen door, and had exchanged
Good Night with a farm-laborer going home. The man could not be more
particular as to the time at which he saw her (he got into dense
confusion when he tried to be), than that it must have been before nine.
When Joe went home at five minutes before ten, he found her struck down
on the floor, and promptly called in assistance. The fire had not then
burnt unusually low, nor was the snuff of the candle very long; the
candle, however, had been blown out.

Nothing had been taken away from any part of the house. Neither, beyond
the blowing out of the candle,--which stood on a table between the door
and my sister, and was behind her when she stood facing the fire and was
struck,--was there any disarrangement of the kitchen, excepting such
as she herself had made, in falling and bleeding. But, there was one
remarkable piece of evidence on the spot. She had been struck with
something blunt and heavy, on the head and spine; after the blows were
dealt, something heavy had been thrown down at her with considerable
violence, as she lay on her face. And on the ground beside her, when Joe
picked her up, was a convict's leg-iron which had been filed asunder.

Now, Joe, examining this iron with a smith's eye, declared it to have
been filed asunder some time ago. The hue and cry going off to the
Hulks, and people coming thence to examine the iron, Joe's opinion
was corroborated. They did not undertake to say when it had left the
prison-ships to which it undoubtedly had once belonged; but they claimed
to know for certain that that particular manacle had not been worn by
either of the two convicts who had escaped last night. Further, one of
those two was already retaken, and had not freed himself of his iron.

Knowing what I knew, I set up an inference of my own here. I believed
the iron to be my convict's iron,--the iron I had seen and heard him
filing at, on the marshes,--but my mind did not accuse him of having put
it to its latest use. For I believed one of two other persons to have
become possessed of it, and to have turned it to this cruel account.
Either Orlick, or the strange man who had shown me the file.

Now, as to Orlick; he had gone to town exactly as he told us when we
picked him up at the turnpike, he had been seen about town all the
evening, he had been in divers companies in several public-houses, and
he had come back with myself and Mr. Wopsle. There was nothing against
him, save the quarrel; and my sister had quarrelled with him, and with
everybody else about her, ten thousand times. As to the strange man; if
he had come back for his two bank-notes there could have been no dispute
about them, because my sister was fully prepared to restore them.
Besides, there had been no altercation; the assailant had come in so
silently and suddenly, that she had been felled before she could look
round.

It was horrible to think that I had provided the weapon, however
undesignedly, but I could hardly think otherwise. I suffered unspeakable
trouble while I considered and reconsidered whether I should at last
dissolve that spell of my childhood and tell Joe all the story. For
months afterwards, I every day settled the question finally in the
negative, and reopened and reargued it next morning. The contention
came, after all, to this;--the secret was such an old one now, had so
grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it
away. In addition to the dread that, having led up to so much mischief,
it would be now more likely than ever to alienate Joe from me if he
believed it, I had a further restraining dread that he would not believe
it, but would assort it with the fabulous dogs and veal-cutlets as a
monstrous invention. However, I temporized with myself, of course--for,
was I not wavering between right and wrong, when the thing is always
done?--and resolved to make a full disclosure if I should see any
such new occasion as a new chance of helping in the discovery of the
assailant.

The Constables and the Bow Street men from London--for, this happened in
the days of the extinct red-waistcoated police--were about the house for
a week or two, and did pretty much what I have heard and read of like
authorities doing in other such cases. They took up several obviously
wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas,
and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead
of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances. Also, they stood
about the door of the Jolly Bargemen, with knowing and reserved looks
that filled the whole neighborhood with admiration; and they had a
mysterious manner of taking their drink, that was almost as good as
taking the culprit. But not quite, for they never did it.

Long after these constitutional powers had dispersed, my sister lay very
ill in bed. Her sight was disturbed, so that she saw objects multiplied,
and grasped at visionary teacups and wineglasses instead of the
realities; her hearing was greatly impaired; her memory also; and her
speech was unintelligible. When, at last, she came round so far as to
be helped downstairs, it was still necessary to keep my slate always by
her, that she might indicate in writing what she could not indicate in
speech. As she was (very bad handwriting apart) a more than indifferent
speller, and as Joe was a more than indifferent reader, extraordinary
complications arose between them which I was always called in to solve.
The administration of mutton instead of medicine, the substitution of
Tea for Joe, and the baker for bacon, were among the mildest of my own
mistakes.

However, her temper was greatly improved, and she was patient. A
tremulous uncertainty of the action of all her limbs soon became a
part of her regular state, and afterwards, at intervals of two or three
months, she would often put her hands to her head, and would then remain
for about a week at a time in some gloomy aberration of mind. We were
at a loss to find a suitable attendant for her, until a circumstance
happened conveniently to relieve us. Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt conquered a
confirmed habit of living into which she had fallen, and Biddy became a
part of our establishment.

It may have been about a month after my sister's reappearance in the
kitchen, when Biddy came to us with a small speckled box containing the
whole of her worldly effects, and became a blessing to the household.
Above all, she was a blessing to Joe, for the dear old fellow was sadly
cut up by the constant contemplation of the wreck of his wife, and had
been accustomed, while attending on her of an evening, to turn to me
every now and then and say, with his blue eyes moistened, “Such a fine
figure of a woman as she once were, Pip!” Biddy instantly taking the
cleverest charge of her as though she had studied her from infancy; Joe
became able in some sort to appreciate the greater quiet of his life,
and to get down to the Jolly Bargemen now and then for a change that did
him good. It was characteristic of the police people that they had all
more or less suspected poor Joe (though he never knew it), and that they
had to a man concurred in regarding him as one of the deepest spirits
they had ever encountered.

Biddy's first triumph in her new office, was to solve a difficulty
that had completely vanquished me. I had tried hard at it, but had made
nothing of it. Thus it was:--

Again and again and again, my sister had traced upon the slate, a
character that looked like a curious T, and then with the utmost
eagerness had called our attention to it as something she particularly
wanted. I had in vain tried everything producible that began with a T,
from tar to toast and tub. At length it had come into my head that the
sign looked like a hammer, and on my lustily calling that word in my
sister's ear, she had begun to hammer on the table and had expressed a
qualified assent. Thereupon, I had brought in all our hammers, one after
another, but without avail. Then I bethought me of a crutch, the shape
being much the same, and I borrowed one in the village, and displayed
it to my sister with considerable confidence. But she shook her head to
that extent when she was shown it, that we were terrified lest in her
weak and shattered state she should dislocate her neck.

When my sister found that Biddy was very quick to understand her, this
mysterious sign reappeared on the slate. Biddy looked thoughtfully
at it, heard my explanation, looked thoughtfully at my sister, looked
thoughtfully at Joe (who was always represented on the slate by his
initial letter), and ran into the forge, followed by Joe and me.

“Why, of course!” cried Biddy, with an exultant face. “Don't you see?
It's him!”

Orlick, without a doubt! She had lost his name, and could only signify
him by his hammer. We told him why we wanted him to come into the
kitchen, and he slowly laid down his hammer, wiped his brow with his
arm, took another wipe at it with his apron, and came slouching
out, with a curious loose vagabond bend in the knees that strongly
distinguished him.

I confess that I expected to see my sister denounce him, and that I
was disappointed by the different result. She manifested the greatest
anxiety to be on good terms with him, was evidently much pleased by his
being at length produced, and motioned that she would have him
given something to drink. She watched his countenance as if she were
particularly wishful to be assured that he took kindly to his reception,
she showed every possible desire to conciliate him, and there was an air
of humble propitiation in all she did, such as I have seen pervade the
bearing of a child towards a hard master. After that day, a day rarely
passed without her drawing the hammer on her slate, and without Orlick's
slouching in and standing doggedly before her, as if he knew no more
than I did what to make of it.




Chapter XVII

I now fell into a regular routine of apprenticeship life, which was
varied beyond the limits of the village and the marshes, by no more
remarkable circumstance than the arrival of my birthday and my paying
another visit to Miss Havisham. I found Miss Sarah Pocket still on duty
at the gate; I found Miss Havisham just as I had left her, and she spoke
of Estella in the very same way, if not in the very same words. The
interview lasted but a few minutes, and she gave me a guinea when I was
going, and told me to come again on my next birthday. I may mention at
once that this became an annual custom. I tried to decline taking the
guinea on the first occasion, but with no better effect than causing her
to ask me very angrily, if I expected more? Then, and after that, I took
it.

So unchanging was the dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened
room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that
I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that
mysterious place, and, while I and everything else outside it grew
older, it stood still. Daylight never entered the house as to my
thoughts and remembrances of it, any more than as to the actual fact. It
bewildered me, and under its influence I continued at heart to hate my
trade and to be ashamed of home.

Imperceptibly I became conscious of a change in Biddy, however. Her
shoes came up at the heel, her hair grew bright and neat, her hands were
always clean. She was not beautiful,--she was common, and could not be
like Estella,--but she was pleasant and wholesome and sweet-tempered.
She had not been with us more than a year (I remember her being newly
out of mourning at the time it struck me), when I observed to myself one
evening that she had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that
were very pretty and very good.

It came of my lifting up my own eyes from a task I was poring
at--writing some passages from a book, to improve myself in two ways at
once by a sort of stratagem--and seeing Biddy observant of what I was
about. I laid down my pen, and Biddy stopped in her needlework without
laying it down.

“Biddy,” said I, “how do you manage it? Either I am very stupid, or you
are very clever.”

“What is it that I manage? I don't know,” returned Biddy, smiling.

She managed our whole domestic life, and wonderfully too; but I did not
mean that, though that made what I did mean more surprising.

“How do you manage, Biddy,” said I, “to learn everything that I learn,
and always to keep up with me?” I was beginning to be rather vain of
my knowledge, for I spent my birthday guineas on it, and set aside the
greater part of my pocket-money for similar investment; though I have no
doubt, now, that the little I knew was extremely dear at the price.

“I might as well ask you,” said Biddy, “how you manage?”

“No; because when I come in from the forge of a night, any one can see
me turning to at it. But you never turn to at it, Biddy.”

“I suppose I must catch it like a cough,” said Biddy, quietly; and went
on with her sewing.

Pursuing my idea as I leaned back in my wooden chair, and looked at
Biddy sewing away with her head on one side, I began to think her rather
an extraordinary girl. For I called to mind now, that she was equally
accomplished in the terms of our trade, and the names of our different
sorts of work, and our various tools. In short, whatever I knew, Biddy
knew. Theoretically, she was already as good a blacksmith as I, or
better.

“You are one of those, Biddy,” said I, “who make the most of every
chance. You never had a chance before you came here, and see how
improved you are!”

Biddy looked at me for an instant, and went on with her sewing. “I was
your first teacher though; wasn't I?” said she, as she sewed.

“Biddy!” I exclaimed, in amazement. “Why, you are crying!”

“No I am not,” said Biddy, looking up and laughing. “What put that in
your head?”

What could have put it in my head but the glistening of a tear as it
dropped on her work? I sat silent, recalling what a drudge she had been
until Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt successfully overcame that bad habit of
living, so highly desirable to be got rid of by some people. I recalled
the hopeless circumstances by which she had been surrounded in the
miserable little shop and the miserable little noisy evening school,
with that miserable old bundle of incompetence always to be dragged and
shouldered. I reflected that even in those untoward times there must
have been latent in Biddy what was now developing, for, in my first
uneasiness and discontent I had turned to her for help, as a matter of
course. Biddy sat quietly sewing, shedding no more tears, and while I
looked at her and thought about it all, it occurred to me that perhaps
I had not been sufficiently grateful to Biddy. I might have been too
reserved, and should have patronized her more (though I did not use that
precise word in my meditations) with my confidence.

“Yes, Biddy,” I observed, when I had done turning it over, “you were my
first teacher, and that at a time when we little thought of ever being
together like this, in this kitchen.”

“Ah, poor thing!” replied Biddy. It was like her self-forgetfulness to
transfer the remark to my sister, and to get up and be busy about her,
making her more comfortable; “that's sadly true!”

“Well!” said I, “we must talk together a little more, as we used to do.
And I must consult you a little more, as I used to do. Let us have a
quiet walk on the marshes next Sunday, Biddy, and a long chat.”

My sister was never left alone now; but Joe more than readily undertook
the care of her on that Sunday afternoon, and Biddy and I went out
together. It was summer-time, and lovely weather. When we had passed the
village and the church and the churchyard, and were out on the marshes
and began to see the sails of the ships as they sailed on, I began to
combine Miss Havisham and Estella with the prospect, in my usual way.
When we came to the river-side and sat down on the bank, with the water
rippling at our feet, making it all more quiet than it would have been
without that sound, I resolved that it was a good time and place for the
admission of Biddy into my inner confidence.

“Biddy,” said I, after binding her to secrecy, “I want to be a
gentleman.”

“O, I wouldn't, if I was you!” she returned. “I don't think it would
answer.”

“Biddy,” said I, with some severity, “I have particular reasons for
wanting to be a gentleman.”

“You know best, Pip; but don't you think you are happier as you are?”

“Biddy,” I exclaimed, impatiently, “I am not at all happy as I am. I
am disgusted with my calling and with my life. I have never taken to
either, since I was bound. Don't be absurd.”

“Was I absurd?” said Biddy, quietly raising her eyebrows; “I am sorry
for that; I didn't mean to be. I only want you to do well, and to be
comfortable.”

“Well, then, understand once for all that I never shall or can be
comfortable--or anything but miserable--there, Biddy!--unless I can lead
a very different sort of life from the life I lead now.”

“That's a pity!” said Biddy, shaking her head with a sorrowful air.

Now, I too had so often thought it a pity, that, in the singular kind of
quarrel with myself which I was always carrying on, I was half inclined
to shed tears of vexation and distress when Biddy gave utterance to her
sentiment and my own. I told her she was right, and I knew it was much
to be regretted, but still it was not to be helped.

“If I could have settled down,” I said to Biddy, plucking up the short
grass within reach, much as I had once upon a time pulled my feelings
out of my hair and kicked them into the brewery wall,--“if I could have
settled down and been but half as fond of the forge as I was when I was
little, I know it would have been much better for me. You and I and Joe
would have wanted nothing then, and Joe and I would perhaps have gone
partners when I was out of my time, and I might even have grown up to
keep company with you, and we might have sat on this very bank on a fine
Sunday, quite different people. I should have been good enough for you;
shouldn't I, Biddy?”

Biddy sighed as she looked at the ships sailing on, and returned for
answer, “Yes; I am not over-particular.” It scarcely sounded flattering,
but I knew she meant well.

“Instead of that,” said I, plucking up more grass and chewing a blade or
two, “see how I am going on. Dissatisfied, and uncomfortable, and--what
would it signify to me, being coarse and common, if nobody had told me
so!”

Biddy turned her face suddenly towards mine, and looked far more
attentively at me than she had looked at the sailing ships.

“It was neither a very true nor a very polite thing to say,” she
remarked, directing her eyes to the ships again. “Who said it?”

I was disconcerted, for I had broken away without quite seeing where
I was going to. It was not to be shuffled off now, however, and I
answered, “The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's, and she's more
beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want
to be a gentleman on her account.” Having made this lunatic confession,
I began to throw my torn-up grass into the river, as if I had some
thoughts of following it.

“Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?” Biddy
quietly asked me, after a pause.

“I don't know,” I moodily answered.

“Because, if it is to spite her,” Biddy pursued, “I should think--but
you know best--that might be better and more independently done by
caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should
think--but you know best--she was not worth gaining over.”

Exactly what I myself had thought, many times. Exactly what was
perfectly manifest to me at the moment. But how could I, a poor dazed
village lad, avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and
wisest of men fall every day?

“It may be all quite true,” said I to Biddy, “but I admire her
dreadfully.”

In short, I turned over on my face when I came to that, and got a good
grasp on the hair on each side of my head, and wrenched it well. All the
while knowing the madness of my heart to be so very mad and misplaced,
that I was quite conscious it would have served my face right, if I
had lifted it up by my hair, and knocked it against the pebbles as a
punishment for belonging to such an idiot.

Biddy was the wisest of girls, and she tried to reason no more with me.
She put her hand, which was a comfortable hand though roughened by work,
upon my hands, one after another, and gently took them out of my hair.
Then she softly patted my shoulder in a soothing way, while with my face
upon my sleeve I cried a little,--exactly as I had done in the brewery
yard,--and felt vaguely convinced that I was very much ill-used by
somebody, or by everybody; I can't say which.

“I am glad of one thing,” said Biddy, “and that is, that you have felt
you could give me your confidence, Pip. And I am glad of another thing,
and that is, that of course you know you may depend upon my keeping it
and always so far deserving it. If your first teacher (dear! such a poor
one, and so much in need of being taught herself!) had been your teacher
at the present time, she thinks she knows what lesson she would set. But
it would be a hard one to learn, and you have got beyond her, and it's
of no use now.” So, with a quiet sigh for me, Biddy rose from the bank,
and said, with a fresh and pleasant change of voice, “Shall we walk a
little farther, or go home?”

“Biddy,” I cried, getting up, putting my arm round her neck, and giving
her a kiss, “I shall always tell you everything.”

“Till you're a gentleman,” said Biddy.

“You know I never shall be, so that's always. Not that I have any
occasion to tell you anything, for you know everything I know,--as I
told you at home the other night.”

“Ah!” said Biddy, quite in a whisper, as she looked away at the ships.
And then repeated, with her former pleasant change, “shall we walk a
little farther, or go home?”

I said to Biddy we would walk a little farther, and we did so, and the
summer afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was very
beautiful. I began to consider whether I was not more naturally and
wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing
beggar my neighbor by candle-light in the room with the stopped clocks,
and being despised by Estella. I thought it would be very good for me if
I could get her out of my head, with all the rest of those remembrances
and fancies, and could go to work determined to relish what I had to do,
and stick to it, and make the best of it. I asked myself the question
whether I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that
moment instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable? I was obliged to
admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself, “Pip,
what a fool you are!”

We talked a good deal as we walked, and all that Biddy said seemed
right. Biddy was never insulting, or capricious, or Biddy to-day and
somebody else to-morrow; she would have derived only pain, and no
pleasure, from giving me pain; she would far rather have wounded her own
breast than mine. How could it be, then, that I did not like her much
the better of the two?

“Biddy,” said I, when we were walking homeward, “I wish you could put me
right.”

“I wish I could!” said Biddy.

“If I could only get myself to fall in love with you,--you don't mind my
speaking so openly to such an old acquaintance?”

“Oh dear, not at all!” said Biddy. “Don't mind me.”

“If I could only get myself to do it, that would be the thing for me.”

“But you never will, you see,” said Biddy.

It did not appear quite so unlikely to me that evening, as it would have
done if we had discussed it a few hours before. I therefore observed
I was not quite sure of that. But Biddy said she was, and she said it
decisively. In my heart I believed her to be right; and yet I took it
rather ill, too, that she should be so positive on the point.

When we came near the churchyard, we had to cross an embankment, and
get over a stile near a sluice-gate. There started up, from the gate, or
from the rushes, or from the ooze (which was quite in his stagnant way),
Old Orlick.

“Halloa!” he growled, “where are you two going?”

“Where should we be going, but home?”

“Well, then,” said he, “I'm jiggered if I don't see you home!”

This penalty of being jiggered was a favorite supposititious case of
his. He attached no definite meaning to the word that I am aware of, but
used it, like his own pretended Christian name, to affront mankind, and
convey an idea of something savagely damaging. When I was younger, I
had had a general belief that if he had jiggered me personally, he would
have done it with a sharp and twisted hook.

Biddy was much against his going with us, and said to me in a whisper,
“Don't let him come; I don't like him.” As I did not like him either,
I took the liberty of saying that we thanked him, but we didn't want
seeing home. He received that piece of information with a yell of
laughter, and dropped back, but came slouching after us at a little
distance.

Curious to know whether Biddy suspected him of having had a hand in
that murderous attack of which my sister had never been able to give any
account, I asked her why she did not like him.

“Oh!” she replied, glancing over her shoulder as he slouched after us,
“because I--I am afraid he likes me.”

“Did he ever tell you he liked you?” I asked indignantly.

“No,” said Biddy, glancing over her shoulder again, “he never told me
so; but he dances at me, whenever he can catch my eye.”

However novel and peculiar this testimony of attachment, I did not
doubt the accuracy of the interpretation. I was very hot indeed upon
Old Orlick's daring to admire her; as hot as if it were an outrage on
myself.

“But it makes no difference to you, you know,” said Biddy, calmly.

“No, Biddy, it makes no difference to me; only I don't like it; I don't
approve of it.”

“Nor I neither,” said Biddy. “Though that makes no difference to you.”

“Exactly,” said I; “but I must tell you I should have no opinion of you,
Biddy, if he danced at you with your own consent.”

I kept an eye on Orlick after that night, and, whenever circumstances
were favorable to his dancing at Biddy, got before him to obscure that
demonstration. He had struck root in Joe's establishment, by reason
of my sister's sudden fancy for him, or I should have tried to get him
dismissed. He quite understood and reciprocated my good intentions, as I
had reason to know thereafter.

And now, because my mind was not confused enough before, I complicated
its confusion fifty thousand-fold, by having states and seasons when I
was clear that Biddy was immeasurably better than Estella, and that the
plain honest working life to which I was born had nothing in it to
be ashamed of, but offered me sufficient means of self-respect
and happiness. At those times, I would decide conclusively that my
disaffection to dear old Joe and the forge was gone, and that I was
growing up in a fair way to be partners with Joe and to keep company
with Biddy,--when all in a moment some confounding remembrance of the
Havisham days would fall upon me like a destructive missile, and scatter
my wits again. Scattered wits take a long time picking up; and often
before I had got them well together, they would be dispersed in all
directions by one stray thought, that perhaps after all Miss Havisham
was going to make my fortune when my time was out.

If my time had run out, it would have left me still at the height of my
perplexities, I dare say. It never did run out, however, but was brought
to a premature end, as I proceed to relate.




Chapter XVIII

It was in the fourth year of my apprenticeship to Joe, and it was a
Saturday night. There was a group assembled round the fire at the Three
Jolly Bargemen, attentive to Mr. Wopsle as he read the newspaper aloud.
Of that group I was one.

A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr. Wopsle was imbrued
in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective
in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the
Inquest. He faintly moaned, “I am done for,” as the victim, and he
barbarously bellowed, “I'll serve you out,” as the murderer. He gave the
medical testimony, in pointed imitation of our local practitioner; and
he piped and shook, as the aged turnpike-keeper who had heard blows, to
an extent so very paralytic as to suggest a doubt regarding the mental
competency of that witness. The coroner, in Mr. Wopsle's hands, became
Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus. He enjoyed himself thoroughly,
and we all enjoyed ourselves, and were delightfully comfortable. In this
cosey state of mind we came to the verdict Wilful Murder.

Then, and not sooner, I became aware of a strange gentleman leaning over
the back of the settle opposite me, looking on. There was an expression
of contempt on his face, and he bit the side of a great forefinger as he
watched the group of faces.

“Well!” said the stranger to Mr. Wopsle, when the reading was done, “you
have settled it all to your own satisfaction, I have no doubt?”

Everybody started and looked up, as if it were the murderer. He looked
at everybody coldly and sarcastically.

“Guilty, of course?” said he. “Out with it. Come!”

“Sir,” returned Mr. Wopsle, “without having the honor of your
acquaintance, I do say Guilty.” Upon this we all took courage to unite
in a confirmatory murmur.

“I know you do,” said the stranger; “I knew you would. I told you so.
But now I'll ask you a question. Do you know, or do you not know,
that the law of England supposes every man to be innocent, until he is
proved--proved--to be guilty?”

“Sir,” Mr. Wopsle began to reply, “as an Englishman myself, I--”

“Come!” said the stranger, biting his forefinger at him. “Don't evade
the question. Either you know it, or you don't know it. Which is it to
be?”

He stood with his head on one side and himself on one side, in a
bullying, interrogative manner, and he threw his forefinger at Mr.
Wopsle,--as it were to mark him out--before biting it again.

“Now!” said he. “Do you know it, or don't you know it?”

“Certainly I know it,” replied Mr. Wopsle.

“Certainly you know it. Then why didn't you say so at first? Now, I'll
ask you another question,”--taking possession of Mr. Wopsle, as if he
had a right to him,--“do you know that none of these witnesses have yet
been cross-examined?”

Mr. Wopsle was beginning, “I can only say--” when the stranger stopped
him.

“What? You won't answer the question, yes or no? Now, I'll try you
again.” Throwing his finger at him again. “Attend to me. Are you
aware, or are you not aware, that none of these witnesses have yet been
cross-examined? Come, I only want one word from you. Yes, or no?”

Mr. Wopsle hesitated, and we all began to conceive rather a poor opinion
of him.

“Come!” said the stranger, “I'll help you. You don't deserve help, but
I'll help you. Look at that paper you hold in your hand. What is it?”

“What is it?” repeated Mr. Wopsle, eyeing it, much at a loss.

“Is it,” pursued the stranger in his most sarcastic and suspicious
manner, “the printed paper you have just been reading from?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Undoubtedly. Now, turn to that paper, and tell me whether it distinctly
states that the prisoner expressly said that his legal advisers
instructed him altogether to reserve his defence?”

“I read that just now,” Mr. Wopsle pleaded.

“Never mind what you read just now, sir; I don't ask you what you read
just now. You may read the Lord's Prayer backwards, if you like,--and,
perhaps, have done it before to-day. Turn to the paper. No, no, no my
friend; not to the top of the column; you know better than that; to
the bottom, to the bottom.” (We all began to think Mr. Wopsle full of
subterfuge.) “Well? Have you found it?”

“Here it is,” said Mr. Wopsle.

“Now, follow that passage with your eye, and tell me whether it
distinctly states that the prisoner expressly said that he was
instructed by his legal advisers wholly to reserve his defence? Come! Do
you make that of it?”

Mr. Wopsle answered, “Those are not the exact words.”

“Not the exact words!” repeated the gentleman bitterly. “Is that the
exact substance?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Wopsle.

“Yes,” repeated the stranger, looking round at the rest of the company
with his right hand extended towards the witness, Wopsle. “And now I ask
you what you say to the conscience of that man who, with that passage
before his eyes, can lay his head upon his pillow after having
pronounced a fellow-creature guilty, unheard?”

We all began to suspect that Mr. Wopsle was not the man we had thought
him, and that he was beginning to be found out.

“And that same man, remember,” pursued the gentleman, throwing his
finger at Mr. Wopsle heavily,--“that same man might be summoned as a
juryman upon this very trial, and, having thus deeply committed himself,
might return to the bosom of his family and lay his head upon his
pillow, after deliberately swearing that he would well and truly try the
issue joined between Our Sovereign Lord the King and the prisoner at the
bar, and would a true verdict give according to the evidence, so help
him God!”

We were all deeply persuaded that the unfortunate Wopsle had gone too
far, and had better stop in his reckless career while there was yet
time.

The strange gentleman, with an air of authority not to be disputed, and
with a manner expressive of knowing something secret about every one of
us that would effectually do for each individual if he chose to disclose
it, left the back of the settle, and came into the space between the two
settles, in front of the fire, where he remained standing, his left hand
in his pocket, and he biting the forefinger of his right.

“From information I have received,” said he, looking round at us as we
all quailed before him, “I have reason to believe there is a blacksmith
among you, by name Joseph--or Joe--Gargery. Which is the man?”

“Here is the man,” said Joe.

The strange gentleman beckoned him out of his place, and Joe went.

“You have an apprentice,” pursued the stranger, “commonly known as Pip?
Is he here?”

“I am here!” I cried.

The stranger did not recognize me, but I recognized him as the gentleman
I had met on the stairs, on the occasion of my second visit to Miss
Havisham. I had known him the moment I saw him looking over the settle,
and now that I stood confronting him with his hand upon my shoulder,
I checked off again in detail his large head, his dark complexion, his
deep-set eyes, his bushy black eyebrows, his large watch-chain, his
strong black dots of beard and whisker, and even the smell of scented
soap on his great hand.

“I wish to have a private conference with you two,” said he, when he had
surveyed me at his leisure. “It will take a little time. Perhaps we
had better go to your place of residence. I prefer not to anticipate my
communication here; you will impart as much or as little of it as you
please to your friends afterwards; I have nothing to do with that.”

Amidst a wondering silence, we three walked out of the Jolly Bargemen,
and in a wondering silence walked home. While going along, the strange
gentleman occasionally looked at me, and occasionally bit the side of
his finger. As we neared home, Joe vaguely acknowledging the occasion as
an impressive and ceremonious one, went on ahead to open the front door.
Our conference was held in the state parlor, which was feebly lighted by
one candle.

It began with the strange gentleman's sitting down at the table, drawing
the candle to him, and looking over some entries in his pocket-book.
He then put up the pocket-book and set the candle a little aside, after
peering round it into the darkness at Joe and me, to ascertain which was
which.

“My name,” he said, “is Jaggers, and I am a lawyer in London. I am
pretty well known. I have unusual business to transact with you, and I
commence by explaining that it is not of my originating. If my advice
had been asked, I should not have been here. It was not asked, and you
see me here. What I have to do as the confidential agent of another, I
do. No less, no more.”

Finding that he could not see us very well from where he sat, he got
up, and threw one leg over the back of a chair and leaned upon it; thus
having one foot on the seat of the chair, and one foot on the ground.

“Now, Joseph Gargery, I am the bearer of an offer to relieve you of
this young fellow your apprentice. You would not object to cancel his
indentures at his request and for his good? You would want nothing for
so doing?”

“Lord forbid that I should want anything for not standing in Pip's way,”
 said Joe, staring.

“Lord forbidding is pious, but not to the purpose,” returned Mr.
Jaggers. “The question is, Would you want anything? Do you want
anything?”

“The answer is,” returned Joe, sternly, “No.”

I thought Mr. Jaggers glanced at Joe, as if he considered him a fool for
his disinterestedness. But I was too much bewildered between breathless
curiosity and surprise, to be sure of it.

“Very well,” said Mr. Jaggers. “Recollect the admission you have made,
and don't try to go from it presently.”

“Who's a going to try?” retorted Joe.

“I don't say anybody is. Do you keep a dog?”

“Yes, I do keep a dog.”

“Bear in mind then, that Brag is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better.
Bear that in mind, will you?” repeated Mr. Jaggers, shutting his eyes
and nodding his head at Joe, as if he were forgiving him something.
“Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to
make is, that he has great expectations.”

Joe and I gasped, and looked at one another.

“I am instructed to communicate to him,” said Mr. Jaggers, throwing
his finger at me sideways, “that he will come into a handsome property.
Further, that it is the desire of the present possessor of that
property, that he be immediately removed from his present sphere of life
and from this place, and be brought up as a gentleman,--in a word, as a
young fellow of great expectations.”

My dream was out; my wild fancy was surpassed by sober reality; Miss
Havisham was going to make my fortune on a grand scale.

“Now, Mr. Pip,” pursued the lawyer, “I address the rest of what I have
to say, to you. You are to understand, first, that it is the request
of the person from whom I take my instructions that you always bear
the name of Pip. You will have no objection, I dare say, to your great
expectations being encumbered with that easy condition. But if you have
any objection, this is the time to mention it.”

My heart was beating so fast, and there was such a singing in my ears,
that I could scarcely stammer I had no objection.

“I should think not! Now you are to understand, secondly, Mr. Pip, that
the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound
secret, until the person chooses to reveal it. I am empowered to mention
that it is the intention of the person to reveal it at first hand by
word of mouth to yourself. When or where that intention may be carried
out, I cannot say; no one can say. It may be years hence. Now, you are
distinctly to understand that you are most positively prohibited from
making any inquiry on this head, or any allusion or reference, however
distant, to any individual whomsoever as the individual, in all the
communications you may have with me. If you have a suspicion in your own
breast, keep that suspicion in your own breast. It is not the least to
the purpose what the reasons of this prohibition are; they may be the
strongest and gravest reasons, or they may be mere whim. This is not for
you to inquire into. The condition is laid down. Your acceptance of it,
and your observance of it as binding, is the only remaining condition
that I am charged with, by the person from whom I take my instructions,
and for whom I am not otherwise responsible. That person is the person
from whom you derive your expectations, and the secret is solely held by
that person and by me. Again, not a very difficult condition with which
to encumber such a rise in fortune; but if you have any objection to it,
this is the time to mention it. Speak out.”

Once more, I stammered with difficulty that I had no objection.

“I should think not! Now, Mr. Pip, I have done with stipulations.”
 Though he called me Mr. Pip, and began rather to make up to me, he still
could not get rid of a certain air of bullying suspicion; and even now
he occasionally shut his eyes and threw his finger at me while he
spoke, as much as to express that he knew all kinds of things to my
disparagement, if he only chose to mention them. “We come next, to mere
details of arrangement. You must know that, although I have used
the term 'expectations' more than once, you are not endowed with
expectations only. There is already lodged in my hands a sum of money
amply sufficient for your suitable education and maintenance. You will
please consider me your guardian. Oh!” for I was going to thank him, “I
tell you at once, I am paid for my services, or I shouldn't render them.
It is considered that you must be better educated, in accordance with
your altered position, and that you will be alive to the importance and
necessity of at once entering on that advantage.”

I said I had always longed for it.

“Never mind what you have always longed for, Mr. Pip,” he retorted;
“keep to the record. If you long for it now, that's enough. Am I
answered that you are ready to be placed at once under some proper
tutor? Is that it?”

I stammered yes, that was it.

“Good. Now, your inclinations are to be consulted. I don't think that
wise, mind, but it's my trust. Have you ever heard of any tutor whom you
would prefer to another?”

I had never heard of any tutor but Biddy and Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt;
so, I replied in the negative.

“There is a certain tutor, of whom I have some knowledge, who I think
might suit the purpose,” said Mr. Jaggers. “I don't recommend him,
observe; because I never recommend anybody. The gentleman I speak of is
one Mr. Matthew Pocket.”

Ah! I caught at the name directly. Miss Havisham's relation. The Matthew
whom Mr. and Mrs. Camilla had spoken of. The Matthew whose place was to
be at Miss Havisham's head, when she lay dead, in her bride's dress on
the bride's table.

“You know the name?” said Mr. Jaggers, looking shrewdly at me, and then
shutting up his eyes while he waited for my answer.

My answer was, that I had heard of the name.

“Oh!” said he. “You have heard of the name. But the question is, what do
you say of it?”

I said, or tried to say, that I was much obliged to him for his
recommendation--

“No, my young friend!” he interrupted, shaking his great head very
slowly. “Recollect yourself!”

Not recollecting myself, I began again that I was much obliged to him
for his recommendation--

“No, my young friend,” he interrupted, shaking his head and frowning and
smiling both at once,--“no, no, no; it's very well done, but it won't
do; you are too young to fix me with it. Recommendation is not the word,
Mr. Pip. Try another.”

Correcting myself, I said that I was much obliged to him for his mention
of Mr. Matthew Pocket--

“That's more like it!” cried Mr. Jaggers.--And (I added), I would
gladly try that gentleman.

“Good. You had better try him in his own house. The way shall be
prepared for you, and you can see his son first, who is in London. When
will you come to London?”

I said (glancing at Joe, who stood looking on, motionless), that I
supposed I could come directly.

“First,” said Mr. Jaggers, “you should have some new clothes to come in,
and they should not be working-clothes. Say this day week. You'll want
some money. Shall I leave you twenty guineas?”

He produced a long purse, with the greatest coolness, and counted them
out on the table and pushed them over to me. This was the first time he
had taken his leg from the chair. He sat astride of the chair when he
had pushed the money over, and sat swinging his purse and eyeing Joe.

“Well, Joseph Gargery? You look dumbfoundered?”

“I am!” said Joe, in a very decided manner.

“It was understood that you wanted nothing for yourself, remember?”

“It were understood,” said Joe. “And it are understood. And it ever will
be similar according.”

“But what,” said Mr. Jaggers, swinging his purse,--“what if it was in my
instructions to make you a present, as compensation?”

“As compensation what for?” Joe demanded.

“For the loss of his services.”

Joe laid his hand upon my shoulder with the touch of a woman. I have
often thought him since, like the steam-hammer that can crush a man or
pat an egg-shell, in his combination of strength with gentleness. “Pip
is that hearty welcome,” said Joe, “to go free with his services, to
honor and fortun', as no words can tell him. But if you think as Money
can make compensation to me for the loss of the little child--what come
to the forge--and ever the best of friends!--”

O dear good Joe, whom I was so ready to leave and so unthankful to, I
see you again, with your muscular blacksmith's arm before your eyes,
and your broad chest heaving, and your voice dying away. O dear good
faithful tender Joe, I feel the loving tremble of your hand upon my arm,
as solemnly this day as if it had been the rustle of an angel's wing!

But I encouraged Joe at the time. I was lost in the mazes of my future
fortunes, and could not retrace the by-paths we had trodden together. I
begged Joe to be comforted, for (as he said) we had ever been the best
of friends, and (as I said) we ever would be so. Joe scooped his eyes
with his disengaged wrist, as if he were bent on gouging himself, but
said not another word.

Mr. Jaggers had looked on at this, as one who recognized in Joe the
village idiot, and in me his keeper. When it was over, he said, weighing
in his hand the purse he had ceased to swing:--

“Now, Joseph Gargery, I warn you this is your last chance. No half
measures with me. If you mean to take a present that I have it in charge
to make you, speak out, and you shall have it. If on the contrary you
mean to say--” Here, to his great amazement, he was stopped by Joe's
suddenly working round him with every demonstration of a fell pugilistic
purpose.

“Which I meantersay,” cried Joe, “that if you come into my place
bull-baiting and badgering me, come out! Which I meantersay as sech if
you're a man, come on! Which I meantersay that what I say, I meantersay
and stand or fall by!”

I drew Joe away, and he immediately became placable; merely stating to
me, in an obliging manner and as a polite expostulatory notice to any
one whom it might happen to concern, that he were not a going to be
bull-baited and badgered in his own place. Mr. Jaggers had risen when
Joe demonstrated, and had backed near the door. Without evincing
any inclination to come in again, he there delivered his valedictory
remarks. They were these.

“Well, Mr. Pip, I think the sooner you leave here--as you are to be a
gentleman--the better. Let it stand for this day week, and you shall
receive my printed address in the meantime. You can take a hackney-coach
at the stage-coach office in London, and come straight to me.
Understand, that I express no opinion, one way or other, on the trust
I undertake. I am paid for undertaking it, and I do so. Now, understand
that, finally. Understand that!”

He was throwing his finger at both of us, and I think would have gone
on, but for his seeming to think Joe dangerous, and going off.

Something came into my head which induced me to run after him, as he was
going down to the Jolly Bargemen, where he had left a hired carriage.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Jaggers.”

“Halloa!” said he, facing round, “what's the matter?”

“I wish to be quite right, Mr. Jaggers, and to keep to your directions;
so I thought I had better ask. Would there be any objection to my taking
leave of any one I know, about here, before I go away?”

“No,” said he, looking as if he hardly understood me.

“I don't mean in the village only, but up town?”

“No,” said he. “No objection.”

I thanked him and ran home again, and there I found that Joe had already
locked the front door and vacated the state parlor, and was seated
by the kitchen fire with a hand on each knee, gazing intently at the
burning coals. I too sat down before the fire and gazed at the coals,
and nothing was said for a long time.

My sister was in her cushioned chair in her corner, and Biddy sat at her
needle-work before the fire, and Joe sat next Biddy, and I sat next Joe
in the corner opposite my sister. The more I looked into the glowing
coals, the more incapable I became of looking at Joe; the longer the
silence lasted, the more unable I felt to speak.

At length I got out, “Joe, have you told Biddy?”

“No, Pip,” returned Joe, still looking at the fire, and holding his
knees tight, as if he had private information that they intended to make
off somewhere, “which I left it to yourself, Pip.”

“I would rather you told, Joe.”

“Pip's a gentleman of fortun' then,” said Joe, “and God bless him in
it!”

Biddy dropped her work, and looked at me. Joe held his knees and looked
at me. I looked at both of them. After a pause, they both heartily
congratulated me; but there was a certain touch of sadness in their
congratulations that I rather resented.

I took it upon myself to impress Biddy (and through Biddy, Joe) with the
grave obligation I considered my friends under, to know nothing and say
nothing about the maker of my fortune. It would all come out in good
time, I observed, and in the meanwhile nothing was to be said, save
that I had come into great expectations from a mysterious patron. Biddy
nodded her head thoughtfully at the fire as she took up her work again,
and said she would be very particular; and Joe, still detaining his
knees, said, “Ay, ay, I'll be ekervally partickler, Pip;” and then they
congratulated me again, and went on to express so much wonder at the
notion of my being a gentleman that I didn't half like it.

Infinite pains were then taken by Biddy to convey to my sister some idea
of what had happened. To the best of my belief, those efforts entirely
failed. She laughed and nodded her head a great many times, and even
repeated after Biddy, the words “Pip” and “Property.” But I doubt if
they had more meaning in them than an election cry, and I cannot suggest
a darker picture of her state of mind.

I never could have believed it without experience, but as Joe and
Biddy became more at their cheerful ease again, I became quite gloomy.
Dissatisfied with my fortune, of course I could not be; but it is
possible that I may have been, without quite knowing it, dissatisfied
with myself.

Any how, I sat with my elbow on my knee and my face upon my hand,
looking into the fire, as those two talked about my going away, and
about what they should do without me, and all that. And whenever I
caught one of them looking at me, though never so pleasantly (and they
often looked at me,--particularly Biddy), I felt offended: as if they
were expressing some mistrust of me. Though Heaven knows they never did
by word or sign.

At those times I would get up and look out at the door; for our kitchen
door opened at once upon the night, and stood open on summer evenings to
air the room. The very stars to which I then raised my eyes, I am afraid
I took to be but poor and humble stars for glittering on the rustic
objects among which I had passed my life.

“Saturday night,” said I, when we sat at our supper of bread and cheese
and beer. “Five more days, and then the day before the day! They'll soon
go.”

“Yes, Pip,” observed Joe, whose voice sounded hollow in his beer-mug.
“They'll soon go.”

“Soon, soon go,” said Biddy.

“I have been thinking, Joe, that when I go down town on Monday, and
order my new clothes, I shall tell the tailor that I'll come and put
them on there, or that I'll have them sent to Mr. Pumblechook's. It
would be very disagreeable to be stared at by all the people here.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Hubble might like to see you in your new gen-teel figure
too, Pip,” said Joe, industriously cutting his bread, with his cheese on
it, in the palm of his left hand, and glancing at my untasted supper
as if he thought of the time when we used to compare slices. “So might
Wopsle. And the Jolly Bargemen might take it as a compliment.”

“That's just what I don't want, Joe. They would make such a business of
it,--such a coarse and common business,--that I couldn't bear myself.”

“Ah, that indeed, Pip!” said Joe. “If you couldn't abear yourself--”

Biddy asked me here, as she sat holding my sister's plate, “Have you
thought about when you'll show yourself to Mr. Gargery, and your sister
and me? You will show yourself to us; won't you?”

“Biddy,” I returned with some resentment, “you are so exceedingly quick
that it's difficult to keep up with you.”

(“She always were quick,” observed Joe.)

“If you had waited another moment, Biddy, you would have heard me say
that I shall bring my clothes here in a bundle one evening,--most likely
on the evening before I go away.”

Biddy said no more. Handsomely forgiving her, I soon exchanged an
affectionate good night with her and Joe, and went up to bed. When I got
into my little room, I sat down and took a long look at it, as a mean
little room that I should soon be parted from and raised above, for
ever. It was furnished with fresh young remembrances too, and even at
the same moment I fell into much the same confused division of mind
between it and the better rooms to which I was going, as I had been in
so often between the forge and Miss Havisham's, and Biddy and Estella.

The sun had been shining brightly all day on the roof of my attic, and
the room was warm. As I put the window open and stood looking out, I saw
Joe come slowly forth at the dark door, below, and take a turn or two
in the air; and then I saw Biddy come, and bring him a pipe and light
it for him. He never smoked so late, and it seemed to hint to me that he
wanted comforting, for some reason or other.

He presently stood at the door immediately beneath me, smoking his pipe,
and Biddy stood there too, quietly talking to him, and I knew that they
talked of me, for I heard my name mentioned in an endearing tone by both
of them more than once. I would not have listened for more, if I could
have heard more; so I drew away from the window, and sat down in my one
chair by the bedside, feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this
first night of my bright fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever
known.

Looking towards the open window, I saw light wreaths from Joe's pipe
floating there, and I fancied it was like a blessing from Joe,--not
obtruded on me or paraded before me, but pervading the air we shared
together. I put my light out, and crept into bed; and it was an uneasy
bed now, and I never slept the old sound sleep in it any more.




Chapter XIX

Morning made a considerable difference in my general prospect of Life,
and brightened it so much that it scarcely seemed the same. What lay
heaviest on my mind was, the consideration that six days intervened
between me and the day of departure; for I could not divest myself of
a misgiving that something might happen to London in the meanwhile, and
that, when I got there, it would be either greatly deteriorated or clean
gone.

Joe and Biddy were very sympathetic and pleasant when I spoke of our
approaching separation; but they only referred to it when I did. After
breakfast, Joe brought out my indentures from the press in the best
parlor, and we put them in the fire, and I felt that I was free. With
all the novelty of my emancipation on me, I went to church with Joe, and
thought perhaps the clergyman wouldn't have read that about the rich man
and the kingdom of Heaven, if he had known all.

After our early dinner, I strolled out alone, purposing to finish off
the marshes at once, and get them done with. As I passed the church, I
felt (as I had felt during service in the morning) a sublime compassion
for the poor creatures who were destined to go there, Sunday after
Sunday, all their lives through, and to lie obscurely at last among the
low green mounds. I promised myself that I would do something for them
one of these days, and formed a plan in outline for bestowing a
dinner of roast-beef and plum-pudding, a pint of ale, and a gallon of
condescension, upon everybody in the village.

If I had often thought before, with something allied to shame, of my
companionship with the fugitive whom I had once seen limping among those
graves, what were my thoughts on this Sunday, when the place recalled
the wretch, ragged and shivering, with his felon iron and badge! My
comfort was, that it happened a long time ago, and that he had doubtless
been transported a long way off, and that he was dead to me, and might
be veritably dead into the bargain.

No more low, wet grounds, no more dikes and sluices, no more of these
grazing cattle,--though they seemed, in their dull manner, to wear a
more respectful air now, and to face round, in order that they
might stare as long as possible at the possessor of such great
expectations,--farewell, monotonous acquaintances of my childhood,
henceforth I was for London and greatness; not for smith's work in
general, and for you! I made my exultant way to the old Battery, and,
lying down there to consider the question whether Miss Havisham intended
me for Estella, fell asleep.

When I awoke, I was much surprised to find Joe sitting beside me,
smoking his pipe. He greeted me with a cheerful smile on my opening my
eyes, and said,--

“As being the last time, Pip, I thought I'd foller.”

“And Joe, I am very glad you did so.”

“Thankee, Pip.”

“You may be sure, dear Joe,” I went on, after we had shaken hands, “that
I shall never forget you.”

“No, no, Pip!” said Joe, in a comfortable tone, “I'm sure of that. Ay,
ay, old chap! Bless you, it were only necessary to get it well round in
a man's mind, to be certain on it. But it took a bit of time to get it
well round, the change come so oncommon plump; didn't it?”

Somehow, I was not best pleased with Joe's being so mightily secure of
me. I should have liked him to have betrayed emotion, or to have said,
“It does you credit, Pip,” or something of that sort. Therefore, I made
no remark on Joe's first head; merely saying as to his second, that the
tidings had indeed come suddenly, but that I had always wanted to be a
gentleman, and had often and often speculated on what I would do, if I
were one.

“Have you though?” said Joe. “Astonishing!”

“It's a pity now, Joe,” said I, “that you did not get on a little more,
when we had our lessons here; isn't it?”

“Well, I don't know,” returned Joe. “I'm so awful dull. I'm only master
of my own trade. It were always a pity as I was so awful dull; but it's
no more of a pity now, than it was--this day twelvemonth--don't you
see?”

What I had meant was, that when I came into my property and was able to
do something for Joe, it would have been much more agreeable if he
had been better qualified for a rise in station. He was so perfectly
innocent of my meaning, however, that I thought I would mention it to
Biddy in preference.

So, when we had walked home and had had tea, I took Biddy into our
little garden by the side of the lane, and, after throwing out in a
general way for the elevation of her spirits, that I should never forget
her, said I had a favor to ask of her.

“And it is, Biddy,” said I, “that you will not omit any opportunity of
helping Joe on, a little.”

“How helping him on?” asked Biddy, with a steady sort of glance.

“Well! Joe is a dear good fellow,--in fact, I think he is the dearest
fellow that ever lived,--but he is rather backward in some things. For
instance, Biddy, in his learning and his manners.”

Although I was looking at Biddy as I spoke, and although she opened her
eyes very wide when I had spoken, she did not look at me.

“O, his manners! won't his manners do then?” asked Biddy, plucking a
black-currant leaf.

“My dear Biddy, they do very well here--”

“O! they do very well here?” interrupted Biddy, looking closely at the
leaf in her hand.

“Hear me out,--but if I were to remove Joe into a higher sphere, as I
shall hope to remove him when I fully come into my property, they would
hardly do him justice.”

“And don't you think he knows that?” asked Biddy.

It was such a very provoking question (for it had never in the most
distant manner occurred to me), that I said, snappishly,--

“Biddy, what do you mean?”

Biddy, having rubbed the leaf to pieces between her hands,--and the
smell of a black-currant bush has ever since recalled to me that evening
in the little garden by the side of the lane,--said, “Have you never
considered that he may be proud?”

“Proud?” I repeated, with disdainful emphasis.

“O! there are many kinds of pride,” said Biddy, looking full at me and
shaking her head; “pride is not all of one kind--”

“Well? What are you stopping for?” said I.

“Not all of one kind,” resumed Biddy. “He may be too proud to let any
one take him out of a place that he is competent to fill, and fills well
and with respect. To tell you the truth, I think he is; though it sounds
bold in me to say so, for you must know him far better than I do.”

“Now, Biddy,” said I, “I am very sorry to see this in you. I did not
expect to see this in you. You are envious, Biddy, and grudging. You
are dissatisfied on account of my rise in fortune, and you can't help
showing it.”

“If you have the heart to think so,” returned Biddy, “say so. Say so
over and over again, if you have the heart to think so.”

“If you have the heart to be so, you mean, Biddy,” said I, in a virtuous
and superior tone; “don't put it off upon me. I am very sorry to see it,
and it's a--it's a bad side of human nature. I did intend to ask you
to use any little opportunities you might have after I was gone, of
improving dear Joe. But after this I ask you nothing. I am extremely
sorry to see this in you, Biddy,” I repeated. “It's a--it's a bad side
of human nature.”

“Whether you scold me or approve of me,” returned poor Biddy, “you may
equally depend upon my trying to do all that lies in my power, here,
at all times. And whatever opinion you take away of me, shall make
no difference in my remembrance of you. Yet a gentleman should not be
unjust neither,” said Biddy, turning away her head.

I again warmly repeated that it was a bad side of human nature (in which
sentiment, waiving its application, I have since seen reason to think I
was right), and I walked down the little path away from Biddy, and
Biddy went into the house, and I went out at the garden gate and took a
dejected stroll until supper-time; again feeling it very sorrowful and
strange that this, the second night of my bright fortunes, should be as
lonely and unsatisfactory as the first.

But, morning once more brightened my view, and I extended my clemency to
Biddy, and we dropped the subject. Putting on the best clothes I had,
I went into town as early as I could hope to find the shops open,
and presented myself before Mr. Trabb, the tailor, who was having his
breakfast in the parlor behind his shop, and who did not think it worth
his while to come out to me, but called me into him.

“Well!” said Mr. Trabb, in a hail-fellow-well-met kind of way. “How are
you, and what can I do for you?”

Mr. Trabb had sliced his hot roll into three feather-beds, and was
slipping butter in between the blankets, and covering it up. He was a
prosperous old bachelor, and his open window looked into a prosperous
little garden and orchard, and there was a prosperous iron safe let into
the wall at the side of his fireplace, and I did not doubt that heaps of
his prosperity were put away in it in bags.

“Mr. Trabb,” said I, “it's an unpleasant thing to have to mention,
because it looks like boasting; but I have come into a handsome
property.”

A change passed over Mr. Trabb. He forgot the butter in bed, got up from
the bedside, and wiped his fingers on the tablecloth, exclaiming, “Lord
bless my soul!”

“I am going up to my guardian in London,” said I, casually drawing some
guineas out of my pocket and looking at them; “and I want a fashionable
suit of clothes to go in. I wish to pay for them,” I added--otherwise I
thought he might only pretend to make them, “with ready money.”

“My dear sir,” said Mr. Trabb, as he respectfully bent his body, opened
his arms, and took the liberty of touching me on the outside of each
elbow, “don't hurt me by mentioning that. May I venture to congratulate
you? Would you do me the favor of stepping into the shop?”

Mr. Trabb's boy was the most audacious boy in all that country-side.
When I had entered he was sweeping the shop, and he had sweetened his
labors by sweeping over me. He was still sweeping when I came out into
the shop with Mr. Trabb, and he knocked the broom against all possible
corners and obstacles, to express (as I understood it) equality with any
blacksmith, alive or dead.

“Hold that noise,” said Mr. Trabb, with the greatest sternness, “or I'll
knock your head off!--Do me the favor to be seated, sir. Now, this,”
 said Mr. Trabb, taking down a roll of cloth, and tiding it out in a
flowing manner over the counter, preparatory to getting his hand under
it to show the gloss, “is a very sweet article. I can recommend it for
your purpose, sir, because it really is extra super. But you shall
see some others. Give me Number Four, you!” (To the boy, and with a
dreadfully severe stare; foreseeing the danger of that miscreant's
brushing me with it, or making some other sign of familiarity.)

Mr. Trabb never removed his stern eye from the boy until he had
deposited number four on the counter and was at a safe distance again.
Then he commanded him to bring number five, and number eight. “And let
me have none of your tricks here,” said Mr. Trabb, “or you shall repent
it, you young scoundrel, the longest day you have to live.”

Mr. Trabb then bent over number four, and in a sort of deferential
confidence recommended it to me as a light article for summer wear, an
article much in vogue among the nobility and gentry, an article that
it would ever be an honor to him to reflect upon a distinguished
fellow-townsman's (if he might claim me for a fellow-townsman) having
worn. “Are you bringing numbers five and eight, you vagabond,” said Mr.
Trabb to the boy after that, “or shall I kick you out of the shop and
bring them myself?”

I selected the materials for a suit, with the assistance of Mr. Trabb's
judgment, and re-entered the parlor to be measured. For although Mr.
Trabb had my measure already, and had previously been quite contented
with it, he said apologetically that it “wouldn't do under existing
circumstances, sir,--wouldn't do at all.” So, Mr. Trabb measured and
calculated me in the parlor, as if I were an estate and he the finest
species of surveyor, and gave himself such a world of trouble that
I felt that no suit of clothes could possibly remunerate him for his
pains. When he had at last done and had appointed to send the articles
to Mr. Pumblechook's on the Thursday evening, he said, with his hand
upon the parlor lock, “I know, sir, that London gentlemen cannot be
expected to patronize local work, as a rule; but if you would give me a
turn now and then in the quality of a townsman, I should greatly esteem
it. Good morning, sir, much obliged.--Door!”

The last word was flung at the boy, who had not the least notion what
it meant. But I saw him collapse as his master rubbed me out with his
hands, and my first decided experience of the stupendous power of money
was, that it had morally laid upon his back Trabb's boy.

After this memorable event, I went to the hatter's, and the bootmaker's,
and the hosier's, and felt rather like Mother Hubbard's dog whose outfit
required the services of so many trades. I also went to the coach-office
and took my place for seven o'clock on Saturday morning. It was
not necessary to explain everywhere that I had come into a handsome
property; but whenever I said anything to that effect, it followed that
the officiating tradesman ceased to have his attention diverted through
the window by the High Street, and concentrated his mind upon me. When
I had ordered everything I wanted, I directed my steps towards
Pumblechook's, and, as I approached that gentleman's place of business,
I saw him standing at his door.

He was waiting for me with great impatience. He had been out early with
the chaise-cart, and had called at the forge and heard the news. He had
prepared a collation for me in the Barnwell parlor, and he too ordered
his shopman to “come out of the gangway” as my sacred person passed.

“My dear friend,” said Mr. Pumblechook, taking me by both hands, when
he and I and the collation were alone, “I give you joy of your good
fortune. Well deserved, well deserved!”

This was coming to the point, and I thought it a sensible way of
expressing himself.

“To think,” said Mr. Pumblechook, after snorting admiration at me for
some moments, “that I should have been the humble instrument of leading
up to this, is a proud reward.”

I begged Mr. Pumblechook to remember that nothing was to be ever said or
hinted, on that point.

“My dear young friend,” said Mr. Pumblechook; “if you will allow me to
call you so--”

I murmured “Certainly,” and Mr. Pumblechook took me by both hands again,
and communicated a movement to his waistcoat, which had an emotional
appearance, though it was rather low down, “My dear young friend, rely
upon my doing my little all in your absence, by keeping the fact before
the mind of Joseph.--Joseph!” said Mr. Pumblechook, in the way of a
compassionate adjuration. “Joseph!! Joseph!!!” Thereupon he shook his
head and tapped it, expressing his sense of deficiency in Joseph.

“But my dear young friend,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “you must be hungry,
you must be exhausted. Be seated. Here is a chicken had round from the
Boar, here is a tongue had round from the Boar, here's one or two little
things had round from the Boar, that I hope you may not despise. But do
I,” said Mr. Pumblechook, getting up again the moment after he had sat
down, “see afore me, him as I ever sported with in his times of happy
infancy? And may I--may I--?”

This May I, meant might he shake hands? I consented, and he was fervent,
and then sat down again.

“Here is wine,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “Let us drink, Thanks to Fortune,
and may she ever pick out her favorites with equal judgment! And yet I
cannot,” said Mr. Pumblechook, getting up again, “see afore me One--and
likewise drink to One--without again expressing--May I--may I--?”

I said he might, and he shook hands with me again, and emptied his glass
and turned it upside down. I did the same; and if I had turned myself
upside down before drinking, the wine could not have gone more direct to
my head.

Mr. Pumblechook helped me to the liver wing, and to the best slice of
tongue (none of those out-of-the-way No Thoroughfares of Pork now), and
took, comparatively speaking, no care of himself at all. “Ah! poultry,
poultry! You little thought,” said Mr. Pumblechook, apostrophizing the
fowl in the dish, “when you was a young fledgling, what was in store for
you. You little thought you was to be refreshment beneath this humble
roof for one as--Call it a weakness, if you will,” said Mr. Pumblechook,
getting up again, “but may I? may I--?”

It began to be unnecessary to repeat the form of saying he might, so
he did it at once. How he ever did it so often without wounding himself
with my knife, I don't know.

“And your sister,” he resumed, after a little steady eating, “which had
the honor of bringing you up by hand! It's a sad picter, to reflect that
she's no longer equal to fully understanding the honor. May--”

I saw he was about to come at me again, and I stopped him.

“We'll drink her health,” said I.

“Ah!” cried Mr. Pumblechook, leaning back in his chair, quite flaccid
with admiration, “that's the way you know 'em, sir!” (I don't know
who Sir was, but he certainly was not I, and there was no third person
present); “that's the way you know the noble-minded, sir! Ever forgiving
and ever affable. It might,” said the servile Pumblechook, putting down
his untasted glass in a hurry and getting up again, “to a common person,
have the appearance of repeating--but may I--?”

When he had done it, he resumed his seat and drank to my sister. “Let us
never be blind,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “to her faults of temper, but it
is to be hoped she meant well.”

At about this time, I began to observe that he was getting flushed in
the face; as to myself, I felt all face, steeped in wine and smarting.

I mentioned to Mr. Pumblechook that I wished to have my new clothes
sent to his house, and he was ecstatic on my so distinguishing him. I
mentioned my reason for desiring to avoid observation in the village,
and he lauded it to the skies. There was nobody but himself, he
intimated, worthy of my confidence, and--in short, might he? Then he
asked me tenderly if I remembered our boyish games at sums, and how we
had gone together to have me bound apprentice, and, in effect, how he
had ever been my favorite fancy and my chosen friend? If I had taken
ten times as many glasses of wine as I had, I should have known that he
never had stood in that relation towards me, and should in my heart of
hearts have repudiated the idea. Yet for all that, I remember feeling
convinced that I had been much mistaken in him, and that he was a
sensible, practical, good-hearted prime fellow.

By degrees he fell to reposing such great confidence in me, as to ask my
advice in reference to his own affairs. He mentioned that there was an
opportunity for a great amalgamation and monopoly of the corn and seed
trade on those premises, if enlarged, such as had never occurred
before in that or any other neighborhood. What alone was wanting to the
realization of a vast fortune, he considered to be More Capital.
Those were the two little words, more capital. Now it appeared to him
(Pumblechook) that if that capital were got into the business, through a
sleeping partner, sir,--which sleeping partner would have nothing to
do but walk in, by self or deputy, whenever he pleased, and examine
the books,--and walk in twice a year and take his profits away in his
pocket, to the tune of fifty per cent,--it appeared to him that that
might be an opening for a young gentleman of spirit combined with
property, which would be worthy of his attention. But what did I think?
He had great confidence in my opinion, and what did I think? I gave it
as my opinion. “Wait a bit!” The united vastness and distinctness of
this view so struck him, that he no longer asked if he might shake hands
with me, but said he really must,--and did.

We drank all the wine, and Mr. Pumblechook pledged himself over and over
again to keep Joseph up to the mark (I don't know what mark), and to
render me efficient and constant service (I don't know what service). He
also made known to me for the first time in my life, and certainly after
having kept his secret wonderfully well, that he had always said of me,
“That boy is no common boy, and mark me, his fortun' will be no common
fortun'.” He said with a tearful smile that it was a singular thing to
think of now, and I said so too. Finally, I went out into the air, with
a dim perception that there was something unwonted in the conduct of the
sunshine, and found that I had slumberously got to the turnpike without
having taken any account of the road.

There, I was roused by Mr. Pumblechook's hailing me. He was a long way
down the sunny street, and was making expressive gestures for me to
stop. I stopped, and he came up breathless.

“No, my dear friend,” said he, when he had recovered wind for speech.
“Not if I can help it. This occasion shall not entirely pass without
that affability on your part.--May I, as an old friend and well-wisher?
May I?”

We shook hands for the hundredth time at least, and he ordered a young
carter out of my way with the greatest indignation. Then, he blessed
me and stood waving his hand to me until I had passed the crook in the
road; and then I turned into a field and had a long nap under a hedge
before I pursued my way home.

I had scant luggage to take with me to London, for little of the little
I possessed was adapted to my new station. But I began packing that same
afternoon, and wildly packed up things that I knew I should want next
morning, in a fiction that there was not a moment to be lost.

So, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, passed; and on Friday morning I
went to Mr. Pumblechook's, to put on my new clothes and pay my visit to
Miss Havisham. Mr. Pumblechook's own room was given up to me to dress
in, and was decorated with clean towels expressly for the event. My
clothes were rather a disappointment, of course. Probably every new
and eagerly expected garment ever put on since clothes came in, fell
a trifle short of the wearer's expectation. But after I had had my
new suit on some half an hour, and had gone through an immensity of
posturing with Mr. Pumblechook's very limited dressing-glass, in the
futile endeavor to see my legs, it seemed to fit me better. It being
market morning at a neighboring town some ten miles off, Mr. Pumblechook
was not at home. I had not told him exactly when I meant to leave, and
was not likely to shake hands with him again before departing. This was
all as it should be, and I went out in my new array, fearfully ashamed
of having to pass the shopman, and suspicious after all that I was at a
personal disadvantage, something like Joe's in his Sunday suit.

I went circuitously to Miss Havisham's by all the back ways, and rang
at the bell constrainedly, on account of the stiff long fingers of my
gloves. Sarah Pocket came to the gate, and positively reeled back when
she saw me so changed; her walnut-shell countenance likewise turned from
brown to green and yellow.

“You?” said she. “You? Good gracious! What do you want?”

“I am going to London, Miss Pocket,” said I, “and want to say good-bye to
Miss Havisham.”

I was not expected, for she left me locked in the yard, while she went
to ask if I were to be admitted. After a very short delay, she returned
and took me up, staring at me all the way.

Miss Havisham was taking exercise in the room with the long spread
table, leaning on her crutch stick. The room was lighted as of yore, and
at the sound of our entrance, she stopped and turned. She was then just
abreast of the rotted bride-cake.

“Don't go, Sarah,” she said. “Well, Pip?”

“I start for London, Miss Havisham, to-morrow,” I was exceedingly
careful what I said, “and I thought you would kindly not mind my taking
leave of you.”

“This is a gay figure, Pip,” said she, making her crutch stick play
round me, as if she, the fairy godmother who had changed me, were
bestowing the finishing gift.

“I have come into such good fortune since I saw you last, Miss
Havisham,” I murmured. “And I am so grateful for it, Miss Havisham!”

“Ay, ay!” said she, looking at the discomfited and envious Sarah, with
delight. “I have seen Mr. Jaggers. I have heard about it, Pip. So you go
to-morrow?”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

“And you are adopted by a rich person?”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

“Not named?”

“No, Miss Havisham.”

“And Mr. Jaggers is made your guardian?”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

She quite gloated on these questions and answers, so keen was her
enjoyment of Sarah Pocket's jealous dismay. “Well!” she went on; “you
have a promising career before you. Be good--deserve it--and abide by
Mr. Jaggers's instructions.” She looked at me, and looked at Sarah, and
Sarah's countenance wrung out of her watchful face a cruel smile. “Good-bye,
Pip!--you will always keep the name of Pip, you know.”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

“Good-bye, Pip!”

She stretched out her hand, and I went down on my knee and put it to
my lips. I had not considered how I should take leave of her; it came
naturally to me at the moment to do this. She looked at Sarah Pocket
with triumph in her weird eyes, and so I left my fairy godmother, with
both her hands on her crutch stick, standing in the midst of the dimly
lighted room beside the rotten bride-cake that was hidden in cobwebs.

Sarah Pocket conducted me down, as if I were a ghost who must be seen
out. She could not get over my appearance, and was in the last degree
confounded. I said “Good-bye, Miss Pocket;” but she merely stared, and
did not seem collected enough to know that I had spoken. Clear of the
house, I made the best of my way back to Pumblechook's, took off my new
clothes, made them into a bundle, and went back home in my older dress,
carrying it--to speak the truth--much more at my ease too, though I had
the bundle to carry.

And now, those six days which were to have run out so slowly, had
run out fast and were gone, and to-morrow looked me in the face more
steadily than I could look at it. As the six evenings had dwindled
away, to five, to four, to three, to two, I had become more and more
appreciative of the society of Joe and Biddy. On this last evening, I
dressed my self out in my new clothes for their delight, and sat in my
splendor until bedtime. We had a hot supper on the occasion, graced by
the inevitable roast fowl, and we had some flip to finish with. We were
all very low, and none the higher for pretending to be in spirits.

I was to leave our village at five in the morning, carrying my little
hand-portmanteau, and I had told Joe that I wished to walk away all
alone. I am afraid--sore afraid--that this purpose originated in my
sense of the contrast there would be between me and Joe, if we went to
the coach together. I had pretended with myself that there was nothing
of this taint in the arrangement; but when I went up to my little room
on this last night, I felt compelled to admit that it might be so, and
had an impulse upon me to go down again and entreat Joe to walk with me
in the morning. I did not.

All night there were coaches in my broken sleep, going to wrong places
instead of to London, and having in the traces, now dogs, now cats, now
pigs, now men,--never horses. Fantastic failures of journeys occupied
me until the day dawned and the birds were singing. Then, I got up and
partly dressed, and sat at the window to take a last look out, and in
taking it fell asleep.

Biddy was astir so early to get my breakfast, that, although I did not
sleep at the window an hour, I smelt the smoke of the kitchen fire when
I started up with a terrible idea that it must be late in the afternoon.
But long after that, and long after I had heard the clinking of the
teacups and was quite ready, I wanted the resolution to go downstairs.
After all, I remained up there, repeatedly unlocking and unstrapping
my small portmanteau and locking and strapping it up again, until Biddy
called to me that I was late.

It was a hurried breakfast with no taste in it. I got up from the meal,
saying with a sort of briskness, as if it had only just occurred to me,
“Well! I suppose I must be off!” and then I kissed my sister who was
laughing and nodding and shaking in her usual chair, and kissed
Biddy, and threw my arms around Joe's neck. Then I took up my little
portmanteau and walked out. The last I saw of them was, when I presently
heard a scuffle behind me, and looking back, saw Joe throwing an old
shoe after me and Biddy throwing another old shoe. I stopped then, to
wave my hat, and dear old Joe waved his strong right arm above his head,
crying huskily “Hooroar!” and Biddy put her apron to her face.

I walked away at a good pace, thinking it was easier to go than I had
supposed it would be, and reflecting that it would never have done to
have had an old shoe thrown after the coach, in sight of all the High
Street. I whistled and made nothing of going. But the village was very
peaceful and quiet, and the light mists were solemnly rising, as if to
show me the world, and I had been so innocent and little there, and all
beyond was so unknown and great, that in a moment with a strong heave
and sob I broke into tears. It was by the finger-post at the end of the
village, and I laid my hand upon it, and said, “Good-bye, O my dear, dear
friend!”

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain
upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was
better after I had cried than before,--more sorry, more aware of my own
ingratitude, more gentle. If I had cried before, I should have had Joe
with me then.

So subdued I was by those tears, and by their breaking out again in the
course of the quiet walk, that when I was on the coach, and it was clear
of the town, I deliberated with an aching heart whether I would not get
down when we changed horses and walk back, and have another evening at
home, and a better parting. We changed, and I had not made up my mind,
and still reflected for my comfort that it would be quite practicable to
get down and walk back, when we changed again. And while I was occupied
with these deliberations, I would fancy an exact resemblance to Joe
in some man coming along the road towards us, and my heart would beat
high.--As if he could possibly be there!

We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to
go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and
the world lay spread before me.

This is the end of the first stage of Pip's expectations.

Chapter XX

The journey from our town to the metropolis was a journey of about five
hours. It was a little past midday when the four-horse stage-coach by
which I was a passenger, got into the ravel of traffic frayed out about
the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.

We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable
to doubt our having and our being the best of everything: otherwise,
while I was scared by the immensity of London, I think I might have had
some faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and
dirty.

Mr. Jaggers had duly sent me his address; it was, Little Britain, and he
had written after it on his card, “just out of Smithfield, and close by
the coach-office.” Nevertheless, a hackney-coachman, who seemed to have
as many capes to his greasy great-coat as he was years old, packed me
up in his coach and hemmed me in with a folding and jingling barrier of
steps, as if he were going to take me fifty miles. His getting on his
box, which I remember to have been decorated with an old weather-stained
pea-green hammercloth moth-eaten into rags, was quite a work of time.
It was a wonderful equipage, with six great coronets outside, and ragged
things behind for I don't know how many footmen to hold on by, and
a harrow below them, to prevent amateur footmen from yielding to the
temptation.

I had scarcely had time to enjoy the coach and to think how like a
straw-yard it was, and yet how like a rag-shop, and to wonder why
the horses' nose-bags were kept inside, when I observed the coachman
beginning to get down, as if we were going to stop presently. And stop
we presently did, in a gloomy street, at certain offices with an open
door, whereon was painted MR. JAGGERS.

“How much?” I asked the coachman.

The coachman answered, “A shilling--unless you wish to make it more.”

I naturally said I had no wish to make it more.

“Then it must be a shilling,” observed the coachman. “I don't want to
get into trouble. I know him!” He darkly closed an eye at Mr. Jaggers's
name, and shook his head.

When he had got his shilling, and had in course of time completed the
ascent to his box, and had got away (which appeared to relieve his
mind), I went into the front office with my little portmanteau in my
hand and asked, Was Mr. Jaggers at home?

“He is not,” returned the clerk. “He is in Court at present. Am I
addressing Mr. Pip?”

I signified that he was addressing Mr. Pip.

“Mr. Jaggers left word, would you wait in his room. He couldn't say how
long he might be, having a case on. But it stands to reason, his time
being valuable, that he won't be longer than he can help.”

With those words, the clerk opened a door, and ushered me into an inner
chamber at the back. Here, we found a gentleman with one eye, in a
velveteen suit and knee-breeches, who wiped his nose with his sleeve on
being interrupted in the perusal of the newspaper.

“Go and wait outside, Mike,” said the clerk.

I began to say that I hoped I was not interrupting, when the clerk
shoved this gentleman out with as little ceremony as I ever saw used,
and tossing his fur cap out after him, left me alone.

Mr. Jaggers's room was lighted by a skylight only, and was a most dismal
place; the skylight, eccentrically pitched like a broken head, and the
distorted adjoining houses looking as if they had twisted themselves to
peep down at me through it. There were not so many papers about, as I
should have expected to see; and there were some odd objects about, that
I should not have expected to see,--such as an old rusty pistol, a
sword in a scabbard, several strange-looking boxes and packages, and
two dreadful casts on a shelf, of faces peculiarly swollen, and twitchy
about the nose. Mr. Jaggers's own high-backed chair was of deadly black
horsehair, with rows of brass nails round it, like a coffin; and I
fancied I could see how he leaned back in it, and bit his forefinger at
the clients. The room was but small, and the clients seemed to have had
a habit of backing up against the wall; the wall, especially opposite to
Mr. Jaggers's chair, being greasy with shoulders. I recalled, too, that
the one-eyed gentleman had shuffled forth against the wall when I was
the innocent cause of his being turned out.

I sat down in the cliental chair placed over against Mr. Jaggers's
chair, and became fascinated by the dismal atmosphere of the place. I
called to mind that the clerk had the same air of knowing something to
everybody else's disadvantage, as his master had. I wondered how many
other clerks there were upstairs, and whether they all claimed to have
the same detrimental mastery of their fellow-creatures. I wondered what
was the history of all the odd litter about the room, and how it came
there. I wondered whether the two swollen faces were of Mr. Jaggers's
family, and, if he were so unfortunate as to have had a pair of such
ill-looking relations, why he stuck them on that dusty perch for the
blacks and flies to settle on, instead of giving them a place at home.
Of course I had no experience of a London summer day, and my spirits may
have been oppressed by the hot exhausted air, and by the dust and grit
that lay thick on everything. But I sat wondering and waiting in Mr.
Jaggers's close room, until I really could not bear the two casts on the
shelf above Mr. Jaggers's chair, and got up and went out.

When I told the clerk that I would take a turn in the air while I
waited, he advised me to go round the corner and I should come into
Smithfield. So I came into Smithfield; and the shameful place, being all
asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So,
I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning into a street where
I saw the great black dome of Saint Paul's bulging at me from behind a
grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison. Following
the wall of the jail, I found the roadway covered with straw to deaden
the noise of passing vehicles; and from this, and from the quantity of
people standing about smelling strongly of spirits and beer, I inferred
that the trials were on.

While I looked about me here, an exceedingly dirty and partially drunk
minister of justice asked me if I would like to step in and hear a
trial or so: informing me that he could give me a front place for half a
crown, whence I should command a full view of the Lord Chief Justice in
his wig and robes,--mentioning that awful personage like waxwork, and
presently offering him at the reduced price of eighteen-pence. As I
declined the proposal on the plea of an appointment, he was so good as
to take me into a yard and show me where the gallows was kept, and also
where people were publicly whipped, and then he showed me the Debtors'
Door, out of which culprits came to be hanged; heightening the interest
of that dreadful portal by giving me to understand that “four on 'em”
 would come out at that door the day after to-morrow at eight in the
morning, to be killed in a row. This was horrible, and gave me a
sickening idea of London; the more so as the Lord Chief Justice's
proprietor wore (from his hat down to his boots and up again to his
pocket-handkerchief inclusive) mildewed clothes which had evidently
not belonged to him originally, and which I took it into my head he had
bought cheap of the executioner. Under these circumstances I thought
myself well rid of him for a shilling.

I dropped into the office to ask if Mr. Jaggers had come in yet, and I
found he had not, and I strolled out again. This time, I made the tour
of Little Britain, and turned into Bartholomew Close; and now I became
aware that other people were waiting about for Mr. Jaggers, as well
as I. There were two men of secret appearance lounging in Bartholomew
Close, and thoughtfully fitting their feet into the cracks of the
pavement as they talked together, one of whom said to the other when
they first passed me, that “Jaggers would do it if it was to be done.”
 There was a knot of three men and two women standing at a corner, and
one of the women was crying on her dirty shawl, and the other comforted
her by saying, as she pulled her own shawl over her shoulders, “Jaggers
is for him, 'Melia, and what more could you have?” There was a red-eyed
little Jew who came into the Close while I was loitering there, in
company with a second little Jew whom he sent upon an errand; and
while the messenger was gone, I remarked this Jew, who was of a highly
excitable temperament, performing a jig of anxiety under a lamp-post and
accompanying himself, in a kind of frenzy, with the words, “O Jaggerth,
Jaggerth, Jaggerth! all otherth ith Cag-Maggerth, give me Jaggerth!”
 These testimonies to the popularity of my guardian made a deep
impression on me, and I admired and wondered more than ever.

At length, as I was looking out at the iron gate of Bartholomew Close
into Little Britain, I saw Mr. Jaggers coming across the road towards
me. All the others who were waiting saw him at the same time, and there
was quite a rush at him. Mr. Jaggers, putting a hand on my shoulder
and walking me on at his side without saying anything to me, addressed
himself to his followers.

First, he took the two secret men.

“Now, I have nothing to say to you,” said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his
finger at them. “I want to know no more than I know. As to the result,
it's a toss-up. I told you from the first it was a toss-up. Have you
paid Wemmick?”

“We made the money up this morning, sir,” said one of the men,
submissively, while the other perused Mr. Jaggers's face.

“I don't ask you when you made it up, or where, or whether you made it
up at all. Has Wemmick got it?”

“Yes, sir,” said both the men together.

“Very well; then you may go. Now, I won't have it!” said Mr Jaggers,
waving his hand at them to put them behind him. “If you say a word to
me, I'll throw up the case.”

“We thought, Mr. Jaggers--” one of the men began, pulling off his hat.

“That's what I told you not to do,” said Mr. Jaggers. “You thought! I
think for you; that's enough for you. If I want you, I know where to
find you; I don't want you to find me. Now I won't have it. I won't hear
a word.”

The two men looked at one another as Mr. Jaggers waved them behind
again, and humbly fell back and were heard no more.

“And now you!” said Mr. Jaggers, suddenly stopping, and turning on
the two women with the shawls, from whom the three men had meekly
separated,--“Oh! Amelia, is it?”

“Yes, Mr. Jaggers.”

“And do you remember,” retorted Mr. Jaggers, “that but for me you
wouldn't be here and couldn't be here?”

“O yes, sir!” exclaimed both women together. “Lord bless you, sir, well
we knows that!”

“Then why,” said Mr. Jaggers, “do you come here?”

“My Bill, sir!” the crying woman pleaded.

“Now, I tell you what!” said Mr. Jaggers. “Once for all. If you don't
know that your Bill's in good hands, I know it. And if you come here
bothering about your Bill, I'll make an example of both your Bill and
you, and let him slip through my fingers. Have you paid Wemmick?”

“O yes, sir! Every farden.”

“Very well. Then you have done all you have got to do. Say another
word--one single word--and Wemmick shall give you your money back.”

This terrible threat caused the two women to fall off immediately.
No one remained now but the excitable Jew, who had already raised the
skirts of Mr. Jaggers's coat to his lips several times.

“I don't know this man!” said Mr. Jaggers, in the same devastating
strain: “What does this fellow want?”

“Ma thear Mithter Jaggerth. Hown brother to Habraham Latharuth?”

“Who's he?” said Mr. Jaggers. “Let go of my coat.”

The suitor, kissing the hem of the garment again before relinquishing
it, replied, “Habraham Latharuth, on thuthpithion of plate.”

“You're too late,” said Mr. Jaggers. “I am over the way.”

“Holy father, Mithter Jaggerth!” cried my excitable acquaintance,
turning white, “don't thay you're again Habraham Latharuth!”

“I am,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and there's an end of it. Get out of the
way.”

“Mithter Jaggerth! Half a moment! My hown cuthen'th gone to Mithter
Wemmick at thith prethent minute, to hoffer him hany termth. Mithter
Jaggerth! Half a quarter of a moment! If you'd have the condethenthun to
be bought off from the t'other thide--at hany thuperior prithe!--money
no object!--Mithter Jaggerth--Mithter--!”

My guardian threw his supplicant off with supreme indifference, and
left him dancing on the pavement as if it were red hot. Without further
interruption, we reached the front office, where we found the clerk and
the man in velveteen with the fur cap.

“Here's Mike,” said the clerk, getting down from his stool, and
approaching Mr. Jaggers confidentially.

“Oh!” said Mr. Jaggers, turning to the man, who was pulling a lock of
hair in the middle of his forehead, like the Bull in Cock Robin pulling
at the bell-rope; “your man comes on this afternoon. Well?”

“Well, Mas'r Jaggers,” returned Mike, in the voice of a sufferer from a
constitutional cold; “arter a deal o' trouble, I've found one, sir, as
might do.”

“What is he prepared to swear?”

“Well, Mas'r Jaggers,” said Mike, wiping his nose on his fur cap this
time; “in a general way, anythink.”

Mr. Jaggers suddenly became most irate. “Now, I warned you before,” said
he, throwing his forefinger at the terrified client, “that if you ever
presumed to talk in that way here, I'd make an example of you. You
infernal scoundrel, how dare you tell ME that?”

The client looked scared, but bewildered too, as if he were unconscious
what he had done.

“Spooney!” said the clerk, in a low voice, giving him a stir with his
elbow. “Soft Head! Need you say it face to face?”

“Now, I ask you, you blundering booby,” said my guardian, very sternly,
“once more and for the last time, what the man you have brought here is
prepared to swear?”

Mike looked hard at my guardian, as if he were trying to learn a lesson
from his face, and slowly replied, “Ayther to character, or to having
been in his company and never left him all the night in question.”

“Now, be careful. In what station of life is this man?”

Mike looked at his cap, and looked at the floor, and looked at the
ceiling, and looked at the clerk, and even looked at me, before
beginning to reply in a nervous manner, “We've dressed him up like--”
 when my guardian blustered out,--

“What? You WILL, will you?”

(“Spooney!” added the clerk again, with another stir.)

After some helpless casting about, Mike brightened and began again:--

“He is dressed like a 'spectable pieman. A sort of a pastry-cook.”

“Is he here?” asked my guardian.

“I left him,” said Mike, “a setting on some doorsteps round the corner.”

“Take him past that window, and let me see him.”

The window indicated was the office window. We all three went to
it, behind the wire blind, and presently saw the client go by in an
accidental manner, with a murderous-looking tall individual, in a short
suit of white linen and a paper cap. This guileless confectioner was not
by any means sober, and had a black eye in the green stage of recovery,
which was painted over.

“Tell him to take his witness away directly,” said my guardian to the
clerk, in extreme disgust, “and ask him what he means by bringing such a
fellow as that.”

My guardian then took me into his own room, and while he lunched,
standing, from a sandwich-box and a pocket-flask of sherry (he seemed to
bully his very sandwich as he ate it), informed me what arrangements he
had made for me. I was to go to “Barnard's Inn,” to young Mr. Pocket's
rooms, where a bed had been sent in for my accommodation; I was to
remain with young Mr. Pocket until Monday; on Monday I was to go with
him to his father's house on a visit, that I might try how I liked it.
Also, I was told what my allowance was to be,--it was a very liberal
one,--and had handed to me from one of my guardian's drawers, the cards
of certain tradesmen with whom I was to deal for all kinds of clothes,
and such other things as I could in reason want. “You will find your
credit good, Mr. Pip,” said my guardian, whose flask of sherry smelt
like a whole caskful, as he hastily refreshed himself, “but I shall by
this means be able to check your bills, and to pull you up if I find you
outrunning the constable. Of course you'll go wrong somehow, but that's
no fault of mine.”

After I had pondered a little over this encouraging sentiment, I asked
Mr. Jaggers if I could send for a coach? He said it was not worth while,
I was so near my destination; Wemmick should walk round with me, if I
pleased.

I then found that Wemmick was the clerk in the next room. Another clerk
was rung down from upstairs to take his place while he was out, and I
accompanied him into the street, after shaking hands with my guardian.
We found a new set of people lingering outside, but Wemmick made a way
among them by saying coolly yet decisively, “I tell you it's no use; he
won't have a word to say to one of you;” and we soon got clear of them,
and went on side by side.




Chapter XXI

Casting my eyes on Mr. Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was
like in the light of day, I found him to be a dry man, rather short in
stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been
imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some marks
in it that might have been dimples, if the material had been softer and
the instrument finer, but which, as it was, were only dints. The chisel
had made three or four of these attempts at embellishment over his nose,
but had given them up without an effort to smooth them off. I judged him
to be a bachelor from the frayed condition of his linen, and he appeared
to have sustained a good many bereavements; for he wore at least four
mourning rings, besides a brooch representing a lady and a weeping
willow at a tomb with an urn on it. I noticed, too, that several rings
and seals hung at his watch-chain, as if he were quite laden with
remembrances of departed friends. He had glittering eyes,--small, keen,
and black,--and thin wide mottled lips. He had had them, to the best of
my belief, from forty to fifty years.

“So you were never in London before?” said Mr. Wemmick to me.

“No,” said I.

“I was new here once,” said Mr. Wemmick. “Rum to think of now!”

“You are well acquainted with it now?”

“Why, yes,” said Mr. Wemmick. “I know the moves of it.”

“Is it a very wicked place?” I asked, more for the sake of saying
something than for information.

“You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered in London. But there are
plenty of people anywhere, who'll do that for you.”

“If there is bad blood between you and them,” said I, to soften it off a
little.

“O! I don't know about bad blood,” returned Mr. Wemmick; “there's not
much bad blood about. They'll do it, if there's anything to be got by
it.”

“That makes it worse.”

“You think so?” returned Mr. Wemmick. “Much about the same, I should
say.”

He wore his hat on the back of his head, and looked straight before him:
walking in a self-contained way as if there were nothing in the streets
to claim his attention. His mouth was such a post-office of a mouth
that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling. We had got to the top of
Holborn Hill before I knew that it was merely a mechanical appearance,
and that he was not smiling at all.

“Do you know where Mr. Matthew Pocket lives?” I asked Mr. Wemmick.

“Yes,” said he, nodding in the direction. “At Hammersmith, west of
London.”

“Is that far?”

“Well! Say five miles.”

“Do you know him?”

“Why, you're a regular cross-examiner!” said Mr. Wemmick, looking at me
with an approving air. “Yes, I know him. I know him!”

There was an air of toleration or depreciation about his utterance of
these words that rather depressed me; and I was still looking sideways
at his block of a face in search of any encouraging note to the text,
when he said here we were at Barnard's Inn. My depression was not
alleviated by the announcement, for, I had supposed that establishment
to be an hotel kept by Mr. Barnard, to which the Blue Boar in our town
was a mere public-house. Whereas I now found Barnard to be a disembodied
spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby
buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for
Tom-cats.

We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an
introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me
like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in
it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most
dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen. I
thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those houses were
divided were in every stage of dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled
flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while
To Let, To Let, To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new
wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were
being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants
and their unholy interment under the gravel. A frowzy mourning of soot
and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewn
ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere
dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot and all
the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar,--rot of rat
and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand besides--addressed
themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, “Try Barnard's
Mixture.”

So imperfect was this realization of the first of my great expectations,
that I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick. “Ah!” said he, mistaking me;
“the retirement reminds you of the country. So it does me.”

He led me into a corner and conducted me up a flight of stairs,--which
appeared to me to be slowly collapsing into sawdust, so that one of
those days the upper lodgers would look out at their doors and find
themselves without the means of coming down,--to a set of chambers on
the top floor. MR. POCKET, JUN., was painted on the door, and there was
a label on the letter-box, “Return shortly.”

“He hardly thought you'd come so soon,” Mr. Wemmick explained. “You
don't want me any more?”

“No, thank you,” said I.

“As I keep the cash,” Mr. Wemmick observed, “we shall most likely meet
pretty often. Good day.”

“Good day.”

I put out my hand, and Mr. Wemmick at first looked at it as if he
thought I wanted something. Then he looked at me, and said, correcting
himself,--

“To be sure! Yes. You're in the habit of shaking hands?”

I was rather confused, thinking it must be out of the London fashion,
but said yes.

“I have got so out of it!” said Mr. Wemmick,--“except at last. Very
glad, I'm sure, to make your acquaintance. Good day!”

When we had shaken hands and he was gone, I opened the staircase window
and had nearly beheaded myself, for, the lines had rotted away, and it
came down like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick that I had not
put my head out. After this escape, I was content to take a foggy view
of the Inn through the window's encrusting dirt, and to stand dolefully
looking out, saying to myself that London was decidedly overrated.

Mr. Pocket, Junior's, idea of Shortly was not mine, for I had nearly
maddened myself with looking out for half an hour, and had written
my name with my finger several times in the dirt of every pane in the
window, before I heard footsteps on the stairs. Gradually there arose
before me the hat, head, neckcloth, waistcoat, trousers, boots, of a
member of society of about my own standing. He had a paper-bag under
each arm and a pottle of strawberries in one hand, and was out of
breath.

“Mr. Pip?” said he.

“Mr. Pocket?” said I.

“Dear me!” he exclaimed. “I am extremely sorry; but I knew there was a
coach from your part of the country at midday, and I thought you would
come by that one. The fact is, I have been out on your account,--not
that that is any excuse,--for I thought, coming from the country, you
might like a little fruit after dinner, and I went to Covent Garden
Market to get it good.”

For a reason that I had, I felt as if my eyes would start out of my
head. I acknowledged his attention incoherently, and began to think this
was a dream.

“Dear me!” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “This door sticks so!”

As he was fast making jam of his fruit by wrestling with the door while
the paper-bags were under his arms, I begged him to allow me to hold
them. He relinquished them with an agreeable smile, and combated with
the door as if it were a wild beast. It yielded so suddenly at last,
that he staggered back upon me, and I staggered back upon the opposite
door, and we both laughed. But still I felt as if my eyes must start out
of my head, and as if this must be a dream.

“Pray come in,” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “Allow me to lead the way. I am
rather bare here, but I hope you'll be able to make out tolerably well
till Monday. My father thought you would get on more agreeably through
to-morrow with me than with him, and might like to take a walk about
London. I am sure I shall be very happy to show London to you. As to our
table, you won't find that bad, I hope, for it will be supplied from our
coffee-house here, and (it is only right I should add) at your expense,
such being Mr. Jaggers's directions. As to our lodging, it's not by
any means splendid, because I have my own bread to earn, and my father
hasn't anything to give me, and I shouldn't be willing to take it, if he
had. This is our sitting-room,--just such chairs and tables and carpet
and so forth, you see, as they could spare from home. You mustn't give
me credit for the tablecloth and spoons and castors, because they come
for you from the coffee-house. This is my little bedroom; rather musty,
but Barnard's is musty. This is your bedroom; the furniture's hired for
the occasion, but I trust it will answer the purpose; if you should want
anything, I'll go and fetch it. The chambers are retired, and we shall
be alone together, but we shan't fight, I dare say. But dear me, I beg
your pardon, you're holding the fruit all this time. Pray let me take
these bags from you. I am quite ashamed.”

As I stood opposite to Mr. Pocket, Junior, delivering him the bags, One,
Two, I saw the starting appearance come into his own eyes that I knew to
be in mine, and he said, falling back,--

“Lord bless me, you're the prowling boy!”

“And you,” said I, “are the pale young gentleman!”




Chapter XXII

The pale young gentleman and I stood contemplating one another in
Barnard's Inn, until we both burst out laughing. “The idea of its
being you!” said he. “The idea of its being you!” said I. And then we
contemplated one another afresh, and laughed again. “Well!” said the
pale young gentleman, reaching out his hand good-humoredly, “it's all
over now, I hope, and it will be magnanimous in you if you'll forgive me
for having knocked you about so.”

I derived from this speech that Mr. Herbert Pocket (for Herbert was the
pale young gentleman's name) still rather confounded his intention with
his execution. But I made a modest reply, and we shook hands warmly.

“You hadn't come into your good fortune at that time?” said Herbert
Pocket.

“No,” said I.

“No,” he acquiesced: “I heard it had happened very lately. I was rather
on the lookout for good fortune then.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes. Miss Havisham had sent for me, to see if she could take a fancy to
me. But she couldn't,--at all events, she didn't.”

I thought it polite to remark that I was surprised to hear that.

“Bad taste,” said Herbert, laughing, “but a fact. Yes, she had sent for
me on a trial visit, and if I had come out of it successfully, I
suppose I should have been provided for; perhaps I should have been
what-you-may-called it to Estella.”

“What's that?” I asked, with sudden gravity.

He was arranging his fruit in plates while we talked, which divided his
attention, and was the cause of his having made this lapse of a word.
“Affianced,” he explained, still busy with the fruit. “Betrothed.
Engaged. What's-his-named. Any word of that sort.”

“How did you bear your disappointment?” I asked.

“Pooh!” said he, “I didn't care much for it. She's a Tartar.”

“Miss Havisham?”

“I don't say no to that, but I meant Estella. That girl's hard and
haughty and capricious to the last degree, and has been brought up by
Miss Havisham to wreak revenge on all the male sex.”

“What relation is she to Miss Havisham?”

“None,” said he. “Only adopted.”

“Why should she wreak revenge on all the male sex? What revenge?”

“Lord, Mr. Pip!” said he. “Don't you know?”

“No,” said I.

“Dear me! It's quite a story, and shall be saved till dinner-time. And
now let me take the liberty of asking you a question. How did you come
there, that day?”

I told him, and he was attentive until I had finished, and then burst
out laughing again, and asked me if I was sore afterwards? I didn't
ask him if he was, for my conviction on that point was perfectly
established.

“Mr. Jaggers is your guardian, I understand?” he went on.

“Yes.”

“You know he is Miss Havisham's man of business and solicitor, and has
her confidence when nobody else has?”

This was bringing me (I felt) towards dangerous ground. I answered with
a constraint I made no attempt to disguise, that I had seen Mr. Jaggers
in Miss Havisham's house on the very day of our combat, but never at any
other time, and that I believed he had no recollection of having ever
seen me there.

“He was so obliging as to suggest my father for your tutor, and he
called on my father to propose it. Of course he knew about my father
from his connection with Miss Havisham. My father is Miss Havisham's
cousin; not that that implies familiar intercourse between them, for he
is a bad courtier and will not propitiate her.”

Herbert Pocket had a frank and easy way with him that was very taking.
I had never seen any one then, and I have never seen any one since,
who more strongly expressed to me, in every look and tone, a natural
incapacity to do anything secret and mean. There was something
wonderfully hopeful about his general air, and something that at the
same time whispered to me he would never be very successful or rich. I
don't know how this was. I became imbued with the notion on that first
occasion before we sat down to dinner, but I cannot define by what
means.

He was still a pale young gentleman, and had a certain conquered languor
about him in the midst of his spirits and briskness, that did not seem
indicative of natural strength. He had not a handsome face, but it was
better than handsome: being extremely amiable and cheerful. His figure
was a little ungainly, as in the days when my knuckles had taken such
liberties with it, but it looked as if it would always be light and
young. Whether Mr. Trabb's local work would have sat more gracefully on
him than on me, may be a question; but I am conscious that he carried
off his rather old clothes much better than I carried off my new suit.

As he was so communicative, I felt that reserve on my part would be a
bad return unsuited to our years. I therefore told him my small story,
and laid stress on my being forbidden to inquire who my benefactor was.
I further mentioned that as I had been brought up a blacksmith in a
country place, and knew very little of the ways of politeness, I would
take it as a great kindness in him if he would give me a hint whenever
he saw me at a loss or going wrong.

“With pleasure,” said he, “though I venture to prophesy that you'll want
very few hints. I dare say we shall be often together, and I should like
to banish any needless restraint between us. Will you do me the favour
to begin at once to call me by my Christian name, Herbert?”

I thanked him and said I would. I informed him in exchange that my
Christian name was Philip.

“I don't take to Philip,” said he, smiling, “for it sounds like a moral
boy out of the spelling-book, who was so lazy that he fell into a pond,
or so fat that he couldn't see out of his eyes, or so avaricious that
he locked up his cake till the mice ate it, or so determined to go a
bird's-nesting that he got himself eaten by bears who lived handy in the
neighborhood. I tell you what I should like. We are so harmonious, and
you have been a blacksmith,---would you mind it?”

“I shouldn't mind anything that you propose,” I answered, “but I don't
understand you.”

“Would you mind Handel for a familiar name? There's a charming piece of
music by Handel, called the Harmonious Blacksmith.”

“I should like it very much.”

“Then, my dear Handel,” said he, turning round as the door opened,
“here is the dinner, and I must beg of you to take the top of the table,
because the dinner is of your providing.”

This I would not hear of, so he took the top, and I faced him. It was a
nice little dinner,--seemed to me then a very Lord Mayor's Feast,--and
it acquired additional relish from being eaten under those independent
circumstances, with no old people by, and with London all around us.
This again was heightened by a certain gypsy character that set the
banquet off; for while the table was, as Mr. Pumblechook might have
said, the lap of luxury,--being entirely furnished forth from the
coffee-house,--the circumjacent region of sitting-room was of a
comparatively pastureless and shifty character; imposing on the waiter
the wandering habits of putting the covers on the floor (where he
fell over them), the melted butter in the arm-chair, the bread on the
bookshelves, the cheese in the coal-scuttle, and the boiled fowl into my
bed in the next room,--where I found much of its parsley and butter in
a state of congelation when I retired for the night. All this made the
feast delightful, and when the waiter was not there to watch me, my
pleasure was without alloy.

We had made some progress in the dinner, when I reminded Herbert of his
promise to tell me about Miss Havisham.

“True,” he replied. “I'll redeem it at once. Let me introduce the topic,
Handel, by mentioning that in London it is not the custom to put the
knife in the mouth,--for fear of accidents,--and that while the fork is
reserved for that use, it is not put further in than necessary. It is
scarcely worth mentioning, only it's as well to do as other people do.
Also, the spoon is not generally used over-hand, but under. This has
two advantages. You get at your mouth better (which after all is the
object), and you save a good deal of the attitude of opening oysters, on
the part of the right elbow.”

He offered these friendly suggestions in such a lively way, that we both
laughed and I scarcely blushed.

“Now,” he pursued, “concerning Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham, you must
know, was a spoilt child. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her
father denied her nothing. Her father was a country gentleman down in
your part of the world, and was a brewer. I don't know why it should
be a crack thing to be a brewer; but it is indisputable that while you
cannot possibly be genteel and bake, you may be as genteel as never was
and brew. You see it every day.”

“Yet a gentleman may not keep a public-house; may he?” said I.

“Not on any account,” returned Herbert; “but a public-house may keep a
gentleman. Well! Mr. Havisham was very rich and very proud. So was his
daughter.”

“Miss Havisham was an only child?” I hazarded.

“Stop a moment, I am coming to that. No, she was not an only child;
she had a half-brother. Her father privately married again--his cook, I
rather think.”

“I thought he was proud,” said I.

“My good Handel, so he was. He married his second wife privately,
because he was proud, and in course of time she died. When she was dead,
I apprehend he first told his daughter what he had done, and then
the son became a part of the family, residing in the house you are
acquainted with. As the son grew a young man, he turned out riotous,
extravagant, undutiful,--altogether bad. At last his father disinherited
him; but he softened when he was dying, and left him well off, though
not nearly so well off as Miss Havisham.--Take another glass of wine,
and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one
to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one's glass, as to turn it
bottom upwards with the rim on one's nose.”

I had been doing this, in an excess of attention to his recital. I
thanked him, and apologized. He said, “Not at all,” and resumed.

“Miss Havisham was now an heiress, and you may suppose was looked after
as a great match. Her half-brother had now ample means again, but what
with debts and what with new madness wasted them most fearfully again.
There were stronger differences between him and her than there had been
between him and his father, and it is suspected that he cherished a deep
and mortal grudge against her as having influenced the father's anger.
Now, I come to the cruel part of the story,--merely breaking off, my
dear Handel, to remark that a dinner-napkin will not go into a tumbler.”

Why I was trying to pack mine into my tumbler, I am wholly unable to
say. I only know that I found myself, with a perseverance worthy of a
much better cause, making the most strenuous exertions to compress it
within those limits. Again I thanked him and apologized, and again he
said in the cheerfullest manner, “Not at all, I am sure!” and resumed.

“There appeared upon the scene--say at the races, or the public
balls, or anywhere else you like--a certain man, who made love to Miss
Havisham. I never saw him (for this happened five-and-twenty years ago,
before you and I were, Handel), but I have heard my father mention that
he was a showy man, and the kind of man for the purpose. But that he was
not to be, without ignorance or prejudice, mistaken for a gentleman, my
father most strongly asseverates; because it is a principle of his that
no man who was not a true gentleman at heart ever was, since the world
began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the
grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the
grain will express itself. Well! This man pursued Miss Havisham closely,
and professed to be devoted to her. I believe she had not shown much
susceptibility up to that time; but all the susceptibility she possessed
certainly came out then, and she passionately loved him. There is no
doubt that she perfectly idolized him. He practised on her affection in
that systematic way, that he got great sums of money from her, and he
induced her to buy her brother out of a share in the brewery (which had
been weakly left him by his father) at an immense price, on the plea
that when he was her husband he must hold and manage it all. Your
guardian was not at that time in Miss Havisham's counsels, and she was
too haughty and too much in love to be advised by any one. Her relations
were poor and scheming, with the exception of my father; he was poor
enough, but not time-serving or jealous. The only independent one among
them, he warned her that she was doing too much for this man, and
was placing herself too unreservedly in his power. She took the first
opportunity of angrily ordering my father out of the house, in his
presence, and my father has never seen her since.”

I thought of her having said, “Matthew will come and see me at last when
I am laid dead upon that table;” and I asked Herbert whether his father
was so inveterate against her?

“It's not that,” said he, “but she charged him, in the presence of her
intended husband, with being disappointed in the hope of fawning upon
her for his own advancement, and, if he were to go to her now, it would
look true--even to him--and even to her. To return to the man and make
an end of him. The marriage day was fixed, the wedding dresses were
bought, the wedding tour was planned out, the wedding guests were
invited. The day came, but not the bridegroom. He wrote her a letter--”

“Which she received,” I struck in, “when she was dressing for her
marriage? At twenty minutes to nine?”

“At the hour and minute,” said Herbert, nodding, “at which she
afterwards stopped all the clocks. What was in it, further than that
it most heartlessly broke the marriage off, I can't tell you, because I
don't know. When she recovered from a bad illness that she had, she
laid the whole place waste, as you have seen it, and she has never since
looked upon the light of day.”

“Is that all the story?” I asked, after considering it.

“All I know of it; and indeed I only know so much, through piecing it
out for myself; for my father always avoids it, and, even when Miss
Havisham invited me to go there, told me no more of it than it was
absolutely requisite I should understand. But I have forgotten one
thing. It has been supposed that the man to whom she gave her misplaced
confidence acted throughout in concert with her half-brother; that it
was a conspiracy between them; and that they shared the profits.”

“I wonder he didn't marry her and get all the property,” said I.

“He may have been married already, and her cruel mortification may have
been a part of her half-brother's scheme,” said Herbert. “Mind! I don't
know that.”

“What became of the two men?” I asked, after again considering the
subject.

“They fell into deeper shame and degradation--if there can be
deeper--and ruin.”

“Are they alive now?”

“I don't know.”

“You said just now that Estella was not related to Miss Havisham, but
adopted. When adopted?”

Herbert shrugged his shoulders. “There has always been an Estella, since
I have heard of a Miss Havisham. I know no more. And now, Handel,” said
he, finally throwing off the story as it were, “there is a perfectly
open understanding between us. All that I know about Miss Havisham, you
know.”

“And all that I know,” I retorted, “you know.”

“I fully believe it. So there can be no competition or perplexity
between you and me. And as to the condition on which you hold your
advancement in life,--namely, that you are not to inquire or discuss to
whom you owe it,--you may be very sure that it will never be encroached
upon, or even approached, by me, or by any one belonging to me.”

In truth, he said this with so much delicacy, that I felt the subject
done with, even though I should be under his father's roof for years and
years to come. Yet he said it with so much meaning, too, that I felt
he as perfectly understood Miss Havisham to be my benefactress, as I
understood the fact myself.

It had not occurred to me before, that he had led up to the theme for
the purpose of clearing it out of our way; but we were so much the
lighter and easier for having broached it, that I now perceived this
to be the case. We were very gay and sociable, and I asked him, in the
course of conversation, what he was? He replied, “A capitalist,--an
Insurer of Ships.” I suppose he saw me glancing about the room in search
of some tokens of Shipping, or capital, for he added, “In the City.”

I had grand ideas of the wealth and importance of Insurers of Ships in
the City, and I began to think with awe of having laid a young Insurer
on his back, blackened his enterprising eye, and cut his responsible
head open. But again there came upon me, for my relief, that odd
impression that Herbert Pocket would never be very successful or rich.

“I shall not rest satisfied with merely employing my capital in insuring
ships. I shall buy up some good Life Assurance shares, and cut into the
Direction. I shall also do a little in the mining way. None of these
things will interfere with my chartering a few thousand tons on my own
account. I think I shall trade,” said he, leaning back in his chair, “to
the East Indies, for silks, shawls, spices, dyes, drugs, and precious
woods. It's an interesting trade.”

“And the profits are large?” said I.

“Tremendous!” said he.

I wavered again, and began to think here were greater expectations than
my own.

“I think I shall trade, also,” said he, putting his thumbs in his
waist-coat pockets, “to the West Indies, for sugar, tobacco, and rum.
Also to Ceylon, specially for elephants' tusks.”

“You will want a good many ships,” said I.

“A perfect fleet,” said he.

Quite overpowered by the magnificence of these transactions, I asked him
where the ships he insured mostly traded to at present?

“I haven't begun insuring yet,” he replied. “I am looking about me.”

Somehow, that pursuit seemed more in keeping with Barnard's Inn. I said
(in a tone of conviction), “Ah-h!”

“Yes. I am in a counting-house, and looking about me.”

“Is a counting-house profitable?” I asked.

“To--do you mean to the young fellow who's in it?” he asked, in reply.

“Yes; to you.”

“Why, n-no; not to me.” He said this with the air of one carefully
reckoning up and striking a balance. “Not directly profitable. That is,
it doesn't pay me anything, and I have to--keep myself.”

This certainly had not a profitable appearance, and I shook my head as
if I would imply that it would be difficult to lay by much accumulative
capital from such a source of income.

“But the thing is,” said Herbert Pocket, “that you look about you.
That's the grand thing. You are in a counting-house, you know, and you
look about you.”

It struck me as a singular implication that you couldn't be out of a
counting-house, you know, and look about you; but I silently deferred to
his experience.

“Then the time comes,” said Herbert, “when you see your opening. And you
go in, and you swoop upon it and you make your capital, and then there
you are! When you have once made your capital, you have nothing to do
but employ it.”

This was very like his way of conducting that encounter in the garden;
very like. His manner of bearing his poverty, too, exactly corresponded
to his manner of bearing that defeat. It seemed to me that he took all
blows and buffets now with just the same air as he had taken mine
then. It was evident that he had nothing around him but the simplest
necessaries, for everything that I remarked upon turned out to have been
sent in on my account from the coffee-house or somewhere else.

Yet, having already made his fortune in his own mind, he was so
unassuming with it that I felt quite grateful to him for not being
puffed up. It was a pleasant addition to his naturally pleasant ways,
and we got on famously. In the evening we went out for a walk in the
streets, and went half-price to the Theatre; and next day we went to
church at Westminster Abbey, and in the afternoon we walked in the
Parks; and I wondered who shod all the horses there, and wished Joe did.

On a moderate computation, it was many months, that Sunday, since I had
left Joe and Biddy. The space interposed between myself and them partook
of that expansion, and our marshes were any distance off. That I could
have been at our old church in my old church-going clothes, on the very
last Sunday that ever was, seemed a combination of impossibilities,
geographical and social, solar and lunar. Yet in the London streets so
crowded with people and so brilliantly lighted in the dusk of evening,
there were depressing hints of reproaches for that I had put the poor
old kitchen at home so far away; and in the dead of night, the footsteps
of some incapable impostor of a porter mooning about Barnard's Inn,
under pretence of watching it, fell hollow on my heart.

On the Monday morning at a quarter before nine, Herbert went to
the counting-house to report himself,--to look about him, too, I
suppose,--and I bore him company. He was to come away in an hour or
two to attend me to Hammersmith, and I was to wait about for him. It
appeared to me that the eggs from which young Insurers were hatched were
incubated in dust and heat, like the eggs of ostriches, judging from the
places to which those incipient giants repaired on a Monday morning. Nor
did the counting-house where Herbert assisted, show in my eyes as at
all a good Observatory; being a back second floor up a yard, of a grimy
presence in all particulars, and with a look into another back second
floor, rather than a look out.

I waited about until it was noon, and I went upon 'Change, and I saw
fluey men sitting there under the bills about shipping, whom I took to
be great merchants, though I couldn't understand why they should all be
out of spirits. When Herbert came, we went and had lunch at a celebrated
house which I then quite venerated, but now believe to have been the
most abject superstition in Europe, and where I could not help noticing,
even then, that there was much more gravy on the tablecloths and knives
and waiters' clothes, than in the steaks. This collation disposed of at
a moderate price (considering the grease, which was not charged for), we
went back to Barnard's Inn and got my little portmanteau, and then took
coach for Hammersmith. We arrived there at two or three o'clock in
the afternoon, and had very little way to walk to Mr. Pocket's house.
Lifting the latch of a gate, we passed direct into a little garden
overlooking the river, where Mr. Pocket's children were playing
about. And unless I deceive myself on a point where my interests or
prepossessions are certainly not concerned, I saw that Mr. and Mrs.
Pocket's children were not growing up or being brought up, but were
tumbling up.

Mrs. Pocket was sitting on a garden chair under a tree, reading, with
her legs upon another garden chair; and Mrs. Pocket's two nurse-maids
were looking about them while the children played. “Mamma,” said
Herbert, “this is young Mr. Pip.” Upon which Mrs. Pocket received me
with an appearance of amiable dignity.

“Master Alick and Miss Jane,” cried one of the nurses to two of the
children, “if you go a bouncing up against them bushes you'll fall over
into the river and be drownded, and what'll your pa say then?”

At the same time this nurse picked up Mrs. Pocket's handkerchief, and
said, “If that don't make six times you've dropped it, Mum!” Upon which
Mrs. Pocket laughed and said, “Thank you, Flopson,” and settling herself
in one chair only, resumed her book. Her countenance immediately assumed
a knitted and intent expression as if she had been reading for a week,
but before she could have read half a dozen lines, she fixed her eyes
upon me, and said, “I hope your mamma is quite well?” This unexpected
inquiry put me into such a difficulty that I began saying in the
absurdest way that if there had been any such person I had no doubt she
would have been quite well and would have been very much obliged and
would have sent her compliments, when the nurse came to my rescue.

“Well!” she cried, picking up the pocket-handkerchief, “if that don't
make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!” Mrs.
Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable
surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of
recognition, and said, “Thank you, Flopson,” and forgot me, and went on
reading.

I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than
six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had
scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region
of air, wailing dolefully.

“If there ain't Baby!” said Flopson, appearing to think it most
surprising. “Make haste up, Millers.”

Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees
the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young
ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the
time, and I was curious to know what the book could be.

We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any
rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the
remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed
near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and
tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and
their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for
this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to
speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby,
which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs.
Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby
and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself.

“Gracious me, Flopson!” said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a
moment, “everybody's tumbling!”

“Gracious you, indeed, Mum!” returned Flopson, very red in the face;
“what have you got there?”

“I got here, Flopson?” asked Mrs. Pocket.

“Why, if it ain't your footstool!” cried Flopson. “And if you keep it
under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the
baby, Mum, and give me your book.”

Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a
little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had
lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders
that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the
second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little
Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down.

Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children
into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out
of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr.
Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and
with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite
see his way to putting anything straight.




Chapter XXIII

Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to
see him. “For, I really am not,” he added, with his son's smile,
“an alarming personage.” He was a young-looking man, in spite of
his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite
natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected;
there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have
been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very
near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs.
Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were
black and handsome, “Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?” And she
looked up from her book, and said, “Yes.” She then smiled upon me in an
absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower
water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone
or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like
her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension.

I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs.
Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased
Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased
father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined
opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose,
if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord
Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had
tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite
supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming
the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address
engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of
some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the
trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to
be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things
must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of
plebeian domestic knowledge.

So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady
by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but
perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed,
in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was
also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount
to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the
one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had
taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would
seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of
the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or
withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them
after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was “a
treasure for a Prince.” Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure
in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought
him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the
object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married
a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving
reproach, because he had never got one.

Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a
pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for
my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other
similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle
and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of
architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance,
was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of
exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody
else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house
and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the
servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving
trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants
felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and
drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very
liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that
by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been
the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for,
before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family
were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers
slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into
tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing
that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business.

By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been
educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself;
but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very
early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling
of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was
remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to
help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had
left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to
London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had “read”
 with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had
refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his
acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction,
and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still
maintained the house I saw.

Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly
sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody,
and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This
lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to
dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the
stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket
should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him.
That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence
(at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if
they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing.

“But dear Mrs. Pocket,” said Mrs. Coiler, “after her early
disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires
so much luxury and elegance--”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to
cry.

“And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said again, with the same object as before.

“--That it is hard,” said Mrs. Coiler, “to have dear Mr. Pocket's time
and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket.”

I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time
and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing,
and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company
manners.

It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and
Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and
other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian
name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy.
It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the
garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which
her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all.
Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky
kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket
as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady
neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it
appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last
a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic
affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my
unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket
relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very
extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and
with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the
carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put
his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an
extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this,
and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he
was about.

Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked
it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the
pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at
me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and
localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and
when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to
her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on
the opposite side of the table.

After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring
comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving
their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides
the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who
was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as
though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere
for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the
young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had
had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what
to make of them.

“Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby,” said Flopson. “Don't
take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table.”

Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head
upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious
concussion.

“Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum,” said Flopson; “and Miss Jane, come
and dance to baby, do!”

One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely
taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place
by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and
laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the
meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed,
and we all laughed and were glad.

Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll,
then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers
to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice
that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its
eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the
two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with
a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost
half his buttons at the gaming-table.

I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a
discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a
sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the
baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At
length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly
left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous
weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time,
and not approving of this, said to Jane,--

“You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!”

“Mamma dear,” lisped the little girl, “baby ood have put hith eyeth
out.”

“How dare you tell me so?” retorted Mrs. Pocket. “Go and sit down in
your chair this moment!”

Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if
I myself had done something to rouse it.

“Belinda,” remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table,
“how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection
of baby.”

“I will not allow anybody to interfere,” said Mrs. Pocket. “I am
surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of
interference.”

“Good God!” cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation.
“Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save
them?”

“I will not be interfered with by Jane,” said Mrs. Pocket, with a
majestic glance at that innocent little offender. “I hope I know my poor
grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!”

Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did
lift himself some inches out of his chair. “Hear this!” he helplessly
exclaimed to the elements. “Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for
people's poor grandpapa's positions!” Then he let himself down again,
and became silent.

We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A
pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a
series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the
only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had
any decided acquaintance.

“Mr. Drummle,” said Mrs. Pocket, “will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you
undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with
ma!”

The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It
doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair
of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft
face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained
its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few
minutes, being nursed by little Jane.

It happened that the other five children were left behind at the
dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and
their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the
mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in
the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face
heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if
he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that
establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on
somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain
questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa,
Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny
came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it
when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and
gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as
they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the
hair he dismissed the hopeless subject.

In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had
each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was
pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as
I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say
for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition
of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I
was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me
very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have
known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would
have paid it.

There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we
should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable
domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid
came in, and said, “If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you.”

“Speak to your master?” said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused
again. “How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or
speak to me--at some other time.”

“Begging your pardon, ma'am,” returned the housemaid, “I should wish to
speak at once, and to speak to master.”

Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of
ourselves until he came back.

“This is a pretty thing, Belinda!” said Mr. Pocket, returning with a
countenance expressive of grief and despair. “Here's the cook lying
insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh
butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!”

Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, “This is
that odious Sophia's doing!”

“What do you mean, Belinda?” demanded Mr. Pocket.

“Sophia has told you,” said Mrs. Pocket. “Did I not see her with my own
eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask
to speak to you?”

“But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda,” returned Mr. Pocket,
“and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?”

“And do you defend her, Matthew,” said Mrs. Pocket, “for making
mischief?”

Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan.

“Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?” said Mrs.
Pocket. “Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman,
and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the
situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess.”

There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the
attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a
hollow voice, “Good night, Mr. Pip,” when I deemed it advisable to go to
bed and leave him.




Chapter XXIV

After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and
had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered
all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together.
He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred
to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any
profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny
if I could “hold my own” with the average of young men in prosperous
circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary.

He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of
such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions
of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with
intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and
should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way
of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on
confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state
at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his
compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling
mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt
I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such
excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard
him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was
serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me.

When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had
begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my
bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my
manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did
not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could
possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt
that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would
save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted
my wish to Mr. Jaggers.

“If I could buy the furniture now hired for me,” said I, “and one or two
other little things, I should be quite at home there.”

“Go it!” said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. “I told you you'd get on.
Well! How much do you want?”

I said I didn't know how much.

“Come!” retorted Mr. Jaggers. “How much? Fifty pounds?”

“O, not nearly so much.”

“Five pounds?” said Mr. Jaggers.

This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, “O, more than
that.”

“More than that, eh!” retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with
his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall
behind me; “how much more?”

“It is so difficult to fix a sum,” said I, hesitating.

“Come!” said Mr. Jaggers. “Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do?
Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?”

I said I thought that would do handsomely.

“Four times five will do handsomely, will it?” said Mr. Jaggers,
knitting his brows. “Now, what do you make of four times five?”

“What do I make of it?”

“Ah!” said Mr. Jaggers; “how much?”

“I suppose you make it twenty pounds,” said I, smiling.

“Never mind what I make it, my friend,” observed Mr. Jaggers, with a
knowing and contradictory toss of his head. “I want to know what you
make it.”

“Twenty pounds, of course.”

“Wemmick!” said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. “Take Mr. Pip's
written order, and pay him twenty pounds.”

This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked
impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never
laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising
himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows
joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to
creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened
to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick
that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner.

“Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment,” answered Wemmick;
“he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!” for
I looked surprised, “it's not personal; it's professional: only
professional.”

Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit;
pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as
if he were posting them.

“Always seems to me,” said Wemmick, “as if he had set a man-trap and was
watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!”

Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I
said I supposed he was very skilful?

“Deep,” said Wemmick, “as Australia.” Pointing with his pen at the
office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes
of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe.
“If there was anything deeper,” added Wemmick, bringing his pen to
paper, “he'd be it.”

Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said,
“Ca-pi-tal!” Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he
replied,--

“We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and
people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would
you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say.”

I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the
post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key
of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his
coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark
and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr.
Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase
for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something
between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen
man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby
appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to
be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. “Getting evidence
together,” said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, “for the Bailey.” In the
room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair
(his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was
similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented
to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt
me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration,
as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a
high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was
dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been
waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of
the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use.

This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick
led me into my guardian's room, and said, “This you've seen already.”

“Pray,” said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them
caught my sight again, “whose likenesses are those?”

“These?” said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off
the horrible heads before bringing them down. “These are two celebrated
ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a world of credit. This chap
(why you must have come down in the night and been peeping into the
inkstand, to get this blot upon your eyebrow, you old rascal!) murdered
his master, and, considering that he wasn't brought up to evidence,
didn't plan it badly.”

“Is it like him?” I asked, recoiling from the brute, as Wemmick spat
upon his eyebrow and gave it a rub with his sleeve.

“Like him? It's himself, you know. The cast was made in Newgate,
directly after he was taken down. You had a particular fancy for
me, hadn't you, Old Artful?” said Wemmick. He then explained this
affectionate apostrophe, by touching his brooch representing the lady
and the weeping willow at the tomb with the urn upon it, and saying,
“Had it made for me, express!”

“Is the lady anybody?” said I.

“No,” returned Wemmick. “Only his game. (You liked your bit of game,
didn't you?) No; deuce a bit of a lady in the case, Mr. Pip, except
one,--and she wasn't of this slender lady-like sort, and you wouldn't
have caught her looking after this urn, unless there was something to
drink in it.” Wemmick's attention being thus directed to his brooch, he
put down the cast, and polished the brooch with his pocket-handkerchief.

“Did that other creature come to the same end?” I asked. “He has the
same look.”

“You're right,” said Wemmick; “it's the genuine look. Much as if one
nostril was caught up with a horse-hair and a little fish-hook. Yes,
he came to the same end; quite the natural end here, I assure you.
He forged wills, this blade did, if he didn't also put the supposed
testators to sleep too. You were a gentlemanly Cove, though” (Mr.
Wemmick was again apostrophizing), “and you said you could write Greek.
Yah, Bounceable! What a liar you were! I never met such a liar as you!”
 Before putting his late friend on his shelf again, Wemmick touched the
largest of his mourning rings and said, “Sent out to buy it for me, only
the day before.”

While he was putting up the other cast and coming down from the chair,
the thought crossed my mind that all his personal jewelry was derived
from like sources. As he had shown no diffidence on the subject, I
ventured on the liberty of asking him the question, when he stood before
me, dusting his hands.

“O yes,” he returned, “these are all gifts of that kind. One brings
another, you see; that's the way of it. I always take 'em. They're
curiosities. And they're property. They may not be worth much, but,
after all, they're property and portable. It don't signify to you with
your brilliant lookout, but as to myself, my guiding-star always is,
'Get hold of portable property'.”

When I had rendered homage to this light, he went on to say, in a
friendly manner:--

“If at any odd time when you have nothing better to do, you wouldn't
mind coming over to see me at Walworth, I could offer you a bed, and I
should consider it an honor. I have not much to show you; but such two
or three curiosities as I have got you might like to look over; and I am
fond of a bit of garden and a summer-house.”

I said I should be delighted to accept his hospitality.

“Thankee,” said he; “then we'll consider that it's to come off, when
convenient to you. Have you dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Well,” said Wemmick, “he'll give you wine, and good wine. I'll give you
punch, and not bad punch. And now I'll tell you something. When you go
to dine with Mr. Jaggers, look at his housekeeper.”

“Shall I see something very uncommon?”

“Well,” said Wemmick, “you'll see a wild beast tamed. Not so very
uncommon, you'll tell me. I reply, that depends on the original wildness
of the beast, and the amount of taming. It won't lower your opinion of
Mr. Jaggers's powers. Keep your eye on it.”

I told him I would do so, with all the interest and curiosity that his
preparation awakened. As I was taking my departure, he asked me if I
would like to devote five minutes to seeing Mr. Jaggers “at it?”

For several reasons, and not least because I didn't clearly know what
Mr. Jaggers would be found to be “at,” I replied in the affirmative.
We dived into the City, and came up in a crowded police-court, where
a blood-relation (in the murderous sense) of the deceased, with the
fanciful taste in brooches, was standing at the bar, uncomfortably
chewing something; while my guardian had a woman under examination or
cross-examination,--I don't know which,--and was striking her, and
the bench, and everybody present, with awe. If anybody, of whatsoever
degree, said a word that he didn't approve of, he instantly required to
have it “taken down.” If anybody wouldn't make an admission, he said,
“I'll have it out of you!” and if anybody made an admission, he said,
“Now I have got you!” The magistrates shivered under a single bite of
his finger. Thieves and thief-takers hung in dread rapture on his words,
and shrank when a hair of his eyebrows turned in their direction. Which
side he was on I couldn't make out, for he seemed to me to be grinding
the whole place in a mill; I only know that when I stole out on tiptoe,
he was not on the side of the bench; for, he was making the legs of the
old gentleman who presided, quite convulsive under the table, by his
denunciations of his conduct as the representative of British law and
justice in that chair that day.




Chapter XXV

Bentley Drummle, who was so sulky a fellow that he even took up a book
as if its writer had done him an injury, did not take up an
acquaintance in a more agreeable spirit. Heavy in figure, movement,
and comprehension,--in the sluggish complexion of his face, and in
the large, awkward tongue that seemed to loll about in his mouth as
he himself lolled about in a room,--he was idle, proud, niggardly,
reserved, and suspicious. He came of rich people down in Somersetshire,
who had nursed this combination of qualities until they made the
discovery that it was just of age and a blockhead. Thus, Bentley Drummle
had come to Mr. Pocket when he was a head taller than that gentleman,
and half a dozen heads thicker than most gentlemen.

Startop had been spoilt by a weak mother and kept at home when he
ought to have been at school, but he was devotedly attached to her, and
admired her beyond measure. He had a woman's delicacy of feature,
and was--“as you may see, though you never saw her,” said Herbert to
me--“exactly like his mother.” It was but natural that I should take to
him much more kindly than to Drummle, and that, even in the earliest
evenings of our boating, he and I should pull homeward abreast of one
another, conversing from boat to boat, while Bentley Drummle came up
in our wake alone, under the overhanging banks and among the rushes. He
would always creep in-shore like some uncomfortable amphibious creature,
even when the tide would have sent him fast upon his way; and I always
think of him as coming after us in the dark or by the back-water,
when our own two boats were breaking the sunset or the moonlight in
mid-stream.

Herbert was my intimate companion and friend. I presented him with a
half-share in my boat, which was the occasion of his often coming down
to Hammersmith; and my possession of a half-share in his chambers often
took me up to London. We used to walk between the two places at all
hours. I have an affection for the road yet (though it is not so
pleasant a road as it was then), formed in the impressibility of untried
youth and hope.

When I had been in Mr. Pocket's family a month or two, Mr. and Mrs.
Camilla turned up. Camilla was Mr. Pocket's sister. Georgiana, whom I
had seen at Miss Havisham's on the same occasion, also turned up. She
was a cousin,--an indigestive single woman, who called her rigidity
religion, and her liver love. These people hated me with the hatred of
cupidity and disappointment. As a matter of course, they fawned upon
me in my prosperity with the basest meanness. Towards Mr. Pocket, as
a grown-up infant with no notion of his own interests, they showed the
complacent forbearance I had heard them express. Mrs. Pocket they
held in contempt; but they allowed the poor soul to have been heavily
disappointed in life, because that shed a feeble reflected light upon
themselves.

These were the surroundings among which I settled down, and applied
myself to my education. I soon contracted expensive habits, and began
to spend an amount of money that within a few short months I should have
thought almost fabulous; but through good and evil I stuck to my books.
There was no other merit in this, than my having sense enough to feel
my deficiencies. Between Mr. Pocket and Herbert I got on fast; and, with
one or the other always at my elbow to give me the start I wanted, and
clear obstructions out of my road, I must have been as great a dolt as
Drummle if I had done less.

I had not seen Mr. Wemmick for some weeks, when I thought I would write
him a note and propose to go home with him on a certain evening. He
replied that it would give him much pleasure, and that he would expect
me at the office at six o'clock. Thither I went, and there I found him,
putting the key of his safe down his back as the clock struck.

“Did you think of walking down to Walworth?” said he.

“Certainly,” said I, “if you approve.”

“Very much,” was Wemmick's reply, “for I have had my legs under the desk
all day, and shall be glad to stretch them. Now, I'll tell you what I
have got for supper, Mr. Pip. I have got a stewed steak,--which is
of home preparation,--and a cold roast fowl,--which is from the
cook's-shop. I think it's tender, because the master of the shop was a
Juryman in some cases of ours the other day, and we let him down easy.
I reminded him of it when I bought the fowl, and I said, “Pick us out
a good one, old Briton, because if we had chosen to keep you in the box
another day or two, we could easily have done it.” He said to that,
“Let me make you a present of the best fowl in the shop.” I let him, of
course. As far as it goes, it's property and portable. You don't object
to an aged parent, I hope?”

I really thought he was still speaking of the fowl, until he added,
“Because I have got an aged parent at my place.” I then said what
politeness required.

“So, you haven't dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?” he pursued, as we walked
along.

“Not yet.”

“He told me so this afternoon when he heard you were coming. I expect
you'll have an invitation to-morrow. He's going to ask your pals, too.
Three of 'em; ain't there?”

Although I was not in the habit of counting Drummle as one of my
intimate associates, I answered, “Yes.”

“Well, he's going to ask the whole gang,”--I hardly felt complimented by
the word,--“and whatever he gives you, he'll give you good. Don't look
forward to variety, but you'll have excellence. And there's another rum
thing in his house,” proceeded Wemmick, after a moment's pause, as if
the remark followed on the housekeeper understood; “he never lets a door
or window be fastened at night.”

“Is he never robbed?”

“That's it!” returned Wemmick. “He says, and gives it out publicly, “I
want to see the man who'll rob me.” Lord bless you, I have heard him, a
hundred times, if I have heard him once, say to regular cracksmen in our
front office, “You know where I live; now, no bolt is ever drawn there;
why don't you do a stroke of business with me? Come; can't I tempt you?”
 Not a man of them, sir, would be bold enough to try it on, for love or
money.”

“They dread him so much?” said I.

“Dread him,” said Wemmick. “I believe you they dread him. Not but what
he's artful, even in his defiance of them. No silver, sir. Britannia
metal, every spoon.”

“So they wouldn't have much,” I observed, “even if they--”

“Ah! But he would have much,” said Wemmick, cutting me short, “and they
know it. He'd have their lives, and the lives of scores of 'em. He'd
have all he could get. And it's impossible to say what he couldn't get,
if he gave his mind to it.”

I was falling into meditation on my guardian's greatness, when Wemmick
remarked:--

“As to the absence of plate, that's only his natural depth, you know.
A river's its natural depth, and he's his natural depth. Look at his
watch-chain. That's real enough.”

“It's very massive,” said I.

“Massive?” repeated Wemmick. “I think so. And his watch is a gold
repeater, and worth a hundred pound if it's worth a penny. Mr. Pip,
there are about seven hundred thieves in this town who know all about
that watch; there's not a man, a woman, or a child, among them, who
wouldn't identify the smallest link in that chain, and drop it as if it
was red hot, if inveigled into touching it.”

At first with such discourse, and afterwards with conversation of a more
general nature, did Mr. Wemmick and I beguile the time and the road,
until he gave me to understand that we had arrived in the district of
Walworth.

It appeared to be a collection of back lanes, ditches, and little
gardens, and to present the aspect of a rather dull retirement.
Wemmick's house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of
garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted
with guns.

“My own doing,” said Wemmick. “Looks pretty; don't it?”

I highly commended it, I think it was the smallest house I ever saw;
with the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham),
and a gothic door almost too small to get in at.

“That's a real flagstaff, you see,” said Wemmick, “and on Sundays I
run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I
hoist it up--so--and cut off the communication.”

The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide
and two deep. But it was very pleasant to see the pride with which he
hoisted it up and made it fast; smiling as he did so, with a relish and
not merely mechanically.

“At nine o'clock every night, Greenwich time,” said Wemmick, “the gun
fires. There he is, you see! And when you hear him go, I think you'll
say he's a Stinger.”

The piece of ordnance referred to, was mounted in a separate fortress,
constructed of lattice-work. It was protected from the weather by an
ingenious little tarpaulin contrivance in the nature of an umbrella.

“Then, at the back,” said Wemmick, “out of sight, so as not to impede
the idea of fortifications,--for it's a principle with me, if you have
an idea, carry it out and keep it up,--I don't know whether that's your
opinion--”

I said, decidedly.

“--At the back, there's a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits; then,
I knock together my own little frame, you see, and grow cucumbers; and
you'll judge at supper what sort of a salad I can raise. So, sir,” said
Wemmick, smiling again, but seriously too, as he shook his head, “if you
can suppose the little place besieged, it would hold out a devil of a
time in point of provisions.”

Then, he conducted me to a bower about a dozen yards off, but which was
approached by such ingenious twists of path that it took quite a long
time to get at; and in this retreat our glasses were already set forth.
Our punch was cooling in an ornamental lake, on whose margin the bower
was raised. This piece of water (with an island in the middle which
might have been the salad for supper) was of a circular form, and he had
constructed a fountain in it, which, when you set a little mill going
and took a cork out of a pipe, played to that powerful extent that it
made the back of your hand quite wet.

“I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and
my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades,” said Wemmick, in
acknowledging my compliments. “Well; it's a good thing, you know. It
brushes the Newgate cobwebs away, and pleases the Aged. You wouldn't
mind being at once introduced to the Aged, would you? It wouldn't put
you out?”

I expressed the readiness I felt, and we went into the castle. There
we found, sitting by a fire, a very old man in a flannel coat: clean,
cheerful, comfortable, and well cared for, but intensely deaf.

“Well aged parent,” said Wemmick, shaking hands with him in a cordial
and jocose way, “how am you?”

“All right, John; all right!” replied the old man.

“Here's Mr. Pip, aged parent,” said Wemmick, “and I wish you could hear
his name. Nod away at him, Mr. Pip; that's what he likes. Nod away at
him, if you please, like winking!”

“This is a fine place of my son's, sir,” cried the old man, while I
nodded as hard as I possibly could. “This is a pretty pleasure-ground,
sir. This spot and these beautiful works upon it ought to be kept
together by the Nation, after my son's time, for the people's
enjoyment.”

“You're as proud of it as Punch; ain't you, Aged?” said Wemmick,
contemplating the old man, with his hard face really softened; “there's
a nod for you;” giving him a tremendous one; “there's another for you;”
 giving him a still more tremendous one; “you like that, don't you? If
you're not tired, Mr. Pip--though I know it's tiring to strangers--will
you tip him one more? You can't think how it pleases him.”

I tipped him several more, and he was in great spirits. We left him
bestirring himself to feed the fowls, and we sat down to our punch in
the arbor; where Wemmick told me, as he smoked a pipe, that it had taken
him a good many years to bring the property up to its present pitch of
perfection.

“Is it your own, Mr. Wemmick?”

“O yes,” said Wemmick, “I have got hold of it, a bit at a time. It's a
freehold, by George!”

“Is it indeed? I hope Mr. Jaggers admires it?”

“Never seen it,” said Wemmick. “Never heard of it. Never seen the Aged.
Never heard of him. No; the office is one thing, and private life is
another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and
when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me. If it's not
in any way disagreeable to you, you'll oblige me by doing the same. I
don't wish it professionally spoken about.”

Of course I felt my good faith involved in the observance of his
request. The punch being very nice, we sat there drinking it and
talking, until it was almost nine o'clock. “Getting near gun-fire,” said
Wemmick then, as he laid down his pipe; “it's the Aged's treat.”

Proceeding into the Castle again, we found the Aged heating the poker,
with expectant eyes, as a preliminary to the performance of this great
nightly ceremony. Wemmick stood with his watch in his hand until the
moment was come for him to take the red-hot poker from the Aged, and
repair to the battery. He took it, and went out, and presently the
Stinger went off with a Bang that shook the crazy little box of a
cottage as if it must fall to pieces, and made every glass and teacup in
it ring. Upon this, the Aged--who I believe would have been blown out
of his arm-chair but for holding on by the elbows--cried out exultingly,
“He's fired! I heerd him!” and I nodded at the old gentleman until it is
no figure of speech to declare that I absolutely could not see him.

The interval between that time and supper Wemmick devoted to showing
me his collection of curiosities. They were mostly of a felonious
character; comprising the pen with which a celebrated forgery had been
committed, a distinguished razor or two, some locks of hair, and several
manuscript confessions written under condemnation,--upon which Mr.
Wemmick set particular value as being, to use his own words, “every one
of 'em Lies, sir.” These were agreeably dispersed among small specimens
of china and glass, various neat trifles made by the proprietor of the
museum, and some tobacco-stoppers carved by the Aged. They were all
displayed in that chamber of the Castle into which I had been first
inducted, and which served, not only as the general sitting-room but
as the kitchen too, if I might judge from a saucepan on the hob, and
a brazen bijou over the fireplace designed for the suspension of a
roasting-jack.

There was a neat little girl in attendance, who looked after the Aged in
the day. When she had laid the supper-cloth, the bridge was lowered to
give her means of egress, and she withdrew for the night. The supper was
excellent; and though the Castle was rather subject to dry-rot insomuch
that it tasted like a bad nut, and though the pig might have been
farther off, I was heartily pleased with my whole entertainment. Nor was
there any drawback on my little turret bedroom, beyond there being such
a very thin ceiling between me and the flagstaff, that when I lay down
on my back in bed, it seemed as if I had to balance that pole on my
forehead all night.

Wemmick was up early in the morning, and I am afraid I heard him
cleaning my boots. After that, he fell to gardening, and I saw him from
my gothic window pretending to employ the Aged, and nodding at him in
a most devoted manner. Our breakfast was as good as the supper, and at
half-past eight precisely we started for Little Britain. By degrees,
Wemmick got dryer and harder as we went along, and his mouth tightened
into a post-office again. At last, when we got to his place of business
and he pulled out his key from his coat-collar, he looked as unconscious
of his Walworth property as if the Castle and the drawbridge and the
arbor and the lake and the fountain and the Aged, had all been blown
into space together by the last discharge of the Stinger.




Chapter XXVI

It fell out as Wemmick had told me it would, that I had an early
opportunity of comparing my guardian's establishment with that of his
cashier and clerk. My guardian was in his room, washing his hands with
his scented soap, when I went into the office from Walworth; and he
called me to him, and gave me the invitation for myself and friends
which Wemmick had prepared me to receive. “No ceremony,” he stipulated,
“and no dinner dress, and say to-morrow.” I asked him where we should
come to (for I had no idea where he lived), and I believe it was in his
general objection to make anything like an admission, that he replied,
“Come here, and I'll take you home with me.” I embrace this opportunity
of remarking that he washed his clients off, as if he were a surgeon or
a dentist. He had a closet in his room, fitted up for the purpose, which
smelt of the scented soap like a perfumer's shop. It had an unusually
large jack-towel on a roller inside the door, and he would wash his
hands, and wipe them and dry them all over this towel, whenever he came
in from a police court or dismissed a client from his room. When I and
my friends repaired to him at six o'clock next day, he seemed to have
been engaged on a case of a darker complexion than usual, for we found
him with his head butted into this closet, not only washing his hands,
but laving his face and gargling his throat. And even when he had
done all that, and had gone all round the jack-towel, he took out his
penknife and scraped the case out of his nails before he put his coat
on.

There were some people slinking about as usual when we passed out into
the street, who were evidently anxious to speak with him; but there was
something so conclusive in the halo of scented soap which encircled
his presence, that they gave it up for that day. As we walked along
westward, he was recognized ever and again by some face in the crowd of
the streets, and whenever that happened he talked louder to me; but
he never otherwise recognized anybody, or took notice that anybody
recognized him.

He conducted us to Gerrard Street, Soho, to a house on the south side of
that street. Rather a stately house of its kind, but dolefully in want
of painting, and with dirty windows. He took out his key and opened the
door, and we all went into a stone hall, bare, gloomy, and little used.
So, up a dark brown staircase into a series of three dark brown rooms on
the first floor. There were carved garlands on the panelled walls, and
as he stood among them giving us welcome, I know what kind of loops I
thought they looked like.

Dinner was laid in the best of these rooms; the second was his
dressing-room; the third, his bedroom. He told us that he held the whole
house, but rarely used more of it than we saw. The table was comfortably
laid--no silver in the service, of course--and at the side of his chair
was a capacious dumb-waiter, with a variety of bottles and decanters on
it, and four dishes of fruit for dessert. I noticed throughout, that he
kept everything under his own hand, and distributed everything himself.

There was a bookcase in the room; I saw from the backs of the books,
that they were about evidence, criminal law, criminal biography, trials,
acts of Parliament, and such things. The furniture was all very solid
and good, like his watch-chain. It had an official look, however, and
there was nothing merely ornamental to be seen. In a corner was a little
table of papers with a shaded lamp: so that he seemed to bring the
office home with him in that respect too, and to wheel it out of an
evening and fall to work.

As he had scarcely seen my three companions until now,--for he and I had
walked together,--he stood on the hearth-rug, after ringing the bell,
and took a searching look at them. To my surprise, he seemed at once to
be principally if not solely interested in Drummle.

“Pip,” said he, putting his large hand on my shoulder and moving me to
the window, “I don't know one from the other. Who's the Spider?”

“The spider?” said I.

“The blotchy, sprawly, sulky fellow.”

“That's Bentley Drummle,” I replied; “the one with the delicate face is
Startop.”

Not making the least account of “the one with the delicate face,” he
returned, “Bentley Drummle is his name, is it? I like the look of that
fellow.”

He immediately began to talk to Drummle: not at all deterred by his
replying in his heavy reticent way, but apparently led on by it to screw
discourse out of him. I was looking at the two, when there came between
me and them the housekeeper, with the first dish for the table.

She was a woman of about forty, I supposed,--but I may have thought her
younger than she was. Rather tall, of a lithe nimble figure, extremely
pale, with large faded eyes, and a quantity of streaming hair. I cannot
say whether any diseased affection of the heart caused her lips to be
parted as if she were panting, and her face to bear a curious expression
of suddenness and flutter; but I know that I had been to see Macbeth at
the theatre, a night or two before, and that her face looked to me as if
it were all disturbed by fiery air, like the faces I had seen rise out
of the Witches' caldron.

She set the dish on, touched my guardian quietly on the arm with a
finger to notify that dinner was ready, and vanished. We took our seats
at the round table, and my guardian kept Drummle on one side of him,
while Startop sat on the other. It was a noble dish of fish that the
housekeeper had put on table, and we had a joint of equally choice
mutton afterwards, and then an equally choice bird. Sauces, wines, all
the accessories we wanted, and all of the best, were given out by our
host from his dumb-waiter; and when they had made the circuit of the
table, he always put them back again. Similarly, he dealt us clean
plates and knives and forks, for each course, and dropped those just
disused into two baskets on the ground by his chair. No other attendant
than the housekeeper appeared. She set on every dish; and I always saw
in her face, a face rising out of the caldron. Years afterwards, I made
a dreadful likeness of that woman, by causing a face that had no other
natural resemblance to it than it derived from flowing hair to pass
behind a bowl of flaming spirits in a dark room.

Induced to take particular notice of the housekeeper, both by her
own striking appearance and by Wemmick's preparation, I observed
that whenever she was in the room she kept her eyes attentively on my
guardian, and that she would remove her hands from any dish she put
before him, hesitatingly, as if she dreaded his calling her back, and
wanted him to speak when she was nigh, if he had anything to say. I
fancied that I could detect in his manner a consciousness of this, and a
purpose of always holding her in suspense.

Dinner went off gayly, and although my guardian seemed to follow rather
than originate subjects, I knew that he wrenched the weakest part of
our dispositions out of us. For myself, I found that I was expressing my
tendency to lavish expenditure, and to patronize Herbert, and to boast
of my great prospects, before I quite knew that I had opened my lips.
It was so with all of us, but with no one more than Drummle: the
development of whose inclination to gird in a grudging and suspicious
way at the rest, was screwed out of him before the fish was taken off.

It was not then, but when we had got to the cheese, that our
conversation turned upon our rowing feats, and that Drummle was rallied
for coming up behind of a night in that slow amphibious way of his.
Drummle upon this, informed our host that he much preferred our room to
our company, and that as to skill he was more than our master, and that
as to strength he could scatter us like chaff. By some invisible agency,
my guardian wound him up to a pitch little short of ferocity about this
trifle; and he fell to baring and spanning his arm to show how muscular
it was, and we all fell to baring and spanning our arms in a ridiculous
manner.

Now the housekeeper was at that time clearing the table; my guardian,
taking no heed of her, but with the side of his face turned from her,
was leaning back in his chair biting the side of his forefinger and
showing an interest in Drummle, that, to me, was quite inexplicable.
Suddenly, he clapped his large hand on the housekeeper's, like a trap,
as she stretched it across the table. So suddenly and smartly did he do
this, that we all stopped in our foolish contention.

“If you talk of strength,” said Mr. Jaggers, “I'll show you a wrist.
Molly, let them see your wrist.”

Her entrapped hand was on the table, but she had already put her other
hand behind her waist. “Master,” she said, in a low voice, with her eyes
attentively and entreatingly fixed upon him. “Don't.”

“I'll show you a wrist,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, with an immovable
determination to show it. “Molly, let them see your wrist.”

“Master,” she again murmured. “Please!”

“Molly,” said Mr. Jaggers, not looking at her, but obstinately looking
at the opposite side of the room, “let them see both your wrists. Show
them. Come!”

He took his hand from hers, and turned that wrist up on the table. She
brought her other hand from behind her, and held the two out side by
side. The last wrist was much disfigured,--deeply scarred and scarred
across and across. When she held her hands out she took her eyes from
Mr. Jaggers, and turned them watchfully on every one of the rest of us
in succession.

“There's power here,” said Mr. Jaggers, coolly tracing out the sinews
with his forefinger. “Very few men have the power of wrist that this
woman has. It's remarkable what mere force of grip there is in these
hands. I have had occasion to notice many hands; but I never saw
stronger in that respect, man's or woman's, than these.”

While he said these words in a leisurely, critical style, she continued
to look at every one of us in regular succession as we sat. The moment
he ceased, she looked at him again. “That'll do, Molly,” said Mr.
Jaggers, giving her a slight nod; “you have been admired, and can
go.” She withdrew her hands and went out of the room, and Mr. Jaggers,
putting the decanters on from his dumb-waiter, filled his glass and
passed round the wine.

“At half-past nine, gentlemen,” said he, “we must break up. Pray make
the best use of your time. I am glad to see you all. Mr. Drummle, I
drink to you.”

If his object in singling out Drummle were to bring him out still more,
it perfectly succeeded. In a sulky triumph, Drummle showed his morose
depreciation of the rest of us, in a more and more offensive degree,
until he became downright intolerable. Through all his stages, Mr.
Jaggers followed him with the same strange interest. He actually seemed
to serve as a zest to Mr. Jaggers's wine.

In our boyish want of discretion I dare say we took too much to drink,
and I know we talked too much. We became particularly hot upon some
boorish sneer of Drummle's, to the effect that we were too free with our
money. It led to my remarking, with more zeal than discretion, that it
came with a bad grace from him, to whom Startop had lent money in my
presence but a week or so before.

“Well,” retorted Drummle; “he'll be paid.”

“I don't mean to imply that he won't,” said I, “but it might make you
hold your tongue about us and our money, I should think.”

“You should think!” retorted Drummle. “Oh Lord!”

“I dare say,” I went on, meaning to be very severe, “that you wouldn't
lend money to any of us if we wanted it.”

“You are right,” said Drummle. “I wouldn't lend one of you a sixpence. I
wouldn't lend anybody a sixpence.”

“Rather mean to borrow under those circumstances, I should say.”

“You should say,” repeated Drummle. “Oh Lord!”

This was so very aggravating--the more especially as I found myself
making no way against his surly obtuseness--that I said, disregarding
Herbert's efforts to check me,--

“Come, Mr. Drummle, since we are on the subject, I'll tell you what
passed between Herbert here and me, when you borrowed that money.”

“I don't want to know what passed between Herbert there and you,”
 growled Drummle. And I think he added in a lower growl, that we might
both go to the devil and shake ourselves.

“I'll tell you, however,” said I, “whether you want to know or not. We
said that as you put it in your pocket very glad to get it, you seemed
to be immensely amused at his being so weak as to lend it.”

Drummle laughed outright, and sat laughing in our faces, with his hands
in his pockets and his round shoulders raised; plainly signifying that
it was quite true, and that he despised us as asses all.

Hereupon Startop took him in hand, though with a much better grace than
I had shown, and exhorted him to be a little more agreeable. Startop,
being a lively, bright young fellow, and Drummle being the exact
opposite, the latter was always disposed to resent him as a direct
personal affront. He now retorted in a coarse, lumpish way, and Startop
tried to turn the discussion aside with some small pleasantry that made
us all laugh. Resenting this little success more than anything, Drummle,
without any threat or warning, pulled his hands out of his pockets,
dropped his round shoulders, swore, took up a large glass, and would
have flung it at his adversary's head, but for our entertainer's
dexterously seizing it at the instant when it was raised for that
purpose.

“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Jaggers, deliberately putting down the glass, and
hauling out his gold repeater by its massive chain, “I am exceedingly
sorry to announce that it's half past nine.”

On this hint we all rose to depart. Before we got to the street door,
Startop was cheerily calling Drummle “old boy,” as if nothing had
happened. But the old boy was so far from responding, that he would not
even walk to Hammersmith on the same side of the way; so Herbert and I,
who remained in town, saw them going down the street on opposite sides;
Startop leading, and Drummle lagging behind in the shadow of the houses,
much as he was wont to follow in his boat.

As the door was not yet shut, I thought I would leave Herbert there for
a moment, and run upstairs again to say a word to my guardian. I found
him in his dressing-room surrounded by his stock of boots, already hard
at it, washing his hands of us.

I told him I had come up again to say how sorry I was that anything
disagreeable should have occurred, and that I hoped he would not blame
me much.

“Pooh!” said he, sluicing his face, and speaking through the
water-drops; “it's nothing, Pip. I like that Spider though.”

He had turned towards me now, and was shaking his head, and blowing, and
towelling himself.

“I am glad you like him, sir,” said I--“but I don't.”

“No, no,” my guardian assented; “don't have too much to do with him.
Keep as clear of him as you can. But I like the fellow, Pip; he is one
of the true sort. Why, if I was a fortune-teller--”

Looking out of the towel, he caught my eye.

“But I am not a fortune-teller,” he said, letting his head drop into a
festoon of towel, and towelling away at his two ears. “You know what I
am, don't you? Good night, Pip.”

“Good night, sir.”

In about a month after that, the Spider's time with Mr. Pocket was up
for good, and, to the great relief of all the house but Mrs. Pocket, he
went home to the family hole.




Chapter XXVII


“MY DEAR MR PIP:--

“I write this by request of Mr. Gargery, for to let you know that he
is going to London in company with Mr. Wopsle and would be glad if
agreeable to be allowed to see you. He would call at Barnard's Hotel
Tuesday morning at nine o'clock, when if not agreeable please leave
word. Your poor sister is much the same as when you left. We talk of you
in the kitchen every night, and wonder what you are saying and doing. If
now considered in the light of a liberty, excuse it for the love of
poor old days. No more, dear Mr. Pip, from your ever obliged, and
affectionate servant,

“BIDDY.”

“P.S. He wishes me most particular to write what larks. He says you will
understand. I hope and do not doubt it will be agreeable to see him,
even though a gentleman, for you had ever a good heart, and he is a
worthy, worthy man. I have read him all, excepting only the last little
sentence, and he wishes me most particular to write again what larks.”

I received this letter by the post on Monday morning, and therefore its
appointment was for next day. Let me confess exactly with what feelings
I looked forward to Joe's coming.

Not with pleasure, though I was bound to him by so many ties; no;
with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of
incongruity. If I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly
would have paid money. My greatest reassurance was that he was coming
to Barnard's Inn, not to Hammersmith, and consequently would not fall
in Bentley Drummle's way. I had little objection to his being seen by
Herbert or his father, for both of whom I had a respect; but I had the
sharpest sensitiveness as to his being seen by Drummle, whom I held in
contempt. So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are
usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.

I had begun to be always decorating the chambers in some quite
unnecessary and inappropriate way or other, and very expensive those
wrestles with Barnard proved to be. By this time, the rooms were
vastly different from what I had found them, and I enjoyed the honor
of occupying a few prominent pages in the books of a neighboring
upholsterer. I had got on so fast of late, that I had even started a boy
in boots,--top boots,--in bondage and slavery to whom I might have been
said to pass my days. For, after I had made the monster (out of the
refuse of my washerwoman's family), and had clothed him with a blue
coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat, creamy breeches, and the boots
already mentioned, I had to find him a little to do and a great deal
to eat; and with both of those horrible requirements he haunted my
existence.

This avenging phantom was ordered to be on duty at eight on Tuesday
morning in the hall, (it was two feet square, as charged for
floorcloth,) and Herbert suggested certain things for breakfast that he
thought Joe would like. While I felt sincerely obliged to him for being
so interested and considerate, I had an odd half-provoked sense of
suspicion upon me, that if Joe had been coming to see him, he wouldn't
have been quite so brisk about it.

However, I came into town on the Monday night to be ready for Joe, and
I got up early in the morning, and caused the sitting-room and
breakfast-table to assume their most splendid appearance. Unfortunately
the morning was drizzly, and an angel could not have concealed the fact
that Barnard was shedding sooty tears outside the window, like some weak
giant of a Sweep.

As the time approached I should have liked to run away, but the Avenger
pursuant to orders was in the hall, and presently I heard Joe on
the staircase. I knew it was Joe, by his clumsy manner of coming upstairs,
--his state boots being always too big for him,--and by the time
it took him to read the names on the other floors in the course of
his ascent. When at last he stopped outside our door, I could hear his
finger tracing over the painted letters of my name, and I afterwards
distinctly heard him breathing in at the keyhole. Finally he gave a
faint single rap, and Pepper--such was the compromising name of the
avenging boy--announced “Mr. Gargery!” I thought he never would have
done wiping his feet, and that I must have gone out to lift him off the
mat, but at last he came in.

“Joe, how are you, Joe?”

“Pip, how AIR you, Pip?”

With his good honest face all glowing and shining, and his hat put
down on the floor between us, he caught both my hands and worked them
straight up and down, as if I had been the last-patented Pump.

“I am glad to see you, Joe. Give me your hat.”

But Joe, taking it up carefully with both hands, like a bird's-nest with
eggs in it, wouldn't hear of parting with that piece of property, and
persisted in standing talking over it in a most uncomfortable way.

“Which you have that growed,” said Joe, “and that swelled, and that
gentle-folked;” Joe considered a little before he discovered this word;
“as to be sure you are a honor to your king and country.”

“And you, Joe, look wonderfully well.”

“Thank God,” said Joe, “I'm ekerval to most. And your sister, she's
no worse than she were. And Biddy, she's ever right and ready. And all
friends is no backerder, if not no forarder. 'Ceptin Wopsle; he's had a
drop.”

All this time (still with both hands taking great care of the
bird's-nest), Joe was rolling his eyes round and round the room, and
round and round the flowered pattern of my dressing-gown.

“Had a drop, Joe?”

“Why yes,” said Joe, lowering his voice, “he's left the Church and went
into the playacting. Which the playacting have likeways brought him
to London along with me. And his wish were,” said Joe, getting the
bird's-nest under his left arm for the moment, and groping in it for an
egg with his right; “if no offence, as I would 'and you that.”

I took what Joe gave me, and found it to be the crumpled play-bill of
a small metropolitan theatre, announcing the first appearance, in that
very week, of “the celebrated Provincial Amateur of Roscian renown,
whose unique performance in the highest tragic walk of our National Bard
has lately occasioned so great a sensation in local dramatic circles.”

“Were you at his performance, Joe?” I inquired.

“I were,” said Joe, with emphasis and solemnity.

“Was there a great sensation?”

“Why,” said Joe, “yes, there certainly were a peck of orange-peel.
Partickler when he see the ghost. Though I put it to yourself, sir,
whether it were calc'lated to keep a man up to his work with a good
hart, to be continiwally cutting in betwixt him and the Ghost with
“Amen!” A man may have had a misfortun' and been in the Church,” said
Joe, lowering his voice to an argumentative and feeling tone, “but
that is no reason why you should put him out at such a time. Which I
meantersay, if the ghost of a man's own father cannot be allowed to
claim his attention, what can, Sir? Still more, when his mourning 'at
is unfortunately made so small as that the weight of the black feathers
brings it off, try to keep it on how you may.”

A ghost-seeing effect in Joe's own countenance informed me that Herbert
had entered the room. So, I presented Joe to Herbert, who held out his
hand; but Joe backed from it, and held on by the bird's-nest.

“Your servant, Sir,” said Joe, “which I hope as you and Pip”--here his
eye fell on the Avenger, who was putting some toast on table, and so
plainly denoted an intention to make that young gentleman one of the
family, that I frowned it down and confused him more--“I meantersay, you
two gentlemen,--which I hope as you get your elths in this close spot?
For the present may be a werry good inn, according to London opinions,”
 said Joe, confidentially, “and I believe its character do stand it; but I
wouldn't keep a pig in it myself,--not in the case that I wished him to
fatten wholesome and to eat with a meller flavor on him.”

Having borne this flattering testimony to the merits of our
dwelling-place, and having incidentally shown this tendency to call me
“sir,” Joe, being invited to sit down to table, looked all round the
room for a suitable spot on which to deposit his hat,--as if it were
only on some very few rare substances in nature that it could find a
resting place,--and ultimately stood it on an extreme corner of the
chimney-piece, from which it ever afterwards fell off at intervals.

“Do you take tea, or coffee, Mr. Gargery?” asked Herbert, who always
presided of a morning.

“Thankee, Sir,” said Joe, stiff from head to foot, “I'll take whichever
is most agreeable to yourself.”

“What do you say to coffee?”

“Thankee, Sir,” returned Joe, evidently dispirited by the proposal,
“since you are so kind as make chice of coffee, I will not run contrairy
to your own opinions. But don't you never find it a little 'eating?”

“Say tea then,” said Herbert, pouring it out.

Here Joe's hat tumbled off the mantel-piece, and he started out of his
chair and picked it up, and fitted it to the same exact spot. As if it
were an absolute point of good breeding that it should tumble off again
soon.

“When did you come to town, Mr. Gargery?”

“Were it yesterday afternoon?” said Joe, after coughing behind his hand,
as if he had had time to catch the whooping-cough since he came. “No
it were not. Yes it were. Yes. It were yesterday afternoon” (with an
appearance of mingled wisdom, relief, and strict impartiality).

“Have you seen anything of London yet?”

“Why, yes, Sir,” said Joe, “me and Wopsle went off straight to look at
the Blacking Ware'us. But we didn't find that it come up to its likeness
in the red bills at the shop doors; which I meantersay,” added Joe, in
an explanatory manner, “as it is there drawd too architectooralooral.”

I really believe Joe would have prolonged this word (mightily expressive
to my mind of some architecture that I know) into a perfect Chorus, but
for his attention being providentially attracted by his hat, which
was toppling. Indeed, it demanded from him a constant attention, and a
quickness of eye and hand, very like that exacted by wicket-keeping.
He made extraordinary play with it, and showed the greatest skill; now,
rushing at it and catching it neatly as it dropped; now, merely stopping
it midway, beating it up, and humoring it in various parts of the room
and against a good deal of the pattern of the paper on the wall,
before he felt it safe to close with it; finally splashing it into the
slop-basin, where I took the liberty of laying hands upon it.

As to his shirt-collar, and his coat-collar, they were perplexing to
reflect upon,--insoluble mysteries both. Why should a man scrape himself
to that extent, before he could consider himself full dressed? Why
should he suppose it necessary to be purified by suffering for
his holiday clothes? Then he fell into such unaccountable fits of
meditation, with his fork midway between his plate and his mouth; had
his eyes attracted in such strange directions; was afflicted with such
remarkable coughs; sat so far from the table, and dropped so much
more than he ate, and pretended that he hadn't dropped it; that I was
heartily glad when Herbert left us for the City.

I had neither the good sense nor the good feeling to know that this was
all my fault, and that if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have
been easier with me. I felt impatient of him and out of temper with him;
in which condition he heaped coals of fire on my head.

“Us two being now alone, sir,”--began Joe.

“Joe,” I interrupted, pettishly, “how can you call me, sir?”

Joe looked at me for a single instant with something faintly like
reproach. Utterly preposterous as his cravat was, and as his collars
were, I was conscious of a sort of dignity in the look.

“Us two being now alone,” resumed Joe, “and me having the intentions and
abilities to stay not many minutes more, I will now conclude--leastways
begin--to mention what have led to my having had the present honor. For
was it not,” said Joe, with his old air of lucid exposition, “that my
only wish were to be useful to you, I should not have had the honor of
breaking wittles in the company and abode of gentlemen.”

I was so unwilling to see the look again, that I made no remonstrance
against this tone.

“Well, sir,” pursued Joe, “this is how it were. I were at the Bargemen
t'other night, Pip;”--whenever he subsided into affection, he called me
Pip, and whenever he relapsed into politeness he called me sir; “when
there come up in his shay-cart, Pumblechook. Which that same identical,”
 said Joe, going down a new track, “do comb my 'air the wrong way
sometimes, awful, by giving out up and down town as it were him which
ever had your infant companionation and were looked upon as a playfellow
by yourself.”

“Nonsense. It was you, Joe.”

“Which I fully believed it were, Pip,” said Joe, slightly tossing
his head, “though it signify little now, sir. Well, Pip; this same
identical, which his manners is given to blusterous, come to me at
the Bargemen (wot a pipe and a pint of beer do give refreshment to the
workingman, sir, and do not over stimilate), and his word were, 'Joseph,
Miss Havisham she wish to speak to you.'”

“Miss Havisham, Joe?”

“'She wish,' were Pumblechook's word, 'to speak to you.'” Joe sat and
rolled his eyes at the ceiling.

“Yes, Joe? Go on, please.”

“Next day, sir,” said Joe, looking at me as if I were a long way off,
“having cleaned myself, I go and I see Miss A.”

“Miss A., Joe? Miss Havisham?”

“Which I say, sir,” replied Joe, with an air of legal formality, as if
he were making his will, “Miss A., or otherways Havisham. Her expression
air then as follering: 'Mr. Gargery. You air in correspondence with Mr.
Pip?' Having had a letter from you, I were able to say 'I am.' (When
I married your sister, sir, I said 'I will;' and when I answered your
friend, Pip, I said 'I am.') 'Would you tell him, then,' said she, 'that
which Estella has come home and would be glad to see him.'”

I felt my face fire up as I looked at Joe. I hope one remote cause
of its firing may have been my consciousness that if I had known his
errand, I should have given him more encouragement.

“Biddy,” pursued Joe, “when I got home and asked her fur to write the
message to you, a little hung back. Biddy says, 'I know he will be very
glad to have it by word of mouth, it is holiday time, you want to see
him, go!' I have now concluded, sir,” said Joe, rising from his chair,
“and, Pip, I wish you ever well and ever prospering to a greater and a
greater height.”

“But you are not going now, Joe?”

“Yes I am,” said Joe.

“But you are coming back to dinner, Joe?”

“No I am not,” said Joe.

Our eyes met, and all the “Sir” melted out of that manly heart as he gave
me his hand.

“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded
together, as I may say, and one man's a blacksmith, and one's a
whitesmith, and one's a goldsmith, and one's a coppersmith. Diwisions
among such must come, and must be met as they come. If there's been
any fault at all to-day, it's mine. You and me is not two figures to
be together in London; nor yet anywheres else but what is private, and
beknown, and understood among friends. It ain't that I am proud, but
that I want to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these
clothes. I'm wrong in these clothes. I'm wrong out of the forge, the
kitchen, or off th' meshes. You won't find half so much fault in me if
you think of me in my forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even
my pipe. You won't find half so much fault in me if, supposing as you
should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at the forge
window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old
burnt apron, sticking to the old work. I'm awful dull, but I hope I've
beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD bless
you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!”

I had not been mistaken in my fancy that there was a simple dignity
in him. The fashion of his dress could no more come in its way when he
spoke these words than it could come in its way in Heaven. He touched me
gently on the forehead, and went out. As soon as I could recover
myself sufficiently, I hurried out after him and looked for him in the
neighboring streets; but he was gone.




Chapter XXVIII

It was clear that I must repair to our town next day, and in the first
flow of my repentance, it was equally clear that I must stay at Joe's.
But, when I had secured my box-place by to-morrow's coach, and had been
down to Mr. Pocket's and back, I was not by any means convinced on the
last point, and began to invent reasons and make excuses for putting
up at the Blue Boar. I should be an inconvenience at Joe's; I was not
expected, and my bed would not be ready; I should be too far from
Miss Havisham's, and she was exacting and mightn't like it. All other
swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such
pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should
innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture is
reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin
of my own make as good money! An obliging stranger, under pretence of
compactly folding up my bank-notes for security's sake, abstracts the
notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine,
when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes!

Having settled that I must go to the Blue Boar, my mind was much
disturbed by indecision whether or not to take the Avenger. It was
tempting to think of that expensive Mercenary publicly airing his boots
in the archway of the Blue Boar's posting-yard; it was almost solemn to
imagine him casually produced in the tailor's shop, and confounding
the disrespectful senses of Trabb's boy. On the other hand, Trabb's boy
might worm himself into his intimacy and tell him things; or, reckless
and desperate wretch as I knew he could be, might hoot him in the High
Street. My patroness, too, might hear of him, and not approve. On the
whole, I resolved to leave the Avenger behind.

It was the afternoon coach by which I had taken my place, and, as winter
had now come round, I should not arrive at my destination until two or
three hours after dark. Our time of starting from the Cross Keys was
two o'clock. I arrived on the ground with a quarter of an hour to spare,
attended by the Avenger,--if I may connect that expression with one who
never attended on me if he could possibly help it.

At that time it was customary to carry Convicts down to the dock-yards
by stage-coach. As I had often heard of them in the capacity of outside
passengers, and had more than once seen them on the high road dangling
their ironed legs over the coach roof, I had no cause to be surprised
when Herbert, meeting me in the yard, came up and told me there were two
convicts going down with me. But I had a reason that was an old reason
now for constitutionally faltering whenever I heard the word “convict.”

“You don't mind them, Handel?” said Herbert.

“O no!”

“I thought you seemed as if you didn't like them?”

“I can't pretend that I do like them, and I suppose you don't
particularly. But I don't mind them.”

“See! There they are,” said Herbert, “coming out of the Tap. What a
degraded and vile sight it is!”

They had been treating their guard, I suppose, for they had a gaoler
with them, and all three came out wiping their mouths on their hands.
The two convicts were handcuffed together, and had irons on their
legs,--irons of a pattern that I knew well. They wore the dress that I
likewise knew well. Their keeper had a brace of pistols, and carried
a thick-knobbed bludgeon under his arm; but he was on terms of good
understanding with them, and stood with them beside him, looking on at
the putting-to of the horses, rather with an air as if the convicts were
an interesting Exhibition not formally open at the moment, and he the
Curator. One was a taller and stouter man than the other, and appeared
as a matter of course, according to the mysterious ways of the world,
both convict and free, to have had allotted to him the smaller suit of
clothes. His arms and legs were like great pincushions of those shapes,
and his attire disguised him absurdly; but I knew his half-closed eye
at one glance. There stood the man whom I had seen on the settle at the
Three Jolly Bargemen on a Saturday night, and who had brought me down
with his invisible gun!

It was easy to make sure that as yet he knew me no more than if he had
never seen me in his life. He looked across at me, and his eye appraised
my watch-chain, and then he incidentally spat and said something to the
other convict, and they laughed and slued themselves round with a clink
of their coupling manacle, and looked at something else. The great
numbers on their backs, as if they were street doors; their coarse mangy
ungainly outer surface, as if they were lower animals; their ironed
legs, apologetically garlanded with pocket-handkerchiefs; and the way
in which all present looked at them and kept from them; made them (as
Herbert had said) a most disagreeable and degraded spectacle.

But this was not the worst of it. It came out that the whole of the back
of the coach had been taken by a family removing from London, and that
there were no places for the two prisoners but on the seat in front
behind the coachman. Hereupon, a choleric gentleman, who had taken the
fourth place on that seat, flew into a most violent passion, and said
that it was a breach of contract to mix him up with such villainous
company, and that it was poisonous, and pernicious, and infamous, and
shameful, and I don't know what else. At this time the coach was ready
and the coachman impatient, and we were all preparing to get up, and
the prisoners had come over with their keeper,--bringing with them that
curious flavor of bread-poultice, baize, rope-yarn, and hearthstone,
which attends the convict presence.

“Don't take it so much amiss, sir,” pleaded the keeper to the angry
passenger; “I'll sit next you myself. I'll put 'em on the outside of
the row. They won't interfere with you, sir. You needn't know they're
there.”

“And don't blame me,” growled the convict I had recognized. “I don't
want to go. I am quite ready to stay behind. As fur as I am concerned
any one's welcome to my place.”

“Or mine,” said the other, gruffly. “I wouldn't have incommoded none
of you, if I'd had my way.” Then they both laughed, and began cracking
nuts, and spitting the shells about.--As I really think I should have
liked to do myself, if I had been in their place and so despised.

At length, it was voted that there was no help for the angry gentleman,
and that he must either go in his chance company or remain behind. So he
got into his place, still making complaints, and the keeper got into the
place next him, and the convicts hauled themselves up as well as they
could, and the convict I had recognized sat behind me with his breath on
the hair of my head.

“Good-bye, Handel!” Herbert called out as we started. I thought what a
blessed fortune it was, that he had found another name for me than Pip.

It is impossible to express with what acuteness I felt the convict's
breathing, not only on the back of my head, but all along my spine. The
sensation was like being touched in the marrow with some pungent and
searching acid, it set my very teeth on edge. He seemed to have more
breathing business to do than another man, and to make more noise in
doing it; and I was conscious of growing high-shouldered on one side, in
my shrinking endeavors to fend him off.

The weather was miserably raw, and the two cursed the cold. It made us
all lethargic before we had gone far, and when we had left the Half-way
House behind, we habitually dozed and shivered and were silent. I dozed
off, myself, in considering the question whether I ought to restore a
couple of pounds sterling to this creature before losing sight of him,
and how it could best be done. In the act of dipping forward as if I
were going to bathe among the horses, I woke in a fright and took the
question up again.

But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since, although
I could recognize nothing in the darkness and the fitful lights and
shadows of our lamps, I traced marsh country in the cold damp wind that
blew at us. Cowering forward for warmth and to make me a screen against
the wind, the convicts were closer to me than before. The very first
words I heard them interchange as I became conscious, were the words of
my own thought, “Two One Pound notes.”

“How did he get 'em?” said the convict I had never seen.

“How should I know?” returned the other. “He had 'em stowed away
somehows. Giv him by friends, I expect.”

“I wish,” said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold, “that I had
'em here.”

“Two one pound notes, or friends?”

“Two one pound notes. I'd sell all the friends I ever had for one, and
think it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he says--?”

“So he says,” resumed the convict I had recognized,--“it was all
said and done in half a minute, behind a pile of timber in the
Dock-yard,--'You're a going to be discharged?' Yes, I was. Would I find
out that boy that had fed him and kep his secret, and give him them two
one pound notes? Yes, I would. And I did.”

“More fool you,” growled the other. “I'd have spent 'em on a Man, in
wittles and drink. He must have been a green one. Mean to say he knowed
nothing of you?”

“Not a ha'porth. Different gangs and different ships. He was tried again
for prison breaking, and got made a Lifer.”

“And was that--Honor!--the only time you worked out, in this part of the
country?”

“The only time.”

“What might have been your opinion of the place?”

“A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work; work, swamp,
mist, and mudbank.”

They both execrated the place in very strong language, and gradually
growled themselves out, and had nothing left to say.

After overhearing this dialogue, I should assuredly have got down and
been left in the solitude and darkness of the highway, but for feeling
certain that the man had no suspicion of my identity. Indeed, I was not
only so changed in the course of nature, but so differently dressed and
so differently circumstanced, that it was not at all likely he could
have known me without accidental help. Still, the coincidence of our
being together on the coach, was sufficiently strange to fill me with a
dread that some other coincidence might at any moment connect me, in his
hearing, with my name. For this reason, I resolved to alight as soon as
we touched the town, and put myself out of his hearing. This device I
executed successfully. My little portmanteau was in the boot under my
feet; I had but to turn a hinge to get it out; I threw it down before
me, got down after it, and was left at the first lamp on the first
stones of the town pavement. As to the convicts, they went their way
with the coach, and I knew at what point they would be spirited off to
the river. In my fancy, I saw the boat with its convict crew waiting for
them at the slime-washed stairs,--again heard the gruff “Give way, you!”
 like and order to dogs,--again saw the wicked Noah's Ark lying out on
the black water.

I could not have said what I was afraid of, for my fear was altogether
undefined and vague, but there was great fear upon me. As I walked on to
the hotel, I felt that a dread, much exceeding the mere apprehension of
a painful or disagreeable recognition, made me tremble. I am confident
that it took no distinctness of shape, and that it was the revival for a
few minutes of the terror of childhood.

The coffee-room at the Blue Boar was empty, and I had not only ordered
my dinner there, but had sat down to it, before the waiter knew me. As
soon as he had apologized for the remissness of his memory, he asked me
if he should send Boots for Mr. Pumblechook?

“No,” said I, “certainly not.”

The waiter (it was he who had brought up the Great Remonstrance from the
Commercials, on the day when I was bound) appeared surprised, and
took the earliest opportunity of putting a dirty old copy of a local
newspaper so directly in my way, that I took it up and read this
paragraph:--

Our readers will learn, not altogether without interest, in reference to
the recent romantic rise in fortune of a young artificer in iron of this
neighborhood (what a theme, by the way, for the magic pen of our as yet
not universally acknowledged townsman TOOBY, the poet of our columns!)
that the youth's earliest patron, companion, and friend, was a highly
respected individual not entirely unconnected with the corn and seed
trade, and whose eminently convenient and commodious business premises
are situate within a hundred miles of the High Street. It is not wholly
irrespective of our personal feelings that we record HIM as the Mentor
of our young Telemachus, for it is good to know that our town produced
the founder of the latter's fortunes. Does the thought-contracted brow
of the local Sage or the lustrous eye of local Beauty inquire whose
fortunes? We believe that Quintin Matsys was the BLACKSMITH of Antwerp.
VERB. SAP.

I entertain a conviction, based upon large experience, that if in the
days of my prosperity I had gone to the North Pole, I should have met
somebody there, wandering Esquimaux or civilized man, who would have
told me that Pumblechook was my earliest patron and the founder of my
fortunes.




Chapter XXIX

Betimes in the morning I was up and out. It was too early yet to go to
Miss Havisham's, so I loitered into the country on Miss Havisham's
side of town,--which was not Joe's side; I could go there
to-morrow,--thinking about my patroness, and painting brilliant pictures
of her plans for me.

She had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me, and it could not
fail to be her intention to bring us together. She reserved it for me to
restore the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms,
set the clocks a-going and the cold hearths a-blazing, tear down the
cobwebs, destroy the vermin,--in short, do all the shining deeds of the
young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess. I had stopped to
look at the house as I passed; and its seared red brick walls, blocked
windows, and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with
its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich
attractive mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella was the inspiration
of it, and the heart of it, of course. But, though she had taken such
strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set upon
her, though her influence on my boyish life and character had been
all-powerful, I did not, even that romantic morning, invest her with any
attributes save those she possessed. I mention this in this place, of a
fixed purpose, because it is the clew by which I am to be followed into
my poor labyrinth. According to my experience, the conventional notion
of a lover cannot be always true. The unqualified truth is, that when I
loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found
her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often,
if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against
peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that
could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it,
and it had no more influence in restraining me than if I had devoutly
believed her to be human perfection.

I so shaped out my walk as to arrive at the gate at my old time. When
I had rung at the bell with an unsteady hand, I turned my back upon the
gate, while I tried to get my breath and keep the beating of my heart
moderately quiet. I heard the side-door open, and steps come across the
courtyard; but I pretended not to hear, even when the gate swung on its
rusty hinges.

Being at last touched on the shoulder, I started and turned. I started
much more naturally then, to find myself confronted by a man in a sober
gray dress. The last man I should have expected to see in that place of
porter at Miss Havisham's door.

“Orlick!”

“Ah, young master, there's more changes than yours. But come in, come
in. It's opposed to my orders to hold the gate open.”

I entered and he swung it, and locked it, and took the key out. “Yes!”
 said he, facing round, after doggedly preceding me a few steps towards
the house. “Here I am!”

“How did you come here?”

“I come her,” he retorted, “on my legs. I had my box brought alongside
me in a barrow.”

“Are you here for good?”

“I ain't here for harm, young master, I suppose?”

I was not so sure of that. I had leisure to entertain the retort in my
mind, while he slowly lifted his heavy glance from the pavement, up my
legs and arms, to my face.

“Then you have left the forge?” I said.

“Do this look like a forge?” replied Orlick, sending his glance all
round him with an air of injury. “Now, do it look like it?”

I asked him how long he had left Gargery's forge?

“One day is so like another here,” he replied, “that I don't know
without casting it up. However, I come here some time since you left.”

“I could have told you that, Orlick.”

“Ah!” said he, dryly. “But then you've got to be a scholar.”

By this time we had come to the house, where I found his room to be one
just within the side-door, with a little window in it looking on the
courtyard. In its small proportions, it was not unlike the kind of place
usually assigned to a gate-porter in Paris. Certain keys were hanging on
the wall, to which he now added the gate key; and his patchwork-covered
bed was in a little inner division or recess. The whole had a slovenly,
confined, and sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse; while he,
looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by the window, looked
like the human dormouse for whom it was fitted up,--as indeed he was.

“I never saw this room before,” I remarked; “but there used to be no
Porter here.”

“No,” said he; “not till it got about that there was no protection on
the premises, and it come to be considered dangerous, with convicts and
Tag and Rag and Bobtail going up and down. And then I was recommended to
the place as a man who could give another man as good as he brought, and
I took it. It's easier than bellowsing and hammering.--That's loaded,
that is.”

My eye had been caught by a gun with a brass-bound stock over the
chimney-piece, and his eye had followed mine.

“Well,” said I, not desirous of more conversation, “shall I go up to
Miss Havisham?”

“Burn me, if I know!” he retorted, first stretching himself and then
shaking himself; “my orders ends here, young master. I give this here
bell a rap with this here hammer, and you go on along the passage till
you meet somebody.”

“I am expected, I believe?”

“Burn me twice over, if I can say!” said he.

Upon that, I turned down the long passage which I had first trodden in
my thick boots, and he made his bell sound. At the end of the passage,
while the bell was still reverberating, I found Sarah Pocket, who
appeared to have now become constitutionally green and yellow by reason
of me.

“Oh!” said she. “You, is it, Mr. Pip?”

“It is, Miss Pocket. I am glad to tell you that Mr. Pocket and family
are all well.”

“Are they any wiser?” said Sarah, with a dismal shake of the head; “they
had better be wiser, than well. Ah, Matthew, Matthew! You know your way,
sir?”

Tolerably, for I had gone up the staircase in the dark, many a time. I
ascended it now, in lighter boots than of yore, and tapped in my old
way at the door of Miss Havisham's room. “Pip's rap,” I heard her say,
immediately; “come in, Pip.”

She was in her chair near the old table, in the old dress, with her two
hands crossed on her stick, her chin resting on them, and her eyes on
the fire. Sitting near her, with the white shoe, that had never been
worn, in her hand, and her head bent as she looked at it, was an elegant
lady whom I had never seen.

“Come in, Pip,” Miss Havisham continued to mutter, without looking round
or up; “come in, Pip, how do you do, Pip? so you kiss my hand as if I
were a queen, eh?--Well?”

She looked up at me suddenly, only moving her eyes, and repeated in a
grimly playful manner,--

“Well?”

“I heard, Miss Havisham,” said I, rather at a loss, “that you were so
kind as to wish me to come and see you, and I came directly.”

“Well?”

The lady whom I had never seen before, lifted up her eyes and looked
archly at me, and then I saw that the eyes were Estella's eyes. But she
was so much changed, was so much more beautiful, so much more womanly,
in all things winning admiration, had made such wonderful advance,
that I seemed to have made none. I fancied, as I looked at her, that
I slipped hopelessly back into the coarse and common boy again. O
the sense of distance and disparity that came upon me, and the
inaccessibility that came about her!

She gave me her hand. I stammered something about the pleasure I felt in
seeing her again, and about my having looked forward to it, for a long,
long time.

“Do you find her much changed, Pip?” asked Miss Havisham, with her
greedy look, and striking her stick upon a chair that stood between
them, as a sign to me to sit down there.

“When I came in, Miss Havisham, I thought there was nothing of Estella
in the face or figure; but now it all settles down so curiously into the
old--”

“What? You are not going to say into the old Estella?” Miss Havisham
interrupted. “She was proud and insulting, and you wanted to go away
from her. Don't you remember?”

I said confusedly that that was long ago, and that I knew no better
then, and the like. Estella smiled with perfect composure, and said she
had no doubt of my having been quite right, and of her having been very
disagreeable.

“Is he changed?” Miss Havisham asked her.

“Very much,” said Estella, looking at me.

“Less coarse and common?” said Miss Havisham, playing with Estella's
hair.

Estella laughed, and looked at the shoe in her hand, and laughed again,
and looked at me, and put the shoe down. She treated me as a boy still,
but she lured me on.

We sat in the dreamy room among the old strange influences which had
so wrought upon me, and I learnt that she had but just come home from
France, and that she was going to London. Proud and wilful as of old,
she had brought those qualities into such subjection to her beauty that
it was impossible and out of nature--or I thought so--to separate them
from her beauty. Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence
from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had
disturbed my boyhood,--from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had
first made me ashamed of home and Joe,--from all those visions that had
raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the
anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden
window of the forge, and flit away. In a word, it was impossible for me
to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life
of my life.

It was settled that I should stay there all the rest of the day, and
return to the hotel at night, and to London to-morrow. When we had
conversed for a while, Miss Havisham sent us two out to walk in the
neglected garden: on our coming in by and by, she said, I should wheel
her about a little, as in times of yore.

So, Estella and I went out into the garden by the gate through which I
had strayed to my encounter with the pale young gentleman, now Herbert;
I, trembling in spirit and worshipping the very hem of her dress; she,
quite composed and most decidedly not worshipping the hem of mine. As we
drew near to the place of encounter, she stopped and said,--

“I must have been a singular little creature to hide and see that fight
that day; but I did, and I enjoyed it very much.”

“You rewarded me very much.”

“Did I?” she replied, in an incidental and forgetful way. “I remember I
entertained a great objection to your adversary, because I took it ill
that he should be brought here to pester me with his company.”

“He and I are great friends now.”

“Are you? I think I recollect though, that you read with his father?”

“Yes.”

I made the admission with reluctance, for it seemed to have a boyish
look, and she already treated me more than enough like a boy.

“Since your change of fortune and prospects, you have changed your
companions,” said Estella.

“Naturally,” said I.

“And necessarily,” she added, in a haughty tone; “what was fit company
for you once, would be quite unfit company for you now.”

In my conscience, I doubt very much whether I had any lingering
intention left of going to see Joe; but if I had, this observation put
it to flight.

“You had no idea of your impending good fortune, in those times?” said
Estella, with a slight wave of her hand, signifying in the fighting
times.

“Not the least.”

The air of completeness and superiority with which she walked at my
side, and the air of youthfulness and submission with which I walked at
hers, made a contrast that I strongly felt. It would have rankled in me
more than it did, if I had not regarded myself as eliciting it by being
so set apart for her and assigned to her.

The garden was too overgrown and rank for walking in with ease, and
after we had made the round of it twice or thrice, we came out again
into the brewery yard. I showed her to a nicety where I had seen her
walking on the casks, that first old day, and she said, with a cold and
careless look in that direction, “Did I?” I reminded her where she had
come out of the house and given me my meat and drink, and she said, “I
don't remember.” “Not remember that you made me cry?” said I. “No,” said
she, and shook her head and looked about her. I verily believe that
her not remembering and not minding in the least, made me cry again,
inwardly,--and that is the sharpest crying of all.

“You must know,” said Estella, condescending to me as a brilliant and
beautiful woman might, “that I have no heart,--if that has anything to
do with my memory.”

I got through some jargon to the effect that I took the liberty of
doubting that. That I knew better. That there could be no such beauty
without it.

“Oh! I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt,” said
Estella, “and of course if it ceased to beat I should cease
to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there,
no--sympathy--sentiment--nonsense.”

What was it that was borne in upon my mind when she stood still and
looked attentively at me? Anything that I had seen in Miss Havisham? No.
In some of her looks and gestures there was that tinge of resemblance
to Miss Havisham which may often be noticed to have been acquired by
children, from grown person with whom they have been much associated and
secluded, and which, when childhood is passed, will produce a remarkable
occasional likeness of expression between faces that are otherwise quite
different. And yet I could not trace this to Miss Havisham. I looked
again, and though she was still looking at me, the suggestion was gone.

What was it?

“I am serious,” said Estella, not so much with a frown (for her brow was
smooth) as with a darkening of her face; “if we are to be thrown much
together, you had better believe it at once. No!” imperiously stopping
me as I opened my lips. “I have not bestowed my tenderness anywhere. I
have never had any such thing.”

In another moment we were in the brewery, so long disused, and she
pointed to the high gallery where I had seen her going out on that same
first day, and told me she remembered to have been up there, and to have
seen me standing scared below. As my eyes followed her white hand, again
the same dim suggestion that I could not possibly grasp crossed me. My
involuntary start occasioned her to lay her hand upon my arm. Instantly
the ghost passed once more and was gone.

What was it?

“What is the matter?” asked Estella. “Are you scared again?”

“I should be, if I believed what you said just now,” I replied, to turn
it off.

“Then you don't? Very well. It is said, at any rate. Miss Havisham will
soon be expecting you at your old post, though I think that might be
laid aside now, with other old belongings. Let us make one more round
of the garden, and then go in. Come! You shall not shed tears for my
cruelty to-day; you shall be my Page, and give me your shoulder.”

Her handsome dress had trailed upon the ground. She held it in one hand
now, and with the other lightly touched my shoulder as we walked. We
walked round the ruined garden twice or thrice more, and it was all in
bloom for me. If the green and yellow growth of weed in the chinks of
the old wall had been the most precious flowers that ever blew, it could
not have been more cherished in my remembrance.

There was no discrepancy of years between us to remove her far from me;
we were of nearly the same age, though of course the age told for more
in her case than in mine; but the air of inaccessibility which her
beauty and her manner gave her, tormented me in the midst of my delight,
and at the height of the assurance I felt that our patroness had chosen
us for one another. Wretched boy!

At last we went back into the house, and there I heard, with surprise,
that my guardian had come down to see Miss Havisham on business, and
would come back to dinner. The old wintry branches of chandeliers in
the room where the mouldering table was spread had been lighted while we
were out, and Miss Havisham was in her chair and waiting for me.

It was like pushing the chair itself back into the past, when we began
the old slow circuit round about the ashes of the bridal feast. But,
in the funereal room, with that figure of the grave fallen back in the
chair fixing its eyes upon her, Estella looked more bright and beautiful
than before, and I was under stronger enchantment.

The time so melted away, that our early dinner-hour drew close at hand,
and Estella left us to prepare herself. We had stopped near the centre
of the long table, and Miss Havisham, with one of her withered arms
stretched out of the chair, rested that clenched hand upon the yellow
cloth. As Estella looked back over her shoulder before going out at the
door, Miss Havisham kissed that hand to her, with a ravenous intensity
that was of its kind quite dreadful.

Then, Estella being gone and we two left alone, she turned to me, and
said in a whisper,--

“Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her?”

“Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham.”

She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers as
she sat in the chair. “Love her, love her, love her! How does she use
you?”

Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question
at all) she repeated, “Love her, love her, love her! If she favors
you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to
pieces,--and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper,--love
her, love her, love her!”

Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to her
utterance of these words. I could feel the muscles of the thin arm round
my neck swell with the vehemence that possessed her.

“Hear me, Pip! I adopted her, to be loved. I bred her and educated her,
to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved.
Love her!”

She said the word often enough, and there could be no doubt that she
meant to say it; but if the often repeated word had been hate instead of
love--despair--revenge--dire death--it could not have sounded from her
lips more like a curse.

“I'll tell you,” said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, “what
real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation,
utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the
whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter--as I
did!”

When she came to that, and to a wild cry that followed that, I caught
her round the waist. For she rose up in the chair, in her shroud of a
dress, and struck at the air as if she would as soon have struck herself
against the wall and fallen dead.

All this passed in a few seconds. As I drew her down into her chair, I
was conscious of a scent that I knew, and turning, saw my guardian in
the room.

He always carried (I have not yet mentioned it, I think) a
pocket-handkerchief of rich silk and of imposing proportions, which was
of great value to him in his profession. I have seen him so terrify a
client or a witness by ceremoniously unfolding this pocket-handkerchief
as if he were immediately going to blow his nose, and then pausing,
as if he knew he should not have time to do it before such client
or witness committed himself, that the self-committal has followed
directly, quite as a matter of course. When I saw him in the room he had
this expressive pocket-handkerchief in both hands, and was looking at
us. On meeting my eye, he said plainly, by a momentary and silent pause
in that attitude, “Indeed? Singular!” and then put the handkerchief to
its right use with wonderful effect.

Miss Havisham had seen him as soon as I, and was (like everybody
else) afraid of him. She made a strong attempt to compose herself, and
stammered that he was as punctual as ever.

“As punctual as ever,” he repeated, coming up to us. “(How do you do,
Pip? Shall I give you a ride, Miss Havisham? Once round?) And so you are
here, Pip?”

I told him when I had arrived, and how Miss Havisham had wished me to
come and see Estella. To which he replied, “Ah! Very fine young lady!”
 Then he pushed Miss Havisham in her chair before him, with one of his
large hands, and put the other in his trousers-pocket as if the pocket
were full of secrets.

“Well, Pip! How often have you seen Miss Estella before?” said he, when
he came to a stop.

“How often?”

“Ah! How many times? Ten thousand times?”

“Oh! Certainly not so many.”

“Twice?”

“Jaggers,” interposed Miss Havisham, much to my relief, “leave my Pip
alone, and go with him to your dinner.”

He complied, and we groped our way down the dark stairs together. While
we were still on our way to those detached apartments across the paved
yard at the back, he asked me how often I had seen Miss Havisham eat
and drink; offering me a breadth of choice, as usual, between a hundred
times and once.

I considered, and said, “Never.”

“And never will, Pip,” he retorted, with a frowning smile. “She has
never allowed herself to be seen doing either, since she lived this
present life of hers. She wanders about in the night, and then lays
hands on such food as she takes.”

“Pray, sir,” said I, “may I ask you a question?”

“You may,” said he, “and I may decline to answer it. Put your question.”

“Estella's name. Is it Havisham or--?” I had nothing to add.

“Or what?” said he.

“Is it Havisham?”

“It is Havisham.”

This brought us to the dinner-table, where she and Sarah Pocket awaited
us. Mr. Jaggers presided, Estella sat opposite to him, I faced my
green and yellow friend. We dined very well, and were waited on by a
maid-servant whom I had never seen in all my comings and goings, but
who, for anything I know, had been in that mysterious house the whole
time. After dinner a bottle of choice old port was placed before my
guardian (he was evidently well acquainted with the vintage), and the
two ladies left us.

Anything to equal the determined reticence of Mr. Jaggers under that
roof I never saw elsewhere, even in him. He kept his very looks to
himself, and scarcely directed his eyes to Estella's face once during
dinner. When she spoke to him, he listened, and in due course answered,
but never looked at her, that I could see. On the other hand, she often
looked at him, with interest and curiosity, if not distrust, but his
face never showed the least consciousness. Throughout dinner he took
a dry delight in making Sarah Pocket greener and yellower, by often
referring in conversation with me to my expectations; but here,
again, he showed no consciousness, and even made it appear that he
extorted--and even did extort, though I don't know how--those references
out of my innocent self.

And when he and I were left alone together, he sat with an air upon him
of general lying by in consequence of information he possessed, that
really was too much for me. He cross-examined his very wine when he had
nothing else in hand. He held it between himself and the candle, tasted
the port, rolled it in his mouth, swallowed it, looked at his
glass again, smelt the port, tried it, drank it, filled again, and
cross-examined the glass again, until I was as nervous as if I had known
the wine to be telling him something to my disadvantage. Three or four
times I feebly thought I would start conversation; but whenever he saw
me going to ask him anything, he looked at me with his glass in his
hand, and rolling his wine about in his mouth, as if requesting me to
take notice that it was of no use, for he couldn't answer.

I think Miss Pocket was conscious that the sight of me involved her
in the danger of being goaded to madness, and perhaps tearing off her
cap,--which was a very hideous one, in the nature of a muslin mop,--and
strewing the ground with her hair,--which assuredly had never grown
on her head. She did not appear when we afterwards went up to Miss
Havisham's room, and we four played at whist. In the interval, Miss
Havisham, in a fantastic way, had put some of the most beautiful jewels
from her dressing-table into Estella's hair, and about her bosom and
arms; and I saw even my guardian look at her from under his thick
eyebrows, and raise them a little, when her loveliness was before him,
with those rich flushes of glitter and color in it.

Of the manner and extent to which he took our trumps into custody, and
came out with mean little cards at the ends of hands, before which the
glory of our Kings and Queens was utterly abased, I say nothing; nor, of
the feeling that I had, respecting his looking upon us personally in the
light of three very obvious and poor riddles that he had found out long
ago. What I suffered from, was the incompatibility between his cold
presence and my feelings towards Estella. It was not that I knew I could
never bear to speak to him about her, that I knew I could never bear to
hear him creak his boots at her, that I knew I could never bear to see
him wash his hands of her; it was, that my admiration should be within
a foot or two of him,--it was, that my feelings should be in the same
place with him,--that, was the agonizing circumstance.

We played until nine o'clock, and then it was arranged that when Estella
came to London I should be forewarned of her coming and should meet her
at the coach; and then I took leave of her, and touched her and left
her.

My guardian lay at the Boar in the next room to mine. Far into the
night, Miss Havisham's words, “Love her, love her, love her!” sounded in
my ears. I adapted them for my own repetition, and said to my pillow, “I
love her, I love her, I love her!” hundreds of times. Then, a burst of
gratitude came upon me, that she should be destined for me, once the
blacksmith's boy. Then I thought if she were, as I feared, by no means
rapturously grateful for that destiny yet, when would she begin to be
interested in me? When should I awaken the heart within her that was
mute and sleeping now?

Ah me! I thought those were high and great emotions. But I never thought
there was anything low and small in my keeping away from Joe, because
I knew she would be contemptuous of him. It was but a day gone, and Joe
had brought the tears into my eyes; they had soon dried, God forgive me!
soon dried.




Chapter XXX

After well considering the matter while I was dressing at the Blue Boar
in the morning, I resolved to tell my guardian that I doubted Orlick's
being the right sort of man to fill a post of trust at Miss Havisham's.
“Why of course he is not the right sort of man, Pip,” said my guardian,
comfortably satisfied beforehand on the general head, “because the man
who fills the post of trust never is the right sort of man.” It seemed
quite to put him into spirits to find that this particular post was
not exceptionally held by the right sort of man, and he listened in a
satisfied manner while I told him what knowledge I had of Orlick. “Very
good, Pip,” he observed, when I had concluded, “I'll go round presently,
and pay our friend off.” Rather alarmed by this summary action, I was
for a little delay, and even hinted that our friend himself might be
difficult to deal with. “Oh no he won't,” said my guardian, making his
pocket-handkerchief-point, with perfect confidence; “I should like to
see him argue the question with me.”

As we were going back together to London by the midday coach, and as I
breakfasted under such terrors of Pumblechook that I could scarcely hold
my cup, this gave me an opportunity of saying that I wanted a walk, and
that I would go on along the London road while Mr. Jaggers was occupied,
if he would let the coachman know that I would get into my place when
overtaken. I was thus enabled to fly from the Blue Boar immediately
after breakfast. By then making a loop of about a couple of miles into
the open country at the back of Pumblechook's premises, I got round into
the High Street again, a little beyond that pitfall, and felt myself in
comparative security.

It was interesting to be in the quiet old town once more, and it was not
disagreeable to be here and there suddenly recognized and stared after.
One or two of the tradespeople even darted out of their shops and went
a little way down the street before me, that they might turn, as if they
had forgotten something, and pass me face to face,--on which occasions I
don't know whether they or I made the worse pretence; they of not doing
it, or I of not seeing it. Still my position was a distinguished one,
and I was not at all dissatisfied with it, until Fate threw me in the
way of that unlimited miscreant, Trabb's boy.

Casting my eyes along the street at a certain point of my progress, I
beheld Trabb's boy approaching, lashing himself with an empty blue bag.
Deeming that a serene and unconscious contemplation of him would best
beseem me, and would be most likely to quell his evil mind, I advanced
with that expression of countenance, and was rather congratulating
myself on my success, when suddenly the knees of Trabb's boy smote
together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off, he trembled violently in
every limb, staggered out into the road, and crying to the populace,
“Hold me! I'm so frightened!” feigned to be in a paroxysm of terror and
contrition, occasioned by the dignity of my appearance. As I passed him,
his teeth loudly chattered in his head, and with every mark of extreme
humiliation, he prostrated himself in the dust.

This was a hard thing to bear, but this was nothing. I had not advanced
another two hundred yards when, to my inexpressible terror, amazement,
and indignation, I again beheld Trabb's boy approaching. He was coming
round a narrow corner. His blue bag was slung over his shoulder, honest
industry beamed in his eyes, a determination to proceed to Trabb's with
cheerful briskness was indicated in his gait. With a shock he became
aware of me, and was severely visited as before; but this time his
motion was rotatory, and he staggered round and round me with knees
more afflicted, and with uplifted hands as if beseeching for mercy. His
sufferings were hailed with the greatest joy by a knot of spectators,
and I felt utterly confounded.

I had not got as much further down the street as the post-office, when I
again beheld Trabb's boy shooting round by a back way. This time, he was
entirely changed. He wore the blue bag in the manner of my great-coat,
and was strutting along the pavement towards me on the opposite side of
the street, attended by a company of delighted young friends to whom he
from time to time exclaimed, with a wave of his hand, “Don't know yah!”
 Words cannot state the amount of aggravation and injury wreaked upon
me by Trabb's boy, when passing abreast of me, he pulled up his
shirt-collar, twined his side-hair, stuck an arm akimbo, and smirked
extravagantly by, wriggling his elbows and body, and drawling to his
attendants, “Don't know yah, don't know yah, 'pon my soul don't know
yah!” The disgrace attendant on his immediately afterwards taking
to crowing and pursuing me across the bridge with crows, as from an
exceedingly dejected fowl who had known me when I was a blacksmith,
culminated the disgrace with which I left the town, and was, so to
speak, ejected by it into the open country.

But unless I had taken the life of Trabb's boy on that occasion, I
really do not even now see what I could have done save endure. To
have struggled with him in the street, or to have exacted any lower
recompense from him than his heart's best blood, would have been
futile and degrading. Moreover, he was a boy whom no man could hurt; an
invulnerable and dodging serpent who, when chased into a corner, flew
out again between his captor's legs, scornfully yelping. I wrote,
however, to Mr. Trabb by next day's post, to say that Mr. Pip must
decline to deal further with one who could so far forget what he owed to
the best interests of society, as to employ a boy who excited Loathing
in every respectable mind.

The coach, with Mr. Jaggers inside, came up in due time, and I took my
box-seat again, and arrived in London safe,--but not sound, for my heart
was gone. As soon as I arrived, I sent a penitential codfish and barrel
of oysters to Joe (as reparation for not having gone myself), and then
went on to Barnard's Inn.

I found Herbert dining on cold meat, and delighted to welcome me back.
Having despatched The Avenger to the coffee-house for an addition to the
dinner, I felt that I must open my breast that very evening to my friend
and chum. As confidence was out of the question with The Avenger in the
hall, which could merely be regarded in the light of an antechamber to
the keyhole, I sent him to the Play. A better proof of the severity
of my bondage to that taskmaster could scarcely be afforded, than
the degrading shifts to which I was constantly driven to find him
employment. So mean is extremity, that I sometimes sent him to Hyde Park
corner to see what o'clock it was.

Dinner done and we sitting with our feet upon the fender, I said to
Herbert, “My dear Herbert, I have something very particular to tell
you.”

“My dear Handel,” he returned, “I shall esteem and respect your
confidence.”

“It concerns myself, Herbert,” said I, “and one other person.”

Herbert crossed his feet, looked at the fire with his head on one side,
and having looked at it in vain for some time, looked at me because I
didn't go on.

“Herbert,” said I, laying my hand upon his knee, “I love--I
adore--Estella.”

Instead of being transfixed, Herbert replied in an easy matter-of-course
way, “Exactly. Well?”

“Well, Herbert? Is that all you say? Well?”

“What next, I mean?” said Herbert. “Of course I know that.”

“How do you know it?” said I.

“How do I know it, Handel? Why, from you.”

“I never told you.”

“Told me! You have never told me when you have got your hair cut, but I
have had senses to perceive it. You have always adored her, ever since
I have known you. You brought your adoration and your portmanteau here
together. Told me! Why, you have always told me all day long. When you
told me your own story, you told me plainly that you began adoring her
the first time you saw her, when you were very young indeed.”

“Very well, then,” said I, to whom this was a new and not unwelcome
light, “I have never left off adoring her. And she has come back, a most
beautiful and most elegant creature. And I saw her yesterday. And if I
adored her before, I now doubly adore her.”

“Lucky for you then, Handel,” said Herbert, “that you are picked out for
her and allotted to her. Without encroaching on forbidden ground, we
may venture to say that there can be no doubt between ourselves of
that fact. Have you any idea yet, of Estella's views on the adoration
question?”

I shook my head gloomily. “Oh! She is thousands of miles away, from me,”
 said I.

“Patience, my dear Handel: time enough, time enough. But you have
something more to say?”

“I am ashamed to say it,” I returned, “and yet it's no worse to say it
than to think it. You call me a lucky fellow. Of course, I am. I was a
blacksmith's boy but yesterday; I am--what shall I say I am--to-day?”

“Say a good fellow, if you want a phrase,” returned Herbert, smiling,
and clapping his hand on the back of mine--“a good fellow, with
impetuosity and hesitation, boldness and diffidence, action and
dreaming, curiously mixed in him.”

I stopped for a moment to consider whether there really was this mixture
in my character. On the whole, I by no means recognized the analysis,
but thought it not worth disputing.

“When I ask what I am to call myself to-day, Herbert,” I went on, “I
suggest what I have in my thoughts. You say I am lucky. I know I have
done nothing to raise myself in life, and that Fortune alone has raised
me; that is being very lucky. And yet, when I think of Estella--”

(“And when don't you, you know?” Herbert threw in, with his eyes on the
fire; which I thought kind and sympathetic of him.)

“--Then, my dear Herbert, I cannot tell you how dependent and uncertain
I feel, and how exposed to hundreds of chances. Avoiding forbidden
ground, as you did just now, I may still say that on the constancy of
one person (naming no person) all my expectations depend. And at the
best, how indefinite and unsatisfactory, only to know so vaguely what
they are!” In saying this, I relieved my mind of what had always been
there, more or less, though no doubt most since yesterday.

“Now, Handel,” Herbert replied, in his gay, hopeful way, “it seems to me
that in the despondency of the tender passion, we are looking into our
gift-horse's mouth with a magnifying-glass. Likewise, it seems to me
that, concentrating our attention on the examination, we altogether
overlook one of the best points of the animal. Didn't you tell me that
your guardian, Mr. Jaggers, told you in the beginning, that you were
not endowed with expectations only? And even if he had not told you
so,--though that is a very large If, I grant,--could you believe that of
all men in London, Mr. Jaggers is the man to hold his present relations
towards you unless he were sure of his ground?”

I said I could not deny that this was a strong point. I said it (people
often do so, in such cases) like a rather reluctant concession to truth
and justice;--as if I wanted to deny it!

“I should think it was a strong point,” said Herbert, “and I should
think you would be puzzled to imagine a stronger; as to the rest, you
must bide your guardian's time, and he must bide his client's time.
You'll be one-and-twenty before you know where you are, and then perhaps
you'll get some further enlightenment. At all events, you'll be nearer
getting it, for it must come at last.”

“What a hopeful disposition you have!” said I, gratefully admiring his
cheery ways.

“I ought to have,” said Herbert, “for I have not much else. I must
acknowledge, by the by, that the good sense of what I have just said is
not my own, but my father's. The only remark I ever heard him make on
your story, was the final one, “The thing is settled and done, or Mr.
Jaggers would not be in it.” And now before I say anything more about my
father, or my father's son, and repay confidence with confidence, I want
to make myself seriously disagreeable to you for a moment,--positively
repulsive.”

“You won't succeed,” said I.

“O yes I shall!” said he. “One, two, three, and now I am in for it.
Handel, my good fellow;”--though he spoke in this light tone, he was
very much in earnest,--“I have been thinking since we have been talking
with our feet on this fender, that Estella surely cannot be a condition
of your inheritance, if she was never referred to by your guardian. Am
I right in so understanding what you have told me, as that he never
referred to her, directly or indirectly, in any way? Never even hinted,
for instance, that your patron might have views as to your marriage
ultimately?”

“Never.”

“Now, Handel, I am quite free from the flavor of sour grapes, upon my
soul and honor! Not being bound to her, can you not detach yourself from
her?--I told you I should be disagreeable.”

I turned my head aside, for, with a rush and a sweep, like the old marsh
winds coming up from the sea, a feeling like that which had subdued
me on the morning when I left the forge, when the mists were solemnly
rising, and when I laid my hand upon the village finger-post, smote upon
my heart again. There was silence between us for a little while.

“Yes; but my dear Handel,” Herbert went on, as if we had been talking,
instead of silent, “its having been so strongly rooted in the breast of
a boy whom nature and circumstances made so romantic, renders it very
serious. Think of her bringing-up, and think of Miss Havisham. Think of
what she is herself (now I am repulsive and you abominate me). This may
lead to miserable things.”

“I know it, Herbert,” said I, with my head still turned away, “but I
can't help it.”

“You can't detach yourself?”

“No. Impossible!”

“You can't try, Handel?”

“No. Impossible!”

“Well!” said Herbert, getting up with a lively shake as if he had
been asleep, and stirring the fire, “now I'll endeavor to make myself
agreeable again!”

So he went round the room and shook the curtains out, put the chairs
in their places, tidied the books and so forth that were lying about,
looked into the hall, peeped into the letter-box, shut the door, and
came back to his chair by the fire: where he sat down, nursing his left
leg in both arms.

“I was going to say a word or two, Handel, concerning my father and my
father's son. I am afraid it is scarcely necessary for my father's son
to remark that my father's establishment is not particularly brilliant
in its housekeeping.”

“There is always plenty, Herbert,” said I, to say something encouraging.

“O yes! and so the dustman says, I believe, with the strongest approval,
and so does the marine-store shop in the back street. Gravely, Handel,
for the subject is grave enough, you know how it is as well as I do. I
suppose there was a time once when my father had not given matters up;
but if ever there was, the time is gone. May I ask you if you have ever
had an opportunity of remarking, down in your part of the country,
that the children of not exactly suitable marriages are always most
particularly anxious to be married?”

This was such a singular question, that I asked him in return, “Is it
so?”

“I don't know,” said Herbert, “that's what I want to know. Because it
is decidedly the case with us. My poor sister Charlotte, who was next me
and died before she was fourteen, was a striking example. Little Jane
is the same. In her desire to be matrimonially established, you
might suppose her to have passed her short existence in the perpetual
contemplation of domestic bliss. Little Alick in a frock has already
made arrangements for his union with a suitable young person at Kew. And
indeed, I think we are all engaged, except the baby.”

“Then you are?” said I.

“I am,” said Herbert; “but it's a secret.”

I assured him of my keeping the secret, and begged to be favored with
further particulars. He had spoken so sensibly and feelingly of my
weakness that I wanted to know something about his strength.

“May I ask the name?” I said.

“Name of Clara,” said Herbert.

“Live in London?”

“Yes, perhaps I ought to mention,” said Herbert, who had become
curiously crestfallen and meek, since we entered on the interesting
theme, “that she is rather below my mother's nonsensical family notions.
Her father had to do with the victualling of passenger-ships. I think he
was a species of purser.”

“What is he now?” said I.

“He's an invalid now,” replied Herbert.

“Living on--?”

“On the first floor,” said Herbert. Which was not at all what I meant,
for I had intended my question to apply to his means. “I have never seen
him, for he has always kept his room overhead, since I have known Clara.
But I have heard him constantly. He makes tremendous rows,--roars, and
pegs at the floor with some frightful instrument.” In looking at me and
then laughing heartily, Herbert for the time recovered his usual lively
manner.

“Don't you expect to see him?” said I.

“O yes, I constantly expect to see him,” returned Herbert, “because
I never hear him, without expecting him to come tumbling through the
ceiling. But I don't know how long the rafters may hold.”

When he had once more laughed heartily, he became meek again, and told
me that the moment he began to realize Capital, it was his intention
to marry this young lady. He added as a self-evident proposition,
engendering low spirits, “But you can't marry, you know, while you're
looking about you.”

As we contemplated the fire, and as I thought what a difficult vision to
realize this same Capital sometimes was, I put my hands in my pockets.
A folded piece of paper in one of them attracting my attention, I opened
it and found it to be the play-bill I had received from Joe, relative
to the celebrated provincial amateur of Roscian renown. “And bless my
heart,” I involuntarily added aloud, “it's to-night!”

This changed the subject in an instant, and made us hurriedly resolve
to go to the play. So, when I had pledged myself to comfort and abet
Herbert in the affair of his heart by all practicable and impracticable
means, and when Herbert had told me that his affianced already knew me
by reputation and that I should be presented to her, and when we had
warmly shaken hands upon our mutual confidence, we blew out our candles,
made up our fire, locked our door, and issued forth in quest of Mr.
Wopsle and Denmark.




Chapter XXXI

On our arrival in Denmark, we found the king and queen of that country
elevated in two arm-chairs on a kitchen-table, holding a Court. The
whole of the Danish nobility were in attendance; consisting of a noble
boy in the wash-leather boots of a gigantic ancestor, a venerable Peer
with a dirty face who seemed to have risen from the people late in life,
and the Danish chivalry with a comb in its hair and a pair of white
silk legs, and presenting on the whole a feminine appearance. My gifted
townsman stood gloomily apart, with folded arms, and I could have wished
that his curls and forehead had been more probable.

Several curious little circumstances transpired as the action proceeded.
The late king of the country not only appeared to have been troubled
with a cough at the time of his decease, but to have taken it with him
to the tomb, and to have brought it back. The royal phantom also carried
a ghostly manuscript round its truncheon, to which it had the appearance
of occasionally referring, and that too, with an air of anxiety and a
tendency to lose the place of reference which were suggestive of a state
of mortality. It was this, I conceive, which led to the Shade's being
advised by the gallery to “turn over!”--a recommendation which it took
extremely ill. It was likewise to be noted of this majestic spirit, that
whereas it always appeared with an air of having been out a long time
and walked an immense distance, it perceptibly came from a closely
contiguous wall. This occasioned its terrors to be received derisively.
The Queen of Denmark, a very buxom lady, though no doubt historically
brazen, was considered by the public to have too much brass about her;
her chin being attached to her diadem by a broad band of that metal (as
if she had a gorgeous toothache), her waist being encircled by another,
and each of her arms by another, so that she was openly mentioned
as “the kettle-drum.” The noble boy in the ancestral boots was
inconsistent, representing himself, as it were in one breath, as an able
seaman, a strolling actor, a grave-digger, a clergyman, and a person
of the utmost importance at a Court fencing-match, on the authority
of whose practised eye and nice discrimination the finest strokes were
judged. This gradually led to a want of toleration for him, and even--on
his being detected in holy orders, and declining to perform the funeral
service--to the general indignation taking the form of nuts. Lastly,
Ophelia was a prey to such slow musical madness, that when, in course of
time, she had taken off her white muslin scarf, folded it up, and buried
it, a sulky man who had been long cooling his impatient nose against an
iron bar in the front row of the gallery, growled, “Now the baby's put
to bed let's have supper!” Which, to say the least of it, was out of
keeping.

Upon my unfortunate townsman all these incidents accumulated with
playful effect. Whenever that undecided Prince had to ask a question or
state a doubt, the public helped him out with it. As for example; on the
question whether 'twas nobler in the mind to suffer, some roared yes,
and some no, and some inclining to both opinions said “Toss up for
it;” and quite a Debating Society arose. When he asked what should such
fellows as he do crawling between earth and heaven, he was encouraged
with loud cries of “Hear, hear!” When he appeared with his stocking
disordered (its disorder expressed, according to usage, by one very neat
fold in the top, which I suppose to be always got up with a flat iron),
a conversation took place in the gallery respecting the paleness of his
leg, and whether it was occasioned by the turn the ghost had given him.
On his taking the recorders,--very like a little black flute that had
just been played in the orchestra and handed out at the door,--he was
called upon unanimously for Rule Britannia. When he recommended the
player not to saw the air thus, the sulky man said, “And don't you do
it, neither; you're a deal worse than him!” And I grieve to add that
peals of laughter greeted Mr. Wopsle on every one of these occasions.

But his greatest trials were in the churchyard, which had the appearance
of a primeval forest, with a kind of small ecclesiastical wash-house
on one side, and a turnpike gate on the other. Mr. Wopsle in a
comprehensive black cloak, being descried entering at the turnpike,
the gravedigger was admonished in a friendly way, “Look out! Here's the
undertaker a coming, to see how you're a getting on with your work!”
 I believe it is well known in a constitutional country that Mr. Wopsle
could not possibly have returned the skull, after moralizing over it,
without dusting his fingers on a white napkin taken from his breast;
but even that innocent and indispensable action did not pass without the
comment, “Wai-ter!” The arrival of the body for interment (in an empty
black box with the lid tumbling open), was the signal for a general
joy, which was much enhanced by the discovery, among the bearers, of
an individual obnoxious to identification. The joy attended Mr. Wopsle
through his struggle with Laertes on the brink of the orchestra and
the grave, and slackened no more until he had tumbled the king off the
kitchen-table, and had died by inches from the ankles upward.

We had made some pale efforts in the beginning to applaud Mr. Wopsle;
but they were too hopeless to be persisted in. Therefore we had sat,
feeling keenly for him, but laughing, nevertheless, from ear to ear. I
laughed in spite of myself all the time, the whole thing was so droll;
and yet I had a latent impression that there was something decidedly
fine in Mr. Wopsle's elocution,--not for old associations' sake, I am
afraid, but because it was very slow, very dreary, very uphill and
downhill, and very unlike any way in which any man in any natural
circumstances of life or death ever expressed himself about anything.
When the tragedy was over, and he had been called for and hooted, I said
to Herbert, “Let us go at once, or perhaps we shall meet him.”

We made all the haste we could downstairs, but we were not quick enough
either. Standing at the door was a Jewish man with an unnatural heavy
smear of eyebrow, who caught my eyes as we advanced, and said, when we
came up with him,--

“Mr. Pip and friend?”

Identity of Mr. Pip and friend confessed.

“Mr. Waldengarver,” said the man, “would be glad to have the honor.”

“Waldengarver?” I repeated--when Herbert murmured in my ear, “Probably
Wopsle.”

“Oh!” said I. “Yes. Shall we follow you?”

“A few steps, please.” When we were in a side alley, he turned and
asked, “How did you think he looked?--I dressed him.”

I don't know what he had looked like, except a funeral; with the
addition of a large Danish sun or star hanging round his neck by a
blue ribbon, that had given him the appearance of being insured in some
extraordinary Fire Office. But I said he had looked very nice.

“When he come to the grave,” said our conductor, “he showed his cloak
beautiful. But, judging from the wing, it looked to me that when he
see the ghost in the queen's apartment, he might have made more of his
stockings.”

I modestly assented, and we all fell through a little dirty swing door,
into a sort of hot packing-case immediately behind it. Here Mr. Wopsle
was divesting himself of his Danish garments, and here there was just
room for us to look at him over one another's shoulders, by keeping the
packing-case door, or lid, wide open.

“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Wopsle, “I am proud to see you. I hope, Mr. Pip,
you will excuse my sending round. I had the happiness to know you in
former times, and the Drama has ever had a claim which has ever been
acknowledged, on the noble and the affluent.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Waldengarver, in a frightful perspiration, was trying to
get himself out of his princely sables.

“Skin the stockings off Mr. Waldengarver,” said the owner of that
property, “or you'll bust 'em. Bust 'em, and you'll bust five-and-thirty
shillings. Shakspeare never was complimented with a finer pair. Keep
quiet in your chair now, and leave 'em to me.”

With that, he went upon his knees, and began to flay his victim; who, on
the first stocking coming off, would certainly have fallen over backward
with his chair, but for there being no room to fall anyhow.

I had been afraid until then to say a word about the play. But then, Mr.
Waldengarver looked up at us complacently, and said,--

“Gentlemen, how did it seem to you, to go, in front?”

Herbert said from behind (at the same time poking me), “Capitally.” So I
said “Capitally.”

“How did you like my reading of the character, gentlemen?” said Mr.
Waldengarver, almost, if not quite, with patronage.

Herbert said from behind (again poking me), “Massive and concrete.” So I
said boldly, as if I had originated it, and must beg to insist upon it,
“Massive and concrete.”

“I am glad to have your approbation, gentlemen,” said Mr. Waldengarver,
with an air of dignity, in spite of his being ground against the wall at
the time, and holding on by the seat of the chair.

“But I'll tell you one thing, Mr. Waldengarver,” said the man who was on
his knees, “in which you're out in your reading. Now mind! I don't care
who says contrairy; I tell you so. You're out in your reading of Hamlet
when you get your legs in profile. The last Hamlet as I dressed, made
the same mistakes in his reading at rehearsal, till I got him to put a
large red wafer on each of his shins, and then at that rehearsal (which
was the last) I went in front, sir, to the back of the pit, and whenever
his reading brought him into profile, I called out “I don't see no
wafers!” And at night his reading was lovely.”

Mr. Waldengarver smiled at me, as much as to say “a faithful
Dependent--I overlook his folly;” and then said aloud, “My view is a
little classic and thoughtful for them here; but they will improve, they
will improve.”

Herbert and I said together, O, no doubt they would improve.

“Did you observe, gentlemen,” said Mr. Waldengarver, “that there was a
man in the gallery who endeavored to cast derision on the service,--I
mean, the representation?”

We basely replied that we rather thought we had noticed such a man. I
added, “He was drunk, no doubt.”

“O dear no, sir,” said Mr. Wopsle, “not drunk. His employer would see to
that, sir. His employer would not allow him to be drunk.”

“You know his employer?” said I.

Mr. Wopsle shut his eyes, and opened them again; performing both
ceremonies very slowly. “You must have observed, gentlemen,” said he,
“an ignorant and a blatant ass, with a rasping throat and a countenance
expressive of low malignity, who went through--I will not say
sustained--the rôle (if I may use a French expression) of Claudius, King
of Denmark. That is his employer, gentlemen. Such is the profession!”

Without distinctly knowing whether I should have been more sorry for Mr.
Wopsle if he had been in despair, I was so sorry for him as it was,
that I took the opportunity of his turning round to have his braces
put on,--which jostled us out at the doorway,--to ask Herbert what he
thought of having him home to supper? Herbert said he thought it would
be kind to do so; therefore I invited him, and he went to Barnard's
with us, wrapped up to the eyes, and we did our best for him, and he sat
until two o'clock in the morning, reviewing his success and developing
his plans. I forget in detail what they were, but I have a general
recollection that he was to begin with reviving the Drama, and to end
with crushing it; inasmuch as his decease would leave it utterly bereft
and without a chance or hope.

Miserably I went to bed after all, and miserably thought of Estella, and
miserably dreamed that my expectations were all cancelled, and that I
had to give my hand in marriage to Herbert's Clara, or play Hamlet to
Miss Havisham's Ghost, before twenty thousand people, without knowing
twenty words of it.




Chapter XXXII

One day when I was busy with my books and Mr. Pocket, I received a note
by the post, the mere outside of which threw me into a great flutter;
for, though I had never seen the handwriting in which it was addressed,
I divined whose hand it was. It had no set beginning, as Dear Mr. Pip,
or Dear Pip, or Dear Sir, or Dear Anything, but ran thus:--

“I am to come to London the day after to-morrow by the midday coach. I
believe it was settled you should meet me? At all events Miss Havisham
has that impression, and I write in obedience to it. She sends you her
regard.

“Yours, ESTELLA.”

If there had been time, I should probably have ordered several suits
of clothes for this occasion; but as there was not, I was fain to be
content with those I had. My appetite vanished instantly, and I knew
no peace or rest until the day arrived. Not that its arrival brought
me either; for, then I was worse than ever, and began haunting the
coach-office in Wood Street, Cheapside, before the coach had left the
Blue Boar in our town. For all that I knew this perfectly well, I still
felt as if it were not safe to let the coach-office be out of my sight
longer than five minutes at a time; and in this condition of unreason I
had performed the first half-hour of a watch of four or five hours, when
Wemmick ran against me.

“Halloa, Mr. Pip,” said he; “how do you do? I should hardly have thought
this was your beat.”

I explained that I was waiting to meet somebody who was coming up by
coach, and I inquired after the Castle and the Aged.

“Both flourishing thankye,” said Wemmick, “and particularly the Aged.
He's in wonderful feather. He'll be eighty-two next birthday. I have
a notion of firing eighty-two times, if the neighborhood shouldn't
complain, and that cannon of mine should prove equal to the pressure.
However, this is not London talk. Where do you think I am going to?”

“To the office?” said I, for he was tending in that direction.

“Next thing to it,” returned Wemmick, “I am going to Newgate. We are in
a banker's-parcel case just at present, and I have been down the road
taking a squint at the scene of action, and thereupon must have a word
or two with our client.”

“Did your client commit the robbery?” I asked.

“Bless your soul and body, no,” answered Wemmick, very drily. “But he
is accused of it. So might you or I be. Either of us might be accused of
it, you know.”

“Only neither of us is,” I remarked.

“Yah!” said Wemmick, touching me on the breast with his forefinger;
“you're a deep one, Mr. Pip! Would you like to have a look at Newgate?
Have you time to spare?”

I had so much time to spare, that the proposal came as a relief,
notwithstanding its irreconcilability with my latent desire to keep my
eye on the coach-office. Muttering that I would make the inquiry whether
I had time to walk with him, I went into the office, and ascertained
from the clerk with the nicest precision and much to the trying of his
temper, the earliest moment at which the coach could be expected,--which
I knew beforehand, quite as well as he. I then rejoined Mr. Wemmick, and
affecting to consult my watch, and to be surprised by the information I
had received, accepted his offer.

We were at Newgate in a few minutes, and we passed through the lodge
where some fetters were hanging up on the bare walls among the prison
rules, into the interior of the jail. At that time jails were much
neglected, and the period of exaggerated reaction consequent on
all public wrongdoing--and which is always its heaviest and longest
punishment--was still far off. So, felons were not lodged and fed better
than soldiers (to say nothing of paupers), and seldom set fire to their
prisons with the excusable object of improving the flavor of their soup.
It was visiting time when Wemmick took me in, and a potman was going his
rounds with beer; and the prisoners, behind bars in yards, were buying
beer, and talking to friends; and a frowzy, ugly, disorderly, depressing
scene it was.

It struck me that Wemmick walked among the prisoners much as a gardener
might walk among his plants. This was first put into my head by his
seeing a shoot that had come up in the night, and saying, “What, Captain
Tom? Are you there? Ah, indeed!” and also, “Is that Black Bill behind
the cistern? Why I didn't look for you these two months; how do you find
yourself?” Equally in his stopping at the bars and attending to
anxious whisperers,--always singly,--Wemmick with his post-office in
an immovable state, looked at them while in conference, as if he were
taking particular notice of the advance they had made, since last
observed, towards coming out in full blow at their trial.

He was highly popular, and I found that he took the familiar department
of Mr. Jaggers's business; though something of the state of Mr. Jaggers
hung about him too, forbidding approach beyond certain limits. His
personal recognition of each successive client was comprised in a nod,
and in his settling his hat a little easier on his head with both
hands, and then tightening the post-office, and putting his hands in his
pockets. In one or two instances there was a difficulty respecting the
raising of fees, and then Mr. Wemmick, backing as far as possible from
the insufficient money produced, said, “it's no use, my boy. I'm only
a subordinate. I can't take it. Don't go on in that way with a
subordinate. If you are unable to make up your quantum, my boy, you had
better address yourself to a principal; there are plenty of principals
in the profession, you know, and what is not worth the while of one, may
be worth the while of another; that's my recommendation to you, speaking
as a subordinate. Don't try on useless measures. Why should you? Now,
who's next?”

Thus, we walked through Wemmick's greenhouse, until he turned to me and
said, “Notice the man I shall shake hands with.” I should have done so,
without the preparation, as he had shaken hands with no one yet.

Almost as soon as he had spoken, a portly upright man (whom I can
see now, as I write) in a well-worn olive-colored frock-coat, with a
peculiar pallor overspreading the red in his complexion, and eyes that
went wandering about when he tried to fix them, came up to a corner
of the bars, and put his hand to his hat--which had a greasy and fatty
surface like cold broth--with a half-serious and half-jocose military
salute.

“Colonel, to you!” said Wemmick; “how are you, Colonel?”

“All right, Mr. Wemmick.”

“Everything was done that could be done, but the evidence was too strong
for us, Colonel.”

“Yes, it was too strong, sir,--but I don't care.”

“No, no,” said Wemmick, coolly, “you don't care.” Then, turning to me,
“Served His Majesty this man. Was a soldier in the line and bought his
discharge.”

I said, “Indeed?” and the man's eyes looked at me, and then looked over
my head, and then looked all round me, and then he drew his hand across
his lips and laughed.

“I think I shall be out of this on Monday, sir,” he said to Wemmick.

“Perhaps,” returned my friend, “but there's no knowing.”

“I am glad to have the chance of bidding you good-bye, Mr. Wemmick,” said
the man, stretching out his hand between two bars.

“Thankye,” said Wemmick, shaking hands with him. “Same to you, Colonel.”

“If what I had upon me when taken had been real, Mr. Wemmick,” said the
man, unwilling to let his hand go, “I should have asked the favor of
your wearing another ring--in acknowledgment of your attentions.”

“I'll accept the will for the deed,” said Wemmick. “By the by; you were
quite a pigeon-fancier.” The man looked up at the sky. “I am told you
had a remarkable breed of tumblers. Could you commission any friend of
yours to bring me a pair, if you've no further use for 'em?”

“It shall be done, sir.”

“All right,” said Wemmick, “they shall be taken care of. Good afternoon,
Colonel. Good-bye!” They shook hands again, and as we walked away Wemmick
said to me, “A Coiner, a very good workman. The Recorder's report is
made to-day, and he is sure to be executed on Monday. Still you see, as
far as it goes, a pair of pigeons are portable property all the same.”
 With that, he looked back, and nodded at this dead plant, and then cast
his eyes about him in walking out of the yard, as if he were considering
what other pot would go best in its place.

As we came out of the prison through the lodge, I found that the great
importance of my guardian was appreciated by the turnkeys, no less
than by those whom they held in charge. “Well, Mr. Wemmick,” said the
turnkey, who kept us between the two studded and spiked lodge gates,
and who carefully locked one before he unlocked the other, “what's Mr.
Jaggers going to do with that water-side murder? Is he going to make it
manslaughter, or what's he going to make of it?”

“Why don't you ask him?” returned Wemmick.

“O yes, I dare say!” said the turnkey.

“Now, that's the way with them here, Mr. Pip,” remarked Wemmick, turning
to me with his post-office elongated. “They don't mind what they ask of
me, the subordinate; but you'll never catch 'em asking any questions of
my principal.”

“Is this young gentleman one of the 'prentices or articled ones of your
office?” asked the turnkey, with a grin at Mr. Wemmick's humor.

“There he goes again, you see!” cried Wemmick, “I told you so! Asks
another question of the subordinate before his first is dry! Well,
supposing Mr. Pip is one of them?”

“Why then,” said the turnkey, grinning again, “he knows what Mr. Jaggers
is.”

“Yah!” cried Wemmick, suddenly hitting out at the turnkey in a facetious
way, “you're dumb as one of your own keys when you have to do with my
principal, you know you are. Let us out, you old fox, or I'll get him to
bring an action against you for false imprisonment.”

The turnkey laughed, and gave us good day, and stood laughing at us over
the spikes of the wicket when we descended the steps into the street.

“Mind you, Mr. Pip,” said Wemmick, gravely in my ear, as he took my arm
to be more confidential; “I don't know that Mr. Jaggers does a better
thing than the way in which he keeps himself so high. He's always so
high. His constant height is of a piece with his immense abilities. That
Colonel durst no more take leave of him, than that turnkey durst ask him
his intentions respecting a case. Then, between his height and them, he
slips in his subordinate,--don't you see?--and so he has 'em, soul and
body.”

I was very much impressed, and not for the first time, by my guardian's
subtlety. To confess the truth, I very heartily wished, and not for the
first time, that I had had some other guardian of minor abilities.

Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where
suppliants for Mr. Jaggers's notice were lingering about as usual, and I
returned to my watch in the street of the coach-office, with some three
hours on hand. I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it
was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime;
that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening, I
should have first encountered it; that, it should have reappeared on two
occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that,
it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement. While my
mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud
and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence
of the contrast between the jail and her. I wished that Wemmick had not
met me, or that I had not yielded to him and gone with him, so that,
of all days in the year on this day, I might not have had Newgate in
my breath and on my clothes. I beat the prison dust off my feet as I
sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled
its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel, remembering who was
coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not yet free
from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick's conservatory, when I saw
her face at the coach window and her hand waving to me.

What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?




Chapter XXXIII

In her furred travelling-dress, Estella seemed more delicately beautiful
than she had ever seemed yet, even in my eyes. Her manner was more
winning than she had cared to let it be to me before, and I thought I
saw Miss Havisham's influence in the change.

We stood in the Inn Yard while she pointed out her luggage to me, and
when it was all collected I remembered--having forgotten everything but
herself in the meanwhile--that I knew nothing of her destination.

“I am going to Richmond,” she told me. “Our lesson is, that there are
two Richmonds, one in Surrey and one in Yorkshire, and that mine is the
Surrey Richmond. The distance is ten miles. I am to have a carriage, and
you are to take me. This is my purse, and you are to pay my charges out
of it. O, you must take the purse! We have no choice, you and I, but to
obey our instructions. We are not free to follow our own devices, you
and I.”

As she looked at me in giving me the purse, I hoped there was an
inner meaning in her words. She said them slightingly, but not with
displeasure.

“A carriage will have to be sent for, Estella. Will you rest here a
little?”

“Yes, I am to rest here a little, and I am to drink some tea, and you
are to take care of me the while.”

She drew her arm through mine, as if it must be done, and I requested a
waiter who had been staring at the coach like a man who had never seen
such a thing in his life, to show us a private sitting-room. Upon that,
he pulled out a napkin, as if it were a magic clew without which he
couldn't find the way upstairs, and led us to the black hole of the
establishment, fitted up with a diminishing mirror (quite a superfluous
article, considering the hole's proportions), an anchovy sauce-cruet,
and somebody's pattens. On my objecting to this retreat, he took us into
another room with a dinner-table for thirty, and in the grate a scorched
leaf of a copy-book under a bushel of coal-dust. Having looked at this
extinct conflagration and shaken his head, he took my order; which,
proving to be merely, “Some tea for the lady,” sent him out of the room
in a very low state of mind.

I was, and I am, sensible that the air of this chamber, in its strong
combination of stable with soup-stock, might have led one to infer that
the coaching department was not doing well, and that the enterprising
proprietor was boiling down the horses for the refreshment department.
Yet the room was all in all to me, Estella being in it. I thought that
with her I could have been happy there for life. (I was not at all happy
there at the time, observe, and I knew it well.)

“Where are you going to, at Richmond?” I asked Estella.

“I am going to live,” said she, “at a great expense, with a lady there,
who has the power--or says she has--of taking me about, and introducing
me, and showing people to me and showing me to people.”

“I suppose you will be glad of variety and admiration?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

She answered so carelessly, that I said, “You speak of yourself as if
you were some one else.”

“Where did you learn how I speak of others? Come, come,” said Estella,
smiling delightfully, “you must not expect me to go to school to you; I
must talk in my own way. How do you thrive with Mr. Pocket?”

“I live quite pleasantly there; at least--” It appeared to me that I was
losing a chance.

“At least?” repeated Estella.

“As pleasantly as I could anywhere, away from you.”

“You silly boy,” said Estella, quite composedly, “how can you talk such
nonsense? Your friend Mr. Matthew, I believe, is superior to the rest of
his family?”

“Very superior indeed. He is nobody's enemy--”

“Don't add but his own,” interposed Estella, “for I hate that class of
man. But he really is disinterested, and above small jealousy and spite,
I have heard?”

“I am sure I have every reason to say so.”

“You have not every reason to say so of the rest of his people,” said
Estella, nodding at me with an expression of face that was at once
grave and rallying, “for they beset Miss Havisham with reports and
insinuations to your disadvantage. They watch you, misrepresent you,
write letters about you (anonymous sometimes), and you are the torment
and the occupation of their lives. You can scarcely realize to yourself
the hatred those people feel for you.”

“They do me no harm, I hope?”

Instead of answering, Estella burst out laughing. This was very singular
to me, and I looked at her in considerable perplexity. When she left
off--and she had not laughed languidly, but with real enjoyment--I said,
in my diffident way with her,--

“I hope I may suppose that you would not be amused if they did me any
harm.”

“No, no you may be sure of that,” said Estella. “You may be certain that
I laugh because they fail. O, those people with Miss Havisham, and the
tortures they undergo!” She laughed again, and even now when she had
told me why, her laughter was very singular to me, for I could not
doubt its being genuine, and yet it seemed too much for the occasion.
I thought there must really be something more here than I knew; she saw
the thought in my mind, and answered it.

“It is not easy for even you.” said Estella, “to know what satisfaction
it gives me to see those people thwarted, or what an enjoyable sense of
the ridiculous I have when they are made ridiculous. For you were not
brought up in that strange house from a mere baby. I was. You had not
your little wits sharpened by their intriguing against you, suppressed
and defenceless, under the mask of sympathy and pity and what not that
is soft and soothing. I had. You did not gradually open your round
childish eyes wider and wider to the discovery of that impostor of a
woman who calculates her stores of peace of mind for when she wakes up
in the night. I did.”

It was no laughing matter with Estella now, nor was she summoning these
remembrances from any shallow place. I would not have been the cause of
that look of hers for all my expectations in a heap.

“Two things I can tell you,” said Estella. “First, notwithstanding the
proverb that constant dropping will wear away a stone, you may set
your mind at rest that these people never will--never would, in hundred
years--impair your ground with Miss Havisham, in any particular, great
or small. Second, I am beholden to you as the cause of their being so
busy and so mean in vain, and there is my hand upon it.”

As she gave it to me playfully,--for her darker mood had been but
Momentary,--I held it and put it to my lips. “You ridiculous boy,” said
Estella, “will you never take warning? Or do you kiss my hand in the
same spirit in which I once let you kiss my cheek?”

“What spirit was that?” said I.

“I must think a moment. A spirit of contempt for the fawners and
plotters.”

“If I say yes, may I kiss the cheek again?”

“You should have asked before you touched the hand. But, yes, if you
like.”

I leaned down, and her calm face was like a statue's. “Now,” said
Estella, gliding away the instant I touched her cheek, “you are to take
care that I have some tea, and you are to take me to Richmond.”

Her reverting to this tone as if our association were forced upon
us, and we were mere puppets, gave me pain; but everything in our
intercourse did give me pain. Whatever her tone with me happened to be,
I could put no trust in it, and build no hope on it; and yet I went on
against trust and against hope. Why repeat it a thousand times? So it
always was.

I rang for the tea, and the waiter, reappearing with his magic clew,
brought in by degrees some fifty adjuncts to that refreshment, but of
tea not a glimpse. A teaboard, cups and saucers, plates, knives and
forks (including carvers), spoons (various), saltcellars, a meek little
muffin confined with the utmost precaution under a strong iron cover,
Moses in the bulrushes typified by a soft bit of butter in a quantity of
parsley, a pale loaf with a powdered head, two proof impressions of
the bars of the kitchen fireplace on triangular bits of bread, and
ultimately a fat family urn; which the waiter staggered in with,
expressing in his countenance burden and suffering. After a prolonged
absence at this stage of the entertainment, he at length came back with
a casket of precious appearance containing twigs. These I steeped in hot
water, and so from the whole of these appliances extracted one cup of I
don't know what for Estella.

The bill paid, and the waiter remembered, and the ostler not forgotten,
and the chambermaid taken into consideration,--in a word, the whole
house bribed into a state of contempt and animosity, and Estella's purse
much lightened,--we got into our post-coach and drove away. Turning into
Cheapside and rattling up Newgate Street, we were soon under the walls
of which I was so ashamed.

“What place is that?” Estella asked me.

I made a foolish pretence of not at first recognizing it, and then
told her. As she looked at it, and drew in her head again,
murmuring, “Wretches!” I would not have confessed to my visit for any
consideration.

“Mr. Jaggers,” said I, by way of putting it neatly on somebody else,
“has the reputation of being more in the secrets of that dismal place
than any man in London.”

“He is more in the secrets of every place, I think,” said Estella, in a
low voice.

“You have been accustomed to see him often, I suppose?”

“I have been accustomed to see him at uncertain intervals, ever since
I can remember. But I know him no better now, than I did before I could
speak plainly. What is your own experience of him? Do you advance with
him?”

“Once habituated to his distrustful manner,” said I, “I have done very
well.”

“Are you intimate?”

“I have dined with him at his private house.”

“I fancy,” said Estella, shrinking “that must be a curious place.”

“It is a curious place.”

I should have been chary of discussing my guardian too freely even with
her; but I should have gone on with the subject so far as to describe
the dinner in Gerrard Street, if we had not then come into a sudden
glare of gas. It seemed, while it lasted, to be all alight and alive
with that inexplicable feeling I had had before; and when we were out of
it, I was as much dazed for a few moments as if I had been in lightning.

So we fell into other talk, and it was principally about the way by
which we were travelling, and about what parts of London lay on this
side of it, and what on that. The great city was almost new to her, she
told me, for she had never left Miss Havisham's neighborhood until she
had gone to France, and she had merely passed through London then in
going and returning. I asked her if my guardian had any charge of her
while she remained here? To that she emphatically said “God forbid!” and
no more.

It was impossible for me to avoid seeing that she cared to attract me;
that she made herself winning, and would have won me even if the task
had needed pains. Yet this made me none the happier, for even if she had
not taken that tone of our being disposed of by others, I should have
felt that she held my heart in her hand because she wilfully chose to do
it, and not because it would have wrung any tenderness in her to crush
it and throw it away.

When we passed through Hammersmith, I showed her where Mr. Matthew
Pocket lived, and said it was no great way from Richmond, and that I
hoped I should see her sometimes.

“O yes, you are to see me; you are to come when you think proper; you
are to be mentioned to the family; indeed you are already mentioned.”

I inquired was it a large household she was going to be a member of?

“No; there are only two; mother and daughter. The mother is a lady of
some station, though not averse to increasing her income.”

“I wonder Miss Havisham could part with you again so soon.”

“It is a part of Miss Havisham's plans for me, Pip,” said Estella, with
a sigh, as if she were tired; “I am to write to her constantly and see
her regularly and report how I go on,--I and the jewels,--for they are
nearly all mine now.”

It was the first time she had ever called me by my name. Of course she
did so purposely, and knew that I should treasure it up.

We came to Richmond all too soon, and our destination there was a house
by the green,--a staid old house, where hoops and powder and patches,
embroidered coats, rolled stockings, ruffles and swords, had had their
court days many a time. Some ancient trees before the house were still
cut into fashions as formal and unnatural as the hoops and wigs and
stiff skirts; but their own allotted places in the great procession of
the dead were not far off, and they would soon drop into them and go the
silent way of the rest.

A bell with an old voice--which I dare say in its time had often said
to the house, Here is the green farthingale, Here is the diamond-hilted
sword, Here are the shoes with red heels and the blue solitaire--sounded
gravely in the moonlight, and two cherry-colored maids came fluttering
out to receive Estella. The doorway soon absorbed her boxes, and she
gave me her hand and a smile, and said good night, and was absorbed
likewise. And still I stood looking at the house, thinking how happy I
should be if I lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy
with her, but always miserable.

I got into the carriage to be taken back to Hammersmith, and I got in
with a bad heart-ache, and I got out with a worse heart-ache. At our
own door, I found little Jane Pocket coming home from a little party
escorted by her little lover; and I envied her little lover, in spite of
his being subject to Flopson.

Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for, he was a most delightful lecturer on
domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and
servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes. But
Mrs. Pocket was at home, and was in a little difficulty, on account of
the baby's having been accommodated with a needle-case to keep him quiet
during the unaccountable absence (with a relative in the Foot Guards)
of Millers. And more needles were missing than it could be regarded
as quite wholesome for a patient of such tender years either to apply
externally or to take as a tonic.

Mr. Pocket being justly celebrated for giving most excellent practical
advice, and for having a clear and sound perception of things and a
highly judicious mind, I had some notion in my heart-ache of begging him
to accept my confidence. But happening to look up at Mrs. Pocket as she
sat reading her book of dignities after prescribing Bed as a sovereign
remedy for baby, I thought--Well--No, I wouldn't.




Chapter XXXIV

As I had grown accustomed to my expectations, I had insensibly begun to
notice their effect upon myself and those around me. Their influence on
my own character I disguised from my recognition as much as possible,
but I knew very well that it was not all good. I lived in a state of
chronic uneasiness respecting my behavior to Joe. My conscience was not
by any means comfortable about Biddy. When I woke up in the night,--like
Camilla,--I used to think, with a weariness on my spirits, that I should
have been happier and better if I had never seen Miss Havisham's face,
and had risen to manhood content to be partners with Joe in the honest
old forge. Many a time of an evening, when I sat alone looking at the
fire, I thought, after all there was no fire like the forge fire and the
kitchen fire at home.

Yet Estella was so inseparable from all my restlessness and disquiet of
mind, that I really fell into confusion as to the limits of my own part
in its production. That is to say, supposing I had had no expectations,
and yet had had Estella to think of, I could not make out to my
satisfaction that I should have done much better. Now, concerning the
influence of my position on others, I was in no such difficulty, and so
I perceived--though dimly enough perhaps--that it was not beneficial
to anybody, and, above all, that it was not beneficial to Herbert.
My lavish habits led his easy nature into expenses that he could not
afford, corrupted the simplicity of his life, and disturbed his peace
with anxieties and regrets. I was not at all remorseful for having
unwittingly set those other branches of the Pocket family to the poor
arts they practised; because such littlenesses were their natural
bent, and would have been evoked by anybody else, if I had left them
slumbering. But Herbert's was a very different case, and it often caused
me a twinge to think that I had done him evil service in crowding his
sparely furnished chambers with incongruous upholstery work, and placing
the Canary-breasted Avenger at his disposal.

So now, as an infallible way of making little ease great ease, I began
to contract a quantity of debt. I could hardly begin but Herbert
must begin too, so he soon followed. At Startop's suggestion, we put
ourselves down for election into a club called The Finches of the Grove:
the object of which institution I have never divined, if it were not
that the members should dine expensively once a fortnight, to quarrel
among themselves as much as possible after dinner, and to cause six
waiters to get drunk on the stairs. I know that these gratifying social
ends were so invariably accomplished, that Herbert and I understood
nothing else to be referred to in the first standing toast of the
society: which ran “Gentlemen, may the present promotion of good feeling
ever reign predominant among the Finches of the Grove.”

The Finches spent their money foolishly (the Hotel we dined at was
in Covent Garden), and the first Finch I saw when I had the honor of
joining the Grove was Bentley Drummle, at that time floundering about
town in a cab of his own, and doing a great deal of damage to the posts
at the street corners. Occasionally, he shot himself out of his equipage
headforemost over the apron; and I saw him on one occasion deliver
himself at the door of the Grove in this unintentional way--like coals.
But here I anticipate a little, for I was not a Finch, and could not be,
according to the sacred laws of the society, until I came of age.

In my confidence in my own resources, I would willingly have taken
Herbert's expenses on myself; but Herbert was proud, and I could make
no such proposal to him. So he got into difficulties in every direction,
and continued to look about him. When we gradually fell into keeping
late hours and late company, I noticed that he looked about him with a
desponding eye at breakfast-time; that he began to look about him more
hopefully about mid-day; that he drooped when he came into dinner;
that he seemed to descry Capital in the distance, rather clearly, after
dinner; that he all but realized Capital towards midnight; and that at
about two o'clock in the morning, he became so deeply despondent again
as to talk of buying a rifle and going to America, with a general
purpose of compelling buffaloes to make his fortune.

I was usually at Hammersmith about half the week, and when I was at
Hammersmith I haunted Richmond, whereof separately by and by. Herbert
would often come to Hammersmith when I was there, and I think at those
seasons his father would occasionally have some passing perception that
the opening he was looking for, had not appeared yet. But in the general
tumbling up of the family, his tumbling out in life somewhere, was
a thing to transact itself somehow. In the meantime Mr. Pocket grew
grayer, and tried oftener to lift himself out of his perplexities by the
hair. While Mrs. Pocket tripped up the family with her footstool, read
her book of dignities, lost her pocket-handkerchief, told us about her
grandpapa, and taught the young idea how to shoot, by shooting it into
bed whenever it attracted her notice.

As I am now generalizing a period of my life with the object of clearing
my way before me, I can scarcely do so better than by at once completing
the description of our usual manners and customs at Barnard's Inn.

We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people
could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less
miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition.
There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying
ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my
belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.

Every morning, with an air ever new, Herbert went into the City to look
about him. I often paid him a visit in the dark back-room in which
he consorted with an ink-jar, a hat-peg, a coal-box, a string-box, an
almanac, a desk and stool, and a ruler; and I do not remember that I
ever saw him do anything else but look about him. If we all did what
we undertake to do, as faithfully as Herbert did, we might live in a
Republic of the Virtues. He had nothing else to do, poor fellow, except
at a certain hour of every afternoon to “go to Lloyd's”--in observance
of a ceremony of seeing his principal, I think. He never did anything
else in connection with Lloyd's that I could find out, except come back
again. When he felt his case unusually serious, and that he positively
must find an opening, he would go on 'Change at a busy time, and walk in
and out, in a kind of gloomy country dance figure, among the assembled
magnates. “For,” says Herbert to me, coming home to dinner on one
of those special occasions, “I find the truth to be, Handel, that an
opening won't come to one, but one must go to it,--so I have been.”

If we had been less attached to one another, I think we must have hated
one another regularly every morning. I detested the chambers beyond
expression at that period of repentance, and could not endure the
sight of the Avenger's livery; which had a more expensive and a
less remunerative appearance then than at any other time in the
four-and-twenty hours. As we got more and more into debt, breakfast
became a hollower and hollower form, and, being on one occasion at
breakfast-time threatened (by letter) with legal proceedings, “not
unwholly unconnected,” as my local paper might put it, “with jewelery,”
 I went so far as to seize the Avenger by his blue collar and shake
him off his feet,--so that he was actually in the air, like a booted
Cupid,--for presuming to suppose that we wanted a roll.

At certain times--meaning at uncertain times, for they depended on our
humor--I would say to Herbert, as if it were a remarkable discovery,--

“My dear Herbert, we are getting on badly.”

“My dear Handel,” Herbert would say to me, in all sincerity, “if you will
believe me, those very words were on my lips, by a strange coincidence.”

“Then, Herbert,” I would respond, “let us look into our affairs.”

We always derived profound satisfaction from making an appointment for
this purpose. I always thought this was business, this was the way to
confront the thing, this was the way to take the foe by the throat. And
I know Herbert thought so too.

We ordered something rather special for dinner, with a bottle of
something similarly out of the common way, in order that our minds might
be fortified for the occasion, and we might come well up to the mark.
Dinner over, we produced a bundle of pens, a copious supply of ink, and
a goodly show of writing and blotting paper. For there was something
very comfortable in having plenty of stationery.

I would then take a sheet of paper, and write across the top of it, in a
neat hand, the heading, “Memorandum of Pip's debts”; with Barnard's Inn
and the date very carefully added. Herbert would also take a sheet of
paper, and write across it with similar formalities, “Memorandum of
Herbert's debts.”

Each of us would then refer to a confused heap of papers at his side,
which had been thrown into drawers, worn into holes in pockets, half
burnt in lighting candles, stuck for weeks into the looking-glass, and
otherwise damaged. The sound of our pens going refreshed us exceedingly,
insomuch that I sometimes found it difficult to distinguish between this
edifying business proceeding and actually paying the money. In point of
meritorious character, the two things seemed about equal.

When we had written a little while, I would ask Herbert how he got on?
Herbert probably would have been scratching his head in a most rueful
manner at the sight of his accumulating figures.

“They are mounting up, Handel,” Herbert would say; “upon my life, they
are mounting up.”

“Be firm, Herbert,” I would retort, plying my own pen with great
assiduity. “Look the thing in the face. Look into your affairs. Stare
them out of countenance.”

“So I would, Handel, only they are staring me out of countenance.”

However, my determined manner would have its effect, and Herbert would
fall to work again. After a time he would give up once more, on the plea
that he had not got Cobbs's bill, or Lobbs's, or Nobbs's, as the case
might be.

“Then, Herbert, estimate; estimate it in round numbers, and put it
down.”

“What a fellow of resource you are!” my friend would reply, with
admiration. “Really your business powers are very remarkable.”

I thought so too. I established with myself, on these occasions,
the reputation of a first-rate man of business,--prompt, decisive,
energetic, clear, cool-headed. When I had got all my responsibilities
down upon my list, I compared each with the bill, and ticked it off. My
self-approval when I ticked an entry was quite a luxurious sensation.
When I had no more ticks to make, I folded all my bills up uniformly,
docketed each on the back, and tied the whole into a symmetrical
bundle. Then I did the same for Herbert (who modestly said he had not my
administrative genius), and felt that I had brought his affairs into a
focus for him.

My business habits had one other bright feature, which I called “leaving
a Margin.” For example; supposing Herbert's debts to be one hundred and
sixty-four pounds four-and-twopence, I would say, “Leave a margin, and
put them down at two hundred.” Or, supposing my own to be four times as
much, I would leave a margin, and put them down at seven hundred. I had
the highest opinion of the wisdom of this same Margin, but I am bound
to acknowledge that on looking back, I deem it to have been an expensive
device. For, we always ran into new debt immediately, to the full extent
of the margin, and sometimes, in the sense of freedom and solvency it
imparted, got pretty far on into another margin.

But there was a calm, a rest, a virtuous hush, consequent on these
examinations of our affairs that gave me, for the time, an admirable
opinion of myself. Soothed by my exertions, my method, and Herbert's
compliments, I would sit with his symmetrical bundle and my own on the
table before me among the stationery, and feel like a Bank of some sort,
rather than a private individual.

We shut our outer door on these solemn occasions, in order that we might
not be interrupted. I had fallen into my serene state one evening, when
we heard a letter dropped through the slit in the said door, and fall on
the ground. “It's for you, Handel,” said Herbert, going out and coming
back with it, “and I hope there is nothing the matter.” This was in
allusion to its heavy black seal and border.

The letter was signed Trabb & Co., and its contents were simply, that
I was an honored sir, and that they begged to inform me that Mrs. J.
Gargery had departed this life on Monday last at twenty minutes past six
in the evening, and that my attendance was requested at the interment on
Monday next at three o'clock in the afternoon.




Chapter XXXV

It was the first time that a grave had opened in my road of life, and
the gap it made in the smooth ground was wonderful. The figure of my
sister in her chair by the kitchen fire, haunted me night and day. That
the place could possibly be, without her, was something my mind seemed
unable to compass; and whereas she had seldom or never been in my
thoughts of late, I had now the strangest ideas that she was coming
towards me in the street, or that she would presently knock at the door.
In my rooms too, with which she had never been at all associated, there
was at once the blankness of death and a perpetual suggestion of the
sound of her voice or the turn of her face or figure, as if she were
still alive and had been often there.

Whatever my fortunes might have been, I could scarcely have recalled my
sister with much tenderness. But I suppose there is a shock of regret
which may exist without much tenderness. Under its influence (and
perhaps to make up for the want of the softer feeling) I was seized with
a violent indignation against the assailant from whom she had suffered
so much; and I felt that on sufficient proof I could have revengefully
pursued Orlick, or any one else, to the last extremity.

Having written to Joe, to offer him consolation, and to assure him
that I would come to the funeral, I passed the intermediate days in
the curious state of mind I have glanced at. I went down early in the
morning, and alighted at the Blue Boar in good time to walk over to the
forge.

It was fine summer weather again, and, as I walked along, the times
when I was a little helpless creature, and my sister did not spare me,
vividly returned. But they returned with a gentle tone upon them that
softened even the edge of Tickler. For now, the very breath of the beans
and clover whispered to my heart that the day must come when it would
be well for my memory that others walking in the sunshine should be
softened as they thought of me.

At last I came within sight of the house, and saw that Trabb and Co. had
put in a funereal execution and taken possession. Two dismally absurd
persons, each ostentatiously exhibiting a crutch done up in a black
bandage,--as if that instrument could possibly communicate any comfort
to anybody,--were posted at the front door; and in one of them I
recognized a postboy discharged from the Boar for turning a young couple
into a sawpit on their bridal morning, in consequence of intoxication
rendering it necessary for him to ride his horse clasped round the neck
with both arms. All the children of the village, and most of the women,
were admiring these sable warders and the closed windows of the house
and forge; and as I came up, one of the two warders (the postboy)
knocked at the door,--implying that I was far too much exhausted by
grief to have strength remaining to knock for myself.

Another sable warder (a carpenter, who had once eaten two geese for a
wager) opened the door, and showed me into the best parlor. Here, Mr.
Trabb had taken unto himself the best table, and had got all the leaves
up, and was holding a kind of black Bazaar, with the aid of a quantity
of black pins. At the moment of my arrival, he had just finished putting
somebody's hat into black long-clothes, like an African baby; so he held
out his hand for mine. But I, misled by the action, and confused by the
occasion, shook hands with him with every testimony of warm affection.

Poor dear Joe, entangled in a little black cloak tied in a large bow
under his chin, was seated apart at the upper end of the room; where,
as chief mourner, he had evidently been stationed by Trabb. When I bent
down and said to him, “Dear Joe, how are you?” he said, “Pip, old chap,
you knowed her when she were a fine figure of a--” and clasped my hand
and said no more.

Biddy, looking very neat and modest in her black dress, went quietly
here and there, and was very helpful. When I had spoken to Biddy, as
I thought it not a time for talking I went and sat down near Joe, and
there began to wonder in what part of the house it--she--my sister--was.
The air of the parlor being faint with the smell of sweet-cake, I looked
about for the table of refreshments; it was scarcely visible until one
had got accustomed to the gloom, but there was a cut-up plum cake upon
it, and there were cut-up oranges, and sandwiches, and biscuits, and two
decanters that I knew very well as ornaments, but had never seen used
in all my life; one full of port, and one of sherry. Standing at this
table, I became conscious of the servile Pumblechook in a black cloak
and several yards of hatband, who was alternately stuffing himself,
and making obsequious movements to catch my attention. The moment he
succeeded, he came over to me (breathing sherry and crumbs), and said
in a subdued voice, “May I, dear sir?” and did. I then descried Mr. and
Mrs. Hubble; the last-named in a decent speechless paroxysm in a corner.
We were all going to “follow,” and were all in course of being tied up
separately (by Trabb) into ridiculous bundles.

“Which I meantersay, Pip,” Joe whispered me, as we were being what Mr.
Trabb called “formed” in the parlor, two and two,--and it was dreadfully
like a preparation for some grim kind of dance; “which I meantersay,
sir, as I would in preference have carried her to the church myself,
along with three or four friendly ones wot come to it with willing harts
and arms, but it were considered wot the neighbors would look down on
such and would be of opinions as it were wanting in respect.”

“Pocket-handkerchiefs out, all!” cried Mr. Trabb at this point, in a
depressed business-like voice. “Pocket-handkerchiefs out! We are ready!”

So we all put our pocket-handkerchiefs to our faces, as if our
noses were bleeding, and filed out two and two; Joe and I; Biddy and
Pumblechook; Mr. and Mrs. Hubble. The remains of my poor sister had been
brought round by the kitchen door, and, it being a point of Undertaking
ceremony that the six bearers must be stifled and blinded under a
horrible black velvet housing with a white border, the whole looked like
a blind monster with twelve human legs, shuffling and blundering along,
under the guidance of two keepers,--the postboy and his comrade.

The neighborhood, however, highly approved of these arrangements, and we
were much admired as we went through the village; the more youthful and
vigorous part of the community making dashes now and then to cut us off,
and lying in wait to intercept us at points of vantage. At such times
the more exuberant among them called out in an excited manner on our
emergence round some corner of expectancy, “Here they come!” “Here they
are!” and we were all but cheered. In this progress I was much annoyed
by the abject Pumblechook, who, being behind me, persisted all the way
as a delicate attention in arranging my streaming hatband, and smoothing
my cloak. My thoughts were further distracted by the excessive pride of
Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, who were surpassingly conceited and vainglorious in
being members of so distinguished a procession.

And now the range of marshes lay clear before us, with the sails of the
ships on the river growing out of it; and we went into the churchyard,
close to the graves of my unknown parents, Philip Pirrip, late of this
parish, and Also Georgiana, Wife of the Above. And there, my sister was
laid quietly in the earth, while the larks sang high above it, and the
light wind strewed it with beautiful shadows of clouds and trees.

Of the conduct of the worldly minded Pumblechook while this was doing,
I desire to say no more than it was all addressed to me; and that even
when those noble passages were read which remind humanity how it brought
nothing into the world and can take nothing out, and how it fleeth like
a shadow and never continueth long in one stay, I heard him cough a
reservation of the case of a young gentleman who came unexpectedly into
large property. When we got back, he had the hardihood to tell me that
he wished my sister could have known I had done her so much honor, and
to hint that she would have considered it reasonably purchased at the
price of her death. After that, he drank all the rest of the sherry,
and Mr. Hubble drank the port, and the two talked (which I have since
observed to be customary in such cases) as if they were of quite another
race from the deceased, and were notoriously immortal. Finally, he went
away with Mr. and Mrs. Hubble,--to make an evening of it, I felt sure,
and to tell the Jolly Bargemen that he was the founder of my fortunes
and my earliest benefactor.

When they were all gone, and when Trabb and his men--but not his Boy; I
looked for him--had crammed their mummery into bags, and were gone too,
the house felt wholesomer. Soon afterwards, Biddy, Joe, and I, had a
cold dinner together; but we dined in the best parlor, not in the old
kitchen, and Joe was so exceedingly particular what he did with his
knife and fork and the saltcellar and what not, that there was great
restraint upon us. But after dinner, when I made him take his pipe,
and when I had loitered with him about the forge, and when we sat down
together on the great block of stone outside it, we got on better. I
noticed that after the funeral Joe changed his clothes so far, as to
make a compromise between his Sunday dress and working dress; in which
the dear fellow looked natural, and like the Man he was.

He was very much pleased by my asking if I might sleep in my own little
room, and I was pleased too; for I felt that I had done rather a great
thing in making the request. When the shadows of evening were closing
in, I took an opportunity of getting into the garden with Biddy for a
little talk.

“Biddy,” said I, “I think you might have written to me about these sad
matters.”

“Do you, Mr. Pip?” said Biddy. “I should have written if I had thought
that.”

“Don't suppose that I mean to be unkind, Biddy, when I say I consider
that you ought to have thought that.”

“Do you, Mr. Pip?”

She was so quiet, and had such an orderly, good, and pretty way with
her, that I did not like the thought of making her cry again. After
looking a little at her downcast eyes as she walked beside me, I gave up
that point.

“I suppose it will be difficult for you to remain here now, Biddy dear?”

“Oh! I can't do so, Mr. Pip,” said Biddy, in a tone of regret but still
of quiet conviction. “I have been speaking to Mrs. Hubble, and I am
going to her to-morrow. I hope we shall be able to take some care of Mr.
Gargery, together, until he settles down.”

“How are you going to live, Biddy? If you want any mo--”

“How am I going to live?” repeated Biddy, striking in, with a momentary
flush upon her face. “I'll tell you, Mr. Pip. I am going to try to get
the place of mistress in the new school nearly finished here. I can be
well recommended by all the neighbors, and I hope I can be industrious
and patient, and teach myself while I teach others. You know, Mr. Pip,”
 pursued Biddy, with a smile, as she raised her eyes to my face, “the new
schools are not like the old, but I learnt a good deal from you after
that time, and have had time since then to improve.”

“I think you would always improve, Biddy, under any circumstances.”

“Ah! Except in my bad side of human nature,” murmured Biddy.

It was not so much a reproach as an irresistible thinking aloud. Well!
I thought I would give up that point too. So, I walked a little further
with Biddy, looking silently at her downcast eyes.

“I have not heard the particulars of my sister's death, Biddy.”

“They are very slight, poor thing. She had been in one of her bad
states--though they had got better of late, rather than worse--for four
days, when she came out of it in the evening, just at tea-time, and said
quite plainly, 'Joe.' As she had never said any word for a long while, I
ran and fetched in Mr. Gargery from the forge. She made signs to me that
she wanted him to sit down close to her, and wanted me to put her arms
round his neck. So I put them round his neck, and she laid her head down
on his shoulder quite content and satisfied. And so she presently said
'Joe' again, and once 'Pardon,' and once 'Pip.' And so she never lifted
her head up any more, and it was just an hour later when we laid it down
on her own bed, because we found she was gone.”

Biddy cried; the darkening garden, and the lane, and the stars that were
coming out, were blurred in my own sight.

“Nothing was ever discovered, Biddy?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you know what is become of Orlick?”

“I should think from the color of his clothes that he is working in the
quarries.”

“Of course you have seen him then?--Why are you looking at that dark
tree in the lane?”

“I saw him there, on the night she died.”

“That was not the last time either, Biddy?”

“No; I have seen him there, since we have been walking here.--It is of
no use,” said Biddy, laying her hand upon my arm, as I was for running
out, “you know I would not deceive you; he was not there a minute, and
he is gone.”

It revived my utmost indignation to find that she was still pursued by
this fellow, and I felt inveterate against him. I told her so, and told
her that I would spend any money or take any pains to drive him out of
that country. By degrees she led me into more temperate talk, and she
told me how Joe loved me, and how Joe never complained of anything,--she
didn't say, of me; she had no need; I knew what she meant,--but ever did
his duty in his way of life, with a strong hand, a quiet tongue, and a
gentle heart.

“Indeed, it would be hard to say too much for him,” said I; “and Biddy,
we must often speak of these things, for of course I shall be often down
here now. I am not going to leave poor Joe alone.”

Biddy said never a single word.

“Biddy, don't you hear me?”

“Yes, Mr. Pip.”

“Not to mention your calling me Mr. Pip,--which appears to me to be in
bad taste, Biddy,--what do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” asked Biddy, timidly.

“Biddy,” said I, in a virtuously self-asserting manner, “I must request
to know what you mean by this?”

“By this?” said Biddy.

“Now, don't echo,” I retorted. “You used not to echo, Biddy.”

“Used not!” said Biddy. “O Mr. Pip! Used!”

Well! I rather thought I would give up that point too. After another
silent turn in the garden, I fell back on the main position.

“Biddy,” said I, “I made a remark respecting my coming down here often,
to see Joe, which you received with a marked silence. Have the goodness,
Biddy, to tell me why.”

“Are you quite sure, then, that you WILL come to see him often?” asked
Biddy, stopping in the narrow garden walk, and looking at me under the
stars with a clear and honest eye.

“O dear me!” said I, as if I found myself compelled to give up Biddy in
despair. “This really is a very bad side of human nature! Don't say any
more, if you please, Biddy. This shocks me very much.”

For which cogent reason I kept Biddy at a distance during supper, and
when I went up to my own old little room, took as stately a leave of her
as I could, in my murmuring soul, deem reconcilable with the churchyard
and the event of the day. As often as I was restless in the night, and
that was every quarter of an hour, I reflected what an unkindness, what
an injury, what an injustice, Biddy had done me.

Early in the morning I was to go. Early in the morning I was out, and
looking in, unseen, at one of the wooden windows of the forge. There
I stood, for minutes, looking at Joe, already at work with a glow of
health and strength upon his face that made it show as if the bright sun
of the life in store for him were shining on it.

“Good-bye, dear Joe!--No, don't wipe it off--for God's sake, give me your
blackened hand!--I shall be down soon and often.”

“Never too soon, sir,” said Joe, “and never too often, Pip!”

Biddy was waiting for me at the kitchen door, with a mug of new milk and
a crust of bread. “Biddy,” said I, when I gave her my hand at parting,
“I am not angry, but I am hurt.”

“No, don't be hurt,” she pleaded quite pathetically; “let only me be
hurt, if I have been ungenerous.”

Once more, the mists were rising as I walked away. If they disclosed to
me, as I suspect they did, that I should not come back, and that Biddy
was quite right, all I can say is,--they were quite right too.




Chapter XXXVI

Herbert and I went on from bad to worse, in the way of increasing our
debts, looking into our affairs, leaving Margins, and the like exemplary
transactions; and Time went on, whether or no, as he has a way of doing;
and I came of age,--in fulfilment of Herbert's prediction, that I should
do so before I knew where I was.

Herbert himself had come of age eight months before me. As he had
nothing else than his majority to come into, the event did not make a
profound sensation in Barnard's Inn. But we had looked forward to
my one-and-twentieth birthday, with a crowd of speculations and
anticipations, for we had both considered that my guardian could hardly
help saying something definite on that occasion.

I had taken care to have it well understood in Little Britain when my
birthday was. On the day before it, I received an official note from
Wemmick, informing me that Mr. Jaggers would be glad if I would call
upon him at five in the afternoon of the auspicious day. This convinced
us that something great was to happen, and threw me into an unusual
flutter when I repaired to my guardian's office, a model of punctuality.

In the outer office Wemmick offered me his congratulations, and
incidentally rubbed the side of his nose with a folded piece of
tissue-paper that I liked the look of. But he said nothing respecting
it, and motioned me with a nod into my guardian's room. It was November,
and my guardian was standing before his fire leaning his back against
the chimney-piece, with his hands under his coattails.

“Well, Pip,” said he, “I must call you Mr. Pip to-day. Congratulations,
Mr. Pip.”

We shook hands,--he was always a remarkably short shaker,--and I thanked
him.

“Take a chair, Mr. Pip,” said my guardian.

As I sat down, and he preserved his attitude and bent his brows at his
boots, I felt at a disadvantage, which reminded me of that old time when
I had been put upon a tombstone. The two ghastly casts on the shelf
were not far from him, and their expression was as if they were making a
stupid apoplectic attempt to attend to the conversation.

“Now my young friend,” my guardian began, as if I were a witness in the
box, “I am going to have a word or two with you.”

“If you please, sir.”

“What do you suppose,” said Mr. Jaggers, bending forward to look at the
ground, and then throwing his head back to look at the ceiling,--“what
do you suppose you are living at the rate of?”

“At the rate of, sir?”

“At,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, still looking at the ceiling,
“the--rate--of?” And then looked all round the room, and paused with his
pocket-handkerchief in his hand, half-way to his nose.

I had looked into my affairs so often, that I had thoroughly destroyed
any slight notion I might ever have had of their bearings. Reluctantly,
I confessed myself quite unable to answer the question. This reply
seemed agreeable to Mr. Jaggers, who said, “I thought so!” and blew his
nose with an air of satisfaction.

“Now, I have asked you a question, my friend,” said Mr. Jaggers. “Have
you anything to ask me?”

“Of course it would be a great relief to me to ask you several
questions, sir; but I remember your prohibition.”

“Ask one,” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Is my benefactor to be made known to me to-day?”

“No. Ask another.”

“Is that confidence to be imparted to me soon?”

“Waive that, a moment,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and ask another.”

I looked about me, but there appeared to be now no possible escape from
the inquiry, “Have-I--anything to receive, sir?” On that, Mr. Jaggers
said, triumphantly, “I thought we should come to it!” and called to
Wemmick to give him that piece of paper. Wemmick appeared, handed it in,
and disappeared.

“Now, Mr. Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, “attend, if you please. You have been
drawing pretty freely here; your name occurs pretty often in Wemmick's
cash-book; but you are in debt, of course?”

“I am afraid I must say yes, sir.”

“You know you must say yes; don't you?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Yes, sir.”

“I don't ask you what you owe, because you don't know; and if you did
know, you wouldn't tell me; you would say less. Yes, yes, my friend,”
 cried Mr. Jaggers, waving his forefinger to stop me as I made a show
of protesting: “it's likely enough that you think you wouldn't, but
you would. You'll excuse me, but I know better than you. Now, take this
piece of paper in your hand. You have got it? Very good. Now, unfold it
and tell me what it is.”

“This is a bank-note,” said I, “for five hundred pounds.”

“That is a bank-note,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, “for five hundred pounds.
And a very handsome sum of money too, I think. You consider it so?”

“How could I do otherwise!”

“Ah! But answer the question,” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Undoubtedly.”

“You consider it, undoubtedly, a handsome sum of money. Now, that
handsome sum of money, Pip, is your own. It is a present to you on this
day, in earnest of your expectations. And at the rate of that handsome
sum of money per annum, and at no higher rate, you are to live until the
donor of the whole appears. That is to say, you will now take your money
affairs entirely into your own hands, and you will draw from Wemmick
one hundred and twenty-five pounds per quarter, until you are in
communication with the fountain-head, and no longer with the mere
agent. As I have told you before, I am the mere agent. I execute my
instructions, and I am paid for doing so. I think them injudicious, but
I am not paid for giving any opinion on their merits.”

I was beginning to express my gratitude to my benefactor for the great
liberality with which I was treated, when Mr. Jaggers stopped me. “I am
not paid, Pip,” said he, coolly, “to carry your words to any one;” and
then gathered up his coat-tails, as he had gathered up the subject, and
stood frowning at his boots as if he suspected them of designs against
him.

After a pause, I hinted,--

“There was a question just now, Mr. Jaggers, which you desired me to
waive for a moment. I hope I am doing nothing wrong in asking it again?”

“What is it?” said he.

I might have known that he would never help me out; but it took me aback
to have to shape the question afresh, as if it were quite new. “Is it
likely,” I said, after hesitating, “that my patron, the fountain-head
you have spoken of, Mr. Jaggers, will soon--” there I delicately
stopped.

“Will soon what?” asked Mr. Jaggers. “That's no question as it stands,
you know.”

“Will soon come to London,” said I, after casting about for a precise
form of words, “or summon me anywhere else?”

“Now, here,” replied Mr. Jaggers, fixing me for the first time with
his dark deep-set eyes, “we must revert to the evening when we first
encountered one another in your village. What did I tell you then, Pip?”

“You told me, Mr. Jaggers, that it might be years hence when that person
appeared.”

“Just so,” said Mr. Jaggers, “that's my answer.”

As we looked full at one another, I felt my breath come quicker in my
strong desire to get something out of him. And as I felt that it came
quicker, and as I felt that he saw that it came quicker, I felt that I
had less chance than ever of getting anything out of him.

“Do you suppose it will still be years hence, Mr. Jaggers?”

Mr. Jaggers shook his head,--not in negativing the question, but in
altogether negativing the notion that he could anyhow be got to answer
it,--and the two horrible casts of the twitched faces looked, when
my eyes strayed up to them, as if they had come to a crisis in their
suspended attention, and were going to sneeze.

“Come!” said Mr. Jaggers, warming the backs of his legs with the backs
of his warmed hands, “I'll be plain with you, my friend Pip. That's a
question I must not be asked. You'll understand that better, when I tell
you it's a question that might compromise me. Come! I'll go a little
further with you; I'll say something more.”

He bent down so low to frown at his boots, that he was able to rub the
calves of his legs in the pause he made.

“When that person discloses,” said Mr. Jaggers, straightening himself,
“you and that person will settle your own affairs. When that person
discloses, my part in this business will cease and determine. When that
person discloses, it will not be necessary for me to know anything about
it. And that's all I have got to say.”

We looked at one another until I withdrew my eyes, and looked
thoughtfully at the floor. From this last speech I derived the notion
that Miss Havisham, for some reason or no reason, had not taken him
into her confidence as to her designing me for Estella; that he resented
this, and felt a jealousy about it; or that he really did object to
that scheme, and would have nothing to do with it. When I raised my eyes
again, I found that he had been shrewdly looking at me all the time, and
was doing so still.

“If that is all you have to say, sir,” I remarked, “there can be nothing
left for me to say.”

He nodded assent, and pulled out his thief-dreaded watch, and asked me
where I was going to dine? I replied at my own chambers, with Herbert.
As a necessary sequence, I asked him if he would favor us with his
company, and he promptly accepted the invitation. But he insisted on
walking home with me, in order that I might make no extra preparation
for him, and first he had a letter or two to write, and (of course) had
his hands to wash. So I said I would go into the outer office and talk
to Wemmick.

The fact was, that when the five hundred pounds had come into my pocket,
a thought had come into my head which had been often there before;
and it appeared to me that Wemmick was a good person to advise with
concerning such thought.

He had already locked up his safe, and made preparations for going home.
He had left his desk, brought out his two greasy office candlesticks and
stood them in line with the snuffers on a slab near the door, ready to
be extinguished; he had raked his fire low, put his hat and great-coat
ready, and was beating himself all over the chest with his safe-key, as
an athletic exercise after business.

“Mr. Wemmick,” said I, “I want to ask your opinion. I am very desirous
to serve a friend.”

Wemmick tightened his post-office and shook his head, as if his opinion
were dead against any fatal weakness of that sort.

“This friend,” I pursued, “is trying to get on in commercial life,
but has no money, and finds it difficult and disheartening to make a
beginning. Now I want somehow to help him to a beginning.”

“With money down?” said Wemmick, in a tone drier than any sawdust.

“With some money down,” I replied, for an uneasy remembrance shot across
me of that symmetrical bundle of papers at home--“with some money down,
and perhaps some anticipation of my expectations.”

“Mr. Pip,” said Wemmick, “I should like just to run over with you on my
fingers, if you please, the names of the various bridges up as high
as Chelsea Reach. Let's see; there's London, one; Southwark, two;
Blackfriars, three; Waterloo, four; Westminster, five; Vauxhall, six.”
 He had checked off each bridge in its turn, with the handle of his
safe-key on the palm of his hand. “There's as many as six, you see, to
choose from.”

“I don't understand you,” said I.

“Choose your bridge, Mr. Pip,” returned Wemmick, “and take a walk upon
your bridge, and pitch your money into the Thames over the centre arch
of your bridge, and you know the end of it. Serve a friend with it, and
you may know the end of it too,--but it's a less pleasant and profitable
end.”

I could have posted a newspaper in his mouth, he made it so wide after
saying this.

“This is very discouraging,” said I.

“Meant to be so,” said Wemmick.

“Then is it your opinion,” I inquired, with some little indignation,
“that a man should never--”

“--Invest portable property in a friend?” said Wemmick. “Certainly
he should not. Unless he wants to get rid of the friend,--and then it
becomes a question how much portable property it may be worth to get rid
of him.”

“And that,” said I, “is your deliberate opinion, Mr. Wemmick?”

“That,” he returned, “is my deliberate opinion in this office.”

“Ah!” said I, pressing him, for I thought I saw him near a loophole
here; “but would that be your opinion at Walworth?”

“Mr. Pip,” he replied, with gravity, “Walworth is one place, and this
office is another. Much as the Aged is one person, and Mr. Jaggers is
another. They must not be confounded together. My Walworth sentiments
must be taken at Walworth; none but my official sentiments can be taken
in this office.”

“Very well,” said I, much relieved, “then I shall look you up at
Walworth, you may depend upon it.”

“Mr. Pip,” he returned, “you will be welcome there, in a private and
personal capacity.”

We had held this conversation in a low voice, well knowing my guardian's
ears to be the sharpest of the sharp. As he now appeared in his doorway,
towelling his hands, Wemmick got on his great-coat and stood by to snuff
out the candles. We all three went into the street together, and from
the door-step Wemmick turned his way, and Mr. Jaggers and I turned ours.

I could not help wishing more than once that evening, that Mr. Jaggers
had had an Aged in Gerrard Street, or a Stinger, or a Something, or
a Somebody, to unbend his brows a little. It was an uncomfortable
consideration on a twenty-first birthday, that coming of age at all
seemed hardly worth while in such a guarded and suspicious world as he
made of it. He was a thousand times better informed and cleverer than
Wemmick, and yet I would a thousand times rather have had Wemmick to
dinner. And Mr. Jaggers made not me alone intensely melancholy, because,
after he was gone, Herbert said of himself, with his eyes fixed on the
fire, that he thought he must have committed a felony and forgotten the
details of it, he felt so dejected and guilty.




Chapter XXXVII

Deeming Sunday the best day for taking Mr. Wemmick's Walworth
sentiments, I devoted the next ensuing Sunday afternoon to a pilgrimage
to the Castle. On arriving before the battlements, I found the Union
Jack flying and the drawbridge up; but undeterred by this show of
defiance and resistance, I rang at the gate, and was admitted in a most
pacific manner by the Aged.

“My son, sir,” said the old man, after securing the drawbridge, “rather
had it in his mind that you might happen to drop in, and he left word
that he would soon be home from his afternoon's walk. He is very regular
in his walks, is my son. Very regular in everything, is my son.”

I nodded at the old gentleman as Wemmick himself might have nodded, and
we went in and sat down by the fireside.

“You made acquaintance with my son, sir,” said the old man, in his
chirping way, while he warmed his hands at the blaze, “at his office, I
expect?” I nodded. “Hah! I have heerd that my son is a wonderful hand at
his business, sir?” I nodded hard. “Yes; so they tell me. His business
is the Law?” I nodded harder. “Which makes it more surprising in my
son,” said the old man, “for he was not brought up to the Law, but to
the Wine-Coopering.”

Curious to know how the old gentleman stood informed concerning the
reputation of Mr. Jaggers, I roared that name at him. He threw me into
the greatest confusion by laughing heartily and replying in a very
sprightly manner, “No, to be sure; you're right.” And to this hour I
have not the faintest notion what he meant, or what joke he thought I
had made.

As I could not sit there nodding at him perpetually, without making
some other attempt to interest him, I shouted at inquiry whether his own
calling in life had been “the Wine-Coopering.” By dint of straining that
term out of myself several times and tapping the old gentleman on the
chest to associate it with him, I at last succeeded in making my meaning
understood.

“No,” said the old gentleman; “the warehousing, the warehousing. First,
over yonder;” he appeared to mean up the chimney, but I believe he
intended to refer me to Liverpool; “and then in the City of London here.
However, having an infirmity--for I am hard of hearing, sir--”

I expressed in pantomime the greatest astonishment.

“--Yes, hard of hearing; having that infirmity coming upon me, my son he
went into the Law, and he took charge of me, and he by little and little
made out this elegant and beautiful property. But returning to what you
said, you know,” pursued the old man, again laughing heartily, “what I
say is, No to be sure; you're right.”

I was modestly wondering whether my utmost ingenuity would have enabled
me to say anything that would have amused him half as much as this
imaginary pleasantry, when I was startled by a sudden click in the wall
on one side of the chimney, and the ghostly tumbling open of a little
wooden flap with “JOHN” upon it. The old man, following my eyes, cried
with great triumph, “My son's come home!” and we both went out to the
drawbridge.

It was worth any money to see Wemmick waving a salute to me from the
other side of the moat, when we might have shaken hands across it with
the greatest ease. The Aged was so delighted to work the drawbridge,
that I made no offer to assist him, but stood quiet until Wemmick had
come across, and had presented me to Miss Skiffins; a lady by whom he
was accompanied.

Miss Skiffins was of a wooden appearance, and was, like her escort, in
the post-office branch of the service. She might have been some two or
three years younger than Wemmick, and I judged her to stand possessed
of portable property. The cut of her dress from the waist upward, both
before and behind, made her figure very like a boy's kite; and I might
have pronounced her gown a little too decidedly orange, and her gloves a
little too intensely green. But she seemed to be a good sort of fellow,
and showed a high regard for the Aged. I was not long in discovering
that she was a frequent visitor at the Castle; for, on our going in,
and my complimenting Wemmick on his ingenious contrivance for announcing
himself to the Aged, he begged me to give my attention for a moment to
the other side of the chimney, and disappeared. Presently another click
came, and another little door tumbled open with “Miss Skiffins” on it;
then Miss Skiffins shut up and John tumbled open; then Miss Skiffins
and John both tumbled open together, and finally shut up together. On
Wemmick's return from working these mechanical appliances, I expressed
the great admiration with which I regarded them, and he said, “Well, you
know, they're both pleasant and useful to the Aged. And by George, sir,
it's a thing worth mentioning, that of all the people who come to
this gate, the secret of those pulls is only known to the Aged, Miss
Skiffins, and me!”

“And Mr. Wemmick made them,” added Miss Skiffins, “with his own hands
out of his own head.”

While Miss Skiffins was taking off her bonnet (she retained her green
gloves during the evening as an outward and visible sign that there was
company), Wemmick invited me to take a walk with him round the property,
and see how the island looked in wintertime. Thinking that he did this
to give me an opportunity of taking his Walworth sentiments, I seized
the opportunity as soon as we were out of the Castle.

Having thought of the matter with care, I approached my subject as if I
had never hinted at it before. I informed Wemmick that I was anxious in
behalf of Herbert Pocket, and I told him how we had first met, and how
we had fought. I glanced at Herbert's home, and at his character, and
at his having no means but such as he was dependent on his father for;
those, uncertain and unpunctual. I alluded to the advantages I had
derived in my first rawness and ignorance from his society, and I
confessed that I feared I had but ill repaid them, and that he might
have done better without me and my expectations. Keeping Miss Havisham
in the background at a great distance, I still hinted at the possibility
of my having competed with him in his prospects, and at the certainty of
his possessing a generous soul, and being far above any mean distrusts,
retaliations, or designs. For all these reasons (I told Wemmick),
and because he was my young companion and friend, and I had a great
affection for him, I wished my own good fortune to reflect some rays
upon him, and therefore I sought advice from Wemmick's experience and
knowledge of men and affairs, how I could best try with my resources to
help Herbert to some present income,--say of a hundred a year, to keep
him in good hope and heart,--and gradually to buy him on to some small
partnership. I begged Wemmick, in conclusion, to understand that my help
must always be rendered without Herbert's knowledge or suspicion, and
that there was no one else in the world with whom I could advise. I
wound up by laying my hand upon his shoulder, and saying, “I can't help
confiding in you, though I know it must be troublesome to you; but that
is your fault, in having ever brought me here.”

Wemmick was silent for a little while, and then said with a kind of
start, “Well you know, Mr. Pip, I must tell you one thing. This is
devilish good of you.”

“Say you'll help me to be good then,” said I.

“Ecod,” replied Wemmick, shaking his head, “that's not my trade.”

“Nor is this your trading-place,” said I.

“You are right,” he returned. “You hit the nail on the head. Mr. Pip,
I'll put on my considering-cap, and I think all you want to do may be
done by degrees. Skiffins (that's her brother) is an accountant and
agent. I'll look him up and go to work for you.”

“I thank you ten thousand times.”

“On the contrary,” said he, “I thank you, for though we are strictly in
our private and personal capacity, still it may be mentioned that there
are Newgate cobwebs about, and it brushes them away.”

After a little further conversation to the same effect, we returned into
the Castle where we found Miss Skiffins preparing tea. The responsible
duty of making the toast was delegated to the Aged, and that excellent
old gentleman was so intent upon it that he seemed to me in some danger
of melting his eyes. It was no nominal meal that we were going to make,
but a vigorous reality. The Aged prepared such a hay-stack of buttered
toast, that I could scarcely see him over it as it simmered on an iron
stand hooked on to the top-bar; while Miss Skiffins brewed such a jorum
of tea, that the pig in the back premises became strongly excited, and
repeatedly expressed his desire to participate in the entertainment.

The flag had been struck, and the gun had been fired, at the right
moment of time, and I felt as snugly cut off from the rest of Walworth
as if the moat were thirty feet wide by as many deep. Nothing disturbed
the tranquillity of the Castle, but the occasional tumbling open of
John and Miss Skiffins: which little doors were a prey to some spasmodic
infirmity that made me sympathetically uncomfortable until I got used
to it. I inferred from the methodical nature of Miss Skiffins's
arrangements that she made tea there every Sunday night; and I rather
suspected that a classic brooch she wore, representing the profile of an
undesirable female with a very straight nose and a very new moon, was a
piece of portable property that had been given her by Wemmick.

We ate the whole of the toast, and drank tea in proportion, and it was
delightful to see how warm and greasy we all got after it. The Aged
especially, might have passed for some clean old chief of a savage
tribe, just oiled. After a short pause of repose, Miss Skiffins--in the
absence of the little servant who, it seemed, retired to the bosom of
her family on Sunday afternoons--washed up the tea-things, in a trifling
lady-like amateur manner that compromised none of us. Then, she put on
her gloves again, and we drew round the fire, and Wemmick said, “Now,
Aged Parent, tip us the paper.”

Wemmick explained to me while the Aged got his spectacles out, that this
was according to custom, and that it gave the old gentleman infinite
satisfaction to read the news aloud. “I won't offer an apology,” said
Wemmick, “for he isn't capable of many pleasures--are you, Aged P.?”

“All right, John, all right,” returned the old man, seeing himself
spoken to.

“Only tip him a nod every now and then when he looks off his paper,”
 said Wemmick, “and he'll be as happy as a king. We are all attention,
Aged One.”

“All right, John, all right!” returned the cheerful old man, so busy and
so pleased, that it really was quite charming.

The Aged's reading reminded me of the classes at Mr. Wopsle's
great-aunt's, with the pleasanter peculiarity that it seemed to come
through a keyhole. As he wanted the candles close to him, and as he was
always on the verge of putting either his head or the newspaper into
them, he required as much watching as a powder-mill. But Wemmick was
equally untiring and gentle in his vigilance, and the Aged read on,
quite unconscious of his many rescues. Whenever he looked at us, we
all expressed the greatest interest and amazement, and nodded until he
resumed again.

As Wemmick and Miss Skiffins sat side by side, and as I sat in a shadowy
corner, I observed a slow and gradual elongation of Mr. Wemmick's mouth,
powerfully suggestive of his slowly and gradually stealing his arm round
Miss Skiffins's waist. In course of time I saw his hand appear on the
other side of Miss Skiffins; but at that moment Miss Skiffins neatly
stopped him with the green glove, unwound his arm again as if it were
an article of dress, and with the greatest deliberation laid it on the
table before her. Miss Skiffins's composure while she did this was one
of the most remarkable sights I have ever seen, and if I could have
thought the act consistent with abstraction of mind, I should have
deemed that Miss Skiffins performed it mechanically.

By and by, I noticed Wemmick's arm beginning to disappear again, and
gradually fading out of view. Shortly afterwards, his mouth began to
widen again. After an interval of suspense on my part that was quite
enthralling and almost painful, I saw his hand appear on the other side
of Miss Skiffins. Instantly, Miss Skiffins stopped it with the neatness
of a placid boxer, took off that girdle or cestus as before, and laid
it on the table. Taking the table to represent the path of virtue, I am
justified in stating that during the whole time of the Aged's reading,
Wemmick's arm was straying from the path of virtue and being recalled to
it by Miss Skiffins.

At last, the Aged read himself into a light slumber. This was the time
for Wemmick to produce a little kettle, a tray of glasses, and a
black bottle with a porcelain-topped cork, representing some clerical
dignitary of a rubicund and social aspect. With the aid of these
appliances we all had something warm to drink, including the Aged, who
was soon awake again. Miss Skiffins mixed, and I observed that she and
Wemmick drank out of one glass. Of course I knew better than to offer to
see Miss Skiffins home, and under the circumstances I thought I had best
go first; which I did, taking a cordial leave of the Aged, and having
passed a pleasant evening.

Before a week was out, I received a note from Wemmick, dated Walworth,
stating that he hoped he had made some advance in that matter
appertaining to our private and personal capacities, and that he would
be glad if I could come and see him again upon it. So, I went out
to Walworth again, and yet again, and yet again, and I saw him by
appointment in the City several times, but never held any communication
with him on the subject in or near Little Britain. The upshot was,
that we found a worthy young merchant or shipping-broker, not long
established in business, who wanted intelligent help, and who wanted
capital, and who in due course of time and receipt would want a partner.
Between him and me, secret articles were signed of which Herbert was the
subject, and I paid him half of my five hundred pounds down, and engaged
for sundry other payments: some, to fall due at certain dates out of my
income: some, contingent on my coming into my property. Miss Skiffins's
brother conducted the negotiation. Wemmick pervaded it throughout, but
never appeared in it.

The whole business was so cleverly managed, that Herbert had not the
least suspicion of my hand being in it. I never shall forget the radiant
face with which he came home one afternoon, and told me, as a mighty
piece of news, of his having fallen in with one Clarriker (the young
merchant's name), and of Clarriker's having shown an extraordinary
inclination towards him, and of his belief that the opening had come at
last. Day by day as his hopes grew stronger and his face brighter, he
must have thought me a more and more affectionate friend, for I had the
greatest difficulty in restraining my tears of triumph when I saw him so
happy. At length, the thing being done, and he having that day entered
Clarriker's House, and he having talked to me for a whole evening in a
flush of pleasure and success, I did really cry in good earnest when
I went to bed, to think that my expectations had done some good to
somebody.

A great event in my life, the turning point of my life, now opens on my
view. But, before I proceed to narrate it, and before I pass on to all
the changes it involved, I must give one chapter to Estella. It is not
much to give to the theme that so long filled my heart.




Chapter XXXVIII

If that staid old house near the Green at Richmond should ever come to
be haunted when I am dead, it will be haunted, surely, by my ghost. O
the many, many nights and days through which the unquiet spirit within
me haunted that house when Estella lived there! Let my body be where it
would, my spirit was always wandering, wandering, wandering, about that
house.

The lady with whom Estella was placed, Mrs. Brandley by name, was a
widow, with one daughter several years older than Estella. The mother
looked young, and the daughter looked old; the mother's complexion was
pink, and the daughter's was yellow; the mother set up for frivolity,
and the daughter for theology. They were in what is called a good
position, and visited, and were visited by, numbers of people. Little,
if any, community of feeling subsisted between them and Estella, but the
understanding was established that they were necessary to her, and
that she was necessary to them. Mrs. Brandley had been a friend of Miss
Havisham's before the time of her seclusion.

In Mrs. Brandley's house and out of Mrs. Brandley's house, I suffered
every kind and degree of torture that Estella could cause me. The
nature of my relations with her, which placed me on terms of familiarity
without placing me on terms of favor, conduced to my distraction.
She made use of me to tease other admirers, and she turned the very
familiarity between herself and me to the account of putting a constant
slight on my devotion to her. If I had been her secretary, steward,
half-brother, poor relation,--if I had been a younger brother of her
appointed husband,--I could not have seemed to myself further from my
hopes when I was nearest to her. The privilege of calling her by her
name and hearing her call me by mine became, under the circumstances
an aggravation of my trials; and while I think it likely that it almost
maddened her other lovers, I know too certainly that it almost maddened
me.

She had admirers without end. No doubt my jealousy made an admirer of
every one who went near her; but there were more than enough of them
without that.

I saw her often at Richmond, I heard of her often in town, and I used
often to take her and the Brandleys on the water; there were picnics,
fête days, plays, operas, concerts, parties, all sorts of pleasures,
through which I pursued her,--and they were all miseries to me. I never
had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the
four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me
unto death.

Throughout this part of our intercourse,--and it lasted, as will
presently be seen, for what I then thought a long time,--she habitually
reverted to that tone which expressed that our association was forced
upon us. There were other times when she would come to a sudden check in
this tone and in all her many tones, and would seem to pity me.

“Pip, Pip,” she said one evening, coming to such a check, when we sat
apart at a darkening window of the house in Richmond; “will you never
take warning?”

“Of what?”

“Of me.”

“Warning not to be attracted by you, do you mean, Estella?”

“Do I mean! If you don't know what I mean, you are blind.”

I should have replied that Love was commonly reputed blind, but for the
reason that I always was restrained--and this was not the least of my
miseries--by a feeling that it was ungenerous to press myself upon her,
when she knew that she could not choose but obey Miss Havisham. My
dread always was, that this knowledge on her part laid me under a heavy
disadvantage with her pride, and made me the subject of a rebellious
struggle in her bosom.

“At any rate,” said I, “I have no warning given me just now, for you
wrote to me to come to you, this time.”

“That's true,” said Estella, with a cold careless smile that always
chilled me.

After looking at the twilight without, for a little while, she went on
to say:--

“The time has come round when Miss Havisham wishes to have me for a day
at Satis. You are to take me there, and bring me back, if you will. She
would rather I did not travel alone, and objects to receiving my maid,
for she has a sensitive horror of being talked of by such people. Can
you take me?”

“Can I take you, Estella!”

“You can then? The day after to-morrow, if you please. You are to pay
all charges out of my purse, You hear the condition of your going?”

“And must obey,” said I.

This was all the preparation I received for that visit, or for others
like it; Miss Havisham never wrote to me, nor had I ever so much as seen
her handwriting. We went down on the next day but one, and we found her
in the room where I had first beheld her, and it is needless to add that
there was no change in Satis House.

She was even more dreadfully fond of Estella than she had been when
I last saw them together; I repeat the word advisedly, for there was
something positively dreadful in the energy of her looks and embraces.
She hung upon Estella's beauty, hung upon her words, hung upon her
gestures, and sat mumbling her own trembling fingers while she looked at
her, as though she were devouring the beautiful creature she had reared.

From Estella she looked at me, with a searching glance that seemed to
pry into my heart and probe its wounds. “How does she use you, Pip; how
does she use you?” she asked me again, with her witch-like eagerness,
even in Estella's hearing. But, when we sat by her flickering fire
at night, she was most weird; for then, keeping Estella's hand drawn
through her arm and clutched in her own hand, she extorted from her,
by dint of referring back to what Estella had told her in her regular
letters, the names and conditions of the men whom she had fascinated;
and as Miss Havisham dwelt upon this roll, with the intensity of a mind
mortally hurt and diseased, she sat with her other hand on her crutch
stick, and her chin on that, and her wan bright eyes glaring at me, a
very spectre.

I saw in this, wretched though it made me, and bitter the sense of
dependence and even of degradation that it awakened,--I saw in this that
Estella was set to wreak Miss Havisham's revenge on men, and that she
was not to be given to me until she had gratified it for a term. I saw
in this, a reason for her being beforehand assigned to me. Sending her
out to attract and torment and do mischief, Miss Havisham sent her with
the malicious assurance that she was beyond the reach of all admirers,
and that all who staked upon that cast were secured to lose. I saw in
this that I, too, was tormented by a perversion of ingenuity, even while
the prize was reserved for me. I saw in this the reason for my being
staved off so long and the reason for my late guardian's declining to
commit himself to the formal knowledge of such a scheme. In a word, I
saw in this Miss Havisham as I had her then and there before my eyes,
and always had had her before my eyes; and I saw in this, the distinct
shadow of the darkened and unhealthy house in which her life was hidden
from the sun.

The candles that lighted that room of hers were placed in sconces on
the wall. They were high from the ground, and they burnt with the steady
dulness of artificial light in air that is seldom renewed. As I looked
round at them, and at the pale gloom they made, and at the stopped
clock, and at the withered articles of bridal dress upon the table and
the ground, and at her own awful figure with its ghostly reflection
thrown large by the fire upon the ceiling and the wall, I saw in
everything the construction that my mind had come to, repeated and
thrown back to me. My thoughts passed into the great room across the
landing where the table was spread, and I saw it written, as it were, in
the falls of the cobwebs from the centre-piece, in the crawlings of the
spiders on the cloth, in the tracks of the mice as they betook their
little quickened hearts behind the panels, and in the gropings and
pausings of the beetles on the floor.

It happened on the occasion of this visit that some sharp words arose
between Estella and Miss Havisham. It was the first time I had ever seen
them opposed.

We were seated by the fire, as just now described, and Miss Havisham
still had Estella's arm drawn through her own, and still clutched
Estella's hand in hers, when Estella gradually began to detach herself.
She had shown a proud impatience more than once before, and had rather
endured that fierce affection than accepted or returned it.

“What!” said Miss Havisham, flashing her eyes upon her, “are you tired
of me?”

“Only a little tired of myself,” replied Estella, disengaging her arm,
and moving to the great chimney-piece, where she stood looking down at
the fire.

“Speak the truth, you ingrate!” cried Miss Havisham, passionately
striking her stick upon the floor; “you are tired of me.”

Estella looked at her with perfect composure, and again looked down
at the fire. Her graceful figure and her beautiful face expressed a
self-possessed indifference to the wild heat of the other, that was
almost cruel.

“You stock and stone!” exclaimed Miss Havisham. “You cold, cold heart!”

“What?” said Estella, preserving her attitude of indifference as she
leaned against the great chimney-piece and only moving her eyes; “do you
reproach me for being cold? You?”

“Are you not?” was the fierce retort.

“You should know,” said Estella. “I am what you have made me. Take
all the praise, take all the blame; take all the success, take all the
failure; in short, take me.”

“O, look at her, look at her!” cried Miss Havisham, bitterly; “Look at
her so hard and thankless, on the hearth where she was reared! Where I
took her into this wretched breast when it was first bleeding from its
stabs, and where I have lavished years of tenderness upon her!”

“At least I was no party to the compact,” said Estella, “for if I could
walk and speak, when it was made, it was as much as I could do. But what
would you have? You have been very good to me, and I owe everything to
you. What would you have?”

“Love,” replied the other.

“You have it.”

“I have not,” said Miss Havisham.

“Mother by adoption,” retorted Estella, never departing from the easy
grace of her attitude, never raising her voice as the other did, never
yielding either to anger or tenderness,--“mother by adoption, I have
said that I owe everything to you. All I possess is freely yours. All
that you have given me, is at your command to have again. Beyond that, I
have nothing. And if you ask me to give you, what you never gave me, my
gratitude and duty cannot do impossibilities.”

“Did I never give her love!” cried Miss Havisham, turning wildly to me.
“Did I never give her a burning love, inseparable from jealousy at all
times, and from sharp pain, while she speaks thus to me! Let her call me
mad, let her call me mad!”

“Why should I call you mad,” returned Estella, “I, of all people? Does
any one live, who knows what set purposes you have, half as well as I
do? Does any one live, who knows what a steady memory you have, half
as well as I do? I who have sat on this same hearth on the little stool
that is even now beside you there, learning your lessons and looking up
into your face, when your face was strange and frightened me!”

“Soon forgotten!” moaned Miss Havisham. “Times soon forgotten!”

“No, not forgotten,” retorted Estella,--“not forgotten, but treasured up
in my memory. When have you found me false to your teaching? When have
you found me unmindful of your lessons? When have you found me giving
admission here,” she touched her bosom with her hand, “to anything that
you excluded? Be just to me.”

“So proud, so proud!” moaned Miss Havisham, pushing away her gray hair
with both her hands.

“Who taught me to be proud?” returned Estella. “Who praised me when I
learnt my lesson?”

“So hard, so hard!” moaned Miss Havisham, with her former action.

“Who taught me to be hard?” returned Estella. “Who praised me when I
learnt my lesson?”

“But to be proud and hard to me!” Miss Havisham quite shrieked, as she
stretched out her arms. “Estella, Estella, Estella, to be proud and hard
to me!”

Estella looked at her for a moment with a kind of calm wonder, but was
not otherwise disturbed; when the moment was past, she looked down at
the fire again.

“I cannot think,” said Estella, raising her eyes after a silence “why
you should be so unreasonable when I come to see you after a separation.
I have never forgotten your wrongs and their causes. I have never been
unfaithful to you or your schooling. I have never shown any weakness
that I can charge myself with.”

“Would it be weakness to return my love?” exclaimed Miss Havisham. “But
yes, yes, she would call it so!”

“I begin to think,” said Estella, in a musing way, after another moment
of calm wonder, “that I almost understand how this comes about. If you
had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of
these rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as
the daylight by which she had never once seen your face,--if you had
done that, and then, for a purpose had wanted her to understand the
daylight and know all about it, you would have been disappointed and
angry?”

Miss Havisham, with her head in her hands, sat making a low moaning, and
swaying herself on her chair, but gave no answer.

“Or,” said Estella,--“which is a nearer case,--if you had taught her,
from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might,
that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her
enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had
blighted you and would else blight her;--if you had done this, and then,
for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she
could not do it, you would have been disappointed and angry?”

Miss Havisham sat listening (or it seemed so, for I could not see her
face), but still made no answer.

“So,” said Estella, “I must be taken as I have been made. The success is
not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.”

Miss Havisham had settled down, I hardly knew how, upon the floor, among
the faded bridal relics with which it was strewn. I took advantage of
the moment--I had sought one from the first--to leave the room, after
beseeching Estella's attention to her, with a movement of my hand. When
I left, Estella was yet standing by the great chimney-piece, just as she
had stood throughout. Miss Havisham's gray hair was all adrift upon the
ground, among the other bridal wrecks, and was a miserable sight to see.

It was with a depressed heart that I walked in the starlight for an
hour and more, about the courtyard, and about the brewery, and about
the ruined garden. When I at last took courage to return to the room, I
found Estella sitting at Miss Havisham's knee, taking up some stitches
in one of those old articles of dress that were dropping to pieces, and
of which I have often been reminded since by the faded tatters of old
banners that I have seen hanging up in cathedrals. Afterwards, Estella
and I played at cards, as of yore,--only we were skilful now, and played
French games,--and so the evening wore away, and I went to bed.

I lay in that separate building across the courtyard. It was the first
time I had ever lain down to rest in Satis House, and sleep refused to
come near me. A thousand Miss Havishams haunted me. She was on this side
of my pillow, on that, at the head of the bed, at the foot, behind the
half-opened door of the dressing-room, in the dressing-room, in the room
overhead, in the room beneath,--everywhere. At last, when the night was
slow to creep on towards two o'clock, I felt that I absolutely could no
longer bear the place as a place to lie down in, and that I must get up.
I therefore got up and put on my clothes, and went out across the yard
into the long stone passage, designing to gain the outer courtyard and
walk there for the relief of my mind. But I was no sooner in the passage
than I extinguished my candle; for I saw Miss Havisham going along it
in a ghostly manner, making a low cry. I followed her at a distance,
and saw her go up the staircase. She carried a bare candle in her hand,
which she had probably taken from one of the sconces in her own room,
and was a most unearthly object by its light. Standing at the bottom
of the staircase, I felt the mildewed air of the feast-chamber, without
seeing her open the door, and I heard her walking there, and so across
into her own room, and so across again into that, never ceasing the low
cry. After a time, I tried in the dark both to get out, and to go back,
but I could do neither until some streaks of day strayed in and showed
me where to lay my hands. During the whole interval, whenever I went to
the bottom of the staircase, I heard her footstep, saw her light pass
above, and heard her ceaseless low cry.

Before we left next day, there was no revival of the difference between
her and Estella, nor was it ever revived on any similar occasion; and
there were four similar occasions, to the best of my remembrance. Nor,
did Miss Havisham's manner towards Estella in anywise change, except
that I believed it to have something like fear infused among its former
characteristics.

It is impossible to turn this leaf of my life, without putting Bentley
Drummle's name upon it; or I would, very gladly.

On a certain occasion when the Finches were assembled in force, and when
good feeling was being promoted in the usual manner by nobody's agreeing
with anybody else, the presiding Finch called the Grove to order,
forasmuch as Mr. Drummle had not yet toasted a lady; which, according
to the solemn constitution of the society, it was the brute's turn to
do that day. I thought I saw him leer in an ugly way at me while the
decanters were going round, but as there was no love lost between us,
that might easily be. What was my indignant surprise when he called upon
the company to pledge him to “Estella!”

“Estella who?” said I.

“Never you mind,” retorted Drummle.

“Estella of where?” said I. “You are bound to say of where.” Which he
was, as a Finch.

“Of Richmond, gentlemen,” said Drummle, putting me out of the question,
“and a peerless beauty.”

Much he knew about peerless beauties, a mean, miserable idiot! I
whispered Herbert.

“I know that lady,” said Herbert, across the table, when the toast had
been honored.

“Do you?” said Drummle.

“And so do I,” I added, with a scarlet face.

“Do you?” said Drummle. “O, Lord!”

This was the only retort--except glass or crockery--that the heavy
creature was capable of making; but, I became as highly incensed by it
as if it had been barbed with wit, and I immediately rose in my place
and said that I could not but regard it as being like the honorable
Finch's impudence to come down to that Grove,--we always talked
about coming down to that Grove, as a neat Parliamentary turn of
expression,--down to that Grove, proposing a lady of whom he knew
nothing. Mr. Drummle, upon this, starting up, demanded what I meant by
that? Whereupon I made him the extreme reply that I believed he knew
where I was to be found.

Whether it was possible in a Christian country to get on without blood,
after this, was a question on which the Finches were divided. The debate
upon it grew so lively, indeed, that at least six more honorable members
told six more, during the discussion, that they believed they knew where
they were to be found. However, it was decided at last (the Grove being
a Court of Honor) that if Mr. Drummle would bring never so slight
a certificate from the lady, importing that he had the honor of her
acquaintance, Mr. Pip must express his regret, as a gentleman and a
Finch, for “having been betrayed into a warmth which.” Next day was
appointed for the production (lest our honor should take cold from
delay), and next day Drummle appeared with a polite little avowal in
Estella's hand, that she had had the honor of dancing with him several
times. This left me no course but to regret that I had been “betrayed
into a warmth which,” and on the whole to repudiate, as untenable, the
idea that I was to be found anywhere. Drummle and I then sat snorting
at one another for an hour, while the Grove engaged in indiscriminate
contradiction, and finally the promotion of good feeling was declared to
have gone ahead at an amazing rate.

I tell this lightly, but it was no light thing to me. For, I cannot
adequately express what pain it gave me to think that Estella should
show any favor to a contemptible, clumsy, sulky booby, so very far below
the average. To the present moment, I believe it to have been referable
to some pure fire of generosity and disinterestedness in my love for
her, that I could not endure the thought of her stooping to that hound.
No doubt I should have been miserable whomsoever she had favored; but
a worthier object would have caused me a different kind and degree of
distress.

It was easy for me to find out, and I did soon find out, that Drummle
had begun to follow her closely, and that she allowed him to do it. A
little while, and he was always in pursuit of her, and he and I crossed
one another every day. He held on, in a dull persistent way, and Estella
held him on; now with encouragement, now with discouragement, now almost
flattering him, now openly despising him, now knowing him very well, now
scarcely remembering who he was.

The Spider, as Mr. Jaggers had called him, was used to lying in wait,
however, and had the patience of his tribe. Added to that, he had a
blockhead confidence in his money and in his family greatness,
which sometimes did him good service,--almost taking the place of
concentration and determined purpose. So, the Spider, doggedly watching
Estella, outwatched many brighter insects, and would often uncoil
himself and drop at the right nick of time.

At a certain Assembly Ball at Richmond (there used to be Assembly Balls
at most places then), where Estella had outshone all other beauties,
this blundering Drummle so hung about her, and with so much toleration
on her part, that I resolved to speak to her concerning him. I took the
next opportunity; which was when she was waiting for Mrs. Blandley to
take her home, and was sitting apart among some flowers, ready to go.
I was with her, for I almost always accompanied them to and from such
places.

“Are you tired, Estella?”

“Rather, Pip.”

“You should be.”

“Say rather, I should not be; for I have my letter to Satis House to
write, before I go to sleep.”

“Recounting to-night's triumph?” said I. “Surely a very poor one,
Estella.”

“What do you mean? I didn't know there had been any.”

“Estella,” said I, “do look at that fellow in the corner yonder, who is
looking over here at us.”

“Why should I look at him?” returned Estella, with her eyes on me
instead. “What is there in that fellow in the corner yonder,--to use
your words,--that I need look at?”

“Indeed, that is the very question I want to ask you,” said I. “For he
has been hovering about you all night.”

“Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures,” replied Estella, with a glance
towards him, “hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?”

“No,” I returned; “but cannot the Estella help it?”

“Well!” said she, laughing, after a moment, “perhaps. Yes. Anything you
like.”

“But, Estella, do hear me speak. It makes me wretched that you should
encourage a man so generally despised as Drummle. You know he is
despised.”

“Well?” said she.

“You know he is as ungainly within as without. A deficient,
ill-tempered, lowering, stupid fellow.”

“Well?” said she.

“You know he has nothing to recommend him but money and a ridiculous
roll of addle-headed predecessors; now, don't you?”

“Well?” said she again; and each time she said it, she opened her lovely
eyes the wider.

To overcome the difficulty of getting past that monosyllable, I took it
from her, and said, repeating it with emphasis, “Well! Then, that is why
it makes me wretched.”

Now, if I could have believed that she favored Drummle with any idea of
making me--me--wretched, I should have been in better heart about it;
but in that habitual way of hers, she put me so entirely out of the
question, that I could believe nothing of the kind.

“Pip,” said Estella, casting her glance over the room, “don't be foolish
about its effect on you. It may have its effect on others, and may be
meant to have. It's not worth discussing.”

“Yes it is,” said I, “because I cannot bear that people should say, 'she
throws away her graces and attractions on a mere boor, the lowest in the
crowd.'”

“I can bear it,” said Estella.

“Oh! don't be so proud, Estella, and so inflexible.”

“Calls me proud and inflexible in this breath!” said Estella, opening
her hands. “And in his last breath reproached me for stooping to a
boor!”

“There is no doubt you do,” said I, something hurriedly, “for I have
seen you give him looks and smiles this very night, such as you never
give to--me.”

“Do you want me then,” said Estella, turning suddenly with a fixed and
serious, if not angry, look, “to deceive and entrap you?”

“Do you deceive and entrap him, Estella?”

“Yes, and many others,--all of them but you. Here is Mrs. Brandley. I'll
say no more.”

* *

And now that I have given the one chapter to the theme that so filled my
heart, and so often made it ache and ache again, I pass on unhindered,
to the event that had impended over me longer yet; the event that had
begun to be prepared for, before I knew that the world held Estella,
and in the days when her baby intelligence was receiving its first
distortions from Miss Havisham's wasting hands.

In the Eastern story, the heavy slab that was to fall on the bed of
state in the flush of conquest was slowly wrought out of the quarry, the
tunnel for the rope to hold it in its place was slowly carried through
the leagues of rock, the slab was slowly raised and fitted in the roof,
the rope was rove to it and slowly taken through the miles of hollow to
the great iron ring. All being made ready with much labor, and the hour
come, the sultan was aroused in the dead of the night, and the sharpened
axe that was to sever the rope from the great iron ring was put into his
hand, and he struck with it, and the rope parted and rushed away, and
the ceiling fell. So, in my case; all the work, near and afar, that
tended to the end, had been accomplished; and in an instant the blow was
struck, and the roof of my stronghold dropped upon me.




Chapter XXXIX

I was three-and-twenty years of age. Not another word had I heard to
enlighten me on the subject of my expectations, and my twenty-third
birthday was a week gone. We had left Barnard's Inn more than a year,
and lived in the Temple. Our chambers were in Garden-court, down by the
river.

Mr. Pocket and I had for some time parted company as to our original
relations, though we continued on the best terms. Notwithstanding my
inability to settle to anything,--which I hope arose out of the restless
and incomplete tenure on which I held my means,--I had a taste for
reading, and read regularly so many hours a day. That matter of
Herbert's was still progressing, and everything with me was as I have
brought it down to the close of the last preceding chapter.

Business had taken Herbert on a journey to Marseilles. I was alone, and
had a dull sense of being alone. Dispirited and anxious, long hoping
that to-morrow or next week would clear my way, and long disappointed, I
sadly missed the cheerful face and ready response of my friend.

It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud, mud,
mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been
driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East
there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts,
that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs;
and in the country, trees had been torn up, and sails of windmills
carried away; and gloomy accounts had come in from the coast, of
shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages
of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the
worst of all.

Alterations have been made in that part of the Temple since that time,
and it has not now so lonely a character as it had then, nor is it so
exposed to the river. We lived at the top of the last house, and the
wind rushing up the river shook the house that night, like discharges
of cannon, or breakings of a sea. When the rain came with it and dashed
against the windows, I thought, raising my eyes to them as they
rocked, that I might have fancied myself in a storm-beaten lighthouse.
Occasionally, the smoke came rolling down the chimney as though it could
not bear to go out into such a night; and when I set the doors open and
looked down the staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out; and when
I shaded my face with my hands and looked through the black windows
(opening them ever so little was out of the question in the teeth of
such wind and rain), I saw that the lamps in the court were blown out,
and that the lamps on the bridges and the shore were shuddering, and
that the coal-fires in barges on the river were being carried away
before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.

I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my book
at eleven o'clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul's, and all the many
church-clocks in the City--some leading, some accompanying, some
following--struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the wind;
and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and tore it,
when I heard a footstep on the stair.

What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the
footstep of my dead sister, matters not. It was past in a moment, and I
listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on.
Remembering then, that the staircase-lights were blown out, I took up
my reading-lamp and went out to the stair-head. Whoever was below had
stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet.

“There is some one down there, is there not?” I called out, looking
down.

“Yes,” said a voice from the darkness beneath.

“What floor do you want?”

“The top. Mr. Pip.”

“That is my name.--There is nothing the matter?”

“Nothing the matter,” returned the voice. And the man came on.

I stood with my lamp held out over the stair-rail, and he came slowly
within its light. It was a shaded lamp, to shine upon a book, and its
circle of light was very contracted; so that he was in it for a mere
instant, and then out of it. In the instant, I had seen a face that was
strange to me, looking up with an incomprehensible air of being touched
and pleased by the sight of me.

Moving the lamp as the man moved, I made out that he was substantially
dressed, but roughly, like a voyager by sea. That he had long iron-gray
hair. That his age was about sixty. That he was a muscular man, strong
on his legs, and that he was browned and hardened by exposure to
weather. As he ascended the last stair or two, and the light of my lamp
included us both, I saw, with a stupid kind of amazement, that he was
holding out both his hands to me.

“Pray what is your business?” I asked him.

“My business?” he repeated, pausing. “Ah! Yes. I will explain my
business, by your leave.”

“Do you wish to come in?”

“Yes,” he replied; “I wish to come in, master.”

I had asked him the question inhospitably enough, for I resented the
sort of bright and gratified recognition that still shone in his face.
I resented it, because it seemed to imply that he expected me to respond
to it. But I took him into the room I had just left, and, having set the
lamp on the table, asked him as civilly as I could to explain himself.

He looked about him with the strangest air,--an air of wondering
pleasure, as if he had some part in the things he admired,--and he
pulled off a rough outer coat, and his hat. Then, I saw that his head
was furrowed and bald, and that the long iron-gray hair grew only on
its sides. But, I saw nothing that in the least explained him. On the
contrary, I saw him next moment, once more holding out both his hands to
me.

“What do you mean?” said I, half suspecting him to be mad.

He stopped in his looking at me, and slowly rubbed his right hand over
his head. “It's disapinting to a man,” he said, in a coarse broken
voice, “arter having looked for'ard so distant, and come so fur; but
you're not to blame for that,--neither on us is to blame for that. I'll
speak in half a minute. Give me half a minute, please.”

He sat down on a chair that stood before the fire, and covered his
forehead with his large brown veinous hands. I looked at him attentively
then, and recoiled a little from him; but I did not know him.

“There's no one nigh,” said he, looking over his shoulder; “is there?”

“Why do you, a stranger coming into my rooms at this time of the night,
ask that question?” said I.

“You're a game one,” he returned, shaking his head at me with a
deliberate affection, at once most unintelligible and most exasperating;
“I'm glad you've grow'd up, a game one! But don't catch hold of me.
You'd be sorry arterwards to have done it.”

I relinquished the intention he had detected, for I knew him! Even yet
I could not recall a single feature, but I knew him! If the wind and
the rain had driven away the intervening years, had scattered all the
intervening objects, had swept us to the churchyard where we first stood
face to face on such different levels, I could not have known my convict
more distinctly than I knew him now as he sat in the chair before the
fire. No need to take a file from his pocket and show it to me; no need
to take the handkerchief from his neck and twist it round his head; no
need to hug himself with both his arms, and take a shivering turn across
the room, looking back at me for recognition. I knew him before he gave
me one of those aids, though, a moment before, I had not been conscious
of remotely suspecting his identity.

He came back to where I stood, and again held out both his hands.
Not knowing what to do,--for, in my astonishment I had lost my
self-possession,--I reluctantly gave him my hands. He grasped them
heartily, raised them to his lips, kissed them, and still held them.

“You acted noble, my boy,” said he. “Noble, Pip! And I have never forgot
it!”

At a change in his manner as if he were even going to embrace me, I laid
a hand upon his breast and put him away.

“Stay!” said I. “Keep off! If you are grateful to me for what I did when
I was a little child, I hope you have shown your gratitude by mending
your way of life. If you have come here to thank me, it was not
necessary. Still, however you have found me out, there must be something
good in the feeling that has brought you here, and I will not repulse
you; but surely you must understand that--I--”

My attention was so attracted by the singularity of his fixed look at
me, that the words died away on my tongue.

“You was a saying,” he observed, when we had confronted one another
in silence, “that surely I must understand. What, surely must I
understand?”

“That I cannot wish to renew that chance intercourse with you of long
ago, under these different circumstances. I am glad to believe you have
repented and recovered yourself. I am glad to tell you so. I am glad
that, thinking I deserve to be thanked, you have come to thank me. But
our ways are different ways, none the less. You are wet, and you look
weary. Will you drink something before you go?”

He had replaced his neckerchief loosely, and had stood, keenly observant
of me, biting a long end of it. “I think,” he answered, still with the
end at his mouth and still observant of me, “that I will drink (I thank
you) afore I go.”

There was a tray ready on a side-table. I brought it to the table
near the fire, and asked him what he would have? He touched one of the
bottles without looking at it or speaking, and I made him some hot rum
and water. I tried to keep my hand steady while I did so, but his look
at me as he leaned back in his chair with the long draggled end of his
neckerchief between his teeth--evidently forgotten--made my hand very
difficult to master. When at last I put the glass to him, I saw with
amazement that his eyes were full of tears.

Up to this time I had remained standing, not to disguise that I wished
him gone. But I was softened by the softened aspect of the man, and felt
a touch of reproach. “I hope,” said I, hurriedly putting something into
a glass for myself, and drawing a chair to the table, “that you will not
think I spoke harshly to you just now. I had no intention of doing it,
and I am sorry for it if I did. I wish you well and happy!”

As I put my glass to my lips, he glanced with surprise at the end of his
neckerchief, dropping from his mouth when he opened it, and stretched
out his hand. I gave him mine, and then he drank, and drew his sleeve
across his eyes and forehead.

“How are you living?” I asked him.

“I've been a sheep-farmer, stock-breeder, other trades besides, away in
the new world,” said he; “many a thousand mile of stormy water off from
this.”

“I hope you have done well?”

“I've done wonderfully well. There's others went out alonger me as has
done well too, but no man has done nigh as well as me. I'm famous for
it.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“I hope to hear you say so, my dear boy.”

Without stopping to try to understand those words or the tone in which
they were spoken, I turned off to a point that had just come into my
mind.

“Have you ever seen a messenger you once sent to me,” I inquired, “since
he undertook that trust?”

“Never set eyes upon him. I warn't likely to it.”

“He came faithfully, and he brought me the two one-pound notes. I was
a poor boy then, as you know, and to a poor boy they were a little
fortune. But, like you, I have done well since, and you must let me pay
them back. You can put them to some other poor boy's use.” I took out my
purse.

He watched me as I laid my purse upon the table and opened it, and he
watched me as I separated two one-pound notes from its contents. They
were clean and new, and I spread them out and handed them over to
him. Still watching me, he laid them one upon the other, folded them
long-wise, gave them a twist, set fire to them at the lamp, and dropped
the ashes into the tray.

“May I make so bold,” he said then, with a smile that was like a frown,
and with a frown that was like a smile, “as ask you how you have done
well, since you and me was out on them lone shivering marshes?”

“How?”

“Ah!”

He emptied his glass, got up, and stood at the side of the fire, with
his heavy brown hand on the mantel-shelf. He put a foot up to the bars,
to dry and warm it, and the wet boot began to steam; but, he neither
looked at it, nor at the fire, but steadily looked at me. It was only
now that I began to tremble.

When my lips had parted, and had shaped some words that were
without sound, I forced myself to tell him (though I could not do it
distinctly), that I had been chosen to succeed to some property.

“Might a mere warmint ask what property?” said he.

I faltered, “I don't know.”

“Might a mere warmint ask whose property?” said he.

I faltered again, “I don't know.”

“Could I make a guess, I wonder,” said the Convict, “at your income
since you come of age! As to the first figure now. Five?”

With my heart beating like a heavy hammer of disordered action, I rose
out of my chair, and stood with my hand upon the back of it, looking
wildly at him.

“Concerning a guardian,” he went on. “There ought to have been some
guardian, or such-like, whiles you was a minor. Some lawyer, maybe. As
to the first letter of that lawyer's name now. Would it be J?”

All the truth of my position came flashing on me; and its
disappointments, dangers, disgraces, consequences of all kinds, rushed
in in such a multitude that I was borne down by them and had to struggle
for every breath I drew.

“Put it,” he resumed, “as the employer of that lawyer whose name begun
with a J, and might be Jaggers,--put it as he had come over sea to
Portsmouth, and had landed there, and had wanted to come on to you.
'However, you have found me out,' you says just now. Well! However, did
I find you out? Why, I wrote from Portsmouth to a person in London, for
particulars of your address. That person's name? Why, Wemmick.”

I could not have spoken one word, though it had been to save my life.
I stood, with a hand on the chair-back and a hand on my breast, where
I seemed to be suffocating,--I stood so, looking wildly at him, until I
grasped at the chair, when the room began to surge and turn. He caught
me, drew me to the sofa, put me up against the cushions, and bent on one
knee before me, bringing the face that I now well remembered, and that I
shuddered at, very near to mine.

“Yes, Pip, dear boy, I've made a gentleman on you! It's me wot has
done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea
should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as ever I spec'lated and got
rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that you should live smooth;
I worked hard, that you should be above work. What odds, dear boy? Do I
tell it, fur you to feel a obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to
know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head
so high that he could make a gentleman,--and, Pip, you're him!”

The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the
repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if
he had been some terrible beast.

“Look'ee here, Pip. I'm your second father. You're my son,--more to me
nor any son. I've put away money, only for you to spend. When I was a
hired-out shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but faces of
sheep till I half forgot wot men's and women's faces wos like, I see
yourn. I drops my knife many a time in that hut when I was a-eating my
dinner or my supper, and I says, 'Here's the boy again, a looking at
me whiles I eats and drinks!' I see you there a many times, as plain as
ever I see you on them misty marshes. 'Lord strike me dead!' I says each
time,--and I goes out in the air to say it under the open heavens,--'but
wot, if I gets liberty and money, I'll make that boy a gentleman!' And
I done it. Why, look at you, dear boy! Look at these here lodgings
o'yourn, fit for a lord! A lord? Ah! You shall show money with lords for
wagers, and beat 'em!”

In his heat and triumph, and in his knowledge that I had been nearly
fainting, he did not remark on my reception of all this. It was the one
grain of relief I had.

“Look'ee here!” he went on, taking my watch out of my pocket, and
turning towards him a ring on my finger, while I recoiled from his
touch as if he had been a snake, “a gold 'un and a beauty: that's a
gentleman's, I hope! A diamond all set round with rubies; that's a
gentleman's, I hope! Look at your linen; fine and beautiful! Look at
your clothes; better ain't to be got! And your books too,” turning his
eyes round the room, “mounting up, on their shelves, by hundreds! And
you read 'em; don't you? I see you'd been a reading of 'em when I come
in. Ha, ha, ha! You shall read 'em to me, dear boy! And if they're in
foreign languages wot I don't understand, I shall be just as proud as if
I did.”

Again he took both my hands and put them to his lips, while my blood ran
cold within me.

“Don't you mind talking, Pip,” said he, after again drawing his sleeve
over his eyes and forehead, as the click came in his throat which I well
remembered,--and he was all the more horrible to me that he was so much
in earnest; “you can't do better nor keep quiet, dear boy. You ain't
looked slowly forward to this as I have; you wosn't prepared for this as
I wos. But didn't you never think it might be me?”

“O no, no, no,” I returned, “Never, never!”

“Well, you see it wos me, and single-handed. Never a soul in it but my
own self and Mr. Jaggers.”

“Was there no one else?” I asked.

“No,” said he, with a glance of surprise: “who else should there be?
And, dear boy, how good looking you have growed! There's bright eyes
somewheres--eh? Isn't there bright eyes somewheres, wot you love the
thoughts on?”

O Estella, Estella!

“They shall be yourn, dear boy, if money can buy 'em. Not that a
gentleman like you, so well set up as you, can't win 'em off of his own
game; but money shall back you! Let me finish wot I was a telling you,
dear boy. From that there hut and that there hiring-out, I got money
left me by my master (which died, and had been the same as me), and got
my liberty and went for myself. In every single thing I went for, I went
for you. 'Lord strike a blight upon it,' I says, wotever it was I went
for, 'if it ain't for him!' It all prospered wonderful. As I giv' you
to understand just now, I'm famous for it. It was the money left me, and
the gains of the first few year wot I sent home to Mr. Jaggers--all for
you--when he first come arter you, agreeable to my letter.”

O that he had never come! That he had left me at the forge,--far from
contented, yet, by comparison happy!

“And then, dear boy, it was a recompense to me, look'ee here, to know in
secret that I was making a gentleman. The blood horses of them colonists
might fling up the dust over me as I was walking; what do I say? I says
to myself, 'I'm making a better gentleman nor ever you'll be!' When
one of 'em says to another, 'He was a convict, a few year ago, and is a
ignorant common fellow now, for all he's lucky,' what do I say? I says
to myself, 'If I ain't a gentleman, nor yet ain't got no learning, I'm
the owner of such. All on you owns stock and land; which on you owns a
brought-up London gentleman?' This way I kep myself a going. And this
way I held steady afore my mind that I would for certain come one day
and see my boy, and make myself known to him, on his own ground.”

He laid his hand on my shoulder. I shuddered at the thought that for
anything I knew, his hand might be stained with blood.

“It warn't easy, Pip, for me to leave them parts, nor yet it warn't
safe. But I held to it, and the harder it was, the stronger I held, for
I was determined, and my mind firm made up. At last I done it. Dear boy,
I done it!”

I tried to collect my thoughts, but I was stunned. Throughout, I had
seemed to myself to attend more to the wind and the rain than to him;
even now, I could not separate his voice from those voices, though those
were loud and his was silent.

“Where will you put me?” he asked, presently. “I must be put somewheres,
dear boy.”

“To sleep?” said I.

“Yes. And to sleep long and sound,” he answered; “for I've been
sea-tossed and sea-washed, months and months.”

“My friend and companion,” said I, rising from the sofa, “is absent; you
must have his room.”

“He won't come back to-morrow; will he?”

“No,” said I, answering almost mechanically, in spite of my utmost
efforts; “not to-morrow.”

“Because, look'ee here, dear boy,” he said, dropping his voice, and
laying a long finger on my breast in an impressive manner, “caution is
necessary.”

“How do you mean? Caution?”

“By G----, it's Death!”

“What's death?”

“I was sent for life. It's death to come back. There's been overmuch
coming back of late years, and I should of a certainty be hanged if
took.”

Nothing was needed but this; the wretched man, after loading wretched me
with his gold and silver chains for years, had risked his life to come
to me, and I held it there in my keeping! If I had loved him instead
of abhorring him; if I had been attracted to him by the strongest
admiration and affection, instead of shrinking from him with the
strongest repugnance; it could have been no worse. On the contrary, it
would have been better, for his preservation would then have naturally
and tenderly addressed my heart.

My first care was to close the shutters, so that no light might be seen
from without, and then to close and make fast the doors. While I did so,
he stood at the table drinking rum and eating biscuit; and when I saw
him thus engaged, I saw my convict on the marshes at his meal again. It
almost seemed to me as if he must stoop down presently, to file at his
leg.

When I had gone into Herbert's room, and had shut off any other
communication between it and the staircase than through the room in
which our conversation had been held, I asked him if he would go to bed?
He said yes, but asked me for some of my “gentleman's linen” to put
on in the morning. I brought it out, and laid it ready for him, and my
blood again ran cold when he again took me by both hands to give me good
night.

I got away from him, without knowing how I did it, and mended the fire
in the room where we had been together, and sat down by it, afraid to go
to bed. For an hour or more, I remained too stunned to think; and it
was not until I began to think, that I began fully to know how wrecked I
was, and how the ship in which I had sailed was gone to pieces.

Miss Havisham's intentions towards me, all a mere dream; Estella not
designed for me; I only suffered in Satis House as a convenience, a
sting for the greedy relations, a model with a mechanical heart to
practise on when no other practice was at hand; those were the first
smarts I had. But, sharpest and deepest pain of all,--it was for the
convict, guilty of I knew not what crimes, and liable to be taken out
of those rooms where I sat thinking, and hanged at the Old Bailey door,
that I had deserted Joe.

I would not have gone back to Joe now, I would not have gone back to
Biddy now, for any consideration; simply, I suppose, because my sense of
my own worthless conduct to them was greater than every consideration.
No wisdom on earth could have given me the comfort that I should have
derived from their simplicity and fidelity; but I could never, never,
undo what I had done.

In every rage of wind and rush of rain, I heard pursuers. Twice, I could
have sworn there was a knocking and whispering at the outer door. With
these fears upon me, I began either to imagine or recall that I had had
mysterious warnings of this man's approach. That, for weeks gone by, I
had passed faces in the streets which I had thought like his. That these
likenesses had grown more numerous, as he, coming over the sea, had
drawn nearer. That his wicked spirit had somehow sent these messengers
to mine, and that now on this stormy night he was as good as his word,
and with me.

Crowding up with these reflections came the reflection that I had seen
him with my childish eyes to be a desperately violent man; that I had
heard that other convict reiterate that he had tried to murder him; that
I had seen him down in the ditch tearing and fighting like a wild
beast. Out of such remembrances I brought into the light of the fire a
half-formed terror that it might not be safe to be shut up there with
him in the dead of the wild solitary night. This dilated until it filled
the room, and impelled me to take a candle and go in and look at my
dreadful burden.

He had rolled a handkerchief round his head, and his face was set and
lowering in his sleep. But he was asleep, and quietly too, though he had
a pistol lying on the pillow. Assured of this, I softly removed the key
to the outside of his door, and turned it on him before I again sat down
by the fire. Gradually I slipped from the chair and lay on the floor.
When I awoke without having parted in my sleep with the perception of
my wretchedness, the clocks of the Eastward churches were striking five,
the candles were wasted out, the fire was dead, and the wind and rain
intensified the thick black darkness.

THIS IS THE END OF THE SECOND STAGE OF PIP'S EXPECTATIONS.




Chapter XL

It was fortunate for me that I had to take precautions to ensure (so far
as I could) the safety of my dreaded visitor; for, this thought pressing
on me when I awoke, held other thoughts in a confused concourse at a
distance.

The impossibility of keeping him concealed in the chambers was
self-evident. It could not be done, and the attempt to do it would
inevitably engender suspicion. True, I had no Avenger in my service now,
but I was looked after by an inflammatory old female, assisted by an
animated rag-bag whom she called her niece, and to keep a room secret
from them would be to invite curiosity and exaggeration. They both had
weak eyes, which I had long attributed to their chronically looking in
at keyholes, and they were always at hand when not wanted; indeed that
was their only reliable quality besides larceny. Not to get up a mystery
with these people, I resolved to announce in the morning that my uncle
had unexpectedly come from the country.

This course I decided on while I was yet groping about in the darkness
for the means of getting a light. Not stumbling on the means after all,
I was fain to go out to the adjacent Lodge and get the watchman there to
come with his lantern. Now, in groping my way down the black staircase I
fell over something, and that something was a man crouching in a corner.

As the man made no answer when I asked him what he did there, but eluded
my touch in silence, I ran to the Lodge and urged the watchman to come
quickly; telling him of the incident on the way back. The wind being as
fierce as ever, we did not care to endanger the light in the lantern by
rekindling the extinguished lamps on the staircase, but we examined the
staircase from the bottom to the top and found no one there. It then
occurred to me as possible that the man might have slipped into my
rooms; so, lighting my candle at the watchman's, and leaving him
standing at the door, I examined them carefully, including the room in
which my dreaded guest lay asleep. All was quiet, and assuredly no other
man was in those chambers.

It troubled me that there should have been a lurker on the stairs, on
that night of all nights in the year, and I asked the watchman, on the
chance of eliciting some hopeful explanation as I handed him a dram
at the door, whether he had admitted at his gate any gentleman who had
perceptibly been dining out? Yes, he said; at different times of the
night, three. One lived in Fountain Court, and the other two lived in
the Lane, and he had seen them all go home. Again, the only other man
who dwelt in the house of which my chambers formed a part had been in
the country for some weeks, and he certainly had not returned in the
night, because we had seen his door with his seal on it as we came
upstairs.

“The night being so bad, sir,” said the watchman, as he gave me back
my glass, “uncommon few have come in at my gate. Besides them three
gentlemen that I have named, I don't call to mind another since about
eleven o'clock, when a stranger asked for you.”

“My uncle,” I muttered. “Yes.”

“You saw him, sir?”

“Yes. Oh yes.”

“Likewise the person with him?”

“Person with him!” I repeated.

“I judged the person to be with him,” returned the watchman. “The person
stopped, when he stopped to make inquiry of me, and the person took this
way when he took this way.”

“What sort of person?”

The watchman had not particularly noticed; he should say a working
person; to the best of his belief, he had a dust-colored kind of clothes
on, under a dark coat. The watchman made more light of the matter than I
did, and naturally; not having my reason for attaching weight to it.

When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do without
prolonging explanations, my mind was much troubled by these two
circumstances taken together. Whereas they were easy of innocent
solution apart,--as, for instance, some diner out or diner at home,
who had not gone near this watchman's gate, might have strayed to my
staircase and dropped asleep there,--and my nameless visitor might have
brought some one with him to show him the way,--still, joined, they had
an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear as the changes of a
few hours had made me.

I lighted my fire, which burnt with a raw pale flare at that time of the
morning, and fell into a doze before it. I seemed to have been dozing a
whole night when the clocks struck six. As there was full an hour and
a half between me and daylight, I dozed again; now, waking up uneasily,
with prolix conversations about nothing, in my ears; now, making thunder
of the wind in the chimney; at length, falling off into a profound sleep
from which the daylight woke me with a start.

All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation, nor
could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to it. I was greatly
dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale sort of way.
As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon have formed an
elephant. When I opened the shutters and looked out at the wet wild
morning, all of a leaden hue; when I walked from room to room; when I
sat down again shivering, before the fire, waiting for my laundress to
appear; I thought how miserable I was, but hardly knew why, or how long
I had been so, or on what day of the week I made the reflection, or even
who I was that made it.

At last, the old woman and the niece came in,--the latter with a head
not easily distinguishable from her dusty broom,--and testified surprise
at sight of me and the fire. To whom I imparted how my uncle had come in
the night and was then asleep, and how the breakfast preparations were
to be modified accordingly. Then I washed and dressed while they knocked
the furniture about and made a dust; and so, in a sort of dream
or sleep-waking, I found myself sitting by the fire again, waiting
for--Him--to come to breakfast.

By and by, his door opened and he came out. I could not bring myself to
bear the sight of him, and I thought he had a worse look by daylight.

“I do not even know,” said I, speaking low as he took his seat at the
table, “by what name to call you. I have given out that you are my
uncle.”

“That's it, dear boy! Call me uncle.”

“You assumed some name, I suppose, on board ship?”

“Yes, dear boy. I took the name of Provis.”

“Do you mean to keep that name?”

“Why, yes, dear boy, it's as good as another,--unless you'd like
another.”

“What is your real name?” I asked him in a whisper.

“Magwitch,” he answered, in the same tone; “chrisen'd Abel.”

“What were you brought up to be?”

“A warmint, dear boy.”

He answered quite seriously, and used the word as if it denoted some
profession.

“When you came into the Temple last night--” said I, pausing to wonder
whether that could really have been last night, which seemed so long
ago.

“Yes, dear boy?”

“When you came in at the gate and asked the watchman the way here, had
you any one with you?”

“With me? No, dear boy.”

“But there was some one there?”

“I didn't take particular notice,” he said, dubiously, “not knowing the
ways of the place. But I think there was a person, too, come in alonger
me.”

“Are you known in London?”

“I hope not!” said he, giving his neck a jerk with his forefinger that
made me turn hot and sick.

“Were you known in London, once?”

“Not over and above, dear boy. I was in the provinces mostly.”

“Were you--tried--in London?”

“Which time?” said he, with a sharp look.

“The last time.”

He nodded. “First knowed Mr. Jaggers that way. Jaggers was for me.”

It was on my lips to ask him what he was tried for, but he took up
a knife, gave it a flourish, and with the words, “And what I done is
worked out and paid for!” fell to at his breakfast.

He ate in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable, and all his actions
were uncouth, noisy, and greedy. Some of his teeth had failed him since
I saw him eat on the marshes, and as he turned his food in his mouth,
and turned his head sideways to bring his strongest fangs to bear upon
it, he looked terribly like a hungry old dog. If I had begun with any
appetite, he would have taken it away, and I should have sat much as
I did,--repelled from him by an insurmountable aversion, and gloomily
looking at the cloth.

“I'm a heavy grubber, dear boy,” he said, as a polite kind of apology
when he made an end of his meal, “but I always was. If it had been in
my constitution to be a lighter grubber, I might ha' got into lighter
trouble. Similarly, I must have my smoke. When I was first hired out as
shepherd t'other side the world, it's my belief I should ha' turned into
a molloncolly-mad sheep myself, if I hadn't a had my smoke.”

As he said so, he got up from table, and putting his hand into the
breast of the pea-coat he wore, brought out a short black pipe, and a
handful of loose tobacco of the kind that is called Negro-head. Having
filled his pipe, he put the surplus tobacco back again, as if his pocket
were a drawer. Then, he took a live coal from the fire with the tongs,
and lighted his pipe at it, and then turned round on the hearth-rug with
his back to the fire, and went through his favorite action of holding
out both his hands for mine.

“And this,” said he, dandling my hands up and down in his, as he puffed
at his pipe,--“and this is the gentleman what I made! The real genuine
One! It does me good fur to look at you, Pip. All I stip'late, is, to
stand by and look at you, dear boy!”

I released my hands as soon as I could, and found that I was beginning
slowly to settle down to the contemplation of my condition. What I was
chained to, and how heavily, became intelligible to me, as I heard his
hoarse voice, and sat looking up at his furrowed bald head with its iron
gray hair at the sides.

“I mustn't see my gentleman a footing it in the mire of the streets;
there mustn't be no mud on his boots. My gentleman must have horses,
Pip! Horses to ride, and horses to drive, and horses for his servant
to ride and drive as well. Shall colonists have their horses (and blood
'uns, if you please, good Lord!) and not my London gentleman? No, no.
We'll show 'em another pair of shoes than that, Pip; won't us?”

He took out of his pocket a great thick pocket-book, bursting with
papers, and tossed it on the table.

“There's something worth spending in that there book, dear boy. It's
yourn. All I've got ain't mine; it's yourn. Don't you be afeerd on it.
There's more where that come from. I've come to the old country fur
to see my gentleman spend his money like a gentleman. That'll be my
pleasure. My pleasure 'ull be fur to see him do it. And blast you all!”
 he wound up, looking round the room and snapping his fingers once with
a loud snap, “blast you every one, from the judge in his wig, to the
colonist a stirring up the dust, I'll show a better gentleman than the
whole kit on you put together!”

“Stop!” said I, almost in a frenzy of fear and dislike, “I want to speak
to you. I want to know what is to be done. I want to know how you are to
be kept out of danger, how long you are going to stay, what projects you
have.”

“Look'ee here, Pip,” said he, laying his hand on my arm in a suddenly
altered and subdued manner; “first of all, look'ee here. I forgot myself
half a minute ago. What I said was low; that's what it was; low. Look'ee
here, Pip. Look over it. I ain't a going to be low.”

“First,” I resumed, half groaning, “what precautions can be taken
against your being recognized and seized?”

“No, dear boy,” he said, in the same tone as before, “that don't
go first. Lowness goes first. I ain't took so many year to make a
gentleman, not without knowing what's due to him. Look'ee here, Pip. I
was low; that's what I was; low. Look over it, dear boy.”

Some sense of the grimly-ludicrous moved me to a fretful laugh, as I
replied, “I have looked over it. In Heaven's name, don't harp upon it!”

“Yes, but look'ee here,” he persisted. “Dear boy, I ain't come so fur,
not fur to be low. Now, go on, dear boy. You was a saying--”

“How are you to be guarded from the danger you have incurred?”

“Well, dear boy, the danger ain't so great. Without I was informed
agen, the danger ain't so much to signify. There's Jaggers, and there's
Wemmick, and there's you. Who else is there to inform?”

“Is there no chance person who might identify you in the street?” said
I.

“Well,” he returned, “there ain't many. Nor yet I don't intend to
advertise myself in the newspapers by the name of A.M. come back from
Botany Bay; and years have rolled away, and who's to gain by it? Still,
look'ee here, Pip. If the danger had been fifty times as great, I should
ha' come to see you, mind you, just the same.”

“And how long do you remain?”

“How long?” said he, taking his black pipe from his mouth, and dropping
his jaw as he stared at me. “I'm not a going back. I've come for good.”

“Where are you to live?” said I. “What is to be done with you? Where
will you be safe?”

“Dear boy,” he returned, “there's disguising wigs can be bought
for money, and there's hair powder, and spectacles, and black
clothes,--shorts and what not. Others has done it safe afore, and what
others has done afore, others can do agen. As to the where and how of
living, dear boy, give me your own opinions on it.”

“You take it smoothly now,” said I, “but you were very serious last
night, when you swore it was Death.”

“And so I swear it is Death,” said he, putting his pipe back in his
mouth, “and Death by the rope, in the open street not fur from this, and
it's serious that you should fully understand it to be so. What then,
when that's once done? Here I am. To go back now 'ud be as bad as to
stand ground--worse. Besides, Pip, I'm here, because I've meant it by
you, years and years. As to what I dare, I'm a old bird now, as has
dared all manner of traps since first he was fledged, and I'm not afeerd
to perch upon a scarecrow. If there's Death hid inside of it, there is,
and let him come out, and I'll face him, and then I'll believe in him
and not afore. And now let me have a look at my gentleman agen.”

Once more, he took me by both hands and surveyed me with an air of
admiring proprietorship: smoking with great complacency all the while.

It appeared to me that I could do no better than secure him some
quiet lodging hard by, of which he might take possession when Herbert
returned: whom I expected in two or three days. That the secret must
be confided to Herbert as a matter of unavoidable necessity, even if I
could have put the immense relief I should derive from sharing it with
him out of the question, was plain to me. But it was by no means so
plain to Mr. Provis (I resolved to call him by that name), who reserved
his consent to Herbert's participation until he should have seen him
and formed a favorable judgment of his physiognomy. “And even then, dear
boy,” said he, pulling a greasy little clasped black Testament out of
his pocket, “we'll have him on his oath.”

To state that my terrible patron carried this little black book about
the world solely to swear people on in cases of emergency, would be to
state what I never quite established; but this I can say, that I never
knew him put it to any other use. The book itself had the appearance of
having been stolen from some court of justice, and perhaps his knowledge
of its antecedents, combined with his own experience in that wise, gave
him a reliance on its powers as a sort of legal spell or charm. On this
first occasion of his producing it, I recalled how he had made me swear
fidelity in the churchyard long ago, and how he had described himself
last night as always swearing to his resolutions in his solitude.

As he was at present dressed in a seafaring slop suit, in which he
looked as if he had some parrots and cigars to dispose of, I next
discussed with him what dress he should wear. He cherished an
extraordinary belief in the virtues of “shorts” as a disguise, and had
in his own mind sketched a dress for himself that would have made
him something between a dean and a dentist. It was with considerable
difficulty that I won him over to the assumption of a dress more like a
prosperous farmer's; and we arranged that he should cut his hair close,
and wear a little powder. Lastly, as he had not yet been seen by the
laundress or her niece, he was to keep himself out of their view until
his change of dress was made.

It would seem a simple matter to decide on these precautions; but in my
dazed, not to say distracted, state, it took so long, that I did not
get out to further them until two or three in the afternoon. He was to
remain shut up in the chambers while I was gone, and was on no account
to open the door.

There being to my knowledge a respectable lodging-house in Essex Street,
the back of which looked into the Temple, and was almost within hail of
my windows, I first of all repaired to that house, and was so fortunate
as to secure the second floor for my uncle, Mr. Provis. I then went from
shop to shop, making such purchases as were necessary to the change in
his appearance. This business transacted, I turned my face, on my own
account, to Little Britain. Mr. Jaggers was at his desk, but, seeing me
enter, got up immediately and stood before his fire.

“Now, Pip,” said he, “be careful.”

“I will, sir,” I returned. For, coming along I had thought well of what
I was going to say.

“Don't commit yourself,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and don't commit any one.
You understand--any one. Don't tell me anything: I don't want to know
anything; I am not curious.”

Of course I saw that he knew the man was come.

“I merely want, Mr. Jaggers,” said I, “to assure myself that what I have
been told is true. I have no hope of its being untrue, but at least I
may verify it.”

Mr. Jaggers nodded. “But did you say 'told' or 'informed'?” he asked
me, with his head on one side, and not looking at me, but looking in
a listening way at the floor. “Told would seem to imply verbal
communication. You can't have verbal communication with a man in New
South Wales, you know.”

“I will say, informed, Mr. Jaggers.”

“Good.”

“I have been informed by a person named Abel Magwitch, that he is the
benefactor so long unknown to me.”

“That is the man,” said Mr. Jaggers, “in New South Wales.”

“And only he?” said I.

“And only he,” said Mr. Jaggers.

“I am not so unreasonable, sir, as to think you at all responsible for
my mistakes and wrong conclusions; but I always supposed it was Miss
Havisham.”

“As you say, Pip,” returned Mr. Jaggers, turning his eyes upon
me coolly, and taking a bite at his forefinger, “I am not at all
responsible for that.”

“And yet it looked so like it, sir,” I pleaded with a downcast heart.

“Not a particle of evidence, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, shaking his head
and gathering up his skirts. “Take nothing on its looks; take everything
on evidence. There's no better rule.”

“I have no more to say,” said I, with a sigh, after standing silent for
a little while. “I have verified my information, and there's an end.”

“And Magwitch--in New South Wales--having at last disclosed himself,”
 said Mr. Jaggers, “you will comprehend, Pip, how rigidly throughout
my communication with you, I have always adhered to the strict line of
fact. There has never been the least departure from the strict line of
fact. You are quite aware of that?”

“Quite, sir.”

“I communicated to Magwitch--in New South Wales--when he first wrote to
me--from New South Wales--the caution that he must not expect me ever to
deviate from the strict line of fact. I also communicated to him another
caution. He appeared to me to have obscurely hinted in his letter at
some distant idea he had of seeing you in England here. I cautioned
him that I must hear no more of that; that he was not at all likely to
obtain a pardon; that he was expatriated for the term of his natural
life; and that his presenting himself in this country would be an act of
felony, rendering him liable to the extreme penalty of the law. I gave
Magwitch that caution,” said Mr. Jaggers, looking hard at me; “I wrote
it to New South Wales. He guided himself by it, no doubt.”

“No doubt,” said I.

“I have been informed by Wemmick,” pursued Mr. Jaggers, still looking
hard at me, “that he has received a letter, under date Portsmouth, from
a colonist of the name of Purvis, or--”

“Or Provis,” I suggested.

“Or Provis--thank you, Pip. Perhaps it is Provis? Perhaps you know it's
Provis?”

“Yes,” said I.

“You know it's Provis. A letter, under date Portsmouth, from a colonist
of the name of Provis, asking for the particulars of your address, on
behalf of Magwitch. Wemmick sent him the particulars, I understand, by
return of post. Probably it is through Provis that you have received the
explanation of Magwitch--in New South Wales?”

“It came through Provis,” I replied.

“Good day, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, offering his hand; “glad to have
seen you. In writing by post to Magwitch--in New South Wales--or in
communicating with him through Provis, have the goodness to mention that
the particulars and vouchers of our long account shall be sent to you,
together with the balance; for there is still a balance remaining. Good
day, Pip!”

We shook hands, and he looked hard at me as long as he could see me. I
turned at the door, and he was still looking hard at me, while the two
vile casts on the shelf seemed to be trying to get their eyelids open,
and to force out of their swollen throats, “O, what a man he is!”

Wemmick was out, and though he had been at his desk he could have done
nothing for me. I went straight back to the Temple, where I found
the terrible Provis drinking rum and water and smoking negro-head, in
safety.

Next day the clothes I had ordered all came home, and he put them on.
Whatever he put on, became him less (it dismally seemed to me) than what
he had worn before. To my thinking, there was something in him that made
it hopeless to attempt to disguise him. The more I dressed him and the
better I dressed him, the more he looked like the slouching fugitive on
the marshes. This effect on my anxious fancy was partly referable, no
doubt, to his old face and manner growing more familiar to me; but I
believe too that he dragged one of his legs as if there were still a
weight of iron on it, and that from head to foot there was Convict in
the very grain of the man.

The influences of his solitary hut-life were upon him besides, and
gave him a savage air that no dress could tame; added to these were the
influences of his subsequent branded life among men, and, crowning all,
his consciousness that he was dodging and hiding now. In all his ways of
sitting and standing, and eating and drinking,--of brooding about in a
high-shouldered reluctant style,--of taking out his great horn-handled
jackknife and wiping it on his legs and cutting his food,--of
lifting light glasses and cups to his lips, as if they were clumsy
pannikins,--of chopping a wedge off his bread, and soaking up with it
the last fragments of gravy round and round his plate, as if to make the
most of an allowance, and then drying his finger-ends on it, and then
swallowing it,--in these ways and a thousand other small nameless
instances arising every minute in the day, there was Prisoner, Felon,
Bondsman, plain as plain could be.

It had been his own idea to wear that touch of powder, and I had
conceded the powder after overcoming the shorts. But I can compare the
effect of it, when on, to nothing but the probable effect of rouge upon
the dead; so awful was the manner in which everything in him that it was
most desirable to repress, started through that thin layer of pretence,
and seemed to come blazing out at the crown of his head. It was
abandoned as soon as tried, and he wore his grizzled hair cut short.

Words cannot tell what a sense I had, at the same time, of the dreadful
mystery that he was to me. When he fell asleep of an evening, with his
knotted hands clenching the sides of the easy-chair, and his bald head
tattooed with deep wrinkles falling forward on his breast, I would sit
and look at him, wondering what he had done, and loading him with all
the crimes in the Calendar, until the impulse was powerful on me to
start up and fly from him. Every hour so increased my abhorrence of
him, that I even think I might have yielded to this impulse in the first
agonies of being so haunted, notwithstanding all he had done for me and
the risk he ran, but for the knowledge that Herbert must soon come back.
Once, I actually did start out of bed in the night, and begin to dress
myself in my worst clothes, hurriedly intending to leave him there with
everything else I possessed, and enlist for India as a private soldier.

I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me, up in those
lonely rooms in the long evenings and long nights, with the wind and the
rain always rushing by. A ghost could not have been taken and hanged on
my account, and the consideration that he could be, and the dread that
he would be, were no small addition to my horrors. When he was not
asleep, or playing a complicated kind of Patience with a ragged pack of
cards of his own,--a game that I never saw before or since, and in which
he recorded his winnings by sticking his jackknife into the table,--when
he was not engaged in either of these pursuits, he would ask me to
read to him,--“Foreign language, dear boy!” While I complied, he, not
comprehending a single word, would stand before the fire surveying me
with the air of an Exhibitor, and I would see him, between the fingers
of the hand with which I shaded my face, appealing in dumb show to
the furniture to take notice of my proficiency. The imaginary student
pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more
wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling
from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the
fonder he was of me.

This is written of, I am sensible, as if it had lasted a year. It lasted
about five days. Expecting Herbert all the time, I dared not go out,
except when I took Provis for an airing after dark. At length, one
evening when dinner was over and I had dropped into a slumber quite
worn out,--for my nights had been agitated and my rest broken by fearful
dreams,--I was roused by the welcome footstep on the staircase. Provis,
who had been asleep too, staggered up at the noise I made, and in an
instant I saw his jackknife shining in his hand.

“Quiet! It's Herbert!” I said; and Herbert came bursting in, with the
airy freshness of six hundred miles of France upon him.

“Handel, my dear fellow, how are you, and again how are you, and again
how are you? I seem to have been gone a twelvemonth! Why, so I must have
been, for you have grown quite thin and pale! Handel, my--Halloa! I beg
your pardon.”

He was stopped in his running on and in his shaking hands with me, by
seeing Provis. Provis, regarding him with a fixed attention, was slowly
putting up his jackknife, and groping in another pocket for something
else.

“Herbert, my dear friend,” said I, shutting the double doors, while
Herbert stood staring and wondering, “something very strange has
happened. This is--a visitor of mine.”

“It's all right, dear boy!” said Provis coming forward, with his little
clasped black book, and then addressing himself to Herbert. “Take it in
your right hand. Lord strike you dead on the spot, if ever you split in
any way sumever! Kiss it!”

“Do so, as he wishes it,” I said to Herbert. So, Herbert, looking at
me with a friendly uneasiness and amazement, complied, and Provis
immediately shaking hands with him, said, “Now you're on your oath, you
know. And never believe me on mine, if Pip shan't make a gentleman on
you!”




Chapter XLI

In vain should I attempt to describe the astonishment and disquiet
of Herbert, when he and I and Provis sat down before the fire, and I
recounted the whole of the secret. Enough, that I saw my own feelings
reflected in Herbert's face, and not least among them, my repugnance
towards the man who had done so much for me.

What would alone have set a division between that man and us, if there
had been no other dividing circumstance, was his triumph in my story.
Saving his troublesome sense of having been “low” on one occasion since
his return,--on which point he began to hold forth to Herbert, the
moment my revelation was finished,--he had no perception of the
possibility of my finding any fault with my good fortune. His boast that
he had made me a gentleman, and that he had come to see me support the
character on his ample resources, was made for me quite as much as for
himself. And that it was a highly agreeable boast to both of us,
and that we must both be very proud of it, was a conclusion quite
established in his own mind.

“Though, look'ee here, Pip's comrade,” he said to Herbert, after having
discoursed for some time, “I know very well that once since I come
back--for half a minute--I've been low. I said to Pip, I knowed as I had
been low. But don't you fret yourself on that score. I ain't made Pip a
gentleman, and Pip ain't a going to make you a gentleman, not fur me not
to know what's due to ye both. Dear boy, and Pip's comrade, you two may
count upon me always having a gen-teel muzzle on. Muzzled I have been
since that half a minute when I was betrayed into lowness, muzzled I am
at the present time, muzzled I ever will be.”

Herbert said, “Certainly,” but looked as if there were no specific
consolation in this, and remained perplexed and dismayed. We were
anxious for the time when he would go to his lodging and leave us
together, but he was evidently jealous of leaving us together, and sat
late. It was midnight before I took him round to Essex Street, and
saw him safely in at his own dark door. When it closed upon him, I
experienced the first moment of relief I had known since the night of
his arrival.

Never quite free from an uneasy remembrance of the man on the stairs,
I had always looked about me in taking my guest out after dark, and in
bringing him back; and I looked about me now. Difficult as it is in a
large city to avoid the suspicion of being watched, when the mind is
conscious of danger in that regard, I could not persuade myself that any
of the people within sight cared about my movements. The few who were
passing passed on their several ways, and the street was empty when I
turned back into the Temple. Nobody had come out at the gate with us,
nobody went in at the gate with me. As I crossed by the fountain, I saw
his lighted back windows looking bright and quiet, and, when I stood for
a few moments in the doorway of the building where I lived, before going
up the stairs, Garden Court was as still and lifeless as the staircase
was when I ascended it.

Herbert received me with open arms, and I had never felt before so
blessedly what it is to have a friend. When he had spoken some sound
words of sympathy and encouragement, we sat down to consider the
question, What was to be done?

The chair that Provis had occupied still remaining where it had
stood,--for he had a barrack way with him of hanging about one spot, in
one unsettled manner, and going through one round of observances with
his pipe and his negro-head and his jackknife and his pack of cards,
and what not, as if it were all put down for him on a slate,--I say his
chair remaining where it had stood, Herbert unconsciously took it, but
next moment started out of it, pushed it away, and took another. He had
no occasion to say after that that he had conceived an aversion for my
patron, neither had I occasion to confess my own. We interchanged that
confidence without shaping a syllable.

“What,” said I to Herbert, when he was safe in another chair,--“what is
to be done?”

“My poor dear Handel,” he replied, holding his head, “I am too stunned
to think.”

“So was I, Herbert, when the blow first fell. Still, something must be
done. He is intent upon various new expenses,--horses, and carriages,
and lavish appearances of all kinds. He must be stopped somehow.”

“You mean that you can't accept--”

“How can I?” I interposed, as Herbert paused. “Think of him! Look at
him!”

An involuntary shudder passed over both of us.

“Yet I am afraid the dreadful truth is, Herbert, that he is attached to
me, strongly attached to me. Was there ever such a fate!”

“My poor dear Handel,” Herbert repeated.

“Then,” said I, “after all, stopping short here, never taking another
penny from him, think what I owe him already! Then again: I am heavily
in debt,--very heavily for me, who have now no expectations,--and I have
been bred to no calling, and I am fit for nothing.”

“Well, well, well!” Herbert remonstrated. “Don't say fit for nothing.”

“What am I fit for? I know only one thing that I am fit for, and that
is, to go for a soldier. And I might have gone, my dear Herbert, but for
the prospect of taking counsel with your friendship and affection.”

Of course I broke down there: and of course Herbert, beyond seizing a
warm grip of my hand, pretended not to know it.

“Anyhow, my dear Handel,” said he presently, “soldiering won't do. If
you were to renounce this patronage and these favors, I suppose you
would do so with some faint hope of one day repaying what you have
already had. Not very strong, that hope, if you went soldiering!
Besides, it's absurd. You would be infinitely better in Clarriker's
house, small as it is. I am working up towards a partnership, you know.”

Poor fellow! He little suspected with whose money.

“But there is another question,” said Herbert. “This is an ignorant,
determined man, who has long had one fixed idea. More than that, he
seems to me (I may misjudge him) to be a man of a desperate and fierce
character.”

“I know he is,” I returned. “Let me tell you what evidence I have seen
of it.” And I told him what I had not mentioned in my narrative, of that
encounter with the other convict.

“See, then,” said Herbert; “think of this! He comes here at the peril
of his life, for the realization of his fixed idea. In the moment of
realization, after all his toil and waiting, you cut the ground from
under his feet, destroy his idea, and make his gains worthless to him.
Do you see nothing that he might do, under the disappointment?”

“I have seen it, Herbert, and dreamed of it, ever since the fatal night
of his arrival. Nothing has been in my thoughts so distinctly as his
putting himself in the way of being taken.”

“Then you may rely upon it,” said Herbert, “that there would be great
danger of his doing it. That is his power over you as long as he remains
in England, and that would be his reckless course if you forsook him.”

I was so struck by the horror of this idea, which had weighed upon
me from the first, and the working out of which would make me regard
myself, in some sort, as his murderer, that I could not rest in my
chair, but began pacing to and fro. I said to Herbert, meanwhile, that
even if Provis were recognized and taken, in spite of himself, I should
be wretched as the cause, however innocently. Yes; even though I was so
wretched in having him at large and near me, and even though I would
far rather have worked at the forge all the days of my life than I would
ever have come to this!

But there was no staving off the question, What was to be done?

“The first and the main thing to be done,” said Herbert, “is to get him
out of England. You will have to go with him, and then he may be induced
to go.”

“But get him where I will, could I prevent his coming back?”

“My good Handel, is it not obvious that with Newgate in the next street,
there must be far greater hazard in your breaking your mind to him and
making him reckless, here, than elsewhere? If a pretext to get him away
could be made out of that other convict, or out of anything else in his
life, now.”

“There, again!” said I, stopping before Herbert, with my open hands held
out, as if they contained the desperation of the case. “I know nothing
of his life. It has almost made me mad to sit here of a night and see
him before me, so bound up with my fortunes and misfortunes, and yet so
unknown to me, except as the miserable wretch who terrified me two days
in my childhood!”

Herbert got up, and linked his arm in mine, and we slowly walked to and
fro together, studying the carpet.

“Handel,” said Herbert, stopping, “you feel convinced that you can take
no further benefits from him; do you?”

“Fully. Surely you would, too, if you were in my place?”

“And you feel convinced that you must break with him?”

“Herbert, can you ask me?”

“And you have, and are bound to have, that tenderness for the life he
has risked on your account, that you must save him, if possible, from
throwing it away. Then you must get him out of England before you stir a
finger to extricate yourself. That done, extricate yourself, in Heaven's
name, and we'll see it out together, dear old boy.”

It was a comfort to shake hands upon it, and walk up and down again,
with only that done.

“Now, Herbert,” said I, “with reference to gaining some knowledge of
his history. There is but one way that I know of. I must ask him point
blank.”

“Yes. Ask him,” said Herbert, “when we sit at breakfast in the morning.”
 For he had said, on taking leave of Herbert, that he would come to
breakfast with us.

With this project formed, we went to bed. I had the wildest dreams
concerning him, and woke unrefreshed; I woke, too, to recover the fear
which I had lost in the night, of his being found out as a returned
transport. Waking, I never lost that fear.

He came round at the appointed time, took out his jackknife, and sat
down to his meal. He was full of plans “for his gentleman's coming out
strong, and like a gentleman,” and urged me to begin speedily upon
the pocket-book which he had left in my possession. He considered the
chambers and his own lodging as temporary residences, and advised me to
look out at once for a “fashionable crib” near Hyde Park, in which he
could have “a shake-down.” When he had made an end of his breakfast,
and was wiping his knife on his leg, I said to him, without a word of
preface,--

“After you were gone last night, I told my friend of the struggle that
the soldiers found you engaged in on the marshes, when we came up. You
remember?”

“Remember!” said he. “I think so!”

“We want to know something about that man--and about you. It is strange
to know no more about either, and particularly you, than I was able to
tell last night. Is not this as good a time as another for our knowing
more?”

“Well!” he said, after consideration. “You're on your oath, you know,
Pip's comrade?”

“Assuredly,” replied Herbert.

“As to anything I say, you know,” he insisted. “The oath applies to
all.”

“I understand it to do so.”

“And look'ee here! Wotever I done is worked out and paid for,” he
insisted again.

“So be it.”

He took out his black pipe and was going to fill it with negro-head,
when, looking at the tangle of tobacco in his hand, he seemed to think
it might perplex the thread of his narrative. He put it back again,
stuck his pipe in a button-hole of his coat, spread a hand on each knee,
and after turning an angry eye on the fire for a few silent moments,
looked round at us and said what follows.




Chapter XLII

“Dear boy and Pip's comrade. I am not a going fur to tell you my life
like a song, or a story-book. But to give it you short and handy, I'll
put it at once into a mouthful of English. In jail and out of jail, in
jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail. There, you've got it.
That's my life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off,
arter Pip stood my friend.

“I've been done everything to, pretty well--except hanged. I've been
locked up as much as a silver tea-kittle. I've been carted here and
carted there, and put out of this town, and put out of that town, and
stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove. I've no more
notion where I was born than you have--if so much. I first become aware
of myself down in Essex, a thieving turnips for my living. Summun had
run away from me--a man--a tinker--and he'd took the fire with him, and
left me wery cold.

“I know'd my name to be Magwitch, chrisen'd Abel. How did I know
it? Much as I know'd the birds' names in the hedges to be chaffinch,
sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it was all lies together, only as
the birds' names come out true, I supposed mine did.

“So fur as I could find, there warn't a soul that see young Abel
Magwitch, with us little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at him,
and either drove him off, or took him up. I was took up, took up, took
up, to that extent that I reg'larly grow'd up took up.

“This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as much
to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass, for there
warn't many insides of furnished houses known to me), I got the name of
being hardened. 'This is a terrible hardened one,' they says to prison
wisitors, picking out me. 'May be said to live in jails, this boy.' Then
they looked at me, and I looked at them, and they measured my head, some
on 'em,--they had better a measured my stomach,--and others on 'em giv
me tracts what I couldn't read, and made me speeches what I couldn't
understand. They always went on agen me about the Devil. But what
the Devil was I to do? I must put something into my stomach, mustn't
I?--Howsomever, I'm a getting low, and I know what's due. Dear boy and
Pip's comrade, don't you be afeerd of me being low.

“Tramping, begging, thieving, working sometimes when I could,--though
that warn't as often as you may think, till you put the question whether
you would ha' been over-ready to give me work yourselves,--a bit of a
poacher, a bit of a laborer, a bit of a wagoner, a bit of a haymaker,
a bit of a hawker, a bit of most things that don't pay and lead to
trouble, I got to be a man. A deserting soldier in a Traveller's Rest,
what lay hid up to the chin under a lot of taturs, learnt me to read;
and a travelling Giant what signed his name at a penny a time learnt me
to write. I warn't locked up as often now as formerly, but I wore out my
good share of key-metal still.

“At Epsom races, a matter of over twenty years ago, I got acquainted wi'
a man whose skull I'd crack wi' this poker, like the claw of a lobster,
if I'd got it on this hob. His right name was Compeyson; and that's the
man, dear boy, what you see me a pounding in the ditch, according to
what you truly told your comrade arter I was gone last night.

“He set up fur a gentleman, this Compeyson, and he'd been to a public
boarding-school and had learning. He was a smooth one to talk, and was
a dab at the ways of gentlefolks. He was good-looking too. It was the
night afore the great race, when I found him on the heath, in a booth
that I know'd on. Him and some more was a sitting among the tables when
I went in, and the landlord (which had a knowledge of me, and was a
sporting one) called him out, and said, 'I think this is a man that
might suit you,'--meaning I was.

“Compeyson, he looks at me very noticing, and I look at him. He has a
watch and a chain and a ring and a breast-pin and a handsome suit of
clothes.

“'To judge from appearances, you're out of luck,' says Compeyson to me.

“'Yes, master, and I've never been in it much.' (I had come out of
Kingston Jail last on a vagrancy committal. Not but what it might have
been for something else; but it warn't.)

“'Luck changes,' says Compeyson; 'perhaps yours is going to change.'

“I says, 'I hope it may be so. There's room.'

“'What can you do?' says Compeyson.

“'Eat and drink,' I says; 'if you'll find the materials.'

“Compeyson laughed, looked at me again very noticing, giv me five
shillings, and appointed me for next night. Same place.

“I went to Compeyson next night, same place, and Compeyson took me on
to be his man and pardner. And what was Compeyson's business in which we
was to go pardners? Compeyson's business was the swindling, handwriting
forging, stolen bank-note passing, and such-like. All sorts of traps as
Compeyson could set with his head, and keep his own legs out of and get
the profits from and let another man in for, was Compeyson's business.
He'd no more heart than a iron file, he was as cold as death, and he had
the head of the Devil afore mentioned.

“There was another in with Compeyson, as was called Arthur,--not as
being so chrisen'd, but as a surname. He was in a Decline, and was a
shadow to look at. Him and Compeyson had been in a bad thing with a
rich lady some years afore, and they'd made a pot of money by it; but
Compeyson betted and gamed, and he'd have run through the king's taxes.
So, Arthur was a dying, and a dying poor and with the horrors on him,
and Compeyson's wife (which Compeyson kicked mostly) was a having pity
on him when she could, and Compeyson was a having pity on nothing and
nobody.

“I might a took warning by Arthur, but I didn't; and I won't pretend I
was partick'ler--for where 'ud be the good on it, dear boy and comrade?
So I begun wi' Compeyson, and a poor tool I was in his hands. Arthur
lived at the top of Compeyson's house (over nigh Brentford it was), and
Compeyson kept a careful account agen him for board and lodging, in case
he should ever get better to work it out. But Arthur soon settled the
account. The second or third time as ever I see him, he come a tearing
down into Compeyson's parlor late at night, in only a flannel gown, with
his hair all in a sweat, and he says to Compeyson's wife, 'Sally, she
really is upstairs alonger me, now, and I can't get rid of her. She's
all in white,' he says, 'wi' white flowers in her hair, and she's awful
mad, and she's got a shroud hanging over her arm, and she says she'll
put it on me at five in the morning.'

“Says Compeyson: 'Why, you fool, don't you know she's got a living body?
And how should she be up there, without coming through the door, or in
at the window, and up the stairs?'

“'I don't know how she's there,' says Arthur, shivering dreadful with
the horrors, 'but she's standing in the corner at the foot of the bed,
awful mad. And over where her heart's broke--you broke it!--there's
drops of blood.'

“Compeyson spoke hardy, but he was always a coward. 'Go up alonger this
drivelling sick man,' he says to his wife, 'and Magwitch, lend her a
hand, will you?' But he never come nigh himself.

“Compeyson's wife and me took him up to bed agen, and he raved most
dreadful. 'Why look at her!' he cries out. 'She's a shaking the shroud
at me! Don't you see her? Look at her eyes! Ain't it awful to see her so
mad?' Next he cries, 'She'll put it on me, and then I'm done for! Take
it away from her, take it away!' And then he catched hold of us, and kep
on a talking to her, and answering of her, till I half believed I see
her myself.

“Compeyson's wife, being used to him, giv him some liquor to get the
horrors off, and by and by he quieted. 'O, she's gone! Has her keeper
been for her?' he says. 'Yes,' says Compeyson's wife. 'Did you tell him
to lock her and bar her in?' 'Yes.' 'And to take that ugly thing away
from her?' 'Yes, yes, all right.' 'You're a good creetur,' he says,
'don't leave me, whatever you do, and thank you!'

“He rested pretty quiet till it might want a few minutes of five, and
then he starts up with a scream, and screams out, 'Here she is! She's
got the shroud again. She's unfolding it. She's coming out of the
corner. She's coming to the bed. Hold me, both on you--one of each
side--don't let her touch me with it. Hah! she missed me that time.
Don't let her throw it over my shoulders. Don't let her lift me up to
get it round me. She's lifting me up. Keep me down!' Then he lifted
himself up hard, and was dead.

“Compeyson took it easy as a good riddance for both sides. Him and
me was soon busy, and first he swore me (being ever artful) on my own
book,--this here little black book, dear boy, what I swore your comrade
on.

“Not to go into the things that Compeyson planned, and I done--which 'ud
take a week--I'll simply say to you, dear boy, and Pip's comrade, that
that man got me into such nets as made me his black slave. I was always
in debt to him, always under his thumb, always a working, always a
getting into danger. He was younger than me, but he'd got craft, and
he'd got learning, and he overmatched me five hundred times told and
no mercy. My Missis as I had the hard time wi'--Stop though! I ain't
brought her in--”

He looked about him in a confused way, as if he had lost his place in
the book of his remembrance; and he turned his face to the fire, and
spread his hands broader on his knees, and lifted them off and put them
on again.

“There ain't no need to go into it,” he said, looking round once more.
“The time wi' Compeyson was a'most as hard a time as ever I had; that
said, all's said. Did I tell you as I was tried, alone, for misdemeanor,
while with Compeyson?”

I answered, No.

“Well!” he said, “I was, and got convicted. As to took up on suspicion,
that was twice or three times in the four or five year that it lasted;
but evidence was wanting. At last, me and Compeyson was both committed
for felony,--on a charge of putting stolen notes in circulation,--and
there was other charges behind. Compeyson says to me, 'Separate
defences, no communication,' and that was all. And I was so miserable
poor, that I sold all the clothes I had, except what hung on my back,
afore I could get Jaggers.

“When we was put in the dock, I noticed first of all what a gentleman
Compeyson looked, wi' his curly hair and his black clothes and his white
pocket-handkercher, and what a common sort of a wretch I looked. When
the prosecution opened and the evidence was put short, aforehand, I
noticed how heavy it all bore on me, and how light on him. When the
evidence was giv in the box, I noticed how it was always me that had
come for'ard, and could be swore to, how it was always me that the money
had been paid to, how it was always me that had seemed to work the thing
and get the profit. But when the defence come on, then I see the plan
plainer; for, says the counsellor for Compeyson, 'My lord and gentlemen,
here you has afore you, side by side, two persons as your eyes can
separate wide; one, the younger, well brought up, who will be spoke to
as such; one, the elder, ill brought up, who will be spoke to as such;
one, the younger, seldom if ever seen in these here transactions, and
only suspected; t'other, the elder, always seen in 'em and always wi' his
guilt brought home. Can you doubt, if there is but one in it, which is
the one, and, if there is two in it, which is much the worst one?' And
such-like. And when it come to character, warn't it Compeyson as had
been to the school, and warn't it his schoolfellows as was in this
position and in that, and warn't it him as had been know'd by witnesses
in such clubs and societies, and nowt to his disadvantage? And warn't it
me as had been tried afore, and as had been know'd up hill and down dale
in Bridewells and Lock-Ups! And when it come to speech-making, warn't it
Compeyson as could speak to 'em wi' his face dropping every now and then
into his white pocket-handkercher,--ah! and wi' verses in his speech,
too,--and warn't it me as could only say, 'Gentlemen, this man at my
side is a most precious rascal'? And when the verdict come, warn't it
Compeyson as was recommended to mercy on account of good character and
bad company, and giving up all the information he could agen me,
and warn't it me as got never a word but Guilty? And when I says to
Compeyson, 'Once out of this court, I'll smash that face of yourn!'
ain't it Compeyson as prays the Judge to be protected, and gets two
turnkeys stood betwixt us? And when we're sentenced, ain't it him as
gets seven year, and me fourteen, and ain't it him as the Judge is
sorry for, because he might a done so well, and ain't it me as the Judge
perceives to be a old offender of wiolent passion, likely to come to
worse?”

He had worked himself into a state of great excitement, but he checked
it, took two or three short breaths, swallowed as often, and stretching
out his hand towards me said, in a reassuring manner, “I ain't a going
to be low, dear boy!”

He had so heated himself that he took out his handkerchief and wiped his
face and head and neck and hands, before he could go on.

“I had said to Compeyson that I'd smash that face of his, and I swore
Lord smash mine! to do it. We was in the same prison-ship, but I
couldn't get at him for long, though I tried. At last I come behind him
and hit him on the cheek to turn him round and get a smashing one at
him, when I was seen and seized. The black-hole of that ship warn't
a strong one, to a judge of black-holes that could swim and dive. I
escaped to the shore, and I was a hiding among the graves there, envying
them as was in 'em and all over, when I first see my boy!”

He regarded me with a look of affection that made him almost abhorrent
to me again, though I had felt great pity for him.

“By my boy, I was giv to understand as Compeyson was out on them marshes
too. Upon my soul, I half believe he escaped in his terror, to get quit
of me, not knowing it was me as had got ashore. I hunted him down. I
smashed his face. 'And now,' says I 'as the worst thing I can do, caring
nothing for myself, I'll drag you back.' And I'd have swum off, towing
him by the hair, if it had come to that, and I'd a got him aboard
without the soldiers.

“Of course he'd much the best of it to the last,--his character was so
good. He had escaped when he was made half wild by me and my murderous
intentions; and his punishment was light. I was put in irons, brought
to trial again, and sent for life. I didn't stop for life, dear boy and
Pip's comrade, being here.”

He wiped himself again, as he had done before, and then slowly took
his tangle of tobacco from his pocket, and plucked his pipe from his
button-hole, and slowly filled it, and began to smoke.

“Is he dead?” I asked, after a silence.

“Is who dead, dear boy?”

“Compeyson.”

“He hopes I am, if he's alive, you may be sure,” with a fierce look. “I
never heerd no more of him.”

Herbert had been writing with his pencil in the cover of a book. He
softly pushed the book over to me, as Provis stood smoking with his eyes
on the fire, and I read in it:--

“Young Havisham's name was Arthur. Compeyson is the man who professed to
be Miss Havisham's lover.”

I shut the book and nodded slightly to Herbert, and put the book by; but
we neither of us said anything, and both looked at Provis as he stood
smoking by the fire.




Chapter XLIII

Why should I pause to ask how much of my shrinking from Provis might be
traced to Estella? Why should I loiter on my road, to compare the state
of mind in which I had tried to rid myself of the stain of the prison
before meeting her at the coach-office, with the state of mind in which
I now reflected on the abyss between Estella in her pride and beauty,
and the returned transport whom I harbored? The road would be none the
smoother for it, the end would be none the better for it, he would not
be helped, nor I extenuated.

A new fear had been engendered in my mind by his narrative; or rather,
his narrative had given form and purpose to the fear that was already
there. If Compeyson were alive and should discover his return, I could
hardly doubt the consequence. That Compeyson stood in mortal fear of
him, neither of the two could know much better than I; and that any
such man as that man had been described to be would hesitate to release
himself for good from a dreaded enemy by the safe means of becoming an
informer was scarcely to be imagined.

Never had I breathed, and never would I breathe--or so I resolved--a
word of Estella to Provis. But, I said to Herbert that, before I could
go abroad, I must see both Estella and Miss Havisham. This was when we
were left alone on the night of the day when Provis told us his story. I
resolved to go out to Richmond next day, and I went.

On my presenting myself at Mrs. Brandley's, Estella's maid was called to
tell that Estella had gone into the country. Where? To Satis House, as
usual. Not as usual, I said, for she had never yet gone there without
me; when was she coming back? There was an air of reservation in the
answer which increased my perplexity, and the answer was, that her maid
believed she was only coming back at all for a little while. I could
make nothing of this, except that it was meant that I should make
nothing of it, and I went home again in complete discomfiture.

Another night consultation with Herbert after Provis was gone home (I
always took him home, and always looked well about me), led us to the
conclusion that nothing should be said about going abroad until I came
back from Miss Havisham's. In the mean time, Herbert and I were to
consider separately what it would be best to say; whether we should
devise any pretence of being afraid that he was under suspicious
observation; or whether I, who had never yet been abroad, should propose
an expedition. We both knew that I had but to propose anything, and he
would consent. We agreed that his remaining many days in his present
hazard was not to be thought of.

Next day I had the meanness to feign that I was under a binding promise
to go down to Joe; but I was capable of almost any meanness towards Joe
or his name. Provis was to be strictly careful while I was gone, and
Herbert was to take the charge of him that I had taken. I was to be
absent only one night, and, on my return, the gratification of his
impatience for my starting as a gentleman on a greater scale was to
be begun. It occurred to me then, and as I afterwards found to
Herbert also, that he might be best got away across the water, on that
pretence,--as, to make purchases, or the like.

Having thus cleared the way for my expedition to Miss Havisham's, I set
off by the early morning coach before it was yet light, and was out
on the open country road when the day came creeping on, halting and
whimpering and shivering, and wrapped in patches of cloud and rags of
mist, like a beggar. When we drove up to the Blue Boar after a drizzly
ride, whom should I see come out under the gateway, toothpick in hand,
to look at the coach, but Bentley Drummle!

As he pretended not to see me, I pretended not to see him. It was a very
lame pretence on both sides; the lamer, because we both went into the
coffee-room, where he had just finished his breakfast, and where I
ordered mine. It was poisonous to me to see him in the town, for I very
well knew why he had come there.

Pretending to read a smeary newspaper long out of date, which had
nothing half so legible in its local news, as the foreign matter of
coffee, pickles, fish sauces, gravy, melted butter, and wine with which
it was sprinkled all over, as if it had taken the measles in a highly
irregular form, I sat at my table while he stood before the fire. By
degrees it became an enormous injury to me that he stood before the
fire. And I got up, determined to have my share of it. I had to put my
hand behind his legs for the poker when I went up to the fireplace to
stir the fire, but still pretended not to know him.

“Is this a cut?” said Mr. Drummle.

“Oh!” said I, poker in hand; “it's you, is it? How do you do? I was
wondering who it was, who kept the fire off.”

With that, I poked tremendously, and having done so, planted myself side
by side with Mr. Drummle, my shoulders squared and my back to the fire.

“You have just come down?” said Mr. Drummle, edging me a little away
with his shoulder.

“Yes,” said I, edging him a little away with my shoulder.

“Beastly place,” said Drummle. “Your part of the country, I think?”

“Yes,” I assented. “I am told it's very like your Shropshire.”

“Not in the least like it,” said Drummle.

Here Mr. Drummle looked at his boots and I looked at mine, and then Mr.
Drummle looked at my boots, and I looked at his.

“Have you been here long?” I asked, determined not to yield an inch of
the fire.

“Long enough to be tired of it,” returned Drummle, pretending to yawn,
but equally determined.

“Do you stay here long?”

“Can't say,” answered Mr. Drummle. “Do you?”

“Can't say,” said I.

I felt here, through a tingling in my blood, that if Mr. Drummle's
shoulder had claimed another hair's breadth of room, I should have
jerked him into the window; equally, that if my own shoulder had urged a
similar claim, Mr. Drummle would have jerked me into the nearest box. He
whistled a little. So did I.

“Large tract of marshes about here, I believe?” said Drummle.

“Yes. What of that?” said I.

Mr. Drummle looked at me, and then at my boots, and then said, “Oh!” and
laughed.

“Are you amused, Mr. Drummle?”

“No,” said he, “not particularly. I am going out for a ride in the
saddle. I mean to explore those marshes for amusement. Out-of-the-way
villages there, they tell me. Curious little public-houses--and
smithies--and that. Waiter!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that horse of mine ready?”

“Brought round to the door, sir.”

“I say. Look here, you sir. The lady won't ride to-day; the weather
won't do.”

“Very good, sir.”

“And I don't dine, because I'm going to dine at the lady's.”

“Very good, sir.”

Then, Drummle glanced at me, with an insolent triumph on his
great-jowled face that cut me to the heart, dull as he was, and so
exasperated me, that I felt inclined to take him in my arms (as the
robber in the story-book is said to have taken the old lady) and seat
him on the fire.

One thing was manifest to both of us, and that was, that until relief
came, neither of us could relinquish the fire. There we stood, well
squared up before it, shoulder to shoulder and foot to foot, with our
hands behind us, not budging an inch. The horse was visible outside in
the drizzle at the door, my breakfast was put on the table, Drummle's
was cleared away, the waiter invited me to begin, I nodded, we both
stood our ground.

“Have you been to the Grove since?” said Drummle.

“No,” said I, “I had quite enough of the Finches the last time I was
there.”

“Was that when we had a difference of opinion?”

“Yes,” I replied, very shortly.

“Come, come! They let you off easily enough,” sneered Drummle. “You
shouldn't have lost your temper.”

“Mr. Drummle,” said I, “you are not competent to give advice on that
subject. When I lose my temper (not that I admit having done so on that
occasion), I don't throw glasses.”

“I do,” said Drummle.

After glancing at him once or twice, in an increased state of
smouldering ferocity, I said,--

“Mr. Drummle, I did not seek this conversation, and I don't think it an
agreeable one.”

“I am sure it's not,” said he, superciliously over his shoulder; “I
don't think anything about it.”

“And therefore,” I went on, “with your leave, I will suggest that we
hold no kind of communication in future.”

“Quite my opinion,” said Drummle, “and what I should have suggested
myself, or done--more likely--without suggesting. But don't lose your
temper. Haven't you lost enough without that?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Waiter!” said Drummle, by way of answering me.

The waiter reappeared.

“Look here, you sir. You quite understand that the young lady don't ride
to-day, and that I dine at the young lady's?”

“Quite so, sir!”

When the waiter had felt my fast-cooling teapot with the palm of his
hand, and had looked imploringly at me, and had gone out, Drummle,
careful not to move the shoulder next me, took a cigar from his pocket
and bit the end off, but showed no sign of stirring. Choking and
boiling as I was, I felt that we could not go a word further, without
introducing Estella's name, which I could not endure to hear him utter;
and therefore I looked stonily at the opposite wall, as if there were
no one present, and forced myself to silence. How long we might have
remained in this ridiculous position it is impossible to say, but
for the incursion of three thriving farmers--laid on by the waiter, I
think--who came into the coffee-room unbuttoning their great-coats and
rubbing their hands, and before whom, as they charged at the fire, we
were obliged to give way.

I saw him through the window, seizing his horse's mane, and mounting in
his blundering brutal manner, and sidling and backing away. I thought
he was gone, when he came back, calling for a light for the cigar in his
mouth, which he had forgotten. A man in a dust-colored dress appeared
with what was wanted,--I could not have said from where: whether from
the inn yard, or the street, or where not,--and as Drummle leaned down
from the saddle and lighted his cigar and laughed, with a jerk of his
head towards the coffee-room windows, the slouching shoulders and ragged
hair of this man whose back was towards me reminded me of Orlick.

Too heavily out of sorts to care much at the time whether it were he or
no, or after all to touch the breakfast, I washed the weather and the
journey from my face and hands, and went out to the memorable old house
that it would have been so much the better for me never to have entered,
never to have seen.




Chapter XLIV

In the room where the dressing-table stood, and where the wax-candles
burnt on the wall, I found Miss Havisham and Estella; Miss Havisham
seated on a settee near the fire, and Estella on a cushion at her feet.
Estella was knitting, and Miss Havisham was looking on. They both raised
their eyes as I went in, and both saw an alteration in me. I derived
that, from the look they interchanged.

“And what wind,” said Miss Havisham, “blows you here, Pip?”

Though she looked steadily at me, I saw that she was rather confused.
Estella, pausing a moment in her knitting with her eyes upon me, and
then going on, I fancied that I read in the action of her fingers, as
plainly as if she had told me in the dumb alphabet, that she perceived I
had discovered my real benefactor.

“Miss Havisham,” said I, “I went to Richmond yesterday, to speak to
Estella; and finding that some wind had blown her here, I followed.”

Miss Havisham motioning to me for the third or fourth time to sit down,
I took the chair by the dressing-table, which I had often seen her
occupy. With all that ruin at my feet and about me, it seemed a natural
place for me, that day.

“What I had to say to Estella, Miss Havisham, I will say before you,
presently--in a few moments. It will not surprise you, it will not
displease you. I am as unhappy as you can ever have meant me to be.”

Miss Havisham continued to look steadily at me. I could see in the
action of Estella's fingers as they worked that she attended to what I
said; but she did not look up.

“I have found out who my patron is. It is not a fortunate discovery,
and is not likely ever to enrich me in reputation, station, fortune,
anything. There are reasons why I must say no more of that. It is not my
secret, but another's.”

As I was silent for a while, looking at Estella and considering how to
go on, Miss Havisham repeated, “It is not your secret, but another's.
Well?”

“When you first caused me to be brought here, Miss Havisham, when I
belonged to the village over yonder, that I wish I had never left,
I suppose I did really come here, as any other chance boy might have
come,--as a kind of servant, to gratify a want or a whim, and to be paid
for it?”

“Ay, Pip,” replied Miss Havisham, steadily nodding her head; “you did.”

“And that Mr. Jaggers--”

“Mr. Jaggers,” said Miss Havisham, taking me up in a firm tone, “had
nothing to do with it, and knew nothing of it. His being my lawyer, and
his being the lawyer of your patron is a coincidence. He holds the same
relation towards numbers of people, and it might easily arise. Be that
as it may, it did arise, and was not brought about by any one.”

Any one might have seen in her haggard face that there was no
suppression or evasion so far.

“But when I fell into the mistake I have so long remained in, at least
you led me on?” said I.

“Yes,” she returned, again nodding steadily, “I let you go on.”

“Was that kind?”

“Who am I,” cried Miss Havisham, striking her stick upon the floor
and flashing into wrath so suddenly that Estella glanced up at her in
surprise,--“who am I, for God's sake, that I should be kind?”

It was a weak complaint to have made, and I had not meant to make it. I
told her so, as she sat brooding after this outburst.

“Well, well, well!” she said. “What else?”

“I was liberally paid for my old attendance here,” I said, to soothe
her, “in being apprenticed, and I have asked these questions only for
my own information. What follows has another (and I hope more
disinterested) purpose. In humoring my mistake, Miss Havisham, you
punished--practised on--perhaps you will supply whatever term expresses
your intention, without offence--your self-seeking relations?”

“I did. Why, they would have it so! So would you. What has been my
history, that I should be at the pains of entreating either them or you
not to have it so! You made your own snares. I never made them.”

Waiting until she was quiet again,--for this, too, flashed out of her in
a wild and sudden way,--I went on.

“I have been thrown among one family of your relations, Miss Havisham,
and have been constantly among them since I went to London. I know them
to have been as honestly under my delusion as I myself. And I should be
false and base if I did not tell you, whether it is acceptable to you or
no, and whether you are inclined to give credence to it or no, that you
deeply wrong both Mr. Matthew Pocket and his son Herbert, if you suppose
them to be otherwise than generous, upright, open, and incapable of
anything designing or mean.”

“They are your friends,” said Miss Havisham.

“They made themselves my friends,” said I, “when they supposed me
to have superseded them; and when Sarah Pocket, Miss Georgiana, and
Mistress Camilla were not my friends, I think.”

This contrasting of them with the rest seemed, I was glad to see, to do
them good with her. She looked at me keenly for a little while, and then
said quietly,--

“What do you want for them?”

“Only,” said I, “that you would not confound them with the others. They
may be of the same blood, but, believe me, they are not of the same
nature.”

Still looking at me keenly, Miss Havisham repeated,--

“What do you want for them?”

“I am not so cunning, you see,” I said, in answer, conscious that I
reddened a little, “as that I could hide from you, even if I desired,
that I do want something. Miss Havisham, if you would spare the money
to do my friend Herbert a lasting service in life, but which from the
nature of the case must be done without his knowledge, I could show you
how.”

“Why must it be done without his knowledge?” she asked, settling her
hands upon her stick, that she might regard me the more attentively.

“Because,” said I, “I began the service myself, more than two years ago,
without his knowledge, and I don't want to be betrayed. Why I fail in my
ability to finish it, I cannot explain. It is a part of the secret which
is another person's and not mine.”

She gradually withdrew her eyes from me, and turned them on the fire.
After watching it for what appeared in the silence and by the light
of the slowly wasting candles to be a long time, she was roused by
the collapse of some of the red coals, and looked towards me again--at
first, vacantly--then, with a gradually concentrating attention. All
this time Estella knitted on. When Miss Havisham had fixed her
attention on me, she said, speaking as if there had been no lapse in our
dialogue,--

“What else?”

“Estella,” said I, turning to her now, and trying to command my
trembling voice, “you know I love you. You know that I have loved you
long and dearly.”

She raised her eyes to my face, on being thus addressed, and her fingers
plied their work, and she looked at me with an unmoved countenance. I
saw that Miss Havisham glanced from me to her, and from her to me.

“I should have said this sooner, but for my long mistake. It induced me
to hope that Miss Havisham meant us for one another. While I thought you
could not help yourself, as it were, I refrained from saying it. But I
must say it now.”

Preserving her unmoved countenance, and with her fingers still going,
Estella shook her head.

“I know,” said I, in answer to that action,--“I know. I have no hope
that I shall ever call you mine, Estella. I am ignorant what may become
of me very soon, how poor I may be, or where I may go. Still, I love
you. I have loved you ever since I first saw you in this house.”

Looking at me perfectly unmoved and with her fingers busy, she shook her
head again.

“It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise
on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these
years with a vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the
gravity of what she did. But I think she did not. I think that, in the
endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella.”

I saw Miss Havisham put her hand to her heart and hold it there, as she
sat looking by turns at Estella and at me.

“It seems,” said Estella, very calmly, “that there are sentiments,
fancies,--I don't know how to call them,--which I am not able to
comprehend. When you say you love me, I know what you mean, as a form
of words; but nothing more. You address nothing in my breast, you touch
nothing there. I don't care for what you say at all. I have tried to
warn you of this; now, have I not?”

I said in a miserable manner, “Yes.”

“Yes. But you would not be warned, for you thought I did not mean it.
Now, did you not think so?”

“I thought and hoped you could not mean it. You, so young, untried, and
beautiful, Estella! Surely it is not in Nature.”

“It is in my nature,” she returned. And then she added, with a stress
upon the words, “It is in the nature formed within me. I make a great
difference between you and all other people when I say so much. I can do
no more.”

“Is it not true,” said I, “that Bentley Drummle is in town here, and
pursuing you?”

“It is quite true,” she replied, referring to him with the indifference
of utter contempt.

“That you encourage him, and ride out with him, and that he dines with
you this very day?”

She seemed a little surprised that I should know it, but again replied,
“Quite true.”

“You cannot love him, Estella!”

Her fingers stopped for the first time, as she retorted rather angrily,
“What have I told you? Do you still think, in spite of it, that I do not
mean what I say?”

“You would never marry him, Estella?”

She looked towards Miss Havisham, and considered for a moment with her
work in her hands. Then she said, “Why not tell you the truth? I am
going to be married to him.”

I dropped my face into my hands, but was able to control myself better
than I could have expected, considering what agony it gave me to hear
her say those words. When I raised my face again, there was such a
ghastly look upon Miss Havisham's, that it impressed me, even in my
passionate hurry and grief.

“Estella, dearest Estella, do not let Miss Havisham lead you into this
fatal step. Put me aside for ever,--you have done so, I well know,--but
bestow yourself on some worthier person than Drummle. Miss Havisham
gives you to him, as the greatest slight and injury that could be done
to the many far better men who admire you, and to the few who truly
love you. Among those few there may be one who loves you even as dearly,
though he has not loved you as long, as I. Take him, and I can bear it
better, for your sake!”

My earnestness awoke a wonder in her that seemed as if it would have
been touched with compassion, if she could have rendered me at all
intelligible to her own mind.

“I am going,” she said again, in a gentler voice, “to be married to
him. The preparations for my marriage are making, and I shall be
married soon. Why do you injuriously introduce the name of my mother by
adoption? It is my own act.”

“Your own act, Estella, to fling yourself away upon a brute?”

“On whom should I fling myself away?” she retorted, with a smile.
“Should I fling myself away upon the man who would the soonest feel (if
people do feel such things) that I took nothing to him? There! It is
done. I shall do well enough, and so will my husband. As to leading
me into what you call this fatal step, Miss Havisham would have had me
wait, and not marry yet; but I am tired of the life I have led, which
has very few charms for me, and I am willing enough to change it. Say no
more. We shall never understand each other.”

“Such a mean brute, such a stupid brute!” I urged, in despair.

“Don't be afraid of my being a blessing to him,” said Estella; “I shall
not be that. Come! Here is my hand. Do we part on this, you visionary
boy--or man?”

“O Estella!” I answered, as my bitter tears fell fast on her hand, do
what I would to restrain them; “even if I remained in England and could
hold my head up with the rest, how could I see you Drummle's wife?”

“Nonsense,” she returned,--“nonsense. This will pass in no time.”

“Never, Estella!”

“You will get me out of your thoughts in a week.”

“Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You
have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the
rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been
in every prospect I have ever seen since,--on the river, on the sails of
the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness,
in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been
the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become
acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings
are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your
hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and
everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you
cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good
in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation, I associate you only
with the good; and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you
must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp
distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”

In what ecstasy of unhappiness I got these broken words out of myself, I
don't know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from an
inward wound, and gushed out. I held her hand to my lips some lingering
moments, and so I left her. But ever afterwards, I remembered,--and soon
afterwards with stronger reason,--that while Estella looked at me merely
with incredulous wonder, the spectral figure of Miss Havisham, her hand
still covering her heart, seemed all resolved into a ghastly stare of
pity and remorse.

All done, all gone! So much was done and gone, that when I went out at
the gate, the light of the day seemed of a darker color than when I went
in. For a while, I hid myself among some lanes and by-paths, and then
struck off to walk all the way to London. For, I had by that time come
to myself so far as to consider that I could not go back to the inn and
see Drummle there; that I could not bear to sit upon the coach and
be spoken to; that I could do nothing half so good for myself as tire
myself out.

It was past midnight when I crossed London Bridge. Pursuing the narrow
intricacies of the streets which at that time tended westward near the
Middlesex shore of the river, my readiest access to the Temple was
close by the river-side, through Whitefriars. I was not expected till
to-morrow; but I had my keys, and, if Herbert were gone to bed, could
get to bed myself without disturbing him.

As it seldom happened that I came in at that Whitefriars gate after the
Temple was closed, and as I was very muddy and weary, I did not take it
ill that the night-porter examined me with much attention as he held the
gate a little way open for me to pass in. To help his memory I mentioned
my name.

“I was not quite sure, sir, but I thought so. Here's a note, sir. The
messenger that brought it, said would you be so good as read it by my
lantern?”

Much surprised by the request, I took the note. It was directed to
Philip Pip, Esquire, and on the top of the superscription were the
words, “PLEASE READ THIS, HERE.” I opened it, the watchman holding up
his light, and read inside, in Wemmick's writing,--

“DON'T GO HOME.”




Chapter XLV

Turning from the Temple gate as soon as I had read the warning, I made
the best of my way to Fleet Street, and there got a late hackney chariot
and drove to the Hummums in Covent Garden. In those times a bed was
always to be got there at any hour of the night, and the chamberlain,
letting me in at his ready wicket, lighted the candle next in order on
his shelf, and showed me straight into the bedroom next in order on his
list. It was a sort of vault on the ground floor at the back, with a
despotic monster of a four-post bedstead in it, straddling over the
whole place, putting one of his arbitrary legs into the fireplace
and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little
washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.

As I had asked for a night-light, the chamberlain had brought me in,
before he left me, the good old constitutional rushlight of those
virtuous days--an object like the ghost of a walking-cane, which
instantly broke its back if it were touched, which nothing could ever be
lighted at, and which was placed in solitary confinement at the bottom
of a high tin tower, perforated with round holes that made a staringly
wide-awake pattern on the walls. When I had got into bed, and lay there
footsore, weary, and wretched, I found that I could no more close my own
eyes than I could close the eyes of this foolish Argus. And thus, in the
gloom and death of the night, we stared at one another.

What a doleful night! How anxious, how dismal, how long! There was an
inhospitable smell in the room, of cold soot and hot dust; and, as I
looked up into the corners of the tester over my head, I thought what
a number of blue-bottle flies from the butchers', and earwigs from the
market, and grubs from the country, must be holding on up there, lying
by for next summer. This led me to speculate whether any of them ever
tumbled down, and then I fancied that I felt light falls on my face,--a
disagreeable turn of thought, suggesting other and more objectionable
approaches up my back. When I had lain awake a little while, those
extraordinary voices with which silence teems began to make themselves
audible. The closet whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little
washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the
chest of drawers. At about the same time, the eyes on the wall acquired
a new expression, and in every one of those staring rounds I saw
written, DON'T GO HOME.

Whatever night-fancies and night-noises crowded on me, they never warded
off this DON'T GO HOME. It plaited itself into whatever I thought of,
as a bodily pain would have done. Not long before, I had read in the
newspapers, how a gentleman unknown had come to the Hummums in the
night, and had gone to bed, and had destroyed himself, and had been
found in the morning weltering in blood. It came into my head that he
must have occupied this very vault of mine, and I got out of bed to
assure myself that there were no red marks about; then opened the door
to look out into the passages, and cheer myself with the companionship
of a distant light, near which I knew the chamberlain to be dozing. But
all this time, why I was not to go home, and what had happened at home,
and when I should go home, and whether Provis was safe at home, were
questions occupying my mind so busily, that one might have supposed
there could be no more room in it for any other theme. Even when I
thought of Estella, and how we had parted that day forever, and when
I recalled all the circumstances of our parting, and all her looks and
tones, and the action of her fingers while she knitted,--even then I
was pursuing, here and there and everywhere, the caution, Don't go home.
When at last I dozed, in sheer exhaustion of mind and body, it became
a vast shadowy verb which I had to conjugate. Imperative mood, present
tense: Do not thou go home, let him not go home, let us not go home, do
not ye or you go home, let not them go home. Then potentially: I may not
and I cannot go home; and I might not, could not, would not, and should
not go home; until I felt that I was going distracted, and rolled over
on the pillow, and looked at the staring rounds upon the wall again.

I had left directions that I was to be called at seven; for it was plain
that I must see Wemmick before seeing any one else, and equally plain
that this was a case in which his Walworth sentiments only could be
taken. It was a relief to get out of the room where the night had been
so miserable, and I needed no second knocking at the door to startle me
from my uneasy bed.

The Castle battlements arose upon my view at eight o'clock. The little
servant happening to be entering the fortress with two hot rolls, I
passed through the postern and crossed the drawbridge in her company,
and so came without announcement into the presence of Wemmick as he was
making tea for himself and the Aged. An open door afforded a perspective
view of the Aged in bed.

“Halloa, Mr. Pip!” said Wemmick. “You did come home, then?”

“Yes,” I returned; “but I didn't go home.”

“That's all right,” said he, rubbing his hands. “I left a note for you
at each of the Temple gates, on the chance. Which gate did you come to?”

I told him.

“I'll go round to the others in the course of the day and destroy the
notes,” said Wemmick; “it's a good rule never to leave documentary
evidence if you can help it, because you don't know when it may be put
in. I'm going to take a liberty with you. Would you mind toasting this
sausage for the Aged P.?”

I said I should be delighted to do it.

“Then you can go about your work, Mary Anne,” said Wemmick to the little
servant; “which leaves us to ourselves, don't you see, Mr. Pip?” he
added, winking, as she disappeared.

I thanked him for his friendship and caution, and our discourse
proceeded in a low tone, while I toasted the Aged's sausage and he
buttered the crumb of the Aged's roll.

“Now, Mr. Pip, you know,” said Wemmick, “you and I understand one
another. We are in our private and personal capacities, and we have been
engaged in a confidential transaction before to-day. Official sentiments
are one thing. We are extra official.”

I cordially assented. I was so very nervous, that I had already lighted
the Aged's sausage like a torch, and been obliged to blow it out.

“I accidentally heard, yesterday morning,” said Wemmick, “being in a
certain place where I once took you,--even between you and me, it's as
well not to mention names when avoidable--”

“Much better not,” said I. “I understand you.”

“I heard there by chance, yesterday morning,” said Wemmick, “that
a certain person not altogether of uncolonial pursuits, and not
unpossessed of portable property,--I don't know who it may really
be,--we won't name this person--”

“Not necessary,” said I.

“--Had made some little stir in a certain part of the world where a good
many people go, not always in gratification of their own inclinations,
and not quite irrespective of the government expense--”

In watching his face, I made quite a firework of the Aged's sausage,
and greatly discomposed both my own attention and Wemmick's; for which I
apologized.

“--By disappearing from such place, and being no more heard of
thereabouts. From which,” said Wemmick, “conjectures had been raised and
theories formed. I also heard that you at your chambers in Garden Court,
Temple, had been watched, and might be watched again.”

“By whom?” said I.

“I wouldn't go into that,” said Wemmick, evasively, “it might clash with
official responsibilities. I heard it, as I have in my time heard other
curious things in the same place. I don't tell it you on information
received. I heard it.”

He took the toasting-fork and sausage from me as he spoke, and set forth
the Aged's breakfast neatly on a little tray. Previous to placing it
before him, he went into the Aged's room with a clean white cloth, and
tied the same under the old gentleman's chin, and propped him up, and
put his nightcap on one side, and gave him quite a rakish air. Then he
placed his breakfast before him with great care, and said, “All right,
ain't you, Aged P.?” To which the cheerful Aged replied, “All right,
John, my boy, all right!” As there seemed to be a tacit understanding
that the Aged was not in a presentable state, and was therefore to be
considered invisible, I made a pretence of being in complete ignorance
of these proceedings.

“This watching of me at my chambers (which I have once had reason to
suspect),” I said to Wemmick when he came back, “is inseparable from the
person to whom you have adverted; is it?”

Wemmick looked very serious. “I couldn't undertake to say that, of my
own knowledge. I mean, I couldn't undertake to say it was at first. But
it either is, or it will be, or it's in great danger of being.”

As I saw that he was restrained by fealty to Little Britain from saying
as much as he could, and as I knew with thankfulness to him how far out
of his way he went to say what he did, I could not press him. But I told
him, after a little meditation over the fire, that I would like to ask
him a question, subject to his answering or not answering, as he
deemed right, and sure that his course would be right. He paused in his
breakfast, and crossing his arms, and pinching his shirt-sleeves (his
notion of in-door comfort was to sit without any coat), he nodded to me
once, to put my question.

“You have heard of a man of bad character, whose true name is
Compeyson?”

He answered with one other nod.

“Is he living?”

One other nod.

“Is he in London?”

He gave me one other nod, compressed the post-office exceedingly, gave
me one last nod, and went on with his breakfast.

“Now,” said Wemmick, “questioning being over,” which he emphasized and
repeated for my guidance, “I come to what I did, after hearing what I
heard. I went to Garden Court to find you; not finding you, I went to
Clarriker's to find Mr. Herbert.”

“And him you found?” said I, with great anxiety.

“And him I found. Without mentioning any names or going into any
details, I gave him to understand that if he was aware of anybody--Tom,
Jack, or Richard--being about the chambers, or about the immediate
neighborhood, he had better get Tom, Jack, or Richard out of the way
while you were out of the way.”

“He would be greatly puzzled what to do?”

“He was puzzled what to do; not the less, because I gave him my opinion
that it was not safe to try to get Tom, Jack, or Richard too far out
of the way at present. Mr. Pip, I'll tell you something. Under existing
circumstances, there is no place like a great city when you are once
in it. Don't break cover too soon. Lie close. Wait till things slacken,
before you try the open, even for foreign air.”

I thanked him for his valuable advice, and asked him what Herbert had
done?

“Mr. Herbert,” said Wemmick, “after being all of a heap for half an
hour, struck out a plan. He mentioned to me as a secret, that he is
courting a young lady who has, as no doubt you are aware, a bedridden
Pa. Which Pa, having been in the Purser line of life, lies a-bed in a
bow-window where he can see the ships sail up and down the river. You
are acquainted with the young lady, most probably?”

“Not personally,” said I.

The truth was, that she had objected to me as an expensive companion
who did Herbert no good, and that, when Herbert had first proposed to
present me to her, she had received the proposal with such very moderate
warmth, that Herbert had felt himself obliged to confide the state of
the case to me, with a view to the lapse of a little time before I made
her acquaintance. When I had begun to advance Herbert's prospects by
stealth, I had been able to bear this with cheerful philosophy: he and
his affianced, for their part, had naturally not been very anxious to
introduce a third person into their interviews; and thus, although I was
assured that I had risen in Clara's esteem, and although the young
lady and I had long regularly interchanged messages and remembrances by
Herbert, I had never seen her. However, I did not trouble Wemmick with
these particulars.

“The house with the bow-window,” said Wemmick, “being by the river-side,
down the Pool there between Limehouse and Greenwich, and being kept, it
seems, by a very respectable widow who has a furnished upper floor to
let, Mr. Herbert put it to me, what did I think of that as a temporary
tenement for Tom, Jack, or Richard? Now, I thought very well of it, for
three reasons I'll give you. That is to say: Firstly. It's altogether
out of all your beats, and is well away from the usual heap of streets
great and small. Secondly. Without going near it yourself, you could
always hear of the safety of Tom, Jack, or Richard, through Mr. Herbert.
Thirdly. After a while and when it might be prudent, if you should want
to slip Tom, Jack, or Richard on board a foreign packet-boat, there he
is--ready.”

Much comforted by these considerations, I thanked Wemmick again and
again, and begged him to proceed.

“Well, sir! Mr. Herbert threw himself into the business with a will, and
by nine o'clock last night he housed Tom, Jack, or Richard,--whichever
it may be,--you and I don't want to know,--quite successfully. At the
old lodgings it was understood that he was summoned to Dover, and, in
fact, he was taken down the Dover road and cornered out of it. Now,
another great advantage of all this is, that it was done without you,
and when, if any one was concerning himself about your movements, you
must be known to be ever so many miles off and quite otherwise engaged.
This diverts suspicion and confuses it; and for the same reason I
recommended that, even if you came back last night, you should not go
home. It brings in more confusion, and you want confusion.”

Wemmick, having finished his breakfast, here looked at his watch, and
began to get his coat on.

“And now, Mr. Pip,” said he, with his hands still in the sleeves, “I
have probably done the most I can do; but if I can ever do more,--from
a Walworth point of view, and in a strictly private and personal
capacity,--I shall be glad to do it. Here's the address. There can be
no harm in your going here to-night, and seeing for yourself that all is
well with Tom, Jack, or Richard, before you go home,--which is another
reason for your not going home last night. But, after you have gone
home, don't go back here. You are very welcome, I am sure, Mr. Pip”; his
hands were now out of his sleeves, and I was shaking them; “and let me
finally impress one important point upon you.” He laid his hands upon
my shoulders, and added in a solemn whisper: “Avail yourself of this
evening to lay hold of his portable property. You don't know what may
happen to him. Don't let anything happen to the portable property.”

Quite despairing of making my mind clear to Wemmick on this point, I
forbore to try.

“Time's up,” said Wemmick, “and I must be off. If you had nothing more
pressing to do than to keep here till dark, that's what I should advise.
You look very much worried, and it would do you good to have a perfectly
quiet day with the Aged,--he'll be up presently,--and a little bit
of--you remember the pig?”

“Of course,” said I.

“Well; and a little bit of him. That sausage you toasted was his, and
he was in all respects a first-rater. Do try him, if it is only for old
acquaintance sake. Good-bye, Aged Parent!” in a cheery shout.

“All right, John; all right, my boy!” piped the old man from within.

I soon fell asleep before Wemmick's fire, and the Aged and I enjoyed one
another's society by falling asleep before it more or less all day.
We had loin of pork for dinner, and greens grown on the estate; and
I nodded at the Aged with a good intention whenever I failed to do it
drowsily. When it was quite dark, I left the Aged preparing the fire for
toast; and I inferred from the number of teacups, as well as from his
glances at the two little doors in the wall, that Miss Skiffins was
expected.




Chapter XLVI

Eight o'clock had struck before I got into the air, that was scented,
not disagreeably, by the chips and shavings of the long-shore
boat-builders, and mast, oar, and block makers. All that water-side
region of the upper and lower Pool below Bridge was unknown ground to
me; and when I struck down by the river, I found that the spot I wanted
was not where I had supposed it to be, and was anything but easy to
find. It was called Mill Pond Bank, Chinks's Basin; and I had no other
guide to Chinks's Basin than the Old Green Copper Rope-walk.

It matters not what stranded ships repairing in dry docks I lost myself
among, what old hulls of ships in course of being knocked to pieces,
what ooze and slime and other dregs of tide, what yards of ship-builders
and ship-breakers, what rusty anchors blindly biting into the ground,
though for years off duty, what mountainous country of accumulated casks
and timber, how many rope-walks that were not the Old Green Copper. After
several times falling short of my destination and as often overshooting
it, I came unexpectedly round a corner, upon Mill Pond Bank. It was a
fresh kind of place, all circumstances considered, where the wind from
the river had room to turn itself round; and there were two or three
trees in it, and there was the stump of a ruined windmill, and there
was the Old Green Copper Rope-walk,--whose long and narrow vista I could
trace in the moonlight, along a series of wooden frames set in the
ground, that looked like superannuated haymaking-rakes which had grown
old and lost most of their teeth.

Selecting from the few queer houses upon Mill Pond Bank a house with a
wooden front and three stories of bow-window (not bay-window, which is
another thing), I looked at the plate upon the door, and read there,
Mrs. Whimple. That being the name I wanted, I knocked, and an elderly
woman of a pleasant and thriving appearance responded. She was
immediately deposed, however, by Herbert, who silently led me into
the parlor and shut the door. It was an odd sensation to see his very
familiar face established quite at home in that very unfamiliar room
and region; and I found myself looking at him, much as I looked at
the corner-cupboard with the glass and china, the shells upon the
chimney-piece, and the colored engravings on the wall, representing the
death of Captain Cook, a ship-launch, and his Majesty King George the
Third in a state coachman's wig, leather-breeches, and top-boots, on the
terrace at Windsor.

“All is well, Handel,” said Herbert, “and he is quite satisfied, though
eager to see you. My dear girl is with her father; and if you'll wait
till she comes down, I'll make you known to her, and then we'll go upstairs.
That's her father.”

I had become aware of an alarming growling overhead, and had probably
expressed the fact in my countenance.

“I am afraid he is a sad old rascal,” said Herbert, smiling, “but I have
never seen him. Don't you smell rum? He is always at it.”

“At rum?” said I.

“Yes,” returned Herbert, “and you may suppose how mild it makes his
gout. He persists, too, in keeping all the provisions upstairs in his
room, and serving them out. He keeps them on shelves over his head, and
will weigh them all. His room must be like a chandler's shop.”

While he thus spoke, the growling noise became a prolonged roar, and
then died away.

“What else can be the consequence,” said Herbert, in explanation, “if
he will cut the cheese? A man with the gout in his right hand--and
everywhere else--can't expect to get through a Double Gloucester without
hurting himself.”

He seemed to have hurt himself very much, for he gave another furious
roar.

“To have Provis for an upper lodger is quite a godsend to Mrs. Whimple,”
 said Herbert, “for of course people in general won't stand that noise. A
curious place, Handel; isn't it?”

It was a curious place, indeed; but remarkably well kept and clean.

“Mrs. Whimple,” said Herbert, when I told him so, “is the best of
housewives, and I really do not know what my Clara would do without
her motherly help. For, Clara has no mother of her own, Handel, and no
relation in the world but old Gruffandgrim.”

“Surely that's not his name, Herbert?”

“No, no,” said Herbert, “that's my name for him. His name is Mr. Barley.
But what a blessing it is for the son of my father and mother to love a
girl who has no relations, and who can never bother herself or anybody
else about her family!”

Herbert had told me on former occasions, and now reminded me, that he
first knew Miss Clara Barley when she was completing her education at
an establishment at Hammersmith, and that on her being recalled home
to nurse her father, he and she had confided their affection to the
motherly Mrs. Whimple, by whom it had been fostered and regulated
with equal kindness and discretion, ever since. It was understood that
nothing of a tender nature could possibly be confided to old Barley, by
reason of his being totally unequal to the consideration of any subject
more psychological than Gout, Rum, and Purser's stores.

As we were thus conversing in a low tone while Old Barley's sustained
growl vibrated in the beam that crossed the ceiling, the room door
opened, and a very pretty, slight, dark-eyed girl of twenty or so came
in with a basket in her hand: whom Herbert tenderly relieved of the
basket, and presented, blushing, as “Clara.” She really was a most
charming girl, and might have passed for a captive fairy, whom that
truculent Ogre, Old Barley, had pressed into his service.

“Look here,” said Herbert, showing me the basket, with a compassionate
and tender smile, after we had talked a little; “here's poor Clara's
supper, served out every night. Here's her allowance of bread, and
here's her slice of cheese, and here's her rum,--which I drink. This
is Mr. Barley's breakfast for to-morrow, served out to be cooked. Two
mutton-chops, three potatoes, some split peas, a little flour, two
ounces of butter, a pinch of salt, and all this black pepper. It's
stewed up together, and taken hot, and it's a nice thing for the gout, I
should think!”

There was something so natural and winning in Clara's resigned way of
looking at these stores in detail, as Herbert pointed them out; and
something so confiding, loving, and innocent in her modest manner of
yielding herself to Herbert's embracing arm; and something so gentle in
her, so much needing protection on Mill Pond Bank, by Chinks's Basin,
and the Old Green Copper Rope-walk, with Old Barley growling in the
beam,--that I would not have undone the engagement between her and
Herbert for all the money in the pocket-book I had never opened.

I was looking at her with pleasure and admiration, when suddenly the
growl swelled into a roar again, and a frightful bumping noise was heard
above, as if a giant with a wooden leg were trying to bore it through
the ceiling to come at us. Upon this Clara said to Herbert, “Papa wants
me, darling!” and ran away.

“There is an unconscionable old shark for you!” said Herbert. “What do
you suppose he wants now, Handel?”

“I don't know,” said I. “Something to drink?”

“That's it!” cried Herbert, as if I had made a guess of extraordinary
merit. “He keeps his grog ready mixed in a little tub on the table.
Wait a moment, and you'll hear Clara lift him up to take some. There
he goes!” Another roar, with a prolonged shake at the end. “Now,” said
Herbert, as it was succeeded by silence, “he's drinking. Now,” said
Herbert, as the growl resounded in the beam once more, “he's down again
on his back!”

Clara returned soon afterwards, and Herbert accompanied me upstairs to
see our charge. As we passed Mr. Barley's door, he was heard hoarsely
muttering within, in a strain that rose and fell like wind, the
following Refrain, in which I substitute good wishes for something quite
the reverse:--

“Ahoy! Bless your eyes, here's old Bill Barley. Here's old Bill Barley,
bless your eyes. Here's old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the
Lord. Lying on the flat of his back like a drifting old dead flounder,
here's your old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Ahoy! Bless you.”

In this strain of consolation, Herbert informed me the invisible Barley
would commune with himself by the day and night together; Often, while
it was light, having, at the same time, one eye at a telescope which was
fitted on his bed for the convenience of sweeping the river.

In his two cabin rooms at the top of the house, which were fresh and
airy, and in which Mr. Barley was less audible than below, I found
Provis comfortably settled. He expressed no alarm, and seemed to
feel none that was worth mentioning; but it struck me that he was
softened,--indefinably, for I could not have said how, and could never
afterwards recall how when I tried, but certainly.

The opportunity that the day's rest had given me for reflection had
resulted in my fully determining to say nothing to him respecting
Compeyson. For anything I knew, his animosity towards the man
might otherwise lead to his seeking him out and rushing on his own
destruction. Therefore, when Herbert and I sat down with him by his
fire, I asked him first of all whether he relied on Wemmick's judgment
and sources of information?

“Ay, ay, dear boy!” he answered, with a grave nod, “Jaggers knows.”

“Then, I have talked with Wemmick,” said I, “and have come to tell you
what caution he gave me and what advice.”

This I did accurately, with the reservation just mentioned; and I told
him how Wemmick had heard, in Newgate prison (whether from officers or
prisoners I could not say), that he was under some suspicion, and that
my chambers had been watched; how Wemmick had recommended his keeping
close for a time, and my keeping away from him; and what Wemmick had
said about getting him abroad. I added, that of course, when the time
came, I should go with him, or should follow close upon him, as might
be safest in Wemmick's judgment. What was to follow that I did not touch
upon; neither, indeed, was I at all clear or comfortable about it in my
own mind, now that I saw him in that softer condition, and in declared
peril for my sake. As to altering my way of living by enlarging my
expenses, I put it to him whether in our present unsettled and difficult
circumstances, it would not be simply ridiculous, if it were no worse?

He could not deny this, and indeed was very reasonable throughout. His
coming back was a venture, he said, and he had always known it to be a
venture. He would do nothing to make it a desperate venture, and he had
very little fear of his safety with such good help.

Herbert, who had been looking at the fire and pondering, here said
that something had come into his thoughts arising out of Wemmick's
suggestion, which it might be worth while to pursue. “We are both good
watermen, Handel, and could take him down the river ourselves when the
right time comes. No boat would then be hired for the purpose, and no
boatmen; that would save at least a chance of suspicion, and any chance
is worth saving. Never mind the season; don't you think it might be a
good thing if you began at once to keep a boat at the Temple stairs, and
were in the habit of rowing up and down the river? You fall into that
habit, and then who notices or minds? Do it twenty or fifty times,
and there is nothing special in your doing it the twenty-first or
fifty-first.”

I liked this scheme, and Provis was quite elated by it. We agreed
that it should be carried into execution, and that Provis should never
recognize us if we came below Bridge, and rowed past Mill Pond Bank. But
we further agreed that he should pull down the blind in that part of his
window which gave upon the east, whenever he saw us and all was right.

Our conference being now ended, and everything arranged, I rose to go;
remarking to Herbert that he and I had better not go home together, and
that I would take half an hour's start of him. “I don't like to leave
you here,” I said to Provis, “though I cannot doubt your being safer
here than near me. Good-bye!”

“Dear boy,” he answered, clasping my hands, “I don't know when we may
meet again, and I don't like good-bye. Say good night!”

“Good night! Herbert will go regularly between us, and when the time
comes you may be certain I shall be ready. Good night, good night!”

We thought it best that he should stay in his own rooms; and we left him
on the landing outside his door, holding a light over the stair-rail to
light us downstairs. Looking back at him, I thought of the first night
of his return, when our positions were reversed, and when I little
supposed my heart could ever be as heavy and anxious at parting from him
as it was now.

Old Barley was growling and swearing when we repassed his door, with no
appearance of having ceased or of meaning to cease. When we got to the
foot of the stairs, I asked Herbert whether he had preserved the name of
Provis. He replied, certainly not, and that the lodger was Mr. Campbell.
He also explained that the utmost known of Mr. Campbell there was,
that he (Herbert) had Mr. Campbell consigned to him, and felt a strong
personal interest in his being well cared for, and living a secluded
life. So, when we went into the parlor where Mrs. Whimple and Clara were
seated at work, I said nothing of my own interest in Mr. Campbell, but
kept it to myself.

When I had taken leave of the pretty, gentle, dark-eyed girl, and of the
motherly woman who had not outlived her honest sympathy with a little
affair of true love, I felt as if the Old Green Copper Rope-walk had
grown quite a different place. Old Barley might be as old as the hills,
and might swear like a whole field of troopers, but there were redeeming
youth and trust and hope enough in Chinks's Basin to fill it to
overflowing. And then I thought of Estella, and of our parting, and went
home very sadly.

All things were as quiet in the Temple as ever I had seen them. The
windows of the rooms on that side, lately occupied by Provis, were dark
and still, and there was no lounger in Garden Court. I walked past the
fountain twice or thrice before I descended the steps that were between
me and my rooms, but I was quite alone. Herbert, coming to my
bedside when he came in,--for I went straight to bed, dispirited and
fatigued,--made the same report. Opening one of the windows after that,
he looked out into the moonlight, and told me that the pavement was as
solemnly empty as the pavement of any cathedral at that same hour.

Next day I set myself to get the boat. It was soon done, and the boat
was brought round to the Temple stairs, and lay where I could reach
her within a minute or two. Then, I began to go out as for training and
practice: sometimes alone, sometimes with Herbert. I was often out in
cold, rain, and sleet, but nobody took much note of me after I had been
out a few times. At first, I kept above Blackfriars Bridge; but as the
hours of the tide changed, I took towards London Bridge. It was Old
London Bridge in those days, and at certain states of the tide there
was a race and fall of water there which gave it a bad reputation. But I
knew well enough how to 'shoot' the bridge after seeing it done, and so
began to row about among the shipping in the Pool, and down to Erith.
The first time I passed Mill Pond Bank, Herbert and I were pulling a
pair of oars; and, both in going and returning, we saw the blind towards
the east come down. Herbert was rarely there less frequently than three
times in a week, and he never brought me a single word of intelligence
that was at all alarming. Still, I knew that there was cause for alarm,
and I could not get rid of the notion of being watched. Once received,
it is a haunting idea; how many undesigning persons I suspected of
watching me, it would be hard to calculate.

In short, I was always full of fears for the rash man who was in hiding.
Herbert had sometimes said to me that he found it pleasant to stand at
one of our windows after dark, when the tide was running down, and to
think that it was flowing, with everything it bore, towards Clara. But
I thought with dread that it was flowing towards Magwitch, and that
any black mark on its surface might be his pursuers, going swiftly,
silently, and surely, to take him.




Chapter XLVII

Some weeks passed without bringing any change. We waited for Wemmick,
and he made no sign. If I had never known him out of Little Britain, and
had never enjoyed the privilege of being on a familiar footing at the
Castle, I might have doubted him; not so for a moment, knowing him as I
did.

My worldly affairs began to wear a gloomy appearance, and I was pressed
for money by more than one creditor. Even I myself began to know the
want of money (I mean of ready money in my own pocket), and to relieve
it by converting some easily spared articles of jewelery into cash. But
I had quite determined that it would be a heartless fraud to take more
money from my patron in the existing state of my uncertain thoughts and
plans. Therefore, I had sent him the unopened pocket-book by Herbert, to
hold in his own keeping, and I felt a kind of satisfaction--whether it
was a false kind or a true, I hardly know--in not having profited by his
generosity since his revelation of himself.

As the time wore on, an impression settled heavily upon me that Estella
was married. Fearful of having it confirmed, though it was all but a
conviction, I avoided the newspapers, and begged Herbert (to whom I had
confided the circumstances of our last interview) never to speak of her
to me. Why I hoarded up this last wretched little rag of the robe of
hope that was rent and given to the winds, how do I know? Why did you
who read this, commit that not dissimilar inconsistency of your own last
year, last month, last week?

It was an unhappy life that I lived; and its one dominant anxiety,
towering over all its other anxieties, like a high mountain above a
range of mountains, never disappeared from my view. Still, no new cause
for fear arose. Let me start from my bed as I would, with the terror
fresh upon me that he was discovered; let me sit listening, as I would
with dread, for Herbert's returning step at night, lest it should be
fleeter than ordinary, and winged with evil news,--for all that, and
much more to like purpose, the round of things went on. Condemned to
inaction and a state of constant restlessness and suspense, I rowed
about in my boat, and waited, waited, waited, as I best could.

There were states of the tide when, having been down the river, I could
not get back through the eddy-chafed arches and starlings of old London
Bridge; then, I left my boat at a wharf near the Custom House, to be
brought up afterwards to the Temple stairs. I was not averse to doing
this, as it served to make me and my boat a commoner incident among the
water-side people there. From this slight occasion sprang two meetings
that I have now to tell of.

One afternoon, late in the month of February, I came ashore at the wharf
at dusk. I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb tide, and
had turned with the tide. It had been a fine bright day, but had become
foggy as the sun dropped, and I had had to feel my way back among the
shipping, pretty carefully. Both in going and returning, I had seen the
signal in his window, All well.

As it was a raw evening, and I was cold, I thought I would comfort
myself with dinner at once; and as I had hours of dejection and solitude
before me if I went home to the Temple, I thought I would afterwards go
to the play. The theatre where Mr. Wopsle had achieved his questionable
triumph was in that water-side neighborhood (it is nowhere now), and
to that theatre I resolved to go. I was aware that Mr. Wopsle had
not succeeded in reviving the Drama, but, on the contrary, had rather
partaken of its decline. He had been ominously heard of, through the
play-bills, as a faithful Black, in connection with a little girl of
noble birth, and a monkey. And Herbert had seen him as a predatory
Tartar of comic propensities, with a face like a red brick, and an
outrageous hat all over bells.

I dined at what Herbert and I used to call a geographical chop-house,
where there were maps of the world in porter-pot rims on every half-yard
of the tablecloths, and charts of gravy on every one of the knives,--to
this day there is scarcely a single chop-house within the Lord Mayor's
dominions which is not geographical,--and wore out the time in dozing
over crumbs, staring at gas, and baking in a hot blast of dinners. By
and by, I roused myself, and went to the play.

There, I found a virtuous boatswain in His Majesty's service,--a most
excellent man, though I could have wished his trousers not quite so
tight in some places, and not quite so loose in others,--who knocked all
the little men's hats over their eyes, though he was very generous and
brave, and who wouldn't hear of anybody's paying taxes, though he was
very patriotic. He had a bag of money in his pocket, like a pudding in
the cloth, and on that property married a young person in bed-furniture,
with great rejoicings; the whole population of Portsmouth (nine in
number at the last census) turning out on the beach to rub their own
hands and shake everybody else's, and sing “Fill, fill!” A certain
dark-complexioned Swab, however, who wouldn't fill, or do anything else
that was proposed to him, and whose heart was openly stated (by the
boatswain) to be as black as his figure-head, proposed to two other
Swabs to get all mankind into difficulties; which was so effectually
done (the Swab family having considerable political influence) that it
took half the evening to set things right, and then it was only brought
about through an honest little grocer with a white hat, black gaiters,
and red nose, getting into a clock, with a gridiron, and listening, and
coming out, and knocking everybody down from behind with the gridiron
whom he couldn't confute with what he had overheard. This led to Mr.
Wopsle's (who had never been heard of before) coming in with a star
and garter on, as a plenipotentiary of great power direct from the
Admiralty, to say that the Swabs were all to go to prison on the spot,
and that he had brought the boatswain down the Union Jack, as a slight
acknowledgment of his public services. The boatswain, unmanned for the
first time, respectfully dried his eyes on the Jack, and then cheering
up, and addressing Mr. Wopsle as Your Honor, solicited permission to
take him by the fin. Mr. Wopsle, conceding his fin with a gracious
dignity, was immediately shoved into a dusty corner, while everybody
danced a hornpipe; and from that corner, surveying the public with a
discontented eye, became aware of me.

The second piece was the last new grand comic Christmas pantomime, in
the first scene of which, it pained me to suspect that I detected
Mr. Wopsle with red worsted legs under a highly magnified phosphoric
countenance and a shock of red curtain-fringe for his hair, engaged
in the manufacture of thunderbolts in a mine, and displaying great
cowardice when his gigantic master came home (very hoarse) to dinner.
But he presently presented himself under worthier circumstances; for,
the Genius of Youthful Love being in want of assistance,--on account of
the parental brutality of an ignorant farmer who opposed the choice
of his daughter's heart, by purposely falling upon the object, in a
flour-sack, out of the first-floor window,--summoned a sententious
Enchanter; and he, coming up from the antipodes rather unsteadily, after
an apparently violent journey, proved to be Mr. Wopsle in a high-crowned
hat, with a necromantic work in one volume under his arm. The business
of this enchanter on earth being principally to be talked at, sung at,
butted at, danced at, and flashed at with fires of various colors,
he had a good deal of time on his hands. And I observed, with great
surprise, that he devoted it to staring in my direction as if he were
lost in amazement.

There was something so remarkable in the increasing glare of Mr.
Wopsle's eye, and he seemed to be turning so many things over in his
mind and to grow so confused, that I could not make it out. I sat
thinking of it long after he had ascended to the clouds in a large
watch-case, and still I could not make it out. I was still thinking
of it when I came out of the theatre an hour afterwards, and found him
waiting for me near the door.

“How do you do?” said I, shaking hands with him as we turned down the
street together. “I saw that you saw me.”

“Saw you, Mr. Pip!” he returned. “Yes, of course I saw you. But who else
was there?”

“Who else?”

“It is the strangest thing,” said Mr. Wopsle, drifting into his lost
look again; “and yet I could swear to him.”

Becoming alarmed, I entreated Mr. Wopsle to explain his meaning.

“Whether I should have noticed him at first but for your being there,”
 said Mr. Wopsle, going on in the same lost way, “I can't be positive;
yet I think I should.”

Involuntarily I looked round me, as I was accustomed to look round me
when I went home; for these mysterious words gave me a chill.

“Oh! He can't be in sight,” said Mr. Wopsle. “He went out before I went
off. I saw him go.”

Having the reason that I had for being suspicious, I even suspected
this poor actor. I mistrusted a design to entrap me into some admission.
Therefore I glanced at him as we walked on together, but said nothing.

“I had a ridiculous fancy that he must be with you, Mr. Pip, till I saw
that you were quite unconscious of him, sitting behind you there like a
ghost.”

My former chill crept over me again, but I was resolved not to speak
yet, for it was quite consistent with his words that he might be set on
to induce me to connect these references with Provis. Of course, I was
perfectly sure and safe that Provis had not been there.

“I dare say you wonder at me, Mr. Pip; indeed, I see you do. But it is
so very strange! You'll hardly believe what I am going to tell you. I
could hardly believe it myself, if you told me.”

“Indeed?” said I.

“No, indeed. Mr. Pip, you remember in old times a certain Christmas Day,
when you were quite a child, and I dined at Gargery's, and some soldiers
came to the door to get a pair of handcuffs mended?”

“I remember it very well.”

“And you remember that there was a chase after two convicts, and that we
joined in it, and that Gargery took you on his back, and that I took the
lead, and you kept up with me as well as you could?”

“I remember it all very well.” Better than he thought,--except the last
clause.

“And you remember that we came up with the two in a ditch, and that
there was a scuffle between them, and that one of them had been severely
handled and much mauled about the face by the other?”

“I see it all before me.”

“And that the soldiers lighted torches, and put the two in the centre,
and that we went on to see the last of them, over the black marshes,
with the torchlight shining on their faces,--I am particular about
that,--with the torchlight shining on their faces, when there was an
outer ring of dark night all about us?”

“Yes,” said I. “I remember all that.”

“Then, Mr. Pip, one of those two prisoners sat behind you tonight. I saw
him over your shoulder.”

“Steady!” I thought. I asked him then, “Which of the two do you suppose
you saw?”

“The one who had been mauled,” he answered readily, “and I'll swear I
saw him! The more I think of him, the more certain I am of him.”

“This is very curious!” said I, with the best assumption I could put on
of its being nothing more to me. “Very curious indeed!”

I cannot exaggerate the enhanced disquiet into which this conversation
threw me, or the special and peculiar terror I felt at Compeyson's
having been behind me “like a ghost.” For if he had ever been out of my
thoughts for a few moments together since the hiding had begun, it was
in those very moments when he was closest to me; and to think that I
should be so unconscious and off my guard after all my care was as if
I had shut an avenue of a hundred doors to keep him out, and then had
found him at my elbow. I could not doubt, either, that he was there,
because I was there, and that, however slight an appearance of danger
there might be about us, danger was always near and active.

I put such questions to Mr. Wopsle as, When did the man come in? He
could not tell me that; he saw me, and over my shoulder he saw the man.
It was not until he had seen him for some time that he began to identify
him; but he had from the first vaguely associated him with me, and
known him as somehow belonging to me in the old village time. How was
he dressed? Prosperously, but not noticeably otherwise; he thought, in
black. Was his face at all disfigured? No, he believed not. I believed
not too, for, although in my brooding state I had taken no especial
notice of the people behind me, I thought it likely that a face at all
disfigured would have attracted my attention.

When Mr. Wopsle had imparted to me all that he could recall or I
extract, and when I had treated him to a little appropriate refreshment,
after the fatigues of the evening, we parted. It was between twelve and
one o'clock when I reached the Temple, and the gates were shut. No one
was near me when I went in and went home.

Herbert had come in, and we held a very serious council by the fire. But
there was nothing to be done, saving to communicate to Wemmick what I
had that night found out, and to remind him that we waited for his hint.
As I thought that I might compromise him if I went too often to the
Castle, I made this communication by letter. I wrote it before I went to
bed, and went out and posted it; and again no one was near me. Herbert
and I agreed that we could do nothing else but be very cautious. And
we were very cautious indeed,--more cautious than before, if that were
possible,--and I for my part never went near Chinks's Basin, except
when I rowed by, and then I only looked at Mill Pond Bank as I looked at
anything else.




Chapter XLVIII

The second of the two meetings referred to in the last chapter occurred
about a week after the first. I had again left my boat at the wharf
below Bridge; the time was an hour earlier in the afternoon; and,
undecided where to dine, I had strolled up into Cheapside, and was
strolling along it, surely the most unsettled person in all the busy
concourse, when a large hand was laid upon my shoulder by some one
overtaking me. It was Mr. Jaggers's hand, and he passed it through my
arm.

“As we are going in the same direction, Pip, we may walk together. Where
are you bound for?”

“For the Temple, I think,” said I.

“Don't you know?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Well,” I returned, glad for once to get the better of him in
cross-examination, “I do not know, for I have not made up my mind.”

“You are going to dine?” said Mr. Jaggers. “You don't mind admitting
that, I suppose?”

“No,” I returned, “I don't mind admitting that.”

“And are not engaged?”

“I don't mind admitting also that I am not engaged.”

“Then,” said Mr. Jaggers, “come and dine with me.”

I was going to excuse myself, when he added, “Wemmick's coming.” So
I changed my excuse into an acceptance,--the few words I had uttered,
serving for the beginning of either,--and we went along Cheapside
and slanted off to Little Britain, while the lights were springing up
brilliantly in the shop windows, and the street lamp-lighters, scarcely
finding ground enough to plant their ladders on in the midst of the
afternoon's bustle, were skipping up and down and running in and out,
opening more red eyes in the gathering fog than my rushlight tower at
the Hummums had opened white eyes in the ghostly wall.

At the office in Little Britain there was the usual letter-writing,
hand-washing, candle-snuffing, and safe-locking, that closed the
business of the day. As I stood idle by Mr. Jaggers's fire, its rising
and falling flame made the two casts on the shelf look as if they were
playing a diabolical game at bo-peep with me; while the pair of coarse,
fat office candles that dimly lighted Mr. Jaggers as he wrote in a
corner were decorated with dirty winding-sheets, as if in remembrance of
a host of hanged clients.

We went to Gerrard Street, all three together, in a hackney-coach: And,
as soon as we got there, dinner was served. Although I should not have
thought of making, in that place, the most distant reference by so much
as a look to Wemmick's Walworth sentiments, yet I should have had no
objection to catching his eye now and then in a friendly way. But it
was not to be done. He turned his eyes on Mr. Jaggers whenever he raised
them from the table, and was as dry and distant to me as if there were
twin Wemmicks, and this was the wrong one.

“Did you send that note of Miss Havisham's to Mr. Pip, Wemmick?” Mr.
Jaggers asked, soon after we began dinner.

“No, sir,” returned Wemmick; “it was going by post, when you brought Mr.
Pip into the office. Here it is.” He handed it to his principal instead
of to me.

“It's a note of two lines, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, handing it on, “sent
up to me by Miss Havisham on account of her not being sure of your
address. She tells me that she wants to see you on a little matter of
business you mentioned to her. You'll go down?”

“Yes,” said I, casting my eyes over the note, which was exactly in those
terms.

“When do you think of going down?”

“I have an impending engagement,” said I, glancing at Wemmick, who was
putting fish into the post-office, “that renders me rather uncertain of
my time. At once, I think.”

“If Mr. Pip has the intention of going at once,” said Wemmick to Mr.
Jaggers, “he needn't write an answer, you know.”

Receiving this as an intimation that it was best not to delay, I settled
that I would go to-morrow, and said so. Wemmick drank a glass of wine,
and looked with a grimly satisfied air at Mr. Jaggers, but not at me.

“So, Pip! Our friend the Spider,” said Mr. Jaggers, “has played his
cards. He has won the pool.”

It was as much as I could do to assent.

“Hah! He is a promising fellow--in his way--but he may not have it all
his own way. The stronger will win in the end, but the stronger has to
be found out first. If he should turn to, and beat her--”

“Surely,” I interrupted, with a burning face and heart, “you do not
seriously think that he is scoundrel enough for that, Mr. Jaggers?”

“I didn't say so, Pip. I am putting a case. If he should turn to and
beat her, he may possibly get the strength on his side; if it should be
a question of intellect, he certainly will not. It would be chance
work to give an opinion how a fellow of that sort will turn out in such
circumstances, because it's a toss-up between two results.”

“May I ask what they are?”

“A fellow like our friend the Spider,” answered Mr. Jaggers, “either
beats or cringes. He may cringe and growl, or cringe and not growl; but
he either beats or cringes. Ask Wemmick his opinion.”

“Either beats or cringes,” said Wemmick, not at all addressing himself
to me.

“So here's to Mrs. Bentley Drummle,” said Mr. Jaggers, taking a decanter
of choicer wine from his dumb-waiter, and filling for each of us and
for himself, “and may the question of supremacy be settled to the lady's
satisfaction! To the satisfaction of the lady and the gentleman,
it never will be. Now, Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly, how slow you are
to-day!”

She was at his elbow when he addressed her, putting a dish upon the
table. As she withdrew her hands from it, she fell back a step or two,
nervously muttering some excuse. And a certain action of her fingers, as
she spoke, arrested my attention.

“What's the matter?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Nothing. Only the subject we were speaking of,” said I, “was rather
painful to me.”

The action of her fingers was like the action of knitting. She stood
looking at her master, not understanding whether she was free to go, or
whether he had more to say to her and would call her back if she did go.
Her look was very intent. Surely, I had seen exactly such eyes and such
hands on a memorable occasion very lately!

He dismissed her, and she glided out of the room. But she remained
before me as plainly as if she were still there. I looked at those
hands, I looked at those eyes, I looked at that flowing hair; and I
compared them with other hands, other eyes, other hair, that I knew of,
and with what those might be after twenty years of a brutal husband
and a stormy life. I looked again at those hands and eyes of the
housekeeper, and thought of the inexplicable feeling that had come over
me when I last walked--not alone--in the ruined garden, and through the
deserted brewery. I thought how the same feeling had come back when I
saw a face looking at me, and a hand waving to me from a stage-coach
window; and how it had come back again and had flashed about me like
lightning, when I had passed in a carriage--not alone--through a sudden
glare of light in a dark street. I thought how one link of association
had helped that identification in the theatre, and how such a link,
wanting before, had been riveted for me now, when I had passed by a
chance swift from Estella's name to the fingers with their knitting
action, and the attentive eyes. And I felt absolutely certain that this
woman was Estella's mother.

Mr. Jaggers had seen me with Estella, and was not likely to have missed
the sentiments I had been at no pains to conceal. He nodded when I said
the subject was painful to me, clapped me on the back, put round the
wine again, and went on with his dinner.

Only twice more did the housekeeper reappear, and then her stay in the
room was very short, and Mr. Jaggers was sharp with her. But her hands
were Estella's hands, and her eyes were Estella's eyes, and if she had
reappeared a hundred times I could have been neither more sure nor less
sure that my conviction was the truth.

It was a dull evening, for Wemmick drew his wine, when it came round,
quite as a matter of business,--just as he might have drawn his salary
when that came round,--and with his eyes on his chief, sat in a state of
perpetual readiness for cross-examination. As to the quantity of wine,
his post-office was as indifferent and ready as any other post-office
for its quantity of letters. From my point of view, he was the wrong
twin all the time, and only externally like the Wemmick of Walworth.

We took our leave early, and left together. Even when we were groping
among Mr. Jaggers's stock of boots for our hats, I felt that the right
twin was on his way back; and we had not gone half a dozen yards down
Gerrard Street in the Walworth direction, before I found that I was
walking arm in arm with the right twin, and that the wrong twin had
evaporated into the evening air.

“Well!” said Wemmick, “that's over! He's a wonderful man, without his
living likeness; but I feel that I have to screw myself up when I dine
with him,--and I dine more comfortably unscrewed.”

I felt that this was a good statement of the case, and told him so.

“Wouldn't say it to anybody but yourself,” he answered. “I know that
what is said between you and me goes no further.”

I asked him if he had ever seen Miss Havisham's adopted daughter, Mrs.
Bentley Drummle. He said no. To avoid being too abrupt, I then spoke
of the Aged and of Miss Skiffins. He looked rather sly when I mentioned
Miss Skiffins, and stopped in the street to blow his nose, with a roll
of the head, and a flourish not quite free from latent boastfulness.

“Wemmick,” said I, “do you remember telling me, before I first went to
Mr. Jaggers's private house, to notice that housekeeper?”

“Did I?” he replied. “Ah, I dare say I did. Deuce take me,” he added,
suddenly, “I know I did. I find I am not quite unscrewed yet.”

“A wild beast tamed, you called her.”

“And what do you call her?”

“The same. How did Mr. Jaggers tame her, Wemmick?”

“That's his secret. She has been with him many a long year.”

“I wish you would tell me her story. I feel a particular interest in
being acquainted with it. You know that what is said between you and me
goes no further.”

“Well!” Wemmick replied, “I don't know her story,--that is, I don't know
all of it. But what I do know I'll tell you. We are in our private and
personal capacities, of course.”

“Of course.”

“A score or so of years ago, that woman was tried at the Old Bailey for
murder, and was acquitted. She was a very handsome young woman, and I
believe had some gypsy blood in her. Anyhow, it was hot enough when it
was up, as you may suppose.”

“But she was acquitted.”

“Mr. Jaggers was for her,” pursued Wemmick, with a look full of meaning,
“and worked the case in a way quite astonishing. It was a desperate
case, and it was comparatively early days with him then, and he worked
it to general admiration; in fact, it may almost be said to have made
him. He worked it himself at the police-office, day after day for many
days, contending against even a committal; and at the trial where he
couldn't work it himself, sat under counsel, and--every one knew--put
in all the salt and pepper. The murdered person was a woman,--a woman a
good ten years older, very much larger, and very much stronger. It was
a case of jealousy. They both led tramping lives, and this woman in
Gerrard Street here had been married very young, over the broomstick (as
we say), to a tramping man, and was a perfect fury in point of jealousy.
The murdered woman,--more a match for the man, certainly, in point of
years--was found dead in a barn near Hounslow Heath. There had been a
violent struggle, perhaps a fight. She was bruised and scratched and
torn, and had been held by the throat, at last, and choked. Now, there
was no reasonable evidence to implicate any person but this woman, and
on the improbabilities of her having been able to do it Mr. Jaggers
principally rested his case. You may be sure,” said Wemmick, touching me
on the sleeve, “that he never dwelt upon the strength of her hands then,
though he sometimes does now.”

I had told Wemmick of his showing us her wrists, that day of the dinner
party.

“Well, sir!” Wemmick went on; “it happened--happened, don't you
see?--that this woman was so very artfully dressed from the time of
her apprehension, that she looked much slighter than she really was; in
particular, her sleeves are always remembered to have been so skilfully
contrived that her arms had quite a delicate look. She had only a bruise
or two about her,--nothing for a tramp,--but the backs of her hands
were lacerated, and the question was, Was it with finger-nails? Now, Mr.
Jaggers showed that she had struggled through a great lot of brambles
which were not as high as her face; but which she could not have got
through and kept her hands out of; and bits of those brambles were
actually found in her skin and put in evidence, as well as the fact that
the brambles in question were found on examination to have been broken
through, and to have little shreds of her dress and little spots of
blood upon them here and there. But the boldest point he made was this:
it was attempted to be set up, in proof of her jealousy, that she was
under strong suspicion of having, at about the time of the murder,
frantically destroyed her child by this man--some three years old--to
revenge herself upon him. Mr. Jaggers worked that in this way: “We say
these are not marks of finger-nails, but marks of brambles, and we show
you the brambles. You say they are marks of finger-nails, and you set
up the hypothesis that she destroyed her child. You must accept all
consequences of that hypothesis. For anything we know, she may have
destroyed her child, and the child in clinging to her may have scratched
her hands. What then? You are not trying her for the murder of her
child; why don't you? As to this case, if you will have scratches,
we say that, for anything we know, you may have accounted for them,
assuming for the sake of argument that you have not invented them?” “To
sum up, sir,” said Wemmick, “Mr. Jaggers was altogether too many for the
jury, and they gave in.”

“Has she been in his service ever since?”

“Yes; but not only that,” said Wemmick, “she went into his service
immediately after her acquittal, tamed as she is now. She has since been
taught one thing and another in the way of her duties, but she was tamed
from the beginning.”

“Do you remember the sex of the child?”

“Said to have been a girl.”

“You have nothing more to say to me to-night?”

“Nothing. I got your letter and destroyed it. Nothing.”

We exchanged a cordial good-night, and I went home, with new matter for
my thoughts, though with no relief from the old.




Chapter XLIX

Putting Miss Havisham's note in my pocket, that it might serve as
my credentials for so soon reappearing at Satis House, in case her
waywardness should lead her to express any surprise at seeing me, I went
down again by the coach next day. But I alighted at the Halfway House,
and breakfasted there, and walked the rest of the distance; for I sought
to get into the town quietly by the unfrequented ways, and to leave it
in the same manner.

The best light of the day was gone when I passed along the quiet echoing
courts behind the High Street. The nooks of ruin where the old monks had
once had their refectories and gardens, and where the strong walls were
now pressed into the service of humble sheds and stables, were almost
as silent as the old monks in their graves. The cathedral chimes had at
once a sadder and a more remote sound to me, as I hurried on avoiding
observation, than they had ever had before; so, the swell of the old
organ was borne to my ears like funeral music; and the rooks, as they
hovered about the gray tower and swung in the bare high trees of the
priory garden, seemed to call to me that the place was changed, and that
Estella was gone out of it for ever.

An elderly woman, whom I had seen before as one of the servants who
lived in the supplementary house across the back courtyard, opened the
gate. The lighted candle stood in the dark passage within, as of old,
and I took it up and ascended the staircase alone. Miss Havisham was not
in her own room, but was in the larger room across the landing. Looking
in at the door, after knocking in vain, I saw her sitting on the hearth
in a ragged chair, close before, and lost in the contemplation of, the
ashy fire.

Doing as I had often done, I went in, and stood touching the old
chimney-piece, where she could see me when she raised her eyes. There
was an air of utter loneliness upon her, that would have moved me to
pity though she had wilfully done me a deeper injury than I could charge
her with. As I stood compassionating her, and thinking how, in the
progress of time, I too had come to be a part of the wrecked fortunes of
that house, her eyes rested on me. She stared, and said in a low voice,
“Is it real?”

“It is I, Pip. Mr. Jaggers gave me your note yesterday, and I have lost
no time.”

“Thank you. Thank you.”

As I brought another of the ragged chairs to the hearth and sat down, I
remarked a new expression on her face, as if she were afraid of me.

“I want,” she said, “to pursue that subject you mentioned to me when you
were last here, and to show you that I am not all stone. But perhaps you
can never believe, now, that there is anything human in my heart?”

When I said some reassuring words, she stretched out her tremulous right
hand, as though she was going to touch me; but she recalled it again
before I understood the action, or knew how to receive it.

“You said, speaking for your friend, that you could tell me how to do
something useful and good. Something that you would like done, is it
not?”

“Something that I would like done very much.”

“What is it?”

I began explaining to her that secret history of the partnership. I had
not got far into it, when I judged from her looks that she was thinking
in a discursive way of me, rather than of what I said. It seemed to be
so; for, when I stopped speaking, many moments passed before she showed
that she was conscious of the fact.

“Do you break off,” she asked then, with her former air of being afraid
of me, “because you hate me too much to bear to speak to me?”

“No, no,” I answered, “how can you think so, Miss Havisham! I stopped
because I thought you were not following what I said.”

“Perhaps I was not,” she answered, putting a hand to her head. “Begin
again, and let me look at something else. Stay! Now tell me.”

She set her hand upon her stick in the resolute way that sometimes was
habitual to her, and looked at the fire with a strong expression of
forcing herself to attend. I went on with my explanation, and told her
how I had hoped to complete the transaction out of my means, but how
in this I was disappointed. That part of the subject (I reminded her)
involved matters which could form no part of my explanation, for they
were the weighty secrets of another.

“So!” said she, assenting with her head, but not looking at me. “And how
much money is wanting to complete the purchase?”

I was rather afraid of stating it, for it sounded a large sum. “Nine
hundred pounds.”

“If I give you the money for this purpose, will you keep my secret as
you have kept your own?”

“Quite as faithfully.”

“And your mind will be more at rest?”

“Much more at rest.”

“Are you very unhappy now?”

She asked this question, still without looking at me, but in an unwonted
tone of sympathy. I could not reply at the moment, for my voice failed
me. She put her left arm across the head of her stick, and softly laid
her forehead on it.

“I am far from happy, Miss Havisham; but I have other causes of disquiet
than any you know of. They are the secrets I have mentioned.”

After a little while, she raised her head, and looked at the fire again.

“It is noble in you to tell me that you have other causes of
unhappiness. Is it true?”

“Too true.”

“Can I only serve you, Pip, by serving your friend? Regarding that as
done, is there nothing I can do for you yourself?”

“Nothing. I thank you for the question. I thank you even more for the
tone of the question. But there is nothing.”

She presently rose from her seat, and looked about the blighted room
for the means of writing. There were none there, and she took from her
pocket a yellow set of ivory tablets, mounted in tarnished gold, and
wrote upon them with a pencil in a case of tarnished gold that hung from
her neck.

“You are still on friendly terms with Mr. Jaggers?”

“Quite. I dined with him yesterday.”

“This is an authority to him to pay you that money, to lay out at your
irresponsible discretion for your friend. I keep no money here; but if
you would rather Mr. Jaggers knew nothing of the matter, I will send it
to you.”

“Thank you, Miss Havisham; I have not the least objection to receiving
it from him.”

She read me what she had written; and it was direct and clear, and
evidently intended to absolve me from any suspicion of profiting by the
receipt of the money. I took the tablets from her hand, and it trembled
again, and it trembled more as she took off the chain to which the
pencil was attached, and put it in mine. All this she did without
looking at me.

“My name is on the first leaf. If you can ever write under my name, “I
forgive her,” though ever so long after my broken heart is dust pray do
it!”

“O Miss Havisham,” said I, “I can do it now. There have been sore
mistakes; and my life has been a blind and thankless one; and I want
forgiveness and direction far too much, to be bitter with you.”

She turned her face to me for the first time since she had averted it,
and, to my amazement, I may even add to my terror, dropped on her knees
at my feet; with her folded hands raised to me in the manner in which,
when her poor heart was young and fresh and whole, they must often have
been raised to heaven from her mother's side.

To see her with her white hair and her worn face kneeling at my feet
gave me a shock through all my frame. I entreated her to rise, and got
my arms about her to help her up; but she only pressed that hand of mine
which was nearest to her grasp, and hung her head over it and wept. I
had never seen her shed a tear before, and, in the hope that the
relief might do her good, I bent over her without speaking. She was not
kneeling now, but was down upon the ground.

“O!” she cried, despairingly. “What have I done! What have I done!”

“If you mean, Miss Havisham, what have you done to injure me, let me
answer. Very little. I should have loved her under any circumstances. Is
she married?”

“Yes.”

It was a needless question, for a new desolation in the desolate house
had told me so.

“What have I done! What have I done!” She wrung her hands, and crushed
her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over again. “What have
I done!”

I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a
grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form
that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride found
vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light
of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had
secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that,
her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and
must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew
equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her
punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth
on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a
master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the
vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been
curses in this world?

“Until you spoke to her the other day, and until I saw in you a
looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know
what I had done. What have I done! What have I done!” And so again,
twenty, fifty times over, What had she done!

“Miss Havisham,” I said, when her cry had died away, “you may dismiss me
from your mind and conscience. But Estella is a different case, and if
you can ever undo any scrap of what you have done amiss in keeping a
part of her right nature away from her, it will be better to do that
than to bemoan the past through a hundred years.”

“Yes, yes, I know it. But, Pip--my dear!” There was an earnest womanly
compassion for me in her new affection. “My dear! Believe this: when she
first came to me, I meant to save her from misery like my own. At first,
I meant no more.”

“Well, well!” said I. “I hope so.”

“But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually did
worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings,
and with this figure of myself always before her, a warning to back and
point my lessons, I stole her heart away, and put ice in its place.”

“Better,” I could not help saying, “to have left her a natural heart,
even to be bruised or broken.”

With that, Miss Havisham looked distractedly at me for a while, and then
burst out again, What had she done!

“If you knew all my story,” she pleaded, “you would have some compassion
for me and a better understanding of me.”

“Miss Havisham,” I answered, as delicately as I could, “I believe I may
say that I do know your story, and have known it ever since I first left
this neighborhood. It has inspired me with great commiseration, and I
hope I understand it and its influences. Does what has passed between us
give me any excuse for asking you a question relative to Estella? Not as
she is, but as she was when she first came here?”

She was seated on the ground, with her arms on the ragged chair, and
her head leaning on them. She looked full at me when I said this, and
replied, “Go on.”

“Whose child was Estella?”

She shook her head.

“You don't know?”

She shook her head again.

“But Mr. Jaggers brought her here, or sent her here?”

“Brought her here.”

“Will you tell me how that came about?”

She answered in a low whisper and with caution: “I had been shut up in
these rooms a long time (I don't know how long; you know what time the
clocks keep here), when I told him that I wanted a little girl to rear
and love, and save from my fate. I had first seen him when I sent
for him to lay this place waste for me; having read of him in the
newspapers, before I and the world parted. He told me that he would
look about him for such an orphan child. One night he brought her here
asleep, and I called her Estella.”

“Might I ask her age then?”

“Two or three. She herself knows nothing, but that she was left an
orphan and I adopted her.”

So convinced I was of that woman's being her mother, that I wanted
no evidence to establish the fact in my own mind. But, to any mind, I
thought, the connection here was clear and straight.

What more could I hope to do by prolonging the interview? I had
succeeded on behalf of Herbert, Miss Havisham had told me all she knew
of Estella, I had said and done what I could to ease her mind. No matter
with what other words we parted; we parted.

Twilight was closing in when I went downstairs into the natural air. I
called to the woman who had opened the gate when I entered, that I would
not trouble her just yet, but would walk round the place before leaving.
For I had a presentiment that I should never be there again, and I felt
that the dying light was suited to my last view of it.

By the wilderness of casks that I had walked on long ago, and on which
the rain of years had fallen since, rotting them in many places, and
leaving miniature swamps and pools of water upon those that stood on
end, I made my way to the ruined garden. I went all round it; round by
the corner where Herbert and I had fought our battle; round by the paths
where Estella and I had walked. So cold, so lonely, so dreary all!

Taking the brewery on my way back, I raised the rusty latch of a little
door at the garden end of it, and walked through. I was going out at the
opposite door,--not easy to open now, for the damp wood had started and
swelled, and the hinges were yielding, and the threshold was encumbered
with a growth of fungus,--when I turned my head to look back. A childish
association revived with wonderful force in the moment of the slight
action, and I fancied that I saw Miss Havisham hanging to the beam. So
strong was the impression, that I stood under the beam shuddering from
head to foot before I knew it was a fancy,--though to be sure I was
there in an instant.

The mournfulness of the place and time, and the great terror of
this illusion, though it was but momentary, caused me to feel an
indescribable awe as I came out between the open wooden gates where I
had once wrung my hair after Estella had wrung my heart. Passing on into
the front courtyard, I hesitated whether to call the woman to let me out
at the locked gate of which she had the key, or first to go upstairs
and assure myself that Miss Havisham was as safe and well as I had left
her. I took the latter course and went up.

I looked into the room where I had left her, and I saw her seated in the
ragged chair upon the hearth close to the fire, with her back towards
me. In the moment when I was withdrawing my head to go quietly away,
I saw a great flaming light spring up. In the same moment I saw her
running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her,
and soaring at least as many feet above her head as she was high.

I had a double-caped great-coat on, and over my arm another thick coat.
That I got them off, closed with her, threw her down, and got them over
her; that I dragged the great cloth from the table for the same purpose,
and with it dragged down the heap of rottenness in the midst, and
all the ugly things that sheltered there; that we were on the ground
struggling like desperate enemies, and that the closer I covered her,
the more wildly she shrieked and tried to free herself,--that this
occurred I knew through the result, but not through anything I felt, or
thought, or knew I did. I knew nothing until I knew that we were on the
floor by the great table, and that patches of tinder yet alight were
floating in the smoky air, which, a moment ago, had been her faded
bridal dress.

Then, I looked round and saw the disturbed beetles and spiders running
away over the floor, and the servants coming in with breathless cries
at the door. I still held her forcibly down with all my strength, like
a prisoner who might escape; and I doubt if I even knew who she was, or
why we had struggled, or that she had been in flames, or that the flames
were out, until I saw the patches of tinder that had been her garments
no longer alight but falling in a black shower around us.

She was insensible, and I was afraid to have her moved, or even
touched. Assistance was sent for, and I held her until it came, as if
I unreasonably fancied (I think I did) that, if I let her go, the fire
would break out again and consume her. When I got up, on the surgeon's
coming to her with other aid, I was astonished to see that both my hands
were burnt; for, I had no knowledge of it through the sense of feeling.

On examination it was pronounced that she had received serious hurts,
but that they of themselves were far from hopeless; the danger lay
mainly in the nervous shock. By the surgeon's directions, her bed was
carried into that room and laid upon the great table, which happened to
be well suited to the dressing of her injuries. When I saw her again, an
hour afterwards, she lay, indeed, where I had seen her strike her stick,
and had heard her say that she would lie one day.

Though every vestige of her dress was burnt, as they told me, she
still had something of her old ghastly bridal appearance; for, they had
covered her to the throat with white cotton-wool, and as she lay with
a white sheet loosely overlying that, the phantom air of something that
had been and was changed was still upon her.

I found, on questioning the servants, that Estella was in Paris, and I
got a promise from the surgeon that he would write to her by the
next post. Miss Havisham's family I took upon myself; intending to
communicate with Mr. Matthew Pocket only, and leave him to do as he
liked about informing the rest. This I did next day, through Herbert, as
soon as I returned to town.

There was a stage, that evening, when she spoke collectedly of what had
happened, though with a certain terrible vivacity. Towards midnight she
began to wander in her speech; and after that it gradually set in that
she said innumerable times in a low solemn voice, “What have I done!”
 And then, “When she first came, I meant to save her from misery like
mine.” And then, “Take the pencil and write under my name, 'I forgive
her!'” She never changed the order of these three sentences, but she
sometimes left out a word in one or other of them; never putting in
another word, but always leaving a blank and going on to the next word.

As I could do no service there, and as I had, nearer home, that pressing
reason for anxiety and fear which even her wanderings could not drive
out of my mind, I decided, in the course of the night that I would
return by the early morning coach, walking on a mile or so, and being
taken up clear of the town. At about six o'clock of the morning,
therefore, I leaned over her and touched her lips with mine, just as
they said, not stopping for being touched, “Take the pencil and write
under my name, 'I forgive her.'”




Chapter L

My hands had been dressed twice or thrice in the night, and again in
the morning. My left arm was a good deal burned to the elbow, and, less
severely, as high as the shoulder; it was very painful, but the flames
had set in that direction, and I felt thankful it was no worse. My right
hand was not so badly burnt but that I could move the fingers. It was
bandaged, of course, but much less inconveniently than my left hand and
arm; those I carried in a sling; and I could only wear my coat like a
cloak, loose over my shoulders and fastened at the neck. My hair had
been caught by the fire, but not my head or face.

When Herbert had been down to Hammersmith and seen his father, he came
back to me at our chambers, and devoted the day to attending on me. He
was the kindest of nurses, and at stated times took off the bandages,
and steeped them in the cooling liquid that was kept ready, and put them
on again, with a patient tenderness that I was deeply grateful for.

At first, as I lay quiet on the sofa, I found it painfully difficult, I
might say impossible, to get rid of the impression of the glare of the
flames, their hurry and noise, and the fierce burning smell. If I
dozed for a minute, I was awakened by Miss Havisham's cries, and by her
running at me with all that height of fire above her head. This pain
of the mind was much harder to strive against than any bodily pain I
suffered; and Herbert, seeing that, did his utmost to hold my attention
engaged.

Neither of us spoke of the boat, but we both thought of it. That
was made apparent by our avoidance of the subject, and by our
agreeing--without agreement--to make my recovery of the use of my hands
a question of so many hours, not of so many weeks.

My first question when I saw Herbert had been of course, whether all
was well down the river? As he replied in the affirmative, with perfect
confidence and cheerfulness, we did not resume the subject until the day
was wearing away. But then, as Herbert changed the bandages, more by
the light of the fire than by the outer light, he went back to it
spontaneously.

“I sat with Provis last night, Handel, two good hours.”

“Where was Clara?”

“Dear little thing!” said Herbert. “She was up and down with
Gruffandgrim all the evening. He was perpetually pegging at the floor
the moment she left his sight. I doubt if he can hold out long, though.
What with rum and pepper,--and pepper and rum,--I should think his
pegging must be nearly over.”

“And then you will be married, Herbert?”

“How can I take care of the dear child otherwise?--Lay your arm out upon
the back of the sofa, my dear boy, and I'll sit down here, and get the
bandage off so gradually that you shall not know when it comes. I was
speaking of Provis. Do you know, Handel, he improves?”

“I said to you I thought he was softened when I last saw him.”

“So you did. And so he is. He was very communicative last night, and
told me more of his life. You remember his breaking off here about some
woman that he had had great trouble with.--Did I hurt you?”

I had started, but not under his touch. His words had given me a start.

“I had forgotten that, Herbert, but I remember it now you speak of it.”

“Well! He went into that part of his life, and a dark wild part it is.
Shall I tell you? Or would it worry you just now?”

“Tell me by all means. Every word.”

Herbert bent forward to look at me more nearly, as if my reply had been
rather more hurried or more eager than he could quite account for. “Your
head is cool?” he said, touching it.

“Quite,” said I. “Tell me what Provis said, my dear Herbert.”

“It seems,” said Herbert, “--there's a bandage off most charmingly, and
now comes the cool one,--makes you shrink at first, my poor dear fellow,
don't it? but it will be comfortable presently,--it seems that the
woman was a young woman, and a jealous woman, and a revengeful woman;
revengeful, Handel, to the last degree.”

“To what last degree?”

“Murder.--Does it strike too cold on that sensitive place?”

“I don't feel it. How did she murder? Whom did she murder?”

“Why, the deed may not have merited quite so terrible a name,”
 said Herbert, “but, she was tried for it, and Mr. Jaggers defended
her, and the reputation of that defence first made his name known
to Provis. It was another and a stronger woman who was the victim,
and there had been a struggle--in a barn. Who began it, or how fair
it was, or how unfair, may be doubtful; but how it ended is
certainly not doubtful, for the victim was found throttled.”

“Was the woman brought in guilty?”

“No; she was acquitted.--My poor Handel, I hurt you!”

“It is impossible to be gentler, Herbert. Yes? What else?”

“This acquitted young woman and Provis had a little child; a little
child of whom Provis was exceedingly fond. On the evening of the very
night when the object of her jealousy was strangled as I tell you, the
young woman presented herself before Provis for one moment, and swore
that she would destroy the child (which was in her possession), and he
should never see it again; then she vanished.--There's the worst arm
comfortably in the sling once more, and now there remains but the right
hand, which is a far easier job. I can do it better by this light
than by a stronger, for my hand is steadiest when I don't see the poor
blistered patches too distinctly.--You don't think your breathing is
affected, my dear boy? You seem to breathe quickly.”

“Perhaps I do, Herbert. Did the woman keep her oath?”

“There comes the darkest part of Provis's life. She did.”

“That is, he says she did.”

“Why, of course, my dear boy,” returned Herbert, in a tone of surprise,
and again bending forward to get a nearer look at me. “He says it all. I
have no other information.”

“No, to be sure.”

“Now, whether,” pursued Herbert, “he had used the child's mother ill, or
whether he had used the child's mother well, Provis doesn't say; but she
had shared some four or five years of the wretched life he described
to us at this fireside, and he seems to have felt pity for her, and
forbearance towards her. Therefore, fearing he should be called upon to
depose about this destroyed child, and so be the cause of her death, he
hid himself (much as he grieved for the child), kept himself dark, as he
says, out of the way and out of the trial, and was only vaguely talked
of as a certain man called Abel, out of whom the jealousy arose. After
the acquittal she disappeared, and thus he lost the child and the
child's mother.”

“I want to ask--”

“A moment, my dear boy, and I have done. That evil genius, Compeyson,
the worst of scoundrels among many scoundrels, knowing of his keeping
out of the way at that time and of his reasons for doing so, of course
afterwards held the knowledge over his head as a means of keeping him
poorer and working him harder. It was clear last night that this barbed
the point of Provis's animosity.”

“I want to know,” said I, “and particularly, Herbert, whether he told
you when this happened?”

“Particularly? Let me remember, then, what he said as to that. His
expression was, 'a round score o' year ago, and a'most directly after I
took up wi' Compeyson.' How old were you when you came upon him in the
little churchyard?”

“I think in my seventh year.”

“Ay. It had happened some three or four years then, he said, and you
brought into his mind the little girl so tragically lost, who would have
been about your age.”

“Herbert,” said I, after a short silence, in a hurried way, “can you see
me best by the light of the window, or the light of the fire?”

“By the firelight,” answered Herbert, coming close again.

“Look at me.”

“I do look at you, my dear boy.”

“Touch me.”

“I do touch you, my dear boy.”

“You are not afraid that I am in any fever, or that my head is much
disordered by the accident of last night?”

“N-no, my dear boy,” said Herbert, after taking time to examine me. “You
are rather excited, but you are quite yourself.”

“I know I am quite myself. And the man we have in hiding down the river,
is Estella's Father.”




Chapter LI

What purpose I had in view when I was hot on tracing out and proving
Estella's parentage, I cannot say. It will presently be seen that the
question was not before me in a distinct shape until it was put before
me by a wiser head than my own.

But when Herbert and I had held our momentous conversation, I was seized
with a feverish conviction that I ought to hunt the matter down,--that I
ought not to let it rest, but that I ought to see Mr. Jaggers, and come
at the bare truth. I really do not know whether I felt that I did this
for Estella's sake, or whether I was glad to transfer to the man in
whose preservation I was so much concerned some rays of the romantic
interest that had so long surrounded me. Perhaps the latter possibility
may be the nearer to the truth.

Any way, I could scarcely be withheld from going out to Gerrard Street
that night. Herbert's representations that, if I did, I should probably
be laid up and stricken useless, when our fugitive's safety would depend
upon me, alone restrained my impatience. On the understanding, again
and again reiterated, that, come what would, I was to go to Mr. Jaggers
to-morrow, I at length submitted to keep quiet, and to have my hurts
looked after, and to stay at home. Early next morning we went out
together, and at the corner of Giltspur Street by Smithfield, I left
Herbert to go his way into the City, and took my way to Little Britain.

There were periodical occasions when Mr. Jaggers and Wemmick went over
the office accounts, and checked off the vouchers, and put all things
straight. On these occasions, Wemmick took his books and papers into Mr.
Jaggers's room, and one of the upstairs clerks came down into the outer
office. Finding such clerk on Wemmick's post that morning, I knew
what was going on; but I was not sorry to have Mr. Jaggers and Wemmick
together, as Wemmick would then hear for himself that I said nothing to
compromise him.

My appearance, with my arm bandaged and my coat loose over my shoulders,
favored my object. Although I had sent Mr. Jaggers a brief account of
the accident as soon as I had arrived in town, yet I had to give him all
the details now; and the speciality of the occasion caused our talk
to be less dry and hard, and less strictly regulated by the rules of
evidence, than it had been before. While I described the disaster, Mr.
Jaggers stood, according to his wont, before the fire. Wemmick leaned
back in his chair, staring at me, with his hands in the pockets of his
trousers, and his pen put horizontally into the post. The two brutal
casts, always inseparable in my mind from the official proceedings,
seemed to be congestively considering whether they didn't smell fire at
the present moment.

My narrative finished, and their questions exhausted, I then produced
Miss Havisham's authority to receive the nine hundred pounds for
Herbert. Mr. Jaggers's eyes retired a little deeper into his head when
I handed him the tablets, but he presently handed them over to Wemmick,
with instructions to draw the check for his signature. While that was
in course of being done, I looked on at Wemmick as he wrote, and Mr.
Jaggers, poising and swaying himself on his well-polished boots, looked
on at me. “I am sorry, Pip,” said he, as I put the check in my pocket,
when he had signed it, “that we do nothing for you.”

“Miss Havisham was good enough to ask me,” I returned, “whether she
could do nothing for me, and I told her No.”

“Everybody should know his own business,” said Mr. Jaggers. And I saw
Wemmick's lips form the words “portable property.”

“I should not have told her No, if I had been you,” said Mr Jaggers;
“but every man ought to know his own business best.”

“Every man's business,” said Wemmick, rather reproachfully towards me,
“is portable property.”

As I thought the time was now come for pursuing the theme I had at
heart, I said, turning on Mr. Jaggers:--

“I did ask something of Miss Havisham, however, sir. I asked her to give
me some information relative to her adopted daughter, and she gave me
all she possessed.”

“Did she?” said Mr. Jaggers, bending forward to look at his boots and
then straightening himself. “Hah! I don't think I should have done so,
if I had been Miss Havisham. But she ought to know her own business
best.”

“I know more of the history of Miss Havisham's adopted child than Miss
Havisham herself does, sir. I know her mother.”

Mr. Jaggers looked at me inquiringly, and repeated “Mother?”

“I have seen her mother within these three days.”

“Yes?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“And so have you, sir. And you have seen her still more recently.”

“Yes?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Perhaps I know more of Estella's history than even you do,” said I. “I
know her father too.”

A certain stop that Mr. Jaggers came to in his manner--he was too
self-possessed to change his manner, but he could not help its being
brought to an indefinably attentive stop--assured me that he did not
know who her father was. This I had strongly suspected from Provis's
account (as Herbert had repeated it) of his having kept himself dark;
which I pieced on to the fact that he himself was not Mr. Jaggers's
client until some four years later, and when he could have no reason for
claiming his identity. But, I could not be sure of this unconsciousness
on Mr. Jaggers's part before, though I was quite sure of it now.

“So! You know the young lady's father, Pip?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Yes,” I replied, “and his name is Provis--from New South Wales.”

Even Mr. Jaggers started when I said those words. It was the slightest
start that could escape a man, the most carefully repressed and the
sooner checked, but he did start, though he made it a part of the
action of taking out his pocket-handkerchief. How Wemmick received the
announcement I am unable to say; for I was afraid to look at him just
then, lest Mr. Jaggers's sharpness should detect that there had been
some communication unknown to him between us.

“And on what evidence, Pip,” asked Mr. Jaggers, very coolly, as he
paused with his handkerchief half way to his nose, “does Provis make
this claim?”

“He does not make it,” said I, “and has never made it, and has no
knowledge or belief that his daughter is in existence.”

For once, the powerful pocket-handkerchief failed. My reply was so
unexpected, that Mr. Jaggers put the handkerchief back into his pocket
without completing the usual performance, folded his arms, and looked
with stern attention at me, though with an immovable face.

Then I told him all I knew, and how I knew it; with the one reservation
that I left him to infer that I knew from Miss Havisham what I in fact
knew from Wemmick. I was very careful indeed as to that. Nor did I look
towards Wemmick until I had finished all I had to tell, and had been for
some time silently meeting Mr. Jaggers's look. When I did at last turn
my eyes in Wemmick's direction, I found that he had unposted his pen,
and was intent upon the table before him.

“Hah!” said Mr. Jaggers at last, as he moved towards the papers on the
table. “What item was it you were at, Wemmick, when Mr. Pip came in?”

But I could not submit to be thrown off in that way, and I made a
passionate, almost an indignant appeal, to him to be more frank and
manly with me. I reminded him of the false hopes into which I had
lapsed, the length of time they had lasted, and the discovery I had
made: and I hinted at the danger that weighed upon my spirits. I
represented myself as being surely worthy of some little confidence from
him, in return for the confidence I had just now imparted. I said that
I did not blame him, or suspect him, or mistrust him, but I wanted
assurance of the truth from him. And if he asked me why I wanted it,
and why I thought I had any right to it, I would tell him, little as he
cared for such poor dreams, that I had loved Estella dearly and long,
and that although I had lost her, and must live a bereaved life,
whatever concerned her was still nearer and dearer to me than anything
else in the world. And seeing that Mr. Jaggers stood quite still and
silent, and apparently quite obdurate, under this appeal, I turned to
Wemmick, and said, “Wemmick, I know you to be a man with a gentle
heart. I have seen your pleasant home, and your old father, and all the
innocent, cheerful playful ways with which you refresh your business
life. And I entreat you to say a word for me to Mr. Jaggers, and to
represent to him that, all circumstances considered, he ought to be more
open with me!”

I have never seen two men look more oddly at one another than Mr.
Jaggers and Wemmick did after this apostrophe. At first, a misgiving
crossed me that Wemmick would be instantly dismissed from his
employment; but it melted as I saw Mr. Jaggers relax into something like
a smile, and Wemmick become bolder.

“What's all this?” said Mr. Jaggers. “You with an old father, and you
with pleasant and playful ways?”

“Well!” returned Wemmick. “If I don't bring 'em here, what does it
matter?”

“Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, laying his hand upon my arm, and smiling
openly, “this man must be the most cunning impostor in all London.”

“Not a bit of it,” returned Wemmick, growing bolder and bolder. “I think
you're another.”

Again they exchanged their former odd looks, each apparently still
distrustful that the other was taking him in.

“You with a pleasant home?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Since it don't interfere with business,” returned Wemmick, “let it be
so. Now, I look at you, sir, I shouldn't wonder if you might be planning
and contriving to have a pleasant home of your own one of these days,
when you're tired of all this work.”

Mr. Jaggers nodded his head retrospectively two or three times, and
actually drew a sigh. “Pip,” said he, “we won't talk about 'poor
dreams;' you know more about such things than I, having much fresher
experience of that kind. But now about this other matter. I'll put a
case to you. Mind! I admit nothing.”

He waited for me to declare that I quite understood that he expressly
said that he admitted nothing.

“Now, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, “put this case. Put the case that a
woman, under such circumstances as you have mentioned, held her child
concealed, and was obliged to communicate the fact to her legal adviser,
on his representing to her that he must know, with an eye to the
latitude of his defence, how the fact stood about that child. Put the
case that, at the same time he held a trust to find a child for an
eccentric rich lady to adopt and bring up.”

“I follow you, sir.”

“Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he
saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain
destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at
a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that
he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported,
neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing
up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw
in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much
spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,--to be
prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.”

“I follow you, sir.”

“Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of the
heap who could be saved; whom the father believed dead, and dared make
no stir about; as to whom, over the mother, the legal adviser had this
power: “I know what you did, and how you did it. You came so and so, you
did such and such things to divert suspicion. I have tracked you through
it all, and I tell it you all. Part with the child, unless it should
be necessary to produce it to clear you, and then it shall be produced.
Give the child into my hands, and I will do my best to bring you off. If
you are saved, your child is saved too; if you are lost, your child is
still saved.” Put the case that this was done, and that the woman was
cleared.”

“I understand you perfectly.”

“But that I make no admissions?”

“That you make no admissions.” And Wemmick repeated, “No admissions.”

“Put the case, Pip, that passion and the terror of death had a little
shaken the woman's intellects, and that when she was set at liberty,
she was scared out of the ways of the world, and went to him to be
sheltered. Put the case that he took her in, and that he kept down the
old, wild, violent nature whenever he saw an inkling of its breaking
out, by asserting his power over her in the old way. Do you comprehend
the imaginary case?”

“Quite.”

“Put the case that the child grew up, and was married for money. That
the mother was still living. That the father was still living. That the
mother and father, unknown to one another, were dwelling within so many
miles, furlongs, yards if you like, of one another. That the secret was
still a secret, except that you had got wind of it. Put that last case
to yourself very carefully.”

“I do.”

“I ask Wemmick to put it to himself very carefully.”

And Wemmick said, “I do.”

“For whose sake would you reveal the secret? For the father's? I think
he would not be much the better for the mother. For the mother's? I
think if she had done such a deed she would be safer where she was.
For the daughter's? I think it would hardly serve her to establish her
parentage for the information of her husband, and to drag her back to
disgrace, after an escape of twenty years, pretty secure to last for
life. But add the case that you had loved her, Pip, and had made her the
subject of those 'poor dreams' which have, at one time or another, been
in the heads of more men than you think likely, then I tell you that you
had better--and would much sooner when you had thought well of it--chop
off that bandaged left hand of yours with your bandaged right hand, and
then pass the chopper on to Wemmick there, to cut that off too.”

I looked at Wemmick, whose face was very grave. He gravely touched his
lips with his forefinger. I did the same. Mr. Jaggers did the same.
“Now, Wemmick,” said the latter then, resuming his usual manner, “what
item was it you were at when Mr. Pip came in?”

Standing by for a little, while they were at work, I observed that the
odd looks they had cast at one another were repeated several times: with
this difference now, that each of them seemed suspicious, not to say
conscious, of having shown himself in a weak and unprofessional light to
the other. For this reason, I suppose, they were now inflexible with one
another; Mr. Jaggers being highly dictatorial, and Wemmick obstinately
justifying himself whenever there was the smallest point in abeyance for
a moment. I had never seen them on such ill terms; for generally they
got on very well indeed together.

But they were both happily relieved by the opportune appearance of Mike,
the client with the fur cap and the habit of wiping his nose on his
sleeve, whom I had seen on the very first day of my appearance within
those walls. This individual, who, either in his own person or in that
of some member of his family, seemed to be always in trouble (which in
that place meant Newgate), called to announce that his eldest daughter
was taken up on suspicion of shoplifting. As he imparted this melancholy
circumstance to Wemmick, Mr. Jaggers standing magisterially before the
fire and taking no share in the proceedings, Mike's eye happened to
twinkle with a tear.

“What are you about?” demanded Wemmick, with the utmost indignation.
“What do you come snivelling here for?”

“I didn't go to do it, Mr. Wemmick.”

“You did,” said Wemmick. “How dare you? You're not in a fit state to
come here, if you can't come here without spluttering like a bad pen.
What do you mean by it?”

“A man can't help his feelings, Mr. Wemmick,” pleaded Mike.

“His what?” demanded Wemmick, quite savagely. “Say that again!”

“Now look here my man,” said Mr. Jaggers, advancing a step, and pointing
to the door. “Get out of this office. I'll have no feelings here. Get
out.”

“It serves you right,” said Wemmick, “Get out.”

So, the unfortunate Mike very humbly withdrew, and Mr. Jaggers and
Wemmick appeared to have re-established their good understanding, and
went to work again with an air of refreshment upon them as if they had
just had lunch.




Chapter LII


From Little Britain I went, with my check in my pocket, to Miss
Skiffins's brother, the accountant; and Miss Skiffins's brother, the
accountant, going straight to Clarriker's and bringing Clarriker to me,
I had the great satisfaction of concluding that arrangement. It was the
only good thing I had done, and the only completed thing I had done,
since I was first apprised of my great expectations.

Clarriker informing me on that occasion that the affairs of the House
were steadily progressing, that he would now be able to establish a
small branch-house in the East which was much wanted for the extension
of the business, and that Herbert in his new partnership capacity would
go out and take charge of it, I found that I must have prepared for
a separation from my friend, even though my own affairs had been more
settled. And now, indeed, I felt as if my last anchor were loosening its
hold, and I should soon be driving with the winds and waves.

But there was recompense in the joy with which Herbert would come home
of a night and tell me of these changes, little imagining that he told
me no news, and would sketch airy pictures of himself conducting Clara
Barley to the land of the Arabian Nights, and of me going out to join
them (with a caravan of camels, I believe), and of our all going up the
Nile and seeing wonders. Without being sanguine as to my own part in
those bright plans, I felt that Herbert's way was clearing fast, and
that old Bill Barley had but to stick to his pepper and rum, and his
daughter would soon be happily provided for.

We had now got into the month of March. My left arm, though it presented
no bad symptoms, took, in the natural course, so long to heal that I
was still unable to get a coat on. My right arm was tolerably restored;
disfigured, but fairly serviceable.

On a Monday morning, when Herbert and I were at breakfast, I received
the following letter from Wemmick by the post.

“Walworth. Burn this as soon as read. Early in the week, or say
Wednesday, you might do what you know of, if you felt disposed to try
it. Now burn.”

When I had shown this to Herbert and had put it in the fire--but not
before we had both got it by heart--we considered what to do. For, of
course my being disabled could now be no longer kept out of view.

“I have thought it over again and again,” said Herbert, “and I think I
know a better course than taking a Thames waterman. Take Startop. A good
fellow, a skilled hand, fond of us, and enthusiastic and honorable.”

I had thought of him more than once.

“But how much would you tell him, Herbert?”

“It is necessary to tell him very little. Let him suppose it a mere
freak, but a secret one, until the morning comes: then let him know that
there is urgent reason for your getting Provis aboard and away. You go
with him?”

“No doubt.”

“Where?”

It had seemed to me, in the many anxious considerations I had given the
point, almost indifferent what port we made for,--Hamburg, Rotterdam,
Antwerp,--the place signified little, so that he was out of England. Any
foreign steamer that fell in our way and would take us up would do.
I had always proposed to myself to get him well down the river in the
boat; certainly well beyond Gravesend, which was a critical place for
search or inquiry if suspicion were afoot. As foreign steamers would
leave London at about the time of high-water, our plan would be to get
down the river by a previous ebb-tide, and lie by in some quiet spot
until we could pull off to one. The time when one would be due where we
lay, wherever that might be, could be calculated pretty nearly, if we
made inquiries beforehand.

Herbert assented to all this, and we went out immediately after
breakfast to pursue our investigations. We found that a steamer for
Hamburg was likely to suit our purpose best, and we directed our
thoughts chiefly to that vessel. But we noted down what other foreign
steamers would leave London with the same tide, and we satisfied
ourselves that we knew the build and color of each. We then separated
for a few hours: I, to get at once such passports as were necessary;
Herbert, to see Startop at his lodgings. We both did what we had to do
without any hindrance, and when we met again at one o'clock reported
it done. I, for my part, was prepared with passports; Herbert had seen
Startop, and he was more than ready to join.

Those two should pull a pair of oars, we settled, and I would steer; our
charge would be sitter, and keep quiet; as speed was not our object, we
should make way enough. We arranged that Herbert should not come home to
dinner before going to Mill Pond Bank that evening; that he should
not go there at all to-morrow evening, Tuesday; that he should prepare
Provis to come down to some stairs hard by the house, on Wednesday, when
he saw us approach, and not sooner; that all the arrangements with
him should be concluded that Monday night; and that he should be
communicated with no more in any way, until we took him on board.

These precautions well understood by both of us, I went home.

On opening the outer door of our chambers with my key, I found a letter
in the box, directed to me; a very dirty letter, though not ill-written.
It had been delivered by hand (of course, since I left home), and its
contents were these:--

“If you are not afraid to come to the old marshes to-night or to-morrow
night at nine, and to come to the little sluice-house by the limekiln,
you had better come. If you want information regarding your uncle
Provis, you had much better come and tell no one, and lose no time. You
must come alone. Bring this with you.”

I had had load enough upon my mind before the receipt of this strange
letter. What to do now, I could not tell. And the worst was, that I must
decide quickly, or I should miss the afternoon coach, which would take
me down in time for to-night. To-morrow night I could not think of
going, for it would be too close upon the time of the flight. And again,
for anything I knew, the proffered information might have some important
bearing on the flight itself.

If I had had ample time for consideration, I believe I should still have
gone. Having hardly any time for consideration,--my watch showing me
that the coach started within half an hour,--I resolved to go. I should
certainly not have gone, but for the reference to my Uncle Provis. That,
coming on Wemmick's letter and the morning's busy preparation, turned
the scale.

It is so difficult to become clearly possessed of the contents of almost
any letter, in a violent hurry, that I had to read this mysterious
epistle again twice, before its injunction to me to be secret got
mechanically into my mind. Yielding to it in the same mechanical kind of
way, I left a note in pencil for Herbert, telling him that as I should
be so soon going away, I knew not for how long, I had decided to hurry
down and back, to ascertain for myself how Miss Havisham was faring.
I had then barely time to get my great-coat, lock up the chambers,
and make for the coach-office by the short by-ways. If I had taken a
hackney-chariot and gone by the streets, I should have missed my aim;
going as I did, I caught the coach just as it came out of the yard. I
was the only inside passenger, jolting away knee-deep in straw, when I
came to myself.

For I really had not been myself since the receipt of the letter; it had
so bewildered me, ensuing on the hurry of the morning. The morning hurry
and flutter had been great; for, long and anxiously as I had waited for
Wemmick, his hint had come like a surprise at last. And now I began
to wonder at myself for being in the coach, and to doubt whether I had
sufficient reason for being there, and to consider whether I should
get out presently and go back, and to argue against ever heeding an
anonymous communication, and, in short, to pass through all those phases
of contradiction and indecision to which I suppose very few hurried
people are strangers. Still, the reference to Provis by name mastered
everything. I reasoned as I had reasoned already without knowing it,--if
that be reasoning,--in case any harm should befall him through my not
going, how could I ever forgive myself!

It was dark before we got down, and the journey seemed long and dreary
to me, who could see little of it inside, and who could not go outside
in my disabled state. Avoiding the Blue Boar, I put up at an inn of
minor reputation down the town, and ordered some dinner. While it was
preparing, I went to Satis House and inquired for Miss Havisham; she was
still very ill, though considered something better.

My inn had once been a part of an ancient ecclesiastical house, and I
dined in a little octagonal common-room, like a font. As I was not able
to cut my dinner, the old landlord with a shining bald head did it for
me. This bringing us into conversation, he was so good as to entertain
me with my own story,--of course with the popular feature that
Pumblechook was my earliest benefactor and the founder of my fortunes.

“Do you know the young man?” said I.

“Know him!” repeated the landlord. “Ever since he was--no height at
all.”

“Does he ever come back to this neighborhood?”

“Ay, he comes back,” said the landlord, “to his great friends, now and
again, and gives the cold shoulder to the man that made him.”

“What man is that?”

“Him that I speak of,” said the landlord. “Mr. Pumblechook.”

“Is he ungrateful to no one else?”

“No doubt he would be, if he could,” returned the landlord, “but he
can't. And why? Because Pumblechook done everything for him.”

“Does Pumblechook say so?”

“Say so!” replied the landlord. “He han't no call to say so.”

“But does he say so?”

“It would turn a man's blood to white wine winegar to hear him tell of
it, sir,” said the landlord.

I thought, “Yet Joe, dear Joe, you never tell of it. Long-suffering and
loving Joe, you never complain. Nor you, sweet-tempered Biddy!”

“Your appetite's been touched like by your accident,” said the landlord,
glancing at the bandaged arm under my coat. “Try a tenderer bit.”

“No, thank you,” I replied, turning from the table to brood over the
fire. “I can eat no more. Please take it away.”

I had never been struck at so keenly, for my thanklessness to Joe, as
through the brazen impostor Pumblechook. The falser he, the truer Joe;
the meaner he, the nobler Joe.

My heart was deeply and most deservedly humbled as I mused over the fire
for an hour or more. The striking of the clock aroused me, but not from
my dejection or remorse, and I got up and had my coat fastened round
my neck, and went out. I had previously sought in my pockets for the
letter, that I might refer to it again; but I could not find it, and
was uneasy to think that it must have been dropped in the straw of
the coach. I knew very well, however, that the appointed place was the
little sluice-house by the limekiln on the marshes, and the hour nine.
Towards the marshes I now went straight, having no time to spare.




Chapter LIII

It was a dark night, though the full moon rose as I left the enclosed
lands, and passed out upon the marshes. Beyond their dark line there was
a ribbon of clear sky, hardly broad enough to hold the red large moon.
In a few minutes she had ascended out of that clear field, in among the
piled mountains of cloud.

There was a melancholy wind, and the marshes were very dismal. A
stranger would have found them insupportable, and even to me they were
so oppressive that I hesitated, half inclined to go back. But I knew
them well, and could have found my way on a far darker night, and had
no excuse for returning, being there. So, having come there against my
inclination, I went on against it.

The direction that I took was not that in which my old home lay, nor
that in which we had pursued the convicts. My back was turned towards
the distant Hulks as I walked on, and, though I could see the old lights
away on the spits of sand, I saw them over my shoulder. I knew the
limekiln as well as I knew the old Battery, but they were miles apart;
so that, if a light had been burning at each point that night, there
would have been a long strip of the blank horizon between the two bright
specks.

At first, I had to shut some gates after me, and now and then to stand
still while the cattle that were lying in the banked-up pathway arose
and blundered down among the grass and reeds. But after a little while I
seemed to have the whole flats to myself.

It was another half-hour before I drew near to the kiln. The lime was
burning with a sluggish stifling smell, but the fires were made up and
left, and no workmen were visible. Hard by was a small stone-quarry. It
lay directly in my way, and had been worked that day, as I saw by the
tools and barrows that were lying about.

Coming up again to the marsh level out of this excavation,--for the rude
path lay through it,--I saw a light in the old sluice-house. I quickened
my pace, and knocked at the door with my hand. Waiting for some reply,
I looked about me, noticing how the sluice was abandoned and broken, and
how the house--of wood with a tiled roof--would not be proof against the
weather much longer, if it were so even now, and how the mud and ooze
were coated with lime, and how the choking vapor of the kiln crept in a
ghostly way towards me. Still there was no answer, and I knocked again.
No answer still, and I tried the latch.

It rose under my hand, and the door yielded. Looking in, I saw a lighted
candle on a table, a bench, and a mattress on a truckle bedstead. As
there was a loft above, I called, “Is there any one here?” but no voice
answered. Then I looked at my watch, and, finding that it was past nine,
called again, “Is there any one here?” There being still no answer, I
went out at the door, irresolute what to do.

It was beginning to rain fast. Seeing nothing save what I had seen
already, I turned back into the house, and stood just within the shelter
of the doorway, looking out into the night. While I was considering that
some one must have been there lately and must soon be coming back, or
the candle would not be burning, it came into my head to look if the
wick were long. I turned round to do so, and had taken up the candle in
my hand, when it was extinguished by some violent shock; and the next
thing I comprehended was, that I had been caught in a strong running
noose, thrown over my head from behind.

“Now,” said a suppressed voice with an oath, “I've got you!”

“What is this?” I cried, struggling. “Who is it? Help, help, help!”

Not only were my arms pulled close to my sides, but the pressure on
my bad arm caused me exquisite pain. Sometimes, a strong man's hand,
sometimes a strong man's breast, was set against my mouth to deaden
my cries, and with a hot breath always close to me, I struggled
ineffectually in the dark, while I was fastened tight to the wall. “And
now,” said the suppressed voice with another oath, “call out again, and
I'll make short work of you!”

Faint and sick with the pain of my injured arm, bewildered by the
surprise, and yet conscious how easily this threat could be put in
execution, I desisted, and tried to ease my arm were it ever so little.
But, it was bound too tight for that. I felt as if, having been burnt
before, it were now being boiled.

The sudden exclusion of the night, and the substitution of black
darkness in its place, warned me that the man had closed a shutter.
After groping about for a little, he found the flint and steel he
wanted, and began to strike a light. I strained my sight upon the sparks
that fell among the tinder, and upon which he breathed and breathed,
match in hand, but I could only see his lips, and the blue point of
the match; even those but fitfully. The tinder was damp,--no wonder
there,--and one after another the sparks died out.

The man was in no hurry, and struck again with the flint and steel. As
the sparks fell thick and bright about him, I could see his hands, and
touches of his face, and could make out that he was seated and bending
over the table; but nothing more. Presently I saw his blue lips again,
breathing on the tinder, and then a flare of light flashed up, and
showed me Orlick.

Whom I had looked for, I don't know. I had not looked for him. Seeing
him, I felt that I was in a dangerous strait indeed, and I kept my eyes
upon him.

He lighted the candle from the flaring match with great deliberation,
and dropped the match, and trod it out. Then he put the candle away from
him on the table, so that he could see me, and sat with his arms folded
on the table and looked at me. I made out that I was fastened to a stout
perpendicular ladder a few inches from the wall,--a fixture there,--the
means of ascent to the loft above.

“Now,” said he, when we had surveyed one another for some time, “I've
got you.”

“Unbind me. Let me go!”

“Ah!” he returned, “I'll let you go. I'll let you go to the moon, I'll
let you go to the stars. All in good time.”

“Why have you lured me here?”

“Don't you know?” said he, with a deadly look.

“Why have you set upon me in the dark?”

“Because I mean to do it all myself. One keeps a secret better than two.
O you enemy, you enemy!”

His enjoyment of the spectacle I furnished, as he sat with his arms
folded on the table, shaking his head at me and hugging himself, had a
malignity in it that made me tremble. As I watched him in silence,
he put his hand into the corner at his side, and took up a gun with a
brass-bound stock.

“Do you know this?” said he, making as if he would take aim at me. “Do
you know where you saw it afore? Speak, wolf!”

“Yes,” I answered.

“You cost me that place. You did. Speak!”

“What else could I do?”

“You did that, and that would be enough, without more. How dared you to
come betwixt me and a young woman I liked?”

“When did I?”

“When didn't you? It was you as always give Old Orlick a bad name to
her.”

“You gave it to yourself; you gained it for yourself. I could have done
you no harm, if you had done yourself none.”

“You're a liar. And you'll take any pains, and spend any money, to drive
me out of this country, will you?” said he, repeating my words to Biddy
in the last interview I had with her. “Now, I'll tell you a piece of
information. It was never so well worth your while to get me out of this
country as it is to-night. Ah! If it was all your money twenty times
told, to the last brass farden!” As he shook his heavy hand at me, with
his mouth snarling like a tiger's, I felt that it was true.

“What are you going to do to me?”

“I'm a going,” said he, bringing his fist down upon the table with a
heavy blow, and rising as the blow fell to give it greater force,--“I'm
a going to have your life!”

He leaned forward staring at me, slowly unclenched his hand and drew it
across his mouth as if his mouth watered for me, and sat down again.

“You was always in Old Orlick's way since ever you was a child. You goes
out of his way this present night. He'll have no more on you. You're
dead.”

I felt that I had come to the brink of my grave. For a moment I looked
wildly round my trap for any chance of escape; but there was none.

“More than that,” said he, folding his arms on the table again, “I won't
have a rag of you, I won't have a bone of you, left on earth. I'll put
your body in the kiln,--I'd carry two such to it, on my Shoulders,--and,
let people suppose what they may of you, they shall never know nothing.”

My mind, with inconceivable rapidity followed out all the consequences
of such a death. Estella's father would believe I had deserted him,
would be taken, would die accusing me; even Herbert would doubt me,
when he compared the letter I had left for him with the fact that I had
called at Miss Havisham's gate for only a moment; Joe and Biddy would
never know how sorry I had been that night, none would ever know what
I had suffered, how true I had meant to be, what an agony I had passed
through. The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible
than death was the dread of being misremembered after death. And
so quick were my thoughts, that I saw myself despised by unborn
generations,--Estella's children, and their children,--while the
wretch's words were yet on his lips.

“Now, wolf,” said he, “afore I kill you like any other beast,--which is
wot I mean to do and wot I have tied you up for,--I'll have a good look
at you and a good goad at you. O you enemy!”

It had passed through my thoughts to cry out for help again; though
few could know better than I, the solitary nature of the spot, and the
hopelessness of aid. But as he sat gloating over me, I was supported by
a scornful detestation of him that sealed my lips. Above all things, I
resolved that I would not entreat him, and that I would die making some
last poor resistance to him. Softened as my thoughts of all the rest of
men were in that dire extremity; humbly beseeching pardon, as I did, of
Heaven; melted at heart, as I was, by the thought that I had taken no
farewell, and never now could take farewell of those who were dear to
me, or could explain myself to them, or ask for their compassion on my
miserable errors,--still, if I could have killed him, even in dying, I
would have done it.

He had been drinking, and his eyes were red and bloodshot. Around his
neck was slung a tin bottle, as I had often seen his meat and drink
slung about him in other days. He brought the bottle to his lips, and
took a fiery drink from it; and I smelt the strong spirits that I saw
flash into his face.

“Wolf!” said he, folding his arms again, “Old Orlick's a going to tell
you somethink. It was you as did for your shrew sister.”

Again my mind, with its former inconceivable rapidity, had exhausted the
whole subject of the attack upon my sister, her illness, and her death,
before his slow and hesitating speech had formed these words.

“It was you, villain,” said I.

“I tell you it was your doing,--I tell you it was done through you,” he
retorted, catching up the gun, and making a blow with the stock at the
vacant air between us. “I come upon her from behind, as I come upon you
to-night. I giv' it her! I left her for dead, and if there had been a
limekiln as nigh her as there is now nigh you, she shouldn't have come
to life again. But it warn't Old Orlick as did it; it was you. You was
favored, and he was bullied and beat. Old Orlick bullied and beat, eh?
Now you pays for it. You done it; now you pays for it.”

He drank again, and became more ferocious. I saw by his tilting of
the bottle that there was no great quantity left in it. I distinctly
understood that he was working himself up with its contents to make an
end of me. I knew that every drop it held was a drop of my life. I knew
that when I was changed into a part of the vapor that had crept towards
me but a little while before, like my own warning ghost, he would do
as he had done in my sister's case,--make all haste to the town, and
be seen slouching about there drinking at the alehouses. My rapid mind
pursued him to the town, made a picture of the street with him in it,
and contrasted its lights and life with the lonely marsh and the white
vapor creeping over it, into which I should have dissolved.

It was not only that I could have summed up years and years and years
while he said a dozen words, but that what he did say presented pictures
to me, and not mere words. In the excited and exalted state of my brain,
I could not think of a place without seeing it, or of persons without
seeing them. It is impossible to overstate the vividness of these
images, and yet I was so intent, all the time, upon him himself,--who
would not be intent on the tiger crouching to spring!--that I knew of
the slightest action of his fingers.

When he had drunk this second time, he rose from the bench on which
he sat, and pushed the table aside. Then, he took up the candle, and,
shading it with his murderous hand so as to throw its light on me, stood
before me, looking at me and enjoying the sight.

“Wolf, I'll tell you something more. It was Old Orlick as you tumbled
over on your stairs that night.”

I saw the staircase with its extinguished lamps. I saw the shadows of
the heavy stair-rails, thrown by the watchman's lantern on the wall.
I saw the rooms that I was never to see again; here, a door half open;
there, a door closed; all the articles of furniture around.

“And why was Old Orlick there? I'll tell you something more, wolf.
You and her have pretty well hunted me out of this country, so far as
getting a easy living in it goes, and I've took up with new companions,
and new masters. Some of 'em writes my letters when I wants 'em
wrote,--do you mind?--writes my letters, wolf! They writes fifty hands;
they're not like sneaking you, as writes but one. I've had a firm mind
and a firm will to have your life, since you was down here at your
sister's burying. I han't seen a way to get you safe, and I've looked
arter you to know your ins and outs. For, says Old Orlick to himself,
'Somehow or another I'll have him!' What! When I looks for you, I finds
your uncle Provis, eh?”

Mill Pond Bank, and Chinks's Basin, and the Old Green Copper Rope-walk,
all so clear and plain! Provis in his rooms, the signal whose use was
over, pretty Clara, the good motherly woman, old Bill Barley on his
back, all drifting by, as on the swift stream of my life fast running
out to sea!

“You with a uncle too! Why, I know'd you at Gargery's when you was so
small a wolf that I could have took your weazen betwixt this finger and
thumb and chucked you away dead (as I'd thoughts o' doing, odd times,
when I see you loitering amongst the pollards on a Sunday), and you
hadn't found no uncles then. No, not you! But when Old Orlick come for
to hear that your uncle Provis had most like wore the leg-iron wot Old
Orlick had picked up, filed asunder, on these meshes ever so many year
ago, and wot he kep by him till he dropped your sister with it, like
a bullock, as he means to drop you--hey?--when he come for to hear
that--hey?”

In his savage taunting, he flared the candle so close at me that I
turned my face aside to save it from the flame.

“Ah!” he cried, laughing, after doing it again, “the burnt child dreads
the fire! Old Orlick knowed you was burnt, Old Orlick knowed you was
smuggling your uncle Provis away, Old Orlick's a match for you and
know'd you'd come to-night! Now I'll tell you something more, wolf, and
this ends it. There's them that's as good a match for your uncle Provis
as Old Orlick has been for you. Let him 'ware them, when he's lost his
nevvy! Let him 'ware them, when no man can't find a rag of his dear
relation's clothes, nor yet a bone of his body. There's them that can't
and that won't have Magwitch,--yes, I know the name!--alive in the same
land with them, and that's had such sure information of him when he
was alive in another land, as that he couldn't and shouldn't leave it
unbeknown and put them in danger. P'raps it's them that writes fifty
hands, and that's not like sneaking you as writes but one. 'Ware
Compeyson, Magwitch, and the gallows!”

He flared the candle at me again, smoking my face and hair, and for an
instant blinding me, and turned his powerful back as he replaced the
light on the table. I had thought a prayer, and had been with Joe and
Biddy and Herbert, before he turned towards me again.

There was a clear space of a few feet between the table and the opposite
wall. Within this space, he now slouched backwards and forwards. His
great strength seemed to sit stronger upon him than ever before, as he
did this with his hands hanging loose and heavy at his sides, and with
his eyes scowling at me. I had no grain of hope left. Wild as my inward
hurry was, and wonderful the force of the pictures that rushed by me
instead of thoughts, I could yet clearly understand that, unless he had
resolved that I was within a few moments of surely perishing out of all
human knowledge, he would never have told me what he had told.

Of a sudden, he stopped, took the cork out of his bottle, and tossed
it away. Light as it was, I heard it fall like a plummet. He swallowed
slowly, tilting up the bottle by little and little, and now he looked at
me no more. The last few drops of liquor he poured into the palm of his
hand, and licked up. Then, with a sudden hurry of violence and swearing
horribly, he threw the bottle from him, and stooped; and I saw in his
hand a stone-hammer with a long heavy handle.

The resolution I had made did not desert me, for, without uttering
one vain word of appeal to him, I shouted out with all my might, and
struggled with all my might. It was only my head and my legs that I
could move, but to that extent I struggled with all the force, until
then unknown, that was within me. In the same instant I heard responsive
shouts, saw figures and a gleam of light dash in at the door, heard
voices and tumult, and saw Orlick emerge from a struggle of men, as if
it were tumbling water, clear the table at a leap, and fly out into the
night.

After a blank, I found that I was lying unbound, on the floor, in the
same place, with my head on some one's knee. My eyes were fixed on the
ladder against the wall, when I came to myself,--had opened on it before
my mind saw it,--and thus as I recovered consciousness, I knew that I
was in the place where I had lost it.

Too indifferent at first, even to look round and ascertain who supported
me, I was lying looking at the ladder, when there came between me and it
a face. The face of Trabb's boy!

“I think he's all right!” said Trabb's boy, in a sober voice; “but ain't
he just pale though!”

At these words, the face of him who supported me looked over into mine,
and I saw my supporter to be--

“Herbert! Great Heaven!”

“Softly,” said Herbert. “Gently, Handel. Don't be too eager.”

“And our old comrade, Startop!” I cried, as he too bent over me.

“Remember what he is going to assist us in,” said Herbert, “and be
calm.”

The allusion made me spring up; though I dropped again from the pain
in my arm. “The time has not gone by, Herbert, has it? What night is
to-night? How long have I been here?” For, I had a strange and
strong misgiving that I had been lying there a long time--a day and a
night,--two days and nights,--more.

“The time has not gone by. It is still Monday night.”

“Thank God!”

“And you have all to-morrow, Tuesday, to rest in,” said Herbert. “But
you can't help groaning, my dear Handel. What hurt have you got? Can you
stand?”

“Yes, yes,” said I, “I can walk. I have no hurt but in this throbbing
arm.”

They laid it bare, and did what they could. It was violently swollen and
inflamed, and I could scarcely endure to have it touched. But, they tore
up their handkerchiefs to make fresh bandages, and carefully replaced
it in the sling, until we could get to the town and obtain some cooling
lotion to put upon it. In a little while we had shut the door of the
dark and empty sluice-house, and were passing through the quarry on our
way back. Trabb's boy--Trabb's overgrown young man now--went before us
with a lantern, which was the light I had seen come in at the door. But,
the moon was a good two hours higher than when I had last seen the sky,
and the night, though rainy, was much lighter. The white vapor of the
kiln was passing from us as we went by, and as I had thought a prayer
before, I thought a thanksgiving now.

Entreating Herbert to tell me how he had come to my rescue,--which at
first he had flatly refused to do, but had insisted on my remaining
quiet,--I learnt that I had in my hurry dropped the letter, open, in our
chambers, where he, coming home to bring with him Startop whom he had
met in the street on his way to me, found it, very soon after I
was gone. Its tone made him uneasy, and the more so because of the
inconsistency between it and the hasty letter I had left for him. His
uneasiness increasing instead of subsiding, after a quarter of an
hour's consideration, he set off for the coach-office with Startop, who
volunteered his company, to make inquiry when the next coach went
down. Finding that the afternoon coach was gone, and finding that his
uneasiness grew into positive alarm, as obstacles came in his way, he
resolved to follow in a post-chaise. So he and Startop arrived at the
Blue Boar, fully expecting there to find me, or tidings of me; but,
finding neither, went on to Miss Havisham's, where they lost me.
Hereupon they went back to the hotel (doubtless at about the time when
I was hearing the popular local version of my own story) to refresh
themselves and to get some one to guide them out upon the marshes. Among
the loungers under the Boar's archway happened to be Trabb's Boy,--true
to his ancient habit of happening to be everywhere where he had no
business,--and Trabb's boy had seen me passing from Miss Havisham's in
the direction of my dining-place. Thus Trabb's boy became their guide,
and with him they went out to the sluice-house, though by the town way
to the marshes, which I had avoided. Now, as they went along, Herbert
reflected, that I might, after all, have been brought there on some
genuine and serviceable errand tending to Provis's safety, and,
bethinking himself that in that case interruption must be mischievous,
left his guide and Startop on the edge of the quarry, and went on by
himself, and stole round the house two or three times, endeavouring to
ascertain whether all was right within. As he could hear nothing but
indistinct sounds of one deep rough voice (this was while my mind was so
busy), he even at last began to doubt whether I was there, when suddenly
I cried out loudly, and he answered the cries, and rushed in, closely
followed by the other two.

When I told Herbert what had passed within the house, he was for our
immediately going before a magistrate in the town, late at night as it
was, and getting out a warrant. But, I had already considered that such
a course, by detaining us there, or binding us to come back, might
be fatal to Provis. There was no gainsaying this difficulty, and we
relinquished all thoughts of pursuing Orlick at that time. For the
present, under the circumstances, we deemed it prudent to make rather
light of the matter to Trabb's boy; who, I am convinced, would have been
much affected by disappointment, if he had known that his intervention
saved me from the limekiln. Not that Trabb's boy was of a malignant
nature, but that he had too much spare vivacity, and that it was in his
constitution to want variety and excitement at anybody's expense. When
we parted, I presented him with two guineas (which seemed to meet his
views), and told him that I was sorry ever to have had an ill opinion of
him (which made no impression on him at all).

Wednesday being so close upon us, we determined to go back to London
that night, three in the post-chaise; the rather, as we should then be
clear away before the night's adventure began to be talked of. Herbert
got a large bottle of stuff for my arm; and by dint of having this stuff
dropped over it all the night through, I was just able to bear its pain
on the journey. It was daylight when we reached the Temple, and I went
at once to bed, and lay in bed all day.

My terror, as I lay there, of falling ill, and being unfitted for
to-morrow, was so besetting, that I wonder it did not disable me of
itself. It would have done so, pretty surely, in conjunction with the
mental wear and tear I had suffered, but for the unnatural strain upon
me that to-morrow was. So anxiously looked forward to, charged with such
consequences, its results so impenetrably hidden, though so near.

No precaution could have been more obvious than our refraining
from communication with him that day; yet this again increased my
restlessness. I started at every footstep and every sound, believing
that he was discovered and taken, and this was the messenger to tell
me so. I persuaded myself that I knew he was taken; that there was
something more upon my mind than a fear or a presentiment; that the fact
had occurred, and I had a mysterious knowledge of it. As the days wore
on, and no ill news came, as the day closed in and darkness fell,
my overshadowing dread of being disabled by illness before to-morrow
morning altogether mastered me. My burning arm throbbed, and my burning
head throbbed, and I fancied I was beginning to wander. I counted up to
high numbers, to make sure of myself, and repeated passages that I knew
in prose and verse. It happened sometimes that in the mere escape of a
fatigued mind, I dozed for some moments or forgot; then I would say to
myself with a start, “Now it has come, and I am turning delirious!”

They kept me very quiet all day, and kept my arm constantly dressed, and
gave me cooling drinks. Whenever I fell asleep, I awoke with the notion
I had had in the sluice-house, that a long time had elapsed and the
opportunity to save him was gone. About midnight I got out of bed
and went to Herbert, with the conviction that I had been asleep for
four-and-twenty hours, and that Wednesday was past. It was the last
self-exhausting effort of my fretfulness, for after that I slept
soundly.

Wednesday morning was dawning when I looked out of window. The winking
lights upon the bridges were already pale, the coming sun was like a
marsh of fire on the horizon. The river, still dark and mysterious, was
spanned by bridges that were turning coldly gray, with here and there
at top a warm touch from the burning in the sky. As I looked along
the clustered roofs, with church-towers and spires shooting into the
unusually clear air, the sun rose up, and a veil seemed to be drawn from
the river, and millions of sparkles burst out upon its waters. From me
too, a veil seemed to be drawn, and I felt strong and well.

Herbert lay asleep in his bed, and our old fellow-student lay asleep on
the sofa. I could not dress myself without help; but I made up the fire,
which was still burning, and got some coffee ready for them. In good
time they too started up strong and well, and we admitted the sharp
morning air at the windows, and looked at the tide that was still
flowing towards us.

“When it turns at nine o'clock,” said Herbert, cheerfully, “look out for
us, and stand ready, you over there at Mill Pond Bank!”




Chapter LIV

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind
blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
We had our pea-coats with us, and I took a bag. Of all my worldly
possessions I took no more than the few necessaries that filled the
bag. Where I might go, what I might do, or when I might return, were
questions utterly unknown to me; nor did I vex my mind with them, for
it was wholly set on Provis's safety. I only wondered for the passing
moment, as I stopped at the door and looked back, under what altered
circumstances I should next see those rooms, if ever.

We loitered down to the Temple stairs, and stood loitering there, as if
we were not quite decided to go upon the water at all. Of course, I had
taken care that the boat should be ready and everything in order. After
a little show of indecision, which there were none to see but the two
or three amphibious creatures belonging to our Temple stairs, we went
on board and cast off; Herbert in the bow, I steering. It was then about
high-water,--half-past eight.

Our plan was this. The tide, beginning to run down at nine, and being
with us until three, we intended still to creep on after it had turned,
and row against it until dark. We should then be well in those long
reaches below Gravesend, between Kent and Essex, where the river is
broad and solitary, where the water-side inhabitants are very few, and
where lone public-houses are scattered here and there, of which we could
choose one for a resting-place. There, we meant to lie by all night.
The steamer for Hamburg and the steamer for Rotterdam would start from
London at about nine on Thursday morning. We should know at what time
to expect them, according to where we were, and would hail the first;
so that, if by any accident we were not taken abroad, we should have
another chance. We knew the distinguishing marks of each vessel.

The relief of being at last engaged in the execution of the purpose
was so great to me that I felt it difficult to realize the condition in
which I had been a few hours before. The crisp air, the sunlight, the
movement on the river, and the moving river itself,--the road that ran
with us, seeming to sympathize with us, animate us, and encourage us
on,--freshened me with new hope. I felt mortified to be of so little use
in the boat; but, there were few better oarsmen than my two friends, and
they rowed with a steady stroke that was to last all day.

At that time, the steam-traffic on the Thames was far below its present
extent, and watermen's boats were far more numerous. Of barges, sailing
colliers, and coasting-traders, there were perhaps, as many as now;
but of steam-ships, great and small, not a tithe or a twentieth part
so many. Early as it was, there were plenty of scullers going here and
there that morning, and plenty of barges dropping down with the tide;
the navigation of the river between bridges, in an open boat, was a much
easier and commoner matter in those days than it is in these; and we
went ahead among many skiffs and wherries briskly.

Old London Bridge was soon passed, and old Billingsgate Market with its
oyster-boats and Dutchmen, and the White Tower and Traitor's Gate, and
we were in among the tiers of shipping. Here were the Leith, Aberdeen,
and Glasgow steamers, loading and unloading goods, and looking immensely
high out of the water as we passed alongside; here, were colliers by the
score and score, with the coal-whippers plunging off stages on deck, as
counterweights to measures of coal swinging up, which were then rattled
over the side into barges; here, at her moorings was to-morrow's steamer
for Rotterdam, of which we took good notice; and here to-morrow's for
Hamburg, under whose bowsprit we crossed. And now I, sitting in the
stern, could see, with a faster beating heart, Mill Pond Bank and Mill
Pond stairs.

“Is he there?” said Herbert.

“Not yet.”

“Right! He was not to come down till he saw us. Can you see his signal?”

“Not well from here; but I think I see it.--Now I see him! Pull both.
Easy, Herbert. Oars!”

We touched the stairs lightly for a single moment, and he was on board,
and we were off again. He had a boat-cloak with him, and a black canvas
bag; and he looked as like a river-pilot as my heart could have wished.

“Dear boy!” he said, putting his arm on my shoulder, as he took his
seat. “Faithful dear boy, well done. Thankye, thankye!”

Again among the tiers of shipping, in and out, avoiding rusty
chain-cables frayed hempen hawsers and bobbing buoys, sinking for the
moment floating broken baskets, scattering floating chips of wood
and shaving, cleaving floating scum of coal, in and out, under the
figure-head of the John of Sunderland making a speech to the winds (as
is done by many Johns), and the Betsy of Yarmouth with a firm formality
of bosom and her knobby eyes starting two inches out of her head; in
and out, hammers going in ship-builders' yards, saws going at timber,
clashing engines going at things unknown, pumps going in leaky ships,
capstans going, ships going out to sea, and unintelligible sea-creatures
roaring curses over the bulwarks at respondent lightermen, in and
out,--out at last upon the clearer river, where the ships' boys might
take their fenders in, no longer fishing in troubled waters with them
over the side, and where the festooned sails might fly out to the wind.

At the stairs where we had taken him abroad, and ever since, I had
looked warily for any token of our being suspected. I had seen none. We
certainly had not been, and at that time as certainly we were not either
attended or followed by any boat. If we had been waited on by any boat,
I should have run in to shore, and have obliged her to go on, or to
make her purpose evident. But we held our own without any appearance of
molestation.

He had his boat-cloak on him, and looked, as I have said, a natural part
of the scene. It was remarkable (but perhaps the wretched life he had
led accounted for it) that he was the least anxious of any of us. He
was not indifferent, for he told me that he hoped to live to see his
gentleman one of the best of gentlemen in a foreign country; he was not
disposed to be passive or resigned, as I understood it; but he had no
notion of meeting danger half way. When it came upon him, he confronted
it, but it must come before he troubled himself.

“If you knowed, dear boy,” he said to me, “what it is to sit here
alonger my dear boy and have my smoke, arter having been day by day
betwixt four walls, you'd envy me. But you don't know what it is.”

“I think I know the delights of freedom,” I answered.

“Ah,” said he, shaking his head gravely. “But you don't know it equal to
me. You must have been under lock and key, dear boy, to know it equal to
me,--but I ain't a going to be low.”

It occurred to me as inconsistent, that, for any mastering idea, he
should have endangered his freedom, and even his life. But I reflected
that perhaps freedom without danger was too much apart from all the
habit of his existence to be to him what it would be to another man. I
was not far out, since he said, after smoking a little:--

“You see, dear boy, when I was over yonder, t'other side the world, I
was always a looking to this side; and it come flat to be there, for
all I was a growing rich. Everybody knowed Magwitch, and Magwitch could
come, and Magwitch could go, and nobody's head would be troubled about
him. They ain't so easy concerning me here, dear boy,--wouldn't be,
leastwise, if they knowed where I was.”

“If all goes well,” said I, “you will be perfectly free and safe again
within a few hours.”

“Well,” he returned, drawing a long breath, “I hope so.”

“And think so?”

He dipped his hand in the water over the boat's gunwale, and said,
smiling with that softened air upon him which was not new to me:--

“Ay, I s'pose I think so, dear boy. We'd be puzzled to be more quiet
and easy-going than we are at present. But--it's a flowing so soft
and pleasant through the water, p'raps, as makes me think it--I was
a thinking through my smoke just then, that we can no more see to the
bottom of the next few hours than we can see to the bottom of this river
what I catches hold of. Nor yet we can't no more hold their tide than
I can hold this. And it's run through my fingers and gone, you see!”
 holding up his dripping hand.

“But for your face I should think you were a little despondent,” said I.

“Not a bit on it, dear boy! It comes of flowing on so quiet, and of that
there rippling at the boat's head making a sort of a Sunday tune. Maybe
I'm a growing a trifle old besides.”

He put his pipe back in his mouth with an undisturbed expression of
face, and sat as composed and contented as if we were already out of
England. Yet he was as submissive to a word of advice as if he had been
in constant terror; for, when we ran ashore to get some bottles of beer
into the boat, and he was stepping out, I hinted that I thought he would
be safest where he was, and he said. “Do you, dear boy?” and quietly sat
down again.

The air felt cold upon the river, but it was a bright day, and the
sunshine was very cheering. The tide ran strong, I took care to lose
none of it, and our steady stroke carried us on thoroughly well. By
imperceptible degrees, as the tide ran out, we lost more and more of the
nearer woods and hills, and dropped lower and lower between the muddy
banks, but the tide was yet with us when we were off Gravesend. As our
charge was wrapped in his cloak, I purposely passed within a boat or
two's length of the floating Custom House, and so out to catch the
stream, alongside of two emigrant ships, and under the bows of a large
transport with troops on the forecastle looking down at us. And soon
the tide began to slacken, and the craft lying at anchor to swing,
and presently they had all swung round, and the ships that were taking
advantage of the new tide to get up to the Pool began to crowd upon us
in a fleet, and we kept under the shore, as much out of the strength of
the tide now as we could, standing carefully off from low shallows and
mudbanks.

Our oarsmen were so fresh, by dint of having occasionally let her drive
with the tide for a minute or two, that a quarter of an hour's rest
proved full as much as they wanted. We got ashore among some slippery
stones while we ate and drank what we had with us, and looked about.
It was like my own marsh country, flat and monotonous, and with a
dim horizon; while the winding river turned and turned, and the great
floating buoys upon it turned and turned, and everything else seemed
stranded and still. For now the last of the fleet of ships was round
the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge, straw-laden,
with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like
a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a
little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles stood crippled in the mud
on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy
stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck
out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building
slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.

We pushed off again, and made what way we could. It was much harder work
now, but Herbert and Startop persevered, and rowed and rowed and rowed
until the sun went down. By that time the river had lifted us a little,
so that we could see above the bank. There was the red sun, on the low
level of the shore, in a purple haze, fast deepening into black; and
there was the solitary flat marsh; and far away there were the rising
grounds, between which and us there seemed to be no life, save here and
there in the foreground a melancholy gull.

As the night was fast falling, and as the moon, being past the full,
would not rise early, we held a little council; a short one, for clearly
our course was to lie by at the first lonely tavern we could find. So,
they plied their oars once more, and I looked out for anything like a
house. Thus we held on, speaking little, for four or five dull miles. It
was very cold, and, a collier coming by us, with her galley-fire smoking
and flaring, looked like a comfortable home. The night was as dark by
this time as it would be until morning; and what light we had, seemed
to come more from the river than the sky, as the oars in their dipping
struck at a few reflected stars.

At this dismal time we were evidently all possessed by the idea that
we were followed. As the tide made, it flapped heavily at irregular
intervals against the shore; and whenever such a sound came, one or
other of us was sure to start, and look in that direction. Here and
there, the set of the current had worn down the bank into a little
creek, and we were all suspicious of such places, and eyed them
nervously. Sometimes, “What was that ripple?” one of us would say in a
low voice. Or another, “Is that a boat yonder?” And afterwards we would
fall into a dead silence, and I would sit impatiently thinking with what
an unusual amount of noise the oars worked in the thowels.

At length we descried a light and a roof, and presently afterwards ran
alongside a little causeway made of stones that had been picked up hard
by. Leaving the rest in the boat, I stepped ashore, and found the light
to be in a window of a public-house. It was a dirty place enough, and I
dare say not unknown to smuggling adventurers; but there was a good
fire in the kitchen, and there were eggs and bacon to eat, and various
liquors to drink. Also, there were two double-bedded rooms,--“such as
they were,” the landlord said. No other company was in the house than
the landlord, his wife, and a grizzled male creature, the “Jack” of the
little causeway, who was as slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water
mark too.

With this assistant, I went down to the boat again, and we all came
ashore, and brought out the oars, and rudder and boat-hook, and all
else, and hauled her up for the night. We made a very good meal by the
kitchen fire, and then apportioned the bedrooms: Herbert and Startop
were to occupy one; I and our charge the other. We found the air as
carefully excluded from both, as if air were fatal to life; and there
were more dirty clothes and bandboxes under the beds than I should have
thought the family possessed. But we considered ourselves well off,
notwithstanding, for a more solitary place we could not have found.

While we were comforting ourselves by the fire after our meal, the
Jack--who was sitting in a corner, and who had a bloated pair of shoes
on, which he had exhibited while we were eating our eggs and bacon, as
interesting relics that he had taken a few days ago from the feet of
a drowned seaman washed ashore--asked me if we had seen a four-oared
galley going up with the tide? When I told him No, he said she must have
gone down then, and yet she “took up too,” when she left there.

“They must ha' thought better on't for some reason or another,” said the
Jack, “and gone down.”

“A four-oared galley, did you say?” said I.

“A four,” said the Jack, “and two sitters.”

“Did they come ashore here?”

“They put in with a stone two-gallon jar for some beer. I'd ha' been
glad to pison the beer myself,” said the Jack, “or put some rattling
physic in it.”

“Why?”

“I know why,” said the Jack. He spoke in a slushy voice, as if much mud
had washed into his throat.

“He thinks,” said the landlord, a weakly meditative man with a pale eye,
who seemed to rely greatly on his Jack,--“he thinks they was, what they
wasn't.”

“I knows what I thinks,” observed the Jack.

“You thinks Custum 'Us, Jack?” said the landlord.

“I do,” said the Jack.

“Then you're wrong, Jack.”

“AM I!”

In the infinite meaning of his reply and his boundless confidence in
his views, the Jack took one of his bloated shoes off, looked into
it, knocked a few stones out of it on the kitchen floor, and put it on
again. He did this with the air of a Jack who was so right that he could
afford to do anything.

“Why, what do you make out that they done with their buttons then,
Jack?” asked the landlord, vacillating weakly.

“Done with their buttons?” returned the Jack. “Chucked 'em overboard.
Swallered 'em. Sowed 'em, to come up small salad. Done with their
buttons!”

“Don't be cheeky, Jack,” remonstrated the landlord, in a melancholy and
pathetic way.

“A Custum 'Us officer knows what to do with his Buttons,” said the Jack,
repeating the obnoxious word with the greatest contempt, “when they
comes betwixt him and his own light. A four and two sitters don't go
hanging and hovering, up with one tide and down with another, and both
with and against another, without there being Custum 'Us at the bottom
of it.” Saying which he went out in disdain; and the landlord, having no
one to reply upon, found it impracticable to pursue the subject.

This dialogue made us all uneasy, and me very uneasy. The dismal wind
was muttering round the house, the tide was flapping at the shore, and
I had a feeling that we were caged and threatened. A four-oared galley
hovering about in so unusual a way as to attract this notice was an ugly
circumstance that I could not get rid of. When I had induced Provis to
go up to bed, I went outside with my two companions (Startop by this
time knew the state of the case), and held another council. Whether we
should remain at the house until near the steamer's time, which would
be about one in the afternoon, or whether we should put off early in the
morning, was the question we discussed. On the whole we deemed it the
better course to lie where we were, until within an hour or so of the
steamer's time, and then to get out in her track, and drift easily with
the tide. Having settled to do this, we returned into the house and went
to bed.

I lay down with the greater part of my clothes on, and slept well for a
few hours. When I awoke, the wind had risen, and the sign of the house
(the Ship) was creaking and banging about, with noises that startled
me. Rising softly, for my charge lay fast asleep, I looked out of the
window. It commanded the causeway where we had hauled up our boat, and,
as my eyes adapted themselves to the light of the clouded moon, I saw
two men looking into her. They passed by under the window, looking at
nothing else, and they did not go down to the landing-place which I
could discern to be empty, but struck across the marsh in the direction
of the Nore.

My first impulse was to call up Herbert, and show him the two men going
away. But reflecting, before I got into his room, which was at the back
of the house and adjoined mine, that he and Startop had had a harder day
than I, and were fatigued, I forbore. Going back to my window, I could
see the two men moving over the marsh. In that light, however, I soon
lost them, and, feeling very cold, lay down to think of the matter, and
fell asleep again.

We were up early. As we walked to and fro, all four together, before
breakfast, I deemed it right to recount what I had seen. Again our
charge was the least anxious of the party. It was very likely that the
men belonged to the Custom House, he said quietly, and that they had no
thought of us. I tried to persuade myself that it was so,--as, indeed,
it might easily be. However, I proposed that he and I should walk away
together to a distant point we could see, and that the boat should take
us aboard there, or as near there as might prove feasible, at about
noon. This being considered a good precaution, soon after breakfast he
and I set forth, without saying anything at the tavern.

He smoked his pipe as we went along, and sometimes stopped to clap me on
the shoulder. One would have supposed that it was I who was in danger,
not he, and that he was reassuring me. We spoke very little. As we
approached the point, I begged him to remain in a sheltered place, while
I went on to reconnoitre; for it was towards it that the men had passed
in the night. He complied, and I went on alone. There was no boat off
the point, nor any boat drawn up anywhere near it, nor were there any
signs of the men having embarked there. But, to be sure, the tide was
high, and there might have been some footpints under water.

When he looked out from his shelter in the distance, and saw that I
waved my hat to him to come up, he rejoined me, and there we waited;
sometimes lying on the bank, wrapped in our coats, and sometimes moving
about to warm ourselves, until we saw our boat coming round. We got
aboard easily, and rowed out into the track of the steamer. By that time
it wanted but ten minutes of one o'clock, and we began to look out for
her smoke.

But, it was half-past one before we saw her smoke, and soon afterwards
we saw behind it the smoke of another steamer. As they were coming on
at full speed, we got the two bags ready, and took that opportunity
of saying good-bye to Herbert and Startop. We had all shaken hands
cordially, and neither Herbert's eyes nor mine were quite dry, when I
saw a four-oared galley shoot out from under the bank but a little way
ahead of us, and row out into the same track.

A stretch of shore had been as yet between us and the steamer's smoke,
by reason of the bend and wind of the river; but now she was visible,
coming head on. I called to Herbert and Startop to keep before the tide,
that she might see us lying by for her, and I adjured Provis to sit
quite still, wrapped in his cloak. He answered cheerily, “Trust to me,
dear boy,” and sat like a statue. Meantime the galley, which was very
skilfully handled, had crossed us, let us come up with her, and fallen
alongside. Leaving just room enough for the play of the oars, she kept
alongside, drifting when we drifted, and pulling a stroke or two when we
pulled. Of the two sitters one held the rudder-lines, and looked at us
attentively,--as did all the rowers; the other sitter was wrapped up,
much as Provis was, and seemed to shrink, and whisper some instruction
to the steerer as he looked at us. Not a word was spoken in either boat.

Startop could make out, after a few minutes, which steamer was first,
and gave me the word “Hamburg,” in a low voice, as we sat face to face.
She was nearing us very fast, and the beating of her peddles grew louder
and louder. I felt as if her shadow were absolutely upon us, when the
galley hailed us. I answered.

“You have a returned Transport there,” said the man who held the lines.
“That's the man, wrapped in the cloak. His name is Abel Magwitch,
otherwise Provis. I apprehend that man, and call upon him to surrender,
and you to assist.”

At the same moment, without giving any audible direction to his crew,
he ran the galley abroad of us. They had pulled one sudden stroke ahead,
had got their oars in, had run athwart us, and were holding on to
our gunwale, before we knew what they were doing. This caused great
confusion on board the steamer, and I heard them calling to us, and
heard the order given to stop the paddles, and heard them stop, but felt
her driving down upon us irresistibly. In the same moment, I saw the
steersman of the galley lay his hand on his prisoner's shoulder, and saw
that both boats were swinging round with the force of the tide, and
saw that all hands on board the steamer were running forward quite
frantically. Still, in the same moment, I saw the prisoner start
up, lean across his captor, and pull the cloak from the neck of the
shrinking sitter in the galley. Still in the same moment, I saw that the
face disclosed, was the face of the other convict of long ago. Still, in
the same moment, I saw the face tilt backward with a white terror on it
that I shall never forget, and heard a great cry on board the steamer,
and a loud splash in the water, and felt the boat sink from under me.

It was but for an instant that I seemed to struggle with a thousand
mill-weirs and a thousand flashes of light; that instant past, I was
taken on board the galley. Herbert was there, and Startop was there; but
our boat was gone, and the two convicts were gone.

What with the cries aboard the steamer, and the furious blowing off of
her steam, and her driving on, and our driving on, I could not at first
distinguish sky from water or shore from shore; but the crew of the
galley righted her with great speed, and, pulling certain swift strong
strokes ahead, lay upon their oars, every man looking silently and
eagerly at the water astern. Presently a dark object was seen in it,
bearing towards us on the tide. No man spoke, but the steersman held up
his hand, and all softly backed water, and kept the boat straight and
true before it. As it came nearer, I saw it to be Magwitch, swimming,
but not swimming freely. He was taken on board, and instantly manacled
at the wrists and ankles.

The galley was kept steady, and the silent, eager look-out at the water
was resumed. But, the Rotterdam steamer now came up, and apparently not
understanding what had happened, came on at speed. By the time she had
been hailed and stopped, both steamers were drifting away from us, and
we were rising and falling in a troubled wake of water. The look-out was
kept, long after all was still again and the two steamers were gone; but
everybody knew that it was hopeless now.

At length we gave it up, and pulled under the shore towards the tavern
we had lately left, where we were received with no little surprise. Here
I was able to get some comforts for Magwitch,--Provis no longer,--who
had received some very severe injury in the chest, and a deep cut in the
head.

He told me that he believed himself to have gone under the keel of the
steamer, and to have been struck on the head in rising. The injury to
his chest (which rendered his breathing extremely painful) he thought
he had received against the side of the galley. He added that he did not
pretend to say what he might or might not have done to Compeyson, but
that, in the moment of his laying his hand on his cloak to identify him,
that villain had staggered up and staggered back, and they had both gone
overboard together, when the sudden wrenching of him (Magwitch) out of
our boat, and the endeavor of his captor to keep him in it, had capsized
us. He told me in a whisper that they had gone down fiercely locked in
each other's arms, and that there had been a struggle under water, and
that he had disengaged himself, struck out, and swum away.

I never had any reason to doubt the exact truth of what he thus told me.
The officer who steered the galley gave the same account of their going
overboard.

When I asked this officer's permission to change the prisoner's
wet clothes by purchasing any spare garments I could get at the
public-house, he gave it readily: merely observing that he must take
charge of everything his prisoner had about him. So the pocket-book
which had once been in my hands passed into the officer's. He further
gave me leave to accompany the prisoner to London; but declined to
accord that grace to my two friends.

The Jack at the Ship was instructed where the drowned man had gone
down, and undertook to search for the body in the places where it was
likeliest to come ashore. His interest in its recovery seemed to me to
be much heightened when he heard that it had stockings on. Probably, it
took about a dozen drowned men to fit him out completely; and that may
have been the reason why the different articles of his dress were in
various stages of decay.

We remained at the public-house until the tide turned, and then Magwitch
was carried down to the galley and put on board. Herbert and Startop
were to get to London by land, as soon as they could. We had a doleful
parting, and when I took my place by Magwitch's side, I felt that that
was my place henceforth while he lived.

For now, my repugnance to him had all melted away; and in the hunted,
wounded, shackled creature who held my hand in his, I only saw a man
who had meant to be my benefactor, and who had felt affectionately,
gratefully, and generously, towards me with great constancy through a
series of years. I only saw in him a much better man than I had been to
Joe.

His breathing became more difficult and painful as the night drew on,
and often he could not repress a groan. I tried to rest him on the arm
I could use, in any easy position; but it was dreadful to think that
I could not be sorry at heart for his being badly hurt, since it was
unquestionably best that he should die. That there were, still living,
people enough who were able and willing to identify him, I could not
doubt. That he would be leniently treated, I could not hope. He who had
been presented in the worst light at his trial, who had since broken
prison and had been tried again, who had returned from transportation
under a life sentence, and who had occasioned the death of the man who
was the cause of his arrest.

As we returned towards the setting sun we had yesterday left behind us,
and as the stream of our hopes seemed all running back, I told him how
grieved I was to think that he had come home for my sake.

“Dear boy,” he answered, “I'm quite content to take my chance. I've seen
my boy, and he can be a gentleman without me.”

No. I had thought about that, while we had been there side by side. No.
Apart from any inclinations of my own, I understood Wemmick's hint now.
I foresaw that, being convicted, his possessions would be forfeited to
the Crown.

“Lookee here, dear boy,” said he “It's best as a gentleman should not be
knowed to belong to me now. Only come to see me as if you come by chance
alonger Wemmick. Sit where I can see you when I am swore to, for the
last o' many times, and I don't ask no more.”

“I will never stir from your side,” said I, “when I am suffered to be
near you. Please God, I will be as true to you as you have been to me!”

I felt his hand tremble as it held mine, and he turned his face away
as he lay in the bottom of the boat, and I heard that old sound in his
throat,--softened now, like all the rest of him. It was a good thing
that he had touched this point, for it put into my mind what I might not
otherwise have thought of until too late,--that he need never know how
his hopes of enriching me had perished.




Chapter LV

He was taken to the Police Court next day, and would have been
immediately committed for trial, but that it was necessary to send down
for an old officer of the prison-ship from which he had once escaped, to
speak to his identity. Nobody doubted it; but Compeyson, who had meant
to depose to it, was tumbling on the tides, dead, and it happened that
there was not at that time any prison officer in London who could give
the required evidence. I had gone direct to Mr. Jaggers at his private
house, on my arrival over night, to retain his assistance, and Mr.
Jaggers on the prisoner's behalf would admit nothing. It was the sole
resource; for he told me that the case must be over in five minutes
when the witness was there, and that no power on earth could prevent its
going against us.

I imparted to Mr. Jaggers my design of keeping him in ignorance of the
fate of his wealth. Mr. Jaggers was querulous and angry with me for
having “let it slip through my fingers,” and said we must memorialize
by and by, and try at all events for some of it. But he did not conceal
from me that, although there might be many cases in which the forfeiture
would not be exacted, there were no circumstances in this case to make
it one of them. I understood that very well. I was not related to the
outlaw, or connected with him by any recognizable tie; he had put his
hand to no writing or settlement in my favor before his apprehension,
and to do so now would be idle. I had no claim, and I finally resolved,
and ever afterwards abided by the resolution, that my heart should never
be sickened with the hopeless task of attempting to establish one.

There appeared to be reason for supposing that the drowned informer
had hoped for a reward out of this forfeiture, and had obtained some
accurate knowledge of Magwitch's affairs. When his body was found, many
miles from the scene of his death, and so horribly disfigured that he
was only recognizable by the contents of his pockets, notes were still
legible, folded in a case he carried. Among these were the name of a
banking-house in New South Wales, where a sum of money was, and the
designation of certain lands of considerable value. Both these heads of
information were in a list that Magwitch, while in prison, gave to Mr.
Jaggers, of the possessions he supposed I should inherit. His ignorance,
poor fellow, at last served him; he never mistrusted but that my
inheritance was quite safe, with Mr. Jaggers's aid.

After three days' delay, during which the crown prosecution stood over
for the production of the witness from the prison-ship, the witness
came, and completed the easy case. He was committed to take his trial at
the next Sessions, which would come on in a month.

It was at this dark time of my life that Herbert returned home one
evening, a good deal cast down, and said,--

“My dear Handel, I fear I shall soon have to leave you.”

His partner having prepared me for that, I was less surprised than he
thought.

“We shall lose a fine opportunity if I put off going to Cairo, and I am
very much afraid I must go, Handel, when you most need me.”

“Herbert, I shall always need you, because I shall always love you; but
my need is no greater now than at another time.”

“You will be so lonely.”

“I have not leisure to think of that,” said I. “You know that I am
always with him to the full extent of the time allowed, and that I
should be with him all day long, if I could. And when I come away from
him, you know that my thoughts are with him.”

The dreadful condition to which he was brought, was so appalling to both
of us, that we could not refer to it in plainer words.

“My dear fellow,” said Herbert, “let the near prospect of our
separation--for, it is very near--be my justification for troubling you
about yourself. Have you thought of your future?”

“No, for I have been afraid to think of any future.”

“But yours cannot be dismissed; indeed, my dear dear Handel, it must not
be dismissed. I wish you would enter on it now, as far as a few friendly
words go, with me.”

“I will,” said I.

“In this branch house of ours, Handel, we must have a--”

I saw that his delicacy was avoiding the right word, so I said, “A
clerk.”

“A clerk. And I hope it is not at all unlikely that he may expand (as
a clerk of your acquaintance has expanded) into a partner. Now,
Handel,--in short, my dear boy, will you come to me?”

There was something charmingly cordial and engaging in the manner in
which after saying “Now, Handel,” as if it were the grave beginning of
a portentous business exordium, he had suddenly given up that tone,
stretched out his honest hand, and spoken like a schoolboy.

“Clara and I have talked about it again and again,” Herbert pursued,
“and the dear little thing begged me only this evening, with tears in
her eyes, to say to you that, if you will live with us when we come
together, she will do her best to make you happy, and to convince her
husband's friend that he is her friend too. We should get on so well,
Handel!”

I thanked her heartily, and I thanked him heartily, but said I could not
yet make sure of joining him as he so kindly offered. Firstly, my
mind was too preoccupied to be able to take in the subject clearly.
Secondly,--Yes! Secondly, there was a vague something lingering in my
thoughts that will come out very near the end of this slight narrative.

“But if you thought, Herbert, that you could, without doing any injury
to your business, leave the question open for a little while--”

“For any while,” cried Herbert. “Six months, a year!”

“Not so long as that,” said I. “Two or three months at most.”

Herbert was highly delighted when we shook hands on this arrangement,
and said he could now take courage to tell me that he believed he must
go away at the end of the week.

“And Clara?” said I.

“The dear little thing,” returned Herbert, “holds dutifully to her
father as long as he lasts; but he won't last long. Mrs. Whimple
confides to me that he is certainly going.”

“Not to say an unfeeling thing,” said I, “he cannot do better than go.”

“I am afraid that must be admitted,” said Herbert; “and then I shall
come back for the dear little thing, and the dear little thing and I
will walk quietly into the nearest church. Remember! The blessed darling
comes of no family, my dear Handel, and never looked into the red book,
and hasn't a notion about her grandpapa. What a fortune for the son of
my mother!”

On the Saturday in that same week, I took my leave of Herbert,--full
of bright hope, but sad and sorry to leave me,--as he sat on one of the
seaport mail coaches. I went into a coffee-house to write a little note
to Clara, telling her he had gone off, sending his love to her over and
over again, and then went to my lonely home,--if it deserved the name;
for it was now no home to me, and I had no home anywhere.

On the stairs I encountered Wemmick, who was coming down, after an
unsuccessful application of his knuckles to my door. I had not seen him
alone since the disastrous issue of the attempted flight; and he had
come, in his private and personal capacity, to say a few words of
explanation in reference to that failure.

“The late Compeyson,” said Wemmick, “had by little and little got at the
bottom of half of the regular business now transacted; and it was from
the talk of some of his people in trouble (some of his people being
always in trouble) that I heard what I did. I kept my ears open, seeming
to have them shut, until I heard that he was absent, and I thought that
would be the best time for making the attempt. I can only suppose now,
that it was a part of his policy, as a very clever man, habitually to
deceive his own instruments. You don't blame me, I hope, Mr. Pip? I am
sure I tried to serve you, with all my heart.”

“I am as sure of that, Wemmick, as you can be, and I thank you most
earnestly for all your interest and friendship.”

“Thank you, thank you very much. It's a bad job,” said Wemmick,
scratching his head, “and I assure you I haven't been so cut up for a
long time. What I look at is the sacrifice of so much portable property.
Dear me!”

“What I think of, Wemmick, is the poor owner of the property.”

“Yes, to be sure,” said Wemmick. “Of course, there can be no objection
to your being sorry for him, and I'd put down a five-pound note myself
to get him out of it. But what I look at is this. The late Compeyson
having been beforehand with him in intelligence of his return, and being
so determined to bring him to book, I do not think he could have been
saved. Whereas, the portable property certainly could have been saved.
That's the difference between the property and the owner, don't you
see?”

I invited Wemmick to come upstairs, and refresh himself with a glass
of grog before walking to Walworth. He accepted the invitation. While he
was drinking his moderate allowance, he said, with nothing to lead up to
it, and after having appeared rather fidgety,--

“What do you think of my meaning to take a holiday on Monday, Mr. Pip?”

“Why, I suppose you have not done such a thing these twelve months.”

“These twelve years, more likely,” said Wemmick. “Yes. I'm going to take
a holiday. More than that; I'm going to take a walk. More than that; I'm
going to ask you to take a walk with me.”

I was about to excuse myself, as being but a bad companion just then,
when Wemmick anticipated me.

“I know your engagements,” said he, “and I know you are out of sorts,
Mr. Pip. But if you could oblige me, I should take it as a kindness.
It ain't a long walk, and it's an early one. Say it might occupy you
(including breakfast on the walk) from eight to twelve. Couldn't you
stretch a point and manage it?”

He had done so much for me at various times, that this was very little
to do for him. I said I could manage it,--would manage it,--and he was
so very much pleased by my acquiescence, that I was pleased too. At his
particular request, I appointed to call for him at the Castle at half
past eight on Monday morning, and so we parted for the time.

Punctual to my appointment, I rang at the Castle gate on the Monday
morning, and was received by Wemmick himself, who struck me as looking
tighter than usual, and having a sleeker hat on. Within, there were two
glasses of rum and milk prepared, and two biscuits. The Aged must have
been stirring with the lark, for, glancing into the perspective of his
bedroom, I observed that his bed was empty.

When we had fortified ourselves with the rum and milk and biscuits, and
were going out for the walk with that training preparation on us, I was
considerably surprised to see Wemmick take up a fishing-rod, and put
it over his shoulder. “Why, we are not going fishing!” said I. “No,”
 returned Wemmick, “but I like to walk with one.”

I thought this odd; however, I said nothing, and we set off. We went
towards Camberwell Green, and when we were thereabouts, Wemmick said
suddenly,--

“Halloa! Here's a church!”

There was nothing very surprising in that; but again, I was rather
surprised, when he said, as if he were animated by a brilliant idea,--

“Let's go in!”

We went in, Wemmick leaving his fishing-rod in the porch, and looked all
round. In the mean time, Wemmick was diving into his coat-pockets, and
getting something out of paper there.

“Halloa!” said he. “Here's a couple of pair of gloves! Let's put 'em
on!”

As the gloves were white kid gloves, and as the post-office was widened
to its utmost extent, I now began to have my strong suspicions. They
were strengthened into certainty when I beheld the Aged enter at a side
door, escorting a lady.

“Halloa!” said Wemmick. “Here's Miss Skiffins! Let's have a wedding.”

That discreet damsel was attired as usual, except that she was now
engaged in substituting for her green kid gloves a pair of white. The
Aged was likewise occupied in preparing a similar sacrifice for
the altar of Hymen. The old gentleman, however, experienced so much
difficulty in getting his gloves on, that Wemmick found it necessary
to put him with his back against a pillar, and then to get behind the
pillar himself and pull away at them, while I for my part held the old
gentleman round the waist, that he might present an equal and safe
resistance. By dint of this ingenious scheme, his gloves were got on to
perfection.

The clerk and clergyman then appearing, we were ranged in order at
those fatal rails. True to his notion of seeming to do it all without
preparation, I heard Wemmick say to himself, as he took something out of
his waistcoat-pocket before the service began, “Halloa! Here's a ring!”

I acted in the capacity of backer, or best-man, to the bridegroom; while
a little limp pew-opener in a soft bonnet like a baby's, made a feint
of being the bosom friend of Miss Skiffins. The responsibility of giving
the lady away devolved upon the Aged, which led to the clergyman's being
unintentionally scandalized, and it happened thus. When he said, “Who
giveth this woman to be married to this man?” the old gentleman, not in
the least knowing what point of the ceremony we had arrived at, stood
most amiably beaming at the ten commandments. Upon which, the clergyman
said again, “WHO giveth this woman to be married to this man?” The old
gentleman being still in a state of most estimable unconsciousness, the
bridegroom cried out in his accustomed voice, “Now Aged P. you know; who
giveth?” To which the Aged replied with great briskness, before saying
that he gave, “All right, John, all right, my boy!” And the clergyman
came to so gloomy a pause upon it, that I had doubts for the moment
whether we should get completely married that day.

It was completely done, however, and when we were going out of church
Wemmick took the cover off the font, and put his white gloves in it, and
put the cover on again. Mrs. Wemmick, more heedful of the future, put
her white gloves in her pocket and assumed her green. “Now, Mr. Pip,”
 said Wemmick, triumphantly shouldering the fishing-rod as we came
out, “let me ask you whether anybody would suppose this to be a
wedding-party!”

Breakfast had been ordered at a pleasant little tavern, a mile or so
away upon the rising ground beyond the green; and there was a bagatelle
board in the room, in case we should desire to unbend our minds after
the solemnity. It was pleasant to observe that Mrs. Wemmick no longer
unwound Wemmick's arm when it adapted itself to her figure, but sat in a
high-backed chair against the wall, like a violoncello in its case, and
submitted to be embraced as that melodious instrument might have done.

We had an excellent breakfast, and when any one declined anything on
table, Wemmick said, “Provided by contract, you know; don't be afraid of
it!” I drank to the new couple, drank to the Aged, drank to the Castle,
saluted the bride at parting, and made myself as agreeable as I could.

Wemmick came down to the door with me, and I again shook hands with him,
and wished him joy.

“Thankee!” said Wemmick, rubbing his hands. “She's such a manager
of fowls, you have no idea. You shall have some eggs, and judge for
yourself. I say, Mr. Pip!” calling me back, and speaking low. “This is
altogether a Walworth sentiment, please.”

“I understand. Not to be mentioned in Little Britain,” said I.

Wemmick nodded. “After what you let out the other day, Mr. Jaggers
may as well not know of it. He might think my brain was softening, or
something of the kind.”




Chapter LVI

He lay in prison very ill, during the whole interval between his
committal for trial and the coming round of the Sessions. He had broken
two ribs, they had wounded one of his lungs, and he breathed with great
pain and difficulty, which increased daily. It was a consequence of his
hurt that he spoke so low as to be scarcely audible; therefore he spoke
very little. But he was ever ready to listen to me; and it became the
first duty of my life to say to him, and read to him, what I knew he
ought to hear.

Being far too ill to remain in the common prison, he was removed, after
the first day or so, into the infirmary. This gave me opportunities
of being with him that I could not otherwise have had. And but for
his illness he would have been put in irons, for he was regarded as a
determined prison-breaker, and I know not what else.

Although I saw him every day, it was for only a short time; hence, the
regularly recurring spaces of our separation were long enough to record
on his face any slight changes that occurred in his physical state. I
do not recollect that I once saw any change in it for the better; he
wasted, and became slowly weaker and worse, day by day, from the day
when the prison door closed upon him.

The kind of submission or resignation that he showed was that of a man
who was tired out. I sometimes derived an impression, from his manner
or from a whispered word or two which escaped him, that he pondered
over the question whether he might have been a better man under better
circumstances. But he never justified himself by a hint tending that
way, or tried to bend the past out of its eternal shape.

It happened on two or three occasions in my presence, that his desperate
reputation was alluded to by one or other of the people in attendance on
him. A smile crossed his face then, and he turned his eyes on me with
a trustful look, as if he were confident that I had seen some small
redeeming touch in him, even so long ago as when I was a little child.
As to all the rest, he was humble and contrite, and I never knew him
complain.

When the Sessions came round, Mr. Jaggers caused an application to be
made for the postponement of his trial until the following Sessions. It
was obviously made with the assurance that he could not live so long,
and was refused. The trial came on at once, and, when he was put to the
bar, he was seated in a chair. No objection was made to my getting
close to the dock, on the outside of it, and holding the hand that he
stretched forth to me.

The trial was very short and very clear. Such things as could be said
for him were said,--how he had taken to industrious habits, and had
thriven lawfully and reputably. But nothing could unsay the fact that
he had returned, and was there in presence of the Judge and Jury. It was
impossible to try him for that, and do otherwise than find him guilty.

At that time, it was the custom (as I learnt from my terrible experience
of that Sessions) to devote a concluding day to the passing of
Sentences, and to make a finishing effect with the Sentence of Death.
But for the indelible picture that my remembrance now holds before me,
I could scarcely believe, even as I write these words, that I saw
two-and-thirty men and women put before the Judge to receive that
sentence together. Foremost among the two-and-thirty was he; seated,
that he might get breath enough to keep life in him.

The whole scene starts out again in the vivid colors of the moment, down
to the drops of April rain on the windows of the court, glittering in
the rays of April sun. Penned in the dock, as I again stood outside it
at the corner with his hand in mine, were the two-and-thirty men
and women; some defiant, some stricken with terror, some sobbing and
weeping, some covering their faces, some staring gloomily about. There
had been shrieks from among the women convicts; but they had been
stilled, and a hush had succeeded. The sheriffs with their great chains
and nosegays, other civic gewgaws and monsters, criers, ushers, a great
gallery full of people,--a large theatrical audience,--looked on, as the
two-and-thirty and the Judge were solemnly confronted. Then the Judge
addressed them. Among the wretched creatures before him whom he must
single out for special address was one who almost from his infancy had
been an offender against the laws; who, after repeated imprisonments and
punishments, had been at length sentenced to exile for a term of years;
and who, under circumstances of great violence and daring, had made his
escape and been re-sentenced to exile for life. That miserable man would
seem for a time to have become convinced of his errors, when far removed
from the scenes of his old offences, and to have lived a peaceable and
honest life. But in a fatal moment, yielding to those propensities and
passions, the indulgence of which had so long rendered him a scourge to
society, he had quitted his haven of rest and repentance, and had
come back to the country where he was proscribed. Being here presently
denounced, he had for a time succeeded in evading the officers of
Justice, but being at length seized while in the act of flight, he had
resisted them, and had--he best knew whether by express design, or in
the blindness of his hardihood--caused the death of his denouncer, to
whom his whole career was known. The appointed punishment for his return
to the land that had cast him out, being Death, and his case being this
aggravated case, he must prepare himself to Die.

The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, through the
glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaft of
light between the two-and-thirty and the Judge, linking both together,
and perhaps reminding some among the audience how both were passing on,
with absolute equality, to the greater Judgment that knoweth all things,
and cannot err. Rising for a moment, a distinct speck of face in this
way of light, the prisoner said, “My Lord, I have received my sentence
of Death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours,” and sat down again.
There was some hushing, and the Judge went on with what he had to say
to the rest. Then they were all formally doomed, and some of them were
supported out, and some of them sauntered out with a haggard look of
bravery, and a few nodded to the gallery, and two or three shook hands,
and others went out chewing the fragments of herb they had taken from
the sweet herbs lying about. He went last of all, because of having to
be helped from his chair, and to go very slowly; and he held my hand
while all the others were removed, and while the audience got up
(putting their dresses right, as they might at church or elsewhere), and
pointed down at this criminal or at that, and most of all at him and me.

I earnestly hoped and prayed that he might die before the Recorder's
Report was made; but, in the dread of his lingering on, I began that
night to write out a petition to the Home Secretary of State, setting
forth my knowledge of him, and how it was that he had come back for my
sake. I wrote it as fervently and pathetically as I could; and when I
had finished it and sent it in, I wrote out other petitions to such men
in authority as I hoped were the most merciful, and drew up one to the
Crown itself. For several days and nights after he was sentenced I took
no rest except when I fell asleep in my chair, but was wholly absorbed
in these appeals. And after I had sent them in, I could not keep away
from the places where they were, but felt as if they were more
hopeful and less desperate when I was near them. In this unreasonable
restlessness and pain of mind I would roam the streets of an evening,
wandering by those offices and houses where I had left the petitions. To
the present hour, the weary western streets of London on a cold, dusty
spring night, with their ranges of stern, shut-up mansions, and their
long rows of lamps, are melancholy to me from this association.

The daily visits I could make him were shortened now, and he was more
strictly kept. Seeing, or fancying, that I was suspected of an intention
of carrying poison to him, I asked to be searched before I sat down
at his bedside, and told the officer who was always there, that I was
willing to do anything that would assure him of the singleness of my
designs. Nobody was hard with him or with me. There was duty to be
done, and it was done, but not harshly. The officer always gave me the
assurance that he was worse, and some other sick prisoners in the
room, and some other prisoners who attended on them as sick nurses,
(malefactors, but not incapable of kindness, God be thanked!) always
joined in the same report.

As the days went on, I noticed more and more that he would lie placidly
looking at the white ceiling, with an absence of light in his face
until some word of mine brightened it for an instant, and then it would
subside again. Sometimes he was almost or quite unable to speak, then
he would answer me with slight pressures on my hand, and I grew to
understand his meaning very well.

The number of the days had risen to ten, when I saw a greater change
in him than I had seen yet. His eyes were turned towards the door, and
lighted up as I entered.

“Dear boy,” he said, as I sat down by his bed: “I thought you was late.
But I knowed you couldn't be that.”

“It is just the time,” said I. “I waited for it at the gate.”

“You always waits at the gate; don't you, dear boy?”

“Yes. Not to lose a moment of the time.”

“Thank'ee dear boy, thank'ee. God bless you! You've never deserted me,
dear boy.”

I pressed his hand in silence, for I could not forget that I had once
meant to desert him.

“And what's the best of all,” he said, “you've been more comfortable
alonger me, since I was under a dark cloud, than when the sun shone.
That's best of all.”

He lay on his back, breathing with great difficulty. Do what he would,
and love me though he did, the light left his face ever and again, and a
film came over the placid look at the white ceiling.

“Are you in much pain to-day?”

“I don't complain of none, dear boy.”

“You never do complain.”

He had spoken his last words. He smiled, and I understood his touch to
mean that he wished to lift my hand, and lay it on his breast. I laid it
there, and he smiled again, and put both his hands upon it.

The allotted time ran out, while we were thus; but, looking round, I
found the governor of the prison standing near me, and he whispered,
“You needn't go yet.” I thanked him gratefully, and asked, “Might I
speak to him, if he can hear me?”

The governor stepped aside, and beckoned the officer away. The change,
though it was made without noise, drew back the film from the placid
look at the white ceiling, and he looked most affectionately at me.

“Dear Magwitch, I must tell you now, at last. You understand what I
say?”

A gentle pressure on my hand.

“You had a child once, whom you loved and lost.”

A stronger pressure on my hand.

“She lived, and found powerful friends. She is living now. She is a lady
and very beautiful. And I love her!”

With a last faint effort, which would have been powerless but for my
yielding to it and assisting it, he raised my hand to his lips. Then,
he gently let it sink upon his breast again, with his own hands lying on
it. The placid look at the white ceiling came back, and passed away, and
his head dropped quietly on his breast.

Mindful, then, of what we had read together, I thought of the two men
who went up into the Temple to pray, and I knew there were no better
words that I could say beside his bed, than “O Lord, be merciful to him
a sinner!”




Chapter LVII

Now that I was left wholly to myself, I gave notice of my intention
to quit the chambers in the Temple as soon as my tenancy could legally
determine, and in the meanwhile to underlet them. At once I put bills
up in the windows; for, I was in debt, and had scarcely any money, and
began to be seriously alarmed by the state of my affairs. I ought
rather to write that I should have been alarmed if I had had energy and
concentration enough to help me to the clear perception of any truth
beyond the fact that I was falling very ill. The late stress upon me had
enabled me to put off illness, but not to put it away; I knew that it
was coming on me now, and I knew very little else, and was even careless
as to that.

For a day or two, I lay on the sofa, or on the floor,--anywhere,
according as I happened to sink down,--with a heavy head and aching
limbs, and no purpose, and no power. Then there came, one night which
appeared of great duration, and which teemed with anxiety and horror;
and when in the morning I tried to sit up in my bed and think of it, I
found I could not do so.

Whether I really had been down in Garden Court in the dead of the night,
groping about for the boat that I supposed to be there; whether I had
two or three times come to myself on the staircase with great terror,
not knowing how I had got out of bed; whether I had found myself
lighting the lamp, possessed by the idea that he was coming up
the stairs, and that the lights were blown out; whether I had been
inexpressibly harassed by the distracted talking, laughing, and groaning
of some one, and had half suspected those sounds to be of my own making;
whether there had been a closed iron furnace in a dark corner of
the room, and a voice had called out, over and over again, that Miss
Havisham was consuming within it,--these were things that I tried to
settle with myself and get into some order, as I lay that morning on
my bed. But the vapor of a limekiln would come between me and them,
disordering them all, and it was through the vapor at last that I saw
two men looking at me.

“What do you want?” I asked, starting; “I don't know you.”

“Well, sir,” returned one of them, bending down and touching me on the
shoulder, “this is a matter that you'll soon arrange, I dare say, but
you're arrested.”

“What is the debt?”

“Hundred and twenty-three pound, fifteen, six. Jeweller's account, I
think.”

“What is to be done?”

“You had better come to my house,” said the man. “I keep a very nice
house.”

I made some attempt to get up and dress myself. When I next attended
to them, they were standing a little off from the bed, looking at me. I
still lay there.

“You see my state,” said I. “I would come with you if I could; but
indeed I am quite unable. If you take me from here, I think I shall die
by the way.”

Perhaps they replied, or argued the point, or tried to encourage me to
believe that I was better than I thought. Forasmuch as they hang in
my memory by only this one slender thread, I don't know what they did,
except that they forbore to remove me.

That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that
I often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I
confounded impossible existences with my own identity; that I was a
brick in the house-wall, and yet entreating to be released from the
giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam of a
vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I implored
in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part in it hammered
off; that I passed through these phases of disease, I know of my own
remembrance, and did in some sort know at the time. That I sometimes
struggled with real people, in the belief that they were murderers, and
that I would all at once comprehend that they meant to do me good, and
would then sink exhausted in their arms, and suffer them to lay me
down, I also knew at the time. But, above all, I knew that there was a
constant tendency in all these people,--who, when I was very ill, would
present all kinds of extraordinary transformations of the human face,
and would be much dilated in size,--above all, I say, I knew that there
was an extraordinary tendency in all these people, sooner or later, to
settle down into the likeness of Joe.

After I had turned the worst point of my illness, I began to notice that
while all its other features changed, this one consistent feature did
not change. Whoever came about me, still settled down into Joe. I opened
my eyes in the night, and I saw, in the great chair at the bedside, Joe.
I opened my eyes in the day, and, sitting on the window-seat, smoking
his pipe in the shaded open window, still I saw Joe. I asked for cooling
drink, and the dear hand that gave it me was Joe's. I sank back on
my pillow after drinking, and the face that looked so hopefully and
tenderly upon me was the face of Joe.

At last, one day, I took courage, and said, “Is it Joe?”

And the dear old home-voice answered, “Which it air, old chap.”

“O Joe, you break my heart! Look angry at me, Joe. Strike me, Joe. Tell
me of my ingratitude. Don't be so good to me!”

For Joe had actually laid his head down on the pillow at my side, and
put his arm round my neck, in his joy that I knew him.

“Which dear old Pip, old chap,” said Joe, “you and me was ever friends.
And when you're well enough to go out for a ride--what larks!”

After which, Joe withdrew to the window, and stood with his back towards
me, wiping his eyes. And as my extreme weakness prevented me from
getting up and going to him, I lay there, penitently whispering, “O God
bless him! O God bless this gentle Christian man!”

Joe's eyes were red when I next found him beside me; but I was holding
his hand, and we both felt happy.

“How long, dear Joe?”

“Which you meantersay, Pip, how long have your illness lasted, dear old
chap?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“It's the end of May, Pip. To-morrow is the first of June.”

“And have you been here all that time, dear Joe?”

“Pretty nigh, old chap. For, as I says to Biddy when the news of your
being ill were brought by letter, which it were brought by the post, and
being formerly single he is now married though underpaid for a deal of
walking and shoe-leather, but wealth were not a object on his part, and
marriage were the great wish of his hart--”

“It is so delightful to hear you, Joe! But I interrupt you in what you
said to Biddy.”

“Which it were,” said Joe, “that how you might be amongst strangers, and
that how you and me having been ever friends, a wisit at such a moment
might not prove unacceptabobble. And Biddy, her word were, 'Go to him,
without loss of time.' That,” said Joe, summing up with his judicial
air, “were the word of Biddy. 'Go to him,' Biddy say, 'without loss of
time.' In short, I shouldn't greatly deceive you,” Joe added, after a
little grave reflection, “if I represented to you that the word of that
young woman were, 'without a minute's loss of time.'”

There Joe cut himself short, and informed me that I was to be talked
to in great moderation, and that I was to take a little nourishment at
stated frequent times, whether I felt inclined for it or not, and that
I was to submit myself to all his orders. So I kissed his hand, and lay
quiet, while he proceeded to indite a note to Biddy, with my love in it.

Evidently Biddy had taught Joe to write. As I lay in bed looking at him,
it made me, in my weak state, cry again with pleasure to see the
pride with which he set about his letter. My bedstead, divested of its
curtains, had been removed, with me upon it, into the sitting-room, as
the airiest and largest, and the carpet had been taken away, and
the room kept always fresh and wholesome night and day. At my own
writing-table, pushed into a corner and cumbered with little bottles,
Joe now sat down to his great work, first choosing a pen from the
pen-tray as if it were a chest of large tools, and tucking up his
sleeves as if he were going to wield a crow-bar or sledgehammer. It was
necessary for Joe to hold on heavily to the table with his left elbow,
and to get his right leg well out behind him, before he could begin; and
when he did begin he made every downstroke so slowly that it might
have been six feet long, while at every upstroke I could hear his pen
spluttering extensively. He had a curious idea that the inkstand was
on the side of him where it was not, and constantly dipped his pen into
space, and seemed quite satisfied with the result. Occasionally, he was
tripped up by some orthographical stumbling-block; but on the whole
he got on very well indeed; and when he had signed his name, and had
removed a finishing blot from the paper to the crown of his head with
his two forefingers, he got up and hovered about the table, trying the
effect of his performance from various points of view, as it lay there,
with unbounded satisfaction.

Not to make Joe uneasy by talking too much, even if I had been able to
talk much, I deferred asking him about Miss Havisham until next day. He
shook his head when I then asked him if she had recovered.

“Is she dead, Joe?”

“Why you see, old chap,” said Joe, in a tone of remonstrance, and by way
of getting at it by degrees, “I wouldn't go so far as to say that, for
that's a deal to say; but she ain't--”

“Living, Joe?”

“That's nigher where it is,” said Joe; “she ain't living.”

“Did she linger long, Joe?”

“Arter you was took ill, pretty much about what you might call (if you
was put to it) a week,” said Joe; still determined, on my account, to
come at everything by degrees.

“Dear Joe, have you heard what becomes of her property?”

“Well, old chap,” said Joe, “it do appear that she had settled the most
of it, which I meantersay tied it up, on Miss Estella. But she had
wrote out a little coddleshell in her own hand a day or two afore the
accident, leaving a cool four thousand to Mr. Matthew Pocket. And why,
do you suppose, above all things, Pip, she left that cool four thousand
unto him? 'Because of Pip's account of him, the said Matthew.' I am told
by Biddy, that air the writing,” said Joe, repeating the legal turn as
if it did him infinite good, “'account of him the said Matthew.' And a
cool four thousand, Pip!”

I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of
the four thousand pounds; but it appeared to make the sum of money more
to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting on its being cool.

This account gave me great joy, as it perfected the only good thing I
had done. I asked Joe whether he had heard if any of the other relations
had any legacies?

“Miss Sarah,” said Joe, “she have twenty-five pound perannium fur to
buy pills, on account of being bilious. Miss Georgiana, she have twenty
pound down. Mrs.--what's the name of them wild beasts with humps, old
chap?”

“Camels?” said I, wondering why he could possibly want to know.

Joe nodded. “Mrs. Camels,” by which I presently understood he meant
Camilla, “she have five pound fur to buy rushlights to put her in
spirits when she wake up in the night.”

The accuracy of these recitals was sufficiently obvious to me, to give
me great confidence in Joe's information. “And now,” said Joe, “you
ain't that strong yet, old chap, that you can take in more nor one
additional shovelful to-day. Old Orlick he's been a bustin' open a
dwelling-ouse.”

“Whose?” said I.

“Not, I grant you, but what his manners is given to blusterous,” said
Joe, apologetically; “still, a Englishman's ouse is his Castle, and
castles must not be busted 'cept when done in war time. And wotsume'er
the failings on his part, he were a corn and seedsman in his hart.”

“Is it Pumblechook's house that has been broken into, then?”

“That's it, Pip,” said Joe; “and they took his till, and they took his
cash-box, and they drinked his wine, and they partook of his wittles,
and they slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and they tied him
up to his bedpust, and they giv' him a dozen, and they stuffed his
mouth full of flowering annuals to prewent his crying out. But he knowed
Orlick, and Orlick's in the county jail.”

By these approaches we arrived at unrestricted conversation. I was slow
to gain strength, but I did slowly and surely become less weak, and Joe
stayed with me, and I fancied I was little Pip again.

For the tenderness of Joe was so beautifully proportioned to my need,
that I was like a child in his hands. He would sit and talk to me in the
old confidence, and with the old simplicity, and in the old unassertive
protecting way, so that I would half believe that all my life since the
days of the old kitchen was one of the mental troubles of the fever that
was gone. He did everything for me except the household work, for which
he had engaged a very decent woman, after paying off the laundress on
his first arrival. “Which I do assure you, Pip,” he would often say, in
explanation of that liberty; “I found her a tapping the spare bed, like
a cask of beer, and drawing off the feathers in a bucket, for sale.
Which she would have tapped yourn next, and draw'd it off with you a
laying on it, and was then a carrying away the coals gradiwally in
the soup-tureen and wegetable-dishes, and the wine and spirits in your
Wellington boots.”

We looked forward to the day when I should go out for a ride, as we had
once looked forward to the day of my apprenticeship. And when the day
came, and an open carriage was got into the Lane, Joe wrapped me up,
took me in his arms, carried me down to it, and put me in, as if I were
still the small helpless creature to whom he had so abundantly given of
the wealth of his great nature.

And Joe got in beside me, and we drove away together into the country,
where the rich summer growth was already on the trees and on the grass,
and sweet summer scents filled all the air. The day happened to be
Sunday, and when I looked on the loveliness around me, and thought
how it had grown and changed, and how the little wild-flowers had been
forming, and the voices of the birds had been strengthening, by day and
by night, under the sun and under the stars, while poor I lay burning
and tossing on my bed, the mere remembrance of having burned and tossed
there came like a check upon my peace. But when I heard the Sunday
bells, and looked around a little more upon the outspread beauty, I felt
that I was not nearly thankful enough,--that I was too weak yet to be
even that,--and I laid my head on Joe's shoulder, as I had laid it long
ago when he had taken me to the Fair or where not, and it was too much
for my young senses.

More composure came to me after a while, and we talked as we used
to talk, lying on the grass at the old Battery. There was no change
whatever in Joe. Exactly what he had been in my eyes then, he was in my
eyes still; just as simply faithful, and as simply right.

When we got back again, and he lifted me out, and carried me--so
easily!--across the court and up the stairs, I thought of that eventful
Christmas Day when he had carried me over the marshes. We had not yet
made any allusion to my change of fortune, nor did I know how much of
my late history he was acquainted with. I was so doubtful of myself now,
and put so much trust in him, that I could not satisfy myself whether I
ought to refer to it when he did not.

“Have you heard, Joe,” I asked him that evening, upon further
consideration, as he smoked his pipe at the window, “who my patron was?”

“I heerd,” returned Joe, “as it were not Miss Havisham, old chap.”

“Did you hear who it was, Joe?”

“Well! I heerd as it were a person what sent the person what giv' you
the bank-notes at the Jolly Bargemen, Pip.”

“So it was.”

“Astonishing!” said Joe, in the placidest way.

“Did you hear that he was dead, Joe?” I presently asked, with increasing
diffidence.

“Which? Him as sent the bank-notes, Pip?”

“Yes.”

“I think,” said Joe, after meditating a long time, and looking rather
evasively at the window-seat, “as I did hear tell that how he were
something or another in a general way in that direction.”

“Did you hear anything of his circumstances, Joe?”

“Not partickler, Pip.”

“If you would like to hear, Joe--” I was beginning, when Joe got up and
came to my sofa.

“Lookee here, old chap,” said Joe, bending over me. “Ever the best of
friends; ain't us, Pip?”

I was ashamed to answer him.

“Wery good, then,” said Joe, as if I had answered; “that's all right;
that's agreed upon. Then why go into subjects, old chap, which as
betwixt two sech must be for ever onnecessary? There's subjects enough
as betwixt two sech, without onnecessary ones. Lord! To think of your
poor sister and her Rampages! And don't you remember Tickler?”

“I do indeed, Joe.”

“Lookee here, old chap,” said Joe. “I done what I could to keep you
and Tickler in sunders, but my power were not always fully equal to my
inclinations. For when your poor sister had a mind to drop into you, it
were not so much,” said Joe, in his favorite argumentative way, “that
she dropped into me too, if I put myself in opposition to her, but that
she dropped into you always heavier for it. I noticed that. It ain't a
grab at a man's whisker, not yet a shake or two of a man (to which your
sister was quite welcome), that 'ud put a man off from getting a little
child out of punishment. But when that little child is dropped into
heavier for that grab of whisker or shaking, then that man naterally up
and says to himself, 'Where is the good as you are a doing? I grant you
I see the 'arm,' says the man, 'but I don't see the good. I call upon
you, sir, therefore, to pint out the good.'”

“The man says?” I observed, as Joe waited for me to speak.

“The man says,” Joe assented. “Is he right, that man?”

“Dear Joe, he is always right.”

“Well, old chap,” said Joe, “then abide by your words. If he's always
right (which in general he's more likely wrong), he's right when he says
this: Supposing ever you kep any little matter to yourself, when you
was a little child, you kep it mostly because you know'd as J. Gargery's
power to part you and Tickler in sunders were not fully equal to his
inclinations. Theerfore, think no more of it as betwixt two sech, and do
not let us pass remarks upon onnecessary subjects. Biddy giv' herself a
deal o' trouble with me afore I left (for I am almost awful dull), as I
should view it in this light, and, viewing it in this light, as I should
so put it. Both of which,” said Joe, quite charmed with his logical
arrangement, “being done, now this to you a true friend, say. Namely.
You mustn't go a overdoing on it, but you must have your supper and your
wine and water, and you must be put betwixt the sheets.”

The delicacy with which Joe dismissed this theme, and the sweet tact and
kindness with which Biddy--who with her woman's wit had found me out so
soon--had prepared him for it, made a deep impression on my mind. But
whether Joe knew how poor I was, and how my great expectations had
all dissolved, like our own marsh mists before the sun, I could not
understand.

Another thing in Joe that I could not understand when it first began to
develop itself, but which I soon arrived at a sorrowful comprehension
of, was this: As I became stronger and better, Joe became a little less
easy with me. In my weakness and entire dependence on him, the dear
fellow had fallen into the old tone, and called me by the old names,
the dear “old Pip, old chap,” that now were music in my ears. I too had
fallen into the old ways, only happy and thankful that he let me. But,
imperceptibly, though I held by them fast, Joe's hold upon them began
to slacken; and whereas I wondered at this, at first, I soon began to
understand that the cause of it was in me, and that the fault of it was
all mine.

Ah! Had I given Joe no reason to doubt my constancy, and to think that
in prosperity I should grow cold to him and cast him off? Had I given
Joe's innocent heart no cause to feel instinctively that as I got
stronger, his hold upon me would be weaker, and that he had better
loosen it in time and let me go, before I plucked myself away?

It was on the third or fourth occasion of my going out walking in the
Temple Gardens leaning on Joe's arm, that I saw this change in him very
plainly. We had been sitting in the bright warm sunlight, looking at the
river, and I chanced to say as we got up,--

“See, Joe! I can walk quite strongly. Now, you shall see me walk back by
myself.”

“Which do not overdo it, Pip,” said Joe; “but I shall be happy fur to
see you able, sir.”

The last word grated on me; but how could I remonstrate! I walked no
further than the gate of the gardens, and then pretended to be
weaker than I was, and asked Joe for his arm. Joe gave it me, but was
thoughtful.

I, for my part, was thoughtful too; for, how best to check this growing
change in Joe was a great perplexity to my remorseful thoughts. That I
was ashamed to tell him exactly how I was placed, and what I had come
down to, I do not seek to conceal; but I hope my reluctance was not
quite an unworthy one. He would want to help me out of his little
savings, I knew, and I knew that he ought not to help me, and that I
must not suffer him to do it.

It was a thoughtful evening with both of us. But, before we went to
bed, I had resolved that I would wait over to-morrow,--to-morrow being
Sunday,--and would begin my new course with the new week. On Monday
morning I would speak to Joe about this change, I would lay aside this
last vestige of reserve, I would tell him what I had in my thoughts
(that Secondly, not yet arrived at), and why I had not decided to go
out to Herbert, and then the change would be conquered for ever. As I
cleared, Joe cleared, and it seemed as though he had sympathetically
arrived at a resolution too.

We had a quiet day on the Sunday, and we rode out into the country, and
then walked in the fields.

“I feel thankful that I have been ill, Joe,” I said.

“Dear old Pip, old chap, you're a'most come round, sir.”

“It has been a memorable time for me, Joe.”

“Likeways for myself, sir,” Joe returned.

“We have had a time together, Joe, that I can never forget. There were
days once, I know, that I did for a while forget; but I never shall
forget these.”

“Pip,” said Joe, appearing a little hurried and troubled, “there has
been larks. And, dear sir, what have been betwixt us--have been.”

At night, when I had gone to bed, Joe came into my room, as he had done
all through my recovery. He asked me if I felt sure that I was as well
as in the morning?

“Yes, dear Joe, quite.”

“And are always a getting stronger, old chap?”

“Yes, dear Joe, steadily.”

Joe patted the coverlet on my shoulder with his great good hand, and
said, in what I thought a husky voice, “Good night!”

When I got up in the morning, refreshed and stronger yet, I was full of
my resolution to tell Joe all, without delay. I would tell him before
breakfast. I would dress at once and go to his room and surprise him;
for, it was the first day I had been up early. I went to his room, and
he was not there. Not only was he not there, but his box was gone.

I hurried then to the breakfast-table, and on it found a letter. These
were its brief contents:--

“Not wishful to intrude I have departured fur you are well again dear
Pip and will do better without JO.

“P.S. Ever the best of friends.”

Enclosed in the letter was a receipt for the debt and costs on which I
had been arrested. Down to that moment, I had vainly supposed that my
creditor had withdrawn, or suspended proceedings until I should be quite
recovered. I had never dreamed of Joe's having paid the money; but Joe
had paid it, and the receipt was in his name.

What remained for me now, but to follow him to the dear old forge, and
there to have out my disclosure to him, and my penitent remonstrance
with him, and there to relieve my mind and heart of that reserved
Secondly, which had begun as a vague something lingering in my thoughts,
and had formed into a settled purpose?

The purpose was, that I would go to Biddy, that I would show her how
humbled and repentant I came back, that I would tell her how I had lost
all I once hoped for, that I would remind her of our old confidences in
my first unhappy time. Then I would say to her, “Biddy, I think you once
liked me very well, when my errant heart, even while it strayed away
from you, was quieter and better with you than it ever has been since.
If you can like me only half as well once more, if you can take me with
all my faults and disappointments on my head, if you can receive me like
a forgiven child (and indeed I am as sorry, Biddy, and have as much need
of a hushing voice and a soothing hand), I hope I am a little worthier
of you that I was,--not much, but a little. And, Biddy, it shall rest
with you to say whether I shall work at the forge with Joe, or whether I
shall try for any different occupation down in this country, or whether
we shall go away to a distant place where an opportunity awaits me which
I set aside, when it was offered, until I knew your answer. And now,
dear Biddy, if you can tell me that you will go through the world with
me, you will surely make it a better world for me, and me a better man
for it, and I will try hard to make it a better world for you.”

Such was my purpose. After three days more of recovery, I went down to
the old place to put it in execution. And how I sped in it is all I have
left to tell.




Chapter LVIII

The tidings of my high fortunes having had a heavy fall had got down
to my native place and its neighborhood before I got there. I found the
Blue Boar in possession of the intelligence, and I found that it made a
great change in the Boar's demeanour. Whereas the Boar had cultivated
my good opinion with warm assiduity when I was coming into property,
the Boar was exceedingly cool on the subject now that I was going out of
property.

It was evening when I arrived, much fatigued by the journey I had so
often made so easily. The Boar could not put me into my usual bedroom,
which was engaged (probably by some one who had expectations), and
could only assign me a very indifferent chamber among the pigeons and
post-chaises up the yard. But I had as sound a sleep in that lodging as
in the most superior accommodation the Boar could have given me, and the
quality of my dreams was about the same as in the best bedroom.

Early in the morning, while my breakfast was getting ready, I strolled
round by Satis House. There were printed bills on the gate and on bits
of carpet hanging out of the windows, announcing a sale by auction of
the Household Furniture and Effects, next week. The House itself was to
be sold as old building materials, and pulled down. LOT 1 was marked in
whitewashed knock-knee letters on the brew house; LOT 2 on that part of
the main building which had been so long shut up. Other lots were marked
off on other parts of the structure, and the ivy had been torn down to
make room for the inscriptions, and much of it trailed low in the dust
and was withered already. Stepping in for a moment at the open gate, and
looking around me with the uncomfortable air of a stranger who had no
business there, I saw the auctioneer's clerk walking on the casks and
telling them off for the information of a catalogue-compiler, pen in
hand, who made a temporary desk of the wheeled chair I had so often
pushed along to the tune of Old Clem.

When I got back to my breakfast in the Boar's coffee-room, I found Mr.
Pumblechook conversing with the landlord. Mr. Pumblechook (not improved
in appearance by his late nocturnal adventure) was waiting for me, and
addressed me in the following terms:--

“Young man, I am sorry to see you brought low. But what else could be
expected! what else could be expected!”

As he extended his hand with a magnificently forgiving air, and as I was
broken by illness and unfit to quarrel, I took it.

“William,” said Mr. Pumblechook to the waiter, “put a muffin on table.
And has it come to this! Has it come to this!”

I frowningly sat down to my breakfast. Mr. Pumblechook stood over me and
poured out my tea--before I could touch the teapot--with the air of a
benefactor who was resolved to be true to the last.

“William,” said Mr. Pumblechook, mournfully, “put the salt on. In
happier times,” addressing me, “I think you took sugar? And did you take
milk? You did. Sugar and milk. William, bring a watercress.”

“Thank you,” said I, shortly, “but I don't eat watercresses.”

“You don't eat 'em,” returned Mr. Pumblechook, sighing and nodding
his head several times, as if he might have expected that, and as if
abstinence from watercresses were consistent with my downfall. “True.
The simple fruits of the earth. No. You needn't bring any, William.”

I went on with my breakfast, and Mr. Pumblechook continued to stand over
me, staring fishily and breathing noisily, as he always did.

“Little more than skin and bone!” mused Mr. Pumblechook, aloud. “And yet
when he went from here (I may say with my blessing), and I spread afore
him my humble store, like the Bee, he was as plump as a Peach!”

This reminded me of the wonderful difference between the servile manner
in which he had offered his hand in my new prosperity, saying, “May I?”
 and the ostentatious clemency with which he had just now exhibited the
same fat five fingers.

“Hah!” he went on, handing me the bread and butter. “And air you a going
to Joseph?”

“In heaven's name,” said I, firing in spite of myself, “what does it
matter to you where I am going? Leave that teapot alone.”

It was the worst course I could have taken, because it gave Pumblechook
the opportunity he wanted.

“Yes, young man,” said he, releasing the handle of the article in
question, retiring a step or two from my table, and speaking for the
behoof of the landlord and waiter at the door, “I will leave that teapot
alone. You are right, young man. For once you are right. I forgit myself
when I take such an interest in your breakfast, as to wish your frame,
exhausted by the debilitating effects of prodigygality, to be stimilated
by the 'olesome nourishment of your forefathers. And yet,” said
Pumblechook, turning to the landlord and waiter, and pointing me out at
arm's length, “this is him as I ever sported with in his days of happy
infancy! Tell me not it cannot be; I tell you this is him!”

A low murmur from the two replied. The waiter appeared to be
particularly affected.

“This is him,” said Pumblechook, “as I have rode in my shay-cart. This
is him as I have seen brought up by hand. This is him untoe the sister
of which I was uncle by marriage, as her name was Georgiana M'ria from
her own mother, let him deny it if he can!”

The waiter seemed convinced that I could not deny it, and that it gave
the case a black look.

“Young man,” said Pumblechook, screwing his head at me in the old
fashion, “you air a going to Joseph. What does it matter to me, you
ask me, where you air a going? I say to you, Sir, you air a going to
Joseph.”

The waiter coughed, as if he modestly invited me to get over that.

“Now,” said Pumblechook, and all this with a most exasperating air
of saying in the cause of virtue what was perfectly convincing and
conclusive, “I will tell you what to say to Joseph. Here is Squires of
the Boar present, known and respected in this town, and here is William,
which his father's name was Potkins if I do not deceive myself.”

“You do not, sir,” said William.

“In their presence,” pursued Pumblechook, “I will tell you, young
man, what to say to Joseph. Says you, “Joseph, I have this day seen
my earliest benefactor and the founder of my fortun's. I will name no
names, Joseph, but so they are pleased to call him up town, and I have
seen that man.”

“I swear I don't see him here,” said I.

“Say that likewise,” retorted Pumblechook. “Say you said that, and even
Joseph will probably betray surprise.”

“There you quite mistake him,” said I. “I know better.”

“Says you,” Pumblechook went on, “'Joseph, I have seen that man, and
that man bears you no malice and bears me no malice. He knows your
character, Joseph, and is well acquainted with your pig-headedness and
ignorance; and he knows my character, Joseph, and he knows my want of
gratitoode. Yes, Joseph,' says you,” here Pumblechook shook his head and
hand at me, “'he knows my total deficiency of common human gratitoode.
He knows it, Joseph, as none can. You do not know it, Joseph, having no
call to know it, but that man do.'”

Windy donkey as he was, it really amazed me that he could have the face
to talk thus to mine.

“Says you, 'Joseph, he gave me a little message, which I will now
repeat. It was that, in my being brought low, he saw the finger of
Providence. He knowed that finger when he saw Joseph, and he saw it
plain. It pinted out this writing, Joseph. Reward of ingratitoode to his
earliest benefactor, and founder of fortun's. But that man said he did
not repent of what he had done, Joseph. Not at all. It was right to do
it, it was kind to do it, it was benevolent to do it, and he would do it
again.'”

“It's pity,” said I, scornfully, as I finished my interrupted breakfast,
“that the man did not say what he had done and would do again.”

“Squires of the Boar!” Pumblechook was now addressing the landlord, “and
William! I have no objections to your mentioning, either up town or down
town, if such should be your wishes, that it was right to do it, kind to
do it, benevolent to do it, and that I would do it again.”

With those words the Impostor shook them both by the hand, with an air,
and left the house; leaving me much more astonished than delighted by
the virtues of that same indefinite “it.” I was not long after him in
leaving the house too, and when I went down the High Street I saw him
holding forth (no doubt to the same effect) at his shop door to a select
group, who honored me with very unfavorable glances as I passed on the
opposite side of the way.

But, it was only the pleasanter to turn to Biddy and to Joe, whose
great forbearance shone more brightly than before, if that could be,
contrasted with this brazen pretender. I went towards them slowly, for
my limbs were weak, but with a sense of increasing relief as I drew
nearer to them, and a sense of leaving arrogance and untruthfulness
further and further behind.

The June weather was delicious. The sky was blue, the larks were soaring
high over the green corn, I thought all that countryside more beautiful
and peaceful by far than I had ever known it to be yet. Many pleasant
pictures of the life that I would lead there, and of the change for the
better that would come over my character when I had a guiding spirit at
my side whose simple faith and clear home wisdom I had proved, beguiled
my way. They awakened a tender emotion in me; for my heart was softened
by my return, and such a change had come to pass, that I felt like one
who was toiling home barefoot from distant travel, and whose wanderings
had lasted many years.

The schoolhouse where Biddy was mistress I had never seen; but, the
little roundabout lane by which I entered the village, for quietness'
sake, took me past it. I was disappointed to find that the day was a
holiday; no children were there, and Biddy's house was closed. Some
hopeful notion of seeing her, busily engaged in her daily duties, before
she saw me, had been in my mind and was defeated.

But the forge was a very short distance off, and I went towards it under
the sweet green limes, listening for the clink of Joe's hammer. Long
after I ought to have heard it, and long after I had fancied I heard it
and found it but a fancy, all was still. The limes were there, and the
white thorns were there, and the chestnut-trees were there, and their
leaves rustled harmoniously when I stopped to listen; but, the clink of
Joe's hammer was not in the midsummer wind.

Almost fearing, without knowing why, to come in view of the forge, I saw
it at last, and saw that it was closed. No gleam of fire, no glittering
shower of sparks, no roar of bellows; all shut up, and still.

But the house was not deserted, and the best parlor seemed to be in use,
for there were white curtains fluttering in its window, and the window
was open and gay with flowers. I went softly towards it, meaning to peep
over the flowers, when Joe and Biddy stood before me, arm in arm.

At first Biddy gave a cry, as if she thought it was my apparition, but
in another moment she was in my embrace. I wept to see her, and she wept
to see me; I, because she looked so fresh and pleasant; she, because I
looked so worn and white.

“But dear Biddy, how smart you are!”

“Yes, dear Pip.”

“And Joe, how smart you are!”

“Yes, dear old Pip, old chap.”

I looked at both of them, from one to the other, and then--

“It's my wedding-day!” cried Biddy, in a burst of happiness, “and I am
married to Joe!”

They had taken me into the kitchen, and I had laid my head down on
the old deal table. Biddy held one of my hands to her lips, and Joe's
restoring touch was on my shoulder. “Which he warn't strong enough, my
dear, fur to be surprised,” said Joe. And Biddy said, “I ought to
have thought of it, dear Joe, but I was too happy.” They were both so
overjoyed to see me, so proud to see me, so touched by my coming to
them, so delighted that I should have come by accident to make their day
complete!

My first thought was one of great thankfulness that I had never breathed
this last baffled hope to Joe. How often, while he was with me in my
illness, had it risen to my lips! How irrevocable would have been his
knowledge of it, if he had remained with me but another hour!

“Dear Biddy,” said I, “you have the best husband in the whole world,
and if you could have seen him by my bed you would have--But no, you
couldn't love him better than you do.”

“No, I couldn't indeed,” said Biddy.

“And, dear Joe, you have the best wife in the whole world, and she will
make you as happy as even you deserve to be, you dear, good, noble Joe!”

Joe looked at me with a quivering lip, and fairly put his sleeve before
his eyes.

“And Joe and Biddy both, as you have been to church to-day, and are in
charity and love with all mankind, receive my humble thanks for all you
have done for me, and all I have so ill repaid! And when I say that I am
going away within the hour, for I am soon going abroad, and that I shall
never rest until I have worked for the money with which you have kept me
out of prison, and have sent it to you, don't think, dear Joe and Biddy,
that if I could repay it a thousand times over, I suppose I could cancel
a farthing of the debt I owe you, or that I would do so if I could!”

They were both melted by these words, and both entreated me to say no
more.

“But I must say more. Dear Joe, I hope you will have children to love,
and that some little fellow will sit in this chimney-corner of a winter
night, who may remind you of another little fellow gone out of it for
ever. Don't tell him, Joe, that I was thankless; don't tell him, Biddy,
that I was ungenerous and unjust; only tell him that I honored you both,
because you were both so good and true, and that, as your child, I said
it would be natural to him to grow up a much better man than I did.”

“I ain't a going,” said Joe, from behind his sleeve, “to tell him
nothink o' that natur, Pip. Nor Biddy ain't. Nor yet no one ain't.”

“And now, though I know you have already done it in your own kind
hearts, pray tell me, both, that you forgive me! Pray let me hear you
say the words, that I may carry the sound of them away with me, and then
I shall be able to believe that you can trust me, and think better of
me, in the time to come!”

“O dear old Pip, old chap,” said Joe. “God knows as I forgive you, if I
have anythink to forgive!”

“Amen! And God knows I do!” echoed Biddy.

“Now let me go up and look at my old little room, and rest there a few
minutes by myself. And then, when I have eaten and drunk with you, go
with me as far as the finger-post, dear Joe and Biddy, before we say
good-bye!”

***

I sold all I had, and put aside as much as I could, for a composition
with my creditors,--who gave me ample time to pay them in full,--and I
went out and joined Herbert. Within a month, I had quitted England,
and within two months I was clerk to Clarriker and Co., and within four
months I assumed my first undivided responsibility. For the beam across
the parlor ceiling at Mill Pond Bank had then ceased to tremble under
old Bill Barley's growls and was at peace, and Herbert had gone away to
marry Clara, and I was left in sole charge of the Eastern Branch until
he brought her back.

Many a year went round before I was a partner in the House; but I lived
happily with Herbert and his wife, and lived frugally, and paid my
debts, and maintained a constant correspondence with Biddy and Joe. It
was not until I became third in the Firm, that Clarriker betrayed me to
Herbert; but he then declared that the secret of Herbert's partnership
had been long enough upon his conscience, and he must tell it. So he
told it, and Herbert was as much moved as amazed, and the dear fellow
and I were not the worse friends for the long concealment. I must not
leave it to be supposed that we were ever a great House, or that we made
mints of money. We were not in a grand way of business, but we had a
good name, and worked for our profits, and did very well. We owed so
much to Herbert's ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often
wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I
was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude
had never been in him at all, but had been in me.




Chapter LIX

For eleven years, I had not seen Joe nor Biddy with my bodily
eyes,--though they had both been often before my fancy in the
East,--when, upon an evening in December, an hour or two after dark, I
laid my hand softly on the latch of the old kitchen door. I touched it
so softly that I was not heard, and looked in unseen. There, smoking his
pipe in the old place by the kitchen firelight, as hale and as strong as
ever, though a little gray, sat Joe; and there, fenced into the corner
with Joe's leg, and sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire,
was--I again!

“We giv' him the name of Pip for your sake, dear old chap,” said Joe,
delighted, when I took another stool by the child's side (but I did not
rumple his hair), “and we hoped he might grow a little bit like you, and
we think he do.”

I thought so too, and I took him out for a walk next morning, and we
talked immensely, understanding one another to perfection. And I took
him down to the churchyard, and set him on a certain tombstone there,
and he showed me from that elevation which stone was sacred to the
memory of Philip Pirrip, late of this Parish, and Also Georgiana, Wife
of the Above.

“Biddy,” said I, when I talked with her after dinner, as her little girl
lay sleeping in her lap, “you must give Pip to me one of these days; or
lend him, at all events.”

“No, no,” said Biddy, gently. “You must marry.”

“So Herbert and Clara say, but I don't think I shall, Biddy. I have so
settled down in their home, that it's not at all likely. I am already
quite an old bachelor.”

Biddy looked down at her child, and put its little hand to her lips, and
then put the good matronly hand with which she had touched it into mine.
There was something in the action, and in the light pressure of Biddy's
wedding-ring, that had a very pretty eloquence in it.

“Dear Pip,” said Biddy, “you are sure you don't fret for her?”

“O no,--I think not, Biddy.”

“Tell me as an old, old friend. Have you quite forgotten her?

“My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life that ever had a
foremost place there, and little that ever had any place there. But that
poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy,--all gone
by!”

Nevertheless, I knew, while I said those words, that I secretly intended
to revisit the site of the old house that evening, alone, for her sake.
Yes, even so. For Estella's sake.

I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being
separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who
had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, avarice, brutality,
and meanness. And I had heard of the death of her husband, from an
accident consequent on his ill-treatment of a horse. This release had
befallen her some two years before; for anything I knew, she was married
again.

The early dinner hour at Joe's, left me abundance of time, without
hurrying my talk with Biddy, to walk over to the old spot before dark.
But, what with loitering on the way to look at old objects and to think
of old times, the day had quite declined when I came to the place.

There was no house now, no brewery, no building whatever left, but the
wall of the old garden. The cleared space had been enclosed with a rough
fence, and looking over it, I saw that some of the old ivy had struck
root anew, and was growing green on low quiet mounds of ruin. A gate in
the fence standing ajar, I pushed it open, and went in.

A cold silvery mist had veiled the afternoon, and the moon was not yet
up to scatter it. But, the stars were shining beyond the mist, and the
moon was coming, and the evening was not dark. I could trace out where
every part of the old house had been, and where the brewery had been,
and where the gates, and where the casks. I had done so, and was looking
along the desolate garden walk, when I beheld a solitary figure in it.

The figure showed itself aware of me, as I advanced. It had been moving
towards me, but it stood still. As I drew nearer, I saw it to be the
figure of a woman. As I drew nearer yet, it was about to turn away, when
it stopped, and let me come up with it. Then, it faltered, as if much
surprised, and uttered my name, and I cried out,--

“Estella!”

“I am greatly changed. I wonder you know me.”

The freshness of her beauty was indeed gone, but its indescribable
majesty and its indescribable charm remained. Those attractions in it,
I had seen before; what I had never seen before, was the saddened,
softened light of the once proud eyes; what I had never felt before was
the friendly touch of the once insensible hand.

We sat down on a bench that was near, and I said, “After so many years,
it is strange that we should thus meet again, Estella, here where our
first meeting was! Do you often come back?”

“I have never been here since.”

“Nor I.”

The moon began to rise, and I thought of the placid look at the white
ceiling, which had passed away. The moon began to rise, and I thought of
the pressure on my hand when I had spoken the last words he had heard on
earth.

Estella was the next to break the silence that ensued between us.

“I have very often hoped and intended to come back, but have been
prevented by many circumstances. Poor, poor old place!”

The silvery mist was touched with the first rays of the moonlight, and
the same rays touched the tears that dropped from her eyes. Not knowing
that I saw them, and setting herself to get the better of them, she said
quietly,--

“Were you wondering, as you walked along, how it came to be left in this
condition?”

“Yes, Estella.”

“The ground belongs to me. It is the only possession I have not
relinquished. Everything else has gone from me, little by little, but I
have kept this. It was the subject of the only determined resistance I
made in all the wretched years.”

“Is it to be built on?”

“At last, it is. I came here to take leave of it before its change. And
you,” she said, in a voice of touching interest to a wanderer,--“you
live abroad still?”

“Still.”

“And do well, I am sure?”

“I work pretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore--yes, I do
well.”

“I have often thought of you,” said Estella.

“Have you?”

“Of late, very often. There was a long hard time when I kept far from me
the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant
of its worth. But since my duty has not been incompatible with the
admission of that remembrance, I have given it a place in my heart.”

“You have always held your place in my heart,” I answered.

And we were silent again until she spoke.

“I little thought,” said Estella, “that I should take leave of you in
taking leave of this spot. I am very glad to do so.”

“Glad to part again, Estella? To me, parting is a painful thing. To me,
the remembrance of our last parting has been ever mournful and painful.”

“But you said to me,” returned Estella, very earnestly, “'God bless you,
God forgive you!' And if you could say that to me then, you will not
hesitate to say that to me now,--now, when suffering has been stronger
than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart
used to be. I have been bent and broken, but--I hope--into a better
shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are
friends.”

“We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from
the bench.

“And will continue friends apart,” said Estella.

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as
the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the
evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil
light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.





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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Hard Times, by Charles Dickens


This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org





Title: Hard Times


Author: Charles Dickens



Release Date: March 17, 2013  [eBook #786]
[This file was first posted on January 20, 1997]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HARD TIMES***


Transcribed from the 1905 Chapman and Hall edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





                                HARD TIMES
                                   AND
                           REPRINTED PIECES {0}


                                * * * * *

                            By CHARLES DICKENS

                                * * * * *

             _With illustrations by Marcus Stone_, _Maurice_
                     _Greiffenhagen_, _and F. Walker_

                                * * * * *

                       LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.
                    NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

                                   1905




CONTENTS

      _BOOK THE FIRST_.  _SOWING_
                                    PAGE
               CHAPTER I
_The One Thing Needful_                3
               CHAPTER II
_Murdering the Innocents_              4
              CHAPTER III
_A Loophole_                           8
               CHAPTER IV
_Mr. Bounderby_                       12
               CHAPTER V
_The Keynote_                         18
               CHAPTER VI
_Sleary’s Horsemanship_               23
              CHAPTER VII
_Mrs. Sparsit_                        33
              CHAPTER VIII
_Never Wonder_                        38
               CHAPTER IX
_Sissy’s Progress_                    43
               CHAPTER X
_Stephen Blackpool_                   49
               CHAPTER XI
_No Way Out_                          53
              CHAPTER XII
_The Old Woman_                       59
              CHAPTER XIII
_Rachael_                             63
              CHAPTER XIV
_The Great Manufacturer_              69
               CHAPTER XV
_Father and Daughter_                 73
              CHAPTER XVI
_Husband and Wife_                    79
     _BOOK THE SECOND_.  _REAPING_
               CHAPTER I
_Effects in the Bank_                 84
               CHAPTER II
_Mr. James Harthouse_                 94
              CHAPTER III
_The Whelp_                          101
               CHAPTER IV
_Men and Brothers_                   111
               CHAPTER V
_Men and Masters_                    105
               CHAPTER VI
_Fading Away_                        116
              CHAPTER VII
_Gunpowder_                          126
              CHAPTER VIII
_Explosion_                          136
               CHAPTER IX
_Hearing the Last of it_             146
               CHAPTER X
_Mrs. Sparsit’s Staircase_           152
               CHAPTER XI
_Lower and Lower_                    156
              CHAPTER XII
_Down_                               163
     _BOOK THE THIRD_.  _GARNERING_
               CHAPTER I
_Another Thing Needful_              167
               CHAPTER II
_Very Ridiculous_                    172
              CHAPTER III
_Very Decided_                       179
               CHAPTER IV
_Lost_                               186
               CHAPTER V
_Found_                              193
               CHAPTER VI
_The Starlight_                      200
              CHAPTER VII
_Whelp-Hunting_                      208
              CHAPTER VIII
_Philosophical_                      216
               CHAPTER IX
_Final_                              222

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

                                                             PAGE
_Stephen and Rachael in the Sick-room_                         64
_Mr. Harthouse Dining at the Bounderbys’_                     100
_Mr. Harthouse and Tom Gradgrind in the Garden_               132
_Stephen Blackpool recovered from the Old Hell Shaft_         206




BOOK THE FIRST
_SOWING_


CHAPTER I
THE ONE THING NEEDFUL


‘NOW, what I want is, Facts.  Teach these boys and girls nothing but
Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life.  Plant nothing else, and root out
everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon
Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.  This is the
principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle
on which I bring up these children.  Stick to Facts, sir!’

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the
speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring
every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve.  The emphasis
was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his
eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two
dark caves, overshadowed by the wall.  The emphasis was helped by the
speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set.  The emphasis was
helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and
dictatorial.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which
bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the
wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of
a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts
stored inside.  The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square
legs, square shoulders,—nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by
the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it
was,—all helped the emphasis.

‘In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present,
all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of
little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial
gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.



CHAPTER II
MURDERING THE INNOCENTS


THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir.  A man of realities.  A man of facts and
calculations.  A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are
four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for
anything over.  Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas
Gradgrind.  With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication
table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of
human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.  It is a mere
question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.  You might hope to get
some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or
Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all
supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas
Gradgrind—no, sir!

In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether
to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general.  In
such terms, no doubt, substituting the words ‘boys and girls,’ for ‘sir,’
Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers
before him, who were to be filled so full of facts.

Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before
mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts,
and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one
discharge.  He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim
mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be
stormed away.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his
square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl.  Who is that girl?’

‘Sissy Jupe, sir,’ explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and
curtseying.

‘Sissy is not a name,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Don’t call yourself Sissy.
Call yourself Cecilia.’

‘It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir,’ returned the young girl in a
trembling voice, and with another curtsey.

‘Then he has no business to do it,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Tell him he
mustn’t.  Cecilia Jupe.  Let me see.  What is your father?’

‘He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.’

Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his
hand.

‘We don’t want to know anything about that, here.  You mustn’t tell us
about that, here.  Your father breaks horses, don’t he?’

‘If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses
in the ring, sir.’

‘You mustn’t tell us about the ring, here.  Very well, then.  Describe
your father as a horsebreaker.  He doctors sick horses, I dare say?’

‘Oh yes, sir.’

‘Very well, then.  He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and
horsebreaker.  Give me your definition of a horse.’

(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, for
the general behoof of all the little pitchers.  ‘Girl number twenty
possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals!
Some boy’s definition of a horse.  Bitzer, yours.’

The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer,
perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which,
darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely white-washed room,
irradiated Sissy.  For, the boys and girls sat on the face of the
inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow
interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came
in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the corner
of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught the end.  But,
whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to
receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone
upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same
rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed.
His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of
lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something
paler than themselves, expressed their form.  His short-cropped hair
might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead
and face.  His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge,
that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind.  ‘Your definition of a horse.’

‘Quadruped.  Graminivorous.  Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders,
four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive.  Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy
countries, sheds hoofs, too.  Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with
iron.  Age known by marks in mouth.’  Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘You know what a horse
is.’

She curtseyed again, and would have blushed deeper, if she could have
blushed deeper than she had blushed all this time.  Bitzer, after rapidly
blinking at Thomas Gradgrind with both eyes at once, and so catching the
light upon his quivering ends of lashes that they looked like the antennæ
of busy insects, put his knuckles to his freckled forehead, and sat down
again.

The third gentleman now stepped forth.  A mighty man at cutting and
drying, he was; a government officer; in his way (and in most other
people’s too), a professed pugilist; always in training, always with a
system to force down the general throat like a bolus, always to be heard
of at the bar of his little Public-office, ready to fight all England.
To continue in fistic phraseology, he had a genius for coming up to the
scratch, wherever and whatever it was, and proving himself an ugly
customer.  He would go in and damage any subject whatever with his right,
follow up with his left, stop, exchange, counter, bore his opponent (he
always fought All England) to the ropes, and fall upon him neatly.  He
was certain to knock the wind out of common sense, and render that
unlucky adversary deaf to the call of time.  And he had it in charge from
high authority to bring about the great public-office Millennium, when
Commissioners should reign upon earth.

‘Very well,’ said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms.
‘That’s a horse.  Now, let me ask you girls and boys, Would you paper a
room with representations of horses?’

After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, ‘Yes, sir!’
Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman’s face that Yes was
wrong, cried out in chorus, ‘No, sir!’—as the custom is, in these
examinations.

‘Of course, No.  Why wouldn’t you?’

A pause.  One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing,
ventured the answer, Because he wouldn’t paper a room at all, but would
paint it.

‘You _must_ paper it,’ said the gentleman, rather warmly.

‘You must paper it,’ said Thomas Gradgrind, ‘whether you like it or not.
Don’t tell _us_ you wouldn’t paper it.  What do you mean, boy?’

‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the gentleman, after another and a
dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of
horses.  Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in
reality—in fact?  Do you?’

‘Yes, sir!’ from one half.  ‘No, sir!’ from the other.

‘Of course no,’ said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong
half.  ‘Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in
fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact.  What is
called Taste, is only another name for Fact.’  Thomas Gradgrind nodded
his approbation.

‘This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,’ said the
gentleman.  ‘Now, I’ll try you again.  Suppose you were going to carpet a
room.  Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon
it?’

There being a general conviction by this time that ‘No, sir!’ was always
the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of NO was very strong.
Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of
knowledge.

Sissy blushed, and stood up.

‘So you would carpet your room—or your husband’s room, if you were a
grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would
you?’ said the gentleman.  ‘Why would you?’

‘If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,’ returned the girl.

‘And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have
people walking over them with heavy boots?’

‘It wouldn’t hurt them, sir.  They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you
please, sir.  They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and
pleasant, and I would fancy—’

‘Ay, ay, ay!  But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated
by coming so happily to his point.  ‘That’s it!  You are never to fancy.’

‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do
anything of that kind.’

‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman.  And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated
Thomas Gradgrind.

‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman,
‘by fact.  We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of
commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact,
and of nothing but fact.  You must discard the word Fancy altogether.
You have nothing to do with it.  You are not to have, in any object of
use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact.  You don’t walk
upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in
carpets.  You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and
perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds
and butterflies upon your crockery.  You never meet with quadrupeds going
up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls.
You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these purposes, combinations
and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are
susceptible of proof and demonstration.  This is the new discovery.  This
is fact.  This is taste.’

The girl curtseyed, and sat down.  She was very young, and she looked as
if she were frightened by the matter-of-fact prospect the world afforded.

‘Now, if Mr. M’Choakumchild,’ said the gentleman, ‘will proceed to give
his first lesson here, Mr. Gradgrind, I shall be happy, at your request,
to observe his mode of procedure.’

Mr. Gradgrind was much obliged.  ‘Mr. M’Choakumchild, we only wait for
you.’

So, Mr. M’Choakumchild began in his best manner.  He and some one hundred
and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time,
in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte
legs.  He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had
answered volumes of head-breaking questions.  Orthography, etymology,
syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general
cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying
and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends
of his ten chilled fingers.  He had worked his stony way into Her
Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the
bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science,
French, German, Latin, and Greek.  He knew all about all the Water Sheds
of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the
peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the
productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their
boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass.  Ah,
rather overdone, M’Choakumchild.  If he had only learnt a little less,
how infinitely better he might have taught much more!

He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the
Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after
another, to see what they contained.  Say, good M’Choakumchild.  When
from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by,
dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy
lurking within—or sometimes only maim him and distort him!



CHAPTER III
A LOOPHOLE


MR. GRADGRIND walked homeward from the school, in a state of considerable
satisfaction.  It was his school, and he intended it to be a model.  He
intended every child in it to be a model—just as the young Gradgrinds
were all models.

There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one.  They
had been lectured at, from their tenderest years; coursed, like little
hares.  Almost as soon as they could run alone, they had been made to run
to the lecture-room.  The first object with which they had an
association, or of which they had a remembrance, was a large black board
with a dry Ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it.

Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an Ogre Fact
forbid!  I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing castle,
with Heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking childhood
captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the hair.

No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the
moon before it could speak distinctly.  No little Gradgrind had ever
learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what
you are!  No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each
little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a
Professor Owen, and driven Charles’s Wain like a locomotive
engine-driver.  No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field
with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who
worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet
more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those
celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous
ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.

To his matter-of-fact home, which was called Stone Lodge, Mr. Gradgrind
directed his steps.  He had virtually retired from the wholesale hardware
trade before he built Stone Lodge, and was now looking about for a
suitable opportunity of making an arithmetical figure in Parliament.
Stone Lodge was situated on a moor within a mile or two of a great
town—called Coketown in the present faithful guide-book.

A very regular feature on the face of the country, Stone Lodge was.  Not
the least disguise toned down or shaded off that uncompromising fact in
the landscape.  A great square house, with a heavy portico darkening the
principal windows, as its master’s heavy brows overshadowed his eyes.  A
calculated, cast up, balanced, and proved house.  Six windows on this
side of the door, six on that side; a total of twelve in this wing, a
total of twelve in the other wing; four-and-twenty carried over to the
back wings.  A lawn and garden and an infant avenue, all ruled straight
like a botanical account-book.  Gas and ventilation, drainage and
water-service, all of the primest quality.  Iron clamps and girders,
fire-proof from top to bottom; mechanical lifts for the housemaids, with
all their brushes and brooms; everything that heart could desire.

Everything?  Well, I suppose so.  The little Gradgrinds had cabinets in
various departments of science too.  They had a little conchological
cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical
cabinet; and the specimens were all arranged and labelled, and the bits
of stone and ore looked as though they might have been broken from the
parent substances by those tremendously hard instruments their own names;
and, to paraphrase the idle legend of Peter Piper, who had never found
his way into their nursery, If the greedy little Gradgrinds grasped at
more than this, what was it for good gracious goodness’ sake, that the
greedy little Gradgrinds grasped it!

Their father walked on in a hopeful and satisfied frame of mind.  He was
an affectionate father, after his manner; but he would probably have
described himself (if he had been put, like Sissy Jupe, upon a
definition) as ‘an eminently practical’ father.  He had a particular
pride in the phrase eminently practical, which was considered to have a
special application to him.  Whatsoever the public meeting held in
Coketown, and whatsoever the subject of such meeting, some Coketowner was
sure to seize the occasion of alluding to his eminently practical friend
Gradgrind.  This always pleased the eminently practical friend.  He knew
it to be his due, but his due was acceptable.

He had reached the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town, which
was neither town nor country, and yet was either spoiled, when his ears
were invaded by the sound of music.  The clashing and banging band
attached to the horse-riding establishment, which had there set up its
rest in a wooden pavilion, was in full bray.  A flag, floating from the
summit of the temple, proclaimed to mankind that it was ‘Sleary’s
Horse-riding’ which claimed their suffrages.  Sleary himself, a stout
modern statue with a money-box at its elbow, in an ecclesiastical niche
of early Gothic architecture, took the money.  Miss Josephine Sleary, as
some very long and very narrow strips of printed bill announced, was then
inaugurating the entertainments with her graceful equestrian Tyrolean
flower-act.  Among the other pleasing but always strictly moral wonders
which must be seen to be believed, Signor Jupe was that afternoon to
‘elucidate the diverting accomplishments of his highly trained performing
dog Merrylegs.’  He was also to exhibit ‘his astounding feat of throwing
seventy-five hundred-weight in rapid succession backhanded over his head,
thus forming a fountain of solid iron in mid-air, a feat never before
attempted in this or any other country, and which having elicited such
rapturous plaudits from enthusiastic throngs it cannot be withdrawn.’
The same Signor Jupe was to ‘enliven the varied performances at frequent
intervals with his chaste Shaksperean quips and retorts.’  Lastly, he was
to wind them up by appearing in his favourite character of Mr. William
Button, of Tooley Street, in ‘the highly novel and laughable
hippo-comedietta of The Tailor’s Journey to Brentford.’

Thomas Gradgrind took no heed of these trivialities of course, but passed
on as a practical man ought to pass on, either brushing the noisy insects
from his thoughts, or consigning them to the House of Correction.  But,
the turning of the road took him by the back of the booth, and at the
back of the booth a number of children were congregated in a number of
stealthy attitudes, striving to peep in at the hidden glories of the
place.

This brought him to a stop.  ‘Now, to think of these vagabonds,’ said he,
‘attracting the young rabble from a model school.’

A space of stunted grass and dry rubbish being between him and the young
rabble, he took his eyeglass out of his waistcoat to look for any child
he knew by name, and might order off.  Phenomenon almost incredible
though distinctly seen, what did he then behold but his own metallurgical
Louisa, peeping with all her might through a hole in a deal board, and
his own mathematical Thomas abasing himself on the ground to catch but a
hoof of the graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act!

Dumb with amazement, Mr. Gradgrind crossed to the spot where his family
was thus disgraced, laid his hand upon each erring child, and said:

‘Louisa!!  Thomas!!’

Both rose, red and disconcerted.  But, Louisa looked at her father with
more boldness than Thomas did.  Indeed, Thomas did not look at him, but
gave himself up to be taken home like a machine.

‘In the name of wonder, idleness, and folly!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, leading
each away by a hand; ‘what do you do here?’

‘Wanted to see what it was like,’ returned Louisa, shortly.

‘What it was like?’

‘Yes, father.’

There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and particularly in
the girl: yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face, there
was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a
starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened its
expression.  Not with the brightness natural to cheerful youth, but with
uncertain, eager, doubtful flashes, which had something painful in them,
analogous to the changes on a blind face groping its way.

She was a child now, of fifteen or sixteen; but at no distant day would
seem to become a woman all at once.  Her father thought so as he looked
at her.  She was pretty.  Would have been self-willed (he thought in his
eminently practical way) but for her bringing-up.

‘Thomas, though I have the fact before me, I find it difficult to believe
that you, with your education and resources, should have brought your
sister to a scene like this.’

‘I brought _him_, father,’ said Louisa, quickly.  ‘I asked him to come.’

‘I am sorry to hear it.  I am very sorry indeed to hear it.  It makes
Thomas no better, and it makes you worse, Louisa.’

She looked at her father again, but no tear fell down her cheek.

‘You!  Thomas and you, to whom the circle of the sciences is open; Thomas
and you, who may be said to be replete with facts; Thomas and you, who
have been trained to mathematical exactness; Thomas and you, here!’ cried
Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘In this degraded position!  I am amazed.’

‘I was tired, father.  I have been tired a long time,’ said Louisa.

‘Tired?  Of what?’ asked the astonished father.

‘I don’t know of what—of everything, I think.’

‘Say not another word,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘You are childish.  I
will hear no more.’  He did not speak again until they had walked some
half-a-mile in silence, when he gravely broke out with: ‘What would your
best friends say, Louisa?  Do you attach no value to their good opinion?
What would Mr. Bounderby say?’  At the mention of this name, his daughter
stole a look at him, remarkable for its intense and searching character.
He saw nothing of it, for before he looked at her, she had again cast
down her eyes!

‘What,’ he repeated presently, ‘would Mr. Bounderby say?’  All the way to
Stone Lodge, as with grave indignation he led the two delinquents home,
he repeated at intervals ‘What would Mr. Bounderby say?’—as if Mr.
Bounderby had been Mrs. Grundy.



CHAPTER IV
MR. BOUNDERBY


NOT being Mrs. Grundy, who _was_ Mr. Bounderby?

Why, Mr. Bounderby was as near being Mr. Gradgrind’s bosom friend, as a
man perfectly devoid of sentiment can approach that spiritual
relationship towards another man perfectly devoid of sentiment.  So near
was Mr. Bounderby—or, if the reader should prefer it, so far off.

He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not.  A big,
loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh.  A man made out of a coarse
material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him.  A
man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples,
and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes
open, and lift his eyebrows up.  A man with a pervading appearance on him
of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start.  A man who could
never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man.  A man who was always
proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his
old ignorance and his old poverty.  A man who was the Bully of humility.

A year or two younger than his eminently practical friend, Mr. Bounderby
looked older; his seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or
eight added to it again, without surprising anybody.  He had not much
hair.  One might have fancied he had talked it off; and that what was
left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being
constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness.

In the formal drawing-room of Stone Lodge, standing on the hearthrug,
warming himself before the fire, Mr. Bounderby delivered some
observations to Mrs. Gradgrind on the circumstance of its being his
birthday.  He stood before the fire, partly because it was a cool spring
afternoon, though the sun shone; partly because the shade of Stone Lodge
was always haunted by the ghost of damp mortar; partly because he thus
took up a commanding position, from which to subdue Mrs. Gradgrind.

‘I hadn’t a shoe to my foot.  As to a stocking, I didn’t know such a
thing by name.  I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty.
That’s the way I spent my tenth birthday.  Not that a ditch was new to
me, for I was born in a ditch.’

Mrs. Gradgrind, a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, of
surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily; who was always taking physic
without any effect, and who, whenever she showed a symptom of coming to
life, was invariably stunned by some weighty piece of fact tumbling on
her; Mrs. Gradgrind hoped it was a dry ditch?

‘No!  As wet as a sop.  A foot of water in it,’ said Mr. Bounderby.

‘Enough to give a baby cold,’ Mrs. Gradgrind considered.

‘Cold?  I was born with inflammation of the lungs, and of everything
else, I believe, that was capable of inflammation,’ returned Mr.
Bounderby.  ‘For years, ma’am, I was one of the most miserable little
wretches ever seen.  I was so sickly, that I was always moaning and
groaning.  I was so ragged and dirty, that you wouldn’t have touched me
with a pair of tongs.’

Mrs. Gradgrind faintly looked at the tongs, as the most appropriate thing
her imbecility could think of doing.

‘How I fought through it, _I_ don’t know,’ said Bounderby.  ‘I was
determined, I suppose.  I have been a determined character in later life,
and I suppose I was then.  Here I am, Mrs. Gradgrind, anyhow, and nobody
to thank for my being here, but myself.’

Mrs. Gradgrind meekly and weakly hoped that his mother—

‘_My_ mother?  Bolted, ma’am!’ said Bounderby.

Mrs. Gradgrind, stunned as usual, collapsed and gave it up.

‘My mother left me to my grandmother,’ said Bounderby; ‘and, according to
the best of my remembrance, my grandmother was the wickedest and the
worst old woman that ever lived.  If I got a little pair of shoes by any
chance, she would take ’em off and sell ’em for drink.  Why, I have known
that grandmother of mine lie in her bed and drink her four-teen glasses
of liquor before breakfast!’

Mrs. Gradgrind, weakly smiling, and giving no other sign of vitality,
looked (as she always did) like an indifferently executed transparency of
a small female figure, without enough light behind it.

‘She kept a chandler’s shop,’ pursued Bounderby, ‘and kept me in an
egg-box.  That was the cot of _my_ infancy; an old egg-box.  As soon as I
was big enough to run away, of course I ran away.  Then I became a young
vagabond; and instead of one old woman knocking me about and starving me,
everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me.  They were right;
they had no business to do anything else.  I was a nuisance, an
incumbrance, and a pest.  I know that very well.’

His pride in having at any time of his life achieved such a great social
distinction as to be a nuisance, an incumbrance, and a pest, was only to
be satisfied by three sonorous repetitions of the boast.

‘I was to pull through it, I suppose, Mrs. Gradgrind.  Whether I was to
do it or not, ma’am, I did it.  I pulled through it, though nobody threw
me out a rope.  Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, labourer, porter, clerk,
chief manager, small partner, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.  Those are
the antecedents, and the culmination.  Josiah Bounderby of Coketown
learnt his letters from the outsides of the shops, Mrs. Gradgrind, and
was first able to tell the time upon a dial-plate, from studying the
steeple clock of St. Giles’s Church, London, under the direction of a
drunken cripple, who was a convicted thief, and an incorrigible vagrant.
Tell Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, of your district schools and your
model schools, and your training schools, and your whole kettle-of-fish
of schools; and Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, tells you plainly, all
right, all correct—he hadn’t such advantages—but let us have hard-headed,
solid-fisted people—the education that made him won’t do for everybody,
he knows well—such and such his education was, however, and you may force
him to swallow boiling fat, but you shall never force him to suppress the
facts of his life.’

Being heated when he arrived at this climax, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown
stopped.  He stopped just as his eminently practical friend, still
accompanied by the two young culprits, entered the room.  His eminently
practical friend, on seeing him, stopped also, and gave Louisa a
reproachful look that plainly said, ‘Behold your Bounderby!’

‘Well!’ blustered Mr. Bounderby, ‘what’s the matter?  What is young
Thomas in the dumps about?’

He spoke of young Thomas, but he looked at Louisa.

‘We were peeping at the circus,’ muttered Louisa, haughtily, without
lifting up her eyes, ‘and father caught us.’

‘And, Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said her husband in a lofty manner, ‘I should as
soon have expected to find my children reading poetry.’

‘Dear me,’ whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind.  ‘How can you, Louisa and Thomas!  I
wonder at you.  I declare you’re enough to make one regret ever having
had a family at all.  I have a great mind to say I wish I hadn’t.  _Then_
what would you have done, I should like to know?’

Mr. Gradgrind did not seem favourably impressed by these cogent remarks.
He frowned impatiently.

‘As if, with my head in its present throbbing state, you couldn’t go and
look at the shells and minerals and things provided for you, instead of
circuses!’ said Mrs. Gradgrind.  ‘You know, as well as I do, no young
people have circus masters, or keep circuses in cabinets, or attend
lectures about circuses.  What can you possibly want to know of circuses
then?  I am sure you have enough to do, if that’s what you want.  With my
head in its present state, I couldn’t remember the mere names of half the
facts you have got to attend to.’

‘That’s the reason!’ pouted Louisa.

‘Don’t tell me that’s the reason, because it can’t be nothing of the
sort,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind.  ‘Go and be somethingological directly.’
Mrs. Gradgrind was not a scientific character, and usually dismissed her
children to their studies with this general injunction to choose their
pursuit.

In truth, Mrs. Gradgrind’s stock of facts in general was woefully
defective; but Mr. Gradgrind in raising her to her high matrimonial
position, had been influenced by two reasons.  Firstly, she was most
satisfactory as a question of figures; and, secondly, she had ‘no
nonsense’ about her.  By nonsense he meant fancy; and truly it is
probable she was as free from any alloy of that nature, as any human
being not arrived at the perfection of an absolute idiot, ever was.

The simple circumstance of being left alone with her husband and Mr.
Bounderby, was sufficient to stun this admirable lady again without
collision between herself and any other fact.  So, she once more died
away, and nobody minded her.

‘Bounderby,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, drawing a chair to the fireside, ‘you
are always so interested in my young people—particularly in Louisa—that I
make no apology for saying to you, I am very much vexed by this
discovery.  I have systematically devoted myself (as you know) to the
education of the reason of my family.  The reason is (as you know) the
only faculty to which education should be addressed.  ‘And yet,
Bounderby, it would appear from this unexpected circumstance of to-day,
though in itself a trifling one, as if something had crept into Thomas’s
and Louisa’s minds which is—or rather, which is not—I don’t know that I
can express myself better than by saying—which has never been intended to
be developed, and in which their reason has no part.’

‘There certainly is no reason in looking with interest at a parcel of
vagabonds,’ returned Bounderby.  ‘When I was a vagabond myself, nobody
looked with any interest at _me_; I know that.’

‘Then comes the question; said the eminently practical father, with his
eyes on the fire, ‘in what has this vulgar curiosity its rise?’

‘I’ll tell you in what.  In idle imagination.’

‘I hope not,’ said the eminently practical; ‘I confess, however, that the
misgiving _has_ crossed me on my way home.’

‘In idle imagination, Gradgrind,’ repeated Bounderby.  ‘A very bad thing
for anybody, but a cursed bad thing for a girl like Louisa.  I should ask
Mrs. Gradgrind’s pardon for strong expressions, but that she knows very
well I am not a refined character.  Whoever expects refinement in _me_
will be disappointed.  I hadn’t a refined bringing up.’

‘Whether,’ said Gradgrind, pondering with his hands in his pockets, and
his cavernous eyes on the fire, ‘whether any instructor or servant can
have suggested anything?  Whether Louisa or Thomas can have been reading
anything?  Whether, in spite of all precautions, any idle story-book can
have got into the house?  Because, in minds that have been practically
formed by rule and line, from the cradle upwards, this is so curious, so
incomprehensible.’

‘Stop a bit!’ cried Bounderby, who all this time had been standing, as
before, on the hearth, bursting at the very furniture of the room with
explosive humility.  ‘You have one of those strollers’ children in the
school.’

‘Cecilia Jupe, by name,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, with something of a stricken
look at his friend.

‘Now, stop a bit!’ cried Bounderby again.  ‘How did she come there?’

‘Why, the fact is, I saw the girl myself, for the first time, only just
now.  She specially applied here at the house to be admitted, as not
regularly belonging to our town, and—yes, you are right, Bounderby, you
are right.’

‘Now, stop a bit!’ cried Bounderby, once more.  ‘Louisa saw her when she
came?’

‘Louisa certainly did see her, for she mentioned the application to me.
But Louisa saw her, I have no doubt, in Mrs. Gradgrind’s presence.’

‘Pray, Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said Bounderby, ‘what passed?’

‘Oh, my poor health!’ returned Mrs. Gradgrind.  ‘The girl wanted to come
to the school, and Mr. Gradgrind wanted girls to come to the school, and
Louisa and Thomas both said that the girl wanted to come, and that Mr.
Gradgrind wanted girls to come, and how was it possible to contradict
them when such was the fact!’

‘Now I tell you what, Gradgrind!’ said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Turn this girl to
the right about, and there’s an end of it.’

‘I am much of your opinion.’

‘Do it at once,’ said Bounderby, ‘has always been my motto from a child.
When I thought I would run away from my egg-box and my grandmother, I did
it at once.  Do you the same.  Do this at once!’

‘Are you walking?’ asked his friend.  ‘I have the father’s address.
Perhaps you would not mind walking to town with me?’

‘Not the least in the world,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘as long as you do it
at once!’

So, Mr. Bounderby threw on his hat—he always threw it on, as expressing a
man who had been far too busily employed in making himself, to acquire
any fashion of wearing his hat—and with his hands in his pockets,
sauntered out into the hall.  ‘I never wear gloves,’ it was his custom to
say.  ‘I didn’t climb up the ladder in _them_.—Shouldn’t be so high up,
if I had.’

Being left to saunter in the hall a minute or two while Mr. Gradgrind
went up-stairs for the address, he opened the door of the children’s
study and looked into that serene floor-clothed apartment, which,
notwithstanding its book-cases and its cabinets and its variety of
learned and philosophical appliances, had much of the genial aspect of a
room devoted to hair-cutting.  Louisa languidly leaned upon the window
looking out, without looking at anything, while young Thomas stood
sniffing revengefully at the fire.  Adam Smith and Malthus, two younger
Gradgrinds, were out at lecture in custody; and little Jane, after
manufacturing a good deal of moist pipe-clay on her face with
slate-pencil and tears, had fallen asleep over vulgar fractions.

‘It’s all right now, Louisa: it’s all right, young Thomas,’ said Mr.
Bounderby; ‘you won’t do so any more.  I’ll answer for it’s being all
over with father.  Well, Louisa, that’s worth a kiss, isn’t it?’

‘You can take one, Mr. Bounderby,’ returned Louisa, when she had coldly
paused, and slowly walked across the room, and ungraciously raised her
cheek towards him, with her face turned away.

‘Always my pet; ain’t you, Louisa?’ said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Good-bye,
Louisa!’

He went his way, but she stood on the same spot, rubbing the cheek he had
kissed, with her handkerchief, until it was burning red.  She was still
doing this, five minutes afterwards.

‘What are you about, Loo?’ her brother sulkily remonstrated.  ‘You’ll rub
a hole in your face.’

‘You may cut the piece out with your penknife if you like, Tom.  I
wouldn’t cry!’



CHAPTER V
THE KEYNOTE


COKETOWN, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a
triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs.
Gradgrind herself.  Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing
our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the
smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of
unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.  It was a town
of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of
smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.  It
had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling
dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a
rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the
steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an
elephant in a state of melancholy madness.  It contained several large
streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like
one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went
in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same
pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as
yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and
the next.

These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work
by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of
life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life
which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely
bear to hear the place mentioned.  The rest of its features were
voluntary, and they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful.  If the
members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of
eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of
red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental
examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it.  The solitary exception
was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the
door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs.  All
the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe
characters of black and white.  The jail might have been the infirmary,
the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been
either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the
contrary in the graces of their construction.  Fact, fact, fact,
everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact,
everywhere in the immaterial.  The M’Choakumchild school was all fact,
and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master
and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in
hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or
show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the
dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.

A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of course
got on well?  Why no, not quite well.  No?  Dear me!

No.  Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all respects like
gold that had stood the fire.  First, the perplexing mystery of the place
was, Who belonged to the eighteen denominations?  Because, whoever did,
the labouring people did not.  It was very strange to walk through the
streets on a Sunday morning, and note how few of _them_ the barbarous
jangling of bells that was driving the sick and nervous mad, called away
from their own quarter, from their own close rooms, from the corners of
their own streets, where they lounged listlessly, gazing at all the
church and chapel going, as at a thing with which they had no manner of
concern.  Nor was it merely the stranger who noticed this, because there
was a native organization in Coketown itself, whose members were to be
heard of in the House of Commons every session, indignantly petitioning
for acts of parliament that should make these people religious by main
force.  Then came the Teetotal Society, who complained that these same
people _would_ get drunk, and showed in tabular statements that they did
get drunk, and proved at tea parties that no inducement, human or Divine
(except a medal), would induce them to forego their custom of getting
drunk.  Then came the chemist and druggist, with other tabular
statements, showing that when they didn’t get drunk, they took opium.
Then came the experienced chaplain of the jail, with more tabular
statements, outdoing all the previous tabular statements, and showing
that the same people _would_ resort to low haunts, hidden from the public
eye, where they heard low singing and saw low dancing, and mayhap joined
in it; and where A. B., aged twenty-four next birthday, and committed for
eighteen months’ solitary, had himself said (not that he had ever shown
himself particularly worthy of belief) his ruin began, as he was
perfectly sure and confident that otherwise he would have been a tip-top
moral specimen.  Then came Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the two
gentlemen at this present moment walking through Coketown, and both
eminently practical, who could, on occasion, furnish more tabular
statements derived from their own personal experience, and illustrated by
cases they had known and seen, from which it clearly appeared—in short,
it was the only clear thing in the case—that these same people were a bad
lot altogether, gentlemen; that do what you would for them they were
never thankful for it, gentlemen; that they were restless, gentlemen;
that they never knew what they wanted; that they lived upon the best, and
bought fresh butter; and insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but
prime parts of meat, and yet were eternally dissatisfied and
unmanageable.  In short, it was the moral of the old nursery fable:

    There was an old woman, and what do you think?
    She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink;
    Victuals and drink were the whole of her diet,
    And yet this old woman would NEVER be quiet.

Is it possible, I wonder, that there was any analogy between the case of
the Coketown population and the case of the little Gradgrinds?  Surely,
none of us in our sober senses and acquainted with figures, are to be
told at this time of day, that one of the foremost elements in the
existence of the Coketown working-people had been for scores of years,
deliberately set at nought?  That there was any Fancy in them demanding
to be brought into healthy existence instead of struggling on in
convulsions?  That exactly in the ratio as they worked long and
monotonously, the craving grew within them for some physical relief—some
relaxation, encouraging good humour and good spirits, and giving them a
vent—some recognized holiday, though it were but for an honest dance to a
stirring band of music—some occasional light pie in which even
M’Choakumchild had no finger—which craving must and would be satisfied
aright, or must and would inevitably go wrong, until the laws of the
Creation were repealed?

‘This man lives at Pod’s End, and I don’t quite know Pod’s End,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind.  ‘Which is it, Bounderby?’

Mr. Bounderby knew it was somewhere down town, but knew no more
respecting it.  So they stopped for a moment, looking about.

Almost as they did so, there came running round the corner of the street
at a quick pace and with a frightened look, a girl whom Mr. Gradgrind
recognized.  ‘Halloa!’ said he.  ‘Stop!  Where are you going! Stop!’
Girl number twenty stopped then, palpitating, and made him a curtsey.

‘Why are you tearing about the streets,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘in this
improper manner?’

‘I was—I was run after, sir,’ the girl panted, ‘and I wanted to get
away.’

‘Run after?’ repeated Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Who would run after _you_?’

The question was unexpectedly and suddenly answered for her, by the
colourless boy, Bitzer, who came round the corner with such blind speed
and so little anticipating a stoppage on the pavement, that he brought
himself up against Mr. Gradgrind’s waistcoat and rebounded into the road.

‘What do you mean, boy?’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘What are you doing?  How
dare you dash against—everybody—in this manner?’  Bitzer picked up his
cap, which the concussion had knocked off; and backing, and knuckling his
forehead, pleaded that it was an accident.

‘Was this boy running after you, Jupe?’ asked Mr. Gradgrind.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the girl reluctantly.

‘No, I wasn’t, sir!’ cried Bitzer.  ‘Not till she run away from me.  But
the horse-riders never mind what they say, sir; they’re famous for it.
You know the horse-riders are famous for never minding what they say,’
addressing Sissy.  ‘It’s as well known in the town as—please, sir, as the
multiplication table isn’t known to the horse-riders.’  Bitzer tried Mr.
Bounderby with this.

‘He frightened me so,’ said the girl, ‘with his cruel faces!’

‘Oh!’ cried Bitzer.  ‘Oh!  An’t you one of the rest!  An’t you a
horse-rider!  I never looked at her, sir.  I asked her if she would know
how to define a horse to-morrow, and offered to tell her again, and she
ran away, and I ran after her, sir, that she might know how to answer
when she was asked.  You wouldn’t have thought of saying such mischief if
you hadn’t been a horse-rider?’

‘Her calling seems to be pretty well known among ’em,’ observed Mr.
Bounderby.  ‘You’d have had the whole school peeping in a row, in a
week.’

‘Truly, I think so,’ returned his friend.  ‘Bitzer, turn you about and
take yourself home. Jupe, stay here a moment.  Let me hear of your
running in this manner any more, boy, and you will hear of me through the
master of the school.  You understand what I mean.  Go along.’

The boy stopped in his rapid blinking, knuckled his forehead again,
glanced at Sissy, turned about, and retreated.

‘Now, girl,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘take this gentleman and me to your
father’s; we are going there.  What have you got in that bottle you are
carrying?’

‘Gin,’ said Mr. Bounderby.

‘Dear, no, sir!  It’s the nine oils.’

‘The what?’ cried Mr. Bounderby.

‘The nine oils, sir, to rub father with.’

‘Then,’ said Mr. Bounderby, with a loud short laugh, ‘what the devil do
you rub your father with nine oils for?’

‘It’s what our people aways use, sir, when they get any hurts in the
ring,’ replied the girl, looking over her shoulder, to assure herself
that her pursuer was gone.  ‘They bruise themselves very bad sometimes.’

‘Serve ’em right,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘for being idle.’  She glanced up
at his face, with mingled astonishment and dread.

‘By George!’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘when I was four or five years younger
than you, I had worse bruises upon me than ten oils, twenty oils, forty
oils, would have rubbed off.  I didn’t get ’em by posture-making, but by
being banged about.  There was no rope-dancing for me; I danced on the
bare ground and was larruped with the rope.’

Mr. Gradgrind, though hard enough, was by no means so rough a man as Mr.
Bounderby.  His character was not unkind, all things considered; it might
have been a very kind one indeed, if he had only made some round mistake
in the arithmetic that balanced it, years ago.  He said, in what he meant
for a reassuring tone, as they turned down a narrow road, ‘And this is
Pod’s End; is it, Jupe?’

‘This is it, sir, and—if you wouldn’t mind, sir—this is the house.’

She stopped, at twilight, at the door of a mean little public-house, with
dim red lights in it.  As haggard and as shabby, as if, for want of
custom, it had itself taken to drinking, and had gone the way all
drunkards go, and was very near the end of it.

‘It’s only crossing the bar, sir, and up the stairs, if you wouldn’t
mind, and waiting there for a moment till I get a candle.  If you should
hear a dog, sir, it’s only Merrylegs, and he only barks.’

‘Merrylegs and nine oils, eh!’ said Mr. Bounderby, entering last with his
metallic laugh.  ‘Pretty well this, for a self-made man!’



CHAPTER VI
SLEARY’S HORSEMANSHIP


THE name of the public-house was the Pegasus’s Arms.  The Pegasus’s legs
might have been more to the purpose; but, underneath the winged horse
upon the sign-board, the Pegasus’s Arms was inscribed in Roman letters.
Beneath that inscription again, in a flowing scroll, the painter had
touched off the lines:

    Good malt makes good beer,
    Walk in, and they’ll draw it here;
    Good wine makes good brandy,
    Give us a call, and you’ll find it handy.

Framed and glazed upon the wall behind the dingy little bar, was another
Pegasus—a theatrical one—with real gauze let in for his wings, golden
stars stuck on all over him, and his ethereal harness made of red silk.

As it had grown too dusky without, to see the sign, and as it had not
grown light enough within to see the picture, Mr. Gradgrind and Mr.
Bounderby received no offence from these idealities.  They followed the
girl up some steep corner-stairs without meeting any one, and stopped in
the dark while she went on for a candle.  They expected every moment to
hear Merrylegs give tongue, but the highly trained performing dog had not
barked when the girl and the candle appeared together.

‘Father is not in our room, sir,’ she said, with a face of great
surprise.  ‘If you wouldn’t mind walking in, I’ll find him directly.’
They walked in; and Sissy, having set two chairs for them, sped away with
a quick light step.  It was a mean, shabbily furnished room, with a bed
in it.  The white night-cap, embellished with two peacock’s feathers and
a pigtail bolt upright, in which Signor Jupe had that very afternoon
enlivened the varied performances with his chaste Shaksperean quips and
retorts, hung upon a nail; but no other portion of his wardrobe, or other
token of himself or his pursuits, was to be seen anywhere.  As to
Merrylegs, that respectable ancestor of the highly trained animal who
went aboard the ark, might have been accidentally shut out of it, for any
sign of a dog that was manifest to eye or ear in the Pegasus’s Arms.

They heard the doors of rooms above, opening and shutting as Sissy went
from one to another in quest of her father; and presently they heard
voices expressing surprise.  She came bounding down again in a great
hurry, opened a battered and mangy old hair trunk, found it empty, and
looked round with her hands clasped and her face full of terror.

‘Father must have gone down to the Booth, sir.  I don’t know why he
should go there, but he must be there; I’ll bring him in a minute!’  She
was gone directly, without her bonnet; with her long, dark, childish hair
streaming behind her.

‘What does she mean!’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Back in a minute?  It’s more
than a mile off.’

Before Mr. Bounderby could reply, a young man appeared at the door, and
introducing himself with the words, ‘By your leaves, gentlemen!’ walked
in with his hands in his pockets.  His face, close-shaven, thin, and
sallow, was shaded by a great quantity of dark hair, brushed into a roll
all round his head, and parted up the centre.  His legs were very robust,
but shorter than legs of good proportions should have been.  His chest
and back were as much too broad, as his legs were too short.  He was
dressed in a Newmarket coat and tight-fitting trousers; wore a shawl
round his neck; smelt of lamp-oil, straw, orange-peel, horses’ provender,
and sawdust; and looked a most remarkable sort of Centaur, compounded of
the stable and the play-house.  Where the one began, and the other ended,
nobody could have told with any precision.  This gentleman was mentioned
in the bills of the day as Mr. E. W. B. Childers, so justly celebrated
for his daring vaulting act as the Wild Huntsman of the North American
Prairies; in which popular performance, a diminutive boy with an old
face, who now accompanied him, assisted as his infant son: being carried
upside down over his father’s shoulder, by one foot, and held by the
crown of his head, heels upwards, in the palm of his father’s hand,
according to the violent paternal manner in which wild huntsmen may be
observed to fondle their offspring.  Made up with curls, wreaths, wings,
white bismuth, and carmine, this hopeful young person soared into so
pleasing a Cupid as to constitute the chief delight of the maternal part
of the spectators; but in private, where his characteristics were a
precocious cutaway coat and an extremely gruff voice, he became of the
Turf, turfy.

‘By your leaves, gentlemen,’ said Mr. E. W. B. Childers, glancing round
the room.  ‘It was you, I believe, that were wishing to see Jupe!’

‘It was,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘His daughter has gone to fetch him, but I
can’t wait; therefore, if you please, I will leave a message for him with
you.’

‘You see, my friend,’ Mr. Bounderby put in, ‘we are the kind of people
who know the value of time, and you are the kind of people who don’t know
the value of time.’

‘I have not,’ retorted Mr. Childers, after surveying him from head to
foot, ‘the honour of knowing _you_,—but if you mean that you can make
more money of your time than I can of mine, I should judge from your
appearance, that you are about right.’

‘And when you have made it, you can keep it too, I should think,’ said
Cupid.

‘Kidderminster, stow that!’ said Mr. Childers.  (Master Kidderminster was
Cupid’s mortal name.)

‘What does he come here cheeking us for, then?’ cried Master
Kidderminster, showing a very irascible temperament.  ‘If you want to
cheek us, pay your ochre at the doors and take it out.’

‘Kidderminster,’ said Mr. Childers, raising his voice, ‘stow that!—Sir,’
to Mr. Gradgrind, ‘I was addressing myself to you.  You may or you may
not be aware (for perhaps you have not been much in the audience), that
Jupe has missed his tip very often, lately.’

‘Has—what has he missed?’ asked Mr. Gradgrind, glancing at the potent
Bounderby for assistance.

‘Missed his tip.’

‘Offered at the Garters four times last night, and never done ’em once,’
said Master Kidderminster.  ‘Missed his tip at the banners, too, and was
loose in his ponging.’

‘Didn’t do what he ought to do.  Was short in his leaps and bad in his
tumbling,’ Mr. Childers interpreted.

‘Oh!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘that is tip, is it?’

‘In a general way that’s missing his tip,’ Mr. E. W. B. Childers
answered.

‘Nine oils, Merrylegs, missing tips, garters, banners, and Ponging, eh!’
ejaculated Bounderby, with his laugh of laughs.  ‘Queer sort of company,
too, for a man who has raised himself!’

‘Lower yourself, then,’ retorted Cupid.  ‘Oh Lord! if you’ve raised
yourself so high as all that comes to, let yourself down a bit.’

‘This is a very obtrusive lad!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, turning, and knitting
his brows on him.

‘We’d have had a young gentleman to meet you, if we had known you were
coming,’ retorted Master Kidderminster, nothing abashed.  ‘It’s a pity
you don’t have a bespeak, being so particular.  You’re on the Tight-Jeff,
ain’t you?’

‘What does this unmannerly boy mean,’ asked Mr. Gradgrind, eyeing him in
a sort of desperation, ‘by Tight-Jeff?’

‘There!  Get out, get out!’ said Mr. Childers, thrusting his young friend
from the room, rather in the prairie manner.  ‘Tight-Jeff or Slack-Jeff,
it don’t much signify: it’s only tight-rope and slack-rope.  You were
going to give me a message for Jupe?’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘Then,’ continued Mr. Childers, quickly, ‘my opinion is, he will never
receive it.  Do you know much of him?’

‘I never saw the man in my life.’

‘I doubt if you ever _will_ see him now.  It’s pretty plain to me, he’s
off.’

‘Do you mean that he has deserted his daughter?’

‘Ay!  I mean,’ said Mr. Childers, with a nod, ‘that he has cut.  He was
goosed last night, he was goosed the night before last, he was goosed
to-day.  He has lately got in the way of being always goosed, and he
can’t stand it.’

‘Why has he been—so very much—Goosed?’ asked Mr. Gradgrind, forcing the
word out of himself, with great solemnity and reluctance.

‘His joints are turning stiff, and he is getting used up,’ said Childers.
‘He has his points as a Cackler still, but he can’t get a living out of
_them_.’

‘A Cackler!’ Bounderby repeated.  ‘Here we go again!’

‘A speaker, if the gentleman likes it better,’ said Mr. E. W. B.
Childers, superciliously throwing the interpretation over his shoulder,
and accompanying it with a shake of his long hair—which all shook at
once.  ‘Now, it’s a remarkable fact, sir, that it cut that man deeper, to
know that his daughter knew of his being goosed, than to go through with
it.’

‘Good!’ interrupted Mr. Bounderby.  ‘This is good, Gradgrind!  A man so
fond of his daughter, that he runs away from her!  This is devilish good!
Ha! ha!  Now, I’ll tell you what, young man.  I haven’t always occupied
my present station of life.  I know what these things are.  You may be
astonished to hear it, but my mother—ran away from _me_.’

E. W. B. Childers replied pointedly, that he was not at all astonished to
hear it.

‘Very well,’ said Bounderby.  ‘I was born in a ditch, and my mother ran
away from me.  Do I excuse her for it?  No.  Have I ever excused her for
it?  Not I.  What do I call her for it?  I call her probably the very
worst woman that ever lived in the world, except my drunken grandmother.
There’s no family pride about me, there’s no imaginative sentimental
humbug about me.  I call a spade a spade; and I call the mother of Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown, without any fear or any favour, what I should call
her if she had been the mother of Dick Jones of Wapping.  So, with this
man.  He is a runaway rogue and a vagabond, that’s what he is, in
English.’

‘It’s all the same to me what he is or what he is not, whether in English
or whether in French,’ retorted Mr. E. W. B. Childers, facing about.  ‘I
am telling your friend what’s the fact; if you don’t like to hear it, you
can avail yourself of the open air.  You give it mouth enough, you do;
but give it mouth in your own building at least,’ remonstrated E. W. B.
with stern irony.  ‘Don’t give it mouth in this building, till you’re
called upon.  You have got some building of your own I dare say, now?’

‘Perhaps so,’ replied Mr. Bounderby, rattling his money and laughing.

‘Then give it mouth in your own building, will you, if you please?’ said
Childers.  ‘Because this isn’t a strong building, and too much of you
might bring it down!’

Eyeing Mr. Bounderby from head to foot again, he turned from him, as from
a man finally disposed of, to Mr. Gradgrind.

‘Jupe sent his daughter out on an errand not an hour ago, and then was
seen to slip out himself, with his hat over his eyes, and a bundle tied
up in a handkerchief under his arm.  She will never believe it of him,
but he has cut away and left her.’

‘Pray,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘why will she never believe it of him?’

‘Because those two were one.  Because they were never asunder.  Because,
up to this time, he seemed to dote upon her,’ said Childers, taking a
step or two to look into the empty trunk.  Both Mr. Childers and Master
Kidderminster walked in a curious manner; with their legs wider apart
than the general run of men, and with a very knowing assumption of being
stiff in the knees.  This walk was common to all the male members of
Sleary’s company, and was understood to express, that they were always on
horseback.

‘Poor Sissy!  He had better have apprenticed her,’ said Childers, giving
his hair another shake, as he looked up from the empty box.  ‘Now, he
leaves her without anything to take to.’

‘It is creditable to you, who have never been apprenticed, to express
that opinion,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind, approvingly.

‘_I_ never apprenticed?  I was apprenticed when I was seven year old.’

‘Oh!  Indeed?’ said Mr. Gradgrind, rather resentfully, as having been
defrauded of his good opinion.  ‘I was not aware of its being the custom
to apprentice young persons to—’

‘Idleness,’ Mr. Bounderby put in with a loud laugh.  ‘No, by the Lord
Harry!  Nor I!’

‘Her father always had it in his head,’ resumed Childers, feigning
unconsciousness of Mr. Bounderby’s existence, ‘that she was to be taught
the deuce-and-all of education.  How it got into his head, I can’t say; I
can only say that it never got out.  He has been picking up a bit of
reading for her, here—and a bit of writing for her, there—and a bit of
ciphering for her, somewhere else—these seven years.’

Mr. E. W. B. Childers took one of his hands out of his pockets, stroked
his face and chin, and looked, with a good deal of doubt and a little
hope, at Mr. Gradgrind.  From the first he had sought to conciliate that
gentleman, for the sake of the deserted girl.

‘When Sissy got into the school here,’ he pursued, ‘her father was as
pleased as Punch.  I couldn’t altogether make out why, myself, as we were
not stationary here, being but comers and goers anywhere.  I suppose,
however, he had this move in his mind—he was always half-cracked—and then
considered her provided for.  If you should happen to have looked in
to-night, for the purpose of telling him that you were going to do her
any little service,’ said Mr. Childers, stroking his face again, and
repeating his look, ‘it would be very fortunate and well-timed; very
fortunate and well-timed.’

‘On the contrary,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘I came to tell him that her
connections made her not an object for the school, and that she must not
attend any more.  Still, if her father really has left her, without any
connivance on her part—Bounderby, let me have a word with you.’

Upon this, Mr. Childers politely betook himself, with his equestrian
walk, to the landing outside the door, and there stood stroking his face,
and softly whistling.  While thus engaged, he overheard such phrases in
Mr. Bounderby’s voice as ‘No.  _I_ say no.  I advise you not.  I say by
no means.’  While, from Mr. Gradgrind, he heard in his much lower tone
the words, ‘But even as an example to Louisa, of what this pursuit which
has been the subject of a vulgar curiosity, leads to and ends in.  Think
of it, Bounderby, in that point of view.’

Meanwhile, the various members of Sleary’s company gradually gathered
together from the upper regions, where they were quartered, and, from
standing about, talking in low voices to one another and to Mr. Childers,
gradually insinuated themselves and him into the room.  There were two or
three handsome young women among them, with their two or three husbands,
and their two or three mothers, and their eight or nine little children,
who did the fairy business when required.  The father of one of the
families was in the habit of balancing the father of another of the
families on the top of a great pole; the father of a third family often
made a pyramid of both those fathers, with Master Kidderminster for the
apex, and himself for the base; all the fathers could dance upon rolling
casks, stand upon bottles, catch knives and balls, twirl hand-basins,
ride upon anything, jump over everything, and stick at nothing.  All the
mothers could (and did) dance, upon the slack wire and the tight-rope,
and perform rapid acts on bare-backed steeds; none of them were at all
particular in respect of showing their legs; and one of them, alone in a
Greek chariot, drove six in hand into every town they came to.  They all
assumed to be mighty rakish and knowing, they were not very tidy in their
private dresses, they were not at all orderly in their domestic
arrangements, and the combined literature of the whole company would have
produced but a poor letter on any subject.  Yet there was a remarkable
gentleness and childishness about these people, a special inaptitude for
any kind of sharp practice, and an untiring readiness to help and pity
one another, deserving often of as much respect, and always of as much
generous construction, as the every-day virtues of any class of people in
the world.

Last of all appeared Mr. Sleary: a stout man as already mentioned, with
one fixed eye, and one loose eye, a voice (if it can be called so) like
the efforts of a broken old pair of bellows, a flabby surface, and a
muddled head which was never sober and never drunk.

‘Thquire!’ said Mr. Sleary, who was troubled with asthma, and whose
breath came far too thick and heavy for the letter s, ‘Your thervant!
Thith ith a bad piethe of bithnith, thith ith.  You’ve heard of my Clown
and hith dog being thuppothed to have morrithed?’

He addressed Mr. Gradgrind, who answered ‘Yes.’

‘Well, Thquire,’ he returned, taking off his hat, and rubbing the lining
with his pocket-handkerchief, which he kept inside for the purpose.  ‘Ith
it your intenthion to do anything for the poor girl, Thquire?’

‘I shall have something to propose to her when she comes back,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind.

‘Glad to hear it, Thquire.  Not that I want to get rid of the child, any
more than I want to thtand in her way.  I’m willing to take her prentith,
though at her age ith late.  My voithe ith a little huthky, Thquire, and
not eathy heard by them ath don’t know me; but if you’d been chilled and
heated, heated and chilled, chilled and heated in the ring when you wath
young, ath often ath I have been, _your_ voithe wouldn’t have lathted
out, Thquire, no more than mine.’

‘I dare say not,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.

‘What thall it be, Thquire, while you wait?  Thall it be Therry?  Give it
a name, Thquire!’ said Mr. Sleary, with hospitable ease.

‘Nothing for me, I thank you,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.

‘Don’t thay nothing, Thquire.  What doth your friend thay?  If you
haven’t took your feed yet, have a glath of bitterth.’

Here his daughter Josephine—a pretty fair-haired girl of eighteen, who
had been tied on a horse at two years old, and had made a will at twelve,
which she always carried about with her, expressive of her dying desire
to be drawn to the grave by the two piebald ponies—cried, ‘Father, hush!
she has come back!’  Then came Sissy Jupe, running into the room as she
had run out of it.  And when she saw them all assembled, and saw their
looks, and saw no father there, she broke into a most deplorable cry, and
took refuge on the bosom of the most accomplished tight-rope lady
(herself in the family-way), who knelt down on the floor to nurse her,
and to weep over her.

‘Ith an internal thame, upon my thoul it ith,’ said Sleary.

‘O my dear father, my good kind father, where are you gone?  You are gone
to try to do me some good, I know!  You are gone away for my sake, I am
sure!  And how miserable and helpless you will be without me, poor, poor
father, until you come back!’  It was so pathetic to hear her saying many
things of this kind, with her face turned upward, and her arms stretched
out as if she were trying to stop his departing shadow and embrace it,
that no one spoke a word until Mr. Bounderby (growing impatient) took the
case in hand.

‘Now, good people all,’ said he, ‘this is wanton waste of time.  Let the
girl understand the fact.  Let her take it from me, if you like, who have
been run away from, myself.  Here, what’s your name!  Your father has
absconded—deserted you—and you mustn’t expect to see him again as long as
you live.’

They cared so little for plain Fact, these people, and were in that
advanced state of degeneracy on the subject, that instead of being
impressed by the speaker’s strong common sense, they took it in
extraordinary dudgeon.  The men muttered ‘Shame!’ and the women ‘Brute!’
and Sleary, in some haste, communicated the following hint, apart to Mr.
Bounderby.

‘I tell you what, Thquire.  To thpeak plain to you, my opinion ith that
you had better cut it thort, and drop it.  They’re a very good natur’d
people, my people, but they’re accuthtomed to be quick in their
movementh; and if you don’t act upon my advithe, I’m damned if I don’t
believe they’ll pith you out o’ winder.’

Mr. Bounderby being restrained by this mild suggestion, Mr. Gradgrind
found an opening for his eminently practical exposition of the subject.

‘It is of no moment,’ said he, ‘whether this person is to be expected
back at any time, or the contrary.  He is gone away, and there is no
present expectation of his return.  That, I believe, is agreed on all
hands.’

‘Thath agreed, Thquire.  Thick to that!’  From Sleary.

‘Well then.  I, who came here to inform the father of the poor girl,
Jupe, that she could not be received at the school any more, in
consequence of there being practical objections, into which I need not
enter, to the reception there of the children of persons so employed, am
prepared in these altered circumstances to make a proposal.  I am willing
to take charge of you, Jupe, and to educate you, and provide for you.
The only condition (over and above your good behaviour) I make is, that
you decide now, at once, whether to accompany me or remain here.  Also,
that if you accompany me now, it is understood that you communicate no
more with any of your friends who are here present.  These observations
comprise the whole of the case.’

‘At the thame time,’ said Sleary, ‘I mutht put in my word, Thquire, tho
that both thides of the banner may be equally theen.  If you like,
Thethilia, to be prentitht, you know the natur of the work and you know
your companionth.  Emma Gordon, in whothe lap you’re a lying at prethent,
would be a mother to you, and Joth’phine would be a thithter to you.  I
don’t pretend to be of the angel breed myself, and I don’t thay but what,
when you mith’d your tip, you’d find me cut up rough, and thwear an oath
or two at you.  But what I thay, Thquire, ith, that good tempered or bad
tempered, I never did a horthe a injury yet, no more than thwearing at
him went, and that I don’t expect I thall begin otherwithe at my time of
life, with a rider.  I never wath much of a Cackler, Thquire, and I have
thed my thay.’

The latter part of this speech was addressed to Mr. Gradgrind, who
received it with a grave inclination of his head, and then remarked:

‘The only observation I will make to you, Jupe, in the way of influencing
your decision, is, that it is highly desirable to have a sound practical
education, and that even your father himself (from what I understand)
appears, on your behalf, to have known and felt that much.’

The last words had a visible effect upon her.  She stopped in her wild
crying, a little detached herself from Emma Gordon, and turned her face
full upon her patron.  The whole company perceived the force of the
change, and drew a long breath together, that plainly said, ‘she will
go!’

‘Be sure you know your own mind, Jupe,’ Mr. Gradgrind cautioned her; ‘I
say no more.  Be sure you know your own mind!’

‘When father comes back,’ cried the girl, bursting into tears again after
a minute’s silence, ‘how will he ever find me if I go away!’

‘You may be quite at ease,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, calmly; he worked out the
whole matter like a sum: ‘you may be quite at ease, Jupe, on that score.
In such a case, your father, I apprehend, must find out Mr.—’

‘Thleary.  Thath my name, Thquire.  Not athamed of it.  Known all over
England, and alwayth paythe ith way.’

‘Must find out Mr. Sleary, who would then let him know where you went.  I
should have no power of keeping you against his wish, and he would have
no difficulty, at any time, in finding Mr. Thomas Gradgrind of Coketown.
I am well known.’

‘Well known,’ assented Mr. Sleary, rolling his loose eye.  ‘You’re one of
the thort, Thquire, that keepth a prethiouth thight of money out of the
houthe.  But never mind that at prethent.’

There was another silence; and then she exclaimed, sobbing with her hands
before her face, ‘Oh, give me my clothes, give me my clothes, and let me
go away before I break my heart!’

The women sadly bestirred themselves to get the clothes together—it was
soon done, for they were not many—and to pack them in a basket which had
often travelled with them.  Sissy sat all the time upon the ground, still
sobbing, and covering her eyes.  Mr. Gradgrind and his friend Bounderby
stood near the door, ready to take her away.  Mr. Sleary stood in the
middle of the room, with the male members of the company about him,
exactly as he would have stood in the centre of the ring during his
daughter Josephine’s performance.  He wanted nothing but his whip.

The basket packed in silence, they brought her bonnet to her, and
smoothed her disordered hair, and put it on.  Then they pressed about
her, and bent over her in very natural attitudes, kissing and embracing
her: and brought the children to take leave of her; and were a
tender-hearted, simple, foolish set of women altogether.

‘Now, Jupe,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘If you are quite determined, come!’

But she had to take her farewell of the male part of the company yet, and
every one of them had to unfold his arms (for they all assumed the
professional attitude when they found themselves near Sleary), and give
her a parting kiss—Master Kidderminster excepted, in whose young nature
there was an original flavour of the misanthrope, who was also known to
have harboured matrimonial views, and who moodily withdrew.  Mr. Sleary
was reserved until the last.  Opening his arms wide he took her by both
her hands, and would have sprung her up and down, after the riding-master
manner of congratulating young ladies on their dismounting from a rapid
act; but there was no rebound in Sissy, and she only stood before him
crying.

‘Good-bye, my dear!’ said Sleary.  ‘You’ll make your fortun, I hope, and
none of our poor folkth will ever trouble you, I’ll pound it.  I with
your father hadn’t taken hith dog with him; ith a ill-conwenienth to have
the dog out of the billth.  But on thecond thoughth, he wouldn’t have
performed without hith mathter, tho ith ath broad ath ith long!’

With that he regarded her attentively with his fixed eye, surveyed his
company with his loose one, kissed her, shook his head, and handed her to
Mr. Gradgrind as to a horse.

‘There the ith, Thquire,’ he said, sweeping her with a professional
glance as if she were being adjusted in her seat, ‘and the’ll do you
juthtithe.  Good-bye, Thethilia!’

‘Good-bye, Cecilia!’  ‘Good-bye, Sissy!’  ‘God bless you, dear!’  In a
variety of voices from all the room.

But the riding-master eye had observed the bottle of the nine oils in her
bosom, and he now interposed with ‘Leave the bottle, my dear; ith large
to carry; it will be of no uthe to you now.  Give it to me!’

‘No, no!’ she said, in another burst of tears.  ‘Oh, no!  Pray let me
keep it for father till he comes back!  He will want it when he comes
back.  He had never thought of going away, when he sent me for it.  I
must keep it for him, if you please!’

‘Tho be it, my dear.  (You thee how it ith, Thquire!)  Farewell,
Thethilia!  My latht wordth to you ith thith, Thtick to the termth of
your engagement, be obedient to the Thquire, and forget uth.  But if,
when you’re grown up and married and well off, you come upon any
horthe-riding ever, don’t be hard upon it, don’t be croth with it, give
it a Bethpeak if you can, and think you might do wurth.  People mutht be
amuthed, Thquire, thomehow,’ continued Sleary, rendered more pursy than
ever, by so much talking; ‘they can’t be alwayth a working, nor yet they
can’t be alwayth a learning.  Make the betht of uth; not the wurtht.
I’ve got my living out of the horthe-riding all my life, I know; but I
conthider that I lay down the philothophy of the thubject when I thay to
you, Thquire, make the betht of uth: not the wurtht!’

The Sleary philosophy was propounded as they went downstairs and the
fixed eye of Philosophy—and its rolling eye, too—soon lost the three
figures and the basket in the darkness of the street.



CHAPTER VII
MRS. SPARSIT


MR. BOUNDERBY being a bachelor, an elderly lady presided over his
establishment, in consideration of a certain annual stipend.  Mrs.
Sparsit was this lady’s name; and she was a prominent figure in
attendance on Mr. Bounderby’s car, as it rolled along in triumph with the
Bully of humility inside.

For, Mrs. Sparsit had not only seen different days, but was highly
connected.  She had a great aunt living in these very times called Lady
Scadgers.  Mr. Sparsit, deceased, of whom she was the relict, had been by
the mother’s side what Mrs. Sparsit still called ‘a Powler.’  Strangers
of limited information and dull apprehension were sometimes observed not
to know what a Powler was, and even to appear uncertain whether it might
be a business, or a political party, or a profession of faith.  The
better class of minds, however, did not need to be informed that the
Powlers were an ancient stock, who could trace themselves so exceedingly
far back that it was not surprising if they sometimes lost
themselves—which they had rather frequently done, as respected
horse-flesh, blind-hookey, Hebrew monetary transactions, and the
Insolvent Debtors’ Court.

The late Mr. Sparsit, being by the mother’s side a Powler, married this
lady, being by the father’s side a Scadgers.  Lady Scadgers (an immensely
fat old woman, with an inordinate appetite for butcher’s meat, and a
mysterious leg which had now refused to get out of bed for fourteen
years) contrived the marriage, at a period when Sparsit was just of age,
and chiefly noticeable for a slender body, weakly supported on two long
slim props, and surmounted by no head worth mentioning.  He inherited a
fair fortune from his uncle, but owed it all before he came into it, and
spent it twice over immediately afterwards.  Thus, when he died, at
twenty-four (the scene of his decease, Calais, and the cause, brandy), he
did not leave his widow, from whom he had been separated soon after the
honeymoon, in affluent circumstances.  That bereaved lady, fifteen years
older than he, fell presently at deadly feud with her only relative, Lady
Scadgers; and, partly to spite her ladyship, and partly to maintain
herself, went out at a salary.  And here she was now, in her elderly
days, with the Coriolanian style of nose and the dense black eyebrows
which had captivated Sparsit, making Mr. Bounderby’s tea as he took his
breakfast.

If Bounderby had been a Conqueror, and Mrs. Sparsit a captive Princess
whom he took about as a feature in his state-processions, he could not
have made a greater flourish with her than he habitually did.  Just as it
belonged to his boastfulness to depreciate his own extraction, so it
belonged to it to exalt Mrs. Sparsit’s.  In the measure that he would not
allow his own youth to have been attended by a single favourable
circumstance, he brightened Mrs. Sparsit’s juvenile career with every
possible advantage, and showered waggon-loads of early roses all over
that lady’s path.  ‘And yet, sir,’ he would say, ‘how does it turn out
after all?  Why here she is at a hundred a year (I give her a hundred,
which she is pleased to term handsome), keeping the house of Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown!’

Nay, he made this foil of his so very widely known, that third parties
took it up, and handled it on some occasions with considerable briskness.
It was one of the most exasperating attributes of Bounderby, that he not
only sang his own praises but stimulated other men to sing them.  There
was a moral infection of clap-trap in him.  Strangers, modest enough
elsewhere, started up at dinners in Coketown, and boasted, in quite a
rampant way, of Bounderby.  They made him out to be the Royal arms, the
Union-Jack, Magna Charta, John Bull, Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights,
An Englishman’s house is his castle, Church and State, and God save the
Queen, all put together.  And as often (and it was very often) as an
orator of this kind brought into his peroration,

    ‘Princes and lords may flourish or may fade,
    A breath can make them, as a breath has made,’

—it was, for certain, more or less understood among the company that he
had heard of Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Mr. Bounderby,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘you are unusually slow, sir, with
your breakfast this morning.’

‘Why, ma’am,’ he returned, ‘I am thinking about Tom Gradgrind’s whim;’
Tom Gradgrind, for a bluff independent manner of speaking—as if somebody
were always endeavouring to bribe him with immense sums to say Thomas,
and he wouldn’t; ‘Tom Gradgrind’s whim, ma’am, of bringing up the
tumbling-girl.’

‘The girl is now waiting to know,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘whether she is to
go straight to the school, or up to the Lodge.’

‘She must wait, ma’am,’ answered Bounderby, ‘till I know myself.  We
shall have Tom Gradgrind down here presently, I suppose.  If he should
wish her to remain here a day or two longer, of course she can, ma’am.’

‘Of course she can if you wish it, Mr. Bounderby.’

‘I told him I would give her a shake-down here, last night, in order that
he might sleep on it before he decided to let her have any association
with Louisa.’

‘Indeed, Mr. Bounderby?  Very thoughtful of you!’  Mrs. Sparsit’s
Coriolanian nose underwent a slight expansion of the nostrils, and her
black eyebrows contracted as she took a sip of tea.

‘It’s tolerably clear to _me_,’ said Bounderby, ‘that the little puss can
get small good out of such companionship.’

‘Are you speaking of young Miss Gradgrind, Mr. Bounderby?’

‘Yes, ma’am, I’m speaking of Louisa.’

‘Your observation being limited to “little puss,”’ said Mrs. Sparsit,
‘and there being two little girls in question, I did not know which might
be indicated by that expression.’

‘Louisa,’ repeated Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Louisa, Louisa.’

‘You are quite another father to Louisa, sir.’  Mrs. Sparsit took a
little more tea; and, as she bent her again contracted eyebrows over her
steaming cup, rather looked as if her classical countenance were invoking
the infernal gods.

‘If you had said I was another father to Tom—young Tom, I mean, not my
friend Tom Gradgrind—you might have been nearer the mark.  I am going to
take young Tom into my office.  Going to have him under my wing, ma’am.’

‘Indeed?  Rather young for that, is he not, sir?’  Mrs. Sparsit’s ‘sir,’
in addressing Mr. Bounderby, was a word of ceremony, rather exacting
consideration for herself in the use, than honouring him.

‘I’m not going to take him at once; he is to finish his educational
cramming before then,’ said Bounderby.  ‘By the Lord Harry, he’ll have
enough of it, first and last!  He’d open his eyes, that boy would, if he
knew how empty of learning _my_ young maw was, at his time of life.’
Which, by the by, he probably did know, for he had heard of it often
enough.  ‘But it’s extraordinary the difficulty I have on scores of such
subjects, in speaking to any one on equal terms.  Here, for example, I
have been speaking to you this morning about tumblers.  Why, what do
_you_ know about tumblers?  At the time when, to have been a tumbler in
the mud of the streets, would have been a godsend to me, a prize in the
lottery to me, you were at the Italian Opera.  You were coming out of the
Italian Opera, ma’am, in white satin and jewels, a blaze of splendour,
when I hadn’t a penny to buy a link to light you.’

‘I certainly, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with a dignity serenely
mournful, ‘was familiar with the Italian Opera at a very early age.’

‘Egad, ma’am, so was I,’ said Bounderby, ‘—with the wrong side of it.  A
hard bed the pavement of its Arcade used to make, I assure you.  People
like you, ma’am, accustomed from infancy to lie on Down feathers, have no
idea _how_ hard a paving-stone is, without trying it.  No, no, it’s of no
use my talking to _you_ about tumblers.  I should speak of foreign
dancers, and the West End of London, and May Fair, and lords and ladies
and honourables.’

‘I trust, sir,’ rejoined Mrs. Sparsit, with decent resignation, ‘it is
not necessary that you should do anything of that kind.  I hope I have
learnt how to accommodate myself to the changes of life.  If I have
acquired an interest in hearing of your instructive experiences, and can
scarcely hear enough of them, I claim no merit for that, since I believe
it is a general sentiment.’

‘Well, ma’am,’ said her patron, ‘perhaps some people may be pleased to
say that they do like to hear, in his own unpolished way, what Josiah
Bounderby, of Coketown, has gone through.  But you must confess that you
were born in the lap of luxury, yourself.  Come, ma’am, you know you were
born in the lap of luxury.’

‘I do not, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit with a shake of her head, ‘deny
it.’

Mr. Bounderby was obliged to get up from table, and stand with his back
to the fire, looking at her; she was such an enhancement of his position.

‘And you were in crack society.  Devilish high society,’ he said, warming
his legs.

‘It is true, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with an affectation of humility
the very opposite of his, and therefore in no danger of jostling it.

‘You were in the tiptop fashion, and all the rest of it,’ said Mr.
Bounderby.

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with a kind of social widowhood upon
her.  ‘It is unquestionably true.’

Mr. Bounderby, bending himself at the knees, literally embraced his legs
in his great satisfaction and laughed aloud.  Mr. and Miss Gradgrind
being then announced, he received the former with a shake of the hand,
and the latter with a kiss.

‘Can Jupe be sent here, Bounderby?’ asked Mr. Gradgrind.

Certainly.  So Jupe was sent there.  On coming in, she curtseyed to Mr.
Bounderby, and to his friend Tom Gradgrind, and also to Louisa; but in
her confusion unluckily omitted Mrs. Sparsit.  Observing this, the
blustrous Bounderby had the following remarks to make:

‘Now, I tell you what, my girl.  The name of that lady by the teapot, is
Mrs. Sparsit.  That lady acts as mistress of this house, and she is a
highly connected lady.  Consequently, if ever you come again into any
room in this house, you will make a short stay in it if you don’t behave
towards that lady in your most respectful manner.  Now, I don’t care a
button what you do to _me_, because I don’t affect to be anybody.  So far
from having high connections I have no connections at all, and I come of
the scum of the earth.  But towards that lady, I do care what you do; and
you shall do what is deferential and respectful, or you shall not come
here.’

‘I hope, Bounderby,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, in a conciliatory voice, ‘that
this was merely an oversight.’

‘My friend Tom Gradgrind suggests, Mrs. Sparsit,’ said Bounderby, ‘that
this was merely an oversight.  Very likely.  However, as you are aware,
ma’am, I don’t allow of even oversights towards you.’

‘You are very good indeed, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, shaking her head
with her State humility.  ‘It is not worth speaking of.’

Sissy, who all this time had been faintly excusing herself with tears in
her eyes, was now waved over by the master of the house to Mr. Gradgrind.
She stood looking intently at him, and Louisa stood coldly by, with her
eyes upon the ground, while he proceeded thus:

‘Jupe, I have made up my mind to take you into my house; and, when you
are not in attendance at the school, to employ you about Mrs. Gradgrind,
who is rather an invalid.  I have explained to Miss Louisa—this is Miss
Louisa—the miserable but natural end of your late career; and you are to
expressly understand that the whole of that subject is past, and is not
to be referred to any more.  From this time you begin your history.  You
are, at present, ignorant, I know.’

‘Yes, sir, very,’ she answered, curtseying.

‘I shall have the satisfaction of causing you to be strictly educated;
and you will be a living proof to all who come into communication with
you, of the advantages of the training you will receive.  You will be
reclaimed and formed.  You have been in the habit now of reading to your
father, and those people I found you among, I dare say?’ said Mr.
Gradgrind, beckoning her nearer to him before he said so, and dropping
his voice.

‘Only to father and Merrylegs, sir.  At least I mean to father, when
Merrylegs was always there.’

‘Never mind Merrylegs, Jupe,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, with a passing frown.
‘I don’t ask about him.  I understand you to have been in the habit of
reading to your father?’

‘O, yes, sir, thousands of times.  They were the happiest—O, of all the
happy times we had together, sir!’

It was only now when her sorrow broke out, that Louisa looked at her.

‘And what,’ asked Mr. Gradgrind, in a still lower voice, ‘did you read to
your father, Jupe?’

‘About the Fairies, sir, and the Dwarf, and the Hunchback, and the
Genies,’ she sobbed out; ‘and about—’

‘Hush!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘that is enough.  Never breathe a word of
such destructive nonsense any more.  Bounderby, this is a case for rigid
training, and I shall observe it with interest.’

‘Well,’ returned Mr. Bounderby, ‘I have given you my opinion already, and
I shouldn’t do as you do.  But, very well, very well.  Since you are bent
upon it, _very_ well!’

So, Mr. Gradgrind and his daughter took Cecilia Jupe off with them to
Stone Lodge, and on the way Louisa never spoke one word, good or bad.
And Mr. Bounderby went about his daily pursuits.  And Mrs. Sparsit got
behind her eyebrows and meditated in the gloom of that retreat, all the
evening.



CHAPTER VIII
NEVER WONDER


LET us strike the key-note again, before pursuing the tune.

When she was half a dozen years younger, Louisa had been overheard to
begin a conversation with her brother one day, by saying ‘Tom, I
wonder’—upon which Mr. Gradgrind, who was the person overhearing, stepped
forth into the light and said, ‘Louisa, never wonder!’

Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the
reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and
affections.  Never wonder.  By means of addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never
wonder.  Bring to me, says M’Choakumchild, yonder baby just able to walk,
and I will engage that it shall never wonder.

Now, besides very many babies just able to walk, there happened to be in
Coketown a considerable population of babies who had been walking against
time towards the infinite world, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years and
more.  These portentous infants being alarming creatures to stalk about
in any human society, the eighteen denominations incessantly scratched
one another’s faces and pulled one another’s hair by way of agreeing on
the steps to be taken for their improvement—which they never did; a
surprising circumstance, when the happy adaptation of the means to the
end is considered.  Still, although they differed in every other
particular, conceivable and inconceivable (especially inconceivable),
they were pretty well united on the point that these unlucky infants were
never to wonder.  Body number one, said they must take everything on
trust.  Body number two, said they must take everything on political
economy.  Body number three, wrote leaden little books for them, showing
how the good grown-up baby invariably got to the Savings-bank, and the
bad grown-up baby invariably got transported.  Body number four, under
dreary pretences of being droll (when it was very melancholy indeed),
made the shallowest pretences of concealing pitfalls of knowledge, into
which it was the duty of these babies to be smuggled and inveigled.  But,
all the bodies agreed that they were never to wonder.

There was a library in Coketown, to which general access was easy.  Mr.
Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this
library: a point whereon little rivers of tabular statements periodically
flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements, which no diver ever
got to any depth in and came up sane.  It was a disheartening
circumstance, but a melancholy fact, that even these readers persisted in
wondering.  They wondered about human nature, human passions, human hopes
and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the cares and joys and
sorrows, the lives and deaths of common men and women!  They sometimes,
after fifteen hours’ work, sat down to read mere fables about men and
women, more or less like themselves, and about children, more or less
like their own.  They took De Foe to their bosoms, instead of Euclid, and
seemed to be on the whole more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker.
Mr. Gradgrind was for ever working, in print and out of print, at this
eccentric sum, and he never could make out how it yielded this
unaccountable product.

‘I am sick of my life, Loo.  I, hate it altogether, and I hate everybody
except you,’ said the unnatural young Thomas Gradgrind in the
hair-cutting chamber at twilight.

‘You don’t hate Sissy, Tom?’

‘I hate to be obliged to call her Jupe.  And she hates me,’ said Tom,
moodily.

‘No, she does not, Tom, I am sure!’

‘She must,’ said Tom.  ‘She must just hate and detest the whole set-out
of us.  They’ll bother her head off, I think, before they have done with
her.  Already she’s getting as pale as wax, and as heavy as—I am.’

Young Thomas expressed these sentiments sitting astride of a chair before
the fire, with his arms on the back, and his sulky face on his arms.  His
sister sat in the darker corner by the fireside, now looking at him, now
looking at the bright sparks as they dropped upon the hearth.

‘As to me,’ said Tom, tumbling his hair all manner of ways with his sulky
hands, ‘I am a Donkey, that’s what _I_ am.  I am as obstinate as one, I
am more stupid than one, I get as much pleasure as one, and I should like
to kick like one.’

‘Not me, I hope, Tom?’

‘No, Loo; I wouldn’t hurt _you_.  I made an exception of you at first.  I
don’t know what this—jolly old—Jaundiced Jail,’ Tom had paused to find a
sufficiently complimentary and expressive name for the parental roof, and
seemed to relieve his mind for a moment by the strong alliteration of
this one, ‘would be without you.’

‘Indeed, Tom?  Do you really and truly say so?’

‘Why, of course I do.  What’s the use of talking about it!’ returned Tom,
chafing his face on his coat-sleeve, as if to mortify his flesh, and have
it in unison with his spirit.

‘Because, Tom,’ said his sister, after silently watching the sparks
awhile, ‘as I get older, and nearer growing up, I often sit wondering
here, and think how unfortunate it is for me that I can’t reconcile you
to home better than I am able to do.  I don’t know what other girls know.
I can’t play to you, or sing to you.  I can’t talk to you so as to
lighten your mind, for I never see any amusing sights or read any amusing
books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk about, when
you are tired.’

‘Well, no more do I.  I am as bad as you in that respect; and I am a Mule
too, which you’re not.  If father was determined to make me either a Prig
or a Mule, and I am not a Prig, why, it stands to reason, I must be a
Mule.  And so I am,’ said Tom, desperately.

‘It’s a great pity,’ said Louisa, after another pause, and speaking
thoughtfully out of her dark corner: ‘it’s a great pity, Tom.  It’s very
unfortunate for both of us.’

‘Oh!  You,’ said Tom; ‘you are a girl, Loo, and a girl comes out of it
better than a boy does.  I don’t miss anything in you.  You are the only
pleasure I have—you can brighten even this place—and you can always lead
me as you like.’

‘You are a dear brother, Tom; and while you think I can do such things, I
don’t so much mind knowing better.  Though I do know better, Tom, and am
very sorry for it.’  She came and kissed him, and went back into her
corner again.

‘I wish I could collect all the Facts we hear so much about,’ said Tom,
spitefully setting his teeth, ‘and all the Figures, and all the people
who found them out: and I wish I could put a thousand barrels of
gunpowder under them, and blow them all up together!  However, when I go
to live with old Bounderby, I’ll have my revenge.’

‘Your revenge, Tom?’

‘I mean, I’ll enjoy myself a little, and go about and see something, and
hear something.  I’ll recompense myself for the way in which I have been
brought up.’

‘But don’t disappoint yourself beforehand, Tom.  Mr. Bounderby thinks as
father thinks, and is a great deal rougher, and not half so kind.’

‘Oh!’ said Tom, laughing; ‘I don’t mind that.  I shall very well know how
to manage and smooth old Bounderby!’

Their shadows were defined upon the wall, but those of the high presses
in the room were all blended together on the wall and on the ceiling, as
if the brother and sister were overhung by a dark cavern.  Or, a fanciful
imagination—if such treason could have been there—might have made it out
to be the shadow of their subject, and of its lowering association with
their future.

‘What is your great mode of smoothing and managing, Tom?  Is it a
secret?’

‘Oh!’ said Tom, ‘if it is a secret, it’s not far off.  It’s you.  You are
his little pet, you are his favourite; he’ll do anything for you.  When
he says to me what I don’t like, I shall say to him, “My sister Loo will
be hurt and disappointed, Mr. Bounderby.  She always used to tell me she
was sure you would be easier with me than this.”  That’ll bring him
about, or nothing will.’

After waiting for some answering remark, and getting none, Tom wearily
relapsed into the present time, and twined himself yawning round and
about the rails of his chair, and rumpled his head more and more, until
he suddenly looked up, and asked:

‘Have you gone to sleep, Loo?’

‘No, Tom.  I am looking at the fire.’

‘You seem to find more to look at in it than ever I could find,’ said
Tom.  ‘Another of the advantages, I suppose, of being a girl.’

‘Tom,’ enquired his sister, slowly, and in a curious tone, as if she were
reading what she asked in the fire, and it was not quite plainly written
there, ‘do you look forward with any satisfaction to this change to Mr.
Bounderby’s?’

‘Why, there’s one thing to be said of it,’ returned Tom, pushing his
chair from him, and standing up; ‘it will be getting away from home.’

‘There is one thing to be said of it,’ Louisa repeated in her former
curious tone; ‘it will be getting away from home.  Yes.’

‘Not but what I shall be very unwilling, both to leave you, Loo, and to
leave you here.  But I must go, you know, whether I like it or not; and I
had better go where I can take with me some advantage of your influence,
than where I should lose it altogether.  Don’t you see?’

‘Yes, Tom.’

The answer was so long in coming, though there was no indecision in it,
that Tom went and leaned on the back of her chair, to contemplate the
fire which so engrossed her, from her point of view, and see what he
could make of it.

‘Except that it is a fire,’ said Tom, ‘it looks to me as stupid and blank
as everything else looks.  What do you see in it?  Not a circus?’

‘I don’t see anything in it, Tom, particularly.  But since I have been
looking at it, I have been wondering about you and me, grown up.’

‘Wondering again!’ said Tom.

‘I have such unmanageable thoughts,’ returned his sister, ‘that they
_will_ wonder.’

‘Then I beg of you, Louisa,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, who had opened the door
without being heard, ‘to do nothing of that description, for goodness’
sake, you inconsiderate girl, or I shall never hear the last of it from
your father.  And, Thomas, it is really shameful, with my poor head
continually wearing me out, that a boy brought up as you have been, and
whose education has cost what yours has, should be found encouraging his
sister to wonder, when he knows his father has expressly said that she is
not to do it.’

Louisa denied Tom’s participation in the offence; but her mother stopped
her with the conclusive answer, ‘Louisa, don’t tell me, in my state of
health; for unless you had been encouraged, it is morally and physically
impossible that you could have done it.’

‘I was encouraged by nothing, mother, but by looking at the red sparks
dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying.  It made me think,
after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could hope to do
in it.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, rendered almost energetic.  ‘Nonsense!
Don’t stand there and tell me such stuff, Louisa, to my face, when you
know very well that if it was ever to reach your father’s ears I should
never hear the last of it.  After all the trouble that has been taken
with you!  After the lectures you have attended, and the experiments you
have seen!  After I have heard you myself, when the whole of my right
side has been benumbed, going on with your master about combustion, and
calcination, and calorification, and I may say every kind of ation that
could drive a poor invalid distracted, to hear you talking in this absurd
way about sparks and ashes!  I wish,’ whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind, taking a
chair, and discharging her strongest point before succumbing under these
mere shadows of facts, ‘yes, I really _do_ wish that I had never had a
family, and then you would have known what it was to do without me!’



CHAPTER IX
SISSY’S PROGRESS


SISSY JUPE had not an easy time of it, between Mr. M’Choakumchild and
Mrs. Gradgrind, and was not without strong impulses, in the first months
of her probation, to run away.  It hailed facts all day long so very
hard, and life in general was opened to her as such a closely ruled
ciphering-book, that assuredly she would have run away, but for only one
restraint.

It is lamentable to think of; but this restraint was the result of no
arithmetical process, was self-imposed in defiance of all calculation,
and went dead against any table of probabilities that any Actuary would
have drawn up from the premises.  The girl believed that her father had
not deserted her; she lived in the hope that he would come back, and in
the faith that he would be made the happier by her remaining where she
was.

The wretched ignorance with which Jupe clung to this consolation,
rejecting the superior comfort of knowing, on a sound arithmetical basis,
that her father was an unnatural vagabond, filled Mr. Gradgrind with
pity.  Yet, what was to be done?  M’Choakumchild reported that she had a
very dense head for figures; that, once possessed with a general idea of
the globe, she took the smallest conceivable interest in its exact
measurements; that she was extremely slow in the acquisition of dates,
unless some pitiful incident happened to be connected therewith; that she
would burst into tears on being required (by the mental process)
immediately to name the cost of two hundred and forty-seven muslin caps
at fourteen-pence halfpenny; that she was as low down, in the school, as
low could be; that after eight weeks of induction into the elements of
Political Economy, she had only yesterday been set right by a prattler
three feet high, for returning to the question, ‘What is the first
principle of this science?’ the absurd answer, ‘To do unto others as I
would that they should do unto me.’

Mr. Gradgrind observed, shaking his head, that all this was very bad;
that it showed the necessity of infinite grinding at the mill of
knowledge, as per system, schedule, blue book, report, and tabular
statements A to Z; and that Jupe ‘must be kept to it.’  So Jupe was kept
to it, and became low-spirited, but no wiser.

‘It would be a fine thing to be you, Miss Louisa!’ she said, one night,
when Louisa had endeavoured to make her perplexities for next day
something clearer to her.

‘Do you think so?’

‘I should know so much, Miss Louisa.  All that is difficult to me now,
would be so easy then.’

‘You might not be the better for it, Sissy.’

Sissy submitted, after a little hesitation, ‘I should not be the worse,
Miss Louisa.’  To which Miss Louisa answered, ‘I don’t know that.’

There had been so little communication between these two—both because
life at Stone Lodge went monotonously round like a piece of machinery
which discouraged human interference, and because of the prohibition
relative to Sissy’s past career—that they were still almost strangers.
Sissy, with her dark eyes wonderingly directed to Louisa’s face, was
uncertain whether to say more or to remain silent.

‘You are more useful to my mother, and more pleasant with her than I can
ever be,’ Louisa resumed.  ‘You are pleasanter to yourself, than _I_ am
to _my_self.’

‘But, if you please, Miss Louisa,’ Sissy pleaded, ‘I am—O so stupid!’

Louisa, with a brighter laugh than usual, told her she would be wiser
by-and-by.

‘You don’t know,’ said Sissy, half crying, ‘what a stupid girl I am.  All
through school hours I make mistakes.  Mr. and Mrs. M’Choakumchild call
me up, over and over again, regularly to make mistakes.  I can’t help
them.  They seem to come natural to me.’

‘Mr. and Mrs. M’Choakumchild never make any mistakes themselves, I
suppose, Sissy?’

‘O no!’ she eagerly returned.  ‘They know everything.’

‘Tell me some of your mistakes.’

‘I am almost ashamed,’ said Sissy, with reluctance.  ‘But to-day, for
instance, Mr. M’Choakumchild was explaining to us about Natural
Prosperity.’

‘National, I think it must have been,’ observed Louisa.

‘Yes, it was.—But isn’t it the same?’ she timidly asked.

‘You had better say, National, as he said so,’ returned Louisa, with her
dry reserve.

‘National Prosperity.  And he said, Now, this schoolroom is a Nation.
And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money.  Isn’t this a
prosperous nation?  Girl number twenty, isn’t this a prosperous nation,
and a’n’t you in a thriving state?’

‘What did you say?’ asked Louisa.

‘Miss Louisa, I said I didn’t know.  I thought I couldn’t know whether it
was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or
not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine.
But that had nothing to do with it.  It was not in the figures at all,’
said Sissy, wiping her eyes.

‘That was a great mistake of yours,’ observed Louisa.

‘Yes, Miss Louisa, I know it was, now.  Then Mr. M’Choakumchild said he
would try me again.  And he said, This schoolroom is an immense town, and
in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are
starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year.  What is your
remark on that proportion?  And my remark was—for I couldn’t think of a
better one—that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were
starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million.  And
that was wrong, too.’

‘Of course it was.’

‘Then Mr. M’Choakumchild said he would try me once more.  And he said,
Here are the stutterings—’

‘Statistics,’ said Louisa.

‘Yes, Miss Louisa—they always remind me of stutterings, and that’s
another of my mistakes—of accidents upon the sea.  And I find (Mr.
M’Choakumchild said) that in a given time a hundred thousand persons went
to sea on long voyages, and only five hundred of them were drowned or
burnt to death.  What is the percentage?  And I said, Miss;’ here Sissy
fairly sobbed as confessing with extreme contrition to her greatest
error; ‘I said it was nothing.’

‘Nothing, Sissy?’

‘Nothing, Miss—to the relations and friends of the people who were
killed.  I shall never learn,’ said Sissy.  ‘And the worst of all is,
that although my poor father wished me so much to learn, and although I
am so anxious to learn, because he wished me to, I am afraid I don’t like
it.’

Louisa stood looking at the pretty modest head, as it drooped abashed
before her, until it was raised again to glance at her face.  Then she
asked:

‘Did your father know so much himself, that he wished you to be well
taught too, Sissy?’

Sissy hesitated before replying, and so plainly showed her sense that
they were entering on forbidden ground, that Louisa added, ‘No one hears
us; and if any one did, I am sure no harm could be found in such an
innocent question.’

‘No, Miss Louisa,’ answered Sissy, upon this encouragement, shaking her
head; ‘father knows very little indeed.  It’s as much as he can do to
write; and it’s more than people in general can do to read his writing.
Though it’s plain to _me_.’

‘Your mother?’

‘Father says she was quite a scholar.  She died when I was born.  She
was;’ Sissy made the terrible communication nervously; ‘she was a
dancer.’

‘Did your father love her?’  Louisa asked these questions with a strong,
wild, wandering interest peculiar to her; an interest gone astray like a
banished creature, and hiding in solitary places.

‘O yes!  As dearly as he loves me.  Father loved me, first, for her sake.
He carried me about with him when I was quite a baby.  We have never been
asunder from that time.’

‘Yet he leaves you now, Sissy?’

‘Only for my good.  Nobody understands him as I do; nobody knows him as I
do.  When he left me for my good—he never would have left me for his
own—I know he was almost broken-hearted with the trial.  He will not be
happy for a single minute, till he comes back.’

‘Tell me more about him,’ said Louisa, ‘I will never ask you again.
Where did you live?’

‘We travelled about the country, and had no fixed place to live in.
Father’s a;’ Sissy whispered the awful word, ‘a clown.’

‘To make the people laugh?’ said Louisa, with a nod of intelligence.

‘Yes.  But they wouldn’t laugh sometimes, and then father cried.  Lately,
they very often wouldn’t laugh, and he used to come home despairing.
Father’s not like most.  Those who didn’t know him as well as I do, and
didn’t love him as dearly as I do, might believe he was not quite right.
Sometimes they played tricks upon him; but they never knew how he felt
them, and shrunk up, when he was alone with me.  He was far, far timider
than they thought!’

‘And you were his comfort through everything?’

She nodded, with the tears rolling down her face.  ‘I hope so, and father
said I was.  It was because he grew so scared and trembling, and because
he felt himself to be a poor, weak, ignorant, helpless man (those used to
be his words), that he wanted me so much to know a great deal, and be
different from him.  I used to read to him to cheer his courage, and he
was very fond of that.  They were wrong books—I am never to speak of them
here—but we didn’t know there was any harm in them.’

‘And he liked them?’ said Louisa, with a searching gaze on Sissy all this
time.

‘O very much!  They kept him, many times, from what did him real harm.
And often and often of a night, he used to forget all his troubles in
wondering whether the Sultan would let the lady go on with the story, or
would have her head cut off before it was finished.’

‘And your father was always kind?  To the last?’ asked Louisa
contravening the great principle, and wondering very much.

‘Always, always!’ returned Sissy, clasping her hands.  ‘Kinder and kinder
than I can tell.  He was angry only one night, and that was not to me,
but Merrylegs.  Merrylegs;’ she whispered the awful fact; ‘is his
performing dog.’

‘Why was he angry with the dog?’ Louisa demanded.

‘Father, soon after they came home from performing, told Merrylegs to
jump up on the backs of the two chairs and stand across them—which is one
of his tricks.  He looked at father, and didn’t do it at once.
Everything of father’s had gone wrong that night, and he hadn’t pleased
the public at all.  He cried out that the very dog knew he was failing,
and had no compassion on him.  Then he beat the dog, and I was
frightened, and said, “Father, father!  Pray don’t hurt the creature who
is so fond of you!  O Heaven forgive you, father, stop!”  And he stopped,
and the dog was bloody, and father lay down crying on the floor with the
dog in his arms, and the dog licked his face.’

Louisa saw that she was sobbing; and going to her, kissed her, took her
hand, and sat down beside her.

‘Finish by telling me how your father left you, Sissy.  Now that I have
asked you so much, tell me the end.  The blame, if there is any blame, is
mine, not yours.’

‘Dear Miss Louisa,’ said Sissy, covering her eyes, and sobbing yet; ‘I
came home from the school that afternoon, and found poor father just come
home too, from the booth.  And he sat rocking himself over the fire, as
if he was in pain.  And I said, “Have you hurt yourself, father?” (as he
did sometimes, like they all did), and he said, “A little, my darling.”
And when I came to stoop down and look up at his face, I saw that he was
crying.  The more I spoke to him, the more he hid his face; and at first
he shook all over, and said nothing but “My darling;” and “My love!”’

Here Tom came lounging in, and stared at the two with a coolness not
particularly savouring of interest in anything but himself, and not much
of that at present.

‘I am asking Sissy a few questions, Tom,’ observed his sister.  ‘You have
no occasion to go away; but don’t interrupt us for a moment, Tom dear.’

‘Oh! very well!’ returned Tom.  ‘Only father has brought old Bounderby
home, and I want you to come into the drawing-room.  Because if you come,
there’s a good chance of old Bounderby’s asking me to dinner; and if you
don’t, there’s none.’

‘I’ll come directly.’

‘I’ll wait for you,’ said Tom, ‘to make sure.’

Sissy resumed in a lower voice.  ‘At last poor father said that he had
given no satisfaction again, and never did give any satisfaction now, and
that he was a shame and disgrace, and I should have done better without
him all along.  I said all the affectionate things to him that came into
my heart, and presently he was quiet and I sat down by him, and told him
all about the school and everything that had been said and done there.
When I had no more left to tell, he put his arms round my neck, and
kissed me a great many times.  Then he asked me to fetch some of the
stuff he used, for the little hurt he had had, and to get it at the best
place, which was at the other end of town from there; and then, after
kissing me again, he let me go.  When I had gone down-stairs, I turned
back that I might be a little bit more company to him yet, and looked in
at the door, and said, “Father dear, shall I take Merrylegs?”  Father
shook his head and said, “No, Sissy, no; take nothing that’s known to be
mine, my darling;” and I left him sitting by the fire.  Then the thought
must have come upon him, poor, poor father! of going away to try
something for my sake; for when I came back, he was gone.’

‘I say!  Look sharp for old Bounderby, Loo!’ Tom remonstrated.

‘There’s no more to tell, Miss Louisa.  I keep the nine oils ready for
him, and I know he will come back.  Every letter that I see in Mr.
Gradgrind’s hand takes my breath away and blinds my eyes, for I think it
comes from father, or from Mr. Sleary about father.  Mr. Sleary promised
to write as soon as ever father should be heard of, and I trust to him to
keep his word.’

‘Do look sharp for old Bounderby, Loo!’ said Tom, with an impatient
whistle.  ‘He’ll be off if you don’t look sharp!’

After this, whenever Sissy dropped a curtsey to Mr. Gradgrind in the
presence of his family, and said in a faltering way, ‘I beg your pardon,
sir, for being troublesome—but—have you had any letter yet about me?’
Louisa would suspend the occupation of the moment, whatever it was, and
look for the reply as earnestly as Sissy did.  And when Mr. Gradgrind
regularly answered, ‘No, Jupe, nothing of the sort,’ the trembling of
Sissy’s lip would be repeated in Louisa’s face, and her eyes would follow
Sissy with compassion to the door.  Mr. Gradgrind usually improved these
occasions by remarking, when she was gone, that if Jupe had been properly
trained from an early age she would have remonstrated to herself on sound
principles the baselessness of these fantastic hopes.  Yet it did seem
(though not to him, for he saw nothing of it) as if fantastic hope could
take as strong a hold as Fact.

This observation must be limited exclusively to his daughter.  As to Tom,
he was becoming that not unprecedented triumph of calculation which is
usually at work on number one.  As to Mrs. Gradgrind, if she said
anything on the subject, she would come a little way out of her wrappers,
like a feminine dormouse, and say:

‘Good gracious bless me, how my poor head is vexed and worried by that
girl Jupe’s so perseveringly asking, over and over again, about her
tiresome letters!  Upon my word and honour I seem to be fated, and
destined, and ordained, to live in the midst of things that I am never to
hear the last of.  It really is a most extraordinary circumstance that it
appears as if I never was to hear the last of anything!’

At about this point, Mr. Gradgrind’s eye would fall upon her; and under
the influence of that wintry piece of fact, she would become torpid
again.



CHAPTER X
STEPHEN BLACKPOOL


I ENTERTAIN a weak idea that the English people are as hard-worked as any
people upon whom the sun shines.  I acknowledge to this ridiculous
idiosyncrasy, as a reason why I would give them a little more play.

In the hardest working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications
of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing
airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow
courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into
existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s
purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling,
and pressing one another to death; in the last close nook of this great
exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want of air to make a
draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes,
as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be
expected to be born in it; among the multitude of Coketown, generically
called ‘the Hands,’—a race who would have found more favour with some
people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the
lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs—lived a certain
Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age.

Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life.  It is said that every
life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a
misadventure or mistake in Stephen’s case, whereby somebody else had
become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of the same
somebody else’s thorns in addition to his own.  He had known, to use his
words, a peck of trouble.  He was usually called Old Stephen, in a kind
of rough homage to the fact.

A rather stooping man, with a knitted brow, a pondering expression of
face, and a hard-looking head sufficiently capacious, on which his
iron-grey hair lay long and thin, Old Stephen might have passed for a
particularly intelligent man in his condition.  Yet he was not.  He took
no place among those remarkable ‘Hands,’ who, piecing together their
broken intervals of leisure through many years, had mastered difficult
sciences, and acquired a knowledge of most unlikely things.  He held no
station among the Hands who could make speeches and carry on debates.
Thousands of his compeers could talk much better than he, at any time.
He was a good power-loom weaver, and a man of perfect integrity.  What
more he was, or what else he had in him, if anything, let him show for
himself.

The lights in the great factories, which looked, when they were
illuminated, like Fairy palaces—or the travellers by express-train said
so—were all extinguished; and the bells had rung for knocking off for the
night, and had ceased again; and the Hands, men and women, boy and girl,
were clattering home.  Old Stephen was standing in the street, with the
old sensation upon him which the stoppage of the machinery always
produced—the sensation of its having worked and stopped in his own head.

‘Yet I don’t see Rachael, still!’ said he.

It was a wet night, and many groups of young women passed him, with their
shawls drawn over their bare heads and held close under their chins to
keep the rain out.  He knew Rachael well, for a glance at any one of
these groups was sufficient to show him that she was not there.  At last,
there were no more to come; and then he turned away, saying in a tone of
disappointment, ‘Why, then, ha’ missed her!’

But, he had not gone the length of three streets, when he saw another of
the shawled figures in advance of him, at which he looked so keenly that
perhaps its mere shadow indistinctly reflected on the wet pavement—if he
could have seen it without the figure itself moving along from lamp to
lamp, brightening and fading as it went—would have been enough to tell
him who was there.  Making his pace at once much quicker and much softer,
he darted on until he was very near this figure, then fell into his
former walk, and called ‘Rachael!’

She turned, being then in the brightness of a lamp; and raising her hood
a little, showed a quiet oval face, dark and rather delicate, irradiated
by a pair of very gentle eyes, and further set off by the perfect order
of her shining black hair.  It was not a face in its first bloom; she was
a woman five and thirty years of age.

‘Ah, lad!  ’Tis thou?’  When she had said this, with a smile which would
have been quite expressed, though nothing of her had been seen but her
pleasant eyes, she replaced her hood again, and they went on together.

‘I thought thou wast ahind me, Rachael?’

‘No.’

‘Early t’night, lass?’

‘’Times I’m a little early, Stephen! ’times a little late.  I’m never to
be counted on, going home.’

‘Nor going t’other way, neither, ’t seems to me, Rachael?’

‘No, Stephen.’

He looked at her with some disappointment in his face, but with a
respectful and patient conviction that she must be right in whatever she
did.  The expression was not lost upon her; she laid her hand lightly on
his arm a moment as if to thank him for it.

‘We are such true friends, lad, and such old friends, and getting to be
such old folk, now.’

‘No, Rachael, thou’rt as young as ever thou wast.’

‘One of us would be puzzled how to get old, Stephen, without ’t other
getting so too, both being alive,’ she answered, laughing; ‘but, anyways,
we’re such old friends, and t’ hide a word of honest truth fro’ one
another would be a sin and a pity.  ’Tis better not to walk too much
together.  ’Times, yes!  ’Twould be hard, indeed, if ’twas not to be at
all,’ she said, with a cheerfulness she sought to communicate to him.

‘’Tis hard, anyways, Rachael.’

‘Try to think not; and ’twill seem better.’

‘I’ve tried a long time, and ’ta’nt got better.  But thou’rt right; ’t
might mak fok talk, even of thee.  Thou hast been that to me, Rachael,
through so many year: thou hast done me so much good, and heartened of me
in that cheering way, that thy word is a law to me.  Ah, lass, and a
bright good law!  Better than some real ones.’

‘Never fret about them, Stephen,’ she answered quickly, and not without
an anxious glance at his face.  ‘Let the laws be.’

‘Yes,’ he said, with a slow nod or two.  ‘Let ’em be.  Let everything be.
Let all sorts alone.  ’Tis a muddle, and that’s aw.’

‘Always a muddle?’ said Rachael, with another gentle touch upon his arm,
as if to recall him out of the thoughtfulness, in which he was biting the
long ends of his loose neckerchief as he walked along.  The touch had its
instantaneous effect.  He let them fall, turned a smiling face upon her,
and said, as he broke into a good-humoured laugh, ‘Ay, Rachael, lass,
awlus a muddle.  That’s where I stick.  I come to the muddle many times
and agen, and I never get beyond it.’

They had walked some distance, and were near their own homes.  The
woman’s was the first reached.  It was in one of the many small streets
for which the favourite undertaker (who turned a handsome sum out of the
one poor ghastly pomp of the neighbourhood) kept a black ladder, in order
that those who had done their daily groping up and down the narrow stairs
might slide out of this working world by the windows.  She stopped at the
corner, and putting her hand in his, wished him good night.

‘Good night, dear lass; good night!’

She went, with her neat figure and her sober womanly step, down the dark
street, and he stood looking after her until she turned into one of the
small houses.  There was not a flutter of her coarse shawl, perhaps, but
had its interest in this man’s eyes; not a tone of her voice but had its
echo in his innermost heart.

When she was lost to his view, he pursued his homeward way, glancing up
sometimes at the sky, where the clouds were sailing fast and wildly.
But, they were broken now, and the rain had ceased, and the moon
shone,—looking down the high chimneys of Coketown on the deep furnaces
below, and casting Titanic shadows of the steam-engines at rest, upon the
walls where they were lodged.  The man seemed to have brightened with the
night, as he went on.

His home, in such another street as the first, saving that it was
narrower, was over a little shop.  How it came to pass that any people
found it worth their while to sell or buy the wretched little toys, mixed
up in its window with cheap newspapers and pork (there was a leg to be
raffled for to-morrow-night), matters not here.  He took his end of
candle from a shelf, lighted it at another end of candle on the counter,
without disturbing the mistress of the shop who was asleep in her little
room, and went upstairs into his lodging.

It was a room, not unacquainted with the black ladder under various
tenants; but as neat, at present, as such a room could be.  A few books
and writings were on an old bureau in a corner, the furniture was decent
and sufficient, and, though the atmosphere was tainted, the room was
clean.

Going to the hearth to set the candle down upon a round three-legged
table standing there, he stumbled against something.  As he recoiled,
looking down at it, it raised itself up into the form of a woman in a
sitting attitude.

‘Heaven’s mercy, woman!’ he cried, falling farther off from the figure.
‘Hast thou come back again!’

Such a woman!  A disabled, drunken creature, barely able to preserve her
sitting posture by steadying herself with one begrimed hand on the floor,
while the other was so purposeless in trying to push away her tangled
hair from her face, that it only blinded her the more with the dirt upon
it.  A creature so foul to look at, in her tatters, stains and splashes,
but so much fouler than that in her moral infamy, that it was a shameful
thing even to see her.

After an impatient oath or two, and some stupid clawing of herself with
the hand not necessary to her support, she got her hair away from her
eyes sufficiently to obtain a sight of him.  Then she sat swaying her
body to and fro, and making gestures with her unnerved arm, which seemed
intended as the accompaniment to a fit of laughter, though her face was
stolid and drowsy.

‘Eigh, lad?  What, yo’r there?’  Some hoarse sounds meant for this, came
mockingly out of her at last; and her head dropped forward on her breast.

‘Back agen?’ she screeched, after some minutes, as if he had that moment
said it.  ‘Yes!  And back agen.  Back agen ever and ever so often.  Back?
Yes, back.  Why not?’

Roused by the unmeaning violence with which she cried it out, she
scrambled up, and stood supporting herself with her shoulders against the
wall; dangling in one hand by the string, a dunghill-fragment of a
bonnet, and trying to look scornfully at him.

‘I’ll sell thee off again, and I’ll sell thee off again, and I’ll sell
thee off a score of times!’ she cried, with something between a furious
menace and an effort at a defiant dance.  ‘Come awa’ from th’ bed!’  He
was sitting on the side of it, with his face hidden in his hands.  ‘Come
awa! from ’t.  ’Tis mine, and I’ve a right to t’!’

As she staggered to it, he avoided her with a shudder, and passed—his
face still hidden—to the opposite end of the room.  She threw herself
upon the bed heavily, and soon was snoring hard.  He sunk into a chair,
and moved but once all that night.  It was to throw a covering over her;
as if his hands were not enough to hide her, even in the darkness.



CHAPTER XI
NO WAY OUT


THE Fairy palaces burst into illumination, before pale morning showed the
monstrous serpents of smoke trailing themselves over Coketown.  A
clattering of clogs upon the pavement; a rapid ringing of bells; and all
the melancholy mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day’s
monotony, were at their heavy exercise again.

Stephen bent over his loom, quiet, watchful, and steady.  A special
contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where Stephen worked,
to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of mechanism at which he
laboured.  Never fear, good people of an anxious turn of mind, that Art
will consign Nature to oblivion.  Set anywhere, side by side, the work of
GOD and the work of man; and the former, even though it be a troop of
Hands of very small account, will gain in dignity from the comparison.

So many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse Steam Power.
It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will
do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the
capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or
discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at
any single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet servants, with
the composed faces and the regulated actions.  There is no mystery in it;
there is an unfathomable mystery in the meanest of them, for
ever.—Supposing we were to reverse our arithmetic for material objects,
and to govern these awful unknown quantities by other means!

The day grew strong, and showed itself outside, even against the flaming
lights within.  The lights were turned out, and the work went on.  The
rain fell, and the Smoke-serpents, submissive to the curse of all that
tribe, trailed themselves upon the earth.  In the waste-yard outside, the
steam from the escape pipe, the litter of barrels and old iron, the
shining heaps of coals, the ashes everywhere, were shrouded in a veil of
mist and rain.

The work went on, until the noon-bell rang.  More clattering upon the
pavements.  The looms, and wheels, and Hands all out of gear for an hour.

Stephen came out of the hot mill into the damp wind and cold wet streets,
haggard and worn.  He turned from his own class and his own quarter,
taking nothing but a little bread as he walked along, towards the hill on
which his principal employer lived, in a red house with black outside
shutters, green inside blinds, a black street door, up two white steps,
BOUNDERBY (in letters very like himself) upon a brazen plate, and a round
brazen door-handle underneath it, like a brazen full-stop.

Mr. Bounderby was at his lunch.  So Stephen had expected.  Would his
servant say that one of the Hands begged leave to speak to him?  Message
in return, requiring name of such Hand.  Stephen Blackpool.  There was
nothing troublesome against Stephen Blackpool; yes, he might come in.

Stephen Blackpool in the parlour.  Mr. Bounderby (whom he just knew by
sight), at lunch on chop and sherry.  Mrs. Sparsit netting at the
fireside, in a side-saddle attitude, with one foot in a cotton stirrup.
It was a part, at once of Mrs. Sparsit’s dignity and service, not to
lunch.  She supervised the meal officially, but implied that in her own
stately person she considered lunch a weakness.

‘Now, Stephen,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘what’s the matter with _you_?’

Stephen made a bow.  Not a servile one—these Hands will never do that!
Lord bless you, sir, you’ll never catch them at that, if they have been
with you twenty years!—and, as a complimentary toilet for Mrs. Sparsit,
tucked his neckerchief ends into his waistcoat.

‘Now, you know,’ said Mr. Bounderby, taking some sherry, ‘we have never
had any difficulty with you, and you have never been one of the
unreasonable ones.  You don’t expect to be set up in a coach and six, and
to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon, as a good many
of ’em do!’  Mr. Bounderby always represented this to be the sole,
immediate, and direct object of any Hand who was not entirely satisfied;
‘and therefore I know already that you have not come here to make a
complaint.  Now, you know, I am certain of that, beforehand.’

‘No, sir, sure I ha’ not coom for nowt o’ th’ kind.’

Mr. Bounderby seemed agreeably surprised, notwithstanding his previous
strong conviction.  ‘Very well,’ he returned.  ‘You’re a steady Hand, and
I was not mistaken.  Now, let me hear what it’s all about.  As it’s not
that, let me hear what it is.  What have you got to say?  Out with it,
lad!’

Stephen happened to glance towards Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘I can go, Mr.
Bounderby, if you wish it,’ said that self-sacrificing lady, making a
feint of taking her foot out of the stirrup.

Mr. Bounderby stayed her, by holding a mouthful of chop in suspension
before swallowing it, and putting out his left hand.  Then, withdrawing
his hand and swallowing his mouthful of chop, he said to Stephen:

‘Now you know, this good lady is a born lady, a high lady.  You are not
to suppose because she keeps my house for me, that she hasn’t been very
high up the tree—ah, up at the top of the tree!  Now, if you have got
anything to say that can’t be said before a born lady, this lady will
leave the room.  If what you have got to say _can_ be said before a born
lady, this lady will stay where she is.’

‘Sir, I hope I never had nowt to say, not fitten for a born lady to year,
sin’ I were born mysen’,’ was the reply, accompanied with a slight flush.

‘Very well,’ said Mr. Bounderby, pushing away his plate, and leaning
back.  ‘Fire away!’

‘I ha’ coom,’ Stephen began, raising his eyes from the floor, after a
moment’s consideration, ‘to ask yo yor advice.  I need ’t overmuch.  I
were married on Eas’r Monday nineteen year sin, long and dree.  She were
a young lass—pretty enow—wi’ good accounts of herseln.  Well!  She went
bad—soon.  Not along of me.  Gonnows I were not a unkind husband to her.’

‘I have heard all this before,’ said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘She took to
drinking, left off working, sold the furniture, pawned the clothes, and
played old Gooseberry.’

‘I were patient wi’ her.’

(‘The more fool you, I think,’ said Mr. Bounderby, in confidence to his
wine-glass.)

‘I were very patient wi’ her.  I tried to wean her fra ’t ower and ower
agen.  I tried this, I tried that, I tried t’other.  I ha’ gone home,
many’s the time, and found all vanished as I had in the world, and her
without a sense left to bless herseln lying on bare ground.  I ha’ dun ’t
not once, not twice—twenty time!’

Every line in his face deepened as he said it, and put in its affecting
evidence of the suffering he had undergone.

‘From bad to worse, from worse to worsen.  She left me.  She disgraced
herseln everyways, bitter and bad.  She coom back, she coom back, she
coom back.  What could I do t’ hinder her?  I ha’ walked the streets
nights long, ere ever I’d go home.  I ha’ gone t’ th’ brigg, minded to
fling myseln ower, and ha’ no more on’t.  I ha’ bore that much, that I
were owd when I were young.’

Mrs. Sparsit, easily ambling along with her netting-needles, raised the
Coriolanian eyebrows and shook her head, as much as to say, ‘The great
know trouble as well as the small.  Please to turn your humble eye in My
direction.’

‘I ha’ paid her to keep awa’ fra’ me.  These five year I ha’ paid her.  I
ha’ gotten decent fewtrils about me agen.  I ha’ lived hard and sad, but
not ashamed and fearfo’ a’ the minnits o’ my life.  Last night, I went
home.  There she lay upon my har-stone!  There she is!’

In the strength of his misfortune, and the energy of his distress, he
fired for the moment like a proud man.  In another moment, he stood as he
had stood all the time—his usual stoop upon him; his pondering face
addressed to Mr. Bounderby, with a curious expression on it, half shrewd,
half perplexed, as if his mind were set upon unravelling something very
difficult; his hat held tight in his left hand, which rested on his hip;
his right arm, with a rugged propriety and force of action, very
earnestly emphasizing what he said: not least so when it always paused, a
little bent, but not withdrawn, as he paused.

‘I was acquainted with all this, you know,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘except
the last clause, long ago.  It’s a bad job; that’s what it is.  You had
better have been satisfied as you were, and not have got married.
However, it’s too late to say that.’

‘Was it an unequal marriage, sir, in point of years?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit.

‘You hear what this lady asks.  Was it an unequal marriage in point of
years, this unlucky job of yours?’ said Mr. Bounderby.

‘Not e’en so.  I were one-and-twenty myseln; she were twenty nighbut.’

‘Indeed, sir?’ said Mrs. Sparsit to her Chief, with great placidity.  ‘I
inferred, from its being so miserable a marriage, that it was probably an
unequal one in point of years.’

Mr. Bounderby looked very hard at the good lady in a side-long way that
had an odd sheepishness about it.  He fortified himself with a little
more sherry.

‘Well?  Why don’t you go on?’ he then asked, turning rather irritably on
Stephen Blackpool.

‘I ha’ coom to ask yo, sir, how I am to be ridded o’ this woman.’
Stephen infused a yet deeper gravity into the mixed expression of his
attentive face.  Mrs. Sparsit uttered a gentle ejaculation, as having
received a moral shock.

‘What do you mean?’ said Bounderby, getting up to lean his back against
the chimney-piece.  ‘What are you talking about?  You took her for better
for worse.’

‘I mun’ be ridden o’ her.  I cannot bear ’t nommore.  I ha’ lived under
’t so long, for that I ha’ had’n the pity and comforting words o’ th’
best lass living or dead.  Haply, but for her, I should ha’ gone
battering mad.’

‘He wishes to be free, to marry the female of whom he speaks, I fear,
sir,’ observed Mrs. Sparsit in an undertone, and much dejected by the
immorality of the people.

‘I do.  The lady says what’s right.  I do.  I were a coming to ’t.  I ha’
read i’ th’ papers that great folk (fair faw ’em a’!  I wishes ’em no
hurt!) are not bonded together for better for worst so fast, but that
they can be set free fro’ _their_ misfortnet marriages, an’ marry ower
agen.  When they dunnot agree, for that their tempers is ill-sorted, they
has rooms o’ one kind an’ another in their houses, above a bit, and they
can live asunders.  We fok ha’ only one room, and we can’t.  When that
won’t do, they ha’ gowd an’ other cash, an’ they can say “This for yo’
an’ that for me,” an’ they can go their separate ways.  We can’t.  Spite
o’ all that, they can be set free for smaller wrongs than mine.  So, I
mun be ridden o’ this woman, and I want t’ know how?’

‘No how,’ returned Mr. Bounderby.

‘If I do her any hurt, sir, there’s a law to punish me?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘If I flee from her, there’s a law to punish me?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘If I marry t’oother dear lass, there’s a law to punish me?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘If I was to live wi’ her an’ not marry her—saying such a thing could be,
which it never could or would, an’ her so good—there’s a law to punish
me, in every innocent child belonging to me?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘Now, a’ God’s name,’ said Stephen Blackpool, ‘show me the law to help
me!’

‘Hem!  There’s a sanctity in this relation of life,’ said Mr. Bounderby,
‘and—and—it must be kept up.’

‘No no, dunnot say that, sir.  ’Tan’t kep’ up that way.  Not that way.
’Tis kep’ down that way.  I’m a weaver, I were in a fact’ry when a chilt,
but I ha’ gotten een to see wi’ and eern to year wi’.  I read in th’
papers every ’Sizes, every Sessions—and you read too—I know it!—with
dismay—how th’ supposed unpossibility o’ ever getting unchained from one
another, at any price, on any terms, brings blood upon this land, and
brings many common married fok to battle, murder, and sudden death.  Let
us ha’ this, right understood.  Mine’s a grievous case, an’ I want—if yo
will be so good—t’ know the law that helps me.’

‘Now, I tell you what!’ said Mr. Bounderby, putting his hands in his
pockets.  ‘There _is_ such a law.’

Stephen, subsiding into his quiet manner, and never wandering in his
attention, gave a nod.

‘But it’s not for you at all.  It costs money.  It costs a mint of
money.’

‘How much might that be?’ Stephen calmly asked.

‘Why, you’d have to go to Doctors’ Commons with a suit, and you’d have to
go to a court of Common Law with a suit, and you’d have to go to the
House of Lords with a suit, and you’d have to get an Act of Parliament to
enable you to marry again, and it would cost you (if it was a case of
very plain sailing), I suppose from a thousand to fifteen hundred pound,’
said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Perhaps twice the money.’

‘There’s no other law?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Why then, sir,’ said Stephen, turning white, and motioning with that
right hand of his, as if he gave everything to the four winds, ‘’_tis_ a
muddle.  ’Tis just a muddle a’toogether, an’ the sooner I am dead, the
better.’

(Mrs. Sparsit again dejected by the impiety of the people.)

‘Pooh, pooh!  Don’t you talk nonsense, my good fellow,’ said Mr.
Bounderby, ‘about things you don’t understand; and don’t you call the
Institutions of your country a muddle, or you’ll get yourself into a real
muddle one of these fine mornings.  The institutions of your country are
not your piece-work, and the only thing you have got to do, is, to mind
your piece-work.  You didn’t take your wife for fast and for loose; but
for better for worse.  If she has turned out worse—why, all we have got
to say is, she might have turned out better.’

‘’Tis a muddle,’ said Stephen, shaking his head as he moved to the door.
‘’Tis a’ a muddle!’

‘Now, I’ll tell you what!’ Mr. Bounderby resumed, as a valedictory
address.  ‘With what I shall call your unhallowed opinions, you have been
quite shocking this lady: who, as I have already told you, is a born
lady, and who, as I have not already told you, has had her own marriage
misfortunes to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds—tens of Thousands
of Pounds!’ (he repeated it with great relish).  ‘Now, you have always
been a steady Hand hitherto; but my opinion is, and so I tell you
plainly, that you are turning into the wrong road.  You have been
listening to some mischievous stranger or other—they’re always about—and
the best thing you can do is, to come out of that.  Now you know;’ here
his countenance expressed marvellous acuteness; ‘I can see as far into a
grindstone as another man; farther than a good many, perhaps, because I
had my nose well kept to it when I was young.  I see traces of the turtle
soup, and venison, and gold spoon in this.  Yes, I do!’ cried Mr.
Bounderby, shaking his head with obstinate cunning.  ‘By the Lord Harry,
I do!’

With a very different shake of the head and deep sigh, Stephen said,
‘Thank you, sir, I wish you good day.’  So he left Mr. Bounderby swelling
at his own portrait on the wall, as if he were going to explode himself
into it; and Mrs. Sparsit still ambling on with her foot in her stirrup,
looking quite cast down by the popular vices.



CHAPTER XII
THE OLD WOMAN


OLD STEPHEN descended the two white steps, shutting the black door with
the brazen door-plate, by the aid of the brazen full-stop, to which he
gave a parting polish with the sleeve of his coat, observing that his hot
hand clouded it.  He crossed the street with his eyes bent upon the
ground, and thus was walking sorrowfully away, when he felt a touch upon
his arm.

It was not the touch he needed most at such a moment—the touch that could
calm the wild waters of his soul, as the uplifted hand of the sublimest
love and patience could abate the raging of the sea—yet it was a woman’s
hand too.  It was an old woman, tall and shapely still, though withered
by time, on whom his eyes fell when he stopped and turned.  She was very
cleanly and plainly dressed, had country mud upon her shoes, and was
newly come from a journey.  The flutter of her manner, in the unwonted
noise of the streets; the spare shawl, carried unfolded on her arm; the
heavy umbrella, and little basket; the loose long-fingered gloves, to
which her hands were unused; all bespoke an old woman from the country,
in her plain holiday clothes, come into Coketown on an expedition of rare
occurrence.  Remarking this at a glance, with the quick observation of
his class, Stephen Blackpool bent his attentive face—his face, which,
like the faces of many of his order, by dint of long working with eyes
and hands in the midst of a prodigious noise, had acquired the
concentrated look with which we are familiar in the countenances of the
deaf—the better to hear what she asked him.

‘Pray, sir,’ said the old woman, ‘didn’t I see you come out of that
gentleman’s house?’ pointing back to Mr. Bounderby’s.  ‘I believe it was
you, unless I have had the bad luck to mistake the person in following?’

‘Yes, missus,’ returned Stephen, ‘it were me.’

‘Have you—you’ll excuse an old woman’s curiosity—have you seen the
gentleman?’

‘Yes, missus.’

‘And how did he look, sir?  Was he portly, bold, outspoken, and hearty?’
As she straightened her own figure, and held up her head in adapting her
action to her words, the idea crossed Stephen that he had seen this old
woman before, and had not quite liked her.

‘O yes,’ he returned, observing her more attentively, ‘he were all that.’

‘And healthy,’ said the old woman, ‘as the fresh wind?’

‘Yes,’ returned Stephen.  ‘He were ett’n and drinking—as large and as
loud as a Hummobee.’

‘Thank you!’ said the old woman, with infinite content.  ‘Thank you!’

He certainly never had seen this old woman before.  Yet there was a vague
remembrance in his mind, as if he had more than once dreamed of some old
woman like her.

She walked along at his side, and, gently accommodating himself to her
humour, he said Coketown was a busy place, was it not?  To which she
answered ‘Eigh sure!  Dreadful busy!’  Then he said, she came from the
country, he saw?  To which she answered in the affirmative.

‘By Parliamentary, this morning.  I came forty mile by Parliamentary this
morning, and I’m going back the same forty mile this afternoon.  I walked
nine mile to the station this morning, and if I find nobody on the road
to give me a lift, I shall walk the nine mile back to-night.  That’s
pretty well, sir, at my age!’ said the chatty old woman, her eye
brightening with exultation.

‘’Deed ’tis.  Don’t do’t too often, missus.’

‘No, no.  Once a year,’ she answered, shaking her head.  ‘I spend my
savings so, once every year.  I come regular, to tramp about the streets,
and see the gentlemen.’

‘Only to see ’em?’ returned Stephen.

‘That’s enough for me,’ she replied, with great earnestness and interest
of manner.  ‘I ask no more!  I have been standing about, on this side of
the way, to see that gentleman,’ turning her head back towards Mr.
Bounderby’s again, ‘come out.  But, he’s late this year, and I have not
seen him.  You came out instead.  Now, if I am obliged to go back without
a glimpse of him—I only want a glimpse—well!  I have seen you, and you
have seen him, and I must make that do.’  Saying this, she looked at
Stephen as if to fix his features in her mind, and her eye was not so
bright as it had been.

With a large allowance for difference of tastes, and with all submission
to the patricians of Coketown, this seemed so extraordinary a source of
interest to take so much trouble about, that it perplexed him.  But they
were passing the church now, and as his eye caught the clock, he
quickened his pace.

He was going to his work? the old woman said, quickening hers, too, quite
easily.  Yes, time was nearly out.  On his telling her where he worked,
the old woman became a more singular old woman than before.

‘An’t you happy?’ she asked him.

‘Why—there’s awmost nobbody but has their troubles, missus.’  He answered
evasively, because the old woman appeared to take it for granted that he
would be very happy indeed, and he had not the heart to disappoint her.
He knew that there was trouble enough in the world; and if the old woman
had lived so long, and could count upon his having so little, why so much
the better for her, and none the worse for him.

‘Ay, ay!  You have your troubles at home, you mean?’ she said.

‘Times.  Just now and then,’ he answered, slightly.

‘But, working under such a gentleman, they don’t follow you to the
Factory?’

No, no; they didn’t follow him there, said Stephen.  All correct there.
Everything accordant there.  (He did not go so far as to say, for her
pleasure, that there was a sort of Divine Right there; but, I have heard
claims almost as magnificent of late years.)

They were now in the black by-road near the place, and the Hands were
crowding in.  The bell was ringing, and the Serpent was a Serpent of many
coils, and the Elephant was getting ready.  The strange old woman was
delighted with the very bell.  It was the beautifullest bell she had ever
heard, she said, and sounded grand!

She asked him, when he stopped good-naturedly to shake hands with her
before going in, how long he had worked there?

‘A dozen year,’ he told her.

‘I must kiss the hand,’ said she, ‘that has worked in this fine factory
for a dozen year!’  And she lifted it, though he would have prevented
her, and put it to her lips.  What harmony, besides her age and her
simplicity, surrounded her, he did not know, but even in this fantastic
action there was a something neither out of time nor place: a something
which it seemed as if nobody else could have made as serious, or done
with such a natural and touching air.

He had been at his loom full half an hour, thinking about this old woman,
when, having occasion to move round the loom for its adjustment, he
glanced through a window which was in his corner, and saw her still
looking up at the pile of building, lost in admiration.  Heedless of the
smoke and mud and wet, and of her two long journeys, she was gazing at
it, as if the heavy thrum that issued from its many stories were proud
music to her.

She was gone by and by, and the day went after her, and the lights sprung
up again, and the Express whirled in full sight of the Fairy Palace over
the arches near: little felt amid the jarring of the machinery, and
scarcely heard above its crash and rattle.  Long before then his thoughts
had gone back to the dreary room above the little shop, and to the
shameful figure heavy on the bed, but heavier on his heart.

Machinery slackened; throbbing feebly like a fainting pulse; stopped.
The bell again; the glare of light and heat dispelled; the factories,
looming heavy in the black wet night—their tall chimneys rising up into
the air like competing Towers of Babel.

He had spoken to Rachael only last night, it was true, and had walked
with her a little way; but he had his new misfortune on him, in which no
one else could give him a moment’s relief, and, for the sake of it, and
because he knew himself to want that softening of his anger which no
voice but hers could effect, he felt he might so far disregard what she
had said as to wait for her again.  He waited, but she had eluded him.
She was gone.  On no other night in the year could he so ill have spared
her patient face.

O!  Better to have no home in which to lay his head, than to have a home
and dread to go to it, through such a cause.  He ate and drank, for he
was exhausted—but he little knew or cared what; and he wandered about in
the chill rain, thinking and thinking, and brooding and brooding.

No word of a new marriage had ever passed between them; but Rachael had
taken great pity on him years ago, and to her alone he had opened his
closed heart all this time, on the subject of his miseries; and he knew
very well that if he were free to ask her, she would take him.  He
thought of the home he might at that moment have been seeking with
pleasure and pride; of the different man he might have been that night;
of the lightness then in his now heavy-laden breast; of the then restored
honour, self-respect, and tranquillity all torn to pieces.  He thought of
the waste of the best part of his life, of the change it made in his
character for the worse every day, of the dreadful nature of his
existence, bound hand and foot, to a dead woman, and tormented by a demon
in her shape.  He thought of Rachael, how young when they were first
brought together in these circumstances, how mature now, how soon to grow
old.  He thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how
many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she
had contentedly pursued her own lone quiet path—for him—and how he had
sometimes seen a shade of melancholy on her blessed face, that smote him
with remorse and despair.  He set the picture of her up, beside the
infamous image of last night; and thought, Could it be, that the whole
earthly course of one so gentle, good, and self-denying, was subjugate to
such a wretch as that!

Filled with these thoughts—so filled that he had an unwholesome sense of
growing larger, of being placed in some new and diseased relation towards
the objects among which he passed, of seeing the iris round every misty
light turn red—he went home for shelter.



CHAPTER XIII
RACHAEL


A CANDLE faintly burned in the window, to which the black ladder had
often been raised for the sliding away of all that was most precious in
this world to a striving wife and a brood of hungry babies; and Stephen
added to his other thoughts the stern reflection, that of all the
casualties of this existence upon earth, not one was dealt out with so
unequal a hand as Death.  The inequality of Birth was nothing to it.
For, say that the child of a King and the child of a Weaver were born
to-night in the same moment, what was that disparity, to the death of any
human creature who was serviceable to, or beloved by, another, while this
abandoned woman lived on!

From the outside of his home he gloomily passed to the inside, with
suspended breath and with a slow footstep.  He went up to his door,
opened it, and so into the room.

Quiet and peace were there.  Rachael was there, sitting by the bed.

She turned her head, and the light of her face shone in upon the midnight
of his mind.  She sat by the bed, watching and tending his wife.  That is
to say, he saw that some one lay there, and he knew too well it must be
she; but Rachael’s hands had put a curtain up, so that she was screened
from his eyes.  Her disgraceful garments were removed, and some of
Rachael’s were in the room.  Everything was in its place and order as he
had always kept it, the little fire was newly trimmed, and the hearth was
freshly swept.  It appeared to him that he saw all this in Rachael’s
face, and looked at nothing besides.  While looking at it, it was shut
out from his view by the softened tears that filled his eyes; but not
before he had seen how earnestly she looked at him, and how her own eyes
were filled too.

She turned again towards the bed, and satisfying herself that all was
quiet there, spoke in a low, calm, cheerful voice.

‘I am glad you have come at last, Stephen.  You are very late.’

‘I ha’ been walking up an’ down.’

‘I thought so.  But ’tis too bad a night for that.  The rain falls very
heavy, and the wind has risen.’

The wind?  True.  It was blowing hard.  Hark to the thundering in the
chimney, and the surging noise!  To have been out in such a wind, and not
to have known it was blowing!

‘I have been here once before, to-day, Stephen.  Landlady came round for
me at dinner-time.  There was some one here that needed looking to, she
said.  And ‘deed she was right.  All wandering and lost, Stephen.
Wounded too, and bruised.’

He slowly moved to a chair and sat down, drooping his head before her.

‘I came to do what little I could, Stephen; first, for that she worked
with me when we were girls both, and for that you courted her and married
her when I was her friend—’

He laid his furrowed forehead on his hand, with a low groan.

‘And next, for that I know your heart, and am right sure and certain that
’tis far too merciful to let her die, or even so much as suffer, for want
of aid.  Thou knowest who said, “Let him who is without sin among you
cast the first stone at her!”  There have been plenty to do that.  Thou
art not the man to cast the last stone, Stephen, when she is brought so
low.’

‘O Rachael, Rachael!’

‘Thou hast been a cruel sufferer, Heaven reward thee!’ she said, in
compassionate accents.  ‘I am thy poor friend, with all my heart and
mind.’

             [Picture: Stephen and Rachael in the sick room]

The wounds of which she had spoken, seemed to be about the neck of the
self-made outcast.  She dressed them now, still without showing her.  She
steeped a piece of linen in a basin, into which she poured some liquid
from a bottle, and laid it with a gentle hand upon the sore.  The
three-legged table had been drawn close to the bedside, and on it there
were two bottles.  This was one.

It was not so far off, but that Stephen, following her hands with his
eyes, could read what was printed on it in large letters.  He turned of a
deadly hue, and a sudden horror seemed to fall upon him.

‘I will stay here, Stephen,’ said Rachael, quietly resuming her seat,
‘till the bells go Three.  ’Tis to be done again at three, and then she
may be left till morning.’

‘But thy rest agen to-morrow’s work, my dear.’

‘I slept sound last night.  I can wake many nights, when I am put to it.
’Tis thou who art in need of rest—so white and tired.  Try to sleep in
the chair there, while I watch.  Thou hadst no sleep last night, I can
well believe.  To-morrow’s work is far harder for thee than for me.’

He heard the thundering and surging out of doors, and it seemed to him as
if his late angry mood were going about trying to get at him.  She had
cast it out; she would keep it out; he trusted to her to defend him from
himself.

‘She don’t know me, Stephen; she just drowsily mutters and stares.  I
have spoken to her times and again, but she don’t notice!  ’Tis as well
so.  When she comes to her right mind once more, I shall have done what I
can, and she never the wiser.’

‘How long, Rachael, is ’t looked for, that she’ll be so?’

‘Doctor said she would haply come to her mind to-morrow.’

His eyes fell again on the bottle, and a tremble passed over him, causing
him to shiver in every limb.  She thought he was chilled with the wet.
‘No,’ he said, ‘it was not that.  He had had a fright.’

‘A fright?’

‘Ay, ay! coming in.  When I were walking.  When I were thinking.  When
I—’  It seized him again; and he stood up, holding by the mantel-shelf,
as he pressed his dank cold hair down with a hand that shook as if it
were palsied.

‘Stephen!’

She was coming to him, but he stretched out his arm to stop her.

‘No!  Don’t, please; don’t.  Let me see thee setten by the bed.  Let me
see thee, a’ so good, and so forgiving.  Let me see thee as I see thee
when I coom in.  I can never see thee better than so.  Never, never,
never!’

He had a violent fit of trembling, and then sunk into his chair.  After a
time he controlled himself, and, resting with an elbow on one knee, and
his head upon that hand, could look towards Rachael.  Seen across the dim
candle with his moistened eyes, she looked as if she had a glory shining
round her head.  He could have believed she had.  He did believe it, as
the noise without shook the window, rattled at the door below, and went
about the house clamouring and lamenting.

‘When she gets better, Stephen, ’tis to be hoped she’ll leave thee to
thyself again, and do thee no more hurt.  Anyways we will hope so now.
And now I shall keep silence, for I want thee to sleep.’

He closed his eyes, more to please her than to rest his weary head; but,
by slow degrees as he listened to the great noise of the wind, he ceased
to hear it, or it changed into the working of his loom, or even into the
voices of the day (his own included) saying what had been really said.
Even this imperfect consciousness faded away at last, and he dreamed a
long, troubled dream.

He thought that he, and some one on whom his heart had long been set—but
she was not Rachael, and that surprised him, even in the midst of his
imaginary happiness—stood in the church being married.  While the
ceremony was performing, and while he recognized among the witnesses some
whom he knew to be living, and many whom he knew to be dead, darkness
came on, succeeded by the shining of a tremendous light.  It broke from
one line in the table of commandments at the altar, and illuminated the
building with the words.  They were sounded through the church, too, as
if there were voices in the fiery letters.  Upon this, the whole
appearance before him and around him changed, and nothing was left as it
had been, but himself and the clergyman.  They stood in the daylight
before a crowd so vast, that if all the people in the world could have
been brought together into one space, they could not have looked, he
thought, more numerous; and they all abhorred him, and there was not one
pitying or friendly eye among the millions that were fastened on his
face.  He stood on a raised stage, under his own loom; and, looking up at
the shape the loom took, and hearing the burial service distinctly read,
he knew that he was there to suffer death.  In an instant what he stood
on fell below him, and he was gone.

—Out of what mystery he came back to his usual life, and to places that
he knew, he was unable to consider; but he was back in those places by
some means, and with this condemnation upon him, that he was never, in
this world or the next, through all the unimaginable ages of eternity, to
look on Rachael’s face or hear her voice.  Wandering to and fro,
unceasingly, without hope, and in search of he knew not what (he only
knew that he was doomed to seek it), he was the subject of a nameless,
horrible dread, a mortal fear of one particular shape which everything
took.  Whatsoever he looked at, grew into that form sooner or later.  The
object of his miserable existence was to prevent its recognition by any
one among the various people he encountered.  Hopeless labour!  If he led
them out of rooms where it was, if he shut up drawers and closets where
it stood, if he drew the curious from places where he knew it to be
secreted, and got them out into the streets, the very chimneys of the
mills assumed that shape, and round them was the printed word.

The wind was blowing again, the rain was beating on the house-tops, and
the larger spaces through which he had strayed contracted to the four
walls of his room.  Saving that the fire had died out, it was as his eyes
had closed upon it.  Rachael seemed to have fallen into a doze, in the
chair by the bed.  She sat wrapped in her shawl, perfectly still.  The
table stood in the same place, close by the bedside, and on it, in its
real proportions and appearance, was the shape so often repeated.

He thought he saw the curtain move.  He looked again, and he was sure it
moved.  He saw a hand come forth and grope about a little.  Then the
curtain moved more perceptibly, and the woman in the bed put it back, and
sat up.

With her woful eyes, so haggard and wild, so heavy and large, she looked
all round the room, and passed the corner where he slept in his chair.
Her eyes returned to that corner, and she put her hand over them as a
shade, while she looked into it.  Again they went all round the room,
scarcely heeding Rachael if at all, and returned to that corner.  He
thought, as she once more shaded them—not so much looking at him, as
looking for him with a brutish instinct that he was there—that no single
trace was left in those debauched features, or in the mind that went
along with them, of the woman he had married eighteen years before.  But
that he had seen her come to this by inches, he never could have believed
her to be the same.

All this time, as if a spell were on him, he was motionless and
powerless, except to watch her.

Stupidly dozing, or communing with her incapable self about nothing, she
sat for a little while with her hands at her ears, and her head resting
on them.  Presently, she resumed her staring round the room.  And now,
for the first time, her eyes stopped at the table with the bottles on it.

Straightway she turned her eyes back to his corner, with the defiance of
last night, and moving very cautiously and softly, stretched out her
greedy hand.  She drew a mug into the bed, and sat for a while
considering which of the two bottles she should choose.  Finally, she
laid her insensate grasp upon the bottle that had swift and certain death
in it, and, before his eyes, pulled out the cork with her teeth.

Dream or reality, he had no voice, nor had he power to stir.  If this be
real, and her allotted time be not yet come, wake, Rachael, wake!

She thought of that, too.  She looked at Rachael, and very slowly, very
cautiously, poured out the contents.  The draught was at her lips.  A
moment and she would be past all help, let the whole world wake and come
about her with its utmost power.  But in that moment Rachael started up
with a suppressed cry.  The creature struggled, struck her, seized her by
the hair; but Rachael had the cup.

Stephen broke out of his chair.  ‘Rachael, am I wakin’ or dreamin’ this
dreadfo’ night?’

‘’Tis all well, Stephen.  I have been asleep, myself.  ’Tis near three.
Hush!  I hear the bells.’

The wind brought the sounds of the church clock to the window.  They
listened, and it struck three.  Stephen looked at her, saw how pale she
was, noted the disorder of her hair, and the red marks of fingers on her
forehead, and felt assured that his senses of sight and hearing had been
awake.  She held the cup in her hand even now.

‘I thought it must be near three,’ she said, calmly pouring from the cup
into the basin, and steeping the linen as before.  ‘I am thankful I
stayed!  ’Tis done now, when I have put this on.  There!  And now she’s
quiet again.  The few drops in the basin I’ll pour away, for ’tis bad
stuff to leave about, though ever so little of it.’  As she spoke, she
drained the basin into the ashes of the fire, and broke the bottle on the
hearth.

She had nothing to do, then, but to cover herself with her shawl before
going out into the wind and rain.

‘Thou’lt let me walk wi’ thee at this hour, Rachael?’

‘No, Stephen.  ’Tis but a minute, and I’m home.’

‘Thou’rt not fearfo’;’ he said it in a low voice, as they went out at the
door; ‘to leave me alone wi’ her!’

As she looked at him, saying, ‘Stephen?’ he went down on his knee before
her, on the poor mean stairs, and put an end of her shawl to his lips.

‘Thou art an Angel.  Bless thee, bless thee!’

‘I am, as I have told thee, Stephen, thy poor friend.  Angels are not
like me.  Between them, and a working woman fu’ of faults, there is a
deep gulf set.  My little sister is among them, but she is changed.’

She raised her eyes for a moment as she said the words; and then they
fell again, in all their gentleness and mildness, on his face.

‘Thou changest me from bad to good.  Thou mak’st me humbly wishfo’ to be
more like thee, and fearfo’ to lose thee when this life is ower, and a’
the muddle cleared awa’.  Thou’rt an Angel; it may be, thou hast saved my
soul alive!’

She looked at him, on his knee at her feet, with her shawl still in his
hand, and the reproof on her lips died away when she saw the working of
his face.

‘I coom home desp’rate.  I coom home wi’out a hope, and mad wi’ thinking
that when I said a word o’ complaint I was reckoned a unreasonable Hand.
I told thee I had had a fright.  It were the Poison-bottle on table.  I
never hurt a livin’ creetur; but happenin’ so suddenly upon ’t, I thowt,
“How can _I_ say what I might ha’ done to myseln, or her, or both!”’

She put her two hands on his mouth, with a face of terror, to stop him
from saying more.  He caught them in his unoccupied hand, and holding
them, and still clasping the border of her shawl, said hurriedly:

‘But I see thee, Rachael, setten by the bed.  I ha’ seen thee, aw this
night.  In my troublous sleep I ha’ known thee still to be there.
Evermore I will see thee there.  I nevermore will see her or think o’
her, but thou shalt be beside her.  I nevermore will see or think o’
anything that angers me, but thou, so much better than me, shalt be by
th’ side on’t.  And so I will try t’ look t’ th’ time, and so I will try
t’ trust t’ th’ time, when thou and me at last shall walk together far
awa’, beyond the deep gulf, in th’ country where thy little sister is.’

He kissed the border of her shawl again, and let her go.  She bade him
good night in a broken voice, and went out into the street.

The wind blew from the quarter where the day would soon appear, and still
blew strongly.  It had cleared the sky before it, and the rain had spent
itself or travelled elsewhere, and the stars were bright.  He stood
bare-headed in the road, watching her quick disappearance.  As the
shining stars were to the heavy candle in the window, so was Rachael, in
the rugged fancy of this man, to the common experiences of his life.



CHAPTER XIV
THE GREAT MANUFACTURER


TIME went on in Coketown like its own machinery: so much material wrought
up, so much fuel consumed, so many powers worn out, so much money made.
But, less inexorable than iron, steel, and brass, it brought its varying
seasons even into that wilderness of smoke and brick, and made the only
stand that ever _was_ made in the place against its direful uniformity.

‘Louisa is becoming,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘almost a young woman.’

Time, with his innumerable horse-power, worked away, not minding what
anybody said, and presently turned out young Thomas a foot taller than
when his father had last taken particular notice of him.

‘Thomas is becoming,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘almost a young man.’

Time passed Thomas on in the mill, while his father was thinking about
it, and there he stood in a long-tailed coat and a stiff shirt-collar.

‘Really,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘the period has arrived when Thomas ought
to go to Bounderby.’

Time, sticking to him, passed him on into Bounderby’s Bank, made him an
inmate of Bounderby’s house, necessitated the purchase of his first
razor, and exercised him diligently in his calculations relative to
number one.

The same great manufacturer, always with an immense variety of work on
hand, in every stage of development, passed Sissy onward in his mill, and
worked her up into a very pretty article indeed.

‘I fear, Jupe,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘that your continuance at the school
any longer would be useless.’

‘I am afraid it would, sir,’ Sissy answered with a curtsey.

‘I cannot disguise from you, Jupe,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, knitting his
brow, ‘that the result of your probation there has disappointed me; has
greatly disappointed me.  You have not acquired, under Mr. and Mrs.
M’Choakumchild, anything like that amount of exact knowledge which I
looked for.  You are extremely deficient in your facts.  Your
acquaintance with figures is very limited.  You are altogether backward,
and below the mark.’

‘I am sorry, sir,’ she returned; ‘but I know it is quite true.  Yet I
have tried hard, sir.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘yes, I believe you have tried hard; I have
observed you, and I can find no fault in that respect.’

‘Thank you, sir.  I have thought sometimes;’ Sissy very timid here; ‘that
perhaps I tried to learn too much, and that if I had asked to be allowed
to try a little less, I might have—’

‘No, Jupe, no,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, shaking his head in his profoundest
and most eminently practical way.  ‘No.  The course you pursued, you
pursued according to the system—the system—and there is no more to be
said about it.  I can only suppose that the circumstances of your early
life were too unfavourable to the development of your reasoning powers,
and that we began too late.  Still, as I have said already, I am
disappointed.’

‘I wish I could have made a better acknowledgment, sir, of your kindness
to a poor forlorn girl who had no claim upon you, and of your protection
of her.’

‘Don’t shed tears,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Don’t shed tears.  I don’t
complain of you.  You are an affectionate, earnest, good young
woman—and—and we must make that do.’

‘Thank you, sir, very much,’ said Sissy, with a grateful curtsey.

‘You are useful to Mrs. Gradgrind, and (in a generally pervading way) you
are serviceable in the family also; so I understand from Miss Louisa,
and, indeed, so I have observed myself.  I therefore hope,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind, ‘that you can make yourself happy in those relations.’

‘I should have nothing to wish, sir, if—’

‘I understand you,’ said Mr. Gradgrind; ‘you still refer to your father.
I have heard from Miss Louisa that you still preserve that bottle.  Well!
If your training in the science of arriving at exact results had been
more successful, you would have been wiser on these points.  I will say
no more.’

He really liked Sissy too well to have a contempt for her; otherwise he
held her calculating powers in such very slight estimation that he must
have fallen upon that conclusion.  Somehow or other, he had become
possessed by an idea that there was something in this girl which could
hardly be set forth in a tabular form.  Her capacity of definition might
be easily stated at a very low figure, her mathematical knowledge at
nothing; yet he was not sure that if he had been required, for example,
to tick her off into columns in a parliamentary return, he would have
quite known how to divide her.

In some stages of his manufacture of the human fabric, the processes of
Time are very rapid.  Young Thomas and Sissy being both at such a stage
of their working up, these changes were effected in a year or two; while
Mr. Gradgrind himself seemed stationary in his course, and underwent no
alteration.

Except one, which was apart from his necessary progress through the mill.
Time hustled him into a little noisy and rather dirty machinery, in a
by-comer, and made him Member of Parliament for Coketown: one of the
respected members for ounce weights and measures, one of the
representatives of the multiplication table, one of the deaf honourable
gentlemen, dumb honourable gentlemen, blind honourable gentlemen, lame
honourable gentlemen, dead honourable gentlemen, to every other
consideration.  Else wherefore live we in a Christian land, eighteen
hundred and odd years after our Master?

All this while, Louisa had been passing on, so quiet and reserved, and so
much given to watching the bright ashes at twilight as they fell into the
grate, and became extinct, that from the period when her father had said
she was almost a young woman—which seemed but yesterday—she had scarcely
attracted his notice again, when he found her quite a young woman.

‘Quite a young woman,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, musing.  ‘Dear me!’

Soon after this discovery, he became more thoughtful than usual for
several days, and seemed much engrossed by one subject.  On a certain
night, when he was going out, and Louisa came to bid him good-bye before
his departure—as he was not to be home until late and she would not see
him again until the morning—he held her in his arms, looking at her in
his kindest manner, and said:

‘My dear Louisa, you are a woman!’

She answered with the old, quick, searching look of the night when she
was found at the Circus; then cast down her eyes.  ‘Yes, father.’

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘I must speak with you alone and
seriously.  Come to me in my room after breakfast to-morrow, will you?’

‘Yes, father.’

‘Your hands are rather cold, Louisa.  Are you not well?’

‘Quite well, father.’

‘And cheerful?’

She looked at him again, and smiled in her peculiar manner.  ‘I am as
cheerful, father, as I usually am, or usually have been.’

‘That’s well,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  So, he kissed her and went away; and
Louisa returned to the serene apartment of the hair-cutting character,
and leaning her elbow on her hand, looked again at the short-lived sparks
that so soon subsided into ashes.

‘Are you there, Loo?’ said her brother, looking in at the door.  He was
quite a young gentleman of pleasure now, and not quite a prepossessing
one.

‘Dear Tom,’ she answered, rising and embracing him, ‘how long it is since
you have been to see me!’

‘Why, I have been otherwise engaged, Loo, in the evenings; and in the
daytime old Bounderby has been keeping me at it rather.  But I touch him
up with you when he comes it too strong, and so we preserve an
understanding.  I say!  Has father said anything particular to you to-day
or yesterday, Loo?’

‘No, Tom.  But he told me to-night that he wished to do so in the
morning.’

‘Ah!  That’s what I mean,’ said Tom.  ‘Do you know where he is
to-night?’—with a very deep expression.

‘No.’

‘Then I’ll tell you.  He’s with old Bounderby.  They are having a regular
confab together up at the Bank.  Why at the Bank, do you think?  Well,
I’ll tell you again.  To keep Mrs. Sparsit’s ears as far off as possible,
I expect.’

With her hand upon her brother’s shoulder, Louisa still stood looking at
the fire.  Her brother glanced at her face with greater interest than
usual, and, encircling her waist with his arm, drew her coaxingly to him.

‘You are very fond of me, an’t you, Loo?’

‘Indeed I am, Tom, though you do let such long intervals go by without
coming to see me.’

‘Well, sister of mine,’ said Tom, ‘when you say that, you are near my
thoughts.  We might be so much oftener together—mightn’t we?  Always
together, almost—mightn’t we?  It would do me a great deal of good if you
were to make up your mind to I know what, Loo.  It would be a splendid
thing for me.  It would be uncommonly jolly!’

Her thoughtfulness baffled his cunning scrutiny.  He could make nothing
of her face.  He pressed her in his arm, and kissed her cheek.  She
returned the kiss, but still looked at the fire.

‘I say, Loo!  I thought I’d come, and just hint to you what was going on:
though I supposed you’d most likely guess, even if you didn’t know.  I
can’t stay, because I’m engaged to some fellows to-night.  You won’t
forget how fond you are of me?’

‘No, dear Tom, I won’t forget.’

‘That’s a capital girl,’ said Tom.  ‘Good-bye, Loo.’

She gave him an affectionate good-night, and went out with him to the
door, whence the fires of Coketown could be seen, making the distance
lurid.  She stood there, looking steadfastly towards them, and listening
to his departing steps.  They retreated quickly, as glad to get away from
Stone Lodge; and she stood there yet, when he was gone and all was quiet.
It seemed as if, first in her own fire within the house, and then in the
fiery haze without, she tried to discover what kind of woof Old Time,
that greatest and longest-established Spinner of all, would weave from
the threads he had already spun into a woman.  But his factory is a
secret place, his work is noiseless, and his Hands are mutes.



CHAPTER XV
FATHER AND DAUGHTER


ALTHOUGH Mr. Gradgrind did not take after Blue Beard, his room was quite
a blue chamber in its abundance of blue books.  Whatever they could prove
(which is usually anything you like), they proved there, in an army
constantly strengthening by the arrival of new recruits.  In that charmed
apartment, the most complicated social questions were cast up, got into
exact totals, and finally settled—if those concerned could only have been
brought to know it.  As if an astronomical observatory should be made
without any windows, and the astronomer within should arrange the starry
universe solely by pen, ink, and paper, so Mr. Gradgrind, in _his_
Observatory (and there are many like it), had no need to cast an eye upon
the teeming myriads of human beings around him, but could settle all
their destinies on a slate, and wipe out all their tears with one dirty
little bit of sponge.

To this Observatory, then: a stern room, with a deadly statistical clock
in it, which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a
coffin-lid; Louisa repaired on the appointed morning.  A window looked
towards Coketown; and when she sat down near her father’s table, she saw
the high chimneys and the long tracts of smoke looming in the heavy
distance gloomily.

‘My dear Louisa,’ said her father, ‘I prepared you last night to give me
your serious attention in the conversation we are now going to have
together.  You have been so well trained, and you do, I am happy to say,
so much justice to the education you have received, that I have perfect
confidence in your good sense.  You are not impulsive, you are not
romantic, you are accustomed to view everything from the strong
dispassionate ground of reason and calculation.  From that ground alone,
I know you will view and consider what I am going to communicate.’

He waited, as if he would have been glad that she said something.  But
she said never a word.

‘Louisa, my dear, you are the subject of a proposal of marriage that has
been made to me.’

Again he waited, and again she answered not one word.  This so far
surprised him, as to induce him gently to repeat, ‘a proposal of
marriage, my dear.’  To which she returned, without any visible emotion
whatever:

‘I hear you, father.  I am attending, I assure you.’

‘Well!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, breaking into a smile, after being for the
moment at a loss, ‘you are even more dispassionate than I expected,
Louisa.  Or, perhaps, you are not unprepared for the announcement I have
it in charge to make?’

‘I cannot say that, father, until I hear it.  Prepared or unprepared, I
wish to hear it all from you.  I wish to hear you state it to me,
father.’

Strange to relate, Mr. Gradgrind was not so collected at this moment as
his daughter was.  He took a paper-knife in his hand, turned it over,
laid it down, took it up again, and even then had to look along the blade
of it, considering how to go on.

‘What you say, my dear Louisa, is perfectly reasonable.  I have
undertaken then to let you know that—in short, that Mr. Bounderby has
informed me that he has long watched your progress with particular
interest and pleasure, and has long hoped that the time might ultimately
arrive when he should offer you his hand in marriage.  That time, to
which he has so long, and certainly with great constancy, looked forward,
is now come.  Mr. Bounderby has made his proposal of marriage to me, and
has entreated me to make it known to you, and to express his hope that
you will take it into your favourable consideration.’

Silence between them.  The deadly statistical clock very hollow.  The
distant smoke very black and heavy.

‘Father,’ said Louisa, ‘do you think I love Mr. Bounderby?’

Mr. Gradgrind was extremely discomfited by this unexpected question.
‘Well, my child,’ he returned, ‘I—really—cannot take upon myself to say.’

‘Father,’ pursued Louisa in exactly the same voice as before, ‘do you ask
me to love Mr. Bounderby?’

‘My dear Louisa, no.  No.  I ask nothing.’

‘Father,’ she still pursued, ‘does Mr. Bounderby ask me to love him?’

‘Really, my dear,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘it is difficult to answer your
question—’

‘Difficult to answer it, Yes or No, father?

‘Certainly, my dear.  Because;’ here was something to demonstrate, and it
set him up again; ‘because the reply depends so materially, Louisa, on
the sense in which we use the expression.  Now, Mr. Bounderby does not do
you the injustice, and does not do himself the injustice, of pretending
to anything fanciful, fantastic, or (I am using synonymous terms)
sentimental.  Mr. Bounderby would have seen you grow up under his eyes,
to very little purpose, if he could so far forget what is due to your
good sense, not to say to his, as to address you from any such ground.
Therefore, perhaps the expression itself—I merely suggest this to you, my
dear—may be a little misplaced.’

‘What would you advise me to use in its stead, father?’

‘Why, my dear Louisa,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, completely recovered by this
time, ‘I would advise you (since you ask me) to consider this question,
as you have been accustomed to consider every other question, simply as
one of tangible Fact.  The ignorant and the giddy may embarrass such
subjects with irrelevant fancies, and other absurdities that have no
existence, properly viewed—really no existence—but it is no compliment to
you to say, that you know better.  Now, what are the Facts of this case?
You are, we will say in round numbers, twenty years of age; Mr. Bounderby
is, we will say in round numbers, fifty.  There is some disparity in your
respective years, but in your means and positions there is none; on the
contrary, there is a great suitability.  Then the question arises, Is
this one disparity sufficient to operate as a bar to such a marriage?  In
considering this question, it is not unimportant to take into account the
statistics of marriage, so far as they have yet been obtained, in England
and Wales.  I find, on reference to the figures, that a large proportion
of these marriages are contracted between parties of very unequal ages,
and that the elder of these contracting parties is, in rather more than
three-fourths of these instances, the bridegroom.  It is remarkable as
showing the wide prevalence of this law, that among the natives of the
British possessions in India, also in a considerable part of China, and
among the Calmucks of Tartary, the best means of computation yet
furnished us by travellers, yield similar results.  The disparity I have
mentioned, therefore, almost ceases to be disparity, and (virtually) all
but disappears.’

‘What do you recommend, father,’ asked Louisa, her reserved composure not
in the least affected by these gratifying results, ‘that I should
substitute for the term I used just now?  For the misplaced expression?’

‘Louisa,’ returned her father, ‘it appears to me that nothing can be
plainer.  Confining yourself rigidly to Fact, the question of Fact you
state to yourself is: Does Mr. Bounderby ask me to marry him?  Yes, he
does.  The sole remaining question then is: Shall I marry him?  I think
nothing can be plainer than that?’

‘Shall I marry him?’ repeated Louisa, with great deliberation.

‘Precisely.  And it is satisfactory to me, as your father, my dear
Louisa, to know that you do not come to the consideration of that
question with the previous habits of mind, and habits of life, that
belong to many young women.’

‘No, father,’ she returned, ‘I do not.’

‘I now leave you to judge for yourself,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘I have
stated the case, as such cases are usually stated among practical minds;
I have stated it, as the case of your mother and myself was stated in its
time.  The rest, my dear Louisa, is for you to decide.’

From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly.  As he now leaned
back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn,
perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was
impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up
confidences of her heart.  But, to see it, he must have overleaped at a
bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting,
between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will
elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be
sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck.  The barriers were too many and
too high for such a leap.  With his unbending, utilitarian,
matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into
the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost
opportunities that are drowned there.

Removing her eyes from him, she sat so long looking silently towards the
town, that he said, at length: ‘Are you consulting the chimneys of the
Coketown works, Louisa?’

‘There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke.  Yet
when the night comes, Fire bursts out, father!’ she answered, turning
quickly.

‘Of course I know that, Louisa.  I do not see the application of the
remark.’  To do him justice he did not, at all.

She passed it away with a slight motion of her hand, and concentrating
her attention upon him again, said, ‘Father, I have often thought that
life is very short.’—This was so distinctly one of his subjects that he
interposed.

‘It is short, no doubt, my dear.  Still, the average duration of human
life is proved to have increased of late years.  The calculations of
various life assurance and annuity offices, among other figures which
cannot go wrong, have established the fact.’

‘I speak of my own life, father.’

‘O indeed?  Still,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘I need not point out to you,
Louisa, that it is governed by the laws which govern lives in the
aggregate.’

‘While it lasts, I would wish to do the little I can, and the little I am
fit for.  What does it matter?’

Mr. Gradgrind seemed rather at a loss to understand the last four words;
replying, ‘How, matter?  What matter, my dear?’

‘Mr. Bounderby,’ she went on in a steady, straight way, without regarding
this, ‘asks me to marry him.  The question I have to ask myself is, shall
I marry him?  That is so, father, is it not?  You have told me so,
father.  Have you not?’

‘Certainly, my dear.’

‘Let it be so.  Since Mr. Bounderby likes to take me thus, I am satisfied
to accept his proposal.  Tell him, father, as soon as you please, that
this was my answer.  Repeat it, word for word, if you can, because I
should wish him to know what I said.’

‘It is quite right, my dear,’ retorted her father approvingly, ‘to be
exact.  I will observe your very proper request.  Have you any wish in
reference to the period of your marriage, my child?’

‘None, father.  What does it matter!’

Mr. Gradgrind had drawn his chair a little nearer to her, and taken her
hand.  But, her repetition of these words seemed to strike with some
little discord on his ear.  He paused to look at her, and, still holding
her hand, said:

‘Louisa, I have not considered it essential to ask you one question,
because the possibility implied in it appeared to me to be too remote.
But perhaps I ought to do so.  You have never entertained in secret any
other proposal?’

‘Father,’ she returned, almost scornfully, ‘what other proposal can have
been made to _me_?  Whom have I seen?  Where have I been?  What are my
heart’s experiences?’

‘My dear Louisa,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind, reassured and satisfied.  ‘You
correct me justly.  I merely wished to discharge my duty.’

‘What do _I_ know, father,’ said Louisa in her quiet manner, ‘of tastes
and fancies; of aspirations and affections; of all that part of my nature
in which such light things might have been nourished?  What escape have I
had from problems that could be demonstrated, and realities that could be
grasped?’  As she said it, she unconsciously closed her hand, as if upon
a solid object, and slowly opened it as though she were releasing dust or
ash.

‘My dear,’ assented her eminently practical parent, ‘quite true, quite
true.’

‘Why, father,’ she pursued, ‘what a strange question to ask _me_!  The
baby-preference that even I have heard of as common among children, has
never had its innocent resting-place in my breast.  You have been so
careful of me, that I never had a child’s heart.  You have trained me so
well, that I never dreamed a child’s dream.  You have dealt so wisely
with me, father, from my cradle to this hour, that I never had a child’s
belief or a child’s fear.’

Mr. Gradgrind was quite moved by his success, and by this testimony to
it.  ‘My dear Louisa,’ said he, ‘you abundantly repay my care.  Kiss me,
my dear girl.’

So, his daughter kissed him.  Detaining her in his embrace, he said, ‘I
may assure you now, my favourite child, that I am made happy by the sound
decision at which you have arrived.  Mr. Bounderby is a very remarkable
man; and what little disparity can be said to exist between you—if any—is
more than counterbalanced by the tone your mind has acquired.  It has
always been my object so to educate you, as that you might, while still
in your early youth, be (if I may so express myself) almost any age.
Kiss me once more, Louisa.  Now, let us go and find your mother.’

Accordingly, they went down to the drawing-room, where the esteemed lady
with no nonsense about her, was recumbent as usual, while Sissy worked
beside her.  She gave some feeble signs of returning animation when they
entered, and presently the faint transparency was presented in a sitting
attitude.

‘Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said her husband, who had waited for the achievement of
this feat with some impatience, ‘allow me to present to you Mrs.
Bounderby.’

‘Oh!’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘so you have settled it!  Well, I’m sure I
hope your health may be good, Louisa; for if your head begins to split as
soon as you are married, which was the case with mine, I cannot consider
that you are to be envied, though I have no doubt you think you are, as
all girls do.  However, I give you joy, my dear—and I hope you may now
turn all your ological studies to good account, I am sure I do!  I must
give you a kiss of congratulation, Louisa; but don’t touch my right
shoulder, for there’s something running down it all day long.  And now
you see,’ whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind, adjusting her shawls after the
affectionate ceremony, ‘I shall be worrying myself, morning, noon, and
night, to know what I am to call him!’

‘Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said her husband, solemnly, ‘what do you mean?’

‘Whatever I am to call him, Mr. Gradgrind, when he is married to Louisa!
I must call him something.  It’s impossible,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, with a
mingled sense of politeness and injury, ‘to be constantly addressing him
and never giving him a name.  I cannot call him Josiah, for the name is
insupportable to me.  You yourself wouldn’t hear of Joe, you very well
know.  Am I to call my own son-in-law, Mister!  Not, I believe, unless
the time has arrived when, as an invalid, I am to be trampled upon by my
relations.  Then, what am I to call him!’

Nobody present having any suggestion to offer in the remarkable
emergency, Mrs. Gradgrind departed this life for the time being, after
delivering the following codicil to her remarks already executed:

‘As to the wedding, all I ask, Louisa, is,—and I ask it with a fluttering
in my chest, which actually extends to the soles of my feet,—that it may
take place soon.  Otherwise, I know it is one of those subjects I shall
never hear the last of.’

When Mr. Gradgrind had presented Mrs. Bounderby, Sissy had suddenly
turned her head, and looked, in wonder, in pity, in sorrow, in doubt, in
a multitude of emotions, towards Louisa.  Louisa had known it, and seen
it, without looking at her.  From that moment she was impassive, proud
and cold—held Sissy at a distance—changed to her altogether.



CHAPTER XVI
HUSBAND AND WIFE


MR. BOUNDERBY’S first disquietude on hearing of his happiness, was
occasioned by the necessity of imparting it to Mrs. Sparsit.  He could
not make up his mind how to do that, or what the consequences of the step
might be.  Whether she would instantly depart, bag and baggage, to Lady
Scadgers, or would positively refuse to budge from the premises; whether
she would be plaintive or abusive, tearful or tearing; whether she would
break her heart, or break the looking-glass; Mr. Bounderby could not all
foresee.  However, as it must be done, he had no choice but to do it; so,
after attempting several letters, and failing in them all, he resolved to
do it by word of mouth.

On his way home, on the evening he set aside for this momentous purpose,
he took the precaution of stepping into a chemist’s shop and buying a
bottle of the very strongest smelling-salts.  ‘By George!’ said Mr.
Bounderby, ‘if she takes it in the fainting way, I’ll have the skin off
her nose, at all events!’  But, in spite of being thus forearmed, he
entered his own house with anything but a courageous air; and appeared
before the object of his misgivings, like a dog who was conscious of
coming direct from the pantry.

‘Good evening, Mr. Bounderby!’

‘Good evening, ma’am, good evening.’  He drew up his chair, and Mrs.
Sparsit drew back hers, as who should say, ‘Your fireside, sir.  I freely
admit it.  It is for you to occupy it all, if you think proper.’

‘Don’t go to the North Pole, ma’am!’ said Mr. Bounderby.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, and returned, though short of her
former position.

Mr. Bounderby sat looking at her, as, with the points of a stiff, sharp
pair of scissors, she picked out holes for some inscrutable ornamental
purpose, in a piece of cambric.  An operation which, taken in connexion
with the bushy eyebrows and the Roman nose, suggested with some
liveliness the idea of a hawk engaged upon the eyes of a tough little
bird.  She was so steadfastly occupied, that many minutes elapsed before
she looked up from her work; when she did so Mr. Bounderby bespoke her
attention with a hitch of his head.

‘Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am,’ said Mr. Bounderby, putting his hands in his
pockets, and assuring himself with his right hand that the cork of the
little bottle was ready for use, ‘I have no occasion to say to you, that
you are not only a lady born and bred, but a devilish sensible woman.’

‘Sir,’ returned the lady, ‘this is indeed not the first time that you
have honoured me with similar expressions of your good opinion.’

‘Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘I am going to astonish you.’

‘Yes, sir?’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, interrogatively, and in the most
tranquil manner possible.  She generally wore mittens, and she now laid
down her work, and smoothed those mittens.

‘I am going, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘to marry Tom Gradgrind’s daughter.’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘I hope you may be happy, Mr.
Bounderby.  Oh, indeed I hope you may be happy, sir!’  And she said it
with such great condescension as well as with such great compassion for
him, that Bounderby,—far more disconcerted than if she had thrown her
workbox at the mirror, or swooned on the hearthrug,—corked up the
smelling-salts tight in his pocket, and thought, ‘Now confound this
woman, who could have even guessed that she would take it in this way!’

‘I wish with all my heart, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, in a highly superior
manner; somehow she seemed, in a moment, to have established a right to
pity him ever afterwards; ‘that you may be in all respects very happy.’

‘Well, ma’am,’ returned Bounderby, with some resentment in his tone:
which was clearly lowered, though in spite of himself, ‘I am obliged to
you.  I hope I shall be.’

‘_Do_ you, sir!’ said Mrs. Sparsit, with great affability.  ‘But
naturally you do; of course you do.’

A very awkward pause on Mr. Bounderby’s part, succeeded.  Mrs. Sparsit
sedately resumed her work and occasionally gave a small cough, which
sounded like the cough of conscious strength and forbearance.

‘Well, ma’am,’ resumed Bounderby, ‘under these circumstances, I imagine
it would not be agreeable to a character like yours to remain here,
though you would be very welcome here.’

‘Oh, dear no, sir, I could on no account think of that!’ Mrs. Sparsit
shook her head, still in her highly superior manner, and a little changed
the small cough—coughing now, as if the spirit of prophecy rose within
her, but had better be coughed down.

‘However, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘there are apartments at the Bank,
where a born and bred lady, as keeper of the place, would be rather a
catch than otherwise; and if the same terms—’

‘I beg your pardon, sir.  You were so good as to promise that you would
always substitute the phrase, annual compliment.’

‘Well, ma’am, annual compliment.  If the same annual compliment would be
acceptable there, why, I see nothing to part us, unless you do.’

‘Sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘The proposal is like yourself, and if the
position I shall assume at the Bank is one that I could occupy without
descending lower in the social scale—’

‘Why, of course it is,’ said Bounderby.  ‘If it was not, ma’am, you don’t
suppose that I should offer it to a lady who has moved in the society you
have moved in.  Not that _I_ care for such society, you know!  But _you_
do.’

‘Mr. Bounderby, you are very considerate.’

‘You’ll have your own private apartments, and you’ll have your coals and
your candles, and all the rest of it, and you’ll have your maid to attend
upon you, and you’ll have your light porter to protect you, and you’ll be
what I take the liberty of considering precious comfortable,’ said
Bounderby.

‘Sir,’ rejoined Mrs. Sparsit, ‘say no more.  In yielding up my trust
here, I shall not be freed from the necessity of eating the bread of
dependence:’ she might have said the sweetbread, for that delicate
article in a savoury brown sauce was her favourite supper: ‘and I would
rather receive it from your hand, than from any other.  Therefore, sir, I
accept your offer gratefully, and with many sincere acknowledgments for
past favours.  And I hope, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, concluding in an
impressively compassionate manner, ‘I fondly hope that Miss Gradgrind may
be all you desire, and deserve!’

Nothing moved Mrs. Sparsit from that position any more.  It was in vain
for Bounderby to bluster or to assert himself in any of his explosive
ways; Mrs. Sparsit was resolved to have compassion on him, as a Victim.
She was polite, obliging, cheerful, hopeful; but, the more polite, the
more obliging, the more cheerful, the more hopeful, the more exemplary
altogether, she; the forlorner Sacrifice and Victim, he.  She had that
tenderness for his melancholy fate, that his great red countenance used
to break out into cold perspirations when she looked at him.

Meanwhile the marriage was appointed to be solemnized in eight weeks’
time, and Mr. Bounderby went every evening to Stone Lodge as an accepted
wooer.  Love was made on these occasions in the form of bracelets; and,
on all occasions during the period of betrothal, took a manufacturing
aspect.  Dresses were made, jewellery was made, cakes and gloves were
made, settlements were made, and an extensive assortment of Facts did
appropriate honour to the contract.  The business was all Fact, from
first to last.  The Hours did not go through any of those rosy
performances, which foolish poets have ascribed to them at such times;
neither did the clocks go any faster, or any slower, than at other
seasons.  The deadly statistical recorder in the Gradgrind observatory
knocked every second on the head as it was born, and buried it with his
accustomed regularity.

So the day came, as all other days come to people who will only stick to
reason; and when it came, there were married in the church of the florid
wooden legs—that popular order of architecture—Josiah Bounderby Esquire
of Coketown, to Louisa eldest daughter of Thomas Gradgrind Esquire of
Stone Lodge, M.P. for that borough.  And when they were united in holy
matrimony, they went home to breakfast at Stone Lodge aforesaid.

There was an improving party assembled on the auspicious occasion, who
knew what everything they had to eat and drink was made of, and how it
was imported or exported, and in what quantities, and in what bottoms,
whether native or foreign, and all about it.  The bridesmaids, down to
little Jane Gradgrind, were, in an intellectual point of view, fit
helpmates for the calculating boy; and there was no nonsense about any of
the company.

After breakfast, the bridegroom addressed them in the following terms:

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.  Since you have
done my wife and myself the honour of drinking our healths and happiness,
I suppose I must acknowledge the same; though, as you all know me, and
know what I am, and what my extraction was, you won’t expect a speech
from a man who, when he sees a Post, says “that’s a Post,” and when he
sees a Pump, says “that’s a Pump,” and is not to be got to call a Post a
Pump, or a Pump a Post, or either of them a Toothpick.  If you want a
speech this morning, my friend and father-in-law, Tom Gradgrind, is a
Member of Parliament, and you know where to get it.  I am not your man.
However, if I feel a little independent when I look around this table
to-day, and reflect how little I thought of marrying Tom Gradgrind’s
daughter when I was a ragged street-boy, who never washed his face unless
it was at a pump, and that not oftener than once a fortnight, I hope I
may be excused.  So, I hope you like my feeling independent; if you
don’t, I can’t help it.  I _do_ feel independent.  Now I have mentioned,
and you have mentioned, that I am this day married to Tom Gradgrind’s
daughter.  I am very glad to be so.  It has long been my wish to be so.
I have watched her bringing-up, and I believe she is worthy of me.  At
the same time—not to deceive you—I believe I am worthy of her.  So, I
thank you, on both our parts, for the good-will you have shown towards
us; and the best wish I can give the unmarried part of the present
company, is this: I hope every bachelor may find as good a wife as I have
found.  And I hope every spinster may find as good a husband as my wife
has found.’

Shortly after which oration, as they were going on a nuptial trip to
Lyons, in order that Mr. Bounderby might take the opportunity of seeing
how the Hands got on in those parts, and whether they, too, required to
be fed with gold spoons; the happy pair departed for the railroad.  The
bride, in passing down-stairs, dressed for her journey, found Tom waiting
for her—flushed, either with his feelings, or the vinous part of the
breakfast.

‘What a game girl you are, to be such a first-rate sister, Loo!’
whispered Tom.

She clung to him as she should have clung to some far better nature that
day, and was a little shaken in her reserved composure for the first
time.

‘Old Bounderby’s quite ready,’ said Tom.  ‘Time’s up.  Good-bye!  I shall
be on the look-out for you, when you come back.  I say, my dear Loo!
AN’T it uncommonly jolly now!’

                                * * * * *

                          END OF THE FIRST BOOK




BOOK THE SECOND
_REAPING_


CHAPTER I
EFFECTS IN THE BANK


A SUNNY midsummer day.  There was such a thing sometimes, even in
Coketown.

Seen from a distance in such weather, Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of
its own, which appeared impervious to the sun’s rays.  You only knew the
town was there, because you knew there could have been no such sulky
blotch upon the prospect without a town.  A blur of soot and smoke, now
confusedly tending this way, now that way, now aspiring to the vault of
Heaven, now murkily creeping along the earth, as the wind rose and fell,
or changed its quarter: a dense formless jumble, with sheets of cross
light in it, that showed nothing but masses of darkness:—Coketown in the
distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be
seen.

The wonder was, it was there at all.  It had been ruined so often, that
it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks.  Surely there never was
such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were
made.  Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such
ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before.  They were
ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school;
they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works;
they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether
they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery;
they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not
always make quite so much smoke.  Besides Mr. Bounderby’s gold spoon
which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was
very popular there.  It took the form of a threat.  Whenever a Coketowner
felt he was ill-used—that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely
alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences
of any of his acts—he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he
would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’  This had terrified
the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.

However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had
pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had
been kind enough to take mighty good care of it.  So there it was, in the
haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.

The streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so
bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over
Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily.  Stokers emerged from low
underground doorways into factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and
palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals.  The
whole town seemed to be frying in oil.  There was a stifling smell of hot
oil everywhere.  The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the
Hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many stories oozed
and trickled it.  The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the
breath of the simoom: and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled
languidly in the desert.  But no temperature made the melancholy mad
elephants more mad or more sane.  Their wearisome heads went up and down
at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair
weather and foul.  The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was
the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods;
while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round,
from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and
wheels.

Drowsily they whirred all through this sunny day, making the passenger
more sleepy and more hot as he passed the humming walls of the mills.
Sun-blinds, and sprinklings of water, a little cooled the main streets
and the shops; but the mills, and the courts and alleys, baked at a
fierce heat.  Down upon the river that was black and thick with dye, some
Coketown boys who were at large—a rare sight there—rowed a crazy boat,
which made a spumous track upon the water as it jogged along, while every
dip of an oar stirred up vile smells.  But the sun itself, however
beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and
rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering
more death than life.  So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil
eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the
things it looks upon to bless.

Mrs. Sparsit sat in her afternoon apartment at the Bank, on the shadier
side of the frying street.  Office-hours were over: and at that period of
the day, in warm weather, she usually embellished with her genteel
presence, a managerial board-room over the public office.  Her own
private sitting-room was a story higher, at the window of which post of
observation she was ready, every morning, to greet Mr. Bounderby, as he
came across the road, with the sympathizing recognition appropriate to a
Victim.  He had been married now a year; and Mrs. Sparsit had never
released him from her determined pity a moment.

The Bank offered no violence to the wholesome monotony of the town.  It
was another red brick house, with black outside shutters, green inside
blinds, a black street-door up two white steps, a brazen door-plate, and
a brazen door-handle full stop.  It was a size larger than Mr.
Bounderby’s house, as other houses were from a size to half-a-dozen sizes
smaller; in all other particulars, it was strictly according to pattern.

Mrs. Sparsit was conscious that by coming in the evening-tide among the
desks and writing implements, she shed a feminine, not to say also
aristocratic, grace upon the office.  Seated, with her needlework or
netting apparatus, at the window, she had a self-laudatory sense of
correcting, by her ladylike deportment, the rude business aspect of the
place.  With this impression of her interesting character upon her, Mrs.
Sparsit considered herself, in some sort, the Bank Fairy.  The
townspeople who, in their passing and repassing, saw her there, regarded
her as the Bank Dragon keeping watch over the treasures of the mine.

What those treasures were, Mrs. Sparsit knew as little as they did.  Gold
and silver coin, precious paper, secrets that if divulged would bring
vague destruction upon vague persons (generally, however, people whom she
disliked), were the chief items in her ideal catalogue thereof.  For the
rest, she knew that after office-hours, she reigned supreme over all the
office furniture, and over a locked-up iron room with three locks,
against the door of which strong chamber the light porter laid his head
every night, on a truckle bed, that disappeared at cockcrow.  Further,
she was lady paramount over certain vaults in the basement, sharply
spiked off from communication with the predatory world; and over the
relics of the current day’s work, consisting of blots of ink, worn-out
pens, fragments of wafers, and scraps of paper torn so small, that
nothing interesting could ever be deciphered on them when Mrs. Sparsit
tried.  Lastly, she was guardian over a little armoury of cutlasses and
carbines, arrayed in vengeful order above one of the official
chimney-pieces; and over that respectable tradition never to be separated
from a place of business claiming to be wealthy—a row of
fire-buckets—vessels calculated to be of no physical utility on any
occasion, but observed to exercise a fine moral influence, almost equal
to bullion, on most beholders.

A deaf serving-woman and the light porter completed Mrs. Sparsit’s
empire.  The deaf serving-woman was rumoured to be wealthy; and a saying
had for years gone about among the lower orders of Coketown, that she
would be murdered some night when the Bank was shut, for the sake of her
money.  It was generally considered, indeed, that she had been due some
time, and ought to have fallen long ago; but she had kept her life, and
her situation, with an ill-conditioned tenacity that occasioned much
offence and disappointment.

Mrs. Sparsit’s tea was just set for her on a pert little table, with its
tripod of legs in an attitude, which she insinuated after office-hours,
into the company of the stern, leathern-topped, long board-table that
bestrode the middle of the room.  The light porter placed the tea-tray on
it, knuckling his forehead as a form of homage.

‘Thank you, Bitzer,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Thank _you_, ma’am,’ returned the light porter.  He was a very light
porter indeed; as light as in the days when he blinkingly defined a
horse, for girl number twenty.

‘All is shut up, Bitzer?’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘All is shut up, ma’am.’

‘And what,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, pouring out her tea, ‘is the news of the
day?  Anything?’

‘Well, ma’am, I can’t say that I have heard anything particular.  Our
people are a bad lot, ma’am; but that is no news, unfortunately.’

‘What are the restless wretches doing now?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Merely going on in the old way, ma’am.  Uniting, and leaguing, and
engaging to stand by one another.’

‘It is much to be regretted,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, making her nose more
Roman and her eyebrows more Coriolanian in the strength of her severity,
‘that the united masters allow of any such class-combinations.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Bitzer.

‘Being united themselves, they ought one and all to set their faces
against employing any man who is united with any other man,’ said Mrs.
Sparsit.

‘They have done that, ma’am,’ returned Bitzer; ‘but it rather fell
through, ma’am.’

‘I do not pretend to understand these things,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, with
dignity, ‘my lot having been signally cast in a widely different sphere;
and Mr. Sparsit, as a Powler, being also quite out of the pale of any
such dissensions.  I only know that these people must be conquered, and
that it’s high time it was done, once for all.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ returned Bitzer, with a demonstration of great respect for
Mrs. Sparsit’s oracular authority.  ‘You couldn’t put it clearer, I am
sure, ma’am.’

As this was his usual hour for having a little confidential chat with
Mrs. Sparsit, and as he had already caught her eye and seen that she was
going to ask him something, he made a pretence of arranging the rulers,
inkstands, and so forth, while that lady went on with her tea, glancing
through the open window, down into the street.

‘Has it been a busy day, Bitzer?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Not a very busy day, my lady.  About an average day.’  He now and then
slided into my lady, instead of ma’am, as an involuntary acknowledgment
of Mrs. Sparsit’s personal dignity and claims to reverence.

‘The clerks,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, carefully brushing an imperceptible
crumb of bread and butter from her left-hand mitten, ‘are trustworthy,
punctual, and industrious, of course?’

‘Yes, ma’am, pretty fair, ma’am.  With the usual exception.’

He held the respectable office of general spy and informer in the
establishment, for which volunteer service he received a present at
Christmas, over and above his weekly wage.  He had grown into an
extremely clear-headed, cautious, prudent young man, who was safe to rise
in the world.  His mind was so exactly regulated, that he had no
affections or passions.  All his proceedings were the result of the
nicest and coldest calculation; and it was not without cause that Mrs.
Sparsit habitually observed of him, that he was a young man of the
steadiest principle she had ever known.  Having satisfied himself, on his
father’s death, that his mother had a right of settlement in Coketown,
this excellent young economist had asserted that right for her with such
a steadfast adherence to the principle of the case, that she had been
shut up in the workhouse ever since.  It must be admitted that he allowed
her half a pound of tea a year, which was weak in him: first, because all
gifts have an inevitable tendency to pauperise the recipient, and
secondly, because his only reasonable transaction in that commodity would
have been to buy it for as little as he could possibly give, and sell it
for as much as he could possibly get; it having been clearly ascertained
by philosophers that in this is comprised the whole duty of man—not a
part of man’s duty, but the whole.

‘Pretty fair, ma’am.  With the usual exception, ma’am,’ repeated Bitzer.

‘Ah—h!’ said Mrs. Sparsit, shaking her head over her tea-cup, and taking
a long gulp.

‘Mr. Thomas, ma’am, I doubt Mr. Thomas very much, ma’am, I don’t like his
ways at all.’

‘Bitzer,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, in a very impressive manner, ‘do you
recollect my having said anything to you respecting names?’

‘I beg your pardon, ma’am.  It’s quite true that you did object to names
being used, and they’re always best avoided.’

‘Please to remember that I have a charge here,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, with
her air of state.  ‘I hold a trust here, Bitzer, under Mr. Bounderby.
However improbable both Mr. Bounderby and myself might have deemed it
years ago, that he would ever become my patron, making me an annual
compliment, I cannot but regard him in that light.  From Mr. Bounderby I
have received every acknowledgment of my social station, and every
recognition of my family descent, that I could possibly expect.  More,
far more.  Therefore, to my patron I will be scrupulously true.  And I do
not consider, I will not consider, I cannot consider,’ said Mrs. Sparsit,
with a most extensive stock on hand of honour and morality, ‘that I
_should_ be scrupulously true, if I allowed names to be mentioned under
this roof, that are unfortunately—most unfortunately—no doubt of
that—connected with his.’

Bitzer knuckled his forehead again, and again begged pardon.

‘No, Bitzer,’ continued Mrs. Sparsit, ‘say an individual, and I will hear
you; say Mr. Thomas, and you must excuse me.’

‘With the usual exception, ma’am,’ said Bitzer, trying back, ‘of an
individual.’

‘Ah—h!’  Mrs. Sparsit repeated the ejaculation, the shake of the head
over her tea-cup, and the long gulp, as taking up the conversation again
at the point where it had been interrupted.

‘An individual, ma’am,’ said Bitzer, ‘has never been what he ought to
have been, since he first came into the place.  He is a dissipated,
extravagant idler.  He is not worth his salt, ma’am.  He wouldn’t get it
either, if he hadn’t a friend and relation at court, ma’am!’

‘Ah—h!’ said Mrs. Sparsit, with another melancholy shake of her head.

‘I only hope, ma’am,’ pursued Bitzer, ‘that his friend and relation may
not supply him with the means of carrying on.  Otherwise, ma’am, we know
out of whose pocket _that_ money comes.’

‘Ah—h!’ sighed Mrs. Sparsit again, with another melancholy shake of her
head.

‘He is to be pitied, ma’am.  The last party I have alluded to, is to be
pitied, ma’am,’ said Bitzer.

‘Yes, Bitzer,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘I have always pitied the delusion,
always.’

‘As to an individual, ma’am,’ said Bitzer, dropping his voice and drawing
nearer, ‘he is as improvident as any of the people in this town.  And you
know what _their_ improvidence is, ma’am.  No one could wish to know it
better than a lady of your eminence does.’

‘They would do well,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘to take example by you,
Bitzer.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.  But, since you do refer to me, now look at me, ma’am.
I have put by a little, ma’am, already.  That gratuity which I receive at
Christmas, ma’am: I never touch it.  I don’t even go the length of my
wages, though they’re not high, ma’am.  Why can’t they do as I have done,
ma’am?  What one person can do, another can do.’

This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown.  Any capitalist there,
who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to
wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn’t each make sixty
thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every
one for not accomplishing the little feat.  What I did you can do.  Why
don’t you go and do it?

‘As to their wanting recreations, ma’am,’ said Bitzer, ‘it’s stuff and
nonsense.  _I_ don’t want recreations.  I never did, and I never shall; I
don’t like ’em.  As to their combining together; there are many of them,
I have no doubt, that by watching and informing upon one another could
earn a trifle now and then, whether in money or good will, and improve
their livelihood.  Then, why don’t they improve it, ma’am!  It’s the
first consideration of a rational creature, and it’s what they pretend to
want.’

‘Pretend indeed!’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘I am sure we are constantly hearing, ma’am, till it becomes quite
nauseous, concerning their wives and families,’ said Bitzer.  ‘Why look
at me, ma’am!  I don’t want a wife and family.  Why should they?’

‘Because they are improvident,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ returned Bitzer, ‘that’s where it is.  If they were more
provident and less perverse, ma’am, what would they do?  They would say,
“While my hat covers my family,” or “while my bonnet covers my
family,”—as the case might be, ma’am—“I have only one to feed, and that’s
the person I most like to feed.”’

‘To be sure,’ assented Mrs. Sparsit, eating muffin.

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Bitzer, knuckling his forehead again, in return
for the favour of Mrs. Sparsit’s improving conversation.  ‘Would you wish
a little more hot water, ma’am, or is there anything else that I could
fetch you?’

‘Nothing just now, Bitzer.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.  I shouldn’t wish to disturb you at your meals, ma’am,
particularly tea, knowing your partiality for it,’ said Bitzer, craning a
little to look over into the street from where he stood; ‘but there’s a
gentleman been looking up here for a minute or so, ma’am, and he has come
across as if he was going to knock.  That _is_ his knock, ma’am, no
doubt.’

He stepped to the window; and looking out, and drawing in his head again,
confirmed himself with, ‘Yes, ma’am.  Would you wish the gentleman to be
shown in, ma’am?’

‘I don’t know who it can be,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, wiping her mouth and
arranging her mittens.

‘A stranger, ma’am, evidently.’

‘What a stranger can want at the Bank at this time of the evening, unless
he comes upon some business for which he is too late, I don’t know,’ said
Mrs. Sparsit, ‘but I hold a charge in this establishment from Mr.
Bounderby, and I will never shrink from it.  If to see him is any part of
the duty I have accepted, I will see him.  Use your own discretion,
Bitzer.’

Here the visitor, all unconscious of Mrs. Sparsit’s magnanimous words,
repeated his knock so loudly that the light porter hastened down to open
the door; while Mrs. Sparsit took the precaution of concealing her little
table, with all its appliances upon it, in a cupboard, and then decamped
up-stairs, that she might appear, if needful, with the greater dignity.

‘If you please, ma’am, the gentleman would wish to see you,’ said Bitzer,
with his light eye at Mrs. Sparsit’s keyhole.  So, Mrs. Sparsit, who had
improved the interval by touching up her cap, took her classical features
down-stairs again, and entered the board-room in the manner of a Roman
matron going outside the city walls to treat with an invading general.

The visitor having strolled to the window, and being then engaged in
looking carelessly out, was as unmoved by this impressive entry as man
could possibly be.  He stood whistling to himself with all imaginable
coolness, with his hat still on, and a certain air of exhaustion upon
him, in part arising from excessive summer, and in part from excessive
gentility.  For it was to be seen with half an eye that he was a thorough
gentleman, made to the model of the time; weary of everything, and
putting no more faith in anything than Lucifer.

‘I believe, sir,’ quoth Mrs. Sparsit, ‘you wished to see me.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, turning and removing his hat; ‘pray excuse
me.’

‘Humph!’ thought Mrs. Sparsit, as she made a stately bend.  ‘Five and
thirty, good-looking, good figure, good teeth, good voice, good breeding,
well-dressed, dark hair, bold eyes.’  All which Mrs. Sparsit observed in
her womanly way—like the Sultan who put his head in the pail of
water—merely in dipping down and coming up again.

‘Please to be seated, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Thank you.  Allow me.’  He placed a chair for her, but remained himself
carelessly lounging against the table.  ‘I left my servant at the railway
looking after the luggage—very heavy train and vast quantity of it in the
van—and strolled on, looking about me.  Exceedingly odd place.  Will you
allow me to ask you if it’s _always_ as black as this?’

‘In general much blacker,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, in her uncompromising
way.

‘Is it possible!  Excuse me: you are not a native, I think?’

‘No, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘It was once my good or ill fortune,
as it may be—before I became a widow—to move in a very different sphere.
My husband was a Powler.’

‘Beg your pardon, really!’ said the stranger.  ‘Was—?’

Mrs. Sparsit repeated, ‘A Powler.’

‘Powler Family,’ said the stranger, after reflecting a few moments.  Mrs.
Sparsit signified assent.  The stranger seemed a little more fatigued
than before.

‘You must be very much bored here?’ was the inference he drew from the
communication.

‘I am the servant of circumstances, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘and I have
long adapted myself to the governing power of my life.’

‘Very philosophical,’ returned the stranger, ‘and very exemplary and
laudable, and—’  It seemed to be scarcely worth his while to finish the
sentence, so he played with his watch-chain wearily.

‘May I be permitted to ask, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘to what I am
indebted for the favour of—’

‘Assuredly,’ said the stranger.  ‘Much obliged to you for reminding me.
I am the bearer of a letter of introduction to Mr. Bounderby, the banker.
Walking through this extraordinarily black town, while they were getting
dinner ready at the hotel, I asked a fellow whom I met; one of the
working people; who appeared to have been taking a shower-bath of
something fluffy, which I assume to be the raw material—’

Mrs. Sparsit inclined her head.

‘—Raw material—where Mr. Bounderby, the banker, might reside.  Upon
which, misled no doubt by the word Banker, he directed me to the Bank.
Fact being, I presume, that Mr. Bounderby the Banker does _not_ reside in
the edifice in which I have the honour of offering this explanation?’

‘No, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘he does not.’

‘Thank you.  I had no intention of delivering my letter at the present
moment, nor have I. But strolling on to the Bank to kill time, and having
the good fortune to observe at the window,’ towards which he languidly
waved his hand, then slightly bowed, ‘a lady of a very superior and
agreeable appearance, I considered that I could not do better than take
the liberty of asking that lady where Mr. Bounderby the Banker _does_
live.  Which I accordingly venture, with all suitable apologies, to do.’

The inattention and indolence of his manner were sufficiently relieved,
to Mrs. Sparsit’s thinking, by a certain gallantry at ease, which offered
her homage too.  Here he was, for instance, at this moment, all but
sitting on the table, and yet lazily bending over her, as if he
acknowledged an attraction in her that made her charming—in her way.

‘Banks, I know, are always suspicious, and officially must be,’ said the
stranger, whose lightness and smoothness of speech were pleasant
likewise; suggesting matter far more sensible and humorous than it ever
contained—which was perhaps a shrewd device of the founder of this
numerous sect, whosoever may have been that great man: ‘therefore I may
observe that my letter—here it is—is from the member for this
place—Gradgrind—whom I have had the pleasure of knowing in London.’

Mrs. Sparsit recognized the hand, intimated that such confirmation was
quite unnecessary, and gave Mr. Bounderby’s address, with all needful
clues and directions in aid.

‘Thousand thanks,’ said the stranger.  ‘Of course you know the Banker
well?’

‘Yes, sir,’ rejoined Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘In my dependent relation towards
him, I have known him ten years.’

‘Quite an eternity!  I think he married Gradgrind’s daughter?’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, suddenly compressing her mouth, ‘he had
that—honour.’

‘The lady is quite a philosopher, I am told?’

‘Indeed, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘_Is_ she?’

‘Excuse my impertinent curiosity,’ pursued the stranger, fluttering over
Mrs. Sparsit’s eyebrows, with a propitiatory air, ‘but you know the
family, and know the world.  I am about to know the family, and may have
much to do with them.  Is the lady so very alarming?  Her father gives
her such a portentously hard-headed reputation, that I have a burning
desire to know.  Is she absolutely unapproachable?  Repellently and
stunningly clever?  I see, by your meaning smile, you think not.  You
have poured balm into my anxious soul.  As to age, now.  Forty?  Five and
thirty?’

Mrs. Sparsit laughed outright.  ‘A chit,’ said she.  ‘Not twenty when she
was married.’

‘I give you my honour, Mrs. Powler,’ returned the stranger, detaching
himself from the table, ‘that I never was so astonished in my life!’

It really did seem to impress him, to the utmost extent of his capacity
of being impressed.  He looked at his informant for full a quarter of a
minute, and appeared to have the surprise in his mind all the time.  ‘I
assure you, Mrs. Powler,’ he then said, much exhausted, ‘that the
father’s manner prepared me for a grim and stony maturity.  I am obliged
to you, of all things, for correcting so absurd a mistake.  Pray excuse
my intrusion.  Many thanks.  Good day!’

He bowed himself out; and Mrs. Sparsit, hiding in the window curtain, saw
him languishing down the street on the shady side of the way, observed of
all the town.

‘What do you think of the gentleman, Bitzer?’ she asked the light porter,
when he came to take away.

‘Spends a deal of money on his dress, ma’am.’

‘It must be admitted,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘that it’s very tasteful.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ returned Bitzer, ‘if that’s worth the money.’

‘Besides which, ma’am,’ resumed Bitzer, while he was polishing the table,
‘he looks to me as if he gamed.’

‘It’s immoral to game,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘It’s ridiculous, ma’am,’ said Bitzer, ‘because the chances are against
the players.’

Whether it was that the heat prevented Mrs. Sparsit from working, or
whether it was that her hand was out, she did no work that night.  She
sat at the window, when the sun began to sink behind the smoke; she sat
there, when the smoke was burning red, when the colour faded from it,
when darkness seemed to rise slowly out of the ground, and creep upward,
upward, up to the house-tops, up the church steeple, up to the summits of
the factory chimneys, up to the sky.  Without a candle in the room, Mrs.
Sparsit sat at the window, with her hands before her, not thinking much
of the sounds of evening; the whooping of boys, the barking of dogs, the
rumbling of wheels, the steps and voices of passengers, the shrill street
cries, the clogs upon the pavement when it was their hour for going by,
the shutting-up of shop-shutters.  Not until the light porter announced
that her nocturnal sweetbread was ready, did Mrs. Sparsit arouse herself
from her reverie, and convey her dense black eyebrows—by that time
creased with meditation, as if they needed ironing out-up-stairs.

‘O, you Fool!’ said Mrs. Sparsit, when she was alone at her supper.  Whom
she meant, she did not say; but she could scarcely have meant the
sweetbread.



CHAPTER II
MR. JAMES HARTHOUSE


THE Gradgrind party wanted assistance in cutting the throats of the
Graces.  They went about recruiting; and where could they enlist recruits
more hopefully, than among the fine gentlemen who, having found out
everything to be worth nothing, were equally ready for anything?

Moreover, the healthy spirits who had mounted to this sublime height were
attractive to many of the Gradgrind school.  They liked fine gentlemen;
they pretended that they did not, but they did.  They became exhausted in
imitation of them; and they yaw-yawed in their speech like them; and they
served out, with an enervated air, the little mouldy rations of political
economy, on which they regaled their disciples.  There never before was
seen on earth such a wonderful hybrid race as was thus produced.

Among the fine gentlemen not regularly belonging to the Gradgrind school,
there was one of a good family and a better appearance, with a happy turn
of humour which had told immensely with the House of Commons on the
occasion of his entertaining it with his (and the Board of Directors)
view of a railway accident, in which the most careful officers ever
known, employed by the most liberal managers ever heard of, assisted by
the finest mechanical contrivances ever devised, the whole in action on
the best line ever constructed, had killed five people and wounded
thirty-two, by a casualty without which the excellence of the whole
system would have been positively incomplete.  Among the slain was a cow,
and among the scattered articles unowned, a widow’s cap.  And the
honourable member had so tickled the House (which has a delicate sense of
humour) by putting the cap on the cow, that it became impatient of any
serious reference to the Coroner’s Inquest, and brought the railway off
with Cheers and Laughter.

Now, this gentleman had a younger brother of still better appearance than
himself, who had tried life as a Cornet of Dragoons, and found it a bore;
and had afterwards tried it in the train of an English minister abroad,
and found it a bore; and had then strolled to Jerusalem, and got bored
there; and had then gone yachting about the world, and got bored
everywhere.  To whom this honourable and jocular, member fraternally said
one day, ‘Jem, there’s a good opening among the hard Fact fellows, and
they want men.  I wonder you don’t go in for statistics.’  Jem, rather
taken by the novelty of the idea, and very hard up for a change, was as
ready to ‘go in’ for statistics as for anything else.  So, he went in.
He coached himself up with a blue-book or two; and his brother put it
about among the hard Fact fellows, and said, ‘If you want to bring in,
for any place, a handsome dog who can make you a devilish good speech,
look after my brother Jem, for he’s your man.’  After a few dashes in the
public meeting way, Mr. Gradgrind and a council of political sages
approved of Jem, and it was resolved to send him down to Coketown, to
become known there and in the neighbourhood.  Hence the letter Jem had
last night shown to Mrs. Sparsit, which Mr. Bounderby now held in his
hand; superscribed, ‘Josiah Bounderby, Esquire, Banker, Coketown.
Specially to introduce James Harthouse, Esquire.  Thomas Gradgrind.’

Within an hour of the receipt of this dispatch and Mr. James Harthouse’s
card, Mr. Bounderby put on his hat and went down to the Hotel.  There he
found Mr. James Harthouse looking out of window, in a state of mind so
disconsolate, that he was already half-disposed to ‘go in’ for something
else.

‘My name, sir,’ said his visitor, ‘is Josiah Bounderby, of Coketown.’

Mr. James Harthouse was very happy indeed (though he scarcely looked so)
to have a pleasure he had long expected.

‘Coketown, sir,’ said Bounderby, obstinately taking a chair, ‘is not the
kind of place you have been accustomed to.  Therefore, if you will allow
me—or whether you will or not, for I am a plain man—I’ll tell you
something about it before we go any further.’

Mr. Harthouse would be charmed.

‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ said Bounderby.  ‘I don’t promise it.  First
of all, you see our smoke.  That’s meat and drink to us.  It’s the
healthiest thing in the world in all respects, and particularly for the
lungs.  If you are one of those who want us to consume it, I differ from
you.  We are not going to wear the bottoms of our boilers out any faster
than we wear ’em out now, for all the humbugging sentiment in Great
Britain and Ireland.’

By way of ‘going in’ to the fullest extent, Mr. Harthouse rejoined, ‘Mr.
Bounderby, I assure you I am entirely and completely of your way of
thinking.  On conviction.’

‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Bounderby.  ‘Now, you have heard a lot of
talk about the work in our mills, no doubt.  You have?  Very good.  I’ll
state the fact of it to you.  It’s the pleasantest work there is, and
it’s the lightest work there is, and it’s the best-paid work there is.
More than that, we couldn’t improve the mills themselves, unless we laid
down Turkey carpets on the floors.  Which we’re not a-going to do.’

‘Mr. Bounderby, perfectly right.’

‘Lastly,’ said Bounderby, ‘as to our Hands.  There’s not a Hand in this
town, sir, man, woman, or child, but has one ultimate object in life.
That object is, to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon.
Now, they’re not a-going—none of ’em—ever to be fed on turtle soup and
venison with a gold spoon.  And now you know the place.’

Mr. Harthouse professed himself in the highest degree instructed and
refreshed, by this condensed epitome of the whole Coketown question.

‘Why, you see,’ replied Mr. Bounderby, ‘it suits my disposition to have a
full understanding with a man, particularly with a public man, when I
make his acquaintance.  I have only one thing more to say to you, Mr.
Harthouse, before assuring you of the pleasure with which I shall
respond, to the utmost of my poor ability, to my friend Tom Gradgrind’s
letter of introduction.  You are a man of family.  Don’t you deceive
yourself by supposing for a moment that I am a man of family.  I am a bit
of dirty riff-raff, and a genuine scrap of tag, rag, and bobtail.’

If anything could have exalted Jem’s interest in Mr. Bounderby, it would
have been this very circumstance.  Or, so he told him.

‘So now,’ said Bounderby, ‘we may shake hands on equal terms.  I say,
equal terms, because although I know what I am, and the exact depth of
the gutter I have lifted myself out of, better than any man does, I am as
proud as you are.  I am just as proud as you are.  Having now asserted my
independence in a proper manner, I may come to how do you find yourself,
and I hope you’re pretty well.’

The better, Mr. Harthouse gave him to understand as they shook hands, for
the salubrious air of Coketown.  Mr. Bounderby received the answer with
favour.

‘Perhaps you know,’ said he, ‘or perhaps you don’t know, I married Tom
Gradgrind’s daughter.  If you have nothing better to do than to walk up
town with me, I shall be glad to introduce you to Tom Gradgrind’s
daughter.’

‘Mr. Bounderby,’ said Jem, ‘you anticipate my dearest wishes.’

They went out without further discourse; and Mr. Bounderby piloted the
new acquaintance who so strongly contrasted with him, to the private red
brick dwelling, with the black outside shutters, the green inside blinds,
and the black street door up the two white steps.  In the drawing-room of
which mansion, there presently entered to them the most remarkable girl
Mr. James Harthouse had ever seen.  She was so constrained, and yet so
careless; so reserved, and yet so watchful; so cold and proud, and yet so
sensitively ashamed of her husband’s braggart humility—from which she
shrunk as if every example of it were a cut or a blow; that it was quite
a new sensation to observe her.  In face she was no less remarkable than
in manner.  Her features were handsome; but their natural play was so
locked up, that it seemed impossible to guess at their genuine
expression.  Utterly indifferent, perfectly self-reliant, never at a
loss, and yet never at her ease, with her figure in company with them
there, and her mind apparently quite alone—it was of no use ‘going in’
yet awhile to comprehend this girl, for she baffled all penetration.

From the mistress of the house, the visitor glanced to the house itself.
There was no mute sign of a woman in the room.  No graceful little
adornment, no fanciful little device, however trivial, anywhere expressed
her influence.  Cheerless and comfortless, boastfully and doggedly rich,
there the room stared at its present occupants, unsoftened and unrelieved
by the least trace of any womanly occupation.  As Mr. Bounderby stood in
the midst of his household gods, so those unrelenting divinities occupied
their places around Mr. Bounderby, and they were worthy of one another,
and well matched.

‘This, sir,’ said Bounderby, ‘is my wife, Mrs. Bounderby: Tom Gradgrind’s
eldest daughter.  Loo, Mr. James Harthouse.  Mr. Harthouse has joined
your father’s muster-roll.  If he is not Tom Gradgrind’s colleague before
long, I believe we shall at least hear of him in connexion with one of
our neighbouring towns.  You observe, Mr. Harthouse, that my wife is my
junior.  I don’t know what she saw in me to marry me, but she saw
something in me, I suppose, or she wouldn’t have married me.  She has
lots of expensive knowledge, sir, political and otherwise.  If you want
to cram for anything, I should be troubled to recommend you to a better
adviser than Loo Bounderby.’

To a more agreeable adviser, or one from whom he would be more likely to
learn, Mr. Harthouse could never be recommended.

‘Come!’ said his host.  ‘If you’re in the complimentary line, you’ll get
on here, for you’ll meet with no competition.  I have never been in the
way of learning compliments myself, and I don’t profess to understand the
art of paying ’em.  In fact, despise ’em.  But, your bringing-up was
different from mine; mine was a real thing, by George!  You’re a
gentleman, and I don’t pretend to be one.  I am Josiah Bounderby of
Coketown, and that’s enough for me.  However, though I am not influenced
by manners and station, Loo Bounderby may be.  She hadn’t my
advantages—disadvantages you would call ’em, but I call ’em advantages—so
you’ll not waste your power, I dare say.’

‘Mr. Bounderby,’ said Jem, turning with a smile to Louisa, ‘is a noble
animal in a comparatively natural state, quite free from the harness in
which a conventional hack like myself works.’

‘You respect Mr. Bounderby very much,’ she quietly returned.  ‘It is
natural that you should.’

He was disgracefully thrown out, for a gentleman who had seen so much of
the world, and thought, ‘Now, how am I to take this?’

‘You are going to devote yourself, as I gather from what Mr. Bounderby
has said, to the service of your country.  You have made up your mind,’
said Louisa, still standing before him where she had first stopped—in all
the singular contrariety of her self-possession, and her being obviously
very ill at ease—‘to show the nation the way out of all its
difficulties.’

‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ he returned, laughing, ‘upon my honour, no.  I will
make no such pretence to you.  I have seen a little, here and there, up
and down; I have found it all to be very worthless, as everybody has, and
as some confess they have, and some do not; and I am going in for your
respected father’s opinions—really because I have no choice of opinions,
and may as well back them as anything else.’

‘Have you none of your own?’ asked Louisa.

‘I have not so much as the slightest predilection left.  I assure you I
attach not the least importance to any opinions.  The result of the
varieties of boredom I have undergone, is a conviction (unless conviction
is too industrious a word for the lazy sentiment I entertain on the
subject), that any set of ideas will do just as much good as any other
set, and just as much harm as any other set.  There’s an English family
with a charming Italian motto.  What will be, will be.  It’s the only
truth going!’

This vicious assumption of honesty in dishonesty—a vice so dangerous, so
deadly, and so common—seemed, he observed, a little to impress her in his
favour.  He followed up the advantage, by saying in his pleasantest
manner: a manner to which she might attach as much or as little meaning
as she pleased: ‘The side that can prove anything in a line of units,
tens, hundreds, and thousands, Mrs. Bounderby, seems to me to afford the
most fun, and to give a man the best chance.  I am quite as much attached
to it as if I believed it.  I am quite ready to go in for it, to the same
extent as if I believed it.  And what more could I possibly do, if I did
believe it!’

‘You are a singular politician,’ said Louisa.

‘Pardon me; I have not even that merit.  We are the largest party in the
state, I assure you, Mrs. Bounderby, if we all fell out of our adopted
ranks and were reviewed together.’

Mr. Bounderby, who had been in danger of bursting in silence, interposed
here with a project for postponing the family dinner till half-past six,
and taking Mr. James Harthouse in the meantime on a round of visits to
the voting and interesting notabilities of Coketown and its vicinity.
The round of visits was made; and Mr. James Harthouse, with a discreet
use of his blue coaching, came off triumphantly, though with a
considerable accession of boredom.

In the evening, he found the dinner-table laid for four, but they sat
down only three.  It was an appropriate occasion for Mr. Bounderby to
discuss the flavour of the hap’orth of stewed eels he had purchased in
the streets at eight years old; and also of the inferior water, specially
used for laying the dust, with which he had washed down that repast.  He
likewise entertained his guest over the soup and fish, with the
calculation that he (Bounderby) had eaten in his youth at least three
horses under the guise of polonies and saveloys.  These recitals, Jem, in
a languid manner, received with ‘charming!’ every now and then; and they
probably would have decided him to ‘go in’ for Jerusalem again to-morrow
morning, had he been less curious respecting Louisa.

‘Is there nothing,’ he thought, glancing at her as she sat at the head of
the table, where her youthful figure, small and slight, but very
graceful, looked as pretty as it looked misplaced; ‘is there nothing that
will move that face?’

Yes!  By Jupiter, there was something, and here it was, in an unexpected
shape.  Tom appeared.  She changed as the door opened, and broke into a
beaming smile.

A beautiful smile.  Mr. James Harthouse might not have thought so much of
it, but that he had wondered so long at her impassive face.  She put out
her hand—a pretty little soft hand; and her fingers closed upon her
brother’s, as if she would have carried them to her lips.

‘Ay, ay?’ thought the visitor.  ‘This whelp is the only creature she
cares for.  So, so!’

The whelp was presented, and took his chair.  The appellation was not
flattering, but not unmerited.

‘When I was your age, young Tom,’ said Bounderby, ‘I was punctual, or I
got no dinner!’

‘When you were my age,’ resumed Tom, ‘you hadn’t a wrong balance to get
right, and hadn’t to dress afterwards.’

‘Never mind that now,’ said Bounderby.

‘Well, then,’ grumbled Tom.  ‘Don’t begin with me.’

‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ said Harthouse, perfectly hearing this under-strain as
it went on; ‘your brother’s face is quite familiar to me.  Can I have
seen him abroad?  Or at some public school, perhaps?’

‘No,’ she resumed, quite interested, ‘he has never been abroad yet, and
was educated here, at home.  Tom, love, I am telling Mr. Harthouse that
he never saw you abroad.’

‘No such luck, sir,’ said Tom.

There was little enough in him to brighten her face, for he was a sullen
young fellow, and ungracious in his manner even to her.  So much the
greater must have been the solitude of her heart, and her need of some
one on whom to bestow it.  ‘So much the more is this whelp the only
creature she has ever cared for,’ thought Mr. James Harthouse, turning it
over and over.  ‘So much the more.  So much the more.’

Both in his sister’s presence, and after she had left the room, the whelp
took no pains to hide his contempt for Mr. Bounderby, whenever he could
indulge it without the observation of that independent man, by making wry
faces, or shutting one eye.  Without responding to these telegraphic
communications, Mr. Harthouse encouraged him much in the course of the
evening, and showed an unusual liking for him.  At last, when he rose to
return to his hotel, and was a little doubtful whether he knew the way by
night, the whelp immediately proffered his services as guide, and turned
out with him to escort him thither.

            [Picture: Mr. Harthouse dines at the Bounderby’s]



CHAPTER III
THE WHELP


IT was very remarkable that a young gentleman who had been brought up
under one continuous system of unnatural restraint, should be a
hypocrite; but it was certainly the case with Tom.  It was very strange
that a young gentleman who had never been left to his own guidance for
five consecutive minutes, should be incapable at last of governing
himself; but so it was with Tom.  It was altogether unaccountable that a
young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle,
should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling
sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom.

‘Do you smoke?’ asked Mr. James Harthouse, when they came to the hotel.

‘I believe you!’ said Tom.

He could do no less than ask Tom up; and Tom could do no less than go up.
What with a cooling drink adapted to the weather, but not so weak as
cool; and what with a rarer tobacco than was to be bought in those parts;
Tom was soon in a highly free and easy state at his end of the sofa, and
more than ever disposed to admire his new friend at the other end.

Tom blew his smoke aside, after he had been smoking a little while, and
took an observation of his friend.  ‘He don’t seem to care about his
dress,’ thought Tom, ‘and yet how capitally he does it.  What an easy
swell he is!’

Mr. James Harthouse, happening to catch Tom’s eye, remarked that he drank
nothing, and filled his glass with his own negligent hand.

‘Thank’ee,’ said Tom.  ‘Thank’ee.  Well, Mr. Harthouse, I hope you have
had about a dose of old Bounderby to-night.’  Tom said this with one eye
shut up again, and looking over his glass knowingly, at his entertainer.

‘A very good fellow indeed!’ returned Mr. James Harthouse.

‘You think so, don’t you?’ said Tom.  And shut up his eye again.

Mr. James Harthouse smiled; and rising from his end of the sofa, and
lounging with his back against the chimney-piece, so that he stood before
the empty fire-grate as he smoked, in front of Tom and looking down at
him, observed:

‘What a comical brother-in-law you are!’

‘What a comical brother-in-law old Bounderby is, I think you mean,’ said
Tom.

‘You are a piece of caustic, Tom,’ retorted Mr. James Harthouse.

There was something so very agreeable in being so intimate with such a
waistcoat; in being called Tom, in such an intimate way, by such a voice;
in being on such off-hand terms so soon, with such a pair of whiskers;
that Tom was uncommonly pleased with himself.

‘Oh!  I don’t care for old Bounderby,’ said he, ‘if you mean that.  I
have always called old Bounderby by the same name when I have talked
about him, and I have always thought of him in the same way.  I am not
going to begin to be polite now, about old Bounderby.  It would be rather
late in the day.’

‘Don’t mind me,’ returned James; ‘but take care when his wife is by, you
know.’

‘His wife?’ said Tom.  ‘My sister Loo?  O yes!’  And he laughed, and took
a little more of the cooling drink.

James Harthouse continued to lounge in the same place and attitude,
smoking his cigar in his own easy way, and looking pleasantly at the
whelp, as if he knew himself to be a kind of agreeable demon who had only
to hover over him, and he must give up his whole soul if required.  It
certainly did seem that the whelp yielded to this influence.  He looked
at his companion sneakingly, he looked at him admiringly, he looked at
him boldly, and put up one leg on the sofa.

‘My sister Loo?’ said Tom.  ‘_She_ never cared for old Bounderby.’

‘That’s the past tense, Tom,’ returned Mr. James Harthouse, striking the
ash from his cigar with his little finger.  ‘We are in the present tense,
now.’

‘Verb neuter, not to care.  Indicative mood, present tense.  First person
singular, I do not care; second person singular, thou dost not care;
third person singular, she does not care,’ returned Tom.

‘Good!  Very quaint!’ said his friend.  ‘Though you don’t mean it.’

‘But I _do_ mean it,’ cried Tom.  ‘Upon my honour!  Why, you won’t tell
me, Mr. Harthouse, that you really suppose my sister Loo does care for
old Bounderby.’

‘My dear fellow,’ returned the other, ‘what am I bound to suppose, when I
find two married people living in harmony and happiness?’

Tom had by this time got both his legs on the sofa.  If his second leg
had not been already there when he was called a dear fellow, he would
have put it up at that great stage of the conversation.  Feeling it
necessary to do something then, he stretched himself out at greater
length, and, reclining with the back of his head on the end of the sofa,
and smoking with an infinite assumption of negligence, turned his common
face, and not too sober eyes, towards the face looking down upon him so
carelessly yet so potently.

‘You know our governor, Mr. Harthouse,’ said Tom, ‘and therefore, you
needn’t be surprised that Loo married old Bounderby.  She never had a
lover, and the governor proposed old Bounderby, and she took him.’

‘Very dutiful in your interesting sister,’ said Mr. James Harthouse.

‘Yes, but she wouldn’t have been as dutiful, and it would not have come
off as easily,’ returned the whelp, ‘if it hadn’t been for me.’

The tempter merely lifted his eyebrows; but the whelp was obliged to go
on.

‘_I_ persuaded her,’ he said, with an edifying air of superiority.  ‘I
was stuck into old Bounderby’s bank (where I never wanted to be), and I
knew I should get into scrapes there, if she put old Bounderby’s pipe
out; so I told her my wishes, and she came into them.  She would do
anything for me.  It was very game of her, wasn’t it?’

‘It was charming, Tom!’

‘Not that it was altogether so important to her as it was to me,’
continued Tom coolly, ‘because my liberty and comfort, and perhaps my
getting on, depended on it; and she had no other lover, and staying at
home was like staying in jail—especially when I was gone.  It wasn’t as
if she gave up another lover for old Bounderby; but still it was a good
thing in her.’

‘Perfectly delightful.  And she gets on so placidly.’

‘Oh,’ returned Tom, with contemptuous patronage, ‘she’s a regular girl.
A girl can get on anywhere.  She has settled down to the life, and _she_
don’t mind.  It does just as well as another.  Besides, though Loo is a
girl, she’s not a common sort of girl.  She can shut herself up within
herself, and think—as I have often known her sit and watch the fire—for
an hour at a stretch.’

‘Ay, ay?  Has resources of her own,’ said Harthouse, smoking quietly.

‘Not so much of that as you may suppose,’ returned Tom; ‘for our governor
had her crammed with all sorts of dry bones and sawdust.  It’s his
system.’

‘Formed his daughter on his own model?’ suggested Harthouse.

‘His daughter?  Ah! and everybody else.  Why, he formed Me that way!’
said Tom.

‘Impossible!’

‘He did, though,’ said Tom, shaking his head.  ‘I mean to say, Mr.
Harthouse, that when I first left home and went to old Bounderby’s, I was
as flat as a warming-pan, and knew no more about life, than any oyster
does.’

‘Come, Tom!  I can hardly believe that.  A joke’s a joke.’

‘Upon my soul!’ said the whelp.  ‘I am serious; I am indeed!’  He smoked
with great gravity and dignity for a little while, and then added, in a
highly complacent tone, ‘Oh!  I have picked up a little since.  I don’t
deny that.  But I have done it myself; no thanks to the governor.’

‘And your intelligent sister?’

‘My intelligent sister is about where she was.  She used to complain to
me that she had nothing to fall back upon, that girls usually fall back
upon; and I don’t see how she is to have got over that since.  But _she_
don’t mind,’ he sagaciously added, puffing at his cigar again.  ‘Girls
can always get on, somehow.’

‘Calling at the Bank yesterday evening, for Mr. Bounderby’s address, I
found an ancient lady there, who seems to entertain great admiration for
your sister,’ observed Mr. James Harthouse, throwing away the last small
remnant of the cigar he had now smoked out.

‘Mother Sparsit!’ said Tom.  ‘What! you have seen her already, have you?’

His friend nodded.  Tom took his cigar out of his mouth, to shut up his
eye (which had grown rather unmanageable) with the greater expression,
and to tap his nose several times with his finger.

‘Mother Sparsit’s feeling for Loo is more than admiration, I should
think,’ said Tom.  ‘Say affection and devotion.  Mother Sparsit never set
her cap at Bounderby when he was a bachelor.  Oh no!’

These were the last words spoken by the whelp, before a giddy drowsiness
came upon him, followed by complete oblivion.  He was roused from the
latter state by an uneasy dream of being stirred up with a boot, and also
of a voice saying: ‘Come, it’s late.  Be off!’

‘Well!’ he said, scrambling from the sofa.  ‘I must take my leave of you
though.  I say.  Yours is very good tobacco.  But it’s too mild.’

‘Yes, it’s too mild,’ returned his entertainer.

‘It’s—it’s ridiculously mild,’ said Tom.  ‘Where’s the door!  Good
night!’

He had another odd dream of being taken by a waiter through a mist,
which, after giving him some trouble and difficulty, resolved itself into
the main street, in which he stood alone.  He then walked home pretty
easily, though not yet free from an impression of the presence and
influence of his new friend—as if he were lounging somewhere in the air,
in the same negligent attitude, regarding him with the same look.

The whelp went home, and went to bed.  If he had had any sense of what he
had done that night, and had been less of a whelp and more of a brother,
he might have turned short on the road, might have gone down to the
ill-smelling river that was dyed black, might have gone to bed in it for
good and all, and have curtained his head for ever with its filthy
waters.



CHAPTER IV
MEN AND BROTHERS


‘OH, my friends, the down-trodden operatives of Coketown!  Oh, my friends
and fellow-countrymen, the slaves of an iron-handed and a grinding
despotism!  Oh, my friends and fellow-sufferers, and fellow-workmen, and
fellow-men!  I tell you that the hour is come, when we must rally round
one another as One united power, and crumble into dust the oppressors
that too long have battened upon the plunder of our families, upon the
sweat of our brows, upon the labour of our hands, upon the strength of
our sinews, upon the God-created glorious rights of Humanity, and upon
the holy and eternal privileges of Brotherhood!’

‘Good!’  ‘Hear, hear, hear!’  ‘Hurrah!’ and other cries, arose in many
voices from various parts of the densely crowded and suffocatingly close
Hall, in which the orator, perched on a stage, delivered himself of this
and what other froth and fume he had in him.  He had declaimed himself
into a violent heat, and was as hoarse as he was hot.  By dint of roaring
at the top of his voice under a flaring gaslight, clenching his fists,
knitting his brows, setting his teeth, and pounding with his arms, he had
taken so much out of himself by this time, that he was brought to a stop,
and called for a glass of water.

As he stood there, trying to quench his fiery face with his drink of
water, the comparison between the orator and the crowd of attentive faces
turned towards him, was extremely to his disadvantage.  Judging him by
Nature’s evidence, he was above the mass in very little but the stage on
which he stood.  In many great respects he was essentially below them.
He was not so honest, he was not so manly, he was not so good-humoured;
he substituted cunning for their simplicity, and passion for their safe
solid sense.  An ill-made, high-shouldered man, with lowering brows, and
his features crushed into an habitually sour expression, he contrasted
most unfavourably, even in his mongrel dress, with the great body of his
hearers in their plain working clothes.  Strange as it always is to
consider any assembly in the act of submissively resigning itself to the
dreariness of some complacent person, lord or commoner, whom
three-fourths of it could, by no human means, raise out of the slough of
inanity to their own intellectual level, it was particularly strange, and
it was even particularly affecting, to see this crowd of earnest faces,
whose honesty in the main no competent observer free from bias could
doubt, so agitated by such a leader.

Good!  Hear, hear!  Hurrah!  The eagerness both of attention and
intention, exhibited in all the countenances, made them a most impressive
sight.  There was no carelessness, no languor, no idle curiosity; none of
the many shades of indifference to be seen in all other assemblies,
visible for one moment there.  That every man felt his condition to be,
somehow or other, worse than it might be; that every man considered it
incumbent on him to join the rest, towards the making of it better; that
every man felt his only hope to be in his allying himself to the comrades
by whom he was surrounded; and that in this belief, right or wrong
(unhappily wrong then), the whole of that crowd were gravely, deeply,
faithfully in earnest; must have been as plain to any one who chose to
see what was there, as the bare beams of the roof and the whitened brick
walls.  Nor could any such spectator fail to know in his own breast, that
these men, through their very delusions, showed great qualities,
susceptible of being turned to the happiest and best account; and that to
pretend (on the strength of sweeping axioms, howsoever cut and dried)
that they went astray wholly without cause, and of their own irrational
wills, was to pretend that there could be smoke without fire, death
without birth, harvest without seed, anything or everything produced from
nothing.

The orator having refreshed himself, wiped his corrugated forehead from
left to right several times with his handkerchief folded into a pad, and
concentrated all his revived forces, in a sneer of great disdain and
bitterness.

‘But oh, my friends and brothers!  Oh, men and Englishmen, the
down-trodden operatives of Coketown!  What shall we say of that man—that
working-man, that I should find it necessary so to libel the glorious
name—who, being practically and well acquainted with the grievances and
wrongs of you, the injured pith and marrow of this land, and having heard
you, with a noble and majestic unanimity that will make Tyrants tremble,
resolve for to subscribe to the funds of the United Aggregate Tribunal,
and to abide by the injunctions issued by that body for your benefit,
whatever they may be—what, I ask you, will you say of that working-man,
since such I must acknowledge him to be, who, at such a time, deserts his
post, and sells his flag; who, at such a time, turns a traitor and a
craven and a recreant, who, at such a time, is not ashamed to make to you
the dastardly and humiliating avowal that he will hold himself aloof, and
will _not_ be one of those associated in the gallant stand for Freedom
and for Right?’

The assembly was divided at this point.  There were some groans and
hisses, but the general sense of honour was much too strong for the
condemnation of a man unheard.  ‘Be sure you’re right, Slackbridge!’
‘Put him up!’  ‘Let’s hear him!’  Such things were said on many sides.
Finally, one strong voice called out, ‘Is the man heer?  If the man’s
heer, Slackbridge, let’s hear the man himseln, ’stead o’ yo.’  Which was
received with a round of applause.

Slackbridge, the orator, looked about him with a withering smile; and,
holding out his right hand at arm’s length (as the manner of all
Slackbridges is), to still the thundering sea, waited until there was a
profound silence.

‘Oh, my friends and fellow-men!’ said Slackbridge then, shaking his head
with violent scorn, ‘I do not wonder that you, the prostrate sons of
labour, are incredulous of the existence of such a man.  But he who sold
his birthright for a mess of pottage existed, and Judas Iscariot existed,
and Castlereagh existed, and this man exists!’

Here, a brief press and confusion near the stage, ended in the man
himself standing at the orator’s side before the concourse.  He was pale
and a little moved in the face—his lips especially showed it; but he
stood quiet, with his left hand at his chin, waiting to be heard.  There
was a chairman to regulate the proceedings, and this functionary now took
the case into his own hands.

‘My friends,’ said he, ‘by virtue o’ my office as your president, I askes
o’ our friend Slackbridge, who may be a little over hetter in this
business, to take his seat, whiles this man Stephen Blackpool is heern.
You all know this man Stephen Blackpool.  You know him awlung o’ his
misfort’ns, and his good name.’

With that, the chairman shook him frankly by the hand, and sat down
again.  Slackbridge likewise sat down, wiping his hot forehead—always
from left to right, and never the reverse way.

‘My friends,’ Stephen began, in the midst of a dead calm; ‘I ha’ hed
what’s been spok’n o’ me, and ’tis lickly that I shan’t mend it.  But I’d
liefer you’d hearn the truth concernin myseln, fro my lips than fro onny
other man’s, though I never cud’n speak afore so monny, wi’out bein
moydert and muddled.’

Slackbridge shook his head as if he would shake it off, in his
bitterness.

‘I’m th’ one single Hand in Bounderby’s mill, o’ a’ the men theer, as
don’t coom in wi’ th’ proposed reg’lations.  I canna coom in wi’ ’em.  My
friends, I doubt their doin’ yo onny good.  Licker they’ll do yo hurt.’

Slackbridge laughed, folded his arms, and frowned sarcastically.

‘But ’t an’t sommuch for that as I stands out.  If that were aw, I’d coom
in wi’ th’ rest.  But I ha’ my reasons—mine, yo see—for being hindered;
not on’y now, but awlus—awlus—life long!’

Slackbridge jumped up and stood beside him, gnashing and tearing.  ‘Oh,
my friends, what but this did I tell you?  Oh, my fellow-countrymen, what
warning but this did I give you?  And how shows this recreant conduct in
a man on whom unequal laws are known to have fallen heavy?  Oh, you
Englishmen, I ask you how does this subornation show in one of
yourselves, who is thus consenting to his own undoing and to yours, and
to your children’s and your children’s children’s?’

There was some applause, and some crying of Shame upon the man; but the
greater part of the audience were quiet.  They looked at Stephen’s worn
face, rendered more pathetic by the homely emotions it evinced; and, in
the kindness of their nature, they were more sorry than indignant.

‘’Tis this Delegate’s trade for t’ speak,’ said Stephen, ‘an’ he’s paid
for ’t, an’ he knows his work.  Let him keep to ’t.  Let him give no heed
to what I ha had’n to bear.  That’s not for him.  That’s not for nobbody
but me.’

There was a propriety, not to say a dignity in these words, that made the
hearers yet more quiet and attentive.  The same strong voice called out,
‘Slackbridge, let the man be heern, and howd thee tongue!’  Then the
place was wonderfully still.

‘My brothers,’ said Stephen, whose low voice was distinctly heard, ‘and
my fellow-workmen—for that yo are to me, though not, as I knows on, to
this delegate here—I ha but a word to sen, and I could sen nommore if I
was to speak till Strike o’ day.  I know weel, aw what’s afore me.  I
know weel that yo aw resolve to ha nommore ado wi’ a man who is not wi’
yo in this matther.  I know weel that if I was a lyin parisht i’ th’
road, yo’d feel it right to pass me by, as a forrenner and stranger.
What I ha getn, I mun mak th’ best on.’

‘Stephen Blackpool,’ said the chairman, rising, ‘think on ’t agen.  Think
on ’t once agen, lad, afore thou’rt shunned by aw owd friends.’

There was an universal murmur to the same effect, though no man
articulated a word.  Every eye was fixed on Stephen’s face.  To repent of
his determination, would be to take a load from all their minds.  He
looked around him, and knew that it was so.  Not a grain of anger with
them was in his heart; he knew them, far below their surface weaknesses
and misconceptions, as no one but their fellow-labourer could.

‘I ha thowt on ’t, above a bit, sir.  I simply canna coom in.  I mun go
th’ way as lays afore me.  I mun tak my leave o’ aw heer.’

He made a sort of reverence to them by holding up his arms, and stood for
the moment in that attitude; not speaking until they slowly dropped at
his sides.

‘Monny’s the pleasant word as soom heer has spok’n wi’ me; monny’s the
face I see heer, as I first seen when I were yoong and lighter heart’n
than now.  I ha’ never had no fratch afore, sin ever I were born, wi’ any
o’ my like; Gonnows I ha’ none now that’s o’ my makin’.  Yo’ll ca’ me
traitor and that—yo I mean t’ say,’ addressing Slackbridge, ‘but ’tis
easier to ca’ than mak’ out.  So let be.’

He had moved away a pace or two to come down from the platform, when he
remembered something he had not said, and returned again.

‘Haply,’ he said, turning his furrowed face slowly about, that he might
as it were individually address the whole audience, those both near and
distant; ‘haply, when this question has been tak’n up and discoosed,
there’ll be a threat to turn out if I’m let to work among yo.  I hope I
shall die ere ever such a time cooms, and I shall work solitary among yo
unless it cooms—truly, I mun do ’t, my friends; not to brave yo, but to
live.  I ha nobbut work to live by; and wheerever can I go, I who ha
worked sin I were no heighth at aw, in Coketown heer?  I mak’ no
complaints o’ bein turned to the wa’, o’ bein outcasten and overlooken
fro this time forrard, but hope I shall be let to work.  If there is any
right for me at aw, my friends, I think ’tis that.’

Not a word was spoken.  Not a sound was audible in the building, but the
slight rustle of men moving a little apart, all along the centre of the
room, to open a means of passing out, to the man with whom they had all
bound themselves to renounce companionship.  Looking at no one, and going
his way with a lowly steadiness upon him that asserted nothing and sought
nothing, Old Stephen, with all his troubles on his head, left the scene.

Then Slackbridge, who had kept his oratorical arm extended during the
going out, as if he were repressing with infinite solicitude and by a
wonderful moral power the vehement passions of the multitude, applied
himself to raising their spirits.  Had not the Roman Brutus, oh, my
British countrymen, condemned his son to death; and had not the Spartan
mothers, oh my soon to be victorious friends, driven their flying
children on the points of their enemies’ swords?  Then was it not the
sacred duty of the men of Coketown, with forefathers before them, an
admiring world in company with them, and a posterity to come after them,
to hurl out traitors from the tents they had pitched in a sacred and a
God-like cause?  The winds of heaven answered Yes; and bore Yes, east,
west, north, and south.  And consequently three cheers for the United
Aggregate Tribunal!

Slackbridge acted as fugleman, and gave the time.  The multitude of
doubtful faces (a little conscience-stricken) brightened at the sound,
and took it up.  Private feeling must yield to the common cause.  Hurrah!
The roof yet vibrated with the cheering, when the assembly dispersed.

Thus easily did Stephen Blackpool fall into the loneliest of lives, the
life of solitude among a familiar crowd.  The stranger in the land who
looks into ten thousand faces for some answering look and never finds it,
is in cheering society as compared with him who passes ten averted faces
daily, that were once the countenances of friends.  Such experience was
to be Stephen’s now, in every waking moment of his life; at his work, on
his way to it and from it, at his door, at his window, everywhere.  By
general consent, they even avoided that side of the street on which he
habitually walked; and left it, of all the working men, to him only.

He had been for many years, a quiet silent man, associating but little
with other men, and used to companionship with his own thoughts.  He had
never known before the strength of the want in his heart for the frequent
recognition of a nod, a look, a word; or the immense amount of relief
that had been poured into it by drops through such small means.  It was
even harder than he could have believed possible, to separate in his own
conscience his abandonment by all his fellows from a baseless sense of
shame and disgrace.

The first four days of his endurance were days so long and heavy, that he
began to be appalled by the prospect before him.  Not only did he see no
Rachael all the time, but he avoided every chance of seeing her; for,
although he knew that the prohibition did not yet formally extend to the
women working in the factories, he found that some of them with whom he
was acquainted were changed to him, and he feared to try others, and
dreaded that Rachael might be even singled out from the rest if she were
seen in his company.  So, he had been quite alone during the four days,
and had spoken to no one, when, as he was leaving his work at night, a
young man of a very light complexion accosted him in the street.

‘Your name’s Blackpool, ain’t it?’ said the young man.

Stephen coloured to find himself with his hat in his hand, in his
gratitude for being spoken to, or in the suddenness of it, or both.  He
made a feint of adjusting the lining, and said, ‘Yes.’

‘You are the Hand they have sent to Coventry, I mean?’ said Bitzer, the
very light young man in question.

Stephen answered ‘Yes,’ again.

‘I supposed so, from their all appearing to keep away from you.  Mr.
Bounderby wants to speak to you.  You know his house, don’t you?’

Stephen said ‘Yes,’ again.

‘Then go straight up there, will you?’ said Bitzer.  ‘You’re expected,
and have only to tell the servant it’s you.  I belong to the Bank; so, if
you go straight up without me (I was sent to fetch you), you’ll save me a
walk.’

Stephen, whose way had been in the contrary direction, turned about, and
betook himself as in duty bound, to the red brick castle of the giant
Bounderby.



CHAPTER V
MEN AND MASTERS


‘WELL, Stephen,’ said Bounderby, in his windy manner, ‘what’s this I
hear?  What have these pests of the earth been doing to _you_?  Come in,
and speak up.’

It was into the drawing-room that he was thus bidden.  A tea-table was
set out; and Mr. Bounderby’s young wife, and her brother, and a great
gentleman from London, were present.  To whom Stephen made his obeisance,
closing the door and standing near it, with his hat in his hand.

‘This is the man I was telling you about, Harthouse,’ said Mr. Bounderby.
The gentleman he addressed, who was talking to Mrs. Bounderby on the
sofa, got up, saying in an indolent way, ‘Oh really?’ and dawdled to the
hearthrug where Mr. Bounderby stood.

‘Now,’ said Bounderby, ‘speak up!’

After the four days he had passed, this address fell rudely and
discordantly on Stephen’s ear.  Besides being a rough handling of his
wounded mind, it seemed to assume that he really was the self-interested
deserter he had been called.

‘What were it, sir,’ said Stephen, ‘as yo were pleased to want wi’ me?’

‘Why, I have told you,’ returned Bounderby.  ‘Speak up like a man, since
you are a man, and tell us about yourself and this Combination.’

‘Wi’ yor pardon, sir,’ said Stephen Blackpool, ‘I ha’ nowt to sen about
it.’

Mr. Bounderby, who was always more or less like a Wind, finding something
in his way here, began to blow at it directly.

‘Now, look here, Harthouse,’ said he, ‘here’s a specimen of ’em.  When
this man was here once before, I warned this man against the mischievous
strangers who are always about—and who ought to be hanged wherever they
are found—and I told this man that he was going in the wrong direction.
Now, would you believe it, that although they have put this mark upon
him, he is such a slave to them still, that he’s afraid to open his lips
about them?’

‘I sed as I had nowt to sen, sir; not as I was fearfo’ o’ openin’ my
lips.’

‘You said!  Ah!  _I_ know what you said; more than that, I know what you
mean, you see.  Not always the same thing, by the Lord Harry!  Quite
different things.  You had better tell us at once, that that fellow
Slackbridge is not in the town, stirring up the people to mutiny; and
that he is not a regular qualified leader of the people: that is, a most
confounded scoundrel.  You had better tell us so at once; you can’t
deceive me.  You want to tell us so.  Why don’t you?’

‘I’m as sooary as yo, sir, when the people’s leaders is bad,’ said
Stephen, shaking his head.  ‘They taks such as offers.  Haply ’tis na’
the sma’est o’ their misfortuns when they can get no better.’

The wind began to get boisterous.

‘Now, you’ll think this pretty well, Harthouse,’ said Mr. Bounderby.
‘You’ll think this tolerably strong.  You’ll say, upon my soul this is a
tidy specimen of what my friends have to deal with; but this is nothing,
sir!  You shall hear me ask this man a question.  Pray, Mr.
Blackpool’—wind springing up very fast—‘may I take the liberty of asking
you how it happens that you refused to be in this Combination?’

‘How ’t happens?’

‘Ah!’ said Mr. Bounderby, with his thumbs in the arms of his coat, and
jerking his head and shutting his eyes in confidence with the opposite
wall: ‘how it happens.’

‘I’d leefer not coom to ’t, sir; but sin you put th’ question—an’ not
want’n t’ be ill-manner’n—I’ll answer.  I ha passed a promess.’

‘Not to me, you know,’ said Bounderby.  (Gusty weather with deceitful
calms.  One now prevailing.)

‘O no, sir.  Not to yo.’

‘As for me, any consideration for me has had just nothing at all to do
with it,’ said Bounderby, still in confidence with the wall.  ‘If only
Josiah Bounderby of Coketown had been in question, you would have joined
and made no bones about it?’

‘Why yes, sir.  ’Tis true.’

‘Though he knows,’ said Mr. Bounderby, now blowing a gale, ‘that there
are a set of rascals and rebels whom transportation is too good for!
Now, Mr. Harthouse, you have been knocking about in the world some time.
Did you ever meet with anything like that man out of this blessed
country?’  And Mr. Bounderby pointed him out for inspection, with an
angry finger.

‘Nay, ma’am,’ said Stephen Blackpool, staunchly protesting against the
words that had been used, and instinctively addressing himself to Louisa,
after glancing at her face.  ‘Not rebels, nor yet rascals.  Nowt o’ th’
kind, ma’am, nowt o’ th’ kind.  They’ve not doon me a kindness, ma’am, as
I know and feel.  But there’s not a dozen men amoong ’em, ma’am—a dozen?
Not six—but what believes as he has doon his duty by the rest and by
himseln.  God forbid as I, that ha’ known, and had’n experience o’ these
men aw my life—I, that ha’ ett’n an’ droonken wi’ ’em, an’ seet’n wi’
’em, and toil’n wi’ ’em, and lov’n ’em, should fail fur to stan by ’em
wi’ the truth, let ’em ha’ doon to me what they may!’

He spoke with the rugged earnestness of his place and character—deepened
perhaps by a proud consciousness that he was faithful to his class under
all their mistrust; but he fully remembered where he was, and did not
even raise his voice.

‘No, ma’am, no.  They’re true to one another, faithfo’ to one another,
’fectionate to one another, e’en to death.  Be poor amoong ’em, be sick
amoong ’em, grieve amoong ’em for onny o’ th’ monny causes that carries
grief to the poor man’s door, an’ they’ll be tender wi’ yo, gentle wi’
yo, comfortable wi’ yo, Chrisen wi’ yo.  Be sure o’ that, ma’am.  They’d
be riven to bits, ere ever they’d be different.’

‘In short,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘it’s because they are so full of virtues
that they have turned you adrift.  Go through with it while you are about
it.  Out with it.’

‘How ’tis, ma’am,’ resumed Stephen, appearing still to find his natural
refuge in Louisa’s face, ‘that what is best in us fok, seems to turn us
most to trouble an’ misfort’n an’ mistake, I dunno.  But ’tis so.  I know
’tis, as I know the heavens is over me ahint the smoke.  We’re patient
too, an’ wants in general to do right.  An’ I canna think the fawt is aw
wi’ us.’

‘Now, my friend,’ said Mr. Bounderby, whom he could not have exasperated
more, quite unconscious of it though he was, than by seeming to appeal to
any one else, ‘if you will favour me with your attention for half a
minute, I should like to have a word or two with you.  You said just now,
that you had nothing to tell us about this business.  You are quite sure
of that before we go any further.’

‘Sir, I am sure on ’t.’

‘Here’s a gentleman from London present,’ Mr. Bounderby made a backhanded
point at Mr. James Harthouse with his thumb, ‘a Parliament gentleman.  I
should like him to hear a short bit of dialogue between you and me,
instead of taking the substance of it—for I know precious well,
beforehand, what it will be; nobody knows better than I do, take
notice!—instead of receiving it on trust from my mouth.’

Stephen bent his head to the gentleman from London, and showed a rather
more troubled mind than usual.  He turned his eyes involuntarily to his
former refuge, but at a look from that quarter (expressive though
instantaneous) he settled them on Mr. Bounderby’s face.

‘Now, what do you complain of?’ asked Mr. Bounderby.

‘I ha’ not coom here, sir,’ Stephen reminded him, ‘to complain.  I coom
for that I were sent for.’

‘What,’ repeated Mr. Bounderby, folding his arms, ‘do you people, in a
general way, complain of?’

Stephen looked at him with some little irresolution for a moment, and
then seemed to make up his mind.

‘Sir, I were never good at showin o ’t, though I ha had’n my share in
feeling o ’t.  ’Deed we are in a muddle, sir.  Look round town—so rich as
’tis—and see the numbers o’ people as has been broughten into bein heer,
fur to weave, an’ to card, an’ to piece out a livin’, aw the same one
way, somehows, ’twixt their cradles and their graves.  Look how we live,
an’ wheer we live, an’ in what numbers, an’ by what chances, and wi’ what
sameness; and look how the mills is awlus a goin, and how they never
works us no nigher to ony dis’ant object—ceptin awlus, Death.  Look how
you considers of us, and writes of us, and talks of us, and goes up wi’
yor deputations to Secretaries o’ State ’bout us, and how yo are awlus
right, and how we are awlus wrong, and never had’n no reason in us sin
ever we were born.  Look how this ha growen an’ growen, sir, bigger an’
bigger, broader an’ broader, harder an’ harder, fro year to year, fro
generation unto generation.  Who can look on ’t, sir, and fairly tell a
man ’tis not a muddle?’

‘Of course,’ said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Now perhaps you’ll let the gentleman
know, how you would set this muddle (as you’re so fond of calling it) to
rights.’

‘I donno, sir.  I canna be expecten to ’t.  ’Tis not me as should be
looken to for that, sir.  ’Tis them as is put ower me, and ower aw the
rest of us.  What do they tak upon themseln, sir, if not to do’t?’

‘I’ll tell you something towards it, at any rate,’ returned Mr.
Bounderby.  ‘We will make an example of half a dozen Slackbridges.  We’ll
indict the blackguards for felony, and get ’em shipped off to penal
settlements.’

Stephen gravely shook his head.

‘Don’t tell me we won’t, man,’ said Mr. Bounderby, by this time blowing a
hurricane, ‘because we will, I tell you!’

‘Sir,’ returned Stephen, with the quiet confidence of absolute certainty,
‘if yo was t’ tak a hundred Slackbridges—aw as there is, and aw the
number ten times towd—an’ was t’ sew ’em up in separate sacks, an’ sink
’em in the deepest ocean as were made ere ever dry land coom to be, yo’d
leave the muddle just wheer ’tis.  Mischeevous strangers!’ said Stephen,
with an anxious smile; ‘when ha we not heern, I am sure, sin ever we can
call to mind, o’ th’ mischeevous strangers!  ’Tis not by _them_ the
trouble’s made, sir.  ’Tis not wi’ _them_ ’t commences.  I ha no favour
for ’em—I ha no reason to favour ’em—but ’tis hopeless and useless to
dream o’ takin them fro their trade, ’stead o’ takin their trade fro
them!  Aw that’s now about me in this room were heer afore I coom, an’
will be heer when I am gone.  Put that clock aboard a ship an’ pack it
off to Norfolk Island, an’ the time will go on just the same.  So ’tis
wi’ Slackbridge every bit.’

Reverting for a moment to his former refuge, he observed a cautionary
movement of her eyes towards the door.  Stepping back, he put his hand
upon the lock.  But he had not spoken out of his own will and desire; and
he felt it in his heart a noble return for his late injurious treatment
to be faithful to the last to those who had repudiated him.  He stayed to
finish what was in his mind.

‘Sir, I canna, wi’ my little learning an’ my common way, tell the
genelman what will better aw this—though some working men o’ this town
could, above my powers—but I can tell him what I know will never do ’t.
The strong hand will never do ’t.  Vict’ry and triumph will never do ’t.
Agreeing fur to mak one side unnat’rally awlus and for ever right, and
toother side unnat’rally awlus and for ever wrong, will never, never do
’t.  Nor yet lettin alone will never do ’t.  Let thousands upon thousands
alone, aw leading the like lives and aw faw’en into the like muddle, and
they will be as one, and yo will be as anoother, wi’ a black unpassable
world betwixt yo, just as long or short a time as sich-like misery can
last.  Not drawin nigh to fok, wi’ kindness and patience an’ cheery ways,
that so draws nigh to one another in their monny troubles, and so
cherishes one another in their distresses wi’ what they need
themseln—like, I humbly believe, as no people the genelman ha seen in aw
his travels can beat—will never do ’t till th’ Sun turns t’ ice.  Most o’
aw, rating ’em as so much Power, and reg’latin ’em as if they was figures
in a soom, or machines: wi’out loves and likens, wi’out memories and
inclinations, wi’out souls to weary and souls to hope—when aw goes quiet,
draggin on wi’ ’em as if they’d nowt o’ th’ kind, and when aw goes
onquiet, reproachin ’em for their want o’ sitch humanly feelins in their
dealins wi’ yo—this will never do ’t, sir, till God’s work is onmade.’

Stephen stood with the open door in his hand, waiting to know if anything
more were expected of him.

‘Just stop a moment,’ said Mr. Bounderby, excessively red in the face.
‘I told you, the last time you were here with a grievance, that you had
better turn about and come out of that.  And I also told you, if you
remember, that I was up to the gold spoon look-out.’

‘I were not up to ’t myseln, sir; I do assure yo.’

‘Now it’s clear to me,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘that you are one of those
chaps who have always got a grievance.  And you go about, sowing it and
raising crops.  That’s the business of _your_ life, my friend.’

Stephen shook his head, mutely protesting that indeed he had other
business to do for his life.

‘You are such a waspish, raspish, ill-conditioned chap, you see,’ said
Mr. Bounderby, ‘that even your own Union, the men who know you best, will
have nothing to do with you.  I never thought those fellows could be
right in anything; but I tell you what!  I so far go along with them for
a novelty, that _I_’ll have nothing to do with you either.’

Stephen raised his eyes quickly to his face.

‘You can finish off what you’re at,’ said Mr. Bounderby, with a meaning
nod, ‘and then go elsewhere.’

‘Sir, yo know weel,’ said Stephen expressively, ‘that if I canna get work
wi’ yo, I canna get it elsewheer.’

The reply was, ‘What I know, I know; and what you know, you know.  I have
no more to say about it.’

Stephen glanced at Louisa again, but her eyes were raised to his no more;
therefore, with a sigh, and saying, barely above his breath, ‘Heaven help
us aw in this world!’ he departed.



CHAPTER VI
FADING AWAY


IT was falling dark when Stephen came out of Mr. Bounderby’s house.  The
shadows of night had gathered so fast, that he did not look about him
when he closed the door, but plodded straight along the street.  Nothing
was further from his thoughts than the curious old woman he had
encountered on his previous visit to the same house, when he heard a step
behind him that he knew, and turning, saw her in Rachael’s company.

He saw Rachael first, as he had heard her only.

‘Ah, Rachael, my dear!  Missus, thou wi’ her!’

‘Well, and now you are surprised to be sure, and with reason I must say,’
the old woman returned.  ‘Here I am again, you see.’

‘But how wi’ Rachael?’ said Stephen, falling into their step, walking
between them, and looking from the one to the other.

‘Why, I come to be with this good lass pretty much as I came to be with
you,’ said the old woman, cheerfully, taking the reply upon herself.  ‘My
visiting time is later this year than usual, for I have been rather
troubled with shortness of breath, and so put it off till the weather was
fine and warm.  For the same reason I don’t make all my journey in one
day, but divide it into two days, and get a bed to-night at the
Travellers’ Coffee House down by the railroad (a nice clean house), and
go back Parliamentary, at six in the morning.  Well, but what has this to
do with this good lass, says you?  I’m going to tell you.  I have heard
of Mr. Bounderby being married.  I read it in the paper, where it looked
grand—oh, it looked fine!’ the old woman dwelt on it with strange
enthusiasm: ‘and I want to see his wife.  I have never seen her yet.
Now, if you’ll believe me, she hasn’t come out of that house since noon
to-day.  So not to give her up too easily, I was waiting about, a little
last bit more, when I passed close to this good lass two or three times;
and her face being so friendly I spoke to her, and she spoke to me.
There!’ said the old woman to Stephen, ‘you can make all the rest out for
yourself now, a deal shorter than I can, I dare say!’

Once again, Stephen had to conquer an instinctive propensity to dislike
this old woman, though her manner was as honest and simple as a manner
possibly could be.  With a gentleness that was as natural to him as he
knew it to be to Rachael, he pursued the subject that interested her in
her old age.

‘Well, missus,’ said he, ‘I ha seen the lady, and she were young and
hansom.  Wi’ fine dark thinkin eyes, and a still way, Rachael, as I ha
never seen the like on.’

‘Young and handsome.  Yes!’ cried the old woman, quite delighted.  ‘As
bonny as a rose!  And what a happy wife!’

‘Aye, missus, I suppose she be,’ said Stephen.  But with a doubtful
glance at Rachael.

‘Suppose she be?  She must be.  She’s your master’s wife,’ returned the
old woman.

Stephen nodded assent.  ‘Though as to master,’ said he, glancing again at
Rachael, ‘not master onny more.  That’s aw enden ’twixt him and me.’

‘Have you left his work, Stephen?’ asked Rachael, anxiously and quickly.

‘Why, Rachael,’ he replied, ‘whether I ha lef’n his work, or whether his
work ha lef’n me, cooms t’ th’ same.  His work and me are parted.  ’Tis
as weel so—better, I were thinkin when yo coom up wi’ me.  It would ha
brought’n trouble upon trouble if I had stayed theer.  Haply ’tis a
kindness to monny that I go; haply ’tis a kindness to myseln; anyways it
mun be done.  I mun turn my face fro Coketown fur th’ time, and seek a
fort’n, dear, by beginnin fresh.’

‘Where will you go, Stephen?’

‘I donno t’night,’ said he, lifting off his hat, and smoothing his thin
hair with the flat of his hand.  ‘But I’m not goin t’night, Rachael, nor
yet t’morrow.  ’Tan’t easy overmuch t’ know wheer t’ turn, but a good
heart will coom to me.’

Herein, too, the sense of even thinking unselfishly aided him.  Before he
had so much as closed Mr. Bounderby’s door, he had reflected that at
least his being obliged to go away was good for her, as it would save her
from the chance of being brought into question for not withdrawing from
him.  Though it would cost him a hard pang to leave her, and though he
could think of no similar place in which his condemnation would not
pursue him, perhaps it was almost a relief to be forced away from the
endurance of the last four days, even to unknown difficulties and
distresses.

So he said, with truth, ‘I’m more leetsome, Rachael, under ’t, than I
could’n ha believed.’  It was not her part to make his burden heavier.
She answered with her comforting smile, and the three walked on together.

Age, especially when it strives to be self-reliant and cheerful, finds
much consideration among the poor.  The old woman was so decent and
contented, and made so light of her infirmities, though they had
increased upon her since her former interview with Stephen, that they
both took an interest in her.  She was too sprightly to allow of their
walking at a slow pace on her account, but she was very grateful to be
talked to, and very willing to talk to any extent: so, when they came to
their part of the town, she was more brisk and vivacious than ever.

‘Come to my poor place, missus,’ said Stephen, ‘and tak a coop o’ tea.
Rachael will coom then; and arterwards I’ll see thee safe t’ thy
Travellers’ lodgin.  ’T may be long, Rachael, ere ever I ha th’ chance o’
thy coompany agen.’

They complied, and the three went on to the house where he lodged.  When
they turned into a narrow street, Stephen glanced at his window with a
dread that always haunted his desolate home; but it was open, as he had
left it, and no one was there.  The evil spirit of his life had flitted
away again, months ago, and he had heard no more of her since.  The only
evidence of her last return now, were the scantier moveables in his room,
and the grayer hair upon his head.

He lighted a candle, set out his little tea-board, got hot water from
below, and brought in small portions of tea and sugar, a loaf, and some
butter from the nearest shop.  The bread was new and crusty, the butter
fresh, and the sugar lump, of course—in fulfilment of the standard
testimony of the Coketown magnates, that these people lived like princes,
sir.  Rachael made the tea (so large a party necessitated the borrowing
of a cup), and the visitor enjoyed it mightily.  It was the first glimpse
of sociality the host had had for many days.  He too, with the world a
wide heath before him, enjoyed the meal—again in corroboration of the
magnates, as exemplifying the utter want of calculation on the part of
these people, sir.

‘I ha never thowt yet, missus,’ said Stephen, ‘o’ askin thy name.’

The old lady announced herself as ‘Mrs. Pegler.’

‘A widder, I think?’ said Stephen.

‘Oh, many long years!’  Mrs. Pegler’s husband (one of the best on record)
was already dead, by Mrs. Pegler’s calculation, when Stephen was born.

‘’Twere a bad job, too, to lose so good a one,’ said Stephen.  ‘Onny
children?’

Mrs. Pegler’s cup, rattling against her saucer as she held it, denoted
some nervousness on her part.  ‘No,’ she said.  ‘Not now, not now.’

‘Dead, Stephen,’ Rachael softly hinted.

‘I’m sooary I ha spok’n on ’t,’ said Stephen, ‘I ought t’ hadn in my mind
as I might touch a sore place.  I—I blame myseln.’

While he excused himself, the old lady’s cup rattled more and more.  ‘I
had a son,’ she said, curiously distressed, and not by any of the usual
appearances of sorrow; ‘and he did well, wonderfully well.  But he is not
to be spoken of if you please.  He is—’  Putting down her cup, she moved
her hands as if she would have added, by her action, ‘dead!’  Then she
said aloud, ‘I have lost him.’

Stephen had not yet got the better of his having given the old lady pain,
when his landlady came stumbling up the narrow stairs, and calling him to
the door, whispered in his ear.  Mrs. Pegler was by no means deaf, for
she caught a word as it was uttered.

‘Bounderby!’ she cried, in a suppressed voice, starting up from the
table.  ‘Oh hide me!  Don’t let me be seen for the world.  Don’t let him
come up till I’ve got away.  Pray, pray!’  She trembled, and was
excessively agitated; getting behind Rachael, when Rachael tried to
reassure her; and not seeming to know what she was about.

‘But hearken, missus, hearken,’ said Stephen, astonished.  ‘’Tisn’t Mr.
Bounderby; ’tis his wife.  Yo’r not fearfo’ o’ her.  Yo was hey-go-mad
about her, but an hour sin.’

‘But are you sure it’s the lady, and not the gentleman?’ she asked, still
trembling.

‘Certain sure!’

‘Well then, pray don’t speak to me, nor yet take any notice of me,’ said
the old woman.  ‘Let me be quite to myself in this corner.’

Stephen nodded; looking to Rachael for an explanation, which she was
quite unable to give him; took the candle, went downstairs, and in a few
moments returned, lighting Louisa into the room.  She was followed by the
whelp.

Rachael had risen, and stood apart with her shawl and bonnet in her hand,
when Stephen, himself profoundly astonished by this visit, put the candle
on the table.  Then he too stood, with his doubled hand upon the table
near it, waiting to be addressed.

For the first time in her life Louisa had come into one of the dwellings
of the Coketown Hands; for the first time in her life she was face to
face with anything like individuality in connection with them.  She knew
of their existence by hundreds and by thousands.  She knew what results
in work a given number of them would produce in a given space of time.
She knew them in crowds passing to and from their nests, like ants or
beetles.  But she knew from her reading infinitely more of the ways of
toiling insects than of these toiling men and women.

Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended;
something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand;
something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into
difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and
over-ate itself when wheat was cheap; something that increased at such a
rate of percentage, and yielded such another percentage of crime, and
such another percentage of pauperism; something wholesale, of which vast
fortunes were made; something that occasionally rose like a sea, and did
some harm and waste (chiefly to itself), and fell again; this she knew
the Coketown Hands to be.  But, she had scarcely thought more of
separating them into units, than of separating the sea itself into its
component drops.

She stood for some moments looking round the room.  From the few chairs,
the few books, the common prints, and the bed, she glanced to the two
women, and to Stephen.

‘I have come to speak to you, in consequence of what passed just now.  I
should like to be serviceable to you, if you will let me.  Is this your
wife?’

Rachael raised her eyes, and they sufficiently answered no, and dropped
again.

‘I remember,’ said Louisa, reddening at her mistake; ‘I recollect, now,
to have heard your domestic misfortunes spoken of, though I was not
attending to the particulars at the time.  It was not my meaning to ask a
question that would give pain to any one here.  If I should ask any other
question that may happen to have that result, give me credit, if you
please, for being in ignorance how to speak to you as I ought.’

As Stephen had but a little while ago instinctively addressed himself to
her, so she now instinctively addressed herself to Rachael.  Her manner
was short and abrupt, yet faltering and timid.

‘He has told you what has passed between himself and my husband?  You
would be his first resource, I think.’

‘I have heard the end of it, young lady,’ said Rachael.

‘Did I understand, that, being rejected by one employer, he would
probably be rejected by all?  I thought he said as much?’

‘The chances are very small, young lady—next to nothing—for a man who
gets a bad name among them.’

‘What shall I understand that you mean by a bad name?’

‘The name of being troublesome.’

‘Then, by the prejudices of his own class, and by the prejudices of the
other, he is sacrificed alike?  Are the two so deeply separated in this
town, that there is no place whatever for an honest workman between
them?’

Rachael shook her head in silence.

‘He fell into suspicion,’ said Louisa, ‘with his fellow-weavers,
because—he had made a promise not to be one of them.  I think it must
have been to you that he made that promise.  Might I ask you why he made
it?’

Rachael burst into tears.  ‘I didn’t seek it of him, poor lad.  I prayed
him to avoid trouble for his own good, little thinking he’d come to it
through me.  But I know he’d die a hundred deaths, ere ever he’d break
his word.  I know that of him well.’

Stephen had remained quietly attentive, in his usual thoughtful attitude,
with his hand at his chin.  He now spoke in a voice rather less steady
than usual.

‘No one, excepting myseln, can ever know what honour, an’ what love, an’
respect, I bear to Rachael, or wi’ what cause.  When I passed that
promess, I towd her true, she were th’ Angel o’ my life.  ’Twere a solemn
promess.  ’Tis gone fro’ me, for ever.’

Louisa turned her head to him, and bent it with a deference that was new
in her.  She looked from him to Rachael, and her features softened.
‘What will you do?’ she asked him.  And her voice had softened too.

‘Weel, ma’am,’ said Stephen, making the best of it, with a smile; ‘when I
ha finished off, I mun quit this part, and try another.  Fortnet or
misfortnet, a man can but try; there’s nowt to be done wi’out tryin’—cept
laying down and dying.’

‘How will you travel?’

‘Afoot, my kind ledy, afoot.’

Louisa coloured, and a purse appeared in her hand.  The rustling of a
bank-note was audible, as she unfolded one and laid it on the table.

‘Rachael, will you tell him—for you know how, without offence—that this
is freely his, to help him on his way?  Will you entreat him to take it?’

‘I canna do that, young lady,’ she answered, turning her head aside.
‘Bless you for thinking o’ the poor lad wi’ such tenderness.  But ’tis
for him to know his heart, and what is right according to it.’

Louisa looked, in part incredulous, in part frightened, in part overcome
with quick sympathy, when this man of so much self-command, who had been
so plain and steady through the late interview, lost his composure in a
moment, and now stood with his hand before his face.  She stretched out
hers, as if she would have touched him; then checked herself, and
remained still.

‘Not e’en Rachael,’ said Stephen, when he stood again with his face
uncovered, ‘could mak sitch a kind offerin, by onny words, kinder.  T’
show that I’m not a man wi’out reason and gratitude, I’ll tak two pound.
I’ll borrow ’t for t’ pay ’t back.  ’Twill be the sweetest work as ever I
ha done, that puts it in my power t’ acknowledge once more my lastin
thankfulness for this present action.’

She was fain to take up the note again, and to substitute the much
smaller sum he had named.  He was neither courtly, nor handsome, nor
picturesque, in any respect; and yet his manner of accepting it, and of
expressing his thanks without more words, had a grace in it that Lord
Chesterfield could not have taught his son in a century.

Tom had sat upon the bed, swinging one leg and sucking his walking-stick
with sufficient unconcern, until the visit had attained this stage.
Seeing his sister ready to depart, he got up, rather hurriedly, and put
in a word.

‘Just wait a moment, Loo!  Before we go, I should like to speak to him a
moment.  Something comes into my head.  If you’ll step out on the stairs,
Blackpool, I’ll mention it.  Never mind a light, man!’  Tom was
remarkably impatient of his moving towards the cupboard, to get one.  ‘It
don’t want a light.’

Stephen followed him out, and Tom closed the room door, and held the lock
in his hand.

‘I say!’ he whispered.  ‘I think I can do you a good turn.  Don’t ask me
what it is, because it may not come to anything.  But there’s no harm in
my trying.’

His breath fell like a flame of fire on Stephen’s ear, it was so hot.

‘That was our light porter at the Bank,’ said Tom, ‘who brought you the
message to-night.  I call him our light porter, because I belong to the
Bank too.’

Stephen thought, ‘What a hurry he is in!’  He spoke so confusedly.

‘Well!’ said Tom.  ‘Now look here!  When are you off?’

‘T’ day’s Monday,’ replied Stephen, considering.  ‘Why, sir, Friday or
Saturday, nigh ’bout.’

‘Friday or Saturday,’ said Tom.  ‘Now look here!  I am not sure that I
can do you the good turn I want to do you—that’s my sister, you know, in
your room—but I may be able to, and if I should not be able to, there’s
no harm done.  So I tell you what.  You’ll know our light porter again?’

‘Yes, sure,’ said Stephen.

‘Very well,’ returned Tom.  ‘When you leave work of a night, between this
and your going away, just hang about the Bank an hour or so, will you?
Don’t take on, as if you meant anything, if he should see you hanging
about there; because I shan’t put him up to speak to you, unless I find I
can do you the service I want to do you.  In that case he’ll have a note
or a message for you, but not else.  Now look here!  You are sure you
understand.’

He had wormed a finger, in the darkness, through a button-hole of
Stephen’s coat, and was screwing that corner of the garment tight up
round and round, in an extraordinary manner.

‘I understand, sir,’ said Stephen.

‘Now look here!’ repeated Tom.  ‘Be sure you don’t make any mistake then,
and don’t forget.  I shall tell my sister as we go home, what I have in
view, and she’ll approve, I know.  Now look here!  You’re all right, are
you?  You understand all about it?  Very well then.  Come along, Loo!’

He pushed the door open as he called to her, but did not return into the
room, or wait to be lighted down the narrow stairs.  He was at the bottom
when she began to descend, and was in the street before she could take
his arm.

Mrs. Pegler remained in her corner until the brother and sister were
gone, and until Stephen came back with the candle in his hand.  She was
in a state of inexpressible admiration of Mrs. Bounderby, and, like an
unaccountable old woman, wept, ‘because she was such a pretty dear.’  Yet
Mrs. Pegler was so flurried lest the object of her admiration should
return by chance, or anybody else should come, that her cheerfulness was
ended for that night.  It was late too, to people who rose early and
worked hard; therefore the party broke up; and Stephen and Rachael
escorted their mysterious acquaintance to the door of the Travellers’
Coffee House, where they parted from her.

They walked back together to the corner of the street where Rachael
lived, and as they drew nearer and nearer to it, silence crept upon them.
When they came to the dark corner where their unfrequent meetings always
ended, they stopped, still silent, as if both were afraid to speak.

‘I shall strive t’ see thee agen, Rachael, afore I go, but if not—’

‘Thou wilt not, Stephen, I know.  ’Tis better that we make up our minds
to be open wi’ one another.’

‘Thou’rt awlus right.  ’Tis bolder and better.  I ha been thinkin then,
Rachael, that as ’tis but a day or two that remains, ’twere better for
thee, my dear, not t’ be seen wi’ me.  ’T might bring thee into trouble,
fur no good.’

‘’Tis not for that, Stephen, that I mind.  But thou know’st our old
agreement.  ’Tis for that.’

‘Well, well,’ said he.  ‘’Tis better, onnyways.’

‘Thou’lt write to me, and tell me all that happens, Stephen?’

‘Yes.  What can I say now, but Heaven be wi’ thee, Heaven bless thee,
Heaven thank thee and reward thee!’

‘May it bless thee, Stephen, too, in all thy wanderings, and send thee
peace and rest at last!’

‘I towd thee, my dear,’ said Stephen Blackpool—‘that night—that I would
never see or think o’ onnything that angered me, but thou, so much better
than me, should’st be beside it.  Thou’rt beside it now.  Thou mak’st me
see it wi’ a better eye.  Bless thee.  Good night.  Good-bye!’

It was but a hurried parting in a common street, yet it was a sacred
remembrance to these two common people.  Utilitarian economists,
skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up
infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds, the poor you will
have always with you.  Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the
utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much
in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is
utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand
face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you.

Stephen worked the next day, and the next, uncheered by a word from any
one, and shunned in all his comings and goings as before.  At the end of
the second day, he saw land; at the end of the third, his loom stood
empty.

He had overstayed his hour in the street outside the Bank, on each of the
two first evenings; and nothing had happened there, good or bad.  That he
might not be remiss in his part of the engagement, he resolved to wait
full two hours, on this third and last night.

There was the lady who had once kept Mr. Bounderby’s house, sitting at
the first-floor window as he had seen her before; and there was the light
porter, sometimes talking with her there, and sometimes looking over the
blind below which had BANK upon it, and sometimes coming to the door and
standing on the steps for a breath of air.  When he first came out,
Stephen thought he might be looking for him, and passed near; but the
light porter only cast his winking eyes upon him slightly, and said
nothing.

Two hours were a long stretch of lounging about, after a long day’s
labour.  Stephen sat upon the step of a door, leaned against a wall under
an archway, strolled up and down, listened for the church clock, stopped
and watched children playing in the street.  Some purpose or other is so
natural to every one, that a mere loiterer always looks and feels
remarkable.  When the first hour was out, Stephen even began to have an
uncomfortable sensation upon him of being for the time a disreputable
character.

Then came the lamplighter, and two lengthening lines of light all down
the long perspective of the street, until they were blended and lost in
the distance.  Mrs. Sparsit closed the first-floor window, drew down the
blind, and went up-stairs.  Presently, a light went up-stairs after her,
passing first the fanlight of the door, and afterwards the two staircase
windows, on its way up.  By and by, one corner of the second-floor blind
was disturbed, as if Mrs. Sparsit’s eye were there; also the other
corner, as if the light porter’s eye were on that side.  Still, no
communication was made to Stephen.  Much relieved when the two hours were
at last accomplished, he went away at a quick pace, as a recompense for
so much loitering.

He had only to take leave of his landlady, and lie down on his temporary
bed upon the floor; for his bundle was made up for to-morrow, and all was
arranged for his departure.  He meant to be clear of the town very early;
before the Hands were in the streets.

It was barely daybreak, when, with a parting look round his room,
mournfully wondering whether he should ever see it again, he went out.
The town was as entirely deserted as if the inhabitants had abandoned it,
rather than hold communication with him.  Everything looked wan at that
hour.  Even the coming sun made but a pale waste in the sky, like a sad
sea.

By the place where Rachael lived, though it was not in his way; by the
red brick streets; by the great silent factories, not trembling yet; by
the railway, where the danger-lights were waning in the strengthening
day; by the railway’s crazy neighbourhood, half pulled down and half
built up; by scattered red brick villas, where the besmoked evergreens
were sprinkled with a dirty powder, like untidy snuff-takers; by
coal-dust paths and many varieties of ugliness; Stephen got to the top of
the hill, and looked back.

Day was shining radiantly upon the town then, and the bells were going
for the morning work.  Domestic fires were not yet lighted, and the high
chimneys had the sky to themselves.  Puffing out their poisonous volumes,
they would not be long in hiding it; but, for half an hour, some of the
many windows were golden, which showed the Coketown people a sun
eternally in eclipse, through a medium of smoked glass.

So strange to turn from the chimneys to the birds.  So strange, to have
the road-dust on his feet instead of the coal-grit.  So strange to have
lived to his time of life, and yet to be beginning like a boy this summer
morning!  With these musings in his mind, and his bundle under his arm,
Stephen took his attentive face along the high road.  And the trees
arched over him, whispering that he left a true and loving heart behind.



CHAPTER VII
GUNPOWDER


MR. JAMES HARTHOUSE, ‘going in’ for his adopted party, soon began to
score.  With the aid of a little more coaching for the political sages, a
little more genteel listlessness for the general society, and a tolerable
management of the assumed honesty in dishonesty, most effective and most
patronized of the polite deadly sins, he speedily came to be considered
of much promise.  The not being troubled with earnestness was a grand
point in his favour, enabling him to take to the hard Fact fellows with
as good a grace as if he had been born one of the tribe, and to throw all
other tribes overboard, as conscious hypocrites.

‘Whom none of us believe, my dear Mrs. Bounderby, and who do not believe
themselves.  The only difference between us and the professors of virtue
or benevolence, or philanthropy—never mind the name—is, that we know it
is all meaningless, and say so; while they know it equally and will never
say so.’

Why should she be shocked or warned by this reiteration?  It was not so
unlike her father’s principles, and her early training, that it need
startle her.  Where was the great difference between the two schools,
when each chained her down to material realities, and inspired her with
no faith in anything else?  What was there in her soul for James
Harthouse to destroy, which Thomas Gradgrind had nurtured there in its
state of innocence!

It was even the worse for her at this pass, that in her mind—implanted
there before her eminently practical father began to form it—a struggling
disposition to believe in a wider and nobler humanity than she had ever
heard of, constantly strove with doubts and resentments.  With doubts,
because the aspiration had been so laid waste in her youth.  With
resentments, because of the wrong that had been done her, if it were
indeed a whisper of the truth.  Upon a nature long accustomed to
self-suppression, thus torn and divided, the Harthouse philosophy came as
a relief and justification.  Everything being hollow and worthless, she
had missed nothing and sacrificed nothing.  What did it matter, she had
said to her father, when he proposed her husband.  What did it matter,
she said still.  With a scornful self-reliance, she asked herself, What
did anything matter—and went on.

Towards what?  Step by step, onward and downward, towards some end, yet
so gradually, that she believed herself to remain motionless.  As to Mr.
Harthouse, whither _he_ tended, he neither considered nor cared.  He had
no particular design or plan before him: no energetic wickedness ruffled
his lassitude.  He was as much amused and interested, at present, as it
became so fine a gentleman to be; perhaps even more than it would have
been consistent with his reputation to confess.  Soon after his arrival
he languidly wrote to his brother, the honourable and jocular member,
that the Bounderbys were ‘great fun;’ and further, that the female
Bounderby, instead of being the Gorgon he had expected, was young, and
remarkably pretty.  After that, he wrote no more about them, and devoted
his leisure chiefly to their house.  He was very often in their house, in
his flittings and visitings about the Coketown district; and was much
encouraged by Mr. Bounderby.  It was quite in Mr. Bounderby’s gusty way
to boast to all his world that _he_ didn’t care about your highly
connected people, but that if his wife Tom Gradgrind’s daughter did, she
was welcome to their company.

Mr. James Harthouse began to think it would be a new sensation, if the
face which changed so beautifully for the whelp, would change for him.

He was quick enough to observe; he had a good memory, and did not forget
a word of the brother’s revelations.  He interwove them with everything
he saw of the sister, and he began to understand her.  To be sure, the
better and profounder part of her character was not within his scope of
perception; for in natures, as in seas, depth answers unto depth; but he
soon began to read the rest with a student’s eye.

Mr. Bounderby had taken possession of a house and grounds, about fifteen
miles from the town, and accessible within a mile or two, by a railway
striding on many arches over a wild country, undermined by deserted
coal-shafts, and spotted at night by fires and black shapes of stationary
engines at pits’ mouths.  This country, gradually softening towards the
neighbourhood of Mr. Bounderby’s retreat, there mellowed into a rustic
landscape, golden with heath, and snowy with hawthorn in the spring of
the year, and tremulous with leaves and their shadows all the summer
time.  The bank had foreclosed a mortgage effected on the property thus
pleasantly situated, by one of the Coketown magnates, who, in his
determination to make a shorter cut than usual to an enormous fortune,
overspeculated himself by about two hundred thousand pounds.  These
accidents did sometimes happen in the best regulated families of
Coketown, but the bankrupts had no connexion whatever with the
improvident classes.

It afforded Mr. Bounderby supreme satisfaction to instal himself in this
snug little estate, and with demonstrative humility to grow cabbages in
the flower-garden.  He delighted to live, barrack-fashion, among the
elegant furniture, and he bullied the very pictures with his origin.
‘Why, sir,’ he would say to a visitor, ‘I am told that Nickits,’ the late
owner, ‘gave seven hundred pound for that Seabeach.  Now, to be plain
with you, if I ever, in the whole course of my life, take seven looks at
it, at a hundred pound a look, it will be as much as I shall do.  No, by
George!  I don’t forget that I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.  For
years upon years, the only pictures in my possession, or that I could
have got into my possession, by any means, unless I stole ’em, were the
engravings of a man shaving himself in a boot, on the blacking bottles
that I was overjoyed to use in cleaning boots with, and that I sold when
they were empty for a farthing a-piece, and glad to get it!’

Then he would address Mr. Harthouse in the same style.

‘Harthouse, you have a couple of horses down here.  Bring half a dozen
more if you like, and we’ll find room for ’em.  There’s stabling in this
place for a dozen horses; and unless Nickits is belied, he kept the full
number.  A round dozen of ’em, sir.  When that man was a boy, he went to
Westminster School.  Went to Westminster School as a King’s Scholar, when
I was principally living on garbage, and sleeping in market baskets.
Why, if I wanted to keep a dozen horses—which I don’t, for one’s enough
for me—I couldn’t bear to see ’em in their stalls here, and think what my
own lodging used to be.  I couldn’t look at ’em, sir, and not order ’em
out.  Yet so things come round.  You see this place; you know what sort
of a place it is; you are aware that there’s not a completer place of its
size in this kingdom or elsewhere—I don’t care where—and here, got into
the middle of it, like a maggot into a nut, is Josiah Bounderby.  While
Nickits (as a man came into my office, and told me yesterday), Nickits,
who used to act in Latin, in the Westminster School plays, with the
chief-justices and nobility of this country applauding him till they were
black in the face, is drivelling at this minute—drivelling, sir!—in a
fifth floor, up a narrow dark back street in Antwerp.’

It was among the leafy shadows of this retirement, in the long sultry
summer days, that Mr. Harthouse began to prove the face which had set him
wondering when he first saw it, and to try if it would change for him.

‘Mrs. Bounderby, I esteem it a most fortunate accident that I find you
alone here.  I have for some time had a particular wish to speak to you.’

It was not by any wonderful accident that he found her, the time of day
being that at which she was always alone, and the place being her
favourite resort.  It was an opening in a dark wood, where some felled
trees lay, and where she would sit watching the fallen leaves of last
year, as she had watched the falling ashes at home.

He sat down beside her, with a glance at her face.

‘Your brother.  My young friend Tom—’

Her colour brightened, and she turned to him with a look of interest.  ‘I
never in my life,’ he thought, ‘saw anything so remarkable and so
captivating as the lighting of those features!’  His face betrayed his
thoughts—perhaps without betraying him, for it might have been according
to its instructions so to do.

‘Pardon me.  The expression of your sisterly interest is so beautiful—Tom
should be so proud of it—I know this is inexcusable, but I am so
compelled to admire.’

‘Being so impulsive,’ she said composedly.

‘Mrs. Bounderby, no: you know I make no pretence with you.  You know I am
a sordid piece of human nature, ready to sell myself at any time for any
reasonable sum, and altogether incapable of any Arcadian proceeding
whatever.’

‘I am waiting,’ she returned, ‘for your further reference to my brother.’

‘You are rigid with me, and I deserve it.  I am as worthless a dog as you
will find, except that I am not false—not false.  But you surprised and
started me from my subject, which was your brother.  I have an interest
in him.’

‘Have you an interest in anything, Mr. Harthouse?’ she asked, half
incredulously and half gratefully.

‘If you had asked me when I first came here, I should have said no.  I
must say now—even at the hazard of appearing to make a pretence, and of
justly awakening your incredulity—yes.’

She made a slight movement, as if she were trying to speak, but could not
find voice; at length she said, ‘Mr. Harthouse, I give you credit for
being interested in my brother.’

‘Thank you.  I claim to deserve it.  You know how little I do claim, but
I will go that length.  You have done so much for him, you are so fond of
him; your whole life, Mrs. Bounderby, expresses such charming
self-forgetfulness on his account—pardon me again—I am running wide of
the subject.  I am interested in him for his own sake.’

She had made the slightest action possible, as if she would have risen in
a hurry and gone away.  He had turned the course of what he said at that
instant, and she remained.

‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ he resumed, in a lighter manner, and yet with a show of
effort in assuming it, which was even more expressive than the manner he
dismissed; ‘it is no irrevocable offence in a young fellow of your
brother’s years, if he is heedless, inconsiderate, and expensive—a little
dissipated, in the common phrase.  Is he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Allow me to be frank.  Do you think he games at all?’

‘I think he makes bets.’  Mr. Harthouse waiting, as if that were not her
whole answer, she added, ‘I know he does.’

‘Of course he loses?’

‘Yes.’

‘Everybody does lose who bets.  May I hint at the probability of your
sometimes supplying him with money for these purposes?’

She sat, looking down; but, at this question, raised her eyes searchingly
and a little resentfully.

‘Acquit me of impertinent curiosity, my dear Mrs. Bounderby.  I think Tom
may be gradually falling into trouble, and I wish to stretch out a
helping hand to him from the depths of my wicked experience.—Shall I say
again, for his sake?  Is that necessary?’

She seemed to try to answer, but nothing came of it.

‘Candidly to confess everything that has occurred to me,’ said James
Harthouse, again gliding with the same appearance of effort into his more
airy manner; ‘I will confide to you my doubt whether he has had many
advantages.  Whether—forgive my plainness—whether any great amount of
confidence is likely to have been established between himself and his
most worthy father.’

‘I do not,’ said Louisa, flushing with her own great remembrance in that
wise, ‘think it likely.’

‘Or, between himself, and—I may trust to your perfect understanding of my
meaning, I am sure—and his highly esteemed brother-in-law.’

She flushed deeper and deeper, and was burning red when she replied in a
fainter voice, ‘I do not think that likely, either.’

‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ said Harthouse, after a short silence, ‘may there be a
better confidence between yourself and me?  Tom has borrowed a
considerable sum of you?’

‘You will understand, Mr. Harthouse,’ she returned, after some
indecision: she had been more or less uncertain, and troubled throughout
the conversation, and yet had in the main preserved her self-contained
manner; ‘you will understand that if I tell you what you press to know,
it is not by way of complaint or regret.  I would never complain of
anything, and what I have done I do not in the least regret.’

‘So spirited, too!’ thought James Harthouse.

‘When I married, I found that my brother was even at that time heavily in
debt.  Heavily for him, I mean.  Heavily enough to oblige me to sell some
trinkets.  They were no sacrifice.  I sold them very willingly.  I
attached no value to them.  They, were quite worthless to me.’

Either she saw in his face that he knew, or she only feared in her
conscience that he knew, that she spoke of some of her husband’s gifts.
She stopped, and reddened again.  If he had not known it before, he would
have known it then, though he had been a much duller man than he was.

‘Since then, I have given my brother, at various times, what money I
could spare: in short, what money I have had.  Confiding in you at all,
on the faith of the interest you profess for him, I will not do so by
halves.  Since you have been in the habit of visiting here, he has wanted
in one sum as much as a hundred pounds.  I have not been able to give it
to him.  I have felt uneasy for the consequences of his being so
involved, but I have kept these secrets until now, when I trust them to
your honour.  I have held no confidence with any one, because—you
anticipated my reason just now.’  She abruptly broke off.

He was a ready man, and he saw, and seized, an opportunity here of
presenting her own image to her, slightly disguised as her brother.

‘Mrs. Bounderby, though a graceless person, of the world worldly, I feel
the utmost interest, I assure you, in what you tell me.  I cannot
possibly be hard upon your brother.  I understand and share the wise
consideration with which you regard his errors.  With all possible
respect both for Mr. Gradgrind and for Mr. Bounderby, I think I perceive
that he has not been fortunate in his training.  Bred at a disadvantage
towards the society in which he has his part to play, he rushes into
these extremes for himself, from opposite extremes that have long been
forced—with the very best intentions we have no doubt—upon him.  Mr.
Bounderby’s fine bluff English independence, though a most charming
characteristic, does not—as we have agreed—invite confidence.  If I might
venture to remark that it is the least in the world deficient in that
delicacy to which a youth mistaken, a character misconceived, and
abilities misdirected, would turn for relief and guidance, I should
express what it presents to my own view.’

As she sat looking straight before her, across the changing lights upon
the grass into the darkness of the wood beyond, he saw in her face her
application of his very distinctly uttered words.

‘All allowance,’ he continued, ‘must be made.  I have one great fault to
find with Tom, however, which I cannot forgive, and for which I take him
heavily to account.’

Louisa turned her eyes to his face, and asked him what fault was that?

‘Perhaps,’ he returned, ‘I have said enough.  Perhaps it would have been
better, on the whole, if no allusion to it had escaped me.’

‘You alarm me, Mr. Harthouse.  Pray let me know it.’

‘To relieve you from needless apprehension—and as this confidence
regarding your brother, which I prize I am sure above all possible
things, has been established between us—I obey.  I cannot forgive him for
not being more sensible in every word, look, and act of his life, of the
affection of his best friend; of the devotion of his best friend; of her
unselfishness; of her sacrifice.  The return he makes her, within my
observation, is a very poor one.  What she has done for him demands his
constant love and gratitude, not his ill-humour and caprice.  Careless
fellow as I am, I am not so indifferent, Mrs. Bounderby, as to be
regardless of this vice in your brother, or inclined to consider it a
venial offence.’

The wood floated before her, for her eyes were suffused with tears.  They
rose from a deep well, long concealed, and her heart was filled with
acute pain that found no relief in them.

‘In a word, it is to correct your brother in this, Mrs. Bounderby, that I
must aspire.  My better knowledge of his circumstances, and my direction
and advice in extricating them—rather valuable, I hope, as coming from a
scapegrace on a much larger scale—will give me some influence over him,
and all I gain I shall certainly use towards this end.  I have said
enough, and more than enough.  I seem to be protesting that I am a sort
of good fellow, when, upon my honour, I have not the least intention to
make any protestation to that effect, and openly announce that I am
nothing of the sort.  Yonder, among the trees,’ he added, having lifted
up his eyes and looked about; for he had watched her closely until now;
‘is your brother himself; no doubt, just come down.  As he seems to be
loitering in this direction, it may be as well, perhaps, to walk towards
him, and throw ourselves in his way.  He has been very silent and doleful
of late.  Perhaps, his brotherly conscience is touched—if there are such
things as consciences.  Though, upon my honour, I hear of them much too
often to believe in them.’

He assisted her to rise, and she took his arm, and they advanced to meet
the whelp.  He was idly beating the branches as he lounged along: or he
stooped viciously to rip the moss from the trees with his stick.  He was
startled when they came upon him while he was engaged in this latter
pastime, and his colour changed.

‘Halloa!’ he stammered; ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

‘Whose name, Tom,’ said Mr. Harthouse, putting his hand upon his shoulder
and turning him, so that they all three walked towards the house
together, ‘have you been carving on the trees?’

‘Whose name?’ returned Tom.  ‘Oh!  You mean what girl’s name?’

‘You have a suspicious appearance of inscribing some fair creature’s on
the bark, Tom.’

         [Picture: Mr. Harthouse and Tom Gradgrind in the garden]

‘Not much of that, Mr. Harthouse, unless some fair creature with a
slashing fortune at her own disposal would take a fancy to me.  Or she
might be as ugly as she was rich, without any fear of losing me.  I’d
carve her name as often as she liked.’

‘I am afraid you are mercenary, Tom.’

‘Mercenary,’ repeated Tom.  ‘Who is not mercenary?  Ask my sister.’

‘Have you so proved it to be a failing of mine, Tom?’ said Louisa,
showing no other sense of his discontent and ill-nature.

‘You know whether the cap fits you, Loo,’ returned her brother sulkily.
‘If it does, you can wear it.’

‘Tom is misanthropical to-day, as all bored people are now and then,’
said Mr. Harthouse.  ‘Don’t believe him, Mrs. Bounderby.  He knows much
better.  I shall disclose some of his opinions of you, privately
expressed to me, unless he relents a little.’

‘At all events, Mr. Harthouse,’ said Tom, softening in his admiration of
his patron, but shaking his head sullenly too, ‘you can’t tell her that I
ever praised her for being mercenary.  I may have praised her for being
the contrary, and I should do it again, if I had as good reason.
However, never mind this now; it’s not very interesting to you, and I am
sick of the subject.’

They walked on to the house, where Louisa quitted her visitor’s arm and
went in.  He stood looking after her, as she ascended the steps, and
passed into the shadow of the door; then put his hand upon her brother’s
shoulder again, and invited him with a confidential nod to a walk in the
garden.

‘Tom, my fine fellow, I want to have a word with you.’

They had stopped among a disorder of roses—it was part of Mr. Bounderby’s
humility to keep Nickits’s roses on a reduced scale—and Tom sat down on a
terrace-parapet, plucking buds and picking them to pieces; while his
powerful Familiar stood over him, with a foot upon the parapet, and his
figure easily resting on the arm supported by that knee.  They were just
visible from her window.  Perhaps she saw them.

‘Tom, what’s the matter?’

‘Oh!  Mr. Harthouse,’ said Tom with a groan, ‘I am hard up, and bothered
out of my life.’

‘My good fellow, so am I.’

‘You!’ returned Tom.  ‘You are the picture of independence.  Mr.
Harthouse, I am in a horrible mess.  You have no idea what a state I have
got myself into—what a state my sister might have got me out of, if she
would only have done it.’

He took to biting the rosebuds now, and tearing them away from his teeth
with a hand that trembled like an infirm old man’s.  After one
exceedingly observant look at him, his companion relapsed into his
lightest air.

‘Tom, you are inconsiderate: you expect too much of your sister.  You
have had money of her, you dog, you know you have.’

‘Well, Mr. Harthouse, I know I have.  How else was I to get it?  Here’s
old Bounderby always boasting that at my age he lived upon twopence a
month, or something of that sort.  Here’s my father drawing what he calls
a line, and tying me down to it from a baby, neck and heels.  Here’s my
mother who never has anything of her own, except her complaints.  What
_is_ a fellow to do for money, and where _am_ I to look for it, if not to
my sister?’

He was almost crying, and scattered the buds about by dozens.  Mr.
Harthouse took him persuasively by the coat.

‘But, my dear Tom, if your sister has not got it—’

‘Not got it, Mr. Harthouse?  I don’t say she has got it.  I may have
wanted more than she was likely to have got.  But then she ought to get
it.  She could get it.  It’s of no use pretending to make a secret of
matters now, after what I have told you already; you know she didn’t
marry old Bounderby for her own sake, or for his sake, but for my sake.
Then why doesn’t she get what I want, out of him, for my sake?  She is
not obliged to say what she is going to do with it; she is sharp enough;
she could manage to coax it out of him, if she chose.  Then why doesn’t
she choose, when I tell her of what consequence it is?  But no.  There
she sits in his company like a stone, instead of making herself agreeable
and getting it easily.  I don’t know what you may call this, but I call
it unnatural conduct.’

There was a piece of ornamental water immediately below the parapet, on
the other side, into which Mr. James Harthouse had a very strong
inclination to pitch Mr. Thomas Gradgrind junior, as the injured men of
Coketown threatened to pitch their property into the Atlantic.  But he
preserved his easy attitude; and nothing more solid went over the stone
balustrades than the accumulated rosebuds now floating about, a little
surface-island.

‘My dear Tom,’ said Harthouse, ‘let me try to be your banker.’

‘For God’s sake,’ replied Tom, suddenly, ‘don’t talk about bankers!’  And
very white he looked, in contrast with the roses.  Very white.

Mr. Harthouse, as a thoroughly well-bred man, accustomed to the best
society, was not to be surprised—he could as soon have been affected—but
he raised his eyelids a little more, as if they were lifted by a feeble
touch of wonder.  Albeit it was as much against the precepts of his
school to wonder, as it was against the doctrines of the Gradgrind
College.

‘What is the present need, Tom?  Three figures?  Out with them.  Say what
they are.’

‘Mr. Harthouse,’ returned Tom, now actually crying; and his tears were
better than his injuries, however pitiful a figure he made: ‘it’s too
late; the money is of no use to me at present.  I should have had it
before to be of use to me.  But I am very much obliged to you; you’re a
true friend.’

A true friend!  ‘Whelp, whelp!’ thought Mr. Harthouse, lazily; ‘what an
Ass you are!’

‘And I take your offer as a great kindness,’ said Tom, grasping his hand.
‘As a great kindness, Mr. Harthouse.’

‘Well,’ returned the other, ‘it may be of more use by and by.  And, my
good fellow, if you will open your bedevilments to me when they come
thick upon you, I may show you better ways out of them than you can find
for yourself.’

‘Thank you,’ said Tom, shaking his head dismally, and chewing rosebuds.
‘I wish I had known you sooner, Mr. Harthouse.’

‘Now, you see, Tom,’ said Mr. Harthouse in conclusion, himself tossing
over a rose or two, as a contribution to the island, which was always
drifting to the wall as if it wanted to become a part of the mainland:
‘every man is selfish in everything he does, and I am exactly like the
rest of my fellow-creatures.  I am desperately intent;’ the languor of
his desperation being quite tropical; ‘on your softening towards your
sister—which you ought to do; and on your being a more loving and
agreeable sort of brother—which you ought to be.’

‘I will be, Mr. Harthouse.’

‘No time like the present, Tom.  Begin at once.’

‘Certainly I will.  And my sister Loo shall say so.’

‘Having made which bargain, Tom,’ said Harthouse, clapping him on the
shoulder again, with an air which left him at liberty to infer—as he did,
poor fool—that this condition was imposed upon him in mere careless good
nature to lessen his sense of obligation, ‘we will tear ourselves asunder
until dinner-time.’

When Tom appeared before dinner, though his mind seemed heavy enough, his
body was on the alert; and he appeared before Mr. Bounderby came in.  ‘I
didn’t mean to be cross, Loo,’ he said, giving her his hand, and kissing
her.  ‘I know you are fond of me, and you know I am fond of you.’

After this, there was a smile upon Louisa’s face that day, for some one
else.  Alas, for some one else!

‘So much the less is the whelp the only creature that she cares for,’
thought James Harthouse, reversing the reflection of his first day’s
knowledge of her pretty face.  ‘So much the less, so much the less.’



CHAPTER VIII
EXPLOSION


THE next morning was too bright a morning for sleep, and James Harthouse
rose early, and sat in the pleasant bay window of his dressing-room,
smoking the rare tobacco that had had so wholesome an influence on his
young friend.  Reposing in the sunlight, with the fragrance of his
eastern pipe about him, and the dreamy smoke vanishing into the air, so
rich and soft with summer odours, he reckoned up his advantages as an
idle winner might count his gains.  He was not at all bored for the time,
and could give his mind to it.

He had established a confidence with her, from which her husband was
excluded.  He had established a confidence with her, that absolutely
turned upon her indifference towards her husband, and the absence, now
and at all times, of any congeniality between them.  He had artfully, but
plainly, assured her that he knew her heart in its last most delicate
recesses; he had come so near to her through its tenderest sentiment; he
had associated himself with that feeling; and the barrier behind which
she lived, had melted away.  All very odd, and very satisfactory!

And yet he had not, even now, any earnest wickedness of purpose in him.
Publicly and privately, it were much better for the age in which he
lived, that he and the legion of whom he was one were designedly bad,
than indifferent and purposeless.  It is the drifting icebergs setting
with any current anywhere, that wreck the ships.

When the Devil goeth about like a roaring lion, he goeth about in a shape
by which few but savages and hunters are attracted.  But, when he is
trimmed, smoothed, and varnished, according to the mode; when he is
aweary of vice, and aweary of virtue, used up as to brimstone, and used
up as to bliss; then, whether he take to the serving out of red tape, or
to the kindling of red fire, he is the very Devil.

So James Harthouse reclined in the window, indolently smoking, and
reckoning up the steps he had taken on the road by which he happened to
be travelling.  The end to which it led was before him, pretty plainly;
but he troubled himself with no calculations about it.  What will be,
will be.

As he had rather a long ride to take that day—for there was a public
occasion ‘to do’ at some distance, which afforded a tolerable opportunity
of going in for the Gradgrind men—he dressed early and went down to
breakfast.  He was anxious to see if she had relapsed since the previous
evening.  No.  He resumed where he had left off.  There was a look of
interest for him again.

He got through the day as much (or as little) to his own satisfaction, as
was to be expected under the fatiguing circumstances; and came riding
back at six o’clock.  There was a sweep of some half-mile between the
lodge and the house, and he was riding along at a foot pace over the
smooth gravel, once Nickits’s, when Mr. Bounderby burst out of the
shrubbery, with such violence as to make his horse shy across the road.

‘Harthouse!’ cried Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Have you heard?’

‘Heard what?’ said Harthouse, soothing his horse, and inwardly favouring
Mr. Bounderby with no good wishes.

‘Then you _haven’t_ heard!’

‘I have heard you, and so has this brute.  I have heard nothing else.’

Mr. Bounderby, red and hot, planted himself in the centre of the path
before the horse’s head, to explode his bombshell with more effect.

‘The Bank’s robbed!’

‘You don’t mean it!’

‘Robbed last night, sir.  Robbed in an extraordinary manner.  Robbed with
a false key.’

‘Of much?’

Mr. Bounderby, in his desire to make the most of it, really seemed
mortified by being obliged to reply, ‘Why, no; not of very much.  But it
might have been.’

‘Of how much?’

‘Oh! as a sum—if you stick to a sum—of not more than a hundred and fifty
pound,’ said Bounderby, with impatience.  ‘But it’s not the sum; it’s the
fact.  It’s the fact of the Bank being robbed, that’s the important
circumstance.  I am surprised you don’t see it.’

‘My dear Bounderby,’ said James, dismounting, and giving his bridle to
his servant, ‘I _do_ see it; and am as overcome as you can possibly
desire me to be, by the spectacle afforded to my mental view.
Nevertheless, I may be allowed, I hope, to congratulate you—which I do
with all my soul, I assure you—on your not having sustained a greater
loss.’

‘Thank’ee,’ replied Bounderby, in a short, ungracious manner.  ‘But I
tell you what.  It might have been twenty thousand pound.’

‘I suppose it might.’

‘Suppose it might!  By the Lord, you _may_ suppose so.  By George!’ said
Mr. Bounderby, with sundry menacing nods and shakes of his head.  ‘It
might have been twice twenty.  There’s no knowing what it would have
been, or wouldn’t have been, as it was, but for the fellows’ being
disturbed.’

Louisa had come up now, and Mrs. Sparsit, and Bitzer.

‘Here’s Tom Gradgrind’s daughter knows pretty well what it might have
been, if you don’t,’ blustered Bounderby.  ‘Dropped, sir, as if she was
shot when I told her!  Never knew her do such a thing before.  Does her
credit, under the circumstances, in my opinion!’

She still looked faint and pale.  James Harthouse begged her to take his
arm; and as they moved on very slowly, asked her how the robbery had been
committed.

‘Why, I am going to tell you,’ said Bounderby, irritably giving his arm
to Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘If you hadn’t been so mighty particular about the sum,
I should have begun to tell you before.  You know this lady (for she _is_
a lady), Mrs. Sparsit?’

‘I have already had the honour—’

‘Very well.  And this young man, Bitzer, you saw him too on the same
occasion?’  Mr. Harthouse inclined his head in assent, and Bitzer
knuckled his forehead.

‘Very well.  They live at the Bank.  You know they live at the Bank,
perhaps?  Very well.  Yesterday afternoon, at the close of business
hours, everything was put away as usual.  In the iron room that this
young fellow sleeps outside of, there was never mind how much.  In the
little safe in young Tom’s closet, the safe used for petty purposes,
there was a hundred and fifty odd pound.’

‘A hundred and fifty-four, seven, one,’ said Bitzer.

‘Come!’ retorted Bounderby, stopping to wheel round upon him, ‘let’s have
none of _your_ interruptions.  It’s enough to be robbed while you’re
snoring because you’re too comfortable, without being put right with
_your_ four seven ones.  I didn’t snore, myself, when I was your age, let
me tell you.  I hadn’t victuals enough to snore.  And I didn’t four seven
one.  Not if I knew it.’

Bitzer knuckled his forehead again, in a sneaking manner, and seemed at
once particularly impressed and depressed by the instance last given of
Mr. Bounderby’s moral abstinence.

‘A hundred and fifty odd pound,’ resumed Mr. Bounderby.  ‘That sum of
money, young Tom locked in his safe, not a very strong safe, but that’s
no matter now.  Everything was left, all right.  Some time in the night,
while this young fellow snored—Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am, you say you have
heard him snore?’

‘Sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I cannot say that I have heard him
precisely snore, and therefore must not make that statement.  But on
winter evenings, when he has fallen asleep at his table, I have heard
him, what I should prefer to describe as partially choke.  I have heard
him on such occasions produce sounds of a nature similar to what may be
sometimes heard in Dutch clocks.  Not,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, with a lofty
sense of giving strict evidence, ‘that I would convey any imputation on
his moral character.  Far from it.  I have always considered Bitzer a
young man of the most upright principle; and to that I beg to bear my
testimony.’

‘Well!’ said the exasperated Bounderby, ‘while he was snoring, _or_
choking, _or_ Dutch-clocking, _or_ something _or_ other—being asleep—some
fellows, somehow, whether previously concealed in the house or not
remains to be seen, got to young Tom’s safe, forced it, and abstracted
the contents.  Being then disturbed, they made off; letting themselves
out at the main door, and double-locking it again (it was double-locked,
and the key under Mrs. Sparsit’s pillow) with a false key, which was
picked up in the street near the Bank, about twelve o’clock to-day.  No
alarm takes place, till this chap, Bitzer, turns out this morning, and
begins to open and prepare the offices for business.  Then, looking at
Tom’s safe, he sees the door ajar, and finds the lock forced, and the
money gone.’

‘Where is Tom, by the by?’ asked Harthouse, glancing round.

‘He has been helping the police,’ said Bounderby, ‘and stays behind at
the Bank.  I wish these fellows had tried to rob me when I was at his
time of life.  They would have been out of pocket if they had invested
eighteenpence in the job; I can tell ’em that.’

‘Is anybody suspected?’

‘Suspected?  I should think there was somebody suspected.  Egod!’ said
Bounderby, relinquishing Mrs. Sparsit’s arm to wipe his heated head.
‘Josiah Bounderby of Coketown is not to be plundered and nobody
suspected.  No, thank you!’

Might Mr. Harthouse inquire Who was suspected?

‘Well,’ said Bounderby, stopping and facing about to confront them all,
‘I’ll tell you.  It’s not to be mentioned everywhere; it’s not to be
mentioned anywhere: in order that the scoundrels concerned (there’s a
gang of ’em) may be thrown off their guard.  So take this in confidence.
Now wait a bit.’  Mr. Bounderby wiped his head again.  ‘What should you
say to;’ here he violently exploded: ‘to a Hand being in it?’

‘I hope,’ said Harthouse, lazily, ‘not our friend Blackpot?’

‘Say Pool instead of Pot, sir,’ returned Bounderby, ‘and that’s the man.’

Louisa faintly uttered some word of incredulity and surprise.

‘O yes!  I know!’ said Bounderby, immediately catching at the sound.  ‘I
know!  I am used to that.  I know all about it.  They are the finest
people in the world, these fellows are.  They have got the gift of the
gab, they have.  They only want to have their rights explained to them,
they do.  But I tell you what.  Show me a dissatisfied Hand, and I’ll
show you a man that’s fit for anything bad, I don’t care what it is.’

Another of the popular fictions of Coketown, which some pains had been
taken to disseminate—and which some people really believed.

‘But I am acquainted with these chaps,’ said Bounderby.  ‘I can read ’em
off, like books.  Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am, I appeal to you.  What warning did
I give that fellow, the first time he set foot in the house, when the
express object of his visit was to know how he could knock Religion over,
and floor the Established Church?  Mrs. Sparsit, in point of high
connexions, you are on a level with the aristocracy,—did I say, or did I
not say, to that fellow, “you can’t hide the truth from me: you are not
the kind of fellow I like; you’ll come to no good”?’

‘Assuredly, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘you did, in a highly impressive
manner, give him such an admonition.’

‘When he shocked you, ma’am,’ said Bounderby; ‘when he shocked your
feelings?’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with a meek shake of her head, ‘he
certainly did so.  Though I do not mean to say but that my feelings may
be weaker on such points—more foolish if the term is preferred—than they
might have been, if I had always occupied my present position.’

Mr. Bounderby stared with a bursting pride at Mr. Harthouse, as much as
to say, ‘I am the proprietor of this female, and she’s worth your
attention, I think.’  Then, resumed his discourse.

‘You can recall for yourself, Harthouse, what I said to him when you saw
him.  I didn’t mince the matter with him.  I am never mealy with ’em.  I
KNOW ’em.  Very well, sir.  Three days after that, he bolted.  Went off,
nobody knows where: as my mother did in my infancy—only with this
difference, that he is a worse subject than my mother, if possible.  What
did he do before he went?  What do you say;’ Mr. Bounderby, with his hat
in his hand, gave a beat upon the crown at every little division of his
sentences, as if it were a tambourine; ‘to his being seen—night after
night—watching the Bank?—to his lurking about there—after dark?—To its
striking Mrs. Sparsit—that he could be lurking for no good—To her calling
Bitzer’s attention to him, and their both taking notice of him—And to its
appearing on inquiry to-day—that he was also noticed by the neighbours?’
Having come to the climax, Mr. Bounderby, like an oriental dancer, put
his tambourine on his head.

‘Suspicious,’ said James Harthouse, ‘certainly.’

‘I think so, sir,’ said Bounderby, with a defiant nod.  ‘I think so.  But
there are more of ’em in it.  There’s an old woman.  One never hears of
these things till the mischief’s done; all sorts of defects are found out
in the stable door after the horse is stolen; there’s an old woman turns
up now.  An old woman who seems to have been flying into town on a
broomstick, every now and then.  _She_ watches the place a whole day
before this fellow begins, and on the night when you saw him, she steals
away with him and holds a council with him—I suppose, to make her report
on going off duty, and be damned to her.’

There was such a person in the room that night, and she shrunk from
observation, thought Louisa.

‘This is not all of ’em, even as we already know ’em,’ said Bounderby,
with many nods of hidden meaning.  ‘But I have said enough for the
present.  You’ll have the goodness to keep it quiet, and mention it to no
one.  It may take time, but we shall have ’em.  It’s policy to give ’em
line enough, and there’s no objection to that.’

‘Of course, they will be punished with the utmost rigour of the law, as
notice-boards observe,’ replied James Harthouse, ‘and serve them right.
Fellows who go in for Banks must take the consequences.  If there were no
consequences, we should all go in for Banks.’  He had gently taken
Louisa’s parasol from her hand, and had put it up for her; and she walked
under its shade, though the sun did not shine there.

‘For the present, Loo Bounderby,’ said her husband, ‘here’s Mrs. Sparsit
to look after.  Mrs. Sparsit’s nerves have been acted upon by this
business, and she’ll stay here a day or two.  So make her comfortable.’

‘Thank you very much, sir,’ that discreet lady observed, ‘but pray do not
let My comfort be a consideration.  Anything will do for Me.’

It soon appeared that if Mrs. Sparsit had a failing in her association
with that domestic establishment, it was that she was so excessively
regardless of herself and regardful of others, as to be a nuisance.  On
being shown her chamber, she was so dreadfully sensible of its comforts
as to suggest the inference that she would have preferred to pass the
night on the mangle in the laundry.  True, the Powlers and the Scadgerses
were accustomed to splendour, ‘but it is my duty to remember,’ Mrs.
Sparsit was fond of observing with a lofty grace: particularly when any
of the domestics were present, ‘that what I was, I am no longer.
Indeed,’ said she, ‘if I could altogether cancel the remembrance that Mr.
Sparsit was a Powler, or that I myself am related to the Scadgers family;
or if I could even revoke the fact, and make myself a person of common
descent and ordinary connexions; I would gladly do so.  I should think
it, under existing circumstances, right to do so.’  The same Hermitical
state of mind led to her renunciation of made dishes and wines at dinner,
until fairly commanded by Mr. Bounderby to take them; when she said,
‘Indeed you are very good, sir;’ and departed from a resolution of which
she had made rather formal and public announcement, to ‘wait for the
simple mutton.’  She was likewise deeply apologetic for wanting the salt;
and, feeling amiably bound to bear out Mr. Bounderby to the fullest
extent in the testimony he had borne to her nerves, occasionally sat back
in her chair and silently wept; at which periods a tear of large
dimensions, like a crystal ear-ring, might be observed (or rather, must
be, for it insisted on public notice) sliding down her Roman nose.

But Mrs. Sparsit’s greatest point, first and last, was her determination
to pity Mr. Bounderby.  There were occasions when in looking at him she
was involuntarily moved to shake her head, as who would say, ‘Alas, poor
Yorick!’  After allowing herself to be betrayed into these evidences of
emotion, she would force a lambent brightness, and would be fitfully
cheerful, and would say, ‘You have still good spirits, sir, I am thankful
to find;’ and would appear to hail it as a blessed dispensation that Mr.
Bounderby bore up as he did.  One idiosyncrasy for which she often
apologized, she found it excessively difficult to conquer.  She had a
curious propensity to call Mrs. Bounderby ‘Miss Gradgrind,’ and yielded
to it some three or four score times in the course of the evening.  Her
repetition of this mistake covered Mrs. Sparsit with modest confusion;
but indeed, she said, it seemed so natural to say Miss Gradgrind:
whereas, to persuade herself that the young lady whom she had had the
happiness of knowing from a child could be really and truly Mrs.
Bounderby, she found almost impossible.  It was a further singularity of
this remarkable case, that the more she thought about it, the more
impossible it appeared; ‘the differences,’ she observed, ‘being such.’

In the drawing-room after dinner, Mr. Bounderby tried the case of the
robbery, examined the witnesses, made notes of the evidence, found the
suspected persons guilty, and sentenced them to the extreme punishment of
the law.  That done, Bitzer was dismissed to town with instructions to
recommend Tom to come home by the mail-train.

When candles were brought, Mrs. Sparsit murmured, ‘Don’t be low, sir.
Pray let me see you cheerful, sir, as I used to do.’  Mr. Bounderby, upon
whom these consolations had begun to produce the effect of making him, in
a bull-headed blundering way, sentimental, sighed like some large
sea-animal.  ‘I cannot bear to see you so, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘Try
a hand at backgammon, sir, as you used to do when I had the honour of
living under your roof.’  ‘I haven’t played backgammon, ma’am,’ said Mr.
Bounderby, ‘since that time.’  ‘No, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, soothingly,
‘I am aware that you have not.  I remember that Miss Gradgrind takes no
interest in the game.  But I shall be happy, sir, if you will
condescend.’

They played near a window, opening on the garden.  It was a fine night:
not moonlight, but sultry and fragrant.  Louisa and Mr. Harthouse
strolled out into the garden, where their voices could be heard in the
stillness, though not what they said.  Mrs. Sparsit, from her place at
the backgammon board, was constantly straining her eyes to pierce the
shadows without.  ‘What’s the matter, ma’am?’ said Mr. Bounderby; ‘you
don’t see a Fire, do you?’  ‘Oh dear no, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I
was thinking of the dew.’  ‘What have you got to do with the dew, ma’am?’
said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘It’s not myself, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I am
fearful of Miss Gradgrind’s taking cold.’  ‘She never takes cold,’ said
Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Really, sir?’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  And was affected with
a cough in her throat.

When the time drew near for retiring, Mr. Bounderby took a glass of
water.  ‘Oh, sir?’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘Not your sherry warm, with
lemon-peel and nutmeg?’  ‘Why, I have got out of the habit of taking it
now, ma’am,’ said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘The more’s the pity, sir,’ returned
Mrs. Sparsit; ‘you are losing all your good old habits.  Cheer up, sir!
If Miss Gradgrind will permit me, I will offer to make it for you, as I
have often done.’

Miss Gradgrind readily permitting Mrs. Sparsit to do anything she
pleased, that considerate lady made the beverage, and handed it to Mr.
Bounderby.  ‘It will do you good, sir.  It will warm your heart.  It is
the sort of thing you want, and ought to take, sir.’  And when Mr.
Bounderby said, ‘Your health, ma’am!’ she answered with great feeling,
‘Thank you, sir.  The same to you, and happiness also.’  Finally, she
wished him good night, with great pathos; and Mr. Bounderby went to bed,
with a maudlin persuasion that he had been crossed in something tender,
though he could not, for his life, have mentioned what it was.

Long after Louisa had undressed and lain down, she watched and waited for
her brother’s coming home.  That could hardly be, she knew, until an hour
past midnight; but in the country silence, which did anything but calm
the trouble of her thoughts, time lagged wearily.  At last, when the
darkness and stillness had seemed for hours to thicken one another, she
heard the bell at the gate.  She felt as though she would have been glad
that it rang on until daylight; but it ceased, and the circles of its
last sound spread out fainter and wider in the air, and all was dead
again.

She waited yet some quarter of an hour, as she judged.  Then she arose,
put on a loose robe, and went out of her room in the dark, and up the
staircase to her brother’s room.  His door being shut, she softly opened
it and spoke to him, approaching his bed with a noiseless step.

She kneeled down beside it, passed her arm over his neck, and drew his
face to hers.  She knew that he only feigned to be asleep, but she said
nothing to him.

He started by and by as if he were just then awakened, and asked who that
was, and what was the matter?

‘Tom, have you anything to tell me?  If ever you loved me in your life,
and have anything concealed from every one besides, tell it to me.’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Loo.  You have been dreaming.’

‘My dear brother:’ she laid her head down on his pillow, and her hair
flowed over him as if she would hide him from every one but herself: ‘is
there nothing that you have to tell me?  Is there nothing you can tell me
if you will?  You can tell me nothing that will change me.  O Tom, tell
me the truth!’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Loo!’

‘As you lie here alone, my dear, in the melancholy night, so you must lie
somewhere one night, when even I, if I am living then, shall have left
you.  As I am here beside you, barefoot, unclothed, undistinguishable in
darkness, so must I lie through all the night of my decay, until I am
dust.  In the name of that time, Tom, tell me the truth now!’

‘What is it you want to know?’

‘You may be certain;’ in the energy of her love she took him to her bosom
as if he were a child; ‘that I will not reproach you.  You may be certain
that I will be compassionate and true to you.  You may be certain that I
will save you at whatever cost.  O Tom, have you nothing to tell me?
Whisper very softly.  Say only “yes,” and I shall understand you!’

She turned her ear to his lips, but he remained doggedly silent.

‘Not a word, Tom?’

‘How can I say Yes, or how can I say No, when I don’t know what you mean?
Loo, you are a brave, kind girl, worthy I begin to think of a better
brother than I am.  But I have nothing more to say.  Go to bed, go to
bed.’

‘You are tired,’ she whispered presently, more in her usual way.

‘Yes, I am quite tired out.’

‘You have been so hurried and disturbed to-day.  Have any fresh
discoveries been made?’

‘Only those you have heard of, from—him.’

‘Tom, have you said to any one that we made a visit to those people, and
that we saw those three together?’

‘No.  Didn’t you yourself particularly ask me to keep it quiet when you
asked me to go there with you?’

‘Yes.  But I did not know then what was going to happen.’

‘Nor I neither.  How could I?’

He was very quick upon her with this retort.

‘Ought I to say, after what has happened,’ said his sister, standing by
the bed—she had gradually withdrawn herself and risen, ‘that I made that
visit?  Should I say so?  Must I say so?’

‘Good Heavens, Loo,’ returned her brother, ‘you are not in the habit of
asking my advice.  Say what you like.  If you keep it to yourself, I
shall keep it to _my_self.  If you disclose it, there’s an end of it.’

It was too dark for either to see the other’s face; but each seemed very
attentive, and to consider before speaking.

‘Tom, do you believe the man I gave the money to, is really implicated in
this crime?’

‘I don’t know.  I don’t see why he shouldn’t be.’

‘He seemed to me an honest man.’

‘Another person may seem to you dishonest, and yet not be so.’  There was
a pause, for he had hesitated and stopped.

‘In short,’ resumed Tom, as if he had made up his mind, ‘if you come to
that, perhaps I was so far from being altogether in his favour, that I
took him outside the door to tell him quietly, that I thought he might
consider himself very well off to get such a windfall as he had got from
my sister, and that I hoped he would make good use of it.  You remember
whether I took him out or not.  I say nothing against the man; he may be
a very good fellow, for anything I know; I hope he is.’

‘Was he offended by what you said?’

‘No, he took it pretty well; he was civil enough.  Where are you, Loo?’
He sat up in bed and kissed her.  ‘Good night, my dear, good night.’

‘You have nothing more to tell me?’

‘No.  What should I have?  You wouldn’t have me tell you a lie!’

‘I wouldn’t have you do that to-night, Tom, of all the nights in your
life; many and much happier as I hope they will be.’

‘Thank you, my dear Loo.  I am so tired, that I am sure I wonder I don’t
say anything to get to sleep.  Go to bed, go to bed.’

Kissing her again, he turned round, drew the coverlet over his head, and
lay as still as if that time had come by which she had adjured him.  She
stood for some time at the bedside before she slowly moved away.  She
stopped at the door, looked back when she had opened it, and asked him if
he had called her?  But he lay still, and she softly closed the door and
returned to her room.

Then the wretched boy looked cautiously up and found her gone, crept out
of bed, fastened his door, and threw himself upon his pillow again:
tearing his hair, morosely crying, grudgingly loving her, hatefully but
impenitently spurning himself, and no less hatefully and unprofitably
spurning all the good in the world.



CHAPTER IX
HEARING THE LAST OF IT


MRS. SPARSIT, lying by to recover the tone of her nerves in Mr.
Bounderby’s retreat, kept such a sharp look-out, night and day, under her
Coriolanian eyebrows, that her eyes, like a couple of lighthouses on an
iron-bound coast, might have warned all prudent mariners from that bold
rock her Roman nose and the dark and craggy region in its neighbourhood,
but for the placidity of her manner.  Although it was hard to believe
that her retiring for the night could be anything but a form, so severely
wide awake were those classical eyes of hers, and so impossible did it
seem that her rigid nose could yield to any relaxing influence, yet her
manner of sitting, smoothing her uncomfortable, not to say, gritty
mittens (they were constructed of a cool fabric like a meat-safe), or of
ambling to unknown places of destination with her foot in her cotton
stirrup, was so perfectly serene, that most observers would have been
constrained to suppose her a dove, embodied by some freak of nature, in
the earthly tabernacle of a bird of the hook-beaked order.

She was a most wonderful woman for prowling about the house.  How she got
from story to story was a mystery beyond solution.  A lady so decorous in
herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping
over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility
of locomotion suggested the wild idea.  Another noticeable circumstance
in Mrs. Sparsit was, that she was never hurried.  She would shoot with
consummate velocity from the roof to the hall, yet would be in full
possession of her breath and dignity on the moment of her arrival there.
Neither was she ever seen by human vision to go at a great pace.

She took very kindly to Mr. Harthouse, and had some pleasant conversation
with him soon after her arrival.  She made him her stately curtsey in the
garden, one morning before breakfast.

‘It appears but yesterday, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘that I had the
honour of receiving you at the Bank, when you were so good as to wish to
be made acquainted with Mr. Bounderby’s address.’

‘An occasion, I am sure, not to be forgotten by myself in the course of
Ages,’ said Mr. Harthouse, inclining his head to Mrs. Sparsit with the
most indolent of all possible airs.

‘We live in a singular world, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘I have had the honour, by a coincidence of which I am proud, to have
made a remark, similar in effect, though not so epigrammatically
expressed.’

‘A singular world, I would say, sir,’ pursued Mrs. Sparsit; after
acknowledging the compliment with a drooping of her dark eyebrows, not
altogether so mild in its expression as her voice was in its dulcet
tones; ‘as regards the intimacies we form at one time, with individuals
we were quite ignorant of, at another.  I recall, sir, that on that
occasion you went so far as to say you were actually apprehensive of Miss
Gradgrind.’

‘Your memory does me more honour than my insignificance deserves.  I
availed myself of your obliging hints to correct my timidity, and it is
unnecessary to add that they were perfectly accurate.  Mrs. Sparsit’s
talent for—in fact for anything requiring accuracy—with a combination of
strength of mind—and Family—is too habitually developed to admit of any
question.’  He was almost falling asleep over this compliment; it took
him so long to get through, and his mind wandered so much in the course
of its execution.

‘You found Miss Gradgrind—I really cannot call her Mrs. Bounderby; it’s
very absurd of me—as youthful as I described her?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit,
sweetly.

‘You drew her portrait perfectly,’ said Mr. Harthouse.  ‘Presented her
dead image.’

‘Very engaging, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, causing her mittens slowly to
revolve over one another.

‘Highly so.’

‘It used to be considered,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘that Miss Gradgrind was
wanting in animation, but I confess she appears to me considerably and
strikingly improved in that respect.  Ay, and indeed here _is_ Mr.
Bounderby!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit, nodding her head a great many times, as
if she had been talking and thinking of no one else.  ‘How do you find
yourself this morning, sir?  Pray let us see you cheerful, sir.’

Now, these persistent assuagements of his misery, and lightenings of his
load, had by this time begun to have the effect of making Mr. Bounderby
softer than usual towards Mrs. Sparsit, and harder than usual to most
other people from his wife downward.  So, when Mrs. Sparsit said with
forced lightness of heart, ‘You want your breakfast, sir, but I dare say
Miss Gradgrind will soon be here to preside at the table,’ Mr. Bounderby
replied, ‘If I waited to be taken care of by my wife, ma’am, I believe
you know pretty well I should wait till Doomsday, so I’ll trouble _you_
to take charge of the teapot.’  Mrs. Sparsit complied, and assumed her
old position at table.

This again made the excellent woman vastly sentimental.  She was so
humble withal, that when Louisa appeared, she rose, protesting she never
could think of sitting in that place under existing circumstances, often
as she had had the honour of making Mr. Bounderby’s breakfast, before
Mrs. Gradgrind—she begged pardon, she meant to say Miss Bounderby—she
hoped to be excused, but she really could not get it right yet, though
she trusted to become familiar with it by and by—had assumed her present
position.  It was only (she observed) because Miss Gradgrind happened to
be a little late, and Mr. Bounderby’s time was so very precious, and she
knew it of old to be so essential that he should breakfast to the moment,
that she had taken the liberty of complying with his request; long as his
will had been a law to her.

‘There!  Stop where you are, ma’am,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘stop where you
are!  Mrs. Bounderby will be very glad to be relieved of the trouble, I
believe.’

‘Don’t say that, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, almost with severity,
‘because that is very unkind to Mrs. Bounderby.  And to be unkind is not
to be you, sir.’

‘You may set your mind at rest, ma’am.—You can take it very quietly,
can’t you, Loo?’ said Mr. Bounderby, in a blustering way to his wife.

‘Of course.  It is of no moment.  Why should it be of any importance to
me?’

‘Why should it be of any importance to any one, Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am?’
said Mr. Bounderby, swelling with a sense of slight.  ‘You attach too
much importance to these things, ma’am.  By George, you’ll be corrupted
in some of your notions here.  You are old-fashioned, ma’am.  You are
behind Tom Gradgrind’s children’s time.’

‘What is the matter with you?’ asked Louisa, coldly surprised.  ‘What has
given you offence?’

‘Offence!’ repeated Bounderby.  ‘Do you suppose if there was any offence
given me, I shouldn’t name it, and request to have it corrected?  I am a
straightforward man, I believe.  I don’t go beating about for
side-winds.’

‘I suppose no one ever had occasion to think you too diffident, or too
delicate,’ Louisa answered him composedly: ‘I have never made that
objection to you, either as a child or as a woman.  I don’t understand
what you would have.’

‘Have?’ returned Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Nothing.  Otherwise, don’t you, Loo
Bounderby, know thoroughly well that I, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown,
would have it?’

She looked at him, as he struck the table and made the teacups ring, with
a proud colour in her face that was a new change, Mr. Harthouse thought.
‘You are incomprehensible this morning,’ said Louisa.  ‘Pray take no
further trouble to explain yourself.  I am not curious to know your
meaning.  What does it matter?’

Nothing more was said on this theme, and Mr. Harthouse was soon idly gay
on indifferent subjects.  But from this day, the Sparsit action upon Mr.
Bounderby threw Louisa and James Harthouse more together, and
strengthened the dangerous alienation from her husband and confidence
against him with another, into which she had fallen by degrees so fine
that she could not retrace them if she tried.  But whether she ever tried
or no, lay hidden in her own closed heart.

Mrs. Sparsit was so much affected on this particular occasion, that,
assisting Mr. Bounderby to his hat after breakfast, and being then alone
with him in the hall, she imprinted a chaste kiss upon his hand, murmured
‘My benefactor!’ and retired, overwhelmed with grief.  Yet it is an
indubitable fact, within the cognizance of this history, that five
minutes after he had left the house in the self-same hat, the same
descendant of the Scadgerses and connexion by matrimony of the Powlers,
shook her right-hand mitten at his portrait, made a contemptuous grimace
at that work of art, and said ‘Serve you right, you Noodle, and I am glad
of it.’

Mr. Bounderby had not been long gone, when Bitzer appeared.  Bitzer had
come down by train, shrieking and rattling over the long line of arches
that bestrode the wild country of past and present coal-pits, with an
express from Stone Lodge.  It was a hasty note to inform Louisa that Mrs.
Gradgrind lay very ill.  She had never been well within her daughter’s
knowledge; but, she had declined within the last few days, had continued
sinking all through the night, and was now as nearly dead, as her limited
capacity of being in any state that implied the ghost of an intention to
get out of it, allowed.

Accompanied by the lightest of porters, fit colourless servitor at
Death’s door when Mrs. Gradgrind knocked, Louisa rumbled to Coketown,
over the coal-pits past and present, and was whirled into its smoky jaws.
She dismissed the messenger to his own devices, and rode away to her old
home.

She had seldom been there since her marriage.  Her father was usually
sifting and sifting at his parliamentary cinder-heap in London (without
being observed to turn up many precious articles among the rubbish), and
was still hard at it in the national dust-yard.  Her mother had taken it
rather as a disturbance than otherwise, to be visited, as she reclined
upon her sofa; young people, Louisa felt herself all unfit for; Sissy she
had never softened to again, since the night when the stroller’s child
had raised her eyes to look at Mr. Bounderby’s intended wife.  She had no
inducements to go back, and had rarely gone.

Neither, as she approached her old home now, did any of the best
influences of old home descend upon her.  The dreams of childhood—its
airy fables; its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of
the world beyond: so good to be believed in once, so good to be
remembered when outgrown, for then the least among them rises to the
stature of a great Charity in the heart, suffering little children to
come into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in
the stony ways of this world, wherein it were better for all the children
of Adam that they should oftener sun themselves, simple and trustful, and
not worldly-wise—what had she to do with these?  Remembrances of how she
had journeyed to the little that she knew, by the enchanted roads of what
she and millions of innocent creatures had hoped and imagined; of how,
first coming upon Reason through the tender light of Fancy, she had seen
it a beneficent god, deferring to gods as great as itself; not a grim
Idol, cruel and cold, with its victims bound hand to foot, and its big
dumb shape set up with a sightless stare, never to be moved by anything
but so many calculated tons of leverage—what had she to do with these?
Her remembrances of home and childhood were remembrances of the drying up
of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out.  The
golden waters were not there.  They were flowing for the fertilization of
the land where grapes are gathered from thorns, and figs from thistles.

She went, with a heavy, hardened kind of sorrow upon her, into the house
and into her mother’s room.  Since the time of her leaving home, Sissy
had lived with the rest of the family on equal terms.  Sissy was at her
mother’s side; and Jane, her sister, now ten or twelve years old, was in
the room.

There was great trouble before it could be made known to Mrs. Gradgrind
that her eldest child was there.  She reclined, propped up, from mere
habit, on a couch: as nearly in her old usual attitude, as anything so
helpless could be kept in.  She had positively refused to take to her
bed; on the ground that if she did, she would never hear the last of it.

Her feeble voice sounded so far away in her bundle of shawls, and the
sound of another voice addressing her seemed to take such a long time in
getting down to her ears, that she might have been lying at the bottom of
a well.  The poor lady was nearer Truth than she ever had been: which had
much to do with it.

On being told that Mrs. Bounderby was there, she replied, at
cross-purposes, that she had never called him by that name since he
married Louisa; that pending her choice of an objectionable name, she had
called him J; and that she could not at present depart from that
regulation, not being yet provided with a permanent substitute.  Louisa
had sat by her for some minutes, and had spoken to her often, before she
arrived at a clear understanding who it was.  She then seemed to come to
it all at once.

‘Well, my dear,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘and I hope you are going on
satisfactorily to yourself.  It was all your father’s doing.  He set his
heart upon it.  And he ought to know.’

‘I want to hear of you, mother; not of myself.’

‘You want to hear of me, my dear?  That’s something new, I am sure, when
anybody wants to hear of me.  Not at all well, Louisa.  Very faint and
giddy.’

‘Are you in pain, dear mother?’

‘I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘but
I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.’

After this strange speech, she lay silent for some time.  Louisa, holding
her hand, could feel no pulse; but kissing it, could see a slight thin
thread of life in fluttering motion.

‘You very seldom see your sister,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind.  ‘She grows like
you.  I wish you would look at her.  Sissy, bring her here.’

She was brought, and stood with her hand in her sister’s.  Louisa had
observed her with her arm round Sissy’s neck, and she felt the difference
of this approach.

‘Do you see the likeness, Louisa?’

‘Yes, mother.  I should think her like me.  But—’

‘Eh!  Yes, I always say so,’ Mrs. Gradgrind cried, with unexpected
quickness.  ‘And that reminds me.  I—I want to speak to you, my dear.
Sissy, my good girl, leave us alone a minute.’ Louisa had relinquished
the hand: had thought that her sister’s was a better and brighter face
than hers had ever been: had seen in it, not without a rising feeling of
resentment, even in that place and at that time, something of the
gentleness of the other face in the room; the sweet face with the
trusting eyes, made paler than watching and sympathy made it, by the rich
dark hair.

Left alone with her mother, Louisa saw her lying with an awful lull upon
her face, like one who was floating away upon some great water, all
resistance over, content to be carried down the stream.  She put the
shadow of a hand to her lips again, and recalled her.

‘You were going to speak to me, mother.’

‘Eh?  Yes, to be sure, my dear.  You know your father is almost always
away now, and therefore I must write to him about it.’

‘About what, mother?  Don’t be troubled.  About what?’

‘You must remember, my dear, that whenever I have said anything, on any
subject, I have never heard the last of it: and consequently, that I have
long left off saying anything.’

‘I can hear you, mother.’  But, it was only by dint of bending down to
her ear, and at the same time attentively watching the lips as they
moved, that she could link such faint and broken sounds into any chain of
connexion.

‘You learnt a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother.  Ologies of
all kinds from morning to night.  If there is any Ology left, of any
description, that has not been worn to rags in this house, all I can say
is, I hope I shall never hear its name.’

‘I can hear you, mother, when you have strength to go on.’  This, to keep
her from floating away.

‘But there is something—not an Ology at all—that your father has missed,
or forgotten, Louisa.  I don’t know what it is.  I have often sat with
Sissy near me, and thought about it.  I shall never get its name now.
But your father may.  It makes me restless.  I want to write to him, to
find out for God’s sake, what it is.  Give me a pen, give me a pen.’

Even the power of restlessness was gone, except from the poor head, which
could just turn from side to side.

She fancied, however, that her request had been complied with, and that
the pen she could not have held was in her hand.  It matters little what
figures of wonderful no-meaning she began to trace upon her wrappers.
The hand soon stopped in the midst of them; the light that had always
been feeble and dim behind the weak transparency, went out; and even Mrs.
Gradgrind, emerged from the shadow in which man walketh and disquieteth
himself in vain, took upon her the dread solemnity of the sages and
patriarchs.



CHAPTER X
MRS. SPARSIT’S STAIRCASE


MRS. SPARSIT’S nerves being slow to recover their tone, the worthy woman
made a stay of some weeks in duration at Mr. Bounderby’s retreat, where,
notwithstanding her anchorite turn of mind based upon her becoming
consciousness of her altered station, she resigned herself with noble
fortitude to lodging, as one may say, in clover, and feeding on the fat
of the land.  During the whole term of this recess from the guardianship
of the Bank, Mrs. Sparsit was a pattern of consistency; continuing to
take such pity on Mr. Bounderby to his face, as is rarely taken on man,
and to call his portrait a Noodle to _its_ face, with the greatest
acrimony and contempt.

Mr. Bounderby, having got it into his explosive composition that Mrs.
Sparsit was a highly superior woman to perceive that he had that general
cross upon him in his deserts (for he had not yet settled what it was),
and further that Louisa would have objected to her as a frequent visitor
if it had comported with his greatness that she should object to anything
he chose to do, resolved not to lose sight of Mrs. Sparsit easily.  So
when her nerves were strung up to the pitch of again consuming
sweetbreads in solitude, he said to her at the dinner-table, on the day
before her departure, ‘I tell you what, ma’am; you shall come down here
of a Saturday, while the fine weather lasts, and stay till Monday.’  To
which Mrs. Sparsit returned, in effect, though not of the Mahomedan
persuasion: ‘To hear is to obey.’

Now, Mrs. Sparsit was not a poetical woman; but she took an idea in the
nature of an allegorical fancy, into her head.  Much watching of Louisa,
and much consequent observation of her impenetrable demeanour, which
keenly whetted and sharpened Mrs. Sparsit’s edge, must have given her as
it were a lift, in the way of inspiration.  She erected in her mind a
mighty Staircase, with a dark pit of shame and ruin at the bottom; and
down those stairs, from day to day and hour to hour, she saw Louisa
coming.

It became the business of Mrs. Sparsit’s life, to look up at her
staircase, and to watch Louisa coming down.  Sometimes slowly, sometimes
quickly, sometimes several steps at one bout, sometimes stopping, never
turning back.  If she had once turned back, it might have been the death
of Mrs. Sparsit in spleen and grief.

She had been descending steadily, to the day, and on the day, when Mr.
Bounderby issued the weekly invitation recorded above.  Mrs. Sparsit was
in good spirits, and inclined to be conversational.

‘And pray, sir,’ said she, ‘if I may venture to ask a question
appertaining to any subject on which you show reserve—which is indeed
hardy in me, for I well know you have a reason for everything you do—have
you received intelligence respecting the robbery?’

‘Why, ma’am, no; not yet.  Under the circumstances, I didn’t expect it
yet.  Rome wasn’t built in a day, ma’am.’

‘Very true, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, shaking her head.

‘Nor yet in a week, ma’am.’

‘No, indeed, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with a gentle melancholy upon
her.

‘In a similar manner, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘I can wait, you know.  If
Romulus and Remus could wait, Josiah Bounderby can wait.  They were
better off in their youth than I was, however.  They had a she-wolf for a
nurse; I had only a she-wolf for a grandmother.  She didn’t give any
milk, ma’am; she gave bruises.  She was a regular Alderney at that.’

‘Ah!’ Mrs. Sparsit sighed and shuddered.

‘No, ma’am,’ continued Bounderby, ‘I have not heard anything more about
it.  It’s in hand, though; and young Tom, who rather sticks to business
at present—something new for him; he hadn’t the schooling _I_ had—is
helping.  My injunction is, Keep it quiet, and let it seem to blow over.
Do what you like under the rose, but don’t give a sign of what you’re
about; or half a hundred of ’em will combine together and get this fellow
who has bolted, out of reach for good.  Keep it quiet, and the thieves
will grow in confidence by little and little, and we shall have ’em.’

‘Very sagacious indeed, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘Very interesting.  The
old woman you mentioned, sir—’

‘The old woman I mentioned, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, cutting the matter
short, as it was nothing to boast about, ‘is not laid hold of; but, she
may take her oath she will be, if that is any satisfaction to her
villainous old mind.  In the mean time, ma’am, I am of opinion, if you
ask me my opinion, that the less she is talked about, the better.’

The same evening, Mrs. Sparsit, in her chamber window, resting from her
packing operations, looked towards her great staircase and saw Louisa
still descending.

She sat by Mr. Harthouse, in an alcove in the garden, talking very low;
he stood leaning over her, as they whispered together, and his face
almost touched her hair.  ‘If not quite!’ said Mrs. Sparsit, straining
her hawk’s eyes to the utmost.  Mrs. Sparsit was too distant to hear a
word of their discourse, or even to know that they were speaking softly,
otherwise than from the expression of their figures; but what they said
was this:

‘You recollect the man, Mr. Harthouse?’

‘Oh, perfectly!’

‘His face, and his manner, and what he said?’

‘Perfectly.  And an infinitely dreary person he appeared to me to be.
Lengthy and prosy in the extreme.  It was knowing to hold forth, in the
humble-virtue school of eloquence; but, I assure you I thought at the
time, “My good fellow, you are over-doing this!”’

‘It has been very difficult to me to think ill of that man.’

‘My dear Louisa—as Tom says.’  Which he never did say.  ‘You know no good
of the fellow?’

‘No, certainly.’

‘Nor of any other such person?’

‘How can I,’ she returned, with more of her first manner on her than he
had lately seen, ‘when I know nothing of them, men or women?’

‘My dear Louisa, then consent to receive the submissive representation of
your devoted friend, who knows something of several varieties of his
excellent fellow-creatures—for excellent they are, I am quite ready to
believe, in spite of such little foibles as always helping themselves to
what they can get hold of.  This fellow talks.  Well; every fellow talks.
He professes morality.  Well; all sorts of humbugs profess morality.
From the House of Commons to the House of Correction, there is a general
profession of morality, except among our people; it really is that
exception which makes our people quite reviving.  You saw and heard the
case.  Here was one of the fluffy classes pulled up extremely short by my
esteemed friend Mr. Bounderby—who, as we know, is not possessed of that
delicacy which would soften so tight a hand.  The member of the fluffy
classes was injured, exasperated, left the house grumbling, met somebody
who proposed to him to go in for some share in this Bank business, went
in, put something in his pocket which had nothing in it before, and
relieved his mind extremely.  Really he would have been an uncommon,
instead of a common, fellow, if he had not availed himself of such an
opportunity.  Or he may have originated it altogether, if he had the
cleverness.’

‘I almost feel as though it must be bad in me,’ returned Louisa, after
sitting thoughtful awhile, ‘to be so ready to agree with you, and to be
so lightened in my heart by what you say.’

‘I only say what is reasonable; nothing worse.  I have talked it over
with my friend Tom more than once—of course I remain on terms of perfect
confidence with Tom—and he is quite of my opinion, and I am quite of his.
Will you walk?’

They strolled away, among the lanes beginning to be indistinct in the
twilight—she leaning on his arm—and she little thought how she was going
down, down, down, Mrs. Sparsit’s staircase.

Night and day, Mrs. Sparsit kept it standing.  When Louisa had arrived at
the bottom and disappeared in the gulf, it might fall in upon her if it
would; but, until then, there it was to be, a Building, before Mrs.
Sparsit’s eyes.  And there Louisa always was, upon it.

And always gliding down, down, down!

Mrs. Sparsit saw James Harthouse come and go; she heard of him here and
there; she saw the changes of the face he had studied; she, too, remarked
to a nicety how and when it clouded, how and when it cleared; she kept
her black eyes wide open, with no touch of pity, with no touch of
compunction, all absorbed in interest.  In the interest of seeing her,
ever drawing, with no hand to stay her, nearer and nearer to the bottom
of this new Giant’s Staircase.

With all her deference for Mr. Bounderby as contradistinguished from his
portrait, Mrs. Sparsit had not the smallest intention of interrupting the
descent.  Eager to see it accomplished, and yet patient, she waited for
the last fall, as for the ripeness and fulness of the harvest of her
hopes.  Hushed in expectancy, she kept her wary gaze upon the stairs; and
seldom so much as darkly shook her right mitten (with her fist in it), at
the figure coming down.



CHAPTER XI
LOWER AND LOWER


THE figure descended the great stairs, steadily, steadily; always
verging, like a weight in deep water, to the black gulf at the bottom.

Mr. Gradgrind, apprised of his wife’s decease, made an expedition from
London, and buried her in a business-like manner.  He then returned with
promptitude to the national cinder-heap, and resumed his sifting for the
odds and ends he wanted, and his throwing of the dust about into the eyes
of other people who wanted other odds and ends—in fact resumed his
parliamentary duties.

In the meantime, Mrs. Sparsit kept unwinking watch and ward.  Separated
from her staircase, all the week, by the length of iron road dividing
Coketown from the country house, she yet maintained her cat-like
observation of Louisa, through her husband, through her brother, through
James Harthouse, through the outsides of letters and packets, through
everything animate and inanimate that at any time went near the stairs.
‘Your foot on the last step, my lady,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, apostrophizing
the descending figure, with the aid of her threatening mitten, ‘and all
your art shall never blind me.’

Art or nature though, the original stock of Louisa’s character or the
graft of circumstances upon it,—her curious reserve did baffle, while it
stimulated, one as sagacious as Mrs. Sparsit.  There were times when Mr.
James Harthouse was not sure of her.  There were times when he could not
read the face he had studied so long; and when this lonely girl was a
greater mystery to him, than any woman of the world with a ring of
satellites to help her.

So the time went on; until it happened that Mr. Bounderby was called away
from home by business which required his presence elsewhere, for three or
four days.  It was on a Friday that he intimated this to Mrs. Sparsit at
the Bank, adding: ‘But you’ll go down to-morrow, ma’am, all the same.
You’ll go down just as if I was there.  It will make no difference to
you.’

‘Pray, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, reproachfully, ‘let me beg you not to
say that.  Your absence will make a vast difference to me, sir, as I
think you very well know.’

‘Well, ma’am, then you must get on in my absence as well as you can,’
said Mr. Bounderby, not displeased.

‘Mr. Bounderby,’ retorted Mrs. Sparsit, ‘your will is to me a law, sir;
otherwise, it might be my inclination to dispute your kind commands, not
feeling sure that it will be quite so agreeable to Miss Gradgrind to
receive me, as it ever is to your own munificent hospitality.  But you
shall say no more, sir.  I will go, upon your invitation.’

‘Why, when I invite you to my house, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, opening his
eyes, ‘I should hope you want no other invitation.’

‘No, indeed, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I should hope not.  Say no
more, sir.  I would, sir, I could see you gay again.’

‘What do you mean, ma’am?’ blustered Bounderby.

‘Sir,’ rejoined Mrs. Sparsit, ‘there was wont to be an elasticity in you
which I sadly miss.  Be buoyant, sir!’

Mr. Bounderby, under the influence of this difficult adjuration, backed
up by her compassionate eye, could only scratch his head in a feeble and
ridiculous manner, and afterwards assert himself at a distance, by being
heard to bully the small fry of business all the morning.

‘Bitzer,’ said Mrs. Sparsit that afternoon, when her patron was gone on
his journey, and the Bank was closing, ‘present my compliments to young
Mr. Thomas, and ask him if he would step up and partake of a lamb chop
and walnut ketchup, with a glass of India ale?’  Young Mr. Thomas being
usually ready for anything in that way, returned a gracious answer, and
followed on its heels.  ‘Mr. Thomas,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘these plain
viands being on table, I thought you might be tempted.’

‘Thank’ee, Mrs. Sparsit,’ said the whelp.  And gloomily fell to.

‘How is Mr. Harthouse, Mr. Tom?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Oh, he’s all right,’ said Tom.

‘Where may he be at present?’ Mrs. Sparsit asked in a light
conversational manner, after mentally devoting the whelp to the Furies
for being so uncommunicative.

‘He is shooting in Yorkshire,’ said Tom.  ‘Sent Loo a basket half as big
as a church, yesterday.’

‘The kind of gentleman, now,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, sweetly, ‘whom one might
wager to be a good shot!’

‘Crack,’ said Tom.

He had long been a down-looking young fellow, but this characteristic had
so increased of late, that he never raised his eyes to any face for three
seconds together.  Mrs. Sparsit consequently had ample means of watching
his looks, if she were so inclined.

‘Mr. Harthouse is a great favourite of mine,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘as
indeed he is of most people.  May we expect to see him again shortly, Mr.
Tom?’

‘Why, _I_ expect to see him to-morrow,’ returned the whelp.

‘Good news!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit, blandly.

‘I have got an appointment with him to meet him in the evening at the
station here,’ said Tom, ‘and I am going to dine with him afterwards, I
believe.  He is not coming down to the country house for a week or so,
being due somewhere else.  At least, he says so; but I shouldn’t wonder
if he was to stop here over Sunday, and stray that way.’

‘Which reminds me!’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘Would you remember a message to
your sister, Mr. Tom, if I was to charge you with one?’

‘Well?  I’ll try,’ returned the reluctant whelp, ‘if it isn’t a long un.’

‘It is merely my respectful compliments,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘and I fear
I may not trouble her with my society this week; being still a little
nervous, and better perhaps by my poor self.’

‘Oh!  If that’s all,’ observed Tom, ‘it wouldn’t much matter, even if I
was to forget it, for Loo’s not likely to think of you unless she sees
you.’

Having paid for his entertainment with this agreeable compliment, he
relapsed into a hangdog silence until there was no more India ale left,
when he said, ‘Well, Mrs. Sparsit, I must be off!’ and went off.

Next day, Saturday, Mrs. Sparsit sat at her window all day long looking
at the customers coming in and out, watching the postmen, keeping an eye
on the general traffic of the street, revolving many things in her mind,
but, above all, keeping her attention on her staircase.  The evening
come, she put on her bonnet and shawl, and went quietly out: having her
reasons for hovering in a furtive way about the station by which a
passenger would arrive from Yorkshire, and for preferring to peep into it
round pillars and corners, and out of ladies’ waiting-room windows, to
appearing in its precincts openly.

Tom was in attendance, and loitered about until the expected train came
in.  It brought no Mr. Harthouse.  Tom waited until the crowd had
dispersed, and the bustle was over; and then referred to a posted list of
trains, and took counsel with porters.  That done, he strolled away idly,
stopping in the street and looking up it and down it, and lifting his hat
off and putting it on again, and yawning and stretching himself, and
exhibiting all the symptoms of mortal weariness to be expected in one who
had still to wait until the next train should come in, an hour and forty
minutes hence.

‘This is a device to keep him out of the way,’ said Mrs. Sparsit,
starting from the dull office window whence she had watched him last.
‘Harthouse is with his sister now!’

It was the conception of an inspired moment, and she shot off with her
utmost swiftness to work it out.  The station for the country house was
at the opposite end of the town, the time was short, the road not easy;
but she was so quick in pouncing on a disengaged coach, so quick in
darting out of it, producing her money, seizing her ticket, and diving
into the train, that she was borne along the arches spanning the land of
coal-pits past and present, as if she had been caught up in a cloud and
whirled away.

All the journey, immovable in the air though never left behind; plain to
the dark eyes of her mind, as the electric wires which ruled a colossal
strip of music-paper out of the evening sky, were plain to the dark eyes
of her body; Mrs. Sparsit saw her staircase, with the figure coming down.
Very near the bottom now.  Upon the brink of the abyss.

An overcast September evening, just at nightfall, saw beneath its
drooping eyelids Mrs. Sparsit glide out of her carriage, pass down the
wooden steps of the little station into a stony road, cross it into a
green lane, and become hidden in a summer-growth of leaves and branches.
One or two late birds sleepily chirping in their nests, and a bat heavily
crossing and recrossing her, and the reek of her own tread in the thick
dust that felt like velvet, were all Mrs. Sparsit heard or saw until she
very softly closed a gate.

She went up to the house, keeping within the shrubbery, and went round
it, peeping between the leaves at the lower windows.  Most of them were
open, as they usually were in such warm weather, but there were no lights
yet, and all was silent.  She tried the garden with no better effect.
She thought of the wood, and stole towards it, heedless of long grass and
briers: of worms, snails, and slugs, and all the creeping things that be.
With her dark eyes and her hook nose warily in advance of her, Mrs.
Sparsit softly crushed her way through the thick undergrowth, so intent
upon her object that she probably would have done no less, if the wood
had been a wood of adders.

Hark!

The smaller birds might have tumbled out of their nests, fascinated by
the glittering of Mrs. Sparsit’s eyes in the gloom, as she stopped and
listened.

Low voices close at hand.  His voice and hers.  The appointment _was_ a
device to keep the brother away!  There they were yonder, by the felled
tree.

Bending low among the dewy grass, Mrs. Sparsit advanced closer to them.
She drew herself up, and stood behind a tree, like Robinson Crusoe in his
ambuscade against the savages; so near to them that at a spring, and that
no great one, she could have touched them both.  He was there secretly,
and had not shown himself at the house.  He had come on horseback, and
must have passed through the neighbouring fields; for his horse was tied
to the meadow side of the fence, within a few paces.

‘My dearest love,’ said he, ‘what could I do?  Knowing you were alone,
was it possible that I could stay away?’

‘You may hang your head, to make yourself the more attractive; _I_ don’t
know what they see in you when you hold it up,’ thought Mrs. Sparsit;
‘but you little think, my dearest love, whose eyes are on you!’

That she hung her head, was certain.  She urged him to go away, she
commanded him to go away; but she neither turned her face to him, nor
raised it.  Yet it was remarkable that she sat as still as ever the
amiable woman in ambuscade had seen her sit, at any period in her life.
Her hands rested in one another, like the hands of a statue; and even her
manner of speaking was not hurried.

‘My dear child,’ said Harthouse; Mrs. Sparsit saw with delight that his
arm embraced her; ‘will you not bear with my society for a little while?’

‘Not here.’

‘Where, Louisa?

‘Not here.’

‘But we have so little time to make so much of, and I have come so far,
and am altogether so devoted, and distracted.  There never was a slave at
once so devoted and ill-used by his mistress.  To look for your sunny
welcome that has warmed me into life, and to be received in your frozen
manner, is heart-rending.’

‘Am I to say again, that I must be left to myself here?’

‘But we must meet, my dear Louisa.  Where shall we meet?’

They both started.  The listener started, guiltily, too; for she thought
there was another listener among the trees.  It was only rain, beginning
to fall fast, in heavy drops.

‘Shall I ride up to the house a few minutes hence, innocently supposing
that its master is at home and will be charmed to receive me?’

‘No!’

‘Your cruel commands are implicitly to be obeyed; though I am the most
unfortunate fellow in the world, I believe, to have been insensible to
all other women, and to have fallen prostrate at last under the foot of
the most beautiful, and the most engaging, and the most imperious.  My
dearest Louisa, I cannot go myself, or let you go, in this hard abuse of
your power.’

Mrs. Sparsit saw him detain her with his encircling arm, and heard him
then and there, within her (Mrs. Sparsit’s) greedy hearing, tell her how
he loved her, and how she was the stake for which he ardently desired to
play away all that he had in life.  The objects he had lately pursued,
turned worthless beside her; such success as was almost in his grasp, he
flung away from him like the dirt it was, compared with her.  Its
pursuit, nevertheless, if it kept him near her, or its renunciation if it
took him from her, or flight if she shared it, or secrecy if she
commanded it, or any fate, or every fate, all was alike to him, so that
she was true to him,—the man who had seen how cast away she was, whom she
had inspired at their first meeting with an admiration, an interest, of
which he had thought himself incapable, whom she had received into her
confidence, who was devoted to her and adored her.  All this, and more,
in his hurry, and in hers, in the whirl of her own gratified malice, in
the dread of being discovered, in the rapidly increasing noise of heavy
rain among the leaves, and a thunderstorm rolling up—Mrs. Sparsit
received into her mind, set off with such an unavoidable halo of
confusion and indistinctness, that when at length he climbed the fence
and led his horse away, she was not sure where they were to meet, or
when, except that they had said it was to be that night.

But one of them yet remained in the darkness before her; and while she
tracked that one she must be right.  ‘Oh, my dearest love,’ thought Mrs.
Sparsit, ‘you little think how well attended you are!’

Mrs. Sparsit saw her out of the wood, and saw her enter the house.  What
to do next?  It rained now, in a sheet of water.  Mrs. Sparsit’s white
stockings were of many colours, green predominating; prickly things were
in her shoes; caterpillars slung themselves, in hammocks of their own
making, from various parts of her dress; rills ran from her bonnet, and
her Roman nose.  In such condition, Mrs. Sparsit stood hidden in the
density of the shrubbery, considering what next?

Lo, Louisa coming out of the house!  Hastily cloaked and muffled, and
stealing away.  She elopes!  She falls from the lowermost stair, and is
swallowed up in the gulf.

Indifferent to the rain, and moving with a quick determined step, she
struck into a side-path parallel with the ride.  Mrs. Sparsit followed in
the shadow of the trees, at but a short distance; for it was not easy to
keep a figure in view going quickly through the umbrageous darkness.

When she stopped to close the side-gate without noise, Mrs. Sparsit
stopped.  When she went on, Mrs. Sparsit went on.  She went by the way
Mrs. Sparsit had come, emerged from the green lane, crossed the stony
road, and ascended the wooden steps to the railroad.  A train for
Coketown would come through presently, Mrs. Sparsit knew; so she
understood Coketown to be her first place of destination.

In Mrs. Sparsit’s limp and streaming state, no extensive precautions were
necessary to change her usual appearance; but, she stopped under the lee
of the station wall, tumbled her shawl into a new shape, and put it on
over her bonnet.  So disguised she had no fear of being recognized when
she followed up the railroad steps, and paid her money in the small
office.  Louisa sat waiting in a corner.  Mrs. Sparsit sat waiting in
another corner.  Both listened to the thunder, which was loud, and to the
rain, as it washed off the roof, and pattered on the parapets of the
arches.  Two or three lamps were rained out and blown out; so, both saw
the lightning to advantage as it quivered and zigzagged on the iron
tracks.

The seizure of the station with a fit of trembling, gradually deepening
to a complaint of the heart, announced the train.  Fire and steam, and
smoke, and red light; a hiss, a crash, a bell, and a shriek; Louisa put
into one carriage, Mrs. Sparsit put into another: the little station a
desert speck in the thunderstorm.

Though her teeth chattered in her head from wet and cold, Mrs. Sparsit
exulted hugely.  The figure had plunged down the precipice, and she felt
herself, as it were, attending on the body.  Could she, who had been so
active in the getting up of the funeral triumph, do less than exult?
‘She will be at Coketown long before him,’ thought Mrs. Sparsit, ‘though
his horse is never so good.  Where will she wait for him?  And where will
they go together?  Patience.  We shall see.’

The tremendous rain occasioned infinite confusion, when the train stopped
at its destination.  Gutters and pipes had burst, drains had overflowed,
and streets were under water.  In the first instant of alighting, Mrs.
Sparsit turned her distracted eyes towards the waiting coaches, which
were in great request.  ‘She will get into one,’ she considered, ‘and
will be away before I can follow in another.  At all risks of being run
over, I must see the number, and hear the order given to the coachman.’

But, Mrs. Sparsit was wrong in her calculation.  Louisa got into no
coach, and was already gone.  The black eyes kept upon the
railroad-carriage in which she had travelled, settled upon it a moment
too late.  The door not being opened after several minutes, Mrs. Sparsit
passed it and repassed it, saw nothing, looked in, and found it empty.
Wet through and through: with her feet squelching and squashing in her
shoes whenever she moved; with a rash of rain upon her classical visage;
with a bonnet like an over-ripe fig; with all her clothes spoiled; with
damp impressions of every button, string, and hook-and-eye she wore,
printed off upon her highly connected back; with a stagnant verdure on
her general exterior, such as accumulates on an old park fence in a
mouldy lane; Mrs. Sparsit had no resource but to burst into tears of
bitterness and say, ‘I have lost her!’



CHAPTER XII
DOWN


THE national dustmen, after entertaining one another with a great many
noisy little fights among themselves, had dispersed for the present, and
Mr. Gradgrind was at home for the vacation.

He sat writing in the room with the deadly statistical clock, proving
something no doubt—probably, in the main, that the Good Samaritan was a
Bad Economist.  The noise of the rain did not disturb him much; but it
attracted his attention sufficiently to make him raise his head
sometimes, as if he were rather remonstrating with the elements.  When it
thundered very loudly, he glanced towards Coketown, having it in his mind
that some of the tall chimneys might be struck by lightning.

The thunder was rolling into distance, and the rain was pouring down like
a deluge, when the door of his room opened.  He looked round the lamp
upon his table, and saw, with amazement, his eldest daughter.

‘Louisa!’

‘Father, I want to speak to you.’

‘What is the matter?  How strange you look!  And good Heaven,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind, wondering more and more, ‘have you come here exposed to this
storm?’

She put her hands to her dress, as if she hardly knew.  ‘Yes.’  Then she
uncovered her head, and letting her cloak and hood fall where they might,
stood looking at him: so colourless, so dishevelled, so defiant and
despairing, that he was afraid of her.

‘What is it?  I conjure you, Louisa, tell me what is the matter.’

She dropped into a chair before him, and put her cold hand on his arm.

‘Father, you have trained me from my cradle?’

‘Yes, Louisa.’

‘I curse the hour in which I was born to such a destiny.’

He looked at her in doubt and dread, vacantly repeating: ‘Curse the hour?
Curse the hour?’

‘How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable
things that raise it from the state of conscious death?  Where are the
graces of my soul?  Where are the sentiments of my heart?  What have you
done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have
bloomed once, in this great wilderness here!’

She struck herself with both her hands upon her bosom.

‘If it had ever been here, its ashes alone would save me from the void in
which my whole life sinks.  I did not mean to say this; but, father, you
remember the last time we conversed in this room?’

He had been so wholly unprepared for what he heard now, that it was with
difficulty he answered, ‘Yes, Louisa.’

‘What has risen to my lips now, would have risen to my lips then, if you
had given me a moment’s help.  I don’t reproach you, father.  What you
have never nurtured in me, you have never nurtured in yourself; but O! if
you had only done so long ago, or if you had only neglected me, what a
much better and much happier creature I should have been this day!’

On hearing this, after all his care, he bowed his head upon his hand and
groaned aloud.

‘Father, if you had known, when we were last together here, what even I
feared while I strove against it—as it has been my task from infancy to
strive against every natural prompting that has arisen in my heart; if
you had known that there lingered in my breast, sensibilities,
affections, weaknesses capable of being cherished into strength, defying
all the calculations ever made by man, and no more known to his
arithmetic than his Creator is,—would you have given me to the husband
whom I am now sure that I hate?’

He said, ‘No.  No, my poor child.’

‘Would you have doomed me, at any time, to the frost and blight that have
hardened and spoiled me?  Would you have robbed me—for no one’s
enrichment—only for the greater desolation of this world—of the
immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my refuge
from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my school in
which I should have learned to be more humble and more trusting with
them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them better?’

‘O no, no.  No, Louisa.’

‘Yet, father, if I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my
sense of touch, and had been free, while I knew the shapes and surfaces
of things, to exercise my fancy somewhat, in regard to them; I should
have been a million times wiser, happier, more loving, more contented,
more innocent and human in all good respects, than I am with the eyes I
have.  Now, hear what I have come to say.’

He moved, to support her with his arm.  She rising as he did so, they
stood close together: she, with a hand upon his shoulder, looking fixedly
in his face.

‘With a hunger and thirst upon me, father, which have never been for a
moment appeased; with an ardent impulse towards some region where rules,
and figures, and definitions were not quite absolute; I have grown up,
battling every inch of my way.’

‘I never knew you were unhappy, my child.’

‘Father, I always knew it.  In this strife I have almost repulsed and
crushed my better angel into a demon.  What I have learned has left me
doubting, misbelieving, despising, regretting, what I have not learned;
and my dismal resource has been to think that life would soon go by, and
that nothing in it could be worth the pain and trouble of a contest.’

‘And you so young, Louisa!’ he said with pity.

‘And I so young.  In this condition, father—for I show you now, without
fear or favour, the ordinary deadened state of my mind as I know it—you
proposed my husband to me.  I took him.  I never made a pretence to him
or you that I loved him.  I knew, and, father, you knew, and he knew,
that I never did.  I was not wholly indifferent, for I had a hope of
being pleasant and useful to Tom.  I made that wild escape into something
visionary, and have slowly found out how wild it was.  But Tom had been
the subject of all the little tenderness of my life; perhaps he became so
because I knew so well how to pity him.  It matters little now, except as
it may dispose you to think more leniently of his errors.’

As her father held her in his arms, she put her other hand upon his other
shoulder, and still looking fixedly in his face, went on.

‘When I was irrevocably married, there rose up into rebellion against the
tie, the old strife, made fiercer by all those causes of disparity which
arise out of our two individual natures, and which no general laws shall
ever rule or state for me, father, until they shall be able to direct the
anatomist where to strike his knife into the secrets of my soul.’

‘Louisa!’ he said, and said imploringly; for he well remembered what had
passed between them in their former interview.

‘I do not reproach you, father, I make no complaint.  I am here with
another object.’

‘What can I do, child?  Ask me what you will.’

‘I am coming to it.  Father, chance then threw into my way a new
acquaintance; a man such as I had had no experience of; used to the
world; light, polished, easy; making no pretences; avowing the low
estimate of everything, that I was half afraid to form in secret;
conveying to me almost immediately, though I don’t know how or by what
degrees, that he understood me, and read my thoughts.  I could not find
that he was worse than I.  There seemed to be a near affinity between us.
I only wondered it should be worth his while, who cared for nothing else,
to care so much for me.’

‘For you, Louisa!’

Her father might instinctively have loosened his hold, but that he felt
her strength departing from her, and saw a wild dilating fire in the eyes
steadfastly regarding him.

‘I say nothing of his plea for claiming my confidence.  It matters very
little how he gained it.  Father, he did gain it.  What you know of the
story of my marriage, he soon knew, just as well.’

Her father’s face was ashy white, and he held her in both his arms.

‘I have done no worse, I have not disgraced you.  But if you ask me
whether I have loved him, or do love him, I tell you plainly, father,
that it may be so.  I don’t know.’

She took her hands suddenly from his shoulders, and pressed them both
upon her side; while in her face, not like itself—and in her figure,
drawn up, resolute to finish by a last effort what she had to say—the
feelings long suppressed broke loose.

‘This night, my husband being away, he has been with me, declaring
himself my lover.  This minute he expects me, for I could release myself
of his presence by no other means.  I do not know that I am sorry, I do
not know that I am ashamed, I do not know that I am degraded in my own
esteem.  All that I know is, your philosophy and your teaching will not
save me.  Now, father, you have brought me to this.  Save me by some
other means!’

He tightened his hold in time to prevent her sinking on the floor, but
she cried out in a terrible voice, ‘I shall die if you hold me!  Let me
fall upon the ground!’  And he laid her down there, and saw the pride of
his heart and the triumph of his system, lying, an insensible heap, at
his feet.

                                * * * * *

                          END OF THE SECOND BOOK




BOOK THE THIRD
_GARNERING_


CHAPTER I
ANOTHER THING NEEDFUL


LOUISA awoke from a torpor, and her eyes languidly opened on her old bed
at home, and her old room.  It seemed, at first, as if all that had
happened since the days when these objects were familiar to her were the
shadows of a dream, but gradually, as the objects became more real to her
sight, the events became more real to her mind.

She could scarcely move her head for pain and heaviness, her eyes were
strained and sore, and she was very weak.  A curious passive inattention
had such possession of her, that the presence of her little sister in the
room did not attract her notice for some time.  Even when their eyes had
met, and her sister had approached the bed, Louisa lay for minutes
looking at her in silence, and suffering her timidly to hold her passive
hand, before she asked:

‘When was I brought to this room?’

‘Last night, Louisa.’

‘Who brought me here?’

‘Sissy, I believe.’

‘Why do you believe so?’

‘Because I found her here this morning.  She didn’t come to my bedside to
wake me, as she always does; and I went to look for her.  She was not in
her own room either; and I went looking for her all over the house, until
I found her here taking care of you and cooling your head.  Will you see
father? Sissy said I was to tell him when you woke.’

‘What a beaming face you have, Jane!’ said Louisa, as her young
sister—timidly still—bent down to kiss her.

‘Have I?  I am very glad you think so.  I am sure it must be Sissy’s
doing.’

The arm Louisa had begun to twine around her neck, unbent itself.  ‘You
can tell father if you will.’  Then, staying her for a moment, she said,
‘It was you who made my room so cheerful, and gave it this look of
welcome?’

‘Oh no, Louisa, it was done before I came.  It was—’

Louisa turned upon her pillow, and heard no more.  When her sister had
withdrawn, she turned her head back again, and lay with her face towards
the door, until it opened and her father entered.

He had a jaded anxious look upon him, and his hand, usually steady,
trembled in hers.  He sat down at the side of the bed, tenderly asking
how she was, and dwelling on the necessity of her keeping very quiet
after her agitation and exposure to the weather last night.  He spoke in
a subdued and troubled voice, very different from his usual dictatorial
manner; and was often at a loss for words.

‘My dear Louisa.  My poor daughter.’  He was so much at a loss at that
place, that he stopped altogether.  He tried again.

‘My unfortunate child.’  The place was so difficult to get over, that he
tried again.

‘It would be hopeless for me, Louisa, to endeavour to tell you how
overwhelmed I have been, and still am, by what broke upon me last night.
The ground on which I stand has ceased to be solid under my feet.  The
only support on which I leaned, and the strength of which it seemed, and
still does seem, impossible to question, has given way in an instant.  I
am stunned by these discoveries.  I have no selfish meaning in what I
say; but I find the shock of what broke upon me last night, to be very
heavy indeed.’

She could give him no comfort herein.  She had suffered the wreck of her
whole life upon the rock.

‘I will not say, Louisa, that if you had by any happy chance undeceived
me some time ago, it would have been better for us both; better for your
peace, and better for mine.  For I am sensible that it may not have been
a part of my system to invite any confidence of that kind.  I had proved
my—my system to myself, and I have rigidly administered it; and I must
bear the responsibility of its failures.  I only entreat you to believe,
my favourite child, that I have meant to do right.’

He said it earnestly, and to do him justice he had.  In gauging
fathomless deeps with his little mean excise-rod, and in staggering over
the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he had meant to do
great things.  Within the limits of his short tether he had tumbled
about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater singleness of
purpose than many of the blatant personages whose company he kept.

‘I am well assured of what you say, father.  I know I have been your
favourite child.  I know you have intended to make me happy.  I have
never blamed you, and I never shall.’

He took her outstretched hand, and retained it in his.

‘My dear, I have remained all night at my table, pondering again and
again on what has so painfully passed between us.  When I consider your
character; when I consider that what has been known to me for hours, has
been concealed by you for years; when I consider under what immediate
pressure it has been forced from you at last; I come to the conclusion
that I cannot but mistrust myself.’

He might have added more than all, when he saw the face now looking at
him.  He did add it in effect, perhaps, as he softly moved her scattered
hair from her forehead with his hand.  Such little actions, slight in
another man, were very noticeable in him; and his daughter received them
as if they had been words of contrition.

‘But,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, slowly, and with hesitation, as well as with a
wretched sense of happiness, ‘if I see reason to mistrust myself for the
past, Louisa, I should also mistrust myself for the present and the
future.  To speak unreservedly to you, I do.  I am far from feeling
convinced now, however differently I might have felt only this time
yesterday, that I am fit for the trust you repose in me; that I know how
to respond to the appeal you have come home to make to me; that I have
the right instinct—supposing it for the moment to be some quality of that
nature—how to help you, and to set you right, my child.’

She had turned upon her pillow, and lay with her face upon her arm, so
that he could not see it.  All her wildness and passion had subsided;
but, though softened, she was not in tears.  Her father was changed in
nothing so much as in the respect that he would have been glad to see her
in tears.

‘Some persons hold,’ he pursued, still hesitating, ‘that there is a
wisdom of the Head, and that there is a wisdom of the Heart.  I have not
supposed so; but, as I have said, I mistrust myself now.  I have supposed
the head to be all-sufficient.  It may not be all-sufficient; how can I
venture this morning to say it is!  If that other kind of wisdom should
be what I have neglected, and should be the instinct that is wanted,
Louisa—’

He suggested it very doubtfully, as if he were half unwilling to admit it
even now.  She made him no answer, lying before him on her bed, still
half-dressed, much as he had seen her lying on the floor of his room last
night.

‘Louisa,’ and his hand rested on her hair again, ‘I have been absent from
here, my dear, a good deal of late; and though your sister’s training has
been pursued according to—the system,’ he appeared to come to that word
with great reluctance always, ‘it has necessarily been modified by daily
associations begun, in her case, at an early age.  I ask you—ignorantly
and humbly, my daughter—for the better, do you think?’

‘Father,’ she replied, without stirring, ‘if any harmony has been
awakened in her young breast that was mute in mine until it turned to
discord, let her thank Heaven for it, and go upon her happier way, taking
it as her greatest blessing that she has avoided my way.’

‘O my child, my child!’ he said, in a forlorn manner, ‘I am an unhappy
man to see you thus!  What avails it to me that you do not reproach me,
if I so bitterly reproach myself!’  He bent his head, and spoke low to
her.  ‘Louisa, I have a misgiving that some change may have been slowly
working about me in this house, by mere love and gratitude: that what the
Head had left undone and could not do, the Heart may have been doing
silently.  Can it be so?’

She made him no reply.

‘I am not too proud to believe it, Louisa.  How could I be arrogant, and
you before me!  Can it be so?  Is it so, my dear?’  He looked upon her
once more, lying cast away there; and without another word went out of
the room.  He had not been long gone, when she heard a light tread near
the door, and knew that some one stood beside her.

She did not raise her head.  A dull anger that she should be seen in her
distress, and that the involuntary look she had so resented should come
to this fulfilment, smouldered within her like an unwholesome fire.  All
closely imprisoned forces rend and destroy.  The air that would be
healthful to the earth, the water that would enrich it, the heat that
would ripen it, tear it when caged up.  So in her bosom even now; the
strongest qualities she possessed, long turned upon themselves, became a
heap of obduracy, that rose against a friend.

It was well that soft touch came upon her neck, and that she understood
herself to be supposed to have fallen asleep.  The sympathetic hand did
not claim her resentment.  Let it lie there, let it lie.

It lay there, warming into life a crowd of gentler thoughts; and she
rested.  As she softened with the quiet, and the consciousness of being
so watched, some tears made their way into her eyes.  The face touched
hers, and she knew that there were tears upon it too, and she the cause
of them.

As Louisa feigned to rouse herself, and sat up, Sissy retired, so that
she stood placidly near the bedside.

‘I hope I have not disturbed you.  I have come to ask if you would let me
stay with you?’

‘Why should you stay with me?  My sister will miss you.  You are
everything to her.’

‘Am I?’ returned Sissy, shaking her head.  ‘I would be something to you,
if I might.’

‘What?’ said Louisa, almost sternly.

‘Whatever you want most, if I could be that.  At all events, I would like
to try to be as near it as I can.  And however far off that may be, I
will never tire of trying.  Will you let me?’

‘My father sent you to ask me.’

‘No indeed,’ replied Sissy.  ‘He told me that I might come in now, but he
sent me away from the room this morning—or at least—’

She hesitated and stopped.

‘At least, what?’ said Louisa, with her searching eyes upon her.

‘I thought it best myself that I should be sent away, for I felt very
uncertain whether you would like to find me here.’

‘Have I always hated you so much?’

‘I hope not, for I have always loved you, and have always wished that you
should know it.  But you changed to me a little, shortly before you left
home.  Not that I wondered at it.  You knew so much, and I knew so
little, and it was so natural in many ways, going as you were among other
friends, that I had nothing to complain of, and was not at all hurt.’

Her colour rose as she said it modestly and hurriedly.  Louisa understood
the loving pretence, and her heart smote her.

‘May I try?’ said Sissy, emboldened to raise her hand to the neck that
was insensibly drooping towards her.

Louisa, taking down the hand that would have embraced her in another
moment, held it in one of hers, and answered:

‘First, Sissy, do you know what I am?  I am so proud and so hardened, so
confused and troubled, so resentful and unjust to every one and to
myself, that everything is stormy, dark, and wicked to me.  Does not that
repel you?’

‘No!’

‘I am so unhappy, and all that should have made me otherwise is so laid
waste, that if I had been bereft of sense to this hour, and instead of
being as learned as you think me, had to begin to acquire the simplest
truths, I could not want a guide to peace, contentment, honour, all the
good of which I am quite devoid, more abjectly than I do.  Does not that
repel you?’

‘No!’

In the innocence of her brave affection, and the brimming up of her old
devoted spirit, the once deserted girl shone like a beautiful light upon
the darkness of the other.

Louisa raised the hand that it might clasp her neck and join its fellow
there.  She fell upon her knees, and clinging to this stroller’s child
looked up at her almost with veneration.

‘Forgive me, pity me, help me!  Have compassion on my great need, and let
me lay this head of mine upon a loving heart!’

‘O lay it here!’ cried Sissy.  ‘Lay it here, my dear.’



CHAPTER II
VERY RIDICULOUS


MR. JAMES HARTHOUSE passed a whole night and a day in a state of so much
hurry, that the World, with its best glass in his eye, would scarcely
have recognized him during that insane interval, as the brother Jem of
the honourable and jocular member.  He was positively agitated.  He
several times spoke with an emphasis, similar to the vulgar manner.  He
went in and went out in an unaccountable way, like a man without an
object.  He rode like a highwayman.  In a word, he was so horribly bored
by existing circumstances, that he forgot to go in for boredom in the
manner prescribed by the authorities.

After putting his horse at Coketown through the storm, as if it were a
leap, he waited up all night: from time to time ringing his bell with the
greatest fury, charging the porter who kept watch with delinquency in
withholding letters or messages that could not fail to have been
entrusted to him, and demanding restitution on the spot.  The dawn
coming, the morning coming, and the day coming, and neither message nor
letter coming with either, he went down to the country house.  There, the
report was, Mr. Bounderby away, and Mrs. Bounderby in town.  Left for
town suddenly last evening.  Not even known to be gone until receipt of
message, importing that her return was not to be expected for the
present.

In these circumstances he had nothing for it but to follow her to town.
He went to the house in town.  Mrs. Bounderby not there.  He looked in at
the Bank.  Mr. Bounderby away and Mrs. Sparsit away.  Mrs. Sparsit away?
Who could have been reduced to sudden extremity for the company of that
griffin!

‘Well!  I don’t know,’ said Tom, who had his own reasons for being uneasy
about it.  ‘She was off somewhere at daybreak this morning.  She’s always
full of mystery; I hate her.  So I do that white chap; he’s always got
his blinking eyes upon a fellow.’

‘Where were you last night, Tom?’

‘Where was I last night!’ said Tom.  ‘Come!  I like that.  I was waiting
for you, Mr. Harthouse, till it came down as _I_ never saw it come down
before.  Where was I too!  Where were you, you mean.’

‘I was prevented from coming—detained.’

‘Detained!’ murmured Tom.  ‘Two of us were detained.  I was detained
looking for you, till I lost every train but the mail.  It would have
been a pleasant job to go down by that on such a night, and have to walk
home through a pond.  I was obliged to sleep in town after all.’

‘Where?’

‘Where?  Why, in my own bed at Bounderby’s.’

‘Did you see your sister?’

‘How the deuce,’ returned Tom, staring, ‘could I see my sister when she
was fifteen miles off?’

Cursing these quick retorts of the young gentleman to whom he was so true
a friend, Mr. Harthouse disembarrassed himself of that interview with the
smallest conceivable amount of ceremony, and debated for the hundredth
time what all this could mean?  He made only one thing clear.  It was,
that whether she was in town or out of town, whether he had been
premature with her who was so hard to comprehend, or she had lost
courage, or they were discovered, or some mischance or mistake, at
present incomprehensible, had occurred, he must remain to confront his
fortune, whatever it was.  The hotel where he was known to live when
condemned to that region of blackness, was the stake to which he was
tied.  As to all the rest—What will be, will be.

‘So, whether I am waiting for a hostile message, or an assignation, or a
penitent remonstrance, or an impromptu wrestle with my friend Bounderby
in the Lancashire manner—which would seem as likely as anything else in
the present state of affairs—I’ll dine,’ said Mr. James Harthouse.
‘Bounderby has the advantage in point of weight; and if anything of a
British nature is to come off between us, it may be as well to be in
training.’

Therefore he rang the bell, and tossing himself negligently on a sofa,
ordered ‘Some dinner at six—with a beefsteak in it,’ and got through the
intervening time as well as he could.  That was not particularly well;
for he remained in the greatest perplexity, and, as the hours went on,
and no kind of explanation offered itself, his perplexity augmented at
compound interest.

However, he took affairs as coolly as it was in human nature to do, and
entertained himself with the facetious idea of the training more than
once.  ‘It wouldn’t be bad,’ he yawned at one time, ‘to give the waiter
five shillings, and throw him.’  At another time it occurred to him, ‘Or
a fellow of about thirteen or fourteen stone might be hired by the hour.’
But these jests did not tell materially on the afternoon, or his
suspense; and, sooth to say, they both lagged fearfully.

It was impossible, even before dinner, to avoid often walking about in
the pattern of the carpet, looking out of the window, listening at the
door for footsteps, and occasionally becoming rather hot when any steps
approached that room.  But, after dinner, when the day turned to
twilight, and the twilight turned to night, and still no communication
was made to him, it began to be as he expressed it, ‘like the Holy Office
and slow torture.’  However, still true to his conviction that
indifference was the genuine high-breeding (the only conviction he had),
he seized this crisis as the opportunity for ordering candles and a
newspaper.

He had been trying in vain, for half an hour, to read this newspaper,
when the waiter appeared and said, at once mysteriously and
apologetically:

‘Beg your pardon, sir.  You’re wanted, sir, if you please.’

A general recollection that this was the kind of thing the Police said to
the swell mob, caused Mr. Harthouse to ask the waiter in return, with
bristling indignation, what the Devil he meant by ‘wanted’?

‘Beg your pardon, sir.  Young lady outside, sir, wishes to see you.’

‘Outside?  Where?’

‘Outside this door, sir.’

Giving the waiter to the personage before mentioned, as a block-head duly
qualified for that consignment, Mr. Harthouse hurried into the gallery.
A young woman whom he had never seen stood there.  Plainly dressed, very
quiet, very pretty.  As he conducted her into the room and placed a chair
for her, he observed, by the light of the candles, that she was even
prettier than he had at first believed.  Her face was innocent and
youthful, and its expression remarkably pleasant.  She was not afraid of
him, or in any way disconcerted; she seemed to have her mind entirely
preoccupied with the occasion of her visit, and to have substituted that
consideration for herself.

‘I speak to Mr. Harthouse?’ she said, when they were alone.

‘To Mr. Harthouse.’  He added in his mind, ‘And you speak to him with the
most confiding eyes I ever saw, and the most earnest voice (though so
quiet) I ever heard.’

‘If I do not understand—and I do not, sir’—said Sissy, ‘what your honour
as a gentleman binds you to, in other matters:’ the blood really rose in
his face as she began in these words: ‘I am sure I may rely upon it to
keep my visit secret, and to keep secret what I am going to say.  I will
rely upon it, if you will tell me I may so far trust—’

‘You may, I assure you.’

‘I am young, as you see; I am alone, as you see.  In coming to you, sir,
I have no advice or encouragement beyond my own hope.’  He thought, ‘But
that is very strong,’ as he followed the momentary upward glance of her
eyes.  He thought besides, ‘This is a very odd beginning.  I don’t see
where we are going.’

‘I think,’ said Sissy, ‘you have already guessed whom I left just now!’

‘I have been in the greatest concern and uneasiness during the last
four-and-twenty hours (which have appeared as many years),’ he returned,
‘on a lady’s account.  The hopes I have been encouraged to form that you
come from that lady, do not deceive me, I trust.’

‘I left her within an hour.’

‘At—!’

‘At her father’s.’

Mr. Harthouse’s face lengthened in spite of his coolness, and his
perplexity increased.  ‘Then I certainly,’ he thought, ‘do _not_ see
where we are going.’

‘She hurried there last night.  She arrived there in great agitation, and
was insensible all through the night.  I live at her father’s, and was
with her.  You may be sure, sir, you will never see her again as long as
you live.’

Mr. Harthouse drew a long breath; and, if ever man found himself in the
position of not knowing what to say, made the discovery beyond all
question that he was so circumstanced.  The child-like ingenuousness with
which his visitor spoke, her modest fearlessness, her truthfulness which
put all artifice aside, her entire forgetfulness of herself in her
earnest quiet holding to the object with which she had come; all this,
together with her reliance on his easily given promise—which in itself
shamed him—presented something in which he was so inexperienced, and
against which he knew any of his usual weapons would fall so powerless;
that not a word could he rally to his relief.

At last he said:

‘So startling an announcement, so confidently made, and by such lips, is
really disconcerting in the last degree.  May I be permitted to inquire,
if you are charged to convey that information to me in those hopeless
words, by the lady of whom we speak?’

‘I have no charge from her.’

‘The drowning man catches at the straw.  With no disrespect for your
judgment, and with no doubt of your sincerity, excuse my saying that I
cling to the belief that there is yet hope that I am not condemned to
perpetual exile from that lady’s presence.’

‘There is not the least hope.  The first object of my coming here, sir,
is to assure you that you must believe that there is no more hope of your
ever speaking with her again, than there would be if she had died when
she came home last night.’

‘Must believe?  But if I can’t—or if I should, by infirmity of nature, be
obstinate—and won’t—’

‘It is still true.  There is no hope.’

James Harthouse looked at her with an incredulous smile upon his lips;
but her mind looked over and beyond him, and the smile was quite thrown
away.

He bit his lip, and took a little time for consideration.

‘Well!  If it should unhappily appear,’ he said, ‘after due pains and
duty on my part, that I am brought to a position so desolate as this
banishment, I shall not become the lady’s persecutor.  But you said you
had no commission from her?’

‘I have only the commission of my love for her, and her love for me.  I
have no other trust, than that I have been with her since she came home,
and that she has given me her confidence.  I have no further trust, than
that I know something of her character and her marriage.  O Mr.
Harthouse, I think you had that trust too!’

He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been—in that
nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they
had not been whistled away—by the fervour of this reproach.

‘I am not a moral sort of fellow,’ he said, ‘and I never make any
pretensions to the character of a moral sort of fellow.  I am as immoral
as need be.  At the same time, in bringing any distress upon the lady who
is the subject of the present conversation, or in unfortunately
compromising her in any way, or in committing myself by any expression of
sentiments towards her, not perfectly reconcilable with—in fact with—the
domestic hearth; or in taking any advantage of her father’s being a
machine, or of her brother’s being a whelp, or of her husband’s being a
bear; I beg to be allowed to assure you that I have had no particularly
evil intentions, but have glided on from one step to another with a
smoothness so perfectly diabolical, that I had not the slightest idea the
catalogue was half so long until I began to turn it over.  Whereas I
find,’ said Mr. James Harthouse, in conclusion, ‘that it is really in
several volumes.’

Though he said all this in his frivolous way, the way seemed, for that
once, a conscious polishing of but an ugly surface.  He was silent for a
moment; and then proceeded with a more self-possessed air, though with
traces of vexation and disappointment that would not be polished out.

‘After what has been just now represented to me, in a manner I find it
impossible to doubt—I know of hardly any other source from which I could
have accepted it so readily—I feel bound to say to you, in whom the
confidence you have mentioned has been reposed, that I cannot refuse to
contemplate the possibility (however unexpected) of my seeing the lady no
more.  I am solely to blame for the thing having come to this—and—and, I
cannot say,’ he added, rather hard up for a general peroration, ‘that I
have any sanguine expectation of ever becoming a moral sort of fellow, or
that I have any belief in any moral sort of fellow whatever.’

Sissy’s face sufficiently showed that her appeal to him was not finished.

‘You spoke,’ he resumed, as she raised her eyes to him again, ‘of your
first object.  I may assume that there is a second to be mentioned?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you oblige me by confiding it?’

‘Mr. Harthouse,’ returned Sissy, with a blending of gentleness and
steadiness that quite defeated him, and with a simple confidence in his
being bound to do what she required, that held him at a singular
disadvantage, ‘the only reparation that remains with you, is to leave
here immediately and finally.  I am quite sure that you can mitigate in
no other way the wrong and harm you have done.  I am quite sure that it
is the only compensation you have left it in your power to make.  I do
not say that it is much, or that it is enough; but it is something, and
it is necessary.  Therefore, though without any other authority than I
have given you, and even without the knowledge of any other person than
yourself and myself, I ask you to depart from this place to-night, under
an obligation never to return to it.’

If she had asserted any influence over him beyond her plain faith in the
truth and right of what she said; if she had concealed the least doubt or
irresolution, or had harboured for the best purpose any reserve or
pretence; if she had shown, or felt, the lightest trace of any
sensitiveness to his ridicule or his astonishment, or any remonstrance he
might offer; he would have carried it against her at this point.  But he
could as easily have changed a clear sky by looking at it in surprise, as
affect her.

‘But do you know,’ he asked, quite at a loss, ‘the extent of what you
ask?  You probably are not aware that I am here on a public kind of
business, preposterous enough in itself, but which I have gone in for,
and sworn by, and am supposed to be devoted to in quite a desperate
manner?  You probably are not aware of that, but I assure you it’s the
fact.’

It had no effect on Sissy, fact or no fact.

‘Besides which,’ said Mr. Harthouse, taking a turn or two across the
room, dubiously, ‘it’s so alarmingly absurd.  It would make a man so
ridiculous, after going in for these fellows, to back out in such an
incomprehensible way.’

‘I am quite sure,’ repeated Sissy, ‘that it is the only reparation in
your power, sir.  I am quite sure, or I would not have come here.’

He glanced at her face, and walked about again.  ‘Upon my soul, I don’t
know what to say.  So immensely absurd!’

It fell to his lot, now, to stipulate for secrecy.

‘If I were to do such a very ridiculous thing,’ he said, stopping again
presently, and leaning against the chimney-piece, ‘it could only be in
the most inviolable confidence.’

‘I will trust to you, sir,’ returned Sissy, ‘and you will trust to me.’

His leaning against the chimney-piece reminded him of the night with the
whelp.  It was the self-same chimney-piece, and somehow he felt as if
_he_ were the whelp to-night.  He could make no way at all.

‘I suppose a man never was placed in a more ridiculous position,’ he
said, after looking down, and looking up, and laughing, and frowning, and
walking off, and walking back again.  ‘But I see no way out of it.  What
will be, will be.  _This_ will be, I suppose.  I must take off myself, I
imagine—in short, I engage to do it.’

Sissy rose.  She was not surprised by the result, but she was happy in
it, and her face beamed brightly.

‘You will permit me to say,’ continued Mr. James Harthouse, ‘that I doubt
if any other ambassador, or ambassadress, could have addressed me with
the same success.  I must not only regard myself as being in a very
ridiculous position, but as being vanquished at all points.  Will you
allow me the privilege of remembering my enemy’s name?’

‘_My_ name?’ said the ambassadress.

‘The only name I could possibly care to know, to-night.’

‘Sissy Jupe.’

‘Pardon my curiosity at parting.  Related to the family?’

‘I am only a poor girl,’ returned Sissy.  ‘I was separated from my
father—he was only a stroller—and taken pity on by Mr. Gradgrind.  I have
lived in the house ever since.’

She was gone.

‘It wanted this to complete the defeat,’ said Mr. James Harthouse,
sinking, with a resigned air, on the sofa, after standing transfixed a
little while.  ‘The defeat may now be considered perfectly accomplished.
Only a poor girl—only a stroller—only James Harthouse made nothing
of—only James Harthouse a Great Pyramid of failure.’

The Great Pyramid put it into his head to go up the Nile.  He took a pen
upon the instant, and wrote the following note (in appropriate
hieroglyphics) to his brother:

    Dear Jack,—All up at Coketown.  Bored out of the place, and going in
    for camels.

                                                           Affectionately,
                                                                      JEM.

He rang the bell.

‘Send my fellow here.’

‘Gone to bed, sir.’

‘Tell him to get up, and pack up.’

He wrote two more notes.  One, to Mr. Bounderby, announcing his
retirement from that part of the country, and showing where he would be
found for the next fortnight.  The other, similar in effect, to Mr.
Gradgrind.  Almost as soon as the ink was dry upon their superscriptions,
he had left the tall chimneys of Coketown behind, and was in a railway
carriage, tearing and glaring over the dark landscape.

The moral sort of fellows might suppose that Mr. James Harthouse derived
some comfortable reflections afterwards, from this prompt retreat, as one
of his few actions that made any amends for anything, and as a token to
himself that he had escaped the climax of a very bad business.  But it
was not so, at all.  A secret sense of having failed and been
ridiculous—a dread of what other fellows who went in for similar sorts of
things, would say at his expense if they knew it—so oppressed him, that
what was about the very best passage in his life was the one of all
others he would not have owned to on any account, and the only one that
made him ashamed of himself.



CHAPTER III
VERY DECIDED


THE indefatigable Mrs. Sparsit, with a violent cold upon her, her voice
reduced to a whisper, and her stately frame so racked by continual
sneezes that it seemed in danger of dismemberment, gave chase to her
patron until she found him in the metropolis; and there, majestically
sweeping in upon him at his hotel in St. James’s Street, exploded the
combustibles with which she was charged, and blew up.  Having executed
her mission with infinite relish, this high-minded woman then fainted
away on Mr. Bounderby’s coat-collar.

Mr. Bounderby’s first procedure was to shake Mrs. Sparsit off, and leave
her to progress as she might through various stages of suffering on the
floor.  He next had recourse to the administration of potent
restoratives, such as screwing the patient’s thumbs, smiting her hands,
abundantly watering her face, and inserting salt in her mouth.  When
these attentions had recovered her (which they speedily did), he hustled
her into a fast train without offering any other refreshment, and carried
her back to Coketown more dead than alive.

Regarded as a classical ruin, Mrs. Sparsit was an interesting spectacle
on her arrival at her journey’s end; but considered in any other light,
the amount of damage she had by that time sustained was excessive, and
impaired her claims to admiration.  Utterly heedless of the wear and tear
of her clothes and constitution, and adamant to her pathetic sneezes, Mr.
Bounderby immediately crammed her into a coach, and bore her off to Stone
Lodge.

‘Now, Tom Gradgrind,’ said Bounderby, bursting into his father-in-law’s
room late at night; ‘here’s a lady here—Mrs. Sparsit—you know Mrs.
Sparsit—who has something to say to you that will strike you dumb.’

‘You have missed my letter!’ exclaimed Mr. Gradgrind, surprised by the
apparition.

‘Missed your letter, sir!’ bawled Bounderby.  ‘The present time is no
time for letters.  No man shall talk to Josiah Bounderby of Coketown
about letters, with his mind in the state it’s in now.’

‘Bounderby,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, in a tone of temperate remonstrance, ‘I
speak of a very special letter I have written to you, in reference to
Louisa.’

‘Tom Gradgrind,’ replied Bounderby, knocking the flat of his hand several
times with great vehemence on the table, ‘I speak of a very special
messenger that has come to me, in reference to Louisa.  Mrs. Sparsit,
ma’am, stand forward!’

That unfortunate lady hereupon essaying to offer testimony, without any
voice and with painful gestures expressive of an inflamed throat, became
so aggravating and underwent so many facial contortions, that Mr.
Bounderby, unable to bear it, seized her by the arm and shook her.

‘If you can’t get it out, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘leave _me_ to get it
out.  This is not a time for a lady, however highly connected, to be
totally inaudible, and seemingly swallowing marbles.  Tom Gradgrind, Mrs.
Sparsit latterly found herself, by accident, in a situation to overhear a
conversation out of doors between your daughter and your precious
gentleman-friend, Mr. James Harthouse.’

‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Gradgrind.

‘Ah!  Indeed!’ cried Bounderby.  ‘And in that conversation—’

‘It is not necessary to repeat its tenor, Bounderby.  I know what
passed.’

‘You do?  Perhaps,’ said Bounderby, staring with all his might at his so
quiet and assuasive father-in-law, ‘you know where your daughter is at
the present time!’

‘Undoubtedly.  She is here.’

‘Here?’

‘My dear Bounderby, let me beg you to restrain these loud out-breaks, on
all accounts.  Louisa is here.  The moment she could detach herself from
that interview with the person of whom you speak, and whom I deeply
regret to have been the means of introducing to you, Louisa hurried here,
for protection.  I myself had not been at home many hours, when I
received her—here, in this room.  She hurried by the train to town, she
ran from town to this house, through a raging storm, and presented
herself before me in a state of distraction.  Of course, she has remained
here ever since.  Let me entreat you, for your own sake and for hers, to
be more quiet.’

Mr. Bounderby silently gazed about him for some moments, in every
direction except Mrs. Sparsit’s direction; and then, abruptly turning
upon the niece of Lady Scadgers, said to that wretched woman:

‘Now, ma’am!  We shall be happy to hear any little apology you may think
proper to offer, for going about the country at express pace, with no
other luggage than a Cock-and-a-Bull, ma’am!’

‘Sir,’ whispered Mrs. Sparsit, ‘my nerves are at present too much shaken,
and my health is at present too much impaired, in your service, to admit
of my doing more than taking refuge in tears.’  (Which she did.)

‘Well, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘without making any observation to you
that may not be made with propriety to a woman of good family, what I
have got to add to that, is that there is something else in which it
appears to me you may take refuge, namely, a coach.  And the coach in
which we came here being at the door, you’ll allow me to hand you down to
it, and pack you home to the Bank: where the best course for you to
pursue, will be to put your feet into the hottest water you can bear, and
take a glass of scalding rum and butter after you get into bed.’  With
these words, Mr. Bounderby extended his right hand to the weeping lady,
and escorted her to the conveyance in question, shedding many plaintive
sneezes by the way.  He soon returned alone.

‘Now, as you showed me in your face, Tom Gradgrind, that you wanted to
speak to me,’ he resumed, ‘here I am.  But, I am not in a very agreeable
state, I tell you plainly: not relishing this business, even as it is,
and not considering that I am at any time as dutifully and submissively
treated by your daughter, as Josiah Bounderby of Coketown ought to be
treated by his wife.  You have your opinion, I dare say; and I have mine,
I know.  If you mean to say anything to me to-night, that goes against
this candid remark, you had better let it alone.’

Mr. Gradgrind, it will be observed, being much softened, Mr. Bounderby
took particular pains to harden himself at all points.  It was his
amiable nature.

‘My dear Bounderby,’ Mr. Gradgrind began in reply.

‘Now, you’ll excuse me,’ said Bounderby, ‘but I don’t want to be too
dear.  That, to start with.  When I begin to be dear to a man, I
generally find that his intention is to come over me.  I am not speaking
to you politely; but, as you are aware, I am _not_ polite.  If you like
politeness, you know where to get it.  You have your gentleman-friends,
you know, and they’ll serve you with as much of the article as you want.
I don’t keep it myself.’

‘Bounderby,’ urged Mr. Gradgrind, ‘we are all liable to mistakes—’

‘I thought you couldn’t make ’em,’ interrupted Bounderby.

‘Perhaps I thought so.  But, I say we are all liable to mistakes and I
should feel sensible of your delicacy, and grateful for it, if you would
spare me these references to Harthouse.  I shall not associate him in our
conversation with your intimacy and encouragement; pray do not persist in
connecting him with mine.’

‘I never mentioned his name!’ said Bounderby.

‘Well, well!’ returned Mr. Gradgrind, with a patient, even a submissive,
air.  And he sat for a little while pondering.  ‘Bounderby, I see reason
to doubt whether we have ever quite understood Louisa.’

‘Who do you mean by We?’

‘Let me say I, then,’ he returned, in answer to the coarsely blurted
question; ‘I doubt whether I have understood Louisa.  I doubt whether I
have been quite right in the manner of her education.’

‘There you hit it,’ returned Bounderby.  ‘There I agree with you.  You
have found it out at last, have you?  Education!  I’ll tell you what
education is—To be tumbled out of doors, neck and crop, and put upon the
shortest allowance of everything except blows.  That’s what _I_ call
education.’

‘I think your good sense will perceive,’ Mr. Gradgrind remonstrated in
all humility, ‘that whatever the merits of such a system may be, it would
be difficult of general application to girls.’

‘I don’t see it at all, sir,’ returned the obstinate Bounderby.

‘Well,’ sighed Mr. Gradgrind, ‘we will not enter into the question.  I
assure you I have no desire to be controversial.  I seek to repair what
is amiss, if I possibly can; and I hope you will assist me in a good
spirit, Bounderby, for I have been very much distressed.’

‘I don’t understand you, yet,’ said Bounderby, with determined obstinacy,
‘and therefore I won’t make any promises.’

‘In the course of a few hours, my dear Bounderby,’ Mr. Gradgrind
proceeded, in the same depressed and propitiatory manner, ‘I appear to
myself to have become better informed as to Louisa’s character, than in
previous years.  The enlightenment has been painfully forced upon me, and
the discovery is not mine.  I think there are—Bounderby, you will be
surprised to hear me say this—I think there are qualities in Louisa,
which—which have been harshly neglected, and—and a little perverted.
And—and I would suggest to you, that—that if you would kindly meet me in
a timely endeavour to leave her to her better nature for a while—and to
encourage it to develop itself by tenderness and consideration—it—it
would be the better for the happiness of all of us.  Louisa,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind, shading his face with his hand, ‘has always been my favourite
child.’

The blustrous Bounderby crimsoned and swelled to such an extent on
hearing these words, that he seemed to be, and probably was, on the brink
of a fit.  With his very ears a bright purple shot with crimson, he pent
up his indignation, however, and said:

‘You’d like to keep her here for a time?’

‘I—I had intended to recommend, my dear Bounderby, that you should allow
Louisa to remain here on a visit, and be attended by Sissy (I mean of
course Cecilia Jupe), who understands her, and in whom she trusts.’

‘I gather from all this, Tom Gradgrind,’ said Bounderby, standing up with
his hands in his pockets, ‘that you are of opinion that there’s what
people call some incompatibility between Loo Bounderby and myself.’

‘I fear there is at present a general incompatibility between Louisa,
and—and—and almost all the relations in which I have placed her,’ was her
father’s sorrowful reply.

‘Now, look you here, Tom Gradgrind,’ said Bounderby the flushed,
confronting him with his legs wide apart, his hands deeper in his
pockets, and his hair like a hayfield wherein his windy anger was
boisterous.  ‘You have said your say; I am going to say mine.  I am a
Coketown man.  I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.  I know the bricks of
this town, and I know the works of this town, and I know the chimneys of
this town, and I know the smoke of this town, and I know the Hands of
this town.  I know ’em all pretty well.  They’re real.  When a man tells
me anything about imaginative qualities, I always tell that man, whoever
he is, that I know what he means.  He means turtle soup and venison, with
a gold spoon, and that he wants to be set up with a coach and six.
That’s what your daughter wants.  Since you are of opinion that she ought
to have what she wants, I recommend you to provide it for her.  Because,
Tom Gradgrind, she will never have it from me.’

‘Bounderby,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘I hoped, after my entreaty, you would
have taken a different tone.’

‘Just wait a bit,’ retorted Bounderby; ‘you have said your say, I
believe.  I heard you out; hear me out, if you please.  Don’t make
yourself a spectacle of unfairness as well as inconsistency, because,
although I am sorry to see Tom Gradgrind reduced to his present position,
I should be doubly sorry to see him brought so low as that.  Now, there’s
an incompatibility of some sort or another, I am given to understand by
you, between your daughter and me.  I’ll give _you_ to understand, in
reply to that, that there unquestionably is an incompatibility of the
first magnitude—to be summed up in this—that your daughter don’t properly
know her husband’s merits, and is not impressed with such a sense as
would become her, by George! of the honour of his alliance.  That’s plain
speaking, I hope.’

‘Bounderby,’ urged Mr. Gradgrind, ‘this is unreasonable.’

‘Is it?’ said Bounderby.  ‘I am glad to hear you say so.  Because when
Tom Gradgrind, with his new lights, tells me that what I say is
unreasonable, I am convinced at once it must be devilish sensible.  With
your permission I am going on.  You know my origin; and you know that for
a good many years of my life I didn’t want a shoeing-horn, in consequence
of not having a shoe.  Yet you may believe or not, as you think proper,
that there are ladies—born ladies—belonging to families—Families!—who
next to worship the ground I walk on.’

He discharged this like a Rocket, at his father-in-law’s head.

‘Whereas your daughter,’ proceeded Bounderby, ‘is far from being a born
lady.  That you know, yourself.  Not that I care a pinch of candle-snuff
about such things, for you are very well aware I don’t; but that such is
the fact, and you, Tom Gradgrind, can’t change it.  Why do I say this?’

‘Not, I fear,’ observed Mr. Gradgrind, in a low voice, ‘to spare me.’

‘Hear me out,’ said Bounderby, ‘and refrain from cutting in till your
turn comes round.  I say this, because highly connected females have been
astonished to see the way in which your daughter has conducted herself,
and to witness her insensibility.  They have wondered how I have suffered
it.  And I wonder myself now, and I won’t suffer it.’

‘Bounderby,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind, rising, ‘the less we say to-night
the better, I think.’

‘On the contrary, Tom Gradgrind, the more we say to-night, the better, I
think.  That is,’ the consideration checked him, ‘till I have said all I
mean to say, and then I don’t care how soon we stop.  I come to a
question that may shorten the business.  What do you mean by the proposal
you made just now?’

‘What do I mean, Bounderby?’

‘By your visiting proposition,’ said Bounderby, with an inflexible jerk
of the hayfield.

‘I mean that I hope you may be induced to arrange in a friendly manner,
for allowing Louisa a period of repose and reflection here, which may
tend to a gradual alteration for the better in many respects.’

‘To a softening down of your ideas of the incompatibility?’ said
Bounderby.

‘If you put it in those terms.’

‘What made you think of this?’ said Bounderby.

‘I have already said, I fear Louisa has not been understood.  Is it
asking too much, Bounderby, that you, so far her elder, should aid in
trying to set her right?  You have accepted a great charge of her; for
better for worse, for—’

Mr. Bounderby may have been annoyed by the repetition of his own words to
Stephen Blackpool, but he cut the quotation short with an angry start.

‘Come!’ said he, ‘I don’t want to be told about that.  I know what I took
her for, as well as you do.  Never you mind what I took her for; that’s
my look out.’

‘I was merely going on to remark, Bounderby, that we may all be more or
less in the wrong, not even excepting you; and that some yielding on your
part, remembering the trust you have accepted, may not only be an act of
true kindness, but perhaps a debt incurred towards Louisa.’

‘I think differently,’ blustered Bounderby.  ‘I am going to finish this
business according to my own opinions.  Now, I don’t want to make a
quarrel of it with you, Tom Gradgrind.  To tell you the truth, I don’t
think it would be worthy of my reputation to quarrel on such a subject.
As to your gentleman-friend, he may take himself off, wherever he likes
best.  If he falls in my way, I shall tell him my mind; if he don’t fall
in my way, I shan’t, for it won’t be worth my while to do it.  As to your
daughter, whom I made Loo Bounderby, and might have done better by
leaving Loo Gradgrind, if she don’t come home to-morrow, by twelve
o’clock at noon, I shall understand that she prefers to stay away, and I
shall send her wearing apparel and so forth over here, and you’ll take
charge of her for the future.  What I shall say to people in general, of
the incompatibility that led to my so laying down the law, will be this.
I am Josiah Bounderby, and I had my bringing-up; she’s the daughter of
Tom Gradgrind, and she had her bringing-up; and the two horses wouldn’t
pull together.  I am pretty well known to be rather an uncommon man, I
believe; and most people will understand fast enough that it must be a
woman rather out of the common, also, who, in the long run, would come up
to my mark.’

‘Let me seriously entreat you to reconsider this, Bounderby,’ urged Mr.
Gradgrind, ‘before you commit yourself to such a decision.’

‘I always come to a decision,’ said Bounderby, tossing his hat on: ‘and
whatever I do, I do at once.  I should be surprised at Tom Gradgrind’s
addressing such a remark to Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, knowing what he
knows of him, if I could be surprised by anything Tom Gradgrind did,
after his making himself a party to sentimental humbug.  I have given you
my decision, and I have got no more to say.  Good night!’

So Mr. Bounderby went home to his town house to bed.  At five minutes
past twelve o’clock next day, he directed Mrs. Bounderby’s property to be
carefully packed up and sent to Tom Gradgrind’s; advertised his country
retreat for sale by private contract; and resumed a bachelor life.



CHAPTER IV
LOST


THE robbery at the Bank had not languished before, and did not cease to
occupy a front place in the attention of the principal of that
establishment now.  In boastful proof of his promptitude and activity, as
a remarkable man, and a self-made man, and a commercial wonder more
admirable than Venus, who had risen out of the mud instead of the sea, he
liked to show how little his domestic affairs abated his business ardour.
Consequently, in the first few weeks of his resumed bachelorhood, he even
advanced upon his usual display of bustle, and every day made such a rout
in renewing his investigations into the robbery, that the officers who
had it in hand almost wished it had never been committed.

They were at fault too, and off the scent.  Although they had been so
quiet since the first outbreak of the matter, that most people really did
suppose it to have been abandoned as hopeless, nothing new occurred.  No
implicated man or woman took untimely courage, or made a self-betraying
step.  More remarkable yet, Stephen Blackpool could not be heard of, and
the mysterious old woman remained a mystery.

Things having come to this pass, and showing no latent signs of stirring
beyond it, the upshot of Mr. Bounderby’s investigations was, that he
resolved to hazard a bold burst.  He drew up a placard, offering Twenty
Pounds reward for the apprehension of Stephen Blackpool, suspected of
complicity in the robbery of Coketown Bank on such a night; he described
the said Stephen Blackpool by dress, complexion, estimated height, and
manner, as minutely as he could; he recited how he had left the town, and
in what direction he had been last seen going; he had the whole printed
in great black letters on a staring broadsheet; and he caused the walls
to be posted with it in the dead of night, so that it should strike upon
the sight of the whole population at one blow.

The factory-bells had need to ring their loudest that morning to disperse
the groups of workers who stood in the tardy daybreak, collected round
the placards, devouring them with eager eyes.  Not the least eager of the
eyes assembled, were the eyes of those who could not read.  These people,
as they listened to the friendly voice that read aloud—there was always
some such ready to help them—stared at the characters which meant so much
with a vague awe and respect that would have been half ludicrous, if any
aspect of public ignorance could ever be otherwise than threatening and
full of evil.  Many ears and eyes were busy with a vision of the matter
of these placards, among turning spindles, rattling looms, and whirling
wheels, for hours afterwards; and when the Hands cleared out again into
the streets, there were still as many readers as before.

Slackbridge, the delegate, had to address his audience too that night;
and Slackbridge had obtained a clean bill from the printer, and had
brought it in his pocket.  Oh, my friends and fellow-countrymen, the
down-trodden operatives of Coketown, oh, my fellow-brothers and
fellow-workmen and fellow-citizens and fellow-men, what a to-do was
there, when Slackbridge unfolded what he called ‘that damning document,’
and held it up to the gaze, and for the execration of the working-man
community!  ‘Oh, my fellow-men, behold of what a traitor in the camp of
those great spirits who are enrolled upon the holy scroll of Justice and
of Union, is appropriately capable!  Oh, my prostrate friends, with the
galling yoke of tyrants on your necks and the iron foot of despotism
treading down your fallen forms into the dust of the earth, upon which
right glad would your oppressors be to see you creeping on your bellies
all the days of your lives, like the serpent in the garden—oh, my
brothers, and shall I as a man not add, my sisters too, what do you say,
_now_, of Stephen Blackpool, with a slight stoop in his shoulders and
about five foot seven in height, as set forth in this degrading and
disgusting document, this blighting bill, this pernicious placard, this
abominable advertisement; and with what majesty of denouncement will you
crush the viper, who would bring this stain and shame upon the God-like
race that happily has cast him out for ever!  Yes, my compatriots,
happily cast him out and sent him forth!  For you remember how he stood
here before you on this platform; you remember how, face to face and foot
to foot, I pursued him through all his intricate windings; you remember
how he sneaked and slunk, and sidled, and splitted of straws, until, with
not an inch of ground to which to cling, I hurled him out from amongst
us: an object for the undying finger of scorn to point at, and for the
avenging fire of every free and thinking mind to scorch and scar!  And
now, my friends—my labouring friends, for I rejoice and triumph in that
stigma—my friends whose hard but honest beds are made in toil, and whose
scanty but independent pots are boiled in hardship; and now, I say, my
friends, what appellation has that dastard craven taken to himself, when,
with the mask torn from his features, he stands before us in all his
native deformity, a What?  A thief!  A plunderer!  A proscribed fugitive,
with a price upon his head; a fester and a wound upon the noble character
of the Coketown operative!  Therefore, my band of brothers in a sacred
bond, to which your children and your children’s children yet unborn have
set their infant hands and seals, I propose to you on the part of the
United Aggregate Tribunal, ever watchful for your welfare, ever zealous
for your benefit, that this meeting does Resolve: That Stephen Blackpool,
weaver, referred to in this placard, having been already solemnly
disowned by the community of Coketown Hands, the same are free from the
shame of his misdeeds, and cannot as a class be reproached with his
dishonest actions!’

Thus Slackbridge; gnashing and perspiring after a prodigious sort.  A few
stern voices called out ‘No!’ and a score or two hailed, with assenting
cries of ‘Hear, hear!’ the caution from one man, ‘Slackbridge, y’or over
hetter in’t; y’or a goen too fast!’  But these were pigmies against an
army; the general assemblage subscribed to the gospel according to
Slackbridge, and gave three cheers for him, as he sat demonstratively
panting at them.

These men and women were yet in the streets, passing quietly to their
homes, when Sissy, who had been called away from Louisa some minutes
before, returned.

‘Who is it?’ asked Louisa.

‘It is Mr. Bounderby,’ said Sissy, timid of the name, ‘and your brother
Mr. Tom, and a young woman who says her name is Rachael, and that you
know her.’

‘What do they want, Sissy dear?’

‘They want to see you.  Rachael has been crying, and seems angry.’

‘Father,’ said Louisa, for he was present, ‘I cannot refuse to see them,
for a reason that will explain itself.  Shall they come in here?’

As he answered in the affirmative, Sissy went away to bring them.  She
reappeared with them directly.  Tom was last; and remained standing in
the obscurest part of the room, near the door.

‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ said her husband, entering with a cool nod, ‘I don’t
disturb you, I hope.  This is an unseasonable hour, but here is a young
woman who has been making statements which render my visit necessary.
Tom Gradgrind, as your son, young Tom, refuses for some obstinate reason
or other to say anything at all about those statements, good or bad, I am
obliged to confront her with your daughter.’

‘You have seen me once before, young lady,’ said Rachael, standing in
front of Louisa.

Tom coughed.

‘You have seen me, young lady,’ repeated Rachael, as she did not answer,
‘once before.’

Tom coughed again.

‘I have.’

Rachael cast her eyes proudly towards Mr. Bounderby, and said, ‘Will you
make it known, young lady, where, and who was there?’

‘I went to the house where Stephen Blackpool lodged, on the night of his
discharge from his work, and I saw you there.  He was there too; and an
old woman who did not speak, and whom I could scarcely see, stood in a
dark corner.  My brother was with me.’

‘Why couldn’t you say so, young Tom?’ demanded Bounderby.

‘I promised my sister I wouldn’t.’  Which Louisa hastily confirmed.  ‘And
besides,’ said the whelp bitterly, ‘she tells her own story so precious
well—and so full—that what business had I to take it out of her mouth!’

‘Say, young lady, if you please,’ pursued Rachael, ‘why, in an evil hour,
you ever came to Stephen’s that night.’

‘I felt compassion for him,’ said Louisa, her colour deepening, ‘and I
wished to know what he was going to do, and wished to offer him
assistance.’

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Bounderby.  ‘Much flattered and obliged.’

‘Did you offer him,’ asked Rachael, ‘a bank-note?’

‘Yes; but he refused it, and would only take two pounds in gold.’

Rachael cast her eyes towards Mr. Bounderby again.

‘Oh, certainly!’ said Bounderby.  ‘If you put the question whether your
ridiculous and improbable account was true or not, I am bound to say it’s
confirmed.’

‘Young lady,’ said Rachael, ‘Stephen Blackpool is now named as a thief in
public print all over this town, and where else!  There have been a
meeting to-night where he have been spoken of in the same shameful way.
Stephen!  The honestest lad, the truest lad, the best!’  Her indignation
failed her, and she broke off sobbing.

‘I am very, very sorry,’ said Louisa.

‘Oh, young lady, young lady,’ returned Rachael, ‘I hope you may be, but I
don’t know!  I can’t say what you may ha’ done!  The like of you don’t
know us, don’t care for us, don’t belong to us.  I am not sure why you
may ha’ come that night.  I can’t tell but what you may ha’ come wi’ some
aim of your own, not mindin to what trouble you brought such as the poor
lad.  I said then, Bless you for coming; and I said it of my heart, you
seemed to take so pitifully to him; but I don’t know now, I don’t know!’

Louisa could not reproach her for her unjust suspicions; she was so
faithful to her idea of the man, and so afflicted.

‘And when I think,’ said Rachael through her sobs, ‘that the poor lad was
so grateful, thinkin you so good to him—when I mind that he put his hand
over his hard-worken face to hide the tears that you brought up there—Oh,
I hope you may be sorry, and ha’ no bad cause to be it; but I don’t know,
I don’t know!’

‘You’re a pretty article,’ growled the whelp, moving uneasily in his dark
corner, ‘to come here with these precious imputations!  You ought to be
bundled out for not knowing how to behave yourself, and you would be by
rights.’

She said nothing in reply; and her low weeping was the only sound that
was heard, until Mr. Bounderby spoke.

‘Come!’ said he, ‘you know what you have engaged to do.  You had better
give your mind to that; not this.’

‘’Deed, I am loath,’ returned Rachael, drying her eyes, ‘that any here
should see me like this; but I won’t be seen so again.  Young lady, when
I had read what’s put in print of Stephen—and what has just as much truth
in it as if it had been put in print of you—I went straight to the Bank
to say I knew where Stephen was, and to give a sure and certain promise
that he should be here in two days.  I couldn’t meet wi’ Mr. Bounderby
then, and your brother sent me away, and I tried to find you, but you was
not to be found, and I went back to work.  Soon as I come out of the Mill
to-night, I hastened to hear what was said of Stephen—for I know wi’
pride he will come back to shame it!—and then I went again to seek Mr.
Bounderby, and I found him, and I told him every word I knew; and he
believed no word I said, and brought me here.’

‘So far, that’s true enough,’ assented Mr. Bounderby, with his hands in
his pockets and his hat on.  ‘But I have known you people before to-day,
you’ll observe, and I know you never die for want of talking.  Now, I
recommend you not so much to mind talking just now, as doing.  You have
undertaken to do something; all I remark upon that at present is, do it!’

‘I have written to Stephen by the post that went out this afternoon, as I
have written to him once before sin’ he went away,’ said Rachael; ‘and he
will be here, at furthest, in two days.’

‘Then, I’ll tell you something.  You are not aware perhaps,’ retorted Mr.
Bounderby, ‘that you yourself have been looked after now and then, not
being considered quite free from suspicion in this business, on account
of most people being judged according to the company they keep.  The
post-office hasn’t been forgotten either.  What I’ll tell you is, that no
letter to Stephen Blackpool has ever got into it.  Therefore, what has
become of yours, I leave you to guess.  Perhaps you’re mistaken, and
never wrote any.’

‘He hadn’t been gone from here, young lady,’ said Rachael, turning
appealingly to Louisa, ‘as much as a week, when he sent me the only
letter I have had from him, saying that he was forced to seek work in
another name.’

‘Oh, by George!’ cried Bounderby, shaking his head, with a whistle, ‘he
changes his name, does he!  That’s rather unlucky, too, for such an
immaculate chap.  It’s considered a little suspicious in Courts of
Justice, I believe, when an Innocent happens to have many names.’

‘What,’ said Rachael, with the tears in her eyes again, ‘what, young
lady, in the name of Mercy, was left the poor lad to do!  The masters
against him on one hand, the men against him on the other, he only wantin
to work hard in peace, and do what he felt right.  Can a man have no soul
of his own, no mind of his own?  Must he go wrong all through wi’ this
side, or must he go wrong all through wi’ that, or else be hunted like a
hare?’

‘Indeed, indeed, I pity him from my heart,’ returned Louisa; ‘and I hope
that he will clear himself.’

‘You need have no fear of that, young lady.  He is sure!’

‘All the surer, I suppose,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘for your refusing to
tell where he is?  Eh?’

‘He shall not, through any act of mine, come back wi’ the unmerited
reproach of being brought back.  He shall come back of his own accord to
clear himself, and put all those that have injured his good character,
and he not here for its defence, to shame.  I have told him what has been
done against him,’ said Rachael, throwing off all distrust as a rock
throws off the sea, ‘and he will be here, at furthest, in two days.’

‘Notwithstanding which,’ added Mr. Bounderby, ‘if he can be laid hold of
any sooner, he shall have an earlier opportunity of clearing himself.  As
to you, I have nothing against you; what you came and told me turns out
to be true, and I have given you the means of proving it to be true, and
there’s an end of it.  I wish you good night all!  I must be off to look
a little further into this.’

Tom came out of his corner when Mr. Bounderby moved, moved with him, kept
close to him, and went away with him.  The only parting salutation of
which he delivered himself was a sulky ‘Good night, father!’  With a
brief speech, and a scowl at his sister, he left the house.

Since his sheet-anchor had come home, Mr. Gradgrind had been sparing of
speech.  He still sat silent, when Louisa mildly said:

‘Rachael, you will not distrust me one day, when you know me better.’

‘It goes against me,’ Rachael answered, in a gentler manner, ‘to mistrust
any one; but when I am so mistrusted—when we all are—I cannot keep such
things quite out of my mind.  I ask your pardon for having done you an
injury.  I don’t think what I said now.  Yet I might come to think it
again, wi’ the poor lad so wronged.’

‘Did you tell him in your letter,’ inquired Sissy, ‘that suspicion seemed
to have fallen upon him, because he had been seen about the Bank at
night?  He would then know what he would have to explain on coming back,
and would be ready.’

‘Yes, dear,’ she returned; ‘but I can’t guess what can have ever taken
him there.  He never used to go there.  It was never in his way.  His way
was the same as mine, and not near it.’

Sissy had already been at her side asking her where she lived, and
whether she might come to-morrow night, to inquire if there were news of
him.

‘I doubt,’ said Rachael, ‘if he can be here till next day.’

‘Then I will come next night too,’ said Sissy.

When Rachael, assenting to this, was gone, Mr. Gradgrind lifted up his
head, and said to his daughter:

‘Louisa, my dear, I have never, that I know of, seen this man.  Do you
believe him to be implicated?’

‘I think I have believed it, father, though with great difficulty.  I do
not believe it now.’

‘That is to say, you once persuaded yourself to believe it, from knowing
him to be suspected.  His appearance and manner; are they so honest?’

‘Very honest.’

‘And her confidence not to be shaken!  I ask myself,’ said Mr. Gradgrind,
musing, ‘does the real culprit know of these accusations?  Where is he?
Who is he?’

His hair had latterly began to change its colour.  As he leaned upon his
hand again, looking gray and old, Louisa, with a face of fear and pity,
hurriedly went over to him, and sat close at his side.  Her eyes by
accident met Sissy’s at the moment.  Sissy flushed and started, and
Louisa put her finger on her lip.

Next night, when Sissy returned home and told Louisa that Stephen was not
come, she told it in a whisper.  Next night again, when she came home
with the same account, and added that he had not been heard of, she spoke
in the same low frightened tone.  From the moment of that interchange of
looks, they never uttered his name, or any reference to him, aloud; nor
ever pursued the subject of the robbery, when Mr. Gradgrind spoke of it.

The two appointed days ran out, three days and nights ran out, and
Stephen Blackpool was not come, and remained unheard of.  On the fourth
day, Rachael, with unabated confidence, but considering her despatch to
have miscarried, went up to the Bank, and showed her letter from him with
his address, at a working colony, one of many, not upon the main road,
sixty miles away.  Messengers were sent to that place, and the whole town
looked for Stephen to be brought in next day.

During this whole time the whelp moved about with Mr. Bounderby like his
shadow, assisting in all the proceedings.  He was greatly excited,
horribly fevered, bit his nails down to the quick, spoke in a hard
rattling voice, and with lips that were black and burnt up.  At the hour
when the suspected man was looked for, the whelp was at the station;
offering to wager that he had made off before the arrival of those who
were sent in quest of him, and that he would not appear.

The whelp was right.  The messengers returned alone.  Rachael’s letter
had gone, Rachael’s letter had been delivered.  Stephen Blackpool had
decamped in that same hour; and no soul knew more of him.  The only doubt
in Coketown was, whether Rachael had written in good faith, believing
that he really would come back, or warning him to fly.  On this point
opinion was divided.

Six days, seven days, far on into another week.  The wretched whelp
plucked up a ghastly courage, and began to grow defiant.  ‘_Was_ the
suspected fellow the thief?  A pretty question!  If not, where was the
man, and why did he not come back?’

Where was the man, and why did he not come back?  In the dead of night
the echoes of his own words, which had rolled Heaven knows how far away
in the daytime, came back instead, and abided by him until morning.



CHAPTER V
FOUND


DAY and night again, day and night again.  No Stephen Blackpool.  Where
was the man, and why did he not come back?

Every night, Sissy went to Rachael’s lodging, and sat with her in her
small neat room.  All day, Rachael toiled as such people must toil,
whatever their anxieties.  The smoke-serpents were indifferent who was
lost or found, who turned out bad or good; the melancholy mad elephants,
like the Hard Fact men, abated nothing of their set routine, whatever
happened.  Day and night again, day and night again.  The monotony was
unbroken.  Even Stephen Blackpool’s disappearance was falling into the
general way, and becoming as monotonous a wonder as any piece of
machinery in Coketown.

‘I misdoubt,’ said Rachael, ‘if there is as many as twenty left in all
this place, who have any trust in the poor dear lad now.’

She said it to Sissy, as they sat in her lodging, lighted only by the
lamp at the street corner.  Sissy had come there when it was already
dark, to await her return from work; and they had since sat at the window
where Rachael had found her, wanting no brighter light to shine on their
sorrowful talk.

‘If it hadn’t been mercifully brought about, that I was to have you to
speak to,’ pursued Rachael, ‘times are, when I think my mind would not
have kept right.  But I get hope and strength through you; and you
believe that though appearances may rise against him, he will be proved
clear?’

‘I do believe so,’ returned Sissy, ‘with my whole heart.  I feel so
certain, Rachael, that the confidence you hold in yours against all
discouragement, is not like to be wrong, that I have no more doubt of him
than if I had known him through as many years of trial as you have.’

‘And I, my dear,’ said Rachel, with a tremble in her voice, ‘have known
him through them all, to be, according to his quiet ways, so faithful to
everything honest and good, that if he was never to be heard of more, and
I was to live to be a hundred years old, I could say with my last breath,
God knows my heart.  I have never once left trusting Stephen Blackpool!’

‘We all believe, up at the Lodge, Rachael, that he will be freed from
suspicion, sooner or later.’

‘The better I know it to be so believed there, my dear,’ said Rachael,
‘and the kinder I feel it that you come away from there, purposely to
comfort me, and keep me company, and be seen wi’ me when I am not yet
free from all suspicion myself, the more grieved I am that I should ever
have spoken those mistrusting words to the young lady.  And yet I—’

‘You don’t mistrust her now, Rachael?’

‘Now that you have brought us more together, no.  But I can’t at all
times keep out of my mind—’

Her voice so sunk into a low and slow communing with herself, that Sissy,
sitting by her side, was obliged to listen with attention.

‘I can’t at all times keep out of my mind, mistrustings of some one.  I
can’t think who ’tis, I can’t think how or why it may be done, but I
mistrust that some one has put Stephen out of the way.  I mistrust that
by his coming back of his own accord, and showing himself innocent before
them all, some one would be confounded, who—to prevent that—has stopped
him, and put him out of the way.’

‘That is a dreadful thought,’ said Sissy, turning pale.

‘It _is_ a dreadful thought to think he may be murdered.’

Sissy shuddered, and turned paler yet.

‘When it makes its way into my mind, dear,’ said Rachael, ‘and it will
come sometimes, though I do all I can to keep it out, wi’ counting on to
high numbers as I work, and saying over and over again pieces that I knew
when I were a child—I fall into such a wild, hot hurry, that, however
tired I am, I want to walk fast, miles and miles.  I must get the better
of this before bed-time.  I’ll walk home wi’ you.’

‘He might fall ill upon the journey back,’ said Sissy, faintly offering a
worn-out scrap of hope; ‘and in such a case, there are many places on the
road where he might stop.’

‘But he is in none of them.  He has been sought for in all, and he’s not
there.’

‘True,’ was Sissy’s reluctant admission.

‘He’d walk the journey in two days.  If he was footsore and couldn’t
walk, I sent him, in the letter he got, the money to ride, lest he should
have none of his own to spare.’

‘Let us hope that to-morrow will bring something better, Rachael.  Come
into the air!’

Her gentle hand adjusted Rachael’s shawl upon her shining black hair in
the usual manner of her wearing it, and they went out.  The night being
fine, little knots of Hands were here and there lingering at street
corners; but it was supper-time with the greater part of them, and there
were but few people in the streets.

‘You’re not so hurried now, Rachael, and your hand is cooler.’

‘I get better, dear, if I can only walk, and breathe a little fresh.
‘Times when I can’t, I turn weak and confused.’

‘But you must not begin to fail, Rachael, for you may be wanted at any
time to stand by Stephen.  To-morrow is Saturday.  If no news comes
to-morrow, let us walk in the country on Sunday morning, and strengthen
you for another week.  Will you go?’

‘Yes, dear.’

They were by this time in the street where Mr. Bounderby’s house stood.
The way to Sissy’s destination led them past the door, and they were
going straight towards it.  Some train had newly arrived in Coketown,
which had put a number of vehicles in motion, and scattered a
considerable bustle about the town.  Several coaches were rattling before
them and behind them as they approached Mr. Bounderby’s, and one of the
latter drew up with such briskness as they were in the act of passing the
house, that they looked round involuntarily.  The bright gaslight over
Mr. Bounderby’s steps showed them Mrs. Sparsit in the coach, in an
ecstasy of excitement, struggling to open the door; Mrs. Sparsit seeing
them at the same moment, called to them to stop.

‘It’s a coincidence,’ exclaimed Mrs. Sparsit, as she was released by the
coachman.  ‘It’s a Providence!  Come out, ma’am!’ then said Mrs. Sparsit,
to some one inside, ‘come out, or we’ll have you dragged out!’

Hereupon, no other than the mysterious old woman descended.  Whom Mrs.
Sparsit incontinently collared.

‘Leave her alone, everybody!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit, with great energy.
‘Let nobody touch her.  She belongs to me.  Come in, ma’am!’ then said
Mrs. Sparsit, reversing her former word of command.  ‘Come in, ma’am, or
we’ll have you dragged in!’

The spectacle of a matron of classical deportment, seizing an ancient
woman by the throat, and hauling her into a dwelling-house, would have
been under any circumstances, sufficient temptation to all true English
stragglers so blest as to witness it, to force a way into that
dwelling-house and see the matter out.  But when the phenomenon was
enhanced by the notoriety and mystery by this time associated all over
the town with the Bank robbery, it would have lured the stragglers in,
with an irresistible attraction, though the roof had been expected to
fall upon their heads.  Accordingly, the chance witnesses on the ground,
consisting of the busiest of the neighbours to the number of some
five-and-twenty, closed in after Sissy and Rachael, as they closed in
after Mrs. Sparsit and her prize; and the whole body made a disorderly
irruption into Mr. Bounderby’s dining-room, where the people behind lost
not a moment’s time in mounting on the chairs, to get the better of the
people in front.

‘Fetch Mr. Bounderby down!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘Rachael, young woman;
you know who this is?’

‘It’s Mrs. Pegler,’ said Rachael.

‘I should think it is!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit, exulting.  ‘Fetch Mr.
Bounderby.  Stand away, everybody!’  Here old Mrs. Pegler, muffling
herself up, and shrinking from observation, whispered a word of entreaty.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, aloud.  ‘I have told you twenty
times, coming along, that I will _not_ leave you till I have handed you
over to him myself.’

Mr. Bounderby now appeared, accompanied by Mr. Gradgrind and the whelp,
with whom he had been holding conference up-stairs.  Mr. Bounderby looked
more astonished than hospitable, at sight of this uninvited party in his
dining-room.

‘Why, what’s the matter now!’ said he.  ‘Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am?’

‘Sir,’ explained that worthy woman, ‘I trust it is my good fortune to
produce a person you have much desired to find.  Stimulated by my wish to
relieve your mind, sir, and connecting together such imperfect clues to
the part of the country in which that person might be supposed to reside,
as have been afforded by the young woman, Rachael, fortunately now
present to identify, I have had the happiness to succeed, and to bring
that person with me—I need not say most unwillingly on her part.  It has
not been, sir, without some trouble that I have effected this; but
trouble in your service is to me a pleasure, and hunger, thirst, and cold
a real gratification.’

Here Mrs. Sparsit ceased; for Mr. Bounderby’s visage exhibited an
extraordinary combination of all possible colours and expressions of
discomfiture, as old Mrs. Pegler was disclosed to his view.

‘Why, what do you mean by this?’ was his highly unexpected demand, in
great warmth.  ‘I ask you, what do you mean by this, Mrs. Sparsit,
ma’am?’

‘Sir!’ exclaimed Mrs. Sparsit, faintly.

‘Why don’t you mind your own business, ma’am?’ roared Bounderby.  ‘How
dare you go and poke your officious nose into my family affairs?’

This allusion to her favourite feature overpowered Mrs. Sparsit.  She sat
down stiffly in a chair, as if she were frozen; and with a fixed stare at
Mr. Bounderby, slowly grated her mittens against one another, as if they
were frozen too.

‘My dear Josiah!’ cried Mrs. Pegler, trembling.  ‘My darling boy!  I am
not to blame.  It’s not my fault, Josiah.  I told this lady over and over
again, that I knew she was doing what would not be agreeable to you, but
she would do it.’

‘What did you let her bring you for?  Couldn’t you knock her cap off, or
her tooth out, or scratch her, or do something or other to her?’ asked
Bounderby.

‘My own boy!  She threatened me that if I resisted her, I should be
brought by constables, and it was better to come quietly than make that
stir in such a’—Mrs. Pegler glanced timidly but proudly round the
walls—‘such a fine house as this.  Indeed, indeed, it is not my fault!
My dear, noble, stately boy!  I have always lived quiet, and secret,
Josiah, my dear.  I have never broken the condition once.  I have never
said I was your mother.  I have admired you at a distance; and if I have
come to town sometimes, with long times between, to take a proud peep at
you, I have done it unbeknown, my love, and gone away again.’

Mr. Bounderby, with his hands in his pockets, walked in impatient
mortification up and down at the side of the long dining-table, while the
spectators greedily took in every syllable of Mrs. Pegler’s appeal, and
at each succeeding syllable became more and more round-eyed.  Mr.
Bounderby still walking up and down when Mrs. Pegler had done, Mr.
Gradgrind addressed that maligned old lady:

‘I am surprised, madam,’ he observed with severity, ‘that in your old age
you have the face to claim Mr. Bounderby for your son, after your
unnatural and inhuman treatment of him.’

‘_Me_ unnatural!’ cried poor old Mrs. Pegler.  ‘_Me_ inhuman!  To my dear
boy?’

‘Dear!’ repeated Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Yes; dear in his self-made prosperity,
madam, I dare say.  Not very dear, however, when you deserted him in his
infancy, and left him to the brutality of a drunken grandmother.’

‘_I_ deserted my Josiah!’ cried Mrs. Pegler, clasping her hands.  ‘Now,
Lord forgive you, sir, for your wicked imaginations, and for your scandal
against the memory of my poor mother, who died in my arms before Josiah
was born.  May you repent of it, sir, and live to know better!’

She was so very earnest and injured, that Mr. Gradgrind, shocked by the
possibility which dawned upon him, said in a gentler tone:

‘Do you deny, then, madam, that you left your son to—to be brought up in
the gutter?’

‘Josiah in the gutter!’ exclaimed Mrs. Pegler.  ‘No such a thing, sir.
Never!  For shame on you!  My dear boy knows, and will give _you_ to
know, that though he come of humble parents, he come of parents that
loved him as dear as the best could, and never thought it hardship on
themselves to pinch a bit that he might write and cipher beautiful, and
I’ve his books at home to show it!  Aye, have I!’ said Mrs. Pegler, with
indignant pride.  ‘And my dear boy knows, and will give _you_ to know,
sir, that after his beloved father died, when he was eight years old, his
mother, too, could pinch a bit, as it was her duty and her pleasure and
her pride to do it, to help him out in life, and put him ’prentice.  And
a steady lad he was, and a kind master he had to lend him a hand, and
well he worked his own way forward to be rich and thriving.  And _I_’ll
give you to know, sir—for this my dear boy won’t—that though his mother
kept but a little village shop, he never forgot her, but pensioned me on
thirty pound a year—more than I want, for I put by out of it—only making
the condition that I was to keep down in my own part, and make no boasts
about him, and not trouble him.  And I never have, except with looking at
him once a year, when he has never knowed it.  And it’s right,’ said poor
old Mrs. Pegler, in affectionate championship, ‘that I _should_ keep down
in my own part, and I have no doubts that if I was here I should do a
many unbefitting things, and I am well contented, and I can keep my pride
in my Josiah to myself, and I can love for love’s own sake!  And I am
ashamed of you, sir,’ said Mrs. Pegler, lastly, ‘for your slanders and
suspicions.  And I never stood here before, nor never wanted to stand
here when my dear son said no.  And I shouldn’t be here now, if it hadn’t
been for being brought here.  And for shame upon you, Oh, for shame, to
accuse me of being a bad mother to my son, with my son standing here to
tell you so different!’

The bystanders, on and off the dining-room chairs, raised a murmur of
sympathy with Mrs. Pegler, and Mr. Gradgrind felt himself innocently
placed in a very distressing predicament, when Mr. Bounderby, who had
never ceased walking up and down, and had every moment swelled larger and
larger, and grown redder and redder, stopped short.

‘I don’t exactly know,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘how I come to be favoured
with the attendance of the present company, but I don’t inquire.  When
they’re quite satisfied, perhaps they’ll be so good as to disperse;
whether they’re satisfied or not, perhaps they’ll be so good as to
disperse.  I’m not bound to deliver a lecture on my family affairs, I
have not undertaken to do it, and I’m not a going to do it.  Therefore
those who expect any explanation whatever upon that branch of the
subject, will be disappointed—particularly Tom Gradgrind, and he can’t
know it too soon.  In reference to the Bank robbery, there has been a
mistake made, concerning my mother.  If there hadn’t been
over-officiousness it wouldn’t have been made, and I hate
over-officiousness at all times, whether or no. Good evening!’

Although Mr. Bounderby carried it off in these terms, holding the door
open for the company to depart, there was a blustering sheepishness upon
him, at once extremely crestfallen and superlatively absurd.  Detected as
the Bully of humility, who had built his windy reputation upon lies, and
in his boastfulness had put the honest truth as far away from him as if
he had advanced the mean claim (there is no meaner) to tack himself on to
a pedigree, he cut a most ridiculous figure.  With the people filing off
at the door he held, who he knew would carry what had passed to the whole
town, to be given to the four winds, he could not have looked a Bully
more shorn and forlorn, if he had had his ears cropped.  Even that
unlucky female, Mrs. Sparsit, fallen from her pinnacle of exultation into
the Slough of Despond, was not in so bad a plight as that remarkable man
and self-made Humbug, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.

Rachael and Sissy, leaving Mrs. Pegler to occupy a bed at her son’s for
that night, walked together to the gate of Stone Lodge and there parted.
Mr. Gradgrind joined them before they had gone very far, and spoke with
much interest of Stephen Blackpool; for whom he thought this signal
failure of the suspicions against Mrs. Pegler was likely to work well.

As to the whelp; throughout this scene as on all other late occasions, he
had stuck close to Bounderby.  He seemed to feel that as long as
Bounderby could make no discovery without his knowledge, he was so far
safe.  He never visited his sister, and had only seen her once since she
went home: that is to say on the night when he still stuck close to
Bounderby, as already related.

There was one dim unformed fear lingering about his sister’s mind, to
which she never gave utterance, which surrounded the graceless and
ungrateful boy with a dreadful mystery.  The same dark possibility had
presented itself in the same shapeless guise, this very day, to Sissy,
when Rachael spoke of some one who would be confounded by Stephen’s
return, having put him out of the way.  Louisa had never spoken of
harbouring any suspicion of her brother in connexion with the robbery,
she and Sissy had held no confidence on the subject, save in that one
interchange of looks when the unconscious father rested his gray head on
his hand; but it was understood between them, and they both knew it.
This other fear was so awful, that it hovered about each of them like a
ghostly shadow; neither daring to think of its being near herself, far
less of its being near the other.

And still the forced spirit which the whelp had plucked up, throve with
him.  If Stephen Blackpool was not the thief, let him show himself.  Why
didn’t he?

Another night.  Another day and night.  No Stephen Blackpool.  Where was
the man, and why did he not come back?



CHAPTER VI
THE STARLIGHT


THE Sunday was a bright Sunday in autumn, clear and cool, when early in
the morning Sissy and Rachael met, to walk in the country.

As Coketown cast ashes not only on its own head but on the
neighbourhood’s too—after the manner of those pious persons who do
penance for their own sins by putting other people into sackcloth—it was
customary for those who now and then thirsted for a draught of pure air,
which is not absolutely the most wicked among the vanities of life, to
get a few miles away by the railroad, and then begin their walk, or their
lounge in the fields.  Sissy and Rachael helped themselves out of the
smoke by the usual means, and were put down at a station about midway
between the town and Mr. Bounderby’s retreat.

Though the green landscape was blotted here and there with heaps of coal,
it was green elsewhere, and there were trees to see, and there were larks
singing (though it was Sunday), and there were pleasant scents in the
air, and all was over-arched by a bright blue sky.  In the distance one
way, Coketown showed as a black mist; in another distance hills began to
rise; in a third, there was a faint change in the light of the horizon
where it shone upon the far-off sea.  Under their feet, the grass was
fresh; beautiful shadows of branches flickered upon it, and speckled it;
hedgerows were luxuriant; everything was at peace.  Engines at pits’
mouths, and lean old horses that had worn the circle of their daily
labour into the ground, were alike quiet; wheels had ceased for a short
space to turn; and the great wheel of earth seemed to revolve without the
shocks and noises of another time.

They walked on across the fields and down the shady lanes, sometimes
getting over a fragment of a fence so rotten that it dropped at a touch
of the foot, sometimes passing near a wreck of bricks and beams overgrown
with grass, marking the site of deserted works.  They followed paths and
tracks, however slight.  Mounds where the grass was rank and high, and
where brambles, dock-weed, and such-like vegetation, were confusedly
heaped together, they always avoided; for dismal stories were told in
that country of the old pits hidden beneath such indications.

The sun was high when they sat down to rest.  They had seen no one, near
or distant, for a long time; and the solitude remained unbroken.  ‘It is
so still here, Rachael, and the way is so untrodden, that I think we must
be the first who have been here all the summer.’

As Sissy said it, her eyes were attracted by another of those rotten
fragments of fence upon the ground.  She got up to look at it.  ‘And yet
I don’t know.  This has not been broken very long.  The wood is quite
fresh where it gave way.  Here are footsteps too.—O Rachael!’

She ran back, and caught her round the neck.  Rachael had already started
up.

‘What is the matter?’

‘I don’t know.  There is a hat lying in the grass.’  They went forward
together.  Rachael took it up, shaking from head to foot.  She broke into
a passion of tears and lamentations: Stephen Blackpool was written in his
own hand on the inside.

‘O the poor lad, the poor lad!  He has been made away with.  He is lying
murdered here!’

‘Is there—has the hat any blood upon it?’ Sissy faltered.

They were afraid to look; but they did examine it, and found no mark of
violence, inside or out.  It had been lying there some days, for rain and
dew had stained it, and the mark of its shape was on the grass where it
had fallen.  They looked fearfully about them, without moving, but could
see nothing more.  ‘Rachael,’ Sissy whispered, ‘I will go on a little by
myself.’

She had unclasped her hand, and was in the act of stepping forward, when
Rachael caught her in both arms with a scream that resounded over the
wide landscape.  Before them, at their very feet, was the brink of a
black ragged chasm hidden by the thick grass.  They sprang back, and fell
upon their knees, each hiding her face upon the other’s neck.

‘O, my good Lord!  He’s down there!  Down there!’  At first this, and her
terrific screams, were all that could be got from Rachael, by any tears,
by any prayers, by any representations, by any means.  It was impossible
to hush her; and it was deadly necessary to hold her, or she would have
flung herself down the shaft.

‘Rachael, dear Rachael, good Rachael, for the love of Heaven, not these
dreadful cries!  Think of Stephen, think of Stephen, think of Stephen!’

By an earnest repetition of this entreaty, poured out in all the agony of
such a moment, Sissy at last brought her to be silent, and to look at her
with a tearless face of stone.

‘Rachael, Stephen may be living.  You wouldn’t leave him lying maimed at
the bottom of this dreadful place, a moment, if you could bring help to
him?’

‘No, no, no!’

‘Don’t stir from here, for his sake!  Let me go and listen.’

She shuddered to approach the pit; but she crept towards it on her hands
and knees, and called to him as loud as she could call.  She listened,
but no sound replied.  She called again and listened; still no answering
sound.  She did this, twenty, thirty times.  She took a little clod of
earth from the broken ground where he had stumbled, and threw it in.  She
could not hear it fall.

The wide prospect, so beautiful in its stillness but a few minutes ago,
almost carried despair to her brave heart, as she rose and looked all
round her, seeing no help.  ‘Rachael, we must lose not a moment.  We must
go in different directions, seeking aid.  You shall go by the way we have
come, and I will go forward by the path.  Tell any one you see, and every
one what has happened.  Think of Stephen, think of Stephen!’

She knew by Rachael’s face that she might trust her now.  And after
standing for a moment to see her running, wringing her hands as she ran,
she turned and went upon her own search; she stopped at the hedge to tie
her shawl there as a guide to the place, then threw her bonnet aside, and
ran as she had never run before.

Run, Sissy, run, in Heaven’s name!  Don’t stop for breath.  Run, run!
Quickening herself by carrying such entreaties in her thoughts, she ran
from field to field, and lane to lane, and place to place, as she had
never run before; until she came to a shed by an engine-house, where two
men lay in the shade, asleep on straw.

First to wake them, and next to tell them, all so wild and breathless as
she was, what had brought her there, were difficulties; but they no
sooner understood her than their spirits were on fire like hers.  One of
the men was in a drunken slumber, but on his comrade’s shouting to him
that a man had fallen down the Old Hell Shaft, he started out to a pool
of dirty water, put his head in it, and came back sober.

With these two men she ran to another half-a-mile further, and with that
one to another, while they ran elsewhere.  Then a horse was found; and
she got another man to ride for life or death to the railroad, and send a
message to Louisa, which she wrote and gave him.  By this time a whole
village was up: and windlasses, ropes, poles, candles, lanterns, all
things necessary, were fast collecting and being brought into one place,
to be carried to the Old Hell Shaft.

It seemed now hours and hours since she had left the lost man lying in
the grave where he had been buried alive.  She could not bear to remain
away from it any longer—it was like deserting him—and she hurried swiftly
back, accompanied by half-a-dozen labourers, including the drunken man
whom the news had sobered, and who was the best man of all.  When they
came to the Old Hell Shaft, they found it as lonely as she had left it.
The men called and listened as she had done, and examined the edge of the
chasm, and settled how it had happened, and then sat down to wait until
the implements they wanted should come up.

Every sound of insects in the air, every stirring of the leaves, every
whisper among these men, made Sissy tremble, for she thought it was a cry
at the bottom of the pit.  But the wind blew idly over it, and no sound
arose to the surface, and they sat upon the grass, waiting and waiting.
After they had waited some time, straggling people who had heard of the
accident began to come up; then the real help of implements began to
arrive.  In the midst of this, Rachael returned; and with her party there
was a surgeon, who brought some wine and medicines.  But, the expectation
among the people that the man would be found alive was very slight
indeed.

There being now people enough present to impede the work, the sobered man
put himself at the head of the rest, or was put there by the general
consent, and made a large ring round the Old Hell Shaft, and appointed
men to keep it.  Besides such volunteers as were accepted to work, only
Sissy and Rachael were at first permitted within this ring; but, later in
the day, when the message brought an express from Coketown, Mr. Gradgrind
and Louisa, and Mr. Bounderby, and the whelp, were also there.

The sun was four hours lower than when Sissy and Rachael had first sat
down upon the grass, before a means of enabling two men to descend
securely was rigged with poles and ropes.  Difficulties had arisen in the
construction of this machine, simple as it was; requisites had been found
wanting, and messages had had to go and return.  It was five o’clock in
the afternoon of the bright autumnal Sunday, before a candle was sent
down to try the air, while three or four rough faces stood crowded close
together, attentively watching it: the man at the windlass lowering as
they were told.  The candle was brought up again, feebly burning, and
then some water was cast in.  Then the bucket was hooked on; and the
sobered man and another got in with lights, giving the word ‘Lower away!’

As the rope went out, tight and strained, and the windlass creaked, there
was not a breath among the one or two hundred men and women looking on,
that came as it was wont to come.  The signal was given and the windlass
stopped, with abundant rope to spare.  Apparently so long an interval
ensued with the men at the windlass standing idle, that some women
shrieked that another accident had happened!  But the surgeon who held
the watch, declared five minutes not to have elapsed yet, and sternly
admonished them to keep silence.  He had not well done speaking, when the
windlass was reversed and worked again.  Practised eyes knew that it did
not go as heavily as it would if both workmen had been coming up, and
that only one was returning.

The rope came in tight and strained; and ring after ring was coiled upon
the barrel of the windlass, and all eyes were fastened on the pit.  The
sobered man was brought up and leaped out briskly on the grass.  There
was an universal cry of ‘Alive or dead?’ and then a deep, profound hush.

When he said ‘Alive!’ a great shout arose and many eyes had tears in
them.

‘But he’s hurt very bad,’ he added, as soon as he could make himself
heard again.  ‘Where’s doctor?  He’s hurt so very bad, sir, that we donno
how to get him up.’

They all consulted together, and looked anxiously at the surgeon, as he
asked some questions, and shook his head on receiving the replies.  The
sun was setting now; and the red light in the evening sky touched every
face there, and caused it to be distinctly seen in all its rapt suspense.

The consultation ended in the men returning to the windlass, and the
pitman going down again, carrying the wine and some other small matters
with him.  Then the other man came up.  In the meantime, under the
surgeon’s directions, some men brought a hurdle, on which others made a
thick bed of spare clothes covered with loose straw, while he himself
contrived some bandages and slings from shawls and handkerchiefs.  As
these were made, they were hung upon an arm of the pitman who had last
come up, with instructions how to use them: and as he stood, shown by the
light he carried, leaning his powerful loose hand upon one of the poles,
and sometimes glancing down the pit, and sometimes glancing round upon
the people, he was not the least conspicuous figure in the scene.  It was
dark now, and torches were kindled.

It appeared from the little this man said to those about him, which was
quickly repeated all over the circle, that the lost man had fallen upon a
mass of crumbled rubbish with which the pit was half choked up, and that
his fall had been further broken by some jagged earth at the side.  He
lay upon his back with one arm doubled under him, and according to his
own belief had hardly stirred since he fell, except that he had moved his
free hand to a side pocket, in which he remembered to have some bread and
meat (of which he had swallowed crumbs), and had likewise scooped up a
little water in it now and then.  He had come straight away from his
work, on being written to, and had walked the whole journey; and was on
his way to Mr. Bounderby’s country house after dark, when he fell.  He
was crossing that dangerous country at such a dangerous time, because he
was innocent of what was laid to his charge, and couldn’t rest from
coming the nearest way to deliver himself up.  The Old Hell Shaft, the
pitman said, with a curse upon it, was worthy of its bad name to the
last; for though Stephen could speak now, he believed it would soon be
found to have mangled the life out of him.

When all was ready, this man, still taking his last hurried charges from
his comrades and the surgeon after the windlass had begun to lower him,
disappeared into the pit.  The rope went out as before, the signal was
made as before, and the windlass stopped.  No man removed his hand from
it now.  Every one waited with his grasp set, and his body bent down to
the work, ready to reverse and wind in.  At length the signal was given,
and all the ring leaned forward.

For, now, the rope came in, tightened and strained to its utmost as it
appeared, and the men turned heavily, and the windlass complained.  It
was scarcely endurable to look at the rope, and think of its giving way.
But, ring after ring was coiled upon the barrel of the windlass safely,
and the connecting chains appeared, and finally the bucket with the two
men holding on at the sides—a sight to make the head swim, and oppress
the heart—and tenderly supporting between them, slung and tied within,
the figure of a poor, crushed, human creature.

A low murmur of pity went round the throng, and the women wept aloud, as
this form, almost without form, was moved very slowly from its iron
deliverance, and laid upon the bed of straw.  At first, none but the
surgeon went close to it.  He did what he could in its adjustment on the
couch, but the best that he could do was to cover it.  That gently done,
he called to him Rachael and Sissy.  And at that time the pale, worn,
patient face was seen looking up at the sky, with the broken right hand
lying bare on the outside of the covering garments, as if waiting to be
taken by another hand.

They gave him drink, moistened his face with water, and administered some
drops of cordial and wine.  Though he lay quite motionless looking up at
the sky, he smiled and said, ‘Rachael.’  She stooped down on the grass at
his side, and bent over him until her eyes were between his and the sky,
for he could not so much as turn them to look at her.

‘Rachael, my dear.’

She took his hand.  He smiled again and said, ‘Don’t let ’t go.’

‘Thou’rt in great pain, my own dear Stephen?’

‘I ha’ been, but not now.  I ha’ been—dreadful, and dree, and long, my
dear—but ’tis ower now.  Ah, Rachael, aw a muddle!  Fro’ first to last, a
muddle!’

The spectre of his old look seemed to pass as he said the word.

‘I ha’ fell into th’ pit, my dear, as have cost wi’in the knowledge o’
old fok now livin, hundreds and hundreds o’ men’s lives—fathers, sons,
brothers, dear to thousands an’ thousands, an’ keeping ’em fro’ want and
hunger.  I ha’ fell into a pit that ha’ been wi’ th’ Firedamp crueller
than battle.  I ha’ read on ’t in the public petition, as onny one may
read, fro’ the men that works in pits, in which they ha’ pray’n and
pray’n the lawmakers for Christ’s sake not to let their work be murder to
’em, but to spare ’em for th’ wives and children that they loves as well
as gentlefok loves theirs.  When it were in work, it killed wi’out need;
when ’tis let alone, it kills wi’out need.  See how we die an’ no need,
one way an’ another—in a muddle—every day!’

He faintly said it, without any anger against any one.  Merely as the
truth.

‘Thy little sister, Rachael, thou hast not forgot her.  Thou’rt not like
to forget her now, and me so nigh her.  Thou know’st—poor, patient,
suff’rin, dear—how thou didst work for her, seet’n all day long in her
little chair at thy winder, and how she died, young and misshapen, awlung
o’ sickly air as had’n no need to be, an’ awlung o’ working people’s
miserable homes.  A muddle!  Aw a muddle!’

Louisa approached him; but he could not see her, lying with his face
turned up to the night sky.

‘If aw th’ things that tooches us, my dear, was not so muddled, I
should’n ha’ had’n need to coom heer.  If we was not in a muddle among
ourseln, I should’n ha’ been, by my own fellow weavers and workin’
brothers, so mistook.  If Mr. Bounderby had ever know’d me right—if he’d
ever know’d me at aw—he would’n ha’ took’n offence wi’ me.  He would’n
ha’ suspect’n me.  But look up yonder, Rachael!  Look aboove!’

Following his eyes, she saw that he was gazing at a star.

      [Picture: Stephen Blackpool recovered from the Old Hell Shaft]

‘It ha’ shined upon me,’ he said reverently, ‘in my pain and trouble down
below.  It ha’ shined into my mind.  I ha’ look’n at ’t and thowt o’
thee, Rachael, till the muddle in my mind have cleared awa, above a bit,
I hope.  If soom ha’ been wantin’ in unnerstan’in me better, I, too, ha’
been wantin’ in unnerstan’in them better.  When I got thy letter, I
easily believen that what the yoong ledy sen and done to me, and what her
brother sen and done to me, was one, and that there were a wicked plot
betwixt ’em.  When I fell, I were in anger wi’ her, an’ hurryin on t’ be
as onjust t’ her as oothers was t’ me.  But in our judgments, like as in
our doins, we mun bear and forbear.  In my pain an’ trouble, lookin up
yonder,—wi’ it shinin on me—I ha’ seen more clear, and ha’ made it my
dyin prayer that aw th’ world may on’y coom toogether more, an’ get a
better unnerstan’in o’ one another, than when I were in ’t my own weak
seln.’

Louisa hearing what he said, bent over him on the opposite side to
Rachael, so that he could see her.

‘You ha’ heard?’ he said, after a few moments’ silence.  ‘I ha’ not
forgot you, ledy.’

‘Yes, Stephen, I have heard you.  And your prayer is mine.’

‘You ha’ a father.  Will yo tak’ a message to him?’

‘He is here,’ said Louisa, with dread.  ‘Shall I bring him to you?’

‘If yo please.’

Louisa returned with her father.  Standing hand-in-hand, they both looked
down upon the solemn countenance.

‘Sir, yo will clear me an’ mak my name good wi’ aw men.  This I leave to
yo.’

Mr. Gradgrind was troubled and asked how?

‘Sir,’ was the reply: ‘yor son will tell yo how.  Ask him.  I mak no
charges: I leave none ahint me: not a single word.  I ha’ seen an’ spok’n
wi’ yor son, one night.  I ask no more o’ yo than that yo clear me—an’ I
trust to yo to do ’t.’

The bearers being now ready to carry him away, and the surgeon being
anxious for his removal, those who had torches or lanterns, prepared to
go in front of the litter.  Before it was raised, and while they were
arranging how to go, he said to Rachael, looking upward at the star:

‘Often as I coom to myseln, and found it shinin’ on me down there in my
trouble, I thowt it were the star as guided to Our Saviour’s home.  I
awmust think it be the very star!’

They lifted him up, and he was overjoyed to find that they were about to
take him in the direction whither the star seemed to him to lead.

‘Rachael, beloved lass!  Don’t let go my hand.  We may walk toogether
t’night, my dear!’

‘I will hold thy hand, and keep beside thee, Stephen, all the way.’

‘Bless thee!  Will soombody be pleased to coover my face!’

They carried him very gently along the fields, and down the lanes, and
over the wide landscape; Rachael always holding the hand in hers.  Very
few whispers broke the mournful silence.  It was soon a funeral
procession.  The star had shown him where to find the God of the poor;
and through humility, and sorrow, and forgiveness, he had gone to his
Redeemer’s rest.



CHAPTER VII
WHELP-HUNTING


BEFORE the ring formed round the Old Hell Shaft was broken, one figure
had disappeared from within it.  Mr. Bounderby and his shadow had not
stood near Louisa, who held her father’s arm, but in a retired place by
themselves.  When Mr. Gradgrind was summoned to the couch, Sissy,
attentive to all that happened, slipped behind that wicked shadow—a sight
in the horror of his face, if there had been eyes there for any sight but
one—and whispered in his ear.  Without turning his head, he conferred
with her a few moments, and vanished.  Thus the whelp had gone out of the
circle before the people moved.

When the father reached home, he sent a message to Mr. Bounderby’s,
desiring his son to come to him directly.  The reply was, that Mr.
Bounderby having missed him in the crowd, and seeing nothing of him
since, had supposed him to be at Stone Lodge.

‘I believe, father,’ said Louisa, ‘he will not come back to town
to-night.’  Mr. Gradgrind turned away, and said no more.

In the morning, he went down to the Bank himself as soon as it was
opened, and seeing his son’s place empty (he had not the courage to look
in at first) went back along the street to meet Mr. Bounderby on his way
there.  To whom he said that, for reasons he would soon explain, but
entreated not then to be asked for, he had found it necessary to employ
his son at a distance for a little while.  Also, that he was charged with
the duty of vindicating Stephen Blackpool’s memory, and declaring the
thief.  Mr. Bounderby quite confounded, stood stock-still in the street
after his father-in-law had left him, swelling like an immense
soap-bubble, without its beauty.

Mr. Gradgrind went home, locked himself in his room, and kept it all that
day.  When Sissy and Louisa tapped at his door, he said, without opening
it, ‘Not now, my dears; in the evening.’  On their return in the evening,
he said, ‘I am not able yet—to-morrow.’  He ate nothing all day, and had
no candle after dark; and they heard him walking to and fro late at
night.

But, in the morning he appeared at breakfast at the usual hour, and took
his usual place at the table.  Aged and bent he looked, and quite bowed
down; and yet he looked a wiser man, and a better man, than in the days
when in this life he wanted nothing—but Facts.  Before he left the room,
he appointed a time for them to come to him; and so, with his gray head
drooping, went away.

‘Dear father,’ said Louisa, when they kept their appointment, ‘you have
three young children left.  They will be different, I will be different
yet, with Heaven’s help.’

She gave her hand to Sissy, as if she meant with her help too.

‘Your wretched brother,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Do you think he had
planned this robbery, when he went with you to the lodging?’

‘I fear so, father.  I know he had wanted money very much, and had spent
a great deal.’

‘The poor man being about to leave the town, it came into his evil brain
to cast suspicion on him?’

‘I think it must have flashed upon him while he sat there, father.  For I
asked him to go there with me.  The visit did not originate with him.’

‘He had some conversation with the poor man.  Did he take him aside?’

‘He took him out of the room.  I asked him afterwards, why he had done
so, and he made a plausible excuse; but since last night, father, and
when I remember the circumstances by its light, I am afraid I can imagine
too truly what passed between them.’

‘Let me know,’ said her father, ‘if your thoughts present your guilty
brother in the same dark view as mine.’

‘I fear, father,’ hesitated Louisa, ‘that he must have made some
representation to Stephen Blackpool—perhaps in my name, perhaps in his
own—which induced him to do in good faith and honesty, what he had never
done before, and to wait about the Bank those two or three nights before
he left the town.’

‘Too plain!’ returned the father.  ‘Too plain!’

He shaded his face, and remained silent for some moments.  Recovering
himself, he said:

‘And now, how is he to be found?  How is he to be saved from justice?  In
the few hours that I can possibly allow to elapse before I publish the
truth, how is he to be found by us, and only by us?  Ten thousand pounds
could not effect it.’

‘Sissy has effected it, father.’

He raised his eyes to where she stood, like a good fairy in his house,
and said in a tone of softened gratitude and grateful kindness, ‘It is
always you, my child!’

‘We had our fears,’ Sissy explained, glancing at Louisa, ‘before
yesterday; and when I saw you brought to the side of the litter last
night, and heard what passed (being close to Rachael all the time), I
went to him when no one saw, and said to him, “Don’t look at me.  See
where your father is.  Escape at once, for his sake and your own!”  He
was in a tremble before I whispered to him, and he started and trembled
more then, and said, “Where can I go?  I have very little money, and I
don’t know who will hide me!”  I thought of father’s old circus.  I have
not forgotten where Mr. Sleary goes at this time of year, and I read of
him in a paper only the other day.  I told him to hurry there, and tell
his name, and ask Mr. Sleary to hide him till I came.  “I’ll get to him
before the morning,” he said.  And I saw him shrink away among the
people.’

‘Thank Heaven!’ exclaimed his father.  ‘He may be got abroad yet.’

It was the more hopeful as the town to which Sissy had directed him was
within three hours’ journey of Liverpool, whence he could be swiftly
dispatched to any part of the world.  But, caution being necessary in
communicating with him—for there was a greater danger every moment of his
being suspected now, and nobody could be sure at heart but that Mr.
Bounderby himself, in a bullying vein of public zeal, might play a Roman
part—it was consented that Sissy and Louisa should repair to the place in
question, by a circuitous course, alone; and that the unhappy father,
setting forth in an opposite direction, should get round to the same
bourne by another and wider route.  It was further agreed that he should
not present himself to Mr. Sleary, lest his intentions should be
mistrusted, or the intelligence of his arrival should cause his son to
take flight anew; but, that the communication should be left to Sissy and
Louisa to open; and that they should inform the cause of so much misery
and disgrace, of his father’s being at hand and of the purpose for which
they had come.  When these arrangements had been well considered and were
fully understood by all three, it was time to begin to carry them into
execution.  Early in the afternoon, Mr. Gradgrind walked direct from his
own house into the country, to be taken up on the line by which he was to
travel; and at night the remaining two set forth upon their different
course, encouraged by not seeing any face they knew.

The two travelled all night, except when they were left, for odd numbers
of minutes, at branch-places, up illimitable flights of steps, or down
wells—which was the only variety of those branches—and, early in the
morning, were turned out on a swamp, a mile or two from the town they
sought.  From this dismal spot they were rescued by a savage old
postilion, who happened to be up early, kicking a horse in a fly: and so
were smuggled into the town by all the back lanes where the pigs lived:
which, although not a magnificent or even savoury approach, was, as is
usual in such cases, the legitimate highway.

The first thing they saw on entering the town was the skeleton of
Sleary’s Circus.  The company had departed for another town more than
twenty miles off, and had opened there last night.  The connection
between the two places was by a hilly turnpike-road, and the travelling
on that road was very slow.  Though they took but a hasty breakfast, and
no rest (which it would have been in vain to seek under such anxious
circumstances), it was noon before they began to find the bills of
Sleary’s Horse-riding on barns and walls, and one o’clock when they
stopped in the market-place.

A Grand Morning Performance by the Riders, commencing at that very hour,
was in course of announcement by the bellman as they set their feet upon
the stones of the street.  Sissy recommended that, to avoid making
inquiries and attracting attention in the town, they should present
themselves to pay at the door.  If Mr. Sleary were taking the money, he
would be sure to know her, and would proceed with discretion.  If he were
not, he would be sure to see them inside; and, knowing what he had done
with the fugitive, would proceed with discretion still.

Therefore, they repaired, with fluttering hearts, to the well-remembered
booth.  The flag with the inscription SLEARY’S HORSE-RIDING was there;
and the Gothic niche was there; but Mr. Sleary was not there.  Master
Kidderminster, grown too maturely turfy to be received by the wildest
credulity as Cupid any more, had yielded to the invincible force of
circumstances (and his beard), and, in the capacity of a man who made
himself generally useful, presided on this occasion over the
exchequer—having also a drum in reserve, on which to expend his leisure
moments and superfluous forces.  In the extreme sharpness of his look out
for base coin, Mr. Kidderminster, as at present situated, never saw
anything but money; so Sissy passed him unrecognised, and they went in.

The Emperor of Japan, on a steady old white horse stencilled with black
spots, was twirling five wash-hand basins at once, as it is the favourite
recreation of that monarch to do.  Sissy, though well acquainted with his
Royal line, had no personal knowledge of the present Emperor, and his
reign was peaceful.  Miss Josephine Sleary, in her celebrated graceful
Equestrian Tyrolean Flower Act, was then announced by a new clown (who
humorously said Cauliflower Act), and Mr. Sleary appeared, leading her
in.

Mr. Sleary had only made one cut at the Clown with his long whip-lash,
and the Clown had only said, ‘If you do it again, I’ll throw the horse at
you!’ when Sissy was recognised both by father and daughter.  But they
got through the Act with great self-possession; and Mr. Sleary, saving
for the first instant, conveyed no more expression into his locomotive
eye than into his fixed one.  The performance seemed a little long to
Sissy and Louisa, particularly when it stopped to afford the Clown an
opportunity of telling Mr. Sleary (who said ‘Indeed, sir!’ to all his
observations in the calmest way, and with his eye on the house) about two
legs sitting on three legs looking at one leg, when in came four legs,
and laid hold of one leg, and up got two legs, caught hold of three legs,
and threw ’em at four legs, who ran away with one leg.  For, although an
ingenious Allegory relating to a butcher, a three-legged stool, a dog,
and a leg of mutton, this narrative consumed time; and they were in great
suspense.  At last, however, little fair-haired Josephine made her
curtsey amid great applause; and the Clown, left alone in the ring, had
just warmed himself, and said, ‘Now _I_’ll have a turn!’ when Sissy was
touched on the shoulder, and beckoned out.

She took Louisa with her; and they were received by Mr. Sleary in a very
little private apartment, with canvas sides, a grass floor, and a wooden
ceiling all aslant, on which the box company stamped their approbation,
as if they were coming through.  ‘Thethilia,’ said Mr. Sleary, who had
brandy and water at hand, ‘it doth me good to thee you.  You wath alwayth
a favourite with uth, and you’ve done uth credith thinth the old timeth
I’m thure.  You mutht thee our people, my dear, afore we thpeak of
bithnith, or they’ll break their hearth—ethpethially the women.  Here’th
Jothphine hath been and got married to E. W. B. Childerth, and thee hath
got a boy, and though he’th only three yearth old, he thtickth on to any
pony you can bring againtht him.  He’th named The Little Wonder of
Thcolathtic Equitation; and if you don’t hear of that boy at Athley’th,
you’ll hear of him at Parith.  And you recollect Kidderminthter, that
wath thought to be rather thweet upon yourthelf?  Well.  He’th married
too.  Married a widder.  Old enough to be hith mother.  Thee wath
Tightrope, thee wath, and now thee’th nothing—on accounth of fat.
They’ve got two children, tho we’re thtrong in the Fairy bithnith and the
Nurthery dodge.  If you wath to thee our Children in the Wood, with their
father and mother both a dyin’ on a horthe—their uncle a retheiving of
’em ath hith wardth, upon a horthe—themthelvth both a goin’ a
black-berryin’ on a horthe—and the Robinth a coming in to cover ’em with
leavth, upon a horthe—you’d thay it wath the completetht thing ath ever
you thet your eyeth on!  And you remember Emma Gordon, my dear, ath wath
a’motht a mother to you?  Of courthe you do; I needn’t athk.  Well!
Emma, thee lotht her huthband.  He wath throw’d a heavy back-fall off a
Elephant in a thort of a Pagoda thing ath the Thultan of the Indieth, and
he never got the better of it; and thee married a thecond time—married a
Cheethemonger ath fell in love with her from the front—and he’th a
Overtheer and makin’ a fortun.’

These various changes, Mr. Sleary, very short of breath now, related with
great heartiness, and with a wonderful kind of innocence, considering
what a bleary and brandy-and-watery old veteran he was.  Afterwards he
brought in Josephine, and E. W. B. Childers (rather deeply lined in the
jaws by daylight), and the Little Wonder of Scholastic Equitation, and in
a word, all the company.  Amazing creatures they were in Louisa’s eyes,
so white and pink of complexion, so scant of dress, and so demonstrative
of leg; but it was very agreeable to see them crowding about Sissy, and
very natural in Sissy to be unable to refrain from tears.

‘There!  Now Thethilia hath kithd all the children, and hugged all the
women, and thaken handth all round with all the men, clear, every one of
you, and ring in the band for the thecond part!’

As soon as they were gone, he continued in a low tone.  ‘Now, Thethilia,
I don’t athk to know any thecreth, but I thuppothe I may conthider thith
to be Mith Thquire.’

‘This is his sister.  Yes.’

‘And t’other on’th daughter.  That’h what I mean.  Hope I thee you well,
mith.  And I hope the Thquire’th well?’

‘My father will be here soon,’ said Louisa, anxious to bring him to the
point.  ‘Is my brother safe?’

‘Thafe and thound!’ he replied.  ‘I want you jutht to take a peep at the
Ring, mith, through here.  Thethilia, you know the dodgeth; find a
thpy-hole for yourthelf.’

They each looked through a chink in the boards.

‘That’h Jack the Giant Killer—piethe of comic infant bithnith,’ said
Sleary.  ‘There’th a property-houthe, you thee, for Jack to hide in;
there’th my Clown with a thauthepan-lid and a thpit, for Jack’th
thervant; there’th little Jack himthelf in a thplendid thoot of armour;
there’th two comic black thervanth twithe ath big ath the houthe, to
thtand by it and to bring it in and clear it; and the Giant (a very
ecthpenthive bathket one), he an’t on yet.  Now, do you thee ’em all?’

‘Yes,’ they both said.

‘Look at ’em again,’ said Sleary, ‘look at ’em well.  You thee em all?
Very good.  Now, mith;’ he put a form for them to sit on; ‘I have my
opinionth, and the Thquire your father hath hith.  I don’t want to know
what your brother’th been up to; ith better for me not to know.  All I
thay ith, the Thquire hath thtood by Thethilia, and I’ll thtand by the
Thquire.  Your brother ith one them black thervanth.’

Louisa uttered an exclamation, partly of distress, partly of
satisfaction.

‘Ith a fact,’ said Sleary, ‘and even knowin’ it, you couldn’t put your
finger on him.  Let the Thquire come.  I thall keep your brother here
after the performanth.  I thant undreth him, nor yet wath hith paint off.
Let the Thquire come here after the performanth, or come here yourthelf
after the performanth, and you thall find your brother, and have the
whole plathe to talk to him in.  Never mind the lookth of him, ath long
ath he’th well hid.’

Louisa, with many thanks and with a lightened load, detained Mr. Sleary
no longer then.  She left her love for her brother, with her eyes full of
tears; and she and Sissy went away until later in the afternoon.

Mr. Gradgrind arrived within an hour afterwards.  He too had encountered
no one whom he knew; and was now sanguine with Sleary’s assistance, of
getting his disgraced son to Liverpool in the night.  As neither of the
three could be his companion without almost identifying him under any
disguise, he prepared a letter to a correspondent whom he could trust,
beseeching him to ship the bearer off at any cost, to North or South
America, or any distant part of the world to which he could be the most
speedily and privately dispatched.

This done, they walked about, waiting for the Circus to be quite vacated;
not only by the audience, but by the company and by the horses.  After
watching it a long time, they saw Mr. Sleary bring out a chair and sit
down by the side-door, smoking; as if that were his signal that they
might approach.

‘Your thervant, Thquire,’ was his cautious salutation as they passed in.
‘If you want me you’ll find me here.  You muthn’t mind your thon having a
comic livery on.’

They all three went in; and Mr. Gradgrind sat down forlorn, on the
Clown’s performing chair in the middle of the ring.  On one of the back
benches, remote in the subdued light and the strangeness of the place,
sat the villainous whelp, sulky to the last, whom he had the misery to
call his son.

In a preposterous coat, like a beadle’s, with cuffs and flaps exaggerated
to an unspeakable extent; in an immense waistcoat, knee-breeches, buckled
shoes, and a mad cocked hat; with nothing fitting him, and everything of
coarse material, moth-eaten and full of holes; with seams in his black
face, where fear and heat had started through the greasy composition
daubed all over it; anything so grimly, detestably, ridiculously shameful
as the whelp in his comic livery, Mr. Gradgrind never could by any other
means have believed in, weighable and measurable fact though it was.  And
one of his model children had come to this!

At first the whelp would not draw any nearer, but persisted in remaining
up there by himself.  Yielding at length, if any concession so sullenly
made can be called yielding, to the entreaties of Sissy—for Louisa he
disowned altogether—he came down, bench by bench, until he stood in the
sawdust, on the verge of the circle, as far as possible, within its
limits from where his father sat.

‘How was this done?’ asked the father.

‘How was what done?’ moodily answered the son.

‘This robbery,’ said the father, raising his voice upon the word.

‘I forced the safe myself over night, and shut it up ajar before I went
away.  I had had the key that was found, made long before.  I dropped it
that morning, that it might be supposed to have been used.  I didn’t take
the money all at once.  I pretended to put my balance away every night,
but I didn’t.  Now you know all about it.’

‘If a thunderbolt had fallen on me,’ said the father, ‘it would have
shocked me less than this!’

‘I don’t see why,’ grumbled the son.  ‘So many people are employed in
situations of trust; so many people, out of so many, will be dishonest.
I have heard you talk, a hundred times, of its being a law.  How can _I_
help laws?  You have comforted others with such things, father.  Comfort
yourself!’

The father buried his face in his hands, and the son stood in his
disgraceful grotesqueness, biting straw: his hands, with the black partly
worn away inside, looking like the hands of a monkey.  The evening was
fast closing in; and from time to time, he turned the whites of his eyes
restlessly and impatiently towards his father.  They were the only parts
of his face that showed any life or expression, the pigment upon it was
so thick.

‘You must be got to Liverpool, and sent abroad.’

‘I suppose I must.  I can’t be more miserable anywhere,’ whimpered the
whelp, ‘than I have been here, ever since I can remember.  That’s one
thing.’

Mr. Gradgrind went to the door, and returned with Sleary, to whom he
submitted the question, How to get this deplorable object away?

‘Why, I’ve been thinking of it, Thquire.  There’th not muth time to
lothe, tho you muth thay yeth or no.  Ith over twenty mileth to the rail.
There’th a coath in half an hour, that goeth _to_ the rail, ‘purpothe to
cath the mail train.  That train will take him right to Liverpool.’

‘But look at him,’ groaned Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Will any coach—’

‘I don’t mean that he thould go in the comic livery,’ said Sleary.  ‘Thay
the word, and I’ll make a Jothkin of him, out of the wardrobe, in five
minutes.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.

‘A Jothkin—a Carter.  Make up your mind quick, Thquire.  There’ll be beer
to feth.  I’ve never met with nothing but beer ath’ll ever clean a comic
blackamoor.’

Mr. Gradgrind rapidly assented; Mr. Sleary rapidly turned out from a box,
a smock frock, a felt hat, and other essentials; the whelp rapidly
changed clothes behind a screen of baize; Mr. Sleary rapidly brought
beer, and washed him white again.

‘Now,’ said Sleary, ‘come along to the coath, and jump up behind; I’ll go
with you there, and they’ll thuppothe you one of my people.  Thay
farewell to your family, and tharp’th the word.’  With which he
delicately retired.

‘Here is your letter,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘All necessary means will be
provided for you.  Atone, by repentance and better conduct, for the
shocking action you have committed, and the dreadful consequences to
which it has led.  Give me your hand, my poor boy, and may God forgive
you as I do!’

The culprit was moved to a few abject tears by these words and their
pathetic tone.  But, when Louisa opened her arms, he repulsed her afresh.

‘Not you.  I don’t want to have anything to say to you!’

‘O Tom, Tom, do we end so, after all my love!’

‘After all your love!’ he returned, obdurately.  ‘Pretty love!  Leaving
old Bounderby to himself, and packing my best friend Mr. Harthouse off,
and going home just when I was in the greatest danger.  Pretty love that!
Coming out with every word about our having gone to that place, when you
saw the net was gathering round me.  Pretty love that!  You have
regularly given me up.  You never cared for me.’

‘Tharp’th the word!’ said Sleary, at the door.

They all confusedly went out: Louisa crying to him that she forgave him,
and loved him still, and that he would one day be sorry to have left her
so, and glad to think of these her last words, far away: when some one
ran against them.  Mr. Gradgrind and Sissy, who were both before him
while his sister yet clung to his shoulder, stopped and recoiled.

For, there was Bitzer, out of breath, his thin lips parted, his thin
nostrils distended, his white eyelashes quivering, his colourless face
more colourless than ever, as if he ran himself into a white heat, when
other people ran themselves into a glow.  There he stood, panting and
heaving, as if he had never stopped since the night, now long ago, when
he had run them down before.

‘I’m sorry to interfere with your plans,’ said Bitzer, shaking his head,
‘but I can’t allow myself to be done by horse-riders.  I must have young
Mr. Tom; he mustn’t be got away by horse-riders; here he is in a smock
frock, and I must have him!’

By the collar, too, it seemed.  For, so he took possession of him.



CHAPTER VIII
PHILOSOPHICAL


THEY went back into the booth, Sleary shutting the door to keep intruders
out.  Bitzer, still holding the paralysed culprit by the collar, stood in
the Ring, blinking at his old patron through the darkness of the
twilight.

‘Bitzer,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, broken down, and miserably submissive to
him, ‘have you a heart?’

‘The circulation, sir,’ returned Bitzer, smiling at the oddity of the
question, ‘couldn’t be carried on without one.  No man, sir, acquainted
with the facts established by Harvey relating to the circulation of the
blood, can doubt that I have a heart.’

‘Is it accessible,’ cried Mr. Gradgrind, ‘to any compassionate
influence?’

‘It is accessible to Reason, sir,’ returned the excellent young man.
‘And to nothing else.’

They stood looking at each other; Mr. Gradgrind’s face as white as the
pursuer’s.

‘What motive—even what motive in reason—can you have for preventing the
escape of this wretched youth,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘and crushing his
miserable father?  See his sister here.  Pity us!’

‘Sir,’ returned Bitzer, in a very business-like and logical manner,
‘since you ask me what motive I have in reason, for taking young Mr. Tom
back to Coketown, it is only reasonable to let you know.  I have
suspected young Mr. Tom of this bank-robbery from the first.  I had had
my eye upon him before that time, for I knew his ways.  I have kept my
observations to myself, but I have made them; and I have got ample proofs
against him now, besides his running away, and besides his own
confession, which I was just in time to overhear.  I had the pleasure of
watching your house yesterday morning, and following you here.  I am
going to take young Mr. Tom back to Coketown, in order to deliver him
over to Mr. Bounderby.  Sir, I have no doubt whatever that Mr. Bounderby
will then promote me to young Mr. Tom’s situation.  And I wish to have
his situation, sir, for it will be a rise to me, and will do me good.’

‘If this is solely a question of self-interest with you—’ Mr. Gradgrind
began.

‘I beg your pardon for interrupting you, sir,’ returned Bitzer; ‘but I am
sure you know that the whole social system is a question of
self-interest.  What you must always appeal to, is a person’s
self-interest.  It’s your only hold.  We are so constituted.  I was
brought up in that catechism when I was very young, sir, as you are
aware.’

‘What sum of money,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘will you set against your
expected promotion?’

‘Thank you, sir,’ returned Bitzer, ‘for hinting at the proposal; but I
will not set any sum against it.  Knowing that your clear head would
propose that alternative, I have gone over the calculations in my mind;
and I find that to compound a felony, even on very high terms indeed,
would not be as safe and good for me as my improved prospects in the
Bank.’

‘Bitzer,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, stretching out his hands as though he would
have said, See how miserable I am!  ‘Bitzer, I have but one chance left
to soften you.  You were many years at my school.  If, in remembrance of
the pains bestowed upon you there, you can persuade yourself in any
degree to disregard your present interest and release my son, I entreat
and pray you to give him the benefit of that remembrance.’

‘I really wonder, sir,’ rejoined the old pupil in an argumentative
manner, ‘to find you taking a position so untenable.  My schooling was
paid for; it was a bargain; and when I came away, the bargain ended.’

It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that
everything was to be paid for.  Nobody was ever on any account to give
anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase.  Gratitude was
to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be.  Every
inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a
bargain across a counter.  And if we didn’t get to Heaven that way, it
was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.

‘I don’t deny,’ added Bitzer, ‘that my schooling was cheap.  But that
comes right, sir.  I was made in the cheapest market, and have to dispose
of myself in the dearest.’

He was a little troubled here, by Louisa and Sissy crying.

‘Pray don’t do that,’ said he, ‘it’s of no use doing that: it only
worries.  You seem to think that I have some animosity against young Mr.
Tom; whereas I have none at all.  I am only going, on the reasonable
grounds I have mentioned, to take him back to Coketown.  If he was to
resist, I should set up the cry of Stop thief!  But, he won’t resist, you
may depend upon it.’

Mr. Sleary, who with his mouth open and his rolling eye as immovably
jammed in his head as his fixed one, had listened to these doctrines with
profound attention, here stepped forward.

‘Thquire, you know perfectly well, and your daughter knowth perfectly
well (better than you, becauthe I thed it to her), that I didn’t know
what your thon had done, and that I didn’t want to know—I thed it wath
better not, though I only thought, then, it wath thome thkylarking.
However, thith young man having made it known to be a robbery of a bank,
why, that’h a theriouth thing; muth too theriouth a thing for me to
compound, ath thith young man hath very properly called it.
Conthequently, Thquire, you muthn’t quarrel with me if I take thith young
man’th thide, and thay he’th right and there’th no help for it.  But I
tell you what I’ll do, Thquire; I’ll drive your thon and thith young man
over to the rail, and prevent expothure here.  I can’t conthent to do
more, but I’ll do that.’

Fresh lamentations from Louisa, and deeper affliction on Mr. Gradgrind’s
part, followed this desertion of them by their last friend.  But, Sissy
glanced at him with great attention; nor did she in her own breast
misunderstand him.  As they were all going out again, he favoured her
with one slight roll of his movable eye, desiring her to linger behind.
As he locked the door, he said excitedly:

‘The Thquire thtood by you, Thethilia, and I’ll thtand by the Thquire.
More than that: thith ith a prethiouth rathcal, and belongth to that
bluthtering Cove that my people nearly pitht out o’ winder.  It’ll be a
dark night; I’ve got a horthe that’ll do anything but thpeak; I’ve got a
pony that’ll go fifteen mile an hour with Childerth driving of him; I’ve
got a dog that’ll keep a man to one plathe four-and-twenty hourth.  Get a
word with the young Thquire.  Tell him, when he theeth our horthe begin
to danthe, not to be afraid of being thpilt, but to look out for a
pony-gig coming up.  Tell him, when he theeth that gig clothe by, to jump
down, and it’ll take him off at a rattling pathe.  If my dog leth thith
young man thtir a peg on foot, I give him leave to go.  And if my horthe
ever thtirth from that thpot where he beginth a danthing, till the
morning—I don’t know him?—Tharp’th the word!’

The word was so sharp, that in ten minutes Mr. Childers, sauntering about
the market-place in a pair of slippers, had his cue, and Mr. Sleary’s
equipage was ready.  It was a fine sight, to behold the learned dog
barking round it, and Mr. Sleary instructing him, with his one
practicable eye, that Bitzer was the object of his particular attentions.
Soon after dark they all three got in and started; the learned dog (a
formidable creature) already pinning Bitzer with his eye, and sticking
close to the wheel on his side, that he might be ready for him in the
event of his showing the slightest disposition to alight.

The other three sat up at the inn all night in great suspense.  At eight
o’clock in the morning Mr. Sleary and the dog reappeared: both in high
spirits.

‘All right, Thquire!’ said Mr. Sleary, ‘your thon may be aboard-a-thip by
thith time.  Childerth took him off, an hour and a half after we left
there latht night.  The horthe danthed the polka till he wath dead beat
(he would have walthed if he hadn’t been in harneth), and then I gave him
the word and he went to thleep comfortable.  When that prethiouth young
Rathcal thed he’d go for’ard afoot, the dog hung on to hith
neck-hankercher with all four legth in the air and pulled him down and
rolled him over.  Tho he come back into the drag, and there he that,
’till I turned the horthe’th head, at half-patht thixth thith morning.’

Mr. Gradgrind overwhelmed him with thanks, of course; and hinted as
delicately as he could, at a handsome remuneration in money.

‘I don’t want money mythelf, Thquire; but Childerth ith a family man, and
if you wath to like to offer him a five-pound note, it mightn’t be
unactheptable.  Likewithe if you wath to thtand a collar for the dog, or
a thet of bellth for the horthe, I thould be very glad to take ’em.
Brandy and water I alwayth take.’  He had already called for a glass, and
now called for another.  ‘If you wouldn’t think it going too far,
Thquire, to make a little thpread for the company at about three and
thixth ahead, not reckoning Luth, it would make ’em happy.’

All these little tokens of his gratitude, Mr. Gradgrind very willingly
undertook to render.  Though he thought them far too slight, he said, for
such a service.

‘Very well, Thquire; then, if you’ll only give a Horthe-riding, a
bethpeak, whenever you can, you’ll more than balanthe the account.  Now,
Thquire, if your daughter will ethcuthe me, I thould like one parting
word with you.’

Louisa and Sissy withdrew into an adjoining room; Mr. Sleary, stirring
and drinking his brandy and water as he stood, went on:

‘Thquire,—you don’t need to be told that dogth ith wonderful animalth.’

‘Their instinct,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘is surprising.’

‘Whatever you call it—and I’m bletht if _I_ know what to call it’—said
Sleary, ‘it ith athtonithing.  The way in whith a dog’ll find you—the
dithtanthe he’ll come!’

‘His scent,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘being so fine.’

‘I’m bletht if I know what to call it,’ repeated Sleary, shaking his
head, ‘but I have had dogth find me, Thquire, in a way that made me think
whether that dog hadn’t gone to another dog, and thed, “You don’t happen
to know a perthon of the name of Thleary, do you?  Perthon of the name of
Thleary, in the Horthe-Riding way—thtout man—game eye?”  And whether that
dog mightn’t have thed, “Well, I can’t thay I know him mythelf, but I
know a dog that I think would be likely to be acquainted with him.”  And
whether that dog mightn’t have thought it over, and thed, “Thleary,
Thleary!  O yeth, to be thure!  A friend of mine menthioned him to me at
one time.  I can get you hith addreth directly.”  In conthequenth of my
being afore the public, and going about tho muth, you thee, there mutht
be a number of dogth acquainted with me, Thquire, that _I_ don’t know!’

Mr. Gradgrind seemed to be quite confounded by this speculation.

‘Any way,’ said Sleary, after putting his lips to his brandy and water,
‘ith fourteen month ago, Thquire, thinthe we wath at Chethter.  We wath
getting up our Children in the Wood one morning, when there cometh into
our Ring, by the thtage door, a dog.  He had travelled a long way, he
wath in a very bad condithon, he wath lame, and pretty well blind.  He
went round to our children, one after another, as if he wath a theeking
for a child he know’d; and then he come to me, and throwd hithelf up
behind, and thtood on hith two forelegth, weak ath he wath, and then he
wagged hith tail and died.  Thquire, that dog wath Merrylegth.’

‘Sissy’s father’s dog!’

‘Thethilia’th father’th old dog.  Now, Thquire, I can take my oath, from
my knowledge of that dog, that that man wath dead—and buried—afore that
dog come back to me.  Joth’phine and Childerth and me talked it over a
long time, whether I thould write or not.  But we agreed, “No.  There’th
nothing comfortable to tell; why unthettle her mind, and make her
unhappy?”  Tho, whether her father bathely detherted her; or whether he
broke hith own heart alone, rather than pull her down along with him;
never will be known, now, Thquire, till—no, not till we know how the
dogth findth uth out!’

‘She keeps the bottle that he sent her for, to this hour; and she will
believe in his affection to the last moment of her life,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind.

‘It theemth to prethent two thingth to a perthon, don’t it, Thquire?’
said Mr. Sleary, musing as he looked down into the depths of his brandy
and water: ‘one, that there ith a love in the world, not all
Thelf-interetht after all, but thomething very different; t’other, that
it hath a way of ith own of calculating or not calculating, whith
thomehow or another ith at leatht ath hard to give a name to, ath the
wayth of the dogth ith!’

Mr. Gradgrind looked out of window, and made no reply.  Mr. Sleary
emptied his glass and recalled the ladies.

‘Thethilia my dear, kith me and good-bye!  Mith Thquire, to thee you
treating of her like a thithter, and a thithter that you trutht and
honour with all your heart and more, ith a very pretty thight to me.  I
hope your brother may live to be better detherving of you, and a greater
comfort to you.  Thquire, thake handth, firtht and latht!  Don’t be croth
with uth poor vagabondth.  People mutht be amuthed.  They can’t be
alwayth a learning, nor yet they can’t be alwayth a working, they an’t
made for it.  You _mutht_ have uth, Thquire.  Do the withe thing and the
kind thing too, and make the betht of uth; not the wurtht!’

‘And I never thought before,’ said Mr. Sleary, putting his head in at the
door again to say it, ‘that I wath tho muth of a Cackler!’



CHAPTER IX
FINAL


IT is a dangerous thing to see anything in the sphere of a vain
blusterer, before the vain blusterer sees it himself.  Mr. Bounderby felt
that Mrs. Sparsit had audaciously anticipated him, and presumed to be
wiser than he.  Inappeasably indignant with her for her triumphant
discovery of Mrs. Pegler, he turned this presumption, on the part of a
woman in her dependent position, over and over in his mind, until it
accumulated with turning like a great snowball.  At last he made the
discovery that to discharge this highly connected female—to have it in
his power to say, ‘She was a woman of family, and wanted to stick to me,
but I wouldn’t have it, and got rid of her’—would be to get the utmost
possible amount of crowning glory out of the connection, and at the same
time to punish Mrs. Sparsit according to her deserts.

Filled fuller than ever, with this great idea, Mr. Bounderby came in to
lunch, and sat himself down in the dining-room of former days, where his
portrait was.  Mrs. Sparsit sat by the fire, with her foot in her cotton
stirrup, little thinking whither she was posting.

Since the Pegler affair, this gentlewoman had covered her pity for Mr.
Bounderby with a veil of quiet melancholy and contrition.  In virtue
thereof, it had become her habit to assume a woful look, which woful look
she now bestowed upon her patron.

‘What’s the matter now, ma’am?’ said Mr. Bounderby, in a very short,
rough way.

‘Pray, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘do not bite my nose off.’

‘Bite your nose off, ma’am?’ repeated Mr. Bounderby.  ‘_Your_ nose!’
meaning, as Mrs. Sparsit conceived, that it was too developed a nose for
the purpose.  After which offensive implication, he cut himself a crust
of bread, and threw the knife down with a noise.

Mrs. Sparsit took her foot out of her stirrup, and said, ‘Mr. Bounderby,
sir!’

‘Well, ma’am?’ retorted Mr. Bounderby.  ‘What are you staring at?’

‘May I ask, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘have you been ruffled this
morning?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘May I inquire, sir,’ pursued the injured woman, ‘whether _I_ am the
unfortunate cause of your having lost your temper?’

‘Now, I’ll tell you what, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘I am not come here to
be bullied.  A female may be highly connected, but she can’t be permitted
to bother and badger a man in my position, and I am not going to put up
with it.’  (Mr. Bounderby felt it necessary to get on: foreseeing that if
he allowed of details, he would be beaten.)

Mrs. Sparsit first elevated, then knitted, her Coriolanian eyebrows;
gathered up her work into its proper basket; and rose.

‘Sir,’ said she, majestically.  ‘It is apparent to me that I am in your
way at present.  I will retire to my own apartment.’

‘Allow me to open the door, ma’am.’

‘Thank you, sir; I can do it for myself.’

‘You had better allow me, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, passing her, and
getting his hand upon the lock; ‘because I can take the opportunity of
saying a word to you, before you go.  Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am, I rather think
you are cramped here, do you know?  It appears to me, that, under my
humble roof, there’s hardly opening enough for a lady of your genius in
other people’s affairs.’

Mrs. Sparsit gave him a look of the darkest scorn, and said with great
politeness, ‘Really, sir?’

‘I have been thinking it over, you see, since the late affairs have
happened, ma’am,’ said Bounderby; ‘and it appears to my poor judgment—’

‘Oh!  Pray, sir,’ Mrs. Sparsit interposed, with sprightly cheerfulness,
‘don’t disparage your judgment.  Everybody knows how unerring Mr.
Bounderby’s judgment is.  Everybody has had proofs of it.  It must be the
theme of general conversation.  Disparage anything in yourself but your
judgment, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, laughing.

Mr. Bounderby, very red and uncomfortable, resumed:

‘It appears to me, ma’am, I say, that a different sort of establishment
altogether would bring out a lady of _your_ powers.  Such an
establishment as your relation, Lady Scadgers’s, now.  Don’t you think
you might find some affairs there, ma’am, to interfere with?’

‘It never occurred to me before, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit; ‘but now
you mention it, should think it highly probable.’

‘Then suppose you try, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, laying an envelope with a
cheque in it in her little basket.  ‘You can take your own time for
going, ma’am; but perhaps in the meanwhile, it will be more agreeable to
a lady of your powers of mind, to eat her meals by herself, and not to be
intruded upon.  I really ought to apologise to you—being only Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown—for having stood in your light so long.’

‘Pray don’t name it, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘If that portrait
could speak, sir—but it has the advantage over the original of not
possessing the power of committing itself and disgusting others,—it would
testify, that a long period has elapsed since I first habitually
addressed it as the picture of a Noodle.  Nothing that a Noodle does, can
awaken surprise or indignation; the proceedings of a Noodle can only
inspire contempt.’

Thus saying, Mrs. Sparsit, with her Roman features like a medal struck to
commemorate her scorn of Mr. Bounderby, surveyed him fixedly from head to
foot, swept disdainfully past him, and ascended the staircase.  Mr.
Bounderby closed the door, and stood before the fire; projecting himself
after his old explosive manner into his portrait—and into futurity.

                                * * * * *

Into how much of futurity?  He saw Mrs. Sparsit fighting out a daily
fight at the points of all the weapons in the female armoury, with the
grudging, smarting, peevish, tormenting Lady Scadgers, still laid up in
bed with her mysterious leg, and gobbling her insufficient income down by
about the middle of every quarter, in a mean little airless lodging, a
mere closet for one, a mere crib for two; but did he see more?  Did he
catch any glimpse of himself making a show of Bitzer to strangers, as the
rising young man, so devoted to his master’s great merits, who had won
young Tom’s place, and had almost captured young Tom himself, in the
times when by various rascals he was spirited away?  Did he see any faint
reflection of his own image making a vain-glorious will, whereby
five-and-twenty Humbugs, past five-and-fifty years of age, each taking
upon himself the name, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, should for ever dine
in Bounderby Hall, for ever lodge in Bounderby buildings, for ever attend
a Bounderby chapel, for ever go to sleep under a Bounderby chaplain, for
ever be supported out of a Bounderby estate, and for ever nauseate all
healthy stomachs, with a vast amount of Bounderby balderdash and bluster?
Had he any prescience of the day, five years to come, when Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown was to die of a fit in the Coketown street, and
this same precious will was to begin its long career of quibble, plunder,
false pretences, vile example, little service and much law?  Probably
not.  Yet the portrait was to see it all out.

Here was Mr. Gradgrind on the same day, and in the same hour, sitting
thoughtful in his own room.  How much of futurity did _he_ see?  Did he
see himself, a white-haired decrepit man, bending his hitherto inflexible
theories to appointed circumstances; making his facts and figures
subservient to Faith, Hope, and Charity; and no longer trying to grind
that Heavenly trio in his dusty little mills?  Did he catch sight of
himself, therefore much despised by his late political associates?  Did
he see them, in the era of its being quite settled that the national
dustmen have only to do with one another, and owe no duty to an
abstraction called a People, ‘taunting the honourable gentleman’ with
this and with that and with what not, five nights a-week, until the small
hours of the morning?  Probably he had that much foreknowledge, knowing
his men.

                                * * * * *

Here was Louisa on the night of the same day, watching the fire as in
days of yore, though with a gentler and a humbler face.  How much of the
future might arise before _her_ vision?  Broadsides in the streets,
signed with her father’s name, exonerating the late Stephen Blackpool,
weaver, from misplaced suspicion, and publishing the guilt of his own
son, with such extenuation as his years and temptation (he could not
bring himself to add, his education) might beseech; were of the Present.
So, Stephen Blackpool’s tombstone, with her father’s record of his death,
was almost of the Present, for she knew it was to be.  These things she
could plainly see.  But, how much of the Future?

A working woman, christened Rachael, after a long illness once again
appearing at the ringing of the Factory bell, and passing to and fro at
the set hours, among the Coketown Hands; a woman of pensive beauty,
always dressed in black, but sweet-tempered and serene, and even
cheerful; who, of all the people in the place, alone appeared to have
compassion on a degraded, drunken wretch of her own sex, who was
sometimes seen in the town secretly begging of her, and crying to her; a
woman working, ever working, but content to do it, and preferring to do
it as her natural lot, until she should be too old to labour any more?
Did Louisa see this?  Such a thing was to be.

A lonely brother, many thousands of miles away, writing, on paper blotted
with tears, that her words had too soon come true, and that all the
treasures in the world would be cheaply bartered for a sight of her dear
face?  At length this brother coming nearer home, with hope of seeing
her, and being delayed by illness; and then a letter, in a strange hand,
saying ‘he died in hospital, of fever, such a day, and died in penitence
and love of you: his last word being your name’?  Did Louisa see these
things?  Such things were to be.

Herself again a wife—a mother—lovingly watchful of her children, ever
careful that they should have a childhood of the mind no less than a
childhood of the body, as knowing it to be even a more beautiful thing,
and a possession, any hoarded scrap of which, is a blessing and happiness
to the wisest?  Did Louisa see this?  Such a thing was never to be.

But, happy Sissy’s happy children loving her; all children loving her;
she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty
fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler
fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality
with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of
infancy will wither up, the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally
stark death, and the plainest national prosperity figures can show, will
be the Writing on the Wall,—she holding this course as part of no
fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or pledge, or
covenant, or fancy dress, or fancy fair; but simply as a duty to be
done,—did Louisa see these things of herself?  These things were to be.

Dear reader!  It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of
action, similar things shall be or not.  Let them be!  We shall sit with
lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray and
cold.




FOOTNOTES


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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: Little Dorrit

Author: Charles Dickens

Posting Date: July 26, 2008 [EBook #963]
Release Date: July, 1997
Last Updated: September 25, 2016

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE DORRIT ***




Produced by Jo Churcher and David Widger





LITTLE DORRIT

By Charles Dickens



CONTENTS


     Preface to the 1857 Edition


     BOOK THE FIRST: POVERTY
     1.  Sun and Shadow
     2.  Fellow Travellers
     3.  Home
     4.  Mrs Flintwinch has a Dream
     5.  Family Affairs
     6.  The Father of the Marshalsea
     7.  The Child of the Marshalsea
     8.  The Lock
     9.  little Mother
     10.  Containing the whole Science of Government
     11.  Let Loose
     12.  Bleeding Heart Yard
     13.  Patriarchal
     14.  Little Dorrit’s Party
     15.  Mrs Flintwinch has another Dream
     16.  Nobody’s Weakness
     17.  Nobody’s Rival
     18.  Little Dorrit’s Lover
     19.  The Father of the Marshalsea in two or three Relations
     20.  Moving in Society
     21.  Mr Merdle’s Complaint
     22.  A Puzzle
     23.  Machinery in Motion
     24.  Fortune-Telling
     25.  Conspirators and Others
     26.  Nobody’s State of Mind
     27.  Five-and-Twenty
     28.  Nobody’s Disappearance
     29.  Mrs Flintwinch goes on Dreaming
     30.  The Word of a Gentleman
     31.  Spirit
     32.  More Fortune-Telling
     33.  Mrs Merdle’s Complaint
     34.  A Shoal of Barnacles
     35.  What was behind Mr Pancks on Little Dorrit’s Hand
     36.  The Marshalsea becomes an Orphan



     BOOK THE SECOND: RICHES

     1.  Fellow Travellers
     2.  Mrs General
     3.  On the Road
     4.  A Letter from Little Dorrit
     5.  Something Wrong Somewhere
     6.  Something Right Somewhere
     7.  Mostly, Prunes and Prism
     8.  The Dowager Mrs Gowan is reminded that ‘It Never Does’
     9.  Appearance and Disappearance
     10.  The Dreams of Mrs Flintwinch thicken
     11.  A Letter from Little Dorrit
     12.  In which a Great Patriotic Conference is holden
     13.  The Progress of an Epidemic
     14.  Taking Advice
     15.  No just Cause or Impediment why these Two Persons should
          not be joined together
     16.  Getting on
     17.  Missing
     18.  A Castle in the Air
     19.  The Storming of the Castle in the Air
     20.  Introduces the next
     21.  The History of a Self-Tormentor
     22.  Who Passes by this Road so late?
     23.  Mistress Affery makes a Conditional Promise, respecting her
          Dreams
     24.  The Evening of a Long Day
     25.  The Chief Butler Resigns the Seals of Office
     26.  Reaping the Whirlwind
     27.  The Pupil of the Marshalsea
     28.  An Appearance in the Marshalsea
     29.  A Plea in the Marshalsea
     30.  Closing in
     31.  Closed
     32.  Going
     33.  Going!
     34.  Gone




PREFACE TO THE 1857 EDITION


I have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of two
years. I must have been very ill employed, if I could not leave its
merits and demerits as a whole, to express themselves on its being read
as a whole. But, as it is not unreasonable to suppose that I may have
held its threads with a more continuous attention than anyone else can
have given them during its desultory publication, it is not unreasonable
to ask that the weaving may be looked at in its completed state, and
with the pattern finished.

If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the
Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the
common experience of an Englishman, without presuming to mention the
unimportant fact of my having done that violence to good manners, in the
days of a Russian war, and of a Court of Inquiry at Chelsea. If I might
make so bold as to defend that extravagant conception, Mr Merdle, I
would hint that it originated after the Railroad-share epoch, in the
times of a certain Irish bank, and of one or two other equally
laudable enterprises. If I were to plead anything in mitigation of the
preposterous fancy that a bad design will sometimes claim to be a good
and an expressly religious design, it would be the curious coincidence
that it has been brought to its climax in these pages, in the days of
the public examination of late Directors of a Royal British Bank. But,
I submit myself to suffer judgment to go by default on all these counts,
if need be, and to accept the assurance (on good authority) that nothing
like them was ever known in this land.

Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or no
any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet standing. I did not know,
myself, until the sixth of this present month, when I went to look. I
found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned here, metamorphosed
into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the jail
for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent ‘Angel Court,
leading to Bermondsey’, I came to ‘Marshalsea Place:’ the houses in
which I recognised, not only as the great block of the former prison,
but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind’s-eye when I became
Little Dorrit’s biographer. The smallest boy I ever conversed with,
carrying the largest baby I ever saw, offered a supernaturally
intelligent explanation of the locality in its old uses, and was very
nearly correct. How this young Newton (for such I judge him to be) came
by his information, I don’t know; he was a quarter of a century too
young to know anything about it of himself. I pointed to the window of
the room where Little Dorrit was born, and where her father lived so
long, and asked him what was the name of the lodger who tenanted that
apartment at present? He said, ‘Tom Pythick.’ I asked him who was Tom
Pythick? and he said, ‘Joe Pythick’s uncle.’

A little further on, I found the older and smaller wall, which used
to enclose the pent-up inner prison where nobody was put, except for
ceremony. But, whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of
Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very
paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its narrow yard
to the right and to the left, very little altered if at all, except that
the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon rooms
in which the debtors lived; and will stand among the crowding ghosts of
many miserable years.

In the Preface to Bleak House I remarked that I had never had so many
readers. In the Preface to its next successor, Little Dorrit, I have
still to repeat the same words. Deeply sensible of the affection and
confidence that have grown up between us, I add to this Preface, as I
added to that, May we meet again!

London May 1857




BOOK THE FIRST: POVERTY



CHAPTER 1. Sun and Shadow


Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.

A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern
France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in
Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been
stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there.
Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses,
staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road,
staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be
seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their
load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air
barely moved their faint leaves.

There was no wind to make a ripple on the foul water within the harbour,
or on the beautiful sea without. The line of demarcation between the two
colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not
pass; but it lay as quiet as the abominable pool, with which it never
mixed. Boats without awnings were too hot to touch; ships blistered at
their moorings; the stones of the quays had not cooled, night or
day, for months. Hindoos, Russians, Chinese, Spaniards, Portuguese,
Englishmen, Frenchmen, Genoese, Neapolitans, Venetians, Greeks, Turks,
descendants from all the builders of Babel, come to trade at Marseilles,
sought the shade alike--taking refuge in any hiding-place from a sea too
intensely blue to be looked at, and a sky of purple, set with one great
flaming jewel of fire.

The universal stare made the eyes ache. Towards the distant line of
Italian coast, indeed, it was a little relieved by light clouds of mist,
slowly rising from the evaporation of the sea, but it softened nowhere
else. Far away the staring roads, deep in dust, stared from the
hill-side, stared from the hollow, stared from the interminable
plain. Far away the dusty vines overhanging wayside cottages, and the
monotonous wayside avenues of parched trees without shade, drooped
beneath the stare of earth and sky. So did the horses with drowsy bells,
in long files of carts, creeping slowly towards the interior; so did
their recumbent drivers, when they were awake, which rarely happened;
so did the exhausted labourers in the fields. Everything that lived or
grew, was oppressed by the glare; except the lizard, passing swiftly
over rough stone walls, and the cicala, chirping his dry hot chirp, like
a rattle. The very dust was scorched brown, and something quivered in
the atmosphere as if the air itself were panting.

Blinds, shutters, curtains, awnings, were all closed and drawn to keep
out the stare. Grant it but a chink or keyhole, and it shot in like a
white-hot arrow. The churches were the freest from it. To come out of
the twilight of pillars and arches--dreamily dotted with winking lamps,
dreamily peopled with ugly old shadows piously dozing, spitting, and
begging--was to plunge into a fiery river, and swim for life to the
nearest strip of shade. So, with people lounging and lying wherever
shade was, with but little hum of tongues or barking of dogs, with
occasional jangling of discordant church bells and rattling of vicious
drums, Marseilles, a fact to be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling
in the sun one day.

In Marseilles that day there was a villainous prison. In one of its
chambers, so repulsive a place that even the obtrusive stare blinked at
it, and left it to such refuse of reflected light as it could find for
itself, were two men. Besides the two men, a notched and disfigured
bench, immovable from the wall, with a draught-board rudely hacked upon
it with a knife, a set of draughts, made of old buttons and soup bones,
a set of dominoes, two mats, and two or three wine bottles. That was all
the chamber held, exclusive of rats and other unseen vermin, in addition
to the seen vermin, the two men.

It received such light as it got through a grating of iron bars
fashioned like a pretty large window, by means of which it could be
always inspected from the gloomy staircase on which the grating gave.
There was a broad strong ledge of stone to this grating where the bottom
of it was let into the masonry, three or four feet above the ground.
Upon it, one of the two men lolled, half sitting and half lying, with
his knees drawn up, and his feet and shoulders planted against the
opposite sides of the aperture. The bars were wide enough apart to
admit of his thrusting his arm through to the elbow; and so he held on
negligently, for his greater ease.

A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the
imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all
deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard,
so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air
was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb,
the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have
kept its polluted atmosphere intact in one of the spice islands of the
Indian ocean.

The man who lay on the ledge of the grating was even chilled. He jerked
his great cloak more heavily upon him by an impatient movement of one
shoulder, and growled, ‘To the devil with this Brigand of a Sun that
never shines in here!’

He was waiting to be fed, looking sideways through the bars that he
might see the further down the stairs, with much of the expression of
a wild beast in similar expectation. But his eyes, too close together,
were not so nobly set in his head as those of the king of beasts are in
his, and they were sharp rather than bright--pointed weapons with little
surface to betray them. They had no depth or change; they glittered,
and they opened and shut. So far, and waiving their use to himself, a
clockmaker could have made a better pair. He had a hook nose, handsome
after its kind, but too high between the eyes by probably just as much
as his eyes were too near to one another. For the rest, he was large and
tall in frame, had thin lips, where his thick moustache showed them at
all, and a quantity of dry hair, of no definable colour, in its shaggy
state, but shot with red. The hand with which he held the grating
(seamed all over the back with ugly scratches newly healed), was
unusually small and plump; would have been unusually white but for the
prison grime.

The other man was lying on the stone floor, covered with a coarse brown
coat.

‘Get up, pig!’ growled the first. ‘Don’t sleep when I am hungry.’

‘It’s all one, master,’ said the pig, in a submissive manner, and not
without cheerfulness; ‘I can wake when I will, I can sleep when I will.
It’s all the same.’

As he said it, he rose, shook himself, scratched himself, tied his brown
coat loosely round his neck by the sleeves (he had previously used it
as a coverlet), and sat down upon the pavement yawning, with his back
against the wall opposite to the grating.

‘Say what the hour is,’ grumbled the first man.

‘The mid-day bells will ring--in forty minutes.’ When he made the
little pause, he had looked round the prison-room, as if for certain
information.

‘You are a clock. How is it that you always know?’

‘How can I say? I always know what the hour is, and where I am. I was
brought in here at night, and out of a boat, but I know where I am. See
here! Marseilles harbour;’ on his knees on the pavement, mapping it all
out with a swarthy forefinger; ‘Toulon (where the galleys are), Spain
over there, Algiers over _there_. Creeping away to the left here, Nice.
Round by the Cornice to Genoa. Genoa Mole and Harbour. Quarantine
Ground. City there; terrace gardens blushing with the bella donna. Here,
Porto Fino. Stand out for Leghorn. Out again for Civita Vecchia, so away
to--hey! there’s no room for Naples;’ he had got to the wall by this
time; ‘but it’s all one; it’s in there!’

He remained on his knees, looking up at his fellow-prisoner with a
lively look for a prison. A sunburnt, quick, lithe, little man, though
rather thickset. Earrings in his brown ears, white teeth lighting up his
grotesque brown face, intensely black hair clustering about his brown
throat, a ragged red shirt open at his brown breast. Loose, seaman-like
trousers, decent shoes, a long red cap, a red sash round his waist, and
a knife in it.

‘Judge if I come back from Naples as I went! See here, my master! Civita
Vecchia, Leghorn, Porto Fino, Genoa, Cornice, Off Nice (which is in
there), Marseilles, you and me. The apartment of the jailer and his keys
is where I put this thumb; and here at my wrist they keep the national
razor in its case--the guillotine locked up.’

The other man spat suddenly on the pavement, and gurgled in his throat.

Some lock below gurgled in _its_ throat immediately afterwards, and then
a door crashed. Slow steps began ascending the stairs; the prattle of
a sweet little voice mingled with the noise they made; and the
prison-keeper appeared carrying his daughter, three or four years old,
and a basket.

‘How goes the world this forenoon, gentlemen? My little one, you see,
going round with me to have a peep at her father’s birds. Fie, then!
Look at the birds, my pretty, look at the birds.’

He looked sharply at the birds himself, as he held the child up at
the grate, especially at the little bird, whose activity he seemed to
mistrust. ‘I have brought your bread, Signor John Baptist,’ said he
(they all spoke in French, but the little man was an Italian); ‘and if I
might recommend you not to game--’

‘You don’t recommend the master!’ said John Baptist, showing his teeth
as he smiled.

‘Oh! but the master wins,’ returned the jailer, with a passing look of
no particular liking at the other man, ‘and you lose. It’s quite another
thing. You get husky bread and sour drink by it; and he gets sausage of
Lyons, veal in savoury jelly, white bread, strachino cheese, and good
wine by it. Look at the birds, my pretty!’

‘Poor birds!’ said the child.

The fair little face, touched with divine compassion, as it peeped
shrinkingly through the grate, was like an angel’s in the prison. John
Baptist rose and moved towards it, as if it had a good attraction for
him. The other bird remained as before, except for an impatient glance
at the basket.

‘Stay!’ said the jailer, putting his little daughter on the outer ledge
of the grate, ‘she shall feed the birds. This big loaf is for Signor
John Baptist. We must break it to get it through into the cage. So,
there’s a tame bird to kiss the little hand! This sausage in a vine
leaf is for Monsieur Rigaud. Again--this veal in savoury jelly is for
Monsieur Rigaud. Again--these three white little loaves are for Monsieur
Rigaud. Again, this cheese--again, this wine--again, this tobacco--all
for Monsieur Rigaud. Lucky bird!’

The child put all these things between the bars into the soft, Smooth,
well-shaped hand, with evident dread--more than once drawing back
her own and looking at the man with her fair brow roughened into an
expression half of fright and half of anger. Whereas she had put the
lump of coarse bread into the swart, scaled, knotted hands of John
Baptist (who had scarcely as much nail on his eight fingers and two
thumbs as would have made out one for Monsieur Rigaud), with ready
confidence; and, when he kissed her hand, had herself passed it
caressingly over his face. Monsieur Rigaud, indifferent to this
distinction, propitiated the father by laughing and nodding at the
daughter as often as she gave him anything; and, so soon as he had
all his viands about him in convenient nooks of the ledge on which he
rested, began to eat with an appetite.

When Monsieur Rigaud laughed, a change took place in his face, that
was more remarkable than prepossessing. His moustache went up under his
nose, and his nose came down over his moustache, in a very sinister and
cruel manner.

‘There!’ said the jailer, turning his basket upside down to beat the
crumbs out, ‘I have expended all the money I received; here is the note
of it, and _that’s_ a thing accomplished. Monsieur Rigaud, as I expected
yesterday, the President will look for the pleasure of your society at
an hour after mid-day, to-day.’

‘To try me, eh?’ said Rigaud, pausing, knife in hand and morsel in
mouth.

‘You have said it. To try you.’

‘There is no news for me?’ asked John Baptist, who had begun,
contentedly, to munch his bread.

The jailer shrugged his shoulders.

‘Lady of mine! Am I to lie here all my life, my father?’

‘What do I know!’ cried the jailer, turning upon him with southern
quickness, and gesticulating with both his hands and all his fingers,
as if he were threatening to tear him to pieces. ‘My friend, how is it
possible for me to tell how long you are to lie here? What do I know,
John Baptist Cavalletto? Death of my life! There are prisoners here
sometimes, who are not in such a devil of a hurry to be tried.’

He seemed to glance obliquely at Monsieur Rigaud in this remark; but
Monsieur Rigaud had already resumed his meal, though not with quite so
quick an appetite as before.

‘Adieu, my birds!’ said the keeper of the prison, taking his pretty
child in his arms, and dictating the words with a kiss.

‘Adieu, my birds!’ the pretty child repeated.

Her innocent face looked back so brightly over his shoulder, as he
walked away with her, singing her the song of the child’s game:

     ‘Who passes by this road so late?
          Compagnon de la Majolaine!
     Who passes by this road so late?
          Always gay!’

that John Baptist felt it a point of honour to reply at the grate, and
in good time and tune, though a little hoarsely:

     ‘Of all the king’s knights ‘tis the flower,
         Compagnon de la Majolaine!
     Of all the king’s knights ‘tis the flower,
          Always gay!’

Which accompanied them so far down the few steep stairs, that the
prison-keeper had to stop at last for his little daughter to hear the
song out, and repeat the Refrain while they were yet in sight. Then the
child’s head disappeared, and the prison-keeper’s head disappeared, but
the little voice prolonged the strain until the door clashed.

Monsieur Rigaud, finding the listening John Baptist in his way before
the echoes had ceased (even the echoes were the weaker for imprisonment,
and seemed to lag), reminded him with a push of his foot that he had
better resume his own darker place. The little man sat down again
upon the pavement with the negligent ease of one who was thoroughly
accustomed to pavements; and placing three hunks of coarse bread before
himself, and falling to upon a fourth, began contentedly to work his way
through them as if to clear them off were a sort of game.

Perhaps he glanced at the Lyons sausage, and perhaps he glanced at the
veal in savoury jelly, but they were not there long, to make his mouth
water; Monsieur Rigaud soon dispatched them, in spite of the president
and tribunal, and proceeded to suck his fingers as clean as he could,
and to wipe them on his vine leaves. Then, as he paused in his drink
to contemplate his fellow-prisoner, his moustache went up, and his nose
came down.

‘How do you find the bread?’

‘A little dry, but I have my old sauce here,’ returned John Baptist,
holding up his knife.

‘How sauce?’

‘I can cut my bread so--like a melon. Or so--like an omelette. Or
so--like a fried fish. Or so--like Lyons sausage,’ said John Baptist,
demonstrating the various cuts on the bread he held, and soberly chewing
what he had in his mouth.

‘Here!’ cried Monsieur Rigaud. ‘You may drink. You may finish this.’

It was no great gift, for there was mighty little wine left; but Signor
Cavalletto, jumping to his feet, received the bottle gratefully, turned
it upside down at his mouth, and smacked his lips.

‘Put the bottle by with the rest,’ said Rigaud.

The little man obeyed his orders, and stood ready to give him a lighted
match; for he was now rolling his tobacco into cigarettes by the aid of
little squares of paper which had been brought in with it.

‘Here! You may have one.’

‘A thousand thanks, my master!’ John Baptist said in his own language,
and with the quick conciliatory manner of his own countrymen.

Monsieur Rigaud arose, lighted a cigarette, put the rest of his stock
into a breast-pocket, and stretched himself out at full length upon the
bench. Cavalletto sat down on the pavement, holding one of his ankles in
each hand, and smoking peacefully. There seemed to be some uncomfortable
attraction of Monsieur Rigaud’s eyes to the immediate neighbourhood of
that part of the pavement where the thumb had been in the plan. They
were so drawn in that direction, that the Italian more than once
followed them to and back from the pavement in some surprise.

‘What an infernal hole this is!’ said Monsieur Rigaud, breaking a long
pause. ‘Look at the light of day. Day? the light of yesterday week, the
light of six months ago, the light of six years ago. So slack and dead!’

It came languishing down a square funnel that blinded a window in the
staircase wall, through which the sky was never seen--nor anything else.

‘Cavalletto,’ said Monsieur Rigaud, suddenly withdrawing his gaze from
this funnel to which they had both involuntarily turned their eyes, ‘you
know me for a gentleman?’

‘Surely, surely!’

‘How long have we been here?’

‘I, eleven weeks, to-morrow night at midnight. You, nine weeks and three
days, at five this afternoon.’

‘Have I ever done anything here? Ever touched the broom, or spread
the mats, or rolled them up, or found the draughts, or collected the
dominoes, or put my hand to any kind of work?’

‘Never!’

‘Have you ever thought of looking to me to do any kind of work?’

John Baptist answered with that peculiar back-handed shake of the
right forefinger which is the most expressive negative in the Italian
language.

‘No! You knew from the first moment when you saw me here, that I was a
gentleman?’

‘ALTRO!’ returned John Baptist, closing his eyes and giving his head a
most vehement toss. The word being, according to its Genoese emphasis,
a confirmation, a contradiction, an assertion, a denial, a taunt,
a compliment, a joke, and fifty other things, became in the present
instance, with a significance beyond all power of written expression,
our familiar English ‘I believe you!’

‘Haha! You are right! A gentleman I am! And a gentleman I’ll live, and
a gentleman I’ll die! It’s my intent to be a gentleman. It’s my game.
Death of my soul, I play it out wherever I go!’

He changed his posture to a sitting one, crying with a triumphant air:

‘Here I am! See me! Shaken out of destiny’s dice-box into the company
of a mere smuggler;--shut up with a poor little contraband trader, whose
papers are wrong, and whom the police lay hold of besides, for placing
his boat (as a means of getting beyond the frontier) at the disposition
of other little people whose papers are wrong; and he instinctively
recognises my position, even by this light and in this place. It’s well
done! By Heaven! I win, however the game goes.’

Again his moustache went up, and his nose came down.

‘What’s the hour now?’ he asked, with a dry hot pallor upon him, rather
difficult of association with merriment.

‘A little half-hour after mid-day.’

‘Good! The President will have a gentleman before him soon. Come!
Shall I tell you on what accusation? It must be now, or never, for I
shall not return here. Either I shall go free, or I shall go to be made
ready for shaving. You know where they keep the razor.’

Signor Cavalletto took his cigarette from between his parted lips, and
showed more momentary discomfiture than might have been expected.

‘I am a’--Monsieur Rigaud stood up to say it--‘I am a cosmopolitan
gentleman. I own no particular country. My father was Swiss--Canton de
Vaud. My mother was French by blood, English by birth. I myself was born
in Belgium. I am a citizen of the world.’

His theatrical air, as he stood with one arm on his hip within the folds
of his cloak, together with his manner of disregarding his companion
and addressing the opposite wall instead, seemed to intimate that he
was rehearsing for the President, whose examination he was shortly to
undergo, rather than troubling himself merely to enlighten so small a
person as John Baptist Cavalletto.

‘Call me five-and-thirty years of age. I have seen the world. I have
lived here, and lived there, and lived like a gentleman everywhere. I
have been treated and respected as a gentleman universally. If you try
to prejudice me by making out that I have lived by my wits--how do
your lawyers live--your politicians--your intriguers--your men of the
Exchange?’

He kept his small smooth hand in constant requisition, as if it were a
witness to his gentility that had often done him good service before.

‘Two years ago I came to Marseilles. I admit that I was poor; I had been
ill. When your lawyers, your politicians, your intriguers, your men of
the Exchange fall ill, and have not scraped money together, _they_ become
poor. I put up at the Cross of Gold,--kept then by Monsieur Henri
Barronneau--sixty-five at least, and in a failing state of health. I had
lived in the house some four months when Monsieur Henri Barronneau had
the misfortune to die;--at any rate, not a rare misfortune, that. It
happens without any aid of mine, pretty often.’

John Baptist having smoked his cigarette down to his fingers’ ends,
Monsieur Rigaud had the magnanimity to throw him another. He lighted the
second at the ashes of the first, and smoked on, looking sideways at his
companion, who, preoccupied with his own case, hardly looked at him.

‘Monsieur Barronneau left a widow. She was two-and-twenty. She had
gained a reputation for beauty, and (which is often another thing) was
beautiful. I continued to live at the Cross of Gold. I married Madame
Barronneau. It is not for me to say whether there was any great
disparity in such a match. Here I stand, with the contamination of a
jail upon me; but it is possible that you may think me better suited to
her than her former husband was.’

He had a certain air of being a handsome man--which he was not; and
a certain air of being a well-bred man--which he was not. It was mere
swagger and challenge; but in this particular, as in many others,
blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world.

‘Be it as it may, Madame Barronneau approved of me. _That_ is not to
prejudice me, I hope?’

His eye happening to light upon John Baptist with this inquiry, that
little man briskly shook his head in the negative, and repeated in an
argumentative tone under his breath, altro, altro, altro, altro--an
infinite number of times.

‘Now came the difficulties of our position. I am proud. I say nothing
in defence of pride, but I am proud. It is also my character to govern.
I can’t submit; I must govern. Unfortunately, the property of Madame
Rigaud was settled upon herself. Such was the insane act of her late
husband. More unfortunately still, she had relations. When a wife’s
relations interpose against a husband who is a gentleman, who is proud,
and who must govern, the consequences are inimical to peace. There
was yet another source of difference between us. Madame Rigaud was
unfortunately a little vulgar. I sought to improve her manners and
ameliorate her general tone; she (supported in this likewise by her
relations) resented my endeavours. Quarrels began to arise between us;
and, propagated and exaggerated by the slanders of the relations of
Madame Rigaud, to become notorious to the neighbours. It has been said
that I treated Madame Rigaud with cruelty. I may have been seen to slap
her face--nothing more. I have a light hand; and if I have been seen
apparently to correct Madame Rigaud in that manner, I have done it
almost playfully.’

If the playfulness of Monsieur Rigaud were at all expressed by his smile
at this point, the relations of Madame Rigaud might have said that
they would have much preferred his correcting that unfortunate woman
seriously.

‘I am sensitive and brave. I do not advance it as a merit to be
sensitive and brave, but it is my character. If the male relations of
Madame Rigaud had put themselves forward openly, I should have known how
to deal with them. They knew that, and their machinations were conducted
in secret; consequently, Madame Rigaud and I were brought into frequent
and unfortunate collision. Even when I wanted any little sum of money
for my personal expenses, I could not obtain it without collision--and
I, too, a man whose character it is to govern! One night, Madame Rigaud
and myself were walking amicably--I may say like lovers--on a height
overhanging the sea. An evil star occasioned Madame Rigaud to advert to
her relations; I reasoned with her on that subject, and remonstrated on
the want of duty and devotion manifested in her allowing herself to be
influenced by their jealous animosity towards her husband. Madame Rigaud
retorted; I retorted; Madame Rigaud grew warm; I grew warm, and provoked
her. I admit it. Frankness is a part of my character. At length, Madame
Rigaud, in an access of fury that I must ever deplore, threw herself
upon me with screams of passion (no doubt those that were overheard
at some distance), tore my clothes, tore my hair, lacerated my hands,
trampled and trod the dust, and finally leaped over, dashing herself to
death upon the rocks below. Such is the train of incidents which
malice has perverted into my endeavouring to force from Madame Rigaud
a relinquishment of her rights; and, on her persistence in a refusal to
make the concession I required, struggling with her--assassinating her!’

He stepped aside to the ledge where the vine leaves yet lay strewn
about, collected two or three, and stood wiping his hands upon them,
with his back to the light.

‘Well,’ he demanded after a silence, ‘have you nothing to say to all
that?’

‘It’s ugly,’ returned the little man, who had risen, and was brightening
his knife upon his shoe, as he leaned an arm against the wall.

‘What do you mean?’

John Baptist polished his knife in silence.

‘Do you mean that I have not represented the case correctly?’

‘Al-tro!’ returned John Baptist. The word was an apology now, and stood
for ‘Oh, by no means!’

‘What then?’

‘Presidents and tribunals are so prejudiced.’

‘Well,’ cried the other, uneasily flinging the end of his cloak over his
shoulder with an oath, ‘let them do their worst!’

‘Truly I think they will,’ murmured John Baptist to himself, as he bent
his head to put his knife in his sash.

Nothing more was said on either side, though they both began walking
to and fro, and necessarily crossed at every turn. Monsieur Rigaud
sometimes stopped, as if he were going to put his case in a new light,
or make some irate remonstrance; but Signor Cavalletto continuing to
go slowly to and fro at a grotesque kind of jog-trot pace with his eyes
turned downward, nothing came of these inclinings.

By-and-by the noise of the key in the lock arrested them both. The sound
of voices succeeded, and the tread of feet. The door clashed, the voices
and the feet came on, and the prison-keeper slowly ascended the stairs,
followed by a guard of soldiers.

‘Now, Monsieur Rigaud,’ said he, pausing for a moment at the grate, with
his keys in his hands, ‘have the goodness to come out.’

‘I am to depart in state, I see?’

‘Why, unless you did,’ returned the jailer, ‘you might depart in so many
pieces that it would be difficult to get you together again. There’s a
crowd, Monsieur Rigaud, and it doesn’t love you.’

He passed on out of sight, and unlocked and unbarred a low door in the
corner of the chamber. ‘Now,’ said he, as he opened it and appeared
within, ‘come out.’

There is no sort of whiteness in all the hues under the sun at all like
the whiteness of Monsieur Rigaud’s face as it was then. Neither is there
any expression of the human countenance at all like that expression in
every little line of which the frightened heart is seen to beat. Both
are conventionally compared with death; but the difference is the whole
deep gulf between the struggle done, and the fight at its most desperate
extremity.

He lighted another of his paper cigars at his companion’s; put it
tightly between his teeth; covered his head with a soft slouched hat;
threw the end of his cloak over his shoulder again; and walked out into
the side gallery on which the door opened, without taking any further
notice of Signor Cavalletto. As to that little man himself, his whole
attention had become absorbed in getting near the door and looking out
at it. Precisely as a beast might approach the opened gate of his den
and eye the freedom beyond, he passed those few moments in watching and
peering, until the door was closed upon him.

There was an officer in command of the soldiers; a stout, serviceable,
profoundly calm man, with his drawn sword in his hand, smoking a cigar.
He very briefly directed the placing of Monsieur Rigaud in the midst of
the party, put himself with consummate indifference at their head, gave
the word ‘march!’ and so they all went jingling down the staircase. The
door clashed--the key turned--and a ray of unusual light, and a breath
of unusual air, seemed to have passed through the jail, vanishing in a
tiny wreath of smoke from the cigar.

Still, in his captivity, like a lower animal--like some impatient ape,
or roused bear of the smaller species--the prisoner, now left solitary,
had jumped upon the ledge, to lose no glimpse of this departure. As he
yet stood clasping the grate with both hands, an uproar broke upon his
hearing; yells, shrieks, oaths, threats, execrations, all comprehended
in it, though (as in a storm) nothing but a raging swell of sound
distinctly heard.

Excited into a still greater resemblance to a caged wild animal by his
anxiety to know more, the prisoner leaped nimbly down, ran round the
chamber, leaped nimbly up again, clasped the grate and tried to shake
it, leaped down and ran, leaped up and listened, and never rested until
the noise, becoming more and more distant, had died away. How many
better prisoners have worn their noble hearts out so; no man thinking
of it; not even the beloved of their souls realising it; great kings
and governors, who had made them captive, careering in the sunlight
jauntily, and men cheering them on. Even the said great personages dying
in bed, making exemplary ends and sounding speeches; and polite history,
more servile than their instruments, embalming them!

At last, John Baptist, now able to choose his own spot within the
compass of those walls for the exercise of his faculty of going to sleep
when he would, lay down upon the bench, with his face turned over on his
crossed arms, and slumbered. In his submission, in his lightness, in his
good humour, in his short-lived passion, in his easy contentment with
hard bread and hard stones, in his ready sleep, in his fits and starts,
altogether a true son of the land that gave him birth.

The wide stare stared itself out for one while; the Sun went down in
a red, green, golden glory; the stars came out in the heavens, and the
fire-flies mimicked them in the lower air, as men may feebly imitate
the goodness of a better order of beings; the long dusty roads and the
interminable plains were in repose--and so deep a hush was on the sea,
that it scarcely whispered of the time when it shall give up its dead.




CHAPTER 2 Fellow Travellers


‘No more of yesterday’s howling over yonder to-day, Sir; is there?’

‘I have heard none.’

‘Then you may be sure there _is_ none. When these people howl, they howl
to be heard.’

‘Most people do, I suppose.’

‘Ah! but these people are always howling. Never happy otherwise.’

‘Do you mean the Marseilles people?’

‘I mean the French people. They’re always at it. As to Marseilles, we
know what Marseilles is. It sent the most insurrectionary tune into the
world that was ever composed. It couldn’t exist without allonging and
marshonging to something or other--victory or death, or blazes, or
something.’

The speaker, with a whimsical good humour upon him all the time, looked
over the parapet-wall with the greatest disparagement of Marseilles; and
taking up a determined position by putting his hands in his pockets and
rattling his money at it, apostrophised it with a short laugh.

‘Allong and marshong, indeed. It would be more creditable to you,
I think, to let other people allong and marshong about their lawful
business, instead of shutting ‘em up in quarantine!’

‘Tiresome enough,’ said the other. ‘But we shall be out to-day.’

‘Out to-day!’ repeated the first. ‘It’s almost an aggravation of the
enormity, that we shall be out to-day. Out! What have we ever been in
for?’

‘For no very strong reason, I must say. But as we come from the East,
and as the East is the country of the plague--’

‘The plague!’ repeated the other. ‘That’s my grievance. I have had the
plague continually, ever since I have been here. I am like a sane man
shut up in a madhouse; I can’t stand the suspicion of the thing. I came
here as well as ever I was in my life; but to suspect me of the plague
is to give me the plague. And I have had it--and I have got it.’

‘You bear it very well, Mr Meagles,’ said the second speaker, smiling.

‘No. If you knew the real state of the case, that’s the last observation
you would think of making. I have been waking up night after night, and
saying, _now_ I have got it, _now_ it has developed itself, _now_ I am
in for it, _now_ these fellows are making out their case for their
precautions. Why, I’d as soon have a spit put through me, and be stuck
upon a card in a collection of beetles, as lead the life I have been
leading here.’

‘Well, Mr Meagles, say no more about it now it’s over,’ urged a cheerful
feminine voice.

‘Over!’ repeated Mr Meagles, who appeared (though without any
ill-nature) to be in that peculiar state of mind in which the last word
spoken by anybody else is a new injury. ‘Over! and why should I say no
more about it because it’s over?’

It was Mrs Meagles who had spoken to Mr Meagles; and Mrs Meagles was,
like Mr Meagles, comely and healthy, with a pleasant English face which
had been looking at homely things for five-and-fifty years or more, and
shone with a bright reflection of them.

‘There! Never mind, Father, never mind!’ said Mrs Meagles. ‘For goodness
sake content yourself with Pet.’

‘With Pet?’ repeated Mr Meagles in his injured vein. Pet, however,
being close behind him, touched him on the shoulder, and Mr Meagles
immediately forgave Marseilles from the bottom of his heart.

Pet was about twenty. A fair girl with rich brown hair hanging free in
natural ringlets. A lovely girl, with a frank face, and wonderful eyes;
so large, so soft, so bright, set to such perfection in her kind good
head. She was round and fresh and dimpled and spoilt, and there was in
Pet an air of timidity and dependence which was the best weakness in
the world, and gave her the only crowning charm a girl so pretty and
pleasant could have been without.

‘Now, I ask you,’ said Mr Meagles in the blandest confidence, falling
back a step himself, and handing his daughter a step forward to
illustrate his question: ‘I ask you simply, as between man and man,
you know, DID you ever hear of such damned nonsense as putting Pet in
quarantine?’

‘It has had the result of making even quarantine enjoyable.’

‘Come!’ said Mr Meagles, ‘that’s something to be sure. I am obliged to
you for that remark. Now, Pet, my darling, you had better go along with
Mother and get ready for the boat. The officer of health, and a variety
of humbugs in cocked hats, are coming off to let us out of this at last:
and all we jail-birds are to breakfast together in something approaching
to a Christian style again, before we take wing for our different
destinations. Tattycoram, stick you close to your young mistress.’

He spoke to a handsome girl with lustrous dark hair and eyes, and very
neatly dressed, who replied with a half curtsey as she passed off in the
train of Mrs Meagles and Pet. They crossed the bare scorched terrace
all three together, and disappeared through a staring white archway.
Mr Meagles’s companion, a grave dark man of forty, still stood looking
towards this archway after they were gone; until Mr Meagles tapped him
on the arm.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said he, starting.

‘Not at all,’ said Mr Meagles.

They took one silent turn backward and forward in the shade of the wall,
getting, at the height on which the quarantine barracks are placed, what
cool refreshment of sea breeze there was at seven in the morning. Mr
Meagles’s companion resumed the conversation.

‘May I ask you,’ he said, ‘what is the name of--’

‘Tattycoram?’ Mr Meagles struck in. ‘I have not the least idea.’

‘I thought,’ said the other, ‘that--’

‘Tattycoram?’ suggested Mr Meagles again.

‘Thank you--that Tattycoram was a name; and I have several times
wondered at the oddity of it.’

‘Why, the fact is,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘Mrs Meagles and myself are, you
see, practical people.’

‘That you have frequently mentioned in the course of the agreeable and
interesting conversations we have had together, walking up and down on
these stones,’ said the other, with a half smile breaking through the
gravity of his dark face.

‘Practical people. So one day, five or six years ago now, when we took
Pet to church at the Foundling--you have heard of the Foundling Hospital
in London? Similar to the Institution for the Found Children in Paris?’

‘I have seen it.’

‘Well! One day when we took Pet to church there to hear the
music--because, as practical people, it is the business of our lives to
show her everything that we think can please her--Mother (my usual name
for Mrs Meagles) began to cry so, that it was necessary to take her out.
“What’s the matter, Mother?” said I, when we had brought her a little
round: “you are frightening Pet, my dear.” “Yes, I know that, Father,”
 says Mother, “but I think it’s through my loving her so much, that it
ever came into my head.” “That ever what came into your head, Mother?”
 “O dear, dear!” cried Mother, breaking out again, “when I saw all those
children ranged tier above tier, and appealing from the father none of
them has ever known on earth, to the great Father of us all in Heaven,
I thought, does any wretched mother ever come here, and look among those
young faces, wondering which is the poor child she brought into this
forlorn world, never through all its life to know her love, her kiss,
her face, her voice, even her name!” Now that was practical in Mother,
and I told her so. I said, “Mother, that’s what I call practical in you,
my dear.”’

The other, not unmoved, assented.

‘So I said next day: Now, Mother, I have a proposition to make that I
think you’ll approve of. Let us take one of those same little children
to be a little maid to Pet. We are practical people. So if we should
find her temper a little defective, or any of her ways a little wide
of ours, we shall know what we have to take into account. We shall
know what an immense deduction must be made from all the influences and
experiences that have formed us--no parents, no child-brother or sister,
no individuality of home, no Glass Slipper, or Fairy Godmother. And
that’s the way we came by Tattycoram.’

‘And the name itself--’

‘By George!’ said Mr Meagles, ‘I was forgetting the name itself. Why,
she was called in the Institution, Harriet Beadle--an arbitrary name,
of course. Now, Harriet we changed into Hattey, and then into Tatty,
because, as practical people, we thought even a playful name might be
a new thing to her, and might have a softening and affectionate kind of
effect, don’t you see? As to Beadle, that I needn’t say was wholly out
of the question. If there is anything that is not to be tolerated on
any terms, anything that is a type of Jack-in-office insolence and
absurdity, anything that represents in coats, waistcoats, and big sticks
our English holding on by nonsense after every one has found it out, it
is a beadle. You haven’t seen a beadle lately?’

‘As an Englishman who has been more than twenty years in China, no.’

‘Then,’ said Mr Meagles, laying his forefinger on his companion’s breast
with great animation, ‘don’t you see a beadle, now, if you can help it.
Whenever I see a beadle in full fig, coming down a street on a Sunday
at the head of a charity school, I am obliged to turn and run away, or
I should hit him. The name of Beadle being out of the question, and the
originator of the Institution for these poor foundlings having been a
blessed creature of the name of Coram, we gave that name to Pet’s little
maid. At one time she was Tatty, and at one time she was Coram, until we
got into a way of mixing the two names together, and now she is always
Tattycoram.’

‘Your daughter,’ said the other, when they had taken another silent turn
to and fro, and, after standing for a moment at the wall glancing down
at the sea, had resumed their walk, ‘is your only child, I know, Mr
Meagles. May I ask you--in no impertinent curiosity, but because I have
had so much pleasure in your society, may never in this labyrinth of
a world exchange a quiet word with you again, and wish to preserve an
accurate remembrance of you and yours--may I ask you, if I have not
gathered from your good wife that you have had other children?’

‘No. No,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘Not exactly other children. One other
child.’

‘I am afraid I have inadvertently touched upon a tender theme.’

‘Never mind,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘If I am grave about it, I am not at all
sorrowful. It quiets me for a moment, but does not make me unhappy. Pet
had a twin sister who died when we could just see her eyes--exactly like
Pet’s--above the table, as she stood on tiptoe holding by it.’

‘Ah! indeed, indeed!’

‘Yes, and being practical people, a result has gradually sprung up in
the minds of Mrs Meagles and myself which perhaps you may--or perhaps
you may not--understand. Pet and her baby sister were so exactly alike,
and so completely one, that in our thoughts we have never been able
to separate them since. It would be of no use to tell us that our dead
child was a mere infant. We have changed that child according to the
changes in the child spared to us and always with us. As Pet has grown,
that child has grown; as Pet has become more sensible and womanly, her
sister has become more sensible and womanly by just the same degrees.
It would be as hard to convince me that if I was to pass into the other
world to-morrow, I should not, through the mercy of God, be received
there by a daughter, just like Pet, as to persuade me that Pet herself
is not a reality at my side.’

‘I understand you,’ said the other, gently.

‘As to her,’ pursued her father, ‘the sudden loss of her little picture
and playfellow, and her early association with that mystery in which we
all have our equal share, but which is not often so forcibly presented
to a child, has necessarily had some influence on her character. Then,
her mother and I were not young when we married, and Pet has always had
a sort of grown-up life with us, though we have tried to adapt ourselves
to her. We have been advised more than once when she has been a
little ailing, to change climate and air for her as often as we
could--especially at about this time of her life--and to keep her
amused. So, as I have no need to stick at a bank-desk now (though I have
been poor enough in my time I assure you, or I should have married Mrs
Meagles long before), we go trotting about the world. This is how you
found us staring at the Nile, and the Pyramids, and the Sphinxes, and
the Desert, and all the rest of it; and this is how Tattycoram will be a
greater traveller in course of time than Captain Cook.’

‘I thank you,’ said the other, ‘very heartily for your confidence.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ returned Mr Meagles, ‘I am sure you are quite
welcome. And now, Mr Clennam, perhaps I may ask you whether you have yet
come to a decision where to go next?’

‘Indeed, no. I am such a waif and stray everywhere, that I am liable to
be drifted where any current may set.’

‘It’s extraordinary to me--if you’ll excuse my freedom in saying
so--that you don’t go straight to London,’ said Mr Meagles, in the tone
of a confidential adviser.

‘Perhaps I shall.’

‘Ay! But I mean with a will.’

‘I have no will. That is to say,’--he coloured a little,--‘next to none
that I can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken, not bent;
heavily ironed with an object on which I was never consulted and which
was never mine; shipped away to the other end of the world before I
was of age, and exiled there until my father’s death there, a year ago;
always grinding in a mill I always hated; what is to be expected from me
in middle life? Will, purpose, hope? All those lights were extinguished
before I could sound the words.’

‘Light ‘em up again!’ said Mr Meagles.

‘Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr Meagles, of a hard father and
mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced
everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced,
had no existence. Strict people as the phrase is, professors of a stern
religion, their very religion was a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and
sympathies that were never their own, offered up as a part of a bargain
for the security of their possessions. Austere faces, inexorable
discipline, penance in this world and terror in the next--nothing
graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void in my cowed heart
everywhere--this was my childhood, if I may so misuse the word as to
apply it to such a beginning of life.’

‘Really though?’ said Mr Meagles, made very uncomfortable by the picture
offered to his imagination. ‘That was a tough commencement. But come!
You must now study, and profit by, all that lies beyond it, like a
practical man.’

‘If the people who are usually called practical, were practical in your
direction--’

‘Why, so they are!’ said Mr Meagles.

‘Are they indeed?’

‘Well, I suppose so,’ returned Mr Meagles, thinking about it. ‘Eh? One
can but _be_ practical, and Mrs Meagles and myself are nothing else.’

‘My unknown course is easier and more helpful than I had expected to
find it, then,’ said Clennam, shaking his head with his grave smile.
‘Enough of me. Here is the boat.’

The boat was filled with the cocked hats to which Mr Meagles entertained
a national objection; and the wearers of those cocked hats landed
and came up the steps, and all the impounded travellers congregated
together. There was then a mighty production of papers on the part of
the cocked hats, and a calling over of names, and great work of signing,
sealing, stamping, inking, and sanding, with exceedingly blurred,
gritty, and undecipherable results. Finally, everything was done
according to rule, and the travellers were at liberty to depart
whithersoever they would.

They made little account of stare and glare, in the new pleasure of
recovering their freedom, but flitted across the harbour in gay boats,
and reassembled at a great hotel, whence the sun was excluded by closed
lattices, and where bare paved floors, lofty ceilings, and resounding
corridors tempered the intense heat. There, a great table in a great
room was soon profusely covered with a superb repast; and the quarantine
quarters became bare indeed, remembered among dainty dishes, southern
fruits, cooled wines, flowers from Genoa, snow from the mountain tops,
and all the colours of the rainbow flashing in the mirrors.

‘But I bear those monotonous walls no ill-will now,’ said Mr Meagles.
‘One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind; I
dare say a prisoner begins to relent towards his prison, after he is let
out.’

They were about thirty in company, and all talking; but necessarily in
groups. Father and Mother Meagles sat with their daughter between them,
the last three on one side of the table: on the opposite side sat Mr
Clennam; a tall French gentleman with raven hair and beard, of a swart
and terrible, not to say genteelly diabolical aspect, but who had
shown himself the mildest of men; and a handsome young Englishwoman,
travelling quite alone, who had a proud observant face, and had either
withdrawn herself from the rest or been avoided by the rest--nobody,
herself excepted perhaps, could have quite decided which. The rest
of the party were of the usual materials: travellers on business, and
travellers for pleasure; officers from India on leave; merchants in
the Greek and Turkey trades; a clerical English husband in a meek
strait-waistcoat, on a wedding trip with his young wife; a majestic
English mama and papa, of the patrician order, with a family of three
growing-up daughters, who were keeping a journal for the confusion of
their fellow-creatures; and a deaf old English mother, tough in travel,
with a very decidedly grown-up daughter indeed, which daughter went
sketching about the universe in the expectation of ultimately toning
herself off into the married state.

The reserved Englishwoman took up Mr Meagles in his last remark.

‘Do you mean that a prisoner forgives his prison?’ said she, slowly and
with emphasis.


‘That was my speculation, Miss Wade. I don’t pretend to know positively
how a prisoner might feel. I never was one before.’

‘Mademoiselle doubts,’ said the French gentleman in his own language,
‘it’s being so easy to forgive?’

‘I do.’

Pet had to translate this passage to Mr Meagles, who never by any
accident acquired any knowledge whatever of the language of any country
into which he travelled. ‘Oh!’ said he. ‘Dear me! But that’s a pity,
isn’t it?’

‘That I am not credulous?’ said Miss Wade.

‘Not exactly that. Put it another way. That you can’t believe it easy to
forgive.’

‘My experience,’ she quietly returned, ‘has been correcting my belief
in many respects, for some years. It is our natural progress, I have
heard.’

‘Well, well! But it’s not natural to bear malice, I hope?’ said Mr
Meagles, cheerily.

‘If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should always
hate that place and wish to burn it down, or raze it to the ground. I
know no more.’

‘Strong, sir?’ said Mr Meagles to the Frenchman; it being another of his
habits to address individuals of all nations in idiomatic English, with
a perfect conviction that they were bound to understand it somehow.
‘Rather forcible in our fair friend, you’ll agree with me, I think?’

The French gentleman courteously replied, ‘Plait-il?’ To which Mr
Meagles returned with much satisfaction, ‘You are right. My opinion.’

The breakfast beginning by-and-by to languish, Mr Meagles made the
company a speech. It was short enough and sensible enough, considering
that it was a speech at all, and hearty. It merely went to the effect
that as they had all been thrown together by chance, and had all
preserved a good understanding together, and were now about to disperse,
and were not likely ever to find themselves all together again, what
could they do better than bid farewell to one another, and give one
another good-speed in a simultaneous glass of cool champagne all round
the table? It was done, and with a general shaking of hands the assembly
broke up for ever.

The solitary young lady all this time had said no more. She rose with
the rest, and silently withdrew to a remote corner of the great room,
where she sat herself on a couch in a window, seeming to watch the
reflection of the water as it made a silver quivering on the bars of the
lattice. She sat, turned away from the whole length of the apartment, as
if she were lonely of her own haughty choice. And yet it would have been
as difficult as ever to say, positively, whether she avoided the rest,
or was avoided.

The shadow in which she sat, falling like a gloomy veil across her
forehead, accorded very well with the character of her beauty. One could
hardly see the face, so still and scornful, set off by the arched
dark eyebrows, and the folds of dark hair, without wondering what its
expression would be if a change came over it. That it could soften or
relent, appeared next to impossible. That it could deepen into anger or
any extreme of defiance, and that it must change in that direction when
it changed at all, would have been its peculiar impression upon most
observers. It was dressed and trimmed into no ceremony of expression.
Although not an open face, there was no pretence in it. ‘I am
self-contained and self-reliant; your opinion is nothing to me; I have
no interest in you, care nothing for you, and see and hear you with
indifference’--this it said plainly. It said so in the proud eyes, in
the lifted nostril, in the handsome but compressed and even cruel mouth.
Cover either two of those channels of expression, and the third would
have said so still. Mask them all, and the mere turn of the head would
have shown an unsubduable nature.

Pet had moved up to her (she had been the subject of remark among her
family and Mr Clennam, who were now the only other occupants of the
room), and was standing at her side.

‘Are you’--she turned her eyes, and Pet faltered--‘expecting any one to
meet you here, Miss Wade?’

‘I? No.’

‘Father is sending to the Poste Restante. Shall he have the pleasure of
directing the messenger to ask if there are any letters for you?’

‘I thank him, but I know there can be none.’

‘We are afraid,’ said Pet, sitting down beside her, shyly and half
tenderly, ‘that you will feel quite deserted when we are all gone.’

‘Indeed!’

‘Not,’ said Pet, apologetically and embarrassed by her eyes, ‘not, of
course, that we are any company to you, or that we have been able to be
so, or that we thought you wished it.’

‘I have not intended to make it understood that I did wish it.’

‘No. Of course. But--in short,’ said Pet, timidly touching her hand as
it lay impassive on the sofa between them, ‘will you not allow Father to
tender you any slight assistance or service? He will be very glad.’

‘Very glad,’ said Mr Meagles, coming forward with his wife and Clennam.
‘Anything short of speaking the language, I shall be delighted to
undertake, I am sure.’

‘I am obliged to you,’ she returned, ‘but my arrangements are made, and
I prefer to go my own way in my own manner.’

‘_Do_ you?’ said Mr Meagles to himself, as he surveyed her with a puzzled
look. ‘Well! There’s character in that, too.’

‘I am not much used to the society of young ladies, and I am afraid I
may not show my appreciation of it as others might. A pleasant journey
to you. Good-bye!’

She would not have put out her hand, it seemed, but that Mr Meagles put
out his so straight before her that she could not pass it. She put hers
in it, and it lay there just as it had lain upon the couch.

‘Good-bye!’ said Mr Meagles. ‘This is the last good-bye upon the list,
for Mother and I have just said it to Mr Clennam here, and he only waits
to say it to Pet. Good-bye! We may never meet again.’

‘In our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming to
meet _us_, from many strange places and by many strange roads,’ was the
composed reply; ‘and what it is set to us to do to them, and what it is
set to them to do to us, will all be done.’

There was something in the manner of these words that jarred upon Pet’s
ear. It implied that what was to be done was necessarily evil, and it
caused her to say in a whisper, ‘O Father!’ and to shrink childishly, in
her spoilt way, a little closer to him. This was not lost on the
speaker.

‘Your pretty daughter,’ she said, ‘starts to think of such things. Yet,’
looking full upon her, ‘you may be sure that there are men and women
already on their road, who have their business to do with _you_, and who
will do it. Of a certainty they will do it. They may be coming hundreds,
thousands, of miles over the sea there; they may be close at hand now;
they may be coming, for anything you know or anything you can do to
prevent it, from the vilest sweepings of this very town.’

With the coldest of farewells, and with a certain worn expression on her
beauty that gave it, though scarcely yet in its prime, a wasted look,
she left the room.

Now, there were many stairs and passages that she had to traverse in
passing from that part of the spacious house to the chamber she had
secured for her own occupation. When she had almost completed the
journey, and was passing along the gallery in which her room was, she
heard an angry sound of muttering and sobbing. A door stood open, and
within she saw the attendant upon the girl she had just left; the maid
with the curious name.

She stood still, to look at this maid. A sullen, passionate girl! Her
rich black hair was all about her face, her face was flushed and hot,
and as she sobbed and raged, she plucked at her lips with an unsparing
hand.

‘Selfish brutes!’ said the girl, sobbing and heaving between whiles.
‘Not caring what becomes of me! Leaving me here hungry and thirsty and
tired, to starve, for anything they care! Beasts! Devils! Wretches!’

‘My poor girl, what is the matter?’

She looked up suddenly, with reddened eyes, and with her hands
suspended, in the act of pinching her neck, freshly disfigured with
great scarlet blots. ‘It’s nothing to you what’s the matter. It don’t
signify to any one.’

‘O yes it does; I am sorry to see you so.’

‘You are not sorry,’ said the girl. ‘You are glad. You know you are
glad. I never was like this but twice over in the quarantine yonder; and
both times you found me. I am afraid of you.’

‘Afraid of me?’

‘Yes. You seem to come like my own anger, my own malice, my
own--whatever it is--I don’t know what it is. But I am ill-used, I am
ill-used, I am ill-used!’ Here the sobs and the tears, and the tearing
hand, which had all been suspended together since the first surprise,
went on together anew.

The visitor stood looking at her with a strange attentive smile. It was
wonderful to see the fury of the contest in the girl, and the bodily
struggle she made as if she were rent by the Demons of old.

‘I am younger than she is by two or three years, and yet it’s me that
looks after her, as if I was old, and it’s she that’s always petted and
called Baby! I detest the name. I hate her! They make a fool of her,
they spoil her. She thinks of nothing but herself, she thinks no more of
me than if I was a stock and a stone!’ So the girl went on.

‘You must have patience.’

‘I _won’t_ have patience!’

‘If they take much care of themselves, and little or none of you, you
must not mind it.’

I _will_ mind it.’

‘Hush! Be more prudent. You forget your dependent position.’

‘I don’t care for that. I’ll run away. I’ll do some mischief. I won’t
bear it; I can’t bear it; I shall die if I try to bear it!’

The observer stood with her hand upon her own bosom, looking at the
girl, as one afflicted with a diseased part might curiously watch the
dissection and exposition of an analogous case.

The girl raged and battled with all the force of her youth and fulness
of life, until by little and little her passionate exclamations trailed
off into broken murmurs as if she were in pain. By corresponding degrees
she sank into a chair, then upon her knees, then upon the ground beside
the bed, drawing the coverlet with her, half to hide her shamed head and
wet hair in it, and half, as it seemed, to embrace it, rather than have
nothing to take to her repentant breast.

‘Go away from me, go away from me! When my temper comes upon me, I
am mad. I know I might keep it off if I only tried hard enough, and
sometimes I do try hard enough, and at other times I don’t and won’t.
What have I said! I knew when I said it, it was all lies. They think I
am being taken care of somewhere, and have all I want. They are nothing
but good to me. I love them dearly; no people could ever be kinder to a
thankless creature than they always are to me. Do, do go away, for I am
afraid of you. I am afraid of myself when I feel my temper coming, and I
am as much afraid of you. Go away from me, and let me pray and cry
myself better!’

The day passed on; and again the wide stare stared itself out; and the
hot night was on Marseilles; and through it the caravan of the morning,
all dispersed, went their appointed ways. And thus ever by day and
night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the dusty hills and
toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by
sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one
another, move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life.




CHAPTER 3. Home


It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening
church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked
and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous.
Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of
the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire
despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down
almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling,
as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round.
Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish
relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no
rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient
world--all _taboo_ with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South
Sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home
again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe
but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind,
or raise it up. Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the
monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think
what a weary life he led, and make the best of it--or the worst,
according to the probabilities.

At such a happy time, so propitious to the interests of religion and
morality, Mr Arthur Clennam, newly arrived from Marseilles by way of
Dover, and by Dover coach the Blue-eyed Maid, sat in the window of a
coffee-house on Ludgate Hill. Ten thousand responsible houses surrounded
him, frowning as heavily on the streets they composed, as if they were
every one inhabited by the ten young men of the Calender’s story, who
blackened their faces and bemoaned their miseries every night. Fifty
thousand lairs surrounded him where people lived so unwholesomely that
fair water put into their crowded rooms on Saturday night, would be
corrupt on Sunday morning; albeit my lord, their county member, was
amazed that they failed to sleep in company with their butcher’s meat.
Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped
for air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass. Through
the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of
a fine fresh river. What secular want could the million or so of
human beings whose daily labour, six days in the week, lay among these
Arcadian objects, from the sweet sameness of which they had no escape
between the cradle and the grave--what secular want could they possibly
have upon their seventh day? Clearly they could want nothing but a
stringent policeman.

Mr Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill,
counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of
songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick
people it might be the death of in the course of the year. As the hour
approached, its changes of measure made it more and more exasperating.
At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively
importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church,
Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware
that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low
spirits, They _won’t_ come, they _won’t_ come, they _won’t_ come! At the
five minutes, it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the
neighbourhood for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per
second, as a groan of despair.

‘Thank Heaven!’ said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell
stopped.

But its sound had revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and the
procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march on.
‘Heaven forgive me,’ said he, ‘and those who trained me. How I have
hated this day!’

There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his hands
before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which commenced
business with the poor child by asking him in its title, why he was
going to Perdition?--a piece of curiosity that he really, in a frock and
drawers, was not in a condition to satisfy--and which, for the further
attraction of his infant mind, had a parenthesis in every other line
with some such hiccupping reference as 2 Ep. Thess. c. iii, v. 6 &
7. There was the sleepy Sunday of his boyhood, when, like a military
deserter, he was marched to chapel by a picquet of teachers three times
a day, morally handcuffed to another boy; and when he would willingly
have bartered two meals of indigestible sermon for another ounce or
two of inferior mutton at his scanty dinner in the flesh. There was the
interminable Sunday of his nonage; when his mother, stern of face and
unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible--bound, like her
own construction of it, in the hardest, barest, and straitest boards,
with one dinted ornament on the cover like the drag of a chain, and a
wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of the leaves--as if it, of
all books! were a fortification against sweetness of temper, natural
affection, and gentle intercourse. There was the resentful Sunday of a
little later, when he sat down glowering and glooming through the tardy
length of the day, with a sullen sense of injury in his heart, and no
more real knowledge of the beneficent history of the New Testament than
if he had been bred among idolaters. There was a legion of Sundays,
all days of unserviceable bitterness and mortification, slowly passing
before him.

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said a brisk waiter, rubbing the table. ‘Wish see
bed-room?’

‘Yes. I have just made up my mind to do it.’

‘Chaymaid!’ cried the waiter. ‘Gelen box num seven wish see room!’

‘Stay!’ said Clennam, rousing himself. ‘I was not thinking of what I
said; I answered mechanically. I am not going to sleep here. I am going
home.’

‘Deed, sir? Chaymaid! Gelen box num seven, not go sleep here, gome.’

He sat in the same place as the day died, looking at the dull houses
opposite, and thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitants
were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old
places of imprisonment. Sometimes a face would appear behind the dingy
glass of a window, and would fade away into the gloom as if it had seen
enough of life and had vanished out of it. Presently the rain began to
fall in slanting lines between him and those houses, and people began
to collect under cover of the public passage opposite, and to look out
hopelessly at the sky as the rain dropped thicker and faster. Then wet
umbrellas began to appear, draggled skirts, and mud. What the mud had
been doing with itself, or where it came from, who could say? But it
seemed to collect in a moment, as a crowd will, and in five minutes to
have splashed all the sons and daughters of Adam. The lamplighter was
going his rounds now; and as the fiery jets sprang up under his touch,
one might have fancied them astonished at being suffered to introduce
any show of brightness into such a dismal scene.

Mr Arthur Clennam took up his hat and buttoned his coat, and walked out.
In the country, the rain would have developed a thousand fresh scents,
and every drop would have had its bright association with some beautiful
form of growth or life. In the city, it developed only foul stale
smells, and was a sickly, lukewarm, dirt-stained, wretched addition to
the gutters.

He crossed by St Paul’s and went down, at a long angle, almost to the
water’s edge, through some of the crooked and descending streets which
lie (and lay more crookedly and closely then) between the river and
Cheapside. Passing, now the mouldy hall of some obsolete Worshipful
Company, now the illuminated windows of a Congregationless Church that
seemed to be waiting for some adventurous Belzoni to dig it out and
discover its history; passing silent warehouses and wharves, and here
and there a narrow alley leading to the river, where a wretched little
bill, FOUND DROWNED, was weeping on the wet wall; he came at last to the
house he sought. An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black,
standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square court-yard
where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying
much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty; behind it,
a jumble of roots. It was a double house, with long, narrow,
heavily-framed windows. Many years ago, it had had it in its mind to
slide down sideways; it had been propped up, however, and was leaning on
some half-dozen gigantic crutches: which gymnasium for the neighbouring
cats, weather-stained, smoke-blackened, and overgrown with weeds,
appeared in these latter days to be no very sure reliance.

‘Nothing changed,’ said the traveller, stopping to look round. ‘Dark and
miserable as ever. A light in my mother’s window, which seems never to
have been extinguished since I came home twice a year from school, and
dragged my box over this pavement. Well, well, well!’

He went up to the door, which had a projecting canopy in carved work
of festooned jack-towels and children’s heads with water on the brain,
designed after a once-popular monumental pattern, and knocked. A
shuffling step was soon heard on the stone floor of the hall, and the
door was opened by an old man, bent and dried, but with keen eyes.

He had a candle in his hand, and he held it up for a moment to assist
his keen eyes. ‘Ah, Mr Arthur?’ he said, without any emotion, ‘you are
come at last? Step in.’

Mr Arthur stepped in and shut the door.

‘Your figure is filled out, and set,’ said the old man, turning to look
at him with the light raised again, and shaking his head; ‘but you don’t
come up to your father in my opinion. Nor yet your mother.’

‘How is my mother?’

‘She is as she always is now. Keeps her room when not actually
bedridden, and hasn’t been out of it fifteen times in as many years,
Arthur.’ They had walked into a spare, meagre dining-room. The old man
had put the candlestick upon the table, and, supporting his right elbow
with his left hand, was smoothing his leathern jaws while he looked at
the visitor. The visitor offered his hand. The old man took it coldly
enough, and seemed to prefer his jaws, to which he returned as soon as
he could.

‘I doubt if your mother will approve of your coming home on the Sabbath,
Arthur,’ he said, shaking his head warily.

‘You wouldn’t have me go away again?’

‘Oh! I? I? I am not the master. It’s not what _I_ would have. I have
stood between your father and mother for a number of years. I don’t
pretend to stand between your mother and you.’

‘Will you tell her that I have come home?’

‘Yes, Arthur, yes. Oh, to be sure! I’ll tell her that you have come
home. Please to wait here. You won’t find the room changed.’ He took
another candle from a cupboard, lighted it, left the first on the table,
and went upon his errand. He was a short, bald old man, in a
high-shouldered black coat and waistcoat, drab breeches, and long drab
gaiters. He might, from his dress, have been either clerk or servant,
and in fact had long been both. There was nothing about him in the way
of decoration but a watch, which was lowered into the depths of its
proper pocket by an old black ribbon, and had a tarnished copper key
moored above it, to show where it was sunk. His head was awry, and
he had a one-sided, crab-like way with him, as if his foundations had
yielded at about the same time as those of the house, and he ought to
have been propped up in a similar manner.

‘How weak am I,’ said Arthur Clennam, when he was gone, ‘that I could
shed tears at this reception! I, who have never experienced anything
else; who have never expected anything else.’

He not only could, but did. It was the momentary yielding of a nature
that had been disappointed from the dawn of its perceptions, but had not
quite given up all its hopeful yearnings yet. He subdued it, took up the
candle, and examined the room. The old articles of furniture were in
their old places; the Plagues of Egypt, much the dimmer for the fly and
smoke plagues of London, were framed and glazed upon the walls. There
was the old cellaret with nothing in it, lined with lead, like a sort of
coffin in compartments; there was the old dark closet, also with nothing
in it, of which he had been many a time the sole contents, in days of
punishment, when he had regarded it as the veritable entrance to that
bourne to which the tract had found him galloping. There was the large,
hard-featured clock on the sideboard, which he used to see bending its
figured brows upon him with a savage joy when he was behind-hand with
his lessons, and which, when it was wound up once a week with an iron
handle, used to sound as if it were growling in ferocious anticipation
of the miseries into which it would bring him. But here was the old man
come back, saying, ‘Arthur, I’ll go before and light you.’

Arthur followed him up the staircase, which was panelled off into spaces
like so many mourning tablets, into a dim bed-chamber, the floor of
which had gradually so sunk and settled, that the fire-place was in a
dell. On a black bier-like sofa in this hollow, propped up behind with
one great angular black bolster like the block at a state execution in
the good old times, sat his mother in a widow’s dress.

She and his father had been at variance from his earliest remembrance.
To sit speechless himself in the midst of rigid silence, glancing in
dread from the one averted face to the other, had been the peacefullest
occupation of his childhood. She gave him one glassy kiss, and four
stiff fingers muffled in worsted. This embrace concluded, he sat down on
the opposite side of her little table. There was a fire in the grate,
as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a kettle on
the hob, as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a
little mound of damped ashes on the top of the fire, and another little
mound swept together under the grate, as there had been night and day
for fifteen years. There was a smell of black dye in the airless room,
which the fire had been drawing out of the crape and stuff of the
widow’s dress for fifteen months, and out of the bier-like sofa for
fifteen years.

‘Mother, this is a change from your old active habits.’

‘The world has narrowed to these dimensions, Arthur,’ she replied,
glancing round the room. ‘It is well for me that I never set my heart
upon its hollow vanities.’

The old influence of her presence and her stern strong voice, so
gathered about her son, that he felt conscious of a renewal of the timid
chill and reserve of his childhood.

‘Do you never leave your room, mother?’

‘What with my rheumatic affection, and what with its attendant debility
or nervous weakness--names are of no matter now--I have lost the use
of my limbs. I never leave my room. I have not been outside this door
for--tell him for how long,’ she said, speaking over her shoulder.

‘A dozen year next Christmas,’ returned a cracked voice out of the
dimness behind.

‘Is that Affery?’ said Arthur, looking towards it.

The cracked voice replied that it was Affery: and an old woman came
forward into what doubtful light there was, and kissed her hand once;
then subsided again into the dimness.

‘I am able,’ said Mrs Clennam, with a slight motion of her
worsted-muffled right hand toward a chair on wheels, standing before a
tall writing cabinet close shut up, ‘I am able to attend to my business
duties, and I am thankful for the privilege. It is a great privilege.
But no more of business on this day. It is a bad night, is it not?’

‘Yes, mother.’

‘Does it snow?’

‘Snow, mother? And we only yet in September?’

‘All seasons are alike to me,’ she returned, with a grim kind of
luxuriousness. ‘I know nothing of summer and winter, shut up here.
The Lord has been pleased to put me beyond all that.’ With her cold grey
eyes and her cold grey hair, and her immovable face, as stiff as the
folds of her stony head-dress,--her being beyond the reach of the
seasons seemed but a fit sequence to her being beyond the reach of all
changing emotions.

On her little table lay two or three books, her handkerchief, a pair of
steel spectacles newly taken off, and an old-fashioned gold watch in a
heavy double case. Upon this last object her son’s eyes and her own now
rested together.

‘I see that you received the packet I sent you on my father’s death,
safely, mother.’

‘You see.’

‘I never knew my father to show so much anxiety on any subject, as that
his watch should be sent straight to you.’

‘I keep it here as a remembrance of your father.’

‘It was not until the last, that he expressed the wish; when he could
only put his hand upon it, and very indistinctly say to me “your
mother.” A moment before, I thought him wandering in his mind, as he
had been for many hours--I think he had no consciousness of pain in his
short illness--when I saw him turn himself in his bed and try to open
it.’

‘Was your father, then, not wandering in his mind when he tried to open
it?’

‘No. He was quite sensible at that time.’

Mrs Clennam shook her head; whether in dismissal of the deceased or
opposing herself to her son’s opinion, was not clearly expressed.

‘After my father’s death I opened it myself, thinking there might be,
for anything I knew, some memorandum there. However, as I need not tell
you, mother, there was nothing but the old silk watch-paper worked in
beads, which you found (no doubt) in its place between the cases, where
I found and left it.’

Mrs Clennam signified assent; then added, ‘No more of business on this
day,’ and then added, ‘Affery, it is nine o’clock.’

Upon this, the old woman cleared the little table, went out of the room,
and quickly returned with a tray on which was a dish of little rusks and
a small precise pat of butter, cool, symmetrical, white, and plump. The
old man who had been standing by the door in one attitude during the
whole interview, looking at the mother up-stairs as he had looked at the
son down-stairs, went out at the same time, and, after a longer absence,
returned with another tray on which was the greater part of a bottle
of port wine (which, to judge by his panting, he had brought from the
cellar), a lemon, a sugar-basin, and a spice box. With these materials
and the aid of the kettle, he filled a tumbler with a hot and
odorous mixture, measured out and compounded with as much nicety as a
physician’s prescription. Into this mixture Mrs Clennam dipped certain
of the rusks, and ate them; while the old woman buttered certain other
of the rusks, which were to be eaten alone. When the invalid had eaten
all the rusks and drunk all the mixture, the two trays were removed;
and the books and the candle, watch, handkerchief, and spectacles were
replaced upon the table. She then put on the spectacles and read certain
passages aloud from a book--sternly, fiercely, wrathfully--praying that
her enemies (she made them by her tone and manner expressly hers) might
be put to the edge of the sword, consumed by fire, smitten by plagues
and leprosy, that their bones might be ground to dust, and that they
might be utterly exterminated. As she read on, years seemed to fall
away from her son like the imaginings of a dream, and all the old dark
horrors of his usual preparation for the sleep of an innocent child to
overshadow him.

She shut the book and remained for a little time with her face shaded by
her hand. So did the old man, otherwise still unchanged in attitude; so,
probably, did the old woman in her dimmer part of the room. Then the
sick woman was ready for bed.

‘Good night, Arthur. Affery will see to your accommodation. Only touch
me, for my hand is tender.’ He touched the worsted muffling of her
hand--that was nothing; if his mother had been sheathed in brass there
would have been no new barrier between them--and followed the old man
and woman down-stairs.

The latter asked him, when they were alone together among the heavy
shadows of the dining-room, would he have some supper?

‘No, Affery, no supper.’

‘You shall if you like,’ said Affery. ‘There’s her tomorrow’s partridge
in the larder--her first this year; say the word and I’ll cook it.’

No, he had not long dined, and could eat nothing.

‘Have something to drink, then,’ said Affery; ‘you shall have some of
her bottle of port, if you like. I’ll tell Jeremiah that you ordered me
to bring it you.’

No; nor would he have that, either.

‘It’s no reason, Arthur,’ said the old woman, bending over him to
whisper, ‘that because I am afeared of my life of ‘em, you should be.
You’ve got half the property, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Well then, don’t you be cowed. You’re clever, Arthur, an’t you?’

He nodded, as she seemed to expect an answer in the affirmative.

‘Then stand up against them! She’s awful clever, and none but a clever
one durst say a word to her. _He’s_ a clever one--oh, he’s a clever
one!--and he gives it her when he has a mind to’t, he does!’

‘Your husband does?’

‘Does? It makes me shake from head to foot, to hear him give it her. My
husband, Jeremiah Flintwinch, can conquer even your mother. What can he
be but a clever one to do that!’

His shuffling footstep coming towards them caused her to retreat to the
other end of the room. Though a tall, hard-favoured, sinewy old woman,
who in her youth might have enlisted in the Foot Guards without much
fear of discovery, she collapsed before the little keen-eyed crab-like
old man.

‘Now, Affery,’ said he, ‘now, woman, what are you doing? Can’t you find
Master Arthur something or another to pick at?’

Master Arthur repeated his recent refusal to pick at anything.

‘Very well, then,’ said the old man; ‘make his bed. Stir yourself.’ His
neck was so twisted that the knotted ends of his white cravat usually
dangled under one ear; his natural acerbity and energy, always
contending with a second nature of habitual repression, gave his
features a swollen and suffused look; and altogether, he had a weird
appearance of having hanged himself at one time or other, and of having
gone about ever since, halter and all, exactly as some timely hand had
cut him down.

‘You’ll have bitter words together to-morrow, Arthur; you and your
mother,’ said Jeremiah. ‘Your having given up the business on your
father’s death--which she suspects, though we have left it to you to
tell her--won’t go off smoothly.’

‘I have given up everything in life for the business, and the time came
for me to give up that.’

‘Good!’ cried Jeremiah, evidently meaning Bad. ‘Very good! only don’t
expect me to stand between your mother and you, Arthur. I stood between
your mother and your father, fending off this, and fending off that, and
getting crushed and pounded betwixt em; and I’ve done with such work.’

‘You will never be asked to begin it again for me, Jeremiah.’

‘Good. I’m glad to hear it; because I should have had to decline it, if
I had been. That’s enough--as your mother says--and more than enough of
such matters on a Sabbath night. Affery, woman, have you found what you
want yet?’

She had been collecting sheets and blankets from a press, and hastened
to gather them up, and to reply, ‘Yes, Jeremiah.’ Arthur Clennam helped
her by carrying the load himself, wished the old man good night, and
went up-stairs with her to the top of the house.

They mounted up and up, through the musty smell of an old close house,
little used, to a large garret bed-room. Meagre and spare, like all the
other rooms, it was even uglier and grimmer than the rest, by being the
place of banishment for the worn-out furniture. Its movables were ugly
old chairs with worn-out seats, and ugly old chairs without any seats;
a threadbare patternless carpet, a maimed table, a crippled wardrobe,
a lean set of fire-irons like the skeleton of a set deceased, a
washing-stand that looked as if it had stood for ages in a hail of
dirty soapsuds, and a bedstead with four bare atomies of posts, each
terminating in a spike, as if for the dismal accommodation of lodgers
who might prefer to impale themselves. Arthur opened the long low
window, and looked out upon the old blasted and blackened forest of
chimneys, and the old red glare in the sky, which had seemed to him once
upon a time but a nightly reflection of the fiery environment that was
presented to his childish fancy in all directions, let it look where it
would.

He drew in his head again, sat down at the bedside, and looked on at
Affery Flintwinch making the bed.

‘Affery, you were not married when I went away.’

She screwed her mouth into the form of saying ‘No,’ shook her head, and
proceeded to get a pillow into its case.

‘How did it happen?’

‘Why, Jeremiah, o’ course,’ said Affery, with an end of the pillow-case
between her teeth.

‘Of course he proposed it, but how did it all come about? I should have
thought that neither of you would have married; least of all should I
have thought of your marrying each other.’

‘No more should I,’ said Mrs Flintwinch, tying the pillow tightly in its
case.

‘That’s what I mean. When did you begin to think otherwise?’

‘Never begun to think otherwise at all,’ said Mrs Flintwinch.

Seeing, as she patted the pillow into its place on the bolster, that he
was still looking at her as if waiting for the rest of her reply,
she gave it a great poke in the middle, and asked, ‘How could I help
myself?’

‘How could you help yourself from being married!’

‘O’ course,’ said Mrs Flintwinch. ‘It was no doing o’ mine. I’d never
thought of it. I’d got something to do, without thinking, indeed! She
kept me to it (as well as he) when she could go about, and she could go
about then.’

‘Well?’

‘Well?’ echoed Mrs Flintwinch. ‘That’s what I said myself. Well! What’s
the use of considering? If them two clever ones have made up their minds
to it, what’s left for _me_ to do? Nothing.’

‘Was it my mother’s project, then?’

‘The Lord bless you, Arthur, and forgive me the wish!’ cried Affery,
speaking always in a low tone. ‘If they hadn’t been both of a mind in
it, how could it ever have been? Jeremiah never courted me; t’ant likely
that he would, after living in the house with me and ordering me
about for as many years as he’d done. He said to me one day, he said,
“Affery,” he said, “now I am going to tell you something. What do you
think of the name of Flintwinch?” “What do I think of it?” I says.
“Yes,” he said, “because you’re going to take it,” he said. “Take it?” I
says. “Jere-_mi_-ah?” Oh! he’s a clever one!’

Mrs Flintwinch went on to spread the upper sheet over the bed, and the
blanket over that, and the counterpane over that, as if she had quite
concluded her story.

‘Well?’ said Arthur again.

‘Well?’ echoed Mrs Flintwinch again. ‘How could I help myself? He said
to me, “Affery, you and me must be married, and I’ll tell you why. She’s
failing in health, and she’ll want pretty constant attendance up in
her room, and we shall have to be much with her, and there’ll be nobody
about now but ourselves when we’re away from her, and altogether it will
be more convenient. She’s of my opinion,” he said, “so if you’ll put
your bonnet on next Monday morning at eight, we’ll get it over.”’ Mrs
Flintwinch tucked up the bed.

‘Well?’

‘Well?’ repeated Mrs Flintwinch, ‘I think so! I sits me down and says
it. Well!--Jeremiah then says to me, “As to banns, next Sunday being the
third time of asking (for I’ve put ‘em up a fortnight), is my reason for
naming Monday. She’ll speak to you about it herself, and now she’ll find
you prepared, Affery.” That same day she spoke to me, and she said, “So,
Affery, I understand that you and Jeremiah are going to be married. I
am glad of it, and so are you, with reason. It is a very good thing for
you, and very welcome under the circumstances to me. He is a sensible
man, and a trustworthy man, and a persevering man, and a pious man.”
 What could I say when it had come to that? Why, if it had been--a
smothering instead of a wedding,’ Mrs Flintwinch cast about in her mind
with great pains for this form of expression, ‘I couldn’t have said a
word upon it, against them two clever ones.’

‘In good faith, I believe so.’

‘And so you may, Arthur.’

‘Affery, what girl was that in my mother’s room just now?’

‘Girl?’ said Mrs Flintwinch in a rather sharp key.

‘It was a girl, surely, whom I saw near you--almost hidden in the dark
corner?’

‘Oh! She? Little Dorrit? _She_‘s nothing; she’s a whim of--hers.’ It was a
peculiarity of Affery Flintwinch that she never spoke of Mrs Clennam
by name. ‘But there’s another sort of girls than that about. Have you
forgot your old sweetheart? Long and long ago, I’ll be bound.’

‘I suffered enough from my mother’s separating us, to remember her.
I recollect her very well.’

‘Have you got another?’

‘No.’

‘Here’s news for you, then. She’s well to do now, and a widow. And if
you like to have her, why you can.’

‘And how do you know that, Affery?’

‘Them two clever ones have been speaking about it.--There’s Jeremiah on
the stairs!’ She was gone in a moment.

Mrs Flintwinch had introduced into the web that his mind was busily
weaving, in that old workshop where the loom of his youth had stood, the
last thread wanting to the pattern. The airy folly of a boy’s love had
found its way even into that house, and he had been as wretched under
its hopelessness as if the house had been a castle of romance. Little
more than a week ago at Marseilles, the face of the pretty girl from
whom he had parted with regret, had had an unusual interest for him, and
a tender hold upon him, because of some resemblance, real or imagined,
to this first face that had soared out of his gloomy life into the
bright glories of fancy. He leaned upon the sill of the long low window,
and looking out upon the blackened forest of chimneys again, began to
dream; for it had been the uniform tendency of this man’s life--so much
was wanting in it to think about, so much that might have been better
directed and happier to speculate upon--to make him a dreamer, after
all.




CHAPTER 4. Mrs Flintwinch has a Dream


When Mrs Flintwinch dreamed, she usually dreamed, unlike the son of her
old mistress, with her eyes shut. She had a curiously vivid dream that
night, and before she had left the son of her old mistress many hours.
In fact it was not at all like a dream; it was so very real in every
respect. It happened in this wise.

The bed-chamber occupied by Mr and Mrs Flintwinch was within a few paces
of that to which Mrs Clennam had been so long confined. It was not on
the same floor, for it was a room at the side of the house, which was
approached by a steep descent of a few odd steps, diverging from the
main staircase nearly opposite to Mrs Clennam’s door. It could scarcely
be said to be within call, the walls, doors, and panelling of the old
place were so cumbrous; but it was within easy reach, in any undress,
at any hour of the night, in any temperature. At the head of the bed
and within a foot of Mrs Flintwinch’s ear, was a bell, the line of which
hung ready to Mrs Clennam’s hand. Whenever this bell rang, up started
Affery, and was in the sick room before she was awake.

Having got her mistress into bed, lighted her lamp, and given her good
night, Mrs Flintwinch went to roost as usual, saving that her lord had
not yet appeared. It was her lord himself who became--unlike the
last theme in the mind, according to the observation of most
philosophers--the subject of Mrs Flintwinch’s dream.

It seemed to her that she awoke after sleeping some hours, and found
Jeremiah not yet abed. That she looked at the candle she had left
burning, and, measuring the time like King Alfred the Great, was
confirmed by its wasted state in her belief that she had been asleep for
some considerable period. That she arose thereupon, muffled herself up
in a wrapper, put on her shoes, and went out on the staircase, much
surprised, to look for Jeremiah.

The staircase was as wooden and solid as need be, and Affery went
straight down it without any of those deviations peculiar to dreams.
She did not skim over it, but walked down it, and guided herself by the
banisters on account of her candle having died out. In one corner of
the hall, behind the house-door, there was a little waiting-room, like a
well-shaft, with a long narrow window in it as if it had been ripped up.
In this room, which was never used, a light was burning.

Mrs Flintwinch crossed the hall, feeling its pavement cold to her
stockingless feet, and peeped in between the rusty hinges on the door,
which stood a little open. She expected to see Jeremiah fast asleep or
in a fit, but he was calmly seated in a chair, awake, and in his usual
health. But what--hey?--Lord forgive us!--Mrs Flintwinch muttered some
ejaculation to this effect, and turned giddy.

For, Mr Flintwinch awake, was watching Mr Flintwinch asleep. He sat on
one side of the small table, looking keenly at himself on the other side
with his chin sunk on his breast, snoring. The waking Flintwinch had his
full front face presented to his wife; the sleeping Flintwinch was
in profile. The waking Flintwinch was the old original; the sleeping
Flintwinch was the double, just as she might have distinguished between
a tangible object and its reflection in a glass, Affery made out this
difference with her head going round and round.

If she had had any doubt which was her own Jeremiah, it would have been
resolved by his impatience. He looked about him for an offensive weapon,
caught up the snuffers, and, before applying them to the cabbage-headed
candle, lunged at the sleeper as though he would have run him through
the body.

‘Who’s that? What’s the matter?’ cried the sleeper, starting.

Mr Flintwinch made a movement with the snuffers, as if he would have
enforced silence on his companion by putting them down his throat; the
companion, coming to himself, said, rubbing his eyes, ‘I forgot where I
was.’

‘You have been asleep,’ snarled Jeremiah, referring to his watch, ‘two
hours. You said you would be rested enough if you had a short nap.’

‘I have had a short nap,’ said Double.

‘Half-past two o’clock in the morning,’ muttered Jeremiah. ‘Where’s your
hat? Where’s your coat? Where’s the box?’

‘All here,’ said Double, tying up his throat with sleepy carefulness in
a shawl. ‘Stop a minute. Now give me the sleeve--not that sleeve, the
other one. Ha! I’m not as young as I was.’ Mr Flintwinch had pulled
him into his coat with vehement energy. ‘You promised me a second glass
after I was rested.’

‘Drink it!’ returned Jeremiah, ‘and--choke yourself, I was going
to say--but go, I mean.’ At the same time he produced the identical
port-wine bottle, and filled a wine-glass.

‘Her port-wine, I believe?’ said Double, tasting it as if he were in the
Docks, with hours to spare. ‘Her health.’

He took a sip.

‘Your health!’

He took another sip.

‘His health!’

He took another sip.

‘And all friends round St Paul’s.’ He emptied and put down the
wine-glass half-way through this ancient civic toast, and took up the
box. It was an iron box some two feet square, which he carried under his
arms pretty easily. Jeremiah watched his manner of adjusting it, with
jealous eyes; tried it with his hands, to be sure that he had a firm
hold of it; bade him for his life be careful what he was about; and then
stole out on tiptoe to open the door for him. Affery, anticipating
the last movement, was on the staircase. The sequence of things was
so ordinary and natural, that, standing there, she could hear the door
open, feel the night air, and see the stars outside.

But now came the most remarkable part of the dream. She felt so afraid
of her husband, that being on the staircase, she had not the power to
retreat to her room (which she might easily have done before he had
fastened the door), but stood there staring. Consequently when he came
up the staircase to bed, candle in hand, he came full upon her. He
looked astonished, but said not a word. He kept his eyes upon her, and
kept advancing; and she, completely under his influence, kept retiring
before him. Thus, she walking backward and he walking forward, they
came into their own room. They were no sooner shut in there, than Mr
Flintwinch took her by the throat, and shook her until she was black in
the face.

‘Why, Affery, woman--Affery!’ said Mr Flintwinch. ‘What have you been
dreaming of? Wake up, wake up! What’s the matter?’

‘The--the matter, Jeremiah?’ gasped Mrs Flintwinch, rolling her eyes.

‘Why, Affery, woman--Affery! You have been getting out of bed in your
sleep, my dear! I come up, after having fallen asleep myself, below, and
find you in your wrapper here, with the nightmare. Affery, woman,’ said
Mr Flintwinch, with a friendly grin on his expressive countenance, ‘if
you ever have a dream of this sort again, it’ll be a sign of your being
in want of physic. And I’ll give you such a dose, old woman--such a
dose!’

Mrs Flintwinch thanked him and crept into bed.




CHAPTER 5. Family Affairs


As the city clocks struck nine on Monday morning, Mrs Clennam was
wheeled by Jeremiah Flintwinch of the cut-down aspect to her tall
cabinet. When she had unlocked and opened it, and had settled herself
at its desk, Jeremiah withdrew--as it might be, to hang himself more
effectually--and her son appeared.

‘Are you any better this morning, mother?’

She shook her head, with the same austere air of luxuriousness that she
had shown over-night when speaking of the weather. ‘I shall never be
better any more. It is well for me, Arthur, that I know it and can bear
it.’

Sitting with her hands laid separately upon the desk, and the tall
cabinet towering before her, she looked as if she were performing on a
dumb church organ. Her son thought so (it was an old thought with him),
while he took his seat beside it.

She opened a drawer or two, looked over some business papers, and put
them back again. Her severe face had no thread of relaxation in it, by
which any explorer could have been guided to the gloomy labyrinth of her
thoughts.

‘Shall I speak of our affairs, mother? Are you inclined to enter upon
business?’

‘Am I inclined, Arthur? Rather, are you? Your father has been dead a
year and more. I have been at your disposal, and waiting your pleasure,
ever since.’

‘There was much to arrange before I could leave; and when I did leave, I
travelled a little for rest and relief.’

She turned her face towards him, as not having heard or understood his
last words.

‘For rest and relief.’

She glanced round the sombre room, and appeared from the motion of her
lips to repeat the words to herself, as calling it to witness how little
of either it afforded her.

‘Besides, mother, you being sole executrix, and having the direction and
management of the estate, there remained little business, or I might say
none, that I could transact, until you had had time to arrange matters
to your satisfaction.’

‘The accounts are made out,’ she returned. ‘I have them here. The
vouchers have all been examined and passed. You can inspect them when
you like, Arthur; now, if you please.’

‘It is quite enough, mother, to know that the business is completed.
Shall I proceed then?’

‘Why not?’ she said, in her frozen way.

‘Mother, our House has done less and less for some years past, and our
dealings have been progressively on the decline. We have never shown
much confidence, or invited much; we have attached no people to us; the
track we have kept is not the track of the time; and we have been
left far behind. I need not dwell on this to you, mother. You know it
necessarily.’

‘I know what you mean,’ she answered, in a qualified tone.

‘Even this old house in which we speak,’ pursued her son, ‘is an
instance of what I say. In my father’s earlier time, and in his uncle’s
time before him, it was a place of business--really a place of business,
and business resort. Now, it is a mere anomaly and incongruity here, out
of date and out of purpose. All our consignments have long been made to
Rovinghams’ the commission-merchants; and although, as a check upon
them, and in the stewardship of my father’s resources, your judgment and
watchfulness have been actively exerted, still those qualities would
have influenced my father’s fortunes equally, if you had lived in any
private dwelling: would they not?’

‘Do you consider,’ she returned, without answering his question, ‘that
a house serves no purpose, Arthur, in sheltering your infirm and
afflicted--justly infirm and righteously afflicted--mother?’

‘I was speaking only of business purposes.’

‘With what object?’

‘I am coming to it.’

‘I foresee,’ she returned, fixing her eyes upon him, ‘what it is.
But the Lord forbid that I should repine under any visitation. In my
sinfulness I merit bitter disappointment, and I accept it.’

‘Mother, I grieve to hear you speak like this, though I have had my
apprehensions that you would--’

‘You knew I would. You knew _me_,’ she interrupted.

Her son paused for a moment. He had struck fire out of her, and was
surprised. ‘Well!’ she said, relapsing into stone. ‘Go on. Let me hear.’

‘You have anticipated, mother, that I decide for my part, to abandon
the business. I have done with it. I will not take upon myself to advise
you; you will continue it, I see. If I had any influence with you, I
would simply use it to soften your judgment of me in causing you this
disappointment: to represent to you that I have lived the half of a long
term of life, and have never before set my own will against yours. I
cannot say that I have been able to conform myself, in heart and spirit,
to your rules; I cannot say that I believe my forty years have been
profitable or pleasant to myself, or any one; but I have habitually
submitted, and I only ask you to remember it.’

Woe to the suppliant, if such a one there were or ever had been, who had
any concession to look for in the inexorable face at the cabinet. Woe to
the defaulter whose appeal lay to the tribunal where those severe eyes
presided. Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion,
veiled in gloom and darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and
destruction, flashing through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts as
we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for her. Smite
Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I would do,
and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower of stone she
built up to scale Heaven.

‘Have you finished, Arthur, or have you anything more to say to me? I
think there can be nothing else. You have been short, but full of matter!’

‘Mother, I have yet something more to say. It has been upon my mind,
night and day, this long time. It is far more difficult to say than what
I have said. That concerned myself; this concerns us all.’

‘Us all! Who are us all?’

‘Yourself, myself, my dead father.’

She took her hands from the desk; folded them in her lap; and sat
looking towards the fire, with the impenetrability of an old Egyptian
sculpture.

‘You knew my father infinitely better than I ever knew him; and his
reserve with me yielded to you. You were much the stronger, mother, and
directed him. As a child, I knew it as well as I know it now. I knew
that your ascendancy over him was the cause of his going to China to
take care of the business there, while you took care of it here (though
I do not even now know whether these were really terms of separation
that you agreed upon); and that it was your will that I should remain
with you until I was twenty, and then go to him as I did. You will not
be offended by my recalling this, after twenty years?’

‘I am waiting to hear why you recall it.’

He lowered his voice, and said, with manifest reluctance, and against
his will:

‘I want to ask you, mother, whether it ever occurred to you to
suspect--’

At the word Suspect, she turned her eyes momentarily upon her son, with
a dark frown. She then suffered them to seek the fire, as before; but
with the frown fixed above them, as if the sculptor of old Egypt had
indented it in the hard granite face, to frown for ages.

‘--that he had any secret remembrance which caused him trouble of
mind--remorse? Whether you ever observed anything in his conduct
suggesting that; or ever spoke to him upon it, or ever heard him hint at
such a thing?’

‘I do not understand what kind of secret remembrance you mean to infer
that your father was a prey to,’ she returned, after a silence. ‘You
speak so mysteriously.’

‘Is it possible, mother,’ her son leaned forward to be the nearer to her
while he whispered it, and laid his hand nervously upon her desk, ‘is
it possible, mother, that he had unhappily wronged any one, and made no
reparation?’

Looking at him wrathfully, she bent herself back in her chair to keep
him further off, but gave him no reply.

‘I am deeply sensible, mother, that if this thought has never at any
time flashed upon you, it must seem cruel and unnatural in me, even in
this confidence, to breathe it. But I cannot shake it off. Time and
change (I have tried both before breaking silence) do nothing to wear it
out.  Remember, I was with my father. Remember, I saw his face when he
gave the watch into my keeping, and struggled to express that he sent it
as a token you would understand, to you. Remember, I saw him at the last
with the pencil in his failing hand, trying to write some word for you
to read, but to which he could give no shape. The more remote and cruel
this vague suspicion that I have, the stronger the circumstances that
could give it any semblance of probability to me. For Heaven’s sake, let
us examine sacredly whether there is any wrong entrusted to us to set
right. No one can help towards it, mother, but you.’

Still so recoiling in her chair that her overpoised weight moved it,
from time to time, a little on its wheels, and gave her the appearance
of a phantom of fierce aspect gliding away from him, she interposed her
left arm, bent at the elbow with the back of her hand towards her face,
between herself and him, and looked at him in a fixed silence.

‘In grasping at money and in driving hard bargains--I have begun, and I
must speak of such things now, mother--some one may have been grievously
deceived, injured, ruined. You were the moving power of all this
machinery before my birth; your stronger spirit has been infused into
all my father’s dealings for more than two score years. You can set
these doubts at rest, I think, if you will really help me to discover
the truth. Will you, mother?’

He stopped in the hope that she would speak. But her grey hair was not
more immovable in its two folds, than were her firm lips.

‘If reparation can be made to any one, if restitution can be made to any
one, let us know it and make it. Nay, mother, if within my means, let _me_
make it. I have seen so little happiness come of money; it has brought
within my knowledge so little peace to this house, or to any one
belonging to it, that it is worth less to me than to another. It can buy
me nothing that will not be a reproach and misery to me, if I am haunted
by a suspicion that it darkened my father’s last hours with remorse, and
that it is not honestly and justly mine.’

There was a bell-rope hanging on the panelled wall, some two or three yards
from the cabinet. By a swift and sudden action of her foot, she drove her
wheeled chair rapidly back to it and pulled it violently--still holding her
arm up in its shield-like posture, as if he were striking at her, and she
warding off the blow.

A girl came hurrying in, frightened.

‘Send Flintwinch here!’

In a moment the girl had withdrawn, and the old man stood within the
door. ‘What! You’re hammer and tongs, already, you two?’ he said, coolly
stroking his face. ‘I thought you would be. I was pretty sure of it.’

‘Flintwinch!’ said the mother, ‘look at my son. Look at him!’

‘Well, I _am_ looking at him,’ said Flintwinch.

She stretched out the arm with which she had shielded herself, and as
she went on, pointed at the object of her anger.

‘In the very hour of his return almost--before the shoe upon his foot is
dry--he asperses his father’s memory to his mother! Asks his mother
to become, with him, a spy upon his father’s transactions through a
lifetime! Has misgivings that the goods of this world which we have
painfully got together early and late, with wear and tear and toil and
self-denial, are so much plunder; and asks to whom they shall be given
up, as reparation and restitution!’

Although she said this raging, she said it in a voice so far from being
beyond her control that it was even lower than her usual tone. She also
spoke with great distinctness.

‘Reparation!’ said she. ‘Yes, truly! It is easy for him to talk of
reparation, fresh from journeying and junketing in foreign lands, and
living a life of vanity and pleasure. But let him look at me, in prison,
and in bonds here. I endure without murmuring, because it is appointed
that I shall so make reparation for my sins. Reparation! Is there none
in this room? Has there been none here this fifteen years?’

Thus was she always balancing her bargains with the Majesty of heaven,
posting up the entries to her credit, strictly keeping her set-off, and
claiming her due. She was only remarkable in this, for the force
and emphasis with which she did it. Thousands upon thousands do it,
according to their varying manner, every day.

‘Flintwinch, give me that book!’

The old man handed it to her from the table. She put two fingers between
the leaves, closed the book upon them, and held it up to her son in
a threatening way.

‘In the days of old, Arthur, treated of in this commentary, there were
pious men, beloved of the Lord, who would have cursed their sons for
less than this: who would have sent them forth, and sent whole nations
forth, if such had supported them, to be avoided of God and man, and
perish, down to the baby at the breast. But I only tell you that if you
ever renew that theme with me, I will renounce you; I will so dismiss
you through that doorway, that you had better have been motherless from
your cradle. I will never see or know you more. And if, after all, you
were to come into this darkened room to look upon me lying dead, my body
should bleed, if I could make it, when you came near me.’

In part relieved by the intensity of this threat, and in part (monstrous
as the fact is) by a general impression that it was in some sort a
religious proceeding, she handed back the book to the old man, and was
silent.

‘Now,’ said Jeremiah; ‘premising that I’m not going to stand between you
two, will you let me ask (as I _have_ been called in, and made a third)
what is all this about?’

‘Take your version of it,’ returned Arthur, finding it left to him to
speak, ‘from my mother. Let it rest there. What I have said, was said to
my mother only.’

‘Oh!’ returned the old man. ‘From your mother? Take it from your mother?
Well! But your mother mentioned that you had been suspecting your father.
That’s not dutiful, Mr Arthur. Who will you be suspecting next?’

‘Enough,’ said Mrs Clennam, turning her face so that it was addressed
for the moment to the old man only. ‘Let no more be said about this.’

‘Yes, but stop a bit, stop a bit,’ the old man persisted. ‘Let us see
how we stand. Have you told Mr Arthur that he mustn’t lay offences at
his father’s door? That he has no right to do it? That he has no ground
to go upon?’

‘I tell him so now.’

‘Ah! Exactly,’ said the old man. ‘You tell him so now. You hadn’t told
him so before, and you tell him so now. Ay, ay! That’s right! You know I
stood between you and his father so long, that it seems as if death had
made no difference, and I was still standing between you. So I will, and
so in fairness I require to have that plainly put forward. Arthur, you
please to hear that you have no right to mistrust your father, and have
no ground to go upon.’

He put his hands to the back of the wheeled chair, and muttering to
himself, slowly wheeled his mistress back to her cabinet. ‘Now,’ he
resumed, standing behind her: ‘in case I should go away leaving things
half done, and so should be wanted again when you come to the other half
and get into one of your flights, has Arthur told you what he means to
do about the business?’

‘He has relinquished it.’

‘In favour of nobody, I suppose?’

Mrs Clennam glanced at her son, leaning against one of the windows. He
observed the look and said, ‘To my mother, of course. She does what she
pleases.’

‘And if any pleasure,’ she said after a short pause, ‘could arise for me
out of the disappointment of my expectations that my son, in the prime
of his life, would infuse new youth and strength into it, and make it
of great profit and power, it would be in advancing an old and faithful
servant. Jeremiah, the captain deserts the ship, but you and I will sink
or float with it.’

Jeremiah, whose eyes glistened as if they saw money, darted a sudden
look at the son, which seemed to say, ‘I owe _you_ no thanks for this;
_you_ have done nothing towards it!’ and then told the mother that he
thanked her, and that Affery thanked her, and that he would never desert
her, and that Affery would never desert her. Finally, he hauled up his
watch from its depths, and said, ‘Eleven. Time for your oysters!’ and with
that change of subject, which involved no change of expression or manner,
rang the bell.

But Mrs Clennam, resolved to treat herself with the greater rigour for
having been supposed to be unacquainted with reparation, refused to
eat her oysters when they were brought. They looked tempting; eight in
number, circularly set out on a white plate on a tray covered with a
white napkin, flanked by a slice of buttered French roll, and a little
compact glass of cool wine and water; but she resisted all persuasions,
and sent them down again--placing the act to her credit, no doubt, in
her Eternal Day-Book.

This refection of oysters was not presided over by Affery, but by the
girl who had appeared when the bell was rung; the same who had been in
the dimly-lighted room last night. Now that he had an opportunity of
observing her, Arthur found that her diminutive figure, small features,
and slight spare dress, gave her the appearance of being much younger
than she was. A woman, probably of not less than two-and-twenty, she
might have been passed in the street for little more than half that
age. Not that her face was very youthful, for in truth there was more
consideration and care in it than naturally belonged to her utmost
years; but she was so little and light, so noiseless and shy, and
appeared so conscious of being out of place among the three hard elders,
that she had all the manner and much of the appearance of a subdued
child.

In a hard way, and in an uncertain way that fluctuated between patronage
and putting down, the sprinkling from a watering-pot and hydraulic
pressure, Mrs Clennam showed an interest in this dependent. Even in the
moment of her entrance, upon the violent ringing of the bell, when the
mother shielded herself with that singular action from the son, Mrs
Clennam’s eyes had had some individual recognition in them, which seemed
reserved for her. As there are degrees of hardness in the hardest metal,
and shades of colour in black itself, so, even in the asperity of Mrs
Clennam’s demeanour towards all the rest of humanity and towards Little
Dorrit, there was a fine gradation.

Little Dorrit let herself out to do needlework. At so much a day--or at
so little--from eight to eight, Little Dorrit was to be hired. Punctual
to the moment, Little Dorrit appeared; punctual to the moment, Little
Dorrit vanished. What became of Little Dorrit between the two eights was
a mystery.

Another of the moral phenomena of Little Dorrit. Besides her
consideration money, her daily contract included meals. She had an
extraordinary repugnance to dining in company; would never do so, if
it were possible to escape. Would always plead that she had this bit of
work to begin first, or that bit of work to finish first; and would, of
a certainty, scheme and plan--not very cunningly, it would seem, for she
deceived no one--to dine alone. Successful in this, happy in carrying
off her plate anywhere, to make a table of her lap, or a box, or the
ground, or even as was supposed, to stand on tip-toe, dining moderately
at a mantel-shelf; the great anxiety of Little Dorrit’s day was set at
rest.

It was not easy to make out Little Dorrit’s face; she was so retiring,
plied her needle in such removed corners, and started away so scared if
encountered on the stairs. But it seemed to be a pale transparent face,
quick in expression, though not beautiful in feature, its soft hazel
eyes excepted. A delicately bent head, a tiny form, a quick little pair
of busy hands, and a shabby dress--it must needs have been very shabby
to look at all so, being so neat--were Little Dorrit as she sat at work.

For these particulars or generalities concerning Little Dorrit, Mr
Arthur was indebted in the course of the day to his own eyes and to Mrs
Affery’s tongue. If Mrs Affery had had any will or way of her own, it
would probably have been unfavourable to Little Dorrit. But as ‘them two
clever ones’--Mrs Affery’s perpetual reference, in whom her personality
was swallowed up--were agreed to accept Little Dorrit as a matter of
course, she had nothing for it but to follow suit. Similarly, if the
two clever ones had agreed to murder Little Dorrit by candlelight, Mrs
Affery, being required to hold the candle, would no doubt have done it.

In the intervals of roasting the partridge for the invalid chamber, and
preparing a baking-dish of beef and pudding for the dining-room, Mrs
Affery made the communications above set forth; invariably putting
her head in at the door again after she had taken it out, to enforce
resistance to the two clever ones. It appeared to have become a perfect
passion with Mrs Flintwinch, that the only son should be pitted against
them.

In the course of the day, too, Arthur looked through the whole house.
Dull and dark he found it. The gaunt rooms, deserted for years upon
years, seemed to have settled down into a gloomy lethargy from which
nothing could rouse them again. The furniture, at once spare and
lumbering, hid in the rooms rather than furnished them, and there was
no colour in all the house; such colour as had ever been there, had long
ago started away on lost sunbeams--got itself absorbed, perhaps, into
flowers, butterflies, plumage of birds, precious stones, what not. There
was not one straight floor from the foundation to the roof; the ceilings
were so fantastically clouded by smoke and dust, that old women might
have told fortunes in them better than in grouts of tea; the dead-cold
hearths showed no traces of having ever been warmed but in heaps of soot
that had tumbled down the chimneys, and eddied about in little
dusky whirlwinds when the doors were opened. In what had once been
a drawing-room, there were a pair of meagre mirrors, with dismal
processions of black figures carrying black garlands, walking round
the frames; but even these were short of heads and legs, and one
undertaker-like Cupid had swung round on its own axis and got upside
down, and another had fallen off altogether. The room Arthur Clennam’s
deceased father had occupied for business purposes, when he first
remembered him, was so unaltered that he might have been imagined still
to keep it invisibly, as his visible relict kept her room up-stairs;
Jeremiah Flintwinch still going between them negotiating. His picture,
dark and gloomy, earnestly speechless on the wall, with the eyes
intently looking at his son as they had looked when life departed from
them, seemed to urge him awfully to the task he had attempted; but as
to any yielding on the part of his mother, he had now no hope, and as to
any other means of setting his distrust at rest, he had abandoned hope a
long time. Down in the cellars, as up in the bed-chambers, old objects
that he well remembered were changed by age and decay, but were still in
their old places; even to empty beer-casks hoary with cobwebs, and empty
wine-bottles with fur and fungus choking up their throats. There, too,
among unusual bottle-racks and pale slants of light from the yard above,
was the strong room stored with old ledgers, which had as musty and
corrupt a smell as if they were regularly balanced, in the dead small
hours, by a nightly resurrection of old book-keepers.

The baking-dish was served up in a penitential manner on a shrunken
cloth at an end of the dining-table, at two o’clock, when he dined with
Mr Flintwinch, the new partner. Mr Flintwinch informed him that his
mother had recovered her equanimity now, and that he need not fear her
again alluding to what had passed in the morning. ‘And don’t you lay
offences at your father’s door, Mr Arthur,’ added Jeremiah, ‘once for
all, don’t do it! Now, we have done with the subject.’

Mr Flintwinch had been already rearranging and dusting his own
particular little office, as if to do honour to his accession to new
dignity. He resumed this occupation when he was replete with beef, had
sucked up all the gravy in the baking-dish with the flat of his knife,
and had drawn liberally on a barrel of small beer in the scullery. Thus
refreshed, he tucked up his shirt-sleeves and went to work again; and Mr
Arthur, watching him as he set about it, plainly saw that his father’s
picture, or his father’s grave, would be as communicative with him as
this old man.

‘Now, Affery, woman,’ said Mr Flintwinch, as she crossed the hall. ‘You
hadn’t made Mr Arthur’s bed when I was up there last. Stir yourself.
Bustle.’

But Mr Arthur found the house so blank and dreary, and was so unwilling
to assist at another implacable consignment of his mother’s enemies
(perhaps himself among them) to mortal disfigurement and immortal ruin,
that he announced his intention of lodging at the coffee-house where he
had left his luggage. Mr Flintwinch taking kindly to the idea of getting
rid of him, and his mother being indifferent, beyond considerations of
saving, to most domestic arrangements that were not bounded by the walls
of her own chamber, he easily carried this point without new offence.
Daily business hours were agreed upon, which his mother, Mr Flintwinch,
and he, were to devote together to a necessary checking of books and
papers; and he left the home he had so lately found, with depressed
heart.

But Little Dorrit?

The business hours, allowing for intervals of invalid regimen of oysters
and partridges, during which Clennam refreshed himself with a walk,
were from ten to six for about a fortnight. Sometimes Little Dorrit was
employed at her needle, sometimes not, sometimes appeared as a humble
visitor: which must have been her character on the occasion of his
arrival. His original curiosity augmented every day, as he watched for
her, saw or did not see her, and speculated about her. Influenced by his
predominant idea, he even fell into a habit of discussing with himself
the possibility of her being in some way associated with it. At last he
resolved to watch Little Dorrit and know more of her story.




CHAPTER 6. The Father of the Marshalsea


Thirty years ago there stood, a few doors short of the church of Saint
George, in the borough of Southwark, on the left-hand side of the way
going southward, the Marshalsea Prison. It had stood there many years
before, and it remained there some years afterwards; but it is gone now,
and the world is none the worse without it.

It was an oblong pile of barrack building, partitioned into squalid
houses standing back to back, so that there were no back rooms;
environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at
top. Itself a close and confined prison for debtors, it contained within
it a much closer and more confined jail for smugglers. Offenders against
the revenue laws, and defaulters to excise or customs who had incurred
fines which they were unable to pay, were supposed to be incarcerated
behind an iron-plated door closing up a second prison, consisting of a
strong cell or two, and a blind alley some yard and a half wide, which
formed the mysterious termination of the very limited skittle-ground in
which the Marshalsea debtors bowled down their troubles.

Supposed to be incarcerated there, because the time had rather outgrown
the strong cells and the blind alley. In practice they had come to be
considered a little too bad, though in theory they were quite as good as
ever; which may be observed to be the case at the present day with other
cells that are not at all strong, and with other blind alleys that are
stone-blind. Hence the smugglers habitually consorted with the debtors
(who received them with open arms), except at certain constitutional
moments when somebody came from some Office, to go through some form of
overlooking something which neither he nor anybody else knew anything
about. On these truly British occasions, the smugglers, if any, made a
feint of walking into the strong cells and the blind alley, while this
somebody pretended to do his something: and made a reality of walking
out again as soon as he hadn’t done it--neatly epitomising the
administration of most of the public affairs in our right little, tight
little, island.

There had been taken to the Marshalsea Prison, long before the day when
the sun shone on Marseilles and on the opening of this narrative, a
debtor with whom this narrative has some concern.

He was, at that time, a very amiable and very helpless middle-aged
gentleman, who was going out again directly. Necessarily, he was going
out again directly, because the Marshalsea lock never turned upon a
debtor who was not. He brought in a portmanteau with him, which he
doubted its being worth while to unpack; he was so perfectly clear--like
all the rest of them, the turnkey on the lock said--that he was going
out again directly.

He was a shy, retiring man; well-looking, though in an effeminate style;
with a mild voice, curling hair, and irresolute hands--rings upon the
fingers in those days--which nervously wandered to his trembling lip a
hundred times in the first half-hour of his acquaintance with the jail.
His principal anxiety was about his wife.

‘Do you think, sir,’ he asked the turnkey, ‘that she will be very much
shocked, if she should come to the gate to-morrow morning?’

The turnkey gave it as the result of his experience that some of ‘em was
and some of ‘em wasn’t. In general, more no than yes. ‘What like is she,
you see?’ he philosophically asked: ‘that’s what it hinges on.’

‘She is very delicate and inexperienced indeed.’

‘That,’ said the turnkey, ‘is agen her.’

‘She is so little used to go out alone,’ said the debtor, ‘that I am at
a loss to think how she will ever make her way here, if she walks.’

‘P’raps,’ quoth the turnkey, ‘she’ll take a ackney coach.’

‘Perhaps.’ The irresolute fingers went to the trembling lip. ‘I hope she
will. She may not think of it.’

‘Or p’raps,’ said the turnkey, offering his suggestions from the the top
of his well-worn wooden stool, as he might have offered them to a child
for whose weakness he felt a compassion, ‘p’raps she’ll get her brother,
or her sister, to come along with her.’

‘She has no brother or sister.’

‘Niece, nevy, cousin, serwant, young ‘ooman, greengrocer.--Dash it! One
or another on ‘em,’ said the turnkey, repudiating beforehand the refusal
of all his suggestions.

‘I fear--I hope it is not against the rules--that she will bring the
children.’

‘The children?’ said the turnkey. ‘And the rules? Why, lord set you
up like a corner pin, we’ve a reg’lar playground o’ children here.
Children! Why we swarm with ‘em. How many a you got?’

‘Two,’ said the debtor, lifting his irresolute hand to his lip again,
and turning into the prison.

The turnkey followed him with his eyes. ‘And you another,’ he observed
to himself, ‘which makes three on you. And your wife another, I’ll lay
a crown. Which makes four on you. And another coming, I’ll lay
half-a-crown. Which’ll make five on you. And I’ll go another seven and
sixpence to name which is the helplessest, the unborn baby or you!’

He was right in all his particulars. She came next day with a little
boy of three years old, and a little girl of two, and he stood entirely
corroborated.

‘Got a room now; haven’t you?’ the turnkey asked the debtor after a week
or two.

‘Yes, I have got a very good room.’

‘Any little sticks a coming to furnish it?’ said the turnkey.

‘I expect a few necessary articles of furniture to be delivered by the
carrier, this afternoon.’

‘Missis and little ‘uns a coming to keep you company?’ asked the
turnkey.

‘Why, yes, we think it better that we should not be scattered, even for
a few weeks.’

‘Even for a few weeks, _of_ course,’ replied the turnkey. And he followed
him again with his eyes, and nodded his head seven times when he was
gone.

The affairs of this debtor were perplexed by a partnership, of which he
knew no more than that he had invested money in it; by legal matters
of assignment and settlement, conveyance here and conveyance there,
suspicion of unlawful preference of creditors in this direction, and of
mysterious spiriting away of property in that; and as nobody on the face
of the earth could be more incapable of explaining any single item in
the heap of confusion than the debtor himself, nothing comprehensible
could be made of his case. To question him in detail, and endeavour
to reconcile his answers; to closet him with accountants and sharp
practitioners, learned in the wiles of insolvency and bankruptcy; was
only to put the case out at compound interest and incomprehensibility.
The irresolute fingers fluttered more and more ineffectually about the
trembling lip on every such occasion, and the sharpest practitioners
gave him up as a hopeless job.

‘Out?’ said the turnkey, ‘_he_‘ll never get out, unless his creditors take
him by the shoulders and shove him out.’

He had been there five or six months, when he came running to this
turnkey one forenoon to tell him, breathless and pale, that his wife was
ill.

‘As anybody might a known she would be,’ said the turnkey.

‘We intended,’ he returned, ‘that she should go to a country lodging
only to-morrow. What am I to do! Oh, good heaven, what am I to do!’

‘Don’t waste your time in clasping your hands and biting your fingers,’
responded the practical turnkey, taking him by the elbow, ‘but come
along with me.’

The turnkey conducted him--trembling from head to foot, and constantly
crying under his breath, What was he to do! while his irresolute fingers
bedabbled the tears upon his face--up one of the common staircases in
the prison to a door on the garret story. Upon which door the turnkey
knocked with the handle of his key.

‘Come in!’ cried a voice inside.

The turnkey, opening the door, disclosed in a wretched, ill-smelling
little room, two hoarse, puffy, red-faced personages seated at a
rickety table, playing at all-fours, smoking pipes, and drinking brandy.

‘Doctor,’ said the turnkey, ‘here’s a gentleman’s wife in want of you
without a minute’s loss of time!’

The doctor’s friend was in the positive degree of hoarseness, puffiness,
red-facedness, all-fours, tobacco, dirt, and brandy; the doctor in
the comparative--hoarser, puffier, more red-faced, more all-fourey,
tobaccoer, dirtier, and brandier. The doctor was amazingly shabby, in
a torn and darned rough-weather sea-jacket, out at elbows and eminently
short of buttons (he had been in his time the experienced surgeon
carried by a passenger ship), the dirtiest white trousers conceivable by
mortal man, carpet slippers, and no visible linen. ‘Childbed?’ said
the doctor. ‘I’m the boy!’ With that the doctor took a comb from the
chimney-piece and stuck his hair upright--which appeared to be his
way of washing himself--produced a professional chest or case, of most
abject appearance, from the cupboard where his cup and saucer and coals
were, settled his chin in the frowsy wrapper round his neck, and became
a ghastly medical scarecrow.

The doctor and the debtor ran down-stairs, leaving the turnkey to return
to the lock, and made for the debtor’s room. All the ladies in the
prison had got hold of the news, and were in the yard. Some of them
had already taken possession of the two children, and were hospitably
carrying them off; others were offering loans of little comforts from
their own scanty store; others were sympathising with the greatest
volubility. The gentlemen prisoners, feeling themselves at a
disadvantage, had for the most part retired, not to say sneaked,
to their rooms; from the open windows of which some of them now
complimented the doctor with whistles as he passed below, while others,
with several stories between them, interchanged sarcastic references to
the prevalent excitement.

It was a hot summer day, and the prison rooms were baking between the
high walls. In the debtor’s confined chamber, Mrs Bangham, charwoman and
messenger, who was not a prisoner (though she had been once), but
was the popular medium of communication with the outer world, had
volunteered her services as fly-catcher and general attendant. The walls
and ceiling were blackened with flies. Mrs Bangham, expert in sudden
device, with one hand fanned the patient with a cabbage leaf, and with
the other set traps of vinegar and sugar in gallipots; at the same time
enunciating sentiments of an encouraging and congratulatory nature,
adapted to the occasion.

‘The flies trouble you, don’t they, my dear?’ said Mrs Bangham. ‘But
p’raps they’ll take your mind off of it, and do you good. What between
the buryin ground, the grocer’s, the waggon-stables, and the paunch
trade, the Marshalsea flies gets very large. P’raps they’re sent as a
consolation, if we only know’d it. How are you now, my dear? No better?
No, my dear, it ain’t to be expected; you’ll be worse before you’re
better, and you know it, don’t you? Yes. That’s right! And to think of
a sweet little cherub being born inside the lock! Now ain’t it pretty,
ain’t _that_ something to carry you through it pleasant? Why, we ain’t
had such a thing happen here, my dear, not for I couldn’t name the time
when. And you a crying too?’ said Mrs Bangham, to rally the patient more
and more. ‘You! Making yourself so famous! With the flies a falling into
the gallipots by fifties! And everything a going on so well! And here if
there ain’t,’ said Mrs Bangham as the door opened, ‘if there ain’t your
dear gentleman along with Dr Haggage! And now indeed we _are_ complete, I
_think_!’

The doctor was scarcely the kind of apparition to inspire a patient
with a sense of absolute completeness, but as he presently delivered the
opinion, ‘We are as right as we can be, Mrs Bangham, and we shall
come out of this like a house afire;’ and as he and Mrs Bangham took
possession of the poor helpless pair, as everybody else and anybody else
had always done, the means at hand were as good on the whole as better
would have been. The special feature in Dr Haggage’s treatment of the
case, was his determination to keep Mrs Bangham up to the mark. As thus:

‘Mrs Bangham,’ said the doctor, before he had been there twenty minutes,
‘go outside and fetch a little brandy, or we shall have you giving in.’

‘Thank you, sir. But none on my accounts,’ said Mrs Bangham.

‘Mrs Bangham,’ returned the doctor, ‘I am in professional attendance
on this lady, and don’t choose to allow any discussion on your part. Go
outside and fetch a little brandy, or I foresee that you’ll break down.’

‘You’re to be obeyed, sir,’ said Mrs Bangham, rising. ‘If you was to put
your own lips to it, I think you wouldn’t be the worse, for you look but
poorly, sir.’

‘Mrs Bangham,’ returned the doctor, ‘I am not your business, thank you,
but you are mine. Never you mind _me_, if you please. What you have got to
do, is, to do as you are told, and to go and get what I bid you.’

Mrs Bangham submitted; and the doctor, having administered her
potion, took his own. He repeated the treatment every hour, being very
determined with Mrs Bangham. Three or four hours passed; the flies
fell into the traps by hundreds; and at length one little life, hardly
stronger than theirs, appeared among the multitude of lesser deaths.

‘A very nice little girl indeed,’ said the doctor; ‘little, but
well-formed. Halloa, Mrs Bangham! You’re looking queer! You be off,
ma’am, this minute, and fetch a little more brandy, or we shall have you
in hysterics.’

By this time, the rings had begun to fall from the debtor’s irresolute
hands, like leaves from a wintry tree. Not one was left upon them that
night, when he put something that chinked into the doctor’s greasy palm.
In the meantime Mrs Bangham had been out on an errand to a neighbouring
establishment decorated with three golden balls, where she was very well
known.

‘Thank you,’ said the doctor, ‘thank you. Your good lady is quite
composed. Doing charmingly.’

‘I am very happy and very thankful to know it,’ said the debtor, ‘though
I little thought once, that--’

‘That a child would be born to you in a place like this?’ said the
doctor. ‘Bah, bah, sir, what does it signify? A little more elbow-room
is all we want here. We are quiet here; we don’t get badgered here;
there’s no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors and bring a
man’s heart into his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a man’s at
home, and to say he’ll stand on the door mat till he is. Nobody writes
threatening letters about money to this place. It’s freedom, sir, it’s
freedom! I have had to-day’s practice at home and abroad, on a march,
and aboard ship, and I’ll tell you this: I don’t know that I have ever
pursued it under such quiet circumstances as here this day. Elsewhere,
people are restless, worried, hurried about, anxious respecting one
thing, anxious respecting another. Nothing of the kind here, sir. We
have done all that--we know the worst of it; we have got to the bottom,
we can’t fall, and what have we found? Peace. That’s the word for
it. Peace.’ With this profession of faith, the doctor, who was an old
jail-bird, and was more sodden than usual, and had the additional and
unusual stimulus of money in his pocket, returned to his associate and
chum in hoarseness, puffiness, red-facedness, all-fours, tobacco, dirt,
and brandy.

Now, the debtor was a very different man from the doctor, but he had
already begun to travel, by his opposite segment of the circle, to the
same point. Crushed at first by his imprisonment, he had soon found a
dull relief in it. He was under lock and key; but the lock and key that
kept him in, kept numbers of his troubles out. If he had been a man with
strength of purpose to face those troubles and fight them, he might have
broken the net that held him, or broken his heart; but being what he
was, he languidly slipped into this smooth descent, and never more took
one step upward.

When he was relieved of the perplexed affairs that nothing would make
plain, through having them returned upon his hands by a dozen agents in
succession who could make neither beginning, middle, nor end of them or
him, he found his miserable place of refuge a quieter refuge than it
had been before. He had unpacked the portmanteau long ago; and his elder
children now played regularly about the yard, and everybody knew the
baby, and claimed a kind of proprietorship in her.

‘Why, I’m getting proud of you,’ said his friend the turnkey, one day.
‘You’ll be the oldest inhabitant soon. The Marshalsea wouldn’t be like
the Marshalsea now, without you and your family.’

The turnkey really was proud of him. He would mention him in laudatory
terms to new-comers, when his back was turned. ‘You took notice of him,’
he would say, ‘that went out of the lodge just now?’

New-comer would probably answer Yes.

‘Brought up as a gentleman, he was, if ever a man was. Ed’cated at no
end of expense. Went into the Marshal’s house once to try a new piano
for him. Played it, I understand, like one o’clock--beautiful! As to
languages--speaks anything. We’ve had a Frenchman here in his time, and
it’s my opinion he knowed more French than the Frenchman did. We’ve had
an Italian here in his time, and he shut _him_ up in about half a minute.
You’ll find some characters behind other locks, I don’t say you won’t;
but if you want the top sawyer in such respects as I’ve mentioned, you
must come to the Marshalsea.’

When his youngest child was eight years old, his wife, who had long been
languishing away--of her own inherent weakness, not that she retained
any greater sensitiveness as to her place of abode than he did--went
upon a visit to a poor friend and old nurse in the country, and died
there. He remained shut up in his room for a fortnight afterwards;
and an attorney’s clerk, who was going through the Insolvent Court,
engrossed an address of condolence to him, which looked like a Lease,
and which all the prisoners signed. When he appeared again he was
greyer (he had soon begun to turn grey); and the turnkey noticed that
his hands went often to his trembling lips again, as they had used to do
when he first came in. But he got pretty well over it in a month or
two; and in the meantime the children played about the yard as regularly
as ever, but in black.

Then Mrs Bangham, long popular medium of communication with the outer
world, began to be infirm, and to be found oftener than usual comatose
on pavements, with her basket of purchases spilt, and the change of her
clients ninepence short. His son began to supersede Mrs Bangham, and
to execute commissions in a knowing manner, and to be of the prison
prisonous, of the streets streety.

Time went on, and the turnkey began to fail. His chest swelled, and his
legs got weak, and he was short of breath. The well-worn wooden stool
was ‘beyond him,’ he complained. He sat in an arm-chair with a cushion,
and sometimes wheezed so, for minutes together, that he couldn’t turn
the key. When he was overpowered by these fits, the debtor often turned
it for him.

‘You and me,’ said the turnkey, one snowy winter’s night when the lodge,
with a bright fire in it, was pretty full of company, ‘is the oldest
inhabitants. I wasn’t here myself above seven year before you. I shan’t
last long. When I’m off the lock for good and all, you’ll be the Father
of the Marshalsea.’

The turnkey went off the lock of this world next day. His words were
remembered and repeated; and tradition afterwards handed down from
generation to generation--a Marshalsea generation might be calculated as
about three months--that the shabby old debtor with the soft manner and
the white hair, was the Father of the Marshalsea.

And he grew to be proud of the title. If any impostor had arisen to
claim it, he would have shed tears in resentment of the attempt to
deprive him of his rights. A disposition began to be perceived in him
to exaggerate the number of years he had been there; it was generally
understood that you must deduct a few from his account; he was vain, the
fleeting generations of debtors said.

All new-comers were presented to him. He was punctilious in the exaction
of this ceremony. The wits would perform the office of introduction with
overcharged pomp and politeness, but they could not easily overstep his
sense of its gravity. He received them in his poor room (he disliked an
introduction in the mere yard, as informal--a thing that might happen
to anybody), with a kind of bowed-down beneficence. They were welcome to
the Marshalsea, he would tell them. Yes, he was the Father of the place.
So the world was kind enough to call him; and so he was, if more than
twenty years of residence gave him a claim to the title. It looked
small at first, but there was very good company there--among a
mixture--necessarily a mixture--and very good air.

It became a not unusual circumstance for letters to be put under his
door at night, enclosing half-a-crown, two half-crowns, now and then at
long intervals even half-a-sovereign, for the Father of the Marshalsea.
‘With the compliments of a collegian taking leave.’ He received the
gifts as tributes, from admirers, to a public character. Sometimes
these correspondents assumed facetious names, as the Brick, Bellows, Old
Gooseberry, Wideawake, Snooks, Mops, Cutaway, the Dogs-meat Man; but he
considered this in bad taste, and was always a little hurt by it.

In the fulness of time, this correspondence showing signs of wearing
out, and seeming to require an effort on the part of the correspondents
to which in the hurried circumstances of departure many of them might
not be equal, he established the custom of attending collegians of
a certain standing, to the gate, and taking leave of them there. The
collegian under treatment, after shaking hands, would occasionally
stop to wrap up something in a bit of paper, and would come back again
calling ‘Hi!’

He would look round surprised.’Me?’ he would say, with a smile.

By this time the collegian would be up with him, and he would paternally
add, VWhat have you forgotten? What can I do for you?’

‘I forgot to leave this,’ the collegian would usually return, ‘for the
Father of the Marshalsea.’

‘My good sir,’ he would rejoin, ‘he is infinitely obliged to you.’ But,
to the last, the irresolute hand of old would remain in the pocket into
which he had slipped the money during two or three turns about the yard,
lest the transaction should be too conspicuous to the general body of
collegians.

One afternoon he had been doing the honours of the place to a rather
large party of collegians, who happened to be going out, when, as he was
coming back, he encountered one from the poor side who had been taken in
execution for a small sum a week before, had ‘settled’ in the course of
that afternoon, and was going out too. The man was a mere Plasterer in
his working dress; had his wife with him, and a bundle; and was in high
spirits.

‘God bless you, sir,’ he said in passing.

‘And you,’ benignantly returned the Father of the Marshalsea.

They were pretty far divided, going their several ways, when the
Plasterer called out, ‘I say!--sir!’ and came back to him.

‘It ain’t much,’ said the Plasterer, putting a little pile of halfpence
in his hand, ‘but it’s well meant.’

The Father of the Marshalsea had never been offered tribute in copper
yet. His children often had, and with his perfect acquiescence it had
gone into the common purse to buy meat that he had eaten, and drink that
he had drunk; but fustian splashed with white lime, bestowing halfpence
on him, front to front, was new.

‘How dare you!’ he said to the man, and feebly burst into tears.

The Plasterer turned him towards the wall, that his face might not be
seen; and the action was so delicate, and the man was so penetrated with
repentance, and asked pardon so honestly, that he could make him no less
acknowledgment than, ‘I know you meant it kindly. Say no more.’

‘Bless your soul, sir,’ urged the Plasterer, ‘I did indeed. I’d do more
by you than the rest of ‘em do, I fancy.’

‘What would you do?’ he asked.

‘I’d come back to see you, after I was let out.’

‘Give me the money again,’ said the other, eagerly, ‘and I’ll keep it,
and never spend it. Thank you for it, thank you! I shall see you again?’

‘If I live a week you shall.’

They shook hands and parted. The collegians, assembled in Symposium in
the Snuggery that night, marvelled what had happened to their Father; he
walked so late in the shadows of the yard, and seemed so downcast.




CHAPTER 7. The Child of the Marshalsea


The baby whose first draught of air had been tinctured with Doctor
Haggage’s brandy, was handed down among the generations of collegians,
like the tradition of their common parent. In the earlier stages of her
existence, she was handed down in a literal and prosaic sense; it being
almost a part of the entrance footing of every new collegian to nurse
the child who had been born in the college.

‘By rights,’ remarked the turnkey when she was first shown to him, ‘I
ought to be her godfather.’

The debtor irresolutely thought of it for a minute, and said, ‘Perhaps
you wouldn’t object to really being her godfather?’

‘Oh! _I_ don’t object,’ replied the turnkey, ‘if you don’t.’

Thus it came to pass that she was christened one Sunday afternoon, when
the turnkey, being relieved, was off the lock; and that the turnkey
went up to the font of Saint George’s Church, and promised and vowed and
renounced on her behalf, as he himself related when he came back, ‘like
a good ‘un.’

This invested the turnkey with a new proprietary share in the child,
over and above his former official one. When she began to walk and talk,
he became fond of her; bought a little arm-chair and stood it by the
high fender of the lodge fire-place; liked to have her company when he
was on the lock; and used to bribe her with cheap toys to come and talk
to him. The child, for her part, soon grew so fond of the turnkey that
she would come climbing up the lodge-steps of her own accord at all
hours of the day. When she fell asleep in the little armchair by the
high fender, the turnkey would cover her with his pocket-handkerchief;
and when she sat in it dressing and undressing a doll which soon came
to be unlike dolls on the other side of the lock, and to bear a horrible
family resemblance to Mrs Bangham--he would contemplate her from the
top of his stool with exceeding gentleness. Witnessing these things,
the collegians would express an opinion that the turnkey, who was a
bachelor, had been cut out by nature for a family man. But the turnkey
thanked them, and said, ‘No, on the whole it was enough to see other
people’s children there.’

At what period of her early life the little creature began to perceive
that it was not the habit of all the world to live locked up in narrow
yards surrounded by high walls with spikes at the top, would be a
difficult question to settle. But she was a very, very little creature
indeed, when she had somehow gained the knowledge that her clasp of her
father’s hand was to be always loosened at the door which the great key
opened; and that while her own light steps were free to pass beyond it,
his feet must never cross that line. A pitiful and plaintive look, with
which she had begun to regard him when she was still extremely young,
was perhaps a part of this discovery.

With a pitiful and plaintive look for everything, indeed, but with
something in it for only him that was like protection, this Child of
the Marshalsea and the child of the Father of the Marshalsea, sat by her
friend the turnkey in the lodge, kept the family room, or wandered about
the prison-yard, for the first eight years of her life. With a pitiful
and plaintive look for her wayward sister; for her idle brother; for the
high blank walls; for the faded crowd they shut in; for the games of the
prison children as they whooped and ran, and played at hide-and-seek,
and made the iron bars of the inner gateway ‘Home.’

Wistful and wondering, she would sit in summer weather by the high
fender in the lodge, looking up at the sky through the barred window,
until, when she turned her eyes away, bars of light would arise between
her and her friend, and she would see him through a grating, too.

‘Thinking of the fields,’ the turnkey said once, after watching her,
‘ain’t you?’

‘Where are they?’ she inquired.

‘Why, they’re--over there, my dear,’ said the turnkey, with a vague
flourish of his key. ‘Just about there.’

‘Does anybody open them, and shut them? Are they locked?’

The turnkey was discomfited. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Not in general.’

‘Are they very pretty, Bob?’ She called him Bob, by his own particular
request and instruction.

‘Lovely. Full of flowers. There’s buttercups, and there’s daisies,
and there’s’--the turnkey hesitated, being short of floral
nomenclature--‘there’s dandelions, and all manner of games.’

‘Is it very pleasant to be there, Bob?’

‘Prime,’ said the turnkey.

‘Was father ever there?’

‘Hem!’ coughed the turnkey. ‘O yes, he was there, sometimes.’

‘Is he sorry not to be there now?’

‘N-not particular,’ said the turnkey.

‘Nor any of the people?’ she asked, glancing at the listless crowd
within. ‘O are you quite sure and certain, Bob?’

At this difficult point of the conversation Bob gave in, and changed the
subject to hard-bake: always his last resource when he found his little
friend getting him into a political, social, or theological corner.
But this was the origin of a series of Sunday excursions that these two
curious companions made together. They used to issue from the lodge on
alternate Sunday afternoons with great gravity, bound for some meadows
or green lanes that had been elaborately appointed by the turnkey in
the course of the week; and there she picked grass and flowers to bring
home, while he smoked his pipe. Afterwards, there were tea-gardens,
shrimps, ale, and other delicacies; and then they would come back hand
in hand, unless she was more than usually tired, and had fallen asleep
on his shoulder.

In those early days, the turnkey first began profoundly to consider
a question which cost him so much mental labour, that it remained
undetermined on the day of his death. He decided to will and bequeath
his little property of savings to his godchild, and the point arose how
could it be so ‘tied up’ as that only she should have the benefit of
it? His experience on the lock gave him such an acute perception of the
enormous difficulty of ‘tying up’ money with any approach to tightness,
and contrariwise of the remarkable ease with which it got loose, that
through a series of years he regularly propounded this knotty point to
every new insolvent agent and other professional gentleman who passed in
and out.

‘Supposing,’ he would say, stating the case with his key on the
professional gentleman’s waistcoat; ‘supposing a man wanted to leave his
property to a young female, and wanted to tie it up so that nobody else
should ever be able to make a grab at it; how would you tie up that
property?’

‘Settle it strictly on herself,’ the professional gentleman would
complacently answer.

‘But look here,’ quoth the turnkey. ‘Supposing she had, say a brother,
say a father, say a husband, who would be likely to make a grab at that
property when she came into it--how about that?’

‘It would be settled on herself, and they would have no more legal claim
on it than you,’ would be the professional answer.

‘Stop a bit,’ said the turnkey. ‘Supposing she was tender-hearted, and
they came over her. Where’s your law for tying it up then?’

The deepest character whom the turnkey sounded, was unable to produce
his law for tying such a knot as that. So, the turnkey thought about it
all his life, and died intestate after all.

But that was long afterwards, when his god-daughter was past sixteen.
The first half of that space of her life was only just accomplished,
when her pitiful and plaintive look saw her father a widower. From that
time the protection that her wondering eyes had expressed towards him,
became embodied in action, and the Child of the Marshalsea took upon
herself a new relation towards the Father.

At first, such a baby could do little more than sit with him, deserting
her livelier place by the high fender, and quietly watching him. But
this made her so far necessary to him that he became accustomed to her,
and began to be sensible of missing her when she was not there. Through
this little gate, she passed out of childhood into the care-laden world.

What her pitiful look saw, at that early time, in her father, in her
sister, in her brother, in the jail; how much, or how little of the
wretched truth it pleased God to make visible to her; lies hidden with
many mysteries. It is enough that she was inspired to be something which
was not what the rest were, and to be that something, different and
laborious, for the sake of the rest. Inspired? Yes. Shall we speak of
the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by
love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life!

With no earthly friend to help her, or so much as to see her, but the
one so strangely assorted; with no knowledge even of the common daily
tone and habits of the common members of the free community who are not
shut up in prisons; born and bred in a social condition, false even with
a reference to the falsest condition outside the walls; drinking from
infancy of a well whose waters had their own peculiar stain, their own
unwholesome and unnatural taste; the Child of the Marshalsea began her
womanly life.

No matter through what mistakes and discouragements, what ridicule (not
unkindly meant, but deeply felt) of her youth and little figure, what
humble consciousness of her own babyhood and want of strength, even
in the matter of lifting and carrying; through how much weariness
and hopelessness, and how many secret tears; she drudged on, until
recognised as useful, even indispensable. That time came. She took the
place of eldest of the three, in all things but precedence; was the
head of the fallen family; and bore, in her own heart, its anxieties and
shames.

At thirteen, she could read and keep accounts, that is, could put down
in words and figures how much the bare necessaries that they wanted
would cost, and how much less they had to buy them with. She had been,
by snatches of a few weeks at a time, to an evening school outside,
and got her sister and brother sent to day-schools by desultory starts,
during three or four years. There was no instruction for any of them at
home; but she knew well--no one better--that a man so broken as to be
the Father of the Marshalsea, could be no father to his own children.

To these scanty means of improvement, she added another of her own
contriving. Once, among the heterogeneous crowd of inmates there
appeared a dancing-master. Her sister had a great desire to learn the
dancing-master’s art, and seemed to have a taste that way. At thirteen
years old, the Child of the Marshalsea presented herself to the
dancing-master, with a little bag in her hand, and preferred her humble
petition.

‘If you please, I was born here, sir.’

‘Oh! You are the young lady, are you?’ said the dancing-master,
surveying the small figure and uplifted face.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And what can I do for you?’ said the dancing-master.

‘Nothing for me, sir, thank you,’ anxiously undrawing the strings of
the little bag; ‘but if, while you stay here, you could be so kind as to
teach my sister cheap--’

‘My child, I’ll teach her for nothing,’ said the dancing-master,
shutting up the bag. He was as good-natured a dancing-master as ever
danced to the Insolvent Court, and he kept his word. The sister was so
apt a pupil, and the dancing-master had such abundant leisure to bestow
upon her (for it took him a matter of ten weeks to set to his creditors,
lead off, turn the Commissioners, and right and left back to his
professional pursuits), that wonderful progress was made. Indeed the
dancing-master was so proud of it, and so wishful to display it before
he left to a few select friends among the collegians, that at six
o’clock on a certain fine morning, a minuet de la cour came off in
the yard--the college-rooms being of too confined proportions for the
purpose--in which so much ground was covered, and the steps were so
conscientiously executed, that the dancing-master, having to play the
kit besides, was thoroughly blown.

The success of this beginning, which led to the dancing-master’s
continuing his instruction after his release, emboldened the poor child
to try again. She watched and waited months for a seamstress. In the
fulness of time a milliner came in, and to her she repaired on her own
behalf.

‘I beg your pardon, ma’am,’ she said, looking timidly round the door of
the milliner, whom she found in tears and in bed: ‘but I was born here.’

Everybody seemed to hear of her as soon as they arrived; for the
milliner sat up in bed, drying her eyes, and said, just as the
dancing-master had said:

‘Oh! _You_ are the child, are you?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘I am sorry I haven’t got anything for you,’ said the milliner, shaking
her head.

‘It’s not that, ma’am. If you please I want to learn needle-work.’

‘Why should you do that,’ returned the milliner, ‘with me before you? It
has not done me much good.’

‘Nothing--whatever it is--seems to have done anybody much good who comes
here,’ she returned in all simplicity; ‘but I want to learn just the
same.’

‘I am afraid you are so weak, you see,’ the milliner objected.

‘I don’t think I am weak, ma’am.’

‘And you are so very, very little, you see,’ the milliner objected.

‘Yes, I am afraid I am very little indeed,’ returned the Child of the
Marshalsea; and so began to sob over that unfortunate defect of hers,
which came so often in her way. The milliner--who was not morose or
hard-hearted, only newly insolvent--was touched, took her in hand with
goodwill, found her the most patient and earnest of pupils, and made her
a cunning work-woman in course of time.

In course of time, and in the very self-same course of time, the Father
of the Marshalsea gradually developed a new flower of character. The
more Fatherly he grew as to the Marshalsea, and the more dependent he
became on the contributions of his changing family, the greater stand
he made by his forlorn gentility. With the same hand that he pocketed
a collegian’s half-crown half an hour ago, he would wipe away the
tears that streamed over his cheeks if any reference were made to his
daughters’ earning their bread. So, over and above other daily cares,
the Child of the Marshalsea had always upon her the care of preserving
the genteel fiction that they were all idle beggars together.

The sister became a dancer. There was a ruined uncle in the family
group--ruined by his brother, the Father of the Marshalsea, and knowing
no more how than his ruiner did, but accepting the fact as an inevitable
certainty--on whom her protection devolved. Naturally a retired and
simple man, he had shown no particular sense of being ruined at the time
when that calamity fell upon him, further than that he left off washing
himself when the shock was announced, and never took to that luxury any
more. He had been a very indifferent musical amateur in his better days;
and when he fell with his brother, resorted for support to playing a
clarionet as dirty as himself in a small Theatre Orchestra. It was the
theatre in which his niece became a dancer; he had been a fixture there
a long time when she took her poor station in it; and he accepted
the task of serving as her escort and guardian, just as he would have
accepted an illness, a legacy, a feast, starvation--anything but soap.

To enable this girl to earn her few weekly shillings, it was necessary
for the Child of the Marshalsea to go through an elaborate form with the
Father.

‘Fanny is not going to live with us just now, father. She will be here a
good deal in the day, but she is going to live outside with uncle.’

‘You surprise me. Why?’

‘I think uncle wants a companion, father. He should be attended to, and
looked after.’

‘A companion? He passes much of his time here. And you attend to him and
look after him, Amy, a great deal more than ever your sister will. You
all go out so much; you all go out so much.’

This was to keep up the ceremony and pretence of his having no idea that
Amy herself went out by the day to work.

‘But we are always glad to come home, father; now, are we not? And as to
Fanny, perhaps besides keeping uncle company and taking care of him, it
may be as well for her not quite to live here, always. She was not born
here as I was, you know, father.’

‘Well, Amy, well. I don’t quite follow you, but it’s natural I suppose
that Fanny should prefer to be outside, and even that you often should,
too. So, you and Fanny and your uncle, my dear, shall have your own way.
Good, good. I’ll not meddle; don’t mind me.’

To get her brother out of the prison; out of the succession to Mrs
Bangham in executing commissions, and out of the slang interchange with
very doubtful companions consequent upon both; was her hardest task. At
eighteen he would have dragged on from hand to mouth, from hour to hour,
from penny to penny, until eighty. Nobody got into the prison from whom
he derived anything useful or good, and she could find no patron for him
but her old friend and godfather.

‘Dear Bob,’ said she, ‘what is to become of poor Tip?’ His name was
Edward, and Ted had been transformed into Tip, within the walls.

The turnkey had strong private opinions as to what would become of
poor Tip, and had even gone so far with the view of averting their
fulfilment, as to sound Tip in reference to the expediency of running
away and going to serve his country. But Tip had thanked him, and said
he didn’t seem to care for his country.

‘Well, my dear,’ said the turnkey, ‘something ought to be done with him.
Suppose I try and get him into the law?’

‘That would be so good of you, Bob!’

The turnkey had now two points to put to the professional gentlemen as
they passed in and out. He put this second one so perseveringly that
a stool and twelve shillings a week were at last found for Tip in the
office of an attorney in a great National Palladium called the Palace
Court; at that time one of a considerable list of everlasting bulwarks
to the dignity and safety of Albion, whose places know them no more.

Tip languished in Clifford’s Inns for six months, and at the expiration
of that term sauntered back one evening with his hands in his pockets,
and incidentally observed to his sister that he was not going back
again.

‘Not going back again?’ said the poor little anxious Child of the
Marshalsea, always calculating and planning for Tip, in the front rank
of her charges.

‘I am so tired of it,’ said Tip, ‘that I have cut it.’

Tip tired of everything. With intervals of Marshalsea lounging, and Mrs
Bangham succession, his small second mother, aided by her trusty friend,
got him into a warehouse, into a market garden, into the hop trade,
into the law again, into an auctioneers, into a brewery, into a
stockbroker’s, into the law again, into a coach office, into a waggon
office, into the law again, into a general dealer’s, into a distillery,
into the law again, into a wool house, into a dry goods house, into the
Billingsgate trade, into the foreign fruit trade, and into the docks.
But whatever Tip went into, he came out of tired, announcing that he
had cut it. Wherever he went, this foredoomed Tip appeared to take the
prison walls with him, and to set them up in such trade or calling;
and to prowl about within their narrow limits in the old slip-shod,
purposeless, down-at-heel way; until the real immovable Marshalsea walls
asserted their fascination over him, and brought him back.

Nevertheless, the brave little creature did so fix her heart on her
brother’s rescue, that while he was ringing out these doleful changes,
she pinched and scraped enough together to ship him for Canada. When he
was tired of nothing to do, and disposed in its turn to cut even that,
he graciously consented to go to Canada. And there was grief in her
bosom over parting with him, and joy in the hope of his being put in a
straight course at last.

‘God bless you, dear Tip. Don’t be too proud to come and see us, when
you have made your fortune.’

‘All right!’ said Tip, and went.

But not all the way to Canada; in fact, not further than Liverpool.
After making the voyage to that port from London, he found himself
so strongly impelled to cut the vessel, that he resolved to walk back
again. Carrying out which intention, he presented himself before her at
the expiration of a month, in rags, without shoes, and much more tired
than ever.

At length, after another interval of successorship to Mrs Bangham, he
found a pursuit for himself, and announced it.

‘Amy, I have got a situation.’

‘Have you really and truly, Tip?’

‘All right. I shall do now. You needn’t look anxious about me any more,
old girl.’

‘What is it, Tip?’

‘Why, you know Slingo by sight?’

‘Not the man they call the dealer?’

‘That’s the chap. He’ll be out on Monday, and he’s going to give me a
berth.’

‘What is he a dealer in, Tip?’

‘Horses. All right! I shall do now, Amy.’

She lost sight of him for months afterwards, and only heard from him
once. A whisper passed among the elder collegians that he had been seen
at a mock auction in Moorfields, pretending to buy plated articles for
massive silver, and paying for them with the greatest liberality in
bank notes; but it never reached her ears. One evening she was alone at
work--standing up at the window, to save the twilight lingering above
the wall--when he opened the door and walked in.

She kissed and welcomed him; but was afraid to ask him any questions. He
saw how anxious and timid she was, and appeared sorry.

‘I am afraid, Amy, you’ll be vexed this time. Upon my life I am!’

‘I am very sorry to hear you say so, Tip. Have you come back?’

‘Why--yes.’

‘Not expecting this time that what you had found would answer very well,
I am less surprised and sorry than I might have been, Tip.’

‘Ah! But that’s not the worst of it.’

‘Not the worst of it?’

‘Don’t look so startled. No, Amy, not the worst of it. I have come back,
you see; but--_don’t_ look so startled--I have come back in what I may
call a new way. I am off the volunteer list altogether. I am in now, as
one of the regulars.’

‘Oh! Don’t say you are a prisoner, Tip! Don’t, don’t!’

‘Well, I don’t want to say it,’ he returned in a reluctant tone; ‘but if
you can’t understand me without my saying it, what am I to do? I am in
for forty pound odd.’

For the first time in all those years, she sunk under her cares. She
cried, with her clasped hands lifted above her head, that it would kill
their father if he ever knew it; and fell down at Tip’s graceless feet.

It was easier for Tip to bring her to her senses than for her to bring
_him_ to understand that the Father of the Marshalsea would be beside
himself if he knew the truth. The thing was incomprehensible to Tip, and
altogether a fanciful notion. He yielded to it in that light only, when
he submitted to her entreaties, backed by those of his uncle and sister.
There was no want of precedent for his return; it was accounted for
to the father in the usual way; and the collegians, with a better
comprehension of the pious fraud than Tip, supported it loyally.

This was the life, and this the history, of the child of the Marshalsea
at twenty-two. With a still surviving attachment to the one miserable
yard and block of houses as her birthplace and home, she passed to and
fro in it shrinkingly now, with a womanly consciousness that she was
pointed out to every one. Since she had begun to work beyond the walls,
she had found it necessary to conceal where she lived, and to come and
go as secretly as she could, between the free city and the iron gates,
outside of which she had never slept in her life. Her original timidity
had grown with this concealment, and her light step and her little
figure shunned the thronged streets while they passed along them.

Worldly wise in hard and poor necessities, she was innocent in all
things else. Innocent, in the mist through which she saw her father,
and the prison, and the turbid living river that flowed through it and
flowed on.

This was the life, and this the history, of Little Dorrit; now going
home upon a dull September evening, observed at a distance by Arthur
Clennam. This was the life, and this the history, of Little Dorrit;
turning at the end of London Bridge, recrossing it, going back again,
passing on to Saint George’s Church, turning back suddenly once more,
and flitting in at the open outer gate and little court-yard of the
Marshalsea.




CHAPTER 8. The Lock


Arthur Clennam stood in the street, waiting to ask some passer-by what
place that was. He suffered a few people to pass him in whose face there
was no encouragement to make the inquiry, and still stood pausing in the
street, when an old man came up and turned into the courtyard.

He stooped a good deal, and plodded along in a slow pre-occupied manner,
which made the bustling London thoroughfares no very safe resort for
him. He was dirtily and meanly dressed, in a threadbare coat, once blue,
reaching to his ankles and buttoned to his chin, where it vanished in
the pale ghost of a velvet collar. A piece of red cloth with which that
phantom had been stiffened in its lifetime was now laid bare, and poked
itself up, at the back of the old man’s neck, into a confusion of grey
hair and rusty stock and buckle which altogether nearly poked his
hat off. A greasy hat it was, and a napless; impending over his eyes,
cracked and crumpled at the brim, and with a wisp of pocket-handkerchief
dangling out below it. His trousers were so long and loose, and his
shoes so clumsy and large, that he shuffled like an elephant; though how
much of this was gait, and how much trailing cloth and leather, no one
could have told. Under one arm he carried a limp and worn-out case,
containing some wind instrument; in the same hand he had a pennyworth
of snuff in a little packet of whitey-brown paper, from which he slowly
comforted his poor blue old nose with a lengthened-out pinch, as Arthur
Clennam looked at him.

To this old man crossing the court-yard, he preferred his inquiry,
touching him on the shoulder. The old man stopped and looked round, with
the expression in his weak grey eyes of one whose thoughts had been far
off, and who was a little dull of hearing also.

‘Pray, sir,’ said Arthur, repeating his question, ‘what is this place?’

‘Ay! This place?’ returned the old man, staying his pinch of snuff on
its road, and pointing at the place without looking at it. ‘This is the
Marshalsea, sir.’

‘The debtors’ prison?’

‘Sir,’ said the old man, with the air of deeming it not quite necessary
to insist upon that designation, ‘the debtors’ prison.’

He turned himself about, and went on.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Arthur, stopping him once more, ‘but will you
allow me to ask you another question? Can any one go in here?’

‘Any one can _go in_,’ replied the old man; plainly adding by the
significance of his emphasis, ‘but it is not every one who can go out.’

‘Pardon me once more. Are you familiar with the place?’

‘Sir,’ returned the old man, squeezing his little packet of snuff in his
hand, and turning upon his interrogator as if such questions hurt him.
‘I am.’

‘I beg you to excuse me. I am not impertinently curious, but have a good
object. Do you know the name of Dorrit here?’

‘My name, sir,’ replied the old man most unexpectedly, ‘is Dorrit.’

Arthur pulled off his hat to him. ‘Grant me the favour of half-a-dozen
words. I was wholly unprepared for your announcement, and hope that
assurance is my sufficient apology for having taken the liberty of
addressing you. I have recently come home to England after a long
absence. I have seen at my mother’s--Mrs Clennam in the city--a young
woman working at her needle, whom I have only heard addressed or spoken
of as Little Dorrit. I have felt sincerely interested in her, and have
had a great desire to know something more about her. I saw her, not a
minute before you came up, pass in at that door.’

The old man looked at him attentively. ‘Are you a sailor, sir?’ he
asked. He seemed a little disappointed by the shake of the head that
replied to him. ‘Not a sailor? I judged from your sunburnt face that you
might be. Are you in earnest, sir?’

‘I do assure you that I am, and do entreat you to believe that I am, in
plain earnest.’

‘I know very little of the world, sir,’ returned the other, who had a
weak and quavering voice. ‘I am merely passing on, like the shadow over
the sun-dial. It would be worth no man’s while to mislead me; it would
really be too easy--too poor a success, to yield any satisfaction. The
young woman whom you saw go in here is my brother’s child. My brother
is William Dorrit; I am Frederick. You say you have seen her at your
mother’s (I know your mother befriends her), you have felt an interest
in her, and you wish to know what she does here. Come and see.’

He went on again, and Arthur accompanied him.

‘My brother,’ said the old man, pausing on the step and slowly facing
round again, ‘has been here many years; and much that happens even among
ourselves, out of doors, is kept from him for reasons that I needn’t
enter upon now. Be so good as to say nothing of my niece’s working at
her needle. Be so good as to say nothing that goes beyond what is said
among us. If you keep within our bounds, you cannot well be wrong. Now!
Come and see.’

Arthur followed him down a narrow entry, at the end of which a key was
turned, and a strong door was opened from within. It admitted them into
a lodge or lobby, across which they passed, and so through another door
and a grating into the prison. The old man always plodding on before,
turned round, in his slow, stiff, stooping manner, when they came to the
turnkey on duty, as if to present his companion. The turnkey nodded; and
the companion passed in without being asked whom he wanted.

The night was dark; and the prison lamps in the yard, and the candles in
the prison windows faintly shining behind many sorts of wry old curtain
and blind, had not the air of making it lighter. A few people loitered
about, but the greater part of the population was within doors. The old
man, taking the right-hand side of the yard, turned in at the third or
fourth doorway, and began to ascend the stairs. ‘They are rather dark,
sir, but you will not find anything in the way.’

He paused for a moment before opening a door on the second story. He had
no sooner turned the handle than the visitor saw Little Dorrit, and saw
the reason of her setting so much store by dining alone.

She had brought the meat home that she should have eaten herself, and
was already warming it on a gridiron over the fire for her father, clad
in an old grey gown and a black cap, awaiting his supper at the table.
A clean cloth was spread before him, with knife, fork, and spoon,
salt-cellar, pepper-box, glass, and pewter ale-pot. Such zests as his
particular little phial of cayenne pepper and his pennyworth of pickles
in a saucer, were not wanting.

She started, coloured deeply, and turned white. The visitor, more with
his eyes than by the slight impulsive motion of his hand, entreated her
to be reassured and to trust him.

‘I found this gentleman,’ said the uncle--‘Mr Clennam, William, son of
Amy’s friend--at the outer gate, wishful, as he was going by, of paying
his respects, but hesitating whether to come in or not. This is my
brother William, sir.’

‘I hope,’ said Arthur, very doubtful what to say, ‘that my respect for
your daughter may explain and justify my desire to be presented to you,
sir.’

‘Mr Clennam,’ returned the other, rising, taking his cap off in the
flat of his hand, and so holding it, ready to put on again, ‘you do me
honour. You are welcome, sir;’ with a low bow. ‘Frederick, a chair. Pray
sit down, Mr Clennam.’

He put his black cap on again as he had taken it off, and resumed his
own seat. There was a wonderful air of benignity and patronage in his
manner. These were the ceremonies with which he received the collegians.

‘You are welcome to the Marshalsea, sir. I have welcomed many gentlemen
to these walls. Perhaps you are aware--my daughter Amy may have
mentioned that I am the Father of this place.’

‘I--so I have understood,’ said Arthur, dashing at the assertion.

‘You know, I dare say, that my daughter Amy was born here. A good girl,
sir, a dear girl, and long a comfort and support to me. Amy, my dear,
put this dish on; Mr Clennam will excuse the primitive customs to which
we are reduced here. Is it a compliment to ask you if you would do me
the honour, sir, to--’

‘Thank you,’ returned Arthur. ‘Not a morsel.’

He felt himself quite lost in wonder at the manner of the man, and that
the probability of his daughter’s having had a reserve as to her family
history, should be so far out of his mind.

She filled his glass, put all the little matters on the table ready to
his hand, and then sat beside him while he ate his supper. Evidently in
observance of their nightly custom, she put some bread before herself,
and touched his glass with her lips; but Arthur saw she was troubled
and took nothing. Her look at her father, half admiring him and proud
of him, half ashamed for him, all devoted and loving, went to his inmost
heart.

The Father of the Marshalsea condescended towards his brother as an
amiable, well-meaning man; a private character, who had not arrived at
distinction. ‘Frederick,’ said he, ‘you and Fanny sup at your lodgings
to-night, I know. What have you done with Fanny, Frederick?’

‘She is walking with Tip.’

‘Tip--as you may know--is my son, Mr Clennam. He has been a little
wild, and difficult to settle, but his introduction to the world was
rather’--he shrugged his shoulders with a faint sigh, and looked round
the room--‘a little adverse. Your first visit here, sir?’

‘My first.’

‘You could hardly have been here since your boyhood without my
knowledge. It very seldom happens that anybody--of any pretensions--any
pretensions--comes here without being presented to me.’

‘As many as forty or fifty in a day have been introduced to my brother,’
said Frederick, faintly lighting up with a ray of pride.

‘Yes!’ the Father of the Marshalsea assented. ‘We have even exceeded
that number. On a fine Sunday in term time, it is quite a Levee--quite
a Levee. Amy, my dear, I have been trying half the day to remember the
name of the gentleman from Camberwell who was introduced to me last
Christmas week by that agreeable coal-merchant who was remanded for six
months.’

‘I don’t remember his name, father.’

‘Frederick, do _you_ remember his name?’

Frederick doubted if he had ever heard it. No one could doubt that
Frederick was the last person upon earth to put such a question to, with
any hope of information.

‘I mean,’ said his brother, ‘the gentleman who did that handsome action
with so much delicacy. Ha! Tush! The name has quite escaped me. Mr
Clennam, as I have happened to mention handsome and delicate action, you
may like, perhaps, to know what it was.’

‘Very much,’ said Arthur, withdrawing his eyes from the delicate head
beginning to droop and the pale face with a new solicitude stealing over
it.

‘It is so generous, and shows so much fine feeling, that it is almost a
duty to mention it. I said at the time that I always would mention it
on every suitable occasion, without regard to personal sensitiveness.
A--well--a--it’s of no use to disguise the fact--you must know, Mr
Clennam, that it does sometimes occur that people who come here desire
to offer some little--Testimonial--to the Father of the place.’

To see her hand upon his arm in mute entreaty half-repressed, and her
timid little shrinking figure turning away, was to see a sad, sad sight.

‘Sometimes,’ he went on in a low, soft voice, agitated, and clearing
his throat every now and then; ‘sometimes--hem--it takes one shape and
sometimes another; but it is generally--ha--Money. And it is, I cannot
but confess it, it is too often--hem--acceptable. This gentleman that I
refer to, was presented to me, Mr Clennam, in a manner highly gratifying
to my feelings, and conversed not only with great politeness, but with
great--ahem--information.’ All this time, though he had finished his
supper, he was nervously going about his plate with his knife and
fork, as if some of it were still before him. ‘It appeared from his
conversation that he had a garden, though he was delicate of mentioning
it at first, as gardens are--hem--are not accessible to me. But it came
out, through my admiring a very fine cluster of geranium--beautiful
cluster of geranium to be sure--which he had brought from his
conservatory. On my taking notice of its rich colour, he showed me a
piece of paper round it, on which was written, “For the Father of the
Marshalsea,” and presented it to me. But this was--hem--not all. He made
a particular request, on taking leave, that I would remove the paper in
half an hour. I--ha--I did so; and I found that it contained--ahem--two
guineas. I assure you, Mr Clennam, I have received--hem--Testimonials
in many ways, and of many degrees of value, and they have always
been--ha--unfortunately acceptable; but I never was more pleased than
with this--ahem--this particular Testimonial.’

Arthur was in the act of saying the little he could say on such a theme,
when a bell began to ring, and footsteps approached the door. A pretty
girl of a far better figure and much more developed than Little Dorrit,
though looking much younger in the face when the two were observed
together, stopped in the doorway on seeing a stranger; and a young man
who was with her, stopped too.

‘Mr Clennam, Fanny. My eldest daughter and my son, Mr Clennam. The bell
is a signal for visitors to retire, and so they have come to say good
night; but there is plenty of time, plenty of time. Girls, Mr Clennam
will excuse any household business you may have together. He knows, I
dare say, that I have but one room here.’

‘I only want my clean dress from Amy, father,’ said the second girl.

‘And I my clothes,’ said Tip.

Amy opened a drawer in an old piece of furniture that was a chest of
drawers above and a bedstead below, and produced two little bundles,
which she handed to her brother and sister. ‘Mended and made up?’
Clennam heard the sister ask in a whisper. To which Amy answered ‘Yes.’
He had risen now, and took the opportunity of glancing round the room.
The bare walls had been coloured green, evidently by an unskilled hand,
and were poorly decorated with a few prints. The window was curtained,
and the floor carpeted; and there were shelves and pegs, and other such
conveniences, that had accumulated in the course of years. It was a
close, confined room, poorly furnished; and the chimney smoked to boot,
or the tin screen at the top of the fireplace was superfluous; but
constant pains and care had made it neat, and even, after its kind,
comfortable.

All the while the bell was ringing, and the uncle was anxious to go.
‘Come, Fanny, come, Fanny,’ he said, with his ragged clarionet case
under his arm; ‘the lock, child, the lock!’

Fanny bade her father good night, and whisked off airily. Tip had
already clattered down-stairs. ‘Now, Mr Clennam,’ said the uncle,
looking back as he shuffled out after them, ‘the lock, sir, the lock.’

Mr Clennam had two things to do before he followed; one, to offer his
testimonial to the Father of the Marshalsea, without giving pain to his
child; the other to say something to that child, though it were but a
word, in explanation of his having come there.

‘Allow me,’ said the Father, ‘to see you down-stairs.’

She had slipped out after the rest, and they were alone. ‘Not on any
account,’ said the visitor, hurriedly. ‘Pray allow me to--’ chink,
chink, chink.

‘Mr Clennam,’ said the Father, ‘I am deeply, deeply--’ But his visitor
had shut up his hand to stop the clinking, and had gone down-stairs with
great speed.

He saw no Little Dorrit on his way down, or in the yard. The last two or
three stragglers were hurrying to the lodge, and he was following,
when he caught sight of her in the doorway of the first house from the
entrance. He turned back hastily.

‘Pray forgive me,’ he said, ‘for speaking to you here; pray forgive me
for coming here at all! I followed you to-night. I did so, that I might
endeavour to render you and your family some service. You know the
terms on which I and my mother are, and may not be surprised that I
have preserved our distant relations at her house, lest I should
unintentionally make her jealous, or resentful, or do you any injury in
her estimation. What I have seen here, in this short time, has greatly
increased my heartfelt wish to be a friend to you. It would recompense
me for much disappointment if I could hope to gain your confidence.’

She was scared at first, but seemed to take courage while he spoke to
her.

‘You are very good, sir. You speak very earnestly to me. But I--but I
wish you had not watched me.’

He understood the emotion with which she said it, to arise in her
father’s behalf; and he respected it, and was silent.

‘Mrs Clennam has been of great service to me; I don’t know what we
should have done without the employment she has given me; I am afraid
it may not be a good return to become secret with her; I can say no more
to-night, sir. I am sure you mean to be kind to us. Thank you, thank
you.’

‘Let me ask you one question before I leave. Have you known my mother
long?’

‘I think two years, sir,--The bell has stopped.’

‘How did you know her first? Did she send here for you?’

‘No. She does not even know that I live here. We have a friend, father
and I--a poor labouring man, but the best of friends--and I wrote out
that I wished to do needlework, and gave his address. And he got what
I wrote out displayed at a few places where it cost nothing, and Mrs
Clennam found me that way, and sent for me. The gate will be locked,
sir!’

She was so tremulous and agitated, and he was so moved by compassion for
her, and by deep interest in her story as it dawned upon him, that he
could scarcely tear himself away. But the stoppage of the bell, and the
quiet in the prison, were a warning to depart; and with a few hurried
words of kindness he left her gliding back to her father.

But he remained too late. The inner gate was locked, and the lodge
closed. After a little fruitless knocking with his hand, he was standing
there with the disagreeable conviction upon him that he had got to get
through the night, when a voice accosted him from behind.

‘Caught, eh?’ said the voice. ‘You won’t go home till morning. Oh! It’s
you, is it, Mr Clennam?’

The voice was Tip’s; and they stood looking at one another in the
prison-yard, as it began to rain.

‘You’ve done it,’ observed Tip; ‘you must be sharper than that next
time.’

‘But you are locked in too,’ said Arthur.

‘I believe I am!’ said Tip, sarcastically. ‘About! But not in your way.
I belong to the shop, only my sister has a theory that our governor must
never know it. I don’t see why, myself.’

‘Can I get any shelter?’ asked Arthur. ‘What had I better do?’

‘We had better get hold of Amy first of all,’ said Tip, referring any
difficulty to her as a matter of course.

‘I would rather walk about all night--it’s not much to do--than give
that trouble.’

‘You needn’t do that, if you don’t mind paying for a bed. If you don’t
mind paying, they’ll make you up one on the Snuggery table, under the
circumstances. If you’ll come along, I’ll introduce you there.’

As they passed down the yard, Arthur looked up at the window of the room
he had lately left, where the light was still burning. ‘Yes, sir,’ said
Tip, following his glance. ‘That’s the governor’s. She’ll sit with him
for another hour reading yesterday’s paper to him, or something of that
sort; and then she’ll come out like a little ghost, and vanish away
without a sound.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘The governor sleeps up in the room, and she has a lodging at the
turnkey’s. First house there,’ said Tip, pointing out the doorway into
which she had retired. ‘First house, sky parlour. She pays twice as much
for it as she would for one twice as good outside. But she stands by the
governor, poor dear girl, day and night.’

This brought them to the tavern-establishment at the upper end of the
prison, where the collegians had just vacated their social evening club.
The apartment on the ground-floor in which it was held, was the Snuggery
in question; the presidential tribune of the chairman, the pewter-pots,
glasses, pipes, tobacco-ashes, and general flavour of members, were
still as that convivial institution had left them on its adjournment.
The Snuggery had two of the qualities popularly held to be essential to
grog for ladies, in respect that it was hot and strong; but in the third
point of analogy, requiring plenty of it, the Snuggery was defective;
being but a cooped-up apartment.

The unaccustomed visitor from outside, naturally assumed everybody here
to be prisoners--landlord, waiter, barmaid, potboy, and all. Whether
they were or not, did not appear; but they all had a weedy look. The
keeper of a chandler’s shop in a front parlour, who took in gentlemen
boarders, lent his assistance in making the bed. He had been a tailor in
his time, and had kept a phaeton, he said. He boasted that he stood up
litigiously for the interests of the college; and he had undefined and
undefinable ideas that the marshal intercepted a ‘Fund,’ which ought to
come to the collegians. He liked to believe this, and always impressed
the shadowy grievance on new-comers and strangers; though he could not,
for his life, have explained what Fund he meant, or how the notion had
got rooted in his soul. He had fully convinced himself, notwithstanding,
that his own proper share of the Fund was three and ninepence a week;
and that in this amount he, as an individual collegian, was swindled by
the marshal, regularly every Monday. Apparently, he helped to make the
bed, that he might not lose an opportunity of stating this case; after
which unloading of his mind, and after announcing (as it seemed he
always did, without anything coming of it) that he was going to write a
letter to the papers and show the marshal up, he fell into miscellaneous
conversation with the rest. It was evident from the general tone of the
whole party, that they had come to regard insolvency as the normal state
of mankind, and the payment of debts as a disease that occasionally
broke out.

In this strange scene, and with these strange spectres flitting about
him, Arthur Clennam looked on at the preparations as if they were part
of a dream. Pending which, the long-initiated Tip, with an awful
enjoyment of the Snuggery’s resources, pointed out the common kitchen
fire maintained by subscription of collegians, the boiler for hot water
supported in like manner, and other premises generally tending to the
deduction that the way to be healthy, wealthy, and wise, was to come to
the Marshalsea.

The two tables put together in a corner, were, at length, converted into
a very fair bed; and the stranger was left to the Windsor chairs,
the presidential tribune, the beery atmosphere, sawdust, pipe-lights,
spittoons and repose. But the last item was long, long, long, in linking
itself to the rest. The novelty of the place, the coming upon it without
preparation, the sense of being locked up, the remembrance of that room
up-stairs, of the two brothers, and above all of the retiring childish
form, and the face in which he now saw years of insufficient food, if
not of want, kept him waking and unhappy.

Speculations, too, bearing the strangest relations towards the prison,
but always concerning the prison, ran like nightmares through his mind
while he lay awake. Whether coffins were kept ready for people who might
die there, where they were kept, how they were kept, where people who
died in the prison were buried, how they were taken out, what forms were
observed, whether an implacable creditor could arrest the dead? As to
escaping, what chances there were of escape? Whether a prisoner could
scale the walls with a cord and grapple, how he would descend upon
the other side? whether he could alight on a housetop, steal down a
staircase, let himself out at a door, and get lost in the crowd? As to
Fire in the prison, if one were to break out while he lay there?

And these involuntary starts of fancy were, after all, but the setting
of a picture in which three people kept before him. His father, with the
steadfast look with which he had died, prophetically darkened forth in
the portrait; his mother, with her arm up, warding off his suspicion;
Little Dorrit, with her hand on the degraded arm, and her drooping head
turned away.

What if his mother had an old reason she well knew for softening to
this poor girl! What if the prisoner now sleeping quietly--Heaven grant
it!--by the light of the great Day of judgment should trace back his
fall to her. What if any act of hers and of his father’s, should have
even remotely brought the grey heads of those two brothers so low!

A swift thought shot into his mind. In that long imprisonment here, and
in her own long confinement to her room, did his mother find a balance
to be struck? ‘I admit that I was accessory to that man’s captivity. I
have suffered for it in kind. He has decayed in his prison: I in mine. I
have paid the penalty.’

When all the other thoughts had faded out, this one held possession
of him. When he fell asleep, she came before him in her wheeled chair,
warding him off with this justification. When he awoke, and sprang up
causelessly frightened, the words were in his ears, as if her voice had
slowly spoken them at his pillow, to break his rest: ‘He withers away in
his prison; I wither away in mine; inexorable justice is done; what do I
owe on this score!’




CHAPTER 9. Little Mother


The morning light was in no hurry to climb the prison wall and look in
at the Snuggery windows; and when it did come, it would have been more
welcome if it had come alone, instead of bringing a rush of rain with
it. But the equinoctial gales were blowing out at sea, and the impartial
south-west wind, in its flight, would not neglect even the narrow
Marshalsea. While it roared through the steeple of St George’s Church,
and twirled all the cowls in the neighbourhood, it made a swoop to beat
the Southwark smoke into the jail; and, plunging down the chimneys
of the few early collegians who were yet lighting their fires, half
suffocated them.

Arthur Clennam would have been little disposed to linger in bed, though
his bed had been in a more private situation, and less affected by the
raking out of yesterday’s fire, the kindling of to-day’s under the
collegiate boiler, the filling of that Spartan vessel at the pump, the
sweeping and sawdusting of the common room, and other such preparations.
Heartily glad to see the morning, though little rested by the night, he
turned out as soon as he could distinguish objects about him, and paced
the yard for two heavy hours before the gate was opened.

The walls were so near to one another, and the wild clouds hurried
over them so fast, that it gave him a sensation like the beginning of
sea-sickness to look up at the gusty sky. The rain, carried aslant by
flaws of wind, blackened that side of the central building which he had
visited last night, but left a narrow dry trough under the lee of the
wall, where he walked up and down among the waits of straw and dust
and paper, the waste droppings of the pump, and the stray leaves of
yesterday’s greens. It was as haggard a view of life as a man need look
upon.

Nor was it relieved by any glimpse of the little creature who had
brought him there. Perhaps she glided out of her doorway and in at that
where her father lived, while his face was turned from both; but he saw
nothing of her. It was too early for her brother; to have seen him once,
was to have seen enough of him to know that he would be sluggish to
leave whatever frowsy bed he occupied at night; so, as Arthur Clennam
walked up and down, waiting for the gate to open, he cast about in
his mind for future rather than for present means of pursuing his
discoveries.

At last the lodge-gate turned, and the turnkey, standing on the step,
taking an early comb at his hair, was ready to let him out. With a
joyful sense of release he passed through the lodge, and found himself
again in the little outer court-yard where he had spoken to the brother
last night.

There was a string of people already straggling in, whom it was not
difficult to identify as the nondescript messengers, go-betweens, and
errand-bearers of the place. Some of them had been lounging in the rain
until the gate should open; others, who had timed their arrival
with greater nicety, were coming up now, and passing in with damp
whitey-brown paper bags from the grocers, loaves of bread, lumps of
butter, eggs, milk, and the like. The shabbiness of these attendants
upon shabbiness, the poverty of these insolvent waiters upon insolvency,
was a sight to see. Such threadbare coats and trousers, such fusty gowns
and shawls, such squashed hats and bonnets, such boots and shoes, such
umbrellas and walking-sticks, never were seen in Rag Fair. All of
them wore the cast-off clothes of other men and women, were made up of
patches and pieces of other people’s individuality, and had no sartorial
existence of their own proper. Their walk was the walk of a race apart.
They had a peculiar way of doggedly slinking round the corner, as if
they were eternally going to the pawnbroker’s. When they coughed, they
coughed like people accustomed to be forgotten on doorsteps and in
draughty passages, waiting for answers to letters in faded ink, which
gave the recipients of those manuscripts great mental disturbance and no
satisfaction. As they eyed the stranger in passing, they eyed him with
borrowing eyes--hungry, sharp, speculative as to his softness if they
were accredited to him, and the likelihood of his standing something
handsome. Mendicity on commission stooped in their high shoulders,
shambled in their unsteady legs, buttoned and pinned and darned and
dragged their clothes, frayed their button-holes, leaked out of their
figures in dirty little ends of tape, and issued from their mouths in
alcoholic breathings.

As these people passed him standing still in the court-yard, and one of
them turned back to inquire if he could assist him with his services,
it came into Arthur Clennam’s mind that he would speak to Little Dorrit
again before he went away. She would have recovered her first surprise,
and might feel easier with him. He asked this member of the fraternity
(who had two red herrings in his hand, and a loaf and a blacking brush
under his arm), where was the nearest place to get a cup of coffee
at. The nondescript replied in encouraging terms, and brought him to a
coffee-shop in the street within a stone’s throw.

‘Do you know Miss Dorrit?’ asked the new client.

The nondescript knew two Miss Dorrits; one who was born inside--That was
the one! That was the one? The nondescript had known her many years.
In regard of the other Miss Dorrit, the nondescript lodged in the same
house with herself and uncle.

This changed the client’s half-formed design of remaining at the
coffee-shop until the nondescript should bring him word that Dorrit
had issued forth into the street. He entrusted the nondescript with a
confidential message to her, importing that the visitor who had waited
on her father last night, begged the favour of a few words with her at
her uncle’s lodging; he obtained from the same source full directions to
the house, which was very near; dismissed the nondescript gratified with
half-a-crown; and having hastily refreshed himself at the coffee-shop,
repaired with all speed to the clarionet-player’s dwelling.

There were so many lodgers in this house that the doorpost seemed to be
as full of bell-handles as a cathedral organ is of stops. Doubtful
which might be the clarionet-stop, he was considering the point, when a
shuttlecock flew out of the parlour window, and alighted on his hat.
He then observed that in the parlour window was a blind with the
inscription, MR CRIPPLES’s ACADEMY; also in another line, EVENING
TUITION; and behind the blind was a little white-faced boy, with a slice
of bread-and-butter and a battledore. The window being accessible from
the footway, he looked in over the blind, returned the shuttlecock, and
put his question.

‘Dorrit?’ said the little white-faced boy (Master Cripples in fact).
‘_Mr_ Dorrit? Third bell and one knock.’

The pupils of Mr Cripples appeared to have been making a copy-book of
the street-door, it was so extensively scribbled over in pencil. The
frequency of the inscriptions, ‘Old Dorrit,’ and ‘Dirty Dick,’ in
combination, suggested intentions of personality on the part Of Mr
Cripples’s pupils.  There was ample time to make these observations
before the door was opened by the poor old man himself.

‘Ha!’ said he, very slowly remembering Arthur, ‘you were shut in last
night?’

‘Yes, Mr Dorrit. I hope to meet your niece here presently.’

‘Oh!’ said he, pondering. ‘Out of my brother’s way? True. Would you come
up-stairs and wait for her?’

‘Thank you.’

Turning himself as slowly as he turned in his mind whatever he heard or
said, he led the way up the narrow stairs. The house was very close, and
had an unwholesome smell. The little staircase windows looked in at the
back windows of other houses as unwholesome as itself, with poles and
lines thrust out of them, on which unsightly linen hung; as if the
inhabitants were angling for clothes, and had had some wretched bites
not worth attending to. In the back garret--a sickly room, with a
turn-up bedstead in it, so hastily and recently turned up that the
blankets were boiling over, as it were, and keeping the lid open--a
half-finished breakfast of coffee and toast for two persons was jumbled
down anyhow on a rickety table.

There was no one there. The old man mumbling to himself, after some
consideration, that Fanny had run away, went to the next room to fetch
her back. The visitor, observing that she held the door on the inside,
and that, when the uncle tried to open it, there was a sharp adjuration
of ‘Don’t, stupid!’ and an appearance of loose stocking and flannel,
concluded that the young lady was in an undress. The uncle, without
appearing to come to any conclusion, shuffled in again, sat down in his
chair, and began warming his hands at the fire; not that it was cold, or
that he had any waking idea whether it was or not.

‘What did you think of my brother, sir?’ he asked, when he by-and-by
discovered what he was doing, left off, reached over to the
chimney-piece, and took his clarionet case down.

‘I was glad,’ said Arthur, very much at a loss, for his thoughts were
on the brother before him; ‘to find him so well and cheerful.’

‘Ha!’ muttered the old man, ‘yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!’

Arthur wondered what he could possibly want with the clarionet case. He
did not want it at all. He discovered, in due time, that it was not the
little paper of snuff (which was also on the chimney-piece), put it back
again, took down the snuff instead, and solaced himself with a pinch. He
was as feeble, spare, and slow in his pinches as in everything else, but
a certain little trickling of enjoyment of them played in the poor worn
nerves about the corners of his eyes and mouth.

‘Amy, Mr Clennam. What do you think of her?’

‘I am much impressed, Mr Dorrit, by all that I have seen of her and
thought of her.’

‘My brother would have been quite lost without Amy,’ he returned. ‘We
should all have been lost without Amy. She is a very good girl, Amy. She
does her duty.’

Arthur fancied that he heard in these praises a certain tone of custom,
which he had heard from the father last night with an inward protest and
feeling of antagonism. It was not that they stinted her praises, or
were insensible to what she did for them; but that they were lazily
habituated to her, as they were to all the rest of their condition.
He fancied that although they had before them, every day, the means of
comparison between her and one another and themselves, they regarded her
as being in her necessary place; as holding a position towards them all
which belonged to her, like her name or her age. He fancied that they
viewed her, not as having risen away from the prison atmosphere, but as
appertaining to it; as being vaguely what they had a right to expect,
and nothing more.

Her uncle resumed his breakfast, and was munching toast sopped in
coffee, oblivious of his guest, when the third bell rang. That was Amy,
he said, and went down to let her in; leaving the visitor with as vivid
a picture on his mind of his begrimed hands, dirt-worn face, and decayed
figure, as if he were still drooping in his chair.

She came up after him, in the usual plain dress, and with the usual
timid manner. Her lips were a little parted, as if her heart beat faster
than usual.

‘Mr Clennam, Amy,’ said her uncle, ‘has been expecting you some time.’

‘I took the liberty of sending you a message.’

‘I received the message, sir.’

‘Are you going to my mother’s this morning? I think not, for it is past
your usual hour.’

‘Not to-day, sir. I am not wanted to-day.’

‘Will you allow Me to walk a little way in whatever direction you may
be going? I can then speak to you as we walk, both without detaining you
here, and without intruding longer here myself.’

She looked embarrassed, but said, if he pleased. He made a pretence of
having mislaid his walking-stick, to give her time to set the bedstead
right, to answer her sister’s impatient knock at the wall, and to say a
word softly to her uncle. Then he found it, and they went down-stairs;
she first, he following; the uncle standing at the stair-head, and
probably forgetting them before they had reached the ground floor.

Mr Cripples’s pupils, who were by this time coming to school, desisted
from their morning recreation of cuffing one another with bags and
books, to stare with all the eyes they had at a stranger who had been
to see Dirty Dick. They bore the trying spectacle in silence, until the
mysterious visitor was at a safe distance; when they burst into pebbles
and yells, and likewise into reviling dances, and in all respects buried
the pipe of peace with so many savage ceremonies, that, if Mr Cripples
had been the chief of the Cripplewayboo tribe with his war-paint on,
they could scarcely have done greater justice to their education.

In the midst of this homage, Mr Arthur Clennam offered his arm to Little
Dorrit, and Little Dorrit took it. ‘Will you go by the Iron Bridge,’
said he, ‘where there is an escape from the noise of the street?’ Little
Dorrit answered, if he pleased, and presently ventured to hope that he
would ‘not mind’ Mr Cripples’s boys, for she had herself received
her education, such as it was, in Mr Cripples’s evening academy. He
returned, with the best will in the world, that Mr Cripples’s boys were
forgiven out of the bottom of his soul. Thus did Cripples unconsciously
become a master of the ceremonies between them, and bring them more
naturally together than Beau Nash might have done if they had lived
in his golden days, and he had alighted from his coach and six for the
purpose.

The morning remained squally, and the streets were miserably muddy, but
no rain fell as they walked towards the Iron Bridge. The little creature
seemed so young in his eyes, that there were moments when he found
himself thinking of her, if not speaking to her, as if she were a child.
Perhaps he seemed as old in her eyes as she seemed young in his.

‘I am sorry to hear you were so inconvenienced last night, sir, as to be
locked in. It was very unfortunate.’

It was nothing, he returned. He had had a very good bed.

‘Oh yes!’ she said quickly; ‘she believed there were excellent beds at
the coffee-house.’ He noticed that the coffee-house was quite a majestic
hotel to her, and that she treasured its reputation.

‘I believe it is very expensive,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘but my father has
told me that quite beautiful dinners may be got there. And wine,’ she
added timidly.

‘Were you ever there?’

‘Oh no! Only into the kitchen to fetch hot water.’

To think of growing up with a kind of awe upon one as to the luxuries of
that superb establishment, the Marshalsea Hotel!

‘I asked you last night,’ said Clennam, ‘how you had become acquainted
with my mother. Did you ever hear her name before she sent for you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Do you think your father ever did?’

‘No, sir.’

He met her eyes raised to his with so much wonder in them (she was
scared when the encounter took place, and shrunk away again), that he
felt it necessary to say:

‘I have a reason for asking, which I cannot very well explain; but you
must, on no account, suppose it to be of a nature to cause you the least
alarm or anxiety. Quite the reverse. And you think that at no time of
your father’s life was my name of Clennam ever familiar to him?’

‘No, sir.’

He felt, from the tone in which she spoke, that she was glancing up at
him with those parted lips; therefore he looked before him, rather than
make her heart beat quicker still by embarrassing her afresh.

Thus they emerged upon the Iron Bridge, which was as quiet after the
roaring streets as though it had been open country. The wind blew
roughly, the wet squalls came rattling past them, skimming the pools on
the road and pavement, and raining them down into the river. The clouds
raced on furiously in the lead-coloured sky, the smoke and mist raced
after them, the dark tide ran fierce and strong in the same direction.
Little Dorrit seemed the least, the quietest, and weakest of Heaven’s
creatures.

‘Let me put you in a coach,’ said Clennam, very nearly adding ‘my poor
child.’

She hurriedly declined, saying that wet or dry made little difference to
her; she was used to go about in all weathers. He knew it to be so, and
was touched with more pity; thinking of the slight figure at his side,
making its nightly way through the damp dark boisterous streets to such
a place of rest.

‘You spoke so feelingly to me last night, sir, and I found afterwards
that you had been so generous to my father, that I could not resist your
message, if it was only to thank you; especially as I wished very much
to say to you--’ she hesitated and trembled, and tears rose in her eyes,
but did not fall.

‘To say to me--?’

‘That I hope you will not misunderstand my father. Don’t judge him, sir,
as you would judge others outside the gates. He has been there so long!
I never saw him outside, but I can understand that he must have grown
different in some things since.’

‘My thoughts will never be unjust or harsh towards him, believe me.’

‘Not,’ she said, with a prouder air, as the misgiving evidently crept
upon her that she might seem to be abandoning him, ‘not that he has
anything to be ashamed of for himself, or that I have anything to be
ashamed of for him. He only requires to be understood. I only ask for
him that his life may be fairly remembered. All that he said was quite
true. It all happened just as he related it. He is very much respected.
Everybody who comes in, is glad to know him. He is more courted than
anyone else. He is far more thought of than the Marshal is.’

If ever pride were innocent, it was innocent in Little Dorrit when she
grew boastful of her father.

‘It is often said that his manners are a true gentleman’s, and quite
a study. I see none like them in that place, but he is admitted to
be superior to all the rest. This is quite as much why they make him
presents, as because they know him to be needy. He is not to be blamed
for being in need, poor love. Who could be in prison a quarter of a
century, and be prosperous!’

What affection in her words, what compassion in her repressed tears,
what a great soul of fidelity within her, how true the light that shed
false brightness round him!

‘If I have found it best to conceal where my home is, it is not because
I am ashamed of him. God forbid! Nor am I so much ashamed of the place
itself as might be supposed. People are not bad because they come there.
I have known numbers of good, persevering, honest people come there
through misfortune. They are almost all kind-hearted to one another.
And it would be ungrateful indeed in me, to forget that I have had many
quiet, comfortable hours there; that I had an excellent friend there
when I was quite a baby, who was very very fond of me; that I have been
taught there, and have worked there, and have slept soundly there. I
think it would be almost cowardly and cruel not to have some little
attachment for it, after all this.’

She had relieved the faithful fulness of her heart, and modestly said,
raising her eyes appealingly to her new friend’s, ‘I did not mean to say
so much, nor have I ever but once spoken about this before. But it seems
to set it more right than it was last night. I said I wished you had
not followed me, sir. I don’t wish it so much now, unless you should
think--indeed I don’t wish it at all, unless I should have spoken so
confusedly, that--that you can scarcely understand me, which I am afraid
may be the case.’

He told her with perfect truth that it was not the case; and putting
himself between her and the sharp wind and rain, sheltered her as well
as he could.

‘I feel permitted now,’ he said, ‘to ask you a little more concerning
your father. Has he many creditors?’

‘Oh! a great number.’

‘I mean detaining creditors, who keep him where he is?’

‘Oh yes! a great number.’

‘Can you tell me--I can get the information, no doubt, elsewhere, if you
cannot--who is the most influential of them?’

Little Dorrit said, after considering a little, that she used to
hear long ago of Mr Tite Barnacle as a man of great power. He was a
commissioner, or a board, or a trustee, ‘or something.’ He lived
in Grosvenor Square, she thought, or very near it. He was under
Government--high in the Circumlocution Office. She appeared to have
acquired, in her infancy, some awful impression of the might of this
formidable Mr Tite Barnacle of Grosvenor Square, or very near it, and
the Circumlocution Office, which quite crushed her when she mentioned
him.

‘It can do no harm,’ thought Arthur, ‘if I see this Mr Tite Barnacle.’

The thought did not present itself so quietly but that her quickness
intercepted it. ‘Ah!’ said Little Dorrit, shaking her head with the mild
despair of a lifetime. ‘Many people used to think once of getting my
poor father out, but you don’t know how hopeless it is.’

She forgot to be shy at the moment, in honestly warning him away from
the sunken wreck he had a dream of raising; and looked at him with
eyes which assuredly, in association with her patient face, her fragile
figure, her spare dress, and the wind and rain, did not turn him from
his purpose of helping her.

‘Even if it could be done,’ said she--‘and it never can be done
now--where could father live, or how could he live? I have often thought
that if such a change could come, it might be anything but a service to
him now. People might not think so well of him outside as they do there.
He might not be so gently dealt with outside as he is there. He might
not be so fit himself for the life outside as he is for that.’

Here for the first time she could not restrain her tears from falling;
and the little thin hands he had watched when they were so busy,
trembled as they clasped each other.

‘It would be a new distress to him even to know that I earn a little
money, and that Fanny earns a little money. He is so anxious about us,
you see, feeling helplessly shut up there. Such a good, good father!’

He let the little burst of feeling go by before he spoke. It was soon
gone. She was not accustomed to think of herself, or to trouble any one
with her emotions. He had but glanced away at the piles of city roofs
and chimneys among which the smoke was rolling heavily, and at the
wilderness of masts on the river, and the wilderness of steeples on
the shore, indistinctly mixed together in the stormy haze, when she
was again as quiet as if she had been plying her needle in his mother’s
room.

‘You would be glad to have your brother set at liberty?’

‘Oh very, very glad, sir!’

‘Well, we will hope for him at least. You told me last night of a friend
you had?’

His name was Plornish, Little Dorrit said.

And where did Plornish live? Plornish lived in Bleeding Heart Yard. He
was ‘only a plasterer,’ Little Dorrit said, as a caution to him not to
form high social expectations of Plornish. He lived at the last house in
Bleeding Heart Yard, and his name was over a little gateway.

Arthur took down the address and gave her his. He had now done all he
sought to do for the present, except that he wished to leave her with a
reliance upon him, and to have something like a promise from her that
she would cherish it.

‘There is one friend!’ he said, putting up his pocketbook. ‘As I take
you back--you are going back?’

‘Oh yes! going straight home.’

‘--As I take you back,’ the word home jarred upon him, ‘let me ask you to
persuade yourself that you have another friend. I make no professions,
and say no more.’

‘You are truly kind to me, sir. I am sure I need no more.’

They walked back through the miserable muddy streets, and among the
poor, mean shops, and were jostled by the crowds of dirty hucksters
usual to a poor neighbourhood. There was nothing, by the short way, that
was pleasant to any of the five senses. Yet it was not a common passage
through common rain, and mire, and noise, to Clennam, having this
little, slender, careful creature on his arm. How young she seemed to
him, or how old he to her; or what a secret either to the other, in that
beginning of the destined interweaving of their stories, matters not
here. He thought of her having been born and bred among these scenes,
and shrinking through them now, familiar yet misplaced; he thought
of her long acquaintance with the squalid needs of life, and of her
innocence; of her solicitude for others, and her few years, and her
childish aspect.

They were come into the High Street, where the prison stood, when a
voice cried, ‘Little mother, little mother!’ Little Dorrit stopping and
looking back, an excited figure of a strange kind bounced against them
(still crying ‘little mother’), fell down, and scattered the contents of
a large basket, filled with potatoes, in the mud.

‘Oh, Maggy,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘what a clumsy child you are!’

Maggy was not hurt, but picked herself up immediately, and then began
to pick up the potatoes, in which both Little Dorrit and Arthur Clennam
helped. Maggy picked up very few potatoes and a great quantity of mud;
but they were all recovered, and deposited in the basket. Maggy then
smeared her muddy face with her shawl, and presenting it to Mr Clennam
as a type of purity, enabled him to see what she was like.

She was about eight-and-twenty, with large bones, large features, large
feet and hands, large eyes and no hair. Her large eyes were limpid and
almost colourless; they seemed to be very little affected by light,
and to stand unnaturally still. There was also that attentive listening
expression in her face, which is seen in the faces of the blind; but she
was not blind, having one tolerably serviceable eye. Her face was not
exceedingly ugly, though it was only redeemed from being so by a smile;
a good-humoured smile, and pleasant in itself, but rendered pitiable
by being constantly there. A great white cap, with a quantity of
opaque frilling that was always flapping about, apologised for Maggy’s
baldness, and made it so very difficult for her old black bonnet to
retain its place upon her head, that it held on round her neck like a
gipsy’s baby. A commission of haberdashers could alone have reported
what the rest of her poor dress was made of, but it had a strong general
resemblance to seaweed, with here and there a gigantic tea-leaf. Her
shawl looked particularly like a tea-leaf after long infusion.

Arthur Clennam looked at Little Dorrit with the expression of one
saying, ‘May I ask who this is?’ Little Dorrit, whose hand this Maggy,
still calling her little mother, had begun to fondle, answered in words
(they were under a gateway into which the majority of the potatoes had
rolled).

‘This is Maggy, sir.’

‘Maggy, sir,’ echoed the personage presented. ‘Little mother!’

‘She is the grand-daughter--’ said Little Dorrit.

‘Grand-daughter,’ echoed Maggy.

‘Of my old nurse, who has been dead a long time. Maggy, how old are
you?’

‘Ten, mother,’ said Maggy.

‘You can’t think how good she is, sir,’ said Little Dorrit, with
infinite tenderness.

‘Good _she_ is,’ echoed Maggy, transferring the pronoun in a most
expressive way from herself to her little mother.

‘Or how clever,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘She goes on errands as well as
any one.’ Maggy laughed. ‘And is as trustworthy as the Bank of England.’
Maggy laughed. ‘She earns her own living entirely. Entirely, sir!’ said
Little Dorrit, in a lower and triumphant tone. ‘Really does!’

‘What is her history?’ asked Clennam.

‘Think of that, Maggy?’ said Little Dorrit, taking her two large hands
and clapping them together. ‘A gentleman from thousands of miles away,
wanting to know your history!’

‘_My_ history?’ cried Maggy. ‘Little mother.’

‘She means me,’ said Little Dorrit, rather confused; ‘she is very much
attached to me. Her old grandmother was not so kind to her as she should
have been; was she, Maggy?’

Maggy shook her head, made a drinking vessel of her clenched left hand,
drank out of it, and said, ‘Gin.’ Then beat an imaginary child, and said,
‘Broom-handles and pokers.’

‘When Maggy was ten years old,’ said Little Dorrit, watching her face
while she spoke, ‘she had a bad fever, sir, and she has never grown any
older ever since.’

‘Ten years old,’ said Maggy, nodding her head. ‘But what a nice
hospital! So comfortable, wasn’t it? Oh so nice it was. Such a Ev’nly
place!’

‘She had never been at peace before, sir,’ said Little Dorrit, turning
towards Arthur for an instant and speaking low, ‘and she always runs off
upon that.’

‘Such beds there is there!’ cried Maggy. ‘Such lemonades! Such oranges!
Such d’licious broth and wine! Such Chicking! Oh, AIN’T it a delightful
place to go and stop at!’

‘So Maggy stopped there as long as she could,’ said Little Dorrit,
in her former tone of telling a child’s story; the tone designed for
Maggy’s ear, ‘and at last, when she could stop there no longer, she came
out. Then, because she was never to be more than ten years old, however
long she lived--’

‘However long she lived,’ echoed Maggy.

‘--And because she was very weak; indeed was so weak that when she began
to laugh she couldn’t stop herself--which was a great pity--’

(Maggy mighty grave of a sudden.)

‘--Her grandmother did not know what to do with her, and for some years
was very unkind to her indeed. At length, in course of time, Maggy began
to take pains to improve herself, and to be very attentive and very
industrious; and by degrees was allowed to come in and out as often as
she liked, and got enough to do to support herself, and does support
herself. And that,’ said Little Dorrit, clapping the two great hands
together again, ‘is Maggy’s history, as Maggy knows!’

Ah! But Arthur would have known what was wanting to its completeness,
though he had never heard of the words Little mother; though he had
never seen the fondling of the small spare hand; though he had had no
sight for the tears now standing in the colourless eyes; though he had
had no hearing for the sob that checked the clumsy laugh. The dirty
gateway with the wind and rain whistling through it, and the basket of
muddy potatoes waiting to be spilt again or taken up, never seemed the
common hole it really was, when he looked back to it by these lights.
Never, never!

They were very near the end of their walk, and they now came out of the
gateway to finish it. Nothing would serve Maggy but that they must stop
at a grocer’s window, short of their destination, for her to show her
learning. She could read after a sort; and picked out the fat figures in
the tickets of prices, for the most part correctly. She also stumbled,
with a large balance of success against her failures, through various
philanthropic recommendations to Try our Mixture, Try our Family Black,
Try our Orange-flavoured Pekoe, challenging competition at the head
of Flowery Teas; and various cautions to the public against spurious
establishments and adulterated articles. When he saw how pleasure
brought a rosy tint into Little Dorrit’s face when Maggy made a hit,
he felt that he could have stood there making a library of the grocer’s
window until the rain and wind were tired.

The court-yard received them at last, and there he said goodbye to
Little Dorrit. Little as she had always looked, she looked less than
ever when he saw her going into the Marshalsea lodge passage, the little
mother attended by her big child.

The cage door opened, and when the small bird, reared in captivity, had
tamely fluttered in, he saw it shut again; and then he came away.




CHAPTER 10. Containing the whole Science of Government


The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told)
the most important Department under Government. No public business of
any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of
the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie,
and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the
plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express
authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had
been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody
would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had
been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks
of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical
correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one
sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country,
was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to
study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through
the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done,
the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments
in the art of perceiving--HOW NOT TO DO IT.

Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it
invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted
on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public
departments; and the public condition had risen to be--what it was.

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of
all public departments and professional politicians all round the
Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every
new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as
necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their
utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from
the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had
been raving on hustings because it hadn’t been done, and who had been
asking the friends of the honourable gentleman in the opposite interest
on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn’t been done, and who had
been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself
that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done. It
is true that the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session
through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to
do it. It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session
virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable
stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your respective
chambers, and discuss, How not to do it. It is true that the royal
speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and
gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering
with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found
out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not
political), I now dismiss you. All this is true, but the Circumlocution
Office went beyond it.

Because the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day,
keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How not
to do it, in motion. Because the Circumlocution Office was down upon any
ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be
by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it, with a minute,
and a memorandum, and a letter of instructions that extinguished him. It
was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office
that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything.
Mechanicians, natural philosophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners,
memorialists, people with grievances, people who wanted to prevent
grievances, people who wanted to redress grievances, jobbing people,
jobbed people, people who couldn’t get rewarded for merit, and people
who couldn’t get punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked
up under the foolscap paper of the Circumlocution Office.

Numbers of people were lost in the Circumlocution Office. Unfortunates
with wrongs, or with projects for the general welfare (and they had
better have had wrongs at first, than have taken that bitter English
recipe for certainly getting them), who in slow lapse of time and agony
had passed safely through other public departments; who, according to
rule, had been bullied in this, over-reached by that, and evaded by
the other; got referred at last to the Circumlocution Office, and
never reappeared in the light of day. Boards sat upon them, secretaries
minuted upon them, commissioners gabbled about them, clerks registered,
entered, checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away. In short,
all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office,
except the business that never came out of it; and _its_ name was Legion.

Sometimes, angry spirits attacked the Circumlocution Office. Sometimes,
parliamentary questions were asked about it, and even parliamentary
motions made or threatened about it by demagogues so low and ignorant as
to hold that the real recipe of government was, How to do it. Then would
the noble lord, or right honourable gentleman, in whose department it
was to defend the Circumlocution Office, put an orange in his pocket,
and make a regular field-day of the occasion. Then would he come down to
that house with a slap upon the table, and meet the honourable gentleman
foot to foot. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman
that the Circumlocution Office not only was blameless in this matter,
but was commendable in this matter, was extollable to the skies in this
matter. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that,
although the Circumlocution Office was invariably right and wholly
right, it never was so right as in this matter. Then would he be there
to tell that honourable gentleman that it would have been more to his
honour, more to his credit, more to his good taste, more to his good
sense, more to half the dictionary of commonplaces, if he had left the
Circumlocution Office alone, and never approached this matter. Then
would he keep one eye upon a coach or crammer from the Circumlocution
Office sitting below the bar, and smash the honourable gentleman with
the Circumlocution Office account of this matter. And although one
of two things always happened; namely, either that the Circumlocution
Office had nothing to say and said it, or that it had something to say
of which the noble lord, or right honourable gentleman, blundered one
half and forgot the other; the Circumlocution Office was always voted
immaculate by an accommodating majority.

Such a nursery of statesmen had the Department become in virtue of a
long career of this nature, that several solemn lords had attained the
reputation of being quite unearthly prodigies of business, solely from
having practised, How not to do it, as the head of the Circumlocution
Office. As to the minor priests and acolytes of that temple, the result
of all this was that they stood divided into two classes, and, down to
the junior messenger, either believed in the Circumlocution Office as
a heaven-born institution that had an absolute right to do whatever it
liked; or took refuge in total infidelity, and considered it a flagrant
nuisance.

The Barnacle family had for some time helped to administer the
Circumlocution Office. The Tite Barnacle Branch, indeed, considered
themselves in a general way as having vested rights in that direction,
and took it ill if any other family had much to say to it. The Barnacles
were a very high family, and a very large family. They were dispersed
all over the public offices, and held all sorts of public places. Either
the nation was under a load of obligation to the Barnacles, or the
Barnacles were under a load of obligation to the nation. It was not
quite unanimously settled which; the Barnacles having their opinion, the
nation theirs.

The Mr Tite Barnacle who at the period now in question usually coached
or crammed the statesman at the head of the Circumlocution Office, when
that noble or right honourable individual sat a little uneasily in his
saddle by reason of some vagabond making a tilt at him in a newspaper,
was more flush of blood than money. As a Barnacle he had his place,
which was a snug thing enough; and as a Barnacle he had of course put
in his son Barnacle Junior in the office. But he had intermarried with
a branch of the Stiltstalkings, who were also better endowed in a
sanguineous point of view than with real or personal property, and of
this marriage there had been issue, Barnacle junior and three young
ladies. What with the patrician requirements of Barnacle junior, the
three young ladies, Mrs Tite Barnacle nee Stiltstalking, and himself,
Mr Tite Barnacle found the intervals between quarter day and quarter day
rather longer than he could have desired; a circumstance which he always
attributed to the country’s parsimony.

For Mr Tite Barnacle, Mr Arthur Clennam made his fifth inquiry one day
at the Circumlocution Office; having on previous occasions awaited that
gentleman successively in a hall, a glass case, a waiting room, and a
fire-proof passage where the Department seemed to keep its wind. On this
occasion Mr Barnacle was not engaged, as he had been before, with the
noble prodigy at the head of the Department; but was absent. Barnacle
Junior, however, was announced as a lesser star, yet visible above the
office horizon.

With Barnacle junior, he signified his desire to confer; and found that
young gentleman singeing the calves of his legs at the parental fire,
and supporting his spine against the mantel-shelf. It was a comfortable
room, handsomely furnished in the higher official manner; an presenting
stately suggestions of the absent Barnacle, in the thick carpet, the
leather-covered desk to sit at, the leather-covered desk to stand at,
the formidable easy-chair and hearth-rug, the interposed screen, the
torn-up papers, the dispatch-boxes with little labels sticking out of
them, like medicine bottles or dead game, the pervading smell of leather
and mahogany, and a general bamboozling air of How not to do it.

The present Barnacle, holding Mr Clennam’s card in his hand, had a
youthful aspect, and the fluffiest little whisker, perhaps, that ever
was seen. Such a downy tip was on his callow chin, that he seemed half
fledged like a young bird; and a compassionate observer might have urged
that, if he had not singed the calves of his legs, he would have died
of cold. He had a superior eye-glass dangling round his neck, but
unfortunately had such flat orbits to his eyes and such limp little
eyelids that it wouldn’t stick in when he put it up, but kept tumbling
out against his waistcoat buttons with a click that discomposed him very
much.

‘Oh, I say. Look here! My father’s not in the way, and won’t be in the
way to-day,’ said Barnacle Junior. ‘Is this anything that I can do?’

(Click! Eye-glass down. Barnacle Junior quite frightened and feeling all
round himself, but not able to find it.)

‘You are very good,’ said Arthur Clennam. ‘I wish however to see Mr
Barnacle.’

‘But I say. Look here! You haven’t got any appointment, you know,’ said
Barnacle Junior.

(By this time he had found the eye-glass, and put it up again.)

‘No,’ said Arthur Clennam. ‘That is what I wish to have.’

‘But I say. Look here! Is this public business?’ asked Barnacle junior.

(Click! Eye-glass down again. Barnacle Junior in that state of search
after it that Mr Clennam felt it useless to reply at present.)

‘Is it,’ said Barnacle junior, taking heed of his visitor’s brown face,
‘anything about--Tonnage--or that sort of thing?’

(Pausing for a reply, he opened his right eye with his hand, and stuck
his glass in it, in that inflammatory manner that his eye began watering
dreadfully.)

‘No,’ said Arthur, ‘it is nothing about tonnage.’

‘Then look here. Is it private business?’

‘I really am not sure. It relates to a Mr Dorrit.’

‘Look here, I tell you what! You had better call at our house, if you
are going that way. Twenty-four, Mews Street, Grosvenor Square. My
father’s got a slight touch of the gout, and is kept at home by it.’

(The misguided young Barnacle evidently going blind on his eye-glass
side, but ashamed to make any further alteration in his painful
arrangements.)

‘Thank you. I will call there now. Good morning.’ Young Barnacle seemed
discomfited at this, as not having at all expected him to go.

‘You are quite sure,’ said Barnacle junior, calling after him when he
got to the door, unwilling wholly to relinquish the bright business idea
he had conceived; ‘that it’s nothing about Tonnage?’

‘Quite sure.’

With such assurance, and rather wondering what might have taken place
if it _had_ been anything about tonnage, Mr Clennam withdrew to pursue his
inquiries.

Mews Street, Grosvenor Square, was not absolutely Grosvenor Square
itself, but it was very near it. It was a hideous little street of dead
wall, stables, and dunghills, with lofts over coach-houses inhabited by
coachmen’s families, who had a passion for drying clothes and decorating
their window-sills with miniature turnpike-gates. The principal
chimney-sweep of that fashionable quarter lived at the blind end of Mews
Street; and the same corner contained an establishment much frequented
about early morning and twilight for the purchase of wine-bottles and
kitchen-stuff. Punch’s shows used to lean against the dead wall in Mews
Street, while their proprietors were dining elsewhere; and the dogs of
the neighbourhood made appointments to meet in the same locality. Yet
there were two or three small airless houses at the entrance end of Mews
Street, which went at enormous rents on account of their being abject
hangers-on to a fashionable situation; and whenever one of these fearful
little coops was to be let (which seldom happened, for they were in
great request), the house agent advertised it as a gentlemanly residence
in the most aristocratic part of town, inhabited solely by the elite of
the beau monde.

If a gentlemanly residence coming strictly within this narrow margin had
not been essential to the blood of the Barnacles, this particular branch
would have had a pretty wide selection among, let us say, ten thousand
houses, offering fifty times the accommodation for a third of the money.
As it was, Mr Barnacle, finding his gentlemanly residence extremely
inconvenient and extremely dear, always laid it, as a public servant,
at the door of the country, and adduced it as another instance of the
country’s parsimony.

Arthur Clennam came to a squeezed house, with a ramshackle bowed
front, little dingy windows, and a little dark area like a damp
waistcoat-pocket, which he found to be number twenty-four, Mews Street,
Grosvenor Square. To the sense of smell the house was like a sort of
bottle filled with a strong distillation of Mews; and when the footman
opened the door, he seemed to take the stopper out.

The footman was to the Grosvenor Square footmen, what the house was to
the Grosvenor Square houses. Admirable in his way, his way was a back
and a bye way. His gorgeousness was not unmixed with dirt; and both in
complexion and consistency he had suffered from the closeness of his
pantry. A sallow flabbiness was upon him when he took the stopper out,
and presented the bottle to Mr Clennam’s nose.

‘Be so good as to give that card to Mr Tite Barnacle, and to say that I
have just now seen the younger Mr Barnacle, who recommended me to call
here.’

The footman (who had as many large buttons with the Barnacle crest upon
them on the flaps of his pockets, as if he were the family strong box,
and carried the plate and jewels about with him buttoned up) pondered
over the card a little; then said, ‘Walk in.’ It required some judgment
to do it without butting the inner hall-door open, and in the consequent
mental confusion and physical darkness slipping down the kitchen stairs.
The visitor, however, brought himself up safely on the door-mat.

Still the footman said ‘Walk in,’ so the visitor followed him. At the
inner hall-door, another bottle seemed to be presented and another
stopper taken out. This second vial appeared to be filled with
concentrated provisions and extract of Sink from the pantry. After a
skirmish in the narrow passage, occasioned by the footman’s opening the
door of the dismal dining-room with confidence, finding some one there
with consternation, and backing on the visitor with disorder, the
visitor was shut up, pending his announcement, in a close back parlour.
There he had an opportunity of refreshing himself with both the
bottles at once, looking out at a low blinding wall three feet off,
and speculating on the number of Barnacle families within the bills of
mortality who lived in such hutches of their own free flunkey choice.

Mr Barnacle would see him. Would he walk up-stairs? He would, and
he did; and in the drawing-room, with his leg on a rest, he found Mr
Barnacle himself, the express image and presentment of How not to do it.

Mr Barnacle dated from a better time, when the country was not so
parsimonious and the Circumlocution Office was not so badgered. He wound
and wound folds of white cravat round his neck, as he wound and wound
folds of tape and paper round the neck of the country. His wristbands
and collar were oppressive; his voice and manner were oppressive. He
had a large watch-chain and bunch of seals, a coat buttoned up to
inconvenience, a waistcoat buttoned up to inconvenience, an unwrinkled
pair of trousers, a stiff pair of boots. He was altogether splendid,
massive, overpowering, and impracticable. He seemed to have been sitting
for his portrait to Sir Thomas Lawrence all the days of his life.

‘Mr Clennam?’ said Mr Barnacle. ‘Be seated.’

Mr Clennam became seated.

‘You have called on me, I believe,’ said Mr Barnacle, ‘at the
Circumlocution--’ giving it the air of a word of about five-and-twenty
syllables--‘Office.’

‘I have taken that liberty.’

Mr Barnacle solemnly bent his head as who should say, ‘I do not deny
that it is a liberty; proceed to take another liberty, and let me know
your business.’

‘Allow me to observe that I have been for some years in China, am quite
a stranger at home, and have no personal motive or interest in the
inquiry I am about to make.’

Mr Barnacle tapped his fingers on the table, and, as if he were now
sitting for his portrait to a new and strange artist, appeared to say
to his visitor, ‘If you will be good enough to take me with my present
lofty expression, I shall feel obliged.’

‘I have found a debtor in the Marshalsea Prison of the name of Dorrit,
who has been there many years. I wish to investigate his confused
affairs so far as to ascertain whether it may not be possible, after
this lapse of time, to ameliorate his unhappy condition. The name of
Mr Tite Barnacle has been mentioned to me as representing some highly
influential interest among his creditors. Am I correctly informed?’

It being one of the principles of the Circumlocution Office never, on
any account whatever, to give a straightforward answer, Mr Barnacle
said, ‘Possibly.’

‘On behalf of the Crown, may I ask, or as private individual?’

‘The Circumlocution Department, sir,’ Mr Barnacle replied, ‘may have
possibly recommended--possibly--I cannot say--that some public claim
against the insolvent estate of a firm or copartnership to which this
person may have belonged, should be enforced. The question may have
been, in the course of official business, referred to the Circumlocution
Department for its consideration. The Department may have either
originated, or confirmed, a Minute making that recommendation.’

‘I assume this to be the case, then.’

‘The Circumlocution Department,’ said Mr Barnacle, ‘is not responsible
for any gentleman’s assumptions.’

‘May I inquire how I can obtain official information as to the real
state of the case?’

‘It is competent,’ said Mr Barnacle, ‘to any member of the--Public,’
mentioning that obscure body with reluctance, as his natural enemy,
‘to memorialise the Circumlocution Department. Such formalities as are
required to be observed in so doing, may be known on application to the
proper branch of that Department.’

‘Which is the proper branch?’

‘I must refer you,’ returned Mr Barnacle, ringing the bell, ‘to the
Department itself for a formal answer to that inquiry.’

‘Excuse my mentioning--’

‘The Department is accessible to the--Public,’ Mr Barnacle was always
checked a little by that word of impertinent signification, ‘if
the--Public approaches it according to the official forms; if
the--Public does not approach it according to the official forms,
the--Public has itself to blame.’

Mr Barnacle made him a severe bow, as a wounded man of family, a wounded
man of place, and a wounded man of a gentlemanly residence, all rolled
into one; and he made Mr Barnacle a bow, and was shut out into Mews
Street by the flabby footman.

Having got to this pass, he resolved as an exercise in perseverance,
to betake himself again to the Circumlocution Office, and try what
satisfaction he could get there. So he went back to the Circumlocution
Office, and once more sent up his card to Barnacle junior by a messenger
who took it very ill indeed that he should come back again, and who was
eating mashed potatoes and gravy behind a partition by the hall fire.

He was readmitted to the presence of Barnacle junior, and found that
young gentleman singeing his knees now, and gaping his weary way on
to four o’clock.

‘I say. Look here. You stick to us in a devil of a manner,’ Said
Barnacle junior, looking over his shoulder.

‘I want to know--’

‘Look here. Upon my soul you mustn’t come into the place saying you
want to know, you know,’ remonstrated Barnacle junior, turning about and
putting up the eye-glass.

‘I want to know,’ said Arthur Clennam, who had made up his mind to
persistence in one short form of words, ‘the precise nature of the claim
of the Crown against a prisoner for debt, named Dorrit.’

‘I say. Look here. You really are going it at a great pace, you know.
Egad, you haven’t got an appointment,’ said Barnacle junior, as if the
thing were growing serious.

‘I want to know,’ said Arthur, and repeated his case.

Barnacle junior stared at him until his eye-glass fell out, and then
put it in again and stared at him until it fell out again. ‘You have
no right to come this sort of move,’ he then observed with the greatest
weakness. ‘Look here. What do you mean? You told me you didn’t know
whether it was public business or not.’

‘I have now ascertained that it is public business,’ returned the
suitor, ‘and I want to know’--and again repeated his monotonous inquiry.

Its effect upon young Barnacle was to make him repeat in a defenceless
way, ‘Look here! Upon my SOUL you mustn’t come into the place saying you
want to know, you know!’ The effect of that upon Arthur Clennam was
to make him repeat his inquiry in exactly the same words and tone
as before. The effect of that upon young Barnacle was to make him a
wonderful spectacle of failure and helplessness.

‘Well, I tell you what. Look here. You had better try the Secretarial
Department,’ he said at last, sidling to the bell and ringing it.
‘Jenkinson,’ to the mashed potatoes messenger, ‘Mr Wobbler!’

Arthur Clennam, who now felt that he had devoted himself to the storming
of the Circumlocution Office, and must go through with it, accompanied
the messenger to another floor of the building, where that functionary
pointed out Mr Wobbler’s room. He entered that apartment, and found two
gentlemen sitting face to face at a large and easy desk, one of whom was
polishing a gun-barrel on his pocket-handkerchief, while the other was
spreading marmalade on bread with a paper-knife.

‘Mr Wobbler?’ inquired the suitor.

Both gentlemen glanced at him, and seemed surprised at his assurance.

‘So he went,’ said the gentleman with the gun-barrel, who was an
extremely deliberate speaker, ‘down to his cousin’s place, and took the
Dog with him by rail. Inestimable Dog. Flew at the porter fellow when he
was put into the dog-box, and flew at the guard when he was taken out.
He got half-a-dozen fellows into a Barn, and a good supply of Rats, and
timed the Dog. Finding the Dog able to do it immensely, made the match,
and heavily backed the Dog. When the match came off, some devil of
a fellow was bought over, Sir, Dog was made drunk, Dog’s master was
cleaned out.’

‘Mr Wobbler?’ inquired the suitor.

The gentleman who was spreading the marmalade returned, without looking
up from that occupation, ‘What did he call the Dog?’

‘Called him Lovely,’ said the other gentleman. ‘Said the Dog was the
perfect picture of the old aunt from whom he had expectations. Found him
particularly like her when hocussed.’

‘Mr Wobbler?’ said the suitor.

Both gentlemen laughed for some time. The gentleman with the gun-barrel,
considering it, on inspection, in a satisfactory state, referred it to
the other; receiving confirmation of his views, he fitted it into its
place in the case before him, and took out the stock and polished that,
softly whistling.

‘Mr Wobbler?’ said the suitor.

‘What’s the matter?’ then said Mr Wobbler, with his mouth full.

‘I want to know--’ and Arthur Clennam again mechanically set forth what
he wanted to know.

‘Can’t inform you,’ observed Mr Wobbler, apparently to his lunch. ‘Never
heard of it. Nothing at all to do with it. Better try Mr Clive, second
door on the left in the next passage.’

‘Perhaps he will give me the same answer.’

‘Very likely. Don’t know anything about it,’ said Mr Wobbler.

The suitor turned away and had left the room, when the gentleman with
the gun called out ‘Mister! Hallo!’

He looked in again.

‘Shut the door after you. You’re letting in a devil of a draught here!’

A few steps brought him to the second door on the left in the next
passage. In that room he found three gentlemen; number one doing nothing
particular, number two doing nothing particular, number three doing
nothing particular. They seemed, however, to be more directly concerned
than the others had been in the effective execution of the great
principle of the office, as there was an awful inner apartment with a
double door, in which the Circumlocution Sages appeared to be assembled
in council, and out of which there was an imposing coming of papers,
and into which there was an imposing going of papers, almost constantly;
wherein another gentleman, number four, was the active instrument.

‘I want to know,’ said Arthur Clennam,--and again stated his case in the
same barrel-organ way. As number one referred him to number two, and
as number two referred him to number three, he had occasion to state
it three times before they all referred him to number four, to whom he
stated it again.

Number four was a vivacious, well-looking, well-dressed, agreeable
young fellow--he was a Barnacle, but on the more sprightly side of
the family--and he said in an easy way, ‘Oh! you had better not bother
yourself about it, I think.’

‘Not bother myself about it?’

‘No! I recommend you not to bother yourself about it.’

This was such a new point of view that Arthur Clennam found himself at a
loss how to receive it.

‘You can if you like. I can give you plenty of forms to fill up. Lots of
‘em here. You can have a dozen if you like. But you’ll never go on with
it,’ said number four.

‘Would it be such hopeless work? Excuse me; I am a stranger in England.’

‘_I_ don’t say it would be hopeless,’ returned number four, with a frank
smile. ‘I don’t express an opinion about that; I only express an opinion
about you. _I_ don’t think you’d go on with it. However, of course, you
can do as you like. I suppose there was a failure in the performance of
a contract, or something of that kind, was there?’

‘I really don’t know.’

‘Well! That you can find out. Then you’ll find out what Department the
contract was in, and then you’ll find out all about it there.’

‘I beg your pardon. How shall I find out?’

‘Why, you’ll--you’ll ask till they tell you. Then you’ll memorialise
that Department (according to regular forms which you’ll find out) for
leave to memorialise this Department. If you get it (which you may after
a time), that memorial must be entered in that Department, sent to
be registered in this Department, sent back to be signed by that
Department, sent back to be countersigned by this Department, and then
it will begin to be regularly before that Department. You’ll find out
when the business passes through each of these stages by asking at both
Departments till they tell you.’

‘But surely this is not the way to do the business,’ Arthur Clennam
could not help saying.

This airy young Barnacle was quite entertained by his simplicity in
supposing for a moment that it was. This light in hand young Barnacle
knew perfectly that it was not. This touch and go young Barnacle had
‘got up’ the Department in a private secretaryship, that he might
be ready for any little bit of fat that came to hand; and he fully
understood the Department to be a politico-diplomatic hocus pocus piece
of machinery for the assistance of the nobs in keeping off the
snobs. This dashing young Barnacle, in a word, was likely to become a
statesman, and to make a figure.

‘When the business is regularly before that Department, whatever it is,’
pursued this bright young Barnacle, ‘then you can watch it from time
to time through that Department. When it comes regularly before this
Department, then you must watch it from time to time through this
Department. We shall have to refer it right and left; and when we refer
it anywhere, then you’ll have to look it up. When it comes back to us
at any time, then you had better look _us_ up. When it sticks anywhere,
you’ll have to try to give it a jog. When you write to another
Department about it, and then to this Department about it, and don’t
hear anything satisfactory about it, why then you had better--keep on
writing.’

Arthur Clennam looked very doubtful indeed. ‘But I am obliged to you at
any rate,’ said he, ‘for your politeness.’

‘Not at all,’ replied this engaging young Barnacle. ‘Try the thing, and
see how you like it. It will be in your power to give it up at any time,
if you don’t like it. You had better take a lot of forms away with you.
Give him a lot of forms!’ With which instruction to number two, this
sparkling young Barnacle took a fresh handful of papers from numbers one
and three, and carried them into the sanctuary to offer to the presiding
Idol of the Circumlocution Office.

Arthur Clennam put his forms in his pocket gloomily enough, and went
his way down the long stone passage and the long stone staircase. He had
come to the swing doors leading into the street, and was waiting, not
over patiently, for two people who were between him and them to pass out
and let him follow, when the voice of one of them struck familiarly on
his ear. He looked at the speaker and recognised Mr Meagles. Mr Meagles
was very red in the face--redder than travel could have made him--and
collaring a short man who was with him, said, ‘come out, you rascal,
come Out!’

It was such an unexpected hearing, and it was also such an unexpected
sight to see Mr Meagles burst the swing doors open, and emerge into the
street with the short man, who was of an unoffending appearance, that
Clennam stood still for the moment exchanging looks of surprise with the
porter. He followed, however, quickly; and saw Mr Meagles going down
the street with his enemy at his side. He soon came up with his old
travelling companion, and touched him on the back. The choleric face
which Mr Meagles turned upon him smoothed when he saw who it was, and he
put out his friendly hand.

‘How are you?’ said Mr Meagles. ‘How d’ye _do?_ I have only just come over
from abroad. I am glad to see you.’

‘And I am rejoiced to see you.’

‘Thank’ee. Thank’ee!’

‘Mrs Meagles and your daughter--?’

‘Are as well as possible,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘I only wish you had come
upon me in a more prepossessing condition as to coolness.’

Though it was anything but a hot day, Mr Meagles was in a heated state
that attracted the attention of the passersby; more particularly as
he leaned his back against a railing, took off his hat and cravat, and
heartily rubbed his steaming head and face, and his reddened ears and
neck, without the least regard for public opinion.

‘Whew!’ said Mr Meagles, dressing again. ‘That’s comfortable. Now I am
cooler.’

‘You have been ruffled, Mr Meagles. What is the matter?’

‘Wait a bit, and I’ll tell you. Have you leisure for a turn in the
Park?’

‘As much as you please.’

‘Come along then. Ah! you may well look at him.’ He happened to have
turned his eyes towards the offender whom Mr Meagles had so angrily
collared. ‘He’s something to look at, that fellow is.’

He was not much to look at, either in point of size or in point of
dress; being merely a short, square, practical looking man, whose hair
had turned grey, and in whose face and forehead there were deep lines of
cogitation, which looked as though they were carved in hard wood. He
was dressed in decent black, a little rusty, and had the appearance of
a sagacious master in some handicraft. He had a spectacle-case in his
hand, which he turned over and over while he was thus in question,
with a certain free use of the thumb that is never seen but in a hand
accustomed to tools.

‘You keep with us,’ said Mr Meagles, in a threatening kind of Way, ‘and
I’ll introduce you presently. Now then!’

Clennam wondered within himself, as they took the nearest way to the
Park, what this unknown (who complied in the gentlest manner) could have
been doing. His appearance did not at all justify the suspicion that he
had been detected in designs on Mr Meagles’s pocket-handkerchief; nor
had he any appearance of being quarrelsome or violent. He was a quiet,
plain, steady man; made no attempt to escape; and seemed a little
depressed, but neither ashamed nor repentant. If he were a criminal
offender, he must surely be an incorrigible hypocrite; and if he were no
offender, why should Mr Meagles have collared him in the Circumlocution
Office? He perceived that the man was not a difficulty in his own
mind alone, but in Mr Meagles’s too; for such conversation as they had
together on the short way to the Park was by no means well sustained,
and Mr Meagles’s eye always wandered back to the man, even when he spoke
of something very different.

At length they being among the trees, Mr Meagles stopped short, and
said:

‘Mr Clennam, will you do me the favour to look at this man? His name
is Doyce, Daniel Doyce. You wouldn’t suppose this man to be a notorious
rascal; would you?’

‘I certainly should not.’ It was really a disconcerting question, with
the man there.

‘No. You would not. I know you would not. You wouldn’t suppose him to be
a public offender; would you?’

‘No.’

‘No. But he is. He is a public offender. What has he been guilty of?
Murder, manslaughter, arson, forgery, swindling, house-breaking, highway
robbery, larceny, conspiracy, fraud? Which should you say, now?’

‘I should say,’ returned Arthur Clennam, observing a faint smile in
Daniel Doyce’s face, ‘not one of them.’

‘You are right,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘But he has been ingenious, and he has
been trying to turn his ingenuity to his country’s service. That makes
him a public offender directly, sir.’

Arthur looked at the man himself, who only shook his head.

‘This Doyce,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘is a smith and engineer. He is not in a
large way, but he is well known as a very ingenious man. A dozen years
ago, he perfects an invention (involving a very curious secret process)
of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures. I won’t say
how much money it cost him, or how many years of his life he had been
about it, but he brought it to perfection a dozen years ago. Wasn’t it a
dozen?’ said Mr Meagles, addressing Doyce. ‘He is the most exasperating
man in the world; he never complains!’

‘Yes. Rather better than twelve years ago.’

‘Rather better?’ said Mr Meagles, ‘you mean rather worse. Well, Mr
Clennam, he addresses himself to the Government. The moment he addresses
himself to the Government, he becomes a public offender! Sir,’ said Mr
Meagles, in danger of making himself excessively hot again, ‘he ceases
to be an innocent citizen, and becomes a culprit. He is treated from
that instant as a man who has done some infernal action. He is a man to
be shirked, put off, brow-beaten, sneered at, handed over by this
highly-connected young or old gentleman, to that highly-connected young
or old gentleman, and dodged back again; he is a man with no rights in
his own time, or his own property; a mere outlaw, whom it is justifiable
to get rid of anyhow; a man to be worn out by all possible means.’

It was not so difficult to believe, after the morning’s experience, as
Mr Meagles supposed.

‘Don’t stand there, Doyce, turning your spectacle-case over and over,’
cried Mr Meagles, ‘but tell Mr Clennam what you confessed to me.’

‘I undoubtedly was made to feel,’ said the inventor, ‘as if I had
committed an offence. In dancing attendance at the various offices, I
was always treated, more or less, as if it was a very bad offence. I
have frequently found it necessary to reflect, for my own self-support,
that I really had not done anything to bring myself into the Newgate
Calendar, but only wanted to effect a great saving and a great
improvement.’

‘There!’ said Mr Meagles. ‘Judge whether I exaggerate. Now you’ll be
able to believe me when I tell you the rest of the case.’

With this prelude, Mr Meagles went through the narrative; the
established narrative, which has become tiresome; the matter-of-course
narrative which we all know by heart. How, after interminable attendance
and correspondence, after infinite impertinences, ignorances, and
insults, my lords made a Minute, number three thousand four hundred
and seventy-two, allowing the culprit to make certain trials of his
invention at his own expense. How the trials were made in the presence
of a board of six, of whom two ancient members were too blind to see it,
two other ancient members were too deaf to hear it, one other ancient
member was too lame to get near it, and the final ancient member was too
pig-headed to look at it. How there were more years; more impertinences,
ignorances, and insults. How my lords then made a Minute, number five
thousand one hundred and three, whereby they resigned the business to
the Circumlocution Office. How the Circumlocution Office, in course of
time, took up the business as if it were a bran new thing of yesterday,
which had never been heard of before; muddled the business, addled the
business, tossed the business in a wet blanket. How the impertinences,
ignorances, and insults went through the multiplication table. How there
was a reference of the invention to three Barnacles and a Stiltstalking,
who knew nothing about it; into whose heads nothing could be hammered
about it; who got bored about it, and reported physical impossibilities
about it. How the Circumlocution Office, in a Minute, number eight
thousand seven hundred and forty, ‘saw no reason to reverse the decision
at which my lords had arrived.’ How the Circumlocution Office, being
reminded that my lords had arrived at no decision, shelved the business.
How there had been a final interview with the head of the Circumlocution
Office that very morning, and how the Brazen Head had spoken, and had
been, upon the whole, and under all the circumstances, and looking at it
from the various points of view, of opinion that one of two courses was
to be pursued in respect of the business: that was to say, either to
leave it alone for evermore, or to begin it all over again.

‘Upon which,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘as a practical man, I then and there, in
that presence, took Doyce by the collar, and told him it was plain to
me that he was an infamous rascal and treasonable disturber of the
government peace, and took him away. I brought him out of the office
door by the collar, that the very porter might know I was a practical
man who appreciated the official estimate of such characters; and here
we are!’

If that airy young Barnacle had been there, he would have frankly told
them perhaps that the Circumlocution Office had achieved its function.
That what the Barnacles had to do, was to stick on to the national ship
as long as they could. That to trim the ship, lighten the ship, clean
the ship, would be to knock them off; that they could but be knocked off
once; and that if the ship went down with them yet sticking to it, that
was the ship’s look out, and not theirs.

‘There!’ said Mr Meagles, ‘now you know all about Doyce. Except, which I
own does not improve my state of mind, that even now you don’t hear him
complain.’

‘You must have great patience,’ said Arthur Clennam, looking at him with
some wonder, ‘great forbearance.’

‘No,’ he returned, ‘I don’t know that I have more than another man.’

‘By the Lord, you have more than I have, though!’ cried Mr Meagles.

Doyce smiled, as he said to Clennam, ‘You see, my experience of these
things does not begin with myself. It has been in my way to know a
little about them from time to time. Mine is not a particular case. I am
not worse used than a hundred others who have put themselves in the same
position--than all the others, I was going to say.’

‘I don’t know that I should find that a consolation, if it were my case;
but I am very glad that you do.’

‘Understand me! I don’t say,’ he replied in his steady, planning
way, and looking into the distance before him as if his grey eye were
measuring it, ‘that it’s recompense for a man’s toil and hope; but it’s
a certain sort of relief to know that I might have counted on this.’

He spoke in that quiet deliberate manner, and in that undertone, which
is often observable in mechanics who consider and adjust with great
nicety. It belonged to him like his suppleness of thumb, or his peculiar
way of tilting up his hat at the back every now and then, as if he were
contemplating some half-finished work of his hand and thinking about it.

‘Disappointed?’ he went on, as he walked between them under the trees.
‘Yes. No doubt I am disappointed. Hurt? Yes. No doubt I am hurt. That’s
only natural. But what I mean when I say that people who put themselves
in the same position are mostly used in the same way--’

‘In England,’ said Mr Meagles.

‘Oh! of course I mean in England. When they take their inventions into
foreign countries, that’s quite different. And that’s the reason why so
many go there.’

Mr Meagles very hot indeed again.

‘What I mean is, that however this comes to be the regular way of our
government, it is its regular way. Have you ever heard of any projector
or inventor who failed to find it all but inaccessible, and whom it did
not discourage and ill-treat?’

‘I cannot say that I ever have.’

‘Have you ever known it to be beforehand in the adoption of any useful
thing? Ever known it to set an example of any useful kind?’

‘I am a good deal older than my friend here,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘and I’ll
answer that. Never.’

‘But we all three have known, I expect,’ said the inventor, ‘a pretty
many cases of its fixed determination to be miles upon miles, and years
upon years, behind the rest of us; and of its being found out persisting
in the use of things long superseded, even after the better things were
well known and generally taken up?’

They all agreed upon that.

‘Well then,’ said Doyce, with a sigh, ‘as I know what such a metal will
do at such a temperature, and such a body under such a pressure, so I
may know (if I will only consider), how these great lords and gentlemen
will certainly deal with such a matter as mine. I have no right to be
surprised, with a head upon my shoulders, and memory in it, that I fall
into the ranks with all who came before me. I ought to have let it
alone. I have had warning enough, I am sure.’

With that he put up his spectacle-case, and said to Arthur, ‘If I don’t
complain, Mr Clennam, I can feel gratitude; and I assure you that I
feel it towards our mutual friend. Many’s the day, and many’s the way in
which he has backed me.’

‘Stuff and nonsense,’ said Mr Meagles.

Arthur could not but glance at Daniel Doyce in the ensuing silence.
Though it was evidently in the grain of his character, and of his
respect for his own case, that he should abstain from idle murmuring,
it was evident that he had grown the older, the sterner, and the poorer,
for his long endeavour. He could not but think what a blessed thing
it would have been for this man, if he had taken a lesson from the
gentlemen who were so kind as to take a nation’s affairs in charge, and
had learnt How not to do it.

Mr Meagles was hot and despondent for about five minutes, and then began
to cool and clear up.

‘Come, come!’ said he. ‘We shall not make this the better by being grim.
Where do you think of going, Dan?’

‘I shall go back to the factory,’ said Dan.

‘Why then, we’ll all go back to the factory, or walk in that direction,’
returned Mr Meagles cheerfully. ‘Mr Clennam won’t be deterred by its
being in Bleeding Heart Yard.’

‘Bleeding Heart Yard?’ said Clennam. ‘I want to go there.’

‘So much the better,’ cried Mr Meagles. ‘Come along!’

As they went along, certainly one of the party, and probably more than
one, thought that Bleeding Heart Yard was no inappropriate destination
for a man who had been in official correspondence with my lords and the
Barnacles--and perhaps had a misgiving also that Britannia herself might
come to look for lodgings in Bleeding Heart Yard some ugly day or other,
if she over-did the Circumlocution Office.



CHAPTER 11. Let Loose


A late, dull autumn night was closing in upon the river Saone. The
stream, like a sullied looking-glass in a gloomy place, reflected the
clouds heavily; and the low banks leaned over here and there, as if they
were half curious, and half afraid, to see their darkening pictures in
the water. The flat expanse of country about Chalons lay a long heavy
streak, occasionally made a little ragged by a row of poplar trees
against the wrathful sunset. On the banks of the river Saone it was wet,
depressing, solitary; and the night deepened fast.

One man slowly moving on towards Chalons was the only visible figure in
the landscape. Cain might have looked as lonely and avoided. With an old
sheepskin knapsack at his back, and a rough, unbarked stick cut out of
some wood in his hand; miry, footsore, his shoes and gaiters trodden
out, his hair and beard untrimmed; the cloak he carried over his
shoulder, and the clothes he wore, sodden with wet; limping along in
pain and difficulty; he looked as if the clouds were hurrying from him,
as if the wail of the wind and the shuddering of the grass were directed
against him, as if the low mysterious plashing of the water murmured at
him, as if the fitful autumn night were disturbed by him.

He glanced here, and he glanced there, sullenly but shrinkingly; and
sometimes stopped and turned about, and looked all round him. Then he
limped on again, toiling and muttering.

‘To the devil with this plain that has no end! To the devil with these
stones that cut like knives! To the devil with this dismal darkness,
wrapping itself about one with a chill! I hate you!’

And he would have visited his hatred upon it all with the scowl he threw
about him, if he could. He trudged a little further; and looking into
the distance before him, stopped again.

‘I, hungry, thirsty, weary. You, imbeciles, where the lights are yonder,
eating and drinking, and warming yourselves at fires! I wish I had the
sacking of your town; I would repay you, my children!’

But the teeth he set at the town, and the hand he shook at the town,
brought the town no nearer; and the man was yet hungrier, and thirstier,
and wearier, when his feet were on its jagged pavement, and he stood
looking about him.

There was the hotel with its gateway, and its savoury smell of cooking;
there was the cafe with its bright windows, and its rattling of
dominoes; there was the dyer’s with its strips of red cloth on the
doorposts; there was the silversmith’s with its earrings, and its
offerings for altars; there was the tobacco dealer’s with its lively
group of soldier customers coming out pipe in mouth; there were the bad
odours of the town, and the rain and the refuse in the kennels, and
the faint lamps slung across the road, and the huge Diligence, and its
mountain of luggage, and its six grey horses with their tails tied up,
getting under weigh at the coach office. But no small cabaret for a
straitened traveller being within sight, he had to seek one round the
dark corner, where the cabbage leaves lay thickest, trodden about the
public cistern at which women had not yet left off drawing water. There,
in the back street he found one, the Break of Day. The curtained windows
clouded the Break of Day, but it seemed light and warm, and it announced
in legible inscriptions with appropriate pictorial embellishment
of billiard cue and ball, that at the Break of Day one could play
billiards; that there one could find meat, drink, and lodgings, whether
one came on horseback, or came on foot; and that it kept good wines,
liqueurs, and brandy. The man turned the handle of the Break of Day
door, and limped in.

He touched his discoloured slouched hat, as he came in at the door, to
a few men who occupied the room. Two were playing dominoes at one of the
little tables; three or four were seated round the stove, conversing
as they smoked; the billiard-table in the centre was left alone for the
time; the landlady of the Daybreak sat behind her little counter among
her cloudy bottles of syrups, baskets of cakes, and leaden drainage for
glasses, working at her needle.

Making his way to an empty little table in a corner of the room behind
the stove, he put down his knapsack and his cloak upon the ground. As
he raised his head from stooping to do so, he found the landlady beside
him.

‘One can lodge here to-night, madame?’

‘Perfectly!’ said the landlady in a high, sing-song, cheery voice.

‘Good. One can dine--sup--what you please to call it?’

‘Ah, perfectly!’ cried the landlady as before.

‘Dispatch then, madame, if you please. Something to eat, as quickly as
you can; and some wine at once. I am exhausted.’

‘It is very bad weather, monsieur,’ said the landlady.

‘Cursed weather.’

‘And a very long road.’

‘A cursed road.’

His hoarse voice failed him, and he rested his head upon his hands until
a bottle of wine was brought from the counter. Having filled and emptied
his little tumbler twice, and having broken off an end from the great
loaf that was set before him with his cloth and napkin, soup-plate,
salt, pepper, and oil, he rested his back against the corner of the
wall, made a couch of the bench on which he sat, and began to chew
crust, until such time as his repast should be ready.

There had been that momentary interruption of the talk about the stove,
and that temporary inattention to and distraction from one another,
which is usually inseparable in such a company from the arrival of a
stranger. It had passed over by this time; and the men had done glancing
at him, and were talking again.

‘That’s the true reason,’ said one of them, bringing a story he had
been telling, to a close, ‘that’s the true reason why they said that the
devil was let loose.’ The speaker was the tall Swiss belonging to the
church, and he brought something of the authority of the church into the
discussion--especially as the devil was in question.

The landlady having given her directions for the new guest’s
entertainment to her husband, who acted as cook to the Break of Day, had
resumed her needlework behind her counter. She was a smart, neat, bright
little woman, with a good deal of cap and a good deal of stocking, and
she struck into the conversation with several laughing nods of her head,
but without looking up from her work.

‘Ah Heaven, then,’ said she. ‘When the boat came up from Lyons, and
brought the news that the devil was actually let loose at Marseilles,
some fly-catchers swallowed it. But I? No, not I.’

‘Madame, you are always right,’ returned the tall Swiss. ‘Doubtless you
were enraged against that man, madame?’

‘Ay, yes, then!’ cried the landlady, raising her eyes from her work,
opening them very wide, and tossing her head on one side. ‘Naturally,
yes.’

‘He was a bad subject.’

‘He was a wicked wretch,’ said the landlady, ‘and well merited what he
had the good fortune to escape. So much the worse.’

‘Stay, madame! Let us see,’ returned the Swiss, argumentatively turning
his cigar between his lips. ‘It may have been his unfortunate destiny.
He may have been the child of circumstances. It is always possible that
he had, and has, good in him if one did but know how to find it out.
Philosophical philanthropy teaches--’

The rest of the little knot about the stove murmured an objection to
the introduction of that threatening expression. Even the two players
at dominoes glanced up from their game, as if to protest against
philosophical philanthropy being brought by name into the Break of Day.

‘Hold there, you and your philanthropy,’ cried the smiling landlady,
nodding her head more than ever. ‘Listen then. I am a woman, I. I know
nothing of philosophical philanthropy. But I know what I have seen, and
what I have looked in the face in this world here, where I find myself.
And I tell you this, my friend, that there are people (men and women
both, unfortunately) who have no good in them--none. That there are
people whom it is necessary to detest without compromise. That there are
people who must be dealt with as enemies of the human race. That there
are people who have no human heart, and who must be crushed like savage
beasts and cleared out of the way. They are but few, I hope; but I have
seen (in this world here where I find myself, and even at the little
Break of Day) that there are such people. And I do not doubt that this
man--whatever they call him, I forget his name--is one of them.’

The landlady’s lively speech was received with greater favour at
the Break of Day, than it would have elicited from certain amiable
whitewashers of the class she so unreasonably objected to, nearer Great
Britain.

‘My faith! If your philosophical philanthropy,’ said the landlady,
putting down her work, and rising to take the stranger’s soup from her
husband, who appeared with it at a side door, ‘puts anybody at the mercy
of such people by holding terms with them at all, in words or deeds, or
both, take it away from the Break of Day, for it isn’t worth a sou.’

As she placed the soup before the guest, who changed his attitude to a
sitting one, he looked her full in the face, and his moustache went up
under his nose, and his nose came down over his moustache.

‘Well!’ said the previous speaker, ‘let us come back to our subject.
Leaving all that aside, gentlemen, it was because the man was acquitted
on his trial that people said at Marseilles that the devil was let
loose. That was how the phrase began to circulate, and what it meant;
nothing more.’

‘How do they call him?’ said the landlady. ‘Biraud, is it not?’

‘Rigaud, madame,’ returned the tall Swiss.

‘Rigaud! To be sure.’

The traveller’s soup was succeeded by a dish of meat, and that by a dish
of vegetables. He ate all that was placed before him, emptied his bottle
of wine, called for a glass of rum, and smoked his cigarette with
his cup of coffee. As he became refreshed, he became overbearing; and
patronised the company at the Daybreak in certain small talk at which he
assisted, as if his condition were far above his appearance.

The company might have had other engagements, or they might have felt
their inferiority, but in any case they dispersed by degrees, and not
being replaced by other company, left their new patron in possession of
the Break of Day. The landlord was clinking about in his kitchen; the
landlady was quiet at her work; and the refreshed traveller sat smoking
by the stove, warming his ragged feet.

‘Pardon me, madame--that Biraud.’

‘Rigaud, monsieur.’

‘Rigaud. Pardon me again--has contracted your displeasure, how?’

The landlady, who had been at one moment thinking within herself that
this was a handsome man, at another moment that this was an ill-looking
man, observed the nose coming down and the moustache going up, and
strongly inclined to the latter decision. Rigaud was a criminal, she
said, who had killed his wife.

‘Ay, ay? Death of my life, that’s a criminal indeed. But how do you know
it?’

‘All the world knows it.’

‘Hah! And yet he escaped justice?’

‘Monsieur, the law could not prove it against him to its satisfaction.
So the law says. Nevertheless, all the world knows he did it. The people
knew it so well, that they tried to tear him to pieces.’

‘Being all in perfect accord with their own wives?’ said the guest. ‘Haha!’

The landlady of the Break of Day looked at him again, and felt almost
confirmed in her last decision. He had a fine hand, though, and he
turned it with a great show. She began once more to think that he was
not ill-looking after all.

‘Did you mention, madame--or was it mentioned among the gentlemen--what
became of him?’

The landlady shook her head; it being the first conversational stage at
which her vivacious earnestness had ceased to nod it, keeping time to what
she said. It had been mentioned at the Daybreak, she remarked, on the
authority of the journals, that he had been kept in prison for his own
safety. However that might be, he had escaped his deserts; so much the
worse.

The guest sat looking at her as he smoked out his final cigarette, and
as she sat with her head bent over her work, with an expression that
might have resolved her doubts, and brought her to a lasting conclusion
on the subject of his good or bad looks if she had seen it. When she did
look up, the expression was not there. The hand was smoothing his shaggy
moustache.

‘May one ask to be shown to bed, madame?’

Very willingly, monsieur. Hola, my husband! My husband would conduct him
up-stairs. There was one traveller there, asleep, who had gone to bed
very early indeed, being overpowered by fatigue; but it was a large
chamber with two beds in it, and space enough for twenty. This the
landlady of the Break of Day chirpingly explained, calling between
whiles, ‘Hola, my husband!’ out at the side door.

My husband answered at length, ‘It is I, my wife!’ and presenting
himself in his cook’s cap, lighted the traveller up a steep and narrow
staircase; the traveller carrying his own cloak and knapsack, and
bidding the landlady good night with a complimentary reference to the
pleasure of seeing her again to-morrow. It was a large room, with a
rough splintery floor, unplastered rafters overhead, and two bedsteads
on opposite sides. Here ‘my husband’ put down the candle he carried, and
with a sidelong look at his guest stooping over his knapsack, gruffly
gave him the instruction, ‘The bed to the right!’ and left him to his
repose. The landlord, whether he was a good or a bad physiognomist, had
fully made up his mind that the guest was an ill-looking fellow.

The guest looked contemptuously at the clean coarse bedding prepared for
him, and, sitting down on the rush chair at the bedside, drew his money
out of his pocket, and told it over in his hand. ‘One must eat,’ he
muttered to himself, ‘but by Heaven I must eat at the cost of some other
man to-morrow!’

As he sat pondering, and mechanically weighing his money in his palm,
the deep breathing of the traveller in the other bed fell so regularly
upon his hearing that it attracted his eyes in that direction. The man
was covered up warm, and had drawn the white curtain at his head, so
that he could be only heard, not seen. But the deep regular breathing,
still going on while the other was taking off his worn shoes and
gaiters, and still continuing when he had laid aside his coat and
cravat, became at length a strong provocative to curiosity, and
incentive to get a glimpse of the sleeper’s face.

The waking traveller, therefore, stole a little nearer, and yet a little
nearer, and a little nearer to the sleeping traveller’s bed, until he
stood close beside it. Even then he could not see his face, for he had
drawn the sheet over it. The regular breathing still continuing, he put
his smooth white hand (such a treacherous hand it looked, as it went
creeping from him!) to the sheet, and gently lifted it away.

‘Death of my soul!’ he whispered, falling back, ‘here’s Cavalletto!’

The little Italian, previously influenced in his sleep, perhaps, by the
stealthy presence at his bedside, stopped in his regular breathing, and
with a long deep respiration opened his eyes. At first they were not
awake, though open. He lay for some seconds looking placidly at his
old prison companion, and then, all at once, with a cry of surprise and
alarm, sprang out of bed.

‘Hush! What’s the matter? Keep quiet! It’s I. You know me?’ cried the
other, in a suppressed voice.

But John Baptist, widely staring, muttering a number of invocations
and ejaculations, tremblingly backing into a corner, slipping on
his trousers, and tying his coat by the two sleeves round his neck,
manifested an unmistakable desire to escape by the door rather than
renew the acquaintance. Seeing this, his old prison comrade fell back
upon the door, and set his shoulders against it.

‘Cavalletto! Wake, boy! Rub your eyes and look at me. Not the name you
used to call me--don’t use that--Lagnier, say Lagnier!’

John Baptist, staring at him with eyes opened to their utmost width,
made a number of those national, backhanded shakes of the right
forefinger in the air, as if he were resolved on negativing beforehand
everything that the other could possibly advance during the whole term
of his life.

‘Cavalletto! Give me your hand. You know Lagnier, the gentleman. Touch
the hand of a gentleman!’

Submitting himself to the old tone of condescending authority, John
Baptist, not at all steady on his legs as yet, advanced and put his
hand in his patron’s. Monsieur Lagnier laughed; and having given it a
squeeze, tossed it up and let it go.

‘Then you were--’ faltered John Baptist.

‘Not shaved? No. See here!’ cried Lagnier, giving his head a twirl; ‘as
tight on as your own.’

John Baptist, with a slight shiver, looked all round the room as if to
recall where he was. His patron took that opportunity of turning the key
in the door, and then sat down upon his bed.

‘Look!’ he said, holding up his shoes and gaiters. ‘That’s a poor trim
for a gentleman, you’ll say. No matter, you shall see how soon I’ll mend
it. Come and sit down. Take your old place!’

John Baptist, looking anything but reassured, sat down on the floor at
the bedside, keeping his eyes upon his patron all the time.

‘That’s well!’ cried Lagnier. ‘Now we might be in the old infernal hole
again, hey? How long have you been out?’

‘Two days after you, my master.’

‘How do you come here?’

‘I was cautioned not to stay there, and so I left the town at once,
and since then I have changed about. I have been doing odds and ends at
Avignon, at Pont Esprit, at Lyons; upon the Rhone, upon the Saone.’ As
he spoke, he rapidly mapped the places out with his sunburnt hand upon
the floor.

‘And where are you going?’

‘Going, my master?’

‘Ay!’

John Baptist seemed to desire to evade the question without knowing how.
‘By Bacchus!’ he said at last, as if he were forced to the admission, ‘I
have sometimes had a thought of going to Paris, and perhaps to England.’

‘Cavalletto. This is in confidence. I also am going to Paris and perhaps
to England. We’ll go together.’

The little man nodded his head, and showed his teeth; and yet seemed not
quite convinced that it was a surpassingly desirable arrangement.

‘We’ll go together,’ repeated Lagnier. ‘You shall see how soon I will
force myself to be recognised as a gentleman, and you shall profit by
it. It is agreed? Are we one?’

‘Oh, surely, surely!’ said the little man.

‘Then you shall hear before I sleep--and in six words, for I want
sleep--how I appear before you, I, Lagnier. Remember that. Not the
other.’

‘Altro, altro! Not Ri----’ Before John Baptist could finish the name, his
comrade had got his hand under his chin and fiercely shut up his mouth.

‘Death! what are you doing? Do you want me to be trampled upon and
stoned? Do _you_ want to be trampled upon and stoned? You would be. You
don’t imagine that they would set upon me, and let my prison chum go?
Don’t think it!’

There was an expression in his face as he released his grip of his
friend’s jaw, from which his friend inferred that if the course of
events really came to any stoning and trampling, Monsieur Lagnier would
so distinguish him with his notice as to ensure his having his full
share of it. He remembered what a cosmopolitan gentleman Monsieur
Lagnier was, and how few weak distinctions he made.

‘I am a man,’ said Monsieur Lagnier, ‘whom society has deeply wronged
since you last saw me. You know that I am sensitive and brave, and that
it is my character to govern. How has society respected those qualities
in me? I have been shrieked at through the streets. I have been guarded
through the streets against men, and especially women, running at me
armed with any weapons they could lay their hands on. I have lain in
prison for security, with the place of my confinement kept a secret,
lest I should be torn out of it and felled by a hundred blows. I have
been carted out of Marseilles in the dead of night, and carried leagues
away from it packed in straw. It has not been safe for me to go near my
house; and, with a beggar’s pittance in my pocket, I have walked through
vile mud and weather ever since, until my feet are crippled--look at
them! Such are the humiliations that society has inflicted upon me,
possessing the qualities I have mentioned, and which you know me to
possess. But society shall pay for it.’

All this he said in his companion’s ear, and with his hand before his
lips.

‘Even here,’ he went on in the same way, ‘even in this mean
drinking-shop, society pursues me. Madame defames me, and her guests
defame me. I, too, a gentleman with manners and accomplishments
to strike them dead! But the wrongs society has heaped upon me are
treasured in this breast.’

To all of which John Baptist, listening attentively to the suppressed
hoarse voice, said from time to time, ‘Surely, surely!’ tossing his
head and shutting his eyes, as if there were the clearest case against
society that perfect candour could make out.

‘Put my shoes there,’ continued Lagnier. ‘Hang my cloak to dry there
by the door. Take my hat.’ He obeyed each instruction, as it was given.
‘And this is the bed to which society consigns me, is it? Hah. _Very_
well!’

As he stretched out his length upon it, with a ragged handkerchief
bound round his wicked head, and only his wicked head showing above the
bedclothes, John Baptist was rather strongly reminded of what had so
very nearly happened to prevent the moustache from any more going up as
it did, and the nose from any more coming down as it did.

‘Shaken out of destiny’s dice-box again into your company, eh? By
Heaven! So much the better for you. You’ll profit by it. I shall need a
long rest. Let me sleep in the morning.’

John Baptist replied that he should sleep as long as he would, and
wishing him a happy night, put out the candle. One might have supposed
that the next proceeding of the Italian would have been to undress;
but he did exactly the reverse, and dressed himself from head to foot,
saving his shoes. When he had so done, he lay down upon his bed with
some of its coverings over him, and his coat still tied round his neck,
to get through the night.

When he started up, the Godfather Break of Day was peeping at its
namesake. He rose, took his shoes in his hand, turned the key in the
door with great caution, and crept downstairs. Nothing was astir there
but the smell of coffee, wine, tobacco, and syrups; and madame’s little
counter looked ghastly enough. But he had paid madame his little note
at it over night, and wanted to see nobody--wanted nothing but to get on
his shoes and his knapsack, open the door, and run away.

He prospered in his object. No movement or voice was heard when he
opened the door; no wicked head tied up in a ragged handkerchief looked
out of the upper window. When the sun had raised his full disc above the
flat line of the horizon, and was striking fire out of the long muddy
vista of paved road with its weary avenue of little trees, a black speck
moved along the road and splashed among the flaming pools of rain-water,
which black speck was John Baptist Cavalletto running away from his
patron.




CHAPTER 12. Bleeding Heart Yard


In London itself, though in the old rustic road towards a suburb of note
where in the days of William Shakespeare, author and stage-player, there
were Royal hunting-seats--howbeit no sport is left there now but for
hunters of men--Bleeding Heart Yard was to be found; a place much
changed in feature and in fortune, yet with some relish of ancient
greatness about it. Two or three mighty stacks of chimneys, and a few
large dark rooms which had escaped being walled and subdivided out of
the recognition of their old proportions, gave the Yard a character.
It was inhabited by poor people, who set up their rest among its faded
glories, as Arabs of the desert pitch their tents among the fallen
stones of the Pyramids; but there was a family sentimental feeling
prevalent in the Yard, that it had a character.

As if the aspiring city had become puffed up in the very ground on which
it stood, the ground had so risen about Bleeding Heart Yard that you
got into it down a flight of steps which formed no part of the original
approach, and got out of it by a low gateway into a maze of shabby
streets, which went about and about, tortuously ascending to the level
again. At this end of the Yard and over the gateway, was the factory of
Daniel Doyce, often heavily beating like a bleeding heart of iron,
with the clink of metal upon metal.

The opinion of the Yard was divided respecting the derivation of its
name. The more practical of its inmates abided by the tradition of a
murder; the gentler and more imaginative inhabitants, including the
whole of the tender sex, were loyal to the legend of a young lady of
former times closely imprisoned in her chamber by a cruel father for
remaining true to her own true love, and refusing to marry the suitor he
chose for her. The legend related how that the young lady used to be
seen up at her window behind the bars, murmuring a love-lorn song of
which the burden was, ‘Bleeding Heart, Bleeding Heart, bleeding away,’
until she died. It was objected by the murderous party that this Refrain
was notoriously the invention of a tambour-worker, a spinster and
romantic, still lodging in the Yard. But, forasmuch as all favourite
legends must be associated with the affections, and as many more people
fall in love than commit murder--which it may be hoped, howsoever bad we
are, will continue until the end of the world to be the dispensation
under which we shall live--the Bleeding Heart, Bleeding Heart, bleeding
away story, carried the day by a great majority. Neither party would
listen to the antiquaries who delivered learned lectures in the
neighbourhood, showing the Bleeding Heart to have been the heraldic
cognisance of the old family to whom the property had once belonged.
And, considering that the hour-glass they turned from year to year was
filled with the earthiest and coarsest sand, the Bleeding Heart Yarders
had reason enough for objecting to be despoiled of the one little golden
grain of poetry that sparkled in it.

Down in to the Yard, by way of the steps, came Daniel Doyce, Mr Meagles,
and Clennam. Passing along the Yard, and between the open doors on
either hand, all abundantly garnished with light children nursing heavy
ones, they arrived at its opposite boundary, the gateway. Here Arthur
Clennam stopped to look about him for the domicile of Plornish,
plasterer, whose name, according to the custom of Londoners, Daniel
Doyce had never seen or heard of to that hour.

It was plain enough, nevertheless, as Little Dorrit had said; over a
lime-splashed gateway in the corner, within which Plornish kept a ladder
and a barrel or two. The last house in Bleeding Heart Yard which she
had described as his place of habitation, was a large house, let off to
various tenants; but Plornish ingeniously hinted that he lived in the
parlour, by means of a painted hand under his name, the forefinger of
which hand (on which the artist had depicted a ring and a most elaborate
nail of the genteelest form) referred all inquirers to that apartment.

Parting from his companions, after arranging another meeting with
Mr Meagles, Clennam went alone into the entry, and knocked with his
knuckles at the parlour-door. It was opened presently by a woman with
a child in her arms, whose unoccupied hand was hastily rearranging the
upper part of her dress. This was Mrs Plornish, and this maternal
action was the action of Mrs Plornish during a large part of her waking
existence.

Was Mr Plornish at home? ‘Well, sir,’ said Mrs Plornish, a civil woman,
‘not to deceive you, he’s gone to look for a job.’

‘Not to deceive you’ was a method of speech with Mrs Plornish. She would
deceive you, under any circumstances, as little as might be; but she had
a trick of answering in this provisional form.

‘Do you think he will be back soon, if I wait for him?’

‘I have been expecting him,’ said Mrs Plornish, ‘this half an hour, at
any minute of time. Walk in, sir.’

Arthur entered the rather dark and close parlour (though it was lofty too),
and sat down in the chair she placed for him.

‘Not to deceive you, sir, I notice it,’ said Mrs Plornish, ‘and I take
it kind of you.’

He was at a loss to understand what she meant; and by expressing as much
in his looks, elicited her explanation.

‘It ain’t many that comes into a poor place, that deems it worth their
while to move their hats,’ said Mrs Plornish. ‘But people think more of
it than people think.’

Clennam returned, with an uncomfortable feeling in so very slight a
courtesy being unusual, Was that all! And stooping down to pinch the
cheek of another young child who was sitting on the floor, staring at
him, asked Mrs Plornish how old that fine boy was?

‘Four year just turned, sir,’ said Mrs Plornish. ‘He _is_ a fine little
fellow, ain’t he, sir? But this one is rather sickly.’ She tenderly
hushed the baby in her arms, as she said it. ‘You wouldn’t mind my
asking if it happened to be a job as you was come about, sir, would
you?’ asked Mrs Plornish wistfully.

She asked it so anxiously, that if he had been in possession of any
kind of tenement, he would have had it plastered a foot deep rather
than answer No. But he was obliged to answer No; and he saw a shade of
disappointment on her face, as she checked a sigh, and looked at the
low fire. Then he saw, also, that Mrs Plornish was a young woman, made
somewhat slatternly in herself and her belongings by poverty; and so
dragged at by poverty and the children together, that their united
forces had already dragged her face into wrinkles.

‘All such things as jobs,’ said Mrs Plornish, ‘seems to me to have gone
underground, they do indeed.’ (Herein Mrs Plornish limited her remark to
the plastering trade, and spoke without reference to the Circumlocution
Office and the Barnacle Family.)

‘Is it so difficult to get work?’ asked Arthur Clennam.

‘Plornish finds it so,’ she returned. ‘He is quite unfortunate. Really
he is.’

Really he was. He was one of those many wayfarers on the road of life,
who seem to be afflicted with supernatural corns, rendering it
impossible for them to keep up even with their lame competitors. A
willing, working, soft hearted, not hard-headed fellow, Plornish took
his fortune as smoothly as could be expected; but it was a rough one. It
so rarely happened that anybody seemed to want him, it was such an
exceptional case when his powers were in any request, that his misty
mind could not make out how it happened. He took it as it came,
therefore; he tumbled into all kinds of difficulties, and tumbled out of
them; and, by tumbling through life, got himself considerably bruised.

‘It’s not for want of looking after jobs, I am sure,’ said Mrs Plornish,
lifting up her eyebrows, and searching for a solution of the problem
between the bars of the grate; ‘nor yet for want of working at them when
they are to be got. No one ever heard my husband complain of work.’

Somehow or other, this was the general misfortune of Bleeding Heart
Yard. From time to time there were public complaints, pathetically
going about, of labour being scarce--which certain people seemed to take
extraordinarily ill, as though they had an absolute right to it on their
own terms--but Bleeding Heart Yard, though as willing a Yard as any in
Britain, was never the better for the demand. That high old family, the
Barnacles, had long been too busy with their great principle to look
into the matter; and indeed the matter had nothing to do with their
watchfulness in out-generalling all other high old families except the
Stiltstalkings.

While Mrs Plornish spoke in these words of her absent lord, her lord
returned. A smooth-cheeked, fresh-coloured, sandy-whiskered man of
thirty. Long in the legs, yielding at the knees, foolish in the face,
flannel-jacketed, lime-whitened.

‘This is Plornish, sir.’

‘I came,’ said Clennam, rising, ‘to beg the favour of a little
conversation with you on the subject of the Dorrit family.’

Plornish became suspicious. Seemed to scent a creditor. Said, ‘Ah, yes.
Well. He didn’t know what satisfaction _he_ could give any gentleman,
respecting that family. What might it be about, now?’

‘I know you better,’ said Clennam, smiling, ‘than you suppose.’

Plornish observed, not smiling in return, And yet he hadn’t the pleasure
of being acquainted with the gentleman, neither.

‘No,’ said Arthur, ‘I know your kind offices at second hand, but on the
best authority; through Little Dorrit.--I mean,’ he explained, ‘Miss
Dorrit.’

‘Mr Clennam, is it? Oh! I’ve heard of you, Sir.’

‘And I of you,’ said Arthur.

‘Please to sit down again, Sir, and consider yourself welcome.--Why,
yes,’ said Plornish, taking a chair, and lifting the elder child upon
his knee, that he might have the moral support of speaking to a stranger
over his head, ‘I have been on the wrong side of the Lock myself, and
in that way we come to know Miss Dorrit. Me and my wife, we are well
acquainted with Miss Dorrit.’

‘Intimate!’ cried Mrs Plornish. Indeed, she was so proud of the
acquaintance, that she had awakened some bitterness of spirit in the
Yard by magnifying to an enormous amount the sum for which Miss Dorrit’s
father had become insolvent. The Bleeding Hearts resented her claiming
to know people of such distinction.

‘It was her father that I got acquainted with first. And through getting
acquainted with him, you see--why--I got acquainted with her,’ said
Plornish tautologically.

‘I see.’

‘Ah! And there’s manners! There’s polish! There’s a gentleman to have
run to seed in the Marshalsea jail! Why, perhaps you are not aware,’
said Plornish, lowering his voice, and speaking with a perverse
admiration of what he ought to have pitied or despised, ‘not aware that
Miss Dorrit and her sister dursn’t let him know that they work for a
living. No!’ said Plornish, looking with a ridiculous triumph first at
his wife, and then all round the room. ‘Dursn’t let him know it, they
dursn’t!’

‘Without admiring him for that,’ Clennam quietly observed, ‘I am very
sorry for him.’ The remark appeared to suggest to Plornish, for the
first time, that it might not be a very fine trait of character after
all. He pondered about it for a moment, and gave it up.

‘As to me,’ he resumed, ‘certainly Mr Dorrit is as affable with me, I
am sure, as I can possibly expect. Considering the differences and
distances betwixt us, more so. But it’s Miss Dorrit that we were
speaking of.’

‘True. Pray how did you introduce her at my mother’s!’

Mr Plornish picked a bit of lime out of his whisker, put it between his
lips, turned it with his tongue like a sugar-plum, considered, found
himself unequal to the task of lucid explanation, and appealing to his
wife, said, ‘Sally, _you_ may as well mention how it was, old woman.’

‘Miss Dorrit,’ said Sally, hushing the baby from side to side, and
laying her chin upon the little hand as it tried to disarrange the gown
again, ‘came here one afternoon with a bit of writing, telling that
how she wished for needlework, and asked if it would be considered any
ill-conwenience in case she was to give her address here.’ (Plornish
repeated, her address here, in a low voice, as if he were making
responses at church.) ‘Me and Plornish says, No, Miss Dorrit, no
ill-conwenience,’ (Plornish repeated, no ill-conwenience,) ‘and she
wrote it in, according. Which then me and Plornish says, Ho Miss
Dorrit!’ (Plornish repeated, Ho Miss Dorrit.) ‘Have you thought of
copying it three or four times, as the way to make it known in more
places than one? No, says Miss Dorrit, I have not, but I will. She
copied it out according, on this table, in a sweet writing, and
Plornish, he took it where he worked, having a job just then,’ (Plornish
repeated job just then,) ‘and likewise to the landlord of the Yard;
through which it was that Mrs Clennam first happened to employ Miss
Dorrit.’ Plornish repeated, employ Miss Dorrit; and Mrs Plornish having
come to an end, feigned to bite the fingers of the little hand as she
kissed it.

‘The landlord of the Yard,’ said Arthur Clennam, ‘is--’

‘He is Mr Casby, by name, he is,’ said Plornish, ‘and Pancks, he
collects the rents. That,’ added Mr Plornish, dwelling on the subject
with a slow thoughtfulness that appeared to have no connection with any
specific object, and to lead him nowhere, ‘that is about what _they_ are,
you may believe me or not, as you think proper.’

‘Ay?’ returned Clennam, thoughtful in his turn. ‘Mr Casby, too! An old
acquaintance of mine, long ago!’

Mr Plornish did not see his road to any comment on this fact, and made
none. As there truly was no reason why he should have the least interest
in it, Arthur Clennam went on to the present purport of his visit;
namely, to make Plornish the instrument of effecting Tip’s release,
with as little detriment as possible to the self-reliance and
self-helpfulness of the young man, supposing him to possess any remnant
of those qualities: without doubt a very wide stretch of supposition.
Plornish, having been made acquainted with the cause of action from the
Defendant’s own mouth, gave Arthur to understand that the Plaintiff
was a ‘Chaunter’--meaning, not a singer of anthems, but a seller of
horses--and that he (Plornish) considered that ten shillings in the
pound ‘would settle handsome,’ and that more would be a waste of money.
The Principal and instrument soon drove off together to a stable-yard in
High Holborn, where a remarkably fine grey gelding, worth, at the lowest
figure, seventy-five guineas (not taking into account the value of the
shot he had been made to swallow for the improvement of his form), was
to be parted with for a twenty-pound note, in consequence of his having
run away last week with Mrs Captain Barbary of Cheltenham, who wasn’t up
to a horse of his courage, and who, in mere spite, insisted on selling
him for that ridiculous sum: or, in other words, on giving him away.
Plornish, going up this yard alone and leaving his Principal outside,
found a gentleman with tight drab legs, a rather old hat, a little
hooked stick, and a blue neckerchief (Captain Maroon of Gloucestershire,
a private friend of Captain Barbary); who happened to be there, in
a friendly way, to mention these little circumstances concerning the
remarkably fine grey gelding to any real judge of a horse and quick
snapper-up of a good thing, who might look in at that address as per
advertisement. This gentleman, happening also to be the Plaintiff in the
Tip case, referred Mr Plornish to his solicitor, and declined to treat
with Mr Plornish, or even to endure his presence in the yard, unless
he appeared there with a twenty-pound note: in which case only, the
gentleman would augur from appearances that he meant business, and
might be induced to talk to him. On this hint, Mr Plornish retired
to communicate with his Principal, and presently came back with the
required credentials. Then said Captain Maroon, ‘Now, how much time do
you want to make the other twenty in? Now, I’ll give you a month.’ Then
said Captain Maroon, when that wouldn’t suit, ‘Now, I’ll tell what I’ll
do with you. You shall get me a good bill at four months, made payable
at a banking-house, for the other twenty!’ Then said Captain Maroon,
when _that_ wouldn’t suit, ‘Now, come; Here’s the last I’ve got to say
to you. You shall give me another ten down, and I’ll run my pen clean
through it.’ Then said Captain Maroon when _that_ wouldn’t suit, ‘Now,
I’ll tell you what it is, and this shuts it up; he has used me bad, but
I’ll let him off for another five down and a bottle of wine; and if you
mean done, say done, and if you don’t like it, leave it.’ Finally said
Captain Maroon, when _that_ wouldn’t suit either, ‘Hand over, then!’--And
in consideration of the first offer, gave a receipt in full and
discharged the prisoner.

‘Mr Plornish,’ said Arthur, ‘I trust to you, if you please, to keep my
secret. If you will undertake to let the young man know that he is free,
and to tell him that you were employed to compound for the debt by
some one whom you are not at liberty to name, you will not only do me a
service, but may do him one, and his sister also.’

‘The last reason, sir,’ said Plornish, ‘would be quite sufficient. Your
wishes shall be attended to.’

‘A Friend has obtained his discharge, you can say if you please. A
Friend who hopes that for his sister’s sake, if for no one else’s, he
will make good use of his liberty.’

‘Your wishes, sir, shall be attended to.’

‘And if you will be so good, in your better knowledge of the family, as
to communicate freely with me, and to point out to me any means by which
you think I may be delicately and really useful to Little Dorrit, I
shall feel under an obligation to you.’

‘Don’t name it, sir,’ returned Plornish, ‘it’ll be ekally a pleasure an
a--it’l be ekally a pleasure and a--’ Finding himself unable to balance
his sentence after two efforts, Mr Plornish wisely dropped it. He took
Clennam’s card and appropriate pecuniary compliment.

He was earnest to finish his commission at once, and his Principal
was in the same mind. So his Principal offered to set him down at the
Marshalsea Gate, and they drove in that direction over Blackfriars
Bridge. On the way, Arthur elicited from his new friend a confused
summary of the interior life of Bleeding Heart Yard. They was all hard
up there, Mr Plornish said, uncommon hard up, to be sure. Well, he
couldn’t say how it was; he didn’t know as anybody _could_ say how it
was; all he know’d was, that so it was. When a man felt, on his own
back and in his own belly, that poor he was, that man (Mr Plornish gave
it as his decided belief) know’d well that he was poor somehow or
another, and you couldn’t talk it out of him, no more than you could
talk Beef into him. Then you see, some people as was better off said,
and a good many such people lived pretty close up to the mark themselves
if not beyond it so he’d heerd, that they was ‘improvident’ (that was
the favourite word) down the Yard. For instance, if they see a man with
his wife and children going to Hampton Court in a Wan, perhaps once in a
year, they says, ‘Hallo! I thought you was poor, my improvident friend!’
Why, Lord, how hard it was upon a man! What was a man to do? He couldn’t
go mollancholy mad, and even if he did, you wouldn’t be the better for
it. In Mr Plornish’s judgment you would be the worse for it. Yet you
seemed to want to make a man mollancholy mad. You was always at it--if
not with your right hand, with your left. What was they a doing in the
Yard? Why, take a look at ‘em and see. There was the girls and their
mothers a working at their sewing, or their shoe-binding, or their
trimming, or their waistcoat making, day and night and night and day,
and not more than able to keep body and soul together after all--often
not so much. There was people of pretty well all sorts of trades you
could name, all wanting to work, and yet not able to get it. There was
old people, after working all their lives, going and being shut up in
the workhouse, much worse fed and lodged and treated altogether,
than--Mr Plornish said manufacturers, but appeared to mean malefactors.
Why, a man didn’t know where to turn himself for a crumb of comfort. As
to who was to blame for it, Mr Plornish didn’t know who was to blame for
it. He could tell you who suffered, but he couldn’t tell you whose fault
it was. It wasn’t _his_ place to find out, and who’d mind what he said,
if he did find out? He only know’d that it wasn’t put right by them what
undertook that line of business, and that it didn’t come right of
itself. And, in brief, his illogical opinion was, that if you couldn’t
do nothing for him, you had better take nothing from him for doing of
it; so far as he could make out, that was about what it come to. Thus,
in a prolix, gently-growling, foolish way, did Plornish turn the tangled
skein of his estate about and about, like a blind man who was trying to
find some beginning or end to it; until they reached the prison gate.
There, he left his Principal alone; to wonder, as he rode away, how many
thousand Plornishes there might be within a day or two’s journey of the
Circumlocution Office, playing sundry curious variations on the same
tune, which were not known by ear in that glorious institution.



CHAPTER 13. Patriarchal


The mention of Mr Casby again revived in Clennam’s memory the
smouldering embers of curiosity and interest which Mrs Flintwinch had
fanned on the night of his arrival. Flora Casby had been the beloved of
his boyhood; and Flora was the daughter and only child of wooden-headed
old Christopher (so he was still occasionally spoken of by some
irreverent spirits who had had dealings with him, and in whom
familiarity had bred its proverbial result perhaps), who was reputed to
be rich in weekly tenants, and to get a good quantity of blood out of
the stones of several unpromising courts and alleys.

After some days of inquiry and research, Arthur Clennam became convinced
that the case of the Father of the Marshalsea was indeed a hopeless one,
and sorrowfully resigned the idea of helping him to freedom again. He
had no hopeful inquiry to make at present, concerning Little Dorrit
either; but he argued with himself that it might--for anything he
knew--it might be serviceable to the poor child, if he renewed this
acquaintance. It is hardly necessary to add that beyond all doubt he
would have presented himself at Mr Casby’s door, if there had been no
Little Dorrit in existence; for we all know how we all deceive
ourselves--that is to say, how people in general, our profounder selves
excepted, deceive themselves--as to motives of action.

With a comfortable impression upon him, and quite an honest one in its
way, that he was still patronising Little Dorrit in doing what had no
reference to her, he found himself one afternoon at the corner of Mr
Casby’s street. Mr Casby lived in a street in the Gray’s Inn Road, which
had set off from that thoroughfare with the intention of running at one
heat down into the valley, and up again to the top of Pentonville Hill;
but which had run itself out of breath in twenty yards, and had stood
still ever since. There is no such place in that part now; but it
remained there for many years, looking with a baulked countenance at
the wilderness patched with unfruitful gardens and pimpled with eruptive
summerhouses, that it had meant to run over in no time.

‘The house,’ thought Clennam, as he crossed to the door, ‘is as little
changed as my mother’s, and looks almost as gloomy. But the likeness
ends outside. I know its staid repose within. The smell of its jars of
old rose-leaves and lavender seems to come upon me even here.’

When his knock at the bright brass knocker of obsolete shape brought a
woman-servant to the door, those faded scents in truth saluted him like
wintry breath that had a faint remembrance in it of the bygone spring.
He stepped into the sober, silent, air-tight house--one might have
fancied it to have been stifled by Mutes in the Eastern manner--and the
door, closing again, seemed to shut out sound and motion. The
furniture was formal, grave, and quaker-like, but well-kept; and had as
prepossessing an aspect as anything, from a human creature to a wooden
stool, that is meant for much use and is preserved for little, can ever
wear. There was a grave clock, ticking somewhere up the staircase; and
there was a songless bird in the same direction, pecking at his cage, as
if he were ticking too. The parlour-fire ticked in the grate. There was
only one person on the parlour-hearth, and the loud watch in his pocket
ticked audibly.

The servant-maid had ticked the two words ‘Mr Clennam’ so softly that
she had not been heard; and he consequently stood, within the door
she had closed, unnoticed. The figure of a man advanced in life, whose
smooth grey eyebrows seemed to move to the ticking as the fire-light
flickered on them, sat in an arm-chair, with his list shoes on the
rug, and his thumbs slowly revolving over one another. This was old
Christopher Casby--recognisable at a glance--as unchanged in twenty
years and upward as his own solid furniture--as little touched by the
influence of the varying seasons as the old rose-leaves and old lavender
in his porcelain jars.

Perhaps there never was a man, in this troublesome world, so troublesome
for the imagination to picture as a boy. And yet he had changed very
little in his progress through life. Confronting him, in the room in
which he sat, was a boy’s portrait, which anybody seeing him would have
identified as Master Christopher Casby, aged ten: though disguised with
a haymaking rake, for which he had had, at any time, as much taste or
use as for a diving-bell; and sitting (on one of his own legs) upon a
bank of violets, moved to precocious contemplation by the spire of a
village church. There was the same smooth face and forehead, the same
calm blue eye, the same placid air. The shining bald head, which looked
so very large because it shone so much; and the long grey hair at its
sides and back, like floss silk or spun glass, which looked so very
benevolent because it was never cut; were not, of course, to be seen in
the boy as in the old man. Nevertheless, in the Seraphic creature with
the haymaking rake, were clearly to be discerned the rudiments of the
Patriarch with the list shoes.

Patriarch was the name which many people delighted to give him.
Various old ladies in the neighbourhood spoke of him as The Last of the
Patriarchs. So grey, so slow, so quiet, so impassionate, so very bumpy
in the head, Patriarch was the word for him. He had been accosted in the
streets, and respectfully solicited to become a Patriarch for painters
and for sculptors; with so much importunity, in sooth, that it would
appear to be beyond the Fine Arts to remember the points of a Patriarch,
or to invent one. Philanthropists of both sexes had asked who he was,
and on being informed, ‘Old Christopher Casby, formerly Town-agent to
Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle,’ had cried in a rapture of disappointment,
‘Oh! why, with that head, is he not a benefactor to his species! Oh!
why, with that head, is he not a father to the orphan and a friend to
the friendless!’ With that head, however, he remained old Christopher
Casby, proclaimed by common report rich in house property; and with that
head, he now sat in his silent parlour. Indeed it would be the height of
unreason to expect him to be sitting there without that head.

Arthur Clennam moved to attract his attention, and the grey eyebrows
turned towards him.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Clennam, ‘I fear you did not hear me
announced?’

‘No, sir, I did not. Did you wish to see me, sir?’

‘I wished to pay my respects.’

Mr Casby seemed a feather’s weight disappointed by the last words,
having perhaps prepared himself for the visitor’s wishing to pay
something else. ‘Have I the pleasure, sir,’ he proceeded--‘take a chair,
if you please--have I the pleasure of knowing--? Ah! truly, yes, I think
I have! I believe I am not mistaken in supposing that I am acquainted
with those features? I think I address a gentleman of whose return to
this country I was informed by Mr Flintwinch?’

‘That is your present visitor.’

‘Really! Mr Clennam?’

‘No other, Mr Casby.’

‘Mr Clennam, I am glad to see you. How have you been since we met?’

Without thinking it worth while to explain that in the course of some
quarter of a century he had experienced occasional slight fluctuations
in his health and spirits, Clennam answered generally that he had never
been better, or something equally to the purpose; and shook hands with
the possessor of ‘that head’ as it shed its patriarchal light upon him.

‘We are older, Mr Clennam,’ said Christopher Casby.

‘We are--not younger,’ said Clennam. After this wise remark he felt that
he was scarcely shining with brilliancy, and became aware that he was
nervous.

‘And your respected father,’ said Mr Casby, ‘is no more! I was grieved
to hear it, Mr Clennam, I was grieved.’

Arthur replied in the usual way that he felt infinitely obliged to him.

‘There was a time,’ said Mr Casby, ‘when your parents and myself were
not on friendly terms. There was a little family misunderstanding among
us. Your respected mother was rather jealous of her son, maybe; when I
say her son, I mean your worthy self, your worthy self.’

His smooth face had a bloom upon it like ripe wall-fruit. What with
his blooming face, and that head, and his blue eyes, he seemed to be
delivering sentiments of rare wisdom and virtue. In like manner, his
physiognomical expression seemed to teem with benignity. Nobody could
have said where the wisdom was, or where the virtue was, or where the
benignity was; but they all seemed to be somewhere about him.

‘Those times, however,’ pursued Mr Casby, ‘are past and gone, past and
gone. I do myself the pleasure of making a visit to your respected
mother occasionally, and of admiring the fortitude and strength of mind
with which she bears her trials, bears her trials.’

When he made one of these little repetitions, sitting with his hands
crossed before him, he did it with his head on one side, and a gentle
smile, as if he had something in his thoughts too sweetly profound to be
put into words. As if he denied himself the pleasure of uttering it,
lest he should soar too high; and his meekness therefore preferred to be
unmeaning.

‘I have heard that you were kind enough on one of those occasions,’ said
Arthur, catching at the opportunity as it drifted past him, ‘to mention
Little Dorrit to my mother.’

‘Little--? Dorrit? That’s the seamstress who was mentioned to me by a
small tenant of mine? Yes, yes. Dorrit? That’s the name. Ah, yes, yes!
You call her Little Dorrit?’

No road in that direction. Nothing came of the cross-cut. It led no
further.

‘My daughter Flora,’ said Mr Casby, ‘as you may have heard probably, Mr
Clennam, was married and established in life, several years ago. She
had the misfortune to lose her husband when she had been married a few
months. She resides with me again. She will be glad to see you, if you
will permit me to let her know that you are here.’

‘By all means,’ returned Clennam. ‘I should have preferred the request,
if your kindness had not anticipated me.’

Upon this Mr Casby rose up in his list shoes, and with a slow, heavy
step (he was of an elephantine build), made for the door. He had a long
wide-skirted bottle-green coat on, and a bottle-green pair of trousers,
and a bottle-green waistcoat. The Patriarchs were not dressed in
bottle-green broadcloth, and yet his clothes looked patriarchal.

He had scarcely left the room, and allowed the ticking to become audible
again, when a quick hand turned a latchkey in the house-door, opened it,
and shut it. Immediately afterwards, a quick and eager short dark man
came into the room with so much way upon him that he was within a foot
of Clennam before he could stop.

‘Halloa!’ he said.

Clennam saw no reason why he should not say ‘Halloa!’ too.

‘What’s the matter?’ said the short dark man.

‘I have not heard that anything is the matter,’ returned Clennam.

‘Where’s Mr Casby?’ asked the short dark man, looking about.

‘He will be here directly, if you want him.’

‘_I_ want him?’ said the short dark man. ‘Don’t you?’

This elicited a word or two of explanation from Clennam, during the
delivery of which the short dark man held his breath and looked at him.
He was dressed in black and rusty iron grey; had jet black beads of
eyes; a scrubby little black chin; wiry black hair striking out from his
head in prongs, like forks or hair-pins; and a complexion that was very
dingy by nature, or very dirty by art, or a compound of nature and art.
He had dirty hands and dirty broken nails, and looked as if he had been
in the coals; he was in a perspiration, and snorted and sniffed and
puffed and blew, like a little labouring steam-engine.

‘Oh!’ said he, when Arthur told him how he came to be there. ‘Very well.
That’s right. If he should ask for Pancks, will you be so good as to say
that Pancks is come in?’ And so, with a snort and a puff, he worked out
by another door.

Now, in the old days at home, certain audacious doubts respecting the
last of the Patriarchs, which were afloat in the air, had, by some
forgotten means, come in contact with Arthur’s sensorium. He was aware
of motes and specks of suspicion in the atmosphere of that time; seen
through which medium, Christopher Casby was a mere Inn signpost, without
any Inn--an invitation to rest and be thankful, when there was no place
to put up at, and nothing whatever to be thankful for. He knew that some
of these specks even represented Christopher as capable of harbouring
designs in ‘that head,’ and as being a crafty impostor. Other motes
there were which showed him as a heavy, selfish, drifting Booby, who,
having stumbled, in the course of his unwieldy jostlings against other
men, on the discovery that to get through life with ease and credit,
he had but to hold his tongue, keep the bald part of his head well
polished, and leave his hair alone, had had just cunning enough to seize
the idea and stick to it. It was said that his being town-agent to
Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle was referable, not to his having the least
business capacity, but to his looking so supremely benignant that nobody
could suppose the property screwed or jobbed under such a man; also,
that for similar reasons he now got more money out of his own wretched
lettings, unquestioned, than anybody with a less nobby and less shining
crown could possibly have done. In a word, it was represented (Clennam
called to mind, alone in the ticking parlour) that many people select
their models, much as the painters, just now mentioned, select theirs;
and that, whereas in the Royal Academy some evil old ruffian of a
Dog-stealer will annually be found embodying all the cardinal virtues,
on account of his eyelashes, or his chin, or his legs (thereby planting
thorns of confusion in the breasts of the more observant students of
nature), so, in the great social Exhibition, accessories are often
accepted in lieu of the internal character.

Calling these things to mind, and ranging Mr Pancks in a row with them,
Arthur Clennam leaned this day to the opinion, without quite deciding
on it, that the last of the Patriarchs was the drifting Booby aforesaid,
with the one idea of keeping the bald part of his head highly polished:
and that, much as an unwieldy ship in the Thames river may sometimes be
seen heavily driving with the tide, broadside on, stern first, in its
own way and in the way of everything else, though making a great show
of navigation, when all of a sudden, a little coaly steam-tug will bear
down upon it, take it in tow, and bustle off with it; similarly the
cumbrous Patriarch had been taken in tow by the snorting Pancks, and was
now following in the wake of that dingy little craft.

The return of Mr Casby with his daughter Flora, put an end to these
meditations. Clennam’s eyes no sooner fell upon the subject of his old
passion than it shivered and broke to pieces.

Most men will be found sufficiently true to themselves to be true to
an old idea. It is no proof of an inconstant mind, but exactly the
opposite, when the idea will not bear close comparison with the reality,
and the contrast is a fatal shock to it. Such was Clennam’s case. In his
youth he had ardently loved this woman, and had heaped upon her all the
locked-up wealth of his affection and imagination. That wealth had been,
in his desert home, like Robinson Crusoe’s money; exchangeable with no
one, lying idle in the dark to rust, until he poured it out for her.
Ever since that memorable time, though he had, until the night of his
arrival, as completely dismissed her from any association with his
Present or Future as if she had been dead (which she might easily
have been for anything he knew), he had kept the old fancy of the Past
unchanged, in its old sacred place. And now, after all, the last of the
Patriarchs coolly walked into the parlour, saying in effect, ‘Be good
enough to throw it down and dance upon it. This is Flora.’

Flora, always tall, had grown to be very broad too, and short of breath;
but that was not much. Flora, whom he had left a lily, had become a
peony; but that was not much. Flora, who had seemed enchanting in all
she said and thought, was diffuse and silly. That was much. Flora, who
had been spoiled and artless long ago, was determined to be spoiled and
artless now. That was a fatal blow.

This is Flora!

‘I am sure,’ giggled Flora, tossing her head with a caricature of
her girlish manner, such as a mummer might have presented at her own
funeral, if she had lived and died in classical antiquity, ‘I am ashamed
to see Mr Clennam, I am a mere fright, I know he’ll find me fearfully
changed, I am actually an old woman, it’s shocking to be found out, it’s
really shocking!’

He assured her that she was just what he had expected and that time had
not stood still with himself.

‘Oh! But with a gentleman it’s so different and really you look so
amazingly well that you have no right to say anything of the kind,
while, as to me, you know--oh!’ cried Flora with a little scream, ‘I am
dreadful!’

The Patriarch, apparently not yet understanding his own part in the
drama under representation, glowed with vacant serenity.

‘But if we talk of not having changed,’ said Flora, who, whatever
she said, never once came to a full stop, ‘look at Papa, is not Papa
precisely what he was when you went away, isn’t it cruel and unnatural
of Papa to be such a reproach to his own child, if we go on in this way
much longer people who don’t know us will begin to suppose that I am
Papa’s Mama!’

That must be a long time hence, Arthur considered.

‘Oh Mr Clennam you insincerest of creatures,’ said Flora, ‘I perceive
already you have not lost your old way of paying compliments, your old
way when you used to pretend to be so sentimentally struck you know--at
least I don’t mean that, I--oh I don’t know what I mean!’ Here Flora
tittered confusedly, and gave him one of her old glances.

The Patriarch, as if he now began to perceive that his part in the piece
was to get off the stage as soon as might be, rose, and went to the door
by which Pancks had worked out, hailing that Tug by name. He received
an answer from some little Dock beyond, and was towed out of sight
directly.

‘You mustn’t think of going yet,’ said Flora--Arthur had looked at his
hat, being in a ludicrous dismay, and not knowing what to do: ‘you could
never be so unkind as to think of going, Arthur--I mean Mr Arthur--or I
suppose Mr Clennam would be far more proper--but I am sure I don’t know
what I am saying--without a word about the dear old days gone for ever,
when I come to think of it I dare say it would be much better not to
speak of them and it’s highly probable that you have some much more
agreeable engagement and pray let Me be the last person in the world
to interfere with it though there _was_ a time, but I am running into
nonsense again.’

Was it possible that Flora could have been such a chatterer in the
days she referred to? Could there have been anything like her present
disjointed volubility in the fascinations that had captivated him?

‘Indeed I have little doubt,’ said Flora, running on with astonishing
speed, and pointing her conversation with nothing but commas, and very
few of them, ‘that you are married to some Chinese lady, being in China
so long and being in business and naturally desirous to settle and
extend your connection nothing was more likely than that you should
propose to a Chinese lady and nothing was more natural I am sure than
that the Chinese lady should accept you and think herself very well off
too, I only hope she’s not a Pagodian dissenter.’

‘I am not,’ returned Arthur, smiling in spite of himself, ‘married to
any lady, Flora.’

‘Oh good gracious me I hope you never kept yourself a bachelor so long
on my account!’ tittered Flora; ‘but of course you never did why should
you, pray don’t answer, I don’t know where I’m running to, oh do tell me
something about the Chinese ladies whether their eyes are really so long
and narrow always putting me in mind of mother-of-pearl fish at cards
and do they really wear tails down their back and plaited too or is
it only the men, and when they pull their hair so very tight off their
foreheads don’t they hurt themselves, and why do they stick little bells
all over their bridges and temples and hats and things or don’t they
really do it?’ Flora gave him another of her old glances. Instantly she
went on again, as if he had spoken in reply for some time.

‘Then it’s all true and they really do! good gracious Arthur!--pray
excuse me--old habit--Mr Clennam far more proper--what a country to live
in for so long a time, and with so many lanterns and umbrellas too how
very dark and wet the climate ought to be and no doubt actually is, and
the sums of money that must be made by those two trades where everybody
carries them and hangs them everywhere, the little shoes too and the
feet screwed back in infancy is quite surprising, what a traveller you
are!’

In his ridiculous distress, Clennam received another of the old glances
without in the least knowing what to do with it.

‘Dear dear,’ said Flora, ‘only to think of the changes at home
Arthur--cannot overcome it, and seems so natural, Mr Clennam far more
proper--since you became familiar with the Chinese customs and language
which I am persuaded you speak like a Native if not better for you were
always quick and clever though immensely difficult no doubt, I am sure
the tea chests alone would kill me if I tried, such changes Arthur--I
am doing it again, seems so natural, most improper--as no one could have
believed, who could have ever imagined Mrs Finching when I can’t imagine
it myself!’

‘Is that your married name?’ asked Arthur, struck, in the midst of all
this, by a certain warmth of heart that expressed itself in her tone
when she referred, however oddly, to the youthful relation in which they
had stood to one another. ‘Finching?’

‘Finching oh yes isn’t it a dreadful name, but as Mr F. said when he
proposed to me which he did seven times and handsomely consented I must
say to be what he used to call on liking twelve months, after all, he
wasn’t answerable for it and couldn’t help it could he, Excellent man,
not at all like you but excellent man!’

Flora had at last talked herself out of breath for one moment. One
moment; for she recovered breath in the act of raising a minute corner
of her pocket-handkerchief to her eye, as a tribute to the ghost of the
departed Mr F., and began again.

‘No one could dispute, Arthur--Mr Clennam--that it’s quite right you
should be formally friendly to me under the altered circumstances and
indeed you couldn’t be anything else, at least I suppose not you ought
to know, but I can’t help recalling that there _was_ a time when things
were very different.’

‘My dear Mrs Finching,’ Arthur began, struck by the good tone again.

‘Oh not that nasty ugly name, say Flora!’

‘Flora. I assure you, Flora, I am happy in seeing you once more, and in
finding that, like me, you have not forgotten the old foolish dreams,
when we saw all before us in the light of our youth and hope.’

‘You don’t seem so,’ pouted Flora, ‘you take it very coolly, but
however I know you are disappointed in me, I suppose the Chinese
ladies--Mandarinesses if you call them so--are the cause or perhaps I am
the cause myself, it’s just as likely.’

‘No, no,’ Clennam entreated, ‘don’t say that.’

‘Oh I must you know,’ said Flora, in a positive tone, ‘what nonsense not
to, I know I am not what you expected, I know that very well.’

In the midst of her rapidity, she had found that out with the quick
perception of a cleverer woman. The inconsistent and profoundly
unreasonable way in which she instantly went on, nevertheless, to
interweave their long-abandoned boy and girl relations with their
present interview, made Clennam feel as if he were light-headed.

‘One remark,’ said Flora, giving their conversation, without the
slightest notice and to the great terror of Clennam, the tone of a
love-quarrel, ‘I wish to make, one explanation I wish to offer, when
your Mama came and made a scene of it with my Papa and when I was called
down into the little breakfast-room where they were looking at one
another with your Mama’s parasol between them seated on two chairs like
mad bulls what was I to do?’

‘My dear Mrs Finching,’ urged Clennam--‘all so long ago and so long
concluded, is it worth while seriously to--’

‘I can’t Arthur,’ returned Flora, ‘be denounced as heartless by the
whole society of China without setting myself right when I have the
opportunity of doing so, and you must be very well aware that there
was Paul and Virginia which had to be returned and which was returned
without note or comment, not that I mean to say you could have written
to me watched as I was but if it had only come back with a red wafer on
the cover I should have known that it meant Come to Pekin Nankeen and
What’s the third place, barefoot.’

‘My dear Mrs Finching, you were not to blame, and I never blamed you.
We were both too young, too dependent and helpless, to do anything but
accept our separation.--Pray think how long ago,’ gently remonstrated
Arthur.

‘One more remark,’ proceeded Flora with unslackened volubility, ‘I wish
to make, one more explanation I wish to offer, for five days I had a
cold in the head from crying which I passed entirely in the back
drawing-room--there is the back drawing-room still on the first floor
and still at the back of the house to confirm my words--when that dreary
period had passed a lull succeeded years rolled on and Mr F. became
acquainted with us at a mutual friend’s, he was all attention he called
next day he soon began to call three evenings a week and to send
in little things for supper it was not love on Mr F.’s part it was
adoration, Mr F. proposed with the full approval of Papa and what could
I do?’

‘Nothing whatever,’ said Arthur, with the cheerfulest readiness, ‘but
what you did. Let an old friend assure you of his full conviction that
you did quite right.’

‘One last remark,’ proceeded Flora, rejecting commonplace life with a
wave of her hand, ‘I wish to make, one last explanation I wish to offer,
there _was_ a time ere Mr F. first paid attentions incapable of being
mistaken, but that is past and was not to be, dear Mr Clennam you no
longer wear a golden chain you are free I trust you may be happy, here
is Papa who is always tiresome and putting in his nose everywhere where
he is not wanted.’

With these words, and with a hasty gesture fraught with timid
caution--such a gesture had Clennam’s eyes been familiar with in the old
time--poor Flora left herself at eighteen years of age, a long long way
behind again; and came to a full stop at last.

Or rather, she left about half of herself at eighteen years of age
behind, and grafted the rest on to the relict of the late Mr F.; thus
making a moral mermaid of herself, which her once boy-lover contemplated
with feelings wherein his sense of the sorrowful and his sense of the
comical were curiously blended.

For example. As if there were a secret understanding between herself
and Clennam of the most thrilling nature; as if the first of a train of
post-chaises and four, extending all the way to Scotland, were at that
moment round the corner; and as if she couldn’t (and wouldn’t) have
walked into the Parish Church with him, under the shade of the family
umbrella, with the Patriarchal blessing on her head, and the perfect
concurrence of all mankind; Flora comforted her soul with agonies of
mysterious signalling, expressing dread of discovery. With the sensation
of becoming more and more light-headed every minute, Clennam saw the
relict of the late Mr F. enjoying herself in the most wonderful manner,
by putting herself and him in their old places, and going through all
the old performances--now, when the stage was dusty, when the scenery
was faded, when the youthful actors were dead, when the orchestra was
empty, when the lights were out. And still, through all this grotesque
revival of what he remembered as having once been prettily natural to
her, he could not but feel that it revived at sight of him, and that
there was a tender memory in it.

The Patriarch insisted on his staying to dinner, and Flora signalled
‘Yes!’ Clennam so wished he could have done more than stay to dinner--so
heartily wished he could have found the Flora that had been, or that
never had been--that he thought the least atonement he could make for
the disappointment he almost felt ashamed of, was to give himself up to
the family desire. Therefore, he stayed to dinner.

Pancks dined with them. Pancks steamed out of his little dock at a
quarter before six, and bore straight down for the Patriarch, who
happened to be then driving, in an inane manner, through a stagnant
account of Bleeding Heart Yard. Pancks instantly made fast to him and
hauled him out.

‘Bleeding Heart Yard?’ said Pancks, with a puff and a snort. ‘It’s a
troublesome property. Don’t pay you badly, but rents are very hard to
get there. You have more trouble with that one place than with all the
places belonging to you.’

Just as the big ship in tow gets the credit, with most spectators, of
being the powerful object, so the Patriarch usually seemed to have said
himself whatever Pancks said for him.

‘Indeed?’ returned Clennam, upon whom this impression was so efficiently
made by a mere gleam of the polished head that he spoke the ship instead
of the Tug. ‘The people are so poor there?’

‘_You_ can’t say, you know,’ snorted Pancks, taking one of his dirty hands
out of his rusty iron-grey pockets to bite his nails, if he could find
any, and turning his beads of eyes upon his employer, ‘whether they’re
poor or not. They say they are, but they all say that. When a man says
he’s rich, you’re generally sure he isn’t. Besides, if they _are_ poor,
you can’t help it. You’d be poor yourself if you didn’t get your rents.’

‘True enough,’ said Arthur.

‘You’re not going to keep open house for all the poor of London,’
pursued Pancks. ‘You’re not going to lodge ‘em for nothing. You’re not
going to open your gates wide and let ‘em come free. Not if you know it,
you ain’t.’

Mr Casby shook his head, in Placid and benignant generality.

‘If a man takes a room of you at half-a-crown a week, and when the week
comes round hasn’t got the half-crown, you say to that man, Why have you
got the room, then? If you haven’t got the one thing, why have you got
the other? What have you been and done with your money? What do you mean
by it? What are you up to? That’s what _you_ say to a man of that sort;
and if you didn’t say it, more shame for you!’ Mr Pancks here made a
singular and startling noise, produced by a strong blowing effort in the
region of the nose, unattended by any result but that acoustic one.

‘You have some extent of such property about the east and north-east
here, I believe?’ said Clennam, doubtful which of the two to address.

‘Oh, pretty well,’ said Pancks. ‘You’re not particular to east or
north-east, any point of the compass will do for you. What you want is
a good investment and a quick return. You take it where you can find it.
You ain’t nice as to situation--not you.’

There was a fourth and most original figure in the Patriarchal tent, who
also appeared before dinner. This was an amazing little old woman, with
a face like a staring wooden doll too cheap for expression, and a stiff
yellow wig perched unevenly on the top of her head, as if the child who
owned the doll had driven a tack through it anywhere, so that it only
got fastened on. Another remarkable thing in this little old woman was,
that the same child seemed to have damaged her face in two or three
places with some blunt instrument in the nature of a spoon; her
countenance, and particularly the tip of her nose, presenting the
phenomena of several dints, generally answering to the bowl of that
article. A further remarkable thing in this little old woman was, that
she had no name but Mr F.’s Aunt.

She broke upon the visitor’s view under the following circumstances:
Flora said when the first dish was being put on the table, perhaps Mr
Clennam might not have heard that Mr F. had left her a legacy? Clennam
in return implied his hope that Mr F. had endowed the wife whom he
adored, with the greater part of his worldly substance, if not with all.
Flora said, oh yes, she didn’t mean that, Mr F. had made a beautiful
will, but he had left her as a separate legacy, his Aunt. She then
went out of the room to fetch the legacy, and, on her return, rather
triumphantly presented ‘Mr F.’s Aunt.’

The major characteristics discoverable by the stranger in Mr F.’s Aunt,
were extreme severity and grim taciturnity; sometimes interrupted by
a propensity to offer remarks in a deep warning voice, which, being
totally uncalled for by anything said by anybody, and traceable to no
association of ideas, confounded and terrified the Mind. Mr F.’s Aunt
may have thrown in these observations on some system of her own, and it
may have been ingenious, or even subtle: but the key to it was wanted.

The neatly-served and well-cooked dinner (for everything about the
Patriarchal household promoted quiet digestion) began with some soup,
some fried soles, a butter-boat of shrimp sauce, and a dish of potatoes.
The conversation still turned on the receipt of rents. Mr F.’s Aunt,
after regarding the company for ten minutes with a malevolent gaze,
delivered the following fearful remark:

‘When we lived at Henley, Barnes’s gander was stole by tinkers.’

Mr Pancks courageously nodded his head and said, ‘All right, ma’am.’ But
the effect of this mysterious communication upon Clennam was absolutely
to frighten him. And another circumstance invested this old lady with
peculiar terrors. Though she was always staring, she never acknowledged
that she saw any individual. The polite and attentive stranger would
desire, say, to consult her inclinations on the subject of potatoes. His
expressive action would be hopelessly lost upon her, and what could he
do? No man could say, ‘Mr F.’s Aunt, will you permit me?’ Every man
retired from the spoon, as Clennam did, cowed and baffled.

There was mutton, a steak, and an apple-pie--nothing in the remotest
way connected with ganders--and the dinner went on like a disenchanted
feast, as it truly was. Once upon a time Clennam had sat at that table
taking no heed of anything but Flora; now the principal heed he took
of Flora was to observe, against his will, that she was very fond of
porter, that she combined a great deal of sherry with sentiment, and
that if she were a little overgrown, it was upon substantial grounds.
The last of the Patriarchs had always been a mighty eater, and he
disposed of an immense quantity of solid food with the benignity of a
good soul who was feeding some one else. Mr Pancks, who was always in a
hurry, and who referred at intervals to a little dirty notebook which he
kept beside him (perhaps containing the names of the defaulters he meant
to look up by way of dessert), took in his victuals much as if he were
coaling; with a good deal of noise, a good deal of dropping about, and a
puff and a snort occasionally, as if he were nearly ready to steam away.

All through dinner, Flora combined her present appetite for eating and
drinking with her past appetite for romantic love, in a way that made
Clennam afraid to lift his eyes from his plate; since he could not
look towards her without receiving some glance of mysterious meaning or
warning, as if they were engaged in a plot. Mr F.’s Aunt sat silently
defying him with an aspect of the greatest bitterness, until the removal
of the cloth and the appearance of the decanters, when she originated
another observation--struck into the conversation like a clock, without
consulting anybody.

Flora had just said, ‘Mr Clennam, will you give me a glass of port for
Mr F.’s Aunt?’

‘The Monument near London Bridge,’ that lady instantly proclaimed, ‘was
put up arter the Great Fire of London; and the Great Fire of London was
not the fire in which your uncle George’s workshops was burned down.’

Mr Pancks, with his former courage, said, ‘Indeed, ma’am? All right!’
But appearing to be incensed by imaginary contradiction, or other
ill-usage, Mr F.’s Aunt, instead of relapsing into silence, made the
following additional proclamation:

‘I hate a fool!’

She imparted to this sentiment, in itself almost Solomonic, so extremely
injurious and personal a character by levelling it straight at the
visitor’s head, that it became necessary to lead Mr F.’s Aunt from
the room. This was quietly done by Flora; Mr F.’s Aunt offering no
resistance, but inquiring on her way out, ‘What he come there for,
then?’ with implacable animosity.

When Flora returned, she explained that her legacy was a clever
old lady, but was sometimes a little singular, and ‘took
dislikes’--peculiarities of which Flora seemed to be proud rather than
otherwise. As Flora’s good nature shone in the case, Clennam had no
fault to find with the old lady for eliciting it, now that he was
relieved from the terrors of her presence; and they took a glass or
two of wine in peace. Foreseeing then that the Pancks would shortly get
under weigh, and that the Patriarch would go to sleep, he pleaded the
necessity of visiting his mother, and asked Mr Pancks in which direction
he was going?

‘Citywards, sir,’ said Pancks.

‘Shall we walk together?’ said Arthur.

‘Quite agreeable,’ said Pancks.

Meanwhile Flora was murmuring in rapid snatches for his ear, that there
was a time and that the past was a yawning gulf however and that a
golden chain no longer bound him and that she revered the memory of the
late Mr F. and that she should be at home to-morrow at half-past one
and that the decrees of Fate were beyond recall and that she considered
nothing so improbable as that he ever walked on the north-west side of
Gray’s-Inn Gardens at exactly four o’clock in the afternoon. He tried
at parting to give his hand in frankness to the existing Flora--not the
vanished Flora, or the mermaid--but Flora wouldn’t have it, couldn’t
have it, was wholly destitute of the power of separating herself and him
from their bygone characters. He left the house miserably enough; and
so much more light-headed than ever, that if it had not been his good
fortune to be towed away, he might, for the first quarter of an hour,
have drifted anywhere.

When he began to come to himself, in the cooler air and the absence of
Flora, he found Pancks at full speed, cropping such scanty pasturage of
nails as he could find, and snorting at intervals. These, in conjunction
with one hand in his pocket and his roughened hat hind side before, were
evidently the conditions under which he reflected.

‘A fresh night!’ said Arthur.

‘Yes, it’s pretty fresh,’ assented Pancks. ‘As a stranger you feel the
climate more than I do, I dare say. Indeed I haven’t got time to feel
it.’

‘You lead such a busy life?’

‘Yes, I have always some of ‘em to look up, or something to look after.
But I like business,’ said Pancks, getting on a little faster. ‘What’s a
man made for?’

‘For nothing else?’ said Clennam.

Pancks put the counter question, ‘What else?’ It packed up, in the
smallest compass, a weight that had rested on Clennam’s life; and he
made no answer.

‘That’s what I ask our weekly tenants,’ said Pancks. ‘Some of ‘em will
pull long faces to me, and say, Poor as you see us, master, we’re always
grinding, drudging, toiling, every minute we’re awake. I say to them,
What else are you made for? It shuts them up. They haven’t a word to
answer. What else are you made for? That clinches it.’

‘Ah dear, dear, dear!’ sighed Clennam.

‘Here am I,’ said Pancks, pursuing his argument with the weekly tenant.
‘What else do you suppose I think I am made for? Nothing. Rattle me out
of bed early, set me going, give me as short a time as you like to bolt
my meals in, and keep me at it. Keep me always at it, and I’ll keep you
always at it, you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with
the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country.’

When they had walked a little further in silence, Clennam said: ‘Have
you no taste for anything, Mr Pancks?’

‘What’s taste?’ drily retorted Pancks.

‘Let us say inclination.’

‘I have an inclination to get money, sir,’ said Pancks, ‘if you will
show me how.’ He blew off that sound again, and it occurred to his
companion for the first time that it was his way of laughing. He was a
singular man in all respects; he might not have been quite in earnest,
but that the short, hard, rapid manner in which he shot out these
cinders of principles, as if it were done by mechanical revolvency,
seemed irreconcilable with banter.

‘You are no great reader, I suppose?’ said Clennam.

‘Never read anything but letters and accounts. Never collect anything
but advertisements relative to next of kin. If _that’s_ a taste, I have
got that. You’re not of the Clennams of Cornwall, Mr Clennam?’

‘Not that I ever heard of.’

‘I know you’re not. I asked your mother, sir. She has too much character
to let a chance escape her.’

‘Supposing I had been of the Clennams of Cornwall?’

‘You’d have heard of something to your advantage.’

‘Indeed! I have heard of little enough to my advantage for some time.’

‘There’s a Cornish property going a begging, sir, and not a Cornish
Clennam to have it for the asking,’ said Pancks, taking his note-book
from his breast pocket and putting it in again. ‘I turn off here. I wish
you good night.’

‘Good night!’ said Clennam. But the Tug, suddenly lightened, and
untrammelled by having any weight in tow, was already puffing away into
the distance.

They had crossed Smithfield together, and Clennam was left alone at the
corner of Barbican. He had no intention of presenting himself in his
mother’s dismal room that night, and could not have felt more depressed
and cast away if he had been in a wilderness. He turned slowly down
Aldersgate Street, and was pondering his way along towards Saint Paul’s,
purposing to come into one of the great thoroughfares for the sake of
their light and life, when a crowd of people flocked towards him on the
same pavement, and he stood aside against a shop to let them pass. As
they came up, he made out that they were gathered around a something
that was carried on men’s shoulders. He soon saw that it was a litter,
hastily made of a shutter or some such thing; and a recumbent figure
upon it, and the scraps of conversation in the crowd, and a muddy bundle
carried by one man, and a muddy hat carried by another, informed him
that an accident had occurred. The litter stopped under a lamp before it
had passed him half-a-dozen paces, for some readjustment of the burden;
and, the crowd stopping too, he found himself in the midst of the array.

‘An accident going to the Hospital?’ he asked an old man beside him, who
stood shaking his head, inviting conversation.

‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘along of them Mails. They ought to be prosecuted
and fined, them Mails. They come a racing out of Lad Lane and Wood
Street at twelve or fourteen mile a hour, them Mails do. The only wonder
is, that people ain’t killed oftener by them Mails.’

‘This person is not killed, I hope?’

‘I don’t know!’ said the man, ‘it an’t for the want of a will in them
Mails, if he an’t.’ The speaker having folded his arms, and set in
comfortably to address his depreciation of them Mails to any of the
bystanders who would listen, several voices, out of pure sympathy with
the sufferer, confirmed him; one voice saying to Clennam, ‘They’re a
public nuisance, them Mails, sir;’ another, ‘_I_ see one on ‘em pull up
within half a inch of a boy, last night;’ another, ‘_I_ see one on ‘em
go over a cat, sir--and it might have been your own mother;’ and all
representing, by implication, that if he happened to possess any public
influence, he could not use it better than against them Mails.

‘Why, a native Englishman is put to it every night of his life, to save
his life from them Mails,’ argued the first old man; ‘and _he_ knows when
they’re a coming round the corner, to tear him limb from limb. What can
you expect from a poor foreigner who don’t know nothing about ‘em!’

‘Is this a foreigner?’ said Clennam, leaning forward to look.

In the midst of such replies as ‘Frenchman, sir,’ ‘Porteghee, sir,’
‘Dutchman, sir,’ ‘Prooshan, sir,’ and other conflicting testimony, he
now heard a feeble voice asking, both in Italian and in French, for
water. A general remark going round, in reply, of ‘Ah, poor fellow,
he says he’ll never get over it; and no wonder!’ Clennam begged to be
allowed to pass, as he understood the poor creature. He was immediately
handed to the front, to speak to him.

‘First, he wants some water,’ said he, looking round. (A dozen good
fellows dispersed to get it.) ‘Are you badly hurt, my friend?’ he asked
the man on the litter, in Italian.

‘Yes, sir; yes, yes, yes. It’s my leg, it’s my leg. But it pleases me to
hear the old music, though I am very bad.’

‘You are a traveller! Stay! See, the water! Let me give you some.’

They had rested the litter on a pile of paving stones. It was at a
convenient height from the ground, and by stooping he could lightly
raise the head with one hand and hold the glass to his lips with the
other. A little, muscular, brown man, with black hair and white teeth. A
lively face, apparently. Earrings in his ears.

‘That’s well. You are a traveller?’

‘Surely, sir.’

‘A stranger in this city?’

‘Surely, surely, altogether. I am arrived this unhappy evening.’

‘From what country?’

‘Marseilles.’

‘Why, see there! I also! Almost as much a stranger here as you, though
born here, I came from Marseilles a little while ago. Don’t be cast
down.’ The face looked up at him imploringly, as he rose from wiping it,
and gently replaced the coat that covered the writhing figure. ‘I won’t
leave you till you shall be well taken care of. Courage! You will be
very much better half an hour hence.’

‘Ah! Altro, Altro!’ cried the poor little man, in a faintly incredulous
tone; and as they took him up, hung out his right hand to give the
forefinger a back-handed shake in the air.

Arthur Clennam turned; and walking beside the litter, and saying an
encouraging word now and then, accompanied it to the neighbouring
hospital of Saint Bartholomew. None of the crowd but the bearers and
he being admitted, the disabled man was soon laid on a table in a cool,
methodical way, and carefully examined by a surgeon who was as near at
hand, and as ready to appear as Calamity herself. ‘He hardly knows an
English word,’ said Clennam; ‘is he badly hurt?’

‘Let us know all about it first,’ said the surgeon, continuing his
examination with a businesslike delight in it, ‘before we pronounce.’

After trying the leg with a finger, and two fingers, and one hand and
two hands, and over and under, and up and down, and in this direction
and in that, and approvingly remarking on the points of interest to
another gentleman who joined him, the surgeon at last clapped the
patient on the shoulder, and said, ‘He won’t hurt. He’ll do very well.
It’s difficult enough, but we shall not want him to part with his leg
this time.’ Which Clennam interpreted to the patient, who was full of
gratitude, and, in his demonstrative way, kissed both the interpreter’s
hand and the surgeon’s several times.

‘It’s a serious injury, I suppose?’ said Clennam.

‘Ye-es,’ replied the surgeon, with the thoughtful pleasure of an artist
contemplating the work upon his easel. ‘Yes, it’s enough. There’s a
compound fracture above the knee, and a dislocation below. They are
both of a beautiful kind.’ He gave the patient a friendly clap on the
shoulder again, as if he really felt that he was a very good fellow
indeed, and worthy of all commendation for having broken his leg in a
manner interesting to science.

‘He speaks French?’ said the surgeon.

‘Oh yes, he speaks French.’

‘He’ll be at no loss here, then.--You have only to bear a little pain
like a brave fellow, my friend, and to be thankful that all goes as
well as it does,’ he added, in that tongue, ‘and you’ll walk again to
a marvel. Now, let us see whether there’s anything else the matter, and
how our ribs are?’

There was nothing else the matter, and our ribs were sound. Clennam
remained until everything possible to be done had been skilfully and
promptly done--the poor belated wanderer in a strange land movingly
besought that favour of him--and lingered by the bed to which he was in
due time removed, until he had fallen into a doze. Even then he wrote a
few words for him on his card, with a promise to return to-morrow, and
left it to be given to him when he should awake.

All these proceedings occupied so long that it struck eleven o’clock at
night as he came out at the Hospital Gate. He had hired a lodging for
the present in Covent Garden, and he took the nearest way to that
quarter, by Snow Hill and Holborn.

Left to himself again, after the solicitude and compassion of his last
adventure, he was naturally in a thoughtful mood. As naturally, he
could not walk on thinking for ten minutes without recalling Flora.
She necessarily recalled to him his life, with all its misdirection and
little happiness.

When he got to his lodging, he sat down before the dying fire, as he
had stood at the window of his old room looking out upon the blackened
forest of chimneys, and turned his gaze back upon the gloomy vista by
which he had come to that stage in his existence. So long, so bare,
so blank. No childhood; no youth, except for one remembrance; that one
remembrance proved, only that day, to be a piece of folly.

It was a misfortune to him, trifle as it might have been to another.
For, while all that was hard and stern in his recollection, remained
Reality on being proved--was obdurate to the sight and touch, and
relaxed nothing of its old indomitable grimness--the one tender
recollection of his experience would not bear the same test, and melted
away. He had foreseen this, on the former night, when he had dreamed
with waking eyes, but he had not felt it then; and he had now.

He was a dreamer in such wise, because he was a man who had, deep-rooted
in his nature, a belief in all the gentle and good things his life had
been without. Bred in meanness and hard dealing, this had rescued him
to be a man of honourable mind and open hand. Bred in coldness and
severity, this had rescued him to have a warm and sympathetic heart.
Bred in a creed too darkly audacious to pursue, through its process of
reserving the making of man in the image of his Creator to the making of
his Creator in the image of an erring man, this had rescued him to judge
not, and in humility to be merciful, and have hope and charity.

And this saved him still from the whimpering weakness and cruel
selfishness of holding that because such a happiness or such a virtue
had not come into his little path, or worked well for him, therefore
it was not in the great scheme, but was reducible, when found in
appearance, to the basest elements. A disappointed mind he had, but a
mind too firm and healthy for such unwholesome air. Leaving himself in
the dark, it could rise into the light, seeing it shine on others and
hailing it.

Therefore, he sat before his dying fire, sorrowful to think upon the way
by which he had come to that night, yet not strewing poison on the way
by which other men had come to it. That he should have missed so much,
and at his time of life should look so far about him for any staff to
bear him company upon his downward journey and cheer it, was a just
regret. He looked at the fire from which the blaze departed, from which
the afterglow subsided, in which the ashes turned grey, from which they
dropped to dust, and thought, ‘How soon I too shall pass through such
changes, and be gone!’

To review his life was like descending a green tree in fruit and flower,
and seeing all the branches wither and drop off, one by one, as he came
down towards them.

‘From the unhappy suppression of my youngest days, through the rigid and
unloving home that followed them, through my departure, my long exile,
my return, my mother’s welcome, my intercourse with her since, down to
the afternoon of this day with poor Flora,’ said Arthur Clennam, ‘what
have I found!’

His door was softly opened, and these spoken words startled him, and
came as if they were an answer:

‘Little Dorrit.’




CHAPTER 14. Little Dorrit’s Party


Arthur Clennam rose hastily, and saw her standing at the door. This
history must sometimes see with Little Dorrit’s eyes, and shall begin
that course by seeing him.

Little Dorrit looked into a dim room, which seemed a spacious one to
her, and grandly furnished. Courtly ideas of Covent Garden, as a place
with famous coffee-houses, where gentlemen wearing gold-laced coats and
swords had quarrelled and fought duels; costly ideas of Covent Garden,
as a place where there were flowers in winter at guineas a-piece,
pine-apples at guineas a pound, and peas at guineas a pint; picturesque
ideas of Covent Garden, as a place where there was a mighty theatre,
showing wonderful and beautiful sights to richly-dressed ladies and
gentlemen, and which was for ever far beyond the reach of poor Fanny or
poor uncle; desolate ideas of Covent Garden, as having all those arches
in it, where the miserable children in rags among whom she had just now
passed, like young rats, slunk and hid, fed on offal, huddled together
for warmth, and were hunted about (look to the rats young and old, all
ye Barnacles, for before God they are eating away our foundations, and
will bring the roofs on our heads!); teeming ideas of Covent Garden, as
a place of past and present mystery, romance, abundance, want, beauty,
ugliness, fair country gardens, and foul street gutters; all confused
together,--made the room dimmer than it was in Little Dorrit’s eyes, as
they timidly saw it from the door.

At first in the chair before the gone-out fire, and then turned round
wondering to see her, was the gentleman whom she sought. The brown,
grave gentleman, who smiled so pleasantly, who was so frank and
considerate in his manner, and yet in whose earnestness there was
something that reminded her of his mother, with the great difference
that she was earnest in asperity and he in gentleness. Now he regarded
her with that attentive and inquiring look before which Little Dorrit’s
eyes had always fallen, and before which they fell still.

‘My poor child! Here at midnight?’

‘I said Little Dorrit, sir, on purpose to prepare you. I knew you must
be very much surprised.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘No sir, I have got Maggy with me.’

Considering her entrance sufficiently prepared for by this mention of
her name, Maggy appeared from the landing outside, on the broad grin.
She instantly suppressed that manifestation, however, and became fixedly
solemn.

‘And I have no fire,’ said Clennam. ‘And you are--’ He was going to say
so lightly clad, but stopped himself in what would have been a reference
to her poverty, saying instead, ‘And it is so cold.’

Putting the chair from which he had risen nearer to the grate, he made
her sit down in it; and hurriedly bringing wood and coal, heaped them
together and got a blaze.

‘Your foot is like marble, my child;’ he had happened to touch it, while
stooping on one knee at his work of kindling the fire; ‘put it nearer
the warmth.’ Little Dorrit thanked him hastily. It was quite warm, it
was very warm! It smote upon his heart to feel that she hid her thin,
worn shoe.

Little Dorrit was not ashamed of her poor shoes. He knew her story, and
it was not that. Little Dorrit had a misgiving that he might blame her
father, if he saw them; that he might think, ‘why did he dine to-day,
and leave this little creature to the mercy of the cold stones!’ She had
no belief that it would have been a just reflection; she simply knew,
by experience, that such delusions did sometimes present themselves to
people. It was a part of her father’s misfortunes that they did.

‘Before I say anything else,’ Little Dorrit began, sitting before
the pale fire, and raising her eyes again to the face which in its
harmonious look of interest, and pity, and protection, she felt to be a
mystery far above her in degree, and almost removed beyond her guessing
at; ‘may I tell you something, sir?’

‘Yes, my child.’

A slight shade of distress fell upon her, at his so often calling her a
child. She was surprised that he should see it, or think of such a
slight thing; but he said directly:

‘I wanted a tender word, and could think of no other. As you just now
gave yourself the name they give you at my mother’s, and as that is the
name by which I always think of you, let me call you Little Dorrit.’

‘Thank you, sir, I should like it better than any name.’

‘Little Dorrit.’

‘Little mother,’ Maggy (who had been falling asleep) put in, as a
correction.

‘It’s all the same, Maggy,’ returned Little Dorrit, ‘all the same.’

‘Is it all the same, mother?’

‘Just the same.’

Maggy laughed, and immediately snored. In Little Dorrit’s eyes and ears,
the uncouth figure and the uncouth sound were as pleasant as could be.
There was a glow of pride in her big child, overspreading her face, when
it again met the eyes of the grave brown gentleman. She wondered what he
was thinking of, as he looked at Maggy and her. She thought what a
good father he would be. How, with some such look, he would counsel and
cherish his daughter.

‘What I was going to tell you, sir,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘is, that my
brother is at large.’

Arthur was rejoiced to hear it, and hoped he would do well.

‘And what I was going to tell you, sir,’ said Little Dorrit, trembling
in all her little figure and in her voice, ‘is, that I am not to know
whose generosity released him--am never to ask, and am never to be told,
and am never to thank that gentleman with all my grateful heart!’

He would probably need no thanks, Clennam said. Very likely he would be
thankful himself (and with reason), that he had had the means and chance
of doing a little service to her, who well deserved a great one.

‘And what I was going to say, sir, is,’ said Little Dorrit, trembling
more and more, ‘that if I knew him, and I might, I would tell him that
he can never, never know how I feel his goodness, and how my good father
would feel it. And what I was going to say, sir, is, that if I knew him,
and I might--but I don’t know him and I must not--I know that!--I would
tell him that I shall never any more lie down to sleep without having
prayed to Heaven to bless him and reward him. And if I knew him, and I
might, I would go down on my knees to him, and take his hand and kiss
it and ask him not to draw it away, but to leave it--O to leave it for a
moment--and let my thankful tears fall on it; for I have no other thanks
to give him!’

Little Dorrit had put his hand to her lips, and would have kneeled to
him, but he gently prevented her, and replaced her in her chair. Her
eyes, and the tones of her voice, had thanked him far better than she
thought. He was not able to say, quite as composedly as usual, ‘There,
Little Dorrit, there, there, there! We will suppose that you did know
this person, and that you might do all this, and that it was all done.
And now tell me, Who am quite another person--who am nothing more than
the friend who begged you to trust him--why you are out at midnight, and
what it is that brings you so far through the streets at this late hour,
my slight, delicate,’ child was on his lips again, ‘Little Dorrit!’

‘Maggy and I have been to-night,’ she answered, subduing herself with
the quiet effort that had long been natural to her, ‘to the theatre
where my sister is engaged.’

‘And oh ain’t it a Ev’nly place,’ suddenly interrupted Maggy, who seemed
to have the power of going to sleep and waking up whenever she chose.
‘Almost as good as a hospital. Only there ain’t no Chicking in it.’

Here she shook herself, and fell asleep again.

‘We went there,’ said Little Dorrit, glancing at her charge, ‘because
I like sometimes to know, of my own knowledge, that my sister is doing
well; and like to see her there, with my own eyes, when neither she nor
Uncle is aware. It is very seldom indeed that I can do that, because
when I am not out at work, I am with my father, and even when I am out
at work, I hurry home to him. But I pretend to-night that I am at a
party.’

As she made the confession, timidly hesitating, she raised her eyes to
the face, and read its expression so plainly that she answered it.

‘Oh no, certainly! I never was at a party in my life.’

She paused a little under his attentive look, and then said, ‘I hope
there is no harm in it. I could never have been of any use, if I had
not pretended a little.’

She feared that he was blaming her in his mind for so devising to
contrive for them, think for them, and watch over them, without their
knowledge or gratitude; perhaps even with their reproaches for supposed
neglect. But what was really in his mind, was the weak figure with its
strong purpose, the thin worn shoes, the insufficient dress, and the
pretence of recreation and enjoyment. He asked where the suppositious
party was? At a place where she worked, answered Little Dorrit,
blushing. She had said very little about it; only a few words to
make her father easy. Her father did not believe it to be a grand
party--indeed he might suppose that. And she glanced for an instant at
the shawl she wore.

‘It is the first night,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘that I have ever been away
from home. And London looks so large, so barren, and so wild.’ In Little
Dorrit’s eyes, its vastness under the black sky was awful; a tremor
passed over her as she said the words.

‘But this is not,’ she added, with the quiet effort again, ‘what I have
come to trouble you with, sir. My sister’s having found a friend, a lady
she has told me of and made me rather anxious about, was the first cause
of my coming away from home. And being away, and coming (on purpose)
round by where you lived and seeing a light in the window--’

Not for the first time. No, not for the first time. In Little Dorrit’s
eyes, the outside of that window had been a distant star on other nights
than this. She had toiled out of her way, tired and troubled, to look up
at it, and wonder about the grave, brown gentleman from so far off, who
had spoken to her as a friend and protector.

‘There were three things,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘that I thought I would
like to say, if you were alone and I might come up-stairs. First, what I
have tried to say, but never can--never shall--’

‘Hush, hush! That is done with, and disposed of. Let us pass to the
second,’ said Clennam, smiling her agitation away, making the blaze
shine upon her, and putting wine and cake and fruit towards her on the
table.

‘I think,’ said Little Dorrit--‘this is the second thing, sir--I think
Mrs Clennam must have found out my secret, and must know where I come
from and where I go to. Where I live, I mean.’

‘Indeed!’ returned Clennam quickly. He asked her, after short
consideration, why she supposed so.

‘I think,’ replied Little Dorrit, ‘that Mr Flintwinch must have watched
me.’

And why, Clennam asked, as he turned his eyes upon the fire, bent his
brows, and considered again; why did she suppose that?

‘I have met him twice. Both times near home. Both times at night, when
I was going back. Both times I thought (though that may easily be my
mistake), that he hardly looked as if he had met me by accident.’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘No; he only nodded and put his head on one side.’

‘The devil take his head!’ mused Clennam, still looking at the fire;
‘it’s always on one side.’

He roused himself to persuade her to put some wine to her lips, and to
touch something to eat--it was very difficult, she was so timid and
shy--and then said, musing again:

‘Is my mother at all changed to you?’

‘Oh, not at all. She is just the same. I wondered whether I had better
tell her my history. I wondered whether I might--I mean, whether you
would like me to tell her. I wondered,’ said Little Dorrit, looking at
him in a suppliant way, and gradually withdrawing her eyes as he looked
at her, ‘whether you would advise me what I ought to do.’

‘Little Dorrit,’ said Clennam; and the phrase had already begun, between
these two, to stand for a hundred gentle phrases, according to the
varying tone and connection in which it was used; ‘do nothing. I will
have some talk with my old friend, Mrs Affery. Do nothing, Little
Dorrit--except refresh yourself with such means as there are here. I
entreat you to do that.’

‘Thank you, I am not hungry. Nor,’ said Little Dorrit, as he softly
put her glass towards her, ‘nor thirsty.--I think Maggy might like
something, perhaps.’

‘We will make her find pockets presently for all there is here,’ said
Clennam: ‘but before we awake her, there was a third thing to say.’

‘Yes. You will not be offended, sir?’

‘I promise that, unreservedly.’

‘It will sound strange. I hardly know how to say it. Don’t think it
unreasonable or ungrateful in me,’ said Little Dorrit, with returning
and increasing agitation.

‘No, no, no. I am sure it will be natural and right. I am not afraid
that I shall put a wrong construction on it, whatever it is.’

‘Thank you. You are coming back to see my father again?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have been so good and thoughtful as to write him a note, saying
that you are coming to-morrow?’

‘Oh, that was nothing! Yes.’

‘Can you guess,’ said Little Dorrit, folding her small hands tight in
one another, and looking at him with all the earnestness of her soul
looking steadily out of her eyes, ‘what I am going to ask you not to
do?’

‘I think I can. But I may be wrong.’

‘No, you are not wrong,’ said Little Dorrit, shaking her head. ‘If we
should want it so very, very badly that we cannot do without it, let me
ask you for it.’

‘I Will,--I Will.’

‘Don’t encourage him to ask. Don’t understand him if he does ask. Don’t
give it to him. Save him and spare him that, and you will be able to
think better of him!’

Clennam said--not very plainly, seeing those tears glistening in her
anxious eyes--that her wish should be sacred with him.

‘You don’t know what he is,’ she said; ‘you don’t know what he really
is. How can you, seeing him there all at once, dear love, and not
gradually, as I have done! You have been so good to us, so delicately
and truly good, that I want him to be better in your eyes than in
anybody’s. And I cannot bear to think,’ cried Little Dorrit, covering
her tears with her hands, ‘I cannot bear to think that you of all the
world should see him in his only moments of degradation.’

‘Pray,’ said Clennam, ‘do not be so distressed. Pray, pray, Little
Dorrit! This is quite understood now.’

‘Thank you, sir. Thank you! I have tried very much to keep myself from
saying this; I have thought about it, days and nights; but when I knew
for certain you were coming again, I made up my mind to speak to you.
Not because I am ashamed of him,’ she dried her tears quickly, ‘but
because I know him better than any one does, and love him, and am proud
of him.’

Relieved of this weight, Little Dorrit was nervously anxious to be gone.
Maggy being broad awake, and in the act of distantly gloating over the
fruit and cakes with chuckles of anticipation, Clennam made the best
diversion in his power by pouring her out a glass of wine, which she
drank in a series of loud smacks; putting her hand upon her windpipe
after every one, and saying, breathless, with her eyes in a prominent
state, ‘Oh, ain’t it d’licious! Ain’t it hospitally!’ When she had
finished the wine and these encomiums, he charged her to load her basket
(she was never without her basket) with every eatable thing upon the
table, and to take especial care to leave no scrap behind. Maggy’s
pleasure in doing this and her little mother’s pleasure in seeing Maggy
pleased, was as good a turn as circumstances could have given to the
late conversation.

‘But the gates will have been locked long ago,’ said Clennam, suddenly
remembering it. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I am going to Maggy’s lodging,’ answered Little Dorrit. ‘I shall be
quite safe, quite well taken care of.’

‘I must accompany you there,’ said Clennam, ‘I cannot let you go alone.’

‘Yes, pray leave us to go there by ourselves. Pray do!’ begged Little
Dorrit.

She was so earnest in the petition, that Clennam felt a delicacy in
obtruding himself upon her: the rather, because he could well understand
that Maggy’s lodging was of the obscurest sort. ‘Come, Maggy,’ said
Little Dorrit cheerily, ‘we shall do very well; we know the way by this
time, Maggy?’

‘Yes, yes, little mother; we know the way,’ chuckled Maggy. And away
they went. Little Dorrit turned at the door to say, ‘God bless you!’ She
said it very softly, but perhaps she may have been as audible above--who
knows!--as a whole cathedral choir.

Arthur Clennam suffered them to pass the corner of the street before he
followed at a distance; not with any idea of encroaching a second time
on Little Dorrit’s privacy, but to satisfy his mind by seeing her secure
in the neighbourhood to which she was accustomed. So diminutive she
looked, so fragile and defenceless against the bleak damp weather,
flitting along in the shuffling shadow of her charge, that he felt, in
his compassion, and in his habit of considering her a child apart from
the rest of the rough world, as if he would have been glad to take her
up in his arms and carry her to her journey’s end.

In course of time she came into the leading thoroughfare where the
Marshalsea was, and then he saw them slacken their pace, and soon turn
down a by-street. He stopped, felt that he had no right to go further,
and slowly left them. He had no suspicion that they ran any risk of
being houseless until morning; had no idea of the truth until long, long
afterwards.

But, said Little Dorrit, when they stopped at a poor dwelling all in
darkness, and heard no sound on listening at the door, ‘Now, this is a
good lodging for you, Maggy, and we must not give offence. Consequently,
we will only knock twice, and not very loud; and if we cannot wake them
so, we must walk about till day.’

Once, Little Dorrit knocked with a careful hand, and listened. Twice,
Little Dorrit knocked with a careful hand, and listened. All was close
and still. ‘Maggy, we must do the best we can, my dear. We must be
patient, and wait for day.’

It was a chill dark night, with a damp wind blowing, when they came out
into the leading street again, and heard the clocks strike half-past
one. ‘In only five hours and a half,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘we shall be
able to go home.’ To speak of home, and to go and look at it, it being
so near, was a natural sequence. They went to the closed gate, and
peeped through into the court-yard. ‘I hope he is sound asleep,’ said
Little Dorrit, kissing one of the bars, ‘and does not miss me.’

The gate was so familiar, and so like a companion, that they put down
Maggy’s basket in a corner to serve for a seat, and keeping close
together, rested there for some time. While the street was empty and
silent, Little Dorrit was not afraid; but when she heard a footstep at
a distance, or saw a moving shadow among the street lamps, she was
startled, and whispered, ‘Maggy, I see some one. Come away!’ Maggy
would then wake up more or less fretfully, and they would wander about a
little, and come back again.

As long as eating was a novelty and an amusement, Maggy kept up pretty
well. But that period going by, she became querulous about the cold, and
shivered and whimpered. ‘It will soon be over, dear,’ said Little Dorrit
patiently. ‘Oh it’s all very fine for you, little mother,’ returned
Maggy, ‘but I’m a poor thing, only ten years old.’ At last, in the dead
of the night, when the street was very still indeed, Little Dorrit laid
the heavy head upon her bosom, and soothed her to sleep. And thus she
sat at the gate, as it were alone; looking up at the stars, and seeing
the clouds pass over them in their wild flight--which was the dance at
Little Dorrit’s party.

‘If it really was a party!’ she thought once, as she sat there. ‘If it
was light and warm and beautiful, and it was our house, and my poor dear
was its master, and had never been inside these walls. And if Mr
Clennam was one of our visitors, and we were dancing to delightful
music, and were all as gay and light-hearted as ever we could be! I
wonder--’ Such a vista of wonder opened out before her, that she sat
looking up at the stars, quite lost, until Maggy was querulous again,
and wanted to get up and walk.

Three o’clock, and half-past three, and they had passed over London
Bridge. They had heard the rush of the tide against obstacles; and
looked down, awed, through the dark vapour on the river; had seen little
spots of lighted water where the bridge lamps were reflected, shining
like demon eyes, with a terrible fascination in them for guilt and
misery. They had shrunk past homeless people, lying coiled up in
nooks. They had run from drunkards. They had started from slinking men,
whistling and signing to one another at bye corners, or running away at
full speed. Though everywhere the leader and the guide, Little Dorrit,
happy for once in her youthful appearance, feigned to cling to and rely
upon Maggy. And more than once some voice, from among a knot of brawling
or prowling figures in their path, had called out to the rest to ‘let
the woman and the child go by!’

So, the woman and the child had gone by, and gone on, and five had
sounded from the steeples. They were walking slowly towards the east,
already looking for the first pale streak of day, when a woman came
after them.

‘What are you doing with the child?’ she said to Maggy.

She was young--far too young to be there, Heaven knows!--and neither
ugly nor wicked-looking. She spoke coarsely, but with no naturally
coarse voice; there was even something musical in its sound.

‘What are you doing with yourself?’ retorted Maggy, for want of a better
answer.

‘Can’t you see, without my telling you?’

‘I don’t know as I can,’ said Maggy.

‘Killing myself! Now I have answered you, answer me. What are you doing
with the child?’

The supposed child kept her head drooped down, and kept her form close
at Maggy’s side.

‘Poor thing!’ said the woman. ‘Have you no feeling, that you keep her
out in the cruel streets at such a time as this? Have you no eyes, that
you don’t see how delicate and slender she is? Have you no sense (you
don’t look as if you had much) that you don’t take more pity on this
cold and trembling little hand?’

She had stepped across to that side, and held the hand between her own
two, chafing it. ‘Kiss a poor lost creature, dear,’ she said, bending
her face, ‘and tell me where’s she taking you.’

Little Dorrit turned towards her.

‘Why, my God!’ she said, recoiling, ‘you’re a woman!’

‘Don’t mind that!’ said Little Dorrit, clasping one of her hands that
had suddenly released hers. ‘I am not afraid of you.’

‘Then you had better be,’ she answered. ‘Have you no mother?’

‘No.’

‘No father?’

‘Yes, a very dear one.’

‘Go home to him, and be afraid of me. Let me go. Good night!’

‘I must thank you first; let me speak to you as if I really were a
child.’

‘You can’t do it,’ said the woman. ‘You are kind and innocent; but you
can’t look at me out of a child’s eyes. I never should have touched you,
but I thought that you were a child.’ And with a strange, wild cry, she
went away.

No day yet in the sky, but there was day in the resounding stones of
the streets; in the waggons, carts, and coaches; in the workers going
to various occupations; in the opening of early shops; in the traffic
at markets; in the stir of the riverside. There was coming day in the
flaring lights, with a feebler colour in them than they would have had
at another time; coming day in the increased sharpness of the air, and
the ghastly dying of the night.

They went back again to the gate, intending to wait there now until it
should be opened; but the air was so raw and cold that Little Dorrit,
leading Maggy about in her sleep, kept in motion. Going round by the
Church, she saw lights there, and the door open; and went up the steps
and looked in.

‘Who’s that?’ cried a stout old man, who was putting on a nightcap as if
he were going to bed in a vault.

‘It’s no one particular, sir,’ said Little Dorrit.

‘Stop!’ cried the man. ‘Let’s have a look at you!’

This caused her to turn back again in the act of going out, and to
present herself and her charge before him.

‘I thought so!’ said he. ‘I know _you_.’

‘We have often seen each other,’ said Little Dorrit, recognising the
sexton, or the beadle, or the verger, or whatever he was, ‘when I have
been at church here.’

‘More than that, we’ve got your birth in our Register, you know; you’re
one of our curiosities.’

‘Indeed!’ said Little Dorrit.

‘To be sure. As the child of the--by-the-bye, how did you get out so
early?’

‘We were shut out last night, and are waiting to get in.’

‘You don’t mean it? And there’s another hour good yet! Come into the
vestry. You’ll find a fire in the vestry, on account of the painters.
I’m waiting for the painters, or I shouldn’t be here, you may depend
upon it. One of our curiosities mustn’t be cold when we have it in our
power to warm her up comfortable. Come along.’

He was a very good old fellow, in his familiar way; and having stirred
the vestry fire, he looked round the shelves of registers for a
particular volume. ‘Here you are, you see,’ he said, taking it down and
turning the leaves. ‘Here you’ll find yourself, as large as life. Amy,
daughter of William and Fanny Dorrit. Born, Marshalsea Prison, Parish of
St George. And we tell people that you have lived there, without so much
as a day’s or a night’s absence, ever since. Is it true?’

‘Quite true, till last night.’

‘Lord!’ But his surveying her with an admiring gaze suggested Something
else to him, to wit: ‘I am sorry to see, though, that you are faint and
tired. Stay a bit. I’ll get some cushions out of the church, and you and
your friend shall lie down before the fire. Don’t be afraid of not
going in to join your father when the gate opens. _I’ll_ call you.’

He soon brought in the cushions, and strewed them on the ground.

‘There you are, you see. Again as large as life. Oh, never mind
thanking. I’ve daughters of my own. And though they weren’t born in the
Marshalsea Prison, they might have been, if I had been, in my ways of
carrying on, of your father’s breed. Stop a bit. I must put something
under the cushion for your head. Here’s a burial volume, just the
thing! We have got Mrs Bangham in this book. But what makes these books
interesting to most people is--not who’s in ‘em, but who isn’t--who’s
coming, you know, and when. That’s the interesting question.’

Commendingly looking back at the pillow he had improvised, he left them
to their hour’s repose. Maggy was snoring already, and Little Dorrit
was soon fast asleep with her head resting on that sealed book of Fate,
untroubled by its mysterious blank leaves.

This was Little Dorrit’s party. The shame, desertion, wretchedness, and
exposure of the great capital; the wet, the cold, the slow hours, and
the swift clouds of the dismal night. This was the party from which
Little Dorrit went home, jaded, in the first grey mist of a rainy
morning.




CHAPTER 15. Mrs Flintwinch has another Dream


The debilitated old house in the city, wrapped in its mantle of soot,
and leaning heavily on the crutches that had partaken of its decay and
worn out with it, never knew a healthy or a cheerful interval, let what
would betide. If the sun ever touched it, it was but with a ray, and
that was gone in half an hour; if the moonlight ever fell upon it, it
was only to put a few patches on its doleful cloak, and make it look
more wretched. The stars, to be sure, coldly watched it when the nights
and the smoke were clear enough; and all bad weather stood by it with
a rare fidelity. You should alike find rain, hail, frost, and thaw
lingering in that dismal enclosure when they had vanished from other
places; and as to snow, you should see it there for weeks, long after
it had changed from yellow to black, slowly weeping away its grimy life.
The place had no other adherents. As to street noises, the rumbling of
wheels in the lane merely rushed in at the gateway in going past, and
rushed out again: making the listening Mistress Affery feel as if she
were deaf, and recovered the sense of hearing by instantaneous flashes.
So with whistling, singing, talking, laughing, and all pleasant human
sounds. They leaped the gap in a moment, and went upon their way.

The varying light of fire and candle in Mrs Clennam’s room made the
greatest change that ever broke the dead monotony of the spot. In her
two long narrow windows, the fire shone sullenly all day, and sullenly
all night. On rare occasions it flashed up passionately, as she did;
but for the most part it was suppressed, like her, and preyed upon
itself evenly and slowly. During many hours of the short winter days,
however, when it was dusk there early in the afternoon, changing
distortions of herself in her wheeled chair, of Mr Flintwinch with his
wry neck, of Mistress Affery coming and going, would be thrown upon the
house wall that was over the gateway, and would hover there like shadows
from a great magic lantern. As the room-ridden invalid settled for the
night, these would gradually disappear: Mistress Affery’s magnified
shadow always flitting about, last, until it finally glided away into
the air, as though she were off upon a witch excursion. Then the
solitary light would burn unchangingly, until it burned pale before the
dawn, and at last died under the breath of Mrs Affery, as her shadow
descended on it from the witch-region of sleep.

Strange, if the little sick-room fire were in effect a beacon fire,
summoning some one, and that the most unlikely some one in the world,
to the spot that _must_ be come to. Strange, if the little sick-room light
were in effect a watch-light, burning in that place every night until
an appointed event should be watched out! Which of the vast multitude
of travellers, under the sun and the stars, climbing the dusty hills
and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by
sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one
another; which of the host may, with no suspicion of the journey’s end,
be travelling surely hither?

Time shall show us. The post of honour and the post of shame, the
general’s station and the drummer’s, a peer’s statue in Westminster
Abbey and a seaman’s hammock in the bosom of the deep, the mitre and
the workhouse, the woolsack and the gallows, the throne and the
guillotine--the travellers to all are on the great high road, but it
has wonderful divergencies, and only Time shall show us whither each
traveller is bound.

On a wintry afternoon at twilight, Mrs Flintwinch, having been heavy all
day, dreamed this dream:

She thought she was in the kitchen getting the kettle ready for tea, and
was warming herself with her feet upon the fender and the skirt of her
gown tucked up, before the collapsed fire in the middle of the grate,
bordered on either hand by a deep cold black ravine. She thought that
as she sat thus, musing upon the question whether life was not for some
people a rather dull invention, she was frightened by a sudden noise
behind her. She thought that she had been similarly frightened once last
week, and that the noise was of a mysterious kind--a sound of rustling
and of three or four quick beats like a rapid step; while a shock or
tremble was communicated to her heart, as if the step had shaken the
floor, or even as if she had been touched by some awful hand. She
thought that this revived within her certain old fears of hers that
the house was haunted; and that she flew up the kitchen stairs without
knowing how she got up, to be nearer company.

Mistress Affery thought that on reaching the hall, she saw the door of
her liege lord’s office standing open, and the room empty. That she went
to the ripped-up window in the little room by the street door to connect
her palpitating heart, through the glass, with living things beyond
and outside the haunted house. That she then saw, on the wall over the
gateway, the shadows of the two clever ones in conversation above. That
she then went upstairs with her shoes in her hand, partly to be near
the clever ones as a match for most ghosts, and partly to hear what they
were talking about.

‘None of your nonsense with me,’ said Mr Flintwinch. ‘I won’t take it
from you.’

Mrs Flintwinch dreamed that she stood behind the door, which was just
ajar, and most distinctly heard her husband say these bold words.

‘Flintwinch,’ returned Mrs Clennam, in her usual strong low voice,
‘there is a demon of anger in you. Guard against it.’

‘I don’t care whether there’s one or a dozen,’ said Mr Flintwinch,
forcibly suggesting in his tone that the higher number was nearer the
mark. ‘If there was fifty, they should all say, None of your nonsense
with me, I won’t take it from you--I’d make ‘em say it, whether they
liked it or not.’

‘What have I done, you wrathful man?’ her strong voice asked.

‘Done?’ said Mr Flintwinch. ‘Dropped down upon me.’

‘If you mean, remonstrated with you--’

‘Don’t put words into my mouth that I don’t mean,’ said Jeremiah,
sticking to his figurative expression with tenacious and impenetrable
obstinacy: ‘I mean dropped down upon me.’

‘I remonstrated with you,’ she began again, ‘because--’

‘I won’t have it!’ cried Jeremiah. ‘You dropped down upon me.’

‘I dropped down upon you, then, you ill-conditioned man,’ (Jeremiah
chuckled at having forced her to adopt his phrase,) ‘for having been
needlessly significant to Arthur that morning. I have a right to
complain of it as almost a breach of confidence. You did not mean it--’

‘I won’t have it!’ interposed the contradictory Jeremiah, flinging back
the concession. ‘I did mean it.’

‘I suppose I must leave you to speak in soliloquy if you choose,’ she
replied, after a pause that seemed an angry one. ‘It is useless my
addressing myself to a rash and headstrong old man who has a set purpose
not to hear me.’

‘Now, I won’t take that from you either,’ said Jeremiah. ‘I have no such
purpose. I have told you I did mean it. Do you wish to know why I meant
it, you rash and headstrong old woman?’

‘After all, you only restore me my own words,’ she said, struggling with
her indignation. ‘Yes.’

‘This is why, then. Because you hadn’t cleared his father to him, and
you ought to have done it. Because, before you went into any tantrum
about yourself, who are--’

‘Hold there, Flintwinch!’ she cried out in a changed voice: ‘you may go
a word too far.’

The old man seemed to think so. There was another pause, and he had
altered his position in the room, when he spoke again more mildly:

‘I was going to tell you why it was. Because, before you took your own
part, I thought you ought to have taken the part of Arthur’s father.
Arthur’s father! I had no particular love for Arthur’s father. I served
Arthur’s father’s uncle, in this house, when Arthur’s father was not
much above me--was poorer as far as his pocket went--and when his uncle
might as soon have left me his heir as have left him. He starved in the
parlour, and I starved in the kitchen; that was the principal difference
in our positions; there was not much more than a flight of breakneck
stairs between us. I never took to him in those times; I don’t know that
I ever took to him greatly at any time. He was an undecided, irresolute
chap, who had everything but his orphan life scared out of him when he
was young. And when he brought you home here, the wife his uncle
had named for him, I didn’t need to look at you twice (you were a
good-looking woman at that time) to know who’d be master. You have stood
of your own strength ever since. Stand of your own strength now. Don’t
lean against the dead.’

‘I do _not_--as you call it--lean against the dead.’

‘But you had a mind to do it, if I had submitted,’ growled Jeremiah,
‘and that’s why you drop down upon me. You can’t forget that I didn’t
submit. I suppose you are astonished that I should consider it worth my
while to have justice done to Arthur’s father? Hey? It doesn’t matter
whether you answer or not, because I know you are, and you know you are.
Come, then, I’ll tell you how it is. I may be a bit of an oddity in
point of temper, but this is my temper--I can’t let anybody have
entirely their own way. You are a determined woman, and a clever woman;
and when you see your purpose before you, nothing will turn you from it.
Who knows that better than I do?’

‘Nothing will turn me from it, Flintwinch, when I have justified it to
myself. Add that.’

‘Justified it to yourself? I said you were the most determined woman on
the face of the earth (or I meant to say so), and if you are determined
to justify any object you entertain, of course you’ll do it.’

‘Man! I justify myself by the authority of these Books,’ she cried, with
stern emphasis, and appearing from the sound that followed to strike the
dead-weight of her arm upon the table.

‘Never mind that,’ returned Jeremiah calmly, ‘we won’t enter into that
question at present. However that may be, you carry out your purposes,
and you make everything go down before them. Now, I won’t go down before
them. I have been faithful to you, and useful to you, and I am attached
to you. But I can’t consent, and I won’t consent, and I never did
consent, and I never will consent to be lost in you. Swallow up
everybody else, and welcome. The peculiarity of my temper is, ma’am,
that I won’t be swallowed up alive.’

Perhaps this had originally been the mainspring of the understanding
between them. Descrying thus much of force of character in Mr
Flintwinch, perhaps Mrs Clennam had deemed alliance with him worth her
while.

‘Enough and more than enough of the subject,’ said she gloomily.

‘Unless you drop down upon me again,’ returned the persistent
Flintwinch, ‘and then you must expect to hear of it again.’

Mistress Affery dreamed that the figure of her lord here began walking
up and down the room, as if to cool his spleen, and that she ran away;
but that, as he did not issue forth when she had stood listening and
trembling in the shadowy hall a little time, she crept up-stairs again,
impelled as before by ghosts and curiosity, and once more cowered
outside the door.

‘Please to light the candle, Flintwinch,’ Mrs Clennam was saying,
apparently wishing to draw him back into their usual tone. ‘It is nearly
time for tea. Little Dorrit is coming, and will find me in the dark.’

Mr Flintwinch lighted the candle briskly, and said as he put it down
upon the table:

‘What are you going to do with Little Dorrit? Is she to come to work
here for ever? To come to tea here for ever? To come backwards and
forwards here, in the same way, for ever?’

‘How can you talk about “for ever” to a maimed creature like me? Are we
not all cut down like the grass of the field, and was not I shorn by the
scythe many years ago: since when I have been lying here, waiting to be
gathered into the barn?’

‘Ay, ay! But since you have been lying here--not near dead--nothing like
it--numbers of children and young people, blooming women, strong men,
and what not, have been cut down and carried; and still here are you,
you see, not much changed after all. Your time and mine may be a long
one yet. When I say for ever, I mean (though I am not poetical) through
all our time.’ Mr Flintwinch gave this explanation with great calmness,
and calmly waited for an answer.

‘So long as Little Dorrit is quiet and industrious, and stands in need
of the slight help I can give her, and deserves it; so long, I suppose,
unless she withdraws of her own act, she will continue to come here, I
being spared.’

‘Nothing more than that?’ said Flintwinch, stroking his mouth and chin.

‘What should there be more than that! What could there be more than
that!’ she ejaculated in her sternly wondering way.

Mrs Flintwinch dreamed, that, for the space of a minute or two, they
remained looking at each other with the candle between them, and
that she somehow derived an impression that they looked at each other
fixedly.

‘Do you happen to know, Mrs Clennam,’ Affery’s liege lord then demanded
in a much lower voice, and with an amount of expression that seemed
quite out of proportion to the simple purpose of his words, ‘where she
lives?’

‘No.’

‘Would you--now, would you like to know?’ said Jeremiah with a pounce as
if he had sprung upon her.

‘If I cared to know, I should know already. Could I not have asked her
any day?’

‘Then you don’t care to know?’

‘I do not.’

Mr Flintwinch, having expelled a long significant breath said, with his
former emphasis, ‘For I have accidentally--mind!--found out.’

‘Wherever she lives,’ said Mrs Clennam, speaking in one unmodulated hard
voice, and separating her words as distinctly as if she were reading
them off from separate bits of metal that she took up one by one, ‘she
has made a secret of it, and she shall always keep her secret from me.’

‘After all, perhaps you would rather not have known the fact, any how?’
said Jeremiah; and he said it with a twist, as if his words had come out
of him in his own wry shape.

‘Flintwinch,’ said his mistress and partner, flashing into a sudden
energy that made Affery start, ‘why do you goad me? Look round this
room. If it is any compensation for my long confinement within these
narrow limits--not that I complain of being afflicted; you know I never
complain of that--if it is any compensation to me for long confinement
to this room, that while I am shut up from all pleasant change I am also
shut up from the knowledge of some things that I may prefer to avoid
knowing, why should you, of all men, grudge me that belief?’

‘I don’t grudge it to you,’ returned Jeremiah.

‘Then say no more. Say no more. Let Little Dorrit keep her secret from
me, and do you keep it from me also. Let her come and go, unobserved and
unquestioned. Let me suffer, and let me have what alleviation belongs to
my condition. Is it so much, that you torment me like an evil spirit?’

‘I asked you a question. That’s all.’

‘I have answered it. So, say no more. Say no more.’ Here the sound of
the wheeled chair was heard upon the floor, and Affery’s bell rang with
a hasty jerk.

More afraid of her husband at the moment than of the mysterious sound in
the kitchen, Affery crept away as lightly and as quickly as she could,
descended the kitchen stairs almost as rapidly as she had ascended them,
resumed her seat before the fire, tucked up her skirt again, and finally
threw her apron over her head. Then the bell rang once more, and then
once more, and then kept on ringing; in despite of which importunate
summons, Affery still sat behind her apron, recovering her breath.

At last Mr Flintwinch came shuffling down the staircase into the
hall, muttering and calling ‘Affery woman!’ all the way. Affery still
remaining behind her apron, he came stumbling down the kitchen stairs,
candle in hand, sidled up to her, twitched her apron off, and roused
her.

‘Oh Jeremiah!’ cried Affery, waking. ‘What a start you gave me!’

‘What have you been doing, woman?’ inquired Jeremiah. ‘You’ve been rung
for fifty times.’

‘Oh Jeremiah,’ said Mistress Affery, ‘I have been a-dreaming!’

Reminded of her former achievement in that way, Mr Flintwinch held the
candle to her head, as if he had some idea of lighting her up for the
illumination of the kitchen.

‘Don’t you know it’s her tea-time?’ he demanded with a vicious grin, and
giving one of the legs of Mistress Affery’s chair a kick.

‘Jeremiah? Tea-time? I don’t know what’s come to me. But I got such a
dreadful turn, Jeremiah, before I went--off a-dreaming, that I think it
must be that.’

‘Yoogh! Sleepy-Head!’ said Mr Flintwinch, ‘what are you talking about?’

‘Such a strange noise, Jeremiah, and such a curious movement. In the
kitchen here--just here.’

Jeremiah held up his light and looked at the blackened ceiling, held
down his light and looked at the damp stone floor, turned round with his
light and looked about at the spotted and blotched walls.

‘Rats, cats, water, drains,’ said Jeremiah.

Mistress Affery negatived each with a shake of her head. ‘No, Jeremiah;
I have felt it before. I have felt it up-stairs, and once on the
staircase as I was going from her room to ours in the night--a rustle
and a sort of trembling touch behind me.’

‘Affery, my woman,’ said Mr Flintwinch grimly, after advancing his nose
to that lady’s lips as a test for the detection of spirituous liquors,
‘if you don’t get tea pretty quick, old woman, you’ll become sensible
of a rustle and a touch that’ll send you flying to the other end of the
kitchen.’

This prediction stimulated Mrs Flintwinch to bestir herself, and to
hasten up-stairs to Mrs Clennam’s chamber. But, for all that, she now
began to entertain a settled conviction that there was something wrong
in the gloomy house. Henceforth, she was never at peace in it after
daylight departed; and never went up or down stairs in the dark without
having her apron over her head, lest she should see something.

What with these ghostly apprehensions and her singular dreams, Mrs
Flintwinch fell that evening into a haunted state of mind, from which
it may be long before this present narrative descries any trace of her
recovery. In the vagueness and indistinctness of all her new experiences
and perceptions, as everything about her was mysterious to herself she
began to be mysterious to others: and became as difficult to be made out
to anybody’s satisfaction as she found the house and everything in it
difficult to make out to her own.

She had not yet finished preparing Mrs Clennam’s tea, when the soft
knock came to the door which always announced Little Dorrit. Mistress
Affery looked on at Little Dorrit taking off her homely bonnet in the
hall, and at Mr Flintwinch scraping his jaws and contemplating her in
silence, as expecting some wonderful consequence to ensue which would
frighten her out of her five wits or blow them all three to pieces.

After tea there came another knock at the door, announcing Arthur.
Mistress Affery went down to let him in, and he said on entering,
‘Affery, I am glad it’s you. I want to ask you a question.’ Affery
immediately replied, ‘For goodness sake don’t ask me nothing, Arthur! I
am frightened out of one half of my life, and dreamed out of the
other. Don’t ask me nothing! I don’t know which is which, or what is
what!’--and immediately started away from him, and came near him no
more.

Mistress Affery having no taste for reading, and no sufficient light for
needlework in the subdued room, supposing her to have the inclination,
now sat every night in the dimness from which she had momentarily
emerged on the evening of Arthur Clennam’s return, occupied with crowds
of wild speculations and suspicions respecting her mistress and her
husband and the noises in the house. When the ferocious devotional
exercises were engaged in, these speculations would distract Mistress
Affery’s eyes towards the door, as if she expected some dark form to
appear at those propitious moments, and make the party one too many.

Otherwise, Affery never said or did anything to attract the attention of
the two clever ones towards her in any marked degree, except on certain
occasions, generally at about the quiet hour towards bed-time, when she
would suddenly dart out of her dim corner, and whisper with a face of
terror to Mr Flintwinch, reading the paper near Mrs Clennam’s little
table:

‘There, Jeremiah! Now! What’s that noise?’

Then the noise, if there were any, would have ceased, and Mr Flintwinch
would snarl, turning upon her as if she had cut him down that moment
against his will, ‘Affery, old woman, you shall have a dose, old woman,
such a dose! You have been dreaming again!’




CHAPTER 16. Nobody’s Weakness


The time being come for the renewal of his acquaintance with the Meagles
family, Clennam, pursuant to contract made between himself and Mr
Meagles within the precincts of Bleeding Heart Yard, turned his face
on a certain Saturday towards Twickenham, where Mr Meagles had a
cottage-residence of his own. The weather being fine and dry, and any
English road abounding in interest for him who had been so long away,
he sent his valise on by the coach, and set out to walk. A walk was in
itself a new enjoyment to him, and one that had rarely diversified his
life afar off.

He went by Fulham and Putney, for the pleasure of strolling over the
heath. It was bright and shining there; and when he found himself so far
on his road to Twickenham, he found himself a long way on his road to
a number of airier and less substantial destinations. They had risen
before him fast, in the healthful exercise and the pleasant road. It is
not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something. And
he had plenty of unsettled subjects to meditate upon, though he had been
walking to the Land’s End.

First, there was the subject seldom absent from his mind, the question,
what he was to do henceforth in life; to what occupation he should
devote himself, and in what direction he had best seek it. He was far
from rich, and every day of indecision and inaction made his inheritance
a source of greater anxiety to him. As often as he began to consider how
to increase this inheritance, or to lay it by, so often his misgiving
that there was some one with an unsatisfied claim upon his justice,
returned; and that alone was a subject to outlast the longest walk.
Again, there was the subject of his relations with his mother, which
were now upon an equable and peaceful but never confidential footing,
and whom he saw several times a week. Little Dorrit was a leading and a
constant subject: for the circumstances of his life, united to those of
her own story, presented the little creature to him as the only person
between whom and himself there were ties of innocent reliance on one
hand, and affectionate protection on the other; ties of compassion,
respect, unselfish interest, gratitude, and pity. Thinking of her, and
of the possibility of her father’s release from prison by the unbarring
hand of death--the only change of circumstance he could foresee that
might enable him to be such a friend to her as he wished to be, by
altering her whole manner of life, smoothing her rough road, and
giving her a home--he regarded her, in that perspective, as his adopted
daughter, his poor child of the Marshalsea hushed to rest. If there were
a last subject in his thoughts, and it lay towards Twickenham, its form
was so indefinite that it was little more than the pervading atmosphere
in which these other subjects floated before him.

He had crossed the heath and was leaving it behind when he gained upon a
figure which had been in advance of him for some time, and which, as
he gained upon it, he thought he knew. He derived this impression
from something in the turn of the head, and in the figure’s action of
consideration, as it went on at a sufficiently sturdy walk. But when
the man--for it was a man’s figure--pushed his hat up at the back of his
head, and stopped to consider some object before him, he knew it to be
Daniel Doyce.

‘How do you do, Mr Doyce?’ said Clennam, overtaking him. ‘I am glad to
see you again, and in a healthier place than the Circumlocution Office.’

‘Ha! Mr Meagles’s friend!’ exclaimed that public criminal, coming out of
some mental combinations he had been making, and offering his hand. ‘I
am glad to see you, sir. Will you excuse me if I forget your name?’

‘Readily. It’s not a celebrated name. It’s not Barnacle.’

‘No, no,’ said Daniel, laughing. ‘And now I know what it is. It’s
Clennam. How do you do, Mr Clennam?’

‘I have some hope,’ said Arthur, as they walked on together, ‘that we
may be going to the same place, Mr Doyce.’

‘Meaning Twickenham?’ returned Daniel. ‘I am glad to hear it.’

They were soon quite intimate, and lightened the way with a variety of
conversation. The ingenious culprit was a man of great modesty and good
sense; and, though a plain man, had been too much accustomed to combine
what was original and daring in conception with what was patient and
minute in execution, to be by any means an ordinary man. It was at first
difficult to lead him to speak about himself, and he put off Arthur’s
advances in that direction by admitting slightly, oh yes, he had done
this, and he had done that, and such a thing was of his making, and
such another thing was his discovery, but it was his trade, you see, his
trade; until, as he gradually became assured that his companion had a
real interest in his account of himself, he frankly yielded to it. Then
it appeared that he was the son of a north-country blacksmith, and had
originally been apprenticed by his widowed mother to a lock-maker; that
he had ‘struck out a few little things’ at the lock-maker’s, which had
led to his being released from his indentures with a present, which
present had enabled him to gratify his ardent wish to bind himself to
a working engineer, under whom he had laboured hard, learned hard, and
lived hard, seven years. His time being out, he had ‘worked in the shop’
at weekly wages seven or eight years more; and had then betaken
himself to the banks of the Clyde, where he had studied, and filed, and
hammered, and improved his knowledge, theoretical and practical, for six
or seven years more. There he had had an offer to go to Lyons, which he
had accepted; and from Lyons had been engaged to go to Germany, and in
Germany had had an offer to go to St Petersburg, and there had done very
well indeed--never better. However, he had naturally felt a preference
for his own country, and a wish to gain distinction there, and to do
whatever service he could do, there rather than elsewhere. And so he had
come home. And so at home he had established himself in business, and
had invented and executed, and worked his way on, until, after a dozen
years of constant suit and service, he had been enrolled in the
Great British Legion of Honour, the Legion of the Rebuffed of the
Circumlocution Office, and had been decorated with the Great British
Order of Merit, the Order of the Disorder of the Barnacles and
Stiltstalkings.

‘It is much to be regretted,’ said Clennam, ‘that you ever turned your
thoughts that way, Mr Doyce.’

‘True, sir, true to a certain extent. But what is a man to do? if he
has the misfortune to strike out something serviceable to the nation,
he must follow where it leads him.’

‘Hadn’t he better let it go?’ said Clennam.

‘He can’t do it,’ said Doyce, shaking his head with a thoughtful smile.
‘It’s not put into his head to be buried. It’s put into his head to be
made useful. You hold your life on the condition that to the last you
shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery on the same
terms.’

‘That is to say,’ said Arthur, with a growing admiration of his quiet
companion, ‘you are not finally discouraged even now?’

‘I have no right to be, if I am,’ returned the other. ‘The thing is as
true as it ever was.’

When they had walked a little way in silence, Clennam, at once to
change the direct point of their conversation and not to change it
too abruptly, asked Mr Doyce if he had any partner in his business to
relieve him of a portion of its anxieties?

‘No,’ he returned, ‘not at present. I had when I first entered on it,
and a good man he was. But he has been dead some years; and as I could
not easily take to the notion of another when I lost him, I bought
his share for myself and have gone on by myself ever since. And here’s
another thing,’ he said, stopping for a moment with a good-humoured
laugh in his eyes, and laying his closed right hand, with its peculiar
suppleness of thumb, on Clennam’s arm, ‘no inventor can be a man of
business, you know.’

‘No?’ said Clennam.

‘Why, so the men of business say,’ he answered, resuming the walk and
laughing outright. ‘I don’t know why we unfortunate creatures should
be supposed to want common sense, but it is generally taken for granted
that we do. Even the best friend I have in the world, our excellent
friend over yonder,’ said Doyce, nodding towards Twickenham, ‘extends
a sort of protection to me, don’t you know, as a man not quite able to
take care of himself?’

Arthur Clennam could not help joining in the good-humoured laugh, for he
recognised the truth of the description.

‘So I find that I must have a partner who is a man of business and not
guilty of any inventions,’ said Daniel Doyce, taking off his hat to pass
his hand over his forehead, ‘if it’s only in deference to the current
opinion, and to uphold the credit of the Works. I don’t think he’ll find
that I have been very remiss or confused in my way of conducting them;
but that’s for him to say--whoever he is--not for me.’

‘You have not chosen him yet, then?’

‘No, sir, no. I have only just come to a decision to take one. The fact
is, there’s more to do than there used to be, and the Works are enough
for me as I grow older. What with the books and correspondence, and
foreign journeys for which a Principal is necessary, I can’t do all. I
am going to talk over the best way of negotiating the matter, if I find
a spare half-hour between this and Monday morning, with my--my Nurse and
protector,’ said Doyce, with laughing eyes again. ‘He is a sagacious man
in business, and has had a good apprenticeship to it.’

After this, they conversed on different subjects until they arrived at
their journey’s end. A composed and unobtrusive self-sustainment was
noticeable in Daniel Doyce--a calm knowledge that what was true must
remain true, in spite of all the Barnacles in the family ocean, and
would be just the truth, and neither more nor less when even that sea
had run dry--which had a kind of greatness in it, though not of the
official quality.

As he knew the house well, he conducted Arthur to it by the way that
showed it to the best advantage. It was a charming place (none the worse
for being a little eccentric), on the road by the river, and just what
the residence of the Meagles family ought to be. It stood in a garden,
no doubt as fresh and beautiful in the May of the Year as Pet now was
in the May of her life; and it was defended by a goodly show of handsome
trees and spreading evergreens, as Pet was by Mr and Mrs Meagles. It
was made out of an old brick house, of which a part had been altogether
pulled down, and another part had been changed into the present cottage;
so there was a hale elderly portion, to represent Mr and Mrs Meagles,
and a young picturesque, very pretty portion to represent Pet. There was
even the later addition of a conservatory sheltering itself against it,
uncertain of hue in its deep-stained glass, and in its more transparent
portions flashing to the sun’s rays, now like fire and now like harmless
water drops; which might have stood for Tattycoram. Within view was
the peaceful river and the ferry-boat, to moralise to all the inmates
saying: Young or old, passionate or tranquil, chafing or content, you,
thus runs the current always. Let the heart swell into what discord it
will, thus plays the rippling water on the prow of the ferry-boat ever
the same tune. Year after year, so much allowance for the drifting of
the boat, so many miles an hour the flowing of the stream, here the
rushes, there the lilies, nothing uncertain or unquiet, upon this road
that steadily runs away; while you, upon your flowing road of time, are
so capricious and distracted.

The bell at the gate had scarcely sounded when Mr Meagles came out to
receive them. Mr Meagles had scarcely come out, when Mrs Meagles came
out. Mrs Meagles had scarcely come out, when Pet came out. Pet scarcely
had come out, when Tattycoram came out. Never had visitors a more
hospitable reception.

‘Here we are, you see,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘boxed up, Mr Clennam, within
our own home-limits, as if we were never going to expand--that is,
travel--again. Not like Marseilles, eh? No allonging and marshonging
here!’

‘A different kind of beauty, indeed!’ said Clennam, looking about him.

‘But, Lord bless me!’ cried Mr Meagles, rubbing his hands with a relish,
‘it was an uncommonly pleasant thing being in quarantine, wasn’t it?
Do you know, I have often wished myself back again? We were a capital
party.’

This was Mr Meagles’s invariable habit. Always to object to everything
while he was travelling, and always to want to get back to it when he
was not travelling.

‘If it was summer-time,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘which I wish it was on your
account, and in order that you might see the place at its best, you
would hardly be able to hear yourself speak for birds. Being practical
people, we never allow anybody to scare the birds; and the birds, being
practical people too, come about us in myriads. We are delighted to see
you, Clennam (if you’ll allow me, I shall drop the Mister); I heartily
assure you, we are delighted.’

‘I have not had so pleasant a greeting,’ said Clennam--then he recalled
what Little Dorrit had said to him in his own room, and faithfully
added ‘except once--since we last walked to and fro, looking down at the
Mediterranean.’

‘Ah!’ returned Mr Meagles. ‘Something like a look out, _that_ was, wasn’t
it? I don’t want a military government, but I shouldn’t mind a little
allonging and marshonging--just a dash of it--in this neighbourhood
sometimes. It’s Devilish still.’

Bestowing this eulogium on the retired character of his retreat with a
dubious shake of the head, Mr Meagles led the way into the house. It was
just large enough, and no more; was as pretty within as it was without,
and was perfectly well-arranged and comfortable. Some traces of the
migratory habits of the family were to be observed in the covered frames
and furniture, and wrapped-up hangings; but it was easy to see that it
was one of Mr Meagles’s whims to have the cottage always kept, in their
absence, as if they were always coming back the day after to-morrow. Of
articles collected on his various expeditions, there was such a vast
miscellany that it was like the dwelling of an amiable Corsair. There
were antiquities from Central Italy, made by the best modern houses in
that department of industry; bits of mummy from Egypt (and perhaps
Birmingham); model gondolas from Venice; model villages from
Switzerland; morsels of tesselated pavement from Herculaneum and
Pompeii, like petrified minced veal; ashes out of tombs, and lava out of
Vesuvius; Spanish fans, Spezzian straw hats, Moorish slippers, Tuscan
hairpins, Carrara sculpture, Trastaverini scarves, Genoese velvets and
filigree, Neapolitan coral, Roman cameos, Geneva jewellery, Arab
lanterns, rosaries blest all round by the Pope himself, and an infinite
variety of lumber. There were views, like and unlike, of a multitude of
places; and there was one little picture-room devoted to a few of the
regular sticky old Saints, with sinews like whipcord, hair like
Neptune’s, wrinkles like tattooing, and such coats of varnish that every
holy personage served for a fly-trap, and became what is now called in
the vulgar tongue a Catch-em-alive O. Of these pictorial acquisitions Mr
Meagles spoke in the usual manner. He was no judge, he said, except of
what pleased himself; he had picked them up, dirt-cheap, and people
_had_ considered them rather fine. One man, who at any rate ought to
know something of the subject, had declared that ‘Sage, Reading’ (a
specially oily old gentleman in a blanket, with a swan’s-down tippet for
a beard, and a web of cracks all over him like rich pie-crust), to be a
fine Guercino. As for Sebastian del Piombo there, you would judge for
yourself; if it were not his later manner, the question was, Who was it?
Titian, that might or might not be--perhaps he had only touched it.
Daniel Doyce said perhaps he hadn’t touched it, but Mr Meagles rather
declined to overhear the remark.

When he had shown all his spoils, Mr Meagles took them into his own
snug room overlooking the lawn, which was fitted up in part like a
dressing-room and in part like an office, and in which, upon a kind of
counter-desk, were a pair of brass scales for weighing gold, and a scoop
for shovelling out money.

‘Here they are, you see,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘I stood behind these two
articles five-and-thirty years running, when I no more thought of
gadding about than I now think of--staying at home. When I left the Bank
for good, I asked for them, and brought them away with me. I mention it
at once, or you might suppose that I sit in my counting-house (as Pet
says I do), like the king in the poem of the four-and-twenty blackbirds,
counting out my money.’

Clennam’s eyes had strayed to a natural picture on the wall, of two
pretty little girls with their arms entwined. ‘Yes, Clennam,’ said
Mr Meagles, in a lower voice. ‘There they both are. It was taken some
seventeen years ago. As I often say to Mother, they were babies then.’

‘Their names?’ said Arthur.

‘Ah, to be sure! You have never heard any name but Pet. Pet’s name is
Minnie; her sister’s Lillie.’

‘Should you have known, Mr Clennam, that one of them was meant for me?’
asked Pet herself, now standing in the doorway.

‘I might have thought that both of them were meant for you, both
are still so like you. Indeed,’ said Clennam, glancing from the fair
original to the picture and back, ‘I cannot even now say which is not
your portrait.’

‘D’ye hear that, Mother?’ cried Mr Meagles to his wife, who had followed
her daughter. ‘It’s always the same, Clennam; nobody can decide. The
child to your left is Pet.’

The picture happened to be near a looking-glass. As Arthur looked at
it again, he saw, by the reflection of the mirror, Tattycoram stop in
passing outside the door, listen to what was going on, and pass away
with an angry and contemptuous frown upon her face, that changed its
beauty into ugliness.

‘But come!’ said Mr Meagles. ‘You have had a long walk, and will be glad
to get your boots off. As to Daniel here, I suppose he’d never think of
taking _his_ boots off, unless we showed him a boot-jack.’

‘Why not?’ asked Daniel, with a significant smile at Clennam.

‘Oh! You have so many things to think about,’ returned Mr Meagles,
clapping him on the shoulder, as if his weakness must not be left to
itself on any account. ‘Figures, and wheels, and cogs, and levers, and
screws, and cylinders, and a thousand things.’

‘In my calling,’ said Daniel, amused, ‘the greater usually includes the
less. But never mind, never mind! Whatever pleases you, pleases me.’

Clennam could not help speculating, as he seated himself in his room
by the fire, whether there might be in the breast of this honest,
affectionate, and cordial Mr Meagles, any microscopic portion of
the mustard-seed that had sprung up into the great tree of the
Circumlocution Office. His curious sense of a general superiority to
Daniel Doyce, which seemed to be founded, not so much on anything
in Doyce’s personal character as on the mere fact of his being an
originator and a man out of the beaten track of other men, suggested the
idea. It might have occupied him until he went down to dinner an hour
afterwards, if he had not had another question to consider, which
had been in his mind so long ago as before he was in quarantine at
Marseilles, and which had now returned to it, and was very urgent with
it. No less a question than this: Whether he should allow himself to
fall in love with Pet?

He was twice her age. (He changed the leg he had crossed over the other,
and tried the calculation again, but could not bring out the total at
less.) He was twice her age. Well! He was young in appearance, young
in health and strength, young in heart. A man was certainly not old
at forty; and many men were not in circumstances to marry, or did not
marry, until they had attained that time of life. On the other hand, the
question was, not what he thought of the point, but what she thought of
it.

He believed that Mr Meagles was disposed to entertain a ripe regard for
him, and he knew that he had a sincere regard for Mr Meagles and his
good wife. He could foresee that to relinquish this beautiful only
child, of whom they were so fond, to any husband, would be a trial
of their love which perhaps they never yet had had the fortitude to
contemplate. But the more beautiful and winning and charming she, the
nearer they must always be to the necessity of approaching it. And why
not in his favour, as well as in another’s?

When he had got so far, it came again into his head that the question
was, not what they thought of it, but what she thought of it.

Arthur Clennam was a retiring man, with a sense of many deficiencies;
and he so exalted the merits of the beautiful Minnie in his mind, and
depressed his own, that when he pinned himself to this point, his hopes
began to fail him. He came to the final resolution, as he made himself
ready for dinner, that he would not allow himself to fall in love with
Pet.

There were only five, at a round table, and it was very pleasant indeed.
They had so many places and people to recall, and they were all so easy
and cheerful together (Daniel Doyce either sitting out like an amused
spectator at cards, or coming in with some shrewd little experiences of
his own, when it happened to be to the purpose), that they might have
been together twenty times, and not have known so much of one another.

‘And Miss Wade,’ said Mr Meagles, after they had recalled a number of
fellow-travellers. ‘Has anybody seen Miss Wade?’

‘I have,’ said Tattycoram.

She had brought a little mantle which her young mistress had sent for,
and was bending over her, putting it on, when she lifted up her dark
eyes and made this unexpected answer.

‘Tatty!’ her young mistress exclaimed. ‘You seen Miss Wade?--where?’

‘Here, miss,’ said Tattycoram.

‘How?’

An impatient glance from Tattycoram seemed, as Clennam saw it, to answer
‘With my eyes!’ But her only answer in words was: ‘I met her near the
church.’

‘What was she doing there I wonder!’ said Mr Meagles. ‘Not going to it,
I should think.’

‘She had written to me first,’ said Tattycoram.

‘Oh, Tatty!’ murmured her mistress, ‘take your hands away. I feel as if
some one else was touching me!’

She said it in a quick involuntary way, but half playfully, and not more
petulantly or disagreeably than a favourite child might have done, who
laughed next moment. Tattycoram set her full red lips together, and
crossed her arms upon her bosom.

‘Did you wish to know, sir,’ she said, looking at Mr Meagles, ‘what Miss
Wade wrote to me about?’

‘Well, Tattycoram,’ returned Mr Meagles, ‘since you ask the question,
and we are all friends here, perhaps you may as well mention it, if you
are so inclined.’

‘She knew, when we were travelling, where you lived,’ said Tattycoram,
‘and she had seen me not quite--not quite--’

‘Not quite in a good temper, Tattycoram?’ suggested Mr Meagles,
shaking his head at the dark eyes with a quiet caution. ‘Take a little
time--count five-and-twenty, Tattycoram.’

She pressed her lips together again, and took a long deep breath.

‘So she wrote to me to say that if I ever felt myself hurt,’ she looked
down at her young mistress, ‘or found myself worried,’ she looked down
at her again, ‘I might go to her, and be considerately treated. I was
to think of it, and could speak to her by the church. So I went there to
thank her.’

‘Tatty,’ said her young mistress, putting her hand up over her shoulder
that the other might take it, ‘Miss Wade almost frightened me when we
parted, and I scarcely like to think of her just now as having been so
near me without my knowing it. Tatty dear!’

Tatty stood for a moment, immovable.

‘Hey?’ cried Mr Meagles. ‘Count another five-and-twenty, Tattycoram.’

She might have counted a dozen, when she bent and put her lips to the
caressing hand. It patted her cheek, as it touched the owner’s beautiful
curls, and Tattycoram went away.

‘Now there,’ said Mr Meagles softly, as he gave a turn to the
dumb-waiter on his right hand to twirl the sugar towards himself.
‘There’s a girl who might be lost and ruined, if she wasn’t among
practical people. Mother and I know, solely from being practical, that
there are times when that girl’s whole nature seems to roughen itself
against seeing us so bound up in Pet. No father and mother were bound
up in her, poor soul. I don’t like to think of the way in which that
unfortunate child, with all that passion and protest in her, feels when
she hears the Fifth Commandment on a Sunday. I am always inclined to
call out, Church, Count five-and-twenty, Tattycoram.’

Besides his dumb-waiter, Mr Meagles had two other not dumb waiters in
the persons of two parlour-maids with rosy faces and bright eyes, who
were a highly ornamental part of the table decoration. ‘And why not, you
see?’ said Mr Meagles on this head. ‘As I always say to Mother, why
not have something pretty to look at, if you have anything at all?’

A certain Mrs Tickit, who was Cook and Housekeeper when the family were
at home, and Housekeeper only when the family were away, completed the
establishment. Mr Meagles regretted that the nature of the duties in
which she was engaged, rendered Mrs Tickit unpresentable at present,
but hoped to introduce her to the new visitor to-morrow. She was an
important part of the Cottage, he said, and all his friends knew her.
That was her picture up in the corner. When they went away, she always
put on the silk-gown and the jet-black row of curls represented in that
portrait (her hair was reddish-grey in the kitchen), established herself
in the breakfast-room, put her spectacles between two particular leaves
of Doctor Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, and sat looking over the blind all
day until they came back again. It was supposed that no persuasion could
be invented which would induce Mrs Tickit to abandon her post at the
blind, however long their absence, or to dispense with the attendance
of Dr Buchan; the lucubrations of which learned practitioner, Mr Meagles
implicitly believed she had never yet consulted to the extent of one
word in her life.

In the evening they played an old-fashioned rubber; and Pet sat looking
over her father’s hand, or singing to herself by fits and starts at the
piano. She was a spoilt child; but how could she be otherwise? Who could
be much with so pliable and beautiful a creature, and not yield to her
endearing influence? Who could pass an evening in the house, and not
love her for the grace and charm of her very presence in the room? This
was Clennam’s reflection, notwithstanding the final conclusion at which
he had arrived up-stairs.

In making it, he revoked. ‘Why, what are you thinking of, my good sir?’
asked the astonished Mr Meagles, who was his partner. ‘I beg your
pardon. Nothing,’ returned Clennam. ‘Think of something, next time;
that’s a dear fellow,’ said Mr Meagles. Pet laughingly believed he had
been thinking of Miss Wade. ‘Why of Miss Wade, Pet?’ asked her father.
‘Why, indeed!’ said Arthur Clennam. Pet coloured a little, and went to
the piano again.

As they broke up for the night, Arthur overheard Doyce ask his host if
he could give him half an hour’s conversation before breakfast in the
morning? The host replying willingly, Arthur lingered behind a moment,
having his own word to add to that topic.

‘Mr Meagles,’ he said, on their being left alone, ‘do you remember when
you advised me to go straight to London?’

‘Perfectly well.’

‘And when you gave me some other good advice which I needed at that time?’

‘I won’t say what it was worth,’ answered Mr Meagles: ‘but of course I
remember our being very pleasant and confidential together.’

‘I have acted on your advice; and having disembarrassed myself of an
occupation that was painful to me for many reasons, wish to devote
myself and what means I have, to another pursuit.’

‘Right! You can’t do it too soon,’ said Mr Meagles.

‘Now, as I came down to-day, I found that your friend, Mr Doyce, is
looking for a partner in his business--not a partner in his mechanical
knowledge, but in the ways and means of turning the business arising
from it to the best account.’

‘Just so,’ said Mr Meagles, with his hands in his pockets, and with
the old business expression of face that had belonged to the scales and
scoop.

‘Mr Doyce mentioned incidentally, in the course of our conversation,
that he was going to take your valuable advice on the subject of finding
such a partner. If you should think our views and opportunities at all
likely to coincide, perhaps you will let him know my available position.
I speak, of course, in ignorance of the details, and they may be
unsuitable on both sides.’

‘No doubt, no doubt,’ said Mr Meagles, with the caution belonging to the
scales and scoop.

‘But they will be a question of figures and accounts--’

‘Just so, just so,’ said Mr Meagles, with arithmetical solidity
belonging to the scales and scoop.

‘--And I shall be glad to enter into the subject, provided Mr Doyce
responds, and you think well of it. If you will at present, therefore,
allow me to place it in your hands, you will much oblige me.’

‘Clennam, I accept the trust with readiness,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘And
without anticipating any of the points which you, as a man of business,
have of course reserved, I am free to say to you that I think something
may come of this. Of one thing you may be perfectly certain. Daniel is
an honest man.’

‘I am so sure of it that I have promptly made up my mind to speak to
you.’

‘You must guide him, you know; you must steer him; you must direct him;
he is one of a crotchety sort,’ said Mr Meagles, evidently meaning
nothing more than that he did new things and went new ways; ‘but he is
as honest as the sun, and so good night!’

Clennam went back to his room, sat down again before his fire, and made
up his mind that he was glad he had resolved not to fall in love with
Pet. She was so beautiful, so amiable, so apt to receive any true
impression given to her gentle nature and her innocent heart, and make
the man who should be so happy as to communicate it, the most fortunate
and enviable of all men, that he was very glad indeed he had come to
that conclusion.

But, as this might have been a reason for coming to the opposite
conclusion, he followed out the theme again a little way in his mind; to
justify himself, perhaps.

‘Suppose that a man,’ so his thoughts ran, ‘who had been of age some
twenty years or so; who was a diffident man, from the circumstances of
his youth; who was rather a grave man, from the tenor of his life; who
knew himself to be deficient in many little engaging qualities which
he admired in others, from having been long in a distant region, with
nothing softening near him; who had no kind sisters to present to her;
who had no congenial home to make her known in; who was a stranger in
the land; who had not a fortune to compensate, in any measure, for
these defects; who had nothing in his favour but his honest love and his
general wish to do right--suppose such a man were to come to this house,
and were to yield to the captivation of this charming girl, and were to
persuade himself that he could hope to win her; what a weakness it would
be!’

He softly opened his window, and looked out upon the serene river. Year
after year so much allowance for the drifting of the ferry-boat, so
many miles an hour the flowing of the stream, here the rushes, there the
lilies, nothing uncertain or unquiet.

Why should he be vexed or sore at heart? It was not his weakness that he
had imagined. It was nobody’s, nobody’s within his knowledge; why should
it trouble him? And yet it did trouble him. And he thought--who has not
thought for a moment, sometimes?--that it might be better to flow away
monotonously, like the river, and to compound for its insensibility to
happiness with its insensibility to pain.




CHAPTER 17. Nobody’s Rival


Before breakfast in the morning, Arthur walked out to look about him.
As the morning was fine and he had an hour on his hands, he crossed the
river by the ferry, and strolled along a footpath through some meadows.
When he came back to the towing-path, he found the ferry-boat on the
opposite side, and a gentleman hailing it and waiting to be taken over.

This gentleman looked barely thirty. He was well dressed, of a sprightly
and gay appearance, a well-knit figure, and a rich dark complexion. As
Arthur came over the stile and down to the water’s edge, the lounger
glanced at him for a moment, and then resumed his occupation of idly
tossing stones into the water with his foot. There was something in his
way of spurning them out of their places with his heel, and getting them
into the required position, that Clennam thought had an air of cruelty
in it. Most of us have more or less frequently derived a similar
impression from a man’s manner of doing some very little thing: plucking
a flower, clearing away an obstacle, or even destroying an insentient
object.

The gentleman’s thoughts were preoccupied, as his face showed, and he
took no notice of a fine Newfoundland dog, who watched him attentively,
and watched every stone too, in its turn, eager to spring into the
river on receiving his master’s sign. The ferry-boat came over, however,
without his receiving any sign, and when it grounded his master took him
by the collar and walked him into it.

‘Not this morning,’ he said to the dog. ‘You won’t do for ladies’
company, dripping wet. Lie down.’

Clennam followed the man and the dog into the boat, and took his seat.
The dog did as he was ordered. The man remained standing, with his hands
in his pockets, and towered between Clennam and the prospect. Man and
dog both jumped lightly out as soon as they touched the other side, and
went away. Clennam was glad to be rid of them.

The church clock struck the breakfast hour as he walked up the little
lane by which the garden-gate was approached. The moment he pulled the
bell a deep loud barking assailed him from within the wall.

‘I heard no dog last night,’ thought Clennam. The gate was opened by
one of the rosy maids, and on the lawn were the Newfoundland dog and the
man.

‘Miss Minnie is not down yet, gentlemen,’ said the blushing portress, as
they all came together in the garden. Then she said to the master of the
dog, ‘Mr Clennam, sir,’ and tripped away.

‘Odd enough, Mr Clennam, that we should have met just now,’ said
the man. Upon which the dog became mute. ‘Allow me to introduce
myself--Henry Gowan. A pretty place this, and looks wonderfully well
this morning!’

The manner was easy, and the voice agreeable; but still Clennam thought,
that if he had not made that decided resolution to avoid falling in love
with Pet, he would have taken a dislike to this Henry Gowan.

‘It’s new to you, I believe?’ said this Gowan, when Arthur had extolled
the place.

‘Quite new. I made acquaintance with it only yesterday afternoon.’

‘Ah! Of course this is not its best aspect. It used to look charming in
the spring, before they went away last time. I should like you to have
seen it then.’

But for that resolution so often recalled, Clennam might have wished him
in the crater of Mount Etna, in return for this civility.

‘I have had the pleasure of seeing it under many circumstances during
the last three years, and it’s--a Paradise.’

It was (at least it might have been, always excepting for that wise
resolution) like his dexterous impudence to call it a Paradise. He only
called it a Paradise because he first saw her coming, and so made her
out within her hearing to be an angel, Confusion to him!

And ah! how beaming she looked, and how glad! How she caressed the dog,
and how the dog knew her! How expressive that heightened colour in her
face, that fluttered manner, her downcast eyes, her irresolute
happiness! When had Clennam seen her look like this? Not that there was
any reason why he might, could, would, or should have ever seen her look
like this, or that he had ever hoped for himself to see her look like
this; but still--when had he ever known her do it!

He stood at a little distance from them. This Gowan when he had talked
about a Paradise, had gone up to her and taken her hand. The dog had put
his great paws on her arm and laid his head against her dear bosom. She
had laughed and welcomed them, and made far too much of the dog, far,
far, too much--that is to say, supposing there had been any third person
looking on who loved her.

She disengaged herself now, and came to Clennam, and put her hand in his
and wished him good morning, and gracefully made as if she would take
his arm and be escorted into the house. To this Gowan had no objection.
No, he knew he was too safe.

There was a passing cloud on Mr Meagles’s good-humoured face when they
all three (four, counting the dog, and he was the most objectionable
but one of the party) came in to breakfast. Neither it, nor the touch
of uneasiness on Mrs Meagles as she directed her eyes towards it, was
unobserved by Clennam.

‘Well, Gowan,’ said Mr Meagles, even suppressing a sigh; ‘how goes the
world with you this morning?’

‘Much as usual, sir. Lion and I being determined not to waste anything
of our weekly visit, turned out early, and came over from Kingston, my
present headquarters, where I am making a sketch or two.’ Then he told
how he had met Mr Clennam at the ferry, and they had come over together.

‘Mrs Gowan is well, Henry?’ said Mrs Meagles. (Clennam became
attentive.)

‘My mother is quite well, thank you.’ (Clennam became inattentive.) ‘I
have taken the liberty of making an addition to your family dinner-party
to-day, which I hope will not be inconvenient to you or to Mr Meagles. I
couldn’t very well get out of it,’ he explained, turning to the latter.
‘The young fellow wrote to propose himself to me; and as he is well
connected, I thought you would not object to my transferring him here.’

‘Who _is_ the young fellow?’ asked Mr Meagles with peculiar complacency.

‘He is one of the Barnacles. Tite Barnacle’s son, Clarence Barnacle, who
is in his father’s Department. I can at least guarantee that the river
shall not suffer from his visit. He won’t set it on fire.’

‘Aye, aye?’ said Meagles. ‘A Barnacle is he? _We_ know something of that
family, eh, Dan? By George, they are at the top of the tree, though! Let
me see. What relation will this young fellow be to Lord Decimus now? His
Lordship married, in seventeen ninety-seven, Lady Jemima Bilberry, who
was the second daughter by the third marriage--no! There I am wrong!
That was Lady Seraphina--Lady Jemima was the first daughter by the
second marriage of the fifteenth Earl of Stiltstalking with the
Honourable Clementina Toozellem. Very well. Now this young fellow’s
father married a Stiltstalking and _his_ father married his cousin who
was a Barnacle. The father of that father who married a Barnacle,
married a Joddleby.--I am getting a little too far back, Gowan; I want
to make out what relation this young fellow is to Lord Decimus.’

‘That’s easily stated. His father is nephew to Lord Decimus.’

‘Nephew--to--Lord--Decimus,’ Mr Meagles luxuriously repeated with his
eyes shut, that he might have nothing to distract him from the full
flavour of the genealogical tree. ‘By George, you are right, Gowan. So
he is.’

‘Consequently, Lord Decimus is his great uncle.’

‘But stop a bit!’ said Mr Meagles, opening his eyes with a fresh
discovery. ‘Then on the mother’s side, Lady Stiltstalking is his great
aunt.’

‘Of course she is.’

‘Aye, aye, aye?’ said Mr Meagles with much interest. ‘Indeed, indeed? We
shall be glad to see him. We’ll entertain him as well as we can, in our
humble way; and we shall not starve him, I hope, at all events.’

In the beginning of this dialogue, Clennam had expected some great
harmless outburst from Mr Meagles, like that which had made him burst
out of the Circumlocution Office, holding Doyce by the collar. But his
good friend had a weakness which none of us need go into the next street
to find, and which no amount of Circumlocution experience could long
subdue in him. Clennam looked at Doyce; but Doyce knew all about it
beforehand, and looked at his plate, and made no sign, and said no word.

‘I am much obliged to you,’ said Gowan, to conclude the subject.
‘Clarence is a great ass, but he is one of the dearest and best fellows
that ever lived!’

It appeared, before the breakfast was over, that everybody whom this
Gowan knew was either more or less of an ass, or more or less of a
knave; but was, notwithstanding, the most lovable, the most engaging,
the simplest, truest, kindest, dearest, best fellow that ever lived.
The process by which this unvarying result was attained, whatever the
premises, might have been stated by Mr Henry Gowan thus: ‘I claim to be
always book-keeping, with a peculiar nicety, in every man’s case, and
posting up a careful little account of Good and Evil with him. I do
this so conscientiously, that I am happy to tell you I find the most
worthless of men to be the dearest old fellow too: and am in a condition
to make the gratifying report, that there is much less difference than
you are inclined to suppose between an honest man and a scoundrel.’ The
effect of this cheering discovery happened to be, that while he seemed
to be scrupulously finding good in most men, he did in reality lower
it where it was, and set it up where it was not; but that was its only
disagreeable or dangerous feature.

It scarcely seemed, however, to afford Mr Meagles as much satisfaction
as the Barnacle genealogy had done. The cloud that Clennam had never
seen upon his face before that morning, frequently overcast it again;
and there was the same shadow of uneasy observation of him on the comely
face of his wife. More than once or twice when Pet caressed the dog,
it appeared to Clennam that her father was unhappy in seeing her do it;
and, in one particular instance when Gowan stood on the other side of
the dog, and bent his head at the same time, Arthur fancied that he saw
tears rise to Mr Meagles’s eyes as he hurried out of the room. It was
either the fact too, or he fancied further, that Pet herself was not
insensible to these little incidents; that she tried, with a more
delicate affection than usual, to express to her good father how much
she loved him; that it was on this account that she fell behind the
rest, both as they went to church and as they returned from it, and
took his arm. He could not have sworn but that as he walked alone in
the garden afterwards, he had an instantaneous glimpse of her in
her father’s room, clinging to both her parents with the greatest
tenderness, and weeping on her father’s shoulder.

The latter part of the day turning out wet, they were fain to keep the
house, look over Mr Meagles’s collection, and beguile the time with
conversation. This Gowan had plenty to say for himself, and said it
in an off-hand and amusing manner. He appeared to be an artist by
profession, and to have been at Rome some time; yet he had a slight,
careless, amateur way with him--a perceptible limp, both in his devotion
to art and his attainments--which Clennam could scarcely understand.

He applied to Daniel Doyce for help, as they stood together, looking out
of window.

‘You know Mr Gowan?’ he said in a low voice.

‘I have seen him here. Comes here every Sunday when they are at home.’

‘An artist, I infer from what he says?’

‘A sort of a one,’ said Daniel Doyce, in a surly tone.

‘What sort of a one?’ asked Clennam, with a smile.

‘Why, he has sauntered into the Arts at a leisurely Pall-Mall pace,’
said Doyce, ‘and I doubt if they care to be taken quite so coolly.’

Pursuing his inquiries, Clennam found that the Gowan family were a very
distant ramification of the Barnacles; and that the paternal Gowan,
originally attached to a legation abroad, had been pensioned off as a
Commissioner of nothing particular somewhere or other, and had died at
his post with his drawn salary in his hand, nobly defending it to the
last extremity. In consideration of this eminent public service, the
Barnacle then in power had recommended the Crown to bestow a pension of
two or three hundred a-year on his widow; to which the next Barnacle in
power had added certain shady and sedate apartments in the Palaces at
Hampton Court, where the old lady still lived, deploring the degeneracy
of the times in company with several other old ladies of both sexes. Her
son, Mr Henry Gowan, inheriting from his father, the Commissioner, that
very questionable help in life, a very small independence, had been
difficult to settle; the rather, as public appointments chanced to
be scarce, and his genius, during his earlier manhood, was of that
exclusively agricultural character which applies itself to the
cultivation of wild oats. At last he had declared that he would become
a Painter; partly because he had always had an idle knack that way,
and partly to grieve the souls of the Barnacles-in-chief who had not
provided for him. So it had come to pass successively, first, that
several distinguished ladies had been frightfully shocked; then, that
portfolios of his performances had been handed about o’ nights, and
declared with ecstasy to be perfect Claudes, perfect Cuyps, perfect
phaenomena; then, that Lord Decimus had bought his picture, and had
asked the President and Council to dinner at a blow, and had said, with
his own magnificent gravity, ‘Do you know, there appears to me to
be really immense merit in that work?’ and, in short, that people of
condition had absolutely taken pains to bring him into fashion. But,
somehow, it had all failed. The prejudiced public had stood out against
it obstinately. They had determined not to admire Lord Decimus’s
picture. They had determined to believe that in every service, except
their own, a man must qualify himself, by striving early and late, and
by working heart and soul, might and main. So now Mr Gowan, like that
worn-out old coffin which never was Mahomet’s nor anybody else’s, hung
midway between two points: jaundiced and jealous as to the one he had
left: jaundiced and jealous as to the other that he couldn’t reach.

Such was the substance of Clennam’s discoveries concerning him, made
that rainy Sunday afternoon and afterwards.

About an hour or so after dinner time, Young Barnacle appeared, attended
by his eye-glass; in honour of whose family connections, Mr Meagles had
cashiered the pretty parlour-maids for the day, and had placed on duty
in their stead two dingy men. Young Barnacle was in the last
degree amazed and disconcerted at sight of Arthur, and had murmured
involuntarily, ‘Look here! upon my soul, you know!’ before his presence
of mind returned.

Even then, he was obliged to embrace the earliest opportunity of taking
his friend into a window, and saying, in a nasal way that was a part of
his general debility:

‘I want to speak to you, Gowan. I say. Look here. Who is that fellow?’

‘A friend of our host’s. None of mine.’

‘He’s a most ferocious Radical, you know,’ said Young Barnacle.

‘Is he? How do you know?’

‘Ecod, sir, he was Pitching into our people the other day in the most
tremendous manner. Went up to our place and Pitched into my father to
that extent that it was necessary to order him out. Came back to
our Department, and Pitched into me. Look here. You never saw such a
fellow.’

‘What did he want?’

‘Ecod, sir,’ returned Young Barnacle, ‘he said he wanted to know, you
know! Pervaded our Department--without an appointment--and said he
wanted to know!’

The stare of indignant wonder with which Young Barnacle accompanied
this disclosure, would have strained his eyes injuriously but for
the opportune relief of dinner. Mr Meagles (who had been extremely
solicitous to know how his uncle and aunt were) begged him to conduct
Mrs Meagles to the dining-room. And when he sat on Mrs Meagles’s right
hand, Mr Meagles looked as gratified as if his whole family were there.

All the natural charm of the previous day was gone. The eaters of the
dinner, like the dinner itself, were lukewarm, insipid, overdone--and
all owing to this poor little dull Young Barnacle. Conversationless at
any time, he was now the victim of a weakness special to the occasion,
and solely referable to Clennam. He was under a pressing and continual
necessity of looking at that gentleman, which occasioned his eye-glass
to get into his soup, into his wine-glass, into Mrs Meagles’s plate, to
hang down his back like a bell-rope, and be several times disgracefully
restored to his bosom by one of the dingy men. Weakened in mind by his
frequent losses of this instrument, and its determination not to stick
in his eye, and more and more enfeebled in intellect every time he
looked at the mysterious Clennam, he applied spoons to his eyes,
forks, and other foreign matters connected with the furniture of the
dinner-table. His discovery of these mistakes greatly increased his
difficulties, but never released him from the necessity of looking at
Clennam. And whenever Clennam spoke, this ill-starred young man was
clearly seized with a dread that he was coming, by some artful device,
round to that point of wanting to know, you know.

It may be questioned, therefore, whether any one but Mr Meagles had much
enjoyment of the time. Mr Meagles, however, thoroughly enjoyed Young
Barnacle. As a mere flask of the golden water in the tale became a full
fountain when it was poured out, so Mr Meagles seemed to feel that this
small spice of Barnacle imparted to his table the flavour of the whole
family-tree. In its presence, his frank, fine, genuine qualities
paled; he was not so easy, he was not so natural, he was striving after
something that did not belong to him, he was not himself. What a strange
peculiarity on the part of Mr Meagles, and where should we find another
such case!

At last the wet Sunday wore itself out in a wet night; and Young
Barnacle went home in a cab, feebly smoking; and the objectionable Gowan
went away on foot, accompanied by the objectionable dog. Pet had taken
the most amiable pains all day to be friendly with Clennam, but Clennam
had been a little reserved since breakfast--that is to say, would have
been, if he had loved her.

When he had gone to his own room, and had again thrown himself into the
chair by the fire, Mr Doyce knocked at the door, candle in hand, to
ask him how and at what hour he proposed returning on the morrow? After
settling this question, he said a word to Mr Doyce about this Gowan--who
would have run in his head a good deal, if he had been his rival.

‘Those are not good prospects for a painter,’ said Clennam.

‘No,’ returned Doyce.

Mr Doyce stood, chamber-candlestick in hand, the other hand in his
pocket, looking hard at the flame of his candle, with a certain quiet
perception in his face that they were going to say something more.

‘I thought our good friend a little changed, and out of spirits, after
he came this morning?’ said Clennam.

‘Yes,’ returned Doyce.

‘But not his daughter?’ said Clennam.

‘No,’ said Doyce.

There was a pause on both sides. Mr Doyce, still looking at the flame of
his candle, slowly resumed:

‘The truth is, he has twice taken his daughter abroad in the hope of
separating her from Mr Gowan. He rather thinks she is disposed to like
him, and he has painful doubts (I quite agree with him, as I dare say
you do) of the hopefulness of such a marriage.’

‘There--’ Clennam choked, and coughed, and stopped.

‘Yes, you have taken cold,’ said Daniel Doyce. But without looking at
him.

‘--There is an engagement between them, of course?’ said Clennam airily.

‘No. As I am told, certainly not. It has been solicited on the
gentleman’s part, but none has been made. Since their recent return,
our friend has yielded to a weekly visit, but that is the utmost. Minnie
would not deceive her father and mother. You have travelled with them,
and I believe you know what a bond there is among them, extending even
beyond this present life. All that there is between Miss Minnie and Mr
Gowan, I have no doubt we see.’

‘Ah! We see enough!’ cried Arthur.

Mr Doyce wished him Good Night in the tone of a man who had heard a
mournful, not to say despairing, exclamation, and who sought to infuse
some encouragement and hope into the mind of the person by whom it had
been uttered. Such tone was probably a part of his oddity, as one of
a crotchety band; for how could he have heard anything of that kind,
without Clennam’s hearing it too?

The rain fell heavily on the roof, and pattered on the ground, and
dripped among the evergreens and the leafless branches of the trees. The
rain fell heavily, drearily. It was a night of tears.

If Clennam had not decided against falling in love with Pet; if he
had had the weakness to do it; if he had, little by little, persuaded
himself to set all the earnestness of his nature, all the might of his
hope, and all the wealth of his matured character, on that cast; if
he had done this and found that all was lost; he would have been,
that night, unutterably miserable. As it was--

As it was, the rain fell heavily, drearily.




CHAPTER 18. Little Dorrit’s Lover


Little Dorrit had not attained her twenty-second birthday without
finding a lover. Even in the shallow Marshalsea, the ever young Archer
shot off a few featherless arrows now and then from a mouldy bow, and
winged a Collegian or two.

Little Dorrit’s lover, however, was not a Collegian. He was the
sentimental son of a turnkey. His father hoped, in the fulness of time,
to leave him the inheritance of an unstained key; and had from his
early youth familiarised him with the duties of his office, and with an
ambition to retain the prison-lock in the family. While the succession
was yet in abeyance, he assisted his mother in the conduct of a snug
tobacco business round the corner of Horsemonger Lane (his father being
a non-resident turnkey), which could usually command a neat connection
within the College walls.

Years agone, when the object of his affections was wont to sit in her
little arm-chair by the high Lodge-fender, Young John (family name,
Chivery), a year older than herself, had eyed her with admiring wonder.
When he had played with her in the yard, his favourite game had been to
counterfeit locking her up in corners, and to counterfeit letting
her out for real kisses. When he grew tall enough to peep through the
keyhole of the great lock of the main door, he had divers times set down
his father’s dinner, or supper, to get on as it might on the outer side
thereof, while he stood taking cold in one eye by dint of peeping at her
through that airy perspective.

If Young John had ever slackened in his truth in the less penetrable
days of his boyhood, when youth is prone to wear its boots unlaced and
is happily unconscious of digestive organs, he had soon strung it up
again and screwed it tight. At nineteen, his hand had inscribed in chalk
on that part of the wall which fronted her lodgings, on the occasion of
her birthday, ‘Welcome sweet nursling of the Fairies!’ At twenty-three,
the same hand falteringly presented cigars on Sundays to the Father of
the Marshalsea, and Father of the queen of his soul.

Young John was small of stature, with rather weak legs and very weak
light hair. One of his eyes (perhaps the eye that used to peep through
the keyhole) was also weak, and looked larger than the other, as if
it couldn’t collect itself. Young John was gentle likewise. But he was
great of soul. Poetical, expansive, faithful.

Though too humble before the ruler of his heart to be sanguine, Young
John had considered the object of his attachment in all its lights and
shades. Following it out to blissful results, he had descried, without
self-commendation, a fitness in it. Say things prospered, and they were
united. She, the child of the Marshalsea; he, the lock-keeper. There
was a fitness in that. Say he became a resident turnkey. She would
officially succeed to the chamber she had rented so long. There was a
beautiful propriety in that. It looked over the wall, if you stood on
tip-toe; and, with a trellis-work of scarlet beans and a canary or so,
would become a very Arbour. There was a charming idea in that. Then,
being all in all to one another, there was even an appropriate grace in
the lock. With the world shut out (except that part of it which would
be shut in); with its troubles and disturbances only known to them by
hearsay, as they would be described by the pilgrims tarrying with them
on their way to the Insolvent Shrine; with the Arbour above, and the
Lodge below; they would glide down the stream of time, in pastoral
domestic happiness. Young John drew tears from his eyes by finishing the
picture with a tombstone in the adjoining churchyard, close against the
prison wall, bearing the following touching inscription: ‘Sacred to
the Memory Of JOHN CHIVERY, Sixty years Turnkey, and fifty years
Head Turnkey, Of the neighbouring Marshalsea, Who departed this life,
universally respected, on the thirty-first of December, One thousand
eight hundred and eighty-six, Aged eighty-three years. Also of his truly
beloved and truly loving wife, AMY, whose maiden name was DORRIT, Who
survived his loss not quite forty-eight hours, And who breathed her last
in the Marshalsea aforesaid. There she was born, There she lived, There
she died.’

The Chivery parents were not ignorant of their son’s attachment--indeed
it had, on some exceptional occasions, thrown him into a state of mind
that had impelled him to conduct himself with irascibility towards the
customers, and damage the business--but they, in their turns, had worked
it out to desirable conclusions. Mrs Chivery, a prudent woman, had
desired her husband to take notice that their John’s prospects of the
Lock would certainly be strengthened by an alliance with Miss Dorrit,
who had herself a kind of claim upon the College and was much respected
there. Mrs Chivery had desired her husband to take notice that if, on
the one hand, their John had means and a post of trust, on the other
hand, Miss Dorrit had family; and that her (Mrs Chivery’s) sentiment
was, that two halves made a whole. Mrs Chivery, speaking as a mother and
not as a diplomatist, had then, from a different point of view, desired
her husband to recollect that their John had never been strong, and
that his love had fretted and worrited him enough as it was, without
his being driven to do himself a mischief, as nobody couldn’t say
he wouldn’t be if he was crossed. These arguments had so powerfully
influenced the mind of Mr Chivery, who was a man of few words, that he
had on sundry Sunday mornings, given his boy what he termed ‘a lucky
touch,’ signifying that he considered such commendation of him to Good
Fortune, preparatory to his that day declaring his passion and
becoming triumphant. But Young John had never taken courage to make
the declaration; and it was principally on these occasions that he had
returned excited to the tobacco shop, and flown at the customers.

In this affair, as in every other, Little Dorrit herself was the last
person considered. Her brother and sister were aware of it, and attained
a sort of station by making a peg of it on which to air the miserably
ragged old fiction of the family gentility. Her sister asserted the
family gentility by flouting the poor swain as he loitered about the
prison for glimpses of his dear. Tip asserted the family gentility, and
his own, by coming out in the character of the aristocratic brother, and
loftily swaggering in the little skittle ground respecting seizures by
the scruff of the neck, which there were looming probabilities of some
gentleman unknown executing on some little puppy not mentioned. These
were not the only members of the Dorrit family who turned it to account.
No, no. The Father of the Marshalsea was supposed to know nothing about
the matter, of course: his poor dignity could not see so low. But he
took the cigars, on Sundays, and was glad to get them; and sometimes
even condescended to walk up and down the yard with the donor (who was
proud and hopeful then), and benignantly to smoke one in his society.
With no less readiness and condescension did he receive attentions from
Chivery Senior, who always relinquished his arm-chair and newspaper to
him, when he came into the Lodge during one of his spells of duty; and
who had even mentioned to him, that, if he would like at any time after
dusk quietly to step out into the fore-court and take a look at the
street, there was not much to prevent him. If he did not avail himself
of this latter civility, it was only because he had lost the relish for
it; inasmuch as he took everything else he could get, and would say at
times, ‘Extremely civil person, Chivery; very attentive man and very
respectful. Young Chivery, too; really almost with a delicate perception
of one’s position here. A very well conducted family indeed, the
Chiveries. Their behaviour gratifies me.’

The devoted Young John all this time regarded the family with reverence.
He never dreamed of disputing their pretensions, but did homage to the
miserable Mumbo jumbo they paraded. As to resenting any affront from _her_
brother, he would have felt, even if he had not naturally been of a most
pacific disposition, that to wag his tongue or lift his hand against
that sacred gentleman would be an unhallowed act. He was sorry that
his noble mind should take offence; still, he felt the fact to be not
incompatible with its nobility, and sought to propitiate and conciliate
that gallant soul. Her father, a gentleman in misfortune--a gentleman of
a fine spirit and courtly manners, who always bore with him--he deeply
honoured. Her sister he considered somewhat vain and proud, but a young
lady of infinite accomplishments, who could not forget the past. It was
an instinctive testimony to Little Dorrit’s worth and difference from
all the rest, that the poor young fellow honoured and loved her for
being simply what she was.

The tobacco business round the corner of Horsemonger Lane was carried
out in a rural establishment one story high, which had the benefit of
the air from the yards of Horsemonger Lane jail, and the advantage of a
retired walk under the wall of that pleasant establishment. The business
was of too modest a character to support a life-size Highlander, but it
maintained a little one on a bracket on the door-post, who looked like
a fallen Cherub that had found it necessary to take to a kilt.

From the portal thus decorated, one Sunday after an early dinner of
baked viands, Young John issued forth on his usual Sunday errand; not
empty-handed, but with his offering of cigars. He was neatly attired in
a plum-coloured coat, with as large a collar of black velvet as his
figure could carry; a silken waistcoat, bedecked with golden sprigs; a
chaste neckerchief much in vogue at that day, representing a preserve of
lilac pheasants on a buff ground; pantaloons so highly decorated with
side-stripes that each leg was a three-stringed lute; and a hat of
state very high and hard. When the prudent Mrs Chivery perceived that
in addition to these adornments her John carried a pair of white kid
gloves, and a cane like a little finger-post, surmounted by an ivory
hand marshalling him the way that he should go; and when she saw him, in
this heavy marching order, turn the corner to the right; she remarked to
Mr Chivery, who was at home at the time, that she thought she knew which
way the wind blew.

The Collegians were entertaining a considerable number of visitors that
Sunday afternoon, and their Father kept his room for the purpose of
receiving presentations. After making the tour of the yard, Little
Dorrit’s lover with a hurried heart went up-stairs, and knocked with his
knuckles at the Father’s door.

‘Come in, come in!’ said a gracious voice. The Father’s voice, her
father’s, the Marshalsea’s father’s. He was seated in his black velvet
cap, with his newspaper, three-and-sixpence accidentally left on the
table, and two chairs arranged. Everything prepared for holding his
Court.

‘Ah, Young John! How do you do, how do you do!’

‘Pretty well, I thank you, sir. I hope you are the same.’

‘Yes, John Chivery; yes. Nothing to complain of.’

‘I have taken the liberty, sir, of--’

‘Eh?’ The Father of the Marshalsea always lifted up his eyebrows at this
point, and became amiably distraught and smilingly absent in mind.

‘--A few cigars, sir.’

‘Oh!’ (For the moment, excessively surprised.) ‘Thank you, Young John,
thank you. But really, I am afraid I am too--No? Well then, I will say
no more about it. Put them on the mantelshelf, if you please, Young
John. And sit down, sit down. You are not a stranger, John.’

‘Thank you, sir, I am sure--Miss;’ here Young John turned the great hat
round and round upon his left-hand, like a slowly twirling mouse-cage;
‘Miss Amy quite well, sir?’

‘Yes, John, yes; very well. She is out.’

‘Indeed, sir?’

‘Yes, John. Miss Amy is gone for an airing. My young people all go out a
good deal. But at their time of life, it’s natural, John.’

‘Very much so, I am sure, sir.’

‘An airing. An airing. Yes.’ He was blandly tapping his fingers on
the table, and casting his eyes up at the window. ‘Amy has gone for
an airing on the Iron Bridge. She has become quite partial to the Iron
Bridge of late, and seems to like to walk there better than anywhere.’
He returned to conversation. ‘Your father is not on duty at present, I
think, John?’

‘No, sir, he comes on later in the afternoon.’ Another twirl of the
great hat, and then Young John said, rising, ‘I am afraid I must wish
you good day, sir.’

‘So soon? Good day, Young John. Nay, nay,’ with the utmost
condescension, ‘never mind your glove, John. Shake hands with it on. You
are no stranger here, you know.’

Highly gratified by the kindness of his reception, Young John descended
the staircase. On his way down he met some Collegians bringing up
visitors to be presented, and at that moment Mr Dorrit happened to call
over the banisters with particular distinctness, ‘Much obliged to you
for your little testimonial, John!’

Little Dorrit’s lover very soon laid down his penny on the tollplate of
the Iron Bridge, and came upon it looking about him for the well-known
and well-beloved figure. At first he feared she was not there; but as he
walked on towards the Middlesex side, he saw her standing still, looking
at the water. She was absorbed in thought, and he wondered what
she might be thinking about. There were the piles of city roofs and
chimneys, more free from smoke than on week-days; and there were the
distant masts and steeples. Perhaps she was thinking about them.

Little Dorrit mused so long, and was so entirely preoccupied, that
although her lover stood quiet for what he thought was a long time, and
twice or thrice retired and came back again to the former spot, still
she did not move. So, in the end, he made up his mind to go on, and seem
to come upon her casually in passing, and speak to her. The place was
quiet, and now or never was the time to speak to her.

He walked on, and she did not appear to hear his steps until he was
close upon her. When he said ‘Miss Dorrit!’ she started and fell back
from him, with an expression in her face of fright and something like
dislike that caused him unutterable dismay. She had often avoided him
before--always, indeed, for a long, long while. She had turned away and
glided off so often when she had seen him coming toward her, that the
unfortunate Young John could not think it accidental. But he had hoped
that it might be shyness, her retiring character, her foreknowledge of
the state of his heart, anything short of aversion. Now, that momentary
look had said, ‘You, of all people! I would rather have seen any one on
earth than you!’

It was but a momentary look, inasmuch as she checked it, and said in her
soft little voice, ‘Oh, Mr John! Is it you?’ But she felt what it had
been, as he felt what it had been; and they stood looking at one another
equally confused.

‘Miss Amy, I am afraid I disturbed you by speaking to you.’

‘Yes, rather. I--I came here to be alone, and I thought I was.’

‘Miss Amy, I took the liberty of walking this way, because Mr Dorrit
chanced to mention, when I called upon him just now, that you--’

She caused him more dismay than before by suddenly murmuring, ‘O father,
father!’ in a heartrending tone, and turning her face away.

‘Miss Amy, I hope I don’t give you any uneasiness by naming Mr Dorrit.
I assure you I found him very well and in the best of Spirits, and he
showed me even more than his usual kindness; being so very kind as to
say that I was not a stranger there, and in all ways gratifying me very
much.’

To the inexpressible consternation of her lover, Little Dorrit, with her
hands to her averted face, and rocking herself where she stood as if she
were in pain, murmured, ‘O father, how can you! O dear, dear father, how
can you, can you, do it!’

The poor fellow stood gazing at her, overflowing with sympathy, but not
knowing what to make of this, until, having taken out her handkerchief
and put it to her still averted face, she hurried away. At first he
remained stock still; then hurried after her.

‘Miss Amy, pray! Will you have the goodness to stop a moment? Miss Amy,
if it comes to that, let _me_ go. I shall go out of my senses, if I have
to think that I have driven you away like this.’

His trembling voice and unfeigned earnestness brought Little Dorrit to
a stop. ‘Oh, I don’t know what to do,’ she cried, ‘I don’t know what to
do!’

To Young John, who had never seen her bereft of her quiet self-command,
who had seen her from her infancy ever so reliable and self-suppressed,
there was a shock in her distress, and in having to associate himself
with it as its cause, that shook him from his great hat to the
pavement. He felt it necessary to explain himself. He might be
misunderstood--supposed to mean something, or to have done something,
that had never entered into his imagination. He begged her to hear him
explain himself, as the greatest favour she could show him.

‘Miss Amy, I know very well that your family is far above mine. It were
vain to conceal it. There never was a Chivery a gentleman that ever
I heard of, and I will not commit the meanness of making a false
representation on a subject so momentous. Miss Amy, I know very well
that your high-souled brother, and likewise your spirited sister, spurn
me from a height. What I have to do is to respect them, to wish to be
admitted to their friendship, to look up at the eminence on which they
are placed from my lowlier station--for, whether viewed as tobacco or
viewed as the lock, I well know it is lowly--and ever wish them well and
happy.’

There really was a genuineness in the poor fellow, and a contrast
between the hardness of his hat and the softness of his heart (albeit,
perhaps, of his head, too), that was moving. Little Dorrit entreated him
to disparage neither himself nor his station, and, above all things, to
divest himself of any idea that she supposed hers to be superior. This
gave him a little comfort.

‘Miss Amy,’ he then stammered, ‘I have had for a long time--ages they
seem to me--Revolving ages--a heart-cherished wish to say something to
you. May I say it?’

Little Dorrit involuntarily started from his side again, with the
faintest shadow of her former look; conquering that, she went on at
great speed half across the Bridge without replying!

‘May I--Miss Amy, I but ask the question humbly--may I say it? I have
been so unlucky already in giving you pain without having any such
intentions, before the holy Heavens! that there is no fear of my saying
it unless I have your leave. I can be miserable alone, I can be cut up
by myself, why should I also make miserable and cut up one that I would
fling myself off that parapet to give half a moment’s joy to! Not that
that’s much to do, for I’d do it for twopence.’

The mournfulness of his spirits, and the gorgeousness of his appearance,
might have made him ridiculous, but that his delicacy made him
respectable. Little Dorrit learnt from it what to do.

‘If you please, John Chivery,’ she returned, trembling, but in a quiet
way, ‘since you are so considerate as to ask me whether you shall say
any more--if you please, no.’

‘Never, Miss Amy?’

‘No, if you please. Never.’

‘O Lord!’ gasped Young John.

‘But perhaps you will let me, instead, say something to you. I want
to say it earnestly, and with as plain a meaning as it is possible to
express. When you think of us, John--I mean my brother, and sister,
and me--don’t think of us as being any different from the rest; for,
whatever we once were (which I hardly know) we ceased to be long ago,
and never can be any more. It will be much better for you, and much
better for others, if you will do that instead of what you are doing
now.’

Young John dolefully protested that he would try to bear it in mind, and
would be heartily glad to do anything she wished.

‘As to me,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘think as little of me as you can; the
less, the better. When you think of me at all, John, let it only be as
the child you have seen grow up in the prison with one set of duties
always occupying her; as a weak, retired, contented, unprotected girl. I
particularly want you to remember, that when I come outside the gate, I
am unprotected and solitary.’

He would try to do anything she wished. But why did Miss Amy so much
want him to remember that?

‘Because,’ returned Little Dorrit, ‘I know I can then quite trust you
not to forget to-day, and not to say any more to me. You are so generous
that I know I can trust to you for that; and I do and I always will. I
am going to show you, at once, that I fully trust you. I like this place
where we are speaking better than any place I know;’ her slight colour
had faded, but her lover thought he saw it coming back just then; ‘and I
may be often here. I know it is only necessary for me to tell you so, to
be quite sure that you will never come here again in search of me. And I
am--quite sure!’

She might rely upon it, said Young John. He was a miserable wretch, but
her word was more than a law for him.

‘And good-bye, John,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘And I hope you will have a
good wife one day, and be a happy man. I am sure you will deserve to be
happy, and you will be, John.’

As she held out her hand to him with these words, the heart that was
under the waistcoat of sprigs--mere slop-work, if the truth must be
known--swelled to the size of the heart of a gentleman; and the poor
common little fellow, having no room to hold it, burst into tears.

‘Oh, don’t cry,’ said Little Dorrit piteously. ‘Don’t, don’t! Good-bye,
John. God bless you!’

‘Good-bye, Miss Amy. Good-bye!’

And so he left her: first observing that she sat down on the corner of a
seat, and not only rested her little hand upon the rough wall, but laid
her face against it too, as if her head were heavy, and her mind were
sad.

It was an affecting illustration of the fallacy of human projects,
to behold her lover, with the great hat pulled over his eyes, the velvet
collar turned up as if it rained, the plum-coloured coat buttoned
to conceal the silken waistcoat of golden sprigs, and the little
direction-post pointing inexorably home, creeping along by the worst
back-streets, and composing, as he went, the following new inscription
for a tombstone in St George’s Churchyard:

‘Here lie the mortal remains Of JOHN CHIVERY, Never anything worth
mentioning, Who died about the end of the year one thousand eight
hundred and twenty-six, Of a broken heart, Requesting with his last
breath that the word AMY might be inscribed over his ashes, which was
accordingly directed to be done, By his afflicted Parents.’




CHAPTER 19. The Father of the Marshalsea in two or three Relations


The brothers William and Frederick Dorrit, walking up and down the
College-yard--of course on the aristocratic or Pump side, for the Father
made it a point of his state to be chary of going among his children
on the Poor side, except on Sunday mornings, Christmas Days, and other
occasions of ceremony, in the observance whereof he was very punctual,
and at which times he laid his hand upon the heads of their infants,
and blessed those young insolvents with a benignity that was highly
edifying--the brothers, walking up and down the College-yard together,
were a memorable sight. Frederick the free, was so humbled, bowed,
withered, and faded; William the bond, was so courtly, condescending,
and benevolently conscious of a position; that in this regard only, if
in no other, the brothers were a spectacle to wonder at.

They walked up and down the yard on the evening of Little Dorrit’s
Sunday interview with her lover on the Iron Bridge. The cares of state
were over for that day, the Drawing Room had been well attended, several
new presentations had taken place, the three-and-sixpence accidentally
left on the table had accidentally increased to twelve shillings, and
the Father of the Marshalsea refreshed himself with a whiff of cigar. As
he walked up and down, affably accommodating his step to the shuffle of
his brother, not proud in his superiority, but considerate of that poor
creature, bearing with him, and breathing toleration of his infirmities
in every little puff of smoke that issued from his lips and aspired to
get over the spiked wall, he was a sight to wonder at.

His brother Frederick of the dim eye, palsied hand, bent form, and
groping mind, submissively shuffled at his side, accepting his patronage
as he accepted every incident of the labyrinthian world in which he had
got lost. He held the usual screwed bit of whitey-brown paper in his
hand, from which he ever and again unscrewed a spare pinch of snuff.
That falteringly taken, he would glance at his brother not unadmiringly,
put his hands behind him, and shuffle on so at his side until he took
another pinch, or stood still to look about him--perchance suddenly
missing his clarionet.

The College visitors were melting away as the shades of night drew on,
but the yard was still pretty full, the Collegians being mostly out,
seeing their friends to the Lodge. As the brothers paced the yard,
William the bond looked about him to receive salutes, returned them by
graciously lifting off his hat, and, with an engaging air, prevented
Frederick the free from running against the company, or being jostled
against the wall. The Collegians as a body were not easily impressible,
but even they, according to their various ways of wondering, appeared to
find in the two brothers a sight to wonder at.

‘You are a little low this evening, Frederick,’ said the Father of the
Marshalsea. ‘Anything the matter?’

‘The matter?’ He stared for a moment, and then dropped his head and eyes
again. ‘No, William, no. Nothing is the matter.’

‘If you could be persuaded to smarten yourself up a little, Frederick--’

‘Aye, aye!’ said the old man hurriedly. ‘But I can’t be. I can’t be.
Don’t talk so. That’s all over.’

The Father of the Marshalsea glanced at a passing Collegian with whom he
was on friendly terms, as who should say, ‘An enfeebled old man, this;
but he is my brother, sir, my brother, and the voice of Nature is
potent!’ and steered his brother clear of the handle of the pump by the
threadbare sleeve. Nothing would have been wanting to the perfection of
his character as a fraternal guide, philosopher and friend, if he had
only steered his brother clear of ruin, instead of bringing it upon him.

‘I think, William,’ said the object of his affectionate consideration,
‘that I am tired, and will go home to bed.’

‘My dear Frederick,’ returned the other, ‘don’t let me detain you; don’t
sacrifice your inclination to me.’

‘Late hours, and a heated atmosphere, and years, I suppose,’ said
Frederick, ‘weaken me.’

‘My dear Frederick,’ returned the Father of the Marshalsea, ‘do you
think you are sufficiently careful of yourself? Do you think your habits
are as precise and methodical as--shall I say as mine are? Not to revert
again to that little eccentricity which I mentioned just now, I doubt if
you take air and exercise enough, Frederick. Here is the parade, always
at your service. Why not use it more regularly than you do?’

‘Hah!’ sighed the other. ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes.’

‘But it is of no use saying yes, yes, my dear Frederick,’ the Father
of the Marshalsea in his mild wisdom persisted, ‘unless you act on that
assent. Consider my case, Frederick. I am a kind of example. Necessity
and time have taught me what to do. At certain stated hours of the day,
you will find me on the parade, in my room, in the Lodge, reading the
paper, receiving company, eating and drinking. I have impressed upon Amy
during many years, that I must have my meals (for instance) punctually.
Amy has grown up in a sense of the importance of these arrangements, and
you know what a good girl she is.’

The brother only sighed again, as he plodded dreamily along, ‘Hah! Yes,
yes, yes, yes.’

‘My dear fellow,’ said the Father of the Marshalsea, laying his hand
upon his shoulder, and mildly rallying him--mildly, because of his
weakness, poor dear soul; ‘you said that before, and it does not express
much, Frederick, even if it means much. I wish I could rouse you, my
good Frederick; you want to be roused.’

‘Yes, William, yes. No doubt,’ returned the other, lifting his dim eyes
to his face. ‘But I am not like you.’

The Father of the Marshalsea said, with a shrug of modest
self-depreciation, ‘Oh! You might be like me, my dear Frederick;
you might be, if you chose!’ and forbore, in the magnanimity of his
strength, to press his fallen brother further.

There was a great deal of leave-taking going on in corners, as was usual
on Sunday nights; and here and there in the dark, some poor woman, wife
or mother, was weeping with a new Collegian. The time had been when the
Father himself had wept, in the shades of that yard, as his own
poor wife had wept. But it was many years ago; and now he was like
a passenger aboard ship in a long voyage, who has recovered from
sea-sickness, and is impatient of that weakness in the fresher
passengers taken aboard at the last port. He was inclined to
remonstrate, and to express his opinion that people who couldn’t get on
without crying, had no business there. In manner, if not in words, he
always testified his displeasure at these interruptions of the general
harmony; and it was so well understood, that delinquents usually
withdrew if they were aware of him.

On this Sunday evening, he accompanied his brother to the gate with an
air of endurance and clemency; being in a bland temper and graciously
disposed to overlook the tears. In the flaring gaslight of the Lodge,
several Collegians were basking; some taking leave of visitors, and
some who had no visitors, watching the frequent turning of the key, and
conversing with one another and with Mr Chivery. The paternal entrance
made a sensation of course; and Mr Chivery, touching his hat (in a short
manner though) with his key, hoped he found himself tolerable.

‘Thank you, Chivery, quite well. And you?’

Mr Chivery said in a low growl, ‘Oh! _he_ was all right.’ Which was his
general way of acknowledging inquiries after his health when a little
sullen.

‘I had a visit from Young John to-day, Chivery. And very smart he
looked, I assure you.’

So Mr Chivery had heard. Mr Chivery must confess, however, that his wish
was that the boy didn’t lay out so much money upon it. For what did it
bring him in? It only brought him in wexation. And he could get that
anywhere for nothing.

‘How vexation, Chivery?’ asked the benignant father.

‘No odds,’ returned Mr Chivery. ‘Never mind. Mr Frederick going out?’

‘Yes, Chivery, my brother is going home to bed. He is tired, and
not quite well. Take care, Frederick, take care. Good night, my dear
Frederick!’

Shaking hands with his brother, and touching his greasy hat to the
company in the Lodge, Frederick slowly shuffled out of the door which
Mr Chivery unlocked for him. The Father of the Marshalsea showed the
amiable solicitude of a superior being that he should come to no harm.

‘Be so kind as to keep the door open a moment, Chivery, that I may see
him go along the passage and down the steps. Take care, Frederick! (He
is very infirm.) Mind the steps! (He is so very absent.) Be careful
how you cross, Frederick. (I really don’t like the notion of his going
wandering at large, he is so extremely liable to be run over.)’

With these words, and with a face expressive of many uneasy doubts and
much anxious guardianship, he turned his regards upon the assembled
company in the Lodge: so plainly indicating that his brother was to be
pitied for not being under lock and key, that an opinion to that effect
went round among the Collegians assembled.

But he did not receive it with unqualified assent; on the contrary, he
said, No, gentlemen, no; let them not misunderstand him. His brother
Frederick was much broken, no doubt, and it might be more comfortable to
himself (the Father of the Marshalsea) to know that he was safe within
the walls. Still, it must be remembered that to support an existence
there during many years, required a certain combination of qualities--he
did not say high qualities, but qualities--moral qualities. Now, had his
brother Frederick that peculiar union of qualities? Gentlemen, he was a
most excellent man, a most gentle, tender, and estimable man, with the
simplicity of a child; but would he, though unsuited for most other
places, do for that place? No; he said confidently, no! And, he said,
Heaven forbid that Frederick should be there in any other character
than in his present voluntary character! Gentlemen, whoever came to
that College, to remain there a length of time, must have strength of
character to go through a good deal and to come out of a good deal. Was
his beloved brother Frederick that man? No. They saw him, even as it
was, crushed. Misfortune crushed him. He had not power of recoil enough,
not elasticity enough, to be a long time in such a place, and yet
preserve his self-respect and feel conscious that he was a gentleman.
Frederick had not (if he might use the expression) Power enough to see
in any delicate little attentions and--and--Testimonials that he might
under such circumstances receive, the goodness of human nature, the fine
spirit animating the Collegians as a community, and at the same time
no degradation to himself, and no depreciation of his claims as a
gentleman. Gentlemen, God bless you!

Such was the homily with which he improved and pointed the occasion to
the company in the Lodge before turning into the sallow yard again,
and going with his own poor shabby dignity past the Collegian in the
dressing-gown who had no coat, and past the Collegian in the sea-side
slippers who had no shoes, and past the stout greengrocer Collegian in
the corduroy knee-breeches who had no cares, and past the lean clerk
Collegian in buttonless black who had no hopes, up his own poor shabby
staircase to his own poor shabby room.

There, the table was laid for his supper, and his old grey gown was
ready for him on his chair-back at the fire. His daughter put her
little prayer-book in her pocket--had she been praying for pity on all
prisoners and captives!--and rose to welcome him.

Uncle had gone home, then? she asked him, as she changed his coat and
gave him his black velvet cap. Yes, uncle had gone home. Had her father
enjoyed his walk? Why, not much, Amy; not much. No! Did he not feel
quite well?

As she stood behind him, leaning over his chair so lovingly, he looked
with downcast eyes at the fire. An uneasiness stole over him that was
like a touch of shame; and when he spoke, as he presently did, it was in
an unconnected and embarrassed manner.

‘Something, I--hem!--I don’t know what, has gone wrong with Chivery.
He is not--ha!--not nearly so obliging and attentive as usual to-night.
It--hem!--it’s a little thing, but it puts me out, my love. It’s
impossible to forget,’ turning his hands over and over and looking
closely at them, ‘that--hem!--that in such a life as mine, I am
unfortunately dependent on these men for something every hour in the
day.’

Her arm was on his shoulder, but she did not look in his face while he
spoke. Bending her head she looked another way.

‘I--hem!--I can’t think, Amy, what has given Chivery offence. He is
generally so--so very attentive and respectful. And to-night he was
quite--quite short with me. Other people there too! Why, good Heaven!
if I was to lose the support and recognition of Chivery and his brother
officers, I might starve to death here.’ While he spoke, he was opening
and shutting his hands like valves; so conscious all the time of that
touch of shame, that he shrunk before his own knowledge of his meaning.

‘I--ha!--I can’t think what it’s owing to. I am sure I cannot imagine
what the cause of it is. There was a certain Jackson here once, a
turnkey of the name of Jackson (I don’t think you can remember him,
my dear, you were very young), and--hem!--and he had a--brother, and
this--young brother paid his addresses to--at least, did not go so far
as to pay his addresses to--but admired--respectfully admired--the--not
daughter, the sister--of one of us; a rather distinguished Collegian; I
may say, very much so. His name was Captain Martin; and he
consulted me on the question whether it was necessary that his
daughter--sister--should hazard offending the turnkey brother by
being too--ha!--too plain with the other brother. Captain Martin was
a gentleman and a man of honour, and I put it to him first to give me
his--his own opinion. Captain Martin (highly respected in the army) then
unhesitatingly said that it appeared to him that his--hem!--sister was
not called upon to understand the young man too distinctly, and that
she might lead him on--I am doubtful whether “lead him on” was Captain
Martin’s exact expression: indeed I think he said tolerate him--on her
father’s--I should say, brother’s--account. I hardly know how I have
strayed into this story. I suppose it has been through being unable to
account for Chivery; but as to the connection between the two, I don’t
see--’

His voice died away, as if she could not bear the pain of hearing him,
and her hand had gradually crept to his lips. For a little while there
was a dead silence and stillness; and he remained shrunk in his chair,
and she remained with her arm round his neck and her head bowed down
upon his shoulder.

His supper was cooking in a saucepan on the fire, and, when she moved,
it was to make it ready for him on the table. He took his usual seat,
she took hers, and he began his meal. They did not, as yet, look at one
another. By little and little he began; laying down his knife and fork
with a noise, taking things up sharply, biting at his bread as if he
were offended with it, and in other similar ways showing that he was out
of sorts. At length he pushed his plate from him, and spoke aloud; with
the strangest inconsistency.

‘What does it matter whether I eat or starve? What does it matter
whether such a blighted life as mine comes to an end, now, next week, or
next year? What am I worth to anyone? A poor prisoner, fed on alms and
broken victuals; a squalid, disgraced wretch!’

‘Father, father!’ As he rose she went on her knees to him, and held up
her hands to him.

‘Amy,’ he went on in a suppressed voice, trembling violently, and
looking at her as wildly as if he had gone mad. ‘I tell you, if you
could see me as your mother saw me, you wouldn’t believe it to be the
creature you have only looked at through the bars of this cage. I was
young, I was accomplished, I was good-looking, I was independent--by God
I was, child!--and people sought me out, and envied me. Envied me!’

‘Dear father!’ She tried to take down the shaking arm that he flourished
in the air, but he resisted, and put her hand away.

‘If I had but a picture of myself in those days, though it was ever so
ill done, you would be proud of it, you would be proud of it. But I have
no such thing. Now, let me be a warning! Let no man,’ he cried, looking
haggardly about, ‘fail to preserve at least that little of the times of
his prosperity and respect. Let his children have that clue to what he
was. Unless my face, when I am dead, subsides into the long departed
look--they say such things happen, I don’t know--my children will have
never seen me.’

‘Father, father!’

‘O despise me, despise me! Look away from me, don’t listen to me, stop
me, blush for me, cry for me--even you, Amy! Do it, do it! I do it to
myself! I am hardened now, I have sunk too low to care long even for
that.’

‘Dear father, loved father, darling of my heart!’ She was clinging to
him with her arms, and she got him to drop into his chair again, and
caught at the raised arm, and tried to put it round her neck.

‘Let it lie there, father. Look at me, father, kiss me, father! Only
think of me, father, for one little moment!’

Still he went on in the same wild way, though it was gradually breaking
down into a miserable whining.

‘And yet I have some respect here. I have made some stand against it. I
am not quite trodden down. Go out and ask who is the chief person in the
place. They’ll tell you it’s your father. Go out and ask who is never
trifled with, and who is always treated with some delicacy. They’ll say,
your father. Go out and ask what funeral here (it must be here, I know
it can be nowhere else) will make more talk, and perhaps more grief,
than any that has ever gone out at the gate. They’ll say your father’s.
Well then. Amy! Amy! Is your father so universally despised? Is there
nothing to redeem him? Will you have nothing to remember him by but his
ruin and decay? Will you be able to have no affection for him when he is
gone, poor castaway, gone?’

He burst into tears of maudlin pity for himself, and at length suffering
her to embrace him and take charge of him, let his grey head rest
against her cheek, and bewailed his wretchedness. Presently he changed
the subject of his lamentations, and clasping his hands about her as she
embraced him, cried, O Amy, his motherless, forlorn child! O the days
that he had seen her careful and laborious for him! Then he reverted to
himself, and weakly told her how much better she would have loved him
if she had known him in his vanished character, and how he would have
married her to a gentleman who should have been proud of her as his
daughter, and how (at which he cried again) she should first have ridden
at his fatherly side on her own horse, and how the crowd (by which he
meant in effect the people who had given him the twelve shillings
he then had in his pocket) should have trudged the dusty roads
respectfully.

Thus, now boasting, now despairing, in either fit a captive with the
jail-rot upon him, and the impurity of his prison worn into the grain of
his soul, he revealed his degenerate state to his affectionate child.
No one else ever beheld him in the details of his humiliation. Little
recked the Collegians who were laughing in their rooms over his late
address in the Lodge, what a serious picture they had in their obscure
gallery of the Marshalsea that Sunday night.

There was a classical daughter once--perhaps--who ministered to her
father in his prison as her mother had ministered to her. Little Dorrit,
though of the unheroic modern stock and mere English, did much more,
in comforting her father’s wasted heart upon her innocent breast, and
turning to it a fountain of love and fidelity that never ran dry or
waned through all his years of famine.

She soothed him; asked him for his forgiveness if she had been, or
seemed to have been, undutiful; told him, Heaven knows truly, that she
could not honour him more if he were the favourite of Fortune and the
whole world acknowledged him. When his tears were dried, and he sobbed
in his weakness no longer, and was free from that touch of shame, and
had recovered his usual bearing, she prepared the remains of his supper
afresh, and, sitting by his side, rejoiced to see him eat and drink. For
now he sat in his black velvet cap and old grey gown, magnanimous again;
and would have comported himself towards any Collegian who might have
looked in to ask his advice, like a great moral Lord Chesterfield, or
Master of the ethical ceremonies of the Marshalsea.

To keep his attention engaged, she talked with him about his wardrobe;
when he was pleased to say, that Yes, indeed, those shirts she proposed
would be exceedingly acceptable, for those he had were worn out, and,
being ready-made, had never fitted him. Being conversational, and in a
reasonable flow of spirits, he then invited her attention to his coat
as it hung behind the door: remarking that the Father of the place
would set an indifferent example to his children, already disposed to be
slovenly, if he went among them out at elbows. He was jocular, too,
as to the heeling of his shoes; but became grave on the subject of his
cravat, and promised her that, when she could afford it, she should buy
him a new one.

While he smoked out his cigar in peace, she made his bed, and put the
small room in order for his repose. Being weary then, owing to the
advanced hour and his emotions, he came out of his chair to bless her
and wish her Good night. All this time he had never once thought of _her_
dress, her shoes, her need of anything. No other person upon earth, save
herself, could have been so unmindful of her wants.

He kissed her many times with ‘Bless you, my love. Good night, my dear!’

But her gentle breast had been so deeply wounded by what she had seen of
him that she was unwilling to leave him alone, lest he should lament
and despair again. ‘Father, dear, I am not tired; let me come back
presently, when you are in bed, and sit by you.’

He asked her, with an air of protection, if she felt solitary?

‘Yes, father.’

‘Then come back by all means, my love.’

‘I shall be very quiet, father.’

‘Don’t think of me, my dear,’ he said, giving her his kind permission
fully. ‘Come back by all means.’

He seemed to be dozing when she returned, and she put the low fire
together very softly lest she should awake him. But he overheard her,
and called out who was that?

‘Only Amy, father.’

‘Amy, my child, come here. I want to say a word to you.’

He raised himself a little in his low bed, as she kneeled beside it to
bring her face near him; and put his hand between hers. O! Both the
private father and the Father of the Marshalsea were strong within him
then.

‘My love, you have had a life of hardship here. No companions, no
recreations, many cares I am afraid?’

‘Don’t think of that, dear. I never do.’

‘You know my position, Amy. I have not been able to do much for you; but
all I have been able to do, I have done.’

‘Yes, my dear father,’ she rejoined, kissing him. ‘I know, I know.’

‘I am in the twenty-third year of my life here,’ he said, with a catch
in his breath that was not so much a sob as an irrepressible sound of
self-approval, the momentary outburst of a noble consciousness. ‘It is
all I could do for my children--I have done it. Amy, my love, you are
by far the best loved of the three; I have had you principally in my
mind--whatever I have done for your sake, my dear child, I have done
freely and without murmuring.’

Only the wisdom that holds the clue to all hearts and all mysteries, can
surely know to what extent a man, especially a man brought down as this
man had been, can impose upon himself. Enough, for the present place,
that he lay down with wet eyelashes, serene, in a manner majestic, after
bestowing his life of degradation as a sort of portion on the devoted
child upon whom its miseries had fallen so heavily, and whose love alone
had saved him to be even what he was.

That child had no doubts, asked herself no question, for she was but too
content to see him with a lustre round his head. Poor dear, good dear,
truest, kindest, dearest, were the only words she had for him, as she
hushed him to rest.

She never left him all that night. As if she had done him a wrong which
her tenderness could hardly repair, she sat by him in his sleep, at
times softly kissing him with suspended breath, and calling him in a
whisper by some endearing name. At times she stood aside so as not to
intercept the low fire-light, and, watching him when it fell upon his
sleeping face, wondered did he look now at all as he had looked when he
was prosperous and happy; as he had so touched her by imagining that he
might look once more in that awful time. At the thought of that time,
she kneeled beside his bed again, and prayed, ‘O spare his life! O
save him to me! O look down upon my dear, long-suffering, unfortunate,
much-changed, dear dear father!’

Not until the morning came to protect him and encourage him, did she
give him a last kiss and leave the small room. When she had stolen
down-stairs, and along the empty yard, and had crept up to her own
high garret, the smokeless housetops and the distant country hills were
discernible over the wall in the clear morning. As she gently opened the
window, and looked eastward down the prison yard, the spikes upon the
wall were tipped with red, then made a sullen purple pattern on the sun
as it came flaming up into the heavens. The spikes had never looked so
sharp and cruel, nor the bars so heavy, nor the prison space so gloomy
and contracted. She thought of the sunrise on rolling rivers, of the
sunrise on wide seas, of the sunrise on rich landscapes, of the
sunrise on great forests where the birds were waking and the trees were
rustling; and she looked down into the living grave on which the sun
had risen, with her father in it three-and-twenty years, and said, in
a burst of sorrow and compassion, ‘No, no, I have never seen him in my
life!’




CHAPTER 20. Moving in Society


If Young John Chivery had had the inclination and the power to write a
satire on family pride, he would have had no need to go for an avenging
illustration out of the family of his beloved. He would have found it
amply in that gallant brother and that dainty sister, so steeped in mean
experiences, and so loftily conscious of the family name; so ready
to beg or borrow from the poorest, to eat of anybody’s bread, spend
anybody’s money, drink from anybody’s cup and break it afterwards.
To have painted the sordid facts of their lives, and they throughout
invoking the death’s head apparition of the family gentility to come and
scare their benefactors, would have made Young John a satirist of the
first water.

Tip had turned his liberty to hopeful account by becoming a
billiard-marker. He had troubled himself so little as to the means of
his release, that Clennam scarcely needed to have been at the pains of
impressing the mind of Mr Plornish on that subject. Whoever had paid
him the compliment, he very readily accepted the compliment with _his_
compliments, and there was an end of it. Issuing forth from the gate
on these easy terms, he became a billiard-marker; and now occasionally
looked in at the little skittle-ground in a green Newmarket coat
(second-hand), with a shining collar and bright buttons (new), and drank
the beer of the Collegians.

One solid stationary point in the looseness of this gentleman’s
character was, that he respected and admired his sister Amy. The feeling
had never induced him to spare her a moment’s uneasiness, or to put
himself to any restraint or inconvenience on her account; but with that
Marshalsea taint upon his love, he loved her. The same rank Marshalsea
flavour was to be recognised in his distinctly perceiving that she
sacrificed her life to her father, and in his having no idea that she
had done anything for himself.

When this spirited young man and his sister had begun systematically
to produce the family skeleton for the overawing of the College, this
narrative cannot precisely state. Probably at about the period when
they began to dine on the College charity. It is certain that the more
reduced and necessitous they were, the more pompously the skeleton
emerged from its tomb; and that when there was anything particularly
shabby in the wind, the skeleton always came out with the ghastliest
flourish.

Little Dorrit was late on the Monday morning, for her father slept
late, and afterwards there was his breakfast to prepare and his room to
arrange. She had no engagement to go out to work, however, and therefore
stayed with him until, with Maggy’s help, she had put everything right
about him, and had seen him off upon his morning walk (of twenty yards
or so) to the coffee-house to read the paper. She then got on her bonnet
and went out, having been anxious to get out much sooner. There was, as
usual, a cessation of the small-talk in the Lodge as she passed through
it; and a Collegian who had come in on Saturday night, received the
intimation from the elbow of a more seasoned Collegian, ‘Look out. Here
she is!’

She wanted to see her sister, but when she got round to Mr Cripples’s,
she found that both her sister and her uncle had gone to the theatre
where they were engaged. Having taken thought of this probability by
the way, and having settled that in such case she would follow them, she
set off afresh for the theatre, which was on that side of the river, and
not very far away.

Little Dorrit was almost as ignorant of the ways of theatres as of the
ways of gold mines, and when she was directed to a furtive sort of door,
with a curious up-all-night air about it, that appeared to be ashamed of
itself and to be hiding in an alley, she hesitated to approach it; being
further deterred by the sight of some half-dozen close-shaved gentlemen
with their hats very strangely on, who were lounging about the door,
looking not at all unlike Collegians. On her applying to them, reassured
by this resemblance, for a direction to Miss Dorrit, they made way for
her to enter a dark hall--it was more like a great grim lamp gone out
than anything else--where she could hear the distant playing of music
and the sound of dancing feet. A man so much in want of airing that he
had a blue mould upon him, sat watching this dark place from a hole in
a corner, like a spider; and he told her that he would send a message
up to Miss Dorrit by the first lady or gentleman who went through. The
first lady who went through had a roll of music, half in her muff and
half out of it, and was in such a tumbled condition altogether, that it
seemed as if it would be an act of kindness to iron her. But as she was
very good-natured, and said, ‘Come with me; I’ll soon find Miss Dorrit
for you,’ Miss Dorrit’s sister went with her, drawing nearer and nearer
at every step she took in the darkness to the sound of music and the
sound of dancing feet.

At last they came into a maze of dust, where a quantity of people were
tumbling over one another, and where there was such a confusion of
unaccountable shapes of beams, bulkheads, brick walls, ropes, and
rollers, and such a mixing of gaslight and daylight, that they seemed
to have got on the wrong side of the pattern of the universe. Little
Dorrit, left to herself, and knocked against by somebody every moment,
was quite bewildered, when she heard her sister’s voice.

‘Why, good gracious, Amy, what ever brought you here?’

‘I wanted to see you, Fanny dear; and as I am going out all day
to-morrow, and knew you might be engaged all day to-day, I thought--’

‘But the idea, Amy, of _you_ coming behind! I never did!’ As her sister
said this in no very cordial tone of welcome, she conducted her to a
more open part of the maze, where various golden chairs and tables were
heaped together, and where a number of young ladies were sitting on
anything they could find, chattering. All these young ladies wanted
ironing, and all had a curious way of looking everywhere while they
chattered.

Just as the sisters arrived here, a monotonous boy in a Scotch cap put
his head round a beam on the left, and said, ‘Less noise there, ladies!’
and disappeared. Immediately after which, a sprightly gentleman with a
quantity of long black hair looked round a beam on the right, and said,
‘Less noise there, darlings!’ and also disappeared.

‘The notion of you among professionals, Amy, is really the last thing
I could have conceived!’ said her sister. ‘Why, how did you ever get
here?’

‘I don’t know. The lady who told you I was here, was so good as to bring
me in.’

‘Like you quiet little things! You can make your way anywhere, I
believe. _I_ couldn’t have managed it, Amy, though I know so much more of
the world.’

It was the family custom to lay it down as family law, that she was a
plain domestic little creature, without the great and sage experience of
the rest. This family fiction was the family assertion of itself against
her services. Not to make too much of them.

‘Well! And what have you got on your mind, Amy? Of course you have
got something on your mind about me?’ said Fanny. She spoke as if her
sister, between two and three years her junior, were her prejudiced
grandmother.

‘It is not much; but since you told me of the lady who gave you the
bracelet, Fanny--’

The monotonous boy put his head round the beam on the left, and said,
‘Look out there, ladies!’ and disappeared. The sprightly gentleman with
the black hair as suddenly put his head round the beam on the right, and
said, ‘Look out there, darlings!’ and also disappeared. Thereupon all
the young ladies rose and began shaking their skirts out behind.

‘Well, Amy?’ said Fanny, doing as the rest did; ‘what were you going to
say?’

‘Since you told me a lady had given you the bracelet you showed me,
Fanny, I have not been quite easy on your account, and indeed want to
know a little more if you will confide more to me.’

‘Now, ladies!’ said the boy in the Scotch cap. ‘Now, darlings!’ said the
gentleman with the black hair. They were every one gone in a moment, and
the music and the dancing feet were heard again.

Little Dorrit sat down in a golden chair, made quite giddy by these
rapid interruptions. Her sister and the rest were a long time gone; and
during their absence a voice (it appeared to be that of the gentleman
with the black hair) was continually calling out through the music,
‘One, two, three, four, five, six--go! One, two, three, four, five,
six--go! Steady, darlings! One, two, three, four, five, six--go!’
Ultimately the voice stopped, and they all came back again, more or less
out of breath, folding themselves in their shawls, and making ready
for the streets. ‘Stop a moment, Amy, and let them get away before
us,’ whispered Fanny. They were soon left alone; nothing more important
happening, in the meantime, than the boy looking round his old beam, and
saying, ‘Everybody at eleven to-morrow, ladies!’ and the gentleman with
the black hair looking round his old beam, and saying, ‘Everybody at
eleven to-morrow, darlings!’ each in his own accustomed manner.

When they were alone, something was rolled up or by other means got out
of the way, and there was a great empty well before them, looking down
into the depths of which Fanny said, ‘Now, uncle!’ Little Dorrit, as her
eyes became used to the darkness, faintly made him out at the bottom of
the well, in an obscure corner by himself, with his instrument in its
ragged case under his arm.

The old man looked as if the remote high gallery windows, with their
little strip of sky, might have been the point of his better fortunes,
from which he had descended, until he had gradually sunk down below
there to the bottom. He had been in that place six nights a week for
many years, but had never been observed to raise his eyes above his
music-book, and was confidently believed to have never seen a play.
There were legends in the place that he did not so much as know the
popular heroes and heroines by sight, and that the low comedian had
‘mugged’ at him in his richest manner fifty nights for a wager, and he
had shown no trace of consciousness. The carpenters had a joke to the
effect that he was dead without being aware of it; and the frequenters
of the pit supposed him to pass his whole life, night and day, and
Sunday and all, in the orchestra. They had tried him a few times with
pinches of snuff offered over the rails, and he had always responded to
this attention with a momentary waking up of manner that had the pale
phantom of a gentleman in it: beyond this he never, on any occasion, had
any other part in what was going on than the part written out for the
clarionet; in private life, where there was no part for the clarionet,
he had no part at all. Some said he was poor, some said he was a wealthy
miser; but he said nothing, never lifted up his bowed head, never varied
his shuffling gait by getting his springless foot from the ground.
Though expecting now to be summoned by his niece, he did not hear her
until she had spoken to him three or four times; nor was he at all
surprised by the presence of two nieces instead of one, but merely said
in his tremulous voice, ‘I am coming, I am coming!’ and crept forth by
some underground way which emitted a cellarous smell.

‘And so, Amy,’ said her sister, when the three together passed out at
the door that had such a shame-faced consciousness of being different
from other doors: the uncle instinctively taking Amy’s arm as the arm to
be relied on: ‘so, Amy, you are curious about me?’

She was pretty, and conscious, and rather flaunting; and the
condescension with which she put aside the superiority of her charms,
and of her worldly experience, and addressed her sister on almost equal
terms, had a vast deal of the family in it.

‘I am interested, Fanny, and concerned in anything that concerns you.’

‘So you are, so you are, and you are the best of Amys. If I am ever a
little provoking, I am sure you’ll consider what a thing it is to
occupy my position and feel a consciousness of being superior to it. I
shouldn’t care,’ said the Daughter of the Father of the Marshalsea, ‘if
the others were not so common. None of them have come down in the world
as we have. They are all on their own level. Common.’

Little Dorrit mildly looked at the speaker, but did not interrupt her.
Fanny took out her handkerchief, and rather angrily wiped her eyes. ‘I
was not born where you were, you know, Amy, and perhaps that makes a
difference. My dear child, when we get rid of Uncle, you shall know all
about it. We’ll drop him at the cook’s shop where he is going to dine.’

They walked on with him until they came to a dirty shop window in a
dirty street, which was made almost opaque by the steam of hot meats,
vegetables, and puddings. But glimpses were to be caught of a roast leg
of pork bursting into tears of sage and onion in a metal reservoir full
of gravy, of an unctuous piece of roast beef and blisterous Yorkshire
pudding, bubbling hot in a similar receptacle, of a stuffed fillet of
veal in rapid cut, of a ham in a perspiration with the pace it was going
at, of a shallow tank of baked potatoes glued together by their own
richness, of a truss or two of boiled greens, and other substantial
delicacies. Within, were a few wooden partitions, behind which such
customers as found it more convenient to take away their dinners in
stomachs than in their hands, Packed their purchases in solitude. Fanny
opening her reticule, as they surveyed these things, produced from that
repository a shilling and handed it to Uncle. Uncle, after not looking
at it a little while, divined its object, and muttering ‘Dinner? Ha!
Yes, yes, yes!’ slowly vanished from them into the mist.

‘Now, Amy,’ said her sister, ‘come with me, if you are not too tired to
walk to Harley Street, Cavendish Square.’

The air with which she threw off this distinguished address and the toss
she gave to her new bonnet (which was more gauzy than serviceable), made
her sister wonder; however, she expressed her readiness to go to Harley
Street, and thither they directed their steps. Arrived at that grand
destination, Fanny singled out the handsomest house, and knocking at the
door, inquired for Mrs Merdle. The footman who opened the door, although
he had powder on his head and was backed up by two other footmen
likewise powdered, not only admitted Mrs Merdle to be at home, but asked
Fanny to walk in. Fanny walked in, taking her sister with her; and they
went up-stairs with powder going before and powder stopping behind,
and were left in a spacious semicircular drawing-room, one of several
drawing-rooms, where there was a parrot on the outside of a golden cage
holding on by its beak, with its scaly legs in the air, and putting
itself into many strange upside-down postures. This peculiarity has been
observed in birds of quite another feather, climbing upon golden wires.

The room was far more splendid than anything Little Dorrit had ever
imagined, and would have been splendid and costly in any eyes. She
looked in amazement at her sister and would have asked a question,
but that Fanny with a warning frown pointed to a curtained doorway of
communication with another room. The curtain shook next moment, and a
lady, raising it with a heavily ringed hand, dropped it behind her again
as she entered.

The lady was not young and fresh from the hand of Nature, but was young
and fresh from the hand of her maid. She had large unfeeling handsome
eyes, and dark unfeeling handsome hair, and a broad unfeeling handsome
bosom, and was made the most of in every particular. Either because she
had a cold, or because it suited her face, she wore a rich white
fillet tied over her head and under her chin. And if ever there were
an unfeeling handsome chin that looked as if, for certain, it had never
been, in familiar parlance, ‘chucked’ by the hand of man, it was the
chin curbed up so tight and close by that laced bridle.

‘Mrs Merdle,’ said Fanny. ‘My sister, ma’am.’

‘I am glad to see your sister, Miss Dorrit. I did not remember that you
had a sister.’

‘I did not mention that I had,’ said Fanny.

‘Ah!’ Mrs Merdle curled the little finger of her left hand as who should
say, ‘I have caught you. I know you didn’t!’ All her action was usually
with her left hand because her hands were not a pair; and left being
much the whiter and plumper of the two. Then she added: ‘Sit down,’ and
composed herself voluptuously, in a nest of crimson and gold cushions,
on an ottoman near the parrot.

‘Also professional?’ said Mrs Merdle, looking at Little Dorrit through
an eye-glass.

Fanny answered No. ‘No,’ said Mrs Merdle, dropping her glass. ‘Has not a
professional air. Very pleasant; but not professional.’

‘My sister, ma’am,’ said Fanny, in whom there was a singular mixture
of deference and hardihood, ‘has been asking me to tell her, as between
sisters, how I came to have the honour of knowing you. And as I had
engaged to call upon you once more, I thought I might take the liberty
of bringing her with me, when perhaps you would tell her. I wish her to
know, and perhaps you will tell her?’

‘Do you think, at your sister’s age--’ hinted Mrs Merdle.

‘She is much older than she looks,’ said Fanny; ‘almost as old as I am.’

‘Society,’ said Mrs Merdle, with another curve of her little finger, ‘is
so difficult to explain to young persons (indeed is so difficult to
explain to most persons), that I am glad to hear that. I wish Society
was not so arbitrary, I wish it was not so exacting--Bird, be quiet!’

The parrot had given a most piercing shriek, as if its name were Society
and it asserted its right to its exactions.

‘But,’ resumed Mrs Merdle, ‘we must take it as we find it. We know it is
hollow and conventional and worldly and very shocking, but unless we
are Savages in the Tropical seas (I should have been charmed to be one
myself--most delightful life and perfect climate, I am told), we
must consult it. It is the common lot. Mr Merdle is a most extensive
merchant, his transactions are on the vastest scale, his wealth and
influence are very great, but even he--Bird, be quiet!’

The parrot had shrieked another shriek; and it filled up the sentence so
expressively that Mrs Merdle was under no necessity to end it.

‘Since your sister begs that I would terminate our personal
acquaintance,’ she began again, addressing Little Dorrit, ‘by relating
the circumstances that are much to her credit, I cannot object to comply
with her request, I am sure. I have a son (I was first married extremely
young) of two or three-and-twenty.’

Fanny set her lips, and her eyes looked half triumphantly at her sister.

‘A son of two or three-and-twenty. He is a little gay, a thing Society
is accustomed to in young men, and he is very impressible. Perhaps he
inherits that misfortune. I am very impressible myself, by nature. The
weakest of creatures--my feelings are touched in a moment.’

She said all this, and everything else, as coldly as a woman of snow;
quite forgetting the sisters except at odd times, and apparently
addressing some abstraction of Society; for whose behoof, too, she
occasionally arranged her dress, or the composition of her figure upon
the ottoman.

‘So he is very impressible. Not a misfortune in our natural state I dare
say, but we are not in a natural state. Much to be lamented, no doubt,
particularly by myself, who am a child of nature if I could but show it;
but so it is. Society suppresses us and dominates us--Bird, be quiet!’

The parrot had broken into a violent fit of laughter, after twisting
divers bars of his cage with his crooked bill, and licking them with his
black tongue.

‘It is quite unnecessary to say to a person of your good sense, wide
range of experience, and cultivated feeling,’ said Mrs Merdle from her
nest of crimson and gold--and there put up her glass to refresh her
memory as to whom she was addressing,--‘that the stage sometimes has
a fascination for young men of that class of character. In saying the
stage, I mean the people on it of the female sex. Therefore, when I
heard that my son was supposed to be fascinated by a dancer, I knew what
that usually meant in Society, and confided in her being a dancer at the
Opera, where young men moving in Society are usually fascinated.’

She passed her white hands over one another, observant of the sisters
now; and the rings upon her fingers grated against each other with a
hard sound.

‘As your sister will tell you, when I found what the theatre was I was
much surprised and much distressed. But when I found that your sister,
by rejecting my son’s advances (I must add, in an unexpected manner),
had brought him to the point of proposing marriage, my feelings were
of the profoundest anguish--acute.’

She traced the outline of her left eyebrow, and put it right.

‘In a distracted condition, which only a mother--moving in Society--can
be susceptible of, I determined to go myself to the theatre, and
represent my state of mind to the dancer. I made myself known to your
sister. I found her, to my surprise, in many respects different from
my expectations; and certainly in none more so, than in meeting me
with--what shall I say--a sort of family assertion on her own part?’ Mrs
Merdle smiled.

‘I told you, ma’am,’ said Fanny, with a heightening colour, ‘that
although you found me in that situation, I was so far above the rest,
that I considered my family as good as your son’s; and that I had a
brother who, knowing the circumstances, would be of the same opinion,
and would not consider such a connection any honour.’

‘Miss Dorrit,’ said Mrs Merdle, after frostily looking at her through
her glass, ‘precisely what I was on the point of telling your sister,
in pursuance of your request. Much obliged to you for recalling it
so accurately and anticipating me. I immediately,’ addressing Little
Dorrit, ‘(for I am the creature of impulse), took a bracelet from my
arm, and begged your sister to let me clasp it on hers, in token of
the delight I had in our being able to approach the subject so far on
a common footing.’ (This was perfectly true, the lady having bought a
cheap and showy article on her way to the interview, with a general eye
to bribery.)

‘And I told you, Mrs Merdle,’ said Fanny, ‘that we might be unfortunate,
but we are not common.’

‘I think, the very words, Miss Dorrit,’ assented Mrs Merdle.

‘And I told you, Mrs Merdle,’ said Fanny, ‘that if you spoke to me
of the superiority of your son’s standing in Society, it was barely
possible that you rather deceived yourself in your suppositions about my
origin; and that my father’s standing, even in the Society in which
he now moved (what that was, was best known to myself), was eminently
superior, and was acknowledged by every one.’

‘Quite accurate,’ rejoined Mrs Merdle. ‘A most admirable memory.’

‘Thank you, ma’am. Perhaps you will be so kind as to tell my sister the
rest.’

‘There is very little to tell,’ said Mrs Merdle, reviewing the breadth
of bosom which seemed essential to her having room enough to be
unfeeling in, ‘but it is to your sister’s credit. I pointed out to your
sister the plain state of the case; the impossibility of the Society
in which we moved recognising the Society in which she moved--though
charming, I have no doubt; the immense disadvantage at which she would
consequently place the family she had so high an opinion of, upon which
we should find ourselves compelled to look down with contempt, and
from which (socially speaking) we should feel obliged to recoil with
abhorrence. In short, I made an appeal to that laudable pride in your
sister.’

‘Let my sister know, if you please, Mrs Merdle,’ Fanny pouted, with a
toss of her gauzy bonnet, ‘that I had already had the honour of telling
your son that I wished to have nothing whatever to say to him.’

‘Well, Miss Dorrit,’ assented Mrs Merdle, ‘perhaps I might have
mentioned that before. If I did not think of it, perhaps it was because
my mind reverted to the apprehensions I had at the time that he might
persevere and you might have something to say to him. I also mentioned
to your sister--I again address the non-professional Miss Dorrit--that
my son would have nothing in the event of such a marriage, and would be
an absolute beggar. (I mention that merely as a fact which is part of
the narrative, and not as supposing it to have influenced your sister,
except in the prudent and legitimate way in which, constituted as our
artificial system is, we must all be influenced by such considerations.)
Finally, after some high words and high spirit on the part of your
sister, we came to the complete understanding that there was no danger;
and your sister was so obliging as to allow me to present her with a
mark or two of my appreciation at my dressmaker’s.’

Little Dorrit looked sorry, and glanced at Fanny with a troubled face.

‘Also,’ said Mrs Merdle, ‘as to promise to give me the present pleasure
of a closing interview, and of parting with her on the best of terms.
On which occasion,’ added Mrs Merdle, quitting her nest, and putting
something in Fanny’s hand, ‘Miss Dorrit will permit me to say Farewell
with best wishes in my own dull manner.’

The sisters rose at the same time, and they all stood near the cage of
the parrot, as he tore at a claw-full of biscuit and spat it out, seemed
to mock them with a pompous dance of his body without moving his feet,
and suddenly turned himself upside down and trailed himself all over
the outside of his golden cage, with the aid of his cruel beak and black
tongue.

‘Adieu, Miss Dorrit, with best wishes,’ said Mrs Merdle. ‘If we could
only come to a Millennium, or something of that sort, I for one might
have the pleasure of knowing a number of charming and talented persons
from whom I am at present excluded. A more primitive state of society
would be delicious to me. There used to be a poem when I learnt lessons,
something about Lo the poor Indians whose something mind! If a few
thousand persons moving in Society, could only go and be Indians, I
would put my name down directly; but as, moving in Society, we can’t be
Indians, unfortunately--Good morning!’

They came down-stairs with powder before them and powder behind, the
elder sister haughty and the younger sister humbled, and were shut out
into unpowdered Harley Street, Cavendish Square.

‘Well?’ said Fanny, when they had gone a little way without speaking.
‘Have you nothing to say, Amy?’

‘Oh, I don’t know what to say!’ she answered, distressed. ‘You didn’t
like this young man, Fanny?’

‘Like him? He is almost an idiot.’

‘I am so sorry--don’t be hurt--but, since you ask me what I have to
say, I am so very sorry, Fanny, that you suffered this lady to give you
anything.’

‘You little Fool!’ returned her sister, shaking her with the sharp pull
she gave her arm. ‘Have you no spirit at all? But that’s just the way!
You have no self-respect, you have no becoming pride, just as you allow
yourself to be followed about by a contemptible little Chivery of a
thing,’ with the scornfullest emphasis, ‘you would let your family be
trodden on, and never turn.’

‘Don’t say that, dear Fanny. I do what I can for them.’

‘You do what you can for them!’ repeated Fanny, walking her on very
fast. ‘Would you let a woman like this, whom you could see, if you had
any experience of anything, to be as false and insolent as a woman can
be--would you let her put her foot upon your family, and thank her for
it?’

‘No, Fanny, I am sure.’

‘Then make her pay for it, you mean little thing. What else can you make
her do? Make her pay for it, you stupid child; and do your family some
credit with the money!’

They spoke no more all the way back to the lodging where Fanny and her
uncle lived. When they arrived there, they found the old man practising
his clarionet in the dolefullest manner in a corner of the room.
Fanny had a composite meal to make, of chops, and porter, and tea; and
indignantly pretended to prepare it for herself, though her sister did
all that in quiet reality. When at last Fanny sat down to eat and drink,
she threw the table implements about and was angry with her bread, much
as her father had been last night.

‘If you despise me,’ she said, bursting into vehement tears, ‘because I
am a dancer, why did you put me in the way of being one? It was your
doing. You would have me stoop as low as the ground before this Mrs
Merdle, and let her say what she liked and do what she liked, and hold
us all in contempt, and tell me so to my face. Because I am a dancer!’

‘O Fanny!’

‘And Tip, too, poor fellow. She is to disparage him just as much as she
likes, without any check--I suppose because he has been in the law, and
the docks, and different things. Why, it was your doing, Amy. You might
at least approve of his being defended.’

All this time the uncle was dolefully blowing his clarionet in the
corner, sometimes taking it an inch or so from his mouth for a moment
while he stopped to gaze at them, with a vague impression that somebody
had said something.

‘And your father, your poor father, Amy. Because he is not free to show
himself and to speak for himself, you would let such people insult him
with impunity. If you don’t feel for yourself because you go out to
work, you might at least feel for him, I should think, knowing what he
has undergone so long.’

Poor Little Dorrit felt the injustice of this taunt rather sharply.
The remembrance of last night added a barbed point to it. She said
nothing in reply, but turned her chair from the table towards the fire.
Uncle, after making one more pause, blew a dismal wail and went on
again.

Fanny was passionate with the tea-cups and the bread as long as her
passion lasted, and then protested that she was the wretchedest girl in
the world, and she wished she was dead. After that, her crying became
remorseful, and she got up and put her arms round her sister. Little
Dorrit tried to stop her from saying anything, but she answered that
she would, she must! Thereupon she said again, and again, ‘I beg your
pardon, Amy,’ and ‘Forgive me, Amy,’ almost as passionately as she had
said what she regretted.

‘But indeed, indeed, Amy,’ she resumed when they were seated in sisterly
accord side by side, ‘I hope and I think you would have seen this
differently, if you had known a little more of Society.’

‘Perhaps I might, Fanny,’ said the mild Little Dorrit.

‘You see, while you have been domestic and resignedly shut up there,
Amy,’ pursued her sister, gradually beginning to patronise, ‘I have
been out, moving more in Society, and may have been getting proud and
spirited--more than I ought to be, perhaps?’

Little Dorrit answered ‘Yes. O yes!’

‘And while you have been thinking of the dinner or the clothes, I may
have been thinking, you know, of the family. Now, may it not be so,
Amy?’

Little Dorrit again nodded ‘Yes,’ with a more cheerful face than heart.

‘Especially as we know,’ said Fanny, ‘that there certainly is a tone in
the place to which you have been so true, which does belong to it, and
which does make it different from other aspects of Society. So kiss me
once again, Amy dear, and we will agree that we may both be right, and
that you are a tranquil, domestic, home-loving, good girl.’

The clarionet had been lamenting most pathetically during this dialogue,
but was cut short now by Fanny’s announcement that it was time to go;
which she conveyed to her uncle by shutting up his scrap of music, and
taking the clarionet out of his mouth.

Little Dorrit parted from them at the door, and hastened back to the
Marshalsea. It fell dark there sooner than elsewhere, and going into it
that evening was like going into a deep trench. The shadow of the wall
was on every object. Not least upon the figure in the old grey gown and
the black velvet cap, as it turned towards her when she opened the door
of the dim room.

‘Why not upon me too!’ thought Little Dorrit, with the door yet in her
hand. ‘It was not unreasonable in Fanny.’




CHAPTER 21. Mr Merdle’s Complaint


Upon that establishment of state, the Merdle establishment in Harley
Street, Cavendish Square, there was the shadow of no more common wall
than the fronts of other establishments of state on the opposite side of
the street. Like unexceptionable Society, the opposing rows of houses in
Harley Street were very grim with one another. Indeed, the mansions and
their inhabitants were so much alike in that respect, that the people
were often to be found drawn up on opposite sides of dinner-tables, in
the shade of their own loftiness, staring at the other side of the way
with the dullness of the houses.

Everybody knows how like the street the two dinner-rows of people who
take their stand by the street will be. The expressionless uniform
twenty houses, all to be knocked at and rung at in the same form, all
approachable by the same dull steps, all fended off by the same pattern
of railing, all with the same impracticable fire-escapes, the same
inconvenient fixtures in their heads, and everything without exception
to be taken at a high valuation--who has not dined with these? The
house so drearily out of repair, the occasional bow-window, the stuccoed
house, the newly-fronted house, the corner house with nothing but
angular rooms, the house with the blinds always down, the house with the
hatchment always up, the house where the collector has called for one
quarter of an Idea, and found nobody at home--who has not dined with
these? The house that nobody will take, and is to be had a bargain--who
does not know her? The showy house that was taken for life by the
disappointed gentleman, and which does not suit him at all--who is
unacquainted with that haunted habitation?

Harley Street, Cavendish Square, was more than aware of Mr and Mrs
Merdle. Intruders there were in Harley Street, of whom it was not aware;
but Mr and Mrs Merdle it delighted to honour. Society was aware of
Mr and Mrs Merdle. Society had said ‘Let us license them; let us know
them.’

Mr Merdle was immensely rich; a man of prodigious enterprise; a
Midas without the ears, who turned all he touched to gold. He was in
everything good, from banking to building. He was in Parliament, of
course. He was in the City, necessarily. He was Chairman of this,
Trustee of that, President of the other. The weightiest of men had said
to projectors, ‘Now, what name have you got? Have you got Merdle?’ And,
the reply being in the negative, had said, ‘Then I won’t look at you.’

This great and fortunate man had provided that extensive bosom which
required so much room to be unfeeling enough in, with a nest of crimson
and gold some fifteen years before. It was not a bosom to repose
upon, but it was a capital bosom to hang jewels upon. Mr Merdle wanted
something to hang jewels upon, and he bought it for the purpose. Storr
and Mortimer might have married on the same speculation.

Like all his other speculations, it was sound and successful. The jewels
showed to the richest advantage. The bosom moving in Society with
the jewels displayed upon it, attracted general admiration. Society
approving, Mr Merdle was satisfied. He was the most disinterested of
men,--did everything for Society, and got as little for himself out of
all his gain and care, as a man might.

That is to say, it may be supposed that he got all he wanted, otherwise
with unlimited wealth he would have got it. But his desire was to the
utmost to satisfy Society (whatever that was), and take up all its
drafts upon him for tribute. He did not shine in company; he had not
very much to say for himself; he was a reserved man, with a broad,
overhanging, watchful head, that particular kind of dull red colour
in his cheeks which is rather stale than fresh, and a somewhat uneasy
expression about his coat-cuffs, as if they were in his confidence, and
had reasons for being anxious to hide his hands. In the little he said,
he was a pleasant man enough; plain, emphatic about public and private
confidence, and tenacious of the utmost deference being shown by every
one, in all things, to Society. In this same Society (if that were it
which came to his dinners, and to Mrs Merdle’s receptions and concerts),
he hardly seemed to enjoy himself much, and was mostly to be found
against walls and behind doors. Also when he went out to it, instead of
its coming home to him, he seemed a little fatigued, and upon the
whole rather more disposed for bed; but he was always cultivating it
nevertheless, and always moving in it--and always laying out money on it
with the greatest liberality.

Mrs Merdle’s first husband had been a colonel, under whose auspices the
bosom had entered into competition with the snows of North America, and
had come off at little disadvantage in point of whiteness, and at none
in point of coldness. The colonel’s son was Mrs Merdle’s only child. He
was of a chuckle-headed, high-shouldered make, with a general appearance
of being, not so much a young man as a swelled boy. He had given so few
signs of reason, that a by-word went among his companions that his brain
had been frozen up in a mighty frost which prevailed at St John’s, New
Brunswick, at the period of his birth there, and had never thawed from
that hour. Another by-word represented him as having in his infancy,
through the negligence of a nurse, fallen out of a high window on his
head, which had been heard by responsible witnesses to crack. It is
probable that both these representations were of ex post facto
origin; the young gentleman (whose expressive name was Sparkler) being
monomaniacal in offering marriage to all manner of undesirable young
ladies, and in remarking of every successive young lady to whom he
tendered a matrimonial proposal that she was ‘a doosed fine gal--well
educated too--with no biggodd nonsense about her.’

A son-in-law with these limited talents, might have been a clog upon
another man; but Mr Merdle did not want a son-in-law for himself; he
wanted a son-in-law for Society. Mr Sparkler having been in the Guards,
and being in the habit of frequenting all the races, and all the
lounges, and all the parties, and being well known, Society was
satisfied with its son-in-law. This happy result Mr Merdle would have
considered well attained, though Mr Sparkler had been a more expensive
article. And he did not get Mr Sparkler by any means cheap for
Society, even as it was.

There was a dinner giving in the Harley Street establishment, while
Little Dorrit was stitching at her father’s new shirts by his side that
night; and there were magnates from the Court and magnates from the
City, magnates from the Commons and magnates from the Lords, magnates
from the bench and magnates from the bar, Bishop magnates, Treasury
magnates, Horse Guard magnates, Admiralty magnates,--all the magnates
that keep us going, and sometimes trip us up.

‘I am told,’ said Bishop magnate to Horse Guards, ‘that Mr Merdle has
made another enormous hit. They say a hundred thousand pounds.’

Horse Guards had heard two.

Treasury had heard three.

Bar, handling his persuasive double eye-glass, was by no means clear but
that it might be four. It was one of those happy strokes of calculation
and combination, the result of which it was difficult to estimate. It
was one of those instances of a comprehensive grasp, associated with
habitual luck and characteristic boldness, of which an age presented us
but few. But here was Brother Bellows, who had been in the great Bank
case, and who could probably tell us more. What did Brother Bellows put
this new success at?

Brother Bellows was on his way to make his bow to the bosom, and could
only tell them in passing that he had heard it stated, with great
appearance of truth, as being worth, from first to last, half-a-million
of money.

Admiralty said Mr Merdle was a wonderful man, Treasury said he was a
new power in the country, and would be able to buy up the whole House of
Commons. Bishop said he was glad to think that this wealth flowed into
the coffers of a gentleman who was always disposed to maintain the best
interests of Society.

Mr Merdle himself was usually late on these occasions, as a man still
detained in the clutch of giant enterprises when other men had shaken
off their dwarfs for the day. On this occasion, he was the last arrival.
Treasury said Merdle’s work punished him a little. Bishop said he was
glad to think that this wealth flowed into the coffers of a gentleman
who accepted it with meekness.

Powder! There was so much Powder in waiting, that it flavoured the
dinner. Pulverous particles got into the dishes, and Society’s meats had
a seasoning of first-rate footmen. Mr Merdle took down a countess who
was secluded somewhere in the core of an immense dress, to which she
was in the proportion of the heart to the overgrown cabbage. If so low a
simile may be admitted, the dress went down the staircase like a richly
brocaded Jack in the Green, and nobody knew what sort of small person
carried it.

Society had everything it could want, and could not want, for dinner.
It had everything to look at, and everything to eat, and everything to
drink. It is to be hoped it enjoyed itself; for Mr Merdle’s own share of
the repast might have been paid for with eighteenpence. Mrs Merdle was
magnificent. The chief butler was the next magnificent institution of
the day. He was the stateliest man in the company. He did nothing, but
he looked on as few other men could have done. He was Mr Merdle’s
last gift to Society. Mr Merdle didn’t want him, and was put out of
countenance when the great creature looked at him; but inappeasable
Society would have him--and had got him.

The invisible countess carried out the Green at the usual stage of
the entertainment, and the file of beauty was closed up by the bosom.
Treasury said, Juno. Bishop said, Judith.

Bar fell into discussion with Horse Guards concerning courts-martial.
Brothers Bellows and Bench struck in. Other magnates paired off. Mr
Merdle sat silent, and looked at the table-cloth. Sometimes a magnate
addressed him, to turn the stream of his own particular discussion
towards him; but Mr Merdle seldom gave much attention to it, or did more
than rouse himself from his calculations and pass the wine.

When they rose, so many of the magnates had something to say to Mr
Merdle individually that he held little levees by the sideboard, and
checked them off as they went out at the door.

Treasury hoped he might venture to congratulate one of England’s
world-famed capitalists and merchant-princes (he had turned that
original sentiment in the house a few times, and it came easy to him) on
a new achievement. To extend the triumphs of such men was to extend
the triumphs and resources of the nation; and Treasury felt--he gave Mr
Merdle to understand--patriotic on the subject.

‘Thank you, my lord,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘thank you. I accept your
congratulations with pride, and I am glad you approve.’

‘Why, I don’t unreservedly approve, my dear Mr Merdle. Because,’
smiling Treasury turned him by the arm towards the sideboard and spoke
banteringly, ‘it never can be worth your while to come among us and help
us.’

Mr Merdle felt honoured by the--

‘No, no,’ said Treasury, ‘that is not the light in which one so
distinguished for practical knowledge and great foresight, can be
expected to regard it. If we should ever be happily enabled, by
accidentally possessing the control over circumstances, to propose
to one so eminent to--to come among us, and give us the weight of his
influence, knowledge, and character, we could only propose it to him as
a duty. In fact, as a duty that he owed to Society.’

Mr Merdle intimated that Society was the apple of his eye, and that its
claims were paramount to every other consideration. Treasury moved
on, and Bar came up.

Bar, with his little insinuating jury droop, and fingering his
persuasive double eye-glass, hoped he might be excused if he mentioned
to one of the greatest converters of the root of all evil into the root
of all good, who had for a long time reflected a shining lustre on the
annals even of our commercial country--if he mentioned, disinterestedly,
and as, what we lawyers called in our pedantic way, amicus curiae, a
fact that had come by accident within his knowledge. He had been
required to look over the title of a very considerable estate in one of
the eastern counties--lying, in fact, for Mr Merdle knew we lawyers
loved to be particular, on the borders of two of the eastern counties.
Now, the title was perfectly sound, and the estate was to be purchased
by one who had the command of--Money (jury droop and persuasive
eye-glass), on remarkably advantageous terms. This had come to Bar’s
knowledge only that day, and it had occurred to him, ‘I shall have the
honour of dining with my esteemed friend Mr Merdle this evening, and,
strictly between ourselves, I will mention the opportunity.’ Such a
purchase would involve not only a great legitimate political influence,
but some half-dozen church presentations of considerable annual value.
Now, that Mr Merdle was already at no loss to discover means of
occupying even his capital, and of fully employing even his active and
vigorous intellect, Bar well knew: but he would venture to suggest that
the question arose in his mind, whether one who had deservedly gained so
high a position and so European a reputation did not owe it--we would
not say to himself, but we would say to Society, to possess himself of
such influences as these; and to exercise them--we would not say for his
own, or for his party’s, but we would say for Society’s--benefit.

Mr Merdle again expressed himself as wholly devoted to that object of
his constant consideration, and Bar took his persuasive eye-glass up the
grand staircase. Bishop then came undesignedly sidling in the direction
of the sideboard.

Surely the goods of this world, it occurred in an accidental way to
Bishop to remark, could scarcely be directed into happier channels than
when they accumulated under the magic touch of the wise and sagacious,
who, while they knew the just value of riches (Bishop tried here to
look as if he were rather poor himself), were aware of their importance,
judiciously governed and rightly distributed, to the welfare of our
brethren at large.

Mr Merdle with humility expressed his conviction that Bishop couldn’t
mean him, and with inconsistency expressed his high gratification in
Bishop’s good opinion.

Bishop then--jauntily stepping out a little with his well-shaped right
leg, as though he said to Mr Merdle ‘don’t mind the apron; a mere form!’
put this case to his good friend:

Whether it had occurred to his good friend, that Society might not
unreasonably hope that one so blest in his undertakings, and whose
example on his pedestal was so influential with it, would shed a little
money in the direction of a mission or so to Africa?

Mr Merdle signifying that the idea should have his best attention,
Bishop put another case:

Whether his good friend had at all interested himself in the proceedings
of our Combined Additional Endowed Dignitaries Committee, and whether it
had occurred to him that to shed a little money in _that_ direction might
be a great conception finely executed?

Mr Merdle made a similar reply, and Bishop explained his reason for
inquiring.

Society looked to such men as his good friend to do such things. It was
not that _he_ looked to them, but that Society looked to them.
Just as it was not Our Committee who wanted the Additional Endowed
Dignitaries, but it was Society that was in a state of the most
agonising uneasiness of mind until it got them. He begged to assure his
good friend that he was extremely sensible of his good friend’s regard
on all occasions for the best interests of Society; and he considered
that he was at once consulting those interests and expressing the
feeling of Society, when he wished him continued prosperity, continued
increase of riches, and continued things in general.

Bishop then betook himself up-stairs, and the other magnates gradually
floated up after him until there was no one left below but Mr Merdle.
That gentleman, after looking at the table-cloth until the soul of the
chief butler glowed with a noble resentment, went slowly up after the
rest, and became of no account in the stream of people on the grand
staircase. Mrs Merdle was at home, the best of the jewels were hung out
to be seen, Society got what it came for, Mr Merdle drank twopennyworth
of tea in a corner and got more than he wanted.

Among the evening magnates was a famous physician, who knew everybody,
and whom everybody knew. On entering at the door, he came upon Mr Merdle
drinking his tea in a corner, and touched him on the arm.

Mr Merdle started. ‘Oh! It’s you!’

‘Any better to-day?’

‘No,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘I am no better.’

‘A pity I didn’t see you this morning. Pray come to me to-morrow, or let
me come to you.’

‘Well!’ he replied. ‘I will come to-morrow as I drive by.’

Bar and Bishop had both been bystanders during this short dialogue, and
as Mr Merdle was swept away by the crowd, they made their remarks upon
it to the Physician. Bar said, there was a certain point of mental
strain beyond which no man could go; that the point varied with various
textures of brain and peculiarities of constitution, as he had had
occasion to notice in several of his learned brothers; but the point of
endurance passed by a line’s breadth, depression and dyspepsia ensued.
Not to intrude on the sacred mysteries of medicine, he took it, now
(with the jury droop and persuasive eye-glass), that this was Merdle’s
case? Bishop said that when he was a young man, and had fallen for a
brief space into the habit of writing sermons on Saturdays, a habit
which all young sons of the church should sedulously avoid, he had
frequently been sensible of a depression, arising as he supposed from an
over-taxed intellect, upon which the yolk of a new-laid egg, beaten up
by the good woman in whose house he at that time lodged, with a glass
of sound sherry, nutmeg, and powdered sugar acted like a charm. Without
presuming to offer so simple a remedy to the consideration of so
profound a professor of the great healing art, he would venture to
inquire whether the strain, being by way of intricate calculations,
the spirits might not (humanly speaking) be restored to their tone by a
gentle and yet generous stimulant?

‘Yes,’ said the physician, ‘yes, you are both right. But I may as well
tell you that I can find nothing the matter with Mr Merdle. He has
the constitution of a rhinoceros, the digestion of an ostrich, and
the concentration of an oyster. As to nerves, Mr Merdle is of a cool
temperament, and not a sensitive man: is about as invulnerable, I should
say, as Achilles. How such a man should suppose himself unwell without
reason, you may think strange. But I have found nothing the matter with
him. He may have some deep-seated recondite complaint. I can’t say. I
only say, that at present I have not found it out.’

There was no shadow of Mr Merdle’s complaint on the bosom now displaying
precious stones in rivalry with many similar superb jewel-stands; there
was no shadow of Mr Merdle’s complaint on young Sparkler hovering about
the rooms, monomaniacally seeking any sufficiently ineligible young lady
with no nonsense about her; there was no shadow of Mr Merdle’s complaint
on the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings, of whom whole colonies were
present; or on any of the company. Even on himself, its shadow was faint
enough as he moved about among the throng, receiving homage.

Mr Merdle’s complaint. Society and he had so much to do with one another
in all things else, that it is hard to imagine his complaint, if he
had one, being solely his own affair. Had he that deep-seated recondite
complaint, and did any doctor find it out? Patience, in the meantime,
the shadow of the Marshalsea wall was a real darkening influence, and
could be seen on the Dorrit Family at any stage of the sun’s course.




CHAPTER 22. A Puzzle


Mr Clennam did not increase in favour with the Father of the Marshalsea
in the ratio of his increasing visits. His obtuseness on the great
Testimonial question was not calculated to awaken admiration in the
paternal breast, but had rather a tendency to give offence in that
sensitive quarter, and to be regarded as a positive shortcoming in point
of gentlemanly feeling. An impression of disappointment, occasioned
by the discovery that Mr Clennam scarcely possessed that delicacy for
which, in the confidence of his nature, he had been inclined to give
him credit, began to darken the fatherly mind in connection with that
gentleman. The father went so far as to say, in his private family
circle, that he feared Mr Clennam was not a man of high instincts.
He was happy, he observed, in his public capacity as leader and
representative of the College, to receive Mr Clennam when he called to
pay his respects; but he didn’t find that he got on with him personally.
There appeared to be something (he didn’t know what it was) wanting in
him. Howbeit, the father did not fail in any outward show of politeness,
but, on the contrary, honoured him with much attention; perhaps
cherishing the hope that, although not a man of a sufficiently
brilliant and spontaneous turn of mind to repeat his former testimonial
unsolicited, it might still be within the compass of his nature to
bear the part of a responsive gentleman, in any correspondence that way
tending.

In the threefold capacity, of the gentleman from outside who had been
accidentally locked in on the night of his first appearance, of the
gentleman from outside who had inquired into the affairs of the Father
of the Marshalsea with the stupendous idea of getting him out, and of
the gentleman from outside who took an interest in the child of the
Marshalsea, Clennam soon became a visitor of mark. He was not surprised
by the attentions he received from Mr Chivery when that officer was on
the lock, for he made little distinction between Mr Chivery’s politeness
and that of the other turnkeys. It was on one particular afternoon that
Mr Chivery surprised him all at once, and stood forth from his
companions in bold relief.

Mr Chivery, by some artful exercise of his power of clearing the Lodge,
had contrived to rid it of all sauntering Collegians; so that Clennam,
coming out of the prison, should find him on duty alone.

‘(Private) I ask your pardon, sir,’ said Mr Chivery in a secret manner;
‘but which way might you be going?’

‘I am going over the Bridge.’ He saw in Mr Chivery, with some
astonishment, quite an Allegory of Silence, as he stood with his key on
his lips.

‘(Private) I ask your pardon again,’ said Mr Chivery, ‘but could you go
round by Horsemonger Lane? Could you by any means find time to look in
at that address?’ handing him a little card, printed for circulation
among the connection of Chivery and Co., Tobacconists, Importers of pure
Havannah Cigars, Bengal Cheroots, and fine-flavoured Cubas, Dealers in
Fancy Snuffs, &c. &c.

‘(Private) It an’t tobacco business,’ said Mr Chivery. ‘The truth is,
it’s my wife. She’s wishful to say a word to you, sir, upon a point
respecting--yes,’ said Mr Chivery, answering Clennam’s look of
apprehension with a nod, ‘respecting _her_.’

‘I will make a point of seeing your wife directly.’

‘Thank you, sir. Much obliged. It an’t above ten minutes out of your
way. Please to ask for _Mrs_ Chivery!’ These instructions, Mr Chivery, who
had already let him out, cautiously called through a little slide in the
outer door, which he could draw back from within for the inspection of
visitors when it pleased him.

Arthur Clennam, with the card in his hand, betook himself to the address
set forth upon it, and speedily arrived there. It was a very small
establishment, wherein a decent woman sat behind the counter working
at her needle. Little jars of tobacco, little boxes of cigars, a
little assortment of pipes, a little jar or two of snuff, and a little
instrument like a shoeing horn for serving it out, composed the retail
stock in trade.

Arthur mentioned his name, and his having promised to call, on the
solicitation of Mr Chivery. About something relating to Miss Dorrit, he
believed. Mrs Chivery at once laid aside her work, rose up from her seat
behind the counter, and deploringly shook her head.

‘You may see him now,’ said she, ‘if you’ll condescend to take a peep.’

With these mysterious words, she preceded the visitor into a little
parlour behind the shop, with a little window in it commanding a very
little dull back-yard. In this yard a wash of sheets and table-cloths
tried (in vain, for want of air) to get itself dried on a line or two;
and among those flapping articles was sitting in a chair, like the
last mariner left alive on the deck of a damp ship without the power of
furling the sails, a little woe-begone young man.

‘Our John,’ said Mrs Chivery.

Not to be deficient in interest, Clennam asked what he might be doing
there?

‘It’s the only change he takes,’ said Mrs Chivery, shaking her head
afresh. ‘He won’t go out, even in the back-yard, when there’s no linen;
but when there’s linen to keep the neighbours’ eyes off, he’ll sit
there, hours. Hours he will. Says he feels as if it was groves!’ Mrs
Chivery shook her head again, put her apron in a motherly way to her
eyes, and reconducted her visitor into the regions of the business.

‘Please to take a seat, sir,’ said Mrs Chivery. ‘Miss Dorrit is the
matter with Our John, sir; he’s a breaking his heart for her, and I
would wish to take the liberty to ask how it’s to be made good to his
parents when bust?’

Mrs Chivery, who was a comfortable-looking woman much respected about
Horsemonger Lane for her feelings and her conversation, uttered this
speech with fell composure, and immediately afterwards began again to
shake her head and dry her eyes.

‘Sir,’ said she in continuation, ‘you are acquainted with the family,
and have interested yourself with the family, and are influential with
the family. If you can promote views calculated to make two young people
happy, let me, for Our John’s sake, and for both their sakes, implore
you so to do!’

‘I have been so habituated,’ returned Arthur, at a loss, ‘during
the short time I have known her, to consider Little--I have been so
habituated to consider Miss Dorrit in a light altogether removed from
that in which you present her to me, that you quite take me by surprise.
Does she know your son?’

‘Brought up together, sir,’ said Mrs Chivery. ‘Played together.’

‘Does she know your son as her admirer?’

‘Oh! bless you, sir,’ said Mrs Chivery, with a sort of triumphant
shiver, ‘she never could have seen him on a Sunday without knowing he
was that. His cane alone would have told it long ago, if nothing else
had. Young men like John don’t take to ivory hands a pinting, for
nothing. How did I first know it myself? Similarly.’

‘Perhaps Miss Dorrit may not be so ready as you, you see.’

‘Then she knows it, sir,’ said Mrs Chivery, ‘by word of mouth.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Sir,’ said Mrs Chivery, ‘sure and certain as in this house I am. I see
my son go out with my own eyes when in this house I was, and I see my
son come in with my own eyes when in this house I was, and I know he
done it!’ Mrs Chivery derived a surprising force of emphasis from the
foregoing circumstantiality and repetition.

‘May I ask you how he came to fall into the desponding state which
causes you so much uneasiness?’

‘That,’ said Mrs Chivery, ‘took place on that same day when to this
house I see that John with these eyes return. Never been himself in this
house since. Never was like what he has been since, not from the hour
when to this house seven year ago me and his father, as tenants by the
quarter, came!’ An effect in the nature of an affidavit was gained from
this speech by Mrs Chivery’s peculiar power of construction.

‘May I venture to inquire what is your version of the matter?’

‘You may,’ said Mrs Chivery, ‘and I will give it to you in honour and in
word as true as in this shop I stand. Our John has every one’s good word
and every one’s good wish. He played with her as a child when in that
yard a child she played. He has known her ever since. He went out upon
the Sunday afternoon when in this very parlour he had dined, and met
her, with appointment or without appointment; which, I do not pretend to
say. He made his offer to her. Her brother and sister is high in their
views, and against Our John. Her father is all for himself in his views
and against sharing her with any one. Under which circumstances she
has answered Our John, “No, John, I cannot have you, I cannot have
any husband, it is not my intentions ever to become a wife, it is my
intentions to be always a sacrifice, farewell, find another worthy of
you, and forget me!” This is the way in which she is doomed to be a
constant slave to them that are not worthy that a constant slave she
unto them should be. This is the way in which Our John has come to find
no pleasure but in taking cold among the linen, and in showing in that
yard, as in that yard I have myself shown you, a broken-down ruin that
goes home to his mother’s heart!’ Here the good woman pointed to the
little window, whence her son might be seen sitting disconsolate in
the tuneless groves; and again shook her head and wiped her eyes, and
besought him, for the united sakes of both the young people, to exercise
his influence towards the bright reversal of these dismal events.

She was so confident in her exposition of the case, and it was so
undeniably founded on correct premises in so far as the relative
positions of Little Dorrit and her family were concerned, that Clennam
could not feel positive on the other side. He had come to attach to
Little Dorrit an interest so peculiar--an interest that removed her
from, while it grew out of, the common and coarse things surrounding
her--that he found it disappointing, disagreeable, almost painful, to
suppose her in love with young Mr Chivery in the back-yard, or any such
person. On the other hand, he reasoned with himself that she was just
as good and just as true in love with him, as not in love with him;
and that to make a kind of domesticated fairy of her, on the penalty
of isolation at heart from the only people she knew, would be but a
weakness of his own fancy, and not a kind one. Still, her youthful and
ethereal appearance, her timid manner, the charm of her sensitive voice
and eyes, the very many respects in which she had interested him out
of her own individuality, and the strong difference between herself and
those about her, were not in unison, and were determined not to be in
unison, with this newly presented idea.

He told the worthy Mrs Chivery, after turning these things over in his
mind--he did that, indeed, while she was yet speaking--that he might be
relied upon to do his utmost at all times to promote the happiness of
Miss Dorrit, and to further the wishes of her heart if it were in his
power to do so, and if he could discover what they were. At the same
time he cautioned her against assumptions and appearances; enjoined
strict silence and secrecy, lest Miss Dorrit should be made unhappy; and
particularly advised her to endeavour to win her son’s confidence and so
to make quite sure of the state of the case. Mrs Chivery considered the
latter precaution superfluous, but said she would try. She shook her
head as if she had not derived all the comfort she had fondly expected
from this interview, but thanked him nevertheless for the trouble he had
kindly taken. They then parted good friends, and Arthur walked away.

The crowd in the street jostling the crowd in his mind, and the two
crowds making a confusion, he avoided London Bridge, and turned off in
the quieter direction of the Iron Bridge. He had scarcely set foot upon
it, when he saw Little Dorrit walking on before him. It was a pleasant
day, with a light breeze blowing, and she seemed to have that minute
come there for air. He had left her in her father’s room within an hour.

It was a timely chance, favourable to his wish of observing her face
and manner when no one else was by. He quickened his pace; but before he
reached her, she turned her head.

‘Have I startled you?’ he asked.

‘I thought I knew the step,’ she answered, hesitating.

‘And did you know it, Little Dorrit? You could hardly have expected
mine.’

‘I did not expect any. But when I heard a step, I thought it--sounded
like yours.’

‘Are you going further?’

‘No, sir, I am only walking here for a little change.’

They walked together, and she recovered her confiding manner with him,
and looked up in his face as she said, after glancing around:

‘It is so strange. Perhaps you can hardly understand it. I sometimes
have a sensation as if it was almost unfeeling to walk here.’

‘Unfeeling?’

‘To see the river, and so much sky, and so many objects, and such change
and motion. Then to go back, you know, and find him in the same cramped
place.’

‘Ah yes! But going back, you must remember that you take with you the
spirit and influence of such things to cheer him.’

‘Do I? I hope I may! I am afraid you fancy too much, sir, and make me
out too powerful. If you were in prison, could I bring such comfort to
you?’

‘Yes, Little Dorrit, I am sure of it.’

He gathered from a tremor on her lip, and a passing shadow of great
agitation on her face, that her mind was with her father. He remained
silent for a few moments, that she might regain her composure. The
Little Dorrit, trembling on his arm, was less in unison than ever with
Mrs Chivery’s theory, and yet was not irreconcilable with a new fancy
which sprung up within him, that there might be some one else in the
hopeless--newer fancy still--in the hopeless unattainable distance.

They turned, and Clennam said, Here was Maggy coming! Little Dorrit
looked up, surprised, and they confronted Maggy, who brought herself
at sight of them to a dead stop. She had been trotting along, so
preoccupied and busy that she had not recognised them until they turned
upon her. She was now in a moment so conscience-stricken that her very
basket partook of the change.

‘Maggy, you promised me to stop near father.’

‘So I would, Little Mother, only he wouldn’t let me. If he takes and
sends me out I must go. If he takes and says, “Maggy, you hurry away and
back with that letter, and you shall have a sixpence if the answer’s a
good ‘un,” I must take it. Lor, Little Mother, what’s a poor thing of
ten year old to do? And if Mr Tip--if he happens to be a coming in as
I come out, and if he says “Where are you going, Maggy?” and if I says,
“I’m a going So and So,” and if he says, “I’ll have a Try too,” and if
he goes into the George and writes a letter and if he gives it me and
says, “Take that one to the same place, and if the answer’s a good ‘un
I’ll give you a shilling,” it ain’t my fault, mother!’

Arthur read, in Little Dorrit’s downcast eyes, to whom she foresaw that
the letters were addressed.

‘I’m a going So and So. There! That’s where I am a going to,’ said
Maggy. ‘I’m a going So and So. It ain’t you, Little Mother, that’s got
anything to do with it--it’s you, you know,’ said Maggy, addressing
Arthur. ‘You’d better come, So and So, and let me take and give ‘em to
you.’

‘We will not be so particular as that, Maggy. Give them me here,’ said
Clennam in a low voice.

‘Well, then, come across the road,’ answered Maggy in a very loud
whisper. ‘Little Mother wasn’t to know nothing of it, and she would
never have known nothing of it if you had only gone So and So, instead
of bothering and loitering about. It ain’t my fault. I must do what I am
told. They ought to be ashamed of themselves for telling me.’

Clennam crossed to the other side, and hurriedly opened the letters.
That from the father mentioned that most unexpectedly finding himself in
the novel position of having been disappointed of a remittance from
the City on which he had confidently counted, he took up his pen, being
restrained by the unhappy circumstance of his incarceration during
three-and-twenty years (doubly underlined), from coming himself, as
he would otherwise certainly have done--took up his pen to entreat Mr
Clennam to advance him the sum of Three Pounds Ten Shillings upon his
I.O.U., which he begged to enclose. That from the son set forth that
Mr Clennam would, he knew, be gratified to hear that he had at
length obtained permanent employment of a highly satisfactory nature,
accompanied with every prospect of complete success in life; but that
the temporary inability of his employer to pay him his arrears of salary
to that date (in which condition said employer had appealed to that
generous forbearance in which he trusted he should never be wanting
towards a fellow-creature), combined with the fraudulent conduct of a
false friend and the present high price of provisions, had reduced
him to the verge of ruin, unless he could by a quarter before six that
evening raise the sum of eight pounds. This sum, Mr Clennam would be
happy to learn, he had, through the promptitude of several friends
who had a lively confidence in his probity, already raised, with the
exception of a trifling balance of one pound seventeen and fourpence;
the loan of which balance, for the period of one month, would be fraught
with the usual beneficent consequences.

These letters Clennam answered with the aid of his pencil and
pocket-book, on the spot; sending the father what he asked for, and
excusing himself from compliance with the demand of the son. He then
commissioned Maggy to return with his replies, and gave her the
shilling of which the failure of her supplemental enterprise would have
disappointed her otherwise.

When he rejoined Little Dorrit, and they had begun walking as before,
she said all at once:

‘I think I had better go. I had better go home.’

‘Don’t be distressed,’ said Clennam, ‘I have answered the letters. They
were nothing. You know what they were. They were nothing.’

‘But I am afraid,’ she returned, ‘to leave him, I am afraid to leave
any of them. When I am gone, they pervert--but they don’t mean it--even
Maggy.’

‘It was a very innocent commission that she undertook, poor thing. And
in keeping it secret from you, she supposed, no doubt, that she was only
saving you uneasiness.’

‘Yes, I hope so, I hope so. But I had better go home! It was but the
other day that my sister told me I had become so used to the prison that
I had its tone and character. It must be so. I am sure it must be when I
see these things. My place is there. I am better there, it is unfeeling
in me to be here, when I can do the least thing there. Good-bye. I had
far better stay at home!’

The agonised way in which she poured this out, as if it burst of itself
from her suppressed heart, made it difficult for Clennam to keep the
tears from his eyes as he saw and heard her.

‘Don’t call it home, my child!’ he entreated. ‘It is always painful to
me to hear you call it home.’

‘But it is home! What else can I call home? Why should I ever forget it
for a single moment?’

‘You never do, dear Little Dorrit, in any good and true service.’

‘I hope not, O I hope not! But it is better for me to stay there; much
better, much more dutiful, much happier. Please don’t go with me, let me
go by myself. Good-bye, God bless you. Thank you, thank you.’

He felt that it was better to respect her entreaty, and did not move
while her slight form went quickly away from him. When it had fluttered
out of sight, he turned his face towards the water and stood thinking.

She would have been distressed at any time by this discovery of the
letters; but so much so, and in that unrestrainable way?

No.

When she had seen her father begging with his threadbare disguise on,
when she had entreated him not to give her father money, she had
been distressed, but not like this. Something had made her keenly and
additionally sensitive just now. Now, was there some one in the hopeless
unattainable distance? Or had the suspicion been brought into his mind,
by his own associations of the troubled river running beneath the bridge
with the same river higher up, its changeless tune upon the prow of the
ferry-boat, so many miles an hour the peaceful flowing of the stream,
here the rushes, there the lilies, nothing uncertain or unquiet?

He thought of his poor child, Little Dorrit, for a long time there; he
thought of her going home; he thought of her in the night; he thought
of her when the day came round again. And the poor child Little Dorrit
thought of him--too faithfully, ah, too faithfully!--in the shadow of
the Marshalsea wall.




CHAPTER 23. Machinery in Motion


Mr Meagles bestirred himself with such prompt activity in the matter of
the negotiation with Daniel Doyce which Clennam had entrusted to him,
that he soon brought it into business train, and called on Clennam at
nine o’clock one morning to make his report.

‘Doyce is highly gratified by your good opinion,’ he opened the business
by saying, ‘and desires nothing so much as that you should examine the
affairs of the Works for yourself, and entirely understand them. He has
handed me the keys of all his books and papers--here they are jingling
in this pocket--and the only charge he has given me is “Let Mr Clennam
have the means of putting himself on a perfect equality with me as to
knowing whatever I know. If it should come to nothing after all, he
will respect my confidence. Unless I was sure of that to begin with, I
should have nothing to do with him.” And there, you see,’ said Mr
Meagles, ‘you have Daniel Doyce all over.’

‘A very honourable character.’

‘Oh, yes, to be sure. Not a doubt of it. Odd, but very honourable. Very
odd though. Now, would you believe, Clennam,’ said Mr Meagles, with
a hearty enjoyment of his friend’s eccentricity, ‘that I had a whole
morning in What’s-his-name Yard--’

‘Bleeding Heart?’

‘A whole morning in Bleeding Heart Yard, before I could induce him to
pursue the subject at all?’

‘How was that?’

‘How was that, my friend? I no sooner mentioned your name in connection
with it than he declared off.’

‘Declared off on my account?’

‘I no sooner mentioned your name, Clennam, than he said, “That will
never do!” What did he mean by that? I asked him. No matter, Meagles;
that would never do. Why would it never do? You’ll hardly believe it,
Clennam,’ said Mr Meagles, laughing within himself, ‘but it came out
that it would never do, because you and he, walking down to Twickenham
together, had glided into a friendly conversation in the course of which
he had referred to his intention of taking a partner, supposing at the
time that you were as firmly and finally settled as St Paul’s Cathedral.
“Whereas,” says he, “Mr Clennam might now believe, if I entertained his
proposition, that I had a sinister and designing motive in what was open
free speech. Which I can’t bear,” says he, “which I really am too proud
to bear.”’

‘I should as soon suspect--’

‘Of course you would,’ interrupted Mr Meagles, ‘and so I told him. But
it took a morning to scale that wall; and I doubt if any other man
than myself (he likes me of old) could have got his leg over it. Well,
Clennam. This business-like obstacle surmounted, he then stipulated that
before resuming with you I should look over the books and form my own
opinion. I looked over the books, and formed my own opinion. “Is it, on
the whole, for, or against?” says he. “For,” says I. “Then,” says he,
“you may now, my good friend, give Mr Clennam the means of forming
his opinion. To enable him to do which, without bias and with perfect
freedom, I shall go out of town for a week.” And he’s gone,’ said Mr
Meagles; ‘that’s the rich conclusion of the thing.’

‘Leaving me,’ said Clennam, ‘with a high sense, I must say, of his
candour and his--’

‘Oddity,’ Mr Meagles struck in. ‘I should think so!’

It was not exactly the word on Clennam’s lips, but he forbore to
interrupt his good-humoured friend.

‘And now,’ added Mr Meagles, ‘you can begin to look into matters as soon
as you think proper. I have undertaken to explain where you may want
explanation, but to be strictly impartial, and to do nothing more.’

They began their perquisitions in Bleeding Heart Yard that same
forenoon. Little peculiarities were easily to be detected by experienced
eyes in Mr Doyce’s way of managing his affairs, but they almost always
involved some ingenious simplification of a difficulty, and some plain
road to the desired end. That his papers were in arrear, and that he
stood in need of assistance to develop the capacity of his business, was
clear enough; but all the results of his undertakings during many years
were distinctly set forth, and were ascertainable with ease. Nothing had
been done for the purposes of the pending investigation; everything was
in its genuine working dress, and in a certain honest rugged order. The
calculations and entries, in his own hand, of which there were many,
were bluntly written, and with no very neat precision; but were always
plain and directed straight to the purpose. It occurred to Arthur that
a far more elaborate and taking show of business--such as the records of
the Circumlocution Office made perhaps--might be far less serviceable,
as being meant to be far less intelligible.

Three or four days of steady application tendered him master of all the
facts it was essential to become acquainted with. Mr Meagles was at hand
the whole time, always ready to illuminate any dim place with the bright
little safety-lamp belonging to the scales and scoop. Between them they
agreed upon the sum it would be fair to offer for the purchase of a
half-share in the business, and then Mr Meagles unsealed a paper in
which Daniel Doyce had noted the amount at which he valued it; which was
even something less. Thus, when Daniel came back, he found the affair as
good as concluded.

‘And I may now avow, Mr Clennam,’ said he, with a cordial shake of the
hand, ‘that if I had looked high and low for a partner, I believe I
could not have found one more to my mind.’

‘I say the same,’ said Clennam.

‘And I say of both of you,’ added Mr Meagles, ‘that you are well
matched. You keep him in check, Clennam, with your common sense, and you
stick to the Works, Dan, with your--’

‘Uncommon sense?’ suggested Daniel, with his quiet smile.

‘You may call it so, if you like--and each of you will be a right hand
to the other. Here’s my own right hand upon it, as a practical man, to
both of you.’

The purchase was completed within a month. It left Arthur in possession
of private personal means not exceeding a few hundred pounds; but it
opened to him an active and promising career. The three friends dined
together on the auspicious occasion; the factory and the factory wives
and children made holiday and dined too; even Bleeding Heart Yard
dined and was full of meat. Two months had barely gone by in all, when
Bleeding Heart Yard had become so familiar with short-commons again,
that the treat was forgotten there; when nothing seemed new in the
partnership but the paint of the inscription on the door-posts, DOYCE
AND CLENNAM; when it appeared even to Clennam himself, that he had had
the affairs of the firm in his mind for years.

The little counting-house reserved for his own occupation, was a room of
wood and glass at the end of a long low workshop, filled with benches,
and vices, and tools, and straps, and wheels; which, when they were
in gear with the steam-engine, went tearing round as though they had a
suicidal mission to grind the business to dust and tear the factory to
pieces. A communication of great trap-doors in the floor and roof with
the workshop above and the workshop below, made a shaft of light in
this perspective, which brought to Clennam’s mind the child’s old
picture-book, where similar rays were the witnesses of Abel’s
murder. The noises were sufficiently removed and shut out from the
counting-house to blend into a busy hum, interspersed with periodical
clinks and thumps. The patient figures at work were swarthy with the
filings of iron and steel that danced on every bench and bubbled up
through every chink in the planking. The workshop was arrived at by a
step-ladder from the outer yard below, where it served as a shelter for
the large grindstone where tools were sharpened. The whole had at once
a fanciful and practical air in Clennam’s eyes, which was a welcome
change; and, as often as he raised them from his first work of getting
the array of business documents into perfect order, he glanced at these
things with a feeling of pleasure in his pursuit that was new to him.

Raising his eyes thus one day, he was surprised to see a bonnet
labouring up the step-ladder. The unusual apparition was followed by
another bonnet. He then perceived that the first bonnet was on the head
of Mr F.’s Aunt, and that the second bonnet was on the head of Flora,
who seemed to have propelled her legacy up the steep ascent with
considerable difficulty.

Though not altogether enraptured at the sight of these visitors, Clennam
lost no time in opening the counting-house door, and extricating them
from the workshop; a rescue which was rendered the more necessary by Mr
F.’s Aunt already stumbling over some impediment, and menacing steam
power as an Institution with a stony reticule she carried.

‘Good gracious, Arthur,--I should say Mr Clennam, far more proper--the
climb we have had to get up here and how ever to get down again without
a fire-escape and Mr F.’s Aunt slipping through the steps and bruised
all over and you in the machinery and foundry way too only think, and
never told us!’

Thus, Flora, out of breath. Meanwhile, Mr F.’s Aunt rubbed her esteemed
insteps with her umbrella, and vindictively glared.

‘Most unkind never to have come back to see us since that day, though
naturally it was not to be expected that there should be any attraction
at _our_ house and you were much more pleasantly engaged, that’s pretty
certain, and is she fair or dark blue eyes or black I wonder, not that
I expect that she should be anything but a perfect contrast to me in all
particulars for I am a disappointment as I very well know and you are
quite right to be devoted no doubt though what I am saying Arthur never
mind I hardly know myself Good gracious!’

By this time he had placed chairs for them in the counting-house. As
Flora dropped into hers, she bestowed the old look upon him.

‘And to think of Doyce and Clennam, and who Doyce can be,’ said Flora;
‘delightful man no doubt and married perhaps or perhaps a daughter, now
has he really? then one understands the partnership and sees it all,
don’t tell me anything about it for I know I have no claim to ask the
question the golden chain that once was forged being snapped and very
proper.’

Flora put her hand tenderly on his, and gave him another of the youthful
glances.

‘Dear Arthur--force of habit, Mr Clennam every way more delicate and
adapted to existing circumstances--I must beg to be excused for taking
the liberty of this intrusion but I thought I might so far presume upon
old times for ever faded never more to bloom as to call with Mr F.’s
Aunt to congratulate and offer best wishes, A great deal superior to
China not to be denied and much nearer though higher up!’

‘I am very happy to see you,’ said Clennam, ‘and I thank you, Flora,
very much for your kind remembrance.’

‘More than I can say myself at any rate,’ returned Flora, ‘for I might
have been dead and buried twenty distinct times over and no doubt
whatever should have been before you had genuinely remembered Me or
anything like it in spite of which one last remark I wish to make, one
last explanation I wish to offer--’

‘My dear Mrs Finching,’ Arthur remonstrated in alarm.

‘Oh not that disagreeable name, say Flora!’

‘Flora, is it worth troubling yourself afresh to enter into
explanations? I assure you none are needed. I am satisfied--I am
perfectly satisfied.’

A diversion was occasioned here, by Mr F.’s Aunt making the following
inexorable and awful statement:

‘There’s mile-stones on the Dover road!’

With such mortal hostility towards the human race did she discharge this
missile, that Clennam was quite at a loss how to defend himself; the
rather as he had been already perplexed in his mind by the honour of a
visit from this venerable lady, when it was plain she held him in the
utmost abhorrence. He could not but look at her with disconcertment, as
she sat breathing bitterness and scorn, and staring leagues away. Flora,
however, received the remark as if it had been of a most apposite and
agreeable nature; approvingly observing aloud that Mr F.’s Aunt had a
great deal of spirit. Stimulated either by this compliment, or by her
burning indignation, that illustrious woman then added, ‘Let him meet
it if he can!’ And, with a rigid movement of her stony reticule (an
appendage of great size and of a fossil appearance), indicated that
Clennam was the unfortunate person at whom the challenge was hurled.

‘One last remark,’ resumed Flora, ‘I was going to say I wish to make one
last explanation I wish to offer, Mr F.’s Aunt and myself would not have
intruded on business hours Mr F. having been in business and though the
wine trade still business is equally business call it what you will and
business habits are just the same as witness Mr F. himself who had his
slippers always on the mat at ten minutes before six in the afternoon
and his boots inside the fender at ten minutes before eight in the
morning to the moment in all weathers light or dark--would not therefore
have intruded without a motive which being kindly meant it may be hoped
will be kindly taken Arthur, Mr Clennam far more proper, even Doyce and
Clennam probably more business-like.’

‘Pray say nothing in the way of apology,’ Arthur entreated. ‘You are
always welcome.’

‘Very polite of you to say so Arthur--cannot remember Mr Clennam until
the word is out, such is the habit of times for ever fled, and so true
it is that oft in the stilly night ere slumber’s chain has bound people,
fond memory brings the light of other days around people--very polite
but more polite than true I am afraid, for to go into the machinery
business without so much as sending a line or a card to papa--I don’t
say me though there was a time but that is past and stern reality has
now my gracious never mind--does not look like it you must confess.’

Even Flora’s commas seemed to have fled on this occasion; she was so
much more disjointed and voluble than in the preceding interview.

‘Though indeed,’ she hurried on, ‘nothing else is to be expected and why
should it be expected and if it’s not to be expected why should it be,
and I am far from blaming you or any one, When your mama and my papa
worried us to death and severed the golden bowl--I mean bond but I dare
say you know what I mean and if you don’t you don’t lose much and care
just as little I will venture to add--when they severed the golden bond
that bound us and threw us into fits of crying on the sofa nearly choked
at least myself everything was changed and in giving my hand to Mr F. I
know I did so with my eyes open but he was so very unsettled and in such
low spirits that he had distractedly alluded to the river if not oil of
something from the chemist’s and I did it for the best.’

‘My good Flora, we settled that before. It was all quite right.’

‘It’s perfectly clear you think so,’ returned Flora, ‘for you take it
very coolly, if I hadn’t known it to be China I should have guessed
myself the Polar regions, dear Mr Clennam you are right however and I
cannot blame you but as to Doyce and Clennam papa’s property being about
here we heard it from Pancks and but for him we never should have heard
one word about it I am satisfied.’

‘No, no, don’t say that.’

‘What nonsense not to say it Arthur--Doyce and Clennam--easier and less
trying to me than Mr Clennam--when I know it and you know it too and
can’t deny it.’

‘But I do deny it, Flora. I should soon have made you a friendly visit.’

‘Ah!’ said Flora, tossing her head. ‘I dare say!’ and she gave him
another of the old looks. ‘However when Pancks told us I made up my mind
that Mr F.’s Aunt and I would come and call because when papa--which was
before that--happened to mention her name to me and to say that you were
interested in her I said at the moment Good gracious why not have her
here then when there’s anything to do instead of putting it out.’

‘When you say Her,’ observed Clennam, by this time pretty well
bewildered, ‘do you mean Mr F.’s--’

‘My goodness, Arthur--Doyce and Clennam really easier to me with old
remembrances--who ever heard of Mr F.’s Aunt doing needlework and going
out by the day?’

‘Going out by the day! Do you speak of Little Dorrit?’

‘Why yes of course,’ returned Flora; ‘and of all the strangest names I
ever heard the strangest, like a place down in the country with a
turnpike, or a favourite pony or a puppy or a bird or something from a
seed-shop to be put in a garden or a flower-pot and come up speckled.’

‘Then, Flora,’ said Arthur, with a sudden interest in the conversation,
‘Mr Casby was so kind as to mention Little Dorrit to you, was he? What
did he say?’

‘Oh you know what papa is,’ rejoined Flora, ‘and how aggravatingly he
sits looking beautiful and turning his thumbs over and over one another
till he makes one giddy if one keeps one’s eyes upon him, he said when
we were talking of you--I don’t know who began the subject Arthur (Doyce
and Clennam) but I am sure it wasn’t me, at least I hope not but you
really must excuse my confessing more on that point.’

‘Certainly,’ said Arthur. ‘By all means.’

‘You are very ready,’ pouted Flora, coming to a sudden stop in a
captivating bashfulness, ‘that I must admit, Papa said you had spoken of
her in an earnest way and I said what I have told you and that’s all.’

‘That’s all?’ said Arthur, a little disappointed.

‘Except that when Pancks told us of your having embarked in this
business and with difficulty persuaded us that it was really you I said
to Mr F.’s Aunt then we would come and ask you if it would be agreeable
to all parties that she should be engaged at our house when required
for I know she often goes to your mama’s and I know that your mama has
a very touchy temper Arthur--Doyce and Clennam--or I never might have
married Mr F. and might have been at this hour but I am running into
nonsense.’

‘It was very kind of you, Flora, to think of this.’

Poor Flora rejoined with a plain sincerity which became her better than
her youngest glances, that she was glad he thought so. She said it with
so much heart that Clennam would have given a great deal to buy his
old character of her on the spot, and throw it and the mermaid away for
ever.

‘I think, Flora,’ he said, ‘that the employment you can give Little
Dorrit, and the kindness you can show her--’

‘Yes and I will,’ said Flora, quickly.

‘I am sure of it--will be a great assistance and support to her. I do
not feel that I have the right to tell you what I know of her, for I
acquired the knowledge confidentially, and under circumstances that
bind me to silence. But I have an interest in the little creature, and
a respect for her that I cannot express to you. Her life has been one
of such trial and devotion, and such quiet goodness, as you can scarcely
imagine. I can hardly think of her, far less speak of her, without
feeling moved. Let that feeling represent what I could tell you, and
commit her to your friendliness with my thanks.’

Once more he put out his hand frankly to poor Flora; once more poor
Flora couldn’t accept it frankly, found it worth nothing openly, must
make the old intrigue and mystery of it. As much to her own enjoyment as
to his dismay, she covered it with a corner of her shawl as she took it.
Then, looking towards the glass front of the counting-house, and seeing
two figures approaching, she cried with infinite relish, ‘Papa! Hush,
Arthur, for Mercy’s sake!’ and tottered back to her chair with an
amazing imitation of being in danger of swooning, in the dread surprise
and maidenly flutter of her spirits.

The Patriarch, meanwhile, came inanely beaming towards the
counting-house in the wake of Pancks. Pancks opened the door for him,
towed him in, and retired to his own moorings in a corner.

‘I heard from Flora,’ said the Patriarch with his benevolent smile,
‘that she was coming to call, coming to call. And being out, I thought
I’d come also, thought I’d come also.’

The benign wisdom he infused into this declaration (not of itself
profound), by means of his blue eyes, his shining head, and his long
white hair, was most impressive. It seemed worth putting down among the
noblest sentiments enunciated by the best of men. Also, when he said to
Clennam, seating himself in the proffered chair, ‘And you are in a new
business, Mr Clennam? I wish you well, sir, I wish you well!’ he seemed
to have done benevolent wonders.

‘Mrs Finching has been telling me, sir,’ said Arthur, after making his
acknowledgments; the relict of the late Mr F. meanwhile protesting, with
a gesture, against his use of that respectable name; ‘that she hopes
occasionally to employ the young needlewoman you recommended to my
mother. For which I have been thanking her.’

The Patriarch turning his head in a lumbering way towards Pancks, that
assistant put up the note-book in which he had been absorbed, and took
him in tow.

‘You didn’t recommend her, you know,’ said Pancks; ‘how could you? You
knew nothing about her, you didn’t. The name was mentioned to you, and
you passed it on. That’s what _you_ did.’

‘Well!’ said Clennam. ‘As she justifies any recommendation, it is much
the same thing.’

‘You are glad she turns out well,’ said Pancks, ‘but it wouldn’t have
been your fault if she had turned out ill. The credit’s not yours as it
is, and the blame wouldn’t have been yours as it might have been. You
gave no guarantee. You knew nothing about her.’

‘You are not acquainted, then,’ said Arthur, hazarding a random question,
‘with any of her family?’

‘Acquainted with any of her family?’ returned Pancks. ‘How should you be
acquainted with any of her family? You never heard of ‘em. You can’t
be acquainted with people you never heard of, can you? You should think
not!’

All this time the Patriarch sat serenely smiling; nodding or shaking his
head benevolently, as the case required.

‘As to being a reference,’ said Pancks, ‘you know, in a general way,
what being a reference means. It’s all your eye, that is! Look at your
tenants down the Yard here. They’d all be references for one another,
if you’d let ‘em. What would be the good of letting ‘em? It’s no
satisfaction to be done by two men instead of one. One’s enough. A
person who can’t pay, gets another person who can’t pay, to guarantee
that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another
person with two wooden legs, to guarantee that he has got two natural
legs. It don’t make either of them able to do a walking match. And four
wooden legs are more troublesome to you than two, when you don’t want
any.’ Mr Pancks concluded by blowing off that steam of his.

A momentary silence that ensued was broken by Mr F.’s Aunt, who had been
sitting upright in a cataleptic state since her last public remark. She
now underwent a violent twitch, calculated to produce a startling effect
on the nerves of the uninitiated, and with the deadliest animosity
observed:

‘You can’t make a head and brains out of a brass knob with nothing in
it. You couldn’t do it when your Uncle George was living; much less when
he’s dead.’

Mr Pancks was not slow to reply, with his usual calmness, ‘Indeed,
ma’am! Bless my soul! I’m surprised to hear it.’ Despite his presence of
mind, however, the speech of Mr F.’s Aunt produced a depressing effect
on the little assembly; firstly, because it was impossible to disguise
that Clennam’s unoffending head was the particular temple of reason
depreciated; and secondly, because nobody ever knew on these occasions
whose Uncle George was referred to, or what spectral presence might be
invoked under that appellation.

Therefore Flora said, though still not without a certain boastfulness
and triumph in her legacy, that Mr F.’s Aunt was ‘very lively to-day,
and she thought they had better go.’ But Mr F.’s Aunt proved so lively
as to take the suggestion in unexpected dudgeon and declare that she
would not go; adding, with several injurious expressions, that if
‘He’--too evidently meaning Clennam--wanted to get rid of her, ‘let
him chuck her out of winder;’ and urgently expressing her desire to see
‘Him’ perform that ceremony.

In this dilemma, Mr Pancks, whose resources appeared equal to any
emergency in the Patriarchal waters, slipped on his hat, slipped out at
the counting-house door, and slipped in again a moment afterwards with
an artificial freshness upon him, as if he had been in the country for
some weeks. ‘Why, bless my heart, ma’am!’ said Mr Pancks, rubbing up his
hair in great astonishment, ‘is that you? How do you _do_, ma’am? You
are looking charming to-day! I am delighted to see you. Favour me with
your arm, ma’am; we’ll have a little walk together, you and me, if
you’ll honour me with your company.’ And so escorted Mr F.’s Aunt down
the private staircase of the counting-house with great gallantry and
success. The patriarchal Mr Casby then rose with the air of having done
it himself, and blandly followed: leaving his daughter, as she followed
in her turn, to remark to her former lover in a distracted whisper
(which she very much enjoyed), that they had drained the cup of life to
the dregs; and further to hint mysteriously that the late Mr F. was at
the bottom of it.

Alone again, Clennam became a prey to his old doubts in reference to his
mother and Little Dorrit, and revolved the old thoughts and suspicions.
They were all in his mind, blending themselves with the duties he was
mechanically discharging, when a shadow on his papers caused him to look
up for the cause. The cause was Mr Pancks. With his hat thrown back upon
his ears as if his wiry prongs of hair had darted up like springs and
cast it off, with his jet-black beads of eyes inquisitively sharp, with
the fingers of his right hand in his mouth that he might bite the nails,
and with the fingers of his left hand in reserve in his pocket for
another course, Mr Pancks cast his shadow through the glass upon the
books and papers.

Mr Pancks asked, with a little inquiring twist of his head, if he
might come in again? Clennam replied with a nod of his head in the
affirmative. Mr Pancks worked his way in, came alongside the desk, made
himself fast by leaning his arms upon it, and started conversation with
a puff and a snort.

‘Mr F.’s Aunt is appeased, I hope?’ said Clennam.

‘All right, sir,’ said Pancks.

‘I am so unfortunate as to have awakened a strong animosity in the
breast of that lady,’ said Clennam. ‘Do you know why?’

‘Does _she_ know why?’ said Pancks.

‘I suppose not.’

‘_I_ suppose not,’ said Pancks.

He took out his note-book, opened it, shut it, dropped it into his hat,
which was beside him on the desk, and looked in at it as it lay at the
bottom of the hat: all with a great appearance of consideration.

‘Mr Clennam,’ he then began, ‘I am in want of information, sir.’

‘Connected with this firm?’ asked Clennam.

‘No,’ said Pancks.

‘With what then, Mr Pancks? That is to say, assuming that you want it of
me.’

‘Yes, sir; yes, I want it of you,’ said Pancks, ‘if I can persuade you
to furnish it. A, B, C, D. DA, DE, DI, DO. Dictionary order. Dorrit.
That’s the name, sir?’

Mr Pancks blew off his peculiar noise again, and fell to at his
right-hand nails. Arthur looked searchingly at him; he returned the
look.

‘I don’t understand you, Mr Pancks.’

‘That’s the name that I want to know about.’

‘And what do you want to know?’

‘Whatever you can and will tell me.’ This comprehensive summary of his
desires was not discharged without some heavy labouring on the part of
Mr Pancks’s machinery.

‘This is a singular visit, Mr Pancks. It strikes me as rather
extraordinary that you should come, with such an object, to me.’

‘It may be all extraordinary together,’ returned Pancks. ‘It may be out
of the ordinary course, and yet be business. In short, it is business. I
am a man of business. What business have I in this present world, except
to stick to business? No business.’

With his former doubt whether this dry hard personage were quite in
earnest, Clennam again turned his eyes attentively upon his face. It
was as scrubby and dingy as ever, and as eager and quick as ever, and he
could see nothing lurking in it that was at all expressive of a latent
mockery that had seemed to strike upon his ear in the voice.

‘Now,’ said Pancks, ‘to put this business on its own footing, it’s not
my proprietor’s.’

‘Do you refer to Mr Casby as your proprietor?’

Pancks nodded. ‘My proprietor. Put a case. Say, at my proprietor’s I
hear name--name of young person Mr Clennam wants to serve. Say, name
first mentioned to my proprietor by Plornish in the Yard. Say, I go to
Plornish. Say, I ask Plornish as a matter of business for information.
Say, Plornish, though six weeks in arrear to my proprietor, declines.
Say, Mrs Plornish declines. Say, both refer to Mr Clennam. Put the
case.’

‘Well?’

‘Well, sir,’ returned Pancks, ‘say, I come to him. Say, here I am.’

With those prongs of hair sticking up all over his head, and his breath
coming and going very hard and short, the busy Pancks fell back a step
(in Tug metaphor, took half a turn astern) as if to show his dingy hull
complete, then forged a-head again, and directed his quick glance by
turns into his hat where his note-book was, and into Clennam’s face.

‘Mr Pancks, not to trespass on your grounds of mystery, I will be as
plain with you as I can. Let me ask two questions. First--’

‘All right!’ said Pancks, holding up his dirty forefinger with his
broken nail. ‘I see! “What’s your motive?”’

‘Exactly.’

‘Motive,’ said Pancks, ‘good. Nothing to do with my proprietor; not
stateable at present, ridiculous to state at present; but good.
Desiring to serve young person, name of Dorrit,’ said Pancks, with his
forefinger still up as a caution. ‘Better admit motive to be good.’

‘Secondly, and lastly, what do you want to know?’

Mr Pancks fished up his note-book before the question was put, and
buttoning it with care in an inner breast-pocket, and looking straight
at Clennam all the time, replied with a pause and a puff, ‘I want
supplementary information of any sort.’

Clennam could not withhold a smile, as the panting little steam-tug, so
useful to that unwieldy ship, the Casby, waited on and watched him as if
it were seeking an opportunity of running in and rifling him of all he
wanted before he could resist its manoeuvres; though there was that in
Mr Pancks’s eagerness, too, which awakened many wondering speculations
in his mind. After a little consideration, he resolved to supply Mr
Pancks with such leading information as it was in his power to impart
him; well knowing that Mr Pancks, if he failed in his present research,
was pretty sure to find other means of getting it.

He, therefore, first requesting Mr Pancks to remember his voluntary
declaration that his proprietor had no part in the disclosure, and that
his own intentions were good (two declarations which that coaly little
gentleman with the greatest ardour repeated), openly told him that as to
the Dorrit lineage or former place of habitation, he had no information
to communicate, and that his knowledge of the family did not extend
beyond the fact that it appeared to be now reduced to five members;
namely, to two brothers, of whom one was single, and one a widower with
three children. The ages of the whole family he made known to Mr Pancks,
as nearly as he could guess at them; and finally he described to him
the position of the Father of the Marshalsea, and the course of time and
events through which he had become invested with that character. To
all this, Mr Pancks, snorting and blowing in a more and more portentous
manner as he became more interested, listened with great attention;
appearing to derive the most agreeable sensations from the painfullest
parts of the narrative, and particularly to be quite charmed by the
account of William Dorrit’s long imprisonment.

‘In conclusion, Mr Pancks,’ said Arthur, ‘I have but to say this. I have
reasons beyond a personal regard for speaking as little as I can of the
Dorrit family, particularly at my mother’s house’ (Mr Pancks nodded),
‘and for knowing as much as I can. So devoted a man of business as you
are--eh?’

For Mr Pancks had suddenly made that blowing effort with unusual force.

‘It’s nothing,’ said Pancks.

‘So devoted a man of business as yourself has a perfect understanding of
a fair bargain. I wish to make a fair bargain with you, that you shall
enlighten me concerning the Dorrit family when you have it in your
power, as I have enlightened you. It may not give you a very flattering
idea of my business habits, that I failed to make my terms beforehand,’
continued Clennam; ‘but I prefer to make them a point of honour. I have
seen so much business done on sharp principles that, to tell you the
truth, Mr Pancks, I am tired of them.’

Mr Pancks laughed. ‘It’s a bargain, sir,’ said he. ‘You shall find me
stick to it.’

After that, he stood a little while looking at Clennam, and biting his
ten nails all round; evidently while he fixed in his mind what he had
been told, and went over it carefully, before the means of supplying a
gap in his memory should be no longer at hand. ‘It’s all right,’ he said
at last, ‘and now I’ll wish you good day, as it’s collecting day in the
Yard. By-the-bye, though. A lame foreigner with a stick.’

‘Ay, ay. You do take a reference sometimes, I see?’ said Clennam.

‘When he can pay, sir,’ replied Pancks. ‘Take all you can get, and
keep back all you can’t be forced to give up. That’s business. The lame
foreigner with the stick wants a top room down the Yard. Is he good for
it?’

‘I am,’ said Clennam, ‘and I will answer for him.’

‘That’s enough. What I must have of Bleeding Heart Yard,’ said Pancks,
making a note of the case in his book, ‘is my bond. I want my bond, you
see. Pay up, or produce your property! That’s the watchword down the
Yard. The lame foreigner with the stick represented that you sent him;
but he could represent (as far as that goes) that the Great Mogul sent
him. He has been in the hospital, I believe?’

‘Yes. Through having met with an accident. He is only just now
discharged.’

‘It’s pauperising a man, sir, I have been shown, to let him into a
hospital?’ said Pancks. And again blew off that remarkable sound.

‘I have been shown so too,’ said Clennam, coldly.

Mr Pancks, being by that time quite ready for a start, got under steam
in a moment, and, without any other signal or ceremony, was snorting
down the step-ladder and working into Bleeding Heart Yard, before he
seemed to be well out of the counting-house.

Throughout the remainder of the day, Bleeding Heart Yard was in
consternation, as the grim Pancks cruised in it; haranguing the
inhabitants on their backslidings in respect of payment, demanding his
bond, breathing notices to quit and executions, running down defaulters,
sending a swell of terror on before him, and leaving it in his wake.
Knots of people, impelled by a fatal attraction, lurked outside any
house in which he was known to be, listening for fragments of his
discourses to the inmates; and, when he was rumoured to be coming down
the stairs, often could not disperse so quickly but that he would be
prematurely in among them, demanding their own arrears, and rooting them
to the spot. Throughout the remainder of the day, Mr Pancks’s What were
they up to? and What did they mean by it? sounded all over the Yard. Mr
Pancks wouldn’t hear of excuses, wouldn’t hear of complaints, wouldn’t
hear of repairs, wouldn’t hear of anything but unconditional money down.
Perspiring and puffing and darting about in eccentric directions, and
becoming hotter and dingier every moment, he lashed the tide of the yard
into a most agitated and turbid state. It had not settled down into calm
water again full two hours after he had been seen fuming away on the
horizon at the top of the steps.

There were several small assemblages of the Bleeding Hearts at the
popular points of meeting in the Yard that night, among whom it was
universally agreed that Mr Pancks was a hard man to have to do with; and
that it was much to be regretted, so it was, that a gentleman like Mr
Casby should put his rents in his hands, and never know him in his true
light. For (said the Bleeding Hearts), if a gentleman with that head of
hair and them eyes took his rents into his own hands, ma’am, there
would be none of this worriting and wearing, and things would be very
different.

At which identical evening hour and minute, the Patriarch--who had
floated serenely through the Yard in the forenoon before the harrying
began, with the express design of getting up this trustfulness in his
shining bumps and silken locks--at which identical hour and minute,
that first-rate humbug of a thousand guns was heavily floundering in the
little Dock of his exhausted Tug at home, and was saying, as he turned
his thumbs:

‘A very bad day’s work, Pancks, very bad day’s work. It seems to me,
sir, and I must insist on making this observation forcibly in justice to
myself, that you ought to have got much more money, much more money.’




CHAPTER 24. Fortune-Telling


Little Dorrit received a call that same evening from Mr Plornish, who,
having intimated that he wished to speak to her privately, in a series
of coughs so very noticeable as to favour the idea that her father, as
regarded her seamstress occupation, was an illustration of the axiom
that there are no such stone-blind men as those who will not see,
obtained an audience with her on the common staircase outside the door.

‘There’s been a lady at our place to-day, Miss Dorrit,’ Plornish
growled, ‘and another one along with her as is a old wixen if ever I met
with such. The way she snapped a person’s head off, dear me!’

The mild Plornish was at first quite unable to get his mind away from Mr
F.’s Aunt. ‘For,’ said he, to excuse himself, ‘she is, I do assure you,
the winegariest party.’

At length, by a great effort, he detached himself from the subject
sufficiently to observe:

‘But she’s neither here nor there just at present. The other lady, she’s
Mr Casby’s daughter; and if Mr Casby an’t well off, none better, it an’t
through any fault of Pancks. For, as to Pancks, he does, he really does,
he does indeed!’

Mr Plornish, after his usual manner, was a little obscure, but
conscientiously emphatic.

‘And what she come to our place for,’ he pursued, ‘was to leave word
that if Miss Dorrit would step up to that card--which it’s Mr Casby’s
house that is, and Pancks he has a office at the back, where he really
does, beyond belief--she would be glad for to engage her. She was a old
and a dear friend, she said particular, of Mr Clennam, and hoped for to
prove herself a useful friend to _his_ friend. Them was her words. Wishing
to know whether Miss Dorrit could come to-morrow morning, I said I would
see you, Miss, and inquire, and look round there to-night, to say yes,
or, if you was engaged to-morrow, when?’

‘I can go to-morrow, thank you,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘This is very kind
of you, but you are always kind.’

Mr Plornish, with a modest disavowal of his merits, opened the room door
for her readmission, and followed her in with such an exceedingly bald
pretence of not having been out at all, that her father might
have observed it without being very suspicious. In his affable
unconsciousness, however, he took no heed. Plornish, after a little
conversation, in which he blended his former duty as a Collegian with
his present privilege as a humble outside friend, qualified again by his
low estate as a plasterer, took his leave; making the tour of the prison
before he left, and looking on at a game of skittles with the mixed
feelings of an old inhabitant who had his private reasons for believing
that it might be his destiny to come back again.

Early in the morning, Little Dorrit, leaving Maggy in high domestic
trust, set off for the Patriarchal tent. She went by the Iron Bridge,
though it cost her a penny, and walked more slowly in that part of her
journey than in any other. At five minutes before eight her hand was on
the Patriarchal knocker, which was quite as high as she could reach.

She gave Mrs Finching’s card to the young woman who opened the door, and
the young woman told her that ‘Miss Flora’--Flora having, on her return
to the parental roof, reinvested herself with the title under which she
had lived there--was not yet out of her bedroom, but she was to please
to walk up into Miss Flora’s sitting-room. She walked up into
Miss Flora’s sitting-room, as in duty bound, and there found a
breakfast-table comfortably laid for two, with a supplementary tray
upon it laid for one. The young woman, disappearing for a few moments,
returned to say that she was to please to take a chair by the fire,
and to take off her bonnet and make herself at home. But Little Dorrit,
being bashful, and not used to make herself at home on such occasions,
felt at a loss how to do it; so she was still sitting near the door with
her bonnet on, when Flora came in in a hurry half an hour afterwards.

Flora was so sorry to have kept her waiting, and good gracious why did
she sit out there in the cold when she had expected to find her by the
fire reading the paper, and hadn’t that heedless girl given her the
message then, and had she really been in her bonnet all this time, and
pray for goodness sake let Flora take it off! Flora taking it off in the
best-natured manner in the world, was so struck with the face disclosed,
that she said, ‘Why, what a good little thing you are, my dear!’ and
pressed her face between her hands like the gentlest of women.

It was the word and the action of a moment. Little Dorrit had hardly
time to think how kind it was, when Flora dashed at the breakfast-table
full of business, and plunged over head and ears into loquacity.

‘Really so sorry that I should happen to be late on this morning of all
mornings because my intention and my wish was to be ready to meet you
when you came in and to say that any one that interested Arthur Clennam
half so much must interest me and that I gave you the heartiest welcome
and was so glad, instead of which they never called me and there I
still am snoring I dare say if the truth was known and if you don’t like
either cold fowl or hot boiled ham which many people don’t I dare say
besides Jews and theirs are scruples of conscience which we must all
respect though I must say I wish they had them equally strong when they
sell us false articles for real that certainly ain’t worth the money I
shall be quite vexed,’ said Flora.

Little Dorrit thanked her, and said, shyly, bread-and-butter and tea was
all she usually--

‘Oh nonsense my dear child I can never hear of that,’ said Flora,
turning on the urn in the most reckless manner, and making herself wink
by splashing hot water into her eyes as she bent down to look into the
teapot. ‘You are coming here on the footing of a friend and companion
you know if you will let me take that liberty and I should be ashamed
of myself indeed if you could come here upon any other, besides which
Arthur Clennam spoke in such terms--you are tired my dear.’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘You turn so pale you have walked too far before breakfast and I dare
say live a great way off and ought to have had a ride,’ said Flora,
‘dear dear is there anything that would do you good?’

‘Indeed I am quite well, ma’am. I thank you again and again, but I am
quite well.’

‘Then take your tea at once I beg,’ said Flora, ‘and this wing of fowl
and bit of ham, don’t mind me or wait for me, because I always carry in
this tray myself to Mr F.’s Aunt who breakfasts in bed and a charming
old lady too and very clever, Portrait of Mr F. behind the door and very
like though too much forehead and as to a pillar with a marble pavement
and balustrades and a mountain, I never saw him near it nor not likely
in the wine trade, excellent man but not at all in that way.’

Little Dorrit glanced at the portrait, very imperfectly following the
references to that work of art.

‘Mr F. was so devoted to me that he never could bear me out of his
sight,’ said Flora, ‘though of course I am unable to say how long that
might have lasted if he hadn’t been cut short while I was a new broom,
worthy man but not poetical manly prose but not romance.’

Little Dorrit glanced at the portrait again. The artist had given it a
head that would have been, in an intellectual point of view, top-heavy
for Shakespeare.

‘Romance, however,’ Flora went on, busily arranging Mr F.’s Aunt’s
toast, ‘as I openly said to Mr F. when he proposed to me and you will be
surprised to hear that he proposed seven times once in a hackney-coach
once in a boat once in a pew once on a donkey at Tunbridge Wells and the
rest on his knees, Romance was fled with the early days of Arthur
Clennam, our parents tore us asunder we became marble and stern reality
usurped the throne, Mr F. said very much to his credit that he was
perfectly aware of it and even preferred that state of things
accordingly the word was spoken the fiat went forth and such is life you
see my dear and yet we do not break but bend, pray make a good breakfast
while I go in with the tray.’

She disappeared, leaving Little Dorrit to ponder over the meaning of her
scattered words. She soon came back again; and at last began to take her
own breakfast, talking all the while.

‘You see, my dear,’ said Flora, measuring out a spoonful or two of some
brown liquid that smelt like brandy, and putting it into her tea, ‘I am
obliged to be careful to follow the directions of my medical man though
the flavour is anything but agreeable being a poor creature and it may
be have never recovered the shock received in youth from too much giving
way to crying in the next room when separated from Arthur, have you
known him long?’

As soon as Little Dorrit comprehended that she had been asked this
question--for which time was necessary, the galloping pace of her new
patroness having left her far behind--she answered that she had known Mr
Clennam ever since his return.

‘To be sure you couldn’t have known him before unless you had been in
China or had corresponded neither of which is likely,’ returned Flora,
‘for travelling-people usually get more or less mahogany and you are not
at all so and as to corresponding what about? that’s very true unless
tea, so it was at his mother’s was it really that you knew him first,
highly sensible and firm but dreadfully severe--ought to be the mother
of the man in the iron mask.’

‘Mrs Clennam has been kind to me,’ said Little Dorrit.

‘Really? I am sure I am glad to hear it because as Arthur’s mother it’s
naturally pleasant to my feelings to have a better opinion of her than
I had before, though what she thinks of me when I run on as I am certain
to do and she sits glowering at me like Fate in a go-cart--shocking
comparison really--invalid and not her fault--I never know or can
imagine.’

‘Shall I find my work anywhere, ma’am?’ asked Little Dorrit, looking
timidly about; ‘can I get it?’

‘You industrious little fairy,’ returned Flora, taking, in another cup
of tea, another of the doses prescribed by her medical man, ‘there’s
not the slightest hurry and it’s better that we should begin by being
confidential about our mutual friend--too cold a word for me at least
I don’t mean that, very proper expression mutual friend--than become
through mere formalities not you but me like the Spartan boy with the
fox biting him, which I hope you’ll excuse my bringing up for of all
the tiresome boys that will go tumbling into every sort of company that
boy’s the tiresomest.’

Little Dorrit, her face very pale, sat down again to listen. ‘Hadn’t I
better work the while?’ she asked. ‘I can work and attend too. I would
rather, if I may.’

Her earnestness was so expressive of her being uneasy without her work,
that Flora answered, ‘Well my dear whatever you like best,’ and produced
a basket of white handkerchiefs. Little Dorrit gladly put it by her
side, took out her little pocket-housewife, threaded the needle, and
began to hem.

‘What nimble fingers you have,’ said Flora, ‘but are you sure you are
well?’

‘Oh yes, indeed!’

Flora put her feet upon the fender, and settled herself for a thorough
good romantic disclosure. She started off at score, tossing her head,
sighing in the most demonstrative manner, making a great deal of use
of her eyebrows, and occasionally, but not often, glancing at the quiet
face that bent over the work.

‘You must know my dear,’ said Flora, ‘but that I have no doubt you know
already not only because I have already thrown it out in a general way
but because I feel I carry it stamped in burning what’s his names
upon my brow that before I was introduced to the late Mr F. I had
been engaged to Arthur Clennam--Mr Clennam in public where reserve is
necessary Arthur here--we were all in all to one another it was the
morning of life it was bliss it was frenzy it was everything else of
that sort in the highest degree, when rent asunder we turned to stone in
which capacity Arthur went to China and I became the statue bride of the
late Mr F.’

Flora, uttering these words in a deep voice, enjoyed herself immensely.

‘To paint,’ said she, ‘the emotions of that morning when all was marble
within and Mr F.’s Aunt followed in a glass-coach which it stands to
reason must have been in shameful repair or it never could have broken
down two streets from the house and Mr F.’s Aunt brought home like the
fifth of November in a rush-bottomed chair I will not attempt,
suffice it to say that the hollow form of breakfast took place in the
dining-room downstairs that papa partaking too freely of pickled salmon
was ill for weeks and that Mr F. and myself went upon a continental
tour to Calais where the people fought for us on the pier until they
separated us though not for ever that was not yet to be.’

The statue bride, hardly pausing for breath, went on, with the greatest
complacency, in a rambling manner sometimes incidental to flesh and
blood.

‘I will draw a veil over that dreamy life, Mr F. was in good spirits his
appetite was good he liked the cookery he considered the wine weak but
palatable and all was well, we returned to the immediate neighbourhood
of Number Thirty Little Gosling Street London Docks and settled down,
ere we had yet fully detected the housemaid in selling the feathers
out of the spare bed Gout flying upwards soared with Mr F. to another
sphere.’

His relict, with a glance at his portrait, shook her head and wiped her
eyes.

‘I revere the memory of Mr F. as an estimable man and most indulgent
husband, only necessary to mention Asparagus and it appeared or to hint
at any little delicate thing to drink and it came like magic in a pint
bottle it was not ecstasy but it was comfort, I returned to papa’s roof
and lived secluded if not happy during some years until one day papa
came smoothly blundering in and said that Arthur Clennam awaited me
below, I went below and found him ask me not what I found him except
that he was still unmarried still unchanged!’

The dark mystery with which Flora now enshrouded herself might have
stopped other fingers than the nimble fingers that worked near her.
They worked on without pause, and the busy head bent over them watching
the stitches.

‘Ask me not,’ said Flora, ‘if I love him still or if he still loves me
or what the end is to be or when, we are surrounded by watchful eyes and
it may be that we are destined to pine asunder it may be never more to
be reunited not a word not a breath not a look to betray us all must
be secret as the tomb wonder not therefore that even if I should seem
comparatively cold to Arthur or Arthur should seem comparatively cold to
me we have fatal reasons it is enough if we understand them hush!’

All of which Flora said with so much headlong vehemence as if she really
believed it. There is not much doubt that when she worked herself into
full mermaid condition, she did actually believe whatever she said in
it.

‘Hush!’ repeated Flora, ‘I have now told you all, confidence is
established between us hush, for Arthur’s sake I will always be a friend
to you my dear girl and in Arthur’s name you may always rely upon me.’

The nimble fingers laid aside the work, and the little figure rose and
kissed her hand. ‘You are very cold,’ said Flora, changing to her own
natural kind-hearted manner, and gaining greatly by the change. ‘Don’t
work to-day. I am sure you are not well I am sure you are not strong.’

‘It is only that I feel a little overcome by your kindness, and by Mr
Clennam’s kindness in confiding me to one he has known and loved so
long.’

‘Well really my dear,’ said Flora, who had a decided tendency to be
always honest when she gave herself time to think about it, ‘it’s as
well to leave that alone now, for I couldn’t undertake to say after all,
but it doesn’t signify lie down a little!’

‘I have always been strong enough to do what I want to do, and I shall
be quite well directly,’ returned Little Dorrit, with a faint smile.
‘You have overpowered me with gratitude, that’s all. If I keep near the
window for a moment I shall be quite myself.’

Flora opened a window, sat her in a chair by it, and considerately
retired to her former place. It was a windy day, and the air stirring
on Little Dorrit’s face soon brightened it. In a very few minutes she
returned to her basket of work, and her nimble fingers were as nimble as
ever.

Quietly pursuing her task, she asked Flora if Mr Clennam had told her
where she lived? When Flora replied in the negative, Little Dorrit said
that she understood why he had been so delicate, but that she felt sure
he would approve of her confiding her secret to Flora, and that
she would therefore do so now with Flora’s permission. Receiving an
encouraging answer, she condensed the narrative of her life into a few
scanty words about herself and a glowing eulogy upon her father; and
Flora took it all in with a natural tenderness that quite understood it,
and in which there was no incoherence.

When dinner-time came, Flora drew the arm of her new charge through
hers, and led her down-stairs, and presented her to the Patriarch and Mr
Pancks, who were already in the dining-room waiting to begin. (Mr F.’s
Aunt was, for the time, laid up in ordinary in her chamber.) By those
gentlemen she was received according to their characters; the Patriarch
appearing to do her some inestimable service in saying that he was glad
to see her, glad to see her; and Mr Pancks blowing off his favourite
sound as a salute.

In that new presence she would have been bashful enough under any
circumstances, and particularly under Flora’s insisting on her
drinking a glass of wine and eating of the best that was there; but her
constraint was greatly increased by Mr Pancks. The demeanour of that
gentleman at first suggested to her mind that he might be a taker of
likenesses, so intently did he look at her, and so frequently did he
glance at the little note-book by his side. Observing that he made no
sketch, however, and that he talked about business only, she began to
have suspicions that he represented some creditor of her father’s, the
balance due to whom was noted in that pocket volume. Regarded from this
point of view Mr Pancks’s puffings expressed injury and impatience, and
each of his louder snorts became a demand for payment.

But here again she was undeceived by anomalous and incongruous conduct
on the part of Mr Pancks himself. She had left the table half an hour,
and was at work alone. Flora had ‘gone to lie down’ in the next room,
concurrently with which retirement a smell of something to drink
had broken out in the house. The Patriarch was fast asleep, with his
philanthropic mouth open under a yellow pocket-handkerchief in the
dining-room. At this quiet time, Mr Pancks softly appeared before her,
urbanely nodding.

‘Find it a little dull, Miss Dorrit?’ inquired Pancks in a low voice.

‘No, thank you, sir,’ said Little Dorrit.

‘Busy, I see,’ observed Mr Pancks, stealing into the room by inches.
‘What are those now, Miss Dorrit?’

‘Handkerchiefs.’

‘Are they, though!’ said Pancks. ‘I shouldn’t have thought it.’ Not in
the least looking at them, but looking at Little Dorrit. ‘Perhaps you
wonder who I am. Shall I tell you? I am a fortune-teller.’

Little Dorrit now began to think he was mad.

‘I belong body and soul to my proprietor,’ said Pancks; ‘you saw my
proprietor having his dinner below. But I do a little in the other way,
sometimes; privately, very privately, Miss Dorrit.’

Little Dorrit looked at him doubtfully, and not without alarm. ‘I wish
you’d show me the palm of your hand,’ said Pancks. ‘I should like to
have a look at it. Don’t let me be troublesome.’

He was so far troublesome that he was not at all wanted there, but she
laid her work in her lap for a moment, and held out her left hand with
her thimble on it.

‘Years of toil, eh?’ said Pancks, softly, touching it with his blunt
forefinger. ‘But what else are we made for? Nothing. Hallo!’ looking
into the lines. ‘What’s this with bars? It’s a College! And what’s this
with a grey gown and a black velvet cap? it’s a father! And what’s this
with a clarionet? It’s an uncle! And what’s this in dancing-shoes? It’s
a sister! And what’s this straggling about in an idle sort of a way?
It’s a brother! And what’s this thinking for ‘em all? Why, this is you,
Miss Dorrit!’

Her eyes met his as she looked up wonderingly into his face, and she
thought that although his were sharp eyes, he was a brighter and
gentler-looking man than she had supposed at dinner. His eyes were on
her hand again directly, and her opportunity of confirming or correcting
the impression was gone.

‘Now, the deuce is in it,’ muttered Pancks, tracing out a line in her
hand with his clumsy finger, ‘if this isn’t me in the corner here! What
do I want here? What’s behind me?’

He carried his finger slowly down to the wrist, and round the wrist, and
affected to look at the back of the hand for what was behind him.

‘Is it any harm?’ asked Little Dorrit, smiling.

‘Deuce a bit!’ said Pancks. ‘What do you think it’s worth?’

‘I ought to ask you that. I am not the fortune-teller.’

‘True,’ said Pancks. ‘What’s it worth? You shall live to see, Miss
Dorrit.’

Releasing the hand by slow degrees, he drew all his fingers through his
prongs of hair, so that they stood up in their most portentous manner;
and repeated slowly, ‘Remember what I say, Miss Dorrit. You shall live
to see.’

She could not help showing that she was much surprised, if it were only
by his knowing so much about her.

‘Ah! That’s it!’ said Pancks, pointing at her. ‘Miss Dorrit, not that,
ever!’

More surprised than before, and a little more frightened, she looked to
him for an explanation of his last words.

‘Not that,’ said Pancks, making, with great seriousness, an imitation
of a surprised look and manner that appeared to be unintentionally
grotesque. ‘Don’t do that. Never on seeing me, no matter when, no matter
where. I am nobody. Don’t take on to mind me. Don’t mention me. Take no
notice. Will you agree, Miss Dorrit?’

‘I hardly know what to say,’ returned Little Dorrit, quite astounded.
‘Why?’

‘Because I am a fortune-teller. Pancks the gipsy. I haven’t told you so
much of your fortune yet, Miss Dorrit, as to tell you what’s behind
me on that little hand. I have told you you shall live to see. Is it
agreed, Miss Dorrit?’

‘Agreed that I--am--to--’

‘To take no notice of me away from here, unless I take on first. Not
to mind me when I come and go. It’s very easy. I am no loss, I am not
handsome, I am not good company, I am only my proprietors grubber.
You need do no more than think, “Ah! Pancks the gipsy at his
fortune-telling--he’ll tell the rest of my fortune one day--I shall live
to know it.” Is it agreed, Miss Dorrit?’

‘Ye-es,’ faltered Little Dorrit, whom he greatly confused, ‘I suppose
so, while you do no harm.’

‘Good!’ Mr Pancks glanced at the wall of the adjoining room, and stooped
forward. ‘Honest creature, woman of capital points, but heedless and
a loose talker, Miss Dorrit.’ With that he rubbed his hands as if the
interview had been very satisfactory to him, panted away to the door,
and urbanely nodded himself out again.

If Little Dorrit were beyond measure perplexed by this curious conduct
on the part of her new acquaintance, and by finding herself involved
in this singular treaty, her perplexity was not diminished by ensuing
circumstances. Besides that Mr Pancks took every opportunity afforded
him in Mr Casby’s house of significantly glancing at her and snorting
at her--which was not much, after what he had done already--he began to
pervade her daily life. She saw him in the street, constantly. When she
went to Mr Casby’s, he was always there. When she went to Mrs Clennam’s,
he came there on any pretence, as if to keep her in his sight. A week
had not gone by, when she found him to her astonishment in the Lodge one
night, conversing with the turnkey on duty, and to all appearance one
of his familiar companions. Her next surprise was to find him equally at
his ease within the prison; to hear of his presenting himself among
the visitors at her father’s Sunday levee; to see him arm in arm with
a Collegiate friend about the yard; to learn, from Fame, that he had
greatly distinguished himself one evening at the social club that held
its meetings in the Snuggery, by addressing a speech to the members
of the institution, singing a song, and treating the company to five
gallons of ale--report madly added a bushel of shrimps. The effect on
Mr Plornish of such of these phenomena as he became an eye-witness of in
his faithful visits, made an impression on Little Dorrit only second to
that produced by the phenomena themselves. They seemed to gag and bind
him. He could only stare, and sometimes weakly mutter that it wouldn’t
be believed down Bleeding Heart Yard that this was Pancks; but he never
said a word more, or made a sign more, even to Little Dorrit. Mr Pancks
crowned his mysteries by making himself acquainted with Tip in some
unknown manner, and taking a Sunday saunter into the College on that
gentleman’s arm. Throughout he never took any notice of Little Dorrit,
save once or twice when he happened to come close to her and there
was no one very near; on which occasions, he said in passing,
with a friendly look and a puff of encouragement, ‘Pancks the
gipsy--fortune-telling.’

Little Dorrit worked and strove as usual, wondering at all this, but
keeping her wonder, as she had from her earliest years kept many heavier
loads, in her own breast. A change had stolen, and was stealing yet,
over the patient heart. Every day found her something more retiring
than the day before. To pass in and out of the prison unnoticed, and
elsewhere to be overlooked and forgotten, were, for herself, her chief
desires.

To her own room too, strangely assorted room for her delicate youth
and character, she was glad to retreat as often as she could without
desertion of any duty. There were afternoon times when she was
unemployed, when visitors dropped in to play a hand at cards with her
father, when she could be spared and was better away. Then she would
flit along the yard, climb the scores of stairs that led to her room,
and take her seat at the window. Many combinations did those spikes
upon the wall assume, many light shapes did the strong iron weave itself
into, many golden touches fell upon the rust, while Little Dorrit sat
there musing. New zig-zags sprung into the cruel pattern sometimes, when
she saw it through a burst of tears; but beautified or hardened still,
always over it and under it and through it, she was fain to look in her
solitude, seeing everything with that ineffaceable brand.

A garret, and a Marshalsea garret without compromise, was Little
Dorrit’s room. Beautifully kept, it was ugly in itself, and had little
but cleanliness and air to set it off; for what embellishment she had
ever been able to buy, had gone to her father’s room. Howbeit, for this
poor place she showed an increasing love; and to sit in it alone became
her favourite rest.

Insomuch, that on a certain afternoon during the Pancks mysteries, when
she was seated at her window, and heard Maggy’s well-known step coming
up the stairs, she was very much disturbed by the apprehension of being
summoned away. As Maggy’s step came higher up and nearer, she trembled
and faltered; and it was as much as she could do to speak, when Maggy at
length appeared.

‘Please, Little Mother,’ said Maggy, panting for breath, ‘you must come
down and see him. He’s here.’

‘Who, Maggy?’

‘Who, o’ course Mr Clennam. He’s in your father’s room, and he says to
me, Maggy, will you be so kind and go and say it’s only me.’

‘I am not very well, Maggy. I had better not go. I am going to lie down.
See! I lie down now, to ease my head. Say, with my grateful regard, that
you left me so, or I would have come.’

‘Well, it an’t very polite though, Little Mother,’ said the staring
Maggy, ‘to turn your face away, neither!’

Maggy was very susceptible to personal slights, and very ingenious in
inventing them. ‘Putting both your hands afore your face too!’ she went
on. ‘If you can’t bear the looks of a poor thing, it would be better to
tell her so at once, and not go and shut her out like that, hurting her
feelings and breaking her heart at ten year old, poor thing!’

‘It’s to ease my head, Maggy.’

‘Well, and if you cry to ease your head, Little Mother, let me cry too.
Don’t go and have all the crying to yourself,’ expostulated Maggy, ‘that
an’t not being greedy.’ And immediately began to blubber.

It was with some difficulty that she could be induced to go back with
the excuse; but the promise of being told a story--of old her great
delight--on condition that she concentrated her faculties upon the
errand and left her little mistress to herself for an hour longer,
combined with a misgiving on Maggy’s part that she had left her good
temper at the bottom of the staircase, prevailed. So away she went,
muttering her message all the way to keep it in her mind, and, at the
appointed time, came back.

‘He was very sorry, I can tell you,’ she announced, ‘and wanted to send
a doctor. And he’s coming again to-morrow he is and I don’t think he’ll
have a good sleep to-night along o’ hearing about your head, Little
Mother. Oh my! Ain’t you been a-crying!’

‘I think I have, a little, Maggy.’

‘A little! Oh!’

‘But it’s all over now--all over for good, Maggy. And my head is much
better and cooler, and I am quite comfortable. I am very glad I did not
go down.’

Her great staring child tenderly embraced her; and having smoothed her
hair, and bathed her forehead and eyes with cold water (offices in which
her awkward hands became skilful), hugged her again, exulted in her
brighter looks, and stationed her in her chair by the window. Over
against this chair, Maggy, with apoplectic exertions that were not
at all required, dragged the box which was her seat on story-telling
occasions, sat down upon it, hugged her own knees, and said, with a
voracious appetite for stories, and with widely-opened eyes:

‘Now, Little Mother, let’s have a good ‘un!’

‘What shall it be about, Maggy?’

‘Oh, let’s have a princess,’ said Maggy, ‘and let her be a reg’lar one.
Beyond all belief, you know!’

Little Dorrit considered for a moment; and with a rather sad smile upon
her face, which was flushed by the sunset, began:

‘Maggy, there was once upon a time a fine King, and he had everything he
could wish for, and a great deal more. He had gold and silver, diamonds
and rubies, riches of every kind. He had palaces, and he had--’

‘Hospitals,’ interposed Maggy, still nursing her knees. ‘Let him have
hospitals, because they’re so comfortable. Hospitals with lots of
Chicking.’

‘Yes, he had plenty of them, and he had plenty of everything.’

‘Plenty of baked potatoes, for instance?’ said Maggy.

‘Plenty of everything.’

‘Lor!’ chuckled Maggy, giving her knees a hug. ‘Wasn’t it prime!’

‘This King had a daughter, who was the wisest and most beautiful
Princess that ever was seen. When she was a child she understood all her
lessons before her masters taught them to her; and when she was grown
up, she was the wonder of the world. Now, near the Palace where this
Princess lived, there was a cottage in which there was a poor little
tiny woman, who lived all alone by herself.’

‘An old woman,’ said Maggy, with an unctuous smack of her lips.

‘No, not an old woman. Quite a young one.’

‘I wonder she warn’t afraid,’ said Maggy. ‘Go on, please.’

‘The Princess passed the cottage nearly every day, and whenever she went
by in her beautiful carriage, she saw the poor tiny woman spinning at
her wheel, and she looked at the tiny woman, and the tiny woman looked
at her. So, one day she stopped the coachman a little way from the
cottage, and got out and walked on and peeped in at the door, and there,
as usual, was the tiny woman spinning at her wheel, and she looked at
the Princess, and the Princess looked at her.’

‘Like trying to stare one another out,’ said Maggy. ‘Please go on,
Little Mother.’

‘The Princess was such a wonderful Princess that she had the power of
knowing secrets, and she said to the tiny woman, Why do you keep it
there? This showed her directly that the Princess knew why she lived
all alone by herself spinning at her wheel, and she kneeled down at
the Princess’s feet, and asked her never to betray her. So the Princess
said, I never will betray you. Let me see it. So the tiny woman closed
the shutter of the cottage window and fastened the door, and trembling
from head to foot for fear that any one should suspect her, opened a
very secret place and showed the Princess a shadow.’

‘Lor!’ said Maggy.

‘It was the shadow of Some one who had gone by long before: of Some one
who had gone on far away quite out of reach, never, never to come back.
It was bright to look at; and when the tiny woman showed it to the
Princess, she was proud of it with all her heart, as a great, great
treasure. When the Princess had considered it a little while, she said
to the tiny woman, And you keep watch over this every day? And she cast
down her eyes, and whispered, Yes. Then the Princess said, Remind me
why. To which the other replied, that no one so good and kind had ever
passed that way, and that was why in the beginning. She said, too, that
nobody missed it, that nobody was the worse for it, that Some one had
gone on, to those who were expecting him--’

‘Some one was a man then?’ interposed Maggy.

Little Dorrit timidly said Yes, she believed so; and resumed:

‘--Had gone on to those who were expecting him, and that this
remembrance was stolen or kept back from nobody. The Princess made
answer, Ah! But when the cottager died it would be discovered there. The
tiny woman told her No; when that time came, it would sink quietly into
her own grave, and would never be found.’

‘Well, to be sure!’ said Maggy. ‘Go on, please.’

‘The Princess was very much astonished to hear this, as you may suppose,
Maggy.’

[‘And well she might be,’ said Maggy.)

‘So she resolved to watch the tiny woman, and see what came of it. Every
day she drove in her beautiful carriage by the cottage-door, and there
she saw the tiny woman always alone by herself spinning at her wheel,
and she looked at the tiny woman, and the tiny woman looked at her. At
last one day the wheel was still, and the tiny woman was not to be seen.
When the Princess made inquiries why the wheel had stopped, and where
the tiny woman was, she was informed that the wheel had stopped because
there was nobody to turn it, the tiny woman being dead.’

[‘They ought to have took her to the Hospital,’ said Maggy, and then
she’d have got over it.’)

‘The Princess, after crying a very little for the loss of the tiny
woman, dried her eyes and got out of her carriage at the place where
she had stopped it before, and went to the cottage and peeped in at the
door. There was nobody to look at her now, and nobody for her to look
at, so she went in at once to search for the treasured shadow. But there
was no sign of it to be found anywhere; and then she knew that the tiny
woman had told her the truth, and that it would never give anybody any
trouble, and that it had sunk quietly into her own grave, and that she
and it were at rest together.

‘That’s all, Maggy.’

The sunset flush was so bright on Little Dorrit’s face when she came
thus to the end of her story, that she interposed her hand to shade it.

‘Had she got to be old?’ Maggy asked.

‘The tiny woman?’

‘Ah!’

‘I don’t know,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘But it would have been just the
same if she had been ever so old.’

‘Would it raly!’ said Maggy. ‘Well, I suppose it would though.’ And sat
staring and ruminating.

She sat so long with her eyes wide open, that at length Little Dorrit,
to entice her from her box, rose and looked out of window. As she
glanced down into the yard, she saw Pancks come in and leer up with the
corner of his eye as he went by.

‘Who’s he, Little Mother?’ said Maggy. She had joined her at the window
and was leaning on her shoulder. ‘I see him come in and out often.’

‘I have heard him called a fortune-teller,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘But I
doubt if he could tell many people even their past or present fortunes.’

‘Couldn’t have told the Princess hers?’ said Maggy.

Little Dorrit, looking musingly down into the dark valley of the prison,
shook her head.

‘Nor the tiny woman hers?’ said Maggy.

‘No,’ said Little Dorrit, with the sunset very bright upon her. ‘But let
us come away from the window.’




CHAPTER 25. Conspirators and Others


The private residence of Mr Pancks was in Pentonville, where he lodged
on the second-floor of a professional gentleman in an extremely small
way, who had an inner-door within the street door, poised on a spring
and starting open with a click like a trap; and who wrote up in the
fan-light, RUGG, GENERAL AGENT, ACCOUNTANT, DEBTS RECOVERED.

This scroll, majestic in its severe simplicity, illuminated a little
slip of front garden abutting on the thirsty high-road, where a few
of the dustiest of leaves hung their dismal heads and led a life of
choking. A professor of writing occupied the first-floor, and enlivened
the garden railings with glass-cases containing choice examples of what
his pupils had been before six lessons and while the whole of his young
family shook the table, and what they had become after six lessons
when the young family was under restraint. The tenancy of Mr Pancks was
limited to one airy bedroom; he covenanting and agreeing with Mr Rugg
his landlord, that in consideration of a certain scale of payments
accurately defined, and on certain verbal notice duly given, he should
be at liberty to elect to share the Sunday breakfast, dinner, tea, or
supper, or each or any or all of those repasts or meals of Mr and Miss
Rugg (his daughter) in the back-parlour.

Miss Rugg was a lady of a little property which she had acquired,
together with much distinction in the neighbourhood, by having her
heart severely lacerated and her feelings mangled by a middle-aged baker
resident in the vicinity, against whom she had, by the agency of Mr
Rugg, found it necessary to proceed at law to recover damages for a
breach of promise of marriage. The baker having been, by the counsel for
Miss Rugg, witheringly denounced on that occasion up to the full amount
of twenty guineas, at the rate of about eighteen-pence an epithet, and
having been cast in corresponding damages, still suffered occasional
persecution from the youth of Pentonville. But Miss Rugg, environed by
the majesty of the law, and having her damages invested in the public
securities, was regarded with consideration.

In the society of Mr Rugg, who had a round white visage, as if all his
blushes had been drawn out of him long ago, and who had a ragged yellow
head like a worn-out hearth broom; and in the society of Miss Rugg, who
had little nankeen spots, like shirt buttons, all over her face, and
whose own yellow tresses were rather scrubby than luxuriant; Mr Pancks
had usually dined on Sundays for some few years, and had twice a week,
or so, enjoyed an evening collation of bread, Dutch cheese, and porter.
Mr Pancks was one of the very few marriageable men for whom Miss Rugg
had no terrors, the argument with which he reassured himself being
twofold; that is to say, firstly, ‘that it wouldn’t do twice,’ and
secondly, ‘that he wasn’t worth it.’ Fortified within this double
armour, Mr Pancks snorted at Miss Rugg on easy terms.

Up to this time, Mr Pancks had transacted little or no business at his
quarters in Pentonville, except in the sleeping line; but now that he
had become a fortune-teller, he was often closeted after midnight
with Mr Rugg in his little front-parlour office, and even after those
untimely hours, burnt tallow in his bed-room. Though his duties as his
proprietor’s grubber were in no wise lessened; and though that service
bore no greater resemblance to a bed of roses than was to be discovered
in its many thorns; some new branch of industry made a constant demand
upon him. When he cast off the Patriarch at night, it was only to take
an anonymous craft in tow, and labour away afresh in other waters.

The advance from a personal acquaintance with the elder Mr Chivery to
an introduction to his amiable wife and disconsolate son, may have been
easy; but easy or not, Mr Pancks soon made it. He nestled in the bosom
of the tobacco business within a week or two after his first appearance
in the College, and particularly addressed himself to the cultivation of
a good understanding with Young John. In this endeavour he so prospered
as to lure that pining shepherd forth from the groves, and tempt him
to undertake mysterious missions; on which he began to disappear at
uncertain intervals for as long a space as two or three days together.
The prudent Mrs Chivery, who wondered greatly at this change, would have
protested against it as detrimental to the Highland typification on the
doorpost but for two forcible reasons; one, that her John was roused to
take strong interest in the business which these starts were supposed
to advance--and this she held to be good for his drooping spirits;
the other, that Mr Pancks confidentially agreed to pay her, for the
occupation of her son’s time, at the handsome rate of seven and sixpence
per day. The proposal originated with himself, and was couched in the
pithy terms, ‘If your John is weak enough, ma’am, not to take it,
that is no reason why you should be, don’t you see? So, quite between
ourselves, ma’am, business being business, here it is!’

What Mr Chivery thought of these things, or how much or how little he
knew about them, was never gathered from himself. It has been already
remarked that he was a man of few words; and it may be here observed
that he had imbibed a professional habit of locking everything up. He
locked himself up as carefully as he locked up the Marshalsea debtors.
Even his custom of bolting his meals may have been a part of an uniform
whole; but there is no question, that, as to all other purposes, he kept
his mouth as he kept the Marshalsea door. He never opened it without
occasion. When it was necessary to let anything out, he opened it a
little way, held it open just as long as sufficed for the purpose, and
locked it again. Even as he would be sparing of his trouble at the
Marshalsea door, and would keep a visitor who wanted to go out, waiting
for a few moments if he saw another visitor coming down the yard, so
that one turn of the key should suffice for both, similarly he would
often reserve a remark if he perceived another on its way to his lips,
and would deliver himself of the two together. As to any key to his
inner knowledge being to be found in his face, the Marshalsea key was as
legible as an index to the individual characters and histories upon
which it was turned.

That Mr Pancks should be moved to invite any one to dinner at
Pentonville, was an unprecedented fact in his calendar. But he invited
Young John to dinner, and even brought him within range of the dangerous
(because expensive) fascinations of Miss Rugg. The banquet was appointed
for a Sunday, and Miss Rugg with her own hands stuffed a leg of mutton
with oysters on the occasion, and sent it to the baker’s--not _the_
baker’s but an opposition establishment. Provision of oranges, apples,
and nuts was also made. And rum was brought home by Mr Pancks on
Saturday night, to gladden the visitor’s heart.

The store of creature comforts was not the chief part of the visitor’s
reception. Its special feature was a foregone family confidence and
sympathy. When Young John appeared at half-past one without the ivory
hand and waistcoat of golden sprigs, the sun shorn of his beams by
disastrous clouds, Mr Pancks presented him to the yellow-haired Ruggs as
the young man he had so often mentioned who loved Miss Dorrit.

‘I am glad,’ said Mr Rugg, challenging him specially in that character,
‘to have the distinguished gratification of making your acquaintance,
sir. Your feelings do you honour. You are young; may you never outlive
your feelings! If I was to outlive my own feelings, sir,’ said Mr Rugg,
who was a man of many words, and was considered to possess a remarkably
good address; ‘if I was to outlive my own feelings, I’d leave fifty
pound in my will to the man who would put me out of existence.’

Miss Rugg heaved a sigh.

‘My daughter, sir,’ said Mr Rugg. ‘Anastatia, you are no stranger to the
state of this young man’s affections. My daughter has had her trials,
sir’--Mr Rugg might have used the word more pointedly in the singular
number--‘and she can feel for you.’

Young John, almost overwhelmed by the touching nature of this greeting,
professed himself to that effect.

‘What I envy you, sir, is,’ said Mr Rugg, ‘allow me to take your hat--we
are rather short of pegs--I’ll put it in the corner, nobody will tread
on it there--What I envy you, sir, is the luxury of your own feelings. I
belong to a profession in which that luxury is sometimes denied us.’

Young John replied, with acknowledgments, that he only hoped he did what
was right, and what showed how entirely he was devoted to Miss Dorrit.
He wished to be unselfish; and he hoped he was. He wished to do anything
as laid in his power to serve Miss Dorrit, altogether putting himself
out of sight; and he hoped he did. It was but little that he could do,
but he hoped he did it.

‘Sir,’ said Mr Rugg, taking him by the hand, ‘you are a young man that
it does one good to come across. You are a young man that I should
like to put in the witness-box, to humanise the minds of the legal
profession. I hope you have brought your appetite with you, and intend
to play a good knife and fork?’

‘Thank you, sir,’ returned Young John, ‘I don’t eat much at present.’

Mr Rugg drew him a little apart. ‘My daughter’s case, sir,’ said he, ‘at
the time when, in vindication of her outraged feelings and her sex, she
became the plaintiff in Rugg and Bawkins. I suppose I could have put it
in evidence, Mr Chivery, if I had thought it worth my while, that the
amount of solid sustenance my daughter consumed at that period did not
exceed ten ounces per week.’

‘I think I go a little beyond that, sir,’ returned the other,
hesitating, as if he confessed it with some shame.

‘But in your case there’s no fiend in human form,’ said Mr Rugg, with
argumentative smile and action of hand. ‘Observe, Mr Chivery!
No fiend in human form!’

‘No, sir, certainly,’ Young John added with simplicity, ‘I should be
very sorry if there was.’

‘The sentiment,’ said Mr Rugg, ‘is what I should have expected from your
known principles. It would affect my daughter greatly, sir, if she heard
it. As I perceive the mutton, I am glad she didn’t hear it. Mr Pancks,
on this occasion, pray face me. My dear, face Mr Chivery. For what we
are going to receive, may we (and Miss Dorrit) be truly thankful!’

But for a grave waggishness in Mr Rugg’s manner of delivering this
introduction to the feast, it might have appeared that Miss Dorrit was
expected to be one of the company. Pancks recognised the sally in
his usual way, and took in his provender in his usual way. Miss Rugg,
perhaps making up some of her arrears, likewise took very kindly to
the mutton, and it rapidly diminished to the bone. A bread-and-butter
pudding entirely disappeared, and a considerable amount of cheese and
radishes vanished by the same means. Then came the dessert.

Then also, and before the broaching of the rum and water, came Mr
Pancks’s note-book. The ensuing business proceedings were brief but
curious, and rather in the nature of a conspiracy. Mr Pancks looked over
his note-book, which was now getting full, studiously; and picked out
little extracts, which he wrote on separate slips of paper on the table;
Mr Rugg, in the meanwhile, looking at him with close attention, and
Young John losing his uncollected eye in mists of meditation. When Mr
Pancks, who supported the character of chief conspirator, had completed
his extracts, he looked them over, corrected them, put up his note-book,
and held them like a hand at cards.

‘Now, there’s a churchyard in Bedfordshire,’ said Pancks. ‘Who takes
it?’

‘I’ll take it, sir,’ returned Mr Rugg, ‘if no one bids.’

Mr Pancks dealt him his card, and looked at his hand again.

‘Now, there’s an Enquiry in York,’ said Pancks. ‘Who takes it?’

‘I’m not good for York,’ said Mr Rugg.

‘Then perhaps,’ pursued Pancks, ‘you’ll be so obliging, John Chivery?’

Young John assenting, Pancks dealt him his card, and consulted his hand
again.

‘There’s a Church in London; I may as well take that. And a Family
Bible; I may as well take that, too. That’s two to me. Two to me,’
repeated Pancks, breathing hard over his cards. ‘Here’s a Clerk at
Durham for you, John, and an old seafaring gentleman at Dunstable for
you, Mr Rugg. Two to me, was it? Yes, two to me. Here’s a Stone; three
to me. And a Still-born Baby; four to me. And all, for the present,
told.’

When he had thus disposed of his cards, all being done very quietly and
in a suppressed tone, Mr Pancks puffed his way into his own
breast-pocket and tugged out a canvas bag; from which, with a sparing
hand, he told forth money for travelling expenses in two little
portions. ‘Cash goes out fast,’ he said anxiously, as he pushed a
portion to each of his male companions, ‘very fast.’

‘I can only assure you, Mr Pancks,’ said Young John, ‘that I deeply
regret my circumstances being such that I can’t afford to pay my own
charges, or that it’s not advisable to allow me the time necessary for
my doing the distances on foot; because nothing would give me greater
satisfaction than to walk myself off my legs without fee or reward.’

This young man’s disinterestedness appeared so very ludicrous in
the eyes of Miss Rugg, that she was obliged to effect a precipitate
retirement from the company, and to sit upon the stairs until she had
had her laugh out. Meanwhile Mr Pancks, looking, not without some pity,
at Young John, slowly and thoughtfully twisted up his canvas bag as if
he were wringing its neck. The lady, returning as he restored it to his
pocket, mixed rum and water for the party, not forgetting her fair self,
and handed to every one his glass. When all were supplied, Mr Rugg rose,
and silently holding out his glass at arm’s length above the centre of
the table, by that gesture invited the other three to add theirs, and to
unite in a general conspiratorial clink. The ceremony was effective up
to a certain point, and would have been wholly so throughout, if Miss
Rugg, as she raised her glass to her lips in completion of it, had not
happened to look at Young John; when she was again so overcome by the
contemptible comicality of his disinterestedness as to splutter some
ambrosial drops of rum and water around, and withdraw in confusion.

Such was the dinner without precedent, given by Pancks at Pentonville;
and such was the busy and strange life Pancks led. The only waking
moments at which he appeared to relax from his cares, and to recreate
himself by going anywhere or saying anything without a pervading object,
were when he showed a dawning interest in the lame foreigner with the
stick, down Bleeding Heart Yard.

The foreigner, by name John Baptist Cavalletto--they called him Mr
Baptist in the Yard--was such a chirping, easy, hopeful little fellow,
that his attraction for Pancks was probably in the force of contrast.
Solitary, weak, and scantily acquainted with the most necessary words
of the only language in which he could communicate with the people about
him, he went with the stream of his fortunes, in a brisk way that was
new in those parts. With little to eat, and less to drink, and nothing
to wear but what he wore upon him, or had brought tied up in one of the
smallest bundles that ever were seen, he put as bright a face upon it as
if he were in the most flourishing circumstances when he first hobbled
up and down the Yard, humbly propitiating the general good-will with his
white teeth.

It was uphill work for a foreigner, lame or sound, to make his way with
the Bleeding Hearts. In the first place, they were vaguely persuaded
that every foreigner had a knife about him; in the second, they held it
to be a sound constitutional national axiom that he ought to go home to
his own country. They never thought of inquiring how many of their own
countrymen would be returned upon their hands from divers parts of the
world, if the principle were generally recognised; they considered it
particularly and peculiarly British. In the third place, they had a
notion that it was a sort of Divine visitation upon a foreigner that he
was not an Englishman, and that all kinds of calamities happened to
his country because it did things that England did not, and did not do
things that England did. In this belief, to be sure, they had long been
carefully trained by the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings, who were always
proclaiming to them, officially, that no country which failed to submit
itself to those two large families could possibly hope to be under the
protection of Providence; and who, when they believed it, disparaged
them in private as the most prejudiced people under the sun.

This, therefore, might be called a political position of the Bleeding
Hearts; but they entertained other objections to having foreigners
in the Yard. They believed that foreigners were always badly off; and
though they were as ill off themselves as they could desire to be,
that did not diminish the force of the objection. They believed that
foreigners were dragooned and bayoneted; and though they certainly got
their own skulls promptly fractured if they showed any ill-humour, still
it was with a blunt instrument, and that didn’t count. They believed
that foreigners were always immoral; and though they had an occasional
assize at home, and now and then a divorce case or so, that had nothing
to do with it. They believed that foreigners had no independent spirit,
as never being escorted to the poll in droves by Lord Decimus Tite
Barnacle, with colours flying and the tune of Rule Britannia playing.
Not to be tedious, they had many other beliefs of a similar kind.

Against these obstacles, the lame foreigner with the stick had to make
head as well as he could; not absolutely single-handed, because Mr
Arthur Clennam had recommended him to the Plornishes (he lived at the
top of the same house), but still at heavy odds. However, the Bleeding
Hearts were kind hearts; and when they saw the little fellow cheerily
limping about with a good-humoured face, doing no harm, drawing no
knives, committing no outrageous immoralities, living chiefly on
farinaceous and milk diet, and playing with Mrs Plornish’s children of
an evening, they began to think that although he could never hope to be
an Englishman, still it would be hard to visit that affliction on his
head. They began to accommodate themselves to his level, calling him ‘Mr
Baptist,’ but treating him like a baby, and laughing immoderately at his
lively gestures and his childish English--more, because he didn’t mind
it, and laughed too. They spoke to him in very loud voices as if he
were stone deaf. They constructed sentences, by way of teaching him the
language in its purity, such as were addressed by the savages to Captain
Cook, or by Friday to Robinson Crusoe. Mrs Plornish was particularly
ingenious in this art; and attained so much celebrity for saying ‘Me ope
you leg well soon,’ that it was considered in the Yard but a very short
remove indeed from speaking Italian. Even Mrs Plornish herself began to
think that she had a natural call towards that language. As he became
more popular, household objects were brought into requisition for his
instruction in a copious vocabulary; and whenever he appeared in the
Yard ladies would fly out at their doors crying ‘Mr Baptist--tea-pot!’
‘Mr Baptist--dust-pan!’ ‘Mr Baptist--flour-dredger!’ ‘Mr
Baptist--coffee-biggin!’ At the same time exhibiting those articles,
and penetrating him with a sense of the appalling difficulties of the
Anglo-Saxon tongue.

It was in this stage of his progress, and in about the third week of his
occupation, that Mr Pancks’s fancy became attracted by the little man.
Mounting to his attic, attended by Mrs Plornish as interpreter, he found
Mr Baptist with no furniture but his bed on the ground, a table, and a
chair, carving with the aid of a few simple tools, in the blithest way
possible.

‘Now, old chap,’ said Mr Pancks, ‘pay up!’

He had his money ready, folded in a scrap of paper, and laughingly
handed it in; then with a free action, threw out as many fingers of his
right hand as there were shillings, and made a cut crosswise in the air
for an odd sixpence.

‘Oh!’ said Mr Pancks, watching him, wonderingly. ‘That’s it, is it?
You’re a quick customer. It’s all right. I didn’t expect to receive it,
though.’

Mrs Plornish here interposed with great condescension, and explained to
Mr Baptist. ‘E please. E glad get money.’

The little man smiled and nodded. His bright face seemed uncommonly
attractive to Mr Pancks. ‘How’s he getting on in his limb?’ he asked Mrs
Plornish.

‘Oh, he’s a deal better, sir,’ said Mrs Plornish. ‘We expect next week
he’ll be able to leave off his stick entirely.’ (The opportunity
being too favourable to be lost, Mrs Plornish displayed her great
accomplishment by explaining with pardonable pride to Mr Baptist, ‘E ope
you leg well soon.’)

‘He’s a merry fellow, too,’ said Mr Pancks, admiring him as if he were a
mechanical toy. ‘How does he live?’

‘Why, sir,’ rejoined Mrs Plornish, ‘he turns out to have quite a power
of carving them flowers that you see him at now.’ (Mr Baptist, watching
their faces as they spoke, held up his work. Mrs Plornish interpreted in
her Italian manner, on behalf of Mr Pancks, ‘E please. Double good!’)

‘Can he live by that?’ asked Mr Pancks.

‘He can live on very little, sir, and it is expected as he will be able,
in time, to make a very good living. Mr Clennam got it him to do, and
gives him odd jobs besides in at the Works next door--makes ‘em for him,
in short, when he knows he wants ‘em.’

‘And what does he do with himself, now, when he ain’t hard at it?’ said
Mr Pancks.

‘Why, not much as yet, sir, on accounts I suppose of not being able to
walk much; but he goes about the Yard, and he chats without particular
understanding or being understood, and he plays with the children,
and he sits in the sun--he’ll sit down anywhere, as if it was an
arm-chair--and he’ll sing, and he’ll laugh!’

‘Laugh!’ echoed Mr Pancks. ‘He looks to me as if every tooth in his head
was always laughing.’

‘But whenever he gets to the top of the steps at t’other end of the
Yard,’ said Mrs Plornish, ‘he’ll peep out in the curiousest way! So that
some of us thinks he’s peeping out towards where his own country is, and
some of us thinks he’s looking for somebody he don’t want to see, and
some of us don’t know what to think.’

Mr Baptist seemed to have a general understanding of what she said; or
perhaps his quickness caught and applied her slight action of peeping.
In any case he closed his eyes and tossed his head with the air of a man
who had sufficient reasons for what he did, and said in his own tongue,
it didn’t matter. Altro!

‘What’s Altro?’ said Pancks.

‘Hem! It’s a sort of a general kind of expression, sir,’ said Mrs
Plornish.

‘Is it?’ said Pancks. ‘Why, then Altro to you, old chap. Good afternoon.
Altro!’

Mr Baptist in his vivacious way repeating the word several times, Mr
Pancks in his duller way gave it him back once. From that time it became
a frequent custom with Pancks the gipsy, as he went home jaded at night,
to pass round by Bleeding Heart Yard, go quietly up the stairs, look in
at Mr Baptist’s door, and, finding him in his room, to say, ‘Hallo, old
chap! Altro!’ To which Mr Baptist would reply with innumerable bright
nods and smiles, ‘Altro, signore, altro, altro, altro!’ After this
highly condensed conversation, Mr Pancks would go his way with an
appearance of being lightened and refreshed.




CHAPTER 26. Nobody’s State of Mind


If Arthur Clennam had not arrived at that wise decision firmly to
restrain himself from loving Pet, he would have lived on in a state of
much perplexity, involving difficult struggles with his own heart. Not
the least of these would have been a contention, always waging within
it, between a tendency to dislike Mr Henry Gowan, if not to regard
him with positive repugnance, and a whisper that the inclination was
unworthy. A generous nature is not prone to strong aversions, and is
slow to admit them even dispassionately; but when it finds ill-will
gaining upon it, and can discern between-whiles that its origin is not
dispassionate, such a nature becomes distressed.

Therefore Mr Henry Gowan would have clouded Clennam’s mind, and would
have been far oftener present to it than more agreeable persons and
subjects but for the great prudence of his decision aforesaid. As it
was, Mr Gowan seemed transferred to Daniel Doyce’s mind; at all events,
it so happened that it usually fell to Mr Doyce’s turn, rather than
to Clennam’s, to speak of him in the friendly conversations they held
together. These were of frequent occurrence now; as the two partners
shared a portion of a roomy house in one of the grave old-fashioned City
streets, lying not far from the Bank of England, by London Wall.

Mr Doyce had been to Twickenham to pass the day. Clennam had excused
himself. Mr Doyce was just come home. He put in his head at the door of
Clennam’s sitting-room to say Good night.

‘Come in, come in!’ said Clennam.

‘I saw you were reading,’ returned Doyce, as he entered, ‘and thought
you might not care to be disturbed.’

But for the notable resolution he had made, Clennam really might not
have known what he had been reading; really might not have had his eyes
upon the book for an hour past, though it lay open before him. He shut
it up, rather quickly.

‘Are they well?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Doyce; ‘they are well. They are all well.’

Daniel had an old workmanlike habit of carrying his pocket-handkerchief
in his hat. He took it out and wiped his forehead with it, slowly
repeating, ‘They are all well. Miss Minnie looking particularly well, I
thought.’

‘Any company at the cottage?’

‘No, no company.’

‘And how did you get on, you four?’ asked Clennam gaily.

‘There were five of us,’ returned his partner. ‘There was
What’s-his-name. He was there.’

‘Who is he?’ said Clennam.

‘Mr Henry Gowan.’

‘Ah, to be sure!’ cried Clennam with unusual vivacity, ‘Yes!--I forgot
him.’

‘As I mentioned, you may remember,’ said Daniel Doyce, ‘he is always
there on Sunday.’

‘Yes, yes,’ returned Clennam; ‘I remember now.’

Daniel Doyce, still wiping his forehead, ploddingly repeated. ‘Yes. He
was there, he was there. Oh yes, he was there. And his dog. _He_ was
there too.’

‘Miss Meagles is quite attached to--the--dog,’ observed Clennam.

‘Quite so,’ assented his partner. ‘More attached to the dog than I am to
the man.’

‘You mean Mr--?’

‘I mean Mr Gowan, most decidedly,’ said Daniel Doyce.

There was a gap in the conversation, which Clennam devoted to winding up
his watch.

‘Perhaps you are a little hasty in your judgment,’ he said. ‘Our
judgments--I am supposing a general case--’

‘Of course,’ said Doyce.

‘Are so liable to be influenced by many considerations, which, almost
without our knowing it, are unfair, that it is necessary to keep a guard
upon them. For instance, Mr--’

‘Gowan,’ quietly said Doyce, upon whom the utterance of the name almost
always devolved.

‘Is young and handsome, easy and quick, has talent, and has seen a
good deal of various kinds of life. It might be difficult to give an
unselfish reason for being prepossessed against him.’

‘Not difficult for me, I think, Clennam,’ returned his partner. ‘I see
him bringing present anxiety, and, I fear, future sorrow, into my old
friend’s house. I see him wearing deeper lines into my old friend’s
face, the nearer he draws to, and the oftener he looks at, the face
of his daughter. In short, I see him with a net about the pretty and
affectionate creature whom he will never make happy.’

‘We don’t know,’ said Clennam, almost in the tone of a man in pain,
‘that he will not make her happy.’

‘We don’t know,’ returned his partner, ‘that the earth will last another
hundred years, but we think it highly probable.’

‘Well, well!’ said Clennam, ‘we must be hopeful, and we must at least
try to be, if not generous (which, in this case, we have no opportunity
of being), just. We will not disparage this gentleman, because he is
successful in his addresses to the beautiful object of his ambition; and
we will not question her natural right to bestow her love on one whom
she finds worthy of it.’

‘Maybe, my friend,’ said Doyce. ‘Maybe also, that she is too young and
petted, too confiding and inexperienced, to discriminate well.’

‘That,’ said Clennam, ‘would be far beyond our power of correction.’

Daniel Doyce shook his head gravely, and rejoined, ‘I fear so.’

‘Therefore, in a word,’ said Clennam, ‘we should make up our minds that
it is not worthy of us to say any ill of Mr Gowan. It would be a poor
thing to gratify a prejudice against him. And I resolve, for my part,
not to depreciate him.’

‘I am not quite so sure of myself, and therefore I reserve my privilege
of objecting to him,’ returned the other. ‘But, if I am not sure of
myself, I am sure of you, Clennam, and I know what an upright man you
are, and how much to be respected. Good night, _my_ friend and partner!’
He shook his hand in saying this, as if there had been something serious
at the bottom of their conversation; and they separated.

By this time they had visited the family on several occasions, and had
always observed that even a passing allusion to Mr Henry Gowan when
he was not among them, brought back the cloud which had obscured Mr
Meagles’s sunshine on the morning of the chance encounter at the Ferry.
If Clennam had ever admitted the forbidden passion into his breast,
this period might have been a period of real trial; under the actual
circumstances, doubtless it was nothing--nothing.

Equally, if his heart had given entertainment to that prohibited guest,
his silent fighting of his way through the mental condition of this
period might have been a little meritorious. In the constant effort not
to be betrayed into a new phase of the besetting sin of his experience,
the pursuit of selfish objects by low and small means, and to hold
instead to some high principle of honour and generosity, there might
have been a little merit. In the resolution not even to avoid Mr
Meagles’s house, lest, in the selfish sparing of himself, he should
bring any slight distress upon the daughter through making her the cause
of an estrangement which he believed the father would regret, there
might have been a little merit. In the modest truthfulness of always
keeping in view the greater equality of Mr Gowan’s years and the greater
attractions of his person and manner, there might have been a little
merit. In doing all this and much more, in a perfectly unaffected way
and with a manful and composed constancy, while the pain within him
(peculiar as his life and history) was very sharp, there might have been
some quiet strength of character. But, after the resolution he had made,
of course he could have no such merits as these; and such a state of
mind was nobody’s--nobody’s.

Mr Gowan made it no concern of his whether it was nobody’s or
somebody’s. He preserved his perfect serenity of manner on all
occasions, as if the possibility of Clennam’s presuming to have debated
the great question were too distant and ridiculous to be imagined. He
had always an affability to bestow on Clennam and an ease to treat
him with, which might of itself (in the supposititious case of his
not having taken that sagacious course) have been a very uncomfortable
element in his state of mind.

‘I quite regret you were not with us yesterday,’ said Mr Henry Gowan,
calling on Clennam the next morning. ‘We had an agreeable day up the
river there.’

So he had heard, Arthur said.

‘From your partner?’ returned Henry Gowan. ‘What a dear old fellow he
is!’

‘I have a great regard for him.’

‘By Jove, he is the finest creature!’ said Gowan. ‘So fresh, so green,
trusts in such wonderful things!’

Here was one of the many little rough points that had a tendency to
grate on Clennam’s hearing. He put it aside by merely repeating that he
had a high regard for Mr Doyce.

‘He is charming! To see him mooning along to that time of life,
laying down nothing by the way and picking up nothing by the way, is
delightful. It warms a man. So unspoilt, so simple, such a good soul!
Upon my life Mr Clennam, one feels desperately worldly and wicked in
comparison with such an innocent creature. I speak for myself, let me
add, without including you. You are genuine also.’

‘Thank you for the compliment,’ said Clennam, ill at ease; ‘you are too,
I hope?’

‘So so,’ rejoined the other. ‘To be candid with you, tolerably. I am
not a great impostor. Buy one of my pictures, and I assure you,
in confidence, it will not be worth the money. Buy one of another
man’s--any great professor who beats me hollow--and the chances are that
the more you give him, the more he’ll impose upon you. They all do it.’

‘All painters?’

‘Painters, writers, patriots, all the rest who have stands in the
market. Give almost any man I know ten pounds, and he will impose upon
you to a corresponding extent; a thousand pounds--to a corresponding
extent; ten thousand pounds--to a corresponding extent. So great the
success, so great the imposition. But what a capital world it is!’ cried
Gowan with warm enthusiasm. ‘What a jolly, excellent, lovable world it
is!’

‘I had rather thought,’ said Clennam, ‘that the principle you mention
was chiefly acted on by--’

‘By the Barnacles?’ interrupted Gowan, laughing.

‘By the political gentlemen who condescend to keep the Circumlocution
Office.’

‘Ah! Don’t be hard upon the Barnacles,’ said Gowan, laughing afresh,
‘they are darling fellows! Even poor little Clarence, the born idiot of
the family, is the most agreeable and most endearing blockhead! And by
Jupiter, with a kind of cleverness in him too that would astonish you!’

‘It would. Very much,’ said Clennam, drily.

‘And after all,’ cried Gowan, with that characteristic balancing of his
which reduced everything in the wide world to the same light weight,
‘though I can’t deny that the Circumlocution Office may ultimately
shipwreck everybody and everything, still, that will probably not be in
our time--and it’s a school for gentlemen.’

‘It’s a very dangerous, unsatisfactory, and expensive school to the
people who pay to keep the pupils there, I am afraid,’ said Clennam,
shaking his head.

‘Ah! You are a terrible fellow,’ returned Gowan, airily. ‘I can
understand how you have frightened that little donkey, Clarence, the
most estimable of moon-calves (I really love him) nearly out of his
wits. But enough of him, and of all the rest of them. I want to present
you to my mother, Mr Clennam. Pray do me the favour to give me the
opportunity.’

In nobody’s state of mind, there was nothing Clennam would have desired
less, or would have been more at a loss how to avoid.

‘My mother lives in a most primitive manner down in that dreary
red-brick dungeon at Hampton Court,’ said Gowan. ‘If you would make
your own appointment, suggest your own day for permitting me to take
you there to dinner, you would be bored and she would be charmed. Really
that’s the state of the case.’

What could Clennam say after this? His retiring character included a
great deal that was simple in the best sense, because unpractised and
unused; and in his simplicity and modesty, he could only say that he was
happy to place himself at Mr Gowan’s disposal. Accordingly he said it,
and the day was fixed. And a dreaded day it was on his part, and a very
unwelcome day when it came and they went down to Hampton Court together.

The venerable inhabitants of that venerable pile seemed, in those times,
to be encamped there like a sort of civilised gipsies. There was a
temporary air about their establishments, as if they were going away the
moment they could get anything better; there was also a dissatisfied air
about themselves, as if they took it very ill that they had not already
got something much better. Genteel blinds and makeshifts were more or
less observable as soon as their doors were opened; screens not half
high enough, which made dining-rooms out of arched passages, and warded
off obscure corners where footboys slept at nights with their heads
among the knives and forks; curtains which called upon you to believe
that they didn’t hide anything; panes of glass which requested you
not to see them; many objects of various forms, feigning to have no
connection with their guilty secret, a bed; disguised traps in walls,
which were clearly coal-cellars; affectations of no thoroughfares, which
were evidently doors to little kitchens. Mental reservations and artful
mysteries grew out of these things. Callers looking steadily into the
eyes of their receivers, pretended not to smell cooking three feet off;
people, confronting closets accidentally left open, pretended not to see
bottles; visitors with their heads against a partition of thin canvas,
and a page and a young female at high words on the other side, made
believe to be sitting in a primeval silence. There was no end to the
small social accommodation-bills of this nature which the gipsies of
gentility were constantly drawing upon, and accepting for, one another.

Some of these Bohemians were of an irritable temperament, as constantly
soured and vexed by two mental trials: the first, the consciousness
that they had never got enough out of the public; the second, the
consciousness that the public were admitted into the building. Under the
latter great wrong, a few suffered dreadfully--particularly on Sundays,
when they had for some time expected the earth to open and swallow
the public up; but which desirable event had not yet occurred, in
consequence of some reprehensible laxity in the arrangements of the
Universe.

Mrs Gowan’s door was attended by a family servant of several years’
standing, who had his own crow to pluck with the public concerning a
situation in the Post-Office which he had been for some time expecting,
and to which he was not yet appointed. He perfectly knew that the public
could never have got him in, but he grimly gratified himself with the
idea that the public kept him out. Under the influence of this injury
(and perhaps of some little straitness and irregularity in the matter
of wages), he had grown neglectful of his person and morose in mind;
and now beholding in Clennam one of the degraded body of his oppressors,
received him with ignominy.

Mrs Gowan, however, received him with condescension. He found her a
courtly old lady, formerly a Beauty, and still sufficiently
well-favoured to have dispensed with the powder on her nose and a
certain impossible bloom under each eye. She was a little lofty with
him; so was another old lady, dark-browed and high-nosed, and who must
have had something real about her or she could not have existed, but it
was certainly not her hair or her teeth or her figure or her complexion;
so was a grey old gentleman of dignified and sullen appearance; both of
whom had come to dinner. But, as they had all been in the British
Embassy way in sundry parts of the earth, and as a British Embassy
cannot better establish a character with the Circumlocution Office than
by treating its compatriots with illimitable contempt (else it would
become like the Embassies of other countries), Clennam felt that on the
whole they let him off lightly.

The dignified old gentleman turned out to be Lord Lancaster
Stiltstalking, who had been maintained by the Circumlocution Office for
many years as a representative of the Britannic Majesty abroad.
This noble Refrigerator had iced several European courts in his time,
and had done it with such complete success that the very name of
Englishman yet struck cold to the stomachs of foreigners who had the
distinguished honour of remembering him at a distance of a quarter of a
century.

He was now in retirement, and hence (in a ponderous white cravat, like
a stiff snow-drift) was so obliging as to shade the dinner. There was a
whisper of the pervading Bohemian character in the nomadic nature of
the service and its curious races of plates and dishes; but the noble
Refrigerator, infinitely better than plate or porcelain, made it superb.
He shaded the dinner, cooled the wines, chilled the gravy, and blighted
the vegetables.

There was only one other person in the room: a microscopically small
footboy, who waited on the malevolent man who hadn’t got into the
Post-Office. Even this youth, if his jacket could have been unbuttoned
and his heart laid bare, would have been seen, as a distant adherent of
the Barnacle family, already to aspire to a situation under Government.

Mrs Gowan with a gentle melancholy upon her, occasioned by her son’s
being reduced to court the swinish public as a follower of the low Arts,
instead of asserting his birthright and putting a ring through its nose
as an acknowledged Barnacle, headed the conversation at dinner on the
evil days. It was then that Clennam learned for the first time what
little pivots this great world goes round upon.

‘If John Barnacle,’ said Mrs Gowan, after the degeneracy of the times
had been fully ascertained, ‘if John Barnacle had but abandoned his most
unfortunate idea of conciliating the mob, all would have been well, and
I think the country would have been preserved.’

The old lady with the high nose assented; but added that if Augustus
Stiltstalking had in a general way ordered the cavalry out with
instructions to charge, she thought the country would have been
preserved.

The noble Refrigerator assented; but added that if William Barnacle and
Tudor Stiltstalking, when they came over to one another and formed
their ever-memorable coalition, had boldly muzzled the newspapers,
and rendered it penal for any Editor-person to presume to discuss the
conduct of any appointed authority abroad or at home, he thought the
country would have been preserved.

It was agreed that the country (another word for the Barnacles and
Stiltstalkings) wanted preserving, but how it came to want preserving
was not so clear. It was only clear that the question was all about
John Barnacle, Augustus Stiltstalking, William Barnacle and Tudor
Stiltstalking, Tom, Dick, or Harry Barnacle or Stiltstalking, because
there was nobody else but mob. And this was the feature of the
conversation which impressed Clennam, as a man not used to it, very
disagreeably: making him doubt if it were quite right to sit there,
silently hearing a great nation narrowed to such little bounds.
Remembering, however, that in the Parliamentary debates, whether on the
life of that nation’s body or the life of its soul, the question was
usually all about and between John Barnacle, Augustus Stiltstalking,
William Barnacle and Tudor Stiltstalking, Tom, Dick, or Harry Barnacle
or Stiltstalking, and nobody else; he said nothing on the part of mob,
bethinking himself that mob was used to it.

Mr Henry Gowan seemed to have a malicious pleasure in playing off the
three talkers against each other, and in seeing Clennam startled by what
they said. Having as supreme a contempt for the class that had thrown
him off as for the class that had not taken him on, he had no personal
disquiet in anything that passed. His healthy state of mind appeared
even to derive a gratification from Clennam’s position of embarrassment
and isolation among the good company; and if Clennam had been in that
condition with which Nobody was incessantly contending, he would have
suspected it, and would have struggled with the suspicion as a meanness,
even while he sat at the table.

In the course of a couple of hours the noble Refrigerator, at no time
less than a hundred years behind the period, got about five centuries
in arrears, and delivered solemn political oracles appropriate to that
epoch. He finished by freezing a cup of tea for his own drinking,
and retiring at his lowest temperature.

Then Mrs Gowan, who had been accustomed in her days of a vacant
arm-chair beside her to which to summon state to retain her devoted
slaves, one by one, for short audiences as marks of her especial favour,
invited Clennam with a turn of her fan to approach the presence. He
obeyed, and took the tripod recently vacated by Lord Lancaster
Stiltstalking.

‘Mr Clennam,’ said Mrs Gowan, ‘apart from the happiness I have in
becoming known to you, though in this odiously inconvenient place--a
mere barrack--there is a subject on which I am dying to speak to you. It
is the subject in connection with which my son first had, I believe, the
pleasure of cultivating your acquaintance.’

Clennam inclined his head, as a generally suitable reply to what he did
not yet quite understand.

‘First,’ said Mrs Gowan, ‘now, is she really pretty?’

In nobody’s difficulties, he would have found it very difficult to
answer; very difficult indeed to smile, and say ‘Who?’

‘Oh! You know!’ she returned. ‘This flame of Henry’s. This unfortunate
fancy. There! If it is a point of honour that I should originate the
name--Miss Mickles--Miggles.’

‘Miss Meagles,’ said Clennam, ‘is very beautiful.’

‘Men are so often mistaken on those points,’ returned Mrs Gowan, shaking
her head, ‘that I candidly confess to you I feel anything but sure of
it, even now; though it is something to have Henry corroborated with so
much gravity and emphasis. He picked the people up at Rome, I think?’

The phrase would have given nobody mortal offence. Clennam replied,
‘Excuse me, I doubt if I understand your expression.’

‘Picked the people up,’ said Mrs Gowan, tapping the sticks of her closed
fan (a large green one, which she used as a hand-screen) on her little
table. ‘Came upon them. Found them out. Stumbled against them.’

‘The people?’

‘Yes. The Miggles people.’

‘I really cannot say,’ said Clennam, ‘where my friend Mr Meagles first
presented Mr Henry Gowan to his daughter.’

‘I am pretty sure he picked her up at Rome; but never mind
where--somewhere. Now (this is entirely between ourselves), is she very
plebeian?’

‘Really, ma’am,’ returned Clennam, ‘I am so undoubtedly plebeian myself,
that I do not feel qualified to judge.’

‘Very neat!’ said Mrs Gowan, coolly unfurling her screen. ‘Very happy!
From which I infer that you secretly think her manner equal to her
looks?’

Clennam, after a moment’s stiffness, bowed.

‘That’s comforting, and I hope you may be right. Did Henry tell me you
had travelled with them?’

‘I travelled with my friend Mr Meagles, and his wife and daughter,
during some months.’ (Nobody’s heart might have been wrung by the
remembrance.)

‘Really comforting, because you must have had a large experience of
them. You see, Mr Clennam, this thing has been going on for a long time,
and I find no improvement in it. Therefore to have the opportunity of
speaking to one so well informed about it as yourself, is an immense
relief to me. Quite a boon. Quite a blessing, I am sure.’

‘Pardon me,’ returned Clennam, ‘but I am not in Mr Henry Gowan’s
confidence. I am far from being so well informed as you suppose me to
be. Your mistake makes my position a very delicate one. No word on this
topic has ever passed between Mr Henry Gowan and myself.’

Mrs Gowan glanced at the other end of the room, where her son was
playing ecarte on a sofa, with the old lady who was for a charge of
cavalry.

‘Not in his confidence? No,’ said Mrs Gowan. ‘No word has passed between
you? No. That I can imagine. But there are unexpressed confidences, Mr
Clennam; and as you have been together intimately among these people, I
cannot doubt that a confidence of that sort exists in the present case.
Perhaps you have heard that I have suffered the keenest distress of
mind from Henry’s having taken to a pursuit which--well!’ shrugging her
shoulders, ‘a very respectable pursuit, I dare say, and some artists
are, as artists, quite superior persons; still, we never yet in our
family have gone beyond an Amateur, and it is a pardonable weakness to
feel a little--’

As Mrs Gowan broke off to heave a sigh, Clennam, however resolute to
be magnanimous, could not keep down the thought that there was mighty
little danger of the family’s ever going beyond an Amateur, even as it
was.

‘Henry,’ the mother resumed, ‘is self-willed and resolute; and as these
people naturally strain every nerve to catch him, I can entertain very
little hope, Mr Clennam, that the thing will be broken off. I apprehend
the girl’s fortune will be very small; Henry might have done much
better; there is scarcely anything to compensate for the connection:
still, he acts for himself; and if I find no improvement within a short
time, I see no other course than to resign myself and make the best of
these people. I am infinitely obliged to you for what you have told
me.’

As she shrugged her shoulders, Clennam stiffly bowed again. With an
uneasy flush upon his face, and hesitation in his manner, he then said
in a still lower tone than he had adopted yet:

‘Mrs Gowan, I scarcely know how to acquit myself of what I feel to be a
duty, and yet I must ask you for your kind consideration in
attempting to discharge it. A misconception on your part, a very great
misconception if I may venture to call it so, seems to require setting
right. You have supposed Mr Meagles and his family to strain every
nerve, I think you said--’

‘Every nerve,’ repeated Mrs Gowan, looking at him in calm obstinacy,
with her green fan between her face and the fire.

‘To secure Mr Henry Gowan?’

The lady placidly assented.

‘Now that is so far,’ said Arthur, ‘from being the case, that I know
Mr Meagles to be unhappy in this matter; and to have interposed all
reasonable obstacles with the hope of putting an end to it.’

Mrs Gowan shut up her great green fan, tapped him on the arm with it,
and tapped her smiling lips. ‘Why, of course,’ said she. ‘Just what I
mean.’

Arthur watched her face for some explanation of what she did mean.

‘Are you really serious, Mr Clennam? Don’t you see?’

Arthur did not see; and said so.

‘Why, don’t I know my son, and don’t I know that this is exactly the way
to hold him?’ said Mrs Gowan, contemptuously; ‘and do not these Miggles
people know it, at least as well as I? Oh, shrewd people, Mr Clennam:
evidently people of business! I believe Miggles belonged to a Bank. It
ought to have been a very profitable Bank, if he had much to do with its
management. This is very well done, indeed.’

‘I beg and entreat you, ma’am--’ Arthur interposed.

‘Oh, Mr Clennam, can you really be so credulous?’

It made such a painful impression upon him to hear her talking in this
haughty tone, and to see her patting her contemptuous lips with her
fan, that he said very earnestly, ‘Believe me, ma’am, this is unjust, a
perfectly groundless suspicion.’

‘Suspicion?’ repeated Mrs Gowan. ‘Not suspicion, Mr Clennam, Certainty.
It is very knowingly done indeed, and seems to have taken _you_ in
completely.’ She laughed; and again sat tapping her lips with her fan,
and tossing her head, as if she added, ‘Don’t tell me. I know such
people will do anything for the honour of such an alliance.’

At this opportune moment, the cards were thrown up, and Mr Henry Gowan
came across the room saying, ‘Mother, if you can spare Mr Clennam for
this time, we have a long way to go, and it’s getting late.’ Mr Clennam
thereupon rose, as he had no choice but to do; and Mrs Gowan showed him,
to the last, the same look and the same tapped contemptuous lips.

‘You have had a portentously long audience of my mother,’ said Gowan, as
the door closed upon them. ‘I fervently hope she has not bored you?’

‘Not at all,’ said Clennam.

They had a little open phaeton for the journey, and were soon in it on
the road home. Gowan, driving, lighted a cigar; Clennam declined one. Do
what he would, he fell into such a mood of abstraction that Gowan said
again, ‘I am very much afraid my mother has bored you?’ To which he
roused himself to answer, ‘Not at all!’ and soon relapsed again.

In that state of mind which rendered nobody uneasy, his thoughtfulness
would have turned principally on the man at his side. He would have
thought of the morning when he first saw him rooting out the stones with
his heel, and would have asked himself, ‘Does he jerk me out of the
path in the same careless, cruel way?’ He would have thought, had this
introduction to his mother been brought about by him because he knew
what she would say, and that he could thus place his position before
a rival and loftily warn him off, without himself reposing a word of
confidence in him? He would have thought, even if there were no such
design as that, had he brought him there to play with his repressed
emotions, and torment him? The current of these meditations would have
been stayed sometimes by a rush of shame, bearing a remonstrance to
himself from his own open nature, representing that to shelter such
suspicions, even for the passing moment, was not to hold the high,
unenvious course he had resolved to keep. At those times, the striving
within him would have been hardest; and looking up and catching Gowan’s
eyes, he would have started as if he had done him an injury.

Then, looking at the dark road and its uncertain objects, he would have
gradually trailed off again into thinking, ‘Where are we driving, he
and I, I wonder, on the darker road of life? How will it be with us, and
with her, in the obscure distance?’ Thinking of her, he would have been
troubled anew with a reproachful misgiving that it was not even loyal to
her to dislike him, and that in being so easily prejudiced against him
he was less deserving of her than at first.

‘You are evidently out of spirits,’ said Gowan; ‘I am very much afraid
my mother must have bored you dreadfully.’

‘Believe me, not at all,’ said Clennam. ‘It’s nothing--nothing!’




CHAPTER 27. Five-and-Twenty

A frequently recurring doubt, whether Mr Pancks’s desire to collect
information relative to the Dorrit family could have any possible
bearing on the misgivings he had imparted to his mother on his return
from his long exile, caused Arthur Clennam much uneasiness at this
period. What Mr Pancks already knew about the Dorrit family, what more
he really wanted to find out, and why he should trouble his busy head
about them at all, were questions that often perplexed him. Mr Pancks
was not a man to waste his time and trouble in researches prompted by
idle curiosity. That he had a specific object Clennam could not doubt.
And whether the attainment of that object by Mr Pancks’s industry might
bring to light, in some untimely way, secret reasons which had induced
his mother to take Little Dorrit by the hand, was a serious speculation.

Not that he ever wavered either in his desire or his determination to
repair a wrong that had been done in his father’s time, should a
wrong come to light, and be reparable. The shadow of a supposed act
of injustice, which had hung over him since his father’s death, was
so vague and formless that it might be the result of a reality widely
remote from his idea of it. But, if his apprehensions should prove to
be well founded, he was ready at any moment to lay down all he had, and
begin the world anew. As the fierce dark teaching of his childhood had
never sunk into his heart, so that first article in his code of morals
was, that he must begin, in practical humility, with looking well to
his feet on Earth, and that he could never mount on wings of words to
Heaven. Duty on earth, restitution on earth, action on earth; these
first, as the first steep steps upward. Strait was the gate and narrow
was the way; far straiter and narrower than the broad high road paved
with vain professions and vain repetitions, motes from other men’s eyes
and liberal delivery of others to the judgment--all cheap materials
costing absolutely nothing.

No. It was not a selfish fear or hesitation that rendered him
uneasy, but a mistrust lest Pancks might not observe his part of the
understanding between them, and, making any discovery, might take some
course upon it without imparting it to him. On the other hand, when he
recalled his conversation with Pancks, and the little reason he had to
suppose that there was any likelihood of that strange personage being
on that track at all, there were times when he wondered that he made so
much of it. Labouring in this sea, as all barks labour in cross seas, he
tossed about and came to no haven.

The removal of Little Dorrit herself from their customary association,
did not mend the matter. She was so much out, and so much in her own
room, that he began to miss her and to find a blank in her place. He had
written to her to inquire if she were better, and she had written
back, very gratefully and earnestly telling him not to be uneasy on her
behalf, for she was quite well; but he had not seen her, for what, in
their intercourse, was a long time.

He returned home one evening from an interview with her father, who had
mentioned that she was out visiting--which was what he always said
when she was hard at work to buy his supper--and found Mr Meagles in an
excited state walking up and down his room. On his opening the door, Mr
Meagles stopped, faced round, and said:

‘Clennam!--Tattycoram!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Lost!’

‘Why, bless my heart alive!’ cried Clennam in amazement. ‘What do you
mean?’

‘Wouldn’t count five-and-twenty, sir; couldn’t be got to do it; stopped
at eight, and took herself off.’

‘Left your house?’

‘Never to come back,’ said Mr Meagles, shaking his head. ‘You don’t know
that girl’s passionate and proud character. A team of horses couldn’t
draw her back now; the bolts and bars of the old Bastille couldn’t keep
her.’

‘How did it happen? Pray sit down and tell me.’

‘As to how it happened, it’s not so easy to relate: because you must
have the unfortunate temperament of the poor impetuous girl herself,
before you can fully understand it. But it came about in this way. Pet
and Mother and I have been having a good deal of talk together of late.
I’ll not disguise from you, Clennam, that those conversations have not
been of as bright a kind as I could wish; they have referred to our
going away again. In proposing to do which, I have had, in fact, an
object.’

Nobody’s heart beat quickly.

‘An object,’ said Mr Meagles, after a moment’s pause, ‘that I will not
disguise from you, either, Clennam. There’s an inclination on the part
of my dear child which I am sorry for. Perhaps you guess the person.
Henry Gowan.’

‘I was not unprepared to hear it.’

‘Well!’ said Mr Meagles, with a heavy sigh, ‘I wish to God you had never
had to hear it. However, so it is. Mother and I have done all we could
to get the better of it, Clennam. We have tried tender advice, we
have tried time, we have tried absence. As yet, of no use. Our late
conversations have been upon the subject of going away for another year
at least, in order that there might be an entire separation and breaking
off for that term. Upon that question, Pet has been unhappy, and
therefore Mother and I have been unhappy.’

Clennam said that he could easily believe it.

‘Well!’ continued Mr Meagles in an apologetic way, ‘I admit as a
practical man, and I am sure Mother would admit as a practical woman,
that we do, in families, magnify our troubles and make mountains of our
molehills in a way that is calculated to be rather trying to people who
look on--to mere outsiders, you know, Clennam. Still, Pet’s happiness
or unhappiness is quite a life or death question with us; and we may be
excused, I hope, for making much of it. At all events, it might have
been borne by Tattycoram. Now, don’t you think so?’

‘I do indeed think so,’ returned Clennam, in most emphatic recognition
of this very moderate expectation.

‘No, sir,’ said Mr Meagles, shaking his head ruefully. ‘She couldn’t
stand it. The chafing and firing of that girl, the wearing and tearing
of that girl within her own breast, has been such that I have
softly said to her again and again in passing her, “Five-and-twenty,
Tattycoram, five-and-twenty!” I heartily wish she could have gone
on counting five-and-twenty day and night, and then it wouldn’t have
happened.’

Mr Meagles with a despondent countenance in which the goodness of his
heart was even more expressed than in his times of cheerfulness and
gaiety, stroked his face down from his forehead to his chin, and shook
his head again.

‘I said to Mother (not that it was necessary, for she would have thought
it all for herself), we are practical people, my dear, and we know her
story; we see in this unhappy girl some reflection of what was raging in
her mother’s heart before ever such a creature as this poor thing was
in the world; we’ll gloss her temper over, Mother, we won’t notice it at
present, my dear, we’ll take advantage of some better disposition in her
another time. So we said nothing. But, do what we would, it seems as if
it was to be; she broke out violently one night.’

‘How, and why?’

‘If you ask me Why,’ said Mr Meagles, a little disturbed by the
question, for he was far more intent on softening her case than the
family’s, ‘I can only refer you to what I have just repeated as having
been pretty near my words to Mother. As to How, we had said Good night
to Pet in her presence (very affectionately, I must allow), and she
had attended Pet up-stairs--you remember she was her maid. Perhaps Pet,
having been out of sorts, may have been a little more inconsiderate than
usual in requiring services of her: but I don’t know that I have any
right to say so; she was always thoughtful and gentle.’

‘The gentlest mistress in the world.’

‘Thank you, Clennam,’ said Mr Meagles, shaking him by the hand; ‘you
have often seen them together. Well! We presently heard this unfortunate
Tattycoram loud and angry, and before we could ask what was the matter,
Pet came back in a tremble, saying she was frightened of her. Close
after her came Tattycoram in a flaming rage. “I hate you all three,”
 says she, stamping her foot at us. “I am bursting with hate of the whole
house.”’

‘Upon which you--?’

‘I?’ said Mr Meagles, with a plain good faith that might have commanded
the belief of Mrs Gowan herself. ‘I said, count five-and-twenty,
Tattycoram.’

Mr Meagles again stroked his face and shook his head, with an air of
profound regret.

‘She was so used to do it, Clennam, that even then, such a picture of
passion as you never saw, she stopped short, looked me full in the face,
and counted (as I made out) to eight. But she couldn’t control herself
to go any further. There she broke down, poor thing, and gave the other
seventeen to the four winds. Then it all burst out. She detested us, she
was miserable with us, she couldn’t bear it, she wouldn’t bear it, she
was determined to go away. She was younger than her young mistress, and
would she remain to see her always held up as the only creature who was
young and interesting, and to be cherished and loved? No. She wouldn’t,
she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t! What did we think she, Tattycoram, might
have been if she had been caressed and cared for in her childhood, like
her young mistress? As good as her? Ah! Perhaps fifty times as good.
When we pretended to be so fond of one another, we exulted over her;
that was what we did; we exulted over her and shamed her. And all in
the house did the same. They talked about their fathers and mothers, and
brothers and sisters; they liked to drag them up before her face. There
was Mrs Tickit, only yesterday, when her little grandchild was with her,
had been amused by the child’s trying to call her (Tattycoram) by the
wretched name we gave her; and had laughed at the name. Why, who didn’t;
and who were we that we should have a right to name her like a dog or a
cat? But she didn’t care. She would take no more benefits from us; she
would fling us her name back again, and she would go. She would leave
us that minute, nobody should stop her, and we should never hear of her
again.’

Mr Meagles had recited all this with such a vivid remembrance of his
original, that he was almost as flushed and hot by this time as he
described her to have been.

‘Ah, well!’ he said, wiping his face. ‘It was of no use trying reason
then, with that vehement panting creature (Heaven knows what her
mother’s story must have been); so I quietly told her that she should
not go at that late hour of night, and I gave her my hand and took her
to her room, and locked the house doors. But she was gone this morning.’

‘And you know no more of her?’

‘No more,’ returned Mr Meagles. ‘I have been hunting about all day. She
must have gone very early and very silently. I have found no trace of
her down about us.’

‘Stay! You want,’ said Clennam, after a moment’s reflection, ‘to see
her? I assume that?’

‘Yes, assuredly; I want to give her another chance; Mother and Pet
want to give her another chance; come! You yourself,’ said Mr Meagles,
persuasively, as if the provocation to be angry were not his own at all,
‘want to give the poor passionate girl another chance, I know, Clennam.’

‘It would be strange and hard indeed if I did not,’ said Clennam, ‘when
you are all so forgiving. What I was going to ask you was, have you
thought of that Miss Wade?’

‘I have. I did not think of her until I had pervaded the whole of our
neighbourhood, and I don’t know that I should have done so then but
for finding Mother and Pet, when I went home, full of the idea that
Tattycoram must have gone to her. Then, of course, I recalled what she
said that day at dinner when you were first with us.’

‘Have you any idea where Miss Wade is to be found?’

‘To tell you the truth,’ returned Mr Meagles, ‘it’s because I have an
addled jumble of a notion on that subject that you found me waiting
here. There is one of those odd impressions in my house, which do
mysteriously get into houses sometimes, which nobody seems to have
picked up in a distinct form from anybody, and yet which everybody seems
to have got hold of loosely from somebody and let go again, that she
lives, or was living, thereabouts.’ Mr Meagles handed him a slip of
paper, on which was written the name of one of the dull by-streets in
the Grosvenor region, near Park Lane.

‘Here is no number,’ said Arthur looking over it.

‘No number, my dear Clennam?’ returned his friend. ‘No anything! The
very name of the street may have been floating in the air; for, as I
tell you, none of my people can say where they got it from. However,
it’s worth an inquiry; and as I would rather make it in company than
alone, and as you too were a fellow-traveller of that immovable woman’s,
I thought perhaps--’ Clennam finished the sentence for him by taking up
his hat again, and saying he was ready.

It was now summer-time; a grey, hot, dusty evening. They rode to the top
of Oxford Street, and there alighting, dived in among the great streets
of melancholy stateliness, and the little streets that try to be as
stately and succeed in being more melancholy, of which there is a
labyrinth near Park Lane. Wildernesses of corner houses, with barbarous
old porticoes and appurtenances; horrors that came into existence under
some wrong-headed person in some wrong-headed time, still demanding
the blind admiration of all ensuing generations and determined to do
so until they tumbled down; frowned upon the twilight. Parasite little
tenements, with the cramp in their whole frame, from the dwarf hall-door
on the giant model of His Grace’s in the Square to the squeezed window
of the boudoir commanding the dunghills in the Mews, made the evening
doleful. Rickety dwellings of undoubted fashion, but of a capacity to
hold nothing comfortably except a dismal smell, looked like the last
result of the great mansions’ breeding in-and-in; and, where their
little supplementary bows and balconies were supported on thin iron
columns, seemed to be scrofulously resting upon crutches. Here and
there a Hatchment, with the whole science of Heraldry in it, loomed down
upon the street, like an Archbishop discoursing on Vanity. The shops,
few in number, made no show; for popular opinion was as nothing to them.
The pastrycook knew who was on his books, and in that knowledge could be
calm, with a few glass cylinders of dowager peppermint-drops in his
window, and half-a-dozen ancient specimens of currant-jelly. A few
oranges formed the greengrocer’s whole concession to the vulgar mind. A
single basket made of moss, once containing plovers’ eggs, held all that
the poulterer had to say to the rabble. Everybody in those streets
seemed (which is always the case at that hour and season) to be gone out
to dinner, and nobody seemed to be giving the dinners they had gone to.
On the doorsteps there were lounging footmen with bright parti-coloured
plumage and white polls, like an extinct race of monstrous birds; and
butlers, solitary men of recluse demeanour, each of whom appeared
distrustful of all other butlers. The roll of carriages in the Park was
done for the day; the street lamps were lighting; and wicked little
grooms in the tightest fitting garments, with twists in their legs
answering to the twists in their minds, hung about in pairs, chewing
straws and exchanging fraudulent secrets. The spotted dogs who went out
with the carriages, and who were so associated with splendid equipages
that it looked like a condescension in those animals to come out without
them, accompanied helpers to and fro on messages. Here and there was a
retiring public-house which did not require to be supported on the
shoulders of the people, and where gentlemen out of livery were not much
wanted.

This last discovery was made by the two friends in pursuing their
inquiries. Nothing was there, or anywhere, known of such a person as
Miss Wade, in connection with the street they sought. It was one of the
parasite streets; long, regular, narrow, dull and gloomy; like a brick
and mortar funeral. They inquired at several little area gates, where
a dejected youth stood spiking his chin on the summit of a precipitous
little shoot of wooden steps, but could gain no information. They walked
up the street on one side of the way, and down it on the other, what
time two vociferous news-sellers, announcing an extraordinary event that
had never happened and never would happen, pitched their hoarse voices
into the secret chambers; but nothing came of it. At length they stood
at the corner from which they had begun, and it had fallen quite dark,
and they were no wiser.

It happened that in the street they had several times passed a dingy
house, apparently empty, with bills in the windows, announcing that it
was to let. The bills, as a variety in the funeral procession, almost
amounted to a decoration. Perhaps because they kept the house separated
in his mind, or perhaps because Mr Meagles and himself had twice agreed
in passing, ‘It is clear she don’t live there,’ Clennam now proposed
that they should go back and try that house before finally going away.
Mr Meagles agreed, and back they went.

They knocked once, and they rang once, without any response. ‘Empty,’
said Mr Meagles, listening. ‘Once more,’ said Clennam, and knocked
again. After that knock they heard a movement below, and somebody
shuffling up towards the door.

The confined entrance was so dark that it was impossible to make out
distinctly what kind of person opened the door; but it appeared to be an
old woman. ‘Excuse our troubling you,’ said Clennam. ‘Pray can you
tell us where Miss Wade lives?’ The voice in the darkness unexpectedly
replied, ‘Lives here.’

‘Is she at home?’

No answer coming, Mr Meagles asked again. ‘Pray is she at home?’

After another delay, ‘I suppose she is,’ said the voice abruptly; ‘you
had better come in, and I’ll ask.’

They were summarily shut into the close black house; and the figure
rustling away, and speaking from a higher level, said, ‘Come up, if you
please; you can’t tumble over anything.’ They groped their way up-stairs
towards a faint light, which proved to be the light of the street
shining through a window; and the figure left them shut in an airless
room.

‘This is odd, Clennam,’ said Mr Meagles, softly.

‘Odd enough,’ assented Clennam in the same tone, ‘but we have succeeded;
that’s the main point. Here’s a light coming!’

The light was a lamp, and the bearer was an old woman: very dirty, very
wrinkled and dry. ‘She’s at home,’ she said (and the voice was the same
that had spoken before); ‘she’ll come directly.’ Having set the lamp
down on the table, the old woman dusted her hands on her apron, which
she might have done for ever without cleaning them, looked at the
visitors with a dim pair of eyes, and backed out.

The lady whom they had come to see, if she were the present occupant
of the house, appeared to have taken up her quarters there as she might
have established herself in an Eastern caravanserai. A small square
of carpet in the middle of the room, a few articles of furniture that
evidently did not belong to the room, and a disorder of trunks and
travelling articles, formed the whole of her surroundings. Under some
former regular inhabitant, the stifling little apartment had broken out
into a pier-glass and a gilt table; but the gilding was as faded as last
year’s flowers, and the glass was so clouded that it seemed to hold in
magic preservation all the fogs and bad weather it had ever reflected.
The visitors had had a minute or two to look about them, when the door
opened and Miss Wade came in.

She was exactly the same as when they had parted, just as handsome, just
as scornful, just as repressed. She manifested no surprise in seeing
them, nor any other emotion. She requested them to be seated; and
declining to take a seat herself, at once anticipated any introduction
of their business.

‘I apprehend,’ she said, ‘that I know the cause of your favouring me
with this visit. We may come to it at once.’

‘The cause then, ma’am,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘is Tattycoram.’

‘So I supposed.’

‘Miss Wade,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘will you be so kind as to say whether you
know anything of her?’

‘Surely. I know she is here with me.’

‘Then, ma’am,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘allow me to make known to you that I
shall be happy to have her back, and that my wife and daughter will
be happy to have her back. She has been with us a long time: we don’t
forget her claims upon us, and I hope we know how to make allowances.’

‘You hope to know how to make allowances?’ she returned, in a level,
measured voice. ‘For what?’

‘I think my friend would say, Miss Wade,’ Arthur Clennam interposed,
seeing Mr Meagles rather at a loss, ‘for the passionate sense that
sometimes comes upon the poor girl, of being at a disadvantage. Which
occasionally gets the better of better remembrances.’

The lady broke into a smile as she turned her eyes upon him. ‘Indeed?’
was all she answered.

She stood by the table so perfectly composed and still after this
acknowledgment of his remark that Mr Meagles stared at her under a sort
of fascination, and could not even look to Clennam to make another move.
After waiting, awkwardly enough, for some moments, Arthur said:

‘Perhaps it would be well if Mr Meagles could see her, Miss Wade?’

‘That is easily done,’ said she. ‘Come here, child.’ She had opened a
door while saying this, and now led the girl in by the hand. It was
very curious to see them standing together: the girl with her disengaged
fingers plaiting the bosom of her dress, half irresolutely, half
passionately; Miss Wade with her composed face attentively regarding
her, and suggesting to an observer, with extraordinary force, in her
composure itself (as a veil will suggest the form it covers), the
unquenchable passion of her own nature.

‘See here,’ she said, in the same level way as before. ‘Here is your
patron, your master. He is willing to take you back, my dear, if you are
sensible of the favour and choose to go. You can be, again, a foil to
his pretty daughter, a slave to her pleasant wilfulness, and a toy in
the house showing the goodness of the family. You can have your droll
name again, playfully pointing you out and setting you apart, as it is
right that you should be pointed out and set apart. (Your birth, you
know; you must not forget your birth.) You can again be shown to this
gentleman’s daughter, Harriet, and kept before her, as a living reminder
of her own superiority and her gracious condescension. You can recover
all these advantages and many more of the same kind which I dare say
start up in your memory while I speak, and which you lose in taking
refuge with me--you can recover them all by telling these gentlemen how
humbled and penitent you are, and by going back to them to be forgiven.
What do you say, Harriet? Will you go?’

The girl who, under the influence of these words, had gradually risen
in anger and heightened in colour, answered, raising her lustrous black
eyes for the moment, and clenching her hand upon the folds it had been
puckering up, ‘I’d die sooner!’

Miss Wade, still standing at her side holding her hand, looked quietly
round and said with a smile, ‘Gentlemen! What do you do upon that?’

Poor Mr Meagles’s inexpressible consternation in hearing his motives and
actions so perverted, had prevented him from interposing any word until
now; but now he regained the power of speech.

‘Tattycoram,’ said he, ‘for I’ll call you by that name still, my good
girl, conscious that I meant nothing but kindness when I gave it to you,
and conscious that you know it--’

‘I don’t!’ said she, looking up again, and almost rending herself with
the same busy hand.

‘No, not now, perhaps,’ said Mr Meagles; ‘not with that lady’s eyes so
intent upon you, Tattycoram,’ she glanced at them for a moment, ‘and
that power over you, which we see she exercises; not now, perhaps, but
at another time. Tattycoram, I’ll not ask that lady whether she believes
what she has said, even in the anger and ill blood in which I and my
friend here equally know she has spoken, though she subdues herself,
with a determination that any one who has once seen her is not likely
to forget. I’ll not ask you, with your remembrance of my house and all
belonging to it, whether you believe it. I’ll only say that you have
no profession to make to me or mine, and no forgiveness to entreat;
and that all in the world that I ask you to do, is, to count
five-and-twenty, Tattycoram.’

She looked at him for an instant, and then said frowningly, ‘I won’t.
Miss Wade, take me away, please.’

The contention that raged within her had no softening in it now; it
was wholly between passionate defiance and stubborn defiance. Her rich
colour, her quick blood, her rapid breath, were all setting themselves
against the opportunity of retracing their steps. ‘I won’t. I won’t.
I won’t!’ she repeated in a low, thick voice. ‘I’d be torn to pieces
first. I’d tear myself to pieces first!’

Miss Wade, who had released her hold, laid her hand protectingly on the
girl’s neck for a moment, and then said, looking round with her former
smile and speaking exactly in her former tone, ‘Gentlemen! What do you
do upon that?’

‘Oh, Tattycoram, Tattycoram!’ cried Mr Meagles, adjuring her besides
with an earnest hand. ‘Hear that lady’s voice, look at that lady’s face,
consider what is in that lady’s heart, and think what a future lies
before you. My child, whatever you may think, that lady’s influence
over you--astonishing to us, and I should hardly go too far in saying
terrible to us to see--is founded in passion fiercer than yours, and
temper more violent than yours. What can you two be together? What can
come of it?’

‘I am alone here, gentlemen,’ observed Miss Wade, with no change of
voice or manner. ‘Say anything you will.’

‘Politeness must yield to this misguided girl, ma’am,’ said Mr Meagles,
‘at her present pass; though I hope not altogether to dismiss it,
even with the injury you do her so strongly before me. Excuse me for
reminding you in her hearing--I must say it--that you were a mystery
to all of us, and had nothing in common with any of us when she
unfortunately fell in your way. I don’t know what you are, but you don’t
hide, can’t hide, what a dark spirit you have within you. If it should
happen that you are a woman, who, from whatever cause, has a perverted
delight in making a sister-woman as wretched as she is (I am old enough
to have heard of such), I warn her against you, and I warn you against
yourself.’

‘Gentlemen!’ said Miss Wade, calmly. ‘When you have concluded--Mr
Clennam, perhaps you will induce your friend--’

‘Not without another effort,’ said Mr Meagles, stoutly. ‘Tattycoram,
my poor dear girl, count five-and-twenty.’

‘Do not reject the hope, the certainty, this kind man offers you,’ said
Clennam in a low emphatic voice. ‘Turn to the friends you have not
forgotten. Think once more!’

‘I won’t! Miss Wade,’ said the girl, with her bosom swelling high, and
speaking with her hand held to her throat, ‘take me away!’

‘Tattycoram,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘Once more yet! The only thing I ask of
you in the world, my child! Count five-and-twenty!’

She put her hands tightly over her ears, confusedly tumbling down her
bright black hair in the vehemence of the action, and turned her face
resolutely to the wall. Miss Wade, who had watched her under this final
appeal with that strange attentive smile, and that repressing hand
upon her own bosom with which she had watched her in her struggle at
Marseilles, then put her arm about her waist as if she took possession
of her for evermore.

And there was a visible triumph in her face when she turned it to
dismiss the visitors.

‘As it is the last time I shall have the honour,’ she said, ‘and as you
have spoken of not knowing what I am, and also of the foundation of my
influence here, you may now know that it is founded in a common cause.
What your broken plaything is as to birth, I am. She has no name, I have
no name. Her wrong is my wrong. I have nothing more to say to you.’

This was addressed to Mr Meagles, who sorrowfully went out. As Clennam
followed, she said to him, with the same external composure and in the
same level voice, but with a smile that is only seen on cruel faces: a
very faint smile, lifting the nostril, scarcely touching the lips, and
not breaking away gradually, but instantly dismissed when done with:

‘I hope the wife of your dear friend Mr Gowan, may be happy in the
contrast of her extraction to this girl’s and mine, and in the high good
fortune that awaits her.’




CHAPTER 28. Nobody’s Disappearance


Not resting satisfied with the endeavours he had made to recover his
lost charge, Mr Meagles addressed a letter of remonstrance, breathing
nothing but goodwill, not only to her, but to Miss Wade too. No answer
coming to these epistles, or to another written to the stubborn girl
by the hand of her late young mistress, which might have melted her
if anything could (all three letters were returned weeks afterwards as
having been refused at the house-door), he deputed Mrs Meagles to make
the experiment of a personal interview. That worthy lady being unable to
obtain one, and being steadfastly denied admission, Mr Meagles besought
Arthur to essay once more what he could do. All that came of his
compliance was, his discovery that the empty house was left in charge
of the old woman, that Miss Wade was gone, that the waifs and strays of
furniture were gone, and that the old woman would accept any number of
half-crowns and thank the donor kindly, but had no information whatever
to exchange for those coins, beyond constantly offering for perusal a
memorandum relative to fixtures, which the house-agent’s young man had
left in the hall.

Unwilling, even under this discomfiture, to resign the ingrate and leave
her hopeless, in case of her better dispositions obtaining the mastery
over the darker side of her character, Mr Meagles, for six successive
days, published a discreetly covert advertisement in the morning papers,
to the effect that if a certain young person who had lately left
home without reflection, would at any time apply to his address at
Twickenham, everything would be as it had been before, and no reproaches
need be apprehended. The unexpected consequences of this notification
suggested to the dismayed Mr Meagles for the first time that some
hundreds of young persons must be leaving their homes without reflection
every day; for shoals of wrong young people came down to Twickenham,
who, not finding themselves received with enthusiasm, generally demanded
compensation by way of damages, in addition to coach-hire there and
back. Nor were these the only uninvited clients whom the advertisement
produced. The swarm of begging-letter writers, who would seem to be
always watching eagerly for any hook, however small, to hang a letter
upon, wrote to say that having seen the advertisement, they were induced
to apply with confidence for various sums, ranging from ten shillings to
fifty pounds: not because they knew anything about the young person,
but because they felt that to part with those donations would greatly
relieve the advertiser’s mind. Several projectors, likewise, availed
themselves of the same opportunity to correspond with Mr Meagles; as,
for example, to apprise him that their attention having been called to
the advertisement by a friend, they begged to state that if they should
ever hear anything of the young person, they would not fail to make it
known to him immediately, and that in the meantime if he would oblige
them with the funds necessary for bringing to perfection a certain
entirely novel description of Pump, the happiest results would ensue to
mankind.

Mr Meagles and his family, under these combined discouragements, had
begun reluctantly to give up Tattycoram as irrecoverable, when the new
and active firm of Doyce and Clennam, in their private capacities,
went down on a Saturday to stay at the cottage until Monday. The senior
partner took the coach, and the junior partner took his walking-stick.

A tranquil summer sunset shone upon him as he approached the end of
his walk, and passed through the meadows by the river side. He had
that sense of peace, and of being lightened of a weight of care, which
country quiet awakens in the breasts of dwellers in towns. Everything
within his view was lovely and placid. The rich foliage of the trees,
the luxuriant grass diversified with wild flowers, the little green
islands in the river, the beds of rushes, the water-lilies floating on
the surface of the stream, the distant voices in boats borne musically
towards him on the ripple of the water and the evening air, were all
expressive of rest. In the occasional leap of a fish, or dip of an oar,
or twittering of a bird not yet at roost, or distant barking of a dog,
or lowing of a cow--in all such sounds, there was the prevailing breath
of rest, which seemed to encompass him in every scent that sweetened
the fragrant air. The long lines of red and gold in the sky, and the
glorious track of the descending sun, were all divinely calm. Upon the
purple tree-tops far away, and on the green height near at hand up which
the shades were slowly creeping, there was an equal hush. Between the
real landscape and its shadow in the water, there was no division; both
were so untroubled and clear, and, while so fraught with solemn mystery
of life and death, so hopefully reassuring to the gazer’s soothed heart,
because so tenderly and mercifully beautiful.

Clennam had stopped, not for the first time by many times, to look about
him and suffer what he saw to sink into his soul, as the shadows, looked
at, seemed to sink deeper and deeper into the water. He was slowly
resuming his way, when he saw a figure in the path before him which he
had, perhaps, already associated with the evening and its impressions.

Minnie was there, alone. She had some roses in her hand, and seemed to
have stood still on seeing him, waiting for him. Her face was towards
him, and she appeared to have been coming from the opposite direction.
There was a flutter in her manner, which Clennam had never seen in it
before; and as he came near her, it entered his mind all at once that
she was there of a set purpose to speak to him.

She gave him her hand, and said, ‘You wonder to see me here by myself?
But the evening is so lovely, I have strolled further than I meant
at first. I thought it likely I might meet you, and that made me more
confident. You always come this way, do you not?’

As Clennam said that it was his favourite way, he felt her hand falter
on his arm, and saw the roses shake.

‘Will you let me give you one, Mr Clennam? I gathered them as I came out
of the garden. Indeed, I almost gathered them for you, thinking it so
likely I might meet you. Mr Doyce arrived more than an hour ago, and
told us you were walking down.’

His own hand shook, as he accepted a rose or two from hers and thanked
her. They were now by an avenue of trees. Whether they turned into it on
his movement or on hers matters little. He never knew how that was.

‘It is very grave here,’ said Clennam, ‘but very pleasant at this hour.
Passing along this deep shade, and out at that arch of light at the
other end, we come upon the ferry and the cottage by the best approach,
I think.’

In her simple garden-hat and her light summer dress, with her rich brown
hair naturally clustering about her, and her wonderful eyes raised to
his for a moment with a look in which regard for him and trustfulness in
him were strikingly blended with a kind of timid sorrow for him, she was
so beautiful that it was well for his peace--or ill for his peace, he
did not quite know which--that he had made that vigorous resolution he
had so often thought about.

She broke a momentary silence by inquiring if he knew that papa had been
thinking of another tour abroad? He said he had heard it mentioned. She
broke another momentary silence by adding, with some hesitation, that
papa had abandoned the idea.

At this, he thought directly, ‘they are to be married.’

‘Mr Clennam,’ she said, hesitating more timidly yet, and speaking so low
that he bent his head to hear her. ‘I should very much like to give you
my confidence, if you would not mind having the goodness to receive
it. I should have very much liked to have given it to you long ago,
because--I felt that you were becoming so much our friend.’

‘How can I be otherwise than proud of it at any time! Pray give it to
me. Pray trust me.’

‘I could never have been afraid of trusting you,’ she returned, raising
her eyes frankly to his face. ‘I think I would have done so some time
ago, if I had known how. But I scarcely know how, even now.’

‘Mr Gowan,’ said Arthur Clennam, ‘has reason to be very happy. God bless
his wife and him!’

She wept, as she tried to thank him. He reassured her, took her hand
as it lay with the trembling roses in it on his arm, took the remaining
roses from it, and put it to his lips. At that time, it seemed to him,
he first finally resigned the dying hope that had flickered in nobody’s
heart so much to its pain and trouble; and from that time he became in
his own eyes, as to any similar hope or prospect, a very much older man
who had done with that part of life.

He put the roses in his breast and they walked on for a little while,
slowly and silently, under the umbrageous trees. Then he asked her, in
a voice of cheerful kindness, was there anything else that she would
say to him as her friend and her father’s friend, many years older than
herself; was there any trust she would repose in him, any service she
would ask of him, any little aid to her happiness that she could give
him the lasting gratification of believing it was in his power to
render?

She was going to answer, when she was so touched by some little hidden
sorrow or sympathy--what could it have been?--that she said, bursting
into tears again: ‘O Mr Clennam! Good, generous, Mr Clennam, pray tell
me you do not blame me.’

‘I blame you?’ said Clennam. ‘My dearest girl! I blame you? No!’

After clasping both her hands upon his arm, and looking confidentially
up into his face, with some hurried words to the effect that she thanked
him from her heart (as she did, if it be the source of earnestness), she
gradually composed herself, with now and then a word of encouragement
from him, as they walked on slowly and almost silently under the
darkening trees.

‘And, now, Minnie Gowan,’ at length said Clennam, smiling; ‘will you ask
me nothing?’

‘Oh! I have very much to ask of you.’

‘That’s well! I hope so; I am not disappointed.’

‘You know how I am loved at home, and how I love home. You can hardly
think it perhaps, dear Mr Clennam,’ she spoke with great agitation,
‘seeing me going from it of my own free will and choice, but I do so
dearly love it!’

‘I am sure of that,’ said Clennam. ‘Can you suppose I doubt it?’

‘No, no. But it is strange, even to me, that loving it so much and
being so much beloved in it, I can bear to cast it away. It seems so
neglectful of it, so unthankful.’

‘My dear girl,’ said Clennam, ‘it is in the natural progress and change
of time. All homes are left so.’

‘Yes, I know; but all homes are not left with such a blank in them as
there will be in mine when I am gone. Not that there is any scarcity of
far better and more endearing and more accomplished girls than I am; not
that I am much, but that they have made so much of me!’

Pet’s affectionate heart was overcharged, and she sobbed while she
pictured what would happen.

‘I know what a change papa will feel at first, and I know that at first
I cannot be to him anything like what I have been these many years.
And it is then, Mr Clennam, then more than at any time, that I beg and
entreat you to remember him, and sometimes to keep him company when you
can spare a little while; and to tell him that you know I was fonder
of him when I left him, than I ever was in all my life. For there is
nobody--he told me so himself when he talked to me this very day--there
is nobody he likes so well as you, or trusts so much.’

A clue to what had passed between the father and daughter dropped like
a heavy stone into the well of Clennam’s heart, and swelled the water
to his eyes. He said, cheerily, but not quite so cheerily as he tried to
say, that it should be done--that he gave her his faithful promise.

‘If I do not speak of mama,’ said Pet, more moved by, and more pretty
in, her innocent grief, than Clennam could trust himself even to
consider--for which reason he counted the trees between them and the
fading light as they slowly diminished in number--‘it is because mama
will understand me better in this action, and will feel my loss in a
different way, and will look forward in a different manner. But you know
what a dear, devoted mother she is, and you will remember her too; will
you not?’

Let Minnie trust him, Clennam said, let Minnie trust him to do all she
wished.

‘And, dear Mr Clennam,’ said Minnie, ‘because papa and one whom I need
not name, do not fully appreciate and understand one another yet, as
they will by-and-by; and because it will be the duty, and the pride,
and pleasure of my new life, to draw them to a better knowledge of one
another, and to be a happiness to one another, and to be proud of one
another, and to love one another, both loving me so dearly; oh, as you
are a kind, true man! when I am first separated from home (I am going a
long distance away), try to reconcile papa to him a little more, and use
your great influence to keep him before papa’s mind free from
prejudice and in his real form. Will you do this for me, as you are a
noble-hearted friend?’

Poor Pet! Self-deceived, mistaken child! When were such changes
ever made in men’s natural relations to one another: when was such
reconcilement of ingrain differences ever effected! It has been tried
many times by other daughters, Minnie; it has never succeeded; nothing
has ever come of it but failure.

So Clennam thought. So he did not say; it was too late. He bound himself
to do all she asked, and she knew full well that he would do it.

They were now at the last tree in the avenue. She stopped, and withdrew
her arm. Speaking to him with her eyes lifted up to his, and with the
hand that had lately rested on his sleeve trembling by touching one of
the roses in his breast as an additional appeal to him, she said:

‘Dear Mr Clennam, in my happiness--for I am happy, though you have seen
me crying--I cannot bear to leave any cloud between us. If you have
anything to forgive me (not anything that I have wilfully done, but any
trouble I may have caused you without meaning it, or having it in my
power to help it), forgive me to-night out of your noble heart!’

He stooped to meet the guileless face that met his without shrinking. He
kissed it, and answered, Heaven knew that he had nothing to forgive.
As he stooped to meet the innocent face once again, she whispered,
‘Good-bye!’ and he repeated it. It was taking leave of all his old
hopes--all nobody’s old restless doubts. They came out of the avenue
next moment, arm-in-arm as they had entered it: and the trees seemed to
close up behind them in the darkness, like their own perspective of the
past.

The voices of Mr and Mrs Meagles and Doyce were audible directly,
speaking near the garden gate. Hearing Pet’s name among them, Clennam
called out, ‘She is here, with me.’ There was some little wondering and
laughing until they came up; but as soon as they had all come together,
it ceased, and Pet glided away.

Mr Meagles, Doyce, and Clennam, without speaking, walked up and down
on the brink of the river, in the light of the rising moon, for a few
minutes; and then Doyce lingered behind, and went into the house. Mr
Meagles and Clennam walked up and down together for a few minutes more
without speaking, until at length the former broke silence.

‘Arthur,’ said he, using that familiar address for the first time in
their communication, ‘do you remember my telling you, as we walked up
and down one hot morning, looking over the harbour at Marseilles, that
Pet’s baby sister who was dead seemed to Mother and me to have grown as
she had grown, and changed as she had changed?’

‘Very well.’

‘You remember my saying that our thoughts had never been able to
separate those twin sisters, and that, in our fancy, whatever Pet was,
the other was?’

‘Yes, very well.’

‘Arthur,’ said Mr Meagles, much subdued, ‘I carry that fancy further
to-night. I feel to-night, my dear fellow, as if you had loved my dead
child very tenderly, and had lost her when she was like what Pet is
now.’

‘Thank you!’ murmured Clennam, ‘thank you!’ And pressed his hand.

‘Will you come in?’ said Mr Meagles, presently.

‘In a little while.’

Mr Meagles fell away, and he was left alone. When he had walked on the
river’s brink in the peaceful moonlight for some half an hour, he put
his hand in his breast and tenderly took out the handful of roses.
Perhaps he put them to his heart, perhaps he put them to his lips, but
certainly he bent down on the shore and gently launched them on the
flowing river. Pale and unreal in the moonlight, the river floated them
away.

The lights were bright within doors when he entered, and the faces on
which they shone, his own face not excepted, were soon quietly cheerful.
They talked of many subjects (his partner never had had such a ready
store to draw upon for the beguiling of the time), and so to bed, and to
sleep. While the flowers, pale and unreal in the moonlight, floated away
upon the river; and thus do greater things that once were in our
breasts, and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal seas.




CHAPTER 29. Mrs Flintwinch goes on Dreaming


The house in the city preserved its heavy dulness through all these
transactions, and the invalid within it turned the same unvarying
round of life. Morning, noon, and night, morning, noon, and night, each
recurring with its accompanying monotony, always the same reluctant
return of the same sequences of machinery, like a dragging piece of
clockwork.

The wheeled chair had its associated remembrances and reveries, one may
suppose, as every place that is made the station of a human being has.
Pictures of demolished streets and altered houses, as they formerly were
when the occupant of the chair was familiar with them, images of people
as they too used to be, with little or no allowance made for the lapse
of time since they were seen; of these, there must have been many in the
long routine of gloomy days. To stop the clock of busy existence at the
hour when we were personally sequestered from it, to suppose mankind
stricken motionless when we were brought to a stand-still, to be unable
to measure the changes beyond our view by any larger standard than
the shrunken one of our own uniform and contracted existence, is the
infirmity of many invalids, and the mental unhealthiness of almost all
recluses.

What scenes and actors the stern woman most reviewed, as she sat
from season to season in her one dark room, none knew but herself. Mr
Flintwinch, with his wry presence brought to bear upon her daily like
some eccentric mechanical force, would perhaps have screwed it out of
her, if there had been less resistance in her; but she was too strong
for him. So far as Mistress Affery was concerned, to regard her
liege-lord and her disabled mistress with a face of blank wonder, to
go about the house after dark with her apron over her head, always to
listen for the strange noises and sometimes to hear them, and never
to emerge from her ghostly, dreamy, sleep-waking state, was occupation
enough for her.

There was a fair stroke of business doing, as Mistress Affery made out,
for her husband had abundant occupation in his little office, and saw
more people than had been used to come there for some years. This might
easily be, the house having been long deserted; but he did receive
letters, and comers, and keep books, and correspond. Moreover, he went
about to other counting-houses, and to wharves, and docks, and to the
Custom House, and to Garraway’s Coffee House, and the Jerusalem Coffee
House, and on ‘Change; so that he was much in and out. He began, too,
sometimes of an evening, when Mrs Clennam expressed no particular wish
for his society, to resort to a tavern in the neighbourhood to look at
the shipping news and closing prices in the evening paper, and even to
exchange small socialities with mercantile Sea Captains who frequented
that establishment. At some period of every day, he and Mrs Clennam held
a council on matters of business; and it appeared to Affery, who was
always groping about, listening and watching, that the two clever ones
were making money.

The state of mind into which Mr Flintwinch’s dazed lady had fallen, had
now begun to be so expressed in all her looks and actions that she was
held in very low account by the two clever ones, as a person, never
of strong intellect, who was becoming foolish. Perhaps because her
appearance was not of a commercial cast, or perhaps because it occurred
to him that his having taken her to wife might expose his judgment to
doubt in the minds of customers, Mr Flintwinch laid his commands upon
her that she should hold her peace on the subject of her conjugal
relations, and should no longer call him Jeremiah out of the domestic
trio. Her frequent forgetfulness of this admonition intensified her
startled manner, since Mr Flintwinch’s habit of avenging himself on her
remissness by making springs after her on the staircase, and shaking
her, occasioned her to be always nervously uncertain when she might be
thus waylaid next.

Little Dorrit had finished a long day’s work in Mrs Clennam’s room, and
was neatly gathering up her shreds and odds and ends before going home.
Mr Pancks, whom Affery had just shown in, was addressing an inquiry to
Mrs Clennam on the subject of her health, coupled with the remark that,
‘happening to find himself in that direction,’ he had looked in to
inquire, on behalf of his proprietor, how she found herself. Mrs
Clennam, with a deep contraction of her brows, was looking at him.

‘Mr Casby knows,’ said she, ‘that I am not subject to changes. The
change that I await here is the great change.’

‘Indeed, ma’am?’ returned Mr Pancks, with a wandering eye towards the
figure of the little seamstress on her knee picking threads and fraying
of her work from the carpet. ‘You look nicely, ma’am.’

‘I bear what I have to bear,’ she answered. ‘Do you what you have to
do.’

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Mr Pancks, ‘such is my endeavour.’

‘You are often in this direction, are you not?’ asked Mrs Clennam.

‘Why, yes, ma’am,’ said Pancks, ‘rather so lately; I have lately been
round this way a good deal, owing to one thing and another.’

‘Beg Mr Casby and his daughter not to trouble themselves, by deputy,
about me. When they wish to see me, they know I am here to see them.
They have no need to trouble themselves to send. You have no need to
trouble yourself to come.’

‘Not the least trouble, ma’am,’ said Mr Pancks. ‘You really are looking
uncommonly nicely, ma’am.’

‘Thank you. Good evening.’

The dismissal, and its accompanying finger pointed straight at the door,
was so curt and direct that Mr Pancks did not see his way to prolong his
visit. He stirred up his hair with his sprightliest expression, glanced
at the little figure again, said ‘Good evening, ma ‘am; don’t come down,
Mrs Affery, I know the road to the door,’ and steamed out. Mrs Clennam,
her chin resting on her hand, followed him with attentive and darkly
distrustful eyes; and Affery stood looking at her as if she were
spell-bound.

Slowly and thoughtfully, Mrs Clennam’s eyes turned from the door by
which Pancks had gone out, to Little Dorrit, rising from the carpet.
With her chin drooping more heavily on her hand, and her eyes vigilant
and lowering, the sick woman sat looking at her until she attracted her
attention. Little Dorrit coloured under such a gaze, and looked down.
Mrs Clennam still sat intent.

‘Little Dorrit,’ she said, when she at last broke silence, ‘what do you
know of that man?’

‘I don’t know anything of him, ma’am, except that I have seen him about,
and that he has spoken to me.’

‘What has he said to you?’

‘I don’t understand what he has said, he is so strange. But nothing
rough or disagreeable.’

‘Why does he come here to see you?’

‘I don’t know, ma’am,’ said Little Dorrit, with perfect frankness.

‘You know that he does come here to see you?’

‘I have fancied so,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘But why he should come here or
anywhere for that, ma’am, I can’t think.’

Mrs Clennam cast her eyes towards the ground, and with her strong, set
face, as intent upon a subject in her mind as it had lately been upon
the form that seemed to pass out of her view, sat absorbed. Some minutes
elapsed before she came out of this thoughtfulness, and resumed her hard
composure.

Little Dorrit in the meanwhile had been waiting to go, but afraid to
disturb her by moving. She now ventured to leave the spot where she
had been standing since she had risen, and to pass gently round by the
wheeled chair. She stopped at its side to say ‘Good night, ma’am.’

Mrs Clennam put out her hand, and laid it on her arm. Little Dorrit,
confused under the touch, stood faltering. Perhaps some momentary
recollection of the story of the Princess may have been in her mind.

‘Tell me, Little Dorrit,’ said Mrs Clennam, ‘have you many friends now?’

‘Very few, ma’am. Besides you, only Miss Flora and--one more.’

‘Meaning,’ said Mrs Clennam, with her unbent finger again pointing to
the door, ‘that man?’

‘Oh no, ma’am!’

‘Some friend of his, perhaps?’

‘No ma’am.’ Little Dorrit earnestly shook her head. ‘Oh no! No one at
all like him, or belonging to him.’

‘Well!’ said Mrs Clennam, almost smiling. ‘It is no affair of mine. I
ask, because I take an interest in you; and because I believe I was your
friend when you had no other who could serve you. Is that so?’

‘Yes, ma’am; indeed it is. I have been here many a time when, but for
you and the work you gave me, we should have wanted everything.’

‘We,’ repeated Mrs Clennam, looking towards the watch, once her dead
husband’s, which always lay upon her table. ‘Are there many of you?’

‘Only father and I, now. I mean, only father and I to keep regularly out
of what we get.’

‘Have you undergone many privations? You and your father and who else
there may be of you?’ asked Mrs Clennam, speaking deliberately, and
meditatively turning the watch over and over.

‘Sometimes it has been rather hard to live,’ said Little Dorrit, in her
soft voice, and timid uncomplaining way; ‘but I think not harder--as to
that--than many people find it.’

‘That’s well said!’ Mrs Clennam quickly returned. ‘That’s the truth!
You are a good, thoughtful girl. You are a grateful girl too, or I much
mistake you.’

‘It is only natural to be that. There is no merit in being that,’ said
Little Dorrit. ‘I am indeed.’

Mrs Clennam, with a gentleness of which the dreaming Affery had never
dreamed her to be capable, drew down the face of her little seamstress,
and kissed her on the forehead.

‘Now go, Little Dorrit,’ said she, ‘or you will be late, poor child!’

In all the dreams Mistress Affery had been piling up since she first
became devoted to the pursuit, she had dreamed nothing more astonishing
than this. Her head ached with the idea that she would find the other
clever one kissing Little Dorrit next, and then the two clever ones
embracing each other and dissolving into tears of tenderness for all
mankind. The idea quite stunned her, as she attended the light footsteps
down the stairs, that the house door might be safely shut.

On opening it to let Little Dorrit out, she found Mr Pancks, instead
of having gone his way, as in any less wonderful place and among less
wonderful phenomena he might have been reasonably expected to do,
fluttering up and down the court outside the house. The moment he saw
Little Dorrit, he passed her briskly, said with his finger to his nose
(as Mrs Affery distinctly heard), ‘Pancks the gipsy, fortune-telling,’
and went away. ‘Lord save us, here’s a gipsy and a fortune-teller in it
now!’ cried Mistress Affery. ‘What next!’

She stood at the open door, staggering herself with this enigma, on a
rainy, thundery evening. The clouds were flying fast, and the wind was
coming up in gusts, banging some neighbouring shutters that had broken
loose, twirling the rusty chimney-cowls and weather-cocks, and rushing
round and round a confined adjacent churchyard as if it had a mind to
blow the dead citizens out of their graves. The low thunder, muttering
in all quarters of the sky at once, seemed to threaten vengeance for
this attempted desecration, and to mutter, ‘Let them rest! Let them
rest!’

Mistress Affery, whose fear of thunder and lightning was only to
be equalled by her dread of the haunted house with a premature and
preternatural darkness in it, stood undecided whether to go in or not,
until the question was settled for her by the door blowing upon her in
a violent gust of wind and shutting her out. ‘What’s to be done now,
what’s to be done now!’ cried Mistress Affery, wringing her hands in
this last uneasy dream of all; ‘when she’s all alone by herself
inside, and can no more come down to open it than the churchyard dead
themselves!’

In this dilemma, Mistress Affery, with her apron as a hood to keep the
rain off, ran crying up and down the solitary paved enclosure several
times. Why she should then stoop down and look in at the keyhole of the
door as if an eye would open it, it would be difficult to say; but it
is none the less what most people would have done in the same situation,
and it is what she did.

From this posture she started up suddenly, with a half scream, feeling
something on her shoulder. It was the touch of a hand; of a man’s hand.

The man was dressed like a traveller, in a foraging cap with fur about
it, and a heap of cloak. He looked like a foreigner. He had a quantity
of hair and moustache--jet black, except at the shaggy ends, where
it had a tinge of red--and a high hook nose. He laughed at Mistress
Affery’s start and cry; and as he laughed, his moustache went up under
his nose, and his nose came down over his moustache.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked in plain English. ‘What are you frightened
at?’

‘At you,’ panted Affery.

‘Me, madam?’

‘And the dismal evening, and--and everything,’ said Affery. ‘And here!
The wind has been and blown the door to, and I can’t get in.’

‘Hah!’ said the gentleman, who took that very coolly. ‘Indeed! Do you
know such a name as Clennam about here?’

‘Lord bless us, I should think I did, I should think I did!’ cried
Affery, exasperated into a new wringing of hands by the inquiry.

‘Where about here?’

‘Where!’ cried Affery, goaded into another inspection of the keyhole.
‘Where but here in this house? And she’s all alone in her room, and lost
the use of her limbs and can’t stir to help herself or me, and t’other
clever one’s out, and Lord forgive me!’ cried Affery, driven into a
frantic dance by these accumulated considerations, ‘if I ain’t a-going
headlong out of my mind!’

Taking a warmer view of the matter now that it concerned himself, the
gentleman stepped back to glance at the house, and his eye soon rested
on the long narrow window of the little room near the hall-door.

‘Where may the lady be who has lost the use of her limbs, madam?’ he
inquired, with that peculiar smile which Mistress Affery could not
choose but keep her eyes upon.

‘Up there!’ said Affery. ‘Them two windows.’

‘Hah! I am of a fair size, but could not have the honour of presenting
myself in that room without a ladder. Now, madam, frankly--frankness is
a part of my character--shall I open the door for you?’

‘Yes, bless you, sir, for a dear creetur, and do it at once,’ cried
Affery, ‘for she may be a-calling to me at this very present minute, or
may be setting herself a fire and burning herself to death, or there’s
no knowing what may be happening to her, and me a-going out of my mind
at thinking of it!’

‘Stay, my good madam!’ He restrained her impatience with a smooth white
hand. ‘Business-hours, I apprehend, are over for the day?’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ cried Affery. ‘Long ago.’

‘Let me make, then, a fair proposal. Fairness is a part of my character.
I am just landed from the packet-boat, as you may see.’ He showed her
that his cloak was very wet, and that his boots were saturated with
water; she had previously observed that he was dishevelled and sallow,
as if from a rough voyage, and so chilled that he could not keep his
teeth from chattering. ‘I am just landed from the packet-boat, madam,
and have been delayed by the weather: the infernal weather! In
consequence of this, madam, some necessary business that I should
otherwise have transacted here within the regular hours (necessary
business because money-business), still remains to be done. Now, if you
will fetch any authorised neighbouring somebody to do it in return for
my opening the door, I’ll open the door. If this arrangement should be
objectionable, I’ll--’ and with the same smile he made a significant
feint of backing away.

Mistress Affery, heartily glad to effect the proposed compromise, gave
in her willing adhesion to it. The gentleman at once requested her to
do him the favour of holding his cloak, took a short run at the narrow
window, made a leap at the sill, clung his way up the bricks, and in
a moment had his hand at the sash, raising it. His eyes looked so very
sinister, as he put his leg into the room and glanced round at Mistress
Affery, that she thought with a sudden coldness, if he were to go
straight up-stairs to murder the invalid, what could she do to prevent
him?

Happily he had no such purpose; for he reappeared, in a moment, at the
house door. ‘Now, my dear madam,’ he said, as he took back his cloak and
threw it on, ‘if you have the goodness to--what the Devil’s that!’

The strangest of sounds. Evidently close at hand from the peculiar
shock it communicated to the air, yet subdued as if it were far off. A
tremble, a rumble, and a fall of some light dry matter.

‘What the Devil is it?’

‘I don’t know what it is, but I’ve heard the like of it over and over
again,’ said Affery, who had caught his arm.

He could hardly be a very brave man, even she thought in her dreamy
start and fright, for his trembling lips had turned colourless. After
listening a few moments, he made light of it.

‘Bah! Nothing! Now, my dear madam, I think you spoke of some clever
personage. Will you be so good as to confront me with that genius?’ He
held the door in his hand, as though he were quite ready to shut her out
again if she failed.

‘Don’t you say anything about the door and me, then,’ whispered Affery.

‘Not a word.’

‘And don’t you stir from here, or speak if she calls, while I run round
the corner.’

‘Madam, I am a statue.’

Affery had so vivid a fear of his going stealthily up-stairs the moment
her back was turned, that after hurrying out of sight, she returned to
the gateway to peep at him. Seeing him still on the threshold, more out
of the house than in it, as if he had no love for darkness and no
desire to probe its mysteries, she flew into the next street, and sent a
message into the tavern to Mr Flintwinch, who came out directly. The
two returning together--the lady in advance, and Mr Flintwinch coming up
briskly behind, animated with the hope of shaking her before she could
get housed--saw the gentleman standing in the same place in the dark,
and heard the strong voice of Mrs Clennam calling from her room, ‘Who is
it? What is it? Why does no one answer? Who _is_ that, down there?’




CHAPTER 30. The Word of a Gentleman


When Mr and Mrs Flintwinch panted up to the door of the old house in the
twilight, Jeremiah within a second of Affery, the stranger started back.
‘Death of my soul!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, how did you get here?’

Mr Flintwinch, to whom these words were spoken, repaid the stranger’s
wonder in full. He gazed at him with blank astonishment; he looked over
his own shoulder, as expecting to see some one he had not been aware of
standing behind him; he gazed at the stranger again, speechlessly, at
a loss to know what he meant; he looked to his wife for explanation;
receiving none, he pounced upon her, and shook her with such heartiness
that he shook her cap off her head, saying between his teeth, with grim
raillery, as he did it, ‘Affery, my woman, you must have a dose, my
woman! This is some of your tricks! You have been dreaming again,
mistress. What’s it about? Who is it? What does it mean! Speak out or be
choked! It’s the only choice I’ll give you.’

Supposing Mistress Affery to have any power of election at the moment,
her choice was decidedly to be choked; for she answered not a syllable
to this adjuration, but, with her bare head wagging violently backwards
and forwards, resigned herself to her punishment. The stranger, however,
picking up her cap with an air of gallantry, interposed.

‘Permit me,’ said he, laying his hand on the shoulder of Jeremiah, who
stopped and released his victim. ‘Thank you. Excuse me. Husband and
wife I know, from this playfulness. Haha! Always agreeable to see that
relation playfully maintained. Listen! May I suggest that somebody
up-stairs, in the dark, is becoming energetically curious to know what
is going on here?’

This reference to Mrs Clennam’s voice reminded Mr Flintwinch to step
into the hall and call up the staircase. ‘It’s all right, I am here,
Affery is coming with your light.’ Then he said to the latter
flustered woman, who was putting her cap on, ‘Get out with you, and get
up-stairs!’ and then turned to the stranger and said to him, ‘Now, sir,
what might you please to want?’

‘I am afraid,’ said the stranger, ‘I must be so troublesome as to
propose a candle.’

‘True,’ assented Jeremiah. ‘I was going to do so. Please to stand where
you are while I get one.’

The visitor was standing in the doorway, but turned a little into the
gloom of the house as Mr Flintwinch turned, and pursued him with his
eyes into the little room, where he groped about for a phosphorus box.
When he found it, it was damp, or otherwise out of order; and match
after match that he struck into it lighted sufficiently to throw a dull
glare about his groping face, and to sprinkle his hands with pale little
spots of fire, but not sufficiently to light the candle. The stranger,
taking advantage of this fitful illumination of his visage, looked
intently and wonderingly at him. Jeremiah, when he at last lighted
the candle, knew he had been doing this, by seeing the last shade of
a lowering watchfulness clear away from his face, as it broke into the
doubtful smile that was a large ingredient in its expression.

‘Be so good,’ said Jeremiah, closing the house door, and taking a pretty
sharp survey of the smiling visitor in his turn, ‘as to step into my
counting-house.--It’s all right, I tell you!’ petulantly breaking off to
answer the voice up-stairs, still unsatisfied, though Affery was there,
speaking in persuasive tones. ‘Don’t I tell you it’s all right? Preserve
the woman, has she no reason at all in her!’

‘Timorous,’ remarked the stranger.

‘Timorous?’ said Mr Flintwinch, turning his head to retort, as he went
before with the candle. ‘More courageous than ninety men in a hundred,
sir, let me tell you.’

‘Though an invalid?’

‘Many years an invalid. Mrs Clennam. The only one of that name left
in the House now. My partner.’

Saying something apologetically as he crossed the hall, to the effect
that at that time of night they were not in the habit of receiving any
one, and were always shut up, Mr Flintwinch led the way into his own
office, which presented a sufficiently business-like appearance. Here he
put the light on his desk, and said to the stranger, with his wryest
twist upon him, ‘Your commands.’

‘My name is Blandois.’

‘Blandois. I don’t know it,’ said Jeremiah.

‘I thought it possible,’ resumed the other, ‘that you might have been
advised from Paris--’

‘We have had no advice from Paris respecting anybody of the name of
Blandois,’ said Jeremiah.

‘No?’

‘No.’

Jeremiah stood in his favourite attitude. The smiling Mr Blandois,
opening his cloak to get his hand to a breast-pocket, paused to say,
with a laugh in his glittering eyes, which it occurred to Mr Flintwinch
were too near together:

‘You are so like a friend of mine! Not so identically the same as I
supposed when I really did for the moment take you to be the same in the
dusk--for which I ought to apologise; permit me to do so; a readiness
to confess my errors is, I hope, a part of the frankness of my
character--still, however, uncommonly like.’

‘Indeed?’ said Jeremiah, perversely. ‘But I have not received any letter
of advice from anywhere respecting anybody of the name of Blandois.’

‘Just so,’ said the stranger.

‘_Just_ so,’ said Jeremiah.

Mr Blandois, not at all put out by this omission on the part of the
correspondents of the house of Clennam and Co., took his pocket-book
from his breast-pocket, selected a letter from that receptacle, and
handed it to Mr Flintwinch. ‘No doubt you are well acquainted with the
writing. Perhaps the letter speaks for itself, and requires no advice.
You are a far more competent judge of such affairs than I am. It is my
misfortune to be, not so much a man of business, as what the world calls
(arbitrarily) a gentleman.’

Mr Flintwinch took the letter, and read, under date of Paris, ‘We have
to present to you, on behalf of a highly esteemed correspondent of our
Firm, M. Blandois, of this city,’ &c. &c. ‘Such facilities as he may
require and such attentions as may lie in your power,’ &c. &c. ‘Also
have to add that if you will honour M. Blandois’ drafts at sight to the
extent of, say Fifty Pounds sterling (50_l_.),’ &c. &c.

‘Very good, sir,’ said Mr Flintwinch. ‘Take a chair. To the extent of
anything that our House can do--we are in a retired, old-fashioned,
steady way of business, sir--we shall be happy to render you our best
assistance. I observe, from the date of this, that we could not yet be
advised of it. Probably you came over with the delayed mail that brings
the advice.’

‘That I came over with the delayed mail, sir,’ returned Mr Blandois,
passing his white hand down his high-hooked nose, ‘I know to the cost
of my head and stomach: the detestable and intolerable weather having
racked them both. You see me in the plight in which I came out of the
packet within this half-hour. I ought to have been here hours ago,
and then I should not have to apologise--permit me to apologise--for
presenting myself so unreasonably, and frightening--no, by-the-bye, you
said not frightening; permit me to apologise again--the esteemed lady,
Mrs Clennam, in her invalid chamber above stairs.’

Swagger and an air of authorised condescension do so much, that
Mr Flintwinch had already begun to think this a highly gentlemanly
personage. Not the less unyielding with him on that account, he scraped
his chin and said, what could he have the honour of doing for Mr
Blandois to-night, out of business hours?

‘Faith!’ returned that gentleman, shrugging his cloaked shoulders,
‘I must change, and eat and drink, and be lodged somewhere. Have the
kindness to advise me, a total stranger, where, and money is a matter of
perfect indifference until to-morrow. The nearer the place, the better.
Next door, if that’s all.’

Mr Flintwinch was slowly beginning, ‘For a gentleman of your habits,
there is not in this immediate neighbourhood any hotel--’ when Mr
Blandois took him up.

‘So much for my habits! my dear sir,’ snapping his fingers. ‘A citizen
of the world has no habits. That I am, in my poor way, a gentleman,
by Heaven! I will not deny, but I have no unaccommodating prejudiced
habits. A clean room, a hot dish for dinner, and a bottle of not
absolutely poisonous wine, are all I want tonight. But I want that much
without the trouble of going one unnecessary inch to get it.’

‘There is,’ said Mr Flintwinch, with more than his usual deliberation,
as he met, for a moment, Mr Blandois’ shining eyes, which were restless;
‘there is a coffee-house and tavern close here, which, so far, I can
recommend; but there’s no style about it.’

‘I dispense with style!’ said Mr Blandois, waving his hand. ‘Do me the
honour to show me the house, and introduce me there (if I am not too
troublesome), and I shall be infinitely obliged.’

Mr Flintwinch, upon this, looked up his hat, and lighted Mr Blandois
across the hall again. As he put the candle on a bracket, where the
dark old panelling almost served as an extinguisher for it, he bethought
himself of going up to tell the invalid that he would not be absent five
minutes.

‘Oblige me,’ said the visitor, on his saying so, ‘by presenting my card
of visit. Do me the favour to add that I shall be happy to wait on Mrs
Clennam, to offer my personal compliments, and to apologise for having
occasioned any agitation in this tranquil corner, if it should suit her
convenience to endure the presence of a stranger for a few minutes,
after he shall have changed his wet clothes and fortified himself with
something to eat and drink.’

Jeremiah made all despatch, and said, on his return, ‘She’ll be glad
to see you, sir; but, being conscious that her sick room has no
attractions, wishes me to say that she won’t hold you to your offer, in
case you should think better of it.’

‘To think better of it,’ returned the gallant Blandois, ‘would be to
slight a lady; to slight a lady would be to be deficient in chivalry
towards the sex; and chivalry towards the sex is a part of my
character!’ Thus expressing himself, he threw the draggled skirt of his
cloak over his shoulder, and accompanied Mr Flintwinch to the tavern;
taking up on the road a porter who was waiting with his portmanteau on
the outer side of the gateway.

The house was kept in a homely manner, and the condescension of Mr
Blandois was infinite. It seemed to fill to inconvenience the little bar
in which the widow landlady and her two daughters received him; it was
much too big for the narrow wainscoted room with a bagatelle-board in
it, that was first proposed for his reception; it perfectly swamped the
little private holiday sitting-room of the family, which was finally
given up to him. Here, in dry clothes and scented linen, with sleeked
hair, a great ring on each forefinger and a massive show of watch-chain,
Mr Blandois waiting for his dinner, lolling on a window-seat with his
knees drawn up, looked (for all the difference in the setting of the
jewel) fearfully and wonderfully like a certain Monsieur Rigaud who had
once so waited for his breakfast, lying on the stone ledge of the iron
grating of a cell in a villainous dungeon at Marseilles.

His greed at dinner, too, was closely in keeping with the greed of
Monsieur Rigaud at breakfast. His avaricious manner of collecting all
the eatables about him, and devouring some with his eyes while devouring
others with his jaws, was the same manner. His utter disregard of
other people, as shown in his way of tossing the little womanly toys
of furniture about, flinging favourite cushions under his boots for a
softer rest, and crushing delicate coverings with his big body and his
great black head, had the same brute selfishness at the bottom of it.
The softly moving hands that were so busy among the dishes had the old
wicked facility of the hands that had clung to the bars. And when he
could eat no more, and sat sucking his delicate fingers one by one and
wiping them on a cloth, there wanted nothing but the substitution of
vine-leaves to finish the picture.

On this man, with his moustache going up and his nose coming down in
that most evil of smiles, and with his surface eyes looking as if they
belonged to his dyed hair, and had had their natural power of reflecting
light stopped by some similar process, Nature, always true, and never
working in vain, had set the mark, Beware! It was not her fault, if the
warning were fruitless. She is never to blame in any such instance.

Mr Blandois, having finished his repast and cleaned his fingers, took
a cigar from his pocket, and, lying on the window-seat again, smoked it
out at his leisure, occasionally apostrophising the smoke as it parted
from his thin lips in a thin stream:

‘Blandois, you shall turn the tables on society, my little child. Haha!
Holy blue, you have begun well, Blandois! At a pinch, an excellent
master in English or French; a man for the bosom of families! You have
a quick perception, you have humour, you have ease, you have insinuating
manners, you have a good appearance; in effect, you are a gentleman! A
gentleman you shall live, my small boy, and a gentleman you shall die.
You shall win, however the game goes. They shall all confess your merit,
Blandois. You shall subdue the society which has grievously wronged
you, to your own high spirit. Death of my soul! You are high spirited by
right and by nature, my Blandois!’

To such soothing murmurs did this gentleman smoke out his cigar and
drink out his bottle of wine. Both being finished, he shook himself into
a sitting attitude; and with the concluding serious apostrophe, ‘Hold,
then! Blandois, you ingenious one, have all your wits about you!’ arose
and went back to the house of Clennam and Co.

He was received at the door by Mistress Affery, who, under instructions
from her lord, had lighted up two candles in the hall and a third on the
staircase, and who conducted him to Mrs Clennam’s room. Tea was prepared
there, and such little company arrangements had been made as usually
attended the reception of expected visitors. They were slight on the
greatest occasion, never extending beyond the production of the China
tea-service, and the covering of the bed with a sober and sad drapery.
For the rest, there was the bier-like sofa with the block upon it, and
the figure in the widow’s dress, as if attired for execution; the fire
topped by the mound of damped ashes; the grate with its second little
mound of ashes; the kettle and the smell of black dye; all as they had
been for fifteen years.

Mr Flintwinch presented the gentleman commended to the consideration of
Clennam and Co. Mrs Clennam, who had the letter lying before her, bent
her head and requested him to sit. They looked very closely at one
another. That was but natural curiosity.

‘I thank you, sir, for thinking of a disabled woman like me. Few who
come here on business have any remembrance to bestow on one so removed
from observation. It would be idle to expect that they should have. Out
of sight, out of mind. While I am grateful for the exception, I don’t
complain of the rule.’

Mr Blandois, in his most gentlemanly manner, was afraid he had disturbed
her by unhappily presenting himself at such an unconscionable time. For
which he had already offered his best apologies to Mr--he begged
pardon--but by name had not the distinguished honour--

‘Mr Flintwinch has been connected with the House many years.’

Mr Blandois was Mr Flintwinch’s most obedient humble servant. He
entreated Mr Flintwinch to receive the assurance of his profoundest
consideration.

‘My husband being dead,’ said Mrs Clennam, ‘and my son preferring
another pursuit, our old House has no other representative in these days
than Mr Flintwinch.’

‘What do you call yourself?’ was the surly demand of that gentleman.
‘You have the head of two men.’

‘My sex disqualifies me,’ she proceeded with merely a slight turn of
her eyes in Jeremiah’s direction, ‘from taking a responsible part in
the business, even if I had the ability; and therefore Mr Flintwinch
combines my interest with his own, and conducts it. It is not what it
used to be; but some of our old friends (principally the writers of this
letter) have the kindness not to forget us, and we retain the power
of doing what they entrust to us as efficiently as we ever did. This
however is not interesting to you. You are English, sir?’

‘Faith, madam, no; I am neither born nor bred in England. In effect, I
am of no country,’ said Mr Blandois, stretching out his leg and smiting
it: ‘I descend from half-a-dozen countries.’

‘You have been much about the world?’

‘It is true. By Heaven, madam, I have been here and there and
everywhere!’

‘You have no ties, probably. Are not married?’

‘Madam,’ said Mr Blandois, with an ugly fall of his eyebrows, ‘I adore
your sex, but I am not married--never was.’

Mistress Affery, who stood at the table near him, pouring out the tea,
happened in her dreamy state to look at him as he said these words, and
to fancy that she caught an expression in his eyes which attracted her
own eyes so that she could not get them away. The effect of this fancy
was to keep her staring at him with the tea-pot in her hand, not only to
her own great uneasiness, but manifestly to his, too; and, through them
both, to Mrs Clennam’s and Mr Flintwinch’s. Thus a few ghostly moments
supervened, when they were all confusedly staring without knowing why.

‘Affery,’ her mistress was the first to say, ‘what is the matter with
you?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mistress Affery, with her disengaged left hand
extended towards the visitor. ‘It ain’t me. It’s him!’

‘What does this good woman mean?’ cried Mr Blandois, turning white, hot,
and slowly rising with a look of such deadly wrath that it contrasted
surprisingly with the slight force of his words. ‘How is it possible to
understand this good creature?’

‘It’s _not_ possible,’ said Mr Flintwinch, screwing himself rapidly
in that direction. ‘She don’t know what she means. She’s an idiot, a
wanderer in her mind. She shall have a dose, she shall have such a dose!
Get along with you, my woman,’ he added in her ear, ‘get along with you,
while you know you’re Affery, and before you’re shaken to yeast.’

Mistress Affery, sensible of the danger in which her identity stood,
relinquished the tea-pot as her husband seized it, put her apron over
her head, and in a twinkling vanished. The visitor gradually broke into
a smile, and sat down again.

‘You’ll excuse her, Mr Blandois,’ said Jeremiah, pouring out the tea
himself, ‘she’s failing and breaking up; that’s what she’s about. Do you
take sugar, sir?’

‘Thank you, no tea for me.--Pardon my observing it, but that’s a very
remarkable watch!’

The tea-table was drawn up near the sofa, with a small interval between
it and Mrs Clennam’s own particular table. Mr Blandois in his gallantry
had risen to hand that lady her tea (her dish of toast was already
there), and it was in placing the cup conveniently within her reach that
the watch, lying before her as it always did, attracted his attention.
Mrs Clennam looked suddenly up at him.

‘May I be permitted? Thank you. A fine old-fashioned watch,’ he said,
taking it in his hand. ‘Heavy for use, but massive and genuine. I have
a partiality for everything genuine. Such as I am, I am genuine myself.
Hah! A gentleman’s watch with two cases in the old fashion. May I remove
it from the outer case? Thank you. Aye? An old silk watch-lining, worked
with beads! I have often seen these among old Dutch people and Belgians.
Quaint things!’

‘They are old-fashioned, too,’ said Mrs Clennam.

‘Very. But this is not so old as the watch, I think?’

‘I think not.’

‘Extraordinary how they used to complicate these cyphers!’ remarked Mr
Blandois, glancing up with his own smile again. ‘Now is this D. N. F.?
It might be almost anything.’

‘Those are the letters.’

Mr Flintwinch, who had been observantly pausing all this time with a cup
of tea in his hand, and his mouth open ready to swallow the contents,
began to do so: always entirely filling his mouth before he emptied it
at a gulp; and always deliberating again before he refilled it.

‘D. N. F. was some tender, lovely, fascinating fair-creature, I make no
doubt,’ observed Mr Blandois, as he snapped on the case again. ‘I adore
her memory on the assumption. Unfortunately for my peace of mind,
I adore but too readily. It may be a vice, it may be a virtue, but
adoration of female beauty and merit constitutes three parts of my
character, madam.’

Mr Flintwinch had by this time poured himself out another cup of tea,
which he was swallowing in gulps as before, with his eyes directed to
the invalid.

‘You may be heart-free here, sir,’ she returned to Mr Blandois. ‘Those
letters are not intended, I believe, for the initials of any name.’

‘Of a motto, perhaps,’ said Mr Blandois, casually.

‘Of a sentence. They have always stood, I believe, for Do Not Forget!’

‘And naturally,’ said Mr Blandois, replacing the watch and stepping
backward to his former chair, ‘you do _not_ forget.’

Mr Flintwinch, finishing his tea, not only took a longer gulp than he
had taken yet, but made his succeeding pause under new circumstances:
that is to say, with his head thrown back and his cup held still at his
lips, while his eyes were still directed at the invalid. She had that
force of face, and that concentrated air of collecting her firmness or
obstinacy, which represented in her case what would have been gesture
and action in another, as she replied with her deliberate strength of
speech:

‘No, sir, I do not forget. To lead a life as monotonous as mine has been
during many years, is not the way to forget. To lead a life of
self-correction is not the way to forget. To be sensible of having (as
we all have, every one of us, all the children of Adam!) offences
to expiate and peace to make, does not justify the desire to forget.
Therefore I have long dismissed it, and I neither forget nor wish to
forget.’

Mr Flintwinch, who had latterly been shaking the sediment at the bottom
of his tea-cup, round and round, here gulped it down, and putting the
cup in the tea-tray, as done with, turned his eyes upon Mr Blandois as
if to ask him what he thought of that?

‘All expressed, madam,’ said Mr Blandois, with his smoothest bow and his
white hand on his breast, ‘by the word “naturally,” which I am proud
to have had sufficient apprehension and appreciation (but without
appreciation I could not be Blandois) to employ.’

‘Pardon me, sir,’ she returned, ‘if I doubt the likelihood of a
gentleman of pleasure, and change, and politeness, accustomed to court
and to be courted--’

‘Oh madam! By Heaven!’

‘--If I doubt the likelihood of such a character quite comprehending
what belongs to mine in my circumstances. Not to obtrude doctrine upon
you,’ she looked at the rigid pile of hard pale books before her, ‘(for
you go your own way, and the consequences are on your own head), I will
say this much: that I shape my course by pilots, strictly by proved and
tried pilots, under whom I cannot be shipwrecked--can not be--and that
if I were unmindful of the admonition conveyed in those three letters, I
should not be half as chastened as I am.’

It was curious how she seized the occasion to argue with some invisible
opponent. Perhaps with her own better sense, always turning upon herself
and her own deception.

‘If I forgot my ignorances in my life of health and freedom, I might
complain of the life to which I am now condemned. I never do; I never
have done. If I forgot that this scene, the Earth, is expressly meant to
be a scene of gloom, and hardship, and dark trial, for the creatures who
are made out of its dust, I might have some tenderness for its vanities.
But I have no such tenderness. If I did not know that we are, every one,
the subject (most justly the subject) of a wrath that must be satisfied,
and against which mere actions are nothing, I might repine at the
difference between me, imprisoned here, and the people who pass that
gateway yonder. But I take it as a grace and favour to be elected to
make the satisfaction I am making here, to know what I know for certain
here, and to work out what I have worked out here. My affliction might
otherwise have had no meaning to me. Hence I would forget, and I do
forget, nothing. Hence I am contented, and say it is better with me
than with millions.’

As she spoke these words, she put her hand upon the watch, and restored
it to the precise spot on her little table which it always occupied.
With her touch lingering upon it, she sat for some moments afterwards,
looking at it steadily and half-defiantly.

Mr Blandois, during this exposition, had been strictly attentive,
keeping his eyes fastened on the lady, and thoughtfully stroking his
moustache with his two hands. Mr Flintwinch had been a little fidgety,
and now struck in.

‘There, there, there!’ said he. ‘That is quite understood, Mrs Clennam,
and you have spoken piously and well. Mr Blandois, I suspect, is not
of a pious cast.’

‘On the contrary, sir!’ that gentleman protested, snapping his fingers.
‘Your pardon! It’s a part of my character. I am sensitive, ardent,
conscientious, and imaginative. A sensitive, ardent, conscientious, and
imaginative man, Mr Flintwinch, must be that, or nothing!’

There was an inkling of suspicion in Mr Flintwinch’s face that he might
be nothing, as he swaggered out of his chair (it was characteristic of
this man, as it is of all men similarly marked, that whatever he did,
he overdid, though it were sometimes by only a hairsbreadth), and
approached to take his leave of Mrs Clennam.

‘With what will appear to you the egotism of a sick old woman, sir,’ she
then said, ‘though really through your accidental allusion, I have
been led away into the subject of myself and my infirmities. Being so
considerate as to visit me, I hope you will be likewise so considerate
as to overlook that. Don’t compliment me, if you please.’ For he was
evidently going to do it. ‘Mr Flintwinch will be happy to render you any
service, and I hope your stay in this city may prove agreeable.’

Mr Blandois thanked her, and kissed his hand several times. ‘This is an
old room,’ he remarked, with a sudden sprightliness of manner, looking
round when he got near the door, ‘I have been so interested that I have
not observed it. But it’s a genuine old room.’

‘It is a genuine old house,’ said Mrs Clennam, with her frozen smile. ‘A
place of no pretensions, but a piece of antiquity.’

‘Faith!’ cried the visitor. ‘If Mr Flintwinch would do me the favour to
take me through the rooms on my way out, he could hardly oblige me more.
An old house is a weakness with me. I have many weaknesses, but none
greater. I love and study the picturesque in all its varieties. I have
been called picturesque myself. It is no merit to be picturesque--I
have greater merits, perhaps--but I may be, by an accident. Sympathy,
sympathy!’

‘I tell you beforehand, Mr Blandois, that you’ll find it very dingy and
very bare,’ said Jeremiah, taking up the candle. ‘It’s not worth your
looking at.’But Mr Blandois, smiting him in a friendly manner on the
back, only laughed; so the said Blandois kissed his hand again to Mrs
Clennam, and they went out of the room together.

‘You don’t care to go up-stairs?’ said Jeremiah, on the landing.

‘On the contrary, Mr Flintwinch; if not tiresome to you, I shall be
ravished!’

Mr Flintwinch, therefore, wormed himself up the staircase, and Mr
Blandois followed close. They ascended to the great garret bed-room
which Arthur had occupied on the night of his return. ‘There, Mr
Blandois!’ said Jeremiah, showing it, ‘I hope you may think that worth
coming so high to see. I confess I don’t.’

Mr Blandois being enraptured, they walked through other garrets and
passages, and came down the staircase again. By this time Mr Flintwinch
had remarked that he never found the visitor looking at any room, after
throwing one quick glance around, but always found the visitor looking
at him, Mr Flintwinch. With this discovery in his thoughts, he turned
about on the staircase for another experiment. He met his eyes directly;
and on the instant of their fixing one another, the visitor, with
that ugly play of nose and moustache, laughed (as he had done at every
similar moment since they left Mrs Clennam’s chamber) a diabolically
silent laugh.

As a much shorter man than the visitor, Mr Flintwinch was at the
physical disadvantage of being thus disagreeably leered at from a
height; and as he went first down the staircase, and was usually a
step or two lower than the other, this disadvantage was at the time
increased. He postponed looking at Mr Blandois again until this
accidental inequality was removed by their having entered the late Mr
Clennam’s room. But, then twisting himself suddenly round upon him, he
found his look unchanged.

‘A most admirable old house,’ smiled Mr Blandois. ‘So mysterious. Do you
never hear any haunted noises here?’

‘Noises,’ returned Mr Flintwinch. ‘No.’

‘Nor see any devils?’

‘Not,’ said Mr Flintwinch, grimly screwing himself at his questioner,
‘not any that introduce themselves under that name and in that
capacity.’

‘Haha! A portrait here, I see.’

(Still looking at Mr Flintwinch, as if he were the portrait.)

‘It’s a portrait, sir, as you observe.’

‘May I ask the subject, Mr Flintwinch?’

‘Mr Clennam, deceased. Her husband.’

‘Former owner of the remarkable watch, perhaps?’ said the visitor.

Mr Flintwinch, who had cast his eyes towards the portrait, twisted
himself about again, and again found himself the subject of the same
look and smile. ‘Yes, Mr Blandois,’ he replied tartly. ‘It was his, and
his uncle’s before him, and Lord knows who before him; and that’s all I
can tell you of its pedigree.’

‘That’s a strongly marked character, Mr Flintwinch, our friend
up-stairs.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Jeremiah, twisting himself at the visitor again, as he
did during the whole of this dialogue, like some screw-machine that
fell short of its grip; for the other never changed, and he always
felt obliged to retreat a little. ‘She is a remarkable woman. Great
fortitude--great strength of mind.’

‘They must have been very happy,’ said Blandois.

‘Who?’ demanded Mr Flintwinch, with another screw at him.

Mr Blandois shook his right forefinger towards the sick room, and his
left forefinger towards the portrait, and then, putting his arms akimbo
and striding his legs wide apart, stood smiling down at Mr Flintwinch
with the advancing nose and the retreating moustache.

‘As happy as most other married people, I suppose,’ returned Mr
Flintwinch. ‘I can’t say. I don’t know. There are secrets in all
families.’

‘Secrets!’ cried Mr Blandois, quickly. ‘Say it again, my son.’

‘I say,’ replied Mr Flintwinch, upon whom he had swelled himself so
suddenly that Mr Flintwinch found his face almost brushed by the dilated
chest. ‘I say there are secrets in all families.’

‘So there are,’ cried the other, clapping him on both shoulders, and
rolling him backwards and forwards. ‘Haha! you are right. So there are!
Secrets! Holy Blue! There are the devil’s own secrets in some families,
Mr Flintwinch!’ With that, after clapping Mr Flintwinch on both
shoulders several times, as if in a friendly and humorous way he were
rallying him on a joke he had made, he threw up his arms, threw back
his head, hooked his hands together behind it, and burst into a roar of
laughter. It was in vain for Mr Flintwinch to try another screw at him.
He had his laugh out.

‘But, favour me with the candle a moment,’ he said, when he had done.
‘Let us have a look at the husband of the remarkable lady. Hah!’ holding
up the light at arm’s length. ‘A decided expression of face here too,
though not of the same character. Looks as if he were saying, what is
it--Do Not Forget--does he not, Mr Flintwinch? By Heaven, sir, he does!’

As he returned the candle, he looked at him once more; and then,
leisurely strolling out with him into the hall, declared it to be a
charming old house indeed, and one which had so greatly pleased him that
he would not have missed inspecting it for a hundred pounds.

Throughout these singular freedoms on the part of Mr Blandois, which
involved a general alteration in his demeanour, making it much coarser
and rougher, much more violent and audacious than before, Mr Flintwinch,
whose leathern face was not liable to many changes, preserved its
immobility intact. Beyond now appearing perhaps, to have been left
hanging a trifle too long before that friendly operation of cutting
down, he outwardly maintained an equable composure. They had brought
their survey to a close in the little room at the side of the hall, and
he stood there, eyeing Mr Blandois.

‘I am glad you are so well satisfied, sir,’ was his calm remark. ‘I
didn’t expect it. You seem to be quite in good spirits.’

‘In admirable spirits,’ returned Blandois. ‘Word of honour! never more
refreshed in spirits. Do you ever have presentiments, Mr Flintwinch?’

‘I am not sure that I know what you mean by the term, sir,’ replied that
gentleman.

‘Say, in this case, Mr Flintwinch, undefined anticipations of pleasure
to come.’

‘I can’t say I’m sensible of such a sensation at present,’ returned Mr
Flintwinch with the utmost gravity. ‘If I should find it coming on, I’ll
mention it.’

‘Now I,’ said Blandois, ‘I, my son, have a presentiment to-night that we
shall be well acquainted. Do you find it coming on?’

‘N-no,’ returned Mr Flintwinch, deliberately inquiring of himself. ‘I
can’t say I do.’

‘I have a strong presentiment that we shall become intimately
acquainted.--You have no feeling of that sort yet?’

‘Not yet,’ said Mr Flintwinch.

Mr Blandois, taking him by both shoulders again, rolled him about a
little in his former merry way, then drew his arm through his own, and
invited him to come off and drink a bottle of wine like a dear deep old
dog as he was.

Without a moment’s indecision, Mr Flintwinch accepted the invitation,
and they went out to the quarters where the traveller was lodged,
through a heavy rain which had rattled on the windows, roofs, and
pavements, ever since nightfall. The thunder and lightning had long ago
passed over, but the rain was furious. On their arrival at Mr Blandois’
room, a bottle of port wine was ordered by that gallant gentleman; who
(crushing every pretty thing he could collect, in the soft disposition
of his dainty figure) coiled himself upon the window-seat, while Mr
Flintwinch took a chair opposite to him, with the table between them. Mr
Blandois proposed having the largest glasses in the house, to which Mr
Flintwinch assented. The bumpers filled, Mr Blandois, with a roystering
gaiety, clinked the top of his glass against the bottom of Mr
Flintwinch’s, and the bottom of his glass against the top of Mr
Flintwinch’s, and drank to the intimate acquaintance he foresaw.
Mr Flintwinch gravely pledged him, and drank all the wine he could get,
and said nothing. As often as Mr Blandois clinked glasses (which was
at every replenishment), Mr Flintwinch stolidly did his part of the
clinking, and would have stolidly done his companion’s part of the wine
as well as his own: being, except in the article of palate, a mere cask.

In short, Mr Blandois found that to pour port wine into the reticent
Flintwinch was, not to open him but to shut him up. Moreover, he had
the appearance of a perfect ability to go on all night; or, if occasion
were, all next day and all next night; whereas Mr Blandois soon grew
indistinctly conscious of swaggering too fiercely and boastfully. He
therefore terminated the entertainment at the end of the third bottle.

‘You will draw upon us to-morrow, sir,’ said Mr Flintwinch, with a
business-like face at parting.

‘My Cabbage,’ returned the other, taking him by the collar with both
hands, ‘I’ll draw upon you; have no fear. Adieu, my Flintwinch. Receive
at parting;’ here he gave him a southern embrace, and kissed him soundly
on both cheeks; ‘the word of a gentleman! By a thousand Thunders, you
shall see me again!’

He did not present himself next day, though the letter of advice came
duly to hand. Inquiring after him at night, Mr Flintwinch found, with
surprise, that he had paid his bill and gone back to the Continent by
way of Calais. Nevertheless, Jeremiah scraped out of his cogitating
face a lively conviction that Mr Blandois would keep his word on this
occasion, and would be seen again.




CHAPTER 31. Spirit


Anybody may pass, any day, in the thronged thoroughfares of the
metropolis, some meagre, wrinkled, yellow old man (who might be supposed
to have dropped from the stars, if there were any star in the Heavens
dull enough to be suspected of casting off so feeble a spark), creeping
along with a scared air, as though bewildered and a little frightened
by the noise and bustle. This old man is always a little old man. If he
were ever a big old man, he has shrunk into a little old man; if he were
always a little old man, he has dwindled into a less old man. His coat
is a colour, and cut, that never was the mode anywhere, at any period.
Clearly, it was not made for him, or for any individual mortal. Some
wholesale contractor measured Fate for five thousand coats of such
quality, and Fate has lent this old coat to this old man, as one of a
long unfinished line of many old men. It has always large dull metal
buttons, similar to no other buttons. This old man wears a hat, a
thumbed and napless and yet an obdurate hat, which has never adapted
itself to the shape of his poor head. His coarse shirt and his coarse
neckcloth have no more individuality than his coat and hat; they have
the same character of not being his--of not being anybody’s. Yet this
old man wears these clothes with a certain unaccustomed air of being
dressed and elaborated for the public ways; as though he passed the
greater part of his time in a nightcap and gown. And so, like the
country mouse in the second year of a famine, come to see the town
mouse, and timidly threading his way to the town-mouse’s lodging through
a city of cats, this old man passes in the streets.

Sometimes, on holidays towards evening, he will be seen to walk with a
slightly increased infirmity, and his old eyes will glimmer with a moist
and marshy light. Then the little old man is drunk. A very small
measure will overset him; he may be bowled off his unsteady legs with
a half-pint pot. Some pitying acquaintance--chance acquaintance
very often--has warmed up his weakness with a treat of beer, and the
consequence will be the lapse of a longer time than usual before he
shall pass again. For the little old man is going home to the Workhouse;
and on his good behaviour they do not let him out often (though methinks
they might, considering the few years he has before him to go out in,
under the sun); and on his bad behaviour they shut him up closer than
ever in a grove of two score and nineteen more old men, every one of
whom smells of all the others.

Mrs Plornish’s father,--a poor little reedy piping old gentleman, like
a worn-out bird; who had been in what he called the music-binding
business, and met with great misfortunes, and who had seldom been able
to make his way, or to see it or to pay it, or to do anything at all
with it but find it no thoroughfare,--had retired of his own accord to
the Workhouse which was appointed by law to be the Good Samaritan of his
district (without the twopence, which was bad political economy), on
the settlement of that execution which had carried Mr Plornish to the
Marshalsea College. Previous to his son-in-law’s difficulties coming to
that head, Old Nandy (he was always so called in his legal Retreat, but
he was Old Mr Nandy among the Bleeding Hearts) had sat in a corner of
the Plornish fireside, and taken his bite and sup out of the Plornish
cupboard. He still hoped to resume that domestic position when Fortune
should smile upon his son-in-law; in the meantime, while she preserved
an immovable countenance, he was, and resolved to remain, one of these
little old men in a grove of little old men with a community of flavour.

But no poverty in him, and no coat on him that never was the mode, and
no Old Men’s Ward for his dwelling-place, could quench his daughter’s
admiration. Mrs Plornish was as proud of her father’s talents as she
could possibly have been if they had made him Lord Chancellor. She had
as firm a belief in the sweetness and propriety of his manners as she
could possibly have had if he had been Lord Chamberlain. The poor little
old man knew some pale and vapid little songs, long out of date, about
Chloe, and Phyllis, and Strephon being wounded by the son of Venus;
and for Mrs Plornish there was no such music at the Opera as the small
internal flutterings and chirpings wherein he would discharge himself
of these ditties, like a weak, little, broken barrel-organ, ground by
a baby. On his ‘days out,’ those flecks of light in his flat vista of
pollard old men,’ it was at once Mrs Plornish’s delight and sorrow,
when he was strong with meat, and had taken his full halfpenny-worth of
porter, to say, ‘Sing us a song, Father.’ Then he would give them Chloe,
and if he were in pretty good spirits, Phyllis also--Strephon he had
hardly been up to since he went into retirement--and then would Mrs
Plornish declare she did believe there never was such a singer as
Father, and wipe her eyes.

If he had come from Court on these occasions, nay, if he had been the
noble Refrigerator come home triumphantly from a foreign court to be
presented and promoted on his last tremendous failure, Mrs Plornish
could not have handed him with greater elevation about Bleeding Heart
Yard. ‘Here’s Father,’ she would say, presenting him to a neighbour.
‘Father will soon be home with us for good, now. Ain’t Father looking
well? Father’s a sweeter singer than ever; you’d never have forgotten
it, if you’d aheard him just now.’ As to Mr Plornish, he had married
these articles of belief in marrying Mr Nandy’s daughter, and only
wondered how it was that so gifted an old gentleman had not made a
fortune. This he attributed, after much reflection, to his musical
genius not having been scientifically developed in his youth. ‘For why,’
argued Mr Plornish, ‘why go a-binding music when you’ve got it in
yourself? That’s where it is, I consider.’

Old Nandy had a patron: one patron. He had a patron who in a certain
sumptuous way--an apologetic way, as if he constantly took an admiring
audience to witness that he really could not help being more free
with this old fellow than they might have expected, on account of his
simplicity and poverty--was mightily good to him. Old Nandy had
been several times to the Marshalsea College, communicating with his
son-in-law during his short durance there; and had happily acquired to
himself, and had by degrees and in course of time much improved, the
patronage of the Father of that national institution.

Mr Dorrit was in the habit of receiving this old man as if the old man
held of him in vassalage under some feudal tenure. He made little treats
and teas for him, as if he came in with his homage from some outlying
district where the tenantry were in a primitive state. It seemed as if
there were moments when he could by no means have sworn but that the old
man was an ancient retainer of his, who had been meritoriously faithful.
When he mentioned him, he spoke of him casually as his old pensioner. He
had a wonderful satisfaction in seeing him, and in commenting on his
decayed condition after he was gone. It appeared to him amazing that he
could hold up his head at all, poor creature. ‘In the Workhouse, sir,
the Union; no privacy, no visitors, no station, no respect, no
speciality. Most deplorable!’

It was Old Nandy’s birthday, and they let him out. He said nothing about
its being his birthday, or they might have kept him in; for such old
men should not be born. He passed along the streets as usual to Bleeding
Heart Yard, and had his dinner with his daughter and son-in-law, and
gave them Phyllis. He had hardly concluded, when Little Dorrit looked in
to see how they all were.

‘Miss Dorrit,’ said Mrs Plornish, ‘here’s Father! Ain’t he looking nice?
And such voice he’s in!’

Little Dorrit gave him her hand, and smilingly said she had not seen him
this long time.

‘No, they’re rather hard on poor Father,’ said Mrs Plornish with a
lengthening face, ‘and don’t let him have half as much change and fresh
air as would benefit him. But he’ll soon be home for good, now. Won’t
you, Father?’

‘Yes, my dear, I hope so. In good time, please God.’

Here Mr Plornish delivered himself of an oration which he invariably
made, word for word the same, on all such opportunities. It was couched
in the following terms:

‘John Edward Nandy. Sir. While there’s a ounce of wittles or drink of
any sort in this present roof, you’re fully welcome to your share on
it. While there’s a handful of fire or a mouthful of bed in this present
roof, you’re fully welcome to your share on it. If so be as there should
be nothing in this present roof, you should be as welcome to your share
on it as if it was something, much or little. And this is what I mean
and so I don’t deceive you, and consequently which is to stand out is to
entreat of you, and therefore why not do it?’

To this lucid address, which Mr Plornish always delivered as if he had
composed it (as no doubt he had) with enormous labour, Mrs Plornish’s
father pipingly replied:

‘I thank you kindly, Thomas, and I know your intentions well, which is
the same I thank you kindly for. But no, Thomas. Until such times as
it’s not to take it out of your children’s mouths, which take it is, and
call it by what name you will it do remain and equally deprive, though
may they come, and too soon they can not come, no Thomas, no!’

Mrs Plornish, who had been turning her face a little away with a corner
of her apron in her hand, brought herself back to the conversation again
by telling Miss Dorrit that Father was going over the water to pay his
respects, unless she knew of any reason why it might not be agreeable.

Her answer was, ‘I am going straight home, and if he will come with me
I shall be so glad to take care of him--so glad,’ said Little Dorrit,
always thoughtful of the feelings of the weak, ‘of his company.’

‘There, Father!’ cried Mrs Plornish. ‘Ain’t you a gay young man to
be going for a walk along with Miss Dorrit! Let me tie your
neck-handkerchief into a regular good bow, for you’re a regular beau
yourself, Father, if ever there was one.’

With this filial joke his daughter smartened him up, and gave him a
loving hug, and stood at the door with her weak child in her arms, and
her strong child tumbling down the steps, looking after her little old
father as he toddled away with his arm under Little Dorrit’s.

They walked at a slow pace, and Little Dorrit took him by the Iron
Bridge and sat him down there for a rest, and they looked over at the
water and talked about the shipping, and the old man mentioned what he
would do if he had a ship full of gold coming home to him (his plan was
to take a noble lodging for the Plornishes and himself at a Tea Gardens,
and live there all the rest of their lives, attended on by the waiter),
and it was a special birthday of the old man. They were within five
minutes of their destination, when, at the corner of her own street,
they came upon Fanny in her new bonnet bound for the same port.

‘Why, good gracious me, Amy!’ cried that young lady starting. ‘You never
mean it!’

‘Mean what, Fanny dear?’

‘Well! I could have believed a great deal of you,’ returned the young
lady with burning indignation, ‘but I don’t think even I could have
believed this, of even you!’

‘Fanny!’ cried Little Dorrit, wounded and astonished.

‘Oh! Don’t Fanny me, you mean little thing, don’t! The idea of coming
along the open streets, in the broad light of day, with a Pauper!’
(firing off the last word as if it were a ball from an air-gun).

‘O Fanny!’

‘I tell you not to Fanny me, for I’ll not submit to it! I never knew
such a thing. The way in which you are resolved and determined to
disgrace us on all occasions, is really infamous. You bad little thing!’

‘Does it disgrace anybody,’ said Little Dorrit, very gently, ‘to take
care of this poor old man?’

‘Yes, miss,’ returned her sister, ‘and you ought to know it does.
And you do know it does, and you do it because you know it does. The
principal pleasure of your life is to remind your family of their
misfortunes. And the next great pleasure of your existence is to keep
low company. But, however, if you have no sense of decency, I
have. You’ll please to allow me to go on the other side of the way,
unmolested.’

With this, she bounced across to the opposite pavement. The old
disgrace, who had been deferentially bowing a pace or two off (for
Little Dorrit had let his arm go in her wonder, when Fanny began), and
who had been hustled and cursed by impatient passengers for stopping the
way, rejoined his companion, rather giddy, and said, ‘I hope nothing’s
wrong with your honoured father, Miss? I hope there’s nothing the matter
in the honoured family?’

‘No, no,’ returned Little Dorrit. ‘No, thank you. Give me your arm
again, Mr Nandy. We shall soon be there now.’

So she talked to him as she had talked before, and they came to the
Lodge and found Mr Chivery on the lock, and went in. Now, it happened
that the Father of the Marshalsea was sauntering towards the Lodge at
the moment when they were coming out of it, entering the prison arm in
arm. As the spectacle of their approach met his view, he displayed the
utmost agitation and despondency of mind; and--altogether regardless of
Old Nandy, who, making his reverence, stood with his hat in his hand, as
he always did in that gracious presence--turned about, and hurried in at
his own doorway and up the staircase.

Leaving the old unfortunate, whom in an evil hour she had taken under
her protection, with a hurried promise to return to him directly, Little
Dorrit hastened after her father, and, on the staircase, found Fanny
following her, and flouncing up with offended dignity. The three came
into the room almost together; and the Father sat down in his chair,
buried his face in his hands, and uttered a groan.

‘Of course,’ said Fanny. ‘Very proper. Poor, afflicted Pa! Now, I hope
you believe me, Miss?’

‘What is it, father?’ cried Little Dorrit, bending over him. ‘Have I
made you unhappy, father? Not I, I hope!’

‘You hope, indeed! I dare say! Oh, you’--Fanny paused for a sufficiently
strong expression--‘you Common-minded little Amy! You complete
prison-child!’

He stopped these angry reproaches with a wave of his hand, and sobbed
out, raising his face and shaking his melancholy head at his younger
daughter, ‘Amy, I know that you are innocent in intention. But you
have cut me to the soul.’

‘Innocent in intention!’ the implacable Fanny struck in. ‘Stuff in
intention! Low in intention! Lowering of the family in intention!’

‘Father!’ cried Little Dorrit, pale and trembling. ‘I am very sorry.
Pray forgive me. Tell me how it is, that I may not do it again!’

‘How it is, you prevaricating little piece of goods!’ cried Fanny. ‘You
know how it is. I have told you already, so don’t fly in the face of
Providence by attempting to deny it!’

‘Hush! Amy,’ said the father, passing his pocket-handkerchief several
times across his face, and then grasping it convulsively in the hand
that dropped across his knee, ‘I have done what I could to keep you
select here; I have done what I could to retain you a position here. I
may have succeeded; I may not. You may know it; you may not. I give no
opinion. I have endured everything here but humiliation. That I have
happily been spared--until this day.’

Here his convulsive grasp unclosed itself, and he put his
pocket-handkerchief to his eyes again. Little Dorrit, on the ground
beside him, with her imploring hand upon his arm, watched him
remorsefully. Coming out of his fit of grief, he clenched his
pocket-handkerchief once more.

‘Humiliation I have happily been spared until this day. Through all
my troubles there has been that--Spirit in myself, and that--that
submission to it, if I may use the term, in those about me, which has
spared me--ha--humiliation. But this day, this minute, I have keenly
felt it.’

‘Of course! How could it be otherwise?’ exclaimed the irrepressible
Fanny. ‘Careering and prancing about with a Pauper!’ (air-gun again).

‘But, dear father,’ cried Little Dorrit, ‘I don’t justify myself for
having wounded your dear heart--no! Heaven knows I don’t!’ She clasped
her hands in quite an agony of distress. ‘I do nothing but beg and pray
you to be comforted and overlook it. But if I had not known that you
were kind to the old man yourself, and took much notice of him, and were
always glad to see him, I would not have come here with him, father, I
would not, indeed. What I have been so unhappy as to do, I have done
in mistake. I would not wilfully bring a tear to your eyes, dear love!’
said Little Dorrit, her heart well-nigh broken, ‘for anything the world
could give me, or anything it could take away.’

Fanny, with a partly angry and partly repentant sob, began to cry
herself, and to say--as this young lady always said when she was half in
passion and half out of it, half spiteful with herself and half spiteful
with everybody else--that she wished she were dead.

The Father of the Marshalsea in the meantime took his younger daughter
to his breast, and patted her head.

‘There, there! Say no more, Amy, say no more, my child. I will forget it
as soon as I can. I,’ with hysterical cheerfulness, ‘I--shall soon be
able to dismiss it. It is perfectly true, my dear, that I am always glad
to see my old pensioner--as such, as such--and that I do--ha--extend as
much protection and kindness to the--hum--the bruised reed--I trust I
may so call him without impropriety--as in my circumstances, I can. It
is quite true that this is the case, my dear child. At the same
time, I preserve in doing this, if I may--ha--if I may use the
expression--Spirit. Becoming Spirit. And there are some things which
are,’ he stopped to sob, ‘irreconcilable with that, and wound
that--wound it deeply. It is not that I have seen my good Amy
attentive, and--ha--condescending to my old pensioner--it is not _that_
that hurts me. It is, if I am to close the painful subject by being
explicit, that I have seen my child, my own child, my own daughter,
coming into this College out of the public streets--smiling!
smiling!--arm in arm with--O my God, a livery!’

This reference to the coat of no cut and no time, the unfortunate
gentleman gasped forth, in a scarcely audible voice, and with his
clenched pocket-handkerchief raised in the air. His excited feelings
might have found some further painful utterance, but for a knock at the
door, which had been already twice repeated, and to which Fanny (still
wishing herself dead, and indeed now going so far as to add, buried)
cried ‘Come in!’

‘Ah, Young John!’ said the Father, in an altered and calmed voice. ‘What
is it, Young John?’

‘A letter for you, sir, being left in the Lodge just this minute, and a
message with it, I thought, happening to be there myself, sir, I would
bring it to your room.’ The speaker’s attention was much distracted by
the piteous spectacle of Little Dorrit at her father’s feet, with her
head turned away.

‘Indeed, John? Thank you.’

‘The letter is from Mr Clennam, sir--it’s the answer--and the message
was, sir, that Mr Clennam also sent his compliments, and word that he
would do himself the pleasure of calling this afternoon, hoping to see
you, and likewise,’ attention more distracted than before, ‘Miss Amy.’

‘Oh!’ As the Father glanced into the letter (there was a bank-note in
it), he reddened a little, and patted Amy on the head afresh. ‘Thank
you, Young John. Quite right. Much obliged to you for your attention. No
one waiting?’

‘No, sir, no one waiting.’

‘Thank you, John. How is your mother, Young John?’

‘Thank you, sir, she’s not quite as well as we could wish--in fact, we
none of us are, except father--but she’s pretty well, sir.’

‘Say we sent our remembrances, will you? Say kind remembrances, if you
please, Young John.’

‘Thank you, sir, I will.’ And Mr Chivery junior went his way, having
spontaneously composed on the spot an entirely new epitaph for himself,
to the effect that Here lay the body of John Chivery, Who, Having
at such a date, Beheld the idol of his life, In grief and tears, And
feeling unable to bear the harrowing spectacle, Immediately repaired to
the abode of his inconsolable parents, And terminated his existence by
his own rash act.

‘There, there, Amy!’ said the Father, when Young John had closed the
door, ‘let us say no more about it.’ The last few minutes had improved
his spirits remarkably, and he was quite lightsome. ‘Where is my old
pensioner all this while? We must not leave him by himself any longer,
or he will begin to suppose he is not welcome, and that would pain me.
Will you fetch him, my child, or shall I?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind, father,’ said Little Dorrit, trying to bring her
sobbing to a close.

‘Certainly I will go, my dear. I forgot; your eyes are rather red.
There! Cheer up, Amy. Don’t be uneasy about me. I am quite myself again,
my love, quite myself. Go to your room, Amy, and make yourself look
comfortable and pleasant to receive Mr Clennam.’

‘I would rather stay in my own room, Father,’ returned Little Dorrit,
finding it more difficult than before to regain her composure. ‘I would
far rather not see Mr Clennam.’

‘Oh, fie, fie, my dear, that’s folly. Mr Clennam is a very gentlemanly
man--very gentlemanly. A little reserved at times; but I will say
extremely gentlemanly. I couldn’t think of your not being here to
receive Mr Clennam, my dear, especially this afternoon. So go and
freshen yourself up, Amy; go and freshen yourself up, like a good girl.’

Thus directed, Little Dorrit dutifully rose and obeyed: only pausing
for a moment as she went out of the room, to give her sister a kiss of
reconciliation. Upon which, that young lady, feeling much harassed
in her mind, and having for the time worn out the wish with which she
generally relieved it, conceived and executed the brilliant idea of
wishing Old Nandy dead, rather than that he should come bothering there
like a disgusting, tiresome, wicked wretch, and making mischief between
two sisters.

The Father of the Marshalsea, even humming a tune, and wearing his black
velvet cap a little on one side, so much improved were his spirits, went
down into the yard, and found his old pensioner standing there hat in
hand just within the gate, as he had stood all this time. ‘Come, Nandy!’
said he, with great suavity. ‘Come up-stairs, Nandy; you know the way;
why don’t you come up-stairs?’ He went the length, on this occasion,
of giving him his hand and saying, ‘How are you, Nandy? Are you pretty
well?’ To which that vocalist returned, ‘I thank you, honoured sir, I am
all the better for seeing your honour.’ As they went along the yard, the
Father of the Marshalsea presented him to a Collegian of recent date.
‘An old acquaintance of mine, sir, an old pensioner.’ And then said, ‘Be
covered, my good Nandy; put your hat on,’ with great consideration.

His patronage did not stop here; for he charged Maggy to get the tea
ready, and instructed her to buy certain tea-cakes, fresh butter,
eggs, cold ham, and shrimps: to purchase which collation he gave her a
bank-note for ten pounds, laying strict injunctions on her to be careful
of the change. These preparations were in an advanced stage of progress,
and his daughter Amy had come back with her work, when Clennam presented
himself; whom he most graciously received, and besought to join their
meal.

‘Amy, my love, you know Mr Clennam even better than I have the happiness
of doing. Fanny, my dear, you are acquainted with Mr Clennam.’ Fanny
acknowledged him haughtily; the position she tacitly took up in all such
cases being that there was a vast conspiracy to insult the family by not
understanding it, or sufficiently deferring to it, and here was one of
the conspirators. ‘This, Mr Clennam, you must know, is an old pensioner
of mine, Old Nandy, a very faithful old man.’ (He always spoke of him as
an object of great antiquity, but he was two or three years younger than
himself.) ‘Let me see. You know Plornish, I think? I think my daughter
Amy has mentioned to me that you know poor Plornish?’

‘O yes!’ said Arthur Clennam.

‘Well, sir, this is Mrs Plornish’s father.’

‘Indeed? I am glad to see him.’

‘You would be more glad if you knew his many good qualities, Mr
Clennam.’

‘I hope I shall come to know them through knowing him,’ said Arthur,
secretly pitying the bowed and submissive figure.

‘It is a holiday with him, and he comes to see his old friends, who are
always glad to see him,’ observed the Father of the Marshalsea. Then he
added behind his hand, [‘Union, poor old fellow. Out for the day.’)

By this time Maggy, quietly assisted by her Little Mother, had spread
the board, and the repast was ready. It being hot weather and the prison
very close, the window was as wide open as it could be pushed. ‘If Maggy
will spread that newspaper on the window-sill, my dear,’ remarked the
Father complacently and in a half whisper to Little Dorrit, ‘my old
pensioner can have his tea there, while we are having ours.’

So, with a gulf between him and the good company of about a foot in
width, standard measure, Mrs Plornish’s father was handsomely regaled.
Clennam had never seen anything like his magnanimous protection by that
other Father, he of the Marshalsea; and was lost in the contemplation of
its many wonders.

The most striking of these was perhaps the relishing manner in which he
remarked on the pensioner’s infirmities and failings, as if he were
a gracious Keeper making a running commentary on the decline of the
harmless animal he exhibited.

‘Not ready for more ham yet, Nandy? Why, how slow you are! (His last
teeth,’ he explained to the company, ‘are going, poor old boy.’)

At another time, he said, ‘No shrimps, Nandy?’ and on his not instantly
replying, observed, [‘His hearing is becoming very defective. He’ll be
deaf directly.’)

At another time he asked him, ‘Do you walk much, Nandy, about the yard
within the walls of that place of yours?’

‘No, sir; no. I haven’t any great liking for that.’

‘No, to be sure,’ he assented. ‘Very natural.’ Then he privately
informed the circle [‘Legs going.’)

Once he asked the pensioner, in that general clemency which asked him
anything to keep him afloat, how old his younger grandchild was?

‘John Edward,’ said the pensioner, slowly laying down his knife and fork
to consider. ‘How old, sir? Let me think now.’

The Father of the Marshalsea tapped his forehead [‘Memory weak.’)

‘John Edward, sir? Well, I really forget. I couldn’t say at this minute,
sir, whether it’s two and two months, or whether it’s two and five
months. It’s one or the other.’

‘Don’t distress yourself by worrying your mind about it,’ he returned,
with infinite forbearance. [‘Faculties evidently decaying--old man rusts
in the life he leads!’)

The more of these discoveries that he persuaded himself he made in the
pensioner, the better he appeared to like him; and when he got out of
his chair after tea to bid the pensioner good-bye, on his intimating
that he feared, honoured sir, his time was running out, he made himself
look as erect and strong as possible.

‘We don’t call this a shilling, Nandy, you know,’ he said, putting one
in his hand. ‘We call it tobacco.’

‘Honoured sir, I thank you. It shall buy tobacco. My thanks and duty to
Miss Amy and Miss Fanny. I wish you good night, Mr Clennam.’

‘And mind you don’t forget us, you know, Nandy,’ said the Father. ‘You
must come again, mind, whenever you have an afternoon. You must not come
out without seeing us, or we shall be jealous. Good night, Nandy. Be
very careful how you descend the stairs, Nandy; they are rather uneven
and worn.’ With that he stood on the landing, watching the old man down:
and when he came into the room again, said, with a solemn satisfaction
on him, ‘A melancholy sight that, Mr Clennam, though one has the
consolation of knowing that he doesn’t feel it himself. The poor old
fellow is a dismal wreck. Spirit broken and gone--pulverised--crushed
out of him, sir, completely!’

As Clennam had a purpose in remaining, he said what he could responsive
to these sentiments, and stood at the window with their enunciator,
while Maggy and her Little Mother washed the tea-service and cleared it
away. He noticed that his companion stood at the window with the air of
an affable and accessible Sovereign, and that, when any of his people in
the yard below looked up, his recognition of their salutes just stopped
short of a blessing.

When Little Dorrit had her work on the table, and Maggy hers on the
bedstead, Fanny fell to tying her bonnet as a preliminary to her
departure. Arthur, still having his purpose, still remained. At this
time the door opened, without any notice, and Mr Tip came in. He kissed
Amy as she started up to meet him, nodded to Fanny, nodded to his
father, gloomed on the visitor without further recognition, and sat
down.

‘Tip, dear,’ said Little Dorrit, mildly, shocked by this, ‘don’t you
see--’

‘Yes, I see, Amy. If you refer to the presence of any visitor you have
here--I say, if you refer to that,’ answered Tip, jerking his head with
emphasis towards his shoulder nearest Clennam, ‘I see!’

‘Is that all you say?’

‘That’s all I say. And I suppose,’ added the lofty young man, after a
moment’s pause, ‘that visitor will understand me, when I say that’s all
I say. In short, I suppose the visitor will understand that he hasn’t
used me like a gentleman.’

‘I do not understand that,’ observed the obnoxious personage referred to
with tranquillity.

‘No? Why, then, to make it clearer to you, sir, I beg to let you know
that when I address what I call a properly-worded appeal, and an urgent
appeal, and a delicate appeal, to an individual, for a small temporary
accommodation, easily within his power--easily within his power,
mind!--and when that individual writes back word to me that he begs to
be excused, I consider that he doesn’t treat me like a gentleman.’

The Father of the Marshalsea, who had surveyed his son in silence, no
sooner heard this sentiment, than he began in angry voice:--

‘How dare you--’ But his son stopped him.

‘Now, don’t ask me how I dare, father, because that’s bosh. As to the
fact of the line of conduct I choose to adopt towards the individual
present, you ought to be proud of my showing a proper spirit.’

‘I should think so!’ cried Fanny.

‘A proper spirit?’ said the Father. ‘Yes, a proper spirit; a becoming
spirit. Is it come to this that my son teaches me--_me_--spirit!’

‘Now, don’t let us bother about it, father, or have any row on the
subject. I have fully made up my mind that the individual present has
not treated me like a gentleman. And there’s an end of it.’

‘But there is not an end of it, sir,’ returned the Father. ‘But there
shall not be an end of it. You have made up your mind? You have made up
your mind?’

‘Yes, _I_ have. What’s the good of keeping on like that?’

‘Because,’ returned the Father, in a great heat, ‘you had no right to
make up your mind to what is monstrous, to what is--ha--immoral, to what
is--hum--parricidal. No, Mr Clennam, I beg, sir. Don’t ask me to desist;
there is a--hum--a general principle involved here, which rises even
above considerations of--ha--hospitality. I object to the assertion made
by my son. I--ha--I personally repel it.’

‘Why, what is it to you, father?’ returned the son, over his shoulder.

‘What is it to me, sir? I have a--hum--a spirit, sir, that will not
endure it. I,’ he took out his pocket-handkerchief again and dabbed his
face. ‘I am outraged and insulted by it. Let me suppose the case that I
myself may at a certain time--ha--or times, have made a--hum--an appeal,
and a properly-worded appeal, and a delicate appeal, and an urgent
appeal to some individual for a small temporary accommodation. Let me
suppose that that accommodation could have been easily extended, and was
not extended, and that that individual informed me that he begged to
be excused. Am I to be told by my own son, that I therefore received
treatment not due to a gentleman, and that I--ha--I submitted to it?’

His daughter Amy gently tried to calm him, but he would not on any
account be calmed. He said his spirit was up, and wouldn’t endure this.

Was he to be told that, he wished to know again, by his own son on his
own hearth, to his own face? Was that humiliation to be put upon him by
his own blood?

‘You are putting it on yourself, father, and getting into all this
injury of your own accord!’ said the young gentleman morosely. ‘What I
have made up my mind about has nothing to do with you. What I said had
nothing to do with you. Why need you go trying on other people’s hats?’

‘I reply it has everything to do with me,’ returned the Father. ‘I point
out to you, sir, with indignation, that--hum--the--ha--delicacy and
peculiarity of your father’s position should strike you dumb, sir, if
nothing else should, in laying down such--ha--such unnatural principles.
Besides; if you are not filial, sir, if you discard that duty, you
are at least--hum--not a Christian? Are you--ha--an Atheist? And is it
Christian, let me ask you, to stigmatise and denounce an individual
for begging to be excused this time, when the same individual
may--ha--respond with the required accommodation next time? Is it the
part of a Christian not to--hum--not to try him again?’ He had worked
himself into quite a religious glow and fervour.

‘I see precious well,’ said Mr Tip, rising, ‘that I shall get no
sensible or fair argument here to-night, and so the best thing I can do
is to cut. Good night, Amy. Don’t be vexed. I am very sorry it happens
here, and you here, upon my soul I am; but I can’t altogether part with
my spirit, even for your sake, old girl.’

With those words he put on his hat and went out, accompanied by Miss
Fanny; who did not consider it spirited on her part to take leave of
Clennam with any less opposing demonstration than a stare, importing
that she had always known him for one of the large body of conspirators.

When they were gone, the Father of the Marshalsea was at first inclined
to sink into despondency again, and would have done so, but that a
gentleman opportunely came up within a minute or two to attend him to
the Snuggery. It was the gentleman Clennam had seen on the night of his
own accidental detention there, who had that impalpable grievance about
the misappropriated Fund on which the Marshal was supposed to batten.
He presented himself as deputation to escort the Father to the Chair, it
being an occasion on which he had promised to preside over the assembled
Collegians in the enjoyment of a little Harmony.

‘Such, you see, Mr Clennam,’ said the Father, ‘are the incongruities
of my position here. But a public duty! No man, I am sure, would more
readily recognise a public duty than yourself.’

Clennam besought him not to delay a moment.

‘Amy, my dear, if you can persuade Mr Clennam to stay longer, I can
leave the honours of our poor apology for an establishment with
confidence in your hands, and perhaps you may do something towards
erasing from Mr Clennam’s mind the--ha--untoward and unpleasant
circumstance which has occurred since tea-time.’

Clennam assured him that it had made no impression on his mind, and
therefore required no erasure.

‘My dear sir,’ said the Father, with a removal of his black cap and a
grasp of Clennam’s hand, combining to express the safe receipt of his
note and enclosure that afternoon, ‘Heaven ever bless you!’

So, at last, Clennam’s purpose in remaining was attained, and he could
speak to Little Dorrit with nobody by. Maggy counted as nobody, and she
was by.




CHAPTER 32. More Fortune-Telling


Maggy sat at her work in her great white cap with its quantity of opaque
frilling hiding what profile she had (she had none to spare), and her
serviceable eye brought to bear upon her occupation, on the window side
of the room. What with her flapping cap, and what with her unserviceable
eye, she was quite partitioned off from her Little Mother, whose seat
was opposite the window. The tread and shuffle of feet on the pavement
of the yard had much diminished since the taking of the Chair, the tide
of Collegians having set strongly in the direction of Harmony. Some few
who had no music in their souls, or no money in their pockets, dawdled
about; and the old spectacle of the visitor-wife and the depressed
unseasoned prisoner still lingered in corners, as broken cobwebs and
such unsightly discomforts draggle in corners of other places. It was
the quietest time the College knew, saving the night hours when the
Collegians took the benefit of the act of sleep. The occasional rattle
of applause upon the tables of the Snuggery, denoted the successful
termination of a morsel of Harmony; or the responsive acceptance, by
the united children, of some toast or sentiment offered to them by their
Father. Occasionally, a vocal strain more sonorous than the generality
informed the listener that some boastful bass was in blue water, or in
the hunting field, or with the reindeer, or on the mountain, or among
the heather; but the Marshal of the Marshalsea knew better, and had got
him hard and fast.

As Arthur Clennam moved to sit down by the side of Little Dorrit, she
trembled so that she had much ado to hold her needle. Clennam gently
put his hand upon her work, and said, ‘Dear Little Dorrit, let me lay it
down.’

She yielded it to him, and he put it aside. Her hands were then
nervously clasping together, but he took one of them.

‘How seldom I have seen you lately, Little Dorrit!’

‘I have been busy, sir.’

‘But I heard only to-day,’ said Clennam, ‘by mere accident, of your
having been with those good people close by me. Why not come to me,
then?’

‘I--I don’t know. Or rather, I thought you might be busy too. You
generally are now, are you not?’

He saw her trembling little form and her downcast face, and the eyes
that drooped the moment they were raised to his--he saw them almost with
as much concern as tenderness.

‘My child, your manner is so changed!’

The trembling was now quite beyond her control. Softly withdrawing her
hand, and laying it in her other hand, she sat before him with her head
bent and her whole form trembling.

‘My own Little Dorrit,’ said Clennam, compassionately.

She burst into tears. Maggy looked round of a sudden, and stared for at
least a minute; but did not interpose. Clennam waited some little while
before he spoke again.

‘I cannot bear,’ he said then, ‘to see you weep; but I hope this is a
relief to an overcharged heart.’

‘Yes it is, sir. Nothing but that.’

‘Well, well! I feared you would think too much of what passed here just
now. It is of no moment; not the least. I am only unfortunate to have
come in the way. Let it go by with these tears. It is not worth one of
them. One of them? Such an idle thing should be repeated, with my glad
consent, fifty times a day, to save you a moment’s heart-ache, Little
Dorrit.’

She had taken courage now, and answered, far more in her usual manner,
‘You are so good! But even if there was nothing else in it to be sorry
for and ashamed of, it is such a bad return to you--’

‘Hush!’ said Clennam, smiling and touching her lips with his hand.
‘Forgetfulness in you who remember so many and so much, would be new
indeed. Shall I remind you that I am not, and that I never was, anything
but the friend whom you agreed to trust? No. You remember it, don’t
you?’

‘I try to do so, or I should have broken the promise just now, when my
mistaken brother was here. You will consider his bringing-up in this
place, and will not judge him hardly, poor fellow, I know!’ In raising
her eyes with these words, she observed his face more nearly than she
had done yet, and said, with a quick change of tone, ‘You have not been
ill, Mr Clennam?’

‘No.’

‘Nor tried? Nor hurt?’ she asked him, anxiously.

It fell to Clennam now, to be not quite certain how to answer. He said
in reply:

‘To speak the truth, I have been a little troubled, but it is over.
Do I show it so plainly? I ought to have more fortitude and self-command
than that. I thought I had. I must learn them of you. Who could teach me
better!’

He never thought that she saw in him what no one else could see. He
never thought that in the whole world there were no other eyes that
looked upon him with the same light and strength as hers.

‘But it brings me to something that I wish to say,’ he continued, ‘and
therefore I will not quarrel even with my own face for telling tales
and being unfaithful to me. Besides, it is a privilege and pleasure to
confide in my Little Dorrit. Let me confess then, that, forgetting how
grave I was, and how old I was, and how the time for such things had
gone by me with the many years of sameness and little happiness that
made up my long life far away, without marking it--that, forgetting all
this, I fancied I loved some one.’

‘Do I know her, sir?’ asked Little Dorrit.

‘No, my child.’

‘Not the lady who has been kind to me for your sake?’

‘Flora. No, no. Do you think--’

‘I never quite thought so,’ said Little Dorrit, more to herself than
him. ‘I did wonder at it a little.’

‘Well!’ said Clennam, abiding by the feeling that had fallen on him in
the avenue on the night of the roses, the feeling that he was an
older man, who had done with that tender part of life, ‘I found out my
mistake, and I thought about it a little--in short, a good deal--and got
wiser. Being wiser, I counted up my years and considered what I am, and
looked back, and looked forward, and found that I should soon be grey. I
found that I had climbed the hill, and passed the level ground upon the
top, and was descending quickly.’

If he had known the sharpness of the pain he caused the patient heart,
in speaking thus! While doing it, too, with the purpose of easing and
serving her.

‘I found that the day when any such thing would have been graceful in
me, or good in me, or hopeful or happy for me or any one in connection
with me, was gone, and would never shine again.’

O! If he had known, if he had known! If he could have seen the dagger in
his hand, and the cruel wounds it struck in the faithful bleeding breast
of his Little Dorrit!

‘All that is over, and I have turned my face from it. Why do I speak of
this to Little Dorrit? Why do I show you, my child, the space of years
that there is between us, and recall to you that I have passed, by the
amount of your whole life, the time that is present to you?’

‘Because you trust me, I hope. Because you know that nothing can touch
you without touching me; that nothing can make you happy or unhappy, but
it must make me, who am so grateful to you, the same.’

He heard the thrill in her voice, he saw her earnest face, he saw her
clear true eyes, he saw the quickened bosom that would have joyfully
thrown itself before him to receive a mortal wound directed at his
breast, with the dying cry, ‘I love him!’ and the remotest suspicion
of the truth never dawned upon his mind. No. He saw the devoted little
creature with her worn shoes, in her common dress, in her jail-home; a
slender child in body, a strong heroine in soul; and the light of her
domestic story made all else dark to him.

‘For those reasons assuredly, Little Dorrit, but for another too. So
far removed, so different, and so much older, I am the better fitted for
your friend and adviser. I mean, I am the more easily to be trusted;
and any little constraint that you might feel with another, may vanish
before me. Why have you kept so retired from me? Tell me.’

‘I am better here. My place and use are here. I am much better here,’
said Little Dorrit, faintly.

‘So you said that day upon the bridge. I thought of it much afterwards.
Have you no secret you could entrust to me, with hope and comfort, if
you would!’

‘Secret? No, I have no secret,’ said Little Dorrit in some trouble.

They had been speaking in low voices; more because it was natural to
what they said to adopt that tone, than with any care to reserve it from
Maggy at her work. All of a sudden Maggy stared again, and this time
spoke:

‘I say! Little Mother!’

‘Yes, Maggy.’

‘If you an’t got no secret of your own to tell him, tell him that about
the Princess. _She_ had a secret, you know.’

‘The Princess had a secret?’ said Clennam, in some surprise. ‘What
Princess was that, Maggy?’

‘Lor! How you do go and bother a gal of ten,’ said Maggy, ‘catching the
poor thing up in that way. Whoever said the Princess had a secret? _I_
never said so.’

‘I beg your pardon. I thought you did.’

‘No, I didn’t. How could I, when it was her as wanted to find it out? It
was the little woman as had the secret, and she was always a spinning at
her wheel. And so she says to her, why do you keep it there? And so the
t’other one says to her, no I don’t; and so the t’other one says to her,
yes you do; and then they both goes to the cupboard, and there it is.
And she wouldn’t go into the Hospital, and so she died. _You_ know, Little
Mother; tell him that. For it was a reg’lar good secret, that was!’ cried
Maggy, hugging herself.

Arthur looked at Little Dorrit for help to comprehend this, and was
struck by seeing her so timid and red. But, when she told him that it
was only a Fairy Tale she had one day made up for Maggy, and that there
was nothing in it which she wouldn’t be ashamed to tell again to anybody
else, even if she could remember it, he left the subject where it was.

However, he returned to his own subject by first entreating her to see
him oftener, and to remember that it was impossible to have a stronger
interest in her welfare than he had, or to be more set upon promoting it
than he was. When she answered fervently, she well knew that, she never
forgot it, he touched upon his second and more delicate point--the
suspicion he had formed.

‘Little Dorrit,’ he said, taking her hand again, and speaking lower than
he had spoken yet, so that even Maggy in the small room could not hear
him, ‘another word. I have wanted very much to say this to you; I have
tried for opportunities. Don’t mind me, who, for the matter of years,
might be your father or your uncle. Always think of me as quite an
old man. I know that all your devotion centres in this room, and
that nothing to the last will ever tempt you away from the duties you
discharge here. If I were not sure of it, I should, before now, have
implored you, and implored your father, to let me make some provision
for you in a more suitable place. But you may have an interest--I will
not say, now, though even that might be--may have, at another time,
an interest in some one else; an interest not incompatible with your
affection here.’

She was very, very pale, and silently shook her head.

‘It may be, dear Little Dorrit.’

‘No. No. No.’ She shook her head, after each slow repetition of
the word, with an air of quiet desolation that he remembered long
afterwards. The time came when he remembered it well, long afterwards,
within those prison walls; within that very room.

‘But, if it ever should be, tell me so, my dear child. Entrust the truth
to me, point out the object of such an interest to me, and I will try
with all the zeal, and honour, and friendship and respect that I feel
for you, good Little Dorrit of my heart, to do you a lasting service.’

‘O thank you, thank you! But, O no, O no, O no!’ She said this, looking
at him with her work-worn hands folded together, and in the same
resigned accents as before.

‘I press for no confidence now. I only ask you to repose unhesitating
trust in me.’

‘Can I do less than that, when you are so good!’

‘Then you will trust me fully? Will have no secret unhappiness, or
anxiety, concealed from me?’

‘Almost none.’

‘And you have none now?’

She shook her head. But she was very pale.

‘When I lie down to-night, and my thoughts come back--as they will, for
they do every night, even when I have not seen you--to this sad place, I
may believe that there is no grief beyond this room, now, and its usual
occupants, which preys on Little Dorrit’s mind?’

She seemed to catch at these words--that he remembered, too, long
afterwards--and said, more brightly, ‘Yes, Mr Clennam; yes, you may!’

The crazy staircase, usually not slow to give notice when any one was
coming up or down, here creaked under a quick tread, and a further sound
was heard upon it, as if a little steam-engine with more steam than it
knew what to do with, were working towards the room. As it approached,
which it did very rapidly, it laboured with increased energy; and,
after knocking at the door, it sounded as if it were stooping down and
snorting in at the keyhole.

Before Maggy could open the door, Mr Pancks, opening it from without,
stood without a hat and with his bare head in the wildest condition,
looking at Clennam and Little Dorrit, over her shoulder. He had a
lighted cigar in his hand, and brought with him airs of ale and tobacco
smoke.

‘Pancks the gipsy,’ he observed out of breath, ‘fortune-telling.’

He stood dingily smiling, and breathing hard at them, with a most
curious air; as if, instead of being his proprietor’s grubber, he were
the triumphant proprietor of the Marshalsea, the Marshal, all the
turnkeys, and all the Collegians. In his great self-satisfaction he put
his cigar to his lips (being evidently no smoker), and took such a pull
at it, with his right eye shut up tight for the purpose, that he
underwent a convulsion of shuddering and choking. But even in the midst
of that paroxysm, he still essayed to repeat his favourite introduction
of himself, ‘Pa-ancks the gi-ipsy, fortune-telling.’

‘I am spending the evening with the rest of ‘em,’ said Pancks. ‘I’ve
been singing. I’ve been taking a part in White sand and grey sand.
_I_ don’t know anything about it. Never mind. I’ll take any part in
anything. It’s all the same, if you’re loud enough.’

At first Clennam supposed him to be intoxicated. But he soon perceived
that though he might be a little the worse (or better) for ale, the
staple of his excitement was not brewed from malt, or distilled from any
grain or berry.

‘How d’ye do, Miss Dorrit?’ said Pancks. ‘I thought you wouldn’t mind my
running round, and looking in for a moment. Mr Clennam I heard was here,
from Mr Dorrit. How are you, Sir?’

Clennam thanked him, and said he was glad to see him so gay.

‘Gay!’ said Pancks. ‘I’m in wonderful feather, sir. I can’t stop a
minute, or I shall be missed, and I don’t want ‘em to miss me.--Eh, Miss
Dorrit?’

He seemed to have an insatiate delight in appealing to her and looking
at her; excitedly sticking his hair up at the same moment, like a dark
species of cockatoo.

‘I haven’t been here half an hour. I knew Mr Dorrit was in the chair,
and I said, “I’ll go and support him!” I ought to be down in Bleeding
Heart Yard by rights; but I can worry them to-morrow.--Eh, Miss Dorrit?’

His little black eyes sparkled electrically. His very hair seemed to
sparkle as he roughened it. He was in that highly-charged state that one
might have expected to draw sparks and snaps from him by presenting a
knuckle to any part of his figure.

‘Capital company here,’ said Pancks.--‘Eh, Miss Dorrit?’

She was half afraid of him, and irresolute what to say. He laughed, with
a nod towards Clennam.

‘Don’t mind him, Miss Dorrit. He’s one of us. We agreed that you
shouldn’t take on to mind me before people, but we didn’t mean Mr
Clennam. He’s one of us. He’s in it. An’t you, Mr Clennam?--Eh, Miss
Dorrit?’

The excitement of this strange creature was fast communicating itself to
Clennam. Little Dorrit with amazement, saw this, and observed that they
exchanged quick looks.

‘I was making a remark,’ said Pancks, ‘but I declare I forget what
it was. Oh, I know! Capital company here. I’ve been treating ‘em all
round.--Eh, Miss Dorrit?’

‘Very generous of you,’ she returned, noticing another of the quick
looks between the two.

‘Not at all,’ said Pancks. ‘Don’t mention it. I’m coming into my
property, that’s the fact. I can afford to be liberal. I think I’ll give
‘em a treat here. Tables laid in the yard. Bread in stacks. Pipes in
faggots. Tobacco in hayloads. Roast beef and plum-pudding for every one.
Quart of double stout a head. Pint of wine too, if they like it, and the
authorities give permission.--Eh, Miss Dorrit?’

She was thrown into such a confusion by his manner, or rather by
Clennam’s growing understanding of his manner (for she looked to him
after every fresh appeal and cockatoo demonstration on the part of Mr
Pancks), that she only moved her lips in answer, without forming any
word.

‘And oh, by-the-bye!’ said Pancks, ‘you were to live to know what was
behind us on that little hand of yours. And so you shall, you shall, my
darling.--Eh, Miss Dorrit?’

He had suddenly checked himself. Where he got all the additional black
prongs from, that now flew up all over his head like the myriads of
points that break out in the large change of a great firework, was a
wonderful mystery.

‘But I shall be missed;’ he came back to that; ‘and I don’t want ‘em to
miss me. Mr Clennam, you and I made a bargain. I said you should find me
stick to it. You shall find me stick to it now, sir, if you’ll step out
of the room a moment. Miss Dorrit, I wish you good night. Miss Dorrit, I
wish you good fortune.’

He rapidly shook her by both hands, and puffed down stairs. Arthur
followed him with such a hurried step, that he had very nearly tumbled
over him on the last landing, and rolled him down into the yard.

‘What is it, for Heaven’s sake!’ Arthur demanded, when they burst out
there both together.

‘Stop a moment, sir. Mr Rugg. Let me introduce him.’

With those words he presented another man without a hat, and also with a
cigar, and also surrounded with a halo of ale and tobacco smoke, which
man, though not so excited as himself, was in a state which would have
been akin to lunacy but for its fading into sober method when compared
with the rampancy of Mr Pancks.

‘Mr Clennam, Mr Rugg,’ said Pancks. ‘Stop a moment. Come to the pump.’

They adjourned to the pump. Mr Pancks, instantly putting his head under
the spout, requested Mr Rugg to take a good strong turn at the handle.
Mr Rugg complying to the letter, Mr Pancks came forth snorting and
blowing to some purpose, and dried himself on his handkerchief.

‘I am the clearer for that,’ he gasped to Clennam standing astonished.
‘But upon my soul, to hear her father making speeches in that chair,
knowing what we know, and to see her up in that room in that dress,
knowing what we know, is enough to--give me a back, Mr Rugg--a little
higher, sir,--that’ll do!’

Then and there, on that Marshalsea pavement, in the shades of evening,
did Mr Pancks, of all mankind, fly over the head and shoulders of Mr
Rugg of Pentonville, General Agent, Accountant, and Recoverer of Debts.
Alighting on his feet, he took Clennam by the button-hole, led him
behind the pump, and pantingly produced from his pocket a bundle of
papers.

Mr Rugg, also, pantingly produced from his pocket a bundle of papers.

‘Stay!’ said Clennam in a whisper.’You have made a discovery.’

Mr Pancks answered, with an unction which there is no language to
convey, ‘We rather think so.’

‘Does it implicate any one?’

‘How implicate, sir?’

‘In any suppression or wrong dealing of any kind?’

‘Not a bit of it.’

‘Thank God!’ said Clennam to himself. ‘Now show me.’

‘You are to understand’--snorted Pancks, feverishly unfolding papers,
and speaking in short high-pressure blasts of sentences, ‘Where’s the
Pedigree? Where’s Schedule number four, Mr Rugg? Oh! all right! Here we
are.--You are to understand that we are this very day virtually
complete. We shan’t be legally for a day or two. Call it at the outside
a week. We’ve been at it night and day for I don’t know how long. Mr
Rugg, you know how long? Never mind. Don’t say. You’ll only confuse me.
You shall tell her, Mr Clennam. Not till we give you leave. Where’s that
rough total, Mr Rugg? Oh! Here we are! There sir! That’s what you’ll
have to break to her. That man’s your Father of the Marshalsea!’




CHAPTER 33. Mrs Merdle’s Complaint


Resigning herself to inevitable fate by making the best of those people,
the Miggleses, and submitting her philosophy to the draught upon it, of
which she had foreseen the likelihood in her interview with Arthur,
Mrs Gowan handsomely resolved not to oppose her son’s marriage. In her
progress to, and happy arrival at, this resolution, she was possibly
influenced, not only by her maternal affections but by three politic
considerations.

Of these, the first may have been that her son had never signified the
smallest intention to ask her consent, or any mistrust of his ability
to dispense with it; the second, that the pension bestowed upon her by a
grateful country (and a Barnacle) would be freed from any little filial
inroads, when her Henry should be married to the darling only child of
a man in very easy circumstances; the third, that Henry’s debts must
clearly be paid down upon the altar-railing by his father-in-law. When,
to these three-fold points of prudence there is added the fact that
Mrs Gowan yielded her consent the moment she knew of Mr Meagles having
yielded his, and that Mr Meagles’s objection to the marriage had
been the sole obstacle in its way all along, it becomes the height of
probability that the relict of the deceased Commissioner of nothing
particular, turned these ideas in her sagacious mind.

Among her connections and acquaintances, however, she maintained her
individual dignity and the dignity of the blood of the Barnacles, by
diligently nursing the pretence that it was a most unfortunate business;
that she was sadly cut up by it; that this was a perfect fascination
under which Henry laboured; that she had opposed it for a long time,
but what could a mother do; and the like. She had already called Arthur
Clennam to bear witness to this fable, as a friend of the Meagles
family; and she followed up the move by now impounding the family itself
for the same purpose. In the first interview she accorded to Mr Meagles,
she slided herself into the position of disconsolately but gracefully
yielding to irresistible pressure. With the utmost politeness and
good-breeding, she feigned that it was she--not he--who had made the
difficulty, and who at length gave way; and that the sacrifice was
hers--not his. The same feint, with the same polite dexterity, she
foisted on Mrs Meagles, as a conjuror might have forced a card on that
innocent lady; and, when her future daughter-in-law was presented to her
by her son, she said on embracing her, ‘My dear, what have you done to
Henry that has bewitched him so!’ at the same time allowing a few tears
to carry before them, in little pills, the cosmetic powder on her nose;
as a delicate but touching signal that she suffered much inwardly for
the show of composure with which she bore her misfortune.

Among the friends of Mrs Gowan (who piqued herself at once on being
Society, and on maintaining intimate and easy relations with that
Power), Mrs Merdle occupied a front row. True, the Hampton Court
Bohemians, without exception, turned up their noses at Merdle as an
upstart; but they turned them down again, by falling flat on their faces
to worship his wealth. In which compensating adjustment of their noses,
they were pretty much like Treasury, Bar, and Bishop, and all the rest
of them.

To Mrs Merdle, Mrs Gowan repaired on a visit of self-condolence, after
having given the gracious consent aforesaid. She drove into town for the
purpose in a one-horse carriage irreverently called at that period of
English history, a pill-box. It belonged to a job-master in a small way,
who drove it himself, and who jobbed it by the day, or hour, to most of
the old ladies in Hampton Court Palace; but it was a point of ceremony,
in that encampment, that the whole equipage should be tacitly regarded
as the private property of the jobber for the time being, and that the
job-master should betray personal knowledge of nobody but the jobber
in possession. So the Circumlocution Barnacles, who were the largest
job-masters in the universe, always pretended to know of no other job
but the job immediately in hand.

Mrs Merdle was at home, and was in her nest of crimson and gold, with
the parrot on a neighbouring stem watching her with his head on one
side, as if he took her for another splendid parrot of a larger species.
To whom entered Mrs Gowan, with her favourite green fan, which softened
the light on the spots of bloom.

‘My dear soul,’ said Mrs Gowan, tapping the back of her friend’s hand
with this fan after a little indifferent conversation, ‘you are my only
comfort. That affair of Henry’s that I told you of, is to take place.
Now, how does it strike you? I am dying to know, because you represent
and express Society so well.’

Mrs Merdle reviewed the bosom which Society was accustomed to review;
and having ascertained that show-window of Mr Merdle’s and the London
jewellers’ to be in good order, replied:

‘As to marriage on the part of a man, my dear, Society requires that
he should retrieve his fortunes by marriage. Society requires that
he should gain by marriage. Society requires that he should found a
handsome establishment by marriage. Society does not see, otherwise,
what he has to do with marriage. Bird, be quiet!’

For the parrot on his cage above them, presiding over the conference as
if he were a judge (and indeed he looked rather like one), had wound up
the exposition with a shriek.

‘Cases there are,’ said Mrs Merdle, delicately crooking the little
finger of her favourite hand, and making her remarks neater by that neat
action; ‘cases there are where a man is not young or elegant, and is
rich, and has a handsome establishment already. Those are of a different
kind. In such cases--’

Mrs Merdle shrugged her snowy shoulders and put her hand upon the
jewel-stand, checking a little cough, as though to add, ‘why, a man
looks out for this sort of thing, my dear.’ Then the parrot shrieked
again, and she put up her glass to look at him, and said, ‘Bird! Do be
quiet!’

‘But, young men,’ resumed Mrs Merdle, ‘and by young men you know
what I mean, my love--I mean people’s sons who have the world before
them--they must place themselves in a better position towards Society by
marriage, or Society really will not have any patience with their making
fools of themselves. Dreadfully worldly all this sounds,’ said Mrs
Merdle, leaning back in her nest and putting up her glass again, ‘does
it not?’

‘But it is true,’ said Mrs Gowan, with a highly moral air.

‘My dear, it is not to be disputed for a moment,’ returned Mrs Merdle;
‘because Society has made up its mind on the subject, and there is
nothing more to be said. If we were in a more primitive state, if we
lived under roofs of leaves, and kept cows and sheep and creatures
instead of banker’s accounts (which would be delicious; my dear, I am
pastoral to a degree, by nature), well and good. But we don’t live
under leaves, and keep cows and sheep and creatures. I perfectly exhaust
myself sometimes, in pointing out the distinction to Edmund Sparkler.’

Mrs Gowan, looking over her green fan when this young gentleman’s name
was mentioned, replied as follows:

‘My love, you know the wretched state of the country--those unfortunate
concessions of John Barnacle’s!--and you therefore know the reasons for
my being as poor as Thingummy.’

‘A church mouse?’ Mrs Merdle suggested with a smile.

‘I was thinking of the other proverbial church person--Job,’ said Mrs
Gowan. ‘Either will do. It would be idle to disguise, consequently, that
there is a wide difference between the position of your son and mine. I
may add, too, that Henry has talent--’

‘Which Edmund certainly has not,’ said Mrs Merdle, with the greatest
suavity.

‘--and that his talent, combined with disappointment,’ Mrs Gowan went
on, ‘has led him into a pursuit which--ah dear me! You know, my dear.
Such being Henry’s different position, the question is what is the most
inferior class of marriage to which I can reconcile myself.’

Mrs Merdle was so much engaged with the contemplation of her arms
(beautiful-formed arms, and the very thing for bracelets), that she
omitted to reply for a while. Roused at length by the silence, she
folded the arms, and with admirable presence of mind looked her friend
full in the face, and said interrogatively, ‘Ye-es? And then?’

‘And then, my dear,’ said Mrs Gowan not quite so sweetly as before, ‘I
should be glad to hear what you have to say to it.’

Here the parrot, who had been standing on one leg since he screamed
last, burst into a fit of laughter, bobbed himself derisively up and
down on both legs, and finished by standing on one leg again, and
pausing for a reply, with his head as much awry as he could possibly
twist it.

‘Sounds mercenary to ask what the gentleman is to get with the lady,’
said Mrs Merdle; ‘but Society is perhaps a little mercenary, you know,
my dear.’

‘From what I can make out,’ said Mrs Gowan, ‘I believe I may say that
Henry will be relieved from debt--’

‘Much in debt?’ asked Mrs Merdle through her eyeglass.

‘Why tolerably, I should think,’ said Mrs Gowan.

‘Meaning the usual thing; I understand; just so,’ Mrs Merdle observed in
a comfortable sort of way.

‘And that the father will make them an allowance of three hundred
a-year, or perhaps altogether something more, which, in Italy-’

‘Oh! Going to Italy?’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘For Henry to study. You need be at no loss to guess why, my dear.
That dreadful Art--’

True. Mrs Merdle hastened to spare the feelings of her afflicted friend.
She understood. Say no more!

‘And that,’ said Mrs Gowan, shaking her despondent head, ‘that’s all.
That,’ repeated Mrs Gowan, furling her green fan for the moment, and
tapping her chin with it (it was on the way to being a double chin;
might be called a chin and a half at present), ‘that’s all! On the death
of the old people, I suppose there will be more to come; but how it may
be restricted or locked up, I don’t know. And as to that, they may live
for ever. My dear, they are just the kind of people to do it.’

Now, Mrs Merdle, who really knew her friend Society pretty well, and who
knew what Society’s mothers were, and what Society’s daughters were, and
what Society’s matrimonial market was, and how prices ruled in it, and
what scheming and counter-scheming took place for the high buyers, and
what bargaining and huckstering went on, thought in the depths of
her capacious bosom that this was a sufficiently good catch. Knowing,
however, what was expected of her, and perceiving the exact nature of
the fiction to be nursed, she took it delicately in her arms, and put
her required contribution of gloss upon it.

‘And that is all, my dear?’ said she, heaving a friendly sigh. ‘Well,
well! The fault is not yours. You have nothing to reproach yourself
with. You must exercise the strength of mind for which you are renowned,
and make the best of it.’

‘The girl’s family have made,’ said Mrs Gowan, ‘of course, the most
strenuous endeavours to--as the lawyers say--to have and to hold Henry.’

‘Of course they have, my dear,’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘I have persisted in every possible objection, and have worried
myself morning, noon, and night, for means to detach Henry from the
connection.’

‘No doubt you have, my dear,’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘And all of no use. All has broken down beneath me. Now tell me, my
love. Am I justified in at last yielding my most reluctant consent to
Henry’s marrying among people not in Society; or, have I acted with
inexcusable weakness?’

In answer to this direct appeal, Mrs Merdle assured Mrs Gowan (speaking
as a Priestess of Society) that she was highly to be commended, that
she was much to be sympathised with, that she had taken the highest of
parts, and had come out of the furnace refined. And Mrs Gowan, who of
course saw through her own threadbare blind perfectly, and who knew that
Mrs Merdle saw through it perfectly, and who knew that Society would see
through it perfectly, came out of this form, notwithstanding, as she had
gone into it, with immense complacency and gravity.

The conference was held at four or five o’clock in the afternoon, when
all the region of Harley Street, Cavendish Square, was resonant of
carriage-wheels and double-knocks. It had reached this point when Mr
Merdle came home from his daily occupation of causing the British
name to be more and more respected in all parts of the civilised globe
capable of the appreciation of world-wide commercial enterprise and
gigantic combinations of skill and capital. For, though nobody knew with
the least precision what Mr Merdle’s business was, except that it was
to coin money, these were the terms in which everybody defined it on all
ceremonious occasions, and which it was the last new polite reading of
the parable of the camel and the needle’s eye to accept without inquiry.

For a gentleman who had this splendid work cut out for him, Mr Merdle
looked a little common, and rather as if, in the course of his vast
transactions, he had accidentally made an interchange of heads with
some inferior spirit. He presented himself before the two ladies in the
course of a dismal stroll through his mansion, which had no apparent
object but escape from the presence of the chief butler.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, stopping short in confusion; ‘I didn’t
know there was anybody here but the parrot.’

However, as Mrs Merdle said, ‘You can come in!’ and as Mrs Gowan said
she was just going, and had already risen to take her leave, he came in,
and stood looking out at a distant window, with his hands crossed under
his uneasy coat-cuffs, clasping his wrists as if he were taking himself
into custody. In this attitude he fell directly into a reverie from
which he was only aroused by his wife’s calling to him from her ottoman,
when they had been for some quarter of an hour alone.

‘Eh? Yes?’ said Mr Merdle, turning towards her. ‘What is it?’

‘What is it?’ repeated Mrs Merdle. ‘It is, I suppose, that you have not
heard a word of my complaint.’

‘Your complaint, Mrs Merdle?’ said Mr Merdle. ‘I didn’t know that you
were suffering from a complaint. What complaint?’

‘A complaint of you,’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘Oh! A complaint of me,’ said Mr Merdle. ‘What is the--what have I--what
may you have to complain of in me, Mrs Merdle?’

In his withdrawing, abstracted, pondering way, it took him some time to
shape this question. As a kind of faint attempt to convince himself
that he was the master of the house, he concluded by presenting his
forefinger to the parrot, who expressed his opinion on that subject by
instantly driving his bill into it.

‘You were saying, Mrs Merdle,’ said Mr Merdle, with his wounded finger
in his mouth, ‘that you had a complaint against me?’

‘A complaint which I could scarcely show the justice of more
emphatically, than by having to repeat it,’ said Mrs Merdle. ‘I might as
well have stated it to the wall. I had far better have stated it to the
bird. He would at least have screamed.’

‘You don’t want me to scream, Mrs Merdle, I suppose,’ said Mr Merdle,
taking a chair.

‘Indeed I don’t know,’ retorted Mrs Merdle, ‘but that you had better do
that, than be so moody and distraught. One would at least know that you
were sensible of what was going on around you.’

‘A man might scream, and yet not be that, Mrs Merdle,’ said Mr Merdle,
heavily.

‘And might be dogged, as you are at present, without screaming,’
returned Mrs Merdle. ‘That’s very true. If you wish to know the
complaint I make against you, it is, in so many plain words, that you
really ought not to go into Society unless you can accommodate yourself
to Society.’

Mr Merdle, so twisting his hands into what hair he had upon his head
that he seemed to lift himself up by it as he started out of his chair,
cried:

‘Why, in the name of all the infernal powers, Mrs Merdle, who
does more for Society than I do? Do you see these premises, Mrs Merdle?
Do you see this furniture, Mrs Merdle? Do you look in the glass and see
yourself, Mrs Merdle? Do you know the cost of all this, and who it’s
all provided for? And yet will you tell me that I oughtn’t to go into
Society? I, who shower money upon it in this way? I, who might always be
said--to--to--to harness myself to a watering-cart full of money, and go
about saturating Society every day of my life.’

‘Pray, don’t be violent, Mr Merdle,’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘Violent?’ said Mr Merdle. ‘You are enough to make me desperate. You
don’t know half of what I do to accommodate Society. You don’t know
anything of the sacrifices I make for it.’

‘I know,’ returned Mrs Merdle, ‘that you receive the best in the land. I
know that you move in the whole Society of the country. And I believe
I know (indeed, not to make any ridiculous pretence about it, I know I
know) who sustains you in it, Mr Merdle.’

‘Mrs Merdle,’ retorted that gentleman, wiping his dull red and yellow
face, ‘I know that as well as you do. If you were not an ornament to
Society, and if I was not a benefactor to Society, you and I would never
have come together. When I say a benefactor to it, I mean a person who
provides it with all sorts of expensive things to eat and drink and look
at. But, to tell me that I am not fit for it after all I have done
for it--after all I have done for it,’ repeated Mr Merdle, with a wild
emphasis that made his wife lift up her eyelids, ‘after all--all!--to
tell me I have no right to mix with it after all, is a pretty reward.’

‘I say,’ answered Mrs Merdle composedly, ‘that you ought to make
yourself fit for it by being more degage, and less preoccupied. There is
a positive vulgarity in carrying your business affairs about with you as
you do.’

‘How do I carry them about, Mrs Merdle?’ asked Mr Merdle.

‘How do you carry them about?’ said Mrs Merdle. ‘Look at yourself in the
glass.’

Mr Merdle involuntarily turned his eyes in the direction of the nearest
mirror, and asked, with a slow determination of his turbid blood to his
temples, whether a man was to be called to account for his digestion?

‘You have a physician,’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘He does me no good,’ said Mr Merdle.

Mrs Merdle changed her ground.

‘Besides,’ said she, ‘your digestion is nonsense. I don’t speak of your
digestion. I speak of your manner.’

‘Mrs Merdle,’ returned her husband, ‘I look to you for that. You supply
manner, and I supply money.’

‘I don’t expect you,’ said Mrs Merdle, reposing easily among her
cushions, ‘to captivate people. I don’t want you to take any trouble
upon yourself, or to try to be fascinating. I simply request you to care
about nothing--or seem to care about nothing--as everybody else does.’

‘Do I ever say I care about anything?’ asked Mr Merdle.

‘Say? No! Nobody would attend to you if you did. But you show it.’

‘Show what? What do I show?’ demanded Mr Merdle hurriedly.

‘I have already told you. You show that you carry your business cares
an projects about, instead of leaving them in the City, or wherever else
they belong to,’ said Mrs Merdle. ‘Or seeming to. Seeming would be quite
enough: I ask no more. Whereas you couldn’t be more occupied with your
day’s calculations and combinations than you habitually show yourself to
be, if you were a carpenter.’

‘A carpenter!’ repeated Mr Merdle, checking something like a groan.
‘I shouldn’t so much mind being a carpenter, Mrs Merdle.’

‘And my complaint is,’ pursued the lady, disregarding the low remark,
‘that it is not the tone of Society, and that you ought to correct
it, Mr Merdle. If you have any doubt of my judgment, ask even Edmund
Sparkler.’ The door of the room had opened, and Mrs Merdle now surveyed
the head of her son through her glass. ‘Edmund; we want you here.’

Mr Sparkler, who had merely put in his head and looked round the room
without entering (as if he were searching the house for that young lady
with no nonsense about her), upon this followed up his head with his
body, and stood before them. To whom, in a few easy words adapted to his
capacity, Mrs Merdle stated the question at issue.

The young gentleman, after anxiously feeling his shirt-collar as if it
were his pulse and he were hypochondriacal, observed, ‘That he had heard
it noticed by fellers.’

‘Edmund Sparkler has heard it noticed,’ said Mrs Merdle, with languid
triumph. ‘Why, no doubt everybody has heard it noticed!’ Which in truth
was no unreasonable inference; seeing that Mr Sparkler would probably be
the last person, in any assemblage of the human species, to receive an
impression from anything that passed in his presence.

‘And Edmund Sparkler will tell you, I dare say,’ said Mrs Merdle, waving
her favourite hand towards her husband, ‘how he has heard it noticed.’

‘I couldn’t,’ said Mr Sparkler, after feeling his pulse as before,
‘couldn’t undertake to say what led to it--‘cause memory desperate
loose. But being in company with the brother of a doosed fine gal--well
educated too--with no biggodd nonsense about her--at the period alluded
to--’

‘There! Never mind the sister,’ remarked Mrs Merdle, a little
impatiently. ‘What did the brother say?’

‘Didn’t say a word, ma’am,’ answered Mr Sparkler. ‘As silent a feller as
myself. Equally hard up for a remark.’

‘Somebody said something,’ returned Mrs Merdle. ‘Never mind who it was.’

[‘Assure you I don’t in the least,’ said Mr Sparkler.)

‘But tell us what it was.’

Mr Sparkler referred to his pulse again, and put himself through some
severe mental discipline before he replied:

‘Fellers referring to my Governor--expression not my own--occasionally
compliment my Governor in a very handsome way on being immensely rich
and knowing--perfect phenomenon of Buyer and Banker and that--but say
the Shop sits heavily on him. Say he carried the Shop about, on his back
rather--like Jew clothesmen with too much business.’

‘Which,’ said Mrs Merdle, rising, with her floating drapery about her,
‘is exactly my complaint. Edmund, give me your arm up-stairs.’

Mr Merdle, left alone to meditate on a better conformation of himself to
Society, looked out of nine windows in succession, and appeared to
see nine wastes of space. When he had thus entertained himself he went
down-stairs, and looked intently at all the carpets on the ground-floor;
and then came up-stairs again, and looked intently at all the carpets
on the first-floor; as if they were gloomy depths, in unison with his
oppressed soul. Through all the rooms he wandered, as he always did,
like the last person on earth who had any business to approach them. Let
Mrs Merdle announce, with all her might, that she was at Home ever
so many nights in a season, she could not announce more widely and
unmistakably than Mr Merdle did that he was never at home.

At last he met the chief butler, the sight of which splendid retainer
always finished him. Extinguished by this great creature, he sneaked
to his dressing-room, and there remained shut up until he rode out to
dinner, with Mrs Merdle, in her own handsome chariot. At dinner, he was
envied and flattered as a being of might, was Treasuried, Barred, and
Bishoped, as much as he would; and an hour after midnight came home
alone, and being instantly put out again in his own hall, like a
rushlight, by the chief butler, went sighing to bed.




CHAPTER 34. A Shoal of Barnacles


Mr Henry Gowan and the dog were established frequenters of the cottage,
and the day was fixed for the wedding. There was to be a convocation of
Barnacles on the occasion, in order that that very high and very large
family might shed as much lustre on the marriage as so dim an event was
capable of receiving.

To have got the whole Barnacle family together would have been
impossible for two reasons. Firstly, because no building could have held
all the members and connections of that illustrious house. Secondly,
because wherever there was a square yard of ground in British occupation
under the sun or moon, with a public post upon it, sticking to that post
was a Barnacle. No intrepid navigator could plant a flag-staff upon any
spot of earth, and take possession of it in the British name, but
to that spot of earth, so soon as the discovery was known, the
Circumlocution Office sent out a Barnacle and a despatch-box. Thus the
Barnacles were all over the world, in every direction--despatch-boxing
the compass.

But, while the so-potent art of Prospero himself would have failed in
summoning the Barnacles from every speck of ocean and dry land on
which there was nothing (except mischief) to be done and anything to be
pocketed, it was perfectly feasible to assemble a good many Barnacles.
This Mrs Gowan applied herself to do; calling on Mr Meagles frequently
with new additions to the list, and holding conferences with that
gentleman when he was not engaged (as he generally was at this period)
in examining and paying the debts of his future son-in-law, in the
apartment of scales and scoop.

One marriage guest there was, in reference to whose presence Mr Meagles
felt a nearer interest and concern than in the attendance of the most
elevated Barnacle expected; though he was far from insensible of the
honour of having such company. This guest was Clennam. But Clennam had
made a promise he held sacred, among the trees that summer night, and,
in the chivalry of his heart, regarded it as binding him to many implied
obligations. In forgetfulness of himself, and delicate service to her on
all occasions, he was never to fail; to begin it, he answered Mr Meagles
cheerfully, ‘I shall come, of course.’

His partner, Daniel Doyce, was something of a stumbling-block in Mr
Meagles’s way, the worthy gentleman being not at all clear in his own
anxious mind but that the mingling of Daniel with official Barnacleism
might produce some explosive combination, even at a marriage breakfast.
The national offender, however, lightened him of his uneasiness by
coming down to Twickenham to represent that he begged, with the freedom
of an old friend, and as a favour to one, that he might not be invited.
‘For,’ said he, ‘as my business with this set of gentlemen was to do a
public duty and a public service, and as their business with me was to
prevent it by wearing my soul out, I think we had better not eat and
drink together with a show of being of one mind.’ Mr Meagles was much
amused by his friend’s oddity; and patronised him with a more protecting
air of allowance than usual, when he rejoined: ‘Well, well, Dan, you
shall have your own crotchety way.’

To Mr Henry Gowan, as the time approached, Clennam tried to convey
by all quiet and unpretending means, that he was frankly and
disinterestedly desirous of tendering him any friendship he would
accept. Mr Gowan treated him in return with his usual ease, and with his
usual show of confidence, which was no confidence at all.

‘You see, Clennam,’ he happened to remark in the course of conversation
one day, when they were walking near the Cottage within a week of the
marriage, ‘I am a disappointed man. That you know already.’

‘Upon my word,’ said Clennam, a little embarrassed, ‘I scarcely know
how.’

‘Why,’ returned Gowan, ‘I belong to a clan, or a clique, or a family, or
a connection, or whatever you like to call it, that might have provided
for me in any one of fifty ways, and that took it into its head not to
do it at all. So here I am, a poor devil of an artist.’

Clennam was beginning, ‘But on the other hand--’ when Gowan took him up.

‘Yes, yes, I know. I have the good fortune of being beloved by a
beautiful and charming girl whom I love with all my heart.’

[‘Is there much of it?’ Clennam thought. And as he thought it, felt
ashamed of himself.)

‘And of finding a father-in-law who is a capital fellow and a liberal
good old boy. Still, I had other prospects washed and combed into my
childish head when it was washed and combed for me, and I took them to
a public school when I washed and combed it for myself, and I am here
without them, and thus I am a disappointed man.’

Clennam thought (and as he thought it, again felt ashamed of himself),
was this notion of being disappointed in life, an assertion of station
which the bridegroom brought into the family as his property, having
already carried it detrimentally into his pursuit? And was it a hopeful
or a promising thing anywhere?

‘Not bitterly disappointed, I think,’ he said aloud.

‘Hang it, no; not bitterly,’ laughed Gowan. ‘My people are not worth
that--though they are charming fellows, and I have the greatest
affection for them. Besides, it’s pleasant to show them that I can do
without them, and that they may all go to the Devil. And besides, again,
most men are disappointed in life, somehow or other, and influenced by
their disappointment. But it’s a dear good world, and I love it!’

‘It lies fair before you now,’ said Arthur.

‘Fair as this summer river,’ cried the other, with enthusiasm, ‘and by
Jove I glow with admiration of it, and with ardour to run a race in it.
It’s the best of old worlds! And my calling! The best of old callings,
isn’t it?’

‘Full of interest and ambition, I conceive,’ said Clennam.

‘And imposition,’ added Gowan, laughing; ‘we won’t leave out the
imposition. I hope I may not break down in that; but there, my being
a disappointed man may show itself. I may not be able to face it out
gravely enough. Between you and me, I think there is some danger of my
being just enough soured not to be able to do that.’

‘To do what?’ asked Clennam.

‘To keep it up. To help myself in my turn, as the man before me helps
himself in his, and pass the bottle of smoke. To keep up the pretence
as to labour, and study, and patience, and being devoted to my art, and
giving up many solitary days to it, and abandoning many pleasures for
it, and living in it, and all the rest of it--in short, to pass the
bottle of smoke according to rule.’

‘But it is well for a man to respect his own vocation, whatever it is;
and to think himself bound to uphold it, and to claim for it the respect
it deserves; is it not?’ Arthur reasoned. ‘And your vocation, Gowan,
may really demand this suit and service. I confess I should have thought
that all Art did.’

‘What a good fellow you are, Clennam!’ exclaimed the other, stopping
to look at him, as if with irrepressible admiration. ‘What a capital
fellow! _You_ have never been disappointed. That’s easy to see.’

It would have been so cruel if he had meant it, that Clennam firmly
resolved to believe he did not mean it. Gowan, without pausing, laid his
hand upon his shoulder, and laughingly and lightly went on:

‘Clennam, I don’t like to dispel your generous visions, and I would give
any money (if I had any), to live in such a rose-coloured mist. But what
I do in my trade, I do to sell. What all we fellows do, we do to
sell. If we didn’t want to sell it for the most we can get for it, we
shouldn’t do it. Being work, it has to be done; but it’s easily enough
done. All the rest is hocus-pocus. Now here’s one of the advantages, or
disadvantages, of knowing a disappointed man. You hear the truth.’

Whatever he had heard, and whether it deserved that name or another, it
sank into Clennam’s mind. It so took root there, that he began to fear
Henry Gowan would always be a trouble to him, and that so far he had
gained little or nothing from the dismissal of Nobody, with all his
inconsistencies, anxieties, and contradictions. He found a contest still
always going on in his breast between his promise to keep Gowan in
none but good aspects before the mind of Mr Meagles, and his enforced
observation of Gowan in aspects that had no good in them. Nor could he
quite support his own conscientious nature against misgivings that he
distorted and discoloured himself, by reminding himself that he never
sought those discoveries, and that he would have avoided them with
willingness and great relief. For he never could forget what he had
been; and he knew that he had once disliked Gowan for no better reason
than that he had come in his way.

Harassed by these thoughts, he now began to wish the marriage over,
Gowan and his young wife gone, and himself left to fulfil his promise,
and discharge the generous function he had accepted. This last week was,
in truth, an uneasy interval for the whole house. Before Pet, or before
Gowan, Mr Meagles was radiant; but Clennam had more than once found him
alone, with his view of the scales and scoop much blurred, and had often
seen him look after the lovers, in the garden or elsewhere when he was
not seen by them, with the old clouded face on which Gowan had fallen
like a shadow. In the arrangement of the house for the great occasion,
many little reminders of the old travels of the father and mother
and daughter had to be disturbed and passed from hand to hand; and
sometimes, in the midst of these mute witnesses, to the life they had
had together, even Pet herself would yield to lamenting and weeping.
Mrs Meagles, the blithest and busiest of mothers, went about singing
and cheering everybody; but she, honest soul, had her flights into store
rooms, where she would cry until her eyes were red, and would then
come out, attributing that appearance to pickled onions and pepper, and
singing clearer than ever. Mrs Tickit, finding no balsam for a wounded
mind in Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, suffered greatly from low spirits,
and from moving recollections of Minnie’s infancy. When the latter was
powerful with her, she usually sent up secret messages importing
that she was not in parlour condition as to her attire, and that she
solicited a sight of ‘her child’ in the kitchen; there, she would bless
her child’s face, and bless her child’s heart, and hug her child, in a
medley of tears and congratulations, chopping-boards, rolling-pins, and
pie-crust, with the tenderness of an old attached servant, which is a
very pretty tenderness indeed.

But all days come that are to be; and the marriage-day was to be, and it
came; and with it came all the Barnacles who were bidden to the feast.

There was Mr Tite Barnacle, from the Circumlocution Office, and Mews
Street, Grosvenor Square, with the expensive Mrs Tite Barnacle _nee_
Stiltstalking, who made the Quarter Days so long in coming, and the
three expensive Miss Tite Barnacles, double-loaded with accomplishments
and ready to go off, and yet not going off with the sharpness of flash
and bang that might have been expected, but rather hanging fire. There
was Barnacle junior, also from the Circumlocution Office, leaving the
Tonnage of the country, which he was somehow supposed to take under
his protection, to look after itself, and, sooth to say, not at all
impairing the efficiency of its protection by leaving it alone. There
was the engaging Young Barnacle, deriving from the sprightly side of the
family, also from the Circumlocution Office, gaily and agreeably helping
the occasion along, and treating it, in his sparkling way, as one of the
official forms and fees of the Church Department of How not to do it.
There were three other Young Barnacles from three other offices, insipid
to all the senses, and terribly in want of seasoning, doing the marriage
as they would have ‘done’ the Nile, Old Rome, the new singer, or
Jerusalem.

But there was greater game than this. There was Lord Decimus Tite
Barnacle himself, in the odour of Circumlocution--with the very smell of
Despatch-Boxes upon him. Yes, there was Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle, who
had risen to official heights on the wings of one indignant idea, and
that was, My Lords, that I am yet to be told that it behoves a Minister
of this free country to set bounds to the philanthropy, to cramp the
charity, to fetter the public spirit, to contract the enterprise, to
damp the independent self-reliance, of its people. That was, in other
words, that this great statesman was always yet to be told that it
behoved the Pilot of the ship to do anything but prosper in the private
loaf and fish trade ashore, the crew being able, by dint of hard
pumping, to keep the ship above water without him. On this sublime
discovery in the great art How not to do it, Lord Decimus had long
sustained the highest glory of the Barnacle family; and let any
ill-advised member of either House but try How to do it by bringing in
a Bill to do it, that Bill was as good as dead and buried when Lord
Decimus Tite Barnacle rose up in his place and solemnly said, soaring
into indignant majesty as the Circumlocution cheering soared around
him, that he was yet to be told, My Lords, that it behoved him as the
Minister of this free country, to set bounds to the philanthropy,
to cramp the charity, to fetter the public spirit, to contract the
enterprise, to damp the independent self-reliance, of its people. The
discovery of this Behoving Machine was the discovery of the political
perpetual motion. It never wore out, though it was always going round
and round in all the State Departments.

And there, with his noble friend and relative Lord Decimus, was
William Barnacle, who had made the ever-famous coalition with Tudor
Stiltstalking, and who always kept ready his own particular recipe for
How not to do it; sometimes tapping the Speaker, and drawing it fresh
out of him, with a ‘First, I will beg you, sir, to inform the House what
Precedent we have for the course into which the honourable gentleman
would precipitate us;’ sometimes asking the honourable gentleman to
favour him with his own version of the Precedent; sometimes telling
the honourable gentleman that he (William Barnacle) would search for a
Precedent; and oftentimes crushing the honourable gentleman flat on
the spot by telling him there was no Precedent. But Precedent and
Precipitate were, under all circumstances, the well-matched pair of
battle-horses of this able Circumlocutionist. No matter that the unhappy
honourable gentleman had been trying in vain, for twenty-five years, to
precipitate William Barnacle into this--William Barnacle still put it to
the House, and (at second-hand or so) to the country, whether he was to
be precipitated into this. No matter that it was utterly irreconcilable
with the nature of things and course of events that the wretched
honourable gentleman could possibly produce a Precedent for
this--William Barnacle would nevertheless thank the honourable gentleman
for that ironical cheer, and would close with him upon that issue, and
would tell him to his teeth that there Was NO Precedent for this. It
might perhaps have been objected that the William Barnacle wisdom was
not high wisdom or the earth it bamboozled would never have been made,
or, if made in a rash mistake, would have remained blank mud. But
Precedent and Precipitate together frightened all objection out of most
people.

And there, too, was another Barnacle, a lively one, who had leaped
through twenty places in quick succession, and was always in two or
three at once, and who was the much-respected inventor of an art
which he practised with great success and admiration in all Barnacle
Governments. This was, when he was asked a Parliamentary question on
any one topic, to return an answer on any other. It had done immense
service, and brought him into high esteem with the Circumlocution
Office.

And there, too, was a sprinkling of less distinguished Parliamentary
Barnacles, who had not as yet got anything snug, and were going through
their probation to prove their worthiness. These Barnacles perched upon
staircases and hid in passages, waiting their orders to make houses
or not to make houses; and they did all their hearing, and ohing, and
cheering, and barking, under directions from the heads of the family;
and they put dummy motions on the paper in the way of other men’s
motions; and they stalled disagreeable subjects off until late in the
night and late in the session, and then with virtuous patriotism cried
out that it was too late; and they went down into the country, whenever
they were sent, and swore that Lord Decimus had revived trade from a
swoon, and commerce from a fit, and had doubled the harvest of corn,
quadrupled the harvest of hay, and prevented no end of gold from flying
out of the Bank. Also these Barnacles were dealt, by the heads of the
family, like so many cards below the court-cards, to public meetings and
dinners; where they bore testimony to all sorts of services on the part
of their noble and honourable relatives, and buttered the Barnacles on
all sorts of toasts. And they stood, under similar orders, at all sorts
of elections; and they turned out of their own seats, on the shortest
notice and the most unreasonable terms, to let in other men; and they
fetched and carried, and toadied and jobbed, and corrupted, and ate
heaps of dirt, and were indefatigable in the public service. And there
was not a list, in all the Circumlocution Office, of places that might
fall vacant anywhere within half a century, from a lord of the Treasury
to a Chinese consul, and up again to a governor-general of India, but as
applicants for such places, the names of some or of every one of these
hungry and adhesive Barnacles were down.

It was necessarily but a sprinkling of any class of Barnacles that
attended the marriage, for there were not two score in all, and what
is that subtracted from Legion! But the sprinkling was a swarm in the
Twickenham cottage, and filled it. A Barnacle (assisted by a Barnacle)
married the happy pair, and it behoved Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle
himself to conduct Mrs Meagles to breakfast.

The entertainment was not as agreeable and natural as it might have
been. Mr Meagles, hove down by his good company while he highly
appreciated it, was not himself. Mrs Gowan was herself, and that did not
improve him. The fiction that it was not Mr Meagles who had stood in the
way, but that it was the Family greatness, and that the Family greatness
had made a concession, and there was now a soothing unanimity, pervaded
the affair, though it was never openly expressed. Then the Barnacles
felt that they for their parts would have done with the Meagleses when
the present patronising occasion was over; and the Meagleses felt the
same for their parts. Then Gowan asserting his rights as a disappointed
man who had his grudge against the family, and who, perhaps, had allowed
his mother to have them there, as much in the hope it might give them
some annoyance as with any other benevolent object, aired his pencil and
his poverty ostentatiously before them, and told them he hoped in time
to settle a crust of bread and cheese on his wife, and that he begged
such of them as (more fortunate than himself) came in for any good
thing, and could buy a picture, to please to remember the poor painter.
Then Lord Decimus, who was a wonder on his own Parliamentary pedestal,
turned out to be the windiest creature here: proposing happiness to the
bride and bridegroom in a series of platitudes that would have made the
hair of any sincere disciple and believer stand on end; and trotting,
with the complacency of an idiotic elephant, among howling labyrinths of
sentences which he seemed to take for high roads, and never so much
as wanted to get out of. Then Mr Tite Barnacle could not but feel that
there was a person in company, who would have disturbed his life-long
sitting to Sir Thomas Lawrence in full official character, if such
disturbance had been possible: while Barnacle junior did, with
indignation, communicate to two vapid gentlemen, his relatives, that
there was a feller here, look here, who had come to our Department
without an appointment and said he wanted to know, you know; and that,
look here, if he was to break out now, as he might you know (for you
never could tell what an ungentlemanly Radical of that sort would be up
to next), and was to say, look here, that he wanted to know this moment,
you know, that would be jolly; wouldn’t it?

The pleasantest part of the occasion by far, to Clennam, was the
painfullest. When Mr and Mrs Meagles at last hung about Pet in the room
with the two pictures (where the company were not), before going with
her to the threshold which she could never recross to be the old Pet and
the old delight, nothing could be more natural and simple than the three
were. Gowan himself was touched, and answered Mr Meagles’s ‘O Gowan,
take care of her, take care of her!’ with an earnest ‘Don’t be so
broken-hearted, sir. By Heaven I will!’

And so, with the last sobs and last loving words, and a last look to
Clennam of confidence in his promise, Pet fell back in the carriage,
and her husband waved his hand, and they were away for Dover; though not
until the faithful Mrs Tickit, in her silk gown and jet black curls, had
rushed out from some hiding-place, and thrown both her shoes after
the carriage: an apparition which occasioned great surprise to the
distinguished company at the windows.

The said company being now relieved from further attendance, and the
chief Barnacles being rather hurried (for they had it in hand just
then to send a mail or two which was in danger of going straight to its
destination, beating about the seas like the Flying Dutchman, and to
arrange with complexity for the stoppage of a good deal of important
business otherwise in peril of being done), went their several ways;
with all affability conveying to Mr and Mrs Meagles that general
assurance that what they had been doing there, they had been doing at a
sacrifice for Mr and Mrs Meagles’s good, which they always conveyed to
Mr John Bull in their official condescension to that most unfortunate
creature.

A miserable blank remained in the house and in the hearts of the father
and mother and Clennam. Mr Meagles called only one remembrance to his
aid, that really did him good.

‘It’s very gratifying, Arthur,’ he said, ‘after all, to look back upon.’

‘The past?’ said Clennam.

‘Yes--but I mean the company.’

It had made him much more low and unhappy at the time, but now it really
did him good. ‘It’s very gratifying,’ he said, often repeating the
remark in the course of the evening. ‘Such high company!’




CHAPTER 35. What was behind Mr Pancks on Little Dorrit’s Hand


It was at this time that Mr Pancks, in discharge of his compact with
Clennam, revealed to him the whole of his gipsy story, and told him
Little Dorrit’s fortune. Her father was heir-at-law to a great estate
that had long lain unknown of, unclaimed, and accumulating. His right
was now clear, nothing interposed in his way, the Marshalsea gates stood
open, the Marshalsea walls were down, a few flourishes of his pen, and
he was extremely rich.

In his tracking out of the claim to its complete establishment, Mr
Pancks had shown a sagacity that nothing could baffle, and a patience
and secrecy that nothing could tire. ‘I little thought, sir,’ said
Pancks, ‘when you and I crossed Smithfield that night, and I told you
what sort of a Collector I was, that this would come of it. I little
thought, sir, when I told you you were not of the Clennams of
Cornwall, that I was ever going to tell you who were of the Dorrits of
Dorsetshire.’ He then went on to detail. How, having that name recorded
in his note-book, he was first attracted by the name alone. How, having
often found two exactly similar names, even belonging to the same place,
to involve no traceable consanguinity, near or distant, he did not at
first give much heed to this, except in the way of speculation as to
what a surprising change would be made in the condition of a little
seamstress, if she could be shown to have any interest in so large a
property. How he rather supposed himself to have pursued the idea into
its next degree, because there was something uncommon in the quiet
little seamstress, which pleased him and provoked his curiosity.
How he had felt his way inch by inch, and ‘Moled it out, sir’ (that was
Mr Pancks’s expression), grain by grain. How, in the beginning of
the labour described by this new verb, and to render which the more
expressive Mr Pancks shut his eyes in pronouncing it and shook his hair
over them, he had alternated from sudden lights and hopes to sudden
darkness and no hopes, and back again, and back again. How he had made
acquaintances in the Prison, expressly that he might come and go there
as all other comers and goers did; and how his first ray of light was
unconsciously given him by Mr Dorrit himself and by his son; to both of
whom he easily became known; with both of whom he talked much, casually
[‘but always Moleing you’ll observe,’ said Mr Pancks): and from whom he
derived, without being at all suspected, two or three little points of
family history which, as he began to hold clues of his own, suggested
others. How it had at length become plain to Mr Pancks that he had made
a real discovery of the heir-at-law to a great fortune, and that his
discovery had but to be ripened to legal fulness and perfection. How
he had, thereupon, sworn his landlord, Mr Rugg, to secrecy in a solemn
manner, and taken him into Moleing partnership. How they had employed
John Chivery as their sole clerk and agent, seeing to whom he was
devoted. And how, until the present hour, when authorities mighty in the
Bank and learned in the law declared their successful labours ended,
they had confided in no other human being.

‘So if the whole thing had broken down, sir,’ concluded Pancks, ‘at the
very last, say the day before the other day when I showed you our papers
in the Prison yard, or say that very day, nobody but ourselves would
have been cruelly disappointed, or a penny the worse.’

Clennam, who had been almost incessantly shaking hands with him
throughout the narrative, was reminded by this to say, in an amazement
which even the preparation he had had for the main disclosure smoothed
down, ‘My dear Mr Pancks, this must have cost you a great sum of money.’

‘Pretty well, sir,’ said the triumphant Pancks. ‘No trifle, though we
did it as cheap as it could be done. And the outlay was a difficulty,
let me tell you.’

‘A difficulty!’ repeated Clennam. ‘But the difficulties you have so
wonderfully conquered in the whole business!’ shaking his hand again.

‘I’ll tell you how I did it,’ said the delighted Pancks, putting his
hair into a condition as elevated as himself. ‘First, I spent all I had
of my own. That wasn’t much.’

‘I am sorry for it,’ said Clennam: ‘not that it matters now, though.
Then, what did you do?’

‘Then,’ answered Pancks, ‘I borrowed a sum of my proprietor.’

‘Of Mr Casby?’ said Clennam. ‘He’s a fine old fellow.’

‘Noble old boy; an’t he?’ said Mr Pancks, entering on a series of the
dryest snorts. ‘Generous old buck. Confiding old boy. Philanthropic old
buck. Benevolent old boy! Twenty per cent. I engaged to pay him, sir.
But we never do business for less at our shop.’

Arthur felt an awkward consciousness of having, in his exultant
condition, been a little premature.

‘I said to that boiling-over old Christian,’ Mr Pancks pursued,
appearing greatly to relish this descriptive epithet, ‘that I had got a
little project on hand; a hopeful one; I told him a hopeful one; which
wanted a certain small capital. I proposed to him to lend me the
money on my note. Which he did, at twenty; sticking the twenty on in a
business-like way, and putting it into the note, to look like a part of
the principal. If I had broken down after that, I should have been his
grubber for the next seven years at half wages and double grind. But
he’s a perfect Patriarch; and it would do a man good to serve him on
such terms--on any terms.’

Arthur for his life could not have said with confidence whether Pancks
really thought so or not.

‘When that was gone, sir,’ resumed Pancks, ‘and it did go, though I
dribbled it out like so much blood, I had taken Mr Rugg into the secret.
I proposed to borrow of Mr Rugg (or of Miss Rugg; it’s the same thing;
she made a little money by a speculation in the Common Pleas once). He
lent it at ten, and thought that pretty high. But Mr Rugg’s a red-haired
man, sir, and gets his hair cut. And as to the crown of his hat, it’s
high. And as to the brim of his hat, it’s narrow. And there’s no more
benevolence bubbling out of him, than out of a ninepin.’

‘Your own recompense for all this, Mr Pancks,’ said Clennam, ‘ought to
be a large one.’

‘I don’t mistrust getting it, sir,’ said Pancks. ‘I have made no
bargain. I owed you one on that score; now I have paid it. Money out of
pocket made good, time fairly allowed for, and Mr Rugg’s bill settled,
a thousand pounds would be a fortune to me. That matter I place in your
hands. I authorize you now to break all this to the family in any way
you think best. Miss Amy Dorrit will be with Mrs Finching this morning.
The sooner done the better. Can’t be done too soon.’

This conversation took place in Clennam’s bed-room, while he was yet in
bed. For Mr Pancks had knocked up the house and made his way in, very
early in the morning; and, without once sitting down or standing still,
had delivered himself of the whole of his details (illustrated with a
variety of documents) at the bedside. He now said he would ‘go and look
up Mr Rugg’, from whom his excited state of mind appeared to require
another back; and bundling up his papers, and exchanging one more hearty
shake of the hand with Clennam, he went at full speed down-stairs, and
steamed off.

Clennam, of course, resolved to go direct to Mr Casby’s. He dressed
and got out so quickly that he found himself at the corner of the
patriarchal street nearly an hour before her time; but he was not sorry
to have the opportunity of calming himself with a leisurely walk.

When he returned to the street, and had knocked at the bright brass
knocker, he was informed that she had come, and was shown up-stairs to
Flora’s breakfast-room. Little Dorrit was not there herself, but Flora
was, and testified the greatest amazement at seeing him.

‘Good gracious, Arthur--Doyce and Clennam!’ cried that lady, ‘who would
have ever thought of seeing such a sight as this and pray excuse a
wrapper for upon my word I really never and a faded check too which
is worse but our little friend is making me, not that I need mind
mentioning it to you for you must know that there are such things a
skirt, and having arranged that a trying on should take place after
breakfast is the reason though I wish not so badly starched.’

‘I ought to make an apology,’ said Arthur, ‘for so early and abrupt a
visit; but you will excuse it when I tell you the cause.’

‘In times for ever fled Arthur,’ returned Mrs Finching, ‘pray excuse
me Doyce and Clennam infinitely more correct and though unquestionably
distant still ‘tis distance lends enchantment to the view, at least I
don’t mean that and if I did I suppose it would depend considerably on
the nature of the view, but I’m running on again and you put it all out
of my head.’

She glanced at him tenderly, and resumed:

‘In times for ever fled I was going to say it would have sounded
strange indeed for Arthur Clennam--Doyce and Clennam naturally quite
different--to make apologies for coming here at any time, but that is
past and what is past can never be recalled except in his own case as
poor Mr F. said when he was in spirits Cucumber and therefore never ate
it.’

She was making the tea when Arthur came in, and now hastily finished
that operation.

‘Papa,’ she said, all mystery and whisper, as she shut down the tea-pot
lid, ‘is sitting prosingly breaking his new laid egg in the back parlour
over the City article exactly like the Woodpecker Tapping and need never
know that you are here, and our little friend you are well aware may be
fully trusted when she comes down from cutting out on the large table
overhead.’

Arthur then told her, in the fewest words, that it was their little
friend he came to see; and what he had to announce to their little
friend. At which astounding intelligence, Flora clasped her hands,
fell into a tremble, and shed tears of sympathy and pleasure, like the
good-natured creature she really was.

‘For gracious sake let me get out of the way first,’ said Flora, putting
her hands to her ears and moving towards the door, ‘or I know I shall
go off dead and screaming and make everybody worse, and the dear little
thing only this morning looking so nice and neat and good and yet so
poor and now a fortune is she really and deserves it too! and might I
mention it to Mr F.’s Aunt Arthur not Doyce and Clennam for this once or
if objectionable not on any account.’

Arthur nodded his free permission, since Flora shut out all verbal
communication. Flora nodded in return to thank him, and hurried out of
the room.

Little Dorrit’s step was already on the stairs, and in another moment
she was at the door. Do what he could to compose his face, he could not
convey so much of an ordinary expression into it, but that the moment
she saw it she dropped her work, and cried, ‘Mr Clennam! What’s the
matter?’

‘Nothing, nothing. That is, no misfortune has happened. I have come
to tell you something, but it is a piece of great good-fortune.’

‘Good-fortune?’

‘Wonderful fortune!’

They stood in a window, and her eyes, full of light, were fixed upon his
face. He put an arm about her, seeing her likely to sink down. She put
a hand upon that arm, partly to rest upon it, and partly so to preserve
their relative positions as that her intent look at him should be shaken
by no change of attitude in either of them. Her lips seemed to repeat
‘Wonderful fortune?’ He repeated it again, aloud.

‘Dear Little Dorrit! Your father.’

The ice of the pale face broke at the word, and little lights and shoots
of expression passed all over it. They were all expressions of pain. Her
breath was faint and hurried. Her heart beat fast. He would have clasped
the little figure closer, but he saw that the eyes appealed to him not
to be moved.

‘Your father can be free within this week. He does not know it; we must
go to him from here, to tell him of it. Your father will be free within
a few days. Your father will be free within a few hours. Remember we
must go to him from here, to tell him of it!’

That brought her back. Her eyes were closing, but they opened again.

‘This is not all the good-fortune. This is not all the wonderful
good-fortune, my dear Little Dorrit. Shall I tell you more?’

Her lips shaped ‘Yes.’

‘Your father will be no beggar when he is free. He will want for
nothing. Shall I tell you more? Remember! He knows nothing of it; we
must go to him, from here, to tell him of it!’

She seemed to entreat him for a little time. He held her in his arm,
and, after a pause, bent down his ear to listen.

‘Did you ask me to go on?’

‘Yes.’

‘He will be a rich man. He is a rich man. A great sum of money
is waiting to be paid over to him as his inheritance; you are all
henceforth very wealthy. Bravest and best of children, I thank Heaven
that you are rewarded!’

As he kissed her, she turned her head towards his shoulder, and raised
her arm towards his neck; cried out ‘Father! Father! Father!’ and
swooned away.

Upon which Flora returned to take care of her, and hovered about her on
a sofa, intermingling kind offices and incoherent scraps of conversation
in a manner so confounding, that whether she pressed the Marshalsea to
take a spoonful of unclaimed dividends, for it would do her good;
or whether she congratulated Little Dorrit’s father on coming into
possession of a hundred thousand smelling-bottles; or whether she
explained that she put seventy-five thousand drops of spirits of
lavender on fifty thousand pounds of lump sugar, and that she entreated
Little Dorrit to take that gentle restorative; or whether she bathed the
foreheads of Doyce and Clennam in vinegar, and gave the late Mr F. more
air; no one with any sense of responsibility could have undertaken to
decide. A tributary stream of confusion, moreover, poured in from an
adjoining bedroom, where Mr F.’s Aunt appeared, from the sound of her
voice, to be in a horizontal posture, awaiting her breakfast; and from
which bower that inexorable lady snapped off short taunts, whenever she
could get a hearing, as, ‘Don’t believe it’s his doing!’ and ‘He needn’t
take no credit to himself for it!’ and ‘It’ll be long enough, I expect,
afore he’ll give up any of his own money!’ all designed to disparage
Clennam’s share in the discovery, and to relieve those inveterate
feelings with which Mr F.’s Aunt regarded him.

But Little Dorrit’s solicitude to get to her father, and to carry the
joyful tidings to him, and not to leave him in his jail a moment with
this happiness in store for him and still unknown to him, did more for
her speedy restoration than all the skill and attention on earth could
have done. ‘Come with me to my dear father. Pray come and tell my dear
father!’ were the first words she said. Her father, her father. She
spoke of nothing but him, thought of nothing but him. Kneeling down and
pouring out her thankfulness with uplifted hands, her thanks were for
her father.

Flora’s tenderness was quite overcome by this, and she launched out
among the cups and saucers into a wonderful flow of tears and speech.

‘I declare,’ she sobbed, ‘I never was so cut up since your mama and my
papa not Doyce and Clennam for this once but give the precious little
thing a cup of tea and make her put it to her lips at least pray Arthur
do, not even Mr F.’s last illness for that was of another kind and gout
is not a child’s affection though very painful for all parties and Mr
F. a martyr with his leg upon a rest and the wine trade in itself
inflammatory for they will do it more or less among themselves and who
can wonder, it seems like a dream I am sure to think of nothing at all
this morning and now Mines of money is it really, but you must know my
darling love because you never will be strong enough to tell him all
about it upon teaspoons, mightn’t it be even best to try the directions
of my own medical man for though the flavour is anything but agreeable
still I force myself to do it as a prescription and find the benefit,
you’d rather not why no my dear I’d rather not but still I do it as a
duty, everybody will congratulate you some in earnest and some not and
many will congratulate you with all their hearts but none more so I
do assure you from the bottom of my own I do myself though sensible of
blundering and being stupid, and will be judged by Arthur not Doyce and
Clennam for this once so good-bye darling and God bless you and may you
be very happy and excuse the liberty, vowing that the dress shall never
be finished by anybody else but shall be laid by for a keepsake just
as it is and called Little Dorrit though why that strangest of
denominations at any time I never did myself and now I never shall!’



Thus Flora, in taking leave of her favourite. Little Dorrit thanked her,
and embraced her, over and over again; and finally came out of the house
with Clennam, and took coach for the Marshalsea.

It was a strangely unreal ride through the old squalid streets, with a
sensation of being raised out of them into an airy world of wealth
and grandeur. When Arthur told her that she would soon ride in her
own carriage through very different scenes, when all the familiar
experiences would have vanished away, she looked frightened. But when
he substituted her father for herself, and told her how he would ride in
his carriage, and how great and grand he would be, her tears of joy
and innocent pride fell fast. Seeing that the happiness her mind could
realise was all shining upon him, Arthur kept that single figure before
her; and so they rode brightly through the poor streets in the prison
neighbourhood to carry him the great news.

When Mr Chivery, who was on duty, admitted them into the Lodge, he saw
something in their faces which filled him with astonishment. He stood
looking after them, when they hurried into the prison, as though he
perceived that they had come back accompanied by a ghost a-piece. Two or
three Collegians whom they passed, looked after them too, and presently
joining Mr Chivery, formed a little group on the Lodge steps, in the
midst of which there spontaneously originated a whisper that the Father
was going to get his discharge. Within a few minutes, it was heard in
the remotest room in the College.

Little Dorrit opened the door from without, and they both entered. He
was sitting in his old grey gown and his old black cap, in the sunlight
by the window, reading his newspaper. His glasses were in his hand, and
he had just looked round; surprised at first, no doubt, by her step upon
the stairs, not expecting her until night; surprised again, by seeing
Arthur Clennam in her company. As they came in, the same unwonted look
in both of them which had already caught attention in the yard below,
struck him. He did not rise or speak, but laid down his glasses and his
newspaper on the table beside him, and looked at them with his mouth
a little open and his lips trembling. When Arthur put out his hand,
he touched it, but not with his usual state; and then he turned to his
daughter, who had sat down close beside him with her hands upon his
shoulder, and looked attentively in her face.

‘Father! I have been made so happy this morning!’

‘You have been made so happy, my dear?’

‘By Mr Clennam, father. He brought me such joyful and wonderful
intelligence about you! If he had not with his great kindness and
gentleness, prepared me for it, father--prepared me for it, father--I
think I could not have borne it.’

Her agitation was exceedingly great, and the tears rolled down her face.
He put his hand suddenly to his heart, and looked at Clennam.

‘Compose yourself, sir,’ said Clennam, ‘and take a little time to think.
To think of the brightest and most fortunate accidents of life. We have
all heard of great surprises of joy. They are not at an end, sir. They
are rare, but not at an end.’

‘Mr Clennam? Not at an end? Not at an end for--’ He touched himself upon
the breast, instead of saying ‘me.’

‘No,’ returned Clennam.

‘What surprise,’ he asked, keeping his left hand over his heart, and
there stopping in his speech, while with his right hand he put his
glasses exactly level on the table: ‘what such surprise can be in store
for me?’

‘Let me answer with another question. Tell me, Mr Dorrit, what surprise
would be the most unlooked for and the most acceptable to you. Do not be
afraid to imagine it, or to say what it would be.’

He looked steadfastly at Clennam, and, so looking at him, seemed to
change into a very old haggard man. The sun was bright upon the wall
beyond the window, and on the spikes at top. He slowly stretched out the
hand that had been upon his heart, and pointed at the wall.

‘It is down,’ said Clennam. ‘Gone!’

He remained in the same attitude, looking steadfastly at him.

‘And in its place,’ said Clennam, slowly and distinctly, ‘are the means
to possess and enjoy the utmost that they have so long shut out. Mr
Dorrit, there is not the smallest doubt that within a few days you will
be free, and highly prosperous. I congratulate you with all my soul on
this change of fortune, and on the happy future into which you are soon
to carry the treasure you have been blest with here--the best of all the
riches you can have elsewhere--the treasure at your side.’

With those words, he pressed his hand and released it; and his daughter,
laying her face against his, encircled him in the hour of his prosperity
with her arms, as she had in the long years of his adversity encircled
him with her love and toil and truth; and poured out her full heart in
gratitude, hope, joy, blissful ecstasy, and all for him.

‘I shall see him as I never saw him yet. I shall see my dear love, with
the dark cloud cleared away. I shall see him, as my poor mother saw him
long ago. O my dear, my dear! O father, father! O thank God, thank God!’

He yielded himself to her kisses and caresses, but did not return them,
except that he put an arm about her. Neither did he say one word. His
steadfast look was now divided between her and Clennam, and he began to
shake as if he were very cold. Explaining to Little Dorrit that he would
run to the coffee-house for a bottle of wine, Arthur fetched it with all
the haste he could use. While it was being brought from the cellar to
the bar, a number of excited people asked him what had happened; when he
hurriedly informed them that Mr Dorrit had succeeded to a fortune.

On coming back with the wine in his hand, he found that she had placed
her father in his easy chair, and had loosened his shirt and neckcloth.
They filled a tumbler with wine, and held it to his lips. When he had
swallowed a little, he took the glass himself and emptied it. Soon
after that, he leaned back in his chair and cried, with his handkerchief
before his face.

After this had lasted a while Clennam thought it a good season for
diverting his attention from the main surprise, by relating its details.
Slowly, therefore, and in a quiet tone of voice, he explained them as
best he could, and enlarged on the nature of Pancks’s service.

‘He shall be--ha--he shall be handsomely recompensed, sir,’ said
the Father, starting up and moving hurriedly about the room. ‘Assure
yourself, Mr Clennam, that everybody concerned shall be--ha--shall
be nobly rewarded. No one, my dear sir, shall say that he has an
unsatisfied claim against me. I shall repay the--hum--the advances I
have had from you, sir, with peculiar pleasure. I beg to be informed at
your earliest convenience, what advances you have made my son.’

He had no purpose in going about the room, but he was not still a
moment.

‘Everybody,’ he said, ‘shall be remembered. I will not go away from
here in anybody’s debt. All the people who have been--ha--well behaved
towards myself and my family, shall be rewarded. Chivery shall be
rewarded. Young John shall be rewarded. I particularly wish, and intend,
to act munificently, Mr Clennam.’

‘Will you allow me,’ said Arthur, laying his purse on the table, ‘to
supply any present contingencies, Mr Dorrit? I thought it best to bring
a sum of money for the purpose.’

‘Thank you, sir, thank you. I accept with readiness, at the present
moment, what I could not an hour ago have conscientiously taken. I am
obliged to you for the temporary accommodation. Exceedingly temporary,
but well timed--well timed.’ His hand had closed upon the money, and
he carried it about with him. ‘Be so kind, sir, as to add the amount to
those former advances to which I have already referred; being careful,
if you please, not to omit advances made to my son. A mere verbal
statement of the gross amount is all I shall--ha--all I shall require.’

His eye fell upon his daughter at this point, and he stopped for a
moment to kiss her, and to pat her head.

‘It will be necessary to find a milliner, my love, and to make a speedy
and complete change in your very plain dress. Something must be done
with Maggy too, who at present is--ha--barely respectable, barely
respectable. And your sister, Amy, and your brother. And _my_ brother,
your uncle--poor soul, I trust this will rouse him--messengers must be
despatched to fetch them. They must be informed of this. We must break
it to them cautiously, but they must be informed directly. We owe it
as a duty to them and to ourselves, from this moment, not to let
them--hum--not to let them do anything.’

This was the first intimation he had ever given, that he was privy to
the fact that they did something for a livelihood.

He was still jogging about the room, with the purse clutched in his
hand, when a great cheering arose in the yard. ‘The news has spread
already,’ said Clennam, looking down from the window. ‘Will you show
yourself to them, Mr Dorrit? They are very earnest, and they evidently
wish it.’

‘I--hum--ha--I confess I could have desired, Amy my dear,’ he said,
jogging about in a more feverish flutter than before, ‘to have made some
change in my dress first, and to have bought a--hum--a watch and chain.
But if it must be done as it is, it--ha--it must be done. Fasten the
collar of my shirt, my dear. Mr Clennam, would you oblige me--hum--with
a blue neckcloth you will find in that drawer at your elbow. Button
my coat across at the chest, my love. It looks--ha--it looks broader,
buttoned.’

With his trembling hand he pushed his grey hair up, and then, taking
Clennam and his daughter for supporters, appeared at the window leaning
on an arm of each. The Collegians cheered him very heartily, and he
kissed his hand to them with great urbanity and protection. When he
withdrew into the room again, he said ‘Poor creatures!’ in a tone of
much pity for their miserable condition.

Little Dorrit was deeply anxious that he should lie down to compose
himself. On Arthur’s speaking to her of his going to inform Pancks that
he might now appear as soon as he would, and pursue the joyful business
to its close, she entreated him in a whisper to stay with her until her
father should be quite calm and at rest. He needed no second entreaty;
and she prepared her father’s bed, and begged him to lie down. For
another half-hour or more he would be persuaded to do nothing but
go about the room, discussing with himself the probabilities for and
against the Marshal’s allowing the whole of the prisoners to go to the
windows of the official residence which commanded the street, to see
himself and family depart for ever in a carriage--which, he said, he
thought would be a Sight for them. But gradually he began to droop and
tire, and at last stretched himself upon the bed.

She took her faithful place beside him, fanning him and cooling his
forehead; and he seemed to be falling asleep (always with the money in
his hand), when he unexpectedly sat up and said:

‘Mr Clennam, I beg your pardon. Am I to understand, my dear sir, that I
could--ha--could pass through the Lodge at this moment, and--hum--take a
walk?’

‘I think not, Mr Dorrit,’ was the unwilling reply. ‘There are certain
forms to be completed; and although your detention here is now in itself
a form, I fear it is one that for a little longer has to be observed
too.’

At this he shed tears again.

‘It is but a few hours, sir,’ Clennam cheerfully urged upon him.

‘A few hours, sir,’ he returned in a sudden passion. ‘You talk very
easily of hours, sir! How long do you suppose, sir, that an hour is to a
man who is choking for want of air?’

It was his last demonstration for that time; as, after shedding some
more tears and querulously complaining that he couldn’t breathe, he
slowly fell into a slumber. Clennam had abundant occupation for his
thoughts, as he sat in the quiet room watching the father on his bed,
and the daughter fanning his face.

Little Dorrit had been thinking too. After softly putting his grey hair
aside, and touching his forehead with her lips, she looked towards
Arthur, who came nearer to her, and pursued in a low whisper the subject
of her thoughts.

‘Mr Clennam, will he pay all his debts before he leaves here?’

‘No doubt. All.’

‘All the debts for which he had been imprisoned here, all my life and
longer?’

‘No doubt.’

There was something of uncertainty and remonstrance in her look;
something that was not all satisfaction. He wondered to detect it, and
said:

‘You are glad that he should do so?’

‘Are you?’ asked Little Dorrit, wistfully.

‘Am I? Most heartily glad!’

‘Then I know I ought to be.’

‘And are you not?’

‘It seems to me hard,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘that he should have lost so
many years and suffered so much, and at last pay all the debts as well.
It seems to me hard that he should pay in life and money both.’

‘My dear child--’ Clennam was beginning.

‘Yes, I know I am wrong,’ she pleaded timidly, ‘don’t think any worse of
me; it has grown up with me here.’

The prison, which could spoil so many things, had tainted Little
Dorrit’s mind no more than this. Engendered as the confusion was, in
compassion for the poor prisoner, her father, it was the first speck
Clennam had ever seen, it was the last speck Clennam ever saw, of the
prison atmosphere upon her.

He thought this, and forbore to say another word. With the thought, her
purity and goodness came before him in their brightest light. The little
spot made them the more beautiful.

Worn out with her own emotions, and yielding to the silence of the room,
her hand slowly slackened and failed in its fanning movement, and her
head dropped down on the pillow at her father’s side. Clennam rose
softly, opened and closed the door without a sound, and passed from the
prison, carrying the quiet with him into the turbulent streets.




CHAPTER 36. The Marshalsea becomes an Orphan


And now the day arrived when Mr Dorrit and his family were to leave the
prison for ever, and the stones of its much-trodden pavement were to
know them no more.

The interval had been short, but he had greatly complained of its
length, and had been imperious with Mr Rugg touching the delay. He had
been high with Mr Rugg, and had threatened to employ some one else. He
had requested Mr Rugg not to presume upon the place in which he found
him, but to do his duty, sir, and to do it with promptitude. He had told
Mr Rugg that he knew what lawyers and agents were, and that he would not
submit to imposition. On that gentleman’s humbly representing that
he exerted himself to the utmost, Miss Fanny was very short with him;
desiring to know what less he could do, when he had been told a dozen
times that money was no object, and expressing her suspicion that he
forgot whom he talked to.

Towards the Marshal, who was a Marshal of many years’ standing, and
with whom he had never had any previous difference, Mr Dorrit comported
himself with severity. That officer, on personally tendering his
congratulations, offered the free use of two rooms in his house for Mr
Dorrit’s occupation until his departure. Mr Dorrit thanked him at the
moment, and replied that he would think of it; but the Marshal was no
sooner gone than he sat down and wrote him a cutting note, in which
he remarked that he had never on any former occasion had the honour of
receiving his congratulations (which was true, though indeed there had
not been anything particular to congratulate him upon), and that he
begged, on behalf of himself and family, to repudiate the Marshal’s
offer, with all those thanks which its disinterested character and its
perfect independence of all worldly considerations demanded.

Although his brother showed so dim a glimmering of interest in their
altered fortunes that it was very doubtful whether he understood them,
Mr Dorrit caused him to be measured for new raiment by the hosiers,
tailors, hatters, and bootmakers whom he called in for himself; and
ordered that his old clothes should be taken from him and burned. Miss
Fanny and Mr Tip required no direction in making an appearance of great
fashion and elegance; and the three passed this interval together at the
best hotel in the neighbourhood--though truly, as Miss Fanny said, the
best was very indifferent. In connection with that establishment, Mr
Tip hired a cabriolet, horse, and groom, a very neat turn out, which
was usually to be observed for two or three hours at a time gracing the
Borough High Street, outside the Marshalsea court-yard. A modest
little hired chariot and pair was also frequently to be seen there;
in alighting from and entering which vehicle, Miss Fanny fluttered the
Marshal’s daughters by the display of inaccessible bonnets.

A great deal of business was transacted in this short period. Among
other items, Messrs Peddle and Pool, solicitors, of Monument Yard, were
instructed by their client Edward Dorrit, Esquire, to address a letter
to Mr Arthur Clennam, enclosing the sum of twenty-four pounds nine
shillings and eightpence, being the amount of principal and interest
computed at the rate of five per cent. per annum, in which their
client believed himself to be indebted to Mr Clennam. In making this
communication and remittance, Messrs Peddle and Pool were further
instructed by their client to remind Mr Clennam that the favour of the
advance now repaid (including gate-fees) had not been asked of him, and
to inform him that it would not have been accepted if it had been openly
proffered in his name. With which they requested a stamped receipt, and
remained his obedient servants. A great deal of business had likewise to
be done, within the so-soon-to-be-orphaned Marshalsea, by Mr Dorrit
so long its Father, chiefly arising out of applications made to him
by Collegians for small sums of money. To these he responded with the
greatest liberality, and with no lack of formality; always first writing
to appoint a time at which the applicant might wait upon him in his
room, and then receiving him in the midst of a vast accumulation of
documents, and accompanying his donation (for he said in every such
case, ‘it is a donation, not a loan’) with a great deal of good counsel:
to the effect that he, the expiring Father of the Marshalsea, hoped to
be long remembered, as an example that a man might preserve his own and
the general respect even there.

The Collegians were not envious. Besides that they had a personal and
traditional regard for a Collegian of so many years’ standing, the event
was creditable to the College, and made it famous in the newspapers.
Perhaps more of them thought, too, than were quite aware of it, that the
thing might in the lottery of chances have happened to themselves, or
that something of the sort might yet happen to themselves some day or
other. They took it very well. A few were low at the thought of being
left behind, and being left poor; but even these did not grudge the
family their brilliant reverse. There might have been much more envy in
politer places. It seems probable that mediocrity of fortune would have
been disposed to be less magnanimous than the Collegians, who lived from
hand to mouth--from the pawnbroker’s hand to the day’s dinner.

They got up an address to him, which they presented in a neat frame and
glass (though it was not afterwards displayed in the family mansion or
preserved among the family papers); and to which he returned a gracious
answer. In that document he assured them, in a Royal manner, that he
received the profession of their attachment with a full conviction
of its sincerity; and again generally exhorted them to follow his
example--which, at least in so far as coming into a great property was
concerned, there is no doubt they would have gladly imitated. He took
the same occasion of inviting them to a comprehensive entertainment, to
be given to the whole College in the yard, and at which he signified
he would have the honour of taking a parting glass to the health and
happiness of all those whom he was about to leave behind.

He did not in person dine at this public repast (it took place at two in
the afternoon, and his dinners now came in from the hotel at six), but
his son was so good as to take the head of the principal table, and to
be very free and engaging. He himself went about among the company, and
took notice of individuals, and saw that the viands were of the quality
he had ordered, and that all were served. On the whole, he was like a
baron of the olden time in a rare good humour. At the conclusion of the
repast, he pledged his guests in a bumper of old Madeira; and told them
that he hoped they had enjoyed themselves, and what was more, that they
would enjoy themselves for the rest of the evening; that he wished them
well; and that he bade them welcome. His health being drunk with
acclamations, he was not so baronial after all but that in trying to
return thanks he broke down, in the manner of a mere serf with a heart
in his breast, and wept before them all. After this great success, which
he supposed to be a failure, he gave them ‘Mr Chivery and his brother
officers;’ whom he had beforehand presented with ten pounds each, and
who were all in attendance. Mr Chivery spoke to the toast, saying, What
you undertake to lock up, lock up; but remember that you are, in the
words of the fettered African, a man and a brother ever. The list of
toasts disposed of, Mr Dorrit urbanely went through the motions of
playing a game of skittles with the Collegian who was the next oldest
inhabitant to himself; and left the tenantry to their diversions.

But all these occurrences preceded the final day. And now the day
arrived when he and his family were to leave the prison for ever, and
when the stones of its much-trodden pavement were to know them no more.

Noon was the hour appointed for the departure. As it approached, there
was not a Collegian within doors, nor a turnkey absent. The latter class
of gentlemen appeared in their Sunday clothes, and the greater part of
the Collegians were brightened up as much as circumstances allowed. Two
or three flags were even displayed, and the children put on odds and
ends of ribbon. Mr Dorrit himself, at this trying time, preserved a
serious but graceful dignity. Much of his great attention was given to
his brother, as to whose bearing on the great occasion he felt anxious.

‘My dear Frederick,’ said he, ‘if you will give me your arm we will pass
among our friends together. I think it is right that we should go out
arm in arm, my dear Frederick.’

‘Hah!’ said Frederick. ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes.’

‘And if, my dear Frederick--if you could, without putting any great
constraint upon yourself, throw a little (pray excuse me, Frederick), a
little polish into your usual demeanour--’

‘William, William,’ said the other, shaking his head, ‘it’s for you to
do all that. I don’t know how. All forgotten, forgotten!’

‘But, my dear fellow,’ returned William, ‘for that very reason, if
for no other, you must positively try to rouse yourself. What you
have forgotten you must now begin to recall, my dear Frederick. Your
position--’

‘Eh?’ said Frederick.

‘Your position, my dear Frederick.’

‘Mine?’ He looked first at his own figure, and then at his brother’s,
and then, drawing a long breath, cried, ‘Hah, to be sure! Yes, yes,
yes.’

‘Your position, my dear Frederick, is now a fine one. Your position, as
my brother, is a very fine one. And I know that it belongs to your
conscientious nature to try to become worthy of it, my dear Frederick,
and to try to adorn it. To be no discredit to it, but to adorn it.’

‘William,’ said the other weakly, and with a sigh, ‘I will do anything
you wish, my brother, provided it lies in my power. Pray be so kind as
to recollect what a limited power mine is. What would you wish me to do
to-day, brother? Say what it is, only say what it is.’

‘My dearest Frederick, nothing. It is not worth troubling so good a
heart as yours with.’

‘Pray trouble it,’ returned the other. ‘It finds it no trouble, William,
to do anything it can for you.’

William passed his hand across his eyes, and murmured with august
satisfaction, ‘Blessings on your attachment, my poor dear fellow!’ Then
he said aloud, ‘Well, my dear Frederick, if you will only try, as we
walk out, to show that you are alive to the occasion--that you think
about it--’

‘What would you advise me to think about it?’ returned his submissive
brother.

‘Oh! my dear Frederick, how can I answer you? I can only say what, in
leaving these good people, I think myself.’

‘That’s it!’ cried his brother. ‘That will help me.’

‘I find that I think, my dear Frederick, and with mixed emotions in
which a softened compassion predominates, What will they do without me!’

‘True,’ returned his brother. ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes. I’ll think that as we
go, What will they do without my brother! Poor things! What will they do
without him!’

Twelve o’clock having just struck, and the carriage being reported ready
in the outer court-yard, the brothers proceeded down-stairs arm-in-arm.
Edward Dorrit, Esquire (once Tip), and his sister Fanny followed,
also arm-in-arm; Mr Plornish and Maggy, to whom had been entrusted the
removal of such of the family effects as were considered worth removing,
followed, bearing bundles and burdens to be packed in a cart.

In the yard, were the Collegians and turnkeys. In the yard, were Mr
Pancks and Mr Rugg, come to see the last touch given to their work.
In the yard, was Young John making a new epitaph for himself, on
the occasion of his dying of a broken heart. In the yard, was the
Patriarchal Casby, looking so tremendously benevolent that many
enthusiastic Collegians grasped him fervently by the hand, and the wives
and female relatives of many more Collegians kissed his hand, nothing
doubting that he had done it all. In the yard, was the man with the
shadowy grievance respecting the Fund which the Marshal embezzled, who
had got up at five in the morning to complete the copying of a perfectly
unintelligible history of that transaction, which he had committed to Mr
Dorrit’s care, as a document of the last importance, calculated to stun
the Government and effect the Marshal’s downfall. In the yard, was the
insolvent whose utmost energies were always set on getting into debt,
who broke into prison with as much pains as other men have broken out
of it, and who was always being cleared and complimented; while the
insolvent at his elbow--a mere little, snivelling, striving tradesman,
half dead of anxious efforts to keep out of debt--found it a hard
matter, indeed, to get a Commissioner to release him with much reproof
and reproach. In the yard, was the man of many children and many
burdens, whose failure astonished everybody; in the yard, was the man of
no children and large resources, whose failure astonished nobody. There,
were the people who were always going out to-morrow, and always putting
it off; there, were the people who had come in yesterday, and who
were much more jealous and resentful of this freak of fortune than
the seasoned birds. There, were some who, in pure meanness of spirit,
cringed and bowed before the enriched Collegian and his family; there,
were others who did so really because their eyes, accustomed to the
gloom of their imprisonment and poverty, could not support the light of
such bright sunshine. There, were many whose shillings had gone into his
pocket to buy him meat and drink; but none who were now obtrusively Hail
fellow well met! with him, on the strength of that assistance. It was
rather to be remarked of the caged birds, that they were a little shy
of the bird about to be so grandly free, and that they had a tendency to
withdraw themselves towards the bars, and seem a little fluttered as he
passed.

Through these spectators the little procession, headed by the two
brothers, moved slowly to the gate. Mr Dorrit, yielding to the vast
speculation how the poor creatures were to get on without him, was
great, and sad, but not absorbed. He patted children on the head
like Sir Roger de Coverley going to church, he spoke to people in the
background by their Christian names, he condescended to all present, and
seemed for their consolation to walk encircled by the legend in golden
characters, ‘Be comforted, my people! Bear it!’

At last three honest cheers announced that he had passed the gate, and
that the Marshalsea was an orphan. Before they had ceased to ring in the
echoes of the prison walls, the family had got into their carriage, and
the attendant had the steps in his hand.

Then, and not before, ‘Good Gracious!’ cried Miss Fanny all at once,
‘Where’s Amy!’

Her father had thought she was with her sister. Her sister had thought
she was ‘somewhere or other.’ They had all trusted to finding her, as
they had always done, quietly in the right place at the right moment.
This going away was perhaps the very first action of their joint lives
that they had got through without her.

A minute might have been consumed in the ascertaining of these points,
when Miss Fanny, who, from her seat in the carriage, commanded the long
narrow passage leading to the Lodge, flushed indignantly.

‘Now I do say, Pa,’ cried she, ‘that this is disgraceful!’

‘What is disgraceful, Fanny?’

‘I do say,’ she repeated, ‘this is perfectly infamous! Really almost
enough, even at such a time as this, to make one wish one was dead!
Here is that child Amy, in her ugly old shabby dress, which she was so
obstinate about, Pa, which I over and over again begged and prayed her
to change, and which she over and over again objected to, and promised
to change to-day, saying she wished to wear it as long as ever she
remained in there with you--which was absolutely romantic nonsense of
the lowest kind--here is that child Amy disgracing us to the last moment
and at the last moment, by being carried out in that dress after all.
And by that Mr Clennam too!’

The offence was proved, as she delivered the indictment. Clennam
appeared at the carriage-door, bearing the little insensible figure in
his arms.

‘She has been forgotten,’ he said, in a tone of pity not free from
reproach. ‘I ran up to her room (which Mr Chivery showed me) and found
the door open, and that she had fainted on the floor, dear child.
She appeared to have gone to change her dress, and to have sunk down
overpowered. It may have been the cheering, or it may have happened
sooner. Take care of this poor cold hand, Miss Dorrit. Don’t let it
fall.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ returned Miss Dorrit, bursting into tears. ‘I believe
I know what to do, if you will give me leave. Dear Amy, open your eyes,
that’s a love! Oh, Amy, Amy, I really am so vexed and ashamed! Do rouse
yourself, darling! Oh, why are they not driving on! Pray, Pa, do drive
on!’

The attendant, getting between Clennam and the carriage-door, with a
sharp ‘By your leave, sir!’ bundled up the steps, and they drove away.





BOOK THE SECOND: RICHES




CHAPTER 1. Fellow Travellers


In the autumn of the year, Darkness and Night were creeping up to the
highest ridges of the Alps.

It was vintage time in the valleys on the Swiss side of the Pass of the
Great Saint Bernard, and along the banks of the Lake of Geneva.
The air there was charged with the scent of gathered grapes. Baskets,
troughs, and tubs of grapes stood in the dim village doorways, stopped
the steep and narrow village streets, and had been carrying all day
along the roads and lanes. Grapes, split and crushed under foot, lay
about everywhere. The child carried in a sling by the laden peasant
woman toiling home, was quieted with picked-up grapes; the idiot sunning
his big goitre under the leaves of the wooden chalet by the way to the
Waterfall, sat munching grapes; the breath of the cows and goats was
redolent of leaves and stalks of grapes; the company in every little
cabaret were eating, drinking, talking grapes. A pity that no ripe touch
of this generous abundance could be given to the thin, hard, stony wine,
which after all was made from the grapes!

The air had been warm and transparent through the whole of the bright
day. Shining metal spires and church-roofs, distant and rarely seen, had
sparkled in the view; and the snowy mountain-tops had been so clear that
unaccustomed eyes, cancelling the intervening country, and slighting
their rugged heights for something fabulous, would have measured them as
within a few hours easy reach. Mountain-peaks of great celebrity in the
valleys, whence no trace of their existence was visible sometimes for
months together, had been since morning plain and near in the blue sky.
And now, when it was dark below, though they seemed solemnly to recede,
like spectres who were going to vanish, as the red dye of the sunset
faded out of them and left them coldly white, they were yet distinctly
defined in their loneliness above the mists and shadows.

Seen from these solitudes, and from the Pass of the Great Saint Bernard,
which was one of them, the ascending Night came up the mountain like a
rising water. When it at last rose to the walls of the convent of the
Great Saint Bernard, it was as if that weather-beaten structure were
another Ark, and floated on the shadowy waves.

Darkness, outstripping some visitors on mules, had risen thus to
the rough convent walls, when those travellers were yet climbing the
mountain. As the heat of the glowing day when they had stopped to drink
at the streams of melted ice and snow, was changed to the searching cold
of the frosty rarefied night air at a great height, so the fresh beauty
of the lower journey had yielded to barrenness and desolation. A craggy
track, up which the mules in single file scrambled and turned from
block to block, as though they were ascending the broken staircase of
a gigantic ruin, was their way now. No trees were to be seen, nor any
vegetable growth save a poor brown scrubby moss, freezing in the chinks
of rock. Blackened skeleton arms of wood by the wayside pointed upward
to the convent as if the ghosts of former travellers overwhelmed by the
snow haunted the scene of their distress. Icicle-hung caves and cellars
built for refuges from sudden storms, were like so many whispers of the
perils of the place; never-resting wreaths and mazes of mist wandered
about, hunted by a moaning wind; and snow, the besetting danger of the
mountain, against which all its defences were taken, drifted sharply
down.

The file of mules, jaded by their day’s work, turned and wound slowly
up the deep ascent; the foremost led by a guide on foot, in his
broad-brimmed hat and round jacket, carrying a mountain staff or two
upon his shoulder, with whom another guide conversed. There was no
speaking among the string of riders. The sharp cold, the fatigue of the
journey, and a new sensation of a catching in the breath, partly as if
they had just emerged from very clear crisp water, and partly as if they
had been sobbing, kept them silent.

At length, a light on the summit of the rocky staircase gleamed through
the snow and mist. The guides called to the mules, the mules pricked up
their drooping heads, the travellers’ tongues were loosened, and in a
sudden burst of slipping, climbing, jingling, clinking, and talking,
they arrived at the convent door.

Other mules had arrived not long before, some with peasant riders and
some with goods, and had trodden the snow about the door into a pool
of mud. Riding-saddles and bridles, pack-saddles and strings of bells,
mules and men, lanterns, torches, sacks, provender, barrels, cheeses,
kegs of honey and butter, straw bundles and packages of many shapes,
were crowded confusedly together in this thawed quagmire and about the
steps. Up here in the clouds, everything was seen through cloud, and
seemed dissolving into cloud. The breath of the men was cloud, the
breath of the mules was cloud, the lights were encircled by cloud,
speakers close at hand were not seen for cloud, though their voices and
all other sounds were surprisingly clear. Of the cloudy line of mules
hastily tied to rings in the wall, one would bite another, or kick
another, and then the whole mist would be disturbed: with men diving
into it, and cries of men and beasts coming out of it, and no bystander
discerning what was wrong. In the midst of this, the great stable of the
convent, occupying the basement story and entered by the basement door,
outside which all the disorder was, poured forth its contribution of
cloud, as if the whole rugged edifice were filled with nothing else,
and would collapse as soon as it had emptied itself, leaving the snow to
fall upon the bare mountain summit.

While all this noise and hurry were rife among the living travellers,
there, too, silently assembled in a grated house half-a-dozen paces
removed, with the same cloud enfolding them and the same snow flakes
drifting in upon them, were the dead travellers found upon the mountain.
The mother, storm-belated many winters ago, still standing in the corner
with her baby at her breast; the man who had frozen with his arm raised
to his mouth in fear or hunger, still pressing it with his dry lips
after years and years. An awful company, mysteriously come together! A
wild destiny for that mother to have foreseen! ‘Surrounded by so many
and such companions upon whom I never looked, and never shall look,
I and my child will dwell together inseparable, on the Great Saint
Bernard, outlasting generations who will come to see us, and will never
know our name, or one word of our story but the end.’

The living travellers thought little or nothing of the dead just then.
They thought much more of alighting at the convent door, and warming
themselves at the convent fire. Disengaged from the turmoil, which was
already calming down as the crowd of mules began to be bestowed in the
stable, they hurried shivering up the steps and into the building. There
was a smell within, coming up from the floor, of tethered beasts, like
the smell of a menagerie of wild animals. There were strong arched
galleries within, huge stone piers, great staircases, and thick walls
pierced with small sunken windows--fortifications against the mountain
storms, as if they had been human enemies. There were gloomy vaulted
sleeping-rooms within, intensely cold, but clean and hospitably prepared
for guests. Finally, there was a parlour for guests to sit in and sup
in, where a table was already laid, and where a blazing fire shone red
and high.

In this room, after having had their quarters for the night allotted
to them by two young Fathers, the travellers presently drew round the
hearth. They were in three parties; of whom the first, as the most
numerous and important, was the slowest, and had been overtaken by
one of the others on the way up. It consisted of an elderly lady, two
grey-haired gentlemen, two young ladies, and their brother. These were
attended (not to mention four guides), by a courier, two footmen, and
two waiting-maids: which strong body of inconvenience was accommodated
elsewhere under the same roof. The party that had overtaken them, and
followed in their train, consisted of only three members: one lady and
two gentlemen. The third party, which had ascended from the valley
on the Italian side of the Pass, and had arrived first, were four in
number: a plethoric, hungry, and silent German tutor in spectacles, on
a tour with three young men, his pupils, all plethoric, hungry, and
silent, and all in spectacles.

These three groups sat round the fire eyeing each other drily, and
waiting for supper. Only one among them, one of the gentlemen belonging
to the party of three, made advances towards conversation. Throwing out
his lines for the Chief of the important tribe, while addressing himself
to his own companions, he remarked, in a tone of voice which included
all the company if they chose to be included, that it had been a long
day, and that he felt for the ladies. That he feared one of the
young ladies was not a strong or accustomed traveller, and had been
over-fatigued two or three hours ago. That he had observed, from his
station in the rear, that she sat her mule as if she were exhausted.
That he had, twice or thrice afterwards, done himself the honour of
inquiring of one of the guides, when he fell behind, how the lady did.
That he had been enchanted to learn that she had recovered her spirits,
and that it had been but a passing discomfort. That he trusted (by this
time he had secured the eyes of the Chief, and addressed him) he might
be permitted to express his hope that she was now none the worse, and
that she would not regret having made the journey.

‘My daughter, I am obliged to you, sir,’ returned the Chief, ‘is quite
restored, and has been greatly interested.’

‘New to mountains, perhaps?’ said the insinuating traveller.

‘New to--ha--to mountains,’ said the Chief.

‘But you are familiar with them, sir?’ the insinuating traveller
assumed.

‘I am--hum--tolerably familiar. Not of late years. Not of late years,’
replied the Chief, with a flourish of his hand.

The insinuating traveller, acknowledging the flourish with an
inclination of his head, passed from the Chief to the second young lady,
who had not yet been referred to otherwise than as one of the ladies in
whose behalf he felt so sensitive an interest.

He hoped she was not incommoded by the fatigues of the day.

‘Incommoded, certainly,’ returned the young lady, ‘but not tired.’

The insinuating traveller complimented her on the justice of the
distinction. It was what he had meant to say. Every lady must doubtless
be incommoded by having to do with that proverbially unaccommodating
animal, the mule.

‘We have had, of course,’ said the young lady, who was rather reserved
and haughty, ‘to leave the carriages and fourgon at Martigny. And the
impossibility of bringing anything that one wants to this inaccessible
place, and the necessity of leaving every comfort behind, is not
convenient.’

‘A savage place indeed,’ said the insinuating traveller.

The elderly lady, who was a model of accurate dressing, and whose manner
was perfect, considered as a piece of machinery, here interposed a
remark in a low soft voice.

‘But, like other inconvenient places,’ she observed, ‘it must be seen.
As a place much spoken of, it is necessary to see it.’

‘O! I have not the least objection to seeing it, I assure you, Mrs
General,’ returned the other, carelessly.

‘You, madam,’ said the insinuating traveller, ‘have visited this spot
before?’

‘Yes,’ returned Mrs General. ‘I have been here before. Let me
commend you, my dear,’ to the former young lady, ‘to shade your face
from the hot wood, after exposure to the mountain air and snow. You,
too, my dear,’ to the other and younger lady, who immediately did so;
while the former merely said, ‘Thank you, Mrs General, I am Perfectly
comfortable, and prefer remaining as I am.’

The brother, who had left his chair to open a piano that stood in
the room, and who had whistled into it and shut it up again, now came
strolling back to the fire with his glass in his eye. He was dressed in
the very fullest and completest travelling trim. The world seemed hardly
large enough to yield him an amount of travel proportionate to his
equipment.

‘These fellows are an immense time with supper,’ he drawled. ‘I wonder
what they’ll give us! Has anybody any idea?’

‘Not roast man, I believe,’ replied the voice of the second gentleman of
the party of three.

‘I suppose not. What d’ye mean?’ he inquired.

‘That, as you are not to be served for the general supper, perhaps you
will do us the favour of not cooking yourself at the general fire,’
returned the other.

The young gentleman who was standing in an easy attitude on the hearth,
cocking his glass at the company, with his back to the blaze and his
coat tucked under his arms, something as if he were Of the Poultry
species and were trussed for roasting, lost countenance at this
reply; he seemed about to demand further explanation, when it was
discovered--through all eyes turning on the speaker--that the lady with
him, who was young and beautiful, had not heard what had passed through
having fainted with her head upon his shoulder.

‘I think,’ said the gentleman in a subdued tone, ‘I had best carry
her straight to her room. Will you call to some one to bring a light?’
addressing his companion, ‘and to show the way? In this strange rambling
place I don’t know that I could find it.’

‘Pray, let me call my maid,’ cried the taller of the young ladies.

‘Pray, let me put this water to her lips,’ said the shorter, who had not
spoken yet.

Each doing what she suggested, there was no want of assistance. Indeed,
when the two maids came in (escorted by the courier, lest any one should
strike them dumb by addressing a foreign language to them on the road),
there was a prospect of too much assistance. Seeing this, and saying as
much in a few words to the slighter and younger of the two ladies,
the gentleman put his wife’s arm over his shoulder, lifted her up, and
carried her away.

His friend, being left alone with the other visitors, walked slowly up
and down the room without coming to the fire again, pulling his black
moustache in a contemplative manner, as if he felt himself committed
to the late retort. While the subject of it was breathing injury in a
corner, the Chief loftily addressed this gentleman.

‘Your friend, sir,’ said he, ‘is--ha--is a little impatient; and, in
his impatience, is not perhaps fully sensible of what he owes
to--hum--to--but we will waive that, we will waive that. Your friend is
a little impatient, sir.’

‘It may be so, sir,’ returned the other. ‘But having had the honour of
making that gentleman’s acquaintance at the hotel at Geneva, where we
and much good company met some time ago, and having had the honour
of exchanging company and conversation with that gentleman on several
subsequent excursions, I can hear nothing--no, not even from one of your
appearance and station, sir--detrimental to that gentleman.’

‘You are in no danger, sir, of hearing any such thing from me. In
remarking that your friend has shown impatience, I say no such thing. I
make that remark, because it is not to be doubted that my son, being by
birth and by--ha--by education a--hum--a gentleman, would have readily
adapted himself to any obligingly expressed wish on the subject of the
fire being equally accessible to the whole of the present circle. Which,
in principle, I--ha--for all are--hum--equal on these occasions--I
consider right.’

‘Good,’ was the reply. ‘And there it ends! I am your son’s obedient
servant. I beg your son to receive the assurance of my profound
consideration. And now, sir, I may admit, freely admit, that my friend
is sometimes of a sarcastic temper.’

‘The lady is your friend’s wife, sir?’

‘The lady is my friend’s wife, sir.’

‘She is very handsome.’

‘Sir, she is peerless. They are still in the first year of their
marriage. They are still partly on a marriage, and partly on an
artistic, tour.’

‘Your friend is an artist, sir?’

The gentleman replied by kissing the fingers of his right hand, and
wafting the kiss the length of his arm towards Heaven. As who should
say, I devote him to the celestial Powers as an immortal artist!

‘But he is a man of family,’ he added. ‘His connections are of the best.
He is more than an artist: he is highly connected. He may, in effect,
have repudiated his connections, proudly, impatiently, sarcastically (I
make the concession of both words); but he has them. Sparks that have
been struck out during our intercourse have shown me this.’

‘Well! I hope,’ said the lofty gentleman, with the air of finally
disposing of the subject, ‘that the lady’s indisposition may be only
temporary.’

‘Sir, I hope so.’

‘Mere fatigue, I dare say.’

‘Not altogether mere fatigue, sir, for her mule stumbled to-day, and
she fell from the saddle. She fell lightly, and was up again without
assistance, and rode from us laughing; but she complained towards
evening of a slight bruise in the side. She spoke of it more than once,
as we followed your party up the mountain.’

The head of the large retinue, who was gracious but not familiar,
appeared by this time to think that he had condescended more than
enough. He said no more, and there was silence for some quarter of an
hour until supper appeared.

With the supper came one of the young Fathers (there seemed to be no
old Fathers) to take the head of the table. It was like the supper of
an ordinary Swiss hotel, and good red wine grown by the convent in more
genial air was not wanting. The artist traveller calmly came and took
his place at table when the rest sat down, with no apparent sense upon
him of his late skirmish with the completely dressed traveller.

‘Pray,’ he inquired of the host, over his soup, ‘has your convent many
of its famous dogs now?’

‘Monsieur, it has three.’

‘I saw three in the gallery below. Doubtless the three in question.’

The host, a slender, bright-eyed, dark young man of polite manners,
whose garment was a black gown with strips of white crossed over it like
braces, and who no more resembled the conventional breed of Saint
Bernard monks than he resembled the conventional breed of Saint Bernard
dogs, replied, doubtless those were the three in question.

‘And I think,’ said the artist traveller, ‘I have seen one of them
before.’

It was possible. He was a dog sufficiently well known. Monsieur might
have easily seen him in the valley or somewhere on the lake, when he
(the dog) had gone down with one of the order to solicit aid for the
convent.

‘Which is done in its regular season of the year, I think?’

Monsieur was right.

‘And never without a dog. The dog is very important.’

Again Monsieur was right. The dog was very important. People were justly
interested in the dog. As one of the dogs celebrated everywhere,
Ma’amselle would observe.

Ma’amselle was a little slow to observe it, as though she were not yet
well accustomed to the French tongue. Mrs General, however, observed it
for her.

‘Ask him if he has saved many lives?’ said, in his native English, the
young man who had been put out of countenance.

The host needed no translation of the question. He promptly replied in
French, ‘No. Not this one.’

‘Why not?’ the same gentleman asked.

‘Pardon,’ returned the host composedly, ‘give him the opportunity and
he will do it without doubt. For example, I am well convinced,’ smiling
sedately, as he cut up the dish of veal to be handed round, on the young
man who had been put out of countenance, ‘that if you, Monsieur, would
give him the opportunity, he would hasten with great ardour to fulfil
his duty.’

The artist traveller laughed. The insinuating traveller (who evinced
a provident anxiety to get his full share of the supper), wiping some
drops of wine from his moustache with a piece of bread, joined the
conversation.

‘It is becoming late in the year, my Father,’ said he, ‘for
tourist-travellers, is it not?’

‘Yes, it is late. Yet two or three weeks, at most, and we shall be left
to the winter snows.’

‘And then,’ said the insinuating traveller, ‘for the scratching dogs and
the buried children, according to the pictures!’

‘Pardon,’ said the host, not quite understanding the allusion. ‘How,
then the scratching dogs and the buried children according to the
pictures?’

The artist traveller struck in again before an answer could be given.

‘Don’t you know,’ he coldly inquired across the table of his companion,
‘that none but smugglers come this way in the winter or can have any
possible business this way?’

‘Holy blue! No; never heard of it.’

‘So it is, I believe. And as they know the signs of the weather
tolerably well, they don’t give much employment to the dogs--who have
consequently died out rather--though this house of entertainment is
conveniently situated for themselves. Their young families, I am told,
they usually leave at home. But it’s a grand idea!’ cried the artist
traveller, unexpectedly rising into a tone of enthusiasm. ‘It’s a
sublime idea. It’s the finest idea in the world, and brings tears into
a man’s eyes, by Jupiter!’ He then went on eating his veal with great
composure.

There was enough of mocking inconsistency at the bottom of this speech
to make it rather discordant, though the manner was refined and the
person well-favoured, and though the depreciatory part of it was so
skilfully thrown off as to be very difficult for one not perfectly
acquainted with the English language to understand, or, even
understanding, to take offence at: so simple and dispassionate was its
tone. After finishing his veal in the midst of silence, the speaker
again addressed his friend.

‘Look,’ said he, in his former tone, ‘at this gentleman our host, not
yet in the prime of life, who in so graceful a way and with such courtly
urbanity and modesty presides over us! Manners fit for a crown! Dine
with the Lord Mayor of London (if you can get an invitation) and observe
the contrast. This dear fellow, with the finest cut face I ever saw, a
face in perfect drawing, leaves some laborious life and comes up here
I don’t know how many feet above the level of the sea, for no other
purpose on earth (except enjoying himself, I hope, in a capital
refectory) than to keep an hotel for idle poor devils like you and
me, and leave the bill to our consciences! Why, isn’t it a beautiful
sacrifice? What do we want more to touch us? Because rescued people of
interesting appearance are not, for eight or nine months out of every
twelve, holding on here round the necks of the most sagacious of dogs
carrying wooden bottles, shall we disparage the place? No! Bless the
place. It’s a great place, a glorious place!’

The chest of the grey-haired gentleman who was the Chief of the
important party, had swelled as if with a protest against his being
numbered among poor devils. No sooner had the artist traveller ceased
speaking than he himself spoke with great dignity, as having it
incumbent on him to take the lead in most places, and having deserted
that duty for a little while.

He weightily communicated his opinion to their host, that his life must
be a very dreary life here in the winter.

The host allowed to Monsieur that it was a little monotonous. The air
was difficult to breathe for a length of time consecutively. The cold
was very severe. One needed youth and strength to bear it. However,
having them and the blessing of Heaven--

Yes, that was very good. ‘But the confinement,’ said the grey-haired
gentleman.

There were many days, even in bad weather, when it was possible to
walk about outside. It was the custom to beat a little track, and take
exercise there.

‘But the space,’ urged the grey-haired gentleman. ‘So small.
So--ha--very limited.’

Monsieur would recall to himself that there were the refuges to visit,
and that tracks had to be made to them also.

Monsieur still urged, on the other hand, that the space was
so--ha--hum--so very contracted. More than that, it was always the same,
always the same.

With a deprecating smile, the host gently raised and gently lowered his
shoulders. That was true, he remarked, but permit him to say that almost
all objects had their various points of view. Monsieur and he did not
see this poor life of his from the same point of view. Monsieur was not
used to confinement.

‘I--ha--yes, very true,’ said the grey-haired gentleman. He seemed to
receive quite a shock from the force of the argument.

Monsieur, as an English traveller, surrounded by all means of travelling
pleasantly; doubtless possessing fortune, carriages, and servants--

‘Perfectly, perfectly. Without doubt,’ said the gentleman.

Monsieur could not easily place himself in the position of a person who
had not the power to choose, I will go here to-morrow, or there next
day; I will pass these barriers, I will enlarge those bounds. Monsieur
could not realise, perhaps, how the mind accommodated itself in such
things to the force of necessity.

‘It is true,’ said Monsieur. ‘We will--ha--not pursue the subject.
You are--hum--quite accurate, I have no doubt. We will say no more.’

The supper having come to a close, he drew his chair away as he spoke,
and moved back to his former place by the fire. As it was very cold
at the greater part of the table, the other guests also resumed their
former seats by the fire, designing to toast themselves well before
going to bed. The host, when they rose from the table, bowed to all
present, wished them good night, and withdrew. But first the insinuating
traveller had asked him if they could have some wine made hot; and as
he had answered Yes, and had presently afterwards sent it in, that
traveller, seated in the centre of the group, and in the full heat of
the fire, was soon engaged in serving it out to the rest.

At this time, the younger of the two young ladies, who had been silently
attentive in her dark corner (the fire-light was the chief light in the
sombre room, the lamp being smoky and dull) to what had been said of the
absent lady, glided out. She was at a loss which way to turn when she
had softly closed the door; but, after a little hesitation among the
sounding passages and the many ways, came to a room in a corner of the
main gallery, where the servants were at their supper. From these she
obtained a lamp, and a direction to the lady’s room.

It was up the great staircase on the story above. Here and there, the
bare white walls were broken by an iron grate, and she thought as she
went along that the place was something like a prison. The arched door
of the lady’s room, or cell, was not quite shut. After knocking at it
two or three times without receiving an answer, she pushed it gently
open, and looked in.

The lady lay with closed eyes on the outside of the bed, protected from
the cold by the blankets and wrappers with which she had been covered
when she revived from her fainting fit. A dull light placed in the deep
recess of the window, made little impression on the arched room. The
visitor timidly stepped to the bed, and said, in a soft whisper, ‘Are
you better?’

The lady had fallen into a slumber, and the whisper was too low to awake
her. Her visitor, standing quite still, looked at her attentively.

‘She is very pretty,’ she said to herself. ‘I never saw so beautiful a
face. O how unlike me!’

It was a curious thing to say, but it had some hidden meaning, for it
filled her eyes with tears.

‘I know I must be right. I know he spoke of her that evening. I could
very easily be wrong on any other subject, but not on this, not on
this!’

With a quiet and tender hand she put aside a straying fold of the
sleeper’s hair, and then touched the hand that lay outside the covering.

‘I like to look at her,’ she breathed to herself. ‘I like to see what
has affected him so much.’

She had not withdrawn her hand, when the sleeper opened her eyes and
started.

‘Pray don’t be alarmed. I am only one of the travellers from
down-stairs. I came to ask if you were better, and if I could do
anything for you.’

‘I think you have already been so kind as to send your servants to my
assistance?’

‘No, not I; that was my sister. Are you better?’

‘Much better. It is only a slight bruise, and has been well looked to,
and is almost easy now. It made me giddy and faint in a moment. It had
hurt me before; but at last it overpowered me all at once.’

‘May I stay with you until some one comes? Would you like it?’

‘I should like it, for it is lonely here; but I am afraid you will feel
the cold too much.’

‘I don’t mind cold. I am not delicate, if I look so.’ She quickly moved
one of the two rough chairs to the bedside, and sat down. The other as
quickly moved a part of some travelling wrapper from herself, and drew
it over her, so that her arm, in keeping it about her, rested on her
shoulder.

‘You have so much the air of a kind nurse,’ said the lady, smiling on
her, ‘that you seem as if you had come to me from home.’

‘I am very glad of it.’

‘I was dreaming of home when I woke just now. Of my old home, I mean,
before I was married.’

‘And before you were so far away from it.’

‘I have been much farther away from it than this; but then I took
the best part of it with me, and missed nothing. I felt solitary as I
dropped asleep here, and, missing it a little, wandered back to it.’

There was a sorrowfully affectionate and regretful sound in her voice,
which made her visitor refrain from looking at her for the moment.

‘It is a curious chance which at last brings us together, under this
covering in which you have wrapped me,’ said the visitor after a
pause; ‘for do you know, I think I have been looking for you some time.’

‘Looking for me?’

‘I believe I have a little note here, which I was to give to you
whenever I found you. This is it. Unless I greatly mistake, it is
addressed to you? Is it not?’

The lady took it, and said yes, and read it. Her visitor watched her as
she did so. It was very short. She flushed a little as she put her lips
to her visitor’s cheek, and pressed her hand.

‘The dear young friend to whom he presents me, may be a comfort to me
at some time, he says. She is truly a comfort to me the first time I see
her.’

‘Perhaps you don’t,’ said the visitor, hesitating--‘perhaps you don’t
know my story? Perhaps he never told you my story?’

‘No.’

‘Oh no, why should he! I have scarcely the right to tell it myself at
present, because I have been entreated not to do so. There is not much
in it, but it might account to you for my asking you not to say anything
about the letter here. You saw my family with me, perhaps? Some of
them--I only say this to you--are a little proud, a little prejudiced.’

‘You shall take it back again,’ said the other; ‘and then my husband is
sure not to see it. He might see it and speak of it, otherwise, by some
accident. Will you put it in your bosom again, to be certain?’

She did so with great care. Her small, slight hand was still upon the
letter, when they heard some one in the gallery outside.

‘I promised,’ said the visitor, rising, ‘that I would write to him after
seeing you (I could hardly fail to see you sooner or later), and tell
him if you were well and happy. I had better say you were well and
happy.’

‘Yes, yes, yes! Say I was very well and very happy. And that I thanked
him affectionately, and would never forget him.’

‘I shall see you in the morning. After that we are sure to meet again
before very long. Good night!’

‘Good night. Thank you, thank you. Good night, my dear!’

Both of them were hurried and fluttered as they exchanged this parting,
and as the visitor came out of the door. She had expected to meet the
lady’s husband approaching it; but the person in the gallery was not
he: it was the traveller who had wiped the wine-drops from his moustache
with the piece of bread. When he heard the step behind him, he turned
round--for he was walking away in the dark.

His politeness, which was extreme, would not allow of the young lady’s
lighting herself down-stairs, or going down alone. He took her lamp,
held it so as to throw the best light on the stone steps, and followed
her all the way to the supper-room. She went down, not easily hiding how
much she was inclined to shrink and tremble; for the appearance of this
traveller was particularly disagreeable to her. She had sat in her quiet
corner before supper imagining what he would have been in the scenes and
places within her experience, until he inspired her with an aversion
that made him little less than terrific.

He followed her down with his smiling politeness, followed her in,
and resumed his seat in the best place in the hearth. There with the
wood-fire, which was beginning to burn low, rising and falling upon him
in the dark room, he sat with his legs thrust out to warm, drinking the
hot wine down to the lees, with a monstrous shadow imitating him on the
wall and ceiling.

The tired company had broken up, and all the rest were gone to bed
except the young lady’s father, who dozed in his chair by the fire.
The traveller had been at the pains of going a long way up-stairs to his
sleeping-room to fetch his pocket-flask of brandy. He told them so, as
he poured its contents into what was left of the wine, and drank with a
new relish.

‘May I ask, sir, if you are on your way to Italy?’

The grey-haired gentleman had roused himself, and was preparing to
withdraw. He answered in the affirmative.

‘I also!’ said the traveller. ‘I shall hope to have the honour
of offering my compliments in fairer scenes, and under softer
circumstances, than on this dismal mountain.’

The gentleman bowed, distantly enough, and said he was obliged to him.

‘We poor gentlemen, sir,’ said the traveller, pulling his moustache dry
with his hand, for he had dipped it in the wine and brandy; ‘we poor
gentlemen do not travel like princes, but the courtesies and graces of
life are precious to us. To your health, sir!’

‘Sir, I thank you.’

‘To the health of your distinguished family--of the fair ladies, your
daughters!’

‘Sir, I thank you again, I wish you good night. My dear, are
our--ha--our people in attendance?’

‘They are close by, father.’

‘Permit me!’ said the traveller, rising and holding the door open, as
the gentleman crossed the room towards it with his arm drawn through his
daughter’s. ‘Good repose! To the pleasure of seeing you once more! To
to-morrow!’

As he kissed his hand, with his best manner and his daintiest smile,
the young lady drew a little nearer to her father, and passed him with a
dread of touching him.

‘Humph!’ said the insinuating traveller, whose manner shrunk, and whose
voice dropped when he was left alone. ‘If they all go to bed, why I must
go. They are in a devil of a hurry. One would think the night would be
long enough, in this freezing silence and solitude, if one went to bed
two hours hence.’

Throwing back his head in emptying his glass, he cast his eyes upon the
travellers’ book, which lay on the piano, open, with pens and ink beside
it, as if the night’s names had been registered when he was absent.
Taking it in his hand, he read these entries.


     William Dorrit, Esquire
     Frederick Dorrit, Esquire
     Edward Dorrit, Esquire
     Miss Dorrit
     Miss Amy Dorrit
     Mrs General
     and Suite.
     From France to Italy.

     Mr and Mrs Henry Gowan.
     From France to Italy.


To which he added, in a small complicated hand, ending with a long lean
flourish, not unlike a lasso thrown at all the rest of the names:


     Blandois.  Paris.
     From France to Italy.


And then, with his nose coming down over his moustache and his moustache
going up and under his nose, repaired to his allotted cell.




CHAPTER 2. Mrs General


It is indispensable to present the accomplished lady who was of
sufficient importance in the suite of the Dorrit Family to have a line
to herself in the Travellers’ Book.

Mrs General was the daughter of a clerical dignitary in a cathedral
town, where she had led the fashion until she was as near forty-five as
a single lady can be. A stiff commissariat officer of sixty, famous as a
martinet, had then become enamoured of the gravity with which she drove
the proprieties four-in-hand through the cathedral town society, and
had solicited to be taken beside her on the box of the cool coach of
ceremony to which that team was harnessed. His proposal of marriage
being accepted by the lady, the commissary took his seat behind
the proprieties with great decorum, and Mrs General drove until the
commissary died. In the course of their united journey, they ran over
several people who came in the way of the proprieties; but always in a
high style and with composure.

The commissary having been buried with all the decorations suitable to
the service (the whole team of proprieties were harnessed to his hearse,
and they all had feathers and black velvet housings with his coat of
arms in the corner), Mrs General began to inquire what quantity of dust
and ashes was deposited at the bankers’. It then transpired that the
commissary had so far stolen a march on Mrs General as to have bought
himself an annuity some years before his marriage, and to have reserved
that circumstance in mentioning, at the period of his proposal, that
his income was derived from the interest of his money. Mrs General
consequently found her means so much diminished, that, but for the
perfect regulation of her mind, she might have felt disposed to question
the accuracy of that portion of the late service which had declared that
the commissary could take nothing away with him.

In this state of affairs it occurred to Mrs General, that she might
‘form the mind,’ and eke the manners of some young lady of distinction.
Or, that she might harness the proprieties to the carriage of some rich
young heiress or widow, and become at once the driver and guard of such
vehicle through the social mazes. Mrs General’s communication of this
idea to her clerical and commissariat connection was so warmly applauded
that, but for the lady’s undoubted merit, it might have appeared as
though they wanted to get rid of her. Testimonials representing Mrs
General as a prodigy of piety, learning, virtue, and gentility, were
lavishly contributed from influential quarters; and one venerable
archdeacon even shed tears in recording his testimony to her perfections
(described to him by persons on whom he could rely), though he had never
had the honour and moral gratification of setting eyes on Mrs General in
all his life.

Thus delegated on her mission, as it were by Church and State, Mrs
General, who had always occupied high ground, felt in a condition to
keep it, and began by putting herself up at a very high figure. An
interval of some duration elapsed, in which there was no bid for Mrs
General. At length a county-widower, with a daughter of fourteen, opened
negotiations with the lady; and as it was a part either of the native
dignity or of the artificial policy of Mrs General (but certainly one
or the other) to comport herself as if she were much more sought than
seeking, the widower pursued Mrs General until he prevailed upon her to
form his daughter’s mind and manners.

The execution of this trust occupied Mrs General about seven years, in
the course of which time she made the tour of Europe, and saw most of
that extensive miscellany of objects which it is essential that all
persons of polite cultivation should see with other people’s eyes,
and never with their own. When her charge was at length formed, the
marriage, not only of the young lady, but likewise of her father, the
widower, was resolved on. The widower then finding Mrs General both
inconvenient and expensive, became of a sudden almost as much affected
by her merits as the archdeacon had been, and circulated such praises
of her surpassing worth, in all quarters where he thought an opportunity
might arise of transferring the blessing to somebody else, that Mrs
General was a name more honourable than ever.

The phoenix was to let, on this elevated perch, when Mr Dorrit, who
had lately succeeded to his property, mentioned to his bankers that he
wished to discover a lady, well-bred, accomplished, well connected, well
accustomed to good society, who was qualified at once to complete the
education of his daughters, and to be their matron or chaperon. Mr
Dorrit’s bankers, as bankers of the county-widower, instantly said, ‘Mrs
General.’

Pursuing the light so fortunately hit upon, and finding the concurrent
testimony of the whole of Mrs General’s acquaintance to be of the
pathetic nature already recorded, Mr Dorrit took the trouble of going
down to the county of the county-widower to see Mrs General, in whom he
found a lady of a quality superior to his highest expectations.

‘Might I be excused,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘if I inquired--ha--what remune--’

‘Why, indeed,’ returned Mrs General, stopping the word, ‘it is a subject
on which I prefer to avoid entering. I have never entered on it with my
friends here; and I cannot overcome the delicacy, Mr Dorrit, with
which I have always regarded it. I am not, as I hope you are aware, a
governess--’

‘O dear no!’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘Pray, madam, do not imagine for a moment
that I think so.’ He really blushed to be suspected of it.

Mrs General gravely inclined her head. ‘I cannot, therefore, put a price
upon services which it is a pleasure to me to render if I can render
them spontaneously, but which I could not render in mere return for any
consideration. Neither do I know how, or where, to find a case parallel
to my own. It is peculiar.’

No doubt. But how then (Mr Dorrit not unnaturally hinted) could the
subject be approached?

‘I cannot object,’ said Mrs General--‘though even that is disagreeable
to me--to Mr Dorrit’s inquiring, in confidence of my friends here, what
amount they have been accustomed, at quarterly intervals, to pay to my
credit at my bankers’.’

Mr Dorrit bowed his acknowledgements.

‘Permit me to add,’ said Mrs General, ‘that beyond this, I can never
resume the topic. Also that I can accept no second or inferior position.
If the honour were proposed to me of becoming known to Mr Dorrit’s
family--I think two daughters were mentioned?--’

‘Two daughters.’

‘I could only accept it on terms of perfect equality, as a companion,
protector, Mentor, and friend.’

Mr Dorrit, in spite of his sense of his importance, felt as if it would
be quite a kindness in her to accept it on any conditions. He almost
said as much.

‘I think,’ repeated Mrs General, ‘two daughters were mentioned?’

‘Two daughters,’ said Mr Dorrit again.

‘It would therefore,’ said Mrs General, ‘be necessary to add a third
more to the payment (whatever its amount may prove to be), which my
friends here have been accustomed to make to my bankers’.’

Mr Dorrit lost no time in referring the delicate question to the
county-widower, and finding that he had been accustomed to pay three
hundred pounds a-year to the credit of Mrs General, arrived, without any
severe strain on his arithmetic, at the conclusion that he himself must
pay four. Mrs General being an article of that lustrous surface which
suggests that it is worth any money, he made a formal proposal to be
allowed to have the honour and pleasure of regarding her as a member of
his family. Mrs General conceded that high privilege, and here she was.

In person, Mrs General, including her skirts which had much to do with
it, was of a dignified and imposing appearance; ample, rustling, gravely
voluminous; always upright behind the proprieties. She might have
been taken--had been taken--to the top of the Alps and the bottom of
Herculaneum, without disarranging a fold in her dress, or displacing
a pin. If her countenance and hair had rather a floury appearance, as
though from living in some transcendently genteel Mill, it was rather
because she was a chalky creation altogether, than because she mended
her complexion with violet powder, or had turned grey. If her eyes had
no expression, it was probably because they had nothing to express. If
she had few wrinkles, it was because her mind had never traced its name
or any other inscription on her face. A cool, waxy, blown-out woman, who
had never lighted well.

Mrs General had no opinions. Her way of forming a mind was to prevent it
from forming opinions. She had a little circular set of mental grooves
or rails on which she started little trains of other people’s opinions,
which never overtook one another, and never got anywhere. Even her
propriety could not dispute that there was impropriety in the world; but
Mrs General’s way of getting rid of it was to put it out of sight, and
make believe that there was no such thing. This was another of her ways
of forming a mind--to cram all articles of difficulty into cupboards,
lock them up, and say they had no existence. It was the easiest way,
and, beyond all comparison, the properest.

Mrs General was not to be told of anything shocking. Accidents,
miseries, and offences, were never to be mentioned before her. Passion
was to go to sleep in the presence of Mrs General, and blood was to
change to milk and water. The little that was left in the world,
when all these deductions were made, it was Mrs General’s province to
varnish. In that formation process of hers, she dipped the smallest of
brushes into the largest of pots, and varnished the surface of every
object that came under consideration. The more cracked it was, the more
Mrs General varnished it.

There was varnish in Mrs General’s voice, varnish in Mrs General’s
touch, an atmosphere of varnish round Mrs General’s figure. Mrs
General’s dreams ought to have been varnished--if she had any--lying
asleep in the arms of the good Saint Bernard, with the feathery snow
falling on his house-top.




CHAPTER 3. On the Road


The bright morning sun dazzled the eyes, the snow had ceased, the mists
had vanished, the mountain air was so clear and light that the
new sensation of breathing it was like the having entered on a new
existence. To help the delusion, the solid ground itself seemed gone,
and the mountain, a shining waste of immense white heaps and masses, to
be a region of cloud floating between the blue sky above and the earth
far below.

Some dark specks in the snow, like knots upon a little thread, beginning
at the convent door and winding away down the descent in broken lengths
which were not yet pieced together, showed where the Brethren were at
work in several places clearing the track. Already the snow had begun to
be foot-thawed again about the door. Mules were busily brought out, tied
to the rings in the wall, and laden; strings of bells were buckled
on, burdens were adjusted, the voices of drivers and riders sounded
musically. Some of the earliest had even already resumed their journey;
and, both on the level summit by the dark water near the convent, and on
the downward way of yesterday’s ascent, little moving figures of men and
mules, reduced to miniatures by the immensity around, went with a clear
tinkling of bells and a pleasant harmony of tongues.

In the supper-room of last night, a new fire, piled upon the feathery
ashes of the old one, shone upon a homely breakfast of loaves, butter,
and milk. It also shone on the courier of the Dorrit family, making tea
for his party from a supply he had brought up with him, together with
several other small stores which were chiefly laid in for the use of the
strong body of inconvenience. Mr Gowan and Blandois of Paris had already
breakfasted, and were walking up and down by the lake, smoking their
cigars.

‘Gowan, eh?’ muttered Tip, otherwise Edward Dorrit, Esquire, turning
over the leaves of the book, when the courier had left them to
breakfast. ‘Then Gowan is the name of a puppy, that’s all I have got to
say! If it was worth my while, I’d pull his nose. But it isn’t worth my
while--fortunately for him. How’s his wife, Amy? I suppose you know.
You generally know things of that sort.’

‘She is better, Edward. But they are not going to-day.’

‘Oh! They are not going to-day! Fortunately for that fellow too,’ said
Tip, ‘or he and I might have come into collision.’

‘It is thought better here that she should lie quiet to-day, and not be
fatigued and shaken by the ride down until to-morrow.’

‘With all my heart. But you talk as if you had been nursing her. You
haven’t been relapsing into (Mrs General is not here) into old habits,
have you, Amy?’

He asked her the question with a sly glance of observation at Miss
Fanny, and at his father too.

‘I have only been in to ask her if I could do anything for her, Tip,’
said Little Dorrit.

‘You needn’t call me Tip, Amy child,’ returned that young gentleman
with a frown; ‘because that’s an old habit, and one you may as well lay
aside.’

‘I didn’t mean to say so, Edward dear. I forgot. It was so natural once,
that it seemed at the moment the right word.’

‘Oh yes!’ Miss Fanny struck in. ‘Natural, and right word, and once, and
all the rest of it! Nonsense, you little thing! I know perfectly well
why you have been taking such an interest in this Mrs Gowan. You can’t
blind _me_.’

‘I will not try to, Fanny. Don’t be angry.’

‘Oh! angry!’ returned that young lady with a flounce. ‘I have no
patience’ (which indeed was the truth).

‘Pray, Fanny,’ said Mr Dorrit, raising his eyebrows, ‘what do you mean?
Explain yourself.’

‘Oh! Never mind, Pa,’ replied Miss Fanny, ‘it’s no great matter.
Amy will understand me. She knew, or knew of, this Mrs Gowan before
yesterday, and she may as well admit that she did.’

‘My child,’ said Mr Dorrit, turning to his younger daughter, ‘has your
sister--any--ha--authority for this curious statement?’

‘However meek we are,’ Miss Fanny struck in before she could answer, ‘we
don’t go creeping into people’s rooms on the tops of cold mountains,
and sitting perishing in the frost with people, unless we know something
about them beforehand. It’s not very hard to divine whose friend Mrs
Gowan is.’

‘Whose friend?’ inquired her father.

‘Pa, I am sorry to say,’ returned Miss Fanny, who had by this time
succeeded in goading herself into a state of much ill-usage and
grievance, which she was often at great pains to do: ‘that I believe her
to be a friend of that very objectionable and unpleasant person, who,
with a total absence of all delicacy, which our experience might have
led us to expect from him, insulted us and outraged our feelings in
so public and wilful a manner on an occasion to which it is understood
among us that we will not more pointedly allude.’

‘Amy, my child,’ said Mr Dorrit, tempering a bland severity with a
dignified affection, ‘is this the case?’

Little Dorrit mildly answered, yes it was.

‘Yes it is!’ cried Miss Fanny. ‘Of course! I said so! And now, Pa, I do
declare once for all’--this young lady was in the habit of declaring the
same thing once for all every day of her life, and even several times in
a day--‘that this is shameful! I do declare once for all that it ought
to be put a stop to. Is it not enough that we have gone through what
is only known to ourselves, but are we to have it thrown in our faces,
perseveringly and systematically, by the very person who should spare
our feelings most? Are we to be exposed to this unnatural conduct every
moment of our lives? Are we never to be permitted to forget? I say
again, it is absolutely infamous!’

‘Well, Amy,’ observed her brother, shaking his head, ‘you know I stand
by you whenever I can, and on most occasions. But I must say, that, upon
my soul, I do consider it rather an unaccountable mode of showing your
sisterly affection, that you should back up a man who treated me in the
most ungentlemanly way in which one man can treat another. And who,’ he
added convincingly, ‘must be a low-minded thief, you know, or he never
could have conducted himself as he did.’

‘And see,’ said Miss Fanny, ‘see what is involved in this! Can we ever
hope to be respected by our servants? Never. Here are our two women, and
Pa’s valet, and a footman, and a courier, and all sorts of dependents,
and yet in the midst of these, we are to have one of ourselves rushing
about with tumblers of cold water, like a menial! Why, a policeman,’
said Miss Fanny, ‘if a beggar had a fit in the street, could but go
plunging about with tumblers, as this very Amy did in this very room
before our very eyes last night!’

‘I don’t so much mind that, once in a way,’ remarked Mr Edward; ‘but
your Clennam, as he thinks proper to call himself, is another thing.’

‘He is part of the same thing,’ returned Miss Fanny, ‘and of a piece
with all the rest. He obtruded himself upon us in the first instance.
We never wanted him. I always showed him, for one, that I could
have dispensed with his company with the greatest pleasure.
He then commits that gross outrage upon our feelings, which he never
could or would have committed but for the delight he took in exposing
us; and then we are to be demeaned for the service of his friends! Why,
I don’t wonder at this Mr Gowan’s conduct towards you. What else was
to be expected when he was enjoying our past misfortunes--gloating over
them at the moment!’

‘Father--Edward--no indeed!’ pleaded Little Dorrit. ‘Neither Mr nor Mrs
Gowan had ever heard our name. They were, and they are, quite ignorant
of our history.’

‘So much the worse,’ retorted Fanny, determined not to admit anything in
extenuation, ‘for then you have no excuse. If they had known about us,
you might have felt yourself called upon to conciliate them. That would
have been a weak and ridiculous mistake, but I can respect a mistake,
whereas I can’t respect a wilful and deliberate abasing of those who
should be nearest and dearest to us. No. I can’t respect that. I can do
nothing but denounce that.’

‘I never offend you wilfully, Fanny,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘though you
are so hard with me.’

‘Then you should be more careful, Amy,’ returned her sister. ‘If you do
such things by accident, you should be more careful. If I happened to
have been born in a peculiar place, and under peculiar circumstances
that blunted my knowledge of propriety, I fancy I should think myself
bound to consider at every step, “Am I going, ignorantly, to compromise
any near and dear relations?” That is what I fancy _I_ should do, if it
was _my_ case.’

Mr Dorrit now interposed, at once to stop these painful subjects by his
authority, and to point their moral by his wisdom.

‘My dear,’ said he to his younger daughter, ‘I beg you to--ha--to say
no more. Your sister Fanny expresses herself strongly, but not without
considerable reason. You have now a--hum--a great position to support.
That great position is not occupied by yourself alone, but by--ha--by
me, and--ha hum--by us. Us. Now, it is incumbent upon all people in an
exalted position, but it is particularly so on this family, for reasons
which I--ha--will not dwell upon, to make themselves respected. To be
vigilant in making themselves respected. Dependants, to respect us, must
be--ha--kept at a distance and--hum--kept down. Down. Therefore, your
not exposing yourself to the remarks of our attendants by appearing to
have at any time dispensed with their services and performed them for
yourself, is--ha--highly important.’

‘Why, who can doubt it?’ cried Miss Fanny. ‘It’s the essence of
everything.’

‘Fanny,’ returned her father, grandiloquently, ‘give me leave, my dear.
We then come to--ha--to Mr Clennam. I am free to say that I do not, Amy,
share your sister’s sentiments--that is to say altogether--hum--
altogether--in reference to Mr Clennam. I am content to regard that
individual in the light of--ha--generally--a well-behaved person. Hum.
A well-behaved person. Nor will I inquire whether Mr Clennam did, at any
time, obtrude himself on--ha--my society. He knew my society to
be--hum--sought, and his plea might be that he regarded me in the light
of a public character. But there were circumstances attending
my--ha--slight knowledge of Mr Clennam (it was very slight), which,’
here Mr Dorrit became extremely grave and impressive, ‘would render it
highly indelicate in Mr Clennam to--ha--to seek to renew communication
with me or with any member of my family under existing circumstances.
If Mr Clennam has sufficient delicacy to perceive the impropriety of
any such attempt, I am bound as a responsible gentleman to--ha--defer
to that delicacy on his part. If, on the other hand, Mr Clennam has not
that delicacy, I cannot for a moment--ha--hold any correspondence with
so--hum--coarse a mind. In either case, it would appear that Mr Clennam
is put altogether out of the question, and that we have nothing to do
with him or he with us. Ha--Mrs General!’

The entrance of the lady whom he announced, to take her place at the
breakfast-table, terminated the discussion. Shortly afterwards, the
courier announced that the valet, and the footman, and the two maids,
and the four guides, and the fourteen mules, were in readiness; so the
breakfast party went out to the convent door to join the cavalcade.

Mr Gowan stood aloof with his cigar and pencil, but Mr Blandois was on
the spot to pay his respects to the ladies. When he gallantly pulled
off his slouched hat to Little Dorrit, she thought he had even a more
sinister look, standing swart and cloaked in the snow, than he had
in the fire-light over-night. But, as both her father and her sister
received his homage with some favour, she refrained from expressing any
distrust of him, lest it should prove to be a new blemish derived from
her prison birth.

Nevertheless, as they wound down the rugged way while the convent was
yet in sight, she more than once looked round, and descried Mr Blandois,
backed by the convent smoke which rose straight and high from the
chimneys in a golden film, always standing on one jutting point looking
down after them. Long after he was a mere black stick in the snow, she
felt as though she could yet see that smile of his, that high nose, and
those eyes that were too near it. And even after that, when the convent
was gone and some light morning clouds veiled the pass below it, the
ghastly skeleton arms by the wayside seemed to be all pointing up at
him.

More treacherous than snow, perhaps, colder at heart, and harder to
melt, Blandois of Paris by degrees passed out of her mind, as they came
down into the softer regions. Again the sun was warm, again the streams
descending from glaciers and snowy caverns were refreshing to drink at,
again they came among the pine-trees, the rocky rivulets, the verdant
heights and dales, the wooden chalets and rough zigzag fences of Swiss
country. Sometimes the way so widened that she and her father could
ride abreast. And then to look at him, handsomely clothed in his fur and
broadcloths, rich, free, numerously served and attended, his eyes roving
far away among the glories of the landscape, no miserable screen before
them to darken his sight and cast its shadow on him, was enough.

Her uncle was so far rescued from that shadow of old, that he wore the
clothes they gave him, and performed some ablutions as a sacrifice to
the family credit, and went where he was taken, with a certain patient
animal enjoyment, which seemed to express that the air and change did
him good. In all other respects, save one, he shone with no light but
such as was reflected from his brother. His brother’s greatness, wealth,
freedom, and grandeur, pleased him without any reference to himself.
Silent and retiring, he had no use for speech when he could hear his
brother speak; no desire to be waited on, so that the servants devoted
themselves to his brother. The only noticeable change he originated in
himself, was an alteration in his manner to his younger niece. Every day
it refined more and more into a marked respect, very rarely shown by age
to youth, and still more rarely susceptible, one would have said, of the
fitness with which he invested it. On those occasions when Miss Fanny
did declare once for all, he would take the next opportunity of baring
his grey head before his younger niece, and of helping her to alight,
or handing her to the carriage, or showing her any other attention, with
the profoundest deference. Yet it never appeared misplaced or forced,
being always heartily simple, spontaneous, and genuine. Neither would he
ever consent, even at his brother’s request, to be helped to any place
before her, or to take precedence of her in anything. So jealous was he
of her being respected, that, on this very journey down from the Great
Saint Bernard, he took sudden and violent umbrage at the footman’s being
remiss to hold her stirrup, though standing near when she dismounted;
and unspeakably astonished the whole retinue by charging at him on a
hard-headed mule, riding him into a corner, and threatening to trample
him to death.

They were a goodly company, and the Innkeepers all but worshipped them.
Wherever they went, their importance preceded them in the person of the
courier riding before, to see that the rooms of state were ready. He was
the herald of the family procession. The great travelling-carriage came
next: containing, inside, Mr Dorrit, Miss Dorrit, Miss Amy Dorrit,
and Mrs General; outside, some of the retainers, and (in fine weather)
Edward Dorrit, Esquire, for whom the box was reserved. Then came
the chariot containing Frederick Dorrit, Esquire, and an empty place
occupied by Edward Dorrit, Esquire, in wet weather. Then came the
fourgon with the rest of the retainers, the heavy baggage, and as much
as it could carry of the mud and dust which the other vehicles left
behind.

These equipages adorned the yard of the hotel at Martigny, on the return
of the family from their mountain excursion. Other vehicles were there,
much company being on the road, from the patched Italian Vettura--like
the body of a swing from an English fair put upon a wooden tray on
wheels, and having another wooden tray without wheels put atop of it--to
the trim English carriage. But there was another adornment of the
hotel which Mr Dorrit had not bargained for. Two strange travellers
embellished one of his rooms.

The Innkeeper, hat in hand in the yard, swore to the courier that he was
blighted, that he was desolated, that he was profoundly afflicted, that
he was the most miserable and unfortunate of beasts, that he had the
head of a wooden pig. He ought never to have made the concession, he
said, but the very genteel lady had so passionately prayed him for the
accommodation of that room to dine in, only for a little half-hour, that
he had been vanquished. The little half-hour was expired, the lady and
gentleman were taking their little dessert and half-cup of coffee, the
note was paid, the horses were ordered, they would depart immediately;
but, owing to an unhappy destiny and the curse of Heaven, they were not
yet gone.

Nothing could exceed Mr Dorrit’s indignation, as he turned at the foot
of the staircase on hearing these apologies. He felt that the family
dignity was struck at by an assassin’s hand. He had a sense of his
dignity, which was of the most exquisite nature. He could detect a
design upon it when nobody else had any perception of the fact. His
life was made an agony by the number of fine scalpels that he felt to be
incessantly engaged in dissecting his dignity.

‘Is it possible, sir,’ said Mr Dorrit, reddening excessively, ‘that you
have--ha--had the audacity to place one of my rooms at the disposition
of any other person?’

Thousands of pardons! It was the host’s profound misfortune to have been
overcome by that too genteel lady. He besought Monseigneur not to enrage
himself. He threw himself on Monseigneur for clemency. If Monseigneur
would have the distinguished goodness to occupy the other salon
especially reserved for him, for but five minutes, all would go well.

‘No, sir,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘I will not occupy any salon. I will leave
your house without eating or drinking, or setting foot in it. How do
you dare to act like this? Who am I that you--ha--separate me from other
gentlemen?’

Alas! The host called all the universe to witness that Monseigneur was
the most amiable of the whole body of nobility, the most important,
the most estimable, the most honoured. If he separated Monseigneur from
others, it was only because he was more distinguished, more cherished,
more generous, more renowned.

‘Don’t tell me so, sir,’ returned Mr Dorrit, in a mighty heat. ‘You have
affronted me. You have heaped insults upon me. How dare you? Explain
yourself.’

Ah, just Heaven, then, how could the host explain himself when he had
nothing more to explain; when he had only to apologise, and confide
himself to the so well-known magnanimity of Monseigneur!

‘I tell you, sir,’ said Mr Dorrit, panting with anger, ‘that you
separate me--ha--from other gentlemen; that you make distinctions
between me and other gentlemen of fortune and station. I demand of you,
why? I wish to know on--ha--what authority, on whose authority. Reply
sir. Explain. Answer why.’

Permit the landlord humbly to submit to Monsieur the Courier then, that
Monseigneur, ordinarily so gracious, enraged himself without cause.
There was no why. Monsieur the Courier would represent to Monseigneur,
that he deceived himself in suspecting that there was any why, but the
why his devoted servant had already had the honour to present to him.
The very genteel lady--

‘Silence!’ cried Mr Dorrit. ‘Hold your tongue! I will hear no more
of the very genteel lady; I will hear no more of you. Look at this
family--my family--a family more genteel than any lady. You have treated
this family with disrespect; you have been insolent to this family. I’ll
ruin you. Ha--send for the horses, pack the carriages, I’ll not set foot
in this man’s house again!’

No one had interfered in the dispute, which was beyond the French
colloquial powers of Edward Dorrit, Esquire, and scarcely within the
province of the ladies. Miss Fanny, however, now supported her father
with great bitterness; declaring, in her native tongue, that it was
quite clear there was something special in this man’s impertinence;
and that she considered it important that he should be, by some means,
forced to give up his authority for making distinctions between that
family and other wealthy families. What the reasons of his presumption
could be, she was at a loss to imagine; but reasons he must have, and
they ought to be torn from him.

All the guides, mule-drivers, and idlers in the yard, had made
themselves parties to the angry conference, and were much impressed by
the courier’s now bestirring himself to get the carriages out. With the
aid of some dozen people to each wheel, this was done at a great cost of
noise; and then the loading was proceeded with, pending the arrival of
the horses from the post-house.

But the very genteel lady’s English chariot being already horsed and at
the inn-door, the landlord had slipped up-stairs to represent his hard
case. This was notified to the yard by his now coming down the staircase
in attendance on the gentleman and the lady, and by his pointing out the
offended majesty of Mr Dorrit to them with a significant motion of his
hand.

‘Beg your pardon,’ said the gentleman, detaching himself from the
lady, and coming forward. ‘I am a man of few words and a bad hand at an
explanation--but lady here is extremely anxious that there should be no
Row. Lady--a mother of mine, in point of fact--wishes me to say that she
hopes no Row.’

Mr Dorrit, still panting under his injury, saluted the gentleman, and
saluted the lady, in a distant, final, and invincible manner.

‘No, but really--here, old feller; you!’ This was the gentleman’s way of
appealing to Edward Dorrit, Esquire, on whom he pounced as a great and
providential relief. ‘Let you and I try to make this all right. Lady so
very much wishes no Row.’

Edward Dorrit, Esquire, led a little apart by the button, assumed a
diplomatic expression of countenance in replying, ‘Why you must confess,
that when you bespeak a lot of rooms beforehand, and they belong to you,
it’s not pleasant to find other people in ‘em.’

‘No,’ said the other, ‘I know it isn’t. I admit it. Still, let you and I
try to make it all right, and avoid Row. The fault is not this chap’s
at all, but my mother’s. Being a remarkably fine woman with no bigodd
nonsense about her--well educated, too--she was too many for this chap.
Regularly pocketed him.’

‘If that’s the case--’ Edward Dorrit, Esquire, began.

‘Assure you ‘pon my soul ‘tis the case. Consequently,’ said the other
gentleman, retiring on his main position, ‘why Row?’

‘Edmund,’ said the lady from the doorway, ‘I hope you have explained,
or are explaining, to the satisfaction of this gentleman and his family
that the civil landlord is not to blame?’

‘Assure you, ma’am,’ returned Edmund, ‘perfectly paralysing myself with
trying it on.’ He then looked steadfastly at Edward Dorrit, Esquire, for
some seconds, and suddenly added, in a burst of confidence, ‘Old feller!
_Is_ it all right?’

‘I don’t know, after all,’ said the lady, gracefully advancing a step or
two towards Mr Dorrit, ‘but that I had better say myself, at once,
that I assured this good man I took all the consequences on myself of
occupying one of a stranger’s suite of rooms during his absence, for
just as much (or as little) time as I could dine in. I had no idea the
rightful owner would come back so soon, nor had I any idea that he
had come back, or I should have hastened to make restoration of my
ill-gotten chamber, and to have offered my explanation and apology. I
trust in saying this--’

For a moment the lady, with a glass at her eye, stood transfixed and
speechless before the two Miss Dorrits. At the same moment, Miss Fanny,
in the foreground of a grand pictorial composition, formed by the
family, the family equipages, and the family servants, held her sister
tight under one arm to detain her on the spot, and with the other arm
fanned herself with a distinguished air, and negligently surveyed the
lady from head to foot.

The lady, recovering herself quickly--for it was Mrs Merdle and she was
not easily dashed--went on to add that she trusted in saying this, she
apologised for her boldness, and restored this well-behaved landlord to
the favour that was so very valuable to him. Mr Dorrit, on the altar of
whose dignity all this was incense, made a gracious reply; and said
that his people should--ha--countermand his horses, and he
would--hum--overlook what he had at first supposed to be an affront,
but now regarded as an honour. Upon this the bosom bent to him; and its
owner, with a wonderful command of feature, addressed a winning smile of
adieu to the two sisters, as young ladies of fortune in whose favour she
was much prepossessed, and whom she had never had the gratification of
seeing before.

Not so, however, Mr Sparkler. This gentleman, becoming transfixed at
the same moment as his lady-mother, could not by any means unfix himself
again, but stood stiffly staring at the whole composition with Miss
Fanny in the Foreground. On his mother saying, ‘Edmund, we are quite
ready; will you give me your arm?’ he seemed, by the motion of his lips,
to reply with some remark comprehending the form of words in which his
shining talents found the most frequent utterance, but he relaxed no
muscle. So fixed was his figure, that it would have been matter of some
difficulty to bend him sufficiently to get him in the carriage-door,
if he had not received the timely assistance of a maternal pull from
within. He was no sooner within than the pad of the little window in the
back of the chariot disappeared, and his eye usurped its place. There
it remained as long as so small an object was discernible, and probably
much longer, staring (as though something inexpressibly surprising
should happen to a codfish) like an ill-executed eye in a large locket.

This encounter was so highly agreeable to Miss Fanny, and gave her
so much to think of with triumph afterwards, that it softened her
asperities exceedingly. When the procession was again in motion next
day, she occupied her place in it with a new gaiety; and showed such a
flow of spirits indeed, that Mrs General looked rather surprised.

Little Dorrit was glad to be found no fault with, and to see that Fanny
was pleased; but her part in the procession was a musing part, and a
quiet one. Sitting opposite her father in the travelling-carriage, and
recalling the old Marshalsea room, her present existence was a dream.
All that she saw was new and wonderful, but it was not real; it seemed
to her as if those visions of mountains and picturesque countries might
melt away at any moment, and the carriage, turning some abrupt corner,
bring up with a jolt at the old Marshalsea gate.

To have no work to do was strange, but not half so strange as having
glided into a corner where she had no one to think for, nothing to plan
and contrive, no cares of others to load herself with. Strange as that
was, it was far stranger yet to find a space between herself and her
father, where others occupied themselves in taking care of him, and
where she was never expected to be. At first, this was so much more
unlike her old experience than even the mountains themselves, that she
had been unable to resign herself to it, and had tried to retain her
old place about him. But he had spoken to her alone, and had said that
people--ha--people in an exalted position, my dear, must scrupulously
exact respect from their dependents; and that for her, his daughter,
Miss Amy Dorrit, of the sole remaining branch of the Dorrits of
Dorsetshire, to be known to--hum--to occupy herself in fulfilling the
functions of--ha hum--a valet, would be incompatible with that respect.
Therefore, my dear, he--ha--he laid his parental injunctions upon
her, to remember that she was a lady, who had now to conduct herself
with--hum--a proper pride, and to preserve the rank of a lady;
and consequently he requested her to abstain from doing what would
occasion--ha--unpleasant and derogatory remarks. She had obeyed without
a murmur. Thus it had been brought about that she now sat in her corner
of the luxurious carriage with her little patient hands folded before
her, quite displaced even from the last point of the old standing ground
in life on which her feet had lingered.

It was from this position that all she saw appeared unreal; the more
surprising the scenes, the more they resembled the unreality of her
own inner life as she went through its vacant places all day long. The
gorges of the Simplon, its enormous depths and thundering waterfalls,
the wonderful road, the points of danger where a loose wheel or a
faltering horse would have been destruction, the descent into Italy, the
opening of that beautiful land as the rugged mountain-chasm widened and
let them out from a gloomy and dark imprisonment--all a dream--only the
old mean Marshalsea a reality. Nay, even the old mean Marshalsea was
shaken to its foundations when she pictured it without her father. She
could scarcely believe that the prisoners were still lingering in the
close yard, that the mean rooms were still every one tenanted, and that
the turnkey still stood in the Lodge letting people in and out, all just
as she well knew it to be.

With a remembrance of her father’s old life in prison hanging about her
like the burden of a sorrowful tune, Little Dorrit would wake from a
dream of her birth-place into a whole day’s dream. The painted room in
which she awoke, often a humbled state-chamber in a dilapidated palace,
would begin it; with its wild red autumnal vine-leaves overhanging the
glass, its orange-trees on the cracked white terrace outside the window,
a group of monks and peasants in the little street below, misery and
magnificence wrestling with each other upon every rood of ground in
the prospect, no matter how widely diversified, and misery throwing
magnificence with the strength of fate. To this would succeed a
labyrinth of bare passages and pillared galleries, with the family
procession already preparing in the quadrangle below, through the
carriages and luggage being brought together by the servants for the
day’s journey. Then breakfast in another painted chamber, damp-stained
and of desolate proportions; and then the departure, which, to her
timidity and sense of not being grand enough for her place in the
ceremonies, was always an uneasy thing. For then the courier (who
himself would have been a foreign gentleman of high mark in the
Marshalsea) would present himself to report that all was ready; and then
her father’s valet would pompously induct him into his travelling-cloak;
and then Fanny’s maid, and her own maid (who was a weight on Little
Dorrit’s mind--absolutely made her cry at first, she knew so little
what to do with her), would be in attendance; and then her brother’s man
would complete his master’s equipment; and then her father would give
his arm to Mrs General, and her uncle would give his to her, and,
escorted by the landlord and Inn servants, they would swoop down-stairs.
There, a crowd would be collected to see them enter their carriages,
which, amidst much bowing, and begging, and prancing, and lashing, and
clattering, they would do; and so they would be driven madly through
narrow unsavoury streets, and jerked out at the town gate.

Among the day’s unrealities would be roads where the bright red vines
were looped and garlanded together on trees for many miles; woods of
olives; white villages and towns on hill-sides, lovely without, but
frightful in their dirt and poverty within; crosses by the way; deep
blue lakes with fairy islands, and clustering boats with awnings of
bright colours and sails of beautiful forms; vast piles of building
mouldering to dust; hanging-gardens where the weeds had grown so strong
that their stems, like wedges driven home, had split the arch and rent
the wall; stone-terraced lanes, with the lizards running into and out
of every chink; beggars of all sorts everywhere: pitiful, picturesque,
hungry, merry; children beggars and aged beggars. Often at
posting-houses and other halting places, these miserable creatures would
appear to her the only realities of the day; and many a time, when the
money she had brought to give them was all given away, she would sit
with her folded hands, thoughtfully looking after some diminutive girl
leading her grey father, as if the sight reminded her of something in
the days that were gone.

Again, there would be places where they stayed the week together in
splendid rooms, had banquets every day, rode out among heaps of wonders,
walked through miles of palaces, and rested in dark corners of great
churches; where there were winking lamps of gold and silver among
pillars and arches, kneeling figures dotted about at confessionals and
on the pavements; where there was the mist and scent of incense; where
there were pictures, fantastic images, gaudy altars, great heights and
distances, all softly lighted through stained glass, and the massive
curtains that hung in the doorways. From these cities they would go on
again, by the roads of vines and olives, through squalid villages, where
there was not a hovel without a gap in its filthy walls, not a window
with a whole inch of glass or paper; where there seemed to be nothing to
support life, nothing to eat, nothing to make, nothing to grow, nothing
to hope, nothing to do but die.

Again they would come to whole towns of palaces, whose proper inmates
were all banished, and which were all changed into barracks: troops
of idle soldiers leaning out of the state windows, where their
accoutrements hung drying on the marble architecture, and showing to the
mind like hosts of rats who were (happily) eating away the props of the
edifices that supported them, and must soon, with them, be smashed on
the heads of the other swarms of soldiers and the swarms of priests, and
the swarms of spies, who were all the ill-looking population left to be
ruined, in the streets below.

Through such scenes, the family procession moved on to Venice. And here
it dispersed for a time, as they were to live in Venice some few months
in a palace (itself six times as big as the whole Marshalsea) on the
Grand Canal.

In this crowning unreality, where all the streets were paved with water,
and where the deathlike stillness of the days and nights was broken by
no sound but the softened ringing of church-bells, the rippling of
the current, and the cry of the gondoliers turning the corners of the
flowing streets, Little Dorrit, quite lost by her task being done, sat
down to muse. The family began a gay life, went here and there, and
turned night into day; but she was timid of joining in their gaieties,
and only asked leave to be left alone.

Sometimes she would step into one of the gondolas that were always kept
in waiting, moored to painted posts at the door--when she could escape
from the attendance of that oppressive maid, who was her mistress, and
a very hard one--and would be taken all over the strange city. Social
people in other gondolas began to ask each other who the little solitary
girl was whom they passed, sitting in her boat with folded hands,
looking so pensively and wonderingly about her. Never thinking that
it would be worth anybody’s while to notice her or her doings, Little
Dorrit, in her quiet, scared, lost manner, went about the city none the
less.

But her favourite station was the balcony of her own room, overhanging
the canal, with other balconies below, and none above. It was of massive
stone darkened by ages, built in a wild fancy which came from the East
to that collection of wild fancies; and Little Dorrit was little indeed,
leaning on the broad-cushioned ledge, and looking over. As she liked no
place of an evening half so well, she soon began to be watched for, and
many eyes in passing gondolas were raised, and many people said, There
was the little figure of the English girl who was always alone.

Such people were not realities to the little figure of the English girl;
such people were all unknown to her. She would watch the sunset, in its
long low lines of purple and red, and its burning flush high up into
the sky: so glowing on the buildings, and so lightening their structure,
that it made them look as if their strong walls were transparent, and
they shone from within. She would watch those glories expire; and then,
after looking at the black gondolas underneath, taking guests to music
and dancing, would raise her eyes to the shining stars. Was there no
party of her own, in other times, on which the stars had shone? To think
of that old gate now!

She would think of that old gate, and of herself sitting at it in the
dead of the night, pillowing Maggy’s head; and of other places and of
other scenes associated with those different times. And then she would
lean upon her balcony, and look over at the water, as though they all
lay underneath it. When she got to that, she would musingly watch its
running, as if, in the general vision, it might run dry, and show her
the prison again, and herself, and the old room, and the old inmates,
and the old visitors: all lasting realities that had never changed.




CHAPTER 4. A Letter from Little Dorrit


Dear Mr Clennam,

I write to you from my own room at Venice, thinking you will be glad to
hear from me. But I know you cannot be so glad to hear from me as I am
to write to you; for everything about you is as you have been accustomed
to see it, and you miss nothing--unless it should be me, which can only
be for a very little while together and very seldom--while everything in
my life is so strange, and I miss so much.

When we were in Switzerland, which appears to have been years ago,
though it was only weeks, I met young Mrs Gowan, who was on a mountain
excursion like ourselves. She told me she was very well and very happy.
She sent you the message, by me, that she thanked you affectionately and
would never forget you. She was quite confiding with me, and I loved her
almost as soon as I spoke to her. But there is nothing singular in that;
who could help loving so beautiful and winning a creature! I could not
wonder at any one loving her. No indeed.

It will not make you uneasy on Mrs Gowan’s account, I hope--for I
remember that you said you had the interest of a true friend in her--if
I tell you that I wish she could have married some one better suited to
her. Mr Gowan seems fond of her, and of course she is very fond of him,
but I thought he was not earnest enough--I don’t mean in that respect--I
mean in anything. I could not keep it out of my mind that if I was Mrs
Gowan (what a change that would be, and how I must alter to become like
her!) I should feel that I was rather lonely and lost, for the want of
some one who was steadfast and firm in purpose. I even thought she felt
this want a little, almost without knowing it. But mind you are not made
uneasy by this, for she was ‘very well and very happy.’ And she looked
most beautiful.

I expect to meet her again before long, and indeed have been expecting
for some days past to see her here. I will ever be as good a friend to
her as I can for your sake. Dear Mr Clennam, I dare say you think little
of having been a friend to me when I had no other (not that I have any
other now, for I have made no new friends), but I think much of it, and
I never can forget it.

I wish I knew--but it is best for no one to write to me--how Mr and Mrs
Plornish prosper in the business which my dear father bought for them,
and that old Mr Nandy lives happily with them and his two grandchildren,
and sings all his songs over and over again. I cannot quite keep back
the tears from my eyes when I think of my poor Maggy, and of the blank
she must have felt at first, however kind they all are to her, without
her Little Mother. Will you go and tell her, as a strict secret, with my
love, that she never can have regretted our separation more than I have
regretted it? And will you tell them all that I have thought of them
every day, and that my heart is faithful to them everywhere? O, if you
could know how faithful, you would almost pity me for being so far away
and being so grand!

You will be glad, I am sure, to know that my dear father is very well
in health, and that all these changes are highly beneficial to him, and
that he is very different indeed from what he used to be when you used
to see him. There is an improvement in my uncle too, I think, though he
never complained of old, and never exults now. Fanny is very graceful,
quick, and clever. It is natural to her to be a lady; she has adapted
herself to our new fortunes with wonderful ease.

This reminds me that I have not been able to do so, and that I sometimes
almost despair of ever being able to do so. I find that I cannot learn.
Mrs General is always with us, and we speak French and speak Italian,
and she takes pains to form us in many ways. When I say we speak French
and Italian, I mean they do. As for me, I am so slow that I scarcely
get on at all. As soon as I begin to plan, and think, and try, all my
planning, thinking, and trying go in old directions, and I begin to feel
careful again about the expenses of the day, and about my dear father,
and about my work, and then I remember with a start that there are no
such cares left, and that in itself is so new and improbable that it
sets me wandering again. I should not have the courage to mention this
to any one but you.

It is the same with all these new countries and wonderful sights.
They are very beautiful, and they astonish me, but I am not collected
enough--not familiar enough with myself, if you can quite understand
what I mean--to have all the pleasure in them that I might have. What
I knew before them, blends with them, too, so curiously. For instance,
when we were among the mountains, I often felt (I hesitate to tell such
an idle thing, dear Mr Clennam, even to you) as if the Marshalsea must
be behind that great rock; or as if Mrs Clennam’s room where I have
worked so many days, and where I first saw you, must be just beyond that
snow. Do you remember one night when I came with Maggy to your lodging
in Covent Garden? That room I have often and often fancied I have seen
before me, travelling along for miles by the side of our carriage, when
I have looked out of the carriage-window after dark. We were shut out
that night, and sat at the iron gate, and walked about till morning.
I often look up at the stars, even from the balcony of this room, and
believe that I am in the street again, shut out with Maggy. It is the
same with people that I left in England.

When I go about here in a gondola, I surprise myself looking into other
gondolas as if I hoped to see them. It would overcome me with joy to
see them, but I don’t think it would surprise me much, at first. In my
fanciful times, I fancy that they might be anywhere; and I almost expect
to see their dear faces on the bridges or the quays.

Another difficulty that I have will seem very strange to you. It must
seem very strange to any one but me, and does even to me: I often feel
the old sad pity for--I need not write the word--for him. Changed as he
is, and inexpressibly blest and thankful as I always am to know it, the
old sorrowful feeling of compassion comes upon me sometimes with such
strength that I want to put my arms round his neck, tell him how I love
him, and cry a little on his breast. I should be glad after that, and
proud and happy. But I know that I must not do this; that he would not
like it, that Fanny would be angry, that Mrs General would be amazed;
and so I quiet myself. Yet in doing so, I struggle with the feeling that
I have come to be at a distance from him; and that even in the midst of
all the servants and attendants, he is deserted, and in want of me.

Dear Mr Clennam, I have written a great deal about myself, but I must
write a little more still, or what I wanted most of all to say in this
weak letter would be left out of it. In all these foolish thoughts of
mine, which I have been so hardy as to confess to you because I know you
will understand me if anybody can, and will make more allowance for me
than anybody else would if you cannot--in all these thoughts, there is
one thought scarcely ever--never--out of my memory, and that is that
I hope you sometimes, in a quiet moment, have a thought for me. I must
tell you that as to this, I have felt, ever since I have been away, an
anxiety which I am very anxious to relieve. I have been afraid that you
may think of me in a new light, or a new character. Don’t do that, I
could not bear that--it would make me more unhappy than you can suppose.
It would break my heart to believe that you thought of me in any way
that would make me stranger to you than I was when you were so good to
me. What I have to pray and entreat of you is, that you will never think
of me as the daughter of a rich person; that you will never think of me
as dressing any better, or living any better, than when you first
knew me. That you will remember me only as the little shabby girl you
protected with so much tenderness, from whose threadbare dress you have
kept away the rain, and whose wet feet you have dried at your fire.
That you will think of me (when you think of me at all), and of my true
affection and devoted gratitude, always without change, as of


     Your poor child,

     LITTLE DORRIT.


P.S.--Particularly remember that you are not to be uneasy about Mrs
Gowan. Her words were, ‘Very well and very happy.’ And she looked most
beautiful.




CHAPTER 5. Something Wrong Somewhere


The family had been a month or two at Venice, when Mr Dorrit, who was
much among Counts and Marquises, and had but scant leisure, set an hour
of one day apart, beforehand, for the purpose of holding some conference
with Mrs General.

The time he had reserved in his mind arriving, he sent Mr Tinkler, his
valet, to Mrs General’s apartment (which would have absorbed about a
third of the area of the Marshalsea), to present his compliments to that
lady, and represent him as desiring the favour of an interview. It being
that period of the forenoon when the various members of the family had
coffee in their own chambers, some couple of hours before assembling at
breakfast in a faded hall which had once been sumptuous, but was now
the prey of watery vapours and a settled melancholy, Mrs General was
accessible to the valet. That envoy found her on a little square of
carpet, so extremely diminutive in reference to the size of her stone
and marble floor that she looked as if she might have had it spread for
the trying on of a ready-made pair of shoes; or as if she had come into
possession of the enchanted piece of carpet, bought for forty purses by
one of the three princes in the Arabian Nights, and had that moment been
transported on it, at a wish, into a palatial saloon with which it had
no connection.

Mrs General, replying to the envoy, as she set down her empty
coffee-cup, that she was willing at once to proceed to Mr Dorrit’s
apartment, and spare him the trouble of coming to her (which, in his
gallantry, he had proposed), the envoy threw open the door, and
escorted Mrs General to the presence. It was quite a walk, by mysterious
staircases and corridors, from Mrs General’s apartment,--hoodwinked by
a narrow side street with a low gloomy bridge in it, and dungeon-like
opposite tenements, their walls besmeared with a thousand downward
stains and streaks, as if every crazy aperture in them had been weeping
tears of rust into the Adriatic for centuries--to Mr Dorrit’s apartment:
with a whole English house-front of window, a prospect of beautiful
church-domes rising into the blue sky sheer out of the water which
reflected them, and a hushed murmur of the Grand Canal laving the
doorways below, where his gondolas and gondoliers attended his pleasure,
drowsily swinging in a little forest of piles.

Mr Dorrit, in a resplendent dressing-gown and cap--the dormant grub that
had so long bided its time among the Collegians had burst into a rare
butterfly--rose to receive Mrs General. A chair to Mrs General. An
easier chair, sir; what are you doing, what are you about, what do you
mean? Now, leave us!

‘Mrs General,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘I took the liberty--’

‘By no means,’ Mrs General interposed. ‘I was quite at your disposition.
I had had my coffee.’

‘--I took the liberty,’ said Mr Dorrit again, with the magnificent
placidity of one who was above correction, ‘to solicit the favour of
a little private conversation with you, because I feel rather worried
respecting my--ha--my younger daughter. You will have observed a great
difference of temperament, madam, between my two daughters?’

Said Mrs General in response, crossing her gloved hands (she was never
without gloves, and they never creased and always fitted), ‘There is a
great difference.’

‘May I ask to be favoured with your view of it?’ said Mr Dorrit, with a
deference not incompatible with majestic serenity.

‘Fanny,’ returned Mrs General, ‘has force of character and
self-reliance. Amy, none.’

None? O Mrs General, ask the Marshalsea stones and bars. O Mrs General,
ask the milliner who taught her to work, and the dancing-master who
taught her sister to dance. O Mrs General, Mrs General, ask me, her
father, what I owe her; and hear my testimony touching the life of this
slighted little creature from her childhood up!

No such adjuration entered Mr. Dorrit’s head. He looked at Mrs
General, seated in her usual erect attitude on her coach-box behind the
proprieties, and he said in a thoughtful manner, ‘True, madam.’

‘I would not,’ said Mrs General, ‘be understood to say, observe,
that there is nothing to improve in Fanny. But there is material
there--perhaps, indeed, a little too much.’

‘Will you be kind enough, madam,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘to be--ha--more
explicit? I do not quite understand my elder daughter’s having--hum--too
much material. What material?’

‘Fanny,’ returned Mrs General, ‘at present forms too many opinions.
Perfect breeding forms none, and is never demonstrative.’

Lest he himself should be found deficient in perfect breeding, Mr Dorrit
hastened to reply, ‘Unquestionably, madam, you are right.’ Mrs General
returned, in her emotionless and expressionless manner, ‘I believe so.’

‘But you are aware, my dear madam,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘that my daughters
had the misfortune to lose their lamented mother when they were very
young; and that, in consequence of my not having been until lately
the recognised heir to my property, they have lived with me as
a comparatively poor, though always proud, gentleman, in--ha
hum--retirement!’

‘I do not,’ said Mrs General, ‘lose sight of the circumstance.’

‘Madam,’ pursued Mr Dorrit, ‘of my daughter Fanny, under her present
guidance and with such an example constantly before her--’

(Mrs General shut her eyes.)

--‘I have no misgivings. There is adaptability of character in Fanny.
But my younger daughter, Mrs General, rather worries and vexes my
thoughts. I must inform you that she has always been my favourite.’

‘There is no accounting,’ said Mrs General, ‘for these partialities.’

‘Ha--no,’ assented Mr Dorrit. ‘No. Now, madam, I am troubled by noticing
that Amy is not, so to speak, one of ourselves. She does not care to go
about with us; she is lost in the society we have here; our tastes
are evidently not her tastes. Which,’ said Mr Dorrit, summing up with
judicial gravity, ‘is to say, in other words, that there is something
wrong in--ha--Amy.’

‘May we incline to the supposition,’ said Mrs General, with a little
touch of varnish, ‘that something is referable to the novelty of the
position?’

‘Excuse me, madam,’ observed Mr Dorrit, rather quickly. ‘The daughter
of a gentleman, though--ha--himself at one time comparatively far from
affluent--comparatively--and herself reared in--hum--retirement, need
not of necessity find this position so very novel.’

‘True,’ said Mrs General, ‘true.’

‘Therefore, madam,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘I took the liberty’ (he laid an
emphasis on the phrase and repeated it, as though he stipulated, with
urbane firmness, that he must not be contradicted again), ‘I took the
liberty of requesting this interview, in order that I might mention the
topic to you, and inquire how you would advise me?’

‘Mr Dorrit,’ returned Mrs General, ‘I have conversed with Amy several
times since we have been residing here, on the general subject of the
formation of a demeanour. She has expressed herself to me as wondering
exceedingly at Venice. I have mentioned to her that it is better not to
wonder. I have pointed out to her that the celebrated Mr Eustace, the
classical tourist, did not think much of it; and that he compared the
Rialto, greatly to its disadvantage, with Westminster and Blackfriars
Bridges. I need not add, after what you have said, that I have not yet
found my arguments successful. You do me the honour to ask me what to
advise. It always appears to me (if this should prove to be a baseless
assumption, I shall be pardoned), that Mr Dorrit has been accustomed to
exercise influence over the minds of others.’

‘Hum--madam,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘I have been at the head of--ha of
a considerable community. You are right in supposing that I am not
unaccustomed to--an influential position.’

‘I am happy,’ returned Mrs General, ‘to be so corroborated. I would
therefore the more confidently recommend that Mr Dorrit should speak to
Amy himself, and make his observations and wishes known to her. Being
his favourite, besides, and no doubt attached to him, she is all the
more likely to yield to his influence.’

‘I had anticipated your suggestion, madam,’ said Mr Dorrit,
‘but--ha--was not sure that I might--hum--not encroach on--’

‘On my province, Mr Dorrit?’ said Mrs General, graciously. ‘Do not
mention it.’

‘Then, with your leave, madam,’ resumed Mr Dorrit, ringing his little
bell to summon his valet, ‘I will send for her at once.’

‘Does Mr Dorrit wish me to remain?’

‘Perhaps, if you have no other engagement, you would not object for a
minute or two--’

‘Not at all.’

So, Tinkler the valet was instructed to find Miss Amy’s maid, and to
request that subordinate to inform Miss Amy that Mr Dorrit wished to
see her in his own room. In delivering this charge to Tinkler, Mr Dorrit
looked severely at him, and also kept a jealous eye upon him until he
went out at the door, mistrusting that he might have something in his
mind prejudicial to the family dignity; that he might have even got wind
of some Collegiate joke before he came into the service, and might be
derisively reviving its remembrance at the present moment. If Tinkler
had happened to smile, however faintly and innocently, nothing would
have persuaded Mr Dorrit, to the hour of his death, but that this was
the case. As Tinkler happened, however, very fortunately for himself, to
be of a serious and composed countenance, he escaped the secret danger
that threatened him. And as on his return--when Mr Dorrit eyed him
again--he announced Miss Amy as if she had come to a funeral, he left a
vague impression on Mr Dorrit’s mind that he was a well-conducted young
fellow, who had been brought up in the study of his Catechism by a
widowed mother.

‘Amy,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘you have just now been the subject of some
conversation between myself and Mrs General. We agree that you scarcely
seem at home here. Ha--how is this?’

A pause.

‘I think, father, I require a little time.’

‘Papa is a preferable mode of address,’ observed Mrs General. ‘Father is
rather vulgar, my dear. The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to
the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very
good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism. You will find it
serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to
yourself in company--on entering a room, for instance--Papa, potatoes,
poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.’

‘Pray, my child,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘attend to the--hum--precepts of Mrs
General.’

Poor Little Dorrit, with a rather forlorn glance at that eminent
varnisher, promised to try.

‘You say, Amy,’ pursued Mr Dorrit, ‘that you think you require time.
Time for what?’

Another pause.

‘To become accustomed to the novelty of my life, was all I meant,’ said
Little Dorrit, with her loving eyes upon her father; whom she had very
nearly addressed as poultry, if not prunes and prism too, in her desire
to submit herself to Mrs General and please him.

Mr Dorrit frowned, and looked anything but pleased. ‘Amy,’ he returned,
‘it appears to me, I must say, that you have had abundance of time for
that. Ha--you surprise me. You disappoint me. Fanny has conquered any
such little difficulties, and--hum--why not you?’

‘I hope I shall do better soon,’ said Little Dorrit.

‘I hope so,’ returned her father. ‘I--ha--I most devoutly hope so, Amy.
I sent for you, in order that I might say--hum--impressively say, in
the presence of Mrs General, to whom we are all so much indebted
for obligingly being present among us, on--ha--on this or any other
occasion,’ Mrs General shut her eyes, ‘that I--ha hum--am not pleased
with you. You make Mrs General’s a thankless task. You--ha--embarrass
me very much. You have always (as I have informed Mrs General) been my
favourite child; I have always made you a--hum--a friend and companion;
in return, I beg--I--ha--I _do_ beg, that you accommodate yourself
better to--hum--circumstances, and dutifully do what becomes your--your
station.’

Mr Dorrit was even a little more fragmentary than usual, being excited
on the subject and anxious to make himself particularly emphatic.

‘I do beg,’ he repeated, ‘that this may be attended to, and that you
will seriously take pains and try to conduct yourself in a manner both
becoming your position as--ha--Miss Amy Dorrit, and satisfactory to
myself and Mrs General.’

That lady shut her eyes again, on being again referred to; then, slowly
opening them and rising, added these words:

‘If Miss Amy Dorrit will direct her own attention to, and will accept of
my poor assistance in, the formation of a surface, Mr. Dorrit will have
no further cause of anxiety. May I take this opportunity of remarking,
as an instance in point, that it is scarcely delicate to look at
vagrants with the attention which I have seen bestowed upon them by a
very dear young friend of mine? They should not be looked at. Nothing
disagreeable should ever be looked at. Apart from such a habit standing
in the way of that graceful equanimity of surface which is so expressive
of good breeding, it hardly seems compatible with refinement of mind. A
truly refined mind will seem to be ignorant of the existence of anything
that is not perfectly proper, placid, and pleasant.’ Having delivered
this exalted sentiment, Mrs General made a sweeping obeisance, and
retired with an expression of mouth indicative of Prunes and Prism.

Little Dorrit, whether speaking or silent, had preserved her quiet
earnestness and her loving look. It had not been clouded, except for a
passing moment, until now. But now that she was left alone with him
the fingers of her lightly folded hands were agitated, and there was
repressed emotion in her face.

Not for herself. She might feel a little wounded, but her care was not
for herself. Her thoughts still turned, as they always had turned, to
him. A faint misgiving, which had hung about her since their accession
to fortune, that even now she could never see him as he used to be
before the prison days, had gradually begun to assume form in her mind.
She felt that, in what he had just now said to her and in his whole
bearing towards her, there was the well-known shadow of the Marshalsea
wall. It took a new shape, but it was the old sad shadow. She began
with sorrowful unwillingness to acknowledge to herself that she was
not strong enough to keep off the fear that no space in the life of man
could overcome that quarter of a century behind the prison bars. She had
no blame to bestow upon him, therefore: nothing to reproach him with,
no emotions in her faithful heart but great compassion and unbounded
tenderness.

This is why it was, that, even as he sat before her on his sofa, in the
brilliant light of a bright Italian day, the wonderful city without and
the splendours of an old palace within, she saw him at the moment in the
long-familiar gloom of his Marshalsea lodging, and wished to take her
seat beside him, and comfort him, and be again full of confidence with
him, and of usefulness to him. If he divined what was in her thoughts,
his own were not in tune with it. After some uneasy moving in his seat,
he got up and walked about, looking very much dissatisfied.

‘Is there anything else you wish to say to me, dear father?’

‘No, no. Nothing else.’

‘I am sorry you have not been pleased with me, dear. I hope you will not
think of me with displeasure now. I am going to try, more than ever, to
adapt myself as you wish to what surrounds me--for indeed I have tried
all along, though I have failed, I know.’

‘Amy,’ he returned, turning short upon her. ‘You--ha--habitually hurt
me.’

‘Hurt you, father! I!’

‘There is a--hum--a topic,’ said Mr Dorrit, looking all about the
ceiling of the room, and never at the attentive, uncomplainingly shocked
face, ‘a painful topic, a series of events which I wish--ha--altogether
to obliterate. This is understood by your sister, who has already
remonstrated with you in my presence; it is understood by your brother;
it is understood by--ha hum--by every one of delicacy and sensitiveness
except yourself--ha--I am sorry to say, except yourself. You,
Amy--hum--you alone and only you--constantly revive the topic, though
not in words.’

She laid her hand on his arm. She did nothing more. She gently touched
him. The trembling hand may have said, with some expression, ‘Think of
me, think how I have worked, think of my many cares!’ But she said not a
syllable herself.

There was a reproach in the touch so addressed to him that she had
not foreseen, or she would have withheld her hand. He began to justify
himself in a heated, stumbling, angry manner, which made nothing of it.

‘I was there all those years. I was--ha--universally acknowledged as
the head of the place. I--hum--I caused you to be respected there, Amy.
I--ha hum--I gave my family a position there. I deserve a return. I
claim a return. I say, sweep it off the face of the earth and begin
afresh. Is that much? I ask, is _that_ much?’

He did not once look at her, as he rambled on in this way; but
gesticulated at, and appealed to, the empty air.

‘I have suffered. Probably I know how much I have suffered better than
any one--ha--I say than any one! If _I_ can put that aside, if _I_ can
eradicate the marks of what I have endured, and can emerge before the
world--a--ha--gentleman unspoiled, unspotted--is it a great deal to
expect--I say again, is it a great deal to expect--that my children
should--hum--do the same and sweep that accursed experience off the face
of the earth?’

In spite of his flustered state, he made all these exclamations in a
carefully suppressed voice, lest the valet should overhear anything.

‘Accordingly, they do it. Your sister does it. Your brother does it. You
alone, my favourite child, whom I made the friend and companion of my
life when you were a mere--hum--Baby, do not do it. You alone say you
can’t do it. I provide you with valuable assistance to do it. I attach
an accomplished and highly bred lady--ha--Mrs General, to you, for the
purpose of doing it. Is it surprising that I should be displeased? Is it
necessary that I should defend myself for expressing my displeasure?
No!’

Notwithstanding which, he continued to defend himself, without any
abatement of his flushed mood.

‘I am careful to appeal to that lady for confirmation, before I express
any displeasure at all. I--hum--I necessarily make that appeal within
limited bounds, or I--ha--should render legible, by that lady, what I
desire to be blotted out. Am I selfish? Do I complain for my own sake?
No. No. Principally for--ha hum--your sake, Amy.’

This last consideration plainly appeared, from his manner of pursuing
it, to have just that instant come into his head.

‘I said I was hurt. So I am. So I--ha--am determined to be, whatever
is advanced to the contrary. I am hurt that my daughter, seated in
the--hum--lap of fortune, should mope and retire and proclaim herself
unequal to her destiny. I am hurt that she should--ha--systematically
reproduce what the rest of us blot out; and seem--hum--I had almost said
positively anxious--to announce to wealthy and distinguished society
that she was born and bred in--ha hum--a place that I myself decline to
name. But there is no inconsistency--ha--not the least, in my feeling
hurt, and yet complaining principally for your sake, Amy. I do; I say
again, I do. It is for your sake that I wish you, under the auspices of
Mrs General, to form a--hum--a surface. It is for your sake that I wish
you to have a--ha--truly refined mind, and (in the striking words of
Mrs General) to be ignorant of everything that is not perfectly proper,
placid, and pleasant.’

He had been running down by jerks, during his last speech, like a
sort of ill-adjusted alarum. The touch was still upon his arm. He fell
silent; and after looking about the ceiling again for a little while,
looked down at her. Her head drooped, and he could not see her face; but
her touch was tender and quiet, and in the expression of her dejected
figure there was no blame--nothing but love. He began to whimper, just
as he had done that night in the prison when she afterwards sat at
his bedside till morning; exclaimed that he was a poor ruin and a poor
wretch in the midst of his wealth; and clasped her in his arms. ‘Hush,
hush, my own dear! Kiss me!’ was all she said to him. His tears
were soon dried, much sooner than on the former occasion; and he was
presently afterwards very high with his valet, as a way of righting
himself for having shed any.

With one remarkable exception, to be recorded in its place, this was
the only time, in his life of freedom and fortune, when he spoke to his
daughter Amy of the old days.

But, now, the breakfast hour arrived; and with it Miss Fanny from her
apartment, and Mr Edward from his apartment. Both these young persons of
distinction were something the worse for late hours. As to Miss Fanny,
she had become the victim of an insatiate mania for what she called
‘going into society;’ and would have gone into it head-foremost fifty
times between sunset and sunrise, if so many opportunities had been at
her disposal. As to Mr Edward, he, too, had a large acquaintance, and
was generally engaged (for the most part, in diceing circles, or others
of a kindred nature), during the greater part of every night. For this
gentleman, when his fortunes changed, had stood at the great advantage
of being already prepared for the highest associates, and having little
to learn: so much was he indebted to the happy accidents which had made
him acquainted with horse-dealing and billiard-marking.

At breakfast, Mr Frederick Dorrit likewise appeared. As the old
gentleman inhabited the highest story of the palace, where he might have
practised pistol-shooting without much chance of discovery by the other
inmates, his younger niece had taken courage to propose the restoration
to him of his clarionet, which Mr Dorrit had ordered to be confiscated,
but which she had ventured to preserve. Notwithstanding some objections
from Miss Fanny, that it was a low instrument, and that she detested the
sound of it, the concession had been made. But it was then discovered
that he had had enough of it, and never played it, now that it was no
longer his means of getting bread. He had insensibly acquired a new
habit of shuffling into the picture-galleries, always with his twisted
paper of snuff in his hand (much to the indignation of Miss Fanny, who
had proposed the purchase of a gold box for him that the family might
not be discredited, which he had absolutely refused to carry when it was
bought); and of passing hours and hours before the portraits of renowned
Venetians. It was never made out what his dazed eyes saw in them;
whether he had an interest in them merely as pictures, or whether he
confusedly identified them with a glory that was departed, like the
strength of his own mind. But he paid his court to them with great
exactness, and clearly derived pleasure from the pursuit. After the
first few days, Little Dorrit happened one morning to assist at these
attentions. It so evidently heightened his gratification that she often
accompanied him afterwards, and the greatest delight of which the old
man had shown himself susceptible since his ruin, arose out of these
excursions, when he would carry a chair about for her from picture
to picture, and stand behind it, in spite of all her remonstrances,
silently presenting her to the noble Venetians.

It fell out that, at this family breakfast, he referred to their having
seen in a gallery, on the previous day, the lady and gentleman whom they
had encountered on the Great Saint Bernard, ‘I forget the name,’ said
he. ‘I dare say you remember them, William? I dare say you do, Edward?’

‘_I_ remember ‘em well enough,’ said the latter.

‘I should think so,’ observed Miss Fanny, with a toss of her head and
a glance at her sister. ‘But they would not have been recalled to our
remembrance, I suspect, if Uncle hadn’t tumbled over the subject.’

‘My dear, what a curious phrase,’ said Mrs General. ‘Would not
inadvertently lighted upon, or accidentally referred to, be better?’

‘Thank you very much, Mrs General,’ returned the young lady, ‘no, I
think not. On the whole I prefer my own expression.’

This was always Miss Fanny’s way of receiving a suggestion from Mrs
General. But she always stored it up in her mind, and adopted it at
another time.

‘I should have mentioned our having met Mr and Mrs Gowan, Fanny,’ said
Little Dorrit, ‘even if Uncle had not. I have scarcely seen you since,
you know. I meant to have spoken of it at breakfast; because I should
like to pay a visit to Mrs Gowan, and to become better acquainted with
her, if Papa and Mrs General do not object.’

‘Well, Amy,’ said Fanny, ‘I am sure I am glad to find you at last
expressing a wish to become better acquainted with anybody in Venice.
Though whether Mr and Mrs Gowan are desirable acquaintances, remains to
be determined.’

‘Mrs Gowan I spoke of, dear.’

‘No doubt,’ said Fanny. ‘But you can’t separate her from her husband, I
believe, without an Act of Parliament.’

‘Do you think, Papa,’ inquired Little Dorrit, with diffidence and
hesitation, ‘there is any objection to my making this visit?’

‘Really,’ he replied, ‘I--ha--what is Mrs General’s view?’

Mrs General’s view was, that not having the honour of any acquaintance
with the lady and gentleman referred to, she was not in a position
to varnish the present article. She could only remark, as a general
principle observed in the varnishing trade, that much depended on the
quarter from which the lady under consideration was accredited to a
family so conspicuously niched in the social temple as the family of
Dorrit.

At this remark the face of Mr Dorrit gloomed considerably. He was about
(connecting the accrediting with an obtrusive person of the name
of Clennam, whom he imperfectly remembered in some former state of
existence) to black-ball the name of Gowan finally, when Edward Dorrit,
Esquire, came into the conversation, with his glass in his eye, and the
preliminary remark of ‘I say--you there! Go out, will you!’--which was
addressed to a couple of men who were handing the dishes round, as a
courteous intimation that their services could be temporarily dispensed
with.

Those menials having obeyed the mandate, Edward Dorrit, Esquire,
proceeded.

‘Perhaps it’s a matter of policy to let you all know that these
Gowans--in whose favour, or at least the gentleman’s, I can’t be
supposed to be much prepossessed myself--are known to people of
importance, if that makes any difference.’

‘That, I would say,’ observed the fair varnisher, ‘Makes the greatest
difference. The connection in question, being really people of
importance and consideration--’

‘As to that,’ said Edward Dorrit, Esquire, ‘I’ll give you the means of
judging for yourself. You are acquainted, perhaps, with the famous name
of Merdle?’

‘The great Merdle!’ exclaimed Mrs General.

‘_The_ Merdle,’ said Edward Dorrit, Esquire. ‘They are known to him.
Mrs Gowan--I mean the dowager, my polite friend’s mother--is intimate
with Mrs Merdle, and I know these two to be on their visiting list.’

‘If so, a more undeniable guarantee could not be given,’ said Mrs
General to Mr Dorrit, raising her gloves and bowing her head, as if she
were doing homage to some visible graven image.

‘I beg to ask my son, from motives of--ah--curiosity,’ Mr Dorrit
observed, with a decided change in his manner, ‘how he becomes possessed
of this--hum--timely information?’

‘It’s not a long story, sir,’ returned Edward Dorrit, Esquire, ‘and you
shall have it out of hand. To begin with, Mrs Merdle is the lady you had
the parley with at what’s-his-name place.’

‘Martigny,’ interposed Miss Fanny with an air of infinite languor.

‘Martigny,’ assented her brother, with a slight nod and a slight wink;
in acknowledgment of which, Miss Fanny looked surprised, and laughed and
reddened.

‘How can that be, Edward?’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘You informed me that the
name of the gentleman with whom you conferred was--ha--Sparkler. Indeed,
you showed me his card. Hum. Sparkler.’

‘No doubt of it, father; but it doesn’t follow that his mother’s name
must be the same. Mrs Merdle was married before, and he is her son. She
is in Rome now; where probably we shall know more of her, as you decide
to winter there. Sparkler is just come here. I passed last evening in
company with Sparkler. Sparkler is a very good fellow on the
whole, though rather a bore on one subject, in consequence of being
tremendously smitten with a certain young lady.’ Here Edward Dorrit,
Esquire, eyed Miss Fanny through his glass across the table. ‘We
happened last night to compare notes about our travels, and I had the
information I have given you from Sparkler himself.’ Here he ceased;
continuing to eye Miss Fanny through his glass, with a face much
twisted, and not ornamentally so, in part by the action of keeping his
glass in his eye, and in part by the great subtlety of his smile.

‘Under these circumstances,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘I believe I express the
sentiments of--ha--Mrs General, no less than my own, when I say
that there is no objection, but--ha hum--quite the contrary--to your
gratifying your desire, Amy. I trust I may--ha--hail--this desire,’ said
Mr Dorrit, in an encouraging and forgiving manner, ‘as an auspicious
omen. It is quite right to know these people. It is a very proper
thing. Mr Merdle’s is a name of--ha--world-wide repute. Mr Merdle’s
undertakings are immense. They bring him in such vast sums of money that
they are regarded as--hum--national benefits. Mr Merdle is the man of
this time. The name of Merdle is the name of the age. Pray do everything
on my behalf that is civil to Mr and Mrs Gowan, for we will--ha--we will
certainly notice them.’

This magnificent accordance of Mr Dorrit’s recognition settled the
matter. It was not observed that Uncle had pushed away his plate, and
forgotten his breakfast; but he was not much observed at any time,
except by Little Dorrit. The servants were recalled, and the meal
proceeded to its conclusion. Mrs General rose and left the table.
Little Dorrit rose and left the table. When Edward and Fanny remained
whispering together across it, and when Mr Dorrit remained eating figs
and reading a French newspaper, Uncle suddenly fixed the attention of
all three by rising out of his chair, striking his hand upon the table,
and saying, ‘Brother! I protest against it!’

If he had made a proclamation in an unknown tongue, and given up the
ghost immediately afterwards, he could not have astounded his audience
more. The paper fell from Mr Dorrit’s hand, and he sat petrified, with a
fig half way to his mouth.

‘Brother!’ said the old man, conveying a surprising energy into his
trembling voice, ‘I protest against it! I love you; you know I love you
dearly. In these many years I have never been untrue to you in a single
thought. Weak as I am, I would at any time have struck any man who spoke
ill of you. But, brother, brother, brother, I protest against it!’

It was extraordinary to see of what a burst of earnestness such a
decrepit man was capable. His eyes became bright, his grey hair rose on
his head, markings of purpose on his brow and face which had faded from
them for five-and-twenty years, started out again, and there was an
energy in his hand that made its action nervous once more.

‘My dear Frederick!’ exclaimed Mr Dorrit faintly. ‘What is wrong? What
is the matter?’

‘How dare you,’ said the old man, turning round on Fanny, ‘how dare you
do it? Have you no memory? Have you no heart?’

‘Uncle?’ cried Fanny, affrighted and bursting into tears, ‘why do you
attack me in this cruel manner? What have I done?’

‘Done?’ returned the old man, pointing to her sister’s place, ‘where’s
your affectionate invaluable friend? Where’s your devoted guardian?
Where’s your more than mother? How dare you set up superiorities against
all these characters combined in your sister? For shame, you false girl,
for shame!’

‘I love Amy,’ cried Miss Fanny, sobbing and weeping, ‘as well as I love
my life--better than I love my life. I don’t deserve to be so treated. I
am as grateful to Amy, and as fond of Amy, as it’s possible for any
human being to be. I wish I was dead. I never was so wickedly wronged.
And only because I am anxious for the family credit.’

‘To the winds with the family credit!’ cried the old man, with great
scorn and indignation. ‘Brother, I protest against pride. I protest
against ingratitude. I protest against any one of us here who have known
what we have known, and have seen what we have seen, setting up any
pretension that puts Amy at a moment’s disadvantage, or to the cost of
a moment’s pain. We may know that it’s a base pretension by its having
that effect. It ought to bring a judgment on us. Brother, I protest
against it in the sight of God!’

As his hand went up above his head and came down on the table, it might
have been a blacksmith’s. After a few moments’ silence, it had relaxed
into its usual weak condition. He went round to his brother with his
ordinary shuffling step, put the hand on his shoulder, and said, in a
softened voice, ‘William, my dear, I felt obliged to say it; forgive me,
for I felt obliged to say it!’ and then went, in his bowed way, out of
the palace hall, just as he might have gone out of the Marshalsea room.

All this time Fanny had been sobbing and crying, and still continued to
do so. Edward, beyond opening his mouth in amazement, had not opened his
lips, and had done nothing but stare. Mr Dorrit also had been utterly
discomfited, and quite unable to assert himself in any way. Fanny was
now the first to speak.

‘I never, never, never was so used!’ she sobbed. ‘There never was
anything so harsh and unjustifiable, so disgracefully violent and cruel!
Dear, kind, quiet little Amy, too, what would she feel if she could know
that she had been innocently the means of exposing me to such treatment!
But I’ll never tell her! No, good darling, I’ll never tell her!’

This helped Mr Dorrit to break his silence.

‘My dear,’ said he, ‘I--ha--approve of your resolution. It will be--ha
hum--much better not to speak of this to Amy. It might--hum--it
might distress her. Ha. No doubt it would distress her greatly. It
is considerate and right to avoid doing so. We will--ha--keep this to
ourselves.’

‘But the cruelty of Uncle!’ cried Miss Fanny. ‘O, I never can forgive
the wanton cruelty of Uncle!’

‘My dear,’ said Mr Dorrit, recovering his tone, though he remained
unusually pale, ‘I must request you not to say so. You must remember
that your uncle is--ha--not what he formerly was. You must remember
that your uncle’s state requires--hum--great forbearance from us, great
forbearance.’

‘I am sure,’ cried Fanny, piteously, ‘it is only charitable to suppose
that there must be something wrong in him somewhere, or he never could
have so attacked Me, of all the people in the world.’

‘Fanny,’ returned Mr Dorrit in a deeply fraternal tone, ‘you know, with
his innumerable good points, what a--hum--wreck your uncle is; and, I
entreat you by the fondness that I have for him, and by the fidelity
that you know I have always shown him, to--ha--to draw your own
conclusions, and to spare my brotherly feelings.’

This ended the scene; Edward Dorrit, Esquire, saying nothing throughout,
but looking, to the last, perplexed and doubtful. Miss Fanny awakened
much affectionate uneasiness in her sister’s mind that day by passing
the greater part of it in violent fits of embracing her, and in
alternately giving her brooches, and wishing herself dead.




CHAPTER 6. Something Right Somewhere


To be in the halting state of Mr Henry Gowan; to have left one of two
powers in disgust; to want the necessary qualifications for finding
promotion with another, and to be loitering moodily about on neutral
ground, cursing both; is to be in a situation unwholesome for the mind,
which time is not likely to improve. The worst class of sum worked in
the every-day world is cyphered by the diseased arithmeticians who are
always in the rule of Subtraction as to the merits and successes of
others, and never in Addition as to their own.

The habit, too, of seeking some sort of recompense in the discontented
boast of being disappointed, is a habit fraught with degeneracy. A
certain idle carelessness and recklessness of consistency soon comes of
it. To bring deserving things down by setting undeserving things up is
one of its perverted delights; and there is no playing fast and loose
with the truth, in any game, without growing the worse for it.

In his expressed opinions of all performances in the Art of painting
that were completely destitute of merit, Gowan was the most liberal
fellow on earth. He would declare such a man to have more power in his
little finger (provided he had none), than such another had (provided he
had much) in his whole mind and body. If the objection were taken that
the thing commended was trash, he would reply, on behalf of his art, ‘My
good fellow, what do we all turn out but trash? _I_ turn out nothing else,
and I make you a present of the confession.’

To make a vaunt of being poor was another of the incidents of his
splenetic state, though this may have had the design in it of showing
that he ought to be rich; just as he would publicly laud and decry the
Barnacles, lest it should be forgotten that he belonged to the family.
Howbeit, these two subjects were very often on his lips; and he managed
them so well that he might have praised himself by the month together,
and not have made himself out half so important a man as he did by his
light disparagement of his claims on anybody’s consideration.

Out of this same airy talk of his, it always soon came to be understood,
wherever he and his wife went, that he had married against the wishes
of his exalted relations, and had had much ado to prevail on them to
countenance her. He never made the representation, on the contrary
seemed to laugh the idea to scorn; but it did happen that, with all his
pains to depreciate himself, he was always in the superior position.
From the days of their honeymoon, Minnie Gowan felt sensible of being
usually regarded as the wife of a man who had made a descent in marrying
her, but whose chivalrous love for her had cancelled that inequality.

To Venice they had been accompanied by Monsieur Blandois of Paris, and
at Venice Monsieur Blandois of Paris was very much in the society of
Gowan. When they had first met this gallant gentleman at Geneva,
Gowan had been undecided whether to kick him or encourage him; and had
remained for about four-and-twenty hours, so troubled to settle
the point to his satisfaction, that he had thought of tossing up a
five-franc piece on the terms, ‘Tails, kick; heads, encourage,’ and
abiding by the voice of the oracle. It chanced, however, that his wife
expressed a dislike to the engaging Blandois, and that the balance
of feeling in the hotel was against him. Upon it, Gowan resolved to
encourage him.

Why this perversity, if it were not in a generous fit?--which it was
not. Why should Gowan, very much the superior of Blandois of Paris, and
very well able to pull that prepossessing gentleman to pieces and find
out the stuff he was made of, take up with such a man? In the first
place, he opposed the first separate wish he observed in his wife,
because her father had paid his debts and it was desirable to take an
early opportunity of asserting his independence. In the second place,
he opposed the prevalent feeling, because with many capacities of
being otherwise, he was an ill-conditioned man. He found a pleasure in
declaring that a courtier with the refined manners of Blandois ought
to rise to the greatest distinction in any polished country. He found a
pleasure in setting up Blandois as the type of elegance, and making
him a satire upon others who piqued themselves on personal graces.
He seriously protested that the bow of Blandois was perfect, that the
address of Blandois was irresistible, and that the picturesque ease
of Blandois would be cheaply purchased (if it were not a gift, and
unpurchasable) for a hundred thousand francs. That exaggeration in the
manner of the man which has been noticed as appertaining to him and to
every such man, whatever his original breeding, as certainly as the sun
belongs to this system, was acceptable to Gowan as a caricature, which
he found it a humorous resource to have at hand for the ridiculing of
numbers of people who necessarily did more or less of what Blandois
overdid. Thus he had taken up with him; and thus, negligently
strengthening these inclinations with habit, and idly deriving some
amusement from his talk, he had glided into a way of having him for
a companion. This, though he supposed him to live by his wits at
play-tables and the like; though he suspected him to be a coward, while
he himself was daring and courageous; though he thoroughly knew him to
be disliked by Minnie; and though he cared so little for him, after all,
that if he had given her any tangible personal cause to regard him with
aversion, he would have had no compunction whatever in flinging him out
of the highest window in Venice into the deepest water of the city.

Little Dorrit would have been glad to make her visit to Mrs Gowan,
alone; but as Fanny, who had not yet recovered from her Uncle’s protest,
though it was four-and-twenty hours of age, pressingly offered her
company, the two sisters stepped together into one of the gondolas under
Mr Dorrit’s window, and, with the courier in attendance, were taken in
high state to Mrs Gowan’s lodging. In truth, their state was rather too
high for the lodging, which was, as Fanny complained, ‘fearfully out of
the way,’ and which took them through a complexity of narrow streets of
water, which the same lady disparaged as ‘mere ditches.’

The house, on a little desert island, looked as if it had broken
away from somewhere else, and had floated by chance into its present
anchorage in company with a vine almost as much in want of training as
the poor wretches who were lying under its leaves. The features of the
surrounding picture were, a church with hoarding and scaffolding about
it, which had been under suppositious repair so long that the means of
repair looked a hundred years old, and had themselves fallen into decay;
a quantity of washed linen, spread to dry in the sun; a number of houses
at odds with one another and grotesquely out of the perpendicular, like
rotten pre-Adamite cheeses cut into fantastic shapes and full of mites;
and a feverish bewilderment of windows, with their lattice-blinds all
hanging askew, and something draggled and dirty dangling out of most of
them.

On the first-floor of the house was a Bank--a surprising experience for
any gentleman of commercial pursuits bringing laws for all mankind from
a British city--where two spare clerks, like dried dragoons, in green
velvet caps adorned with golden tassels, stood, bearded, behind a small
counter in a small room, containing no other visible objects than an
empty iron-safe with the door open, a jug of water, and a papering of
garland of roses; but who, on lawful requisition, by merely dipping
their hands out of sight, could produce exhaustless mounds of five-franc
pieces. Below the Bank was a suite of three or four rooms with barred
windows, which had the appearance of a jail for criminal rats. Above the
Bank was Mrs Gowan’s residence.

Notwithstanding that its walls were blotched, as if missionary maps were
bursting out of them to impart geographical knowledge; notwithstanding
that its weird furniture was forlornly faded and musty, and that the
prevailing Venetian odour of bilge water and an ebb tide on a weedy
shore was very strong; the place was better within, than it promised.
The door was opened by a smiling man like a reformed assassin--a
temporary servant--who ushered them into the room where Mrs Gowan sat,
with the announcement that two beautiful English ladies were come to see
the mistress.

Mrs Gowan, who was engaged in needlework, put her work aside in a
covered basket, and rose, a little hurriedly. Miss Fanny was excessively
courteous to her, and said the usual nothings with the skill of a
veteran.

‘Papa was extremely sorry,’ proceeded Fanny, ‘to be engaged to-day (he
is so much engaged here, our acquaintance being so wretchedly large!);
and particularly requested me to bring his card for Mr Gowan. That I may
be sure to acquit myself of a commission which he impressed upon me at
least a dozen times, allow me to relieve my conscience by placing it on
the table at once.’

Which she did with veteran ease.

‘We have been,’ said Fanny, ‘charmed to understand that you know the
Merdles. We hope it may be another means of bringing us together.’

‘They are friends,’ said Mrs Gowan, ‘of Mr Gowan’s family. I have not
yet had the pleasure of a personal introduction to Mrs Merdle, but I
suppose I shall be presented to her at Rome.’

‘Indeed?’ returned Fanny, with an appearance of amiably quenching her
own superiority. ‘I think you’ll like her.’

‘You know her very well?’

‘Why, you see,’ said Fanny, with a frank action of her pretty shoulders,
‘in London one knows every one. We met her on our way here, and, to say
the truth, papa was at first rather cross with her for taking one of the
rooms that our people had ordered for us. However, of course, that soon
blew over, and we were all good friends again.’

Although the visit had as yet given Little Dorrit no opportunity of
conversing with Mrs Gowan, there was a silent understanding between
them, which did as well. She looked at Mrs Gowan with keen and unabated
interest; the sound of her voice was thrilling to her; nothing that was
near her, or about her, or at all concerned her, escaped Little Dorrit.
She was quicker to perceive the slightest matter here, than in any other
case--but one.

‘You have been quite well,’ she now said, ‘since that night?’

‘Quite, my dear. And you?’

‘Oh! I am always well,’ said Little Dorrit, timidly. ‘I--yes, thank you.’

There was no reason for her faltering and breaking off, other than that
Mrs Gowan had touched her hand in speaking to her, and their looks had
met. Something thoughtfully apprehensive in the large, soft eyes, had
checked Little Dorrit in an instant.

‘You don’t know that you are a favourite of my husband’s, and that I am
almost bound to be jealous of you?’ said Mrs Gowan.

Little Dorrit, blushing, shook her head.

‘He will tell you, if he tells you what he tells me, that you are
quieter and quicker of resource than any one he ever saw.’

‘He speaks far too well of me,’ said Little Dorrit.

‘I doubt that; but I don’t at all doubt that I must tell him you
are here. I should never be forgiven, if I were to let you--and Miss
Dorrit--go, without doing so. May I? You can excuse the disorder and
discomfort of a painter’s studio?’

The inquiries were addressed to Miss Fanny, who graciously replied that
she would be beyond anything interested and enchanted. Mrs Gowan went to
a door, looked in beyond it, and came back. ‘Do Henry the favour to come
in,’ said she, ‘I knew he would be pleased!’

The first object that confronted Little Dorrit, entering first, was
Blandois of Paris in a great cloak and a furtive slouched hat, standing
on a throne platform in a corner, as he had stood on the Great Saint
Bernard, when the warning arms seemed to be all pointing up at him. She
recoiled from this figure, as it smiled at her.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ said Gowan, coming from his easel behind the door.
‘It’s only Blandois. He is doing duty as a model to-day. I am making
a study of him. It saves me money to turn him to some use. We poor
painters have none to spare.’

Blandois of Paris pulled off his slouched hat, and saluted the ladies
without coming out of his corner.

‘A thousand pardons!’ said he. ‘But the Professore here is so inexorable
with me, that I am afraid to stir.’

‘Don’t stir, then,’ said Gowan coolly, as the sisters approached the
easel. ‘Let the ladies at least see the original of the daub, that they
may know what it’s meant for. There he stands, you see. A bravo waiting
for his prey, a distinguished noble waiting to save his country, the
common enemy waiting to do somebody a bad turn, an angelic messenger
waiting to do somebody a good turn--whatever you think he looks most
like!’

‘Say, Professore Mio, a poor gentleman waiting to do homage to
elegance and beauty,’ remarked Blandois.

‘Or say, Cattivo Soggetto Mio,’ returned Gowan, touching the painted
face with his brush in the part where the real face had moved, ‘a
murderer after the fact. Show that white hand of yours, Blandois. Put it
outside the cloak. Keep it still.’

Blandois’ hand was unsteady; but he laughed, and that would naturally
shake it.

‘He was formerly in some scuffle with another murderer, or with a
victim, you observe,’ said Gowan, putting in the markings of the hand
with a quick, impatient, unskilful touch, ‘and these are the tokens of
it. Outside the cloak, man!--Corpo di San Marco, what are you thinking
of?’

Blandois of Paris shook with a laugh again, so that his hand shook more;
now he raised it to twist his moustache, which had a damp appearance;
and now he stood in the required position, with a little new swagger.

His face was so directed in reference to the spot where Little Dorrit
stood by the easel, that throughout he looked at her. Once attracted by
his peculiar eyes, she could not remove her own, and they had looked
at each other all the time. She trembled now; Gowan, feeling it, and
supposing her to be alarmed by the large dog beside him, whose head she
caressed in her hand, and who had just uttered a low growl, glanced at
her to say, ‘He won’t hurt you, Miss Dorrit.’

‘I am not afraid of him,’ she returned in the same breath; ‘but will you
look at him?’

In a moment Gowan had thrown down his brush, and seized the dog with
both hands by the collar.

‘Blandois! How can you be such a fool as to provoke him! By Heaven, and
the other place too, he’ll tear you to bits! Lie down! Lion! Do you hear
my voice, you rebel!’

The great dog, regardless of being half-choked by his collar, was
obdurately pulling with his dead weight against his master, resolved to
get across the room. He had been crouching for a spring at the moment
when his master caught him.

‘Lion! Lion!’ He was up on his hind legs, and it was a wrestle between
master and dog. ‘Get back! Down, Lion! Get out of his sight, Blandois!
What devil have you conjured into the dog?’

‘I have done nothing to him.’

‘Get out of his sight or I can’t hold the wild beast! Get out of the
room! By my soul, he’ll kill you!’

The dog, with a ferocious bark, made one other struggle as Blandois
vanished; then, in the moment of the dog’s submission, the master,
little less angry than the dog, felled him with a blow on the head, and
standing over him, struck him many times severely with the heel of his
boot, so that his mouth was presently bloody.

‘Now get you into that corner and lie down,’ said Gowan, ‘or I’ll take
you out and shoot you.’

Lion did as he was ordered, and lay down licking his mouth and chest.
Lion’s master stopped for a moment to take breath, and then, recovering
his usual coolness of manner, turned to speak to his frightened wife
and her visitors. Probably the whole occurrence had not occupied two
minutes.

‘Come, come, Minnie! You know he is always good-humoured and tractable.
Blandois must have irritated him,--made faces at him. The dog has his
likings and dislikings, and Blandois is no great favourite of his; but
I am sure you will give him a character, Minnie, for never having been
like this before.’

Minnie was too much disturbed to say anything connected in reply; Little
Dorrit was already occupied in soothing her; Fanny, who had cried out
twice or thrice, held Gowan’s arm for protection; Lion, deeply ashamed
of having caused them this alarm, came trailing himself along the ground
to the feet of his mistress.

‘You furious brute,’ said Gowan, striking him with his foot again. ‘You
shall do penance for this.’ And he struck him again, and yet again.

‘O, pray don’t punish him any more,’ cried Little Dorrit. ‘Don’t hurt
him. See how gentle he is!’ At her entreaty, Gowan spared him; and he
deserved her intercession, for truly he was as submissive, and as sorry,
and as wretched as a dog could be.

It was not easy to recover this shock and make the visit unrestrained,
even though Fanny had not been, under the best of circumstances, the
least trifle in the way. In such further communication as passed among
them before the sisters took their departure, Little Dorrit fancied it
was revealed to her that Mr Gowan treated his wife, even in his very
fondness, too much like a beautiful child. He seemed so unsuspicious of
the depths of feeling which she knew must lie below that surface, that
she doubted if there could be any such depths in himself. She wondered
whether his want of earnestness might be the natural result of his want
of such qualities, and whether it was with people as with ships, that,
in too shallow and rocky waters, their anchors had no hold, and they
drifted anywhere.

He attended them down the staircase, jocosely apologising for the
poor quarters to which such poor fellows as himself were limited, and
remarking that when the high and mighty Barnacles, his relatives, who
would be dreadfully ashamed of them, presented him with better, he would
live in better to oblige them. At the water’s edge they were saluted by
Blandois, who looked white enough after his late adventure, but who made
very light of it notwithstanding,--laughing at the mention of Lion.

Leaving the two together under the scrap of vine upon the causeway,
Gowan idly scattering the leaves from it into the water, and Blandois
lighting a cigarette, the sisters were paddled away in state as they had
come. They had not glided on for many minutes, when Little Dorrit became
aware that Fanny was more showy in manner than the occasion appeared to
require, and, looking about for the cause through the window and through
the open door, saw another gondola evidently in waiting on them.

As this gondola attended their progress in various artful ways;
sometimes shooting on a-head, and stopping to let them pass; sometimes,
when the way was broad enough, skimming along side by side with them;
and sometimes following close astern; and as Fanny gradually made no
disguise that she was playing off graces upon somebody within it, of
whom she at the same time feigned to be unconscious; Little Dorrit at
length asked who it was?

To which Fanny made the short answer, ‘That gaby.’

‘Who?’ said Little Dorrit.

‘My dear child,’ returned Fanny (in a tone suggesting that before her
Uncle’s protest she might have said, You little fool, instead), ‘how
slow you are! Young Sparkler.’

She lowered the window on her side, and, leaning back and resting her
elbow on it negligently, fanned herself with a rich Spanish fan of black
and gold. The attendant gondola, having skimmed forward again, with some
swift trace of an eye in the window, Fanny laughed coquettishly and
said, ‘Did you ever see such a fool, my love?’

‘Do you think he means to follow you all the way?’ asked Little Dorrit.

‘My precious child,’ returned Fanny, ‘I can’t possibly answer for what
an idiot in a state of desperation may do, but I should think it highly
probable. It’s not such an enormous distance. All Venice would scarcely
be that, I imagine, if he’s dying for a glimpse of me.’

‘And is he?’ asked Little Dorrit in perfect simplicity.

‘Well, my love, that really is an awkward question for me to answer,’
said her sister. ‘I believe he is. You had better ask Edward. He tells
Edward he is, I believe. I understand he makes a perfect spectacle of
himself at the Casino, and that sort of places, by going on about me.
But you had better ask Edward if you want to know.’

‘I wonder he doesn’t call,’ said Little Dorrit after thinking a moment.

‘My dear Amy, your wonder will soon cease, if I am rightly informed.
I should not be at all surprised if he called to-day. The creature has
only been waiting to get his courage up, I suspect.’

‘Will you see him?’

‘Indeed, my darling,’ said Fanny, ‘that’s just as it may happen. Here he
is again. Look at him. O, you simpleton!’

Mr Sparkler had, undeniably, a weak appearance; with his eye in the
window like a knot in the glass, and no reason on earth for stopping his
bark suddenly, except the real reason.

‘When you asked me if I will see him, my dear,’ said Fanny, almost as
well composed in the graceful indifference of her attitude as Mrs Merdle
herself, ‘what do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ said Little Dorrit--‘I think I rather mean what do you mean,
dear Fanny?’

Fanny laughed again, in a manner at once condescending, arch, and
affable; and said, putting her arm round her sister in a playfully
affectionate way:

‘Now tell me, my little pet. When we saw that woman at Martigny, how
did you think she carried it off? Did you see what she decided on in a
moment?’

‘No, Fanny.’

‘Then I’ll tell you, Amy. She settled with herself, now I’ll never
refer to that meeting under such different circumstances, and I’ll never
pretend to have any idea that these are the same girls. That’s _her_ way
out of a difficulty. What did I tell you when we came away from Harley
Street that time? She is as insolent and false as any woman in the
world. But in the first capacity, my love, she may find people who can
match her.’

A significant turn of the Spanish fan towards Fanny’s bosom, indicated
with great expression where one of these people was to be found.

‘Not only that,’ pursued Fanny, ‘but she gives the same charge to
Young Sparkler; and doesn’t let him come after me until she has got it
thoroughly into his most ridiculous of all ridiculous noddles (for one
really can’t call it a head), that he is to pretend to have been first
struck with me in that Inn Yard.’

‘Why?’ asked Little Dorrit.

‘Why? Good gracious, my love!’ (again very much in the tone of You
stupid little creature) ‘how can you ask? Don’t you see that I may have
become a rather desirable match for a noddle? And don’t you see that she
puts the deception upon us, and makes a pretence, while she shifts it
from her own shoulders (very good shoulders they are too, I must say),’
observed Miss Fanny, glancing complacently at herself, ‘of considering
our feelings?’

‘But we can always go back to the plain truth.’

‘Yes, but if you please we won’t,’ retorted Fanny. ‘No; I am not going
to have that done, Amy. The pretext is none of mine; it’s hers, and she
shall have enough of it.’

In the triumphant exaltation of her feelings, Miss Fanny, using her
Spanish fan with one hand, squeezed her sister’s waist with the other,
as if she were crushing Mrs Merdle.

‘No,’ repeated Fanny. ‘She shall find me go her way. She took it, and
I’ll follow it. And, with the blessing of fate and fortune, I’ll go on
improving that woman’s acquaintance until I have given her maid,
before her eyes, things from my dressmaker’s ten times as handsome and
expensive as she once gave me from hers!’

Little Dorrit was silent; sensible that she was not to be heard on
any question affecting the family dignity, and unwilling to lose to no
purpose her sister’s newly and unexpectedly restored favour. She could
not concur, but she was silent. Fanny well knew what she was thinking
of; so well, that she soon asked her.

Her reply was, ‘Do you mean to encourage Mr Sparkler, Fanny?’

‘Encourage him, my dear?’ said her sister, smiling contemptuously, ‘that
depends upon what you call encourage. No, I don’t mean to encourage him.
But I’ll make a slave of him.’

Little Dorrit glanced seriously and doubtfully in her face, but Fanny
was not to be so brought to a check. She furled her fan of black and
gold, and used it to tap her sister’s nose; with the air of a proud
beauty and a great spirit, who toyed with and playfully instructed a
homely companion.

‘I shall make him fetch and carry, my dear, and I shall make him subject
to me. And if I don’t make his mother subject to me, too, it shall not
be my fault.’

‘Do you think--dear Fanny, don’t be offended, we are so comfortable
together now--that you can quite see the end of that course?’

‘I can’t say I have so much as looked for it yet, my dear,’ answered
Fanny, with supreme indifference; ‘all in good time. Such are my
intentions. And really they have taken me so long to develop, that here
we are at home. And Young Sparkler at the door, inquiring who is within.
By the merest accident, of course!’

In effect, the swain was standing up in his gondola, card-case in
hand, affecting to put the question to a servant. This conjunction
of circumstances led to his immediately afterwards presenting himself
before the young ladies in a posture, which in ancient times would not
have been considered one of favourable augury for his suit; since the
gondoliers of the young ladies, having been put to some inconvenience
by the chase, so neatly brought their own boat in the gentlest collision
with the bark of Mr Sparkler, as to tip that gentleman over like a
larger species of ninepin, and cause him to exhibit the soles of his
shoes to the object of his dearest wishes: while the nobler portions of
his anatomy struggled at the bottom of his boat in the arms of one of
his men.

However, as Miss Fanny called out with much concern, Was the gentleman
hurt, Mr Sparkler rose more restored than might have been expected, and
stammered for himself with blushes, ‘Not at all so.’ Miss Fanny had no
recollection of having ever seen him before, and was passing on, with a
distant inclination of her head, when he announced himself by name. Even
then she was in a difficulty from being unable to call it to mind, until
he explained that he had had the honour of seeing her at Martigny. Then
she remembered him, and hoped his lady-mother was well.

‘Thank you,’ stammered Mr Sparkler, ‘she’s uncommonly well--at least,
poorly.’

‘In Venice?’ said Miss Fanny.

‘In Rome,’ Mr Sparkler answered. ‘I am here by myself, myself. I came to
call upon Mr Edward Dorrit myself. Indeed, upon Mr Dorrit likewise. In
fact, upon the family.’

Turning graciously to the attendants, Miss Fanny inquired whether her
papa or brother was within? The reply being that they were both within,
Mr Sparkler humbly offered his arm. Miss Fanny accepting it, was squired
up the great staircase by Mr Sparkler, who, if he still believed (which
there is not any reason to doubt) that she had no nonsense about her,
rather deceived himself.

Arrived in a mouldering reception-room, where the faded hangings, of a
sad sea-green, had worn and withered until they looked as if they
might have claimed kindred with the waifs of seaweed drifting under
the windows, or clinging to the walls and weeping for their imprisoned
relations, Miss Fanny despatched emissaries for her father and brother.
Pending whose appearance, she showed to great advantage on a sofa,
completing Mr Sparkler’s conquest with some remarks upon Dante--known
to that gentleman as an eccentric man in the nature of an Old File,
who used to put leaves round his head, and sit upon a stool for some
unaccountable purpose, outside the cathedral at Florence.

Mr Dorrit welcomed the visitor with the highest urbanity, and most
courtly manners. He inquired particularly after Mrs Merdle. He inquired
particularly after Mr Merdle. Mr Sparkler said, or rather twitched out
of himself in small pieces by the shirt-collar, that Mrs Merdle having
completely used up her place in the country, and also her house at
Brighton, and being, of course, unable, don’t you see, to remain in
London when there wasn’t a soul there, and not feeling herself this year
quite up to visiting about at people’s places, had resolved to have
a touch at Rome, where a woman like herself, with a proverbially fine
appearance, and with no nonsense about her, couldn’t fail to be a great
acquisition. As to Mr Merdle, he was so much wanted by the men in the
City and the rest of those places, and was such a doosed extraordinary
phenomenon in Buying and Banking and that, that Mr Sparkler doubted if
the monetary system of the country would be able to spare him; though
that his work was occasionally one too many for him, and that he would
be all the better for a temporary shy at an entirely new scene and
climate, Mr Sparkler did not conceal. As to himself, Mr Sparkler
conveyed to the Dorrit family that he was going, on rather particular
business, wherever they were going.

This immense conversational achievement required time, but was effected.
Being effected, Mr Dorrit expressed his hope that Mr Sparkler would
shortly dine with them. Mr Sparkler received the idea so kindly that Mr
Dorrit asked what he was going to do that day, for instance? As he was
going to do nothing that day (his usual occupation, and one for which he
was particularly qualified), he was secured without postponement; being
further bound over to accompany the ladies to the Opera in the evening.

At dinner-time Mr Sparkler rose out of the sea, like Venus’s son taking
after his mother, and made a splendid appearance ascending the great
staircase. If Fanny had been charming in the morning, she was now thrice
charming, very becomingly dressed in her most suitable colours, and with
an air of negligence upon her that doubled Mr Sparkler’s fetters, and
riveted them.

‘I hear you are acquainted, Mr Sparkler,’ said his host at dinner,
‘with--ha--Mr Gowan. Mr Henry Gowan?’

‘Perfectly, sir,’ returned Mr Sparkler. ‘His mother and my mother are
cronies in fact.’

‘If I had thought of it, Amy,’ said Mr Dorrit, with a patronage as
magnificent as that of Lord Decimus himself, ‘you should have despatched
a note to them, asking them to dine to-day. Some of our people could
have--ha--fetched them, and taken them home. We could have spared
a--hum--gondola for that purpose. I am sorry to have forgotten this.
Pray remind me of them to-morrow.’

Little Dorrit was not without doubts how Mr Henry Gowan might take their
patronage; but she promised not to fail in the reminder.

‘Pray, does Mr Henry Gowan paint--ha--Portraits?’ inquired Mr Dorrit.

Mr Sparkler opined that he painted anything, if he could get the job.

‘He has no particular walk?’ said Mr Dorrit.

Mr Sparkler, stimulated by Love to brilliancy, replied that for a
particular walk a man ought to have a particular pair of shoes; as, for
example, shooting, shooting-shoes; cricket, cricket-shoes. Whereas, he
believed that Henry Gowan had no particular pair of shoes.

‘No speciality?’ said Mr Dorrit.

This being a very long word for Mr Sparkler, and his mind being
exhausted by his late effort, he replied, ‘No, thank you. I seldom take
it.’

‘Well!’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘It would be very agreeable to me to present
a gentleman so connected, with some--ha--Testimonial of my desire to
further his interests, and develop the--hum--germs of his genius. I
think I must engage Mr Gowan to paint my picture. If the result should
be--ha--mutually satisfactory, I might afterwards engage him to try his
hand upon my family.’

The exquisitely bold and original thought presented itself to Mr
Sparkler, that there was an opening here for saying there were some of
the family (emphasising ‘some’ in a marked manner) to whom no painter
could render justice. But, for want of a form of words in which to
express the idea, it returned to the skies.

This was the more to be regretted as Miss Fanny greatly applauded the
notion of the portrait, and urged her papa to act upon it. She surmised,
she said, that Mr Gowan had lost better and higher opportunities by
marrying his pretty wife; and Love in a cottage, painting pictures for
dinner, was so delightfully interesting, that she begged her papa to
give him the commission whether he could paint a likeness or not: though
indeed both she and Amy knew he could, from having seen a speaking
likeness on his easel that day, and having had the opportunity of
comparing it with the original. These remarks made Mr Sparkler (as
perhaps they were intended to do) nearly distracted; for while on
the one hand they expressed Miss Fanny’s susceptibility of the tender
passion, she herself showed such an innocent unconsciousness of his
admiration that his eyes goggled in his head with jealousy of an unknown
rival.

Descending into the sea again after dinner, and ascending out of it
at the Opera staircase, preceded by one of their gondoliers, like an
attendant Merman, with a great linen lantern, they entered their box,
and Mr Sparkler entered on an evening of agony. The theatre being
dark, and the box light, several visitors lounged in during the
representation; in whom Fanny was so interested, and in conversation
with whom she fell into such charming attitudes, as she had little
confidences with them, and little disputes concerning the identity of
people in distant boxes, that the wretched Sparkler hated all mankind.
But he had two consolations at the close of the performance. She gave
him her fan to hold while she adjusted her cloak, and it was his
blessed privilege to give her his arm down-stairs again. These crumbs of
encouragement, Mr Sparkler thought, would just keep him going; and it is
not impossible that Miss Dorrit thought so too.

The Merman with his light was ready at the box-door, and other Mermen
with other lights were ready at many of the doors. The Dorrit Merman
held his lantern low, to show the steps, and Mr Sparkler put on another
heavy set of fetters over his former set, as he watched her radiant
feet twinkling down the stairs beside him. Among the loiterers here, was
Blandois of Paris. He spoke, and moved forward beside Fanny.

Little Dorrit was in front with her brother and Mrs General (Mr Dorrit
had remained at home), but on the brink of the quay they all came
together. She started again to find Blandois close to her, handing Fanny
into the boat.

‘Gowan has had a loss,’ he said, ‘since he was made happy to-day by a
visit from fair ladies.’

‘A loss?’ repeated Fanny, relinquished by the bereaved Sparkler, and
taking her seat.

‘A loss,’ said Blandois. ‘His dog Lion.’

Little Dorrit’s hand was in his, as he spoke.


‘He is dead,’ said Blandois.

‘Dead?’ echoed Little Dorrit. ‘That noble dog?’

‘Faith, dear ladies!’ said Blandois, smiling and shrugging his
shoulders, ‘somebody has poisoned that noble dog. He is as dead as the
Doges!’




CHAPTER 7. Mostly, Prunes and Prism


Mrs General, always on her coach-box keeping the proprieties well
together, took pains to form a surface on her very dear young friend,
and Mrs General’s very dear young friend tried hard to receive it. Hard
as she had tried in her laborious life to attain many ends, she had
never tried harder than she did now, to be varnished by Mrs General. It
made her anxious and ill at ease to be operated upon by that smoothing
hand, it is true; but she submitted herself to the family want in
its greatness as she had submitted herself to the family want in its
littleness, and yielded to her own inclinations in this thing no more
than she had yielded to her hunger itself, in the days when she had
saved her dinner that her father might have his supper.

One comfort that she had under the Ordeal by General was more
sustaining to her, and made her more grateful than to a less devoted
and affectionate spirit, not habituated to her struggles and sacrifices,
might appear quite reasonable; and, indeed, it may often be observed in
life, that spirits like Little Dorrit do not appear to reason half
as carefully as the folks who get the better of them. The continued
kindness of her sister was this comfort to Little Dorrit. It was nothing
to her that the kindness took the form of tolerant patronage; she was
used to that. It was nothing to her that it kept her in a tributary
position, and showed her in attendance on the flaming car in which Miss
Fanny sat on an elevated seat, exacting homage; she sought no better
place. Always admiring Fanny’s beauty, and grace, and readiness, and not
now asking herself how much of her disposition to be strongly attached
to Fanny was due to her own heart, and how much to Fanny’s, she gave her
all the sisterly fondness her great heart contained.

The wholesale amount of Prunes and Prism which Mrs General infused into
the family life, combined with the perpetual plunges made by Fanny into
society, left but a very small residue of any natural deposit at the
bottom of the mixture. This rendered confidences with Fanny doubly
precious to Little Dorrit, and heightened the relief they afforded her.

‘Amy,’ said Fanny to her one night when they were alone, after a day so
tiring that Little Dorrit was quite worn out, though Fanny would have
taken another dip into society with the greatest pleasure in life, ‘I
am going to put something into your little head. You won’t guess what it
is, I suspect.’

‘I don’t think that’s likely, dear,’ said Little Dorrit.

‘Come, I’ll give you a clue, child,’ said Fanny. ‘Mrs General.’

Prunes and Prism, in a thousand combinations, having been wearily in the
ascendant all day--everything having been surface and varnish and show
without substance--Little Dorrit looked as if she had hoped that Mrs
General was safely tucked up in bed for some hours.

‘_Now_, can you guess, Amy?’ said Fanny.

‘No, dear. Unless I have done anything,’ said Little Dorrit, rather
alarmed, and meaning anything calculated to crack varnish and ruffle
surface.

Fanny was so very much amused by the misgiving, that she took up her
favourite fan (being then seated at her dressing-table with her armoury
of cruel instruments about her, most of them reeking from the heart
of Sparkler), and tapped her sister frequently on the nose with it,
laughing all the time.

‘Oh, our Amy, our Amy!’ said Fanny. ‘What a timid little goose our Amy
is! But this is nothing to laugh at. On the contrary, I am very cross,
my dear.’

‘As it is not with me, Fanny, I don’t mind,’ returned her sister,
smiling.

‘Ah! But I do mind,’ said Fanny, ‘and so will you, Pet, when I enlighten
you. Amy, has it never struck you that somebody is monstrously polite to
Mrs General?’

‘Everybody is polite to Mrs General,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘Because--’

‘Because she freezes them into it?’ interrupted Fanny. ‘I don’t mean
that; quite different from that. Come! Has it never struck you, Amy,
that Pa is monstrously polite to Mrs General.’

Amy, murmuring ‘No,’ looked quite confounded.

‘No; I dare say not. But he is,’ said Fanny. ‘He is, Amy. And remember
my words. Mrs General has designs on Pa!’

‘Dear Fanny, do you think it possible that Mrs General has designs on
any one?’

‘Do I think it possible?’ retorted Fanny. ‘My love, I know it. I tell
you she has designs on Pa. And more than that, I tell you Pa considers
her such a wonder, such a paragon of accomplishment, and such an
acquisition to our family, that he is ready to get himself into a state
of perfect infatuation with her at any moment. And that opens a pretty
picture of things, I hope? Think of me with Mrs General for a Mama!’

Little Dorrit did not reply, ‘Think of me with Mrs General for a Mama;’
but she looked anxious, and seriously inquired what had led Fanny to
these conclusions.

‘Lord, my darling,’ said Fanny, tartly. ‘You might as well ask me how
I know when a man is struck with myself! But, of course I do know. It
happens pretty often: but I always know it. I know this in much the same
way, I suppose. At all events, I know it.’

‘You never heard Papa say anything?’

‘Say anything?’ repeated Fanny. ‘My dearest, darling child, what
necessity has he had, yet awhile, to say anything?’

‘And you have never heard Mrs General say anything?’

‘My goodness me, Amy,’ returned Fanny, ‘is she the sort of woman to say
anything? Isn’t it perfectly plain and clear that she has nothing to do
at present but to hold herself upright, keep her aggravating gloves on,
and go sweeping about? Say anything! If she had the ace of trumps in her
hand at whist, she wouldn’t say anything, child. It would come out when
she played it.’

‘At least, you may be mistaken, Fanny. Now, may you not?’

‘O yes, I _may_ be,’ said Fanny, ‘but I am not. However, I am glad you
can contemplate such an escape, my dear, and I am glad that you can take
this for the present with sufficient coolness to think of such a chance.
It makes me hope that you may be able to bear the connection. I should
not be able to bear it, and I should not try. I’d marry young Sparkler
first.’

‘O, you would never marry him, Fanny, under any circumstances.’

‘Upon my word, my dear,’ rejoined that young lady with exceeding
indifference, ‘I wouldn’t positively answer even for that. There’s
no knowing what might happen. Especially as I should have many
opportunities, afterwards, of treating that woman, his mother, in her
own style. Which I most decidedly should not be slow to avail myself of,
Amy.’

No more passed between the sisters then; but what had passed gave the
two subjects of Mrs General and Mr Sparkler great prominence in Little
Dorrit’s mind, and thenceforth she thought very much of both.

Mrs General, having long ago formed her own surface to such perfection
that it hid whatever was below it (if anything), no observation was to
be made in that quarter. Mr Dorrit was undeniably very polite to her
and had a high opinion of her; but Fanny, impetuous at most times, might
easily be wrong for all that. Whereas, the Sparkler question was on the
different footing that any one could see what was going on there, and
Little Dorrit saw it and pondered on it with many doubts and wonderings.

The devotion of Mr Sparkler was only to be equalled by the caprice
and cruelty of his enslaver. Sometimes she would prefer him to such
distinction of notice, that he would chuckle aloud with joy; next day,
or next hour, she would overlook him so completely, and drop him into
such an abyss of obscurity, that he would groan under a weak pretence of
coughing. The constancy of his attendance never touched Fanny: though he
was so inseparable from Edward, that, when that gentleman wished for
a change of society, he was under the irksome necessity of gliding out
like a conspirator in disguised boats and by secret doors and back ways;
though he was so solicitous to know how Mr Dorrit was, that he called
every other day to inquire, as if Mr Dorrit were the prey of an
intermittent fever; though he was so constantly being paddled up and
down before the principal windows, that he might have been supposed to
have made a wager for a large stake to be paddled a thousand miles in
a thousand hours; though whenever the gondola of his mistress left the
gate, the gondola of Mr Sparkler shot out from some watery ambush
and gave chase, as if she were a fair smuggler and he a custom-house
officer. It was probably owing to this fortification of the natural
strength of his constitution with so much exposure to the air, and the
salt sea, that Mr Sparkler did not pine outwardly; but, whatever the
cause, he was so far from having any prospect of moving his mistress by
a languishing state of health, that he grew bluffer every day, and that
peculiarity in his appearance of seeming rather a swelled boy than
a young man, became developed to an extraordinary degree of ruddy
puffiness.

Blandois calling to pay his respects, Mr Dorrit received him with
affability as the friend of Mr Gowan, and mentioned to him his idea of
commissioning Mr Gowan to transmit him to posterity. Blandois highly
extolling it, it occurred to Mr Dorrit that it might be agreeable to
Blandois to communicate to his friend the great opportunity reserved
for him. Blandois accepted the commission with his own free elegance of
manner, and swore he would discharge it before he was an hour older. On
his imparting the news to Gowan, that Master gave Mr Dorrit to the
Devil with great liberality some round dozen of times (for he resented
patronage almost as much as he resented the want of it), and was
inclined to quarrel with his friend for bringing him the message.

‘It may be a defect in my mental vision, Blandois,’ said he, ‘but may I
die if I see what you have to do with this.’

‘Death of my life,’ replied Blandois, ‘nor I neither, except that I
thought I was serving my friend.’

‘By putting an upstart’s hire in his pocket?’ said Gowan, frowning.
‘Do you mean that? Tell your other friend to get his head painted for
the sign of some public-house, and to get it done by a sign-painter. Who
am I, and who is he?’

‘Professore,’ returned the ambassador, ‘and who is Blandois?’

Without appearing at all interested in the latter question, Gowan
angrily whistled Mr Dorrit away. But, next day, he resumed the subject
by saying in his off-hand manner and with a slighting laugh, ‘Well,
Blandois, when shall we go to this Maecenas of yours? We journeymen must
take jobs when we can get them. When shall we go and look after this
job?’

‘When you will,’ said the injured Blandois, ‘as you please. What have I
to do with it? What is it to me?’

‘I can tell you what it is to me,’ said Gowan. ‘Bread and cheese. One
must eat! So come along, my Blandois.’

Mr Dorrit received them in the presence of his daughters and of Mr
Sparkler, who happened, by some surprising accident, to be calling
there. ‘How are you, Sparkler?’ said Gowan carelessly. ‘When you have
to live by your mother wit, old boy, I hope you may get on better than I
do.’

Mr Dorrit then mentioned his proposal. ‘Sir,’ said Gowan, laughing,
after receiving it gracefully enough, ‘I am new to the trade, and not
expert at its mysteries. I believe I ought to look at you in various
lights, tell you you are a capital subject, and consider when I shall be
sufficiently disengaged to devote myself with the necessary enthusiasm
to the fine picture I mean to make of you. I assure you,’ and he laughed
again, ‘I feel quite a traitor in the camp of those dear, gifted, good,
noble fellows, my brother artists, by not doing the hocus-pocus better.
But I have not been brought up to it, and it’s too late to learn it.
Now, the fact is, I am a very bad painter, but not much worse than the
generality. If you are going to throw away a hundred guineas or so, I
am as poor as a poor relation of great people usually is, and I shall be
very much obliged to you, if you’ll throw them away upon me. I’ll do the
best I can for the money; and if the best should be bad, why even then,
you may probably have a bad picture with a small name to it, instead of
a bad picture with a large name to it.’

This tone, though not what he had expected, on the whole suited Mr
Dorrit remarkably well. It showed that the gentleman, highly connected,
and not a mere workman, would be under an obligation to him. He
expressed his satisfaction in placing himself in Mr Gowan’s hands, and
trusted that he would have the pleasure, in their characters of private
gentlemen, of improving his acquaintance.

‘You are very good,’ said Gowan. ‘I have not forsworn society since I
joined the brotherhood of the brush (the most delightful fellows on the
face of the earth), and am glad enough to smell the old fine gunpowder
now and then, though it did blow me into mid-air and my present calling.
You’ll not think, Mr Dorrit,’ and here he laughed again in the easiest
way, ‘that I am lapsing into the freemasonry of the craft--for it’s not
so; upon my life I can’t help betraying it wherever I go, though, by
Jupiter, I love and honour the craft with all my might--if I propose a
stipulation as to time and place?’

Ha! Mr Dorrit could erect no--hum--suspicion of that kind on Mr Gowan’s
frankness.

‘Again you are very good,’ said Gowan. ‘Mr Dorrit, I hear you are going
to Rome. I am going to Rome, having friends there. Let me begin to do
you the injustice I have conspired to do you, there--not here. We shall
all be hurried during the rest of our stay here; and though there’s not
a poorer man with whole elbows in Venice, than myself, I have not quite
got all the Amateur out of me yet--comprising the trade again, you
see!--and can’t fall on to order, in a hurry, for the mere sake of the
sixpences.’

These remarks were not less favourably received by Mr Dorrit than their
predecessors. They were the prelude to the first reception of Mr and Mrs
Gowan at dinner, and they skilfully placed Gowan on his usual ground in
the new family.

His wife, too, they placed on her usual ground. Miss Fanny understood,
with particular distinctness, that Mrs Gowan’s good looks had cost her
husband very dear; that there had been a great disturbance about her
in the Barnacle family; and that the Dowager Mrs Gowan, nearly
heart-broken, had resolutely set her face against the marriage until
overpowered by her maternal feelings. Mrs General likewise clearly
understood that the attachment had occasioned much family grief and
dissension. Of honest Mr Meagles no mention was made; except that it
was natural enough that a person of that sort should wish to raise his
daughter out of his own obscurity, and that no one could blame him for
trying his best to do so.

Little Dorrit’s interest in the fair subject of this easily accepted
belief was too earnest and watchful to fail in accurate observation. She
could see that it had its part in throwing upon Mrs Gowan the touch of a
shadow under which she lived, and she even had an instinctive knowledge
that there was not the least truth in it. But it had an influence in
placing obstacles in the way of her association with Mrs Gowan by making
the Prunes and Prism school excessively polite to her, but not very
intimate with her; and Little Dorrit, as an enforced sizar of that
college, was obliged to submit herself humbly to its ordinances.

Nevertheless, there was a sympathetic understanding already
established between the two, which would have carried them over
greater difficulties, and made a friendship out of a more restricted
intercourse. As though accidents were determined to be favourable to
it, they had a new assurance of congeniality in the aversion which each
perceived that the other felt towards Blandois of Paris; an aversion
amounting to the repugnance and horror of a natural antipathy towards an
odious creature of the reptile kind.

And there was a passive congeniality between them, besides this active
one. To both of them, Blandois behaved in exactly the same manner; and
to both of them his manner had uniformly something in it, which
they both knew to be different from his bearing towards others. The
difference was too minute in its expression to be perceived by others,
but they knew it to be there. A mere trick of his evil eyes, a mere turn
of his smooth white hand, a mere hair’s-breadth of addition to the fall
of his nose and the rise of the moustache in the most frequent movement
of his face, conveyed to both of them, equally, a swagger personal to
themselves. It was as if he had said, ‘I have a secret power in this
quarter. I know what I know.’

This had never been felt by them both in so great a degree, and never
by each so perfectly to the knowledge of the other, as on a day when he
came to Mr Dorrit’s to take his leave before quitting Venice. Mrs
Gowan was herself there for the same purpose, and he came upon the
two together; the rest of the family being out. The two had not been
together five minutes, and the peculiar manner seemed to convey to them,
‘You were going to talk about me. Ha! Behold me here to prevent it!’

‘Gowan is coming here?’ said Blandois, with a smile.

Mrs Gowan replied he was not coming.

‘Not coming!’ said Blandois. ‘Permit your devoted servant, when you
leave here, to escort you home.’

‘Thank you: I am not going home.’

‘Not going home!’ said Blandois. ‘Then I am forlorn.’

That he might be; but he was not so forlorn as to roam away and leave
them together. He sat entertaining them with his finest compliments, and
his choicest conversation; but he conveyed to them, all the time, ‘No,
no, no, dear ladies. Behold me here expressly to prevent it!’

He conveyed it to them with so much meaning, and he had such a
diabolical persistency in him, that at length, Mrs Gowan rose to depart.
On his offering his hand to Mrs Gowan to lead her down the staircase,
she retained Little Dorrit’s hand in hers, with a cautious pressure, and
said, ‘No, thank you. But, if you will please to see if my boatman is
there, I shall be obliged to you.’

It left him no choice but to go down before them. As he did so, hat in
hand, Mrs Gowan whispered:

‘He killed the dog.’

‘Does Mr Gowan know it?’ Little Dorrit whispered.

‘No one knows it. Don’t look towards me; look towards him. He will turn
his face in a moment. No one knows it, but I am sure he did. You are?’

‘I--I think so,’ Little Dorrit answered.

‘Henry likes him, and he will not think ill of him; he is so generous
and open himself. But you and I feel sure that we think of him as he
deserves. He argued with Henry that the dog had been already poisoned
when he changed so, and sprang at him. Henry believes it, but we do not.
I see he is listening, but can’t hear. Good-bye, my love! Good-bye!’

The last words were spoken aloud, as the vigilant Blandois stopped,
turned his head, and looked at them from the bottom of the staircase.
Assuredly he did look then, though he looked his politest, as if any
real philanthropist could have desired no better employment than to lash
a great stone to his neck, and drop him into the water flowing beyond
the dark arched gateway in which he stood. No such benefactor to mankind
being on the spot, he handed Mrs Gowan to her boat, and stood there
until it had shot out of the narrow view; when he handed himself into
his own boat and followed.

Little Dorrit had sometimes thought, and now thought again as she
retraced her steps up the staircase, that he had made his way too easily
into her father’s house. But so many and such varieties of people did
the same, through Mr Dorrit’s participation in his elder daughter’s
society mania, that it was hardly an exceptional case. A perfect fury
for making acquaintances on whom to impress their riches and importance,
had seized the House of Dorrit.

It appeared on the whole, to Little Dorrit herself, that this same
society in which they lived, greatly resembled a superior sort of
Marshalsea. Numbers of people seemed to come abroad, pretty much
as people had come into the prison; through debt, through idleness,
relationship, curiosity, and general unfitness for getting on at home.
They were brought into these foreign towns in the custody of couriers
and local followers, just as the debtors had been brought into the
prison. They prowled about the churches and picture-galleries, much in
the old, dreary, prison-yard manner. They were usually going away again
to-morrow or next week, and rarely knew their own minds, and seldom did
what they said they would do, or went where they said they would go: in
all this again, very like the prison debtors. They paid high for poor
accommodation, and disparaged a place while they pretended to like it:
which was exactly the Marshalsea custom. They were envied when they went
away by people left behind, feigning not to want to go: and that again
was the Marshalsea habit invariably. A certain set of words and phrases,
as much belonging to tourists as the College and the Snuggery belonged
to the jail, was always in their mouths. They had precisely the same
incapacity for settling down to anything, as the prisoners used to have;
they rather deteriorated one another, as the prisoners used to do; and
they wore untidy dresses, and fell into a slouching way of life: still,
always like the people in the Marshalsea.

The period of the family’s stay at Venice came, in its course, to an
end, and they moved, with their retinue, to Rome. Through a repetition
of the former Italian scenes, growing more dirty and more haggard as
they went on, and bringing them at length to where the very air was
diseased, they passed to their destination. A fine residence had been
taken for them on the Corso, and there they took up their abode, in a
city where everything seemed to be trying to stand still for ever on
the ruins of something else--except the water, which, following eternal
laws, tumbled and rolled from its glorious multitude of fountains.

Here it seemed to Little Dorrit that a change came over the Marshalsea
spirit of their society, and that Prunes and Prism got the upper hand.
Everybody was walking about St Peter’s and the Vatican on somebody
else’s cork legs, and straining every visible object through somebody
else’s sieve. Nobody said what anything was, but everybody said what the
Mrs Generals, Mr Eustace, or somebody else said it was. The whole body
of travellers seemed to be a collection of voluntary human sacrifices,
bound hand and foot, and delivered over to Mr Eustace and his
attendants, to have the entrails of their intellects arranged according
to the taste of that sacred priesthood. Through the rugged remains
of temples and tombs and palaces and senate halls and theatres and
amphitheatres of ancient days, hosts of tongue-tied and blindfolded
moderns were carefully feeling their way, incessantly repeating Prunes
and Prism in the endeavour to set their lips according to the received
form. Mrs General was in her pure element. Nobody had an opinion. There
was a formation of surface going on around her on an amazing scale, and
it had not a flaw of courage or honest free speech in it.

Another modification of Prunes and Prism insinuated itself on Little
Dorrit’s notice very shortly after their arrival. They received an early
visit from Mrs Merdle, who led that extensive department of life in the
Eternal City that winter; and the skilful manner in which she and Fanny
fenced with one another on the occasion, almost made her quiet sister
wink, like the glittering of small-swords.

‘So delighted,’ said Mrs Merdle, ‘to resume an acquaintance so
inauspiciously begun at Martigny.’

‘At Martigny, of course,’ said Fanny. ‘Charmed, I am sure!’

‘I understand,’ said Mrs Merdle, ‘from my son Edmund Sparkler, that
he has already improved that chance occasion. He has returned quite
transported with Venice.’

‘Indeed?’ returned the careless Fanny. ‘Was he there long?’

‘I might refer that question to Mr Dorrit,’ said Mrs Merdle, turning the
bosom towards that gentleman; ‘Edmund having been so much indebted to
him for rendering his stay agreeable.’

‘Oh, pray don’t speak of it,’ returned Fanny. ‘I believe Papa had the
pleasure of inviting Mr Sparkler twice or thrice,--but it was nothing.
We had so many people about us, and kept such open house, that if he had
that pleasure, it was less than nothing.’

‘Except, my dear,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘except--ha--as it afforded me
unusual gratification to--hum--show by any means, however slight and
worthless, the--ha, hum--high estimation in which, in--ha--common with
the rest of the world, I hold so distinguished and princely a character
as Mr Merdle’s.’

The bosom received this tribute in its most engaging manner. ‘Mr
Merdle,’ observed Fanny, as a means of dismissing Mr Sparkler into the
background, ‘is quite a theme of Papa’s, you must know, Mrs Merdle.’

‘I have been--ha--disappointed, madam,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘to understand
from Mr Sparkler that there is no great--hum--probability of Mr Merdle’s
coming abroad.’

‘Why, indeed,’ said Mrs Merdle, ‘he is so much engaged and in such
request, that I fear not. He has not been able to get abroad for years.
You, Miss Dorrit, I believe have been almost continually abroad for a
long time.’

‘Oh dear yes,’ drawled Fanny, with the greatest hardihood. ‘An immense
number of years.’

‘So I should have inferred,’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘Exactly,’ said Fanny.

‘I trust, however,’ resumed Mr Dorrit, ‘that if I have not
the--hum--great advantage of becoming known to Mr Merdle on this side
of the Alps or Mediterranean, I shall have that honour on returning to
England. It is an honour I particularly desire and shall particularly
esteem.’

‘Mr Merdle,’ said Mrs Merdle, who had been looking admiringly at Fanny
through her eye-glass, ‘will esteem it, I am sure, no less.’

Little Dorrit, still habitually thoughtful and solitary though no longer
alone, at first supposed this to be mere Prunes and Prism. But as her
father when they had been to a brilliant reception at Mrs Merdle’s,
harped at their own family breakfast-table on his wish to know Mr
Merdle, with the contingent view of benefiting by the advice of that
wonderful man in the disposal of his fortune, she began to think it had
a real meaning, and to entertain a curiosity on her own part to see the
shining light of the time.




CHAPTER 8. The Dowager Mrs Gowan is reminded that ‘It Never Does’


While the waters of Venice and the ruins of Rome were sunning themselves
for the pleasure of the Dorrit family, and were daily being sketched
out of all earthly proportion, lineament, and likeness, by travelling
pencils innumerable, the firm of Doyce and Clennam hammered away in
Bleeding Heart Yard, and the vigorous clink of iron upon iron was heard
there through the working hours.

The younger partner had, by this time, brought the business into sound
trim; and the elder, left free to follow his own ingenious devices, had
done much to enhance the character of the factory. As an ingenious man,
he had necessarily to encounter every discouragement that the ruling
powers for a length of time had been able by any means to put in the way
of this class of culprits; but that was only reasonable self-defence in
the powers, since How to do it must obviously be regarded as the natural
and mortal enemy of How not to do it. In this was to be found the basis
of the wise system, by tooth and nail upheld by the Circumlocution
Office, of warning every ingenious British subject to be ingenious
at his peril: of harassing him, obstructing him, inviting robbers (by
making his remedy uncertain, and expensive) to plunder him, and at the
best of confiscating his property after a short term of enjoyment, as
though invention were on a par with felony. The system had uniformly
found great favour with the Barnacles, and that was only reasonable,
too; for one who worthily invents must be in earnest, and the Barnacles
abhorred and dreaded nothing half so much. That again was very
reasonable; since in a country suffering under the affliction of a great
amount of earnestness, there might, in an exceeding short space of time,
be not a single Barnacle left sticking to a post.

Daniel Doyce faced his condition with its pains and penalties attached
to it, and soberly worked on for the work’s sake. Clennam cheering him
with a hearty co-operation, was a moral support to him, besides doing
good service in his business relation. The concern prospered, and the
partners were fast friends.

But Daniel could not forget the old design of so many years. It was not
in reason to be expected that he should; if he could have lightly
forgotten it, he could never have conceived it, or had the patience and
perseverance to work it out. So Clennam thought, when he sometimes
observed him of an evening looking over the models and drawings, and
consoling himself by muttering with a sigh as he put them away again,
that the thing was as true as it ever was.

To show no sympathy with so much endeavour, and so much disappointment,
would have been to fail in what Clennam regarded as among the implied
obligations of his partnership. A revival of the passing interest in
the subject which had been by chance awakened at the door of the
Circumlocution Office, originated in this feeling. He asked his partner
to explain the invention to him; ‘having a lenient consideration,’ he
stipulated, ‘for my being no workman, Doyce.’

‘No workman?’ said Doyce. ‘You would have been a thorough workman if you
had given yourself to it. You have as good a head for understanding such
things as I have met with.’

‘A totally uneducated one, I am sorry to add,’ said Clennam.

‘I don’t know that,’ returned Doyce, ‘and I wouldn’t have you say
that. No man of sense who has been generally improved, and has improved
himself, can be called quite uneducated as to anything. I don’t
particularly favour mysteries. I would as soon, on a fair and clear
explanation, be judged by one class of man as another, provided he had
the qualification I have named.’

‘At all events,’ said Clennam--‘this sounds as if we were exchanging
compliments, but we know we are not--I shall have the advantage of as
plain an explanation as can be given.’

‘Well!’ said Daniel, in his steady even way, ‘I’ll try to make it so.’

He had the power, often to be found in union with such a character, of
explaining what he himself perceived, and meant, with the direct force
and distinctness with which it struck his own mind. His manner of
demonstration was so orderly and neat and simple, that it was not easy
to mistake him. There was something almost ludicrous in the complete
irreconcilability of a vague conventional notion that he must be a
visionary man, with the precise, sagacious travelling of his eye and
thumb over the plans, their patient stoppages at particular points,
their careful returns to other points whence little channels of
explanation had to be traced up, and his steady manner of making
everything good and everything sound at each important stage, before
taking his hearer on a line’s-breadth further. His dismissal of himself
from his description, was hardly less remarkable. He never said, I
discovered this adaptation or invented that combination; but showed the
whole thing as if the Divine artificer had made it, and he had happened
to find it; so modest he was about it, such a pleasant touch of respect
was mingled with his quiet admiration of it, and so calmly convinced he
was that it was established on irrefragable laws.

Not only that evening, but for several succeeding evenings, Clennam was
quite charmed by this investigation. The more he pursued it, and the
oftener he glanced at the grey head bending over it, and the shrewd eye
kindling with pleasure in it and love of it--instrument for probing his
heart though it had been made for twelve long years--the less he could
reconcile it to his younger energy to let it go without one effort more.
At length he said:

‘Doyce, it came to this at last--that the business was to be sunk with
Heaven knows how many more wrecks, or begun all over again?’

‘Yes,’ returned Doyce, ‘that’s what the noblemen and gentlemen made of
it after a dozen years.’

‘And pretty fellows too!’ said Clennam, bitterly.

‘The usual thing!’ observed Doyce. ‘I must not make a martyr of myself,
when I am one of so large a company.’

‘Relinquish it, or begin it all over again?’ mused Clennam.

‘That was exactly the long and the short of it,’ said Doyce.

‘Then, my friend,’ cried Clennam, starting up and taking his
work-roughened hand, ‘it shall be begun all over again!’

Doyce looked alarmed, and replied in a hurry--for him, ‘No, no. Better
put it by. Far better put it by. It will be heard of, one day. I can
put it by. You forget, my good Clennam; I _have_ put it by. It’s all at an
end.’

‘Yes, Doyce,’ returned Clennam, ‘at an end as far as your efforts and
rebuffs are concerned, I admit, but not as far as mine are. I am younger
than you: I have only once set foot in that precious office, and I am
fresh game for them. Come! I’ll try them. You shall do exactly as you
have been doing since we have been together. I will add (as I easily
can) to what I have been doing, the attempt to get public justice done
to you; and, unless I have some success to report, you shall hear no
more of it.’

Daniel Doyce was still reluctant to consent, and again and again urged
that they had better put it by. But it was natural that he should
gradually allow himself to be over-persuaded by Clennam, and should
yield. Yield he did. So Arthur resumed the long and hopeless labour of
striving to make way with the Circumlocution Office.

The waiting-rooms of that Department soon began to be familiar with his
presence, and he was generally ushered into them by its janitors much
as a pickpocket might be shown into a police-office; the principal
difference being that the object of the latter class of public business
is to keep the pickpocket, while the Circumlocution object was to
get rid of Clennam. However, he was resolved to stick to the Great
Department; and so the work of form-filling, corresponding, minuting,
memorandum-making, signing, counter-signing, counter-counter-signing,
referring backwards and forwards, and referring sideways, crosswise, and
zig-zag, recommenced.

Here arises a feature of the Circumlocution Office, not previously
mentioned in the present record. When that admirable Department got
into trouble, and was, by some infuriated members of Parliament whom
the smaller Barnacles almost suspected of labouring under diabolic
possession, attacked on the merits of no individual case, but as an
Institution wholly abominable and Bedlamite; then the noble or right
honourable Barnacle who represented it in the House, would smite that
member and cleave him asunder, with a statement of the quantity of
business (for the prevention of business) done by the Circumlocution
Office. Then would that noble or right honourable Barnacle hold in his
hand a paper containing a few figures, to which, with the permission
of the House, he would entreat its attention. Then would the inferior
Barnacles exclaim, obeying orders, ‘Hear, Hear, Hear!’ and ‘Read!’ Then
would the noble or right honourable Barnacle perceive, sir, from this
little document, which he thought might carry conviction even to the
perversest mind (Derisive laughter and cheering from the Barnacle fry),
that within the short compass of the last financial half-year, this
much-maligned Department (Cheers) had written and received fifteen
thousand letters (Loud cheers), had written twenty-four thousand minutes
(Louder cheers), and thirty-two thousand five hundred and seventeen
memoranda (Vehement cheering). Nay, an ingenious gentleman connected
with the Department, and himself a valuable public servant, had done
him the favour to make a curious calculation of the amount of stationery
consumed in it during the same period. It formed a part of this same
short document; and he derived from it the remarkable fact that the
sheets of foolscap paper it had devoted to the public service would pave
the footways on both sides of Oxford Street from end to end, and leave
nearly a quarter of a mile to spare for the park (Immense cheering and
laughter); while of tape--red tape--it had used enough to stretch, in
graceful festoons, from Hyde Park Corner to the General Post Office.
Then, amidst a burst of official exultation, would the noble or right
honourable Barnacle sit down, leaving the mutilated fragments of the
Member on the field. No one, after that exemplary demolition of him,
would have the hardihood to hint that the more the Circumlocution Office
did, the less was done, and that the greatest blessing it could confer
on an unhappy public would be to do nothing.

With sufficient occupation on his hands, now that he had this additional
task--such a task had many and many a serviceable man died of before his
day--Arthur Clennam led a life of slight variety. Regular visits to his
mother’s dull sick room, and visits scarcely less regular to Mr Meagles
at Twickenham, were its only changes during many months.

He sadly and sorely missed Little Dorrit. He had been prepared to miss
her very much, but not so much. He knew to the full extent only through
experience, what a large place in his life was left blank when her
familiar little figure went out of it. He felt, too, that he must
relinquish the hope of its return, understanding the family character
sufficiently well to be assured that he and she were divided by a broad
ground of separation. The old interest he had had in her, and her old
trusting reliance on him, were tinged with melancholy in his mind: so
soon had change stolen over them, and so soon had they glided into the
past with other secret tendernesses.

When he received her letter he was greatly moved, but did not the less
sensibly feel that she was far divided from him by more than distance.
It helped him to a clearer and keener perception of the place assigned
him by the family. He saw that he was cherished in her grateful
remembrance secretly, and that they resented him with the jail and the
rest of its belongings.

Through all these meditations which every day of his life crowded about
her, he thought of her otherwise in the old way. She was his innocent
friend, his delicate child, his dear Little Dorrit. This very change
of circumstances fitted curiously in with the habit, begun on the night
when the roses floated away, of considering himself as a much older man
than his years really made him. He regarded her from a point of view
which in its remoteness, tender as it was, he little thought would have
been unspeakable agony to her. He speculated about her future destiny,
and about the husband she might have, with an affection for her which
would have drained her heart of its dearest drop of hope, and broken it.

Everything about him tended to confirm him in the custom of looking on
himself as an elderly man, from whom such aspirations as he had combated
in the case of Minnie Gowan (though that was not so long ago either,
reckoning by months and seasons), were finally departed. His relations
with her father and mother were like those on which a widower son-in-law
might have stood. If the twin sister who was dead had lived to pass away
in the bloom of womanhood, and he had been her husband, the nature of
his intercourse with Mr and Mrs Meagles would probably have been just
what it was. This imperceptibly helped to render habitual the impression
within him, that he had done with, and dismissed that part of life.

He invariably heard of Minnie from them, as telling them in her letters
how happy she was, and how she loved her husband; but inseparable from
that subject, he invariably saw the old cloud on Mr Meagles’s face. Mr
Meagles had never been quite so radiant since the marriage as before.
He had never quite recovered the separation from Pet. He was the same
good-humoured, open creature; but as if his face, from being much turned
towards the pictures of his two children which could show him only one
look, unconsciously adopted a characteristic from them, it always had
now, through all its changes of expression, a look of loss in it.

One wintry Saturday when Clennam was at the cottage, the Dowager Mrs
Gowan drove up, in the Hampton Court equipage which pretended to be the
exclusive equipage of so many individual proprietors. She descended, in
her shady ambuscade of green fan, to favour Mr and Mrs Meagles with a
call.

‘And how do you both do, Papa and Mama Meagles?’ said she, encouraging
her humble connections. ‘And when did you last hear from or about my
poor fellow?’

My poor fellow was her son; and this mode of speaking of him politely
kept alive, without any offence in the world, the pretence that he had
fallen a victim to the Meagles’ wiles.

‘And the dear pretty one?’ said Mrs Gowan. ‘Have you later news of her
than I have?’

Which also delicately implied that her son had been captured by mere
beauty, and under its fascination had forgone all sorts of worldly
advantages.

‘I am sure,’ said Mrs Gowan, without straining her attention on the
answers she received, ‘it’s an unspeakable comfort to know they continue
happy. My poor fellow is of such a restless disposition, and has been
so used to roving about, and to being inconstant and popular among all
manner of people, that it’s the greatest comfort in life. I suppose
they’re as poor as mice, Papa Meagles?’

Mr Meagles, fidgety under the question, replied, ‘I hope not, ma’am. I
hope they will manage their little income.’

‘Oh! my dearest Meagles!’ returned the lady, tapping him on the arm with
the green fan and then adroitly interposing it between a yawn and
the company, ‘how can you, as a man of the world and one of the most
business-like of human beings--for you know you are business-like, and a
great deal too much for us who are not--’

(Which went to the former purpose, by making Mr Meagles out to be an
artful schemer.)

‘--How can you talk about their managing their little means? My poor
dear fellow! The idea of his managing hundreds! And the sweet pretty
creature too. The notion of her managing! Papa Meagles! Don’t!’

‘Well, ma’am,’ said Mr Meagles, gravely, ‘I am sorry to admit, then,
that Henry certainly does anticipate his means.’

‘My dear good man--I use no ceremony with you, because we are a kind of
relations;--positively, Mama Meagles,’ exclaimed Mrs Gowan cheerfully,
as if the absurd coincidence then flashed upon her for the first time,
‘a kind of relations! My dear good man, in this world none of us can
have _everything_ our own way.’

This again went to the former point, and showed Mr Meagles with all good
breeding that, so far, he had been brilliantly successful in his deep
designs. Mrs Gowan thought the hit so good a one, that she dwelt upon
it; repeating ‘Not _everything_. No, no; in this world we must not expect
_everything_, Papa Meagles.’

‘And may I ask, ma’am,’ retorted Mr Meagles, a little heightened in
colour, ‘who does expect everything?’

‘Oh, nobody, nobody!’ said Mrs Gowan. ‘I was going to say--but you put
me out. You interrupting Papa, what was I going to say?’

Drooping her large green fan, she looked musingly at Mr Meagles while
she thought about it; a performance not tending to the cooling of that
gentleman’s rather heated spirits.

‘Ah! Yes, to be sure!’ said Mrs Gowan. ‘You must remember that my poor
fellow has always been accustomed to expectations. They may have been
realised, or they may not have been realised--’

‘Let us say, then, may not have been realised,’ observed Mr Meagles.

The Dowager for a moment gave him an angry look; but tossed it off with
her head and her fan, and pursued the tenor of her way in her former
manner.

‘It makes no difference. My poor fellow has been accustomed to that
sort of thing, and of course you knew it, and were prepared for the
consequences. I myself always clearly foresaw the consequences, and am
not surprised. And you must not be surprised. In fact, can’t be
surprised. Must have been prepared for it.’

Mr Meagles looked at his wife and at Clennam; bit his lip; and coughed.

‘And now here’s my poor fellow,’ Mrs Gowan pursued, ‘receiving notice
that he is to hold himself in expectation of a baby, and all the
expenses attendant on such an addition to his family! Poor Henry! But
it can’t be helped now; it’s too late to help it now. Only don’t talk of
anticipating means, Papa Meagles, as a discovery; because that would be
too much.’

‘Too much, ma’am?’ said Mr Meagles, as seeking an explanation.

‘There, there!’ said Mrs Gowan, putting him in his inferior place with
an expressive action of her hand. ‘Too much for my poor fellow’s
mother to bear at this time of day. They are fast married, and can’t
be unmarried. There, there! I know that! You needn’t tell me that, Papa
Meagles. I know it very well. What was it I said just now? That it was
a great comfort they continued happy. It is to be hoped they will still
continue happy. It is to be hoped Pretty One will do everything she
can to make my poor fellow happy, and keep him contented. Papa and Mama
Meagles, we had better say no more about it. We never did look at this
subject from the same side, and we never shall. There, there! Now I am
good.’

Truly, having by this time said everything she could say in maintenance
of her wonderfully mythical position, and in admonition to Mr Meagles
that he must not expect to bear his honours of alliance too cheaply, Mrs
Gowan was disposed to forgo the rest. If Mr Meagles had submitted to
a glance of entreaty from Mrs Meagles, and an expressive gesture from
Clennam, he would have left her in the undisturbed enjoyment of this
state of mind. But Pet was the darling and pride of his heart; and if he
could ever have championed her more devotedly, or loved her better, than
in the days when she was the sunlight of his house, it would have been
now, when, as its daily grace and delight, she was lost to it.

‘Mrs Gowan, ma’am,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘I have been a plain man all my
life. If I was to try--no matter whether on myself, on somebody else,
or both--any genteel mystifications, I should probably not succeed in
them.’

‘Papa Meagles,’ returned the Dowager, with an affable smile, but with
the bloom on her cheeks standing out a little more vividly than usual as
the neighbouring surface became paler, ‘probably not.’

‘Therefore, my good madam,’ said Mr Meagles, at great pains to
restrain himself, ‘I hope I may, without offence, ask to have no such
mystification played off upon me.’

‘Mama Meagles,’ observed Mrs Gowan, ‘your good man is incomprehensible.’

Her turning to that worthy lady was an artifice to bring her into the
discussion, quarrel with her, and vanquish her. Mr Meagles interposed to
prevent that consummation.

‘Mother,’ said he, ‘you are inexpert, my dear, and it is not a fair
match. Let me beg of you to remain quiet. Come, Mrs Gowan, come! Let
us try to be sensible; let us try to be good-natured; let us try to
be fair. Don’t you pity Henry, and I won’t pity Pet. And don’t be
one-sided, my dear madam; it’s not considerate, it’s not kind. Don’t
let us say that we hope Pet will make Henry happy, or even that we hope
Henry will make Pet happy,’ (Mr Meagles himself did not look happy as he
spoke the words,) ‘but let us hope they will make each other happy.’

‘Yes, sure, and there leave it, father,’ said Mrs Meagles the
kind-hearted and comfortable.

‘Why, mother, no,’ returned Mr Meagles, ‘not exactly there. I can’t
quite leave it there; I must say just half-a-dozen words more. Mrs
Gowan, I hope I am not over-sensitive. I believe I don’t look it.’

‘Indeed you do not,’ said Mrs Gowan, shaking her head and the great
green fan together, for emphasis.

‘Thank you, ma’am; that’s well. Notwithstanding which, I feel a
little--I don’t want to use a strong word--now shall I say hurt?’
asked Mr Meagles at once with frankness and moderation, and with a
conciliatory appeal in his tone.

‘Say what you like,’ answered Mrs Gowan. ‘It is perfectly indifferent to
me.’

‘No, no, don’t say that,’ urged Mr Meagles, ‘because that’s not
responding amiably. I feel a little hurt when I hear references made to
consequences having been foreseen, and to its being too late now, and so
forth.’

‘_Do_ you, Papa Meagles?’ said Mrs Gowan. ‘I am not surprised.’

‘Well, ma’am,’ reasoned Mr Meagles, ‘I was in hopes you would have been
at least surprised, because to hurt me wilfully on so tender a subject
is surely not generous.’

‘I am not responsible,’ said Mrs Gowan, ‘for your conscience, you know.’

Poor Mr Meagles looked aghast with astonishment.

‘If I am unluckily obliged to carry a cap about with me, which is yours
and fits you,’ pursued Mrs Gowan, ‘don’t blame me for its pattern, Papa
Meagles, I beg!’

‘Why, good Lord, ma’am!’ Mr Meagles broke out, ‘that’s as much as to
state--’

‘Now, Papa Meagles, Papa Meagles,’ said Mrs Gowan, who became extremely
deliberate and prepossessing in manner whenever that gentleman became at
all warm, ‘perhaps to prevent confusion, I had better speak for myself
than trouble your kindness to speak for me. It’s as much as to state,
you begin. If you please, I will finish the sentence. It is as much as
to state--not that I wish to press it or even recall it, for it is of no
use now, and my only wish is to make the best of existing
circumstances--that from the first to the last I always objected to this
match of yours, and at a very late period yielded a most unwilling
consent to it.’

‘Mother!’ cried Mr Meagles. ‘Do you hear this! Arthur! Do you hear
this!’

‘The room being of a convenient size,’ said Mrs Gowan, looking about
as she fanned herself, ‘and quite charmingly adapted in all respects to
conversation, I should imagine I am audible in any part of it.’

Some moments passed in silence, before Mr Meagles could hold himself in
his chair with sufficient security to prevent his breaking out of it at
the next word he spoke. At last he said: ‘Ma’am, I am very unwilling to
revive them, but I must remind you what my opinions and my course were,
all along, on that unfortunate subject.’

‘O, my dear sir!’ said Mrs Gowan, smiling and shaking her head with
accusatory intelligence, ‘they were well understood by me, I assure
you.’

‘I never, ma’am,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘knew unhappiness before that time,
I never knew anxiety before that time. It was a time of such distress to
me that--’ That Mr Meagles could really say no more about it, in short,
but passed his handkerchief before his face.

‘I understood the whole affair,’ said Mrs Gowan, composedly looking
over her fan. ‘As you have appealed to Mr Clennam, I may appeal to Mr
Clennam, too. He knows whether I did or not.’

‘I am very unwilling,’ said Clennam, looked to by all parties, ‘to take
any share in this discussion, more especially because I wish to preserve
the best understanding and the clearest relations with Mr Henry Gowan.
I have very strong reasons indeed, for entertaining that wish. Mrs Gowan
attributed certain views of furthering the marriage to my friend here,
in conversation with me before it took place; and I endeavoured to
undeceive her. I represented that I knew him (as I did and do) to be
strenuously opposed to it, both in opinion and action.’

‘You see?’ said Mrs Gowan, turning the palms of her hands towards Mr
Meagles, as if she were Justice herself, representing to him that he had
better confess, for he had not a leg to stand on. ‘You see? Very good!
Now Papa and Mama Meagles both!’ here she rose; ‘allow me to take the
liberty of putting an end to this rather formidable controversy. I will
not say another word upon its merits. I will only say that it is an
additional proof of what one knows from all experience; that this kind
of thing never answers--as my poor fellow himself would say, that it
never pays--in one word, that it never does.’

Mr Meagles asked, What kind of thing?

‘It is in vain,’ said Mrs Gowan, ‘for people to attempt to get on
together who have such extremely different antecedents; who are jumbled
against each other in this accidental, matrimonial sort of way; and who
cannot look at the untoward circumstance which has shaken them together
in the same light. It never does.’

Mr Meagles was beginning, ‘Permit me to say, ma’am--’

‘No, don’t,’ returned Mrs Gowan. ‘Why should you! It is an ascertained
fact. It never does. I will therefore, if you please, go my way, leaving
you to yours. I shall at all times be happy to receive my poor fellow’s
pretty wife, and I shall always make a point of being on the most
affectionate terms with her. But as to these terms, semi-family and
semi-stranger, semi-goring and semi-boring, they form a state of things
quite amusing in its impracticability. I assure you it never does.’

The Dowager here made a smiling obeisance, rather to the room than to
any one in it, and therewith took a final farewell of Papa and Mama
Meagles. Clennam stepped forward to hand her to the Pill-Box which was
at the service of all the Pills in Hampton Court Palace; and she got
into that vehicle with distinguished serenity, and was driven away.

Thenceforth the Dowager, with a light and careless humour, often
recounted to her particular acquaintance how, after a hard trial, she
had found it impossible to know those people who belonged to Henry’s
wife, and who had made that desperate set to catch him. Whether she had
come to the conclusion beforehand, that to get rid of them would give
her favourite pretence a better air, might save her some occasional
inconvenience, and could risk no loss (the pretty creature being fast
married, and her father devoted to her), was best known to herself.
Though this history has its opinion on that point too, and decidedly in
the affirmative.




CHAPTER 9. Appearance and Disappearance


‘Arthur, my dear boy,’ said Mr Meagles, on the evening of the following
day, ‘Mother and I have been talking this over, and we don’t feel
comfortable in remaining as we are. That elegant connection of
ours--that dear lady who was here yesterday--’

‘I understand,’ said Arthur.

‘Even that affable and condescending ornament of society,’ pursued Mr
Meagles, ‘may misrepresent us, we are afraid. We could bear a great
deal, Arthur, for her sake; but we think we would rather not bear that,
if it was all the same to her.’

‘Good,’ said Arthur. ‘Go on.’

‘You see,’ proceeded Mr Meagles ‘it might put us wrong with our
son-in-law, it might even put us wrong with our daughter, and it might
lead to a great deal of domestic trouble. You see, don’t you?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ returned Arthur, ‘there is much reason in what you say.’
He had glanced at Mrs Meagles, who was always on the good and sensible
side; and a petition had shone out of her honest face that he would
support Mr Meagles in his present inclinings.

‘So we are very much disposed, are Mother and I,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘to
pack up bags and baggage and go among the Allongers and Marshongers once
more. I mean, we are very much disposed to be off, strike right through
France into Italy, and see our Pet.’

‘And I don’t think,’ replied Arthur, touched by the motherly
anticipation in the bright face of Mrs Meagles (she must have been very
like her daughter, once), ‘that you could do better. And if you ask me
for my advice, it is that you set off to-morrow.’

‘Is it really, though?’ said Mr Meagles. ‘Mother, this is being backed
in an idea!’

Mother, with a look which thanked Clennam in a manner very agreeable to
him, answered that it was indeed.

‘The fact is, besides, Arthur,’ said Mr Meagles, the old cloud coming
over his face, ‘that my son-in-law is already in debt again, and that I
suppose I must clear him again. It may be as well, even on this account,
that I should step over there, and look him up in a friendly way. Then
again, here’s Mother foolishly anxious (and yet naturally too) about
Pet’s state of health, and that she should not be left to feel lonesome
at the present time. It’s undeniably a long way off, Arthur, and a
strange place for the poor love under all the circumstances. Let her be
as well cared for as any lady in that land, still it is a long way off.
just as Home is Home though it’s never so Homely, why you see,’ said Mr
Meagles, adding a new version to the proverb, ‘Rome is Rome, though it’s
never so Romely.’

‘All perfectly true,’ observed Arthur, ‘and all sufficient reasons for
going.’

‘I am glad you think so; it decides me. Mother, my dear, you may get
ready. We have lost our pleasant interpreter (she spoke three foreign
languages beautifully, Arthur; you have heard her many a time), and you
must pull me through it, Mother, as well as you can. I require a deal
of pulling through, Arthur,’ said Mr Meagles, shaking his head, ‘a deal
of pulling through. I stick at everything beyond a noun-substantive--and
I stick at him, if he’s at all a tight one.’

‘Now I think of it,’ returned Clennam, ‘there’s Cavalletto. He shall
go with you, if you like. I could not afford to lose him, but you will
bring him safe back.’

‘Well! I am much obliged to you, my boy,’ said Mr Meagles, turning it
over, ‘but I think not. No, I think I’ll be pulled through by Mother.
Cavallooro (I stick at his very name to start with, and it sounds like
the chorus to a comic song) is so necessary to you, that I don’t like
the thought of taking him away. More than that, there’s no saying when
we may come home again; and it would never do to take him away for
an indefinite time. The cottage is not what it was. It only holds two
little people less than it ever did, Pet, and her poor unfortunate maid
Tattycoram; but it seems empty now. Once out of it, there’s no knowing
when we may come back to it. No, Arthur, I’ll be pulled through by
Mother.’

They would do best by themselves perhaps, after all, Clennam thought;
therefore did not press his proposal.

‘If you would come down and stay here for a change, when it wouldn’t
trouble you,’ Mr Meagles resumed, ‘I should be glad to think--and so
would Mother too, I know--that you were brightening up the old place
with a bit of life it was used to when it was full, and that the Babies
on the wall there had a kind eye upon them sometimes. You so belong to
the spot, and to them, Arthur, and we should every one of us have been
so happy if it had fallen out--but, let us see--how’s the weather for
travelling now?’ Mr Meagles broke off, cleared his throat, and got up to
look out of the window.

They agreed that the weather was of high promise; and Clennam kept the
talk in that safe direction until it had become easy again, when he
gently diverted it to Henry Gowan and his quick sense and agreeable
qualities when he was delicately dealt with; he likewise dwelt on the
indisputable affection he entertained for his wife. Clennam did not fail
of his effect upon good Mr Meagles, whom these commendations greatly
cheered; and who took Mother to witness that the single and cordial
desire of his heart in reference to their daughter’s husband, was
harmoniously to exchange friendship for friendship, and confidence for
confidence. Within a few hours the cottage furniture began to be wrapped
up for preservation in the family absence--or, as Mr Meagles expressed
it, the house began to put its hair in papers--and within a few days
Father and Mother were gone, Mrs Tickit and Dr Buchan were posted, as of
yore, behind the parlour blind, and Arthur’s solitary feet were rustling
among the dry fallen leaves in the garden walks.

As he had a liking for the spot, he seldom let a week pass without
paying a visit. Sometimes, he went down alone from Saturday to Monday;
sometimes his partner accompanied him; sometimes, he merely strolled for
an hour or two about the house and garden, saw that all was right, and
returned to London again. At all times, and under all circumstances, Mrs
Tickit, with her dark row of curls, and Dr Buchan, sat in the parlour
window, looking out for the family return.

On one of his visits Mrs Tickit received him with the words, ‘I
have something to tell you, Mr Clennam, that will surprise you.’ So
surprising was the something in question, that it actually brought Mrs
Tickit out of the parlour window and produced her in the garden walk,
when Clennam went in at the gate on its being opened for him.

‘What is it, Mrs Tickit?’ said he.

‘Sir,’ returned that faithful housekeeper, having taken him into the
parlour and closed the door; ‘if ever I saw the led away and deluded
child in my life, I saw her identically in the dusk of yesterday
evening.’

‘You don’t mean Tatty--’

‘Coram yes I do!’ quoth Mrs Tickit, clearing the disclosure at a leap.

‘Where?’

‘Mr Clennam,’ returned Mrs Tickit, ‘I was a little heavy in my eyes,
being that I was waiting longer than customary for my cup of tea which
was then preparing by Mary Jane. I was not sleeping, nor what a person
would term correctly, dozing. I was more what a person would strictly
call watching with my eyes closed.’

Without entering upon an inquiry into this curious abnormal condition,
Clennam said, ‘Exactly. Well?’

‘Well, sir,’ proceeded Mrs Tickit, ‘I was thinking of one thing and
thinking of another, just as you yourself might. Just as anybody might.’

‘Precisely so,’ said Clennam. ‘Well?’

‘And when I do think of one thing and do think of another,’ pursued
Mrs Tickit, ‘I hardly need to tell you, Mr Clennam, that I think of the
family. Because, dear me! a person’s thoughts,’ Mrs Tickit said this
with an argumentative and philosophic air, ‘however they may stray, will
go more or less on what is uppermost in their minds. They _will_ do it,
sir, and a person can’t prevent them.’

Arthur subscribed to this discovery with a nod.

‘You find it so yourself, sir, I’ll be bold to say,’ said Mrs Tickit,
‘and we all find it so. It an’t our stations in life that changes us, Mr
Clennam; thoughts is free!--As I was saying, I was thinking of one thing
and thinking of another, and thinking very much of the family. Not of
the family in the present times only, but in the past times too. For
when a person does begin thinking of one thing and thinking of another
in that manner, as it’s getting dark, what I say is, that all times
seem to be present, and a person must get out of that state and consider
before they can say which is which.’

He nodded again; afraid to utter a word, lest it should present any new
opening to Mrs Tickit’s conversational powers.

‘In consequence of which,’ said Mrs Tickit, ‘when I quivered my eyes and
saw her actual form and figure looking in at the gate, I let them close
again without so much as starting, for that actual form and figure came
so pat to the time when it belonged to the house as much as mine or your
own, that I never thought at the moment of its having gone away. But,
sir, when I quivered my eyes again, and saw that it wasn’t there, then
it all flooded upon me with a fright, and I jumped up.’

‘You ran out directly?’ said Clennam.

‘I ran out,’ assented Mrs Tickit, ‘as fast as ever my feet would carry
me; and if you’ll credit it, Mr Clennam, there wasn’t in the whole
shining Heavens, no not so much as a finger of that young woman.’

Passing over the absence from the firmament of this novel constellation,
Arthur inquired of Mrs Tickit if she herself went beyond the gate?

‘Went to and fro, and high and low,’ said Mrs Tickit, ‘and saw no sign
of her!’

He then asked Mrs Tickit how long a space of time she supposed there
might have been between the two sets of ocular quiverings she had
experienced? Mrs Tickit, though minutely circumstantial in her reply,
had no settled opinion between five seconds and ten minutes. She was so
plainly at sea on this part of the case, and had so clearly been
startled out of slumber, that Clennam was much disposed to regard the
appearance as a dream. Without hurting Mrs Tickit’s feelings with that
infidel solution of her mystery, he took it away from the cottage with
him; and probably would have retained it ever afterwards if a
circumstance had not soon happened to change his opinion.

He was passing at nightfall along the Strand, and the lamp-lighter was
going on before him, under whose hand the street-lamps, blurred by the
foggy air, burst out one after another, like so many blazing sunflowers
coming into full-blow all at once,--when a stoppage on the pavement,
caused by a train of coal-waggons toiling up from the wharves at the
river-side, brought him to a stand-still. He had been walking quickly,
and going with some current of thought, and the sudden check given to
both operations caused him to look freshly about him, as people under
such circumstances usually do.

Immediately, he saw in advance--a few people intervening, but still
so near to him that he could have touched them by stretching out
his arm--Tattycoram and a strange man of a remarkable appearance: a
swaggering man, with a high nose, and a black moustache as false in its
colour as his eyes were false in their expression, who wore his heavy
cloak with the air of a foreigner. His dress and general appearance were
those of a man on travel, and he seemed to have very recently joined
the girl. In bending down (being much taller than she was), listening
to whatever she said to him, he looked over his shoulder with the
suspicious glance of one who was not unused to be mistrustful that his
footsteps might be dogged. It was then that Clennam saw his face; as
his eyes lowered on the people behind him in the aggregate, without
particularly resting upon Clennam’s face or any other.

He had scarcely turned his head about again, and it was still bent down,
listening to the girl, when the stoppage ceased, and the obstructed
stream of people flowed on. Still bending his head and listening to the
girl, he went on at her side, and Clennam followed them, resolved to
play this unexpected play out, and see where they went.

He had hardly made the determination (though he was not long about it),
when he was again as suddenly brought up as he had been by the stoppage.
They turned short into the Adelphi,--the girl evidently leading,--and
went straight on, as if they were going to the Terrace which overhangs
the river.

There is always, to this day, a sudden pause in that place to the roar
of the great thoroughfare. The many sounds become so deadened that the
change is like putting cotton in the ears, or having the head thickly
muffled. At that time the contrast was far greater; there being no small
steam-boats on the river, no landing places but slippery wooden stairs
and foot-causeways, no railroad on the opposite bank, no hanging bridge
or fish-market near at hand, no traffic on the nearest bridge of stone,
nothing moving on the stream but watermen’s wherries and coal-lighters.
Long and broad black tiers of the latter, moored fast in the mud as if
they were never to move again, made the shore funereal and silent after
dark; and kept what little water-movement there was, far out towards
mid-stream. At any hour later than sunset, and not least at that hour
when most of the people who have anything to eat at home are going home
to eat it, and when most of those who have nothing have hardly yet slunk
out to beg or steal, it was a deserted place and looked on a deserted
scene.

Such was the hour when Clennam stopped at the corner, observing the girl
and the strange man as they went down the street. The man’s footsteps
were so noisy on the echoing stones that he was unwilling to add the
sound of his own. But when they had passed the turning and were in the
darkness of the dark corner leading to the terrace, he made after them
with such indifferent appearance of being a casual passenger on his way,
as he could assume.

When he rounded the dark corner, they were walking along the terrace
towards a figure which was coming towards them. If he had seen it by
itself, under such conditions of gas-lamp, mist, and distance, he might
not have known it at first sight, but with the figure of the girl to
prompt him, he at once recognised Miss Wade.

He stopped at the corner, seeming to look back expectantly up the street
as if he had made an appointment with some one to meet him there; but he
kept a careful eye on the three. When they came together, the man took
off his hat, and made Miss Wade a bow. The girl appeared to say a few
words as though she presented him, or accounted for his being late, or
early, or what not; and then fell a pace or so behind, by herself. Miss
Wade and the man then began to walk up and down; the man having the
appearance of being extremely courteous and complimentary in manner;
Miss Wade having the appearance of being extremely haughty.

When they came down to the corner and turned, she was saying, ‘If I
pinch myself for it, sir, that is my business. Confine yourself to
yours, and ask me no question.’

‘By Heaven, ma’am!’ he replied, making her another bow. ‘It was my
profound respect for the strength of your character, and my admiration
of your beauty.’

‘I want neither the one nor the other from any one,’ said she, ‘and
certainly not from you of all creatures. Go on with your report.’

‘Am I pardoned?’ he asked, with an air of half abashed gallantry.

‘You are paid,’ she said, ‘and that is all you want.’

Whether the girl hung behind because she was not to hear the business,
or as already knowing enough about it, Clennam could not determine. They
turned and she turned. She looked away at the river, as she walked
with her hands folded before her; and that was all he could make of
her without showing his face. There happened, by good fortune, to be a
lounger really waiting for some one; and he sometimes looked over the
railing at the water, and sometimes came to the dark corner and looked
up the street, rendering Arthur less conspicuous.

When Miss Wade and the man came back again, she was saying, ‘You must
wait until to-morrow.’

‘A thousand pardons?’ he returned. ‘My faith! Then it’s not convenient
to-night?’

‘No. I tell you I must get it before I can give it to you.’

She stopped in the roadway, as if to put an end to the conference. He of
course stopped too. And the girl stopped.

‘It’s a little inconvenient,’ said the man. ‘A little. But, Holy Blue!
that’s nothing in such a service. I am without money to-night, by
chance. I have a good banker in this city, but I would not wish to draw
upon the house until the time when I shall draw for a round sum.’

‘Harriet,’ said Miss Wade, ‘arrange with him--this gentleman here--for
sending him some money to-morrow.’ She said it with a slur of the word
gentleman which was more contemptuous than any emphasis, and walked
slowly on.

The man bent his head again, and the girl spoke to him as they both
followed her. Clennam ventured to look at the girl as they moved away.
He could note that her rich black eyes were fastened upon the man with a
scrutinising expression, and that she kept at a little distance from
him, as they walked side by side to the further end of the terrace.

A loud and altered clank upon the pavement warned him, before he could
discern what was passing there, that the man was coming back alone.
Clennam lounged into the road, towards the railing; and the man passed
at a quick swing, with the end of his cloak thrown over his shoulder,
singing a scrap of a French song.

The whole vista had no one in it now but himself. The lounger had
lounged out of view, and Miss Wade and Tattycoram were gone. More than
ever bent on seeing what became of them, and on having some information
to give his good friend, Mr Meagles, he went out at the further end of
the terrace, looking cautiously about him. He rightly judged that, at
first at all events, they would go in a contrary direction from their
late companion. He soon saw them in a neighbouring bye-street, which was
not a thoroughfare, evidently allowing time for the man to get well
out of their way. They walked leisurely arm-in-arm down one side of the
street, and returned on the opposite side. When they came back to the
street-corner, they changed their pace for the pace of people with an
object and a distance before them, and walked steadily away. Clennam, no
less steadily, kept them in sight.

They crossed the Strand, and passed through Covent Garden (under the
windows of his old lodging where dear Little Dorrit had come that
night), and slanted away north-east, until they passed the great
building whence Tattycoram derived her name, and turned into the Gray’s
Inn Road. Clennam was quite at home here, in right of Flora, not to
mention the Patriarch and Pancks, and kept them in view with ease. He
was beginning to wonder where they might be going next, when that wonder
was lost in the greater wonder with which he saw them turn into the
Patriarchal street. That wonder was in its turn swallowed up on the
greater wonder with which he saw them stop at the Patriarchal door. A
low double knock at the bright brass knocker, a gleam of light into the
road from the opened door, a brief pause for inquiry and answer and the
door was shut, and they were housed.

After looking at the surrounding objects for assurance that he was
not in an odd dream, and after pacing a little while before the house,
Arthur knocked at the door. It was opened by the usual maid-servant,
and she showed him up at once, with her usual alacrity, to Flora’s
sitting-room.

There was no one with Flora but Mr F.’s Aunt, which respectable
gentlewoman, basking in a balmy atmosphere of tea and toast, was
ensconced in an easy-chair by the fireside, with a little table at her
elbow, and a clean white handkerchief spread over her lap on which
two pieces of toast at that moment awaited consumption. Bending over
a steaming vessel of tea, and looking through the steam, and breathing
forth the steam, like a malignant Chinese enchantress engaged in the
performance of unholy rites, Mr F.’s Aunt put down her great teacup and
exclaimed, ‘Drat him, if he an’t come back again!’

It would seem from the foregoing exclamation that this uncompromising
relative of the lamented Mr F., measuring time by the acuteness of her
sensations and not by the clock, supposed Clennam to have lately gone
away; whereas at least a quarter of a year had elapsed since he had had
the temerity to present himself before her.

‘My goodness Arthur!’ cried Flora, rising to give him a cordial
reception, ‘Doyce and Clennam what a start and a surprise for though not
far from the machinery and foundry business and surely might be taken
sometimes if at no other time about mid-day when a glass of sherry and a
humble sandwich of whatever cold meat in the larder might not come amiss
nor taste the worse for being friendly for you know you buy it somewhere
and wherever bought a profit must be made or they would never keep the
place it stands to reason without a motive still never seen and learnt
now not to be expected, for as Mr F. himself said if seeing is believing
not seeing is believing too and when you don’t see you may fully believe
you’re not remembered not that I expect you Arthur Doyce and Clennam to
remember me why should I for the days are gone but bring another teacup
here directly and tell her fresh toast and pray sit near the fire.’

Arthur was in the greatest anxiety to explain the object of his
visit; but was put off for the moment, in spite of himself, by what he
understood of the reproachful purport of these words, and by the genuine
pleasure she testified in seeing him.

‘And now pray tell me something all you know,’ said Flora, drawing her
chair near to his, ‘about the good dear quiet little thing and all the
changes of her fortunes carriage people now no doubt and horses without
number most romantic, a coat of arms of course and wild beasts on their
hind legs showing it as if it was a copy they had done with mouths from
ear to ear good gracious, and has she her health which is the first
consideration after all for what is wealth without it Mr F. himself so
often saying when his twinges came that sixpence a day and find yourself
and no gout so much preferable, not that he could have lived on anything
like it being the last man or that the previous little thing though far
too familiar an expression now had any tendency of that sort much too
slight and small but looked so fragile bless her?’

Mr F.’s Aunt, who had eaten a piece of toast down to the crust, here
solemnly handed the crust to Flora, who ate it for her as a matter of
business. Mr F.’s Aunt then moistened her ten fingers in slow succession
at her lips, and wiped them in exactly the same order on the white
handkerchief; then took the other piece of toast, and fell to work
upon it. While pursuing this routine, she looked at Clennam with an
expression of such intense severity that he felt obliged to look at her
in return, against his personal inclinations.

‘She is in Italy, with all her family, Flora,’ he said, when the dreaded
lady was occupied again.

‘In Italy is she really?’ said Flora, ‘with the grapes growing
everywhere and lava necklaces and bracelets too that land of poetry with
burning mountains picturesque beyond belief though if the organ-boys
come away from the neighbourhood not to be scorched nobody can wonder
being so young and bringing their white mice with them most humane, and
is she really in that favoured land with nothing but blue about her and
dying gladiators and Belvederes though Mr F. himself did not believe
for his objection when in spirits was that the images could not be true
there being no medium between expensive quantities of linen badly got
up and all in creases and none whatever, which certainly does not seem
probable though perhaps in consequence of the extremes of rich and poor
which may account for it.’

Arthur tried to edge a word in, but Flora hurried on again.

‘Venice Preserved too,’ said she, ‘I think you have been there is it
well or ill preserved for people differ so and Maccaroni if they really
eat it like the conjurors why not cut it shorter, you are acquainted
Arthur--dear Doyce and Clennam at least not dear and most assuredly
not Doyce for I have not the pleasure but pray excuse me--acquainted I
believe with Mantua what _has_ it got to do with Mantua-making for I never
have been able to conceive?’

‘I believe there is no connection, Flora, between the two,’ Arthur was
beginning, when she caught him up again.

‘Upon your word no isn’t there I never did but that’s like me I run away
with an idea and having none to spare I keep it, alas there was a time
dear Arthur that is to say decidedly not dear nor Arthur neither but you
understand me when one bright idea gilded the what’s-his-name horizon of
et cetera but it is darkly clouded now and all is over.’

Arthur’s increasing wish to speak of something very different was by
this time so plainly written on his face, that Flora stopped in a tender
look, and asked him what it was?

‘I have the greatest desire, Flora, to speak to some one who is now in
this house--with Mr Casby no doubt. Some one whom I saw come in, and
who, in a misguided and deplorable way, has deserted the house of a
friend of mine.’

‘Papa sees so many and such odd people,’ said Flora, rising, ‘that I
shouldn’t venture to go down for any one but you Arthur but for you I
would willingly go down in a diving-bell much more a dining-room and
will come back directly if you’ll mind and at the same time not mind Mr
F.’s Aunt while I’m gone.’

With those words and a parting glance, Flora bustled out, leaving
Clennam under dreadful apprehension of this terrible charge.

The first variation which manifested itself in Mr F.’s Aunt’s demeanour
when she had finished her piece of toast, was a loud and prolonged
sniff. Finding it impossible to avoid construing this demonstration
into a defiance of himself, its gloomy significance being unmistakable,
Clennam looked plaintively at the excellent though prejudiced lady
from whom it emanated, in the hope that she might be disarmed by a meek
submission.

‘None of your eyes at me,’ said Mr F.’s Aunt, shivering with hostility.
‘Take that.’

‘That’ was the crust of the piece of toast. Clennam accepted the boon
with a look of gratitude, and held it in his hand under the pressure
of a little embarrassment, which was not relieved when Mr F.’s Aunt,
elevating her voice into a cry of considerable power, exclaimed, ‘He
has a proud stomach, this chap! He’s too proud a chap to eat it!’ and,
coming out of her chair, shook her venerable fist so very close to his
nose as to tickle the surface. But for the timely return of Flora, to
find him in this difficult situation, further consequences might
have ensued. Flora, without the least discomposure or surprise, but
congratulating the old lady in an approving manner on being ‘very lively
to-night’, handed her back to her chair.

‘He has a proud stomach, this chap,’ said Mr F.’s relation, on being
reseated. ‘Give him a meal of chaff!’

‘Oh! I don’t think he would like that, aunt,’ returned Flora.

‘Give him a meal of chaff, I tell you,’ said Mr F.’s Aunt, glaring round
Flora on her enemy. ‘It’s the only thing for a proud stomach. Let him
eat up every morsel. Drat him, give him a meal of chaff!’

Under a general pretence of helping him to this refreshment, Flora got
him out on the staircase; Mr F.’s Aunt even then constantly reiterating,
with inexpressible bitterness, that he was ‘a chap,’ and had a ‘proud
stomach,’ and over and over again insisting on that equine provision
being made for him which she had already so strongly prescribed.

‘Such an inconvenient staircase and so many corner-stairs Arthur,’
whispered Flora, ‘would you object to putting your arm round me under my
pelerine?’

With a sense of going down-stairs in a highly-ridiculous manner, Clennam
descended in the required attitude, and only released his fair burden at
the dining-room door; indeed, even there she was rather difficult to
be got rid of, remaining in his embrace to murmur, ‘Arthur, for mercy’s
sake, don’t breathe it to papa!’

She accompanied Arthur into the room, where the Patriarch sat alone,
with his list shoes on the fender, twirling his thumbs as if he had
never left off. The youthful Patriarch, aged ten, looked out of his
picture-frame above him with no calmer air than he. Both smooth heads
were alike beaming, blundering, and bumpy.

‘Mr Clennam, I am glad to see you. I hope you are well, sir, I hope you
are well. Please to sit down, please to sit down.’

‘I had hoped, sir,’ said Clennam, doing so, and looking round with a
face of blank disappointment, ‘not to find you alone.’

‘Ah, indeed?’ said the Patriarch, sweetly. ‘Ah, indeed?’

‘I told you so you know papa,’ cried Flora.

‘Ah, to be sure!’ returned the Patriarch. ‘Yes, just so. Ah, to be
sure!’

‘Pray, sir,’ demanded Clennam, anxiously, ‘is Miss Wade gone?’

‘Miss--? Oh, you call her Wade,’ returned Mr Casby. ‘Highly proper.’

Arthur quickly returned, ‘What do you call her?’

‘Wade,’ said Mr Casby. ‘Oh, always Wade.’

After looking at the philanthropic visage and the long silky white hair
for a few seconds, during which Mr Casby twirled his thumbs, and smiled
at the fire as if he were benevolently wishing it to burn him that he
might forgive it, Arthur began:

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Casby--’

‘Not so, not so,’ said the Patriarch, ‘not so.’

‘--But, Miss Wade had an attendant with her--a young woman brought up
by friends of mine, over whom her influence is not considered very
salutary, and to whom I should be glad to have the opportunity of giving
the assurance that she has not yet forfeited the interest of those
protectors.’

‘Really, really?’ returned the Patriarch.

‘Will you therefore be so good as to give me the address of Miss Wade?’

‘Dear, dear, dear!’ said the Patriarch, ‘how very unfortunate! If you
had only sent in to me when they were here! I observed the young woman,
Mr Clennam. A fine full-coloured young woman, Mr Clennam, with very dark
hair and very dark eyes. If I mistake not, if I mistake not?’

Arthur assented, and said once more with new expression, ‘If you would
be so good as to give me the address.’

‘Dear, dear, dear!’ exclaimed the Patriarch in sweet regret. ‘Tut, tut,
tut! what a pity, what a pity! I have no address, sir. Miss Wade mostly
lives abroad, Mr Clennam. She has done so for some years, and she is (if
I may say so of a fellow-creature and a lady) fitful and uncertain to a
fault, Mr Clennam. I may not see her again for a long, long time. I may
never see her again. What a pity, what a pity!’

Clennam saw now, that he had as much hope of getting assistance out of
the Portrait as out of the Patriarch; but he said nevertheless:

‘Mr Casby, could you, for the satisfaction of the friends I have
mentioned, and under any obligation of secrecy that you may consider it
your duty to impose, give me any information at all touching Miss Wade?
I have seen her abroad, and I have seen her at home, but I know nothing
of her. Could you give me any account of her whatever?’

‘None,’ returned the Patriarch, shaking his big head with his utmost
benevolence. ‘None at all. Dear, dear, dear! What a real pity that
she stayed so short a time, and you delayed! As confidential agency
business, agency business, I have occasionally paid this lady money; but
what satisfaction is it to you, sir, to know that?’

‘Truly, none at all,’ said Clennam.

‘Truly,’ assented the Patriarch, with a shining face as he
philanthropically smiled at the fire, ‘none at all, sir. You hit the
wise answer, Mr Clennam. Truly, none at all, sir.’

His turning of his smooth thumbs over one another as he sat there, was
so typical to Clennam of the way in which he would make the subject
revolve if it were pursued, never showing any new part of it nor
allowing it to make the smallest advance, that it did much to help to
convince him of his labour having been in vain. He might have taken any
time to think about it, for Mr Casby, well accustomed to get on anywhere
by leaving everything to his bumps and his white hair, knew his strength
to lie in silence. So there Casby sat, twirling and twirling, and making
his polished head and forehead look largely benevolent in every knob.

With this spectacle before him, Arthur had risen to go, when from the
inner Dock where the good ship Pancks was hove down when out in no
cruising ground, the noise was heard of that steamer labouring towards
him. It struck Arthur that the noise began demonstratively far off, as
though Mr Pancks sought to impress on any one who might happen to think
about it, that he was working on from out of hearing.

Mr Pancks and he shook hands, and the former brought his employer a
letter or two to sign. Mr Pancks in shaking hands merely scratched his
eyebrow with his left forefinger and snorted once, but Clennam, who
understood him better now than of old, comprehended that he had almost
done for the evening and wished to say a word to him outside. Therefore,
when he had taken his leave of Mr Casby, and (which was a more difficult
process) of Flora, he sauntered in the neighbourhood on Mr Pancks’s line
of road.

He had waited but a short time when Mr Pancks appeared. Mr Pancks
shaking hands again with another expressive snort, and taking off his
hat to put his hair up, Arthur thought he received his cue to speak to
him as one who knew pretty well what had just now passed. Therefore he
said, without any preface:

‘I suppose they were really gone, Pancks?’

‘Yes,’ replied Pancks. ‘They were really gone.’

‘Does he know where to find that lady?’

‘Can’t say. I should think so.’

Mr Pancks did not? No, Mr Pancks did not. Did Mr Pancks know anything
about her?

‘I expect,’ rejoined that worthy, ‘I know as much about her as she knows
about herself. She is somebody’s child--anybody’s, nobody’s. Put her in
a room in London here with any six people old enough to be her parents,
and her parents may be there for anything she knows. They may be in any
house she sees, they may be in any churchyard she passes, she may run
against ‘em in any street, she may make chance acquaintance of ‘em at
any time; and never know it. She knows nothing about ‘em. She knows
nothing about any relative whatever. Never did. Never will.’

‘Mr Casby could enlighten her, perhaps?’

‘May be,’ said Pancks. ‘I expect so, but don’t know. He has long had
money (not overmuch as I make out) in trust to dole out to her when
she can’t do without it. Sometimes she’s proud and won’t touch it for
a length of time; sometimes she’s so poor that she must have it. She
writhes under her life. A woman more angry, passionate, reckless,
and revengeful never lived. She came for money to-night. Said she had
peculiar occasion for it.’

‘I think,’ observed Clennam musing, ‘I by chance know what occasion--I
mean into whose pocket the money is to go.’

‘Indeed?’ said Pancks. ‘If it’s a compact, I recommend that party to be
exact in it. I wouldn’t trust myself to that woman, young and handsome
as she is, if I had wronged her; no, not for twice my proprietor’s
money! Unless,’ Pancks added as a saving clause, ‘I had a lingering
illness on me, and wanted to get it over.’

Arthur, hurriedly reviewing his own observation of her, found it to
tally pretty nearly with Mr Pancks’s view.

‘The wonder is to me,’ pursued Pancks, ‘that she has never done for my
proprietor, as the only person connected with her story she can lay
hold of. Mentioning that, I may tell you, between ourselves, that I am
sometimes tempted to do for him myself.’

Arthur started and said, ‘Dear me, Pancks, don’t say that!’

‘Understand me,’ said Pancks, extending five cropped coaly finger-nails
on Arthur’s arm; ‘I don’t mean, cut his throat. But by all that’s
precious, if he goes too far, I’ll cut his hair!’

Having exhibited himself in the new light of enunciating this tremendous
threat, Mr Pancks, with a countenance of grave import, snorted several
times and steamed away.




CHAPTER 10. The Dreams of Mrs Flintwinch thicken


The shady waiting-rooms of the Circumlocution Office, where he passed a
good deal of time in company with various troublesome Convicts who were
under sentence to be broken alive on that wheel, had afforded Arthur
Clennam ample leisure, in three or four successive days, to exhaust the
subject of his late glimpse of Miss Wade and Tattycoram. He had been
able to make no more of it and no less of it, and in this unsatisfactory
condition he was fain to leave it.

During this space he had not been to his mother’s dismal old house.
One of his customary evenings for repairing thither now coming round,
he left his dwelling and his partner at nearly nine o’clock, and slowly
walked in the direction of that grim home of his youth.

It always affected his imagination as wrathful, mysterious, and sad;
and his imagination was sufficiently impressible to see the whole
neighbourhood under some tinge of its dark shadow. As he went along,
upon a dreary night, the dim streets by which he went, seemed all
depositories of oppressive secrets. The deserted counting-houses, with
their secrets of books and papers locked up in chests and safes; the
banking-houses, with their secrets of strong rooms and wells, the
keys of which were in a very few secret pockets and a very few secret
breasts; the secrets of all the dispersed grinders in the vast mill,
among whom there were doubtless plunderers, forgers, and trust-betrayers
of many sorts, whom the light of any day that dawned might reveal; he
could have fancied that these things, in hiding, imparted a heaviness
to the air. The shadow thickening and thickening as he approached its
source, he thought of the secrets of the lonely church-vaults, where the
people who had hoarded and secreted in iron coffers were in their turn
similarly hoarded, not yet at rest from doing harm; and then of the
secrets of the river, as it rolled its turbid tide between two frowning
wildernesses of secrets, extending, thick and dense, for many miles, and
warding off the free air and the free country swept by winds and wings
of birds.

The shadow still darkening as he drew near the house, the melancholy
room which his father had once occupied, haunted by the appealing face
he had himself seen fade away with him when there was no other watcher
by the bed, arose before his mind. Its close air was secret. The gloom,
and must, and dust of the whole tenement, were secret. At the heart of
it his mother presided, inflexible of face, indomitable of will, firmly
holding all the secrets of her own and his father’s life, and austerely
opposing herself, front to front, to the great final secret of all life.

He had turned into the narrow and steep street from which the court of
enclosure wherein the house stood opened, when another footstep turned
into it behind him, and so close upon his own that he was jostled to the
wall. As his mind was teeming with these thoughts, the encounter took
him altogether unprepared, so that the other passenger had had time to
say, boisterously, ‘Pardon! Not my fault!’ and to pass on before the
instant had elapsed which was requisite to his recovery of the realities
about him.

When that moment had flashed away, he saw that the man striding on
before him was the man who had been so much in his mind during the last
few days. It was no casual resemblance, helped out by the force of
the impression the man made upon him. It was the man; the man he had
followed in company with the girl, and whom he had overheard talking to
Miss Wade.

The street was a sharp descent and was crooked too, and the man (who
although not drunk had the air of being flushed with some strong drink)
went down it so fast that Clennam lost him as he looked at him. With
no defined intention of following him, but with an impulse to keep the
figure in view a little longer, Clennam quickened his pace to pass the
twist in the street which hid him from his sight. On turning it, he saw
the man no more.

Standing now, close to the gateway of his mother’s house, he looked
down the street: but it was empty. There was no projecting shadow large
enough to obscure the man; there was no turning near that he could have
taken; nor had there been any audible sound of the opening and closing
of a door. Nevertheless, he concluded that the man must have had a key
in his hand, and must have opened one of the many house-doors and gone
in.

Ruminating on this strange chance and strange glimpse, he turned into
the court-yard. As he looked, by mere habit, towards the feebly lighted
windows of his mother’s room, his eyes encountered the figure he had
just lost, standing against the iron railings of the little waste
enclosure looking up at those windows and laughing to himself. Some of
the many vagrant cats who were always prowling about there by night,
and who had taken fright at him, appeared to have stopped when he had
stopped, and were looking at him with eyes by no means unlike his own
from tops of walls and porches, and other safe points of pause. He had
only halted for a moment to entertain himself thus; he immediately went
forward, throwing the end of his cloak off his shoulder as he went,
ascended the unevenly sunken steps, and knocked a sounding knock at the
door.

Clennam’s surprise was not so absorbing but that he took his resolution
without any incertitude. He went up to the door too, and ascended the
steps too. His friend looked at him with a braggart air, and sang to
himself.


     ‘Who passes by this road so late?
          Compagnon de la Majolaine;
    Who passes by this road so late?
          Always gay!’


After which he knocked again.

‘You are impatient, sir,’ said Arthur.

‘I am, sir. Death of my life, sir,’ returned the stranger, ‘it’s my
character to be impatient!’

The sound of Mistress Affery cautiously chaining the door before she
opened it, caused them both to look that way. Affery opened it a very
little, with a flaring candle in her hands and asked who was that, at
that time of night, with that knock! ‘Why, Arthur!’ she added with
astonishment, seeing him first. ‘Not you sure? Ah, Lord save us! No,’
she cried out, seeing the other. ‘Him again!’

‘It’s true! Him again, dear Mrs Flintwinch,’ cried the stranger. ‘Open
the door, and let me take my dear friend Jeremiah to my arms! Open the
door, and let me hasten myself to embrace my Flintwinch!’

‘He’s not at home,’ cried Affery.

‘Fetch him!’ cried the stranger. ‘Fetch my Flintwinch! Tell him that it
is his old Blandois, who comes from arriving in England; tell him that
it is his little boy who is here, his cabbage, his well-beloved! Open
the door, beautiful Mrs Flintwinch, and in the meantime let me to pass
upstairs, to present my compliments--homage of Blandois--to my lady! My
lady lives always? It is well. Open then!’

To Arthur’s increased surprise, Mistress Affery, stretching her eyes
wide at himself, as if in warning that this was not a gentleman for
him to interfere with, drew back the chain, and opened the door. The
stranger, without ceremony, walked into the hall, leaving Arthur to
follow him.

‘Despatch then! Achieve then! Bring my Flintwinch! Announce me to my
lady!’ cried the stranger, clanking about the stone floor.

‘Pray tell me, Affery,’ said Arthur aloud and sternly, as he surveyed
him from head to foot with indignation; ‘who is this gentleman?’

‘Pray tell me, Affery,’ the stranger repeated in his turn, ‘who--ha, ha,
ha!--who is this gentleman?’

The voice of Mrs Clennam opportunely called from her chamber above,
‘Affery, let them both come up. Arthur, come straight to me!’

‘Arthur?’ exclaimed Blandois, taking off his hat at arm’s length,
and bringing his heels together from a great stride in making him a
flourishing bow. ‘The son of my lady? I am the all-devoted of the son of
my lady!’

Arthur looked at him again in no more flattering manner than before,
and, turning on his heel without acknowledgment, went up-stairs. The
visitor followed him up-stairs. Mistress Affery took the key from behind
the door, and deftly slipped out to fetch her lord.

A bystander, informed of the previous appearance of Monsieur Blandois
in that room, would have observed a difference in Mrs Clennam’s present
reception of him. Her face was not one to betray it; and her suppressed
manner, and her set voice, were equally under her control. It wholly
consisted in her never taking her eyes off his face from the moment of
his entrance, and in her twice or thrice, when he was becoming noisy,
swaying herself a very little forward in the chair in which she sat
upright, with her hands immovable upon its elbows; as if she gave him
the assurance that he should be presently heard at any length he would.
Arthur did not fail to observe this; though the difference between the
present occasion and the former was not within his power of observation.

‘Madame,’ said Blandois, ‘do me the honour to present me to Monsieur,
your son. It appears to me, madame, that Monsieur, your son, is disposed
to complain of me. He is not polite.’

‘Sir,’ said Arthur, striking in expeditiously, ‘whoever you are, and
however you come to be here, if I were the master of this house I would
lose no time in placing you on the outside of it.’

‘But you are not,’ said his mother, without looking at him.
‘Unfortunately for the gratification of your unreasonable temper, you
are not the master, Arthur.’

‘I make no claim to be, mother. If I object to this person’s manner of
conducting himself here, and object to it so much, that if I had any
authority here I certainly would not suffer him to remain a minute, I
object on your account.’

‘In the case of objection being necessary,’ she returned, ‘I could
object for myself. And of course I should.’

The subject of their dispute, who had seated himself, laughed aloud, and
rapped his legs with his hand.

‘You have no right,’ said Mrs Clennam, always intent on Blandois,
however directly she addressed her son, ‘to speak to the prejudice of
any gentleman (least of all a gentleman from another country), because
he does not conform to your standard, or square his behaviour by your
rules. It is possible that the gentleman may, on similar grounds, object
to you.’

‘I hope so,’ returned Arthur.

‘The gentleman,’ pursued Mrs Clennam, ‘on a former occasion brought
a letter of recommendation to us from highly esteemed and responsible
correspondents. I am perfectly unacquainted with the gentleman’s object
in coming here at present. I am entirely ignorant of it, and cannot be
supposed likely to be able to form the remotest guess at its nature;’
her habitual frown became stronger, as she very slowly and weightily
emphasised those words; ‘but, when the gentleman proceeds to explain
his object, as I shall beg him to have the goodness to do to myself and
Flintwinch, when Flintwinch returns, it will prove, no doubt, to be one
more or less in the usual way of our business, which it will be both our
business and our pleasure to advance. It can be nothing else.’

‘We shall see, madame!’ said the man of business.

‘We shall see,’ she assented. ‘The gentleman is acquainted with
Flintwinch; and when the gentleman was in London last, I remember
to have heard that he and Flintwinch had some entertainment or
good-fellowship together. I am not in the way of knowing much that
passes outside this room, and the jingle of little worldly things beyond
it does not much interest me; but I remember to have heard that.’

‘Right, madame. It is true.’ He laughed again, and whistled the burden
of the tune he had sung at the door.

‘Therefore, Arthur,’ said his mother, ‘the gentleman comes here as an
acquaintance, and no stranger; and it is much to be regretted that your
unreasonable temper should have found offence in him. I regret it. I say
so to the gentleman. You will not say so, I know; therefore I say it for
myself and Flintwinch, since with us two the gentleman’s business lies.’

The key of the door below was now heard in the lock, and the door was
heard to open and close. In due sequence Mr Flintwinch appeared; on
whose entrance the visitor rose from his chair, laughing loud, and
folded him in a close embrace.

‘How goes it, my cherished friend!’ said he. ‘How goes the world, my
Flintwinch? Rose-coloured? So much the better, so much the better! Ah,
but you look charming! Ah, but you look young and fresh as the flowers
of Spring! Ah, good little boy! Brave child, brave child!’

While heaping these compliments on Mr Flintwinch, he rolled him about
with a hand on each of his shoulders, until the staggerings of that
gentleman, who under the circumstances was dryer and more twisted than
ever, were like those of a teetotum nearly spent.

‘I had a presentiment, last time, that we should be better and more
intimately acquainted. Is it coming on you, Flintwinch? Is it yet coming
on?’

‘Why, no, sir,’ retorted Mr Flintwinch. ‘Not unusually. Hadn’t you
better be seated? You have been calling for some more of that port, sir,
I guess?’

‘Ah, Little joker! Little pig!’ cried the visitor. ‘Ha ha ha ha!’ And
throwing Mr Flintwinch away, as a closing piece of raillery, he sat down
again.

The amazement, suspicion, resentment, and shame, with which Arthur
looked on at all this, struck him dumb. Mr Flintwinch, who had spun
backward some two or three yards under the impetus last given to him,
brought himself up with a face completely unchanged in its stolidity
except as it was affected by shortness of breath, and looked hard at
Arthur. Not a whit less reticent and wooden was Mr Flintwinch outwardly,
than in the usual course of things: the only perceptible difference in
him being that the knot of cravat which was generally under his ear,
had worked round to the back of his head: where it formed an ornamental
appendage not unlike a bagwig, and gave him something of a courtly
appearance.

As Mrs Clennam never removed her eyes from Blandois (on whom they had
some effect, as a steady look has on a lower sort of dog), so Jeremiah
never removed his from Arthur. It was as if they had tacitly agreed to
take their different provinces. Thus, in the ensuing silence, Jeremiah
stood scraping his chin and looking at Arthur as though he were trying
to screw his thoughts out of him with an instrument.

After a little, the visitor, as if he felt the silence irksome, rose,
and impatiently put himself with his back to the sacred fire which had
burned through so many years. Thereupon Mrs Clennam said, moving one of
her hands for the first time, and moving it very slightly with an action
of dismissal:

‘Please to leave us to our business, Arthur.’

‘Mother, I do so with reluctance.’

‘Never mind with what,’ she returned, ‘or with what not. Please to leave
us. Come back at any other time when you may consider it a duty to bury
half an hour wearily here. Good night.’

She held up her muffled fingers that he might touch them with his,
according to their usual custom, and he stood over her wheeled chair to
touch her face with his lips. He thought, then, that her cheek was
more strained than usual, and that it was colder. As he followed the
direction of her eyes, in rising again, towards Mr Flintwinch’s good
friend, Mr Blandois, Mr Blandois snapped his finger and thumb with one
loud contemptuous snap.

‘I leave your--your business acquaintance in my mother’s room, Mr
Flintwinch,’ said Clennam, ‘with a great deal of surprise and a great
deal of unwillingness.’

The person referred to snapped his finger and thumb again.

‘Good night, mother.’

‘Good night.’

‘I had a friend once, my good comrade Flintwinch,’ said Blandois,
standing astride before the fire, and so evidently saying it to arrest
Clennam’s retreating steps, that he lingered near the door; ‘I had a
friend once, who had heard so much of the dark side of this city and
its ways, that he wouldn’t have confided himself alone by night with two
people who had an interest in getting him under the ground--my faith!
not even in a respectable house like this--unless he was bodily too
strong for them. Bah! What a poltroon, my Flintwinch! Eh?’

‘A cur, sir.’

‘Agreed! A cur. But he wouldn’t have done it, my Flintwinch, unless he
had known them to have the will to silence him, without the power. He
wouldn’t have drunk from a glass of water under such circumstances--not
even in a respectable house like this, my Flintwinch--unless he had seen
one of them drink first, and swallow too!’

Disdaining to speak, and indeed not very well able, for he was
half-choking, Clennam only glanced at the visitor as he passed out.
The visitor saluted him with another parting snap, and his nose came
down over his moustache and his moustache went up under his nose, in an
ominous and ugly smile.

‘For Heaven’s sake, Affery,’ whispered Clennam, as she opened the door
for him in the dark hall, and he groped his way to the sight of the
night-sky, ‘what is going on here?’

Her own appearance was sufficiently ghastly, standing in the dark
with her apron thrown over her head, and speaking behind it in a low,
deadened voice.

‘Don’t ask me anything, Arthur. I’ve been in a dream for ever so long.
Go away!’

He went out, and she shut the door upon him. He looked up at the windows
of his mother’s room, and the dim light, deadened by the yellow blinds,
seemed to say a response after Affery, and to mutter, ‘Don’t ask me
anything. Go away!’




CHAPTER 11. A Letter from Little Dorrit


Dear Mr Clennam,

As I said in my last that it was best for nobody to write to me, and
as my sending you another little letter can therefore give you no other
trouble than the trouble of reading it (perhaps you may not find leisure
for even that, though I hope you will some day), I am now going to
devote an hour to writing to you again. This time, I write from Rome.

We left Venice before Mr and Mrs Gowan did, but they were not so long
upon the road as we were, and did not travel by the same way, and so
when we arrived we found them in a lodging here, in a place called the
Via Gregoriana. I dare say you know it.

Now I am going to tell you all I can about them, because I know that is
what you most want to hear. Theirs is not a very comfortable lodging,
but perhaps I thought it less so when I first saw it than you would have
done, because you have been in many different countries and have
seen many different customs. Of course it is a far, far better
place--millions of times--than any I have ever been used to until
lately; and I fancy I don’t look at it with my own eyes, but with hers.
For it would be easy to see that she has always been brought up in a
tender and happy home, even if she had not told me so with great love
for it.

Well, it is a rather bare lodging up a rather dark common staircase, and
it is nearly all a large dull room, where Mr Gowan paints. The windows
are blocked up where any one could look out, and the walls have been
all drawn over with chalk and charcoal by others who have lived there
before--oh,--I should think, for years! There is a curtain more
dust-coloured than red, which divides it, and the part behind the
curtain makes the private sitting-room. When I first saw her there she
was alone, and her work had fallen out of her hand, and she was looking
up at the sky shining through the tops of the windows. Pray do not be
uneasy when I tell you, but it was not quite so airy, nor so bright, nor
so cheerful, nor so happy and youthful altogether as I should have liked
it to be.

On account of Mr Gowan’s painting Papa’s picture (which I am not quite
convinced I should have known from the likeness if I had not seen him
doing it), I have had more opportunities of being with her since then
than I might have had without this fortunate chance. She is very much
alone. Very much alone indeed.

Shall I tell you about the second time I saw her? I went one day, when
it happened that I could run round by myself, at four or five o’clock
in the afternoon. She was then dining alone, and her solitary dinner had
been brought in from somewhere, over a kind of brazier with a fire in
it, and she had no company or prospect of company, that I could see,
but the old man who had brought it. He was telling her a long story (of
robbers outside the walls being taken up by a stone statue of a Saint),
to entertain her--as he said to me when I came out, ‘because he had a
daughter of his own, though she was not so pretty.’

I ought now to mention Mr Gowan, before I say what little more I have to
say about her. He must admire her beauty, and he must be proud of her,
for everybody praises it, and he must be fond of her, and I do not
doubt that he is--but in his way. You know his way, and if it appears
as careless and discontented in your eyes as it does in mine, I am not
wrong in thinking that it might be better suited to her. If it does not
seem so to you, I am quite sure I am wholly mistaken; for your unchanged
poor child confides in your knowledge and goodness more than she could
ever tell you if she was to try. But don’t be frightened, I am not going
to try.

Owing (as I think, if you think so too) to Mr Gowan’s unsettled
and dissatisfied way, he applies himself to his profession very little.
He does nothing steadily or patiently; but equally takes things up and
throws them down, and does them, or leaves them undone, without caring
about them. When I have heard him talking to Papa during the sittings
for the picture, I have sat wondering whether it could be that he has no
belief in anybody else, because he has no belief in himself. Is it so?
I wonder what you will say when you come to this! I know how you will
look, and I can almost hear the voice in which you would tell me on the
Iron Bridge.

Mr Gowan goes out a good deal among what is considered the best company
here--though he does not look as if he enjoyed it or liked it when he is
with it--and she sometimes accompanies him, but lately she has gone out
very little. I think I have noticed that they have an inconsistent way
of speaking about her, as if she had made some great self-interested
success in marrying Mr Gowan, though, at the same time, the very same
people, would not have dreamed of taking him for themselves or their
daughters. Then he goes into the country besides, to think about making
sketches; and in all places where there are visitors, he has a large
acquaintance and is very well known. Besides all this, he has a friend
who is much in his society both at home and away from home, though he
treats this friend very coolly and is very uncertain in his behaviour
to him. I am quite sure (because she has told me so), that she does not
like this friend. He is so revolting to me, too, that his being away
from here, at present, is quite a relief to my mind. How much more to
hers!

But what I particularly want you to know, and why I have resolved
to tell you so much while I am afraid it may make you a little
uncomfortable without occasion, is this. She is so true and so devoted,
and knows so completely that all her love and duty are his for ever,
that you may be certain she will love him, admire him, praise him, and
conceal all his faults, until she dies. I believe she conceals them, and
always will conceal them, even from herself. She has given him a heart
that can never be taken back; and however much he may try it, he will
never wear out its affection. You know the truth of this, as you know
everything, far far better than I; but I cannot help telling you what a
nature she shows, and that you can never think too well of her.

I have not yet called her by her name in this letter, but we are such
friends now that I do so when we are quietly together, and she speaks to
me by my name--I mean, not my Christian name, but the name you gave me.
When she began to call me Amy, I told her my short story, and that you
had always called me Little Dorrit. I told her that the name was much
dearer to me than any other, and so she calls me Little Dorrit too.

Perhaps you have not heard from her father or mother yet, and may not
know that she has a baby son. He was born only two days ago, and just a
week after they came. It has made them very happy. However, I must tell
you, as I am to tell you all, that I fancy they are under a constraint
with Mr Gowan, and that they feel as if his mocking way with them was
sometimes a slight given to their love for her. It was but yesterday,
when I was there, that I saw Mr Meagles change colour, and get up and
go out, as if he was afraid that he might say so, unless he prevented
himself by that means. Yet I am sure they are both so considerate,
good-humoured, and reasonable, that he might spare them. It is hard in
him not to think of them a little more.

I stopped at the last full stop to read all this over. It looked at
first as if I was taking on myself to understand and explain so much,
that I was half inclined not to send it. But when I thought it over a
little, I felt more hopeful for your knowing at once that I had only
been watchful for you, and had only noticed what I think I have noticed,
because I was quickened by your interest in it. Indeed, you may be sure
that is the truth.

And now I have done with the subject in the present letter, and have
little left to say.

We are all quite well, and Fanny improves every day. You can hardly
think how kind she is to me, and what pains she takes with me. She has
a lover, who has followed her, first all the way from Switzerland, and
then all the way from Venice, and who has just confided to me that he
means to follow her everywhere. I was much confused by his speaking to
me about it, but he would. I did not know what to say, but at last I
told him that I thought he had better not. For Fanny (but I did not tell
him this) is much too spirited and clever to suit him. Still, he said he
would, all the same. I have no lover, of course.

If you should ever get so far as this in this long letter, you will
perhaps say, Surely Little Dorrit will not leave off without telling me
something about her travels, and surely it is time she did. I think it
is indeed, but I don’t know what to tell you. Since we left Venice we
have been in a great many wonderful places, Genoa and Florence among
them, and have seen so many wonderful sights, that I am almost giddy
when I think what a crowd they make. But you can tell me so much more
about them than I can tell you, that why should I tire you with my
accounts and descriptions?

Dear Mr Clennam, as I had the courage to tell you what the familiar
difficulties in my travelling mind were before, I will not be a coward
now. One of my frequent thoughts is this:--Old as these cities are,
their age itself is hardly so curious, to my reflections, as that they
should have been in their places all through those days when I did not
even know of the existence of more than two or three of them, and when
I scarcely knew of anything outside our old walls. There is something
melancholy in it, and I don’t know why. When we went to see the famous
leaning tower at Pisa, it was a bright sunny day, and it and the
buildings near it looked so old, and the earth and the sky looked so
young, and its shadow on the ground was so soft and retired! I could not
at first think how beautiful it was, or how curious, but I thought, ‘O
how many times when the shadow of the wall was falling on our room, and
when that weary tread of feet was going up and down the yard--O how many
times this place was just as quiet and lovely as it is to-day!’ It quite
overpowered me. My heart was so full that tears burst out of my eyes,
though I did what I could to restrain them. And I have the same feeling
often--often.

Do you know that since the change in our fortunes, though I appear to
myself to have dreamed more than before, I have always dreamed of myself
as very young indeed! I am not very old, you may say. No, but that is
not what I mean. I have always dreamed of myself as a child learning
to do needlework. I have often dreamed of myself as back there, seeing
faces in the yard little known, and which I should have thought I had
quite forgotten; but, as often as not, I have been abroad here--in
Switzerland, or France, or Italy--somewhere where we have been--yet
always as that little child. I have dreamed of going down to Mrs
General, with the patches on my clothes in which I can first remember
myself. I have over and over again dreamed of taking my place at dinner
at Venice when we have had a large company, in the mourning for my poor
mother which I wore when I was eight years old, and wore long after it
was threadbare and would mend no more. It has been a great distress to
me to think how irreconcilable the company would consider it with my
father’s wealth, and how I should displease and disgrace him and Fanny
and Edward by so plainly disclosing what they wished to keep secret. But
I have not grown out of the little child in thinking of it; and at the
self-same moment I have dreamed that I have sat with the heart-ache at
table, calculating the expenses of the dinner, and quite distracting
myself with thinking how they were ever to be made good. I have never
dreamed of the change in our fortunes itself; I have never dreamed of
your coming back with me that memorable morning to break it; I have
never even dreamed of you.

Dear Mr Clennam, it is possible that I have thought of you--and
others--so much by day, that I have no thoughts left to wander round
you by night. For I must now confess to you that I suffer from
home-sickness--that I long so ardently and earnestly for home, as
sometimes, when no one sees me, to pine for it. I cannot bear to turn my
face further away from it. My heart is a little lightened when we turn
towards it, even for a few miles, and with the knowledge that we are
soon to turn away again. So dearly do I love the scene of my poverty and
your kindness. O so dearly, O so dearly!

Heaven knows when your poor child will see England again. We are all
fond of the life here (except me), and there are no plans for our
return. My dear father talks of a visit to London late in this next
spring, on some affairs connected with the property, but I have no hope
that he will bring me with him.

I have tried to get on a little better under Mrs General’s instruction,
and I hope I am not quite so dull as I used to be. I have begun to speak
and understand, almost easily, the hard languages I told you about. I
did not remember, at the moment when I wrote last, that you knew them
both; but I remembered it afterwards, and it helped me on. God bless
you, dear Mr Clennam. Do not forget

     Your ever grateful and affectionate

     LITTLE DORRIT.

P.S.--Particularly remember that Minnie Gowan deserves the best
remembrance in which you can hold her. You cannot think too generously
or too highly of her. I forgot Mr Pancks last time. Please, if you
should see him, give him your Little Dorrit’s kind regard. He was very
good to Little D.




CHAPTER 12. In which a Great Patriotic Conference is holden


The famous name of Merdle became, every day, more famous in the land.
Nobody knew that the Merdle of such high renown had ever done any good
to any one, alive or dead, or to any earthly thing; nobody knew that he
had any capacity or utterance of any sort in him, which had ever thrown,
for any creature, the feeblest farthing-candle ray of light on any path
of duty or diversion, pain or pleasure, toil or rest, fact or fancy,
among the multiplicity of paths in the labyrinth trodden by the sons
of Adam; nobody had the smallest reason for supposing the clay of which
this object of worship was made, to be other than the commonest clay,
with as clogged a wick smouldering inside of it as ever kept an image of
humanity from tumbling to pieces. All people knew (or thought they knew)
that he had made himself immensely rich; and, for that reason alone,
prostrated themselves before him, more degradedly and less excusably
than the darkest savage creeps out of his hole in the ground to
propitiate, in some log or reptile, the Deity of his benighted soul.

Nay, the high priests of this worship had the man before them as
a protest against their meanness. The multitude worshipped on
trust--though always distinctly knowing why--but the officiators at the
altar had the man habitually in their view. They sat at his feasts, and
he sat at theirs. There was a spectre always attendant on him, saying to
these high priests, ‘Are such the signs you trust, and love to honour;
this head, these eyes, this mode of speech, the tone and manner of this
man? You are the levers of the Circumlocution Office, and the rulers of
men. When half-a-dozen of you fall out by the ears, it seems that mother
earth can give birth to no other rulers. Does your qualification lie in
the superior knowledge of men which accepts, courts, and puffs this man?
Or, if you are competent to judge aright the signs I never fail to
show you when he appears among you, is your superior honesty your
qualification?’ Two rather ugly questions these, always going about
town with Mr Merdle; and there was a tacit agreement that they must be
stifled.

In Mrs Merdle’s absence abroad, Mr Merdle still kept the great house
open for the passage through it of a stream Of visitors. A few of these
took affable possession of the establishment. Three or four ladies of
distinction and liveliness used to say to one another, ‘Let us dine at
our dear Merdle’s next Thursday. Whom shall we have?’ Our dear Merdle
would then receive his instructions; and would sit heavily among the
company at table and wander lumpishly about his drawing-rooms
afterwards, only remarkable for appearing to have nothing to do with the
entertainment beyond being in its way.

The Chief Butler, the Avenging Spirit of this great man’s life, relaxed
nothing of his severity. He looked on at these dinners when the bosom
was not there, as he looked on at other dinners when the bosom was
there; and his eye was a basilisk to Mr Merdle. He was a hard man, and
would never bate an ounce of plate or a bottle of wine. He would not
allow a dinner to be given, unless it was up to his mark. He set forth
the table for his own dignity. If the guests chose to partake of what
was served, he saw no objection; but it was served for the maintenance
of his rank. As he stood by the sideboard he seemed to announce, ‘I have
accepted office to look at this which is now before me, and to look at
nothing less than this.’ If he missed the presiding bosom, it was as a
part of his own state of which he was, from unavoidable circumstances,
temporarily deprived, just as he might have missed a centre-piece, or a
choice wine-cooler, which had been sent to the Banker’s.

Mr Merdle issued invitations for a Barnacle dinner. Lord Decimus was to
be there, Mr Tite Barnacle was to be there, the pleasant young Barnacle
was to be there; and the Chorus of Parliamentary Barnacles who went
about the provinces when the House was up, warbling the praises of their
Chief, were to be represented there. It was understood to be a great
occasion. Mr Merdle was going to take up the Barnacles. Some delicate
little negotiations had occurred between him and the noble Decimus--the
young Barnacle of engaging manners acting as negotiator--and Mr Merdle
had decided to cast the weight of his great probity and great riches
into the Barnacle scale. Jobbery was suspected by the malicious; perhaps
because it was indisputable that if the adherence of the immortal Enemy
of Mankind could have been secured by a job, the Barnacles would have
jobbed him--for the good of the country, for the good of the country.

Mrs Merdle had written to this magnificent spouse of hers, whom it was
heresy to regard as anything less than all the British Merchants since
the days of Whittington rolled into one, and gilded three feet deep all
over--had written to this spouse of hers, several letters from Rome, in
quick succession, urging upon him with importunity that now or never was
the time to provide for Edmund Sparkler. Mrs Merdle had shown him that
the case of Edmund was urgent, and that infinite advantages might result
from his having some good thing directly. In the grammar of Mrs
Merdle’s verbs on this momentous subject, there was only one mood, the
Imperative; and that Mood had only one Tense, the Present. Mrs Merdle’s
verbs were so pressingly presented to Mr Merdle to conjugate, that his
sluggish blood and his long coat-cuffs became quite agitated.

In which state of agitation, Mr Merdle, evasively rolling his eyes
round the Chief Butler’s shoes without raising them to the index of that
stupendous creature’s thoughts, had signified to him his intention of
giving a special dinner: not a very large dinner, but a very special
dinner. The Chief Butler had signified, in return, that he had no
objection to look on at the most expensive thing in that way that could
be done; and the day of the dinner was now come.

Mr Merdle stood in one of his drawing-rooms, with his back to the fire,
waiting for the arrival of his important guests. He seldom or never took
the liberty of standing with his back to the fire unless he was quite
alone. In the presence of the Chief Butler, he could not have done such
a deed. He would have clasped himself by the wrists in that constabulary
manner of his, and have paced up and down the hearthrug, or gone
creeping about among the rich objects of furniture, if his oppressive
retainer had appeared in the room at that very moment. The sly shadows
which seemed to dart out of hiding when the fire rose, and to dart back
into it when the fire fell, were sufficient witnesses of his making
himself so easy. They were even more than sufficient, if his
uncomfortable glances at them might be taken to mean anything.

Mr Merdle’s right hand was filled with the evening paper, and the
evening paper was full of Mr Merdle. His wonderful enterprise, his
wonderful wealth, his wonderful Bank, were the fattening food of the
evening paper that night. The wonderful Bank, of which he was the chief
projector, establisher, and manager, was the latest of the many Merdle
wonders. So modest was Mr Merdle withal, in the midst of these splendid
achievements, that he looked far more like a man in possession of his
house under a distraint, than a commercial Colossus bestriding his own
hearthrug, while the little ships were sailing into dinner.

Behold the vessels coming into port! The engaging young Barnacle was the
first arrival; but Bar overtook him on the staircase. Bar, strengthened
as usual with his double eye-glass and his little jury droop, was
overjoyed to see the engaging young Barnacle; and opined that we were
going to sit in Banco, as we lawyers called it, to take a special
argument?

‘Indeed,’ said the sprightly young Barnacle, whose name was Ferdinand;
‘how so?’

‘Nay,’ smiled Bar. ‘If you don’t know, how can I know? You are in the
innermost sanctuary of the temple; I am one of the admiring concourse on
the plain without.’

Bar could be light in hand, or heavy in hand, according to the customer
he had to deal with. With Ferdinand Barnacle he was gossamer. Bar was
likewise always modest and self-depreciatory--in his way. Bar was a man
of great variety; but one leading thread ran through the woof of all his
patterns. Every man with whom he had to do was in his eyes a jury-man;
and he must get that jury-man over, if he could.

‘Our illustrious host and friend,’ said Bar; ‘our shining mercantile
star;--going into politics?’

‘Going? He has been in Parliament some time, you know,’ returned the
engaging young Barnacle.

‘True,’ said Bar, with his light-comedy laugh for special jury-men,
which was a very different thing from his low-comedy laugh for comic
tradesmen on common juries: ‘he has been in Parliament for some time.
Yet hitherto our star has been a vacillating and wavering star? Humph?’

An average witness would have been seduced by the Humph? into an
affirmative answer, But Ferdinand Barnacle looked knowingly at Bar as he
strolled up-stairs, and gave him no answer at all.

‘Just so, just so,’ said Bar, nodding his head, for he was not to be put
off in that way, ‘and therefore I spoke of our sitting _in Banco_ to take
a special argument--meaning this to be a high and solemn occasion, when,
as Captain Macheath says, “the judges are met: a terrible show!” We
lawyers are sufficiently liberal, you see, to quote the Captain, though
the Captain is severe upon us. Nevertheless, I think I could put in
evidence an admission of the Captain’s,’ said Bar, with a little jocose
roll of his head; for, in his legal current of speech, he always assumed
the air of rallying himself with the best grace in the world; ‘an
admission of the Captain’s that Law, in the gross, is at least
intended to be impartial. For what says the Captain, if I quote
him correctly--and if not,’ with a light-comedy touch of his double
eye-glass on his companion’s shoulder, ‘my learned friend will set me
right:


     “Since laws were made for every degree,
     To curb vice in others as well as in me,
     I wonder we ha’n’t better company
     Upon Tyburn Tree!”’


These words brought them to the drawing-room, where Mr Merdle stood
before the fire. So immensely astounded was Mr Merdle by the entrance
of Bar with such a reference in his mouth, that Bar explained himself
to have been quoting Gay. ‘Assuredly not one of our Westminster Hall
authorities,’ said he, ‘but still no despicable one to a man possessing
the largely-practical Mr Merdle’s knowledge of the world.’

Mr Merdle looked as if he thought he would say something, but
subsequently looked as if he thought he wouldn’t. The interval afforded
time for Bishop to be announced.

Bishop came in with meekness, and yet with a strong and rapid step as if
he wanted to get his seven-league dress-shoes on, and go round the world
to see that everybody was in a satisfactory state. Bishop had no idea
that there was anything significant in the occasion. That was the most
remarkable trait in his demeanour. He was crisp, fresh, cheerful,
affable, bland; but so surprisingly innocent.

Bar sidled up to prefer his politest inquiries in reference to the
health of Mrs Bishop. Mrs Bishop had been a little unfortunate in the
article of taking cold at a Confirmation, but otherwise was well. Young
Mr Bishop was also well. He was down, with his young wife and little
family, at his Cure of Souls.

The representatives of the Barnacle Chorus dropped in next, and Mr
Merdle’s physician dropped in next. Bar, who had a bit of one eye and a
bit of his double eye-glass for every one who came in at the door, no
matter with whom he was conversing or what he was talking about, got
among them all by some skilful means, without being seen to get at them,
and touched each individual gentleman of the jury on his own individual
favourite spot. With some of the Chorus, he laughed about the sleepy
member who had gone out into the lobby the other night, and voted the
wrong way: with others, he deplored that innovating spirit in the time
which could not even be prevented from taking an unnatural interest in
the public service and the public money: with the physician he had a
word to say about the general health; he had also a little information
to ask him for, concerning a professional man of unquestioned erudition
and polished manners--but those credentials in their highest development
he believed were the possession of other professors of the healing art
(jury droop)--whom he had happened to have in the witness-box the day
before yesterday, and from whom he had elicited in cross-examination
that he claimed to be one of the exponents of this new mode of treatment
which appeared to Bar to--eh?--well, Bar thought so; Bar had thought,
and hoped, Physician would tell him so. Without presuming to decide
where doctors disagreed, it did appear to Bar, viewing it as a question
of common sense and not of so-called legal penetration, that this new
system was--might be, in the presence of so great an authority--say,
Humbug? Ah! Fortified by such encouragement, he could venture to say
Humbug; and now Bar’s mind was relieved.

Mr Tite Barnacle, who, like Dr Johnson’s celebrated acquaintance, had
only one idea in his head and that was a wrong one, had appeared by this
time. This eminent gentleman and Mr Merdle, seated diverse ways and with
ruminating aspects on a yellow ottoman in the light of the fire,
holding no verbal communication with each other, bore a strong general
resemblance to the two cows in the Cuyp picture over against them.

But now, Lord Decimus arrived. The Chief Butler, who up to this time
had limited himself to a branch of his usual function by looking at the
company as they entered (and that, with more of defiance than favour),
put himself so far out of his way as to come up-stairs with him and
announce him. Lord Decimus being an overpowering peer, a bashful young
member of the Lower House who was the last fish but one caught by the
Barnacles, and who had been invited on this occasion to commemorate his
capture, shut his eyes when his Lordship came in.

Lord Decimus, nevertheless, was glad to see the Member. He was also
glad to see Mr Merdle, glad to see Bishop, glad to see Bar, glad to see
Physician, glad to see Tite Barnacle, glad to see Chorus, glad to
see Ferdinand his private secretary. Lord Decimus, though one of the
greatest of the earth, was not remarkable for ingratiatory manners, and
Ferdinand had coached him up to the point of noticing all the fellows
he might find there, and saying he was glad to see them. When he had
achieved this rush of vivacity and condescension, his Lordship composed
himself into the picture after Cuyp, and made a third cow in the group.

Bar, who felt that he had got all the rest of the jury and must now lay
hold of the Foreman, soon came sidling up, double eye-glass in hand. Bar
tendered the weather, as a subject neatly aloof from official reserve,
for the Foreman’s consideration. Bar said that he was told (as everybody
always is told, though who tells them, and why, will ever remain a
mystery), that there was to be no wall-fruit this year. Lord Decimus
had not heard anything amiss of his peaches, but rather believed, if his
people were correct, he was to have no apples. No apples? Bar was lost
in astonishment and concern. It would have been all one to him, in
reality, if there had not been a pippin on the surface of the earth, but
his show of interest in this apple question was positively painful.
Now, to what, Lord Decimus--for we troublesome lawyers loved to gather
information, and could never tell how useful it might prove to us--to
what, Lord Decimus, was this to be attributed? Lord Decimus could not
undertake to propound any theory about it. This might have stopped
another man; but Bar, sticking to him fresh as ever, said, ‘As to pears,
now?’

Long after Bar got made Attorney-General, this was told of him as
a master-stroke. Lord Decimus had a reminiscence about a pear-tree
formerly growing in a garden near the back of his dame’s house at Eton,
upon which pear-tree the only joke of his life perennially bloomed. It
was a joke of a compact and portable nature, turning on the difference
between Eton pears and Parliamentary pairs; but it was a joke, a refined
relish of which would seem to have appeared to Lord Decimus impossible
to be had without a thorough and intimate acquaintance with the tree.
Therefore, the story at first had no idea of such a tree, sir, then
gradually found it in winter, carried it through the changing season,
saw it bud, saw it blossom, saw it bear fruit, saw the fruit ripen; in
short, cultivated the tree in that diligent and minute manner before it
got out of the bed-room window to steal the fruit, that many thanks had
been offered up by belated listeners for the trees having been planted
and grafted prior to Lord Decimus’s time. Bar’s interest in apples was
so overtopped by the wrapt suspense in which he pursued the changes
of these pears, from the moment when Lord Decimus solemnly opened with
‘Your mentioning pears recalls to my remembrance a pear-tree,’ down to
the rich conclusion, ‘And so we pass, through the various changes
of life, from Eton pears to Parliamentary pairs,’ that he had to go
down-stairs with Lord Decimus, and even then to be seated next to him
at table in order that he might hear the anecdote out. By that time, Bar
felt that he had secured the Foreman, and might go to dinner with a good
appetite.

It was a dinner to provoke an appetite, though he had not had one. The
rarest dishes, sumptuously cooked and sumptuously served; the choicest
fruits; the most exquisite wines; marvels of workmanship in gold and
silver, china and glass; innumerable things delicious to the senses of
taste, smell, and sight, were insinuated into its composition. O, what
a wonderful man this Merdle, what a great man, what a master man, how
blessedly and enviably endowed--in one word, what a rich man!

He took his usual poor eighteenpennyworth of food in his usual
indigestive way, and had as little to say for himself as ever a
wonderful man had. Fortunately Lord Decimus was one of those sublimities
who have no occasion to be talked to, for they can be at any time
sufficiently occupied with the contemplation of their own greatness.
This enabled the bashful young Member to keep his eyes open long enough
at a time to see his dinner. But, whenever Lord Decimus spoke, he shut
them again.

The agreeable young Barnacle, and Bar, were the talkers of the party.
Bishop would have been exceedingly agreeable also, but that his
innocence stood in his way. He was so soon left behind. When there was
any little hint of anything being in the wind, he got lost directly.
Worldly affairs were too much for him; he couldn’t make them out at all.

This was observable when Bar said, incidentally, that he was happy to
have heard that we were soon to have the advantage of enlisting on
the good side, the sound and plain sagacity--not demonstrative or
ostentatious, but thoroughly sound and practical--of our friend Mr
Sparkler.

Ferdinand Barnacle laughed, and said oh yes, he believed so. A vote was
a vote, and always acceptable.

Bar was sorry to miss our good friend Mr Sparkler to-day, Mr Merdle.

‘He is away with Mrs Merdle,’ returned that gentleman, slowly coming
out of a long abstraction, in the course of which he had been fitting a
tablespoon up his sleeve. ‘It is not indispensable for him to be on the
spot.’

‘The magic name of Merdle,’ said Bar, with the jury droop, ‘no doubt
will suffice for all.’

‘Why--yes--I believe so,’ assented Mr Merdle, putting the spoon aside,
and clumsily hiding each of his hands in the coat-cuff of the other
hand. ‘I believe the people in my interest down there will not make any
difficulty.’

‘Model people!’ said Bar.

‘I am glad you approve of them,’ said Mr Merdle.

‘And the people of those other two places, now,’ pursued Bar, with a
bright twinkle in his keen eye, as it slightly turned in the direction
of his magnificent neighbour; ‘we lawyers are always curious, always
inquisitive, always picking up odds and ends for our patchwork minds,
since there is no knowing when and where they may fit into some
corner;--the people of those other two places now? Do they yield so
laudably to the vast and cumulative influence of such enterprise and
such renown; do those little rills become absorbed so quietly
and easily, and, as it were by the influence of natural laws, so
beautifully, in the swoop of the majestic stream as it flows upon its
wondrous way enriching the surrounding lands; that their course is
perfectly to be calculated, and distinctly to be predicated?’

Mr Merdle, a little troubled by Bar’s eloquence, looked fitfully about
the nearest salt-cellar for some moments, and then said hesitating:

‘They are perfectly aware, sir, of their duty to Society. They will
return anybody I send to them for that purpose.’

‘Cheering to know,’ said Bar. ‘Cheering to know.’

The three places in question were three little rotten holes in this
Island, containing three little ignorant, drunken, guzzling, dirty,
out-of-the-way constituencies, that had reeled into Mr Merdle’s pocket.
Ferdinand Barnacle laughed in his easy way, and airily said they were
a nice set of fellows. Bishop, mentally perambulating among paths of
peace, was altogether swallowed up in absence of mind.

‘Pray,’ asked Lord Decimus, casting his eyes around the table, ‘what
is this story I have heard of a gentleman long confined in a debtors’
prison proving to be of a wealthy family, and having come into the
inheritance of a large sum of money? I have met with a variety of
allusions to it. Do you know anything of it, Ferdinand?’

‘I only know this much,’ said Ferdinand, ‘that he has given the
Department with which I have the honour to be associated;’ this
sparkling young Barnacle threw off the phrase sportively, as who should
say, We know all about these forms of speech, but we must keep it up,
we must keep the game alive; ‘no end of trouble, and has put us into
innumerable fixes.’

‘Fixes?’ repeated Lord Decimus, with a majestic pausing and pondering
on the word that made the bashful Member shut his eyes quite tight.
‘Fixes?’

‘A very perplexing business indeed,’ observed Mr Tite Barnacle, with an
air of grave resentment.

‘What,’ said Lord Decimus, ‘was the character of his business; what was
the nature of these--a--Fixes, Ferdinand?’

‘Oh, it’s a good story, as a story,’ returned that gentleman; ‘as good
a thing of its kind as need be. This Mr Dorrit (his name is Dorrit) had
incurred a responsibility to us, ages before the fairy came out of
the Bank and gave him his fortune, under a bond he had signed for the
performance of a contract which was not at all performed. He was a
partner in a house in some large way--spirits, or buttons, or wine, or
blacking, or oatmeal, or woollen, or pork, or hooks and eyes, or iron,
or treacle, or shoes, or something or other that was wanted for troops,
or seamen, or somebody--and the house burst, and we being among
the creditors, detainees were lodged on the part of the Crown in a
scientific manner, and all the rest of it. When the fairy had appeared
and he wanted to pay us off, Egad we had got into such an exemplary
state of checking and counter-checking, signing and counter-signing,
that it was six months before we knew how to take the money, or how to
give a receipt for it. It was a triumph of public business,’ said this
handsome young Barnacle, laughing heartily, ‘You never saw such a lot of
forms in your life. “Why,” the attorney said to me one day, “if I wanted
this office to give me two or three thousand pounds instead of take it,
I couldn’t have more trouble about it.” “You are right, old fellow,”
 I told him, “and in future you’ll know that we have something to do
here.”’ The pleasant young Barnacle finished by once more laughing
heartily. He was a very easy, pleasant fellow indeed, and his manners
were exceedingly winning.

Mr Tite Barnacle’s view of the business was of a less airy character. He
took it ill that Mr Dorrit had troubled the Department by wanting to
pay the money, and considered it a grossly informal thing to do after so
many years. But Mr Tite Barnacle was a buttoned-up man, and consequently
a weighty one. All buttoned-up men are weighty. All buttoned-up men are
believed in. Whether or no the reserved and never-exercised power of
unbuttoning, fascinates mankind; whether or no wisdom is supposed to
condense and augment when buttoned up, and to evaporate when unbuttoned;
it is certain that the man to whom importance is accorded is the
buttoned-up man. Mr Tite Barnacle never would have passed for half his
current value, unless his coat had been always buttoned-up to his white
cravat.

‘May I ask,’ said Lord Decimus, ‘if Mr Darrit--or Dorrit--has any
family?’

Nobody else replying, the host said, ‘He has two daughters, my lord.’

‘Oh! you are acquainted with him?’ asked Lord Decimus.

‘Mrs Merdle is. Mr Sparkler is, too. In fact,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘I rather
believe that one of the young ladies has made an impression on Edmund
Sparkler. He is susceptible, and--I--think--the conquest--’ Here Mr
Merdle stopped, and looked at the table-cloth, as he usually did when he
found himself observed or listened to.

Bar was uncommonly pleased to find that the Merdle family, and this
family, had already been brought into contact. He submitted, in a low
voice across the table to Bishop, that it was a kind of analogical
illustration of those physical laws, in virtue of which Like flies to
Like. He regarded this power of attraction in wealth to draw wealth
to it, as something remarkably interesting and curious--something
indefinably allied to the loadstone and gravitation. Bishop, who
had ambled back to earth again when the present theme was broached,
acquiesced. He said it was indeed highly important to Society that one
in the trying situation of unexpectedly finding himself invested with a
power for good or for evil in Society, should become, as it were, merged
in the superior power of a more legitimate and more gigantic growth, the
influence of which (as in the case of our friend at whose board we sat)
was habitually exercised in harmony with the best interests of Society.
Thus, instead of two rival and contending flames, a larger and a lesser,
each burning with a lurid and uncertain glare, we had a blended and a
softened light whose genial ray diffused an equable warmth throughout
the land. Bishop seemed to like his own way of putting the case very
much, and rather dwelt upon it; Bar, meanwhile (not to throw away a
jury-man), making a show of sitting at his feet and feeding on his
precepts.

The dinner and dessert being three hours long, the bashful Member cooled
in the shadow of Lord Decimus faster than he warmed with food and drink,
and had but a chilly time of it. Lord Decimus, like a tall tower in a
flat country, seemed to project himself across the table-cloth, hide the
light from the honourable Member, cool the honourable Member’s marrow,
and give him a woeful idea of distance. When he asked this unfortunate
traveller to take wine, he encompassed his faltering steps with the
gloomiest of shades; and when he said, ‘Your health sir!’ all around him
was barrenness and desolation.

At length Lord Decimus, with a coffee-cup in his hand, began to hover
about among the pictures, and to cause an interesting speculation to
arise in all minds as to the probabilities of his ceasing to hover, and
enabling the smaller birds to flutter up-stairs; which could not be
done until he had urged his noble pinions in that direction. After some
delay, and several stretches of his wings which came to nothing, he
soared to the drawing-rooms.

And here a difficulty arose, which always does arise when two people
are specially brought together at a dinner to confer with one another.
Everybody (except Bishop, who had no suspicion of it) knew perfectly
well that this dinner had been eaten and drunk, specifically to the end
that Lord Decimus and Mr Merdle should have five minutes’ conversation
together. The opportunity so elaborately prepared was now arrived, and
it seemed from that moment that no mere human ingenuity could so much as
get the two chieftains into the same room. Mr Merdle and his noble guest
persisted in prowling about at opposite ends of the perspective. It was
in vain for the engaging Ferdinand to bring Lord Decimus to look at the
bronze horses near Mr Merdle. Then Mr Merdle evaded, and wandered away.
It was in vain for him to bring Mr Merdle to Lord Decimus to tell him
the history of the unique Dresden vases. Then Lord Decimus evaded and
wandered away, while he was getting his man up to the mark.

‘Did you ever see such a thing as this?’ said Ferdinand to Bar when he
had been baffled twenty times.

‘Often,’ returned Bar.

‘Unless I butt one of them into an appointed corner, and you butt the
other,’ said Ferdinand, ‘it will not come off after all.’

‘Very good,’ said Bar. ‘I’ll butt Merdle, if you like; but not my lord.’

Ferdinand laughed, in the midst of his vexation. ‘Confound them both!’
said he, looking at his watch. ‘I want to get away. Why the deuce can’t
they come together! They both know what they want and mean to do. Look
at them!’

They were still looming at opposite ends of the perspective, each with
an absurd pretence of not having the other on his mind, which could not
have been more transparently ridiculous though his real mind had been
chalked on his back. Bishop, who had just now made a third with Bar and
Ferdinand, but whose innocence had again cut him out of the subject and
washed him in sweet oil, was seen to approach Lord Decimus and glide
into conversation.

‘I must get Merdle’s doctor to catch and secure him, I suppose,’ said
Ferdinand; ‘and then I must lay hold of my illustrious kinsman, and
decoy him if I can--drag him if I can’t--to the conference.’

‘Since you do me the honour,’ said Bar, with his slyest smile, to ask
for my poor aid, it shall be yours with the greatest pleasure. I don’t
think this is to be done by one man. But if you will undertake to pen
my lord into that furthest drawing-room where he is now so profoundly
engaged, I will undertake to bring our dear Merdle into the presence,
without the possibility of getting away.’

‘Done!’ said Ferdinand. ‘Done!’ said Bar.

Bar was a sight wondrous to behold, and full of matter, when, jauntily
waving his double eye-glass by its ribbon, and jauntily drooping to an
Universe of Jurymen, he, in the most accidental manner ever seen,
found himself at Mr Merdle’s shoulder, and embraced that opportunity of
mentioning a little point to him, on which he particularly wished to
be guided by the light of his practical knowledge. (Here he took Mr
Merdle’s arm and walked him gently away.) A banker, whom we would call
A. B., advanced a considerable sum of money, which we would call fifteen
thousand pounds, to a client or customer of his, whom he would call P.
Q. (Here, as they were getting towards Lord Decimus, he held Mr Merdle
tight.) As a security for the repayment of this advance to P. Q. whom
we would call a widow lady, there were placed in A. B.’s hands the
title-deeds of a freehold estate, which we would call Blinkiter Doddles.
Now, the point was this. A limited right of felling and lopping in
the woods of Blinkiter Doddles, lay in the son of P. Q. then past his
majority, and whom we would call X. Y.--but really this was too bad! In
the presence of Lord Decimus, to detain the host with chopping our dry
chaff of law, was really too bad! Another time! Bar was truly repentant,
and would not say another syllable. Would Bishop favour him with
half-a-dozen words? (He had now set Mr Merdle down on a couch, side by
side with Lord Decimus, and to it they must go, now or never.)

And now the rest of the company, highly excited and interested, always
excepting Bishop, who had not the slightest idea that anything was going
on, formed in one group round the fire in the next drawing-room, and
pretended to be chatting easily on the infinite variety of small topics,
while everybody’s thoughts and eyes were secretly straying towards the
secluded pair. The Chorus were excessively nervous, perhaps as labouring
under the dreadful apprehension that some good thing was going to
be diverted from them! Bishop alone talked steadily and evenly. He
conversed with the great Physician on that relaxation of the throat with
which young curates were too frequently afflicted, and on the means
of lessening the great prevalence of that disorder in the church.
Physician, as a general rule, was of opinion that the best way to avoid
it was to know how to read, before you made a profession of reading.
Bishop said dubiously, did he really think so? And Physician said,
decidedly, yes he did.

Ferdinand, meanwhile, was the only one of the party who skirmished on
the outside of the circle; he kept about mid-way between it and the
two, as if some sort of surgical operation were being performed by Lord
Decimus on Mr Merdle, or by Mr Merdle on Lord Decimus, and his services
might at any moment be required as Dresser. In fact, within a quarter
of an hour Lord Decimus called to him ‘Ferdinand!’ and he went, and
took his place in the conference for some five minutes more. Then a
half-suppressed gasp broke out among the Chorus; for Lord Decimus rose
to take his leave. Again coached up by Ferdinand to the point of making
himself popular, he shook hands in the most brilliant manner with the
whole company, and even said to Bar, ‘I hope you were not bored by my
pears?’ To which Bar retorted, ‘Eton, my lord, or Parliamentary?’ neatly
showing that he had mastered the joke, and delicately insinuating that
he could never forget it while his life remained.

All the grave importance that was buttoned up in Mr Tite Barnacle, took
itself away next; and Ferdinand took himself away next, to the opera.
Some of the rest lingered a little, marrying golden liqueur glasses to
Buhl tables with sticky rings; on the desperate chance of Mr Merdle’s
saying something. But Merdle, as usual, oozed sluggishly and muddily
about his drawing-room, saying never a word.

In a day or two it was announced to all the town, that Edmund Sparkler,
Esquire, son-in-law of the eminent Mr Merdle of worldwide renown, was
made one of the Lords of the Circumlocution Office; and proclamation was
issued, to all true believers, that this admirable appointment was to
be hailed as a graceful and gracious mark of homage, rendered by the
graceful and gracious Decimus, to that commercial interest which must
ever in a great commercial country--and all the rest of it, with
blast of trumpet. So, bolstered by this mark of Government homage, the
wonderful Bank and all the other wonderful undertakings went on and went
up; and gapers came to Harley Street, Cavendish Square, only to look at
the house where the golden wonder lived.

And when they saw the Chief Butler looking out at the hall-door in
his moments of condescension, the gapers said how rich he looked, and
wondered how much money he had in the wonderful Bank. But, if they had
known that respectable Nemesis better, they would not have wondered
about it, and might have stated the amount with the utmost precision.




CHAPTER 13. The Progress of an Epidemic


That it is at least as difficult to stay a moral infection as a physical
one; that such a disease will spread with the malignity and rapidity of
the Plague; that the contagion, when it has once made head, will spare
no pursuit or condition, but will lay hold on people in the soundest
health, and become developed in the most unlikely constitutions: is
a fact as firmly established by experience as that we human creatures
breathe an atmosphere. A blessing beyond appreciation would be conferred
upon mankind, if the tainted, in whose weakness or wickedness these
virulent disorders are bred, could be instantly seized and placed in
close confinement (not to say summarily smothered) before the poison is
communicable.

As a vast fire will fill the air to a great distance with its roar, so
the sacred flame which the mighty Barnacles had fanned caused the air to
resound more and more with the name of Merdle. It was deposited on every
lip, and carried into every ear. There never was, there never had
been, there never again should be, such a man as Mr Merdle. Nobody,
as aforesaid, knew what he had done; but everybody knew him to be the
greatest that had appeared.

Down in Bleeding Heart Yard, where there was not one unappropriated
halfpenny, as lively an interest was taken in this paragon of men as on
the Stock Exchange. Mrs Plornish, now established in the small grocery
and general trade in a snug little shop at the crack end of the Yard,
at the top of the steps, with her little old father and Maggy acting
as assistants, habitually held forth about him over the counter in
conversation with her customers. Mr Plornish, who had a small share in a
small builder’s business in the neighbourhood, said, trowel in hand, on
the tops of scaffolds and on the tiles of houses, that people did tell
him as Mr Merdle was _the_ one, mind you, to put us all to rights in
respects of that which all on us looked to, and to bring us all safe
home as much as we needed, mind you, fur toe be brought. Mr Baptist,
sole lodger of Mr and Mrs Plornish was reputed in whispers to lay by
the savings which were the result of his simple and moderate life,
for investment in one of Mr Merdle’s certain enterprises. The female
Bleeding Hearts, when they came for ounces of tea, and hundredweights of
talk, gave Mrs Plornish to understand, That how, ma’am, they had heard
from their cousin Mary Anne, which worked in the line, that his lady’s
dresses would fill three waggons. That how she was as handsome a lady,
ma’am, as lived, no matter wheres, and a busk like marble itself. That
how, according to what they was told, ma’am, it was her son by a former
husband as was took into the Government; and a General he had been, and
armies he had marched again and victory crowned, if all you heard was to
be believed. That how it was reported that Mr Merdle’s words had been,
that if they could have made it worth his while to take the whole
Government he would have took it without a profit, but that take it he
could not and stand a loss. That how it was not to be expected, ma’am,
that he should lose by it, his ways being, as you might say and utter
no falsehood, paved with gold; but that how it was much to be regretted
that something handsome hadn’t been got up to make it worth his while;
for it was such and only such that knowed the heighth to which the bread
and butchers’ meat had rose, and it was such and only such that both
could and would bring that heighth down.

So rife and potent was the fever in Bleeding Heart Yard, that Mr
Pancks’s rent-days caused no interval in the patients. The disease took
the singular form, on those occasions, of causing the infected to find
an unfathomable excuse and consolation in allusions to the magic name.

‘Now, then!’ Mr Pancks would say, to a defaulting lodger. ‘Pay up!
Come on!’

‘I haven’t got it, Mr Pancks,’ Defaulter would reply. ‘I tell you the
truth, sir, when I say I haven’t got so much as a single sixpence of it
to bless myself with.’

‘This won’t do, you know,’ Mr Pancks would retort. ‘You don’t expect it
_will_ do; do you?’

Defaulter would admit, with a low-spirited ‘No, sir,’ having no such
expectation.

‘My proprietor isn’t going to stand this, you know,’ Mr Pancks would
proceed. ‘He don’t send me here for this. Pay up! Come!’

The Defaulter would make answer, ‘Ah, Mr Pancks. If I was the rich
gentleman whose name is in everybody’s mouth--if my name was Merdle,
sir--I’d soon pay up, and be glad to do it.’

Dialogues on the rent-question usually took place at the house-doors
or in the entries, and in the presence of several deeply interested
Bleeding Hearts. They always received a reference of this kind with a
low murmur of response, as if it were convincing; and the Defaulter,
however black and discomfited before, always cheered up a little in
making it.

‘If I was Mr Merdle, sir, you wouldn’t have cause to complain of me
then. No, believe me!’ the Defaulter would proceed with a shake of the
head. ‘I’d pay up so quick then, Mr Pancks, that you shouldn’t have to
ask me.’

The response would be heard again here, implying that it was impossible
to say anything fairer, and that this was the next thing to paying the
money down.

Mr Pancks would be now reduced to saying as he booked the case, ‘Well!
You’ll have the broker in, and be turned out; that’s what’ll happen to
you. It’s no use talking to me about Mr Merdle. You are not Mr Merdle,
any more than I am.’

‘No, sir,’ the Defaulter would reply. ‘I only wish you _were_ him, sir.’

The response would take this up quickly; replying with great feeling,
‘Only wish you _were_ him, sir.’

‘You’d be easier with us if you were Mr Merdle, sir,’ the Defaulter
would go on with rising spirits, ‘and it would be better for all
parties. Better for our sakes, and better for yours, too. You wouldn’t
have to worry no one, then, sir. You wouldn’t have to worry us, and you
wouldn’t have to worry yourself. You’d be easier in your own mind, sir,
and you’d leave others easier, too, you would, if you were Mr Merdle.’

Mr Pancks, in whom these impersonal compliments produced an irresistible
sheepishness, never rallied after such a charge. He could only bite
his nails and puff away to the next Defaulter. The responsive Bleeding
Hearts would then gather round the Defaulter whom he had just abandoned,
and the most extravagant rumours would circulate among them, to their
great comfort, touching the amount of Mr Merdle’s ready money.

From one of the many such defeats of one of many rent-days, Mr Pancks,
having finished his day’s collection, repaired with his note-book
under his arm to Mrs Plornish’s corner. Mr Pancks’s object was not
professional, but social. He had had a trying day, and wanted a little
brightening. By this time he was on friendly terms with the Plornish
family, having often looked in upon them at similar seasons, and borne
his part in recollections of Miss Dorrit.

Mrs Plornish’s shop-parlour had been decorated under her own eye, and
presented, on the side towards the shop, a little fiction in which Mrs
Plornish unspeakably rejoiced. This poetical heightening of the parlour
consisted in the wall being painted to represent the exterior of a
thatched cottage; the artist having introduced (in as effective a manner
as he found compatible with their highly disproportionate dimensions)
the real door and window. The modest sunflower and hollyhock were
depicted as flourishing with great luxuriance on this rustic dwelling,
while a quantity of dense smoke issuing from the chimney indicated good
cheer within, and also, perhaps, that it had not been lately swept.
A faithful dog was represented as flying at the legs of the friendly
visitor, from the threshold; and a circular pigeon-house, enveloped in a
cloud of pigeons, arose from behind the garden-paling. On the door (when
it was shut), appeared the semblance of a brass-plate, presenting
the inscription, Happy Cottage, T. and M. Plornish; the partnership
expressing man and wife. No Poetry and no Art ever charmed the
imagination more than the union of the two in this counterfeit cottage
charmed Mrs Plornish. It was nothing to her that Plornish had a habit
of leaning against it as he smoked his pipe after work, when his
hat blotted out the pigeon-house and all the pigeons, when his back
swallowed up the dwelling, when his hands in his pockets uprooted the
blooming garden and laid waste the adjacent country. To Mrs Plornish, it
was still a most beautiful cottage, a most wonderful deception; and
it made no difference that Mr Plornish’s eye was some inches above the
level of the gable bed-room in the thatch. To come out into the shop
after it was shut, and hear her father sing a song inside this cottage,
was a perfect Pastoral to Mrs Plornish, the Golden Age revived. And
truly if that famous period had been revived, or had ever been at all,
it may be doubted whether it would have produced many more heartily
admiring daughters than the poor woman.

Warned of a visitor by the tinkling bell at the shop-door, Mrs Plornish
came out of Happy Cottage to see who it might be. ‘I guessed it was
you, Mr Pancks,’ said she, ‘for it’s quite your regular night; ain’t it?
Here’s father, you see, come out to serve at the sound of the bell, like
a brisk young shopman. Ain’t he looking well? Father’s more pleased to
see you than if you was a customer, for he dearly loves a gossip; and
when it turns upon Miss Dorrit, he loves it all the more. You never
heard father in such voice as he is at present,’ said Mrs Plornish, her
own voice quavering, she was so proud and pleased. ‘He gave us Strephon
last night to that degree that Plornish gets up and makes him this
speech across the table. “John Edward Nandy,” says Plornish to father,
“I never heard you come the warbles as I have heard you come the warbles
this night.” An’t it gratifying, Mr Pancks, though; really?’

Mr Pancks, who had snorted at the old man in his friendliest manner,
replied in the affirmative, and casually asked whether that lively Altro
chap had come in yet? Mrs Plornish answered no, not yet, though he had
gone to the West-End with some work, and had said he should be back
by tea-time. Mr Pancks was then hospitably pressed into Happy Cottage,
where he encountered the elder Master Plornish just come home from
school. Examining that young student, lightly, on the educational
proceedings of the day, he found that the more advanced pupils who
were in the large text and the letter M, had been set the copy ‘Merdle,
Millions.’

‘And how are _you_ getting on, Mrs Plornish,’ said Pancks, ‘since we’re
mentioning millions?’

‘Very steady, indeed, sir,’ returned Mrs Plornish. ‘Father, dear, would
you go into the shop and tidy the window a little bit before tea, your
taste being so beautiful?’

John Edward Nandy trotted away, much gratified, to comply with his
daughter’s request. Mrs Plornish, who was always in mortal terror
of mentioning pecuniary affairs before the old gentleman, lest any
disclosure she made might rouse his spirit and induce him to run away to
the workhouse, was thus left free to be confidential with Mr Pancks.

‘It’s quite true that the business is very steady indeed,’ said Mrs
Plornish, lowering her voice; ‘and has a excellent connection. The only
thing that stands in its way, sir, is the Credit.’

This drawback, rather severely felt by most people who engaged in
commercial transactions with the inhabitants of Bleeding Heart Yard,
was a large stumbling-block in Mrs Plornish’s trade. When Mr Dorrit had
established her in the business, the Bleeding Hearts had shown an amount
of emotion and a determination to support her in it, that did honour to
human nature. Recognising her claim upon their generous feelings as one
who had long been a member of their community, they pledged themselves,
with great feeling, to deal with Mrs Plornish, come what would and
bestow their patronage on no other establishment. Influenced by these
noble sentiments, they had even gone out of their way to purchase little
luxuries in the grocery and butter line to which they were unaccustomed;
saying to one another, that if they did stretch a point, was it not for
a neighbour and a friend, and for whom ought a point to be stretched if
not for such? So stimulated, the business was extremely brisk, and the
articles in stock went off with the greatest celerity. In short, if the

Bleeding Hearts had but paid, the undertaking would have been a complete
success; whereas, by reason of their exclusively confining themselves to
owing, the profits actually realised had not yet begun to appear in the
books.

Mr Pancks was making a very porcupine of himself by sticking his hair
up in the contemplation of this state of accounts, when old Mr Nandy,
re-entering the cottage with an air of mystery, entreated them to come
and look at the strange behaviour of Mr Baptist, who seemed to have met
with something that had scared him. All three going into the shop, and
watching through the window, then saw Mr Baptist, pale and agitated, go
through the following extraordinary performances. First, he was observed
hiding at the top of the steps leading down into the Yard, and peeping
up and down the street with his head cautiously thrust out close to the
side of the shop-door. After very anxious scrutiny, he came out of
his retreat, and went briskly down the street as if he were going away
altogether; then, suddenly turned about, and went, at the same pace, and
with the same feint, up the street. He had gone no further up the street
than he had gone down, when he crossed the road and disappeared. The
object of this last manoeuvre was only apparent, when his entering the
shop with a sudden twist, from the steps again, explained that he
had made a wide and obscure circuit round to the other, or Doyce and
Clennam, end of the Yard, and had come through the Yard and bolted in.
He was out of breath by that time, as he might well be, and his heart
seemed to jerk faster than the little shop-bell, as it quivered and
jingled behind him with his hasty shutting of the door.

‘Hallo, old chap!’ said Mr Pancks. ‘Altro, old boy! What’s the matter?’

Mr Baptist, or Signor Cavalletto, understood English now almost as well
as Mr Pancks himself, and could speak it very well too. Nevertheless,
Mrs Plornish, with a pardonable vanity in that accomplishment of hers
which made her all but Italian, stepped in as interpreter.

‘E ask know,’ said Mrs Plornish, ‘what go wrong?’

‘Come into the happy little cottage, Padrona,’ returned Mr Baptist,
imparting great stealthiness to his flurried back-handed shake of his
right forefinger. ‘Come there!’

Mrs Plornish was proud of the title Padrona, which she regarded as
signifying: not so much Mistress of the house, as Mistress of the
Italian tongue. She immediately complied with Mr Baptist’s request, and
they all went into the cottage.

‘E ope you no fright,’ said Mrs Plornish then, interpreting Mr Pancks
in a new way with her usual fertility of resource. ‘What appen? Peaka
Padrona!’

‘I have seen some one,’ returned Baptist. ‘I have rincontrato him.’

‘Im? Oo him?’ asked Mrs Plornish.

‘A bad man. A baddest man. I have hoped that I should never see him
again.’

‘Ow you know him bad?’ asked Mrs Plornish.

‘It does not matter, Padrona. I know it too well.’

‘E see you?’ asked Mrs Plornish.

‘No. I hope not. I believe not.’

‘He says,’ Mrs Plornish then interpreted, addressing her father and
Pancks with mild condescension, ‘that he has met a bad man, but he hopes
the bad man didn’t see him--Why,’ inquired Mrs Plornish, reverting to
the Italian language, ‘why ope bad man no see?’

‘Padrona, dearest,’ returned the little foreigner whom she so
considerately protected, ‘do not ask, I pray. Once again I say it
matters not. I have fear of this man. I do not wish to see him, I do not
wish to be known of him--never again! Enough, most beautiful. Leave it.’

The topic was so disagreeable to him, and so put his usual liveliness to
the rout, that Mrs Plornish forbore to press him further: the rather as
the tea had been drawing for some time on the hob. But she was not the
less surprised and curious for asking no more questions; neither was
Mr Pancks, whose expressive breathing had been labouring hard since the
entrance of the little man, like a locomotive engine with a great load
getting up a steep incline. Maggy, now better dressed than of yore,
though still faithful to the monstrous character of her cap, had been
in the background from the first with open mouth and eyes, which staring
and gaping features were not diminished in breadth by the untimely
suppression of the subject. However, no more was said about it, though
much appeared to be thought on all sides: by no means excepting the two
young Plornishes, who partook of the evening meal as if their eating
the bread and butter were rendered almost superfluous by the painful
probability of the worst of men shortly presenting himself for the
purpose of eating them. Mr Baptist, by degrees began to chirp a little;
but never stirred from the seat he had taken behind the door and close
to the window, though it was not his usual place. As often as the little
bell rang, he started and peeped out secretly, with the end of the
little curtain in his hand and the rest before his face; evidently not
at all satisfied but that the man he dreaded had tracked him through all
his doublings and turnings, with the certainty of a terrible bloodhound.

The entrance, at various times, of two or three customers and of Mr
Plornish, gave Mr Baptist just enough of this employment to keep the
attention of the company fixed upon him. Tea was over, and the children
were abed, and Mrs Plornish was feeling her way to the dutiful proposal
that her father should favour them with Chloe, when the bell rang again,
and Mr Clennam came in.

Clennam had been poring late over his books and letters; for the
waiting-rooms of the Circumlocution Office ravaged his time sorely.
Over and above that, he was depressed and made uneasy by the late
occurrence at his mother’s. He looked worn and solitary. He felt so,
too; but, nevertheless, was returning home from his counting-house by
that end of the Yard to give them the intelligence that he had received
another letter from Miss Dorrit.

The news made a sensation in the cottage which drew off the general
attention from Mr Baptist. Maggy, who pushed her way into the foreground
immediately, would have seemed to draw in the tidings of her Little
Mother equally at her ears, nose, mouth, and eyes, but that the last
were obstructed by tears. She was particularly delighted when Clennam
assured her that there were hospitals, and very kindly conducted
hospitals, in Rome. Mr Pancks rose into new distinction in virtue of
being specially remembered in the letter. Everybody was pleased and
interested, and Clennam was well repaid for his trouble.

‘But you are tired, sir. Let me make you a cup of tea,’ said Mrs
Plornish, ‘if you’d condescend to take such a thing in the cottage; and
many thanks to you, too, I am sure, for bearing us in mind so kindly.’

Mr Plornish deeming it incumbent on him, as host, to add his personal
acknowledgments, tendered them in the form which always expressed his
highest ideal of a combination of ceremony with sincerity.

‘John Edward Nandy,’ said Mr Plornish, addressing the old gentleman.
‘Sir. It’s not too often that you see unpretending actions without a
spark of pride, and therefore when you see them give grateful honour
unto the same, being that if you don’t, and live to want ‘em, it follows
serve you right.’

To which Mr Nandy replied:

‘I am heartily of your opinion, Thomas, and which your opinion is the
same as mine, and therefore no more words and not being backwards
with that opinion, which opinion giving it as yes, Thomas, yes, is the
opinion in which yourself and me must ever be unanimously jined by all,
and where there is not difference of opinion there can be none but one
opinion, which fully no, Thomas, Thomas, no!’

Arthur, with less formality, expressed himself gratified by their high
appreciation of so very slight an attention on his part; and explained
as to the tea that he had not yet dined, and was going straight home to
refresh after a long day’s labour, or he would have readily accepted the
hospitable offer. As Mr Pancks was somewhat noisily getting his steam
up for departure, he concluded by asking that gentleman if he would walk
with him? Mr Pancks said he desired no better engagement, and the two
took leave of Happy Cottage.

‘If you will come home with me, Pancks,’ said Arthur, when they got into
the street, ‘and will share what dinner or supper there is, it will
be next door to an act of charity; for I am weary and out of sorts
to-night.’

‘Ask me to do a greater thing than that,’ said Pancks, ‘when you want it
done, and I’ll do it.’

Between this eccentric personage and Clennam, a tacit understanding and
accord had been always improving since Mr Pancks flew over Mr Rugg’s
back in the Marshalsea Yard. When the carriage drove away on the
memorable day of the family’s departure, these two had looked after it
together, and had walked slowly away together. When the first letter
came from little Dorrit, nobody was more interested in hearing of
her than Mr Pancks. The second letter, at that moment in Clennam’s
breast-pocket, particularly remembered him by name. Though he had never
before made any profession or protestation to Clennam, and though what
he had just said was little enough as to the words in which it was
expressed, Clennam had long had a growing belief that Mr Pancks, in
his own odd way, was becoming attached to him. All these strings
intertwining made Pancks a very cable of anchorage that night.

‘I am quite alone,’ Arthur explained as they walked on. ‘My partner is
away, busily engaged at a distance on his branch of our business, and
you shall do just as you like.’

‘Thank you. You didn’t take particular notice of little Altro just now;
did you?’ said Pancks.

‘No. Why?’

‘He’s a bright fellow, and I like him,’ said Pancks. ‘Something has
gone amiss with him to-day. Have you any idea of any cause that can have
overset him?’

‘You surprise me! None whatever.’

Mr Pancks gave his reasons for the inquiry. Arthur was quite unprepared
for them, and quite unable to suggest an explanation of them.

‘Perhaps you’ll ask him,’ said Pancks, ‘as he’s a stranger?’

‘Ask him what?’ returned Clennam.

‘What he has on his mind.’

‘I ought first to see for myself that he has something on his mind, I
think,’ said Clennam. ‘I have found him in every way so diligent, so
grateful (for little enough), and so trustworthy, that it might look
like suspecting him. And that would be very unjust.’

‘True,’ said Pancks. ‘But, I say! You oughtn’t to be anybody’s
proprietor, Mr Clennam. You’re much too delicate.’

‘For the matter of that,’ returned Clennam laughing, ‘I have not a large
proprietary share in Cavalletto. His carving is his livelihood. He keeps
the keys of the Factory, watches it every alternate night, and acts as a
sort of housekeeper to it generally; but we have little work in the way
of his ingenuity, though we give him what we have. No! I am rather his
adviser than his proprietor. To call me his standing counsel and his
banker would be nearer the fact. Speaking of being his banker, is it not
curious, Pancks, that the ventures which run just now in so many
people’s heads, should run even in little Cavalletto’s?’

‘Ventures?’ retorted Pancks, with a snort. ‘What ventures?’

‘These Merdle enterprises.’

‘Oh! Investments,’ said Pancks. ‘Ay, ay! I didn’t know you were speaking
of investments.’

His quick way of replying caused Clennam to look at him, with a doubt
whether he meant more than he said. As it was accompanied, however, with
a quickening of his pace and a corresponding increase in the labouring
of his machinery, Arthur did not pursue the matter, and they soon
arrived at his house.

A dinner of soup and a pigeon-pie, served on a little round table before
the fire, and flavoured with a bottle of good wine, oiled Mr Pancks’s
works in a highly effective manner; so that when Clennam produced his
Eastern pipe, and handed Mr Pancks another Eastern pipe, the latter
gentleman was perfectly comfortable.

They puffed for a while in silence, Mr Pancks like a steam-vessel
with wind, tide, calm water, and all other sea-going conditions in her
favour. He was the first to speak, and he spoke thus:

‘Yes. Investments is the word.’

Clennam, with his former look, said ‘Ah!’

‘I am going back to it, you see,’ said Pancks.

‘Yes. I see you are going back to it,’ returned Clennam, wondering why.

‘Wasn’t it a curious thing that they should run in little Altro’s head?
Eh?’ said Pancks as he smoked. ‘Wasn’t that how you put it?’

‘That was what I said.’

‘Ay! But think of the whole Yard having got it. Think of their
all meeting me with it, on my collecting days, here and there and
everywhere. Whether they pay, or whether they don’t pay. Merdle, Merdle,
Merdle. Always Merdle.’

‘Very strange how these runs on an infatuation prevail,’ said Arthur.

‘An’t it?’ returned Pancks. After smoking for a minute or so, more drily
than comported with his recent oiling, he added: ‘Because you see these
people don’t understand the subject.’

‘Not a bit,’ assented Clennam.

‘Not a bit,’ cried Pancks. ‘Know nothing of figures. Know nothing of
money questions. Never made a calculation. Never worked it, sir!’

‘If they had--’ Clennam was going on to say; when Mr Pancks, without
change of countenance, produced a sound so far surpassing all his usual
efforts, nasal or bronchial, that he stopped.

‘If they had?’ repeated Pancks in an inquiring tone.

‘I thought you--spoke,’ said Arthur, hesitating what name to give the
interruption.

‘Not at all,’ said Pancks. ‘Not yet. I may in a minute. If they had?’

‘If they had,’ observed Clennam, who was a little at a loss how to take
his friend, ‘why, I suppose they would have known better.’

‘How so, Mr Clennam?’ Pancks asked quickly, and with an odd effect of
having been from the commencement of the conversation loaded with the
heavy charge he now fired off. ‘They’re right, you know. They don’t mean
to be, but they’re right.’

‘Right in sharing Cavalletto’s inclination to speculate with Mr Merdle?’

‘Per-fectly, sir,’ said Pancks. ‘I’ve gone into it. I’ve made the
calculations. I’ve worked it. They’re safe and genuine.’ Relieved by
having got to this, Mr Pancks took as long a pull as his lungs would
permit at his Eastern pipe, and looked sagaciously and steadily at
Clennam while inhaling and exhaling too.

In those moments, Mr Pancks began to give out the dangerous infection
with which he was laden. It is the manner of communicating these
diseases; it is the subtle way in which they go about.

‘Do you mean, my good Pancks,’ asked Clennam emphatically, ‘that you
would put that thousand pounds of yours, let us say, for instance, out
at this kind of interest?’

‘Certainly,’ said Pancks. ‘Already done it, sir.’

Mr Pancks took another long inhalation, another long exhalation, another
long sagacious look at Clennam.

‘I tell you, Mr Clennam, I’ve gone into it,’ said Pancks. ‘He’s a man of
immense resources--enormous capital--government influence. They’re the
best schemes afloat. They’re safe. They’re certain.’

‘Well!’ returned Clennam, looking first at him gravely and then at the
fire gravely. ‘You surprise me!’

‘Bah!’ Pancks retorted. ‘Don’t say that, sir. It’s what you ought to do
yourself! Why don’t you do as I do?’

Of whom Mr Pancks had taken the prevalent disease, he could no more have
told than if he had unconsciously taken a fever. Bred at first, as many
physical diseases are, in the wickedness of men, and then disseminated
in their ignorance, these epidemics, after a period, get communicated to
many sufferers who are neither ignorant nor wicked. Mr Pancks might, or
might not, have caught the illness himself from a subject of this class;
but in this category he appeared before Clennam, and the infection he
threw off was all the more virulent.

‘And you have really invested,’ Clennam had already passed to that word,
‘your thousand pounds, Pancks?’

‘To be sure, sir!’ replied Pancks boldly, with a puff of smoke. ‘And
only wish it ten!’

Now, Clennam had two subjects lying heavy on his lonely mind that night;
the one, his partner’s long-deferred hope; the other, what he had seen
and heard at his mother’s. In the relief of having this companion,
and of feeling that he could trust him, he passed on to both, and both
brought him round again, with an increase and acceleration of force, to
his point of departure.

It came about in the simplest manner. Quitting the investment subject,
after an interval of silent looking at the fire through the smoke of his
pipe, he told Pancks how and why he was occupied with the great National
Department. ‘A hard case it has been, and a hard case it is on Doyce,’
he finished by saying, with all the honest feeling the topic roused in
him.

‘Hard indeed,’ Pancks acquiesced. ‘But you manage for him, Mr Clennam?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Manage the money part of the business?’

‘Yes. As well as I can.’

‘Manage it better, sir,’ said Pancks. ‘Recompense him for his toils and
disappointments. Give him the chances of the time. He’ll never benefit
himself in that way, patient and preoccupied workman. He looks to you,
sir.’

‘I do my best, Pancks,’ returned Clennam, uneasily. ‘As to duly weighing
and considering these new enterprises of which I have had no experience,
I doubt if I am fit for it, I am growing old.’

‘Growing old?’ cried Pancks. ‘Ha, ha!’

There was something so indubitably genuine in the wonderful laugh, and
series of snorts and puffs, engendered in Mr Pancks’s astonishment at,
and utter rejection of, the idea, that his being quite in earnest could
not be questioned.

‘Growing old?’ cried Pancks. ‘Hear, hear, hear! Old? Hear him, hear
him!’

The positive refusal expressed in Mr Pancks’s continued snorts, no less
than in these exclamations, to entertain the sentiment for a single
instant, drove Arthur away from it. Indeed, he was fearful of something
happening to Mr Pancks in the violent conflict that took place between
the breath he jerked out of himself and the smoke he jerked into
himself. This abandonment of the second topic threw him on the third.

‘Young, old, or middle-aged, Pancks,’ he said, when there was a
favourable pause, ‘I am in a very anxious and uncertain state; a state
that even leads me to doubt whether anything now seeming to belong to
me, may be really mine. Shall I tell you how this is? Shall I put a
great trust in you?’

‘You shall, sir,’ said Pancks, ‘if you believe me worthy of it.’

‘I do.’

‘You may!’ Mr Pancks’s short and sharp rejoinder, confirmed by the
sudden outstretching of his coaly hand, was most expressive and
convincing. Arthur shook the hand warmly.

He then, softening the nature of his old apprehensions as much as was
possible consistently with their being made intelligible and never
alluding to his mother by name, but speaking vaguely of a relation
of his, confided to Mr Pancks a broad outline of the misgivings he
entertained, and of the interview he had witnessed. Mr Pancks listened
with such interest that, regardless of the charms of the Eastern pipe,
he put it in the grate among the fire-irons, and occupied his hands
during the whole recital in so erecting the loops and hooks of hair
all over his head, that he looked, when it came to a conclusion, like a
journeyman Hamlet in conversation with his father’s spirit.

‘Brings me back, sir,’ was his exclamation then, with a startling touch
on Clennam’s knee, ‘brings me back, sir, to the Investments! I don’t
say anything of your making yourself poor to repair a wrong you never
committed. That’s you. A man must be himself. But I say this,
fearing you may want money to save your own blood from exposure and
disgrace--make as much as you can!’

Arthur shook his head, but looked at him thoughtfully too.

‘Be as rich as you can, sir,’ Pancks adjured him with a powerful
concentration of all his energies on the advice. ‘Be as rich as you
honestly can. It’s your duty. Not for your sake, but for the sake of
others. Take time by the forelock. Poor Mr Doyce (who really _is_ growing
old) depends upon you. Your relative depends upon you. You don’t know
what depends upon you.’

‘Well, well, well!’ returned Arthur. ‘Enough for to-night.’

‘One word more, Mr Clennam,’ retorted Pancks, ‘and then enough for
to-night. Why should you leave all the gains to the gluttons, knaves,
and impostors? Why should you leave all the gains that are to be got to
my proprietor and the like of him? Yet you’re always doing it. When I
say you, I mean such men as you. You know you are. Why, I see it
every day of my life. I see nothing else. It’s my business to see it.
Therefore I say,’ urged Pancks, ‘Go in and win!’

‘But what of Go in and lose?’ said Arthur.

‘Can’t be done, sir,’ returned Pancks. ‘I have looked into it. Name up
everywhere--immense resources--enormous capital--great position--high
connection--government influence. Can’t be done!’

Gradually, after this closing exposition, Mr Pancks subsided; allowed
his hair to droop as much as it ever would droop on the utmost
persuasion; reclaimed the pipe from the fire-irons, filled it anew, and
smoked it out. They said little more; but were company to one another in
silently pursuing the same subjects, and did not part until midnight.
On taking his leave, Mr Pancks, when he had shaken hands with Clennam,
worked completely round him before he steamed out at the door. This,
Arthur received as an assurance that he might implicitly rely on Pancks,
if he ever should come to need assistance; either in any of the matters
of which they had spoken that night, or any other subject that could in
any way affect himself.

At intervals all next day, and even while his attention was fixed on
other things, he thought of Mr Pancks’s investment of his thousand
pounds, and of his having ‘looked into it.’ He thought of Mr Pancks’s
being so sanguine in this matter, and of his not being usually of a
sanguine character. He thought of the great National Department, and of
the delight it would be to him to see Doyce better off. He thought
of the darkly threatening place that went by the name of Home in his
remembrance, and of the gathering shadows which made it yet more darkly
threatening than of old. He observed anew that wherever he went, he
saw, or heard, or touched, the celebrated name of Merdle; he found it
difficult even to remain at his desk a couple of hours, without having
it presented to one of his bodily senses through some agency or other.
He began to think it was curious too that it should be everywhere, and
that nobody but he should seem to have any mistrust of it. Though indeed
he began to remember, when he got to this, even _he_ did not mistrust it;
he had only happened to keep aloof from it.

Such symptoms, when a disease of the kind is rife, are usually the signs
of sickening.




CHAPTER 14. Taking Advice


When it became known to the Britons on the shore of the yellow Tiber
that their intelligent compatriot, Mr Sparkler, was made one of the
Lords of their Circumlocution Office, they took it as a piece of news
with which they had no nearer concern than with any other piece of
news--any other Accident or Offence--in the English papers. Some
laughed; some said, by way of complete excuse, that the post was
virtually a sinecure, and any fool who could spell his name was good
enough for it; some, and these the more solemn political oracles,
said that Decimus did wisely to strengthen himself, and that the sole
constitutional purpose of all places within the gift of Decimus, was,
that Decimus _should_ strengthen himself. A few bilious Britons there were
who would not subscribe to this article of faith; but their objection
was purely theoretical. In a practical point of view, they listlessly
abandoned the matter, as being the business of some other Britons
unknown, somewhere, or nowhere. In like manner, at home, great numbers
of Britons maintained, for as long as four-and-twenty consecutive hours,
that those invisible and anonymous Britons ‘ought to take it up;’ and
that if they quietly acquiesced in it, they deserved it. But of what
class the remiss Britons were composed, and where the unlucky creatures
hid themselves, and why they hid themselves, and how it constantly
happened that they neglected their interests, when so many other Britons
were quite at a loss to account for their not looking after those
interests, was not, either upon the shore of the yellow Tiber or the
shore of the black Thames, made apparent to men.

Mrs Merdle circulated the news, as she received congratulations on it,
with a careless grace that displayed it to advantage, as the setting
displays the jewel. Yes, she said, Edmund had taken the place. Mr Merdle
wished him to take it, and he had taken it. She hoped Edmund might like
it, but really she didn’t know. It would keep him in town a good
deal, and he preferred the country. Still, it was not a disagreeable
position--and it was a position. There was no denying that the thing
was a compliment to Mr Merdle, and was not a bad thing for Edmund if he
liked it. It was just as well that he should have something to do, and
it was just as well that he should have something for doing it. Whether
it would be more agreeable to Edmund than the army, remained to be seen.

Thus the Bosom; accomplished in the art of seeming to make things of
small account, and really enhancing them in the process. While Henry
Gowan, whom Decimus had thrown away, went through the whole round of
his acquaintance between the Gate of the People and the town of Albano,
vowing, almost (but not quite) with tears in his eyes, that Sparkler was
the sweetest-tempered, simplest-hearted, altogether most lovable jackass
that ever grazed on the public common; and that only one circumstance
could have delighted him (Gowan) more, than his (the beloved jackass’s)
getting this post, and that would have been his (Gowan’s) getting it
himself. He said it was the very thing for Sparkler. There was nothing
to do, and he would do it charmingly; there was a handsome salary to
draw, and he would draw it charmingly; it was a delightful, appropriate,
capital appointment; and he almost forgave the donor his slight of
himself, in his joy that the dear donkey for whom he had so great an
affection was so admirably stabled. Nor did his benevolence stop here.
He took pains, on all social occasions, to draw Mr Sparkler out, and
make him conspicuous before the company; and, although the considerate
action always resulted in that young gentleman’s making a dreary and
forlorn mental spectacle of himself, the friendly intention was not to
be doubted.

Unless, indeed, it chanced to be doubted by the object of Mr Sparkler’s
affections. Miss Fanny was now in the difficult situation of being
universally known in that light, and of not having dismissed Mr
Sparkler, however capriciously she used him. Hence, she was sufficiently
identified with the gentleman to feel compromised by his being more than
usually ridiculous; and hence, being by no means deficient in quickness,
she sometimes came to his rescue against Gowan, and did him very good
service. But, while doing this, she was ashamed of him, undetermined
whether to get rid of him or more decidedly encourage him, distracted
with apprehensions that she was every day becoming more and more
immeshed in her uncertainties, and tortured by misgivings that Mrs
Merdle triumphed in her distress. With this tumult in her mind, it is no
subject for surprise that Miss Fanny came home one night in a state
of agitation from a concert and ball at Mrs Merdle’s house, and on her
sister affectionately trying to soothe her, pushed that sister away from
the toilette-table at which she sat angrily trying to cry, and declared
with a heaving bosom that she detested everybody, and she wished she was
dead.

‘Dear Fanny, what is the matter? Tell me.’

‘Matter, you little Mole,’ said Fanny. ‘If you were not the blindest of
the blind, you would have no occasion to ask me. The idea of daring to
pretend to assert that you have eyes in your head, and yet ask me what’s
the matter!’

‘Is it Mr Sparkler, dear?’

‘Mis-ter Spark-ler!’ repeated Fanny, with unbounded scorn, as if he were
the last subject in the Solar system that could possibly be near her
mind. ‘No, Miss Bat, it is not.’

Immediately afterwards, she became remorseful for having called her
sister names; declaring with sobs that she knew she made herself
hateful, but that everybody drove her to it.

‘I don’t think you are well to-night, dear Fanny.’

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ replied the young lady, turning angry again; ‘I am
as well as you are. Perhaps I might say better, and yet make no boast of
it.’

Poor Little Dorrit, not seeing her way to the offering of any soothing
words that would escape repudiation, deemed it best to remain quiet. At
first, Fanny took this ill, too; protesting to her looking-glass, that
of all the trying sisters a girl could have, she did think the most
trying sister was a flat sister. That she knew she was at times a
wretched temper; that she knew she made herself hateful; that when she
made herself hateful, nothing would do her half the good as being told
so; but that, being afflicted with a flat sister, she never _was_ told so,
and the consequence resulted that she was absolutely tempted and
goaded into making herself disagreeable. Besides (she angrily told
her looking-glass), she didn’t want to be forgiven. It was not a right
example, that she should be constantly stooping to be forgiven by a
younger sister. And this was the Art of it--that she was always being
placed in the position of being forgiven, whether she liked it or not.
Finally she burst into violent weeping, and, when her sister came and
sat close at her side to comfort her, said, ‘Amy, you’re an Angel!’

‘But, I tell you what, my Pet,’ said Fanny, when her sister’s gentleness
had calmed her, ‘it now comes to this; that things cannot and shall not
go on as they are at present going on, and that there must be an end of
this, one way or another.’

As the announcement was vague, though very peremptory, Little Dorrit
returned, ‘Let us talk about it.’

‘Quite so, my dear,’ assented Fanny, as she dried her eyes. ‘Let us talk
about it. I am rational again now, and you shall advise me. _Will_ you
advise me, my sweet child?’

Even Amy smiled at this notion, but she said, ‘I will, Fanny, as well as
I can.’

‘Thank you, dearest Amy,’ returned Fanny, kissing her. ‘You are my
anchor.’

Having embraced her Anchor with great affection, Fanny took a bottle of
sweet toilette water from the table, and called to her maid for a fine
handkerchief. She then dismissed that attendant for the night, and went
on to be advised; dabbing her eyes and forehead from time to time to
cool them.

‘My love,’ Fanny began, ‘our characters and points of view are
sufficiently different (kiss me again, my darling), to make it very
probable that I shall surprise you by what I am going to say. What I am
going to say, my dear, is, that notwithstanding our property, we labour,
socially speaking, under disadvantages. You don’t quite understand what
I mean, Amy?’

‘I have no doubt I shall,’ said Amy, mildly, ‘after a few words more.’

‘Well, my dear, what I mean is, that we are, after all, newcomers into
fashionable life.’

‘I am sure, Fanny,’ Little Dorrit interposed in her zealous admiration,
‘no one need find that out in you.’

‘Well, my dear child, perhaps not,’ said Fanny, ‘though it’s most kind
and most affectionate in you, you precious girl, to say so.’ Here she
dabbed her sister’s forehead, and blew upon it a little. ‘But you are,’
resumed Fanny, ‘as is well known, the dearest little thing that ever
was! To resume, my child. Pa is extremely gentlemanly and extremely well
informed, but he is, in some trifling respects, a little different from
other gentlemen of his fortune: partly on account of what he has gone
through, poor dear: partly, I fancy, on account of its often running in
his mind that other people are thinking about that, while he is talking
to them. Uncle, my love, is altogether unpresentable. Though a dear
creature to whom I am tenderly attached, he is, socially speaking,
shocking. Edward is frightfully expensive and dissipated. I don’t mean
that there is anything ungenteel in that itself--far from it--but I
do mean that he doesn’t do it well, and that he doesn’t, if I may
so express myself, get the money’s-worth in the sort of dissipated
reputation that attaches to him.’

‘Poor Edward!’ sighed Little Dorrit, with the whole family history in
the sigh.

‘Yes. And poor you and me, too,’ returned Fanny, rather sharply.
‘Very true! Then, my dear, we have no mother, and we have a Mrs General.
And I tell you again, darling, that Mrs General, if I may reverse a
common proverb and adapt it to her, is a cat in gloves who _will_
catch mice. That woman, I am quite sure and confident, will be our
mother-in-law.’

‘I can hardly think, Fanny--’ Fanny stopped her.

‘Now, don’t argue with me about it, Amy,’ said she, ‘because I know
better.’ Feeling that she had been sharp again, she dabbed her sister’s
forehead again, and blew upon it again. ‘To resume once more, my dear.
It then becomes a question with me (I am proud and spirited, Amy, as you
very well know: too much so, I dare say) whether I shall make up my mind
to take it upon myself to carry the family through.’

‘How?’ asked her sister, anxiously.

‘I will not,’ said Fanny, without answering the question, ‘submit to
be mother-in-lawed by Mrs General; and I will not submit to be, in any
respect whatever, either patronised or tormented by Mrs Merdle.’

Little Dorrit laid her hand upon the hand that held the bottle of sweet
water, with a still more anxious look. Fanny, quite punishing her own
forehead with the vehement dabs she now began to give it, fitfully went
on.

‘That he has somehow or other, and how is of no consequence, attained a
very good position, no one can deny. That it is a very good connection,
no one can deny. And as to the question of clever or not clever, I doubt
very much whether a clever husband would be suitable to me. I cannot
submit. I should not be able to defer to him enough.’

‘O, my dear Fanny!’ expostulated Little Dorrit, upon whom a kind of
terror had been stealing as she perceived what her sister meant. ‘If you
loved any one, all this feeling would change. If you loved any one, you
would no more be yourself, but you would quite lose and forget yourself
in your devotion to him. If you loved him, Fanny--’ Fanny had stopped
the dabbing hand, and was looking at her fixedly.

‘O, indeed!’ cried Fanny. ‘Really? Bless me, how much some people know
of some subjects! They say every one has a subject, and I certainly
seem to have hit upon yours, Amy. There, you little thing, I was only in
fun,’ dabbing her sister’s forehead; ‘but don’t you be a silly puss,
and don’t you think flightily and eloquently about degenerate
impossibilities. There! Now, I’ll go back to myself.’

‘Dear Fanny, let me say first, that I would far rather we worked for
a scanty living again than I would see you rich and married to Mr
Sparkler.’

‘_Let_ you say, my dear?’ retorted Fanny. ‘Why, of course, I will _let_
you say anything. There is no constraint upon you, I hope. We are
together to talk it over. And as to marrying Mr Sparkler, I have not the
slightest intention of doing so to-night, my dear, or to-morrow morning
either.’

‘But at some time?’

‘At no time, for anything I know at present,’ answered Fanny, with
indifference. Then, suddenly changing her indifference into a burning
restlessness, she added, ‘You talk about the clever men, you little
thing! It’s all very fine and easy to talk about the clever men; but
where are they? _I_ don’t see them anywhere near _me_!’

‘My dear Fanny, so short a time--’

‘Short time or long time,’ interrupted Fanny. ‘I am impatient of our
situation. I don’t like our situation, and very little would induce
me to change it. Other girls, differently reared and differently
circumstanced altogether, might wonder at what I say or may do. Let
them. They are driven by their lives and characters; I am driven by
mine.’

‘Fanny, my dear Fanny, you know that you have qualities to make you the
wife of one very superior to Mr Sparkler.’

‘Amy, my dear Amy,’ retorted Fanny, parodying her words, ‘I know that I
wish to have a more defined and distinct position, in which I can assert
myself with greater effect against that insolent woman.’

‘Would you therefore--forgive my asking, Fanny--therefore marry her
son?’

‘Why, perhaps,’ said Fanny, with a triumphant smile. ‘There may be many
less promising ways of arriving at an end than that, my dear. That piece
of insolence may think, now, that it would be a great success to get her
son off upon me, and shelve me. But, perhaps, she little thinks how I
would retort upon her if I married her son. I would oppose her in
everything, and compete with her. I would make it the business of my
life.’

Fanny set down the bottle when she came to this, and walked about the
room; always stopping and standing still while she spoke.

‘One thing I could certainly do, my child: I could make her older. And I
would!’

This was followed by another walk.

‘I would talk of her as an old woman. I would pretend to know--if I
didn’t, but I should from her son--all about her age. And she should
hear me say, Amy: affectionately, quite dutifully and affectionately:
how well she looked, considering her time of life. I could make her seem
older at once, by being myself so much younger. I may not be as handsome
as she is; I am not a fair judge of that question, I suppose; but I know
I am handsome enough to be a thorn in her side. And I would be!’

‘My dear sister, would you condemn yourself to an unhappy life for
this?’

‘It wouldn’t be an unhappy life, Amy. It would be the life I am fitted
for. Whether by disposition, or whether by circumstances, is no matter;
I am better fitted for such a life than for almost any other.’

There was something of a desolate tone in those words; but, with a
short proud laugh she took another walk, and after passing a great
looking-glass came to another stop.

‘Figure! Figure, Amy! Well. The woman has a good figure. I will give her
her due, and not deny it. But is it so far beyond all others that it is
altogether unapproachable? Upon my word, I am not so sure of it. Give
some much younger woman the latitude as to dress that she has, being
married; and we would see about that, my dear!’

Something in the thought that was agreeable and flattering, brought her
back to her seat in a gayer temper. She took her sister’s hands in hers,
and clapped all four hands above her head as she looked in her sister’s
face laughing:

‘And the dancer, Amy, that she has quite forgotten--the dancer who bore
no sort of resemblance to me, and of whom I never remind her, oh dear
no!--should dance through her life, and dance in her way, to such a tune
as would disturb her insolent placidity a little. Just a little, my dear
Amy, just a little!’

Meeting an earnest and imploring look in Amy’s face, she brought the
four hands down, and laid only one on Amy’s lips.

‘Now, don’t argue with me, child,’ she said in a sterner way, ‘because
it is of no use. I understand these subjects much better than you do. I
have not nearly made up my mind, but it may be. Now we have talked this
over comfortably, and may go to bed. You best and dearest little mouse,
Good night!’ With those words Fanny weighed her Anchor, and--having
taken so much advice--left off being advised for that occasion.

Thenceforward, Amy observed Mr Sparkler’s treatment by his enslaver,
with new reasons for attaching importance to all that passed between
them. There were times when Fanny appeared quite unable to endure his
mental feebleness, and when she became so sharply impatient of it that
she would all but dismiss him for good. There were other times when she
got on much better with him; when he amused her, and when her sense of
superiority seemed to counterbalance that opposite side of the scale. If
Mr Sparkler had been other than the faithfullest and most submissive of
swains, he was sufficiently hard pressed to have fled from the scene of
his trials, and have set at least the whole distance from Rome to London
between himself and his enchantress. But he had no greater will of his
own than a boat has when it is towed by a steam-ship; and he followed
his cruel mistress through rough and smooth, on equally strong
compulsion.

Mrs Merdle, during these passages, said little to Fanny, but said
more about her. She was, as it were, forced to look at her through her
eye-glass, and in general conversation to allow commendations of her
beauty to be wrung from her by its irresistible demands. The defiant
character it assumed when Fanny heard these extollings (as it generally
happened that she did), was not expressive of concessions to the
impartial bosom; but the utmost revenge the bosom took was, to say
audibly, ‘A spoilt beauty--but with that face and shape, who could
wonder?’

It might have been about a month or six weeks after the night of the
new advice, when Little Dorrit began to think she detected some new
understanding between Mr Sparkler and Fanny. Mr Sparkler, as if in
attendance to some compact, scarcely ever spoke without first looking
towards Fanny for leave. That young lady was too discreet ever to look
back again; but, if Mr Sparkler had permission to speak, she remained
silent; if he had not, she herself spoke. Moreover, it became plain
whenever Henry Gowan attempted to perform the friendly office of drawing
him out, that he was not to be drawn. And not only that, but Fanny would
presently, without any pointed application in the world, chance to say
something with such a sting in it that Gowan would draw back as if he
had put his hand into a bee-hive.

There was yet another circumstance which went a long way to confirm
Little Dorrit in her fears, though it was not a great circumstance
in itself. Mr Sparkler’s demeanour towards herself changed. It became
fraternal. Sometimes, when she was in the outer circle of assemblies--at
their own residence, at Mrs Merdle’s, or elsewhere--she would find
herself stealthily supported round the waist by Mr Sparkler’s arm. Mr
Sparkler never offered the slightest explanation of this attention;
but merely smiled with an air of blundering, contented, good-natured
proprietorship, which, in so heavy a gentleman, was ominously
expressive.

Little Dorrit was at home one day, thinking about Fanny with a heavy
heart. They had a room at one end of their drawing-room suite, nearly
all irregular bay-window, projecting over the street, and commanding
all the picturesque life and variety of the Corso, both up and down. At
three or four o’clock in the afternoon, English time, the view from this
window was very bright and peculiar; and Little Dorrit used to sit
and muse here, much as she had been used to while away the time in her
balcony at Venice. Seated thus one day, she was softly touched on the
shoulder, and Fanny said, ‘Well, Amy dear,’ and took her seat at her
side. Their seat was a part of the window; when there was anything in
the way of a procession going on, they used to have bright draperies
hung out of the window, and used to kneel or sit on this seat, and look
out at it, leaning on the brilliant colour. But there was no procession
that day, and Little Dorrit was rather surprised by Fanny’s being at
home at that hour, as she was generally out on horseback then.

‘Well, Amy,’ said Fanny, ‘what are you thinking of, little one?’

‘I was thinking of you, Fanny.’

‘No? What a coincidence! I declare here’s some one else. You were not
thinking of this some one else too; were you, Amy?’

Amy _had_ been thinking of this some one else too; for it was Mr Sparkler.
She did not say so, however, as she gave him her hand. Mr Sparkler
came and sat down on the other side of her, and she felt the fraternal
railing come behind her, and apparently stretch on to include Fanny.

‘Well, my little sister,’ said Fanny with a sigh, ‘I suppose you know
what this means?’

‘She’s as beautiful as she’s doated on,’ stammered Mr Sparkler--‘and
there’s no nonsense about her--it’s arranged--’

‘You needn’t explain, Edmund,’ said Fanny.

‘No, my love,’ said Mr Sparkler.

‘In short, pet,’ proceeded Fanny, ‘on the whole, we are engaged. We
must tell papa about it either to-night or to-morrow, according to the
opportunities. Then it’s done, and very little more need be said.’

‘My dear Fanny,’ said Mr Sparkler, with deference, ‘I should like to say
a word to Amy.’

‘Well, well! Say it for goodness’ sake,’ returned the young lady.

‘I am convinced, my dear Amy,’ said Mr Sparkler, ‘that if ever there
was a girl, next to your highly endowed and beautiful sister, who had no
nonsense about her--’

‘We know all about that, Edmund,’ interposed Miss Fanny. ‘Never mind
that. Pray go on to something else besides our having no nonsense about
us.’

‘Yes, my love,’ said Mr Sparkler. ‘And I assure you, Amy, that nothing
can be a greater happiness to myself, myself--next to the happiness of
being so highly honoured with the choice of a glorious girl who hasn’t
an atom of--’

‘Pray, Edmund, pray!’ interrupted Fanny, with a slight pat of her pretty
foot upon the floor.

‘My love, you’re quite right,’ said Mr Sparkler, ‘and I know I have a
habit of it. What I wished to declare was, that nothing can be a greater
happiness to myself, myself-next to the happiness of being united to
pre-eminently the most glorious of girls--than to have the happiness
of cultivating the affectionate acquaintance of Amy. I may not myself,’
said Mr Sparkler manfully, ‘be up to the mark on some other subjects
at a short notice, and I am aware that if you were to poll Society the
general opinion would be that I am not; but on the subject of Amy I AM
up to the mark!’

Mr Sparkler kissed her, in witness thereof.

‘A knife and fork and an apartment,’ proceeded Mr Sparkler, growing, in
comparison with his oratorical antecedents, quite diffuse, ‘will ever
be at Amy’s disposal. My Governor, I am sure, will always be proud to
entertain one whom I so much esteem. And regarding my mother,’ said Mr
Sparkler, ‘who is a remarkably fine woman, with--’

‘Edmund, Edmund!’ cried Miss Fanny, as before.

‘With submission, my soul,’ pleaded Mr Sparkler. ‘I know I have a habit
of it, and I thank you very much, my adorable girl, for taking the
trouble to correct it; but my mother is admitted on all sides to be a
remarkably fine woman, and she really hasn’t any.’

‘That may be, or may not be,’ returned Fanny, ‘but pray don’t mention it
any more.’

‘I will not, my love,’ said Mr Sparkler.

‘Then, in fact, you have nothing more to say, Edmund; have you?’
inquired Fanny.

‘So far from it, my adorable girl,’ answered Mr Sparkler, ‘I apologise
for having said so much.’

Mr Sparkler perceived, by a kind of inspiration, that the question
implied had he not better go? He therefore withdrew the fraternal
railing, and neatly said that he thought he would, with submission, take
his leave. He did not go without being congratulated by Amy, as well
as she could discharge that office in the flutter and distress of her
spirits.

When he was gone, she said, ‘O Fanny, Fanny!’ and turned to her sister
in the bright window, and fell upon her bosom and cried there. Fanny
laughed at first; but soon laid her face against her sister’s and cried
too--a little. It was the last time Fanny ever showed that there was any
hidden, suppressed, or conquered feeling in her on the matter. From that
hour the way she had chosen lay before her, and she trod it with her own
imperious self-willed step.




CHAPTER 15. No just Cause or Impediment why these Two Persons
should not be joined together


Mr Dorrit, on being informed by his elder daughter that she had accepted
matrimonial overtures from Mr Sparkler, to whom she had plighted her
troth, received the communication at once with great dignity and with a
large display of parental pride; his dignity dilating with the widened
prospect of advantageous ground from which to make acquaintances, and
his parental pride being developed by Miss Fanny’s ready sympathy with
that great object of his existence. He gave her to understand that her
noble ambition found harmonious echoes in his heart; and bestowed
his blessing on her, as a child brimful of duty and good principle,
self-devoted to the aggrandisement of the family name.

To Mr Sparkler, when Miss Fanny permitted him to appear, Mr Dorrit said,
he would not disguise that the alliance Mr Sparkler did him the honour
to propose was highly congenial to his feelings; both as being in unison
with the spontaneous affections of his daughter Fanny, and as opening
a family connection of a gratifying nature with Mr Merdle, the
master spirit of the age. Mrs Merdle also, as a leading lady rich in
distinction, elegance, grace, and beauty, he mentioned in very laudatory
terms. He felt it his duty to remark (he was sure a gentleman of Mr
Sparkler’s fine sense would interpret him with all delicacy), that he
could not consider this proposal definitely determined on, until he
should have had the privilege of holding some correspondence with Mr
Merdle; and of ascertaining it to be so far accordant with the views
of that eminent gentleman as that his (Mr Dorrit’s) daughter would be
received on that footing which her station in life and her dowry and
expectations warranted him in requiring that she should maintain in
what he trusted he might be allowed, without the appearance of being
mercenary, to call the Eye of the Great World. While saying this, which
his character as a gentleman of some little station, and his character
as a father, equally demanded of him, he would not be so diplomatic
as to conceal that the proposal remained in hopeful abeyance and
under conditional acceptance, and that he thanked Mr Sparkler for the
compliment rendered to himself and to his family. He concluded with
some further and more general observations on the--ha--character of an
independent gentleman, and the--hum--character of a possibly too
partial and admiring parent. To sum the whole up shortly, he received
Mr Sparkler’s offer very much as he would have received three or four
half-crowns from him in the days that were gone.

Mr Sparkler, finding himself stunned by the words thus heaped upon his
inoffensive head, made a brief though pertinent rejoinder; the same
being neither more nor less than that he had long perceived Miss Fanny
to have no nonsense about her, and that he had no doubt of its being all
right with his Governor. At that point the object of his affections shut
him up like a box with a spring lid, and sent him away.

Proceeding shortly afterwards to pay his respects to the Bosom, Mr
Dorrit was received by it with great consideration. Mrs Merdle had heard
of this affair from Edmund. She had been surprised at first, because she
had not thought Edmund a marrying man. Society had not thought Edmund
a marrying man. Still, of course she had seen, as a woman (we women
did instinctively see these things, Mr Dorrit!), that Edmund had been
immensely captivated by Miss Dorrit, and she had openly said that Mr
Dorrit had much to answer for in bringing so charming a girl abroad to
turn the heads of his countrymen.

‘Have I the honour to conclude, madam,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘that the
direction which Mr Sparkler’s affections have taken, is--ha-approved of
by you?’

‘I assure you, Mr Dorrit,’ returned the lady, ‘that, personally, I am
charmed.’

That was very gratifying to Mr Dorrit.

‘Personally,’ repeated Mrs Merdle, ‘charmed.’

This casual repetition of the word ‘personally,’ moved Mr Dorrit to
express his hope that Mr Merdle’s approval, too, would not be wanting?

‘I cannot,’ said Mrs Merdle, ‘take upon myself to answer positively for
Mr Merdle; gentlemen, especially gentlemen who are what Society calls
capitalists, having their own ideas of these matters. But I should
think--merely giving an opinion, Mr Dorrit--I should think Mr Merdle
would be upon the whole,’ here she held a review of herself before
adding at her leisure, ‘quite charmed.’

At the mention of gentlemen whom Society called capitalists, Mr Dorrit
had coughed, as if some internal demur were breaking out of him. Mrs
Merdle had observed it, and went on to take up the cue.

‘Though, indeed, Mr Dorrit, it is scarcely necessary for me to make that
remark, except in the mere openness of saying what is uppermost to one
whom I so highly regard, and with whom I hope I may have the pleasure
of being brought into still more agreeable relations. For one cannot
but see the great probability of your considering such things from Mr
Merdle’s own point of view, except indeed that circumstances have made
it Mr Merdle’s accidental fortune, or misfortune, to be engaged in
business transactions, and that they, however vast, may a little cramp
his horizons. I am a very child as to having any notion of business,’
said Mrs Merdle; ‘but I am afraid, Mr Dorrit, it may have that
tendency.’

This skilful see-saw of Mr Dorrit and Mrs Merdle, so that each of them
sent the other up, and each of them sent the other down, and neither
had the advantage, acted as a sedative on Mr Dorrit’s cough. He remarked
with his utmost politeness, that he must beg to protest against its
being supposed, even by Mrs Merdle, the accomplished and graceful
(to which compliment she bent herself), that such enterprises as Mr
Merdle’s, apart as they were from the puny undertakings of the rest of
men, had any lower tendency than to enlarge and expand the genius in
which they were conceived. ‘You are generosity itself,’ said Mrs Merdle
in return, smiling her best smile; ‘let us hope so. But I confess I am
almost superstitious in my ideas about business.’

Mr Dorrit threw in another compliment here, to the effect that business,
like the time which was precious in it, was made for slaves; and that it
was not for Mrs Merdle, who ruled all hearts at her supreme pleasure,
to have anything to do with it. Mrs Merdle laughed, and conveyed to
Mr Dorrit an idea that the Bosom flushed--which was one of her best
effects.

‘I say so much,’ she then explained, ‘merely because Mr Merdle has
always taken the greatest interest in Edmund, and has always expressed
the strongest desire to advance his prospects. Edmund’s public position,
I think you know. His private position rests solely with Mr Merdle. In
my foolish incapacity for business, I assure you I know no more.’

Mr Dorrit again expressed, in his own way, the sentiment that business
was below the ken of enslavers and enchantresses. He then mentioned his
intention, as a gentleman and a parent, of writing to Mr Merdle. Mrs
Merdle concurred with all her heart--or with all her art, which was
exactly the same thing--and herself despatched a preparatory letter by
the next post to the eighth wonder of the world.

In his epistolary communication, as in his dialogues and discourses on
the great question to which it related, Mr Dorrit surrounded the
subject with flourishes, as writing-masters embellish copy-books and
ciphering-books: where the titles of the elementary rules of
arithmetic diverge into swans, eagles, griffins, and other calligraphic
recreations, and where the capital letters go out of their minds and
bodies into ecstasies of pen and ink. Nevertheless, he did render the
purport of his letter sufficiently clear, to enable Mr Merdle to make a
decent pretence of having learnt it from that source. Mr Merdle replied
to it accordingly. Mr Dorrit replied to Mr Merdle; Mr Merdle replied to
Mr Dorrit; and it was soon announced that the corresponding powers had
come to a satisfactory understanding.

Now, and not before, Miss Fanny burst upon the scene, completely arrayed
for her new part. Now and not before, she wholly absorbed Mr Sparkler in
her light, and shone for both, and twenty more. No longer feeling that
want of a defined place and character which had caused her so much
trouble, this fair ship began to steer steadily on a shaped course, and
to swim with a weight and balance that developed her sailing qualities.

‘The preliminaries being so satisfactorily arranged, I think I will now,
my dear,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘announce--ha--formally, to Mrs General--’

‘Papa,’ returned Fanny, taking him up short upon that name, ‘I don’t see
what Mrs General has got to do with it.’

‘My dear,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘it will be an act of courtesy to--hum--a
lady, well bred and refined--’

‘Oh! I am sick of Mrs General’s good breeding and refinement, papa,’
said Fanny. ‘I am tired of Mrs General.’

‘Tired,’ repeated Mr Dorrit in reproachful astonishment, ‘of--ha--Mrs
General.’

‘Quite disgusted with her, papa,’ said Fanny. ‘I really don’t see what
she has to do with my marriage. Let her keep to her own matrimonial
projects--if she has any.’

‘Fanny,’ returned Mr Dorrit, with a grave and weighty slowness upon him,
contrasting strongly with his daughter’s levity: ‘I beg the favour of
your explaining--ha--what it is you mean.’

‘I mean, papa,’ said Fanny, ‘that if Mrs General should happen to have
any matrimonial projects of her own, I dare say they are quite enough to
occupy her spare time. And that if she has not, so much the better; but
still I don’t wish to have the honour of making announcements to her.’

‘Permit me to ask you, Fanny,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘why not?’

‘Because she can find my engagement out for herself, papa,’ retorted
Fanny. ‘She is watchful enough, I dare say. I think I have seen her
so. Let her find it out for herself. If she should not find it out for
herself, she will know it when I am married. And I hope you will not
consider me wanting in affection for you, papa, if I say it strikes me
that will be quite enough for Mrs General.’

‘Fanny,’ returned Mr Dorrit, ‘I am amazed, I am displeased by
this--hum--this capricious and unintelligible display of animosity
towards--ha--Mrs General.’

‘Do not, if you please, papa,’ urged Fanny, ‘call it animosity, because
I assure you I do not consider Mrs General worth my animosity.’

At this, Mr Dorrit rose from his chair with a fixed look of severe
reproof, and remained standing in his dignity before his daughter. His
daughter, turning the bracelet on her arm, and now looking at him, and
now looking from him, said, ‘Very well, papa. I am truly sorry if you
don’t like it; but I can’t help it. I am not a child, and I am not Amy,
and I must speak.’

‘Fanny,’ gasped Mr Dorrit, after a majestic silence, ‘if I request
you to remain here, while I formally announce to Mrs General, as
an exemplary lady, who is--hum--a trusted member of this family,
the--ha--the change that is contemplated among us; if I--ha--not only
request it, but--hum--insist upon it--’

‘Oh, papa,’ Fanny broke in with pointed significance, ‘if you make so
much of it as that, I have in duty nothing to do but comply. I hope I
may have my thoughts upon the subject, however, for I really cannot help
it under the circumstances.’ So, Fanny sat down with a meekness which,
in the junction of extremes, became defiance; and her father, either not
deigning to answer, or not knowing what to answer, summoned Mr Tinkler
into his presence.

‘Mrs General.’

Mr Tinkler, unused to receive such short orders in connection with the
fair varnisher, paused. Mr Dorrit, seeing the whole Marshalsea and all
its testimonials in the pause, instantly flew at him with, ‘How dare
you, sir? What do you mean?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ pleaded Mr Tinkler, ‘I was wishful to know--’

‘You wished to know nothing, sir,’ cried Mr Dorrit, highly flushed.
‘Don’t tell me you did. Ha. You didn’t. You are guilty of mockery, sir.’

‘I assure you, sir--’ Mr Tinkler began.

‘Don’t assure me!’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘I will not be assured by a
domestic. You are guilty of mockery. You shall leave me--hum--the whole
establishment shall leave me. What are you waiting for?’

‘Only for my orders, sir.’

‘It’s false,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘you have your orders. Ha--hum. My
compliments to Mrs General, and I beg the favour of her coming to me, if
quite convenient, for a few minutes. Those are your orders.’

In his execution of this mission, Mr Tinkler perhaps expressed that Mr
Dorrit was in a raging fume. However that was, Mrs General’s skirts were
very speedily heard outside, coming along--one might almost have said
bouncing along--with unusual expedition. Albeit, they settled down at
the door and swept into the room with their customary coolness.

‘Mrs General,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘take a chair.’

Mrs General, with a graceful curve of acknowledgment, descended into the
chair which Mr Dorrit offered.

‘Madam,’ pursued that gentleman, ‘as you have had the kindness to
undertake the--hum--formation of my daughters, and as I am persuaded
that nothing nearly affecting them can--ha--be indifferent to you--’

‘Wholly impossible,’ said Mrs General in the calmest of ways.

‘--I therefore wish to announce to you, madam, that my daughter now
present--’

Mrs General made a slight inclination of her head to Fanny, who made
a very low inclination of her head to Mrs General, and came loftily
upright again.

‘--That my daughter Fanny is--ha--contracted to be married to Mr
Sparkler, with whom you are acquainted. Hence, madam, you will be
relieved of half your difficult charge--ha--difficult charge.’ Mr
Dorrit repeated it with his angry eye on Fanny. ‘But not, I hope, to
the--hum--diminution of any other portion, direct or indirect, of the
footing you have at present the kindness to occupy in my family.’

‘Mr Dorrit,’ returned Mrs General, with her gloved hands resting on
one another in exemplary repose, ‘is ever considerate, and ever but too
appreciative of my friendly services.’

(Miss Fanny coughed, as much as to say, ‘You are right.’)

‘Miss Dorrit has no doubt exercised the soundest discretion of which
the circumstances admitted, and I trust will allow me to offer her my
sincere congratulations. When free from the trammels of passion,’ Mrs
General closed her eyes at the word, as if she could not utter it, and
see anybody; ‘when occurring with the approbation of near relatives;
and when cementing the proud structure of a family edifice; these are
usually auspicious events. I trust Miss Dorrit will allow me to offer
her my best congratulations.’

Here Mrs General stopped, and added internally, for the setting of her
face, ‘Papa, potatoes, poultry, Prunes, and prism.’

‘Mr Dorrit,’ she superadded aloud, ‘is ever most obliging; and for
the attention, and I will add distinction, of having this confidence
imparted to me by himself and Miss Dorrit at this early time, I beg to
offer the tribute of my thanks. My thanks, and my congratulations, are
equally the meed of Mr Dorrit and of Miss Dorrit.’

‘To me,’ observed Miss Fanny, ‘they are excessively
gratifying--inexpressibly so. The relief of finding that you have no
objection to make, Mrs General, quite takes a load off my mind, I am
sure. I hardly know what I should have done,’ said Fanny, ‘if you had
interposed any objection, Mrs General.’

Mrs General changed her gloves, as to the right glove being uppermost
and the left undermost, with a Prunes and Prism smile.

‘To preserve your approbation, Mrs General,’ said Fanny, returning the
smile with one in which there was no trace of those ingredients, ‘will
of course be the highest object of my married life; to lose it, would of
course be perfect wretchedness. I am sure your great kindness will
not object, and I hope papa will not object, to my correcting a
small mistake you have made, however. The best of us are so liable to
mistakes, that even you, Mrs General, have fallen into a little error.
The attention and distinction you have so impressively mentioned, Mrs
General, as attaching to this confidence, are, I have no doubt, of the
most complimentary and gratifying description; but they don’t at all
proceed from me. The merit of having consulted you on the subject would
have been so great in me, that I feel I must not lay claim to it when it
really is not mine. It is wholly papa’s. I am deeply obliged to you for
your encouragement and patronage, but it was papa who asked for it.
I have to thank you, Mrs General, for relieving my breast of a great
weight by so handsomely giving your consent to my engagement, but you
have really nothing to thank me for. I hope you will always approve of
my proceedings after I have left home and that my sister also may long
remain the favoured object of your condescension, Mrs General.’

With this address, which was delivered in her politest manner, Fanny
left the room with an elegant and cheerful air--to tear up-stairs with
a flushed face as soon as she was out of hearing, pounce in upon her
sister, call her a little Dormouse, shake her for the better opening of
her eyes, tell her what had passed below, and ask her what she thought
of Pa now?

Towards Mrs Merdle, the young lady comported herself with great
independence and self-possession; but not as yet with any more decided
opening of hostilities. Occasionally they had a slight skirmish, as when
Fanny considered herself patted on the back by that lady, or as when Mrs
Merdle looked particularly young and well; but Mrs Merdle always soon
terminated those passages of arms by sinking among her cushions with the
gracefullest indifference, and finding her attention otherwise engaged.
Society (for that mysterious creature sat upon the Seven Hills too)
found Miss Fanny vastly improved by her engagement. She was much more
accessible, much more free and engaging, much less exacting; insomuch
that she now entertained a host of followers and admirers, to the bitter
indignation of ladies with daughters to marry, who were to be regarded
as Having revolted from Society on the Miss Dorrit grievance, and
erected a rebellious standard. Enjoying the flutter she caused. Miss
Dorrit not only haughtily moved through it in her own proper person, but
haughtily, even Ostentatiously, led Mr Sparkler through it too: seeming
to say to them all, ‘If I think proper to march among you in triumphal
procession attended by this weak captive in bonds, rather than a
stronger one, that is my business. Enough that I choose to do it!’ Mr
Sparkler for his part, questioned nothing; but went wherever he was
taken, did whatever he was told, felt that for his bride-elect to be
distinguished was for him to be distinguished on the easiest terms, and
was truly grateful for being so openly acknowledged.

The winter passing on towards the spring while this condition of affairs
prevailed, it became necessary for Mr Sparkler to repair to England, and
take his appointed part in the expression and direction of its genius,
learning, commerce, spirit, and sense. The land of Shakespeare, Milton,
Bacon, Newton, Watt, the land of a host of past and present abstract
philosophers, natural philosophers, and subduers of Nature and Art in
their myriad forms, called to Mr Sparkler to come and take care of it,
lest it should perish. Mr Sparkler, unable to resist the agonised cry
from the depths of his country’s soul, declared that he must go.

It followed that the question was rendered pressing when, where, and
how Mr Sparkler should be married to the foremost girl in all this world
with no nonsense about her. Its solution, after some little mystery and
secrecy, Miss Fanny herself announced to her sister.

‘Now, my child,’ said she, seeking her out one day, ‘I am going to tell
you something. It is only this moment broached; and naturally I hurry to
you the moment it _is_ broached.’

‘Your marriage, Fanny?’

‘My precious child,’ said Fanny, ‘don’t anticipate me. Let me impart my
confidence to you, you flurried little thing, in my own way. As to your
guess, if I answered it literally, I should answer no. For really it is
not my marriage that is in question, half as much as it is Edmund’s.’

Little Dorrit looked, and perhaps not altogether without cause, somewhat
at a loss to understand this fine distinction.

‘I am in no difficulty,’ exclaimed Fanny, ‘and in no hurry. I am not
wanted at any public office, or to give any vote anywhere else.
But Edmund is. And Edmund is deeply dejected at the idea of going away
by himself, and, indeed, I don’t like that he should be trusted by
himself. For, if it’s possible--and it generally is--to do a foolish
thing, he is sure to do it.’

As she concluded this impartial summary of the reliance that might be
safely placed upon her future husband, she took off, with an air of
business, the bonnet she wore, and dangled it by its strings upon the
ground.

‘It is far more Edmund’s question, therefore, than mine. However, we
need say no more about that. That is self-evident on the face of it.
Well, my dearest Amy! The point arising, is he to go by himself, or is
he not to go by himself, this other point arises, are we to be married
here and shortly, or are we to be married at home months hence?’

‘I see I am going to lose you, Fanny.’

‘What a little thing you are,’ cried Fanny, half tolerant and half
impatient, ‘for anticipating one! Pray, my darling, hear me out. That
woman,’ she spoke of Mrs Merdle, of course, ‘remains here until after
Easter; so, in the case of my being married here and going to London
with Edmund, I should have the start of her. That is something. Further,
Amy. That woman being out of the way, I don’t know that I greatly object
to Mr Merdle’s proposal to Pa that Edmund and I should take up our abode
in that house--_you_ know--where you once went with a dancer, my dear,
until our own house can be chosen and fitted up. Further still, Amy.
Papa having always intended to go to town himself, in the spring,--you
see, if Edmund and I were married here, we might go off to Florence,
where papa might join us, and we might all three travel home together.
Mr Merdle has entreated Pa to stay with him in that same mansion I have
mentioned, and I suppose he will. But he is master of his own actions;
and upon that point (which is not at all material) I can’t speak
positively.’

The difference between papa’s being master of his own actions and Mr
Sparkler’s being nothing of the sort, was forcibly expressed by Fanny in
her manner of stating the case. Not that her sister noticed it; for she
was divided between regret at the coming separation, and a lingering
wish that she had been included in the plans for visiting England.

‘And these are the arrangements, Fanny dear?’

‘Arrangements!’ repeated Fanny. ‘Now, really, child, you are a little
trying. You know I particularly guarded myself against laying my words
open to any such construction. What I said was, that certain questions
present themselves; and these are the questions.’

Little Dorrit’s thoughtful eyes met hers, tenderly and quietly.

‘Now, my own sweet girl,’ said Fanny, weighing her bonnet by the strings
with considerable impatience, ‘it’s no use staring. A little owl could
stare. I look to you for advice, Amy. What do you advise me to do?’

‘Do you think,’ asked Little Dorrit, persuasively, after a short
hesitation, ‘do you think, Fanny, that if you were to put it off for a
few months, it might be, considering all things, best?’

‘No, little Tortoise,’ retorted Fanny, with exceeding sharpness. ‘I
don’t think anything of the kind.’

Here, she threw her bonnet from her altogether, and flounced into a
chair. But, becoming affectionate almost immediately, she flounced out
of it again, and kneeled down on the floor to take her sister, chair and
all, in her arms.

‘Don’t suppose I am hasty or unkind, darling, because I really am not.
But you are such a little oddity! You make one bite your head off,
when one wants to be soothing beyond everything. Didn’t I tell you, you
dearest baby, that Edmund can’t be trusted by himself? And don’t you
know that he can’t?’

‘Yes, yes, Fanny. You said so, I know.’

‘And you know it, I know,’ retorted Fanny. ‘Well, my precious child! If
he is not to be trusted by himself, it follows, I suppose, that I should
go with him?’

‘It--seems so, love,’ said Little Dorrit.

‘Therefore, having heard the arrangements that are feasible to carry
out that object, am I to understand, dearest Amy, that on the whole you
advise me to make them?’

‘It--seems so, love,’ said Little Dorrit again.

‘Very well,’ cried Fanny with an air of resignation, ‘then I suppose it
must be done! I came to you, my sweet, the moment I saw the doubt, and
the necessity of deciding. I have now decided. So let it be.’

After yielding herself up, in this pattern manner, to sisterly advice
and the force of circumstances, Fanny became quite benignant: as one
who had laid her own inclinations at the feet of her dearest friend, and
felt a glow of conscience in having made the sacrifice. ‘After all, my
Amy,’ she said to her sister, ‘you are the best of small creatures, and
full of good sense; and I don’t know what I shall ever do without you!’

With which words she folded her in a closer embrace, and a really fond
one.

‘Not that I contemplate doing without You, Amy, by any means, for I hope
we shall ever be next to inseparable. And now, my pet, I am going
to give you a word of advice. When you are left alone here with Mrs
General--’

‘I am to be left alone here with Mrs General?’ said Little Dorrit,
quietly.

‘Why, of course, my precious, till papa comes back! Unless you call
Edward company, which he certainly is not, even when he is here, and
still more certainly is not when he is away at Naples or in Sicily. I
was going to say--but you are such a beloved little Marplot for putting
one out--when you are left alone here with Mrs General, Amy, don’t you
let her slide into any sort of artful understanding with you that she is
looking after Pa, or that Pa is looking after her. She will if she can.
I know her sly manner of feeling her way with those gloves of hers. But
don’t you comprehend her on any account. And if Pa should tell you when
he comes back, that he has it in contemplation to make Mrs General your
mama (which is not the less likely because I am going away), my advice
to you is, that you say at once, “Papa, I beg to object most strongly.
Fanny cautioned me about this, and she objected, and I object.” I don’t
mean to say that any objection from you, Amy, is likely to be of the
smallest effect, or that I think you likely to make it with any degree
of firmness. But there is a principle involved--a filial principle--and
I implore you not to submit to be mother-in-lawed by Mrs General,
without asserting it in making every one about you as uncomfortable as
possible. I don’t expect you to stand by it--indeed, I know you won’t,
Pa being concerned--but I wish to rouse you to a sense of duty. As to
any help from me, or as to any opposition that I can offer to such a
match, you shall not be left in the lurch, my love. Whatever weight
I may derive from my position as a married girl not wholly devoid of
attractions--used, as that position always shall be, to oppose that
woman--I will bring to bear, you May depend upon it, on the head and
false hair (for I am confident it’s not all real, ugly as it is and
unlikely as it appears that any One in their Senses would go to the
expense of buying it) of Mrs General!’

Little Dorrit received this counsel without venturing to oppose it but
without giving Fanny any reason to believe that she intended to act upon
it. Having now, as it were, formally wound up her single life and
arranged her worldly affairs, Fanny proceeded with characteristic ardour
to prepare for the serious change in her condition.

The preparation consisted in the despatch of her maid to Paris under the
protection of the Courier, for the purchase of that outfit for a bride
on which it would be extremely low, in the present narrative, to bestow
an English name, but to which (on a vulgar principle it observes
of adhering to the language in which it professes to be written) it
declines to give a French one. The rich and beautiful wardrobe purchased
by these agents, in the course of a few weeks made its way through the
intervening country, bristling with custom-houses, garrisoned by an
immense army of shabby mendicants in uniform who incessantly repeated
the Beggar’s Petition over it, as if every individual warrior among them
were the ancient Belisarius: and of whom there were so many Legions,
that unless the Courier had expended just one bushel and a half of
silver money relieving their distresses, they would have worn the
wardrobe out before it got to Rome, by turning it over and over. Through
all such dangers, however, it was triumphantly brought, inch by inch,
and arrived at its journey’s end in fine condition.

There it was exhibited to select companies of female viewers, in whose
gentle bosoms it awakened implacable feelings. Concurrently, active
preparations were made for the day on which some of its treasures were
to be publicly displayed. Cards of breakfast-invitation were sent out
to half the English in the city of Romulus; the other half made
arrangements to be under arms, as criticising volunteers, at various
outer points of the solemnity. The most high and illustrious English
Signor Edgardo Dorrit, came post through the deep mud and ruts (from
forming a surface under the improving Neapolitan nobility), to grace
the occasion. The best hotel and all its culinary myrmidons, were set to
work to prepare the feast. The drafts of Mr Dorrit almost constituted a
run on the Torlonia Bank. The British Consul hadn’t had such a marriage
in the whole of his Consularity.

The day came, and the She-Wolf in the Capitol might have snarled with
envy to see how the Island Savages contrived these things now-a-days.
The murderous-headed statues of the wicked Emperors of the Soldiery,
whom sculptors had not been able to flatter out of their villainous
hideousness, might have come off their pedestals to run away with the
Bride. The choked old fountain, where erst the gladiators washed, might
have leaped into life again to honour the ceremony. The Temple of
Vesta might have sprung up anew from its ruins, expressly to lend its
countenance to the occasion. Might have done; but did not. Like sentient
things--even like the lords and ladies of creation sometimes--might
have done much, but did nothing. The celebration went off with admirable
pomp; monks in black robes, white robes, and russet robes stopped to
look after the carriages; wandering peasants in fleeces of sheep, begged
and piped under the house-windows; the English volunteers defiled; the
day wore on to the hour of vespers; the festival wore away; the thousand
churches rang their bells without any reference to it; and St Peter
denied that he had anything to do with it.

But by that time the Bride was near the end of the first day’s journey
towards Florence. It was the peculiarity of the nuptials that they
were all Bride. Nobody noticed the Bridegroom. Nobody noticed the first
Bridesmaid. Few could have seen Little Dorrit (who held that post) for
the glare, even supposing many to have sought her. So, the Bride had
mounted into her handsome chariot, incidentally accompanied by the
Bridegroom; and after rolling for a few minutes smoothly over a fair
pavement, had begun to jolt through a Slough of Despond, and through a
long, long avenue of wrack and ruin. Other nuptial carriages are said to
have gone the same road, before and since.

If Little Dorrit found herself left a little lonely and a little low
that night, nothing would have done so much against her feeling of
depression as the being able to sit at work by her father, as in the old
time, and help him to his supper and his rest. But that was not to be
thought of now, when they sat in the state-equipage with Mrs General on
the coach-box. And as to supper! If Mr Dorrit had wanted supper, there
was an Italian cook and there was a Swiss confectioner, who must
have put on caps as high as the Pope’s Mitre, and have performed the
mysteries of Alchemists in a copper-saucepaned laboratory below, before
he could have got it.

He was sententious and didactic that night. If he had been simply
loving, he would have done Little Dorrit more good; but she accepted him
as he was--when had she not accepted him as he was!--and made the most
and best of him. Mrs General at length retired. Her retirement for the
night was always her frostiest ceremony, as if she felt it necessary
that the human imagination should be chilled into stone to prevent
its following her. When she had gone through her rigid preliminaries,
amounting to a sort of genteel platoon-exercise, she withdrew. Little
Dorrit then put her arm round her father’s neck, to bid him good night.

‘Amy, my dear,’ said Mr Dorrit, taking her by the hand, ‘this is the
close of a day, that has--ha--greatly impressed and gratified me.’

‘A little tired you, dear, too?’

‘No,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘no: I am not sensible of fatigue when it arises
from an occasion so--hum--replete with gratification of the purest
kind.’

Little Dorrit was glad to find him in such heart, and smiled from her
own heart.

‘My dear,’ he continued, ‘this is an occasion--ha--teeming with a good
example. With a good example, my favourite and attached child--hum--to
you.’

Little Dorrit, fluttered by his words, did not know what to say, though
he stopped as if he expected her to say something.

‘Amy,’ he resumed; ‘your dear sister, our Fanny, has contracted
ha hum--a marriage, eminently calculated to extend the basis of
our--ha--connection, and to--hum--consolidate our social relations. My
love, I trust that the time is not far distant when some--ha--eligible
partner may be found for you.’

‘Oh no! Let me stay with you. I beg and pray that I may stay with you! I
want nothing but to stay and take care of you!’

She said it like one in sudden alarm.

‘Nay, Amy, Amy,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘This is weak and foolish, weak
and foolish. You have a--ha--responsibility imposed upon you by your
position. It is to develop that position, and be--hum--worthy of that
position. As to taking care of me; I can--ha--take care of myself.
Or,’ he added after a moment, ‘if I should need to be taken care of,
I--hum--can, with the--ha--blessing of Providence, be taken care of,
I--ha hum--I cannot, my dear child, think of engrossing, and--ha--as it
were, sacrificing you.’

O what a time of day at which to begin that profession of self-denial;
at which to make it, with an air of taking credit for it; at which to
believe it, if such a thing could be!

‘Don’t speak, Amy. I positively say I cannot do it. I--ha--must not do
it. My--hum--conscience would not allow it. I therefore, my love, take
the opportunity afforded by this gratifying and impressive occasion
of--ha--solemnly remarking, that it is now a cherished wish and purpose
of mine to see you--ha--eligibly (I repeat eligibly) married.’

‘Oh no, dear! Pray!’

‘Amy,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘I am well persuaded that if the topic were
referred to any person of superior social knowledge, of superior
delicacy and sense--let us say, for instance, to--ha--Mrs General--that
there would not be two opinions as to the--hum--affectionate character
and propriety of my sentiments. But, as I know your loving and dutiful
nature from--hum--from experience, I am quite satisfied that it is
necessary to say no more. I have--hum--no husband to propose at
present, my dear: I have not even one in view. I merely wish that we
should--ha--understand each other. Hum. Good night, my dear and sole
remaining daughter. Good night. God bless you!’

If the thought ever entered Little Dorrit’s head that night, that he
could give her up lightly now in his prosperity, and when he had it in
his mind to replace her with a second wife, she drove it away. Faithful
to him still, as in the worst times through which she had borne him
single-handed, she drove the thought away; and entertained no harder
reflection, in her tearful unrest, than that he now saw everything
through their wealth, and through the care he always had upon him that
they should continue rich, and grow richer.

They sat in their equipage of state, with Mrs General on the box, for
three weeks longer, and then he started for Florence to join Fanny.
Little Dorrit would have been glad to bear him company so far, only for
the sake of her own love, and then to have turned back alone, thinking
of dear England. But, though the Courier had gone on with the Bride, the
Valet was next in the line; and the succession would not have come to
her, as long as any one could be got for money.

Mrs General took life easily--as easily, that is, as she could
take anything--when the Roman establishment remained in their sole
occupation; and Little Dorrit would often ride out in a hired carriage
that was left them, and alight alone and wander among the ruins of old
Rome. The ruins of the vast old Amphitheatre, of the old Temples, of the
old commemorative Arches, of the old trodden highways, of the old
tombs, besides being what they were, to her were ruins of the old
Marshalsea--ruins of her own old life--ruins of the faces and forms
that of old peopled it--ruins of its loves, hopes, cares, and joys. Two
ruined spheres of action and suffering were before the solitary girl
often sitting on some broken fragment; and in the lonely places, under
the blue sky, she saw them both together.

Up, then, would come Mrs General; taking all the colour out of
everything, as Nature and Art had taken it out of herself; writing
Prunes and Prism, in Mr Eustace’s text, wherever she could lay a hand;
looking everywhere for Mr Eustace and company, and seeing nothing else;
scratching up the driest little bones of antiquity, and bolting them
whole without any human visitings--like a Ghoule in gloves.




CHAPTER 16. Getting on


The newly married pair, on their arrival in Harley Street, Cavendish
Square, London, were received by the Chief Butler. That great man was
not interested in them, but on the whole endured them. People must
continue to be married and given in marriage, or Chief Butlers would not
be wanted. As nations are made to be taxed, so families are made to
be butlered. The Chief Butler, no doubt, reflected that the course of
nature required the wealthy population to be kept up, on his account.

He therefore condescended to look at the carriage from the Hall-door
without frowning at it, and said, in a very handsome way, to one of
his men, ‘Thomas, help with the luggage.’ He even escorted the Bride
up-stairs into Mr Merdle’s presence; but this must be considered as an
act of homage to the sex (of which he was an admirer, being notoriously
captivated by the charms of a certain Duchess), and not as a committal
of himself with the family.

Mr Merdle was slinking about the hearthrug, waiting to welcome Mrs
Sparkler. His hand seemed to retreat up his sleeve as he advanced to
do so, and he gave her such a superfluity of coat-cuff that it was like
being received by the popular conception of Guy Fawkes. When he put his
lips to hers, besides, he took himself into custody by the wrists, and
backed himself among the ottomans and chairs and tables as if he were
his own Police officer, saying to himself, ‘Now, none of that! Come!
I’ve got you, you know, and you go quietly along with me!’

Mrs Sparkler, installed in the rooms of state--the innermost sanctuary
of down, silk, chintz, and fine linen--felt that so far her triumph was
good, and her way made, step by step. On the day before her marriage,
she had bestowed on Mrs Merdle’s maid with an air of gracious
indifference, in Mrs Merdle’s presence, a trifling little keepsake
(bracelet, bonnet, and two dresses, all new) about four times as
valuable as the present formerly made by Mrs Merdle to her. She was now
established in Mrs Merdle’s own rooms, to which some extra touches had
been given to render them more worthy of her occupation. In her mind’s
eye, as she lounged there, surrounded by every luxurious accessory that
wealth could obtain or invention devise, she saw the fair bosom that
beat in unison with the exultation of her thoughts, competing with the
bosom that had been famous so long, outshining it, and deposing it.
Happy? Fanny must have been happy. No more wishing one’s self dead now.

The Courier had not approved of Mr Dorrit’s staying in the house of
a friend, and had preferred to take him to an hotel in Brook Street,
Grosvenor Square. Mr Merdle ordered his carriage to be ready early
in the morning that he might wait upon Mr Dorrit immediately after
breakfast.

Bright the carriage looked, sleek the horses looked, gleaming the
harness looked, luscious and lasting the liveries looked. A rich,
responsible turn-out. An equipage for a Merdle. Early people looked
after it as it rattled along the streets, and said, with awe in their
breath, ‘There he goes!’

There he went, until Brook Street stopped him. Then, forth from its
magnificent case came the jewel; not lustrous in itself, but quite the
contrary.

Commotion in the office of the hotel. Merdle! The landlord, though
a gentleman of a haughty spirit who had just driven a pair of
thorough-bred horses into town, turned out to show him up-stairs.
The clerks and servants cut him off by back-passages, and were found
accidentally hovering in doorways and angles, that they might look upon
him. Merdle! O ye sun, moon, and stars, the great man! The rich man, who
had in a manner revised the New Testament, and already entered into the
kingdom of Heaven. The man who could have any one he chose to dine with
him, and who had made the money! As he went up the stairs, people were
already posted on the lower stairs, that his shadow might fall upon them
when he came down. So were the sick brought out and laid in the track of
the Apostle--who had _not_ got into the good society, and had _not_ made
the money.

Mr Dorrit, dressing-gowned and newspapered, was at his breakfast. The
Courier, with agitation in his voice, announced ‘Miss Mairdale!’ Mr
Dorrit’s overwrought heart bounded as he leaped up.

‘Mr Merdle, this is--ha--indeed an honour. Permit me to express
the--hum--sense, the high sense, I entertain of this--ha hum--highly
gratifying act of attention. I am well aware, sir, of the many demands
upon your time, and its--ha--enormous value,’ Mr Dorrit could not
say enormous roundly enough for his own satisfaction. ‘That you
should--ha--at this early hour, bestow any of your priceless time upon
me, is--ha--a compliment that I acknowledge with the greatest esteem.’
Mr Dorrit positively trembled in addressing the great man.

Mr Merdle uttered, in his subdued, inward, hesitating voice, a few
sounds that were to no purpose whatever; and finally said, ‘I am glad to
see you, sir.’

‘You are very kind,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘Truly kind.’ By this time the
visitor was seated, and was passing his great hand over his exhausted
forehead. ‘You are well, I hope, Mr Merdle?’

‘I am as well as I--yes, I am as well as I usually am,’ said Mr Merdle.

‘Your occupations must be immense.’

‘Tolerably so. But--Oh dear no, there’s not much the matter with _me_,’
said Mr Merdle, looking round the room.

‘A little dyspeptic?’ Mr Dorrit hinted.

‘Very likely. But I--Oh, I am well enough,’ said Mr Merdle.

There were black traces on his lips where they met, as if a little train
of gunpowder had been fired there; and he looked like a man who, if his
natural temperament had been quicker, would have been very feverish that
morning. This, and his heavy way of passing his hand over his forehead,
had prompted Mr Dorrit’s solicitous inquiries.

‘Mrs Merdle,’ Mr Dorrit insinuatingly pursued, ‘I left, as you will be
prepared to hear, the--ha--observed of all observers, the--hum--admired
of all admirers, the leading fascination and charm of Society in Rome.
She was looking wonderfully well when I quitted it.’

‘Mrs Merdle,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘is generally considered a very attractive
woman. And she is, no doubt. I am sensible of her being so.’

‘Who can be otherwise?’ responded Mr Dorrit.

Mr Merdle turned his tongue in his closed mouth--it seemed rather a
stiff and unmanageable tongue--moistened his lips, passed his hand over
his forehead again, and looked all round the room again, principally
under the chairs.

‘But,’ he said, looking Mr Dorrit in the face for the first time, and
immediately afterwards dropping his eyes to the buttons of Mr Dorrit’s
waistcoat; ‘if we speak of attractions, your daughter ought to be the
subject of our conversation. She is extremely beautiful. Both in face
and figure, she is quite uncommon. When the young people arrived last
night, I was really surprised to see such charms.’

Mr Dorrit’s gratification was such that he said--ha--he could not
refrain from telling Mr Merdle verbally, as he had already done by
letter, what honour and happiness he felt in this union of their
families. And he offered his hand. Mr Merdle looked at the hand for a
little while, took it on his for a moment as if his were a yellow salver
or fish-slice, and then returned it to Mr Dorrit.

‘I thought I would drive round the first thing,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘to
offer my services, in case I can do anything for you; and to say that
I hope you will at least do me the honour of dining with me to-day, and
every day when you are not better engaged during your stay in town.’

Mr Dorrit was enraptured by these attentions.

‘Do you stay long, sir?’

‘I have not at present the intention,’ said Mr Dorrit,
‘of--ha--exceeding a fortnight.’

‘That’s a very short stay, after so long a journey,’ returned Mr Merdle.

‘Hum. Yes,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘But the truth is--ha--my dear Mr Merdle,
that I find a foreign life so well suited to my health and taste, that
I--hum--have but two objects in my present visit to London. First,
the--ha--the distinguished happiness and--ha--privilege which I now
enjoy and appreciate; secondly, the arrangement--hum--the laying out,
that is to say, in the best way, of--ha, hum--my money.’

‘Well, sir,’ said Mr Merdle, after turning his tongue again, ‘if I can
be of any use to you in that respect, you may command me.’

Mr Dorrit’s speech had had more hesitation in it than usual, as he
approached the ticklish topic, for he was not perfectly clear how so
exalted a potentate might take it. He had doubts whether reference to
any individual capital, or fortune, might not seem a wretchedly retail
affair to so wholesale a dealer. Greatly relieved by Mr Merdle’s
affable offer of assistance, he caught at it directly, and heaped
acknowledgments upon him.

‘I scarcely--ha--dared,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘I assure you, to hope for
so--hum--vast an advantage as your direct advice and assistance. Though
of course I should, under any circumstances, like the--ha, hum--rest of
the civilised world, have followed in Mr Merdle’s train.’

‘You know we may almost say we are related, sir,’ said Mr Merdle,
curiously interested in the pattern of the carpet, ‘and, therefore, you
may consider me at your service.’

‘Ha. Very handsome, indeed!’ cried Mr Dorrit. ‘Ha. Most handsome!’

‘It would not,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘be at the present moment easy for
what I may call a mere outsider to come into any of the good things--of
course I speak of my own good things--’

‘Of course, of course!’ cried Mr Dorrit, in a tone implying that there
were no other good things.

‘--Unless at a high price. At what we are accustomed to term a very long
figure.’

Mr Dorrit laughed in the buoyancy of his spirit. Ha, ha, ha! Long
figure. Good. Ha. Very expressive to be sure!

‘However,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘I do generally retain in my own hands the
power of exercising some preference--people in general would be pleased
to call it favour--as a sort of compliment for my care and trouble.’

‘And public spirit and genius,’ Mr Dorrit suggested.

Mr Merdle, with a dry, swallowing action, seemed to dispose of those
qualities like a bolus; then added, ‘As a sort of return for it. I will
see, if you please, how I can exert this limited power (for people are
jealous, and it is limited), to your advantage.’

‘You are very good,’ replied Mr Dorrit. ‘You are _very_ good.’

‘Of course,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘there must be the strictest integrity
and uprightness in these transactions; there must be the purest faith
between man and man; there must be unimpeached and unimpeachable
confidence; or business could not be carried on.’

Mr Dorrit hailed these generous sentiments with fervour.

‘Therefore,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘I can only give you a preference to a
certain extent.’

‘I perceive. To a defined extent,’ observed Mr Dorrit.

‘Defined extent. And perfectly above-board. As to my advice, however,’
said Mr Merdle, ‘that is another matter. That, such as it is--’

Oh! Such as it was! (Mr Dorrit could not bear the faintest appearance of
its being depreciated, even by Mr Merdle himself.)

‘--That, there is nothing in the bonds of spotless honour between myself
and my fellow-man to prevent my parting with, if I choose. And that,’
said Mr Merdle, now deeply intent upon a dust-cart that was passing the
windows, ‘shall be at your command whenever you think proper.’

New acknowledgments from Mr Dorrit. New passages of Mr Merdle’s hand
over his forehead. Calm and silence. Contemplation of Mr Dorrit’s
waistcoat buttons by Mr Merdle.

‘My time being rather precious,’ said Mr Merdle, suddenly getting up,
as if he had been waiting in the interval for his legs and they had just
come, ‘I must be moving towards the City. Can I take you anywhere, sir?
I shall be happy to set you down, or send you on. My carriage is at your
disposal.’

Mr Dorrit bethought himself that he had business at his banker’s. His
banker’s was in the City. That was fortunate; Mr Merdle would take
him into the City. But, surely, he might not detain Mr Merdle while he
assumed his coat? Yes, he might and must; Mr Merdle insisted on it. So
Mr Dorrit, retiring into the next room, put himself under the hands of
his valet, and in five minutes came back glorious.

Then said Mr Merdle, ‘Allow me, sir. Take my arm!’ Then leaning on
Mr Merdle’s arm, did Mr Dorrit descend the staircase, seeing the
worshippers on the steps, and feeling that the light of Mr Merdle shone
by reflection in himself. Then the carriage, and the ride into the
City; and the people who looked at them; and the hats that flew off grey
heads; and the general bowing and crouching before this wonderful mortal
the like of which prostration of spirit was not to be seen--no, by
high Heaven, no! It may be worth thinking of by Fawners of all
denominations--in Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul’s Cathedral put
together, on any Sunday in the year. It was a rapturous dream to Mr
Dorrit to find himself set aloft in this public car of triumph, making a
magnificent progress to that befitting destination, the golden Street of
the Lombards.

There Mr Merdle insisted on alighting and going his way a-foot, and
leaving his poor equipage at Mr Dorrit’s disposition. So the dream
increased in rapture when Mr Dorrit came out of the bank alone, and
people looked at _him_ in default of Mr Merdle, and when, with the ears of
his mind, he heard the frequent exclamation as he rolled glibly along,
‘A wonderful man to be Mr Merdle’s friend!’

At dinner that day, although the occasion was not foreseen and provided
for, a brilliant company of such as are not made of the dust of the
earth, but of some superior article for the present unknown, shed
their lustrous benediction upon Mr Dorrit’s daughter’s marriage. And Mr
Dorrit’s daughter that day began, in earnest, her competition with that
woman not present; and began it so well that Mr Dorrit could all but
have taken his affidavit, if required, that Mrs Sparkler had all her
life been lying at full length in the lap of luxury, and had never heard
of such a rough word in the English tongue as Marshalsea.

Next day, and the day after, and every day, all graced by more dinner
company, cards descended on Mr Dorrit like theatrical snow. As the
friend and relative by marriage of the illustrious Merdle, Bar, Bishop,
Treasury, Chorus, Everybody, wanted to make or improve Mr Dorrit’s
acquaintance. In Mr Merdle’s heap of offices in the City, when Mr Dorrit
appeared at any of them on his business taking him Eastward (which it
frequently did, for it throve amazingly), the name of Dorrit was always
a passport to the great presence of Merdle. So the dream increased in
rapture every hour, as Mr Dorrit felt increasingly sensible that this
connection had brought him forward indeed.

Only one thing sat otherwise than auriferously, and at the same time
lightly, on Mr Dorrit’s mind. It was the Chief Butler. That stupendous
character looked at him, in the course of his official looking at the
dinners, in a manner that Mr Dorrit considered questionable. He looked
at him, as he passed through the hall and up the staircase, going to
dinner, with a glazed fixedness that Mr Dorrit did not like. Seated
at table in the act of drinking, Mr Dorrit still saw him through his
wine-glass, regarding him with a cold and ghostly eye. It misgave him
that the Chief Butler must have known a Collegian, and must have seen
him in the College--perhaps had been presented to him. He looked as
closely at the Chief Butler as such a man could be looked at, and yet
he did not recall that he had ever seen him elsewhere. Ultimately he was
inclined to think that there was no reverence in the man, no sentiment
in the great creature. But he was not relieved by that; for, let him
think what he would, the Chief Butler had him in his supercilious eye,
even when that eye was on the plate and other table-garniture; and he
never let him out of it. To hint to him that this confinement in his eye
was disagreeable, or to ask him what he meant, was an act too daring to
venture upon; his severity with his employers and their visitors being
terrific, and he never permitting himself to be approached with the
slightest liberty.




CHAPTER 17. Missing


The term of Mr Dorrit’s visit was within two days of being out, and he
was about to dress for another inspection by the Chief Butler (whose
victims were always dressed expressly for him), when one of the servants
of the hotel presented himself bearing a card. Mr Dorrit, taking it,
read:

‘Mrs Finching.’

The servant waited in speechless deference.

‘Man, man,’ said Mr Dorrit, turning upon him with grievous indignation,
‘explain your motive in bringing me this ridiculous name. I am wholly
unacquainted with it. Finching, sir?’ said Mr Dorrit, perhaps avenging
himself on the Chief Butler by Substitute. ‘Ha! What do you mean by
Finching?’

The man, man, seemed to mean Flinching as much as anything else, for
he backed away from Mr Dorrit’s severe regard, as he replied, ‘A lady,
sir.’

‘I know no such lady, sir,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘Take this card away. I know
no Finching of either sex.’

‘Ask your pardon, sir. The lady said she was aware she might be unknown
by name. But she begged me to say, sir, that she had formerly the honour
of being acquainted with Miss Dorrit. The lady said, sir, the youngest
Miss Dorrit.’

Mr Dorrit knitted his brows and rejoined, after a moment or two, ‘Inform
Mrs Finching, sir,’ emphasising the name as if the innocent man were
solely responsible for it, ‘that she can come up.’

He had reflected, in his momentary pause, that unless she were admitted
she might leave some message, or might say something below, having
a disgraceful reference to that former state of existence. Hence the
concession, and hence the appearance of Flora, piloted in by the man,
man.

‘I have not the pleasure,’ said Mr Dorrit, standing with the card in his
hand, and with an air which imported that it would scarcely have been a
first-class pleasure if he had had it, ‘of knowing either this name, or
yourself, madam. Place a chair, sir.’

The responsible man, with a start, obeyed, and went out on tiptoe.
Flora, putting aside her veil with a bashful tremor upon her, proceeded
to introduce herself. At the same time a singular combination of
perfumes was diffused through the room, as if some brandy had been put
by mistake in a lavender-water bottle, or as if some lavender-water had
been put by mistake in a brandy-bottle.

‘I beg Mr Dorrit to offer a thousand apologies and indeed they would
be far too few for such an intrusion which I know must appear extremely
bold in a lady and alone too, but I thought it best upon the whole
however difficult and even apparently improper though Mr F.’s Aunt would
have willingly accompanied me and as a character of great force and
spirit would probably have struck one possessed of such a knowledge of
life as no doubt with so many changes must have been acquired, for Mr F.
himself said frequently that although well educated in the neighbourhood
of Blackheath at as high as eighty guineas which is a good deal for
parents and the plate kept back too on going away but that is more a
meanness than its value that he had learnt more in his first years as a
commercial traveller with a large commission on the sale of an article
that nobody would hear of much less buy which preceded the wine trade
a long time than in the whole six years in that academy conducted by a
college Bachelor, though why a Bachelor more clever than a married man I
do not see and never did but pray excuse me that is not the point.’

Mr Dorrit stood rooted to the carpet, a statue of mystification.

‘I must openly admit that I have no pretensions,’ said Flora, ‘but
having known the dear little thing which under altered circumstances
appears a liberty but is not so intended and Goodness knows there was no
favour in half-a-crown a-day to such a needle as herself but quite the
other way and as to anything lowering in it far from it the labourer is
worthy of his hire and I am sure I only wish he got it oftener and more
animal food and less rheumatism in the back and legs poor soul.’

‘Madam,’ said Mr Dorrit, recovering his breath by a great effort, as the
relict of the late Mr Finching stopped to take hers; ‘madam,’ said Mr
Dorrit, very red in the face, ‘if I understand you to refer to--ha--to
anything in the antecedents of--hum--a daughter of mine, involving--ha
hum--daily compensation, madam, I beg to observe that the--ha--fact,
assuming it--ha--to be fact, never was within my knowledge. Hum. I
should not have permitted it. Ha. Never! Never!’

‘Unnecessary to pursue the subject,’ returned Flora, ‘and would not have
mentioned it on any account except as supposing it a favourable and only
letter of introduction but as to being fact no doubt whatever and you
may set your mind at rest for the very dress I have on now can prove it
and sweetly made though there is no denying that it would tell better on
a better figure for my own is much too fat though how to bring it down I
know not, pray excuse me I am roving off again.’

Mr Dorrit backed to his chair in a stony way, and seated himself, as
Flora gave him a softening look and played with her parasol.

‘The dear little thing,’ said Flora, ‘having gone off perfectly limp
and white and cold in my own house or at least papa’s for though not
a freehold still a long lease at a peppercorn on the morning when
Arthur--foolish habit of our youthful days and Mr Clennam far more
adapted to existing circumstances particularly addressing a stranger and
that stranger a gentleman in an elevated station--communicated the glad
tidings imparted by a person of name of Pancks emboldens me.’

At the mention of these two names, Mr Dorrit frowned, stared, frowned
again, hesitated with his fingers at his lips, as he had hesitated long
ago, and said, ‘Do me the favour to--ha--state your pleasure, madam.’

‘Mr Dorrit,’ said Flora, ‘you are very kind in giving me permission and
highly natural it seems to me that you should be kind for though more
stately I perceive a likeness filled out of course but a likeness still,
the object of my intruding is my own without the slightest consultation
with any human being and most decidedly not with Arthur--pray excuse me
Doyce and Clennam I don’t know what I am saying Mr Clennam solus--for to
put that individual linked by a golden chain to a purple time when all
was ethereal out of any anxiety would be worth to me the ransom of a
monarch not that I have the least idea how much that would come to but
using it as the total of all I have in the world and more.’

Mr Dorrit, without greatly regarding the earnestness of these latter
words, repeated, ‘State your pleasure, madam.’

‘It’s not likely I well know,’ said Flora, ‘but it’s possible and being
possible when I had the gratification of reading in the papers that you
had arrived from Italy and were going back I made up my mind to try it
for you might come across him or hear something of him and if so what a
blessing and relief to all!’

‘Allow me to ask, madam,’ said Mr Dorrit, with his ideas in wild
confusion, ‘to whom--ha--TO WHOM,’ he repeated it with a raised voice in
mere desperation, ‘you at present allude?’

‘To the foreigner from Italy who disappeared in the City as no doubt you
have read in the papers equally with myself,’ said Flora, ‘not referring
to private sources by the name of Pancks from which one gathers what
dreadfully ill-natured things some people are wicked enough to whisper
most likely judging others by themselves and what the uneasiness
and indignation of Arthur--quite unable to overcome it Doyce and
Clennam--cannot fail to be.’

It happened, fortunately for the elucidation of any intelligible result,
that Mr Dorrit had heard or read nothing about the matter. This
caused Mrs Finching, with many apologies for being in great practical
difficulties as to finding the way to her pocket among the stripes of
her dress at length to produce a police handbill, setting forth that
a foreign gentleman of the name of Blandois, last from Venice, had
unaccountably disappeared on such a night in such a part of the city of
London; that he was known to have entered such a house, at such an hour;
that he was stated by the inmates of that house to have left it, about
so many minutes before midnight; and that he had never been beheld
since. This, with exact particulars of time and locality, and with
a good detailed description of the foreign gentleman who had so
mysteriously vanished, Mr Dorrit read at large.

‘Blandois!’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘Venice! And this description! I know this
gentleman. He has been in my house. He is intimately acquainted with a
gentleman of good family (but in indifferent circumstances), of whom I
am a--hum--patron.’

‘Then my humble and pressing entreaty is the more,’ said Flora, ‘that
in travelling back you will have the kindness to look for this foreign
gentleman along all the roads and up and down all the turnings and to
make inquiries for him at all the hotels and orange-trees and vineyards
and volcanoes and places for he must be somewhere and why doesn’t he
come forward and say he’s there and clear all parties up?’

‘Pray, madam,’ said Mr Dorrit, referring to the handbill again, ‘who is
Clennam and Co.? Ha. I see the name mentioned here, in connection with
the occupation of the house which Monsieur Blandois was seen to
enter: who is Clennam and Co.? Is it the individual of whom I had
formerly--hum--some--ha--slight transitory knowledge, and to whom I
believe you have referred? Is it--ha--that person?’

‘It’s a very different person indeed,’ replied Flora, ‘with no limbs and
wheels instead and the grimmest of women though his mother.’

‘Clennam and Co. a--hum--a mother!’ exclaimed Mr Dorrit.

‘And an old man besides,’ said Flora.

Mr Dorrit looked as if he must immediately be driven out of his mind
by this account. Neither was it rendered more favourable to sanity by
Flora’s dashing into a rapid analysis of Mr Flintwinch’s cravat, and
describing him, without the lightest boundary line of separation between
his identity and Mrs Clennam’s, as a rusty screw in gaiters. Which
compound of man and woman, no limbs, wheels, rusty screw, grimness, and
gaiters, so completely stupefied Mr Dorrit, that he was a spectacle to
be pitied.

‘But I would not detain you one moment longer,’ said Flora, upon whom
his condition wrought its effect, though she was quite unconscious of
having produced it, ‘if you would have the goodness to give your promise
as a gentleman that both in going back to Italy and in Italy too you
would look for this Mr Blandois high and low and if you found or heard
of him make him come forward for the clearing of all parties.’

By that time Mr Dorrit had so far recovered from his bewilderment, as to
be able to say, in a tolerably connected manner, that he should consider
that his duty. Flora was delighted with her success, and rose to take
her leave.

‘With a million thanks,’ said she, ‘and my address upon my card in case
of anything to be communicated personally, I will not send my love to
the dear little thing for it might not be acceptable, and indeed there
is no dear little thing left in the transformation so why do it but
both myself and Mr F.’s Aunt ever wish her well and lay no claim to any
favour on our side you may be sure of that but quite the other way for
what she undertook to do she did and that is more than a great many of
us do, not to say anything of her doing it as well as it could be
done and I myself am one of them for I have said ever since I began to
recover the blow of Mr F’s death that I would learn the Organ of which
I am extremely fond but of which I am ashamed to say I do not yet know a
note, good evening!’

When Mr Dorrit, who attended her to the room-door, had had a little time
to collect his senses, he found that the interview had summoned back
discarded reminiscences which jarred with the Merdle dinner-table.
He wrote and sent off a brief note excusing himself for that day, and
ordered dinner presently in his own rooms at the hotel. He had another
reason for this. His time in London was very nearly out, and was
anticipated by engagements; his plans were made for returning; and he
thought it behoved his importance to pursue some direct inquiry into the
Blandois disappearance, and be in a condition to carry back to Mr
Henry Gowan the result of his own personal investigation. He therefore
resolved that he would take advantage of that evening’s freedom to go
down to Clennam and Co.’s, easily to be found by the direction set forth
in the handbill; and see the place, and ask a question or two there
himself.

Having dined as plainly as the establishment and the Courier would let
him, and having taken a short sleep by the fire for his better recovery
from Mrs Finching, he set out in a hackney-cabriolet alone. The deep
bell of St Paul’s was striking nine as he passed under the shadow of
Temple Bar, headless and forlorn in these degenerate days.

As he approached his destination through the by-streets and water-side
ways, that part of London seemed to him an uglier spot at such an hour
than he had ever supposed it to be. Many long years had passed since he
had seen it; he had never known much of it; and it wore a mysterious and
dismal aspect in his eyes. So powerfully was his imagination impressed
by it, that when his driver stopped, after having asked the way more
than once, and said to the best of his belief this was the gateway they
wanted, Mr Dorrit stood hesitating, with the coach-door in his hand,
half afraid of the dark look of the place.

Truly, it looked as gloomy that night as even it had ever looked. Two of
the handbills were posted on the entrance wall, one on either side, and
as the lamp flickered in the night air, shadows passed over them, not
unlike the shadows of fingers following the lines. A watch was evidently
kept upon the place. As Mr Dorrit paused, a man passed in from over the
way, and another man passed out from some dark corner within; and both
looked at him in passing, and both remained standing about.

As there was only one house in the enclosure, there was no room for
uncertainty, so he went up the steps of that house and knocked. There
was a dim light in two windows on the first-floor. The door gave back
a dreary, vacant sound, as though the house were empty; but it was not,
for a light was visible, and a step was audible, almost directly. They
both came to the door, and a chain grated, and a woman with her apron
thrown over her face and head stood in the aperture.

‘Who is it?’ said the woman.

Mr Dorrit, much amazed by this appearance, replied that he was from
Italy, and that he wished to ask a question relative to the missing
person, whom he knew.

‘Hi!’ cried the woman, raising a cracked voice. ‘Jeremiah!’

Upon this, a dry old man appeared, whom Mr Dorrit thought he identified
by his gaiters, as the rusty screw. The woman was under apprehensions
of the dry old man, for she whisked her apron away as he approached, and
disclosed a pale affrighted face. ‘Open the door, you fool,’ said the
old man; ‘and let the gentleman in.’

Mr Dorrit, not without a glance over his shoulder towards his driver and
the cabriolet, walked into the dim hall. ‘Now, sir,’ said Mr Flintwinch,
‘you can ask anything here you think proper; there are no secrets here,
sir.’

Before a reply could be made, a strong stern voice, though a woman’s,
called from above, ‘Who is it?’

‘Who is it?’ returned Jeremiah. ‘More inquiries. A gentleman from
Italy.’

‘Bring him up here!’

Mr Flintwinch muttered, as if he deemed that unnecessary; but, turning
to Mr Dorrit, said, ‘Mrs Clennam. She _will_ do as she likes. I’ll show
you the way.’ He then preceded Mr Dorrit up the blackened staircase;
that gentleman, not unnaturally looking behind him on the road, saw the
woman following, with her apron thrown over her head again in her former
ghastly manner.

Mrs Clennam had her books open on her little table. ‘Oh!’ said she
abruptly, as she eyed her visitor with a steady look. ‘You are from
Italy, sir, are you. Well?’

Mr Dorrit was at a loss for any more distinct rejoinder at the moment
than ‘Ha--well?’

‘Where is this missing man? Have you come to give us information where
he is? I hope you have?’

‘So far from it, I--hum--have come to seek information.’

‘Unfortunately for us, there is none to be got here. Flintwinch, show
the gentleman the handbill. Give him several to take away. Hold the
light for him to read it.’

Mr Flintwinch did as he was directed, and Mr Dorrit read it through,
as if he had not previously seen it; glad enough of the opportunity of
collecting his presence of mind, which the air of the house and of the
people in it had a little disturbed. While his eyes were on the paper,
he felt that the eyes of Mr Flintwinch and of Mrs Clennam were on him.
He found, when he looked up, that this sensation was not a fanciful one.

‘Now you know as much,’ said Mrs Clennam, ‘as we know, sir. Is Mr
Blandois a friend of yours?’

‘No--a--hum--an acquaintance,’ answered Mr Dorrit.

‘You have no commission from him, perhaps?’

‘I? Ha. Certainly not.’

The searching look turned gradually to the floor, after taking Mr
Flintwinch’s face in its way. Mr Dorrit, discomfited by finding that
he was the questioned instead of the questioner, applied himself to the
reversal of that unexpected order of things.

‘I am--ha--a gentleman of property, at present residing in Italy with my
family, my servants, and--hum--my rather large establishment. Being in
London for a short time on affairs connected with--ha--my estate,
and hearing of this strange disappearance, I wished to make myself
acquainted with the circumstances at first-hand, because there is--ha
hum--an English gentleman in Italy whom I shall no doubt see on my
return, who has been in habits of close and daily intimacy with Monsieur
Blandois. Mr Henry Gowan. You may know the name.’

‘Never heard of it.’

Mrs Clennam said it, and Mr Flintwinch echoed it.

‘Wishing to--ha--make the narrative coherent and consecutive to him,’
said Mr Dorrit, ‘may I ask--say, three questions?’

‘Thirty, if you choose.’

‘Have you known Monsieur Blandois long?’

‘Not a twelvemonth. Mr Flintwinch here, will refer to the books and tell
you when, and by whom at Paris he was introduced to us. If that,’
Mrs Clennam added, ‘should be any satisfaction to you. It is poor
satisfaction to us.’

‘Have you seen him often?’

‘No. Twice. Once before, and--’

‘That once,’ suggested Mr Flintwinch.

‘And that once.’

‘Pray, madam,’ said Mr Dorrit, with a growing fancy upon him as he
recovered his importance, that he was in some superior way in the
Commission of the Peace; ‘pray, madam, may I inquire, for the greater
satisfaction of the gentleman whom I have the honour to--ha--retain, or
protect or let me say to--hum--know--to know--Was Monsieur Blandois here
on business on the night indicated in this present sheet?’

‘On what he called business,’ returned Mrs Clennam.

‘Is--ha--excuse me--is its nature to be communicated?’

‘No.’

It was evidently impracticable to pass the barrier of that reply.

‘The question has been asked before,’ said Mrs Clennam, ‘and the answer
has been, No. We don’t choose to publish our transactions, however
unimportant, to all the town. We say, No.’

‘I mean, he took away no money with him, for example,’ said Mr Dorrit.

‘He took away none of ours, sir, and got none here.’

‘I suppose,’ observed Mr Dorrit, glancing from Mrs Clennam to Mr
Flintwinch, and from Mr Flintwinch to Mrs Clennam, ‘you have no way of
accounting to yourself for this mystery?’

‘Why do you suppose so?’ rejoined Mrs Clennam.

Disconcerted by the cold and hard inquiry, Mr Dorrit was unable to
assign any reason for his supposing so.

‘I account for it, sir,’ she pursued after an awkward silence on Mr
Dorrit’s part, ‘by having no doubt that he is travelling somewhere, or
hiding somewhere.’

‘Do you know--ha--why he should hide anywhere?’

‘No.’

It was exactly the same No as before, and put another barrier up.

‘You asked me if I accounted for the disappearance to myself,’ Mrs
Clennam sternly reminded him, ‘not if I accounted for it to you. I do
not pretend to account for it to you, sir. I understand it to be no more
my business to do that, than it is yours to require that.’

Mr Dorrit answered with an apologetic bend of his head. As he stepped
back, preparatory to saying he had no more to ask, he could not but
observe how gloomily and fixedly she sat with her eyes fastened on
the ground, and a certain air upon her of resolute waiting; also,
how exactly the self-same expression was reflected in Mr Flintwinch,
standing at a little distance from her chair, with his eyes also on the
ground, and his right hand softly rubbing his chin.

At that moment, Mistress Affery (of course, the woman with the apron)
dropped the candlestick she held, and cried out, ‘There! O good Lord!
there it is again. Hark, Jeremiah! Now!’

If there were any sound at all, it was so slight that she must have
fallen into a confirmed habit of listening for sounds; but Mr Dorrit
believed he did hear a something, like the falling of dry leaves. The
woman’s terror, for a very short space, seemed to touch the three; and
they all listened.

Mr Flintwinch was the first to stir. ‘Affery, my woman,’ said he,
sidling at her with his fists clenched, and his elbows quivering with
impatience to shake her, ‘you are at your old tricks. You’ll be walking
in your sleep next, my woman, and playing the whole round of your
distempered antics. You must have some physic. When I have shown this
gentleman out, I’ll make you up such a comfortable dose, my woman; such
a comfortable dose!’

It did not appear altogether comfortable in expectation to Mistress
Affery; but Jeremiah, without further reference to his healing medicine,
took another candle from Mrs Clennam’s table, and said, ‘Now, sir; shall
I light you down?’

Mr Dorrit professed himself obliged, and went down. Mr Flintwinch shut
him out, and chained him out, without a moment’s loss of time.
He was again passed by the two men, one going out and the other coming
in; got into the vehicle he had left waiting, and was driven away.

Before he had gone far, the driver stopped to let him know that he
had given his name, number, and address to the two men, on their joint
requisition; and also the address at which he had taken Mr Dorrit up,
the hour at which he had been called from his stand and the way by which
he had come. This did not make the night’s adventure run any less hotly
in Mr Dorrit’s mind, either when he sat down by his fire again, or
when he went to bed. All night he haunted the dismal house, saw the two
people resolutely waiting, heard the woman with her apron over her face
cry out about the noise, and found the body of the missing Blandois, now
buried in the cellar, and now bricked up in a wall.




CHAPTER 18. A Castle in the Air


Manifold are the cares of wealth and state. Mr Dorrit’s satisfaction in
remembering that it had not been necessary for him to announce himself
to Clennam and Co., or to make an allusion to his having had any
knowledge of the intrusive person of that name, had been damped
over-night, while it was still fresh, by a debate that arose within him
whether or no he should take the Marshalsea in his way back, and look
at the old gate. He had decided not to do so; and had astonished the
coachman by being very fierce with him for proposing to go over London
Bridge and recross the river by Waterloo Bridge--a course which would
have taken him almost within sight of his old quarters. Still, for all
that, the question had raised a conflict in his breast; and, for some
odd reason or no reason, he was vaguely dissatisfied. Even at the Merdle
dinner-table next day, he was so out of sorts about it that he
continued at intervals to turn it over and over, in a manner frightfully
inconsistent with the good society surrounding him. It made him hot to
think what the Chief Butler’s opinion of him would have been, if that
illustrious personage could have plumbed with that heavy eye of his the
stream of his meditations.

The farewell banquet was of a gorgeous nature, and wound up his visit
in a most brilliant manner. Fanny combined with the attractions of her
youth and beauty, a certain weight of self-sustainment as if she had
been married twenty years. He felt that he could leave her with a
quiet mind to tread the paths of distinction, and wished--but without
abatement of patronage, and without prejudice to the retiring virtues of
his favourite child--that he had such another daughter.

‘My dear,’ he told her at parting, ‘our family looks to you
to--ha--assert its dignity and--hum--maintain its importance. I know you
will never disappoint it.’

‘No, papa,’ said Fanny, ‘you may rely upon that, I think. My best love
to dearest Amy, and I will write to her very soon.’

‘Shall I convey any message to--ha--anybody else?’ asked Mr Dorrit, in
an insinuating manner.

‘Papa,’ said Fanny, before whom Mrs General instantly loomed, ‘no, I
thank you. You are very kind, Pa, but I must beg to be excused. There
is no other message to send, I thank you, dear papa, that it would be at
all agreeable to you to take.’

They parted in an outer drawing-room, where only Mr Sparkler waited
on his lady, and dutifully bided his time for shaking hands. When Mr
Sparkler was admitted to this closing audience, Mr Merdle came creeping
in with not much more appearance of arms in his sleeves than if he
had been the twin brother of Miss Biffin, and insisted on escorting
Mr Dorrit down-stairs. All Mr Dorrit’s protestations being in vain,
he enjoyed the honour of being accompanied to the hall-door by this
distinguished man, who (as Mr Dorrit told him in shaking hands on the
step) had really overwhelmed him with attentions and services during
this memorable visit. Thus they parted; Mr Dorrit entering his carriage
with a swelling breast, not at all sorry that his Courier, who had
come to take leave in the lower regions, should have an opportunity of
beholding the grandeur of his departure.

The aforesaid grandeur was yet full upon Mr Dorrit when he alighted at
his hotel. Helped out by the Courier and some half-dozen of the hotel
servants, he was passing through the hall with a serene magnificence,
when lo! a sight presented itself that struck him dumb and motionless.
John Chivery, in his best clothes, with his tall hat under his arm, his
ivory-handled cane genteelly embarrassing his deportment, and a bundle
of cigars in his hand!

‘Now, young man,’ said the porter. ‘This is the gentleman. This young
man has persisted in waiting, sir, saying you would be glad to see him.’

Mr Dorrit glared on the young man, choked, and said, in the mildest of
tones, ‘Ah! Young John! It is Young John, I think; is it not?’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Young John.

‘I--ha--thought it was Young John!’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘The young man may
come up,’ turning to the attendants, as he passed on: ‘oh yes, he may
come up. Let Young John follow. I will speak to him above.’

Young John followed, smiling and much gratified. Mr Dorrit’s rooms were
reached. Candles were lighted. The attendants withdrew.

‘Now, sir,’ said Mr Dorrit, turning round upon him and seizing him by
the collar when they were safely alone. ‘What do you mean by this?’

The amazement and horror depicted in the unfortunate John’s face--for
he had rather expected to be embraced next--were of that powerfully
expressive nature that Mr Dorrit withdrew his hand and merely glared at
him.

‘How dare you do this?’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘How do you presume to come
here? How dare you insult me?’

‘I insult you, sir?’ cried Young John. ‘Oh!’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mr Dorrit. ‘Insult me. Your coming here is an
affront, an impertinence, an audacity. You are not wanted here.
Who sent you here? What--ha--the Devil do you do here?’

‘I thought, sir,’ said Young John, with as pale and shocked a face as
ever had been turned to Mr Dorrit’s in his life--even in his College
life: ‘I thought, sir, you mightn’t object to have the goodness to
accept a bundle--’

‘Damn your bundle, sir!’ cried Mr Dorrit, in irrepressible rage.
‘I--hum--don’t smoke.’

‘I humbly beg your pardon, sir. You used to.’

‘Tell me that again,’ cried Mr Dorrit, quite beside himself, ‘and I’ll
take the poker to you!’

John Chivery backed to the door.

‘Stop, sir!’ cried Mr Dorrit. ‘Stop! Sit down. Confound you sit down!’

John Chivery dropped into the chair nearest the door, and Mr Dorrit
walked up and down the room; rapidly at first; then, more slowly. Once,
he went to the window, and stood there with his forehead against the
glass. All of a sudden, he turned and said:

‘What else did you come for, Sir?’

‘Nothing else in the world, sir. Oh dear me! Only to say, Sir, that I
hoped you was well, and only to ask if Miss Amy was Well?’

‘What’s that to you, sir?’ retorted Mr Dorrit.

‘It’s nothing to me, sir, by rights. I never thought of lessening the
distance betwixt us, I am sure. I know it’s a liberty, sir, but I never
thought you’d have taken it ill. Upon my word and honour, sir,’ said
Young John, with emotion, ‘in my poor way, I am too proud to have come,
I assure you, if I had thought so.’

Mr Dorrit was ashamed. He went back to the window, and leaned his
forehead against the glass for some time. When he turned, he had his
handkerchief in his hand, and he had been wiping his eyes with it, and
he looked tired and ill.

‘Young John, I am very sorry to have been hasty with you, but--ha--some
remembrances are not happy remembrances, and--hum--you shouldn’t have
come.’

‘I feel that now, sir,’ returned John Chivery; ‘but I didn’t before, and
Heaven knows I meant no harm, sir.’

‘No. No,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘I am--hum--sure of that. Ha. Give me your
hand, Young John, give me your hand.’

Young John gave it; but Mr Dorrit had driven his heart out of it, and
nothing could change his face now, from its white, shocked look.

‘There!’ said Mr Dorrit, slowly shaking hands with him. ‘Sit down again,
Young John.’

‘Thank you, sir--but I’d rather stand.’

Mr Dorrit sat down instead. After painfully holding his head a little
while, he turned it to his visitor, and said, with an effort to be easy:

‘And how is your father, Young John? How--ha--how are they all, Young
John?’

‘Thank you, sir, They’re all pretty well, sir. They’re not any ways
complaining.’

‘Hum. You are in your--ha--old business I see, John?’ said Mr Dorrit,
with a glance at the offending bundle he had anathematised.

‘Partly, sir. I am in my’--John hesitated a little--‘father’s business
likewise.’

‘Oh indeed!’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘Do you--ha hum--go upon the ha--’

‘Lock, sir? Yes, sir.’

‘Much to do, John?’

‘Yes, sir; we’re pretty heavy at present. I don’t know how it is, but we
generally _are_ pretty heavy.’

‘At this time of the year, Young John?’

‘Mostly at all times of the year, sir. I don’t know the time that makes
much difference to us. I wish you good night, sir.’

‘Stay a moment, John--ha--stay a moment. Hum. Leave me the cigars, John,
I--ha--beg.’

‘Certainly, sir.’ John put them, with a trembling hand, on the table.

‘Stay a moment, Young John; stay another moment. It would be a--ha--a
gratification to me to send a little--hum--Testimonial, by such a trusty
messenger, to be divided among--ha hum--them--_them_--according to their
wants. Would you object to take it, John?’

‘Not in any ways, sir. There’s many of them, I’m sure, that would be the
better for it.’

‘Thank you, John. I--ha--I’ll write it, John.’

His hand shook so that he was a long time writing it, and wrote it in
a tremulous scrawl at last. It was a cheque for one hundred pounds. He
folded it up, put it in Young John’s hand, and pressed the hand in his.

‘I hope you’ll--ha--overlook--hum--what has passed, John.’

‘Don’t speak of it, sir, on any accounts. I don’t in any ways bear
malice, I’m sure.’

But nothing while John was there could change John’s face to its natural
colour and expression, or restore John’s natural manner.

‘And, John,’ said Mr Dorrit, giving his hand a final pressure, and
releasing it, ‘I hope we--ha--agree that we have spoken together
in confidence; and that you will abstain, in going out, from saying
anything to any one that might--hum--suggest that--ha--once I--’

‘Oh! I assure you, sir,’ returned John Chivery, ‘in my poor humble way,
sir, I’m too proud and honourable to do it, sir.’

Mr Dorrit was not too proud and honourable to listen at the door that
he might ascertain for himself whether John really went straight out, or
lingered to have any talk with any one. There was no doubt that he went
direct out at the door, and away down the street with a quick step.
After remaining alone for an hour, Mr Dorrit rang for the Courier,
who found him with his chair on the hearth-rug, sitting with his back
towards him and his face to the fire. ‘You can take that bundle of
cigars to smoke on the journey, if you like,’ said Mr Dorrit, with
a careless wave of his hand. ‘Ha--brought by--hum--little offering
from--ha--son of old tenant of mine.’

Next morning’s sun saw Mr Dorrit’s equipage upon the Dover road, where
every red-jacketed postilion was the sign of a cruel house, established
for the unmerciful plundering of travellers. The whole business of the
human race, between London and Dover, being spoliation, Mr Dorrit was
waylaid at Dartford, pillaged at Gravesend, rifled at Rochester, fleeced
at Sittingbourne, and sacked at Canterbury. However, it being the
Courier’s business to get him out of the hands of the banditti, the
Courier brought him off at every stage; and so the red-jackets went
gleaming merrily along the spring landscape, rising and falling to
a regular measure, between Mr Dorrit in his snug corner and the next
chalky rise in the dusty highway.

Another day’s sun saw him at Calais. And having now got the Channel
between himself and John Chivery, he began to feel safe, and to find
that the foreign air was lighter to breathe than the air of England.

On again by the heavy French roads for Paris. Having now quite recovered
his equanimity, Mr Dorrit, in his snug corner, fell to castle-building
as he rode along. It was evident that he had a very large castle in
hand. All day long he was running towers up, taking towers down, adding
a wing here, putting on a battlement there, looking to the walls,
strengthening the defences, giving ornamental touches to the interior,
making in all respects a superb castle of it. His preoccupied face so
clearly denoted the pursuit in which he was engaged, that every cripple
at the post-houses, not blind, who shoved his little battered tin-box in
at the carriage window for Charity in the name of Heaven, Charity in the
name of our Lady, Charity in the name of all the Saints, knew as well
what work he was at, as their countryman Le Brun could have known it
himself, though he had made that English traveller the subject of a
special physiognomical treatise.

Arrived at Paris, and resting there three days, Mr Dorrit strolled
much about the streets alone, looking in at the shop-windows, and
particularly the jewellers’ windows. Ultimately, he went into the most
famous jeweller’s, and said he wanted to buy a little gift for a lady.

It was a charming little woman to whom he said it--a sprightly little
woman, dressed in perfect taste, who came out of a green velvet bower
to attend upon him, from posting up some dainty little books of account
which one could hardly suppose to be ruled for the entry of any articles
more commercial than kisses, at a dainty little shining desk which
looked in itself like a sweetmeat.

For example, then, said the little woman, what species of gift did
Monsieur desire? A love-gift?

Mr Dorrit smiled, and said, Eh, well! Perhaps. What did he know? It was
always possible; the sex being so charming. Would she show him some?

Most willingly, said the little woman. Flattered and enchanted to show
him many. But pardon! To begin with, he would have the great goodness
to observe that there were love-gifts, and there were nuptial gifts.
For example, these ravishing ear-rings and this necklace so superb to
correspond, were what one called a love-gift. These brooches and these
rings, of a beauty so gracious and celestial, were what one called, with
the permission of Monsieur, nuptial gifts.

Perhaps it would be a good arrangement, Mr Dorrit hinted, smiling, to
purchase both, and to present the love-gift first, and to finish with
the nuptial offering?

Ah Heaven! said the little woman, laying the tips of the fingers of her
two little hands against each other, that would be generous indeed, that
would be a special gallantry! And without doubt the lady so crushed with
gifts would find them irresistible.

Mr Dorrit was not sure of that. But, for example, the sprightly little
woman was very sure of it, she said. So Mr Dorrit bought a gift of
each sort, and paid handsomely for it. As he strolled back to his hotel
afterwards, he carried his head high: having plainly got up his castle
now to a much loftier altitude than the two square towers of Notre Dame.

Building away with all his might, but reserving the plans of his castle
exclusively for his own eye, Mr Dorrit posted away for Marseilles.
Building on, building on, busily, busily, from morning to night. Falling
asleep, and leaving great blocks of building materials dangling in the
air; waking again, to resume work and get them into their places. What
time the Courier in the rumble, smoking Young John’s best cigars, left
a little thread of thin light smoke behind--perhaps as _he_ built a
castle or two with stray pieces of Mr Dorrit’s money.

Not a fortified town that they passed in all their journey was as
strong, not a Cathedral summit was as high, as Mr Dorrit’s castle.
Neither the Saone nor the Rhone sped with the swiftness of that peerless
building; nor was the Mediterranean deeper than its foundations; nor
were the distant landscapes on the Cornice road, nor the hills and bay
of Genoa the Superb, more beautiful. Mr Dorrit and his matchless castle
were disembarked among the dirty white houses and dirtier felons of
Civita Vecchia, and thence scrambled on to Rome as they could, through
the filth that festered on the way.




CHAPTER 19. The Storming of the Castle in the Air


The sun had gone down full four hours, and it was later than most
travellers would like it to be for finding themselves outside the walls
of Rome, when Mr Dorrit’s carriage, still on its last wearisome
stage, rattled over the solitary Campagna. The savage herdsmen and
the fierce-looking peasants who had chequered the way while the light
lasted, had all gone down with the sun, and left the wilderness
blank. At some turns of the road, a pale flare on the horizon, like an
exhalation from the ruin-sown land, showed that the city was yet far
off; but this poor relief was rare and short-lived. The carriage dipped
down again into a hollow of the black dry sea, and for a long time there
was nothing visible save its petrified swell and the gloomy sky.

Mr Dorrit, though he had his castle-building to engage his mind, could
not be quite easy in that desolate place. He was far more curious, in
every swerve of the carriage, and every cry of the postilions, than he
had been since he quitted London. The valet on the box evidently quaked.
The Courier in the rumble was not altogether comfortable in his mind. As
often as Mr Dorrit let down the glass and looked back at him (which was
very often), he saw him smoking John Chivery out, it is true, but still
generally standing up the while and looking about him, like a man who
had his suspicions, and kept upon his guard. Then would Mr Dorrit,
pulling up the glass again, reflect that those postilions were
cut-throat looking fellows, and that he would have done better to have
slept at Civita Vecchia, and have started betimes in the morning. But,
for all this, he worked at his castle in the intervals.

And now, fragments of ruinous enclosure, yawning window-gap and crazy
wall, deserted houses, leaking wells, broken water-tanks, spectral
cypress-trees, patches of tangled vine, and the changing of the track to
a long, irregular, disordered lane where everything was crumbling away,
from the unsightly buildings to the jolting road--now, these objects
showed that they were nearing Rome. And now, a sudden twist and stoppage
of the carriage inspired Mr Dorrit with the mistrust that the brigand
moment was come for twisting him into a ditch and robbing him; until,
letting down the glass again and looking out, he perceived himself
assailed by nothing worse than a funeral procession, which came
mechanically chaunting by, with an indistinct show of dirty vestments,
lurid torches, swinging censers, and a great cross borne before a
priest. He was an ugly priest by torchlight; of a lowering aspect, with
an overhanging brow; and as his eyes met those of Mr Dorrit, looking
bareheaded out of the carriage, his lips, moving as they chaunted,
seemed to threaten that important traveller; likewise the action of
his hand, which was in fact his manner of returning the traveller’s
salutation, seemed to come in aid of that menace. So thought Mr Dorrit,
made fanciful by the weariness of building and travelling, as the priest
drifted past him, and the procession straggled away, taking its dead
along with it. Upon their so-different way went Mr Dorrit’s company too;
and soon, with their coach load of luxuries from the two great capitals
of Europe, they were (like the Goths reversed) beating at the gates of
Rome.

Mr Dorrit was not expected by his own people that night. He had been;
but they had given him up until to-morrow, not doubting that it was
later than he would care, in those parts, to be out. Thus, when his
equipage stopped at his own gate, no one but the porter appeared to
receive him. Was Miss Dorrit from home? he asked. No. She was within.
Good, said Mr Dorrit to the assembling servants; let them keep where
they were; let them help to unload the carriage; he would find Miss
Dorrit for himself.

So he went up his grand staircase, slowly, and tired, and looked into
various chambers which were empty, until he saw a light in a small
ante-room. It was a curtained nook, like a tent, within two other rooms;
and it looked warm and bright in colour, as he approached it through the
dark avenue they made.

There was a draped doorway, but no door; and as he stopped here, looking
in unseen, he felt a pang. Surely not like jealousy? For why like
jealousy? There was only his daughter and his brother there: he, with
his chair drawn to the hearth, enjoying the warmth of the evening wood
fire; she seated at a little table, busied with some embroidery work.
Allowing for the great difference in the still-life of the picture, the
figures were much the same as of old; his brother being sufficiently
like himself to represent himself, for a moment, in the composition.
So had he sat many a night, over a coal fire far away; so had she sat,
devoted to him. Yet surely there was nothing to be jealous of in the old
miserable poverty. Whence, then, the pang in his heart?

‘Do you know, uncle, I think you are growing young again?’

Her uncle shook his head and said, ‘Since when, my dear; since when?’

‘I think,’ returned Little Dorrit, plying her needle, ‘that you have
been growing younger for weeks past. So cheerful, uncle, and so ready,
and so interested.’

‘My dear child--all you.’

‘All me, uncle!’

‘Yes, yes. You have done me a world of good. You have been so
considerate of me, and so tender with me, and so delicate in trying to
hide your attentions from me, that I--well, well, well! It’s treasured
up, my darling, treasured up.’

‘There is nothing in it but your own fresh fancy, uncle,’ said Little
Dorrit, cheerfully.

‘Well, well, well!’ murmured the old man. ‘Thank God!’

She paused for an instant in her work to look at him, and her look
revived that former pain in her father’s breast; in his poor weak
breast, so full of contradictions, vacillations, inconsistencies, the
little peevish perplexities of this ignorant life, mists which the
morning without a night only can clear away.

‘I have been freer with you, you see, my dove,’ said the old man, ‘since
we have been alone. I say, alone, for I don’t count Mrs General; I
don’t care for her; she has nothing to do with me. But I know Fanny was
impatient of me. And I don’t wonder at it, or complain of it, for I am
sensible that I must be in the way, though I try to keep out of it as
well as I can. I know I am not fit company for our company. My brother
William,’ said the old man admiringly, ‘is fit company for monarchs;
but not so your uncle, my dear. Frederick Dorrit is no credit to William
Dorrit, and he knows it quite well. Ah! Why, here’s your father, Amy!
My dear William, welcome back! My beloved brother, I am rejoiced to see
you!’

(Turning his head in speaking, he had caught sight of him as he stood in
the doorway.)

Little Dorrit with a cry of pleasure put her arms about her father’s
neck, and kissed him again and again. Her father was a little impatient,
and a little querulous. ‘I am glad to find you at last, Amy,’ he said.
‘Ha. Really I am glad to find--hum--any one to receive me at last.
I appear to have been--ha--so little expected, that upon my word
I began--ha hum--to think it might be right to offer an apology
for--ha--taking the liberty of coming back at all.’

‘It was so late, my dear William,’ said his brother, ‘that we had given
you up for to-night.’

‘I am stronger than you, dear Frederick,’ returned his brother with an
elaboration of fraternity in which there was severity; ‘and I hope I can
travel without detriment at--ha--any hour I choose.’

‘Surely, surely,’ returned the other, with a misgiving that he had given
offence. ‘Surely, William.’

‘Thank you, Amy,’ pursued Mr Dorrit, as she helped him to put off his
wrappers. ‘I can do it without assistance. I--ha--need not trouble you,
Amy. Could I have a morsel of bread and a glass of wine, or--hum--would
it cause too much inconvenience?’

‘Dear father, you shall have supper in a very few minutes.’

‘Thank you, my love,’ said Mr Dorrit, with a reproachful frost upon him;
‘I--ha--am afraid I am causing inconvenience. Hum. Mrs General pretty
well?’

‘Mrs General complained of a headache, and of being fatigued; and so,
when we gave you up, she went to bed, dear.’

Perhaps Mr Dorrit thought that Mrs General had done well in being
overcome by the disappointment of his not arriving. At any rate, his
face relaxed, and he said with obvious satisfaction, ‘Extremely sorry to
hear that Mrs General is not well.’

During this short dialogue, his daughter had been observant of him, with
something more than her usual interest. It would seem as though he had
a changed or worn appearance in her eyes, and he perceived and resented
it; for he said with renewed peevishness, when he had divested himself
of his travelling-cloak, and had come to the fire:

‘Amy, what are you looking at? What do you see in me that causes you
to--ha--concentrate your solicitude on me in that--hum--very particular
manner?’

‘I did not know it, father; I beg your pardon. It gladdens my eyes to
see you again; that’s all.’

‘Don’t say that’s all, because--ha--that’s not all. You--hum--you
think,’ said Mr Dorrit, with an accusatory emphasis, ‘that I am not
looking well.’

‘I thought you looked a little tired, love.’

‘Then you are mistaken,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘Ha, I am _not_ tired. Ha, hum. I
am very much fresher than I was when I went away.’

He was so inclined to be angry that she said nothing more in her
justification, but remained quietly beside him embracing his arm. As
he stood thus, with his brother on the other side, he fell into a heavy
doze, of not a minute’s duration, and awoke with a start.

‘Frederick,’ he said, turning to his brother: ‘I recommend you to go to
bed immediately.’

‘No, William. I’ll wait and see you sup.’

‘Frederick,’ he retorted, ‘I beg you to go to bed. I--ha--make it a
personal request that you go to bed. You ought to have been in bed long
ago. You are very feeble.’

‘Hah!’ said the old man, who had no wish but to please him. ‘Well, well,
well! I dare say I am.’

‘My dear Frederick,’ returned Mr Dorrit, with an astonishing superiority
to his brother’s failing powers, ‘there can be no doubt of it. It is
painful to me to see you so weak. Ha. It distresses me. Hum. I don’t
find you looking at all well. You are not fit for this sort of thing.
You should be more careful, you should be very careful.’

‘Shall I go to bed?’ asked Frederick.

‘Dear Frederick,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘do, I adjure you! Good night,
brother. I hope you will be stronger to-morrow. I am not at all pleased
with your looks. Good night, dear fellow.’ After dismissing his brother
in this gracious way, he fell into a doze again before the old man was
well out of the room: and he would have stumbled forward upon the logs,
but for his daughter’s restraining hold.

‘Your uncle wanders very much, Amy,’ he said, when he was thus roused.
‘He is less--ha--coherent, and his conversation is more--hum--broken,
than I have--ha, hum--ever known. Has he had any illness since I have
been gone?’

‘No, father.’

‘You--ha--see a great change in him, Amy?’

‘I have not observed it, dear.’

‘Greatly broken,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘Greatly broken. My poor,
affectionate, failing Frederick! Ha. Even taking into account what he
was before, he is--hum--sadly broken!’

His supper, which was brought to him there, and spread upon the little
table where he had seen her working, diverted his attention. She sat at
his side as in the days that were gone, for the first time since those
days ended. They were alone, and she helped him to his meat and poured
out his drink for him, as she had been used to do in the prison. All
this happened now, for the first time since their accession to wealth.
She was afraid to look at him much, after the offence he had taken; but
she noticed two occasions in the course of his meal, when he all of a
sudden looked at her, and looked about him, as if the association were
so strong that he needed assurance from his sense of sight that they
were not in the old prison-room. Both times, he put his hand to his head
as if he missed his old black cap--though it had been ignominiously
given away in the Marshalsea, and had never got free to that hour, but
still hovered about the yards on the head of his successor.

He took very little supper, but was a long time over it, and often
reverted to his brother’s declining state. Though he expressed the
greatest pity for him, he was almost bitter upon him. He said that poor
Frederick--ha hum--drivelled. There was no other word to express it;
drivelled. Poor fellow! It was melancholy to reflect what Amy must have
undergone from the excessive tediousness of his Society--wandering and
babbling on, poor dear estimable creature, wandering and babbling on--if
it had not been for the relief she had had in Mrs General.
Extremely sorry, he then repeated with his former satisfaction, that
that--ha--superior woman was poorly.

Little Dorrit, in her watchful love, would have remembered the lightest
thing he said or did that night, though she had had no subsequent reason
to recall that night. She always remembered that, when he looked about
him under the strong influence of the old association, he tried to
keep it out of her mind, and perhaps out of his own too, by immediately
expatiating on the great riches and great company that had encompassed
him in his absence, and on the lofty position he and his family had to
sustain. Nor did she fail to recall that there were two under-currents,
side by side, pervading all his discourse and all his manner; one
showing her how well he had got on without her, and how independent
he was of her; the other, in a fitful and unintelligible way almost
complaining of her, as if it had been possible that she had neglected
him while he was away.

His telling her of the glorious state that Mr Merdle kept, and of the
court that bowed before him, naturally brought him to Mrs Merdle. So
naturally indeed, that although there was an unusual want of sequence in
the greater part of his remarks, he passed to her at once, and asked how
she was.

‘She is very well. She is going away next week.’

‘Home?’ asked Mr Dorrit.

‘After a few weeks’ stay upon the road.’

‘She will be a vast loss here,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘A vast--ha--acquisition
at home. To Fanny, and to--hum--the rest of the--ha--great world.’

Little Dorrit thought of the competition that was to be entered upon,
and assented very softly.

‘Mrs Merdle is going to have a great farewell Assembly, dear, and a
dinner before it. She has been expressing her anxiety that you should
return in time. She has invited both you and me to her dinner.’

‘She is--ha--very kind. When is the day?’

‘The day after to-morrow.’

‘Write round in the morning, and say that I have returned, and
shall--hum--be delighted.’

‘May I walk with you up the stairs to your room, dear?’

‘No!’ he answered, looking angrily round; for he was moving away, as if
forgetful of leave-taking. ‘You may not, Amy. I want no help. I am your
father, not your infirm uncle!’ He checked himself, as abruptly as he
had broken into this reply, and said, ‘You have not kissed me, Amy. Good
night, my dear! We must marry--ha--we must marry _you_, now.’ With that
he went, more slowly and more tired, up the staircase to his rooms, and,
almost as soon as he got there, dismissed his valet. His next care was
to look about him for his Paris purchases, and, after opening their
cases and carefully surveying them, to put them away under lock and
key. After that, what with dozing and what with castle-building, he lost
himself for a long time, so that there was a touch of morning on the
eastward rim of the desolate Campagna when he crept to bed.

Mrs General sent up her compliments in good time next day, and hoped
he had rested well after this fatiguing journey. He sent down his
compliments, and begged to inform Mrs General that he had rested very
well indeed, and was in high condition. Nevertheless, he did not come
forth from his own rooms until late in the afternoon; and, although he
then caused himself to be magnificently arrayed for a drive with
Mrs General and his daughter, his appearance was scarcely up to his
description of himself.

As the family had no visitors that day, its four members dined alone
together. He conducted Mrs General to the seat at his right hand with
immense ceremony; and Little Dorrit could not but notice as she followed
with her uncle, both that he was again elaborately dressed, and that his
manner towards Mrs General was very particular. The perfect formation of
that accomplished lady’s surface rendered it difficult to displace an
atom of its genteel glaze, but Little Dorrit thought she descried a
slight thaw of triumph in a corner of her frosty eye.

Notwithstanding what may be called in these pages the Pruney and
Prismatic nature of the family banquet, Mr Dorrit several times fell
asleep while it was in progress. His fits of dozing were as sudden as
they had been overnight, and were as short and profound. When the first
of these slumberings seized him, Mrs General looked almost amazed: but,
on each recurrence of the symptoms, she told her polite beads, Papa,
Potatoes, Poultry, Prunes, and Prism; and, by dint of going through that
infallible performance very slowly, appeared to finish her rosary at
about the same time as Mr Dorrit started from his sleep.

He was again painfully aware of a somnolent tendency in Frederick (which
had no existence out of his own imagination), and after dinner, when
Frederick had withdrawn, privately apologised to Mrs General for the
poor man. ‘The most estimable and affectionate of brothers,’ he said,
‘but--ha, hum--broken up altogether. Unhappily, declining fast.’

‘Mr Frederick, sir,’ quoth Mrs General, ‘is habitually absent and
drooping, but let us hope it is not so bad as that.’

Mr Dorrit, however, was determined not to let him off. ‘Fast declining,
madam. A wreck. A ruin. Mouldering away before our eyes. Hum. Good
Frederick!’

‘You left Mrs Sparkler quite well and happy, I trust?’ said Mrs General,
after heaving a cool sigh for Frederick.

‘Surrounded,’ replied Mr Dorrit, ‘by--ha--all that can charm the taste,
and--hum--elevate the mind. Happy, my dear madam, in a--hum--husband.’

Mrs General was a little fluttered; seeming delicately to put the word
away with her gloves, as if there were no knowing what it might lead to.

‘Fanny,’ Mr Dorrit continued. ‘Fanny, Mrs General, has high
qualities. Ha. Ambition--hum--purpose, consciousness of--ha--position,
determination to support that position--ha, hum--grace, beauty, and
native nobility.’

‘No doubt,’ said Mrs General (with a little extra stiffness).

‘Combined with these qualities, madam,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘Fanny
has--ha--manifested one blemish which has made me--hum--made me uneasy,
and--ha--I must add, angry; but which I trust may now be considered
at an end, even as to herself, and which is undoubtedly at an end as
to--ha--others.’

‘To what, Mr Dorrit,’ returned Mrs General, with her gloves again
somewhat excited, ‘can you allude? I am at a loss to--’

‘Do not say that, my dear madam,’ interrupted Mr Dorrit.

Mrs General’s voice, as it died away, pronounced the words, ‘at a loss
to imagine.’

After which Mr Dorrit was seized with a doze for about a minute, out of
which he sprang with spasmodic nimbleness.

‘I refer, Mrs General, to that--ha--strong spirit of opposition,
or--hum--I might say--ha--jealousy in Fanny, which has occasionally
risen against the--ha--sense I entertain of--hum--the claims of--ha--the
lady with whom I have now the honour of communing.’

‘Mr Dorrit,’ returned Mrs General, ‘is ever but too obliging, ever but
too appreciative. If there have been moments when I have imagined that
Miss Dorrit has indeed resented the favourable opinion Mr Dorrit has
formed of my services, I have found, in that only too high opinion, my
consolation and recompense.’

‘Opinion of your services, madam?’ said Mr Dorrit.

‘Of,’ Mrs General repeated, in an elegantly impressive manner, ‘my
services.’

‘Of your services alone, dear madam?’ said Mr Dorrit.

‘I presume,’ retorted Mrs General, in her former impressive manner, ‘of
my services alone. For, to what else,’ said Mrs General, with a slightly
interrogative action of her gloves, ‘could I impute--’

‘To--ha--yourself, Mrs General. Ha, hum. To yourself and your merits,’
was Mr Dorrit’s rejoinder.

‘Mr Dorrit will pardon me,’ said Mrs General, ‘if I remark that this
is not a time or place for the pursuit of the present conversation.
Mr Dorrit will excuse me if I remind him that Miss Dorrit is in the
adjoining room, and is visible to myself while I utter her name. Mr
Dorrit will forgive me if I observe that I am agitated, and that I find
there are moments when weaknesses I supposed myself to have subdued,
return with redoubled power. Mr Dorrit will allow me to withdraw.’

‘Hum. Perhaps we may resume this--ha--interesting conversation,’ said
Mr Dorrit, ‘at another time; unless it should be, what I hope it is
not--hum--in any way disagreeable to--ah--Mrs General.’

‘Mr Dorrit,’ said Mrs General, casting down her eyes as she rose with a
bend, ‘must ever claim my homage and obedience.’

Mrs General then took herself off in a stately way, and not with that
amount of trepidation upon her which might have been expected in a less
remarkable woman. Mr Dorrit, who had conducted his part of the dialogue
with a certain majestic and admiring condescension--much as some people
may be seen to conduct themselves in Church, and to perform their part
in the service--appeared, on the whole, very well satisfied with himself
and with Mrs General too. On the return of that lady to tea, she had
touched herself up with a little powder and pomatum, and was not without
moral enchantment likewise: the latter showing itself in much sweet
patronage of manner towards Miss Dorrit, and in an air of as tender
interest in Mr Dorrit as was consistent with rigid propriety. At the
close of the evening, when she rose to retire, Mr Dorrit took her by the
hand as if he were going to lead her out into the Piazza of the people
to walk a minuet by moonlight, and with great solemnity conducted her to
the room door, where he raised her knuckles to his lips. Having parted
from her with what may be conjectured to have been a rather bony kiss of
a cosmetic flavour, he gave his daughter his blessing, graciously. And
having thus hinted that there was something remarkable in the wind, he
again went to bed.

He remained in the seclusion of his own chamber next morning; but, early
in the afternoon, sent down his best compliments to Mrs General, by Mr
Tinkler, and begged she would accompany Miss Dorrit on an airing
without him. His daughter was dressed for Mrs Merdle’s dinner before he
appeared. He then presented himself in a refulgent condition as to his
attire, but looking indefinably shrunken and old. However, as he was
plainly determined to be angry with her if she so much as asked him how
he was, she only ventured to kiss his cheek, before accompanying him to
Mrs Merdle’s with an anxious heart.

The distance that they had to go was very short, but he was at his
building work again before the carriage had half traversed it. Mrs
Merdle received him with great distinction; the bosom was in admirable
preservation, and on the best terms with itself; the dinner was very
choice; and the company was very select.

It was principally English; saving that it comprised the usual French
Count and the usual Italian Marchese--decorative social milestones,
always to be found in certain places, and varying very little in
appearance. The table was long, and the dinner was long; and Little
Dorrit, overshadowed by a large pair of black whiskers and a large white
cravat, lost sight of her father altogether, until a servant put a scrap
of paper in her hand, with a whispered request from Mrs Merdle that she
would read it directly. Mrs Merdle had written on it in pencil, ‘Pray
come and speak to Mr Dorrit, I doubt if he is well.’

She was hurrying to him, unobserved, when he got up out of his chair,
and leaning over the table called to her, supposing her to be still in
her place:

‘Amy, Amy, my child!’

The action was so unusual, to say nothing of his strange eager
appearance and strange eager voice, that it instantaneously caused a
profound silence.

‘Amy, my dear,’ he repeated. ‘Will you go and see if Bob is on the
lock?’

She was at his side, and touching him, but he still perversely supposed
her to be in her seat, and called out, still leaning over the table,
‘Amy, Amy. I don’t feel quite myself. Ha. I don’t know what’s the matter
with me. I particularly wish to see Bob. Ha. Of all the turnkeys, he’s
as much my friend as yours. See if Bob is in the lodge, and beg him to
come to me.’

All the guests were now in consternation, and everybody rose.

‘Dear father, I am not there; I am here, by you.’

‘Oh! You are here, Amy! Good. Hum. Good. Ha. Call Bob. If he has been
relieved, and is not on the lock, tell Mrs Bangham to go and fetch him.’

She was gently trying to get him away; but he resisted, and would not
go.

‘I tell you, child,’ he said petulantly, ‘I can’t be got up the narrow
stairs without Bob. Ha. Send for Bob. Hum. Send for Bob--best of all the
turnkeys--send for Bob!’

He looked confusedly about him, and, becoming conscious of the number of
faces by which he was surrounded, addressed them:

‘Ladies and gentlemen, the duty--ha--devolves upon me of--hum--welcoming
you to the Marshalsea! Welcome to the Marshalsea! The space
is--ha--limited--limited--the parade might be wider; but you will
find it apparently grow larger after a time--a time, ladies and
gentlemen--and the air is, all things considered, very good. It blows
over the--ha--Surrey hills. Blows over the Surrey hills. This is the
Snuggery. Hum. Supported by a small subscription of the--ha--Collegiate
body. In return for which--hot water--general kitchen--and little
domestic advantages. Those who are habituated to the--ha--Marshalsea,
are pleased to call me its father. I am accustomed to be complimented by
strangers as the--ha--Father of the Marshalsea. Certainly, if years of
residence may establish a claim to so--ha--honourable a title, I may
accept the--hum--conferred distinction. My child, ladies and gentlemen.
My daughter. Born here!’

She was not ashamed of it, or ashamed of him. She was pale and
frightened; but she had no other care than to soothe him and get him
away, for his own dear sake. She was between him and the wondering
faces, turned round upon his breast with her own face raised to his. He
held her clasped in his left arm, and between whiles her low voice was
heard tenderly imploring him to go away with her.

‘Born here,’ he repeated, shedding tears. ‘Bred here. Ladies and
gentlemen, my daughter. Child of an unfortunate father, but--ha--always
a gentleman. Poor, no doubt, but--hum--proud. Always proud. It
has become a--hum--not infrequent custom for my--ha--personal
admirers--personal admirers solely--to be pleased to express
their desire to acknowledge my semi-official position here,
by offering--ha--little tributes, which usually take the form
of--ha--voluntary recognitions of my humble endeavours to--hum--to
uphold a Tone here--a Tone--I beg it to be understood that I do not
consider myself compromised. Ha. Not compromised. Ha. Not a beggar. No;
I repudiate the title! At the same time far be it from me to--hum--to
put upon the fine feelings by which my partial friends are actuated,
the slight of scrupling to admit that those offerings are--hum--highly
acceptable. On the contrary, they are most acceptable. In my child’s
name, if not in my own, I make the admission in the fullest manner, at
the same time reserving--ha--shall I say my personal dignity? Ladies and
gentlemen, God bless you all!’

By this time, the exceeding mortification undergone by the Bosom had
occasioned the withdrawal of the greater part of the company into other
rooms. The few who had lingered thus long followed the rest, and Little
Dorrit and her father were left to the servants and themselves. Dearest
and most precious to her, he would come with her now, would he not? He
replied to her fervid entreaties, that he would never be able to get up
the narrow stairs without Bob; where was Bob, would nobody fetch Bob?
Under pretence of looking for Bob, she got him out against the stream of
gay company now pouring in for the evening assembly, and got him into a
coach that had just set down its load, and got him home.

The broad stairs of his Roman palace were contracted in his failing
sight to the narrow stairs of his London prison; and he would suffer no
one but her to touch him, his brother excepted. They got him up to his
room without help, and laid him down on his bed. And from that hour his
poor maimed spirit, only remembering the place where it had broken its
wings, cancelled the dream through which it had since groped, and knew
of nothing beyond the Marshalsea. When he heard footsteps in the street,
he took them for the old weary tread in the yards. When the hour came
for locking up, he supposed all strangers to be excluded for the night.
When the time for opening came again, he was so anxious to see Bob, that
they were fain to patch up a narrative how that Bob--many a year dead
then, gentle turnkey--had taken cold, but hoped to be out to-morrow, or
the next day, or the next at furthest.

He fell away into a weakness so extreme that he could not raise his
hand. But he still protected his brother according to his long usage;
and would say with some complacency, fifty times a day, when he saw him
standing by his bed, ‘My good Frederick, sit down. You are very feeble
indeed.’

They tried him with Mrs General, but he had not the faintest knowledge
of her. Some injurious suspicion lodged itself in his brain, that she
wanted to supplant Mrs Bangham, and that she was given to drinking. He
charged her with it in no measured terms; and was so urgent with his
daughter to go round to the Marshal and entreat him to turn her out,
that she was never reproduced after the first failure.

Saving that he once asked ‘if Tip had gone outside?’ the remembrance of
his two children not present seemed to have departed from him. But the
child who had done so much for him and had been so poorly repaid, was
never out of his mind. Not that he spared her, or was fearful of her
being spent by watching and fatigue; he was not more troubled on that
score than he had usually been. No; he loved her in his old way. They
were in the jail again, and she tended him, and he had constant need of
her, and could not turn without her; and he even told her, sometimes,
that he was content to have undergone a great deal for her sake. As to
her, she bent over his bed with her quiet face against his, and would
have laid down her own life to restore him.

When he had been sinking in this painless way for two or three days, she
observed him to be troubled by the ticking of his watch--a pompous gold
watch that made as great a to-do about its going as if nothing else
went but itself and Time. She suffered it to run down; but he was still
uneasy, and showed that was not what he wanted. At length he roused
himself to explain that he wanted money to be raised on this watch. He
was quite pleased when she pretended to take it away for the purpose,
and afterwards had a relish for his little tastes of wine and jelly,
that he had not had before.

He soon made it plain that this was so; for, in another day or two
he sent off his sleeve-buttons and finger-rings. He had an amazing
satisfaction in entrusting her with these errands, and appeared to
consider it equivalent to making the most methodical and provident
arrangements. After his trinkets, or such of them as he had been able to
see about him, were gone, his clothes engaged his attention; and it
is as likely as not that he was kept alive for some days by the
satisfaction of sending them, piece by piece, to an imaginary
pawnbroker’s.

Thus for ten days Little Dorrit bent over his pillow, laying her cheek
against his. Sometimes she was so worn out that for a few minutes
they would slumber together. Then she would awake; to recollect with
fast-flowing silent tears what it was that touched her face, and to see,
stealing over the cherished face upon the pillow, a deeper shadow than
the shadow of the Marshalsea Wall.

Quietly, quietly, all the lines of the plan of the great Castle
melted one after another. Quietly, quietly, the ruled and cross-ruled
countenance on which they were traced, became fair and blank.
Quietly, quietly, the reflected marks of the prison bars and of the
zig-zag iron on the wall-top, faded away. Quietly, quietly, the face
subsided into a far younger likeness of her own than she had ever seen
under the grey hair, and sank to rest.

At first her uncle was stark distracted. ‘O my brother! O William,
William! You to go before me; you to go alone; you to go, and I to
remain! You, so far superior, so distinguished, so noble; I, a poor
useless creature fit for nothing, and whom no one would have missed!’

It did her, for the time, the good of having him to think of and to
succour.

‘Uncle, dear uncle, spare yourself, spare me!’

The old man was not deaf to the last words. When he did begin to
restrain himself, it was that he might spare her. He had no care for
himself; but, with all the remaining power of the honest heart, stunned
so long and now awaking to be broken, he honoured and blessed her.

‘O God,’ he cried, before they left the room, with his wrinkled hands
clasped over her. ‘Thou seest this daughter of my dear dead brother! All
that I have looked upon, with my half-blind and sinful eyes, Thou hast
discerned clearly, brightly. Not a hair of her head shall be harmed
before Thee. Thou wilt uphold her here to her last hour. And I know Thou
wilt reward her hereafter!’

They remained in a dim room near, until it was almost midnight, quiet
and sad together. At times his grief would seek relief in a burst like
that in which it had found its earliest expression; but, besides that
his little strength would soon have been unequal to such strains, he
never failed to recall her words, and to reproach himself and calm
himself. The only utterance with which he indulged his sorrow, was the
frequent exclamation that his brother was gone, alone; that they had
been together in the outset of their lives, that they had fallen into
misfortune together, that they had kept together through their many
years of poverty, that they had remained together to that day; and that
his brother was gone alone, alone!

They parted, heavy and sorrowful. She would not consent to leave him
anywhere but in his own room, and she saw him lie down in his clothes
upon his bed, and covered him with her own hands. Then she sank upon her
own bed, and fell into a deep sleep: the sleep of exhaustion and
rest, though not of complete release from a pervading consciousness of
affliction. Sleep, good Little Dorrit. Sleep through the night!

It was a moonlight night; but the moon rose late, being long past the
full. When it was high in the peaceful firmament, it shone through
half-closed lattice blinds into the solemn room where the stumblings and
wanderings of a life had so lately ended. Two quiet figures were within
the room; two figures, equally still and impassive, equally removed
by an untraversable distance from the teeming earth and all that it
contains, though soon to lie in it.

One figure reposed upon the bed. The other, kneeling on the floor,
drooped over it; the arms easily and peacefully resting on the coverlet;
the face bowed down, so that the lips touched the hand over which with
its last breath it had bent. The two brothers were before their Father;
far beyond the twilight judgment of this world; high above its mists and
obscurities.




CHAPTER 20. Introduces the next


The passengers were landing from the packet on the pier at Calais.
A low-lying place and a low-spirited place Calais was, with the tide
ebbing out towards low water-mark. There had been no more water on the
bar than had sufficed to float the packet in; and now the bar itself,
with a shallow break of sea over it, looked like a lazy marine monster
just risen to the surface, whose form was indistinctly shown as it lay
asleep. The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard as if
it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had colour and rotundity,
dropped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves. The long
rows of gaunt black piles, slimy and wet and weather-worn, with funeral
garlands of seaweed twisted about them by the late tide, might
have represented an unsightly marine cemetery. Every wave-dashed,
storm-beaten object, was so low and so little, under the broad grey sky,
in the noise of the wind and sea, and before the curling lines of surf,
making at it ferociously, that the wonder was there was any Calais left,
and that its low gates and low wall and low roofs and low ditches and
low sand-hills and low ramparts and flat streets, had not yielded
long ago to the undermining and besieging sea, like the fortifications
children make on the sea-shore.

After slipping among oozy piles and planks, stumbling up wet steps and
encountering many salt difficulties, the passengers entered on their
comfortless peregrination along the pier; where all the French vagabonds
and English outlaws in the town (half the population) attended to
prevent their recovery from bewilderment. After being minutely inspected
by all the English, and claimed and reclaimed and counter-claimed as
prizes by all the French in a hand-to-hand scuffle three quarters of a
mile long, they were at last free to enter the streets, and to make off
in their various directions, hotly pursued.

Clennam, harassed by more anxieties than one, was among this devoted
band. Having rescued the most defenceless of his compatriots from
situations of great extremity, he now went his way alone, or as nearly
alone as he could be, with a native gentleman in a suit of grease and
a cap of the same material, giving chase at a distance of some fifty
yards, and continually calling after him, ‘Hi! Ice-say! You! Seer!
Ice-say! Nice Oatel!’

Even this hospitable person, however, was left behind at last, and
Clennam pursued his way, unmolested. There was a tranquil air in the
town after the turbulence of the Channel and the beach, and its dulness
in that comparison was agreeable. He met new groups of his countrymen,
who had all a straggling air of having at one time overblown themselves,
like certain uncomfortable kinds of flowers, and of being now mere
weeds. They had all an air, too, of lounging out a limited round, day
after day, which strongly reminded him of the Marshalsea. But, taking
no further note of them than was sufficient to give birth to the
reflection, he sought out a certain street and number which he kept in
his mind.

‘So Pancks said,’ he murmured to himself, as he stopped before a dull
house answering to the address. ‘I suppose his information to be correct
and his discovery, among Mr Casby’s loose papers, indisputable; but,
without it, I should hardly have supposed this to be a likely place.’

A dead sort of house, with a dead wall over the way and a dead gateway
at the side, where a pendant bell-handle produced two dead tinkles, and
a knocker produced a dead, flat, surface-tapping, that seemed not to
have depth enough in it to penetrate even the cracked door. However, the
door jarred open on a dead sort of spring; and he closed it behind him
as he entered a dull yard, soon brought to a close by another dead wall,
where an attempt had been made to train some creeping shrubs, which were
dead; and to make a little fountain in a grotto, which was dry; and to
decorate that with a little statue, which was gone.

The entry to the house was on the left, and it was garnished as the
outer gateway was, with two printed bills in French and English,
announcing Furnished Apartments to let, with immediate possession. A
strong cheerful peasant woman, all stocking, petticoat, white cap, and
ear-ring, stood here in a dark doorway, and said with a pleasant show of
teeth, ‘Ice-say! Seer! Who?’

Clennam, replying in French, said the English lady; he wished to see
the English lady. ‘Enter then and ascend, if you please,’ returned the
peasant woman, in French likewise. He did both, and followed her up a
dark bare staircase to a back room on the first-floor. Hence, there was
a gloomy view of the yard that was dull, and of the shrubs that were
dead, and of the fountain that was dry, and of the pedestal of the
statue that was gone.

‘Monsieur Blandois,’ said Clennam.

‘With pleasure, Monsieur.’

Thereupon the woman withdrew and left him to look at the room. It was
the pattern of room always to be found in such a house. Cool, dull, and
dark. Waxed floor very slippery. A room not large enough to skate in;
nor adapted to the easy pursuit of any other occupation. Red and
white curtained windows, little straw mat, little round table with a
tumultuous assemblage of legs underneath, clumsy rush-bottomed chairs,
two great red velvet arm-chairs affording plenty of space to be
uncomfortable in, bureau, chimney-glass in several pieces pretending to
be in one piece, pair of gaudy vases of very artificial flowers; between
them a Greek warrior with his helmet off, sacrificing a clock to the
Genius of France.

After some pause, a door of communication with another room was opened,
and a lady entered. She manifested great surprise on seeing Clennam, and
her glance went round the room in search of some one else.

‘Pardon me, Miss Wade. I am alone.’

‘It was not your name that was brought to me.’

‘No; I know that. Excuse me. I have already had experience that my name
does not predispose you to an interview; and I ventured to mention the
name of one I am in search of.’

‘Pray,’ she returned, motioning him to a chair so coldly that he
remained standing, ‘what name was it that you gave?’

‘I mentioned the name of Blandois.’

‘Blandois?’

‘A name you are acquainted with.’

‘It is strange,’ she said, frowning, ‘that you should still press an
undesired interest in me and my acquaintances, in me and my affairs, Mr
Clennam. I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Pardon me. You know the name?’

‘What can you have to do with the name? What can I have to do with the
name? What can you have to do with my knowing or not knowing any name?
I know many names and I have forgotten many more. This may be in the
one class, or it may be in the other, or I may never have heard it. I am
acquainted with no reason for examining myself, or for being examined,
about it.’

‘If you will allow me,’ said Clennam, ‘I will tell you my reason for
pressing the subject. I admit that I do press it, and I must beg you to
forgive me if I do so, very earnestly. The reason is all mine, I do not
insinuate that it is in any way yours.’

‘Well, sir,’ she returned, repeating a little less haughtily than before
her former invitation to him to be seated: to which he now deferred, as
she seated herself. ‘I am at least glad to know that this is not another
bondswoman of some friend of yours, who is bereft of free choice, and
whom I have spirited away. I will hear your reason, if you please.’

‘First, to identify the person of whom we speak,’ said Clennam, ‘let me
observe that it is the person you met in London some time back. You will
remember meeting him near the river--in the Adelphi!’

‘You mix yourself most unaccountably with my business,’ she replied,
looking full at him with stern displeasure. ‘How do you know that?’

‘I entreat you not to take it ill. By mere accident.’

‘What accident?’

‘Solely the accident of coming upon you in the street and seeing the
meeting.’

‘Do you speak of yourself, or of some one else?’

‘Of myself. I saw it.’

‘To be sure it was in the open street,’ she observed, after a few
moments of less and less angry reflection. ‘Fifty people might have seen
it. It would have signified nothing if they had.’

‘Nor do I make my having seen it of any moment, nor (otherwise than as
an explanation of my coming here) do I connect my visit with it or the
favour that I have to ask.’

‘Oh! You have to ask a favour! It occurred to me,’ and the handsome face
looked bitterly at him, ‘that your manner was softened, Mr Clennam.’

He was content to protest against this by a slight action without
contesting it in words. He then referred to Blandois’ disappearance, of
which it was probable she had heard? However probable it was to him, she
had heard of no such thing. Let him look round him (she said) and judge
for himself what general intelligence was likely to reach the ears of
a woman who had been shut up there while it was rife, devouring her own
heart. When she had uttered this denial, which he believed to be true,
she asked him what he meant by disappearance? That led to his narrating
the circumstances in detail, and expressing something of his anxiety
to discover what had really become of the man, and to repel the dark
suspicions that clouded about his mother’s house. She heard him with
evident surprise, and with more marks of suppressed interest than he
had seen in her; still they did not overcome her distant, proud, and
self-secluded manner. When he had finished, she said nothing but these
words:

‘You have not yet told me, sir, what I have to do with it, or what the
favour is? Will you be so good as come to that?’

‘I assume,’ said Arthur, persevering, in his endeavour to soften
her scornful demeanour, ‘that being in communication--may I say,
confidential communication?--with this person--’

‘You may say, of course, whatever you like,’ she remarked; ‘but I do not
subscribe to your assumptions, Mr Clennam, or to any one’s.’

‘--that being, at least in personal communication with him,’ said
Clennam, changing the form of his position in the hope of making
it unobjectionable, ‘you can tell me something of his antecedents,
pursuits, habits, usual place of residence. Can give me some little clue
by which to seek him out in the likeliest manner, and either produce
him, or establish what has become of him. This is the favour I ask,
and I ask it in a distress of mind for which I hope you will feel some
consideration. If you should have any reason for imposing conditions
upon me, I will respect it without asking what it is.’

‘You chanced to see me in the street with the man,’ she observed,
after being, to his mortification, evidently more occupied with her own
reflections on the matter than with his appeal. ‘Then you knew the man
before?’

‘Not before; afterwards. I never saw him before, but I saw him again on
this very night of his disappearance. In my mother’s room, in fact. I
left him there. You will read in this paper all that is known of him.’

He handed her one of the printed bills, which she read with a steady and
attentive face.

‘This is more than _I_ knew of him,’ she said, giving it back.
Clennam’s looks expressed his heavy disappointment, perhaps his
incredulity; for she added in the same unsympathetic tone: ‘You don’t
believe it. Still, it is so. As to personal communication: it seems that
there was personal communication between him and your mother. And yet
you say you believe _her_ declaration that she knows no more of him!’

A sufficiently expressive hint of suspicion was conveyed in these words,
and in the smile by which they were accompanied, to bring the blood into
Clennam’s cheeks.

‘Come, sir,’ she said, with a cruel pleasure in repeating the stab, ‘I
will be as open with you as you can desire. I will confess that if I
cared for my credit (which I do not), or had a good name to preserve
(which I have not, for I am utterly indifferent to its being considered
good or bad), I should regard myself as heavily compromised by having
had anything to do with this fellow. Yet he never passed in at _my_
door--never sat in colloquy with _me_ until midnight.’

She took her revenge for her old grudge in thus turning his subject
against him. Hers was not the nature to spare him, and she had no
compunction.

‘That he is a low, mercenary wretch; that I first saw him prowling about
Italy (where I was, not long ago), and that I hired him there, as the
suitable instrument of a purpose I happened to have; I have no objection
to tell you. In short, it was worth my while, for my own pleasure--the
gratification of a strong feeling--to pay a spy who would fetch and
carry for money. I paid this creature. And I dare say that if I had
wanted to make such a bargain, and if I could have paid him enough, and
if he could have done it in the dark, free from all risk, he would have
taken any life with as little scruple as he took my money. That, at
least, is my opinion of him; and I see it is not very far removed from
yours. Your mother’s opinion of him, I am to assume (following your
example of assuming this and that), was vastly different.’

‘My mother, let me remind you,’ said Clennam, ‘was first brought into
communication with him in the unlucky course of business.’

‘It appears to have been an unlucky course of business that last brought
her into communication with him,’ returned Miss Wade; ‘and business
hours on that occasion were late.’

‘You imply,’ said Arthur, smarting under these cool-handed thrusts, of
which he had deeply felt the force already, ‘that there was something--’

‘Mr Clennam,’ she composedly interrupted, ‘recollect that I do not speak
by implication about the man. He is, I say again without disguise, a low
mercenary wretch. I suppose such a creature goes where there is occasion
for him. If I had not had occasion for him, you would not have seen him
and me together.’

Wrung by her persistence in keeping that dark side of the case before
him, of which there was a half-hidden shadow in his own breast, Clennam
was silent.

‘I have spoken of him as still living,’ she added, ‘but he may have been
put out of the way for anything I know. For anything I care, also. I
have no further occasion for him.’

With a heavy sigh and a despondent air, Arthur Clennam slowly rose.
She did not rise also, but said, having looked at him in the meanwhile
with a fixed look of suspicion, and lips angrily compressed:

‘He was the chosen associate of your dear friend, Mr Gowan, was he not?
Why don’t you ask your dear friend to help you?’

The denial that he was a dear friend rose to Arthur’s lips; but he
repressed it, remembering his old struggles and resolutions, and said:

‘Further than that he has never seen Blandois since Blandois set out for
England, Mr Gowan knows nothing additional about him. He was a chance
acquaintance, made abroad.’

‘A chance acquaintance made abroad!’ she repeated. ‘Yes. Your dear
friend has need to divert himself with all the acquaintances he can
make, seeing what a wife he has. I hate his wife, sir.’

The anger with which she said it, the more remarkable for being so much
under her restraint, fixed Clennam’s attention, and kept him on the
spot. It flashed out of her dark eyes as they regarded him, quivered in
her nostrils, and fired the very breath she exhaled; but her face was
otherwise composed into a disdainful serenity; and her attitude was as
calmly and haughtily graceful as if she had been in a mood of complete
indifference.

‘All I will say is, Miss Wade,’ he remarked, ‘that you can have received
no provocation to a feeling in which I believe you have no sharer.’

‘You may ask your dear friend, if you choose,’ she returned, ‘for his
opinion upon that subject.’

‘I am scarcely on those intimate terms with my dear friend,’ said
Arthur, in spite of his resolutions, ‘that would render my approaching
the subject very probable, Miss Wade.’

‘I hate him,’ she returned. ‘Worse than his wife, because I was once
dupe enough, and false enough to myself, almost to love him. You have
seen me, sir, only on common-place occasions, when I dare say you have
thought me a common-place woman, a little more self-willed than the
generality. You don’t know what I mean by hating, if you know me no
better than that; you can’t know, without knowing with what care I have
studied myself and people about me. For this reason I have for some
time inclined to tell you what my life has been--not to propitiate your
opinion, for I set no value on it; but that you may comprehend, when
you think of your dear friend and his dear wife, what I mean by hating.
Shall I give you something I have written and put by for your perusal,
or shall I hold my hand?’

Arthur begged her to give it to him. She went to the bureau, unlocked
it, and took from an inner drawer a few folded sheets of paper. Without
any conciliation of him, scarcely addressing him, rather speaking as if
she were speaking to her own looking-glass for the justification of her
own stubbornness, she said, as she gave them to him:

‘Now you may know what I mean by hating! No more of that. Sir, whether
you find me temporarily and cheaply lodging in an empty London house, or
in a Calais apartment, you find Harriet with me. You may like to see
her before you leave. Harriet, come in!’ She called Harriet again. The
second call produced Harriet, once Tattycoram.

‘Here is Mr Clennam,’ said Miss Wade; ‘not come for you; he has given
you up,--I suppose you have, by this time?’

‘Having no authority, or influence--yes,’ assented Clennam.

‘Not come in search of you, you see; but still seeking some one. He
wants that Blandois man.’

‘With whom I saw you in the Strand in London,’ hinted Arthur.

‘If you know anything of him, Harriet, except that he came from
Venice--which we all know--tell it to Mr Clennam freely.’

‘I know nothing more about him,’ said the girl.

‘Are you satisfied?’ Miss Wade inquired of Arthur.

He had no reason to disbelieve them; the girl’s manner being so natural
as to be almost convincing, if he had had any previous doubts. He
replied, ‘I must seek for intelligence elsewhere.’

He was not going in the same breath; but he had risen before the girl
entered, and she evidently thought he was. She looked quickly at him,
and said:

‘Are they well, sir?’

‘Who?’

She stopped herself in saying what would have been ‘all of them;’
glanced at Miss Wade; and said ‘Mr and Mrs Meagles.’

‘They were, when I last heard of them. They are not at home. By the way,
let me ask you. Is it true that you were seen there?’

‘Where? Where does any one say I was seen?’ returned the girl, sullenly
casting down her eyes.

‘Looking in at the garden gate of the cottage.’

‘No,’ said Miss Wade. ‘She has never been near it.’

‘You are wrong, then,’ said the girl. ‘I went down there the last time
we were in London. I went one afternoon when you left me alone. And I
did look in.’

‘You poor-spirited girl,’ returned Miss Wade with infinite contempt;
‘does all our companionship, do all our conversations, do all your old
complainings, tell for so little as that?’

‘There was no harm in looking in at the gate for an instant,’ said the
girl. ‘I saw by the windows that the family were not there.’

‘Why should you go near the place?’

‘Because I wanted to see it. Because I felt that I should like to look
at it again.’

As each of the two handsome faces looked at the other, Clennam felt how
each of the two natures must be constantly tearing the other to pieces.

‘Oh!’ said Miss Wade, coldly subduing and removing her glance; ‘if you
had any desire to see the place where you led the life from which I
rescued you because you had found out what it was, that is another
thing. But is that your truth to me? Is that your fidelity to me? Is
that the common cause I make with you? You are not worth the confidence
I have placed in you. You are not worth the favour I have shown you. You
are no higher than a spaniel, and had better go back to the people who
did worse than whip you.’

‘If you speak so of them with any one else by to hear, you’ll provoke me
to take their part,’ said the girl.

‘Go back to them,’ Miss Wade retorted. ‘Go back to them.’

‘You know very well,’ retorted Harriet in her turn, ‘that I won’t go
back to them. You know very well that I have thrown them off, and never
can, never shall, never will, go back to them. Let them alone, then,
Miss Wade.’

‘You prefer their plenty to your less fat living here,’ she rejoined.
‘You exalt them, and slight me. What else should I have expected? I
ought to have known it.’

‘It’s not so,’ said the girl, flushing high, ‘and you don’t say what you
mean. I know what you mean. You are reproaching me, underhanded, with
having nobody but you to look to. And because I have nobody but you
to look to, you think you are to make me do, or not do, everything you
please, and are to put any affront upon me. You are as bad as they were,
every bit. But I will not be quite tamed, and made submissive. I will
say again that I went to look at the house, because I had often thought
that I should like to see it once more. I will ask again how they are,
because I once liked them and at times thought they were kind to me.’

Hereupon Clennam said that he was sure they would still receive her
kindly, if she should ever desire to return.

‘Never!’ said the girl passionately. ‘I shall never do that. Nobody
knows that better than Miss Wade, though she taunts me because she has
made me her dependent. And I know I am so; and I know she is overjoyed
when she can bring it to my mind.’

‘A good pretence!’ said Miss Wade, with no less anger, haughtiness, and
bitterness; ‘but too threadbare to cover what I plainly see in this. My
poverty will not bear competition with their money. Better go back at
once, better go back at once, and have done with it!’

Arthur Clennam looked at them, standing a little distance asunder in the
dull confined room, each proudly cherishing her own anger; each, with
a fixed determination, torturing her own breast, and torturing the
other’s. He said a word or two of leave-taking; but Miss Wade barely
inclined her head, and Harriet, with the assumed humiliation of an
abject dependent and serf (but not without defiance for all that), made
as if she were too low to notice or to be noticed.

He came down the dark winding stairs into the yard with an increased
sense upon him of the gloom of the wall that was dead, and of the shrubs
that were dead, and of the fountain that was dry, and of the statue that
was gone. Pondering much on what he had seen and heard in that house,
as well as on the failure of all his efforts to trace the suspicious
character who was lost, he returned to London and to England by the
packet that had taken him over. On the way he unfolded the sheets of
paper, and read in them what is reproduced in the next chapter.




CHAPTER 21. The History of a Self-Tormentor


I have the misfortune of not being a fool. From a very early age I have
detected what those about me thought they hid from me. If I could have
been habitually imposed upon, instead of habitually discerning the
truth, I might have lived as smoothly as most fools do.

My childhood was passed with a grandmother; that is to say, with a lady
who represented that relative to me, and who took that title on herself.
She had no claim to it, but I--being to that extent a little fool--had
no suspicion of her. She had some children of her own family in her
house, and some children of other people. All girls; ten in number,
including me. We all lived together and were educated together.

I must have been about twelve years old when I began to see how
determinedly those girls patronised me. I was told I was an orphan.
There was no other orphan among us; and I perceived (here was the
first disadvantage of not being a fool) that they conciliated me in an
insolent pity, and in a sense of superiority. I did not set this down
as a discovery, rashly. I tried them often. I could hardly make them
quarrel with me. When I succeeded with any of them, they were sure to
come after an hour or two, and begin a reconciliation. I tried them over
and over again, and I never knew them wait for me to begin. They were
always forgiving me, in their vanity and condescension. Little images of
grown people!

One of them was my chosen friend. I loved that stupid mite in a
passionate way that she could no more deserve than I can remember
without feeling ashamed of, though I was but a child. She had what they
called an amiable temper, an affectionate temper. She could distribute,
and did distribute pretty looks and smiles to every one among them. I
believe there was not a soul in the place, except myself, who knew that
she did it purposely to wound and gall me!

Nevertheless, I so loved that unworthy girl that my life was made stormy
by my fondness for her. I was constantly lectured and disgraced for what
was called ‘trying her;’ in other words charging her with her little
perfidy and throwing her into tears by showing her that I read her
heart. However, I loved her faithfully; and one time I went home with
her for the holidays.

She was worse at home than she had been at school. She had a crowd of
cousins and acquaintances, and we had dances at her house, and went out
to dances at other houses, and, both at home and out, she tormented my
love beyond endurance. Her plan was, to make them all fond of her--and
so drive me wild with jealousy. To be familiar and endearing with them
all--and so make me mad with envying them. When we were left alone in
our bedroom at night, I would reproach her with my perfect knowledge of
her baseness; and then she would cry and cry and say I was cruel, and
then I would hold her in my arms till morning: loving her as much as
ever, and often feeling as if, rather than suffer so, I could so hold
her in my arms and plunge to the bottom of a river--where I would still
hold her after we were both dead.

It came to an end, and I was relieved. In the family there was an aunt
who was not fond of me. I doubt if any of the family liked me much; but
I never wanted them to like me, being altogether bound up in the one
girl. The aunt was a young woman, and she had a serious way with her
eyes of watching me. She was an audacious woman, and openly looked
compassionately at me. After one of the nights that I have spoken of, I
came down into a greenhouse before breakfast. Charlotte (the name of
my false young friend) had gone down before me, and I heard this aunt
speaking to her about me as I entered. I stopped where I was, among the
leaves, and listened.

The aunt said, ‘Charlotte, Miss Wade is wearing you to death, and this
must not continue.’ I repeat the very words I heard.

Now, what did she answer? Did she say, ‘It is I who am wearing her to
death, I who am keeping her on a rack and am the executioner, yet she
tells me every night that she loves me devotedly, though she knows what
I make her undergo?’ No; my first memorable experience was true to
what I knew her to be, and to all my experience. She began sobbing and
weeping (to secure the aunt’s sympathy to herself), and said, ‘Dear
aunt, she has an unhappy temper; other girls at school, besides I, try
hard to make it better; we all try hard.’

Upon that the aunt fondled her, as if she had said something noble
instead of despicable and false, and kept up the infamous pretence by
replying, ‘But there are reasonable limits, my dear love, to everything,
and I see that this poor miserable girl causes you more constant and
useless distress than even so good an effort justifies.’

The poor miserable girl came out of her concealment, as you may be
prepared to hear, and said, ‘Send me home.’ I never said another word
to either of them, or to any of them, but ‘Send me home, or I will
walk home alone, night and day!’ When I got home, I told my supposed
grandmother that, unless I was sent away to finish my education
somewhere else before that girl came back, or before any one of them
came back, I would burn my sight away by throwing myself into the fire,
rather than I would endure to look at their plotting faces.

I went among young women next, and I found them no better. Fair
words and fair pretences; but I penetrated below those assertions of
themselves and depreciations of me, and they were no better. Before
I left them, I learned that I had no grandmother and no recognised
relation. I carried the light of that information both into my past
and into my future. It showed me many new occasions on which people
triumphed over me, when they made a pretence of treating me with
consideration, or doing me a service.

A man of business had a small property in trust for me. I was to be
a governess; I became a governess; and went into the family of a poor
nobleman, where there were two daughters--little children, but the
parents wished them to grow up, if possible, under one instructress. The
mother was young and pretty. From the first, she made a show of behaving
to me with great delicacy. I kept my resentment to myself; but I knew
very well that it was her way of petting the knowledge that she was my
Mistress, and might have behaved differently to her servant if it had
been her fancy.

I say I did not resent it, nor did I; but I showed her, by not
gratifying her, that I understood her. When she pressed me to take wine,
I took water. If there happened to be anything choice at table, she
always sent it to me: but I always declined it, and ate of the rejected
dishes. These disappointments of her patronage were a sharp retort, and
made me feel independent.

I liked the children. They were timid, but on the whole disposed to
attach themselves to me. There was a nurse, however, in the house, a
rosy-faced woman always making an obtrusive pretence of being gay and
good-humoured, who had nursed them both, and who had secured their
affections before I saw them. I could almost have settled down to my
fate but for this woman. Her artful devices for keeping herself before
the children in constant competition with me, might have blinded many
in my place; but I saw through them from the first. On the pretext of
arranging my rooms and waiting on me and taking care of my wardrobe (all
of which she did busily), she was never absent. The most crafty of her
many subtleties was her feint of seeking to make the children fonder of
me. She would lead them to me and coax them to me. ‘Come to good Miss
Wade, come to dear Miss Wade, come to pretty Miss Wade. She loves you
very much. Miss Wade is a clever lady, who has read heaps of books, and
can tell you far better and more interesting stories than I know. Come
and hear Miss Wade!’ How could I engage their attentions, when my heart
was burning against these ignorant designs? How could I wonder, when I
saw their innocent faces shrinking away, and their arms twining round
her neck, instead of mine? Then she would look up at me, shaking their
curls from her face, and say, ‘They’ll come round soon, Miss Wade;
they’re very simple and loving, ma’am; don’t be at all cast down about
it, ma’am’--exulting over me!

There was another thing the woman did. At times, when she saw that she
had safely plunged me into a black despondent brooding by these means,
she would call the attention of the children to it, and would show them
the difference between herself and me. ‘Hush! Poor Miss Wade is not
well. Don’t make a noise, my dears, her head aches. Come and comfort
her. Come and ask her if she is better; come and ask her to lie down. I
hope you have nothing on your mind, ma’am. Don’t take on, ma’am, and be
sorry!’

It became intolerable. Her ladyship, my Mistress, coming in one day when
I was alone, and at the height of feeling that I could support it no
longer, I told her I must go. I could not bear the presence of that
woman Dawes.

‘Miss Wade! Poor Dawes is devoted to you; would do anything for you!’

I knew beforehand she would say so; I was quite prepared for it; I only
answered, it was not for me to contradict my Mistress; I must go.

‘I hope, Miss Wade,’ she returned, instantly assuming the tone of
superiority she had always so thinly concealed, ‘that nothing I have
ever said or done since we have been together, has justified your use of
that disagreeable word, “Mistress.” It must have been wholly inadvertent
on my part. Pray tell me what it is.’

I replied that I had no complaint to make, either of my Mistress or to
my Mistress; but I must go.

She hesitated a moment, and then sat down beside me, and laid her hand
on mine. As if that honour would obliterate any remembrance!

‘Miss Wade, I fear you are unhappy, through causes over which I have no
influence.’

I smiled, thinking of the experience the word awakened, and said, ‘I
have an unhappy temper, I suppose.’

‘I did not say that.’

‘It is an easy way of accounting for anything,’ said I.

‘It may be; but I did not say so. What I wish to approach is something
very different. My husband and I have exchanged some remarks upon the
subject, when we have observed with pain that you have not been easy
with us.’

‘Easy? Oh! You are such great people, my lady,’ said I.

‘I am unfortunate in using a word which may convey a meaning--and
evidently does--quite opposite to my intention.’ (She had not expected
my reply, and it shamed her.) ‘I only mean, not happy with us. It is
a difficult topic to enter on; but, from one young woman to another,
perhaps--in short, we have been apprehensive that you may allow some
family circumstances of which no one can be more innocent than yourself,
to prey upon your spirits. If so, let us entreat you not to make them
a cause of grief. My husband himself, as is well known, formerly had a
very dear sister who was not in law his sister, but who was universally
beloved and respected--’

I saw directly that they had taken me in for the sake of the dead woman,
whoever she was, and to have that boast of me and advantage of me; I
saw, in the nurse’s knowledge of it, an encouragement to goad me as
she had done; and I saw, in the children’s shrinking away, a vague
impression, that I was not like other people. I left that house that
night.

After one or two short and very similar experiences, which are not to
the present purpose, I entered another family where I had but one pupil:
a girl of fifteen, who was the only daughter. The parents here were
elderly people: people of station, and rich. A nephew whom they had
brought up was a frequent visitor at the house, among many other
visitors; and he began to pay me attention. I was resolute in repulsing
him; for I had determined when I went there, that no one should pity me
or condescend to me. But he wrote me a letter. It led to our being
engaged to be married.

He was a year younger than I, and young-looking even when that allowance
was made. He was on absence from India, where he had a post that was
soon to grow into a very good one. In six months we were to be married,
and were to go to India. I was to stay in the house, and was to be
married from the house. Nobody objected to any part of the plan.

I cannot avoid saying he admired me; but, if I could, I would. Vanity
has nothing to do with the declaration, for his admiration worried me.
He took no pains to hide it; and caused me to feel among the rich people
as if he had bought me for my looks, and made a show of his purchase to
justify himself. They appraised me in their own minds, I saw, and were
curious to ascertain what my full value was. I resolved that they
should not know. I was immovable and silent before them; and would have
suffered any one of them to kill me sooner than I would have laid myself
out to bespeak their approval.

He told me I did not do myself justice. I told him I did, and it was
because I did and meant to do so to the last, that I would not stoop to
propitiate any of them. He was concerned and even shocked, when I added
that I wished he would not parade his attachment before them; but he
said he would sacrifice even the honest impulses of his affection to my
peace.

Under that pretence he began to retort upon me. By the hour together, he
would keep at a distance from me, talking to any one rather than to me.
I have sat alone and unnoticed, half an evening, while he conversed with
his young cousin, my pupil. I have seen all the while, in people’s eyes,
that they thought the two looked nearer on an equality than he and I.
I have sat, divining their thoughts, until I have felt that his young
appearance made me ridiculous, and have raged against myself for ever
loving him.

For I did love him once. Undeserving as he was, and little as he thought
of all these agonies that it cost me--agonies which should have made him
wholly and gratefully mine to his life’s end--I loved him. I bore with
his cousin’s praising him to my face, and with her pretending to think
that it pleased me, but full well knowing that it rankled in my breast;
for his sake. While I have sat in his presence recalling all my slights
and wrongs, and deliberating whether I should not fly from the house at
once and never see him again--I have loved him.

His aunt (my Mistress you will please to remember) deliberately,
wilfully, added to my trials and vexations. It was her delight to
expatiate on the style in which we were to live in India, and on the
establishment we should keep, and the company we should entertain when
he got his advancement. My pride rose against this barefaced way of
pointing out the contrast my married life was to present to my then
dependent and inferior position. I suppressed my indignation; but I
showed her that her intention was not lost upon me, and I repaid her
annoyance by affecting humility. What she described would surely be
a great deal too much honour for me, I would tell her. I was afraid
I might not be able to support so great a change. Think of a mere
governess, her daughter’s governess, coming to that high distinction! It
made her uneasy, and made them all uneasy, when I answered in this way.
They knew that I fully understood her.

It was at the time when my troubles were at their highest, and when
I was most incensed against my lover for his ingratitude in caring as
little as he did for the innumerable distresses and mortifications I
underwent on his account, that your dear friend, Mr Gowan, appeared
at the house. He had been intimate there for a long time, but had been
abroad. He understood the state of things at a glance, and he understood
me.

He was the first person I had ever seen in my life who had understood
me. He was not in the house three times before I knew that he
accompanied every movement of my mind. In his coldly easy way with all
of them, and with me, and with the whole subject, I saw it clearly.
In his light protestations of admiration of my future husband, in his
enthusiasm regarding our engagement and our prospects, in his hopeful
congratulations on our future wealth and his despondent references to
his own poverty--all equally hollow, and jesting, and full of mockery--I
saw it clearly. He made me feel more and more resentful, and more and
more contemptible, by always presenting to me everything that surrounded
me with some new hateful light upon it, while he pretended to exhibit
it in its best aspect for my admiration and his own. He was like the
dressed-up Death in the Dutch series; whatever figure he took upon his
arm, whether it was youth or age, beauty or ugliness, whether he danced
with it, sang with it, played with it, or prayed with it, he made it
ghastly.

You will understand, then, that when your dear friend complimented me,
he really condoled with me; that when he soothed me under my vexations,
he laid bare every smarting wound I had; that when he declared my
‘faithful swain’ to be ‘the most loving young fellow in the world, with
the tenderest heart that ever beat,’ he touched my old misgiving that
I was made ridiculous. These were not great services, you may say. They
were acceptable to me, because they echoed my own mind, and confirmed
my own knowledge. I soon began to like the society of your dear friend
better than any other.

When I perceived (which I did, almost as soon) that jealousy was growing
out of this, I liked this society still better. Had I not been subject
to jealousy, and were the endurances to be all mine? No. Let him know
what it was! I was delighted that he should know it; I was delighted
that he should feel keenly, and I hoped he did. More than that. He was
tame in comparison with Mr Gowan, who knew how to address me on equal
terms, and how to anatomise the wretched people around us.

This went on, until the aunt, my Mistress, took it upon herself to speak
to me. It was scarcely worth alluding to; she knew I meant nothing; but
she suggested from herself, knowing it was only necessary to suggest,
that it might be better if I were a little less companionable with Mr
Gowan.

I asked her how she could answer for what I meant? She could always
answer, she replied, for my meaning nothing wrong. I thanked her,
but said I would prefer to answer for myself and to myself. Her other
servants would probably be grateful for good characters, but I wanted
none.

Other conversation followed, and induced me to ask her how she knew that
it was only necessary for her to make a suggestion to me, to have it
obeyed? Did she presume on my birth, or on my hire? I was not bought,
body and soul. She seemed to think that her distinguished nephew had
gone into a slave-market and purchased a wife.

It would probably have come, sooner or later, to the end to which it did
come, but she brought it to its issue at once. She told me, with assumed
commiseration, that I had an unhappy temper. On this repetition of the
old wicked injury, I withheld no longer, but exposed to her all I had
known of her and seen in her, and all I had undergone within myself
since I had occupied the despicable position of being engaged to her
nephew. I told her that Mr Gowan was the only relief I had had in my
degradation; that I had borne it too long, and that I shook it off too
late; but that I would see none of them more. And I never did.

Your dear friend followed me to my retreat, and was very droll on the
severance of the connection; though he was sorry, too, for the excellent
people (in their way the best he had ever met), and deplored the
necessity of breaking mere house-flies on the wheel. He protested before
long, and far more truly than I then supposed, that he was not worth
acceptance by a woman of such endowments, and such power of character;
but--well, well--!

Your dear friend amused me and amused himself as long as it suited
his inclinations; and then reminded me that we were both people of the
world, that we both understood mankind, that we both knew there was no
such thing as romance, that we were both prepared for going different
ways to seek our fortunes like people of sense, and that we both foresaw
that whenever we encountered one another again we should meet as the
best friends on earth. So he said, and I did not contradict him.

It was not very long before I found that he was courting his present
wife, and that she had been taken away to be out of his reach. I hated
her then, quite as much as I hate her now; and naturally, therefore,
could desire nothing better than that she should marry him. But I was
restlessly curious to look at her--so curious that I felt it to be one
of the few sources of entertainment left to me. I travelled a little:
travelled until I found myself in her society, and in yours. Your dear
friend, I think, was not known to you then, and had not given you any of
those signal marks of his friendship which he has bestowed upon you.

In that company I found a girl, in various circumstances of whose
position there was a singular likeness to my own, and in whose character
I was interested and pleased to see much of the rising against swollen
patronage and selfishness, calling themselves kindness, protection,
benevolence, and other fine names, which I have described as inherent in
my nature. I often heard it said, too, that she had ‘an unhappy temper.’
Well understanding what was meant by the convenient phrase, and wanting
a companion with a knowledge of what I knew, I thought I would try to
release the girl from her bondage and sense of injustice. I have no
occasion to relate that I succeeded.

We have been together ever since, sharing my small means.




CHAPTER 22. Who passes by this Road so late?


Arthur Clennam had made his unavailing expedition to Calais in the midst
of a great pressure of business. A certain barbaric Power with valuable
possessions on the map of the world, had occasion for the services of
one or two engineers, quick in invention and determined in execution:
practical men, who could make the men and means their ingenuity
perceived to be wanted out of the best materials they could find
at hand; and who were as bold and fertile in the adaptation of such
materials to their purpose, as in the conception of their purpose
itself. This Power, being a barbaric one, had no idea of stowing away
a great national object in a Circumlocution Office, as strong wine is
hidden from the light in a cellar until its fire and youth are gone,
and the labourers who worked in the vineyard and pressed the grapes are
dust. With characteristic ignorance, it acted on the most decided and
energetic notions of How to do it; and never showed the least respect
for, or gave any quarter to, the great political science, How not to do
it. Indeed it had a barbarous way of striking the latter art and mystery
dead, in the person of any enlightened subject who practised it.

Accordingly, the men who were wanted were sought out and found; which
was in itself a most uncivilised and irregular way of proceeding. Being
found, they were treated with great confidence and honour (which again
showed dense political ignorance), and were invited to come at once and
do what they had to do. In short, they were regarded as men who meant to
do it, engaging with other men who meant it to be done.

Daniel Doyce was one of the chosen. There was no foreseeing at that time
whether he would be absent months or years. The preparations for his
departure, and the conscientious arrangement for him of all the details
and results of their joint business, had necessitated labour within a
short compass of time, which had occupied Clennam day and night. He
had slipped across the water in his first leisure, and had slipped as
quickly back again for his farewell interview with Doyce.

Him Arthur now showed, with pains and care, the state of their gains and
losses, responsibilities and prospects. Daniel went through it all
in his patient manner, and admired it all exceedingly. He audited the
accounts, as if they were a far more ingenious piece of mechanism than
he had ever constructed, and afterwards stood looking at them, weighing
his hat over his head by the brims, as if he were absorbed in the
contemplation of some wonderful engine.

‘It’s all beautiful, Clennam, in its regularity and order. Nothing can
be plainer. Nothing can be better.’

‘I am glad you approve, Doyce. Now, as to the management of your capital
while you are away, and as to the conversion of so much of it as the
business may need from time to time--’ His partner stopped him.

‘As to that, and as to everything else of that kind, all rests with you.
You will continue in all such matters to act for both of us, as you
have done hitherto, and to lighten my mind of a load it is much relieved
from.’

‘Though, as I often tell you,’ returned Clennam, ‘you unreasonably
depreciate your business qualities.’

‘Perhaps so,’ said Doyce, smiling. ‘And perhaps not. Anyhow, I have a
calling that I have studied more than such matters, and that I am better
fitted for. I have perfect confidence in my partner, and I am satisfied
that he will do what is best. If I have a prejudice connected with money
and money figures,’ continued Doyce, laying that plastic workman’s thumb
of his on the lapel of his partner’s coat, ‘it is against speculating.
I don’t think I have any other. I dare say I entertain that prejudice,
only because I have never given my mind fully to the subject.’

‘But you shouldn’t call it a prejudice,’ said Clennam. ‘My dear Doyce,
it is the soundest sense.’

‘I am glad you think so,’ returned Doyce, with his grey eye looking kind
and bright.

‘It so happens,’ said Clennam, ‘that just now, not half an hour before
you came down, I was saying the same thing to Pancks, who looked in
here. We both agreed that to travel out of safe investments is one of
the most dangerous, as it is one of the most common, of those follies
which often deserve the name of vices.’

‘Pancks?’ said Doyce, tilting up his hat at the back, and nodding with
an air of confidence. ‘Aye, aye, aye! That’s a cautious fellow.’

‘He is a very cautious fellow indeed,’ returned Arthur. ‘Quite a
specimen of caution.’

They both appeared to derive a larger amount of satisfaction from the
cautious character of Mr Pancks, than was quite intelligible, judged by
the surface of their conversation.

‘And now,’ said Daniel, looking at his watch, ‘as time and tide wait
for no man, my trusty partner, and as I am ready for starting, bag and
baggage, at the gate below, let me say a last word. I want you to grant
a request of mine.’

‘Any request you can make--Except,’ Clennam was quick with his
exception, for his partner’s face was quick in suggesting it, ‘except
that I will abandon your invention.’

‘That’s the request, and you know it is,’ said Doyce.

‘I say, No, then. I say positively, No. Now that I have begun, I will
have some definite reason, some responsible statement, something in the
nature of a real answer, from those people.’

‘You will not,’ returned Doyce, shaking his head. ‘Take my word for it,
you never will.’

‘At least, I’ll try,’ said Clennam. ‘It will do me no harm to try.’

‘I am not certain of that,’ rejoined Doyce, laying his hand persuasively
on his shoulder. ‘It has done me harm, my friend. It has aged me, tired
me, vexed me, disappointed me. It does no man any good to have his
patience worn out, and to think himself ill-used. I fancy, even already,
that unavailing attendance on delays and evasions has made you something
less elastic than you used to be.’

‘Private anxieties may have done that for the moment,’ said Clennam,
‘but not official harrying. Not yet. I am not hurt yet.’

‘Then you won’t grant my request?’

‘Decidedly, No,’ said Clennam. ‘I should be ashamed if I submitted to
be so soon driven out of the field, where a much older and a much more
sensitively interested man contended with fortitude so long.’

As there was no moving him, Daniel Doyce returned the grasp of his hand,
and, casting a farewell look round the counting-house, went down-stairs
with him. Doyce was to go to Southampton to join the small staff of
his fellow-travellers; and a coach was at the gate, well furnished and
packed, and ready to take him there. The workmen were at the gate to see
him off, and were mightily proud of him. ‘Good luck to you, Mr Doyce!’
said one of the number. ‘Wherever you go, they’ll find as they’ve got a
man among ‘em, a man as knows his tools and as his tools knows, a man
as is willing and a man as is able, and if that’s not a man, where is
a man!’ This oration from a gruff volunteer in the back-ground, not
previously suspected of any powers in that way, was received with three
loud cheers; and the speaker became a distinguished character for ever
afterwards. In the midst of the three loud cheers, Daniel gave them all
a hearty ‘Good Bye, Men!’ and the coach disappeared from sight, as if
the concussion of the air had blown it out of Bleeding Heart Yard.

Mr Baptist, as a grateful little fellow in a position of trust, was
among the workmen, and had done as much towards the cheering as a mere
foreigner could. In truth, no men on earth can cheer like Englishmen,
who do so rally one another’s blood and spirit when they cheer in
earnest, that the stir is like the rush of their whole history, with all
its standards waving at once, from Saxon Alfred’s downwards. Mr Baptist
had been in a manner whirled away before the onset, and was taking his
breath in quite a scared condition when Clennam beckoned him to follow
up-stairs, and return the books and papers to their places.

In the lull consequent on the departure--in that first vacuity which
ensues on every separation, foreshadowing the great separation that
is always overhanging all mankind--Arthur stood at his desk, looking
dreamily out at a gleam of sun. But his liberated attention soon
reverted to the theme that was foremost in his thoughts, and began, for
the hundredth time, to dwell upon every circumstance that had impressed
itself upon his mind on the mysterious night when he had seen the man at
his mother’s. Again the man jostled him in the crooked street, again
he followed the man and lost him, again he came upon the man in the
court-yard looking at the house, again he followed the man and stood
beside him on the door-steps.


     ‘Who passes by this road so late?
          Compagnon de la Majolaine;
     Who passes by this road so late?
          Always gay!’


It was not the first time, by many, that he had recalled the song of the
child’s game, of which the fellow had hummed this verse while they stood
side by side; but he was so unconscious of having repeated it audibly,
that he started to hear the next verse.


     ‘Of all the king’s knights ‘tis the flower,
         Compagnon de la Majolaine;
     Of all the king’s knights ‘tis the flower,
          Always gay!’


Cavalletto had deferentially suggested the words and tune, supposing him
to have stopped short for want of more.

‘Ah! You know the song, Cavalletto?’

‘By Bacchus, yes, sir! They all know it in France. I have heard it many
times, sung by the little children. The last time when it I have heard,’
said Mr Baptist, formerly Cavalletto, who usually went back to his
native construction of sentences when his memory went near home, ‘is
from a sweet little voice. A little voice, very pretty, very innocent.
Altro!’

‘The last time I heard it,’ returned Arthur, ‘was in a voice quite the
reverse of pretty, and quite the reverse of innocent.’ He said it more
to himself than to his companion, and added to himself, repeating
the man’s next words. ‘Death of my life, sir, it’s my character to be
impatient!’

‘EH!’ cried Cavalletto, astounded, and with all his colour gone in a
moment.

‘What is the matter?’

‘Sir! You know where I have heard that song the last time?’

With his rapid native action, his hands made the outline of a high hook
nose, pushed his eyes near together, dishevelled his hair, puffed out
his upper lip to represent a thick moustache, and threw the heavy end
of an ideal cloak over his shoulder. While doing this, with a swiftness
incredible to one who has not watched an Italian peasant, he indicated a
very remarkable and sinister smile. The whole change passed over him
like a flash of light, and he stood in the same instant, pale and
astonished, before his patron.

‘In the name of Fate and wonder,’ said Clennam, ‘what do you mean? Do
you know a man of the name of Blandois?’

‘No!’ said Mr Baptist, shaking his head.

‘You have just now described a man who was by when you heard that song;
have you not?’

‘Yes!’ said Mr Baptist, nodding fifty times.

‘And was he not called Blandois?’

‘No!’ said Mr Baptist. ‘Altro, Altro, Altro, Altro!’ He could not reject
the name sufficiently, with his head and his right forefinger going at
once.

‘Stay!’ cried Clennam, spreading out the handbill on his desk. ‘Was this
the man? You can understand what I read aloud?’

‘Altogether. Perfectly.’

‘But look at it, too. Come here and look over me, while I read.’

Mr Baptist approached, followed every word with his quick eyes, saw
and heard it all out with the greatest impatience, then clapped his
two hands flat upon the bill as if he had fiercely caught some noxious
creature, and cried, looking eagerly at Clennam, ‘It is the man! Behold
him!’

‘This is of far greater moment to me’ said Clennam, in great agitation,
‘than you can imagine. Tell me where you knew the man.’

Mr Baptist, releasing the paper very slowly and with much discomfiture,
and drawing himself back two or three paces, and making as though he
dusted his hands, returned, very much against his will:

‘At Marsiglia--Marseilles.’

‘What was he?’

‘A prisoner, and--Altro! I believe yes!--an,’ Mr Baptist crept closer
again to whisper it, ‘Assassin!’

Clennam fell back as if the word had struck him a blow: so terrible
did it make his mother’s communication with the man appear.
Cavalletto dropped on one knee, and implored him, with a redundancy of
gesticulation, to hear what had brought himself into such foul company.

He told with perfect truth how it had come of a little contraband
trading, and how he had in time been released from prison, and how he
had gone away from those antecedents. How, at the house of entertainment
called the Break of Day at Chalons on the Saone, he had been awakened
in his bed at night by the same assassin, then assuming the name of
Lagnier, though his name had formerly been Rigaud; how the assassin had
proposed that they should join their fortunes together; how he held
the assassin in such dread and aversion that he had fled from him at
daylight, and how he had ever since been haunted by the fear of seeing
the assassin again and being claimed by him as an acquaintance. When he
had related this, with an emphasis and poise on the word, ‘assassin,’
peculiarly belonging to his own language, and which did not serve to
render it less terrible to Clennam, he suddenly sprang to his feet,
pounced upon the bill again, and with a vehemence that would have been
absolute madness in any man of Northern origin, cried ‘Behold the same
assassin! Here he is!’

In his passionate raptures, he at first forgot the fact that he had
lately seen the assassin in London. On his remembering it, it suggested
hope to Clennam that the recognition might be of later date than the
night of the visit at his mother’s; but Cavalletto was too exact and
clear about time and place, to leave any opening for doubt that it had
preceded that occasion.

‘Listen,’ said Arthur, very seriously. ‘This man, as we have read here,
has wholly disappeared.’

‘Of it I am well content!’ said Cavalletto, raising his eyes piously. ‘A
thousand thanks to Heaven! Accursed assassin!’

‘Not so,’ returned Clennam; ‘for until something more is heard of him, I
can never know an hour’s peace.’

‘Enough, Benefactor; that is quite another thing. A million of excuses!’

‘Now, Cavalletto,’ said Clennam, gently turning him by the arm, so that
they looked into each other’s eyes. ‘I am certain that for the little
I have been able to do for you, you are the most sincerely grateful of
men.’

‘I swear it!’ cried the other.

‘I know it. If you could find this man, or discover what has become of
him, or gain any later intelligence whatever of him, you would render
me a service above any other service I could receive in the world, and
would make me (with far greater reason) as grateful to you as you are to
me.’

‘I know not where to look,’ cried the little man, kissing Arthur’s
hand in a transport. ‘I know not where to begin. I know not where to go.
But, courage! Enough! It matters not! I go, in this instant of time!’

‘Not a word to any one but me, Cavalletto.’

‘Al-tro!’ cried Cavalletto. And was gone with great speed.




CHAPTER 23. Mistress Affery makes a Conditional Promise,
respecting her Dreams


Left alone, with the expressive looks and gestures of Mr Baptist,
otherwise Giovanni Baptista Cavalletto, vividly before him, Clennam
entered on a weary day. It was in vain that he tried to control his
attention by directing it to any business occupation or train of
thought; it rode at anchor by the haunting topic, and would hold to no
other idea. As though a criminal should be chained in a stationary boat
on a deep clear river, condemned, whatever countless leagues of water
flowed past him, always to see the body of the fellow-creature he had
drowned lying at the bottom, immovable, and unchangeable, except as
the eddies made it broad or long, now expanding, now contracting
its terrible lineaments; so Arthur, below the shifting current of
transparent thoughts and fancies which were gone and succeeded by others
as soon as come, saw, steady and dark, and not to be stirred from its
place, the one subject that he endeavoured with all his might to rid
himself of, and that he could not fly from.

The assurance he now had, that Blandois, whatever his right name, was
one of the worst of characters, greatly augmented the burden of his
anxieties. Though the disappearance should be accounted for to-morrow,
the fact that his mother had been in communication with such a man,
would remain unalterable. That the communication had been of a secret
kind, and that she had been submissive to him and afraid of him, he
hoped might be known to no one beyond himself; yet, knowing it, how
could he separate it from his old vague fears, and how believe that
there was nothing evil in such relations?

Her resolution not to enter on the question with him, and his knowledge
of her indomitable character, enhanced his sense of helplessness. It was
like the oppression of a dream to believe that shame and exposure were
impending over her and his father’s memory, and to be shut out, as by a
brazen wall, from the possibility of coming to their aid. The purpose he
had brought home to his native country, and had ever since kept in view,
was, with her greatest determination, defeated by his mother herself, at
the time of all others when he feared that it pressed most. His advice,
energy, activity, money, credit, all his resources whatsoever, were all
made useless. If she had been possessed of the old fabled influence, and
had turned those who looked upon her into stone, she could not have
rendered him more completely powerless (so it seemed to him in his
distress of mind) than she did, when she turned her unyielding face to
his in her gloomy room.

But the light of that day’s discovery, shining on these considerations,
roused him to take a more decided course of action. Confident in the
rectitude of his purpose, and impelled by a sense of overhanging danger
closing in around, he resolved, if his mother would still admit of no
approach, to make a desperate appeal to Affery. If she could be brought
to become communicative, and to do what lay in her to break the spell of
secrecy that enshrouded the house, he might shake off the paralysis of
which every hour that passed over his head made him more acutely
sensible. This was the result of his day’s anxiety, and this was the
decision he put in practice when the day closed in.

His first disappointment, on arriving at the house, was to find the door
open, and Mr Flintwinch smoking a pipe on the steps. If circumstances
had been commonly favourable, Mistress Affery would have opened the
door to his knock. Circumstances being uncommonly unfavourable, the door
stood open, and Mr Flintwinch was smoking his pipe on the steps.

‘Good evening,’ said Arthur.

‘Good evening,’ said Mr Flintwinch.

The smoke came crookedly out of Mr Flintwinch’s mouth, as if it
circulated through the whole of his wry figure and came back by his wry
throat, before coming forth to mingle with the smoke from the crooked
chimneys and the mists from the crooked river.

‘Have you any news?’ said Arthur.

‘We have no news,’ said Jeremiah.

‘I mean of the foreign man,’ Arthur explained.

‘_I_ mean of the foreign man,’ said Jeremiah.

He looked so grim, as he stood askew, with the knot of his cravat under
his ear, that the thought passed into Clennam’s mind, and not for the
first time by many, could Flintwinch for a purpose of his own have got
rid of Blandois? Could it have been his secret, and his safety, that
were at issue? He was small and bent, and perhaps not actively strong;
yet he was as tough as an old yew-tree, and as crusty as an old jackdaw.
Such a man, coming behind a much younger and more vigorous man, and
having the will to put an end to him and no relenting, might do it
pretty surely in that solitary place at a late hour.

While, in the morbid condition of his thoughts, these thoughts drifted
over the main one that was always in Clennam’s mind, Mr Flintwinch,
regarding the opposite house over the gateway with his neck twisted and
one eye shut up, stood smoking with a vicious expression upon him; more
as if he were trying to bite off the stem of his pipe, than as if he
were enjoying it. Yet he was enjoying it in his own way.

‘You’ll be able to take my likeness, the next time you call, Arthur,
I should think,’ said Mr Flintwinch, drily, as he stooped to knock the
ashes out.

Rather conscious and confused, Arthur asked his pardon, if he had stared
at him unpolitely. ‘But my mind runs so much upon this matter,’ he said,
‘that I lose myself.’

‘Hah! Yet I don’t see,’ returned Mr Flintwinch, quite at his leisure,
‘why it should trouble _you_, Arthur.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ said Mr Flintwinch, very shortly and decidedly: much as if he were
of the canine race, and snapped at Arthur’s hand.

‘Is it nothing to see those placards about? Is it nothing to me to
see my mother’s name and residence hawked up and down in such an
association?’

‘I don’t see,’ returned Mr Flintwinch, scraping his horny cheek, ‘that
it need signify much to you. But I’ll tell you what I do see, Arthur,’
glancing up at the windows; ‘I see the light of fire and candle in your
mother’s room!’

‘And what has that to do with it?’

‘Why, sir, I read by it,’ said Mr Flintwinch, screwing himself at him,
‘that if it’s advisable (as the proverb says it is) to let sleeping dogs
lie, it’s just as advisable, perhaps, to let missing dogs lie. Let ‘em
be. They generally turn up soon enough.’

Mr Flintwinch turned short round when he had made this remark, and went
into the dark hall. Clennam stood there, following him with his eyes,
as he dipped for a light in the phosphorus-box in the little room at the
side, got one after three or four dips, and lighted the dim lamp against
the wall. All the while, Clennam was pursuing the probabilities--rather
as if they were being shown to him by an invisible hand than as if he
himself were conjuring them up--of Mr Flintwinch’s ways and means of
doing that darker deed, and removing its traces by any of the black
avenues of shadow that lay around them.

‘Now, sir,’ said the testy Jeremiah; ‘will it be agreeable to walk
up-stairs?’

‘My mother is alone, I suppose?’

‘Not alone,’ said Mr Flintwinch. ‘Mr Casby and his daughter are with
her. They came in while I was smoking, and I stayed behind to have my
smoke out.’

This was the second disappointment. Arthur made no remark upon it, and
repaired to his mother’s room, where Mr Casby and Flora had been
taking tea, anchovy paste, and hot buttered toast. The relics of those
delicacies were not yet removed, either from the table or from the
scorched countenance of Affery, who, with the kitchen toasting-fork
still in her hand, looked like a sort of allegorical personage; except
that she had a considerable advantage over the general run of such
personages in point of significant emblematical purpose.

Flora had spread her bonnet and shawl upon the bed, with a care
indicative of an intention to stay some time. Mr Casby, too, was beaming
near the hob, with his benevolent knobs shining as if the warm butter of
the toast were exuding through the patriarchal skull, and with his face
as ruddy as if the colouring matter of the anchovy paste were mantling
in the patriarchal visage. Seeing this, as he exchanged the
usual salutations, Clennam decided to speak to his mother without
postponement.

It had long been customary, as she never changed her room, for those who
had anything to say to her apart, to wheel her to her desk; where she
sat, usually with the back of her chair turned towards the rest of the
room, and the person who talked with her seated in a corner, on a stool
which was always set in that place for that purpose. Except that it
was long since the mother and son had spoken together without the
intervention of a third person, it was an ordinary matter of course
within the experience of visitors for Mrs Clennam to be asked, with a
word of apology for the interruption, if she could be spoken with on
a matter of business, and, on her replying in the affirmative, to be
wheeled into the position described.

Therefore, when Arthur now made such an apology, and such a request,
and moved her to her desk and seated himself on the stool, Mrs Finching
merely began to talk louder and faster, as a delicate hint that she
could overhear nothing, and Mr Casby stroked his long white locks with
sleepy calmness.

‘Mother, I have heard something to-day which I feel persuaded you don’t
know, and which I think you should know, of the antecedents of that man
I saw here.’

‘I know nothing of the antecedents of the man you saw here, Arthur.’

She spoke aloud. He had lowered his own voice; but she rejected that
advance towards confidence as she rejected every other, and spoke in her
usual key and in her usual stern voice.

‘I have received it on no circuitous information; it has come to me
direct.’

She asked him, exactly as before, if he were there to tell her what it
was?

‘I thought it right that you should know it.’

‘And what is it?’

‘He has been a prisoner in a French gaol.’

She answered with composure, ‘I should think that very likely.’

‘But in a gaol for criminals, mother. On an accusation of murder.’

She started at the word, and her looks expressed her natural horror. Yet
she still spoke aloud, when she demanded:--

‘Who told you so?’

‘A man who was his fellow-prisoner.’

‘That man’s antecedents, I suppose, were not known to you, before he
told you?’

‘No.’

‘Though the man himself was?’

‘Yes.’

‘My case and Flintwinch’s, in respect of this other man! I dare say the
resemblance is not so exact, though, as that your informant became known
to you through a letter from a correspondent with whom he had deposited
money? How does that part of the parallel stand?’

Arthur had no choice but to say that his informant had not become known
to him through the agency of any such credentials, or indeed of any
credentials at all. Mrs Clennam’s attentive frown expanded by degrees
into a severe look of triumph, and she retorted with emphasis, ‘Take
care how you judge others, then. I say to you, Arthur, for your good,
take care how you judge!’

Her emphasis had been derived from her eyes quite as much as from the
stress she laid upon her words. She continued to look at him; and if,
when he entered the house, he had had any latent hope of prevailing in
the least with her, she now looked it out of his heart.

‘Mother, shall I do nothing to assist you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Will you entrust me with no confidence, no charge, no explanation?
Will you take no counsel with me? Will you not let me come near you?’

‘How can you ask me? You separated yourself from my affairs. It was not
my act; it was yours. How can you consistently ask me such a question?
You know that you left me to Flintwinch, and that he occupies your
place.’

Glancing at Jeremiah, Clennam saw in his very gaiters that his attention
was closely directed to them, though he stood leaning against the wall
scraping his jaw, and pretended to listen to Flora as she held forth in
a most distracting manner on a chaos of subjects, in which mackerel, and
Mr F.’s Aunt in a swing, had become entangled with cockchafers and the
wine trade.

‘A prisoner, in a French gaol, on an accusation of murder,’ repeated
Mrs Clennam, steadily going over what her son had said. ‘That is all you
know of him from the fellow-prisoner?’

‘In substance, all.’

‘And was the fellow-prisoner his accomplice and a murderer, too? But, of
course, he gives a better account of himself than of his friend; it is
needless to ask. This will supply the rest of them here with something
new to talk about. Casby, Arthur tells me--’

‘Stay, mother! Stay, stay!’ He interrupted her hastily, for it had not
entered his imagination that she would openly proclaim what he had told
her.

‘What now?’ she said with displeasure. ‘What more?’

‘I beg you to excuse me, Mr Casby--and you, too, Mrs Finching--for one
other moment with my mother--’

He had laid his hand upon her chair, or she would otherwise have wheeled
it round with the touch of her foot upon the ground. They were still
face to face. She looked at him, as he ran over the possibilities of
some result he had not intended, and could not foresee, being influenced
by Cavalletto’s disclosure becoming a matter of notoriety, and hurriedly
arrived at the conclusion that it had best not be talked about; though
perhaps he was guided by no more distinct reason than that he had taken
it for granted that his mother would reserve it to herself and her
partner.

‘What now?’ she said again, impatiently. ‘What is it?’

‘I did not mean, mother, that you should repeat what I have
communicated. I think you had better not repeat it.’

‘Do you make that a condition with me?’

‘Well! Yes.’

‘Observe, then! It is you who make this a secret,’ said she, holding
up her hand, ‘and not I. It is you, Arthur, who bring here doubts and
suspicions and entreaties for explanations, and it is you, Arthur, who
bring secrets here. What is it to me, do you think, where the man has
been, or what he has been? What can it be to me? The whole world may
know it, if they care to know it; it is nothing to me. Now, let me go.’

He yielded to her imperious but elated look, and turned her chair back
to the place from which he had wheeled it. In doing so he saw elation
in the face of Mr Flintwinch, which most assuredly was not inspired by
Flora. This turning of his intelligence and of his whole attempt and
design against himself, did even more than his mother’s fixedness and
firmness to convince him that his efforts with her were idle. Nothing
remained but the appeal to his old friend Affery.

But even to get the very doubtful and preliminary stage of making the
appeal, seemed one of the least promising of human undertakings. She
was so completely under the thrall of the two clever ones, was so
systematically kept in sight by one or other of them, and was so afraid
to go about the house besides, that every opportunity of speaking to her
alone appeared to be forestalled. Over and above that, Mistress Affery,
by some means (it was not very difficult to guess, through the sharp
arguments of her liege lord), had acquired such a lively conviction
of the hazard of saying anything under any circumstances, that she had
remained all this time in a corner guarding herself from approach with
that symbolical instrument of hers; so that, when a word or two had
been addressed to her by Flora, or even by the bottle-green patriarch
himself, she had warded off conversation with the toasting-fork like a
dumb woman.

After several abortive attempts to get Affery to look at him while
she cleared the table and washed the tea-service, Arthur thought of an
expedient which Flora might originate. To whom he therefore whispered,
‘Could you say you would like to go through the house?’

Now, poor Flora, being always in fluctuating expectation of the time
when Clennam would renew his boyhood and be madly in love with her
again, received the whisper with the utmost delight; not only as
rendered precious by its mysterious character, but as preparing the
way for a tender interview in which he would declare the state of his
affections. She immediately began to work out the hint.

‘Ah dear me the poor old room,’ said Flora, glancing round, ‘looks just
as ever Mrs Clennam I am touched to see except for being smokier which
was to be expected with time and which we must all expect and reconcile
ourselves to being whether we like it or not as I am sure I have had to
do myself if not exactly smokier dreadfully stouter which is the same or
worse, to think of the days when papa used to bring me here the least of
girls a perfect mass of chilblains to be stuck upon a chair with my feet
on the rails and stare at Arthur--pray excuse me--Mr Clennam--the
least of boys in the frightfullest of frills and jackets ere yet Mr
F. appeared a misty shadow on the horizon paying attentions like the
well-known spectre of some place in Germany beginning with a B is a
moral lesson inculcating that all the paths in life are similar to the
paths down in the North of England where they get the coals and make the
iron and things gravelled with ashes!’

Having paid the tribute of a sigh to the instability of human existence,
Flora hurried on with her purpose.

‘Not that at any time,’ she proceeded, ‘its worst enemy could have said
it was a cheerful house for that it was never made to be but always
highly impressive, fond memory recalls an occasion in youth ere yet the
judgment was mature when Arthur--confirmed habit--Mr Clennam--took
me down into an unused kitchen eminent for mouldiness and proposed to
secrete me there for life and feed me on what he could hide from his
meals when he was not at home for the holidays and on dry bread in
disgrace which at that halcyon period too frequently occurred, would
it be inconvenient or asking too much to beg to be permitted to revive
those scenes and walk through the house?’

Mrs Clennam, who responded with a constrained grace to Mrs Finching’s
good nature in being there at all, though her visit (before Arthur’s
unexpected arrival) was undoubtedly an act of pure good nature and no
self-gratification, intimated that all the house was open to her. Flora
rose and looked to Arthur for his escort. ‘Certainly,’ said he, aloud;
‘and Affery will light us, I dare say.’

Affery was excusing herself with ‘Don’t ask nothing of me, Arthur!’ when
Mr Flintwinch stopped her with ‘Why not? Affery, what’s the matter with
you, woman? Why not, jade!’ Thus expostulated with, she came unwillingly
out of her corner, resigned the toasting-fork into one of her husband’s
hands, and took the candlestick he offered from the other.

‘Go before, you fool!’ said Jeremiah. ‘Are you going up, or down, Mrs
Finching?’

Flora answered, ‘Down.’

‘Then go before, and down, you Affery,’ said Jeremiah. ‘And do it
properly, or I’ll come rolling down the banisters, and tumbling over
you!’

Affery headed the exploring party; Jeremiah closed it. He had no
intention of leaving them. Clennam looking back, and seeing him
following three stairs behind, in the coolest and most methodical
manner exclaimed in a low voice, ‘Is there no getting rid of him!’ Flora
reassured his mind by replying promptly, ‘Why though not exactly
proper Arthur and a thing I couldn’t think of before a younger man or
a stranger still I don’t mind him if you so particularly wish it and
provided you’ll have the goodness not to take me too tight.’

Wanting the heart to explain that this was not at all what he meant,
Arthur extended his supporting arm round Flora’s figure. ‘Oh my goodness
me,’ said she. ‘You are very obedient indeed really and it’s extremely
honourable and gentlemanly in you I am sure but still at the same time
if you would like to be a little tighter than that I shouldn’t consider
it intruding.’

In this preposterous attitude, unspeakably at variance with his anxious
mind, Clennam descended to the basement of the house; finding that
wherever it became darker than elsewhere, Flora became heavier, and
that when the house was lightest she was too. Returning from the dismal
kitchen regions, which were as dreary as they could be, Mistress Affery
passed with the light into his father’s old room, and then into the old
dining-room; always passing on before like a phantom that was not to be
overtaken, and neither turning nor answering when he whispered, ‘Affery!
I want to speak to you!’

In the dining-room, a sentimental desire came over Flora to look into
the dragon closet which had so often swallowed Arthur in the days of his
boyhood--not improbably because, as a very dark closet, it was a likely
place to be heavy in. Arthur, fast subsiding into despair, had opened
it, when a knock was heard at the outer door.

Mistress Affery, with a suppressed cry, threw her apron over her head.

‘What? You want another dose!’ said Mr Flintwinch. ‘You shall have it,
my woman, you shall have a good one! Oh! You shall have a sneezer, you
shall have a teaser!’

‘In the meantime is anybody going to the door?’ said Arthur.

‘In the meantime, _I_ am going to the door, sir,’ returned the old man so
savagely, as to render it clear that in a choice of difficulties he felt
he must go, though he would have preferred not to go. ‘Stay here the
while, all! Affery, my woman, move an inch, or speak a word in your
foolishness, and I’ll treble your dose!’

The moment he was gone, Arthur released Mrs Finching: with some
difficulty, by reason of that lady misunderstanding his intentions, and
making arrangements with a view to tightening instead of slackening.

‘Affery, speak to me now!’

‘Don’t touch me, Arthur!’ she cried, shrinking from him. ‘Don’t come
near me. He’ll see you. Jeremiah will. Don’t.’

‘He can’t see me,’ returned Arthur, suiting the action to the word, ‘if
I blow the candle out.’

‘He’ll hear you,’ cried Affery.

‘He can’t hear me,’ returned Arthur, suiting the action to the words
again, ‘if I draw you into this black closet, and speak here. Why do
you hide your face?’

‘Because I am afraid of seeing something.’

‘You can’t be afraid of seeing anything in this darkness, Affery.’

‘Yes I am. Much more than if it was light.’

‘Why are you afraid?’

‘Because the house is full of mysteries and secrets; because it’s full
of whisperings and counsellings; because it’s full of noises. There
never was such a house for noises. I shall die of ‘em, if Jeremiah don’t
strangle me first. As I expect he will.’

‘I have never heard any noises here, worth speaking of.’

‘Ah! But you would, though, if you lived in the house, and was obliged
to go about it as I am,’ said Affery; ‘and you’d feel that they was so
well worth speaking of, that you’d feel you was nigh bursting through
not being allowed to speak of ‘em. Here’s Jeremiah! You’ll get me
killed.’

‘My good Affery, I solemnly declare to you that I can see the light of
the open door on the pavement of the hall, and so could you if you would
uncover your face and look.’

‘I durstn’t do it,’ said Affery, ‘I durstn’t never, Arthur. I’m always
blind-folded when Jeremiah an’t a looking, and sometimes even when he
is.’

‘He cannot shut the door without my seeing him,’ said Arthur. ‘You are
as safe with me as if he was fifty miles away.’

[‘I wish he was!’ cried Affery.)

‘Affery, I want to know what is amiss here; I want some light thrown
on the secrets of this house.’

‘I tell you, Arthur,’ she interrupted, ‘noises is the secrets, rustlings
and stealings about, tremblings, treads overhead and treads underneath.’

‘But those are not all the secrets.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Affery. ‘Don’t ask me no more. Your old sweetheart
an’t far off, and she’s a blabber.’

His old sweetheart, being in fact so near at hand that she was then
reclining against him in a flutter, a very substantial angle of
forty-five degrees, here interposed to assure Mistress Affery with
greater earnestness than directness of asseveration, that what she heard
should go no further, but should be kept inviolate, ‘if on no other
account on Arthur’s--sensible of intruding in being too familiar Doyce
and Clennam’s.’

‘I make an imploring appeal to you, Affery, to you, one of the few
agreeable early remembrances I have, for my mother’s sake, for your
husband’s sake, for my own, for all our sakes. I am sure you can tell me
something connected with the coming here of this man, if you will.’

‘Why, then I’ll tell you, Arthur,’ returned Affery--‘Jeremiah’s coming!’

‘No, indeed he is not. The door is open, and he is standing outside,
talking.’

‘I’ll tell you then,’ said Affery, after listening, ‘that the first time
he ever come he heard the noises his own self. “What’s that?” he said to
me. “I don’t know what it is,” I says to him, catching hold of him,
“but I have heard it over and over again.” While I says it, he stands a
looking at me, all of a shake, he do.’

‘Has he been here often?’

‘Only that night, and the last night.’

‘What did you see of him on the last night, after I was gone?’

‘Them two clever ones had him all alone to themselves. Jeremiah come
a dancing at me sideways, after I had let you out (he always comes a
dancing at me sideways when he’s going to hurt me), and he said to me,
“Now, Affery,” he said, “I am a coming behind you, my woman, and a going
to run you up.” So he took and squeezed the back of my neck in his hand,
till it made me open my mouth, and then he pushed me before him to bed,
squeezing all the way. That’s what he calls running me up, he do. Oh,
he’s a wicked one!’

‘And did you hear or see no more, Affery?’

‘Don’t I tell you I was sent to bed, Arthur! Here he is!’

‘I assure you he is still at the door. Those whisperings and
counsellings, Affery, that you have spoken of. What are they?’

‘How should I know? Don’t ask me nothing about ‘em, Arthur. Get away!’

‘But my dear Affery; unless I can gain some insight into these hidden
things, in spite of your husband and in spite of my mother, ruin will
come of it.’

‘Don’t ask me nothing,’ repeated Affery. ‘I have been in a dream for
ever so long. Go away, go away!’

‘You said that before,’ returned Arthur. ‘You used the same expression
that night, at the door, when I asked you what was going on here. What
do you mean by being in a dream?’

‘I an’t a going to tell you. Get away! I shouldn’t tell you, if you was
by yourself; much less with your old sweetheart here.’

It was equally vain for Arthur to entreat, and for Flora to protest.
Affery, who had been trembling and struggling the whole time, turned a
deaf ear to all adjuration, and was bent on forcing herself out of the
closet.

‘I’d sooner scream to Jeremiah than say another word! I’ll call out to
him, Arthur, if you don’t give over speaking to me. Now here’s the very
last word I’ll say afore I call to him--If ever you begin to get the
better of them two clever ones your own self (you ought to it, as I told
you when you first come home, for you haven’t been a living here long
years, to be made afeared of your life as I have), then do you get the
better of ‘em afore my face; and then do you say to me, Affery tell your
dreams! Maybe, then I’ll tell ‘em!’

The shutting of the door stopped Arthur from replying. They glided into
the places where Jeremiah had left them; and Clennam, stepping forward
as that old gentleman returned, informed him that he had accidentally
extinguished the candle. Mr Flintwinch looked on as he re-lighted it at
the lamp in the hall, and preserved a profound taciturnity respecting
the person who had been holding him in conversation. Perhaps his
irascibility demanded compensation for some tediousness that the visitor
had expended on him; however that was, he took such umbrage at seeing
his wife with her apron over her head, that he charged at her, and
taking her veiled nose between his thumb and finger, appeared to throw
the whole screw-power of his person into the wring he gave it.

Flora, now permanently heavy, did not release Arthur from the survey of
the house, until it had extended even to his old garret bedchamber. His
thoughts were otherwise occupied than with the tour of inspection; yet
he took particular notice at the time, as he afterwards had occasion to
remember, of the airlessness and closeness of the house; that they left
the track of their footsteps in the dust on the upper floors; and that
there was a resistance to the opening of one room door, which occasioned
Affery to cry out that somebody was hiding inside, and to continue to
believe so, though somebody was sought and not discovered. When they at
last returned to his mother’s room, they found her shading her face
with her muffled hand, and talking in a low voice to the Patriarch as he
stood before the fire, whose blue eyes, polished head, and silken locks,
turning towards them as they came in, imparted an inestimable value and
inexhaustible love of his species to his remark:

‘So you have been seeing the premises, seeing the premises--premises--
seeing the premises!’

It was not in itself a jewel of benevolence or wisdom, yet he made it an
exemplar of both that one would have liked to have a copy of.




CHAPTER 24. The Evening of a Long Day


That illustrious man and great national ornament, Mr Merdle, continued
his shining course. It began to be widely understood that one who had
done society the admirable service of making so much money out of it,
could not be suffered to remain a commoner. A baronetcy was spoken of
with confidence; a peerage was frequently mentioned. Rumour had it
that Mr Merdle had set his golden face against a baronetcy; that he had
plainly intimated to Lord Decimus that a baronetcy was not enough
for him; that he had said, ‘No--a Peerage, or plain Merdle.’ This was
reported to have plunged Lord Decimus as nigh to his noble chin in a
slough of doubts as so lofty a person could be sunk. For the Barnacles,
as a group of themselves in creation, had an idea that such distinctions
belonged to them; and that when a soldier, sailor, or lawyer became
ennobled, they let him in, as it were, by an act of condescension, at
the family door, and immediately shut it again. Not only (said Rumour)
had the troubled Decimus his own hereditary part in this impression, but
he also knew of several Barnacle claims already on the file, which came
into collision with that of the master spirit. Right or wrong, Rumour
was very busy; and Lord Decimus, while he was, or was supposed to be, in
stately excogitation of the difficulty, lent her some countenance by
taking, on several public occasions, one of those elephantine trots of
his through a jungle of overgrown sentences, waving Mr Merdle about on
his trunk as Gigantic Enterprise, The Wealth of England, Elasticity,
Credit, Capital, Prosperity, and all manner of blessings.

So quietly did the mowing of the old scythe go on, that fully three
months had passed unnoticed since the two English brothers had been laid
in one tomb in the strangers’ cemetery at Rome. Mr and Mrs Sparkler were
established in their own house: a little mansion, rather of the Tite
Barnacle class, quite a triumph of inconvenience, with a perpetual smell
in it of the day before yesterday’s soup and coach-horses, but extremely
dear, as being exactly in the centre of the habitable globe. In this
enviable abode (and envied it really was by many people), Mrs Sparkler
had intended to proceed at once to the demolition of the Bosom, when
active hostilities had been suspended by the arrival of the Courier with
his tidings of death. Mrs Sparkler, who was not unfeeling, had received
them with a violent burst of grief, which had lasted twelve hours;
after which, she had arisen to see about her mourning, and to take every
precaution that could ensure its being as becoming as Mrs Merdle’s. A
gloom was then cast over more than one distinguished family (according
to the politest sources of intelligence), and the Courier went back
again.

Mr and Mrs Sparkler had been dining alone, with their gloom cast over
them, and Mrs Sparkler reclined on a drawing-room sofa. It was a hot
summer Sunday evening. The residence in the centre of the habitable
globe, at all times stuffed and close as if it had an incurable cold in
its head, was that evening particularly stifling. The bells of the
churches had done their worst in the way of clanging among the
unmelodious echoes of the streets, and the lighted windows of the
churches had ceased to be yellow in the grey dusk, and had died out
opaque black. Mrs Sparkler, lying on her sofa, looking through an open
window at the opposite side of a narrow street over boxes of mignonette
and flowers, was tired of the view. Mrs Sparkler, looking at another
window where her husband stood in the balcony, was tired of that view.
Mrs Sparkler, looking at herself in her mourning, was even tired of that
view: though, naturally, not so tired of that as of the other two.

‘It’s like lying in a well,’ said Mrs Sparkler, changing her position
fretfully. ‘Dear me, Edmund, if you have anything to say, why don’t you
say it?’

Mr Sparkler might have replied with ingenuousness, ‘My life, I have
nothing to say.’ But, as the repartee did not occur to him, he contented
himself with coming in from the balcony and standing at the side of his
wife’s couch.

‘Good gracious, Edmund!’ said Mrs Sparkler more fretfully still, ‘you are
absolutely putting mignonette up your nose! Pray don’t!’

Mr Sparkler, in absence of mind--perhaps in a more literal absence of
mind than is usually understood by the phrase--had smelt so hard at a
sprig in his hand as to be on the verge of the offence in question. He
smiled, said, ‘I ask your pardon, my dear,’ and threw it out of window.

‘You make my head ache by remaining in that position, Edmund,’ said Mrs
Sparkler, raising her eyes to him after another minute; ‘you look so
aggravatingly large by this light. Do sit down.’

‘Certainly, my dear,’ said Mr Sparkler, and took a chair on the same
spot.

‘If I didn’t know that the longest day was past,’ said Fanny, yawning in
a dreary manner, ‘I should have felt certain this was the longest day. I
never did experience such a day.’

‘Is that your fan, my love?’ asked Mr Sparkler, picking up one and
presenting it.

‘Edmund,’ returned his wife, more wearily yet, ‘don’t ask weak
questions, I entreat you not. Whose can it be but mine?’

‘Yes, I thought it was yours,’ said Mr Sparkler.

‘Then you shouldn’t ask,’ retorted Fanny. After a little while she
turned on her sofa and exclaimed, ‘Dear me, dear me, there never was
such a long day as this!’ After another little while, she got up slowly,
walked about, and came back again.

‘My dear,’ said Mr Sparkler, flashing with an original conception, ‘I
think you must have got the fidgets.’

‘Oh, Fidgets!’ repeated Mrs Sparkler. ‘Don’t.’

‘My adorable girl,’ urged Mr Sparkler, ‘try your aromatic vinegar. I
have often seen my mother try it, and it seemingly refreshed her.

And she is, as I believe you are aware, a remarkably fine woman, with no
non--’

‘Good Gracious!’ exclaimed Fanny, starting up again. ‘It’s beyond all
patience! This is the most wearisome day that ever did dawn upon the
world, I am certain.’

Mr Sparkler looked meekly after her as she lounged about the room, and
he appeared to be a little frightened. When she had tossed a few trifles
about, and had looked down into the darkening street out of all the
three windows, she returned to her sofa, and threw herself among its
pillows.

‘Now Edmund, come here! Come a little nearer, because I want to be able
to touch you with my fan, that I may impress you very much with what I
am going to say. That will do. Quite close enough. Oh, you _do_ look so
big!’

Mr Sparkler apologised for the circumstance, pleaded that he couldn’t
help it, and said that ‘our fellows,’ without more particularly
indicating whose fellows, used to call him by the name of Quinbus
Flestrin, Junior, or the Young Man Mountain.

‘You ought to have told me so before,’ Fanny complained.

‘My dear,’ returned Mr Sparkler, rather gratified, ‘I didn’t know
It would interest you, or I would have made a point of telling you.’

‘There! For goodness sake, don’t talk,’ said Fanny; ‘I want to talk,
myself. Edmund, we must not be alone any more. I must take such
precautions as will prevent my being ever again reduced to the state of
dreadful depression in which I am this evening.’

‘My dear,’ answered Mr Sparkler; ‘being as you are well known to be, a
remarkably fine woman with no--’

‘Oh, good GRACIOUS!’ cried Fanny.

Mr Sparkler was so discomposed by the energy of this exclamation,
accompanied with a flouncing up from the sofa and a flouncing down
again, that a minute or two elapsed before he felt himself equal to
saying in explanation:

‘I mean, my dear, that everybody knows you are calculated to shine in
society.’

‘Calculated to shine in society,’ retorted Fanny with great
irritability; ‘yes, indeed! And then what happens? I no sooner recover,
in a visiting point of view, the shock of poor dear papa’s death, and my
poor uncle’s--though I do not disguise from myself that the last was
a happy release, for, if you are not presentable you had much better
die--’

‘You are not referring to me, my love, I hope?’ Mr Sparkler humbly
interrupted.

‘Edmund, Edmund, you would wear out a Saint. Am I not expressly speaking
of my poor uncle?’

‘You looked with so much expression at myself, my dear girl,’ said Mr
Sparkler, ‘that I felt a little uncomfortable. Thank you, my love.’

‘Now you have put me out,’ observed Fanny with a resigned toss of her
fan, ‘and I had better go to bed.’

‘Don’t do that, my love,’ urged Mr Sparkler. ‘Take time.’

Fanny took a good deal of time: lying back with her eyes shut, and her
eyebrows raised with a hopeless expression as if she had utterly given
up all terrestrial affairs. At length, without the slightest notice, she
opened her eyes again, and recommenced in a short, sharp manner:

‘What happens then, I ask! What happens? Why, I find myself at the very
period when I might shine most in society, and should most like for
very momentous reasons to shine in society--I find myself in a situation
which to a certain extent disqualifies me for going into society. It’s
too bad, really!’

‘My dear,’ said Mr Sparkler. ‘I don’t think it need keep you at
home.’

‘Edmund, you ridiculous creature,’ returned Fanny, with great
indignation; ‘do you suppose that a woman in the bloom of youth and not
wholly devoid of personal attractions, can put herself, at such a
time, in competition as to figure with a woman in every other way her
inferior? If you do suppose such a thing, your folly is boundless.’

Mr Sparkler submitted that he had thought ‘it might be got over.’

‘Got over!’ repeated Fanny, with immeasurable scorn.

‘For a time,’ Mr Sparkler submitted.

Honouring the last feeble suggestion with no notice, Mrs Sparkler
declared with bitterness that it really was too bad, and that positively
it was enough to make one wish one was dead!

‘However,’ she said, when she had in some measure recovered from her
sense of personal ill-usage; ‘provoking as it is, and cruel as it seems,
I suppose it must be submitted to.’

‘Especially as it was to be expected,’ said Mr Sparkler.

‘Edmund,’ returned his wife, ‘if you have nothing more becoming to do
than to attempt to insult the woman who has honoured you with her hand,
when she finds herself in adversity, I think _you_ had better go to bed!’

Mr Sparkler was much afflicted by the charge, and offered a most
tender and earnest apology. His apology was accepted; but Mrs Sparkler
requested him to go round to the other side of the sofa and sit in the
window-curtain, to tone himself down.

‘Now, Edmund,’ she said, stretching out her fan, and touching him with
it at arm’s length, ‘what I was going to say to you when you began as
usual to prose and worry, is, that I shall guard against our being alone
any more, and that when circumstances prevent my going out to my own
satisfaction, I must arrange to have some people or other always here;
for I really cannot, and will not, have another such day as this has
been.’

Mr Sparkler’s sentiments as to the plan were, in brief, that it had no
nonsense about it. He added, ‘And besides, you know it’s likely that
you’ll soon have your sister--’

‘Dearest Amy, yes!’ cried Mrs Sparkler with a sigh of affection.
‘Darling little thing! Not, however, that Amy would do here alone.’

Mr Sparkler was going to say ‘No?’ interrogatively, but he saw his
danger and said it assentingly, ‘No, Oh dear no; she wouldn’t do here
alone.’

‘No, Edmund. For not only are the virtues of the precious child of that
still character that they require a contrast--require life and movement
around them to bring them out in their right colours and make one love
them of all things; but she will require to be roused, on more accounts
than one.’

‘That’s it,’ said Mr Sparkler. ‘Roused.’

‘Pray don’t, Edmund! Your habit of interrupting without having the least
thing in the world to say, distracts one. You must be broken of it.
Speaking of Amy;--my poor little pet was devotedly attached to poor
papa, and no doubt will have lamented his loss exceedingly, and grieved
very much. I have done so myself. I have felt it dreadfully. But Amy
will no doubt have felt it even more, from having been on the spot the
whole time, and having been with poor dear papa at the last; which I
unhappily was not.’

Here Fanny stopped to weep, and to say, ‘Dear, dear, beloved papa! How
truly gentlemanly he was! What a contrast to poor uncle!’

‘From the effects of that trying time,’ she pursued, ‘my good little
Mouse will have to be roused. Also, from the effects of this long
attendance upon Edward in his illness; an attendance which is not
yet over, which may even go on for some time longer, and which in the
meanwhile unsettles us all by keeping poor dear papa’s affairs from
being wound up. Fortunately, however, the papers with his agents
here being all sealed up and locked up, as he left them when he
providentially came to England, the affairs are in that state of order
that they can wait until my brother Edward recovers his health in
Sicily, sufficiently to come over, and administer, or execute, or
whatever it may be that will have to be done.’

‘He couldn’t have a better nurse to bring him round,’ Mr Sparkler made
bold to opine.

‘For a wonder, I can agree with you,’ returned his wife, languidly
turning her eyelids a little in his direction (she held forth, in
general, as if to the drawing-room furniture), ‘and can adopt your
words. He couldn’t have a better nurse to bring him round. There are
times when my dear child is a little wearing to an active mind; but, as
a nurse, she is Perfection. Best of Amys!’

Mr Sparkler, growing rash on his late success, observed that Edward had
had, biggodd, a long bout of it, my dear girl.

‘If Bout, Edmund,’ returned Mrs Sparkler, ‘is the slang term for
indisposition, he has. If it is not, I am unable to give an opinion
on the barbarous language you address to Edward’s sister. That he
contracted Malaria Fever somewhere, either by travelling day and night
to Rome, where, after all, he arrived too late to see poor dear papa
before his death--or under some other unwholesome circumstances--is
indubitable, if that is what you mean. Likewise that his extremely
careless life has made him a very bad subject for it indeed.’

Mr Sparkler considered it a parallel case to that of some of our fellows
in the West Indies with Yellow Jack. Mrs Sparkler closed her eyes again,
and refused to have any consciousness of our fellows of the West Indies,
or of Yellow Jack.

‘So, Amy,’ she pursued, when she reopened her eyelids, ‘will require
to be roused from the effects of many tedious and anxious weeks. And
lastly, she will require to be roused from a low tendency which I know
very well to be at the bottom of her heart. Don’t ask me what it is,
Edmund, because I must decline to tell you.’

‘I am not going to, my dear,’ said Mr Sparkler.

‘I shall thus have much improvement to effect in my sweet child,’ Mrs
Sparkler continued, ‘and cannot have her near me too soon. Amiable and
dear little Twoshoes! As to the settlement of poor papa’s affairs, my
interest in that is not very selfish. Papa behaved very generously to me
when I was married, and I have little or nothing to expect. Provided
he had made no will that can come into force, leaving a legacy to Mrs
General, I am contented. Dear papa, dear papa.’

She wept again, but Mrs General was the best of restoratives. The name
soon stimulated her to dry her eyes and say:

‘It is a highly encouraging circumstance in Edward’s illness, I am
thankful to think, and gives one the greatest confidence in his sense
not being impaired, or his proper spirit weakened--down to the time
of poor dear papa’s death at all events--that he paid off Mrs General
instantly, and sent her out of the house. I applaud him for it. I could
forgive him a great deal for doing, with such promptitude, so exactly
what I would have done myself!’

Mrs Sparkler was in the full glow of her gratification, when a double
knock was heard at the door. A very odd knock. Low, as if to avoid
making a noise and attracting attention. Long, as if the person knocking
were preoccupied in mind, and forgot to leave off.

‘Halloa!’ said Mr Sparkler. ‘Who’s this?’

‘Not Amy and Edward without notice and without a carriage!’ said Mrs
Sparkler. ‘Look out.’

The room was dark, but the street was lighter, because of its lamps. Mr
Sparkler’s head peeping over the balcony looked so very bulky and heavy
that it seemed on the point of overbalancing him and flattening the
unknown below.

‘It’s one fellow,’ said Mr Sparkler. ‘I can’t see who--stop though!’

On this second thought he went out into the balcony again and had
another look. He came back as the door was opened, and announced that he
believed he had identified ‘his governor’s tile.’ He was not mistaken,
for his governor, with his tile in his hand, was introduced immediately
afterwards.

‘Candles!’ said Mrs Sparkler, with a word of excuse for the darkness.

‘It’s light enough for me,’ said Mr Merdle.

When the candles were brought in, Mr Merdle was discovered standing
behind the door, picking his lips. ‘I thought I’d give you a call,’ he
said. ‘I am rather particularly occupied just now; and, as I happened to
be out for a stroll, I thought I’d give you a call.’

As he was in dinner dress, Fanny asked him where he had been dining?

‘Well,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘I haven’t been dining anywhere, particularly.’

‘Of course you have dined?’ said Fanny.

‘Why--no, I haven’t exactly dined,’ said Mr Merdle.

He had passed his hand over his yellow forehead and considered, as if he
were not sure about it. Something to eat was proposed. ‘No, thank you,’
said Mr Merdle, ‘I don’t feel inclined for it. I was to have dined out
along with Mrs Merdle. But as I didn’t feel inclined for dinner, I let
Mrs Merdle go by herself just as we were getting into the carriage, and
thought I’d take a stroll instead.’

Would he have tea or coffee? ‘No, thank you,’ said Mr Merdle. ‘I looked
in at the Club, and got a bottle of wine.’

At this period of his visit, Mr Merdle took the chair which Edmund
Sparkler had offered him, and which he had hitherto been pushing slowly
about before him, like a dull man with a pair of skates on for the first
time, who could not make up his mind to start. He now put his hat upon
another chair beside him, and, looking down into it as if it were some
twenty feet deep, said again: ‘You see I thought I’d give you a call.’

‘Flattering to us,’ said Fanny, ‘for you are not a calling man.’

‘No--no,’ returned Mr Merdle, who was by this time taking himself into
custody under both coat-sleeves. ‘No, I am not a calling man.’

‘You have too much to do for that,’ said Fanny. ‘Having so much to do,
Mr Merdle, loss of appetite is a serious thing with you, and you must
have it seen to. You must not be ill.’

‘Oh! I am very well,’ replied Mr Merdle, after deliberating about it. ‘I
am as well as I usually am. I am well enough. I am as well as I want to
be.’

The master-mind of the age, true to its characteristic of being at all
times a mind that had as little as possible to say for itself and great
difficulty in saying it, became mute again. Mrs Sparkler began to wonder
how long the master-mind meant to stay.

‘I was speaking of poor papa when you came in, sir.’

‘Aye! Quite a coincidence,’ said Mr Merdle.

Fanny did not see that; but felt it incumbent on her to continue
talking. ‘I was saying,’ she pursued, ‘that my brother’s illness has
occasioned a delay in examining and arranging papa’s property.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘yes. There has been a delay.’

‘Not that it is of consequence,’ said Fanny.

‘Not,’ assented Mr Merdle, after having examined the cornice of all
that part of the room which was within his range: ‘not that it is of any
consequence.’

‘My only anxiety is,’ said Fanny, ‘that Mrs General should not get
anything.’

‘_She_ won’t get anything,’ said Mr Merdle.

Fanny was delighted to hear him express the opinion. Mr Merdle, after
taking another gaze into the depths of his hat as if he thought he saw
something at the bottom, rubbed his hair and slowly appended to his last
remark the confirmatory words, ‘Oh dear no. No. Not she. Not likely.’

As the topic seemed exhausted, and Mr Merdle too, Fanny inquired if he
were going to take up Mrs Merdle and the carriage in his way home?

‘No,’ he answered; ‘I shall go by the shortest way, and leave Mrs Merdle
to--’ here he looked all over the palms of both his hands as if he were
telling his own fortune--‘to take care of herself. I dare say she’ll
manage to do it.’

‘Probably,’ said Fanny.

There was then a long silence; during which, Mrs Sparkler, lying back
on her sofa again, shut her eyes and raised her eyebrows in her former
retirement from mundane affairs.

‘But, however,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘I am equally detaining you and myself.
I thought I’d give you a call, you know.’

‘Charmed, I am sure,’ said Fanny.

‘So I am off,’ added Mr Merdle, getting up. ‘Could you lend me a
penknife?’

It was an odd thing, Fanny smilingly observed, for her who could seldom
prevail upon herself even to write a letter, to lend to a man of such
vast business as Mr Merdle. ‘Isn’t it?’ Mr Merdle acquiesced; ‘but
I want one; and I know you have got several little wedding keepsakes
about, with scissors and tweezers and such things in them. You shall
have it back to-morrow.’

‘Edmund,’ said Mrs Sparkler, ‘open (now, very carefully, I beg and
beseech, for you are so very awkward) the mother of pearl box on my
little table there, and give Mr Merdle the mother of pearl penknife.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘but if you have got one with a darker
handle, I think I should prefer one with a darker handle.’

‘Tortoise-shell?’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘yes. I think I should prefer
tortoise-shell.’

Edmund accordingly received instructions to open the tortoise-shell box,
and give Mr Merdle the tortoise-shell knife. On his doing so, his wife
said to the master-spirit graciously:

‘I will forgive you, if you ink it.’

‘I’ll undertake not to ink it,’ said Mr Merdle.

The illustrious visitor then put out his coat-cuff, and for a moment
entombed Mrs Sparkler’s hand: wrist, bracelet, and all. Where his own
hand had shrunk to, was not made manifest, but it was as remote from Mrs
Sparkler’s sense of touch as if he had been a highly meritorious Chelsea
Veteran or Greenwich Pensioner.

Thoroughly convinced, as he went out of the room, that it was the
longest day that ever did come to an end at last, and that there never
was a woman, not wholly devoid of personal attractions, so worn out by
idiotic and lumpish people, Fanny passed into the balcony for a breath
of air. Waters of vexation filled her eyes; and they had the effect of
making the famous Mr Merdle, in going down the street, appear to leap,
and waltz, and gyrate, as if he were possessed of several Devils.




CHAPTER 25. The Chief Butler Resigns the Seals of Office


The dinner-party was at the great Physician’s. Bar was there, and in
full force. Ferdinand Barnacle was there, and in his most engaging
state. Few ways of life were hidden from Physician, and he was oftener
in its darkest places than even Bishop. There were brilliant ladies
about London who perfectly doted on him, my dear, as the most charming
creature and the most delightful person, who would have been shocked to
find themselves so close to him if they could have known on what sights
those thoughtful eyes of his had rested within an hour or two, and near
to whose beds, and under what roofs, his composed figure had stood. But
Physician was a composed man, who performed neither on his own trumpet,
nor on the trumpets of other people. Many wonderful things did he see
and hear, and much irreconcilable moral contradiction did he pass his
life among; yet his equality of compassion was no more disturbed than
the Divine Master’s of all healing was. He went, like the rain,
among the just and unjust, doing all the good he could, and neither
proclaiming it in the synagogues nor at the corner of streets.

As no man of large experience of humanity, however quietly carried
it may be, can fail to be invested with an interest peculiar to the
possession of such knowledge, Physician was an attractive man. Even the
daintier gentlemen and ladies who had no idea of his secret, and
who would have been startled out of more wits than they had, by the
monstrous impropriety of his proposing to them ‘Come and see what I
see!’ confessed his attraction. Where he was, something real was. And
half a grain of reality, like the smallest portion of some other scarce
natural productions, will flavour an enormous quantity of diluent.

It came to pass, therefore, that Physician’s little dinners always
presented people in their least conventional lights. The guests said to
themselves, whether they were conscious of it or no, ‘Here is a man who
really has an acquaintance with us as we are, who is admitted to some
of us every day with our wigs and paint off, who hears the wanderings of
our minds, and sees the undisguised expression of our faces, when both
are past our control; we may as well make an approach to reality with
him, for the man has got the better of us and is too strong for us.’
Therefore, Physician’s guests came out so surprisingly at his round
table that they were almost natural.

Bar’s knowledge of that agglomeration of jurymen which is called
humanity was as sharp as a razor; yet a razor is not a generally
convenient instrument, and Physician’s plain bright scalpel, though far
less keen, was adaptable to far wider purposes. Bar knew all about the
gullibility and knavery of people; but Physician could have given him
a better insight into their tendernesses and affections, in one week of
his rounds, than Westminster Hall and all the circuits put together,
in threescore years and ten. Bar always had a suspicion of this, and
perhaps was glad to encourage it (for, if the world were really a great
Law Court, one would think that the last day of Term could not too soon
arrive); and so he liked and respected Physician quite as much as any
other kind of man did.

Mr Merdle’s default left a Banquo’s chair at the table; but, if he had
been there, he would have merely made the difference of Banquo in it,
and consequently he was no loss. Bar, who picked up all sorts of odds
and ends about Westminster Hall, much as a raven would have done if he
had passed as much of his time there, had been picking up a great many
straws lately and tossing them about, to try which way the Merdle wind
blew. He now had a little talk on the subject with Mrs Merdle herself;
sidling up to that lady, of course, with his double eye-glass and his
jury droop.

‘A certain bird,’ said Bar; and he looked as if it could have been no
other bird than a magpie; ‘has been whispering among us lawyers lately,
that there is to be an addition to the titled personages of this realm.’

‘Really?’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘Yes,’ said Bar. ‘Has not the bird been whispering in very different
ears from ours--in lovely ears?’ He looked expressively at Mrs Merdle’s
nearest ear-ring.

‘Do you mean mine?’ asked Mrs Merdle.

‘When I say lovely,’ said Bar, ‘I always mean you.’

‘You never mean anything, I think,’ returned Mrs Merdle (not
displeased).

‘Oh, cruelly unjust!’ said Bar. ‘But, the bird.’

‘I am the last person in the world to hear news,’ observed Mrs Merdle,
carelessly arranging her stronghold. ‘Who is it?’

‘What an admirable witness you would make!’ said Bar. ‘No jury (unless
we could empanel one of blind men) could resist you, if you were ever so
bad a one; but you would be such a good one!’

‘Why, you ridiculous man?’ asked Mrs Merdle, laughing.

Bar waved his double eye-glass three or four times between himself and
the Bosom, as a rallying answer, and inquired in his most insinuating
accents:

‘What am I to call the most elegant, accomplished and charming of women,
a few weeks, or it may be a few days, hence?’

‘Didn’t your bird tell you what to call her?’ answered Mrs Merdle. ‘Do
ask it to-morrow, and tell me the next time you see me what it says.’

This led to further passages of similar pleasantry between the two; but
Bar, with all his sharpness, got nothing out of them. Physician, on the
other hand, taking Mrs Merdle down to her carriage and attending on her
as she put on her cloak, inquired into the symptoms with his usual calm
directness.

‘May I ask,’ he said, ‘is this true about Merdle?’

‘My dear doctor,’ she returned, ‘you ask me the very question that I was
half disposed to ask you.’

‘To ask me! Why me?’

‘Upon my honour, I think Mr Merdle reposes greater confidence in you
than in any one.’

‘On the contrary, he tells me absolutely nothing, even professionally.
You have heard the talk, of course?’

‘Of course I have. But you know what Mr Merdle is; you know how
taciturn and reserved he is. I assure you I have no idea what foundation
for it there may be. I should like it to be true; why should I deny that
to you? You would know better, if I did!’

‘Just so,’ said Physician.

‘But whether it is all true, or partly true, or entirely false, I am
wholly unable to say. It is a most provoking situation, a most absurd
situation; but you know Mr Merdle, and are not surprised.’

Physician was not surprised, handed her into her carriage, and bade her
Good Night. He stood for a moment at his own hall door, looking sedately
at the elegant equipage as it rattled away. On his return up-stairs, the
rest of the guests soon dispersed, and he was left alone. Being a great
reader of all kinds of literature (and never at all apologetic for that
weakness), he sat down comfortably to read.

The clock upon his study table pointed to a few minutes short of twelve,
when his attention was called to it by a ringing at the door bell. A man
of plain habits, he had sent his servants to bed and must needs go down
to open the door. He went down, and there found a man without hat or
coat, whose shirt sleeves were rolled up tight to his shoulders. For a
moment, he thought the man had been fighting: the rather, as he was much
agitated and out of breath. A second look, however, showed him that
the man was particularly clean, and not otherwise discomposed as to his
dress than as it answered this description.

‘I come from the warm-baths, sir, round in the neighbouring street.’

‘And what is the matter at the warm-baths?’

‘Would you please to come directly, sir. We found that, lying on the
table.’

He put into the physician’s hand a scrap of paper. Physician looked at
it, and read his own name and address written in pencil; nothing more.
He looked closer at the writing, looked at the man, took his hat from
its peg, put the key of his door in his pocket, and they hurried away
together.

When they came to the warm-baths, all the other people belonging to that
establishment were looking out for them at the door, and running up and
down the passages. ‘Request everybody else to keep back, if you please,’
said the physician aloud to the master; ‘and do you take me straight to
the place, my friend,’ to the messenger.

The messenger hurried before him, along a grove of little rooms,
and turning into one at the end of the grove, looked round the door.
Physician was close upon him, and looked round the door too.

There was a bath in that corner, from which the water had been hastily
drained off. Lying in it, as in a grave or sarcophagus, with a hurried
drapery of sheet and blanket thrown across it, was the body of a
heavily-made man, with an obtuse head, and coarse, mean, common
features. A sky-light had been opened to release the steam with which
the room had been filled; but it hung, condensed into water-drops,
heavily upon the walls, and heavily upon the face and figure in the
bath. The room was still hot, and the marble of the bath still warm; but
the face and figure were clammy to the touch. The white marble at the
bottom of the bath was veined with a dreadful red. On the ledge at
the side, were an empty laudanum-bottle and a tortoise-shell handled
penknife--soiled, but not with ink.

‘Separation of jugular vein--death rapid--been dead at least half an
hour.’ This echo of the physician’s words ran through the passages
and little rooms, and through the house while he was yet straightening
himself from having bent down to reach to the bottom of the bath, and
while he was yet dabbling his hands in water; redly veining it as the
marble was veined, before it mingled into one tint.

He turned his eyes to the dress upon the sofa, and to the watch, money,
and pocket-book on the table. A folded note half buckled up in the
pocket-book, and half protruding from it, caught his observant glance.
He looked at it, touched it, pulled it a little further out from among
the leaves, said quietly, ‘This is addressed to me,’ and opened and read
it.

There were no directions for him to give. The people of the house knew
what to do; the proper authorities were soon brought; and they took an
equable business-like possession of the deceased, and of what had been
his property, with no greater disturbance of manner or countenance than
usually attends the winding-up of a clock. Physician was glad to walk
out into the night air--was even glad, in spite of his great experience,
to sit down upon a door-step for a little while: feeling sick and faint.

Bar was a near neighbour of his, and, when he came to the house, he saw
a light in the room where he knew his friend often sat late getting up
his work. As the light was never there when Bar was not, it gave him
assurance that Bar was not yet in bed. In fact, this busy bee had
a verdict to get to-morrow, against evidence, and was improving the
shining hours in setting snares for the gentlemen of the jury.

Physician’s knock astonished Bar; but, as he immediately suspected that
somebody had come to tell him that somebody else was robbing him, or
otherwise trying to get the better of him, he came down promptly and
softly. He had been clearing his head with a lotion of cold water, as a
good preparative to providing hot water for the heads of the jury, and
had been reading with the neck of his shirt thrown wide open that he
might the more freely choke the opposite witnesses. In consequence, he
came down, looking rather wild. Seeing Physician, the least expected of
men, he looked wilder and said, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘You asked me once what Merdle’s complaint was.’

‘Extraordinary answer! I know I did.’

‘I told you I had not found out.’

‘Yes. I know you did.’

‘I have found it out.’

‘My God!’ said Bar, starting back, and clapping his hand upon the
other’s breast. ‘And so have I! I see it in your face.’

They went into the nearest room, where Physician gave him the letter to
read. He read it through half-a-dozen times. There was not much in it
as to quantity; but it made a great demand on his close and continuous
attention. He could not sufficiently give utterance to his regret that
he had not himself found a clue to this. The smallest clue, he said,
would have made him master of the case, and what a case it would have
been to have got to the bottom of!

Physician had engaged to break the intelligence in Harley Street. Bar
could not at once return to his inveiglements of the most enlightened
and remarkable jury he had ever seen in that box, with whom, he could
tell his learned friend, no shallow sophistry would go down, and no
unhappily abused professional tact and skill prevail (this was the way
he meant to begin with them); so he said he would go too, and would
loiter to and fro near the house while his friend was inside. They
walked there, the better to recover self-possession in the air; and the
wings of day were fluttering the night when Physician knocked at the
door.

A footman of rainbow hues, in the public eye, was sitting up for his
master--that is to say, was fast asleep in the kitchen over a couple
of candles and a newspaper, demonstrating the great accumulation of
mathematical odds against the probabilities of a house being set on fire
by accident When this serving man was roused, Physician had still to
await the rousing of the Chief Butler. At last that noble creature came
into the dining-room in a flannel gown and list shoes; but with his
cravat on, and a Chief Butler all over. It was morning now. Physician
had opened the shutters of one window while waiting, that he might see
the light.

‘Mrs Merdle’s maid must be called, and told to get Mrs Merdle up, and
prepare her as gently as she can to see me. I have dreadful news to
break to her.’

Thus Physician to the Chief Butler. The latter, who had a candle in his
hand, called his man to take it away. Then he approached the window with
dignity; looking on at Physician’s news exactly as he had looked on at
the dinners in that very room.

‘Mr Merdle is dead.’

‘I should wish,’ said the Chief Butler, ‘to give a month’s notice.’

‘Mr Merdle has destroyed himself.’

‘Sir,’ said the Chief Butler, ‘that is very unpleasant to the feelings
of one in my position, as calculated to awaken prejudice; and I should
wish to leave immediately.’

‘If you are not shocked, are you not surprised, man?’ demanded the
Physician, warmly.

The Chief Butler, erect and calm, replied in these memorable words.
‘Sir, Mr Merdle never was the gentleman, and no ungentlemanly act on
Mr Merdle’s part would surprise me. Is there anybody else I can send to
you, or any other directions I can give before I leave, respecting what
you would wish to be done?’

When Physician, after discharging himself of his trust up-stairs,
rejoined Bar in the street, he said no more of his interview with Mrs
Merdle than that he had not yet told her all, but that what he had told
her she had borne pretty well. Bar had devoted his leisure in the street
to the construction of a most ingenious man-trap for catching the whole
of his jury at a blow; having got that matter settled in his mind,
it was lucid on the late catastrophe, and they walked home slowly,
discussing it in every bearing. Before parting at the Physician’s door,
they both looked up at the sunny morning sky, into which the smoke of a
few early fires and the breath and voices of a few early stirrers were
peacefully rising, and then looked round upon the immense city, and
said, if all those hundreds and thousands of beggared people who were
yet asleep could only know, as they two spoke, the ruin that impended
over them, what a fearful cry against one miserable soul would go up to
Heaven!

The report that the great man was dead, got about with astonishing
rapidity. At first, he was dead of all the diseases that ever were
known, and of several bran-new maladies invented with the speed of
Light to meet the demand of the occasion. He had concealed a dropsy from
infancy, he had inherited a large estate of water on the chest from his
grandfather, he had had an operation performed upon him every morning
of his life for eighteen years, he had been subject to the explosion of
important veins in his body after the manner of fireworks, he had had
something the matter with his lungs, he had had something the matter
with his heart, he had had something the matter with his brain. Five
hundred people who sat down to breakfast entirely uninformed on the
whole subject, believed before they had done breakfast, that they
privately and personally knew Physician to have said to Mr Merdle, ‘You
must expect to go out, some day, like the snuff of a candle;’ and that
they knew Mr Merdle to have said to Physician, ‘A man can die but once.’
By about eleven o’clock in the forenoon, something the matter with the
brain, became the favourite theory against the field; and by twelve the
something had been distinctly ascertained to be ‘Pressure.’

Pressure was so entirely satisfactory to the public mind, and seemed to
make everybody so comfortable, that it might have lasted all day but for
Bar’s having taken the real state of the case into Court at half-past
nine. This led to its beginning to be currently whispered all over
London by about one, that Mr Merdle had killed himself. Pressure,
however, so far from being overthrown by the discovery, became a greater
favourite than ever. There was a general moralising upon Pressure, in
every street. All the people who had tried to make money and had not
been able to do it, said, There you were! You no sooner began to devote
yourself to the pursuit of wealth than you got Pressure. The idle people
improved the occasion in a similar manner. See, said they, what you
brought yourself to by work, work, work! You persisted in working, you
overdid it. Pressure came on, and you were done for! This consideration
was very potent in many quarters, but nowhere more so than among the
young clerks and partners who had never been in the slightest danger
of overdoing it. These, one and all, declared, quite piously, that they
hoped they would never forget the warning as long as they lived, and
that their conduct might be so regulated as to keep off Pressure, and
preserve them, a comfort to their friends, for many years.

But, at about the time of High ‘Change, Pressure began to wane, and
appalling whispers to circulate, east, west, north, and south. At first
they were faint, and went no further than a doubt whether Mr Merdle’s
wealth would be found to be as vast as had been supposed; whether there
might not be a temporary difficulty in ‘realising’ it; whether there
might not even be a temporary suspension (say a month or so), on the
part of the wonderful Bank. As the whispers became louder, which they
did from that time every minute, they became more threatening. He had
sprung from nothing, by no natural growth or process that any one could
account for; he had been, after all, a low, ignorant fellow; he had been
a down-looking man, and no one had ever been able to catch his eye;
he had been taken up by all sorts of people in quite an unaccountable
manner; he had never had any money of his own, his ventures had been
utterly reckless, and his expenditure had been most enormous. In steady
progression, as the day declined, the talk rose in sound and purpose.
He had left a letter at the Baths addressed to his physician, and his
physician had got the letter, and the letter would be produced at the
Inquest on the morrow, and it would fall like a thunderbolt upon the
multitude he had deluded. Numbers of men in every profession and trade
would be blighted by his insolvency; old people who had been in easy
circumstances all their lives would have no place of repentance for
their trust in him but the workhouse; legions of women and children
would have their whole future desolated by the hand of this mighty
scoundrel. Every partaker of his magnificent feasts would be seen to
have been a sharer in the plunder of innumerable homes; every servile
worshipper of riches who had helped to set him on his pedestal, would
have done better to worship the Devil point-blank. So, the talk, lashed
louder and higher by confirmation on confirmation, and by edition after
edition of the evening papers, swelled into such a roar when night came,
as might have brought one to believe that a solitary watcher on the
gallery above the Dome of St Paul’s would have perceived the night air
to be laden with a heavy muttering of the name of Merdle, coupled with
every form of execration.

For by that time it was known that the late Mr Merdle’s complaint
had been simply Forgery and Robbery. He, the uncouth object of such
wide-spread adulation, the sitter at great men’s feasts, the roc’s egg
of great ladies’ assemblies, the subduer of exclusiveness, the leveller
of pride, the patron of patrons, the bargain-driver with a Minister
for Lordships of the Circumlocution Office, the recipient of more
acknowledgment within some ten or fifteen years, at most, than had been
bestowed in England upon all peaceful public benefactors, and upon
all the leaders of all the Arts and Sciences, with all their works to
testify for them, during two centuries at least--he, the shining wonder,
the new constellation to be followed by the wise men bringing gifts,
until it stopped over a certain carrion at the bottom of a bath and
disappeared--was simply the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that
ever cheated the gallows.




CHAPTER 26. Reaping the Whirlwind


With a precursory sound of hurried breath and hurried feet, Mr Pancks
rushed into Arthur Clennam’s Counting-house. The Inquest was over, the
letter was public, the Bank was broken, the other model structures of
straw had taken fire and were turned to smoke. The admired piratical
ship had blown up, in the midst of a vast fleet of ships of all rates,
and boats of all sizes; and on the deep was nothing but ruin; nothing
but burning hulls, bursting magazines, great guns self-exploded tearing
friends and neighbours to pieces, drowning men clinging to unseaworthy
spars and going down every minute, spent swimmers, floating dead, and
sharks.

The usual diligence and order of the Counting-house at the Works were
overthrown. Unopened letters and unsorted papers lay strewn about the
desk. In the midst of these tokens of prostrated energy and dismissed
hope, the master of the Counting-house stood idle in his usual place,
with his arms crossed on the desk, and his head bowed down upon them.

Mr Pancks rushed in and saw him, and stood still. In another minute, Mr
Pancks’s arms were on the desk, and Mr Pancks’s head was bowed down
upon them; and for some time they remained in these attitudes, idle and
silent, with the width of the little room between them.

Mr Pancks was the first to lift up his head and speak.

‘I persuaded you to it, Mr Clennam. I know it. Say what you will. You
can’t say more to me than I say to myself. You can’t say more than I
deserve.’

‘O, Pancks, Pancks!’ returned Clennam, ‘don’t speak of deserving. What
do I myself deserve!’

‘Better luck,’ said Pancks.

‘I,’ pursued Clennam, without attending to him, ‘who have ruined my
partner! Pancks, Pancks, I have ruined Doyce! The honest, self-helpful,
indefatigable old man who has worked his way all through his life;
the man who has contended against so much disappointment, and who has
brought out of it such a good and hopeful nature; the man I have felt
so much for, and meant to be so true and useful to; I have ruined
him--brought him to shame and disgrace--ruined him, ruined him!’

The agony into which the reflection wrought his mind was so distressing
to see, that Mr Pancks took hold of himself by the hair of his head, and
tore it in desperation at the spectacle.

‘Reproach me!’ cried Pancks. ‘Reproach me, sir, or I’ll do myself an
injury. Say,--You fool, you villain. Say,--Ass, how could you do it;
Beast, what did you mean by it! Catch hold of me somewhere. Say
something abusive to me!’ All the time, Mr Pancks was tearing at his
tough hair in a most pitiless and cruel manner.

‘If you had never yielded to this fatal mania, Pancks,’ said Clennam,
more in commiseration than retaliation, ‘it would have been how much
better for you, and how much better for me!’

‘At me again, sir!’ cried Pancks, grinding his teeth in remorse. ‘At
me again!’

‘If you had never gone into those accursed calculations, and brought out
your results with such abominable clearness,’ groaned Clennam, ‘it would
have been how much better for you, Pancks, and how much better for me!’

‘At me again, sir!’ exclaimed Pancks, loosening his hold of his hair;
‘at me again, and again!’

Clennam, however, finding him already beginning to be pacified, had said
all he wanted to say, and more. He wrung his hand, only adding, ‘Blind
leaders of the blind, Pancks! Blind leaders of the blind! But Doyce,
Doyce, Doyce; my injured partner!’ That brought his head down on the
desk once more.

Their former attitudes and their former silence were once more first
encroached upon by Pancks.

‘Not been to bed, sir, since it began to get about. Been high and low,
on the chance of finding some hope of saving any cinders from the fire.
All in vain. All gone. All vanished.’

‘I know it,’ returned Clennam, ‘too well.’

Mr Pancks filled up a pause with a groan that came out of the very
depths of his soul.

‘Only yesterday, Pancks,’ said Arthur; ‘only yesterday, Monday, I had
the fixed intention of selling, realising, and making an end of it.’

‘I can’t say as much for myself, sir,’ returned Pancks. ‘Though it’s
wonderful how many people I’ve heard of, who were going to realise
yesterday, of all days in the three hundred and sixty-five, if it hadn’t
been too late!’

His steam-like breathings, usually droll in their effect, were more
tragic than so many groans: while from head to foot, he was in that
begrimed, besmeared, neglected state, that he might have been an
authentic portrait of Misfortune which could scarcely be discerned
through its want of cleaning.

‘Mr Clennam, had you laid out--everything?’ He got over the break before
the last word, and also brought out the last word itself with great
difficulty.

‘Everything.’

Mr Pancks took hold of his tough hair again, and gave it such a wrench
that he pulled out several prongs of it. After looking at these with an
eye of wild hatred, he put them in his pocket.

‘My course,’ said Clennam, brushing away some tears that had been
silently dropping down his face, ‘must be taken at once. What wretched
amends I can make must be made. I must clear my unfortunate partner’s
reputation. I must retain nothing for myself. I must resign to our
creditors the power of management I have so much abused, and I must work
out as much of my fault--or crime--as is susceptible of being worked out
in the rest of my days.’

‘Is it impossible, sir, to tide over the present?’

‘Out of the question. Nothing can be tided over now, Pancks. The sooner
the business can pass out of my hands, the better for it. There are
engagements to be met, this week, which would bring the catastrophe
before many days were over, even if I would postpone it for a single day
by going on for that space, secretly knowing what I know. All last night
I thought of what I would do; what remains is to do it.’

‘Not entirely of yourself?’ said Pancks, whose face was as damp as if
his steam were turning into water as fast as he dismally blew it off.
‘Have some legal help.’

‘Perhaps I had better.’

‘Have Rugg.’

‘There is not much to do. He will do it as well as another.’

‘Shall I fetch Rugg, Mr Clennam?’

‘If you could spare the time, I should be much obliged to you.’

Mr Pancks put on his hat that moment, and steamed away to Pentonville.
While he was gone Arthur never raised his head from the desk, but
remained in that one position.

Mr Pancks brought his friend and professional adviser, Mr Rugg, back
with him. Mr Rugg had had such ample experience, on the road, of Mr
Pancks’s being at that present in an irrational state of mind, that he
opened his professional mediation by requesting that gentleman to take
himself out of the way. Mr Pancks, crushed and submissive, obeyed.

‘He is not unlike what my daughter was, sir, when we began the Breach of
Promise action of Rugg and Bawkins, in which she was Plaintiff,’ said
Mr Rugg. ‘He takes too strong and direct an interest in the case. His
feelings are worked upon. There is no getting on, in our profession,
with feelings worked upon, sir.’

As he pulled off his gloves and put them in his hat, he saw, in a side
glance or two, that a great change had come over his client.

‘I am sorry to perceive, sir,’ said Mr Rugg, ‘that you have been
allowing your own feelings to be worked upon. Now, pray don’t, pray
don’t. These losses are much to be deplored, sir, but we must look ‘em
in the face.’

‘If the money I have sacrificed had been all my own, Mr Rugg,’ sighed Mr
Clennam, ‘I should have cared far less.’

‘Indeed, sir?’ said Mr Rugg, rubbing his hands with a cheerful air.
‘You surprise me. That’s singular, sir. I have generally found, in my
experience, that it’s their own money people are most particular about.
I have seen people get rid of a good deal of other people’s money, and
bear it very well: very well indeed.’

With these comforting remarks, Mr Rugg seated himself on an office-stool
at the desk and proceeded to business.

‘Now, Mr Clennam, by your leave, let us go into the matter. Let us see
the state of the case. The question is simple. The question is the
usual plain, straightforward, common-sense question. What can we do for
ourself? What can we do for ourself?’

‘This is not the question with me, Mr Rugg,’ said Arthur. ‘You mistake
it in the beginning. It is, what can I do for my partner, how can I best
make reparation to him?’

‘I am afraid, sir, do you know,’ argued Mr Rugg persuasively, ‘that you
are still allowing your feeling to be worked upon. I _don’t_ like the term
“reparation,” sir, except as a lever in the hands of counsel. Will you
excuse my saying that I feel it my duty to offer you the caution, that
you really must not allow your feelings to be worked upon?’

‘Mr Rugg,’ said Clennam, nerving himself to go through with what he
had resolved upon, and surprising that gentleman by appearing, in his
despondency, to have a settled determination of purpose; ‘you give me
the impression that you will not be much disposed to adopt the course
I have made up my mind to take. If your disapproval of it should render
you unwilling to discharge such business as it necessitates, I am sorry
for it, and must seek other aid. But I will represent to you at once,
that to argue against it with me is useless.’

‘Good, sir,’ answered Mr Rugg, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Good, sir. Since
the business is to be done by some hands, let it be done by mine. Such
was my principle in the case of Rugg and Bawkins. Such is my principle
in most cases.’

Clennam then proceeded to state to Mr Rugg his fixed resolution. He told
Mr Rugg that his partner was a man of great simplicity and integrity,
and that in all he meant to do, he was guided above all things by a
knowledge of his partner’s character, and a respect for his feelings.
He explained that his partner was then absent on an enterprise of
importance, and that it particularly behoved himself publicly to accept
the blame of what he had rashly done, and publicly to exonerate his
partner from all participation in the responsibility of it, lest the
successful conduct of that enterprise should be endangered by the
slightest suspicion wrongly attaching to his partner’s honour and credit
in another country. He told Mr Rugg that to clear his partner morally,
to the fullest extent, and publicly and unreservedly to declare that
he, Arthur Clennam, of that Firm, had of his own sole act, and even
expressly against his partner’s caution, embarked its resources in the
swindles that had lately perished, was the only real atonement within
his power; was a better atonement to the particular man than it would be
to many men; and was therefore the atonement he had first to make. With
this view, his intention was to print a declaration to the foregoing
effect, which he had already drawn up; and, besides circulating it
among all who had dealings with the House, to advertise it in the public
papers. Concurrently with this measure (the description of which cost Mr
Rugg innumerable wry faces and great uneasiness in his limbs), he would
address a letter to all the creditors, exonerating his partner in a
solemn manner, informing them of the stoppage of the House until their
pleasure could be known and his partner communicated with, and humbly
submitting himself to their direction. If, through their consideration
for his partner’s innocence, the affairs could ever be got into such
train as that the business could be profitably resumed, and its present
downfall overcome, then his own share in it should revert to his
partner, as the only reparation he could make to him in money value for
the distress and loss he had unhappily brought upon him, and he himself,
at as small a salary as he could live upon, would ask to be allowed to
serve the business as a faithful clerk.

Though Mr Rugg saw plainly there was no preventing this from being done,
still the wryness of his face and the uneasiness of his limbs so sorely
required the propitiation of a Protest, that he made one. ‘I offer no
objection, sir,’ said he, ‘I argue no point with you. I will carry out
your views, sir; but, under protest.’ Mr Rugg then stated, not without
prolixity, the heads of his protest. These were, in effect, because the
whole town, or he might say the whole country, was in the first madness
of the late discovery, and the resentment against the victims would be
very strong: those who had not been deluded being certain to wax
exceedingly wroth with them for not having been as wise as they were:
and those who had been deluded being certain to find excuses and reasons
for themselves, of which they were equally certain to see that other
sufferers were wholly devoid: not to mention the great probability of
every individual sufferer persuading himself, to his violent
indignation, that but for the example of all the other sufferers he
never would have put himself in the way of suffering. Because such a
declaration as Clennam’s, made at such a time, would certainly draw down
upon him a storm of animosity, rendering it impossible to calculate on
forbearance in the creditors, or on unanimity among them; and exposing
him a solitary target to a straggling cross-fire, which might bring him
down from half-a-dozen quarters at once.

To all this Clennam merely replied that, granting the whole protest,
nothing in it lessened the force, or could lessen the force, of the
voluntary and public exoneration of his partner. He therefore, once
and for all, requested Mr Rugg’s immediate aid in getting the business
despatched. Upon that, Mr Rugg fell to work; and Arthur, retaining no
property to himself but his clothes and books, and a little loose
money, placed his small private banker’s-account with the papers of the
business.

The disclosure was made, and the storm raged fearfully. Thousands of
people were wildly staring about for somebody alive to heap reproaches
on; and this notable case, courting publicity, set the living somebody
so much wanted, on a scaffold. When people who had nothing to do with
the case were so sensible of its flagrancy, people who lost money by it
could scarcely be expected to deal mildly with it. Letters of reproach
and invective showered in from the creditors; and Mr Rugg, who sat upon
the high stool every day and read them all, informed his client within a
week that he feared there were writs out.

‘I must take the consequences of what I have done,’ said Clennam. ‘The
writs will find me here.’

On the very next morning, as he was turning in Bleeding Heart Yard by
Mrs Plornish’s corner, Mrs Plornish stood at the door waiting for him,
and mysteriously besought him to step into Happy Cottage. There he found
Mr Rugg.

‘I thought I’d wait for you here. I wouldn’t go on to the Counting-house
this morning if I was you, sir.’

‘Why not, Mr Rugg?’

‘There are as many as five out, to my knowledge.’

‘It cannot be too soon over,’ said Clennam. ‘Let them take me at once.’

‘Yes, but,’ said Mr Rugg, getting between him and the door, ‘hear
reason, hear reason. They’ll take you soon enough, Mr Clennam, I don’t
doubt; but, hear reason. It almost always happens, in these cases,
that some insignificant matter pushes itself in front and makes much
of itself. Now, I find there’s a little one out--a mere Palace Court
jurisdiction--and I have reason to believe that a caption may be made
upon that. I wouldn’t be taken upon that.’

‘Why not?’ asked Clennam.

‘I’d be taken on a full-grown one, sir,’ said Mr Rugg. ‘It’s as well to
keep up appearances. As your professional adviser, I should prefer your
being taken on a writ from one of the Superior Courts, if you have no
objection to do me that favour. It looks better.’

‘Mr Rugg,’ said Arthur, in his dejection, ‘my only wish is, that it
should be over. I will go on, and take my chance.’

‘Another word of reason, sir!’ cried Mr Rugg. ‘Now, this _is_ reason.
The other may be taste; but this is reason. If you should be taken on a
little one, sir, you would go to the Marshalsea. Now, you know what the
Marshalsea is. Very close. Excessively confined. Whereas in the King’s
Bench--’ Mr Rugg waved his right hand freely, as expressing abundance of
space.

‘I would rather,’ said Clennam, ‘be taken to the Marshalsea than to any
other prison.’

‘Do you say so indeed, sir?’ returned Mr Rugg. ‘Then this is taste, too,
and we may be walking.’

He was a little offended at first, but he soon overlooked it. They
walked through the Yard to the other end. The Bleeding Hearts were more
interested in Arthur since his reverses than formerly; now regarding him
as one who was true to the place and had taken up his freedom. Many of
them came out to look after him, and to observe to one another, with
great unctuousness, that he was ‘pulled down by it.’ Mrs Plornish
and her father stood at the top of the steps at their own end, much
depressed and shaking their heads.

There was nobody visibly in waiting when Arthur and Mr Rugg arrived
at the Counting-house. But an elderly member of the Jewish persuasion,
preserved in rum, followed them close, and looked in at the glass before
Mr Rugg had opened one of the day’s letters. ‘Oh!’ said Mr Rugg,
looking up. ‘How do you do? Step in--Mr Clennam, I think this is the
gentleman I was mentioning.’

This gentleman explained the object of his visit to be ‘a tyfling madder
ob bithznithz,’ and executed his legal function.

‘Shall I accompany you, Mr Clennam?’ asked Mr Rugg politely, rubbing his
hands.

‘I would rather go alone, thank you. Be so good as send me my clothes.’
Mr Rugg in a light airy way replied in the affirmative, and shook hands
with him. He and his attendant then went down-stairs, got into the first
conveyance they found, and drove to the old gates.

‘Where I little thought, Heaven forgive me,’ said Clennam to himself,
‘that I should ever enter thus!’

Mr Chivery was on the Lock, and Young John was in the Lodge: either
newly released from it, or waiting to take his own spell of duty. Both
were more astonished on seeing who the prisoner was, than one might have
thought turnkeys would have been. The elder Mr Chivery shook hands with
him in a shame-faced kind of way, and said, ‘I don’t call to mind,
sir, as I was ever less glad to see you.’ The younger Mr Chivery, more
distant, did not shake hands with him at all; he stood looking at him
in a state of indecision so observable that it even came within the
observation of Clennam with his heavy eyes and heavy heart. Presently
afterwards, Young John disappeared into the jail.

As Clennam knew enough of the place to know that he was required to
remain in the Lodge a certain time, he took a seat in a corner, and
feigned to be occupied with the perusal of letters from his pocket.
They did not so engross his attention, but that he saw, with gratitude,
how the elder Mr Chivery kept the Lodge clear of prisoners; how he
signed to some, with his keys, not to come in, how he nudged others with
his elbows to go out, and how he made his misery as easy to him as he
could.

Arthur was sitting with his eyes fixed on the floor, recalling the past,
brooding over the present, and not attending to either, when he felt
himself touched upon the shoulder. It was by Young John; and he said,
‘You can come now.’

He got up and followed Young John. When they had gone a step or two
within the inner iron-gate, Young John turned and said to him:

‘You want a room. I have got you one.’

‘I thank you heartily.’

Young John turned again, and took him in at the old doorway, up the old
staircase, into the old room. Arthur stretched out his hand. Young John
looked at it, looked at him--sternly--swelled, choked, and said:

‘I don’t know as I can. No, I find I can’t. But I thought you’d like the
room, and here it is for you.’

Surprise at this inconsistent behaviour yielded when he was gone (he
went away directly) to the feelings which the empty room awakened in
Clennam’s wounded breast, and to the crowding associations with the
one good and gentle creature who had sanctified it. Her absence in his
altered fortunes made it, and him in it, so very desolate and so much in
need of such a face of love and truth, that he turned against the
wall to weep, sobbing out, as his heart relieved itself, ‘O my Little
Dorrit!’




CHAPTER 27. The Pupil of the Marshalsea


The day was sunny, and the Marshalsea, with the hot noon striking
upon it, was unwontedly quiet. Arthur Clennam dropped into a solitary
arm-chair, itself as faded as any debtor in the jail, and yielded
himself to his thoughts.

In the unnatural peace of having gone through the dreaded arrest, and
got there,--the first change of feeling which the prison most commonly
induced, and from which dangerous resting-place so many men had slipped
down to the depths of degradation and disgrace by so many ways,--he
could think of some passages in his life, almost as if he were removed
from them into another state of existence. Taking into account where he
was, the interest that had first brought him there when he had been free
to keep away, and the gentle presence that was equally inseparable from
the walls and bars about him and from the impalpable remembrances of his
later life which no walls or bars could imprison, it was not remarkable
that everything his memory turned upon should bring him round again to
Little Dorrit. Yet it was remarkable to him; not because of the fact
itself, but because of the reminder it brought with it, how much the
dear little creature had influenced his better resolutions.

None of us clearly know to whom or to what we are indebted in this wise,
until some marked stop in the whirling wheel of life brings the right
perception with it. It comes with sickness, it comes with sorrow, it
comes with the loss of the dearly loved, it is one of the most frequent
uses of adversity. It came to Clennam in his adversity, strongly and
tenderly. ‘When I first gathered myself together,’ he thought, ‘and
set something like purpose before my jaded eyes, whom had I before me,
toiling on, for a good object’s sake, without encouragement, without
notice, against ignoble obstacles that would have turned an army of
received heroes and heroines? One weak girl! When I tried to conquer
my misplaced love, and to be generous to the man who was more fortunate
than I, though he should never know it or repay me with a gracious word,
in whom had I watched patience, self-denial, self-subdual, charitable
construction, the noblest generosity of the affections? In the same poor
girl! If I, a man, with a man’s advantages and means and energies, had
slighted the whisper in my heart, that if my father had erred, it was my
first duty to conceal the fault and to repair it, what youthful figure
with tender feet going almost bare on the damp ground, with spare hands
ever working, with its slight shape but half protected from the
sharp weather, would have stood before me to put me to shame? Little
Dorrit’s.’ So always as he sat alone in the faded chair, thinking.
Always, Little Dorrit. Until it seemed to him as if he met the reward of
having wandered away from her, and suffered anything to pass between him
and his remembrance of her virtues.

His door was opened, and the head of the elder Chivery was put in a very
little way, without being turned towards him.

‘I am off the Lock, Mr Clennam, and going out. Can I do anything for
you?’

‘Many thanks. Nothing.’

‘You’ll excuse me opening the door,’ said Mr Chivery; ‘but I couldn’t
make you hear.’

‘Did you knock?’ ‘Half-a-dozen times.’

Rousing himself, Clennam observed that the prison had awakened from its
noontide doze, that the inmates were loitering about the shady yard, and
that it was late in the afternoon. He had been thinking for hours.

‘Your things is come,’ said Mr Chivery, ‘and my son is going to carry
‘em up. I should have sent ‘em up but for his wishing to carry ‘em
himself. Indeed he would have ‘em himself, and so I couldn’t send ‘em
up. Mr Clennam, could I say a word to you?’

‘Pray come in,’ said Arthur; for Mr Chivery’s head was still put in at
the door a very little way, and Mr Chivery had but one ear upon him,
instead of both eyes. This was native delicacy in Mr Chivery--true
politeness; though his exterior had very much of a turnkey about it, and
not the least of a gentleman.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Mr Chivery, without advancing; ‘it’s no odds me
coming in. Mr Clennam, don’t you take no notice of my son (if you’ll
be so good) in case you find him cut up anyways difficult. My son has a
‘art, and my son’s ‘art is in the right place. Me and his mother knows
where to find it, and we find it sitiwated correct.’

With this mysterious speech, Mr Chivery took his ear away and shut the
door. He might have been gone ten minutes, when his son succeeded him.

‘Here’s your portmanteau,’ he said to Arthur, putting it carefully down.

‘It’s very kind of you. I am ashamed that you should have the trouble.’

He was gone before it came to that; but soon returned, saying exactly as
before, ‘Here’s your black box:’ which he also put down with care.

‘I am very sensible of this attention. I hope we may shake hands now, Mr
John.’

Young John, however, drew back, turning his right wrist in a socket made
of his left thumb and middle-finger and said as he had said at first,
‘I don’t know as I can. No; I find I can’t!’ He then stood regarding the
prisoner sternly, though with a swelling humour in his eyes that looked
like pity.

‘Why are you angry with me,’ said Clennam, ‘and yet so ready to do me
these kind services? There must be some mistake between us. If I have
done anything to occasion it I am sorry.’

‘No mistake, sir,’ returned John, turning the wrist backwards and
forwards in the socket, for which it was rather tight. ‘No mistake, sir,
in the feelings with which my eyes behold you at the present moment! If
I was at all fairly equal to your weight, Mr Clennam--which I am not;
and if you weren’t under a cloud--which you are; and if it wasn’t
against all rules of the Marshalsea--which it is; those feelings are
such, that they would stimulate me, more to having it out with you in
a Round on the present spot than to anything else I could name.’

Arthur looked at him for a moment in some wonder, and some little anger.
‘Well, well!’ he said. ‘A mistake, a mistake!’ Turning away, he sat down
with a heavy sigh in the faded chair again.

Young John followed him with his eyes, and, after a short pause, cried
out, ‘I beg your pardon!’

‘Freely granted,’ said Clennam, waving his hand without raising his
sunken head. ‘Say no more. I am not worth it.’

‘This furniture, sir,’ said Young John in a voice of mild and soft
explanation, ‘belongs to me. I am in the habit of letting it out to
parties without furniture, that have the room. It an’t much, but it’s at
your service. Free, I mean. I could not think of letting you have it on
any other terms. You’re welcome to it for nothing.’

Arthur raised his head again to thank him, and to say he could
not accept the favour. John was still turning his wrist, and still
contending with himself in his former divided manner.

‘What is the matter between us?’ said Arthur.

‘I decline to name it, sir,’ returned Young John, suddenly turning loud
and sharp. ‘Nothing’s the matter.’

Arthur looked at him again, in vain, for an explanation of his
behaviour. After a while, Arthur turned away his head again. Young John
said, presently afterwards, with the utmost mildness:

‘The little round table, sir, that’s nigh your elbow, was--you know
whose--I needn’t mention him--he died a great gentleman. I bought it of
an individual that he gave it to, and that lived here after him. But the
individual wasn’t any ways equal to him. Most individuals would find it
hard to come up to his level.’

Arthur drew the little table nearer, rested his arm upon it, and kept it
there.

‘Perhaps you may not be aware, sir,’ said Young John, ‘that I intruded
upon him when he was over here in London. On the whole he was of opinion
that it _was_ an intrusion, though he was so good as to ask me to sit
down and to inquire after father and all other old friends. Leastways
humblest acquaintances. He looked, to me, a good deal changed, and I
said so when I came back. I asked him if Miss Amy was well--’

‘And she was?’

‘I should have thought you would have known without putting the question
to such as me,’ returned Young John, after appearing to take a large
invisible pill. ‘Since you do put me the question, I am sorry I can’t
answer it. But the truth is, he looked upon the inquiry as a liberty,
and said, “What was that to me?” It was then I became quite aware I was
intruding: of which I had been fearful before. However, he spoke very
handsome afterwards; very handsome.’

They were both silent for several minutes: except that Young John
remarked, at about the middle of the pause, ‘He both spoke and acted
very handsome.’

It was again Young John who broke the silence by inquiring:

‘If it’s not a liberty, how long may it be your intentions, sir, to go
without eating and drinking?’

‘I have not felt the want of anything yet,’ returned Clennam. ‘I have no
appetite just now.’

‘The more reason why you should take some support, sir,’ urged Young
John. ‘If you find yourself going on sitting here for hours and hours
partaking of no refreshment because you have no appetite, why then you
should and must partake of refreshment without an appetite. I’m going to
have tea in my own apartment. If it’s not a liberty, please to come and
take a cup. Or I can bring a tray here in two minutes.’

Feeling that Young John would impose that trouble on himself if he
refused, and also feeling anxious to show that he bore in mind both
the elder Mr Chivery’s entreaty, and the younger Mr Chivery’s apology,
Arthur rose and expressed his willingness to take a cup of tea in Mr
John’s apartment. Young John locked his door for him as they went out,
slided the key into his pocket with great dexterity, and led the way to
his own residence.

It was at the top of the house nearest to the gateway. It was the room
to which Clennam had hurried on the day when the enriched family had
left the prison for ever, and where he had lifted her insensible from
the floor. He foresaw where they were going as soon as their feet
touched the staircase. The room was so far changed that it was papered
now, and had been repainted, and was far more comfortably furnished; but
he could recall it just as he had seen it in that single glance, when he
raised her from the ground and carried her down to the carriage.

Young John looked hard at him, biting his fingers.

‘I see you recollect the room, Mr Clennam?’

‘I recollect it well, Heaven bless her!’

Oblivious of the tea, Young John continued to bite his fingers and to
look at his visitor, as long as his visitor continued to glance about
the room. Finally, he made a start at the teapot, gustily rattled a
quantity of tea into it from a canister, and set off for the common
kitchen to fill it with hot water.

The room was so eloquent to Clennam in the changed circumstances of his
return to the miserable Marshalsea; it spoke to him so mournfully of
her, and of his loss of her; that it would have gone hard with him to
resist it, even though he had not been alone. Alone, he did not try.
He had his hand on the insensible wall as tenderly as if it had been
herself that he touched, and pronounced her name in a low voice. He
stood at the window, looking over the prison-parapet with its grim
spiked border, and breathed a benediction through the summer haze
towards the distant land where she was rich and prosperous.

Young John was some time absent, and, when he came back, showed that he
had been outside by bringing with him fresh butter in a cabbage leaf,
some thin slices of boiled ham in another cabbage leaf, and a little
basket of water-cresses and salad herbs. When these were arranged upon
the table to his satisfaction, they sat down to tea.

Clennam tried to do honour to the meal, but unavailingly. The ham
sickened him, the bread seemed to turn to sand in his mouth. He could
force nothing upon himself but a cup of tea.

‘Try a little something green,’ said Young John, handing him the basket.

He took a sprig or so of water-cress, and tried again; but the bread
turned to a heavier sand than before, and the ham (though it was good
enough of itself) seemed to blow a faint simoom of ham through the whole
Marshalsea.

‘Try a little more something green, sir,’ said Young John; and again
handed the basket.

It was so like handing green meat into the cage of a dull imprisoned
bird, and John had so evidently brought the little basket as a handful
of fresh relief from the stale hot paving-stones and bricks of the jail,
that Clennam said, with a smile, ‘It was very kind of you to think of
putting this between the wires; but I cannot even get this down to-day.’

As if the difficulty were contagious, Young John soon pushed away his
own plate, and fell to folding the cabbage-leaf that had contained the
ham. When he had folded it into a number of layers, one over another,
so that it was small in the palm of his hand, he began to flatten it
between both his hands, and to eye Clennam attentively.

‘I wonder,’ he at length said, compressing his green packet with some
force, ‘that if it’s not worth your while to take care of yourself for
your own sake, it’s not worth doing for some one else’s.’

‘Truly,’ returned Arthur, with a sigh and a smile, ‘I don’t know for
whose.’

‘Mr Clennam,’ said John, warmly, ‘I am surprised that a gentleman who
is capable of the straightforwardness that you are capable of, should be
capable of the mean action of making me such an answer. Mr Clennam, I am
surprised that a gentleman who is capable of having a heart of his own,
should be capable of the heartlessness of treating mine in that way. I
am astonished at it, sir. Really and truly I am astonished!’

Having got upon his feet to emphasise his concluding words, Young John
sat down again, and fell to rolling his green packet on his right leg;
never taking his eyes off Clennam, but surveying him with a fixed look
of indignant reproach.

‘I had got over it, sir,’ said John. ‘I had conquered it, knowing that
it _must_ be conquered, and had come to the resolution to think no more
about it. I shouldn’t have given my mind to it again, I hope, if to this
prison you had not been brought, and in an hour unfortunate for me,
this day!’ (In his agitation Young John adopted his mother’s powerful
construction of sentences.) ‘When you first came upon me, sir, in the
Lodge, this day, more as if a Upas tree had been made a capture of than
a private defendant, such mingled streams of feelings broke loose again
within me, that everything was for the first few minutes swept away
before them, and I was going round and round in a vortex. I got out of
it. I struggled, and got out of it. If it was the last word I had to
speak, against that vortex with my utmost powers I strove, and out of it
I came. I argued that if I had been rude, apologies was due, and those
apologies without a question of demeaning, I did make. And now, when
I’ve been so wishful to show that one thought is next to being a holy
one with me and goes before all others--now, after all, you dodge me
when I ever so gently hint at it, and throw me back upon myself. For, do
not, sir,’ said Young John, ‘do not be so base as to deny that dodge you
do, and thrown me back upon myself you have!’

All amazement, Arthur gazed at him like one lost, only saying, ‘What is
it? What do you mean, John?’ But, John, being in that state of mind in
which nothing would seem to be more impossible to a certain class of
people than the giving of an answer, went ahead blindly.

‘I hadn’t,’ John declared, ‘no, I hadn’t, and I never had the
audaciousness to think, I am sure, that all was anything but lost. I
hadn’t, no, why should I say I hadn’t if I ever had, any hope that it
was possible to be so blest, not after the words that passed, not even
if barriers insurmountable had not been raised! But is that a reason why
I am to have no memory, why I am to have no thoughts, why I am to have
no sacred spots, nor anything?’

‘What can you mean?’ cried Arthur.

‘It’s all very well to trample on it, sir,’ John went on, scouring a
very prairie of wild words, ‘if a person can make up his mind to be
guilty of the action. It’s all very well to trample on it, but it’s
there. It may be that it couldn’t be trampled upon if it wasn’t there.
But that doesn’t make it gentlemanly, that doesn’t make it honourable,
that doesn’t justify throwing a person back upon himself after he has
struggled and strived out of himself like a butterfly. The world may
sneer at a turnkey, but he’s a man--when he isn’t a woman, which among
female criminals he’s expected to be.’

Ridiculous as the incoherence of his talk was, there was yet a
truthfulness in Young John’s simple, sentimental character, and a sense
of being wounded in some very tender respect, expressed in his burning
face and in the agitation of his voice and manner, which Arthur must
have been cruel to disregard. He turned his thoughts back to the
starting-point of this unknown injury; and in the meantime Young John,
having rolled his green packet pretty round, cut it carefully into three
pieces, and laid it on a plate as if it were some particular delicacy.

‘It seems to me just possible,’ said Arthur, when he had retraced the
conversation to the water-cresses and back again, ‘that you have made
some reference to Miss Dorrit.’

‘It is just possible, sir,’ returned John Chivery.

‘I don’t understand it. I hope I may not be so unlucky as to make you
think I mean to offend you again, for I never have meant to offend you
yet, when I say I don’t understand it.’

‘Sir,’ said Young John, ‘will you have the perfidy to deny that you know
and long have known that I felt towards Miss Dorrit, call it not the
presumption of love, but adoration and sacrifice?’

‘Indeed, John, I will not have any perfidy if I know it; why you should
suspect me of it I am at a loss to think. Did you ever hear from Mrs
Chivery, your mother, that I went to see her once?’

‘No, sir,’ returned John, shortly. ‘Never heard of such a thing.’

‘But I did. Can you imagine why?’

‘No, sir,’ returned John, shortly. ‘I can’t imagine why.’

‘I will tell you. I was solicitous to promote Miss Dorrit’s happiness;
and if I could have supposed that Miss Dorrit returned your affection--’

Poor John Chivery turned crimson to the tips of his ears. ‘Miss Dorrit
never did, sir. I wish to be honourable and true, so far as in my humble
way I can, and I would scorn to pretend for a moment that she ever did,
or that she ever led me to believe she did; no, nor even that it was
ever to be expected in any cool reason that she would or could. She was
far above me in all respects at all times. As likewise,’ added John,
‘similarly was her gen-teel family.’

His chivalrous feeling towards all that belonged to her made him so very
respectable, in spite of his small stature and his rather weak legs, and
his very weak hair, and his poetical temperament, that a Goliath might
have sat in his place demanding less consideration at Arthur’s hands.

‘You speak, John,’ he said, with cordial admiration, ‘like a Man.’

‘Well, sir,’ returned John, brushing his hand across his eyes, ‘then I
wish you’d do the same.’

He was quick with this unexpected retort, and it again made Arthur
regard him with a wondering expression of face.

‘Leastways,’ said John, stretching his hand across the tea-tray, ‘if too
strong a remark, withdrawn! But, why not, why not? When I say to you,
Mr Clennam, take care of yourself for some one else’s sake, why not be
open, though a turnkey? Why did I get you the room which I knew you’d
like best? Why did I carry up your things? Not that I found ‘em heavy;
I don’t mention ‘em on that accounts; far from it. Why have I cultivated
you in the manner I have done since the morning? On the ground of your
own merits? No. They’re very great, I’ve no doubt at all; but not on the
ground of them. Another’s merits have had their weight, and have had far
more weight with Me. Then why not speak free?’

‘Unaffectedly, John,’ said Clennam, ‘you are so good a fellow and I have
so true a respect for your character, that if I have appeared to be less
sensible than I really am of the fact that the kind services you have
rendered me to-day are attributable to my having been trusted by
Miss Dorrit as her friend--I confess it to be a fault, and I ask your
forgiveness.’

‘Oh! why not,’ John repeated with returning scorn, ‘why not speak free!’

‘I declare to you,’ returned Arthur, ‘that I do not understand you.
Look at me. Consider the trouble I have been in. Is it likely that I
would wilfully add to my other self-reproaches, that of being ungrateful
or treacherous to you. I do not understand you.’

John’s incredulous face slowly softened into a face of doubt. He rose,
backed into the garret-window of the room, beckoned Arthur to come
there, and stood looking at him thoughtfully.

‘Mr Clennam, do you mean to say that you don’t know?’

‘What, John?’

‘Lord,’ said Young John, appealing with a gasp to the spikes on the
wall. ‘He says, What!’

Clennam looked at the spikes, and looked at John; and looked at the
spikes, and looked at John.

‘He says What! And what is more,’ exclaimed Young John, surveying him in
a doleful maze, ‘he appears to mean it! Do you see this window, sir?’

‘Of course I see this window.’

‘See this room?’

‘Why, of course I see this room.’

‘That wall opposite, and that yard down below? They have all been
witnesses of it, from day to day, from night to night, from week to
week, from month to month. For how often have I seen Miss Dorrit here
when she has not seen me!’

‘Witnesses of what?’ said Clennam.

‘Of Miss Dorrit’s love.’

‘For whom?’

‘You,’ said John. And touched him with the back of his hand upon the
breast, and backed to his chair, and sat down on it with a pale face,
holding the arms, and shaking his head at him.

If he had dealt Clennam a heavy blow, instead of laying that light touch
upon him, its effect could not have been to shake him more. He stood
amazed; his eyes looking at John; his lips parted, and seeming now and
then to form the word ‘Me!’ without uttering it; his hands dropped at
his sides; his whole appearance that of a man who has been awakened from
sleep, and stupefied by intelligence beyond his full comprehension.

‘Me!’ he at length said aloud.

‘Ah!’ groaned Young John. ‘You!’

He did what he could to muster a smile, and returned, ‘Your fancy. You
are completely mistaken.’

‘I mistaken, sir!’ said Young John. ‘_I_ completely mistaken on that
subject! No, Mr Clennam, don’t tell me so. On any other, if you like,
for I don’t set up to be a penetrating character, and am well aware of
my own deficiencies. But, _I_ mistaken on a point that has caused me
more smart in my breast than a flight of savages’ arrows could have
done! _I_ mistaken on a point that almost sent me into my grave, as
I sometimes wished it would, if the grave could only have been made
compatible with the tobacco-business and father and mother’s feelings! I
mistaken on a point that, even at the present moment, makes me take out
my pocket-handkerchief like a great girl, as people say: though I am sure
I don’t know why a great girl should be a term of reproach, for every
rightly constituted male mind loves ‘em great and small. Don’t tell me
so, don’t tell me so!’

Still highly respectable at bottom, though absurd enough upon the
surface, Young John took out his pocket-handkerchief with a genuine
absence both of display and concealment, which is only to be seen in
a man with a great deal of good in him, when he takes out his
pocket-handkerchief for the purpose of wiping his eyes. Having dried
them, and indulged in the harmless luxury of a sob and a sniff, he put
it up again.

The touch was still in its influence so like a blow that Arthur could
not get many words together to close the subject with. He assured John
Chivery when he had returned his handkerchief to his pocket, that he
did all honour to his disinterestedness and to the fidelity of his
remembrance of Miss Dorrit. As to the impression on his mind, of which
he had just relieved it--here John interposed, and said, ‘No impression!
Certainty!’--as to that, they might perhaps speak of it at another time,
but would say no more now. Feeling low-spirited and weary, he would go
back to his room, with John’s leave, and come out no more that night.
John assented, and he crept back in the shadow of the wall to his own
lodging.

The feeling of the blow was still so strong upon him that, when the
dirty old woman was gone whom he found sitting on the stairs outside
his door, waiting to make his bed, and who gave him to understand while
doing it, that she had received her instructions from Mr Chivery, ‘not
the old ‘un but the young ‘un,’ he sat down in the faded arm-chair,
pressing his head between his hands, as if he had been stunned. Little
Dorrit love him! More bewildering to him than his misery, far.

Consider the improbability. He had been accustomed to call her his
child, and his dear child, and to invite her confidence by dwelling upon
the difference in their respective ages, and to speak of himself as one
who was turning old. Yet she might not have thought him old. Something
reminded him that he had not thought himself so, until the roses had
floated away upon the river.

He had her two letters among other papers in his box, and he took them
out and read them. There seemed to be a sound in them like the sound
of her sweet voice. It fell upon his ear with many tones of tenderness,
that were not insusceptible of the new meaning. Now it was that the
quiet desolation of her answer, ‘No, No, No,’ made to him that night
in that very room--that night when he had been shown the dawn of her
altered fortune, and when other words had passed between them which he
had been destined to remember in humiliation and a prisoner, rushed into
his mind.

Consider the improbability.

But it had a preponderating tendency, when considered, to become
fainter. There was another and a curious inquiry of his own heart’s that
concurrently became stronger. In the reluctance he had felt to believe
that she loved any one; in his desire to set that question at rest; in
a half-formed consciousness he had had that there would be a kind of
nobleness in his helping her love for any one, was there no suppressed
something on his own side that he had hushed as it arose? Had he ever
whispered to himself that he must not think of such a thing as her
loving him, that he must not take advantage of her gratitude, that he
must keep his experience in remembrance as a warning and reproof;
that he must regard such youthful hopes as having passed away, as his
friend’s dead daughter had passed away; that he must be steady in saying
to himself that the time had gone by him, and he was too saddened and
old?

He had kissed her when he raised her from the ground on the day when she
had been so consistently and expressively forgotten. Quite as he might
have kissed her, if she had been conscious? No difference?

The darkness found him occupied with these thoughts. The darkness also
found Mr and Mrs Plornish knocking at his door. They brought with them a
basket, filled with choice selections from that stock in trade which met
with such a quick sale and produced such a slow return. Mrs Plornish was
affected to tears. Mr Plornish amiably growled, in his philosophical but
not lucid manner, that there was ups you see, and there was downs. It
was in vain to ask why ups, why downs; there they was, you know. He had
heerd it given for a truth that accordin’ as the world went round, which
round it did rewolve undoubted, even the best of gentlemen must take his
turn of standing with his ed upside down and all his air a flying
the wrong way into what you might call Space. Wery well then. What
Mr Plornish said was, wery well then. That gentleman’s ed would come
up-ards when his turn come, that gentleman’s air would be a pleasure to
look upon being all smooth again, and wery well then!

It has been already stated that Mrs Plornish, not being philosophical,
wept. It further happened that Mrs Plornish, not being philosophical,
was intelligible. It may have arisen out of her softened state of mind,
out of her sex’s wit, out of a woman’s quick association of ideas,
or out of a woman’s no association of ideas, but it further happened
somehow that Mrs Plornish’s intelligibility displayed itself upon the
very subject of Arthur’s meditations.

‘The way father has been talking about you, Mr Clennam,’ said Mrs
Plornish, ‘you hardly would believe. It’s made him quite poorly. As
to his voice, this misfortune has took it away. You know what a sweet
singer father is; but he couldn’t get a note out for the children at
tea, if you’ll credit what I tell you.’

While speaking, Mrs Plornish shook her head, and wiped her eyes, and
looked retrospectively about the room.

‘As to Mr Baptist,’ pursued Mrs Plornish, ‘whatever he’ll do when he
comes to know of it, I can’t conceive nor yet imagine. He’d have been
here before now, you may be sure, but that he’s away on confidential
business of your own. The persevering manner in which he follows up that
business, and gives himself no rest from it--it really do,’ said
Mrs Plornish, winding up in the Italian manner, ‘as I say to him,
Mooshattonisha padrona.’

Though not conceited, Mrs Plornish felt that she had turned this Tuscan
sentence with peculiar elegance. Mr Plornish could not conceal his
exultation in her accomplishments as a linguist.

‘But what I say is, Mr Clennam,’ the good woman went on, ‘there’s always
something to be thankful for, as I am sure you will yourself admit.
Speaking in this room, it’s not hard to think what the present something
is. It’s a thing to be thankful for, indeed, that Miss Dorrit is not
here to know it.’

Arthur thought she looked at him with particular expression.

‘It’s a thing,’ reiterated Mrs Plornish, ‘to be thankful for, indeed,
that Miss Dorrit is far away. It’s to be hoped she is not likely to hear
of it. If she had been here to see it, sir, it’s not to be doubted
that the sight of you,’ Mrs Plornish repeated those words--‘not to be
doubted, that the sight of you--in misfortune and trouble, would have
been almost too much for her affectionate heart. There’s nothing I can
think of, that would have touched Miss Dorrit so bad as that.’

Of a certainty Mrs Plornish did look at him now, with a sort of
quivering defiance in her friendly emotion.

‘Yes!’ said she. ‘And it shows what notice father takes, though at his
time of life, that he says to me this afternoon, which Happy Cottage
knows I neither make it up nor any ways enlarge, “Mary, it’s much to
be rejoiced in that Miss Dorrit is not on the spot to behold it.” Those
were father’s words. Father’s own words was, “Much to be rejoiced in,
Mary, that Miss Dorrit is not on the spot to behold it.” I says to
father then, I says to him, “Father, you are right!” That,’ Mrs Plornish
concluded, with the air of a very precise legal witness, ‘is what passed
betwixt father and me. And I tell you nothing but what did pass betwixt
me and father.’

Mr Plornish, as being of a more laconic temperament, embraced this
opportunity of interposing with the suggestion that she should now leave
Mr Clennam to himself. ‘For, you see,’ said Mr Plornish, gravely, ‘I
know what it is, old gal;’ repeating that valuable remark several times,
as if it appeared to him to include some great moral secret. Finally,
the worthy couple went away arm in arm.

Little Dorrit, Little Dorrit. Again, for hours. Always Little Dorrit!


Happily, if it ever had been so, it was over, and better over. Granted
that she had loved him, and he had known it and had suffered himself
to love her, what a road to have led her away upon--the road that would
have brought her back to this miserable place! He ought to be much
comforted by the reflection that she was quit of it forever; that she
was, or would soon be, married (vague rumours of her father’s projects
in that direction had reached Bleeding Heart Yard, with the news of her
sister’s marriage); and that the Marshalsea gate had shut for ever on
all those perplexed possibilities of a time that was gone.

Dear Little Dorrit.

Looking back upon his own poor story, she was its vanishing-point. Every
thing in its perspective led to her innocent figure. He had travelled
thousands of miles towards it; previous unquiet hopes and doubts had
worked themselves out before it; it was the centre of the interest
of his life; it was the termination of everything that was good and
pleasant in it; beyond, there was nothing but mere waste and darkened
sky.

As ill at ease as on the first night of his lying down to sleep within
those dreary walls, he wore the night out with such thoughts. What time
Young John lay wrapt in peaceful slumber, after composing and arranging
the following monumental inscription on his pillow--


                         STRANGER!
                    RESPECT THE TOMB OF
                   JOHN CHIVERY, JUNIOR,
                WHO DIED AT AN ADVANCED AGE
                 NOT NECESSARY TO MENTION.
      HE ENCOUNTERED HIS RIVAL IN A DISTRESSED STATE,
                     AND FELT INCLINED
                 TO HAVE A ROUND WITH HIM;
            BUT, FOR THE SAKE OF THE LOVED ONE,
     CONQUERED THOSE FEELINGS OF BITTERNESS, AND BECAME
                        MAGNANIMOUS.




CHAPTER 28. An Appearance in the Marshalsea


The opinion of the community outside the prison gates bore hard on
Clennam as time went on, and he made no friends among the community
within. Too depressed to associate with the herd in the yard, who got
together to forget their cares; too retiring and too unhappy to join in
the poor socialities of the tavern; he kept his own room, and was held
in distrust. Some said he was proud; some objected that he was
sullen and reserved; some were contemptuous of him, for that he was a
poor-spirited dog who pined under his debts. The whole population were
shy of him on these various counts of indictment, but especially the
last, which involved a species of domestic treason; and he soon became
so confirmed in his seclusion, that his only time for walking up and
down was when the evening Club were assembled at their songs and toasts
and sentiments, and when the yard was nearly left to the women and
children.

Imprisonment began to tell upon him. He knew that he idled and moped.
After what he had known of the influences of imprisonment within the
four small walls of the very room he occupied, this consciousness made
him afraid of himself. Shrinking from the observation of other men, and
shrinking from his own, he began to change very sensibly. Anybody might
see that the shadow of the wall was dark upon him.

One day when he might have been some ten or twelve weeks in jail, and
when he had been trying to read and had not been able to release even
the imaginary people of the book from the Marshalsea, a footstep stopped
at his door, and a hand tapped at it. He arose and opened it, and an
agreeable voice accosted him with ‘How do you do, Mr Clennam? I hope I
am not unwelcome in calling to see you.’

It was the sprightly young Barnacle, Ferdinand. He looked very
good-natured and prepossessing, though overpoweringly gay and free, in
contrast with the squalid prison.

‘You are surprised to see me, Mr Clennam,’ he said, taking the seat
which Clennam offered him.

‘I must confess to being much surprised.’

‘Not disagreeably, I hope?’

‘By no means.’

‘Thank you. Frankly,’ said the engaging young Barnacle, ‘I have been
excessively sorry to hear that you were under the necessity of a
temporary retirement here, and I hope (of course as between two private
gentlemen) that our place has had nothing to do with it?’

‘Your office?’

‘Our Circumlocution place.’

‘I cannot charge any part of my reverses upon that remarkable
establishment.’

‘Upon my life,’ said the vivacious young Barnacle, ‘I am heartily glad to
know it. It is quite a relief to me to hear you say it. I should have
so exceedingly regretted our place having had anything to do with your
difficulties.’

Clennam again assured him that he absolved it of the responsibility.

‘That’s right,’ said Ferdinand. ‘I am very happy to hear it. I was
rather afraid in my own mind that we might have helped to floor you,
because there is no doubt that it is our misfortune to do that kind
of thing now and then. We don’t want to do it; but if men will be
gravelled, why--we can’t help it.’

‘Without giving an unqualified assent to what you say,’ returned Arthur,
gloomily, ‘I am much obliged to you for your interest in me.’

‘No, but really! Our place is,’ said the easy young Barnacle, ‘the most
inoffensive place possible. You’ll say we are a humbug. I won’t say
we are not; but all that sort of thing is intended to be, and must be.
Don’t you see?’

‘I do not,’ said Clennam.

‘You don’t regard it from the right point of view. It is the point of
view that is the essential thing. Regard our place from the point of
view that we only ask you to leave us alone, and we are as capital a
Department as you’ll find anywhere.’

‘Is your place there to be left alone?’ asked Clennam.

‘You exactly hit it,’ returned Ferdinand. ‘It is there with the express
intention that everything shall be left alone. That is what it means.
That is what it’s for. No doubt there’s a certain form to be kept up
that it’s for something else, but it’s only a form. Why, good Heaven,
we are nothing but forms! Think what a lot of our forms you have gone
through. And you have never got any nearer to an end?’

‘Never,’ said Clennam.

‘Look at it from the right point of view, and there you have
us--official and effectual. It’s like a limited game of cricket. A field
of outsiders are always going in to bowl at the Public Service, and we
block the balls.’

Clennam asked what became of the bowlers? The airy young Barnacle
replied that they grew tired, got dead beat, got lamed, got their backs
broken, died off, gave it up, went in for other games.

‘And this occasions me to congratulate myself again,’ he pursued,
‘on the circumstance that our place has had nothing to do with your
temporary retirement. It very easily might have had a hand in it;
because it is undeniable that we are sometimes a most unlucky place, in
our effects upon people who will not leave us alone. Mr Clennam, I am
quite unreserved with you. As between yourself and myself, I know I may
be. I was so, when I first saw you making the mistake of not leaving us
alone; because I perceived that you were inexperienced and sanguine, and
had--I hope you’ll not object to my saying--some simplicity?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Some simplicity. Therefore I felt what a pity it was, and I went out
of my way to hint to you (which really was not official, but I never am
official when I can help it) something to the effect that if I were you,
I wouldn’t bother myself. However, you did bother yourself, and you have
since bothered yourself. Now, don’t do it any more.’

‘I am not likely to have the opportunity,’ said Clennam.

‘Oh yes, you are! You’ll leave here. Everybody leaves here. There are no
ends of ways of leaving here. Now, don’t come back to us. That entreaty
is the second object of my call. Pray, don’t come back to us. Upon my
honour,’ said Ferdinand in a very friendly and confiding way, ‘I shall
be greatly vexed if you don’t take warning by the past and keep away
from us.’

‘And the invention?’ said Clennam.

‘My good fellow,’ returned Ferdinand, ‘if you’ll excuse the freedom of
that form of address, nobody wants to know of the invention, and nobody
cares twopence-halfpenny about it.’

‘Nobody in the Office, that is to say?’

‘Nor out of it. Everybody is ready to dislike and ridicule any
invention. You have no idea how many people want to be left alone.
You have no idea how the Genius of the country (overlook the
Parliamentary nature of the phrase, and don’t be bored by it) tends
to being left alone. Believe me, Mr Clennam,’ said the sprightly young
Barnacle in his pleasantest manner, ‘our place is not a wicked Giant to
be charged at full tilt; but only a windmill showing you, as it grinds
immense quantities of chaff, which way the country wind blows.’

‘If I could believe that,’ said Clennam, ‘it would be a dismal prospect
for all of us.’

‘Oh! Don’t say so!’ returned Ferdinand. ‘It’s all right. We must have
humbug, we all like humbug, we couldn’t get on without humbug. A little
humbug, and a groove, and everything goes on admirably, if you leave it
alone.’

With this hopeful confession of his faith as the head of the rising
Barnacles who were born of woman, to be followed under a variety of
watchwords which they utterly repudiated and disbelieved, Ferdinand
rose. Nothing could be more agreeable than his frank and courteous
bearing, or adapted with a more gentlemanly instinct to the
circumstances of his visit.

‘Is it fair to ask,’ he said, as Clennam gave him his hand with a real
feeling of thankfulness for his candour and good-humour, ‘whether it
is true that our late lamented Merdle is the cause of this passing
inconvenience?’

‘I am one of the many he has ruined. Yes.’

‘He must have been an exceedingly clever fellow,’ said Ferdinand
Barnacle.

Arthur, not being in the mood to extol the memory of the deceased, was
silent.

‘A consummate rascal, of course,’ said Ferdinand, ‘but remarkably
clever! One cannot help admiring the fellow. Must have been such a
master of humbug. Knew people so well--got over them so completely--did
so much with them!’

In his easy way, he was really moved to genuine admiration.

‘I hope,’ said Arthur, ‘that he and his dupes may be a warning to people
not to have so much done with them again.’

‘My dear Mr Clennam,’ returned Ferdinand, laughing, ‘have you really
such a verdant hope? The next man who has as large a capacity and as
genuine a taste for swindling, will succeed as well. Pardon me, but
I think you really have no idea how the human bees will swarm to the
beating of any old tin kettle; in that fact lies the complete manual of
governing them. When they can be got to believe that the kettle is made
of the precious metals, in that fact lies the whole power of men like
our late lamented. No doubt there are here and there,’ said Ferdinand
politely, ‘exceptional cases, where people have been taken in for what
appeared to them to be much better reasons; and I need not go far to
find such a case; but they don’t invalidate the rule. Good day! I hope
that when I have the pleasure of seeing you, next, this passing cloud
will have given place to sunshine. Don’t come a step beyond the door. I
know the way out perfectly. Good day!’

With those words, the best and brightest of the Barnacles went
down-stairs, hummed his way through the Lodge, mounted his horse in the
front court-yard, and rode off to keep an appointment with his noble
kinsman, who wanted a little coaching before he could triumphantly
answer certain infidel Snobs who were going to question the Nobs about
their statesmanship.

He must have passed Mr Rugg on his way out, for, a minute or two
afterwards, that ruddy-headed gentleman shone in at the door, like an
elderly Phoebus.

‘How do you do to-day, sir?’ said Mr Rugg. ‘Is there any little thing I
can do for you to-day, sir?’

‘No, I thank you.’

Mr Rugg’s enjoyment of embarrassed affairs was like a housekeeper’s
enjoyment in pickling and preserving, or a washerwoman’s enjoyment of a
heavy wash, or a dustman’s enjoyment of an overflowing dust-bin, or any
other professional enjoyment of a mess in the way of business.

‘I still look round, from time to time, sir,’ said Mr Rugg, cheerfully,
‘to see whether any lingering Detainers are accumulating at the gate.
They have fallen in pretty thick, sir; as thick as we could have
expected.’

He remarked upon the circumstance as if it were matter of
congratulation: rubbing his hands briskly, and rolling his head a
little.

‘As thick,’ repeated Mr Rugg, ‘as we could reasonably have expected.
Quite a shower-bath of ‘em. I don’t often intrude upon you now, when I
look round, because I know you are not inclined for company, and that if
you wished to see me, you would leave word in the Lodge. But I am here
pretty well every day, sir. Would this be an unseasonable time, sir,’
asked Mr Rugg, coaxingly, ‘for me to offer an observation?’

‘As seasonable a time as any other.’

‘Hum! Public opinion, sir,’ said Mr Rugg, ‘has been busy with you.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘Might it not be advisable, sir,’ said Mr Rugg, more coaxingly yet, ‘now
to make, at last and after all, a trifling concession to public opinion?
We all do it in one way or another. The fact is, we must do it.’

‘I cannot set myself right with it, Mr Rugg, and have no business to
expect that I ever shall.’

‘Don’t say that, sir, don’t say that. The cost of being moved to the
Bench is almost insignificant, and if the general feeling is strong that
you ought to be there, why--really--’

‘I thought you had settled, Mr Rugg,’ said Arthur, ‘that my
determination to remain here was a matter of taste.’

‘Well, sir, well! But is it good taste, is it good taste? That’s the
Question.’ Mr Rugg was so soothingly persuasive as to be quite pathetic.
‘I was almost going to say, is it good feeling? This is an extensive
affair of yours; and your remaining here where a man can come for a
pound or two, is remarked upon as not in keeping. It is not in keeping.
I can’t tell you, sir, in how many quarters I heard it mentioned. I
heard comments made upon it last night in a Parlour frequented by what
I should call, if I did not look in there now and then myself, the best
legal company--I heard, there, comments on it that I was sorry to hear.
They hurt me on your account. Again, only this morning at breakfast. My
daughter (but a woman, you’ll say: yet still with a feeling for these
things, and even with some little personal experience, as the plaintiff
in Rugg and Bawkins) was expressing her great surprise; her great
surprise. Now under these circumstances, and considering that none of
us can quite set ourselves above public opinion, wouldn’t a trifling
concession to that opinion be--Come, sir,’ said Rugg, ‘I will put it on
the lowest ground of argument, and say, Amiable?’

Arthur’s thoughts had once more wandered away to Little Dorrit, and the
question remained unanswered.

‘As to myself, sir,’ said Mr Rugg, hoping that his eloquence had reduced
him to a state of indecision, ‘it is a principle of mine not to consider
myself when a client’s inclinations are in the scale. But, knowing your
considerate character and general wish to oblige, I will repeat that I
should prefer your being in the Bench. Your case has made a noise; it
is a creditable case to be professionally concerned in; I should feel on
a better standing with my connection, if you went to the Bench. Don’t
let that influence you, sir. I merely state the fact.’

So errant had the prisoner’s attention already grown in solitude and
dejection, and so accustomed had it become to commune with only one
silent figure within the ever-frowning walls, that Clennam had to shake
off a kind of stupor before he could look at Mr Rugg, recall the thread
of his talk, and hurriedly say, ‘I am unchanged, and unchangeable, in my
decision. Pray, let it be; let it be!’ Mr Rugg, without concealing that
he was nettled and mortified, replied:

‘Oh! Beyond a doubt, sir. I have travelled out of the record, sir, I am
aware, in putting the point to you. But really, when I hear it remarked
in several companies, and in very good company, that however worthy of a
foreigner, it is not worthy of the spirit of an Englishman to remain in
the Marshalsea when the glorious liberties of his island home admit
of his removal to the Bench, I thought I would depart from the narrow
professional line marked out to me, and mention it. Personally,’ said Mr
Rugg, ‘I have no opinion on the topic.’

‘That’s well,’ returned Arthur.

‘Oh! None at all, sir!’ said Mr Rugg. ‘If I had, I should have been
unwilling, some minutes ago, to see a client of mine visited in this
place by a gentleman of a high family riding a saddle-horse. But it was
not my business. If I had, I might have wished to be now empowered to
mention to another gentleman, a gentleman of military exterior at
present waiting in the Lodge, that my client had never intended to
remain here, and was on the eve of removal to a superior abode. But my
course as a professional machine is clear; I have nothing to do with it.
Is it your good pleasure to see the gentleman, sir?’

‘Who is waiting to see me, did you say?’

‘I did take that unprofessional liberty, sir. Hearing that I was your
professional adviser, he declined to interpose before my very limited
function was performed. Happily,’ said Mr Rugg, with sarcasm, ‘I did not
so far travel out of the record as to ask the gentleman for his name.’

‘I suppose I have no resource but to see him,’ sighed Clennam, wearily.

‘Then it _is_ your good pleasure, sir?’ retorted Rugg. ‘Am I honoured by
your instructions to mention as much to the gentleman, as I pass out? I
am? Thank you, sir. I take my leave.’ His leave he took accordingly, in
dudgeon.

The gentleman of military exterior had so imperfectly awakened Clennam’s
curiosity, in the existing state of his mind, that a half-forgetfulness
of such a visitor’s having been referred to, was already creeping over
it as a part of the sombre veil which almost always dimmed it now, when
a heavy footstep on the stairs aroused him. It appeared to ascend them,
not very promptly or spontaneously, yet with a display of stride and
clatter meant to be insulting. As it paused for a moment on the
landing outside his door, he could not recall his association with the
peculiarity of its sound, though he thought he had one. Only a moment
was given him for consideration. His door was immediately swung open
by a thump, and in the doorway stood the missing Blandois, the cause of
many anxieties.

‘Salve, fellow jail-bird!’ said he. ‘You want me, it seems. Here I am!’

Before Arthur could speak to him in his indignant wonder, Cavalletto
followed him into the room. Mr Pancks followed Cavalletto. Neither of
the two had been there since its present occupant had had possession of
it. Mr Pancks, breathing hard, sidled near the window, put his hat on
the ground, stirred his hair up with both hands, and folded his arms,
like a man who had come to a pause in a hard day’s work. Mr Baptist,
never taking his eyes from his dreaded chum of old, softly sat down on
the floor with his back against the door and one of his ankles in
each hand: resuming the attitude (except that it was now expressive of
unwinking watchfulness) in which he had sat before the same man in the
deeper shade of another prison, one hot morning at Marseilles.

‘I have it on the witnessing of these two madmen,’ said Monsieur
Blandois, otherwise Lagnier, otherwise Rigaud, ‘that you want me,
brother-bird. Here I am!’

Glancing round contemptuously at the bedstead, which was
turned up by day, he leaned his back against it as a resting-place,
without removing his hat from his head, and stood defiantly lounging
with his hands in his pockets.

‘You villain of ill-omen!’ said Arthur. ‘You have purposely cast a
dreadful suspicion upon my mother’s house. Why have you done it?
What prompted you to the devilish invention?’

Monsieur Rigaud, after frowning at him for a moment, laughed. ‘Hear this
noble gentleman! Listen, all the world, to this creature of Virtue! But
take care, take care. It is possible, my friend, that your ardour is a
little compromising. Holy Blue! It is possible.’

‘Signore!’ interposed Cavalletto, also addressing Arthur: ‘for to
commence, hear me! I received your instructions to find him, Rigaud; is
it not?’

‘It is the truth.’

‘I go, consequentementally,’--it would have given Mrs Plornish great
concern if she could have been persuaded that his occasional lengthening
of an adverb in this way, was the chief fault of his English,--‘first
among my countrymen. I ask them what news in Londra, of foreigners
arrived. Then I go among the French. Then I go among the Germans. They
all tell me. The great part of us know well the other, and they all tell
me. But!--no person can tell me nothing of him, Rigaud. Fifteen times,’
said Cavalletto, thrice throwing out his left hand with all its fingers
spread, and doing it so rapidly that the sense of sight could hardly
follow the action, ‘I ask of him in every place where go the foreigners;
and fifteen times,’ repeating the same swift performance, ‘they know
nothing. But!--’

At this significant Italian rest on the word ‘But,’ his backhanded shake
of his right forefinger came into play; a very little, and very
cautiously.

‘But!--After a long time when I have not been able to find that he
is here in Londra, some one tells me of a soldier with white
hair--hey?--not hair like this that he carries--white--who lives retired
secrettementally, in a certain place. But!--’ with another rest upon
the word, ‘who sometimes in the after-dinner, walks, and smokes. It is
necessary, as they say in Italy (and as they know, poor people), to
have patience. I have patience. I ask where is this certain place. One.
believes it is here, one believes it is there. Eh well! It is not here,
it is not there. I wait patientissamentally. At last I find it. Then I
watch; then I hide, until he walks and smokes. He is a soldier with grey
hair--But!--’ a very decided rest indeed, and a very vigorous play from
side to side of the back-handed forefinger--‘he is also this man that
you see.’

It was noticeable, that, in his old habit of submission to one who had
been at the trouble of asserting superiority over him, he even then
bestowed upon Rigaud a confused bend of his head, after thus pointing
him out.

‘Eh well, Signore!’ he cried in conclusion, addressing Arthur again. ‘I
waited for a good opportunity. I writed some words to Signor Panco,’ an
air of novelty came over Mr Pancks with this designation, ‘to come and
help. I showed him, Rigaud, at his window, to Signor Panco, who was
often the spy in the day. I slept at night near the door of the house.
At last we entered, only this to-day, and now you see him! As he would
not come up in presence of the illustrious Advocate,’ such was Mr
Baptist’s honourable mention of Mr Rugg, ‘we waited down below there,
together, and Signor Panco guarded the street.’

At the close of this recital, Arthur turned his eyes upon the impudent
and wicked face. As it met his, the nose came down over the moustache
and the moustache went up under the nose. When nose and moustache had
settled into their places again, Monsieur Rigaud loudly snapped his
fingers half-a-dozen times; bending forward to jerk the snaps at Arthur,
as if they were palpable missiles which he jerked into his face.

‘Now, Philosopher!’ said Rigaud. ‘What do you want with me?’

‘I want to know,’ returned Arthur, without disguising his abhorrence,
‘how you dare direct a suspicion of murder against my mother’s house?’

‘Dare!’ cried Rigaud. ‘Ho, ho! Hear him! Dare? Is it dare? By Heaven, my
small boy, but you are a little imprudent!’

‘I want that suspicion to be cleared away,’ said Arthur. ‘You shall
be taken there, and be publicly seen. I want to know, moreover,
what business you had there when I had a burning desire to fling you
down-stairs. Don’t frown at me, man! I have seen enough of you to know
that you are a bully and coward. I need no revival of my spirits from
the effects of this wretched place to tell you so plain a fact, and one
that you know so well.’

White to the lips, Rigaud stroked his moustache, muttering, ‘By Heaven,
my small boy, but you are a little compromising of my lady, your
respectable mother’--and seemed for a minute undecided how to act.
His indecision was soon gone. He sat himself down with a threatening
swagger, and said:

‘Give me a bottle of wine. You can buy wine here. Send one of your
madmen to get me a bottle of wine. I won’t talk to you without wine.
Come! Yes or no?’

‘Fetch him what he wants, Cavalletto,’ said Arthur, scornfully,
producing the money.

‘Contraband beast,’ added Rigaud, ‘bring Port wine! I’ll drink nothing
but Porto-Porto.’

The contraband beast, however, assuring all present, with his
significant finger, that he peremptorily declined to leave his post at
the door, Signor Panco offered his services. He soon returned with the
bottle of wine: which, according to the custom of the place, originating
in a scarcity of corkscrews among the Collegians (in common with a
scarcity of much else), was already opened for use.

‘Madman! A large glass,’ said Rigaud.

Signor Panco put a tumbler before him; not without a visible conflict of
feeling on the question of throwing it at his head.

‘Haha!’ boasted Rigaud. ‘Once a gentleman, and always a gentleman.
A gentleman from the beginning, and a gentleman to the end. What
the Devil! A gentleman must be waited on, I hope? It’s a part of my
character to be waited on!’

He half filled the tumbler as he said it, and drank off the contents
when he had done saying it.

‘Hah!’ smacking his lips. ‘Not a very old prisoner _that_! I judge by
your looks, brave sir, that imprisonment will subdue your blood much
sooner than it softens this hot wine. You are mellowing--losing body
and colour already. I salute you!’

He tossed off another half glass: holding it up both before and
afterwards, so as to display his small, white hand.

‘To business,’ he then continued. ‘To conversation. You have shown
yourself more free of speech than body, sir.’

‘I have used the freedom of telling you what you know yourself to be.
You know yourself, as we all know you, to be far worse than that.’

‘Add, always a gentleman, and it’s no matter. Except in that regard, we
are all alike. For example: you couldn’t for your life be a gentleman;
I couldn’t for my life be otherwise. How great the difference! Let us go
on. Words, sir, never influence the course of the cards, or the course
of the dice. Do you know that? You do? I also play a game, and words are
without power over it.’

Now that he was confronted with Cavalletto, and knew that his story was
known--whatever thin disguise he had worn, he dropped; and faced it out,
with a bare face, as the infamous wretch he was.

‘No, my son,’ he resumed, with a snap of his fingers. ‘I play my game
to the end in spite of words; and Death of my Body and Death of my Soul!
I’ll win it. You want to know why I played this little trick that
you have interrupted? Know then that I had, and that I have--do you
understand me? have--a commodity to sell to my lady your respectable
mother. I described my precious commodity, and fixed my price. Touching
the bargain, your admirable mother was a little too calm, too stolid,
too immovable and statue-like. In fine, your admirable mother vexed me.
To make variety in my position, and to amuse myself--what! a gentleman
must be amused at somebody’s expense!--I conceived the happy idea of
disappearing. An idea, see you, that your characteristic mother and my
Flintwinch would have been well enough pleased to execute. Ah! Bah,
bah, bah, don’t look as from high to low at me! I repeat it. Well enough
pleased, excessively enchanted, and with all their hearts ravished. How
strongly will you have it?’

He threw out the lees of his glass on the ground, so that they nearly
spattered Cavalletto. This seemed to draw his attention to him anew. He
set down his glass and said:

‘I’ll not fill it. What! I am born to be served. Come then, you
Cavalletto, and fill!’

The little man looked at Clennam, whose eyes were occupied with Rigaud,
and, seeing no prohibition, got up from the ground, and poured out
from the bottle into the glass. The blending, as he did so, of his old
submission with a sense of something humorous; the striving of that
with a certain smouldering ferocity, which might have flashed fire in
an instant (as the born gentleman seemed to think, for he had a wary
eye upon him); and the easy yielding of all to a good-natured, careless,
predominant propensity to sit down on the ground again: formed a very
remarkable combination of character.

‘This happy idea, brave sir,’ Rigaud resumed after drinking, ‘was a
happy idea for several reasons. It amused me, it worried your dear
mama and my Flintwinch, it caused you agonies (my terms for a lesson
in politeness towards a gentleman), and it suggested to all the amiable
persons interested that your entirely devoted is a man to fear. By
Heaven, he is a man to fear! Beyond this; it might have restored her wit
to my lady your mother--might, under the pressing little suspicion your
wisdom has recognised, have persuaded her at last to announce, covertly,
in the journals, that the difficulties of a certain contract would be
removed by the appearance of a certain important party to it. Perhaps
yes, perhaps no. But that, you have interrupted. Now, what is it you
say? What is it you want?’

Never had Clennam felt more acutely that he was a prisoner in bonds,
than when he saw this man before him, and could not accompany him to his
mother’s house. All the undiscernible difficulties and dangers he had
ever feared were closing in, when he could not stir hand or foot.

‘Perhaps, my friend, philosopher, man of virtue, Imbecile, what you
will; perhaps,’ said Rigaud, pausing in his drink to look out of his
glass with his horrible smile, ‘you would have done better to leave me
alone?’

‘No! At least,’ said Clennam, ‘you are known to be alive and unharmed.
At least you cannot escape from these two witnesses; and they can
produce you before any public authorities, or before hundreds of
people!’

‘But will not produce me before one,’ said Rigaud, snapping his
fingers again with an air of triumphant menace. ‘To the Devil with your
witnesses! To the Devil with your produced! To the Devil with yourself!
What! Do I know what I know, for that? Have I my commodity on sale, for
that? Bah, poor debtor! You have interrupted my little project. Let it
pass. How then? What remains? To you, nothing; to me, all. Produce
_me_! Is that what you want? I will produce myself, only too quickly.
Contrabandist! Give me pen, ink, and paper.’

Cavalletto got up again as before, and laid them before him in his
former manner. Rigaud, after some villainous thinking and smiling,
wrote, and read aloud, as follows:


‘To MRS CLENNAM.

‘Wait answer.

‘Prison of the Marshalsea.
‘At the apartment of your son.

‘Dear Madam,
‘I am in despair to be informed to-day by our prisoner here
(who has had the goodness to employ spies to seek me, living for politic
reasons in retirement), that you have had fears for my safety.

‘Reassure yourself, dear madam. I am well, I am strong and constant.

‘With the greatest impatience I should fly to your house, but that I
foresee it to be possible, under the circumstances, that you will not
yet have quite definitively arranged the little proposition I have had
the honour to submit to you. I name one week from this day, for a last
final visit on my part; when you will unconditionally accept it or
reject it, with its train of consequences.

‘I suppress my ardour to embrace you and achieve this interesting
business, in order that you may have leisure to adjust its details to
our perfect mutual satisfaction.

‘In the meanwhile, it is not too much to propose (our prisoner having
deranged my housekeeping), that my expenses of lodging and nourishment
at an hotel shall be paid by you.

‘Receive, dear madam, the assurance of my highest and most distinguished
consideration,

               ‘RIGAUD BLANDOIS.

‘A thousand friendships to that dear Flintwinch.

‘I kiss the hands of Madame F.’


When he had finished this epistle, Rigaud folded it and tossed it with
a flourish at Clennam’s feet. ‘Hola you! Apropos of producing, let
somebody produce that at its address, and produce the answer here.’

‘Cavalletto,’ said Arthur. ‘Will you take this fellow’s letter?’

But, Cavalletto’s significant finger again expressing that his post was
at the door to keep watch over Rigaud, now he had found him with so much
trouble, and that the duty of his post was to sit on the floor backed up
by the door, looking at Rigaud and holding his own ankles,--Signor Panco
once more volunteered. His services being accepted, Cavalletto suffered
the door to open barely wide enough to admit of his squeezing himself
out, and immediately shut it on him.

‘Touch me with a finger, touch me with an epithet, question my
superiority as I sit here drinking my wine at my pleasure,’ said Rigaud,
‘and I follow the letter and cancel my week’s grace. _You_ wanted me? You
have got me! How do you like me?’

‘You know,’ returned Clennam, with a bitter sense of his helplessness,
‘that when I sought you, I was not a prisoner.’

‘To the Devil with you and your prison,’ retorted Rigaud, leisurely,
as he took from his pocket a case containing the materials for making
cigarettes, and employed his facile hands in folding a few for present
use; ‘I care for neither of you. Contrabandist! A light.’

Again Cavalletto got up, and gave him what he wanted. There had been
something dreadful in the noiseless skill of his cold, white hands, with
the fingers lithely twisting about and twining one over another like
serpents. Clennam could not prevent himself from shuddering inwardly, as
if he had been looking on at a nest of those creatures.

‘Hola, Pig!’ cried Rigaud, with a noisy stimulating cry, as if
Cavalletto were an Italian horse or mule. ‘What! The infernal old jail
was a respectable one to this. There was dignity in the bars and stones
of that place. It was a prison for men. But this? Bah! A hospital for
imbeciles!’

He smoked his cigarette out, with his ugly smile so fixed upon his face
that he looked as though he were smoking with his drooping beak of a
nose, rather than with his mouth; like a fancy in a weird picture. When
he had lighted a second cigarette at the still burning end of the first,
he said to Clennam:

‘One must pass the time in the madman’s absence. One must talk. One
can’t drink strong wine all day long, or I would have another bottle.
She’s handsome, sir. Though not exactly to my taste, still, by
the Thunder and the Lightning! handsome. I felicitate you on your
admiration.’

‘I neither know nor ask,’ said Clennam, ‘of whom you speak.’

‘Della bella Gowana, sir, as they say in Italy. Of the Gowan, the fair
Gowan.’

‘Of whose husband you were the--follower, I think?’

‘Sir? Follower? You are insolent. The friend.’

‘Do you sell all your friends?’

Rigaud took his cigarette from his mouth, and eyed him with a momentary
revelation of surprise. But he put it between his lips again, as he
answered with coolness:

‘I sell anything that commands a price. How do your lawyers live, your
politicians, your intriguers, your men of the Exchange? How do you live?
How do you come here? Have you sold no friend? Lady of mine! I rather
think, yes!’

Clennam turned away from him towards the window, and sat looking out at
the wall.

‘Effectively, sir,’ said Rigaud, ‘Society sells itself and sells me: and
I sell Society. I perceive you have acquaintance with another lady. Also
handsome. A strong spirit. Let us see. How do they call her? Wade.’

He received no answer, but could easily discern that he had hit the
mark.

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘that handsome lady and strong spirit addresses me in
the street, and I am not insensible. I respond. That handsome lady and
strong spirit does me the favour to remark, in full confidence, “I have
my curiosity, and I have my chagrins. You are not more than ordinarily
honourable, perhaps?” I announce myself, “Madame, a gentleman from
the birth, and a gentleman to the death; but _not_ more than ordinarily
honourable. I despise such a weak fantasy.” Thereupon she is pleased to
compliment. “The difference between you and the rest is,” she answers,
“that you say so.” For she knows Society. I accept her congratulations
with gallantry and politeness. Politeness and little gallantries are
inseparable from my character. She then makes a proposition, which is,
in effect, that she has seen us much together; that it appears to her
that I am for the passing time the cat of the house, the friend of
the family; that her curiosity and her chagrins awaken the fancy to be
acquainted with their movements, to know the manner of their life, how
the fair Gowana is beloved, how the fair Gowana is cherished, and so
on. She is not rich, but offers such and such little recompenses for the
little cares and derangements of such services; and I graciously--to do
everything graciously is a part of my character--consent to accept them.
O yes! So goes the world. It is the mode.’

Though Clennam’s back was turned while he spoke, and thenceforth to the
end of the interview, he kept those glittering eyes of his that were too
near together, upon him, and evidently saw in the very carriage of the
head, as he passed with his braggart recklessness from clause to clause
of what he said, that he was saying nothing which Clennam did not
already know.

‘Whoof! The fair Gowana!’ he said, lighting a third cigarette with a
sound as if his lightest breath could blow her away. ‘Charming, but
imprudent! For it was not well of the fair Gowana to make mysteries of
letters from old lovers, in her bedchamber on the mountain, that her
husband might not see them. No, no. That was not well. Whoof! The Gowana
was mistaken there.’

‘I earnestly hope,’ cried Arthur aloud, ‘that Pancks may not be long
gone, for this man’s presence pollutes the room.’

‘Ah! But he’ll flourish here, and everywhere,’ said Rigaud, with an
exulting look and snap of his fingers. ‘He always has; he always will!’
Stretching his body out on the only three chairs in the room besides
that on which Clennam sat, he sang, smiting himself on the breast as the
gallant personage of the song.


     ‘Who passes by this road so late?
          Compagnon de la Majolaine!
     Who passes by this road so late?
          Always gay!


‘Sing the Refrain, pig! You could sing it once, in another jail. Sing
it! Or, by every Saint who was stoned to death, I’ll be affronted and
compromising; and then some people who are not dead yet, had better have
been stoned along with them!’


     ‘Of all the king’s knights ‘tis the flower,
          Compagnon de la Majolaine!
     Of all the king’s knights ‘tis the flower,
          Always gay!’


Partly in his old habit of submission, partly because his not doing it
might injure his benefactor, and partly because he would as soon do
it as anything else, Cavalletto took up the Refrain this time. Rigaud
laughed, and fell to smoking with his eyes shut.

Possibly another quarter of an hour elapsed before Mr Pancks’s step was
heard upon the stairs, but the interval seemed to Clennam insupportably
long. His step was attended by another step; and when Cavalletto opened
the door, he admitted Mr Pancks and Mr Flintwinch. The latter was no
sooner visible, than Rigaud rushed at him and embraced him boisterously.

‘How do you find yourself, sir?’ said Mr Flintwinch, as soon as he could
disengage himself, which he struggled to do with very little ceremony.
‘Thank you, no; I don’t want any more.’ This was in reference to another
menace of attention from his recovered friend. ‘Well, Arthur. You
remember what I said to you about sleeping dogs and missing ones. It’s
come true, you see.’

He was as imperturbable as ever, to all appearance, and nodded his head
in a moralising way as he looked round the room.

‘And this is the Marshalsea prison for debt!’ said Mr Flintwinch. ‘Hah!
you have brought your pigs to a very indifferent market, Arthur.’

If Arthur had patience, Rigaud had not. He took his little Flintwinch,
with fierce playfulness, by the two lapels of his coat, and cried:

‘To the Devil with the Market, to the Devil with the Pigs, and to the
Devil with the Pig-Driver! Now! Give me the answer to my letter.’

‘If you can make it convenient to let go a moment, sir,’ returned Mr
Flintwinch, ‘I’ll first hand Mr Arthur a little note that I have for
him.’

He did so. It was in his mother’s maimed writing, on a slip of paper,
and contained only these words:


‘I hope it is enough that you have ruined yourself. Rest contented
without more ruin. Jeremiah Flintwinch is my messenger and
representative. Your affectionate M. C.’


Clennam read this twice, in silence, and then tore it to pieces. Rigaud
in the meanwhile stepped into a chair, and sat himself on the back with
his feet upon the seat.

‘Now, Beau Flintwinch,’ he said, when he had closely watched the note to
its destruction, ‘the answer to my letter?’

‘Mrs Clennam did not write, Mr Blandois, her hands being cramped,
and she thinking it as well to send it verbally by me.’ Mr Flintwinch
screwed this out of himself, unwillingly and rustily. ‘She sends
her compliments, and says she doesn’t on the whole wish to term
you unreasonable, and that she agrees. But without prejudicing the
appointment that stands for this day week.’

Monsieur Rigaud, after indulging in a fit of laughter, descended from
his throne, saying, ‘Good! I go to seek an hotel!’ But, there his eyes
encountered Cavalletto, who was still at his post.

‘Come, Pig,’ he added, ‘I have had you for a follower against my will;
now, I’ll have you against yours. I tell you, my little reptiles, I
am born to be served. I demand the service of this contrabandist as my
domestic until this day week.’

In answer to Cavalletto’s look of inquiry, Clennam made him a sign
to go; but he added aloud, ‘unless you are afraid of him.’ Cavalletto
replied with a very emphatic finger-negative.’No, master, I am not
afraid of him, when I no more keep it secrettementally that he was once
my comrade.’ Rigaud took no notice of either remark until he had lighted
his last cigarette and was quite ready for walking.

‘Afraid of him,’ he said then, looking round upon them all. ‘Whoof! My
children, my babies, my little dolls, you are all afraid of him. You
give him his bottle of wine here; you give him meat, drink, and lodging
there; you dare not touch him with a finger or an epithet. No. It is his
character to triumph! Whoof!


     ‘Of all the king’s knights he’s the flower,
          And he’s always gay!’


With this adaptation of the Refrain to himself, he stalked out of the
room closely followed by Cavalletto, whom perhaps he had pressed into
his service because he tolerably well knew it would not be easy to get
rid of him. Mr Flintwinch, after scraping his chin, and looking about
with caustic disparagement of the Pig-Market, nodded to Arthur, and
followed. Mr Pancks, still penitent and depressed, followed too; after
receiving with great attention a secret word or two of instructions from
Arthur, and whispering back that he would see this affair out, and stand
by it to the end. The prisoner, with the feeling that he was more
despised, more scorned and repudiated, more helpless, altogether more
miserable and fallen than before, was left alone again.




CHAPTER 29. A Plea in the Marshalsea


Haggard anxiety and remorse are bad companions to be barred up with.
Brooding all day, and resting very little indeed at night, will not
arm a man against misery. Next morning, Clennam felt that his health was
sinking, as his spirits had already sunk and that the weight under which
he bent was bearing him down.

Night after night he had risen from his bed of wretchedness at twelve or
one o’clock, and had sat at his window watching the sickly lamps in the
yard, and looking upward for the first wan trace of day, hours before it
was possible that the sky could show it to him. Now when the night came,
he could not even persuade himself to undress.

For a burning restlessness set in, an agonised impatience of the prison,
and a conviction that he was going to break his heart and die there,
which caused him indescribable suffering. His dread and hatred of the
place became so intense that he felt it a labour to draw his breath in
it. The sensation of being stifled sometimes so overpowered him, that
he would stand at the window holding his throat and gasping. At the
same time a longing for other air, and a yearning to be beyond the blind
blank wall, made him feel as if he must go mad with the ardour of the
desire.

Many other prisoners had had experience of this condition before him,
and its violence and continuity had worn themselves out in their cases,
as they did in his. Two nights and a day exhausted it. It came back by
fits, but those grew fainter and returned at lengthening intervals. A
desolate calm succeeded; and the middle of the week found him settled
down in the despondency of low, slow fever.

With Cavalletto and Pancks away, he had no visitors to fear but Mr and
Mrs Plornish. His anxiety, in reference to that worthy pair, was that
they should not come near him; for, in the morbid state of his nerves,
he sought to be left alone, and spared the being seen so subdued and
weak. He wrote a note to Mrs Plornish representing himself as occupied
with his affairs, and bound by the necessity of devoting himself to
them, to remain for a time even without the pleasant interruption of
a sight of her kind face. As to Young John, who looked in daily at a
certain hour, when the turnkeys were relieved, to ask if he could do
anything for him; he always made a pretence of being engaged in writing,
and to answer cheerfully in the negative. The subject of their only
long conversation had never been revived between them. Through all these
changes of unhappiness, however, it had never lost its hold on Clennam’s
mind.

The sixth day of the appointed week was a moist, hot, misty day. It
seemed as though the prison’s poverty, and shabbiness, and dirt, were
growing in the sultry atmosphere. With an aching head and a weary heart,
Clennam had watched the miserable night out, listening to the fall of
rain on the yard pavement, thinking of its softer fall upon the country
earth. A blurred circle of yellow haze had risen up in the sky in lieu
of sun, and he had watched the patch it put upon his wall, like a bit of
the prison’s raggedness. He had heard the gates open; and the badly shod
feet that waited outside shuffle in; and the sweeping, and pumping,
and moving about, begin, which commenced the prison morning. So ill and
faint that he was obliged to rest many times in the process of getting
himself washed, he had at length crept to his chair by the open window.
In it he sat dozing, while the old woman who arranged his room went
through her morning’s work.

Light of head with want of sleep and want of food (his appetite, and
even his sense of taste, having forsaken him), he had been two or three
times conscious, in the night, of going astray. He had heard fragments
of tunes and songs in the warm wind, which he knew had no existence.
Now that he began to doze in exhaustion, he heard them again; and voices
seemed to address him, and he answered, and started.

Dozing and dreaming, without the power of reckoning time, so that
a minute might have been an hour and an hour a minute, some abiding
impression of a garden stole over him--a garden of flowers, with a
damp warm wind gently stirring their scents. It required such a painful
effort to lift his head for the purpose of inquiring into this, or
inquiring into anything, that the impression appeared to have become
quite an old and importunate one when he looked round. Beside the
tea-cup on his table he saw, then, a blooming nosegay: a wonderful
handful of the choicest and most lovely flowers.

Nothing had ever appeared so beautiful in his sight. He took them up and
inhaled their fragrance, and he lifted them to his hot head, and he put
them down and opened his parched hands to them, as cold hands are opened
to receive the cheering of a fire. It was not until he had delighted in
them for some time, that he wondered who had sent them; and opened his
door to ask the woman who must have put them there, how they had come
into her hands. But she was gone, and seemed to have been long gone; for
the tea she had left for him on the table was cold. He tried to drink
some, but could not bear the odour of it: so he crept back to his chair
by the open window, and put the flowers on the little round table of
old.

When the first faintness consequent on having moved about had left him,
he subsided into his former state. One of the night-tunes was playing
in the wind, when the door of his room seemed to open to a light touch,
and, after a moment’s pause, a quiet figure seemed to stand there, with
a black mantle on it. It seemed to draw the mantle off and drop it on
the ground, and then it seemed to be his Little Dorrit in her old, worn
dress. It seemed to tremble, and to clasp its hands, and to smile, and
to burst into tears.

He roused himself, and cried out. And then he saw, in the loving,
pitying, sorrowing, dear face, as in a mirror, how changed he was; and
she came towards him; and with her hands laid on his breast to keep him
in his chair, and with her knees upon the floor at his feet, and with
her lips raised up to kiss him, and with her tears dropping on him as
the rain from Heaven had dropped upon the flowers, Little Dorrit, a
living presence, called him by his name.

‘O, my best friend! Dear Mr Clennam, don’t let me see you weep! Unless
you weep with pleasure to see me. I hope you do. Your own poor child
come back!’

So faithful, tender, and unspoiled by Fortune. In the sound of her
voice, in the light of her eyes, in the touch of her hands, so
Angelically comforting and true!

As he embraced her, she said to him, ‘They never told me you were ill,’
and drawing an arm softly round his neck, laid his head upon her bosom,
put a hand upon his head, and resting her cheek upon that hand, nursed
him as lovingly, and GOD knows as innocently, as she had nursed her
father in that room when she had been but a baby, needing all the care
from others that she took of them.

When he could speak, he said, ‘Is it possible that you have come to me?
And in this dress?’

‘I hoped you would like me better in this dress than any other. I have
always kept it by me, to remind me: though I wanted no reminding. I am
not alone, you see. I have brought an old friend with me.’

Looking round, he saw Maggy in her big cap which had been long
abandoned, with a basket on her arm as in the bygone days, chuckling
rapturously.

‘It was only yesterday evening that I came to London with my brother.
I sent round to Mrs Plornish almost as soon as we arrived, that I might
hear of you and let you know I had come. Then I heard that you were
here. Did you happen to think of me in the night? I almost believe you
must have thought of me a little. I thought of you so anxiously, and it
appeared so long to morning.’

‘I have thought of you--’ he hesitated what to call her. She perceived
it in an instant.

‘You have not spoken to me by my right name yet. You know what my right
name always is with you.’

‘I have thought of you, Little Dorrit, every day, every hour, every
minute, since I have been here.’

‘Have you? Have you?’

He saw the bright delight of her face, and the flush that kindled in
it, with a feeling of shame. He, a broken, bankrupt, sick, dishonoured
prisoner.

‘I was here before the gates were opened, but I was afraid to come
straight to you. I should have done you more harm than good, at first;
for the prison was so familiar and yet so strange, and it brought back
so many remembrances of my poor father, and of you too, that at first
it overpowered me. But we went to Mr Chivery before we came to the gate,
and he brought us in, and got John’s room for us--my poor old room, you
know--and we waited there a little. I brought the flowers to the door,
but you didn’t hear me.’

She looked something more womanly than when she had gone away, and the
ripening touch of the Italian sun was visible upon her face. But,
otherwise, she was quite unchanged. The same deep, timid earnestness
that he had always seen in her, and never without emotion, he saw still.
If it had a new meaning that smote him to the heart, the change was in
his perception, not in her.

She took off her old bonnet, hung it in the old place, and noiselessly
began, with Maggy’s help, to make his room as fresh and neat as it could
be made, and to sprinkle it with a pleasant-smelling water. When that
was done, the basket, which was filled with grapes and other fruit,
was unpacked, and all its contents were quietly put away. When that was
done, a moment’s whisper despatched Maggy to despatch somebody else to
fill the basket again; which soon came back replenished with new
stores, from which a present provision of cooling drink and jelly, and
a prospective supply of roast chicken and wine and water, were the first
extracts. These various arrangements completed, she took out her old
needle-case to make him a curtain for his window; and thus, with a quiet
reigning in the room, that seemed to diffuse itself through the else
noisy prison, he found himself composed in his chair, with Little Dorrit
working at his side.

To see the modest head again bent down over its task, and the nimble
fingers busy at their old work--though she was not so absorbed in it,
but that her compassionate eyes were often raised to his face, and, when
they drooped again had tears in them--to be so consoled and comforted,
and to believe that all the devotion of this great nature was turned to
him in his adversity to pour out its inexhaustible wealth of goodness
upon him, did not steady Clennam’s trembling voice or hand, or
strengthen him in his weakness. Yet it inspired him with an inward
fortitude, that rose with his love. And how dearly he loved her now,
what words can tell!

As they sat side by side in the shadow of the wall, the shadow fell like
light upon him. She would not let him speak much, and he lay back in
his chair, looking at her. Now and again she would rise and give him
the glass that he might drink, or would smooth the resting-place of his
head; then she would gently resume her seat by him, and bend over her
work again.

The shadow moved with the sun, but she never moved from his side, except
to wait upon him. The sun went down and she was still there. She had
done her work now, and her hand, faltering on the arm of his chair since
its last tending of him, was hesitating there yet. He laid his hand upon
it, and it clasped him with a trembling supplication.

‘Dear Mr Clennam, I must say something to you before I go. I have put it
off from hour to hour, but I must say it.’

‘I too, dear Little Dorrit. I have put off what I must say.’

She nervously moved her hand towards his lips as if to stop him; then it
dropped, trembling, into its former place.

‘I am not going abroad again. My brother is, but I am not. He was always
attached to me, and he is so grateful to me now--so much too grateful,
for it is only because I happened to be with him in his illness--that
he says I shall be free to stay where I like best, and to do what I like
best. He only wishes me to be happy, he says.’

There was one bright star shining in the sky. She looked up at it while
she spoke, as if it were the fervent purpose of her own heart shining
above her.

‘You will understand, I dare say, without my telling you, that my
brother has come home to find my dear father’s will, and to take
possession of his property. He says, if there is a will, he is sure I
shall be left rich; and if there is none, that he will make me so.’

He would have spoken; but she put up her trembling hand again, and he
stopped.

‘I have no use for money, I have no wish for it. It would be of no value
at all to me but for your sake. I could not be rich, and you here. I
must always be much worse than poor, with you distressed. Will you let
me lend you all I have? Will you let me give it you? Will you let me
show you that I have never forgotten, that I never can forget, your
protection of me when this was my home? Dear Mr Clennam, make me of all
the world the happiest, by saying Yes? Make me as happy as I can be in
leaving you here, by saying nothing to-night, and letting me go
away with the hope that you will think of it kindly; and that for my
sake--not for yours, for mine, for nobody’s but mine!--you will give me
the greatest joy I can experience on earth, the joy of knowing that I
have been serviceable to you, and that I have paid some little of the
great debt of my affection and gratitude. I can’t say what I wish to
say. I can’t visit you here where I have lived so long, I can’t think of
you here where I have seen so much, and be as calm and comforting as I
ought. My tears will make their way. I cannot keep them back. But
pray, pray, pray, do not turn from your Little Dorrit, now, in your
affliction! Pray, pray, pray, I beg you and implore you with all my
grieving heart, my friend--my dear!--take all I have, and make it a
Blessing to me!’

The star had shone on her face until now, when her face sank upon his
hand and her own.

It had grown darker when he raised her in his encircling arm, and softly
answered her.

‘No, darling Little Dorrit. No, my child. I must not hear of such a
sacrifice. Liberty and hope would be so dear, bought at such a price,
that I could never support their weight, never bear the reproach of
possessing them. But with what ardent thankfulness and love I say this,
I may call Heaven to witness!’

‘And yet you will not let me be faithful to you in your affliction?’

‘Say, dearest Little Dorrit, and yet I will try to be faithful to you.
If, in the bygone days when this was your home and when this was your
dress, I had understood myself (I speak only of myself) better, and
had read the secrets of my own breast more distinctly; if, through my
reserve and self-mistrust, I had discerned a light that I see brightly
now when it has passed far away, and my weak footsteps can never
overtake it; if I had then known, and told you that I loved and honoured
you, not as the poor child I used to call you, but as a woman whose
true hand would raise me high above myself and make me a far happier and
better man; if I had so used the opportunity there is no recalling--as
I wish I had, O I wish I had!--and if something had kept us apart then,
when I was moderately thriving, and when you were poor; I might have met
your noble offer of your fortune, dearest girl, with other words than
these, and still have blushed to touch it. But, as it is, I must never
touch it, never!’

She besought him, more pathetically and earnestly, with her little
supplicatory hand, than she could have done in any words.

‘I am disgraced enough, my Little Dorrit. I must not descend so low as
that, and carry you--so dear, so generous, so good--down with me. GOD
bless you, GOD reward you! It is past.’

He took her in his arms, as if she had been his daughter.

‘Always so much older, so much rougher, and so much less worthy, even
what I was must be dismissed by both of us, and you must see me only as
I am. I put this parting kiss upon your cheek, my child--who might have
been more near to me, who never could have been more dear--a ruined man
far removed from you, for ever separated from you, whose course is
run while yours is but beginning. I have not the courage to ask to be
forgotten by you in my humiliation; but I ask to be remembered only as I
am.’

The bell began to ring, warning visitors to depart. He took her mantle
from the wall, and tenderly wrapped it round her.

‘One other word, my Little Dorrit. A hard one to me, but it is a
necessary one. The time when you and this prison had anything in common
has long gone by. Do you understand?’

‘O! you will never say to me,’ she cried, weeping bitterly, and holding
up her clasped hands in entreaty, ‘that I am not to come back any more!
You will surely not desert me so!’

‘I would say it, if I could; but I have not the courage quite to shut
out this dear face, and abandon all hope of its return. But do not come
soon, do not come often! This is now a tainted place, and I well know
the taint of it clings to me. You belong to much brighter and better
scenes. You are not to look back here, my Little Dorrit; you are to look
away to very different and much happier paths. Again, GOD bless you in
them! GOD reward you!’

Maggy, who had fallen into very low spirits, here cried, ‘Oh get him
into a hospital; do get him into a hospital, Mother! He’ll never look
like hisself again, if he an’t got into a hospital. And then the little
woman as was always a spinning at her wheel, she can go to the cupboard
with the Princess, and say, what do you keep the Chicking there for? and
then they can take it out and give it to him, and then all be happy!’

The interruption was seasonable, for the bell had nearly rung itself
out. Again tenderly wrapping her mantle about her, and taking her on his
arm (though, but for her visit, he was almost too weak to walk), Arthur
led Little Dorrit down-stairs. She was the last visitor to pass out at
the Lodge, and the gate jarred heavily and hopelessly upon her.

With the funeral clang that it sounded into Arthur’s heart, his sense of
weakness returned. It was a toilsome journey up-stairs to his room, and
he re-entered its dark solitary precincts in unutterable misery.

When it was almost midnight, and the prison had long been quiet, a
cautious creak came up the stairs, and a cautious tap of a key was given
at his door. It was Young John. He glided in, in his stockings, and held
the door closed, while he spoke in a whisper.

‘It’s against all rules, but I don’t mind. I was determined to come
through, and come to you.’

‘What is the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter, sir. I was waiting in the court-yard for Miss
Dorrit when she came out. I thought you’d like some one to see that she
was safe.’

‘Thank you, thank you! You took her home, John?’

‘I saw her to her hotel. The same that Mr Dorrit was at. Miss Dorrit
walked all the way, and talked to me so kind, it quite knocked me over.
Why do you think she walked instead of riding?’

‘I don’t know, John.’

‘To talk about you. She said to me, “John, you was always honourable,
and if you’ll promise me that you will take care of him, and never let
him want for help and comfort when I am not there, my mind will be at
rest so far.” I promised her. And I’ll stand by you,’ said John Chivery,
‘for ever!’

Clennam, much affected, stretched out his hand to this honest spirit.

‘Before I take it,’ said John, looking at it, without coming from the
door, ‘guess what message Miss Dorrit gave me.’

Clennam shook his head.

‘“Tell him,”’ repeated John, in a distinct, though quavering voice,
‘“that his Little Dorrit sent him her undying love.” Now it’s delivered.
Have I been honourable, sir?’

‘Very, very!’

‘Will you tell Miss Dorrit I’ve been honourable, sir?’

‘I will indeed.’

‘There’s my hand, sir,’ said John, ‘and I’ll stand by you forever!’

After a hearty squeeze, he disappeared with the same cautious creak upon
the stair, crept shoeless over the pavement of the yard, and, locking
the gates behind him, passed out into the front where he had left his
shoes. If the same way had been paved with burning ploughshares, it is
not at all improbable that John would have traversed it with the same
devotion, for the same purpose.




CHAPTER 30. Closing in


The last day of the appointed week touched the bars of the Marshalsea
gate. Black, all night, since the gate had clashed upon Little Dorrit,
its iron stripes were turned by the early-glowing sun into stripes of
gold. Far aslant across the city, over its jumbled roofs, and through
the open tracery of its church towers, struck the long bright rays, bars
of the prison of this lower world.

Throughout the day the old house within the gateway remained untroubled
by any visitors. But, when the sun was low, three men turned in at the
gateway and made for the dilapidated house.

Rigaud was the first, and walked by himself smoking. Mr Baptist was
the second, and jogged close after him, looking at no other object.
Mr Pancks was the third, and carried his hat under his arm for the
liberation of his restive hair; the weather being extremely hot. They
all came together at the door-steps.

‘You pair of madmen!’ said Rigaud, facing about. ‘Don’t go yet!’

‘We don’t mean to,’ said Mr Pancks.

Giving him a dark glance in acknowledgment of his answer, Rigaud knocked
loudly. He had charged himself with drink, for the playing out of his
game, and was impatient to begin. He had hardly finished one long
resounding knock, when he turned to the knocker again and began another.
That was not yet finished when Jeremiah Flintwinch opened the door, and
they all clanked into the stone hall. Rigaud, thrusting Mr Flintwinch
aside, proceeded straight up-stairs. His two attendants followed him, Mr
Flintwinch followed them, and they all came trooping into Mrs Clennam’s
quiet room. It was in its usual state; except that one of the windows
was wide open, and Affery sat on its old-fashioned window-seat, mending
a stocking. The usual articles were on the little table; the usual
deadened fire was in the grate; the bed had its usual pall upon it; and
the mistress of all sat on her black bier-like sofa, propped up by her
black angular bolster that was like the headsman’s block.

Yet there was a nameless air of preparation in the room, as if it were
strung up for an occasion. From what the room derived it--every one of
its small variety of objects being in the fixed spot it had occupied
for years--no one could have said without looking attentively at its
mistress, and that, too, with a previous knowledge of her face. Although
her unchanging black dress was in every plait precisely as of old, and
her unchanging attitude was rigidly preserved, a very slight additional
setting of her features and contraction of her gloomy forehead was so
powerfully marked, that it marked everything about her.

‘Who are these?’ she said, wonderingly, as the two attendants entered.
‘What do these people want here?’

‘Who are these, dear madame, is it?’ returned Rigaud. ‘Faith, they are
friends of your son the prisoner. And what do they want here, is it?
Death, madame, I don’t know. You will do well to ask them.’

‘You know you told us at the door, not to go yet,’ said Pancks.

‘And you know you told me at the door, you didn’t mean to go,’ retorted
Rigaud. ‘In a word, madame, permit me to present two spies of the
prisoner’s--madmen, but spies. If you wish them to remain here during
our little conversation, say the word. It is nothing to me.’

‘Why should I wish them to remain here?’ said Mrs Clennam. ‘What have I
to do with them?’

‘Then, dearest madame,’ said Rigaud, throwing himself into an arm-chair
so heavily that the old room trembled, ‘you will do well to dismiss
them. It is your affair. They are not my spies, not my rascals.’

‘Hark! You Pancks,’ said Mrs Clennam, bending her brows upon him
angrily, ‘you Casby’s clerk! Attend to your employer’s business and your
own. Go. And take that other man with you.’

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ returned Mr Pancks, ‘I am glad to say I see no
objection to our both retiring. We have done all we undertook to do for
Mr Clennam. His constant anxiety has been (and it grew worse upon him
when he became a prisoner), that this agreeable gentleman should be
brought back here to the place from which he slipped away. Here he
is--brought back. And I will say,’ added Mr Pancks, ‘to his ill-looking
face, that in my opinion the world would be no worse for his slipping
out of it altogether.’

‘Your opinion is not asked,’ answered Mrs Clennam. ‘Go.’

‘I am sorry not to leave you in better company, ma’am,’ said Pancks;
‘and sorry, too, that Mr Clennam can’t be present. It’s my fault, that
is.’

‘You mean his own,’ she returned.

‘No, I mean mine, ma’am,’ said Pancks, ‘for it was my misfortune to lead
him into a ruinous investment.’ (Mr Pancks still clung to that word,
and never said speculation.) ‘Though I can prove by figures,’ added Mr
Pancks, with an anxious countenance, ‘that it ought to have been a good
investment. I have gone over it since it failed, every day of my life,
and it comes out--regarded as a question of figures--triumphant. The
present is not a time or place,’ Mr Pancks pursued, with a longing
glance into his hat, where he kept his calculations, ‘for entering upon
the figures; but the figures are not to be disputed. Mr Clennam ought to
have been at this moment in his carriage and pair, and I ought to have
been worth from three to five thousand pound.’

Mr Pancks put his hair erect with a general aspect of confidence that
could hardly have been surpassed, if he had had the amount in his
pocket. These incontrovertible figures had been the occupation of every
moment of his leisure since he had lost his money, and were destined to
afford him consolation to the end of his days.

‘However,’ said Mr Pancks, ‘enough of that. Altro, old boy, you have
seen the figures, and you know how they come out.’ Mr Baptist, who had
not the slightest arithmetical power of compensating himself in this
way, nodded, with a fine display of bright teeth.

At whom Mr Flintwinch had been looking, and to whom he then said:

‘Oh! it’s you, is it? I thought I remembered your face, but I wasn’t
certain till I saw your teeth. Ah! yes, to be sure. It was this
officious refugee,’ said Jeremiah to Mrs Clennam, ‘who came knocking
at the door on the night when Arthur and Chatterbox were here, and who
asked me a whole Catechism of questions about Mr Blandois.’

‘It is true,’ Mr Baptist cheerfully admitted. ‘And behold him, padrone!
I have found him consequentementally.’

‘I shouldn’t have objected,’ returned Mr Flintwinch, ‘to your having
broken your neck consequentementally.’

‘And now,’ said Mr Pancks, whose eye had often stealthily wandered to
the window-seat and the stocking that was being mended there, ‘I’ve
only one other word to say before I go. If Mr Clennam was here--but
unfortunately, though he has so far got the better of this fine
gentleman as to return him to this place against his will, he is ill
and in prison--ill and in prison, poor fellow--if he was here,’ said Mr
Pancks, taking one step aside towards the window-seat, and laying
his right hand upon the stocking; ‘he would say, “Affery, tell your
dreams!”’

Mr Pancks held up his right forefinger between his nose and the stocking
with a ghostly air of warning, turned, steamed out and towed Mr Baptist
after him. The house-door was heard to close upon them, their steps
were heard passing over the dull pavement of the echoing court-yard, and
still nobody had added a word. Mrs Clennam and Jeremiah had exchanged a
look; and had then looked, and looked still, at Affery, who sat mending
the stocking with great assiduity.

‘Come!’ said Mr Flintwinch at length, screwing himself a curve or two in
the direction of the window-seat, and rubbing the palms of his hands on
his coat-tail as if he were preparing them to do something: ‘Whatever
has to be said among us had better be begun to be said without more loss
of time.--So, Affery, my woman, take yourself away!’

In a moment Affery had thrown the stocking down, started up, caught
hold of the windowsill with her right hand, lodged herself upon the
window-seat with her right knee, and was flourishing her left hand,
beating expected assailants off.

‘No, I won’t, Jeremiah--no, I won’t--no, I won’t! I won’t go! I’ll stay
here. I’ll hear all I don’t know, and say all I know. I will, at last,
if I die for it. I will, I will, I will, I will!’

Mr Flintwinch, stiffening with indignation and amazement, moistened the
fingers of one hand at his lips, softly described a circle with them in
the palm of the other hand, and continued with a menacing grin to
screw himself in the direction of his wife; gasping some remark as he
advanced, of which, in his choking anger, only the words, ‘Such a dose!’
were audible.

‘Not a bit nearer, Jeremiah!’ cried Affery, never ceasing to beat the
air. ‘Don’t come a bit nearer to me, or I’ll rouse the neighbourhood!
I’ll throw myself out of window. I’ll scream Fire and Murder! I’ll wake
the dead! Stop where you are, or I’ll make shrieks enough to wake the
dead!’

The determined voice of Mrs Clennam echoed ‘Stop!’ Jeremiah had stopped
already.

‘It is closing in, Flintwinch. Let her alone. Affery, do you turn
against me after these many years?’

‘I do, if it’s turning against you to hear what I don’t know, and say
what I know. I have broke out now, and I can’t go back. I am determined
to do it. I will do it, I will, I will, I will! If that’s turning
against you, yes, I turn against both of you two clever ones. I told
Arthur when he first come home to stand up against you. I told him it
was no reason, because I was afeard of my life of you, that he should
be. All manner of things have been a-going on since then, and I won’t
be run up by Jeremiah, nor yet I won’t be dazed and scared, nor made a
party to I don’t know what, no more. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t! I’ll
up for Arthur when he has nothing left, and is ill, and in prison, and
can’t up for himself. I will, I will, I will, I will!’

‘How do you know, you heap of confusion,’ asked Mrs Clennam sternly,
‘that in doing what you are doing now, you are even serving Arthur?’

‘I don’t know nothing rightly about anything,’ said Affery; ‘and if
ever you said a true word in your life, it’s when you call me a heap of
confusion, for you two clever ones have done your most to make me such.
You married me whether I liked it or not, and you’ve led me, pretty well
ever since, such a life of dreaming and frightening as never was known,
and what do you expect me to be but a heap of confusion? You wanted to
make me such, and I am such; but I won’t submit no longer; no, I won’t,
I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!’ She was still beating the air against all
comers.

After gazing at her in silence, Mrs Clennam turned to Rigaud. ‘You
see and hear this foolish creature. Do you object to such a piece of
distraction remaining where she is?’

‘I, madame,’ he replied, ‘do I? That’s a question for you.’

‘I do not,’ she said, gloomily. ‘There is little left to choose now.
Flintwinch, it is closing in.’

Mr Flintwinch replied by directing a look of red vengeance at his wife,
and then, as if to pinion himself from falling upon her, screwed his
crossed arms into the breast of his waistcoat, and with his chin very
near one of his elbows stood in a corner, watching Rigaud in the oddest
attitude. Rigaud, for his part, arose from his chair, and seated himself
on the table with his legs dangling. In this easy attitude, he met Mrs
Clennam’s set face, with his moustache going up and his nose coming
down.

‘Madame, I am a gentleman--’

‘Of whom,’ she interrupted in her steady tones, ‘I have heard
disparagement, in connection with a French jail and an accusation of
murder.’

He kissed his hand to her with his exaggerated gallantry.

‘Perfectly. Exactly. Of a lady too! What absurdity! How incredible! I
had the honour of making a great success then; I hope to have the
honour of making a great success now. I kiss your hands. Madame, I am a
gentleman (I was going to observe), who when he says, “I will definitely
finish this or that affair at the present sitting,” does definitely
finish it. I announce to you that we are arrived at our last sitting on
our little business. You do me the favour to follow, and to comprehend?’

She kept her eyes fixed upon him with a frown. ‘Yes.’

‘Further, I am a gentleman to whom mere mercenary trade-bargains are
unknown, but to whom money is always acceptable as the means of pursuing
his pleasures. You do me the favour to follow, and to comprehend?’

‘Scarcely necessary to ask, one would say. Yes.’

‘Further, I am a gentleman of the softest and sweetest disposition,
but who, if trifled with, becomes enraged. Noble natures under such
circumstances become enraged. I possess a noble nature. When the lion
is awakened--that is to say, when I enrage--the satisfaction of my
animosity is as acceptable to me as money. You always do me the favour
to follow, and to comprehend?’

‘Yes,’ she answered, somewhat louder than before.

‘Do not let me derange you; pray be tranquil. I have said we are now
arrived at our last sitting. Allow me to recall the two sittings we have
held.’

‘It is not necessary.’

‘Death, madame,’ he burst out, ‘it’s my fancy! Besides, it clears the
way. The first sitting was limited. I had the honour of making your
acquaintance--of presenting my letter; I am a Knight of Industry, at
your service, madame, but my polished manners had won me so much of
success, as a master of languages, among your compatriots who are as
stiff as their own starch is to one another, but are ready to relax to
a foreign gentleman of polished manners--and of observing one or two
little things,’ he glanced around the room and smiled, ‘about this
honourable house, to know which was necessary to assure me, and
to convince me that I had the distinguished pleasure of making the
acquaintance of the lady I sought. I achieved this. I gave my word
of honour to our dear Flintwinch that I would return. I gracefully
departed.’

Her face neither acquiesced nor demurred. The same when he paused, and
when he spoke, it as yet showed him always the one attentive frown,
and the dark revelation before mentioned of her being nerved for the
occasion.

‘I say, gracefully departed, because it was graceful to retire without
alarming a lady. To be morally graceful, not less than physically, is
a part of the character of Rigaud Blandois. It was also politic, as
leaving you with something overhanging you, to expect me again with a
little anxiety on a day not named. But your slave is politic. By Heaven,
madame, politic! Let us return. On the day not named, I have again the
honour to render myself at your house. I intimate that I have something
to sell, which, if not bought, will compromise madame whom I highly
esteem. I explain myself generally. I demand--I think it was a thousand
pounds. Will you correct me?’

Thus forced to speak, she replied with constraint, ‘You demanded as much
as a thousand pounds.’

‘I demand at present, Two. Such are the evils of delay. But to return
once more. We are not accordant; we differ on that occasion. I am
playful; playfulness is a part of my amiable character. Playfully, I
become as one slain and hidden. For, it may alone be worth half the sum
to madame, to be freed from the suspicions that my droll idea awakens.
Accident and spies intermix themselves against my playfulness, and spoil
the fruit, perhaps--who knows? only you and Flintwinch--when it is just
ripe. Thus, madame, I am here for the last time. Listen! Definitely the
last.’

As he struck his straggling boot-heels against the flap of the table,
meeting her frown with an insolent gaze, he began to change his tone for
a fierce one.

‘Bah! Stop an instant! Let us advance by steps. Here is my Hotel-note to
be paid, according to contract. Five minutes hence we may be at daggers’
points. I’ll not leave it till then, or you’ll cheat me. Pay it! Count
me the money!’

‘Take it from his hand and pay it, Flintwinch,’ said Mrs Clennam.

He spirted it into Mr Flintwinch’s face when the old man advanced to
take it, and held forth his hand, repeating noisily, ‘Pay it! Count it
out! Good money!’ Jeremiah picked the bill up, looked at the total with
a bloodshot eye, took a small canvas bag from his pocket, and told the
amount into his hand.

Rigaud chinked the money, weighed it in his hand, threw it up a little
way and caught it, chinked it again.

‘The sound of it, to the bold Rigaud Blandois, is like the taste of
fresh meat to the tiger. Say, then, madame. How much?’

He turned upon her suddenly with a menacing gesture of the weighted hand
that clenched the money, as if he were going to strike her with it.

‘I tell you again, as I told you before, that we are not rich here, as
you suppose us to be, and that your demand is excessive. I have not the
present means of complying with such a demand, if I had ever so great an
inclination.’

‘If!’ cried Rigaud. ‘Hear this lady with her If! Will you say that you
have not the inclination?’

‘I will say what presents itself to me, and not what presents itself to
you.’

‘Say it then. As to the inclination. Quick! Come to the inclination, and
I know what to do.’

She was no quicker, and no slower, in her reply. ‘It would seem that
you have obtained possession of a paper--or of papers--which I assuredly
have the inclination to recover.’

Rigaud, with a loud laugh, drummed his heels against the table, and
chinked his money. ‘I think so! I believe you there!’

‘The paper might be worth, to me, a sum of money. I cannot say how much,
or how little.’

‘What the Devil!’ he asked savagely. ‘Not after a week’s grace to
consider?’

‘No! I will not out of my scanty means--for I tell you again, we are
poor here, and not rich--I will not offer any price for a power that I
do not know the worst and the fullest extent of. This is the third time
of your hinting and threatening. You must speak explicitly, or you may
go where you will, and do what you will. It is better to be torn to
pieces at a spring, than to be a mouse at the caprice of such a cat.’

He looked at her so hard with those eyes too near together that the
sinister sight of each, crossing that of the other, seemed to make the
bridge of his hooked nose crooked. After a long survey, he said, with
the further setting off of his internal smile:

‘You are a bold woman!’

‘I am a resolved woman.’

‘You always were. What? She always was; is it not so, my little
Flintwinch?’

‘Flintwinch, say nothing to him. It is for him to say, here and now,
all he can; or to go hence, and do all he can. You know this to be our
determination. Leave him to his action on it.’

She did not shrink under his evil leer, or avoid it. He turned it upon
her again, but she remained steady at the point to which she had fixed
herself. He got off the table, placed a chair near the sofa, sat down in
it, and leaned an arm upon the sofa close to her own, which he touched
with his hand. Her face was ever frowning, attentive, and settled.

‘It is your pleasure then, madame, that I shall relate a morsel of
family history in this little family society,’ said Rigaud, with a
warning play of his lithe fingers on her arm. ‘I am something of a
doctor. Let me touch your pulse.’

She suffered him to take her wrist in his hand. Holding it, he proceeded
to say:

‘A history of a strange marriage, and a strange mother, and a revenge,
and a suppression.--Aye, aye, aye? this pulse is beating curiously!
It appears to me that it doubles while I touch it. Are these the usual
changes of your malady, madame?’

There was a struggle in her maimed arm as she twisted it away, but there
was none in her face. On his face there was his own smile.

‘I have lived an adventurous life. I am an adventurous character. I have
known many adventurers; interesting spirits--amiable society! To one
of them I owe my knowledge and my proofs--I repeat it, estimable
lady--proofs--of the ravishing little family history I go to commence.
You will be charmed with it. But, bah! I forget. One should name a
history. Shall I name it the history of a house? But, bah, again. There
are so many houses. Shall I name it the history of this house?’

Leaning over the sofa, poised on two legs of his chair and his left
elbow; that hand often tapping her arm to beat his words home; his
legs crossed; his right hand sometimes arranging his hair, sometimes
smoothing his moustache, sometimes striking his nose, always threatening
her whatever it did; coarse, insolent, rapacious, cruel, and powerful,
he pursued his narrative at his ease.

‘In fine, then, I name it the history of this house. I commence it.
There live here, let us suppose, an uncle and nephew. The uncle, a
rigid old gentleman of strong force of character; the nephew, habitually
timid, repressed, and under constraint.’

Mistress Affery, fixedly attentive in the window-seat, biting the
rolled up end of her apron, and trembling from head to foot, here cried
out, ‘Jeremiah, keep off from me! I’ve heerd, in my dreams, of Arthur’s
father and his uncle. He’s a talking of them. It was before my time
here; but I’ve heerd in my dreams that Arthur’s father was a poor,
irresolute, frightened chap, who had had everything but his orphan life
scared out of him when he was young, and that he had no voice in the
choice of his wife even, but his uncle chose her. There she sits! I
heerd it in my dreams, and you said it to her own self.’

As Mr Flintwinch shook his fist at her, and as Mrs Clennam gazed upon
her, Rigaud kissed his hand to her.

‘Perfectly right, dear Madame Flintwinch. You have a genius for
dreaming.’

‘I don’t want none of your praises,’ returned Affery. ‘I don’t want to
have nothing at all to say to you. But Jeremiah said they was dreams,
and I’ll tell ‘em as such!’ Here she put her apron in her mouth again,
as if she were stopping somebody else’s mouth--perhaps Jeremiah’s, which
was chattering with threats as if he were grimly cold.

‘Our beloved Madame Flintwinch,’ said Rigaud, ‘developing all of a
sudden a fine susceptibility and spirituality, is right to a marvel.
Yes. So runs the history. Monsieur, the uncle, commands the nephew to
marry. Monsieur says to him in effect, “My nephew, I introduce to you a
lady of strong force of character, like myself--a resolved lady, a stern
lady, a lady who has a will that can break the weak to powder: a lady
without pity, without love, implacable, revengeful, cold as the stone,
but raging as the fire.” Ah! what fortitude! Ah, what superiority of
intellectual strength! Truly, a proud and noble character that I
describe in the supposed words of Monsieur, the uncle. Ha, ha, ha! Death
of my soul, I love the sweet lady!’

Mrs Clennam’s face had changed. There was a remarkable darkness of
colour on it, and the brow was more contracted. ‘Madame, madame,’ said
Rigaud, tapping her on the arm, as if his cruel hand were sounding a
musical instrument, ‘I perceive I interest you. I perceive I awaken your
sympathy. Let us go on.’

The drooping nose and the ascending moustache had, however, to be hidden
for a moment with the white hand, before he could go on; he enjoyed the
effect he made so much.

‘The nephew, being, as the lucid Madame Flintwinch has remarked, a poor
devil who has had everything but his orphan life frightened and famished
out of him--the nephew abases his head, and makes response: “My uncle,
it is to you to command. Do as you will!” Monsieur, the uncle, does as
he will. It is what he always does. The auspicious nuptials take place;
the newly married come home to this charming mansion; the lady is
received, let us suppose, by Flintwinch. Hey, old intriguer?’

Jeremiah, with his eyes upon his mistress, made no reply. Rigaud looked
from one to the other, struck his ugly nose, and made a clucking with
his tongue.

‘Soon the lady makes a singular and exciting discovery. Thereupon,
full of anger, full of jealousy, full of vengeance, she forms--see you,
madame!--a scheme of retribution, the weight of which she ingeniously
forces her crushed husband to bear himself, as well as execute upon her
enemy. What superior intelligence!’

‘Keep off, Jeremiah!’ cried the palpitating Affery, taking her apron
from her mouth again. ‘But it was one of my dreams, that you told her,
when you quarrelled with her one winter evening at dusk--there she sits
and you looking at her--that she oughtn’t to have let Arthur when he
come home, suspect his father only; that she had always had the strength
and the power; and that she ought to have stood up more to Arthur, for
his father. It was in the same dream where you said to her that she was
not--not something, but I don’t know what, for she burst out tremendous
and stopped you. You know the dream as well as I do. When you come
down-stairs into the kitchen with the candle in your hand, and hitched
my apron off my head. When you told me I had been dreaming. When you
wouldn’t believe the noises.’ After this explosion Affery put her apron
into her mouth again; always keeping her hand on the window-sill and her
knee on the window-seat, ready to cry out or jump out if her lord and
master approached.

Rigaud had not lost a word of this.

‘Haha!’ he cried, lifting his eyebrows, folding his arms, and leaning
back in his chair. ‘Assuredly, Madame Flintwinch is an oracle! How shall
we interpret the oracle, you and I and the old intriguer? He said that
you were not--? And you burst out and stopped him! What was it you were
not? What is it you are not? Say then, madame!’

Under this ferocious banter, she sat breathing harder, and her mouth was
disturbed. Her lips quivered and opened, in spite of her utmost efforts
to keep them still.

‘Come then, madame! Speak, then! Our old intriguer said that you were
not--and you stopped him. He was going to say that you were not--what?
I know already, but I want a little confidence from you. How, then? You
are not what?’

She tried again to repress herself, but broke out vehemently, ‘Not
Arthur’s mother!’

‘Good,’ said Rigaud. ‘You are amenable.’

With the set expression of her face all torn away by the explosion
of her passion, and with a bursting, from every rent feature, of the
smouldering fire so long pent up, she cried out: ‘I will tell it myself!
I will not hear it from your lips, and with the taint of your wickedness
upon it. Since it must be seen, I will have it seen by the light I stood
in. Not another word. Hear me!’

‘Unless you are a more obstinate and more persisting woman than even
I know you to be,’ Mr Flintwinch interposed, ‘you had better leave Mr
Rigaud, Mr Blandois, Mr Beelzebub, to tell it in his own way. What does
it signify when he knows all about it?’

‘He does not know all about it.’

‘He knows all he cares about it,’ Mr Flintwinch testily urged.

‘He does not know _me_.’

‘What do you suppose he cares for you, you conceited woman?’ said Mr
Flintwinch.

‘I tell you, Flintwinch, I will speak. I tell you when it has come
to this, I will tell it with my own lips, and will express myself
throughout it. What! Have I suffered nothing in this room, no
deprivation, no imprisonment, that I should condescend at last to
contemplate myself in such a glass as _that_. Can you see him? Can you
hear him? If your wife were a hundred times the ingrate that she is, and
if I were a thousand times more hopeless than I am of inducing her to be
silent if this man is silenced, I would tell it myself, before I would
bear the torment of the hearing it from him.’

Rigaud pushed his chair a little back; pushed his legs out straight
before him; and sat with his arms folded over against her.

‘You do not know what it is,’ she went on addressing him, ‘to be brought
up strictly and straitly. I was so brought up. Mine was no light youth
of sinful gaiety and pleasure. Mine were days of wholesome repression,
punishment, and fear. The corruption of our hearts, the evil of our
ways, the curse that is upon us, the terrors that surround us--these
were the themes of my childhood. They formed my character, and filled me
with an abhorrence of evil-doers. When old Mr Gilbert Clennam proposed
his orphan nephew to my father for my husband, my father impressed upon
me that his bringing-up had been, like mine, one of severe restraint.
He told me, that besides the discipline his spirit had undergone, he
had lived in a starved house, where rioting and gaiety were unknown, and
where every day was a day of toil and trial like the last. He told me
that he had been a man in years long before his uncle had acknowledged
him as one; and that from his school-days to that hour, his uncle’s roof
has been a sanctuary to him from the contagion of the irreligious
and dissolute. When, within a twelvemonth of our marriage, I found
my husband, at that time when my father spoke of him, to have sinned
against the Lord and outraged me by holding a guilty creature in my
place, was I to doubt that it had been appointed to me to make the
discovery, and that it was appointed to me to lay the hand of punishment
upon that creature of perdition? Was I to dismiss in a moment--not my
own wrongs--what was I! but all the rejection of sin, and all the war
against it, in which I had been bred?’

She laid her wrathful hand upon the watch on the table.

‘No! “Do not forget.” The initials of those words are within here now,
and were within here then. I was appointed to find the old letter that
referred to them, and that told me what they meant, and whose work they
were, and why they were worked, lying with this watch in his secret
drawer. But for that appointment there would have been no discovery.
“Do not forget.” It spoke to me like a voice from an angry cloud. Do
not forget the deadly sin, do not forget the appointed discovery, do not
forget the appointed suffering. I did not forget. Was it my own wrong I
remembered? Mine! I was but a servant and a minister. What power could I
have over them, but that they were bound in the bonds of their sin, and
delivered to me!’

More than forty years had passed over the grey head of this determined
woman, since the time she recalled. More than forty years of strife
and struggle with the whisper that, by whatever name she called her
vindictive pride and rage, nothing through all eternity could change
their nature. Yet, gone those more than forty years, and come this
Nemesis now looking her in the face, she still abided by her old
impiety--still reversed the order of Creation, and breathed her own
breath into a clay image of her Creator. Verily, verily, travellers have
seen many monstrous idols in many countries; but no human eyes have ever
seen more daring, gross, and shocking images of the Divine nature than
we creatures of the dust make in our own likenesses, of our own bad
passions.

‘When I forced him to give her up to me, by her name and place of
abode,’ she went on in her torrent of indignation and defence; ‘when I
accused her, and she fell hiding her face at my feet, was it my injury
that I asserted, were they my reproaches that I poured upon her? Those
who were appointed of old to go to wicked kings and accuse them--were
they not ministers and servants? And had not I, unworthy and far-removed
from them, sin to denounce? When she pleaded to me her youth, and his
wretched and hard life (that was her phrase for the virtuous training he
had belied), and the desecrated ceremony of marriage there had
secretly been between them, and the terrors of want and shame that had
overwhelmed them both when I was first appointed to be the instrument of
their punishment, and the love (for she said the word to me, down at my
feet) in which she had abandoned him and left him to me, was it _my_
enemy that became my footstool, were they the words of my wrath that
made her shrink and quiver! Not unto me the strength be ascribed; not
unto me the wringing of the expiation!’

Many years had come and gone since she had had the free use even of
her fingers; but it was noticeable that she had already more than once
struck her clenched hand vigorously upon the table, and that when she
said these words she raised her whole arm in the air, as though it had
been a common action with her.

‘And what was the repentance that was extorted from the hardness of her
heart and the blackness of her depravity? I, vindictive and implacable?
It may be so, to such as you who know no righteousness, and no
appointment except Satan’s. Laugh; but I will be known as I know
myself, and as Flintwinch knows me, though it is only to you and this
half-witted woman.’

‘Add, to yourself, madame,’ said Rigaud. ‘I have my little suspicions
that madame is rather solicitous to be justified to herself.’

‘It is false. It is not so. I have no need to be,’ she said, with great
energy and anger.

‘Truly?’ retorted Rigaud. ‘Hah!’

‘I ask, what was the penitence, in works, that was demanded of her?
“You have a child; I have none. You love that child. Give him to me. He
shall believe himself to be my son, and he shall be believed by every
one to be my son. To save you from exposure, his father shall swear
never to see or communicate with you more; equally to save him from
being stripped by his uncle, and to save your child from being a beggar,
you shall swear never to see or communicate with either of them more.
That done, and your present means, derived from my husband, renounced,
I charge myself with your support. You may, with your place of retreat
unknown, then leave, if you please, uncontradicted by me, the lie that
when you passed out of all knowledge but mine, you merited a good name.”
 That was all. She had to sacrifice her sinful and shameful affections;
no more. She was then free to bear her load of guilt in secret, and to
break her heart in secret; and through such present misery (light enough
for her, I think!) to purchase her redemption from endless misery, if
she could. If, in this, I punished her here, did I not open to her a way
hereafter? If she knew herself to be surrounded by insatiable vengeance
and unquenchable fires, were they mine? If I threatened her, then and
afterwards, with the terrors that encompassed her, did I hold them in my
right hand?’

She turned the watch upon the table, and opened it, and, with an
unsoftening face, looked at the worked letters within.

‘They did _not_ forget. It is appointed against such offences that the
offenders shall not be able to forget. If the presence of Arthur was a
daily reproach to his father, and if the absence of Arthur was a daily
agony to his mother, that was the just dispensation of Jehovah. As well
might it be charged upon me, that the stings of an awakened conscience
drove her mad, and that it was the will of the Disposer of all things
that she should live so, many years. I devoted myself to reclaim the
otherwise predestined and lost boy; to give him the reputation of an
honest origin; to bring him up in fear and trembling, and in a life of
practical contrition for the sins that were heavy on his head before his
entrance into this condemned world. Was that a cruelty? Was I, too,
not visited with consequences of the original offence in which I had no
complicity? Arthur’s father and I lived no further apart, with half the
globe between us, than when we were together in this house. He died,
and sent this watch back to me, with its Do not forget. I do NOT forget,
though I do not read it as he did. I read in it, that I was appointed
to do these things. I have so read these three letters since I have
had them lying on this table, and I did so read them, with equal
distinctness, when they were thousands of miles away.’

As she took the watch-case in her hand, with that new freedom in the use
of her hand of which she showed no consciousness whatever, bending her
eyes upon it as if she were defying it to move her, Rigaud cried with a
loud and contemptuous snapping of his fingers. ‘Come, madame! Time runs
out. Come, lady of piety, it must be! You can tell nothing I don’t know.
Come to the money stolen, or I will! Death of my soul, I have had enough
of your other jargon. Come straight to the stolen money!’

‘Wretch that you are,’ she answered, and now her hands clasped her head:
‘through what fatal error of Flintwinch’s, through what incompleteness
on his part, who was the only other person helping in these things and
trusted with them, through whose and what bringing together of the ashes
of a burnt paper, you have become possessed of that codicil, I know no
more than how you acquired the rest of your power here--’

‘And yet,’ interrupted Rigaud, ‘it is my odd fortune to have by me, in a
convenient place that I know of, that same short little addition to the
will of Monsieur Gilbert Clennam, written by a lady and witnessed by the
same lady and our old intriguer! Ah, bah, old intriguer, crooked little
puppet! Madame, let us go on. Time presses. You or I to finish?’

‘I!’ she answered, with increased determination, if it were possible.
‘I, because I will not endure to be shown myself, and have myself
shown to any one, with your horrible distortion upon me. You, with your
practices of infamous foreign prisons and galleys would make it the
money that impelled me. It was not the money.’

‘Bah, bah, bah! I repudiate, for the moment, my politeness, and say,
Lies, lies, lies. You know you suppressed the deed and kept the money.’

‘Not for the money’s sake, wretch!’ She made a struggle as if she were
starting up; even as if, in her vehemence, she had almost risen on her
disabled feet. ‘If Gilbert Clennam, reduced to imbecility, at the point
of death, and labouring under the delusion of some imaginary relenting
towards a girl of whom he had heard that his nephew had once had a fancy
for her which he had crushed out of him, and that she afterwards drooped
away into melancholy and withdrawal from all who knew her--if, in that
state of weakness, he dictated to me, whose life she had darkened with
her sin, and who had been appointed to know her wickedness from her
own hand and her own lips, a bequest meant as a recompense to her
for supposed unmerited suffering; was there no difference between my
spurning that injustice, and coveting mere money--a thing which you, and
your comrades in the prisons, may steal from anyone?’

‘Time presses, madame. Take care!’

‘If this house was blazing from the roof to the ground,’ she returned,
‘I would stay in it to justify myself against my righteous motives being
classed with those of stabbers and thieves.’

Rigaud snapped his fingers tauntingly in her face. ‘One thousand guineas
to the little beauty you slowly hunted to death. One thousand guineas
to the youngest daughter her patron might have at fifty, or (if he
had none) brother’s youngest daughter, on her coming of age, “as the
remembrance his disinterestedness may like best, of his protection of
a friendless young orphan girl.” Two thousand guineas. What! You will
never come to the money?’

‘That patron,’ she was vehemently proceeding, when he checked her.

‘Names! Call him Mr Frederick Dorrit. No more evasions.’

‘That Frederick Dorrit was the beginning of it all. If he had not been
a player of music, and had not kept, in those days of his youth and
prosperity, an idle house where singers, and players, and such-like
children of Evil turned their backs on the Light and their faces to the
Darkness, she might have remained in her lowly station, and might not
have been raised out of it to be cast down. But, no. Satan entered into
that Frederick Dorrit, and counselled him that he was a man of innocent
and laudable tastes who did kind actions, and that here was a poor girl
with a voice for singing music with. Then he is to have her taught. Then
Arthur’s father, who has all along been secretly pining in the ways of
virtuous ruggedness for those accursed snares which are called the Arts,
becomes acquainted with her. And so, a graceless orphan, training to be
a singing girl, carries it, by that Frederick Dorrit’s agency, against
me, and I am humbled and deceived!--Not I, that is to say,’ she added
quickly, as colour flushed into her face; ‘a greater than I. What am I?’

Jeremiah Flintwinch, who had been gradually screwing himself towards
her, and who was now very near her elbow without her knowing it, made a
specially wry face of objection when she said these words, and moreover
twitched his gaiters, as if such pretensions were equivalent to little
barbs in his legs.

‘Lastly,’ she continued, ‘for I am at the end of these things, and I
will say no more of them, and you shall say no more of them, and all
that remains will be to determine whether the knowledge of them can
be kept among us who are here present; lastly, when I suppressed that
paper, with the knowledge of Arthur’s father--’

‘But not with his consent, you know,’ said Mr Flintwinch.

‘Who said with his consent?’ She started to find Jeremiah so near her,
and drew back her head, looking at him with some rising distrust. ‘You
were often enough between us when he would have had me produce it and
I would not, to have contradicted me if I had said, with his consent. I
say, when I suppressed that paper, I made no effort to destroy it, but
kept it by me, here in this house, many years. The rest of the Gilbert
property being left to Arthur’s father, I could at any time, without
unsettling more than the two sums, have made a pretence of finding
it. But, besides that I must have supported such pretence by a direct
falsehood (a great responsibility), I have seen no new reason, in
all the time I have been tried here, to bring it to light. It was a
rewarding of sin; the wrong result of a delusion. I did what I was
appointed to do, and I have undergone, within these four walls, what
I was appointed to undergo. When the paper was at last destroyed--as
I thought--in my presence, she had long been dead, and her patron,
Frederick Dorrit, had long been deservedly ruined and imbecile. He had
no daughter. I had found the niece before then; and what I did for her,
was better for her far than the money of which she would have had no
good.’ She added, after a moment, as though she addressed the watch:
‘She herself was innocent, and I might not have forgotten to relinquish
it to her at my death:’ and sat looking at it.

‘Shall I recall something to you, worthy madame?’ said Rigaud. ‘The
little paper was in this house on the night when our friend the
prisoner--jail-comrade of my soul--came home from foreign countries.
Shall I recall yet something more to you? The little singing-bird
that never was fledged, was long kept in a cage by a guardian of your
appointing, well enough known to our old intriguer here. Shall we coax
our old intriguer to tell us when he saw him last?’

‘I’ll tell you!’ cried Affery, unstopping her mouth. ‘I dreamed it,
first of all my dreams. Jeremiah, if you come a-nigh me now, I’ll scream
to be heard at St Paul’s! The person as this man has spoken of, was
Jeremiah’s own twin brother; and he was here in the dead of the night,
on the night when Arthur come home, and Jeremiah with his own hands give
him this paper, along with I don’t know what more, and he took it away
in an iron box--Help! Murder! Save me from Jere-_mi_-ah!’

Mr Flintwinch had made a run at her, but Rigaud had caught him in his
arms midway. After a moment’s wrestle with him, Flintwinch gave up, and
put his hands in his pockets.

‘What!’ cried Rigaud, rallying him as he poked and jerked him back with
his elbows, ‘assault a lady with such a genius for dreaming! Ha, ha, ha!
Why, she’ll be a fortune to you as an exhibition. All that she dreams
comes true. Ha, ha, ha! You’re so like him, Little Flintwinch. So like
him, as I knew him (when I first spoke English for him to the host) in
the Cabaret of the Three Billiard Tables, in the little street of the
high roofs, by the wharf at Antwerp! Ah, but he was a brave boy to
drink. Ah, but he was a brave boy to smoke! Ah, but he lived in a sweet
bachelor-apartment--furnished, on the fifth floor, above the wood and
charcoal merchant’s, and the dress-maker’s, and the chair-maker’s, and
the maker of tubs--where I knew him too, and wherewith his cognac and
tobacco, he had twelve sleeps a day and one fit, until he had a fit too
much, and ascended to the skies. Ha, ha, ha! What does it matter how I
took possession of the papers in his iron box? Perhaps he confided it
to my hands for you, perhaps it was locked and my curiosity was piqued,
perhaps I suppressed it. Ha, ha, ha! What does it matter, so that I
have it safe? We are not particular here; hey, Flintwinch? We are not
particular here; is it not so, madame?’

Retiring before him with vicious counter-jerks of his own elbows, Mr
Flintwinch had got back into his corner, where he now stood with his
hands in his pockets, taking breath, and returning Mrs Clennam’s stare.
‘Ha, ha, ha! But what’s this?’ cried Rigaud. ‘It appears as if you
don’t know, one the other. Permit me, Madame Clennam who suppresses, to
present Monsieur Flintwinch who intrigues.’

Mr Flintwinch, unpocketing one of his hands to scrape his jaw, advanced
a step or so in that attitude, still returning Mrs Clennam’s look, and
thus addressed her:

‘Now, I know what you mean by opening your eyes so wide at me, but you
needn’t take the trouble, because I don’t care for it. I’ve been telling
you for how many years that you’re one of the most opinionated and
obstinate of women. That’s what _you_ are. You call yourself humble and
sinful, but you are the most Bumptious of your sex. That’s what _you_ are.
I have told you, over and over again when we have had a tiff, that you
wanted to make everything go down before you, but I wouldn’t go down
before you--that you wanted to swallow up everybody alive, but I
wouldn’t be swallowed up alive. Why didn’t you destroy the paper when
you first laid hands upon it? I advised you to; but no, it’s not your
way to take advice. You must keep it forsooth. Perhaps you may carry it
out at some other time, forsooth. As if I didn’t know better than that!
I think I see your pride carrying it out, with a chance of being
suspected of having kept it by you. But that’s the way you cheat
yourself. Just as you cheat yourself into making out that you didn’t do
all this business because you were a rigorous woman, all slight, and
spite, and power, and unforgiveness, but because you were a servant and
a minister, and were appointed to do it. Who are you, that you should
be appointed to do it? That may be your religion, but it’s my gammon.
And to tell you all the truth while I am about it,’ said Mr Flintwinch,
crossing his arms, and becoming the express image of irascible
doggedness, ‘I have been rasped--rasped these forty years--by your
taking such high ground even with me, who knows better; the effect of it
being coolly to put me on low ground. I admire you very much; you are a
woman of strong head and great talent; but the strongest head, and the
greatest talent, can’t rasp a man for forty years without making him
sore. So I don’t care for your present eyes. Now, I am coming to the
paper, and mark what I say. You put it away somewhere, and you kept your
own counsel where. You’re an active woman at that time, and if you want
to get that paper, you can get it. But, mark. There comes a time when
you are struck into what you are now, and then if you want to get that
paper, you can’t get it. So it lies, long years, in its hiding-place. At
last, when we are expecting Arthur home every day, and when any day may
bring him home, and it’s impossible to say what rummaging he may make
about the house, I recommend you five thousand times, if you can’t get
at it, to let me get at it, that it may be put in the fire. But no--no
one but you knows where it is, and that’s power; and, call yourself
whatever humble names you will, I call you a female Lucifer in appetite
for power! On a Sunday night, Arthur comes home. He has not been in this
room ten minutes, when he speaks of his father’s watch. You know very
well that the Do Not Forget, at the time when his father sent that watch
to you, could only mean, the rest of the story being then all dead and
over, Do Not Forget the suppression. Make restitution! Arthur’s ways
have frightened you a bit, and the paper shall be burnt after all. So,
before that jumping jade and Jezebel,’ Mr Flintwinch grinned at his
wife, ‘has got you into bed, you at last tell me where you have put the
paper, among the old ledgers in the cellars, where Arthur himself went
prowling the very next morning. But it’s not to be burnt on a Sunday
night. No; you are strict, you are; we must wait over twelve o’clock,
and get into Monday. Now, all this is a swallowing of me up alive that
rasps me; so, feeling a little out of temper, and not being as strict as
yourself, I take a look at the document before twelve o’clock to refresh
my memory as to its appearance--fold up one of the many yellow old
papers in the cellars like it--and afterwards, when we have got into
Monday morning, and I have, by the light of your lamp, to walk from you,
lying on that bed, to this grate, make a little exchange like the
conjuror, and burn accordingly. My brother Ephraim, the lunatic-keeper
(I wish he had had himself to keep in a strait-waistcoat), had had many
jobs since the close of the long job he got from you, but had not done
well. His wife died (not that that was much; mine might have died
instead, and welcome), he speculated unsuccessfully in lunatics, he got
into difficulty about over-roasting a patient to bring him to reason,
and he got into debt. He was going out of the way, on what he had been
able to scrape up, and a trifle from me. He was here that early Monday
morning, waiting for the tide; in short, he was going to Antwerp, where
(I am afraid you’ll be shocked at my saying, And be damned to him!) he
made the acquaintance of this gentleman. He had come a long way, and, I
thought then, was only sleepy; but, I suppose now, was drunk. When
Arthur’s mother had been under the care of him and his wife, she had
been always writing, incessantly writing,--mostly letters of confession
to you, and Prayers for forgiveness. My brother had handed, from time to
time, lots of these sheets to me. I thought I might as well keep them to
myself as have them swallowed up alive too; so I kept them in a box,
looking over them when I felt in the humour. Convinced that it was
advisable to get the paper out of the place, with Arthur coming about
it, I put it into this same box, and I locked the whole up with two
locks, and I trusted it to my brother to take away and keep, till I
should write about it. I did write about it, and never got an answer. I
didn’t know what to make of it, till this gentleman favoured us with his
first visit. Of course, I began to suspect how it was, then; and I don’t
want his word for it now to understand how he gets his knowledge from my
papers, and your paper, and my brother’s cognac and tobacco talk (I wish
he’d had to gag himself). Now, I have only one thing more to say, you
hammer-headed woman, and that is, that I haven’t altogether made up my
mind whether I might, or might not, have ever given you any trouble
about the codicil. I think not; and that I should have been quite
satisfied with knowing I had got the better of you, and that I held the
power over you. In the present state of circumstances, I have no more
explanation to give you till this time to-morrow night. So you may as
well,’ said Mr Flintwinch, terminating his oration with a screw, ‘keep
your eyes open at somebody else, for it’s no use keeping ‘em open at
me.’

She slowly withdrew them when he had ceased, and dropped her forehead
on her hand. Her other hand pressed hard upon the table, and again the
curious stir was observable in her, as if she were going to rise.

‘This box can never bring, elsewhere, the price it will bring here.
This knowledge can never be of the same profit to you, sold to any other
person, as sold to me. But I have not the present means of raising the
sum you have demanded. I have not prospered. What will you take now, and
what at another time, and how am I to be assured of your silence?’

‘My angel,’ said Rigaud, ‘I have said what I will take, and time
presses. Before coming here, I placed copies of the most important of
these papers in another hand. Put off the time till the Marshalsea
gate shall be shut for the night, and it will be too late to treat. The
prisoner will have read them.’

She put her two hands to her head again, uttered a loud exclamation, and
started to her feet. She staggered for a moment, as if she would have
fallen; then stood firm.

‘Say what you mean. Say what you mean, man!’

Before her ghostly figure, so long unused to its erect attitude, and so
stiffened in it, Rigaud fell back and dropped his voice. It was, to all
the three, almost as if a dead woman had risen.

‘Miss Dorrit,’ answered Rigaud, ‘the little niece of Monsieur Frederick,
whom I have known across the water, is attached to the prisoner. Miss
Dorrit, little niece of Monsieur Frederick, watches at this moment over
the prisoner, who is ill. For her I with my own hands left a packet
at the prison, on my way here, with a letter of instructions, “_for his
sake_”--she will do anything for his sake--to keep it without breaking
the seal, in case of its being reclaimed before the hour of shutting up
to-night--if it should not be reclaimed before the ringing of the prison
bell, to give it to him; and it encloses a second copy for herself,
which he must give to her. What! I don’t trust myself among you, now we
have got so far, without giving my secret a second life. And as to its
not bringing me, elsewhere, the price it will bring here, say then,
madame, have you limited and settled the price the little niece will
give--for his sake--to hush it up? Once more I say, time presses. The
packet not reclaimed before the ringing of the bell to-night, you cannot
buy. I sell, then, to the little girl!’

Once more the stir and struggle in her, and she ran to a closet, tore
the door open, took down a hood or shawl, and wrapped it over her head.
Affery, who had watched her in terror, darted to her in the middle of
the room, caught hold of her dress, and went on her knees to her.

‘Don’t, don’t, don’t! What are you doing? Where are you going? You’re a
fearful woman, but I don’t bear you no ill-will. I can do poor Arthur
no good now, that I see; and you needn’t be afraid of me. I’ll keep your
secret. Don’t go out, you’ll fall dead in the street. Only promise me,
that, if it’s the poor thing that’s kept here secretly, you’ll let me
take charge of her and be her nurse. Only promise me that, and never be
afraid of me.’

Mrs Clennam stood still for an instant, at the height of her rapid
haste, saying in stern amazement:

‘Kept here? She has been dead a score of years or more. Ask
Flintwinch--ask _him_. They can both tell you that she died when Arthur
went abroad.’

‘So much the worse,’ said Affery, with a shiver, ‘for she haunts the
house, then. Who else rustles about it, making signals by dropping
dust so softly? Who else comes and goes, and marks the walls with
long crooked touches when we are all a-bed? Who else holds the door
sometimes? But don’t go out--don’t go out! Mistress, you’ll die in the
street!’

Her mistress only disengaged her dress from the beseeching hands, said
to Rigaud, ‘Wait here till I come back!’ and ran out of the room. They
saw her, from the window, run wildly through the court-yard and out at
the gateway.

For a few moments they stood motionless. Affery was the first to move,
and she, wringing her hands, pursued her mistress. Next, Jeremiah
Flintwinch, slowly backing to the door, with one hand in a pocket, and
the other rubbing his chin, twisted himself out in his reticent way,
speechlessly. Rigaud, left alone, composed himself upon the window-seat
of the open window, in the old Marseilles-jail attitude. He laid his
cigarettes and fire-box ready to his hand, and fell to smoking.

‘Whoof! Almost as dull as the infernal old jail. Warmer, but almost as
dismal. Wait till she comes back? Yes, certainly; but where is she gone,
and how long will she be gone? No matter! Rigaud Lagnier Blandois, my
amiable subject, you will get your money. You will enrich yourself. You
have lived a gentleman; you will die a gentleman. You triumph, my little
boy; but it is your character to triumph. Whoof!’

In the hour of his triumph, his moustache went up and his nose came
down, as he ogled a great beam over his head with particular
satisfaction.




CHAPTER 31. Closed


The sun had set, and the streets were dim in the dusty twilight, when
the figure so long unused to them hurried on its way. In the immediate
neighbourhood of the old house it attracted little attention, for there
were only a few straggling people to notice it; but, ascending from the
river by the crooked ways that led to London Bridge, and passing into
the great main road, it became surrounded by astonishment.

Resolute and wild of look, rapid of foot and yet weak and uncertain,
conspicuously dressed in its black garments and with its hurried
head-covering, gaunt and of an unearthly paleness, it pressed forward,
taking no more heed of the throng than a sleep-walker. More remarkable
by being so removed from the crowd it was among than if it had been
lifted on a pedestal to be seen, the figure attracted all eyes.
Saunterers pricked up their attention to observe it; busy people,
crossing it, slackened their pace and turned their heads; companions
pausing and standing aside, whispered one another to look at this
spectral woman who was coming by; and the sweep of the figure as it
passed seemed to create a vortex, drawing the most idle and most curious
after it.

Made giddy by the turbulent irruption of this multitude of staring faces
into her cell of years, by the confusing sensation of being in the air,
and the yet more confusing sensation of being afoot, by the unexpected
changes in half-remembered objects, and the want of likeness between the
controllable pictures her imagination had often drawn of the life from
which she was secluded and the overwhelming rush of the reality, she
held her way as if she were environed by distracting thoughts, rather
than by external humanity and observation. But, having crossed the
bridge and gone some distance straight onward, she remembered that she
must ask for a direction; and it was only then, when she stopped and
turned to look about her for a promising place of inquiry, that she
found herself surrounded by an eager glare of faces.

‘Why are you encircling me?’ she asked, trembling.

None of those who were nearest answered; but from the outer ring there
arose a shrill cry of ‘’Cause you’re mad!’

‘I am sure as sane as any one here. I want to find the Marshalsea
prison.’

The shrill outer circle again retorted, ‘Then that ‘ud show you was mad
if nothing else did, ‘cause it’s right opposite!’

A short, mild, quiet-looking young man made his way through to her, as
a whooping ensued on this reply, and said: ‘Was it the Marshalsea you
wanted? I’m going on duty there. Come across with me.’

She laid her hand upon his arm, and he took her over the way; the crowd,
rather injured by the near prospect of losing her, pressing before and
behind and on either side, and recommending an adjournment to Bedlam.
After a momentary whirl in the outer court-yard, the prison-door opened,
and shut upon them. In the Lodge, which seemed by contrast with the
outer noise a place of refuge and peace, a yellow lamp was already
striving with the prison shadows.

‘Why, John!’ said the turnkey who admitted them. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing, father; only this lady not knowing her way, and being badgered
by the boys. Who did you want, ma’am?’

‘Miss Dorrit. Is she here?’

The young man became more interested. ‘Yes, she is here. What might your
name be?’

‘Mrs Clennam.’

‘Mr Clennam’s mother?’ asked the young man.

She pressed her lips together, and hesitated. ‘Yes. She had better be
told it is his mother.’

‘You see,’ said the young man, ‘the Marshal’s family living in the
country at present, the Marshal has given Miss Dorrit one of the rooms
in his house to use when she likes. Don’t you think you had better come
up there, and let me bring Miss Dorrit?’

She signified her assent, and he unlocked a door and conducted her up
a side staircase into a dwelling-house above. He showed her into a
darkening room, and left her. The room looked down into the darkening
prison-yard, with its inmates strolling here and there, leaning out
of windows communing as much apart as they could with friends who were
going away, and generally wearing out their imprisonment as they best
might that summer evening. The air was heavy and hot; the closeness
of the place, oppressive; and from without there arose a rush of
free sounds, like the jarring memory of such things in a headache and
heartache. She stood at the window, bewildered, looking down into this
prison as it were out of her own different prison, when a soft word or
two of surprise made her start, and Little Dorrit stood before her.

‘Is it possible, Mrs Clennam, that you are so happily recovered as--’

Little Dorrit stopped, for there was neither happiness nor health in the
face that turned to her.

‘This is not recovery; it is not strength; I don’t know what it is.’
With an agitated wave of her hand, she put all that aside. ‘You have a
packet left with you which you were to give to Arthur, if it was not
reclaimed before this place closed to-night.’

‘Yes.’

‘I reclaim it.’

Little Dorrit took it from her bosom, and gave it into her hand, which
remained stretched out after receiving it.

‘Have you any idea of its contents?’

Frightened by her being there with that new power Of Movement in her,
which, as she said herself, was not strength, and which was unreal
to look upon, as though a picture or statue had been animated, Little
Dorrit answered ‘No.’

‘Read them.’

Little Dorrit took the packet from the still outstretched hand, and
broke the seal. Mrs Clennam then gave her the inner packet that was
addressed to herself, and held the other. The shadow of the wall and of
the prison buildings, which made the room sombre at noon, made it too
dark to read there, with the dusk deepening apace, save in the window.
In the window, where a little of the bright summer evening sky
could shine upon her, Little Dorrit stood, and read. After a broken
exclamation or so of wonder and of terror, she read in silence. When
she had finished, she looked round, and her old mistress bowed herself
before her.

‘You know, now, what I have done.’

‘I think so. I am afraid so; though my mind is so hurried, and so sorry,
and has so much to pity that it has not been able to follow all I have
read,’ said Little Dorrit tremulously.

‘I will restore to you what I have withheld from you. Forgive me. Can
you forgive me?’

‘I can, and Heaven knows I do! Do not kiss my dress and kneel to me; you
are too old to kneel to me; I forgive you freely without that.’

‘I have more yet to ask.’

‘Not in that posture,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘It is unnatural to see your
grey hair lower than mine. Pray rise; let me help you.’ With that she
raised her up, and stood rather shrinking from her, but looking at her
earnestly.

‘The great petition that I make to you (there is another which grows
out of it), the great supplication that I address to your merciful and
gentle heart, is, that you will not disclose this to Arthur until I am
dead. If you think, when you have had time for consideration, that it
can do him any good to know it while I am yet alive, then tell him. But
you will not think that; and in such case, will you promise me to spare
me until I am dead?’

‘I am so sorry, and what I have read has so confused my thoughts,’
returned Little Dorrit, ‘that I can scarcely give you a steady answer.
If I should be quite sure that to be acquainted with it will do Mr
Clennam no good--’

‘I know you are attached to him, and will make him the first
consideration. It is right that he should be the first consideration. I
ask that. But, having regarded him, and still finding that you may spare
me for the little time I shall remain on earth, will you do it?’

‘I will.’

‘GOD bless you!’

She stood in the shadow so that she was only a veiled form to Little
Dorrit in the light; but the sound of her voice, in saying those three
grateful words, was at once fervent and broken--broken by emotion as
unfamiliar to her frozen eyes as action to her frozen limbs.

‘You will wonder, perhaps,’ she said in a stronger tone, ‘that I can
better bear to be known to you whom I have wronged, than to the son
of my enemy who wronged me.--For she did wrong me! She not only sinned
grievously against the Lord, but she wronged me. What Arthur’s father
was to me, she made him. From our marriage day I was his dread, and that
she made me. I was the scourge of both, and that is referable to her.
You love Arthur (I can see the blush upon your face; may it be the dawn
of happier days to both of you!), and you will have thought already that
he is as merciful and kind as you, and why do I not trust myself to him
as soon as to you. Have you not thought so?’

‘No thought,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘can be quite a stranger to my heart,
that springs out of the knowledge that Mr Clennam is always to be relied
upon for being kind and generous and good.’

‘I do not doubt it. Yet Arthur is, of the whole world, the one person
from whom I would conceal this, while I am in it. I kept over him as
a child, in the days of his first remembrance, my restraining and
correcting hand. I was stern with him, knowing that the transgressions
of the parents are visited on their offspring, and that there was an
angry mark upon him at his birth. I have sat with him and his father,
seeing the weakness of his father yearning to unbend to him; and forcing
it back, that the child might work out his release in bondage and
hardship. I have seen him, with his mother’s face, looking up at me in
awe from his little books, and trying to soften me with his mother’s
ways that hardened me.’

The shrinking of her auditress stopped her for a moment in her flow of
words, delivered in a retrospective gloomy voice.

‘For his good. Not for the satisfaction of my injury. What was I, and
what was the worth of that, before the curse of Heaven! I have seen that
child grow up; not to be pious in a chosen way (his mother’s influence
lay too heavy on him for that), but still to be just and upright, and
to be submissive to me. He never loved me, as I once half-hoped he
might--so frail we are, and so do the corrupt affections of the flesh
war with our trusts and tasks; but he always respected me and ordered
himself dutifully to me. He does to this hour. With an empty place in
his heart that he has never known the meaning of, he has turned
away from me and gone his separate road; but even that he has done
considerately and with deference. These have been his relations towards
me. Yours have been of a much slighter kind, spread over a much shorter
time. When you have sat at your needle in my room, you have been in fear
of me, but you have supposed me to have been doing you a kindness; you
are better informed now, and know me to have done you an injury. Your
misconstruction and misunderstanding of the cause in which, and the
motives with which, I have worked out this work, is lighter to endure
than his would be. I would not, for any worldly recompense I can
imagine, have him in a moment, however blindly, throw me down from the
station I have held before him all his life, and change me altogether
into something he would cast out of his respect, and think detected and
exposed. Let him do it, if it must be done, when I am not here to see
it. Let me never feel, while I am still alive, that I die before his
face, and utterly perish away from him, like one consumed by lightning
and swallowed by an earthquake.’

Her pride was very strong in her, the pain of it and of her old passions
was very sharp with her, when she thus expressed herself. Not less so,
when she added:

‘Even now, I see _you_ shrink from me, as if I had been cruel.’

Little Dorrit could not gainsay it. She tried not to show it, but she
recoiled with dread from the state of mind that had burnt so fiercely
and lasted so long. It presented itself to her, with no sophistry upon
it, in its own plain nature.

‘I have done,’ said Mrs Clennam, ‘what it was given to me to do. I have
set myself against evil; not against good. I have been an instrument
of severity against sin. Have not mere sinners like myself been
commissioned to lay it low in all time?’

‘In all time?’ repeated Little Dorrit.

‘Even if my own wrong had prevailed with me, and my own vengeance had
moved me, could I have found no justification? None in the old days
when the innocent perished with the guilty, a thousand to one? When the
wrath of the hater of the unrighteous was not slaked even in blood, and
yet found favour?’

‘O, Mrs Clennam, Mrs Clennam,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘angry feelings and
unforgiving deeds are no comfort and no guide to you and me. My life
has been passed in this poor prison, and my teaching has been very
defective; but let me implore you to remember later and better days.
Be guided only by the healer of the sick, the raiser of the dead, the
friend of all who were afflicted and forlorn, the patient Master who
shed tears of compassion for our infirmities. We cannot but be right if
we put all the rest away, and do everything in remembrance of Him. There
is no vengeance and no infliction of suffering in His life, I am sure.
There can be no confusion in following Him, and seeking for no other
footsteps, I am certain.’

In the softened light of the window, looking from the scene of her early
trials to the shining sky, she was not in stronger opposition to the
black figure in the shade than the life and doctrine on which she rested
were to that figure’s history. It bent its head low again, and said not
a word. It remained thus, until the first warning bell began to ring.

‘Hark!’ cried Mrs Clennam starting, ‘I said I had another petition.
It is one that does not admit of delay. The man who brought you this
packet and possesses these proofs, is now waiting at my house to be
bought off. I can keep this from Arthur, only by buying him off. He
asks a large sum; more than I can get together to pay him without having
time. He refuses to make any abatement, because his threat is, that if
he fails with me, he will come to you. Will you return with me and show
him that you already know it? Will you return with me and try to prevail
with him? Will you come and help me with him? Do not refuse what I ask
in Arthur’s name, though I dare not ask it for Arthur’s sake!’

Little Dorrit yielded willingly. She glided away into the prison for a
few moments, returned, and said she was ready to go. They went out
by another staircase, avoiding the lodge; and coming into the front
court-yard, now all quiet and deserted, gained the street.

It was one of those summer evenings when there is no greater darkness
than a long twilight. The vista of street and bridge was plain to see,
and the sky was serene and beautiful. People stood and sat at their
doors, playing with children and enjoying the evening; numbers were
walking for air; the worry of the day had almost worried itself out, and
few but themselves were hurried. As they crossed the bridge, the clear
steeples of the many churches looked as if they had advanced out of the
murk that usually enshrouded them, and come much nearer. The smoke that
rose into the sky had lost its dingy hue and taken a brightness upon it.
The beauties of the sunset had not faded from the long light films of
cloud that lay at peace in the horizon. From a radiant centre, over
the whole length and breadth of the tranquil firmament, great shoots of
light streamed among the early stars, like signs of the blessed later
covenant of peace and hope that changed the crown of thorns into a
glory.

Less remarkable, now that she was not alone and it was darker, Mrs
Clennam hurried on at Little Dorrit’s side, unmolested. They left the
great thoroughfare at the turning by which she had entered it, and wound
their way down among the silent, empty, cross-streets. Their feet were
at the gateway, when there was a sudden noise like thunder.

‘What was that! Let us make haste in,’ cried Mrs Clennam.

They were in the gateway. Little Dorrit, with a piercing cry, held her
back.

In one swift instant the old house was before them, with the man lying
smoking in the window; another thundering sound, and it heaved, surged
outward, opened asunder in fifty places, collapsed, and fell. Deafened
by the noise, stifled, choked, and blinded by the dust, they hid their
faces and stood rooted to the spot. The dust storm, driving between them
and the placid sky, parted for a moment and showed them the stars. As
they looked up, wildly crying for help, the great pile of chimneys,
which was then alone left standing like a tower in a whirlwind, rocked,
broke, and hailed itself down upon the heap of ruin, as if every
tumbling fragment were intent on burying the crushed wretch deeper.

So blackened by the flying particles of rubbish as to be unrecognisable,
they ran back from the gateway into the street, crying and shrieking.
There, Mrs Clennam dropped upon the stones; and she never from that hour
moved so much as a finger again, or had the power to speak one word.
For upwards of three years she reclined in a wheeled chair, looking
attentively at those about her and appearing to understand what they
said; but the rigid silence she had so long held was evermore enforced
upon her, and except that she could move her eyes and faintly express a
negative and affirmative with her head, she lived and died a statue.

Affery had been looking for them at the prison, and had caught sight
of them at a distance on the bridge. She came up to receive her old
mistress in her arms, to help to carry her into a neighbouring house,
and to be faithful to her. The mystery of the noises was out now;
Affery, like greater people, had always been right in her facts, and
always wrong in the theories she deduced from them.

When the storm of dust had cleared away and the summer night was calm
again, numbers of people choked up every avenue of access, and parties
of diggers were formed to relieve one another in digging among the
ruins. There had been a hundred people in the house at the time of its
fall, there had been fifty, there had been fifteen, there had been
two. Rumour finally settled the number at two; the foreigner and Mr
Flintwinch.

The diggers dug all through the short night by flaring pipes of gas, and
on a level with the early sun, and deeper and deeper below it as it rose
into its zenith, and aslant of it as it declined, and on a level with it
again as it departed. Sturdy digging, and shovelling, and carrying away,
in carts, barrows, and baskets, went on without intermission, by night
and by day; but it was night for the second time when they found the
dirty heap of rubbish that had been the foreigner before his head had
been shivered to atoms, like so much glass, by the great beam that lay
upon him, crushing him.

Still, they had not come upon Flintwinch yet; so the sturdy digging and
shovelling and carrying away went on without intermission by night and
by day. It got about that the old house had had famous cellarage (which
indeed was true), and that Flintwinch had been in a cellar at the
moment, or had had time to escape into one, and that he was safe under
its strong arch, and even that he had been heard to cry, in hollow,
subterranean, suffocated notes, ‘Here I am!’ At the opposite extremity
of the town it was even known that the excavators had been able to open
a communication with him through a pipe, and that he had received both
soup and brandy by that channel, and that he had said with admirable
fortitude that he was All right, my lads, with the exception of his
collar-bone. But the digging and shovelling and carrying away went on
without intermission, until the ruins were all dug out, and the cellars
opened to the light; and still no Flintwinch, living or dead, all right
or all wrong, had been turned up by pick or spade.

It began then to be perceived that Flintwinch had not been there at the
time of the fall; and it began then to be perceived that he had been
rather busy elsewhere, converting securities into as much money as could
be got for them on the shortest notice, and turning to his own exclusive
account his authority to act for the Firm. Affery, remembering that the
clever one had said he would explain himself further in four-and-twenty
hours’ time, determined for her part that his taking himself off within
that period with all he could get, was the final satisfactory sum and
substance of his promised explanation; but she held her peace, devoutly
thankful to be quit of him. As it seemed reasonable to conclude that a
man who had never been buried could not be unburied, the diggers gave
him up when their task was done, and did not dig down for him into the
depths of the earth.

This was taken in ill part by a great many people, who persisted
in believing that Flintwinch was lying somewhere among the London
geological formation. Nor was their belief much shaken by repeated
intelligence which came over in course of time, that an old man who wore
the tie of his neckcloth under one ear, and who was very well known to
be an Englishman, consorted with the Dutchmen on the quaint banks of the
canals of the Hague and in the drinking-shops of Amsterdam, under the
style and designation of Mynheer von Flyntevynge.




CHAPTER 32. Going


Arthur continuing to lie very ill in the Marshalsea, and Mr Rugg
descrying no break in the legal sky affording a hope of his enlargement,
Mr Pancks suffered desperately from self-reproaches. If it had not been
for those infallible figures which proved that Arthur, instead of pining
in imprisonment, ought to be promenading in a carriage and pair, and
that Mr Pancks, instead of being restricted to his clerkly wages, ought
to have from three to five thousand pounds of his own at his immediate
disposal, that unhappy arithmetician would probably have taken to his
bed, and there have made one of the many obscure persons who turned
their faces to the wall and died, as a last sacrifice to the late Mr
Merdle’s greatness. Solely supported by his unimpugnable calculations,
Mr Pancks led an unhappy and restless life; constantly carrying his
figures about with him in his hat, and not only going over them himself
on every possible occasion, but entreating every human being he could
lay hold of to go over them with him, and observe what a clear case it
was. Down in Bleeding Heart Yard there was scarcely an inhabitant of
note to whom Mr Pancks had not imparted his demonstration, and, as
figures are catching, a kind of cyphering measles broke out in that
locality, under the influence of which the whole Yard was light-headed.

The more restless Mr Pancks grew in his mind, the more impatient he
became of the Patriarch. In their later conferences his snorting assumed
an irritable sound which boded the Patriarch no good; likewise, Mr
Pancks had on several occasions looked harder at the Patriarchal bumps
than was quite reconcilable with the fact of his not being a painter, or
a peruke-maker in search of the living model.

However, he steamed in and out of his little back Dock according as he
was wanted or not wanted in the Patriarchal presence, and business had
gone on in its customary course. Bleeding Heart Yard had been harrowed
by Mr Pancks, and cropped by Mr Casby, at the regular seasons; Mr Pancks
had taken all the drudgery and all the dirt of the business as _his_
share; Mr Casby had taken all the profits, all the ethereal vapour, and
all the moonshine, as his share; and, in the form of words which that
benevolent beamer generally employed on Saturday evenings, when he
twirled his fat thumbs after striking the week’s balance, ‘everything
had been satisfactory to all parties--all parties--satisfactory, sir, to
all parties.’

The Dock of the Steam-Tug, Pancks, had a leaden roof, which, frying in
the very hot sunshine, may have heated the vessel. Be that as it
may, one glowing Saturday evening, on being hailed by the lumbering
bottle-green ship, the Tug instantly came working out of the Dock in a
highly heated condition.

‘Mr Pancks,’ was the Patriarchal remark, ‘you have been remiss, you have
been remiss, sir.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ was the short rejoinder.

The Patriarchal state, always a state of calmness and composure, was
so particularly serene that evening as to be provoking. Everybody else
within the bills of mortality was hot; but the Patriarch was perfectly
cool. Everybody was thirsty, and the Patriarch was drinking. There was
a fragrance of limes or lemons about him; and he made a drink of golden
sherry, which shone in a large tumbler as if he were drinking the
evening sunshine. This was bad, but not the worst. The worst was, that
with his big blue eyes, and his polished head, and his long white hair,
and his bottle-green legs stretched out before him, terminating in his
easy shoes easily crossed at the instep, he had a radiant appearance
of having in his extensive benevolence made the drink for the human
species, while he himself wanted nothing but his own milk of human
kindness.

Wherefore, Mr Pancks said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ and put his hair
up with both hands, in a highly portentous manner.

‘I mean, Mr Pancks, that you must be sharper with the people, sharper
with the people, much sharper with the people, sir. You don’t squeeze
them. You don’t squeeze them. Your receipts are not up to the mark. You
must squeeze them, sir, or our connection will not continue to be as
satisfactory as I could wish it to be to all parties. All parties.’

‘_Don’t_ I squeeze ‘em?’ retorted Mr Pancks. ‘What else am I made for?’

‘You are made for nothing else, Mr Pancks. You are made to do your
duty, but you don’t do your duty. You are paid to squeeze, and you
must squeeze to pay.’ The Patriarch so much surprised himself by this
brilliant turn, after Dr Johnson, which he had not in the least
expected or intended, that he laughed aloud; and repeated with great
satisfaction, as he twirled his thumbs and nodded at his youthful
portrait, ‘Paid to squeeze, sir, and must squeeze to pay.’

‘Oh,’ said Pancks. ‘Anything more?’

‘Yes, sir, yes, sir. Something more. You will please, Mr Pancks, to
squeeze the Yard again, the first thing on Monday morning.’

‘Oh!’ said Pancks. ‘Ain’t that too soon? I squeezed it dry to-day.’

‘Nonsense, sir. Not near the mark, not near the mark.’

‘Oh!’ said Pancks, watching him as he benevolently gulped down a good
draught of his mixture. ‘Anything more?’

‘Yes, sir, yes, sir, something more. I am not at all pleased, Mr Pancks,
with my daughter; not at all pleased. Besides calling much too often
to inquire for Mrs Clennam, Mrs Clennam, who is not just now in
circumstances that are by any means calculated to--to be satisfactory to
all parties, she goes, Mr Pancks, unless I am much deceived, to inquire
for Mr Clennam in jail. In jail.’

‘He’s laid up, you know,’ said Pancks. ‘Perhaps it’s kind.’

‘Pooh, pooh, Mr Pancks. She has nothing to do with that, nothing to do
with that. I can’t allow it. Let him pay his debts and come out, come
out; pay his debts, and come out.’

Although Mr Pancks’s hair was standing up like strong wire, he gave it
another double-handed impulse in the perpendicular direction, and smiled
at his proprietor in a most hideous manner.

‘You will please to mention to my daughter, Mr Pancks, that I can’t
allow it, can’t allow it,’ said the Patriarch blandly.

‘Oh!’ said Pancks. ‘You couldn’t mention it yourself?’

‘No, sir, no; you are paid to mention it,’ the blundering old booby
could not resist the temptation of trying it again, ‘and you must
mention it to pay, mention it to pay.’

‘Oh!’ said Pancks. ‘Anything more?’

‘Yes, sir. It appears to me, Mr Pancks, that you yourself are too often
and too much in that direction, that direction. I recommend you, Mr
Pancks, to dismiss from your attention both your own losses and other
people’s losses, and to mind your business, mind your business.’

Mr Pancks acknowledged this recommendation with such an extraordinarily
abrupt, short, and loud utterance of the monosyllable ‘Oh!’ that even
the unwieldy Patriarch moved his blue eyes in something of a hurry, to
look at him. Mr Pancks, with a sniff of corresponding intensity, then
added, ‘Anything more?’

‘Not at present, sir, not at present. I am going,’ said the Patriarch,
finishing his mixture, and rising with an amiable air, ‘to take a little
stroll, a little stroll. Perhaps I shall find you here when I come back.
If not, sir, duty, duty; squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, on Monday; squeeze
on Monday!’

Mr Pancks, after another stiffening of his hair, looked on at the
Patriarchal assumption of the broad-brimmed hat, with a momentary
appearance of indecision contending with a sense of injury. He was also
hotter than at first, and breathed harder. But he suffered Mr Casby to
go out, without offering any further remark, and then took a peep at
him over the little green window-blinds. ‘I thought so,’ he observed. ‘I
knew where you were bound to. Good!’ He then steamed back to his Dock,
put it carefully in order, took down his hat, looked round the Dock,
said ‘Good-bye!’ and puffed away on his own account. He steered straight
for Mrs Plornish’s end of Bleeding Heart Yard, and arrived there, at the
top of the steps, hotter than ever.

At the top of the steps, resisting Mrs Plornish’s invitations to come
and sit along with father in Happy Cottage--which to his relief were not
so numerous as they would have been on any other night than Saturday,
when the connection who so gallantly supported the business with
everything but money gave their orders freely--at the top of the steps
Mr Pancks remained until he beheld the Patriarch, who always entered
the Yard at the other end, slowly advancing, beaming, and surrounded
by suitors. Then Mr Pancks descended and bore down upon him, with his
utmost pressure of steam on.

The Patriarch, approaching with his usual benignity, was surprised to
see Mr Pancks, but supposed him to have been stimulated to an immediate
squeeze instead of postponing that operation until Monday. The
population of the Yard were astonished at the meeting, for the two
powers had never been seen there together, within the memory of the
oldest Bleeding Heart. But they were overcome by unutterable amazement
when Mr Pancks, going close up to the most venerable of men and halting
in front of the bottle-green waistcoat, made a trigger of his right
thumb and forefinger, applied the same to the brim of the broad-brimmed
hat, and, with singular smartness and precision, shot it off the
polished head as if it had been a large marble.

Having taken this little liberty with the Patriarchal person, Mr Pancks
further astounded and attracted the Bleeding Hearts by saying in an
audible voice, ‘Now, you sugary swindler, I mean to have it out with
you!’

Mr Pancks and the Patriarch were instantly the centre of a press, all
eyes and ears; windows were thrown open, and door-steps were thronged.

‘What do you pretend to be?’ said Mr Pancks. ‘What’s your moral game?
What do you go in for? Benevolence, an’t it? You benevolent!’ Here Mr
Pancks, apparently without the intention of hitting him, but merely to
relieve his mind and expend his superfluous power in wholesome exercise,
aimed a blow at the bumpy head, which the bumpy head ducked to
avoid. This singular performance was repeated, to the ever-increasing
admiration of the spectators, at the end of every succeeding article of
Mr Pancks’s oration.

‘I have discharged myself from your service,’ said Pancks, ‘that I may
tell you what you are. You’re one of a lot of impostors that are the
worst lot of all the lots to be met with. Speaking as a sufferer by
both, I don’t know that I wouldn’t as soon have the Merdle lot as your
lot. You’re a driver in disguise, a screwer by deputy, a wringer, and
squeezer, and shaver by substitute. You’re a philanthropic sneak. You’re
a shabby deceiver!’

(The repetition of the performance at this point was received with a
burst of laughter.)

‘Ask these good people who’s the hard man here. They’ll tell you Pancks,
I believe.’

This was confirmed with cries of ‘Certainly,’ and ‘Hear!’

‘But I tell you, good people--Casby! This mound of meekness, this lump
of love, this bottle-green smiler, this is your driver!’ said Pancks.
‘If you want to see the man who would flay you alive--here he is! Don’t
look for him in me, at thirty shillings a week, but look for him in
Casby, at I don’t know how much a year!’

‘Good!’ cried several voices. ‘Hear Mr Pancks!’

‘Hear Mr Pancks?’ cried that gentleman (after repeating the popular
performance). ‘Yes, I should think so! It’s almost time to hear Mr
Pancks. Mr Pancks has come down into the Yard to-night on purpose that
you should hear him. Pancks is only the Works; but here’s the Winder!’

The audience would have gone over to Mr Pancks, as one man, woman, and
child, but for the long, grey, silken locks, and the broad-brimmed hat.

‘Here’s the Stop,’ said Pancks, ‘that sets the tune to be ground. And
there is but one tune, and its name is Grind, Grind, Grind! Here’s the
Proprietor, and here’s his Grubber. Why, good people, when he comes
smoothly spinning through the Yard to-night, like a slow-going
benevolent Humming-Top, and when you come about him with your complaints
of the Grubber, you don’t know what a cheat the Proprietor is! What do
you think of his showing himself to-night, that I may have all the blame
on Monday? What do you think of his having had me over the coals this
very evening, because I don’t squeeze you enough? What do you think of
my being, at the present moment, under special orders to squeeze you dry
on Monday?’

The reply was given in a murmur of ‘Shame!’ and ‘Shabby!’

‘Shabby?’ snorted Pancks. ‘Yes, I should think so! The lot that your
Casby belongs to, is the shabbiest of all the lots. Setting their
Grubbers on, at a wretched pittance, to do what they’re ashamed and
afraid to do and pretend not to do, but what they will have done, or
give a man no rest! Imposing on you to give their Grubbers nothing but
blame, and to give them nothing but credit! Why, the worst-looking
cheat in all this town who gets the value of eighteenpence under false
pretences, an’t half such a cheat as this sign-post of The Casby’s Head
here!’

Cries of ‘That’s true!’ and ‘No more he an’t!’

‘And see what you get of these fellows, besides,’ said Pancks. ‘See what
more you get of these precious Humming-Tops, revolving among you with
such smoothness that you’ve no idea of the pattern painted on ‘em, or
the little window in ‘em. I wish to call your attention to myself for a
moment. I an’t an agreeable style of chap, I know that very well.’

The auditory were divided on this point; its more uncompromising members
crying, ‘No, you are not,’ and its politer materials, ‘Yes, you are.’

‘I am, in general,’ said Mr Pancks, ‘a dry, uncomfortable, dreary
Plodder and Grubber. That’s your humble servant. There’s his full-length
portrait, painted by himself and presented to you, warranted a likeness!
But what’s a man to be, with such a man as this for his Proprietor?
What can be expected of him? Did anybody ever find boiled mutton and
caper-sauce growing in a cocoa-nut?’

None of the Bleeding Hearts ever had, it was clear from the alacrity of
their response.

‘Well,’ said Mr Pancks, ‘and neither will you find in Grubbers like
myself, under Proprietors like this, pleasant qualities. I’ve been a
Grubber from a boy. What has my life been? Fag and grind, fag and grind,
turn the wheel, turn the wheel! I haven’t been agreeable to myself,
and I haven’t been likely to be agreeable to anybody else. If I was a
shilling a week less useful in ten years’ time, this impostor would give
me a shilling a week less; if as useful a man could be got at sixpence
cheaper, he would be taken in my place at sixpence cheaper. Bargain and
sale, bless you! Fixed principles! It’s a mighty fine sign-post, is The
Casby’s Head,’ said Mr Pancks, surveying it with anything rather than
admiration; ‘but the real name of the House is the Sham’s Arms. Its
motto is, Keep the Grubber always at it. Is any gentleman present,’ said
Mr Pancks, breaking off and looking round, ‘acquainted with the English
Grammar?’

Bleeding Heart Yard was shy of claiming that acquaintance.

‘It’s no matter,’ said Mr Pancks, ‘I merely wish to remark that the task
this Proprietor has set me, has been never to leave off conjugating the
Imperative Mood Present Tense of the verb To keep always at it. Keep
thou always at it. Let him keep always at it. Keep we or do we keep
always at it. Keep ye or do ye or you keep always at it. Let them keep
always at it. Here is your benevolent Patriarch of a Casby, and there is
his golden rule. He is uncommonly improving to look at, and I am not
at all so. He is as sweet as honey, and I am as dull as ditch-water. He
provides the pitch, and I handle it, and it sticks to me. Now,’ said
Mr Pancks, closing upon his late Proprietor again, from whom he had
withdrawn a little for the better display of him to the Yard; ‘as I am
not accustomed to speak in public, and as I have made a rather lengthy
speech, all circumstances considered, I shall bring my observations to a
close by requesting you to get out of this.’

The Last of the Patriarchs had been so seized by assault, and required
so much room to catch an idea in, an so much more room to turn it in,
that he had not a word to offer in reply. He appeared to be meditating
some Patriarchal way out of his delicate position, when Mr Pancks, once
more suddenly applying the trigger to his hat, shot it off again with
his former dexterity. On the preceding occasion, one or two of the
Bleeding Heart Yarders had obsequiously picked it up and handed it to
its owner; but Mr Pancks had now so far impressed his audience, that the
Patriarch had to turn and stoop for it himself.

Quick as lightning, Mr Pancks, who, for some moments, had had his right
hand in his coat pocket, whipped out a pair of shears, swooped upon the
Patriarch behind, and snipped off short the sacred locks that flowed
upon his shoulders. In a paroxysm of animosity and rapidity, Mr Pancks
then caught the broad-brimmed hat out of the astounded Patriarch’s hand,
cut it down into a mere stewpan, and fixed it on the Patriarch’s head.

Before the frightful results of this desperate action, Mr Pancks himself
recoiled in consternation. A bare-polled, goggle-eyed, big-headed
lumbering personage stood staring at him, not in the least impressive,
not in the least venerable, who seemed to have started out of the
earth to ask what was become of Casby. After staring at this phantom in
return, in silent awe, Mr Pancks threw down his shears, and fled for a
place of hiding, where he might lie sheltered from the consequences of
his crime. Mr Pancks deemed it prudent to use all possible despatch in
making off, though he was pursued by nothing but the sound of laughter
in Bleeding Heart Yard, rippling through the air and making it ring
again.




CHAPTER 33. Going!


The changes of a fevered room are slow and fluctuating; but the changes
of the fevered world are rapid and irrevocable.

It was Little Dorrit’s lot to wait upon both kinds of change. The
Marshalsea walls, during a portion of every day, again embraced her in
their shadows as their child, while she thought for Clennam, worked for
him, watched him, and only left him, still to devote her utmost love and
care to him. Her part in the life outside the gate urged its pressing
claims upon her too, and her patience untiringly responded to them.
Here was Fanny, proud, fitful, whimsical, further advanced in that
disqualified state for going into society which had so much fretted
her on the evening of the tortoise-shell knife, resolved always to want
comfort, resolved not to be comforted, resolved to be deeply wronged,
and resolved that nobody should have the audacity to think her so. Here
was her brother, a weak, proud, tipsy, young old man, shaking from
head to foot, talking as indistinctly as if some of the money he plumed
himself upon had got into his mouth and couldn’t be got out, unable to
walk alone in any act of his life, and patronising the sister whom he
selfishly loved (he always had that negative merit, ill-starred and
ill-launched Tip!) because he suffered her to lead him. Here was Mrs
Merdle in gauzy mourning--the original cap whereof had possibly been
rent to pieces in a fit of grief, but had certainly yielded to a highly
becoming article from the Parisian market--warring with Fanny foot to
foot, and breasting her with her desolate bosom every hour in the day.
Here was poor Mr Sparkler, not knowing how to keep the peace between
them, but humbly inclining to the opinion that they could do no better
than agree that they were both remarkably fine women, and that there was
no nonsense about either of them--for which gentle recommendation they
united in falling upon him frightfully. Then, too, here was Mrs General,
got home from foreign parts, sending a Prune and a Prism by post every
other day, demanding a new Testimonial by way of recommendation to some
vacant appointment or other. Of which remarkable gentlewoman it may be
finally observed, that there surely never was a gentlewoman of whose
transcendent fitness for any vacant appointment on the face of this
earth, so many people were (as the warmth of her Testimonials evinced)
so perfectly satisfied--or who was so very unfortunate in having a
large circle of ardent and distinguished admirers, who never themselves
happened to want her in any capacity.

On the first crash of the eminent Mr Merdle’s decease, many important
persons had been unable to determine whether they should cut Mrs Merdle,
or comfort her. As it seemed, however, essential to the strength of
their own case that they should admit her to have been cruelly deceived,
they graciously made the admission, and continued to know her. It
followed that Mrs Merdle, as a woman of fashion and good breeding who
had been sacrificed to the wiles of a vulgar barbarian (for Mr Merdle
was found out from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, the
moment he was found out in his pocket), must be actively championed by
her order for her order’s sake. She returned this fealty by causing it
to be understood that she was even more incensed against the felonious
shade of the deceased than anybody else was; thus, on the whole, she
came out of her furnace like a wise woman, and did exceedingly well.

Mr Sparkler’s lordship was fortunately one of those shelves on which a
gentleman is considered to be put away for life, unless there should be
reasons for hoisting him up with the Barnacle crane to a more lucrative
height. That patriotic servant accordingly stuck to his colours (the
Standard of four Quarterings), and was a perfect Nelson in respect
of nailing them to the mast. On the profits of his intrepidity, Mrs
Sparkler and Mrs Merdle, inhabiting different floors of the genteel
little temple of inconvenience to which the smell of the day before
yesterday’s soup and coach-horses was as constant as Death to man,
arrayed themselves to fight it out in the lists of Society, sworn
rivals. And Little Dorrit, seeing all these things as they developed
themselves, could not but wonder, anxiously, into what back corner of
the genteel establishment Fanny’s children would be poked by-and-by, and
who would take care of those unborn little victims.

Arthur being far too ill to be spoken with on subjects of emotion or
anxiety, and his recovery greatly depending on the repose into which
his weakness could be hushed, Little Dorrit’s sole reliance during this
heavy period was on Mr Meagles. He was still abroad; but she had written
to him through his daughter, immediately after first seeing Arthur in
the Marshalsea and since, confiding her uneasiness to him on the points
on which she was most anxious, but especially on one. To that one,
the continued absence of Mr Meagles abroad, instead of his comforting
presence in the Marshalsea, was referable.

Without disclosing the precise nature of the documents that had fallen
into Rigaud’s hands, Little Dorrit had confided the general outline of
that story to Mr Meagles, to whom she had also recounted his fate. The
old cautious habits of the scales and scoop at once showed Mr Meagles
the importance of recovering the original papers; wherefore he wrote
back to Little Dorrit, strongly confirming her in the solicitude she
expressed on that head, and adding that he would not come over to
England ‘without making some attempt to trace them out.’

By this time Mr Henry Gowan had made up his mind that it would be
agreeable to him not to know the Meagleses. He was so considerate as to
lay no injunctions on his wife in that particular; but he mentioned
to Mr Meagles that personally they did not appear to him to get on
together, and that he thought it would be a good thing if--politely, and
without any scene, or anything of that sort--they agreed that they were
the best fellows in the world, but were best apart. Poor Mr Meagles, who
was already sensible that he did not advance his daughter’s happiness by
being constantly slighted in her presence, said ‘Good, Henry! You are
my Pet’s husband; you have displaced me, in the course of nature; if
you wish it, good!’ This arrangement involved the contingent advantage,
which perhaps Henry Gowan had not foreseen, that both Mr and Mrs
Meagles were more liberal than before to their daughter, when their
communication was only with her and her young child: and that his high
spirit found itself better provided with money, without being under the
degrading necessity of knowing whence it came.

Mr Meagles, at such a period, naturally seized an occupation with great
ardour. He knew from his daughter the various towns which Rigaud had
been haunting, and the various hotels at which he had been living for
some time back. The occupation he set himself was to visit these with
all discretion and speed, and, in the event of finding anywhere that he
had left a bill unpaid, and a box or parcel behind, to pay such bill,
and bring away such box or parcel.

With no other attendant than Mother, Mr Meagles went upon his
pilgrimage, and encountered a number of adventures. Not the least of his
difficulties was, that he never knew what was said to him, and that he
pursued his inquiries among people who never knew what he said to them.
Still, with an unshaken confidence that the English tongue was somehow
the mother tongue of the whole world, only the people were too stupid
to know it, Mr Meagles harangued innkeepers in the most voluble manner,
entered into loud explanations of the most complicated sort, and utterly
renounced replies in the native language of the respondents, on the
ground that they were ‘all bosh.’ Sometimes interpreters were called
in; whom Mr Meagles addressed in such idiomatic terms of speech, as
instantly to extinguish and shut up--which made the matter worse. On a
balance of the account, however, it may be doubted whether he lost much;
for, although he found no property, he found so many debts and various
associations of discredit with the proper name, which was the only word
he made intelligible, that he was almost everywhere overwhelmed with
injurious accusations. On no fewer than four occasions the police
were called in to receive denunciations of Mr Meagles as a Knight of
Industry, a good-for-nothing, and a thief, all of which opprobrious
language he bore with the best temper (having no idea what it meant),
and was in the most ignominious manner escorted to steam-boats and
public carriages, to be got rid of, talking all the while, like a
cheerful and fluent Briton as he was, with Mother under his arm.

But, in his own tongue, and in his own head, Mr Meagles was a clear,
shrewd, persevering man. When he had ‘worked round,’ as he called it, to
Paris in his pilgrimage, and had wholly failed in it so far, he was not
disheartened. ‘The nearer to England I follow him, you see, Mother,’
argued Mr Meagles, ‘the nearer I am likely to come to the papers,
whether they turn up or no. Because it is only reasonable to conclude
that he would deposit them somewhere where they would be safe from
people over in England, and where they would yet be accessible to
himself, don’t you see?’

At Paris Mr Meagles found a letter from Little Dorrit, lying waiting for
him; in which she mentioned that she had been able to talk for a minute
or two with Mr Clennam about this man who was no more; and that when she
told Mr Clennam that his friend Mr Meagles, who was on his way to see
him, had an interest in ascertaining something about the man if he
could, he had asked her to tell Mr Meagles that he had been known
to Miss Wade, then living in such a street at Calais. ‘Oho!’ said Mr
Meagles.

As soon afterwards as might be in those Diligence days, Mr Meagles
rang the cracked bell at the cracked gate, and it jarred open, and the
peasant-woman stood in the dark doorway, saying, ‘Ice-say! Seer! Who?’
In acknowledgment of whose address, Mr Meagles murmured to himself that
there was some sense about these Calais people, who really did know
something of what you and themselves were up to; and returned, ‘Miss
Wade, my dear.’ He was then shown into the presence of Miss Wade.

‘It’s some time since we met,’ said Mr Meagles, clearing his throat; ‘I
hope you have been pretty well, Miss Wade?’

Without hoping that he or anybody else had been pretty well, Miss Wade
asked him to what she was indebted for the honour of seeing him again?
Mr Meagles, in the meanwhile, glanced all round the room without
observing anything in the shape of a box.

‘Why, the truth is, Miss Wade,’ said Mr Meagles, in a comfortable,
managing, not to say coaxing voice, ‘it is possible that you may be able
to throw a light upon a little something that is at present dark. Any
unpleasant bygones between us are bygones, I hope. Can’t be helped now.
You recollect my daughter? Time changes so! A mother!’

In his innocence, Mr Meagles could not have struck a worse key-note. He
paused for any expression of interest, but paused in vain.

‘That is not the subject you wished to enter on?’ she said, after a cold
silence.

‘No, no,’ returned Mr Meagles. ‘No. I thought your good nature might--’

‘I thought you knew,’ she interrupted, with a smile, ‘that my good
nature is not to be calculated upon?’

‘Don’t say so,’ said Mr Meagles; ‘you do yourself an injustice. However,
to come to the point.’ For he was sensible of having gained nothing
by approaching it in a roundabout way. ‘I have heard from my friend
Clennam, who, you will be sorry to hear, has been and still is very
ill--’

He paused again, and again she was silent.

‘--that you had some knowledge of one Blandois, lately killed in London
by a violent accident. Now, don’t mistake me! I know it was a slight
knowledge,’ said Mr Meagles, dexterously forestalling an angry
interruption which he saw about to break. ‘I am fully aware of that. It
was a slight knowledge, I know. But the question is,’ Mr Meagles’s voice
here became comfortable again, ‘did he, on his way to England last time,
leave a box of papers, or a bundle of papers, or some papers or other in
some receptacle or other--any papers--with you: begging you to allow him
to leave them here for a short time, until he wanted them?’

‘The question is?’ she repeated. ‘Whose question is?’

‘Mine,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘And not only mine but Clennam’s question, and
other people’s question. Now, I am sure,’ continued Mr Meagles, whose
heart was overflowing with Pet, ‘that you can’t have any unkind feeling
towards my daughter; it’s impossible. Well! It’s her question, too;
being one in which a particular friend of hers is nearly interested.
So here I am, frankly to say that is the question, and to ask, Now, did
he?’

‘Upon my word,’ she returned, ‘I seem to be a mark for everybody who
knew anything of a man I once in my life hired, and paid, and dismissed,
to aim their questions at!’

‘Now, don’t,’ remonstrated Mr Meagles, ‘don’t! Don’t take offence,
because it’s the plainest question in the world, and might be asked
of any one. The documents I refer to were not his own, were wrongfully
obtained, might at some time or other be troublesome to an innocent
person to have in keeping, and are sought by the people to whom they
really belong. He passed through Calais going to London, and there were
reasons why he should not take them with him then, why he should wish
to be able to put his hand upon them readily, and why he should distrust
leaving them with people of his own sort. Did he leave them here? I
declare if I knew how to avoid giving you offence, I would take any
pains to do it. I put the question personally, but there’s nothing
personal in it. I might put it to any one; I have put it already to many
people. Did he leave them here? Did he leave anything here?’

‘No.’

‘Then unfortunately, Miss Wade, you know nothing about them?’

‘I know nothing about them. I have now answered your unaccountable
question. He did not leave them here, and I know nothing about them.’

‘There!’ said Mr Meagles rising. ‘I am sorry for it; that’s over; and I
hope there is not much harm done.--Tattycoram well, Miss Wade?’

‘Harriet well? O yes!’

‘I have put my foot in it again,’ said Mr Meagles, thus corrected. ‘I
can’t keep my foot out of it here, it seems. Perhaps, if I had thought
twice about it, I might never have given her the jingling name. But,
when one means to be good-natured and sportive with young people, one
doesn’t think twice. Her old friend leaves a kind word for her, Miss
Wade, if you should think proper to deliver it.’

She said nothing as to that; and Mr Meagles, taking his honest face out
of the dull room, where it shone like a sun, took it to the Hotel where
he had left Mrs Meagles, and where he made the Report: ‘Beaten, Mother;
no effects!’ He took it next to the London Steam Packet, which sailed in
the night; and next to the Marshalsea.

The faithful John was on duty when Father and Mother Meagles presented
themselves at the wicket towards nightfall. Miss Dorrit was not there
then, he said; but she had been there in the morning, and invariably
came in the evening. Mr Clennam was slowly mending; and Maggy and Mrs
Plornish and Mr Baptist took care of him by turns. Miss Dorrit was sure
to come back that evening before the bell rang. There was the room the
Marshal had lent her, up-stairs, in which they could wait for her, if
they pleased. Mistrustful that it might be hazardous to Arthur to see
him without preparation, Mr Meagles accepted the offer; and they were
left shut up in the room, looking down through its barred window into
the jail.

The cramped area of the prison had such an effect on Mrs Meagles that
she began to weep, and such an effect on Mr Meagles that he began to
gasp for air. He was walking up and down the room, panting, and making
himself worse by laboriously fanning himself with her handkerchief, when
he turned towards the opening door.

‘Eh? Good gracious!’ said Mr Meagles, ‘this is not Miss Dorrit! Why,
Mother, look! Tattycoram!’

No other. And in Tattycoram’s arms was an iron box some two feet square.
Such a box had Affery Flintwinch seen, in the first of her dreams, going
out of the old house in the dead of the night under Double’s arm. This,
Tattycoram put on the ground at her old master’s feet: this, Tattycoram
fell on her knees by, and beat her hands upon, crying half in exultation
and half in despair, half in laughter and half in tears, ‘Pardon, dear
Master; take me back, dear Mistress; here it is!’

‘Tatty!’ exclaimed Mr Meagles.

‘What you wanted!’ said Tattycoram. ‘Here it is! I was put in the next
room not to see you. I heard you ask her about it, I heard her say she
hadn’t got it, I was there when he left it, and I took it at bedtime and
brought it away. Here it is!’

‘Why, my girl,’ cried Mr Meagles, more breathless than before, ‘how did
you come over?’

‘I came in the boat with you. I was sitting wrapped up at the other end.
When you took a coach at the wharf, I took another coach and followed
you here. She never would have given it up after what you had said to
her about its being wanted; she would sooner have sunk it in the sea, or
burnt it. But, here it is!’

The glow and rapture that the girl was in, with her ‘Here it is!’

‘She never wanted it to be left, I must say that for her; but he left
it, and I knew well that after what you said, and after her denying
it, she never would have given it up. But here it is! Dear Master, dear
Mistress, take me back again, and give me back the dear old name! Let
this intercede for me. Here it is!’

Father and Mother Meagles never deserved their names better than when
they took the headstrong foundling-girl into their protection again.

‘Oh! I have been so wretched,’ cried Tattycoram, weeping much more,
‘always so unhappy, and so repentant! I was afraid of her from the first
time I saw her. I knew she had got a power over me through understanding
what was bad in me so well. It was a madness in me, and she could raise
it whenever she liked. I used to think, when I got into that state, that
people were all against me because of my first beginning; and the kinder
they were to me, the worse fault I found in them. I made it out that
they triumphed above me, and that they wanted to make me envy them, when
I know--when I even knew then--that they never thought of such a thing.
And my beautiful young mistress not so happy as she ought to have been,
and I gone away from her! Such a brute and a wretch as she must think
me! But you’ll say a word to her for me, and ask her to be as forgiving
as you two are? For I am not so bad as I was,’ pleaded Tattycoram; ‘I am
bad enough, but not so bad as I was, indeed. I have had Miss Wade
before me all this time, as if it was my own self grown ripe--turning
everything the wrong way, and twisting all good into evil. I have had
her before me all this time, finding no pleasure in anything but keeping
me as miserable, suspicious, and tormenting as herself. Not that she had
much to do, to do that,’ cried Tattycoram, in a closing great burst of
distress, ‘for I was as bad as bad could be. I only mean to say, that,
after what I have gone through, I hope I shall never be quite so bad
again, and that I shall get better by very slow degrees. I’ll try very
hard. I won’t stop at five-and-twenty, sir, I’ll count five-and-twenty
hundred, five-and-twenty thousand!’

Another opening of the door, and Tattycoram subsided, and Little Dorrit
came in, and Mr Meagles with pride and joy produced the box, and her
gentle face was lighted up with grateful happiness and joy. The secret
was safe now! She could keep her own part of it from him; he should
never know of her loss; in time to come he should know all that was of
import to himself; but he should never know what concerned her only.
That was all passed, all forgiven, all forgotten.

‘Now, my dear Miss Dorrit,’ said Mr Meagles; ‘I am a man of business--or
at least was--and I am going to take my measures promptly, in that
character. Had I better see Arthur to-night?’

‘I think not to-night. I will go to his room and ascertain how he is.
But I think it will be better not to see him to-night.’

‘I am much of your opinion, my dear,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘and therefore
I have not been any nearer to him than this dismal room. Then I shall
probably not see him for some little time to come. But I’ll explain what
I mean when you come back.’

She left the room. Mr Meagles, looking through the bars of the window,
saw her pass out of the Lodge below him into the prison-yard. He said
gently, ‘Tattycoram, come to me a moment, my good girl.’

She went up to the window.

‘You see that young lady who was here just now--that little, quiet,
fragile figure passing along there, Tatty? Look. The people stand out
of the way to let her go by. The men--see the poor, shabby fellows--pull
off their hats to her quite politely, and now she glides in at that
doorway. See her, Tattycoram?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I have heard tell, Tatty, that she was once regularly called the child
of this place. She was born here, and lived here many years. I can’t
breathe here. A doleful place to be born and bred in, Tattycoram?’

‘Yes indeed, sir!’

‘If she had constantly thought of herself, and settled with herself that
everybody visited this place upon her, turned it against her, and cast
it at her, she would have led an irritable and probably an useless
existence. Yet I have heard tell, Tattycoram, that her young life has
been one of active resignation, goodness, and noble service. Shall I
tell you what I consider those eyes of hers, that were here just now, to
have always looked at, to get that expression?’

‘Yes, if you please, sir.’

‘Duty, Tattycoram. Begin it early, and do it well; and there is no
antecedent to it, in any origin or station, that will tell against us
with the Almighty, or with ourselves.’

They remained at the window, Mother joining them and pitying the
prisoners, until she was seen coming back. She was soon in the room, and
recommended that Arthur, whom she had left calm and composed, should not
be visited that night.

‘Good!’ said Mr Meagles, cheerily. ‘I have not a doubt that’s best. I
shall trust my remembrances then, my sweet nurse, in your hands, and I
well know they couldn’t be in better. I am off again to-morrow morning.’

Little Dorrit, surprised, asked him where?

‘My dear,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘I can’t live without breathing. This place
has taken my breath away, and I shall never get it back again until
Arthur is out of this place.’

‘How is that a reason for going off again to-morrow morning?’

‘You shall understand,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘To-night we three will put up
at a City Hotel. To-morrow morning, Mother and Tattycoram will go down
to Twickenham, where Mrs Tickit, sitting attended by Dr Buchan in the
parlour-window, will think them a couple of ghosts; and I shall go
abroad again for Doyce. We must have Dan here. Now, I tell you, my love,
it’s of no use writing and planning and conditionally speculating upon
this and that and the other, at uncertain intervals and distances; we
must have Doyce here. I devote myself at daybreak to-morrow morning, to
bringing Doyce here. It’s nothing to me to go and find him. I’m an old
traveller, and all foreign languages and customs are alike to me--I
never understand anything about any of ‘em. Therefore I can’t be put
to any inconvenience. Go at once I must, it stands to reason; because
I can’t live without breathing freely; and I can’t breathe freely until
Arthur is out of this Marshalsea. I am stifled at the present moment,
and have scarcely breath enough to say this much, and to carry this
precious box down-stairs for you.’

They got into the street as the bell began to ring, Mr Meagles carrying
the box. Little Dorrit had no conveyance there: which rather surprised
him. He called a coach for her and she got into it, and he placed the
box beside her when she was seated. In her joy and gratitude she kissed
his hand.

‘I don’t like that, my dear,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘It goes against my
feeling of what’s right, that _you_ should do homage to _me_--at the
Marshalsea Gate.’

She bent forward, and kissed his cheek.

‘You remind me of the days,’ said Mr Meagles, suddenly drooping--‘but
she’s very fond of him, and hides his faults, and thinks that no
one sees them--and he certainly is well connected and of a very good
family!’

It was the only comfort he had in the loss of his daughter, and if he
made the most of it, who could blame him?




CHAPTER 34. Gone


On a healthy autumn day, the Marshalsea prisoner, weak but otherwise
restored, sat listening to a voice that read to him. On a healthy autumn
day; when the golden fields had been reaped and ploughed again, when the
summer fruits had ripened and waned, when the green perspectives of hops
had been laid low by the busy pickers, when the apples clustering in the
orchards were russet, and the berries of the mountain ash were crimson
among the yellowing foliage. Already in the woods, glimpses of the hardy
winter that was coming were to be caught through unaccustomed openings
among the boughs where the prospect shone defined and clear, free from
the bloom of the drowsy summer weather, which had rested on it as the
bloom lies on the plum. So, from the seashore the ocean was no longer to
be seen lying asleep in the heat, but its thousand sparkling eyes were
open, and its whole breadth was in joyful animation, from the cool sand
on the beach to the little sails on the horizon, drifting away like
autumn-tinted leaves that had drifted from the trees.

Changeless and barren, looking ignorantly at all the seasons with its
fixed, pinched face of poverty and care, the prison had not a touch of
any of these beauties on it. Blossom what would, its bricks and bars
bore uniformly the same dead crop. Yet Clennam, listening to the voice
as it read to him, heard in it all that great Nature was doing, heard in
it all the soothing songs she sings to man. At no Mother’s knee but hers
had he ever dwelt in his youth on hopeful promises, on playful fancies,
on the harvests of tenderness and humility that lie hidden in the
early-fostered seeds of the imagination; on the oaks of retreat from
blighting winds, that have the germs of their strong roots in nursery
acorns. But, in the tones of the voice that read to him, there were
memories of an old feeling of such things, and echoes of every merciful
and loving whisper that had ever stolen to him in his life.

When the voice stopped, he put his hand over his eyes, murmuring that
the light was strong upon them.

Little Dorrit put the book by, and presently arose quietly to shade
the window. Maggy sat at her needlework in her old place. The light
softened, Little Dorrit brought her chair closer to his side.

‘This will soon be over now, dear Mr Clennam. Not only are Mr Doyce’s
letters to you so full of friendship and encouragement, but Mr Rugg says
his letters to him are so full of help, and that everybody (now a little
anger is past) is so considerate, and speaks so well of you, that it
will soon be over now.’

‘Dear girl. Dear heart. Good angel!’

‘You praise me far too much. And yet it is such an exquisite pleasure
to me to hear you speak so feelingly, and to--and to see,’ said Little
Dorrit, raising her eyes to his, ‘how deeply you mean it, that I cannot
say Don’t.’

He lifted her hand to his lips.

‘You have been here many, many times, when I have not seen you, Little
Dorrit?’

‘Yes, I have been here sometimes when I have not come into the room.’

‘Very often?’

‘Rather often,’ said Little Dorrit, timidly.

‘Every day?’

‘I think,’ said Little Dorrit, after hesitating, ‘that I have been here
at least twice every day.’

He might have released the little light hand after fervently kissing it
again; but that, with a very gentle lingering where it was, it seemed to
court being retained. He took it in both of his, and it lay softly on his
breast.

‘Dear Little Dorrit, it is not my imprisonment only that will soon be
over. This sacrifice of you must be ended. We must learn to part again,
and to take our different ways so wide asunder. You have not forgotten
what we said together, when you came back?’

‘O no, I have not forgotten it. But something has been--You feel quite
strong to-day, don’t you?’

‘Quite strong.’

The hand he held crept up a little nearer his face.

‘Do you feel quite strong enough to know what a great fortune I have
got?’

‘I shall be very glad to be told. No fortune can be too great or good
for Little Dorrit.’

‘I have been anxiously waiting to tell you. I have been longing and
longing to tell you. You are sure you will not take it?’

‘Never!’

‘You are quite sure you will not take half of it?’

‘Never, dear Little Dorrit!’

As she looked at him silently, there was something in her affectionate
face that he did not quite comprehend: something that could have broken
into tears in a moment, and yet that was happy and proud.

‘You will be sorry to hear what I have to tell you about Fanny. Poor
Fanny has lost everything. She has nothing left but her husband’s
income. All that papa gave her when she married was lost as your money
was lost. It was in the same hands, and it is all gone.’

Arthur was more shocked than surprised to hear it. ‘I had hoped it might
not be so bad,’ he said: ‘but I had feared a heavy loss there, knowing
the connection between her husband and the defaulter.’

‘Yes. It is all gone. I am very sorry for Fanny; very, very, very sorry
for poor Fanny. My poor brother too!’

‘Had _he_ property in the same hands?’

‘Yes! And it’s all gone.--How much do you think my own great fortune
is?’

As Arthur looked at her inquiringly, with a new apprehension on him,
she withdrew her hand, and laid her face down on the spot where it had
rested.

‘I have nothing in the world. I am as poor as when I lived here. When
papa came over to England, he confided everything he had to the same
hands, and it is all swept away. O my dearest and best, are you quite
sure you will not share my fortune with me now?’

Locked in his arms, held to his heart, with his manly tears upon her own
cheek, she drew the slight hand round his neck, and clasped it in its
fellow-hand.

‘Never to part, my dearest Arthur; never any more, until the last!
I never was rich before, I never was proud before, I never was happy
before, I am rich in being taken by you, I am proud in having been
resigned by you, I am happy in being with you in this prison, as I
should be happy in coming back to it with you, if it should be the will
of GOD, and comforting and serving you with all my love and truth. I am
yours anywhere, everywhere! I love you dearly! I would rather pass my
life here with you, and go out daily, working for our bread, than I
would have the greatest fortune that ever was told, and be the greatest
lady that ever was honoured. O, if poor papa may only know how blest at
last my heart is, in this room where he suffered for so many years!’


Maggy had of course been staring from the first, and had of course been
crying her eyes out long before this. Maggy was now so overjoyed that,
after hugging her little mother with all her might, she went down-stairs
like a clog-hornpipe to find somebody or other to whom to impart her
gladness. Whom should Maggy meet but Flora and Mr F.’s Aunt opportunely
coming in? And whom else, as a consequence of that meeting, should
Little Dorrit find waiting for herself, when, a good two or three hours
afterwards, she went out?

Flora’s eyes were a little red, and she seemed rather out of spirits.
Mr F.’s Aunt was so stiffened that she had the appearance of being past
bending by any means short of powerful mechanical pressure. Her bonnet
was cocked up behind in a terrific manner; and her stony reticule was as
rigid as if it had been petrified by the Gorgon’s head, and had got it
at that moment inside. With these imposing attributes, Mr F.’s Aunt,
publicly seated on the steps of the Marshal’s official residence, had
been for the two or three hours in question a great boon to the younger
inhabitants of the Borough, whose sallies of humour she had considerably
flushed herself by resenting at the point of her umbrella, from time to
time.

‘Painfully aware, Miss Dorrit, I am sure,’ said Flora, ‘that to propose
an adjournment to any place to one so far removed by fortune and so
courted and caressed by the best society must ever appear intruding
even if not a pie-shop far below your present sphere and a back-parlour
though a civil man but if for the sake of Arthur--cannot overcome it
more improper now than ever late Doyce and Clennam--one last remark I
might wish to make one last explanation I might wish to offer perhaps
your good nature might excuse under pretence of three kidney ones the
humble place of conversation.’

Rightly interpreting this rather obscure speech, Little Dorrit returned
that she was quite at Flora’s disposition. Flora accordingly led the
way across the road to the pie-shop in question: Mr F.’s Aunt stalking
across in the rear, and putting herself in the way of being run over,
with a perseverance worthy of a better cause.

When the ‘three kidney ones,’ which were to be a blind to the
conversation, were set before them on three little tin platters, each
kidney one ornamented with a hole at the top, into which the civil man
poured hot gravy out of a spouted can as if he were feeding three lamps,
Flora took out her pocket-handkerchief.

‘If Fancy’s fair dreams,’ she began, ‘have ever pictured that when
Arthur--cannot overcome it pray excuse me--was restored to freedom even
a pie as far from flaky as the present and so deficient in kidney as to
be in that respect like a minced nutmeg might not prove unacceptable if
offered by the hand of true regard such visions have for ever fled
and all is cancelled but being aware that tender relations are in
contemplation beg to state that I heartily wish well to both and find
no fault with either not the least, it may be withering to know that ere
the hand of Time had made me much less slim than formerly and dreadfully
red on the slightest exertion particularly after eating I well know when
it takes the form of a rash, it might have been and was not through the
interruption of parents and mental torpor succeeded until the mysterious
clue was held by Mr F. still I would not be ungenerous to either and I
heartily wish well to both.’

Little Dorrit took her hand, and thanked her for all her old kindness.

‘Call it not kindness,’ returned Flora, giving her an honest kiss, ‘for
you always were the best and dearest little thing that ever was if I
may take the liberty and even in a money point of view a saving being
Conscience itself though I must add much more agreeable than mine ever
was to me for though not I hope more burdened than other people’s yet
I have always found it far readier to make one uncomfortable than
comfortable and evidently taking a greater pleasure in doing it but I am
wandering, one hope I wish to express ere yet the closing scene draws
in and it is that I do trust for the sake of old times and old sincerity
that Arthur will know that I didn’t desert him in his misfortunes but
that I came backwards and forwards constantly to ask if I could do
anything for him and that I sat in the pie-shop where they very civilly
fetched something warm in a tumbler from the hotel and really very nice
hours after hours to keep him company over the way without his knowing
it.’

Flora really had tears in her eyes now, and they showed her to great
advantage.

‘Over and above which,’ said Flora, ‘I earnestly beg you as the dearest
thing that ever was if you’ll still excuse the familiarity from one who
moves in very different circles to let Arthur understand that I don’t
know after all whether it wasn’t all nonsense between us though pleasant
at the time and trying too and certainly Mr F. did work a change and
the spell being broken nothing could be expected to take place without
weaving it afresh which various circumstances have combined to prevent
of which perhaps not the least powerful was that it was not to be, I
am not prepared to say that if it had been agreeable to Arthur and had
brought itself about naturally in the first instance I should not have
been very glad being of a lively disposition and moped at home where
papa undoubtedly is the most aggravating of his sex and not improved
since having been cut down by the hand of the Incendiary into something
of which I never saw the counterpart in all my life but jealousy is not
my character nor ill-will though many faults.’

Without having been able closely to follow Mrs Finching through this
labyrinth, Little Dorrit understood its purpose, and cordially accepted
the trust.

‘The withered chaplet my dear,’ said Flora, with great enjoyment, ‘is
then perished the column is crumbled and the pyramid is standing upside
down upon its what’s-his-name call it not giddiness call it not weakness
call it not folly I must now retire into privacy and look upon the ashes
of departed joys no more but taking a further liberty of paying for the
pastry which has formed the humble pretext of our interview will for
ever say Adieu!’

Mr F.’s Aunt, who had eaten her pie with great solemnity, and who had
been elaborating some grievous scheme of injury in her mind since her
first assumption of that public position on the Marshal’s steps, took
the present opportunity of addressing the following Sibyllic apostrophe
to the relict of her late nephew.

‘Bring him for’ard, and I’ll chuck him out o’ winder!’

Flora tried in vain to soothe the excellent woman by explaining that
they were going home to dinner. Mr F.’s Aunt persisted in replying,
‘Bring him for’ard and I’ll chuck him out o’ winder!’ Having reiterated
this demand an immense number of times, with a sustained glare of
defiance at Little Dorrit, Mr F.’s Aunt folded her arms, and sat down in
the corner of the pie-shop parlour; steadfastly refusing to budge until
such time as ‘he’ should have been ‘brought for’ard,’ and the chucking
portion of his destiny accomplished.

In this condition of things, Flora confided to Little Dorrit that she
had not seen Mr F.’s Aunt so full of life and character for weeks; that
she would find it necessary to remain there ‘hours perhaps,’ until the
inexorable old lady could be softened; and that she could manage her
best alone. They parted, therefore, in the friendliest manner, and with
the kindest feeling on both sides.

Mr F.’s Aunt holding out like a grim fortress, and Flora becoming in
need of refreshment, a messenger was despatched to the hotel for the
tumbler already glanced at, which was afterwards replenished. With the
aid of its content, a newspaper, and some skimming of the cream of the
pie-stock, Flora got through the remainder of the day in perfect good
humour; though occasionally embarrassed by the consequences of an
idle rumour which circulated among the credulous infants of the
neighbourhood, to the effect that an old lady had sold herself to the
pie-shop to be made up, and was then sitting in the pie-shop parlour,
declining to complete her contract. This attracted so many young persons
of both sexes, and, when the shades of evening began to fall, occasioned
so much interruption to the business, that the merchant became very
pressing in his proposals that Mr F.’s Aunt should be removed. A
conveyance was accordingly brought to the door, which, by the joint
efforts of the merchant and Flora, this remarkable woman was at last
induced to enter; though not without even then putting her head out of
the window, and demanding to have him ‘brought for’ard’ for the purpose
originally mentioned. As she was observed at this time to direct baleful
glances towards the Marshalsea, it has been supposed that this admirably
consistent female intended by ‘him,’ Arthur Clennam. This, however, is
mere speculation; who the person was, who, for the satisfaction of Mr
F.’s Aunt’s mind, ought to have been brought forward and never was
brought forward, will never be positively known.


The autumn days went on, and Little Dorrit never came to the Marshalsea
now and went away without seeing him. No, no, no.

One morning, as Arthur listened for the light feet that every morning
ascended winged to his heart, bringing the heavenly brightness of a new
love into the room where the old love had wrought so hard and been so
true; one morning, as he listened, he heard her coming, not alone.

‘Dear Arthur,’ said her delighted voice outside the door, ‘I have some
one here. May I bring some one in?’

He had thought from the tread there were two with her. He answered
‘Yes,’ and she came in with Mr Meagles. Sun-browned and jolly Mr
Meagles looked, and he opened his arms and folded Arthur in them, like a
sun-browned and jolly father.

‘Now I am all right,’ said Mr Meagles, after a minute or so. ‘Now it’s
over. Arthur, my dear fellow, confess at once that you expected me
before.’

‘I did,’ said Arthur; ‘but Amy told me--’

‘Little Dorrit. Never any other name.’ (It was she who whispered it.)

‘--But my Little Dorrit told me that, without asking for any further
explanation, I was not to expect you until I saw you.’

‘And now you see me, my boy,’ said Mr Meagles, shaking him by the hand
stoutly; ‘and now you shall have any explanation and every explanation.
The fact is, I _was_ here--came straight to you from the Allongers
and Marshongers, or I should be ashamed to look you in the face this
day,--but you were not in company trim at the moment, and I had to start
off again to catch Doyce.’

‘Poor Doyce!’ sighed Arthur.

‘Don’t call him names that he don’t deserve,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘_He’s_
not poor; _he’s_ doing well enough. Doyce is a wonderful fellow over
there. I assure you he is making out his case like a house a-fire. He
has fallen on his legs, has Dan. Where they don’t want things done and
find a man to do ‘em, that man’s off his legs; but where they do want
things done and find a man to do ‘em, that man’s on his legs. You won’t
have occasion to trouble the Circumlocution Office any more. Let me tell
you, Dan has done without ‘em!’

‘What a load you take from my mind!’ cried Arthur. ‘What happiness you
give me!’

‘Happiness?’ retorted Mr Meagles. ‘Don’t talk about happiness till you
see Dan. I assure you Dan is directing works and executing labours over
yonder, that it would make your hair stand on end to look at. He’s no
public offender, bless you, now! He’s medalled and ribboned, and starred
and crossed, and I don’t-know-what all’d, like a born nobleman. But we
mustn’t talk about that over here.’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh, egad!’ said Mr Meagles, shaking his head very seriously, ‘he must
hide all those things under lock and key when he comes over here. They
won’t do over here. In that particular, Britannia is a Britannia in the
Manger--won’t give her children such distinctions herself, and won’t
allow them to be seen when they are given by other countries. No, no,
Dan!’ said Mr Meagles, shaking his head again. ‘That won’t do here!’

‘If you had brought me (except for Doyce’s sake) twice what I have
lost,’ cried Arthur, ‘you would not have given me the pleasure that you
give me in this news.’

‘Why, of course, of course,’ assented Mr Meagles. ‘Of course I know
that, my good fellow, and therefore I come out with it in the first
burst. Now, to go back, about catching Doyce. I caught Doyce. Ran
against him among a lot of those dirty brown dogs in women’s nightcaps a
great deal too big for ‘em, calling themselves Arabs and all sorts of
incoherent races. _You_ know ‘em! Well! He was coming straight to me,
and I was going to him, and so we came back together.’

‘Doyce in England!’ exclaimed Arthur.

‘There!’ said Mr Meagles, throwing open his arms. ‘I am the worst man
in the world to manage a thing of this sort. I don’t know what I should
have done if I had been in the diplomatic line--right, perhaps! The long
and short of it is, Arthur, we have both been in England this fortnight.
And if you go on to ask where Doyce is at the present moment, why, my
plain answer is--here he is! And now I can breathe again at last!’

Doyce darted in from behind the door, caught Arthur by both hands, and
said the rest for himself.

‘There are only three branches of my subject, my dear Clennam,’ said
Doyce, proceeding to mould them severally, with his plastic thumb, on
the palm of his hand, ‘and they’re soon disposed of. First, not a word
more from you about the past. There was an error in your calculations.
I know what that is. It affects the whole machine, and failure is the
consequence. You will profit by the failure, and will avoid it another
time. I have done a similar thing myself, in construction, often. Every
failure teaches a man something, if he will learn; and you are too
sensible a man not to learn from this failure. So much for firstly.
Secondly. I was sorry you should have taken it so heavily to heart, and
reproached yourself so severely; I was travelling home night and day
to put matters right, with the assistance of our friend, when I fell in
with our friend as he has informed you. Thirdly. We two agreed, that,
after what you had undergone, after your distress of mind, and after
your illness, it would be a pleasant surprise if we could so far keep
quiet as to get things perfectly arranged without your knowledge, and
then come and say that all the affairs were smooth, that everything was
right, that the business stood in greater want of you than ever it did,
and that a new and prosperous career was opened before you and me as
partners. That’s thirdly. But you know we always make an allowance for
friction, and so I have reserved space to close in. My dear Clennam,
I thoroughly confide in you; you have it in your power to be quite as
useful to me as I have, or have had, it in my power to be useful to you;
your old place awaits you, and wants you very much; there is nothing to
detain you here one half-hour longer.’

There was silence, which was not broken until Arthur had stood for some
time at the window with his back towards them, and until his little wife
that was to be had gone to him and stayed by him.

‘I made a remark a little while ago,’ said Daniel Doyce then, ‘which I
am inclined to think was an incorrect one. I said there was nothing
to detain you here, Clennam, half an hour longer. Am I mistaken in
supposing that you would rather not leave here till to-morrow morning?
Do I know, without being very wise, where you would like to go, direct
from these walls and from this room?’

‘You do,’ returned Arthur. ‘It has been our cherished purpose.’

‘Very well!’ said Doyce. ‘Then, if this young lady will do me the honour
of regarding me for four-and-twenty hours in the light of a father, and
will take a ride with me now towards Saint Paul’s Churchyard, I dare say
I know what we want to get there.’

Little Dorrit and he went out together soon afterwards, and Mr Meagles
lingered behind to say a word to his friend.

‘I think, Arthur, you will not want Mother and me in the morning and
we will keep away. It might set Mother thinking about Pet; she’s a
soft-hearted woman. She’s best at the Cottage, and I’ll stay there and
keep her company.’

With that they parted for the time. And the day ended, and the night
ended, and the morning came, and Little Dorrit, simply dressed as usual
and having no one with her but Maggy, came into the prison with the
sunshine. The poor room was a happy room that morning. Where in the
world was there a room so full of quiet joy!

‘My dear love,’ said Arthur. ‘Why does Maggy light the fire? We shall be
gone directly.’

‘I asked her to do it. I have taken such an odd fancy. I want you to
burn something for me.’

‘What?’

‘Only this folded paper. If you will put it in the fire with your own
hand, just as it is, my fancy will be gratified.’

‘Superstitious, darling Little Dorrit? Is it a charm?’

‘It is anything you like best, my own,’ she answered, laughing with
glistening eyes and standing on tiptoe to kiss him, ‘if you will only
humour me when the fire burns up.’

So they stood before the fire, waiting: Clennam with his arm about her
waist, and the fire shining, as fire in that same place had often shone,
in Little Dorrit’s eyes. ‘Is it bright enough now?’ said Arthur. ‘Quite
bright enough now,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘Does the charm want any words
to be said?’ asked Arthur, as he held the paper over the flame. ‘You can
say (if you don’t mind) “I love you!”’ answered Little Dorrit. So he said
it, and the paper burned away.

They passed very quietly along the yard; for no one was there, though
many heads were stealthily peeping from the windows. Only one face,
familiar of old, was in the Lodge. When they had both accosted it, and
spoken many kind words, Little Dorrit turned back one last time with her
hand stretched out, saying, ‘Good-bye, good John! I hope you will live
very happy, dear!’

Then they went up the steps of the neighbouring Saint George’s Church,
and went up to the altar, where Daniel Doyce was waiting in his paternal
character. And there was Little Dorrit’s old friend who had given her
the Burial Register for a pillow; full of admiration that she should
come back to them to be married, after all.

And they were married with the sun shining on them through the painted
figure of Our Saviour on the window. And they went into the very room
where Little Dorrit had slumbered after her party, to sign the Marriage
Register. And there, Mr Pancks, (destined to be chief clerk to Doyce and
Clennam, and afterwards partner in the house), sinking the Incendiary
in the peaceful friend, looked in at the door to see it done, with Flora
gallantly supported on one arm and Maggy on the other, and a back-ground
of John Chivery and father and other turnkeys who had run round for the
moment, deserting the parent Marshalsea for its happy child. Nor had
Flora the least signs of seclusion upon her, notwithstanding her recent
declaration; but, on the contrary, was wonderfully smart, and enjoyed
the ceremonies mightily, though in a fluttered way.

Little Dorrit’s old friend held the inkstand as she signed her name, and
the clerk paused in taking off the good clergyman’s surplice, and all
the witnesses looked on with special interest. ‘For, you see,’ said
Little Dorrit’s old friend, ‘this young lady is one of our curiosities,
and has come now to the third volume of our Registers. Her birth is in
what I call the first volume; she lay asleep, on this very floor,
with her pretty head on what I call the second volume; and she’s now
a-writing her little name as a bride in what I call the third volume.’

They all gave place when the signing was done, and Little Dorrit and her
husband walked out of the church alone. They paused for a moment on the
steps of the portico, looking at the fresh perspective of the street in
the autumn morning sun’s bright rays, and then went down.

Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness. Went down
to give a mother’s care, in the fulness of time, to Fanny’s neglected
children no less than to their own, and to leave that lady going into
Society for ever and a day. Went down to give a tender nurse and friend
to Tip for some few years, who was never vexed by the great exactions he
made of her in return for the riches he might have given her if he had
ever had them, and who lovingly closed his eyes upon the Marshalsea
and all its blighted fruits. They went quietly down into the roaring
streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine
and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and
the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.





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Title: The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby

Author: Charles Dickens

Release Date: April 27, 2006 [EBook #967]
Last Updated: September 25, 2016

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NICHOLAS NICKLEBY ***




Produced by Donald Lainson





THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY,

containing a Faithful Account of the Fortunes, Misfortunes,

Uprisings, Downfallings and Complete Career of the Nickelby Family


by Charles Dickens




AUTHOR’S PREFACE


This story was begun, within a few months after the publication of
the completed “Pickwick Papers.” There were, then, a good many cheap
Yorkshire schools in existence. There are very few now.

Of the monstrous neglect of education in England, and the disregard
of it by the State as a means of forming good or bad citizens, and
miserable or happy men, private schools long afforded a notable example.
Although any man who had proved his unfitness for any other occupation
in life, was free, without examination or qualification, to open a
school anywhere; although preparation for the functions he undertook,
was required in the surgeon who assisted to bring a boy into the world,
or might one day assist, perhaps, to send him out of it; in the chemist,
the attorney, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker; the whole
round of crafts and trades, the schoolmaster excepted; and although
schoolmasters, as a race, were the blockheads and impostors who might
naturally be expected to spring from such a state of things, and to
flourish in it; these Yorkshire schoolmasters were the lowest and most
rotten round in the whole ladder. Traders in the avarice, indifference,
or imbecility of parents, and the helplessness of children; ignorant,
sordid, brutal men, to whom few considerate persons would have entrusted
the board and lodging of a horse or a dog; they formed the worthy
cornerstone of a structure, which, for absurdity and a magnificent
high-minded LAISSEZ-ALLER neglect, has rarely been exceeded in the
world.

We hear sometimes of an action for damages against the unqualified
medical practitioner, who has deformed a broken limb in pretending to
heal it. But, what of the hundreds of thousands of minds that have been
deformed for ever by the incapable pettifoggers who have pretended to
form them!

I make mention of the race, as of the Yorkshire schoolmasters, in the
past tense. Though it has not yet finally disappeared, it is dwindling
daily. A long day’s work remains to be done about us in the way of
education, Heaven knows; but great improvements and facilities towards
the attainment of a good one, have been furnished, of late years.

I cannot call to mind, now, how I came to hear about Yorkshire schools
when I was a not very robust child, sitting in bye-places near Rochester
Castle, with a head full of PARTRIDGE, STRAP, TOM PIPES, and SANCHO
PANZA; but I know that my first impressions of them were picked up
at that time, and that they were somehow or other connected with a
suppurated abscess that some boy had come home with, in consequence of
his Yorkshire guide, philosopher, and friend, having ripped it open with
an inky pen-knife. The impression made upon me, however made, never left
me. I was always curious about Yorkshire schools--fell, long afterwards
and at sundry times, into the way of hearing more about them--at last,
having an audience, resolved to write about them.

With that intent I went down into Yorkshire before I began this book, in
very severe winter time which is pretty faithfully described herein.
As I wanted to see a schoolmaster or two, and was forewarned that those
gentlemen might, in their modesty, be shy of receiving a visit from the
author of the “Pickwick Papers,” I consulted with a professional friend
who had a Yorkshire connexion, and with whom I concerted a pious fraud.
He gave me some letters of introduction, in the name, I think, of my
travelling companion; they bore reference to a supposititious little boy
who had been left with a widowed mother who didn’t know what to do
with him; the poor lady had thought, as a means of thawing the tardy
compassion of her relations in his behalf, of sending him to a Yorkshire
school; I was the poor lady’s friend, travelling that way; and if
the recipient of the letter could inform me of a school in his
neighbourhood, the writer would be very much obliged.

I went to several places in that part of the country where I understood
the schools to be most plentifully sprinkled, and had no occasion to
deliver a letter until I came to a certain town which shall be nameless.
The person to whom it was addressed, was not at home; but he came down
at night, through the snow, to the inn where I was staying. It was after
dinner; and he needed little persuasion to sit down by the fire in a
warm corner, and take his share of the wine that was on the table.

I am afraid he is dead now. I recollect he was a jovial, ruddy,
broad-faced man; that we got acquainted directly; and that we talked
on all kinds of subjects, except the school, which he showed a great
anxiety to avoid. “Was there any large school near?” I asked him, in
reference to the letter. “Oh yes,” he said; “there was a pratty big
‘un.” “Was it a good one?” I asked. “Ey!” he said, “it was as good as
anoother; that was a’ a matther of opinion”; and fell to looking at the
fire, staring round the room, and whistling a little. On my reverting to
some other topic that we had been discussing, he recovered immediately;
but, though I tried him again and again, I never approached the question
of the school, even if he were in the middle of a laugh, without
observing that his countenance fell, and that he became uncomfortable.
At last, when we had passed a couple of hours or so, very agreeably, he
suddenly took up his hat, and leaning over the table and looking me
full in the face, said, in a low voice: “Weel, Misther, we’ve been vara
pleasant toogather, and ar’ll spak’ my moind tiv’ee. Dinnot let the
weedur send her lattle boy to yan o’ our school-measthers, while there’s
a harse to hoold in a’ Lunnun, or a gootther to lie asleep in. Ar
wouldn’t mak’ ill words amang my neeburs, and ar speak tiv’ee quiet
loike. But I’m dom’d if ar can gang to bed and not tellee, for weedur’s
sak’, to keep the lattle boy from a’ sike scoondrels while there’s a
harse to hoold in a’ Lunnun, or a gootther to lie asleep in!” Repeating
these words with great heartiness, and with a solemnity on his jolly
face that made it look twice as large as before, he shook hands and went
away. I never saw him afterwards, but I sometimes imagine that I descry
a faint reflection of him in John Browdie.

In reference to these gentry, I may here quote a few words from the
original preface to this book.

“It has afforded the Author great amusement and satisfaction, during the
progress of this work, to learn, from country friends and from a variety
of ludicrous statements concerning himself in provincial newspapers,
that more than one Yorkshire schoolmaster lays claim to being the
original of Mr. Squeers. One worthy, he has reason to believe, has
actually consulted authorities learned in the law, as to his having good
grounds on which to rest an action for libel; another, has meditated a
journey to London, for the express purpose of committing an assault and
battery on his traducer; a third, perfectly remembers being waited on,
last January twelve-month, by two gentlemen, one of whom held him
in conversation while the other took his likeness; and, although Mr.
Squeers has but one eye, and he has two, and the published sketch does
not resemble him (whoever he may be) in any other respect, still he
and all his friends and neighbours know at once for whom it is meant,
because--the character is SO like him.

“While the Author cannot but feel the full force of the compliment thus
conveyed to him, he ventures to suggest that these contentions may arise
from the fact, that Mr. Squeers is the representative of a class, and
not of an individual. Where imposture, ignorance, and brutal cupidity,
are the stock in trade of a small body of men, and one is described
by these characteristics, all his fellows will recognise something
belonging to themselves, and each will have a misgiving that the
portrait is his own.

“The Author’s object in calling public attention to the system would be
very imperfectly fulfilled, if he did not state now, in his own person,
emphatically and earnestly, that Mr. Squeers and his school are faint
and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept
down lest they should be deemed impossible. That there are, upon record,
trials at law in which damages have been sought as a poor recompense
for lasting agonies and disfigurements inflicted upon children by the
treatment of the master in these places, involving such offensive and
foul details of neglect, cruelty, and disease, as no writer of fiction
would have the boldness to imagine. And that, since he has been engaged
upon these Adventures, he has received, from private quarters far beyond
the reach of suspicion or distrust, accounts of atrocities, in the
perpetration of which upon neglected or repudiated children, these
schools have been the main instruments, very far exceeding any that
appear in these pages.”

This comprises all I need say on the subject; except that if I had seen
occasion, I had resolved to reprint a few of these details of legal
proceedings, from certain old newspapers.

One other quotation from the same Preface may serve to introduce a fact
that my readers may think curious.

“To turn to a more pleasant subject, it may be right to say, that
there ARE two characters in this book which are drawn from life. It is
remarkable that what we call the world, which is so very credulous in
what professes to be true, is most incredulous in what professes to be
imaginary; and that, while, every day in real life, it will allow in one
man no blemishes, and in another no virtues, it will seldom admit a
very strongly-marked character, either good or bad, in a fictitious
narrative, to be within the limits of probability. But those who take an
interest in this tale, will be glad to learn that the BROTHERS CHEERYBLE
live; that their liberal charity, their singleness of heart, their
noble nature, and their unbounded benevolence, are no creations of the
Author’s brain; but are prompting every day (and oftenest by stealth)
some munificent and generous deed in that town of which they are the
pride and honour.”

If I were to attempt to sum up the thousands of letters, from all sorts
of people in all sorts of latitudes and climates, which this unlucky
paragraph brought down upon me, I should get into an arithmetical
difficulty from which I could not easily extricate myself. Suffice it
to say, that I believe the applications for loans, gifts, and offices
of profit that I have been requested to forward to the originals of the
BROTHERS CHEERYBLE (with whom I never interchanged any communication
in my life) would have exhausted the combined patronage of all the Lord
Chancellors since the accession of the House of Brunswick, and would
have broken the Rest of the Bank of England.

The Brothers are now dead.

There is only one other point, on which I would desire to offer a
remark. If Nicholas be not always found to be blameless or agreeable, he
is not always intended to appear so. He is a young man of an impetuous
temper and of little or no experience; and I saw no reason why such a
hero should be lifted out of nature.





CHAPTER 1

Introduces all the Rest


There once lived, in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one
Mr. Godfrey Nickleby: a worthy gentleman, who, taking it into his head
rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough
or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an
old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the
same reason. Thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for money,
sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love.

Some ill-conditioned persons who sneer at the life-matrimonial, may
perhaps suggest, in this place, that the good couple would be better
likened to two principals in a sparring match, who, when fortune is low
and backers scarce, will chivalrously set to, for the mere pleasure
of the buffeting; and in one respect indeed this comparison would hold
good; for, as the adventurous pair of the Fives’ Court will afterwards
send round a hat, and trust to the bounty of the lookers-on for the
means of regaling themselves, so Mr. Godfrey Nickleby and HIS partner,
the honeymoon being over, looked out wistfully into the world, relying
in no inconsiderable degree upon chance for the improvement of their
means. Mr. Nickleby’s income, at the period of his marriage, fluctuated
between sixty and eighty pounds PER ANNUM.

There are people enough in the world, Heaven knows! and even in London
(where Mr. Nickleby dwelt in those days) but few complaints prevail, of
the population being scanty. It is extraordinary how long a man may look
among the crowd without discovering the face of a friend, but it is no
less true. Mr. Nickleby looked, and looked, till his eyes became sore
as his heart, but no friend appeared; and when, growing tired of the
search, he turned his eyes homeward, he saw very little there to relieve
his weary vision. A painter who has gazed too long upon some glaring
colour, refreshes his dazzled sight by looking upon a darker and more
sombre tint; but everything that met Mr. Nickleby’s gaze wore so black
and gloomy a hue, that he would have been beyond description refreshed
by the very reverse of the contrast.

At length, after five years, when Mrs. Nickleby had presented her husband
with a couple of sons, and that embarrassed gentleman, impressed with
the necessity of making some provision for his family, was seriously
revolving in his mind a little commercial speculation of insuring his
life next quarter-day, and then falling from the top of the Monument by
accident, there came, one morning, by the general post, a black-bordered
letter to inform him how his uncle, Mr. Ralph Nickleby, was dead, and
had left him the bulk of his little property, amounting in all to five
thousand pounds sterling.

As the deceased had taken no further notice of his nephew in his
lifetime, than sending to his eldest boy (who had been christened after
him, on desperate speculation) a silver spoon in a morocco case, which,
as he had not too much to eat with it, seemed a kind of satire upon his
having been born without that useful article of plate in his mouth,
Mr. Godfrey Nickleby could, at first, scarcely believe the tidings thus
conveyed to him. On examination, however, they turned out to be strictly
correct. The amiable old gentleman, it seemed, had intended to leave
the whole to the Royal Humane Society, and had indeed executed a will to
that effect; but the Institution, having been unfortunate enough, a few
months before, to save the life of a poor relation to whom he paid a
weekly allowance of three shillings and sixpence, he had, in a fit of
very natural exasperation, revoked the bequest in a codicil, and left it
all to Mr. Godfrey Nickleby; with a special mention of his indignation,
not only against the society for saving the poor relation’s life, but
against the poor relation also, for allowing himself to be saved.

With a portion of this property Mr. Godfrey Nickleby purchased a small
farm, near Dawlish in Devonshire, whither he retired with his wife and
two children, to live upon the best interest he could get for the rest
of his money, and the little produce he could raise from his land. The
two prospered so well together that, when he died, some fifteen years
after this period, and some five after his wife, he was enabled to
leave, to his eldest son, Ralph, three thousand pounds in cash, and
to his youngest son, Nicholas, one thousand and the farm, which was as
small a landed estate as one would desire to see.

These two brothers had been brought up together in a school at Exeter;
and, being accustomed to go home once a week, had often heard, from
their mother’s lips, long accounts of their father’s sufferings in his
days of poverty, and of their deceased uncle’s importance in his days
of affluence: which recitals produced a very different impression on
the two: for, while the younger, who was of a timid and retiring
disposition, gleaned from thence nothing but forewarnings to shun the
great world and attach himself to the quiet routine of a country life,
Ralph, the elder, deduced from the often-repeated tale the two great
morals that riches are the only true source of happiness and power, and
that it is lawful and just to compass their acquisition by all means
short of felony. ‘And,’ reasoned Ralph with himself, ‘if no good came
of my uncle’s money when he was alive, a great deal of good came of it
after he was dead, inasmuch as my father has got it now, and is saving
it up for me, which is a highly virtuous purpose; and, going back to the
old gentleman, good DID come of it to him too, for he had the pleasure
of thinking of it all his life long, and of being envied and courted
by all his family besides.’ And Ralph always wound up these mental
soliloquies by arriving at the conclusion, that there was nothing like
money.

Not confining himself to theory, or permitting his faculties to rust,
even at that early age, in mere abstract speculations, this promising
lad commenced usurer on a limited scale at school; putting out at good
interest a small capital of slate-pencil and marbles, and gradually
extending his operations until they aspired to the copper coinage of
this realm, in which he speculated to considerable advantage. Nor did
he trouble his borrowers with abstract calculations of figures, or
references to ready-reckoners; his simple rule of interest being all
comprised in the one golden sentence, ‘two-pence for every half-penny,’
which greatly simplified the accounts, and which, as a familiar precept,
more easily acquired and retained in the memory than any known rule
of arithmetic, cannot be too strongly recommended to the notice of
capitalists, both large and small, and more especially of money-brokers
and bill-discounters. Indeed, to do these gentlemen justice, many of
them are to this day in the frequent habit of adopting it, with eminent
success.

In like manner, did young Ralph Nickleby avoid all those minute and
intricate calculations of odd days, which nobody who has worked sums
in simple-interest can fail to have found most embarrassing, by
establishing the one general rule that all sums of principal and
interest should be paid on pocket-money day, that is to say, on
Saturday: and that whether a loan were contracted on the Monday, or on
the Friday, the amount of interest should be, in both cases, the same.
Indeed he argued, and with great show of reason, that it ought to be
rather more for one day than for five, inasmuch as the borrower might
in the former case be very fairly presumed to be in great extremity,
otherwise he would not borrow at all with such odds against him. This
fact is interesting, as illustrating the secret connection and sympathy
which always exist between great minds. Though Master Ralph Nickleby was
not at that time aware of it, the class of gentlemen before alluded to,
proceed on just the same principle in all their transactions.

From what we have said of this young gentleman, and the natural
admiration the reader will immediately conceive of his character, it may
perhaps be inferred that he is to be the hero of the work which we shall
presently begin. To set this point at rest, for once and for ever, we
hasten to undeceive them, and stride to its commencement.

On the death of his father, Ralph Nickleby, who had been some time
before placed in a mercantile house in London, applied himself
passionately to his old pursuit of money-getting, in which he speedily
became so buried and absorbed, that he quite forgot his brother for many
years; and if, at times, a recollection of his old playfellow broke
upon him through the haze in which he lived--for gold conjures up a mist
about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to
his feelings than the fumes of charcoal--it brought along with it a
companion thought, that if they were intimate he would want to borrow
money of him. So, Mr. Ralph Nickleby shrugged his shoulders, and said
things were better as they were.

As for Nicholas, he lived a single man on the patrimonial estate until
he grew tired of living alone, and then he took to wife the daughter of
a neighbouring gentleman with a dower of one thousand pounds. This good
lady bore him two children, a son and a daughter, and when the son
was about nineteen, and the daughter fourteen, as near as we can
guess--impartial records of young ladies’ ages being, before the passing
of the new act, nowhere preserved in the registries of this country--Mr
Nickleby looked about him for the means of repairing his capital, now
sadly reduced by this increase in his family, and the expenses of their
education.

‘Speculate with it,’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

‘Spec--u--late, my dear?’ said Mr. Nickleby, as though in doubt.

‘Why not?’ asked Mrs. Nickleby.

‘Because, my dear, if we SHOULD lose it,’ rejoined Mr. Nickleby, who
was a slow and time-taking speaker, ‘if we SHOULD lose it, we shall no
longer be able to live, my dear.’

‘Fiddle,’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

‘I am not altogether sure of that, my dear,’ said Mr. Nickleby.

‘There’s Nicholas,’ pursued the lady, ‘quite a young man--it’s time he
was in the way of doing something for himself; and Kate too, poor girl,
without a penny in the world. Think of your brother! Would he be what he
is, if he hadn’t speculated?’

‘That’s true,’ replied Mr. Nickleby. ‘Very good, my dear. Yes. I WILL
speculate, my dear.’

Speculation is a round game; the players see little or nothing of their
cards at first starting; gains MAY be great--and so may losses. The run
of luck went against Mr. Nickleby. A mania prevailed, a bubble burst,
four stock-brokers took villa residences at Florence, four hundred
nobodies were ruined, and among them Mr. Nickleby.

‘The very house I live in,’ sighed the poor gentleman, ‘may be taken
from me tomorrow. Not an article of my old furniture, but will be sold
to strangers!’

The last reflection hurt him so much, that he took at once to his bed;
apparently resolved to keep that, at all events.

‘Cheer up, sir!’ said the apothecary.

‘You mustn’t let yourself be cast down, sir,’ said the nurse.

‘Such things happen every day,’ remarked the lawyer.

‘And it is very sinful to rebel against them,’ whispered the clergyman.

‘And what no man with a family ought to do,’ added the neighbours.

Mr. Nickleby shook his head, and motioning them all out of the room,
embraced his wife and children, and having pressed them by turns to
his languidly beating heart, sunk exhausted on his pillow. They were
concerned to find that his reason went astray after this; for he
babbled, for a long time, about the generosity and goodness of his
brother, and the merry old times when they were at school together.
This fit of wandering past, he solemnly commended them to One who never
deserted the widow or her fatherless children, and, smiling gently on
them, turned upon his face, and observed, that he thought he could fall
asleep.



CHAPTER 2

Of Mr. Ralph Nickleby, and his Establishments, and his Undertakings, and
of a great Joint Stock Company of vast national Importance


Mr. Ralph Nickleby was not, strictly speaking, what you would call
a merchant, neither was he a banker, nor an attorney, nor a special
pleader, nor a notary. He was certainly not a tradesman, and still less
could he lay any claim to the title of a professional gentleman; for it
would have been impossible to mention any recognised profession to which
he belonged. Nevertheless, as he lived in a spacious house in Golden
Square, which, in addition to a brass plate upon the street-door, had
another brass plate two sizes and a half smaller upon the left hand
door-post, surrounding a brass model of an infant’s fist grasping a
fragment of a skewer, and displaying the word ‘Office,’ it was clear
that Mr. Ralph Nickleby did, or pretended to do, business of some kind;
and the fact, if it required any further circumstantial evidence, was
abundantly demonstrated by the diurnal attendance, between the hours of
half-past nine and five, of a sallow-faced man in rusty brown, who sat
upon an uncommonly hard stool in a species of butler’s pantry at the end
of the passage, and always had a pen behind his ear when he answered the
bell.

Although a few members of the graver professions live about Golden
Square, it is not exactly in anybody’s way to or from anywhere. It is
one of the squares that have been; a quarter of the town that has gone
down in the world, and taken to letting lodgings. Many of its first
and second floors are let, furnished, to single gentlemen; and it
takes boarders besides. It is a great resort of foreigners. The
dark-complexioned men who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards, and
bushy whiskers, and who congregate under the Opera Colonnade, and about
the box-office in the season, between four and five in the afternoon,
when they give away the orders,--all live in Golden Square, or within a
street of it. Two or three violins and a wind instrument from the Opera
band reside within its precincts. Its boarding-houses are musical, and
the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head
of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of a little wilderness of
shrubs, in the centre of the square. On a summer’s night, windows
are thrown open, and groups of swarthy moustached men are seen by the
passer-by, lounging at the casements, and smoking fearfully. Sounds of
gruff voices practising vocal music invade the evening’s silence; and
the fumes of choice tobacco scent the air. There, snuff and cigars,
and German pipes and flutes, and violins and violoncellos, divide the
supremacy between them. It is the region of song and smoke. Street bands
are on their mettle in Golden Square; and itinerant glee-singers quaver
involuntarily as they raise their voices within its boundaries.

This would not seem a spot very well adapted to the transaction of
business; but Mr. Ralph Nickleby had lived there, notwithstanding, for
many years, and uttered no complaint on that score. He knew nobody round
about, and nobody knew him, although he enjoyed the reputation of being
immensely rich. The tradesmen held that he was a sort of lawyer, and
the other neighbours opined that he was a kind of general agent; both
of which guesses were as correct and definite as guesses about other
people’s affairs usually are, or need to be.

Mr. Ralph Nickleby sat in his private office one morning, ready dressed
to walk abroad. He wore a bottle-green spencer over a blue coat; a white
waistcoat, grey mixture pantaloons, and Wellington boots drawn over
them. The corner of a small-plaited shirt-frill struggled out, as if
insisting to show itself, from between his chin and the top button of
his spencer; and the latter garment was not made low enough to conceal
a long gold watch-chain, composed of a series of plain rings, which had
its beginning at the handle of a gold repeater in Mr. Nickleby’s pocket,
and its termination in two little keys: one belonging to the watch
itself, and the other to some patent padlock. He wore a sprinkling of
powder upon his head, as if to make himself look benevolent; but if
that were his purpose, he would perhaps have done better to powder his
countenance also, for there was something in its very wrinkles, and
in his cold restless eye, which seemed to tell of cunning that would
announce itself in spite of him. However this might be, there he was;
and as he was all alone, neither the powder, nor the wrinkles, nor the
eyes, had the smallest effect, good or bad, upon anybody just then, and
are consequently no business of ours just now.

Mr. Nickleby closed an account-book which lay on his desk, and, throwing
himself back in his chair, gazed with an air of abstraction through the
dirty window. Some London houses have a melancholy little plot of ground
behind them, usually fenced in by four high whitewashed walls, and
frowned upon by stacks of chimneys: in which there withers on, from
year to year, a crippled tree, that makes a show of putting forth a few
leaves late in autumn when other trees shed theirs, and, drooping in
the effort, lingers on, all crackled and smoke-dried, till the following
season, when it repeats the same process, and perhaps, if the weather
be particularly genial, even tempts some rheumatic sparrow to chirrup
in its branches. People sometimes call these dark yards ‘gardens’; it
is not supposed that they were ever planted, but rather that they are
pieces of unreclaimed land, with the withered vegetation of the original
brick-field. No man thinks of walking in this desolate place, or of
turning it to any account. A few hampers, half-a-dozen broken bottles,
and such-like rubbish, may be thrown there, when the tenant first moves
in, but nothing more; and there they remain until he goes away again:
the damp straw taking just as long to moulder as it thinks proper:
and mingling with the scanty box, and stunted everbrowns, and broken
flower-pots, that are scattered mournfully about--a prey to ‘blacks’ and
dirt.

It was into a place of this kind that Mr. Ralph Nickleby gazed, as he sat
with his hands in his pockets looking out of the window. He had fixed
his eyes upon a distorted fir tree, planted by some former tenant in a
tub that had once been green, and left there, years before, to rot
away piecemeal. There was nothing very inviting in the object, but Mr
Nickleby was wrapt in a brown study, and sat contemplating it with far
greater attention than, in a more conscious mood, he would have deigned
to bestow upon the rarest exotic. At length, his eyes wandered to a
little dirty window on the left, through which the face of the clerk
was dimly visible; that worthy chancing to look up, he beckoned him to
attend.

In obedience to this summons the clerk got off the high stool (to which
he had communicated a high polish by countless gettings off and on),
and presented himself in Mr. Nickleby’s room. He was a tall man of middle
age, with two goggle eyes whereof one was a fixture, a rubicund nose,
a cadaverous face, and a suit of clothes (if the term be allowable
when they suited him not at all) much the worse for wear, very much too
small, and placed upon such a short allowance of buttons that it was
marvellous how he contrived to keep them on.

‘Was that half-past twelve, Noggs?’ said Mr. Nickleby, in a sharp and
grating voice.

‘Not more than five-and-twenty minutes by the--’ Noggs was going to
add public-house clock, but recollecting himself, substituted ‘regular
time.’

‘My watch has stopped,’ said Mr. Nickleby; ‘I don’t know from what
cause.’

‘Not wound up,’ said Noggs.

‘Yes it is,’ said Mr. Nickleby.

‘Over-wound then,’ rejoined Noggs.

‘That can’t very well be,’ observed Mr. Nickleby.

‘Must be,’ said Noggs.

‘Well!’ said Mr. Nickleby, putting the repeater back in his pocket;
‘perhaps it is.’

Noggs gave a peculiar grunt, as was his custom at the end of all
disputes with his master, to imply that he (Noggs) triumphed; and (as he
rarely spoke to anybody unless somebody spoke to him) fell into a grim
silence, and rubbed his hands slowly over each other: cracking the
joints of his fingers, and squeezing them into all possible distortions.
The incessant performance of this routine on every occasion, and the
communication of a fixed and rigid look to his unaffected eye, so as to
make it uniform with the other, and to render it impossible for anybody
to determine where or at what he was looking, were two among the
numerous peculiarities of Mr. Noggs, which struck an inexperienced
observer at first sight.

‘I am going to the London Tavern this morning,’ said Mr. Nickleby.

‘Public meeting?’ inquired Noggs.

Mr. Nickleby nodded. ‘I expect a letter from the solicitor respecting
that mortgage of Ruddle’s. If it comes at all, it will be here by the
two o’clock delivery. I shall leave the city about that time and walk
to Charing Cross on the left-hand side of the way; if there are any
letters, come and meet me, and bring them with you.’

Noggs nodded; and as he nodded, there came a ring at the office bell.
The master looked up from his papers, and the clerk calmly remained in a
stationary position.

‘The bell,’ said Noggs, as though in explanation. ‘At home?’

‘Yes.’

‘To anybody?’

‘Yes.’

‘To the tax-gatherer?’

‘No! Let him call again.’

Noggs gave vent to his usual grunt, as much as to say ‘I thought so!’
and, the ring being repeated, went to the door, whence he presently
returned, ushering in, by the name of Mr. Bonney, a pale gentleman in a
violent hurry, who, with his hair standing up in great disorder all over
his head, and a very narrow white cravat tied loosely round his throat,
looked as if he had been knocked up in the night and had not dressed
himself since.

‘My dear Nickleby,’ said the gentleman, taking off a white hat which was
so full of papers that it would scarcely stick upon his head, ‘there’s
not a moment to lose; I have a cab at the door. Sir Matthew Pupker takes
the chair, and three members of Parliament are positively coming. I have
seen two of them safely out of bed. The third, who was at Crockford’s
all night, has just gone home to put a clean shirt on, and take a bottle
or two of soda water, and will certainly be with us, in time to address
the meeting. He is a little excited by last night, but never mind that;
he always speaks the stronger for it.’

‘It seems to promise pretty well,’ said Mr. Ralph Nickleby, whose
deliberate manner was strongly opposed to the vivacity of the other man
of business.

‘Pretty well!’ echoed Mr. Bonney. ‘It’s the finest idea that was ever
started. “United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking
and Punctual Delivery Company. Capital, five millions, in five hundred
thousand shares of ten pounds each.” Why the very name will get the
shares up to a premium in ten days.’

‘And when they ARE at a premium,’ said Mr. Ralph Nickleby, smiling.

‘When they are, you know what to do with them as well as any man alive,
and how to back quietly out at the right time,’ said Mr. Bonney, slapping
the capitalist familiarly on the shoulder. ‘By-the-bye, what a VERY
remarkable man that clerk of yours is.’

‘Yes, poor devil!’ replied Ralph, drawing on his gloves. ‘Though Newman
Noggs kept his horses and hounds once.’

‘Ay, ay?’ said the other carelessly.

‘Yes,’ continued Ralph, ‘and not many years ago either; but he
squandered his money, invested it anyhow, borrowed at interest, and in
short made first a thorough fool of himself, and then a beggar. He took
to drinking, and had a touch of paralysis, and then came here to borrow
a pound, as in his better days I had--’

‘Done business with him,’ said Mr. Bonney with a meaning look.

‘Just so,’ replied Ralph; ‘I couldn’t lend it, you know.’

‘Oh, of course not.’

‘But as I wanted a clerk just then, to open the door and so forth, I
took him out of charity, and he has remained with me ever since. He is
a little mad, I think,’ said Mr. Nickleby, calling up a charitable look,
‘but he is useful enough, poor creature--useful enough.’

The kind-hearted gentleman omitted to add that Newman Noggs, being
utterly destitute, served him for rather less than the usual wages of a
boy of thirteen; and likewise failed to mention in his hasty chronicle,
that his eccentric taciturnity rendered him an especially valuable
person in a place where much business was done, of which it was
desirable no mention should be made out of doors. The other gentleman
was plainly impatient to be gone, however, and as they hurried into the
hackney cabriolet immediately afterwards, perhaps Mr. Nickleby forgot to
mention circumstances so unimportant.

There was a great bustle in Bishopsgate Street Within, as they drew up,
and (it being a windy day) half-a-dozen men were tacking across the road
under a press of paper, bearing gigantic announcements that a Public
Meeting would be holden at one o’clock precisely, to take into
consideration the propriety of petitioning Parliament in favour of the
United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual
Delivery Company, capital five millions, in five hundred thousand shares
of ten pounds each; which sums were duly set forth in fat black figures
of considerable size. Mr. Bonney elbowed his way briskly upstairs,
receiving in his progress many low bows from the waiters who stood on
the landings to show the way; and, followed by Mr. Nickleby, dived into a
suite of apartments behind the great public room: in the second of which
was a business-looking table, and several business-looking people.

‘Hear!’ cried a gentleman with a double chin, as Mr. Bonney presented
himself. ‘Chair, gentlemen, chair!’

The new-comers were received with universal approbation, and Mr. Bonney
bustled up to the top of the table, took off his hat, ran his fingers
through his hair, and knocked a hackney-coachman’s knock on the table
with a little hammer: whereat several gentlemen cried ‘Hear!’ and nodded
slightly to each other, as much as to say what spirited conduct that
was. Just at this moment, a waiter, feverish with agitation, tore into
the room, and throwing the door open with a crash, shouted ‘Sir Matthew
Pupker!’

The committee stood up and clapped their hands for joy, and while they
were clapping them, in came Sir Matthew Pupker, attended by two live
members of Parliament, one Irish and one Scotch, all smiling and bowing,
and looking so pleasant that it seemed a perfect marvel how any
man could have the heart to vote against them. Sir Matthew Pupker
especially, who had a little round head with a flaxen wig on the top
of it, fell into such a paroxysm of bows, that the wig threatened to
be jerked off, every instant. When these symptoms had in some degree
subsided, the gentlemen who were on speaking terms with Sir Matthew
Pupker, or the two other members, crowded round them in three little
groups, near one or other of which the gentlemen who were NOT on
speaking terms with Sir Matthew Pupker or the two other members, stood
lingering, and smiling, and rubbing their hands, in the desperate hope
of something turning up which might bring them into notice. All this
time, Sir Matthew Pupker and the two other members were relating to
their separate circles what the intentions of government were, about
taking up the bill; with a full account of what the government had said
in a whisper the last time they dined with it, and how the government
had been observed to wink when it said so; from which premises they were
at no loss to draw the conclusion, that if the government had one
object more at heart than another, that one object was the welfare and
advantage of the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet
Baking and Punctual Delivery Company.

Meanwhile, and pending the arrangement of the proceedings, and a fair
division of the speechifying, the public in the large room were eyeing,
by turns, the empty platform, and the ladies in the Music Gallery. In
these amusements the greater portion of them had been occupied for a
couple of hours before, and as the most agreeable diversions pall upon
the taste on a too protracted enjoyment of them, the sterner spirits now
began to hammer the floor with their boot-heels, and to express their
dissatisfaction by various hoots and cries. These vocal exertions,
emanating from the people who had been there longest, naturally
proceeded from those who were nearest to the platform and furthest from
the policemen in attendance, who having no great mind to fight their way
through the crowd, but entertaining nevertheless a praiseworthy desire
to do something to quell the disturbance, immediately began to drag
forth, by the coat tails and collars, all the quiet people near the
door; at the same time dealing out various smart and tingling blows with
their truncheons, after the manner of that ingenious actor, Mr. Punch:
whose brilliant example, both in the fashion of his weapons and their
use, this branch of the executive occasionally follows.

Several very exciting skirmishes were in progress, when a loud shout
attracted the attention even of the belligerents, and then there poured
on to the platform, from a door at the side, a long line of gentlemen
with their hats off, all looking behind them, and uttering vociferous
cheers; the cause whereof was sufficiently explained when Sir Matthew
Pupker and the two other real members of Parliament came to the front,
amidst deafening shouts, and testified to each other in dumb motions
that they had never seen such a glorious sight as that, in the whole
course of their public career.

At length, and at last, the assembly left off shouting, but Sir Matthew
Pupker being voted into the chair, they underwent a relapse which lasted
five minutes. This over, Sir Matthew Pupker went on to say what must be
his feelings on that great occasion, and what must be that occasion
in the eyes of the world, and what must be the intelligence of
his fellow-countrymen before him, and what must be the wealth and
respectability of his honourable friends behind him, and lastly, what
must be the importance to the wealth, the happiness, the comfort, the
liberty, the very existence of a free and great people, of such an
Institution as the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet
Baking and Punctual Delivery Company!

Mr. Bonney then presented himself to move the first resolution; and
having run his right hand through his hair, and planted his left, in
an easy manner, in his ribs, he consigned his hat to the care of the
gentleman with the double chin (who acted as a species of bottle-holder
to the orators generally), and said he would read to them the first
resolution--‘That this meeting views with alarm and apprehension,
the existing state of the Muffin Trade in this Metropolis and its
neighbourhood; that it considers the Muffin Boys, as at present
constituted, wholly underserving the confidence of the public; and that
it deems the whole Muffin system alike prejudicial to the health and
morals of the people, and subversive of the best interests of a great
commercial and mercantile community.’ The honourable gentleman made a
speech which drew tears from the eyes of the ladies, and awakened the
liveliest emotions in every individual present. He had visited the
houses of the poor in the various districts of London, and had found
them destitute of the slightest vestige of a muffin, which there
appeared too much reason to believe some of these indigent persons
did not taste from year’s end to year’s end. He had found that among
muffin-sellers there existed drunkenness, debauchery, and profligacy,
which he attributed to the debasing nature of their employment as at
present exercised; he had found the same vices among the poorer class of
people who ought to be muffin consumers; and this he attributed to
the despair engendered by their being placed beyond the reach of that
nutritious article, which drove them to seek a false stimulant in
intoxicating liquors. He would undertake to prove before a committee of
the House of Commons, that there existed a combination to keep up the
price of muffins, and to give the bellmen a monopoly; he would prove it
by bellmen at the bar of that House; and he would also prove, that these
men corresponded with each other by secret words and signs as ‘Snooks,’
‘Walker,’ ‘Ferguson,’ ‘Is Murphy right?’ and many others. It was
this melancholy state of things that the Company proposed to correct;
firstly, by prohibiting, under heavy penalties, all private muffin
trading of every description; secondly, by themselves supplying the
public generally, and the poor at their own homes, with muffins of first
quality at reduced prices. It was with this object that a bill had
been introduced into Parliament by their patriotic chairman Sir Matthew
Pupker; it was this bill that they had met to support; it was the
supporters of this bill who would confer undying brightness and
splendour upon England, under the name of the United Metropolitan
Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company;
he would add, with a capital of Five Millions, in five hundred thousand
shares of ten pounds each.

Mr. Ralph Nickleby seconded the resolution, and another gentleman having
moved that it be amended by the insertion of the words ‘and crumpet’
after the word ‘muffin,’ whenever it occurred, it was carried
triumphantly. Only one man in the crowd cried ‘No!’ and he was promptly
taken into custody, and straightway borne off.

The second resolution, which recognised the expediency of immediately
abolishing ‘all muffin (or crumpet) sellers, all traders in muffins (or
crumpets) of whatsoever description, whether male or female, boys or
men, ringing hand-bells or otherwise,’ was moved by a grievous gentleman
of semi-clerical appearance, who went at once into such deep pathetics,
that he knocked the first speaker clean out of the course in no time.
You might have heard a pin fall--a pin! a feather--as he described
the cruelties inflicted on muffin boys by their masters, which he
very wisely urged were in themselves a sufficient reason for the
establishment of that inestimable company. It seemed that the unhappy
youths were nightly turned out into the wet streets at the most
inclement periods of the year, to wander about, in darkness and rain--or
it might be hail or snow--for hours together, without shelter, food,
or warmth; and let the public never forget upon the latter point, that
while the muffins were provided with warm clothing and blankets,
the boys were wholly unprovided for, and left to their own miserable
resources. (Shame!) The honourable gentleman related one case of a
muffin boy, who having been exposed to this inhuman and barbarous system
for no less than five years, at length fell a victim to a cold in the
head, beneath which he gradually sunk until he fell into a perspiration
and recovered; this he could vouch for, on his own authority, but he
had heard (and he had no reason to doubt the fact) of a still more
heart-rending and appalling circumstance. He had heard of the case of an
orphan muffin boy, who, having been run over by a hackney carriage, had
been removed to the hospital, had undergone the amputation of his
leg below the knee, and was now actually pursuing his occupation on
crutches. Fountain of justice, were these things to last!

This was the department of the subject that took the meeting, and this
was the style of speaking to enlist their sympathies. The men shouted;
the ladies wept into their pocket-handkerchiefs till they were moist,
and waved them till they were dry; the excitement was tremendous; and
Mr. Nickleby whispered his friend that the shares were thenceforth at a
premium of five-and-twenty per cent.

The resolution was, of course, carried with loud acclamations, every
man holding up both hands in favour of it, as he would in his enthusiasm
have held up both legs also, if he could have conveniently accomplished
it. This done, the draft of the proposed petition was read at length:
and the petition said, as all petitions DO say, that the petitioners
were very humble, and the petitioned very honourable, and the object
very virtuous; therefore (said the petition) the bill ought to be passed
into a law at once, to the everlasting honour and glory of that most
honourable and glorious Commons of England in Parliament assembled.

Then, the gentleman who had been at Crockford’s all night, and who
looked something the worse about the eyes in consequence, came forward
to tell his fellow-countrymen what a speech he meant to make in favour
of that petition whenever it should be presented, and how desperately he
meant to taunt the parliament if they rejected the bill; and to inform
them also, that he regretted his honourable friends had not inserted a
clause rendering the purchase of muffins and crumpets compulsory upon
all classes of the community, which he--opposing all half-measures,
and preferring to go the extreme animal--pledged himself to propose
and divide upon, in committee. After announcing this determination, the
honourable gentleman grew jocular; and as patent boots, lemon-coloured
kid gloves, and a fur coat collar, assist jokes materially, there
was immense laughter and much cheering, and moreover such a brilliant
display of ladies’ pocket-handkerchiefs, as threw the grievous gentleman
quite into the shade.

And when the petition had been read and was about to be adopted, there
came forward the Irish member (who was a young gentleman of ardent
temperament,) with such a speech as only an Irish member can make,
breathing the true soul and spirit of poetry, and poured forth with such
fervour, that it made one warm to look at him; in the course whereof,
he told them how he would demand the extension of that great boon to his
native country; how he would claim for her equal rights in the muffin
laws as in all other laws; and how he yet hoped to see the day when
crumpets should be toasted in her lowly cabins, and muffin bells should
ring in her rich green valleys. And, after him, came the Scotch member,
with various pleasant allusions to the probable amount of profits, which
increased the good humour that the poetry had awakened; and all the
speeches put together did exactly what they were intended to do, and
established in the hearers’ minds that there was no speculation
so promising, or at the same time so praiseworthy, as the United
Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual
Delivery Company.

So, the petition in favour of the bill was agreed upon, and the meeting
adjourned with acclamations, and Mr. Nickleby and the other directors
went to the office to lunch, as they did every day at half-past one
o’clock; and to remunerate themselves for which trouble, (as the company
was yet in its infancy,) they only charged three guineas each man for
every such attendance.



CHAPTER 3

Mr. Ralph Nickleby receives Sad Tidings of his Brother, but bears up
nobly against the Intelligence communicated to him. The Reader is
informed how he liked Nicholas, who is herein introduced, and how kindly
he proposed to make his Fortune at once


Having rendered his zealous assistance towards dispatching the lunch,
with all that promptitude and energy which are among the most important
qualities that men of business can possess, Mr. Ralph Nickleby took a
cordial farewell of his fellow-speculators, and bent his steps westward
in unwonted good humour. As he passed St Paul’s he stepped aside into
a doorway to set his watch, and with his hand on the key and his eye
on the cathedral dial, was intent upon so doing, when a man suddenly
stopped before him. It was Newman Noggs.

‘Ah! Newman,’ said Mr. Nickleby, looking up as he pursued his occupation.
‘The letter about the mortgage has come, has it? I thought it would.’

‘Wrong,’ replied Newman.

‘What! and nobody called respecting it?’ inquired Mr. Nickleby, pausing.
Noggs shook his head.

‘What HAS come, then?’ inquired Mr. Nickleby.

‘I have,’ said Newman.

‘What else?’ demanded the master, sternly.

‘This,’ said Newman, drawing a sealed letter slowly from his pocket.
‘Post-mark, Strand, black wax, black border, woman’s hand, C. N. in the
corner.’

‘Black wax?’ said Mr. Nickleby, glancing at the letter. ‘I know something
of that hand, too. Newman, I shouldn’t be surprised if my brother were
dead.’

‘I don’t think you would,’ said Newman, quietly.

‘Why not, sir?’ demanded Mr. Nickleby.

‘You never are surprised,’ replied Newman, ‘that’s all.’

Mr. Nickleby snatched the letter from his assistant, and fixing a cold
look upon him, opened, read it, put it in his pocket, and having now hit
the time to a second, began winding up his watch.

‘It is as I expected, Newman,’ said Mr. Nickleby, while he was thus
engaged. ‘He IS dead. Dear me! Well, that’s sudden thing. I shouldn’t
have thought it, really.’ With these touching expressions of sorrow, Mr
Nickleby replaced his watch in his fob, and, fitting on his gloves to a
nicety, turned upon his way, and walked slowly westward with his hands
behind him.

‘Children alive?’ inquired Noggs, stepping up to him.

‘Why, that’s the very thing,’ replied Mr. Nickleby, as though his
thoughts were about them at that moment. ‘They are both alive.’

‘Both!’ repeated Newman Noggs, in a low voice.

‘And the widow, too,’ added Mr. Nickleby, ‘and all three in London,
confound them; all three here, Newman.’

Newman fell a little behind his master, and his face was curiously
twisted as by a spasm; but whether of paralysis, or grief, or inward
laughter, nobody but himself could possibly explain. The expression of
a man’s face is commonly a help to his thoughts, or glossary on his
speech; but the countenance of Newman Noggs, in his ordinary moods, was
a problem which no stretch of ingenuity could solve.

‘Go home!’ said Mr. Nickleby, after they had walked a few paces: looking
round at the clerk as if he were his dog. The words were scarcely
uttered when Newman darted across the road, slunk among the crowd, and
disappeared in an instant.

‘Reasonable, certainly!’ muttered Mr. Nickleby to himself, as he walked
on, ‘very reasonable! My brother never did anything for me, and I never
expected it; the breath is no sooner out of his body than I am to be
looked to, as the support of a great hearty woman, and a grown boy and
girl. What are they to me! I never saw them.’

Full of these, and many other reflections of a similar kind, Mr. Nickleby
made the best of his way to the Strand, and, referring to his letter as
if to ascertain the number of the house he wanted, stopped at a private
door about half-way down that crowded thoroughfare.

A miniature painter lived there, for there was a large gilt frame
screwed upon the street-door, in which were displayed, upon a black
velvet ground, two portraits of naval dress coats with faces looking
out of them, and telescopes attached; one of a young gentleman in a very
vermilion uniform, flourishing a sabre; and one of a literary character
with a high forehead, a pen and ink, six books, and a curtain. There
was, moreover, a touching representation of a young lady reading a
manuscript in an unfathomable forest, and a charming whole length of a
large-headed little boy, sitting on a stool with his legs fore-shortened
to the size of salt-spoons. Besides these works of art, there were a
great many heads of old ladies and gentlemen smirking at each other out
of blue and brown skies, and an elegantly written card of terms with an
embossed border.

Mr. Nickleby glanced at these frivolities with great contempt, and gave
a double knock, which, having been thrice repeated, was answered by a
servant girl with an uncommonly dirty face.

‘Is Mrs. Nickleby at home, girl?’ demanded Ralph sharply.

‘Her name ain’t Nickleby,’ said the girl, ‘La Creevy, you mean.’

Mr. Nickleby looked very indignant at the handmaid on being thus
corrected, and demanded with much asperity what she meant; which she
was about to state, when a female voice proceeding from a perpendicular
staircase at the end of the passage, inquired who was wanted.

‘Mrs. Nickleby,’ said Ralph.

‘It’s the second floor, Hannah,’ said the same voice; ‘what a stupid
thing you are! Is the second floor at home?’

‘Somebody went out just now, but I think it was the attic which had been
a cleaning of himself,’ replied the girl.

‘You had better see,’ said the invisible female. ‘Show the gentleman
where the bell is, and tell him he mustn’t knock double knocks for the
second floor; I can’t allow a knock except when the bell’s broke, and
then it must be two single ones.’

‘Here,’ said Ralph, walking in without more parley, ‘I beg your pardon;
is that Mrs. La what’s-her-name?’

‘Creevy--La Creevy,’ replied the voice, as a yellow headdress bobbed
over the banisters.

‘I’ll speak to you a moment, ma’am, with your leave,’ said Ralph.

The voice replied that the gentleman was to walk up; but he had walked
up before it spoke, and stepping into the first floor, was received by
the wearer of the yellow head-dress, who had a gown to correspond, and
was of much the same colour herself. Miss La Creevy was a mincing
young lady of fifty, and Miss La Creevy’s apartment was the gilt frame
downstairs on a larger scale and something dirtier.

‘Hem!’ said Miss La Creevy, coughing delicately behind her black silk
mitten. ‘A miniature, I presume. A very strongly-marked countenance for
the purpose, sir. Have you ever sat before?’

‘You mistake my purpose, I see, ma’am,’ replied Mr. Nickleby, in his
usual blunt fashion. ‘I have no money to throw away on miniatures,
ma’am, and nobody to give one to (thank God) if I had. Seeing you on the
stairs, I wanted to ask a question of you, about some lodgers here.’

Miss La Creevy coughed once more--this cough was to conceal her
disappointment--and said, ‘Oh, indeed!’

‘I infer from what you said to your servant, that the floor above
belongs to you, ma’am,’ said Mr. Nickleby.

Yes it did, Miss La Creevy replied. The upper part of the house belonged
to her, and as she had no necessity for the second-floor rooms just
then, she was in the habit of letting them. Indeed, there was a lady
from the country and her two children in them, at that present speaking.

‘A widow, ma’am?’ said Ralph.

‘Yes, she is a widow,’ replied the lady.

‘A POOR widow, ma’am,’ said Ralph, with a powerful emphasis on that
little adjective which conveys so much.

‘Well, I’m afraid she IS poor,’ rejoined Miss La Creevy.

‘I happen to know that she is, ma’am,’ said Ralph. ‘Now, what business
has a poor widow in such a house as this, ma’am?’

‘Very true,’ replied Miss La Creevy, not at all displeased with this
implied compliment to the apartments. ‘Exceedingly true.’

‘I know her circumstances intimately, ma’am,’ said Ralph; ‘in fact, I
am a relation of the family; and I should recommend you not to keep them
here, ma’am.’

‘I should hope, if there was any incompatibility to meet the pecuniary
obligations,’ said Miss La Creevy with another cough, ‘that the lady’s
family would--’

‘No they wouldn’t, ma’am,’ interrupted Ralph, hastily. ‘Don’t think it.’

‘If I am to understand that,’ said Miss La Creevy, ‘the case wears a
very different appearance.’

‘You may understand it then, ma’am,’ said Ralph, ‘and make your
arrangements accordingly. I am the family, ma’am--at least, I believe
I am the only relation they have, and I think it right that you should
know I can’t support them in their extravagances. How long have they
taken these lodgings for?’

‘Only from week to week,’ replied Miss La Creevy. ‘Mrs. Nickleby paid the
first week in advance.’

‘Then you had better get them out at the end of it,’ said Ralph.
‘They can’t do better than go back to the country, ma’am; they are in
everybody’s way here.’

‘Certainly,’ said Miss La Creevy, rubbing her hands, ‘if Mrs. Nickleby
took the apartments without the means of paying for them, it was very
unbecoming a lady.’

‘Of course it was, ma’am,’ said Ralph.

‘And naturally,’ continued Miss La Creevy, ‘I who am, AT
PRESENT--hem--an unprotected female, cannot afford to lose by the
apartments.’

‘Of course you can’t, ma’am,’ replied Ralph.

‘Though at the same time,’ added Miss La Creevy, who was plainly
wavering between her good-nature and her interest, ‘I have nothing
whatever to say against the lady, who is extremely pleasant and affable,
though, poor thing, she seems terribly low in her spirits; nor against
the young people either, for nicer, or better-behaved young people
cannot be.’

‘Very well, ma’am,’ said Ralph, turning to the door, for these encomiums
on poverty irritated him; ‘I have done my duty, and perhaps more than I
ought: of course nobody will thank me for saying what I have.’

‘I am sure I am very much obliged to you at least, sir,’ said Miss La
Creevy in a gracious manner. ‘Would you do me the favour to look at a
few specimens of my portrait painting?’

‘You’re very good, ma’am,’ said Mr. Nickleby, making off with great
speed; ‘but as I have a visit to pay upstairs, and my time is precious,
I really can’t.’

‘At any other time when you are passing, I shall be most happy,’ said
Miss La Creevy. ‘Perhaps you will have the kindness to take a card of
terms with you? Thank you--good-morning!’

‘Good-morning, ma’am,’ said Ralph, shutting the door abruptly after him
to prevent any further conversation. ‘Now for my sister-in-law. Bah!’

Climbing up another perpendicular flight, composed with great mechanical
ingenuity of nothing but corner stairs, Mr. Ralph Nickleby stopped to
take breath on the landing, when he was overtaken by the handmaid, whom
the politeness of Miss La Creevy had dispatched to announce him, and
who had apparently been making a variety of unsuccessful attempts, since
their last interview, to wipe her dirty face clean, upon an apron much
dirtier.

‘What name?’ said the girl.

‘Nickleby,’ replied Ralph.

‘Oh! Mrs. Nickleby,’ said the girl, throwing open the door, ‘here’s Mr
Nickleby.’

A lady in deep mourning rose as Mr. Ralph Nickleby entered, but appeared
incapable of advancing to meet him, and leant upon the arm of a slight
but very beautiful girl of about seventeen, who had been sitting by her.
A youth, who appeared a year or two older, stepped forward and saluted
Ralph as his uncle.

‘Oh,’ growled Ralph, with an ill-favoured frown, ‘you are Nicholas, I
suppose?’

‘That is my name, sir,’ replied the youth.

‘Put my hat down,’ said Ralph, imperiously. ‘Well, ma’am, how do you do?
You must bear up against sorrow, ma’am; I always do.’

‘Mine was no common loss!’ said Mrs. Nickleby, applying her handkerchief
to her eyes.

‘It was no UNcommon loss, ma’am,’ returned Ralph, as he coolly
unbuttoned his spencer. ‘Husbands die every day, ma’am, and wives too.’

‘And brothers also, sir,’ said Nicholas, with a glance of indignation.

‘Yes, sir, and puppies, and pug-dogs likewise,’ replied his uncle,
taking a chair. ‘You didn’t mention in your letter what my brother’s
complaint was, ma’am.’

‘The doctors could attribute it to no particular disease,’ said Mrs
Nickleby; shedding tears. ‘We have too much reason to fear that he died
of a broken heart.’

‘Pooh!’ said Ralph, ‘there’s no such thing. I can understand a man’s
dying of a broken neck, or suffering from a broken arm, or a broken
head, or a broken leg, or a broken nose; but a broken heart!--nonsense,
it’s the cant of the day. If a man can’t pay his debts, he dies of a
broken heart, and his widow’s a martyr.’

‘Some people, I believe, have no hearts to break,’ observed Nicholas,
quietly.

‘How old is this boy, for God’s sake?’ inquired Ralph, wheeling back his
chair, and surveying his nephew from head to foot with intense scorn.

‘Nicholas is very nearly nineteen,’ replied the widow.

‘Nineteen, eh!’ said Ralph; ‘and what do you mean to do for your bread,
sir?’

‘Not to live upon my mother,’ replied Nicholas, his heart swelling as he
spoke.

‘You’d have little enough to live upon, if you did,’ retorted the uncle,
eyeing him contemptuously.

‘Whatever it be,’ said Nicholas, flushed with anger, ‘I shall not look
to you to make it more.’

‘Nicholas, my dear, recollect yourself,’ remonstrated Mrs. Nickleby.

‘Dear Nicholas, pray,’ urged the young lady.

‘Hold your tongue, sir,’ said Ralph. ‘Upon my word! Fine beginnings, Mrs
Nickleby--fine beginnings!’

Mrs. Nickleby made no other reply than entreating Nicholas by a gesture
to keep silent; and the uncle and nephew looked at each other for
some seconds without speaking. The face of the old man was stern,
hard-featured, and forbidding; that of the young one, open, handsome,
and ingenuous. The old man’s eye was keen with the twinklings of avarice
and cunning; the young man’s bright with the light of intelligence and
spirit. His figure was somewhat slight, but manly and well formed; and,
apart from all the grace of youth and comeliness, there was an emanation
from the warm young heart in his look and bearing which kept the old man
down.

However striking such a contrast as this may be to lookers-on, none ever
feel it with half the keenness or acuteness of perfection with which it
strikes to the very soul of him whose inferiority it marks. It galled
Ralph to the heart’s core, and he hated Nicholas from that hour.

The mutual inspection was at length brought to a close by Ralph
withdrawing his eyes, with a great show of disdain, and calling Nicholas
‘a boy.’ This word is much used as a term of reproach by elderly
gentlemen towards their juniors: probably with the view of deluding
society into the belief that if they could be young again, they wouldn’t
on any account.

‘Well, ma’am,’ said Ralph, impatiently, ‘the creditors have
administered, you tell me, and there’s nothing left for you?’

‘Nothing,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby.

‘And you spent what little money you had, in coming all the way to
London, to see what I could do for you?’ pursued Ralph.

‘I hoped,’ faltered Mrs. Nickleby, ‘that you might have an opportunity of
doing something for your brother’s children. It was his dying wish that
I should appeal to you in their behalf.’

‘I don’t know how it is,’ muttered Ralph, walking up and down the room,
‘but whenever a man dies without any property of his own, he always
seems to think he has a right to dispose of other people’s. What is your
daughter fit for, ma’am?’

‘Kate has been well educated,’ sobbed Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Tell your uncle, my
dear, how far you went in French and extras.’

The poor girl was about to murmur something, when her uncle stopped her,
very unceremoniously.

‘We must try and get you apprenticed at some boarding-school,’ said
Ralph. ‘You have not been brought up too delicately for that, I hope?’

‘No, indeed, uncle,’ replied the weeping girl. ‘I will try to do
anything that will gain me a home and bread.’

‘Well, well,’ said Ralph, a little softened, either by his niece’s
beauty or her distress (stretch a point, and say the latter). ‘You must
try it, and if the life is too hard, perhaps dressmaking or tambour-work
will come lighter. Have YOU ever done anything, sir?’ (turning to his
nephew.)

‘No,’ replied Nicholas, bluntly.

‘No, I thought not!’ said Ralph. ‘This is the way my brother brought up
his children, ma’am.’

‘Nicholas has not long completed such education as his poor father could
give him,’ rejoined Mrs. Nickleby, ‘and he was thinking of--’

‘Of making something of him someday,’ said Ralph. ‘The old story; always
thinking, and never doing. If my brother had been a man of activity
and prudence, he might have left you a rich woman, ma’am: and if he had
turned his son into the world, as my father turned me, when I wasn’t as
old as that boy by a year and a half, he would have been in a situation
to help you, instead of being a burden upon you, and increasing your
distress. My brother was a thoughtless, inconsiderate man, Mrs. Nickleby,
and nobody, I am sure, can have better reason to feel that, than you.’

This appeal set the widow upon thinking that perhaps she might have made
a more successful venture with her one thousand pounds, and then she
began to reflect what a comfortable sum it would have been just then;
which dismal thoughts made her tears flow faster, and in the excess of
these griefs she (being a well-meaning woman enough, but weak withal)
fell first to deploring her hard fate, and then to remarking, with many
sobs, that to be sure she had been a slave to poor Nicholas, and had
often told him she might have married better (as indeed she had, very
often), and that she never knew in his lifetime how the money went, but
that if he had confided in her they might all have been better off that
day; with other bitter recollections common to most married ladies,
either during their coverture, or afterwards, or at both periods. Mrs
Nickleby concluded by lamenting that the dear departed had never deigned
to profit by her advice, save on one occasion; which was a strictly
veracious statement, inasmuch as he had only acted upon it once, and had
ruined himself in consequence.

Mr. Ralph Nickleby heard all this with a half-smile; and when the widow
had finished, quietly took up the subject where it had been left before
the above outbreak.

‘Are you willing to work, sir?’ he inquired, frowning on his nephew.

‘Of course I am,’ replied Nicholas haughtily.

‘Then see here, sir,’ said his uncle. ‘This caught my eye this morning,
and you may thank your stars for it.’

With this exordium, Mr. Ralph Nickleby took a newspaper from his
pocket, and after unfolding it, and looking for a short time among the
advertisements, read as follows:

‘“EDUCATION.--At Mr. Wackford Squeers’s Academy, Dotheboys Hall, at the
delightful village of Dotheboys, near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire, Youth
are boarded, clothed, booked, furnished with pocket-money, provided
with all necessaries, instructed in all languages living and dead,
mathematics, orthography, geometry, astronomy, trigonometry, the use of
the globes, algebra, single stick (if required), writing, arithmetic,
fortification, and every other branch of classical literature.
Terms, twenty guineas per annum. No extras, no vacations, and diet
unparalleled. Mr. Squeers is in town, and attends daily, from one till
four, at the Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill. N.B. An able assistant wanted.
Annual salary 5 pounds. A Master of Arts would be preferred.”

‘There!’ said Ralph, folding the paper again. ‘Let him get that
situation, and his fortune is made.’

‘But he is not a Master of Arts,’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

‘That,’ replied Ralph, ‘that, I think, can be got over.’

‘But the salary is so small, and it is such a long way off, uncle!’
faltered Kate.

‘Hush, Kate my dear,’ interposed Mrs. Nickleby; ‘your uncle must know
best.’

‘I say,’ repeated Ralph, tartly, ‘let him get that situation, and his
fortune is made. If he don’t like that, let him get one for himself.
Without friends, money, recommendation, or knowledge of business of any
kind, let him find honest employment in London, which will keep him in
shoe leather, and I’ll give him a thousand pounds. At least,’ said Mr
Ralph Nickleby, checking himself, ‘I would if I had it.’

‘Poor fellow!’ said the young lady. ‘Oh! uncle, must we be separated so
soon!’

‘Don’t tease your uncle with questions when he is thinking only for our
good, my love,’ said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Nicholas, my dear, I wish you would
say something.’

‘Yes, mother, yes,’ said Nicholas, who had hitherto remained silent and
absorbed in thought. ‘If I am fortunate enough to be appointed to this
post, sir, for which I am so imperfectly qualified, what will become of
those I leave behind?’

‘Your mother and sister, sir,’ replied Ralph, ‘will be provided for, in
that case (not otherwise), by me, and placed in some sphere of life in
which they will be able to be independent. That will be my immediate
care; they will not remain as they are, one week after your departure, I
will undertake.’

‘Then,’ said Nicholas, starting gaily up, and wringing his uncle’s hand,
‘I am ready to do anything you wish me. Let us try our fortune with Mr
Squeers at once; he can but refuse.’

‘He won’t do that,’ said Ralph. ‘He will be glad to have you on my
recommendation. Make yourself of use to him, and you’ll rise to be a
partner in the establishment in no time. Bless me, only think! if he
were to die, why your fortune’s made at once.’

‘To be sure, I see it all,’ said poor Nicholas, delighted with a
thousand visionary ideas, that his good spirits and his inexperience
were conjuring up before him. ‘Or suppose some young nobleman who is
being educated at the Hall, were to take a fancy to me, and get his
father to appoint me his travelling tutor when he left, and when we
come back from the continent, procured me some handsome appointment. Eh!
uncle?’

‘Ah, to be sure!’ sneered Ralph.

‘And who knows, but when he came to see me when I was settled (as he
would of course), he might fall in love with Kate, who would be keeping
my house, and--and marry her, eh! uncle? Who knows?’

‘Who, indeed!’ snarled Ralph.

‘How happy we should be!’ cried Nicholas with enthusiasm. ‘The pain of
parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again. Kate will be a beautiful
woman, and I so proud to hear them say so, and mother so happy to
be with us once again, and all these sad times forgotten, and--’ The
picture was too bright a one to bear, and Nicholas, fairly overpowered
by it, smiled faintly, and burst into tears.

This simple family, born and bred in retirement, and wholly unacquainted
with what is called the world--a conventional phrase which, being
interpreted, often signifieth all the rascals in it--mingled their tears
together at the thought of their first separation; and, this first gush
of feeling over, were proceeding to dilate with all the buoyancy of
untried hope on the bright prospects before them, when Mr. Ralph Nickleby
suggested, that if they lost time, some more fortunate candidate
might deprive Nicholas of the stepping-stone to fortune which the
advertisement pointed out, and so undermine all their air-built castles.
This timely reminder effectually stopped the conversation. Nicholas,
having carefully copied the address of Mr. Squeers, the uncle and nephew
issued forth together in quest of that accomplished gentleman; Nicholas
firmly persuading himself that he had done his relative great injustice
in disliking him at first sight; and Mrs. Nickleby being at some pains to
inform her daughter that she was sure he was a much more kindly disposed
person than he seemed; which, Miss Nickleby dutifully remarked, he might
very easily be.

To tell the truth, the good lady’s opinion had been not a little
influenced by her brother-in-law’s appeal to her better understanding,
and his implied compliment to her high deserts; and although she had
dearly loved her husband, and still doted on her children, he had struck
so successfully on one of those little jarring chords in the human heart
(Ralph was well acquainted with its worst weaknesses, though he knew
nothing of its best), that she had already begun seriously to consider
herself the amiable and suffering victim of her late husband’s
imprudence.



CHAPTER 4

Nicholas and his Uncle (to secure the Fortune without loss of time) wait
upon Mr. Wackford Squeers, the Yorkshire Schoolmaster


Snow Hill! What kind of place can the quiet townspeople who see the
words emblazoned, in all the legibility of gilt letters and dark
shading, on the north-country coaches, take Snow Hill to be? All
people have some undefined and shadowy notion of a place whose name is
frequently before their eyes, or often in their ears. What a vast number
of random ideas there must be perpetually floating about, regarding this
same Snow Hill. The name is such a good one. Snow Hill--Snow Hill too,
coupled with a Saracen’s Head: picturing to us by a double association
of ideas, something stern and rugged! A bleak desolate tract of country,
open to piercing blasts and fierce wintry storms--a dark, cold, gloomy
heath, lonely by day, and scarcely to be thought of by honest folks
at night--a place which solitary wayfarers shun, and where desperate
robbers congregate;--this, or something like this, should be the
prevalent notion of Snow Hill, in those remote and rustic parts, through
which the Saracen’s Head, like some grim apparition, rushes each day and
night with mysterious and ghost-like punctuality; holding its swift and
headlong course in all weathers, and seeming to bid defiance to the very
elements themselves.

The reality is rather different, but by no means to be despised
notwithstanding. There, at the very core of London, in the heart of its
business and animation, in the midst of a whirl of noise and motion:
stemming as it were the giant currents of life that flow ceaselessly on
from different quarters, and meet beneath its walls: stands Newgate; and
in that crowded street on which it frowns so darkly--within a few feet
of the squalid tottering houses--upon the very spot on which the vendors
of soup and fish and damaged fruit are now plying their trades--scores
of human beings, amidst a roar of sounds to which even the tumult of a
great city is as nothing, four, six, or eight strong men at a time, have
been hurried violently and swiftly from the world, when the scene has
been rendered frightful with excess of human life; when curious eyes
have glared from casement and house-top, and wall and pillar; and
when, in the mass of white and upturned faces, the dying wretch, in his
all-comprehensive look of agony, has met not one--not one--that bore the
impress of pity or compassion.

Near to the jail, and by consequence near to Smithfield also, and
the Compter, and the bustle and noise of the city; and just on that
particular part of Snow Hill where omnibus horses going eastward
seriously think of falling down on purpose, and where horses in hackney
cabriolets going westward not unfrequently fall by accident, is
the coach-yard of the Saracen’s Head Inn; its portal guarded by two
Saracens’ heads and shoulders, which it was once the pride and glory of
the choice spirits of this metropolis to pull down at night, but which
have for some time remained in undisturbed tranquillity; possibly
because this species of humour is now confined to St James’s parish,
where door knockers are preferred as being more portable, and bell-wires
esteemed as convenient toothpicks. Whether this be the reason or not,
there they are, frowning upon you from each side of the gateway. The inn
itself garnished with another Saracen’s Head, frowns upon you from the
top of the yard; while from the door of the hind boot of all the red
coaches that are standing therein, there glares a small Saracen’s Head,
with a twin expression to the large Saracens’ Heads below, so that the
general appearance of the pile is decidedly of the Saracenic order.

When you walk up this yard, you will see the booking-office on your
left, and the tower of St Sepulchre’s church, darting abruptly up into
the sky, on your right, and a gallery of bedrooms on both sides. Just
before you, you will observe a long window with the words ‘coffee-room’
legibly painted above it; and looking out of that window, you would have
seen in addition, if you had gone at the right time, Mr. Wackford Squeers
with his hands in his pockets.

Mr. Squeers’s appearance was not prepossessing. He had but one eye,
and the popular prejudice runs in favour of two. The eye he had, was
unquestionably useful, but decidedly not ornamental: being of a greenish
grey, and in shape resembling the fan-light of a street door. The blank
side of his face was much wrinkled and puckered up, which gave him a
very sinister appearance, especially when he smiled, at which times his
expression bordered closely on the villainous. His hair was very flat
and shiny, save at the ends, where it was brushed stiffly up from a low
protruding forehead, which assorted well with his harsh voice and coarse
manner. He was about two or three and fifty, and a trifle below the
middle size; he wore a white neckerchief with long ends, and a suit of
scholastic black; but his coat sleeves being a great deal too long,
and his trousers a great deal too short, he appeared ill at ease in
his clothes, and as if he were in a perpetual state of astonishment at
finding himself so respectable.

Mr. Squeers was standing in a box by one of the coffee-room fire-places,
fitted with one such table as is usually seen in coffee-rooms, and two
of extraordinary shapes and dimensions made to suit the angles of the
partition. In a corner of the seat, was a very small deal trunk, tied
round with a scanty piece of cord; and on the trunk was perched--his
lace-up half-boots and corduroy trousers dangling in the air--a
diminutive boy, with his shoulders drawn up to his ears, and his hands
planted on his knees, who glanced timidly at the schoolmaster, from time
to time, with evident dread and apprehension.

‘Half-past three,’ muttered Mr. Squeers, turning from the window, and
looking sulkily at the coffee-room clock. ‘There will be nobody here
today.’

Much vexed by this reflection, Mr. Squeers looked at the little boy to
see whether he was doing anything he could beat him for. As he happened
not to be doing anything at all, he merely boxed his ears, and told him
not to do it again.

‘At Midsummer,’ muttered Mr. Squeers, resuming his complaint, ‘I took
down ten boys; ten twenties is two hundred pound. I go back at eight
o’clock tomorrow morning, and have got only three--three oughts is an
ought--three twos is six--sixty pound. What’s come of all the boys?
what’s parents got in their heads? what does it all mean?’

Here the little boy on the top of the trunk gave a violent sneeze.

‘Halloa, sir!’ growled the schoolmaster, turning round. ‘What’s that,
sir?’

‘Nothing, please sir,’ replied the little boy.

‘Nothing, sir!’ exclaimed Mr. Squeers.

‘Please sir, I sneezed,’ rejoined the boy, trembling till the little
trunk shook under him.

‘Oh! sneezed, did you?’ retorted Mr. Squeers. ‘Then what did you say
“nothing” for, sir?’

In default of a better answer to this question, the little boy screwed a
couple of knuckles into each of his eyes and began to cry, wherefore Mr
Squeers knocked him off the trunk with a blow on one side of the face,
and knocked him on again with a blow on the other.

‘Wait till I get you down into Yorkshire, my young gentleman,’ said Mr
Squeers, ‘and then I’ll give you the rest. Will you hold that noise,
sir?’

‘Ye--ye--yes,’ sobbed the little boy, rubbing his face very hard with
the Beggar’s Petition in printed calico.

‘Then do so at once, sir,’ said Squeers. ‘Do you hear?’

As this admonition was accompanied with a threatening gesture, and
uttered with a savage aspect, the little boy rubbed his face harder, as
if to keep the tears back; and, beyond alternately sniffing and choking,
gave no further vent to his emotions.

‘Mr. Squeers,’ said the waiter, looking in at this juncture; ‘here’s a
gentleman asking for you at the bar.’

‘Show the gentleman in, Richard,’ replied Mr. Squeers, in a soft voice.
‘Put your handkerchief in your pocket, you little scoundrel, or I’ll
murder you when the gentleman goes.’

The schoolmaster had scarcely uttered these words in a fierce whisper,
when the stranger entered. Affecting not to see him, Mr. Squeers feigned
to be intent upon mending a pen, and offering benevolent advice to his
youthful pupil.

‘My dear child,’ said Mr. Squeers, ‘all people have their trials. This
early trial of yours that is fit to make your little heart burst, and
your very eyes come out of your head with crying, what is it? Nothing;
less than nothing. You are leaving your friends, but you will have a
father in me, my dear, and a mother in Mrs. Squeers. At the delightful
village of Dotheboys, near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire, where youth are
boarded, clothed, booked, washed, furnished with pocket-money, provided
with all necessaries--’

‘It IS the gentleman,’ observed the stranger, stopping the schoolmaster
in the rehearsal of his advertisement. ‘Mr. Squeers, I believe, sir?’

‘The same, sir,’ said Mr. Squeers, with an assumption of extreme
surprise.

‘The gentleman,’ said the stranger, ‘that advertised in the Times
newspaper?’

‘--Morning Post, Chronicle, Herald, and Advertiser, regarding the
Academy called Dotheboys Hall at the delightful village of Dotheboys,
near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire,’ added Mr. Squeers. ‘You come on
business, sir. I see by my young friends. How do you do, my little
gentleman? and how do you do, sir?’ With this salutation Mr. Squeers
patted the heads of two hollow-eyed, small-boned little boys, whom the
applicant had brought with him, and waited for further communications.

‘I am in the oil and colour way. My name is Snawley, sir,’ said the
stranger.

Squeers inclined his head as much as to say, ‘And a remarkably pretty
name, too.’

The stranger continued. ‘I have been thinking, Mr. Squeers, of placing my
two boys at your school.’

‘It is not for me to say so, sir,’ replied Mr. Squeers, ‘but I don’t
think you could possibly do a better thing.’

‘Hem!’ said the other. ‘Twenty pounds per annewum, I believe, Mr
Squeers?’

‘Guineas,’ rejoined the schoolmaster, with a persuasive smile.

‘Pounds for two, I think, Mr. Squeers,’ said Mr. Snawley, solemnly.

‘I don’t think it could be done, sir,’ replied Squeers, as if he had
never considered the proposition before. ‘Let me see; four fives is
twenty, double that, and deduct the--well, a pound either way shall not
stand betwixt us. You must recommend me to your connection, sir, and
make it up that way.’

‘They are not great eaters,’ said Mr. Snawley.

‘Oh! that doesn’t matter at all,’ replied Squeers. ‘We don’t consider
the boys’ appetites at our establishment.’ This was strictly true; they
did not.

‘Every wholesome luxury, sir, that Yorkshire can afford,’ continued
Squeers; ‘every beautiful moral that Mrs. Squeers can instil; every--in
short, every comfort of a home that a boy could wish for, will be
theirs, Mr. Snawley.’

‘I should wish their morals to be particularly attended to,’ said Mr
Snawley.

‘I am glad of that, sir,’ replied the schoolmaster, drawing himself up.
‘They have come to the right shop for morals, sir.’

‘You are a moral man yourself,’ said Mr. Snawley.

‘I rather believe I am, sir,’ replied Squeers.

‘I have the satisfaction to know you are, sir,’ said Mr. Snawley. ‘I
asked one of your references, and he said you were pious.’

‘Well, sir, I hope I am a little in that line,’ replied Squeers.

‘I hope I am also,’ rejoined the other. ‘Could I say a few words with
you in the next box?’

‘By all means,’ rejoined Squeers with a grin. ‘My dears, will you speak
to your new playfellow a minute or two? That is one of my boys, sir.
Belling his name is,--a Taunton boy that, sir.’

‘Is he, indeed?’ rejoined Mr. Snawley, looking at the poor little urchin
as if he were some extraordinary natural curiosity.

‘He goes down with me tomorrow, sir,’ said Squeers. ‘That’s his luggage
that he is a sitting upon now. Each boy is required to bring, sir, two
suits of clothes, six shirts, six pair of stockings, two nightcaps, two
pocket-handkerchiefs, two pair of shoes, two hats, and a razor.’

‘A razor!’ exclaimed Mr. Snawley, as they walked into the next box. ‘What
for?’

‘To shave with,’ replied Squeers, in a slow and measured tone.

There was not much in these three words, but there must have been
something in the manner in which they were said, to attract attention;
for the schoolmaster and his companion looked steadily at each other for
a few seconds, and then exchanged a very meaning smile. Snawley was a
sleek, flat-nosed man, clad in sombre garments, and long black gaiters,
and bearing in his countenance an expression of much mortification
and sanctity; so, his smiling without any obvious reason was the more
remarkable.

‘Up to what age do you keep boys at your school then?’ he asked at
length.

‘Just as long as their friends make the quarterly payments to my agent
in town, or until such time as they run away,’ replied Squeers. ‘Let
us understand each other; I see we may safely do so. What are these
boys;--natural children?’

‘No,’ rejoined Snawley, meeting the gaze of the schoolmaster’s one eye.
‘They ain’t.’

‘I thought they might be,’ said Squeers, coolly. ‘We have a good many of
them; that boy’s one.’

‘Him in the next box?’ said Snawley.

Squeers nodded in the affirmative; his companion took another peep at
the little boy on the trunk, and, turning round again, looked as if he
were quite disappointed to see him so much like other boys, and said he
should hardly have thought it.

‘He is,’ cried Squeers. ‘But about these boys of yours; you wanted to
speak to me?’

‘Yes,’ replied Snawley. ‘The fact is, I am not their father, Mr. Squeers.
I’m only their father-in-law.’

‘Oh! Is that it?’ said the schoolmaster. ‘That explains it at once. I
was wondering what the devil you were going to send them to Yorkshire
for. Ha! ha! Oh, I understand now.’

‘You see I have married the mother,’ pursued Snawley; ‘it’s expensive
keeping boys at home, and as she has a little money in her own right, I
am afraid (women are so very foolish, Mr. Squeers) that she might be led
to squander it on them, which would be their ruin, you know.’

‘I see,’ returned Squeers, throwing himself back in his chair, and
waving his hand.

‘And this,’ resumed Snawley, ‘has made me anxious to put them to some
school a good distance off, where there are no holidays--none of those
ill-judged coming home twice a year that unsettle children’s minds
so--and where they may rough it a little--you comprehend?’

‘The payments regular, and no questions asked,’ said Squeers, nodding
his head.

‘That’s it, exactly,’ rejoined the other. ‘Morals strictly attended to,
though.’

‘Strictly,’ said Squeers.

‘Not too much writing home allowed, I suppose?’ said the father-in-law,
hesitating.

‘None, except a circular at Christmas, to say they never were so happy,
and hope they may never be sent for,’ rejoined Squeers.

‘Nothing could be better,’ said the father-in-law, rubbing his hands.

‘Then, as we understand each other,’ said Squeers, ‘will you allow me
to ask you whether you consider me a highly virtuous, exemplary, and
well-conducted man in private life; and whether, as a person whose
business it is to take charge of youth, you place the strongest
confidence in my unimpeachable integrity, liberality, religious
principles, and ability?’

‘Certainly I do,’ replied the father-in-law, reciprocating the
schoolmaster’s grin.

‘Perhaps you won’t object to say that, if I make you a reference?’

‘Not the least in the world.’

‘That’s your sort!’ said Squeers, taking up a pen; ‘this is doing
business, and that’s what I like.’

Having entered Mr. Snawley’s address, the schoolmaster had next to
perform the still more agreeable office of entering the receipt of the
first quarter’s payment in advance, which he had scarcely completed,
when another voice was heard inquiring for Mr. Squeers.

‘Here he is,’ replied the schoolmaster; ‘what is it?’

‘Only a matter of business, sir,’ said Ralph Nickleby, presenting
himself, closely followed by Nicholas. ‘There was an advertisement of
yours in the papers this morning?’

‘There was, sir. This way, if you please,’ said Squeers, who had by this
time got back to the box by the fire-place. ‘Won’t you be seated?’

‘Why, I think I will,’ replied Ralph, suiting the action to the word,
and placing his hat on the table before him. ‘This is my nephew, sir, Mr
Nicholas Nickleby.’

‘How do you do, sir?’ said Squeers.

Nicholas bowed, said he was very well, and seemed very much astonished
at the outward appearance of the proprietor of Dotheboys Hall: as indeed
he was.

‘Perhaps you recollect me?’ said Ralph, looking narrowly at the
schoolmaster.

‘You paid me a small account at each of my half-yearly visits to town,
for some years, I think, sir,’ replied Squeers.

‘I did,’ rejoined Ralph.

‘For the parents of a boy named Dorker, who unfortunately--’

‘--unfortunately died at Dotheboys Hall,’ said Ralph, finishing the
sentence.

‘I remember very well, sir,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘Ah! Mrs. Squeers, sir,
was as partial to that lad as if he had been her own; the attention,
sir, that was bestowed upon that boy in his illness! Dry toast and
warm tea offered him every night and morning when he couldn’t swallow
anything--a candle in his bedroom on the very night he died--the best
dictionary sent up for him to lay his head upon--I don’t regret it
though. It is a pleasant thing to reflect that one did one’s duty by
him.’

Ralph smiled, as if he meant anything but smiling, and looked round at
the strangers present.

‘These are only some pupils of mine,’ said Wackford Squeers, pointing
to the little boy on the trunk and the two little boys on the floor,
who had been staring at each other without uttering a word, and writhing
their bodies into most remarkable contortions, according to the custom
of little boys when they first become acquainted. ‘This gentleman,
sir, is a parent who is kind enough to compliment me upon the course
of education adopted at Dotheboys Hall, which is situated, sir, at the
delightful village of Dotheboys, near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire,
where youth are boarded, clothed, booked, washed, furnished with
pocket-money--’

‘Yes, we know all about that, sir,’ interrupted Ralph, testily. ‘It’s in
the advertisement.’

‘You are very right, sir; it IS in the advertisement,’ replied Squeers.

‘And in the matter of fact besides,’ interrupted Mr. Snawley. ‘I feel
bound to assure you, sir, and I am proud to have this opportunity OF
assuring you, that I consider Mr. Squeers a gentleman highly virtuous,
exemplary, well conducted, and--’

‘I make no doubt of it, sir,’ interrupted Ralph, checking the torrent of
recommendation; ‘no doubt of it at all. Suppose we come to business?’

‘With all my heart, sir,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘“Never postpone business,”
 is the very first lesson we instil into our commercial pupils. Master
Belling, my dear, always remember that; do you hear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ repeated Master Belling.

‘He recollects what it is, does he?’ said Ralph.

‘Tell the gentleman,’ said Squeers.

‘“Never,”’ repeated Master Belling.

‘Very good,’ said Squeers; ‘go on.’

‘Never,’ repeated Master Belling again.

‘Very good indeed,’ said Squeers. ‘Yes.’

‘P,’ suggested Nicholas, good-naturedly.

‘Perform--business!’ said Master Belling. ‘Never--perform--business!’

‘Very well, sir,’ said Squeers, darting a withering look at the culprit.
‘You and I will perform a little business on our private account
by-and-by.’

‘And just now,’ said Ralph, ‘we had better transact our own, perhaps.’

‘If you please,’ said Squeers.

‘Well,’ resumed Ralph, ‘it’s brief enough; soon broached; and I hope
easily concluded. You have advertised for an able assistant, sir?’

‘Precisely so,’ said Squeers.

‘And you really want one?’

‘Certainly,’ answered Squeers.

‘Here he is!’ said Ralph. ‘My nephew Nicholas, hot from school,
with everything he learnt there, fermenting in his head, and nothing
fermenting in his pocket, is just the man you want.’

‘I am afraid,’ said Squeers, perplexed with such an application from a
youth of Nicholas’s figure, ‘I am afraid the young man won’t suit me.’

‘Yes, he will,’ said Ralph; ‘I know better. Don’t be cast down, sir; you
will be teaching all the young noblemen in Dotheboys Hall in less than a
week’s time, unless this gentleman is more obstinate than I take him to
be.’

‘I fear, sir,’ said Nicholas, addressing Mr. Squeers, ‘that you object to
my youth, and to my not being a Master of Arts?’

‘The absence of a college degree IS an objection,’ replied Squeers,
looking as grave as he could, and considerably puzzled, no less by the
contrast between the simplicity of the nephew and the worldly manner of
the uncle, than by the incomprehensible allusion to the young noblemen
under his tuition.

‘Look here, sir,’ said Ralph; ‘I’ll put this matter in its true light in
two seconds.’

‘If you’ll have the goodness,’ rejoined Squeers.

‘This is a boy, or a youth, or a lad, or a young man, or a hobbledehoy,
or whatever you like to call him, of eighteen or nineteen, or
thereabouts,’ said Ralph.

‘That I see,’ observed the schoolmaster.

‘So do I,’ said Mr. Snawley, thinking it as well to back his new friend
occasionally.

‘His father is dead, he is wholly ignorant of the world, has no
resources whatever, and wants something to do,’ said Ralph. ‘I recommend
him to this splendid establishment of yours, as an opening which will
lead him to fortune if he turns it to proper account. Do you see that?’

‘Everybody must see that,’ replied Squeers, half imitating the sneer
with which the old gentleman was regarding his unconscious relative.

‘I do, of course,’ said Nicholas, eagerly.

‘He does, of course, you observe,’ said Ralph, in the same dry, hard
manner. ‘If any caprice of temper should induce him to cast aside this
golden opportunity before he has brought it to perfection, I consider
myself absolved from extending any assistance to his mother and sister.
Look at him, and think of the use he may be to you in half-a-dozen ways!
Now, the question is, whether, for some time to come at all events, he
won’t serve your purpose better than twenty of the kind of people
you would get under ordinary circumstances. Isn’t that a question for
consideration?’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Squeers, answering a nod of Ralph’s head with a nod
of his own.

‘Good,’ rejoined Ralph. ‘Let me have two words with you.’

The two words were had apart; in a couple of minutes Mr. Wackford Squeers
announced that Mr. Nicholas Nickleby was, from that moment, thoroughly
nominated to, and installed in, the office of first assistant master at
Dotheboys Hall.

‘Your uncle’s recommendation has done it, Mr. Nickleby,’ said Wackford
Squeers.

Nicholas, overjoyed at his success, shook his uncle’s hand warmly, and
could almost have worshipped Squeers upon the spot.

‘He is an odd-looking man,’ thought Nicholas. ‘What of that? Porson was
an odd-looking man, and so was Doctor Johnson; all these bookworms are.’

‘At eight o’clock tomorrow morning, Mr. Nickleby,’ said Squeers, ‘the
coach starts. You must be here at a quarter before, as we take these
boys with us.’

‘Certainly, sir,’ said Nicholas.

‘And your fare down, I have paid,’ growled Ralph. ‘So, you’ll have
nothing to do but keep yourself warm.’

Here was another instance of his uncle’s generosity! Nicholas felt his
unexpected kindness so much, that he could scarcely find words to thank
him; indeed, he had not found half enough, when they took leave of the
schoolmaster, and emerged from the Saracen’s Head gateway.

‘I shall be here in the morning to see you fairly off,’ said Ralph. ‘No
skulking!’

‘Thank you, sir,’ replied Nicholas; ‘I never shall forget this
kindness.’

‘Take care you don’t,’ replied his uncle. ‘You had better go home now,
and pack up what you have got to pack. Do you think you could find your
way to Golden Square first?’

‘Certainly,’ said Nicholas. ‘I can easily inquire.’

‘Leave these papers with my clerk, then,’ said Ralph, producing a small
parcel, ‘and tell him to wait till I come home.’

Nicholas cheerfully undertook the errand, and bidding his worthy
uncle an affectionate farewell, which that warm-hearted old gentleman
acknowledged by a growl, hastened away to execute his commission.

He found Golden Square in due course; Mr. Noggs, who had stepped out
for a minute or so to the public-house, was opening the door with a
latch-key, as he reached the steps.

‘What’s that?’ inquired Noggs, pointing to the parcel.

‘Papers from my uncle,’ replied Nicholas; ‘and you’re to have the
goodness to wait till he comes home, if you please.’

‘Uncle!’ cried Noggs.

‘Mr. Nickleby,’ said Nicholas in explanation.

‘Come in,’ said Newman.

Without another word he led Nicholas into the passage, and thence into
the official pantry at the end of it, where he thrust him into a chair,
and mounting upon his high stool, sat, with his arms hanging, straight
down by his sides, gazing fixedly upon him, as from a tower of
observation.

‘There is no answer,’ said Nicholas, laying the parcel on a table beside
him.

Newman said nothing, but folding his arms, and thrusting his head
forward so as to obtain a nearer view of Nicholas’s face, scanned his
features closely.

‘No answer,’ said Nicholas, speaking very loud, under the impression
that Newman Noggs was deaf.

Newman placed his hands upon his knees, and, without uttering a
syllable, continued the same close scrutiny of his companion’s face.

This was such a very singular proceeding on the part of an utter
stranger, and his appearance was so extremely peculiar, that Nicholas,
who had a sufficiently keen sense of the ridiculous, could not refrain
from breaking into a smile as he inquired whether Mr. Noggs had any
commands for him.

Noggs shook his head and sighed; upon which Nicholas rose, and remarking
that he required no rest, bade him good-morning.

It was a great exertion for Newman Noggs, and nobody knows to this day
how he ever came to make it, the other party being wholly unknown to
him, but he drew a long breath and actually said, out loud, without once
stopping, that if the young gentleman did not object to tell, he should
like to know what his uncle was going to do for him.

Nicholas had not the least objection in the world, but on the contrary
was rather pleased to have an opportunity of talking on the subject
which occupied his thoughts; so, he sat down again, and (his sanguine
imagination warming as he spoke) entered into a fervent and glowing
description of all the honours and advantages to be derived from his
appointment at that seat of learning, Dotheboys Hall.

‘But, what’s the matter--are you ill?’ said Nicholas, suddenly breaking
off, as his companion, after throwing himself into a variety of
uncouth attitudes, thrust his hands under the stool, and cracked his
finger-joints as if he were snapping all the bones in his hands.

Newman Noggs made no reply, but went on shrugging his shoulders and
cracking his finger-joints; smiling horribly all the time, and looking
steadfastly at nothing, out of the tops of his eyes, in a most ghastly
manner.

At first, Nicholas thought the mysterious man was in a fit, but, on
further consideration, decided that he was in liquor, under which
circumstances he deemed it prudent to make off at once. He looked back
when he had got the street-door open. Newman Noggs was still indulging
in the same extraordinary gestures, and the cracking of his fingers
sounded louder that ever.



CHAPTER 5

Nicholas starts for Yorkshire. Of his Leave-taking and his
Fellow-Travellers, and what befell them on the Road


If tears dropped into a trunk were charms to preserve its owner from
sorrow and misfortune, Nicholas Nickleby would have commenced his
expedition under most happy auspices. There was so much to be done, and
so little time to do it in; so many kind words to be spoken, and such
bitter pain in the hearts in which they rose to impede their utterance;
that the little preparations for his journey were made mournfully
indeed. A hundred things which the anxious care of his mother and sister
deemed indispensable for his comfort, Nicholas insisted on leaving
behind, as they might prove of some after use, or might be convertible
into money if occasion required. A hundred affectionate contests on
such points as these, took place on the sad night which preceded his
departure; and, as the termination of every angerless dispute brought
them nearer and nearer to the close of their slight preparations, Kate
grew busier and busier, and wept more silently.

The box was packed at last, and then there came supper, with some little
delicacy provided for the occasion, and as a set-off against the expense
of which, Kate and her mother had feigned to dine when Nicholas was out.
The poor lad nearly choked himself by attempting to partake of it,
and almost suffocated himself in affecting a jest or two, and forcing a
melancholy laugh. Thus, they lingered on till the hour of separating
for the night was long past; and then they found that they might as
well have given vent to their real feelings before, for they could not
suppress them, do what they would. So, they let them have their way, and
even that was a relief.

Nicholas slept well till six next morning; dreamed of home, or of what
was home once--no matter which, for things that are changed or gone will
come back as they used to be, thank God! in sleep--and rose quite brisk
and gay. He wrote a few lines in pencil, to say the goodbye which he was
afraid to pronounce himself, and laying them, with half his scanty stock
of money, at his sister’s door, shouldered his box and crept softly
downstairs.

‘Is that you, Hannah?’ cried a voice from Miss La Creevy’s sitting-room,
whence shone the light of a feeble candle.

‘It is I, Miss La Creevy,’ said Nicholas, putting down the box and
looking in.

‘Bless us!’ exclaimed Miss La Creevy, starting and putting her hand to
her curl-papers. ‘You’re up very early, Mr. Nickleby.’

‘So are you,’ replied Nicholas.

‘It’s the fine arts that bring me out of bed, Mr. Nickleby,’ returned the
lady. ‘I’m waiting for the light to carry out an idea.’

Miss La Creevy had got up early to put a fancy nose into a miniature of
an ugly little boy, destined for his grandmother in the country, who was
expected to bequeath him property if he was like the family.

‘To carry out an idea,’ repeated Miss La Creevy; ‘and that’s the great
convenience of living in a thoroughfare like the Strand. When I want
a nose or an eye for any particular sitter, I have only to look out of
window and wait till I get one.’

‘Does it take long to get a nose, now?’ inquired Nicholas, smiling.

‘Why, that depends in a great measure on the pattern,’ replied Miss La
Creevy. ‘Snubs and Romans are plentiful enough, and there are flats of
all sorts and sizes when there’s a meeting at Exeter Hall; but perfect
aquilines, I am sorry to say, are scarce, and we generally use them for
uniforms or public characters.’

‘Indeed!’ said Nicholas. ‘If I should meet with any in my travels, I’ll
endeavour to sketch them for you.’

‘You don’t mean to say that you are really going all the way down into
Yorkshire this cold winter’s weather, Mr. Nickleby?’ said Miss La Creevy.
‘I heard something of it last night.’

‘I do, indeed,’ replied Nicholas. ‘Needs must, you know, when somebody
drives. Necessity is my driver, and that is only another name for the
same gentleman.’

‘Well, I am very sorry for it; that’s all I can say,’ said Miss La
Creevy; ‘as much on your mother’s and sister’s account as on yours.
Your sister is a very pretty young lady, Mr. Nickleby, and that is
an additional reason why she should have somebody to protect her. I
persuaded her to give me a sitting or two, for the street-door case.
‘Ah! she’ll make a sweet miniature.’ As Miss La Creevy spoke, she held
up an ivory countenance intersected with very perceptible sky-blue
veins, and regarded it with so much complacency, that Nicholas quite
envied her.

‘If you ever have an opportunity of showing Kate some little kindness,’
said Nicholas, presenting his hand, ‘I think you will.’

‘Depend upon that,’ said the good-natured miniature painter; ‘and God
bless you, Mr. Nickleby; and I wish you well.’

It was very little that Nicholas knew of the world, but he guessed
enough about its ways to think, that if he gave Miss La Creevy one
little kiss, perhaps she might not be the less kindly disposed towards
those he was leaving behind. So, he gave her three or four with a kind
of jocose gallantry, and Miss La Creevy evinced no greater symptoms of
displeasure than declaring, as she adjusted her yellow turban, that she
had never heard of such a thing, and couldn’t have believed it possible.

Having terminated the unexpected interview in this satisfactory manner,
Nicholas hastily withdrew himself from the house. By the time he had
found a man to carry his box it was only seven o’clock, so he walked
slowly on, a little in advance of the porter, and very probably with not
half as light a heart in his breast as the man had, although he had no
waistcoat to cover it with, and had evidently, from the appearance of
his other garments, been spending the night in a stable, and taking his
breakfast at a pump.

Regarding, with no small curiosity and interest, all the busy
preparations for the coming day which every street and almost every
house displayed; and thinking, now and then, that it seemed rather hard
that so many people of all ranks and stations could earn a livelihood in
London, and that he should be compelled to journey so far in search of
one; Nicholas speedily arrived at the Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill. Having
dismissed his attendant, and seen the box safely deposited in the
coach-office, he looked into the coffee-room in search of Mr. Squeers.

He found that learned gentleman sitting at breakfast, with the three
little boys before noticed, and two others who had turned up by some
lucky chance since the interview of the previous day, ranged in a row on
the opposite seat. Mr. Squeers had before him a small measure of coffee,
a plate of hot toast, and a cold round of beef; but he was at that
moment intent on preparing breakfast for the little boys.

‘This is twopenn’orth of milk, is it, waiter?’ said Mr. Squeers, looking
down into a large blue mug, and slanting it gently, so as to get an
accurate view of the quantity of liquid contained in it.

‘That’s twopenn’orth, sir,’ replied the waiter.

‘What a rare article milk is, to be sure, in London!’ said Mr. Squeers,
with a sigh. ‘Just fill that mug up with lukewarm water, William, will
you?’

‘To the wery top, sir?’ inquired the waiter. ‘Why, the milk will be
drownded.’

‘Never you mind that,’ replied Mr. Squeers. ‘Serve it right for being so
dear. You ordered that thick bread and butter for three, did you?’

‘Coming directly, sir.’

‘You needn’t hurry yourself,’ said Squeers; ‘there’s plenty of time.
Conquer your passions, boys, and don’t be eager after vittles.’ As he
uttered this moral precept, Mr. Squeers took a large bite out of the cold
beef, and recognised Nicholas.

‘Sit down, Mr. Nickleby,’ said Squeers. ‘Here we are, a breakfasting you
see!’

Nicholas did NOT see that anybody was breakfasting, except Mr. Squeers;
but he bowed with all becoming reverence, and looked as cheerful as he
could.

‘Oh! that’s the milk and water, is it, William?’ said Squeers. ‘Very
good; don’t forget the bread and butter presently.’

At this fresh mention of the bread and butter, the five little boys
looked very eager, and followed the waiter out, with their eyes;
meanwhile Mr. Squeers tasted the milk and water.

‘Ah!’ said that gentleman, smacking his lips, ‘here’s richness! Think of
the many beggars and orphans in the streets that would be glad of this,
little boys. A shocking thing hunger, isn’t it, Mr. Nickleby?’

‘Very shocking, sir,’ said Nicholas.

‘When I say number one,’ pursued Mr. Squeers, putting the mug before the
children, ‘the boy on the left hand nearest the window may take a drink;
and when I say number two, the boy next him will go in, and so till we
come to number five, which is the last boy. Are you ready?’

‘Yes, sir,’ cried all the little boys with great eagerness.

‘That’s right,’ said Squeers, calmly getting on with his breakfast;
‘keep ready till I tell you to begin. Subdue your appetites, my dears,
and you’ve conquered human natur. This is the way we inculcate strength
of mind, Mr. Nickleby,’ said the schoolmaster, turning to Nicholas, and
speaking with his mouth very full of beef and toast.

Nicholas murmured something--he knew not what--in reply; and the little
boys, dividing their gaze between the mug, the bread and butter (which
had by this time arrived), and every morsel which Mr. Squeers took into
his mouth, remained with strained eyes in torments of expectation.

‘Thank God for a good breakfast,’ said Squeers, when he had finished.
‘Number one may take a drink.’

Number one seized the mug ravenously, and had just drunk enough to make
him wish for more, when Mr. Squeers gave the signal for number two, who
gave up at the same interesting moment to number three; and the process
was repeated until the milk and water terminated with number five.

‘And now,’ said the schoolmaster, dividing the bread and butter for
three into as many portions as there were children, ‘you had better look
sharp with your breakfast, for the horn will blow in a minute or two,
and then every boy leaves off.’

Permission being thus given to fall to, the boys began to eat
voraciously, and in desperate haste: while the schoolmaster (who was
in high good humour after his meal) picked his teeth with a fork, and
looked smilingly on. In a very short time, the horn was heard.

‘I thought it wouldn’t be long,’ said Squeers, jumping up and producing
a little basket from under the seat; ‘put what you haven’t had time to
eat, in here, boys! You’ll want it on the road!’

Nicholas was considerably startled by these very economical
arrangements; but he had no time to reflect upon them, for the little
boys had to be got up to the top of the coach, and their boxes had to
be brought out and put in, and Mr. Squeers’s luggage was to be seen
carefully deposited in the boot, and all these offices were in his
department. He was in the full heat and bustle of concluding these
operations, when his uncle, Mr. Ralph Nickleby, accosted him.

‘Oh! here you are, sir!’ said Ralph. ‘Here are your mother and sister,
sir.’

‘Where?’ cried Nicholas, looking hastily round.

‘Here!’ replied his uncle. ‘Having too much money and nothing at all to
do with it, they were paying a hackney coach as I came up, sir.’

‘We were afraid of being too late to see him before he went away from
us,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, embracing her son, heedless of the unconcerned
lookers-on in the coach-yard.

‘Very good, ma’am,’ returned Ralph, ‘you’re the best judge of course. I
merely said that you were paying a hackney coach. I never pay a hackney
coach, ma’am; I never hire one. I haven’t been in a hackney coach of my
own hiring, for thirty years, and I hope I shan’t be for thirty more, if
I live as long.’

‘I should never have forgiven myself if I had not seen him,’ said Mrs
Nickleby. ‘Poor dear boy--going away without his breakfast too, because
he feared to distress us!’

‘Mighty fine certainly,’ said Ralph, with great testiness. ‘When I first
went to business, ma’am, I took a penny loaf and a ha’porth of milk for
my breakfast as I walked to the city every morning; what do you say to
that, ma’am? Breakfast! Bah!’

‘Now, Nickleby,’ said Squeers, coming up at the moment buttoning his
greatcoat; ‘I think you’d better get up behind. I’m afraid of one of
them boys falling off and then there’s twenty pound a year gone.’

‘Dear Nicholas,’ whispered Kate, touching her brother’s arm, ‘who is
that vulgar man?’

‘Eh!’ growled Ralph, whose quick ears had caught the inquiry. ‘Do you
wish to be introduced to Mr. Squeers, my dear?’

‘That the schoolmaster! No, uncle. Oh no!’ replied Kate, shrinking back.

‘I’m sure I heard you say as much, my dear,’ retorted Ralph in his cold
sarcastic manner. ‘Mr. Squeers, here’s my niece: Nicholas’s sister!’

‘Very glad to make your acquaintance, miss,’ said Squeers, raising his
hat an inch or two. ‘I wish Mrs. Squeers took gals, and we had you for a
teacher. I don’t know, though, whether she mightn’t grow jealous if we
had. Ha! ha! ha!’

If the proprietor of Dotheboys Hall could have known what was passing
in his assistant’s breast at that moment, he would have discovered, with
some surprise, that he was as near being soundly pummelled as he had
ever been in his life. Kate Nickleby, having a quicker perception of her
brother’s emotions, led him gently aside, and thus prevented Mr. Squeers
from being impressed with the fact in a peculiarly disagreeable manner.

‘My dear Nicholas,’ said the young lady, ‘who is this man? What kind of
place can it be that you are going to?’

‘I hardly know, Kate,’ replied Nicholas, pressing his sister’s hand. ‘I
suppose the Yorkshire folks are rather rough and uncultivated; that’s
all.’

‘But this person,’ urged Kate.

‘Is my employer, or master, or whatever the proper name may be,’ replied
Nicholas quickly; ‘and I was an ass to take his coarseness ill. They are
looking this way, and it is time I was in my place. Bless you, love,
and goodbye! Mother, look forward to our meeting again someday! Uncle,
farewell! Thank you heartily for all you have done and all you mean to
do. Quite ready, sir!’

With these hasty adieux, Nicholas mounted nimbly to his seat, and waved
his hand as gallantly as if his heart went with it.

At this moment, when the coachman and guard were comparing notes for the
last time before starting, on the subject of the way-bill; when porters
were screwing out the last reluctant sixpences, itinerant newsmen
making the last offer of a morning paper, and the horses giving the last
impatient rattle to their harness; Nicholas felt somebody pulling softly
at his leg. He looked down, and there stood Newman Noggs, who pushed up
into his hand a dirty letter.

‘What’s this?’ inquired Nicholas.

‘Hush!’ rejoined Noggs, pointing to Mr. Ralph Nickleby, who was saying a
few earnest words to Squeers, a short distance off: ‘Take it. Read it.
Nobody knows. That’s all.’

‘Stop!’ cried Nicholas.

‘No,’ replied Noggs.

Nicholas cried stop, again, but Newman Noggs was gone.

A minute’s bustle, a banging of the coach doors, a swaying of the
vehicle to one side, as the heavy coachman, and still heavier guard,
climbed into their seats; a cry of all right, a few notes from the horn,
a hasty glance of two sorrowful faces below, and the hard features of Mr
Ralph Nickleby--and the coach was gone too, and rattling over the stones
of Smithfield.

The little boys’ legs being too short to admit of their feet
resting upon anything as they sat, and the little boys’ bodies being
consequently in imminent hazard of being jerked off the coach, Nicholas
had enough to do over the stones to hold them on. Between the manual
exertion and the mental anxiety attendant upon this task, he was not a
little relieved when the coach stopped at the Peacock at Islington. He
was still more relieved when a hearty-looking gentleman, with a very
good-humoured face, and a very fresh colour, got up behind, and proposed
to take the other corner of the seat.

‘If we put some of these youngsters in the middle,’ said the new-comer,
‘they’ll be safer in case of their going to sleep; eh?’

‘If you’ll have the goodness, sir,’ replied Squeers, ‘that’ll be the
very thing. Mr. Nickleby, take three of them boys between you and the
gentleman. Belling and the youngest Snawley can sit between me and the
guard. Three children,’ said Squeers, explaining to the stranger, ‘books
as two.’

‘I have not the least objection I am sure,’ said the fresh-coloured
gentleman; ‘I have a brother who wouldn’t object to book his six
children as two at any butcher’s or baker’s in the kingdom, I dare say.
Far from it.’

‘Six children, sir?’ exclaimed Squeers.

‘Yes, and all boys,’ replied the stranger.

‘Mr. Nickleby,’ said Squeers, in great haste, ‘catch hold of that basket.
Let me give you a card, sir, of an establishment where those six boys
can be brought up in an enlightened, liberal, and moral manner, with no
mistake at all about it, for twenty guineas a year each--twenty guineas,
sir--or I’d take all the boys together upon a average right through, and
say a hundred pound a year for the lot.’

‘Oh!’ said the gentleman, glancing at the card, ‘you are the Mr. Squeers
mentioned here, I presume?’

‘Yes, I am, sir,’ replied the worthy pedagogue; ‘Mr. Wackford Squeers is
my name, and I’m very far from being ashamed of it. These are some of my
boys, sir; that’s one of my assistants, sir--Mr. Nickleby, a gentleman’s
son, and a good scholar, mathematical, classical, and commercial. We
don’t do things by halves at our shop. All manner of learning my boys
take down, sir; the expense is never thought of; and they get paternal
treatment and washing in.’

‘Upon my word,’ said the gentleman, glancing at Nicholas with a
half-smile, and a more than half expression of surprise, ‘these are
advantages indeed.’

‘You may say that, sir,’ rejoined Squeers, thrusting his hands into his
great-coat pockets. ‘The most unexceptionable references are given
and required. I wouldn’t take a reference with any boy, that wasn’t
responsible for the payment of five pound five a quarter, no, not if you
went down on your knees, and asked me, with the tears running down your
face, to do it.’

‘Highly considerate,’ said the passenger.

‘It’s my great aim and end to be considerate, sir,’ rejoined Squeers.
‘Snawley, junior, if you don’t leave off chattering your teeth, and
shaking with the cold, I’ll warm you with a severe thrashing in about
half a minute’s time.’

‘Sit fast here, genelmen,’ said the guard as he clambered up.

‘All right behind there, Dick?’ cried the coachman.

‘All right,’ was the reply. ‘Off she goes!’ And off she did go--if
coaches be feminine--amidst a loud flourish from the guard’s horn,
and the calm approval of all the judges of coaches and coach-horses
congregated at the Peacock, but more especially of the helpers, who
stood, with the cloths over their arms, watching the coach till it
disappeared, and then lounged admiringly stablewards, bestowing various
gruff encomiums on the beauty of the turn-out.

When the guard (who was a stout old Yorkshireman) had blown himself
quite out of breath, he put the horn into a little tunnel of a basket
fastened to the coach-side for the purpose, and giving himself a
plentiful shower of blows on the chest and shoulders, observed it was
uncommon cold; after which, he demanded of every person separately
whether he was going right through, and if not, where he WAS going.
Satisfactory replies being made to these queries, he surmised that the
roads were pretty heavy arter that fall last night, and took the
liberty of asking whether any of them gentlemen carried a snuff-box. It
happening that nobody did, he remarked with a mysterious air that he had
heard a medical gentleman as went down to Grantham last week, say how
that snuff-taking was bad for the eyes; but for his part he had never
found it so, and what he said was, that everybody should speak as they
found. Nobody attempting to controvert this position, he took a small
brown-paper parcel out of his hat, and putting on a pair of horn
spectacles (the writing being crabbed) read the direction half-a-dozen
times over; having done which, he consigned the parcel to its old place,
put up his spectacles again, and stared at everybody in turn. After
this, he took another blow at the horn by way of refreshment; and,
having now exhausted his usual topics of conversation, folded his arms
as well as he could in so many coats, and falling into a solemn silence,
looked carelessly at the familiar objects which met his eye on every
side as the coach rolled on; the only things he seemed to care for,
being horses and droves of cattle, which he scrutinised with a critical
air as they were passed upon the road.

The weather was intensely and bitterly cold; a great deal of snow fell
from time to time; and the wind was intolerably keen. Mr. Squeers got
down at almost every stage--to stretch his legs as he said--and as he
always came back from such excursions with a very red nose, and composed
himself to sleep directly, there is reason to suppose that he derived
great benefit from the process. The little pupils having been stimulated
with the remains of their breakfast, and further invigorated by sundry
small cups of a curious cordial carried by Mr. Squeers, which tasted very
like toast-and-water put into a brandy bottle by mistake, went to sleep,
woke, shivered, and cried, as their feelings prompted. Nicholas and
the good-tempered man found so many things to talk about, that between
conversing together, and cheering up the boys, the time passed with them
as rapidly as it could, under such adverse circumstances.

So the day wore on. At Eton Slocomb there was a good coach dinner, of
which the box, the four front outsides, the one inside, Nicholas, the
good-tempered man, and Mr. Squeers, partook; while the five little boys
were put to thaw by the fire, and regaled with sandwiches. A stage or
two further on, the lamps were lighted, and a great to-do occasioned
by the taking up, at a roadside inn, of a very fastidious lady with an
infinite variety of cloaks and small parcels, who loudly lamented, for
the behoof of the outsides, the non-arrival of her own carriage which
was to have taken her on, and made the guard solemnly promise to stop
every green chariot he saw coming; which, as it was a dark night and he
was sitting with his face the other way, that officer undertook, with
many fervent asseverations, to do. Lastly, the fastidious lady, finding
there was a solitary gentleman inside, had a small lamp lighted which
she carried in reticule, and being after much trouble shut in, the
horses were put into a brisk canter and the coach was once more in rapid
motion.

The night and the snow came on together, and dismal enough they were.
There was no sound to be heard but the howling of the wind; for the
noise of the wheels, and the tread of the horses’ feet, were rendered
inaudible by the thick coating of snow which covered the ground, and was
fast increasing every moment. The streets of Stamford were deserted as
they passed through the town; and its old churches rose, frowning and
dark, from the whitened ground. Twenty miles further on, two of the
front outside passengers, wisely availing themselves of their arrival at
one of the best inns in England, turned in, for the night, at the George
at Grantham. The remainder wrapped themselves more closely in their
coats and cloaks, and leaving the light and warmth of the town behind
them, pillowed themselves against the luggage, and prepared, with many
half-suppressed moans, again to encounter the piercing blast which swept
across the open country.

They were little more than a stage out of Grantham, or about halfway
between it and Newark, when Nicholas, who had been asleep for a short
time, was suddenly roused by a violent jerk which nearly threw him from
his seat. Grasping the rail, he found that the coach had sunk greatly
on one side, though it was still dragged forward by the horses; and
while--confused by their plunging and the loud screams of the lady
inside--he hesitated, for an instant, whether to jump off or not,
the vehicle turned easily over, and relieved him from all further
uncertainty by flinging him into the road.



CHAPTER 6

In which the Occurrence of the Accident mentioned in the last Chapter,
affords an Opportunity to a couple of Gentlemen to tell Stories against
each other


‘Wo ho!’ cried the guard, on his legs in a minute, and running to the
leaders’ heads. ‘Is there ony genelmen there as can len’ a hond here?
Keep quiet, dang ye! Wo ho!’

‘What’s the matter?’ demanded Nicholas, looking sleepily up.

‘Matther mun, matter eneaf for one neight,’ replied the guard; ‘dang the
wall-eyed bay, he’s gane mad wi’ glory I think, carse t’coorch is over.
Here, can’t ye len’ a hond? Dom it, I’d ha’ dean it if all my boans were
brokken.’

‘Here!’ cried Nicholas, staggering to his feet, ‘I’m ready. I’m only a
little abroad, that’s all.’

‘Hoold ‘em toight,’ cried the guard, ‘while ar coot treaces. Hang on
tiv’em sumhoo. Well deane, my lod. That’s it. Let’em goa noo. Dang ‘em,
they’ll gang whoam fast eneaf!’

In truth, the animals were no sooner released than they trotted back,
with much deliberation, to the stable they had just left, which was
distant not a mile behind.

‘Can you blo’ a harn?’ asked the guard, disengaging one of the
coach-lamps.

‘I dare say I can,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Then just blo’ away into that ‘un as lies on the grund, fit to wakken
the deead, will’ee,’ said the man, ‘while I stop sum o’ this here
squealing inside. Cumin’, cumin’. Dean’t make that noise, wooman.’

As the man spoke, he proceeded to wrench open the uppermost door of the
coach, while Nicholas, seizing the horn, awoke the echoes far and wide
with one of the most extraordinary performances on that instrument ever
heard by mortal ears. It had its effect, however, not only in rousing
such of their fall, but in summoning assistance to their relief; for
lights gleamed in the distance, and people were already astir.

In fact, a man on horseback galloped down, before the passengers were
well collected together; and a careful investigation being instituted,
it appeared that the lady inside had broken her lamp, and the gentleman
his head; that the two front outsides had escaped with black eyes; the
box with a bloody nose; the coachman with a contusion on the temple;
Mr. Squeers with a portmanteau bruise on his back; and the remaining
passengers without any injury at all--thanks to the softness of the
snow-drift in which they had been overturned. These facts were no
sooner thoroughly ascertained, than the lady gave several indications of
fainting, but being forewarned that if she did, she must be carried on
some gentleman’s shoulders to the nearest public-house, she prudently
thought better of it, and walked back with the rest.

They found on reaching it, that it was a lonely place with no very great
accommodation in the way of apartments--that portion of its resources
being all comprised in one public room with a sanded floor, and a chair
or two. However, a large faggot and a plentiful supply of coals being
heaped upon the fire, the appearance of things was not long in mending;
and, by the time they had washed off all effaceable marks of the late
accident, the room was warm and light, which was a most agreeable
exchange for the cold and darkness out of doors.

‘Well, Mr. Nickleby,’ said Squeers, insinuating himself into the warmest
corner, ‘you did very right to catch hold of them horses. I should have
done it myself if I had come to in time, but I am very glad you did it.
You did it very well; very well.’

‘So well,’ said the merry-faced gentleman, who did not seem to approve
very much of the patronising tone adopted by Squeers, ‘that if they had
not been firmly checked when they were, you would most probably have had
no brains left to teach with.’

This remark called up a discourse relative to the promptitude
Nicholas had displayed, and he was overwhelmed with compliments and
commendations.

‘I am very glad to have escaped, of course,’ observed Squeers: ‘every
man is glad when he escapes from danger; but if any one of my charges
had been hurt--if I had been prevented from restoring any one of these
little boys to his parents whole and sound as I received him--what would
have been my feelings? Why the wheel a-top of my head would have been
far preferable to it.’

‘Are they all brothers, sir?’ inquired the lady who had carried the
‘Davy’ or safety-lamp.

‘In one sense they are, ma’am,’ replied Squeers, diving into his
greatcoat pocket for cards. ‘They are all under the same parental and
affectionate treatment. Mrs. Squeers and myself are a mother and father
to every one of ‘em. Mr. Nickleby, hand the lady them cards, and offer
these to the gentleman. Perhaps they might know of some parents that
would be glad to avail themselves of the establishment.’

Expressing himself to this effect, Mr. Squeers, who lost no opportunity
of advertising gratuitously, placed his hands upon his knees, and looked
at the pupils with as much benignity as he could possibly affect, while
Nicholas, blushing with shame, handed round the cards as directed.

‘I hope you suffer no inconvenience from the overturn, ma’am?’ said the
merry-faced gentleman, addressing the fastidious lady, as though he were
charitably desirous to change the subject.

‘No bodily inconvenience,’ replied the lady.

‘No mental inconvenience, I hope?’

‘The subject is a very painful one to my feelings, sir,’ replied the
lady with strong emotion; ‘and I beg you as a gentleman, not to refer to
it.’

‘Dear me,’ said the merry-faced gentleman, looking merrier still, ‘I
merely intended to inquire--’

‘I hope no inquiries will be made,’ said the lady, ‘or I shall be
compelled to throw myself on the protection of the other gentlemen.
Landlord, pray direct a boy to keep watch outside the door--and if
a green chariot passes in the direction of Grantham, to stop it
instantly.’

The people of the house were evidently overcome by this request, and
when the lady charged the boy to remember, as a means of identifying the
expected green chariot, that it would have a coachman with a gold-laced
hat on the box, and a footman, most probably in silk stockings, behind,
the attentions of the good woman of the inn were redoubled. Even the
box-passenger caught the infection, and growing wonderfully deferential,
immediately inquired whether there was not very good society in that
neighbourhood, to which the lady replied yes, there was: in a manner
which sufficiently implied that she moved at the very tiptop and summit
of it all.

‘As the guard has gone on horseback to Grantham to get another coach,’
said the good-tempered gentleman when they had been all sitting round
the fire, for some time, in silence, ‘and as he must be gone a couple
of hours at the very least, I propose a bowl of hot punch. What say you,
sir?’

This question was addressed to the broken-headed inside, who was a man
of very genteel appearance, dressed in mourning. He was not past the
middle age, but his hair was grey; it seemed to have been prematurely
turned by care or sorrow. He readily acceded to the proposal, and
appeared to be prepossessed by the frank good-nature of the individual
from whom it emanated.

This latter personage took upon himself the office of tapster when the
punch was ready, and after dispensing it all round, led the conversation
to the antiquities of York, with which both he and the grey-haired
gentleman appeared to be well acquainted. When this topic flagged, he
turned with a smile to the grey-headed gentleman, and asked if he could
sing.

‘I cannot indeed,’ replied gentleman, smiling in his turn.

‘That’s a pity,’ said the owner of the good-humoured countenance. ‘Is
there nobody here who can sing a song to lighten the time?’

The passengers, one and all, protested that they could not; that they
wished they could; that they couldn’t remember the words of anything
without the book; and so forth.

‘Perhaps the lady would not object,’ said the president with great
respect, and a merry twinkle in his eye. ‘Some little Italian thing out
of the last opera brought out in town, would be most acceptable I am
sure.’

As the lady condescended to make no reply, but tossed her head
contemptuously, and murmured some further expression of surprise
regarding the absence of the green chariot, one or two voices urged
upon the president himself, the propriety of making an attempt for the
general benefit.

‘I would if I could,’ said he of the good-tempered face; ‘for I hold
that in this, as in all other cases where people who are strangers to
each other are thrown unexpectedly together, they should endeavour
to render themselves as pleasant, for the joint sake of the little
community, as possible.’

‘I wish the maxim were more generally acted on, in all cases,’ said the
grey-headed gentleman.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ returned the other. ‘Perhaps, as you can’t sing,
you’ll tell us a story?’

‘Nay. I should ask you.’

‘After you, I will, with pleasure.’

‘Indeed!’ said the grey-haired gentleman, smiling, ‘Well, let it be so.
I fear the turn of my thoughts is not calculated to lighten the time
you must pass here; but you have brought this upon yourselves, and shall
judge. We were speaking of York Minster just now. My story shall have
some reference to it. Let us call it


THE FIVE SISTERS OF YORK


After a murmur of approbation from the other passengers, during which
the fastidious lady drank a glass of punch unobserved, the grey-headed
gentleman thus went on:

‘A great many years ago--for the fifteenth century was scarce two
years old at the time, and King Henry the Fourth sat upon the throne of
England--there dwelt, in the ancient city of York, five maiden sisters,
the subjects of my tale.

‘These five sisters were all of surpassing beauty. The eldest was in her
twenty-third year, the second a year younger, the third a year younger
than the second, and the fourth a year younger than the third. They were
tall stately figures, with dark flashing eyes and hair of jet; dignity
and grace were in their every movement; and the fame of their great
beauty had spread through all the country round.

‘But, if the four elder sisters were lovely, how beautiful was the
youngest, a fair creature of sixteen! The blushing tints in the soft
bloom on the fruit, or the delicate painting on the flower, are not more
exquisite than was the blending of the rose and lily in her gentle face,
or the deep blue of her eye. The vine, in all its elegant luxuriance, is
not more graceful than were the clusters of rich brown hair that sported
round her brow.

‘If we all had hearts like those which beat so lightly in the bosoms of
the young and beautiful, what a heaven this earth would be! If, while
our bodies grow old and withered, our hearts could but retain their
early youth and freshness, of what avail would be our sorrows and
sufferings! But, the faint image of Eden which is stamped upon them in
childhood, chafes and rubs in our rough struggles with the world,
and soon wears away: too often to leave nothing but a mournful blank
remaining.

‘The heart of this fair girl bounded with joy and gladness. Devoted
attachment to her sisters, and a fervent love of all beautiful things
in nature, were its pure affections. Her gleesome voice and merry laugh
were the sweetest music of their home. She was its very light and life.
The brightest flowers in the garden were reared by her; the caged
birds sang when they heard her voice, and pined when they missed its
sweetness. Alice, dear Alice; what living thing within the sphere of her
gentle witchery, could fail to love her!

‘You may seek in vain, now, for the spot on which these sisters lived,
for their very names have passed away, and dusty antiquaries tell of
them as of a fable. But they dwelt in an old wooden house--old even in
those days--with overhanging gables and balconies of rudely-carved oak,
which stood within a pleasant orchard, and was surrounded by a rough
stone wall, whence a stout archer might have winged an arrow to St
Mary’s Abbey. The old abbey flourished then; and the five sisters,
living on its fair domains, paid yearly dues to the black monks of St
Benedict, to which fraternity it belonged.

‘It was a bright and sunny morning in the pleasant time of summer, when
one of those black monks emerged from the abbey portal, and bent his
steps towards the house of the fair sisters. Heaven above was blue, and
earth beneath was green; the river glistened like a path of diamonds in
the sun; the birds poured forth their songs from the shady trees; the
lark soared high above the waving corn; and the deep buzz of insects
filled the air. Everything looked gay and smiling; but the holy man
walked gloomily on, with his eyes bent upon the ground. The beauty of
the earth is but a breath, and man is but a shadow. What sympathy should
a holy preacher have with either?

‘With eyes bent upon the ground, then, or only raised enough to prevent
his stumbling over such obstacles as lay in his way, the religious man
moved slowly forward until he reached a small postern in the wall of the
sisters’ orchard, through which he passed, closing it behind him. The
noise of soft voices in conversation, and of merry laughter, fell upon
his ears ere he had advanced many paces; and raising his eyes higher
than was his humble wont, he descried, at no great distance, the five
sisters seated on the grass, with Alice in the centre: all busily plying
their customary task of embroidering.

‘“Save you, fair daughters!” said the friar; and fair in truth they
were. Even a monk might have loved them as choice masterpieces of his
Maker’s hand.

‘The sisters saluted the holy man with becoming reverence, and the
eldest motioned him to a mossy seat beside them. But the good friar
shook his head, and bumped himself down on a very hard stone,--at which,
no doubt, approving angels were gratified.

‘“Ye were merry, daughters,” said the monk.

‘“You know how light of heart sweet Alice is,” replied the eldest
sister, passing her fingers through the tresses of the smiling girl.

‘“And what joy and cheerfulness it wakes up within us, to see all nature
beaming in brightness and sunshine, father,” added Alice, blushing
beneath the stern look of the recluse.

‘The monk answered not, save by a grave inclination of the head, and the
sisters pursued their task in silence.

‘“Still wasting the precious hours,” said the monk at length, turning to
the eldest sister as he spoke, “still wasting the precious hours on
this vain trifling. Alas, alas! that the few bubbles on the surface
of eternity--all that Heaven wills we should see of that dark deep
stream--should be so lightly scattered!”

‘“Father,” urged the maiden, pausing, as did each of the others, in
her busy task, “we have prayed at matins, our daily alms have been
distributed at the gate, the sick peasants have been tended,--all our
morning tasks have been performed. I hope our occupation is a blameless
one?’

‘“See here,” said the friar, taking the frame from her hand, “an
intricate winding of gaudy colours, without purpose or object, unless
it be that one day it is destined for some vain ornament, to minister to
the pride of your frail and giddy sex. Day after day has been employed
upon this senseless task, and yet it is not half accomplished. The shade
of each departed day falls upon our graves, and the worm exults as he
beholds it, to know that we are hastening thither. Daughters, is there
no better way to pass the fleeting hours?”

‘The four elder sisters cast down their eyes as if abashed by the holy
man’s reproof, but Alice raised hers, and bent them mildly on the friar.

‘“Our dear mother,” said the maiden; “Heaven rest her soul!”

‘“Amen!” cried the friar in a deep voice.

‘“Our dear mother,” faltered the fair Alice, “was living when these long
tasks began, and bade us, when she should be no more, ply them in all
discretion and cheerfulness, in our leisure hours; she said that if in
harmless mirth and maidenly pursuits we passed those hours together,
they would prove the happiest and most peaceful of our lives, and that
if, in later times, we went forth into the world, and mingled with its
cares and trials--if, allured by its temptations and dazzled by its
glitter, we ever forgot that love and duty which should bind, in holy
ties, the children of one loved parent--a glance at the old work of our
common girlhood would awaken good thoughts of bygone days, and soften
our hearts to affection and love.”

‘“Alice speaks truly, father,” said the elder sister, somewhat proudly.
And so saying she resumed her work, as did the others.

‘It was a kind of sampler of large size, that each sister had before
her; the device was of a complex and intricate description, and
the pattern and colours of all five were the same. The sisters bent
gracefully over their work; the monk, resting his chin upon his hands,
looked from one to the other in silence.

‘“How much better,” he said at length, “to shun all such thoughts and
chances, and, in the peaceful shelter of the church, devote your lives
to Heaven! Infancy, childhood, the prime of life, and old age, wither as
rapidly as they crowd upon each other. Think how human dust rolls onward
to the tomb, and turning your faces steadily towards that goal, avoid
the cloud which takes its rise among the pleasures of the world, and
cheats the senses of their votaries. The veil, daughters, the veil!”

‘“Never, sisters,” cried Alice. “Barter not the light and air of heaven,
and the freshness of earth and all the beautiful things which breathe
upon it, for the cold cloister and the cell. Nature’s own blessings are
the proper goods of life, and we may share them sinlessly together. To
die is our heavy portion, but, oh, let us die with life about us; when
our cold hearts cease to beat, let warm hearts be beating near; let our
last look be upon the bounds which God has set to his own bright skies,
and not on stone walls and bars of iron! Dear sisters, let us live and
die, if you list, in this green garden’s compass; only shun the gloom
and sadness of a cloister, and we shall be happy.”

‘The tears fell fast from the maiden’s eyes as she closed her
impassioned appeal, and hid her face in the bosom of her sister.

‘“Take comfort, Alice,” said the eldest, kissing her fair forehead.
“The veil shall never cast its shadow on thy young brow. How say you,
sisters? For yourselves you speak, and not for Alice, or for me.”

‘The sisters, as with one accord, cried that their lot was cast
together, and that there were dwellings for peace and virtue beyond the
convent’s walls.

‘“Father,” said the eldest lady, rising with dignity, “you hear our
final resolve. The same pious care which enriched the abbey of St
Mary, and left us, orphans, to its holy guardianship, directed that no
constraint should be imposed upon our inclinations, but that we should
be free to live according to our choice. Let us hear no more of this,
we pray you. Sisters, it is nearly noon. Let us take shelter until
evening!” With a reverence to the friar, the lady rose and walked
towards the house, hand in hand with Alice; the other sisters followed.

‘The holy man, who had often urged the same point before, but had never
met with so direct a repulse, walked some little distance behind, with
his eyes bent upon the earth, and his lips moving AS IF in prayer. As
the sisters reached the porch, he quickened his pace, and called upon
them to stop.

‘“Stay!” said the monk, raising his right hand in the air, and directing
an angry glance by turns at Alice and the eldest sister. “Stay, and
hear from me what these recollections are, which you would cherish above
eternity, and awaken--if in mercy they slumbered--by means of idle toys.
The memory of earthly things is charged, in after life, with bitter
disappointment, affliction, death; with dreary change and wasting
sorrow. The time will one day come, when a glance at those unmeaning
baubles will tear open deep wounds in the hearts of some among you, and
strike to your inmost souls. When that hour arrives--and, mark me, come
it will--turn from the world to which you clung, to the refuge which you
spurned. Find me the cell which shall be colder than the fire of mortals
grows, when dimmed by calamity and trial, and there weep for the dreams
of youth. These things are Heaven’s will, not mine,” said the friar,
subduing his voice as he looked round upon the shrinking girls. “The
Virgin’s blessing be upon you, daughters!”

‘With these words he disappeared through the postern; and the sisters
hastening into the house were seen no more that day.

‘But nature will smile though priests may frown, and next day the
sun shone brightly, and on the next, and the next again. And in the
morning’s glare, and the evening’s soft repose, the five sisters still
walked, or worked, or beguiled the time by cheerful conversation, in
their quiet orchard.

‘Time passed away as a tale that is told; faster indeed than many tales
that are told, of which number I fear this may be one. The house of the
five sisters stood where it did, and the same trees cast their pleasant
shade upon the orchard grass. The sisters too were there, and lovely as
at first, but a change had come over their dwelling. Sometimes, there
was the clash of armour, and the gleaming of the moon on caps of steel;
and, at others, jaded coursers were spurred up to the gate, and a female
form glided hurriedly forth, as if eager to demand tidings of the weary
messenger. A goodly train of knights and ladies lodged one night within
the abbey walls, and next day rode away, with two of the fair sisters
among them. Then, horsemen began to come less frequently, and seemed to
bring bad tidings when they did, and at length they ceased to come at
all, and footsore peasants slunk to the gate after sunset, and did their
errand there, by stealth. Once, a vassal was dispatched in haste to the
abbey at dead of night, and when morning came, there were sounds of woe
and wailing in the sisters’ house; and after this, a mournful silence
fell upon it, and knight or lady, horse or armour, was seen about it no
more.

‘There was a sullen darkness in the sky, and the sun had gone angrily
down, tinting the dull clouds with the last traces of his wrath,
when the same black monk walked slowly on, with folded arms, within a
stone’s-throw of the abbey. A blight had fallen on the trees and shrubs;
and the wind, at length beginning to break the unnatural stillness
that had prevailed all day, sighed heavily from time to time, as though
foretelling in grief the ravages of the coming storm. The bat skimmed in
fantastic flights through the heavy air, and the ground was alive with
crawling things, whose instinct brought them forth to swell and fatten
in the rain.

‘No longer were the friar’s eyes directed to the earth; they were cast
abroad, and roamed from point to point, as if the gloom and desolation
of the scene found a quick response in his own bosom. Again he paused
near the sisters’ house, and again he entered by the postern.

‘But not again did his ear encounter the sound of laughter, or his eyes
rest upon the beautiful figures of the five sisters. All was silent and
deserted. The boughs of the trees were bent and broken, and the grass
had grown long and rank. No light feet had pressed it for many, many a
day.

‘With the indifference or abstraction of one well accustomed to the
change, the monk glided into the house, and entered a low, dark room.
Four sisters sat there. Their black garments made their pale faces
whiter still, and time and sorrow had worked deep ravages. They were
stately yet; but the flush and pride of beauty were gone.

‘And Alice--where was she? In Heaven.

‘The monk--even the monk--could bear with some grief here; for it
was long since these sisters had met, and there were furrows in their
blanched faces which years could never plough. He took his seat in
silence, and motioned them to continue their speech.

‘“They are here, sisters,” said the elder lady in a trembling voice. “I
have never borne to look upon them since, and now I blame myself for my
weakness. What is there in her memory that we should dread? To call up
our old days shall be a solemn pleasure yet.”

‘She glanced at the monk as she spoke, and, opening a cabinet, brought
forth the five frames of work, completed long before. Her step was
firm, but her hand trembled as she produced the last one; and, when the
feelings of the other sisters gushed forth at sight of it, her pent-up
tears made way, and she sobbed “God bless her!”

‘The monk rose and advanced towards them. “It was almost the last thing
she touched in health,” he said in a low voice.

‘“It was,” cried the elder lady, weeping bitterly.

‘The monk turned to the second sister.

‘“The gallant youth who looked into thine eyes, and hung upon thy very
breath when first he saw thee intent upon this pastime, lies buried on
a plain whereof the turf is red with blood. Rusty fragments of armour,
once brightly burnished, lie rotting on the ground, and are as little
distinguishable for his, as are the bones that crumble in the mould!”

‘The lady groaned, and wrung her hands.

‘“The policy of courts,” he continued, turning to the two other sisters,
“drew ye from your peaceful home to scenes of revelry and splendour.
The same policy, and the restless ambition of--proud and fiery men, have
sent ye back, widowed maidens, and humbled outcasts. Do I speak truly?”

‘The sobs of the two sisters were their only reply.

‘“There is little need,” said the monk, with a meaning look, “to fritter
away the time in gewgaws which shall raise up the pale ghosts of hopes
of early years. Bury them, heap penance and mortification on their
heads, keep them down, and let the convent be their grave!”

‘The sisters asked for three days to deliberate; and felt, that night,
as though the veil were indeed the fitting shroud for their dead joys.
But, morning came again, and though the boughs of the orchard trees
drooped and ran wild upon the ground, it was the same orchard still. The
grass was coarse and high, but there was yet the spot on which they had
so often sat together, when change and sorrow were but names. There was
every walk and nook which Alice had made glad; and in the minster nave
was one flat stone beneath which she slept in peace.

‘And could they, remembering how her young heart had sickened at the
thought of cloistered walls, look upon her grave, in garbs which would
chill the very ashes within it? Could they bow down in prayer, and when
all Heaven turned to hear them, bring the dark shade of sadness on one
angel’s face? No.

‘They sent abroad, to artists of great celebrity in those times, and
having obtained the church’s sanction to their work of piety, caused
to be executed, in five large compartments of richly stained glass, a
faithful copy of their old embroidery work. These were fitted into a
large window until that time bare of ornament; and when the sun shone
brightly, as she had so well loved to see it, the familiar patterns were
reflected in their original colours, and throwing a stream of brilliant
light upon the pavement, fell warmly on the name of Alice.

‘For many hours in every day, the sisters paced slowly up and down the
nave, or knelt by the side of the flat broad stone. Only three were seen
in the customary place, after many years; then but two, and, for a long
time afterwards, but one solitary female bent with age. At length she
came no more, and the stone bore five plain Christian names.

‘That stone has worn away and been replaced by others, and many
generations have come and gone since then. Time has softened down the
colours, but the same stream of light still falls upon the forgotten
tomb, of which no trace remains; and, to this day, the stranger is shown
in York Cathedral, an old window called the Five Sisters.’


‘That’s a melancholy tale,’ said the merry-faced gentleman, emptying his
glass.

‘It is a tale of life, and life is made up of such sorrows,’ returned
the other, courteously, but in a grave and sad tone of voice.

‘There are shades in all good pictures, but there are lights too, if
we choose to contemplate them,’ said the gentleman with the merry face.
‘The youngest sister in your tale was always light-hearted.’

‘And died early,’ said the other, gently.

‘She would have died earlier, perhaps, had she been less happy,’ said
the first speaker, with much feeling. ‘Do you think the sisters who
loved her so well, would have grieved the less if her life had been one
of gloom and sadness? If anything could soothe the first sharp pain of a
heavy loss, it would be--with me--the reflection, that those I mourned,
by being innocently happy here, and loving all about them, had prepared
themselves for a purer and happier world. The sun does not shine upon
this fair earth to meet frowning eyes, depend upon it.’

‘I believe you are right,’ said the gentleman who had told the story.

‘Believe!’ retorted the other, ‘can anybody doubt it? Take any subject
of sorrowful regret, and see with how much pleasure it is associated.
The recollection of past pleasure may become pain--’

‘It does,’ interposed the other.

‘Well; it does. To remember happiness which cannot be restored, is pain,
but of a softened kind. Our recollections are unfortunately mingled with
much that we deplore, and with many actions which we bitterly repent;
still in the most chequered life I firmly think there are so many little
rays of sunshine to look back upon, that I do not believe any mortal
(unless he had put himself without the pale of hope) would deliberately
drain a goblet of the waters of Lethe, if he had it in his power.’

‘Possibly you are correct in that belief,’ said the grey-haired
gentleman after a short reflection. ‘I am inclined to think you are.’

‘Why, then,’ replied the other, ‘the good in this state of existence
preponderates over the bad, let miscalled philosophers tell us what they
will. If our affections be tried, our affections are our consolation and
comfort; and memory, however sad, is the best and purest link between
this world and a better. But come! I’ll tell you a story of another
kind.’

After a very brief silence, the merry-faced gentleman sent round the
punch, and glancing slyly at the fastidious lady, who seemed desperately
apprehensive that he was going to relate something improper, began


THE BARON OF GROGZWIG


‘The Baron Von Koeldwethout, of Grogzwig in Germany, was as likely a
young baron as you would wish to see. I needn’t say that he lived in a
castle, because that’s of course; neither need I say that he lived in
an old castle; for what German baron ever lived in a new one? There were
many strange circumstances connected with this venerable building, among
which, not the least startling and mysterious were, that when the wind
blew, it rumbled in the chimneys, or even howled among the trees in the
neighbouring forest; and that when the moon shone, she found her way
through certain small loopholes in the wall, and actually made some
parts of the wide halls and galleries quite light, while she left others
in gloomy shadow. I believe that one of the baron’s ancestors, being
short of money, had inserted a dagger in a gentleman who called
one night to ask his way, and it WAS supposed that these miraculous
occurrences took place in consequence. And yet I hardly know how that
could have been, either, because the baron’s ancestor, who was an
amiable man, felt very sorry afterwards for having been so rash, and
laying violent hands upon a quantity of stone and timber which belonged
to a weaker baron, built a chapel as an apology, and so took a receipt
from Heaven, in full of all demands.

‘Talking of the baron’s ancestor puts me in mind of the baron’s great
claims to respect, on the score of his pedigree. I am afraid to say,
I am sure, how many ancestors the baron had; but I know that he had a
great many more than any other man of his time; and I only wish that
he had lived in these latter days, that he might have had more. It is a
very hard thing upon the great men of past centuries, that they should
have come into the world so soon, because a man who was born three or
four hundred years ago, cannot reasonably be expected to have had as
many relations before him, as a man who is born now. The last man,
whoever he is--and he may be a cobbler or some low vulgar dog for aught
we know--will have a longer pedigree than the greatest nobleman now
alive; and I contend that this is not fair.

‘Well, but the Baron Von Koeldwethout of Grogzwig! He was a fine swarthy
fellow, with dark hair and large moustachios, who rode a-hunting in
clothes of Lincoln green, with russet boots on his feet, and a bugle
slung over his shoulder like the guard of a long stage. When he blew
this bugle, four-and-twenty other gentlemen of inferior rank, in Lincoln
green a little coarser, and russet boots with a little thicker soles,
turned out directly: and away galloped the whole train, with spears in
their hands like lacquered area railings, to hunt down the boars, or
perhaps encounter a bear: in which latter case the baron killed him
first, and greased his whiskers with him afterwards.

‘This was a merry life for the Baron of Grogzwig, and a merrier still
for the baron’s retainers, who drank Rhine wine every night till they
fell under the table, and then had the bottles on the floor, and called
for pipes. Never were such jolly, roystering, rollicking, merry-making
blades, as the jovial crew of Grogzwig.

‘But the pleasures of the table, or the pleasures of under the table,
require a little variety; especially when the same five-and-twenty
people sit daily down to the same board, to discuss the same subjects,
and tell the same stories. The baron grew weary, and wanted excitement.
He took to quarrelling with his gentlemen, and tried kicking two or
three of them every day after dinner. This was a pleasant change at
first; but it became monotonous after a week or so, and the baron felt
quite out of sorts, and cast about, in despair, for some new amusement.

‘One night, after a day’s sport in which he had outdone Nimrod or
Gillingwater, and slaughtered “another fine bear,” and brought him home
in triumph, the Baron Von Koeldwethout sat moodily at the head of his
table, eyeing the smoky roof of the hall with a discontented aspect. He
swallowed huge bumpers of wine, but the more he swallowed, the more
he frowned. The gentlemen who had been honoured with the dangerous
distinction of sitting on his right and left, imitated him to a miracle
in the drinking, and frowned at each other.

‘“I will!” cried the baron suddenly, smiting the table with his right
hand, and twirling his moustache with his left. “Fill to the Lady of
Grogzwig!”

‘The four-and-twenty Lincoln greens turned pale, with the exception of
their four-and-twenty noses, which were unchangeable.

‘“I said to the Lady of Grogzwig,” repeated the baron, looking round the
board.

‘“To the Lady of Grogzwig!” shouted the Lincoln greens; and down their
four-and-twenty throats went four-and-twenty imperial pints of such
rare old hock, that they smacked their eight-and-forty lips, and winked
again.

‘“The fair daughter of the Baron Von Swillenhausen,” said Koeldwethout,
condescending to explain. “We will demand her in marriage of her father,
ere the sun goes down tomorrow. If he refuse our suit, we will cut off
his nose.”

‘A hoarse murmur arose from the company; every man touched, first
the hilt of his sword, and then the tip of his nose, with appalling
significance.

‘What a pleasant thing filial piety is to contemplate! If the daughter
of the Baron Von Swillenhausen had pleaded a preoccupied heart, or
fallen at her father’s feet and corned them in salt tears, or
only fainted away, and complimented the old gentleman in frantic
ejaculations, the odds are a hundred to one but Swillenhausen Castle
would have been turned out at window, or rather the baron turned out at
window, and the castle demolished. The damsel held her peace, however,
when an early messenger bore the request of Von Koeldwethout next
morning, and modestly retired to her chamber, from the casement of which
she watched the coming of the suitor and his retinue. She was no sooner
assured that the horseman with the large moustachios was her proffered
husband, than she hastened to her father’s presence, and expressed her
readiness to sacrifice herself to secure his peace. The venerable baron
caught his child to his arms, and shed a wink of joy.

‘There was great feasting at the castle, that day. The four-and-twenty
Lincoln greens of Von Koeldwethout exchanged vows of eternal friendship
with twelve Lincoln greens of Von Swillenhausen, and promised the
old baron that they would drink his wine “Till all was blue”--meaning
probably until their whole countenances had acquired the same tint as
their noses. Everybody slapped everybody else’s back, when the time
for parting came; and the Baron Von Koeldwethout and his followers rode
gaily home.

‘For six mortal weeks, the bears and boars had a holiday. The houses of
Koeldwethout and Swillenhausen were united; the spears rusted; and the
baron’s bugle grew hoarse for lack of blowing.

‘Those were great times for the four-and-twenty; but, alas! their high
and palmy days had taken boots to themselves, and were already walking
off.

‘“My dear,” said the baroness.

‘“My love,” said the baron.

‘“Those coarse, noisy men--”

‘“Which, ma’am?” said the baron, starting.

‘The baroness pointed, from the window at which they stood, to the
courtyard beneath, where the unconscious Lincoln greens were taking a
copious stirrup-cup, preparatory to issuing forth after a boar or two.

‘“My hunting train, ma’am,” said the baron.

‘“Disband them, love,” murmured the baroness.

‘“Disband them!” cried the baron, in amazement.

‘“To please me, love,” replied the baroness.

‘“To please the devil, ma’am,” answered the baron.

‘Whereupon the baroness uttered a great cry, and swooned away at the
baron’s feet.

‘What could the baron do? He called for the lady’s maid, and roared
for the doctor; and then, rushing into the yard, kicked the two Lincoln
greens who were the most used to it, and cursing the others all round,
bade them go--but never mind where. I don’t know the German for it, or I
would put it delicately that way.

‘It is not for me to say by what means, or by what degrees, some wives
manage to keep down some husbands as they do, although I may have
my private opinion on the subject, and may think that no Member of
Parliament ought to be married, inasmuch as three married members out of
every four, must vote according to their wives’ consciences (if there be
such things), and not according to their own. All I need say, just now,
is, that the Baroness Von Koeldwethout somehow or other acquired great
control over the Baron Von Koeldwethout, and that, little by little, and
bit by bit, and day by day, and year by year, the baron got the worst of
some disputed question, or was slyly unhorsed from some old hobby;
and that by the time he was a fat hearty fellow of forty-eight or
thereabouts, he had no feasting, no revelry, no hunting train, and no
hunting--nothing in short that he liked, or used to have; and that,
although he was as fierce as a lion, and as bold as brass, he was
decidedly snubbed and put down, by his own lady, in his own castle of
Grogzwig.

‘Nor was this the whole extent of the baron’s misfortunes. About a year
after his nuptials, there came into the world a lusty young baron,
in whose honour a great many fireworks were let off, and a great many
dozens of wine drunk; but next year there came a young baroness, and
next year another young baron, and so on, every year, either a baron or
baroness (and one year both together), until the baron found himself
the father of a small family of twelve. Upon every one of these
anniversaries, the venerable Baroness Von Swillenhausen was nervously
sensitive for the well-being of her child the Baroness Von Koeldwethout;
and although it was not found that the good lady ever did anything
material towards contributing to her child’s recovery, still she made it
a point of duty to be as nervous as possible at the castle of Grogzwig,
and to divide her time between moral observations on the baron’s
housekeeping, and bewailing the hard lot of her unhappy daughter. And if
the Baron of Grogzwig, a little hurt and irritated at this, took heart,
and ventured to suggest that his wife was at least no worse off than the
wives of other barons, the Baroness Von Swillenhausen begged all
persons to take notice, that nobody but she, sympathised with her dear
daughter’s sufferings; upon which, her relations and friends remarked,
that to be sure she did cry a great deal more than her son-in-law, and
that if there were a hard-hearted brute alive, it was that Baron of
Grogzwig.

‘The poor baron bore it all as long as he could, and when he could bear
it no longer lost his appetite and his spirits, and sat himself gloomily
and dejectedly down. But there were worse troubles yet in store for
him, and as they came on, his melancholy and sadness increased. Times
changed. He got into debt. The Grogzwig coffers ran low, though the
Swillenhausen family had looked upon them as inexhaustible; and just
when the baroness was on the point of making a thirteenth addition to
the family pedigree, Von Koeldwethout discovered that he had no means of
replenishing them.

‘“I don’t see what is to be done,” said the baron. “I think I’ll kill
myself.”

‘This was a bright idea. The baron took an old hunting-knife from a
cupboard hard by, and having sharpened it on his boot, made what boys
call “an offer” at his throat.

‘“Hem!” said the baron, stopping short. “Perhaps it’s not sharp enough.”

‘The baron sharpened it again, and made another offer, when his hand was
arrested by a loud screaming among the young barons and baronesses, who
had a nursery in an upstairs tower with iron bars outside the window, to
prevent their tumbling out into the moat.

‘“If I had been a bachelor,” said the baron sighing, “I might have done
it fifty times over, without being interrupted. Hallo! Put a flask of
wine and the largest pipe in the little vaulted room behind the hall.”

‘One of the domestics, in a very kind manner, executed the baron’s order
in the course of half an hour or so, and Von Koeldwethout being apprised
thereof, strode to the vaulted room, the walls of which, being of dark
shining wood, gleamed in the light of the blazing logs which were piled
upon the hearth. The bottle and pipe were ready, and, upon the whole,
the place looked very comfortable.

‘“Leave the lamp,” said the baron.

‘“Anything else, my lord?” inquired the domestic.

‘“The room,” replied the baron. The domestic obeyed, and the baron
locked the door.

‘“I’ll smoke a last pipe,” said the baron, “and then I’ll be off.” So,
putting the knife upon the table till he wanted it, and tossing off a
goodly measure of wine, the Lord of Grogzwig threw himself back in his
chair, stretched his legs out before the fire, and puffed away.

‘He thought about a great many things--about his present troubles and
past days of bachelorship, and about the Lincoln greens, long since
dispersed up and down the country, no one knew whither: with the
exception of two who had been unfortunately beheaded, and four who had
killed themselves with drinking. His mind was running upon bears and
boars, when, in the process of draining his glass to the bottom,
he raised his eyes, and saw, for the first time and with unbounded
astonishment, that he was not alone.

‘No, he was not; for, on the opposite side of the fire, there sat with
folded arms a wrinkled hideous figure, with deeply sunk and bloodshot
eyes, and an immensely long cadaverous face, shadowed by jagged and
matted locks of coarse black hair. He wore a kind of tunic of a dull
bluish colour, which, the baron observed, on regarding it attentively,
was clasped or ornamented down the front with coffin handles. His legs,
too, were encased in coffin plates as though in armour; and over his
left shoulder he wore a short dusky cloak, which seemed made of a
remnant of some pall. He took no notice of the baron, but was intently
eyeing the fire.

‘“Halloa!” said the baron, stamping his foot to attract attention.

‘“Halloa!” replied the stranger, moving his eyes towards the baron, but
not his face or himself “What now?”

‘“What now!” replied the baron, nothing daunted by his hollow voice and
lustreless eyes. “I should ask that question. How did you get here?”

‘“Through the door,” replied the figure.

‘“What are you?” says the baron.

‘“A man,” replied the figure.

‘“I don’t believe it,” says the baron.

‘“Disbelieve it then,” says the figure.

‘“I will,” rejoined the baron.

‘The figure looked at the bold Baron of Grogzwig for some time, and then
said familiarly,

‘“There’s no coming over you, I see. I’m not a man!”

‘“What are you then?” asked the baron.

‘“A genius,” replied the figure.

‘“You don’t look much like one,” returned the baron scornfully.

‘“I am the Genius of Despair and Suicide,” said the apparition. “Now you
know me.”

‘With these words the apparition turned towards the baron, as if
composing himself for a talk--and, what was very remarkable, was, that
he threw his cloak aside, and displaying a stake, which was run through
the centre of his body, pulled it out with a jerk, and laid it on the
table, as composedly as if it had been a walking-stick.

‘“Now,” said the figure, glancing at the hunting-knife, “are you ready
for me?”

‘“Not quite,” rejoined the baron; “I must finish this pipe first.”

‘“Look sharp then,” said the figure.

‘“You seem in a hurry,” said the baron.

‘“Why, yes, I am,” answered the figure; “they’re doing a pretty brisk
business in my way, over in England and France just now, and my time is
a good deal taken up.”

‘“Do you drink?” said the baron, touching the bottle with the bowl of
his pipe.

‘“Nine times out of ten, and then very hard,” rejoined the figure,
drily.

‘“Never in moderation?” asked the baron.

‘“Never,” replied the figure, with a shudder, “that breeds
cheerfulness.”

‘The baron took another look at his new friend, whom he thought an
uncommonly queer customer, and at length inquired whether he took
any active part in such little proceedings as that which he had in
contemplation.

‘“No,” replied the figure evasively; “but I am always present.”

‘“Just to see fair, I suppose?” said the baron.

‘“Just that,” replied the figure, playing with his stake, and examining
the ferule. “Be as quick as you can, will you, for there’s a young
gentleman who is afflicted with too much money and leisure wanting me
now, I find.”

‘“Going to kill himself because he has too much money!” exclaimed the
baron, quite tickled. “Ha! ha! that’s a good one.” (This was the first
time the baron had laughed for many a long day.)

‘“I say,” expostulated the figure, looking very much scared; “don’t do
that again.”

‘“Why not?” demanded the baron.

‘“Because it gives me pain all over,” replied the figure. “Sigh as much
as you please: that does me good.”

‘The baron sighed mechanically at the mention of the word; the figure,
brightening up again, handed him the hunting-knife with most winning
politeness.

‘“It’s not a bad idea though,” said the baron, feeling the edge of the
weapon; “a man killing himself because he has too much money.”

‘“Pooh!” said the apparition, petulantly, “no better than a man’s
killing himself because he has none or little.”

‘Whether the genius unintentionally committed himself in saying this,
or whether he thought the baron’s mind was so thoroughly made up that it
didn’t matter what he said, I have no means of knowing. I only know that
the baron stopped his hand, all of a sudden, opened his eyes wide, and
looked as if quite a new light had come upon him for the first time.

‘“Why, certainly,” said Von Koeldwethout, “nothing is too bad to be
retrieved.”

‘“Except empty coffers,” cried the genius.

‘“Well; but they may be one day filled again,” said the baron.

‘“Scolding wives,” snarled the genius.

‘“Oh! They may be made quiet,” said the baron.

‘“Thirteen children,” shouted the genius.

‘“Can’t all go wrong, surely,” said the baron.

‘The genius was evidently growing very savage with the baron, for
holding these opinions all at once; but he tried to laugh it off, and
said if he would let him know when he had left off joking he should feel
obliged to him.

‘“But I am not joking; I was never farther from it,” remonstrated the
baron.

‘“Well, I am glad to hear that,” said the genius, looking very grim,
“because a joke, without any figure of speech, IS the death of me. Come!
Quit this dreary world at once.”

‘“I don’t know,” said the baron, playing with the knife; “it’s a dreary
one certainly, but I don’t think yours is much better, for you have
not the appearance of being particularly comfortable. That puts me in
mind--what security have I, that I shall be any the better for going
out of the world after all!” he cried, starting up; “I never thought of
that.”

‘“Dispatch,” cried the figure, gnashing his teeth.

‘“Keep off!” said the baron. ‘I’ll brood over miseries no longer, but
put a good face on the matter, and try the fresh air and the bears
again; and if that don’t do, I’ll talk to the baroness soundly, and cut
the Von Swillenhausens dead.’ With this the baron fell into his chair,
and laughed so loud and boisterously, that the room rang with it.

‘The figure fell back a pace or two, regarding the baron meanwhile with
a look of intense terror, and when he had ceased, caught up the stake,
plunged it violently into its body, uttered a frightful howl, and
disappeared.

‘Von Koeldwethout never saw it again. Having once made up his mind
to action, he soon brought the baroness and the Von Swillenhausens to
reason, and died many years afterwards: not a rich man that I am aware
of, but certainly a happy one: leaving behind him a numerous family,
who had been carefully educated in bear and boar-hunting under his own
personal eye. And my advice to all men is, that if ever they become
hipped and melancholy from similar causes (as very many men do), they
look at both sides of the question, applying a magnifying-glass to the
best one; and if they still feel tempted to retire without leave, that
they smoke a large pipe and drink a full bottle first, and profit by the
laudable example of the Baron of Grogzwig.’


‘The fresh coach is ready, ladies and gentlemen, if you please,’ said a
new driver, looking in.

This intelligence caused the punch to be finished in a great hurry,
and prevented any discussion relative to the last story. Mr. Squeers was
observed to draw the grey-headed gentleman on one side, and to ask a
question with great apparent interest; it bore reference to the Five
Sisters of York, and was, in fact, an inquiry whether he could inform
him how much per annum the Yorkshire convents got in those days with
their boarders.

The journey was then resumed. Nicholas fell asleep towards morning, and,
when he awoke, found, with great regret, that, during his nap, both the
Baron of Grogzwig and the grey-haired gentleman had got down and were
gone. The day dragged on uncomfortably enough. At about six o’clock that
night, he and Mr. Squeers, and the little boys, and their united luggage,
were all put down together at the George and New Inn, Greta Bridge.



CHAPTER 7

Mr. and Mrs. Squeers at Home


Mr. Squeers, being safely landed, left Nicholas and the boys standing
with the luggage in the road, to amuse themselves by looking at the
coach as it changed horses, while he ran into the tavern and went
through the leg-stretching process at the bar. After some minutes, he
returned, with his legs thoroughly stretched, if the hue of his nose and
a short hiccup afforded any criterion; and at the same time there came
out of the yard a rusty pony-chaise, and a cart, driven by two labouring
men.

‘Put the boys and the boxes into the cart,’ said Squeers, rubbing his
hands; ‘and this young man and me will go on in the chaise. Get in,
Nickleby.’

Nicholas obeyed. Mr. Squeers with some difficulty inducing the pony to
obey also, they started off, leaving the cart-load of infant misery to
follow at leisure.

‘Are you cold, Nickleby?’ inquired Squeers, after they had travelled
some distance in silence.

‘Rather, sir, I must say.’

‘Well, I don’t find fault with that,’ said Squeers; ‘it’s a long journey
this weather.’

‘Is it much farther to Dotheboys Hall, sir?’ asked Nicholas.

‘About three mile from here,’ replied Squeers. ‘But you needn’t call it
a Hall down here.’

Nicholas coughed, as if he would like to know why.

‘The fact is, it ain’t a Hall,’ observed Squeers drily.

‘Oh, indeed!’ said Nicholas, whom this piece of intelligence much
astonished.

‘No,’ replied Squeers. ‘We call it a Hall up in London, because it
sounds better, but they don’t know it by that name in these parts. A man
may call his house an island if he likes; there’s no act of Parliament
against that, I believe?’

‘I believe not, sir,’ rejoined Nicholas.

Squeers eyed his companion slyly, at the conclusion of this little
dialogue, and finding that he had grown thoughtful and appeared in
nowise disposed to volunteer any observations, contented himself with
lashing the pony until they reached their journey’s end.

‘Jump out,’ said Squeers. ‘Hallo there! Come and put this horse up. Be
quick, will you!’

While the schoolmaster was uttering these and other impatient cries,
Nicholas had time to observe that the school was a long, cold-looking
house, one storey high, with a few straggling out-buildings behind, and
a barn and stable adjoining. After the lapse of a minute or two, the
noise of somebody unlocking the yard-gate was heard, and presently a
tall lean boy, with a lantern in his hand, issued forth.

‘Is that you, Smike?’ cried Squeers.

‘Yes, sir,’ replied the boy.

‘Then why the devil didn’t you come before?’

‘Please, sir, I fell asleep over the fire,’ answered Smike, with
humility.

‘Fire! what fire? Where’s there a fire?’ demanded the schoolmaster,
sharply.

‘Only in the kitchen, sir,’ replied the boy. ‘Missus said as I was
sitting up, I might go in there for a warm.’

‘Your missus is a fool,’ retorted Squeers. ‘You’d have been a deuced
deal more wakeful in the cold, I’ll engage.’

By this time Mr. Squeers had dismounted; and after ordering the boy to
see to the pony, and to take care that he hadn’t any more corn that
night, he told Nicholas to wait at the front-door a minute while he went
round and let him in.

A host of unpleasant misgivings, which had been crowding upon Nicholas
during the whole journey, thronged into his mind with redoubled
force when he was left alone. His great distance from home and the
impossibility of reaching it, except on foot, should he feel ever so
anxious to return, presented itself to him in most alarming colours; and
as he looked up at the dreary house and dark windows, and upon the wild
country round, covered with snow, he felt a depression of heart and
spirit which he had never experienced before.

‘Now then!’ cried Squeers, poking his head out at the front-door. ‘Where
are you, Nickleby?’

‘Here, sir,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Come in, then,’ said Squeers ‘the wind blows in, at this door, fit to
knock a man off his legs.’

Nicholas sighed, and hurried in. Mr. Squeers, having bolted the door to
keep it shut, ushered him into a small parlour scantily furnished with a
few chairs, a yellow map hung against the wall, and a couple of tables;
one of which bore some preparations for supper; while, on the other, a
tutor’s assistant, a Murray’s grammar, half-a-dozen cards of terms, and
a worn letter directed to Wackford Squeers, Esquire, were arranged in
picturesque confusion.

They had not been in this apartment a couple of minutes, when a female
bounced into the room, and, seizing Mr. Squeers by the throat, gave him
two loud kisses: one close after the other, like a postman’s knock. The
lady, who was of a large raw-boned figure, was about half a head taller
than Mr. Squeers, and was dressed in a dimity night-jacket; with her hair
in papers; she had also a dirty nightcap on, relieved by a yellow cotton
handkerchief which tied it under the chin.

‘How is my Squeery?’ said this lady in a playful manner, and a very
hoarse voice.

‘Quite well, my love,’ replied Squeers. ‘How’s the cows?’

‘All right, every one of’em,’ answered the lady.

‘And the pigs?’ said Squeers.

‘As well as they were when you went away.’

‘Come; that’s a blessing,’ said Squeers, pulling off his great-coat.
‘The boys are all as they were, I suppose?’

‘Oh, yes, they’re well enough,’ replied Mrs. Squeers, snappishly. ‘That
young Pitcher’s had a fever.’

‘No!’ exclaimed Squeers. ‘Damn that boy, he’s always at something of
that sort.’

‘Never was such a boy, I do believe,’ said Mrs. Squeers; ‘whatever he
has is always catching too. I say it’s obstinacy, and nothing shall ever
convince me that it isn’t. I’d beat it out of him; and I told you that,
six months ago.’

‘So you did, my love,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘We’ll try what can be done.’

Pending these little endearments, Nicholas had stood, awkwardly enough,
in the middle of the room: not very well knowing whether he was expected
to retire into the passage, or to remain where he was. He was now
relieved from his perplexity by Mr. Squeers.

‘This is the new young man, my dear,’ said that gentleman.

‘Oh,’ replied Mrs. Squeers, nodding her head at Nicholas, and eyeing him
coldly from top to toe.

‘He’ll take a meal with us tonight,’ said Squeers, ‘and go among the
boys tomorrow morning. You can give him a shake-down here, tonight,
can’t you?’

‘We must manage it somehow,’ replied the lady. ‘You don’t much mind how
you sleep, I suppose, sir?’

No, indeed,’ replied Nicholas, ‘I am not particular.’

‘That’s lucky,’ said Mrs. Squeers. And as the lady’s humour was
considered to lie chiefly in retort, Mr. Squeers laughed heartily, and
seemed to expect that Nicholas should do the same.

After some further conversation between the master and mistress relative
to the success of Mr. Squeers’s trip and the people who had paid, and the
people who had made default in payment, a young servant girl brought in
a Yorkshire pie and some cold beef, which being set upon the table, the
boy Smike appeared with a jug of ale.

Mr. Squeers was emptying his great-coat pockets of letters to different
boys, and other small documents, which he had brought down in them. The
boy glanced, with an anxious and timid expression, at the papers, as if
with a sickly hope that one among them might relate to him. The look was
a very painful one, and went to Nicholas’s heart at once; for it told a
long and very sad history.

It induced him to consider the boy more attentively, and he was
surprised to observe the extraordinary mixture of garments which
formed his dress. Although he could not have been less than eighteen or
nineteen years old, and was tall for that age, he wore a skeleton suit,
such as is usually put upon very little boys, and which, though most
absurdly short in the arms and legs, was quite wide enough for his
attenuated frame. In order that the lower part of his legs might be in
perfect keeping with this singular dress, he had a very large pair of
boots, originally made for tops, which might have been once worn by some
stout farmer, but were now too patched and tattered for a beggar. Heaven
knows how long he had been there, but he still wore the same linen which
he had first taken down; for, round his neck, was a tattered child’s
frill, only half concealed by a coarse, man’s neckerchief. He was lame;
and as he feigned to be busy in arranging the table, glanced at the
letters with a look so keen, and yet so dispirited and hopeless, that
Nicholas could hardly bear to watch him.

‘What are you bothering about there, Smike?’ cried Mrs. Squeers; ‘let the
things alone, can’t you?’

‘Eh!’ said Squeers, looking up. ‘Oh! it’s you, is it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied the youth, pressing his hands together, as though to
control, by force, the nervous wandering of his fingers. ‘Is there--’

‘Well!’ said Squeers.

‘Have you--did anybody--has nothing been heard--about me?’

‘Devil a bit,’ replied Squeers testily.

The lad withdrew his eyes, and, putting his hand to his face, moved
towards the door.

‘Not a word,’ resumed Squeers, ‘and never will be. Now, this is a pretty
sort of thing, isn’t it, that you should have been left here, all these
years, and no money paid after the first six--nor no notice taken, nor
no clue to be got who you belong to? It’s a pretty sort of thing that I
should have to feed a great fellow like you, and never hope to get one
penny for it, isn’t it?’

The boy put his hand to his head as if he were making an effort to
recollect something, and then, looking vacantly at his questioner,
gradually broke into a smile, and limped away.

‘I’ll tell you what, Squeers,’ remarked his wife as the door closed, ‘I
think that young chap’s turning silly.’

‘I hope not,’ said the schoolmaster; ‘for he’s a handy fellow out of
doors, and worth his meat and drink, anyway. I should think he’d have
wit enough for us though, if he was. But come; let’s have supper, for I
am hungry and tired, and want to get to bed.’

This reminder brought in an exclusive steak for Mr. Squeers, who speedily
proceeded to do it ample justice. Nicholas drew up his chair, but his
appetite was effectually taken away.

‘How’s the steak, Squeers?’ said Mrs. S.

‘Tender as a lamb,’ replied Squeers. ‘Have a bit.’

‘I couldn’t eat a morsel,’ replied his wife. ‘What’ll the young man
take, my dear?’

‘Whatever he likes that’s present,’ rejoined Squeers, in a most unusual
burst of generosity.

‘What do you say, Mr. Knuckleboy?’ inquired Mrs. Squeers.

‘I’ll take a little of the pie, if you please,’ replied Nicholas. ‘A
very little, for I’m not hungry.’

Well, it’s a pity to cut the pie if you’re not hungry, isn’t it?’ said
Mrs. Squeers. ‘Will you try a bit of the beef?’

‘Whatever you please,’ replied Nicholas abstractedly; ‘it’s all the same
to me.’

Mrs. Squeers looked vastly gracious on receiving this reply; and nodding
to Squeers, as much as to say that she was glad to find the young man
knew his station, assisted Nicholas to a slice of meat with her own fair
hands.

‘Ale, Squeery?’ inquired the lady, winking and frowning to give him to
understand that the question propounded, was, whether Nicholas should
have ale, and not whether he (Squeers) would take any.

‘Certainly,’ said Squeers, re-telegraphing in the same manner. ‘A
glassful.’

So Nicholas had a glassful, and being occupied with his own reflections,
drank it, in happy innocence of all the foregone proceedings.

‘Uncommon juicy steak that,’ said Squeers, as he laid down his knife and
fork, after plying it, in silence, for some time.

‘It’s prime meat,’ rejoined his lady. ‘I bought a good large piece of it
myself on purpose for--’

‘For what!’ exclaimed Squeers hastily. ‘Not for the--’

‘No, no; not for them,’ rejoined Mrs. Squeers; ‘on purpose for you
against you came home. Lor! you didn’t think I could have made such a
mistake as that.’

‘Upon my word, my dear, I didn’t know what you were going to say,’ said
Squeers, who had turned pale.

‘You needn’t make yourself uncomfortable,’ remarked his wife, laughing
heartily. ‘To think that I should be such a noddy! Well!’

This part of the conversation was rather unintelligible; but popular
rumour in the neighbourhood asserted that Mr. Squeers, being amiably
opposed to cruelty to animals, not unfrequently purchased for boy
consumption the bodies of horned cattle who had died a natural death;
possibly he was apprehensive of having unintentionally devoured some
choice morsel intended for the young gentlemen.

Supper being over, and removed by a small servant girl with a hungry
eye, Mrs. Squeers retired to lock it up, and also to take into safe
custody the clothes of the five boys who had just arrived, and who were
half-way up the troublesome flight of steps which leads to death’s door,
in consequence of exposure to the cold. They were then regaled with
a light supper of porridge, and stowed away, side by side, in a small
bedstead, to warm each other, and dream of a substantial meal with
something hot after it, if their fancies set that way: which it is not
at all improbable they did.

Mr. Squeers treated himself to a stiff tumbler of brandy and water, made
on the liberal half-and-half principle, allowing for the dissolution of
the sugar; and his amiable helpmate mixed Nicholas the ghost of a small
glassful of the same compound. This done, Mr. and Mrs. Squeers drew
close up to the fire, and sitting with their feet on the fender, talked
confidentially in whispers; while Nicholas, taking up the tutor’s
assistant, read the interesting legends in the miscellaneous questions,
and all the figures into the bargain, with as much thought or
consciousness of what he was doing, as if he had been in a magnetic
slumber.

At length, Mr. Squeers yawned fearfully, and opined that it was high time
to go to bed; upon which signal, Mrs. Squeers and the girl dragged in a
small straw mattress and a couple of blankets, and arranged them into a
couch for Nicholas.

‘We’ll put you into your regular bedroom tomorrow, Nickelby,’ said
Squeers. ‘Let me see! Who sleeps in Brooks’s bed, my dear?’

‘In Brooks’s,’ said Mrs. Squeers, pondering. ‘There’s Jennings, little
Bolder, Graymarsh, and what’s his name.’

‘So there is,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘Yes! Brooks is full.’

‘Full!’ thought Nicholas. ‘I should think he was.’

‘There’s a place somewhere, I know,’ said Squeers; ‘but I can’t at this
moment call to mind where it is. However, we’ll have that all settled
tomorrow. Good-night, Nickleby. Seven o’clock in the morning, mind.’

‘I shall be ready, sir,’ replied Nicholas. ‘Good-night.’

‘I’ll come in myself and show you where the well is,’ said Squeers.
‘You’ll always find a little bit of soap in the kitchen window; that
belongs to you.’

Nicholas opened his eyes, but not his mouth; and Squeers was again going
away, when he once more turned back.

‘I don’t know, I am sure,’ he said, ‘whose towel to put you on; but
if you’ll make shift with something tomorrow morning, Mrs. Squeers will
arrange that, in the course of the day. My dear, don’t forget.’

‘I’ll take care,’ replied Mrs. Squeers; ‘and mind YOU take care, young
man, and get first wash. The teacher ought always to have it; but they
get the better of him if they can.’

Mr. Squeers then nudged Mrs. Squeers to bring away the brandy bottle, lest
Nicholas should help himself in the night; and the lady having seized it
with great precipitation, they retired together.

Nicholas, being left alone, took half-a-dozen turns up and down the room
in a condition of much agitation and excitement; but, growing gradually
calmer, sat himself down in a chair, and mentally resolved that, come
what come might, he would endeavour, for a time, to bear whatever
wretchedness might be in store for him, and that remembering the
helplessness of his mother and sister, he would give his uncle no
plea for deserting them in their need. Good resolutions seldom fail of
producing some good effect in the mind from which they spring. He grew
less desponding, and--so sanguine and buoyant is youth--even hoped that
affairs at Dotheboys Hall might yet prove better than they promised.

He was preparing for bed, with something like renewed cheerfulness,
when a sealed letter fell from his coat pocket. In the hurry of leaving
London, it had escaped his attention, and had not occurred to him since,
but it at once brought back to him the recollection of the mysterious
behaviour of Newman Noggs.

‘Dear me!’ said Nicholas; ‘what an extraordinary hand!’

It was directed to himself, was written upon very dirty paper, and in
such cramped and crippled writing as to be almost illegible. After great
difficulty and much puzzling, he contrived to read as follows:--

My dear young Man.

I know the world. Your father did not, or he would not have done me a
kindness when there was no hope of return. You do not, or you would not
be bound on such a journey.

If ever you want a shelter in London (don’t be angry at this, I once
thought I never should), they know where I live, at the sign of the
Crown, in Silver Street, Golden Square. It is at the corner of Silver
Street and James Street, with a bar door both ways. You can come at
night. Once, nobody was ashamed--never mind that. It’s all over.

Excuse errors. I should forget how to wear a whole coat now. I have
forgotten all my old ways. My spelling may have gone with them.

NEWMAN NOGGS.

P.S. If you should go near Barnard Castle, there is good ale at the
King’s Head. Say you know me, and I am sure they will not charge you
for it. You may say Mr. Noggs there, for I was a gentleman then. I was
indeed.


It may be a very undignified circumstances to record, but after he had
folded this letter and placed it in his pocket-book, Nicholas Nickleby’s
eyes were dimmed with a moisture that might have been taken for tears.



CHAPTER 8

Of the Internal Economy of Dotheboys Hall


A ride of two hundred and odd miles in severe weather, is one of the
best softeners of a hard bed that ingenuity can devise. Perhaps it is
even a sweetener of dreams, for those which hovered over the rough couch
of Nicholas, and whispered their airy nothings in his ear, were of an
agreeable and happy kind. He was making his fortune very fast indeed,
when the faint glimmer of an expiring candle shone before his eyes, and
a voice he had no difficulty in recognising as part and parcel of Mr
Squeers, admonished him that it was time to rise.

‘Past seven, Nickleby,’ said Mr. Squeers.

‘Has morning come already?’ asked Nicholas, sitting up in bed.

‘Ah! that has it,’ replied Squeers, ‘and ready iced too. Now, Nickleby,
come; tumble up, will you?’

Nicholas needed no further admonition, but ‘tumbled up’ at once, and
proceeded to dress himself by the light of the taper, which Mr. Squeers
carried in his hand.

‘Here’s a pretty go,’ said that gentleman; ‘the pump’s froze.’

‘Indeed!’ said Nicholas, not much interested in the intelligence.

‘Yes,’ replied Squeers. ‘You can’t wash yourself this morning.’

‘Not wash myself!’ exclaimed Nicholas.

‘No, not a bit of it,’ rejoined Squeers tartly. ‘So you must be content
with giving yourself a dry polish till we break the ice in the well, and
can get a bucketful out for the boys. Don’t stand staring at me, but do
look sharp, will you?’

Offering no further observation, Nicholas huddled on his clothes.
Squeers, meanwhile, opened the shutters and blew the candle out; when
the voice of his amiable consort was heard in the passage, demanding
admittance.

‘Come in, my love,’ said Squeers.

Mrs. Squeers came in, still habited in the primitive night-jacket which
had displayed the symmetry of her figure on the previous night, and
further ornamented with a beaver bonnet of some antiquity, which she
wore, with much ease and lightness, on the top of the nightcap before
mentioned.

‘Drat the things,’ said the lady, opening the cupboard; ‘I can’t find
the school spoon anywhere.’

‘Never mind it, my dear,’ observed Squeers in a soothing manner; ‘it’s
of no consequence.’

‘No consequence, why how you talk!’ retorted Mrs. Squeers sharply; ‘isn’t
it brimstone morning?’

‘I forgot, my dear,’ rejoined Squeers; ‘yes, it certainly is. We purify
the boys’ bloods now and then, Nickleby.’

‘Purify fiddlesticks’ ends,’ said his lady. ‘Don’t think, young man,
that we go to the expense of flower of brimstone and molasses, just to
purify them; because if you think we carry on the business in that way,
you’ll find yourself mistaken, and so I tell you plainly.’

‘My dear,’ said Squeers frowning. ‘Hem!’

‘Oh! nonsense,’ rejoined Mrs. Squeers. ‘If the young man comes to be
a teacher here, let him understand, at once, that we don’t want any
foolery about the boys. They have the brimstone and treacle, partly
because if they hadn’t something or other in the way of medicine they’d
be always ailing and giving a world of trouble, and partly because it
spoils their appetites and comes cheaper than breakfast and dinner. So,
it does them good and us good at the same time, and that’s fair enough
I’m sure.’

Having given this explanation, Mrs. Squeers put her head into the closet
and instituted a stricter search after the spoon, in which Mr. Squeers
assisted. A few words passed between them while they were thus engaged,
but as their voices were partially stifled by the cupboard, all that
Nicholas could distinguish was, that Mr. Squeers said what Mrs. Squeers
had said, was injudicious, and that Mrs. Squeers said what Mr. Squeers
said, was ‘stuff.’

A vast deal of searching and rummaging ensued, and it proving fruitless,
Smike was called in, and pushed by Mrs. Squeers, and boxed by Mr. Squeers;
which course of treatment brightening his intellects, enabled him to
suggest that possibly Mrs. Squeers might have the spoon in her pocket,
as indeed turned out to be the case. As Mrs. Squeers had previously
protested, however, that she was quite certain she had not got it,
Smike received another box on the ear for presuming to contradict his
mistress, together with a promise of a sound thrashing if he were not
more respectful in future; so that he took nothing very advantageous by
his motion.

‘A most invaluable woman, that, Nickleby,’ said Squeers when his consort
had hurried away, pushing the drudge before her.

‘Indeed, sir!’ observed Nicholas.

‘I don’t know her equal,’ said Squeers; ‘I do not know her equal. That
woman, Nickleby, is always the same--always the same bustling, lively,
active, saving creetur that you see her now.’

Nicholas sighed involuntarily at the thought of the agreeable domestic
prospect thus opened to him; but Squeers was, fortunately, too much
occupied with his own reflections to perceive it.

‘It’s my way to say, when I am up in London,’ continued Squeers, ‘that
to them boys she is a mother. But she is more than a mother to them;
ten times more. She does things for them boys, Nickleby, that I don’t
believe half the mothers going, would do for their own sons.’

‘I should think they would not, sir,’ answered Nicholas.

Now, the fact was, that both Mr. and Mrs. Squeers viewed the boys in the
light of their proper and natural enemies; or, in other words, they held
and considered that their business and profession was to get as much
from every boy as could by possibility be screwed out of him. On this
point they were both agreed, and behaved in unison accordingly. The
only difference between them was, that Mrs. Squeers waged war against
the enemy openly and fearlessly, and that Squeers covered his rascality,
even at home, with a spice of his habitual deceit; as if he really had
a notion of someday or other being able to take himself in, and persuade
his own mind that he was a very good fellow.

‘But come,’ said Squeers, interrupting the progress of some thoughts to
this effect in the mind of his usher, ‘let’s go to the schoolroom; and
lend me a hand with my school-coat, will you?’

Nicholas assisted his master to put on an old fustian shooting-jacket,
which he took down from a peg in the passage; and Squeers, arming
himself with his cane, led the way across a yard, to a door in the rear
of the house.

‘There,’ said the schoolmaster as they stepped in together; ‘this is our
shop, Nickleby!’

It was such a crowded scene, and there were so many objects to attract
attention, that, at first, Nicholas stared about him, really without
seeing anything at all. By degrees, however, the place resolved itself
into a bare and dirty room, with a couple of windows, whereof a
tenth part might be of glass, the remainder being stopped up with old
copy-books and paper. There were a couple of long old rickety desks, cut
and notched, and inked, and damaged, in every possible way; two or three
forms; a detached desk for Squeers; and another for his assistant. The
ceiling was supported, like that of a barn, by cross-beams and rafters;
and the walls were so stained and discoloured, that it was impossible to
tell whether they had ever been touched with paint or whitewash.

But the pupils--the young noblemen! How the last faint traces of hope,
the remotest glimmering of any good to be derived from his efforts in
this den, faded from the mind of Nicholas as he looked in dismay
around! Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the
countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys
of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear
their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were
the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness
or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for
their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of
infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There
were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the
scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of
its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining;
there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like
malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins
of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary
nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every
kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and
healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion
that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in
silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding here!

And yet this scene, painful as it was, had its grotesque features,
which, in a less interested observer than Nicholas, might have provoked
a smile. Mrs. Squeers stood at one of the desks, presiding over an
immense basin of brimstone and treacle, of which delicious compound she
administered a large instalment to each boy in succession: using for
the purpose a common wooden spoon, which might have been originally
manufactured for some gigantic top, and which widened every young
gentleman’s mouth considerably: they being all obliged, under heavy
corporal penalties, to take in the whole of the bowl at a gasp. In
another corner, huddled together for companionship, were the little
boys who had arrived on the preceding night, three of them in very large
leather breeches, and two in old trousers, a something tighter fit than
drawers are usually worn; at no great distance from these was seated
the juvenile son and heir of Mr. Squeers--a striking likeness of his
father--kicking, with great vigour, under the hands of Smike, who
was fitting upon him a pair of new boots that bore a most suspicious
resemblance to those which the least of the little boys had worn on
the journey down--as the little boy himself seemed to think, for he
was regarding the appropriation with a look of most rueful amazement.
Besides these, there was a long row of boys waiting, with countenances
of no pleasant anticipation, to be treacled; and another file, who
had just escaped from the infliction, making a variety of wry mouths
indicative of anything but satisfaction. The whole were attired in
such motley, ill-assorted, extraordinary garments, as would have been
irresistibly ridiculous, but for the foul appearance of dirt, disorder,
and disease, with which they were associated.

‘Now,’ said Squeers, giving the desk a great rap with his cane, which
made half the little boys nearly jump out of their boots, ‘is that
physicking over?’

‘Just over,’ said Mrs. Squeers, choking the last boy in her hurry, and
tapping the crown of his head with the wooden spoon to restore him.
‘Here, you Smike; take away now. Look sharp!’

Smike shuffled out with the basin, and Mrs. Squeers having called up a
little boy with a curly head, and wiped her hands upon it, hurried out
after him into a species of wash-house, where there was a small fire and
a large kettle, together with a number of little wooden bowls which were
arranged upon a board.

Into these bowls, Mrs. Squeers, assisted by the hungry servant, poured
a brown composition, which looked like diluted pincushions without
the covers, and was called porridge. A minute wedge of brown bread was
inserted in each bowl, and when they had eaten their porridge by means
of the bread, the boys ate the bread itself, and had finished their
breakfast; whereupon Mr. Squeers said, in a solemn voice, ‘For what we
have received, may the Lord make us truly thankful!’--and went away to
his own.

Nicholas distended his stomach with a bowl of porridge, for much the
same reason which induces some savages to swallow earth--lest they
should be inconveniently hungry when there is nothing to eat. Having
further disposed of a slice of bread and butter, allotted to him in
virtue of his office, he sat himself down, to wait for school-time.

He could not but observe how silent and sad the boys all seemed to be.
There was none of the noise and clamour of a schoolroom; none of
its boisterous play, or hearty mirth. The children sat crouching and
shivering together, and seemed to lack the spirit to move about. The
only pupil who evinced the slightest tendency towards locomotion or
playfulness was Master Squeers, and as his chief amusement was to tread
upon the other boys’ toes in his new boots, his flow of spirits was
rather disagreeable than otherwise.

After some half-hour’s delay, Mr. Squeers reappeared, and the boys took
their places and their books, of which latter commodity the average
might be about one to eight learners. A few minutes having elapsed,
during which Mr. Squeers looked very profound, as if he had a perfect
apprehension of what was inside all the books, and could say every word
of their contents by heart if he only chose to take the trouble, that
gentleman called up the first class.

Obedient to this summons there ranged themselves in front of the
schoolmaster’s desk, half-a-dozen scarecrows, out at knees and elbows,
one of whom placed a torn and filthy book beneath his learned eye.

‘This is the first class in English spelling and philosophy, Nickleby,’
said Squeers, beckoning Nicholas to stand beside him. ‘We’ll get up a
Latin one, and hand that over to you. Now, then, where’s the first boy?’

‘Please, sir, he’s cleaning the back-parlour window,’ said the temporary
head of the philosophical class.

‘So he is, to be sure,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘We go upon the practical mode
of teaching, Nickleby; the regular education system. C-l-e-a-n, clean,
verb active, to make bright, to scour. W-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a
casement. When the boy knows this out of book, he goes and does it. It’s
just the same principle as the use of the globes. Where’s the second
boy?’

‘Please, sir, he’s weeding the garden,’ replied a small voice.

‘To be sure,’ said Squeers, by no means disconcerted. ‘So he is. B-o-t,
bot, t-i-n, tin, bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottinney, noun substantive,
a knowledge of plants. When he has learned that bottinney means a
knowledge of plants, he goes and knows ‘em. That’s our system, Nickleby:
what do you think of it?’

‘It’s very useful one, at any rate,’ answered Nicholas.

‘I believe you,’ rejoined Squeers, not remarking the emphasis of his
usher. ‘Third boy, what’s horse?’

‘A beast, sir,’ replied the boy.

‘So it is,’ said Squeers. ‘Ain’t it, Nickleby?’

‘I believe there is no doubt of that, sir,’ answered Nicholas.

‘Of course there isn’t,’ said Squeers. ‘A horse is a quadruped, and
quadruped’s Latin for beast, as everybody that’s gone through the
grammar knows, or else where’s the use of having grammars at all?’

‘Where, indeed!’ said Nicholas abstractedly.

‘As you’re perfect in that,’ resumed Squeers, turning to the boy, ‘go
and look after MY horse, and rub him down well, or I’ll rub you down.
The rest of the class go and draw water up, till somebody tells you
to leave off, for it’s washing-day tomorrow, and they want the coppers
filled.’

So saying, he dismissed the first class to their experiments in
practical philosophy, and eyed Nicholas with a look, half cunning and
half doubtful, as if he were not altogether certain what he might think
of him by this time.

‘That’s the way we do it, Nickleby,’ he said, after a pause.

Nicholas shrugged his shoulders in a manner that was scarcely
perceptible, and said he saw it was.

‘And a very good way it is, too,’ said Squeers. ‘Now, just take them
fourteen little boys and hear them some reading, because, you know, you
must begin to be useful. Idling about here won’t do.’

Mr. Squeers said this, as if it had suddenly occurred to him, either that
he must not say too much to his assistant, or that his assistant did
not say enough to him in praise of the establishment. The children were
arranged in a semicircle round the new master, and he was soon listening
to their dull, drawling, hesitating recital of those stories of
engrossing interest which are to be found in the more antiquated
spelling-books.

In this exciting occupation, the morning lagged heavily on. At one
o’clock, the boys, having previously had their appetites thoroughly
taken away by stir-about and potatoes, sat down in the kitchen to some
hard salt beef, of which Nicholas was graciously permitted to take his
portion to his own solitary desk, to eat it there in peace. After this,
there was another hour of crouching in the schoolroom and shivering with
cold, and then school began again.

It was Mr. Squeer’s custom to call the boys together, and make a sort of
report, after every half-yearly visit to the metropolis, regarding the
relations and friends he had seen, the news he had heard, the letters he
had brought down, the bills which had been paid, the accounts which had
been left unpaid, and so forth. This solemn proceeding always took place
in the afternoon of the day succeeding his return; perhaps, because the
boys acquired strength of mind from the suspense of the morning, or,
possibly, because Mr. Squeers himself acquired greater sternness and
inflexibility from certain warm potations in which he was wont to
indulge after his early dinner. Be this as it may, the boys were
recalled from house-window, garden, stable, and cow-yard, and the school
were assembled in full conclave, when Mr. Squeers, with a small bundle of
papers in his hand, and Mrs. S. following with a pair of canes, entered
the room and proclaimed silence.

‘Let any boy speak a word without leave,’ said Mr. Squeers mildly, ‘and
I’ll take the skin off his back.’

This special proclamation had the desired effect, and a deathlike
silence immediately prevailed, in the midst of which Mr. Squeers went on
to say:

‘Boys, I’ve been to London, and have returned to my family and you, as
strong and well as ever.’

According to half-yearly custom, the boys gave three feeble cheers at
this refreshing intelligence. Such cheers! Sights of extra strength with
the chill on.

‘I have seen the parents of some boys,’ continued Squeers, turning over
his papers, ‘and they’re so glad to hear how their sons are getting on,
that there’s no prospect at all of their going away, which of course is
a very pleasant thing to reflect upon, for all parties.’

Two or three hands went to two or three eyes when Squeers said this, but
the greater part of the young gentlemen having no particular parents to
speak of, were wholly uninterested in the thing one way or other.

‘I have had disappointments to contend against,’ said Squeers, looking
very grim; ‘Bolder’s father was two pound ten short. Where is Bolder?’

‘Here he is, please sir,’ rejoined twenty officious voices. Boys are
very like men to be sure.

‘Come here, Bolder,’ said Squeers.

An unhealthy-looking boy, with warts all over his hands, stepped from
his place to the master’s desk, and raised his eyes imploringly to
Squeers’s face; his own, quite white from the rapid beating of his
heart.

‘Bolder,’ said Squeers, speaking very slowly, for he was considering, as
the saying goes, where to have him. ‘Bolder, if you father thinks that
because--why, what’s this, sir?’

As Squeers spoke, he caught up the boy’s hand by the cuff of his jacket,
and surveyed it with an edifying aspect of horror and disgust.

‘What do you call this, sir?’ demanded the schoolmaster, administering a
cut with the cane to expedite the reply.

‘I can’t help it, indeed, sir,’ rejoined the boy, crying. ‘They will
come; it’s the dirty work I think, sir--at least I don’t know what it
is, sir, but it’s not my fault.’

‘Bolder,’ said Squeers, tucking up his wristbands, and moistening
the palm of his right hand to get a good grip of the cane, ‘you’re an
incorrigible young scoundrel, and as the last thrashing did you no good,
we must see what another will do towards beating it out of you.’

With this, and wholly disregarding a piteous cry for mercy, Mr. Squeers
fell upon the boy and caned him soundly: not leaving off, indeed, until
his arm was tired out.

‘There,’ said Squeers, when he had quite done; ‘rub away as hard as you
like, you won’t rub that off in a hurry. Oh! you won’t hold that noise,
won’t you? Put him out, Smike.’

The drudge knew better from long experience, than to hesitate about
obeying, so he bundled the victim out by a side-door, and Mr. Squeers
perched himself again on his own stool, supported by Mrs. Squeers, who
occupied another at his side.

‘Now let us see,’ said Squeers. ‘A letter for Cobbey. Stand up, Cobbey.’

Another boy stood up, and eyed the letter very hard while Squeers made a
mental abstract of the same.

‘Oh!’ said Squeers: ‘Cobbey’s grandmother is dead, and his uncle John
has took to drinking, which is all the news his sister sends, except
eighteenpence, which will just pay for that broken square of glass. Mrs
Squeers, my dear, will you take the money?’

The worthy lady pocketed the eighteenpence with a most business-like
air, and Squeers passed on to the next boy, as coolly as possible.

‘Graymarsh,’ said Squeers, ‘he’s the next. Stand up, Graymarsh.’

Another boy stood up, and the schoolmaster looked over the letter as
before.

‘Graymarsh’s maternal aunt,’ said Squeers, when he had possessed himself
of the contents, ‘is very glad to hear he’s so well and happy, and sends
her respectful compliments to Mrs. Squeers, and thinks she must be an
angel. She likewise thinks Mr. Squeers is too good for this world; but
hopes he may long be spared to carry on the business. Would have sent
the two pair of stockings as desired, but is short of money, so forwards
a tract instead, and hopes Graymarsh will put his trust in Providence.
Hopes, above all, that he will study in everything to please Mr. and Mrs
Squeers, and look upon them as his only friends; and that he will love
Master Squeers; and not object to sleeping five in a bed, which no
Christian should. Ah!’ said Squeers, folding it up, ‘a delightful
letter. Very affecting indeed.’

It was affecting in one sense, for Graymarsh’s maternal aunt was
strongly supposed, by her more intimate friends, to be no other than his
maternal parent; Squeers, however, without alluding to this part of the
story (which would have sounded immoral before boys), proceeded with
the business by calling out ‘Mobbs,’ whereupon another boy rose, and
Graymarsh resumed his seat.

‘Mobbs’s step-mother,’ said Squeers, ‘took to her bed on hearing that he
wouldn’t eat fat, and has been very ill ever since. She wishes to know,
by an early post, where he expects to go to, if he quarrels with
his vittles; and with what feelings he could turn up his nose at the
cow’s-liver broth, after his good master had asked a blessing on it.
This was told her in the London newspapers--not by Mr. Squeers, for he is
too kind and too good to set anybody against anybody--and it has vexed
her so much, Mobbs can’t think. She is sorry to find he is discontented,
which is sinful and horrid, and hopes Mr. Squeers will flog him into
a happier state of mind; with which view, she has also stopped his
halfpenny a week pocket-money, and given a double-bladed knife with a
corkscrew in it to the Missionaries, which she had bought on purpose for
him.’

‘A sulky state of feeling,’ said Squeers, after a terrible pause, during
which he had moistened the palm of his right hand again, ‘won’t do.
Cheerfulness and contentment must be kept up. Mobbs, come to me!’

Mobbs moved slowly towards the desk, rubbing his eyes in anticipation
of good cause for doing so; and he soon afterwards retired by the
side-door, with as good cause as a boy need have.

Mr. Squeers then proceeded to open a miscellaneous collection of letters;
some enclosing money, which Mrs. Squeers ‘took care of;’ and others
referring to small articles of apparel, as caps and so forth, all of
which the same lady stated to be too large, or too small, and calculated
for nobody but young Squeers, who would appear indeed to have had most
accommodating limbs, since everything that came into the school fitted
him to a nicety. His head, in particular, must have been singularly
elastic, for hats and caps of all dimensions were alike to him.

This business dispatched, a few slovenly lessons were performed, and
Squeers retired to his fireside, leaving Nicholas to take care of the
boys in the school-room, which was very cold, and where a meal of bread
and cheese was served out shortly after dark.

There was a small stove at that corner of the room which was nearest
to the master’s desk, and by it Nicholas sat down, so depressed and
self-degraded by the consciousness of his position, that if death could
have come upon him at that time, he would have been almost happy to meet
it. The cruelty of which he had been an unwilling witness, the coarse
and ruffianly behaviour of Squeers even in his best moods, the filthy
place, the sights and sounds about him, all contributed to this state of
feeling; but when he recollected that, being there as an assistant,
he actually seemed--no matter what unhappy train of circumstances had
brought him to that pass--to be the aider and abettor of a system which
filled him with honest disgust and indignation, he loathed himself, and
felt, for the moment, as though the mere consciousness of his present
situation must, through all time to come, prevent his raising his head
again.

But, for the present, his resolve was taken, and the resolution he had
formed on the preceding night remained undisturbed. He had written to
his mother and sister, announcing the safe conclusion of his journey,
and saying as little about Dotheboys Hall, and saying that little as
cheerfully, as he possibly could. He hoped that by remaining where he
was, he might do some good, even there; at all events, others depended
too much on his uncle’s favour, to admit of his awakening his wrath just
then.

One reflection disturbed him far more than any selfish considerations
arising out of his own position. This was the probable destination of
his sister Kate. His uncle had deceived him, and might he not consign
her to some miserable place where her youth and beauty would prove a far
greater curse than ugliness and decrepitude? To a caged man, bound hand
and foot, this was a terrible idea--but no, he thought, his mother was
by; there was the portrait-painter, too--simple enough, but still living
in the world, and of it. He was willing to believe that Ralph Nickleby
had conceived a personal dislike to himself. Having pretty good reason,
by this time, to reciprocate it, he had no great difficulty in arriving
at this conclusion, and tried to persuade himself that the feeling
extended no farther than between them.

As he was absorbed in these meditations, he all at once encountered the
upturned face of Smike, who was on his knees before the stove, picking a
few stray cinders from the hearth and planting them on the fire. He
had paused to steal a look at Nicholas, and when he saw that he was
observed, shrunk back, as if expecting a blow.

‘You need not fear me,’ said Nicholas kindly. ‘Are you cold?’

‘N-n-o.’

‘You are shivering.’

‘I am not cold,’ replied Smike quickly. ‘I am used to it.’

There was such an obvious fear of giving offence in his manner, and he
was such a timid, broken-spirited creature, that Nicholas could not help
exclaiming, ‘Poor fellow!’

If he had struck the drudge, he would have slunk away without a word.
But, now, he burst into tears.

‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ he cried, covering his face with his cracked and
horny hands. ‘My heart will break. It will, it will.’

‘Hush!’ said Nicholas, laying his hand upon his shoulder. ‘Be a man; you
are nearly one by years, God help you.’

‘By years!’ cried Smike. ‘Oh dear, dear, how many of them! How many of
them since I was a little child, younger than any that are here now!
Where are they all!’

‘Whom do you speak of?’ inquired Nicholas, wishing to rouse the poor
half-witted creature to reason. ‘Tell me.’

‘My friends,’ he replied, ‘myself--my--oh! what sufferings mine have
been!’

‘There is always hope,’ said Nicholas; he knew not what to say.

‘No,’ rejoined the other, ‘no; none for me. Do you remember the boy that
died here?’

‘I was not here, you know,’ said Nicholas gently; ‘but what of him?’

‘Why,’ replied the youth, drawing closer to his questioner’s side, ‘I
was with him at night, and when it was all silent he cried no more for
friends he wished to come and sit with him, but began to see faces round
his bed that came from home; he said they smiled, and talked to him; and
he died at last lifting his head to kiss them. Do you hear?’

‘Yes, yes,’ rejoined Nicholas.

‘What faces will smile on me when I die!’ cried his companion,
shivering. ‘Who will talk to me in those long nights! They cannot come
from home; they would frighten me, if they did, for I don’t know what it
is, and shouldn’t know them. Pain and fear, pain and fear for me, alive
or dead. No hope, no hope!’

The bell rang to bed: and the boy, subsiding at the sound into his usual
listless state, crept away as if anxious to avoid notice. It was with a
heavy heart that Nicholas soon afterwards--no, not retired; there was no
retirement there--followed--to his dirty and crowded dormitory.



CHAPTER 9

Of Miss Squeers, Mrs. Squeers, Master Squeers, and Mr. Squeers; and of
various Matters and Persons connected no less with the Squeerses than
Nicholas Nickleby


When Mr. Squeers left the schoolroom for the night, he betook himself, as
has been before remarked, to his own fireside, which was situated--not
in the room in which Nicholas had supped on the night of his arrival,
but in a smaller apartment in the rear of the premises, where his lady
wife, his amiable son, and accomplished daughter, were in the full
enjoyment of each other’s society; Mrs. Squeers being engaged in the
matronly pursuit of stocking-darning; and the young lady and gentleman
being occupied in the adjustment of some youthful differences, by means
of a pugilistic contest across the table, which, on the approach of
their honoured parent, subsided into a noiseless exchange of kicks
beneath it.

And, in this place, it may be as well to apprise the reader, that Miss
Fanny Squeers was in her three-and-twentieth year. If there be any one
grace or loveliness inseparable from that particular period of life,
Miss Squeers may be presumed to have been possessed of it, as there is
no reason to suppose that she was a solitary exception to an universal
rule. She was not tall like her mother, but short like her father; from
the former she inherited a voice of harsh quality; from the latter a
remarkable expression of the right eye, something akin to having none at
all.

Miss Squeers had been spending a few days with a neighbouring friend,
and had only just returned to the parental roof. To this circumstance
may be referred, her having heard nothing of Nicholas, until Mr. Squeers
himself now made him the subject of conversation.

‘Well, my dear,’ said Squeers, drawing up his chair, ‘what do you think
of him by this time?’

‘Think of who?’ inquired Mrs. Squeers; who (as she often remarked) was no
grammarian, thank Heaven.

‘Of the young man--the new teacher--who else could I mean?’

‘Oh! that Knuckleboy,’ said Mrs. Squeers impatiently. ‘I hate him.’

‘What do you hate him for, my dear?’ asked Squeers.

‘What’s that to you?’ retorted Mrs. Squeers. ‘If I hate him, that’s
enough, ain’t it?’

‘Quite enough for him, my dear, and a great deal too much I dare say,
if he knew it,’ replied Squeers in a pacific tone. ‘I only ask from
curiosity, my dear.’

‘Well, then, if you want to know,’ rejoined Mrs. Squeers, ‘I’ll tell you.
Because he’s a proud, haughty, consequential, turned-up-nosed peacock.’

Mrs. Squeers, when excited, was accustomed to use strong language, and,
moreover, to make use of a plurality of epithets, some of which were of
a figurative kind, as the word peacock, and furthermore the allusion
to Nicholas’s nose, which was not intended to be taken in its literal
sense, but rather to bear a latitude of construction according to the
fancy of the hearers.

Neither were they meant to bear reference to each other, so much as to
the object on whom they were bestowed, as will be seen in the present
case: a peacock with a turned-up nose being a novelty in ornithology,
and a thing not commonly seen.

‘Hem!’ said Squeers, as if in mild deprecation of this outbreak. ‘He is
cheap, my dear; the young man is very cheap.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ retorted Mrs. Squeers.

‘Five pound a year,’ said Squeers.

‘What of that; it’s dear if you don’t want him, isn’t it?’ replied his
wife.

‘But we DO want him,’ urged Squeers.

‘I don’t see that you want him any more than the dead,’ said
Mrs. Squeers. ‘Don’t tell me. You can put on the cards and in the
advertisements, “Education by Mr. Wackford Squeers and able assistants,”
 without having any assistants, can’t you? Isn’t it done every day by all
the masters about? I’ve no patience with you.’

‘Haven’t you!’ said Squeers, sternly. ‘Now I’ll tell you what, Mrs
Squeers. In this matter of having a teacher, I’ll take my own way, if
you please. A slave driver in the West Indies is allowed a man under
him, to see that his blacks don’t run away, or get up a rebellion; and
I’ll have a man under me to do the same with OUR blacks, till such time
as little Wackford is able to take charge of the school.’

‘Am I to take care of the school when I grow up a man, father?’ said
Wackford junior, suspending, in the excess of his delight, a vicious
kick which he was administering to his sister.

‘You are, my son,’ replied Mr. Squeers, in a sentimental voice.

‘Oh my eye, won’t I give it to the boys!’ exclaimed the interesting
child, grasping his father’s cane. ‘Oh, father, won’t I make ‘em squeak
again!’

It was a proud moment in Mr. Squeers’s life, when he witnessed that burst
of enthusiasm in his young child’s mind, and saw in it a foreshadowing
of his future eminence. He pressed a penny into his hand, and gave
vent to his feelings (as did his exemplary wife also), in a shout of
approving laughter. The infantine appeal to their common sympathies,
at once restored cheerfulness to the conversation, and harmony to the
company.

‘He’s a nasty stuck-up monkey, that’s what I consider him,’ said Mrs
Squeers, reverting to Nicholas.

‘Supposing he is,’ said Squeers, ‘he is as well stuck up in our
schoolroom as anywhere else, isn’t he?--especially as he don’t like it.’

‘Well,’ observed Mrs. Squeers, ‘there’s something in that. I hope it’ll
bring his pride down, and it shall be no fault of mine if it don’t.’

Now, a proud usher in a Yorkshire school was such a very extraordinary
and unaccountable thing to hear of,--any usher at all being a novelty;
but a proud one, a being of whose existence the wildest imagination
could never have dreamed--that Miss Squeers, who seldom troubled
herself with scholastic matters, inquired with much curiosity who this
Knuckleboy was, that gave himself such airs.

‘Nickleby,’ said Squeers, spelling the name according to some eccentric
system which prevailed in his own mind; ‘your mother always calls things
and people by their wrong names.’

‘No matter for that,’ said Mrs. Squeers; ‘I see them with right eyes,
and that’s quite enough for me. I watched him when you were laying on
to little Bolder this afternoon. He looked as black as thunder, all the
while, and, one time, started up as if he had more than got it in his
mind to make a rush at you. I saw him, though he thought I didn’t.’

‘Never mind that, father,’ said Miss Squeers, as the head of the family
was about to reply. ‘Who is the man?’

‘Why, your father has got some nonsense in his head that he’s the son of
a poor gentleman that died the other day,’ said Mrs. Squeers.

‘The son of a gentleman!’

‘Yes; but I don’t believe a word of it. If he’s a gentleman’s son at
all, he’s a fondling, that’s my opinion.’

‘Mrs. Squeers intended to say ‘foundling,’ but, as she frequently
remarked when she made any such mistake, it would be all the same a
hundred years hence; with which axiom of philosophy, indeed, she was in
the constant habit of consoling the boys when they laboured under more
than ordinary ill-usage.

‘He’s nothing of the kind,’ said Squeers, in answer to the above remark,
‘for his father was married to his mother years before he was born, and
she is alive now. If he was, it would be no business of ours, for we
make a very good friend by having him here; and if he likes to learn the
boys anything besides minding them, I have no objection I am sure.’

‘I say again, I hate him worse than poison,’ said Mrs. Squeers
vehemently.

‘If you dislike him, my dear,’ returned Squeers, ‘I don’t know anybody
who can show dislike better than you, and of course there’s no occasion,
with him, to take the trouble to hide it.’

‘I don’t intend to, I assure you,’ interposed Mrs. S.

‘That’s right,’ said Squeers; ‘and if he has a touch of pride about him,
as I think he has, I don’t believe there’s woman in all England that can
bring anybody’s spirit down, as quick as you can, my love.’

Mrs. Squeers chuckled vastly on the receipt of these flattering
compliments, and said, she hoped she had tamed a high spirit or two in
her day. It is but due to her character to say, that in conjunction with
her estimable husband, she had broken many and many a one.

Miss Fanny Squeers carefully treasured up this, and much more
conversation on the same subject, until she retired for the night,
when she questioned the hungry servant, minutely, regarding the outward
appearance and demeanour of Nicholas; to which queries the girl returned
such enthusiastic replies, coupled with so many laudatory remarks
touching his beautiful dark eyes, and his sweet smile, and his straight
legs--upon which last-named articles she laid particular stress; the
general run of legs at Dotheboys Hall being crooked--that Miss Squeers
was not long in arriving at the conclusion that the new usher must be
a very remarkable person, or, as she herself significantly phrased it,
‘something quite out of the common.’ And so Miss Squeers made up her
mind that she would take a personal observation of Nicholas the very
next day.

In pursuance of this design, the young lady watched the opportunity of
her mother being engaged, and her father absent, and went accidentally
into the schoolroom to get a pen mended: where, seeing nobody but
Nicholas presiding over the boys, she blushed very deeply, and exhibited
great confusion.

‘I beg your pardon,’ faltered Miss Squeers; ‘I thought my father was--or
might be--dear me, how very awkward!’

‘Mr. Squeers is out,’ said Nicholas, by no means overcome by the
apparition, unexpected though it was.

‘Do you know will he be long, sir?’ asked Miss Squeers, with bashful
hesitation.

‘He said about an hour,’ replied Nicholas--politely of course, but
without any indication of being stricken to the heart by Miss Squeers’s
charms.

‘I never knew anything happen so cross,’ exclaimed the young lady.
‘Thank you! I am very sorry I intruded, I am sure. If I hadn’t thought
my father was here, I wouldn’t upon any account have--it is very
provoking--must look so very strange,’ murmured Miss Squeers, blushing
once more, and glancing, from the pen in her hand, to Nicholas at his
desk, and back again.

‘If that is all you want,’ said Nicholas, pointing to the pen, and
smiling, in spite of himself, at the affected embarrassment of the
schoolmaster’s daughter, ‘perhaps I can supply his place.’

Miss Squeers glanced at the door, as if dubious of the propriety of
advancing any nearer to an utter stranger; then round the schoolroom,
as though in some measure reassured by the presence of forty boys; and
finally sidled up to Nicholas and delivered the pen into his hand, with
a most winning mixture of reserve and condescension.

‘Shall it be a hard or a soft nib?’ inquired Nicholas, smiling to
prevent himself from laughing outright.

‘He HAS a beautiful smile,’ thought Miss Squeers.

‘Which did you say?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Dear me, I was thinking of something else for the moment, I declare,’
replied Miss Squeers. ‘Oh! as soft as possible, if you please.’ With
which words, Miss Squeers sighed. It might be, to give Nicholas to
understand that her heart was soft, and that the pen was wanted to
match.

Upon these instructions Nicholas made the pen; when he gave it to Miss
Squeers, Miss Squeers dropped it; and when he stooped to pick it up,
Miss Squeers stooped also, and they knocked their heads together;
whereat five-and-twenty little boys laughed aloud: being positively for
the first and only time that half-year.

‘Very awkward of me,’ said Nicholas, opening the door for the young
lady’s retreat.

‘Not at all, sir,’ replied Miss Squeers; ‘it was my fault. It was all my
foolish--a--a--good-morning!’

‘Goodbye,’ said Nicholas. ‘The next I make for you, I hope will be made
less clumsily. Take care! You are biting the nib off now.’

‘Really,’ said Miss Squeers; ‘so embarrassing that I scarcely know what
I--very sorry to give you so much trouble.’

‘Not the least trouble in the world,’ replied Nicholas, closing the
schoolroom door.

‘I never saw such legs in the whole course of my life!’ said Miss
Squeers, as she walked away.

In fact, Miss Squeers was in love with Nicholas Nickleby.

To account for the rapidity with which this young lady had conceived a
passion for Nicholas, it may be necessary to state, that the friend
from whom she had so recently returned, was a miller’s daughter of
only eighteen, who had contracted herself unto the son of a small
corn-factor, resident in the nearest market town. Miss Squeers and the
miller’s daughter, being fast friends, had covenanted together some two
years before, according to a custom prevalent among young ladies, that
whoever was first engaged to be married, should straightway confide the
mighty secret to the bosom of the other, before communicating it to
any living soul, and bespeak her as bridesmaid without loss of time; in
fulfilment of which pledge the miller’s daughter, when her engagement
was formed, came out express, at eleven o’clock at night as the
corn-factor’s son made an offer of his hand and heart at twenty-five
minutes past ten by the Dutch clock in the kitchen, and rushed into Miss
Squeers’s bedroom with the gratifying intelligence. Now, Miss Squeers
being five years older, and out of her teens (which is also a great
matter), had, since, been more than commonly anxious to return the
compliment, and possess her friend with a similar secret; but, either
in consequence of finding it hard to please herself, or harder still to
please anybody else, had never had an opportunity so to do, inasmuch as
she had no such secret to disclose. The little interview with Nicholas
had no sooner passed, as above described, however, than Miss Squeers,
putting on her bonnet, made her way, with great precipitation, to
her friend’s house, and, upon a solemn renewal of divers old vows of
secrecy, revealed how that she was--not exactly engaged, but going to
be--to a gentleman’s son--(none of your corn-factors, but a gentleman’s
son of high descent)--who had come down as teacher to Dotheboys Hall,
under most mysterious and remarkable circumstances--indeed, as Miss
Squeers more than once hinted she had good reason to believe, induced,
by the fame of her many charms, to seek her out, and woo and win her.

‘Isn’t it an extraordinary thing?’ said Miss Squeers, emphasising the
adjective strongly.

‘Most extraordinary,’ replied the friend. ‘But what has he said to you?’

‘Don’t ask me what he said, my dear,’ rejoined Miss Squeers. ‘If you had
only seen his looks and smiles! I never was so overcome in all my life.’

‘Did he look in this way?’ inquired the miller’s daughter,
counterfeiting, as nearly as she could, a favourite leer of the
corn-factor.

‘Very like that--only more genteel,’ replied Miss Squeers.

‘Ah!’ said the friend, ‘then he means something, depend on it.’

Miss Squeers, having slight misgivings on the subject, was by no means
ill pleased to be confirmed by a competent authority; and discovering,
on further conversation and comparison of notes, a great many points
of resemblance between the behaviour of Nicholas, and that of the
corn-factor, grew so exceedingly confidential, that she intrusted her
friend with a vast number of things Nicholas had NOT said, which were
all so very complimentary as to be quite conclusive. Then, she dilated
on the fearful hardship of having a father and mother strenuously
opposed to her intended husband; on which unhappy circumstance she dwelt
at great length; for the friend’s father and mother were quite agreeable
to her being married, and the whole courtship was in consequence as flat
and common-place an affair as it was possible to imagine.

‘How I should like to see him!’ exclaimed the friend.

‘So you shall, ‘Tilda,’ replied Miss Squeers. ‘I should consider myself
one of the most ungrateful creatures alive, if I denied you. I think
mother’s going away for two days to fetch some boys; and when she does,
I’ll ask you and John up to tea, and have him to meet you.’

This was a charming idea, and having fully discussed it, the friends
parted.

It so fell out, that Mrs. Squeers’s journey, to some distance, to fetch
three new boys, and dun the relations of two old ones for the balance
of a small account, was fixed that very afternoon, for the next day but
one; and on the next day but one, Mrs. Squeers got up outside the coach,
as it stopped to change at Greta Bridge, taking with her a small bundle
containing something in a bottle, and some sandwiches, and carrying
besides a large white top-coat to wear in the night-time; with which
baggage she went her way.

Whenever such opportunities as these occurred, it was Squeers’s custom
to drive over to the market town, every evening, on pretence of urgent
business, and stop till ten or eleven o’clock at a tavern he much
affected. As the party was not in his way, therefore, but rather
afforded a means of compromise with Miss Squeers, he readily yielded his
full assent thereunto, and willingly communicated to Nicholas that
he was expected to take his tea in the parlour that evening, at five
o’clock.

To be sure Miss Squeers was in a desperate flutter as the time
approached, and to be sure she was dressed out to the best advantage:
with her hair--it had more than a tinge of red, and she wore it in a
crop--curled in five distinct rows, up to the very top of her head, and
arranged dexterously over the doubtful eye; to say nothing of the
blue sash which floated down her back, or the worked apron or the long
gloves, or the green gauze scarf worn over one shoulder and under the
other; or any of the numerous devices which were to be as so many arrows
to the heart of Nicholas. She had scarcely completed these arrangements
to her entire satisfaction, when the friend arrived with a whity-brown
parcel--flat and three-cornered--containing sundry small adornments
which were to be put on upstairs, and which the friend put on, talking
incessantly. When Miss Squeers had ‘done’ the friend’s hair, the friend
‘did’ Miss Squeers’s hair, throwing in some striking improvements in the
way of ringlets down the neck; and then, when they were both touched up
to their entire satisfaction, they went downstairs in full state with
the long gloves on, all ready for company.

‘Where’s John, ‘Tilda?’ said Miss Squeers.

‘Only gone home to clean himself,’ replied the friend. ‘He will be here
by the time the tea’s drawn.’

‘I do so palpitate,’ observed Miss Squeers.

‘Ah! I know what it is,’ replied the friend.

‘I have not been used to it, you know, ‘Tilda,’ said Miss Squeers,
applying her hand to the left side of her sash.

‘You’ll soon get the better of it, dear,’ rejoined the friend. While
they were talking thus, the hungry servant brought in the tea-things,
and, soon afterwards, somebody tapped at the room door.

‘There he is!’ cried Miss Squeers. ‘Oh ‘Tilda!’

‘Hush!’ said ‘Tilda. ‘Hem! Say, come in.’

‘Come in,’ cried Miss Squeers faintly. And in walked Nicholas.

‘Good-evening,’ said that young gentleman, all unconscious of his
conquest. ‘I understood from Mr. Squeers that--’

‘Oh yes; it’s all right,’ interposed Miss Squeers. ‘Father don’t tea
with us, but you won’t mind that, I dare say.’ (This was said archly.)

Nicholas opened his eyes at this, but he turned the matter off very
coolly--not caring, particularly, about anything just then--and went
through the ceremony of introduction to the miller’s daughter with so
much grace, that that young lady was lost in admiration.

‘We are only waiting for one more gentleman,’ said Miss Squeers, taking
off the teapot lid, and looking in, to see how the tea was getting on.

It was matter of equal moment to Nicholas whether they were waiting for
one gentleman or twenty, so he received the intelligence with perfect
unconcern; and, being out of spirits, and not seeing any especial reason
why he should make himself agreeable, looked out of the window and
sighed involuntarily.

As luck would have it, Miss Squeers’s friend was of a playful turn, and
hearing Nicholas sigh, she took it into her head to rally the lovers on
their lowness of spirits.

‘But if it’s caused by my being here,’ said the young lady, ‘don’t mind
me a bit, for I’m quite as bad. You may go on just as you would if you
were alone.’

‘’Tilda,’ said Miss Squeers, colouring up to the top row of curls,
‘I am ashamed of you;’ and here the two friends burst into a variety
of giggles, and glanced from time to time, over the tops of
their pocket-handkerchiefs, at Nicholas, who from a state of
unmixed astonishment, gradually fell into one of irrepressible
laughter--occasioned, partly by the bare notion of his being in love
with Miss Squeers, and partly by the preposterous appearance and
behaviour of the two girls. These two causes of merriment, taken
together, struck him as being so keenly ridiculous, that, despite his
miserable condition, he laughed till he was thoroughly exhausted.

‘Well,’ thought Nicholas, ‘as I am here, and seem expected, for some
reason or other, to be amiable, it’s of no use looking like a goose. I
may as well accommodate myself to the company.’

We blush to tell it; but his youthful spirits and vivacity getting,
for the time, the better of his sad thoughts, he no sooner formed
this resolution than he saluted Miss Squeers and the friend with great
gallantry, and drawing a chair to the tea-table, began to make himself
more at home than in all probability an usher has ever done in his
employer’s house since ushers were first invented.

The ladies were in the full delight of this altered behaviour on the
part of Mr. Nickleby, when the expected swain arrived, with his hair very
damp from recent washing, and a clean shirt, whereof the collar might
have belonged to some giant ancestor, forming, together with a white
waistcoat of similar dimensions, the chief ornament of his person.

‘Well, John,’ said Miss Matilda Price (which, by-the-bye, was the name
of the miller’s daughter).

‘Weel,’ said John with a grin that even the collar could not conceal.

‘I beg your pardon,’ interposed Miss Squeers, hastening to do the
honours. ‘Mr. Nickleby--Mr. John Browdie.’

‘Servant, sir,’ said John, who was something over six feet high, with a
face and body rather above the due proportion than below it.

‘Yours to command, sir,’ replied Nicholas, making fearful ravages on the
bread and butter.

Mr. Browdie was not a gentleman of great conversational powers, so
he grinned twice more, and having now bestowed his customary mark
of recognition on every person in company, grinned at nothing in
particular, and helped himself to food.

‘Old wooman awa’, bean’t she?’ said Mr. Browdie, with his mouth full.

Miss Squeers nodded assent.

Mr. Browdie gave a grin of special width, as if he thought that really
was something to laugh at, and went to work at the bread and butter with
increased vigour. It was quite a sight to behold how he and Nicholas
emptied the plate between them.

‘Ye wean’t get bread and butther ev’ry neight, I expect, mun,’ said Mr
Browdie, after he had sat staring at Nicholas a long time over the empty
plate.

Nicholas bit his lip, and coloured, but affected not to hear the remark.

‘Ecod,’ said Mr. Browdie, laughing boisterously, ‘they dean’t put too
much intiv’em. Ye’ll be nowt but skeen and boans if you stop here long
eneaf. Ho! ho! ho!’

‘You are facetious, sir,’ said Nicholas, scornfully.

‘Na; I dean’t know,’ replied Mr. Browdie, ‘but t’oother teacher, ‘cod
he wur a learn ‘un, he wur.’ The recollection of the last teacher’s
leanness seemed to afford Mr. Browdie the most exquisite delight, for he
laughed until he found it necessary to apply his coat-cuffs to his eyes.

‘I don’t know whether your perceptions are quite keen enough, Mr
Browdie, to enable you to understand that your remarks are offensive,’
said Nicholas in a towering passion, ‘but if they are, have the goodness
to--’

‘If you say another word, John,’ shrieked Miss Price, stopping her
admirer’s mouth as he was about to interrupt, ‘only half a word, I’ll
never forgive you, or speak to you again.’

‘Weel, my lass, I dean’t care aboot ‘un,’ said the corn-factor,
bestowing a hearty kiss on Miss Matilda; ‘let ‘un gang on, let ‘un gang
on.’

It now became Miss Squeers’s turn to intercede with Nicholas, which she
did with many symptoms of alarm and horror; the effect of the double
intercession was, that he and John Browdie shook hands across the table
with much gravity; and such was the imposing nature of the ceremonial,
that Miss Squeers was overcome and shed tears.

‘What’s the matter, Fanny?’ said Miss Price.

‘Nothing, ‘Tilda,’ replied Miss Squeers, sobbing.

‘There never was any danger,’ said Miss Price, ‘was there, Mr. Nickleby?’

‘None at all,’ replied Nicholas. ‘Absurd.’

‘That’s right,’ whispered Miss Price, ‘say something kind to her,
and she’ll soon come round. Here! Shall John and I go into the little
kitchen, and come back presently?’

‘Not on any account,’ rejoined Nicholas, quite alarmed at the
proposition. ‘What on earth should you do that for?’

‘Well,’ said Miss Price, beckoning him aside, and speaking with some
degree of contempt--‘you ARE a one to keep company.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Nicholas; ‘I am not a one to keep company at
all--here at all events. I can’t make this out.’

‘No, nor I neither,’ rejoined Miss Price; ‘but men are always fickle,
and always were, and always will be; that I can make out, very easily.’

‘Fickle!’ cried Nicholas; ‘what do you suppose? You don’t mean to say
that you think--’

‘Oh no, I think nothing at all,’ retorted Miss Price, pettishly.
‘Look at her, dressed so beautiful and looking so well--really ALMOST
handsome. I am ashamed at you.’

‘My dear girl, what have I got to do with her dressing beautifully or
looking well?’ inquired Nicholas.

‘Come, don’t call me a dear girl,’ said Miss Price--smiling a little
though, for she was pretty, and a coquette too in her small way, and
Nicholas was good-looking, and she supposed him the property of somebody
else, which were all reasons why she should be gratified to think she
had made an impression on him,--‘or Fanny will be saying it’s my fault.
Come; we’re going to have a game at cards.’ Pronouncing these last words
aloud, she tripped away and rejoined the big Yorkshireman.

This was wholly unintelligible to Nicholas, who had no other distinct
impression on his mind at the moment, than that Miss Squeers was an
ordinary-looking girl, and her friend Miss Price a pretty one; but he
had not time to enlighten himself by reflection, for the hearth being
by this time swept up, and the candle snuffed, they sat down to play
speculation.

‘There are only four of us, ‘Tilda,’ said Miss Squeers, looking slyly at
Nicholas; ‘so we had better go partners, two against two.’

‘What do you say, Mr. Nickleby?’ inquired Miss Price.

‘With all the pleasure in life,’ replied Nicholas. And so saying, quite
unconscious of his heinous offence, he amalgamated into one common heap
those portions of a Dotheboys Hall card of terms, which represented his
own counters, and those allotted to Miss Price, respectively.

‘Mr. Browdie,’ said Miss Squeers hysterically, ‘shall we make a bank
against them?’

The Yorkshireman assented--apparently quite overwhelmed by the new
usher’s impudence--and Miss Squeers darted a spiteful look at her
friend, and giggled convulsively.

The deal fell to Nicholas, and the hand prospered.

‘We intend to win everything,’ said he.

‘’Tilda HAS won something she didn’t expect, I think, haven’t you,
dear?’ said Miss Squeers, maliciously.

‘Only a dozen and eight, love,’ replied Miss Price, affecting to take
the question in a literal sense.

‘How dull you are tonight!’ sneered Miss Squeers.

‘No, indeed,’ replied Miss Price, ‘I am in excellent spirits. I was
thinking YOU seemed out of sorts.’

‘Me!’ cried Miss Squeers, biting her lips, and trembling with very
jealousy. ‘Oh no!’

‘That’s well,’ remarked Miss Price. ‘Your hair’s coming out of curl,
dear.’

‘Never mind me,’ tittered Miss Squeers; ‘you had better attend to your
partner.’

‘Thank you for reminding her,’ said Nicholas. ‘So she had.’

The Yorkshireman flattened his nose, once or twice, with his clenched
fist, as if to keep his hand in, till he had an opportunity of
exercising it upon the features of some other gentleman; and Miss
Squeers tossed her head with such indignation, that the gust of wind
raised by the multitudinous curls in motion, nearly blew the candle out.

‘I never had such luck, really,’ exclaimed coquettish Miss Price, after
another hand or two. ‘It’s all along of you, Mr. Nickleby, I think. I
should like to have you for a partner always.’

‘I wish you had.’

‘You’ll have a bad wife, though, if you always win at cards,’ said Miss
Price.

‘Not if your wish is gratified,’ replied Nicholas. ‘I am sure I shall
have a good one in that case.’

To see how Miss Squeers tossed her head, and the corn-factor flattened
his nose, while this conversation was carrying on! It would have been
worth a small annuity to have beheld that; let alone Miss Price’s
evident joy at making them jealous, and Nicholas Nickleby’s happy
unconsciousness of making anybody uncomfortable.

‘We have all the talking to ourselves, it seems,’ said Nicholas, looking
good-humouredly round the table as he took up the cards for a fresh
deal.

‘You do it so well,’ tittered Miss Squeers, ‘that it would be a pity to
interrupt, wouldn’t it, Mr. Browdie? He! he! he!’

‘Nay,’ said Nicholas, ‘we do it in default of having anybody else to
talk to.’

‘We’ll talk to you, you know, if you’ll say anything,’ said Miss Price.

‘Thank you, ‘Tilda, dear,’ retorted Miss Squeers, majestically.

‘Or you can talk to each other, if you don’t choose to talk to us,’
said Miss Price, rallying her dear friend. ‘John, why don’t you say
something?’

‘Say summat?’ repeated the Yorkshireman.

‘Ay, and not sit there so silent and glum.’

‘Weel, then!’ said the Yorkshireman, striking the table heavily with his
fist, ‘what I say’s this--Dang my boans and boddy, if I stan’ this ony
longer. Do ye gang whoam wi’ me, and do yon loight an’ toight young
whipster look sharp out for a brokken head, next time he cums under my
hond.’

‘Mercy on us, what’s all this?’ cried Miss Price, in affected
astonishment.

‘Cum whoam, tell ‘e, cum whoam,’ replied the Yorkshireman, sternly. And
as he delivered the reply, Miss Squeers burst into a shower of tears;
arising in part from desperate vexation, and in part from an impotent
desire to lacerate somebody’s countenance with her fair finger-nails.

This state of things had been brought about by divers means and
workings. Miss Squeers had brought it about, by aspiring to the high
state and condition of being matrimonially engaged, without good grounds
for so doing; Miss Price had brought it about, by indulging in three
motives of action: first, a desire to punish her friend for laying
claim to a rivalship in dignity, having no good title: secondly, the
gratification of her own vanity, in receiving the compliments of a smart
young man: and thirdly, a wish to convince the corn-factor of the great
danger he ran, in deferring the celebration of their expected nuptials;
while Nicholas had brought it about, by half an hour’s gaiety and
thoughtlessness, and a very sincere desire to avoid the imputation of
inclining at all to Miss Squeers. So the means employed, and the end
produced, were alike the most natural in the world; for young ladies
will look forward to being married, and will jostle each other in the
race to the altar, and will avail themselves of all opportunities of
displaying their own attractions to the best advantage, down to the very
end of time, as they have done from its beginning.

‘Why, and here’s Fanny in tears now!’ exclaimed Miss Price, as if in
fresh amazement. ‘What can be the matter?’

‘Oh! you don’t know, miss, of course you don’t know. Pray don’t trouble
yourself to inquire,’ said Miss Squeers, producing that change of
countenance which children call making a face.

‘Well, I’m sure!’ exclaimed Miss Price.

‘And who cares whether you are sure or not, ma’am?’ retorted Miss
Squeers, making another face.

‘You are monstrous polite, ma’am,’ said Miss Price.

‘I shall not come to you to take lessons in the art, ma’am!’ retorted
Miss Squeers.

‘You needn’t take the trouble to make yourself plainer than you
are, ma’am, however,’ rejoined Miss Price, ‘because that’s quite
unnecessary.’

Miss Squeers, in reply, turned very red, and thanked God that she
hadn’t got the bold faces of some people. Miss Price, in rejoinder,
congratulated herself upon not being possessed of the envious feeling of
other people; whereupon Miss Squeers made some general remark touching
the danger of associating with low persons; in which Miss Price entirely
coincided: observing that it was very true indeed, and she had thought
so a long time.

‘’Tilda,’ exclaimed Miss Squeers with dignity, ‘I hate you.’

‘Ah! There’s no love lost between us, I assure you,’ said Miss Price,
tying her bonnet strings with a jerk. ‘You’ll cry your eyes out, when
I’m gone; you know you will.’

‘I scorn your words, Minx,’ said Miss Squeers.

‘You pay me a great compliment when you say so,’ answered the miller’s
daughter, curtseying very low. ‘Wish you a very good-night, ma’am, and
pleasant dreams attend your sleep!’

With this parting benediction, Miss Price swept from the room, followed
by the huge Yorkshireman, who exchanged with Nicholas, at parting, that
peculiarly expressive scowl with which the cut-and-thrust counts, in
melodramatic performances, inform each other they will meet again.

They were no sooner gone, than Miss Squeers fulfilled the prediction of
her quondam friend by giving vent to a most copious burst of tears,
and uttering various dismal lamentations and incoherent words. Nicholas
stood looking on for a few seconds, rather doubtful what to do, but
feeling uncertain whether the fit would end in his being embraced,
or scratched, and considering that either infliction would be equally
agreeable, he walked off very quietly while Miss Squeers was moaning in
her pocket-handkerchief.

‘This is one consequence,’ thought Nicholas, when he had groped his way
to the dark sleeping-room, ‘of my cursed readiness to adapt myself
to any society in which chance carries me. If I had sat mute and
motionless, as I might have done, this would not have happened.’

He listened for a few minutes, but all was quiet.

‘I was glad,’ he murmured, ‘to grasp at any relief from the sight of
this dreadful place, or the presence of its vile master. I have set
these people by the ears, and made two new enemies, where, Heaven knows,
I needed none. Well, it is a just punishment for having forgotten, even
for an hour, what is around me now!’

So saying, he felt his way among the throng of weary-hearted sleepers,
and crept into his poor bed.



CHAPTER 10

How Mr. Ralph Nickleby provided for his Niece and Sister-in-Law


On the second morning after the departure of Nicholas for Yorkshire,
Kate Nickleby sat in a very faded chair raised upon a very dusty throne
in Miss La Creevy’s room, giving that lady a sitting for the portrait
upon which she was engaged; and towards the full perfection of which,
Miss La Creevy had had the street-door case brought upstairs, in
order that she might be the better able to infuse into the counterfeit
countenance of Miss Nickleby, a bright salmon flesh-tint which she had
originally hit upon while executing the miniature of a young officer
therein contained, and which bright salmon flesh-tint was considered,
by Miss La Creevy’s chief friends and patrons, to be quite a novelty in
art: as indeed it was.

‘I think I have caught it now,’ said Miss La Creevy. ‘The very shade!
This will be the sweetest portrait I have ever done, certainly.’

‘It will be your genius that makes it so, then, I am sure,’ replied
Kate, smiling.

‘No, no, I won’t allow that, my dear,’ rejoined Miss La Creevy. ‘It’s
a very nice subject--a very nice subject, indeed--though, of course,
something depends upon the mode of treatment.’

‘And not a little,’ observed Kate.

‘Why, my dear, you are right there,’ said Miss La Creevy, ‘in the main
you are right there; though I don’t allow that it is of such very great
importance in the present case. Ah! The difficulties of Art, my dear,
are great.’

‘They must be, I have no doubt,’ said Kate, humouring her good-natured
little friend.

‘They are beyond anything you can form the faintest conception of,’
replied Miss La Creevy. ‘What with bringing out eyes with all one’s
power, and keeping down noses with all one’s force, and adding to heads,
and taking away teeth altogether, you have no idea of the trouble one
little miniature is.’

‘The remuneration can scarcely repay you,’ said Kate.

‘Why, it does not, and that’s the truth,’ answered Miss La Creevy; ‘and
then people are so dissatisfied and unreasonable, that, nine times out
of ten, there’s no pleasure in painting them. Sometimes they say, “Oh,
how very serious you have made me look, Miss La Creevy!” and at others,
“La, Miss La Creevy, how very smirking!” when the very essence of a
good portrait is, that it must be either serious or smirking, or it’s no
portrait at all.’

‘Indeed!’ said Kate, laughing.

‘Certainly, my dear; because the sitters are always either the one or
the other,’ replied Miss La Creevy. ‘Look at the Royal Academy! All
those beautiful shiny portraits of gentlemen in black velvet waistcoats,
with their fists doubled up on round tables, or marble slabs, are
serious, you know; and all the ladies who are playing with little
parasols, or little dogs, or little children--it’s the same rule in art,
only varying the objects--are smirking. In fact,’ said Miss La Creevy,
sinking her voice to a confidential whisper, ‘there are only two styles
of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk; and we always use the
serious for professional people (except actors sometimes), and the smirk
for private ladies and gentlemen who don’t care so much about looking
clever.’

Kate seemed highly amused by this information, and Miss La Creevy went
on painting and talking, with immovable complacency.

‘What a number of officers you seem to paint!’ said Kate, availing
herself of a pause in the discourse, and glancing round the room.

‘Number of what, child?’ inquired Miss La Creevy, looking up from her
work. ‘Character portraits, oh yes--they’re not real military men, you
know.’

‘No!’

‘Bless your heart, of course not; only clerks and that, who hire a
uniform coat to be painted in, and send it here in a carpet bag.
Some artists,’ said Miss La Creevy, ‘keep a red coat, and charge
seven-and-sixpence extra for hire and carmine; but I don’t do that
myself, for I don’t consider it legitimate.’

Drawing herself up, as though she plumed herself greatly upon not
resorting to these lures to catch sitters, Miss La Creevy applied
herself, more intently, to her task: only raising her head occasionally,
to look with unspeakable satisfaction at some touch she had just put
in: and now and then giving Miss Nickleby to understand what particular
feature she was at work upon, at the moment; ‘not,’ she expressly
observed, ‘that you should make it up for painting, my dear, but because
it’s our custom sometimes to tell sitters what part we are upon, in
order that if there’s any particular expression they want introduced,
they may throw it in, at the time, you know.’

‘And when,’ said Miss La Creevy, after a long silence, to wit, an
interval of full a minute and a half, ‘when do you expect to see your
uncle again?’

‘I scarcely know; I had expected to have seen him before now,’ replied
Kate. ‘Soon I hope, for this state of uncertainty is worse than
anything.’

‘I suppose he has money, hasn’t he?’ inquired Miss La Creevy.

‘He is very rich, I have heard,’ rejoined Kate. ‘I don’t know that he
is, but I believe so.’

‘Ah, you may depend upon it he is, or he wouldn’t be so surly,’
remarked Miss La Creevy, who was an odd little mixture of shrewdness and
simplicity. ‘When a man’s a bear, he is generally pretty independent.’

‘His manner is rough,’ said Kate.

‘Rough!’ cried Miss La Creevy, ‘a porcupine’s a featherbed to him! I
never met with such a cross-grained old savage.’

‘It is only his manner, I believe,’ observed Kate, timidly; ‘he was
disappointed in early life, I think I have heard, or has had his temper
soured by some calamity. I should be sorry to think ill of him until I
knew he deserved it.’

‘Well; that’s very right and proper,’ observed the miniature painter,
‘and Heaven forbid that I should be the cause of your doing so! But,
now, mightn’t he, without feeling it himself, make you and your mama
some nice little allowance that would keep you both comfortable until
you were well married, and be a little fortune to her afterwards? What
would a hundred a year for instance, be to him?’

‘I don’t know what it would be to him,’ said Kate, with energy, ‘but it
would be that to me I would rather die than take.’

‘Heyday!’ cried Miss La Creevy.

‘A dependence upon him,’ said Kate, ‘would embitter my whole life. I
should feel begging a far less degradation.’

‘Well!’ exclaimed Miss La Creevy. ‘This of a relation whom you will not
hear an indifferent person speak ill of, my dear, sounds oddly enough, I
confess.’

‘I dare say it does,’ replied Kate, speaking more gently, ‘indeed I am
sure it must. I--I--only mean that with the feelings and recollection of
better times upon me, I could not bear to live on anybody’s bounty--not
his particularly, but anybody’s.’

Miss La Creevy looked slyly at her companion, as if she doubted whether
Ralph himself were not the subject of dislike, but seeing that her young
friend was distressed, made no remark.

‘I only ask of him,’ continued Kate, whose tears fell while she spoke,
‘that he will move so little out of his way, in my behalf, as to
enable me by his recommendation--only by his recommendation--to earn,
literally, my bread and remain with my mother. Whether we shall ever
taste happiness again, depends upon the fortunes of my dear brother;
but if he will do this, and Nicholas only tells us that he is well and
cheerful, I shall be contented.’

As she ceased to speak, there was a rustling behind the screen
which stood between her and the door, and some person knocked at the
wainscot.’

‘Come in, whoever it is!’ cried Miss La Creevy.

The person complied, and, coming forward at once, gave to view the form
and features of no less an individual than Mr. Ralph Nickleby himself.

‘Your servant, ladies,’ said Ralph, looking sharply at them by turns.
‘You were talking so loud, that I was unable to make you hear.’

When the man of business had a more than commonly vicious snarl lurking
at his heart, he had a trick of almost concealing his eyes under their
thick and protruding brows, for an instant, and then displaying them in
their full keenness. As he did so now, and tried to keep down the smile
which parted his thin compressed lips, and puckered up the bad lines
about his mouth, they both felt certain that some part, if not the
whole, of their recent conversation, had been overheard.

‘I called in, on my way upstairs, more than half expecting to find you
here,’ said Ralph, addressing his niece, and looking contemptuously at
the portrait. ‘Is that my niece’s portrait, ma’am?’

‘Yes it is, Mr. Nickleby,’ said Miss La Creevy, with a very sprightly
air, ‘and between you and me and the post, sir, it will be a very nice
portrait too, though I say it who am the painter.’

‘Don’t trouble yourself to show it to me, ma’am,’ cried Ralph, moving
away, ‘I have no eye for likenesses. Is it nearly finished?’

‘Why, yes,’ replied Miss La Creevy, considering with the pencil end of
her brush in her mouth. ‘Two sittings more will--’

‘Have them at once, ma’am,’ said Ralph. ‘She’ll have no time to idle
over fooleries after tomorrow. Work, ma’am, work; we must all work. Have
you let your lodgings, ma’am?’

‘I have not put a bill up yet, sir.’

‘Put it up at once, ma’am; they won’t want the rooms after this week,
or if they do, can’t pay for them. Now, my dear, if you’re ready, we’ll
lose no more time.’

With an assumption of kindness which sat worse upon him even than his
usual manner, Mr. Ralph Nickleby motioned to the young lady to precede
him, and bowing gravely to Miss La Creevy, closed the door and followed
upstairs, where Mrs. Nickleby received him with many expressions of
regard. Stopping them somewhat abruptly, Ralph waved his hand with an
impatient gesture, and proceeded to the object of his visit.

‘I have found a situation for your daughter, ma’am,’ said Ralph.

‘Well,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Now, I will say that that is only just
what I have expected of you. “Depend upon it,” I said to Kate, only
yesterday morning at breakfast, “that after your uncle has provided, in
that most ready manner, for Nicholas, he will not leave us until he has
done at least the same for you.” These were my very words, as near as I
remember. Kate, my dear, why don’t you thank your--’

‘Let me proceed, ma’am, pray,’ said Ralph, interrupting his
sister-in-law in the full torrent of her discourse.

‘Kate, my love, let your uncle proceed,’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

‘I am most anxious that he should, mama,’ rejoined Kate.

‘Well, my dear, if you are anxious that he should, you had better allow
your uncle to say what he has to say, without interruption,’ observed
Mrs. Nickleby, with many small nods and frowns. ‘Your uncle’s time is
very valuable, my dear; and however desirous you may be--and naturally
desirous, as I am sure any affectionate relations who have seen so
little of your uncle as we have, must naturally be to protract the
pleasure of having him among us, still, we are bound not to be selfish,
but to take into consideration the important nature of his occupations
in the city.’

‘I am very much obliged to you, ma’am,’ said Ralph with a scarcely
perceptible sneer. ‘An absence of business habits in this family leads,
apparently, to a great waste of words before business--when it does come
under consideration--is arrived at, at all.’

‘I fear it is so indeed,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby with a sigh. ‘Your poor
brother--’

‘My poor brother, ma’am,’ interposed Ralph tartly, ‘had no idea what
business was--was unacquainted, I verily believe, with the very meaning
of the word.’

‘I fear he was,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, with her handkerchief to her eyes.
‘If it hadn’t been for me, I don’t know what would have become of him.’

What strange creatures we are! The slight bait so skilfully thrown out
by Ralph, on their first interview, was dangling on the hook yet. At
every small deprivation or discomfort which presented itself in the
course of the four-and-twenty hours to remind her of her straitened
and altered circumstances, peevish visions of her dower of one thousand
pounds had arisen before Mrs. Nickleby’s mind, until, at last, she had
come to persuade herself that of all her late husband’s creditors she
was the worst used and the most to be pitied. And yet, she had loved him
dearly for many years, and had no greater share of selfishness than is
the usual lot of mortals. Such is the irritability of sudden poverty. A
decent annuity would have restored her thoughts to their old train, at
once.

‘Repining is of no use, ma’am,’ said Ralph. ‘Of all fruitless errands,
sending a tear to look after a day that is gone is the most fruitless.’

‘So it is,’ sobbed Mrs. Nickleby. ‘So it is.’

‘As you feel so keenly, in your own purse and person, the consequences
of inattention to business, ma’am,’ said Ralph, ‘I am sure you will
impress upon your children the necessity of attaching themselves to it
early in life.’

‘Of course I must see that,’ rejoined Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Sad experience, you
know, brother-in-law.--Kate, my dear, put that down in the next letter
to Nicholas, or remind me to do it if I write.’

Ralph paused for a few moments, and seeing that he had now made pretty
sure of the mother, in case the daughter objected to his proposition,
went on to say:

‘The situation that I have made interest to procure, ma’am, is
with--with a milliner and dressmaker, in short.’

‘A milliner!’ cried Mrs. Nickleby.

‘A milliner and dressmaker, ma’am,’ replied Ralph. ‘Dressmakers in
London, as I need not remind you, ma’am, who are so well acquainted with
all matters in the ordinary routine of life, make large fortunes, keep
equipages, and become persons of great wealth and fortune.’

Now, the first idea called up in Mrs. Nickleby’s mind by the words
milliner and dressmaker were connected with certain wicker baskets lined
with black oilskin, which she remembered to have seen carried to and
fro in the streets; but, as Ralph proceeded, these disappeared, and
were replaced by visions of large houses at the West end, neat private
carriages, and a banker’s book; all of which images succeeded each other
with such rapidity, that he had no sooner finished speaking, than
she nodded her head and said ‘Very true,’ with great appearance of
satisfaction.

‘What your uncle says is very true, Kate, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby.
‘I recollect when your poor papa and I came to town after we were
married, that a young lady brought me home a chip cottage-bonnet, with
white and green trimming, and green persian lining, in her own carriage,
which drove up to the door full gallop;--at least, I am not quite
certain whether it was her own carriage or a hackney chariot, but I
remember very well that the horse dropped down dead as he was turning
round, and that your poor papa said he hadn’t had any corn for a
fortnight.’

This anecdote, so strikingly illustrative of the opulence of milliners,
was not received with any great demonstration of feeling, inasmuch as
Kate hung down her head while it was relating, and Ralph manifested very
intelligible symptoms of extreme impatience.

‘The lady’s name,’ said Ralph, hastily striking in, ‘is
Mantalini--Madame Mantalini. I know her. She lives near Cavendish
Square. If your daughter is disposed to try after the situation, I’ll
take her there directly.’

‘Have you nothing to say to your uncle, my love?’ inquired Mrs. Nickleby.

‘A great deal,’ replied Kate; ‘but not now. I would rather speak to him
when we are alone;--it will save his time if I thank him and say what I
wish to say to him, as we walk along.’

With these words, Kate hurried away, to hide the traces of emotion that
were stealing down her face, and to prepare herself for the walk, while
Mrs. Nickleby amused her brother-in-law by giving him, with many tears, a
detailed account of the dimensions of a rosewood cabinet piano they had
possessed in their days of affluence, together with a minute description
of eight drawing-room chairs, with turned legs and green chintz squabs
to match the curtains, which had cost two pounds fifteen shillings
apiece, and had gone at the sale for a mere nothing.

These reminiscences were at length cut short by Kate’s return in her
walking dress, when Ralph, who had been fretting and fuming during the
whole time of her absence, lost no time, and used very little ceremony,
in descending into the street.

‘Now,’ he said, taking her arm, ‘walk as fast as you can, and you’ll get
into the step that you’ll have to walk to business with, every morning.’
So saying, he led Kate off, at a good round pace, towards Cavendish
Square.

‘I am very much obliged to you, uncle,’ said the young lady, after they
had hurried on in silence for some time; ‘very.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Ralph. ‘I hope you’ll do your duty.’

‘I will try to please, uncle,’ replied Kate: ‘indeed I--’

‘Don’t begin to cry,’ growled Ralph; ‘I hate crying.’

‘It’s very foolish, I know, uncle,’ began poor Kate.

‘It is,’ replied Ralph, stopping her short, ‘and very affected besides.
Let me see no more of it.’

Perhaps this was not the best way to dry the tears of a young and
sensitive female, about to make her first entry on an entirely new scene
of life, among cold and uninterested strangers; but it had its effect
notwithstanding. Kate coloured deeply, breathed quickly for a few
moments, and then walked on with a firmer and more determined step.

It was a curious contrast to see how the timid country girl shrunk
through the crowd that hurried up and down the streets, giving way to
the press of people, and clinging closely to Ralph as though she feared
to lose him in the throng; and how the stern and hard-featured man of
business went doggedly on, elbowing the passengers aside, and now and
then exchanging a gruff salutation with some passing acquaintance, who
turned to look back upon his pretty charge, with looks expressive of
surprise, and seemed to wonder at the ill-assorted companionship. But,
it would have been a stranger contrast still, to have read the hearts
that were beating side by side; to have laid bare the gentle innocence
of the one, and the rugged villainy of the other; to have hung upon the
guileless thoughts of the affectionate girl, and been amazed that, among
all the wily plots and calculations of the old man, there should not be
one word or figure denoting thought of death or of the grave. But so it
was; and stranger still--though this is a thing of every day--the warm
young heart palpitated with a thousand anxieties and apprehensions,
while that of the old worldly man lay rusting in its cell, beating only
as a piece of cunning mechanism, and yielding no one throb of hope, or
fear, or love, or care, for any living thing.

‘Uncle,’ said Kate, when she judged they must be near their destination,
‘I must ask one question of you. I am to live at home?’

‘At home!’ replied Ralph; ‘where’s that?’

‘I mean with my mother--THE WIDOW,’ said Kate emphatically.

‘You will live, to all intents and purposes, here,’ rejoined Ralph; ‘for
here you will take your meals, and here you will be from morning till
night--occasionally perhaps till morning again.’

‘But at night, I mean,’ said Kate; ‘I cannot leave her, uncle. I must
have some place that I can call a home; it will be wherever she is, you
know, and may be a very humble one.’

‘May be!’ said Ralph, walking faster, in the impatience provoked by the
remark; ‘must be, you mean. May be a humble one! Is the girl mad?’

‘The word slipped from my lips, I did not mean it indeed,’ urged Kate.

‘I hope not,’ said Ralph.

‘But my question, uncle; you have not answered it.’

‘Why, I anticipated something of the kind,’ said Ralph; ‘and--though I
object very strongly, mind--have provided against it. I spoke of you as
an out-of-door worker; so you will go to this home that may be humble,
every night.’

There was comfort in this. Kate poured forth many thanks for her uncle’s
consideration, which Ralph received as if he had deserved them all, and
they arrived without any further conversation at the dressmaker’s door,
which displayed a very large plate, with Madame Mantalini’s name and
occupation, and was approached by a handsome flight of steps. There was
a shop to the house, but it was let off to an importer of otto of roses.
Madame Mantalini’s shows-rooms were on the first-floor: a fact which was
notified to the nobility and gentry by the casual exhibition, near the
handsomely curtained windows, of two or three elegant bonnets of the
newest fashion, and some costly garments in the most approved taste.

A liveried footman opened the door, and in reply to Ralph’s inquiry
whether Madame Mantalini was at home, ushered them, through a handsome
hall and up a spacious staircase, into the show saloon, which comprised
two spacious drawing-rooms, and exhibited an immense variety of superb
dresses and materials for dresses: some arranged on stands, others
laid carelessly on sofas, and others again, scattered over the carpet,
hanging on the cheval-glasses, or mingling, in some other way, with the
rich furniture of various descriptions, which was profusely displayed.

They waited here a much longer time than was agreeable to Mr. Ralph
Nickleby, who eyed the gaudy frippery about him with very little
concern, and was at length about to pull the bell, when a gentleman
suddenly popped his head into the room, and, seeing somebody there, as
suddenly popped it out again.

‘Here. Hollo!’ cried Ralph. ‘Who’s that?’

At the sound of Ralph’s voice, the head reappeared, and the mouth,
displaying a very long row of very white teeth, uttered in a mincing
tone the words, ‘Demmit. What, Nickleby! oh, demmit!’ Having uttered
which ejaculations, the gentleman advanced, and shook hands with Ralph,
with great warmth. He was dressed in a gorgeous morning gown, with
a waistcoat and Turkish trousers of the same pattern, a pink silk
neckerchief, and bright green slippers, and had a very copious
watch-chain wound round his body. Moreover, he had whiskers and a
moustache, both dyed black and gracefully curled.

‘Demmit, you don’t mean to say you want me, do you, demmit?’ said this
gentleman, smiting Ralph on the shoulder.

‘Not yet,’ said Ralph, sarcastically.

‘Ha! ha! demmit,’ cried the gentleman; when, wheeling round to laugh
with greater elegance, he encountered Kate Nickleby, who was standing
near.

‘My niece,’ said Ralph.

‘I remember,’ said the gentleman, striking his nose with the knuckle
of his forefinger as a chastening for his forgetfulness. ‘Demmit, I
remember what you come for. Step this way, Nickleby; my dear, will you
follow me? Ha! ha! They all follow me, Nickleby; always did, demmit,
always.’

Giving loose to the playfulness of his imagination, after this fashion,
the gentleman led the way to a private sitting-room on the second floor,
scarcely less elegantly furnished than the apartment below, where the
presence of a silver coffee-pot, an egg-shell, and sloppy china for one,
seemed to show that he had just breakfasted.

‘Sit down, my dear,’ said the gentleman: first staring Miss Nickleby out
of countenance, and then grinning in delight at the achievement.
‘This cursed high room takes one’s breath away. These infernal sky
parlours--I’m afraid I must move, Nickleby.’

‘I would, by all means,’ replied Ralph, looking bitterly round.

‘What a demd rum fellow you are, Nickleby,’ said the gentleman, ‘the
demdest, longest-headed, queerest-tempered old coiner of gold and silver
ever was--demmit.’

Having complimented Ralph to this effect, the gentleman rang the bell,
and stared at Miss Nickleby until it was answered, when he left off to
bid the man desire his mistress to come directly; after which, he began
again, and left off no more until Madame Mantalini appeared.

The dressmaker was a buxom person, handsomely dressed and rather
good-looking, but much older than the gentleman in the Turkish trousers,
whom she had wedded some six months before. His name was originally
Muntle; but it had been converted, by an easy transition, into
Mantalini: the lady rightly considering that an English appellation
would be of serious injury to the business. He had married on his
whiskers; upon which property he had previously subsisted, in a genteel
manner, for some years; and which he had recently improved, after
patient cultivation by the addition of a moustache, which promised
to secure him an easy independence: his share in the labours of
the business being at present confined to spending the money, and
occasionally, when that ran short, driving to Mr. Ralph Nickleby to
procure discount--at a percentage--for the customers’ bills.

‘My life,’ said Mr. Mantalini, ‘what a demd devil of a time you have
been!’

‘I didn’t even know Mr. Nickleby was here, my love,’ said Madame
Mantalini.

‘Then what a doubly demd infernal rascal that footman must be, my soul,’
remonstrated Mr. Mantalini.

‘My dear,’ said Madame, ‘that is entirely your fault.’

‘My fault, my heart’s joy?’

‘Certainly,’ returned the lady; ‘what can you expect, dearest, if you
will not correct the man?’

‘Correct the man, my soul’s delight!’

‘Yes; I am sure he wants speaking to, badly enough,’ said Madame,
pouting.

‘Then do not vex itself,’ said Mr. Mantalini; ‘he shall be horse-whipped
till he cries out demnebly.’ With this promise Mr. Mantalini kissed
Madame Mantalini, and, after that performance, Madame Mantalini pulled
Mr. Mantalini playfully by the ear: which done, they descended to
business.

‘Now, ma’am,’ said Ralph, who had looked on, at all this, with such
scorn as few men can express in looks, ‘this is my niece.’

‘Just so, Mr. Nickleby,’ replied Madame Mantalini, surveying Kate from
head to foot, and back again. ‘Can you speak French, child?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ replied Kate, not daring to look up; for she felt that the
eyes of the odious man in the dressing-gown were directed towards her.

‘Like a demd native?’ asked the husband.

Miss Nickleby offered no reply to this inquiry, but turned her back upon
the questioner, as if addressing herself to make answer to what his wife
might demand.

‘We keep twenty young women constantly employed in the establishment,’
said Madame.

‘Indeed, ma’am!’ replied Kate, timidly.

‘Yes; and some of ‘em demd handsome, too,’ said the master.

‘Mantalini!’ exclaimed his wife, in an awful voice.

‘My senses’ idol!’ said Mantalini.

‘Do you wish to break my heart?’

‘Not for twenty thousand hemispheres populated with--with--with little
ballet-dancers,’ replied Mantalini in a poetical strain.

‘Then you will, if you persevere in that mode of speaking,’ said his
wife. ‘What can Mr. Nickleby think when he hears you?’

‘Oh! Nothing, ma’am, nothing,’ replied Ralph. ‘I know his amiable
nature, and yours,--mere little remarks that give a zest to your daily
intercourse--lovers’ quarrels that add sweetness to those domestic joys
which promise to last so long--that’s all; that’s all.’

If an iron door could be supposed to quarrel with its hinges, and to
make a firm resolution to open with slow obstinacy, and grind them to
powder in the process, it would emit a pleasanter sound in so doing,
than did these words in the rough and bitter voice in which they were
uttered by Ralph. Even Mr. Mantalini felt their influence, and turning
affrighted round, exclaimed: ‘What a demd horrid croaking!’

‘You will pay no attention, if you please, to what Mr. Mantalini says,’
observed his wife, addressing Miss Nickleby.

‘I do not, ma’am,’ said Kate, with quiet contempt.

‘Mr. Mantalini knows nothing whatever about any of the young women,’
continued Madame, looking at her husband, and speaking to Kate. ‘If he
has seen any of them, he must have seen them in the street, going to, or
returning from, their work, and not here. He was never even in the room.
I do not allow it. What hours of work have you been accustomed to?’

‘I have never yet been accustomed to work at all, ma’am,’ replied Kate,
in a low voice.

‘For which reason she’ll work all the better now,’ said Ralph, putting
in a word, lest this confession should injure the negotiation.

‘I hope so,’ returned Madame Mantalini; ‘our hours are from nine to
nine, with extra work when we’re very full of business, for which I
allow payment as overtime.’

Kate bowed her head, to intimate that she heard, and was satisfied.

‘Your meals,’ continued Madame Mantalini, ‘that is, dinner and tea, you
will take here. I should think your wages would average from five to
seven shillings a week; but I can’t give you any certain information on
that point, until I see what you can do.’

Kate bowed her head again.

‘If you’re ready to come,’ said Madame Mantalini, ‘you had better begin
on Monday morning at nine exactly, and Miss Knag the forewoman shall
then have directions to try you with some easy work at first. Is there
anything more, Mr. Nickleby?’

‘Nothing more, ma’am,’ replied Ralph, rising.

‘Then I believe that’s all,’ said the lady. Having arrived at this
natural conclusion, she looked at the door, as if she wished to be
gone, but hesitated notwithstanding, as though unwilling to leave to Mr
Mantalini the sole honour of showing them downstairs. Ralph relieved
her from her perplexity by taking his departure without delay: Madame
Mantalini making many gracious inquiries why he never came to see them;
and Mr. Mantalini anathematising the stairs with great volubility as he
followed them down, in the hope of inducing Kate to look round,--a hope,
however, which was destined to remain ungratified.

‘There!’ said Ralph when they got into the street; ‘now you’re provided
for.’

Kate was about to thank him again, but he stopped her.

‘I had some idea,’ he said, ‘of providing for your mother in a pleasant
part of the country--(he had a presentation to some almshouses on the
borders of Cornwall, which had occurred to him more than once)--but as
you want to be together, I must do something else for her. She has a
little money?’

‘A very little,’ replied Kate.

‘A little will go a long way if it’s used sparingly,’ said Ralph. ‘She
must see how long she can make it last, living rent free. You leave your
lodgings on Saturday?’

‘You told us to do so, uncle.’

‘Yes; there is a house empty that belongs to me, which I can put you
into till it is let, and then, if nothing else turns up, perhaps I shall
have another. You must live there.’

‘Is it far from here, sir?’ inquired Kate.

‘Pretty well,’ said Ralph; ‘in another quarter of the town--at the East
end; but I’ll send my clerk down to you, at five o’clock on Saturday, to
take you there. Goodbye. You know your way? Straight on.’

Coldly shaking his niece’s hand, Ralph left her at the top of Regent
Street, and turned down a by-thoroughfare, intent on schemes of
money-getting. Kate walked sadly back to their lodgings in the Strand.



CHAPTER 11

Newman Noggs inducts Mrs. and Miss Nickleby into their New Dwelling in
the City


Miss Nickleby’s reflections, as she wended her way homewards, were of
that desponding nature which the occurrences of the morning had been
sufficiently calculated to awaken. Her uncle’s was not a manner likely
to dispel any doubts or apprehensions she might have formed, in the
outset, neither was the glimpse she had had of Madame Mantalini’s
establishment by any means encouraging. It was with many gloomy
forebodings and misgivings, therefore, that she looked forward, with a
heavy heart, to the opening of her new career.

If her mother’s consolations could have restored her to a pleasanter and
more enviable state of mind, there were abundance of them to produce the
effect. By the time Kate reached home, the good lady had called to mind
two authentic cases of milliners who had been possessed of considerable
property, though whether they had acquired it all in business, or had
had a capital to start with, or had been lucky and married to advantage,
she could not exactly remember. However, as she very logically remarked,
there must have been SOME young person in that way of business who had
made a fortune without having anything to begin with, and that being
taken for granted, why should not Kate do the same? Miss La Creevy, who
was a member of the little council, ventured to insinuate some doubts
relative to the probability of Miss Nickleby’s arriving at this happy
consummation in the compass of an ordinary lifetime; but the good lady
set that question entirely at rest, by informing them that she had a
presentiment on the subject--a species of second-sight with which she
had been in the habit of clenching every argument with the deceased
Mr. Nickleby, and, in nine cases and three-quarters out of every ten,
determining it the wrong way.

‘I am afraid it is an unhealthy occupation,’ said Miss La Creevy. ‘I
recollect getting three young milliners to sit to me, when I first began
to paint, and I remember that they were all very pale and sickly.’

‘Oh! that’s not a general rule by any means,’ observed Mrs. Nickleby;
‘for I remember, as well as if it was only yesterday, employing one that
I was particularly recommended to, to make me a scarlet cloak at the
time when scarlet cloaks were fashionable, and she had a very red
face--a very red face, indeed.’

‘Perhaps she drank,’ suggested Miss La Creevy.

‘I don’t know how that may have been,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby: ‘but I
know she had a very red face, so your argument goes for nothing.’

In this manner, and with like powerful reasoning, did the worthy matron
meet every little objection that presented itself to the new scheme of
the morning. Happy Mrs. Nickleby! A project had but to be new, and it
came home to her mind, brightly varnished and gilded as a glittering
toy.

This question disposed of, Kate communicated her uncle’s desire about
the empty house, to which Mrs. Nickleby assented with equal readiness,
characteristically remarking, that, on the fine evenings, it would be a
pleasant amusement for her to walk to the West end to fetch her daughter
home; and no less characteristically forgetting, that there were such
things as wet nights and bad weather to be encountered in almost every
week of the year.

‘I shall be sorry--truly sorry to leave you, my kind friend,’ said Kate,
on whom the good feeling of the poor miniature painter had made a deep
impression.

‘You shall not shake me off, for all that,’ replied Miss La Creevy, with
as much sprightliness as she could assume. ‘I shall see you very often,
and come and hear how you get on; and if, in all London, or all the wide
world besides, there is no other heart that takes an interest in your
welfare, there will be one little lonely woman that prays for it night
and day.’

With this, the poor soul, who had a heart big enough for Gog, the
guardian genius of London, and enough to spare for Magog to boot, after
making a great many extraordinary faces which would have secured her an
ample fortune, could she have transferred them to ivory or canvas, sat
down in a corner, and had what she termed ‘a real good cry.’

But no crying, or talking, or hoping, or fearing, could keep off the
dreaded Saturday afternoon, or Newman Noggs either; who, punctual to his
time, limped up to the door, and breathed a whiff of cordial gin through
the keyhole, exactly as such of the church clocks in the neighbourhood
as agreed among themselves about the time, struck five. Newman waited
for the last stroke, and then knocked.

‘From Mr. Ralph Nickleby,’ said Newman, announcing his errand, when he
got upstairs, with all possible brevity.

‘We shall be ready directly,’ said Kate. ‘We have not much to carry, but
I fear we must have a coach.’

‘I’ll get one,’ replied Newman.

‘Indeed you shall not trouble yourself,’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

‘I will,’ said Newman.

‘I can’t suffer you to think of such a thing,’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

‘You can’t help it,’ said Newman.

‘Not help it!’

‘No; I thought of it as I came along; but didn’t get one, thinking you
mightn’t be ready. I think of a great many things. Nobody can prevent
that.’

‘Oh yes, I understand you, Mr. Noggs,’ said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Our thoughts
are free, of course. Everybody’s thoughts are their own, clearly.’

‘They wouldn’t be, if some people had their way,’ muttered Newman.

‘Well, no more they would, Mr. Noggs, and that’s very true,’ rejoined Mrs
Nickleby. ‘Some people to be sure are such--how’s your master?’

Newman darted a meaning glance at Kate, and replied with a strong
emphasis on the last word of his answer, that Mr. Ralph Nickleby was
well, and sent his LOVE.

‘I am sure we are very much obliged to him,’ observed Mrs. Nickleby.

‘Very,’ said Newman. ‘I’ll tell him so.’

It was no very easy matter to mistake Newman Noggs, after having once
seen him, and as Kate, attracted by the singularity of his manner (in
which on this occasion, however, there was something respectful and even
delicate, notwithstanding the abruptness of his speech), looked at him
more closely, she recollected having caught a passing glimpse of that
strange figure before.

‘Excuse my curiosity,’ she said, ‘but did I not see you in the
coachyard, on the morning my brother went away to Yorkshire?’

Newman cast a wistful glance on Mrs. Nickleby and said ‘No,’ most
unblushingly.

‘No!’ exclaimed Kate, ‘I should have said so anywhere.’

‘You’d have said wrong,’ rejoined Newman. ‘It’s the first time I’ve been
out for three weeks. I’ve had the gout.’

Newman was very, very far from having the appearance of a gouty subject,
and so Kate could not help thinking; but the conference was cut short by
Mrs. Nickleby’s insisting on having the door shut, lest Mr. Noggs should
take cold, and further persisting in sending the servant girl for a
coach, for fear he should bring on another attack of his disorder. To
both conditions, Newman was compelled to yield. Presently, the coach
came; and, after many sorrowful farewells, and a great deal of running
backwards and forwards across the pavement on the part of Miss La
Creevy, in the course of which the yellow turban came into violent
contact with sundry foot-passengers, it (that is to say the coach,
not the turban) went away again, with the two ladies and their luggage
inside; and Newman, despite all Mrs. Nickleby’s assurances that it would
be his death--on the box beside the driver.

They went into the city, turning down by the river side; and, after a
long and very slow drive, the streets being crowded at that hour with
vehicles of every kind, stopped in front of a large old dingy house in
Thames Street: the door and windows of which were so bespattered with
mud, that it would have appeared to have been uninhabited for years.

The door of this deserted mansion Newman opened with a key which he took
out of his hat--in which, by-the-bye, in consequence of the dilapidated
state of his pockets, he deposited everything, and would most
likely have carried his money if he had had any--and the coach being
discharged, he led the way into the interior of the mansion.

Old, and gloomy, and black, in truth it was, and sullen and dark were
the rooms, once so bustling with life and enterprise. There was a
wharf behind, opening on the Thames. An empty dog-kennel, some bones of
animals, fragments of iron hoops, and staves of old casks, lay strewn
about, but no life was stirring there. It was a picture of cold, silent
decay.

‘This house depresses and chills one,’ said Kate, ‘and seems as if some
blight had fallen on it. If I were superstitious, I should be almost
inclined to believe that some dreadful crime had been perpetrated within
these old walls, and that the place had never prospered since. How
frowning and how dark it looks!’

‘Lord, my dear,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby, ‘don’t talk in that way, or
you’ll frighten me to death.’

‘It is only my foolish fancy, mama,’ said Kate, forcing a smile.

‘Well, then, my love, I wish you would keep your foolish fancy to
yourself, and not wake up MY foolish fancy to keep it company,’ retorted
Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Why didn’t you think of all this before--you are so
careless--we might have asked Miss La Creevy to keep us company or
borrowed a dog, or a thousand things--but it always was the way, and
was just the same with your poor dear father. Unless I thought of
everything--’ This was Mrs. Nickleby’s usual commencement of a general
lamentation, running through a dozen or so of complicated sentences
addressed to nobody in particular, and into which she now launched until
her breath was exhausted.

Newman appeared not to hear these remarks, but preceded them to a couple
of rooms on the first floor, which some kind of attempt had been made to
render habitable. In one, were a few chairs, a table, an old hearth-rug,
and some faded baize; and a fire was ready laid in the grate. In the
other stood an old tent bedstead, and a few scanty articles of chamber
furniture.

‘Well, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, trying to be pleased, ‘now isn’t
this thoughtful and considerate of your uncle? Why, we should not have
had anything but the bed we bought yesterday, to lie down upon, if it
hadn’t been for his thoughtfulness!’

‘Very kind, indeed,’ replied Kate, looking round.

Newman Noggs did not say that he had hunted up the old furniture they
saw, from attic and cellar; or that he had taken in the halfpennyworth
of milk for tea that stood upon a shelf, or filled the rusty kettle on
the hob, or collected the woodchips from the wharf, or begged the coals.
But the notion of Ralph Nickleby having directed it to be done, tickled
his fancy so much, that he could not refrain from cracking all his ten
fingers in succession: at which performance Mrs. Nickleby was rather
startled at first, but supposing it to be in some remote manner
connected with the gout, did not remark upon.

‘We need detain you no longer, I think,’ said Kate.

‘Is there nothing I can do?’ asked Newman.

‘Nothing, thank you,’ rejoined Miss Nickleby.

‘Perhaps, my dear, Mr. Noggs would like to drink our healths,’ said Mrs
Nickleby, fumbling in her reticule for some small coin.

‘I think, mama,’ said Kate hesitating, and remarking Newman’s averted
face, ‘you would hurt his feelings if you offered it.’

Newman Noggs, bowing to the young lady more like a gentleman than
the miserable wretch he seemed, placed his hand upon his breast, and,
pausing for a moment, with the air of a man who struggles to speak but
is uncertain what to say, quitted the room.

As the jarring echoes of the heavy house-door, closing on its latch,
reverberated dismally through the building, Kate felt half tempted to
call him back, and beg him to remain a little while; but she was ashamed
to own her fears, and Newman Noggs was on his road homewards.



CHAPTER 12

Whereby the Reader will be enabled to trace the further course of
Miss Fanny Squeer’s Love, and to ascertain whether it ran smooth or
otherwise.


It was a fortunate circumstance for Miss Fanny Squeers, that when her
worthy papa returned home on the night of the small tea-party, he was
what the initiated term ‘too far gone’ to observe the numerous tokens
of extreme vexation of spirit which were plainly visible in her
countenance. Being, however, of a rather violent and quarrelsome mood in
his cups, it is not impossible that he might have fallen out with her,
either on this or some imaginary topic, if the young lady had not, with
a foresight and prudence highly commendable, kept a boy up, on purpose,
to bear the first brunt of the good gentleman’s anger; which, having
vented itself in a variety of kicks and cuffs, subsided sufficiently to
admit of his being persuaded to go to bed. Which he did with his boots
on, and an umbrella under his arm.

The hungry servant attended Miss Squeers in her own room according
to custom, to curl her hair, perform the other little offices of her
toilet, and administer as much flattery as she could get up, for the
purpose; for Miss Squeers was quite lazy enough (and sufficiently vain
and frivolous withal) to have been a fine lady; and it was only the
arbitrary distinctions of rank and station which prevented her from
being one.

‘How lovely your hair do curl tonight, miss!’ said the handmaiden. ‘I
declare if it isn’t a pity and a shame to brush it out!’

‘Hold your tongue!’ replied Miss Squeers wrathfully.

Some considerable experience prevented the girl from being at all
surprised at any outbreak of ill-temper on the part of Miss Squeers.
Having a half-perception of what had occurred in the course of the
evening, she changed her mode of making herself agreeable, and proceeded
on the indirect tack.

‘Well, I couldn’t help saying, miss, if you was to kill me for it,’ said
the attendant, ‘that I never see nobody look so vulgar as Miss Price
this night.’

Miss Squeers sighed, and composed herself to listen.

‘I know it’s very wrong in me to say so, miss,’ continued the girl,
delighted to see the impression she was making, ‘Miss Price being a
friend of your’n, and all; but she do dress herself out so, and go on
in such a manner to get noticed, that--oh--well, if people only saw
themselves!’

‘What do you mean, Phib?’ asked Miss Squeers, looking in her own little
glass, where, like most of us, she saw--not herself, but the reflection
of some pleasant image in her own brain. ‘How you talk!’

‘Talk, miss! It’s enough to make a Tom cat talk French grammar, only to
see how she tosses her head,’ replied the handmaid.

‘She DOES toss her head,’ observed Miss Squeers, with an air of
abstraction.

‘So vain, and so very--very plain,’ said the girl.

‘Poor ‘Tilda!’ sighed Miss Squeers, compassionately.

‘And always laying herself out so, to get to be admired,’ pursued the
servant. ‘Oh, dear! It’s positive indelicate.’

‘I can’t allow you to talk in that way, Phib,’ said Miss Squeers.
‘’Tilda’s friends are low people, and if she don’t know any better, it’s
their fault, and not hers.’

‘Well, but you know, miss,’ said Phoebe, for which name ‘Phib’ was
used as a patronising abbreviation, ‘if she was only to take copy by
a friend--oh! if she only knew how wrong she was, and would but set
herself right by you, what a nice young woman she might be in time!’

‘Phib,’ rejoined Miss Squeers, with a stately air, ‘it’s not proper
for me to hear these comparisons drawn; they make ‘Tilda look a coarse
improper sort of person, and it seems unfriendly in me to listen to
them. I would rather you dropped the subject, Phib; at the same time,
I must say, that if ‘Tilda Price would take pattern by somebody--not me
particularly--’

‘Oh yes; you, miss,’ interposed Phib.

‘Well, me, Phib, if you will have it so,’ said Miss Squeers. ‘I must
say, that if she would, she would be all the better for it.’

‘So somebody else thinks, or I am much mistaken,’ said the girl
mysteriously.

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Miss Squeers.

‘Never mind, miss,’ replied the girl; ‘I know what I know; that’s all.’

‘Phib,’ said Miss Squeers dramatically, ‘I insist upon your explaining
yourself. What is this dark mystery? Speak.’

‘Why, if you will have it, miss, it’s this,’ said the servant girl. ‘Mr
John Browdie thinks as you think; and if he wasn’t too far gone to do
it creditable, he’d be very glad to be off with Miss Price, and on with
Miss Squeers.’

‘Gracious heavens!’ exclaimed Miss Squeers, clasping her hands with
great dignity. ‘What is this?’

‘Truth, ma’am, and nothing but truth,’ replied the artful Phib.

‘What a situation!’ cried Miss Squeers; ‘on the brink of unconsciously
destroying the peace and happiness of my own ‘Tilda. What is the reason
that men fall in love with me, whether I like it or not, and desert
their chosen intendeds for my sake?’

‘Because they can’t help it, miss,’ replied the girl; ‘the reason’s
plain.’ (If Miss Squeers were the reason, it was very plain.)

‘Never let me hear of it again,’ retorted Miss Squeers. ‘Never! Do you
hear? ‘Tilda Price has faults--many faults--but I wish her well, and
above all I wish her married; for I think it highly desirable--most
desirable from the very nature of her failings--that she should be
married as soon as possible. No, Phib. Let her have Mr. Browdie. I may
pity HIM, poor fellow; but I have a great regard for ‘Tilda, and only
hope she may make a better wife than I think she will.’

With this effusion of feeling, Miss Squeers went to bed.

Spite is a little word; but it represents as strange a jumble of
feelings, and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language.
Miss Squeers knew as well in her heart of hearts that what the miserable
serving-girl had said was sheer, coarse, lying flattery, as did the girl
herself; yet the mere opportunity of venting a little ill-nature against
the offending Miss Price, and affecting to compassionate her weaknesses
and foibles, though only in the presence of a solitary dependant, was
almost as great a relief to her spleen as if the whole had been gospel
truth. Nay, more. We have such extraordinary powers of persuasion
when they are exerted over ourselves, that Miss Squeers felt quite
high-minded and great after her noble renunciation of John Browdie’s
hand, and looked down upon her rival with a kind of holy calmness and
tranquillity, that had a mighty effect in soothing her ruffled feelings.

This happy state of mind had some influence in bringing about a
reconciliation; for, when a knock came at the front-door next day, and
the miller’s daughter was announced, Miss Squeers betook herself to the
parlour in a Christian frame of spirit, perfectly beautiful to behold.

‘Well, Fanny,’ said the miller’s daughter, ‘you see I have come to see
you, although we HAD some words last night.’

‘I pity your bad passions, ‘Tilda,’ replied Miss Squeers, ‘but I bear no
malice. I am above it.’

‘Don’t be cross, Fanny,’ said Miss Price. ‘I have come to tell you
something that I know will please you.’

‘What may that be, ‘Tilda?’ demanded Miss Squeers; screwing up her lips,
and looking as if nothing in earth, air, fire, or water, could afford
her the slightest gleam of satisfaction.

‘This,’ rejoined Miss Price. ‘After we left here last night John and I
had a dreadful quarrel.’

‘That doesn’t please me,’ said Miss Squeers--relaxing into a smile
though.

‘Lor! I wouldn’t think so bad of you as to suppose it did,’ rejoined her
companion. ‘That’s not it.’

‘Oh!’ said Miss Squeers, relapsing into melancholy. ‘Go on.’

‘After a great deal of wrangling, and saying we would never see each
other any more,’ continued Miss Price, ‘we made it up, and this morning
John went and wrote our names down to be put up, for the first time,
next Sunday, so we shall be married in three weeks, and I give you
notice to get your frock made.’

There was mingled gall and honey in this intelligence. The prospect of
the friend’s being married so soon was the gall, and the certainty of
her not entertaining serious designs upon Nicholas was the honey. Upon
the whole, the sweet greatly preponderated over the bitter, so Miss
Squeers said she would get the frock made, and that she hoped ‘Tilda
might be happy, though at the same time she didn’t know, and would not
have her build too much upon it, for men were strange creatures, and
a great many married women were very miserable, and wished themselves
single again with all their hearts; to which condolences Miss Squeers
added others equally calculated to raise her friend’s spirits and
promote her cheerfulness of mind.

‘But come now, Fanny,’ said Miss Price, ‘I want to have a word or two
with you about young Mr. Nickleby.’

‘He is nothing to me,’ interrupted Miss Squeers, with hysterical
symptoms. ‘I despise him too much!’

‘Oh, you don’t mean that, I am sure?’ replied her friend. ‘Confess,
Fanny; don’t you like him now?’

Without returning any direct reply, Miss Squeers, all at once, fell into
a paroxysm of spiteful tears, and exclaimed that she was a wretched,
neglected, miserable castaway.

‘I hate everybody,’ said Miss Squeers, ‘and I wish that everybody was
dead--that I do.’

‘Dear, dear,’ said Miss Price, quite moved by this avowal of
misanthropical sentiments. ‘You are not serious, I am sure.’

‘Yes, I am,’ rejoined Miss Squeers, tying tight knots in her
pocket-handkerchief and clenching her teeth. ‘And I wish I was dead too.
There!’

‘Oh! you’ll think very differently in another five minutes,’ said
Matilda. ‘How much better to take him into favour again, than to hurt
yourself by going on in that way. Wouldn’t it be much nicer, now,
to have him all to yourself on good terms, in a company-keeping,
love-making, pleasant sort of manner?’

‘I don’t know but what it would,’ sobbed Miss Squeers. ‘Oh! ‘Tilda, how
could you have acted so mean and dishonourable! I wouldn’t have believed
it of you, if anybody had told me.’

‘Heyday!’ exclaimed Miss Price, giggling. ‘One would suppose I had been
murdering somebody at least.’

‘Very nigh as bad,’ said Miss Squeers passionately.

‘And all this because I happen to have enough of good looks to make
people civil to me,’ cried Miss Price. ‘Persons don’t make their own
faces, and it’s no more my fault if mine is a good one than it is other
people’s fault if theirs is a bad one.’

‘Hold your tongue,’ shrieked Miss Squeers, in her shrillest tone; ‘or
you’ll make me slap you, ‘Tilda, and afterwards I should be sorry for
it!’

It is needless to say, that, by this time, the temper of each young lady
was in some slight degree affected by the tone of her conversation,
and that a dash of personality was infused into the altercation, in
consequence. Indeed, the quarrel, from slight beginnings, rose to a
considerable height, and was assuming a very violent complexion,
when both parties, falling into a great passion of tears, exclaimed
simultaneously, that they had never thought of being spoken to in that
way: which exclamation, leading to a remonstrance, gradually brought
on an explanation: and the upshot was, that they fell into each other’s
arms and vowed eternal friendship; the occasion in question making the
fifty-second time of repeating the same impressive ceremony within a
twelvemonth.

Perfect amicability being thus restored, a dialogue naturally ensued
upon the number and nature of the garments which would be indispensable
for Miss Price’s entrance into the holy state of matrimony, when Miss
Squeers clearly showed that a great many more than the miller could,
or would, afford, were absolutely necessary, and could not decently
be dispensed with. The young lady then, by an easy digression, led
the discourse to her own wardrobe, and after recounting its principal
beauties at some length, took her friend upstairs to make inspection
thereof. The treasures of two drawers and a closet having been
displayed, and all the smaller articles tried on, it was time for Miss
Price to return home; and as she had been in raptures with all the
frocks, and had been stricken quite dumb with admiration of a new pink
scarf, Miss Squeers said in high good humour, that she would walk part
of the way with her, for the pleasure of her company; and off they went
together: Miss Squeers dilating, as they walked along, upon her father’s
accomplishments: and multiplying his income by ten, to give her friend
some faint notion of the vast importance and superiority of her family.

It happened that that particular time, comprising the short daily
interval which was suffered to elapse between what was pleasantly called
the dinner of Mr. Squeers’s pupils, and their return to the pursuit of
useful knowledge, was precisely the hour when Nicholas was accustomed
to issue forth for a melancholy walk, and to brood, as he sauntered
listlessly through the village, upon his miserable lot. Miss Squeers
knew this perfectly well, but had perhaps forgotten it, for when she
caught sight of that young gentleman advancing towards them, she evinced
many symptoms of surprise and consternation, and assured her friend that
she ‘felt fit to drop into the earth.’

‘Shall we turn back, or run into a cottage?’ asked Miss Price. ‘He don’t
see us yet.’

‘No, ‘Tilda,’ replied Miss Squeers, ‘it is my duty to go through with
it, and I will!’

As Miss Squeers said this, in the tone of one who has made a high moral
resolution, and was, besides, taken with one or two chokes and catchings
of breath, indicative of feelings at a high pressure, her friend made no
further remark, and they bore straight down upon Nicholas, who, walking
with his eyes bent upon the ground, was not aware of their approach
until they were close upon him; otherwise, he might, perhaps, have taken
shelter himself.

‘Good-morning,’ said Nicholas, bowing and passing by.

‘He is going,’ murmured Miss Squeers. ‘I shall choke, ‘Tilda.’

‘Come back, Mr. Nickleby, do!’ cried Miss Price, affecting alarm at her
friend’s threat, but really actuated by a malicious wish to hear what
Nicholas would say; ‘come back, Mr. Nickleby!’

Mr. Nickleby came back, and looked as confused as might be, as he
inquired whether the ladies had any commands for him.

‘Don’t stop to talk,’ urged Miss Price, hastily; ‘but support her on the
other side. How do you feel now, dear?’

‘Better,’ sighed Miss Squeers, laying a beaver bonnet of a reddish brown
with a green veil attached, on Mr. Nickleby’s shoulder. ‘This foolish
faintness!’

‘Don’t call it foolish, dear,’ said Miss Price: her bright eye dancing
with merriment as she saw the perplexity of Nicholas; ‘you have no
reason to be ashamed of it. It’s those who are too proud to come round
again, without all this to-do, that ought to be ashamed.’

‘You are resolved to fix it upon me, I see,’ said Nicholas, smiling,
‘although I told you, last night, it was not my fault.’

‘There; he says it was not his fault, my dear,’ remarked the wicked Miss
Price. ‘Perhaps you were too jealous, or too hasty with him? He says it
was not his fault. You hear; I think that’s apology enough.’

‘You will not understand me,’ said Nicholas. ‘Pray dispense with this
jesting, for I have no time, and really no inclination, to be the
subject or promoter of mirth just now.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Miss Price, affecting amazement.

‘Don’t ask him, ‘Tilda,’ cried Miss Squeers; ‘I forgive him.’

‘Dear me,’ said Nicholas, as the brown bonnet went down on his shoulder
again, ‘this is more serious than I supposed. Allow me! Will you have
the goodness to hear me speak?’

Here he raised up the brown bonnet, and regarding with most unfeigned
astonishment a look of tender reproach from Miss Squeers, shrunk back a
few paces to be out of the reach of the fair burden, and went on to say:

‘I am very sorry--truly and sincerely sorry--for having been the
cause of any difference among you, last night. I reproach myself, most
bitterly, for having been so unfortunate as to cause the dissension
that occurred, although I did so, I assure you, most unwittingly and
heedlessly.’

‘Well; that’s not all you have got to say surely,’ exclaimed Miss Price
as Nicholas paused.

‘I fear there is something more,’ stammered Nicholas with a half-smile,
and looking towards Miss Squeers, ‘it is a most awkward thing to
say--but--the very mention of such a supposition makes one look like a
puppy--still--may I ask if that lady supposes that I entertain any--in
short, does she think that I am in love with her?’

‘Delightful embarrassment,’ thought Miss Squeers, ‘I have brought him to
it, at last. Answer for me, dear,’ she whispered to her friend.

‘Does she think so?’ rejoined Miss Price; ‘of course she does.’

‘She does!’ exclaimed Nicholas with such energy of utterance as might
have been, for the moment, mistaken for rapture.

‘Certainly,’ replied Miss Price

‘If Mr. Nickleby has doubted that, ‘Tilda,’ said the blushing Miss
Squeers in soft accents, ‘he may set his mind at rest. His sentiments
are recipro--’

‘Stop,’ cried Nicholas hurriedly; ‘pray hear me. This is the grossest
and wildest delusion, the completest and most signal mistake, that ever
human being laboured under, or committed. I have scarcely seen the
young lady half-a-dozen times, but if I had seen her sixty times, or am
destined to see her sixty thousand, it would be, and will be, precisely
the same. I have not one thought, wish, or hope, connected with her,
unless it be--and I say this, not to hurt her feelings, but to impress
her with the real state of my own--unless it be the one object, dear to
my heart as life itself, of being one day able to turn my back upon
this accursed place, never to set foot in it again, or think of it--even
think of it--but with loathing and disgust.’

With this particularly plain and straightforward declaration, which
he made with all the vehemence that his indignant and excited feelings
could bring to bear upon it, Nicholas waiting to hear no more,
retreated.

But poor Miss Squeers! Her anger, rage, and vexation; the rapid
succession of bitter and passionate feelings that whirled through her
mind; are not to be described. Refused! refused by a teacher, picked
up by advertisement, at an annual salary of five pounds payable at
indefinite periods, and ‘found’ in food and lodging like the very boys
themselves; and this too in the presence of a little chit of a miller’s
daughter of eighteen, who was going to be married, in three weeks’ time,
to a man who had gone down on his very knees to ask her. She could have
choked in right good earnest, at the thought of being so humbled.

But, there was one thing clear in the midst of her mortification; and
that was, that she hated and detested Nicholas with all the narrowness
of mind and littleness of purpose worthy a descendant of the house of
Squeers. And there was one comfort too; and that was, that every hour in
every day she could wound his pride, and goad him with the infliction
of some slight, or insult, or deprivation, which could not but have some
effect on the most insensible person, and must be acutely felt by one so
sensitive as Nicholas. With these two reflections uppermost in her mind,
Miss Squeers made the best of the matter to her friend, by observing
that Mr. Nickleby was such an odd creature, and of such a violent temper,
that she feared she should be obliged to give him up; and parted from
her.

And here it may be remarked, that Miss Squeers, having bestowed her
affections (or whatever it might be that, in the absence of anything
better, represented them) on Nicholas Nickleby, had never once seriously
contemplated the possibility of his being of a different opinion
from herself in the business. Miss Squeers reasoned that she was
prepossessing and beautiful, and that her father was master, and
Nicholas man, and that her father had saved money, and Nicholas had
none, all of which seemed to her conclusive arguments why the young man
should feel only too much honoured by her preference. She had not failed
to recollect, either, how much more agreeable she could render his
situation if she were his friend, and how much more disagreeable if she
were his enemy; and, doubtless, many less scrupulous young gentlemen
than Nicholas would have encouraged her extravagance had it been only
for this very obvious and intelligible reason. However, he had thought
proper to do otherwise, and Miss Squeers was outrageous.

‘Let him see,’ said the irritated young lady, when she had regained her
own room, and eased her mind by committing an assault on Phib, ‘if I
don’t set mother against him a little more when she comes back!’

It was scarcely necessary to do this, but Miss Squeers was as good as
her word; and poor Nicholas, in addition to bad food, dirty lodging,
and the being compelled to witness one dull unvarying round of squalid
misery, was treated with every special indignity that malice could
suggest, or the most grasping cupidity put upon him.

Nor was this all. There was another and deeper system of annoyance which
made his heart sink, and nearly drove him wild, by its injustice and
cruelty.

The wretched creature, Smike, since the night Nicholas had spoken
kindly to him in the schoolroom, had followed him to and fro, with an
ever-restless desire to serve or help him; anticipating such little
wants as his humble ability could supply, and content only to be near
him. He would sit beside him for hours, looking patiently into his face;
and a word would brighten up his care-worn visage, and call into it a
passing gleam, even of happiness. He was an altered being; he had an
object now; and that object was, to show his attachment to the only
person--that person a stranger--who had treated him, not to say with
kindness, but like a human creature.

Upon this poor being, all the spleen and ill-humour that could not be
vented on Nicholas were unceasingly bestowed. Drudgery would have been
nothing--Smike was well used to that. Buffetings inflicted without
cause, would have been equally a matter of course; for to them also
he had served a long and weary apprenticeship; but it was no sooner
observed that he had become attached to Nicholas, than stripes and
blows, stripes and blows, morning, noon, and night, were his only
portion. Squeers was jealous of the influence which his man had so soon
acquired, and his family hated him, and Smike paid for both. Nicholas
saw it, and ground his teeth at every repetition of the savage and
cowardly attack.

He had arranged a few regular lessons for the boys; and one night, as
he paced up and down the dismal schoolroom, his swollen heart almost
bursting to think that his protection and countenance should have
increased the misery of the wretched being whose peculiar destitution
had awakened his pity, he paused mechanically in a dark corner where sat
the object of his thoughts.

The poor soul was poring hard over a tattered book, with the traces of
recent tears still upon his face; vainly endeavouring to master some
task which a child of nine years old, possessed of ordinary powers,
could have conquered with ease, but which, to the addled brain of the
crushed boy of nineteen, was a sealed and hopeless mystery. Yet there he
sat, patiently conning the page again and again, stimulated by no boyish
ambition, for he was the common jest and scoff even of the uncouth
objects that congregated about him, but inspired by the one eager desire
to please his solitary friend.

Nicholas laid his hand upon his shoulder.

‘I can’t do it,’ said the dejected creature, looking up with bitter
disappointment in every feature. ‘No, no.’

‘Do not try,’ replied Nicholas.

The boy shook his head, and closing the book with a sigh, looked
vacantly round, and laid his head upon his arm. He was weeping.

‘Do not for God’s sake,’ said Nicholas, in an agitated voice; ‘I cannot
bear to see you.’

‘They are more hard with me than ever,’ sobbed the boy.

‘I know it,’ rejoined Nicholas. ‘They are.’

‘But for you,’ said the outcast, ‘I should die. They would kill me; they
would; I know they would.’

‘You will do better, poor fellow,’ replied Nicholas, shaking his head
mournfully, ‘when I am gone.’

‘Gone!’ cried the other, looking intently in his face.

‘Softly!’ rejoined Nicholas. ‘Yes.’

‘Are you going?’ demanded the boy, in an earnest whisper.

‘I cannot say,’ replied Nicholas. ‘I was speaking more to my own
thoughts, than to you.’

‘Tell me,’ said the boy imploringly, ‘oh do tell me, WILL you go--WILL
you?’

‘I shall be driven to that at last!’ said Nicholas. ‘The world is before
me, after all.’

‘Tell me,’ urged Smike, ‘is the world as bad and dismal as this place?’

‘Heaven forbid,’ replied Nicholas, pursuing the train of his own
thoughts; ‘its hardest, coarsest toil, were happiness to this.’

‘Should I ever meet you there?’ demanded the boy, speaking with unusual
wildness and volubility.

‘Yes,’ replied Nicholas, willing to soothe him.

‘No, no!’ said the other, clasping him by the hand. ‘Should I--should
I--tell me that again. Say I should be sure to find you.’

‘You would,’ replied Nicholas, with the same humane intention, ‘and I
would help and aid you, and not bring fresh sorrow on you as I have done
here.’

The boy caught both the young man’s hands passionately in his, and,
hugging them to his breast, uttered a few broken sounds which were
unintelligible. Squeers entered at the moment, and he shrunk back into
his old corner.



CHAPTER 13

Nicholas varies the Monotony of Dothebys Hall by a most vigorous and
remarkable proceeding, which leads to Consequences of some Importance


The cold, feeble dawn of a January morning was stealing in at the
windows of the common sleeping-room, when Nicholas, raising himself on
his arm, looked among the prostrate forms which on every side surrounded
him, as though in search of some particular object.

It needed a quick eye to detect, from among the huddled mass of
sleepers, the form of any given individual. As they lay closely packed
together, covered, for warmth’s sake, with their patched and ragged
clothes, little could be distinguished but the sharp outlines of pale
faces, over which the sombre light shed the same dull heavy colour;
with, here and there, a gaunt arm thrust forth: its thinness hidden by
no covering, but fully exposed to view, in all its shrunken ugliness.
There were some who, lying on their backs with upturned faces and
clenched hands, just visible in the leaden light, bore more the aspect
of dead bodies than of living creatures; and there were others coiled up
into strange and fantastic postures, such as might have been taken for
the uneasy efforts of pain to gain some temporary relief, rather than
the freaks of slumber. A few--and these were among the youngest of the
children--slept peacefully on, with smiles upon their faces, dreaming
perhaps of home; but ever and again a deep and heavy sigh, breaking the
stillness of the room, announced that some new sleeper had awakened to
the misery of another day; and, as morning took the place of night, the
smiles gradually faded away, with the friendly darkness which had given
them birth.

Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth
in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which
lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the
world.

Nicholas looked upon the sleepers; at first, with the air of one who
gazes upon a scene which, though familiar to him, has lost none of its
sorrowful effect in consequence; and, afterwards, with a more intense
and searching scrutiny, as a man would who missed something his eye was
accustomed to meet, and had expected to rest upon. He was still occupied
in this search, and had half risen from his bed in the eagerness of his
quest, when the voice of Squeers was heard, calling from the bottom of
the stairs.

‘Now then,’ cried that gentleman, ‘are you going to sleep all day, up
there--’

‘You lazy hounds?’ added Mrs. Squeers, finishing the sentence, and
producing, at the same time, a sharp sound, like that which is
occasioned by the lacing of stays.

‘We shall be down directly, sir,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Down directly!’ said Squeers. ‘Ah! you had better be down directly, or
I’ll be down upon some of you in less. Where’s that Smike?’

Nicholas looked hurriedly round again, but made no answer.

‘Smike!’ shouted Squeers.

‘Do you want your head broke in a fresh place, Smike?’ demanded his
amiable lady in the same key.

Still there was no reply, and still Nicholas stared about him, as did
the greater part of the boys, who were by this time roused.

‘Confound his impudence!’ muttered Squeers, rapping the stair-rail
impatiently with his cane. ‘Nickleby!’

‘Well, sir.’

‘Send that obstinate scoundrel down; don’t you hear me calling?’

‘He is not here, sir,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Don’t tell me a lie,’ retorted the schoolmaster. ‘He is.’

‘He is not,’ retorted Nicholas angrily, ‘don’t tell me one.’

‘We shall soon see that,’ said Mr. Squeers, rushing upstairs. ‘I’ll find
him, I warrant you.’

With which assurance, Mr. Squeers bounced into the dormitory, and,
swinging his cane in the air ready for a blow, darted into the corner
where the lean body of the drudge was usually stretched at night. The
cane descended harmlessly upon the ground. There was nobody there.

‘What does this mean?’ said Squeers, turning round with a very pale
face. ‘Where have you hid him?’

‘I have seen nothing of him since last night,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Come,’ said Squeers, evidently frightened, though he endeavoured to
look otherwise, ‘you won’t save him this way. Where is he?’

‘At the bottom of the nearest pond for aught I know,’ rejoined Nicholas
in a low voice, and fixing his eyes full on the master’s face.

‘Damn you, what do you mean by that?’ retorted Squeers in great
perturbation. Without waiting for a reply, he inquired of the boys
whether any one among them knew anything of their missing schoolmate.

There was a general hum of anxious denial, in the midst of which, one
shrill voice was heard to say (as, indeed, everybody thought):

‘Please, sir, I think Smike’s run away, sir.’

‘Ha!’ cried Squeers, turning sharp round. ‘Who said that?’

‘Tomkins, please sir,’ rejoined a chorus of voices. Mr. Squeers made
a plunge into the crowd, and at one dive, caught a very little boy,
habited still in his night-gear, and the perplexed expression of whose
countenance, as he was brought forward, seemed to intimate that he was
as yet uncertain whether he was about to be punished or rewarded for the
suggestion. He was not long in doubt.

‘You think he has run away, do you, sir?’ demanded Squeers.

‘Yes, please sir,’ replied the little boy.

‘And what, sir,’ said Squeers, catching the little boy suddenly by
the arms and whisking up his drapery in a most dexterous manner, ‘what
reason have you to suppose that any boy would want to run away from this
establishment? Eh, sir?’

The child raised a dismal cry, by way of answer, and Mr. Squeers,
throwing himself into the most favourable attitude for exercising his
strength, beat him until the little urchin in his writhings actually
rolled out of his hands, when he mercifully allowed him to roll away, as
he best could.

‘There,’ said Squeers. ‘Now if any other boy thinks Smike has run away,
I shall be glad to have a talk with him.’

There was, of course, a profound silence, during which Nicholas showed
his disgust as plainly as looks could show it.

‘Well, Nickleby,’ said Squeers, eyeing him maliciously. ‘YOU think he
has run away, I suppose?’

‘I think it extremely likely,’ replied Nicholas, in a quiet manner.

‘Oh, you do, do you?’ sneered Squeers. ‘Maybe you know he has?’

‘I know nothing of the kind.’

‘He didn’t tell you he was going, I suppose, did he?’ sneered Squeers.

‘He did not,’ replied Nicholas; ‘I am very glad he did not, for it would
then have been my duty to have warned you in time.’

‘Which no doubt you would have been devilish sorry to do,’ said Squeers
in a taunting fashion.

‘I should indeed,’ replied Nicholas. ‘You interpret my feelings with
great accuracy.’

Mrs. Squeers had listened to this conversation, from the bottom of
the stairs; but, now losing all patience, she hastily assumed her
night-jacket, and made her way to the scene of action.

‘What’s all this here to-do?’ said the lady, as the boys fell off right
and left, to save her the trouble of clearing a passage with her brawny
arms. ‘What on earth are you a talking to him for, Squeery!’

‘Why, my dear,’ said Squeers, ‘the fact is, that Smike is not to be
found.’

‘Well, I know that,’ said the lady, ‘and where’s the wonder? If you
get a parcel of proud-stomached teachers that set the young dogs a
rebelling, what else can you look for? Now, young man, you just have the
kindness to take yourself off to the schoolroom, and take the boys off
with you, and don’t you stir out of there till you have leave given you,
or you and I may fall out in a way that’ll spoil your beauty, handsome
as you think yourself, and so I tell you.’

‘Indeed!’ said Nicholas.

‘Yes; and indeed and indeed again, Mister Jackanapes,’ said the excited
lady; ‘and I wouldn’t keep such as you in the house another hour, if I
had my way.’

‘Nor would you if I had mine,’ replied Nicholas. ‘Now, boys!’

‘Ah! Now, boys,’ said Mrs. Squeers, mimicking, as nearly as she could,
the voice and manner of the usher. ‘Follow your leader, boys, and take
pattern by Smike if you dare. See what he’ll get for himself, when he
is brought back; and, mind! I tell you that you shall have as bad, and
twice as bad, if you so much as open your mouths about him.’

‘If I catch him,’ said Squeers, ‘I’ll only stop short of flaying him
alive. I give you notice, boys.’

‘IF you catch him,’ retorted Mrs. Squeers, contemptuously; ‘you are sure
to; you can’t help it, if you go the right way to work. Come! Away with
you!’

With these words, Mrs. Squeers dismissed the boys, and after a little
light skirmishing with those in the rear who were pressing forward to
get out of the way, but were detained for a few moments by the throng
in front, succeeded in clearing the room, when she confronted her spouse
alone.

‘He is off,’ said Mrs. Squeers. ‘The cow-house and stable are locked up,
so he can’t be there; and he’s not downstairs anywhere, for the girl has
looked. He must have gone York way, and by a public road too.’

‘Why must he?’ inquired Squeers.

‘Stupid!’ said Mrs. Squeers angrily. ‘He hadn’t any money, had he?’

‘Never had a penny of his own in his whole life, that I know of,’
replied Squeers.

‘To be sure,’ rejoined Mrs. Squeers, ‘and he didn’t take anything to eat
with him; that I’ll answer for. Ha! ha! ha!’

‘Ha! ha! ha!’ laughed Squeers.

‘Then, of course,’ said Mrs. S., ‘he must beg his way, and he could do
that, nowhere, but on the public road.’

‘That’s true,’ exclaimed Squeers, clapping his hands.

‘True! Yes; but you would never have thought of it, for all that, if I
hadn’t said so,’ replied his wife. ‘Now, if you take the chaise and go
one road, and I borrow Swallow’s chaise, and go the other, what with
keeping our eyes open, and asking questions, one or other of us is
pretty certain to lay hold of him.’

The worthy lady’s plan was adopted and put in execution without a
moment’s delay. After a very hasty breakfast, and the prosecution of
some inquiries in the village, the result of which seemed to show that
he was on the right track, Squeers started forth in the pony-chaise,
intent upon discovery and vengeance. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Squeers,
arrayed in the white top-coat, and tied up in various shawls and
handkerchiefs, issued forth in another chaise and another direction,
taking with her a good-sized bludgeon, several odd pieces of strong
cord, and a stout labouring man: all provided and carried upon the
expedition, with the sole object of assisting in the capture, and (once
caught) insuring the safe custody of the unfortunate Smike.

Nicholas remained behind, in a tumult of feeling, sensible that whatever
might be the upshot of the boy’s flight, nothing but painful and
deplorable consequences were likely to ensue from it. Death, from want
and exposure to the weather, was the best that could be expected from
the protracted wandering of so poor and helpless a creature, alone and
unfriended, through a country of which he was wholly ignorant. There was
little, perhaps, to choose between this fate and a return to the tender
mercies of the Yorkshire school; but the unhappy being had established a
hold upon his sympathy and compassion, which made his heart ache at the
prospect of the suffering he was destined to undergo. He lingered on, in
restless anxiety, picturing a thousand possibilities, until the evening
of next day, when Squeers returned, alone, and unsuccessful.

‘No news of the scamp!’ said the schoolmaster, who had evidently been
stretching his legs, on the old principle, not a few times during the
journey. ‘I’ll have consolation for this out of somebody, Nickleby, if
Mrs. Squeers don’t hunt him down; so I give you warning.’

‘It is not in my power to console you, sir,’ said Nicholas. ‘It is
nothing to me.’

‘Isn’t it?’ said Squeers in a threatening manner. ‘We shall see!’

‘We shall,’ rejoined Nicholas.

‘Here’s the pony run right off his legs, and me obliged to come home
with a hack cob, that’ll cost fifteen shillings besides other expenses,’
said Squeers; ‘who’s to pay for that, do you hear?’

Nicholas shrugged his shoulders and remained silent.

‘I’ll have it out of somebody, I tell you,’ said Squeers, his usual
harsh crafty manner changed to open bullying ‘None of your whining
vapourings here, Mr. Puppy, but be off to your kennel, for it’s past your
bedtime! Come! Get out!’

Nicholas bit his lip and knit his hands involuntarily, for his
fingerends tingled to avenge the insult; but remembering that the
man was drunk, and that it could come to little but a noisy brawl, he
contented himself with darting a contemptuous look at the tyrant, and
walked, as majestically as he could, upstairs: not a little nettled,
however, to observe that Miss Squeers and Master Squeers, and the
servant girl, were enjoying the scene from a snug corner; the two
former indulging in many edifying remarks about the presumption of poor
upstarts, which occasioned a vast deal of laughter, in which even the
most miserable of all miserable servant girls joined: while Nicholas,
stung to the quick, drew over his head such bedclothes as he had, and
sternly resolved that the outstanding account between himself and
Mr. Squeers should be settled rather more speedily than the latter
anticipated.

Another day came, and Nicholas was scarcely awake when he heard the
wheels of a chaise approaching the house. It stopped. The voice of Mrs
Squeers was heard, and in exultation, ordering a glass of spirits
for somebody, which was in itself a sufficient sign that something
extraordinary had happened. Nicholas hardly dared to look out of the
window; but he did so, and the very first object that met his eyes was
the wretched Smike: so bedabbled with mud and rain, so haggard and worn,
and wild, that, but for his garments being such as no scarecrow was ever
seen to wear, he might have been doubtful, even then, of his identity.

‘Lift him out,’ said Squeers, after he had literally feasted his eyes,
in silence, upon the culprit. ‘Bring him in; bring him in!’

‘Take care,’ cried Mrs. Squeers, as her husband proffered his assistance.
‘We tied his legs under the apron and made’em fast to the chaise, to
prevent his giving us the slip again.’

With hands trembling with delight, Squeers unloosened the cord; and
Smike, to all appearance more dead than alive, was brought into the
house and securely locked up in a cellar, until such time as Mr. Squeers
should deem it expedient to operate upon him, in presence of the
assembled school.

Upon a hasty consideration of the circumstances, it may be matter of
surprise to some persons, that Mr. and Mrs. Squeers should have taken so
much trouble to repossess themselves of an incumbrance of which it was
their wont to complain so loudly; but their surprise will cease when
they are informed that the manifold services of the drudge, if performed
by anybody else, would have cost the establishment some ten or twelve
shillings per week in the shape of wages; and furthermore, that all
runaways were, as a matter of policy, made severe examples of, at
Dotheboys Hall, inasmuch as, in consequence of the limited extent of
its attractions, there was but little inducement, beyond the powerful
impulse of fear, for any pupil, provided with the usual number of legs
and the power of using them, to remain.

The news that Smike had been caught and brought back in triumph, ran
like wild-fire through the hungry community, and expectation was on
tiptoe all the morning. On tiptoe it was destined to remain, however,
until afternoon; when Squeers, having refreshed himself with his dinner,
and further strengthened himself by an extra libation or so, made his
appearance (accompanied by his amiable partner) with a countenance of
portentous import, and a fearful instrument of flagellation, strong,
supple, wax-ended, and new,--in short, purchased that morning, expressly
for the occasion.

‘Is every boy here?’ asked Squeers, in a tremendous voice.

Every boy was there, but every boy was afraid to speak, so Squeers
glared along the lines to assure himself; and every eye drooped, and
every head cowered down, as he did so.

‘Each boy keep his place,’ said Squeers, administering his favourite
blow to the desk, and regarding with gloomy satisfaction the universal
start which it never failed to occasion. ‘Nickleby! to your desk, sir.’

It was remarked by more than one small observer, that there was a very
curious and unusual expression in the usher’s face; but he took his
seat, without opening his lips in reply. Squeers, casting a triumphant
glance at his assistant and a look of most comprehensive despotism on
the boys, left the room, and shortly afterwards returned, dragging
Smike by the collar--or rather by that fragment of his jacket which was
nearest the place where his collar would have been, had he boasted such
a decoration.

In any other place, the appearance of the wretched, jaded, spiritless
object would have occasioned a murmur of compassion and remonstrance. It
had some effect, even there; for the lookers-on moved uneasily in their
seats; and a few of the boldest ventured to steal looks at each other,
expressive of indignation and pity.

They were lost on Squeers, however, whose gaze was fastened on the
luckless Smike, as he inquired, according to custom in such cases,
whether he had anything to say for himself.

‘Nothing, I suppose?’ said Squeers, with a diabolical grin.

Smike glanced round, and his eye rested, for an instant, on Nicholas,
as if he had expected him to intercede; but his look was riveted on his
desk.

‘Have you anything to say?’ demanded Squeers again: giving his right arm
two or three flourishes to try its power and suppleness. ‘Stand a little
out of the way, Mrs. Squeers, my dear; I’ve hardly got room enough.’

‘Spare me, sir!’ cried Smike.

‘Oh! that’s all, is it?’ said Squeers. ‘Yes, I’ll flog you within an
inch of your life, and spare you that.’

‘Ha, ha, ha,’ laughed Mrs. Squeers, ‘that’s a good ‘un!’

‘I was driven to do it,’ said Smike faintly; and casting another
imploring look about him.

‘Driven to do it, were you?’ said Squeers. ‘Oh! it wasn’t your fault; it
was mine, I suppose--eh?’

‘A nasty, ungrateful, pig-headed, brutish, obstinate, sneaking
dog,’ exclaimed Mrs. Squeers, taking Smike’s head under her arm, and
administering a cuff at every epithet; ‘what does he mean by that?’

‘Stand aside, my dear,’ replied Squeers. ‘We’ll try and find out.’

Mrs. Squeers, being out of breath with her exertions, complied. Squeers
caught the boy firmly in his grip; one desperate cut had fallen on his
body--he was wincing from the lash and uttering a scream of pain--it was
raised again, and again about to fall--when Nicholas Nickleby, suddenly
starting up, cried ‘Stop!’ in a voice that made the rafters ring.

‘Who cried stop?’ said Squeers, turning savagely round.

‘I,’ said Nicholas, stepping forward. ‘This must not go on.’

‘Must not go on!’ cried Squeers, almost in a shriek.

‘No!’ thundered Nicholas.

Aghast and stupefied by the boldness of the interference, Squeers
released his hold of Smike, and, falling back a pace or two, gazed upon
Nicholas with looks that were positively frightful.

‘I say must not,’ repeated Nicholas, nothing daunted; ‘shall not. I will
prevent it.’

Squeers continued to gaze upon him, with his eyes starting out of his
head; but astonishment had actually, for the moment, bereft him of
speech.

‘You have disregarded all my quiet interference in the miserable lad’s
behalf,’ said Nicholas; ‘you have returned no answer to the letter in
which I begged forgiveness for him, and offered to be responsible
that he would remain quietly here. Don’t blame me for this public
interference. You have brought it upon yourself; not I.’

‘Sit down, beggar!’ screamed Squeers, almost beside himself with rage,
and seizing Smike as he spoke.

‘Wretch,’ rejoined Nicholas, fiercely, ‘touch him at your peril! I will
not stand by, and see it done. My blood is up, and I have the strength
of ten such men as you. Look to yourself, for by Heaven I will not spare
you, if you drive me on!’

‘Stand back,’ cried Squeers, brandishing his weapon.

‘I have a long series of insults to avenge,’ said Nicholas, flushed with
passion; ‘and my indignation is aggravated by the dastardly cruelties
practised on helpless infancy in this foul den. Have a care; for if you
do raise the devil within me, the consequences shall fall heavily upon
your own head!’

He had scarcely spoken, when Squeers, in a violent outbreak of wrath,
and with a cry like the howl of a wild beast, spat upon him, and struck
him a blow across the face with his instrument of torture, which raised
up a bar of livid flesh as it was inflicted. Smarting with the agony
of the blow, and concentrating into that one moment all his feelings
of rage, scorn, and indignation, Nicholas sprang upon him, wrested the
weapon from his hand, and pinning him by the throat, beat the ruffian
till he roared for mercy.

The boys--with the exception of Master Squeers, who, coming to his
father’s assistance, harassed the enemy in the rear--moved not, hand or
foot; but Mrs. Squeers, with many shrieks for aid, hung on to the tail
of her partner’s coat, and endeavoured to drag him from his infuriated
adversary; while Miss Squeers, who had been peeping through the
keyhole in expectation of a very different scene, darted in at the very
beginning of the attack, and after launching a shower of inkstands
at the usher’s head, beat Nicholas to her heart’s content; animating
herself, at every blow, with the recollection of his having refused her
proffered love, and thus imparting additional strength to an arm which
(as she took after her mother in this respect) was, at no time, one of
the weakest.

Nicholas, in the full torrent of his violence, felt the blows no more
than if they had been dealt with feathers; but, becoming tired of the
noise and uproar, and feeling that his arm grew weak besides, he threw
all his remaining strength into half-a-dozen finishing cuts, and flung
Squeers from him with all the force he could muster. The violence of
his fall precipitated Mrs. Squeers completely over an adjacent form; and
Squeers striking his head against it in his descent, lay at his full
length on the ground, stunned and motionless.

Having brought affairs to this happy termination, and ascertained, to
his thorough satisfaction, that Squeers was only stunned, and not dead
(upon which point he had had some unpleasant doubts at first), Nicholas
left his family to restore him, and retired to consider what course he
had better adopt. He looked anxiously round for Smike, as he left the
room, but he was nowhere to be seen.

After a brief consideration, he packed up a few clothes in a small
leathern valise, and, finding that nobody offered to oppose his
progress, marched boldly out by the front-door, and shortly afterwards,
struck into the road which led to Greta Bridge.

When he had cooled sufficiently to be enabled to give his present
circumstances some little reflection, they did not appear in a very
encouraging light; he had only four shillings and a few pence in his
pocket, and was something more than two hundred and fifty miles
from London, whither he resolved to direct his steps, that he might
ascertain, among other things, what account of the morning’s proceedings
Mr. Squeers transmitted to his most affectionate uncle.

Lifting up his eyes, as he arrived at the conclusion that there was no
remedy for this unfortunate state of things, he beheld a horseman coming
towards him, whom, on nearer approach, he discovered, to his infinite
chagrin, to be no other than Mr. John Browdie, who, clad in cords and
leather leggings, was urging his animal forward by means of a thick ash
stick, which seemed to have been recently cut from some stout sapling.

‘I am in no mood for more noise and riot,’ thought Nicholas, ‘and yet,
do what I will, I shall have an altercation with this honest blockhead,
and perhaps a blow or two from yonder staff.’

In truth, there appeared some reason to expect that such a result would
follow from the encounter, for John Browdie no sooner saw Nicholas
advancing, than he reined in his horse by the footpath, and waited until
such time as he should come up; looking meanwhile, very sternly between
the horse’s ears, at Nicholas, as he came on at his leisure.

‘Servant, young genelman,’ said John.

‘Yours,’ said Nicholas.

‘Weel; we ha’ met at last,’ observed John, making the stirrup ring under
a smart touch of the ash stick.

‘Yes,’ replied Nicholas, hesitating. ‘Come!’ he said, frankly, after a
moment’s pause, ‘we parted on no very good terms the last time we met;
it was my fault, I believe; but I had no intention of offending you, and
no idea that I was doing so. I was very sorry for it, afterwards. Will
you shake hands?’

‘Shake honds!’ cried the good-humoured Yorkshireman; ‘ah! that I weel;’
at the same time, he bent down from the saddle, and gave Nicholas’s fist
a huge wrench: ‘but wa’at be the matther wi’ thy feace, mun? it be all
brokken loike.’

‘It is a cut,’ said Nicholas, turning scarlet as he spoke,--‘a blow; but
I returned it to the giver, and with good interest too.’

‘Noa, did ‘ee though?’ exclaimed John Browdie. ‘Well deane! I loike ‘un
for thot.’

‘The fact is,’ said Nicholas, not very well knowing how to make the
avowal, ‘the fact is, that I have been ill-treated.’

‘Noa!’ interposed John Browdie, in a tone of compassion; for he was a
giant in strength and stature, and Nicholas, very likely, in his eyes,
seemed a mere dwarf; ‘dean’t say thot.’

‘Yes, I have,’ replied Nicholas, ‘by that man Squeers, and I have beaten
him soundly, and am leaving this place in consequence.’

‘What!’ cried John Browdie, with such an ecstatic shout, that the horse
quite shied at it. ‘Beatten the schoolmeasther! Ho! ho! ho! Beatten the
schoolmeasther! who ever heard o’ the loike o’ that noo! Giv’ us thee
hond agean, yoongster. Beatten the schoolmeasther! Dang it, I loov’ thee
for’t.’

With these expressions of delight, John Browdie laughed and laughed
again--so loud that the echoes, far and wide, sent back nothing but
jovial peals of merriment--and shook Nicholas by the hand meanwhile, no
less heartily. When his mirth had subsided, he inquired what Nicholas
meant to do; on his informing him, to go straight to London, he shook
his head doubtfully, and inquired if he knew how much the coaches
charged to carry passengers so far.

‘No, I do not,’ said Nicholas; ‘but it is of no great consequence to me,
for I intend walking.’

‘Gang awa’ to Lunnun afoot!’ cried John, in amazement.

‘Every step of the way,’ replied Nicholas. ‘I should be many steps
further on by this time, and so goodbye!’

‘Nay noo,’ replied the honest countryman, reining in his impatient
horse, ‘stan’ still, tellee. Hoo much cash hast thee gotten?’

‘Not much,’ said Nicholas, colouring, ‘but I can make it enough. Where
there’s a will, there’s a way, you know.’

John Browdie made no verbal answer to this remark, but putting his hand
in his pocket, pulled out an old purse of solid leather, and insisted
that Nicholas should borrow from him whatever he required for his
present necessities.

‘Dean’t be afeard, mun,’ he said; ‘tak’ eneaf to carry thee whoam.
Thee’lt pay me yan day, a’ warrant.’

Nicholas could by no means be prevailed upon to borrow more than a
sovereign, with which loan Mr. Browdie, after many entreaties that he
would accept of more (observing, with a touch of Yorkshire caution, that
if he didn’t spend it all, he could put the surplus by, till he had an
opportunity of remitting it carriage free), was fain to content himself.

‘Tak’ that bit o’ timber to help thee on wi’, mun,’ he added, pressing
his stick on Nicholas, and giving his hand another squeeze; ‘keep a good
heart, and bless thee. Beatten the schoolmeasther! ‘Cod it’s the best
thing a’ve heerd this twonty year!’

So saying, and indulging, with more delicacy than might have been
expected from him, in another series of loud laughs, for the purpose of
avoiding the thanks which Nicholas poured forth, John Browdie set spurs
to his horse, and went off at a smart canter: looking back, from time to
time, as Nicholas stood gazing after him, and waving his hand cheerily,
as if to encourage him on his way. Nicholas watched the horse and rider
until they disappeared over the brow of a distant hill, and then set
forward on his journey.

He did not travel far that afternoon, for by this time it was nearly
dark, and there had been a heavy fall of snow, which not only rendered
the way toilsome, but the track uncertain and difficult to find, after
daylight, save by experienced wayfarers. He lay, that night, at a
cottage, where beds were let at a cheap rate to the more humble class of
travellers; and, rising betimes next morning, made his way before night
to Boroughbridge. Passing through that town in search of some cheap
resting-place, he stumbled upon an empty barn within a couple of hundred
yards of the roadside; in a warm corner of which, he stretched his weary
limbs, and soon fell asleep.

When he awoke next morning, and tried to recollect his dreams, which had
been all connected with his recent sojourn at Dotheboys Hall, he sat
up, rubbed his eyes and stared--not with the most composed countenance
possible--at some motionless object which seemed to be stationed within
a few yards in front of him.

‘Strange!’ cried Nicholas; ‘can this be some lingering creation of the
visions that have scarcely left me! It cannot be real--and yet I--I am
awake! Smike!’

The form moved, rose, advanced, and dropped upon its knees at his feet.
It was Smike indeed.

‘Why do you kneel to me?’ said Nicholas, hastily raising him.

‘To go with you--anywhere--everywhere--to the world’s end--to the
churchyard grave,’ replied Smike, clinging to his hand. ‘Let me, oh do
let me. You are my home--my kind friend--take me with you, pray.’

‘I am a friend who can do little for you,’ said Nicholas, kindly. ‘How
came you here?’

He had followed him, it seemed; had never lost sight of him all the way;
had watched while he slept, and when he halted for refreshment; and
had feared to appear before, lest he should be sent back. He had not
intended to appear now, but Nicholas had awakened more suddenly than he
looked for, and he had had no time to conceal himself.

‘Poor fellow!’ said Nicholas, ‘your hard fate denies you any friend but
one, and he is nearly as poor and helpless as yourself.’

‘May I--may I go with you?’ asked Smike, timidly. ‘I will be your
faithful hard-working servant, I will, indeed. I want no clothes,’ added
the poor creature, drawing his rags together; ‘these will do very well.
I only want to be near you.’

‘And you shall,’ cried Nicholas. ‘And the world shall deal by you as it
does by me, till one or both of us shall quit it for a better. Come!’

With these words, he strapped his burden on his shoulders, and, taking
his stick in one hand, extended the other to his delighted charge; and
so they passed out of the old barn, together.



CHAPTER 14

Having the Misfortune to treat of none but Common People, is necessarily
of a Mean and Vulgar Character


In that quarter of London in which Golden Square is situated, there is
a bygone, faded, tumble-down street, with two irregular rows of tall
meagre houses, which seem to have stared each other out of countenance
years ago. The very chimneys appear to have grown dismal and melancholy,
from having had nothing better to look at than the chimneys over the
way. Their tops are battered, and broken, and blackened with smoke; and,
here and there, some taller stack than the rest, inclining heavily to
one side, and toppling over the roof, seems to meditate taking revenge
for half a century’s neglect, by crushing the inhabitants of the garrets
beneath.

The fowls who peck about the kennels, jerking their bodies hither and
thither with a gait which none but town fowls are ever seen to adopt,
and which any country cock or hen would be puzzled to understand, are
perfectly in keeping with the crazy habitations of their owners. Dingy,
ill-plumed, drowsy flutterers, sent, like many of the neighbouring
children, to get a livelihood in the streets, they hop, from stone to
stone, in forlorn search of some hidden eatable in the mud, and can
scarcely raise a crow among them. The only one with anything approaching
to a voice, is an aged bantam at the baker’s; and even he is hoarse, in
consequence of bad living in his last place.

To judge from the size of the houses, they have been, at one time,
tenanted by persons of better condition than their present occupants;
but they are now let off, by the week, in floors or rooms, and every
door has almost as many plates or bell-handles as there are apartments
within. The windows are, for the same reason, sufficiently diversified
in appearance, being ornamented with every variety of common blind and
curtain that can easily be imagined; while every doorway is blocked up,
and rendered nearly impassable, by a motley collection of children and
porter pots of all sizes, from the baby in arms and the half-pint pot,
to the full-grown girl and half-gallon can.

In the parlour of one of these houses, which was perhaps a thought
dirtier than any of its neighbours; which exhibited more bell-handles,
children, and porter pots, and caught in all its freshness the first
gust of the thick black smoke that poured forth, night and day, from a
large brewery hard by; hung a bill, announcing that there was yet one
room to let within its walls, though on what story the vacant room could
be--regard being had to the outward tokens of many lodgers which the
whole front displayed, from the mangle in the kitchen window to the
flower-pots on the parapet--it would have been beyond the power of a
calculating boy to discover.

The common stairs of this mansion were bare and carpetless; but a
curious visitor who had to climb his way to the top, might have observed
that there were not wanting indications of the progressive poverty
of the inmates, although their rooms were shut. Thus, the first-floor
lodgers, being flush of furniture, kept an old mahogany table--real
mahogany--on the landing-place outside, which was only taken in, when
occasion required. On the second story, the spare furniture dwindled
down to a couple of old deal chairs, of which one, belonging to the
back-room, was shorn of a leg, and bottomless. The story above,
boasted no greater excess than a worm-eaten wash-tub; and the garret
landing-place displayed no costlier articles than two crippled pitchers,
and some broken blacking-bottles.

It was on this garret landing-place that a hard-featured square-faced
man, elderly and shabby, stopped to unlock the door of the front attic,
into which, having surmounted the task of turning the rusty key in its
still more rusty wards, he walked with the air of legal owner.

This person wore a wig of short, coarse, red hair, which he took off
with his hat, and hung upon a nail. Having adopted in its place a dirty
cotton nightcap, and groped about in the dark till he found a remnant of
candle, he knocked at the partition which divided the two garrets, and
inquired, in a loud voice, whether Mr. Noggs had a light.

The sounds that came back were stifled by the lath and plaster, and it
seemed moreover as though the speaker had uttered them from the interior
of a mug or other drinking vessel; but they were in the voice of Newman,
and conveyed a reply in the affirmative.

‘A nasty night, Mr. Noggs!’ said the man in the nightcap, stepping in to
light his candle.

‘Does it rain?’ asked Newman.

‘Does it?’ replied the other pettishly. ‘I am wet through.’

‘It doesn’t take much to wet you and me through, Mr. Crowl,’ said Newman,
laying his hand upon the lappel of his threadbare coat.

‘Well; and that makes it the more vexatious,’ observed Mr. Crowl, in the
same pettish tone.

Uttering a low querulous growl, the speaker, whose harsh countenance was
the very epitome of selfishness, raked the scanty fire nearly out of
the grate, and, emptying the glass which Noggs had pushed towards him,
inquired where he kept his coals.

Newman Noggs pointed to the bottom of a cupboard, and Mr. Crowl, seizing
the shovel, threw on half the stock: which Noggs very deliberately took
off again, without saying a word.

‘You have not turned saving, at this time of day, I hope?’ said Crowl.

Newman pointed to the empty glass, as though it were a sufficient
refutation of the charge, and briefly said that he was going downstairs
to supper.

‘To the Kenwigses?’ asked Crowl.

Newman nodded assent.

‘Think of that now!’ said Crowl. ‘If I didn’t--thinking that you
were certain not to go, because you said you wouldn’t--tell Kenwigs I
couldn’t come, and make up my mind to spend the evening with you!’

‘I was obliged to go,’ said Newman. ‘They would have me.’

‘Well; but what’s to become of me?’ urged the selfish man, who never
thought of anybody else. ‘It’s all your fault. I’ll tell you what--I’ll
sit by your fire till you come back again.’

Newman cast a despairing glance at his small store of fuel, but, not
having the courage to say no--a word which in all his life he never had
said at the right time, either to himself or anyone else--gave way to
the proposed arrangement. Mr. Crowl immediately went about making himself
as comfortable, with Newman Nogg’s means, as circumstances would admit
of his being made.

The lodgers to whom Crowl had made allusion under the designation of
‘the Kenwigses,’ were the wife and olive branches of one Mr. Kenwigs, a
turner in ivory, who was looked upon as a person of some consideration
on the premises, inasmuch as he occupied the whole of the first floor,
comprising a suite of two rooms. Mrs. Kenwigs, too, was quite a lady in
her manners, and of a very genteel family, having an uncle who collected
a water-rate; besides which distinction, the two eldest of her little
girls went twice a week to a dancing school in the neighbourhood, and
had flaxen hair, tied with blue ribbons, hanging in luxuriant pigtails
down their backs; and wore little white trousers with frills round the
ankles--for all of which reasons, and many more equally valid but too
numerous to mention, Mrs. Kenwigs was considered a very desirable person
to know, and was the constant theme of all the gossips in the street,
and even three or four doors round the corner at both ends.

It was the anniversary of that happy day on which the Church of England
as by law established, had bestowed Mrs. Kenwigs upon Mr. Kenwigs; and in
grateful commemoration of the same, Mrs. Kenwigs had invited a few select
friends to cards and a supper in the first floor, and had put on a new
gown to receive them in: which gown, being of a flaming colour and made
upon a juvenile principle, was so successful that Mr. Kenwigs said the
eight years of matrimony and the five children seemed all a dream, and
Mrs. Kenwigs younger and more blooming than on the very first Sunday he
had kept company with her.

Beautiful as Mrs. Kenwigs looked when she was dressed though, and so
stately that you would have supposed she had a cook and housemaid
at least, and nothing to do but order them about, she had a world
of trouble with the preparations; more, indeed, than she, being of a
delicate and genteel constitution, could have sustained, had not the
pride of housewifery upheld her. At last, however, all the things that
had to be got together were got together, and all the things that had to
be got out of the way were got out of the way, and everything was ready,
and the collector himself having promised to come, fortune smiled upon
the occasion.

The party was admirably selected. There were, first of all, Mr. Kenwigs
and Mrs. Kenwigs, and four olive Kenwigses who sat up to supper; firstly,
because it was but right that they should have a treat on such a day;
and secondly, because their going to bed, in presence of the company,
would have been inconvenient, not to say improper. Then, there was a
young lady who had made Mrs. Kenwigs’s dress, and who--it was the most
convenient thing in the world--living in the two-pair back, gave up her
bed to the baby, and got a little girl to watch it. Then, to match this
young lady, was a young man, who had known Mr. Kenwigs when he was a
bachelor, and was much esteemed by the ladies, as bearing the reputation
of a rake. To these were added a newly-married couple, who had visited
Mr. and Mrs. Kenwigs in their courtship; and a sister of Mrs. Kenwigs’s,
who was quite a beauty; besides whom, there was another young man,
supposed to entertain honourable designs upon the lady last mentioned;
and Mr. Noggs, who was a genteel person to ask, because he had been a
gentleman once. There were also an elderly lady from the back-parlour,
and one more young lady, who, next to the collector, perhaps was the
great lion of the party, being the daughter of a theatrical fireman, who
‘went on’ in the pantomime, and had the greatest turn for the stage that
was ever known, being able to sing and recite in a manner that brought
the tears into Mrs. Kenwigs’s eyes. There was only one drawback upon
the pleasure of seeing such friends, and that was, that the lady in
the back-parlour, who was very fat, and turned of sixty, came in a
low book-muslin dress and short kid gloves, which so exasperated Mrs
Kenwigs, that that lady assured her visitors, in private, that if it
hadn’t happened that the supper was cooking at the back-parlour grate
at that moment, she certainly would have requested its representative to
withdraw.

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, ‘wouldn’t it be better to begin a round
game?’

‘Kenwigs, my dear,’ returned his wife, ‘I am surprised at you. Would you
begin without my uncle?’

‘I forgot the collector,’ said Kenwigs; ‘oh no, that would never do.’

‘He’s so particular,’ said Mrs. Kenwigs, turning to the other married
lady, ‘that if we began without him, I should be out of his will for
ever.’

‘Dear!’ cried the married lady.

‘You’ve no idea what he is,’ replied Mrs. Kenwigs; ‘and yet as good a
creature as ever breathed.’

‘The kindest-hearted man as ever was,’ said Kenwigs.

‘It goes to his heart, I believe, to be forced to cut the water off,
when the people don’t pay,’ observed the bachelor friend, intending a
joke.

‘George,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, solemnly, ‘none of that, if you please.’

‘It was only my joke,’ said the friend, abashed.

‘George,’ rejoined Mr. Kenwigs, ‘a joke is a wery good thing--a wery
good thing--but when that joke is made at the expense of Mrs. Kenwigs’s
feelings, I set my face against it. A man in public life expects to
be sneered at--it is the fault of his elewated sitiwation, and not of
himself. Mrs. Kenwigs’s relation is a public man, and that he knows,
George, and that he can bear; but putting Mrs. Kenwigs out of the
question (if I COULD put Mrs. Kenwigs out of the question on such an
occasion as this), I have the honour to be connected with the collector
by marriage; and I cannot allow these remarks in my--’ Mr. Kenwigs was
going to say ‘house,’ but he rounded the sentence with ‘apartments’.

At the conclusion of these observations, which drew forth evidences
of acute feeling from Mrs. Kenwigs, and had the intended effect of
impressing the company with a deep sense of the collector’s dignity, a
ring was heard at the bell.

‘That’s him,’ whispered Mr. Kenwigs, greatly excited. ‘Morleena, my dear,
run down and let your uncle in, and kiss him directly you get the door
open. Hem! Let’s be talking.’

Adopting Mr. Kenwigs’s suggestion, the company spoke very loudly, to look
easy and unembarrassed; and almost as soon as they had begun to do so,
a short old gentleman in drabs and gaiters, with a face that might
have been carved out of LIGNUM VITAE, for anything that appeared to the
contrary, was led playfully in by Miss Morleena Kenwigs, regarding
whose uncommon Christian name it may be here remarked that it had been
invented and composed by Mrs. Kenwigs previous to her first lying-in, for
the special distinction of her eldest child, in case it should prove a
daughter.

‘Oh, uncle, I am SO glad to see you,’ said Mrs. Kenwigs, kissing the
collector affectionately on both cheeks. ‘So glad!’

‘Many happy returns of the day, my dear,’ replied the collector,
returning the compliment.

Now, this was an interesting thing. Here was a collector of water-rates,
without his book, without his pen and ink, without his double knock,
without his intimidation, kissing--actually kissing--an agreeable
female, and leaving taxes, summonses, notices that he had called, or
announcements that he would never call again, for two quarters’ due,
wholly out of the question. It was pleasant to see how the company
looked on, quite absorbed in the sight, and to behold the nods and
winks with which they expressed their gratification at finding so much
humanity in a tax-gatherer.

‘Where will you sit, uncle?’ said Mrs. Kenwigs, in the full glow of
family pride, which the appearance of her distinguished relation
occasioned.

‘Anywheres, my dear,’ said the collector, ‘I am not particular.’

Not particular! What a meek collector! If he had been an author, who
knew his place, he couldn’t have been more humble.

‘Mr. Lillyvick,’ said Kenwigs, addressing the collector, ‘some friends
here, sir, are very anxious for the honour of--thank you--Mr. and Mrs
Cutler, Mr. Lillyvick.’

‘Proud to know you, sir,’ said Mr. Cutler; ‘I’ve heerd of you very
often.’ These were not mere words of ceremony; for, Mr. Cutler, having
kept house in Mr. Lillyvick’s parish, had heard of him very often indeed.
His attention in calling had been quite extraordinary.

‘George, you know, I think, Mr. Lillyvick,’ said Kenwigs; ‘lady from
downstairs--Mr. Lillyvick. Mr. Snewkes--Mr. Lillyvick. Miss Green--Mr
Lillyvick. Mr. Lillyvick--Miss Petowker of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
Very glad to make two public characters acquainted! Mrs. Kenwigs, my
dear, will you sort the counters?’

Mrs. Kenwigs, with the assistance of Newman Noggs, (who, as he performed
sundry little acts of kindness for the children, at all times and
seasons, was humoured in his request to be taken no notice of, and was
merely spoken about, in a whisper, as the decayed gentleman), did as he
was desired; and the greater part of the guests sat down to speculation,
while Newman himself, Mrs. Kenwigs, and Miss Petowker of the Theatre
Royal Drury Lane, looked after the supper-table.

While the ladies were thus busying themselves, Mr. Lillyvick was intent
upon the game in progress, and as all should be fish that comes to a
water-collector’s net, the dear old gentleman was by no means scrupulous
in appropriating to himself the property of his neighbours, which, on
the contrary, he abstracted whenever an opportunity presented itself,
smiling good-humouredly all the while, and making so many condescending
speeches to the owners, that they were delighted with his amiability,
and thought in their hearts that he deserved to be Chancellor of the
Exchequer at least.

After a great deal of trouble, and the administration of many slaps on
the head to the infant Kenwigses, whereof two of the most rebellious
were summarily banished, the cloth was laid with much elegance, and a
pair of boiled fowls, a large piece of pork, apple-pie, potatoes and
greens, were served; at sight of which, the worthy Mr. Lillyvick vented a
great many witticisms, and plucked up amazingly: to the immense delight
and satisfaction of the whole body of admirers.

Very well and very fast the supper went off; no more serious
difficulties occurring, than those which arose from the incessant demand
for clean knives and forks; which made poor Mrs. Kenwigs wish, more
than once, that private society adopted the principle of schools, and
required that every guest should bring his own knife, fork, and spoon;
which doubtless would be a great accommodation in many cases, and to no
one more so than to the lady and gentleman of the house, especially
if the school principle were carried out to the full extent, and the
articles were expected, as a matter of delicacy, not to be taken away
again.

Everybody having eaten everything, the table was cleared in a most
alarming hurry, and with great noise; and the spirits, whereat the eyes
of Newman Noggs glistened, being arranged in order, with water both hot
and cold, the party composed themselves for conviviality; Mr. Lillyvick
being stationed in a large armchair by the fireside, and the four little
Kenwigses disposed on a small form in front of the company with their
flaxen tails towards them, and their faces to the fire; an arrangement
which was no sooner perfected, than Mrs. Kenwigs was overpowered by the
feelings of a mother, and fell upon the left shoulder of Mr. Kenwigs
dissolved in tears.

‘They are so beautiful!’ said Mrs. Kenwigs, sobbing.

‘Oh, dear,’ said all the ladies, ‘so they are! it’s very natural you
should feel proud of that; but don’t give way, don’t.’

‘I can--not help it, and it don’t signify,’ sobbed Mrs. Kenwigs; ‘oh!
they’re too beautiful to live, much too beautiful!’

On hearing this alarming presentiment of their being doomed to an early
death in the flower of their infancy, all four little girls raised
a hideous cry, and burying their heads in their mother’s lap
simultaneously, screamed until the eight flaxen tails vibrated again;
Mrs. Kenwigs meanwhile clasping them alternately to her bosom, with
attitudes expressive of distraction, which Miss Petowker herself might
have copied.

At length, the anxious mother permitted herself to be soothed into a
more tranquil state, and the little Kenwigses, being also composed, were
distributed among the company, to prevent the possibility of Mrs. Kenwigs
being again overcome by the blaze of their combined beauty. This done,
the ladies and gentlemen united in prophesying that they would live for
many, many years, and that there was no occasion at all for Mrs. Kenwigs
to distress herself; which, in good truth, there did not appear to be;
the loveliness of the children by no means justifying her apprehensions.

‘This day eight year,’ said Mr. Kenwigs after a pause. ‘Dear me--ah!’

This reflection was echoed by all present, who said ‘Ah!’ first, and
‘dear me,’ afterwards.

‘I was younger then,’ tittered Mrs. Kenwigs.

‘No,’ said the collector.

‘Certainly not,’ added everybody.

‘I remember my niece,’ said Mr. Lillyvick, surveying his audience with
a grave air; ‘I remember her, on that very afternoon, when she first
acknowledged to her mother a partiality for Kenwigs. “Mother,” she says,
“I love him.”’

‘“Adore him,” I said, uncle,’ interposed Mrs. Kenwigs.

‘“Love him,” I think, my dear,’ said the collector, firmly.

‘Perhaps you are right, uncle,’ replied Mrs. Kenwigs, submissively. ‘I
thought it was “adore.”’

‘“Love,” my dear,’ retorted Mr. Lillyvick. ‘“Mother,” she says, “I love
him!” “What do I hear?” cries her mother; and instantly falls into
strong conwulsions.’

A general exclamation of astonishment burst from the company.

‘Into strong conwulsions,’ repeated Mr. Lillyvick, regarding them with a
rigid look. ‘Kenwigs will excuse my saying, in the presence of friends,
that there was a very great objection to him, on the ground that he was
beneath the family, and would disgrace it. You remember, Kenwigs?’

‘Certainly,’ replied that gentleman, in no way displeased at the
reminiscence, inasmuch as it proved, beyond all doubt, what a high
family Mrs. Kenwigs came of.

‘I shared in that feeling,’ said Mr. Lillyvick: ‘perhaps it was natural;
perhaps it wasn’t.’

A gentle murmur seemed to say, that, in one of Mr. Lillyvick’s station,
the objection was not only natural, but highly praiseworthy.

‘I came round to him in time,’ said Mr. Lillyvick. ‘After they were
married, and there was no help for it, I was one of the first to say
that Kenwigs must be taken notice of. The family DID take notice of him,
in consequence, and on my representation; and I am bound to say--and
proud to say--that I have always found him a very honest, well-behaved,
upright, respectable sort of man. Kenwigs, shake hands.’

‘I am proud to do it, sir,’ said Mr. Kenwigs.

‘So am I, Kenwigs,’ rejoined Mr. Lillyvick.

‘A very happy life I have led with your niece, sir,’ said Kenwigs.

‘It would have been your own fault if you had not, sir,’ remarked Mr
Lillyvick.

‘Morleena Kenwigs,’ cried her mother, at this crisis, much affected,
‘kiss your dear uncle!’

The young lady did as she was requested, and the three other little
girls were successively hoisted up to the collector’s countenance, and
subjected to the same process, which was afterwards repeated on them by
the majority of those present.

‘Oh dear, Mrs. Kenwigs,’ said Miss Petowker, ‘while Mr. Noggs is making
that punch to drink happy returns in, do let Morleena go through that
figure dance before Mr. Lillyvick.’

‘No, no, my dear,’ replied Mrs. Kenwigs, ‘it will only worry my uncle.’

‘It can’t worry him, I am sure,’ said Miss Petowker. ‘You will be very
much pleased, won’t you, sir?’

‘That I am sure I shall’ replied the collector, glancing at the
punch-mixer.

‘Well then, I’ll tell you what,’ said Mrs. Kenwigs, ‘Morleena shall
do the steps, if uncle can persuade Miss Petowker to recite us the
Blood-Drinker’s Burial, afterwards.’

There was a great clapping of hands and stamping of feet, at this
proposition; the subject whereof, gently inclined her head several
times, in acknowledgment of the reception.

‘You know,’ said Miss Petowker, reproachfully, ‘that I dislike doing
anything professional in private parties.’

‘Oh, but not here!’ said Mrs. Kenwigs. ‘We are all so very friendly and
pleasant, that you might as well be going through it in your own room;
besides, the occasion--’

‘I can’t resist that,’ interrupted Miss Petowker; ‘anything in my humble
power I shall be delighted to do.’

Mrs. Kenwigs and Miss Petowker had arranged a small PROGRAMME of the
entertainments between them, of which this was the prescribed order,
but they had settled to have a little pressing on both sides, because it
looked more natural. The company being all ready, Miss Petowker hummed
a tune, and Morleena danced a dance; having previously had the soles
of her shoes chalked, with as much care as if she were going on the
tight-rope. It was a very beautiful figure, comprising a great deal of
work for the arms, and was received with unbounded applause.

‘If I was blessed with a--a child--’ said Miss Petowker, blushing, ‘of
such genius as that, I would have her out at the Opera instantly.’

Mrs. Kenwigs sighed, and looked at Mr. Kenwigs, who shook his head, and
observed that he was doubtful about it.

‘Kenwigs is afraid,’ said Mrs. K.

‘What of?’ inquired Miss Petowker, ‘not of her failing?’

‘Oh no,’ replied Mrs. Kenwigs, ‘but if she grew up what she is now,--only
think of the young dukes and marquises.’

‘Very right,’ said the collector.

‘Still,’ submitted Miss Petowker, ‘if she took a proper pride in
herself, you know--’

‘There’s a good deal in that,’ observed Mrs. Kenwigs, looking at her
husband.

‘I only know--’ faltered Miss Petowker,--‘it may be no rule to be
sure--but I have never found any inconvenience or unpleasantness of that
sort.’

Mr. Kenwigs, with becoming gallantry, said that settled the question at
once, and that he would take the subject into his serious consideration.
This being resolved upon, Miss Petowker was entreated to begin the
Blood-Drinker’s Burial; to which end, that young lady let down her back
hair, and taking up her position at the other end of the room, with the
bachelor friend posted in a corner, to rush out at the cue ‘in death
expire,’ and catch her in his arms when she died raving mad, went
through the performance with extraordinary spirit, and to the great
terror of the little Kenwigses, who were all but frightened into fits.

The ecstasies consequent upon the effort had not yet subsided, and
Newman (who had not been thoroughly sober at so late an hour for a long
long time,) had not yet been able to put in a word of announcement,
that the punch was ready, when a hasty knock was heard at the room-door,
which elicited a shriek from Mrs. Kenwigs, who immediately divined that
the baby had fallen out of bed.

‘Who is that?’ demanded Mr. Kenwigs, sharply.

‘Don’t be alarmed, it’s only me,’ said Crowl, looking in, in his
nightcap. ‘The baby is very comfortable, for I peeped into the room as
I came down, and it’s fast asleep, and so is the girl; and I don’t think
the candle will set fire to the bed-curtain, unless a draught was to get
into the room--it’s Mr. Noggs that’s wanted.’

‘Me!’ cried Newman, much astonished.

‘Why, it IS a queer hour, isn’t it?’ replied Crowl, who was not best
pleased at the prospect of losing his fire; ‘and they are queer-looking
people, too, all covered with rain and mud. Shall I tell them to go
away?’

‘No,’ said Newman, rising. ‘People? How many?’

‘Two,’ rejoined Crowl.

‘Want me? By name?’ asked Newman.

‘By name,’ replied Crowl. ‘Mr. Newman Noggs, as pat as need be.’

Newman reflected for a few seconds, and then hurried away, muttering
that he would be back directly. He was as good as his word; for, in an
exceedingly short time, he burst into the room, and seizing, without
a word of apology or explanation, a lighted candle and tumbler of hot
punch from the table, darted away like a madman.

‘What the deuce is the matter with him?’ exclaimed Crowl, throwing the
door open. ‘Hark! Is there any noise above?’

The guests rose in great confusion, and, looking in each other’s faces
with much perplexity and some fear, stretched their necks forward, and
listened attentively.



CHAPTER 15

Acquaints the Reader with the Cause and Origin of the Interruption
described in the last Chapter, and with some other Matters necessary to
be known


Newman Noggs scrambled in violent haste upstairs with the steaming
beverage, which he had so unceremoniously snatched from the table of Mr
Kenwigs, and indeed from the very grasp of the water-rate collector, who
was eyeing the contents of the tumbler, at the moment of its unexpected
abstraction, with lively marks of pleasure visible in his countenance.
He bore his prize straight to his own back-garret, where, footsore and
nearly shoeless, wet, dirty, jaded, and disfigured with every mark of
fatiguing travel, sat Nicholas and Smike, at once the cause and partner
of his toil; both perfectly worn out by their unwonted and protracted
exertion.

Newman’s first act was to compel Nicholas, with gentle force, to swallow
half of the punch at a breath, nearly boiling as it was; and his next,
to pour the remainder down the throat of Smike, who, never having tasted
anything stronger than aperient medicine in his whole life, exhibited
various odd manifestations of surprise and delight, during the passage
of the liquor down his throat, and turned up his eyes most emphatically
when it was all gone.

‘You are wet through,’ said Newman, passing his hand hastily over the
coat which Nicholas had thrown off; ‘and I--I--haven’t even a change,’
he added, with a wistful glance at the shabby clothes he wore himself.

‘I have dry clothes, or at least such as will serve my turn well, in
my bundle,’ replied Nicholas. ‘If you look so distressed to see me, you
will add to the pain I feel already, at being compelled, for one night,
to cast myself upon your slender means for aid and shelter.’

Newman did not look the less distressed to hear Nicholas talking in this
strain; but, upon his young friend grasping him heartily by the hand,
and assuring him that nothing but implicit confidence in the sincerity
of his professions, and kindness of feeling towards himself, would have
induced him, on any consideration, even to have made him acquainted
with his arrival in London, Mr. Noggs brightened up again, and went about
making such arrangements as were in his power for the comfort of his
visitors, with extreme alacrity.

These were simple enough; poor Newman’s means halting at a very
considerable distance short of his inclinations; but, slight as they
were, they were not made without much bustling and running about. As
Nicholas had husbanded his scanty stock of money, so well that it was
not yet quite expended, a supper of bread and cheese, with some cold
beef from the cook’s shop, was soon placed upon the table; and these
viands being flanked by a bottle of spirits and a pot of porter, there
was no ground for apprehension on the score of hunger or thirst, at all
events. Such preparations as Newman had it in his power to make, for
the accommodation of his guests during the night, occupied no very great
time in completing; and as he had insisted, as an express preliminary,
that Nicholas should change his clothes, and that Smike should invest
himself in his solitary coat (which no entreaties would dissuade him
from stripping off for the purpose), the travellers partook of their
frugal fare, with more satisfaction than one of them at least had
derived from many a better meal.

They then drew near the fire, which Newman Noggs had made up as well as
he could, after the inroads of Crowl upon the fuel; and Nicholas, who
had hitherto been restrained by the extreme anxiety of his friend
that he should refresh himself after his journey, now pressed him with
earnest questions concerning his mother and sister.

‘Well,’ replied Newman, with his accustomed taciturnity; ‘both well.’

‘They are living in the city still?’ inquired Nicholas.

‘They are,’ said Newman.

‘And my sister,’--added Nicholas. ‘Is she still engaged in the business
which she wrote to tell me she thought she should like so much?’

Newman opened his eyes rather wider than usual, but merely replied by
a gasp, which, according to the action of the head that accompanied
it, was interpreted by his friends as meaning yes or no. In the present
instance, the pantomime consisted of a nod, and not a shake; so Nicholas
took the answer as a favourable one.

‘Now listen to me,’ said Nicholas, laying his hand on Newman’s shoulder.
‘Before I would make an effort to see them, I deemed it expedient to
come to you, lest, by gratifying my own selfish desire, I should inflict
an injury upon them which I can never repair. What has my uncle heard
from Yorkshire?’

Newman opened and shut his mouth, several times, as though he were
trying his utmost to speak, but could make nothing of it, and finally
fixed his eyes on Nicholas with a grim and ghastly stare.

‘What has he heard?’ urged Nicholas, colouring. ‘You see that I am
prepared to hear the very worst that malice can have suggested. Why
should you conceal it from me? I must know it sooner or later; and what
purpose can be gained by trifling with the matter for a few minutes,
when half the time would put me in possession of all that has occurred?
Tell me at once, pray.’

‘Tomorrow morning,’ said Newman; ‘hear it tomorrow.’

‘What purpose would that answer?’ urged Nicholas.

‘You would sleep the better,’ replied Newman.

‘I should sleep the worse,’ answered Nicholas, impatiently. ‘Sleep!
Exhausted as I am, and standing in no common need of rest, I cannot hope
to close my eyes all night, unless you tell me everything.’

‘And if I should tell you everything,’ said Newman, hesitating.

‘Why, then you may rouse my indignation or wound my pride,’ rejoined
Nicholas; ‘but you will not break my rest; for if the scene were acted
over again, I could take no other part than I have taken; and whatever
consequences may accrue to myself from it, I shall never regret doing as
I have done--never, if I starve or beg in consequence. What is a little
poverty or suffering, to the disgrace of the basest and most inhuman
cowardice! I tell you, if I had stood by, tamely and passively, I should
have hated myself, and merited the contempt of every man in existence.
The black-hearted scoundrel!’

With this gentle allusion to the absent Mr. Squeers, Nicholas repressed
his rising wrath, and relating to Newman exactly what had passed at
Dotheboys Hall, entreated him to speak out without more pressing. Thus
adjured, Mr. Noggs took, from an old trunk, a sheet of paper, which
appeared to have been scrawled over in great haste; and after sundry
extraordinary demonstrations of reluctance, delivered himself in the
following terms.

‘My dear young man, you mustn’t give way to--this sort of thing
will never do, you know--as to getting on in the world, if you take
everybody’s part that’s ill-treated--Damn it, I am proud to hear of it;
and would have done it myself!’

Newman accompanied this very unusual outbreak with a violent blow upon
the table, as if, in the heat of the moment, he had mistaken it for the
chest or ribs of Mr. Wackford Squeers. Having, by this open declaration
of his feelings, quite precluded himself from offering Nicholas any
cautious worldly advice (which had been his first intention), Mr. Noggs
went straight to the point.

‘The day before yesterday,’ said Newman, ‘your uncle received this
letter. I took a hasty copy of it, while he was out. Shall I read it?’

‘If you please,’ replied Nicholas. Newman Noggs accordingly read as
follows:

‘DOTHEBOYS HALL, ‘THURSDAY MORNING.

‘SIR,

‘My pa requests me to write to you, the doctors considering it doubtful
whether he will ever recuvver the use of his legs which prevents his
holding a pen.

‘We are in a state of mind beyond everything, and my pa is one mask of
brooses both blue and green likewise two forms are steepled in his Goar.
We were kimpelled to have him carried down into the kitchen where he now
lays. You will judge from this that he has been brought very low.

‘When your nevew that you recommended for a teacher had done this to
my pa and jumped upon his body with his feet and also langwedge which
I will not pollewt my pen with describing, he assaulted my ma with
dreadful violence, dashed her to the earth, and drove her back comb
several inches into her head. A very little more and it must have
entered her skull. We have a medical certifiket that if it had, the
tortershell would have affected the brain.

‘Me and my brother were then the victims of his feury since which we
have suffered very much which leads us to the arrowing belief that we
have received some injury in our insides, especially as no marks of
violence are visible externally. I am screaming out loud all the time
I write and so is my brother which takes off my attention rather and I
hope will excuse mistakes.

‘The monster having sasiated his thirst for blood ran away, taking with
him a boy of desperate character that he had excited to rebellyon, and a
garnet ring belonging to my ma, and not having been apprehended by the
constables is supposed to have been took up by some stage-coach. My pa
begs that if he comes to you the ring may be returned, and that you will
let the thief and assassin go, as if we prosecuted him he would only be
transported, and if he is let go he is sure to be hung before long which
will save us trouble and be much more satisfactory. Hoping to hear from
you when convenient

‘I remain ‘Yours and cetrer ‘FANNY SQUEERS.

‘P.S. I pity his ignorance and despise him.’

A profound silence succeeded to the reading of this choice epistle,
during which Newman Noggs, as he folded it up, gazed with a kind of
grotesque pity at the boy of desperate character therein referred to;
who, having no more distinct perception of the matter in hand, than that
he had been the unfortunate cause of heaping trouble and falsehood
upon Nicholas, sat mute and dispirited, with a most woe-begone and
heart-stricken look.

‘Mr. Noggs,’ said Nicholas, after a few moments’ reflection, ‘I must go
out at once.’

‘Go out!’ cried Newman.

‘Yes,’ said Nicholas, ‘to Golden Square. Nobody who knows me would
believe this story of the ring; but it may suit the purpose, or gratify
the hatred of Mr. Ralph Nickleby to feign to attach credence to it. It
is due--not to him, but to myself--that I should state the truth; and
moreover, I have a word or two to exchange with him, which will not keep
cool.’

‘They must,’ said Newman.

‘They must not, indeed,’ rejoined Nicholas firmly, as he prepared to
leave the house.

‘Hear me speak,’ said Newman, planting himself before his impetuous
young friend. ‘He is not there. He is away from town. He will not be
back for three days; and I know that letter will not be answered before
he returns.’

‘Are you sure of this?’ asked Nicholas, chafing violently, and pacing
the narrow room with rapid strides.

‘Quite,’ rejoined Newman. ‘He had hardly read it when he was called
away. Its contents are known to nobody but himself and us.’

‘Are you certain?’ demanded Nicholas, precipitately; ‘not even to my
mother or sister? If I thought that they--I will go there--I must see
them. Which is the way? Where is it?’

‘Now, be advised by me,’ said Newman, speaking for the moment, in his
earnestness, like any other man--‘make no effort to see even them, till
he comes home. I know the man. Do not seem to have been tampering with
anybody. When he returns, go straight to him, and speak as boldly as you
like. Guessing at the real truth, he knows it as well as you or I. Trust
him for that.’

‘You mean well to me, and should know him better than I can,’ replied
Nicholas, after some consideration. ‘Well; let it be so.’

Newman, who had stood during the foregoing conversation with his back
planted against the door, ready to oppose any egress from the apartment
by force, if necessary, resumed his seat with much satisfaction; and
as the water in the kettle was by this time boiling, made a glassful
of spirits and water for Nicholas, and a cracked mug-full for the joint
accommodation of himself and Smike, of which the two partook in great
harmony, while Nicholas, leaning his head upon his hand, remained buried
in melancholy meditation.

Meanwhile, the company below stairs, after listening attentively and
not hearing any noise which would justify them in interfering for
the gratification of their curiosity, returned to the chamber of the
Kenwigses, and employed themselves in hazarding a great variety of
conjectures relative to the cause of Mr. Noggs’ sudden disappearance and
detention.

‘Lor, I’ll tell you what,’ said Mrs. Kenwigs. ‘Suppose it should be an
express sent up to say that his property has all come back again!’

‘Dear me,’ said Mr. Kenwigs; ‘it’s not impossible. Perhaps, in that case,
we’d better send up and ask if he won’t take a little more punch.’

‘Kenwigs!’ said Mr. Lillyvick, in a loud voice, ‘I’m surprised at you.’

‘What’s the matter, sir?’ asked Mr. Kenwigs, with becoming submission to
the collector of water-rates.

‘Making such a remark as that, sir,’ replied Mr. Lillyvick, angrily. ‘He
has had punch already, has he not, sir? I consider the way in which that
punch was cut off, if I may use the expression, highly disrespectful to
this company; scandalous, perfectly scandalous. It may be the custom to
allow such things in this house, but it’s not the kind of behaviour
that I’ve been used to see displayed, and so I don’t mind telling you,
Kenwigs. A gentleman has a glass of punch before him to which he is just
about to set his lips, when another gentleman comes and collars that
glass of punch, without a “with your leave”, or “by your leave”, and
carries that glass of punch away. This may be good manners--I dare say
it is--but I don’t understand it, that’s all; and what’s more, I don’t
care if I never do. It’s my way to speak my mind, Kenwigs, and that is
my mind; and if you don’t like it, it’s past my regular time for going
to bed, and I can find my way home without making it later.’

Here was an untoward event! The collector had sat swelling and fuming
in offended dignity for some minutes, and had now fairly burst out. The
great man--the rich relation--the unmarried uncle--who had it in his
power to make Morleena an heiress, and the very baby a legatee--was
offended. Gracious Powers, where was this to end!

‘I am very sorry, sir,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, humbly.

‘Don’t tell me you’re sorry,’ retorted Mr. Lillyvick, with much
sharpness. ‘You should have prevented it, then.’

The company were quite paralysed by this domestic crash. The
back-parlour sat with her mouth wide open, staring vacantly at the
collector, in a stupor of dismay; the other guests were scarcely less
overpowered by the great man’s irritation. Mr. Kenwigs, not being skilful
in such matters, only fanned the flame in attempting to extinguish it.

‘I didn’t think of it, I am sure, sir,’ said that gentleman. ‘I didn’t
suppose that such a little thing as a glass of punch would have put you
out of temper.’

‘Out of temper! What the devil do you mean by that piece of
impertinence, Mr. Kenwigs?’ said the collector. ‘Morleena, child--give me
my hat.’

‘Oh, you’re not going, Mr. Lillyvick, sir,’ interposed Miss Petowker,
with her most bewitching smile.

But still Mr. Lillyvick, regardless of the siren, cried obdurately,
‘Morleena, my hat!’ upon the fourth repetition of which demand, Mrs
Kenwigs sunk back in her chair, with a cry that might have softened a
water-butt, not to say a water-collector; while the four little girls
(privately instructed to that effect) clasped their uncle’s drab shorts
in their arms, and prayed him, in imperfect English, to remain.

‘Why should I stop here, my dears?’ said Mr. Lillyvick; ‘I’m not wanted
here.’

‘Oh, do not speak so cruelly, uncle,’ sobbed Mrs. Kenwigs, ‘unless you
wish to kill me.’

‘I shouldn’t wonder if some people were to say I did,’ replied Mr
Lillyvick, glancing angrily at Kenwigs. ‘Out of temper!’

‘Oh! I cannot bear to see him look so, at my husband,’ cried Mrs
Kenwigs. ‘It’s so dreadful in families. Oh!’

‘Mr. Lillyvick,’ said Kenwigs, ‘I hope, for the sake of your niece, that
you won’t object to be reconciled.’

The collector’s features relaxed, as the company added their entreaties
to those of his nephew-in-law. He gave up his hat, and held out his
hand.

‘There, Kenwigs,’ said Mr. Lillyvick; ‘and let me tell you, at the same
time, to show you how much out of temper I was, that if I had gone away
without another word, it would have made no difference respecting that
pound or two which I shall leave among your children when I die.’

‘Morleena Kenwigs,’ cried her mother, in a torrent of affection. ‘Go
down upon your knees to your dear uncle, and beg him to love you all
his life through, for he’s more a angel than a man, and I’ve always said
so.’

Miss Morleena approaching to do homage, in compliance with this
injunction, was summarily caught up and kissed by Mr. Lillyvick; and
thereupon Mrs. Kenwigs darted forward and kissed the collector, and
an irrepressible murmur of applause broke from the company who had
witnessed his magnanimity.

The worthy gentleman then became once more the life and soul of the
society; being again reinstated in his old post of lion, from which high
station the temporary distraction of their thoughts had for a moment
dispossessed him. Quadruped lions are said to be savage, only when they
are hungry; biped lions are rarely sulky longer than when their appetite
for distinction remains unappeased. Mr. Lillyvick stood higher than ever;
for he had shown his power; hinted at his property and testamentary
intentions; gained great credit for disinterestedness and virtue; and,
in addition to all, was finally accommodated with a much larger tumbler
of punch than that which Newman Noggs had so feloniously made off with.

‘I say! I beg everybody’s pardon for intruding again,’ said Crowl,
looking in at this happy juncture; ‘but what a queer business this is,
isn’t it? Noggs has lived in this house, now going on for five years,
and nobody has ever been to see him before, within the memory of the
oldest inhabitant.’

‘It’s a strange time of night to be called away, sir, certainly,’ said
the collector; ‘and the behaviour of Mr. Noggs himself, is, to say the
least of it, mysterious.’

‘Well, so it is,’ rejoined Crowl; ‘and I’ll tell you what’s more--I
think these two geniuses, whoever they are, have run away from
somewhere.’

‘What makes you think that, sir?’ demanded the collector, who seemed, by
a tacit understanding, to have been chosen and elected mouthpiece to
the company. ‘You have no reason to suppose that they have run away from
anywhere without paying the rates and taxes due, I hope?’

Mr. Crowl, with a look of some contempt, was about to enter a general
protest against the payment of rates or taxes, under any circumstances,
when he was checked by a timely whisper from Kenwigs, and several frowns
and winks from Mrs. K., which providentially stopped him.

‘Why the fact is,’ said Crowl, who had been listening at Newman’s door
with all his might and main; ‘the fact is, that they have been talking
so loud, that they quite disturbed me in my room, and so I couldn’t
help catching a word here, and a word there; and all I heard, certainly
seemed to refer to their having bolted from some place or other. I don’t
wish to alarm Mrs. Kenwigs; but I hope they haven’t come from any jail or
hospital, and brought away a fever or some unpleasantness of that sort,
which might be catching for the children.’

Mrs. Kenwigs was so overpowered by this supposition, that it needed all
the tender attentions of Miss Petowker, of the Theatre Royal, Drury
Lane, to restore her to anything like a state of calmness; not to
mention the assiduity of Mr. Kenwigs, who held a fat smelling-bottle to
his lady’s nose, until it became matter of some doubt whether the tears
which coursed down her face were the result of feelings or SAL VOLATILE.

The ladies, having expressed their sympathy, singly and separately,
fell, according to custom, into a little chorus of soothing expressions,
among which, such condolences as ‘Poor dear!’--‘I should feel just the
same, if I was her’--‘To be sure, it’s a very trying thing’--and ‘Nobody
but a mother knows what a mother’s feelings is,’ were among the most
prominent, and most frequently repeated. In short, the opinion of the
company was so clearly manifested, that Mr. Kenwigs was on the point of
repairing to Mr. Noggs’s room, to demand an explanation, and had indeed
swallowed a preparatory glass of punch, with great inflexibility and
steadiness of purpose, when the attention of all present was diverted by
a new and terrible surprise.

This was nothing less than the sudden pouring forth of a rapid
succession of the shrillest and most piercing screams, from an upper
story; and to all appearance from the very two-pair back, in which
the infant Kenwigs was at that moment enshrined. They were no sooner
audible, than Mrs. Kenwigs, opining that a strange cat had come in, and
sucked the baby’s breath while the girl was asleep, made for the door,
wringing her hands, and shrieking dismally; to the great consternation
and confusion of the company.

‘Mr. Kenwigs, see what it is; make haste!’ cried the sister, laying
violent hands upon Mrs. Kenwigs, and holding her back by force. ‘Oh don’t
twist about so, dear, or I can never hold you.’

‘My baby, my blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed baby!’ screamed Mrs
Kenwigs, making every blessed louder than the last. ‘My own darling,
sweet, innocent Lillyvick--Oh let me go to him. Let me go-o-o-o!’

Pending the utterance of these frantic cries, and the wails and
lamentations of the four little girls, Mr. Kenwigs rushed upstairs to the
room whence the sounds proceeded; at the door of which, he encountered
Nicholas, with the child in his arms, who darted out with such violence,
that the anxious father was thrown down six stairs, and alighted on the
nearest landing-place, before he had found time to open his mouth to ask
what was the matter.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ cried Nicholas, running down; ‘here it is; it’s all
out, it’s all over; pray compose yourselves; there’s no harm done;’
and with these, and a thousand other assurances, he delivered the baby
(whom, in his hurry, he had carried upside down), to Mrs. Kenwigs, and
ran back to assist Mr. Kenwigs, who was rubbing his head very hard, and
looking much bewildered by his tumble.

Reassured by this cheering intelligence, the company in some degree
recovered from their fears, which had been productive of some most
singular instances of a total want of presence of mind; thus, the
bachelor friend had, for a long time, supported in his arms Mrs
Kenwigs’s sister, instead of Mrs. Kenwigs; and the worthy Mr. Lillyvick
had been actually seen, in the perturbation of his spirits, to kiss Miss
Petowker several times, behind the room-door, as calmly as if nothing
distressing were going forward.

‘It is a mere nothing,’ said Nicholas, returning to Mrs. Kenwigs; ‘the
little girl, who was watching the child, being tired I suppose, fell
asleep, and set her hair on fire.’

‘Oh you malicious little wretch!’ cried Mrs. Kenwigs, impressively
shaking her forefinger at the small unfortunate, who might be thirteen
years old, and was looking on with a singed head and a frightened face.

‘I heard her cries,’ continued Nicholas, ‘and ran down, in time to
prevent her setting fire to anything else. You may depend upon it that
the child is not hurt; for I took it off the bed myself, and brought it
here to convince you.’

This brief explanation over, the infant, who, as he was christened after
the collector! rejoiced in the names of Lillyvick Kenwigs, was partially
suffocated under the caresses of the audience, and squeezed to his
mother’s bosom, until he roared again. The attention of the company was
then directed, by a natural transition, to the little girl who had had
the audacity to burn her hair off, and who, after receiving sundry small
slaps and pushes from the more energetic of the ladies, was mercifully
sent home: the ninepence, with which she was to have been rewarded,
being escheated to the Kenwigs family.

‘And whatever we are to say to you, sir,’ exclaimed Mrs. Kenwigs,
addressing young Lillyvick’s deliverer, ‘I am sure I don’t know.’

‘You need say nothing at all,’ replied Nicholas. ‘I have done nothing to
found any very strong claim upon your eloquence, I am sure.’

‘He might have been burnt to death, if it hadn’t been for you, sir,’
simpered Miss Petowker.

‘Not very likely, I think,’ replied Nicholas; ‘for there was abundance
of assistance here, which must have reached him before he had been in
any danger.’

‘You will let us drink your health, anyvays, sir!’ said Mr. Kenwigs
motioning towards the table.

‘--In my absence, by all means,’ rejoined Nicholas, with a smile.
‘I have had a very fatiguing journey, and should be most indifferent
company--a far greater check upon your merriment, than a promoter of it,
even if I kept awake, which I think very doubtful. If you will allow
me, I’ll return to my friend, Mr. Noggs, who went upstairs again, when he
found nothing serious had occurred. Good-night.’

Excusing himself, in these terms, from joining in the festivities,
Nicholas took a most winning farewell of Mrs. Kenwigs and the other
ladies, and retired, after making a very extraordinary impression upon
the company.

‘What a delightful young man!’ cried Mrs. Kenwigs.

‘Uncommon gentlemanly, really,’ said Mr. Kenwigs. ‘Don’t you think so, Mr
Lillyvick?’

‘Yes,’ said the collector, with a dubious shrug of his shoulders, ‘He is
gentlemanly, very gentlemanly--in appearance.’

‘I hope you don’t see anything against him, uncle?’ inquired Mrs
Kenwigs.

‘No, my dear,’ replied the collector, ‘no. I trust he may not turn
out--well--no matter--my love to you, my dear, and long life to the
baby!’

‘Your namesake,’ said Mrs. Kenwigs, with a sweet smile.

‘And I hope a worthy namesake,’ observed Mr. Kenwigs, willing to
propitiate the collector. ‘I hope a baby as will never disgrace his
godfather, and as may be considered, in arter years, of a piece with the
Lillyvicks whose name he bears. I do say--and Mrs. Kenwigs is of the same
sentiment, and feels it as strong as I do--that I consider his being
called Lillyvick one of the greatest blessings and Honours of my
existence.’

‘THE greatest blessing, Kenwigs,’ murmured his lady.

‘THE greatest blessing,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, correcting himself. ‘A
blessing that I hope, one of these days, I may be able to deserve.’

This was a politic stroke of the Kenwigses, because it made Mr. Lillyvick
the great head and fountain of the baby’s importance. The good gentleman
felt the delicacy and dexterity of the touch, and at once proposed the
health of the gentleman, name unknown, who had signalised himself, that
night, by his coolness and alacrity.

‘Who, I don’t mind saying,’ observed Mr. Lillyvick, as a great
concession, ‘is a good-looking young man enough, with manners that I
hope his character may be equal to.’

‘He has a very nice face and style, really,’ said Mrs. Kenwigs.

‘He certainly has,’ added Miss Petowker. ‘There’s something in his
appearance quite--dear, dear, what’s that word again?’

‘What word?’ inquired Mr. Lillyvick.

‘Why--dear me, how stupid I am,’ replied Miss Petowker, hesitating.
‘What do you call it, when Lords break off door-knockers and beat
policemen, and play at coaches with other people’s money, and all that
sort of thing?’

‘Aristocratic?’ suggested the collector.

‘Ah! aristocratic,’ replied Miss Petowker; ‘something very aristocratic
about him, isn’t there?’

The gentleman held their peace, and smiled at each other, as who should
say, ‘Well! there’s no accounting for tastes;’ but the ladies resolved
unanimously that Nicholas had an aristocratic air; and nobody caring to
dispute the position, it was established triumphantly.

The punch being, by this time, drunk out, and the little Kenwigses (who
had for some time previously held their little eyes open with their
little forefingers) becoming fractious, and requesting rather urgently
to be put to bed, the collector made a move by pulling out his watch,
and acquainting the company that it was nigh two o’clock; whereat some
of the guests were surprised and others shocked, and hats and bonnets
being groped for under the tables, and in course of time found, their
owners went away, after a vast deal of shaking of hands, and many
remarks how they had never spent such a delightful evening, and how
they marvelled to find it so late, expecting to have heard that it was
half-past ten at the very latest, and how they wished that Mr. and Mrs
Kenwigs had a wedding-day once a week, and how they wondered by what
hidden agency Mrs. Kenwigs could possibly have managed so well; and
a great deal more of the same kind. To all of which flattering
expressions, Mr. and Mrs. Kenwigs replied, by thanking every lady and
gentleman, SERIATIM, for the favour of their company, and hoping they
might have enjoyed themselves only half as well as they said they had.

As to Nicholas, quite unconscious of the impression he had produced, he
had long since fallen asleep, leaving Mr. Newman Noggs and Smike to empty
the spirit bottle between them; and this office they performed with
such extreme good-will, that Newman was equally at a loss to determine
whether he himself was quite sober, and whether he had ever seen any
gentleman so heavily, drowsily, and completely intoxicated as his new
acquaintance.



CHAPTER 16

Nicholas seeks to employ himself in a New Capacity, and being
unsuccessful, accepts an engagement as Tutor in a Private Family


The first care of Nicholas, next morning, was, to look after some room
in which, until better times dawned upon him, he could contrive to
exist, without trenching upon the hospitality of Newman Noggs, who would
have slept upon the stairs with pleasure, so that his young friend was
accommodated.

The vacant apartment to which the bill in the parlour window bore
reference, appeared, on inquiry, to be a small back-room on the second
floor, reclaimed from the leads, and overlooking a soot-bespeckled
prospect of tiles and chimney-pots. For the letting of this portion of
the house from week to week, on reasonable terms, the parlour lodger was
empowered to treat; he being deputed by the landlord to dispose of
the rooms as they became vacant, and to keep a sharp look-out that the
lodgers didn’t run away. As a means of securing the punctual discharge
of which last service he was permitted to live rent-free, lest he should
at any time be tempted to run away himself.

Of this chamber, Nicholas became the tenant; and having hired a few
common articles of furniture from a neighbouring broker, and paid
the first week’s hire in advance, out of a small fund raised by the
conversion of some spare clothes into ready money, he sat himself down
to ruminate upon his prospects, which, like the prospect outside his
window, were sufficiently confined and dingy. As they by no means
improved on better acquaintance, and as familiarity breeds contempt, he
resolved to banish them from his thoughts by dint of hard walking. So,
taking up his hat, and leaving poor Smike to arrange and rearrange the
room with as much delight as if it had been the costliest palace, he
betook himself to the streets, and mingled with the crowd which thronged
them.

Although a man may lose a sense of his own importance when he is a mere
unit among a busy throng, all utterly regardless of him, it by no means
follows that he can dispossess himself, with equal facility, of a very
strong sense of the importance and magnitude of his cares. The unhappy
state of his own affairs was the one idea which occupied the brain of
Nicholas, walk as fast as he would; and when he tried to dislodge it by
speculating on the situation and prospects of the people who surrounded
him, he caught himself, in a few seconds, contrasting their condition
with his own, and gliding almost imperceptibly back into his old train
of thought again.

Occupied in these reflections, as he was making his way along one of the
great public thoroughfares of London, he chanced to raise his eyes to
a blue board, whereon was inscribed, in characters of gold, ‘General
Agency Office; for places and situations of all kinds inquire within.’
It was a shop-front, fitted up with a gauze blind and an inner door;
and in the window hung a long and tempting array of written placards,
announcing vacant places of every grade, from a secretary’s to a
foot-boy’s.

Nicholas halted, instinctively, before this temple of promise, and ran
his eye over the capital-text openings in life which were so profusely
displayed. When he had completed his survey he walked on a little way,
and then back, and then on again; at length, after pausing irresolutely
several times before the door of the General Agency Office, he made up
his mind, and stepped in.

He found himself in a little floor-clothed room, with a high desk railed
off in one corner, behind which sat a lean youth with cunning eyes and a
protruding chin, whose performances in capital-text darkened the window.
He had a thick ledger lying open before him, and with the fingers of his
right hand inserted between the leaves, and his eyes fixed on a very
fat old lady in a mob-cap--evidently the proprietress of the
establishment--who was airing herself at the fire, seemed to be only
waiting her directions to refer to some entries contained within its
rusty clasps.

As there was a board outside, which acquainted the public that
servants-of-all-work were perpetually in waiting to be hired from ten
till four, Nicholas knew at once that some half-dozen strong young
women, each with pattens and an umbrella, who were sitting upon a form
in one corner, were in attendance for that purpose: especially as the
poor things looked anxious and weary. He was not quite so certain of the
callings and stations of two smart young ladies who were in conversation
with the fat lady before the fire, until--having sat himself down in a
corner, and remarked that he would wait until the other customers had
been served--the fat lady resumed the dialogue which his entrance had
interrupted.

‘Cook, Tom,’ said the fat lady, still airing herself as aforesaid.

‘Cook,’ said Tom, turning over some leaves of the ledger. ‘Well!’

‘Read out an easy place or two,’ said the fat lady.

‘Pick out very light ones, if you please, young man,’ interposed a
genteel female, in shepherd’s-plaid boots, who appeared to be the
client.

‘“Mrs. Marker,”’ said Tom, reading, ‘“Russell Place, Russell Square;
offers eighteen guineas; tea and sugar found. Two in family, and see
very little company. Five servants kept. No man. No followers.”’

‘Oh Lor!’ tittered the client. ‘THAT won’t do. Read another, young man,
will you?’

‘“Mrs. Wrymug,”’ said Tom, ‘“Pleasant Place, Finsbury. Wages, twelve
guineas. No tea, no sugar. Serious family--“’

‘Ah! you needn’t mind reading that,’ interrupted the client.

‘“Three serious footmen,”’ said Tom, impressively.

‘Three? did you say?’ asked the client in an altered tone.

‘Three serious footmen,’ replied Tom. ‘“Cook, housemaid, and nursemaid;
each female servant required to join the Little Bethel Congregation
three times every Sunday--with a serious footman. If the cook is more
serious than the footman, she will be expected to improve the footman;
if the footman is more serious than the cook, he will be expected to
improve the cook.”’

‘I’ll take the address of that place,’ said the client; ‘I don’t know
but what it mightn’t suit me pretty well.’

‘Here’s another,’ remarked Tom, turning over the leaves. ‘“Family of Mr
Gallanbile, MP. Fifteen guineas, tea and sugar, and servants allowed
to see male cousins, if godly. Note. Cold dinner in the kitchen on the
Sabbath, Mr. Gallanbile being devoted to the Observance question. No
victuals whatever cooked on the Lord’s Day, with the exception of dinner
for Mr. and Mrs. Gallanbile, which, being a work of piety and necessity,
is exempted. Mr. Gallanbile dines late on the day of rest, in order to
prevent the sinfulness of the cook’s dressing herself.”’

‘I don’t think that’ll answer as well as the other,’ said the client,
after a little whispering with her friend. ‘I’ll take the other
direction, if you please, young man. I can but come back again, if it
don’t do.’

Tom made out the address, as requested, and the genteel client,
having satisfied the fat lady with a small fee, meanwhile, went away
accompanied by her friend.

As Nicholas opened his mouth, to request the young man to turn to letter
S, and let him know what secretaryships remained undisposed of, there
came into the office an applicant, in whose favour he immediately
retired, and whose appearance both surprised and interested him.

This was a young lady who could be scarcely eighteen, of very slight and
delicate figure, but exquisitely shaped, who, walking timidly up to the
desk, made an inquiry, in a very low tone of voice, relative to some
situation as governess, or companion to a lady. She raised her veil, for
an instant, while she preferred the inquiry, and disclosed a countenance
of most uncommon beauty, though shaded by a cloud of sadness, which, in
one so young, was doubly remarkable. Having received a card of reference
to some person on the books, she made the usual acknowledgment, and
glided away.

She was neatly, but very quietly attired; so much so, indeed, that it
seemed as though her dress, if it had been worn by one who imparted
fewer graces of her own to it, might have looked poor and shabby. Her
attendant--for she had one--was a red-faced, round-eyed, slovenly girl,
who, from a certain roughness about the bare arms that peeped from under
her draggled shawl, and the half-washed-out traces of smut and
blacklead which tattooed her countenance, was clearly of a kin with the
servants-of-all-work on the form: between whom and herself there had
passed various grins and glances, indicative of the freemasonry of the
craft.

This girl followed her mistress; and, before Nicholas had recovered from
the first effects of his surprise and admiration, the young lady was
gone. It is not a matter of such complete and utter improbability as
some sober people may think, that he would have followed them out,
had he not been restrained by what passed between the fat lady and her
book-keeper.

‘When is she coming again, Tom?’ asked the fat lady.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ replied Tom, mending his pen.

‘Where have you sent her to?’ asked the fat lady.

‘Mrs. Clark’s,’ replied Tom.

‘She’ll have a nice life of it, if she goes there,’ observed the fat
lady, taking a pinch of snuff from a tin box.

Tom made no other reply than thrusting his tongue into his cheek,
and pointing the feather of his pen towards Nicholas--reminders which
elicited from the fat lady an inquiry, of ‘Now, sir, what can we do for
YOU?’

Nicholas briefly replied, that he wanted to know whether there was any
such post to be had, as secretary or amanuensis to a gentleman.

‘Any such!’ rejoined the mistress; ‘a-dozen-such. An’t there, Tom?’

‘I should think so,’ answered that young gentleman; and as he said it,
he winked towards Nicholas, with a degree of familiarity which he,
no doubt, intended for a rather flattering compliment, but with which
Nicholas was most ungratefully disgusted.

Upon reference to the book, it appeared that the dozen secretaryships
had dwindled down to one. Mr. Gregsbury, the great member of parliament,
of Manchester Buildings, Westminster, wanted a young man, to keep his
papers and correspondence in order; and Nicholas was exactly the sort of
young man that Mr. Gregsbury wanted.

‘I don’t know what the terms are, as he said he’d settle them himself
with the party,’ observed the fat lady; ‘but they must be pretty good
ones, because he’s a member of parliament.’

Inexperienced as he was, Nicholas did not feel quite assured of the
force of this reasoning, or the justice of this conclusion; but without
troubling himself to question it, he took down the address, and resolved
to wait upon Mr. Gregsbury without delay.

‘I don’t know what the number is,’ said Tom; ‘but Manchester Buildings
isn’t a large place; and if the worst comes to the worst it won’t take
you very long to knock at all the doors on both sides of the way till
you find him out. I say, what a good-looking gal that was, wasn’t she?’

‘What girl?’ demanded Nicholas, sternly.

‘Oh yes. I know--what gal, eh?’ whispered Tom, shutting one eye, and
cocking his chin in the air. ‘You didn’t see her, you didn’t--I say,
don’t you wish you was me, when she comes tomorrow morning?’

Nicholas looked at the ugly clerk, as if he had a mind to reward his
admiration of the young lady by beating the ledger about his ears,
but he refrained, and strode haughtily out of the office; setting at
defiance, in his indignation, those ancient laws of chivalry, which not
only made it proper and lawful for all good knights to hear the praise
of the ladies to whom they were devoted, but rendered it incumbent upon
them to roam about the world, and knock at head all such matter-of-fact
and un-poetical characters, as declined to exalt, above all the earth,
damsels whom they had never chanced to look upon or hear of--as if that
were any excuse!

Thinking no longer of his own misfortunes, but wondering what could
be those of the beautiful girl he had seen, Nicholas, with many wrong
turns, and many inquiries, and almost as many misdirections, bent his
steps towards the place whither he had been directed.

Within the precincts of the ancient city of Westminster, and within
half a quarter of a mile of its ancient sanctuary, is a narrow and dirty
region, the sanctuary of the smaller members of Parliament in modern
days. It is all comprised in one street of gloomy lodging-houses, from
whose windows, in vacation-time, there frown long melancholy rows of
bills, which say, as plainly as did the countenances of their occupiers,
ranged on ministerial and opposition benches in the session which
slumbers with its fathers, ‘To Let’, ‘To Let’. In busier periods of the
year these bills disappear, and the houses swarm with legislators. There
are legislators in the parlours, in the first floor, in the second, in
the third, in the garrets; the small apartments reek with the breath of
deputations and delegates. In damp weather, the place is rendered close,
by the steams of moist acts of parliament and frouzy petitions; general
postmen grow faint as they enter its infected limits, and shabby figures
in quest of franks, flit restlessly to and fro like the troubled ghosts
of Complete Letter-writers departed. This is Manchester Buildings; and
here, at all hours of the night, may be heard the rattling of latch-keys
in their respective keyholes: with now and then--when a gust of wind
sweeping across the water which washes the Buildings’ feet, impels the
sound towards its entrance--the weak, shrill voice of some young member
practising tomorrow’s speech. All the livelong day, there is a grinding
of organs and clashing and clanging of little boxes of music; for
Manchester Buildings is an eel-pot, which has no outlet but its awkward
mouth--a case-bottle which has no thoroughfare, and a short and narrow
neck--and in this respect it may be typical of the fate of some few
among its more adventurous residents, who, after wriggling themselves
into Parliament by violent efforts and contortions, find that it, too,
is no thoroughfare for them; that, like Manchester Buildings, it leads
to nothing beyond itself; and that they are fain at last to back out, no
wiser, no richer, not one whit more famous, than they went in.

Into Manchester Buildings Nicholas turned, with the address of the great
Mr. Gregsbury in his hand. As there was a stream of people pouring into
a shabby house not far from the entrance, he waited until they had made
their way in, and then making up to the servant, ventured to inquire if
he knew where Mr. Gregsbury lived.

The servant was a very pale, shabby boy, who looked as if he had slept
underground from his infancy, as very likely he had. ‘Mr. Gregsbury?’
said he; ‘Mr. Gregsbury lodges here. It’s all right. Come in!’

Nicholas thought he might as well get in while he could, so in he
walked; and he had no sooner done so, than the boy shut the door, and
made off.

This was odd enough: but what was more embarrassing was, that all along
the passage, and all along the narrow stairs, blocking up the window,
and making the dark entry darker still, was a confused crowd of
persons with great importance depicted in their looks; who were, to all
appearance, waiting in silent expectation of some coming event. From
time to time, one man would whisper to his neighbour, or a little group
would whisper together, and then the whisperers would nod fiercely to
each other, or give their heads a relentless shake, as if they were bent
upon doing something very desperate, and were determined not to be put
off, whatever happened.

As a few minutes elapsed without anything occurring to explain this
phenomenon, and as he felt his own position a peculiarly uncomfortable
one, Nicholas was on the point of seeking some information from the man
next him, when a sudden move was visible on the stairs, and a voice was
heard to cry, ‘Now, gentleman, have the goodness to walk up!’

So far from walking up, the gentlemen on the stairs began to walk down
with great alacrity, and to entreat, with extraordinary politeness, that
the gentlemen nearest the street would go first; the gentlemen nearest
the street retorted, with equal courtesy, that they couldn’t think of
such a thing on any account; but they did it, without thinking of it,
inasmuch as the other gentlemen pressing some half-dozen (among whom was
Nicholas) forward, and closing up behind, pushed them, not merely up the
stairs, but into the very sitting-room of Mr. Gregsbury, which they were
thus compelled to enter with most unseemly precipitation, and without
the means of retreat; the press behind them, more than filling the
apartment.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Mr. Gregsbury, ‘you are welcome. I am rejoiced to see
you.’

For a gentleman who was rejoiced to see a body of visitors, Mr. Gregsbury
looked as uncomfortable as might be; but perhaps this was occasioned by
senatorial gravity, and a statesmanlike habit of keeping his feelings
under control. He was a tough, burly, thick-headed gentleman, with a
loud voice, a pompous manner, a tolerable command of sentences with no
meaning in them, and, in short, every requisite for a very good member
indeed.

‘Now, gentlemen,’ said Mr. Gregsbury, tossing a great bundle of papers
into a wicker basket at his feet, and throwing himself back in his chair
with his arms over the elbows, ‘you are dissatisfied with my conduct, I
see by the newspapers.’

‘Yes, Mr. Gregsbury, we are,’ said a plump old gentleman in a violent
heat, bursting out of the throng, and planting himself in the front.

‘Do my eyes deceive me,’ said Mr. Gregsbury, looking towards the speaker,
‘or is that my old friend Pugstyles?’

‘I am that man, and no other, sir,’ replied the plump old gentleman.

‘Give me your hand, my worthy friend,’ said Mr. Gregsbury. ‘Pugstyles, my
dear friend, I am very sorry to see you here.’

‘I am very sorry to be here, sir,’ said Mr. Pugstyles; ‘but your conduct,
Mr. Gregsbury, has rendered this deputation from your constituents
imperatively necessary.’

‘My conduct, Pugstyles,’ said Mr. Gregsbury, looking round upon the
deputation with gracious magnanimity--‘my conduct has been, and ever
will be, regulated by a sincere regard for the true and real interests
of this great and happy country. Whether I look at home, or abroad;
whether I behold the peaceful industrious communities of our island
home: her rivers covered with steamboats, her roads with locomotives,
her streets with cabs, her skies with balloons of a power and magnitude
hitherto unknown in the history of aeronautics in this or any other
nation--I say, whether I look merely at home, or, stretching my
eyes farther, contemplate the boundless prospect of conquest and
possession--achieved by British perseverance and British valour--which
is outspread before me, I clasp my hands, and turning my eyes to the
broad expanse above my head, exclaim, “Thank Heaven, I am a Briton!”’

The time had been, when this burst of enthusiasm would have been cheered
to the very echo; but now, the deputation received it with chilling
coldness. The general impression seemed to be, that as an explanation
of Mr. Gregsbury’s political conduct, it did not enter quite enough into
detail; and one gentleman in the rear did not scruple to remark aloud,
that, for his purpose, it savoured rather too much of a ‘gammon’
tendency.

‘The meaning of that term--gammon,’ said Mr. Gregsbury, ‘is unknown
to me. If it means that I grow a little too fervid, or perhaps even
hyperbolical, in extolling my native land, I admit the full justice of
the remark. I AM proud of this free and happy country. My form dilates,
my eye glistens, my breast heaves, my heart swells, my bosom burns, when
I call to mind her greatness and her glory.’

‘We wish, sir,’ remarked Mr. Pugstyles, calmly, ‘to ask you a few
questions.’

‘If you please, gentlemen; my time is yours--and my country’s--and my
country’s--’ said Mr. Gregsbury.

This permission being conceded, Mr. Pugstyles put on his spectacles, and
referred to a written paper which he drew from his pocket; whereupon
nearly every other member of the deputation pulled a written paper from
HIS pocket, to check Mr. Pugstyles off, as he read the questions.

This done, Mr. Pugstyles proceeded to business.

‘Question number one.--Whether, sir, you did not give a voluntary pledge
previous to your election, that in event of your being returned, you
would immediately put down the practice of coughing and groaning in
the House of Commons. And whether you did not submit to be coughed and
groaned down in the very first debate of the session, and have since
made no effort to effect a reform in this respect? Whether you did not
also pledge yourself to astonish the government, and make them shrink in
their shoes? And whether you have astonished them, and made them shrink
in their shoes, or not?’

‘Go on to the next one, my dear Pugstyles,’ said Mr. Gregsbury.

‘Have you any explanation to offer with reference to that question,
sir?’ asked Mr. Pugstyles.

‘Certainly not,’ said Mr. Gregsbury.

The members of the deputation looked fiercely at each other, and
afterwards at the member. ‘Dear Pugstyles’ having taken a very long
stare at Mr. Gregsbury over the tops of his spectacles, resumed his list
of inquiries.

‘Question number two.--Whether, sir, you did not likewise give a
voluntary pledge that you would support your colleague on every
occasion; and whether you did not, the night before last, desert him
and vote upon the other side, because the wife of a leader on that other
side had invited Mrs. Gregsbury to an evening party?’

‘Go on,’ said Mr. Gregsbury.

‘Nothing to say on that, either, sir?’ asked the spokesman.

‘Nothing whatever,’ replied Mr. Gregsbury. The deputation, who had
only seen him at canvassing or election time, were struck dumb by his
coolness. He didn’t appear like the same man; then he was all milk and
honey; now he was all starch and vinegar. But men ARE so different at
different times!

‘Question number three--and last,’ said Mr. Pugstyles, emphatically.
‘Whether, sir, you did not state upon the hustings, that it was your
firm and determined intention to oppose everything proposed; to divide
the house upon every question, to move for returns on every subject,
to place a motion on the books every day, and, in short, in your own
memorable words, to play the very devil with everything and everybody?’
With this comprehensive inquiry, Mr. Pugstyles folded up his list of
questions, as did all his backers.

Mr. Gregsbury reflected, blew his nose, threw himself further back in
his chair, came forward again, leaning his elbows on the table, made a
triangle with his two thumbs and his two forefingers, and tapping his
nose with the apex thereof, replied (smiling as he said it), ‘I deny
everything.’

At this unexpected answer, a hoarse murmur arose from the deputation;
and the same gentleman who had expressed an opinion relative to the
gammoning nature of the introductory speech, again made a monosyllabic
demonstration, by growling out ‘Resign!’ Which growl being taken up by
his fellows, swelled into a very earnest and general remonstrance.

‘I am requested, sir, to express a hope,’ said Mr. Pugstyles, with a
distant bow, ‘that on receiving a requisition to that effect from a
great majority of your constituents, you will not object at once to
resign your seat in favour of some candidate whom they think they can
better trust.’

To this, Mr. Gregsbury read the following reply, which, anticipating the
request, he had composed in the form of a letter, whereof copies had
been made to send round to the newspapers.

‘MY DEAR MR PUGSTYLES,

‘Next to the welfare of our beloved island--this great and free and
happy country, whose powers and resources are, I sincerely believe,
illimitable--I value that noble independence which is an Englishman’s
proudest boast, and which I fondly hope to bequeath to my children,
untarnished and unsullied. Actuated by no personal motives, but moved
only by high and great constitutional considerations; which I will not
attempt to explain, for they are really beneath the comprehension of
those who have not made themselves masters, as I have, of the intricate
and arduous study of politics; I would rather keep my seat, and intend
doing so.

‘Will you do me the favour to present my compliments to the constituent
body, and acquaint them with this circumstance?

‘With great esteem, ‘My dear Mr. Pugstyles, ‘&c.&c.’

‘Then you will not resign, under any circumstances?’ asked the
spokesman.

Mr. Gregsbury smiled, and shook his head.

‘Then, good-morning, sir,’ said Pugstyles, angrily.

‘Heaven bless you!’ said Mr. Gregsbury. And the deputation, with many
growls and scowls, filed off as quickly as the narrowness of the
staircase would allow of their getting down.

The last man being gone, Mr. Gregsbury rubbed his hands and chuckled, as
merry fellows will, when they think they have said or done a more than
commonly good thing; he was so engrossed in this self-congratulation,
that he did not observe that Nicholas had been left behind in the shadow
of the window-curtains, until that young gentleman, fearing he might
otherwise overhear some soliloquy intended to have no listeners, coughed
twice or thrice, to attract the member’s notice.

‘What’s that?’ said Mr. Gregsbury, in sharp accents.

Nicholas stepped forward, and bowed.

‘What do you do here, sir?’ asked Mr. Gregsbury; ‘a spy upon my privacy!
A concealed voter! You have heard my answer, sir. Pray follow the
deputation.’

‘I should have done so, if I had belonged to it, but I do not,’ said
Nicholas.

‘Then how came you here, sir?’ was the natural inquiry of Mr. Gregsbury,
MP. ‘And where the devil have you come from, sir?’ was the question
which followed it.

‘I brought this card from the General Agency Office, sir,’ said
Nicholas, ‘wishing to offer myself as your secretary, and understanding
that you stood in need of one.’

‘That’s all you have come for, is it?’ said Mr. Gregsbury, eyeing him in
some doubt.

Nicholas replied in the affirmative.

‘You have no connection with any of those rascally papers have you?’
said Mr. Gregsbury. ‘You didn’t get into the room, to hear what was going
forward, and put it in print, eh?’

‘I have no connection, I am sorry to say, with anything at present,’
rejoined Nicholas,--politely enough, but quite at his ease.

‘Oh!’ said Mr. Gregsbury. ‘How did you find your way up here, then?’

Nicholas related how he had been forced up by the deputation.

‘That was the way, was it?’ said Mr. Gregsbury. ‘Sit down.’

Nicholas took a chair, and Mr. Gregsbury stared at him for a long time,
as if to make certain, before he asked any further questions, that there
were no objections to his outward appearance.

‘You want to be my secretary, do you?’ he said at length.

‘I wish to be employed in that capacity, sir,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Well,’ said Mr. Gregsbury; ‘now what can you do?’

‘I suppose,’ replied Nicholas, smiling, ‘that I can do what usually
falls to the lot of other secretaries.’

‘What’s that?’ inquired Mr. Gregsbury.

‘What is it?’ replied Nicholas.

‘Ah! What is it?’ retorted the member, looking shrewdly at him, with his
head on one side.

‘A secretary’s duties are rather difficult to define, perhaps,’ said
Nicholas, considering. ‘They include, I presume, correspondence?’

‘Good,’ interposed Mr. Gregsbury.

‘The arrangement of papers and documents?’

‘Very good.’

‘Occasionally, perhaps, the writing from your dictation; and possibly,
sir,’ said Nicholas, with a half-smile, ‘the copying of your speech
for some public journal, when you have made one of more than usual
importance.’

‘Certainly,’ rejoined Mr. Gregsbury. ‘What else?’

‘Really,’ said Nicholas, after a moment’s reflection, ‘I am not able, at
this instant, to recapitulate any other duty of a secretary, beyond the
general one of making himself as agreeable and useful to his employer
as he can, consistently with his own respectability, and without
overstepping that line of duties which he undertakes to perform, and
which the designation of his office is usually understood to imply.’

Mr. Gregsbury looked fixedly at Nicholas for a short time, and then
glancing warily round the room, said in a suppressed voice:

‘This is all very well, Mr--what is your name?’

‘Nickleby.’

‘This is all very well, Mr. Nickleby, and very proper, so far as it
goes--so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. There are other
duties, Mr. Nickleby, which a secretary to a parliamentary gentleman must
never lose sight of. I should require to be crammed, sir.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ interposed Nicholas, doubtful whether he had heard
aright.

‘--To be crammed, sir,’ repeated Mr. Gregsbury.

‘May I beg your pardon again, if I inquire what you mean, sir?’ said
Nicholas.

‘My meaning, sir, is perfectly plain,’ replied Mr. Gregsbury with a
solemn aspect. ‘My secretary would have to make himself master of the
foreign policy of the world, as it is mirrored in the newspapers; to run
his eye over all accounts of public meetings, all leading articles,
and accounts of the proceedings of public bodies; and to make notes
of anything which it appeared to him might be made a point of, in any
little speech upon the question of some petition lying on the table, or
anything of that kind. Do you understand?’

‘I think I do, sir,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Then,’ said Mr. Gregsbury, ‘it would be necessary for him to make
himself acquainted, from day to day, with newspaper paragraphs on
passing events; such as “Mysterious disappearance, and supposed suicide
of a potboy,” or anything of that sort, upon which I might found a
question to the Secretary of State for the Home Department. Then, he
would have to copy the question, and as much as I remembered of the
answer (including a little compliment about independence and good
sense); and to send the manuscript in a frank to the local paper, with
perhaps half-a-dozen lines of leader, to the effect, that I was always
to be found in my place in parliament, and never shrunk from the
responsible and arduous duties, and so forth. You see?’

Nicholas bowed.

‘Besides which,’ continued Mr. Gregsbury, ‘I should expect him, now and
then, to go through a few figures in the printed tables, and to pick
out a few results, so that I might come out pretty well on timber duty
questions, and finance questions, and so on; and I should like him to
get up a few little arguments about the disastrous effects of a return
to cash payments and a metallic currency, with a touch now and then
about the exportation of bullion, and the Emperor of Russia, and bank
notes, and all that kind of thing, which it’s only necessary to talk
fluently about, because nobody understands it. Do you take me?’

‘I think I understand,’ said Nicholas.

‘With regard to such questions as are not political,’ continued Mr
Gregsbury, warming; ‘and which one can’t be expected to care a curse
about, beyond the natural care of not allowing inferior people to be as
well off as ourselves--else where are our privileges?--I should wish
my secretary to get together a few little flourishing speeches, of a
patriotic cast. For instance, if any preposterous bill were brought
forward, for giving poor grubbing devils of authors a right to their own
property, I should like to say, that I for one would never consent to
opposing an insurmountable bar to the diffusion of literature among THE
PEOPLE,--you understand?--that the creations of the pocket, being man’s,
might belong to one man, or one family; but that the creations of the
brain, being God’s, ought as a matter of course to belong to the people
at large--and if I was pleasantly disposed, I should like to make a joke
about posterity, and say that those who wrote for posterity should be
content to be rewarded by the approbation OF posterity; it might take
with the house, and could never do me any harm, because posterity can’t
be expected to know anything about me or my jokes either--do you see?’

‘I see that, sir,’ replied Nicholas.

‘You must always bear in mind, in such cases as this, where our
interests are not affected,’ said Mr. Gregsbury, ‘to put it very strong
about the people, because it comes out very well at election-time; and
you could be as funny as you liked about the authors; because I believe
the greater part of them live in lodgings, and are not voters. This is
a hasty outline of the chief things you’d have to do, except waiting in
the lobby every night, in case I forgot anything, and should want fresh
cramming; and, now and then, during great debates, sitting in the
front row of the gallery, and saying to the people about--‘You see that
gentleman, with his hand to his face, and his arm twisted round the
pillar--that’s Mr. Gregsbury--the celebrated Mr. Gregsbury,’--with any
other little eulogium that might strike you at the moment. And for
salary,’ said Mr. Gregsbury, winding up with great rapidity; for he was
out of breath--‘and for salary, I don’t mind saying at once in round
numbers, to prevent any dissatisfaction--though it’s more than I’ve been
accustomed to give--fifteen shillings a week, and find yourself. There!’

With this handsome offer, Mr. Gregsbury once more threw himself back in
his chair, and looked like a man who had been most profligately liberal,
but is determined not to repent of it notwithstanding.

‘Fifteen shillings a week is not much,’ said Nicholas, mildly.

‘Not much! Fifteen shillings a week not much, young man?’ cried Mr
Gregsbury. ‘Fifteen shillings a--’

‘Pray do not suppose that I quarrel with the sum, sir,’ replied
Nicholas; ‘for I am not ashamed to confess, that whatever it may be in
itself, to me it is a great deal. But the duties and responsibilities
make the recompense small, and they are so very heavy that I fear to
undertake them.’

‘Do you decline to undertake them, sir?’ inquired Mr. Gregsbury, with his
hand on the bell-rope.

‘I fear they are too great for my powers, however good my will may be,
sir,’ replied Nicholas.

‘That is as much as to say that you had rather not accept the place,
and that you consider fifteen shillings a week too little,’ said Mr
Gregsbury, ringing. ‘Do you decline it, sir?’

‘I have no alternative but to do so,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Door, Matthews!’ said Mr. Gregsbury, as the boy appeared.

‘I am sorry I have troubled you unnecessarily, sir,’ said Nicholas.

‘I am sorry you have,’ rejoined Mr. Gregsbury, turning his back upon him.
‘Door, Matthews!’

‘Good-morning, sir,’ said Nicholas.

‘Door, Matthews!’ cried Mr. Gregsbury.

The boy beckoned Nicholas, and tumbling lazily downstairs before him,
opened the door, and ushered him into the street. With a sad and pensive
air, he retraced his steps homewards.

Smike had scraped a meal together from the remnant of last night’s
supper, and was anxiously awaiting his return. The occurrences of the
morning had not improved Nicholas’s appetite, and, by him, the dinner
remained untasted. He was sitting in a thoughtful attitude, with the
plate which the poor fellow had assiduously filled with the choicest
morsels, untouched, by his side, when Newman Noggs looked into the room.

‘Come back?’ asked Newman.

‘Yes,’ replied Nicholas, ‘tired to death: and, what is worse, might have
remained at home for all the good I have done.’

‘Couldn’t expect to do much in one morning,’ said Newman.

‘Maybe so, but I am sanguine, and did expect,’ said Nicholas, ‘and am
proportionately disappointed.’ Saying which, he gave Newman an account
of his proceedings.

‘If I could do anything,’ said Nicholas, ‘anything, however slight,
until Ralph Nickleby returns, and I have eased my mind by confronting
him, I should feel happier. I should think it no disgrace to work,
Heaven knows. Lying indolently here, like a half-tamed sullen beast,
distracts me.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Newman; ‘small things offer--they would pay the
rent, and more--but you wouldn’t like them; no, you could hardly be
expected to undergo it--no, no.’

‘What could I hardly be expected to undergo?’ asked Nicholas, raising
his eyes. ‘Show me, in this wide waste of London, any honest means by
which I could even defray the weekly hire of this poor room, and see if
I shrink from resorting to them! Undergo! I have undergone too much,
my friend, to feel pride or squeamishness now. Except--’ added Nicholas
hastily, after a short silence, ‘except such squeamishness as is common
honesty, and so much pride as constitutes self-respect. I see little
to choose, between assistant to a brutal pedagogue, and toad-eater to a
mean and ignorant upstart, be he member or no member.’

‘I hardly know whether I should tell you what I heard this morning, or
not,’ said Newman.

‘Has it reference to what you said just now?’ asked Nicholas.

‘It has.’

‘Then in Heaven’s name, my good friend, tell it me,’ said Nicholas. ‘For
God’s sake consider my deplorable condition; and, while I promise to
take no step without taking counsel with you, give me, at least, a vote
in my own behalf.’

Moved by this entreaty, Newman stammered forth a variety of most
unaccountable and entangled sentences, the upshot of which was, that
Mrs. Kenwigs had examined him, at great length that morning, touching
the origin of his acquaintance with, and the whole life, adventures, and
pedigree of, Nicholas; that Newman had parried these questions as
long as he could, but being, at length, hard pressed and driven into a
corner, had gone so far as to admit, that Nicholas was a tutor of
great accomplishments, involved in some misfortunes which he was not at
liberty to explain, and bearing the name of Johnson. That Mrs. Kenwigs,
impelled by gratitude, or ambition, or maternal pride, or maternal love,
or all four powerful motives conjointly, had taken secret conference
with Mr. Kenwigs, and had finally returned to propose that Mr. Johnson
should instruct the four Miss Kenwigses in the French language as spoken
by natives, at the weekly stipend of five shillings, current coin of
the realm; being at the rate of one shilling per week, per each Miss
Kenwigs, and one shilling over, until such time as the baby might be
able to take it out in grammar.

‘Which, unless I am very much mistaken,’ observed Mrs. Kenwigs in making
the proposition, ‘will not be very long; for such clever children, Mr
Noggs, never were born into this world, I do believe.’

‘There,’ said Newman, ‘that’s all. It’s beneath you, I know; but I
thought that perhaps you might--’

‘Might!’ cried Nicholas, with great alacrity; ‘of course I shall. I
accept the offer at once. Tell the worthy mother so, without delay, my
dear fellow; and that I am ready to begin whenever she pleases.’

Newman hastened, with joyful steps, to inform Mrs. Kenwigs of his
friend’s acquiescence, and soon returning, brought back word that they
would be happy to see him in the first floor as soon as convenient;
that Mrs. Kenwigs had, upon the instant, sent out to secure a second-hand
French grammar and dialogues, which had long been fluttering in the
sixpenny box at the bookstall round the corner; and that the family,
highly excited at the prospect of this addition to their gentility,
wished the initiatory lesson to come off immediately.

And here it may be observed, that Nicholas was not, in the ordinary
sense of the word, a young man of high spirit. He would resent an
affront to himself, or interpose to redress a wrong offered to another,
as boldly and freely as any knight that ever set lance in rest; but he
lacked that peculiar excess of coolness and great-minded selfishness,
which invariably distinguish gentlemen of high spirit. In truth, for our
own part, we are disposed to look upon such gentleman as being rather
incumbrances than otherwise in rising families: happening to be
acquainted with several whose spirit prevents their settling down to
any grovelling occupation, and only displays itself in a tendency to
cultivate moustachios, and look fierce; and although moustachios and
ferocity are both very pretty things in their way, and very much to be
commended, we confess to a desire to see them bred at the owner’s proper
cost, rather than at the expense of low-spirited people.

Nicholas, therefore, not being a high-spirited young man according to
common parlance, and deeming it a greater degradation to borrow, for the
supply of his necessities, from Newman Noggs, than to teach French to
the little Kenwigses for five shillings a week, accepted the offer with
the alacrity already described, and betook himself to the first floor
with all convenient speed.

Here, he was received by Mrs. Kenwigs with a genteel air, kindly intended
to assure him of her protection and support; and here, too, he found Mr
Lillyvick and Miss Petowker; the four Miss Kenwigses on their form of
audience; and the baby in a dwarf porter’s chair with a deal tray before
it, amusing himself with a toy horse without a head; the said horse
being composed of a small wooden cylinder, not unlike an Italian iron,
supported on four crooked pegs, and painted in ingenious resemblance of
red wafers set in blacking.

‘How do you do, Mr. Johnson?’ said Mrs. Kenwigs. ‘Uncle--Mr. Johnson.’

‘How do you do, sir?’ said Mr. Lillyvick--rather sharply; for he had not
known what Nicholas was, on the previous night, and it was rather an
aggravating circumstance if a tax collector had been too polite to a
teacher.

‘Mr. Johnson is engaged as private master to the children, uncle,’ said
Mrs. Kenwigs.

‘So you said just now, my dear,’ replied Mr. Lillyvick.

‘But I hope,’ said Mrs. Kenwigs, drawing herself up, ‘that that will not
make them proud; but that they will bless their own good fortune,
which has born them superior to common people’s children. Do you hear,
Morleena?’

‘Yes, ma,’ replied Miss Kenwigs.

‘And when you go out in the streets, or elsewhere, I desire that you
don’t boast of it to the other children,’ said Mrs. Kenwigs; ‘and that if
you must say anything about it, you don’t say no more than “We’ve got a
private master comes to teach us at home, but we ain’t proud, because ma
says it’s sinful.” Do you hear, Morleena?’

‘Yes, ma,’ replied Miss Kenwigs again.

‘Then mind you recollect, and do as I tell you,’ said Mrs. Kenwigs.
‘Shall Mr. Johnson begin, uncle?’

‘I am ready to hear, if Mr. Johnson is ready to commence, my dear,’ said
the collector, assuming the air of a profound critic. ‘What sort of
language do you consider French, sir?’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Do you consider it a good language, sir?’ said the collector; ‘a pretty
language, a sensible language?’

‘A pretty language, certainly,’ replied Nicholas; ‘and as it has a name
for everything, and admits of elegant conversation about everything, I
presume it is a sensible one.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mr. Lillyvick, doubtfully. ‘Do you call it a
cheerful language, now?’

‘Yes,’ replied Nicholas, ‘I should say it was, certainly.’

‘It’s very much changed since my time, then,’ said the collector, ‘very
much.’

‘Was it a dismal one in your time?’ asked Nicholas, scarcely able to
repress a smile.

‘Very,’ replied Mr. Lillyvick, with some vehemence of manner. ‘It’s the
war time that I speak of; the last war. It may be a cheerful language.
I should be sorry to contradict anybody; but I can only say that I’ve
heard the French prisoners, who were natives, and ought to know how to
speak it, talking in such a dismal manner, that it made one miserable to
hear them. Ay, that I have, fifty times, sir--fifty times!’

Mr. Lillyvick was waxing so cross, that Mrs. Kenwigs thought it expedient
to motion to Nicholas not to say anything; and it was not until Miss
Petowker had practised several blandishments, to soften the excellent
old gentleman, that he deigned to break silence by asking,

‘What’s the water in French, sir?’

‘L’EAU,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Ah!’ said Mr. Lillyvick, shaking his head mournfully, ‘I thought as
much. Lo, eh? I don’t think anything of that language--nothing at all.’

‘I suppose the children may begin, uncle?’ said Mrs. Kenwigs.

‘Oh yes; they may begin, my dear,’ replied the collector,
discontentedly. ‘I have no wish to prevent them.’

This permission being conceded, the four Miss Kenwigses sat in a row,
with their tails all one way, and Morleena at the top: while Nicholas,
taking the book, began his preliminary explanations. Miss Petowker
and Mrs. Kenwigs looked on, in silent admiration, broken only by the
whispered assurances of the latter, that Morleena would have it all by
heart in no time; and Mr. Lillyvick regarded the group with frowning and
attentive eyes, lying in wait for something upon which he could open a
fresh discussion on the language.



CHAPTER 17

Follows the Fortunes of Miss Nickleby


It was with a heavy heart, and many sad forebodings which no effort
could banish, that Kate Nickleby, on the morning appointed for the
commencement of her engagement with Madame Mantalini, left the city when
its clocks yet wanted a quarter of an hour of eight, and threaded her
way alone, amid the noise and bustle of the streets, towards the west
end of London.

At this early hour many sickly girls, whose business, like that of the
poor worm, is to produce, with patient toil, the finery that bedecks
the thoughtless and luxurious, traverse our streets, making towards the
scene of their daily labour, and catching, as if by stealth, in their
hurried walk, the only gasp of wholesome air and glimpse of sunlight
which cheer their monotonous existence during the long train of hours
that make a working day. As she drew nigh to the more fashionable
quarter of the town, Kate marked many of this class as they passed by,
hurrying like herself to their painful occupation, and saw, in their
unhealthy looks and feeble gait, but too clear an evidence that her
misgivings were not wholly groundless.

She arrived at Madame Mantalini’s some minutes before the appointed
hour, and after walking a few times up and down, in the hope that some
other female might arrive and spare her the embarrassment of stating her
business to the servant, knocked timidly at the door: which, after some
delay, was opened by the footman, who had been putting on his striped
jacket as he came upstairs, and was now intent on fastening his apron.

‘Is Madame Mantalini in?’ faltered Kate.

‘Not often out at this time, miss,’ replied the man in a tone which
rendered “Miss,” something more offensive than “My dear.”

‘Can I see her?’ asked Kate.

‘Eh?’ replied the man, holding the door in his hand, and honouring the
inquirer with a stare and a broad grin, ‘Lord, no.’

‘I came by her own appointment,’ said Kate; ‘I am--I am--to be employed
here.’

‘Oh! you should have rung the worker’s bell,’ said the footman, touching
the handle of one in the door-post. ‘Let me see, though, I forgot--Miss
Nickleby, is it?’

‘Yes,’ replied Kate.

‘You’re to walk upstairs then, please,’ said the man. ‘Madame Mantalini
wants to see you--this way--take care of these things on the floor.’

Cautioning her, in these terms, not to trip over a heterogeneous litter
of pastry-cook’s trays, lamps, waiters full of glasses, and piles of
rout seats which were strewn about the hall, plainly bespeaking a late
party on the previous night, the man led the way to the second story,
and ushered Kate into a back-room, communicating by folding-doors
with the apartment in which she had first seen the mistress of the
establishment.

‘If you’ll wait here a minute,’ said the man, ‘I’ll tell her presently.’
Having made this promise with much affability, he retired and left Kate
alone.

There was not much to amuse in the room; of which the most attractive
feature was, a half-length portrait in oil, of Mr. Mantalini, whom the
artist had depicted scratching his head in an easy manner, and thus
displaying to advantage a diamond ring, the gift of Madame Mantalini
before her marriage. There was, however, the sound of voices in
conversation in the next room; and as the conversation was loud and the
partition thin, Kate could not help discovering that they belonged to Mr
and Mrs. Mantalini.

‘If you will be odiously, demnebly, outr_i_geously jealous, my soul,’ said
Mr. Mantalini, ‘you will be very miserable--horrid miserable--demnition
miserable.’ And then, there was a sound as though Mr. Mantalini were
sipping his coffee.

‘I AM miserable,’ returned Madame Mantalini, evidently pouting.

‘Then you are an ungrateful, unworthy, demd unthankful little fairy,’
said Mr. Mantalini.

‘I am not,’ returned Madame, with a sob.

‘Do not put itself out of humour,’ said Mr. Mantalini, breaking an egg.
‘It is a pretty, bewitching little demd countenance, and it should not
be out of humour, for it spoils its loveliness, and makes it cross and
gloomy like a frightful, naughty, demd hobgoblin.’

‘I am not to be brought round in that way, always,’ rejoined Madame,
sulkily.

‘It shall be brought round in any way it likes best, and not brought
round at all if it likes that better,’ retorted Mr. Mantalini, with his
egg-spoon in his mouth.

‘It’s very easy to talk,’ said Mrs. Mantalini.

‘Not so easy when one is eating a demnition egg,’ replied Mr. Mantalini;
‘for the yolk runs down the waistcoat, and yolk of egg does not match
any waistcoat but a yellow waistcoat, demmit.’

‘You were flirting with her during the whole night,’ said Madame
Mantalini, apparently desirous to lead the conversation back to the
point from which it had strayed.

‘No, no, my life.’

‘You were,’ said Madame; ‘I had my eye upon you all the time.’

‘Bless the little winking twinkling eye; was it on me all the time!’
cried Mantalini, in a sort of lazy rapture. ‘Oh, demmit!’

‘And I say once more,’ resumed Madame, ‘that you ought not to waltz with
anybody but your own wife; and I will not bear it, Mantalini, if I take
poison first.’

‘She will not take poison and have horrid pains, will she?’ said
Mantalini; who, by the altered sound of his voice, seemed to have moved
his chair, and taken up his position nearer to his wife. ‘She will not
take poison, because she had a demd fine husband who might have married
two countesses and a dowager--’

‘Two countesses,’ interposed Madame. ‘You told me one before!’

‘Two!’ cried Mantalini. ‘Two demd fine women, real countesses and
splendid fortunes, demmit.’

‘And why didn’t you?’ asked Madame, playfully.

‘Why didn’t I!’ replied her husband. ‘Had I not seen, at a morning
concert, the demdest little fascinator in all the world, and while that
little fascinator is my wife, may not all the countesses and dowagers in
England be--’

Mr. Mantalini did not finish the sentence, but he gave Madame Mantalini
a very loud kiss, which Madame Mantalini returned; after which, there
seemed to be some more kissing mixed up with the progress of the
breakfast.

‘And what about the cash, my existence’s jewel?’ said Mantalini, when
these endearments ceased. ‘How much have we in hand?’

‘Very little indeed,’ replied Madame.

‘We must have some more,’ said Mantalini; ‘we must have some discount
out of old Nickleby to carry on the war with, demmit.’

‘You can’t want any more just now,’ said Madame coaxingly.

‘My life and soul,’ returned her husband, ‘there is a horse for sale
at Scrubbs’s, which it would be a sin and a crime to lose--going, my
senses’ joy, for nothing.’

‘For nothing,’ cried Madame, ‘I am glad of that.’

‘For actually nothing,’ replied Mantalini. ‘A hundred guineas down will
buy him; mane, and crest, and legs, and tail, all of the demdest beauty.
I will ride him in the park before the very chariots of the rejected
countesses. The demd old dowager will faint with grief and rage; the
other two will say “He is married, he has made away with himself, it
is a demd thing, it is all up!” They will hate each other demnebly, and
wish you dead and buried. Ha! ha! Demmit.’

Madame Mantalini’s prudence, if she had any, was not proof against these
triumphal pictures; after a little jingling of keys, she observed that
she would see what her desk contained, and rising for that purpose,
opened the folding-door, and walked into the room where Kate was seated.

‘Dear me, child!’ exclaimed Madame Mantalini, recoiling in surprise.
‘How came you here?’

‘Child!’ cried Mantalini, hurrying in. ‘How came--eh!--oh--demmit, how
d’ye do?’

‘I have been waiting, here some time, ma’am,’ said Kate, addressing
Madame Mantalini. ‘The servant must have forgotten to let you know that
I was here, I think.’

‘You really must see to that man,’ said Madame, turning to her husband.
‘He forgets everything.’

‘I will twist his demd nose off his countenance for leaving such a very
pretty creature all alone by herself,’ said her husband.

‘Mantalini,’ cried Madame, ‘you forget yourself.’

‘I don’t forget you, my soul, and never shall, and never can,’ said
Mantalini, kissing his wife’s hand, and grimacing aside, to Miss
Nickleby, who turned away.

Appeased by this compliment, the lady of the business took some papers
from her desk which she handed over to Mr. Mantalini, who received them
with great delight. She then requested Kate to follow her, and after
several feints on the part of Mr. Mantalini to attract the young lady’s
attention, they went away: leaving that gentleman extended at full
length on the sofa, with his heels in the air and a newspaper in his
hand.

Madame Mantalini led the way down a flight of stairs, and through a
passage, to a large room at the back of the premises where were a number
of young women employed in sewing, cutting out, making up, altering, and
various other processes known only to those who are cunning in the arts
of millinery and dressmaking. It was a close room with a skylight, and
as dull and quiet as a room need be.

On Madame Mantalini calling aloud for Miss Knag, a short, bustling,
over-dressed female, full of importance, presented herself, and all the
young ladies suspending their operations for the moment, whispered
to each other sundry criticisms upon the make and texture of Miss
Nickleby’s dress, her complexion, cast of features, and personal
appearance, with as much good breeding as could have been displayed by
the very best society in a crowded ball-room.

‘Oh, Miss Knag,’ said Madame Mantalini, ‘this is the young person I
spoke to you about.’

Miss Knag bestowed a reverential smile upon Madame Mantalini, which
she dexterously transformed into a gracious one for Kate, and said that
certainly, although it was a great deal of trouble to have young people
who were wholly unused to the business, still, she was sure the young
person would try to do her best--impressed with which conviction she
(Miss Knag) felt an interest in her, already.

‘I think that, for the present at all events, it will be better for
Miss Nickleby to come into the show-room with you, and try things on for
people,’ said Madame Mantalini. ‘She will not be able for the present to
be of much use in any other way; and her appearance will--’

‘Suit very well with mine, Madame Mantalini,’ interrupted Miss Knag. ‘So
it will; and to be sure I might have known that you would not be long in
finding that out; for you have so much taste in all those matters, that
really, as I often say to the young ladies, I do not know how, when, or
where, you possibly could have acquired all you know--hem--Miss Nickleby
and I are quite a pair, Madame Mantalini, only I am a little darker than
Miss Nickleby, and--hem--I think my foot may be a little smaller. Miss
Nickleby, I am sure, will not be offended at my saying that, when she
hears that our family always have been celebrated for small feet ever
since--hem--ever since our family had any feet at all, indeed, I think.
I had an uncle once, Madame Mantalini, who lived in Cheltenham, and
had a most excellent business as a tobacconist--hem--who had such small
feet, that they were no bigger than those which are usually joined to
wooden legs--the most symmetrical feet, Madame Mantalini, that even you
can imagine.’

‘They must have had something of the appearance of club feet, Miss
Knag,’ said Madame.

‘Well now, that is so like you,’ returned Miss Knag, ‘Ha! ha! ha! Of
club feet! Oh very good! As I often remark to the young ladies, “Well
I must say, and I do not care who knows it, of all the ready
humour--hem--I ever heard anywhere”--and I have heard a good deal; for
when my dear brother was alive (I kept house for him, Miss Nickleby), we
had to supper once a week two or three young men, highly celebrated
in those days for their humour, Madame Mantalini--“Of all the ready
humour,” I say to the young ladies, “I ever heard, Madame Mantalini’s
is the most remarkable--hem. It is so gentle, so sarcastic, and yet so
good-natured (as I was observing to Miss Simmonds only this morning),
that how, or when, or by what means she acquired it, is to me a mystery
indeed.”’

Here Miss Knag paused to take breath, and while she pauses it may be
observed--not that she was marvellously loquacious and marvellously
deferential to Madame Mantalini, since these are facts which require no
comment; but that every now and then, she was accustomed, in the torrent
of her discourse, to introduce a loud, shrill, clear ‘hem!’ the import
and meaning of which, was variously interpreted by her acquaintance;
some holding that Miss Knag dealt in exaggeration, and introduced the
monosyllable when any fresh invention was in course of coinage in her
brain; others, that when she wanted a word, she threw it in to gain
time, and prevent anybody else from striking into the conversation. It
may be further remarked, that Miss Knag still aimed at youth, although
she had shot beyond it, years ago; and that she was weak and vain, and
one of those people who are best described by the axiom, that you may
trust them as far as you can see them, and no farther.

‘You’ll take care that Miss Nickleby understands her hours, and so
forth,’ said Madame Mantalini; ‘and so I’ll leave her with you. You’ll
not forget my directions, Miss Knag?’

Miss Knag of course replied, that to forget anything Madame Mantalini
had directed, was a moral impossibility; and that lady, dispensing a
general good-morning among her assistants, sailed away.

‘Charming creature, isn’t she, Miss Nickleby?’ said Miss Knag, rubbing
her hands together.

‘I have seen very little of her,’ said Kate. ‘I hardly know yet.’

‘Have you seen Mr. Mantalini?’ inquired Miss Knag.

‘Yes; I have seen him twice.’

‘Isn’t HE a charming creature?’

‘Indeed he does not strike me as being so, by any means,’ replied Kate.

‘No, my dear!’ cried Miss Knag, elevating her hands. ‘Why, goodness
gracious mercy, where’s your taste? Such a fine tall, full-whiskered
dashing gentlemanly man, with such teeth and hair, and--hem--well now,
you DO astonish me.’

‘I dare say I am very foolish,’ replied Kate, laying aside her bonnet;
‘but as my opinion is of very little importance to him or anyone else,
I do not regret having formed it, and shall be slow to change it, I
think.’

‘He is a very fine man, don’t you think so?’ asked one of the young
ladies.

‘Indeed he may be, for anything I could say to the contrary,’ replied
Kate.

‘And drives very beautiful horses, doesn’t he?’ inquired another.

‘I dare say he may, but I never saw them,’ answered Kate.

‘Never saw them!’ interposed Miss Knag. ‘Oh, well! There it is at
once you know; how can you possibly pronounce an opinion about a
gentleman--hem--if you don’t see him as he turns out altogether?’

There was so much of the world--even of the little world of the country
girl--in this idea of the old milliner, that Kate, who was anxious, for
every reason, to change the subject, made no further remark, and left
Miss Knag in possession of the field.

After a short silence, during which most of the young people made a
closer inspection of Kate’s appearance, and compared notes respecting
it, one of them offered to help her off with her shawl, and the
offer being accepted, inquired whether she did not find black very
uncomfortable wear.

‘I do indeed,’ replied Kate, with a bitter sigh.

‘So dusty and hot,’ observed the same speaker, adjusting her dress for
her.

Kate might have said, that mourning is sometimes the coldest wear which
mortals can assume; that it not only chills the breasts of those it
clothes, but extending its influence to summer friends, freezes up their
sources of good-will and kindness, and withering all the buds of promise
they once so liberally put forth, leaves nothing but bared and rotten
hearts exposed. There are few who have lost a friend or relative
constituting in life their sole dependence, who have not keenly felt
this chilling influence of their sable garb. She had felt it acutely,
and feeling it at the moment, could not quite restrain her tears.

‘I am very sorry to have wounded you by my thoughtless speech,’ said
her companion. ‘I did not think of it. You are in mourning for some near
relation?’

‘For my father,’ answered Kate.

‘For what relation, Miss Simmonds?’ asked Miss Knag, in an audible
voice.

‘Her father,’ replied the other softly.

‘Her father, eh?’ said Miss Knag, without the slightest depression of
her voice. ‘Ah! A long illness, Miss Simmonds?’

‘Hush,’ replied the girl; ‘I don’t know.’

‘Our misfortune was very sudden,’ said Kate, turning away, ‘or I might
perhaps, at a time like this, be enabled to support it better.’

There had existed not a little desire in the room, according to
invariable custom, when any new ‘young person’ came, to know who Kate
was, and what she was, and all about her; but, although it might
have been very naturally increased by her appearance and emotion, the
knowledge that it pained her to be questioned, was sufficient to repress
even this curiosity; and Miss Knag, finding it hopeless to attempt
extracting any further particulars just then, reluctantly commanded
silence, and bade the work proceed.

In silence, then, the tasks were plied until half-past one, when a baked
leg of mutton, with potatoes to correspond, were served in the kitchen.
The meal over, and the young ladies having enjoyed the additional
relaxation of washing their hands, the work began again, and was again
performed in silence, until the noise of carriages rattling through the
streets, and of loud double knocks at doors, gave token that the day’s
work of the more fortunate members of society was proceeding in its
turn.

One of these double knocks at Madame Mantalini’s door, announced
the equipage of some great lady--or rather rich one, for there is
occasionally a distinction between riches and greatness--who had come
with her daughter to approve of some court-dresses which had been a long
time preparing, and upon whom Kate was deputed to wait, accompanied by
Miss Knag, and officered of course by Madame Mantalini.

Kate’s part in the pageant was humble enough, her duties being limited
to holding articles of costume until Miss Knag was ready to try them on,
and now and then tying a string, or fastening a hook-and-eye. She
might, not unreasonably, have supposed herself beneath the reach of any
arrogance, or bad humour; but it happened that the lady and daughter
were both out of temper that day, and the poor girl came in for
her share of their revilings. She was awkward--her hands were
cold--dirty--coarse--she could do nothing right; they wondered how
Madame Mantalini could have such people about her; requested they might
see some other young woman the next time they came; and so forth.

So common an occurrence would be hardly deserving of mention, but for
its effect. Kate shed many bitter tears when these people were gone,
and felt, for the first time, humbled by her occupation. She had, it is
true, quailed at the prospect of drudgery and hard service; but she had
felt no degradation in working for her bread, until she found herself
exposed to insolence and pride. Philosophy would have taught her that
the degradation was on the side of those who had sunk so low as to
display such passions habitually, and without cause: but she was too
young for such consolation, and her honest feeling was hurt. May not the
complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its
rise in the fact of UNcommon people being below theirs?

In such scenes and occupations the time wore on until nine o’clock, when
Kate, jaded and dispirited with the occurrences of the day, hastened
from the confinement of the workroom, to join her mother at the street
corner, and walk home:--the more sadly, from having to disguise her real
feelings, and feign to participate in all the sanguine visions of her
companion.

‘Bless my soul, Kate,’ said Mrs. Nickleby; ‘I’ve been thinking all day
what a delightful thing it would be for Madame Mantalini to take you
into partnership--such a likely thing too, you know! Why, your poor
dear papa’s cousin’s sister-in-law--a Miss Browndock--was taken into
partnership by a lady that kept a school at Hammersmith, and made her
fortune in no time at all. I forget, by-the-bye, whether that Miss
Browndock was the same lady that got the ten thousand pounds prize in
the lottery, but I think she was; indeed, now I come to think of it, I
am sure she was. “Mantalini and Nickleby”, how well it would sound!--and
if Nicholas has any good fortune, you might have Doctor Nickleby, the
head-master of Westminster School, living in the same street.’

‘Dear Nicholas!’ cried Kate, taking from her reticule her brother’s
letter from Dotheboys Hall. ‘In all our misfortunes, how happy it makes
me, mama, to hear he is doing well, and to find him writing in such
good spirits! It consoles me for all we may undergo, to think that he is
comfortable and happy.’

Poor Kate! she little thought how weak her consolation was, and how soon
she would be undeceived.



CHAPTER 18

Miss Knag, after doting on Kate Nickleby for three whole Days, makes
up her Mind to hate her for evermore. The Causes which led Miss Knag to
form this Resolution


There are many lives of much pain, hardship, and suffering, which,
having no stirring interest for any but those who lead them, are
disregarded by persons who do not want thought or feeling, but who
pamper their compassion and need high stimulants to rouse it.

There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their
vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in
theirs; and hence it is that diseased sympathy and compassion are every
day expended on out-of-the-way objects, when only too many demands upon
the legitimate exercise of the same virtues in a healthy state, are
constantly within the sight and hearing of the most unobservant person
alive. In short, charity must have its romance, as the novelist or
playwright must have his. A thief in fustian is a vulgar character,
scarcely to be thought of by persons of refinement; but dress him in
green velvet, with a high-crowned hat, and change the scene of his
operations, from a thickly-peopled city, to a mountain road, and you
shall find in him the very soul of poetry and adventure. So it is with
the one great cardinal virtue, which, properly nourished and exercised,
leads to, if it does not necessarily include, all the others. It must
have its romance; and the less of real, hard, struggling work-a-day life
there is in that romance, the better.

The life to which poor Kate Nickleby was devoted, in consequence of the
unforeseen train of circumstances already developed in this narrative,
was a hard one; but lest the very dulness, unhealthy confinement, and
bodily fatigue, which made up its sum and substance, should deprive it
of any interest with the mass of the charitable and sympathetic, I would
rather keep Miss Nickleby herself in view just now, than chill them in
the outset, by a minute and lengthened description of the establishment
presided over by Madame Mantalini.

‘Well, now, indeed, Madame Mantalini,’ said Miss Knag, as Kate was
taking her weary way homewards on the first night of her novitiate;
‘that Miss Nickleby is a very creditable young person--a very creditable
young person indeed--hem--upon my word, Madame Mantalini, it does very
extraordinary credit even to your discrimination that you should
have found such a very excellent, very well-behaved, very--hem--very
unassuming young woman to assist in the fitting on. I have seen some
young women when they had the opportunity of displaying before their
betters, behave in such a--oh, dear--well--but you’re always right,
Madame Mantalini, always; and as I very often tell the young ladies,
how you do contrive to be always right, when so many people are so often
wrong, is to me a mystery indeed.’

‘Beyond putting a very excellent client out of humour, Miss Nickleby has
not done anything very remarkable today--that I am aware of, at least,’
said Madame Mantalini in reply.

‘Oh, dear!’ said Miss Knag; ‘but you must allow a great deal for
inexperience, you know.’

‘And youth?’ inquired Madame.

‘Oh, I say nothing about that, Madame Mantalini,’ replied Miss Knag,
reddening; ‘because if youth were any excuse, you wouldn’t have--’

‘Quite so good a forewoman as I have, I suppose,’ suggested Madame.

‘Well, I never did know anybody like you, Madame Mantalini,’ rejoined
Miss Knag most complacently, ‘and that’s the fact, for you know what
one’s going to say, before it has time to rise to one’s lips. Oh, very
good! Ha, ha, ha!’

‘For myself,’ observed Madame Mantalini, glancing with affected
carelessness at her assistant, and laughing heartily in her sleeve, ‘I
consider Miss Nickleby the most awkward girl I ever saw in my life.’

‘Poor dear thing,’ said Miss Knag, ‘it’s not her fault. If it was, we
might hope to cure it; but as it’s her misfortune, Madame Mantalini,
why really you know, as the man said about the blind horse, we ought to
respect it.’

‘Her uncle told me she had been considered pretty,’ remarked Madame
Mantalini. ‘I think her one of the most ordinary girls I ever met with.’

‘Ordinary!’ cried Miss Knag with a countenance beaming delight; ‘and
awkward! Well, all I can say is, Madame Mantalini, that I quite love the
poor girl; and that if she was twice as indifferent-looking, and twice
as awkward as she is, I should be only so much the more her friend, and
that’s the truth of it.’

In fact, Miss Knag had conceived an incipient affection for Kate
Nickleby, after witnessing her failure that morning, and this short
conversation with her superior increased the favourable prepossession
to a most surprising extent; which was the more remarkable, as when she
first scanned that young lady’s face and figure, she had entertained
certain inward misgivings that they would never agree.

‘But now,’ said Miss Knag, glancing at the reflection of herself in a
mirror at no great distance, ‘I love her--I quite love her--I declare I
do!’

Of such a highly disinterested quality was this devoted friendship, and
so superior was it to the little weaknesses of flattery or ill-nature,
that the kind-hearted Miss Knag candidly informed Kate Nickleby, next
day, that she saw she would never do for the business, but that she need
not give herself the slightest uneasiness on this account, for that she
(Miss Knag), by increased exertions on her own part, would keep her as
much as possible in the background, and that all she would have to do,
would be to remain perfectly quiet before company, and to shrink from
attracting notice by every means in her power. This last suggestion was
so much in accordance with the timid girl’s own feelings and wishes,
that she readily promised implicit reliance on the excellent spinster’s
advice: without questioning, or indeed bestowing a moment’s reflection
upon, the motives that dictated it.

‘I take quite a lively interest in you, my dear soul, upon my word,’
said Miss Knag; ‘a sister’s interest, actually. It’s the most singular
circumstance I ever knew.’

Undoubtedly it was singular, that if Miss Knag did feel a strong
interest in Kate Nickleby, it should not rather have been the interest
of a maiden aunt or grandmother; that being the conclusion to which the
difference in their respective ages would have naturally tended. But
Miss Knag wore clothes of a very youthful pattern, and perhaps her
feelings took the same shape.

‘Bless you!’ said Miss Knag, bestowing a kiss upon Kate at the
conclusion of the second day’s work, ‘how very awkward you have been all
day.’

‘I fear your kind and open communication, which has rendered me more
painfully conscious of my own defects, has not improved me,’ sighed
Kate.

‘No, no, I dare say not,’ rejoined Miss Knag, in a most uncommon flow of
good humour. ‘But how much better that you should know it at first,
and so be able to go on, straight and comfortable! Which way are you
walking, my love?’

‘Towards the city,’ replied Kate.

‘The city!’ cried Miss Knag, regarding herself with great favour in the
glass as she tied her bonnet. ‘Goodness gracious me! now do you really
live in the city?’

‘Is it so very unusual for anybody to live there?’ asked Kate, half
smiling.

‘I couldn’t have believed it possible that any young woman could have
lived there, under any circumstances whatever, for three days together,’
replied Miss Knag.

‘Reduced--I should say poor people,’ answered Kate, correcting herself
hastily, for she was afraid of appearing proud, ‘must live where they
can.’

‘Ah! very true, so they must; very proper indeed!’ rejoined Miss Knag
with that sort of half-sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight
nods of the head, is pity’s small change in general society; ‘and that’s
what I very often tell my brother, when our servants go away ill, one
after another, and he thinks the back-kitchen’s rather too damp for
‘em to sleep in. These sort of people, I tell him, are glad to sleep
anywhere! Heaven suits the back to the burden. What a nice thing it is
to think that it should be so, isn’t it?’

‘Very,’ replied Kate.

‘I’ll walk with you part of the way, my dear,’ said Miss Knag, ‘for
you must go very near our house; and as it’s quite dark, and our last
servant went to the hospital a week ago, with St Anthony’s fire in her
face, I shall be glad of your company.’

Kate would willingly have excused herself from this flattering
companionship; but Miss Knag having adjusted her bonnet to her entire
satisfaction, took her arm with an air which plainly showed how much
she felt the compliment she was conferring, and they were in the street
before she could say another word.

‘I fear,’ said Kate, hesitating, ‘that mama--my mother, I mean--is
waiting for me.’

‘You needn’t make the least apology, my dear,’ said Miss Knag, smiling
sweetly as she spoke; ‘I dare say she is a very respectable old person,
and I shall be quite--hem--quite pleased to know her.’

As poor Mrs. Nickleby was cooling--not her heels alone, but her limbs
generally at the street corner, Kate had no alternative but to make
her known to Miss Knag, who, doing the last new carriage customer
at second-hand, acknowledged the introduction with condescending
politeness. The three then walked away, arm in arm: with Miss Knag in
the middle, in a special state of amiability.

‘I have taken such a fancy to your daughter, Mrs. Nickleby, you can’t
think,’ said Miss Knag, after she had proceeded a little distance in
dignified silence.

‘I am delighted to hear it,’ said Mrs. Nickleby; ‘though it is nothing
new to me, that even strangers should like Kate.’

‘Hem!’ cried Miss Knag.

‘You will like her better when you know how good she is,’ said Mrs
Nickleby. ‘It is a great blessing to me, in my misfortunes, to have a
child, who knows neither pride nor vanity, and whose bringing-up might
very well have excused a little of both at first. You don’t know what it
is to lose a husband, Miss Knag.’

As Miss Knag had never yet known what it was to gain one, it followed,
very nearly as a matter of course, that she didn’t know what it was to
lose one; so she said, in some haste, ‘No, indeed I don’t,’ and said it
with an air intending to signify that she should like to catch herself
marrying anybody--no, no, she knew better than that.

‘Kate has improved even in this little time, I have no doubt,’ said Mrs
Nickleby, glancing proudly at her daughter.

‘Oh! of course,’ said Miss Knag.

‘And will improve still more,’ added Mrs. Nickleby.

‘That she will, I’ll be bound,’ replied Miss Knag, squeezing Kate’s arm
in her own, to point the joke.

‘She always was clever,’ said poor Mrs. Nickleby, brightening up,
‘always, from a baby. I recollect when she was only two years and a
half old, that a gentleman who used to visit very much at our house--Mr
Watkins, you know, Kate, my dear, that your poor papa went bail for,
who afterwards ran away to the United States, and sent us a pair of
snow shoes, with such an affectionate letter that it made your poor dear
father cry for a week. You remember the letter? In which he said that he
was very sorry he couldn’t repay the fifty pounds just then, because
his capital was all out at interest, and he was very busy making his
fortune, but that he didn’t forget you were his god-daughter, and he
should take it very unkind if we didn’t buy you a silver coral and put
it down to his old account? Dear me, yes, my dear, how stupid you are!
and spoke so affectionately of the old port wine that he used to drink a
bottle and a half of every time he came. You must remember, Kate?’

‘Yes, yes, mama; what of him?’

‘Why, that Mr. Watkins, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby slowly, as if she
were making a tremendous effort to recollect something of paramount
importance; ‘that Mr. Watkins--he wasn’t any relation, Miss Knag will
understand, to the Watkins who kept the Old Boar in the village;
by-the-bye, I don’t remember whether it was the Old Boar or the
George the Third, but it was one of the two, I know, and it’s much the
same--that Mr. Watkins said, when you were only two years and a half old,
that you were one of the most astonishing children he ever saw. He did
indeed, Miss Knag, and he wasn’t at all fond of children, and couldn’t
have had the slightest motive for doing it. I know it was he who said
so, because I recollect, as well as if it was only yesterday,
his borrowing twenty pounds of her poor dear papa the very moment
afterwards.’

Having quoted this extraordinary and most disinterested testimony to her
daughter’s excellence, Mrs. Nickleby stopped to breathe; and Miss Knag,
finding that the discourse was turning upon family greatness, lost no
time in striking in, with a small reminiscence on her own account.

‘Don’t talk of lending money, Mrs. Nickleby,’ said Miss Knag, ‘or you’ll
drive me crazy, perfectly crazy. My mama--hem--was the most lovely and
beautiful creature, with the most striking and exquisite--hem--the most
exquisite nose that ever was put upon a human face, I do believe, Mrs
Nickleby (here Miss Knag rubbed her own nose sympathetically); the most
delightful and accomplished woman, perhaps, that ever was seen; but she
had that one failing of lending money, and carried it to such an extent
that she lent--hem--oh! thousands of pounds, all our little fortunes,
and what’s more, Mrs. Nickleby, I don’t think, if we were to live
till--till--hem--till the very end of time, that we should ever get them
back again. I don’t indeed.’

After concluding this effort of invention without being interrupted,
Miss Knag fell into many more recollections, no less interesting than
true, the full tide of which, Mrs. Nickleby in vain attempting to stem,
at length sailed smoothly down by adding an under-current of her own
recollections; and so both ladies went on talking together in perfect
contentment; the only difference between them being, that whereas Miss
Knag addressed herself to Kate, and talked very loud, Mrs. Nickleby kept
on in one unbroken monotonous flow, perfectly satisfied to be talking
and caring very little whether anybody listened or not.

In this manner they walked on, very amicably, until they arrived at Miss
Knag’s brother’s, who was an ornamental stationer and small circulating
library keeper, in a by-street off Tottenham Court Road; and who let
out by the day, week, month, or year, the newest old novels, whereof
the titles were displayed in pen-and-ink characters on a sheet of
pasteboard, swinging at his door-post. As Miss Knag happened, at the
moment, to be in the middle of an account of her twenty-second offer
from a gentleman of large property, she insisted upon their all going in
to supper together; and in they went.

‘Don’t go away, Mortimer,’ said Miss Knag as they entered the shop.
‘It’s only one of our young ladies and her mother. Mrs. and Miss
Nickleby.’

‘Oh, indeed!’ said Mr. Mortimer Knag. ‘Ah!’

Having given utterance to these ejaculations with a very profound
and thoughtful air, Mr. Knag slowly snuffed two kitchen candles on the
counter, and two more in the window, and then snuffed himself from a box
in his waistcoat pocket.

There was something very impressive in the ghostly air with which
all this was done; and as Mr. Knag was a tall lank gentleman of solemn
features, wearing spectacles, and garnished with much less hair than
a gentleman bordering on forty, or thereabouts, usually boasts, Mrs
Nickleby whispered her daughter that she thought he must be literary.

‘Past ten,’ said Mr. Knag, consulting his watch. ‘Thomas, close the
warehouse.’

Thomas was a boy nearly half as tall as a shutter, and the warehouse was
a shop about the size of three hackney coaches.

‘Ah!’ said Mr. Knag once more, heaving a deep sigh as he restored to its
parent shelf the book he had been reading. ‘Well--yes--I believe supper
is ready, sister.’

With another sigh Mr. Knag took up the kitchen candles from the counter,
and preceded the ladies with mournful steps to a back-parlour, where a
charwoman, employed in the absence of the sick servant, and remunerated
with certain eighteenpences to be deducted from her wages due, was
putting the supper out.

‘Mrs. Blockson,’ said Miss Knag, reproachfully, ‘how very often I have
begged you not to come into the room with your bonnet on!’

‘I can’t help it, Miss Knag,’ said the charwoman, bridling up on the
shortest notice. ‘There’s been a deal o’cleaning to do in this house,
and if you don’t like it, I must trouble you to look out for somebody
else, for it don’t hardly pay me, and that’s the truth, if I was to be
hung this minute.’

‘I don’t want any remarks if YOU please,’ said Miss Knag, with a strong
emphasis on the personal pronoun. ‘Is there any fire downstairs for some
hot water presently?’

‘No there is not, indeed, Miss Knag,’ replied the substitute; ‘and so I
won’t tell you no stories about it.’

‘Then why isn’t there?’ said Miss Knag.

‘Because there arn’t no coals left out, and if I could make coals I
would, but as I can’t I won’t, and so I make bold to tell you, Mem,’
replied Mrs. Blockson.

‘Will you hold your tongue--female?’ said Mr. Mortimer Knag, plunging
violently into this dialogue.

‘By your leave, Mr. Knag,’ retorted the charwoman, turning sharp round.
‘I’m only too glad not to speak in this house, excepting when and where
I’m spoke to, sir; and with regard to being a female, sir, I should wish
to know what you considered yourself?’

‘A miserable wretch,’ exclaimed Mr. Knag, striking his forehead. ‘A
miserable wretch.’

‘I’m very glad to find that you don’t call yourself out of your name,
sir,’ said Mrs. Blockson; ‘and as I had two twin children the day before
yesterday was only seven weeks, and my little Charley fell down a airy
and put his elber out, last Monday, I shall take it as a favour if
you’ll send nine shillings, for one week’s work, to my house, afore the
clock strikes ten tomorrow.’

With these parting words, the good woman quitted the room with great
ease of manner, leaving the door wide open; Mr. Knag, at the same moment,
flung himself into the ‘warehouse,’ and groaned aloud.

‘What is the matter with that gentleman, pray?’ inquired Mrs. Nickleby,
greatly disturbed by the sound.

‘Is he ill?’ inquired Kate, really alarmed.

‘Hush!’ replied Miss Knag; ‘a most melancholy history. He was once most
devotedly attached to--hem--to Madame Mantalini.’

‘Bless me!’ exclaimed Mrs. Nickleby.

‘Yes,’ continued Miss Knag, ‘and received great encouragement too,
and confidently hoped to marry her. He has a most romantic heart,
Mrs. Nickleby, as indeed--hem--as indeed all our family have, and the
disappointment was a dreadful blow. He is a wonderfully accomplished
man--most extraordinarily accomplished--reads--hem--reads every novel
that comes out; I mean every novel that--hem--that has any fashion in
it, of course. The fact is, that he did find so much in the books he
read, applicable to his own misfortunes, and did find himself in every
respect so much like the heroes--because of course he is conscious of
his own superiority, as we all are, and very naturally--that he took to
scorning everything, and became a genius; and I am quite sure that he
is, at this very present moment, writing another book.’

‘Another book!’ repeated Kate, finding that a pause was left for
somebody to say something.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Knag, nodding in great triumph; ‘another book, in three
volumes post octavo. Of course it’s a great advantage to him, in all his
little fashionable descriptions, to have the benefit of my--hem--of my
experience, because, of course, few authors who write about such things
can have such opportunities of knowing them as I have. He’s so wrapped
up in high life, that the least allusion to business or worldly
matters--like that woman just now, for instance--quite distracts him;
but, as I often say, I think his disappointment a great thing for him,
because if he hadn’t been disappointed he couldn’t have written about
blighted hopes and all that; and the fact is, if it hadn’t happened as
it has, I don’t believe his genius would ever have come out at all.’

How much more communicative Miss Knag might have become under more
favourable circumstances, it is impossible to divine, but as the gloomy
one was within ear-shot, and the fire wanted making up, her disclosures
stopped here. To judge from all appearances, and the difficulty of
making the water warm, the last servant could not have been much
accustomed to any other fire than St Anthony’s; but a little brandy and
water was made at last, and the guests, having been previously regaled
with cold leg of mutton and bread and cheese, soon afterwards took
leave; Kate amusing herself, all the way home, with the recollection of
her last glimpse of Mr. Mortimer Knag deeply abstracted in the shop; and
Mrs. Nickleby by debating within herself whether the dressmaking firm
would ultimately become ‘Mantalini, Knag, and Nickleby’, or ‘Mantalini,
Nickleby, and Knag’.

At this high point, Miss Knag’s friendship remained for three whole
days, much to the wonderment of Madame Mantalini’s young ladies who had
never beheld such constancy in that quarter, before; but on the fourth,
it received a check no less violent than sudden, which thus occurred.

It happened that an old lord of great family, who was going to marry a
young lady of no family in particular, came with the young lady, and the
young lady’s sister, to witness the ceremony of trying on two nuptial
bonnets which had been ordered the day before, and Madame Mantalini
announcing the fact, in a shrill treble, through the speaking-pipe,
which communicated with the workroom, Miss Knag darted hastily upstairs
with a bonnet in each hand, and presented herself in the show-room, in a
charming state of palpitation, intended to demonstrate her enthusiasm
in the cause. The bonnets were no sooner fairly on, than Miss Knag and
Madame Mantalini fell into convulsions of admiration.

‘A most elegant appearance,’ said Madame Mantalini.

‘I never saw anything so exquisite in all my life,’ said Miss Knag.

Now, the old lord, who was a VERY old lord, said nothing, but mumbled
and chuckled in a state of great delight, no less with the nuptial
bonnets and their wearers, than with his own address in getting such a
fine woman for his wife; and the young lady, who was a very lively young
lady, seeing the old lord in this rapturous condition, chased the old
lord behind a cheval-glass, and then and there kissed him, while Madame
Mantalini and the other young lady looked, discreetly, another way.

But, pending the salutation, Miss Knag, who was tinged with curiosity,
stepped accidentally behind the glass, and encountered the lively young
lady’s eye just at the very moment when she kissed the old lord; upon
which the young lady, in a pouting manner, murmured something about ‘an
old thing,’ and ‘great impertinence,’ and finished by darting a look of
displeasure at Miss Knag, and smiling contemptuously.

‘Madame Mantalini,’ said the young lady.

‘Ma’am,’ said Madame Mantalini.

‘Pray have up that pretty young creature we saw yesterday.’

‘Oh yes, do,’ said the sister.

‘Of all things in the world, Madame Mantalini,’ said the lord’s
intended, throwing herself languidly on a sofa, ‘I hate being waited
upon by frights or elderly persons. Let me always see that young
creature, I beg, whenever I come.’

‘By all means,’ said the old lord; ‘the lovely young creature, by all
means.’

‘Everybody is talking about her,’ said the young lady, in the same
careless manner; ‘and my lord, being a great admirer of beauty, must
positively see her.’

‘She IS universally admired,’ replied Madame Mantalini. ‘Miss Knag, send
up Miss Nickleby. You needn’t return.’

‘I beg your pardon, Madame Mantalini, what did you say last?’ asked Miss
Knag, trembling.

‘You needn’t return,’ repeated the superior, sharply. Miss Knag vanished
without another word, and in all reasonable time was replaced by Kate,
who took off the new bonnets and put on the old ones: blushing very much
to find that the old lord and the two young ladies were staring her out
of countenance all the time.

‘Why, how you colour, child!’ said the lord’s chosen bride.

‘She is not quite so accustomed to her business, as she will be in a
week or two,’ interposed Madame Mantalini with a gracious smile.

‘I am afraid you have been giving her some of your wicked looks, my
lord,’ said the intended.

‘No, no, no,’ replied the old lord, ‘no, no, I’m going to be married,
and lead a new life. Ha, ha, ha! a new life, a new life! ha, ha, ha!’

It was a satisfactory thing to hear that the old gentleman was going to
lead a new life, for it was pretty evident that his old one would not
last him much longer. The mere exertion of protracted chuckling reduced
him to a fearful ebb of coughing and gasping; it was some minutes
before he could find breath to remark that the girl was too pretty for a
milliner.

‘I hope you don’t think good looks a disqualification for the business,
my lord,’ said Madame Mantalini, simpering.

‘Not by any means,’ replied the old lord, ‘or you would have left it
long ago.’

‘You naughty creature,’ said the lively lady, poking the peer with her
parasol; ‘I won’t have you talk so. How dare you?’

This playful inquiry was accompanied with another poke, and another,
and then the old lord caught the parasol, and wouldn’t give it up again,
which induced the other lady to come to the rescue, and some very pretty
sportiveness ensued.

‘You will see that those little alterations are made, Madame Mantalini,’
said the lady. ‘Nay, you bad man, you positively shall go first; I
wouldn’t leave you behind with that pretty girl, not for half a second.
I know you too well. Jane, my dear, let him go first, and we shall be
quite sure of him.’

The old lord, evidently much flattered by this suspicion, bestowed a
grotesque leer upon Kate as he passed; and, receiving another tap with
the parasol for his wickedness, tottered downstairs to the door, where
his sprightly body was hoisted into the carriage by two stout footmen.

‘Foh!’ said Madame Mantalini, ‘how he ever gets into a carriage without
thinking of a hearse, I can’t think. There, take the things away, my
dear, take them away.’

Kate, who had remained during the whole scene with her eyes modestly
fixed upon the ground, was only too happy to avail herself of the
permission to retire, and hasten joyfully downstairs to Miss Knag’s
dominion.

The circumstances of the little kingdom had greatly changed, however,
during the short period of her absence. In place of Miss Knag being
stationed in her accustomed seat, preserving all the dignity and
greatness of Madame Mantalini’s representative, that worthy soul was
reposing on a large box, bathed in tears, while three or four of the
young ladies in close attendance upon her, together with the presence
of hartshorn, vinegar, and other restoratives, would have borne ample
testimony, even without the derangement of the head-dress and front row
of curls, to her having fainted desperately.

‘Bless me!’ said Kate, stepping hastily forward, ‘what is the matter?’

This inquiry produced in Miss Knag violent symptoms of a relapse; and
several young ladies, darting angry looks at Kate, applied more vinegar
and hartshorn, and said it was ‘a shame.’

‘What is a shame?’ demanded Kate. ‘What is the matter? What has
happened? tell me.’

‘Matter!’ cried Miss Knag, coming, all at once, bolt upright, to the
great consternation of the assembled maidens; ‘matter! Fie upon you, you
nasty creature!’

‘Gracious!’ cried Kate, almost paralysed by the violence with which the
adjective had been jerked out from between Miss Knag’s closed teeth;
‘have I offended you?’

‘YOU offended me!’ retorted Miss Knag, ‘YOU! a chit, a child, an upstart
nobody! Oh, indeed! Ha, ha!’

Now, it was evident, as Miss Knag laughed, that something struck her as
being exceedingly funny; and as the young ladies took their tone from
Miss Knag--she being the chief--they all got up a laugh without
a moment’s delay, and nodded their heads a little, and smiled
sarcastically to each other, as much as to say how very good that was!

‘Here she is,’ continued Miss Knag, getting off the box, and introducing
Kate with much ceremony and many low curtseys to the delighted throng;
‘here she is--everybody is talking about her--the belle, ladies--the
beauty, the--oh, you bold-faced thing!’

At this crisis, Miss Knag was unable to repress a virtuous shudder,
which immediately communicated itself to all the young ladies; after
which, Miss Knag laughed, and after that, cried.

‘For fifteen years,’ exclaimed Miss Knag, sobbing in a most affecting
manner, ‘for fifteen years have I been the credit and ornament of this
room and the one upstairs. Thank God,’ said Miss Knag, stamping first
her right foot and then her left with remarkable energy, ‘I have never
in all that time, till now, been exposed to the arts, the vile arts, of
a creature, who disgraces us with all her proceedings, and makes proper
people blush for themselves. But I feel it, I do feel it, although I am
disgusted.’

Miss Knag here relapsed into softness, and the young ladies renewing
their attentions, murmured that she ought to be superior to such things,
and that for their part they despised them, and considered them beneath
their notice; in witness whereof, they called out, more emphatically
than before, that it was a shame, and that they felt so angry, they did,
they hardly knew what to do with themselves.

‘Have I lived to this day to be called a fright!’ cried Miss Knag,
suddenly becoming convulsive, and making an effort to tear her front
off.

‘Oh no, no,’ replied the chorus, ‘pray don’t say so; don’t now!’

‘Have I deserved to be called an elderly person?’ screamed Miss Knag,
wrestling with the supernumeraries.

‘Don’t think of such things, dear,’ answered the chorus.

‘I hate her,’ cried Miss Knag; ‘I detest and hate her. Never let her
speak to me again; never let anybody who is a friend of mine speak to
her; a slut, a hussy, an impudent artful hussy!’ Having denounced the
object of her wrath, in these terms, Miss Knag screamed once, hiccuped
thrice, gurgled in her throat several times, slumbered, shivered, woke,
came to, composed her head-dress, and declared herself quite well again.

Poor Kate had regarded these proceedings, at first, in perfect
bewilderment. She had then turned red and pale by turns, and once
or twice essayed to speak; but, as the true motives of this altered
behaviour developed themselves, she retired a few paces, and looked
calmly on without deigning a reply. Nevertheless, although she walked
proudly to her seat, and turned her back upon the group of little
satellites who clustered round their ruling planet in the remotest
corner of the room, she gave way, in secret, to some such bitter tears
as would have gladdened Miss Knag’s inmost soul, if she could have seen
them fall.



CHAPTER 19

Descriptive of a Dinner at Mr. Ralph Nickleby’s, and of the Manner in
which the Company entertained themselves, before Dinner, at Dinner, and
after Dinner.


The bile and rancour of the worthy Miss Knag undergoing no diminution
during the remainder of the week, but rather augmenting with every
successive hour; and the honest ire of all the young ladies rising, or
seeming to rise, in exact proportion to the good spinster’s indignation,
and both waxing very hot every time Miss Nickleby was called upstairs;
it will be readily imagined that that young lady’s daily life was
none of the most cheerful or enviable kind. She hailed the arrival of
Saturday night, as a prisoner would a few delicious hours’ respite from
slow and wearing torture, and felt that the poor pittance for her first
week’s labour would have been dearly and hardly earned, had its amount
been trebled.

When she joined her mother, as usual, at the street corner, she was not
a little surprised to find her in conversation with Mr. Ralph Nickleby;
but her surprise was soon redoubled, no less by the matter of their
conversation, than by the smoothed and altered manner of Mr. Nickleby
himself.

‘Ah! my dear!’ said Ralph; ‘we were at that moment talking about you.’

‘Indeed!’ replied Kate, shrinking, though she scarce knew why, from her
uncle’s cold glistening eye.

‘That instant,’ said Ralph. ‘I was coming to call for you, making sure
to catch you before you left; but your mother and I have been talking
over family affairs, and the time has slipped away so rapidly--’

‘Well, now, hasn’t it?’ interposed Mrs. Nickleby, quite insensible to the
sarcastic tone of Ralph’s last remark. ‘Upon my word, I couldn’t have
believed it possible, that such a--Kate, my dear, you’re to dine with
your uncle at half-past six o’clock tomorrow.’

Triumphing in having been the first to communicate this extraordinary
intelligence, Mrs. Nickleby nodded and smiled a great many times, to
impress its full magnificence on Kate’s wondering mind, and then flew
off, at an acute angle, to a committee of ways and means.

‘Let me see,’ said the good lady. ‘Your black silk frock will be quite
dress enough, my dear, with that pretty little scarf, and a plain band
in your hair, and a pair of black silk stock--Dear, dear,’ cried Mrs
Nickleby, flying off at another angle, ‘if I had but those unfortunate
amethysts of mine--you recollect them, Kate, my love--how they used to
sparkle, you know--but your papa, your poor dear papa--ah! there
never was anything so cruelly sacrificed as those jewels were, never!’
Overpowered by this agonising thought, Mrs. Nickleby shook her head, in a
melancholy manner, and applied her handkerchief to her eyes.

I don’t want them, mama, indeed,’ said Kate. ‘Forget that you ever had
them.’

‘Lord, Kate, my dear,’ rejoined Mrs. Nickleby, pettishly, ‘how like a
child you talk! Four-and-twenty silver tea-spoons, brother-in-law,
two gravies, four salts, all the amethysts--necklace, brooch, and
ear-rings--all made away with, at the same time, and I saying, almost
on my bended knees, to that poor good soul, “Why don’t you do something,
Nicholas? Why don’t you make some arrangement?” I am sure that anybody
who was about us at that time, will do me the justice to own, that if
I said that once, I said it fifty times a day. Didn’t I, Kate, my dear?
Did I ever lose an opportunity of impressing it on your poor papa?’

‘No, no, mama, never,’ replied Kate. And to do Mrs. Nickleby justice, she
never had lost--and to do married ladies as a body justice, they seldom
do lose--any occasion of inculcating similar golden percepts, whose only
blemish is, the slight degree of vagueness and uncertainty in which they
are usually enveloped.

‘Ah!’ said Mrs. Nickleby, with great fervour, ‘if my advice had been
taken at the beginning--Well, I have always done MY duty, and that’s
some comfort.’

When she had arrived at this reflection, Mrs. Nickleby sighed, rubbed her
hands, cast up her eyes, and finally assumed a look of meek composure;
thus importing that she was a persecuted saint, but that she wouldn’t
trouble her hearers by mentioning a circumstance which must be so
obvious to everybody.

‘Now,’ said Ralph, with a smile, which, in common with all other tokens
of emotion, seemed to skulk under his face, rather than play boldly over
it--‘to return to the point from which we have strayed. I have a little
party of--of--gentlemen with whom I am connected in business just now,
at my house tomorrow; and your mother has promised that you shall
keep house for me. I am not much used to parties; but this is one of
business, and such fooleries are an important part of it sometimes. You
don’t mind obliging me?’

‘Mind!’ cried Mrs. Nickleby. ‘My dear Kate, why--’

‘Pray,’ interrupted Ralph, motioning her to be silent. ‘I spoke to my
niece.’

‘I shall be very glad, of course, uncle,’ replied Kate; ‘but I am afraid
you will find me awkward and embarrassed.’

‘Oh no,’ said Ralph; ‘come when you like, in a hackney coach--I’ll pay
for it. Good-night--a--a--God bless you.’

The blessing seemed to stick in Mr. Ralph Nickleby’s throat, as if it
were not used to the thoroughfare, and didn’t know the way out. But it
got out somehow, though awkwardly enough; and having disposed of it, he
shook hands with his two relatives, and abruptly left them.

‘What a very strongly marked countenance your uncle has!’ said Mrs
Nickleby, quite struck with his parting look. ‘I don’t see the slightest
resemblance to his poor brother.’

‘Mama!’ said Kate reprovingly. ‘To think of such a thing!’

‘No,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, musing. ‘There certainly is none. But it’s a
very honest face.’

The worthy matron made this remark with great emphasis and elocution,
as if it comprised no small quantity of ingenuity and research; and,
in truth, it was not unworthy of being classed among the extraordinary
discoveries of the age. Kate looked up hastily, and as hastily looked
down again.

‘What has come over you, my dear, in the name of goodness?’ asked Mrs
Nickleby, when they had walked on, for some time, in silence.

‘I was only thinking, mama,’ answered Kate.

‘Thinking!’ repeated Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Ay, and indeed plenty to think
about, too. Your uncle has taken a strong fancy to you, that’s quite
clear; and if some extraordinary good fortune doesn’t come to you, after
this, I shall be a little surprised, that’s all.’

With this she launched out into sundry anecdotes of young ladies, who
had had thousand-pound notes given them in reticules, by eccentric
uncles; and of young ladies who had accidentally met amiable gentlemen
of enormous wealth at their uncles’ houses, and married them, after
short but ardent courtships; and Kate, listening first in apathy, and
afterwards in amusement, felt, as they walked home, something of her
mother’s sanguine complexion gradually awakening in her own bosom, and
began to think that her prospects might be brightening, and that better
days might be dawning upon them. Such is hope, Heaven’s own gift to
struggling mortals; pervading, like some subtle essence from the
skies, all things, both good and bad; as universal as death, and more
infectious than disease!

The feeble winter’s sun--and winter’s suns in the city are very feeble
indeed--might have brightened up, as he shone through the dim windows
of the large old house, on witnessing the unusual sight which one
half-furnished room displayed. In a gloomy corner, where, for years, had
stood a silent dusty pile of merchandise, sheltering its colony of mice,
and frowning, a dull and lifeless mass, upon the panelled room, save
when, responding to the roll of heavy waggons in the street without,
it quaked with sturdy tremblings and caused the bright eyes of its tiny
citizens to grow brighter still with fear, and struck them motionless,
with attentive ear and palpitating heart, until the alarm had passed
away--in this dark corner, was arranged, with scrupulous care, all
Kate’s little finery for the day; each article of dress partaking of
that indescribable air of jauntiness and individuality which empty
garments--whether by association, or that they become moulded, as
it were, to the owner’s form--will take, in eyes accustomed to, or
picturing, the wearer’s smartness. In place of a bale of musty goods,
there lay the black silk dress: the neatest possible figure in itself.
The small shoes, with toes delicately turned out, stood upon the very
pressure of some old iron weight; and a pile of harsh discoloured
leather had unconsciously given place to the very same little pair
of black silk stockings, which had been the objects of Mrs. Nickleby’s
peculiar care. Rats and mice, and such small gear, had long ago been
starved, or had emigrated to better quarters: and, in their stead,
appeared gloves, bands, scarfs, hair-pins, and many other little
devices, almost as ingenious in their way as rats and mice themselves,
for the tantalisation of mankind. About and among them all, moved Kate
herself, not the least beautiful or unwonted relief to the stern, old,
gloomy building.

In good time, or in bad time, as the reader likes to take it--for Mrs
Nickleby’s impatience went a great deal faster than the clocks at that
end of the town, and Kate was dressed to the very last hair-pin a full
hour and a half before it was at all necessary to begin to think about
it--in good time, or in bad time, the toilet was completed; and it being
at length the hour agreed upon for starting, the milkman fetched a coach
from the nearest stand, and Kate, with many adieux to her mother, and
many kind messages to Miss La Creevy, who was to come to tea, seated
herself in it, and went away in state, if ever anybody went away in
state in a hackney coach yet. And the coach, and the coachman, and the
horses, rattled, and jangled, and whipped, and cursed, and swore, and
tumbled on together, until they came to Golden Square.

The coachman gave a tremendous double knock at the door, which was
opened long before he had done, as quickly as if there had been a man
behind it, with his hand tied to the latch. Kate, who had expected no
more uncommon appearance than Newman Noggs in a clean shirt, was not a
little astonished to see that the opener was a man in handsome livery,
and that there were two or three others in the hall. There was no doubt
about its being the right house, however, for there was the name upon
the door; so she accepted the laced coat-sleeve which was tendered her,
and entering the house, was ushered upstairs, into a back drawing-room,
where she was left alone.

If she had been surprised at the apparition of the footman, she was
perfectly absorbed in amazement at the richness and splendour of the
furniture. The softest and most elegant carpets, the most exquisite
pictures, the costliest mirrors; articles of richest ornament, quite
dazzling from their beauty and perplexing from the prodigality with
which they were scattered around; encountered her on every side. The
very staircase nearly down to the hall-door, was crammed with beautiful
and luxurious things, as though the house were brimful of riches, which,
with a very trifling addition, would fairly run over into the street.

Presently, she heard a series of loud double knocks at the street-door,
and after every knock some new voice in the next room; the tones of Mr
Ralph Nickleby were easily distinguishable at first, but by degrees
they merged into the general buzz of conversation, and all she could
ascertain was, that there were several gentlemen with no very musical
voices, who talked very loud, laughed very heartily, and swore more
than she would have thought quite necessary. But this was a question of
taste.

At length, the door opened, and Ralph himself, divested of his boots,
and ceremoniously embellished with black silks and shoes, presented his
crafty face.

‘I couldn’t see you before, my dear,’ he said, in a low tone, and
pointing, as he spoke, to the next room. ‘I was engaged in receiving
them. Now--shall I take you in?’

‘Pray, uncle,’ said Kate, a little flurried, as people much more
conversant with society often are, when they are about to enter a room
full of strangers, and have had time to think of it previously, ‘are
there any ladies here?’

‘No,’ said Ralph, shortly, ‘I don’t know any.’

‘Must I go in immediately?’ asked Kate, drawing back a little.

‘As you please,’ said Ralph, shrugging his shoulders. ‘They are all
come, and dinner will be announced directly afterwards--that’s all.’

Kate would have entreated a few minutes’ respite, but reflecting that
her uncle might consider the payment of the hackney-coach fare a sort
of bargain for her punctuality, she suffered him to draw her arm through
his, and to lead her away.

Seven or eight gentlemen were standing round the fire when they went in,
and, as they were talking very loud, were not aware of their entrance
until Mr. Ralph Nickleby, touching one on the coat-sleeve, said in a
harsh emphatic voice, as if to attract general attention--

‘Lord Frederick Verisopht, my niece, Miss Nickleby.’

The group dispersed, as if in great surprise, and the gentleman
addressed, turning round, exhibited a suit of clothes of the most
superlative cut, a pair of whiskers of similar quality, a moustache, a
head of hair, and a young face.

‘Eh!’ said the gentleman. ‘What--the--deyvle!’

With which broken ejaculations, he fixed his glass in his eye, and
stared at Miss Nickleby in great surprise.

‘My niece, my lord,’ said Ralph.

‘Then my ears did not deceive me, and it’s not wa-a-x work,’ said his
lordship. ‘How de do? I’m very happy.’ And then his lordship turned
to another superlative gentleman, something older, something stouter,
something redder in the face, and something longer upon town, and said
in a loud whisper that the girl was ‘deyvlish pitty.’

‘Introduce me, Nickleby,’ said this second gentleman, who was lounging
with his back to the fire, and both elbows on the chimneypiece.

‘Sir Mulberry Hawk,’ said Ralph.

‘Otherwise the most knowing card in the pa-ack, Miss Nickleby,’ said
Lord Frederick Verisopht.

‘Don’t leave me out, Nickleby,’ cried a sharp-faced gentleman, who was
sitting on a low chair with a high back, reading the paper.

‘Mr. Pyke,’ said Ralph.

‘Nor me, Nickleby,’ cried a gentleman with a flushed face and a flash
air, from the elbow of Sir Mulberry Hawk.

‘Mr. Pluck,’ said Ralph. Then wheeling about again, towards a gentleman
with the neck of a stork and the legs of no animal in particular, Ralph
introduced him as the Honourable Mr. Snobb; and a white-headed person
at the table as Colonel Chowser. The colonel was in conversation with
somebody, who appeared to be a make-weight, and was not introduced at
all.

There were two circumstances which, in this early stage of the party,
struck home to Kate’s bosom, and brought the blood tingling to her face.
One was the flippant contempt with which the guests evidently regarded
her uncle, and the other, the easy insolence of their manner towards
herself. That the first symptom was very likely to lead to the
aggravation of the second, it needed no great penetration to foresee.
And here Mr. Ralph Nickleby had reckoned without his host; for however
fresh from the country a young lady (by nature) may be, and however
unacquainted with conventional behaviour, the chances are, that she will
have quite as strong an innate sense of the decencies and proprieties of
life as if she had run the gauntlet of a dozen London seasons--possibly
a stronger one, for such senses have been known to blunt in this
improving process.

When Ralph had completed the ceremonial of introduction, he led his
blushing niece to a seat. As he did so, he glanced warily round as
though to assure himself of the impression which her unlooked-for
appearance had created.

‘An unexpected playsure, Nickleby,’ said Lord Frederick Verisopht,
taking his glass out of his right eye, where it had, until now, done
duty on Kate, and fixing it in his left, to bring it to bear on Ralph.

‘Designed to surprise you, Lord Frederick,’ said Mr. Pluck.

‘Not a bad idea,’ said his lordship, ‘and one that would almost warrant
the addition of an extra two and a half per cent.’

‘Nickleby,’ said Sir Mulberry Hawk, in a thick coarse voice, ‘take the
hint, and tack it on the other five-and-twenty, or whatever it is, and
give me half for the advice.’

Sir Mulberry garnished this speech with a hoarse laugh, and terminated
it with a pleasant oath regarding Mr. Nickleby’s limbs, whereat Messrs
Pyke and Pluck laughed consumedly.

These gentlemen had not yet quite recovered the jest, when dinner was
announced, and then they were thrown into fresh ecstasies by a similar
cause; for Sir Mulberry Hawk, in an excess of humour, shot dexterously
past Lord Frederick Verisopht who was about to lead Kate downstairs, and
drew her arm through his up to the elbow.

‘No, damn it, Verisopht,’ said Sir Mulberry, ‘fair play’s a jewel, and
Miss Nickleby and I settled the matter with our eyes ten minutes ago.’

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ laughed the honourable Mr. Snobb, ‘very good, very good.’

Rendered additionally witty by this applause, Sir Mulberry Hawk leered
upon his friends most facetiously, and led Kate downstairs with an
air of familiarity, which roused in her gentle breast such burning
indignation, as she felt it almost impossible to repress. Nor was the
intensity of these feelings at all diminished, when she found herself
placed at the top of the table, with Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord
Frederick Verisopht on either side.

‘Oh, you’ve found your way into our neighbourhood, have you?’ said Sir
Mulberry as his lordship sat down.

‘Of course,’ replied Lord Frederick, fixing his eyes on Miss Nickleby,
‘how can you a-ask me?’

‘Well, you attend to your dinner,’ said Sir Mulberry, ‘and don’t mind
Miss Nickleby and me, for we shall prove very indifferent company, I
dare say.’

‘I wish you’d interfere here, Nickleby,’ said Lord Frederick.

‘What is the matter, my lord?’ demanded Ralph from the bottom of the
table, where he was supported by Messrs Pyke and Pluck.

‘This fellow, Hawk, is monopolising your niece,’ said Lord Frederick.

‘He has a tolerable share of everything that you lay claim to, my lord,’
said Ralph with a sneer.

‘’Gad, so he has,’ replied the young man; ‘deyvle take me if I know
which is master in my house, he or I.’

‘I know,’ muttered Ralph.

‘I think I shall cut him off with a shilling,’ said the young nobleman,
jocosely.

‘No, no, curse it,’ said Sir Mulberry. ‘When you come to the
shilling--the last shilling--I’ll cut you fast enough; but till then,
I’ll never leave you--you may take your oath of it.’

This sally (which was strictly founded on fact) was received with a
general roar, above which, was plainly distinguishable the laughter
of Mr. Pyke and Mr. Pluck, who were, evidently, Sir Mulberry’s toads in
ordinary. Indeed, it was not difficult to see, that the majority of the
company preyed upon the unfortunate young lord, who, weak and silly as
he was, appeared by far the least vicious of the party. Sir Mulberry
Hawk was remarkable for his tact in ruining, by himself and his
creatures, young gentlemen of fortune--a genteel and elegant profession,
of which he had undoubtedly gained the head. With all the boldness of an
original genius, he had struck out an entirely new course of treatment
quite opposed to the usual method; his custom being, when he had gained
the ascendancy over those he took in hand, rather to keep them down
than to give them their own way; and to exercise his vivacity upon
them openly, and without reserve. Thus, he made them butts, in a double
sense, and while he emptied them with great address, caused them to ring
with sundry well-administered taps, for the diversion of society.

The dinner was as remarkable for the splendour and completeness of its
appointments as the mansion itself, and the company were remarkable
for doing it ample justice, in which respect Messrs Pyke and Pluck
particularly signalised themselves; these two gentlemen eating of every
dish, and drinking of every bottle, with a capacity and perseverance
truly astonishing. They were remarkably fresh, too, notwithstanding
their great exertions: for, on the appearance of the dessert, they broke
out again, as if nothing serious had taken place since breakfast.

‘Well,’ said Lord Frederick, sipping his first glass of port, ‘if this
is a discounting dinner, all I have to say is, deyvle take me, if it
wouldn’t be a good pla-an to get discount every day.’

‘You’ll have plenty of it, in your time,’ returned Sir Mulberry Hawk;
‘Nickleby will tell you that.’

‘What do you say, Nickleby?’ inquired the young man; ‘am I to be a good
customer?’

‘It depends entirely on circumstances, my lord,’ replied Ralph.

‘On your lordship’s circumstances,’ interposed Colonel Chowser of the
Militia--and the race-courses.

The gallant colonel glanced at Messrs Pyke and Pluck as if he thought
they ought to laugh at his joke; but those gentlemen, being only engaged
to laugh for Sir Mulberry Hawk, were, to his signal discomfiture, as
grave as a pair of undertakers. To add to his defeat, Sir Mulberry,
considering any such efforts an invasion of his peculiar privilege,
eyed the offender steadily, through his glass, as if astonished at his
presumption, and audibly stated his impression that it was an ‘infernal
liberty,’ which being a hint to Lord Frederick, he put up HIS glass,
and surveyed the object of censure as if he were some extraordinary wild
animal then exhibiting for the first time. As a matter of course, Messrs
Pyke and Pluck stared at the individual whom Sir Mulberry Hawk stared
at; so, the poor colonel, to hide his confusion, was reduced to the
necessity of holding his port before his right eye and affecting to
scrutinise its colour with the most lively interest.

All this while, Kate had sat as silently as she could, scarcely daring
to raise her eyes, lest they should encounter the admiring gaze of Lord
Frederick Verisopht, or, what was still more embarrassing, the bold
looks of his friend Sir Mulberry. The latter gentleman was obliging
enough to direct general attention towards her.

‘Here is Miss Nickleby,’ observed Sir Mulberry, ‘wondering why the deuce
somebody doesn’t make love to her.’

‘No, indeed,’ said Kate, looking hastily up, ‘I--’ and then she stopped,
feeling it would have been better to have said nothing at all.

‘I’ll hold any man fifty pounds,’ said Sir Mulberry, ‘that Miss Nickleby
can’t look in my face, and tell me she wasn’t thinking so.’

‘Done!’ cried the noble gull. ‘Within ten minutes.’

‘Done!’ responded Sir Mulberry. The money was produced on both sides,
and the Honourable Mr. Snobb was elected to the double office of
stake-holder and time-keeper.

‘Pray,’ said Kate, in great confusion, while these preliminaries were
in course of completion. ‘Pray do not make me the subject of any bets.
Uncle, I cannot really--’

‘Why not, my dear?’ replied Ralph, in whose grating voice, however,
there was an unusual huskiness, as though he spoke unwillingly, and
would rather that the proposition had not been broached. ‘It is done in
a moment; there is nothing in it. If the gentlemen insist on it--’

‘I don’t insist on it,’ said Sir Mulberry, with a loud laugh. ‘That is,
I by no means insist upon Miss Nickleby’s making the denial, for if she
does, I lose; but I shall be glad to see her bright eyes, especially as
she favours the mahogany so much.’

‘So she does, and it’s too ba-a-d of you, Miss Nickleby,’ said the noble
youth.

‘Quite cruel,’ said Mr. Pyke.

‘Horrid cruel,’ said Mr. Pluck.

‘I don’t care if I do lose,’ said Sir Mulberry; ‘for one tolerable look
at Miss Nickleby’s eyes is worth double the money.’

‘More,’ said Mr. Pyke.

‘Far more,’ said Mr. Pluck.

‘How goes the enemy, Snobb?’ asked Sir Mulberry Hawk.

‘Four minutes gone.’

‘Bravo!’

‘Won’t you ma-ake one effort for me, Miss Nickleby?’ asked Lord
Frederick, after a short interval.

‘You needn’t trouble yourself to inquire, my buck,’ said Sir Mulberry;
‘Miss Nickleby and I understand each other; she declares on my side, and
shows her taste. You haven’t a chance, old fellow. Time, Snobb?’

‘Eight minutes gone.’

‘Get the money ready,’ said Sir Mulberry; ‘you’ll soon hand over.’

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ laughed Mr. Pyke.

Mr. Pluck, who always came second, and topped his companion if he could,
screamed outright.

The poor girl, who was so overwhelmed with confusion that she scarcely
knew what she did, had determined to remain perfectly quiet; but fearing
that by so doing she might seem to countenance Sir Mulberry’s boast,
which had been uttered with great coarseness and vulgarity of manner,
raised her eyes, and looked him in the face. There was something so
odious, so insolent, so repulsive in the look which met her, that,
without the power to stammer forth a syllable, she rose and hurried from
the room. She restrained her tears by a great effort until she was alone
upstairs, and then gave them vent.

‘Capital!’ said Sir Mulberry Hawk, putting the stakes in his pocket.

‘That’s a girl of spirit, and we’ll drink her health.’

It is needless to say, that Pyke and Co. responded, with great warmth of
manner, to this proposal, or that the toast was drunk with many
little insinuations from the firm, relative to the completeness of Sir
Mulberry’s conquest. Ralph, who, while the attention of the other guests
was attracted to the principals in the preceding scene, had eyed them
like a wolf, appeared to breathe more freely now his niece was gone; the
decanters passing quickly round, he leaned back in his chair, and turned
his eyes from speaker to speaker, as they warmed with wine, with looks
that seemed to search their hearts, and lay bare, for his distempered
sport, every idle thought within them.

Meanwhile Kate, left wholly to herself, had, in some degree, recovered
her composure. She had learnt from a female attendant, that her uncle
wished to see her before she left, and had also gleaned the satisfactory
intelligence, that the gentlemen would take coffee at table. The
prospect of seeing them no more, contributed greatly to calm her
agitation, and, taking up a book, she composed herself to read.

She started sometimes, when the sudden opening of the dining-room door
let loose a wild shout of noisy revelry, and more than once rose in
great alarm, as a fancied footstep on the staircase impressed her
with the fear that some stray member of the party was returning
alone. Nothing occurring, however, to realise her apprehensions, she
endeavoured to fix her attention more closely on her book, in which
by degrees she became so much interested, that she had read on through
several chapters without heed of time or place, when she was terrified
by suddenly hearing her name pronounced by a man’s voice close at her
ear.

The book fell from her hand. Lounging on an ottoman close beside her,
was Sir Mulberry Hawk, evidently the worse--if a man be a ruffian at
heart, he is never the better--for wine.

‘What a delightful studiousness!’ said this accomplished gentleman. ‘Was
it real, now, or only to display the eyelashes?’

Kate, looking anxiously towards the door, made no reply.

‘I have looked at ‘em for five minutes,’ said Sir Mulberry. ‘Upon my
soul, they’re perfect. Why did I speak, and destroy such a pretty little
picture?’

‘Do me the favour to be silent now, sir,’ replied Kate.

‘No, don’t,’ said Sir Mulberry, folding his crushed hat to lay his elbow
on, and bringing himself still closer to the young lady; ‘upon my life,
you oughtn’t to. Such a devoted slave of yours, Miss Nickleby--it’s an
infernal thing to treat him so harshly, upon my soul it is.’

‘I wish you to understand, sir,’ said Kate, trembling in spite of
herself, but speaking with great indignation, ‘that your behaviour
offends and disgusts me. If you have a spark of gentlemanly feeling
remaining, you will leave me.’

‘Now why,’ said Sir Mulberry, ‘why will you keep up this appearance of
excessive rigour, my sweet creature? Now, be more natural--my dear Miss
Nickleby, be more natural--do.’

Kate hastily rose; but as she rose, Sir Mulberry caught her dress, and
forcibly detained her.

‘Let me go, sir,’ she cried, her heart swelling with anger. ‘Do you
hear? Instantly--this moment.’

‘Sit down, sit down,’ said Sir Mulberry; ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘Unhand me, sir, this instant,’ cried Kate.

‘Not for the world,’ rejoined Sir Mulberry. Thus speaking, he leaned
over, as if to replace her in her chair; but the young lady, making a
violent effort to disengage herself, he lost his balance, and measured
his length upon the ground. As Kate sprung forward to leave the room, Mr
Ralph Nickleby appeared in the doorway, and confronted her.

‘What is this?’ said Ralph.

‘It is this, sir,’ replied Kate, violently agitated: ‘that beneath the
roof where I, a helpless girl, your dead brother’s child, should most
have found protection, I have been exposed to insult which should make
you shrink to look upon me. Let me pass you.’

Ralph DID shrink, as the indignant girl fixed her kindling eye upon him;
but he did not comply with her injunction, nevertheless: for he led her
to a distant seat, and returning, and approaching Sir Mulberry Hawk, who
had by this time risen, motioned towards the door.

‘Your way lies there, sir,’ said Ralph, in a suppressed voice, that some
devil might have owned with pride.

‘What do you mean by that?’ demanded his friend, fiercely.

The swoln veins stood out like sinews on Ralph’s wrinkled forehead, and
the nerves about his mouth worked as though some unendurable emotion
wrung them; but he smiled disdainfully, and again pointed to the door.

‘Do you know me, you old madman?’ asked Sir Mulberry.

‘Well,’ said Ralph. The fashionable vagabond for the moment quite
quailed under the steady look of the older sinner, and walked towards
the door, muttering as he went.

‘You wanted the lord, did you?’ he said, stopping short when he reached
the door, as if a new light had broken in upon him, and confronting
Ralph again. ‘Damme, I was in the way, was I?’

Ralph smiled again, but made no answer.

‘Who brought him to you first?’ pursued Sir Mulberry; ‘and how, without
me, could you ever have wound him in your net as you have?’

‘The net is a large one, and rather full,’ said Ralph. ‘Take care that
it chokes nobody in the meshes.’

‘You would sell your flesh and blood for money; yourself, if you have
not already made a bargain with the devil,’ retorted the other. ‘Do you
mean to tell me that your pretty niece was not brought here as a decoy
for the drunken boy downstairs?’

Although this hurried dialogue was carried on in a suppressed tone on
both sides, Ralph looked involuntarily round to ascertain that Kate had
not moved her position so as to be within hearing. His adversary saw the
advantage he had gained, and followed it up.

‘Do you mean to tell me,’ he asked again, ‘that it is not so? Do you
mean to say that if he had found his way up here instead of me, you
wouldn’t have been a little more blind, and a little more deaf, and a
little less flourishing, than you have been? Come, Nickleby, answer me
that.’

‘I tell you this,’ replied Ralph, ‘that if I brought her here, as a
matter of business--’

‘Ay, that’s the word,’ interposed Sir Mulberry, with a laugh. ‘You’re
coming to yourself again now.’

‘--As a matter of business,’ pursued Ralph, speaking slowly and firmly,
as a man who has made up his mind to say no more, ‘because I thought she
might make some impression on the silly youth you have taken in hand
and are lending good help to ruin, I knew--knowing him--that it would be
long before he outraged her girl’s feelings, and that unless he offended
by mere puppyism and emptiness, he would, with a little management,
respect the sex and conduct even of his usurer’s niece. But if I thought
to draw him on more gently by this device, I did not think of subjecting
the girl to the licentiousness and brutality of so old a hand as you.
And now we understand each other.’

‘Especially as there was nothing to be got by it--eh?’ sneered Sir
Mulberry.

‘Exactly so,’ said Ralph. He had turned away, and looked over his
shoulder to make this last reply. The eyes of the two worthies met,
with an expression as if each rascal felt that there was no disguising
himself from the other; and Sir Mulberry Hawk shrugged his shoulders and
walked slowly out.

His friend closed the door, and looked restlessly towards the spot where
his niece still remained in the attitude in which he had left her. She
had flung herself heavily upon the couch, and with her head drooping
over the cushion, and her face hidden in her hands, seemed to be still
weeping in an agony of shame and grief.

Ralph would have walked into any poverty-stricken debtor’s house, and
pointed him out to a bailiff, though in attendance upon a young child’s
death-bed, without the smallest concern, because it would have been a
matter quite in the ordinary course of business, and the man would have
been an offender against his only code of morality. But, here was a
young girl, who had done no wrong save that of coming into the world
alive; who had patiently yielded to all his wishes; who had tried hard
to please him--above all, who didn’t owe him money--and he felt awkward
and nervous.

Ralph took a chair at some distance; then, another chair a little
nearer; then, moved a little nearer still; then, nearer again, and
finally sat himself on the same sofa, and laid his hand on Kate’s arm.

‘Hush, my dear!’ he said, as she drew it back, and her sobs burst out
afresh. ‘Hush, hush! Don’t mind it, now; don’t think of it.’

‘Oh, for pity’s sake, let me go home,’ cried Kate. ‘Let me leave this
house, and go home.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Ralph. ‘You shall. But you must dry your eyes first,
and compose yourself. Let me raise your head. There--there.’

‘Oh, uncle!’ exclaimed Kate, clasping her hands. ‘What have I done--what
have I done--that you should subject me to this? If I had wronged you in
thought, or word, or deed, it would have been most cruel to me, and the
memory of one you must have loved in some old time; but--’

‘Only listen to me for a moment,’ interrupted Ralph, seriously alarmed
by the violence of her emotions. ‘I didn’t know it would be so; it was
impossible for me to foresee it. I did all I could.--Come, let us walk
about. You are faint with the closeness of the room, and the heat of
these lamps. You will be better now, if you make the slightest effort.’

‘I will do anything,’ replied Kate, ‘if you will only send me home.’

‘Well, well, I will,’ said Ralph; ‘but you must get back your own looks;
for those you have, will frighten them, and nobody must know of this but
you and I. Now let us walk the other way. There. You look better even
now.’

With such encouragements as these, Ralph Nickleby walked to and fro,
with his niece leaning on his arm; actually trembling beneath her touch.

In the same manner, when he judged it prudent to allow her to depart, he
supported her downstairs, after adjusting her shawl and performing such
little offices, most probably for the first time in his life. Across
the hall, and down the steps, Ralph led her too; nor did he withdraw his
hand until she was seated in the coach.

As the door of the vehicle was roughly closed, a comb fell from Kate’s
hair, close at her uncle’s feet; and as he picked it up, and returned it
into her hand, the light from a neighbouring lamp shone upon her face.
The lock of hair that had escaped and curled loosely over her brow, the
traces of tears yet scarcely dry, the flushed cheek, the look of sorrow,
all fired some dormant train of recollection in the old man’s breast;
and the face of his dead brother seemed present before him, with the
very look it bore on some occasion of boyish grief, of which every
minutest circumstance flashed upon his mind, with the distinctness of a
scene of yesterday.

Ralph Nickleby, who was proof against all appeals of blood
and kindred--who was steeled against every tale of sorrow and
distress--staggered while he looked, and went back into his house, as a
man who had seen a spirit from some world beyond the grave.



CHAPTER 20

Wherein Nicholas at length encounters his Uncle, to whom he expresses
his Sentiments with much Candour. His Resolution.


Little Miss La Creevy trotted briskly through divers streets at the
west end of the town, early on Monday morning--the day after the
dinner--charged with the important commission of acquainting Madame
Mantalini that Miss Nickleby was too unwell to attend that day, but
hoped to be enabled to resume her duties on the morrow. And as Miss La
Creevy walked along, revolving in her mind various genteel forms and
elegant turns of expression, with a view to the selection of the very
best in which to couch her communication, she cogitated a good deal upon
the probable causes of her young friend’s indisposition.

‘I don’t know what to make of it,’ said Miss La Creevy. ‘Her eyes were
decidedly red last night. She said she had a headache; headaches don’t
occasion red eyes. She must have been crying.’

Arriving at this conclusion, which, indeed, she had established to her
perfect satisfaction on the previous evening, Miss La Creevy went on
to consider--as she had done nearly all night--what new cause of
unhappiness her young friend could possibly have had.

‘I can’t think of anything,’ said the little portrait painter. ‘Nothing
at all, unless it was the behaviour of that old bear. Cross to her, I
suppose? Unpleasant brute!’

Relieved by this expression of opinion, albeit it was vented upon empty
air, Miss La Creevy trotted on to Madame Mantalini’s; and being informed
that the governing power was not yet out of bed, requested an interview
with the second in command; whereupon Miss Knag appeared.

‘So far as I am concerned,’ said Miss Knag, when the message had been
delivered, with many ornaments of speech; ‘I could spare Miss Nickleby
for evermore.’

‘Oh, indeed, ma’am!’ rejoined Miss La Creevy, highly offended. ‘But,
you see, you are not mistress of the business, and therefore it’s of no
great consequence.’

‘Very good, ma’am,’ said Miss Knag. ‘Have you any further commands for
me?’

‘No, I have not, ma’am,’ rejoined Miss La Creevy.

‘Then good-morning, ma’am,’ said Miss Knag.

‘Good-morning to you, ma’am; and many obligations for your extreme
politeness and good breeding,’ rejoined Miss La Creevy.

Thus terminating the interview, during which both ladies had trembled
very much, and been marvellously polite--certain indications that they
were within an inch of a very desperate quarrel--Miss La Creevy bounced
out of the room, and into the street.

‘I wonder who that is,’ said the queer little soul. ‘A nice person
to know, I should think! I wish I had the painting of her: I’D do her
justice.’ So, feeling quite satisfied that she had said a very cutting
thing at Miss Knag’s expense, Miss La Creevy had a hearty laugh, and
went home to breakfast in great good humour.

Here was one of the advantages of having lived alone so long! The little
bustling, active, cheerful creature existed entirely within herself,
talked to herself, made a confidante of herself, was as sarcastic as she
could be, on people who offended her, by herself; pleased herself, and
did no harm. If she indulged in scandal, nobody’s reputation suffered;
and if she enjoyed a little bit of revenge, no living soul was one atom
the worse. One of the many to whom, from straitened circumstances, a
consequent inability to form the associations they would wish, and a
disinclination to mix with the society they could obtain, London is
as complete a solitude as the plains of Syria, the humble artist had
pursued her lonely, but contented way for many years; and, until the
peculiar misfortunes of the Nickleby family attracted her attention,
had made no friends, though brimful of the friendliest feelings to all
mankind. There are many warm hearts in the same solitary guise as poor
little Miss La Creevy’s.

However, that’s neither here nor there, just now. She went home to
breakfast, and had scarcely caught the full flavour of her first sip of
tea, when the servant announced a gentleman, whereat Miss La Creevy, at
once imagining a new sitter transfixed by admiration at the street-door
case, was in unspeakable consternation at the presence of the
tea-things.

‘Here, take ‘em away; run with ‘em into the bedroom; anywhere,’ said
Miss La Creevy. ‘Dear, dear; to think that I should be late on this
particular morning, of all others, after being ready for three weeks by
half-past eight o’clock, and not a soul coming near the place!’

‘Don’t let me put you out of the way,’ said a voice Miss La Creevy knew.
‘I told the servant not to mention my name, because I wished to surprise
you.’

‘Mr. Nicholas!’ cried Miss La Creevy, starting in great astonishment.
‘You have not forgotten me, I see,’ replied Nicholas, extending his
hand.

‘Why, I think I should even have known you if I had met you in the
street,’ said Miss La Creevy, with a smile. ‘Hannah, another cup and
saucer. Now, I’ll tell you what, young man; I’ll trouble you not to
repeat the impertinence you were guilty of, on the morning you went
away.’

‘You would not be very angry, would you?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Wouldn’t I!’ said Miss La Creevy. ‘You had better try; that’s all!’

Nicholas, with becoming gallantry, immediately took Miss La Creevy at
her word, who uttered a faint scream and slapped his face; but it was
not a very hard slap, and that’s the truth.

‘I never saw such a rude creature!’ exclaimed Miss La Creevy.

‘You told me to try,’ said Nicholas.

‘Well; but I was speaking ironically,’ rejoined Miss La Creevy.

‘Oh! that’s another thing,’ said Nicholas; ‘you should have told me
that, too.’

‘I dare say you didn’t know, indeed!’ retorted Miss La Creevy. ‘But, now
I look at you again, you seem thinner than when I saw you last, and your
face is haggard and pale. And how come you to have left Yorkshire?’

She stopped here; for there was so much heart in her altered tone and
manner, that Nicholas was quite moved.

‘I need look somewhat changed,’ he said, after a short silence; ‘for
I have undergone some suffering, both of mind and body, since I left
London. I have been very poor, too, and have even suffered from want.’

‘Good Heaven, Mr. Nicholas!’ exclaimed Miss La Creevy, ‘what are you
telling me?’

‘Nothing which need distress you quite so much,’ answered Nicholas, with
a more sprightly air; ‘neither did I come here to bewail my lot, but
on matter more to the purpose. I wish to meet my uncle face to face. I
should tell you that first.’

‘Then all I have to say about that is,’ interposed Miss La Creevy, ‘that
I don’t envy you your taste; and that sitting in the same room with his
very boots, would put me out of humour for a fortnight.’

‘In the main,’ said Nicholas, ‘there may be no great difference of
opinion between you and me, so far; but you will understand, that I
desire to confront him, to justify myself, and to cast his duplicity and
malice in his throat.’

‘That’s quite another matter,’ rejoined Miss La Creevy. ‘Heaven forgive
me; but I shouldn’t cry my eyes quite out of my head, if they choked
him. Well?’

‘To this end, I called upon him this morning,’ said Nicholas. ‘He only
returned to town on Saturday, and I knew nothing of his arrival until
late last night.’

‘And did you see him?’ asked Miss La Creevy.

‘No,’ replied Nicholas. ‘He had gone out.’

‘Hah!’ said Miss La Creevy; ‘on some kind, charitable business, I dare
say.’

‘I have reason to believe,’ pursued Nicholas, ‘from what has been told
me, by a friend of mine who is acquainted with his movements, that he
intends seeing my mother and sister today, and giving them his version
of the occurrences that have befallen me. I will meet him there.’

‘That’s right,’ said Miss La Creevy, rubbing her hands. ‘And yet, I
don’t know,’ she added, ‘there is much to be thought of--others to be
considered.’

‘I have considered others,’ rejoined Nicholas; ‘but as honesty and
honour are both at issue, nothing shall deter me.’

‘You should know best,’ said Miss La Creevy.

‘In this case I hope so,’ answered Nicholas. ‘And all I want you to do
for me, is, to prepare them for my coming. They think me a long way
off, and if I went wholly unexpected, I should frighten them. If you can
spare time to tell them that you have seen me, and that I shall be
with them in a quarter of an hour afterwards, you will do me a great
service.’

‘I wish I could do you, or any of you, a greater,’ said Miss La Creevy;
‘but the power to serve, is as seldom joined with the will, as the will
is with the power, I think.’

Talking on very fast and very much, Miss La Creevy finished her
breakfast with great expedition, put away the tea-caddy and hid the
key under the fender, resumed her bonnet, and, taking Nicholas’s arm,
sallied forth at once to the city. Nicholas left her near the door of
his mother’s house, and promised to return within a quarter of an hour.

It so chanced that Ralph Nickleby, at length seeing fit, for his own
purposes, to communicate the atrocities of which Nicholas had been
guilty, had (instead of first proceeding to another quarter of the town
on business, as Newman Noggs supposed he would) gone straight to his
sister-in-law. Hence, when Miss La Creevy, admitted by a girl who was
cleaning the house, made her way to the sitting-room, she found Mrs
Nickleby and Kate in tears, and Ralph just concluding his statement of
his nephew’s misdemeanours. Kate beckoned her not to retire, and Miss La
Creevy took a seat in silence.

‘You are here already, are you, my gentleman?’ thought the little woman.
‘Then he shall announce himself, and see what effect that has on you.’

‘This is pretty,’ said Ralph, folding up Miss Squeers’s note; ‘very
pretty. I recommend him--against all my previous conviction, for I
knew he would never do any good--to a man with whom, behaving himself
properly, he might have remained, in comfort, for years. What is the
result? Conduct for which he might hold up his hand at the Old Bailey.’

‘I never will believe it,’ said Kate, indignantly; ‘never. It is some
base conspiracy, which carries its own falsehood with it.’

‘My dear,’ said Ralph, ‘you wrong the worthy man. These are not
inventions. The man is assaulted, your brother is not to be found; this
boy, of whom they speak, goes with him--remember, remember.’

‘It is impossible,’ said Kate. ‘Nicholas!--and a thief too! Mama, how
can you sit and hear such statements?’

Poor Mrs. Nickleby, who had, at no time, been remarkable for the
possession of a very clear understanding, and who had been reduced
by the late changes in her affairs to a most complicated state of
perplexity, made no other reply to this earnest remonstrance than
exclaiming from behind a mass of pocket-handkerchief, that she never
could have believed it--thereby most ingeniously leaving her hearers to
suppose that she did believe it.

‘It would be my duty, if he came in my way, to deliver him up to
justice,’ said Ralph, ‘my bounden duty; I should have no other course,
as a man of the world and a man of business, to pursue. And yet,’ said
Ralph, speaking in a very marked manner, and looking furtively, but
fixedly, at Kate, ‘and yet I would not. I would spare the feelings of
his--of his sister. And his mother of course,’ added Ralph, as though by
an afterthought, and with far less emphasis.

Kate very well understood that this was held out as an additional
inducement to her to preserve the strictest silence regarding the events
of the preceding night. She looked involuntarily towards Ralph as he
ceased to speak, but he had turned his eyes another way, and seemed for
the moment quite unconscious of her presence.

‘Everything,’ said Ralph, after a long silence, broken only by Mrs
Nickleby’s sobs, ‘everything combines to prove the truth of this letter,
if indeed there were any possibility of disputing it. Do innocent men
steal away from the sight of honest folks, and skulk in hiding-places,
like outlaws? Do innocent men inveigle nameless vagabonds, and prowl
with them about the country as idle robbers do? Assault, riot, theft,
what do you call these?’

‘A lie!’ cried a voice, as the door was dashed open, and Nicholas came
into the room.

In the first moment of surprise, and possibly of alarm, Ralph rose from
his seat, and fell back a few paces, quite taken off his guard by this
unexpected apparition. In another moment, he stood, fixed and immovable
with folded arms, regarding his nephew with a scowl; while Kate and
Miss La Creevy threw themselves between the two, to prevent the personal
violence which the fierce excitement of Nicholas appeared to threaten.

‘Dear Nicholas,’ cried his sister, clinging to him. ‘Be calm,
consider--’

‘Consider, Kate!’ cried Nicholas, clasping her hand so tight in the
tumult of his anger, that she could scarcely bear the pain. ‘When I
consider all, and think of what has passed, I need be made of iron to
stand before him.’

‘Or bronze,’ said Ralph, quietly; ‘there is not hardihood enough in
flesh and blood to face it out.’

‘Oh dear, dear!’ cried Mrs. Nickleby, ‘that things should have come to
such a pass as this!’

‘Who speaks in a tone, as if I had done wrong, and brought disgrace on
them?’ said Nicholas, looking round.

‘Your mother, sir,’ replied Ralph, motioning towards her.

‘Whose ears have been poisoned by you,’ said Nicholas; ‘by you--who,
under pretence of deserving the thanks she poured upon you, heaped every
insult, wrong, and indignity upon my head. You, who sent me to a den
where sordid cruelty, worthy of yourself, runs wanton, and youthful
misery stalks precocious; where the lightness of childhood shrinks into
the heaviness of age, and its every promise blights, and withers as it
grows. I call Heaven to witness,’ said Nicholas, looking eagerly round,
‘that I have seen all this, and that he knows it.’

‘Refute these calumnies,’ said Kate, ‘and be more patient, so that you
may give them no advantage. Tell us what you really did, and show that
they are untrue.’

‘Of what do they--or of what does he--accuse me?’ said Nicholas.

‘First, of attacking your master, and being within an ace of qualifying
yourself to be tried for murder,’ interposed Ralph. ‘I speak plainly,
young man, bluster as you will.’

‘I interfered,’ said Nicholas, ‘to save a miserable creature from the
vilest cruelty. In so doing, I inflicted such punishment upon a wretch
as he will not readily forget, though far less than he deserved from
me. If the same scene were renewed before me now, I would take the same
part; but I would strike harder and heavier, and brand him with such
marks as he should carry to his grave, go to it when he would.’

‘You hear?’ said Ralph, turning to Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Penitence, this!’

‘Oh dear me!’ cried Mrs. Nickleby, ‘I don’t know what to think, I really
don’t.’

‘Do not speak just now, mama, I entreat you,’ said Kate. ‘Dear Nicholas,
I only tell you, that you may know what wickedness can prompt, but they
accuse you of--a ring is missing, and they dare to say that--’

‘The woman,’ said Nicholas, haughtily, ‘the wife of the fellow from whom
these charges come, dropped--as I suppose--a worthless ring among some
clothes of mine, early in the morning on which I left the house. At
least, I know that she was in the bedroom where they lay, struggling
with an unhappy child, and that I found it when I opened my bundle on
the road. I returned it, at once, by coach, and they have it now.’

‘I knew, I knew,’ said Kate, looking towards her uncle. ‘About this boy,
love, in whose company they say you left?’

‘The boy, a silly, helpless creature, from brutality and hard usage, is
with me now,’ rejoined Nicholas.

‘You hear?’ said Ralph, appealing to the mother again, ‘everything
proved, even upon his own confession. Do you choose to restore that boy,
sir?’

‘No, I do not,’ replied Nicholas.

‘You do not?’ sneered Ralph.

‘No,’ repeated Nicholas, ‘not to the man with whom I found him. I would
that I knew on whom he has the claim of birth: I might wring something
from his sense of shame, if he were dead to every tie of nature.’

‘Indeed!’ said Ralph. ‘Now, sir, will you hear a word or two from me?’

‘You can speak when and what you please,’ replied Nicholas, embracing
his sister. ‘I take little heed of what you say or threaten.’

‘Mighty well, sir,’ retorted Ralph; ‘but perhaps it may concern others,
who may think it worth their while to listen, and consider what I tell
them. I will address your mother, sir, who knows the world.’

‘Ah! and I only too dearly wish I didn’t,’ sobbed Mrs. Nickleby.

There really was no necessity for the good lady to be much distressed
upon this particular head; the extent of her worldly knowledge being, to
say the least, very questionable; and so Ralph seemed to think, for he
smiled as she spoke. He then glanced steadily at her and Nicholas by
turns, as he delivered himself in these words:

‘Of what I have done, or what I meant to do, for you, ma’am, and my
niece, I say not one syllable. I held out no promise, and leave you to
judge for yourself. I hold out no threat now, but I say that this boy,
headstrong, wilful and disorderly as he is, should not have one penny of
my money, or one crust of my bread, or one grasp of my hand, to save him
from the loftiest gallows in all Europe. I will not meet him, come where
he comes, or hear his name. I will not help him, or those who help him.
With a full knowledge of what he brought upon you by so doing, he has
come back in his selfish sloth, to be an aggravation of your wants, and
a burden upon his sister’s scanty wages. I regret to leave you, and more
to leave her, now, but I will not encourage this compound of meanness
and cruelty, and, as I will not ask you to renounce him, I see you no
more.’

If Ralph had not known and felt his power in wounding those he hated,
his glances at Nicholas would have shown it him, in all its force, as
he proceeded in the above address. Innocent as the young man was of all
wrong, every artful insinuation stung, every well-considered sarcasm cut
him to the quick; and when Ralph noted his pale face and quivering
lip, he hugged himself to mark how well he had chosen the taunts best
calculated to strike deep into a young and ardent spirit.

‘I can’t help it,’ cried Mrs. Nickleby. ‘I know you have been very good
to us, and meant to do a good deal for my dear daughter. I am quite sure
of that; I know you did, and it was very kind of you, having her at your
house and all--and of course it would have been a great thing for her
and for me too. But I can’t, you know, brother-in-law, I can’t renounce
my own son, even if he has done all you say he has--it’s not possible;
I couldn’t do it; so we must go to rack and ruin, Kate, my dear. I can
bear it, I dare say.’ Pouring forth these and a perfectly wonderful
train of other disjointed expressions of regret, which no mortal power
but Mrs. Nickleby’s could ever have strung together, that lady wrung her
hands, and her tears fell faster.

‘Why do you say “IF Nicholas has done what they say he has,” mama?’
asked Kate, with honest anger. ‘You know he has not.’

‘I don’t know what to think, one way or other, my dear,’ said Mrs
Nickleby; ‘Nicholas is so violent, and your uncle has so much composure,
that I can only hear what he says, and not what Nicholas does. Never
mind, don’t let us talk any more about it. We can go to the Workhouse,
or the Refuge for the Destitute, or the Magdalen Hospital, I dare say;
and the sooner we go the better.’ With this extraordinary jumble of
charitable institutions, Mrs. Nickleby again gave way to her tears.

‘Stay,’ said Nicholas, as Ralph turned to go. ‘You need not leave this
place, sir, for it will be relieved of my presence in one minute, and it
will be long, very long, before I darken these doors again.’

‘Nicholas,’ cried Kate, throwing herself on her brother’s shoulder, ‘do
not say so. My dear brother, you will break my heart. Mama, speak to
him. Do not mind her, Nicholas; she does not mean it, you should know
her better. Uncle, somebody, for Heaven’s sake speak to him.’

‘I never meant, Kate,’ said Nicholas, tenderly, ‘I never meant to stay
among you; think better of me than to suppose it possible. I may turn my
back on this town a few hours sooner than I intended, but what of that?
We shall not forget each other apart, and better days will come when we
shall part no more. Be a woman, Kate,’ he whispered, proudly, ‘and do
not make me one, while HE looks on.’

‘No, no, I will not,’ said Kate, eagerly, ‘but you will not leave us.
Oh! think of all the happy days we have had together, before these
terrible misfortunes came upon us; of all the comfort and happiness of
home, and the trials we have to bear now; of our having no protector
under all the slights and wrongs that poverty so much favours, and you
cannot leave us to bear them alone, without one hand to help us.’

‘You will be helped when I am away,’ replied Nicholas hurriedly. ‘I am
no help to you, no protector; I should bring you nothing but sorrow, and
want, and suffering. My own mother sees it, and her fondness and fears
for you, point to the course that I should take. And so all good angels
bless you, Kate, till I can carry you to some home of mine, where we may
revive the happiness denied to us now, and talk of these trials as of
things gone by. Do not keep me here, but let me go at once. There. Dear
girl--dear girl.’

The grasp which had detained him relaxed, and Kate swooned in his arms.
Nicholas stooped over her for a few seconds, and placing her gently in a
chair, confided her to their honest friend.

‘I need not entreat your sympathy,’ he said, wringing her hand, ‘for I
know your nature. You will never forget them.’

He stepped up to Ralph, who remained in the same attitude which he had
preserved throughout the interview, and moved not a finger.

‘Whatever step you take, sir,’ he said, in a voice inaudible beyond
themselves, ‘I shall keep a strict account of. I leave them to you, at
your desire. There will be a day of reckoning sooner or later, and it
will be a heavy one for you if they are wronged.’

Ralph did not allow a muscle of his face to indicate that he heard one
word of this parting address. He hardly knew that it was concluded, and
Mrs. Nickleby had scarcely made up her mind to detain her son by force if
necessary, when Nicholas was gone.

As he hurried through the streets to his obscure lodging, seeking to
keep pace, as it were, with the rapidity of the thoughts which crowded
upon him, many doubts and hesitations arose in his mind, and almost
tempted him to return. But what would they gain by this? Supposing he
were to put Ralph Nickleby at defiance, and were even fortunate enough
to obtain some small employment, his being with them could only render
their present condition worse, and might greatly impair their future
prospects; for his mother had spoken of some new kindnesses towards Kate
which she had not denied. ‘No,’ thought Nicholas, ‘I have acted for the
best.’

But, before he had gone five hundred yards, some other and different
feeling would come upon him, and then he would lag again, and pulling
his hat over his eyes, give way to the melancholy reflections which
pressed thickly upon him. To have committed no fault, and yet to be so
entirely alone in the world; to be separated from the only persons he
loved, and to be proscribed like a criminal, when six months ago he had
been surrounded by every comfort, and looked up to, as the chief hope of
his family--this was hard to bear. He had not deserved it either. Well,
there was comfort in that; and poor Nicholas would brighten up again,
to be again depressed, as his quickly shifting thoughts presented every
variety of light and shade before him.

Undergoing these alternations of hope and misgiving, which no one,
placed in a situation of ordinary trial, can fail to have experienced,
Nicholas at length reached his poor room, where, no longer borne up by
the excitement which had hitherto sustained him, but depressed by the
revulsion of feeling it left behind, he threw himself on the bed, and
turning his face to the wall, gave free vent to the emotions he had so
long stifled.

He had not heard anybody enter, and was unconscious of the presence of
Smike, until, happening to raise his head, he saw him, standing at the
upper end of the room, looking wistfully towards him. He withdrew his
eyes when he saw that he was observed, and affected to be busied with
some scanty preparations for dinner.

‘Well, Smike,’ said Nicholas, as cheerfully as he could speak, ‘let
me hear what new acquaintances you have made this morning, or what new
wonder you have found out, in the compass of this street and the next
one.’

‘No,’ said Smike, shaking his head mournfully; ‘I must talk of something
else today.’

‘Of what you like,’ replied Nicholas, good-humouredly.

‘Of this,’ said Smike. ‘I know you are unhappy, and have got into great
trouble by bringing me away. I ought to have known that, and stopped
behind--I would, indeed, if I had thought it then. You--you--are not
rich; you have not enough for yourself, and I should not be here. You
grow,’ said the lad, laying his hand timidly on that of Nicholas, ‘you
grow thinner every day; your cheek is paler, and your eye more sunk.
Indeed I cannot bear to see you so, and think how I am burdening you. I
tried to go away today, but the thought of your kind face drew me back.
I could not leave you without a word.’ The poor fellow could say no
more, for his eyes filled with tears, and his voice was gone.

‘The word which separates us,’ said Nicholas, grasping him heartily by
the shoulder, ‘shall never be said by me, for you are my only comfort
and stay. I would not lose you now, Smike, for all the world could give.
The thought of you has upheld me through all I have endured today, and
shall, through fifty times such trouble. Give me your hand. My heart is
linked to yours. We will journey from this place together, before the
week is out. What, if I am steeped in poverty? You lighten it, and we
will be poor together.’



CHAPTER 21

Madam Mantalini finds herself in a Situation of some Difficulty, and
Miss Nickleby finds herself in no Situation at all


The agitation she had undergone, rendered Kate Nickleby unable to resume
her duties at the dressmaker’s for three days, at the expiration of
which interval she betook herself at the accustomed hour, and with
languid steps, to the temple of fashion where Madame Mantalini reigned
paramount and supreme.

The ill-will of Miss Knag had lost nothing of its virulence in
the interval. The young ladies still scrupulously shrunk from all
companionship with their denounced associate; and when that exemplary
female arrived a few minutes afterwards, she was at no pains to conceal
the displeasure with which she regarded Kate’s return.

‘Upon my word!’ said Miss Knag, as the satellites flocked round, to
relieve her of her bonnet and shawl; ‘I should have thought some people
would have had spirit enough to stop away altogether, when they know
what an incumbrance their presence is to right-minded persons. But it’s
a queer world; oh! it’s a queer world!’

Miss Knag, having passed this comment on the world, in the tone in which
most people do pass comments on the world when they are out of temper,
that is to say, as if they by no means belonged to it, concluded
by heaving a sigh, wherewith she seemed meekly to compassionate the
wickedness of mankind.

The attendants were not slow to echo the sigh, and Miss Knag was
apparently on the eve of favouring them with some further moral
reflections, when the voice of Madame Mantalini, conveyed through
the speaking-tube, ordered Miss Nickleby upstairs to assist in the
arrangement of the show-room; a distinction which caused Miss Knag to
toss her head so much, and bite her lips so hard, that her powers of
conversation were, for the time, annihilated.

‘Well, Miss Nickleby, child,’ said Madame Mantalini, when Kate presented
herself; ‘are you quite well again?’

‘A great deal better, thank you,’ replied Kate.

‘I wish I could say the same,’ remarked Madame Mantalini, seating
herself with an air of weariness.

‘Are you ill?’ asked Kate. ‘I am very sorry for that.’

‘Not exactly ill, but worried, child--worried,’ rejoined Madame.

‘I am still more sorry to hear that,’ said Kate, gently. ‘Bodily illness
is more easy to bear than mental.’

‘Ah! and it’s much easier to talk than to bear either,’ said Madame,
rubbing her nose with much irritability of manner. ‘There, get to your
work, child, and put the things in order, do.’

While Kate was wondering within herself what these symptoms of unusual
vexation portended, Mr. Mantalini put the tips of his whiskers, and, by
degrees, his head, through the half-opened door, and cried in a soft
voice--

‘Is my life and soul there?’

‘No,’ replied his wife.

‘How can it say so, when it is blooming in the front room like a little
rose in a demnition flower-pot?’ urged Mantalini. ‘May its poppet come
in and talk?’

‘Certainly not,’ replied Madame: ‘you know I never allow you here. Go
along!’

The poppet, however, encouraged perhaps by the relenting tone of this
reply, ventured to rebel, and, stealing into the room, made towards
Madame Mantalini on tiptoe, blowing her a kiss as he came along.

‘Why will it vex itself, and twist its little face into bewitching
nutcrackers?’ said Mantalini, putting his left arm round the waist of
his life and soul, and drawing her towards him with his right.

‘Oh! I can’t bear you,’ replied his wife.

‘Not--eh, not bear ME!’ exclaimed Mantalini. ‘Fibs, fibs. It couldn’t
be. There’s not a woman alive, that could tell me such a thing to my
face--to my own face.’ Mr. Mantalini stroked his chin, as he said this,
and glanced complacently at an opposite mirror.

‘Such destructive extravagance,’ reasoned his wife, in a low tone.

‘All in its joy at having gained such a lovely creature, such a little
Venus, such a demd, enchanting, bewitching, engrossing, captivating
little Venus,’ said Mantalini.

‘See what a situation you have placed me in!’ urged Madame.

‘No harm will come, no harm shall come, to its own darling,’ rejoined
Mr. Mantalini. ‘It is all over; there will be nothing the matter; money
shall be got in; and if it don’t come in fast enough, old Nickleby shall
stump up again, or have his jugular separated if he dares to vex and
hurt the little--’

‘Hush!’ interposed Madame. ‘Don’t you see?’

Mr. Mantalini, who, in his eagerness to make up matters with his wife,
had overlooked, or feigned to overlook, Miss Nickleby hitherto, took
the hint, and laying his finger on his lip, sunk his voice still
lower. There was, then, a great deal of whispering, during which Madame
Mantalini appeared to make reference, more than once, to certain debts
incurred by Mr. Mantalini previous to her coverture; and also to an
unexpected outlay of money in payment of the aforesaid debts; and
furthermore, to certain agreeable weaknesses on that gentleman’s part,
such as gaming, wasting, idling, and a tendency to horse-flesh; each
of which matters of accusation Mr. Mantalini disposed of, by one kiss
or more, as its relative importance demanded. The upshot of it all
was, that Madame Mantalini was in raptures with him, and that they went
upstairs to breakfast.

Kate busied herself in what she had to do, and was silently arranging
the various articles of decoration in the best taste she could display,
when she started to hear a strange man’s voice in the room, and started
again, to observe, on looking round, that a white hat, and a red
neckerchief, and a broad round face, and a large head, and part of a
green coat were in the room too.

‘Don’t alarm yourself, miss,’ said the proprietor of these appearances.
‘I say; this here’s the mantie-making consarn, an’t it?’

‘Yes,’ rejoined Kate, greatly astonished. ‘What did you want?’

The stranger answered not; but, first looking back, as though to beckon
to some unseen person outside, came, very deliberately, into the room,
and was closely followed by a little man in brown, very much the worse
for wear, who brought with him a mingled fumigation of stale tobacco and
fresh onions. The clothes of this gentleman were much bespeckled with
flue; and his shoes, stockings, and nether garments, from his heels to
the waist buttons of his coat inclusive, were profusely embroidered with
splashes of mud, caught a fortnight previously--before the setting-in of
the fine weather.

Kate’s very natural impression was, that these engaging individuals
had called with the view of possessing themselves, unlawfully, of
any portable articles that chanced to strike their fancy. She did not
attempt to disguise her apprehensions, and made a move towards the door.

‘Wait a minnit,’ said the man in the green coat, closing it softly, and
standing with his back against it. ‘This is a unpleasant bisness. Vere’s
your govvernor?’

‘My what--did you say?’ asked Kate, trembling; for she thought
‘governor’ might be slang for watch or money.

‘Mister Muntlehiney,’ said the man. ‘Wot’s come on him? Is he at home?’

‘He is above stairs, I believe,’ replied Kate, a little reassured by
this inquiry. ‘Do you want him?’

‘No,’ replied the visitor. ‘I don’t ezactly want him, if it’s made a
favour on. You can jist give him that ‘ere card, and tell him if he
wants to speak to ME, and save trouble, here I am; that’s all.’

With these words, the stranger put a thick square card into Kate’s hand,
and, turning to his friend, remarked, with an easy air, ‘that the rooms
was a good high pitch;’ to which the friend assented, adding, by way of
illustration, ‘that there was lots of room for a little boy to grow up
a man in either on ‘em, vithout much fear of his ever bringing his head
into contract vith the ceiling.’

After ringing the bell which would summon Madame Mantalini, Kate glanced
at the card, and saw that it displayed the name of ‘Scaley,’ together
with some other information to which she had not had time to refer, when
her attention was attracted by Mr. Scaley himself, who, walking up to one
of the cheval-glasses, gave it a hard poke in the centre with his stick,
as coolly as if it had been made of cast iron.

‘Good plate this here, Tix,’ said Mr. Scaley to his friend.

‘Ah!’ rejoined Mr. Tix, placing the marks of his four fingers, and a
duplicate impression of his thumb, on a piece of sky-blue silk; ‘and
this here article warn’t made for nothing, mind you.’

From the silk, Mr. Tix transferred his admiration to some elegant
articles of wearing apparel, while Mr. Scaley adjusted his neckcloth,
at leisure, before the glass, and afterwards, aided by its reflection,
proceeded to the minute consideration of a pimple on his chin; in which
absorbing occupation he was yet engaged, when Madame Mantalini, entering
the room, uttered an exclamation of surprise which roused him.

‘Oh! Is this the missis?’ inquired Scaley.

‘It is Madame Mantalini,’ said Kate.

‘Then,’ said Mr. Scaley, producing a small document from his pocket and
unfolding it very slowly, ‘this is a writ of execution, and if it’s not
conwenient to settle we’ll go over the house at wunst, please, and take
the inwentory.’

Poor Madame Mantalini wrung her hands for grief, and rung the bell
for her husband; which done, she fell into a chair and a fainting fit,
simultaneously. The professional gentlemen, however, were not at all
discomposed by this event, for Mr. Scaley, leaning upon a stand on which
a handsome dress was displayed (so that his shoulders appeared above it,
in nearly the same manner as the shoulders of the lady for whom it was
designed would have done if she had had it on), pushed his hat on one
side and scratched his head with perfect unconcern, while his friend
Mr. Tix, taking that opportunity for a general survey of the apartment
preparatory to entering on business, stood with his inventory-book under
his arm and his hat in his hand, mentally occupied in putting a price
upon every object within his range of vision.

Such was the posture of affairs when Mr. Mantalini hurried in; and as
that distinguished specimen had had a pretty extensive intercourse with
Mr. Scaley’s fraternity in his bachelor days, and was, besides, very
far from being taken by surprise on the present agitating occasion, he
merely shrugged his shoulders, thrust his hands down to the bottom of
his pockets, elevated his eyebrows, whistled a bar or two, swore an oath
or two, and, sitting astride upon a chair, put the best face upon the
matter with great composure and decency.

‘What’s the demd total?’ was the first question he asked.

‘Fifteen hundred and twenty-seven pound, four and ninepence ha’penny,’
replied Mr. Scaley, without moving a limb.

‘The halfpenny be demd,’ said Mr. Mantalini, impatiently.

‘By all means if you vish it,’ retorted Mr. Scaley; ‘and the ninepence.’

‘It don’t matter to us if the fifteen hundred and twenty-seven pound
went along with it, that I know on,’ observed Mr. Tix.

‘Not a button,’ said Scaley.

‘Well,’ said the same gentleman, after a pause, ‘wot’s to be
done--anything? Is it only a small crack, or a out-and-out smash? A
break-up of the constitootion is it?--werry good. Then Mr. Tom Tix,
esk-vire, you must inform your angel wife and lovely family as you won’t
sleep at home for three nights to come, along of being in possession
here. Wot’s the good of the lady a fretting herself?’ continued Mr
Scaley, as Madame Mantalini sobbed. ‘A good half of wot’s here isn’t
paid for, I des-say, and wot a consolation oughtn’t that to be to her
feelings!’

With these remarks, combining great pleasantry with sound moral
encouragement under difficulties, Mr. Scaley proceeded to take the
inventory, in which delicate task he was materially assisted by the
uncommon tact and experience of Mr. Tix, the broker.

‘My cup of happiness’s sweetener,’ said Mantalini, approaching his wife
with a penitent air; ‘will you listen to me for two minutes?’

‘Oh! don’t speak to me,’ replied his wife, sobbing. ‘You have ruined me,
and that’s enough.’

Mr. Mantalini, who had doubtless well considered his part, no sooner
heard these words pronounced in a tone of grief and severity, than he
recoiled several paces, assumed an expression of consuming mental agony,
rushed headlong from the room, and was, soon afterwards, heard to slam
the door of an upstairs dressing-room with great violence.

‘Miss Nickleby,’ cried Madame Mantalini, when this sound met her
ear, ‘make haste, for Heaven’s sake, he will destroy himself! I spoke
unkindly to him, and he cannot bear it from me. Alfred, my darling
Alfred.’

With such exclamations, she hurried upstairs, followed by Kate who,
although she did not quite participate in the fond wife’s apprehensions,
was a little flurried, nevertheless. The dressing-room door being
hastily flung open, Mr. Mantalini was disclosed to view, with his
shirt-collar symmetrically thrown back: putting a fine edge to a
breakfast knife by means of his razor strop.

‘Ah!’ cried Mr. Mantalini, ‘interrupted!’ and whisk went the breakfast
knife into Mr. Mantalini’s dressing-gown pocket, while Mr. Mantalini’s
eyes rolled wildly, and his hair floating in wild disorder, mingled with
his whiskers.

‘Alfred,’ cried his wife, flinging her arms about him, ‘I didn’t mean to
say it, I didn’t mean to say it!’

‘Ruined!’ cried Mr. Mantalini. ‘Have I brought ruin upon the best and
purest creature that ever blessed a demnition vagabond! Demmit, let
me go.’ At this crisis of his ravings Mr. Mantalini made a pluck at the
breakfast knife, and being restrained by his wife’s grasp, attempted to
dash his head against the wall--taking very good care to be at least six
feet from it.

‘Compose yourself, my own angel,’ said Madame. ‘It was nobody’s fault;
it was mine as much as yours, we shall do very well yet. Come, Alfred,
come.’

Mr. Mantalini did not think proper to come to, all at once; but, after
calling several times for poison, and requesting some lady or gentleman
to blow his brains out, gentler feelings came upon him, and he wept
pathetically. In this softened frame of mind he did not oppose the
capture of the knife--which, to tell the truth, he was rather glad to be
rid of, as an inconvenient and dangerous article for a skirt pocket--and
finally he suffered himself to be led away by his affectionate partner.

After a delay of two or three hours, the young ladies were informed that
their services would be dispensed with until further notice, and at the
expiration of two days, the name of Mantalini appeared in the list of
bankrupts: Miss Nickleby received an intimation per post, on the same
morning, that the business would be, in future, carried on under
the name of Miss Knag, and that her assistance would no longer be
required--a piece of intelligence with which Mrs. Nickleby was no sooner
made acquainted, than that good lady declared she had expected it all
along and cited divers unknown occasions on which she had prophesied to
that precise effect.

‘And I say again,’ remarked Mrs. Nickleby (who, it is scarcely necessary
to observe, had never said so before), ‘I say again, that a milliner’s
and dressmaker’s is the very last description of business, Kate, that
you should have thought of attaching yourself to. I don’t make it
a reproach to you, my love; but still I will say, that if you had
consulted your own mother--’

‘Well, well, mama,’ said Kate, mildly: ‘what would you recommend now?’

‘Recommend!’ cried Mrs. Nickleby, ‘isn’t it obvious, my dear, that of all
occupations in this world for a young lady situated as you are, that
of companion to some amiable lady is the very thing for which your
education, and manners, and personal appearance, and everything else,
exactly qualify you? Did you never hear your poor dear papa speak of the
young lady who was the daughter of the old lady who boarded in the same
house that he boarded in once, when he was a bachelor--what was her name
again? I know it began with a B, and ended with g, but whether it was
Waters or--no, it couldn’t have been that, either; but whatever her name
was, don’t you know that that young lady went as companion to a married
lady who died soon afterwards, and that she married the husband, and had
one of the finest little boys that the medical man had ever seen--all
within eighteen months?’

Kate knew, perfectly well, that this torrent of favourable recollection
was occasioned by some opening, real or imaginary, which her mother had
discovered, in the companionship walk of life. She therefore waited,
very patiently, until all reminiscences and anecdotes, bearing or not
bearing upon the subject, had been exhausted, and at last ventured
to inquire what discovery had been made. The truth then came out. Mrs
Nickleby had, that morning, had a yesterday’s newspaper of the very
first respectability from the public-house where the porter came from;
and in this yesterday’s newspaper was an advertisement, couched in the
purest and most grammatical English, announcing that a married lady was
in want of a genteel young person as companion, and that the married
lady’s name and address were to be known, on application at a certain
library at the west end of the town, therein mentioned.

‘And I say,’ exclaimed Mrs. Nickleby, laying the paper down in triumph,
‘that if your uncle don’t object, it’s well worth the trial.’

Kate was too sick at heart, after the rough jostling she had already had
with the world, and really cared too little at the moment what fate was
reserved for her, to make any objection. Mr. Ralph Nickleby offered none,
but, on the contrary, highly approved of the suggestion; neither did he
express any great surprise at Madame Mantalini’s sudden failure, indeed
it would have been strange if he had, inasmuch as it had been procured
and brought about chiefly by himself. So, the name and address were
obtained without loss of time, and Miss Nickleby and her mama went off
in quest of Mrs. Wititterly, of Cadogan Place, Sloane Street, that same
forenoon.

Cadogan Place is the one slight bond that joins two great extremes; it
is the connecting link between the aristocratic pavements of Belgrave
Square, and the barbarism of Chelsea. It is in Sloane Street, but not of
it. The people in Cadogan Place look down upon Sloane Street, and think
Brompton low. They affect fashion too, and wonder where the New Road
is. Not that they claim to be on precisely the same footing as the high
folks of Belgrave Square and Grosvenor Place, but that they stand, with
reference to them, rather in the light of those illegitimate children of
the great who are content to boast of their connections, although their
connections disavow them. Wearing as much as they can of the airs
and semblances of loftiest rank, the people of Cadogan Place have the
realities of middle station. It is the conductor which communicates to
the inhabitants of regions beyond its limit, the shock of pride of
birth and rank, which it has not within itself, but derives from a
fountain-head beyond; or, like the ligament which unites the Siamese
twins, it contains something of the life and essence of two distinct
bodies, and yet belongs to neither.

Upon this doubtful ground, lived Mrs. Wititterly, and at Mrs. Wititterly’s
door Kate Nickleby knocked with trembling hand. The door was opened by
a big footman with his head floured, or chalked, or painted in some way
(it didn’t look genuine powder), and the big footman, receiving the card
of introduction, gave it to a little page; so little, indeed, that his
body would not hold, in ordinary array, the number of small buttons
which are indispensable to a page’s costume, and they were consequently
obliged to be stuck on four abreast. This young gentleman took the card
upstairs on a salver, and pending his return, Kate and her mother were
shown into a dining-room of rather dirty and shabby aspect, and so
comfortably arranged as to be adapted to almost any purpose rather than
eating and drinking.

Now, in the ordinary course of things, and according to all authentic
descriptions of high life, as set forth in books, Mrs. Wititterly ought
to have been in her BOUDOIR; but whether it was that Mr. Wititterly was
at that moment shaving himself in the BOUDOIR or what not, certain it
is that Mrs. Wititterly gave audience in the drawing-room, where was
everything proper and necessary, including curtains and furniture
coverings of a roseate hue, to shed a delicate bloom on Mrs. Wititterly’s
complexion, and a little dog to snap at strangers’ legs for Mrs
Wititterly’s amusement, and the afore-mentioned page, to hand chocolate
for Mrs. Wititterly’s refreshment.

The lady had an air of sweet insipidity, and a face of engaging
paleness; there was a faded look about her, and about the furniture, and
about the house. She was reclining on a sofa in such a very unstudied
attitude, that she might have been taken for an actress all ready for
the first scene in a ballet, and only waiting for the drop curtain to go
up.

‘Place chairs.’

The page placed them.

‘Leave the room, Alphonse.’

The page left it; but if ever an Alphonse carried plain Bill in his face
and figure, that page was the boy.

‘I have ventured to call, ma’am,’ said Kate, after a few seconds of
awkward silence, ‘from having seen your advertisement.’

‘Yes,’ replied Mrs. Wititterly, ‘one of my people put it in the
paper--Yes.’

‘I thought, perhaps,’ said Kate, modestly, ‘that if you had not
already made a final choice, you would forgive my troubling you with an
application.’

‘Yes,’ drawled Mrs. Wititterly again.

‘If you have already made a selection--’

‘Oh dear no,’ interrupted the lady, ‘I am not so easily suited. I really
don’t know what to say. You have never been a companion before, have
you?’

Mrs. Nickleby, who had been eagerly watching her opportunity, came
dexterously in, before Kate could reply. ‘Not to any stranger, ma’am,’
said the good lady; ‘but she has been a companion to me for some years.
I am her mother, ma’am.’

‘Oh!’ said Mrs. Wititterly, ‘I apprehend you.’

‘I assure you, ma’am,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘that I very little thought,
at one time, that it would be necessary for my daughter to go out into
the world at all, for her poor dear papa was an independent gentleman,
and would have been at this moment if he had but listened in time to my
constant entreaties and--’

‘Dear mama,’ said Kate, in a low voice.

‘My dear Kate, if you will allow me to speak,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘I
shall take the liberty of explaining to this lady--’

‘I think it is almost unnecessary, mama.’

And notwithstanding all the frowns and winks with which Mrs. Nickleby
intimated that she was going to say something which would clench the
business at once, Kate maintained her point by an expressive look, and
for once Mrs. Nickleby was stopped upon the very brink of an oration.

‘What are your accomplishments?’ asked Mrs. Wititterly, with her eyes
shut.

Kate blushed as she mentioned her principal acquirements, and Mrs
Nickleby checked them all off, one by one, on her fingers; having
calculated the number before she came out. Luckily the two calculations
agreed, so Mrs. Nickleby had no excuse for talking.

‘You are a good temper?’ asked Mrs. Wititterly, opening her eyes for an
instant, and shutting them again.

‘I hope so,’ rejoined Kate.

‘And have a highly respectable reference for everything, have you?’

Kate replied that she had, and laid her uncle’s card upon the table.

‘Have the goodness to draw your chair a little nearer, and let me look
at you,’ said Mrs. Wititterly; ‘I am so very nearsighted that I can’t
quite discern your features.’

Kate complied, though not without some embarrassment, with this request,
and Mrs. Wititterly took a languid survey of her countenance, which
lasted some two or three minutes.

‘I like your appearance,’ said that lady, ringing a little bell.
‘Alphonse, request your master to come here.’

The page disappeared on this errand, and after a short interval, during
which not a word was spoken on either side, opened the door for an
important gentleman of about eight-and-thirty, of rather plebeian
countenance, and with a very light head of hair, who leant over Mrs
Wititterly for a little time, and conversed with her in whispers.

‘Oh!’ he said, turning round, ‘yes. This is a most important matter. Mrs
Wititterly is of a very excitable nature; very delicate, very fragile; a
hothouse plant, an exotic.’

‘Oh! Henry, my dear,’ interposed Mrs. Wititterly.

‘You are, my love, you know you are; one breath--’ said Mr. W., blowing
an imaginary feather away. ‘Pho! you’re gone!’

The lady sighed.

‘Your soul is too large for your body,’ said Mr. Wititterly. ‘Your
intellect wears you out; all the medical men say so; you know that there
is not a physician who is not proud of being called in to you. What
is their unanimous declaration? “My dear doctor,” said I to Sir Tumley
Snuffim, in this very room, the very last time he came. “My dear doctor,
what is my wife’s complaint? Tell me all. I can bear it. Is it nerves?”
 “My dear fellow,” he said, “be proud of that woman; make much of her;
she is an ornament to the fashionable world, and to you. Her complaint
is soul. It swells, expands, dilates--the blood fires, the pulse
quickens, the excitement increases--Whew!”’ Here Mr. Wititterly, who, in
the ardour of his description, had flourished his right hand to within
something less than an inch of Mrs. Nickleby’s bonnet, drew it hastily
back again, and blew his nose as fiercely as if it had been done by some
violent machinery.

‘You make me out worse than I am, Henry,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, with a
faint smile.

‘I do not, Julia, I do not,’ said Mr. W. ‘The society in which
you move--necessarily move, from your station, connection, and
endowments--is one vortex and whirlpool of the most frightful
excitement. Bless my heart and body, can I ever forget the night you
danced with the baronet’s nephew at the election ball, at Exeter! It was
tremendous.’

‘I always suffer for these triumphs afterwards,’ said Mrs. Wititterly.

‘And for that very reason,’ rejoined her husband, ‘you must have a
companion, in whom there is great gentleness, great sweetness, excessive
sympathy, and perfect repose.’

Here, both Mr. and Mrs. Wititterly, who had talked rather at the Nicklebys
than to each other, left off speaking, and looked at their two hearers,
with an expression of countenance which seemed to say, ‘What do you
think of all this?’

‘Mrs. Wititterly,’ said her husband, addressing himself to Mrs. Nickleby,
‘is sought after and courted by glittering crowds and brilliant circles.
She is excited by the opera, the drama, the fine arts, the--the--the--’

‘The nobility, my love,’ interposed Mrs. Wititterly.

‘The nobility, of course,’ said Mr. Wititterly. ‘And the military. She
forms and expresses an immense variety of opinions on an immense variety
of subjects. If some people in public life were acquainted with Mrs
Wititterly’s real opinion of them, they would not hold their heads,
perhaps, quite as high as they do.’

‘Hush, Henry,’ said the lady; ‘this is scarcely fair.’

‘I mention no names, Julia,’ replied Mr. Wititterly; ‘and nobody is
injured. I merely mention the circumstance to show that you are no
ordinary person, that there is a constant friction perpetually going
on between your mind and your body; and that you must be soothed and
tended. Now let me hear, dispassionately and calmly, what are this young
lady’s qualifications for the office.’

In obedience to this request, the qualifications were all gone through
again, with the addition of many interruptions and cross-questionings
from Mr. Wititterly. It was finally arranged that inquiries should be
made, and a decisive answer addressed to Miss Nickleby under cover
of her uncle, within two days. These conditions agreed upon, the page
showed them down as far as the staircase window; and the big footman,
relieving guard at that point, piloted them in perfect safety to the
street-door.

‘They are very distinguished people, evidently,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, as
she took her daughter’s arm. ‘What a superior person Mrs. Wititterly is!’

‘Do you think so, mama?’ was all Kate’s reply.

‘Why, who can help thinking so, Kate, my love?’ rejoined her mother.
‘She is pale though, and looks much exhausted. I hope she may not be
wearing herself out, but I am very much afraid.’

These considerations led the deep-sighted lady into a calculation of
the probable duration of Mrs. Wititterly’s life, and the chances of the
disconsolate widower bestowing his hand on her daughter. Before reaching
home, she had freed Mrs. Wititterly’s soul from all bodily restraint;
married Kate with great splendour at St George’s, Hanover Square;
and only left undecided the minor question, whether a splendid
French-polished mahogany bedstead should be erected for herself in the
two-pair back of the house in Cadogan Place, or in the three-pair front:
between which apartments she could not quite balance the advantages, and
therefore adjusted the question at last, by determining to leave it to
the decision of her son-in-law.

The inquiries were made. The answer--not to Kate’s very great joy--was
favourable; and at the expiration of a week she betook herself, with all
her movables and valuables, to Mrs. Wititterly’s mansion, where for the
present we will leave her.



CHAPTER 22

Nicholas, accompanied by Smike, sallies forth to seek his Fortune. He
encounters Mr. Vincent Crummles; and who he was, is herein made manifest


The whole capital which Nicholas found himself entitled to, either in
possession, reversion, remainder, or expectancy, after paying his rent
and settling with the broker from whom he had hired his poor furniture,
did not exceed, by more than a few halfpence, the sum of twenty
shillings. And yet he hailed the morning on which he had resolved
to quit London, with a light heart, and sprang from his bed with an
elasticity of spirit which is happily the lot of young persons, or the
world would never be stocked with old ones.

It was a cold, dry, foggy morning in early spring. A few meagre shadows
flitted to and fro in the misty streets, and occasionally there loomed
through the dull vapour, the heavy outline of some hackney coach wending
homewards, which, drawing slowly nearer, rolled jangling by, scattering
the thin crust of frost from its whitened roof, and soon was lost again
in the cloud. At intervals were heard the tread of slipshod feet, and
the chilly cry of the poor sweep as he crept, shivering, to his early
toil; the heavy footfall of the official watcher of the night, pacing
slowly up and down and cursing the tardy hours that still intervened
between him and sleep; the rambling of ponderous carts and waggons; the
roll of the lighter vehicles which carried buyers and sellers to the
different markets; the sound of ineffectual knocking at the doors of
heavy sleepers--all these noises fell upon the ear from time to
time, but all seemed muffled by the fog, and to be rendered almost as
indistinct to the ear as was every object to the sight. The sluggish
darkness thickened as the day came on; and those who had the courage to
rise and peep at the gloomy street from their curtained windows, crept
back to bed again, and coiled themselves up to sleep.

Before even these indications of approaching morning were rife in busy
London, Nicholas had made his way alone to the city, and stood beneath
the windows of his mother’s house. It was dull and bare to see, but it
had light and life for him; for there was at least one heart within
its old walls to which insult or dishonour would bring the same blood
rushing, that flowed in his own veins.

He crossed the road, and raised his eyes to the window of the room where
he knew his sister slept. It was closed and dark. ‘Poor girl,’ thought
Nicholas, ‘she little thinks who lingers here!’

He looked again, and felt, for the moment, almost vexed that Kate was
not there to exchange one word at parting. ‘Good God!’ he thought,
suddenly correcting himself, ‘what a boy I am!’

‘It is better as it is,’ said Nicholas, after he had lounged on, a few
paces, and returned to the same spot. ‘When I left them before, and
could have said goodbye a thousand times if I had chosen, I spared them
the pain of leave-taking, and why not now?’ As he spoke, some fancied
motion of the curtain almost persuaded him, for the instant, that Kate
was at the window, and by one of those strange contradictions of feeling
which are common to us all, he shrunk involuntarily into a doorway, that
she might not see him. He smiled at his own weakness; said ‘God bless
them!’ and walked away with a lighter step.

Smike was anxiously expecting him when he reached his old lodgings, and
so was Newman, who had expended a day’s income in a can of rum and milk
to prepare them for the journey. They had tied up the luggage, Smike
shouldered it, and away they went, with Newman Noggs in company; for he
had insisted on walking as far as he could with them, overnight.

‘Which way?’ asked Newman, wistfully.

‘To Kingston first,’ replied Nicholas.

‘And where afterwards?’ asked Newman. ‘Why won’t you tell me?’

‘Because I scarcely know myself, good friend,’ rejoined Nicholas, laying
his hand upon his shoulder; ‘and if I did, I have neither plan nor
prospect yet, and might shift my quarters a hundred times before you
could possibly communicate with me.’

‘I am afraid you have some deep scheme in your head,’ said Newman,
doubtfully.

‘So deep,’ replied his young friend, ‘that even I can’t fathom it.
Whatever I resolve upon, depend upon it I will write you soon.’

‘You won’t forget?’ said Newman.

‘I am not very likely to,’ rejoined Nicholas. ‘I have not so many
friends that I shall grow confused among the number, and forget my best
one.’

Occupied in such discourse, they walked on for a couple of hours,
as they might have done for a couple of days if Nicholas had not sat
himself down on a stone by the wayside, and resolutely declared his
intention of not moving another step until Newman Noggs turned back.
Having pleaded ineffectually first for another half-mile, and afterwards
for another quarter, Newman was fain to comply, and to shape his course
towards Golden Square, after interchanging many hearty and affectionate
farewells, and many times turning back to wave his hat to the two
wayfarers when they had become mere specks in the distance.

‘Now listen to me, Smike,’ said Nicholas, as they trudged with stout
hearts onwards. ‘We are bound for Portsmouth.’

Smike nodded his head and smiled, but expressed no other emotion; for
whether they had been bound for Portsmouth or Port Royal would have been
alike to him, so they had been bound together.

‘I don’t know much of these matters,’ resumed Nicholas; ‘but Portsmouth
is a seaport town, and if no other employment is to be obtained, I
should think we might get on board some ship. I am young and active, and
could be useful in many ways. So could you.’

‘I hope so,’ replied Smike. ‘When I was at that--you know where I mean?’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Nicholas. ‘You needn’t name the place.’

‘Well, when I was there,’ resumed Smike; his eyes sparkling at the
prospect of displaying his abilities; ‘I could milk a cow, and groom a
horse, with anybody.’

‘Ha!’ said Nicholas, gravely. ‘I am afraid they don’t keep many animals
of either kind on board ship, Smike, and even when they have horses,
that they are not very particular about rubbing them down; still you can
learn to do something else, you know. Where there’s a will, there’s a
way.’

‘And I am very willing,’ said Smike, brightening up again.

‘God knows you are,’ rejoined Nicholas; ‘and if you fail, it shall go
hard but I’ll do enough for us both.’

‘Do we go all the way today?’ asked Smike, after a short silence.

‘That would be too severe a trial, even for your willing legs,’ said
Nicholas, with a good-humoured smile. ‘No. Godalming is some thirty and
odd miles from London--as I found from a map I borrowed--and I purpose
to rest there. We must push on again tomorrow, for we are not rich
enough to loiter. Let me relieve you of that bundle! Come!’

‘No, no,’ rejoined Smike, falling back a few steps. ‘Don’t ask me to
give it up to you.’

‘Why not?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Let me do something for you, at least,’ said Smike. ‘You will never let
me serve you as I ought. You will never know how I think, day and night,
of ways to please you.’

‘You are a foolish fellow to say it, for I know it well, and see it, or
I should be a blind and senseless beast,’ rejoined Nicholas. ‘Let me ask
you a question while I think of it, and there is no one by,’ he added,
looking him steadily in the face. ‘Have you a good memory?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Smike, shaking his head sorrowfully. ‘I think I had
once; but it’s all gone now--all gone.’

‘Why do you think you had once?’ asked Nicholas, turning quickly upon
him as though the answer in some way helped out the purport of his
question.

‘Because I could remember, when I was a child,’ said Smike, ‘but that is
very, very long ago, or at least it seems so. I was always confused
and giddy at that place you took me from; and could never remember,
and sometimes couldn’t even understand, what they said to me. I--let me
see--let me see!’

‘You are wandering now,’ said Nicholas, touching him on the arm.

‘No,’ replied his companion, with a vacant look ‘I was only thinking
how--’ He shivered involuntarily as he spoke.

‘Think no more of that place, for it is all over,’ retorted Nicholas,
fixing his eyes full upon that of his companion, which was fast settling
into an unmeaning stupefied gaze, once habitual to him, and common even
then. ‘What of the first day you went to Yorkshire?’

‘Eh!’ cried the lad.

‘That was before you began to lose your recollection, you know,’ said
Nicholas quietly. ‘Was the weather hot or cold?’

‘Wet,’ replied the boy. ‘Very wet. I have always said, when it has
rained hard, that it was like the night I came: and they used to crowd
round and laugh to see me cry when the rain fell heavily. It was like a
child, they said, and that made me think of it more. I turned cold all
over sometimes, for I could see myself as I was then, coming in at the
very same door.’

‘As you were then,’ repeated Nicholas, with assumed carelessness; ‘how
was that?’

‘Such a little creature,’ said Smike, ‘that they might have had pity and
mercy upon me, only to remember it.’

‘You didn’t find your way there, alone!’ remarked Nicholas.

‘No,’ rejoined Smike, ‘oh no.’

‘Who was with you?’

‘A man--a dark, withered man. I have heard them say so, at the school,
and I remembered that before. I was glad to leave him, I was afraid of
him; but they made me more afraid of them, and used me harder too.’

‘Look at me,’ said Nicholas, wishing to attract his full attention.
‘There; don’t turn away. Do you remember no woman, no kind woman, who
hung over you once, and kissed your lips, and called you her child?’

‘No,’ said the poor creature, shaking his head, ‘no, never.’

‘Nor any house but that house in Yorkshire?’

‘No,’ rejoined the youth, with a melancholy look; ‘a room--I remember
I slept in a room, a large lonesome room at the top of a house, where
there was a trap-door in the ceiling. I have covered my head with the
clothes often, not to see it, for it frightened me: a young child with
no one near at night: and I used to wonder what was on the other side.
There was a clock too, an old clock, in one corner. I remember that.
I have never forgotten that room; for when I have terrible dreams, it
comes back, just as it was. I see things and people in it that I had
never seen then, but there is the room just as it used to be; THAT never
changes.’

‘Will you let me take the bundle now?’ asked Nicholas, abruptly changing
the theme.

‘No,’ said Smike, ‘no. Come, let us walk on.’

He quickened his pace as he said this, apparently under the impression
that they had been standing still during the whole of the previous
dialogue. Nicholas marked him closely, and every word of this
conversation remained upon his memory.

It was, by this time, within an hour of noon, and although a dense
vapour still enveloped the city they had left, as if the very breath of
its busy people hung over their schemes of gain and profit, and found
greater attraction there than in the quiet region above, in the open
country it was clear and fair. Occasionally, in some low spots they
came upon patches of mist which the sun had not yet driven from their
strongholds; but these were soon passed, and as they laboured up the
hills beyond, it was pleasant to look down, and see how the sluggish
mass rolled heavily off, before the cheering influence of day. A broad,
fine, honest sun lighted up the green pastures and dimpled water
with the semblance of summer, while it left the travellers all the
invigorating freshness of that early time of year. The ground seemed
elastic under their feet; the sheep-bells were music to their ears; and
exhilarated by exercise, and stimulated by hope, they pushed onward with
the strength of lions.

The day wore on, and all these bright colours subsided, and assumed
a quieter tint, like young hopes softened down by time, or youthful
features by degrees resolving into the calm and serenity of age. But
they were scarcely less beautiful in their slow decline, than they had
been in their prime; for nature gives to every time and season some
beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to
the grave, is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy, that we
can scarcely mark their progress.

To Godalming they came at last, and here they bargained for two humble
beds, and slept soundly. In the morning they were astir: though
not quite so early as the sun: and again afoot; if not with all the
freshness of yesterday, still, with enough of hope and spirit to bear
them cheerily on.

It was a harder day’s journey than yesterday’s, for there were long and
weary hills to climb; and in journeys, as in life, it is a great deal
easier to go down hill than up. However, they kept on, with unabated
perseverance, and the hill has not yet lifted its face to heaven that
perseverance will not gain the summit of at last.

They walked upon the rim of the Devil’s Punch Bowl; and Smike listened
with greedy interest as Nicholas read the inscription upon the stone
which, reared upon that wild spot, tells of a murder committed there by
night. The grass on which they stood, had once been dyed with gore;
and the blood of the murdered man had run down, drop by drop, into
the hollow which gives the place its name. ‘The Devil’s Bowl,’ thought
Nicholas, as he looked into the void, ‘never held fitter liquor than
that!’

Onward they kept, with steady purpose, and entered at length upon a wide
and spacious tract of downs, with every variety of little hill and
plain to change their verdant surface. Here, there shot up, almost
perpendicularly, into the sky, a height so steep, as to be hardly
accessible to any but the sheep and goats that fed upon its sides, and
there, stood a mound of green, sloping and tapering off so delicately,
and merging so gently into the level ground, that you could scarce
define its limits. Hills swelling above each other; and undulations
shapely and uncouth, smooth and rugged, graceful and grotesque, thrown
negligently side by side, bounded the view in each direction; while
frequently, with unexpected noise, there uprose from the ground a
flight of crows, who, cawing and wheeling round the nearest hills, as if
uncertain of their course, suddenly poised themselves upon the wing and
skimmed down the long vista of some opening valley, with the speed of
light itself.

By degrees, the prospect receded more and more on either hand, and as
they had been shut out from rich and extensive scenery, so they emerged
once again upon the open country. The knowledge that they were drawing
near their place of destination, gave them fresh courage to proceed; but
the way had been difficult, and they had loitered on the road, and Smike
was tired. Thus, twilight had already closed in, when they turned
off the path to the door of a roadside inn, yet twelve miles short of
Portsmouth.

‘Twelve miles,’ said Nicholas, leaning with both hands on his stick, and
looking doubtfully at Smike.

‘Twelve long miles,’ repeated the landlord.

‘Is it a good road?’ inquired Nicholas.

‘Very bad,’ said the landlord. As of course, being a landlord, he would
say.

‘I want to get on,’ observed Nicholas, hesitating. ‘I scarcely know what
to do.’

‘Don’t let me influence you,’ rejoined the landlord. ‘I wouldn’t go on
if it was me.’

‘Wouldn’t you?’ asked Nicholas, with the same uncertainty.

‘Not if I knew when I was well off,’ said the landlord. And having said
it he pulled up his apron, put his hands into his pockets, and, taking
a step or two outside the door, looked down the dark road with an
assumption of great indifference.

A glance at the toil-worn face of Smike determined Nicholas, so without
any further consideration he made up his mind to stay where he was.

The landlord led them into the kitchen, and as there was a good fire he
remarked that it was very cold. If there had happened to be a bad one he
would have observed that it was very warm.

‘What can you give us for supper?’ was Nicholas’s natural question.

‘Why--what would you like?’ was the landlord’s no less natural answer.

Nicholas suggested cold meat, but there was no cold meat--poached eggs,
but there were no eggs--mutton chops, but there wasn’t a mutton chop
within three miles, though there had been more last week than they knew
what to do with, and would be an extraordinary supply the day after
tomorrow.

‘Then,’ said Nicholas, ‘I must leave it entirely to you, as I would have
done, at first, if you had allowed me.’

‘Why, then I’ll tell you what,’ rejoined the landlord. ‘There’s a
gentleman in the parlour that’s ordered a hot beef-steak pudding and
potatoes, at nine. There’s more of it than he can manage, and I have
very little doubt that if I ask leave, you can sup with him. I’ll do
that, in a minute.’

‘No, no,’ said Nicholas, detaining him. ‘I would rather not. I--at
least--pshaw! why cannot I speak out? Here; you see that I am travelling
in a very humble manner, and have made my way hither on foot. It is more
than probable, I think, that the gentleman may not relish my company;
and although I am the dusty figure you see, I am too proud to thrust
myself into his.’

‘Lord love you,’ said the landlord, ‘it’s only Mr. Crummles; HE isn’t
particular.’

‘Is he not?’ asked Nicholas, on whose mind, to tell the truth, the
prospect of the savoury pudding was making some impression.

‘Not he,’ replied the landlord. ‘He’ll like your way of talking, I know.
But we’ll soon see all about that. Just wait a minute.’

The landlord hurried into the parlour, without staying for further
permission, nor did Nicholas strive to prevent him: wisely considering
that supper, under the circumstances, was too serious a matter to be
trifled with. It was not long before the host returned, in a condition
of much excitement.

‘All right,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I knew he would. You’ll see
something rather worth seeing, in there. Ecod, how they are a-going of
it!’

There was no time to inquire to what this exclamation, which was
delivered in a very rapturous tone, referred; for he had already thrown
open the door of the room; into which Nicholas, followed by Smike with
the bundle on his shoulder (he carried it about with him as vigilantly
as if it had been a sack of gold), straightway repaired.

Nicholas was prepared for something odd, but not for something quite so
odd as the sight he encountered. At the upper end of the room, were a
couple of boys, one of them very tall and the other very short, both
dressed as sailors--or at least as theatrical sailors, with belts,
buckles, pigtails, and pistols complete--fighting what is called in
play-bills a terrific combat, with two of those short broad-swords with
basket hilts which are commonly used at our minor theatres. The short
boy had gained a great advantage over the tall boy, who was reduced to
mortal strait, and both were overlooked by a large heavy man, perched
against the corner of a table, who emphatically adjured them to strike a
little more fire out of the swords, and they couldn’t fail to bring the
house down, on the very first night.

‘Mr. Vincent Crummles,’ said the landlord with an air of great deference.
‘This is the young gentleman.’

Mr. Vincent Crummles received Nicholas with an inclination of the head,
something between the courtesy of a Roman emperor and the nod of a pot
companion; and bade the landlord shut the door and begone.

‘There’s a picture,’ said Mr. Crummles, motioning Nicholas not to advance
and spoil it. ‘The little ‘un has him; if the big ‘un doesn’t knock
under, in three seconds, he’s a dead man. Do that again, boys.’

The two combatants went to work afresh, and chopped away until the
swords emitted a shower of sparks: to the great satisfaction of Mr
Crummles, who appeared to consider this a very great point indeed. The
engagement commenced with about two hundred chops administered by the
short sailor and the tall sailor alternately, without producing any
particular result, until the short sailor was chopped down on one knee;
but this was nothing to him, for he worked himself about on the one knee
with the assistance of his left hand, and fought most desperately until
the tall sailor chopped his sword out of his grasp. Now, the inference
was, that the short sailor, reduced to this extremity, would give in at
once and cry quarter, but, instead of that, he all of a sudden drew
a large pistol from his belt and presented it at the face of the tall
sailor, who was so overcome at this (not expecting it) that he let
the short sailor pick up his sword and begin again. Then, the chopping
recommenced, and a variety of fancy chops were administered on both
sides; such as chops dealt with the left hand, and under the leg, and
over the right shoulder, and over the left; and when the short sailor
made a vigorous cut at the tall sailor’s legs, which would have shaved
them clean off if it had taken effect, the tall sailor jumped over the
short sailor’s sword, wherefore to balance the matter, and make it all
fair, the tall sailor administered the same cut, and the short sailor
jumped over HIS sword. After this, there was a good deal of dodging
about, and hitching up of the inexpressibles in the absence of braces,
and then the short sailor (who was the moral character evidently, for he
always had the best of it) made a violent demonstration and closed with
the tall sailor, who, after a few unavailing struggles, went down,
and expired in great torture as the short sailor put his foot upon his
breast, and bored a hole in him through and through.

‘That’ll be a double ENCORE if you take care, boys,’ said Mr. Crummles.
‘You had better get your wind now and change your clothes.’

Having addressed these words to the combatants, he saluted Nicholas, who
then observed that the face of Mr. Crummles was quite proportionate in
size to his body; that he had a very full under-lip, a hoarse voice, as
though he were in the habit of shouting very much, and very short
black hair, shaved off nearly to the crown of his head--to admit (as
he afterwards learnt) of his more easily wearing character wigs of any
shape or pattern.

‘What did you think of that, sir?’ inquired Mr. Crummles.

‘Very good, indeed--capital,’ answered Nicholas.

‘You won’t see such boys as those very often, I think,’ said Mr
Crummles.

Nicholas assented--observing that if they were a little better match--

‘Match!’ cried Mr. Crummles.

‘I mean if they were a little more of a size,’ said Nicholas, explaining
himself.

‘Size!’ repeated Mr. Crummles; ‘why, it’s the essence of the combat that
there should be a foot or two between them. How are you to get up the
sympathies of the audience in a legitimate manner, if there isn’t a
little man contending against a big one?--unless there’s at least five
to one, and we haven’t hands enough for that business in our company.’

‘I see,’ replied Nicholas. ‘I beg your pardon. That didn’t occur to me,
I confess.’

‘It’s the main point,’ said Mr. Crummles. ‘I open at Portsmouth the day
after tomorrow. If you’re going there, look into the theatre, and see
how that’ll tell.’

Nicholas promised to do so, if he could, and drawing a chair near the
fire, fell into conversation with the manager at once. He was very
talkative and communicative, stimulated perhaps, not only by his natural
disposition, but by the spirits and water he sipped very plentifully, or
the snuff he took in large quantities from a piece of whitey-brown paper
in his waistcoat pocket. He laid open his affairs without the smallest
reserve, and descanted at some length upon the merits of his company,
and the acquirements of his family; of both of which, the two
broad-sword boys formed an honourable portion. There was to be
a gathering, it seemed, of the different ladies and gentlemen at
Portsmouth on the morrow, whither the father and sons were proceeding
(not for the regular season, but in the course of a wandering
speculation), after fulfilling an engagement at Guildford with the
greatest applause.

‘You are going that way?’ asked the manager.

‘Ye-yes,’ said Nicholas. ‘Yes, I am.’

‘Do you know the town at all?’ inquired the manager, who seemed to
consider himself entitled to the same degree of confidence as he had
himself exhibited.

‘No,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Never there?’

‘Never.’

Mr. Vincent Crummles gave a short dry cough, as much as to say, ‘If you
won’t be communicative, you won’t;’ and took so many pinches of snuff
from the piece of paper, one after another, that Nicholas quite wondered
where it all went to.

While he was thus engaged, Mr. Crummles looked, from time to time, with
great interest at Smike, with whom he had appeared considerably struck
from the first. He had now fallen asleep, and was nodding in his chair.

‘Excuse my saying so,’ said the manager, leaning over to Nicholas, and
sinking his voice, ‘but what a capital countenance your friend has got!’

‘Poor fellow!’ said Nicholas, with a half-smile, ‘I wish it were a
little more plump, and less haggard.’

‘Plump!’ exclaimed the manager, quite horrified, ‘you’d spoil it for
ever.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Think so, sir! Why, as he is now,’ said the manager, striking his knee
emphatically; ‘without a pad upon his body, and hardly a touch of paint
upon his face, he’d make such an actor for the starved business as was
never seen in this country. Only let him be tolerably well up in the
Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, with the slightest possible dab of red
on the tip of his nose, and he’d be certain of three rounds the moment
he put his head out of the practicable door in the front grooves O.P.’

‘You view him with a professional eye,’ said Nicholas, laughing.

‘And well I may,’ rejoined the manager. ‘I never saw a young fellow so
regularly cut out for that line, since I’ve been in the profession. And
I played the heavy children when I was eighteen months old.’

The appearance of the beef-steak pudding, which came in simultaneously
with the junior Vincent Crummleses, turned the conversation to other
matters, and indeed, for a time, stopped it altogether. These two young
gentlemen wielded their knives and forks with scarcely less address than
their broad-swords, and as the whole party were quite as sharp set as
either class of weapons, there was no time for talking until the supper
had been disposed of.

The Master Crummleses had no sooner swallowed the last procurable
morsel of food, than they evinced, by various half-suppressed yawns and
stretchings of their limbs, an obvious inclination to retire for the
night, which Smike had betrayed still more strongly: he having, in the
course of the meal, fallen asleep several times while in the very act of
eating. Nicholas therefore proposed that they should break up at
once, but the manager would by no means hear of it; vowing that he had
promised himself the pleasure of inviting his new acquaintance to
share a bowl of punch, and that if he declined, he should deem it very
unhandsome behaviour.

‘Let them go,’ said Mr. Vincent Crummles, ‘and we’ll have it snugly and
cosily together by the fire.’

Nicholas was not much disposed to sleep--being in truth too anxious--so,
after a little demur, he accepted the offer, and having exchanged a
shake of the hand with the young Crummleses, and the manager having
on his part bestowed a most affectionate benediction on Smike, he sat
himself down opposite to that gentleman by the fireside to assist in
emptying the bowl, which soon afterwards appeared, steaming in a
manner which was quite exhilarating to behold, and sending forth a most
grateful and inviting fragrance.

But, despite the punch and the manager, who told a variety of stories,
and smoked tobacco from a pipe, and inhaled it in the shape of snuff,
with a most astonishing power, Nicholas was absent and dispirited. His
thoughts were in his old home, and when they reverted to his present
condition, the uncertainty of the morrow cast a gloom upon him, which
his utmost efforts were unable to dispel. His attention wandered;
although he heard the manager’s voice, he was deaf to what he said; and
when Mr. Vincent Crummles concluded the history of some long adventure
with a loud laugh, and an inquiry what Nicholas would have done under
the same circumstances, he was obliged to make the best apology in his
power, and to confess his entire ignorance of all he had been talking
about.

‘Why, so I saw,’ observed Mr. Crummles. ‘You’re uneasy in your mind.
What’s the matter?’

Nicholas could not refrain from smiling at the abruptness of the
question; but, thinking it scarcely worth while to parry it, owned that
he was under some apprehensions lest he might not succeed in the object
which had brought him to that part of the country.

‘And what’s that?’ asked the manager.

‘Getting something to do which will keep me and my poor fellow-traveller
in the common necessaries of life,’ said Nicholas. ‘That’s the truth.
You guessed it long ago, I dare say, so I may as well have the credit of
telling it you with a good grace.’

‘What’s to be got to do at Portsmouth more than anywhere else?’ asked Mr
Vincent Crummles, melting the sealing-wax on the stem of his pipe in the
candle, and rolling it out afresh with his little finger.

‘There are many vessels leaving the port, I suppose,’ replied Nicholas.
‘I shall try for a berth in some ship or other. There is meat and drink
there at all events.’

‘Salt meat and new rum; pease-pudding and chaff-biscuits,’ said the
manager, taking a whiff at his pipe to keep it alight, and returning to
his work of embellishment.

‘One may do worse than that,’ said Nicholas. ‘I can rough it, I believe,
as well as most young men of my age and previous habits.’

‘You need be able to,’ said the manager, ‘if you go on board ship; but
you won’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because there’s not a skipper or mate that would think you worth your
salt, when he could get a practised hand,’ replied the manager; ‘and
they as plentiful there, as the oysters in the streets.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Nicholas, alarmed by this prediction, and
the confident tone in which it had been uttered. ‘Men are not born able
seamen. They must be reared, I suppose?’

Mr. Vincent Crummles nodded his head. ‘They must; but not at your age, or
from young gentlemen like you.’

There was a pause. The countenance of Nicholas fell, and he gazed
ruefully at the fire.

‘Does no other profession occur to you, which a young man of your figure
and address could take up easily, and see the world to advantage in?’
asked the manager.

‘No,’ said Nicholas, shaking his head.

‘Why, then, I’ll tell you one,’ said Mr. Crummles, throwing his pipe into
the fire, and raising his voice. ‘The stage.’

‘The stage!’ cried Nicholas, in a voice almost as loud.

‘The theatrical profession,’ said Mr. Vincent Crummles. ‘I am in the
theatrical profession myself, my wife is in the theatrical profession,
my children are in the theatrical profession. I had a dog that lived
and died in it from a puppy; and my chaise-pony goes on, in Timour the
Tartar. I’ll bring you out, and your friend too. Say the word. I want a
novelty.’

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ rejoined Nicholas, whose breath had
been almost taken away by this sudden proposal. ‘I never acted a part in
my life, except at school.’

‘There’s genteel comedy in your walk and manner, juvenile tragedy
in your eye, and touch-and-go farce in your laugh,’ said Mr. Vincent
Crummles. ‘You’ll do as well as if you had thought of nothing else but
the lamps, from your birth downwards.’

Nicholas thought of the small amount of small change that would remain
in his pocket after paying the tavern bill; and he hesitated.

‘You can be useful to us in a hundred ways,’ said Mr. Crummles.
‘Think what capital bills a man of your education could write for the
shop-windows.’

‘Well, I think I could manage that department,’ said Nicholas.

‘To be sure you could,’ replied Mr. Crummles. ‘“For further particulars
see small hand-bills”--we might have half a volume in every one of
‘em. Pieces too; why, you could write us a piece to bring out the whole
strength of the company, whenever we wanted one.’

‘I am not quite so confident about that,’ replied Nicholas. ‘But I dare
say I could scribble something now and then, that would suit you.’

‘We’ll have a new show-piece out directly,’ said the manager. ‘Let
me see--peculiar resources of this establishment--new and splendid
scenery--you must manage to introduce a real pump and two washing-tubs.’

‘Into the piece?’ said Nicholas.

‘Yes,’ replied the manager. ‘I bought ‘em cheap, at a sale the other
day, and they’ll come in admirably. That’s the London plan. They look up
some dresses, and properties, and have a piece written to fit ‘em. Most
of the theatres keep an author on purpose.’

‘Indeed!’ cried Nicholas.

‘Oh, yes,’ said the manager; ‘a common thing. It’ll look very well
in the bills in separate lines--Real pump!--Splendid tubs!--Great
attraction! You don’t happen to be anything of an artist, do you?’

‘That is not one of my accomplishments,’ rejoined Nicholas.

‘Ah! Then it can’t be helped,’ said the manager. ‘If you had been,
we might have had a large woodcut of the last scene for the posters,
showing the whole depth of the stage, with the pump and tubs in the
middle; but, however, if you’re not, it can’t be helped.’

‘What should I get for all this?’ inquired Nicholas, after a few
moments’ reflection. ‘Could I live by it?’

‘Live by it!’ said the manager. ‘Like a prince! With your own salary,
and your friend’s, and your writings, you’d make--ah! you’d make a pound
a week!’

‘You don’t say so!’

‘I do indeed, and if we had a run of good houses, nearly double the
money.’

Nicholas shrugged his shoulders; but sheer destitution was before him;
and if he could summon fortitude to undergo the extremes of want and
hardship, for what had he rescued his helpless charge if it were only to
bear as hard a fate as that from which he had wrested him? It was easy
to think of seventy miles as nothing, when he was in the same town with
the man who had treated him so ill and roused his bitterest thoughts;
but now, it seemed far enough. What if he went abroad, and his mother or
Kate were to die the while?

Without more deliberation, he hastily declared that it was a bargain,
and gave Mr. Vincent Crummles his hand upon it.



CHAPTER 23

Treats of the Company of Mr. Vincent Crummles, and of his Affairs,
Domestic and Theatrical


As Mr. Crummles had a strange four-legged animal in the inn stables,
which he called a pony, and a vehicle of unknown design, on which he
bestowed the appellation of a four-wheeled phaeton, Nicholas proceeded
on his journey next morning with greater ease than he had expected: the
manager and himself occupying the front seat: and the Master Crummleses
and Smike being packed together behind, in company with a wicker basket
defended from wet by a stout oilskin, in which were the broad-swords,
pistols, pigtails, nautical costumes, and other professional necessaries
of the aforesaid young gentlemen.

The pony took his time upon the road, and--possibly in consequence
of his theatrical education--evinced, every now and then, a strong
inclination to lie down. However, Mr. Vincent Crummles kept him up pretty
well, by jerking the rein, and plying the whip; and when these means
failed, and the animal came to a stand, the elder Master Crummles got
out and kicked him. By dint of these encouragements, he was persuaded
to move from time to time, and they jogged on (as Mr. Crummles truly
observed) very comfortably for all parties.

‘He’s a good pony at bottom,’ said Mr. Crummles, turning to Nicholas.

He might have been at bottom, but he certainly was not at top, seeing
that his coat was of the roughest and most ill-favoured kind. So,
Nicholas merely observed that he shouldn’t wonder if he was.

‘Many and many is the circuit this pony has gone,’ said Mr. Crummles,
flicking him skilfully on the eyelid for old acquaintance’ sake. ‘He is
quite one of us. His mother was on the stage.’

‘Was she?’ rejoined Nicholas.

‘She ate apple-pie at a circus for upwards of fourteen years,’ said the
manager; ‘fired pistols, and went to bed in a nightcap; and, in short,
took the low comedy entirely. His father was a dancer.’

‘Was he at all distinguished?’

‘Not very,’ said the manager. ‘He was rather a low sort of pony. The
fact is, he had been originally jobbed out by the day, and he never
quite got over his old habits. He was clever in melodrama too, but too
broad--too broad. When the mother died, he took the port-wine business.’

‘The port-wine business!’ cried Nicholas.

‘Drinking port-wine with the clown,’ said the manager; ‘but he was
greedy, and one night bit off the bowl of the glass, and choked himself,
so his vulgarity was the death of him at last.’

The descendant of this ill-starred animal requiring increased attention
from Mr. Crummles as he progressed in his day’s work, that gentleman had
very little time for conversation. Nicholas was thus left at leisure
to entertain himself with his own thoughts, until they arrived at the
drawbridge at Portsmouth, when Mr. Crummles pulled up.

‘We’ll get down here,’ said the manager, ‘and the boys will take him
round to the stable, and call at my lodgings with the luggage. You had
better let yours be taken there, for the present.’

Thanking Mr. Vincent Crummles for his obliging offer, Nicholas jumped
out, and, giving Smike his arm, accompanied the manager up High Street
on their way to the theatre; feeling nervous and uncomfortable enough at
the prospect of an immediate introduction to a scene so new to him.

They passed a great many bills, pasted against the walls and displayed
in windows, wherein the names of Mr. Vincent Crummles, Mrs. Vincent
Crummles, Master Crummles, Master P. Crummles, and Miss Crummles, were
printed in very large letters, and everything else in very small ones;
and, turning at length into an entry, in which was a strong smell of
orange-peel and lamp-oil, with an under-current of sawdust, groped their
way through a dark passage, and, descending a step or two, threaded a
little maze of canvas screens and paint pots, and emerged upon the stage
of the Portsmouth Theatre.

‘Here we are,’ said Mr. Crummles.

It was not very light, but Nicholas found himself close to the first
entrance on the prompt side, among bare walls, dusty scenes, mildewed
clouds, heavily daubed draperies, and dirty floors. He looked about him;
ceiling, pit, boxes, gallery, orchestra, fittings, and decorations of
every kind,--all looked coarse, cold, gloomy, and wretched.

‘Is this a theatre?’ whispered Smike, in amazement; ‘I thought it was a
blaze of light and finery.’

‘Why, so it is,’ replied Nicholas, hardly less surprised; ‘but not by
day, Smike--not by day.’

The manager’s voice recalled him from a more careful inspection of the
building, to the opposite side of the proscenium, where, at a small
mahogany table with rickety legs and of an oblong shape, sat a stout,
portly female, apparently between forty and fifty, in a tarnished silk
cloak, with her bonnet dangling by the strings in her hand, and her hair
(of which she had a great quantity) braided in a large festoon over each
temple.

‘Mr. Johnson,’ said the manager (for Nicholas had given the name
which Newman Noggs had bestowed upon him in his conversation with Mrs
Kenwigs), ‘let me introduce Mrs. Vincent Crummles.’

‘I am glad to see you, sir,’ said Mrs. Vincent Crummles, in a sepulchral
voice. ‘I am very glad to see you, and still more happy to hail you as a
promising member of our corps.’

The lady shook Nicholas by the hand as she addressed him in these terms;
he saw it was a large one, but had not expected quite such an iron grip
as that with which she honoured him.

‘And this,’ said the lady, crossing to Smike, as tragic actresses cross
when they obey a stage direction, ‘and this is the other. You too, are
welcome, sir.’

‘He’ll do, I think, my dear?’ said the manager, taking a pinch of snuff.

‘He is admirable,’ replied the lady. ‘An acquisition indeed.’

As Mrs. Vincent Crummles recrossed back to the table, there bounded on
to the stage from some mysterious inlet, a little girl in a dirty white
frock with tucks up to the knees, short trousers, sandaled shoes, white
spencer, pink gauze bonnet, green veil and curl papers; who turned a
pirouette, cut twice in the air, turned another pirouette, then, looking
off at the opposite wing, shrieked, bounded forward to within six inches
of the footlights, and fell into a beautiful attitude of terror, as a
shabby gentleman in an old pair of buff slippers came in at one powerful
slide, and chattering his teeth, fiercely brandished a walking-stick.

‘They are going through the Indian Savage and the Maiden,’ said Mrs
Crummles.

‘Oh!’ said the manager, ‘the little ballet interlude. Very good, go on.
A little this way, if you please, Mr. Johnson. That’ll do. Now!’

The manager clapped his hands as a signal to proceed, and the savage,
becoming ferocious, made a slide towards the maiden; but the maiden
avoided him in six twirls, and came down, at the end of the last one,
upon the very points of her toes. This seemed to make some impression
upon the savage; for, after a little more ferocity and chasing of the
maiden into corners, he began to relent, and stroked his face several
times with his right thumb and four fingers, thereby intimating that
he was struck with admiration of the maiden’s beauty. Acting upon the
impulse of this passion, he (the savage) began to hit himself severe
thumps in the chest, and to exhibit other indications of being
desperately in love, which being rather a prosy proceeding, was very
likely the cause of the maiden’s falling asleep; whether it was or
no, asleep she did fall, sound as a church, on a sloping bank, and the
savage perceiving it, leant his left ear on his left hand, and nodded
sideways, to intimate to all whom it might concern that she WAS asleep,
and no shamming. Being left to himself, the savage had a dance, all
alone. Just as he left off, the maiden woke up, rubbed her eyes, got off
the bank, and had a dance all alone too--such a dance that the savage
looked on in ecstasy all the while, and when it was done, plucked from
a neighbouring tree some botanical curiosity, resembling a small pickled
cabbage, and offered it to the maiden, who at first wouldn’t have it,
but on the savage shedding tears relented. Then the savage jumped
for joy; then the maiden jumped for rapture at the sweet smell of
the pickled cabbage. Then the savage and the maiden danced violently
together, and, finally, the savage dropped down on one knee, and the
maiden stood on one leg upon his other knee; thus concluding the ballet,
and leaving the spectators in a state of pleasing uncertainty, whether
she would ultimately marry the savage, or return to her friends.

‘Very well indeed,’ said Mr. Crummles; ‘bravo!’

‘Bravo!’ cried Nicholas, resolved to make the best of everything.
‘Beautiful!’

‘This, sir,’ said Mr. Vincent Crummles, bringing the maiden forward,
‘this is the infant phenomenon--Miss Ninetta Crummles.’

‘Your daughter?’ inquired Nicholas.

‘My daughter--my daughter,’ replied Mr. Vincent Crummles; ‘the idol of
every place we go into, sir. We have had complimentary letters about
this girl, sir, from the nobility and gentry of almost every town in
England.’

‘I am not surprised at that,’ said Nicholas; ‘she must be quite a
natural genius.’

‘Quite a--!’ Mr. Crummles stopped: language was not powerful enough to
describe the infant phenomenon. ‘I’ll tell you what, sir,’ he said;
‘the talent of this child is not to be imagined. She must be seen,
sir--seen--to be ever so faintly appreciated. There; go to your mother,
my dear.’

‘May I ask how old she is?’ inquired Nicholas.

‘You may, sir,’ replied Mr. Crummles, looking steadily in his
questioner’s face, as some men do when they have doubts about being
implicitly believed in what they are going to say. ‘She is ten years of
age, sir.’

‘Not more!’

‘Not a day.’

‘Dear me!’ said Nicholas, ‘it’s extraordinary.’

It was; for the infant phenomenon, though of short stature, had a
comparatively aged countenance, and had moreover been precisely the
same age--not perhaps to the full extent of the memory of the oldest
inhabitant, but certainly for five good years. But she had been kept up
late every night, and put upon an unlimited allowance of gin-and-water
from infancy, to prevent her growing tall, and perhaps this system
of training had produced in the infant phenomenon these additional
phenomena.

While this short dialogue was going on, the gentleman who had enacted
the savage, came up, with his walking shoes on his feet, and his
slippers in his hand, to within a few paces, as if desirous to join in
the conversation. Deeming this a good opportunity, he put in his word.

‘Talent there, sir!’ said the savage, nodding towards Miss Crummles.

Nicholas assented.

‘Ah!’ said the actor, setting his teeth together, and drawing in his
breath with a hissing sound, ‘she oughtn’t to be in the provinces, she
oughtn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked the manager.

‘I mean to say,’ replied the other, warmly, ‘that she is too good for
country boards, and that she ought to be in one of the large houses in
London, or nowhere; and I tell you more, without mincing the matter,
that if it wasn’t for envy and jealousy in some quarter that you know
of, she would be. Perhaps you’ll introduce me here, Mr. Crummles.’

‘Mr. Folair,’ said the manager, presenting him to Nicholas.

‘Happy to know you, sir.’ Mr. Folair touched the brim of his hat with his
forefinger, and then shook hands. ‘A recruit, sir, I understand?’

‘An unworthy one,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Did you ever see such a set-out as that?’ whispered the actor, drawing
him away, as Crummles left them to speak to his wife.

‘As what?’

Mr. Folair made a funny face from his pantomime collection, and pointed
over his shoulder.

‘You don’t mean the infant phenomenon?’

‘Infant humbug, sir,’ replied Mr. Folair. ‘There isn’t a female child of
common sharpness in a charity school, that couldn’t do better than that.
She may thank her stars she was born a manager’s daughter.’

‘You seem to take it to heart,’ observed Nicholas, with a smile.

‘Yes, by Jove, and well I may,’ said Mr. Folair, drawing his arm through
his, and walking him up and down the stage. ‘Isn’t it enough to make a
man crusty to see that little sprawler put up in the best business every
night, and actually keeping money out of the house, by being forced
down the people’s throats, while other people are passed over? Isn’t
it extraordinary to see a man’s confounded family conceit blinding him,
even to his own interest? Why I KNOW of fifteen and sixpence that came
to Southampton one night last month, to see me dance the Highland Fling;
and what’s the consequence? I’ve never been put up in it since--never
once--while the “infant phenomenon” has been grinning through artificial
flowers at five people and a baby in the pit, and two boys in the
gallery, every night.’

‘If I may judge from what I have seen of you,’ said Nicholas, ‘you must
be a valuable member of the company.’

‘Oh!’ replied Mr. Folair, beating his slippers together, to knock the
dust out; ‘I CAN come it pretty well--nobody better, perhaps, in my own
line--but having such business as one gets here, is like putting lead on
one’s feet instead of chalk, and dancing in fetters without the credit
of it. Holloa, old fellow, how are you?’

The gentleman addressed in these latter words was a dark-complexioned
man, inclining indeed to sallow, with long thick black hair, and very
evident inclinations (although he was close shaved) of a stiff beard,
and whiskers of the same deep shade. His age did not appear to exceed
thirty, though many at first sight would have considered him much older,
as his face was long, and very pale, from the constant application of
stage paint. He wore a checked shirt, an old green coat with new gilt
buttons, a neckerchief of broad red and green stripes, and full blue
trousers; he carried, too, a common ash walking-stick, apparently
more for show than use, as he flourished it about, with the hooked end
downwards, except when he raised it for a few seconds, and throwing
himself into a fencing attitude, made a pass or two at the side-scenes,
or at any other object, animate or inanimate, that chanced to afford him
a pretty good mark at the moment.

‘Well, Tommy,’ said this gentleman, making a thrust at his friend, who
parried it dexterously with his slipper, ‘what’s the news?’

‘A new appearance, that’s all,’ replied Mr. Folair, looking at Nicholas.

‘Do the honours, Tommy, do the honours,’ said the other gentleman,
tapping him reproachfully on the crown of the hat with his stick.

‘This is Mr. Lenville, who does our first tragedy, Mr. Johnson,’ said the
pantomimist.

‘Except when old bricks and mortar takes it into his head to do it
himself, you should add, Tommy,’ remarked Mr. Lenville. ‘You know who
bricks and mortar is, I suppose, sir?’

‘I do not, indeed,’ replied Nicholas.

‘We call Crummles that, because his style of acting is rather in the
heavy and ponderous way,’ said Mr. Lenville. ‘I mustn’t be cracking jokes
though, for I’ve got a part of twelve lengths here, which I must be
up in tomorrow night, and I haven’t had time to look at it yet; I’m a
confounded quick study, that’s one comfort.’

Consoling himself with this reflection, Mr. Lenville drew from his coat
pocket a greasy and crumpled manuscript, and, having made another pass
at his friend, proceeded to walk to and fro, conning it to himself and
indulging occasionally in such appropriate action as his imagination and
the text suggested.

A pretty general muster of the company had by this time taken place;
for besides Mr. Lenville and his friend Tommy, there were present, a slim
young gentleman with weak eyes, who played the low-spirited lovers
and sang tenor songs, and who had come arm-in-arm with the comic
countryman--a man with a turned-up nose, large mouth, broad face, and
staring eyes. Making himself very amiable to the infant phenomenon, was
an inebriated elderly gentleman in the last depths of shabbiness, who
played the calm and virtuous old men; and paying especial court to Mrs
Crummles was another elderly gentleman, a shade more respectable, who
played the irascible old men--those funny fellows who have nephews in
the army and perpetually run about with thick sticks to compel them to
marry heiresses. Besides these, there was a roving-looking person in
a rough great-coat, who strode up and down in front of the lamps,
flourishing a dress cane, and rattling away, in an undertone, with great
vivacity for the amusement of an ideal audience. He was not quite so
young as he had been, and his figure was rather running to seed; but
there was an air of exaggerated gentility about him, which bespoke the
hero of swaggering comedy. There was, also, a little group of three or
four young men with lantern jaws and thick eyebrows, who were conversing
in one corner; but they seemed to be of secondary importance, and
laughed and talked together without attracting any attention.

The ladies were gathered in a little knot by themselves round the
rickety table before mentioned. There was Miss Snevellicci--who could
do anything, from a medley dance to Lady Macbeth, and also always played
some part in blue silk knee-smalls at her benefit--glancing, from the
depths of her coal-scuttle straw bonnet, at Nicholas, and affecting
to be absorbed in the recital of a diverting story to her friend Miss
Ledrook, who had brought her work, and was making up a ruff in the most
natural manner possible. There was Miss Belvawney--who seldom aspired
to speaking parts, and usually went on as a page in white silk hose, to
stand with one leg bent, and contemplate the audience, or to go in and
out after Mr. Crummles in stately tragedy--twisting up the ringlets of
the beautiful Miss Bravassa, who had once had her likeness taken ‘in
character’ by an engraver’s apprentice, whereof impressions were hung up
for sale in the pastry-cook’s window, and the greengrocer’s, and at the
circulating library, and the box-office, whenever the announce bills
came out for her annual night. There was Mrs. Lenville, in a very limp
bonnet and veil, decidedly in that way in which she would wish to be if
she truly loved Mr. Lenville; there was Miss Gazingi, with an imitation
ermine boa tied in a loose knot round her neck, flogging Mr. Crummles,
junior, with both ends, in fun. Lastly, there was Mrs. Grudden in a brown
cloth pelisse and a beaver bonnet, who assisted Mrs. Crummles in her
domestic affairs, and took money at the doors, and dressed the ladies,
and swept the house, and held the prompt book when everybody else was on
for the last scene, and acted any kind of part on any emergency without
ever learning it, and was put down in the bills under any name or names
whatever, that occurred to Mr. Crummles as looking well in print.

Mr. Folair having obligingly confided these particulars to Nicholas, left
him to mingle with his fellows; the work of personal introduction was
completed by Mr. Vincent Crummles, who publicly heralded the new actor as
a prodigy of genius and learning.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Miss Snevellicci, sidling towards Nicholas,
‘but did you ever play at Canterbury?’

‘I never did,’ replied Nicholas.

‘I recollect meeting a gentleman at Canterbury,’ said Miss Snevellicci,
‘only for a few moments, for I was leaving the company as he joined it,
so like you that I felt almost certain it was the same.’

‘I see you now for the first time,’ rejoined Nicholas with all due
gallantry. ‘I am sure I never saw you before; I couldn’t have forgotten
it.’

‘Oh, I’m sure--it’s very flattering of you to say so,’ retorted Miss
Snevellicci with a graceful bend. ‘Now I look at you again, I see that
the gentleman at Canterbury hadn’t the same eyes as you--you’ll think me
very foolish for taking notice of such things, won’t you?’

‘Not at all,’ said Nicholas. ‘How can I feel otherwise than flattered by
your notice in any way?’

‘Oh! you men are such vain creatures!’ cried Miss Snevellicci.
Whereupon, she became charmingly confused, and, pulling out her
pocket-handkerchief from a faded pink silk reticule with a gilt clasp,
called to Miss Ledrook--

‘Led, my dear,’ said Miss Snevellicci.

‘Well, what is the matter?’ said Miss Ledrook.

‘It’s not the same.’

‘Not the same what?’

‘Canterbury--you know what I mean. Come here! I want to speak to you.’

But Miss Ledrook wouldn’t come to Miss Snevellicci, so Miss Snevellicci
was obliged to go to Miss Ledrook, which she did, in a skipping manner
that was quite fascinating; and Miss Ledrook evidently joked Miss
Snevellicci about being struck with Nicholas; for, after some playful
whispering, Miss Snevellicci hit Miss Ledrook very hard on the backs of
her hands, and retired up, in a state of pleasing confusion.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Mr. Vincent Crummles, who had been writing
on a piece of paper, ‘we’ll call the Mortal Struggle tomorrow at ten;
everybody for the procession. Intrigue, and Ways and Means, you’re all
up in, so we shall only want one rehearsal. Everybody at ten, if you
please.’

‘Everybody at ten,’ repeated Mrs. Grudden, looking about her.

‘On Monday morning we shall read a new piece,’ said Mr. Crummles; ‘the
name’s not known yet, but everybody will have a good part. Mr. Johnson
will take care of that.’

‘Hallo!’ said Nicholas, starting. ‘I--’

‘On Monday morning,’ repeated Mr. Crummles, raising his voice, to drown
the unfortunate Mr. Johnson’s remonstrance; ‘that’ll do, ladies and
gentlemen.’

The ladies and gentlemen required no second notice to quit; and, in
a few minutes, the theatre was deserted, save by the Crummles family,
Nicholas, and Smike.

‘Upon my word,’ said Nicholas, taking the manager aside, ‘I don’t think
I can be ready by Monday.’

‘Pooh, pooh,’ replied Mr. Crummles.

‘But really I can’t,’ returned Nicholas; ‘my invention is not accustomed
to these demands, or possibly I might produce--’

‘Invention! what the devil’s that got to do with it!’ cried the manager
hastily.

‘Everything, my dear sir.’

‘Nothing, my dear sir,’ retorted the manager, with evident impatience.
‘Do you understand French?’

‘Perfectly well.’

‘Very good,’ said the manager, opening the table drawer, and giving a
roll of paper from it to Nicholas. ‘There! Just turn that into English,
and put your name on the title-page. Damn me,’ said Mr. Crummles,
angrily, ‘if I haven’t often said that I wouldn’t have a man or woman in
my company that wasn’t master of the language, so that they might learn
it from the original, and play it in English, and save all this trouble
and expense.’

Nicholas smiled and pocketed the play.

‘What are you going to do about your lodgings?’ said Mr. Crummles.

Nicholas could not help thinking that, for the first week, it would be
an uncommon convenience to have a turn-up bedstead in the pit, but he
merely remarked that he had not turned his thoughts that way.

‘Come home with me then,’ said Mr. Crummles, ‘and my boys shall go with
you after dinner, and show you the most likely place.’

The offer was not to be refused; Nicholas and Mr. Crummles gave Mrs
Crummles an arm each, and walked up the street in stately array. Smike,
the boys, and the phenomenon, went home by a shorter cut, and Mrs
Grudden remained behind to take some cold Irish stew and a pint of
porter in the box-office.

Mrs. Crummles trod the pavement as if she were going to immediate
execution with an animating consciousness of innocence, and that heroic
fortitude which virtue alone inspires. Mr. Crummles, on the other hand,
assumed the look and gait of a hardened despot; but they both attracted
some notice from many of the passers-by, and when they heard a whisper
of ‘Mr. and Mrs. Crummles!’ or saw a little boy run back to stare them in
the face, the severe expression of their countenances relaxed, for they
felt it was popularity.

Mr. Crummles lived in St Thomas’s Street, at the house of one Bulph, a
pilot, who sported a boat-green door, with window-frames of the same
colour, and had the little finger of a drowned man on his parlour
mantelshelf, with other maritime and natural curiosities. He displayed
also a brass knocker, a brass plate, and a brass bell-handle, all very
bright and shining; and had a mast, with a vane on the top of it, in his
back yard.

‘You are welcome,’ said Mrs. Crummles, turning round to Nicholas when
they reached the bow-windowed front room on the first floor.

Nicholas bowed his acknowledgments, and was unfeignedly glad to see the
cloth laid.

‘We have but a shoulder of mutton with onion sauce,’ said Mrs. Crummles,
in the same charnel-house voice; ‘but such as our dinner is, we beg you
to partake of it.’

‘You are very good,’ replied Nicholas, ‘I shall do it ample justice.’

‘Vincent,’ said Mrs. Crummles, ‘what is the hour?’

‘Five minutes past dinner-time,’ said Mr. Crummles.

Mrs. Crummles rang the bell. ‘Let the mutton and onion sauce appear.’

The slave who attended upon Mr. Bulph’s lodgers, disappeared, and after
a short interval reappeared with the festive banquet. Nicholas and the
infant phenomenon opposed each other at the pembroke-table, and Smike
and the master Crummleses dined on the sofa bedstead.

‘Are they very theatrical people here?’ asked Nicholas.

‘No,’ replied Mr. Crummles, shaking his head, ‘far from it--far from it.’

‘I pity them,’ observed Mrs. Crummles.

‘So do I,’ said Nicholas; ‘if they have no relish for theatrical
entertainments, properly conducted.’

‘Then they have none, sir,’ rejoined Mr. Crummles. ‘To the infant’s
benefit, last year, on which occasion she repeated three of her most
popular characters, and also appeared in the Fairy Porcupine, as
originally performed by her, there was a house of no more than four
pound twelve.’

‘Is it possible?’ cried Nicholas.

‘And two pound of that was trust, pa,’ said the phenomenon.

‘And two pound of that was trust,’ repeated Mr. Crummles. ‘Mrs. Crummles
herself has played to mere handfuls.’

‘But they are always a taking audience, Vincent,’ said the manager’s
wife.

‘Most audiences are, when they have good acting--real good acting--the
regular thing,’ replied Mr. Crummles, forcibly.

‘Do you give lessons, ma’am?’ inquired Nicholas.

‘I do,’ said Mrs. Crummles.

‘There is no teaching here, I suppose?’

‘There has been,’ said Mrs. Crummles. ‘I have received pupils here. I
imparted tuition to the daughter of a dealer in ships’ provision; but
it afterwards appeared that she was insane when she first came to me. It
was very extraordinary that she should come, under such circumstances.’

Not feeling quite so sure of that, Nicholas thought it best to hold his
peace.

‘Let me see,’ said the manager cogitating after dinner. ‘Would you like
some nice little part with the infant?’

‘You are very good,’ replied Nicholas hastily; ‘but I think perhaps it
would be better if I had somebody of my own size at first, in case I
should turn out awkward. I should feel more at home, perhaps.’

‘True,’ said the manager. ‘Perhaps you would. And you could play up to
the infant, in time, you know.’

‘Certainly,’ replied Nicholas: devoutly hoping that it would be a very
long time before he was honoured with this distinction.

‘Then I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ said Mr. Crummles. ‘You shall study
Romeo when you’ve done that piece--don’t forget to throw the pump
and tubs in by-the-bye--Juliet Miss Snevellicci, old Grudden the
nurse.--Yes, that’ll do very well. Rover too;--you might get up Rover
while you were about it, and Cassio, and Jeremy Diddler. You can easily
knock them off; one part helps the other so much. Here they are, cues
and all.’

With these hasty general directions Mr. Crummles thrust a number of
little books into the faltering hands of Nicholas, and bidding his
eldest son go with him and show where lodgings were to be had, shook him
by the hand, and wished him good night.

There is no lack of comfortable furnished apartments in Portsmouth, and
no difficulty in finding some that are proportionate to very slender
finances; but the former were too good, and the latter too bad, and they
went into so many houses, and came out unsuited, that Nicholas seriously
began to think he should be obliged to ask permission to spend the night
in the theatre, after all.

Eventually, however, they stumbled upon two small rooms up three pair of
stairs, or rather two pair and a ladder, at a tobacconist’s shop, on the
Common Hard: a dirty street leading down to the dockyard. These Nicholas
engaged, only too happy to have escaped any request for payment of a
week’s rent beforehand.

‘There! Lay down our personal property, Smike,’ he said, after showing
young Crummles downstairs. ‘We have fallen upon strange times, and
Heaven only knows the end of them; but I am tired with the events of
these three days, and will postpone reflection till tomorrow--if I can.’



CHAPTER 24

Of the Great Bespeak for Miss Snevellicci, and the first Appearance of
Nicholas upon any Stage


Nicholas was up betimes in the morning; but he had scarcely begun to
dress, notwithstanding, when he heard footsteps ascending the stairs,
and was presently saluted by the voices of Mr. Folair the pantomimist,
and Mr. Lenville, the tragedian.

‘House, house, house!’ cried Mr. Folair.

‘What, ho! within there,’ said Mr. Lenville, in a deep voice.

‘Confound these fellows!’ thought Nicholas; ‘they have come to
breakfast, I suppose. I’ll open the door directly, if you’ll wait an
instant.’

The gentlemen entreated him not to hurry himself; and, to beguile the
interval, had a fencing bout with their walking-sticks on the very small
landing-place: to the unspeakable discomposure of all the other lodgers
downstairs.

‘Here, come in,’ said Nicholas, when he had completed his toilet. ‘In
the name of all that’s horrible, don’t make that noise outside.’

‘An uncommon snug little box this,’ said Mr. Lenville, stepping into
the front room, and taking his hat off, before he could get in at all.
‘Pernicious snug.’

‘For a man at all particular in such matters, it might be a trifle
too snug,’ said Nicholas; ‘for, although it is, undoubtedly, a great
convenience to be able to reach anything you want from the ceiling or
the floor, or either side of the room, without having to move from your
chair, still these advantages can only be had in an apartment of the
most limited size.’

‘It isn’t a bit too confined for a single man,’ returned Mr. Lenville.
‘That reminds me,--my wife, Mr. Johnson,--I hope she’ll have some good
part in this piece of yours?’

‘I glanced at the French copy last night,’ said Nicholas. ‘It looks very
good, I think.’

‘What do you mean to do for me, old fellow?’ asked Mr. Lenville, poking
the struggling fire with his walking-stick, and afterwards wiping it on
the skirt of his coat. ‘Anything in the gruff and grumble way?’

‘You turn your wife and child out of doors,’ said Nicholas; ‘and, in a
fit of rage and jealousy, stab your eldest son in the library.’

‘Do I though!’ exclaimed Mr. Lenville. ‘That’s very good business.’

‘After which,’ said Nicholas, ‘you are troubled with remorse till the
last act, and then you make up your mind to destroy yourself. But, just
as you are raising the pistol to your head, a clock strikes--ten.’

‘I see,’ cried Mr. Lenville. ‘Very good.’

‘You pause,’ said Nicholas; ‘you recollect to have heard a clock
strike ten in your infancy. The pistol falls from your hand--you are
overcome--you burst into tears, and become a virtuous and exemplary
character for ever afterwards.’

‘Capital!’ said Mr. Lenville: ‘that’s a sure card, a sure card. Get the
curtain down with a touch of nature like that, and it’ll be a triumphant
success.’

‘Is there anything good for me?’ inquired Mr. Folair, anxiously.

‘Let me see,’ said Nicholas. ‘You play the faithful and attached
servant; you are turned out of doors with the wife and child.’

‘Always coupled with that infernal phenomenon,’ sighed Mr. Folair;
‘and we go into poor lodgings, where I won’t take any wages, and talk
sentiment, I suppose?’

‘Why--yes,’ replied Nicholas: ‘that is the course of the piece.’

‘I must have a dance of some kind, you know,’ said Mr. Folair. ‘You’ll
have to introduce one for the phenomenon, so you’d better make a PAS DE
DEUX, and save time.’

‘There’s nothing easier than that,’ said Mr. Lenville, observing the
disturbed looks of the young dramatist.

‘Upon my word I don’t see how it’s to be done,’ rejoined Nicholas.

‘Why, isn’t it obvious?’ reasoned Mr. Lenville. ‘Gadzooks, who can help
seeing the way to do it?--you astonish me! You get the distressed lady,
and the little child, and the attached servant, into the poor lodgings,
don’t you?--Well, look here. The distressed lady sinks into a chair, and
buries her face in her pocket-handkerchief. “What makes you weep, mama?”
 says the child. “Don’t weep, mama, or you’ll make me weep too!”--“And
me!” says the favourite servant, rubbing his eyes with his arm. “What
can we do to raise your spirits, dear mama?” says the little child.
“Ay, what CAN we do?” says the faithful servant. “Oh, Pierre!” says
the distressed lady; “would that I could shake off these painful
thoughts.”--“Try, ma’am, try,” says the faithful servant; “rouse
yourself, ma’am; be amused.”--“I will,” says the lady, “I will learn
to suffer with fortitude. Do you remember that dance, my honest friend,
which, in happier days, you practised with this sweet angel? It never
failed to calm my spirits then. Oh! let me see it once again before I
die!”--There it is--cue for the band, BEFORE I DIE,--and off they go.
That’s the regular thing; isn’t it, Tommy?’

‘That’s it,’ replied Mr. Folair. ‘The distressed lady, overpowered by old
recollections, faints at the end of the dance, and you close in with a
picture.’

Profiting by these and other lessons, which were the result of the
personal experience of the two actors, Nicholas willingly gave them the
best breakfast he could, and, when he at length got rid of them, applied
himself to his task: by no means displeased to find that it was so much
easier than he had at first supposed. He worked very hard all day,
and did not leave his room until the evening, when he went down to the
theatre, whither Smike had repaired before him to go on with another
gentleman as a general rebellion.

Here all the people were so much changed, that he scarcely knew them.
False hair, false colour, false calves, false muscles--they had become
different beings. Mr. Lenville was a blooming warrior of most exquisite
proportions; Mr. Crummles, his large face shaded by a profusion of
black hair, a Highland outlaw of most majestic bearing; one of the
old gentlemen a jailer, and the other a venerable patriarch; the comic
countryman, a fighting-man of great valour, relieved by a touch of
humour; each of the Master Crummleses a prince in his own right; and the
low-spirited lover, a desponding captive. There was a gorgeous banquet
ready spread for the third act, consisting of two pasteboard vases, one
plate of biscuits, a black bottle, and a vinegar cruet; and, in short,
everything was on a scale of the utmost splendour and preparation.

Nicholas was standing with his back to the curtain, now contemplating
the first scene, which was a Gothic archway, about two feet shorter
than Mr. Crummles, through which that gentleman was to make his first
entrance, and now listening to a couple of people who were cracking nuts
in the gallery, wondering whether they made the whole audience, when the
manager himself walked familiarly up and accosted him.

‘Been in front tonight?’ said Mr. Crummles.

‘No,’ replied Nicholas, ‘not yet. I am going to see the play.’

‘We’ve had a pretty good Let,’ said Mr. Crummles. ‘Four front places in
the centre, and the whole of the stage-box.’

‘Oh, indeed!’ said Nicholas; ‘a family, I suppose?’

‘Yes,’ replied Mr. Crummles, ‘yes. It’s an affecting thing. There are six
children, and they never come unless the phenomenon plays.’

It would have been difficult for any party, family, or otherwise, to
have visited the theatre on a night when the phenomenon did NOT play,
inasmuch as she always sustained one, and not uncommonly two or three,
characters, every night; but Nicholas, sympathising with the feelings of
a father, refrained from hinting at this trifling circumstance, and Mr
Crummles continued to talk, uninterrupted by him.

‘Six,’ said that gentleman; ‘pa and ma eight, aunt nine, governess
ten, grandfather and grandmother twelve. Then, there’s the footman, who
stands outside, with a bag of oranges and a jug of toast-and-water,
and sees the play for nothing through the little pane of glass in the
box-door--it’s cheap at a guinea; they gain by taking a box.’

‘I wonder you allow so many,’ observed Nicholas.

‘There’s no help for it,’ replied Mr. Crummles; ‘it’s always expected in
the country. If there are six children, six people come to hold them in
their laps. A family-box carries double always. Ring in the orchestra,
Grudden!’

That useful lady did as she was requested, and shortly afterwards the
tuning of three fiddles was heard. Which process having been protracted
as long as it was supposed that the patience of the audience could
possibly bear it, was put a stop to by another jerk of the bell, which,
being the signal to begin in earnest, set the orchestra playing a
variety of popular airs, with involuntary variations.

If Nicholas had been astonished at the alteration for the better which
the gentlemen displayed, the transformation of the ladies was still more
extraordinary. When, from a snug corner of the manager’s box, he beheld
Miss Snevellicci in all the glories of white muslin with a golden hem,
and Mrs. Crummles in all the dignity of the outlaw’s wife, and Miss
Bravassa in all the sweetness of Miss Snevellicci’s confidential friend,
and Miss Belvawney in the white silks of a page doing duty everywhere
and swearing to live and die in the service of everybody, he could
scarcely contain his admiration, which testified itself in great
applause, and the closest possible attention to the business of the
scene. The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age,
people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account,
as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of
what would ever come of it. An outlaw had been very successful in doing
something somewhere, and came home, in triumph, to the sound of shouts
and fiddles, to greet his wife--a lady of masculine mind, who talked
a good deal about her father’s bones, which it seemed were unburied,
though whether from a peculiar taste on the part of the old gentleman
himself, or the reprehensible neglect of his relations, did not appear.
This outlaw’s wife was, somehow or other, mixed up with a patriarch,
living in a castle a long way off, and this patriarch was the father
of several of the characters, but he didn’t exactly know which, and was
uncertain whether he had brought up the right ones in his castle, or the
wrong ones; he rather inclined to the latter opinion, and, being uneasy,
relieved his mind with a banquet, during which solemnity somebody in
a cloak said ‘Beware!’ which somebody was known by nobody (except the
audience) to be the outlaw himself, who had come there, for reasons
unexplained, but possibly with an eye to the spoons. There was an
agreeable little surprise in the way of certain love passages between
the desponding captive and Miss Snevellicci, and the comic fighting-man
and Miss Bravassa; besides which, Mr. Lenville had several very tragic
scenes in the dark, while on throat-cutting expeditions, which were
all baffled by the skill and bravery of the comic fighting-man (who
overheard whatever was said all through the piece) and the intrepidity
of Miss Snevellicci, who adopted tights, and therein repaired to the
prison of her captive lover, with a small basket of refreshments and a
dark lantern. At last, it came out that the patriarch was the man
who had treated the bones of the outlaw’s father-in-law with so much
disrespect, for which cause and reason the outlaw’s wife repaired to
his castle to kill him, and so got into a dark room, where, after a good
deal of groping in the dark, everybody got hold of everybody else, and
took them for somebody besides, which occasioned a vast quantity of
confusion, with some pistolling, loss of life, and torchlight; after
which, the patriarch came forward, and observing, with a knowing look,
that he knew all about his children now, and would tell them when they
got inside, said that there could not be a more appropriate occasion
for marrying the young people than that; and therefore he joined their
hands, with the full consent of the indefatigable page, who (being the
only other person surviving) pointed with his cap into the clouds, and
his right hand to the ground; thereby invoking a blessing and giving the
cue for the curtain to come down, which it did, amidst general applause.

‘What did you think of that?’ asked Mr. Crummles, when Nicholas went
round to the stage again. Mr. Crummles was very red and hot, for your
outlaws are desperate fellows to shout.

‘I think it was very capital indeed,’ replied Nicholas; ‘Miss
Snevellicci in particular was uncommonly good.’

‘She’s a genius,’ said Mr. Crummles; ‘quite a genius, that girl.
By-the-bye, I’ve been thinking of bringing out that piece of yours on
her bespeak night.’

‘When?’ asked Nicholas.

‘The night of her bespeak. Her benefit night, when her friends and
patrons bespeak the play,’ said Mr. Crummles.

‘Oh! I understand,’ replied Nicholas.

‘You see,’ said Mr. Crummles, ‘it’s sure to go, on such an occasion, and
even if it should not work up quite as well as we expect, why it will be
her risk, you know, and not ours.’

‘Yours, you mean,’ said Nicholas.

‘I said mine, didn’t I?’ returned Mr. Crummles. ‘Next Monday week. What
do you say? You’ll have done it, and are sure to be up in the lover’s
part, long before that time.’

‘I don’t know about “long before,”’ replied Nicholas; ‘but BY that time
I think I can undertake to be ready.’

‘Very good,’ pursued Mr. Crummles, ‘then we’ll call that settled. Now,
I want to ask you something else. There’s a little--what shall I call
it?--a little canvassing takes place on these occasions.’

‘Among the patrons, I suppose?’ said Nicholas.

‘Among the patrons; and the fact is, that Snevellicci has had so many
bespeaks in this place, that she wants an attraction. She had a bespeak
when her mother-in-law died, and a bespeak when her uncle died; and
Mrs. Crummles and myself have had bespeaks on the anniversary of the
phenomenon’s birthday, and our wedding-day, and occasions of that
description, so that, in fact, there’s some difficulty in getting a good
one. Now, won’t you help this poor girl, Mr. Johnson?’ said Crummles,
sitting himself down on a drum, and taking a great pinch of snuff, as he
looked him steadily in the face.

‘How do you mean?’ rejoined Nicholas.

‘Don’t you think you could spare half an hour tomorrow morning, to call
with her at the houses of one or two of the principal people?’ murmured
the manager in a persuasive tone.

‘Oh dear me,’ said Nicholas, with an air of very strong objection, ‘I
shouldn’t like to do that.’

‘The infant will accompany her,’ said Mr. Crummles. ‘The moment it was
suggested to me, I gave permission for the infant to go. There will not
be the smallest impropriety--Miss Snevellicci, sir, is the very soul
of honour. It would be of material service--the gentleman from
London--author of the new piece--actor in the new piece--first
appearance on any boards--it would lead to a great bespeak, Mr. Johnson.’

‘I am very sorry to throw a damp upon the prospects of anybody, and
more especially a lady,’ replied Nicholas; ‘but really I must decidedly
object to making one of the canvassing party.’

‘What does Mr. Johnson say, Vincent?’ inquired a voice close to his ear;
and, looking round, he found Mrs. Crummles and Miss Snevellicci herself
standing behind him.

‘He has some objection, my dear,’ replied Mr. Crummles, looking at
Nicholas.

‘Objection!’ exclaimed Mrs. Crummles. ‘Can it be possible?’

‘Oh, I hope not!’ cried Miss Snevellicci. ‘You surely are not so
cruel--oh, dear me!--Well, I--to think of that now, after all one’s
looking forward to it!’

‘Mr. Johnson will not persist, my dear,’ said Mrs. Crummles. ‘Think better
of him than to suppose it. Gallantry, humanity, all the best feelings of
his nature, must be enlisted in this interesting cause.’

‘Which moves even a manager,’ said Mr. Crummles, smiling.

‘And a manager’s wife,’ added Mrs. Crummles, in her accustomed tragedy
tones. ‘Come, come, you will relent, I know you will.’

‘It is not in my nature,’ said Nicholas, moved by these appeals, ‘to
resist any entreaty, unless it is to do something positively wrong; and,
beyond a feeling of pride, I know nothing which should prevent my doing
this. I know nobody here, and nobody knows me. So be it then. I yield.’

Miss Snevellicci was at once overwhelmed with blushes and expressions of
gratitude, of which latter commodity neither Mr. nor Mrs. Crummles was by
any means sparing. It was arranged that Nicholas should call upon her,
at her lodgings, at eleven next morning, and soon after they parted:
he to return home to his authorship: Miss Snevellicci to dress for the
after-piece: and the disinterested manager and his wife to discuss the
probable gains of the forthcoming bespeak, of which they were to have
two-thirds of the profits by solemn treaty of agreement.

At the stipulated hour next morning, Nicholas repaired to the lodgings
of Miss Snevellicci, which were in a place called Lombard Street, at
the house of a tailor. A strong smell of ironing pervaded the little
passage; and the tailor’s daughter, who opened the door, appeared in
that flutter of spirits which is so often attendant upon the periodical
getting up of a family’s linen.

‘Miss Snevellicci lives here, I believe?’ said Nicholas, when the door
was opened.

The tailor’s daughter replied in the affirmative.

‘Will you have the goodness to let her know that Mr. Johnson is here?’
said Nicholas.

‘Oh, if you please, you’re to come upstairs,’ replied the tailor’s
daughter, with a smile.

Nicholas followed the young lady, and was shown into a small apartment
on the first floor, communicating with a back-room; in which, as he
judged from a certain half-subdued clinking sound, as of cups and
saucers, Miss Snevellicci was then taking her breakfast in bed.

‘You’re to wait, if you please,’ said the tailor’s daughter, after a
short period of absence, during which the clinking in the back-room had
ceased, and been succeeded by whispering--‘She won’t be long.’

As she spoke, she pulled up the window-blind, and having by this means
(as she thought) diverted Mr. Johnson’s attention from the room to the
street, caught up some articles which were airing on the fender, and had
very much the appearance of stockings, and darted off.

As there were not many objects of interest outside the window, Nicholas
looked about the room with more curiosity than he might otherwise have
bestowed upon it. On the sofa lay an old guitar, several thumbed
pieces of music, and a scattered litter of curl-papers; together with a
confused heap of play-bills, and a pair of soiled white satin shoes
with large blue rosettes. Hanging over the back of a chair was a
half-finished muslin apron with little pockets ornamented with red
ribbons, such as waiting-women wear on the stage, and (by consequence)
are never seen with anywhere else. In one corner stood the diminutive
pair of top-boots in which Miss Snevellicci was accustomed to enact the
little jockey, and, folded on a chair hard by, was a small parcel, which
bore a very suspicious resemblance to the companion smalls.

But the most interesting object of all was, perhaps, the open scrapbook,
displayed in the midst of some theatrical duodecimos that were strewn
upon the table; and pasted into which scrapbook were various critical
notices of Miss Snevellicci’s acting, extracted from different
provincial journals, together with one poetic address in her honour,
commencing--

     Sing, God of Love, and tell me in what dearth
     Thrice-gifted SNEVELLICCI came on earth,
     To thrill us with her smile, her tear, her eye,
     Sing, God of Love, and tell me quickly why.

Besides this effusion, there were innumerable complimentary allusions,
also extracted from newspapers, such as--‘We observe from an
advertisement in another part of our paper of today, that the charming
and highly-talented Miss Snevellicci takes her benefit on Wednesday,
for which occasion she has put forth a bill of fare that might kindle
exhilaration in the breast of a misanthrope. In the confidence that our
fellow-townsmen have not lost that high appreciation of public utility
and private worth, for which they have long been so pre-eminently
distinguished, we predict that this charming actress will be greeted
with a bumper.’ ‘To Correspondents.--J.S. is misinformed when he
supposes that the highly-gifted and beautiful Miss Snevellicci, nightly
captivating all hearts at our pretty and commodious little theatre,
is NOT the same lady to whom the young gentleman of immense fortune,
residing within a hundred miles of the good city of York, lately made
honourable proposals. We have reason to know that Miss Snevellicci IS
the lady who was implicated in that mysterious and romantic affair, and
whose conduct on that occasion did no less honour to her head and heart,
than do her histrionic triumphs to her brilliant genius.’ A copious
assortment of such paragraphs as these, with long bills of benefits
all ending with ‘Come Early’, in large capitals, formed the principal
contents of Miss Snevellicci’s scrapbook.

Nicholas had read a great many of these scraps, and was absorbed in a
circumstantial and melancholy account of the train of events which had
led to Miss Snevellicci’s spraining her ankle by slipping on a piece of
orange-peel flung by a monster in human form, (so the paper said,) upon
the stage at Winchester,--when that young lady herself, attired in the
coal-scuttle bonnet and walking-dress complete, tripped into the room,
with a thousand apologies for having detained him so long after the
appointed time.

‘But really,’ said Miss Snevellicci, ‘my darling Led, who lives with me
here, was taken so very ill in the night that I thought she would have
expired in my arms.’

‘Such a fate is almost to be envied,’ returned Nicholas, ‘but I am very
sorry to hear it nevertheless.’

‘What a creature you are to flatter!’ said Miss Snevellicci, buttoning
her glove in much confusion.

‘If it be flattery to admire your charms and accomplishments,’ rejoined
Nicholas, laying his hand upon the scrapbook, ‘you have better specimens
of it here.’

‘Oh you cruel creature, to read such things as those! I’m almost
ashamed to look you in the face afterwards, positively I am,’ said Miss
Snevellicci, seizing the book and putting it away in a closet. ‘How
careless of Led! How could she be so naughty!’

‘I thought you had kindly left it here, on purpose for me to read,’ said
Nicholas. And really it did seem possible.

‘I wouldn’t have had you see it for the world!’ rejoined Miss
Snevellicci. ‘I never was so vexed--never! But she is such a careless
thing, there’s no trusting her.’

The conversation was here interrupted by the entrance of the phenomenon,
who had discreetly remained in the bedroom up to this moment, and now
presented herself, with much grace and lightness, bearing in her hand
a very little green parasol with a broad fringe border, and no handle.
After a few words of course, they sallied into the street.

The phenomenon was rather a troublesome companion, for first the
right sandal came down, and then the left, and these mischances being
repaired, one leg of the little white trousers was discovered to be
longer than the other; besides these accidents, the green parasol
was dropped down an iron grating, and only fished up again with great
difficulty and by dint of much exertion. However, it was impossible to
scold her, as she was the manager’s daughter, so Nicholas took it all in
perfect good humour, and walked on, with Miss Snevellicci, arm-in-arm on
one side, and the offending infant on the other.

The first house to which they bent their steps, was situated in
a terrace of respectable appearance. Miss Snevellicci’s modest
double-knock was answered by a foot-boy, who, in reply to her inquiry
whether Mrs. Curdle was at home, opened his eyes very wide, grinned very
much, and said he didn’t know, but he’d inquire. With this he
showed them into a parlour where he kept them waiting, until the two
women-servants had repaired thither, under false pretences, to see the
play-actors; and having compared notes with them in the passage, and
joined in a vast quantity of whispering and giggling, he at length went
upstairs with Miss Snevellicci’s name.

Now, Mrs. Curdle was supposed, by those who were best informed on
such points, to possess quite the London taste in matters relating to
literature and the drama; and as to Mr. Curdle, he had written a pamphlet
of sixty-four pages, post octavo, on the character of the Nurse’s
deceased husband in Romeo and Juliet, with an inquiry whether he really
had been a ‘merry man’ in his lifetime, or whether it was merely his
widow’s affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him. He
had likewise proved, that by altering the received mode of punctuation,
any one of Shakespeare’s plays could be made quite different, and the
sense completely changed; it is needless to say, therefore, that he was
a great critic, and a very profound and most original thinker.

‘Well, Miss Snevellicci,’ said Mrs. Curdle, entering the parlour, ‘and
how do YOU do?’

Miss Snevellicci made a graceful obeisance, and hoped Mrs. Curdle was
well, as also Mr. Curdle, who at the same time appeared. Mrs. Curdle was
dressed in a morning wrapper, with a little cap stuck upon the top
of her head. Mr. Curdle wore a loose robe on his back, and his right
forefinger on his forehead after the portraits of Sterne, to whom
somebody or other had once said he bore a striking resemblance.

‘I venture to call, for the purpose of asking whether you would put your
name to my bespeak, ma’am,’ said Miss Snevellicci, producing documents.

‘Oh! I really don’t know what to say,’ replied Mrs. Curdle. ‘It’s not as
if the theatre was in its high and palmy days--you needn’t stand, Miss
Snevellicci--the drama is gone, perfectly gone.’

‘As an exquisite embodiment of the poet’s visions, and a realisation of
human intellectuality, gilding with refulgent light our dreamy moments,
and laying open a new and magic world before the mental eye, the drama
is gone, perfectly gone,’ said Mr. Curdle.

‘What man is there, now living, who can present before us all those
changing and prismatic colours with which the character of Hamlet is
invested?’ exclaimed Mrs. Curdle.

‘What man indeed--upon the stage,’ said Mr. Curdle, with a small
reservation in favour of himself. ‘Hamlet! Pooh! ridiculous! Hamlet is
gone, perfectly gone.’

Quite overcome by these dismal reflections, Mr. and Mrs. Curdle sighed,
and sat for some short time without speaking. At length, the lady,
turning to Miss Snevellicci, inquired what play she proposed to have.

‘Quite a new one,’ said Miss Snevellicci, ‘of which this gentleman is
the author, and in which he plays; being his first appearance on any
stage. Mr. Johnson is the gentleman’s name.’

‘I hope you have preserved the unities, sir?’ said Mr. Curdle.

‘The original piece is a French one,’ said Nicholas. ‘There is abundance
of incident, sprightly dialogue, strongly-marked characters--’

‘--All unavailing without a strict observance of the unities, sir,’
returned Mr. Curdle. ‘The unities of the drama, before everything.’

‘Might I ask you,’ said Nicholas, hesitating between the respect he
ought to assume, and his love of the whimsical, ‘might I ask you what
the unities are?’

Mr. Curdle coughed and considered. ‘The unities, sir,’ he said, ‘are a
completeness--a kind of universal dovetailedness with regard to place
and time--a sort of a general oneness, if I may be allowed to use so
strong an expression. I take those to be the dramatic unities, so far as
I have been enabled to bestow attention upon them, and I have read
much upon the subject, and thought much. I find, running through the
performances of this child,’ said Mr. Curdle, turning to the phenomenon,
‘a unity of feeling, a breadth, a light and shade, a warmth of
colouring, a tone, a harmony, a glow, an artistical development
of original conceptions, which I look for, in vain, among older
performers--I don’t know whether I make myself understood?’

‘Perfectly,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Just so,’ said Mr. Curdle, pulling up his neckcloth. ‘That is my
definition of the unities of the drama.’

Mrs. Curdle had sat listening to this lucid explanation with great
complacency. It being finished, she inquired what Mr. Curdle thought,
about putting down their names.

‘I don’t know, my dear; upon my word I don’t know,’ said Mr. Curdle. ‘If
we do, it must be distinctly understood that we do not pledge ourselves
to the quality of the performances. Let it go forth to the world, that
we do not give THEM the sanction of our names, but that we confer the
distinction merely upon Miss Snevellicci. That being clearly stated, I
take it to be, as it were, a duty, that we should extend our patronage
to a degraded stage, even for the sake of the associations with which
it is entwined. Have you got two-and-sixpence for half-a-crown, Miss
Snevellicci?’ said Mr. Curdle, turning over four of those pieces of
money.

Miss Snevellicci felt in all the corners of the pink reticule, but there
was nothing in any of them. Nicholas murmured a jest about his being an
author, and thought it best not to go through the form of feeling in his
own pockets at all.

‘Let me see,’ said Mr. Curdle; ‘twice four’s eight--four shillings
a-piece to the boxes, Miss Snevellicci, is exceedingly dear in the
present state of the drama--three half-crowns is seven-and-six; we shall
not differ about sixpence, I suppose? Sixpence will not part us, Miss
Snevellicci?’

Poor Miss Snevellicci took the three half-crowns, with many smiles and
bends, and Mrs. Curdle, adding several supplementary directions relative
to keeping the places for them, and dusting the seat, and sending two
clean bills as soon as they came out, rang the bell, as a signal for
breaking up the conference.

‘Odd people those,’ said Nicholas, when they got clear of the house.

‘I assure you,’ said Miss Snevellicci, taking his arm, ‘that I think
myself very lucky they did not owe all the money instead of being
sixpence short. Now, if you were to succeed, they would give people to
understand that they had always patronised you; and if you were to fail,
they would have been quite certain of that from the very beginning.’

At the next house they visited, they were in great glory; for, there,
resided the six children who were so enraptured with the public actions
of the phenomenon, and who, being called down from the nursery to be
treated with a private view of that young lady, proceeded to poke their
fingers into her eyes, and tread upon her toes, and show her many other
little attentions peculiar to their time of life.

‘I shall certainly persuade Mr. Borum to take a private box,’ said the
lady of the house, after a most gracious reception. ‘I shall only
take two of the children, and will make up the rest of the party, of
gentlemen--your admirers, Miss Snevellicci. Augustus, you naughty boy,
leave the little girl alone.’

This was addressed to a young gentleman who was pinching the phenomenon
behind, apparently with a view of ascertaining whether she was real.

‘I am sure you must be very tired,’ said the mama, turning to Miss
Snevellicci. ‘I cannot think of allowing you to go, without first taking
a glass of wine. Fie, Charlotte, I am ashamed of you! Miss Lane, my
dear, pray see to the children.’

Miss Lane was the governess, and this entreaty was rendered necessary by
the abrupt behaviour of the youngest Miss Borum, who, having filched the
phenomenon’s little green parasol, was now carrying it bodily off, while
the distracted infant looked helplessly on.

‘I am sure, where you ever learnt to act as you do,’ said good-natured
Mrs. Borum, turning again to Miss Snevellicci, ‘I cannot understand
(Emma, don’t stare so); laughing in one piece, and crying in the next,
and so natural in all--oh, dear!’

‘I am very happy to hear you express so favourable an opinion,’ said
Miss Snevellicci. ‘It’s quite delightful to think you like it.’

‘Like it!’ cried Mrs. Borum. ‘Who can help liking it? I would go to the
play, twice a week if I could: I dote upon it--only you’re too affecting
sometimes. You do put me in such a state--into such fits of crying!
Goodness gracious me, Miss Lane, how can you let them torment that poor
child so!’

The phenomenon was really in a fair way of being torn limb from limb;
for two strong little boys, one holding on by each of her hands, were
dragging her in different directions as a trial of strength. However,
Miss Lane (who had herself been too much occupied in contemplating the
grown-up actors, to pay the necessary attention to these proceedings)
rescued the unhappy infant at this juncture, who, being recruited with
a glass of wine, was shortly afterwards taken away by her friends, after
sustaining no more serious damage than a flattening of the pink gauze
bonnet, and a rather extensive creasing of the white frock and trousers.

It was a trying morning; for there were a great many calls to make, and
everybody wanted a different thing. Some wanted tragedies, and others
comedies; some objected to dancing; some wanted scarcely anything else.
Some thought the comic singer decidedly low, and others hoped he would
have more to do than he usually had. Some people wouldn’t promise to go,
because other people wouldn’t promise to go; and other people wouldn’t
go at all, because other people went. At length, and by little and
little, omitting something in this place, and adding something in
that, Miss Snevellicci pledged herself to a bill of fare which was
comprehensive enough, if it had no other merit (it included among other
trifles, four pieces, divers songs, a few combats, and several dances);
and they returned home, pretty well exhausted with the business of the
day.

Nicholas worked away at the piece, which was speedily put into
rehearsal, and then worked away at his own part, which he studied with
great perseverance and acted--as the whole company said--to perfection.
And at length the great day arrived. The crier was sent round, in the
morning, to proclaim the entertainments with the sound of bell in all
the thoroughfares; and extra bills of three feet long by nine inches
wide, were dispersed in all directions, flung down all the areas,
thrust under all the knockers, and developed in all the shops. They were
placarded on all the walls too, though not with complete success, for an
illiterate person having undertaken this office during the indisposition
of the regular bill-sticker, a part were posted sideways, and the
remainder upside down.

At half-past five, there was a rush of four people to the gallery-door;
at a quarter before six, there were at least a dozen; at six o’clock the
kicks were terrific; and when the elder Master Crummles opened the door,
he was obliged to run behind it for his life. Fifteen shillings were
taken by Mrs. Grudden in the first ten minutes.

Behind the scenes, the same unwonted excitement prevailed. Miss
Snevellicci was in such a perspiration that the paint would scarcely
stay on her face. Mrs. Crummles was so nervous that she could hardly
remember her part. Miss Bravassa’s ringlets came out of curl with the
heat and anxiety; even Mr. Crummles himself kept peeping through the hole
in the curtain, and running back, every now and then, to announce that
another man had come into the pit.

At last, the orchestra left off, and the curtain rose upon the new
piece. The first scene, in which there was nobody particular, passed
off calmly enough, but when Miss Snevellicci went on in the second,
accompanied by the phenomenon as child, what a roar of applause broke
out! The people in the Borum box rose as one man, waving their hats
and handkerchiefs, and uttering shouts of ‘Bravo!’ Mrs. Borum and the
governess cast wreaths upon the stage, of which, some fluttered into the
lamps, and one crowned the temples of a fat gentleman in the pit, who,
looking eagerly towards the scene, remained unconscious of the honour;
the tailor and his family kicked at the panels of the upper boxes
till they threatened to come out altogether; the very ginger-beer
boy remained transfixed in the centre of the house; a young officer,
supposed to entertain a passion for Miss Snevellicci, stuck his glass
in his eye as though to hide a tear. Again and again Miss Snevellicci
curtseyed lower and lower, and again and again the applause came down,
louder and louder. At length, when the phenomenon picked up one of the
smoking wreaths and put it on, sideways, over Miss Snevellicci’s eye, it
reached its climax, and the play proceeded.

But when Nicholas came on for his crack scene with Mrs. Crummles, what
a clapping of hands there was! When Mrs. Crummles (who was his unworthy
mother), sneered, and called him ‘presumptuous boy,’ and he defied her,
what a tumult of applause came on! When he quarrelled with the other
gentleman about the young lady, and producing a case of pistols, said,
that if he WAS a gentleman, he would fight him in that drawing-room,
until the furniture was sprinkled with the blood of one, if not of
two--how boxes, pit, and gallery, joined in one most vigorous cheer!
When he called his mother names, because she wouldn’t give up the young
lady’s property, and she relenting, caused him to relent likewise,
and fall down on one knee and ask her blessing, how the ladies in the
audience sobbed! When he was hid behind the curtain in the dark, and the
wicked relation poked a sharp sword in every direction, save where his
legs were plainly visible, what a thrill of anxious fear ran through the
house! His air, his figure, his walk, his look, everything he said or
did, was the subject of commendation. There was a round of applause
every time he spoke. And when, at last, in the pump-and-tub scene, Mrs
Grudden lighted the blue fire, and all the unemployed members of the
company came in, and tumbled down in various directions--not because
that had anything to do with the plot, but in order to finish off with a
tableau--the audience (who had by this time increased considerably) gave
vent to such a shout of enthusiasm as had not been heard in those walls
for many and many a day.

In short, the success both of new piece and new actor was complete, and
when Miss Snevellicci was called for at the end of the play, Nicholas
led her on, and divided the applause.



CHAPTER 25

Concerning a young Lady from London, who joins the Company, and an
elderly Admirer who follows in her Train; with an affecting Ceremony
consequent on their Arrival


The new piece being a decided hit, was announced for every evening of
performance until further notice, and the evenings when the theatre was
closed, were reduced from three in the week to two. Nor were these the
only tokens of extraordinary success; for, on the succeeding Saturday,
Nicholas received, by favour of the indefatigable Mrs. Grudden, no less a
sum than thirty shillings; besides which substantial reward, he enjoyed
considerable fame and honour: having a presentation copy of Mr. Curdle’s
pamphlet forwarded to the theatre, with that gentleman’s own autograph
(in itself an inestimable treasure) on the fly-leaf, accompanied with
a note, containing many expressions of approval, and an unsolicited
assurance that Mr. Curdle would be very happy to read Shakespeare to him
for three hours every morning before breakfast during his stay in the
town.

‘I’ve got another novelty, Johnson,’ said Mr. Crummles one morning in
great glee.

‘What’s that?’ rejoined Nicholas. ‘The pony?’

‘No, no, we never come to the pony till everything else has failed,’
said Mr. Crummles. ‘I don’t think we shall come to the pony at all, this
season. No, no, not the pony.’

‘A boy phenomenon, perhaps?’ suggested Nicholas.

‘There is only one phenomenon, sir,’ replied Mr. Crummles impressively,
‘and that’s a girl.’

‘Very true,’ said Nicholas. ‘I beg your pardon. Then I don’t know what
it is, I am sure.’

‘What should you say to a young lady from London?’ inquired Mr. Crummles.
‘Miss So-and-so, of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane?’

‘I should say she would look very well in the bills,’ said Nicholas.

‘You’re about right there,’ said Mr. Crummles; ‘and if you had said she
would look very well upon the stage too, you wouldn’t have been far out.
Look here; what do you think of this?’

With this inquiry Mr. Crummles unfolded a red poster, and a blue poster,
and a yellow poster, at the top of each of which public notification was
inscribed in enormous characters--‘First appearance of the unrivalled
Miss Petowker of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane!’

‘Dear me!’ said Nicholas, ‘I know that lady.’

‘Then you are acquainted with as much talent as was ever compressed into
one young person’s body,’ retorted Mr. Crummles, rolling up the bills
again; ‘that is, talent of a certain sort--of a certain sort. “The Blood
Drinker,”’ added Mr. Crummles with a prophetic sigh, ‘“The Blood Drinker”
 will die with that girl; and she’s the only sylph I ever saw, who could
stand upon one leg, and play the tambourine on her other knee, LIKE a
sylph.’

‘When does she come down?’ asked Nicholas.

‘We expect her today,’ replied Mr. Crummles. ‘She is an old friend of Mrs
Crummles’s. Mrs. Crummles saw what she could do--always knew it from the
first. She taught her, indeed, nearly all she knows. Mrs. Crummles was
the original Blood Drinker.’

‘Was she, indeed?’

‘Yes. She was obliged to give it up though.’

‘Did it disagree with her?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Not so much with her, as with her audiences,’ replied Mr. Crummles.
‘Nobody could stand it. It was too tremendous. You don’t quite know what
Mrs. Crummles is yet.’

Nicholas ventured to insinuate that he thought he did.

‘No, no, you don’t,’ said Mr. Crummles; ‘you don’t, indeed. I don’t, and
that’s a fact. I don’t think her country will, till she is dead. Some
new proof of talent bursts from that astonishing woman every year of her
life. Look at her--mother of six children--three of ‘em alive, and all
upon the stage!’

‘Extraordinary!’ cried Nicholas.

‘Ah! extraordinary indeed,’ rejoined Mr. Crummles, taking a complacent
pinch of snuff, and shaking his head gravely. ‘I pledge you my
professional word I didn’t even know she could dance, till her last
benefit, and then she played Juliet, and Helen Macgregor, and did the
skipping-rope hornpipe between the pieces. The very first time I saw
that admirable woman, Johnson,’ said Mr. Crummles, drawing a little
nearer, and speaking in the tone of confidential friendship, ‘she
stood upon her head on the butt-end of a spear, surrounded with blazing
fireworks.’

‘You astonish me!’ said Nicholas.

‘SHE astonished ME!’ returned Mr. Crummles, with a very serious
countenance. ‘Such grace, coupled with such dignity! I adored her from
that moment!’

The arrival of the gifted subject of these remarks put an abrupt
termination to Mr. Crummles’s eulogium. Almost immediately afterwards,
Master Percy Crummles entered with a letter, which had arrived by the
General Post, and was directed to his gracious mother; at sight of
the superscription whereof, Mrs. Crummles exclaimed, ‘From Henrietta
Petowker, I do declare!’ and instantly became absorbed in the contents.

‘Is it--?’ inquired Mr. Crummles, hesitating.

‘Oh, yes, it’s all right,’ replied Mrs. Crummles, anticipating the
question. ‘What an excellent thing for her, to be sure!’

‘It’s the best thing altogether, that I ever heard of, I think,’ said Mr
Crummles; and then Mr. Crummles, Mrs. Crummles, and Master Percy Crummles,
all fell to laughing violently. Nicholas left them to enjoy their mirth
together, and walked to his lodgings; wondering very much what mystery
connected with Miss Petowker could provoke such merriment, and pondering
still more on the extreme surprise with which that lady would regard his
sudden enlistment in a profession of which she was such a distinguished
and brilliant ornament.

But, in this latter respect he was mistaken; for--whether Mr. Vincent
Crummles had paved the way, or Miss Petowker had some special reason for
treating him with even more than her usual amiability--their meeting at
the theatre next day was more like that of two dear friends who had been
inseparable from infancy, than a recognition passing between a lady
and gentleman who had only met some half-dozen times, and then by mere
chance. Nay, Miss Petowker even whispered that she had wholly dropped
the Kenwigses in her conversations with the manager’s family, and had
represented herself as having encountered Mr. Johnson in the very
first and most fashionable circles; and on Nicholas receiving this
intelligence with unfeigned surprise, she added, with a sweet glance,
that she had a claim on his good nature now, and might tax it before
long.

Nicholas had the honour of playing in a slight piece with Miss Petowker
that night, and could not but observe that the warmth of her reception
was mainly attributable to a most persevering umbrella in the upper
boxes; he saw, too, that the enchanting actress cast many sweet looks
towards the quarter whence these sounds proceeded; and that every time
she did so, the umbrella broke out afresh. Once, he thought that a
peculiarly shaped hat in the same corner was not wholly unknown to him;
but, being occupied with his share of the stage business, he bestowed no
great attention upon this circumstance, and it had quite vanished from
his memory by the time he reached home.

He had just sat down to supper with Smike, when one of the people of the
house came outside the door, and announced that a gentleman below stairs
wished to speak to Mr. Johnson.

‘Well, if he does, you must tell him to come up; that’s all I know,’
replied Nicholas. ‘One of our hungry brethren, I suppose, Smike.’

His fellow-lodger looked at the cold meat in silent calculation of the
quantity that would be left for dinner next day, and put back a slice he
had cut for himself, in order that the visitor’s encroachments might be
less formidable in their effects.

‘It is not anybody who has been here before,’ said Nicholas, ‘for he
is tumbling up every stair. Come in, come in. In the name of wonder! Mr
Lillyvick?’

It was, indeed, the collector of water-rates who, regarding Nicholas
with a fixed look and immovable countenance, shook hands with
most portentous solemnity, and sat himself down in a seat by the
chimney-corner.

‘Why, when did you come here?’ asked Nicholas.

‘This morning, sir,’ replied Mr. Lillyvick.

‘Oh! I see; then you were at the theatre tonight, and it was your umb--’

‘This umbrella,’ said Mr. Lillyvick, producing a fat green cotton one
with a battered ferrule. ‘What did you think of that performance?’

‘So far as I could judge, being on the stage,’ replied Nicholas, ‘I
thought it very agreeable.’

‘Agreeable!’ cried the collector. ‘I mean to say, sir, that it was
delicious.’

Mr. Lillyvick bent forward to pronounce the last word with greater
emphasis; and having done so, drew himself up, and frowned and nodded a
great many times.

‘I say, delicious,’ repeated Mr. Lillyvick. ‘Absorbing, fairy-like,
toomultuous,’ and again Mr. Lillyvick drew himself up, and again he
frowned and nodded.

‘Ah!’ said Nicholas, a little surprised at these symptoms of ecstatic
approbation. ‘Yes--she is a clever girl.’

‘She is a divinity,’ returned Mr. Lillyvick, giving a collector’s double
knock on the ground with the umbrella before-mentioned. ‘I have known
divine actresses before now, sir, I used to collect--at least I used
to CALL for--and very often call for--the water-rate at the house of
a divine actress, who lived in my beat for upwards of four year
but never--no, never, sir of all divine creatures, actresses or no
actresses, did I see a diviner one than is Henrietta Petowker.’

Nicholas had much ado to prevent himself from laughing; not trusting
himself to speak, he merely nodded in accordance with Mr. Lillyvick’s
nods, and remained silent.

‘Let me speak a word with you in private,’ said Mr. Lillyvick.

Nicholas looked good-humouredly at Smike, who, taking the hint,
disappeared.

‘A bachelor is a miserable wretch, sir,’ said Mr. Lillyvick.

‘Is he?’ asked Nicholas.

‘He is,’ rejoined the collector. ‘I have lived in the world for nigh
sixty year, and I ought to know what it is.’

‘You OUGHT to know, certainly,’ thought Nicholas; ‘but whether you do or
not, is another question.’

‘If a bachelor happens to have saved a little matter of money,’ said Mr
Lillyvick, ‘his sisters and brothers, and nephews and nieces, look TO
that money, and not to him; even if, by being a public character, he is
the head of the family, or, as it may be, the main from which all the
other little branches are turned on, they still wish him dead all the
while, and get low-spirited every time they see him looking in good
health, because they want to come into his little property. You see
that?’

‘Oh yes,’ replied Nicholas: ‘it’s very true, no doubt.’

‘The great reason for not being married,’ resumed Mr. Lillyvick, ‘is the
expense; that’s what’s kept me off, or else--Lord!’ said Mr. Lillyvick,
snapping his fingers, ‘I might have had fifty women.’

‘Fine women?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Fine women, sir!’ replied the collector; ‘ay! not so fine as Henrietta
Petowker, for she is an uncommon specimen, but such women as don’t
fall into every man’s way, I can tell you. Now suppose a man can get a
fortune IN a wife instead of with her--eh?’

‘Why, then, he’s a lucky fellow,’ replied Nicholas.

‘That’s what I say,’ retorted the collector, patting him benignantly
on the side of the head with his umbrella; ‘just what I say. Henrietta
Petowker, the talented Henrietta Petowker has a fortune in herself, and
I am going to--’

‘To make her Mrs. Lillyvick?’ suggested Nicholas.

‘No, sir, not to make her Mrs. Lillyvick,’ replied the collector.
‘Actresses, sir, always keep their maiden names--that’s the regular
thing--but I’m going to marry her; and the day after tomorrow, too.’

‘I congratulate you, sir,’ said Nicholas.

‘Thank you, sir,’ replied the collector, buttoning his waistcoat. ‘I
shall draw her salary, of course, and I hope after all that it’s nearly
as cheap to keep two as it is to keep one; that’s a consolation.’

‘Surely you don’t want any consolation at such a moment?’ observed
Nicholas.

‘No,’ replied Mr. Lillyvick, shaking his head nervously: ‘no--of course
not.’

‘But how come you both here, if you’re going to be married, Mr
Lillyvick?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Why, that’s what I came to explain to you,’ replied the collector of
water-rate. ‘The fact is, we have thought it best to keep it secret from
the family.’

‘Family!’ said Nicholas. ‘What family?’

‘The Kenwigses of course,’ rejoined Mr. Lillyvick. ‘If my niece and the
children had known a word about it before I came away, they’d have gone
into fits at my feet, and never have come out of ‘em till I took an oath
not to marry anybody--or they’d have got out a commission of lunacy, or
some dreadful thing,’ said the collector, quite trembling as he spoke.

‘To be sure,’ said Nicholas. ‘Yes; they would have been jealous, no
doubt.’

‘To prevent which,’ said Mr. Lillyvick, ‘Henrietta Petowker (it
was settled between us) should come down here to her friends, the
Crummleses, under pretence of this engagement, and I should go down to
Guildford the day before, and join her on the coach there, which I did,
and we came down from Guildford yesterday together. Now, for fear you
should be writing to Mr. Noggs, and might say anything about us, we have
thought it best to let you into the secret. We shall be married from the
Crummleses’ lodgings, and shall be delighted to see you--either before
church or at breakfast-time, which you like. It won’t be expensive,
you know,’ said the collector, highly anxious to prevent any
misunderstanding on this point; ‘just muffins and coffee, with perhaps a
shrimp or something of that sort for a relish, you know.’

‘Yes, yes, I understand,’ replied Nicholas. ‘Oh, I shall be most
happy to come; it will give me the greatest pleasure. Where’s the lady
stopping--with Mrs. Crummles?’

‘Why, no,’ said the collector; ‘they couldn’t very well dispose of
her at night, and so she is staying with an acquaintance of hers, and
another young lady; they both belong to the theatre.’

‘Miss Snevellicci, I suppose?’ said Nicholas.

‘Yes, that’s the name.’

‘And they’ll be bridesmaids, I presume?’ said Nicholas.

‘Why,’ said the collector, with a rueful face, ‘they WILL have four
bridesmaids; I’m afraid they’ll make it rather theatrical.’

‘Oh no, not at all,’ replied Nicholas, with an awkward attempt to
convert a laugh into a cough. ‘Who may the four be? Miss Snevellicci of
course--Miss Ledrook--’

‘The--the phenomenon,’ groaned the collector.

‘Ha, ha!’ cried Nicholas. ‘I beg your pardon, I don’t know what I’m
laughing at--yes, that’ll be very pretty--the phenomenon--who else?’

‘Some young woman or other,’ replied the collector, rising; ‘some other
friend of Henrietta Petowker’s. Well, you’ll be careful not to say
anything about it, will you?’

‘You may safely depend upon me,’ replied Nicholas. ‘Won’t you take
anything to eat or drink?’

‘No,’ said the collector; ‘I haven’t any appetite. I should think it was
a very pleasant life, the married one, eh?’

‘I have not the least doubt of it,’ rejoined Nicholas.

‘Yes,’ said the collector; ‘certainly. Oh yes. No doubt. Good night.’

With these words, Mr. Lillyvick, whose manner had exhibited through the
whole of this interview a most extraordinary compound of precipitation,
hesitation, confidence and doubt, fondness, misgiving, meanness, and
self-importance, turned his back upon the room, and left Nicholas to
enjoy a laugh by himself if he felt so disposed.

Without stopping to inquire whether the intervening day appeared to
Nicholas to consist of the usual number of hours of the ordinary length,
it may be remarked that, to the parties more directly interested in the
forthcoming ceremony, it passed with great rapidity, insomuch that when
Miss Petowker awoke on the succeeding morning in the chamber of Miss
Snevellicci, she declared that nothing should ever persuade her that
that really was the day which was to behold a change in her condition.

‘I never will believe it,’ said Miss Petowker; ‘I cannot really. It’s
of no use talking, I never can make up my mind to go through with such a
trial!’

On hearing this, Miss Snevellicci and Miss Ledrook, who knew perfectly
well that their fair friend’s mind had been made up for three or four
years, at any period of which time she would have cheerfully undergone
the desperate trial now approaching if she could have found any
eligible gentleman disposed for the venture, began to preach comfort and
firmness, and to say how very proud she ought to feel that it was in her
power to confer lasting bliss on a deserving object, and how necessary
it was for the happiness of mankind in general that women should possess
fortitude and resignation on such occasions; and that although for their
parts they held true happiness to consist in a single life, which
they would not willingly exchange--no, not for any worldly
consideration--still (thank God), if ever the time SHOULD come, they
hoped they knew their duty too well to repine, but would the rather
submit with meekness and humility of spirit to a fate for which
Providence had clearly designed them with a view to the contentment and
reward of their fellow-creatures.

‘I might feel it was a great blow,’ said Miss Snevellicci, ‘to break
up old associations and what-do-you-callems of that kind, but I would
submit, my dear, I would indeed.’

‘So would I,’ said Miss Ledrook; ‘I would rather court the yoke than
shun it. I have broken hearts before now, and I’m very sorry for it: for
it’s a terrible thing to reflect upon.’

‘It is indeed,’ said Miss Snevellicci. ‘Now Led, my dear, we must
positively get her ready, or we shall be too late, we shall indeed.’

This pious reasoning, and perhaps the fear of being too late, supported
the bride through the ceremony of robing, after which, strong tea and
brandy were administered in alternate doses as a means of strengthening
her feeble limbs and causing her to walk steadier.

‘How do you feel now, my love?’ inquired Miss Snevellicci.

‘Oh Lillyvick!’ cried the bride. ‘If you knew what I am undergoing for
you!’

‘Of course he knows it, love, and will never forget it,’ said Miss
Ledrook.

‘Do you think he won’t?’ cried Miss Petowker, really showing great
capability for the stage. ‘Oh, do you think he won’t? Do you think
Lillyvick will always remember it--always, always, always?’

There is no knowing in what this burst of feeling might have ended, if
Miss Snevellicci had not at that moment proclaimed the arrival of the
fly, which so astounded the bride that she shook off divers alarming
symptoms which were coming on very strong, and running to the glass
adjusted her dress, and calmly declared that she was ready for the
sacrifice.

She was accordingly supported into the coach, and there ‘kept up’ (as
Miss Snevellicci said) with perpetual sniffs of SAL VOLATILE and sips
of brandy and other gentle stimulants, until they reached the manager’s
door, which was already opened by the two Master Crummleses, who
wore white cockades, and were decorated with the choicest and most
resplendent waistcoats in the theatrical wardrobe. By the combined
exertions of these young gentlemen and the bridesmaids, assisted by the
coachman, Miss Petowker was at length supported in a condition of much
exhaustion to the first floor, where she no sooner encountered the
youthful bridegroom than she fainted with great decorum.

‘Henrietta Petowker!’ said the collector; ‘cheer up, my lovely one.’

Miss Petowker grasped the collector’s hand, but emotion choked her
utterance.

‘Is the sight of me so dreadful, Henrietta Petowker?’ said the
collector.

‘Oh no, no, no,’ rejoined the bride; ‘but all the friends--the darling
friends--of my youthful days--to leave them all--it is such a shock!’

With such expressions of sorrow, Miss Petowker went on to enumerate the
dear friends of her youthful days one by one, and to call upon such of
them as were present to come and embrace her. This done, she remembered
that Mrs. Crummles had been more than a mother to her, and after that,
that Mr. Crummles had been more than a father to her, and after that,
that the Master Crummleses and Miss Ninetta Crummles had been more
than brothers and sisters to her. These various remembrances being each
accompanied with a series of hugs, occupied a long time, and they were
obliged to drive to church very fast, for fear they should be too late.

The procession consisted of two flys; in the first of which were Miss
Bravassa (the fourth bridesmaid), Mrs. Crummles, the collector, and Mr
Folair, who had been chosen as his second on the occasion. In the other
were the bride, Mr. Crummles, Miss Snevellicci, Miss Ledrook, and the
phenomenon. The costumes were beautiful. The bridesmaids were quite
covered with artificial flowers, and the phenomenon, in particular,
was rendered almost invisible by the portable arbour in which she was
enshrined. Miss Ledrook, who was of a romantic turn, wore in her breast
the miniature of some field-officer unknown, which she had purchased, a
great bargain, not very long before; the other ladies displayed several
dazzling articles of imitative jewellery, almost equal to real, and Mrs
Crummles came out in a stern and gloomy majesty, which attracted the
admiration of all beholders.

But, perhaps the appearance of Mr. Crummles was more striking and
appropriate than that of any member of the party. This gentleman, who
personated the bride’s father, had, in pursuance of a happy and original
conception, ‘made up’ for the part by arraying himself in a theatrical
wig, of a style and pattern commonly known as a brown George, and
moreover assuming a snuff-coloured suit, of the previous century, with
grey silk stockings, and buckles to his shoes. The better to support
his assumed character he had determined to be greatly overcome, and,
consequently, when they entered the church, the sobs of the affectionate
parent were so heart-rending that the pew-opener suggested the propriety
of his retiring to the vestry, and comforting himself with a glass of
water before the ceremony began.

The procession up the aisle was beautiful. The bride, with the four
bridesmaids, forming a group previously arranged and rehearsed; the
collector, followed by his second, imitating his walk and gestures to
the indescribable amusement of some theatrical friends in the gallery;
Mr. Crummles, with an infirm and feeble gait; Mrs. Crummles advancing with
that stage walk, which consists of a stride and a stop alternately--it
was the completest thing ever witnessed. The ceremony was very quickly
disposed of, and all parties present having signed the register (for
which purpose, when it came to his turn, Mr. Crummles carefully wiped and
put on an immense pair of spectacles), they went back to breakfast in
high spirits. And here they found Nicholas awaiting their arrival.

‘Now then,’ said Crummles, who had been assisting Mrs. Grudden in the
preparations, which were on a more extensive scale than was quite
agreeable to the collector. ‘Breakfast, breakfast.’

No second invitation was required. The company crowded and squeezed
themselves at the table as well as they could, and fell to, immediately:
Miss Petowker blushing very much when anybody was looking, and eating
very much when anybody was NOT looking; and Mr. Lillyvick going to work
as though with the cool resolve, that since the good things must be paid
for by him, he would leave as little as possible for the Crummleses to
eat up afterwards.

‘It’s very soon done, sir, isn’t it?’ inquired Mr. Folair of the
collector, leaning over the table to address him.

‘What is soon done, sir?’ returned Mr. Lillyvick.

‘The tying up--the fixing oneself with a wife,’ replied Mr. Folair. ‘It
don’t take long, does it?’

‘No, sir,’ replied Mr. Lillyvick, colouring. ‘It does not take long. And
what then, sir?’

‘Oh! nothing,’ said the actor. ‘It don’t take a man long to hang
himself, either, eh? ha, ha!’

Mr. Lillyvick laid down his knife and fork, and looked round the table
with indignant astonishment.

‘To hang himself!’ repeated Mr. Lillyvick.

A profound silence came upon all, for Mr. Lillyvick was dignified beyond
expression.

‘To hang himself!’ cried Mr. Lillyvick again. ‘Is any parallel attempted
to be drawn in this company between matrimony and hanging?’

‘The noose, you know,’ said Mr. Folair, a little crest-fallen.

‘The noose, sir?’ retorted Mr. Lillyvick. ‘Does any man dare to speak to
me of a noose, and Henrietta Pe--’

‘Lillyvick,’ suggested Mr. Crummles.

‘--And Henrietta Lillyvick in the same breath?’ said the collector. ‘In
this house, in the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Crummles, who have brought
up a talented and virtuous family, to be blessings and phenomenons, and
what not, are we to hear talk of nooses?’

‘Folair,’ said Mr. Crummles, deeming it a matter of decency to be
affected by this allusion to himself and partner, ‘I’m astonished at
you.’

‘What are you going on in this way at me for?’ urged the unfortunate
actor. ‘What have I done?’

‘Done, sir!’ cried Mr. Lillyvick, ‘aimed a blow at the whole framework of
society--’

‘And the best and tenderest feelings,’ added Crummles, relapsing into
the old man.

‘And the highest and most estimable of social ties,’ said the collector.
‘Noose! As if one was caught, trapped into the married state, pinned by
the leg, instead of going into it of one’s own accord and glorying in
the act!’

‘I didn’t mean to make it out, that you were caught and trapped, and
pinned by the leg,’ replied the actor. ‘I’m sorry for it; I can’t say
any more.’

‘So you ought to be, sir,’ returned Mr. Lillyvick; ‘and I am glad to hear
that you have enough of feeling left to be so.’

The quarrel appearing to terminate with this reply, Mrs. Lillyvick
considered that the fittest occasion (the attention of the company being
no longer distracted) to burst into tears, and require the assistance of
all four bridesmaids, which was immediately rendered, though not without
some confusion, for the room being small and the table-cloth long, a
whole detachment of plates were swept off the board at the very first
move. Regardless of this circumstance, however, Mrs. Lillyvick refused
to be comforted until the belligerents had passed their words that the
dispute should be carried no further, which, after a sufficient show of
reluctance, they did, and from that time Mr. Folair sat in moody silence,
contenting himself with pinching Nicholas’s leg when anything was said,
and so expressing his contempt both for the speaker and the sentiments
to which he gave utterance.

There were a great number of speeches made; some by Nicholas, and some
by Crummles, and some by the collector; two by the Master Crummleses in
returning thanks for themselves, and one by the phenomenon on behalf
of the bridesmaids, at which Mrs. Crummles shed tears. There was some
singing, too, from Miss Ledrook and Miss Bravassa, and very likely there
might have been more, if the fly-driver, who stopped to drive the happy
pair to the spot where they proposed to take steamboat to Ryde, had
not sent in a peremptory message intimating, that if they didn’t come
directly he should infallibly demand eighteen-pence over and above his
agreement.

This desperate threat effectually broke up the party. After a most
pathetic leave-taking, Mr. Lillyvick and his bride departed for Ryde,
where they were to spend the next two days in profound retirement, and
whither they were accompanied by the infant, who had been appointed
travelling bridesmaid on Mr. Lillyvick’s express stipulation: as the
steamboat people, deceived by her size, would (he had previously
ascertained) transport her at half-price.

As there was no performance that night, Mr. Crummles declared his
intention of keeping it up till everything to drink was disposed of; but
Nicholas having to play Romeo for the first time on the ensuing evening,
contrived to slip away in the midst of a temporary confusion, occasioned
by the unexpected development of strong symptoms of inebriety in the
conduct of Mrs. Grudden.

To this act of desertion he was led, not only by his own inclinations,
but by his anxiety on account of Smike, who, having to sustain the
character of the Apothecary, had been as yet wholly unable to get any
more of the part into his head than the general idea that he was very
hungry, which--perhaps from old recollections--he had acquired with
great aptitude.

‘I don’t know what’s to be done, Smike,’ said Nicholas, laying down the
book. ‘I am afraid you can’t learn it, my poor fellow.’

‘I am afraid not,’ said Smike, shaking his head. ‘I think if you--but
that would give you so much trouble.’

‘What?’ inquired Nicholas. ‘Never mind me.’

‘I think,’ said Smike, ‘if you were to keep saying it to me in little
bits, over and over again, I should be able to recollect it from hearing
you.’

‘Do you think so?’ exclaimed Nicholas. ‘Well said. Let us see who tires
first. Not I, Smike, trust me. Now then. Who calls so loud?’

‘“Who calls so loud?”’ said Smike.

‘“Who calls so loud?”’ repeated Nicholas.

‘“Who calls so loud?”’ cried Smike.

Thus they continued to ask each other who called so loud, over and
over again; and when Smike had that by heart Nicholas went to another
sentence, and then to two at a time, and then to three, and so on, until
at midnight poor Smike found to his unspeakable joy that he really began
to remember something about the text.

Early in the morning they went to it again, and Smike, rendered more
confident by the progress he had already made, got on faster and with
better heart. As soon as he began to acquire the words pretty freely,
Nicholas showed him how he must come in with both hands spread out upon
his stomach, and how he must occasionally rub it, in compliance with the
established form by which people on the stage always denote that they
want something to eat. After the morning’s rehearsal they went to work
again, nor did they stop, except for a hasty dinner, until it was time
to repair to the theatre at night.

Never had master a more anxious, humble, docile pupil. Never had pupil a
more patient, unwearying, considerate, kindhearted master.

As soon as they were dressed, and at every interval when he was not upon
the stage, Nicholas renewed his instructions. They prospered well. The
Romeo was received with hearty plaudits and unbounded favour, and Smike
was pronounced unanimously, alike by audience and actors, the very
prince and prodigy of Apothecaries.



CHAPTER 26

Is fraught with some Danger to Miss Nickleby’s Peace of Mind


The place was a handsome suite of private apartments in Regent Street;
the time was three o’clock in the afternoon to the dull and plodding,
and the first hour of morning to the gay and spirited; the persons were
Lord Frederick Verisopht, and his friend Sir Mulberry Hawk.

These distinguished gentlemen were reclining listlessly on a couple
of sofas, with a table between them, on which were scattered in rich
confusion the materials of an untasted breakfast. Newspapers lay strewn
about the room, but these, like the meal, were neglected and unnoticed;
not, however, because any flow of conversation prevented the attractions
of the journals from being called into request, for not a word was
exchanged between the two, nor was any sound uttered, save when one,
in tossing about to find an easier resting-place for his aching head,
uttered an exclamation of impatience, and seemed for a moment to
communicate a new restlessness to his companion.

These appearances would in themselves have furnished a pretty strong
clue to the extent of the debauch of the previous night, even if there
had not been other indications of the amusements in which it had been
passed. A couple of billiard balls, all mud and dirt, two battered hats,
a champagne bottle with a soiled glove twisted round the neck, to allow
of its being grasped more surely in its capacity of an offensive
weapon; a broken cane; a card-case without the top; an empty purse; a
watch-guard snapped asunder; a handful of silver, mingled with fragments
of half-smoked cigars, and their stale and crumbled ashes;--these, and
many other tokens of riot and disorder, hinted very intelligibly at the
nature of last night’s gentlemanly frolics.

Lord Frederick Verisopht was the first to speak. Dropping his slippered
foot on the ground, and, yawning heavily, he struggled into a sitting
posture, and turned his dull languid eyes towards his friend, to whom he
called in a drowsy voice.

‘Hallo!’ replied Sir Mulberry, turning round.

‘Are we going to lie here all da-a-y?’ said the lord.

‘I don’t know that we’re fit for anything else,’ replied Sir Mulberry;
‘yet awhile, at least. I haven’t a grain of life in me this morning.’

‘Life!’ cried Lord Verisopht. ‘I feel as if there would be nothing so
snug and comfortable as to die at once.’

‘Then why don’t you die?’ said Sir Mulberry.

With which inquiry he turned his face away, and seemed to occupy himself
in an attempt to fall asleep.

His hopeful friend and pupil drew a chair to the breakfast-table, and
essayed to eat; but, finding that impossible, lounged to the window,
then loitered up and down the room with his hand to his fevered head,
and finally threw himself again on his sofa, and roused his friend once
more.

‘What the devil’s the matter?’ groaned Sir Mulberry, sitting upright on
the couch.

Although Sir Mulberry said this with sufficient ill-humour, he did
not seem to feel himself quite at liberty to remain silent; for, after
stretching himself very often, and declaring with a shiver that it
was ‘infernal cold,’ he made an experiment at the breakfast-table, and
proving more successful in it than his less-seasoned friend, remained
there.

‘Suppose,’ said Sir Mulberry, pausing with a morsel on the point of his
fork, ‘suppose we go back to the subject of little Nickleby, eh?’

‘Which little Nickleby; the money-lender or the ga-a-l?’ asked Lord
Verisopht.

‘You take me, I see,’ replied Sir Mulberry. ‘The girl, of course.’

‘You promised me you’d find her out,’ said Lord Verisopht.

‘So I did,’ rejoined his friend; ‘but I have thought further of the
matter since then. You distrust me in the business--you shall find her
out yourself.’

‘Na-ay,’ remonstrated Lord Verisopht.

‘But I say yes,’ returned his friend. ‘You shall find her out yourself.
Don’t think that I mean, when you can--I know as well as you that if I
did, you could never get sight of her without me. No. I say you shall
find her out--SHALL--and I’ll put you in the way.’

‘Now, curse me, if you ain’t a real, deyvlish, downright, thorough-paced
friend,’ said the young lord, on whom this speech had produced a most
reviving effect.

‘I’ll tell you how,’ said Sir Mulberry. ‘She was at that dinner as a
bait for you.’

‘No!’ cried the young lord. ‘What the dey--’

‘As a bait for you,’ repeated his friend; ‘old Nickleby told me so
himself.’

‘What a fine old cock it is!’ exclaimed Lord Verisopht; ‘a noble
rascal!’

‘Yes,’ said Sir Mulberry, ‘he knew she was a smart little creature--’

‘Smart!’ interposed the young lord. ‘Upon my soul, Hawk, she’s a perfect
beauty--a--a picture, a statue, a--a--upon my soul she is!’

‘Well,’ replied Sir Mulberry, shrugging his shoulders and manifesting an
indifference, whether he felt it or not; ‘that’s a matter of taste; if
mine doesn’t agree with yours, so much the better.’

‘Confound it!’ reasoned the lord, ‘you were thick enough with her that
day, anyhow. I could hardly get in a word.’

‘Well enough for once, well enough for once,’ replied Sir Mulberry; ‘but
not worth the trouble of being agreeable to again. If you seriously
want to follow up the niece, tell the uncle that you must know where she
lives and how she lives, and with whom, or you are no longer a customer
of his. He’ll tell you fast enough.’

‘Why didn’t you say this before?’ asked Lord Verisopht, ‘instead of
letting me go on burning, consuming, dragging out a miserable existence
for an a-age!’

‘I didn’t know it, in the first place,’ answered Sir Mulberry
carelessly; ‘and in the second, I didn’t believe you were so very much
in earnest.’

Now, the truth was, that in the interval which had elapsed since the
dinner at Ralph Nickleby’s, Sir Mulberry Hawk had been furtively trying
by every means in his power to discover whence Kate had so suddenly
appeared, and whither she had disappeared. Unassisted by Ralph, however,
with whom he had held no communication since their angry parting on that
occasion, all his efforts were wholly unavailing, and he had therefore
arrived at the determination of communicating to the young lord the
substance of the admission he had gleaned from that worthy. To this he
was impelled by various considerations; among which the certainty of
knowing whatever the weak young man knew was decidedly not the least,
as the desire of encountering the usurer’s niece again, and using his
utmost arts to reduce her pride, and revenge himself for her contempt,
was uppermost in his thoughts. It was a politic course of proceeding,
and one which could not fail to redound to his advantage in every point
of view, since the very circumstance of his having extorted from Ralph
Nickleby his real design in introducing his niece to such society,
coupled with his extreme disinterestedness in communicating it so freely
to his friend, could not but advance his interests in that quarter,
and greatly facilitate the passage of coin (pretty frequent and speedy
already) from the pockets of Lord Frederick Verisopht to those of Sir
Mulberry Hawk.

Thus reasoned Sir Mulberry, and in pursuance of this reasoning he
and his friend soon afterwards repaired to Ralph Nickleby’s, there to
execute a plan of operations concerted by Sir Mulberry himself, avowedly
to promote his friend’s object, and really to attain his own.

They found Ralph at home, and alone. As he led them into the
drawing-room, the recollection of the scene which had taken place there
seemed to occur to him, for he cast a curious look at Sir Mulberry, who
bestowed upon it no other acknowledgment than a careless smile.

They had a short conference upon some money matters then in progress,
which were scarcely disposed of when the lordly dupe (in pursuance of
his friend’s instructions) requested with some embarrassment to speak to
Ralph alone.

‘Alone, eh?’ cried Sir Mulberry, affecting surprise. ‘Oh, very good.
I’ll walk into the next room here. Don’t keep me long, that’s all.’

So saying, Sir Mulberry took up his hat, and humming a fragment of
a song disappeared through the door of communication between the two
drawing-rooms, and closed it after him.

‘Now, my lord,’ said Ralph, ‘what is it?’

‘Nickleby,’ said his client, throwing himself along the sofa on which
he had been previously seated, so as to bring his lips nearer to the old
man’s ear, ‘what a pretty creature your niece is!’

‘Is she, my lord?’ replied Ralph. ‘Maybe--maybe--I don’t trouble my head
with such matters.’

‘You know she’s a deyvlish fine girl,’ said the client. ‘You must know
that, Nickleby. Come, don’t deny that.’

‘Yes, I believe she is considered so,’ replied Ralph. ‘Indeed, I know
she is. If I did not, you are an authority on such points, and your
taste, my lord--on all points, indeed--is undeniable.’

Nobody but the young man to whom these words were addressed could have
been deaf to the sneering tone in which they were spoken, or blind to
the look of contempt by which they were accompanied. But Lord Frederick
Verisopht was both, and took them to be complimentary.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘p’raps you’re a little right, and p’raps you’re a
little wrong--a little of both, Nickleby. I want to know where this
beauty lives, that I may have another peep at her, Nickleby.’

‘Really--’ Ralph began in his usual tones.

‘Don’t talk so loud,’ cried the other, achieving the great point of his
lesson to a miracle. ‘I don’t want Hawk to hear.’

‘You know he is your rival, do you?’ said Ralph, looking sharply at him.

‘He always is, d-a-amn him,’ replied the client; ‘and I want to steal
a march upon him. Ha, ha, ha! He’ll cut up so rough, Nickleby, at our
talking together without him. Where does she live, Nickleby, that’s all?
Only tell me where she lives, Nickleby.’

‘He bites,’ thought Ralph. ‘He bites.’

‘Eh, Nickleby, eh?’ pursued the client. ‘Where does she live?’

‘Really, my lord,’ said Ralph, rubbing his hands slowly over each other,
‘I must think before I tell you.’

‘No, not a bit of it, Nickleby; you mustn’t think at all,’ replied
Verisopht. ‘Where is it?’

‘No good can come of your knowing,’ replied Ralph. ‘She has been
virtuously and well brought up; to be sure she is handsome, poor,
unprotected! Poor girl, poor girl.’

Ralph ran over this brief summary of Kate’s condition as if it were
merely passing through his own mind, and he had no intention to speak
aloud; but the shrewd sly look which he directed at his companion as he
delivered it, gave this poor assumption the lie.

‘I tell you I only want to see her,’ cried his client. ‘A ma-an may look
at a pretty woman without harm, mayn’t he? Now, where DOES she live?
You know you’re making a fortune out of me, Nickleby, and upon my soul
nobody shall ever take me to anybody else, if you only tell me this.’

‘As you promise that, my lord,’ said Ralph, with feigned reluctance,
‘and as I am most anxious to oblige you, and as there’s no harm in
it--no harm--I’ll tell you. But you had better keep it to yourself, my
lord; strictly to yourself.’ Ralph pointed to the adjoining room as he
spoke, and nodded expressively.

The young lord, feigning to be equally impressed with the necessity of
this precaution, Ralph disclosed the present address and occupation of
his niece, observing that from what he heard of the family they appeared
very ambitious to have distinguished acquaintances, and that a lord
could, doubtless, introduce himself with great ease, if he felt
disposed.

‘Your object being only to see her again,’ said Ralph, ‘you could effect
it at any time you chose by that means.’

Lord Verisopht acknowledged the hint with a great many squeezes of
Ralph’s hard, horny hand, and whispering that they would now do well to
close the conversation, called to Sir Mulberry Hawk that he might come
back.

‘I thought you had gone to sleep,’ said Sir Mulberry, reappearing with
an ill-tempered air.

‘Sorry to detain you,’ replied the gull; ‘but Nickleby has been so
ama-azingly funny that I couldn’t tear myself away.’

‘No, no,’ said Ralph; ‘it was all his lordship. You know what a witty,
humorous, elegant, accomplished man Lord Frederick is. Mind the step, my
lord--Sir Mulberry, pray give way.’

With such courtesies as these, and many low bows, and the same cold
sneer upon his face all the while, Ralph busied himself in showing his
visitors downstairs, and otherwise than by the slightest possible motion
about the corners of his mouth, returned no show of answer to the look
of admiration with which Sir Mulberry Hawk seemed to compliment him on
being such an accomplished and most consummate scoundrel.

There had been a ring at the bell a few minutes before, which was
answered by Newman Noggs just as they reached the hall. In the ordinary
course of business Newman would have either admitted the new-comer in
silence, or have requested him or her to stand aside while the gentlemen
passed out. But he no sooner saw who it was, than as if for some private
reason of his own, he boldly departed from the established custom of
Ralph’s mansion in business hours, and looking towards the respectable
trio who were approaching, cried in a loud and sonorous voice, ‘Mrs
Nickleby!’

‘Mrs. Nickleby!’ cried Sir Mulberry Hawk, as his friend looked back, and
stared him in the face.

It was, indeed, that well-intentioned lady, who, having received an
offer for the empty house in the city directed to the landlord, had
brought it post-haste to Mr. Nickleby without delay.

‘Nobody YOU know,’ said Ralph. ‘Step into the office, my--my--dear. I’ll
be with you directly.’

‘Nobody I know!’ cried Sir Mulberry Hawk, advancing to the astonished
lady. ‘Is this Mrs. Nickleby--the mother of Miss Nickleby--the delightful
creature that I had the happiness of meeting in this house the very last
time I dined here? But no;’ said Sir Mulberry, stopping short. ‘No, it
can’t be. There is the same cast of features, the same indescribable air
of--But no; no. This lady is too young for that.’

‘I think you can tell the gentleman, brother-in-law, if it concerns
him to know,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, acknowledging the compliment with a
graceful bend, ‘that Kate Nickleby is my daughter.’

‘Her daughter, my lord!’ cried Sir Mulberry, turning to his friend.
‘This lady’s daughter, my lord.’

‘My lord!’ thought Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Well, I never did--’

‘This, then, my lord,’ said Sir Mulberry, ‘is the lady to whose obliging
marriage we owe so much happiness. This lady is the mother of sweet
Miss Nickleby. Do you observe the extraordinary likeness, my lord?
Nickleby--introduce us.’

Ralph did so, in a kind of desperation.

‘Upon my soul, it’s a most delightful thing,’ said Lord Frederick,
pressing forward. ‘How de do?’

Mrs. Nickleby was too much flurried by these uncommonly kind salutations,
and her regrets at not having on her other bonnet, to make any immediate
reply, so she merely continued to bend and smile, and betray great
agitation.

‘A--and how is Miss Nickleby?’ said Lord Frederick. ‘Well, I hope?’

‘She is quite well, I’m obliged to you, my lord,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby,
recovering. ‘Quite well. She wasn’t well for some days after that day
she dined here, and I can’t help thinking, that she caught cold in that
hackney coach coming home. Hackney coaches, my lord, are such nasty
things, that it’s almost better to walk at any time, for although I
believe a hackney coachman can be transported for life, if he has a
broken window, still they are so reckless, that they nearly all have
broken windows. I once had a swelled face for six weeks, my lord, from
riding in a hackney coach--I think it was a hackney coach,’ said Mrs
Nickleby reflecting, ‘though I’m not quite certain whether it wasn’t
a chariot; at all events I know it was a dark green, with a very long
number, beginning with a nought and ending with a nine--no, beginning
with a nine, and ending with a nought, that was it, and of course the
stamp-office people would know at once whether it was a coach or a
chariot if any inquiries were made there--however that was, there it
was with a broken window and there was I for six weeks with a swelled
face--I think that was the very same hackney coach, that we found out
afterwards, had the top open all the time, and we should never even have
known it, if they hadn’t charged us a shilling an hour extra for having
it open, which it seems is the law, or was then, and a most shameful law
it appears to be--I don’t understand the subject, but I should say the
Corn Laws could be nothing to THAT act of Parliament.’

Having pretty well run herself out by this time, Mrs. Nickleby stopped as
suddenly as she had started off; and repeated that Kate was quite well.
‘Indeed,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘I don’t think she ever was better, since
she had the hooping-cough, scarlet-fever, and measles, all at the same
time, and that’s the fact.’

‘Is that letter for me?’ growled Ralph, pointing to the little packet
Mrs. Nickleby held in her hand.

‘For you, brother-in-law,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby, ‘and I walked all the
way up here on purpose to give it you.’

‘All the way up here!’ cried Sir Mulberry, seizing upon the chance
of discovering where Mrs. Nickleby had come from. ‘What a confounded
distance! How far do you call it now?’

‘How far do I call it?’ said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Let me see. It’s just a mile
from our door to the Old Bailey.’

‘No, no. Not so much as that,’ urged Sir Mulberry.

‘Oh! It is indeed,’ said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘I appeal to his lordship.’

‘I should decidedly say it was a mile,’ remarked Lord Frederick, with a
solemn aspect.

‘It must be; it can’t be a yard less,’ said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘All down
Newgate Street, all down Cheapside, all up Lombard Street, down
Gracechurch Street, and along Thames Street, as far as Spigwiffin’s
Wharf. Oh! It’s a mile.’

‘Yes, on second thoughts I should say it was,’ replied Sir Mulberry.
‘But you don’t surely mean to walk all the way back?’

‘Oh, no,’ rejoined Mrs. Nickleby. ‘I shall go back in an omnibus. I
didn’t travel about in omnibuses, when my poor dear Nicholas was alive,
brother-in-law. But as it is, you know--’

‘Yes, yes,’ replied Ralph impatiently, ‘and you had better get back
before dark.’

‘Thank you, brother-in-law, so I had,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby. ‘I think I
had better say goodbye, at once.’

‘Not stop and--rest?’ said Ralph, who seldom offered refreshments unless
something was to be got by it.

‘Oh dear me no,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby, glancing at the dial.

‘Lord Frederick,’ said Sir Mulberry, ‘we are going Mrs. Nickleby’s way.
We’ll see her safe to the omnibus?’

‘By all means. Ye-es.’

‘Oh! I really couldn’t think of it!’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

But Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Verisopht were peremptory in their
politeness, and leaving Ralph, who seemed to think, not unwisely, that
he looked less ridiculous as a mere spectator, than he would have done
if he had taken any part in these proceedings, they quitted the house
with Mrs. Nickleby between them; that good lady in a perfect ecstasy
of satisfaction, no less with the attentions shown her by two titled
gentlemen, than with the conviction that Kate might now pick and choose,
at least between two large fortunes, and most unexceptionable husbands.

As she was carried away for the moment by an irresistible train of
thought, all connected with her daughter’s future greatness, Sir
Mulberry Hawk and his friend exchanged glances over the top of the
bonnet which the poor lady so much regretted not having left at home,
and proceeded to dilate with great rapture, but much respect on the
manifold perfections of Miss Nickleby.

‘What a delight, what a comfort, what a happiness, this amiable
creature must be to you,’ said Sir Mulberry, throwing into his voice an
indication of the warmest feeling.

‘She is indeed, sir,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby; ‘she is the
sweetest-tempered, kindest-hearted creature--and so clever!’

‘She looks clayver,’ said Lord Verisopht, with the air of a judge of
cleverness.

‘I assure you she is, my lord,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby. ‘When she was
at school in Devonshire, she was universally allowed to be beyond all
exception the very cleverest girl there, and there were a great many
very clever ones too, and that’s the truth--twenty-five young ladies,
fifty guineas a year without the et-ceteras, both the Miss Dowdles the
most accomplished, elegant, fascinating creatures--Oh dear me!’ said Mrs
Nickleby, ‘I never shall forget what pleasure she used to give me
and her poor dear papa, when she was at that school, never--such a
delightful letter every half-year, telling us that she was the first
pupil in the whole establishment, and had made more progress than
anybody else! I can scarcely bear to think of it even now. The girls
wrote all the letters themselves,’ added Mrs. Nickleby, ‘and the
writing-master touched them up afterwards with a magnifying glass and
a silver pen; at least I think they wrote them, though Kate was never
quite certain about that, because she didn’t know the handwriting of
hers again; but anyway, I know it was a circular which they all copied,
and of course it was a very gratifying thing--very gratifying.’

With similar recollections Mrs. Nickleby beguiled the tediousness of the
way, until they reached the omnibus, which the extreme politeness of
her new friends would not allow them to leave until it actually started,
when they took their hats, as Mrs. Nickleby solemnly assured her hearers
on many subsequent occasions, ‘completely off,’ and kissed their
straw-coloured kid gloves till they were no longer visible.

Mrs. Nickleby leant back in the furthest corner of the conveyance,
and, closing her eyes, resigned herself to a host of most pleasing
meditations. Kate had never said a word about having met either of
these gentlemen; ‘that,’ she thought, ‘argues that she is strongly
prepossessed in favour of one of them.’ Then the question arose, which
one could it be. The lord was the youngest, and his title was certainly
the grandest; still Kate was not the girl to be swayed by such
considerations as these. ‘I will never put any constraint upon her
inclinations,’ said Mrs. Nickleby to herself; ‘but upon my word I
think there’s no comparison between his lordship and Sir Mulberry--Sir
Mulberry is such an attentive gentlemanly creature, so much manner,
such a fine man, and has so much to say for himself. I hope it’s Sir
Mulberry--I think it must be Sir Mulberry!’ And then her thoughts flew
back to her old predictions, and the number of times she had said, that
Kate with no fortune would marry better than other people’s daughters
with thousands; and, as she pictured with the brightness of a mother’s
fancy all the beauty and grace of the poor girl who had struggled so
cheerfully with her new life of hardship and trial, her heart grew too
full, and the tears trickled down her face.

Meanwhile, Ralph walked to and fro in his little back-office, troubled
in mind by what had just occurred. To say that Ralph loved or cared
for--in the most ordinary acceptation of those terms--any one of God’s
creatures, would be the wildest fiction. Still, there had somehow stolen
upon him from time to time a thought of his niece which was tinged
with compassion and pity; breaking through the dull cloud of dislike or
indifference which darkened men and women in his eyes, there was, in her
case, the faintest gleam of light--a most feeble and sickly ray at the
best of times--but there it was, and it showed the poor girl in a better
and purer aspect than any in which he had looked on human nature yet.

‘I wish,’ thought Ralph, ‘I had never done this. And yet it will
keep this boy to me, while there is money to be made. Selling a
girl--throwing her in the way of temptation, and insult, and coarse
speech. Nearly two thousand pounds profit from him already though.
Pshaw! match-making mothers do the same thing every day.’

He sat down, and told the chances, for and against, on his fingers.

‘If I had not put them in the right track today,’ thought Ralph, ‘this
foolish woman would have done so. Well. If her daughter is as true to
herself as she should be from what I have seen, what harm ensues? A
little teasing, a little humbling, a few tears. Yes,’ said Ralph, aloud,
as he locked his iron safe. ‘She must take her chance. She must take her
chance.’



CHAPTER 27

Mrs. Nickleby becomes acquainted with Messrs Pyke and Pluck, whose
Affection and Interest are beyond all Bounds


Mrs. Nickleby had not felt so proud and important for many a day, as
when, on reaching home, she gave herself wholly up to the pleasant
visions which had accompanied her on her way thither. Lady Mulberry
Hawk--that was the prevalent idea. Lady Mulberry Hawk!--On Tuesday last,
at St George’s, Hanover Square, by the Right Reverend the Bishop
of Llandaff, Sir Mulberry Hawk, of Mulberry Castle, North Wales, to
Catherine, only daughter of the late Nicholas Nickleby, Esquire, of
Devonshire. ‘Upon my word!’ cried Mrs. Nicholas Nickleby, ‘it sounds very
well.’

Having dispatched the ceremony, with its attendant festivities, to the
perfect satisfaction of her own mind, the sanguine mother pictured to
her imagination a long train of honours and distinctions which could
not fail to accompany Kate in her new and brilliant sphere. She would be
presented at court, of course. On the anniversary of her birthday, which
was upon the nineteenth of July [‘at ten minutes past three o’clock in
the morning,’ thought Mrs. Nickleby in a parenthesis, ‘for I recollect
asking what o’clock it was’), Sir Mulberry would give a great feast to
all his tenants, and would return them three and a half per cent on the
amount of their last half-year’s rent, as would be fully described and
recorded in the fashionable intelligence, to the immeasurable delight
and admiration of all the readers thereof. Kate’s picture, too, would be
in at least half-a-dozen of the annuals, and on the opposite page would
appear, in delicate type, ‘Lines on contemplating the Portrait of Lady
Mulberry Hawk. By Sir Dingleby Dabber.’ Perhaps some one annual, of more
comprehensive design than its fellows, might even contain a portrait
of the mother of Lady Mulberry Hawk, with lines by the father of Sir
Dingleby Dabber. More unlikely things had come to pass. Less interesting
portraits had appeared. As this thought occurred to the good lady, her
countenance unconsciously assumed that compound expression of simpering
and sleepiness which, being common to all such portraits, is perhaps one
reason why they are always so charming and agreeable.

With such triumphs of aerial architecture did Mrs. Nickleby occupy
the whole evening after her accidental introduction to Ralph’s titled
friends; and dreams, no less prophetic and equally promising, haunted
her sleep that night. She was preparing for her frugal dinner next day,
still occupied with the same ideas--a little softened down perhaps by
sleep and daylight--when the girl who attended her, partly for company,
and partly to assist in the household affairs, rushed into the room in
unwonted agitation, and announced that two gentlemen were waiting in the
passage for permission to walk upstairs.

‘Bless my heart!’ cried Mrs. Nickleby, hastily arranging her cap and
front, ‘if it should be--dear me, standing in the passage all this
time--why don’t you go and ask them to walk up, you stupid thing?’

While the girl was gone on this errand, Mrs. Nickleby hastily swept into
a cupboard all vestiges of eating and drinking; which she had scarcely
done, and seated herself with looks as collected as she could assume,
when two gentlemen, both perfect strangers, presented themselves.

‘How do you DO?’ said one gentleman, laying great stress on the last
word of the inquiry.

‘HOW do you do?’ said the other gentleman, altering the emphasis, as if
to give variety to the salutation.

Mrs. Nickleby curtseyed and smiled, and curtseyed again, and remarked,
rubbing her hands as she did so, that she hadn’t the--really--the honour
to--

‘To know us,’ said the first gentleman. ‘The loss has been ours, Mrs
Nickleby. Has the loss been ours, Pyke?’

‘It has, Pluck,’ answered the other gentleman.

‘We have regretted it very often, I believe, Pyke?’ said the first
gentleman.

‘Very often, Pluck,’ answered the second.

‘But now,’ said the first gentleman, ‘now we have the happiness we
have pined and languished for. Have we pined and languished for this
happiness, Pyke, or have we not?’

‘You know we have, Pluck,’ said Pyke, reproachfully.

‘You hear him, ma’am?’ said Mr. Pluck, looking round; ‘you hear
the unimpeachable testimony of my friend Pyke--that reminds
me,--formalities, formalities, must not be neglected in civilised
society. Pyke--Mrs. Nickleby.’

Mr. Pyke laid his hand upon his heart, and bowed low.

‘Whether I shall introduce myself with the same formality,’ said Mr
Pluck--‘whether I shall say myself that my name is Pluck, or whether
I shall ask my friend Pyke (who being now regularly introduced, is
competent to the office) to state for me, Mrs. Nickleby, that my name is
Pluck; whether I shall claim your acquaintance on the plain ground of
the strong interest I take in your welfare, or whether I shall make
myself known to you as the friend of Sir Mulberry Hawk--these, Mrs
Nickleby, are considerations which I leave to you to determine.’

‘Any friend of Sir Mulberry Hawk’s requires no better introduction to
me,’ observed Mrs. Nickleby, graciously.

‘It is delightful to hear you say so,’ said Mr. Pluck, drawing a chair
close to Mrs. Nickleby, and sitting himself down. ‘It is refreshing
to know that you hold my excellent friend, Sir Mulberry, in such high
esteem. A word in your ear, Mrs. Nickleby. When Sir Mulberry knows it, he
will be a happy man--I say, Mrs. Nickleby, a happy man. Pyke, be seated.’

‘MY good opinion,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, and the poor lady exulted in the
idea that she was marvellously sly,--‘my good opinion can be of very
little consequence to a gentleman like Sir Mulberry.’

‘Of little consequence!’ exclaimed Mr. Pluck. ‘Pyke, of what consequence
to our friend, Sir Mulberry, is the good opinion of Mrs. Nickleby?’

‘Of what consequence?’ echoed Pyke.

‘Ay,’ repeated Pluck; ‘is it of the greatest consequence?’

‘Of the very greatest consequence,’ replied Pyke.

‘Mrs. Nickleby cannot be ignorant,’ said Mr. Pluck, ‘of the immense
impression which that sweet girl has--’

‘Pluck!’ said his friend, ‘beware!’

‘Pyke is right,’ muttered Mr. Pluck, after a short pause; ‘I was not to
mention it. Pyke is very right. Thank you, Pyke.’

‘Well now, really,’ thought Mrs. Nickleby within herself. ‘Such delicacy
as that, I never saw!’

Mr. Pluck, after feigning to be in a condition of great embarrassment
for some minutes, resumed the conversation by entreating Mrs. Nickleby
to take no heed of what he had inadvertently said--to consider him
imprudent, rash, injudicious. The only stipulation he would make in his
own favour was, that she should give him credit for the best intentions.

‘But when,’ said Mr. Pluck, ‘when I see so much sweetness and beauty on
the one hand, and so much ardour and devotion on the other, I--pardon
me, Pyke, I didn’t intend to resume that theme. Change the subject,
Pyke.’

‘We promised Sir Mulberry and Lord Frederick,’ said Pyke, ‘that we’d
call this morning and inquire whether you took any cold last night.’

‘Not the least in the world last night, sir,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby,
‘with many thanks to his lordship and Sir Mulberry for doing me the
honour to inquire; not the least--which is the more singular, as I
really am very subject to colds, indeed--very subject. I had a cold
once,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘I think it was in the year eighteen hundred
and seventeen; let me see, four and five are nine, and--yes, eighteen
hundred and seventeen, that I thought I never should get rid of;
actually and seriously, that I thought I never should get rid of. I
was only cured at last by a remedy that I don’t know whether you ever
happened to hear of, Mr. Pluck. You have a gallon of water as hot as
you can possibly bear it, with a pound of salt, and sixpen’orth of the
finest bran, and sit with your head in it for twenty minutes every night
just before going to bed; at least, I don’t mean your head--your feet.
It’s a most extraordinary cure--a most extraordinary cure. I used it
for the first time, I recollect, the day after Christmas Day, and by the
middle of April following the cold was gone. It seems quite a miracle
when you come to think of it, for I had it ever since the beginning of
September.’

‘What an afflicting calamity!’ said Mr. Pyke.

‘Perfectly horrid!’ exclaimed Mr. Pluck.

‘But it’s worth the pain of hearing, only to know that Mrs. Nickleby
recovered it, isn’t it, Pluck?’ cried Mr. Pyke.

‘That is the circumstance which gives it such a thrilling interest,’
replied Mr. Pluck.

‘But come,’ said Pyke, as if suddenly recollecting himself; ‘we must
not forget our mission in the pleasure of this interview. We come on a
mission, Mrs. Nickleby.’

‘On a mission,’ exclaimed that good lady, to whose mind a definite
proposal of marriage for Kate at once presented itself in lively
colours.

‘From Sir Mulberry,’ replied Pyke. ‘You must be very dull here.’

‘Rather dull, I confess,’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

‘We bring the compliments of Sir Mulberry Hawk, and a thousand
entreaties that you’ll take a seat in a private box at the play
tonight,’ said Mr. Pluck.

‘Oh dear!’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘I never go out at all, never.’

‘And that is the very reason, my dear Mrs. Nickleby, why you should go
out tonight,’ retorted Mr. Pluck. ‘Pyke, entreat Mrs. Nickleby.’

‘Oh, pray do,’ said Pyke.

‘You positively must,’ urged Pluck.

‘You are very kind,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, hesitating; ‘but--’

‘There’s not a but in the case, my dear Mrs. Nickleby,’ remonstrated Mr
Pluck; ‘not such a word in the vocabulary. Your brother-in-law joins us,
Lord Frederick joins us, Sir Mulberry joins us, Pyke joins us--a refusal
is out of the question. Sir Mulberry sends a carriage for you--twenty
minutes before seven to the moment--you’ll not be so cruel as to
disappoint the whole party, Mrs. Nickleby?’

‘You are so very pressing, that I scarcely know what to say,’ replied
the worthy lady.

‘Say nothing; not a word, not a word, my dearest madam,’ urged Mr. Pluck.
‘Mrs. Nickleby,’ said that excellent gentleman, lowering his voice,
‘there is the most trifling, the most excusable breach of confidence
in what I am about to say; and yet if my friend Pyke there overheard
it--such is that man’s delicate sense of honour, Mrs. Nickleby--he’d have
me out before dinner-time.’

Mrs. Nickleby cast an apprehensive glance at the warlike Pyke, who had
walked to the window; and Mr. Pluck, squeezing her hand, went on:

‘Your daughter has made a conquest--a conquest on which I may
congratulate you. Sir Mulberry, my dear ma’am, Sir Mulberry is her
devoted slave. Hem!’

‘Hah!’ cried Mr. Pyke at this juncture, snatching something from the
chimney-piece with a theatrical air. ‘What is this! what do I behold!’

‘What DO you behold, my dear fellow?’ asked Mr. Pluck.

‘It is the face, the countenance, the expression,’ cried Mr. Pyke,
falling into his chair with a miniature in his hand; ‘feebly
portrayed, imperfectly caught, but still THE face, THE countenance, THE
expression.’

‘I recognise it at this distance!’ exclaimed Mr. Pluck in a fit of
enthusiasm. ‘Is it not, my dear madam, the faint similitude of--’

‘It is my daughter’s portrait,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, with great pride. And
so it was. And little Miss La Creevy had brought it home for inspection
only two nights before.

Mr. Pyke no sooner ascertained that he was quite right in his conjecture,
than he launched into the most extravagant encomiums of the divine
original; and in the warmth of his enthusiasm kissed the picture a
thousand times, while Mr. Pluck pressed Mrs. Nickleby’s hand to his heart,
and congratulated her on the possession of such a daughter, with so much
earnestness and affection, that the tears stood, or seemed to stand,
in his eyes. Poor Mrs. Nickleby, who had listened in a state of enviable
complacency at first, became at length quite overpowered by these tokens
of regard for, and attachment to, the family; and even the servant
girl, who had peeped in at the door, remained rooted to the spot in
astonishment at the ecstasies of the two friendly visitors.

By degrees these raptures subsided, and Mrs. Nickleby went on to
entertain her guests with a lament over her fallen fortunes, and a
picturesque account of her old house in the country: comprising a full
description of the different apartments, not forgetting the little
store-room, and a lively recollection of how many steps you went down to
get into the garden, and which way you turned when you came out at the
parlour door, and what capital fixtures there were in the kitchen. This
last reflection naturally conducted her into the wash-house, where she
stumbled upon the brewing utensils, among which she might have wandered
for an hour, if the mere mention of those implements had not, by an
association of ideas, instantly reminded Mr. Pyke that he was ‘amazing
thirsty.’

‘And I’ll tell you what,’ said Mr. Pyke; ‘if you’ll send round to the
public-house for a pot of milk half-and-half, positively and actually
I’ll drink it.’

And positively and actually Mr. Pyke DID drink it, and Mr. Pluck
helped him, while Mrs. Nickleby looked on in divided admiration of the
condescension of the two, and the aptitude with which they accommodated
themselves to the pewter-pot; in explanation of which seeming marvel it
may be here observed, that gentlemen who, like Messrs Pyke and Pluck,
live upon their wits (or not so much, perhaps, upon the presence
of their own wits as upon the absence of wits in other people) are
occasionally reduced to very narrow shifts and straits, and are at such
periods accustomed to regale themselves in a very simple and primitive
manner.

‘At twenty minutes before seven, then,’ said Mr. Pyke, rising, ‘the coach
will be here. One more look--one little look--at that sweet face. Ah!
here it is. Unmoved, unchanged!’ This, by the way, was a very
remarkable circumstance, miniatures being liable to so many changes of
expression--‘Oh, Pluck! Pluck!’

Mr. Pluck made no other reply than kissing Mrs. Nickleby’s hand with a
great show of feeling and attachment; Mr. Pyke having done the same, both
gentlemen hastily withdrew.

Mrs. Nickleby was commonly in the habit of giving herself credit for a
pretty tolerable share of penetration and acuteness, but she had never
felt so satisfied with her own sharp-sightedness as she did that day.
She had found it all out the night before. She had never seen Sir
Mulberry and Kate together--never even heard Sir Mulberry’s name--and
yet hadn’t she said to herself from the very first, that she saw how the
case stood? and what a triumph it was, for there was now no doubt
about it. If these flattering attentions to herself were not sufficient
proofs, Sir Mulberry’s confidential friend had suffered the secret
to escape him in so many words. ‘I am quite in love with that dear Mr
Pluck, I declare I am,’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

There was one great source of uneasiness in the midst of this good
fortune, and that was the having nobody by, to whom she could confide
it. Once or twice she almost resolved to walk straight to Miss La
Creevy’s and tell it all to her. ‘But I don’t know,’ thought Mrs
Nickleby; ‘she is a very worthy person, but I am afraid too much beneath
Sir Mulberry’s station for us to make a companion of. Poor thing!’
Acting upon this grave consideration she rejected the idea of taking the
little portrait painter into her confidence, and contented herself
with holding out sundry vague and mysterious hopes of preferment to the
servant girl, who received these obscure hints of dawning greatness with
much veneration and respect.

Punctual to its time came the promised vehicle, which was no hackney
coach, but a private chariot, having behind it a footman, whose legs,
although somewhat large for his body, might, as mere abstract legs,
have set themselves up for models at the Royal Academy. It was quite
exhilarating to hear the clash and bustle with which he banged the door
and jumped up behind after Mrs. Nickleby was in; and as that good lady
was perfectly unconscious that he applied the gold-headed end of his
long stick to his nose, and so telegraphed most disrespectfully to the
coachman over her very head, she sat in a state of much stiffness and
dignity, not a little proud of her position.

At the theatre entrance there was more banging and more bustle, and
there were also Messrs Pyke and Pluck waiting to escort her to her box;
and so polite were they, that Mr. Pyke threatened with many oaths to
‘smifligate’ a very old man with a lantern who accidentally stumbled
in her way--to the great terror of Mrs. Nickleby, who, conjecturing
more from Mr. Pyke’s excitement than any previous acquaintance with the
etymology of the word that smifligation and bloodshed must be in
the main one and the same thing, was alarmed beyond expression, lest
something should occur. Fortunately, however, Mr. Pyke confined himself
to mere verbal smifligation, and they reached their box with no more
serious interruption by the way, than a desire on the part of the same
pugnacious gentleman to ‘smash’ the assistant box-keeper for happening
to mistake the number.

Mrs. Nickleby had scarcely been put away behind the curtain of the box in
an armchair, when Sir Mulberry and Lord Verisopht arrived, arrayed from
the crowns of their heads to the tips of their gloves, and from the
tips of their gloves to the toes of their boots, in the most elegant and
costly manner. Sir Mulberry was a little hoarser than on the previous
day, and Lord Verisopht looked rather sleepy and queer; from which
tokens, as well as from the circumstance of their both being to a
trifling extent unsteady upon their legs, Mrs. Nickleby justly concluded
that they had taken dinner.

‘We have been--we have been--toasting your lovely daughter, Mrs
Nickleby,’ whispered Sir Mulberry, sitting down behind her.

‘Oh, ho!’ thought that knowing lady; ‘wine in, truth out.--You are very
kind, Sir Mulberry.’

‘No, no upon my soul!’ replied Sir Mulberry Hawk. ‘It’s you that’s kind,
upon my soul it is. It was so kind of you to come tonight.’

‘So very kind of you to invite me, you mean, Sir Mulberry,’ replied Mrs
Nickleby, tossing her head, and looking prodigiously sly.

‘I am so anxious to know you, so anxious to cultivate your good opinion,
so desirous that there should be a delicious kind of harmonious family
understanding between us,’ said Sir Mulberry, ‘that you mustn’t think
I’m disinterested in what I do. I’m infernal selfish; I am--upon my soul
I am.’

‘I am sure you can’t be selfish, Sir Mulberry!’ replied Mrs. Nickleby.
‘You have much too open and generous a countenance for that.’

‘What an extraordinary observer you are!’ said Sir Mulberry Hawk.

‘Oh no, indeed, I don’t see very far into things, Sir Mulberry,’ replied
Mrs. Nickleby, in a tone of voice which left the baronet to infer that
she saw very far indeed.

‘I am quite afraid of you,’ said the baronet. ‘Upon my soul,’ repeated
Sir Mulberry, looking round to his companions; ‘I am afraid of Mrs
Nickleby. She is so immensely sharp.’

Messrs Pyke and Pluck shook their heads mysteriously, and observed
together that they had found that out long ago; upon which Mrs. Nickleby
tittered, and Sir Mulberry laughed, and Pyke and Pluck roared.

‘But where’s my brother-in-law, Sir Mulberry?’ inquired Mrs. Nickleby. ‘I
shouldn’t be here without him. I hope he’s coming.’

‘Pyke,’ said Sir Mulberry, taking out his toothpick and lolling back in
his chair, as if he were too lazy to invent a reply to this question.
‘Where’s Ralph Nickleby?’

‘Pluck,’ said Pyke, imitating the baronet’s action, and turning the lie
over to his friend, ‘where’s Ralph Nickleby?’

Mr. Pluck was about to return some evasive reply, when the hustle caused
by a party entering the next box seemed to attract the attention of all
four gentlemen, who exchanged glances of much meaning. The new party
beginning to converse together, Sir Mulberry suddenly assumed the
character of a most attentive listener, and implored his friends not to
breathe--not to breathe.

‘Why not?’ said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘What is the matter?’

‘Hush!’ replied Sir Mulberry, laying his hand on her arm. ‘Lord
Frederick, do you recognise the tones of that voice?’

‘Deyvle take me if I didn’t think it was the voice of Miss Nickleby.’

‘Lor, my lord!’ cried Miss Nickleby’s mama, thrusting her head round the
curtain. ‘Why actually--Kate, my dear, Kate.’

‘YOU here, mama! Is it possible!’

‘Possible, my dear? Yes.’

‘Why who--who on earth is that you have with you, mama?’ said Kate,
shrinking back as she caught sight of a man smiling and kissing his
hand.

‘Who do you suppose, my dear?’ replied Mrs. Nickleby, bending towards Mrs
Wititterly, and speaking a little louder for that lady’s edification.
‘There’s Mr. Pyke, Mr. Pluck, Sir Mulberry Hawk, and Lord Frederick
Verisopht.’

‘Gracious Heaven!’ thought Kate hurriedly. ‘How comes she in such
society?’

Now, Kate thought thus SO hurriedly, and the surprise was so great, and
moreover brought back so forcibly the recollection of what had passed at
Ralph’s delectable dinner, that she turned extremely pale and appeared
greatly agitated, which symptoms being observed by Mrs. Nickleby, were
at once set down by that acute lady as being caused and occasioned by
violent love. But, although she was in no small degree delighted by
this discovery, which reflected so much credit on her own quickness of
perception, it did not lessen her motherly anxiety in Kate’s behalf; and
accordingly, with a vast quantity of trepidation, she quitted her own
box to hasten into that of Mrs. Wititterly. Mrs. Wititterly, keenly
alive to the glory of having a lord and a baronet among her visiting
acquaintance, lost no time in signing to Mr. Wititterly to open the door,
and thus it was that in less than thirty seconds Mrs. Nickleby’s party
had made an irruption into Mrs. Wititterly’s box, which it filled to the
very door, there being in fact only room for Messrs Pyke and Pluck to
get in their heads and waistcoats.

‘My dear Kate,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, kissing her daughter affectionately.
‘How ill you looked a moment ago! You quite frightened me, I declare!’

‘It was mere fancy, mama,--the--the--reflection of the lights perhaps,’
replied Kate, glancing nervously round, and finding it impossible to
whisper any caution or explanation.

‘Don’t you see Sir Mulberry Hawk, my dear?’

Kate bowed slightly, and biting her lip turned her head towards the
stage.

But Sir Mulberry Hawk was not to be so easily repulsed, for he advanced
with extended hand; and Mrs. Nickleby officiously informing Kate of this
circumstance, she was obliged to extend her own. Sir Mulberry detained
it while he murmured a profusion of compliments, which Kate, remembering
what had passed between them, rightly considered as so many aggravations
of the insult he had already put upon her. Then followed the recognition
of Lord Verisopht, and then the greeting of Mr. Pyke, and then that of Mr
Pluck, and finally, to complete the young lady’s mortification, she
was compelled at Mrs. Wititterly’s request to perform the ceremony
of introducing the odious persons, whom she regarded with the utmost
indignation and abhorrence.

‘Mrs. Wititterly is delighted,’ said Mr. Wititterly, rubbing his hands;
‘delighted, my lord, I am sure, with this opportunity of contracting an
acquaintance which, I trust, my lord, we shall improve. Julia, my dear,
you must not allow yourself to be too much excited, you must not.
Indeed you must not. Mrs. Wititterly is of a most excitable nature, Sir
Mulberry. The snuff of a candle, the wick of a lamp, the bloom on a
peach, the down on a butterfly. You might blow her away, my lord; you
might blow her away.’

Sir Mulberry seemed to think that it would be a great convenience if the
lady could be blown away. He said, however, that the delight was mutual,
and Lord Verisopht added that it was mutual, whereupon Messrs Pyke and
Pluck were heard to murmur from the distance that it was very mutual
indeed.

‘I take an interest, my lord,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, with a faint smile,
‘such an interest in the drama.’

‘Ye--es. It’s very interesting,’ replied Lord Verisopht.

‘I’m always ill after Shakespeare,’ said Mrs. Wititterly. ‘I scarcely
exist the next day; I find the reaction so very great after a tragedy,
my lord, and Shakespeare is such a delicious creature.’

‘Ye--es!’ replied Lord Verisopht. ‘He was a clayver man.’

‘Do you know, my lord,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, after a long silence, ‘I
find I take so much more interest in his plays, after having been to
that dear little dull house he was born in! Were you ever there, my
lord?’

‘No, nayver,’ replied Verisopht.

‘Then really you ought to go, my lord,’ returned Mrs. Wititterly, in very
languid and drawling accents. ‘I don’t know how it is, but after you’ve
seen the place and written your name in the little book, somehow or
other you seem to be inspired; it kindles up quite a fire within one.’

‘Ye--es!’ replied Lord Verisopht, ‘I shall certainly go there.’

‘Julia, my life,’ interposed Mr. Wititterly, ‘you are deceiving his
lordship--unintentionally, my lord, she is deceiving you. It is
your poetical temperament, my dear--your ethereal soul--your fervid
imagination, which throws you into a glow of genius and excitement.
There is nothing in the place, my dear--nothing, nothing.’

‘I think there must be something in the place,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, who
had been listening in silence; ‘for, soon after I was married, I went
to Stratford with my poor dear Mr. Nickleby, in a post-chaise
from Birmingham--was it a post-chaise though?’ said Mrs. Nickleby,
considering; ‘yes, it must have been a post-chaise, because I recollect
remarking at the time that the driver had a green shade over his
left eye;--in a post-chaise from Birmingham, and after we had seen
Shakespeare’s tomb and birthplace, we went back to the inn there, where
we slept that night, and I recollect that all night long I dreamt of
nothing but a black gentleman, at full length, in plaster-of-Paris,
with a lay-down collar tied with two tassels, leaning against a post
and thinking; and when I woke in the morning and described him to Mr
Nickleby, he said it was Shakespeare just as he had been when he was
alive, which was very curious indeed. Stratford--Stratford,’ continued
Mrs. Nickleby, considering. ‘Yes, I am positive about that, because I
recollect I was in the family way with my son Nicholas at the time,
and I had been very much frightened by an Italian image boy that very
morning. In fact, it was quite a mercy, ma’am,’ added Mrs. Nickleby, in
a whisper to Mrs. Wititterly, ‘that my son didn’t turn out to be a
Shakespeare, and what a dreadful thing that would have been!’

When Mrs. Nickleby had brought this interesting anecdote to a close,
Pyke and Pluck, ever zealous in their patron’s cause, proposed the
adjournment of a detachment of the party into the next box; and with so
much skill were the preliminaries adjusted, that Kate, despite all
she could say or do to the contrary, had no alternative but to suffer
herself to be led away by Sir Mulberry Hawk. Her mother and Mr. Pluck
accompanied them, but the worthy lady, pluming herself upon her
discretion, took particular care not so much as to look at her daughter
during the whole evening, and to seem wholly absorbed in the jokes and
conversation of Mr. Pluck, who, having been appointed sentry over Mrs
Nickleby for that especial purpose, neglected, on his side, no possible
opportunity of engrossing her attention.

Lord Frederick Verisopht remained in the next box to be talked to by Mrs
Wititterly, and Mr. Pyke was in attendance to throw in a word or two when
necessary. As to Mr. Wititterly, he was sufficiently busy in the body of
the house, informing such of his friends and acquaintance as happened
to be there, that those two gentlemen upstairs, whom they had seen
in conversation with Mrs. W., were the distinguished Lord Frederick
Verisopht and his most intimate friend, the gay Sir Mulberry Hawk--a
communication which inflamed several respectable house-keepers with the
utmost jealousy and rage, and reduced sixteen unmarried daughters to the
very brink of despair.

The evening came to an end at last, but Kate had yet to be handed
downstairs by the detested Sir Mulberry; and so skilfully were the
manoeuvres of Messrs Pyke and Pluck conducted, that she and the baronet
were the last of the party, and were even--without an appearance of
effort or design--left at some little distance behind.

‘Don’t hurry, don’t hurry,’ said Sir Mulberry, as Kate hastened on, and
attempted to release her arm.

She made no reply, but still pressed forward.

‘Nay, then--’ coolly observed Sir Mulberry, stopping her outright.

‘You had best not seek to detain me, sir!’ said Kate, angrily.

‘And why not?’ retorted Sir Mulberry. ‘My dear creature, now why do you
keep up this show of displeasure?’

‘SHOW!’ repeated Kate, indignantly. ‘How dare you presume to speak to
me, sir--to address me--to come into my presence?’

‘You look prettier in a passion, Miss Nickleby,’ said Sir Mulberry Hawk,
stooping down, the better to see her face.

‘I hold you in the bitterest detestation and contempt, sir,’ said Kate.
‘If you find any attraction in looks of disgust and aversion, you--let
me rejoin my friends, sir, instantly. Whatever considerations may have
withheld me thus far, I will disregard them all, and take a course that
even YOU might feel, if you do not immediately suffer me to proceed.’

Sir Mulberry smiled, and still looking in her face and retaining her
arm, walked towards the door.

‘If no regard for my sex or helpless situation will induce you to desist
from this coarse and unmanly persecution,’ said Kate, scarcely knowing,
in the tumult of her passions, what she said,--‘I have a brother who
will resent it dearly, one day.’

‘Upon my soul!’ exclaimed Sir Mulberry, as though quietly communing with
himself; passing his arm round her waist as he spoke, ‘she looks more
beautiful, and I like her better in this mood, than when her eyes are
cast down, and she is in perfect repose!’

How Kate reached the lobby where her friends were waiting she never
knew, but she hurried across it without at all regarding them, and
disengaged herself suddenly from her companion, sprang into the coach,
and throwing herself into its darkest corner burst into tears.

Messrs Pyke and Pluck, knowing their cue, at once threw the party into
great commotion by shouting for the carriages, and getting up a violent
quarrel with sundry inoffensive bystanders; in the midst of which tumult
they put the affrighted Mrs. Nickleby in her chariot, and having got her
safely off, turned their thoughts to Mrs. Wititterly, whose attention
also they had now effectually distracted from the young lady, by
throwing her into a state of the utmost bewilderment and consternation.
At length, the conveyance in which she had come rolled off too with its
load, and the four worthies, being left alone under the portico, enjoyed
a hearty laugh together.

‘There,’ said Sir Mulberry, turning to his noble friend. ‘Didn’t I tell
you last night that if we could find where they were going by bribing a
servant through my fellow, and then established ourselves close by with
the mother, these people’s honour would be our own? Why here it is, done
in four-and-twenty hours.’

‘Ye--es,’ replied the dupe. ‘But I have been tied to the old woman all
ni-ight.’

‘Hear him,’ said Sir Mulberry, turning to his two friends. ‘Hear this
discontented grumbler. Isn’t it enough to make a man swear never to help
him in his plots and schemes again? Isn’t it an infernal shame?’

Pyke asked Pluck whether it was not an infernal shame, and Pluck asked
Pyke; but neither answered.

‘Isn’t it the truth?’ demanded Verisopht. ‘Wasn’t it so?’

‘Wasn’t it so!’ repeated Sir Mulberry. ‘How would you have had it? How
could we have got a general invitation at first sight--come when you
like, go when you like, stop as long as you like, do what you like--if
you, the lord, had not made yourself agreeable to the foolish mistress
of the house? Do I care for this girl, except as your friend? Haven’t I
been sounding your praises in her ears, and bearing her pretty sulks and
peevishness all night for you? What sort of stuff do you think I’m made
of? Would I do this for every man? Don’t I deserve even gratitude in
return?’

‘You’re a deyvlish good fellow,’ said the poor young lord, taking his
friend’s arm. ‘Upon my life you’re a deyvlish good fellow, Hawk.’

‘And I have done right, have I?’ demanded Sir Mulberry.

‘Quite ri-ght.’

‘And like a poor, silly, good-natured, friendly dog as I am, eh?’

‘Ye--es, ye--es; like a friend,’ replied the other.

‘Well then,’ replied Sir Mulberry, ‘I’m satisfied. And now let’s go and
have our revenge on the German baron and the Frenchman, who cleaned you
out so handsomely last night.’

With these words the friendly creature took his companion’s arm and led
him away, turning half round as he did so, and bestowing a wink and
a contemptuous smile on Messrs Pyke and Pluck, who, cramming their
handkerchiefs into their mouths to denote their silent enjoyment of
the whole proceedings, followed their patron and his victim at a little
distance.



CHAPTER 28

Miss Nickleby, rendered desperate by the Persecution of Sir Mulberry
Hawk, and the Complicated Difficulties and Distresses which surround
her, appeals, as a last resource, to her Uncle for Protection


The ensuing morning brought reflection with it, as morning usually
does; but widely different was the train of thought it awakened in the
different persons who had been so unexpectedly brought together on the
preceding evening, by the active agency of Messrs Pyke and Pluck.

The reflections of Sir Mulberry Hawk--if such a term can be applied to
the thoughts of the systematic and calculating man of dissipation, whose
joys, regrets, pains, and pleasures, are all of self, and who would seem
to retain nothing of the intellectual faculty but the power to debase
himself, and to degrade the very nature whose outward semblance he
wears--the reflections of Sir Mulberry Hawk turned upon Kate Nickleby,
and were, in brief, that she was undoubtedly handsome; that her coyness
MUST be easily conquerable by a man of his address and experience, and
that the pursuit was one which could not fail to redound to his credit,
and greatly to enhance his reputation with the world. And lest this last
consideration--no mean or secondary one with Sir Mulberry--should sound
strangely in the ears of some, let it be remembered that most men live
in a world of their own, and that in that limited circle alone are they
ambitious for distinction and applause. Sir Mulberry’s world was peopled
with profligates, and he acted accordingly.

Thus, cases of injustice, and oppression, and tyranny, and the most
extravagant bigotry, are in constant occurrence among us every day. It
is the custom to trumpet forth much wonder and astonishment at the chief
actors therein setting at defiance so completely the opinion of the
world; but there is no greater fallacy; it is precisely because they
do consult the opinion of their own little world that such things take
place at all, and strike the great world dumb with amazement.

The reflections of Mrs. Nickleby were of the proudest and most complacent
kind; and under the influence of her very agreeable delusion she
straightway sat down and indited a long letter to Kate, in which she
expressed her entire approval of the admirable choice she had made, and
extolled Sir Mulberry to the skies; asserting, for the more complete
satisfaction of her daughter’s feelings, that he was precisely the
individual whom she (Mrs. Nickleby) would have chosen for her son-in-law,
if she had had the picking and choosing from all mankind. The good lady
then, with the preliminary observation that she might be fairly supposed
not to have lived in the world so long without knowing its ways,
communicated a great many subtle precepts applicable to the state of
courtship, and confirmed in their wisdom by her own personal experience.
Above all things she commended a strict maidenly reserve, as being
not only a very laudable thing in itself, but as tending materially
to strengthen and increase a lover’s ardour. ‘And I never,’ added Mrs
Nickleby, ‘was more delighted in my life than to observe last night,
my dear, that your good sense had already told you this.’ With which
sentiment, and various hints of the pleasure she derived from the
knowledge that her daughter inherited so large an instalment of her own
excellent sense and discretion (to nearly the full measure of which she
might hope, with care, to succeed in time), Mrs. Nickleby concluded a
very long and rather illegible letter.

Poor Kate was well-nigh distracted on the receipt of four
closely-written and closely-crossed sides of congratulation on the very
subject which had prevented her closing her eyes all night, and kept her
weeping and watching in her chamber; still worse and more trying was the
necessity of rendering herself agreeable to Mrs. Wititterly, who, being
in low spirits after the fatigue of the preceding night, of course
expected her companion (else wherefore had she board and salary?) to be
in the best spirits possible. As to Mr. Wititterly, he went about all day
in a tremor of delight at having shaken hands with a lord, and having
actually asked him to come and see him in his own house. The lord
himself, not being troubled to any inconvenient extent with the power
of thinking, regaled himself with the conversation of Messrs Pyke and
Pluck, who sharpened their wit by a plentiful indulgence in various
costly stimulants at his expense.

It was four in the afternoon--that is, the vulgar afternoon of the sun
and the clock--and Mrs. Wititterly reclined, according to custom, on the
drawing-room sofa, while Kate read aloud a new novel in three volumes,
entitled ‘The Lady Flabella,’ which Alphonse the doubtful had procured
from the library that very morning. And it was a production admirably
suited to a lady labouring under Mrs. Wititterly’s complaint, seeing that
there was not a line in it, from beginning to end, which could, by the
most remote contingency, awaken the smallest excitement in any person
breathing.

Kate read on.

‘“Cherizette,” said the Lady Flabella, inserting her mouse-like feet
in the blue satin slippers, which had unwittingly occasioned the
half-playful half-angry altercation between herself and the youthful
Colonel Befillaire, in the Duke of Mincefenille’s SALON DE DANSE on the
previous night. “CHERIZETTE, MA CHERE, DONNEZ-MOI DE L’EAU-DE-COLOGNE,
S’IL VOUS PLAIT, MON ENFANT.”

‘“MERCIE--thank you,” said the Lady Flabella, as the lively but devoted
Cherizette plentifully besprinkled with the fragrant compound the Lady
Flabella’s MOUCHOIR of finest cambric, edged with richest lace, and
emblazoned at the four corners with the Flabella crest, and gorgeous
heraldic bearings of that noble family. “MERCIE--that will do.”

‘At this instant, while the Lady Flabella yet inhaled that
delicious fragrance by holding the MOUCHOIR to her exquisite, but
thoughtfully-chiselled nose, the door of the BOUDOIR (artfully concealed
by rich hangings of silken damask, the hue of Italy’s firmament) was
thrown open, and with noiseless tread two VALETS-DE-CHAMBRE, clad in
sumptuous liveries of peach-blossom and gold, advanced into the room
followed by a page in BAS DE SOIE--silk stockings--who, while they
remained at some distance making the most graceful obeisances, advanced
to the feet of his lovely mistress, and dropping on one knee presented,
on a golden salver gorgeously chased, a scented BILLET.

‘The Lady Flabella, with an agitation she could not repress, hastily
tore off the ENVELOPE and broke the scented seal. It WAS from
Befillaire--the young, the slim, the low-voiced--HER OWN Befillaire.’

‘Oh, charming!’ interrupted Kate’s patroness, who was sometimes taken
literary. ‘Poetic, really. Read that description again, Miss Nickleby.’

Kate complied.

‘Sweet, indeed!’ said Mrs. Wititterly, with a sigh. ‘So voluptuous, is it
not--so soft?’

‘Yes, I think it is,’ replied Kate, gently; ‘very soft.’

‘Close the book, Miss Nickleby,’ said Mrs. Wititterly. ‘I can hear
nothing more today; I should be sorry to disturb the impression of that
sweet description. Close the book.’

Kate complied, not unwillingly; and, as she did so, Mrs. Wititterly
raising her glass with a languid hand, remarked, that she looked pale.

‘It was the fright of that--that noise and confusion last night,’ said
Kate.

‘How very odd!’ exclaimed Mrs. Wititterly, with a look of surprise. And
certainly, when one comes to think of it, it WAS very odd that anything
should have disturbed a companion. A steam-engine, or other ingenious
piece of mechanism out of order, would have been nothing to it.

‘How did you come to know Lord Frederick, and those other delightful
creatures, child?’ asked Mrs. Wititterly, still eyeing Kate through her
glass.

‘I met them at my uncle’s,’ said Kate, vexed to feel that she was
colouring deeply, but unable to keep down the blood which rushed to her
face whenever she thought of that man.

‘Have you known them long?’

‘No,’ rejoined Kate. ‘Not long.’

‘I was very glad of the opportunity which that respectable person, your
mother, gave us of being known to them,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, in a lofty
manner. ‘Some friends of ours were on the very point of introducing us,
which makes it quite remarkable.’

This was said lest Miss Nickleby should grow conceited on the honour
and dignity of having known four great people (for Pyke and Pluck were
included among the delightful creatures), whom Mrs. Wititterly did not
know. But as the circumstance had made no impression one way or other
upon Kate’s mind, the force of the observation was quite lost upon her.

‘They asked permission to call,’ said Mrs. Wititterly. ‘I gave it them of
course.’

‘Do you expect them today?’ Kate ventured to inquire.

Mrs. Wititterly’s answer was lost in the noise of a tremendous rapping at
the street-door, and before it had ceased to vibrate, there drove up a
handsome cabriolet, out of which leaped Sir Mulberry Hawk and his friend
Lord Verisopht.

‘They are here now,’ said Kate, rising and hurrying away.

‘Miss Nickleby!’ cried Mrs. Wititterly, perfectly aghast at a companion’s
attempting to quit the room, without her permission first had and
obtained. ‘Pray don’t think of going.’

‘You are very good!’ replied Kate. ‘But--’

‘For goodness’ sake, don’t agitate me by making me speak so much,’ said
Mrs. Wititterly, with great sharpness. ‘Dear me, Miss Nickleby, I beg--’

It was in vain for Kate to protest that she was unwell, for the
footsteps of the knockers, whoever they were, were already on the
stairs. She resumed her seat, and had scarcely done so, when the
doubtful page darted into the room and announced, Mr. Pyke, and Mr. Pluck,
and Lord Verisopht, and Sir Mulberry Hawk, all at one burst.

‘The most extraordinary thing in the world,’ said Mr. Pluck, saluting
both ladies with the utmost cordiality; ‘the most extraordinary thing.
As Lord Frederick and Sir Mulberry drove up to the door, Pyke and I had
that instant knocked.’

‘That instant knocked,’ said Pyke.

‘No matter how you came, so that you are here,’ said Mrs. Wititterly,
who, by dint of lying on the same sofa for three years and a half, had
got up quite a little pantomime of graceful attitudes, and now threw
herself into the most striking of the whole series, to astonish the
visitors. ‘I am delighted, I am sure.’

‘And how is Miss Nickleby?’ said Sir Mulberry Hawk, accosting Kate, in
a low voice--not so low, however, but that it reached the ears of Mrs
Wititterly.

‘Why, she complains of suffering from the fright of last night,’ said
the lady. ‘I am sure I don’t wonder at it, for my nerves are quite torn
to pieces.’

‘And yet you look,’ observed Sir Mulberry, turning round; ‘and yet you
look--’

‘Beyond everything,’ said Mr. Pyke, coming to his patron’s assistance. Of
course Mr. Pluck said the same.

‘I am afraid Sir Mulberry is a flatterer, my lord,’ said Mrs. Wititterly,
turning to that young gentleman, who had been sucking the head of his
cane in silence, and staring at Kate.

‘Oh, deyvlish!’ replied Verisopht. Having given utterance to which
remarkable sentiment, he occupied himself as before.

‘Neither does Miss Nickleby look the worse,’ said Sir Mulberry, bending
his bold gaze upon her. ‘She was always handsome, but upon my soul,
ma’am, you seem to have imparted some of your own good looks to her
besides.’

To judge from the glow which suffused the poor girl’s countenance after
this speech, Mrs. Wititterly might, with some show of reason, have been
supposed to have imparted to it some of that artificial bloom which
decorated her own. Mrs. Wititterly admitted, though not with the best
grace in the world, that Kate DID look pretty. She began to think, too,
that Sir Mulberry was not quite so agreeable a creature as she had
at first supposed him; for, although a skilful flatterer is a most
delightful companion if you can keep him all to yourself, his taste
becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people.

‘Pyke,’ said the watchful Mr. Pluck, observing the effect which the
praise of Miss Nickleby had produced.

‘Well, Pluck,’ said Pyke.

‘Is there anybody,’ demanded Mr. Pluck, mysteriously, ‘anybody you know,
that Mrs. Wititterly’s profile reminds you of?’

‘Reminds me of!’ answered Pyke. ‘Of course there is.’

‘Who do you mean?’ said Pluck, in the same mysterious manner. ‘The D. of
B.?’

‘The C. of B.,’ replied Pyke, with the faintest trace of a grin
lingering in his countenance. ‘The beautiful sister is the countess; not
the duchess.’

‘True,’ said Pluck, ‘the C. of B. The resemblance is wonderful!’

‘Perfectly startling,’ said Mr. Pyke.

Here was a state of things! Mrs. Wititterly was declared, upon the
testimony of two veracious and competent witnesses, to be the very
picture of a countess! This was one of the consequences of getting into
good society. Why, she might have moved among grovelling people for
twenty years, and never heard of it. How could she, indeed? what did
THEY know about countesses?

The two gentlemen having, by the greediness with which this little
bait was swallowed, tested the extent of Mrs. Wititterly’s appetite for
adulation, proceeded to administer that commodity in very large doses,
thus affording to Sir Mulberry Hawk an opportunity of pestering Miss
Nickleby with questions and remarks, to which she was absolutely obliged
to make some reply. Meanwhile, Lord Verisopht enjoyed unmolested the
full flavour of the gold knob at the top of his cane, as he would have
done to the end of the interview if Mr. Wititterly had not come home, and
caused the conversation to turn to his favourite topic.

‘My lord,’ said Mr. Wititterly, ‘I am delighted--honoured--proud. Be
seated again, my lord, pray. I am proud, indeed--most proud.’

It was to the secret annoyance of his wife that Mr. Wititterly said all
this, for, although she was bursting with pride and arrogance, she would
have had the illustrious guests believe that their visit was quite a
common occurrence, and that they had lords and baronets to see them
every day in the week. But Mr. Wititterly’s feelings were beyond the
power of suppression.

‘It is an honour, indeed!’ said Mr. Wititterly. ‘Julia, my soul, you will
suffer for this tomorrow.’

‘Suffer!’ cried Lord Verisopht.

‘The reaction, my lord, the reaction,’ said Mr. Wititterly. ‘This violent
strain upon the nervous system over, my lord, what ensues? A sinking, a
depression, a lowness, a lassitude, a debility. My lord, if Sir Tumley
Snuffim was to see that delicate creature at this moment, he would
not give a--a--THIS for her life.’ In illustration of which remark, Mr
Wititterly took a pinch of snuff from his box, and jerked it lightly
into the air as an emblem of instability.

‘Not THAT,’ said Mr. Wititterly, looking about him with a serious
countenance. ‘Sir Tumley Snuffim would not give that for Mrs
Wititterly’s existence.’

Mr. Wititterly told this with a kind of sober exultation, as if it were
no trifling distinction for a man to have a wife in such a desperate
state, and Mrs. Wititterly sighed and looked on, as if she felt the
honour, but had determined to bear it as meekly as might be.

‘Mrs. Wititterly,’ said her husband, ‘is Sir Tumley Snuffim’s favourite
patient. I believe I may venture to say, that Mrs. Wititterly is the
first person who took the new medicine which is supposed to have
destroyed a family at Kensington Gravel Pits. I believe she was. If I am
wrong, Julia, my dear, you will correct me.’

‘I believe I was,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, in a faint voice.

As there appeared to be some doubt in the mind of his patron how he
could best join in this conversation, the indefatigable Mr. Pyke threw
himself into the breach, and, by way of saying something to the point,
inquired--with reference to the aforesaid medicine--whether it was nice.

‘No, sir, it was not. It had not even that recommendation,’ said Mr. W.

‘Mrs. Wititterly is quite a martyr,’ observed Pyke, with a complimentary
bow.

‘I THINK I am,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, smiling.

‘I think you are, my dear Julia,’ replied her husband, in a tone which
seemed to say that he was not vain, but still must insist upon their
privileges. ‘If anybody, my lord,’ added Mr. Wititterly, wheeling
round to the nobleman, ‘will produce to me a greater martyr than Mrs
Wititterly, all I can say is, that I shall be glad to see that martyr,
whether male or female--that’s all, my lord.’

Pyke and Pluck promptly remarked that certainly nothing could be fairer
than that; and the call having been by this time protracted to a very
great length, they obeyed Sir Mulberry’s look, and rose to go. This
brought Sir Mulberry himself and Lord Verisopht on their legs also.
Many protestations of friendship, and expressions anticipative of the
pleasure which must inevitably flow from so happy an acquaintance, were
exchanged, and the visitors departed, with renewed assurances that at
all times and seasons the mansion of the Wititterlys would be honoured
by receiving them beneath its roof.

That they came at all times and seasons--that they dined there one day,
supped the next, dined again on the next, and were constantly to and
fro on all--that they made parties to visit public places, and met by
accident at lounges--that upon all these occasions Miss Nickleby was
exposed to the constant and unremitting persecution of Sir Mulberry
Hawk, who now began to feel his character, even in the estimation of his
two dependants, involved in the successful reduction of her pride--that
she had no intervals of peace or rest, except at those hours when she
could sit in her solitary room, and weep over the trials of the day--all
these were consequences naturally flowing from the well-laid plans of
Sir Mulberry, and their able execution by the auxiliaries, Pyke and
Pluck.

And thus for a fortnight matters went on. That any but the weakest and
silliest of people could have seen in one interview that Lord Verisopht,
though he was a lord, and Sir Mulberry Hawk, though he was a baronet,
were not persons accustomed to be the best possible companions, and were
certainly not calculated by habits, manners, tastes, or conversation, to
shine with any very great lustre in the society of ladies, need scarcely
be remarked. But with Mrs. Wititterly the two titles were all sufficient;
coarseness became humour, vulgarity softened itself down into the most
charming eccentricity; insolence took the guise of an easy absence of
reserve, attainable only by those who had had the good fortune to mix
with high folks.

If the mistress put such a construction upon the behaviour of her new
friends, what could the companion urge against them? If they accustomed
themselves to very little restraint before the lady of the house, with
how much more freedom could they address her paid dependent! Nor was
even this the worst. As the odious Sir Mulberry Hawk attached himself
to Kate with less and less of disguise, Mrs. Wititterly began to grow
jealous of the superior attractions of Miss Nickleby. If this feeling
had led to her banishment from the drawing-room when such company was
there, Kate would have been only too happy and willing that it should
have existed, but unfortunately for her she possessed that native
grace and true gentility of manner, and those thousand nameless
accomplishments which give to female society its greatest charm; if
these be valuable anywhere, they were especially so where the lady of
the house was a mere animated doll. The consequence was, that Kate had
the double mortification of being an indispensable part of the circle
when Sir Mulberry and his friends were there, and of being exposed, on
that very account, to all Mrs. Wititterly’s ill-humours and caprices when
they were gone. She became utterly and completely miserable.

Mrs. Wititterly had never thrown off the mask with regard to Sir
Mulberry, but when she was more than usually out of temper, attributed
the circumstance, as ladies sometimes do, to nervous indisposition.
However, as the dreadful idea that Lord Verisopht also was somewhat
taken with Kate, and that she, Mrs. Wititterly, was quite a secondary
person, dawned upon that lady’s mind and gradually developed itself,
she became possessed with a large quantity of highly proper and most
virtuous indignation, and felt it her duty, as a married lady and a
moral member of society, to mention the circumstance to ‘the young
person’ without delay.

Accordingly Mrs. Wititterly broke ground next morning, during a pause in
the novel-reading.

‘Miss Nickleby,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, ‘I wish to speak to you very
gravely. I am sorry to have to do it, upon my word I am very sorry, but
you leave me no alternative, Miss Nickleby.’ Here Mrs. Wititterly tossed
her head--not passionately, only virtuously--and remarked, with some
appearance of excitement, that she feared that palpitation of the heart
was coming on again.

‘Your behaviour, Miss Nickleby,’ resumed the lady, ‘is very far from
pleasing me--very far. I am very anxious indeed that you should do well,
but you may depend upon it, Miss Nickleby, you will not, if you go on as
you do.’

‘Ma’am!’ exclaimed Kate, proudly.

‘Don’t agitate me by speaking in that way, Miss Nickleby, don’t,’ said
Mrs. Wititterly, with some violence, ‘or you’ll compel me to ring the
bell.’

Kate looked at her, but said nothing.

‘You needn’t suppose,’ resumed Mrs. Wititterly, ‘that your looking at me
in that way, Miss Nickleby, will prevent my saying what I am going
to say, which I feel to be a religious duty. You needn’t direct your
glances towards me,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, with a sudden burst of spite;
‘I am not Sir Mulberry, no, nor Lord Frederick Verisopht, Miss Nickleby,
nor am I Mr. Pyke, nor Mr. Pluck either.’

Kate looked at her again, but less steadily than before; and resting her
elbow on the table, covered her eyes with her hand.

‘If such things had been done when I was a young girl,’ said Mrs
Wititterly (this, by the way, must have been some little time before),
‘I don’t suppose anybody would have believed it.’

‘I don’t think they would,’ murmured Kate. ‘I do not think anybody would
believe, without actually knowing it, what I seem doomed to undergo!’

‘Don’t talk to me of being doomed to undergo, Miss Nickleby, if you
please,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, with a shrillness of tone quite surprising
in so great an invalid. ‘I will not be answered, Miss Nickleby. I am not
accustomed to be answered, nor will I permit it for an instant. Do
you hear?’ she added, waiting with some apparent inconsistency FOR an
answer.

‘I do hear you, ma’am,’ replied Kate, ‘with surprise--with greater
surprise than I can express.’

‘I have always considered you a particularly well-behaved young person
for your station in life,’ said Mrs. Wititterly; ‘and as you are a person
of healthy appearance, and neat in your dress and so forth, I have taken
an interest in you, as I do still, considering that I owe a sort of duty
to that respectable old female, your mother. For these reasons, Miss
Nickleby, I must tell you once for all, and begging you to mind what I
say, that I must insist upon your immediately altering your very forward
behaviour to the gentlemen who visit at this house. It really is not
becoming,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, closing her chaste eyes as she spoke;
‘it is improper--quite improper.’

‘Oh!’ cried Kate, looking upwards and clasping her hands; ‘is not this,
is not this, too cruel, too hard to bear! Is it not enough that I should
have suffered as I have, night and day; that I should almost have sunk
in my own estimation from very shame of having been brought into contact
with such people; but must I also be exposed to this unjust and most
unfounded charge!’

‘You will have the goodness to recollect, Miss Nickleby,’ said Mrs
Wititterly, ‘that when you use such terms as “unjust”, and “unfounded”,
you charge me, in effect, with stating that which is untrue.’

‘I do,’ said Kate with honest indignation. ‘Whether you make this
accusation of yourself, or at the prompting of others, is alike to me. I
say it IS vilely, grossly, wilfully untrue. Is it possible!’ cried Kate,
‘that anyone of my own sex can have sat by, and not have seen the misery
these men have caused me? Is it possible that you, ma’am, can have been
present, and failed to mark the insulting freedom that their every look
bespoke? Is it possible that you can have avoided seeing, that these
libertines, in their utter disrespect for you, and utter disregard
of all gentlemanly behaviour, and almost of decency, have had but one
object in introducing themselves here, and that the furtherance of their
designs upon a friendless, helpless girl, who, without this humiliating
confession, might have hoped to receive from one so much her senior
something like womanly aid and sympathy? I do not--I cannot believe it!’

If poor Kate had possessed the slightest knowledge of the world, she
certainly would not have ventured, even in the excitement into which she
had been lashed, upon such an injudicious speech as this. Its effect
was precisely what a more experienced observer would have foreseen.
Mrs. Wititterly received the attack upon her veracity with exemplary
calmness, and listened with the most heroic fortitude to Kate’s account
of her own sufferings. But allusion being made to her being held in
disregard by the gentlemen, she evinced violent emotion, and this blow
was no sooner followed up by the remark concerning her seniority, than
she fell back upon the sofa, uttering dismal screams.

‘What is the matter?’ cried Mr. Wititterly, bouncing into the room.
‘Heavens, what do I see? Julia! Julia! look up, my life, look up!’

But Julia looked down most perseveringly, and screamed still louder; so
Mr. Wititterly rang the bell, and danced in a frenzied manner round
the sofa on which Mrs. Wititterly lay; uttering perpetual cries for Sir
Tumley Snuffim, and never once leaving off to ask for any explanation of
the scene before him.

‘Run for Sir Tumley,’ cried Mr. Wititterly, menacing the page with both
fists. ‘I knew it, Miss Nickleby,’ he said, looking round with an air of
melancholy triumph, ‘that society has been too much for her. This is all
soul, you know, every bit of it.’ With this assurance Mr. Wititterly took
up the prostrate form of Mrs. Wititterly, and carried her bodily off to
bed.

Kate waited until Sir Tumley Snuffim had paid his visit and looked in
with a report, that, through the special interposition of a merciful
Providence (thus spake Sir Tumley), Mrs. Wititterly had gone to sleep.
She then hastily attired herself for walking, and leaving word that she
should return within a couple of hours, hurried away towards her uncle’s
house.

It had been a good day with Ralph Nickleby--quite a lucky day; and as he
walked to and fro in his little back-room with his hands clasped behind
him, adding up in his own mind all the sums that had been, or would be,
netted from the business done since morning, his mouth was drawn into a
hard stern smile; while the firmness of the lines and curves that made
it up, as well as the cunning glance of his cold, bright eye, seemed to
tell, that if any resolution or cunning would increase the profits, they
would not fail to be excited for the purpose.

‘Very good!’ said Ralph, in allusion, no doubt, to some proceeding of
the day. ‘He defies the usurer, does he? Well, we shall see. “Honesty is
the best policy,” is it? We’ll try that too.’

He stopped, and then walked on again.

‘He is content,’ said Ralph, relaxing into a smile, ‘to set his known
character and conduct against the power of money--dross, as he calls it.
Why, what a dull blockhead this fellow must be! Dross to, dross! Who’s
that?’

‘Me,’ said Newman Noggs, looking in. ‘Your niece.’

‘What of her?’ asked Ralph sharply.

‘She’s here.’

‘Here!’

Newman jerked his head towards his little room, to signify that she was
waiting there.

‘What does she want?’ asked Ralph.

‘I don’t know,’ rejoined Newman. ‘Shall I ask?’ he added quickly.

‘No,’ replied Ralph. ‘Show her in! Stay.’ He hastily put away a
padlocked cash-box that was on the table, and substituted in its stead
an empty purse. ‘There,’ said Ralph. ‘NOW she may come in.’

Newman, with a grim smile at this manoeuvre, beckoned the young lady to
advance, and having placed a chair for her, retired; looking stealthily
over his shoulder at Ralph as he limped slowly out.

‘Well,’ said Ralph, roughly enough; but still with something more of
kindness in his manner than he would have exhibited towards anybody
else. ‘Well, my--dear. What now?’

Kate raised her eyes, which were filled with tears; and with an effort
to master her emotion strove to speak, but in vain. So drooping her head
again, she remained silent. Her face was hidden from his view, but Ralph
could see that she was weeping.

‘I can guess the cause of this!’ thought Ralph, after looking at her
for some time in silence. ‘I can--I can--guess the cause. Well! Well!’
thought Ralph--for the moment quite disconcerted, as he watched the
anguish of his beautiful niece. ‘Where is the harm? only a few tears;
and it’s an excellent lesson for her, an excellent lesson.’

‘What is the matter?’ asked Ralph, drawing a chair opposite, and sitting
down.

He was rather taken aback by the sudden firmness with which Kate looked
up and answered him.

‘The matter which brings me to you, sir,’ she said, ‘is one which should
call the blood up into your cheeks, and make you burn to hear, as it
does me to tell. I have been wronged; my feelings have been outraged,
insulted, wounded past all healing, and by your friends.’

‘Friends!’ cried Ralph, sternly. ‘I have no friends, girl.’

‘By the men I saw here, then,’ returned Kate, quickly. ‘If they were no
friends of yours, and you knew what they were,--oh, the more shame on
you, uncle, for bringing me among them. To have subjected me to what
I was exposed to here, through any misplaced confidence or imperfect
knowledge of your guests, would have required some strong excuse; but
if you did it--as I now believe you did--knowing them well, it was most
dastardly and cruel.’

Ralph drew back in utter amazement at this plain speaking, and regarded
Kate with the sternest look. But she met his gaze proudly and firmly,
and although her face was very pale, it looked more noble and handsome,
lighted up as it was, than it had ever appeared before.

‘There is some of that boy’s blood in you, I see,’ said Ralph, speaking
in his harshest tones, as something in the flashing eye reminded him of
Nicholas at their last meeting.

‘I hope there is!’ replied Kate. ‘I should be proud to know it. I am
young, uncle, and all the difficulties and miseries of my situation have
kept it down, but I have been roused today beyond all endurance, and
come what may, I WILL NOT, as I am your brother’s child, bear these
insults longer.’

‘What insults, girl?’ demanded Ralph, sharply.

‘Remember what took place here, and ask yourself,’ replied Kate,
colouring deeply. ‘Uncle, you must--I am sure you will--release me from
such vile and degrading companionship as I am exposed to now. I do not
mean,’ said Kate, hurrying to the old man, and laying her arm upon his
shoulder; ‘I do not mean to be angry and violent--I beg your pardon if
I have seemed so, dear uncle,--but you do not know what I have suffered,
you do not indeed. You cannot tell what the heart of a young girl
is--I have no right to expect you should; but when I tell you that I am
wretched, and that my heart is breaking, I am sure you will help me. I
am sure, I am sure you will!’

Ralph looked at her for an instant; then turned away his head, and beat
his foot nervously upon the ground.

‘I have gone on day after day,’ said Kate, bending over him, and timidly
placing her little hand in his, ‘in the hope that this persecution would
cease; I have gone on day after day, compelled to assume the appearance
of cheerfulness, when I was most unhappy. I have had no counsellor, no
adviser, no one to protect me. Mama supposes that these are honourable
men, rich and distinguished, and how CAN I--how can I undeceive
her--when she is so happy in these little delusions, which are the only
happiness she has? The lady with whom you placed me, is not the person
to whom I could confide matters of so much delicacy, and I have come at
last to you, the only friend I have at hand--almost the only friend I
have at all--to entreat and implore you to assist me.’

‘How can I assist you, child?’ said Ralph, rising from his chair, and
pacing up and down the room in his old attitude.

‘You have influence with one of these men, I KNOW,’ rejoined Kate,
emphatically. ‘Would not a word from you induce them to desist from this
unmanly course?’

‘No,’ said Ralph, suddenly turning; ‘at least--that--I can’t say it, if
it would.’

‘Can’t say it!’

‘No,’ said Ralph, coming to a dead stop, and clasping his hands more
tightly behind him. ‘I can’t say it.’

Kate fell back a step or two, and looked at him, as if in doubt whether
she had heard aright.

‘We are connected in business,’ said Ralph, poising himself alternately
on his toes and heels, and looking coolly in his niece’s face, ‘in
business, and I can’t afford to offend them. What is it after all? We
have all our trials, and this is one of yours. Some girls would be proud
to have such gallants at their feet.’

‘Proud!’ cried Kate.

‘I don’t say,’ rejoined Ralph, raising his forefinger, ‘but that you do
right to despise them; no, you show your good sense in that, as indeed
I knew from the first you would. Well. In all other respects you are
comfortably bestowed. It’s not much to bear. If this young lord does dog
your footsteps, and whisper his drivelling inanities in your ears, what
of it? It’s a dishonourable passion. So be it; it won’t last long. Some
other novelty will spring up one day, and you will be released. In the
mean time--’

‘In the mean time,’ interrupted Kate, with becoming pride and
indignation, ‘I am to be the scorn of my own sex, and the toy of the
other; justly condemned by all women of right feeling, and despised by
all honest and honourable men; sunken in my own esteem, and degraded in
every eye that looks upon me. No, not if I work my fingers to the bone,
not if I am driven to the roughest and hardest labour. Do not mistake
me. I will not disgrace your recommendation. I will remain in the house
in which it placed me, until I am entitled to leave it by the terms of
my engagement; though, mind, I see these men no more. When I quit it, I
will hide myself from them and you, and, striving to support my mother
by hard service, I will live, at least, in peace, and trust in God to
help me.’

With these words, she waved her hand, and quitted the room, leaving
Ralph Nickleby motionless as a statue.

The surprise with which Kate, as she closed the room-door, beheld, close
beside it, Newman Noggs standing bolt upright in a little niche in the
wall like some scarecrow or Guy Faux laid up in winter quarters, almost
occasioned her to call aloud. But, Newman laying his finger upon his
lips, she had the presence of mind to refrain.

‘Don’t,’ said Newman, gliding out of his recess, and accompanying
her across the hall. ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry.’ Two very large tears,
by-the-bye, were running down Newman’s face as he spoke.

‘I see how it is,’ said poor Noggs, drawing from his pocket what seemed
to be a very old duster, and wiping Kate’s eyes with it, as gently as if
she were an infant. ‘You’re giving way now. Yes, yes, very good; that’s
right, I like that. It was right not to give way before him. Yes, yes!
Ha, ha, ha! Oh, yes. Poor thing!’

With these disjointed exclamations, Newman wiped his own eyes with the
afore-mentioned duster, and, limping to the street-door, opened it to
let her out.

‘Don’t cry any more,’ whispered Newman. ‘I shall see you soon. Ha! ha!
ha! And so shall somebody else too. Yes, yes. Ho! ho!’

‘God bless you,’ answered Kate, hurrying out, ‘God bless you.’

‘Same to you,’ rejoined Newman, opening the door again a little way to
say so. ‘Ha, ha, ha! Ho! ho! ho!’

And Newman Noggs opened the door once again to nod cheerfully, and
laugh--and shut it, to shake his head mournfully, and cry.

Ralph remained in the same attitude till he heard the noise of the
closing door, when he shrugged his shoulders, and after a few turns
about the room--hasty at first, but gradually becoming slower, as he
relapsed into himself--sat down before his desk.

It is one of those problems of human nature, which may be noted down,
but not solved;--although Ralph felt no remorse at that moment for his
conduct towards the innocent, true-hearted girl; although his libertine
clients had done precisely what he had expected, precisely what he most
wished, and precisely what would tend most to his advantage, still he
hated them for doing it, from the very bottom of his soul.

‘Ugh!’ said Ralph, scowling round, and shaking his clenched hand as the
faces of the two profligates rose up before his mind; ‘you shall pay for
this. Oh! you shall pay for this!’

As the usurer turned for consolation to his books and papers, a
performance was going on outside his office door, which would have
occasioned him no small surprise, if he could by any means have become
acquainted with it.

Newman Noggs was the sole actor. He stood at a little distance from the
door, with his face towards it; and with the sleeves of his coat
turned back at the wrists, was occupied in bestowing the most vigorous,
scientific, and straightforward blows upon the empty air.

At first sight, this would have appeared merely a wise precaution in
a man of sedentary habits, with the view of opening the chest and
strengthening the muscles of the arms. But the intense eagerness and
joy depicted in the face of Newman Noggs, which was suffused with
perspiration; the surprising energy with which he directed a constant
succession of blows towards a particular panel about five feet eight
from the ground, and still worked away in the most untiring and
persevering manner, would have sufficiently explained to the attentive
observer, that his imagination was thrashing, to within an inch of his
life, his body’s most active employer, Mr. Ralph Nickleby.



CHAPTER 29

Of the Proceedings of Nicholas, and certain Internal Divisions in the
Company of Mr. Vincent Crummles


The unexpected success and favour with which his experiment at
Portsmouth had been received, induced Mr. Crummles to prolong his stay in
that town for a fortnight beyond the period he had originally assigned
for the duration of his visit, during which time Nicholas personated a
vast variety of characters with undiminished success, and attracted so
many people to the theatre who had never been seen there before, that
a benefit was considered by the manager a very promising speculation.
Nicholas assenting to the terms proposed, the benefit was had, and by it
he realised no less a sum than twenty pounds.

Possessed of this unexpected wealth, his first act was to enclose
to honest John Browdie the amount of his friendly loan, which he
accompanied with many expressions of gratitude and esteem, and many
cordial wishes for his matrimonial happiness. To Newman Noggs he
forwarded one half of the sum he had realised, entreating him to take
an opportunity of handing it to Kate in secret, and conveying to her the
warmest assurances of his love and affection. He made no mention of the
way in which he had employed himself; merely informing Newman that
a letter addressed to him under his assumed name at the Post Office,
Portsmouth, would readily find him, and entreating that worthy friend to
write full particulars of the situation of his mother and sister, and
an account of all the grand things that Ralph Nickleby had done for them
since his departure from London.

‘You are out of spirits,’ said Smike, on the night after the letter had
been dispatched.

‘Not I!’ rejoined Nicholas, with assumed gaiety, for the confession
would have made the boy miserable all night; ‘I was thinking about my
sister, Smike.’

‘Sister!’

‘Ay.’

‘Is she like you?’ inquired Smike.

‘Why, so they say,’ replied Nicholas, laughing, ‘only a great deal
handsomer.’

‘She must be VERY beautiful,’ said Smike, after thinking a little while
with his hands folded together, and his eyes bent upon his friend.

‘Anybody who didn’t know you as well as I do, my dear fellow, would say
you were an accomplished courtier,’ said Nicholas.

‘I don’t even know what that is,’ replied Smike, shaking his head.
‘Shall I ever see your sister?’

‘To be sure,’ cried Nicholas; ‘we shall all be together one of these
days--when we are rich, Smike.’

‘How is it that you, who are so kind and good to me, have nobody to be
kind to you?’ asked Smike. ‘I cannot make that out.’

‘Why, it is a long story,’ replied Nicholas, ‘and one you would
have some difficulty in comprehending, I fear. I have an enemy--you
understand what that is?’

‘Oh, yes, I understand that,’ said Smike.

‘Well, it is owing to him,’ returned Nicholas. ‘He is rich, and not so
easily punished as YOUR old enemy, Mr. Squeers. He is my uncle, but he is
a villain, and has done me wrong.’

‘Has he though?’ asked Smike, bending eagerly forward. ‘What is his
name? Tell me his name.’

‘Ralph--Ralph Nickleby.’

‘Ralph Nickleby,’ repeated Smike. ‘Ralph. I’ll get that name by heart.’

He had muttered it over to himself some twenty times, when a loud knock
at the door disturbed him from his occupation. Before he could open it,
Mr. Folair, the pantomimist, thrust in his head.

Mr. Folair’s head was usually decorated with a very round hat, unusually
high in the crown, and curled up quite tight in the brims. On the
present occasion he wore it very much on one side, with the back part
forward in consequence of its being the least rusty; round his neck he
wore a flaming red worsted comforter, whereof the straggling ends peeped
out beneath his threadbare Newmarket coat, which was very tight and
buttoned all the way up. He carried in his hand one very dirty glove,
and a cheap dress cane with a glass handle; in short, his whole
appearance was unusually dashing, and demonstrated a far more scrupulous
attention to his toilet than he was in the habit of bestowing upon it.

‘Good-evening, sir,’ said Mr. Folair, taking off the tall hat, and
running his fingers through his hair. ‘I bring a communication. Hem!’

‘From whom and what about?’ inquired Nicholas. ‘You are unusually
mysterious tonight.’

‘Cold, perhaps,’ returned Mr. Folair; ‘cold, perhaps. That is the fault
of my position--not of myself, Mr. Johnson. My position as a mutual
friend requires it, sir.’ Mr. Folair paused with a most impressive look,
and diving into the hat before noticed, drew from thence a small piece
of whity-brown paper curiously folded, whence he brought forth a note
which it had served to keep clean, and handing it over to Nicholas,
said--

‘Have the goodness to read that, sir.’

Nicholas, in a state of much amazement, took the note and broke the
seal, glancing at Mr. Folair as he did so, who, knitting his brow and
pursing up his mouth with great dignity, was sitting with his eyes
steadily fixed upon the ceiling.

It was directed to blank Johnson, Esq., by favour of Augustus Folair,
Esq.; and the astonishment of Nicholas was in no degree lessened, when
he found it to be couched in the following laconic terms:--

“Mr. Lenville presents his kind regards to Mr. Johnson, and will feel
obliged if he will inform him at what hour tomorrow morning it will be
most convenient to him to meet Mr. L. at the Theatre, for the purpose of
having his nose pulled in the presence of the company.

“Mr. Lenville requests Mr. Johnson not to neglect making an appointment,
as he has invited two or three professional friends to witness the
ceremony, and cannot disappoint them upon any account whatever.

“PORTSMOUTH, TUESDAY NIGHT.”

Indignant as he was at this impertinence, there was something so
exquisitely absurd in such a cartel of defiance, that Nicholas was
obliged to bite his lip and read the note over two or three times before
he could muster sufficient gravity and sternness to address the hostile
messenger, who had not taken his eyes from the ceiling, nor altered the
expression of his face in the slightest degree.

‘Do you know the contents of this note, sir?’ he asked, at length.

‘Yes,’ rejoined Mr. Folair, looking round for an instant, and immediately
carrying his eyes back again to the ceiling.

‘And how dare you bring it here, sir?’ asked Nicholas, tearing it into
very little pieces, and jerking it in a shower towards the messenger.
‘Had you no fear of being kicked downstairs, sir?’

Mr. Folair turned his head--now ornamented with several fragments of the
note--towards Nicholas, and with the same imperturbable dignity, briefly
replied ‘No.’

‘Then,’ said Nicholas, taking up the tall hat and tossing it towards the
door, ‘you had better follow that article of your dress, sir, or you
may find yourself very disagreeably deceived, and that within a dozen
seconds.’

‘I say, Johnson,’ remonstrated Mr. Folair, suddenly losing all his
dignity, ‘none of that, you know. No tricks with a gentleman’s
wardrobe.’

‘Leave the room,’ returned Nicholas. ‘How could you presume to come here
on such an errand, you scoundrel?’

‘Pooh! pooh!’ said Mr. Folair, unwinding his comforter, and gradually
getting himself out of it. ‘There--that’s enough.’

‘Enough!’ cried Nicholas, advancing towards him. ‘Take yourself off,
sir.’

‘Pooh! pooh! I tell you,’ returned Mr. Folair, waving his hand in
deprecation of any further wrath; ‘I wasn’t in earnest. I only brought
it in joke.’

‘You had better be careful how you indulge in such jokes again,’
said Nicholas, ‘or you may find an allusion to pulling noses rather a
dangerous reminder for the subject of your facetiousness. Was it written
in joke, too, pray?’

‘No, no, that’s the best of it,’ returned the actor; ‘right down
earnest--honour bright.’

Nicholas could not repress a smile at the odd figure before him, which,
at all times more calculated to provoke mirth than anger, was especially
so at that moment, when with one knee upon the ground, Mr. Folair twirled
his old hat round upon his hand, and affected the extremest agony lest
any of the nap should have been knocked off--an ornament which it is
almost superfluous to say, it had not boasted for many months.

‘Come, sir,’ said Nicholas, laughing in spite of himself. ‘Have the
goodness to explain.’

‘Why, I’ll tell you how it is,’ said Mr. Folair, sitting himself down
in a chair with great coolness. ‘Since you came here Lenville has done
nothing but second business, and, instead of having a reception every
night as he used to have, they have let him come on as if he was
nobody.’

‘What do you mean by a reception?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Jupiter!’ exclaimed Mr. Folair, ‘what an unsophisticated shepherd you
are, Johnson! Why, applause from the house when you first come on. So he
has gone on night after night, never getting a hand, and you getting a
couple of rounds at least, and sometimes three, till at length he got
quite desperate, and had half a mind last night to play Tybalt with a
real sword, and pink you--not dangerously, but just enough to lay you up
for a month or two.’

‘Very considerate,’ remarked Nicholas.

‘Yes, I think it was under the circumstances; his professional
reputation being at stake,’ said Mr. Folair, quite seriously. ‘But his
heart failed him, and he cast about for some other way of annoying
you, and making himself popular at the same time--for that’s the point.
Notoriety, notoriety, is the thing. Bless you, if he had pinked you,’
said Mr. Folair, stopping to make a calculation in his mind, ‘it would
have been worth--ah, it would have been worth eight or ten shillings a
week to him. All the town would have come to see the actor who nearly
killed a man by mistake; I shouldn’t wonder if it had got him an
engagement in London. However, he was obliged to try some other mode of
getting popular, and this one occurred to him. It’s a clever idea, really.
If you had shown the white feather, and let him pull your nose, he’d
have got it into the paper; if you had sworn the peace against him, it
would have been in the paper too, and he’d have been just as much talked
about as you--don’t you see?’

‘Oh, certainly,’ rejoined Nicholas; ‘but suppose I were to turn the
tables, and pull HIS nose, what then? Would that make his fortune?’

‘Why, I don’t think it would,’ replied Mr. Folair, scratching his head,
‘because there wouldn’t be any romance about it, and he wouldn’t be
favourably known. To tell you the truth though, he didn’t calculate much
upon that, for you’re always so mild-spoken, and are so popular among
the women, that we didn’t suspect you of showing fight. If you did,
however, he has a way of getting out of it easily, depend upon that.’

‘Has he?’ rejoined Nicholas. ‘We will try, tomorrow morning. In the
meantime, you can give whatever account of our interview you like best.
Good-night.’

As Mr. Folair was pretty well known among his fellow-actors for a man who
delighted in mischief, and was by no means scrupulous, Nicholas had not
much doubt but that he had secretly prompted the tragedian in the course
he had taken, and, moreover, that he would have carried his mission with
a very high hand if he had not been disconcerted by the very unexpected
demonstrations with which it had been received. It was not worth his
while to be serious with him, however, so he dismissed the pantomimist,
with a gentle hint that if he offended again it would be under
the penalty of a broken head; and Mr. Folair, taking the caution in
exceedingly good part, walked away to confer with his principal,
and give such an account of his proceedings as he might think best
calculated to carry on the joke.

He had no doubt reported that Nicholas was in a state of extreme bodily
fear; for when that young gentleman walked with much deliberation down
to the theatre next morning at the usual hour, he found all the company
assembled in evident expectation, and Mr. Lenville, with his severest
stage face, sitting majestically on a table, whistling defiance.

Now the ladies were on the side of Nicholas, and the gentlemen (being
jealous) were on the side of the disappointed tragedian; so that the
latter formed a little group about the redoubtable Mr. Lenville, and the
former looked on at a little distance in some trepidation and anxiety.
On Nicholas stopping to salute them, Mr. Lenville laughed a scornful
laugh, and made some general remark touching the natural history of
puppies.

‘Oh!’ said Nicholas, looking quietly round, ‘are you there?’

‘Slave!’ returned Mr. Lenville, flourishing his right arm, and
approaching Nicholas with a theatrical stride. But somehow he appeared
just at that moment a little startled, as if Nicholas did not look quite
so frightened as he had expected, and came all at once to an awkward
halt, at which the assembled ladies burst into a shrill laugh.

‘Object of my scorn and hatred!’ said Mr. Lenville, ‘I hold ye in
contempt.’

Nicholas laughed in very unexpected enjoyment of this performance; and
the ladies, by way of encouragement, laughed louder than before; whereat
Mr. Lenville assumed his bitterest smile, and expressed his opinion that
they were ‘minions’.

‘But they shall not protect ye!’ said the tragedian, taking an upward
look at Nicholas, beginning at his boots and ending at the crown of his
head, and then a downward one, beginning at the crown of his head,
and ending at his boots--which two looks, as everybody knows, express
defiance on the stage. ‘They shall not protect ye--boy!’

Thus speaking, Mr. Lenville folded his arms, and treated Nicholas to that
expression of face with which, in melodramatic performances, he was in
the habit of regarding the tyrannical kings when they said, ‘Away
with him to the deepest dungeon beneath the castle moat;’ and which,
accompanied with a little jingling of fetters, had been known to produce
great effects in its time.

Whether it was the absence of the fetters or not, it made no very deep
impression on Mr. Lenville’s adversary, however, but rather seemed to
increase the good-humour expressed in his countenance; in which stage of
the contest, one or two gentlemen, who had come out expressly to witness
the pulling of Nicholas’s nose, grew impatient, murmuring that if it
were to be done at all it had better be done at once, and that if Mr
Lenville didn’t mean to do it he had better say so, and not keep them
waiting there. Thus urged, the tragedian adjusted the cuff of his right
coat sleeve for the performance of the operation, and walked in a very
stately manner up to Nicholas, who suffered him to approach to within
the requisite distance, and then, without the smallest discomposure,
knocked him down.

Before the discomfited tragedian could raise his head from the boards,
Mrs. Lenville (who, as has been before hinted, was in an interesting
state) rushed from the rear rank of ladies, and uttering a piercing
scream threw herself upon the body.

‘Do you see this, monster? Do you see THIS?’ cried Mr. Lenville, sitting
up, and pointing to his prostrate lady, who was holding him very tight
round the waist.

‘Come,’ said Nicholas, nodding his head, ‘apologise for the insolent
note you wrote to me last night, and waste no more time in talking.’

‘Never!’ cried Mr. Lenville.

‘Yes--yes--yes!’ screamed his wife. ‘For my sake--for mine,
Lenville--forego all idle forms, unless you would see me a blighted
corse at your feet.’

‘This is affecting!’ said Mr. Lenville, looking round him, and drawing
the back of his hand across his eyes. ‘The ties of nature are strong.
The weak husband and the father--the father that is yet to be--relents.
I apologise.’

‘Humbly and submissively?’ said Nicholas.

‘Humbly and submissively,’ returned the tragedian, scowling upwards.
‘But only to save her,--for a time will come--’

‘Very good,’ said Nicholas; ‘I hope Mrs. Lenville may have a good one;
and when it does come, and you are a father, you shall retract it if you
have the courage. There. Be careful, sir, to what lengths your jealousy
carries you another time; and be careful, also, before you venture
too far, to ascertain your rival’s temper.’ With this parting advice
Nicholas picked up Mr. Lenville’s ash stick which had flown out of his
hand, and breaking it in half, threw him the pieces and withdrew, bowing
slightly to the spectators as he walked out.

The profoundest deference was paid to Nicholas that night, and the
people who had been most anxious to have his nose pulled in the morning,
embraced occasions of taking him aside, and telling him with great
feeling, how very friendly they took it that he should have treated that
Lenville so properly, who was a most unbearable fellow, and on whom they
had all, by a remarkable coincidence, at one time or other contemplated
the infliction of condign punishment, which they had only been
restrained from administering by considerations of mercy; indeed, to
judge from the invariable termination of all these stories, there never
was such a charitable and kind-hearted set of people as the male members
of Mr. Crummles’s company.

Nicholas bore his triumph, as he had his success in the little world of
the theatre, with the utmost moderation and good humour. The crestfallen
Mr. Lenville made an expiring effort to obtain revenge by sending a
boy into the gallery to hiss, but he fell a sacrifice to popular
indignation, and was promptly turned out without having his money back.

‘Well, Smike,’ said Nicholas when the first piece was over, and he had
almost finished dressing to go home, ‘is there any letter yet?’

‘Yes,’ replied Smike, ‘I got this one from the post-office.’

‘From Newman Noggs,’ said Nicholas, casting his eye upon the cramped
direction; ‘it’s no easy matter to make his writing out. Let me see--let
me see.’

By dint of poring over the letter for half an hour, he contrived to make
himself master of the contents, which were certainly not of a nature
to set his mind at ease. Newman took upon himself to send back the ten
pounds, observing that he had ascertained that neither Mrs. Nickleby nor
Kate was in actual want of money at the moment, and that a time might
shortly come when Nicholas might want it more. He entreated him not to
be alarmed at what he was about to say;--there was no bad news--they
were in good health--but he thought circumstances might occur, or were
occurring, which would render it absolutely necessary that Kate should
have her brother’s protection, and if so, Newman said, he would write to
him to that effect, either by the next post or the next but one.

Nicholas read this passage very often, and the more he thought of it
the more he began to fear some treachery upon the part of Ralph. Once
or twice he felt tempted to repair to London at all hazards without an
hour’s delay, but a little reflection assured him that if such a step
were necessary, Newman would have spoken out and told him so at once.

‘At all events I should prepare them here for the possibility of my
going away suddenly,’ said Nicholas; ‘I should lose no time in doing
that.’ As the thought occurred to him, he took up his hat and hurried to
the green-room.

‘Well, Mr. Johnson,’ said Mrs. Crummles, who was seated there in full
regal costume, with the phenomenon as the Maiden in her maternal arms,
‘next week for Ryde, then for Winchester, then for--’

‘I have some reason to fear,’ interrupted Nicholas, ‘that before you
leave here my career with you will have closed.’

‘Closed!’ cried Mrs. Crummles, raising her hands in astonishment.

‘Closed!’ cried Miss Snevellicci, trembling so much in her tights that
she actually laid her hand upon the shoulder of the manageress for
support.

‘Why he don’t mean to say he’s going!’ exclaimed Mrs. Grudden, making her
way towards Mrs. Crummles. ‘Hoity toity! Nonsense.’

The phenomenon, being of an affectionate nature and moreover excitable,
raised a loud cry, and Miss Belvawney and Miss Bravassa actually shed
tears. Even the male performers stopped in their conversation, and
echoed the word ‘Going!’ although some among them (and they had been
the loudest in their congratulations that day) winked at each other
as though they would not be sorry to lose such a favoured rival; an
opinion, indeed, which the honest Mr. Folair, who was ready dressed for
the savage, openly stated in so many words to a demon with whom he was
sharing a pot of porter.

Nicholas briefly said that he feared it would be so, although he could
not yet speak with any degree of certainty; and getting away as soon as
he could, went home to con Newman’s letter once more, and speculate upon
it afresh.

How trifling all that had been occupying his time and thoughts for many
weeks seemed to him during that sleepless night, and how constantly and
incessantly present to his imagination was the one idea that Kate in the
midst of some great trouble and distress might even then be looking--and
vainly too--for him!



CHAPTER 30

Festivities are held in honour of Nicholas, who suddenly withdraws
himself from the Society of Mr. Vincent Crummles and his Theatrical
Companions


Mr. Vincent Crummles was no sooner acquainted with the public
announcement which Nicholas had made relative to the probability of
his shortly ceasing to be a member of the company, than he evinced many
tokens of grief and consternation; and, in the extremity of his despair,
even held out certain vague promises of a speedy improvement not only in
the amount of his regular salary, but also in the contingent emoluments
appertaining to his authorship. Finding Nicholas bent upon quitting the
society--for he had now determined that, even if no further tidings came
from Newman, he would, at all hazards, ease his mind by repairing to
London and ascertaining the exact position of his sister--Mr. Crummles
was fain to content himself by calculating the chances of his coming
back again, and taking prompt and energetic measures to make the most of
him before he went away.

‘Let me see,’ said Mr. Crummles, taking off his outlaw’s wig, the better
to arrive at a cool-headed view of the whole case. ‘Let me see. This is
Wednesday night. We’ll have posters out the first thing in the morning,
announcing positively your last appearance for tomorrow.’

‘But perhaps it may not be my last appearance, you know,’ said Nicholas.
‘Unless I am summoned away, I should be sorry to inconvenience you by
leaving before the end of the week.’

‘So much the better,’ returned Mr. Crummles. ‘We can have positively
your last appearance, on Thursday--re-engagement for one night more, on
Friday--and, yielding to the wishes of numerous influential patrons, who
were disappointed in obtaining seats, on Saturday. That ought to bring
three very decent houses.’

‘Then I am to make three last appearances, am I?’ inquired Nicholas,
smiling.

‘Yes,’ rejoined the manager, scratching his head with an air of some
vexation; ‘three is not enough, and it’s very bungling and irregular
not to have more, but if we can’t help it we can’t, so there’s no use
in talking. A novelty would be very desirable. You couldn’t sing a comic
song on the pony’s back, could you?’

‘No,’ replied Nicholas, ‘I couldn’t indeed.’

‘It has drawn money before now,’ said Mr. Crummles, with a look of
disappointment. ‘What do you think of a brilliant display of fireworks?’

‘That it would be rather expensive,’ replied Nicholas, drily.

‘Eighteen-pence would do it,’ said Mr. Crummles. ‘You on the top of
a pair of steps with the phenomenon in an attitude; “Farewell!” on a
transparency behind; and nine people at the wings with a squib in each
hand--all the dozen and a half going off at once--it would be very
grand--awful from the front, quite awful.’

As Nicholas appeared by no means impressed with the solemnity of the
proposed effect, but, on the contrary, received the proposition in a
most irreverent manner, and laughed at it very heartily, Mr. Crummles
abandoned the project in its birth, and gloomily observed that they
must make up the best bill they could with combats and hornpipes, and so
stick to the legitimate drama.

For the purpose of carrying this object into instant execution, the
manager at once repaired to a small dressing-room, adjacent, where
Mrs. Crummles was then occupied in exchanging the habiliments of
a melodramatic empress for the ordinary attire of matrons in the
nineteenth century. And with the assistance of this lady, and the
accomplished Mrs. Grudden (who had quite a genius for making out bills,
being a great hand at throwing in the notes of admiration, and knowing
from long experience exactly where the largest capitals ought to go), he
seriously applied himself to the composition of the poster.

‘Heigho!’ sighed Nicholas, as he threw himself back in the prompter’s
chair, after telegraphing the needful directions to Smike, who had been
playing a meagre tailor in the interlude, with one skirt to his coat,
and a little pocket-handkerchief with a large hole in it, and a woollen
nightcap, and a red nose, and other distinctive marks peculiar to
tailors on the stage. ‘Heigho! I wish all this were over.’

‘Over, Mr. Johnson!’ repeated a female voice behind him, in a kind of
plaintive surprise.

‘It was an ungallant speech, certainly,’ said Nicholas, looking up to
see who the speaker was, and recognising Miss Snevellicci. ‘I would not
have made it if I had known you had been within hearing.’

‘What a dear that Mr. Digby is!’ said Miss Snevellicci, as the tailor
went off on the opposite side, at the end of the piece, with great
applause. (Smike’s theatrical name was Digby.)

‘I’ll tell him presently, for his gratification, that you said so,’
returned Nicholas.

‘Oh you naughty thing!’ rejoined Miss Snevellicci. ‘I don’t know though,
that I should much mind HIS knowing my opinion of him; with some other
people, indeed, it might be--’ Here Miss Snevellicci stopped, as though
waiting to be questioned, but no questioning came, for Nicholas was
thinking about more serious matters.

‘How kind it is of you,’ resumed Miss Snevellicci, after a short
silence, ‘to sit waiting here for him night after night, night after
night, no matter how tired you are; and taking so much pains with him,
and doing it all with as much delight and readiness as if you were
coining gold by it!’

‘He well deserves all the kindness I can show him, and a great deal
more,’ said Nicholas. ‘He is the most grateful, single-hearted,
affectionate creature that ever breathed.’

‘So odd, too,’ remarked Miss Snevellicci, ‘isn’t he?’

‘God help him, and those who have made him so; he is indeed,’ rejoined
Nicholas, shaking his head.

‘He is such a devilish close chap,’ said Mr. Folair, who had come up a
little before, and now joined in the conversation. ‘Nobody can ever get
anything out of him.’

‘What SHOULD they get out of him?’ asked Nicholas, turning round with
some abruptness.

‘Zooks! what a fire-eater you are, Johnson!’ returned Mr. Folair, pulling
up the heel of his dancing shoe. ‘I’m only talking of the natural
curiosity of the people here, to know what he has been about all his
life.’

‘Poor fellow! it is pretty plain, I should think, that he has not the
intellect to have been about anything of much importance to them or
anybody else,’ said Nicholas.

‘Ay,’ rejoined the actor, contemplating the effect of his face in a lamp
reflector, ‘but that involves the whole question, you know.’

‘What question?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Why, the who he is and what he is, and how you two, who are so
different, came to be such close companions,’ replied Mr. Folair,
delighted with the opportunity of saying something disagreeable. ‘That’s
in everybody’s mouth.’

‘The “everybody” of the theatre, I suppose?’ said Nicholas,
contemptuously.

‘In it and out of it too,’ replied the actor. ‘Why, you know, Lenville
says--’

‘I thought I had silenced him effectually,’ interrupted Nicholas,
reddening.

‘Perhaps you have,’ rejoined the immovable Mr. Folair; ‘if you have, he
said this before he was silenced: Lenville says that you’re a regular
stick of an actor, and that it’s only the mystery about you that has
caused you to go down with the people here, and that Crummles keeps
it up for his own sake; though Lenville says he don’t believe there’s
anything at all in it, except your having got into a scrape and run away
from somewhere, for doing something or other.’

‘Oh!’ said Nicholas, forcing a smile.

‘That’s a part of what he says,’ added Mr. Folair. ‘I mention it as the
friend of both parties, and in strict confidence. I don’t agree with
him, you know. He says he takes Digby to be more knave than fool; and
old Fluggers, who does the heavy business you know, HE says that when he
delivered messages at Covent Garden the season before last, there used
to be a pickpocket hovering about the coach-stand who had exactly the
face of Digby; though, as he very properly says, Digby may not be the
same, but only his brother, or some near relation.’

‘Oh!’ cried Nicholas again.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Folair, with undisturbed calmness, ‘that’s what they say.
I thought I’d tell you, because really you ought to know. Oh! here’s
this blessed phenomenon at last. Ugh, you little imposition, I should
like to--quite ready, my darling,--humbug--Ring up, Mrs. G., and let the
favourite wake ‘em.’

Uttering in a loud voice such of the latter allusions as were
complimentary to the unconscious phenomenon, and giving the rest in a
confidential ‘aside’ to Nicholas, Mr. Folair followed the ascent of
the curtain with his eyes, regarded with a sneer the reception of Miss
Crummles as the Maiden, and, falling back a step or two to advance with
the better effect, uttered a preliminary howl, and ‘went on’ chattering
his teeth and brandishing his tin tomahawk as the Indian Savage.

‘So these are some of the stories they invent about us, and bandy from
mouth to mouth!’ thought Nicholas. ‘If a man would commit an inexpiable
offence against any society, large or small, let him be successful. They
will forgive him any crime but that.’

‘You surely don’t mind what that malicious creature says, Mr. Johnson?’
observed Miss Snevellicci in her most winning tones.

‘Not I,’ replied Nicholas. ‘If I were going to remain here, I might
think it worth my while to embroil myself. As it is, let them talk till
they are hoarse. But here,’ added Nicholas, as Smike approached, ‘here
comes the subject of a portion of their good-nature, so let he and I say
good night together.’

‘No, I will not let either of you say anything of the kind,’ returned
Miss Snevellicci. ‘You must come home and see mama, who only came to
Portsmouth today, and is dying to behold you. Led, my dear, persuade Mr
Johnson.’

‘Oh, I’m sure,’ returned Miss Ledrook, with considerable vivacity, ‘if
YOU can’t persuade him--’ Miss Ledrook said no more, but intimated, by
a dexterous playfulness, that if Miss Snevellicci couldn’t persuade him,
nobody could.

‘Mr. and Mrs. Lillyvick have taken lodgings in our house, and share our
sitting-room for the present,’ said Miss Snevellicci. ‘Won’t that induce
you?’

‘Surely,’ returned Nicholas, ‘I can require no possible inducement
beyond your invitation.’

‘Oh no! I dare say,’ rejoined Miss Snevellicci. And Miss Ledrook said,
‘Upon my word!’ Upon which Miss Snevellicci said that Miss Ledrook was a
giddy thing; and Miss Ledrook said that Miss Snevellicci needn’t colour
up quite so much; and Miss Snevellicci beat Miss Ledrook, and Miss
Ledrook beat Miss Snevellicci.

‘Come,’ said Miss Ledrook, ‘it’s high time we were there, or we shall
have poor Mrs. Snevellicci thinking that you have run away with her
daughter, Mr. Johnson; and then we should have a pretty to-do.’

‘My dear Led,’ remonstrated Miss Snevellicci, ‘how you do talk!’

Miss Ledrook made no answer, but taking Smike’s arm in hers, left her
friend and Nicholas to follow at their pleasure; which it pleased them,
or rather pleased Nicholas, who had no great fancy for a TETE-A-TETE
under the circumstances, to do at once.

There were not wanting matters of conversation when they reached the
street, for it turned out that Miss Snevellicci had a small basket to
carry home, and Miss Ledrook a small bandbox, both containing such minor
articles of theatrical costume as the lady performers usually carried to
and fro every evening. Nicholas would insist upon carrying the basket,
and Miss Snevellicci would insist upon carrying it herself, which
gave rise to a struggle, in which Nicholas captured the basket and
the bandbox likewise. Then Nicholas said, that he wondered what could
possibly be inside the basket, and attempted to peep in, whereat Miss
Snevellicci screamed, and declared that if she thought he had seen,
she was sure she should faint away. This declaration was followed by a
similar attempt on the bandbox, and similar demonstrations on the part
of Miss Ledrook, and then both ladies vowed that they wouldn’t move a
step further until Nicholas had promised that he wouldn’t offer to peep
again. At last Nicholas pledged himself to betray no further curiosity,
and they walked on: both ladies giggling very much, and declaring
that they never had seen such a wicked creature in all their born
days--never.

Lightening the way with such pleasantry as this, they arrived at the
tailor’s house in no time; and here they made quite a little party,
there being present besides Mr. Lillyvick and Mrs. Lillyvick, not only
Miss Snevellicci’s mama, but her papa also. And an uncommonly fine man
Miss Snevellicci’s papa was, with a hook nose, and a white forehead, and
curly black hair, and high cheek bones, and altogether quite a handsome
face, only a little pimply as though with drinking. He had a very
broad chest had Miss Snevellicci’s papa, and he wore a threadbare blue
dress-coat buttoned with gilt buttons tight across it; and he no sooner
saw Nicholas come into the room, than he whipped the two forefingers of
his right hand in between the two centre buttons, and sticking his other
arm gracefully a-kimbo seemed to say, ‘Now, here I am, my buck, and what
have you got to say to me?’

Such was, and in such an attitude sat Miss Snevellicci’s papa, who had
been in the profession ever since he had first played the ten-year-old
imps in the Christmas pantomimes; who could sing a little, dance a
little, fence a little, act a little, and do everything a little, but
not much; who had been sometimes in the ballet, and sometimes in the
chorus, at every theatre in London; who was always selected in virtue
of his figure to play the military visitors and the speechless noblemen;
who always wore a smart dress, and came on arm-in-arm with a smart lady
in short petticoats,--and always did it too with such an air that people
in the pit had been several times known to cry out ‘Bravo!’ under the
impression that he was somebody. Such was Miss Snevellicci’s papa, upon
whom some envious persons cast the imputation that he occasionally beat
Miss Snevellicci’s mama, who was still a dancer, with a neat little
figure and some remains of good looks; and who now sat, as she
danced,--being rather too old for the full glare of the foot-lights,--in
the background.

To these good people Nicholas was presented with much formality. The
introduction being completed, Miss Snevellicci’s papa (who was scented
with rum-and-water) said that he was delighted to make the acquaintance
of a gentleman so highly talented; and furthermore remarked, that there
hadn’t been such a hit made--no, not since the first appearance of his
friend Mr. Glavormelly, at the Coburg.

‘You have seen him, sir?’ said Miss Snevellicci’s papa.

‘No, really I never did,’ replied Nicholas.

‘You never saw my friend Glavormelly, sir!’ said Miss Snevellicci’s
papa. ‘Then you have never seen acting yet. If he had lived--’

‘Oh, he is dead, is he?’ interrupted Nicholas.

‘He is,’ said Mr. Snevellicci, ‘but he isn’t in Westminster Abbey, more’s
the shame. He was a--. Well, no matter. He is gone to that bourne from
whence no traveller returns. I hope he is appreciated THERE.’

So saying Miss Snevellicci’s papa rubbed the tip of his nose with a very
yellow silk handkerchief, and gave the company to understand that these
recollections overcame him.

‘Well, Mr. Lillyvick,’ said Nicholas, ‘and how are you?’

‘Quite well, sir,’ replied the collector. ‘There is nothing like the
married state, sir, depend upon it.’

‘Indeed!’ said Nicholas, laughing.

‘Ah! nothing like it, sir,’ replied Mr. Lillyvick solemnly. ‘How do you
think,’ whispered the collector, drawing him aside, ‘how do you think
she looks tonight?’

‘As handsome as ever,’ replied Nicholas, glancing at the late Miss
Petowker.

‘Why, there’s air about her, sir,’ whispered the collector, ‘that I
never saw in anybody. Look at her now she moves to put the kettle on.
There! Isn’t it fascination, sir?’

‘You’re a lucky man,’ said Nicholas.

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ rejoined the collector. ‘No. Do you think I am though,
eh? Perhaps I may be, perhaps I may be. I say, I couldn’t have done much
better if I had been a young man, could I? You couldn’t have done much
better yourself, could you--eh--could you?’ With such inquires, and
many more such, Mr. Lillyvick jerked his elbow into Nicholas’s side, and
chuckled till his face became quite purple in the attempt to keep down
his satisfaction.

By this time the cloth had been laid under the joint superintendence of
all the ladies, upon two tables put together, one being high and narrow,
and the other low and broad. There were oysters at the top, sausages
at the bottom, a pair of snuffers in the centre, and baked potatoes
wherever it was most convenient to put them. Two additional chairs were
brought in from the bedroom: Miss Snevellicci sat at the head of the
table, and Mr. Lillyvick at the foot; and Nicholas had not only
the honour of sitting next Miss Snevellicci, but of having Miss
Snevellicci’s mama on his right hand, and Miss Snevellicci’s papa over
the way. In short, he was the hero of the feast; and when the table was
cleared and something warm introduced, Miss Snevellicci’s papa got up
and proposed his health in a speech containing such affecting allusions
to his coming departure, that Miss Snevellicci wept, and was compelled
to retire into the bedroom.

‘Hush! Don’t take any notice of it,’ said Miss Ledrook, peeping in from
the bedroom. ‘Say, when she comes back, that she exerts herself too
much.’

Miss Ledrook eked out this speech with so many mysterious nods and
frowns before she shut the door again, that a profound silence came upon
all the company, during which Miss Snevellicci’s papa looked very
big indeed--several sizes larger than life--at everybody in turn, but
particularly at Nicholas, and kept on perpetually emptying his tumbler
and filling it again, until the ladies returned in a cluster, with Miss
Snevellicci among them.

‘You needn’t alarm yourself a bit, Mr. Snevellicci,’ said Mrs. Lillyvick.
‘She is only a little weak and nervous; she has been so ever since the
morning.’

‘Oh,’ said Mr. Snevellicci, ‘that’s all, is it?’

‘Oh yes, that’s all. Don’t make a fuss about it,’ cried all the ladies
together.

Now this was not exactly the kind of reply suited to Mr. Snevellicci’s
importance as a man and a father, so he picked out the unfortunate Mrs
Snevellicci, and asked her what the devil she meant by talking to him in
that way.

‘Dear me, my dear!’ said Mrs. Snevellicci.

‘Don’t call me your dear, ma’am,’ said Mr. Snevellicci, ‘if you please.’

‘Pray, pa, don’t,’ interposed Miss Snevellicci.

‘Don’t what, my child?’

‘Talk in that way.’

‘Why not?’ said Mr. Snevellicci. ‘I hope you don’t suppose there’s
anybody here who is to prevent my talking as I like?’

‘Nobody wants to, pa,’ rejoined his daughter.

‘Nobody would if they did want to,’ said Mr. Snevellicci. ‘I am not
ashamed of myself, Snevellicci is my name; I’m to be found in Broad
Court, Bow Street, when I’m in town. If I’m not at home, let any man
ask for me at the stage-door. Damme, they know me at the stage-door
I suppose. Most men have seen my portrait at the cigar shop round the
corner. I’ve been mentioned in the newspapers before now, haven’t I?
Talk! I’ll tell you what; if I found out that any man had been tampering
with the affections of my daughter, I wouldn’t talk. I’d astonish him
without talking; that’s my way.’

So saying, Mr. Snevellicci struck the palm of his left hand three smart
blows with his clenched fist; pulled a phantom nose with his right thumb
and forefinger, and swallowed another glassful at a draught. ‘That’s my
way,’ repeated Mr. Snevellicci.

Most public characters have their failings; and the truth is that Mr
Snevellicci was a little addicted to drinking; or, if the whole truth
must be told, that he was scarcely ever sober. He knew in his cups three
distinct stages of intoxication,--the dignified--the quarrelsome--the
amorous. When professionally engaged he never got beyond the dignified;
in private circles he went through all three, passing from one to
another with a rapidity of transition often rather perplexing to those
who had not the honour of his acquaintance.

Thus Mr. Snevellicci had no sooner swallowed another glassful than he
smiled upon all present in happy forgetfulness of having exhibited
symptoms of pugnacity, and proposed ‘The ladies! Bless their hearts!’ in
a most vivacious manner.

‘I love ‘em,’ said Mr. Snevellicci, looking round the table, ‘I love ‘em,
every one.’

‘Not every one,’ reasoned Mr. Lillyvick, mildly.

‘Yes, every one,’ repeated Mr. Snevellicci.

‘That would include the married ladies, you know,’ said Mr. Lillyvick.

‘I love them too, sir,’ said Mr. Snevellicci.

The collector looked into the surrounding faces with an aspect of grave
astonishment, seeming to say, ‘This is a nice man!’ and appeared a
little surprised that Mrs. Lillyvick’s manner yielded no evidences of
horror and indignation.

‘One good turn deserves another,’ said Mr. Snevellicci. ‘I love them
and they love me.’ And as if this avowal were not made in sufficient
disregard and defiance of all moral obligations, what did Mr. Snevellicci
do? He winked--winked openly and undisguisedly; winked with his right
eye--upon Henrietta Lillyvick!

The collector fell back in his chair in the intensity of his
astonishment. If anybody had winked at her as Henrietta Petowker, it
would have been indecorous in the last degree; but as Mrs. Lillyvick!
While he thought of it in a cold perspiration, and wondered whether
it was possible that he could be dreaming, Mr. Snevellicci repeated the
wink, and drinking to Mrs. Lillyvick in dumb show, actually blew her a
kiss! Mr. Lillyvick left his chair, walked straight up to the other
end of the table, and fell upon him--literally fell upon
him--instantaneously. Mr. Lillyvick was no light weight, and consequently
when he fell upon Mr. Snevellicci, Mr. Snevellicci fell under the table.
Mr. Lillyvick followed him, and the ladies screamed.

‘What is the matter with the men! Are they mad?’ cried Nicholas, diving
under the table, dragging up the collector by main force, and thrusting
him, all doubled up, into a chair, as if he had been a stuffed figure.
‘What do you mean to do? What do you want to do? What is the matter with
you?’

While Nicholas raised up the collector, Smike had performed the same
office for Mr. Snevellicci, who now regarded his late adversary in tipsy
amazement.

‘Look here, sir,’ replied Mr. Lillyvick, pointing to his astonished
wife, ‘here is purity and elegance combined, whose feelings have been
outraged--violated, sir!’

‘Lor, what nonsense he talks!’ exclaimed Mrs. Lillyvick in answer to the
inquiring look of Nicholas. ‘Nobody has said anything to me.’

‘Said, Henrietta!’ cried the collector. ‘Didn’t I see him--’ Mr
Lillyvick couldn’t bring himself to utter the word, but he counterfeited
the motion of the eye.

‘Well!’ cried Mrs. Lillyvick. ‘Do you suppose nobody is ever to look at
me? A pretty thing to be married indeed, if that was law!’

‘You didn’t mind it?’ cried the collector.

‘Mind it!’ repeated Mrs. Lillyvick contemptuously. ‘You ought to go down
on your knees and beg everybody’s pardon, that you ought.’

‘Pardon, my dear?’ said the dismayed collector.

‘Yes, and mine first,’ replied Mrs. Lillyvick. ‘Do you suppose I ain’t
the best judge of what’s proper and what’s improper?’

‘To be sure,’ cried all the ladies. ‘Do you suppose WE shouldn’t be the
first to speak, if there was anything that ought to be taken notice of?’

‘Do you suppose THEY don’t know, sir?’ said Miss Snevellicci’s papa,
pulling up his collar, and muttering something about a punching of
heads, and being only withheld by considerations of age. With which Miss
Snevellicci’s papa looked steadily and sternly at Mr. Lillyvick for some
seconds, and then rising deliberately from his chair, kissed the ladies
all round, beginning with Mrs. Lillyvick.

The unhappy collector looked piteously at his wife, as if to see whether
there was any one trait of Miss Petowker left in Mrs. Lillyvick, and
finding too surely that there was not, begged pardon of all the company
with great humility, and sat down such a crest-fallen, dispirited,
disenchanted man, that despite all his selfishness and dotage, he was
quite an object of compassion.

Miss Snevellicci’s papa being greatly exalted by this triumph, and
incontestable proof of his popularity with the fair sex, quickly grew
convivial, not to say uproarious; volunteering more than one song of
no inconsiderable length, and regaling the social circle between-whiles
with recollections of divers splendid women who had been supposed to
entertain a passion for himself, several of whom he toasted by name,
taking occasion to remark at the same time that if he had been a little
more alive to his own interest, he might have been rolling at that
moment in his chariot-and-four. These reminiscences appeared to awaken
no very torturing pangs in the breast of Mrs. Snevellicci, who was
sufficiently occupied in descanting to Nicholas upon the manifold
accomplishments and merits of her daughter. Nor was the young lady
herself at all behind-hand in displaying her choicest allurements; but
these, heightened as they were by the artifices of Miss Ledrook, had no
effect whatever in increasing the attentions of Nicholas, who, with the
precedent of Miss Squeers still fresh in his memory, steadily resisted
every fascination, and placed so strict a guard upon his behaviour that
when he had taken his leave the ladies were unanimous in pronouncing him
quite a monster of insensibility.

Next day the posters appeared in due course, and the public were
informed, in all the colours of the rainbow, and in letters afflicted
with every possible variation of spinal deformity, how that Mr. Johnson
would have the honour of making his last appearance that evening, and
how that an early application for places was requested, in consequence
of the extraordinary overflow attendant on his performances,--it being
a remarkable fact in theatrical history, but one long since established
beyond dispute, that it is a hopeless endeavour to attract people to a
theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never
get into it.

Nicholas was somewhat at a loss, on entering the theatre at night,
to account for the unusual perturbation and excitement visible in the
countenances of all the company, but he was not long in doubt as to the
cause, for before he could make any inquiry respecting it Mr. Crummles
approached, and in an agitated tone of voice, informed him that there
was a London manager in the boxes.

‘It’s the phenomenon, depend upon it, sir,’ said Crummles, dragging
Nicholas to the little hole in the curtain that he might look through at
the London manager. ‘I have not the smallest doubt it’s the fame of the
phenomenon--that’s the man; him in the great-coat and no shirt-collar.
She shall have ten pound a week, Johnson; she shall not appear on the
London boards for a farthing less. They shan’t engage her either, unless
they engage Mrs. Crummles too--twenty pound a week for the pair; or I’ll
tell you what, I’ll throw in myself and the two boys, and they shall
have the family for thirty. I can’t say fairer than that. They must take
us all, if none of us will go without the others. That’s the way some of
the London people do, and it always answers. Thirty pound a week--it’s
too cheap, Johnson. It’s dirt cheap.’

Nicholas replied, that it certainly was; and Mr. Vincent Crummles taking
several huge pinches of snuff to compose his feelings, hurried away to
tell Mrs. Crummles that he had quite settled the only terms that could be
accepted, and had resolved not to abate one single farthing.

When everybody was dressed and the curtain went up, the excitement
occasioned by the presence of the London manager increased a
thousand-fold. Everybody happened to know that the London manager had
come down specially to witness his or her own performance, and all were
in a flutter of anxiety and expectation. Some of those who were not
on in the first scene, hurried to the wings, and there stretched their
necks to have a peep at him; others stole up into the two little private
boxes over the stage-doors, and from that position reconnoitred the
London manager. Once the London manager was seen to smile--he smiled
at the comic countryman’s pretending to catch a blue-bottle, while Mrs
Crummles was making her greatest effect. ‘Very good, my fine fellow,’
said Mr. Crummles, shaking his fist at the comic countryman when he came
off, ‘you leave this company next Saturday night.’

In the same way, everybody who was on the stage beheld no audience but
one individual; everybody played to the London manager. When Mr. Lenville
in a sudden burst of passion called the emperor a miscreant, and then
biting his glove, said, ‘But I must dissemble,’ instead of looking
gloomily at the boards and so waiting for his cue, as is proper in such
cases, he kept his eye fixed upon the London manager. When Miss Bravassa
sang her song at her lover, who according to custom stood ready to shake
hands with her between the verses, they looked, not at each other, but
at the London manager. Mr. Crummles died point blank at him; and when the
two guards came in to take the body off after a very hard death, it was
seen to open its eyes and glance at the London manager. At length the
London manager was discovered to be asleep, and shortly after that
he woke up and went away, whereupon all the company fell foul of the
unhappy comic countryman, declaring that his buffoonery was the sole
cause; and Mr. Crummles said, that he had put up with it a long time, but
that he really couldn’t stand it any longer, and therefore would feel
obliged by his looking out for another engagement.

All this was the occasion of much amusement to Nicholas, whose only
feeling upon the subject was one of sincere satisfaction that the great
man went away before he appeared. He went through his part in the
two last pieces as briskly as he could, and having been received with
unbounded favour and unprecedented applause--so said the bills for next
day, which had been printed an hour or two before--he took Smike’s arm
and walked home to bed.

With the post next morning came a letter from Newman Noggs, very inky,
very short, very dirty, very small, and very mysterious, urging Nicholas
to return to London instantly; not to lose an instant; to be there that
night if possible.

‘I will,’ said Nicholas. ‘Heaven knows I have remained here for the
best, and sorely against my own will; but even now I may have dallied
too long. What can have happened? Smike, my good fellow, here--take my
purse. Put our things together, and pay what little debts we owe--quick,
and we shall be in time for the morning coach. I will only tell them
that we are going, and will return to you immediately.’

So saying, he took his hat, and hurrying away to the lodgings of Mr
Crummles, applied his hand to the knocker with such hearty good-will,
that he awakened that gentleman, who was still in bed, and caused Mr
Bulph the pilot to take his morning’s pipe very nearly out of his mouth
in the extremity of his surprise.

The door being opened, Nicholas ran upstairs without any ceremony, and
bursting into the darkened sitting-room on the one-pair front, found
that the two Master Crummleses had sprung out of the sofa-bedstead and
were putting on their clothes with great rapidity, under the impression
that it was the middle of the night, and the next house was on fire.

Before he could undeceive them, Mr. Crummles came down in a flannel gown
and nightcap; and to him Nicholas briefly explained that circumstances
had occurred which rendered it necessary for him to repair to London
immediately.

‘So goodbye,’ said Nicholas; ‘goodbye, goodbye.’

He was half-way downstairs before Mr. Crummles had sufficiently recovered
his surprise to gasp out something about the posters.

‘I can’t help it,’ replied Nicholas. ‘Set whatever I may have earned
this week against them, or if that will not repay you, say at once what
will. Quick, quick.’

‘We’ll cry quits about that,’ returned Crummles. ‘But can’t we have one
last night more?’

‘Not an hour--not a minute,’ replied Nicholas, impatiently.

‘Won’t you stop to say something to Mrs. Crummles?’ asked the manager,
following him down to the door.

‘I couldn’t stop if it were to prolong my life a score of years,’
rejoined Nicholas. ‘Here, take my hand, and with it my hearty
thanks.--Oh! that I should have been fooling here!’

Accompanying these words with an impatient stamp upon the ground, he
tore himself from the manager’s detaining grasp, and darting rapidly
down the street was out of sight in an instant.

‘Dear me, dear me,’ said Mr. Crummles, looking wistfully towards the
point at which he had just disappeared; ‘if he only acted like that,
what a deal of money he’d draw! He should have kept upon this circuit;
he’d have been very useful to me. But he don’t know what’s good for him.
He is an impetuous youth. Young men are rash, very rash.’

Mr. Crummles being in a moralising mood, might possibly have moralised
for some minutes longer if he had not mechanically put his hand towards
his waistcoat pocket, where he was accustomed to keep his snuff. The
absence of any pocket at all in the usual direction, suddenly recalled
to his recollection the fact that he had no waistcoat on; and this
leading him to a contemplation of the extreme scantiness of his
attire, he shut the door abruptly, and retired upstairs with great
precipitation.

Smike had made good speed while Nicholas was absent, and with his help
everything was soon ready for their departure. They scarcely stopped to
take a morsel of breakfast, and in less than half an hour arrived at the
coach-office: quite out of breath with the haste they had made to reach
it in time. There were yet a few minutes to spare, so, having secured
the places, Nicholas hurried into a slopseller’s hard by, and bought
Smike a great-coat. It would have been rather large for a substantial
yeoman, but the shopman averring (and with considerable truth) that
it was a most uncommon fit, Nicholas would have purchased it in his
impatience if it had been twice the size.

As they hurried up to the coach, which was now in the open street and
all ready for starting, Nicholas was not a little astonished to find
himself suddenly clutched in a close and violent embrace, which nearly
took him off his legs; nor was his amazement at all lessened by hearing
the voice of Mr. Crummles exclaim, ‘It is he--my friend, my friend!’

‘Bless my heart,’ cried Nicholas, struggling in the manager’s arms,
‘what are you about?’

The manager made no reply, but strained him to his breast again,
exclaiming as he did so, ‘Farewell, my noble, my lion-hearted boy!’

In fact, Mr. Crummles, who could never lose any opportunity for
professional display, had turned out for the express purpose of taking a
public farewell of Nicholas; and to render it the more imposing, he was
now, to that young gentleman’s most profound annoyance, inflicting upon
him a rapid succession of stage embraces, which, as everybody knows, are
performed by the embracer’s laying his or her chin on the shoulder of
the object of affection, and looking over it. This Mr. Crummles did in
the highest style of melodrama, pouring forth at the same time all
the most dismal forms of farewell he could think of, out of the stock
pieces. Nor was this all, for the elder Master Crummles was going
through a similar ceremony with Smike; while Master Percy Crummles, with
a very little second-hand camlet cloak, worn theatrically over his left
shoulder, stood by, in the attitude of an attendant officer, waiting to
convey the two victims to the scaffold.

The lookers-on laughed very heartily, and as it was as well to put a
good face upon the matter, Nicholas laughed too when he had succeeded
in disengaging himself; and rescuing the astonished Smike, climbed up
to the coach roof after him, and kissed his hand in honour of the absent
Mrs. Crummles as they rolled away.



CHAPTER 31

Of Ralph Nickleby and Newman Noggs, and some wise Precautions, the
success or failure of which will appear in the Sequel


In blissful unconsciousness that his nephew was hastening at the utmost
speed of four good horses towards his sphere of action, and that every
passing minute diminished the distance between them, Ralph Nickleby sat
that morning occupied in his customary avocations, and yet unable to
prevent his thoughts wandering from time to time back to the interview
which had taken place between himself and his niece on the previous
day. At such intervals, after a few moments of abstraction, Ralph
would mutter some peevish interjection, and apply himself with renewed
steadiness of purpose to the ledger before him, but again and again the
same train of thought came back despite all his efforts to prevent it,
confusing him in his calculations, and utterly distracting his attention
from the figures over which he bent. At length Ralph laid down his pen,
and threw himself back in his chair as though he had made up his mind to
allow the obtrusive current of reflection to take its own course, and,
by giving it full scope, to rid himself of it effectually.

‘I am not a man to be moved by a pretty face,’ muttered Ralph sternly.
‘There is a grinning skull beneath it, and men like me who look and work
below the surface see that, and not its delicate covering. And yet
I almost like the girl, or should if she had been less proudly and
squeamishly brought up. If the boy were drowned or hanged, and the
mother dead, this house should be her home. I wish they were, with all
my soul.’

Notwithstanding the deadly hatred which Ralph felt towards Nicholas,
and the bitter contempt with which he sneered at poor Mrs
Nickleby--notwithstanding the baseness with which he had behaved, and
was then behaving, and would behave again if his interest prompted
him, towards Kate herself--still there was, strange though it may seem,
something humanising and even gentle in his thoughts at that moment. He
thought of what his home might be if Kate were there; he placed her in
the empty chair, looked upon her, heard her speak; he felt again upon
his arm the gentle pressure of the trembling hand; he strewed his
costly rooms with the hundred silent tokens of feminine presence and
occupation; he came back again to the cold fireside and the silent
dreary splendour; and in that one glimpse of a better nature, born as
it was in selfish thoughts, the rich man felt himself friendless,
childless, and alone. Gold, for the instant, lost its lustre in his
eyes, for there were countless treasures of the heart which it could
never purchase.

A very slight circumstance was sufficient to banish such reflections
from the mind of such a man. As Ralph looked vacantly out across the
yard towards the window of the other office, he became suddenly aware of
the earnest observation of Newman Noggs, who, with his red nose almost
touching the glass, feigned to be mending a pen with a rusty fragment of
a knife, but was in reality staring at his employer with a countenance
of the closest and most eager scrutiny.

Ralph exchanged his dreamy posture for his accustomed business attitude:
the face of Newman disappeared, and the train of thought took to flight,
all simultaneously, and in an instant.

After a few minutes, Ralph rang his bell. Newman answered the summons,
and Ralph raised his eyes stealthily to his face, as if he almost feared
to read there, a knowledge of his recent thoughts.

There was not the smallest speculation, however, in the countenance of
Newman Noggs. If it be possible to imagine a man, with two eyes in his
head, and both wide open, looking in no direction whatever, and seeing
nothing, Newman appeared to be that man while Ralph Nickleby regarded
him.

‘How now?’ growled Ralph.

‘Oh!’ said Newman, throwing some intelligence into his eyes all at
once, and dropping them on his master, ‘I thought you rang.’ With which
laconic remark Newman turned round and hobbled away.

‘Stop!’ said Ralph.

Newman stopped; not at all disconcerted.

‘I did ring.’

‘I knew you did.’

‘Then why do you offer to go if you know that?’

‘I thought you rang to say you didn’t ring,’ replied Newman. ‘You often
do.’

‘How dare you pry, and peer, and stare at me, sirrah?’ demanded Ralph.

‘Stare!’ cried Newman, ‘at YOU! Ha, ha!’ which was all the explanation
Newman deigned to offer.

‘Be careful, sir,’ said Ralph, looking steadily at him. ‘Let me have no
drunken fooling here. Do you see this parcel?’

‘It’s big enough,’ rejoined Newman.

‘Carry it into the city; to Cross, in Broad Street, and leave it
there--quick. Do you hear?’

Newman gave a dogged kind of nod to express an affirmative reply, and,
leaving the room for a few seconds, returned with his hat. Having made
various ineffective attempts to fit the parcel (which was some two feet
square) into the crown thereof, Newman took it under his arm, and
after putting on his fingerless gloves with great precision and nicety,
keeping his eyes fixed upon Mr. Ralph Nickleby all the time, he adjusted
his hat upon his head with as much care, real or pretended, as if it
were a bran-new one of the most expensive quality, and at last departed
on his errand.

He executed his commission with great promptitude and dispatch, only
calling at one public-house for half a minute, and even that might be
said to be in his way, for he went in at one door and came out at the
other; but as he returned and had got so far homewards as the Strand,
Newman began to loiter with the uncertain air of a man who has not quite
made up his mind whether to halt or go straight forwards. After a
very short consideration, the former inclination prevailed, and making
towards the point he had had in his mind, Newman knocked a modest double
knock, or rather a nervous single one, at Miss La Creevy’s door.

It was opened by a strange servant, on whom the odd figure of the
visitor did not appear to make the most favourable impression possible,
inasmuch as she no sooner saw him than she very nearly closed it, and
placing herself in the narrow gap, inquired what he wanted. But Newman
merely uttering the monosyllable ‘Noggs,’ as if it were some cabalistic
word, at sound of which bolts would fly back and doors open, pushed
briskly past and gained the door of Miss La Creevy’s sitting-room,
before the astonished servant could offer any opposition.

‘Walk in if you please,’ said Miss La Creevy in reply to the sound of
Newman’s knuckles; and in he walked accordingly.

‘Bless us!’ cried Miss La Creevy, starting as Newman bolted in; ‘what
did you want, sir?’

‘You have forgotten me,’ said Newman, with an inclination of the head.
‘I wonder at that. That nobody should remember me who knew me in other
days, is natural enough; but there are few people who, seeing me once,
forget me NOW.’ He glanced, as he spoke, at his shabby clothes and
paralytic limb, and slightly shook his head.

‘I did forget you, I declare,’ said Miss La Creevy, rising to receive
Newman, who met her half-way, ‘and I am ashamed of myself for doing so;
for you are a kind, good creature, Mr. Noggs. Sit down and tell me all
about Miss Nickleby. Poor dear thing! I haven’t seen her for this many a
week.’

‘How’s that?’ asked Newman.

‘Why, the truth is, Mr. Noggs,’ said Miss La Creevy, ‘that I have been
out on a visit--the first visit I have made for fifteen years.’

‘That is a long time,’ said Newman, sadly.

‘So it is a very long time to look back upon in years, though, somehow
or other, thank Heaven, the solitary days roll away peacefully and
happily enough,’ replied the miniature painter. ‘I have a brother, Mr
Noggs--the only relation I have--and all that time I never saw him once.
Not that we ever quarrelled, but he was apprenticed down in the country,
and he got married there; and new ties and affections springing up about
him, he forgot a poor little woman like me, as it was very reasonable
he should, you know. Don’t suppose that I complain about that, because I
always said to myself, “It is very natural; poor dear John is making his
way in the world, and has a wife to tell his cares and troubles to, and
children now to play about him, so God bless him and them, and send we
may all meet together one day where we shall part no more.” But what
do you think, Mr. Noggs,’ said the miniature painter, brightening up and
clapping her hands, ‘of that very same brother coming up to London at
last, and never resting till he found me out; what do you think of his
coming here and sitting down in that very chair, and crying like a child
because he was so glad to see me--what do you think of his insisting on
taking me down all the way into the country to his own house (quite a
sumptuous place, Mr. Noggs, with a large garden and I don’t know how many
fields, and a man in livery waiting at table, and cows and horses and
pigs and I don’t know what besides), and making me stay a whole month,
and pressing me to stop there all my life--yes, all my life--and so did
his wife, and so did the children--and there were four of them, and one,
the eldest girl of all, they--they had named her after me eight good
years before, they had indeed. I never was so happy; in all my life I
never was!’ The worthy soul hid her face in her handkerchief, and sobbed
aloud; for it was the first opportunity she had had of unburdening her
heart, and it would have its way.

‘But bless my life,’ said Miss La Creevy, wiping her eyes after a short
pause, and cramming her handkerchief into her pocket with great bustle
and dispatch; ‘what a foolish creature I must seem to you, Mr. Noggs! I
shouldn’t have said anything about it, only I wanted to explain to you
how it was I hadn’t seen Miss Nickleby.’

‘Have you seen the old lady?’ asked Newman.

‘You mean Mrs. Nickleby?’ said Miss La Creevy. ‘Then I tell you what, Mr
Noggs, if you want to keep in the good books in that quarter, you had
better not call her the old lady any more, for I suspect she wouldn’t be
best pleased to hear you. Yes, I went there the night before last, but
she was quite on the high ropes about something, and was so grand and
mysterious, that I couldn’t make anything of her: so, to tell you the
truth, I took it into my head to be grand too, and came away in state. I
thought she would have come round again before this, but she hasn’t been
here.’

‘About Miss Nickleby--’ said Newman.

‘Why, she was here twice while I was away,’ returned Miss La Creevy. ‘I
was afraid she mightn’t like to have me calling on her among those great
folks in what’s-its-name Place, so I thought I’d wait a day or two, and
if I didn’t see her, write.’

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Newman, cracking his fingers.

‘However, I want to hear all the news about them from you,’ said Miss La
Creevy. ‘How is the old rough and tough monster of Golden Square? Well,
of course; such people always are. I don’t mean how is he in health, but
how is he going on: how is he behaving himself?’

‘Damn him!’ cried Newman, dashing his cherished hat on the floor; ‘like
a false hound.’

‘Gracious, Mr. Noggs, you quite terrify me!’ exclaimed Miss La Creevy,
turning pale.

‘I should have spoilt his features yesterday afternoon if I could have
afforded it,’ said Newman, moving restlessly about, and shaking his fist
at a portrait of Mr. Canning over the mantelpiece. ‘I was very near it.
I was obliged to put my hands in my pockets, and keep ‘em there very
tight. I shall do it some day in that little back-parlour, I know I
shall. I should have done it before now, if I hadn’t been afraid of
making bad worse. I shall double-lock myself in with him and have it out
before I die, I’m quite certain of it.’

‘I shall scream if you don’t compose yourself, Mr. Noggs,’ said Miss La
Creevy; ‘I’m sure I shan’t be able to help it.’

‘Never mind,’ rejoined Newman, darting violently to and fro. ‘He’s
coming up tonight: I wrote to tell him. He little thinks I know; he
little thinks I care. Cunning scoundrel! he don’t think that. Not
he, not he. Never mind, I’ll thwart him--I, Newman Noggs. Ho, ho, the
rascal!’

Lashing himself up to an extravagant pitch of fury, Newman Noggs jerked
himself about the room with the most eccentric motion ever beheld in a
human being: now sparring at the little miniatures on the wall, and
now giving himself violent thumps on the head, as if to heighten the
delusion, until he sank down in his former seat quite breathless and
exhausted.

‘There,’ said Newman, picking up his hat; ‘that’s done me good. Now I’m
better, and I’ll tell you all about it.’

It took some little time to reassure Miss La Creevy, who had been almost
frightened out of her senses by this remarkable demonstration; but that
done, Newman faithfully related all that had passed in the interview
between Kate and her uncle, prefacing his narrative with a statement
of his previous suspicions on the subject, and his reasons for forming
them; and concluding with a communication of the step he had taken in
secretly writing to Nicholas.

Though little Miss La Creevy’s indignation was not so singularly
displayed as Newman’s, it was scarcely inferior in violence and
intensity. Indeed, if Ralph Nickleby had happened to make his appearance
in the room at that moment, there is some doubt whether he would not
have found Miss La Creevy a more dangerous opponent than even Newman
Noggs himself.

‘God forgive me for saying so,’ said Miss La Creevy, as a wind-up to all
her expressions of anger, ‘but I really feel as if I could stick this
into him with pleasure.’

It was not a very awful weapon that Miss La Creevy held, it being in
fact nothing more nor less than a black-lead pencil; but discovering her
mistake, the little portrait painter exchanged it for a mother-of-pearl
fruit knife, wherewith, in proof of her desperate thoughts, she made a
lunge as she spoke, which would have scarcely disturbed the crumb of a
half-quartern loaf.

‘She won’t stop where she is after tonight,’ said Newman. ‘That’s a
comfort.’

‘Stop!’ cried Miss La Creevy, ‘she should have left there, weeks ago.’

‘--If we had known of this,’ rejoined Newman. ‘But we didn’t. Nobody
could properly interfere but her mother or brother. The mother’s
weak--poor thing--weak. The dear young man will be here tonight.’

‘Heart alive!’ cried Miss La Creevy. ‘He will do something desperate, Mr
Noggs, if you tell him all at once.’

Newman left off rubbing his hands, and assumed a thoughtful look.

‘Depend upon it,’ said Miss La Creevy, earnestly, ‘if you are not very
careful in breaking out the truth to him, he will do some violence upon
his uncle or one of these men that will bring some terrible calamity
upon his own head, and grief and sorrow to us all.’

‘I never thought of that,’ rejoined Newman, his countenance falling more
and more. ‘I came to ask you to receive his sister in case he brought
her here, but--’

‘But this is a matter of much greater importance,’ interrupted Miss La
Creevy; ‘that you might have been sure of before you came, but the end
of this, nobody can foresee, unless you are very guarded and careful.’

‘What CAN I do?’ cried Newman, scratching his head with an air of great
vexation and perplexity. ‘If he was to talk of pistoling ‘em all, I
should be obliged to say, “Certainly--serve ‘em right.”’

Miss La Creevy could not suppress a small shriek on hearing this, and
instantly set about extorting a solemn pledge from Newman that he would
use his utmost endeavours to pacify the wrath of Nicholas; which, after
some demur, was conceded. They then consulted together on the safest and
surest mode of communicating to him the circumstances which had rendered
his presence necessary.

‘He must have time to cool before he can possibly do anything,’ said
Miss La Creevy. ‘That is of the greatest consequence. He must not be
told until late at night.’

‘But he’ll be in town between six and seven this evening,’ replied
Newman. ‘I can’t keep it from him when he asks me.’

‘Then you must go out, Mr. Noggs,’ said Miss La Creevy. ‘You can easily
have been kept away by business, and must not return till nearly
midnight.’

‘Then he will come straight here,’ retorted Newman.

‘So I suppose,’ observed Miss La Creevy; ‘but he won’t find me at home,
for I’ll go straight to the city the instant you leave me, make up
matters with Mrs. Nickleby, and take her away to the theatre, so that he
may not even know where his sister lives.’

Upon further discussion, this appeared the safest and most feasible mode
of proceeding that could possibly be adopted. Therefore it was finally
determined that matters should be so arranged, and Newman, after
listening to many supplementary cautions and entreaties, took his leave
of Miss La Creevy and trudged back to Golden Square; ruminating as
he went upon a vast number of possibilities and impossibilities which
crowded upon his brain, and arose out of the conversation that had just
terminated.



CHAPTER 32

Relating chiefly to some remarkable Conversation, and some remarkable
Proceedings to which it gives rise


‘London at last!’ cried Nicholas, throwing back his greatcoat and
rousing Smike from a long nap. ‘It seemed to me as though we should
never reach it.’

‘And yet you came along at a tidy pace too,’ observed the coachman,
looking over his shoulder at Nicholas with no very pleasant expression
of countenance.

‘Ay, I know that,’ was the reply; ‘but I have been very anxious to be at
my journey’s end, and that makes the way seem long.’

‘Well,’ remarked the coachman, ‘if the way seemed long with such cattle
as you’ve sat behind, you MUST have been most uncommon anxious;’ and
so saying, he let out his whip-lash and touched up a little boy on the
calves of his legs by way of emphasis.

They rattled on through the noisy, bustling, crowded street of London,
now displaying long double rows of brightly-burning lamps, dotted here
and there with the chemists’ glaring lights, and illuminated besides
with the brilliant flood that streamed from the windows of the shops,
where sparkling jewellery, silks and velvets of the richest colours,
the most inviting delicacies, and most sumptuous articles of luxurious
ornament, succeeded each other in rich and glittering profusion. Streams
of people apparently without end poured on and on, jostling each other
in the crowd and hurrying forward, scarcely seeming to notice the riches
that surrounded them on every side; while vehicles of all shapes and
makes, mingled up together in one moving mass, like running water, lent
their ceaseless roar to swell the noise and tumult.

As they dashed by the quickly-changing and ever-varying objects, it was
curious to observe in what a strange procession they passed before the
eye. Emporiums of splendid dresses, the materials brought from every
quarter of the world; tempting stores of everything to stimulate and
pamper the sated appetite and give new relish to the oft-repeated feast;
vessels of burnished gold and silver, wrought into every exquisite form
of vase, and dish, and goblet; guns, swords, pistols, and patent engines
of destruction; screws and irons for the crooked, clothes for the
newly-born, drugs for the sick, coffins for the dead, and churchyards
for the buried--all these jumbled each with the other and flocking side
by side, seemed to flit by in motley dance like the fantastic groups of
the old Dutch painter, and with the same stern moral for the unheeding
restless crowd.

Nor were there wanting objects in the crowd itself to give new point
and purpose to the shifting scene. The rags of the squalid ballad-singer
fluttered in the rich light that showed the goldsmith’s treasures, pale
and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting food,
hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin sheet
of brittle glass--an iron wall to them; half-naked shivering figures
stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India. There
was a christening party at the largest coffin-maker’s and a funeral
hatchment had stopped some great improvements in the bravest mansion.
Life and death went hand in hand; wealth and poverty stood side by side;
repletion and starvation laid them down together.

But it was London; and the old country lady inside, who had put her head
out of the coach-window a mile or two this side Kingston, and cried out
to the driver that she was sure he must have passed it and forgotten to
set her down, was satisfied at last.

Nicholas engaged beds for himself and Smike at the inn where the coach
stopped, and repaired, without the delay of another moment, to the
lodgings of Newman Noggs; for his anxiety and impatience had increased
with every succeeding minute, and were almost beyond control.

There was a fire in Newman’s garret; and a candle had been left burning;
the floor was cleanly swept, the room was as comfortably arranged as
such a room could be, and meat and drink were placed in order upon the
table. Everything bespoke the affectionate care and attention of Newman
Noggs, but Newman himself was not there.

‘Do you know what time he will be home?’ inquired Nicholas, tapping at
the door of Newman’s front neighbour.

‘Ah, Mr. Johnson!’ said Crowl, presenting himself. ‘Welcome, sir. How
well you’re looking! I never could have believed--’

‘Pardon me,’ interposed Nicholas. ‘My question--I am extremely anxious
to know.’

‘Why, he has a troublesome affair of business,’ replied Crowl, ‘and will
not be home before twelve o’clock. He was very unwilling to go, I can
tell you, but there was no help for it. However, he left word that you
were to make yourself comfortable till he came back, and that I was to
entertain you, which I shall be very glad to do.’

In proof of his extreme readiness to exert himself for the general
entertainment, Mr. Crowl drew a chair to the table as he spoke, and
helping himself plentifully to the cold meat, invited Nicholas and Smike
to follow his example.

Disappointed and uneasy, Nicholas could touch no food, so, after he had
seen Smike comfortably established at the table, he walked out (despite
a great many dissuasions uttered by Mr. Crowl with his mouth full), and
left Smike to detain Newman in case he returned first.

As Miss La Creevy had anticipated, Nicholas betook himself straight to
her house. Finding her from home, he debated within himself for some
time whether he should go to his mother’s residence, and so compromise
her with Ralph Nickleby. Fully persuaded, however, that Newman would not
have solicited him to return unless there was some strong reason which
required his presence at home, he resolved to go there, and hastened
eastwards with all speed.

Mrs. Nickleby would not be at home, the girl said, until past twelve, or
later. She believed Miss Nickleby was well, but she didn’t live at home
now, nor did she come home except very seldom. She couldn’t say where
she was stopping, but it was not at Madame Mantalini’s. She was sure of
that.

With his heart beating violently, and apprehending he knew not what
disaster, Nicholas returned to where he had left Smike. Newman had not
been home. He wouldn’t be, till twelve o’clock; there was no chance of
it. Was there no possibility of sending to fetch him if it were only for
an instant, or forwarding to him one line of writing to which he might
return a verbal reply? That was quite impracticable. He was not at
Golden Square, and probably had been sent to execute some commission at
a distance.

Nicholas tried to remain quietly where he was, but he felt so nervous
and excited that he could not sit still. He seemed to be losing time
unless he was moving. It was an absurd fancy, he knew, but he was wholly
unable to resist it. So, he took up his hat and rambled out again.

He strolled westward this time, pacing the long streets with hurried
footsteps, and agitated by a thousand misgivings and apprehensions
which he could not overcome. He passed into Hyde Park, now silent and
deserted, and increased his rate of walking as if in the hope of leaving
his thoughts behind. They crowded upon him more thickly, however, now
there were no passing objects to attract his attention; and the one idea
was always uppermost, that some stroke of ill-fortune must have occurred
so calamitous in its nature that all were fearful of disclosing it to
him. The old question arose again and again--What could it be? Nicholas
walked till he was weary, but was not one bit the wiser; and indeed he
came out of the Park at last a great deal more confused and perplexed
than when he went in.

He had taken scarcely anything to eat or drink since early in the
morning, and felt quite worn out and exhausted. As he returned
languidly towards the point from which he had started, along one of the
thoroughfares which lie between Park Lane and Bond Street, he passed a
handsome hotel, before which he stopped mechanically.

‘An expensive place, I dare say,’ thought Nicholas; ‘but a pint of wine
and a biscuit are no great debauch wherever they are had. And yet I
don’t know.’

He walked on a few steps, but looking wistfully down the long vista of
gas-lamps before him, and thinking how long it would take to reach the
end of it and being besides in that kind of mood in which a man is most
disposed to yield to his first impulse--and being, besides, strongly
attracted to the hotel, in part by curiosity, and in part by some
odd mixture of feelings which he would have been troubled to
define--Nicholas turned back again, and walked into the coffee-room.

It was very handsomely furnished. The walls were ornamented with the
choicest specimens of French paper, enriched with a gilded cornice of
elegant design. The floor was covered with a rich carpet; and two superb
mirrors, one above the chimneypiece and one at the opposite end of the
room reaching from floor to ceiling, multiplied the other beauties and
added new ones of their own to enhance the general effect. There was
a rather noisy party of four gentlemen in a box by the fire-place, and
only two other persons present--both elderly gentlemen, and both alone.

Observing all this in the first comprehensive glance with which a
stranger surveys a place that is new to him, Nicholas sat himself down
in the box next to the noisy party, with his back towards them, and
postponing his order for a pint of claret until such time as the waiter
and one of the elderly gentlemen should have settled a disputed
question relative to the price of an item in the bill of fare, took up a
newspaper and began to read.

He had not read twenty lines, and was in truth himself dozing, when he
was startled by the mention of his sister’s name. ‘Little Kate Nickleby’
were the words that caught his ear. He raised his head in amazement, and
as he did so, saw by the reflection in the opposite glass, that two of
the party behind him had risen and were standing before the fire. ‘It
must have come from one of them,’ thought Nicholas. He waited to hear
more with a countenance of some indignation, for the tone of speech had
been anything but respectful, and the appearance of the individual whom
he presumed to have been the speaker was coarse and swaggering.

This person--so Nicholas observed in the same glance at the mirror which
had enabled him to see his face--was standing with his back to the fire
conversing with a younger man, who stood with his back to the company,
wore his hat, and was adjusting his shirt-collar by the aid of the
glass. They spoke in whispers, now and then bursting into a loud laugh,
but Nicholas could catch no repetition of the words, nor anything
sounding at all like the words, which had attracted his attention.

At length the two resumed their seats, and more wine being ordered, the
party grew louder in their mirth. Still there was no reference made to
anybody with whom he was acquainted, and Nicholas became persuaded
that his excited fancy had either imagined the sounds altogether, or
converted some other words into the name which had been so much in his
thoughts.

‘It is remarkable too,’ thought Nicholas: ‘if it had been “Kate” or
“Kate Nickleby,” I should not have been so much surprised: but “little
Kate Nickleby!”’

The wine coming at the moment prevented his finishing the sentence. He
swallowed a glassful and took up the paper again. At that instant--

‘Little Kate Nickleby!’ cried the voice behind him.

‘I was right,’ muttered Nicholas as the paper fell from his hand. ‘And
it was the man I supposed.’

‘As there was a proper objection to drinking her in heel-taps,’ said the
voice, ‘we’ll give her the first glass in the new magnum. Little Kate
Nickleby!’

‘Little Kate Nickleby,’ cried the other three. And the glasses were set
down empty.

Keenly alive to the tone and manner of this slight and careless mention
of his sister’s name in a public place, Nicholas fired at once; but he
kept himself quiet by a great effort, and did not even turn his head.

‘The jade!’ said the same voice which had spoken before. ‘She’s a true
Nickleby--a worthy imitator of her old uncle Ralph--she hangs back to be
more sought after--so does he; nothing to be got out of Ralph unless you
follow him up, and then the money comes doubly welcome, and the bargain
doubly hard, for you’re impatient and he isn’t. Oh! infernal cunning.’

‘Infernal cunning,’ echoed two voices.

Nicholas was in a perfect agony as the two elderly gentlemen opposite,
rose one after the other and went away, lest they should be the means of
his losing one word of what was said. But the conversation was suspended
as they withdrew, and resumed with even greater freedom when they had
left the room.

‘I am afraid,’ said the younger gentleman, ‘that the old woman has grown
jea-a-lous, and locked her up. Upon my soul it looks like it.’

‘If they quarrel and little Nickleby goes home to her mother, so much
the better,’ said the first. ‘I can do anything with the old lady.
She’ll believe anything I tell her.’

‘Egad that’s true,’ returned the other voice. ‘Ha, ha, ha! Poor deyvle!’

The laugh was taken up by the two voices which always came in together,
and became general at Mrs. Nickleby’s expense. Nicholas turned burning
hot with rage, but he commanded himself for the moment, and waited to
hear more.

What he heard need not be repeated here. Suffice it that as the wine
went round he heard enough to acquaint him with the characters and
designs of those whose conversation he overhead; to possess him with the
full extent of Ralph’s villainy, and the real reason of his own presence
being required in London. He heard all this and more. He heard his
sister’s sufferings derided, and her virtuous conduct jeered at and
brutally misconstrued; he heard her name bandied from mouth to mouth,
and herself made the subject of coarse and insolent wagers, free speech,
and licentious jesting.

The man who had spoken first, led the conversation, and indeed almost
engrossed it, being only stimulated from time to time by some slight
observation from one or other of his companions. To him then Nicholas
addressed himself when he was sufficiently composed to stand before the
party, and force the words from his parched and scorching throat.

‘Let me have a word with you, sir,’ said Nicholas.

‘With me, sir?’ retorted Sir Mulberry Hawk, eyeing him in disdainful
surprise.

‘I said with you,’ replied Nicholas, speaking with great difficulty, for
his passion choked him.

‘A mysterious stranger, upon my soul!’ exclaimed Sir Mulberry, raising
his wine-glass to his lips, and looking round upon his friends.

‘Will you step apart with me for a few minutes, or do you refuse?’ said
Nicholas sternly.

Sir Mulberry merely paused in the act of drinking, and bade him either
name his business or leave the table.

Nicholas drew a card from his pocket, and threw it before him.

‘There, sir,’ said Nicholas; ‘my business you will guess.’

A momentary expression of astonishment, not unmixed with some confusion,
appeared in the face of Sir Mulberry as he read the name; but he subdued
it in an instant, and tossing the card to Lord Verisopht, who sat
opposite, drew a toothpick from a glass before him, and very leisurely
applied it to his mouth.

‘Your name and address?’ said Nicholas, turning paler as his passion
kindled.

‘I shall give you neither,’ replied Sir Mulberry.

‘If there is a gentleman in this party,’ said Nicholas, looking round
and scarcely able to make his white lips form the words, ‘he will
acquaint me with the name and residence of this man.’

There was a dead silence.

‘I am the brother of the young lady who has been the subject of
conversation here,’ said Nicholas. ‘I denounce this person as a liar,
and impeach him as a coward. If he has a friend here, he will save him
the disgrace of the paltry attempt to conceal his name--and utterly
useless one--for I will find it out, nor leave him until I have.’

Sir Mulberry looked at him contemptuously, and, addressing his
companions, said--

‘Let the fellow talk, I have nothing serious to say to boys of his
station; and his pretty sister shall save him a broken head, if he talks
till midnight.’

‘You are a base and spiritless scoundrel!’ said Nicholas, ‘and shall be
proclaimed so to the world. I WILL know you; I will follow you home if
you walk the streets till morning.’

Sir Mulberry’s hand involuntarily closed upon the decanter, and he
seemed for an instant about to launch it at the head of his challenger.
But he only filled his glass, and laughed in derision.

Nicholas sat himself down, directly opposite to the party, and,
summoning the waiter, paid his bill.

‘Do you know that person’s name?’ he inquired of the man in an audible
voice; pointing out Sir Mulberry as he put the question.

Sir Mulberry laughed again, and the two voices which had always spoken
together, echoed the laugh; but rather feebly.

‘That gentleman, sir?’ replied the waiter, who, no doubt, knew his cue,
and answered with just as little respect, and just as much impertinence
as he could safely show: ‘no, sir, I do not, sir.’

‘Here, you sir,’ cried Sir Mulberry, as the man was retiring; ‘do you
know THAT person’s name?’

‘Name, sir? No, sir.’

‘Then you’ll find it there,’ said Sir Mulberry, throwing Nicholas’s card
towards him; ‘and when you have made yourself master of it, put that
piece of pasteboard in the fire--do you hear me?’

The man grinned, and, looking doubtfully at Nicholas, compromised the
matter by sticking the card in the chimney-glass. Having done this, he
retired.

Nicholas folded his arms, and biting his lip, sat perfectly quiet;
sufficiently expressing by his manner, however, a firm determination to
carry his threat of following Sir Mulberry home, into steady execution.

It was evident from the tone in which the younger member of the party
appeared to remonstrate with his friend, that he objected to this course
of proceeding, and urged him to comply with the request which Nicholas
had made. Sir Mulberry, however, who was not quite sober, and who was
in a sullen and dogged state of obstinacy, soon silenced the
representations of his weak young friend, and further seemed--as if to
save himself from a repetition of them--to insist on being left alone.
However this might have been, the young gentleman and the two who had
always spoken together, actually rose to go after a short interval, and
presently retired, leaving their friend alone with Nicholas.

It will be very readily supposed that to one in the condition of
Nicholas, the minutes appeared to move with leaden wings indeed, and
that their progress did not seem the more rapid from the monotonous
ticking of a French clock, or the shrill sound of its little bell which
told the quarters. But there he sat; and in his old seat on the opposite
side of the room reclined Sir Mulberry Hawk, with his legs upon the
cushion, and his handkerchief thrown negligently over his knees:
finishing his magnum of claret with the utmost coolness and
indifference.

Thus they remained in perfect silence for upwards of an hour--Nicholas
would have thought for three hours at least, but that the little
bell had only gone four times. Twice or thrice he looked angrily and
impatiently round; but there was Sir Mulberry in the same attitude,
putting his glass to his lips from time to time, and looking vacantly
at the wall, as if he were wholly ignorant of the presence of any living
person.

At length he yawned, stretched himself, and rose; walked coolly to the
glass, and having surveyed himself therein, turned round and honoured
Nicholas with a long and contemptuous stare. Nicholas stared again with
right good-will; Sir Mulberry shrugged his shoulders, smiled slightly,
rang the bell, and ordered the waiter to help him on with his greatcoat.

The man did so, and held the door open.

‘Don’t wait,’ said Sir Mulberry; and they were alone again.

Sir Mulberry took several turns up and down the room, whistling
carelessly all the time; stopped to finish the last glass of claret
which he had poured out a few minutes before, walked again, put on his
hat, adjusted it by the glass, drew on his gloves, and, at last, walked
slowly out. Nicholas, who had been fuming and chafing until he was
nearly wild, darted from his seat, and followed him: so closely, that
before the door had swung upon its hinges after Sir Mulberry’s passing
out, they stood side by side in the street together.

There was a private cabriolet in waiting; the groom opened the apron,
and jumped out to the horse’s head.

‘Will you make yourself known to me?’ asked Nicholas in a suppressed
voice.

‘No,’ replied the other fiercely, and confirming the refusal with an
oath. ‘No.’

‘If you trust to your horse’s speed, you will find yourself mistaken,’
said Nicholas. ‘I will accompany you. By Heaven I will, if I hang on to
the foot-board.’

‘You shall be horsewhipped if you do,’ returned Sir Mulberry.

‘You are a villain,’ said Nicholas.

‘You are an errand-boy for aught I know,’ said Sir Mulberry Hawk.

‘I am the son of a country gentleman,’ returned Nicholas, ‘your equal in
birth and education, and your superior I trust in everything besides.
I tell you again, Miss Nickleby is my sister. Will you or will you not
answer for your unmanly and brutal conduct?’

‘To a proper champion--yes. To you--no,’ returned Sir Mulberry, taking
the reins in his hand. ‘Stand out of the way, dog. William, let go her
head.’

‘You had better not,’ cried Nicholas, springing on the step as Sir
Mulberry jumped in, and catching at the reins. ‘He has no command over
the horse, mind. You shall not go--you shall not, I swear--till you have
told me who you are.’

The groom hesitated, for the mare, who was a high-spirited animal and
thorough-bred, plunged so violently that he could scarcely hold her.

‘Leave go, I tell you!’ thundered his master.

The man obeyed. The animal reared and plunged as though it would dash
the carriage into a thousand pieces, but Nicholas, blind to all sense
of danger, and conscious of nothing but his fury, still maintained his
place and his hold upon the reins.

‘Will you unclasp your hand?’

‘Will you tell me who you are?’

‘No!’

‘No!’

In less time than the quickest tongue could tell it, these words were
exchanged, and Sir Mulberry shortening his whip, applied it furiously
to the head and shoulders of Nicholas. It was broken in the struggle;
Nicholas gained the heavy handle, and with it laid open one side of his
antagonist’s face from the eye to the lip. He saw the gash; knew that
the mare had darted off at a wild mad gallop; a hundred lights danced in
his eyes, and he felt himself flung violently upon the ground.

He was giddy and sick, but staggered to his feet directly, roused by the
loud shouts of the men who were tearing up the street, and screaming to
those ahead to clear the way. He was conscious of a torrent of people
rushing quickly by--looking up, could discern the cabriolet whirled
along the foot-pavement with frightful rapidity--then heard a loud cry,
the smashing of some heavy body, and the breaking of glass--and then the
crowd closed in in the distance, and he could see or hear no more.

The general attention had been entirely directed from himself to the
person in the carriage, and he was quite alone. Rightly judging that
under such circumstances it would be madness to follow, he turned down a
bye-street in search of the nearest coach-stand, finding after a minute
or two that he was reeling like a drunken man, and aware for the first
time of a stream of blood that was trickling down his face and breast.



CHAPTER 33

In which Mr. Ralph Nickleby is relieved, by a very expeditious Process,
from all Commerce with his Relations


Smike and Newman Noggs, who in his impatience had returned home long
before the time agreed upon, sat before the fire, listening anxiously
to every footstep on the stairs, and the slightest sound that stirred
within the house, for the approach of Nicholas. Time had worn on, and
it was growing late. He had promised to be back in an hour; and his
prolonged absence began to excite considerable alarm in the minds of
both, as was abundantly testified by the blank looks they cast upon each
other at every new disappointment.

At length a coach was heard to stop, and Newman ran out to light
Nicholas up the stairs. Beholding him in the trim described at
the conclusion of the last chapter, he stood aghast in wonder and
consternation.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ said Nicholas, hurrying him back into the room.
‘There is no harm done, beyond what a basin of water can repair.’

‘No harm!’ cried Newman, passing his hands hastily over the back and
arms of Nicholas, as if to assure himself that he had broken no bones.
‘What have you been doing?’

‘I know all,’ interrupted Nicholas; ‘I have heard a part, and guessed
the rest. But before I remove one jot of these stains, I must hear the
whole from you. You see I am collected. My resolution is taken. Now, my
good friend, speak out; for the time for any palliation or concealment
is past, and nothing will avail Ralph Nickleby now.’

‘Your dress is torn in several places; you walk lame, and I am sure you
are suffering pain,’ said Newman. ‘Let me see to your hurts first.’

‘I have no hurts to see to, beyond a little soreness and stiffness
that will soon pass off,’ said Nicholas, seating himself with some
difficulty. ‘But if I had fractured every limb, and still preserved my
senses, you should not bandage one till you had told me what I have the
right to know. Come,’ said Nicholas, giving his hand to Noggs. ‘You had
a sister of your own, you told me once, who died before you fell into
misfortune. Now think of her, and tell me, Newman.’

‘Yes, I will, I will,’ said Noggs. ‘I’ll tell you the whole truth.’

Newman did so. Nicholas nodded his head from time to time, as it
corroborated the particulars he had already gleaned; but he fixed his
eyes upon the fire, and did not look round once.

His recital ended, Newman insisted upon his young friend’s stripping off
his coat and allowing whatever injuries he had received to be properly
tended. Nicholas, after some opposition, at length consented, and, while
some pretty severe bruises on his arms and shoulders were being rubbed
with oil and vinegar, and various other efficacious remedies which
Newman borrowed from the different lodgers, related in what manner they
had been received. The recital made a strong impression on the warm
imagination of Newman; for when Nicholas came to the violent part of the
quarrel, he rubbed so hard, as to occasion him the most exquisite pain,
which he would not have exhibited, however, for the world, it being
perfectly clear that, for the moment, Newman was operating on Sir
Mulberry Hawk, and had quite lost sight of his real patient.

This martyrdom over, Nicholas arranged with Newman that while he was
otherwise occupied next morning, arrangements should be made for his
mother’s immediately quitting her present residence, and also for
dispatching Miss La Creevy to break the intelligence to her. He then
wrapped himself in Smike’s greatcoat, and repaired to the inn where they
were to pass the night, and where (after writing a few lines to Ralph,
the delivery of which was to be intrusted to Newman next day), he
endeavoured to obtain the repose of which he stood so much in need.

Drunken men, they say, may roll down precipices, and be quite
unconscious of any serious personal inconvenience when their reason
returns. The remark may possibly apply to injuries received in other
kinds of violent excitement: certain it is, that although Nicholas
experienced some pain on first awakening next morning, he sprung out of
bed as the clock struck seven, with very little difficulty, and was soon
as much on the alert as if nothing had occurred.

Merely looking into Smike’s room, and telling him that Newman Noggs
would call for him very shortly, Nicholas descended into the street,
and calling a hackney coach, bade the man drive to Mrs. Wititterly’s,
according to the direction which Newman had given him on the previous
night.

It wanted a quarter to eight when they reached Cadogan Place. Nicholas
began to fear that no one might be stirring at that early hour, when he
was relieved by the sight of a female servant, employed in cleaning the
door-steps. By this functionary he was referred to the doubtful page,
who appeared with dishevelled hair and a very warm and glossy face, as
of a page who had just got out of bed.

By this young gentleman he was informed that Miss Nickleby was then
taking her morning’s walk in the gardens before the house. On the
question being propounded whether he could go and find her, the page
desponded and thought not; but being stimulated with a shilling, the
page grew sanguine and thought he could.

‘Say to Miss Nickleby that her brother is here, and in great haste to
see her,’ said Nicholas.

The plated buttons disappeared with an alacrity most unusual to them,
and Nicholas paced the room in a state of feverish agitation which made
the delay even of a minute insupportable. He soon heard a light footstep
which he well knew, and before he could advance to meet her, Kate had
fallen on his neck and burst into tears.

‘My darling girl,’ said Nicholas as he embraced her. ‘How pale you are!’

‘I have been so unhappy here, dear brother,’ sobbed poor Kate; ‘so very,
very miserable. Do not leave me here, dear Nicholas, or I shall die of a
broken heart.’

‘I will leave you nowhere,’ answered Nicholas--‘never again, Kate,’ he
cried, moved in spite of himself as he folded her to his heart. ‘Tell
me that I acted for the best. Tell me that we parted because I feared to
bring misfortune on your head; that it was a trial to me no less than to
yourself, and that if I did wrong it was in ignorance of the world and
unknowingly.’

‘Why should I tell you what we know so well?’ returned Kate soothingly.
‘Nicholas--dear Nicholas--how can you give way thus?’

‘It is such bitter reproach to me to know what you have undergone,’
returned her brother; ‘to see you so much altered, and yet so kind and
patient--God!’ cried Nicholas, clenching his fist and suddenly changing
his tone and manner, ‘it sets my whole blood on fire again. You must
leave here with me directly; you should not have slept here last night,
but that I knew all this too late. To whom can I speak, before we drive
away?’

This question was most opportunely put, for at that instant Mr
Wititterly walked in, and to him Kate introduced her brother, who at
once announced his purpose, and the impossibility of deferring it.

‘The quarter’s notice,’ said Mr. Wititterly, with the gravity of a man on
the right side, ‘is not yet half expired. Therefore--’

‘Therefore,’ interposed Nicholas, ‘the quarter’s salary must be lost,
sir. You will excuse this extreme haste, but circumstances require that
I should immediately remove my sister, and I have not a moment’s time to
lose. Whatever she brought here I will send for, if you will allow me,
in the course of the day.’

Mr. Wititterly bowed, but offered no opposition to Kate’s immediate
departure; with which, indeed, he was rather gratified than otherwise,
Sir Tumley Snuffim having given it as his opinion, that she rather
disagreed with Mrs. Wititterly’s constitution.

‘With regard to the trifle of salary that is due,’ said Mr. Wititterly,
‘I will’--here he was interrupted by a violent fit of coughing--‘I
will--owe it to Miss Nickleby.’

Mr. Wititterly, it should be observed, was accustomed to owe small
accounts, and to leave them owing. All men have some little pleasant way
of their own; and this was Mr. Wititterly’s.

‘If you please,’ said Nicholas. And once more offering a hurried apology
for so sudden a departure, he hurried Kate into the vehicle, and bade
the man drive with all speed into the city.

To the city they went accordingly, with all the speed the hackney coach
could make; and as the horses happened to live at Whitechapel and to be
in the habit of taking their breakfast there, when they breakfasted
at all, they performed the journey with greater expedition than could
reasonably have been expected.

Nicholas sent Kate upstairs a few minutes before him, that his
unlooked-for appearance might not alarm his mother, and when the way had
been paved, presented himself with much duty and affection. Newman had
not been idle, for there was a little cart at the door, and the effects
were hurrying out already.

Now, Mrs. Nickleby was not the sort of person to be told anything in
a hurry, or rather to comprehend anything of peculiar delicacy or
importance on a short notice. Wherefore, although the good lady had been
subjected to a full hour’s preparation by little Miss La Creevy, and was
now addressed in most lucid terms both by Nicholas and his sister, she
was in a state of singular bewilderment and confusion, and could by no
means be made to comprehend the necessity of such hurried proceedings.

‘Why don’t you ask your uncle, my dear Nicholas, what he can possibly
mean by it?’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

‘My dear mother,’ returned Nicholas, ‘the time for talking has gone
by. There is but one step to take, and that is to cast him off with the
scorn and indignation he deserves. Your own honour and good name demand
that, after the discovery of his vile proceedings, you should not be
beholden to him one hour, even for the shelter of these bare walls.’

‘To be sure,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, crying bitterly, ‘he is a brute, a
monster; and the walls are very bare, and want painting too, and I have
had this ceiling whitewashed at the expense of eighteen-pence, which is
a very distressing thing, considering that it is so much gone into your
uncle’s pocket. I never could have believed it--never.’

‘Nor I, nor anybody else,’ said Nicholas.

‘Lord bless my life!’ exclaimed Mrs. Nickleby. ‘To think that that Sir
Mulberry Hawk should be such an abandoned wretch as Miss La Creevy says
he is, Nicholas, my dear; when I was congratulating myself every day on
his being an admirer of our dear Kate’s, and thinking what a thing it
would be for the family if he was to become connected with us, and use
his interest to get you some profitable government place. There are
very good places to be got about the court, I know; for a friend of ours
(Miss Cropley, at Exeter, my dear Kate, you recollect), he had one, and
I know that it was the chief part of his duty to wear silk stockings,
and a bag wig like a black watch-pocket; and to think that it should
come to this after all--oh, dear, dear, it’s enough to kill one, that it
is!’ With which expressions of sorrow, Mrs. Nickleby gave fresh vent to
her grief, and wept piteously.

As Nicholas and his sister were by this time compelled to superintend
the removal of the few articles of furniture, Miss La Creevy devoted
herself to the consolation of the matron, and observed with great
kindness of manner that she must really make an effort, and cheer up.

‘Oh I dare say, Miss La Creevy,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby, with a petulance
not unnatural in her unhappy circumstances, ‘it’s very easy to say cheer
up, but if you had as many occasions to cheer up as I have had--and
there,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, stopping short. ‘Think of Mr. Pyke and Mr
Pluck, two of the most perfect gentlemen that ever lived, what am I too
say to them--what can I say to them? Why, if I was to say to them, “I’m
told your friend Sir Mulberry is a base wretch,” they’d laugh at me.’

‘They will laugh no more at us, I take it,’ said Nicholas, advancing.
‘Come, mother, there is a coach at the door, and until Monday, at all
events, we will return to our old quarters.’

‘--Where everything is ready, and a hearty welcome into the bargain,’
added Miss La Creevy. ‘Now, let me go with you downstairs.’

But Mrs. Nickleby was not to be so easily moved, for first she insisted
on going upstairs to see that nothing had been left, and then on going
downstairs to see that everything had been taken away; and when she was
getting into the coach she had a vision of a forgotten coffee-pot on the
back-kitchen hob, and after she was shut in, a dismal recollection of
a green umbrella behind some unknown door. At last Nicholas, in a
condition of absolute despair, ordered the coachman to drive away,
and in the unexpected jerk of a sudden starting, Mrs. Nickleby lost a
shilling among the straw, which fortunately confined her attention to
the coach until it was too late to remember anything else.

Having seen everything safely out, discharged the servant, and locked
the door, Nicholas jumped into a cabriolet and drove to a bye place near
Golden Square where he had appointed to meet Noggs; and so quickly had
everything been done, that it was barely half-past nine when he reached
the place of meeting.

‘Here is the letter for Ralph,’ said Nicholas, ‘and here the key. When
you come to me this evening, not a word of last night. Ill news travels
fast, and they will know it soon enough. Have you heard if he was much
hurt?’

Newman shook his head.

‘I will ascertain that myself without loss of time,’ said Nicholas.

‘You had better take some rest,’ returned Newman. ‘You are fevered and
ill.’

Nicholas waved his hand carelessly, and concealing the indisposition he
really felt, now that the excitement which had sustained him was over,
took a hurried farewell of Newman Noggs, and left him.

Newman was not three minutes’ walk from Golden Square, but in the course
of that three minutes he took the letter out of his hat and put it in
again twenty times at least. First the front, then the back, then the
sides, then the superscription, then the seal, were objects of Newman’s
admiration. Then he held it at arm’s length as if to take in the whole
at one delicious survey, and then he rubbed his hands in a perfect
ecstasy with his commission.

He reached the office, hung his hat on its accustomed peg, laid the
letter and key upon the desk, and waited impatiently until Ralph
Nickleby should appear. After a few minutes, the well-known creaking of
his boots was heard on the stairs, and then the bell rung.

‘Has the post come in?’

‘No.’

‘Any other letters?’

‘One.’ Newman eyed him closely, and laid it on the desk.

‘What’s this?’ asked Ralph, taking up the key.

‘Left with the letter;--a boy brought them--quarter of an hour ago, or
less.’

Ralph glanced at the direction, opened the letter, and read as
follows:--

‘You are known to me now. There are no reproaches I could heap upon your
head which would carry with them one thousandth part of the grovelling
shame that this assurance will awaken even in your breast.

‘Your brother’s widow and her orphan child spurn the shelter of your
roof, and shun you with disgust and loathing. Your kindred renounce you,
for they know no shame but the ties of blood which bind them in name
with you.

‘You are an old man, and I leave you to the grave. May every
recollection of your life cling to your false heart, and cast their
darkness on your death-bed.’

Ralph Nickleby read this letter twice, and frowning heavily, fell into
a fit of musing; the paper fluttered from his hand and dropped upon the
floor, but he clasped his fingers, as if he held it still.

Suddenly, he started from his seat, and thrusting it all crumpled into
his pocket, turned furiously to Newman Noggs, as though to ask him
why he lingered. But Newman stood unmoved, with his back towards him,
following up, with the worn and blackened stump of an old pen, some
figures in an Interest-table which was pasted against the wall, and
apparently quite abstracted from every other object.



CHAPTER 34

Wherein Mr. Ralph Nickleby is visited by Persons with whom the Reader has
been already made acquainted


‘What a demnition long time you have kept me ringing at this confounded
old cracked tea-kettle of a bell, every tinkle of which is enough to
throw a strong man into blue convulsions, upon my life and soul, oh
demmit,’--said Mr. Mantalini to Newman Noggs, scraping his boots, as he
spoke, on Ralph Nickleby’s scraper.

‘I didn’t hear the bell more than once,’ replied Newman.

‘Then you are most immensely and outr-i-geously deaf,’ said Mr
Mantalini, ‘as deaf as a demnition post.’

Mr. Mantalini had got by this time into the passage, and was making his
way to the door of Ralph’s office with very little ceremony, when Newman
interposed his body; and hinting that Mr. Nickleby was unwilling to be
disturbed, inquired whether the client’s business was of a pressing
nature.

‘It is most demnebly particular,’ said Mr. Mantalini. ‘It is to melt some
scraps of dirty paper into bright, shining, chinking, tinkling, demd
mint sauce.’

Newman uttered a significant grunt, and taking Mr. Mantalini’s proffered
card, limped with it into his master’s office. As he thrust his head in
at the door, he saw that Ralph had resumed the thoughtful posture into
which he had fallen after perusing his nephew’s letter, and that he
seemed to have been reading it again, as he once more held it open in
his hand. The glance was but momentary, for Ralph, being disturbed,
turned to demand the cause of the interruption.

As Newman stated it, the cause himself swaggered into the room, and
grasping Ralph’s horny hand with uncommon affection, vowed that he had
never seen him looking so well in all his life.

‘There is quite a bloom upon your demd countenance,’ said Mr. Mantalini,
seating himself unbidden, and arranging his hair and whiskers. ‘You look
quite juvenile and jolly, demmit!’

‘We are alone,’ returned Ralph, tartly. ‘What do you want with me?’

‘Good!’ cried Mr. Mantalini, displaying his teeth. ‘What did I want! Yes.
Ha, ha! Very good. WHAT did I want. Ha, ha. Oh dem!’

‘What DO you want, man?’ demanded Ralph, sternly.

‘Demnition discount,’ returned Mr. Mantalini, with a grin, and shaking
his head waggishly.

‘Money is scarce,’ said Ralph.

‘Demd scarce, or I shouldn’t want it,’ interrupted Mr. Mantalini.

‘The times are bad, and one scarcely knows whom to trust,’ continued
Ralph. ‘I don’t want to do business just now, in fact I would rather
not; but as you are a friend--how many bills have you there?’

‘Two,’ returned Mr. Mantalini.

‘What is the gross amount?’

‘Demd trifling--five-and-seventy.’

‘And the dates?’

‘Two months, and four.’

‘I’ll do them for you--mind, for YOU; I wouldn’t for many people--for
five-and-twenty pounds,’ said Ralph, deliberately.

‘Oh demmit!’ cried Mr. Mantalini, whose face lengthened considerably at
this handsome proposal.

‘Why, that leaves you fifty,’ retorted Ralph. ‘What would you have? Let
me see the names.’

‘You are so demd hard, Nickleby,’ remonstrated Mr. Mantalini.

‘Let me see the names,’ replied Ralph, impatiently extending his hand
for the bills. ‘Well! They are not sure, but they are safe enough. Do
you consent to the terms, and will you take the money? I don’t want you
to do so. I would rather you didn’t.’

‘Demmit, Nickleby, can’t you--’ began Mr. Mantalini.

‘No,’ replied Ralph, interrupting him. ‘I can’t. Will you take the
money--down, mind; no delay, no going into the city and pretending to
negotiate with some other party who has no existence, and never had. Is
it a bargain, or is it not?’

Ralph pushed some papers from him as he spoke, and carelessly rattled
his cash-box, as though by mere accident. The sound was too much for Mr
Mantalini. He closed the bargain directly it reached his ears, and Ralph
told the money out upon the table.

He had scarcely done so, and Mr. Mantalini had not yet gathered it all
up, when a ring was heard at the bell, and immediately afterwards Newman
ushered in no less a person than Madame Mantalini, at sight of whom Mr
Mantalini evinced considerable discomposure, and swept the cash into his
pocket with remarkable alacrity.

‘Oh, you ARE here,’ said Madame Mantalini, tossing her head.

‘Yes, my life and soul, I am,’ replied her husband, dropping on his
knees, and pouncing with kitten-like playfulness upon a stray sovereign.
‘I am here, my soul’s delight, upon Tom Tiddler’s ground, picking up the
demnition gold and silver.’

‘I am ashamed of you,’ said Madame Mantalini, with much indignation.

‘Ashamed--of ME, my joy? It knows it is talking demd charming sweetness,
but naughty fibs,’ returned Mr. Mantalini. ‘It knows it is not ashamed of
its own popolorum tibby.’

Whatever were the circumstances which had led to such a result,
it certainly appeared as though the popolorum tibby had rather
miscalculated, for the nonce, the extent of his lady’s affection. Madame
Mantalini only looked scornful in reply; and, turning to Ralph, begged
him to excuse her intrusion.

‘Which is entirely attributable,’ said Madame, ‘to the gross misconduct
and most improper behaviour of Mr. Mantalini.’

‘Of me, my essential juice of pineapple!’

‘Of you,’ returned his wife. ‘But I will not allow it. I will not submit
to be ruined by the extravagance and profligacy of any man. I call Mr
Nickleby to witness the course I intend to pursue with you.’

‘Pray don’t call me to witness anything, ma’am,’ said Ralph. ‘Settle it
between yourselves, settle it between yourselves.’

‘No, but I must beg you as a favour,’ said Madame Mantalini, ‘to hear
me give him notice of what it is my fixed intention to do--my fixed
intention, sir,’ repeated Madame Mantalini, darting an angry look at her
husband.

‘Will she call me “Sir”?’ cried Mantalini. ‘Me who dote upon her with
the demdest ardour! She, who coils her fascinations round me like a pure
angelic rattlesnake! It will be all up with my feelings; she will throw
me into a demd state.’

‘Don’t talk of feelings, sir,’ rejoined Madame Mantalini, seating
herself, and turning her back upon him. ‘You don’t consider mine.’

‘I do not consider yours, my soul!’ exclaimed Mr. Mantalini.

‘No,’ replied his wife.

And notwithstanding various blandishments on the part of Mr. Mantalini,
Madame Mantalini still said no, and said it too with such determined and
resolute ill-temper, that Mr. Mantalini was clearly taken aback.

‘His extravagance, Mr. Nickleby,’ said Madame Mantalini, addressing
herself to Ralph, who leant against his easy-chair with his hands behind
him, and regarded the amiable couple with a smile of the supremest and
most unmitigated contempt,--‘his extravagance is beyond all bounds.’

‘I should scarcely have supposed it,’ answered Ralph, sarcastically.

‘I assure you, Mr. Nickleby, however, that it is,’ returned Madame
Mantalini. ‘It makes me miserable! I am under constant apprehensions,
and in constant difficulty. And even this,’ said Madame Mantalini,
wiping her eyes, ‘is not the worst. He took some papers of value out of
my desk this morning without asking my permission.’

Mr. Mantalini groaned slightly, and buttoned his trousers pocket.

‘I am obliged,’ continued Madame Mantalini, ‘since our late misfortunes,
to pay Miss Knag a great deal of money for having her name in the
business, and I really cannot afford to encourage him in all his
wastefulness. As I have no doubt that he came straight here, Mr
Nickleby, to convert the papers I have spoken of, into money, and as you
have assisted us very often before, and are very much connected with us
in this kind of matters, I wish you to know the determination at which
his conduct has compelled me to arrive.’

Mr. Mantalini groaned once more from behind his wife’s bonnet, and
fitting a sovereign into one of his eyes, winked with the other at
Ralph. Having achieved this performance with great dexterity, he whipped
the coin into his pocket, and groaned again with increased penitence.

‘I have made up my mind,’ said Madame Mantalini, as tokens of impatience
manifested themselves in Ralph’s countenance, ‘to allowance him.’

‘To do that, my joy?’ inquired Mr. Mantalini, who did not seem to have
caught the words.

‘To put him,’ said Madame Mantalini, looking at Ralph, and prudently
abstaining from the slightest glance at her husband, lest his many
graces should induce her to falter in her resolution, ‘to put him upon a
fixed allowance; and I say that if he has a hundred and twenty pounds
a year for his clothes and pocket-money, he may consider himself a very
fortunate man.’

Mr. Mantalini waited, with much decorum, to hear the amount of the
proposed stipend, but when it reached his ears, he cast his hat and cane
upon the floor, and drawing out his pocket-handkerchief, gave vent to
his feelings in a dismal moan.

‘Demnition!’ cried Mr. Mantalini, suddenly skipping out of his chair,
and as suddenly skipping into it again, to the great discomposure of his
lady’s nerves. ‘But no. It is a demd horrid dream. It is not reality.
No!’

Comforting himself with this assurance, Mr. Mantalini closed his eyes and
waited patiently till such time as he should wake up.

‘A very judicious arrangement,’ observed Ralph with a sneer, ‘if your
husband will keep within it, ma’am--as no doubt he will.’

‘Demmit!’ exclaimed Mr. Mantalini, opening his eyes at the sound of
Ralph’s voice, ‘it is a horrid reality. She is sitting there before me.
There is the graceful outline of her form; it cannot be mistaken--there
is nothing like it. The two countesses had no outlines at all, and the
dowager’s was a demd outline. Why is she so excruciatingly beautiful
that I cannot be angry with her, even now?’

‘You have brought it upon yourself, Alfred,’ returned Madame
Mantalini--still reproachfully, but in a softened tone.

‘I am a demd villain!’ cried Mr. Mantalini, smiting himself on the head.
‘I will fill my pockets with change for a sovereign in halfpence and
drown myself in the Thames; but I will not be angry with her, even then,
for I will put a note in the twopenny-post as I go along, to tell her
where the body is. She will be a lovely widow. I shall be a body. Some
handsome women will cry; she will laugh demnebly.’

‘Alfred, you cruel, cruel creature,’ said Madame Mantalini, sobbing at
the dreadful picture.

‘She calls me cruel--me--me--who for her sake will become a demd, damp,
moist, unpleasant body!’ exclaimed Mr. Mantalini.

‘You know it almost breaks my heart, even to hear you talk of such a
thing,’ replied Madame Mantalini.

‘Can I live to be mistrusted?’ cried her husband. ‘Have I cut my heart
into a demd extraordinary number of little pieces, and given them
all away, one after another, to the same little engrossing demnition
captivater, and can I live to be suspected by her? Demmit, no I can’t.’

‘Ask Mr. Nickleby whether the sum I have mentioned is not a proper one,’
reasoned Madame Mantalini.

‘I don’t want any sum,’ replied her disconsolate husband; ‘I shall
require no demd allowance. I will be a body.’

On this repetition of Mr. Mantalini’s fatal threat, Madame Mantalini
wrung her hands, and implored the interference of Ralph Nickleby; and
after a great quantity of tears and talking, and several attempts on
the part of Mr. Mantalini to reach the door, preparatory to straightway
committing violence upon himself, that gentleman was prevailed upon,
with difficulty, to promise that he wouldn’t be a body. This great point
attained, Madame Mantalini argued the question of the allowance, and Mr
Mantalini did the same, taking occasion to show that he could live with
uncommon satisfaction upon bread and water, and go clad in rags, but
that he could not support existence with the additional burden of
being mistrusted by the object of his most devoted and disinterested
affection. This brought fresh tears into Madame Mantalini’s eyes, which
having just begun to open to some few of the demerits of Mr. Mantalini,
were only open a very little way, and could be easily closed again. The
result was, that without quite giving up the allowance question, Madame
Mantalini, postponed its further consideration; and Ralph saw, clearly
enough, that Mr. Mantalini had gained a fresh lease of his easy life, and
that, for some time longer at all events, his degradation and downfall
were postponed.

‘But it will come soon enough,’ thought Ralph; ‘all love--bah! that I
should use the cant of boys and girls--is fleeting enough; though that
which has its sole root in the admiration of a whiskered face like that
of yonder baboon, perhaps lasts the longest, as it originates in the
greater blindness and is fed by vanity. Meantime the fools bring grist
to my mill, so let them live out their day, and the longer it is, the
better.’

These agreeable reflections occurred to Ralph Nickleby, as sundry small
caresses and endearments, supposed to be unseen, were exchanged between
the objects of his thoughts.

‘If you have nothing more to say, my dear, to Mr. Nickleby,’ said Madame
Mantalini, ‘we will take our leaves. I am sure we have detained him much
too long already.’

Mr. Mantalini answered, in the first instance, by tapping Madame
Mantalini several times on the nose, and then, by remarking in words
that he had nothing more to say.

‘Demmit! I have, though,’ he added almost immediately, drawing Ralph
into a corner. ‘Here’s an affair about your friend Sir Mulberry. Such a
demd extraordinary out-of-the-way kind of thing as never was--eh?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Ralph.

‘Don’t you know, demmit?’ asked Mr. Mantalini.

‘I see by the paper that he was thrown from his cabriolet last night,
and severely injured, and that his life is in some danger,’ answered
Ralph with great composure; ‘but I see nothing extraordinary in
that--accidents are not miraculous events, when men live hard, and drive
after dinner.’

‘Whew!’ cried Mr. Mantalini in a long shrill whistle. ‘Then don’t you
know how it was?’

‘Not unless it was as I have just supposed,’ replied Ralph, shrugging
his shoulders carelessly, as if to give his questioner to understand
that he had no curiosity upon the subject.

‘Demmit, you amaze me,’ cried Mantalini.

Ralph shrugged his shoulders again, as if it were no great feat to amaze
Mr. Mantalini, and cast a wistful glance at the face of Newman Noggs,
which had several times appeared behind a couple of panes of glass in
the room door; it being a part of Newman’s duty, when unimportant people
called, to make various feints of supposing that the bell had rung for
him to show them out: by way of a gentle hint to such visitors that it
was time to go.

‘Don’t you know,’ said Mr. Mantalini, taking Ralph by the button, ‘that
it wasn’t an accident at all, but a demd, furious, manslaughtering
attack made upon him by your nephew?’

‘What!’ snarled Ralph, clenching his fists and turning a livid white.

‘Demmit, Nickleby, you’re as great a tiger as he is,’ said Mantalini,
alarmed at these demonstrations.

‘Go on,’ cried Ralph. ‘Tell me what you mean. What is this story? Who
told you? Speak,’ growled Ralph. ‘Do you hear me?’

‘’Gad, Nickleby,’ said Mr. Mantalini, retreating towards his wife, ‘what
a demneble fierce old evil genius you are! You’re enough to frighten the
life and soul out of her little delicious wits--flying all at once into
such a blazing, ravaging, raging passion as never was, demmit!’

‘Pshaw,’ rejoined Ralph, forcing a smile. ‘It is but manner.’

‘It is a demd uncomfortable, private-madhouse-sort of a manner,’ said Mr
Mantalini, picking up his cane.

Ralph affected to smile, and once more inquired from whom Mr. Mantalini
had derived his information.

‘From Pyke; and a demd, fine, pleasant, gentlemanly dog it is,’ replied
Mantalini. ‘Demnition pleasant, and a tip-top sawyer.’

‘And what said he?’ asked Ralph, knitting his brows.

‘That it happened this way--that your nephew met him at a coffeehouse,
fell upon him with the most demneble ferocity, followed him to his cab,
swore he would ride home with him, if he rode upon the horse’s back or
hooked himself on to the horse’s tail; smashed his countenance, which
is a demd fine countenance in its natural state; frightened the horse,
pitched out Sir Mulberry and himself, and--’

‘And was killed?’ interposed Ralph with gleaming eyes. ‘Was he? Is he
dead?’

Mantalini shook his head.

‘Ugh,’ said Ralph, turning away. ‘Then he has done nothing. Stay,’
he added, looking round again. ‘He broke a leg or an arm, or put his
shoulder out, or fractured his collar-bone, or ground a rib or two? His
neck was saved for the halter, but he got some painful and slow-healing
injury for his trouble? Did he? You must have heard that, at least.’

‘No,’ rejoined Mantalini, shaking his head again. ‘Unless he was dashed
into such little pieces that they blew away, he wasn’t hurt, for he went
off as quiet and comfortable as--as--as demnition,’ said Mr. Mantalini,
rather at a loss for a simile.

‘And what,’ said Ralph, hesitating a little, ‘what was the cause of
quarrel?’

‘You are the demdest, knowing hand,’ replied Mr. Mantalini, in an
admiring tone, ‘the cunningest, rummest, superlativest old fox--oh
dem!--to pretend now not to know that it was the little bright-eyed
niece--the softest, sweetest, prettiest--’

‘Alfred!’ interposed Madame Mantalini.

‘She is always right,’ rejoined Mr. Mantalini soothingly, ‘and when she
says it is time to go, it is time, and go she shall; and when she walks
along the streets with her own tulip, the women shall say, with envy,
she has got a demd fine husband; and the men shall say with rapture,
he has got a demd fine wife; and they shall both be right and neither
wrong, upon my life and soul--oh demmit!’

With which remarks, and many more, no less intellectual and to the
purpose, Mr. Mantalini kissed the fingers of his gloves to Ralph
Nickleby, and drawing his lady’s arm through his, led her mincingly
away.

‘So, so,’ muttered Ralph, dropping into his chair; ‘this devil is loose
again, and thwarting me, as he was born to do, at every turn. He told
me once there should be a day of reckoning between us, sooner or later.
I’ll make him a true prophet, for it shall surely come.’

‘Are you at home?’ asked Newman, suddenly popping in his head.

‘No,’ replied Ralph, with equal abruptness.

Newman withdrew his head, but thrust it in again.

‘You’re quite sure you’re not at home, are you?’ said Newman.

‘What does the idiot mean?’ cried Ralph, testily.

‘He has been waiting nearly ever since they first came in, and may have
heard your voice--that’s all,’ said Newman, rubbing his hands.

‘Who has?’ demanded Ralph, wrought by the intelligence he had just
heard, and his clerk’s provoking coolness, to an intense pitch of
irritation.

The necessity of a reply was superseded by the unlooked-for entrance
of a third party--the individual in question--who, bringing his one
eye (for he had but one) to bear on Ralph Nickleby, made a great many
shambling bows, and sat himself down in an armchair, with his hands on
his knees, and his short black trousers drawn up so high in the legs by
the exertion of seating himself, that they scarcely reached below the
tops of his Wellington boots.

‘Why, this IS a surprise!’ said Ralph, bending his gaze upon the
visitor, and half smiling as he scrutinised him attentively; ‘I should
know your face, Mr. Squeers.’

‘Ah!’ replied that worthy, ‘and you’d have know’d it better, sir, if
it hadn’t been for all that I’ve been a-going through. Just lift that
little boy off the tall stool in the back-office, and tell him to come
in here, will you, my man?’ said Squeers, addressing himself to Newman.
‘Oh, he’s lifted his-self off. My son, sir, little Wackford. What do you
think of him, sir, for a specimen of the Dotheboys Hall feeding? Ain’t
he fit to bust out of his clothes, and start the seams, and make the
very buttons fly off with his fatness? Here’s flesh!’ cried Squeers,
turning the boy about, and indenting the plumpest parts of his figure
with divers pokes and punches, to the great discomposure of his son
and heir. ‘Here’s firmness, here’s solidness! Why you can hardly get up
enough of him between your finger and thumb to pinch him anywheres.’

In however good condition Master Squeers might have been, he certainly
did not present this remarkable compactness of person, for on his
father’s closing his finger and thumb in illustration of his remark,
he uttered a sharp cry, and rubbed the place in the most natural manner
possible.

‘Well,’ remarked Squeers, a little disconcerted, ‘I had him there; but
that’s because we breakfasted early this morning, and he hasn’t had his
lunch yet. Why you couldn’t shut a bit of him in a door, when he’s had
his dinner. Look at them tears, sir,’ said Squeers, with a triumphant
air, as Master Wackford wiped his eyes with the cuff of his jacket,
‘there’s oiliness!’

‘He looks well, indeed,’ returned Ralph, who, for some purposes of his
own, seemed desirous to conciliate the schoolmaster. ‘But how is Mrs
Squeers, and how are you?’

‘Mrs. Squeers, sir,’ replied the proprietor of Dotheboys, ‘is as she
always is--a mother to them lads, and a blessing, and a comfort, and
a joy to all them as knows her. One of our boys--gorging his-self with
vittles, and then turning in; that’s their way--got a abscess on him
last week. To see how she operated upon him with a pen-knife! Oh Lor!’
said Squeers, heaving a sigh, and nodding his head a great many times,
‘what a member of society that woman is!’

Mr. Squeers indulged in a retrospective look, for some quarter of a
minute, as if this allusion to his lady’s excellences had naturally
led his mind to the peaceful village of Dotheboys near Greta Bridge
in Yorkshire; and then looked at Ralph, as if waiting for him to say
something.

‘Have you quite recovered that scoundrel’s attack?’ asked Ralph.

‘I’ve only just done it, if I’ve done it now,’ replied Squeers. ‘I was
one blessed bruise, sir,’ said Squeers, touching first the roots of his
hair, and then the toes of his boots, ‘from HERE to THERE. Vinegar and
brown paper, vinegar and brown paper, from morning to night. I suppose
there was a matter of half a ream of brown paper stuck upon me, from
first to last. As I laid all of a heap in our kitchen, plastered all
over, you might have thought I was a large brown-paper parcel, chock
full of nothing but groans. Did I groan loud, Wackford, or did I groan
soft?’ asked Mr. Squeers, appealing to his son.

‘Loud,’ replied Wackford.

‘Was the boys sorry to see me in such a dreadful condition, Wackford, or
was they glad?’ asked Mr. Squeers, in a sentimental manner.

‘Gl--’

‘Eh?’ cried Squeers, turning sharp round.

‘Sorry,’ rejoined his son.

‘Oh!’ said Squeers, catching him a smart box on the ear. ‘Then take
your hands out of your pockets, and don’t stammer when you’re asked a
question. Hold your noise, sir, in a gentleman’s office, or I’ll run
away from my family and never come back any more; and then what would
become of all them precious and forlorn lads as would be let loose on
the world, without their best friend at their elbers?’

‘Were you obliged to have medical attendance?’ inquired Ralph.

‘Ay, was I,’ rejoined Squeers, ‘and a precious bill the medical
attendant brought in too; but I paid it though.’

Ralph elevated his eyebrows in a manner which might be expressive of
either sympathy or astonishment--just as the beholder was pleased to
take it.

‘Yes, I paid it, every farthing,’ replied Squeers, who seemed to know
the man he had to deal with, too well to suppose that any blinking of
the question would induce him to subscribe towards the expenses; ‘I
wasn’t out of pocket by it after all, either.’

‘No!’ said Ralph.

‘Not a halfpenny,’ replied Squeers. ‘The fact is, we have only one extra
with our boys, and that is for doctors when required--and not then,
unless we’re sure of our customers. Do you see?’

‘I understand,’ said Ralph.

‘Very good,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘Then, after my bill was run up, we
picked out five little boys (sons of small tradesmen, as was sure pay)
that had never had the scarlet fever, and we sent one to a cottage where
they’d got it, and he took it, and then we put the four others to sleep
with him, and THEY took it, and then the doctor came and attended ‘em
once all round, and we divided my total among ‘em, and added it on to
their little bills, and the parents paid it. Ha! ha! ha!’

‘And a good plan too,’ said Ralph, eyeing the schoolmaster stealthily.

‘I believe you,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘We always do it. Why, when Mrs
Squeers was brought to bed with little Wackford here, we ran the
hooping-cough through half-a-dozen boys, and charged her expenses among
‘em, monthly nurse included. Ha! ha! ha!’

Ralph never laughed, but on this occasion he produced the nearest
approach to it that he could, and waiting until Mr. Squeers had enjoyed
the professional joke to his heart’s content, inquired what had brought
him to town.

‘Some bothering law business,’ replied Squeers, scratching his head,
‘connected with an action, for what they call neglect of a boy. I don’t
know what they would have. He had as good grazing, that boy had, as
there is about us.’

Ralph looked as if he did not quite understand the observation.

‘Grazing,’ said Squeers, raising his voice, under the impression that as
Ralph failed to comprehend him, he must be deaf. ‘When a boy gets weak
and ill and don’t relish his meals, we give him a change of diet--turn
him out, for an hour or so every day, into a neighbour’s turnip field,
or sometimes, if it’s a delicate case, a turnip field and a piece of
carrots alternately, and let him eat as many as he likes. There an’t
better land in the country than this perwerse lad grazed on, and yet he
goes and catches cold and indigestion and what not, and then his friends
brings a lawsuit against ME! Now, you’d hardly suppose,’ added Squeers,
moving in his chair with the impatience of an ill-used man, ‘that
people’s ingratitude would carry them quite as far as that; would you?’

‘A hard case, indeed,’ observed Ralph.

‘You don’t say more than the truth when you say that,’ replied Squeers.
‘I don’t suppose there’s a man going, as possesses the fondness for
youth that I do. There’s youth to the amount of eight hundred pound a
year at Dotheboys Hall at this present time. I’d take sixteen hundred
pound worth if I could get ‘em, and be as fond of every individual
twenty pound among ‘em as nothing should equal it!’

‘Are you stopping at your old quarters?’ asked Ralph.

‘Yes, we are at the Saracen,’ replied Squeers, ‘and as it don’t want
very long to the end of the half-year, we shall continney to stop there
till I’ve collected the money, and some new boys too, I hope. I’ve
brought little Wackford up, on purpose to show to parents and
guardians. I shall put him in the advertisement, this time. Look at that
boy--himself a pupil. Why he’s a miracle of high feeding, that boy is!’

‘I should like to have a word with you,’ said Ralph, who had both
spoken and listened mechanically for some time, and seemed to have been
thinking.

‘As many words as you like, sir,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘Wackford, you go
and play in the back office, and don’t move about too much or you’ll get
thin, and that won’t do. You haven’t got such a thing as twopence, Mr
Nickleby, have you?’ said Squeers, rattling a bunch of keys in his coat
pocket, and muttering something about its being all silver.

‘I--think I have,’ said Ralph, very slowly, and producing, after much
rummaging in an old drawer, a penny, a halfpenny, and two farthings.

‘Thankee,’ said Squeers, bestowing it upon his son. ‘Here! You go and
buy a tart--Mr. Nickleby’s man will show you where--and mind you buy a
rich one. Pastry,’ added Squeers, closing the door on Master Wackford,
‘makes his flesh shine a good deal, and parents thinks that a healthy
sign.’

With this explanation, and a peculiarly knowing look to eke it out,
Mr. Squeers moved his chair so as to bring himself opposite to Ralph
Nickleby at no great distance off; and having planted it to his entire
satisfaction, sat down.

‘Attend to me,’ said Ralph, bending forward a little.

Squeers nodded.

‘I am not to suppose,’ said Ralph, ‘that you are dolt enough to forgive
or forget, very readily, the violence that was committed upon you, or
the exposure which accompanied it?’

‘Devil a bit,’ replied Squeers, tartly.

‘Or to lose an opportunity of repaying it with interest, if you could
get one?’ said Ralph.

‘Show me one, and try,’ rejoined Squeers.

‘Some such object it was, that induced you to call on me?’ said Ralph,
raising his eyes to the schoolmaster’s face.

‘N-n-no, I don’t know that,’ replied Squeers. ‘I thought that if it
was in your power to make me, besides the trifle of money you sent, any
compensation--’

‘Ah!’ cried Ralph, interrupting him. ‘You needn’t go on.’

After a long pause, during which Ralph appeared absorbed in
contemplation, he again broke silence by asking:

‘Who is this boy that he took with him?’

Squeers stated his name.

‘Was he young or old, healthy or sickly, tractable or rebellious? Speak
out, man,’ retorted Ralph.

‘Why, he wasn’t young,’ answered Squeers; ‘that is, not young for a boy,
you know.’

‘That is, he was not a boy at all, I suppose?’ interrupted Ralph.

‘Well,’ returned Squeers, briskly, as if he felt relieved by the
suggestion, ‘he might have been nigh twenty. He wouldn’t seem so old,
though, to them as didn’t know him, for he was a little wanting here,’
touching his forehead; ‘nobody at home, you know, if you knocked ever so
often.’

‘And you DID knock pretty often, I dare say?’ muttered Ralph.

‘Pretty well,’ returned Squeers with a grin.

‘When you wrote to acknowledge the receipt of this trifle of money as
you call it,’ said Ralph, ‘you told me his friends had deserted him long
ago, and that you had not the faintest clue or trace to tell you who he
was. Is that the truth?’

‘It is, worse luck!’ replied Squeers, becoming more and more easy and
familiar in his manner, as Ralph pursued his inquiries with the less
reserve. ‘It’s fourteen years ago, by the entry in my book, since a
strange man brought him to my place, one autumn night, and left him
there; paying five pound five, for his first quarter in advance. He
might have been five or six year old at that time--not more.’

‘What more do you know about him?’ demanded Ralph.

‘Devilish little, I’m sorry to say,’ replied Squeers. ‘The money was
paid for some six or eight year, and then it stopped. He had given an
address in London, had this chap; but when it came to the point, of
course nobody knowed anything about him. So I kept the lad out of--out
of--’

‘Charity?’ suggested Ralph drily.

‘Charity, to be sure,’ returned Squeers, rubbing his knees, ‘and when he
begins to be useful in a certain sort of way, this young scoundrel of
a Nickleby comes and carries him off. But the most vexatious and
aggeravating part of the whole affair is,’ said Squeers, dropping his
voice, and drawing his chair still closer to Ralph, ‘that some questions
have been asked about him at last--not of me, but, in a roundabout kind
of way, of people in our village. So, that just when I might have had
all arrears paid up, perhaps, and perhaps--who knows? such things have
happened in our business before--a present besides for putting him out
to a farmer, or sending him to sea, so that he might never turn up to
disgrace his parents, supposing him to be a natural boy, as many of our
boys are--damme, if that villain of a Nickleby don’t collar him in open
day, and commit as good as highway robbery upon my pocket.’

‘We will both cry quits with him before long,’ said Ralph, laying his
hand on the arm of the Yorkshire schoolmaster.

‘Quits!’ echoed Squeers. ‘Ah! and I should like to leave a small balance
in his favour, to be settled when he can. I only wish Mrs. Squeers could
catch hold of him. Bless her heart! She’d murder him, Mr. Nickleby--she
would, as soon as eat her dinner.’

‘We will talk of this again,’ said Ralph. ‘I must have time to think of
it. To wound him through his own affections and fancies--. If I could
strike him through this boy--’

‘Strike him how you like, sir,’ interrupted Squeers, ‘only hit him hard
enough, that’s all--and with that, I’ll say good-morning. Here!--just
chuck that little boy’s hat off that corner peg, and lift him off the
stool will you?’

Bawling these requests to Newman Noggs, Mr. Squeers betook himself to the
little back-office, and fitted on his child’s hat with parental anxiety,
while Newman, with his pen behind his ear, sat, stiff and immovable, on
his stool, regarding the father and son by turns with a broad stare.

‘He’s a fine boy, an’t he?’ said Squeers, throwing his head a little
on one side, and falling back to the desk, the better to estimate the
proportions of little Wackford.

‘Very,’ said Newman.

‘Pretty well swelled out, an’t he?’ pursued Squeers. ‘He has the fatness
of twenty boys, he has.’

‘Ah!’ replied Newman, suddenly thrusting his face into that of Squeers,
‘he has;--the fatness of twenty!--more! He’s got it all. God help that
others. Ha! ha! Oh Lord!’

Having uttered these fragmentary observations, Newman dropped upon his
desk and began to write with most marvellous rapidity.

‘Why, what does the man mean?’ cried Squeers, colouring. ‘Is he drunk?’

Newman made no reply.

‘Is he mad?’ said Squeers.

But, still Newman betrayed no consciousness of any presence save his
own; so, Mr. Squeers comforted himself by saying that he was both drunk
AND mad; and, with this parting observation, he led his hopeful son
away.

In exact proportion as Ralph Nickleby became conscious of a struggling
and lingering regard for Kate, had his detestation of Nicholas
augmented. It might be, that to atone for the weakness of inclining to
any one person, he held it necessary to hate some other more intensely
than before; but such had been the course of his feelings. And now,
to be defied and spurned, to be held up to her in the worst and most
repulsive colours, to know that she was taught to hate and despise
him: to feel that there was infection in his touch, and taint in his
companionship--to know all this, and to know that the mover of it all
was that same boyish poor relation who had twitted him in their very
first interview, and openly bearded and braved him since, wrought his
quiet and stealthy malignity to such a pitch, that there was scarcely
anything he would not have hazarded to gratify it, if he could have seen
his way to some immediate retaliation.

But, fortunately for Nicholas, Ralph Nickleby did not; and although he
cast about all that day, and kept a corner of his brain working on the
one anxious subject through all the round of schemes and business that
came with it, night found him at last, still harping on the same theme,
and still pursuing the same unprofitable reflections.

‘When my brother was such as he,’ said Ralph, ‘the first comparisons
were drawn between us--always in my disfavour. HE was open, liberal,
gallant, gay; I a crafty hunks of cold and stagnant blood, with no
passion but love of saving, and no spirit beyond a thirst for gain. I
recollected it well when I first saw this whipster; but I remember it
better now.’

He had been occupied in tearing Nicholas’s letter into atoms; and as he
spoke, he scattered it in a tiny shower about him.

‘Recollections like these,’ pursued Ralph, with a bitter smile, ‘flock
upon me--when I resign myself to them--in crowds, and from countless
quarters. As a portion of the world affect to despise the power of
money, I must try and show them what it is.’

And being, by this time, in a pleasant frame of mind for slumber, Ralph
Nickleby went to bed.



CHAPTER 35

Smike becomes known to Mrs. Nickleby and Kate. Nicholas also meets with
new Acquaintances. Brighter Days seem to dawn upon the Family


Having established his mother and sister in the apartments of the
kind-hearted miniature painter, and ascertained that Sir Mulberry Hawk
was in no danger of losing his life, Nicholas turned his thoughts to
poor Smike, who, after breakfasting with Newman Noggs, had remained, in
a disconsolate state, at that worthy creature’s lodgings, waiting, with
much anxiety, for further intelligence of his protector.

‘As he will be one of our own little household, wherever we live,
or whatever fortune is in reserve for us,’ thought Nicholas, ‘I must
present the poor fellow in due form. They will be kind to him for his
own sake, and if not (on that account solely) to the full extent I could
wish, they will stretch a point, I am sure, for mine.’

Nicholas said ‘they’, but his misgivings were confined to one person.
He was sure of Kate, but he knew his mother’s peculiarities, and was
not quite so certain that Smike would find favour in the eyes of Mrs
Nickleby.

‘However,’ thought Nicholas as he departed on his benevolent errand;
‘she cannot fail to become attached to him, when she knows what a
devoted creature he is, and as she must quickly make the discovery, his
probation will be a short one.’

‘I was afraid,’ said Smike, overjoyed to see his friend again, ‘that you
had fallen into some fresh trouble; the time seemed so long, at last,
that I almost feared you were lost.’

‘Lost!’ replied Nicholas gaily. ‘You will not be rid of me so easily,
I promise you. I shall rise to the surface many thousand times yet,
and the harder the thrust that pushes me down, the more quickly I shall
rebound, Smike. But come; my errand here is to take you home.’

‘Home!’ faltered Smike, drawing timidly back.

‘Ay,’ rejoined Nicholas, taking his arm. ‘Why not?’

‘I had such hopes once,’ said Smike; ‘day and night, day and night,
for many years. I longed for home till I was weary, and pined away with
grief, but now--’

‘And what now?’ asked Nicholas, looking kindly in his face. ‘What now,
old friend?’

‘I could not part from you to go to any home on earth,’ replied Smike,
pressing his hand; ‘except one, except one. I shall never be an old man;
and if your hand placed me in the grave, and I could think, before I
died, that you would come and look upon it sometimes with one of your
kind smiles, and in the summer weather, when everything was alive--not
dead like me--I could go to that home almost without a tear.’

‘Why do you talk thus, poor boy, if your life is a happy one with me?’
said Nicholas.

‘Because I should change; not those about me. And if they forgot me,
I should never know it,’ replied Smike. ‘In the churchyard we are all
alike, but here there are none like me. I am a poor creature, but I know
that.’

‘You are a foolish, silly creature,’ said Nicholas cheerfully. ‘If
that is what you mean, I grant you that. Why, here’s a dismal face for
ladies’ company!--my pretty sister too, whom you have so often asked me
about. Is this your Yorkshire gallantry? For shame! for shame!’

Smike brightened up and smiled.

‘When I talk of home,’ pursued Nicholas, ‘I talk of mine--which is yours
of course. If it were defined by any particular four walls and a roof,
God knows I should be sufficiently puzzled to say whereabouts it lay;
but that is not what I mean. When I speak of home, I speak of the place
where--in default of a better--those I love are gathered together; and
if that place were a gypsy’s tent, or a barn, I should call it by the
same good name notwithstanding. And now, for what is my present home,
which, however alarming your expectations may be, will neither terrify
you by its extent nor its magnificence!’

So saying, Nicholas took his companion by the arm, and saying a great
deal more to the same purpose, and pointing out various things to amuse
and interest him as they went along, led the way to Miss La Creevy’s
house.

‘And this, Kate,’ said Nicholas, entering the room where his sister sat
alone, ‘is the faithful friend and affectionate fellow-traveller whom I
prepared you to receive.’

Poor Smike was bashful, and awkward, and frightened enough, at first,
but Kate advanced towards him so kindly, and said, in such a sweet
voice, how anxious she had been to see him after all her brother
had told her, and how much she had to thank him for having comforted
Nicholas so greatly in their very trying reverses, that he began to be
very doubtful whether he should shed tears or not, and became still more
flurried. However, he managed to say, in a broken voice, that Nicholas
was his only friend, and that he would lay down his life to help him;
and Kate, although she was so kind and considerate, seemed to be so
wholly unconscious of his distress and embarrassment, that he recovered
almost immediately and felt quite at home.

Then, Miss La Creevy came in; and to her Smike had to be presented also.
And Miss La Creevy was very kind too, and wonderfully talkative: not to
Smike, for that would have made him uneasy at first, but to Nicholas and
his sister. Then, after a time, she would speak to Smike himself now and
then, asking him whether he was a judge of likenesses, and whether he
thought that picture in the corner was like herself, and whether he
didn’t think it would have looked better if she had made herself ten
years younger, and whether he didn’t think, as a matter of general
observation, that young ladies looked better not only in pictures, but
out of them too, than old ones; with many more small jokes and facetious
remarks, which were delivered with such good-humour and merriment, that
Smike thought, within himself, she was the nicest lady he had ever seen;
even nicer than Mrs. Grudden, of Mr. Vincent Crummles’s theatre; and she
was a nice lady too, and talked, perhaps more, but certainly louder,
than Miss La Creevy.

At length the door opened again, and a lady in mourning came in; and
Nicholas kissing the lady in mourning affectionately, and calling her
his mother, led her towards the chair from which Smike had risen when
she entered the room.

‘You are always kind-hearted, and anxious to help the oppressed, my dear
mother,’ said Nicholas, ‘so you will be favourably disposed towards him,
I know.’

‘I am sure, my dear Nicholas,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby, looking very hard
at her new friend, and bending to him with something more of majesty
than the occasion seemed to require: ‘I am sure any friend of yours
has, as indeed he naturally ought to have, and must have, of course, you
know, a great claim upon me, and of course, it is a very great pleasure
to me to be introduced to anybody you take an interest in. There can be
no doubt about that; none at all; not the least in the world,’ said Mrs
Nickleby. ‘At the same time I must say, Nicholas, my dear, as I used
to say to your poor dear papa, when he WOULD bring gentlemen home to
dinner, and there was nothing in the house, that if he had come the
day before yesterday--no, I don’t mean the day before yesterday now;
I should have said, perhaps, the year before last--we should have been
better able to entertain him.’

With which remarks, Mrs. Nickleby turned to her daughter, and inquired,
in an audible whisper, whether the gentleman was going to stop all
night.

‘Because, if he is, Kate, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘I don’t see that
it’s possible for him to sleep anywhere, and that’s the truth.’

Kate stepped gracefully forward, and without any show of annoyance or
irritation, breathed a few words into her mother’s ear.

‘La, Kate, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, shrinking back, ‘how you do
tickle one! Of course, I understand THAT, my love, without your telling
me; and I said the same to Nicholas, and I AM very much pleased. You
didn’t tell me, Nicholas, my dear,’ added Mrs. Nickleby, turning round
with an air of less reserve than she had before assumed, ‘what your
friend’s name is.’

‘His name, mother,’ replied Nicholas, ‘is Smike.’

The effect of this communication was by no means anticipated; but the
name was no sooner pronounced, than Mrs. Nickleby dropped upon a chair,
and burst into a fit of crying.

‘What is the matter?’ exclaimed Nicholas, running to support her.

‘It’s so like Pyke,’ cried Mrs. Nickleby; ‘so exactly like Pyke. Oh!
don’t speak to me--I shall be better presently.’

And after exhibiting every symptom of slow suffocation in all its
stages, and drinking about a tea-spoonful of water from a full tumbler,
and spilling the remainder, Mrs. Nickleby WAS better, and remarked, with
a feeble smile, that she was very foolish, she knew.

‘It’s a weakness in our family,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘so, of course,
I can’t be blamed for it. Your grandmama, Kate, was exactly the
same--precisely. The least excitement, the slightest surprise--she
fainted away directly. I have heard her say, often and often, that when
she was a young lady, and before she was married, she was turning
a corner into Oxford Street one day, when she ran against her own
hairdresser, who, it seems, was escaping from a bear;--the mere
suddenness of the encounter made her faint away directly. Wait, though,’
added Mrs. Nickleby, pausing to consider. ‘Let me be sure I’m right. Was
it her hairdresser who had escaped from a bear, or was it a bear who had
escaped from her hairdresser’s? I declare I can’t remember just now, but
the hairdresser was a very handsome man, I know, and quite a gentleman
in his manners; so that it has nothing to do with the point of the
story.’

Mrs. Nickleby having fallen imperceptibly into one of her retrospective
moods, improved in temper from that moment, and glided, by an easy
change of the conversation occasionally, into various other anecdotes,
no less remarkable for their strict application to the subject in hand.

‘Mr. Smike is from Yorkshire, Nicholas, my dear?’ said Mrs. Nickleby,
after dinner, and when she had been silent for some time.

‘Certainly, mother,’ replied Nicholas. ‘I see you have not forgotten his
melancholy history.’

‘O dear no,’ cried Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Ah! melancholy, indeed. You don’t
happen, Mr. Smike, ever to have dined with the Grimbles of Grimble Hall,
somewhere in the North Riding, do you?’ said the good lady, addressing
herself to him. ‘A very proud man, Sir Thomas Grimble, with six grown-up
and most lovely daughters, and the finest park in the county.’

‘My dear mother,’ reasoned Nicholas, ‘do you suppose that the
unfortunate outcast of a Yorkshire school was likely to receive many
cards of invitation from the nobility and gentry in the neighbourhood?’

‘Really, my dear, I don’t know why it should be so very extraordinary,’
said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘I know that when I was at school, I always went at
least twice every half-year to the Hawkinses at Taunton Vale, and they
are much richer than the Grimbles, and connected with them in marriage;
so you see it’s not so very unlikely, after all.’

Having put down Nicholas in this triumphant manner, Mrs. Nickleby was
suddenly seized with a forgetfulness of Smike’s real name, and an
irresistible tendency to call him Mr. Slammons; which circumstance she
attributed to the remarkable similarity of the two names in point of
sound both beginning with an S, and moreover being spelt with an M. But
whatever doubt there might be on this point, there was none as to his
being a most excellent listener; which circumstance had considerable
influence in placing them on the very best terms, and inducing Mrs
Nickleby to express the highest opinion of his general deportment and
disposition.

Thus, the little circle remained, on the most amicable and agreeable
footing, until the Monday morning, when Nicholas withdrew himself from
it for a short time, seriously to reflect upon the state of his affairs,
and to determine, if he could, upon some course of life, which would
enable him to support those who were so entirely dependent upon his
exertions.

Mr. Crummles occurred to him more than once; but although Kate was
acquainted with the whole history of his connection with that gentleman,
his mother was not; and he foresaw a thousand fretful objections, on
her part, to his seeking a livelihood upon the stage. There were graver
reasons, too, against his returning to that mode of life. Independently
of those arising out of its spare and precarious earnings, and his own
internal conviction that he could never hope to aspire to any great
distinction, even as a provincial actor, how could he carry his sister
from town to town, and place to place, and debar her from any other
associates than those with whom he would be compelled, almost without
distinction, to mingle? ‘It won’t do,’ said Nicholas, shaking his head;
‘I must try something else.’

It was much easier to make this resolution than to carry it into effect.
With no greater experience of the world than he had acquired for himself
in his short trials; with a sufficient share of headlong rashness and
precipitation (qualities not altogether unnatural at his time of life);
with a very slender stock of money, and a still more scanty stock
of friends; what could he do? ‘Egad!’ said Nicholas, ‘I’ll try that
Register Office again.’

He smiled at himself as he walked away with a quick step; for, an
instant before, he had been internally blaming his own precipitation.
He did not laugh himself out of the intention, however, for on he went:
picturing to himself, as he approached the place, all kinds of splendid
possibilities, and impossibilities too, for that matter, and thinking
himself, perhaps with good reason, very fortunate to be endowed with so
buoyant and sanguine a temperament.

The office looked just the same as when he had left it last, and,
indeed, with one or two exceptions, there seemed to be the very same
placards in the window that he had seen before. There were the same
unimpeachable masters and mistresses in want of virtuous servants,
and the same virtuous servants in want of unimpeachable masters and
mistresses, and the same magnificent estates for the investment of
capital, and the same enormous quantities of capital to be invested in
estates, and, in short, the same opportunities of all sorts for people
who wanted to make their fortunes. And a most extraordinary proof it
was of the national prosperity, that people had not been found to avail
themselves of such advantages long ago.

As Nicholas stopped to look in at the window, an old gentleman happened
to stop too; and Nicholas, carrying his eye along the window-panes from
left to right in search of some capital-text placard which should be
applicable to his own case, caught sight of this old gentleman’s figure,
and instinctively withdrew his eyes from the window, to observe the same
more closely.

He was a sturdy old fellow in a broad-skirted blue coat, made pretty
large, to fit easily, and with no particular waist; his bulky legs
clothed in drab breeches and high gaiters, and his head protected by
a low-crowned broad-brimmed white hat, such as a wealthy grazier might
wear. He wore his coat buttoned; and his dimpled double chin rested
in the folds of a white neckerchief--not one of your stiff-starched
apoplectic cravats, but a good, easy, old-fashioned white neckcloth that
a man might go to bed in and be none the worse for. But what principally
attracted the attention of Nicholas was the old gentleman’s eye,--never
was such a clear, twinkling, honest, merry, happy eye, as that. And
there he stood, looking a little upward, with one hand thrust into the
breast of his coat, and the other playing with his old-fashioned gold
watch-chain: his head thrown a little on one side, and his hat a little
more on one side than his head, (but that was evidently accident; not
his ordinary way of wearing it,) with such a pleasant smile playing
about his mouth, and such a comical expression of mingled slyness,
simplicity, kind-heartedness, and good-humour, lighting up his jolly
old face, that Nicholas would have been content to have stood there
and looked at him until evening, and to have forgotten, meanwhile, that
there was such a thing as a soured mind or a crabbed countenance to be
met with in the whole wide world.

But, even a very remote approach to this gratification was not to
be made, for although he seemed quite unconscious of having been the
subject of observation, he looked casually at Nicholas; and the latter,
fearful of giving offence, resumed his scrutiny of the window instantly.

Still, the old gentleman stood there, glancing from placard to placard,
and Nicholas could not forbear raising his eyes to his face again.
Grafted upon the quaintness and oddity of his appearance, was something
so indescribably engaging, and bespeaking so much worth, and there were
so many little lights hovering about the corners of his mouth and eyes,
that it was not a mere amusement, but a positive pleasure and delight to
look at him.

This being the case, it is no wonder that the old man caught Nicholas
in the fact, more than once. At such times, Nicholas coloured and looked
embarrassed: for the truth is, that he had begun to wonder whether the
stranger could, by any possibility, be looking for a clerk or secretary;
and thinking this, he felt as if the old gentleman must know it.

Long as all this takes to tell, it was not more than a couple of minutes
in passing. As the stranger was moving away, Nicholas caught his eye
again, and, in the awkwardness of the moment, stammered out an apology.

‘No offence. Oh no offence!’ said the old man.

This was said in such a hearty tone, and the voice was so exactly what
it should have been from such a speaker, and there was such a cordiality
in the manner, that Nicholas was emboldened to speak again.

‘A great many opportunities here, sir,’ he said, half smiling as he
motioned towards the window.

‘A great many people willing and anxious to be employed have seriously
thought so very often, I dare say,’ replied the old man. ‘Poor fellows,
poor fellows!’

He moved away as he said this; but seeing that Nicholas was about to
speak, good-naturedly slackened his pace, as if he were unwilling to
cut him short. After a little of that hesitation which may be sometimes
observed between two people in the street who have exchanged a nod,
and are both uncertain whether they shall turn back and speak, or not,
Nicholas found himself at the old man’s side.

‘You were about to speak, young gentleman; what were you going to say?’

‘Merely that I almost hoped--I mean to say, thought--you had some object
in consulting those advertisements,’ said Nicholas.

‘Ay, ay? what object now--what object?’ returned the old man, looking
slyly at Nicholas. ‘Did you think I wanted a situation now--eh? Did you
think I did?’

Nicholas shook his head.

‘Ha! ha!’ laughed the old gentleman, rubbing his hands and wrists as
if he were washing them. ‘A very natural thought, at all events, after
seeing me gazing at those bills. I thought the same of you, at first;
upon my word I did.’

‘If you had thought so at last, too, sir, you would not have been far
from the truth,’ rejoined Nicholas.

‘Eh?’ cried the old man, surveying him from head to foot. ‘What! Dear
me! No, no. Well-behaved young gentleman reduced to such a necessity! No
no, no no.’

Nicholas bowed, and bidding him good-morning, turned upon his heel.

‘Stay,’ said the old man, beckoning him into a bye street, where they
could converse with less interruption. ‘What d’ye mean, eh?’

‘Merely that your kind face and manner--both so unlike any I have ever
seen--tempted me into an avowal, which, to any other stranger in this
wilderness of London, I should not have dreamt of making,’ returned
Nicholas.

‘Wilderness! Yes, it is, it is. Good! It IS a wilderness,’ said the old
man with much animation. ‘It was a wilderness to me once. I came here
barefoot. I have never forgotten it. Thank God!’ and he raised his hat
from his head, and looked very grave.

‘What’s the matter? What is it? How did it all come about?’ said the old
man, laying his hand on the shoulder of Nicholas, and walking him up the
street. ‘You’re--Eh?’ laying his finger on the sleeve of his black coat.
‘Who’s it for, eh?’

‘My father,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Ah!’ said the old gentleman quickly. ‘Bad thing for a young man to lose
his father. Widowed mother, perhaps?’

Nicholas sighed.

‘Brothers and sisters too? Eh?’

‘One sister,’ rejoined Nicholas.

‘Poor thing, poor thing! You are a scholar too, I dare say?’ said the
old man, looking wistfully into the face of the young one.

‘I have been tolerably well educated,’ said Nicholas.

‘Fine thing,’ said the old gentleman, ‘education a great thing: a very
great thing! I never had any. I admire it the more in others. A very
fine thing. Yes, yes. Tell me more of your history. Let me hear it all.
No impertinent curiosity--no, no, no.’

There was something so earnest and guileless in the way in which
all this was said, and such a complete disregard of all conventional
restraints and coldnesses, that Nicholas could not resist it. Among
men who have any sound and sterling qualities, there is nothing so
contagious as pure openness of heart. Nicholas took the infection
instantly, and ran over the main points of his little history without
reserve: merely suppressing names, and touching as lightly as possible
upon his uncle’s treatment of Kate. The old man listened with great
attention, and when he had concluded, drew his arm eagerly through his
own.

‘Don’t say another word. Not another word’ said he. ‘Come along with me.
We mustn’t lose a minute.’

So saying, the old gentleman dragged him back into Oxford Street, and
hailing an omnibus on its way to the city, pushed Nicholas in before
him, and followed himself.

As he appeared in a most extraordinary condition of restless excitement,
and whenever Nicholas offered to speak, immediately interposed with:
‘Don’t say another word, my dear sir, on any account--not another word,’
the young man thought it better to attempt no further interruption.
Into the city they journeyed accordingly, without interchanging any
conversation; and the farther they went, the more Nicholas wondered what
the end of the adventure could possibly be.

The old gentleman got out, with great alacrity, when they reached
the Bank, and once more taking Nicholas by the arm, hurried him along
Threadneedle Street, and through some lanes and passages on the right,
until they, at length, emerged in a quiet shady little square. Into the
oldest and cleanest-looking house of business in the square, he led the
way. The only inscription on the door-post was ‘Cheeryble, Brothers;’
but from a hasty glance at the directions of some packages which were
lying about, Nicholas supposed that the brothers Cheeryble were German
merchants.

Passing through a warehouse which presented every indication of a
thriving business, Mr. Cheeryble (for such Nicholas supposed him to
be, from the respect which had been shown him by the warehousemen
and porters whom they passed) led him into a little partitioned-off
counting-house like a large glass case, in which counting-house there
sat--as free from dust and blemish as if he had been fixed into the
glass case before the top was put on, and had never come out since--a
fat, elderly, large-faced clerk, with silver spectacles and a powdered
head.

‘Is my brother in his room, Tim?’ said Mr. Cheeryble, with no less
kindness of manner than he had shown to Nicholas.

‘Yes, he is, sir,’ replied the fat clerk, turning his spectacle-glasses
towards his principal, and his eyes towards Nicholas, ‘but Mr. Trimmers
is with him.’

‘Ay! And what has he come about, Tim?’ said Mr. Cheeryble.

‘He is getting up a subscription for the widow and family of a man who
was killed in the East India Docks this morning, sir,’ rejoined Tim.
‘Smashed, sir, by a cask of sugar.’

‘He is a good creature,’ said Mr. Cheeryble, with great earnestness. ‘He
is a kind soul. I am very much obliged to Trimmers. Trimmers is one of
the best friends we have. He makes a thousand cases known to us that we
should never discover of ourselves. I am VERY much obliged to Trimmers.’
Saying which, Mr. Cheeryble rubbed his hands with infinite delight, and
Mr. Trimmers happening to pass the door that instant, on his way out,
shot out after him and caught him by the hand.

‘I owe you a thousand thanks, Trimmers, ten thousand thanks. I take it
very friendly of you, very friendly indeed,’ said Mr. Cheeryble, dragging
him into a corner to get out of hearing. ‘How many children are there,
and what has my brother Ned given, Trimmers?’

‘There are six children,’ replied the gentleman, ‘and your brother has
given us twenty pounds.’

‘My brother Ned is a good fellow, and you’re a good fellow too,
Trimmers,’ said the old man, shaking him by both hands with trembling
eagerness. ‘Put me down for another twenty--or--stop a minute, stop a
minute. We mustn’t look ostentatious; put me down ten pound, and Tim
Linkinwater ten pound. A cheque for twenty pound for Mr. Trimmers, Tim.
God bless you, Trimmers--and come and dine with us some day this week;
you’ll always find a knife and fork, and we shall be delighted. Now, my
dear sir--cheque from Mr. Linkinwater, Tim. Smashed by a cask of sugar,
and six poor children--oh dear, dear, dear!’

Talking on in this strain, as fast as he could, to prevent any friendly
remonstrances from the collector of the subscription on the large amount
of his donation, Mr. Cheeryble led Nicholas, equally astonished and
affected by what he had seen and heard in this short space, to the
half-opened door of another room.

‘Brother Ned,’ said Mr. Cheeryble, tapping with his knuckles, and
stooping to listen, ‘are you busy, my dear brother, or can you spare
time for a word or two with me?’

‘Brother Charles, my dear fellow,’ replied a voice from the inside, so
like in its tones to that which had just spoken, that Nicholas started,
and almost thought it was the same, ‘don’t ask me such a question, but
come in directly.’

They went in, without further parley. What was the amazement of Nicholas
when his conductor advanced, and exchanged a warm greeting with another
old gentleman, the very type and model of himself--the same face, the
same figure, the same coat, waistcoat, and neckcloth, the same breeches
and gaiters--nay, there was the very same white hat hanging against the
wall!

As they shook each other by the hand: the face of each lighted up by
beaming looks of affection, which would have been most delightful to
behold in infants, and which, in men so old, was inexpressibly touching:
Nicholas could observe that the last old gentleman was something stouter
than his brother; this, and a slight additional shade of clumsiness in
his gait and stature, formed the only perceptible difference between
them. Nobody could have doubted their being twin brothers.

‘Brother Ned,’ said Nicholas’s friend, closing the room-door, ‘here is a
young friend of mine whom we must assist. We must make proper inquiries
into his statements, in justice to him as well as to ourselves, and if
they are confirmed--as I feel assured they will be--we must assist him,
we must assist him, brother Ned.’

‘It is enough, my dear brother, that you say we should,’ returned the
other. ‘When you say that, no further inquiries are needed. He SHALL be
assisted. What are his necessities, and what does he require? Where is
Tim Linkinwater? Let us have him here.’

Both the brothers, it may be here remarked, had a very emphatic and
earnest delivery; both had lost nearly the same teeth, which imparted
the same peculiarity to their speech; and both spoke as if, besides
possessing the utmost serenity of mind that the kindliest and most
unsuspecting nature could bestow, they had, in collecting the plums from
Fortune’s choicest pudding, retained a few for present use, and kept
them in their mouths.

‘Where is Tim Linkinwater?’ said brother Ned.

‘Stop, stop, stop!’ said brother Charles, taking the other aside. ‘I’ve
a plan, my dear brother, I’ve a plan. Tim is getting old, and Tim has
been a faithful servant, brother Ned; and I don’t think pensioning Tim’s
mother and sister, and buying a little tomb for the family when his poor
brother died, was a sufficient recompense for his faithful services.’

‘No, no, no,’ replied the other. ‘Certainly not. Not half enough, not
half.’

‘If we could lighten Tim’s duties,’ said the old gentleman, ‘and prevail
upon him to go into the country, now and then, and sleep in the fresh
air, besides, two or three times a week (which he could, if he began
business an hour later in the morning), old Tim Linkinwater would grow
young again in time; and he’s three good years our senior now. Old Tim
Linkinwater young again! Eh, brother Ned, eh? Why, I recollect old Tim
Linkinwater quite a little boy, don’t you? Ha, ha, ha! Poor Tim, poor
Tim!’

And the fine old fellows laughed pleasantly together: each with a tear
of regard for old Tim Linkinwater standing in his eye.

‘But hear this first--hear this first, brother Ned,’ said the old man,
hastily, placing two chairs, one on each side of Nicholas: ‘I’ll tell it
you myself, brother Ned, because the young gentleman is modest, and is
a scholar, Ned, and I shouldn’t feel it right that he should tell us
his story over and over again as if he was a beggar, or as if we doubted
him. No, no no.’

‘No, no, no,’ returned the other, nodding his head gravely. ‘Very right,
my dear brother, very right.’

‘He will tell me I’m wrong, if I make a mistake,’ said Nicholas’s
friend. ‘But whether I do or not, you’ll be very much affected, brother
Ned, remembering the time when we were two friendless lads, and earned
our first shilling in this great city.’

The twins pressed each other’s hands in silence; and in his own homely
manner, brother Charles related the particulars he had heard from
Nicholas. The conversation which ensued was a long one, and when it was
over, a secret conference of almost equal duration took place between
brother Ned and Tim Linkinwater in another room. It is no disparagement
to Nicholas to say, that before he had been closeted with the two
brothers ten minutes, he could only wave his hand at every fresh
expression of kindness and sympathy, and sob like a little child.

At length brother Ned and Tim Linkinwater came back together, when Tim
instantly walked up to Nicholas and whispered in his ear in a very brief
sentence (for Tim was ordinarily a man of few words), that he had taken
down the address in the Strand, and would call upon him that evening,
at eight. Having done which, Tim wiped his spectacles and put them on,
preparatory to hearing what more the brothers Cheeryble had got to say.

‘Tim,’ said brother Charles, ‘you understand that we have an intention
of taking this young gentleman into the counting-house?’

Brother Ned remarked that Tim was aware of that intention, and quite
approved of it; and Tim having nodded, and said he did, drew himself up
and looked particularly fat, and very important. After which, there was
a profound silence.

‘I’m not coming an hour later in the morning, you know,’ said Tim,
breaking out all at once, and looking very resolute. ‘I’m not going to
sleep in the fresh air; no, nor I’m not going into the country either. A
pretty thing at this time of day, certainly. Pho!’

‘Damn your obstinacy, Tim Linkinwater,’ said brother Charles, looking at
him without the faintest spark of anger, and with a countenance radiant
with attachment to the old clerk. ‘Damn your obstinacy, Tim Linkinwater,
what do you mean, sir?’

‘It’s forty-four year,’ said Tim, making a calculation in the air with
his pen, and drawing an imaginary line before he cast it up, ‘forty-four
year, next May, since I first kept the books of Cheeryble, Brothers.
I’ve opened the safe every morning all that time (Sundays excepted) as
the clock struck nine, and gone over the house every night at half-past
ten (except on Foreign Post nights, and then twenty minutes before
twelve) to see the doors fastened, and the fires out. I’ve never slept
out of the back-attic one single night. There’s the same mignonette box
in the middle of the window, and the same four flower-pots, two on each
side, that I brought with me when I first came. There an’t--I’ve said it
again and again, and I’ll maintain it--there an’t such a square as this
in the world. I KNOW there an’t,’ said Tim, with sudden energy, and
looking sternly about him. ‘Not one. For business or pleasure, in
summer-time or winter--I don’t care which--there’s nothing like it.
There’s not such a spring in England as the pump under the archway.
There’s not such a view in England as the view out of my window; I’ve
seen it every morning before I shaved, and I ought to know something
about it. I have slept in that room,’ added Tim, sinking his voice a
little, ‘for four-and-forty year; and if it wasn’t inconvenient, and
didn’t interfere with business, I should request leave to die there.’

‘Damn you, Tim Linkinwater, how dare you talk about dying?’ roared the
twins by one impulse, and blowing their old noses violently.

‘That’s what I’ve got to say, Mr. Edwin and Mr. Charles,’ said Tim,
squaring his shoulders again. ‘This isn’t the first time you’ve talked
about superannuating me; but, if you please, we’ll make it the last, and
drop the subject for evermore.’

With these words, Tim Linkinwater stalked out, and shut himself up
in his glass case, with the air of a man who had had his say, and was
thoroughly resolved not to be put down.

The brothers interchanged looks, and coughed some half-dozen times
without speaking.

‘He must be done something with, brother Ned,’ said the other, warmly;
‘we must disregard his old scruples; they can’t be tolerated, or borne.
He must be made a partner, brother Ned; and if he won’t submit to it
peaceably, we must have recourse to violence.’

‘Quite right,’ replied brother Ned, nodding his head as a man thoroughly
determined; ‘quite right, my dear brother. If he won’t listen to reason,
we must do it against his will, and show him that we are determined to
exert our authority. We must quarrel with him, brother Charles.’

‘We must. We certainly must have a quarrel with Tim Linkinwater,’ said
the other. ‘But in the meantime, my dear brother, we are keeping our
young friend; and the poor lady and her daughter will be anxious for his
return. So let us say goodbye for the present, and--there, there--take
care of that box, my dear sir--and--no, no, not a word now; but be
careful of the crossings and--’

And with any disjointed and unconnected words which would prevent
Nicholas from pouring forth his thanks, the brothers hurried him
out: shaking hands with him all the way, and affecting very
unsuccessfully--they were poor hands at deception!--to be wholly
unconscious of the feelings that completely mastered him.

Nicholas’s heart was too full to allow of his turning into the street
until he had recovered some composure. When he at last glided out of the
dark doorway corner in which he had been compelled to halt, he caught
a glimpse of the twins stealthily peeping in at one corner of the glass
case, evidently undecided whether they should follow up their late
attack without delay, or for the present postpone laying further siege
to the inflexible Tim Linkinwater.

To recount all the delight and wonder which the circumstances just
detailed awakened at Miss La Creevy’s, and all the things that were
done, said, thought, expected, hoped, and prophesied in consequence,
is beside the present course and purpose of these adventures. It is
sufficient to state, in brief, that Mr. Timothy Linkinwater arrived,
punctual to his appointment; that, oddity as he was, and jealous, as
he was bound to be, of the proper exercise of his employers’ most
comprehensive liberality, he reported strongly and warmly in favour of
Nicholas; and that, next day, he was appointed to the vacant stool in
the counting-house of Cheeryble, Brothers, with a present salary of one
hundred and twenty pounds a year.

‘And I think, my dear brother,’ said Nicholas’s first friend, ‘that
if we were to let them that little cottage at Bow which is empty, at
something under the usual rent, now? Eh, brother Ned?’

‘For nothing at all,’ said brother Ned. ‘We are rich, and should be
ashamed to touch the rent under such circumstances as these. Where is
Tim Linkinwater?--for nothing at all, my dear brother, for nothing at
all.’

‘Perhaps it would be better to say something, brother Ned,’ suggested
the other, mildly; ‘it would help to preserve habits of frugality, you
know, and remove any painful sense of overwhelming obligations. We might
say fifteen pound, or twenty pound, and if it was punctually paid, make
it up to them in some other way. And I might secretly advance a small
loan towards a little furniture, and you might secretly advance another
small loan, brother Ned; and if we find them doing well--as we shall;
there’s no fear, no fear--we can change the loans into gifts. Carefully,
brother Ned, and by degrees, and without pressing upon them too much;
what do you say now, brother?’

Brother Ned gave his hand upon it, and not only said it should be done,
but had it done too; and, in one short week, Nicholas took possession of
the stool, and Mrs. Nickleby and Kate took possession of the house, and
all was hope, bustle, and light-heartedness.

There surely never was such a week of discoveries and surprises as
the first week of that cottage. Every night when Nicholas came home,
something new had been found out. One day it was a grapevine, and
another day it was a boiler, and another day it was the key of the
front-parlour closet at the bottom of the water-butt, and so on through
a hundred items. Then, this room was embellished with a muslin curtain,
and that room was rendered quite elegant by a window-blind, and such
improvements were made, as no one would have supposed possible. Then
there was Miss La Creevy, who had come out in the omnibus to stop a day
or two and help, and who was perpetually losing a very small brown-paper
parcel of tin tacks and a very large hammer, and running about with
her sleeves tucked up at the wrists, and falling off pairs of steps and
hurting herself very much--and Mrs. Nickleby, who talked incessantly, and
did something now and then, but not often--and Kate, who busied herself
noiselessly everywhere, and was pleased with everything--and Smike, who
made the garden a perfect wonder to look upon--and Nicholas, who helped
and encouraged them every one--all the peace and cheerfulness of home
restored, with such new zest imparted to every frugal pleasure, and such
delight to every hour of meeting, as misfortune and separation alone
could give!

In short, the poor Nicklebys were social and happy; while the rich
Nickleby was alone and miserable.



CHAPTER 36

Private and confidential; relating to Family Matters. Showing how Mr
Kenwigs underwent violent Agitation, and how Mrs. Kenwigs was as well as
could be expected


It might have been seven o’clock in the evening, and it was growing dark
in the narrow streets near Golden Square, when Mr. Kenwigs sent out for
a pair of the cheapest white kid gloves--those at fourteen-pence--and
selecting the strongest, which happened to be the right-hand one, walked
downstairs with an air of pomp and much excitement, and proceeded to
muffle the knob of the street-door knocker therein. Having executed this
task with great nicety, Mr. Kenwigs pulled the door to, after him, and
just stepped across the road to try the effect from the opposite side
of the street. Satisfied that nothing could possibly look better in its
way, Mr. Kenwigs then stepped back again, and calling through the keyhole
to Morleena to open the door, vanished into the house, and was seen no
longer.

Now, considered as an abstract circumstance, there was no more obvious
cause or reason why Mr. Kenwigs should take the trouble of muffling this
particular knocker, than there would have been for his muffling the
knocker of any nobleman or gentleman resident ten miles off; because,
for the greater convenience of the numerous lodgers, the street-door
always stood wide open, and the knocker was never used at all. The first
floor, the second floor, and the third floor, had each a bell of its
own. As to the attics, no one ever called on them; if anybody wanted
the parlours, they were close at hand, and all he had to do was to walk
straight into them; while the kitchen had a separate entrance down the
area steps. As a question of mere necessity and usefulness, therefore,
this muffling of the knocker was thoroughly incomprehensible.

But knockers may be muffled for other purposes than those of mere
utilitarianism, as, in the present instance, was clearly shown. There
are certain polite forms and ceremonies which must be observed in
civilised life, or mankind relapse into their original barbarism. No
genteel lady was ever yet confined--indeed, no genteel confinement
can possibly take place--without the accompanying symbol of a muffled
knocker. Mrs. Kenwigs was a lady of some pretensions to gentility; Mrs
Kenwigs was confined. And, therefore, Mr. Kenwigs tied up the silent
knocker on the premises in a white kid glove.

‘I’m not quite certain neither,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, arranging his
shirt-collar, and walking slowly upstairs, ‘whether, as it’s a boy, I
won’t have it in the papers.’

Pondering upon the advisability of this step, and the sensation it was
likely to create in the neighbourhood, Mr. Kenwigs betook himself to the
sitting-room, where various extremely diminutive articles of clothing
were airing on a horse before the fire, and Mr. Lumbey, the doctor, was
dandling the baby--that is, the old baby--not the new one.

‘It’s a fine boy, Mr. Kenwigs,’ said Mr. Lumbey, the doctor.

‘You consider him a fine boy, do you, sir?’ returned Mr. Kenwigs.

‘It’s the finest boy I ever saw in all my life,’ said the doctor. ‘I
never saw such a baby.’

It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer
to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species,
that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

‘I ne--ver saw such a baby,’ said Mr. Lumbey, the doctor.

‘Morleena was a fine baby,’ remarked Mr. Kenwigs; as if this were rather
an attack, by implication, upon the family.

‘They were all fine babies,’ said Mr. Lumbey. And Mr. Lumbey went on
nursing the baby with a thoughtful look. Whether he was considering
under what head he could best charge the nursing in the bill, was best
known to himself.

During this short conversation, Miss Morleena, as the eldest of
the family, and natural representative of her mother during her
indisposition, had been hustling and slapping the three younger Miss
Kenwigses, without intermission; which considerate and affectionate
conduct brought tears into the eyes of Mr. Kenwigs, and caused him to
declare that, in understanding and behaviour, that child was a woman.

‘She will be a treasure to the man she marries, sir,’ said Mr. Kenwigs,
half aside; ‘I think she’ll marry above her station, Mr. Lumbey.’

‘I shouldn’t wonder at all,’ replied the doctor.

‘You never see her dance, sir, did you?’ asked Mr. Kenwigs.

The doctor shook his head.

‘Ay!’ said Mr. Kenwigs, as though he pitied him from his heart, ‘then you
don’t know what she’s capable of.’

All this time there had been a great whisking in and out of the other
room; the door had been opened and shut very softly about twenty times
a minute (for it was necessary to keep Mrs. Kenwigs quiet); and the baby
had been exhibited to a score or two of deputations from a select body
of female friends, who had assembled in the passage, and about the
street-door, to discuss the event in all its bearings. Indeed, the
excitement extended itself over the whole street, and groups of ladies
might be seen standing at the doors, (some in the interesting condition
in which Mrs. Kenwigs had last appeared in public,) relating their
experiences of similar occurrences. Some few acquired great credit from
having prophesied, the day before yesterday, exactly when it would come
to pass; others, again, related, how that they guessed what it was,
directly they saw Mr. Kenwigs turn pale and run up the street as hard as
ever he could go. Some said one thing, and some another; but all talked
together, and all agreed upon two points: first, that it was very
meritorious and highly praiseworthy in Mrs. Kenwigs to do as she had
done: and secondly, that there never was such a skilful and scientific
doctor as that Dr Lumbey.

In the midst of this general hubbub, Dr Lumbey sat in the first-floor
front, as before related, nursing the deposed baby, and talking to Mr
Kenwigs. He was a stout bluff-looking gentleman, with no shirt-collar to
speak of, and a beard that had been growing since yesterday morning; for
Dr Lumbey was popular, and the neighbourhood was prolific; and there
had been no less than three other knockers muffled, one after the other
within the last forty-eight hours.

‘Well, Mr. Kenwigs,’ said Dr Lumbey, ‘this makes six. You’ll have a fine
family in time, sir.’

‘I think six is almost enough, sir,’ returned Mr. Kenwigs.

‘Pooh! pooh!’ said the doctor. ‘Nonsense! not half enough.’

With this, the doctor laughed; but he didn’t laugh half as much as a
married friend of Mrs. Kenwigs’s, who had just come in from the sick
chamber to report progress, and take a small sip of brandy-and-water:
and who seemed to consider it one of the best jokes ever launched upon
society.

‘They’re not altogether dependent upon good fortune, neither,’ said
Mr. Kenwigs, taking his second daughter on his knee; ‘they have
expectations.’

‘Oh, indeed!’ said Mr. Lumbey, the doctor.

‘And very good ones too, I believe, haven’t they?’ asked the married
lady.

‘Why, ma’am,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, ‘it’s not exactly for me to say what they
may be, or what they may not be. It’s not for me to boast of any family
with which I have the honour to be connected; at the same time, Mrs
Kenwigs’s is--I should say,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, abruptly, and raising
his voice as he spoke, ‘that my children might come into a matter of a
hundred pound apiece, perhaps. Perhaps more, but certainly that.’

‘And a very pretty little fortune,’ said the married lady.

‘There are some relations of Mrs. Kenwigs’s,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, taking a
pinch of snuff from the doctor’s box, and then sneezing very hard, for
he wasn’t used to it, ‘that might leave their hundred pound apiece to
ten people, and yet not go begging when they had done it.’

‘Ah! I know who you mean,’ observed the married lady, nodding her head.

‘I made mention of no names, and I wish to make mention of no names,’
said Mr. Kenwigs, with a portentous look. ‘Many of my friends have met a
relation of Mrs. Kenwigs’s in this very room, as would do honour to any
company; that’s all.’

‘I’ve met him,’ said the married lady, with a glance towards Dr Lumbey.

‘It’s naterally very gratifying to my feelings as a father, to see such
a man as that, a kissing and taking notice of my children,’ pursued Mr
Kenwigs. ‘It’s naterally very gratifying to my feelings as a man, to
know that man. It will be naterally very gratifying to my feelings as a
husband, to make that man acquainted with this ewent.’

Having delivered his sentiments in this form of words, Mr. Kenwigs
arranged his second daughter’s flaxen tail, and bade her be a good girl
and mind what her sister, Morleena, said.

‘That girl grows more like her mother every day,’ said Mr. Lumbey,
suddenly stricken with an enthusiastic admiration of Morleena.

‘There!’ rejoined the married lady. ‘What I always say; what I always
did say! She’s the very picter of her.’ Having thus directed the general
attention to the young lady in question, the married lady embraced the
opportunity of taking another sip of the brandy-and-water--and a pretty
long sip too.

‘Yes! there is a likeness,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, after some reflection. ‘But
such a woman as Mrs. Kenwigs was, afore she was married! Good gracious,
such a woman!’

Mr. Lumbey shook his head with great solemnity, as though to imply that
he supposed she must have been rather a dazzler.

‘Talk of fairies!’ cried Mr. Kenwigs ‘I never see anybody so light to be
alive, never. Such manners too; so playful, and yet so sewerely proper!
As for her figure! It isn’t generally known,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, dropping
his voice; ‘but her figure was such, at that time, that the sign of the
Britannia, over in the Holloway Road, was painted from it!’

‘But only see what it is now,’ urged the married lady. ‘Does SHE look
like the mother of six?’

‘Quite ridiculous,’ cried the doctor.

‘She looks a deal more like her own daughter,’ said the married lady.

‘So she does,’ assented Mr. Lumbey. ‘A great deal more.’

Mr. Kenwigs was about to make some further observations, most probably in
confirmation of this opinion, when another married lady, who had looked
in to keep up Mrs. Kenwigs’s spirits, and help to clear off anything in
the eating and drinking way that might be going about, put in her head
to announce that she had just been down to answer the bell, and that
there was a gentleman at the door who wanted to see Mr. Kenwigs ‘most
particular.’

Shadowy visions of his distinguished relation flitted through the brain
of Mr. Kenwigs, as this message was delivered; and under their influence,
he dispatched Morleena to show the gentleman up straightway.

‘Why, I do declare,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, standing opposite the door so as
to get the earliest glimpse of the visitor, as he came upstairs, ‘it’s
Mr. Johnson! How do you find yourself, sir?’

Nicholas shook hands, kissed his old pupils all round, intrusted a large
parcel of toys to the guardianship of Morleena, bowed to the doctor
and the married ladies, and inquired after Mrs. Kenwigs in a tone of
interest, which went to the very heart and soul of the nurse, who had
come in to warm some mysterious compound, in a little saucepan over the
fire.

‘I ought to make a hundred apologies to you for calling at such a
season,’ said Nicholas, ‘but I was not aware of it until I had rung the
bell, and my time is so fully occupied now, that I feared it might be
some days before I could possibly come again.’

‘No time like the present, sir,’ said Mr. Kenwigs. ‘The sitiwation of Mrs
Kenwigs, sir, is no obstacle to a little conversation between you and
me, I hope?’

‘You are very good,’ said Nicholas.

At this juncture, proclamation was made by another married lady, that
the baby had begun to eat like anything; whereupon the two married
ladies, already mentioned, rushed tumultuously into the bedroom to
behold him in the act.

‘The fact is,’ resumed Nicholas, ‘that before I left the country, where
I have been for some time past, I undertook to deliver a message to
you.’

‘Ay, ay?’ said Mr. Kenwigs.

‘And I have been,’ added Nicholas, ‘already in town for some days,
without having had an opportunity of doing so.’

‘It’s no matter, sir,’ said Mr. Kenwigs. ‘I dare say it’s none the
worse for keeping cold. Message from the country!’ said Mr. Kenwigs,
ruminating; ‘that’s curious. I don’t know anybody in the country.’

‘Miss Petowker,’ suggested Nicholas.

‘Oh! from her, is it?’ said Mr. Kenwigs. ‘Oh dear, yes. Ah! Mrs. Kenwigs
will be glad to hear from her. Henrietta Petowker, eh? How odd things
come about, now! That you should have met her in the country! Well!’

Hearing this mention of their old friend’s name, the four Miss Kenwigses
gathered round Nicholas, open eyed and mouthed, to hear more. Mr. Kenwigs
looked a little curious too, but quite comfortable and unsuspecting.

‘The message relates to family matters,’ said Nicholas, hesitating.

‘Oh, never mind,’ said Kenwigs, glancing at Mr. Lumbey, who, having
rashly taken charge of little Lillyvick, found nobody disposed to
relieve him of his precious burden. ‘All friends here.’

Nicholas hemmed once or twice, and seemed to have some difficulty in
proceeding.

‘At Portsmouth, Henrietta Petowker is,’ observed Mr. Kenwigs.

‘Yes,’ said Nicholas, ‘Mr. Lillyvick is there.’

Mr. Kenwigs turned pale, but he recovered, and said, THAT was an odd
coincidence also.

‘The message is from him,’ said Nicholas.

Mr. Kenwigs appeared to revive. He knew that his niece was in a delicate
state, and had, no doubt, sent word that they were to forward full
particulars. Yes. That was very kind of him; so like him too!

‘He desired me to give his kindest love,’ said Nicholas.

‘Very much obliged to him, I’m sure. Your great-uncle, Lillyvick, my
dears!’ interposed Mr. Kenwigs, condescendingly explaining it to the
children.

‘His kindest love,’ resumed Nicholas; ‘and to say that he had no time to
write, but that he was married to Miss Petowker.’

Mr. Kenwigs started from his seat with a petrified stare, caught his
second daughter by her flaxen tail, and covered his face with his
pocket-handkerchief. Morleena fell, all stiff and rigid, into the baby’s
chair, as she had seen her mother fall when she fainted away, and the
two remaining little Kenwigses shrieked in affright.

‘My children, my defrauded, swindled infants!’ cried Mr. Kenwigs, pulling
so hard, in his vehemence, at the flaxen tail of his second daughter,
that he lifted her up on tiptoe, and kept her, for some seconds, in that
attitude. ‘Villain, ass, traitor!’

‘Drat the man!’ cried the nurse, looking angrily around. ‘What does he
mean by making that noise here?’

‘Silence, woman!’ said Mr. Kenwigs, fiercely.

‘I won’t be silent,’ returned the nurse. ‘Be silent yourself, you
wretch. Have you no regard for your baby?’

‘No!’ returned Mr. Kenwigs.

‘More shame for you,’ retorted the nurse. ‘Ugh! you unnatural monster.’

‘Let him die,’ cried Mr. Kenwigs, in the torrent of his wrath. ‘Let him
die! He has no expectations, no property to come into. We want no babies
here,’ said Mr. Kenwigs recklessly. ‘Take ‘em away, take ‘em away to the
Fondling!’

With these awful remarks, Mr. Kenwigs sat himself down in a chair, and
defied the nurse, who made the best of her way into the adjoining room,
and returned with a stream of matrons: declaring that Mr. Kenwigs had
spoken blasphemy against his family, and must be raving mad.

Appearances were certainly not in Mr. Kenwigs’s favour, for the exertion
of speaking with so much vehemence, and yet in such a tone as should
prevent his lamentations reaching the ears of Mrs. Kenwigs, had made him
very black in the face; besides which, the excitement of the occasion,
and an unwonted indulgence in various strong cordials to celebrate it,
had swollen and dilated his features to a most unusual extent. But,
Nicholas and the doctor--who had been passive at first, doubting very
much whether Mr. Kenwigs could be in earnest--interfering to explain the
immediate cause of his condition, the indignation of the matrons was
changed to pity, and they implored him, with much feeling, to go quietly
to bed.

‘The attention,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, looking around with a plaintive air,
‘the attention that I’ve shown to that man! The hyseters he has eat, and
the pints of ale he has drank, in this house--!’

‘It’s very trying, and very hard to bear, we know,’ said one of the
married ladies; ‘but think of your dear darling wife.’

‘Oh yes, and what she’s been a undergoing of, only this day,’ cried a
great many voices. ‘There’s a good man, do.’

‘The presents that have been made to him,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, reverting
to his calamity, ‘the pipes, the snuff-boxes--a pair of india-rubber
goloshes, that cost six-and-six--’

‘Ah! it won’t bear thinking of, indeed,’ cried the matrons generally;
‘but it’ll all come home to him, never fear.’

Mr. Kenwigs looked darkly upon the ladies, as if he would prefer its all
coming home to HIM, as there was nothing to be got by it; but he said
nothing, and resting his head upon his hand, subsided into a kind of
doze.

Then, the matrons again expatiated on the expediency of taking the good
gentleman to bed; observing that he would be better tomorrow, and that
they knew what was the wear and tear of some men’s minds when their
wives were taken as Mrs. Kenwigs had been that day, and that it did him
great credit, and there was nothing to be ashamed of in it; far from it;
they liked to see it, they did, for it showed a good heart. And one lady
observed, as a case bearing upon the present, that her husband was often
quite light-headed from anxiety on similar occasions, and that once,
when her little Johnny was born, it was nearly a week before he came to
himself again, during the whole of which time he did nothing but cry ‘Is
it a boy, is it a boy?’ in a manner which went to the hearts of all his
hearers.

At length, Morleena (who quite forgot she had fainted, when she
found she was not noticed) announced that a chamber was ready for her
afflicted parent; and Mr. Kenwigs, having partially smothered his four
daughters in the closeness of his embrace, accepted the doctor’s arm on
one side, and the support of Nicholas on the other, and was conducted
upstairs to a bedroom which been secured for the occasion.

Having seen him sound asleep, and heard him snore most satisfactorily,
and having further presided over the distribution of the toys, to the
perfect contentment of all the little Kenwigses, Nicholas took his
leave. The matrons dropped off one by one, with the exception of six
or eight particular friends, who had determined to stop all night; the
lights in the houses gradually disappeared; the last bulletin was issued
that Mrs. Kenwigs was as well as could be expected; and the whole family
were left to their repose.



CHAPTER 37

Nicholas finds further Favour in the Eyes of the brothers Cheeryble and
Mr. Timothy Linkinwater. The brothers give a Banquet on a great Annual
Occasion. Nicholas, on returning Home from it, receives a mysterious and
important Disclosure from the Lips of Mrs. Nickleby


The square in which the counting-house of the brothers Cheeryble
was situated, although it might not wholly realise the very sanguine
expectations which a stranger would be disposed to form on hearing
the fervent encomiums bestowed upon it by Tim Linkinwater, was,
nevertheless, a sufficiently desirable nook in the heart of a busy town
like London, and one which occupied a high place in the affectionate
remembrances of several grave persons domiciled in the neighbourhood,
whose recollections, however, dated from a much more recent period,
and whose attachment to the spot was far less absorbing, than were the
recollections and attachment of the enthusiastic Tim.

And let not those whose eyes have been accustomed to the aristocratic
gravity of Grosvenor Square and Hanover Square, the dowager barrenness
and frigidity of Fitzroy Square, or the gravel walks and garden seats
of the Squares of Russell and Euston, suppose that the affections of
Tim Linkinwater, or the inferior lovers of this particular locality, had
been awakened and kept alive by any refreshing associations with leaves,
however dingy, or grass, however bare and thin. The city square has no
enclosure, save the lamp-post in the middle: and no grass, but the
weeds which spring up round its base. It is a quiet, little-frequented,
retired spot, favourable to melancholy and contemplation, and
appointments of long-waiting; and up and down its every side the
Appointed saunters idly by the hour together wakening the echoes with
the monotonous sound of his footsteps on the smooth worn stones, and
counting, first the windows, and then the very bricks of the tall silent
houses that hem him round about. In winter-time, the snow will linger
there, long after it has melted from the busy streets and highways. The
summer’s sun holds it in some respect, and while he darts his cheerful
rays sparingly into the square, keeps his fiery heat and glare for
noisier and less-imposing precincts. It is so quiet, that you can
almost hear the ticking of your own watch when you stop to cool in
its refreshing atmosphere. There is a distant hum--of coaches, not of
insects--but no other sound disturbs the stillness of the square. The
ticket porter leans idly against the post at the corner: comfortably
warm, but not hot, although the day is broiling. His white apron flaps
languidly in the air, his head gradually droops upon his breast, he
takes very long winks with both eyes at once; even he is unable to
withstand the soporific influence of the place, and is gradually falling
asleep. But now, he starts into full wakefulness, recoils a step or two,
and gazes out before him with eager wildness in his eye. Is it a job, or
a boy at marbles? Does he see a ghost, or hear an organ? No; sight
more unwonted still--there is a butterfly in the square--a real, live
butterfly! astray from flowers and sweets, and fluttering among the iron
heads of the dusty area railings.

But if there were not many matters immediately without the doors of
Cheeryble Brothers, to engage the attention or distract the thoughts of
the young clerk, there were not a few within, to interest and amuse him.
There was scarcely an object in the place, animate or inanimate, which
did not partake in some degree of the scrupulous method and punctuality
of Mr. Timothy Linkinwater. Punctual as the counting-house dial, which he
maintained to be the best time-keeper in London next after the clock
of some old, hidden, unknown church hard by, (for Tim held the fabled
goodness of that at the Horse Guards to be a pleasant fiction, invented
by jealous West-enders,) the old clerk performed the minutest actions
of the day, and arranged the minutest articles in the little room, in a
precise and regular order, which could not have been exceeded if it had
actually been a real glass case, fitted with the choicest curiosities.
Paper, pens, ink, ruler, sealing-wax, wafers, pounce-box, string-box,
fire-box, Tim’s hat, Tim’s scrupulously-folded gloves, Tim’s other
coat--looking precisely like a back view of himself as it hung against
the wall--all had their accustomed inches of space. Except the clock,
there was not such an accurate and unimpeachable instrument in existence
as the little thermometer which hung behind the door. There was not a
bird of such methodical and business-like habits in all the world, as
the blind blackbird, who dreamed and dozed away his days in a large
snug cage, and had lost his voice, from old age, years before Tim first
bought him. There was not such an eventful story in the whole range
of anecdote, as Tim could tell concerning the acquisition of that very
bird; how, compassionating his starved and suffering condition, he had
purchased him, with the view of humanely terminating his wretched life;
how he determined to wait three days and see whether the bird revived;
how, before half the time was out, the bird did revive; and how he
went on reviving and picking up his appetite and good looks until he
gradually became what--‘what you see him now, sir,’--Tim would say,
glancing proudly at the cage. And with that, Tim would utter a melodious
chirrup, and cry ‘Dick;’ and Dick, who, for any sign of life he had
previously given, might have been a wooden or stuffed representation of
a blackbird indifferently executed, would come to the side of the cage
in three small jumps, and, thrusting his bill between the bars, turn his
sightless head towards his old master--and at that moment it would be
very difficult to determine which of the two was the happier, the bird
or Tim Linkinwater.

Nor was this all. Everything gave back, besides, some reflection of the
kindly spirit of the brothers. The warehousemen and porters were such
sturdy, jolly fellows, that it was a treat to see them. Among the
shipping announcements and steam-packet lists which decorated the
counting-house wall, were designs for almshouses, statements of
charities, and plans for new hospitals. A blunderbuss and two swords
hung above the chimney-piece, for the terror of evil-doers, but the
blunderbuss was rusty and shattered, and the swords were broken and
edgeless. Elsewhere, their open display in such a condition would have
realised a smile; but, there, it seemed as though even violent and
offensive weapons partook of the reigning influence, and became emblems
of mercy and forbearance.

Such thoughts as these occurred to Nicholas very strongly, on the
morning when he first took possession of the vacant stool, and looked
about him, more freely and at ease, than he had before enjoyed an
opportunity of doing. Perhaps they encouraged and stimulated him to
exertion, for, during the next two weeks, all his spare hours, late at
night and early in the morning, were incessantly devoted to acquiring
the mysteries of book-keeping and some other forms of mercantile
account. To these, he applied himself with such steadiness and
perseverance that, although he brought no greater amount of previous
knowledge to the subject than certain dim recollections of two or three
very long sums entered into a ciphering-book at school, and relieved for
parental inspection by the effigy of a fat swan tastefully flourished
by the writing-master’s own hand, he found himself, at the end of a
fortnight, in a condition to report his proficiency to Mr. Linkinwater,
and to claim his promise that he, Nicholas Nickleby, should now be
allowed to assist him in his graver labours.

It was a sight to behold Tim Linkinwater slowly bring out a massive
ledger and day-book, and, after turning them over and over, and
affectionately dusting their backs and sides, open the leaves here and
there, and cast his eyes, half mournfully, half proudly, upon the fair
and unblotted entries.

‘Four-and-forty year, next May!’ said Tim. ‘Many new ledgers since then.
Four-and-forty year!’

Tim closed the book again.

‘Come, come,’ said Nicholas, ‘I am all impatience to begin.’

Tim Linkinwater shook his head with an air of mild reproof. Mr. Nickleby
was not sufficiently impressed with the deep and awful nature of his
undertaking. Suppose there should be any mistake--any scratching out!

Young men are adventurous. It is extraordinary what they will rush upon,
sometimes. Without even taking the precaution of sitting himself down
upon his stool, but standing leisurely at the desk, and with a smile
upon his face--actually a smile--there was no mistake about it; Mr
Linkinwater often mentioned it afterwards--Nicholas dipped his pen
into the inkstand before him, and plunged into the books of Cheeryble
Brothers!

Tim Linkinwater turned pale, and tilting up his stool on the two legs
nearest Nicholas, looked over his shoulder in breathless anxiety.
Brother Charles and brother Ned entered the counting-house together; but
Tim Linkinwater, without looking round, impatiently waved his hand as a
caution that profound silence must be observed, and followed the nib of
the inexperienced pen with strained and eager eyes.

The brothers looked on with smiling faces, but Tim Linkinwater smiled
not, nor moved for some minutes. At length, he drew a long slow breath,
and still maintaining his position on the tilted stool, glanced at
brother Charles, secretly pointed with the feather of his pen towards
Nicholas, and nodded his head in a grave and resolute manner, plainly
signifying ‘He’ll do.’

Brother Charles nodded again, and exchanged a laughing look with brother
Ned; but, just then, Nicholas stopped to refer to some other page,
and Tim Linkinwater, unable to contain his satisfaction any longer,
descended from his stool, and caught him rapturously by the hand.

‘He has done it!’ said Tim, looking round at his employers and shaking
his head triumphantly. ‘His capital B’s and D’s are exactly like mine;
he dots all his small i’s and crosses every t as he writes it. There
an’t such a young man as this in all London,’ said Tim, clapping
Nicholas on the back; ‘not one. Don’t tell me! The city can’t produce
his equal. I challenge the city to do it!’

With this casting down of his gauntlet, Tim Linkinwater struck the desk
such a blow with his clenched fist, that the old blackbird tumbled off
his perch with the start it gave him, and actually uttered a feeble
croak, in the extremity of his astonishment.

‘Well said, Tim--well said, Tim Linkinwater!’ cried brother Charles,
scarcely less pleased than Tim himself, and clapping his hands gently
as he spoke. ‘I knew our young friend would take great pains, and I was
quite certain he would succeed, in no time. Didn’t I say so, brother
Ned?’

‘You did, my dear brother; certainly, my dear brother, you said so, and
you were quite right,’ replied Ned. ‘Quite right. Tim Linkinwater is
excited, but he is justly excited, properly excited. Tim is a fine
fellow. Tim Linkinwater, sir--you’re a fine fellow.’

‘Here’s a pleasant thing to think of!’ said Tim, wholly regardless of
this address to himself, and raising his spectacles from the ledger to
the brothers. ‘Here’s a pleasant thing. Do you suppose I haven’t often
thought of what would become of these books when I was gone? Do you
suppose I haven’t often thought that things might go on irregular and
untidy here, after I was taken away? But now,’ said Tim, extending his
forefinger towards Nicholas, ‘now, when I’ve shown him a little more,
I’m satisfied. The business will go on, when I’m dead, as well as it did
when I was alive--just the same--and I shall have the satisfaction of
knowing that there never were such books--never were such books! No, nor
never will be such books--as the books of Cheeryble Brothers.’

Having thus expressed his sentiments, Mr. Linkinwater gave vent to
a short laugh, indicative of defiance to the cities of London and
Westminster, and, turning again to his desk, quietly carried seventy-six
from the last column he had added up, and went on with his work.

‘Tim Linkinwater, sir,’ said brother Charles; ‘give me your hand, sir.
This is your birthday. How dare you talk about anything else till you
have been wished many happy returns of the day, Tim Linkinwater? God
bless you, Tim! God bless you!’

‘My dear brother,’ said the other, seizing Tim’s disengaged fist, ‘Tim
Linkinwater looks ten years younger than he did on his last birthday.’

‘Brother Ned, my dear boy,’ returned the other old fellow, ‘I believe
that Tim Linkinwater was born a hundred and fifty years old, and
is gradually coming down to five-and-twenty; for he’s younger every
birthday than he was the year before.’

‘So he is, brother Charles, so he is,’ replied brother Ned. ‘There’s not
a doubt about it.’

‘Remember, Tim,’ said brother Charles, ‘that we dine at half-past five
today instead of two o’clock; we always depart from our usual custom on
this anniversary, as you very well know, Tim Linkinwater. Mr. Nickleby,
my dear sir, you will make one. Tim Linkinwater, give me your snuff-box
as a remembrance to brother Charles and myself of an attached and
faithful rascal, and take that, in exchange, as a feeble mark of our
respect and esteem, and don’t open it until you go to bed, and never
say another word upon the subject, or I’ll kill the blackbird. A dog! He
should have had a golden cage half-a-dozen years ago, if it would have
made him or his master a bit the happier. Now, brother Ned, my dear
fellow, I’m ready. At half-past five, remember, Mr. Nickleby! Tim
Linkinwater, sir, take care of Mr. Nickleby at half-past five. Now,
brother Ned.’

Chattering away thus, according to custom, to prevent the possibility
of any thanks or acknowledgment being expressed on the other side, the
twins trotted off, arm-in-arm; having endowed Tim Linkinwater with a
costly gold snuff-box, enclosing a bank note worth more than its value
ten times told.

At a quarter past five o’clock, punctual to the minute, arrived,
according to annual usage, Tim Linkinwater’s sister; and a great to-do
there was, between Tim Linkinwater’s sister and the old housekeeper,
respecting Tim Linkinwater’s sister’s cap, which had been dispatched,
per boy, from the house of the family where Tim Linkinwater’s sister
boarded, and had not yet come to hand: notwithstanding that it had
been packed up in a bandbox, and the bandbox in a handkerchief, and the
handkerchief tied on to the boy’s arm; and notwithstanding, too, that
the place of its consignment had been duly set forth, at full length,
on the back of an old letter, and the boy enjoined, under pain of divers
horrible penalties, the full extent of which the eye of man could not
foresee, to deliver the same with all possible speed, and not to loiter
by the way. Tim Linkinwater’s sister lamented; the housekeeper condoled;
and both kept thrusting their heads out of the second-floor window to
see if the boy was ‘coming’--which would have been highly satisfactory,
and, upon the whole, tantamount to his being come, as the distance to
the corner was not quite five yards--when, all of a sudden, and when he
was least expected, the messenger, carrying the bandbox with elaborate
caution, appeared in an exactly opposite direction, puffing and panting
for breath, and flushed with recent exercise; as well he might be; for
he had taken the air, in the first instance, behind a hackney coach that
went to Camberwell, and had followed two Punches afterwards and had seen
the Stilts home to their own door. The cap was all safe, however--that
was one comfort--and it was no use scolding him--that was another;
so the boy went upon his way rejoicing, and Tim Linkinwater’s sister
presented herself to the company below-stairs, just five minutes after
the half-hour had struck by Tim Linkinwater’s own infallible clock.

The company consisted of the brothers Cheeryble, Tim Linkinwater, a
ruddy-faced white-headed friend of Tim’s (who was a superannuated bank
clerk), and Nicholas, who was presented to Tim Linkinwater’s sister with
much gravity and solemnity. The party being now completed, brother Ned
rang for dinner, and, dinner being shortly afterwards announced, led
Tim Linkinwater’s sister into the next room, where it was set forth with
great preparation. Then, brother Ned took the head of the table, and
brother Charles the foot; and Tim Linkinwater’s sister sat on the left
hand of brother Ned, and Tim Linkinwater himself on his right: and an
ancient butler of apoplectic appearance, and with very short legs, took
up his position at the back of brother Ned’s armchair, and, waving his
right arm preparatory to taking off the covers with a flourish, stood
bolt upright and motionless.

‘For these and all other blessings, brother Charles,’ said Ned.

‘Lord, make us truly thankful, brother Ned,’ said Charles.

Whereupon the apoplectic butler whisked off the top of the soup tureen,
and shot, all at once, into a state of violent activity.

There was abundance of conversation, and little fear of its ever
flagging, for the good-humour of the glorious old twins drew
everybody out, and Tim Linkinwater’s sister went off into a long and
circumstantial account of Tim Linkinwater’s infancy, immediately after
the very first glass of champagne--taking care to premise that she was
very much Tim’s junior, and had only become acquainted with the facts
from their being preserved and handed down in the family. This history
concluded, brother Ned related how that, exactly thirty-five years ago,
Tim Linkinwater was suspected to have received a love-letter, and how
that vague information had been brought to the counting-house of his
having been seen walking down Cheapside with an uncommonly handsome
spinster; at which there was a roar of laughter, and Tim Linkinwater
being charged with blushing, and called upon to explain, denied that the
accusation was true; and further, that there would have been any harm in
it if it had been; which last position occasioned the superannuated bank
clerk to laugh tremendously, and to declare that it was the very best
thing he had ever heard in his life, and that Tim Linkinwater might say
a great many things before he said anything which would beat THAT.

There was one little ceremony peculiar to the day, both the matter and
manner of which made a very strong impression upon Nicholas. The cloth
having been removed and the decanters sent round for the first time, a
profound silence succeeded, and in the cheerful faces of the brothers
there appeared an expression, not of absolute melancholy, but of quiet
thoughtfulness very unusual at a festive table. As Nicholas, struck
by this sudden alteration, was wondering what it could portend, the
brothers rose together, and the one at the top of the table leaning
forward towards the other, and speaking in a low voice as if he were
addressing him individually, said:

‘Brother Charles, my dear fellow, there is another association connected
with this day which must never be forgotten, and never can be forgotten,
by you and me. This day, which brought into the world a most faithful
and excellent and exemplary fellow, took from it the kindest and very
best of parents, the very best of parents to us both. I wish that
she could have seen us in our prosperity, and shared it, and had the
happiness of knowing how dearly we loved her in it, as we did when we
were two poor boys; but that was not to be. My dear brother--The Memory
of our Mother.’

‘Good Lord!’ thought Nicholas, ‘and there are scores of people of their
own station, knowing all this, and twenty thousand times more, who
wouldn’t ask these men to dinner because they eat with their knives and
never went to school!’

But there was no time to moralise, for the joviality again became very
brisk, and the decanter of port being nearly out, brother Ned pulled the
bell, which was instantly answered by the apoplectic butler.

‘David,’ said brother Ned.

‘Sir,’ replied the butler.

‘A magnum of the double-diamond, David, to drink the health of Mr
Linkinwater.’

Instantly, by a feat of dexterity, which was the admiration of all the
company, and had been, annually, for some years past, the apoplectic
butler, bringing his left hand from behind the small of his back,
produced the bottle with the corkscrew already inserted; uncorked it at
a jerk; and placed the magnum and the cork before his master with the
dignity of conscious cleverness.

‘Ha!’ said brother Ned, first examining the cork and afterwards filling
his glass, while the old butler looked complacently and amiably on, as
if it were all his own property, but the company were quite welcome to
make free with it, ‘this looks well, David.’

‘It ought to, sir,’ replied David. ‘You’d be troubled to find such a
glass of wine as is our double-diamond, and that Mr. Linkinwater knows
very well. That was laid down when Mr. Linkinwater first come: that wine
was, gentlemen.’

‘Nay, David, nay,’ interposed brother Charles.

‘I wrote the entry in the cellar-book myself, sir, if you please,’ said
David, in the tone of a man, quite confident in the strength of his
facts. ‘Mr. Linkinwater had only been here twenty year, sir, when that
pipe of double-diamond was laid down.’

‘David is quite right, quite right, brother Charles,’ said Ned: ‘are the
people here, David?’

‘Outside the door, sir,’ replied the butler.

‘Show ‘em in, David, show ‘em in.’

At this bidding, the older butler placed before his master a small tray
of clean glasses, and opening the door admitted the jolly porters and
warehousemen whom Nicholas had seen below. They were four in all, and as
they came in, bowing, and grinning, and blushing, the housekeeper, and
cook, and housemaid, brought up the rear.

‘Seven,’ said brother Ned, filling a corresponding number of glasses
with the double-diamond, ‘and David, eight. There! Now, you’re all of
you to drink the health of your best friend Mr. Timothy Linkinwater, and
wish him health and long life and many happy returns of this day, both
for his own sake and that of your old masters, who consider him an
inestimable treasure. Tim Linkinwater, sir, your health. Devil take you,
Tim Linkinwater, sir, God bless you.’

With this singular contradiction of terms, brother Ned gave Tim
Linkinwater a slap on the back, which made him look, for the moment,
almost as apoplectic as the butler: and tossed off the contents of his
glass in a twinkling.

The toast was scarcely drunk with all honour to Tim Linkinwater, when
the sturdiest and jolliest subordinate elbowed himself a little
in advance of his fellows, and exhibiting a very hot and flushed
countenance, pulled a single lock of grey hair in the middle of his
forehead as a respectful salute to the company, and delivered himself
as follows--rubbing the palms of his hands very hard on a blue cotton
handkerchief as he did so:

‘We’re allowed to take a liberty once a year, gen’lemen, and if you
please we’ll take it now; there being no time like the present, and no
two birds in the hand worth one in the bush, as is well known--leastways
in a contrairy sense, which the meaning is the same. (A pause--the
butler unconvinced.) What we mean to say is, that there never
was (looking at the butler)--such--(looking at the cook)
noble--excellent--(looking everywhere and seeing nobody) free,
generous-spirited masters as them as has treated us so handsome
this day. And here’s thanking of ‘em for all their goodness as is so
constancy a diffusing of itself over everywhere, and wishing they may
live long and die happy!’

When the foregoing speech was over--and it might have been much more
elegant and much less to the purpose--the whole body of subordinates
under command of the apoplectic butler gave three soft cheers; which, to
that gentleman’s great indignation, were not very regular, inasmuch as
the women persisted in giving an immense number of little shrill hurrahs
among themselves, in utter disregard of the time. This done, they
withdrew; shortly afterwards, Tim Linkinwater’s sister withdrew; in
reasonable time after that, the sitting was broken up for tea and
coffee, and a round game of cards.

At half-past ten--late hours for the square--there appeared a little
tray of sandwiches and a bowl of bishop, which bishop coming on the top
of the double-diamond, and other excitements, had such an effect
upon Tim Linkinwater, that he drew Nicholas aside, and gave him to
understand, confidentially, that it was quite true about the uncommonly
handsome spinster, and that she was to the full as good-looking as she
had been described--more so, indeed--but that she was in too much of a
hurry to change her condition, and consequently, while Tim was courting
her and thinking of changing his, got married to somebody else. ‘After
all, I dare say it was my fault,’ said Tim. ‘I’ll show you a print
I have got upstairs, one of these days. It cost me five-and-twenty
shillings. I bought it soon after we were cool to each other. Don’t
mention it, but it’s the most extraordinary accidental likeness you ever
saw--her very portrait, sir!’

By this time it was past eleven o’clock; and Tim Linkinwater’s sister
declaring that she ought to have been at home a full hour ago, a coach
was procured, into which she was handed with great ceremony by brother
Ned, while brother Charles imparted the fullest directions to the
coachman, and besides paying the man a shilling over and above his fare,
in order that he might take the utmost care of the lady, all but choked
him with a glass of spirits of uncommon strength, and then nearly
knocked all the breath out of his body in his energetic endeavours to
knock it in again.

At length the coach rumbled off, and Tim Linkinwater’s sister being now
fairly on her way home, Nicholas and Tim Linkinwater’s friend took
their leaves together, and left old Tim and the worthy brothers to their
repose.

As Nicholas had some distance to walk, it was considerably past midnight
by the time he reached home, where he found his mother and Smike sitting
up to receive him. It was long after their usual hour of retiring, and
they had expected him, at the very latest, two hours ago; but the time
had not hung heavily on their hands, for Mrs. Nickleby had entertained
Smike with a genealogical account of her family by the mother’s side,
comprising biographical sketches of the principal members, and Smike had
sat wondering what it was all about, and whether it was learnt from
a book, or said out of Mrs. Nickleby’s own head; so that they got on
together very pleasantly.

Nicholas could not go to bed without expatiating on the excellences and
munificence of the brothers Cheeryble, and relating the great success
which had attended his efforts that day. But before he had said a dozen
words, Mrs. Nickleby, with many sly winks and nods, observed, that she
was sure Mr. Smike must be quite tired out, and that she positively must
insist on his not sitting up a minute longer.

‘A most biddable creature he is, to be sure,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, when
Smike had wished them good-night and left the room. ‘I know you’ll
excuse me, Nicholas, my dear, but I don’t like to do this before a third
person; indeed, before a young man it would not be quite proper, though
really, after all, I don’t know what harm there is in it, except that
to be sure it’s not a very becoming thing, though some people say it is
very much so, and really I don’t know why it should not be, if it’s
well got up, and the borders are small-plaited; of course, a good deal
depends upon that.’

With which preface, Mrs. Nickleby took her nightcap from between the
leaves of a very large prayer-book where it had been folded up small,
and proceeded to tie it on: talking away in her usual discursive manner,
all the time.

‘People may say what they like,’ observed Mrs. Nickleby, ‘but there’s
a great deal of comfort in a nightcap, as I’m sure you would confess,
Nicholas my dear, if you would only have strings to yours, and wear it
like a Christian, instead of sticking it upon the very top of your head
like a blue-coat boy. You needn’t think it an unmanly or quizzical thing
to be particular about your nightcap, for I have often heard your poor
dear papa, and the Reverend Mr. What’s-his-name, who used to read prayers
in that old church with the curious little steeple that the weathercock
was blown off the night week before you were born,--I have often heard
them say, that the young men at college are uncommonly particular about
their nightcaps, and that the Oxford nightcaps are quite celebrated
for their strength and goodness; so much so, indeed, that the young men
never dream of going to bed without ‘em, and I believe it’s admitted on
all hands that THEY know what’s good, and don’t coddle themselves.’

Nicholas laughed, and entering no further into the subject of this
lengthened harangue, reverted to the pleasant tone of the little
birthday party. And as Mrs. Nickleby instantly became very curious
respecting it, and made a great number of inquiries touching what they
had had for dinner, and how it was put on table, and whether it was
overdone or underdone, and who was there, and what ‘the Mr. Cherrybles’
said, and what Nicholas said, and what the Mr. Cherrybles said when he
said that; Nicholas described the festivities at full length, and also
the occurrences of the morning.

‘Late as it is,’ said Nicholas, ‘I am almost selfish enough to wish
that Kate had been up to hear all this. I was all impatience, as I came
along, to tell her.’

‘Why, Kate,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, putting her feet upon the fender, and
drawing her chair close to it, as if settling herself for a long
talk. ‘Kate has been in bed--oh! a couple of hours--and I’m very glad,
Nicholas my dear, that I prevailed upon her not to sit up, for I wished
very much to have an opportunity of saying a few words to you. I am
naturally anxious about it, and of course it’s a very delightful and
consoling thing to have a grown-up son that one can put confidence in,
and advise with; indeed I don’t know any use there would be in having
sons at all, unless people could put confidence in them.’

Nicholas stopped in the middle of a sleepy yawn, as his mother began to
speak: and looked at her with fixed attention.

‘There was a lady in our neighbourhood,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘speaking
of sons puts me in mind of it--a lady in our neighbourhood when we lived
near Dawlish, I think her name was Rogers; indeed I am sure it was if it
wasn’t Murphy, which is the only doubt I have--’

‘Is it about her, mother, that you wished to speak to me?’ said Nicholas
quietly.

‘About HER!’ cried Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Good gracious, Nicholas, my dear, how
CAN you be so ridiculous! But that was always the way with your poor
dear papa,--just his way--always wandering, never able to fix his
thoughts on any one subject for two minutes together. I think I see him
now!’ said Mrs. Nickleby, wiping her eyes, ‘looking at me while I was
talking to him about his affairs, just as if his ideas were in a state
of perfect conglomeration! Anybody who had come in upon us suddenly,
would have supposed I was confusing and distracting him instead of
making things plainer; upon my word they would.’

‘I am very sorry, mother, that I should inherit this unfortunate
slowness of apprehension,’ said Nicholas, kindly; ‘but I’ll do my best
to understand you, if you’ll only go straight on: indeed I will.’

‘Your poor pa!’ said Mrs. Nickleby, pondering. ‘He never knew, till it
was too late, what I would have had him do!’

This was undoubtedly the case, inasmuch as the deceased Mr. Nickleby had
not arrived at the knowledge when he died. Neither had Mrs. Nickleby
herself; which is, in some sort, an explanation of the circumstance.

‘However,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, drying her tears, ‘this has nothing to
do--certainly nothing whatever to do--with the gentleman in the next
house.’

‘I should suppose that the gentleman in the next house has as little to
do with us,’ returned Nicholas.

‘There can be no doubt,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘that he IS a gentleman,
and has the manners of a gentleman, and the appearance of a gentleman,
although he does wear smalls and grey worsted stockings. That may
be eccentricity, or he may be proud of his legs. I don’t see why he
shouldn’t be. The Prince Regent was proud of his legs, and so was Daniel
Lambert, who was also a fat man; HE was proud of his legs. So was Miss
Biffin: she was--no,’ added Mrs. Nickleby, correcting, herself, ‘I think
she had only toes, but the principle is the same.’

Nicholas looked on, quite amazed at the introduction of this new theme.
Which seemed just what Mrs. Nickleby had expected him to be.

‘You may well be surprised, Nicholas, my dear,’ she said, ‘I am sure I
was. It came upon me like a flash of fire, and almost froze my blood.
The bottom of his garden joins the bottom of ours, and of course I had
several times seen him sitting among the scarlet-beans in his little
arbour, or working at his little hot-beds. I used to think he stared
rather, but I didn’t take any particular notice of that, as we were
newcomers, and he might be curious to see what we were like. But when he
began to throw his cucumbers over our wall--’

‘To throw his cucumbers over our wall!’ repeated Nicholas, in great
astonishment.

‘Yes, Nicholas, my dear,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby in a very serious tone;
‘his cucumbers over our wall. And vegetable marrows likewise.’

‘Confound his impudence!’ said Nicholas, firing immediately. ‘What does
he mean by that?’

‘I don’t think he means it impertinently at all,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby.

‘What!’ said Nicholas, ‘cucumbers and vegetable marrows flying at the
heads of the family as they walk in their own garden, and not meant
impertinently! Why, mother--’

Nicholas stopped short; for there was an indescribable expression of
placid triumph, mingled with a modest confusion, lingering between
the borders of Mrs. Nickleby’s nightcap, which arrested his attention
suddenly.

‘He must be a very weak, and foolish, and inconsiderate man,’ said
Mrs. Nickleby; ‘blamable indeed--at least I suppose other people would
consider him so; of course I can’t be expected to express any opinion on
that point, especially after always defending your poor dear papa when
other people blamed him for making proposals to me; and to be sure there
can be no doubt that he has taken a very singular way of showing it.
Still at the same time, his attentions are--that is, as far as it goes,
and to a certain extent of course--a flattering sort of thing; and
although I should never dream of marrying again with a dear girl like
Kate still unsettled in life--’

‘Surely, mother, such an idea never entered your brain for an instant?’
said Nicholas.

‘Bless my heart, Nicholas my dear,’ returned his mother in a peevish
tone, ‘isn’t that precisely what I am saying, if you would only let me
speak? Of course, I never gave it a second thought, and I am surprised
and astonished that you should suppose me capable of such a thing. All
I say is, what step is the best to take, so as to reject these advances
civilly and delicately, and without hurting his feelings too much,
and driving him to despair, or anything of that kind? My goodness me!’
exclaimed Mrs. Nickleby, with a half-simper, ‘suppose he was to go doing
anything rash to himself. Could I ever be happy again, Nicholas?’

Despite his vexation and concern, Nicholas could scarcely help smiling,
as he rejoined, ‘Now, do you think, mother, that such a result would be
likely to ensue from the most cruel repulse?’

‘Upon my word, my dear, I don’t know,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby; ‘really,
I don’t know. I am sure there was a case in the day before yesterday’s
paper, extracted from one of the French newspapers, about a journeyman
shoemaker who was jealous of a young girl in an adjoining
village, because she wouldn’t shut herself up in an air-tight
three-pair-of-stairs, and charcoal herself to death with him; and who
went and hid himself in a wood with a sharp-pointed knife, and rushed
out, as she was passing by with a few friends, and killed himself first,
and then all the friends, and then her--no, killed all the friends
first, and then herself, and then HIMself--which it is quite frightful
to think of. Somehow or other,’ added Mrs. Nickleby, after a momentary
pause, ‘they always ARE journeyman shoemakers who do these things in
France, according to the papers. I don’t know how it is--something in
the leather, I suppose.’

‘But this man, who is not a shoemaker--what has he done, mother, what
has he said?’ inquired Nicholas, fretted almost beyond endurance, but
looking nearly as resigned and patient as Mrs. Nickleby herself. ‘You
know, there is no language of vegetables, which converts a cucumber into
a formal declaration of attachment.’

‘My dear,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby, tossing her head and looking at the
ashes in the grate, ‘he has done and said all sorts of things.’

‘Is there no mistake on your part?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Mistake!’ cried Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Lord, Nicholas my dear, do you suppose I
don’t know when a man’s in earnest?’

‘Well, well!’ muttered Nicholas.

‘Every time I go to the window,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘he kisses one hand,
and lays the other upon his heart--of course it’s very foolish of him
to do so, and I dare say you’ll say it’s very wrong, but he does it very
respectfully--very respectfully indeed--and very tenderly, extremely
tenderly. So far, he deserves the greatest credit; there can be no doubt
about that. Then, there are the presents which come pouring over the
wall every day, and very fine they certainly are, very fine; we had one
of the cucumbers at dinner yesterday, and think of pickling the rest
for next winter. And last evening,’ added Mrs. Nickleby, with increased
confusion, ‘he called gently over the wall, as I was walking in the
garden, and proposed marriage, and an elopement. His voice is as clear
as a bell or a musical glass--very like a musical glass indeed--but of
course I didn’t listen to it. Then, the question is, Nicholas my dear,
what am I to do?’

‘Does Kate know of this?’ asked Nicholas.

‘I have not said a word about it yet,’ answered his mother.

‘Then, for Heaven’s sake,’ rejoined Nicholas, rising, ‘do not, for it
would make her very unhappy. And with regard to what you should do, my
dear mother, do what your good sense and feeling, and respect for my
father’s memory, would prompt. There are a thousand ways in which you
can show your dislike of these preposterous and doting attentions. If
you act as decidedly as you ought and they are still continued, and
to your annoyance, I can speedily put a stop to them. But I should not
interfere in a matter so ridiculous, and attach importance to it, until
you have vindicated yourself. Most women can do that, but especially
one of your age and condition, in circumstances like these, which are
unworthy of a serious thought. I would not shame you by seeming to
take them to heart, or treat them earnestly for an instant. Absurd old
idiot!’

So saying, Nicholas kissed his mother, and bade her good-night, and they
retired to their respective chambers.

To do Mrs. Nickleby justice, her attachment to her children would have
prevented her seriously contemplating a second marriage, even if she
could have so far conquered her recollections of her late husband as to
have any strong inclinations that way. But, although there was no evil
and little real selfishness in Mrs. Nickleby’s heart, she had a weak head
and a vain one; and there was something so flattering in being sought
(and vainly sought) in marriage at this time of day, that she could
not dismiss the passion of the unknown gentleman quite so summarily or
lightly as Nicholas appeared to deem becoming.

‘As to its being preposterous, and doting, and ridiculous,’ thought Mrs
Nickleby, communing with herself in her own room, ‘I don’t see that,
at all. It’s hopeless on his part, certainly; but why he should be an
absurd old idiot, I confess I don’t see. He is not to be supposed to
know it’s hopeless. Poor fellow! He is to be pitied, I think!’

Having made these reflections, Mrs. Nickleby looked in her little
dressing-glass, and walking backward a few steps from it, tried
to remember who it was who used to say that when Nicholas was
one-and-twenty he would have more the appearance of her brother than her
son. Not being able to call the authority to mind, she extinguished
her candle, and drew up the window-blind to admit the light of morning,
which had, by this time, begun to dawn.

‘It’s a bad light to distinguish objects in,’ murmured Mrs. Nickleby,
peering into the garden, ‘and my eyes are not very good--I was
short-sighted from a child--but, upon my word, I think there’s another
large vegetable marrow sticking, at this moment, on the broken glass
bottles at the top of the wall!’



CHAPTER 38

Comprises certain Particulars arising out of a Visit of Condolence,
which may prove important hereafter. Smike unexpectedly encounters a
very old Friend, who invites him to his House, and will take no Denial


Quite unconscious of the demonstrations of their amorous neighbour, or
their effects upon the susceptible bosom of her mama, Kate Nickleby
had, by this time, begun to enjoy a settled feeling of tranquillity and
happiness, to which, even in occasional and transitory glimpses, she
had long been a stranger. Living under the same roof with the beloved
brother from whom she had been so suddenly and hardly separated: with
a mind at ease, and free from any persecutions which could call a blush
into her cheek, or a pang into her heart, she seemed to have passed into
a new state of being. Her former cheerfulness was restored, her step
regained its elasticity and lightness, the colour which had forsaken
her cheek visited it once again, and Kate Nickleby looked more beautiful
than ever.

Such was the result to which Miss La Creevy’s ruminations and
observations led her, when the cottage had been, as she emphatically
said, ‘thoroughly got to rights, from the chimney-pots to the
street-door scraper,’ and the busy little woman had at length a moment’s
time to think about its inmates.

‘Which I declare I haven’t had since I first came down here,’ said
Miss La Creevy; ‘for I have thought of nothing but hammers, nails,
screwdrivers, and gimlets, morning, noon, and night.’

‘You never bestowed one thought upon yourself, I believe,’ returned
Kate, smiling.

‘Upon my word, my dear, when there are so many pleasanter things
to think of, I should be a goose if I did,’ said Miss La Creevy.
‘By-the-bye, I HAVE thought of somebody too. Do you know, that I observe
a great change in one of this family--a very extraordinary change?’

‘In whom?’ asked Kate, anxiously. ‘Not in--’

‘Not in your brother, my dear,’ returned Miss La Creevy, anticipating
the close of the sentence, ‘for he is always the same affectionate
good-natured clever creature, with a spice of the--I won’t say who--in
him when there’s any occasion, that he was when I first knew you. No.
Smike, as he WILL be called, poor fellow! for he won’t hear of a MR
before his name, is greatly altered, even in this short time.’

‘How?’ asked Kate. ‘Not in health?’

‘N--n--o; perhaps not in health exactly,’ said Miss La Creevy, pausing
to consider, ‘although he is a worn and feeble creature, and has that
in his face which it would wring my heart to see in yours. No; not in
health.’

‘How then?’

‘I scarcely know,’ said the miniature painter. ‘But I have watched him,
and he has brought the tears into my eyes many times. It is not a very
difficult matter to do that, certainly, for I am easily melted; still I
think these came with good cause and reason. I am sure that since he has
been here, he has grown, from some strong cause, more conscious of his
weak intellect. He feels it more. It gives him greater pain to know that
he wanders sometimes, and cannot understand very simple things. I have
watched him when you have not been by, my dear, sit brooding by himself,
with such a look of pain as I could scarcely bear to see, and then get
up and leave the room: so sorrowfully, and in such dejection, that
I cannot tell you how it has hurt me. Not three weeks ago, he was a
light-hearted busy creature, overjoyed to be in a bustle, and as
happy as the day was long. Now, he is another being--the same willing,
harmless, faithful, loving creature--but the same in nothing else.’

‘Surely this will all pass off,’ said Kate. ‘Poor fellow!’

‘I hope,’ returned her little friend, with a gravity very unusual in
her, ‘it may. I hope, for the sake of that poor lad, it may. However,’
said Miss La Creevy, relapsing into the cheerful, chattering tone, which
was habitual to her, ‘I have said my say, and a very long say it is, and
a very wrong say too, I shouldn’t wonder at all. I shall cheer him up
tonight, at all events, for if he is to be my squire all the way to the
Strand, I shall talk on, and on, and on, and never leave off, till I
have roused him into a laugh at something. So the sooner he goes, the
better for him, and the sooner I go, the better for me, I am sure, or
else I shall have my maid gallivanting with somebody who may rob the
house--though what there is to take away, besides tables and chairs,
I don’t know, except the miniatures: and he is a clever thief who can
dispose of them to any great advantage, for I can’t, I know, and that’s
the honest truth.’

So saying, little Miss La Creevy hid her face in a very flat bonnet, and
herself in a very big shawl; and fixing herself tightly into the latter,
by means of a large pin, declared that the omnibus might come as soon as
it pleased, for she was quite ready.

But there was still Mrs. Nickleby to take leave of; and long before that
good lady had concluded some reminiscences bearing upon, and appropriate
to, the occasion, the omnibus arrived. This put Miss La Creevy in a
great bustle, in consequence whereof, as she secretly rewarded the
servant girl with eighteen-pence behind the street-door, she pulled
out of her reticule ten-pennyworth of halfpence, which rolled into all
possible corners of the passage, and occupied some considerable time
in the picking up. This ceremony had, of course, to be succeeded by a
second kissing of Kate and Mrs. Nickleby, and a gathering together of the
little basket and the brown-paper parcel, during which proceedings, ‘the
omnibus,’ as Miss La Creevy protested, ‘swore so dreadfully, that it was
quite awful to hear it.’ At length and at last, it made a feint of going
away, and then Miss La Creevy darted out, and darted in, apologising
with great volubility to all the passengers, and declaring that she
wouldn’t purposely have kept them waiting on any account whatever. While
she was looking about for a convenient seat, the conductor pushed Smike
in, and cried that it was all right--though it wasn’t--and away went the
huge vehicle, with the noise of half-a-dozen brewers’ drays at least.

Leaving it to pursue its journey at the pleasure of the conductor
aforementioned, who lounged gracefully on his little shelf behind,
smoking an odoriferous cigar; and leaving it to stop, or go on, or
gallop, or crawl, as that gentleman deemed expedient and advisable; this
narrative may embrace the opportunity of ascertaining the condition of
Sir Mulberry Hawk, and to what extent he had, by this time, recovered
from the injuries consequent on being flung violently from his
cabriolet, under the circumstances already detailed.

With a shattered limb, a body severely bruised, a face disfigured by
half-healed scars, and pallid from the exhaustion of recent pain and
fever, Sir Mulberry Hawk lay stretched upon his back, on the couch to
which he was doomed to be a prisoner for some weeks yet to come. Mr. Pyke
and Mr. Pluck sat drinking hard in the next room, now and then varying
the monotonous murmurs of their conversation with a half-smothered
laugh, while the young lord--the only member of the party who was not
thoroughly irredeemable, and who really had a kind heart--sat beside his
Mentor, with a cigar in his mouth, and read to him, by the light of a
lamp, such scraps of intelligence from a paper of the day, as were most
likely to yield him interest or amusement.

‘Curse those hounds!’ said the invalid, turning his head impatiently
towards the adjoining room; ‘will nothing stop their infernal throats?’

Messrs Pyke and Pluck heard the exclamation, and stopped immediately:
winking to each other as they did so, and filling their glasses to the
brim, as some recompense for the deprivation of speech.

‘Damn!’ muttered the sick man between his teeth, and writhing
impatiently in his bed. ‘Isn’t this mattress hard enough, and the room
dull enough, and pain bad enough, but THEY must torture me? What’s the
time?’

‘Half-past eight,’ replied his friend.

‘Here, draw the table nearer, and let us have the cards again,’ said Sir
Mulberry. ‘More piquet. Come.’

It was curious to see how eagerly the sick man, debarred from any change
of position save the mere turning of his head from side to side, watched
every motion of his friend in the progress of the game; and with what
eagerness and interest he played, and yet how warily and coolly. His
address and skill were more than twenty times a match for his adversary,
who could make little head against them, even when fortune favoured him
with good cards, which was not often the case. Sir Mulberry won every
game; and when his companion threw down the cards, and refused to play
any longer, thrust forth his wasted arm and caught up the stakes with a
boastful oath, and the same hoarse laugh, though considerably lowered in
tone, that had resounded in Ralph Nickleby’s dining-room, months before.

While he was thus occupied, his man appeared, to announce that Mr. Ralph
Nickleby was below, and wished to know how he was, tonight.

‘Better,’ said Sir Mulberry, impatiently.

‘Mr. Nickleby wishes to know, sir--’

‘I tell you, better,’ replied Sir Mulberry, striking his hand upon the
table.

The man hesitated for a moment or two, and then said that Mr. Nickleby
had requested permission to see Sir Mulberry Hawk, if it was not
inconvenient.

‘It IS inconvenient. I can’t see him. I can’t see anybody,’ said his
master, more violently than before. ‘You know that, you blockhead.’

‘I am very sorry, sir,’ returned the man. ‘But Mr. Nickleby pressed so
much, sir--’

The fact was, that Ralph Nickleby had bribed the man, who, being anxious
to earn his money with a view to future favours, held the door in his
hand, and ventured to linger still.

‘Did he say whether he had any business to speak about?’ inquired Sir
Mulberry, after a little impatient consideration.

‘No, sir. He said he wished to see you, sir. Particularly, Mr. Nickleby
said, sir.’

‘Tell him to come up. Here,’ cried Sir Mulberry, calling the man back,
as he passed his hand over his disfigured face, ‘move that lamp, and
put it on the stand behind me. Wheel that table away, and place a chair
there--further off. Leave it so.’

The man obeyed these directions as if he quite comprehended the motive
with which they were dictated, and left the room. Lord Frederick
Verisopht, remarking that he would look in presently, strolled into the
adjoining apartment, and closed the folding door behind him.

Then was heard a subdued footstep on the stairs; and Ralph Nickleby, hat
in hand, crept softly into the room, with his body bent forward as if in
profound respect, and his eyes fixed upon the face of his worthy client.

‘Well, Nickleby,’ said Sir Mulberry, motioning him to the chair by the
couch side, and waving his hand in assumed carelessness, ‘I have had a
bad accident, you see.’

‘I see,’ rejoined Ralph, with the same steady gaze. ‘Bad, indeed! I
should not have known you, Sir Mulberry. Dear, dear! This IS bad.’

Ralph’s manner was one of profound humility and respect; and the low
tone of voice was that, which the gentlest consideration for a sick man
would have taught a visitor to assume. But the expression of his face,
Sir Mulberry’s being averted, was in extraordinary contrast; and as
he stood, in his usual attitude, calmly looking on the prostrate form
before him, all that part of his features which was not cast into shadow
by his protruding and contracted brows, bore the impress of a sarcastic
smile.

‘Sit down,’ said Sir Mulberry, turning towards him, as though by a
violent effort. ‘Am I a sight, that you stand gazing there?’

As he turned his face, Ralph recoiled a step or two, and making as
though he were irresistibly impelled to express astonishment, but was
determined not to do so, sat down with well-acted confusion.

‘I have inquired at the door, Sir Mulberry, every day,’ said Ralph,
‘twice a day, indeed, at first--and tonight, presuming upon old
acquaintance, and past transactions by which we have mutually benefited
in some degree, I could not resist soliciting admission to your chamber.
Have you--have you suffered much?’ said Ralph, bending forward, and
allowing the same harsh smile to gather upon his face, as the other
closed his eyes.

‘More than enough to please me, and less than enough to please some
broken-down hacks that you and I know of, and who lay their ruin between
us, I dare say,’ returned Sir Mulberry, tossing his arm restlessly upon
the coverlet.

Ralph shrugged his shoulders in deprecation of the intense irritation
with which this had been said; for there was an aggravating, cold
distinctness in his speech and manner which so grated on the sick man
that he could scarcely endure it.

‘And what is it in these “past transactions,” that brought you here
tonight?’ asked Sir Mulberry.

‘Nothing,’ replied Ralph. ‘There are some bills of my lord’s which need
renewal; but let them be till you are well. I--I--came,’ said Ralph,
speaking more slowly, and with harsher emphasis, ‘I came to say how
grieved I am that any relative of mine, although disowned by me, should
have inflicted such punishment on you as--’

‘Punishment!’ interposed Sir Mulberry.

‘I know it has been a severe one,’ said Ralph, wilfully mistaking the
meaning of the interruption, ‘and that has made me the more anxious to
tell you that I disown this vagabond--that I acknowledge him as no kin
of mine--and that I leave him to take his deserts from you, and
every man besides. You may wring his neck if you please. I shall not
interfere.’

‘This story that they tell me here, has got abroad then, has it?’ asked
Sir Mulberry, clenching his hands and teeth.

‘Noised in all directions,’ replied Ralph. ‘Every club and gaming-room
has rung with it. There has been a good song made about it, as I am
told,’ said Ralph, looking eagerly at his questioner. ‘I have not heard
it myself, not being in the way of such things, but I have been told
it’s even printed--for private circulation--but that’s all over town, of
course.’

‘It’s a lie!’ said Sir Mulberry; ‘I tell you it’s all a lie. The mare
took fright.’

‘They SAY he frightened her,’ observed Ralph, in the same unmoved and
quiet manner. ‘Some say he frightened you, but THAT’S a lie, I know. I
have said that boldly--oh, a score of times! I am a peaceable man, but I
can’t hear folks tell that of you. No, no.’

When Sir Mulberry found coherent words to utter, Ralph bent forward
with his hand to his ear, and a face as calm as if its every line of
sternness had been cast in iron.

‘When I am off this cursed bed,’ said the invalid, actually striking at
his broken leg in the ecstasy of his passion, ‘I’ll have such revenge as
never man had yet. By God, I will. Accident favouring him, he has marked
me for a week or two, but I’ll put a mark on him that he shall carry
to his grave. I’ll slit his nose and ears, flog him, maim him for life.
I’ll do more than that; I’ll drag that pattern of chastity, that pink of
prudery, the delicate sister, through--’

It might have been that even Ralph’s cold blood tingled in his cheeks
at that moment. It might have been that Sir Mulberry remembered, that,
knave and usurer as he was, he must, in some early time of infancy, have
twined his arm about her father’s neck. He stopped, and menacing with
his hand, confirmed the unuttered threat with a tremendous oath.

‘It is a galling thing,’ said Ralph, after a short term of silence,
during which he had eyed the sufferer keenly, ‘to think that the man
about town, the rake, the ROUE, the rook of twenty seasons should be
brought to this pass by a mere boy!’

Sir Mulberry darted a wrathful look at him, but Ralph’s eyes were bent
upon the ground, and his face wore no other expression than one of
thoughtfulness.

‘A raw, slight stripling,’ continued Ralph, ‘against a man whose very
weight might crush him; to say nothing of his skill in--I am right, I
think,’ said Ralph, raising his eyes, ‘you WERE a patron of the ring
once, were you not?’

The sick man made an impatient gesture, which Ralph chose to consider as
one of acquiescence.

‘Ha!’ he said, ‘I thought so. That was before I knew you, but I was
pretty sure I couldn’t be mistaken. He is light and active, I suppose.
But those were slight advantages compared with yours. Luck, luck! These
hang-dog outcasts have it.’

‘He’ll need the most he has, when I am well again,’ said Sir Mulberry
Hawk, ‘let him fly where he will.’

‘Oh!’ returned Ralph quickly, ‘he doesn’t dream of that. He is here,
good sir, waiting your pleasure, here in London, walking the streets
at noonday; carrying it off jauntily; looking for you, I swear,’ said
Ralph, his face darkening, and his own hatred getting the upper hand
of him, for the first time, as this gay picture of Nicholas presented
itself; ‘if we were only citizens of a country where it could be safely
done, I’d give good money to have him stabbed to the heart and rolled
into the kennel for the dogs to tear.’

As Ralph, somewhat to the surprise of his old client, vented this
little piece of sound family feeling, and took up his hat preparatory to
departing, Lord Frederick Verisopht looked in.

‘Why what in the deyvle’s name, Hawk, have you and Nickleby been talking
about?’ said the young man. ‘I neyver heard such an insufferable riot.
Croak, croak, croak. Bow, wow, wow. What has it all been about?’

‘Sir Mulberry has been angry, my Lord,’ said Ralph, looking towards the
couch.

‘Not about money, I hope? Nothing has gone wrong in business, has it,
Nickleby?’

‘No, my Lord, no,’ returned Ralph. ‘On that point we always agree. Sir
Mulberry has been calling to mind the cause of--’

There was neither necessity nor opportunity for Ralph to proceed; for
Sir Mulberry took up the theme, and vented his threats and oaths against
Nicholas, almost as ferociously as before.

Ralph, who was no common observer, was surprised to see that as this
tirade proceeded, the manner of Lord Frederick Verisopht, who at the
commencement had been twirling his whiskers with a most dandified
and listless air, underwent a complete alteration. He was still more
surprised when, Sir Mulberry ceasing to speak, the young lord angrily,
and almost unaffectedly, requested never to have the subject renewed in
his presence.

‘Mind that, Hawk!’ he added, with unusual energy. ‘I never will be a
party to, or permit, if I can help it, a cowardly attack upon this young
fellow.’

‘Cowardly!’ interrupted his friend.

‘Ye-es,’ said the other, turning full upon him. ‘If you had told him
who you were; if you had given him your card, and found out, afterwards,
that his station or character prevented your fighting him, it would have
been bad enough then; upon my soul it would have been bad enough then.
As it is, you did wrong. I did wrong too, not to interfere, and I
am sorry for it. What happened to you afterwards, was as much the
consequence of accident as design, and more your fault than his; and it
shall not, with my knowledge, be cruelly visited upon him, it shall not
indeed.’

With this emphatic repetition of his concluding words, the young lord
turned upon his heel; but before he had reached the adjoining room he
turned back again, and said, with even greater vehemence than he had
displayed before,

‘I do believe, now; upon my honour I do believe, that the sister is as
virtuous and modest a young lady as she is a handsome one; and of the
brother, I say this, that he acted as her brother should, and in a manly
and spirited manner. And I only wish, with all my heart and soul, that
any one of us came out of this matter half as well as he does.’

So saying, Lord Frederick Verisopht walked out of the room, leaving
Ralph Nickleby and Sir Mulberry in most unpleasant astonishment.

‘Is this your pupil?’ asked Ralph, softly, ‘or has he come fresh from
some country parson?’

‘Green fools take these fits sometimes,’ replied Sir Mulberry Hawk,
biting his lip, and pointing to the door. ‘Leave him to me.’

Ralph exchanged a familiar look with his old acquaintance; for they had
suddenly grown confidential again in this alarming surprise; and took
his way home, thoughtfully and slowly.

While these things were being said and done, and long before they were
concluded, the omnibus had disgorged Miss La Creevy and her escort, and
they had arrived at her own door. Now, the good-nature of the little
miniature painter would by no means allow of Smike’s walking back again,
until he had been previously refreshed with just a sip of something
comfortable and a mixed biscuit or so; and Smike, entertaining no
objection either to the sip of something comfortable, or the mixed
biscuit, but, considering on the contrary that they would be a very
pleasant preparation for a walk to Bow, it fell out that he delayed much
longer than he originally intended, and that it was some half-hour after
dusk when he set forth on his journey home.

There was no likelihood of his losing his way, for it lay quite straight
before him, and he had walked into town with Nicholas, and back alone,
almost every day. So, Miss La Creevy and he shook hands with mutual
confidence, and, being charged with more kind remembrances to Mrs. and
Miss Nickleby, Smike started off.

At the foot of Ludgate Hill, he turned a little out of the road to
satisfy his curiosity by having a look at Newgate. After staring up at
the sombre walls, from the opposite side of the way, with great care
and dread for some minutes, he turned back again into the old track, and
walked briskly through the city; stopping now and then to gaze in at the
window of some particularly attractive shop, then running for a little
way, then stopping again, and so on, as any other country lad might do.

He had been gazing for a long time through a jeweller’s window, wishing
he could take some of the beautiful trinkets home as a present, and
imagining what delight they would afford if he could, when the clocks
struck three-quarters past eight; roused by the sound, he hurried on at
a very quick pace, and was crossing the corner of a by-street when he
felt himself violently brought to, with a jerk so sudden that he was
obliged to cling to a lamp-post to save himself from falling. At the
same moment, a small boy clung tight round his leg, and a shrill cry of
‘Here he is, father! Hooray!’ vibrated in his ears.

Smike knew that voice too well. He cast his despairing eyes downward
towards the form from which it had proceeded, and, shuddering from head
to foot, looked round. Mr. Squeers had hooked him in the coat collar with
the handle of his umbrella, and was hanging on at the other end with all
his might and main. The cry of triumph proceeded from Master Wackford,
who, regardless of all his kicks and struggles, clung to him with the
tenacity of a bull-dog!

One glance showed him this; and in that one glance the terrified
creature became utterly powerless and unable to utter a sound.

‘Here’s a go!’ cried Mr. Squeers, gradually coming hand-over-hand down
the umbrella, and only unhooking it when he had got tight hold of the
victim’s collar. ‘Here’s a delicious go! Wackford, my boy, call up one
of them coaches.’

‘A coach, father!’ cried little Wackford.

‘Yes, a coach, sir,’ replied Squeers, feasting his eyes upon the
countenance of Smike. ‘Damn the expense. Let’s have him in a coach.’

‘What’s he been a doing of?’ asked a labourer with a hod of bricks,
against whom and a fellow-labourer Mr. Squeers had backed, on the first
jerk of the umbrella.

‘Everything!’ replied Mr. Squeers, looking fixedly at his old pupil in
a sort of rapturous trance. ‘Everything--running away, sir--joining in
bloodthirsty attacks upon his master--there’s nothing that’s bad that he
hasn’t done. Oh, what a delicious go is this here, good Lord!’

The man looked from Squeers to Smike; but such mental faculties as the
poor fellow possessed, had utterly deserted him. The coach came up;
Master Wackford entered; Squeers pushed in his prize, and following
close at his heels, pulled up the glasses. The coachman mounted his
box and drove slowly off, leaving the two bricklayers, and an old
apple-woman, and a town-made little boy returning from an evening
school, who had been the only witnesses of the scene, to meditate upon
it at their leisure.

Mr. Squeers sat himself down on the opposite seat to the unfortunate
Smike, and, planting his hands firmly on his knees, looked at him for
some five minutes, when, seeming to recover from his trance, he uttered
a loud laugh, and slapped his old pupil’s face several times--taking the
right and left sides alternately.

‘It isn’t a dream!’ said Squeers. ‘That’s real flesh and blood! I know
the feel of it!’ and being quite assured of his good fortune by these
experiments, Mr. Squeers administered a few boxes on the ear, lest the
entertainments should seem to partake of sameness, and laughed louder
and longer at every one.

‘Your mother will be fit to jump out of her skin, my boy, when she hears
of this,’ said Squeers to his son.

‘Oh, won’t she though, father?’ replied Master Wackford.

‘To think,’ said Squeers, ‘that you and me should be turning out of a
street, and come upon him at the very nick; and that I should have him
tight, at only one cast of the umbrella, as if I had hooked him with a
grappling-iron! Ha, ha!’

‘Didn’t I catch hold of his leg, neither, father?’ said little Wackford.

‘You did; like a good ‘un, my boy,’ said Mr. Squeers, patting his son’s
head, ‘and you shall have the best button-over jacket and waistcoat
that the next new boy brings down, as a reward of merit. Mind that. You
always keep on in the same path, and do them things that you see your
father do, and when you die you’ll go right slap to Heaven and no
questions asked.’

Improving the occasion in these words, Mr. Squeers patted his son’s head
again, and then patted Smike’s--but harder; and inquired in a bantering
tone how he found himself by this time.

‘I must go home,’ replied Smike, looking wildly round.

‘To be sure you must. You’re about right there,’ replied Mr. Squeers.
‘You’ll go home very soon, you will. You’ll find yourself at the
peaceful village of Dotheboys, in Yorkshire, in something under a week’s
time, my young friend; and the next time you get away from there, I
give you leave to keep away. Where’s the clothes you run off in, you
ungrateful robber?’ said Mr. Squeers, in a severe voice.

Smike glanced at the neat attire which the care of Nicholas had provided
for him; and wrung his hands.

‘Do you know that I could hang you up, outside of the Old Bailey, for
making away with them articles of property?’ said Squeers. ‘Do you know
that it’s a hanging matter--and I an’t quite certain whether it an’t
an anatomy one besides--to walk off with up’ards of the valley of five
pound from a dwelling-house? Eh? Do you know that? What do you suppose
was the worth of them clothes you had? Do you know that that Wellington
boot you wore, cost eight-and-twenty shillings when it was a pair, and
the shoe seven-and-six? But you came to the right shop for mercy when
you came to me, and thank your stars that it IS me as has got to serve
you with the article.’

Anybody not in Mr. Squeers’s confidence would have supposed that he was
quite out of the article in question, instead of having a large stock
on hand ready for all comers; nor would the opinion of sceptical persons
have undergone much alteration when he followed up the remark by poking
Smike in the chest with the ferrule of his umbrella, and dealing a smart
shower of blows, with the ribs of the same instrument, upon his head and
shoulders.

‘I never threshed a boy in a hackney coach before,’ said Mr. Squeers,
when he stopped to rest. ‘There’s inconveniency in it, but the novelty
gives it a sort of relish, too!’

Poor Smike! He warded off the blows, as well as he could, and now shrunk
into a corner of the coach, with his head resting on his hands, and his
elbows on his knees; he was stunned and stupefied, and had no more idea
that any act of his, would enable him to escape from the all-powerful
Squeers, now that he had no friend to speak to or to advise with, than
he had had in all the weary years of his Yorkshire life which preceded
the arrival of Nicholas.

The journey seemed endless; street after street was entered and left
behind; and still they went jolting on. At last Mr. Squeers began to
thrust his head out of the widow every half-minute, and to bawl a
variety of directions to the coachman; and after passing, with some
difficulty, through several mean streets which the appearance of the
houses and the bad state of the road denoted to have been recently
built, Mr. Squeers suddenly tugged at the check string with all his
might, and cried, ‘Stop!’

‘What are you pulling a man’s arm off for?’ said the coachman looking
angrily down.

‘That’s the house,’ replied Squeers. ‘The second of them four little
houses, one story high, with the green shutters. There’s brass plate on
the door, with the name of Snawley.’

‘Couldn’t you say that without wrenching a man’s limbs off his body?’
inquired the coachman.

‘No!’ bawled Mr. Squeers. ‘Say another word, and I’ll summons you for
having a broken winder. Stop!’

Obedient to this direction, the coach stopped at Mr. Snawley’s door.
Mr. Snawley may be remembered as the sleek and sanctified gentleman
who confided two sons (in law) to the parental care of Mr. Squeers, as
narrated in the fourth chapter of this history. Mr. Snawley’s house was
on the extreme borders of some new settlements adjoining Somers Town,
and Mr. Squeers had taken lodgings therein for a short time, as his stay
was longer than usual, and the Saracen, having experience of Master
Wackford’s appetite, had declined to receive him on any other terms than
as a full-grown customer.

‘Here we are!’ said Squeers, hurrying Smike into the little parlour,
where Mr. Snawley and his wife were taking a lobster supper. ‘Here’s the
vagrant--the felon--the rebel--the monster of unthankfulness.’

‘What! The boy that run away!’ cried Snawley, resting his knife and fork
upright on the table, and opening his eyes to their full width.

‘The very boy’, said Squeers, putting his fist close to Smike’s nose,
and drawing it away again, and repeating the process several times, with
a vicious aspect. ‘If there wasn’t a lady present, I’d fetch him such
a--: never mind, I’ll owe it him.’

And here Mr. Squeers related how, and in what manner, and when and where,
he had picked up the runaway.

‘It’s clear that there has been a Providence in it, sir,’ said Mr
Snawley, casting down his eyes with an air of humility, and elevating
his fork, with a bit of lobster on the top of it, towards the ceiling.

‘Providence is against him, no doubt,’ replied Mr. Squeers, scratching
his nose. ‘Of course; that was to be expected. Anybody might have known
that.’

‘Hard-heartedness and evil-doing will never prosper, sir,’ said Mr
Snawley.

‘Never was such a thing known,’ rejoined Squeers, taking a little roll
of notes from his pocket-book, to see that they were all safe.

‘I have been, Mr. Snawley,’ said Mr. Squeers, when he had satisfied
himself upon this point, ‘I have been that chap’s benefactor, feeder,
teacher, and clother. I have been that chap’s classical, commercial,
mathematical, philosophical, and trigonomical friend. My son--my only
son, Wackford--has been his brother; Mrs. Squeers has been his mother,
grandmother, aunt,--ah! and I may say uncle too, all in one. She never
cottoned to anybody, except them two engaging and delightful boys of
yours, as she cottoned to this chap. What’s my return? What’s come of
my milk of human kindness? It turns into curds and whey when I look at
him.’

‘Well it may, sir,’ said Mrs. Snawley. ‘Oh! Well it may, sir.’

‘Where has he been all this time?’ inquired Snawley. ‘Has he been living
with--?’

‘Ah, sir!’ interposed Squeers, confronting him again. ‘Have you been a
living with that there devilish Nickleby, sir?’

But no threats or cuffs could elicit from Smike one word of reply to
this question; for he had internally resolved that he would rather
perish in the wretched prison to which he was again about to be
consigned, than utter one syllable which could involve his first and
true friend. He had already called to mind the strict injunctions of
secrecy as to his past life, which Nicholas had laid upon him when they
travelled from Yorkshire; and a confused and perplexed idea that his
benefactor might have committed some terrible crime in bringing him
away, which would render him liable to heavy punishment if detected,
had contributed, in some degree, to reduce him to his present state of
apathy and terror.

Such were the thoughts--if to visions so imperfect and undefined as
those which wandered through his enfeebled brain, the term can be
applied--which were present to the mind of Smike, and rendered him deaf
alike to intimidation and persuasion. Finding every effort useless, Mr
Squeers conducted him to a little back room up-stairs, where he was to
pass the night; and, taking the precaution of removing his shoes, and
coat and waistcoat, and also of locking the door on the outside, lest
he should muster up sufficient energy to make an attempt at escape, that
worthy gentleman left him to his meditations.

What those meditations were, and how the poor creature’s heart sunk
within him when he thought--when did he, for a moment, cease to
think?--of his late home, and the dear friends and familiar faces with
which it was associated, cannot be told. To prepare the mind for such
a heavy sleep, its growth must be stopped by rigour and cruelty in
childhood; there must be years of misery and suffering, lightened by no
ray of hope; the chords of the heart, which beat a quick response to the
voice of gentleness and affection, must have rusted and broken in their
secret places, and bear the lingering echo of no old word of love or
kindness. Gloomy, indeed, must have been the short day, and dull the
long, long twilight, preceding such a night of intellect as his.

There were voices which would have roused him, even then; but their
welcome tones could not penetrate there; and he crept to bed the same
listless, hopeless, blighted creature, that Nicholas had first found him
at the Yorkshire school.



CHAPTER 39

In which another old Friend encounters Smike, very opportunely and to
some Purpose


The night, fraught with so much bitterness to one poor soul, had given
place to a bright and cloudless summer morning, when a north-country
mail-coach traversed, with cheerful noise, the yet silent streets
of Islington, and, giving brisk note of its approach with the lively
winding of the guard’s horn, clattered onward to its halting-place hard
by the Post Office.

The only outside passenger was a burly, honest-looking countryman on
the box, who, with his eyes fixed upon the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral,
appeared so wrapt in admiring wonder, as to be quite insensible to all
the bustle of getting out the bags and parcels, until one of the coach
windows being let sharply down, he looked round, and encountered a
pretty female face which was just then thrust out.

‘See there, lass!’ bawled the countryman, pointing towards the object of
his admiration. ‘There be Paul’s Church. ‘Ecod, he be a soizable ‘un, he
be.’

‘Goodness, John! I shouldn’t have thought it could have been half the
size. What a monster!’

‘Monsther!--Ye’re aboot right theer, I reckon, Mrs. Browdie,’ said the
countryman good-humouredly, as he came slowly down in his huge top-coat;
‘and wa’at dost thee tak yon place to be noo--thot’un owor the wa’? Ye’d
never coom near it ‘gin you thried for twolve moonths. It’s na’ but a
Poast Office! Ho! ho! They need to charge for dooble-latthers. A Poast
Office! Wa’at dost thee think o’ thot? ‘Ecod, if thot’s on’y a Poast
Office, I’d loike to see where the Lord Mayor o’ Lunnun lives.’

So saying, John Browdie--for he it was--opened the coach-door, and
tapping Mrs. Browdie, late Miss Price, on the cheek as he looked in,
burst into a boisterous fit of laughter.

‘Weel!’ said John. ‘Dang my bootuns if she bean’t asleep agean!’

‘She’s been asleep all night, and was, all yesterday, except for a
minute or two now and then,’ replied John Browdie’s choice, ‘and I was
very sorry when she woke, for she has been SO cross!’

The subject of these remarks was a slumbering figure, so muffled in
shawl and cloak, that it would have been matter of impossibility to
guess at its sex but for a brown beaver bonnet and green veil which
ornamented the head, and which, having been crushed and flattened, for
two hundred and fifty miles, in that particular angle of the vehicle
from which the lady’s snores now proceeded, presented an appearance
sufficiently ludicrous to have moved less risible muscles than those of
John Browdie’s ruddy face.

‘Hollo!’ cried John, twitching one end of the dragged veil. ‘Coom,
wakken oop, will ‘ee?’

After several burrowings into the old corner, and many exclamations of
impatience and fatigue, the figure struggled into a sitting posture; and
there, under a mass of crumpled beaver, and surrounded by a semicircle
of blue curl-papers, were the delicate features of Miss Fanny Squeers.

‘Oh, ‘Tilda!’ cried Miss Squeers, ‘how you have been kicking of me
through this blessed night!’

‘Well, I do like that,’ replied her friend, laughing, ‘when you have had
nearly the whole coach to yourself.’

‘Don’t deny it, ‘Tilda,’ said Miss Squeers, impressively, ‘because you
have, and it’s no use to go attempting to say you haven’t. You mightn’t
have known it in your sleep, ‘Tilda, but I haven’t closed my eyes for a
single wink, and so I THINK I am to be believed.’

With which reply, Miss Squeers adjusted the bonnet and veil, which
nothing but supernatural interference and an utter suspension of
nature’s laws could have reduced to any shape or form; and evidently
flattering herself that it looked uncommonly neat, brushed off the
sandwich-crumbs and bits of biscuit which had accumulated in her lap,
and availing herself of John Browdie’s proffered arm, descended from the
coach.

‘Noo,’ said John, when a hackney coach had been called, and the ladies
and the luggage hurried in, ‘gang to the Sarah’s Head, mun.’

‘To the VERE?’ cried the coachman.

‘Lawk, Mr. Browdie!’ interrupted Miss Squeers. ‘The idea! Saracen’s
Head.’

‘Sure-ly,’ said John, ‘I know’d it was something aboot Sarah’s Son’s
Head. Dost thou know thot?’

‘Oh, ah! I know that,’ replied the coachman gruffly, as he banged the
door.

‘’Tilda, dear, really,’ remonstrated Miss Squeers, ‘we shall be taken
for I don’t know what.’

‘Let them tak’ us as they foind us,’ said John Browdie; ‘we dean’t come
to Lunnun to do nought but ‘joy oursel, do we?’

‘I hope not, Mr. Browdie,’ replied Miss Squeers, looking singularly
dismal.

‘Well, then,’ said John, ‘it’s no matther. I’ve only been a married man
fower days, ‘account of poor old feyther deein, and puttin’ it off. Here
be a weddin’ party--broide and broide’s-maid, and the groom--if a mun
dean’t ‘joy himsel noo, when ought he, hey? Drat it all, thot’s what I
want to know.’

So, in order that he might begin to enjoy himself at once, and lose no
time, Mr. Browdie gave his wife a hearty kiss, and succeeded in wresting
another from Miss Squeers, after a maidenly resistance of scratching and
struggling on the part of that young lady, which was not quite over when
they reached the Saracen’s Head.

Here, the party straightway retired to rest; the refreshment of sleep
being necessary after so long a journey; and here they met again
about noon, to a substantial breakfast, spread by direction of Mr. John
Browdie, in a small private room upstairs commanding an uninterrupted
view of the stables.

To have seen Miss Squeers now, divested of the brown beaver, the green
veil, and the blue curl-papers, and arrayed in all the virgin splendour
of a white frock and spencer, with a white muslin bonnet, and an
imitative damask rose in full bloom on the inside thereof--her luxuriant
crop of hair arranged in curls so tight that it was impossible they
could come out by any accident, and her bonnet-cap trimmed with little
damask roses, which might be supposed to be so many promising scions of
the big rose--to have seen all this, and to have seen the broad
damask belt, matching both the family rose and the little roses, which
encircled her slender waist, and by a happy ingenuity took off from the
shortness of the spencer behind,--to have beheld all this, and to have
taken further into account the coral bracelets (rather short of beads,
and with a very visible black string) which clasped her wrists, and the
coral necklace which rested on her neck, supporting, outside her frock,
a lonely cornelian heart, typical of her own disengaged affections--to
have contemplated all these mute but expressive appeals to the purest
feelings of our nature, might have thawed the frost of age, and added
new and inextinguishable fuel to the fire of youth.

The waiter was touched. Waiter as he was, he had human passions and
feelings, and he looked very hard at Miss Squeers as he handed the
muffins.

‘Is my pa in, do you know?’ asked Miss Squeers with dignity.

‘Beg your pardon, miss?’

‘My pa,’ repeated Miss Squeers; ‘is he in?’

‘In where, miss?’

‘In here--in the house!’ replied Miss Squeers. ‘My pa--Mr. Wackford
Squeers--he’s stopping here. Is he at home?’

‘I didn’t know there was any gen’l’man of that name in the house, miss’
replied the waiter. ‘There may be, in the coffee-room.’

MAY BE. Very pretty this, indeed! Here was Miss Squeers, who had been
depending, all the way to London, upon showing her friends how much
at home she would be, and how much respectful notice her name and
connections would excite, told that her father MIGHT be there! ‘As if he
was a feller!’ observed Miss Squeers, with emphatic indignation.

‘Ye’d betther inquire, mun,’ said John Browdie. ‘An’ hond up another
pigeon-pie, will ‘ee? Dang the chap,’ muttered John, looking into the
empty dish as the waiter retired; ‘does he ca’ this a pie--three yoong
pigeons and a troifling matther o’ steak, and a crust so loight that you
doant know when it’s in your mooth and when it’s gane? I wonder hoo many
pies goes to a breakfast!’

After a short interval, which John Browdie employed upon the ham and
a cold round of beef, the waiter returned with another pie, and the
information that Mr. Squeers was not stopping in the house, but that he
came there every day and that directly he arrived, he should be shown
upstairs. With this, he retired; and he had not retired two minutes,
when he returned with Mr. Squeers and his hopeful son.

‘Why, who’d have thought of this?’ said Mr. Squeers, when he had saluted
the party and received some private family intelligence from his
daughter.

‘Who, indeed, pa!’ replied that young lady, spitefully. ‘But you see
‘Tilda IS married at last.’

‘And I stond threat for a soight o’ Lunnun, schoolmeasther,’ said John,
vigorously attacking the pie.

‘One of them things that young men do when they get married,’ returned
Squeers; ‘and as runs through with their money like nothing at all! How
much better wouldn’t it be now, to save it up for the eddication of
any little boys, for instance! They come on you,’ said Mr. Squeers in a
moralising way, ‘before you’re aware of it; mine did upon me.’

‘Will ‘ee pick a bit?’ said John.

‘I won’t myself,’ returned Squeers; ‘but if you’ll just let little
Wackford tuck into something fat, I’ll be obliged to you. Give it him in
his fingers, else the waiter charges it on, and there’s lot of profit on
this sort of vittles without that. If you hear the waiter coming, sir,
shove it in your pocket and look out of the window, d’ye hear?’

‘I’m awake, father,’ replied the dutiful Wackford.

‘Well,’ said Squeers, turning to his daughter, ‘it’s your turn to be
married next. You must make haste.’

‘Oh, I’m in no hurry,’ said Miss Squeers, very sharply.

‘No, Fanny?’ cried her old friend with some archness.

‘No, ‘Tilda,’ replied Miss Squeers, shaking her head vehemently. ‘I can
wait.’

‘So can the young men, it seems, Fanny,’ observed Mrs. Browdie.

‘They an’t draw’d into it by ME, ‘Tilda,’ retorted Miss Squeers.

‘No,’ returned her friend; ‘that’s exceedingly true.’

The sarcastic tone of this reply might have provoked a rather
acrimonious retort from Miss Squeers, who, besides being of a
constitutionally vicious temper--aggravated, just now, by travel and
recent jolting--was somewhat irritated by old recollections and the
failure of her own designs upon Mr. Browdie; and the acrimonious retort
might have led to a great many other retorts, which might have led to
Heaven knows what, if the subject of conversation had not been, at that
precise moment, accidentally changed by Mr. Squeers himself

‘What do you think?’ said that gentleman; ‘who do you suppose we have
laid hands on, Wackford and me?’

‘Pa! not Mr--?’ Miss Squeers was unable to finish the sentence, but Mrs
Browdie did it for her, and added, ‘Nickleby?’

‘No,’ said Squeers. ‘But next door to him though.’

‘You can’t mean Smike?’ cried Miss Squeers, clapping her hands.

‘Yes, I can though,’ rejoined her father. ‘I’ve got him, hard and fast.’

‘Wa’at!’ exclaimed John Browdie, pushing away his plate. ‘Got that
poor--dom’d scoondrel? Where?’

‘Why, in the top back room, at my lodging,’ replied Squeers, ‘with him
on one side, and the key on the other.’

‘At thy loodgin’! Thee’st gotten him at thy loodgin’? Ho! ho! The
schoolmeasther agin all England. Give us thee hond, mun; I’m darned but
I must shak thee by the hond for thot.--Gotten him at thy loodgin’?’

‘Yes,’ replied Squeers, staggering in his chair under the congratulatory
blow on the chest which the stout Yorkshireman dealt him; ‘thankee.
Don’t do it again. You mean it kindly, I know, but it hurts rather. Yes,
there he is. That’s not so bad, is it?’

‘Ba’ad!’ repeated John Browdie. ‘It’s eneaf to scare a mun to hear tell
on.’

‘I thought it would surprise you a bit,’ said Squeers, rubbing his
hands. ‘It was pretty neatly done, and pretty quick too.’

‘Hoo wor it?’ inquired John, sitting down close to him. ‘Tell us all
aboot it, mun; coom, quick!’

Although he could not keep pace with John Browdie’s impatience, Mr
Squeers related the lucky chance by which Smike had fallen into his
hands, as quickly as he could, and, except when he was interrupted by
the admiring remarks of his auditors, paused not in the recital until he
had brought it to an end.

‘For fear he should give me the slip, by any chance,’ observed Squeers,
when he had finished, looking very cunning, ‘I’ve taken three outsides
for tomorrow morning--for Wackford and him and me--and have arranged to
leave the accounts and the new boys to the agent, don’t you see? So it’s
very lucky you come today, or you’d have missed us; and as it is, unless
you could come and tea with me tonight, we shan’t see anything more of
you before we go away.’

‘Dean’t say anoother wurd,’ returned the Yorkshireman, shaking him by
the hand. ‘We’d coom, if it was twonty mile.’

‘No, would you though?’ returned Mr. Squeers, who had not expected quite
such a ready acceptance of his invitation, or he would have considered
twice before he gave it.

John Browdie’s only reply was another squeeze of the hand, and an
assurance that they would not begin to see London till tomorrow, so that
they might be at Mr. Snawley’s at six o’clock without fail; and after
some further conversation, Mr. Squeers and his son departed.

During the remainder of the day, Mr. Browdie was in a very odd and
excitable state; bursting occasionally into an explosion of laughter,
and then taking up his hat and running into the coach-yard to have it
out by himself. He was very restless too, constantly walking in and out,
and snapping his fingers, and dancing scraps of uncouth country dances,
and, in short, conducting himself in such a very extraordinary manner,
that Miss Squeers opined he was going mad, and, begging her dear ‘Tilda
not to distress herself, communicated her suspicions in so many words.
Mrs. Browdie, however, without discovering any great alarm, observed that
she had seen him so once before, and that although he was almost sure to
be ill after it, it would not be anything very serious, and therefore he
was better left alone.

The result proved her to be perfectly correct for, while they were all
sitting in Mr. Snawley’s parlour that night, and just as it was beginning
to get dusk, John Browdie was taken so ill, and seized with such an
alarming dizziness in the head, that the whole company were thrown into
the utmost consternation. His good lady, indeed, was the only person
present, who retained presence of mind enough to observe that if he
were allowed to lie down on Mr. Squeers’s bed for an hour or so, and left
entirely to himself, he would be sure to recover again almost as quickly
as he had been taken ill. Nobody could refuse to try the effect of so
reasonable a proposal, before sending for a surgeon. Accordingly, John
was supported upstairs, with great difficulty; being a monstrous weight,
and regularly tumbling down two steps every time they hoisted him up
three; and, being laid on the bed, was left in charge of his wife, who,
after a short interval, reappeared in the parlour, with the gratifying
intelligence that he had fallen fast asleep.

Now, the fact was, that at that particular moment, John Browdie was
sitting on the bed with the reddest face ever seen, cramming the corner
of the pillow into his mouth, to prevent his roaring out loud with
laughter. He had no sooner succeeded in suppressing this emotion, than
he slipped off his shoes, and creeping to the adjoining room where the
prisoner was confined, turned the key, which was on the outside, and
darting in, covered Smike’s mouth with his huge hand before he could
utter a sound.

‘Ods-bobs, dost thee not know me, mun?’ whispered the Yorkshireman to
the bewildered lad. ‘Browdie. Chap as met thee efther schoolmeasther was
banged?’

‘Yes, yes,’ cried Smike. ‘Oh! help me.’

‘Help thee!’ replied John, stopping his mouth again, the instant he
had said this much. ‘Thee didn’t need help, if thee warn’t as silly
yoongster as ever draw’d breath. Wa’at did ‘ee come here for, then?’

‘He brought me; oh! he brought me,’ cried Smike.

‘Brout thee!’ replied John. ‘Why didn’t ‘ee punch his head, or lay
theeself doon and kick, and squeal out for the pollis? I’d ha’ licked
a doozen such as him when I was yoong as thee. But thee be’est a poor
broken-doon chap,’ said John, sadly, ‘and God forgi’ me for bragging
ower yan o’ his weakest creeturs!’

Smike opened his mouth to speak, but John Browdie stopped him.

‘Stan’ still,’ said the Yorkshireman, ‘and doant’ee speak a morsel o’
talk till I tell’ee.’

With this caution, John Browdie shook his head significantly, and
drawing a screwdriver from his pocket, took off the box of the lock in
a very deliberate and workmanlike manner, and laid it, together with the
implement, on the floor.

‘See thot?’ said John ‘Thot be thy doin’. Noo, coot awa’!’

Smike looked vacantly at him, as if unable to comprehend his meaning.

‘I say, coot awa’,’ repeated John, hastily. ‘Dost thee know where thee
livest? Thee dost? Weel. Are yon thy clothes, or schoolmeasther’s?’

‘Mine,’ replied Smike, as the Yorkshireman hurried him to the adjoining
room, and pointed out a pair of shoes and a coat which were lying on a
chair.

‘On wi’ ‘em,’ said John, forcing the wrong arm into the wrong sleeve,
and winding the tails of the coat round the fugitive’s neck. ‘Noo,
foller me, and when thee get’st ootside door, turn to the right, and
they wean’t see thee pass.’

‘But--but--he’ll hear me shut the door,’ replied Smike, trembling from
head to foot.

‘Then dean’t shut it at all,’ retorted John Browdie. ‘Dang it, thee
bean’t afeard o’ schoolmeasther’s takkin cold, I hope?’

‘N-no,’ said Smike, his teeth chattering in his head. ‘But he brought me
back before, and will again. He will, he will indeed.’

‘He wull, he wull!’ replied John impatiently. ‘He wean’t, he wean’t.
Look’ee! I wont to do this neighbourly loike, and let them think thee’s
gotten awa’ o’ theeself, but if he cooms oot o’ thot parlour awhiles
theer’t clearing off, he mun’ have mercy on his oun boans, for I wean’t.
If he foinds it oot, soon efther, I’ll put ‘un on a wrong scent, I
warrant ‘ee. But if thee keep’st a good hart, thee’lt be at whoam afore
they know thee’st gotten off. Coom!’

Smike, who comprehended just enough of this to know it was intended
as encouragement, prepared to follow with tottering steps, when John
whispered in his ear.

‘Thee’lt just tell yoong Measther that I’m sploiced to ‘Tilly Price, and
to be heerd on at the Saracen by latther, and that I bean’t jealous of
‘un--dang it, I’m loike to boost when I think o’ that neight! ‘Cod, I
think I see ‘un now, a powderin’ awa’ at the thin bread an’ butther!’

It was rather a ticklish recollection for John just then, for he was
within an ace of breaking out into a loud guffaw. Restraining himself,
however, just in time, by a great effort, he glided downstairs, hauling
Smike behind him; and placing himself close to the parlour door, to
confront the first person that might come out, signed to him to make
off.

Having got so far, Smike needed no second bidding. Opening the
house-door gently, and casting a look of mingled gratitude and terror
at his deliverer, he took the direction which had been indicated to him,
and sped away like the wind.

The Yorkshireman remained on his post for a few minutes, but, finding
that there was no pause in the conversation inside, crept back again
unheard, and stood, listening over the stair-rail, for a full hour.
Everything remaining perfectly quiet, he got into Mr. Squeers’s bed, once
more, and drawing the clothes over his head, laughed till he was nearly
smothered.

If there could only have been somebody by, to see how the bedclothes
shook, and to see the Yorkshireman’s great red face and round head
appear above the sheets, every now and then, like some jovial monster
coming to the surface to breathe, and once more dive down convulsed with
the laughter which came bursting forth afresh--that somebody would have
been scarcely less amused than John Browdie himself.



CHAPTER 40

In which Nicholas falls in Love. He employs a Mediator, whose
Proceedings are crowned with unexpected Success, excepting in one
solitary Particular


Once more out of the clutches of his old persecutor, it needed no fresh
stimulation to call forth the utmost energy and exertion that Smike was
capable of summoning to his aid. Without pausing for a moment to reflect
upon the course he was taking, or the probability of its leading him
homewards or the reverse, he fled away with surprising swiftness and
constancy of purpose, borne upon such wings as only Fear can wear, and
impelled by imaginary shouts in the well remembered voice of Squeers,
who, with a host of pursuers, seemed to the poor fellow’s disordered
senses to press hard upon his track; now left at a greater distance
in the rear, and now gaining faster and faster upon him, as the
alternations of hope and terror agitated him by turns. Long after he had
become assured that these sounds were but the creation of his excited
brain, he still held on, at a pace which even weakness and exhaustion
could scarcely retard. It was not until the darkness and quiet of a
country road, recalled him to a sense of external objects, and the
starry sky, above, warned him of the rapid flight of time, that, covered
with dust and panting for breath, he stopped to listen and look about
him.

All was still and silent. A glare of light in the distance, casting a
warm glow upon the sky, marked where the huge city lay. Solitary fields,
divided by hedges and ditches, through many of which he had crashed and
scrambled in his flight, skirted the road, both by the way he had come
and upon the opposite side. It was late now. They could scarcely trace
him by such paths as he had taken, and if he could hope to regain his
own dwelling, it must surely be at such a time as that, and under cover
of the darkness. This, by degrees, became pretty plain, even to the mind
of Smike. He had, at first, entertained some vague and childish idea of
travelling into the country for ten or a dozen miles, and then returning
homewards by a wide circuit, which should keep him clear of London--so
great was his apprehension of traversing the streets alone, lest
he should again encounter his dreaded enemy--but, yielding to the
conviction which these thoughts inspired, he turned back, and taking the
open road, though not without many fears and misgivings, made for London
again, with scarcely less speed of foot than that with which he had left
the temporary abode of Mr. Squeers.

By the time he re-entered it, at the western extremity, the greater part
of the shops were closed. Of the throngs of people who had been tempted
abroad after the heat of the day, but few remained in the streets, and
they were lounging home. But of these he asked his way from time to
time, and by dint of repeated inquiries, he at length reached the
dwelling of Newman Noggs.

All that evening, Newman had been hunting and searching in byways and
corners for the very person who now knocked at his door, while Nicholas
had been pursuing the same inquiry in other directions. He was sitting,
with a melancholy air, at his poor supper, when Smike’s timorous and
uncertain knock reached his ears. Alive to every sound, in his anxious
and expectant state, Newman hurried downstairs, and, uttering a cry of
joyful surprise, dragged the welcome visitor into the passage and up the
stairs, and said not a word until he had him safe in his own garret
and the door was shut behind them, when he mixed a great mug-full of
gin-and-water, and holding it to Smike’s mouth, as one might hold a bowl
of medicine to the lips of a refractory child, commanded him to drain it
to the last drop.

Newman looked uncommonly blank when he found that Smike did little more
than put his lips to the precious mixture; he was in the act of raising
the mug to his own mouth with a deep sigh of compassion for his poor
friend’s weakness, when Smike, beginning to relate the adventures which
had befallen him, arrested him half-way, and he stood listening, with
the mug in his hand.

It was odd enough to see the change that came over Newman as Smike
proceeded. At first he stood, rubbing his lips with the back of his
hand, as a preparatory ceremony towards composing himself for a draught;
then, at the mention of Squeers, he took the mug under his arm, and
opening his eyes very wide, looked on, in the utmost astonishment. When
Smike came to the assault upon himself in the hackney coach, he hastily
deposited the mug upon the table, and limped up and down the room in a
state of the greatest excitement, stopping himself with a jerk, every
now and then, as if to listen more attentively. When John Browdie came
to be spoken of, he dropped, by slow and gradual degrees, into a chair,
and rubbing his hands upon his knees--quicker and quicker as the story
reached its climax--burst, at last, into a laugh composed of one
loud sonorous ‘Ha! ha!’ having given vent to which, his countenance
immediately fell again as he inquired, with the utmost anxiety, whether
it was probable that John Browdie and Squeers had come to blows.

‘No! I think not,’ replied Smike. ‘I don’t think he could have missed me
till I had got quite away.’

Newman scratched his head with a shout of great disappointment, and
once more lifting up the mug, applied himself to the contents; smiling
meanwhile, over the rim, with a grim and ghastly smile at Smike.

‘You shall stay here,’ said Newman; ‘you’re tired--fagged. I’ll tell
them you’re come back. They have been half mad about you. Mr. Nicholas--’

‘God bless him!’ cried Smike.

‘Amen!’ returned Newman. ‘He hasn’t had a minute’s rest or peace; no
more has the old lady, nor Miss Nickleby.’

‘No, no. Has SHE thought about me?’ said Smike. ‘Has she though? oh, has
she, has she? Don’t tell me so if she has not.’

‘She has,’ cried Newman. ‘She is as noble-hearted as she is beautiful.’

‘Yes, yes!’ cried Smike. ‘Well said!’

‘So mild and gentle,’ said Newman.

‘Yes, yes!’ cried Smike, with increasing eagerness.

‘And yet with such a true and gallant spirit,’ pursued Newman.

He was going on, in his enthusiasm, when, chancing to look at his
companion, he saw that he had covered his face with his hands, and that
tears were stealing out between his fingers.

A moment before, the boy’s eyes were sparkling with unwonted fire, and
every feature had been lighted up with an excitement which made him
appear, for the moment, quite a different being.

‘Well, well,’ muttered Newman, as if he were a little puzzled. ‘It has
touched ME, more than once, to think such a nature should have been
exposed to such trials; this poor fellow--yes, yes,--he feels that
too--it softens him--makes him think of his former misery. Hah! That’s
it? Yes, that’s--hum!’

It was by no means clear, from the tone of these broken reflections,
that Newman Noggs considered them as explaining, at all satisfactorily,
the emotion which had suggested them. He sat, in a musing attitude, for
some time, regarding Smike occasionally with an anxious and doubtful
glance, which sufficiently showed that he was not very remotely
connected with his thoughts.

At length he repeated his proposition that Smike should remain where he
was for that night, and that he (Noggs) should straightway repair to the
cottage to relieve the suspense of the family. But, as Smike would
not hear of this--pleading his anxiety to see his friends again--they
eventually sallied forth together; and the night being, by this time,
far advanced, and Smike being, besides, so footsore that he could hardly
crawl along, it was within an hour of sunrise when they reached their
destination.

At the first sound of their voices outside the house, Nicholas, who had
passed a sleepless night, devising schemes for the recovery of his lost
charge, started from his bed, and joyfully admitted them. There was so
much noisy conversation, and congratulation, and indignation, that the
remainder of the family were soon awakened, and Smike received a warm
and cordial welcome, not only from Kate, but from Mrs. Nickleby also, who
assured him of her future favour and regard, and was so obliging as to
relate, for his entertainment and that of the assembled circle, a most
remarkable account extracted from some work the name of which she had
never known, of a miraculous escape from some prison, but what one she
couldn’t remember, effected by an officer whose name she had forgotten,
confined for some crime which she didn’t clearly recollect.

At first Nicholas was disposed to give his uncle credit for some portion
of this bold attempt (which had so nearly proved successful) to carry
off Smike; but on more mature consideration, he was inclined to
think that the full merit of it rested with Mr. Squeers. Determined to
ascertain, if he could, through John Browdie, how the case really stood,
he betook himself to his daily occupation: meditating, as he went, on
a great variety of schemes for the punishment of the Yorkshire
schoolmaster, all of which had their foundation in the strictest
principles of retributive justice, and had but the one drawback of being
wholly impracticable.

‘A fine morning, Mr. Linkinwater!’ said Nicholas, entering the office.

‘Ah!’ replied Tim, ‘talk of the country, indeed! What do you think of
this, now, for a day--a London day--eh?’

‘It’s a little clearer out of town,’ said Nicholas.

‘Clearer!’ echoed Tim Linkinwater. ‘You should see it from my bedroom
window.’

‘You should see it from MINE,’ replied Nicholas, with a smile.

‘Pooh! pooh!’ said Tim Linkinwater, ‘don’t tell me. Country!’ (Bow was
quite a rustic place to Tim.) ‘Nonsense! What can you get in the country
but new-laid eggs and flowers? I can buy new-laid eggs in Leadenhall
Market, any morning before breakfast; and as to flowers, it’s worth a
run upstairs to smell my mignonette, or to see the double wallflower in
the back-attic window, at No. 6, in the court.’

‘There is a double wallflower at No. 6, in the court, is there?’ said
Nicholas.

‘Yes, is there!’ replied Tim, ‘and planted in a cracked jug, without a
spout. There were hyacinths there, this last spring, blossoming, in--but
you’ll laugh at that, of course.’

‘At what?’

‘At their blossoming in old blacking-bottles,’ said Tim.

‘Not I, indeed,’ returned Nicholas.

Tim looked wistfully at him, for a moment, as if he were encouraged
by the tone of this reply to be more communicative on the subject; and
sticking behind his ear, a pen that he had been making, and shutting up
his knife with a smart click, said,

‘They belong to a sickly bedridden hump-backed boy, and seem to be the
only pleasure, Mr. Nickleby, of his sad existence. How many years is it,’
said Tim, pondering, ‘since I first noticed him, quite a little child,
dragging himself about on a pair of tiny crutches? Well! Well! Not many;
but though they would appear nothing, if I thought of other things, they
seem a long, long time, when I think of him. It is a sad thing,’ said
Tim, breaking off, ‘to see a little deformed child sitting apart from
other children, who are active and merry, watching the games he is
denied the power to share in. He made my heart ache very often.’

‘It is a good heart,’ said Nicholas, ‘that disentangles itself from the
close avocations of every day, to heed such things. You were saying--’

‘That the flowers belonged to this poor boy,’ said Tim; ‘that’s all.
When it is fine weather, and he can crawl out of bed, he draws a chair
close to the window, and sits there, looking at them and arranging
them, all day long. He used to nod, at first, and then we came to speak.
Formerly, when I called to him of a morning, and asked him how he was,
he would smile, and say, “Better!” but now he shakes his head, and only
bends more closely over his old plants. It must be dull to watch the
dark housetops and the flying clouds, for so many months; but he is very
patient.’

‘Is there nobody in the house to cheer or help him?’ asked Nicholas.

‘His father lives there, I believe,’ replied Tim, ‘and other people too;
but no one seems to care much for the poor sickly cripple. I have asked
him, very often, if I can do nothing for him; his answer is always the
same. “Nothing.” His voice is growing weak of late, but I can SEE that
he makes the old reply. He can’t leave his bed now, so they have moved
it close beside the window, and there he lies, all day: now looking at
the sky, and now at his flowers, which he still makes shift to trim and
water, with his own thin hands. At night, when he sees my candle, he
draws back his curtain, and leaves it so, till I am in bed. It seems
such company to him to know that I am there, that I often sit at my
window for an hour or more, that he may see I am still awake; and
sometimes I get up in the night to look at the dull melancholy light in
his little room, and wonder whether he is awake or sleeping.

‘The night will not be long coming,’ said Tim, ‘when he will sleep, and
never wake again on earth. We have never so much as shaken hands in all
our lives; and yet I shall miss him like an old friend. Are there any
country flowers that could interest me like these, do you think? Or
do you suppose that the withering of a hundred kinds of the choicest
flowers that blow, called by the hardest Latin names that were ever
invented, would give me one fraction of the pain that I shall feel when
these old jugs and bottles are swept away as lumber? Country!’ cried
Tim, with a contemptuous emphasis; ‘don’t you know that I couldn’t have
such a court under my bedroom window, anywhere, but in London?’

With which inquiry, Tim turned his back, and pretending to be absorbed
in his accounts, took an opportunity of hastily wiping his eyes when he
supposed Nicholas was looking another way.

Whether it was that Tim’s accounts were more than usually intricate that
morning, or whether it was that his habitual serenity had been a little
disturbed by these recollections, it so happened that when Nicholas
returned from executing some commission, and inquired whether Mr. Charles
Cheeryble was alone in his room, Tim promptly, and without the smallest
hesitation, replied in the affirmative, although somebody had passed
into the room not ten minutes before, and Tim took especial and
particular pride in preventing any intrusion on either of the brothers
when they were engaged with any visitor whatever.

‘I’ll take this letter to him at once,’ said Nicholas, ‘if that’s the
case.’ And with that, he walked to the room and knocked at the door.

No answer.

Another knock, and still no answer.

‘He can’t be here,’ thought Nicholas. ‘I’ll lay it on his table.’

So, Nicholas opened the door and walked in; and very quickly he
turned to walk out again, when he saw, to his great astonishment and
discomfiture, a young lady upon her knees at Mr. Cheeryble’s feet, and Mr
Cheeryble beseeching her to rise, and entreating a third person, who
had the appearance of the young lady’s female attendant, to add her
persuasions to his to induce her to do so.

Nicholas stammered out an awkward apology, and was precipitately
retiring, when the young lady, turning her head a little, presented
to his view the features of the lovely girl whom he had seen at the
register-office on his first visit long before. Glancing from her to the
attendant, he recognised the same clumsy servant who had accompanied
her then; and between his admiration of the young lady’s beauty, and
the confusion and surprise of this unexpected recognition, he stood
stock-still, in such a bewildered state of surprise and embarrassment
that, for the moment, he was quite bereft of the power either to speak
or move.

‘My dear ma’am--my dear young lady,’ cried brother Charles in violent
agitation, ‘pray don’t--not another word, I beseech and entreat you! I
implore you--I beg of you--to rise. We--we--are not alone.’

As he spoke, he raised the young lady, who staggered to a chair and
swooned away.

‘She has fainted, sir,’ said Nicholas, darting eagerly forward.

‘Poor dear, poor dear!’ cried brother Charles ‘Where is my brother Ned?
Ned, my dear brother, come here pray.’

‘Brother Charles, my dear fellow,’ replied his brother, hurrying into
the room, ‘what is the--ah! what--’

‘Hush! hush!--not a word for your life, brother Ned,’ returned the
other. ‘Ring for the housekeeper, my dear brother--call Tim Linkinwater!
Here, Tim Linkinwater, sir--Mr. Nickleby, my dear sir, leave the room, I
beg and beseech of you.’

‘I think she is better now,’ said Nicholas, who had been watching the
patient so eagerly, that he had not heard the request.

‘Poor bird!’ cried brother Charles, gently taking her hand in his, and
laying her head upon his arm. ‘Brother Ned, my dear fellow, you will be
surprised, I know, to witness this, in business hours; but--’ here he
was again reminded of the presence of Nicholas, and shaking him by
the hand, earnestly requested him to leave the room, and to send Tim
Linkinwater without an instant’s delay.

Nicholas immediately withdrew and, on his way to the counting-house, met
both the old housekeeper and Tim Linkinwater, jostling each other in the
passage, and hurrying to the scene of action with extraordinary speed.
Without waiting to hear his message, Tim Linkinwater darted into the
room, and presently afterwards Nicholas heard the door shut and locked
on the inside.

He had abundance of time to ruminate on this discovery, for Tim
Linkinwater was absent during the greater part of an hour, during the
whole of which time Nicholas thought of nothing but the young lady, and
her exceeding beauty, and what could possibly have brought her there,
and why they made such a mystery of it. The more he thought of all this,
the more it perplexed him, and the more anxious he became to know who
and what she was. ‘I should have known her among ten thousand,’ thought
Nicholas. And with that he walked up and down the room, and recalling
her face and figure (of which he had a peculiarly vivid remembrance),
discarded all other subjects of reflection and dwelt upon that alone.

At length Tim Linkinwater came back--provokingly cool, and with papers
in his hand, and a pen in his mouth, as if nothing had happened.

‘Is she quite recovered?’ said Nicholas, impetuously.

‘Who?’ returned Tim Linkinwater.

‘Who!’ repeated Nicholas. ‘The young lady.’

‘What do you make, Mr. Nickleby,’ said Tim, taking his pen out of his
mouth, ‘what do you make of four hundred and twenty-seven times three
thousand two hundred and thirty-eight?’

‘Nay,’ returned Nicholas, ‘what do you make of my question first? I
asked you--’

‘About the young lady,’ said Tim Linkinwater, putting on his spectacles.
‘To be sure. Yes. Oh! she’s very well.’

‘Very well, is she?’ returned Nicholas.

‘Very well,’ replied Mr. Linkinwater, gravely.

‘Will she be able to go home today?’ asked Nicholas.

‘She’s gone,’ said Tim.

‘Gone!’

‘Yes.’

‘I hope she has not far to go?’ said Nicholas, looking earnestly at the
other.

‘Ay,’ replied the immovable Tim, ‘I hope she hasn’t.’

Nicholas hazarded one or two further remarks, but it was evident that
Tim Linkinwater had his own reasons for evading the subject, and that
he was determined to afford no further information respecting the fair
unknown, who had awakened so much curiosity in the breast of his young
friend. Nothing daunted by this repulse, Nicholas returned to the charge
next day, emboldened by the circumstance of Mr. Linkinwater being in
a very talkative and communicative mood; but, directly he resumed the
theme, Tim relapsed into a state of most provoking taciturnity, and from
answering in monosyllables, came to returning no answers at all, save
such as were to be inferred from several grave nods and shrugs, which
only served to whet that appetite for intelligence in Nicholas, which
had already attained a most unreasonable height.

Foiled in these attempts, he was fain to content himself with watching
for the young lady’s next visit, but here again he was disappointed.
Day after day passed, and she did not return. He looked eagerly at the
superscription of all the notes and letters, but there was not one among
them which he could fancy to be in her handwriting. On two or three
occasions he was employed on business which took him to a distance, and
had formerly been transacted by Tim Linkinwater. Nicholas could not help
suspecting that, for some reason or other, he was sent out of the way
on purpose, and that the young lady was there in his absence. Nothing
transpired, however, to confirm this suspicion, and Tim could not be
entrapped into any confession or admission tending to support it in the
smallest degree.

Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the
growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries. ‘Out
of sight, out of mind,’ is well enough as a proverb applicable to cases
of friendship, though absence is not always necessary to hollowness
of heart, even between friends, and truth and honesty, like precious
stones, are perhaps most easily imitated at a distance, when the
counterfeits often pass for real. Love, however, is very materially
assisted by a warm and active imagination: which has a long memory, and
will thrive, for a considerable time, on very slight and sparing
food. Thus it is, that it often attains its most luxuriant growth in
separation and under circumstances of the utmost difficulty; and thus it
was, that Nicholas, thinking of nothing but the unknown young lady, from
day to day and from hour to hour, began, at last, to think that he was
very desperately in love with her, and that never was such an ill-used
and persecuted lover as he.

Still, though he loved and languished after the most orthodox models,
and was only deterred from making a confidante of Kate by the slight
considerations of having never, in all his life, spoken to the object
of his passion, and having never set eyes upon her, except on two
occasions, on both of which she had come and gone like a flash of
lightning--or, as Nicholas himself said, in the numerous conversations
he held with himself, like a vision of youth and beauty much too bright
to last--his ardour and devotion remained without its reward. The young
lady appeared no more; so there was a great deal of love wasted (enough
indeed to have set up half-a-dozen young gentlemen, as times go, with
the utmost decency), and nobody was a bit the wiser for it; not even
Nicholas himself, who, on the contrary, became more dull, sentimental,
and lackadaisical, every day.

While matters were in this state, the failure of a correspondent of
the brothers Cheeryble, in Germany, imposed upon Tim Linkinwater and
Nicholas the necessity of going through some very long and complicated
accounts, extending over a considerable space of time. To get through
them with the greater dispatch, Tim Linkinwater proposed that they
should remain at the counting-house, for a week or so, until ten o’clock
at night; to this, as nothing damped the zeal of Nicholas in the
service of his kind patrons--not even romance, which has seldom business
habits--he cheerfully assented. On the very first night of these later
hours, at nine exactly, there came: not the young lady herself, but her
servant, who, being closeted with brother Charles for some time, went
away, and returned next night at the same hour, and on the next, and on
the next again.

These repeated visits inflamed the curiosity of Nicholas to the very
highest pitch. Tantalised and excited, beyond all bearing, and unable
to fathom the mystery without neglecting his duty, he confided the whole
secret to Newman Noggs, imploring him to be on the watch next night;
to follow the girl home; to set on foot such inquiries relative to
the name, condition, and history of her mistress, as he could, without
exciting suspicion; and to report the result to him with the least
possible delay.

Beyond all measure proud of this commission, Newman Noggs took up his
post, in the square, on the following evening, a full hour before the
needful time, and planting himself behind the pump and pulling his hat
over his eyes, began his watch with an elaborate appearance of mystery,
admirably calculated to excite the suspicion of all beholders. Indeed,
divers servant girls who came to draw water, and sundry little boys who
stopped to drink at the ladle, were almost scared out of their senses,
by the apparition of Newman Noggs looking stealthily round the
pump, with nothing of him visible but his face, and that wearing the
expression of a meditative Ogre.

Punctual to her time, the messenger came again, and, after an interview
of rather longer duration than usual, departed. Newman had made two
appointments with Nicholas: one for the next evening, conditional on his
success: and one the next night following, which was to be kept under
all circumstances. The first night he was not at the place of meeting (a
certain tavern about half-way between the city and Golden Square), but
on the second night he was there before Nicholas, and received him with
open arms.

‘It’s all right,’ whispered Newman. ‘Sit down. Sit down, there’s a dear
young man, and let me tell you all about it.’

Nicholas needed no second invitation, and eagerly inquired what was the
news.

‘There’s a great deal of news,’ said Newman, in a flutter of exultation.
‘It’s all right. Don’t be anxious. I don’t know where to begin. Never
mind that. Keep up your spirits. It’s all right.’

‘Well?’ said Nicholas eagerly. ‘Yes?’

‘Yes,’ replied Newman. ‘That’s it.’

‘What’s it?’ said Nicholas. ‘The name--the name, my dear fellow!’

‘The name’s Bobster,’ replied Newman.

‘Bobster!’ repeated Nicholas, indignantly.

‘That’s the name,’ said Newman. ‘I remember it by lobster.’

‘Bobster!’ repeated Nicholas, more emphatically than before. ‘That must
be the servant’s name.’

‘No, it an’t,’ said Newman, shaking his head with great positiveness.
‘Miss Cecilia Bobster.’

‘Cecilia, eh?’ returned Nicholas, muttering the two names together
over and over again in every variety of tone, to try the effect. ‘Well,
Cecilia is a pretty name.’

‘Very. And a pretty creature too,’ said Newman.

‘Who?’ said Nicholas.

‘Miss Bobster.’

‘Why, where have you seen her?’ demanded Nicholas.

‘Never mind, my dear boy,’ retorted Noggs, clapping him on the shoulder.
‘I HAVE seen her. You shall see her. I’ve managed it all.’

‘My dear Newman,’ cried Nicholas, grasping his hand, ‘are you serious?’

‘I am,’ replied Newman. ‘I mean it all. Every word. You shall see her
tomorrow night. She consents to hear you speak for yourself. I persuaded
her. She is all affability, goodness, sweetness, and beauty.’

‘I know she is; I know she must be, Newman!’ said Nicholas, wringing his
hand.

‘You are right,’ returned Newman.

‘Where does she live?’ cried Nicholas. ‘What have you learnt of her
history? Has she a father--mother--any brothers--sisters? What did she
say? How came you to see her? Was she not very much surprised? Did you
say how passionately I have longed to speak to her? Did you tell her
where I had seen her? Did you tell her how, and when, and where, and how
long, and how often, I have thought of that sweet face which came upon
me in my bitterest distress like a glimpse of some better world--did
you, Newman--did you?’

Poor Noggs literally gasped for breath as this flood of questions rushed
upon him, and moved spasmodically in his chair at every fresh inquiry,
staring at Nicholas meanwhile with a most ludicrous expression of
perplexity.

‘No,’ said Newman, ‘I didn’t tell her that.’

‘Didn’t tell her which?’ asked Nicholas.

‘About the glimpse of the better world,’ said Newman. ‘I didn’t tell her
who you were, either, or where you’d seen her. I said you loved her to
distraction.’

‘That’s true, Newman,’ replied Nicholas, with his characteristic
vehemence. ‘Heaven knows I do!’

‘I said too, that you had admired her for a long time in secret,’ said
Newman.

‘Yes, yes. What did she say to that?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Blushed,’ said Newman.

‘To be sure. Of course she would,’ said Nicholas approvingly. Newman
then went on to say, that the young lady was an only child, that her
mother was dead, that she resided with her father, and that she had been
induced to allow her lover a secret interview, at the intercession of
her servant, who had great influence with her. He further related how it
required much moving and great eloquence to bring the young lady to this
pass; how it was expressly understood that she merely afforded Nicholas
an opportunity of declaring his passion; and how she by no means pledged
herself to be favourably impressed with his attentions. The mystery of
her visits to the brothers Cheeryble remained wholly unexplained, for
Newman had not alluded to them, either in his preliminary conversations
with the servant or his subsequent interview with the mistress, merely
remarking that he had been instructed to watch the girl home and plead
his young friend’s cause, and not saying how far he had followed her,
or from what point. But Newman hinted that from what had fallen from the
confidante, he had been led to suspect that the young lady led a very
miserable and unhappy life, under the strict control of her only parent,
who was of a violent and brutal temper; a circumstance which he thought
might in some degree account, both for her having sought the protection
and friendship of the brothers, and her suffering herself to be
prevailed upon to grant the promised interview. The last he held to be a
very logical deduction from the premises, inasmuch as it was but natural
to suppose that a young lady, whose present condition was so unenviable,
would be more than commonly desirous to change it.

It appeared, on further questioning--for it was only by a very long and
arduous process that all this could be got out of Newman Noggs--that
Newman, in explanation of his shabby appearance, had represented himself
as being, for certain wise and indispensable purposes connected with
that intrigue, in disguise; and, being questioned how he had come to
exceed his commission so far as to procure an interview, he responded,
that the lady appearing willing to grant it, he considered himself
bound, both in duty and gallantry, to avail himself of such a golden
means of enabling Nicholas to prosecute his addresses. After these and
all possible questions had been asked and answered twenty times over,
they parted, undertaking to meet on the following night at half-past
ten, for the purpose of fulfilling the appointment; which was for eleven
o’clock.

‘Things come about very strangely!’ thought Nicholas, as he walked
home. ‘I never contemplated anything of this kind; never dreamt of the
possibility of it. To know something of the life of one in whom I felt
such interest; to see her in the street, to pass the house in which she
lived, to meet her sometimes in her walks, to hope that a day might
come when I might be in a condition to tell her of my love, this was
the utmost extent of my thoughts. Now, however--but I should be a fool,
indeed, to repine at my own good fortune!’

Still, Nicholas was dissatisfied; and there was more in the
dissatisfaction than mere revulsion of feeling. He was angry with the
young lady for being so easily won, ‘because,’ reasoned Nicholas, ‘it is
not as if she knew it was I, but it might have been anybody,’--which was
certainly not pleasant. The next moment, he was angry with himself for
entertaining such thoughts, arguing that nothing but goodness could
dwell in such a temple, and that the behaviour of the brothers
sufficiently showed the estimation in which they held her. ‘The fact
is, she’s a mystery altogether,’ said Nicholas. This was not more
satisfactory than his previous course of reflection, and only drove him
out upon a new sea of speculation and conjecture, where he tossed and
tumbled, in great discomfort of mind, until the clock struck ten, and
the hour of meeting drew nigh.

Nicholas had dressed himself with great care, and even Newman Noggs had
trimmed himself up a little; his coat presenting the phenomenon of
two consecutive buttons, and the supplementary pins being inserted at
tolerably regular intervals. He wore his hat, too, in the newest
taste, with a pocket-handkerchief in the crown, and a twisted end of it
straggling out behind after the fashion of a pigtail, though he could
scarcely lay claim to the ingenuity of inventing this latter decoration,
inasmuch as he was utterly unconscious of it: being in a nervous and
excited condition which rendered him quite insensible to everything but
the great object of the expedition.

They traversed the streets in profound silence; and after walking at a
round pace for some distance, arrived in one, of a gloomy appearance and
very little frequented, near the Edgeware Road.

‘Number twelve,’ said Newman.

‘Oh!’ replied Nicholas, looking about him.

‘Good street?’ said Newman.

‘Yes,’ returned Nicholas. ‘Rather dull.’

Newman made no answer to this remark, but, halting abruptly, planted
Nicholas with his back to some area railings, and gave him to understand
that he was to wait there, without moving hand or foot, until it was
satisfactorily ascertained that the coast was clear. This done, Noggs
limped away with great alacrity; looking over his shoulder every
instant, to make quite certain that Nicholas was obeying his directions;
and, ascending the steps of a house some half-dozen doors off, was lost
to view.

After a short delay, he reappeared, and limping back again, halted
midway, and beckoned Nicholas to follow him.

‘Well?’ said Nicholas, advancing towards him on tiptoe.

‘All right,’ replied Newman, in high glee. ‘All ready; nobody at home.
Couldn’t be better. Ha! ha!’

With this fortifying assurance, he stole past a street-door, on which
Nicholas caught a glimpse of a brass plate, with ‘BOBSTER,’ in very
large letters; and, stopping at the area-gate, which was open, signed to
his young friend to descend.

‘What the devil!’ cried Nicholas, drawing back. ‘Are we to sneak into
the kitchen, as if we came after the forks?’

‘Hush!’ replied Newman. ‘Old Bobster--ferocious Turk. He’d kill ‘em
all--box the young lady’s ears--he does--often.’

‘What!’ cried Nicholas, in high wrath, ‘do you mean to tell me that any
man would dare to box the ears of such a--’

He had no time to sing the praises of his mistress, just then, for
Newman gave him a gentle push which had nearly precipitated him to the
bottom of the area steps. Thinking it best to take the hint in good
part, Nicholas descended, without further remonstrance, but with a
countenance bespeaking anything rather than the hope and rapture of a
passionate lover. Newman followed--he would have followed head first,
but for the timely assistance of Nicholas--and, taking his hand, led him
through a stone passage, profoundly dark, into a back-kitchen or cellar,
of the blackest and most pitchy obscurity, where they stopped.

‘Well!’ said Nicholas, in a discontented whisper, ‘this is not all, I
suppose, is it?’

‘No, no,’ rejoined Noggs; ‘they’ll be here directly. It’s all right.’

‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Nicholas. ‘I shouldn’t have thought it, I
confess.’

They exchanged no further words, and there Nicholas stood, listening to
the loud breathing of Newman Noggs, and imagining that his nose seemed
to glow like a red-hot coal, even in the midst of the darkness which
enshrouded them. Suddenly the sound of cautious footsteps attracted his
ear, and directly afterwards a female voice inquired if the gentleman
was there.

‘Yes,’ replied Nicholas, turning towards the corner from which the voice
proceeded. ‘Who is that?’

‘Only me, sir,’ replied the voice. ‘Now if you please, ma’am.’

A gleam of light shone into the place, and presently the servant girl
appeared, bearing a light, and followed by her young mistress, who
seemed to be overwhelmed by modesty and confusion.

At sight of the young lady, Nicholas started and changed colour; his
heart beat violently, and he stood rooted to the spot. At that instant,
and almost simultaneously with her arrival and that of the candle, there
was heard a loud and furious knocking at the street-door, which caused
Newman Noggs to jump up, with great agility, from a beer-barrel on which
he had been seated astride, and to exclaim abruptly, and with a face of
ashy paleness, ‘Bobster, by the Lord!’

The young lady shrieked, the attendant wrung her hands, Nicholas gazed
from one to the other in apparent stupefaction, and Newman hurried to
and fro, thrusting his hands into all his pockets successively, and
drawing out the linings of every one in the excess of his irresolution.
It was but a moment, but the confusion crowded into that one moment no
imagination can exaggerate.

‘Leave the house, for Heaven’s sake! We have done wrong, we deserve it
all,’ cried the young lady. ‘Leave the house, or I am ruined and undone
for ever.’

‘Will you hear me say but one word?’ cried Nicholas. ‘Only one. I will
not detain you. Will you hear me say one word, in explanation of this
mischance?’

But Nicholas might as well have spoken to the wind, for the young lady,
with distracted looks, hurried up the stairs. He would have followed
her, but Newman, twisting his hand in his coat collar, dragged him
towards the passage by which they had entered.

‘Let me go, Newman, in the Devil’s name!’ cried Nicholas. ‘I must speak
to her. I will! I will not leave this house without.’

‘Reputation--character--violence--consider,’ said Newman, clinging round
him with both arms, and hurrying him away. ‘Let them open the door.
We’ll go, as we came, directly it’s shut. Come. This way. Here.’

Overpowered by the remonstrances of Newman, and the tears and prayers
of the girl, and the tremendous knocking above, which had never ceased,
Nicholas allowed himself to be hurried off; and, precisely as Mr. Bobster
made his entrance by the street-door, he and Noggs made their exit by
the area-gate.

They hurried away, through several streets, without stopping or
speaking. At last, they halted and confronted each other with blank and
rueful faces.

‘Never mind,’ said Newman, gasping for breath. ‘Don’t be cast down. It’s
all right. More fortunate next time. It couldn’t be helped. I did MY
part.’

‘Excellently,’ replied Nicholas, taking his hand. ‘Excellently, and like
the true and zealous friend you are. Only--mind, I am not disappointed,
Newman, and feel just as much indebted to you--only IT WAS THE WRONG
LADY.’

‘Eh?’ cried Newman Noggs. ‘Taken in by the servant?’

‘Newman, Newman,’ said Nicholas, laying his hand upon his shoulder: ‘it
was the wrong servant too.’

Newman’s under-jaw dropped, and he gazed at Nicholas, with his sound eye
fixed fast and motionless in his head.

‘Don’t take it to heart,’ said Nicholas; ‘it’s of no consequence; you
see I don’t care about it; you followed the wrong person, that’s all.’

That WAS all. Whether Newman Noggs had looked round the pump, in a
slanting direction, so long, that his sight became impaired; or whether,
finding that there was time to spare, he had recruited himself with a
few drops of something stronger than the pump could yield--by whatsoever
means it had come to pass, this was his mistake. And Nicholas went home
to brood upon it, and to meditate upon the charms of the unknown young
lady, now as far beyond his reach as ever.



CHAPTER 41

Containing some Romantic Passages between Mrs. Nickleby and the Gentleman
in the Small-clothes next Door


Ever since her last momentous conversation with her son, Mrs. Nickleby
had begun to display unusual care in the adornment of her person,
gradually superadding to those staid and matronly habiliments,
which had, up to that time, formed her ordinary attire, a variety of
embellishments and decorations, slight perhaps in themselves, but,
taken together, and considered with reference to the subject of
her disclosure, of no mean importance. Even her black dress assumed
something of a deadly-lively air from the jaunty style in which it was
worn; and, eked out as its lingering attractions were; by a prudent
disposal, here and there, of certain juvenile ornaments of little or no
value, which had, for that reason alone, escaped the general wreck and
been permitted to slumber peacefully in odd corners of old drawers and
boxes where daylight seldom shone, her mourning garments assumed quite
a new character. From being the outward tokens of respect and sorrow for
the dead, they became converted into signals of very slaughterous and
killing designs upon the living.

Mrs. Nickleby might have been stimulated to this proceeding by a lofty
sense of duty, and impulses of unquestionable excellence. She might, by
this time, have become impressed with the sinfulness of long indulgence
in unavailing woe, or the necessity of setting a proper example of
neatness and decorum to her blooming daughter. Considerations of duty
and responsibility apart, the change might have taken its rise in
feelings of the purest and most disinterested charity. The gentleman
next door had been vilified by Nicholas; rudely stigmatised as a dotard
and an idiot; and for these attacks upon his understanding, Mrs. Nickleby
was, in some sort, accountable. She might have felt that it was the act
of a good Christian to show by all means in her power, that the abused
gentleman was neither the one nor the other. And what better means could
she adopt, towards so virtuous and laudable an end, than proving to
all men, in her own person, that his passion was the most rational and
reasonable in the world, and just the very result, of all others, which
discreet and thinking persons might have foreseen, from her incautiously
displaying her matured charms, without reserve, under the very eye, as
it were, of an ardent and too-susceptible man?

‘Ah!’ said Mrs. Nickleby, gravely shaking her head; ‘if Nicholas knew
what his poor dear papa suffered before we were engaged, when I used to
hate him, he would have a little more feeling. Shall I ever forget the
morning I looked scornfully at him when he offered to carry my parasol?
Or that night, when I frowned at him? It was a mercy he didn’t emigrate.
It very nearly drove him to it.’

Whether the deceased might not have been better off if he had emigrated
in his bachelor days, was a question which his relict did not stop to
consider; for Kate entered the room, with her workbox, in this stage of
her reflections; and a much slighter interruption, or no interruption at
all, would have diverted Mrs. Nickleby’s thoughts into a new channel at
any time.

‘Kate, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby; ‘I don’t know how it is, but a fine
warm summer day like this, with the birds singing in every direction,
always puts me in mind of roast pig, with sage and onion sauce, and made
gravy.’

‘That’s a curious association of ideas, is it not, mama?’

‘Upon my word, my dear, I don’t know,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Roast pig;
let me see. On the day five weeks after you were christened, we had a
roast--no, that couldn’t have been a pig, either, because I recollect
there were a pair of them to carve, and your poor papa and I could
never have thought of sitting down to two pigs--they must have been
partridges. Roast pig! I hardly think we ever could have had one, now
I come to remember, for your papa could never bear the sight of them
in the shops, and used to say that they always put him in mind of very
little babies, only the pigs had much fairer complexions; and he had a
horror of little babies, too, because he couldn’t very well afford any
increase to his family, and had a natural dislike to the subject. It’s
very odd now, what can have put that in my head! I recollect dining
once at Mrs. Bevan’s, in that broad street round the corner by the
coachmaker’s, where the tipsy man fell through the cellar-flap of an
empty house nearly a week before the quarter-day, and wasn’t found till
the new tenant went in--and we had roast pig there. It must be that, I
think, that reminds me of it, especially as there was a little bird in
the room that would keep on singing all the time of dinner--at least,
not a little bird, for it was a parrot, and he didn’t sing exactly, for
he talked and swore dreadfully: but I think it must be that. Indeed I am
sure it must. Shouldn’t you say so, my dear?’

‘I should say there was not a doubt about it, mama,’ returned Kate, with
a cheerful smile.

‘No; but DO you think so, Kate?’ said Mrs. Nickleby, with as much gravity
as if it were a question of the most imminent and thrilling interest.
‘If you don’t, say so at once, you know; because it’s just as well to be
correct, particularly on a point of this kind, which is very curious and
worth settling while one thinks about it.’

Kate laughingly replied that she was quite convinced; and as her mama
still appeared undetermined whether it was not absolutely essential that
the subject should be renewed, proposed that they should take their
work into the summer-house, and enjoy the beauty of the afternoon.
Mrs. Nickleby readily assented, and to the summer-house they repaired,
without further discussion.

‘Well, I will say,’ observed Mrs. Nickleby, as she took her seat, ‘that
there never was such a good creature as Smike. Upon my word, the pains
he has taken in putting this little arbour to rights, and training the
sweetest flowers about it, are beyond anything I could have--I wish he
wouldn’t put ALL the gravel on your side, Kate, my dear, though, and
leave nothing but mould for me.’

‘Dear mama,’ returned Kate, hastily, ‘take this seat--do--to oblige me,
mama.’

‘No, indeed, my dear. I shall keep my own side,’ said Mrs. Nickleby.
‘Well! I declare!’

Kate looked up inquiringly.

‘If he hasn’t been,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘and got, from somewhere or
other, a couple of roots of those flowers that I said I was so fond of,
the other night, and asked you if you were not--no, that YOU said YOU
were so fond of, the other night, and asked me if I wasn’t--it’s the
same thing. Now, upon my word, I take that as very kind and attentive
indeed! I don’t see,’ added Mrs. Nickleby, looking narrowly about her,
‘any of them on my side, but I suppose they grow best near the gravel.
You may depend upon it they do, Kate, and that’s the reason they are all
near you, and he has put the gravel there, because it’s the sunny side.
Upon my word, that’s very clever now! I shouldn’t have had half as much
thought myself!’

‘Mama,’ said Kate, bending over her work so that her face was almost
hidden, ‘before you were married--’

‘Dear me, Kate,’ interrupted Mrs. Nickleby, ‘what in the name of goodness
graciousness makes you fly off to the time before I was married, when
I’m talking to you about his thoughtfulness and attention to me? You
don’t seem to take the smallest interest in the garden.’

‘Oh! mama,’ said Kate, raising her face again, ‘you know I do.’

‘Well then, my dear, why don’t you praise the neatness and prettiness
with which it’s kept?’ said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘How very odd you are, Kate!’

‘I do praise it, mama,’ answered Kate, gently. ‘Poor fellow!’

‘I scarcely ever hear you, my dear,’ retorted Mrs. Nickleby; ‘that’s all
I’ve got to say.’ By this time the good lady had been a long while upon
one topic, so she fell at once into her daughter’s little trap, if trap
it were, and inquired what she had been going to say.

‘About what, mama?’ said Kate, who had apparently quite forgotten her
diversion.

‘Lor, Kate, my dear,’ returned her mother, ‘why, you’re asleep or
stupid! About the time before I was married.’

‘Oh yes!’ said Kate, ‘I remember. I was going to ask, mama, before you
were married, had you many suitors?’

‘Suitors, my dear!’ cried Mrs. Nickleby, with a smile of wonderful
complacency. ‘First and last, Kate, I must have had a dozen at least.’

‘Mama!’ returned Kate, in a tone of remonstrance.

‘I had indeed, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby; ‘not including your poor
papa, or a young gentleman who used to go, at that time, to the same
dancing school, and who WOULD send gold watches and bracelets to
our house in gilt-edged paper, (which were always returned,) and who
afterwards unfortunately went out to Botany Bay in a cadet ship--a
convict ship I mean--and escaped into a bush and killed sheep, (I don’t
know how they got there,) and was going to be hung, only he accidentally
choked himself, and the government pardoned him. Then there was young
Lukin,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, beginning with her left thumb and checking
off the names on her fingers--‘Mogley--Tipslark--Cabbery--Smifser--’

Having now reached her little finger, Mrs. Nickleby was carrying the
account over to the other hand, when a loud ‘Hem!’ which appeared to
come from the very foundation of the garden-wall, gave both herself and
her daughter a violent start.

‘Mama! what was that?’ said Kate, in a low tone of voice.

‘Upon my word, my dear,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby, considerably startled,
‘unless it was the gentleman belonging to the next house, I don’t know
what it could possibly--’

‘A--hem!’ cried the same voice; and that, not in the tone of an ordinary
clearing of the throat, but in a kind of bellow, which woke up all the
echoes in the neighbourhood, and was prolonged to an extent which must
have made the unseen bellower quite black in the face.

‘I understand it now, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, laying her hand on
Kate’s; ‘don’t be alarmed, my love, it’s not directed to you, and is not
intended to frighten anybody. Let us give everybody their due, Kate; I
am bound to say that.’

So saying, Mrs. Nickleby nodded her head, and patted the back of her
daughter’s hand, a great many times, and looked as if she could tell
something vastly important if she chose, but had self-denial, thank
Heaven; and wouldn’t do it.

‘What do you mean, mama?’ demanded Kate, in evident surprise.

‘Don’t be flurried, my dear,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby, looking towards
the garden-wall, ‘for you see I’m not, and if it would be excusable
in anybody to be flurried, it certainly would--under all the
circumstances--be excusable in me, but I am not, Kate--not at all.’

‘It seems designed to attract our attention, mama,’ said Kate.

‘It is designed to attract our attention, my dear; at least,’ rejoined
Mrs. Nickleby, drawing herself up, and patting her daughter’s hand more
blandly than before, ‘to attract the attention of one of us. Hem! you
needn’t be at all uneasy, my dear.’

Kate looked very much perplexed, and was apparently about to ask for
further explanation, when a shouting and scuffling noise, as of an
elderly gentleman whooping, and kicking up his legs on loose gravel,
with great violence, was heard to proceed from the same direction as the
former sounds; and before they had subsided, a large cucumber was seen
to shoot up in the air with the velocity of a sky-rocket, whence it
descended, tumbling over and over, until it fell at Mrs. Nickleby’s feet.

This remarkable appearance was succeeded by another of a precisely
similar description; then a fine vegetable marrow, of unusually large
dimensions, was seen to whirl aloft, and come toppling down; then,
several cucumbers shot up together; and, finally, the air was darkened
by a shower of onions, turnip-radishes, and other small vegetables,
which fell rolling and scattering, and bumping about, in all directions.

As Kate rose from her seat, in some alarm, and caught her mother’s hand
to run with her into the house, she felt herself rather retarded than
assisted in her intention; and following the direction of Mrs. Nickleby’s
eyes, was quite terrified by the apparition of an old black velvet cap,
which, by slow degrees, as if its wearer were ascending a ladder or pair
of steps, rose above the wall dividing their garden from that of the
next cottage, (which, like their own, was a detached building,) and was
gradually followed by a very large head, and an old face, in which were
a pair of most extraordinary grey eyes: very wild, very wide open, and
rolling in their sockets, with a dull, languishing, leering look, most
ugly to behold.

‘Mama!’ cried Kate, really terrified for the moment, ‘why do you stop,
why do you lose an instant? Mama, pray come in!’

‘Kate, my dear,’ returned her mother, still holding back, ‘how can you
be so foolish? I’m ashamed of you. How do you suppose you are ever to
get through life, if you’re such a coward as this? What do you want,
sir?’ said Mrs. Nickleby, addressing the intruder with a sort of
simpering displeasure. ‘How dare you look into this garden?’

‘Queen of my soul,’ replied the stranger, folding his hands together,
‘this goblet sip!’

‘Nonsense, sir,’ said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Kate, my love, pray be quiet.’

‘Won’t you sip the goblet?’ urged the stranger, with his head
imploringly on one side, and his right hand on his breast. ‘Oh, do sip
the goblet!’

‘I shall not consent to do anything of the kind, sir,’ said Mrs
Nickleby. ‘Pray, begone.’

‘Why is it,’ said the old gentleman, coming up a step higher, and
leaning his elbows on the wall, with as much complacency as if he were
looking out of window, ‘why is it that beauty is always obdurate,
even when admiration is as honourable and respectful as mine?’ Here he
smiled, kissed his hand, and made several low bows. ‘Is it owing to the
bees, who, when the honey season is over, and they are supposed to
have been killed with brimstone, in reality fly to Barbary and lull the
captive Moors to sleep with their drowsy songs? Or is it,’ he added,
dropping his voice almost to a whisper, ‘in consequence of the statue
at Charing Cross having been lately seen, on the Stock Exchange
at midnight, walking arm-in-arm with the Pump from Aldgate, in a
riding-habit?’

‘Mama,’ murmured Kate, ‘do you hear him?’

‘Hush, my dear!’ replied Mrs. Nickleby, in the same tone of voice, ‘he
is very polite, and I think that was a quotation from the poets. Pray,
don’t worry me so--you’ll pinch my arm black and blue. Go away, sir!’

‘Quite away?’ said the gentleman, with a languishing look. ‘Oh! quite
away?’

‘Yes,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby, ‘certainly. You have no business here.
This is private property, sir; you ought to know that.’

‘I do know,’ said the old gentleman, laying his finger on his nose, with
an air of familiarity, most reprehensible, ‘that this is a sacred and
enchanted spot, where the most divine charms’--here he kissed his hand
and bowed again--‘waft mellifluousness over the neighbours’ gardens, and
force the fruit and vegetables into premature existence. That fact I am
acquainted with. But will you permit me, fairest creature, to ask
you one question, in the absence of the planet Venus, who has gone
on business to the Horse Guards, and would otherwise--jealous of your
superior charms--interpose between us?’

‘Kate,’ observed Mrs. Nickleby, turning to her daughter, ‘it’s very
awkward, positively. I really don’t know what to say to this gentleman.
One ought to be civil, you know.’

‘Dear mama,’ rejoined Kate, ‘don’t say a word to him, but let us run
away as fast as we can, and shut ourselves up till Nicholas comes home.’

Mrs. Nickleby looked very grand, not to say contemptuous, at this
humiliating proposal; and, turning to the old gentleman, who had watched
them during these whispers with absorbing eagerness, said:

‘If you will conduct yourself, sir, like the gentleman I should
imagine you to be, from your language and--and--appearance, (quite the
counterpart of your grandpapa, Kate, my dear, in his best days,) and
will put your question to me in plain words, I will answer it.’

If Mrs. Nickleby’s excellent papa had borne, in his best days, a
resemblance to the neighbour now looking over the wall, he must have
been, to say the least, a very queer-looking old gentleman in his
prime. Perhaps Kate thought so, for she ventured to glance at his living
portrait with some attention, as he took off his black velvet cap,
and, exhibiting a perfectly bald head, made a long series of bows, each
accompanied with a fresh kiss of the hand. After exhausting himself,
to all appearance, with this fatiguing performance, he covered his head
once more, pulled the cap very carefully over the tips of his ears, and
resuming his former attitude, said,

‘The question is--’

Here he broke off to look round in every direction, and satisfy himself
beyond all doubt that there were no listeners near. Assured that there
were not, he tapped his nose several times, accompanying the action with
a cunning look, as though congratulating himself on his caution; and
stretching out his neck, said in a loud whisper,

‘Are you a princess?’

‘You are mocking me, sir,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby, making a feint of
retreating towards the house.

‘No, but are you?’ said the old gentleman.

‘You know I am not, sir,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby.

‘Then are you any relation to the Archbishop of Canterbury?’ inquired
the old gentleman with great anxiety, ‘or to the Pope of Rome? Or the
Speaker of the House of Commons? Forgive me, if I am wrong, but I was
told you were niece to the Commissioners of Paving, and daughter-in-law
to the Lord Mayor and Court of Common Council, which would account for
your relationship to all three.’

‘Whoever has spread such reports, sir,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby, with some
warmth, ‘has taken great liberties with my name, and one which I am sure
my son Nicholas, if he was aware of it, would not allow for an instant.
The idea!’ said Mrs. Nickleby, drawing herself up, ‘niece to the
Commissioners of Paving!’

‘Pray, mama, come away!’ whispered Kate.

‘“Pray mama!” Nonsense, Kate,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, angrily, ‘but that’s
just the way. If they had said I was niece to a piping bullfinch, what
would you care? But I have no sympathy,’ whimpered Mrs. Nickleby. ‘I
don’t expect it, that’s one thing.’

‘Tears!’ cried the old gentleman, with such an energetic jump, that
he fell down two or three steps and grated his chin against the
wall. ‘Catch the crystal globules--catch ‘em--bottle ‘em up--cork ‘em
tight--put sealing wax on the top--seal ‘em with a cupid--label ‘em
“Best quality”--and stow ‘em away in the fourteen binn, with a bar of
iron on the top to keep the thunder off!’

Issuing these commands, as if there were a dozen attendants all actively
engaged in their execution, he turned his velvet cap inside out, put it
on with great dignity so as to obscure his right eye and three-fourths
of his nose, and sticking his arms a-kimbo, looked very fiercely at a
sparrow hard by, till the bird flew away, when he put his cap in his
pocket with an air of great satisfaction, and addressed himself with
respectful demeanour to Mrs. Nickleby.

‘Beautiful madam,’ such were his words, ‘if I have made any mistake with
regard to your family or connections, I humbly beseech you to pardon me.
If I supposed you to be related to Foreign Powers or Native Boards,
it is because you have a manner, a carriage, a dignity, which you will
excuse my saying that none but yourself (with the single exception
perhaps of the tragic muse, when playing extemporaneously on the barrel
organ before the East India Company) can parallel. I am not a youth,
ma’am, as you see; and although beings like you can never grow old, I
venture to presume that we are fitted for each other.’

‘Really, Kate, my love!’ said Mrs. Nickleby faintly, and looking another
way.

‘I have estates, ma’am,’ said the old gentleman, flourishing his right
hand negligently, as if he made very light of such matters, and speaking
very fast; ‘jewels, lighthouses, fish-ponds, a whalery of my own in the
North Sea, and several oyster-beds of great profit in the Pacific Ocean.
If you will have the kindness to step down to the Royal Exchange and
to take the cocked-hat off the stoutest beadle’s head, you will find my
card in the lining of the crown, wrapped up in a piece of blue paper. My
walking-stick is also to be seen on application to the chaplain of
the House of Commons, who is strictly forbidden to take any money for
showing it. I have enemies about me, ma’am,’ he looked towards his house
and spoke very low, ‘who attack me on all occasions, and wish to secure
my property. If you bless me with your hand and heart, you can apply to
the Lord Chancellor or call out the military if necessary--sending my
toothpick to the commander-in-chief will be sufficient--and so clear the
house of them before the ceremony is performed. After that, love, bliss
and rapture; rapture, love and bliss. Be mine, be mine!’

Repeating these last words with great rapture and enthusiasm, the old
gentleman put on his black velvet cap again, and looking up into the
sky in a hasty manner, said something that was not quite intelligible
concerning a balloon he expected, and which was rather after its time.

‘Be mine, be mine!’ repeated the old gentleman.

‘Kate, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘I have hardly the power to speak;
but it is necessary for the happiness of all parties that this matter
should be set at rest for ever.’

‘Surely there is no necessity for you to say one word, mama?’ reasoned
Kate.

‘You will allow me, my dear, if you please, to judge for myself,’ said
Mrs. Nickleby.

‘Be mine, be mine!’ cried the old gentleman.

‘It can scarcely be expected, sir,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, fixing her eyes
modestly on the ground, ‘that I should tell a stranger whether I feel
flattered and obliged by such proposals, or not. They certainly are made
under very singular circumstances; still at the same time, as far as
it goes, and to a certain extent of course’ (Mrs. Nickleby’s customary
qualification), ‘they must be gratifying and agreeable to one’s
feelings.’

‘Be mine, be mine,’ cried the old gentleman. ‘Gog and Magog, Gog and
Magog. Be mine, be mine!’

‘It will be sufficient for me to say, sir,’ resumed Mrs. Nickleby, with
perfect seriousness--‘and I’m sure you’ll see the propriety of taking
an answer and going away--that I have made up my mind to remain a widow,
and to devote myself to my children. You may not suppose I am the mother
of two children--indeed many people have doubted it, and said that
nothing on earth could ever make ‘em believe it possible--but it is the
case, and they are both grown up. We shall be very glad to have you for
a neighbour--very glad; delighted, I’m sure--but in any other character
it’s quite impossible, quite. As to my being young enough to marry
again, that perhaps may be so, or it may not be; but I couldn’t think
of it for an instant, not on any account whatever. I said I never would,
and I never will. It’s a very painful thing to have to reject proposals,
and I would much rather that none were made; at the same time this is
the answer that I determined long ago to make, and this is the answer I
shall always give.’

These observations were partly addressed to the old gentleman, partly to
Kate, and partly delivered in soliloquy. Towards their conclusion, the
suitor evinced a very irreverent degree of inattention, and Mrs. Nickleby
had scarcely finished speaking, when, to the great terror both of that
lady and her daughter, he suddenly flung off his coat, and springing on
the top of the wall, threw himself into an attitude which displayed his
small-clothes and grey worsteds to the fullest advantage, and concluded
by standing on one leg, and repeating his favourite bellow with
increased vehemence.

While he was still dwelling on the last note, and embellishing it with
a prolonged flourish, a dirty hand was observed to glide stealthily and
swiftly along the top of the wall, as if in pursuit of a fly, and then
to clasp with the utmost dexterity one of the old gentleman’s ankles.
This done, the companion hand appeared, and clasped the other ankle.

Thus encumbered the old gentleman lifted his legs awkwardly once or
twice, as if they were very clumsy and imperfect pieces of machinery,
and then looking down on his own side of the wall, burst into a loud
laugh.

‘It’s you, is it?’ said the old gentleman.

‘Yes, it’s me,’ replied a gruff voice.

‘How’s the Emperor of Tartary?’ said the old gentleman.

‘Oh! he’s much the same as usual,’ was the reply. ‘No better and no
worse.’

‘The young Prince of China,’ said the old gentleman, with much interest.
‘Is he reconciled to his father-in-law, the great potato salesman?’

‘No,’ answered the gruff voice; ‘and he says he never will be, that’s
more.’

‘If that’s the case,’ observed the old gentleman, ‘perhaps I’d better
come down.’

‘Well,’ said the man on the other side, ‘I think you had, perhaps.’

One of the hands being then cautiously unclasped, the old gentleman
dropped into a sitting posture, and was looking round to smile and bow
to Mrs. Nickleby, when he disappeared with some precipitation, as if his
legs had been pulled from below.

Very much relieved by his disappearance, Kate was turning to speak
to her mama, when the dirty hands again became visible, and were
immediately followed by the figure of a coarse squat man, who ascended
by the steps which had been recently occupied by their singular
neighbour.

‘Beg your pardon, ladies,’ said this new comer, grinning and touching
his hat. ‘Has he been making love to either of you?’

‘Yes,’ said Kate.

‘Ah!’ rejoined the man, taking his handkerchief out of his hat and
wiping his face, ‘he always will, you know. Nothing will prevent his
making love.’

‘I need not ask you if he is out of his mind, poor creature,’ said Kate.

‘Why no,’ replied the man, looking into his hat, throwing his
handkerchief in at one dab, and putting it on again. ‘That’s pretty
plain, that is.’

‘Has he been long so?’ asked Kate.

‘A long while.’

‘And is there no hope for him?’ said Kate, compassionately

‘Not a bit, and don’t deserve to be,’ replied the keeper. ‘He’s a deal
pleasanter without his senses than with ‘em. He was the cruellest,
wickedest, out-and-outerest old flint that ever drawed breath.’

‘Indeed!’ said Kate.

‘By George!’ replied the keeper, shaking his head so emphatically that
he was obliged to frown to keep his hat on. ‘I never come across such a
vagabond, and my mate says the same. Broke his poor wife’s heart, turned
his daughters out of doors, drove his sons into the streets; it was a
blessing he went mad at last, through evil tempers, and covetousness,
and selfishness, and guzzling, and drinking, or he’d have drove many
others so. Hope for HIM, an old rip! There isn’t too much hope going,
but I’ll bet a crown that what there is, is saved for more deserving
chaps than him, anyhow.’

With which confession of his faith, the keeper shook his head again, as
much as to say that nothing short of this would do, if things were to
go on at all; and touching his hat sulkily--not that he was in an ill
humour, but that his subject ruffled him--descended the ladder, and took
it away.

During this conversation, Mrs. Nickleby had regarded the man with a
severe and steadfast look. She now heaved a profound sigh, and pursing
up her lips, shook her head in a slow and doubtful manner.

‘Poor creature!’ said Kate.

‘Ah! poor indeed!’ rejoined Mrs. Nickleby. ‘It’s shameful that such
things should be allowed. Shameful!’

‘How can they be helped, mama?’ said Kate, mournfully. ‘The infirmities
of nature--’

‘Nature!’ said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘What! Do YOU suppose this poor gentleman
is out of his mind?’

‘Can anybody who sees him entertain any other opinion, mama?’

‘Why then, I just tell you this, Kate,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby, ‘that, he
is nothing of the kind, and I am surprised you can be so imposed
upon. It’s some plot of these people to possess themselves of his
property--didn’t he say so himself? He may be a little odd and flighty,
perhaps, many of us are that; but downright mad! and express himself as
he does, respectfully, and in quite poetical language, and making offers
with so much thought, and care, and prudence--not as if he ran into the
streets, and went down upon his knees to the first chit of a girl he
met, as a madman would! No, no, Kate, there’s a great deal too much
method in HIS madness; depend upon that, my dear.’



CHAPTER 42

Illustrative of the convivial Sentiment, that the best of Friends must
sometimes part


The pavement of Snow Hill had been baking and frying all day in the
heat, and the twain Saracens’ heads guarding the entrance to the
hostelry of whose name and sign they are the duplicate presentments,
looked--or seemed, in the eyes of jaded and footsore passers-by, to
look--more vicious than usual, after blistering and scorching in the
sun, when, in one of the inn’s smallest sitting-rooms, through whose
open window there rose, in a palpable steam, wholesome exhalations from
reeking coach-horses, the usual furniture of a tea-table was displayed
in neat and inviting order, flanked by large joints of roast and boiled,
a tongue, a pigeon pie, a cold fowl, a tankard of ale, and other little
matters of the like kind, which, in degenerate towns and cities, are
generally understood to belong more particularly to solid lunches,
stage-coach dinners, or unusually substantial breakfasts.

Mr. John Browdie, with his hands in his pockets, hovered restlessly about
these delicacies, stopping occasionally to whisk the flies out of the
sugar-basin with his wife’s pocket-handkerchief, or to dip a teaspoon in
the milk-pot and carry it to his mouth, or to cut off a little knob of
crust, and a little corner of meat, and swallow them at two gulps like a
couple of pills. After every one of these flirtations with the eatables,
he pulled out his watch, and declared with an earnestness quite pathetic
that he couldn’t undertake to hold out two minutes longer.

‘Tilly!’ said John to his lady, who was reclining half awake and half
asleep upon a sofa.

‘Well, John!’

‘Well, John!’ retorted her husband, impatiently. ‘Dost thou feel
hoongry, lass?’

‘Not very,’ said Mrs. Browdie.

‘Not vary!’ repeated John, raising his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Hear her
say not vary, and us dining at three, and loonching off pasthry thot
aggravates a mon ‘stead of pacifying him! Not vary!’

‘Here’s a gen’l’man for you, sir,’ said the waiter, looking in.

‘A wa’at for me?’ cried John, as though he thought it must be a letter,
or a parcel.

‘A gen’l’man, sir.’

‘Stars and garthers, chap!’ said John, ‘wa’at dost thou coom and say
thot for? In wi’ ‘un.’

‘Are you at home, sir?’

‘At whoam!’ cried John, ‘I wish I wur; I’d ha tea’d two hour ago. Why, I
told t’oother chap to look sharp ootside door, and tell ‘un d’rectly he
coom, thot we war faint wi’ hoonger. In wi’ ‘un. Aha! Thee hond, Misther
Nickleby. This is nigh to be the proodest day o’ my life, sir. Hoo be
all wi’ ye? Ding! But, I’m glod o’ this!’

Quite forgetting even his hunger in the heartiness of his salutation,
John Browdie shook Nicholas by the hand again and again, slapping
his palm with great violence between each shake, to add warmth to the
reception.

‘Ah! there she be,’ said John, observing the look which Nicholas
directed towards his wife. ‘There she be--we shan’t quarrel about her
noo--eh? Ecod, when I think o’ thot--but thou want’st soom’at to eat.
Fall to, mun, fall to, and for wa’at we’re aboot to receive--’

No doubt the grace was properly finished, but nothing more was heard,
for John had already begun to play such a knife and fork, that his
speech was, for the time, gone.

‘I shall take the usual licence, Mr. Browdie,’ said Nicholas, as he
placed a chair for the bride.

‘Tak’ whatever thou like’st,’ said John, ‘and when a’s gane, ca’ for
more.’

Without stopping to explain, Nicholas kissed the blushing Mrs. Browdie,
and handed her to her seat.

‘I say,’ said John, rather astounded for the moment, ‘mak’ theeself
quite at whoam, will ‘ee?’

‘You may depend upon that,’ replied Nicholas; ‘on one condition.’

‘And wa’at may thot be?’ asked John.

‘That you make me a godfather the very first time you have occasion for
one.’

‘Eh! d’ye hear thot?’ cried John, laying down his knife and fork. ‘A
godfeyther! Ha! ha! ha! Tilly--hear till ‘un--a godfeyther! Divn’t say
a word more, ye’ll never beat thot. Occasion for ‘un--a godfeyther! Ha!
ha! ha!’

Never was man so tickled with a respectable old joke, as John Browdie
was with this. He chuckled, roared, half suffocated himself by laughing
large pieces of beef into his windpipe, roared again, persisted in
eating at the same time, got red in the face and black in the forehead,
coughed, cried, got better, went off again laughing inwardly, got worse,
choked, had his back thumped, stamped about, frightened his wife, and
at last recovered in a state of the last exhaustion and with the water
streaming from his eyes, but still faintly ejaculating, ‘A godfeyther--a
godfeyther, Tilly!’ in a tone bespeaking an exquisite relish of the
sally, which no suffering could diminish.

‘You remember the night of our first tea-drinking?’ said Nicholas.

‘Shall I e’er forget it, mun?’ replied John Browdie.

‘He was a desperate fellow that night though, was he not, Mrs. Browdie?’
said Nicholas. ‘Quite a monster!’

‘If you had only heard him as we were going home, Mr. Nickleby, you’d
have said so indeed,’ returned the bride. ‘I never was so frightened in
all my life.’

‘Coom, coom,’ said John, with a broad grin; ‘thou know’st betther than
thot, Tilly.’

‘So I was,’ replied Mrs. Browdie. ‘I almost made up my mind never to
speak to you again.’

‘A’most!’ said John, with a broader grin than the last. ‘A’most made up
her mind! And she wur coaxin’, and coaxin’, and wheedlin’, and wheedlin’
a’ the blessed wa’. “Wa’at didst thou let yon chap mak’ oop tiv’ee for?”
 says I. “I deedn’t, John,” says she, a squeedgin my arm. “You deedn’t?”
 says I. “Noa,” says she, a squeedgin of me agean.’

‘Lor, John!’ interposed his pretty wife, colouring very much. ‘How can
you talk such nonsense? As if I should have dreamt of such a thing!’

‘I dinnot know whether thou’d ever dreamt of it, though I think that’s
loike eneaf, mind,’ retorted John; ‘but thou didst it. “Ye’re a feeckle,
changeable weathercock, lass,” says I. “Not feeckle, John,” says she.
“Yes,” says I, “feeckle, dom’d feeckle. Dinnot tell me thou bean’t,
efther yon chap at schoolmeasther’s,” says I. “Him!” says she, quite
screeching. “Ah! him!” says I. “Why, John,” says she--and she coom a
deal closer and squeedged a deal harder than she’d deane afore--“dost
thou think it’s nat’ral noo, that having such a proper mun as thou
to keep company wi’, I’d ever tak’ opp wi’ such a leetle scanty
whipper-snapper as yon?” she says. Ha! ha! ha! She said whipper-snapper!
“Ecod!” I says, “efther thot, neame the day, and let’s have it ower!”
 Ha! ha! ha!’

Nicholas laughed very heartily at this story, both on account of its
telling against himself, and his being desirous to spare the blushes of
Mrs. Browdie, whose protestations were drowned in peals of laughter from
her husband. His good-nature soon put her at her ease; and although she
still denied the charge, she laughed so heartily at it, that Nicholas
had the satisfaction of feeling assured that in all essential respects
it was strictly true.

‘This is the second time,’ said Nicholas, ‘that we have ever taken a
meal together, and only third I have ever seen you; and yet it really
seems to me as if I were among old friends.’

‘Weel!’ observed the Yorkshireman, ‘so I say.’

‘And I am sure I do,’ added his young wife.

‘I have the best reason to be impressed with the feeling, mind,’ said
Nicholas; ‘for if it had not been for your kindness of heart, my good
friend, when I had no right or reason to expect it, I know not what
might have become of me or what plight I should have been in by this
time.’

‘Talk aboot soom’at else,’ replied John, gruffly, ‘and dinnot bother.’

‘It must be a new song to the same tune then,’ said Nicholas, smiling.
‘I told you in my letter that I deeply felt and admired your sympathy
with that poor lad, whom you released at the risk of involving yourself
in trouble and difficulty; but I can never tell you how grateful he and
I, and others whom you don’t know, are to you for taking pity on him.’

‘Ecod!’ rejoined John Browdie, drawing up his chair; ‘and I can never
tell YOU hoo gratful soom folks that we do know would be loikewise, if
THEY know’d I had takken pity on him.’

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Mrs. Browdie, ‘what a state I was in that night!’

‘Were they at all disposed to give you credit for assisting in the
escape?’ inquired Nicholas of John Browdie.

‘Not a bit,’ replied the Yorkshireman, extending his mouth from ear
to ear. ‘There I lay, snoog in schoolmeasther’s bed long efther it was
dark, and nobody coom nigh the pleace. “Weel!” thinks I, “he’s got a
pretty good start, and if he bean’t whoam by noo, he never will be; so
you may coom as quick as you loike, and foind us reddy”--that is, you
know, schoolmeasther might coom.’

‘I understand,’ said Nicholas.

‘Presently,’ resumed John, ‘he DID coom. I heerd door shut doonstairs,
and him a warking, oop in the daark. “Slow and steddy,” I says to
myself, “tak’ your time, sir--no hurry.” He cooms to the door, turns the
key--turns the key when there warn’t nothing to hoold the lock--and ca’s
oot “Hallo, there!”--“Yes,” thinks I, “you may do thot agean, and
not wakken anybody, sir.” “Hallo, there,” he says, and then he stops.
“Thou’d betther not aggravate me,” says schoolmeasther, efther a little
time. “I’ll brak’ every boan in your boddy, Smike,” he says, efther
another little time. Then all of a soodden, he sings oot for a loight,
and when it cooms--ecod, such a hoorly-boorly! “Wa’at’s the matter?”
 says I. “He’s gane,” says he,--stark mad wi’ vengeance. “Have you heerd
nought?” “Ees,” says I, “I heerd street-door shut, no time at a’ ago.
I heerd a person run doon there” (pointing t’other wa’--eh?) “Help!” he
cries. “I’ll help you,” says I; and off we set--the wrong wa’! Ho! ho!
ho!’

‘Did you go far?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Far!’ replied John; ‘I run him clean off his legs in quarther of an
hoor. To see old schoolmeasther wi’out his hat, skimming along oop to
his knees in mud and wather, tumbling over fences, and rowling into
ditches, and bawling oot like mad, wi’ his one eye looking sharp out for
the lad, and his coat-tails flying out behind, and him spattered wi’ mud
all ower, face and all! I tho’t I should ha’ dropped doon, and killed
myself wi’ laughing.’

John laughed so heartily at the mere recollection, that he communicated
the contagion to both his hearers, and all three burst into peals of
laughter, which were renewed again and again, until they could laugh no
longer.

‘He’s a bad ‘un,’ said John, wiping his eyes; ‘a very bad ‘un, is
schoolmeasther.’

‘I can’t bear the sight of him, John,’ said his wife.

‘Coom,’ retorted John, ‘thot’s tidy in you, thot is. If it wa’nt along
o’ you, we shouldn’t know nought aboot ‘un. Thou know’d ‘un first,
Tilly, didn’t thou?’

‘I couldn’t help knowing Fanny Squeers, John,’ returned his wife; ‘she
was an old playmate of mine, you know.’

‘Weel,’ replied John, ‘dean’t I say so, lass? It’s best to be
neighbourly, and keep up old acquaintance loike; and what I say is,
dean’t quarrel if ‘ee can help it. Dinnot think so, Mr. Nickleby?’

‘Certainly,’ returned Nicholas; ‘and you acted upon that principle when
I meet you on horseback on the road, after our memorable evening.’

‘Sure-ly,’ said John. ‘Wa’at I say, I stick by.’

‘And that’s a fine thing to do, and manly too,’ said Nicholas, ‘though
it’s not exactly what we understand by “coming Yorkshire over us” in
London. Miss Squeers is stopping with you, you said in your note.’

‘Yes,’ replied John, ‘Tilly’s bridesmaid; and a queer bridesmaid she be,
too. She wean’t be a bride in a hurry, I reckon.’

‘For shame, John,’ said Mrs. Browdie; with an acute perception of the
joke though, being a bride herself.

‘The groom will be a blessed mun,’ said John, his eyes twinkling at the
idea. ‘He’ll be in luck, he will.’

‘You see, Mr. Nickleby,’ said his wife, ‘that it was in consequence of
her being here, that John wrote to you and fixed tonight, because we
thought that it wouldn’t be pleasant for you to meet, after what has
passed.’

‘Unquestionably. You were quite right in that,’ said Nicholas,
interrupting.

‘Especially,’ observed Mrs. Browdie, looking very sly, ‘after what we
know about past and gone love matters.’

‘We know, indeed!’ said Nicholas, shaking his head. ‘You behaved rather
wickedly there, I suspect.’

‘O’ course she did,’ said John Browdie, passing his huge forefinger
through one of his wife’s pretty ringlets, and looking very proud of
her. ‘She wur always as skittish and full o’ tricks as a--’

‘Well, as a what?’ said his wife.

‘As a woman,’ returned John. ‘Ding! But I dinnot know ought else that
cooms near it.’

‘You were speaking about Miss Squeers,’ said Nicholas, with the view of
stopping some slight connubialities which had begun to pass between Mr
and Mrs. Browdie, and which rendered the position of a third party in
some degree embarrassing, as occasioning him to feel rather in the way
than otherwise.

‘Oh yes,’ rejoined Mrs. Browdie. ‘John ha’ done. John fixed tonight,
because she had settled that she would go and drink tea with her father.
And to make quite sure of there being nothing amiss, and of your being
quite alone with us, he settled to go out there and fetch her home.’

‘That was a very good arrangement,’ said Nicholas, ‘though I am sorry to
be the occasion of so much trouble.’

‘Not the least in the world,’ returned Mrs. Browdie; ‘for we have
looked forward to see you--John and I have--with the greatest possible
pleasure. Do you know, Mr. Nickleby,’ said Mrs. Browdie, with her archest
smile, ‘that I really think Fanny Squeers was very fond of you?’

‘I am very much obliged to her,’ said Nicholas; ‘but upon my word, I
never aspired to making any impression upon her virgin heart.’

‘How you talk!’ tittered Mrs. Browdie. ‘No, but do you know that
really--seriously now and without any joking--I was given to understand
by Fanny herself, that you had made an offer to her, and that you two
were going to be engaged quite solemn and regular.’

‘Was you, ma’am--was you?’ cried a shrill female voice, ‘was you given
to understand that I--I--was going to be engaged to an assassinating
thief that shed the gore of my pa? Do you--do you think, ma’am--that I
was very fond of such dirt beneath my feet, as I couldn’t condescend to
touch with kitchen tongs, without blacking and crocking myself by the
contract? Do you, ma’am--do you? Oh! base and degrading ‘Tilda!’

With these reproaches Miss Squeers flung the door wide open, and
disclosed to the eyes of the astonished Browdies and Nicholas, not only
her own symmetrical form, arrayed in the chaste white garments before
described (a little dirtier), but the form of her brother and father,
the pair of Wackfords.

‘This is the hend, is it?’ continued Miss Squeers, who, being excited,
aspirated her h’s strongly; ‘this is the hend, is it, of all my
forbearance and friendship for that double-faced thing--that viper,
that--that--mermaid?’ (Miss Squeers hesitated a long time for this
last epithet, and brought it out triumphantly at last, as if it quite
clinched the business.) ‘This is the hend, is it, of all my bearing with
her deceitfulness, her lowness, her falseness, her laying herself out to
catch the admiration of vulgar minds, in a way which made me blush for
my--for my--’

‘Gender,’ suggested Mr. Squeers, regarding the spectators with a
malevolent eye--literally A malevolent eye.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Squeers; ‘but I thank my stars that my ma is of the
same--’

‘Hear, hear!’ remarked Mr. Squeers; ‘and I wish she was here to have a
scratch at this company.’

‘This is the hend, is it,’ said Miss Squeers, tossing her head, and
looking contemptuously at the floor, ‘of my taking notice of that
rubbishing creature, and demeaning myself to patronise her?’

‘Oh, come,’ rejoined Mrs. Browdie, disregarding all the endeavours of
her spouse to restrain her, and forcing herself into a front row, ‘don’t
talk such nonsense as that.’

‘Have I not patronised you, ma’am?’ demanded Miss Squeers.

‘No,’ returned Mrs. Browdie.

‘I will not look for blushes in such a quarter,’ said Miss Squeers,
haughtily, ‘for that countenance is a stranger to everything but
hignominiousness and red-faced boldness.’

‘I say,’ interposed John Browdie, nettled by these accumulated attacks
on his wife, ‘dra’ it mild, dra’ it mild.’

‘You, Mr. Browdie,’ said Miss Squeers, taking him up very quickly, ‘I
pity. I have no feeling for you, sir, but one of unliquidated pity.’

‘Oh!’ said John.

‘No,’ said Miss Squeers, looking sideways at her parent, ‘although I AM
a queer bridesmaid, and SHAN’T be a bride in a hurry, and although my
husband WILL be in luck, I entertain no sentiments towards you, sir, but
sentiments of pity.’

Here Miss Squeers looked sideways at her father again, who looked
sideways at her, as much as to say, ‘There you had him.’

‘I know what you’ve got to go through,’ said Miss Squeers, shaking her
curls violently. ‘I know what life is before you, and if you was my
bitterest and deadliest enemy, I could wish you nothing worse.’

‘Couldn’t you wish to be married to him yourself, if that was the case?’
inquired Mrs. Browdie, with great suavity of manner.

‘Oh, ma’am, how witty you are,’ retorted Miss Squeers with a low curtsy,
‘almost as witty, ma’am, as you are clever. How very clever it was in
you, ma’am, to choose a time when I had gone to tea with my pa, and
was sure not to come back without being fetched! What a pity you never
thought that other people might be as clever as yourself and spoil your
plans!’

‘You won’t vex me, child, with such airs as these,’ said the late Miss
Price, assuming the matron.

‘Don’t MISSIS me, ma’am, if you please,’ returned Miss Squeers, sharply.
‘I’ll not bear it. Is THIS the hend--’

‘Dang it a’,’ cried John Browdie, impatiently. ‘Say thee say out, Fanny,
and mak’ sure it’s the end, and dinnot ask nobody whether it is or not.’

‘Thanking you for your advice which was not required, Mr. Browdie,’
returned Miss Squeers, with laborious politeness, ‘have the goodness not
to presume to meddle with my Christian name. Even my pity shall never
make me forget what’s due to myself, Mr. Browdie. ‘Tilda,’ said Miss
Squeers, with such a sudden accession of violence that John started in
his boots, ‘I throw you off for ever, miss. I abandon you. I renounce
you. I wouldn’t,’ cried Miss Squeers in a solemn voice, ‘have a child
named ‘Tilda, not to save it from its grave.’

‘As for the matther o’ that,’ observed John, ‘it’ll be time eneaf to
think aboot neaming of it when it cooms.’

‘John!’ interposed his wife, ‘don’t tease her.’

‘Oh! Tease, indeed!’ cried Miss Squeers, bridling up. ‘Tease, indeed!
He, he! Tease, too! No, don’t tease her. Consider her feelings, pray!’

‘If it’s fated that listeners are never to hear any good of themselves,’
said Mrs. Browdie, ‘I can’t help it, and I am very sorry for it. But I
will say, Fanny, that times out of number I have spoken so kindly of you
behind your back, that even you could have found no fault with what I
said.’

‘Oh, I dare say not, ma’am!’ cried Miss Squeers, with another curtsy.
‘Best thanks to you for your goodness, and begging and praying you not
to be hard upon me another time!’

‘I don’t know,’ resumed Mrs. Browdie, ‘that I have said anything very bad
of you, even now. At all events, what I did say was quite true; but if I
have, I am very sorry for it, and I beg your pardon. You have said much
worse of me, scores of times, Fanny; but I have never borne any malice
to you, and I hope you’ll not bear any to me.’

Miss Squeers made no more direct reply than surveying her former friend
from top to toe, and elevating her nose in the air with ineffable
disdain. But some indistinct allusions to a ‘puss,’ and a ‘minx,’ and a
‘contemptible creature,’ escaped her; and this, together with a severe
biting of the lips, great difficulty in swallowing, and very frequent
comings and goings of breath, seemed to imply that feelings were
swelling in Miss Squeers’s bosom too great for utterance.

While the foregoing conversation was proceeding, Master Wackford,
finding himself unnoticed, and feeling his preponderating inclinations
strong upon him, had by little and little sidled up to the table and
attacked the food with such slight skirmishing as drawing his fingers
round and round the inside of the plates, and afterwards sucking them
with infinite relish; picking the bread, and dragging the pieces over
the surface of the butter; pocketing lumps of sugar, pretending all
the time to be absorbed in thought; and so forth. Finding that no
interference was attempted with these small liberties, he gradually
mounted to greater, and, after helping himself to a moderately good cold
collation, was, by this time, deep in the pie.

Nothing of this had been unobserved by Mr. Squeers, who, so long as the
attention of the company was fixed upon other objects, hugged himself to
think that his son and heir should be fattening at the enemy’s expense.
But there being now an appearance of a temporary calm, in which the
proceedings of little Wackford could scarcely fail to be observed,
he feigned to be aware of the circumstance for the first time, and
inflicted upon the face of that young gentleman a slap that made the
very tea-cups ring.

‘Eating!’ cried Mr. Squeers, ‘of what his father’s enemies has left! It’s
fit to go and poison you, you unnat’ral boy.’

‘It wean’t hurt him,’ said John, apparently very much relieved by the
prospect of having a man in the quarrel; ‘let’ un eat. I wish the whole
school was here. I’d give’em soom’at to stay their unfort’nate stomachs
wi’, if I spent the last penny I had!’

Squeers scowled at him with the worst and most malicious expression of
which his face was capable--it was a face of remarkable capability, too,
in that way--and shook his fist stealthily.

‘Coom, coom, schoolmeasther,’ said John, ‘dinnot make a fool o’ thyself;
for if I was to sheake mine--only once--thou’d fa’ doon wi’ the wind o’
it.’

‘It was you, was it,’ returned Squeers, ‘that helped off my runaway boy?
It was you, was it?’

‘Me!’ returned John, in a loud tone. ‘Yes, it wa’ me, coom; wa’at o’
that? It wa’ me. Noo then!’

‘You hear him say he did it, my child!’ said Squeers, appealing to his
daughter. ‘You hear him say he did it!’

‘Did it!’ cried John. ‘I’ll tell ‘ee more; hear this, too. If thou’d
got another roonaway boy, I’d do it agean. If thou’d got twonty roonaway
boys, I’d do it twonty times ower, and twonty more to thot; and I
tell thee more,’ said John, ‘noo my blood is oop, that thou’rt an old
ra’ascal; and that it’s weel for thou, thou be’est an old ‘un, or I’d
ha’ poonded thee to flour when thou told an honest mun hoo thou’d licked
that poor chap in t’ coorch.’

‘An honest man!’ cried Squeers, with a sneer.

‘Ah! an honest man,’ replied John; ‘honest in ought but ever putting
legs under seame table wi’ such as thou.’

‘Scandal!’ said Squeers, exultingly. ‘Two witnesses to it; Wackford
knows the nature of an oath, he does; we shall have you there, sir.
Rascal, eh?’ Mr. Squeers took out his pocketbook and made a note of it.
‘Very good. I should say that was worth full twenty pound at the next
assizes, without the honesty, sir.’

‘’Soizes,’ cried John, ‘thou’d betther not talk to me o’ ‘Soizes.
Yorkshire schools have been shown up at ‘Soizes afore noo, mun, and it’s
a ticklish soobjact to revive, I can tell ye.’

Mr. Squeers shook his head in a threatening manner, looking very white
with passion; and taking his daughter’s arm, and dragging little
Wackford by the hand, retreated towards the door.

‘As for you,’ said Squeers, turning round and addressing Nicholas,
who, as he had caused him to smart pretty soundly on a former occasion,
purposely abstained from taking any part in the discussion, ‘see if I
ain’t down upon you before long. You’ll go a kidnapping of boys, will
you? Take care their fathers don’t turn up--mark that--take care their
fathers don’t turn up, and send ‘em back to me to do as I like with, in
spite of you.’

‘I am not afraid of that,’ replied Nicholas, shrugging his shoulders
contemptuously, and turning away.

‘Ain’t you!’ retorted Squeers, with a diabolical look. ‘Now then, come
along.’

‘I leave such society, with my pa, for Hever,’ said Miss Squeers,
looking contemptuously and loftily round. ‘I am defiled by breathing
the air with such creatures. Poor Mr. Browdie! He! he! he! I do pity him,
that I do; he’s so deluded. He! he! he!--Artful and designing ‘Tilda!’

With this sudden relapse into the sternest and most majestic wrath, Miss
Squeers swept from the room; and having sustained her dignity until the
last possible moment, was heard to sob and scream and struggle in the
passage.

John Browdie remained standing behind the table, looking from his wife
to Nicholas, and back again, with his mouth wide open, until his hand
accidentally fell upon the tankard of ale, when he took it up, and
having obscured his features therewith for some time, drew a long
breath, handed it over to Nicholas, and rang the bell.

‘Here, waither,’ said John, briskly. ‘Look alive here. Tak’ these things
awa’, and let’s have soomat broiled for sooper--vary comfortable and
plenty o’ it--at ten o’clock. Bring soom brandy and soom wather, and a
pair o’ slippers--the largest pair in the house--and be quick aboot it.
Dash ma wig!’ said John, rubbing his hands, ‘there’s no ganging oot to
neeght, noo, to fetch anybody whoam, and ecod, we’ll begin to spend the
evening in airnest.’



CHAPTER 43

Officiates as a kind of Gentleman Usher, in bringing various People
together


The storm had long given place to a calm the most profound, and the
evening was pretty far advanced--indeed supper was over, and the
process of digestion proceeding as favourably as, under the influence of
complete tranquillity, cheerful conversation, and a moderate allowance
of brandy-and-water, most wise men conversant with the anatomy and
functions of the human frame will consider that it ought to have
proceeded, when the three friends, or as one might say, both in a civil
and religious sense, and with proper deference and regard to the holy
state of matrimony, the two friends, (Mr. and Mrs. Browdie counting as
no more than one,) were startled by the noise of loud and angry
threatenings below stairs, which presently attained so high a pitch,
and were conveyed besides in language so towering, sanguinary, and
ferocious, that it could hardly have been surpassed, if there had
actually been a Saracen’s head then present in the establishment,
supported on the shoulders and surmounting the trunk of a real, live,
furious, and most unappeasable Saracen.

This turmoil, instead of quickly subsiding after the first outburst,
(as turmoils not unfrequently do, whether in taverns, legislative
assemblies, or elsewhere,) into a mere grumbling and growling squabble,
increased every moment; and although the whole din appeared to be
raised by but one pair of lungs, yet that one pair was of so powerful
a quality, and repeated such words as ‘scoundrel,’ ‘rascal,’ ‘insolent
puppy,’ and a variety of expletives no less flattering to the party
addressed, with such great relish and strength of tone, that a dozen
voices raised in concert under any ordinary circumstances would have
made far less uproar and created much smaller consternation.

‘Why, what’s the matter?’ said Nicholas, moving hastily towards the
door.

John Browdie was striding in the same direction when Mrs. Browdie turned
pale, and, leaning back in her chair, requested him with a faint voice
to take notice, that if he ran into any danger it was her intention to
fall into hysterics immediately, and that the consequences might be more
serious than he thought for. John looked rather disconcerted by this
intelligence, though there was a lurking grin on his face at the same
time; but, being quite unable to keep out of the fray, he compromised
the matter by tucking his wife’s arm under his own, and, thus
accompanied, following Nicholas downstairs with all speed.

The passage outside the coffee-room door was the scene of disturbance,
and here were congregated the coffee-room customers and waiters,
together with two or three coachmen and helpers from the yard. These had
hastily assembled round a young man who from his appearance might have
been a year or two older than Nicholas, and who, besides having given
utterance to the defiances just now described, seemed to have proceeded
to even greater lengths in his indignation, inasmuch as his feet had no
other covering than a pair of stockings, while a couple of slippers lay
at no great distance from the head of a prostrate figure in an opposite
corner, who bore the appearance of having been shot into his present
retreat by means of a kick, and complimented by having the slippers
flung about his ears afterwards.

The coffee-room customers, and the waiters, and the coachmen, and the
helpers--not to mention a barmaid who was looking on from behind an
open sash window--seemed at that moment, if a spectator might judge from
their winks, nods, and muttered exclamations, strongly disposed to take
part against the young gentleman in the stockings. Observing this, and
that the young gentleman was nearly of his own age and had in nothing
the appearance of an habitual brawler, Nicholas, impelled by such
feelings as will influence young men sometimes, felt a very strong
disposition to side with the weaker party, and so thrust himself at once
into the centre of the group, and in a more emphatic tone, perhaps, than
circumstances might seem to warrant, demanded what all that noise was
about.

‘Hallo!’ said one of the men from the yard, ‘this is somebody in
disguise, this is.’

‘Room for the eldest son of the Emperor of Roosher, gen’l’men!’ cried
another fellow.

Disregarding these sallies, which were uncommonly well received, as
sallies at the expense of the best-dressed persons in a crowd usually
are, Nicholas glanced carelessly round, and addressing the young
gentleman, who had by this time picked up his slippers and thrust his
feet into them, repeated his inquiries with a courteous air.

‘A mere nothing!’ he replied.

At this a murmur was raised by the lookers-on, and some of the boldest
cried, ‘Oh, indeed!--Wasn’t it though?--Nothing, eh?--He called that
nothing, did he? Lucky for him if he found it nothing.’ These and many
other expressions of ironical disapprobation having been exhausted, two
or three of the out-of-door fellows began to hustle Nicholas and the
young gentleman who had made the noise: stumbling against them by
accident, and treading on their toes, and so forth. But this being a
round game, and one not necessarily limited to three or four players,
was open to John Browdie too, who, bursting into the little crowd--to
the great terror of his wife--and falling about in all directions,
now to the right, now to the left, now forwards, now backwards, and
accidentally driving his elbow through the hat of the tallest helper,
who had been particularly active, speedily caused the odds to wear a
very different appearance; while more than one stout fellow limped away
to a respectful distance, anathematising with tears in his eyes the
heavy tread and ponderous feet of the burly Yorkshireman.

‘Let me see him do it again,’ said he who had been kicked into the
corner, rising as he spoke, apparently more from the fear of John
Browdie’s inadvertently treading upon him, than from any desire to place
himself on equal terms with his late adversary. ‘Let me see him do it
again. That’s all.’

‘Let me hear you make those remarks again,’ said the young man, ‘and
I’ll knock that head of yours in among the wine-glasses behind you
there.’

Here a waiter who had been rubbing his hands in excessive enjoyment
of the scene, so long as only the breaking of heads was in question,
adjured the spectators with great earnestness to fetch the police,
declaring that otherwise murder would be surely done, and that he was
responsible for all the glass and china on the premises.

‘No one need trouble himself to stir,’ said the young gentleman, ‘I am
going to remain in the house all night, and shall be found here in the
morning if there is any assault to answer for.’

‘What did you strike him for?’ asked one of the bystanders.

‘Ah! what did you strike him for?’ demanded the others.

The unpopular gentleman looked coolly round, and addressing himself to
Nicholas, said:

‘You inquired just now what was the matter here. The matter is simply
this. Yonder person, who was drinking with a friend in the coffee-room
when I took my seat there for half an hour before going to bed, (for I
have just come off a journey, and preferred stopping here tonight, to
going home at this hour, where I was not expected until tomorrow,) chose
to express himself in very disrespectful, and insolently familiar
terms, of a young lady, whom I recognised from his description and other
circumstances, and whom I have the honour to know. As he spoke loud
enough to be overheard by the other guests who were present, I informed
him most civilly that he was mistaken in his conjectures, which were
of an offensive nature, and requested him to forbear. He did so for a
little time, but as he chose to renew his conversation when leaving the
room, in a more offensive strain than before, I could not refrain
from making after him, and facilitating his departure by a kick, which
reduced him to the posture in which you saw him just now. I am the
best judge of my own affairs, I take it,’ said the young man, who had
certainly not quite recovered from his recent heat; ‘if anybody here
thinks proper to make this quarrel his own, I have not the smallest
earthly objection, I do assure him.’

Of all possible courses of proceeding under the circumstances detailed,
there was certainly not one which, in his then state of mind, could
have appeared more laudable to Nicholas than this. There were not many
subjects of dispute which at that moment could have come home to his
own breast more powerfully, for having the unknown uppermost in his
thoughts, it naturally occurred to him that he would have done just the
same if any audacious gossiper durst have presumed in his hearing to
speak lightly of her. Influenced by these considerations, he espoused
the young gentleman’s quarrel with great warmth, protesting that he had
done quite right, and that he respected him for it; which John Browdie
(albeit not quite clear as to the merits) immediately protested too,
with not inferior vehemence.

‘Let him take care, that’s all,’ said the defeated party, who was being
rubbed down by a waiter, after his recent fall on the dusty boards. ‘He
don’t knock me about for nothing, I can tell him that. A pretty state of
things, if a man isn’t to admire a handsome girl without being beat to
pieces for it!’

This reflection appeared to have great weight with the young lady in
the bar, who (adjusting her cap as she spoke, and glancing at a mirror)
declared that it would be a very pretty state of things indeed; and that
if people were to be punished for actions so innocent and natural as
that, there would be more people to be knocked down than there would
be people to knock them down, and that she wondered what the gentleman
meant by it, that she did.

‘My dear girl,’ said the young gentleman in a low voice, advancing
towards the sash window.

‘Nonsense, sir!’ replied the young lady sharply, smiling though as she
turned aside, and biting her lip, (whereat Mrs. Browdie, who was still
standing on the stairs, glanced at her with disdain, and called to her
husband to come away).

‘No, but listen to me,’ said the young man. ‘If admiration of a pretty
face were criminal, I should be the most hopeless person alive, for I
cannot resist one. It has the most extraordinary effect upon me, checks
and controls me in the most furious and obstinate mood. You see what an
effect yours has had upon me already.’

‘Oh, that’s very pretty,’ replied the young lady, tossing her head,
‘but--’

‘Yes, I know it’s very pretty,’ said the young man, looking with an air
of admiration in the barmaid’s face; ‘I said so, you know, just this
moment. But beauty should be spoken of respectfully--respectfully, and
in proper terms, and with a becoming sense of its worth and excellence,
whereas this fellow has no more notion--’

The young lady interrupted the conversation at this point, by thrusting
her head out of the bar-window, and inquiring of the waiter in a shrill
voice whether that young man who had been knocked down was going to
stand in the passage all night, or whether the entrance was to be left
clear for other people. The waiters taking the hint, and communicating
it to the hostlers, were not slow to change their tone too, and the
result was, that the unfortunate victim was bundled out in a twinkling.

‘I am sure I have seen that fellow before,’ said Nicholas.

‘Indeed!’ replied his new acquaintance.

‘I am certain of it,’ said Nicholas, pausing to reflect. ‘Where can I
have--stop!--yes, to be sure--he belongs to a register-office up at the
west end of the town. I knew I recollected the face.’

It was, indeed, Tom, the ugly clerk.

‘That’s odd enough!’ said Nicholas, ruminating upon the strange manner
in which the register-office seemed to start up and stare him in the
face every now and then, and when he least expected it.

‘I am much obliged to you for your kind advocacy of my cause when it
most needed an advocate,’ said the young man, laughing, and drawing a
card from his pocket. ‘Perhaps you’ll do me the favour to let me know
where I can thank you.’

Nicholas took the card, and glancing at it involuntarily as he returned
the compliment, evinced very great surprise.

‘Mr. Frank Cheeryble!’ said Nicholas. ‘Surely not the nephew of Cheeryble
Brothers, who is expected tomorrow!’

‘I don’t usually call myself the nephew of the firm,’ returned Mr. Frank,
good-humouredly; ‘but of the two excellent individuals who compose it,
I am proud to say I AM the nephew. And you, I see, are Mr. Nickleby, of
whom I have heard so much! This is a most unexpected meeting, but not
the less welcome, I assure you.’

Nicholas responded to these compliments with others of the same kind,
and they shook hands warmly. Then he introduced John Browdie, who had
remained in a state of great admiration ever since the young lady in
the bar had been so skilfully won over to the right side. Then Mrs. John
Browdie was introduced, and finally they all went upstairs together
and spent the next half-hour with great satisfaction and mutual
entertainment; Mrs. John Browdie beginning the conversation by
declaring that of all the made-up things she ever saw, that young woman
below-stairs was the vainest and the plainest.

This Mr. Frank Cheeryble, although, to judge from what had recently taken
place, a hot-headed young man (which is not an absolute miracle and
phenomenon in nature), was a sprightly, good-humoured, pleasant fellow,
with much both in his countenance and disposition that reminded Nicholas
very strongly of the kind-hearted brothers. His manner was as unaffected
as theirs, and his demeanour full of that heartiness which, to most
people who have anything generous in their composition, is peculiarly
prepossessing. Add to this, that he was good-looking and intelligent,
had a plentiful share of vivacity, was extremely cheerful, and
accommodated himself in five minutes’ time to all John Browdie’s
oddities with as much ease as if he had known him from a boy; and it
will be a source of no great wonder that, when they parted for the
night, he had produced a most favourable impression, not only upon the
worthy Yorkshireman and his wife, but upon Nicholas also, who, revolving
all these things in his mind as he made the best of his way home,
arrived at the conclusion that he had laid the foundation of a most
agreeable and desirable acquaintance.

‘But it’s a most extraordinary thing about that register-office fellow!’
thought Nicholas. ‘Is it likely that this nephew can know anything about
that beautiful girl? When Tim Linkinwater gave me to understand the
other day that he was coming to take a share in the business here, he
said he had been superintending it in Germany for four years, and that
during the last six months he had been engaged in establishing an agency
in the north of England. That’s four years and a half--four years and a
half. She can’t be more than seventeen--say eighteen at the outside. She
was quite a child when he went away, then. I should say he knew nothing
about her and had never seen her, so HE can give me no information. At
all events,’ thought Nicholas, coming to the real point in his mind,
‘there can be no danger of any prior occupation of her affections in
that quarter; that’s quite clear.’

Is selfishness a necessary ingredient in the composition of that passion
called love, or does it deserve all the fine things which poets, in the
exercise of their undoubted vocation, have said of it? There are, no
doubt, authenticated instances of gentlemen having given up ladies
and ladies having given up gentlemen to meritorious rivals, under
circumstances of great high-mindedness; but is it quite established
that the majority of such ladies and gentlemen have not made a virtue of
necessity, and nobly resigned what was beyond their reach; as a private
soldier might register a vow never to accept the order of the Garter, or
a poor curate of great piety and learning, but of no family--save a very
large family of children--might renounce a bishopric?

Here was Nicholas Nickleby, who would have scorned the thought of
counting how the chances stood of his rising in favour or fortune with
the brothers Cheeryble, now that their nephew had returned, already deep
in calculations whether that same nephew was likely to rival him in the
affections of the fair unknown--discussing the matter with himself too,
as gravely as if, with that one exception, it were all settled; and
recurring to the subject again and again, and feeling quite indignant
and ill-used at the notion of anybody else making love to one with
whom he had never exchanged a word in all his life. To be sure, he
exaggerated rather than depreciated the merits of his new acquaintance;
but still he took it as a kind of personal offence that he should have
any merits at all--in the eyes of this particular young lady, that is;
for elsewhere he was quite welcome to have as many as he pleased. There
was undoubted selfishness in all this, and yet Nicholas was of a most
free and generous nature, with as few mean or sordid thoughts, perhaps,
as ever fell to the lot of any man; and there is no reason to suppose
that, being in love, he felt and thought differently from other people
in the like sublime condition.

He did not stop to set on foot an inquiry into his train of thought or
state of feeling, however; but went thinking on all the way home,
and continued to dream on in the same strain all night. For, having
satisfied himself that Frank Cheeryble could have no knowledge of, or
acquaintance with, the mysterious young lady, it began to occur to him
that even he himself might never see her again; upon which hypothesis he
built up a very ingenious succession of tormenting ideas which answered
his purpose even better than the vision of Mr. Frank Cheeryble, and
tantalised and worried him, waking and sleeping.

Notwithstanding all that has been said and sung to the contrary,
there is no well-established case of morning having either deferred
or hastened its approach by the term of an hour or so for the mere
gratification of a splenetic feeling against some unoffending lover:
the sun having, in the discharge of his public duty, as the books
of precedent report, invariably risen according to the almanacs, and
without suffering himself to be swayed by any private considerations.
So, morning came as usual, and with it business-hours, and with them Mr
Frank Cheeryble, and with him a long train of smiles and welcomes from
the worthy brothers, and a more grave and clerk-like, but scarcely less
hearty reception from Mr. Timothy Linkinwater.

‘That Mr. Frank and Mr. Nickleby should have met last night,’ said
Tim Linkinwater, getting slowly off his stool, and looking round the
counting-house with his back planted against the desk, as was his custom
when he had anything very particular to say: ‘that those two young men
should have met last night in that manner is, I say, a coincidence, a
remarkable coincidence. Why, I don’t believe now,’ added Tim, taking off
his spectacles, and smiling as with gentle pride, ‘that there’s such a
place in all the world for coincidences as London is!’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Mr. Frank; ‘but--’

‘Don’t know about it, Mr. Francis!’ interrupted Tim, with an obstinate
air. ‘Well, but let us know. If there is any better place for such
things, where is it? Is it in Europe? No, that it isn’t. Is it in Asia?
Why, of course it’s not. Is it in Africa? Not a bit of it. Is it in
America? YOU know better than that, at all events. Well, then,’ said
Tim, folding his arms resolutely, ‘where is it?’

‘I was not about to dispute the point, Tim,’ said young Cheeryble,
laughing. ‘I am not such a heretic as that. All I was going to say was,
that I hold myself under an obligation to the coincidence, that’s all.’

‘Oh! if you don’t dispute it,’ said Tim, quite satisfied, ‘that’s
another thing. I’ll tell you what though. I wish you had. I wish you
or anybody would. I would so put that man down,’ said Tim, tapping the
forefinger of his left hand emphatically with his spectacles, ‘so put
that man down by argument--’

It was quite impossible to find language to express the degree of mental
prostration to which such an adventurous wight would be reduced in the
keen encounter with Tim Linkinwater, so Tim gave up the rest of his
declaration in pure lack of words, and mounted his stool again.

‘We may consider ourselves, brother Ned,’ said Charles, after he had
patted Tim Linkinwater approvingly on the back, ‘very fortunate in
having two such young men about us as our nephew Frank and Mr. Nickleby.
It should be a source of great satisfaction and pleasure to us.’

‘Certainly, Charles, certainly,’ returned the other.

‘Of Tim,’ added brother Ned, ‘I say nothing whatever, because Tim is
a mere child--an infant--a nobody that we never think of or take into
account at all. Tim, you villain, what do you say to that, sir?’

‘I am jealous of both of ‘em,’ said Tim, ‘and mean to look out for
another situation; so provide yourselves, gentlemen, if you please.’

Tim thought this such an exquisite, unparalleled, and most extraordinary
joke, that he laid his pen upon the inkstand, and rather tumbling off
his stool than getting down with his usual deliberation, laughed till he
was quite faint, shaking his head all the time so that little particles
of powder flew palpably about the office. Nor were the brothers at all
behind-hand, for they laughed almost as heartily at the ludicrous idea
of any voluntary separation between themselves and old Tim. Nicholas
and Mr. Frank laughed quite boisterously, perhaps to conceal some other
emotion awakened by this little incident, (and so, indeed, did the three
old fellows after the first burst,) so perhaps there was as much keen
enjoyment and relish in that laugh, altogether, as the politest assembly
ever derived from the most poignant witticism uttered at any one
person’s expense.

‘Mr. Nickleby,’ said brother Charles, calling him aside, and taking him
kindly by the hand, ‘I--I--am anxious, my dear sir, to see that you are
properly and comfortably settled in the cottage. We cannot allow those
who serve us well to labour under any privation or discomfort that it is
in our power to remove. I wish, too, to see your mother and sister: to
know them, Mr. Nickleby, and have an opportunity of relieving their minds
by assuring them that any trifling service we have been able to do
them is a great deal more than repaid by the zeal and ardour you
display.--Not a word, my dear sir, I beg. Tomorrow is Sunday. I shall
make bold to come out at teatime, and take the chance of finding you at
home; if you are not, you know, or the ladies should feel a delicacy in
being intruded on, and would rather not be known to me just now, why
I can come again another time, any other time would do for me. Let it
remain upon that understanding. Brother Ned, my dear fellow, let me have
a word with you this way.’

The twins went out of the office arm-in-arm, and Nicholas, who saw in
this act of kindness, and many others of which he had been the subject
that morning, only so many delicate renewals on the arrival of their
nephew of the kind assurance which the brothers had given him in his
absence, could scarcely feel sufficient admiration and gratitude for
such extraordinary consideration.

The intelligence that they were to have a visitor--and such a
visitor--next day, awakened in the breast of Mrs. Nickleby mingled
feelings of exultation and regret; for whereas on the one hand she
hailed it as an omen of her speedy restoration to good society and the
almost-forgotten pleasures of morning calls and evening tea-drinkings,
she could not, on the other, but reflect with bitterness of spirit on
the absence of a silver teapot with an ivory knob on the lid, and a
milk-jug to match, which had been the pride of her heart in days of
yore, and had been kept from year’s end to year’s end wrapped up in
wash-leather on a certain top shelf which now presented itself in lively
colours to her sorrowing imagination.

‘I wonder who’s got that spice-box,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, shaking her
head. ‘It used to stand in the left-hand corner, next but two to the
pickled onions. You remember that spice-box, Kate?’

‘Perfectly well, mama.’

‘I shouldn’t think you did, Kate,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby, in a severe
manner, ‘talking about it in that cold and unfeeling way! If there
is any one thing that vexes me in these losses more than the losses
themselves, I do protest and declare,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, rubbing her
nose with an impassioned air, ‘that it is to have people about me who
take things with such provoking calmness.’

‘My dear mama,’ said Kate, stealing her arm round her mother’s neck,
‘why do you say what I know you cannot seriously mean or think, or why
be angry with me for being happy and content? You and Nicholas are left
to me, we are together once again, and what regard can I have for a few
trifling things of which we never feel the want? When I have seen all
the misery and desolation that death can bring, and known the lonesome
feeling of being solitary and alone in crowds, and all the agony of
separation in grief and poverty when we most needed comfort and support
from each other, can you wonder that I look upon this as a place of such
delicious quiet and rest, that with you beside me I have nothing to
wish for or regret? There was a time, and not long since, when all
the comforts of our old home did come back upon me, I own, very
often--oftener than you would think perhaps--but I affected to care
nothing for them, in the hope that you would so be brought to regret
them the less. I was not insensible, indeed. I might have felt happier
if I had been. Dear mama,’ said Kate, in great agitation, ‘I know no
difference between this home and that in which we were all so happy
for so many years, except that the kindest and gentlest heart that ever
ached on earth has passed in peace to heaven.’

‘Kate my dear, Kate,’ cried Mrs. Nickleby, folding her in her arms.

‘I have so often thought,’ sobbed Kate, ‘of all his kind words--of the
last time he looked into my little room, as he passed upstairs to bed,
and said “God bless you, darling.” There was a paleness in his face,
mama--the broken heart--I know it was--I little thought so--then--’

A gush of tears came to her relief, and Kate laid her head upon her
mother’s breast, and wept like a little child.

It is an exquisite and beautiful thing in our nature, that when the
heart is touched and softened by some tranquil happiness or affectionate
feeling, the memory of the dead comes over it most powerfully and
irresistibly. It would almost seem as though our better thoughts and
sympathies were charms, in virtue of which the soul is enabled to hold
some vague and mysterious intercourse with the spirits of those whom
we dearly loved in life. Alas! how often and how long may those patient
angels hover above us, watching for the spell which is so seldom
uttered, and so soon forgotten!

Poor Mrs. Nickleby, accustomed to give ready utterance to whatever
came uppermost in her mind, had never conceived the possibility of her
daughter’s dwelling upon these thoughts in secret, the more especially
as no hard trial or querulous reproach had ever drawn them from her. But
now, when the happiness of all that Nicholas had just told them, and
of their new and peaceful life, brought these recollections so strongly
upon Kate that she could not suppress them, Mrs. Nickleby began to have
a glimmering that she had been rather thoughtless now and then, and was
conscious of something like self-reproach as she embraced her daughter,
and yielded to the emotions which such a conversation naturally
awakened.

There was a mighty bustle that night, and a vast quantity of preparation
for the expected visitor, and a very large nosegay was brought from a
gardener’s hard by, and cut up into a number of very small ones, with
which Mrs. Nickleby would have garnished the little sitting-room, in
a style that certainly could not have failed to attract anybody’s
attention, if Kate had not offered to spare her the trouble, and
arranged them in the prettiest and neatest manner possible. If the
cottage ever looked pretty, it must have been on such a bright and
sunshiny day as the next day was. But Smike’s pride in the garden,
or Mrs. Nickleby’s in the condition of the furniture, or Kate’s in
everything, was nothing to the pride with which Nicholas looked at Kate
herself; and surely the costliest mansion in all England might have
found in her beautiful face and graceful form its most exquisite and
peerless ornament.

About six o’clock in the afternoon Mrs. Nickleby was thrown into a great
flutter of spirits by the long-expected knock at the door, nor was this
flutter at all composed by the audible tread of two pair of boots in the
passage, which Mrs. Nickleby augured, in a breathless state, must be ‘the
two Mr. Cheerybles;’ as it certainly was, though not the two Mrs. Nickleby
expected, because it was Mr. Charles Cheeryble, and his nephew, Mr. Frank,
who made a thousand apologies for his intrusion, which Mrs. Nickleby
(having tea-spoons enough and to spare for all) most graciously
received. Nor did the appearance of this unexpected visitor occasion
the least embarrassment, (save in Kate, and that only to the extent of
a blush or two at first,) for the old gentleman was so kind and cordial,
and the young gentleman imitated him in this respect so well, that the
usual stiffness and formality of a first meeting showed no signs of
appearing, and Kate really more than once detected herself in the very
act of wondering when it was going to begin.

At the tea-table there was plenty of conversation on a great variety of
subjects, nor were there wanting jocose matters of discussion, such as
they were; for young Mr. Cheeryble’s recent stay in Germany happening to
be alluded to, old Mr. Cheeryble informed the company that the aforesaid
young Mr. Cheeryble was suspected to have fallen deeply in love with
the daughter of a certain German burgomaster. This accusation young
Mr. Cheeryble most indignantly repelled, upon which Mrs. Nickleby slyly
remarked, that she suspected, from the very warmth of the denial, there
must be something in it. Young Mr. Cheeryble then earnestly entreated old
Mr. Cheeryble to confess that it was all a jest, which old Mr. Cheeryble
at last did, young Mr. Cheeryble being so much in earnest about it,
that--as Mrs. Nickleby said many thousand times afterwards in recalling
the scene--he ‘quite coloured,’ which she rightly considered a memorable
circumstance, and one worthy of remark, young men not being as a class
remarkable for modesty or self-denial, especially when there is a lady
in the case, when, if they colour at all, it is rather their practice to
colour the story, and not themselves.

After tea there was a walk in the garden, and the evening being very
fine they strolled out at the garden-gate into some lanes and bye-roads,
and sauntered up and down until it grew quite dark. The time seemed to
pass very quickly with all the party. Kate went first, leaning upon
her brother’s arm, and talking with him and Mr. Frank Cheeryble; and
Mrs. Nickleby and the elder gentleman followed at a short distance, the
kindness of the good merchant, his interest in the welfare of Nicholas,
and his admiration of Kate, so operating upon the good lady’s feelings,
that the usual current of her speech was confined within very narrow
and circumscribed limits. Smike (who, if he had ever been an object of
interest in his life, had been one that day) accompanied them, joining
sometimes one group and sometimes the other, as brother Charles, laying
his hand upon his shoulder, bade him walk with him, or Nicholas, looking
smilingly round, beckoned him to come and talk with the old friend who
understood him best, and who could win a smile into his careworn face
when none else could.

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of
a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal
virtues--faith and hope. This was the pride which swelled Mrs. Nickleby’s
heart that night, and this it was which left upon her face, glistening
in the light when they returned home, traces of the most grateful tears
she had ever shed.

There was a quiet mirth about the little supper, which harmonised
exactly with this tone of feeling, and at length the two gentlemen
took their leave. There was one circumstance in the leave-taking which
occasioned a vast deal of smiling and pleasantry, and that was, that Mr
Frank Cheeryble offered his hand to Kate twice over, quite forgetting
that he had bade her adieu already. This was held by the elder Mr
Cheeryble to be a convincing proof that he was thinking of his German
flame, and the jest occasioned immense laughter. So easy is it to move
light hearts.

In short, it was a day of serene and tranquil happiness; and as we
all have some bright day--many of us, let us hope, among a crowd of
others--to which we revert with particular delight, so this one was
often looked back to afterwards, as holding a conspicuous place in the
calendar of those who shared it.

Was there one exception, and that one he who needed to have been most
happy?

Who was that who, in the silence of his own chamber, sunk upon his knees
to pray as his first friend had taught him, and folding his hands and
stretching them wildly in the air, fell upon his face in a passion of
bitter grief?



CHAPTER 44

Mr. Ralph Nickleby cuts an old Acquaintance. It would also appear from
the Contents hereof, that a Joke, even between Husband and Wife, may be
sometimes carried too far


There are some men who, living with the one object of enriching
themselves, no matter by what means, and being perfectly conscious of
the baseness and rascality of the means which they will use every day
towards this end, affect nevertheless--even to themselves--a high tone
of moral rectitude, and shake their heads and sigh over the depravity of
the world. Some of the craftiest scoundrels that ever walked this earth,
or rather--for walking implies, at least, an erect position and the
bearing of a man--that ever crawled and crept through life by its
dirtiest and narrowest ways, will gravely jot down in diaries the
events of every day, and keep a regular debtor and creditor account with
Heaven, which shall always show a floating balance in their own favour.
Whether this is a gratuitous (the only gratuitous) part of the falsehood
and trickery of such men’s lives, or whether they really hope to cheat
Heaven itself, and lay up treasure in the next world by the same process
which has enabled them to lay up treasure in this--not to question
how it is, so it is. And, doubtless, such book-keeping (like certain
autobiographies which have enlightened the world) cannot fail to prove
serviceable, in the one respect of sparing the recording Angel some time
and labour.

Ralph Nickleby was not a man of this stamp. Stern, unyielding, dogged,
and impenetrable, Ralph cared for nothing in life, or beyond it, save
the gratification of two passions, avarice, the first and predominant
appetite of his nature, and hatred, the second. Affecting to consider
himself but a type of all humanity, he was at little pains to conceal
his true character from the world in general, and in his own heart he
exulted over and cherished every bad design as it had birth. The only
scriptural admonition that Ralph Nickleby heeded, in the letter, was
‘know thyself.’ He knew himself well, and choosing to imagine that all
mankind were cast in the same mould, hated them; for, though no man
hates himself, the coldest among us having too much self-love for that,
yet most men unconsciously judge the world from themselves, and it will
be very generally found that those who sneer habitually at human
nature, and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant
samples.

But the present business of these adventures is with Ralph himself, who
stood regarding Newman Noggs with a heavy frown, while that worthy took
off his fingerless gloves, and spreading them carefully on the palm of
his left hand, and flattening them with his right to take the creases
out, proceeded to roll them up with an absent air as if he were utterly
regardless of all things else, in the deep interest of the ceremonial.

‘Gone out of town!’ said Ralph, slowly. ‘A mistake of yours. Go back
again.’

‘No mistake,’ returned Newman. ‘Not even going; gone.’

‘Has he turned girl or baby?’ muttered Ralph, with a fretful gesture.

‘I don’t know,’ said Newman, ‘but he’s gone.’

The repetition of the word ‘gone’ seemed to afford Newman Noggs
inexpressible delight, in proportion as it annoyed Ralph Nickleby. He
uttered the word with a full round emphasis, dwelling upon it as long
as he decently could, and when he could hold out no longer without
attracting observation, stood gasping it to himself as if even that were
a satisfaction.

‘And WHERE has he gone?’ said Ralph.

‘France,’ replied Newman. ‘Danger of another attack of erysipelas--a
worse attack--in the head. So the doctors ordered him off. And he’s
gone.’

‘And Lord Frederick--?’ began Ralph.

‘He’s gone too,’ replied Newman.

‘And he carries his drubbing with him, does he?’ said Ralph, turning
away; ‘pockets his bruises, and sneaks off without the retaliation of a
word, or seeking the smallest reparation!’

‘He’s too ill,’ said Newman.

‘Too ill!’ repeated Ralph. ‘Why I would have it if I were dying; in that
case I should only be the more determined to have it, and that without
delay--I mean if I were he. But he’s too ill! Poor Sir Mulberry! Too
ill!’

Uttering these words with supreme contempt and great irritation of
manner, Ralph signed hastily to Newman to leave the room; and throwing
himself into his chair, beat his foot impatiently upon the ground.

‘There is some spell about that boy,’ said Ralph, grinding his teeth.
‘Circumstances conspire to help him. Talk of fortune’s favours! What is
even money to such Devil’s luck as this?’

He thrust his hands impatiently into his pockets, but notwithstanding
his previous reflection there was some consolation there, for his face
relaxed a little; and although there was still a deep frown upon the
contracted brow, it was one of calculation, and not of disappointment.

‘This Hawk will come back, however,’ muttered Ralph; ‘and if I know the
man (and I should by this time) his wrath will have lost nothing of its
violence in the meanwhile. Obliged to live in retirement--the
monotony of a sick-room to a man of his habits--no life--no drink--no
play--nothing that he likes and lives by. He is not likely to forget
his obligations to the cause of all this. Few men would; but he of all
others? No, no!’

He smiled and shook his head, and resting his chin upon his hand, fell a
musing, and smiled again. After a time he rose and rang the bell.

‘That Mr. Squeers; has he been here?’ said Ralph.

‘He was here last night. I left him here when I went home,’ returned
Newman.

‘I know that, fool, do I not?’ said Ralph, irascibly. ‘Has he been here
since? Was he here this morning?’

‘No,’ bawled Newman, in a very loud key.

‘If he comes while I am out--he is pretty sure to be here by nine
tonight--let him wait. And if there’s another man with him, as there
will be--perhaps,’ said Ralph, checking himself, ‘let him wait too.’

‘Let ‘em both wait?’ said Newman.

‘Ay,’ replied Ralph, turning upon him with an angry look. ‘Help me on
with this spencer, and don’t repeat after me, like a croaking parrot.’

‘I wish I was a parrot,’ Newman, sulkily.

‘I wish you were,’ rejoined Ralph, drawing his spencer on; ‘I’d have
wrung your neck long ago.’

Newman returned no answer to this compliment, but looked over Ralph’s
shoulder for an instant, (he was adjusting the collar of the spencer
behind, just then,) as if he were strongly disposed to tweak him by the
nose. Meeting Ralph’s eye, however, he suddenly recalled his wandering
fingers, and rubbed his own red nose with a vehemence quite astonishing.

Bestowing no further notice upon his eccentric follower than a
threatening look, and an admonition to be careful and make no mistake,
Ralph took his hat and gloves, and walked out.

He appeared to have a very extraordinary and miscellaneous connection,
and very odd calls he made, some at great rich houses, and some at small
poor ones, but all upon one subject: money. His face was a talisman to
the porters and servants of his more dashing clients, and procured him
ready admission, though he trudged on foot, and others, who were denied,
rattled to the door in carriages. Here he was all softness and cringing
civility; his step so light, that it scarcely produced a sound upon
the thick carpets; his voice so soft that it was not audible beyond the
person to whom it was addressed. But in the poorer habitations Ralph
was another man; his boots creaked upon the passage floor as he walked
boldly in; his voice was harsh and loud as he demanded the money that
was overdue; his threats were coarse and angry. With another class of
customers, Ralph was again another man. These were attorneys of more
than doubtful reputation, who helped him to new business, or raised
fresh profits upon old. With them Ralph was familiar and jocose,
humorous upon the topics of the day, and especially pleasant upon
bankruptcies and pecuniary difficulties that made good for trade. In
short, it would have been difficult to have recognised the same man
under these various aspects, but for the bulky leather case full of
bills and notes which he drew from his pocket at every house, and the
constant repetition of the same complaint, (varied only in tone and
style of delivery,) that the world thought him rich, and that perhaps
he might be if he had his own; but there was no getting money in when it
was once out, either principal or interest, and it was a hard matter to
live; even to live from day to day.

It was evening before a long round of such visits (interrupted only by
a scanty dinner at an eating-house) terminated at Pimlico, and Ralph
walked along St James’s Park, on his way home.

There were some deep schemes in his head, as the puckered brow and
firmly-set mouth would have abundantly testified, even if they had been
unaccompanied by a complete indifference to, or unconsciousness of, the
objects about him. So complete was his abstraction, however, that
Ralph, usually as quick-sighted as any man, did not observe that he was
followed by a shambling figure, which at one time stole behind him with
noiseless footsteps, at another crept a few paces before him, and at
another glided along by his side; at all times regarding him with an eye
so keen, and a look so eager and attentive, that it was more like the
expression of an intrusive face in some powerful picture or strongly
marked dream, than the scrutiny even of a most interested and anxious
observer.

The sky had been lowering and dark for some time, and the commencement
of a violent storm of rain drove Ralph for shelter to a tree. He was
leaning against it with folded arms, still buried in thought, when,
happening to raise his eyes, he suddenly met those of a man who,
creeping round the trunk, peered into his face with a searching look.
There was something in the usurer’s expression at the moment, which the
man appeared to remember well, for it decided him; and stepping close up
to Ralph, he pronounced his name.

Astonished for the moment, Ralph fell back a couple of paces and
surveyed him from head to foot. A spare, dark, withered man, of about
his own age, with a stooping body, and a very sinister face rendered
more ill-favoured by hollow and hungry cheeks, deeply sunburnt, and
thick black eyebrows, blacker in contrast with the perfect whiteness of
his hair; roughly clothed in shabby garments, of a strange and uncouth
make; and having about him an indefinable manner of depression and
degradation--this, for a moment, was all he saw. But he looked again,
and the face and person seemed gradually to grow less strange; to change
as he looked, to subside and soften into lineaments that were familiar,
until at last they resolved themselves, as if by some strange optical
illusion, into those of one whom he had known for many years, and
forgotten and lost sight of for nearly as many more.

The man saw that the recognition was mutual, and beckoning to Ralph to
take his former place under the tree, and not to stand in the falling
rain, of which, in his first surprise, he had been quite regardless,
addressed him in a hoarse, faint tone.

‘You would hardly have known me from my voice, I suppose, Mr. Nickleby?’
he said.

‘No,’ returned Ralph, bending a severe look upon him. ‘Though there is
something in that, that I remember now.’

‘There is little in me that you can call to mind as having been there
eight years ago, I dare say?’ observed the other.

‘Quite enough,’ said Ralph, carelessly, and averting his face. ‘More
than enough.’

‘If I had remained in doubt about YOU, Mr. Nickleby,’ said the other,
‘this reception, and YOUR manner, would have decided me very soon.’

‘Did you expect any other?’ asked Ralph, sharply.

‘No!’ said the man.

‘You were right,’ retorted Ralph; ‘and as you feel no surprise, need
express none.’

‘Mr. Nickleby,’ said the man, bluntly, after a brief pause, during which
he had seemed to struggle with an inclination to answer him by some
reproach, ‘will you hear a few words that I have to say?’

‘I am obliged to wait here till the rain holds a little,’ said Ralph,
looking abroad. ‘If you talk, sir, I shall not put my fingers in my
ears, though your talking may have as much effect as if I did.’

‘I was once in your confidence--’ thus his companion began. Ralph looked
round, and smiled involuntarily.

‘Well,’ said the other, ‘as much in your confidence as you ever chose to
let anybody be.’

‘Ah!’ rejoined Ralph, folding his arms; ‘that’s another thing, quite
another thing.’

‘Don’t let us play upon words, Mr. Nickleby, in the name of humanity.’

‘Of what?’ said Ralph.

‘Of humanity,’ replied the other, sternly. ‘I am hungry and in want. If
the change that you must see in me after so long an absence--must see,
for I, upon whom it has come by slow and hard degrees, see it and know
it well--will not move you to pity, let the knowledge that bread; not
the daily bread of the Lord’s Prayer, which, as it is offered up in
cities like this, is understood to include half the luxuries of the
world for the rich, and just as much coarse food as will support life
for the poor--not that, but bread, a crust of dry hard bread, is beyond
my reach today--let that have some weight with you, if nothing else
has.’

‘If this is the usual form in which you beg, sir,’ said Ralph, ‘you have
studied your part well; but if you will take advice from one who knows
something of the world and its ways, I should recommend a lower tone; a
little lower tone, or you stand a fair chance of being starved in good
earnest.’

As he said this, Ralph clenched his left wrist tightly with his right
hand, and inclining his head a little on one side and dropping his chin
upon his breast, looked at him whom he addressed with a frowning, sullen
face. The very picture of a man whom nothing could move or soften.

‘Yesterday was my first day in London,’ said the old man, glancing at
his travel-stained dress and worn shoes.

‘It would have been better for you, I think, if it had been your last
also,’ replied Ralph.

‘I have been seeking you these two days, where I thought you were most
likely to be found,’ resumed the other more humbly, ‘and I met you here
at last, when I had almost given up the hope of encountering you, Mr
Nickleby.’

He seemed to wait for some reply, but Ralph giving him none, he
continued:

‘I am a most miserable and wretched outcast, nearly sixty years old, and
as destitute and helpless as a child of six.’

‘I am sixty years old, too,’ replied Ralph, ‘and am neither destitute
nor helpless. Work. Don’t make fine play-acting speeches about bread,
but earn it.’

‘How?’ cried the other. ‘Where? Show me the means. Will you give them to
me--will you?’

‘I did once,’ replied Ralph, composedly; ‘you scarcely need ask me
whether I will again.’

‘It’s twenty years ago, or more,’ said the man, in a suppressed voice,
‘since you and I fell out. You remember that? I claimed a share in the
profits of some business I brought to you, and, as I persisted, you
arrested me for an old advance of ten pounds, odd shillings, including
interest at fifty per cent, or so.’

‘I remember something of it,’ replied Ralph, carelessly. ‘What then?’

‘That didn’t part us,’ said the man. ‘I made submission, being on the
wrong side of the bolts and bars; and as you were not the made man then
that you are now, you were glad enough to take back a clerk who wasn’t
over nice, and who knew something of the trade you drove.’

‘You begged and prayed, and I consented,’ returned Ralph. ‘That was kind
of me. Perhaps I did want you. I forget. I should think I did, or you
would have begged in vain. You were useful; not too honest, not too
delicate, not too nice of hand or heart; but useful.’

‘Useful, indeed!’ said the man. ‘Come. You had pinched and ground me
down for some years before that, but I had served you faithfully up to
that time, in spite of all your dog’s usage. Had I?’

Ralph made no reply.

‘Had I?’ said the man again.

‘You had had your wages,’ rejoined Ralph, ‘and had done your work. We
stood on equal ground so far, and could both cry quits.’

‘Then, but not afterwards,’ said the other.

‘Not afterwards, certainly, nor even then, for (as you have just said)
you owed me money, and do still,’ replied Ralph.

‘That’s not all,’ said the man, eagerly. ‘That’s not all. Mark that. I
didn’t forget that old sore, trust me. Partly in remembrance of that,
and partly in the hope of making money someday by the scheme, I took
advantage of my position about you, and possessed myself of a hold upon
you, which you would give half of all you have to know, and never can
know but through me. I left you--long after that time, remember--and,
for some poor trickery that came within the law, but was nothing to what
you money-makers daily practise just outside its bounds, was sent away
a convict for seven years. I have returned what you see me. Now, Mr
Nickleby,’ said the man, with a strange mixture of humility and sense of
power, ‘what help and assistance will you give me; what bribe, to speak
out plainly? My expectations are not monstrous, but I must live, and to
live I must eat and drink. Money is on your side, and hunger and thirst
on mine. You may drive an easy bargain.’

‘Is that all?’ said Ralph, still eyeing his companion with the same
steady look, and moving nothing but his lips.

‘It depends on you, Mr. Nickleby, whether that’s all or not,’ was the
rejoinder.

‘Why then, harkye, Mr--, I don’t know by what name I am to call you,’
said Ralph.

‘By my old one, if you like.’

‘Why then, harkye, Mr. Brooker,’ said Ralph, in his harshest accents,
‘and don’t expect to draw another speech from me. Harkye, sir. I know
you of old for a ready scoundrel, but you never had a stout heart; and
hard work, with (maybe) chains upon those legs of yours, and shorter
food than when I “pinched” and “ground” you, has blunted your wits, or
you would not come with such a tale as this to me. You a hold upon me!
Keep it, or publish it to the world, if you like.’

‘I can’t do that,’ interposed Brooker. ‘That wouldn’t serve me.’

‘Wouldn’t it?’ said Ralph. ‘It will serve you as much as bringing it to
me, I promise you. To be plain with you, I am a careful man, and know my
affairs thoroughly. I know the world, and the world knows me. Whatever
you gleaned, or heard, or saw, when you served me, the world knows and
magnifies already. You could tell it nothing that would surprise it,
unless, indeed, it redounded to my credit or honour, and then it would
scout you for a liar. And yet I don’t find business slack, or clients
scrupulous. Quite the contrary. I am reviled or threatened every day by
one man or another,’ said Ralph; ‘but things roll on just the same, and
I don’t grow poorer either.’

‘I neither revile nor threaten,’ rejoined the man. ‘I can tell you of
what you have lost by my act, what I only can restore, and what, if I
die without restoring, dies with me, and never can be regained.’

‘I tell my money pretty accurately, and generally keep it in my own
custody,’ said Ralph. ‘I look sharply after most men that I deal with,
and most of all I looked sharply after you. You are welcome to all you
have kept from me.’

‘Are those of your own name dear to you?’ said the man emphatically. ‘If
they are--’

‘They are not,’ returned Ralph, exasperated at this perseverance, and
the thought of Nicholas, which the last question awakened. ‘They are
not. If you had come as a common beggar, I might have thrown a sixpence
to you in remembrance of the clever knave you used to be; but since you
try to palm these stale tricks upon one you might have known better,
I’ll not part with a halfpenny--nor would I to save you from rotting.
And remember this, ‘scape-gallows,’ said Ralph, menacing him with
his hand, ‘that if we meet again, and you so much as notice me by one
begging gesture, you shall see the inside of a jail once more, and
tighten this hold upon me in intervals of the hard labour that vagabonds
are put to. There’s my answer to your trash. Take it.’

With a disdainful scowl at the object of his anger, who met his eye
but uttered not a word, Ralph walked away at his usual pace, without
manifesting the slightest curiosity to see what became of his late
companion, or indeed once looking behind him. The man remained on the
same spot with his eyes fixed upon his retreating figure until it was
lost to view, and then drawing his arm about his chest, as if the damp
and lack of food struck coldly to him, lingered with slouching steps by
the wayside, and begged of those who passed along.

Ralph, in no-wise moved by what had lately passed, further than as he
had already expressed himself, walked deliberately on, and turning out
of the Park and leaving Golden Square on his right, took his way through
some streets at the west end of the town until he arrived in that
particular one in which stood the residence of Madame Mantalini. The
name of that lady no longer appeared on the flaming door-plate, that of
Miss Knag being substituted in its stead; but the bonnets and dresses
were still dimly visible in the first-floor windows by the decaying
light of a summer’s evening, and excepting this ostensible alteration in
the proprietorship, the establishment wore its old appearance.

‘Humph!’ muttered Ralph, drawing his hand across his mouth with a
connoisseur-like air, and surveying the house from top to bottom; ‘these
people look pretty well. They can’t last long; but if I know of their
going in good time, I am safe, and a fair profit too. I must keep them
closely in view; that’s all.’

So, nodding his head very complacently, Ralph was leaving the spot, when
his quick ear caught the sound of a confused noise and hubbub of voices,
mingled with a great running up and down stairs, in the very house
which had been the subject of his scrutiny; and while he was hesitating
whether to knock at the door or listen at the keyhole a little longer, a
female servant of Madame Mantalini’s (whom he had often seen) opened
it abruptly and bounced out, with her blue cap-ribbons streaming in the
air.

‘Hallo here. Stop!’ cried Ralph. ‘What’s the matter? Here am I. Didn’t
you hear me knock?’

‘Oh! Mr. Nickleby, sir,’ said the girl. ‘Go up, for the love of Gracious.
Master’s been and done it again.’

‘Done what?’ said Ralph, tartly; ‘what d’ye mean?’

‘I knew he would if he was drove to it,’ cried the girl. ‘I said so all
along.’

‘Come here, you silly wench,’ said Ralph, catching her by the wrist;
‘and don’t carry family matters to the neighbours, destroying the credit
of the establishment. Come here; do you hear me, girl?’

Without any further expostulation, he led or rather pulled the
frightened handmaid into the house, and shut the door; then bidding her
walk upstairs before him, followed without more ceremony.

Guided by the noise of a great many voices all talking together, and
passing the girl in his impatience, before they had ascended many steps,
Ralph quickly reached the private sitting-room, when he was rather
amazed by the confused and inexplicable scene in which he suddenly found
himself.

There were all the young-lady workers, some with bonnets and some
without, in various attitudes expressive of alarm and consternation;
some gathered round Madame Mantalini, who was in tears upon one chair;
and others round Miss Knag, who was in opposition tears upon another;
and others round Mr. Mantalini, who was perhaps the most striking figure
in the whole group, for Mr. Mantalini’s legs were extended at full length
upon the floor, and his head and shoulders were supported by a very
tall footman, who didn’t seem to know what to do with them, and Mr
Mantalini’s eyes were closed, and his face was pale and his hair was
comparatively straight, and his whiskers and moustache were limp, and
his teeth were clenched, and he had a little bottle in his right hand,
and a little tea-spoon in his left; and his hands, arms, legs, and
shoulders, were all stiff and powerless. And yet Madame Mantalini was
not weeping upon the body, but was scolding violently upon her chair;
and all this amidst a clamour of tongues perfectly deafening, and which
really appeared to have driven the unfortunate footman to the utmost
verge of distraction.

‘What is the matter here?’ said Ralph, pressing forward.

At this inquiry, the clamour was increased twenty-fold, and an
astounding string of such shrill contradictions as ‘He’s poisoned
himself’--‘He hasn’t’--‘Send for a doctor’--‘Don’t’--‘He’s dying’--‘He
isn’t, he’s only pretending’--with various other cries, poured forth
with bewildering volubility, until Madame Mantalini was seen to address
herself to Ralph, when female curiosity to know what she would say,
prevailed, and, as if by general consent, a dead silence, unbroken by a
single whisper, instantaneously succeeded.

‘Mr. Nickleby,’ said Madame Mantalini; ‘by what chance you came here, I
don’t know.’

Here a gurgling voice was heard to ejaculate, as part of the wanderings
of a sick man, the words ‘Demnition sweetness!’ but nobody heeded
them except the footman, who, being startled to hear such awful tones
proceeding, as it were, from between his very fingers, dropped his
master’s head upon the floor with a pretty loud crash, and then, without
an effort to lift it up, gazed upon the bystanders, as if he had done
something rather clever than otherwise.

‘I will, however,’ continued Madame Mantalini, drying her eyes, and
speaking with great indignation, ‘say before you, and before everybody
here, for the first time, and once for all, that I never will supply
that man’s extravagances and viciousness again. I have been a dupe and a
fool to him long enough. In future, he shall support himself if he
can, and then he may spend what money he pleases, upon whom and how he
pleases; but it shall not be mine, and therefore you had better pause
before you trust him further.’

Thereupon Madame Mantalini, quite unmoved by some most pathetic
lamentations on the part of her husband, that the apothecary had not
mixed the prussic acid strong enough, and that he must take another
bottle or two to finish the work he had in hand, entered into a
catalogue of that amiable gentleman’s gallantries, deceptions,
extravagances, and infidelities (especially the last), winding up with
a protest against being supposed to entertain the smallest remnant
of regard for him; and adducing, in proof of the altered state of her
affections, the circumstance of his having poisoned himself in private
no less than six times within the last fortnight, and her not having
once interfered by word or deed to save his life.

‘And I insist on being separated and left to myself,’ said Madame
Mantalini, sobbing. ‘If he dares to refuse me a separation, I’ll have
one in law--I can--and I hope this will be a warning to all girls who
have seen this disgraceful exhibition.’

Miss Knag, who was unquestionably the oldest girl in company, said with
great solemnity, that it would be a warning to HER, and so did the
young ladies generally, with the exception of one or two who appeared to
entertain some doubts whether such whispers could do wrong.

‘Why do you say all this before so many listeners?’ said Ralph, in a low
voice. ‘You know you are not in earnest.’

‘I AM in earnest,’ replied Madame Mantalini, aloud, and retreating
towards Miss Knag.

‘Well, but consider,’ reasoned Ralph, who had a great interest in the
matter. ‘It would be well to reflect. A married woman has no property.’

‘Not a solitary single individual dem, my soul,’ and Mr. Mantalini,
raising himself upon his elbow.

‘I am quite aware of that,’ retorted Madame Mantalini, tossing her head;
‘and I have none. The business, the stock, this house, and everything in
it, all belong to Miss Knag.’

‘That’s quite true, Madame Mantalini,’ said Miss Knag, with whom her
late employer had secretly come to an amicable understanding on this
point. ‘Very true, indeed, Madame Mantalini--hem--very true. And I never
was more glad in all my life, that I had strength of mind to resist
matrimonial offers, no matter how advantageous, than I am when I think
of my present position as compared with your most unfortunate and most
undeserved one, Madame Mantalini.’

‘Demmit!’ cried Mr. Mantalini, turning his head towards his wife. ‘Will
it not slap and pinch the envious dowager, that dares to reflect upon
its own delicious?’

But the day of Mr. Mantalini’s blandishments had departed. ‘Miss
Knag, sir,’ said his wife, ‘is my particular friend;’ and although Mr
Mantalini leered till his eyes seemed in danger of never coming back to
their right places again, Madame Mantalini showed no signs of softening.

To do the excellent Miss Knag justice, she had been mainly instrumental
in bringing about this altered state of things, for, finding by daily
experience, that there was no chance of the business thriving, or even
continuing to exist, while Mr. Mantalini had any hand in the expenditure,
and having now a considerable interest in its well-doing, she had
sedulously applied herself to the investigation of some little matters
connected with that gentleman’s private character, which she had so well
elucidated, and artfully imparted to Madame Mantalini, as to open her
eyes more effectually than the closest and most philosophical reasoning
could have done in a series of years. To which end, the accidental
discovery by Miss Knag of some tender correspondence, in which Madame
Mantalini was described as ‘old’ and ‘ordinary,’ had most providentially
contributed.

However, notwithstanding her firmness, Madame Mantalini wept very
piteously; and as she leant upon Miss Knag, and signed towards the door,
that young lady and all the other young ladies with sympathising faces,
proceeded to bear her out.

‘Nickleby,’ said Mr. Mantalini in tears, ‘you have been made a witness
to this demnition cruelty, on the part of the demdest enslaver and
captivator that never was, oh dem! I forgive that woman.’

‘Forgive!’ repeated Madame Mantalini, angrily.

‘I do forgive her, Nickleby,’ said Mr. Mantalini. ‘You will blame me, the
world will blame me, the women will blame me; everybody will laugh,
and scoff, and smile, and grin most demnebly. They will say, “She had a
blessing. She did not know it. He was too weak; he was too good; he was
a dem’d fine fellow, but he loved too strong; he could not bear her to
be cross, and call him wicked names. It was a dem’d case, there never
was a demder.” But I forgive her.’

With this affecting speech Mr. Mantalini fell down again very flat, and
lay to all appearance without sense or motion, until all the females
had left the room, when he came cautiously into a sitting posture, and
confronted Ralph with a very blank face, and the little bottle still in
one hand and the tea-spoon in the other.

‘You may put away those fooleries now, and live by your wits again,’
said Ralph, coolly putting on his hat.

‘Demmit, Nickleby, you’re not serious?’

‘I seldom joke,’ said Ralph. ‘Good-night.’

‘No, but Nickleby--’ said Mantalini.

‘I am wrong, perhaps,’ rejoined Ralph. ‘I hope so. You should know best.
Good-night.’

Affecting not to hear his entreaties that he would stay and advise with
him, Ralph left the crest-fallen Mr. Mantalini to his meditations, and
left the house quietly.

‘Oho!’ he said, ‘sets the wind that way so soon? Half knave and half
fool, and detected in both characters? I think your day is over, sir.’

As he said this, he made some memorandum in his pocket-book in which Mr
Mantalini’s name figured conspicuously, and finding by his watch that it
was between nine and ten o’clock, made all speed home.

‘Are they here?’ was the first question he asked of Newman.

Newman nodded. ‘Been here half an hour.’

‘Two of them? One a fat sleek man?’

‘Ay,’ said Newman. ‘In your room now.’

‘Good,’ rejoined Ralph. ‘Get me a coach.’

‘A coach! What, you--going to--eh?’ stammered Newman.

Ralph angrily repeated his orders, and Noggs, who might well have been
excused for wondering at such an unusual and extraordinary circumstance
(for he had never seen Ralph in a coach in his life) departed on his
errand, and presently returned with the conveyance.

Into it went Mr. Squeers, and Ralph, and the third man, whom Newman Noggs
had never seen. Newman stood upon the door-step to see them off, not
troubling himself to wonder where or upon what business they were going,
until he chanced by mere accident to hear Ralph name the address whither
the coachman was to drive.

Quick as lightning and in a state of the most extreme wonder, Newman
darted into his little office for his hat, and limped after the coach
as if with the intention of getting up behind; but in this design he
was balked, for it had too much the start of him and was soon hopelessly
ahead, leaving him gaping in the empty street.

‘I don’t know though,’ said Noggs, stopping for breath, ‘any good that
I could have done by going too. He would have seen me if I had. Drive
THERE! What can come of this? If I had only known it yesterday I could
have told--drive there! There’s mischief in it. There must be.’

His reflections were interrupted by a grey-haired man of a very
remarkable, though far from prepossessing appearance, who, coming
stealthily towards him, solicited relief.

Newman, still cogitating deeply, turned away; but the man followed him,
and pressed him with such a tale of misery that Newman (who might have
been considered a hopeless person to beg from, and who had little enough
to give) looked into his hat for some halfpence which he usually kept
screwed up, when he had any, in a corner of his pocket-handkerchief.

While he was busily untwisting the knot with his teeth, the man said
something which attracted his attention; whatever that something was, it
led to something else, and in the end he and Newman walked away side by
side--the strange man talking earnestly, and Newman listening.



CHAPTER 45

Containing Matter of a surprising Kind


‘As we gang awa’ fra’ Lunnun tomorrow neeght, and as I dinnot know that
I was e’er so happy in a’ my days, Misther Nickleby, Ding! but I WILL
tak’ anoother glass to our next merry meeting!’

So said John Browdie, rubbing his hands with great joyousness, and
looking round him with a ruddy shining face, quite in keeping with the
declaration.

The time at which John found himself in this enviable condition was the
same evening to which the last chapter bore reference; the place was
the cottage; and the assembled company were Nicholas, Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs
Browdie, Kate Nickleby, and Smike.

A very merry party they had been. Mrs. Nickleby, knowing of her son’s
obligations to the honest Yorkshireman, had, after some demur, yielded
her consent to Mr. and Mrs. Browdie being invited out to tea; in the
way of which arrangement, there were at first sundry difficulties and
obstacles, arising out of her not having had an opportunity of ‘calling’
upon Mrs. Browdie first; for although Mrs. Nickleby very often observed
with much complacency (as most punctilious people do), that she had not
an atom of pride or formality about her, still she was a great stickler
for dignity and ceremonies; and as it was manifest that, until a call
had been made, she could not be (politely speaking, and according to the
laws of society) even cognisant of the fact of Mrs. Browdie’s existence,
she felt her situation to be one of peculiar delicacy and difficulty.

‘The call MUST originate with me, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘that’s
indispensable. The fact is, my dear, that it’s necessary there should
be a sort of condescension on my part, and that I should show this
young person that I am willing to take notice of her. There’s a very
respectable-looking young man,’ added Mrs. Nickleby, after a short
consideration, ‘who is conductor to one of the omnibuses that go by
here, and who wears a glazed hat--your sister and I have noticed him
very often--he has a wart upon his nose, Kate, you know, exactly like a
gentleman’s servant.’

‘Have all gentlemen’s servants warts upon their noses, mother?’ asked
Nicholas.

‘Nicholas, my dear, how very absurd you are,’ returned his mother; ‘of
course I mean that his glazed hat looks like a gentleman’s servant, and
not the wart upon his nose; though even that is not so ridiculous as it
may seem to you, for we had a footboy once, who had not only a wart, but
a wen also, and a very large wen too, and he demanded to have his wages
raised in consequence, because he found it came very expensive. Let me
see, what was I--oh yes, I know. The best way that I can think of would
be to send a card, and my compliments, (I’ve no doubt he’d take ‘em for
a pot of porter,) by this young man, to the Saracen with Two Necks. If
the waiter took him for a gentleman’s servant, so much the better. Then
all Mrs. Browdie would have to do would be to send her card back by the
carrier (he could easily come with a double knock), and there’s an end
of it.’

‘My dear mother,’ said Nicholas, ‘I don’t suppose such unsophisticated
people as these ever had a card of their own, or ever will have.’

‘Oh that, indeed, Nicholas, my dear,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby, ‘that’s
another thing. If you put it upon that ground, why, of course, I have
no more to say, than that I have no doubt they are very good sort of
persons, and that I have no kind of objection to their coming here to
tea if they like, and shall make a point of being very civil to them if
they do.’

The point being thus effectually set at rest, and Mrs. Nickleby duly
placed in the patronising and mildly-condescending position which became
her rank and matrimonial years, Mr. and Mrs. Browdie were invited and
came; and as they were very deferential to Mrs. Nickleby, and seemed
to have a becoming appreciation of her greatness, and were very much
pleased with everything, the good lady had more than once given Kate
to understand, in a whisper, that she thought they were the very
best-meaning people she had ever seen, and perfectly well behaved.

And thus it came to pass, that John Browdie declared, in the parlour
after supper, to wit, and twenty minutes before eleven o’clock p.m.,
that he had never been so happy in all his days.

Nor was Mrs. Browdie much behind her husband in this respect, for that
young matron, whose rustic beauty contrasted very prettily with the
more delicate loveliness of Kate, and without suffering by the contrast
either, for each served as it were to set off and decorate the other,
could not sufficiently admire the gentle and winning manners of the
young lady, or the engaging affability of the elder one. Then Kate had
the art of turning the conversation to subjects upon which the country
girl, bashful at first in strange company, could feel herself at
home; and if Mrs. Nickleby was not quite so felicitous at times in the
selection of topics of discourse, or if she did seem, as Mrs. Browdie
expressed it, ‘rather high in her notions,’ still nothing could be
kinder, and that she took considerable interest in the young couple was
manifest from the very long lectures on housewifery with which she
was so obliging as to entertain Mrs. Browdie’s private ear, which
were illustrated by various references to the domestic economy of the
cottage, in which (those duties falling exclusively upon Kate) the good
lady had about as much share, either in theory or practice, as any one
of the statues of the Twelve Apostles which embellish the exterior of St
Paul’s Cathedral.

‘Mr. Browdie,’ said Kate, addressing his young wife, ‘is the
best-humoured, the kindest and heartiest creature I ever saw. If I were
oppressed with I don’t know how many cares, it would make me happy only
to look at him.’

‘He does seem indeed, upon my word, a most excellent creature, Kate,’
said Mrs. Nickleby; ‘most excellent. And I am sure that at all times it
will give me pleasure--really pleasure now--to have you, Mrs. Browdie,
to see me in this plain and homely manner. We make no display,’ said Mrs
Nickleby, with an air which seemed to insinuate that they could make a
vast deal if they were so disposed; ‘no fuss, no preparation; I wouldn’t
allow it. I said, “Kate, my dear, you will only make Mrs. Browdie feel
uncomfortable, and how very foolish and inconsiderate that would be!”’

‘I am very much obliged to you, I am sure, ma’am,’ returned Mrs. Browdie,
gratefully. ‘It’s nearly eleven o’clock, John. I am afraid we are
keeping you up very late, ma’am.’

‘Late!’ cried Mrs. Nickleby, with a sharp thin laugh, and one little
cough at the end, like a note of admiration expressed. ‘This is quite
early for us. We used to keep such hours! Twelve, one, two, three
o’clock was nothing to us. Balls, dinners, card-parties! Never were such
rakes as the people about where we used to live. I often think now, I
am sure, that how we ever could go through with it is quite astonishing,
and that is just the evil of having a large connection and being a great
deal sought after, which I would recommend all young married people
steadily to resist; though of course, and it’s perfectly clear, and a
very happy thing too, I think, that very few young married people can
be exposed to such temptations. There was one family in particular,
that used to live about a mile from us--not straight down the road, but
turning sharp off to the left by the turnpike where the Plymouth mail
ran over the donkey--that were quite extraordinary people for giving
the most extravagant parties, with artificial flowers and champagne, and
variegated lamps, and, in short, every delicacy of eating and drinking
that the most singular epicure could possibly require. I don’t think
that there ever were such people as those Peltiroguses. You remember the
Peltiroguses, Kate?’

Kate saw that for the ease and comfort of the visitors it was high time
to stay this flood of recollection, so answered that she entertained of
the Peltiroguses a most vivid and distinct remembrance; and then said
that Mr. Browdie had half promised, early in the evening, that he would
sing a Yorkshire song, and that she was most impatient that he should
redeem his promise, because she was sure it would afford her mama more
amusement and pleasure than it was possible to express.

Mrs. Nickleby confirming her daughter with the best possible grace--for
there was patronage in that too, and a kind of implication that she had
a discerning taste in such matters, and was something of a critic--John
Browdie proceeded to consider the words of some north-country ditty, and
to take his wife’s recollection respecting the same. This done, he made
divers ungainly movements in his chair, and singling out one particular
fly on the ceiling from the other flies there asleep, fixed his eyes
upon him, and began to roar a meek sentiment (supposed to be uttered
by a gentle swain fast pining away with love and despair) in a voice of
thunder.

At the end of the first verse, as though some person without had
waited until then to make himself audible, was heard a loud and violent
knocking at the street-door; so loud and so violent, indeed, that the
ladies started as by one accord, and John Browdie stopped.

‘It must be some mistake,’ said Nicholas, carelessly. ‘We know nobody
who would come here at this hour.’

Mrs. Nickleby surmised, however, that perhaps the counting-house was
burnt down, or perhaps ‘the Mr. Cheerybles’ had sent to take Nicholas
into partnership (which certainly appeared highly probable at that time
of night), or perhaps Mr. Linkinwater had run away with the property, or
perhaps Miss La Creevy was taken in, or perhaps--

But a hasty exclamation from Kate stopped her abruptly in her
conjectures, and Ralph Nickleby walked into the room.

‘Stay,’ said Ralph, as Nicholas rose, and Kate, making her way towards
him, threw herself upon his arm. ‘Before that boy says a word, hear me.’

Nicholas bit his lip and shook his head in a threatening manner, but
appeared for the moment unable to articulate a syllable. Kate clung
closer to his arm, Smike retreated behind them, and John Browdie,
who had heard of Ralph, and appeared to have no great difficulty in
recognising him, stepped between the old man and his young friend, as
if with the intention of preventing either of them from advancing a step
further.

‘Hear me, I say,’ said Ralph, ‘and not him.’

‘Say what thou’st gotten to say then, sir,’ retorted John; ‘and tak’
care thou dinnot put up angry bluid which thou’dst betther try to
quiet.’

‘I should know YOU,’ said Ralph, ‘by your tongue; and HIM’ (pointing to
Smike) ‘by his looks.’

‘Don’t speak to him,’ said Nicholas, recovering his voice. ‘I will not
have it. I will not hear him. I do not know that man. I cannot breathe
the air that he corrupts. His presence is an insult to my sister. It is
shame to see him. I will not bear it.’

‘Stand!’ cried John, laying his heavy hand upon his chest.

‘Then let him instantly retire,’ said Nicholas, struggling. ‘I am not
going to lay hands upon him, but he shall withdraw. I will not have him
here. John, John Browdie, is this my house, am I a child? If he stands
there,’ cried Nicholas, burning with fury, ‘looking so calmly upon those
who know his black and dastardly heart, he’ll drive me mad.’

To all these exclamations John Browdie answered not a word, but he
retained his hold upon Nicholas; and when he was silent again, spoke.

‘There’s more to say and hear than thou think’st for,’ said John. ‘I
tell’ee I ha’ gotten scent o’ thot already. Wa’at be that shadow
ootside door there? Noo, schoolmeasther, show thyself, mun; dinnot be
sheame-feaced. Noo, auld gen’l’man, let’s have schoolmeasther, coom.’

Hearing this adjuration, Mr. Squeers, who had been lingering in the
passage until such time as it should be expedient for him to enter and
he could appear with effect, was fain to present himself in a somewhat
undignified and sneaking way; at which John Browdie laughed with such
keen and heartfelt delight, that even Kate, in all the pain, anxiety,
and surprise of the scene, and though the tears were in her eyes, felt a
disposition to join him.

‘Have you done enjoying yourself, sir?’ said Ralph, at length.

‘Pratty nigh for the prasant time, sir,’ replied John.

‘I can wait,’ said Ralph. ‘Take your own time, pray.’

Ralph waited until there was a perfect silence, and then turning to Mrs
Nickleby, but directing an eager glance at Kate, as if more anxious to
watch his effect upon her, said:

‘Now, ma’am, listen to me. I don’t imagine that you were a party to a
very fine tirade of words sent me by that boy of yours, because I don’t
believe that under his control, you have the slightest will of your own,
or that your advice, your opinion, your wants, your wishes, anything
which in nature and reason (or of what use is your great experience?)
ought to weigh with him, has the slightest influence or weight whatever,
or is taken for a moment into account.’

Mrs. Nickleby shook her head and sighed, as if there were a good deal in
that, certainly.

‘For this reason,’ resumed Ralph, ‘I address myself to you, ma’am. For
this reason, partly, and partly because I do not wish to be disgraced by
the acts of a vicious stripling whom I was obliged to disown, and who,
afterwards, in his boyish majesty, feigns to--ha! ha!--to disown ME, I
present myself here tonight. I have another motive in coming: a motive
of humanity. I come here,’ said Ralph, looking round with a biting and
triumphant smile, and gloating and dwelling upon the words as if he
were loath to lose the pleasure of saying them, ‘to restore a parent his
child. Ay, sir,’ he continued, bending eagerly forward, and addressing
Nicholas, as he marked the change of his countenance, ‘to restore a
parent his child; his son, sir; trepanned, waylaid, and guarded at every
turn by you, with the base design of robbing him some day of any little
wretched pittance of which he might become possessed.’

‘In that, you know you lie,’ said Nicholas, proudly.

‘In this, I know I speak the truth. I have his father here,’ retorted
Ralph.

‘Here!’ sneered Squeers, stepping forward. ‘Do you hear that? Here!
Didn’t I tell you to be careful that his father didn’t turn up and send
him back to me? Why, his father’s my friend; he’s to come back to me
directly, he is. Now, what do you say--eh!--now--come--what do you say
to that--an’t you sorry you took so much trouble for nothing? an’t you?
an’t you?’

‘You bear upon your body certain marks I gave you,’ said Nicholas,
looking quietly away, ‘and may talk in acknowledgment of them as much
as you please. You’ll talk a long time before you rub them out, Mr
Squeers.’

The estimable gentleman last named cast a hasty look at the table, as if
he were prompted by this retort to throw a jug or bottle at the head of
Nicholas, but he was interrupted in this design (if such design he had)
by Ralph, who, touching him on the elbow, bade him tell the father that
he might now appear and claim his son.

This being purely a labour of love, Mr. Squeers readily complied,
and leaving the room for the purpose, almost immediately returned,
supporting a sleek personage with an oily face, who, bursting from him,
and giving to view the form and face of Mr. Snawley, made straight up
to Smike, and tucking that poor fellow’s head under his arm in a most
uncouth and awkward embrace, elevated his broad-brimmed hat at arm’s
length in the air as a token of devout thanksgiving, exclaiming,
meanwhile, ‘How little did I think of this here joyful meeting, when I
saw him last! Oh, how little did I think it!’

‘Be composed, sir,’ said Ralph, with a gruff expression of sympathy,
‘you have got him now.’

‘Got him! Oh, haven’t I got him! Have I got him, though?’ cried Mr
Snawley, scarcely able to believe it. ‘Yes, here he is, flesh and blood,
flesh and blood.’

‘Vary little flesh,’ said John Browdie.

Mr. Snawley was too much occupied by his parental feelings to notice this
remark; and, to assure himself more completely of the restoration of his
child, tucked his head under his arm again, and kept it there.

‘What was it,’ said Snawley, ‘that made me take such a strong interest
in him, when that worthy instructor of youth brought him to my house?
What was it that made me burn all over with a wish to chastise him
severely for cutting away from his best friends, his pastors and
masters?’

‘It was parental instinct, sir,’ observed Squeers.

‘That’s what it was, sir,’ rejoined Snawley; ‘the elevated feeling, the
feeling of the ancient Romans and Grecians, and of the beasts of the
field and birds of the air, with the exception of rabbits and tom-cats,
which sometimes devour their offspring. My heart yearned towards him. I
could have--I don’t know what I couldn’t have done to him in the anger
of a father.’

‘It only shows what Natur is, sir,’ said Mr. Squeers. ‘She’s rum ‘un, is
Natur.’

‘She is a holy thing, sir,’ remarked Snawley.

‘I believe you,’ added Mr. Squeers, with a moral sigh. ‘I should like
to know how we should ever get on without her. Natur,’ said Mr. Squeers,
solemnly, ‘is more easier conceived than described. Oh what a blessed
thing, sir, to be in a state of natur!’

Pending this philosophical discourse, the bystanders had been quite
stupefied with amazement, while Nicholas had looked keenly from Snawley
to Squeers, and from Squeers to Ralph, divided between his feelings of
disgust, doubt, and surprise. At this juncture, Smike escaping from his
father fled to Nicholas, and implored him, in most moving terms, never
to give him up, but to let him live and die beside him.

‘If you are this boy’s father,’ said Nicholas, ‘look at the wreck he is,
and tell me that you purpose to send him back to that loathsome den from
which I brought him.’

‘Scandal again!’ cried Squeers. ‘Recollect, you an’t worth powder and
shot, but I’ll be even with you one way or another.’

‘Stop,’ interposed Ralph, as Snawley was about to speak. ‘Let us
cut this matter short, and not bandy words here with hare-brained
profligates. This is your son, as you can prove. And you, Mr. Squeers,
you know this boy to be the same that was with you for so many years
under the name of Smike. Do you?’

‘Do I!’ returned Squeers. ‘Don’t I?’

‘Good,’ said Ralph; ‘a very few words will be sufficient here. You had a
son by your first wife, Mr. Snawley?’

‘I had,’ replied that person, ‘and there he stands.’

‘We’ll show that presently,’ said Ralph. ‘You and your wife were
separated, and she had the boy to live with her, when he was a year old.
You received a communication from her, when you had lived apart a year
or two, that the boy was dead; and you believed it?’

‘Of course I did!’ returned Snawley. ‘Oh the joy of--’

‘Be rational, sir, pray,’ said Ralph. ‘This is business, and
transports interfere with it. This wife died a year and a half ago, or
thereabouts--not more--in some obscure place, where she was housekeeper
in a family. Is that the case?’

‘That’s the case,’ replied Snawley.

‘Having written on her death-bed a letter or confession to you, about
this very boy, which, as it was not directed otherwise than in your
name, only reached you, and that by a circuitous course, a few days
since?’

‘Just so,’ said Snawley. ‘Correct in every particular, sir.’

‘And this confession,’ resumed Ralph, ‘is to the effect that his
death was an invention of hers to wound you--was a part of a system
of annoyance, in short, which you seem to have adopted towards each
other--that the boy lived, but was of weak and imperfect intellect--that
she sent him by a trusty hand to a cheap school in Yorkshire--that she
had paid for his education for some years, and then, being poor, and
going a long way off, gradually deserted him, for which she prayed
forgiveness?’

Snawley nodded his head, and wiped his eyes; the first slightly, the
last violently.

‘The school was Mr. Squeers’s,’ continued Ralph; ‘the boy was left there
in the name of Smike; every description was fully given, dates tally
exactly with Mr. Squeers’s books, Mr. Squeers is lodging with you at this
time; you have two other boys at his school: you communicated the whole
discovery to him, he brought you to me as the person who had recommended
to him the kidnapper of his child; and I brought you here. Is that so?’

‘You talk like a good book, sir, that’s got nothing in its inside but
what’s the truth,’ replied Snawley.

‘This is your pocket-book,’ said Ralph, producing one from his coat;
‘the certificates of your first marriage and of the boy’s birth, and
your wife’s two letters, and every other paper that can support these
statements directly or by implication, are here, are they?’

‘Every one of ‘em, sir.’

‘And you don’t object to their being looked at here, so that these
people may be convinced of your power to substantiate your claim at once
in law and reason, and you may resume your control over your own son
without more delay. Do I understand you?’

‘I couldn’t have understood myself better, sir.’

‘There, then,’ said Ralph, tossing the pocket-book upon the table. ‘Let
them see them if they like; and as those are the original papers, I
should recommend you to stand near while they are being examined, or you
may chance to lose some.’

With these words Ralph sat down unbidden, and compressing his lips,
which were for the moment slightly parted by a smile, folded his arms,
and looked for the first time at his nephew.

Nicholas, stung by the concluding taunt, darted an indignant glance at
him; but commanding himself as well as he could, entered upon a close
examination of the documents, at which John Browdie assisted. There was
nothing about them which could be called in question. The certificates
were regularly signed as extracts from the parish books, the first
letter had a genuine appearance of having been written and preserved
for some years, the handwriting of the second tallied with it exactly,
(making proper allowance for its having been written by a person in
extremity,) and there were several other corroboratory scraps of entries
and memoranda which it was equally difficult to question.

‘Dear Nicholas,’ whispered Kate, who had been looking anxiously over his
shoulder, ‘can this be really the case? Is this statement true?’

‘I fear it is,’ answered Nicholas. ‘What say you, John?’

John scratched his head and shook it, but said nothing at all.

‘You will observe, ma’am,’ said Ralph, addressing himself to Mrs
Nickleby, ‘that this boy being a minor and not of strong mind, we might
have come here tonight, armed with the powers of the law, and backed by
a troop of its myrmidons. I should have done so, ma’am, unquestionably,
but for my regard for the feelings of yourself, and your daughter.’

‘You have shown your regard for HER feelings well,’ said Nicholas,
drawing his sister towards him.

‘Thank you,’ replied Ralph. ‘Your praise, sir, is commendation, indeed.’

‘Well,’ said Squeers, ‘what’s to be done? Them hackney-coach horses will
catch cold if we don’t think of moving; there’s one of ‘em a sneezing
now, so that he blows the street door right open. What’s the order of
the day? Is Master Snawley to come along with us?’

‘No, no, no,’ replied Smike, drawing back, and clinging to Nicholas.

‘No. Pray, no. I will not go from you with him. No, no.’

‘This is a cruel thing,’ said Snawley, looking to his friends for
support. ‘Do parents bring children into the world for this?’

‘Do parents bring children into the world for THOT?’ said John Browdie
bluntly, pointing, as he spoke, to Squeers.

‘Never you mind,’ retorted that gentleman, tapping his nose derisively.

‘Never I mind!’ said John, ‘no, nor never nobody mind, say’st thou,
schoolmeasther. It’s nobody’s minding that keeps sike men as thou
afloat. Noo then, where be’est thou coomin’ to? Dang it, dinnot coom
treadin’ ower me, mun.’

Suiting the action to the word, John Browdie just jerked his elbow
into the chest of Mr. Squeers who was advancing upon Smike; with so much
dexterity that the schoolmaster reeled and staggered back upon Ralph
Nickleby, and being unable to recover his balance, knocked that
gentleman off his chair, and stumbled heavily upon him.

This accidental circumstance was the signal for some very decisive
proceedings. In the midst of a great noise, occasioned by the prayers
and entreaties of Smike, the cries and exclamations of the women, and
the vehemence of the men, demonstrations were made of carrying off the
lost son by violence. Squeers had actually begun to haul him out, when
Nicholas (who, until then, had been evidently undecided how to act)
took him by the collar, and shaking him so that such teeth as he had,
chattered in his head, politely escorted him to the room-door, and
thrusting him into the passage, shut it upon him.

‘Now,’ said Nicholas to the other two, ‘have the goodness to follow your
friend.’

‘I want my son,’ said Snawley.

‘Your son,’ replied Nicholas, ‘chooses for himself. He chooses to remain
here, and he shall.’

‘You won’t give him up?’ said Snawley.

‘I would not give him up against his will, to be the victim of such
brutality as that to which you would consign him,’ replied Nicholas, ‘if
he were a dog or a rat.’

‘Knock that Nickleby down with a candlestick,’ cried Mr. Squeers, through
the keyhole, ‘and bring out my hat, somebody, will you, unless he wants
to steal it.’

‘I am very sorry, indeed,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, who, with Mrs. Browdie, had
stood crying and biting her fingers in a corner, while Kate (very pale,
but perfectly quiet) had kept as near her brother as she could. ‘I am
very sorry, indeed, for all this. I really don’t know what would be best
to do, and that’s the truth. Nicholas ought to be the best judge, and I
hope he is. Of course, it’s a hard thing to have to keep other people’s
children, though young Mr. Snawley is certainly as useful and willing
as it’s possible for anybody to be; but, if it could be settled in any
friendly manner--if old Mr. Snawley, for instance, would settle to pay
something certain for his board and lodging, and some fair arrangement
was come to, so that we undertook to have fish twice a week, and a
pudding twice, or a dumpling, or something of that sort--I do think that
it might be very satisfactory and pleasant for all parties.’

This compromise, which was proposed with abundance of tears and sighs,
not exactly meeting the point at issue, nobody took any notice of it;
and poor Mrs. Nickleby accordingly proceeded to enlighten Mrs. Browdie
upon the advantages of such a scheme, and the unhappy results flowing,
on all occasions, from her not being attended to when she proffered her
advice.

‘You, sir,’ said Snawley, addressing the terrified Smike, ‘are an
unnatural, ungrateful, unlovable boy. You won’t let me love you when I
want to. Won’t you come home, won’t you?’

‘No, no, no,’ cried Smike, shrinking back.

‘He never loved nobody,’ bawled Squeers, through the keyhole. ‘He
never loved me; he never loved Wackford, who is next door but one to
a cherubim. How can you expect that he’ll love his father? He’ll never
love his father, he won’t. He don’t know what it is to have a father. He
don’t understand it. It an’t in him.’

Mr. Snawley looked steadfastly at his son for a full minute, and then
covering his eyes with his hand, and once more raising his hat in the
air, appeared deeply occupied in deploring his black ingratitude. Then
drawing his arm across his eyes, he picked up Mr. Squeers’s hat, and
taking it under one arm, and his own under the other, walked slowly and
sadly out.

‘Your romance, sir,’ said Ralph, lingering for a moment, ‘is destroyed,
I take it. No unknown; no persecuted descendant of a man of high degree;
but the weak, imbecile son of a poor, petty tradesman. We shall see how
your sympathy melts before plain matter of fact.’

‘You shall,’ said Nicholas, motioning towards the door.

‘And trust me, sir,’ added Ralph, ‘that I never supposed you would give
him up tonight. Pride, obstinacy, reputation for fine feeling, were all
against it. These must be brought down, sir, lowered, crushed, as they
shall be soon. The protracted and wearing anxiety and expense of the law
in its most oppressive form, its torture from hour to hour, its weary
days and sleepless nights, with these I’ll prove you, and break your
haughty spirit, strong as you deem it now. And when you make this house
a hell, and visit these trials upon yonder wretched object (as you will;
I know you), and those who think you now a young-fledged hero, we’ll
go into old accounts between us two, and see who stands the debtor, and
comes out best at last, even before the world.’

Ralph Nickleby withdrew. But Mr. Squeers, who had heard a portion of this
closing address, and was by this time wound up to a pitch of impotent
malignity almost unprecedented, could not refrain from returning to the
parlour door, and actually cutting some dozen capers with various wry
faces and hideous grimaces, expressive of his triumphant confidence in
the downfall and defeat of Nicholas.

Having concluded this war-dance, in which his short trousers and large
boots had borne a very conspicuous figure, Mr. Squeers followed his
friends, and the family were left to meditate upon recent occurrences.



CHAPTER 46

Throws some Light upon Nicholas’s Love; but whether for Good or Evil the
Reader must determine


After an anxious consideration of the painful and embarrassing position
in which he was placed, Nicholas decided that he ought to lose no time
in frankly stating it to the kind brothers. Availing himself of the
first opportunity of being alone with Mr. Charles Cheeryble at the close
of next day, he accordingly related Smike’s little history, and modestly
but firmly expressed his hope that the good old gentleman would, under
such circumstances as he described, hold him justified in adopting the
extreme course of interfering between parent and child, and upholding
the latter in his disobedience; even though his horror and dread of his
father might seem, and would doubtless be represented as, a thing so
repulsive and unnatural, as to render those who countenanced him in it,
fit objects of general detestation and abhorrence.

‘So deeply rooted does this horror of the man appear to be,’ said
Nicholas, ‘that I can hardly believe he really is his son. Nature
does not seem to have implanted in his breast one lingering feeling of
affection for him, and surely she can never err.’

‘My dear sir,’ replied brother Charles, ‘you fall into the very common
mistake of charging upon Nature, matters with which she has not the
smallest connection, and for which she is in no way responsible. Men
talk of Nature as an abstract thing, and lose sight of what is natural
while they do so. Here is a poor lad who has never felt a parent’s care,
who has scarcely known anything all his life but suffering and sorrow,
presented to a man who he is told is his father, and whose first act
is to signify his intention of putting an end to his short term of
happiness, of consigning him to his old fate, and taking him from the
only friend he has ever had--which is yourself. If Nature, in such a
case, put into that lad’s breast but one secret prompting which urged
him towards his father and away from you, she would be a liar and an
idiot.’

Nicholas was delighted to find that the old gentleman spoke so warmly,
and in the hope that he might say something more to the same purpose,
made no reply.

‘The same mistake presents itself to me, in one shape or other, at
every turn,’ said brother Charles. ‘Parents who never showed their love,
complain of want of natural affection in their children; children who
never showed their duty, complain of want of natural feeling in their
parents; law-makers who find both so miserable that their affections
have never had enough of life’s sun to develop them, are loud in their
moralisings over parents and children too, and cry that the very ties of
nature are disregarded. Natural affections and instincts, my dear sir,
are the most beautiful of the Almighty’s works, but like other beautiful
works of His, they must be reared and fostered, or it is as natural that
they should be wholly obscured, and that new feelings should usurp
their place, as it is that the sweetest productions of the earth, left
untended, should be choked with weeds and briers. I wish we could be
brought to consider this, and remembering natural obligations a little
more at the right time, talk about them a little less at the wrong one.’

After this, brother Charles, who had talked himself into a great heat,
stopped to cool a little, and then continued:

‘I dare say you are surprised, my dear sir, that I have listened to
your recital with so little astonishment. That is easily explained. Your
uncle has been here this morning.’

Nicholas coloured, and drew back a step or two.

‘Yes,’ said the old gentleman, tapping his desk emphatically, ‘here, in
this room. He would listen neither to reason, feeling, nor justice. But
brother Ned was hard upon him; brother Ned, sir, might have melted a
paving-stone.’

‘He came to--’ said Nicholas.

‘To complain of you,’ returned brother Charles, ‘to poison our ears with
calumnies and falsehoods; but he came on a fruitless errand, and went
away with some wholesome truths in his ear besides. Brother Ned, my dear
Mr. Nickleby--brother Ned, sir, is a perfect lion. So is Tim Linkinwater;
Tim is quite a lion. We had Tim in to face him at first, and Tim was at
him, sir, before you could say “Jack Robinson.”’

‘How can I ever thank you for all the deep obligations you impose upon
me every day?’ said Nicholas.

‘By keeping silence upon the subject, my dear sir,’ returned brother
Charles. ‘You shall be righted. At least you shall not be wronged.
Nobody belonging to you shall be wronged. They shall not hurt a hair of
your head, or the boy’s head, or your mother’s head, or your sister’s
head. I have said it, brother Ned has said it, Tim Linkinwater has said
it. We have all said it, and we’ll all do it. I have seen the father--if
he is the father--and I suppose he must be. He is a barbarian and a
hypocrite, Mr. Nickleby. I told him, “You are a barbarian, sir.” I did.
I said, “You’re a barbarian, sir.” And I’m glad of it, I am VERY glad I
told him he was a barbarian, very glad indeed!’

By this time brother Charles was in such a very warm state of
indignation, that Nicholas thought he might venture to put in a word,
but the moment he essayed to do so, Mr. Cheeryble laid his hand softly
upon his arm, and pointed to a chair.

‘The subject is at an end for the present,’ said the old gentleman,
wiping his face. ‘Don’t revive it by a single word. I am going to speak
upon another subject, a confidential subject, Mr. Nickleby. We must be
cool again, we must be cool.’

After two or three turns across the room he resumed his seat, and
drawing his chair nearer to that on which Nicholas was seated, said:

‘I am about to employ you, my dear sir, on a confidential and delicate
mission.’

‘You might employ many a more able messenger, sir,’ said Nicholas, ‘but
a more trustworthy or zealous one, I may be bold to say, you could not
find.’

‘Of that I am well assured,’ returned brother Charles, ‘well assured.
You will give me credit for thinking so, when I tell you that the object
of this mission is a young lady.’

‘A young lady, sir!’ cried Nicholas, quite trembling for the moment with
his eagerness to hear more.

‘A very beautiful young lady,’ said Mr. Cheeryble, gravely.

‘Pray go on, sir,’ returned Nicholas.

‘I am thinking how to do so,’ said brother Charles; sadly, as it
seemed to his young friend, and with an expression allied to pain. ‘You
accidentally saw a young lady in this room one morning, my dear sir, in
a fainting fit. Do you remember? Perhaps you have forgotten.’

‘Oh no,’ replied Nicholas, hurriedly. ‘I--I--remember it very well
indeed.’

‘SHE is the lady I speak of,’ said brother Charles. Like the famous
parrot, Nicholas thought a great deal, but was unable to utter a word.

‘She is the daughter,’ said Mr. Cheeryble, ‘of a lady who, when she was a
beautiful girl herself, and I was very many years younger, I--it seems
a strange word for me to utter now--I loved very dearly. You will smile,
perhaps, to hear a grey-headed man talk about such things. You will not
offend me, for when I was as young as you, I dare say I should have done
the same.’

‘I have no such inclination, indeed,’ said Nicholas.

‘My dear brother Ned,’ continued Mr. Cheeryble, ‘was to have married her
sister, but she died. She is dead too now, and has been for many years.
She married her choice; and I wish I could add that her after-life was
as happy as God knows I ever prayed it might be!’

A short silence intervened, which Nicholas made no effort to break.

‘If trial and calamity had fallen as lightly on his head, as in the
deepest truth of my own heart I ever hoped (for her sake) it would, his
life would have been one of peace and happiness,’ said the old gentleman
calmly. ‘It will be enough to say that this was not the case; that
she was not happy; that they fell into complicated distresses and
difficulties; that she came, twelve months before her death, to appeal
to my old friendship; sadly changed, sadly altered, broken-spirited from
suffering and ill-usage, and almost broken-hearted. He readily availed
himself of the money which, to give her but one hour’s peace of mind,
I would have poured out as freely as water--nay, he often sent her back
for more--and yet even while he squandered it, he made the very success
of these, her applications to me, the groundwork of cruel taunts and
jeers, protesting that he knew she thought with bitter remorse of the
choice she had made, that she had married him from motives of interest
and vanity (he was a gay young man with great friends about him when
she chose him for her husband), and venting in short upon her, by every
unjust and unkind means, the bitterness of that ruin and disappointment
which had been brought about by his profligacy alone. In those times
this young lady was a mere child. I never saw her again until that
morning when you saw her also, but my nephew, Frank--’

Nicholas started, and indistinctly apologising for the interruption,
begged his patron to proceed.

‘--My nephew, Frank, I say,’ resumed Mr. Cheeryble, ‘encountered her by
accident, and lost sight of her almost in a minute afterwards, within
two days after he returned to England. Her father lay in some secret
place to avoid his creditors, reduced, between sickness and poverty, to
the verge of death, and she, a child,--we might almost think, if we did
not know the wisdom of all Heaven’s decrees--who should have blessed a
better man, was steadily braving privation, degradation, and everything
most terrible to such a young and delicate creature’s heart, for the
purpose of supporting him. She was attended, sir,’ said brother Charles,
‘in these reverses, by one faithful creature, who had been, in old
times, a poor kitchen wench in the family, who was then their solitary
servant, but who might have been, for the truth and fidelity of her
heart--who might have been--ah! the wife of Tim Linkinwater himself,
sir!’

Pursuing this encomium upon the poor follower with such energy and
relish as no words can describe, brother Charles leant back in his
chair, and delivered the remainder of his relation with greater
composure.

It was in substance this: That proudly resisting all offers of permanent
aid and support from her late mother’s friends, because they were made
conditional upon her quitting the wretched man, her father, who had no
friends left, and shrinking with instinctive delicacy from appealing
in their behalf to that true and noble heart which he hated, and
had, through its greatest and purest goodness, deeply wronged by
misconstruction and ill report, this young girl had struggled alone and
unassisted to maintain him by the labour of her hands. That through the
utmost depths of poverty and affliction she had toiled, never turning
aside for an instant from her task, never wearied by the petulant gloom
of a sick man sustained by no consoling recollections of the past or
hopes of the future; never repining for the comforts she had rejected,
or bewailing the hard lot she had voluntarily incurred. That every
little accomplishment she had acquired in happier days had been put into
requisition for this purpose, and directed to this one end. That for
two long years, toiling by day and often too by night, working at the
needle, the pencil, and the pen, and submitting, as a daily governess,
to such caprices and indignities as women (with daughters too) too often
love to inflict upon their own sex when they serve in such capacities,
as though in jealousy of the superior intelligence which they are
necessitated to employ,--indignities, in ninety-nine cases out of
every hundred, heaped upon persons immeasurably and incalculably their
betters, but outweighing in comparison any that the most heartless
blackleg would put upon his groom--that for two long years, by dint
of labouring in all these capacities and wearying in none, she had not
succeeded in the sole aim and object of her life, but that, overwhelmed
by accumulated difficulties and disappointments, she had been compelled
to seek out her mother’s old friend, and, with a bursting heart, to
confide in him at last.

‘If I had been poor,’ said brother Charles, with sparkling eyes; ‘if
I had been poor, Mr. Nickleby, my dear sir, which thank God I am not,
I would have denied myself (of course anybody would under such
circumstances) the commonest necessaries of life, to help her. As it is,
the task is a difficult one. If her father were dead, nothing could
be easier, for then she should share and cheer the happiest home that
brother Ned and I could have, as if she were our child or sister. But
he is still alive. Nobody can help him; that has been tried a thousand
times; he was not abandoned by all without good cause, I know.’

‘Cannot she be persuaded to--’ Nicholas hesitated when he had got thus
far.

‘To leave him?’ said brother Charles. ‘Who could entreat a child
to desert her parent? Such entreaties, limited to her seeing him
occasionally, have been urged upon her--not by me--but always with the
same result.’

‘Is he kind to her?’ said Nicholas. ‘Does he requite her affection?’

‘True kindness, considerate self-denying kindness, is not in his
nature,’ returned Mr. Cheeryble. ‘Such kindness as he knows, he regards
her with, I believe. The mother was a gentle, loving, confiding
creature, and although he wounded her from their marriage till her death
as cruelly and wantonly as ever man did, she never ceased to love him.
She commended him on her death-bed to her child’s care. Her child has
never forgotten it, and never will.’

‘Have you no influence over him?’ asked Nicholas.

‘I, my dear sir! The last man in the world. Such are his jealousy and
hatred of me, that if he knew his daughter had opened her heart to me,
he would render her life miserable with his reproaches; although--this
is the inconsistency and selfishness of his character--although if he
knew that every penny she had came from me, he would not relinquish one
personal desire that the most reckless expenditure of her scanty stock
could gratify.’

‘An unnatural scoundrel!’ said Nicholas, indignantly.

‘We will use no harsh terms,’ said brother Charles, in a gentle voice;
‘but accommodate ourselves to the circumstances in which this young lady
is placed. Such assistance as I have prevailed upon her to accept,
I have been obliged, at her own earnest request, to dole out in the
smallest portions, lest he, finding how easily money was procured,
should squander it even more lightly than he is accustomed to do. She
has come to and fro, to and fro, secretly and by night, to take even
this; and I cannot bear that things should go on in this way, Mr
Nickleby, I really cannot bear it.’

Then it came out by little and little, how that the twins had been
revolving in their good old heads manifold plans and schemes for helping
this young lady in the most delicate and considerate way, and so that
her father should not suspect the source whence the aid was derived; and
how they had at last come to the conclusion, that the best course would
be to make a feint of purchasing her little drawings and ornamental work
at a high price, and keeping up a constant demand for the same. For
the furtherance of which end and object it was necessary that somebody
should represent the dealer in such commodities, and after great
deliberation they had pitched upon Nicholas to support this character.

‘He knows me,’ said brother Charles, ‘and he knows my brother Ned.
Neither of us would do. Frank is a very good fellow--a very fine
fellow--but we are afraid that he might be a little flighty and
thoughtless in such a delicate matter, and that he might, perhaps--that
he might, in short, be too susceptible (for she is a beautiful creature,
sir; just what her poor mother was), and falling in love with her before
he knew well his own mind, carry pain and sorrow into that innocent
breast, which we would be the humble instruments of gradually making
happy. He took an extraordinary interest in her fortunes when he first
happened to encounter her; and we gather from the inquiries we have made
of him, that it was she in whose behalf he made that turmoil which led
to your first acquaintance.’

Nicholas stammered out that he had before suspected the possibility
of such a thing; and in explanation of its having occurred to him,
described when and where he had seen the young lady himself.

‘Well; then you see,’ continued brother Charles, ‘that HE wouldn’t
do. Tim Linkinwater is out of the question; for Tim, sir, is such a
tremendous fellow, that he could never contain himself, but would go
to loggerheads with the father before he had been in the place five
minutes. You don’t know what Tim is, sir, when he is aroused by anything
that appeals to his feelings very strongly; then he is terrific, sir,
is Tim Linkinwater, absolutely terrific. Now, in you we can repose the
strictest confidence; in you we have seen--or at least I have seen,
and that’s the same thing, for there’s no difference between me and my
brother Ned, except that he is the finest creature that ever lived,
and that there is not, and never will be, anybody like him in all the
world--in you we have seen domestic virtues and affections, and delicacy
of feeling, which exactly qualify you for such an office. And you are
the man, sir.’

‘The young lady, sir,’ said Nicholas, who felt so embarrassed that he
had no small difficulty in saying anything at all--‘Does--is--is she a
party to this innocent deceit?’

‘Yes, yes,’ returned Mr. Cheeryble; ‘at least she knows you come from us;
she does NOT know, however, but that we shall dispose of these little
productions that you’ll purchase from time to time; and, perhaps, if
you did it very well (that is, VERY well indeed), perhaps she might be
brought to believe that we--that we made a profit of them. Eh? Eh?’

In this guileless and most kind simplicity, brother Charles was so
happy, and in this possibility of the young lady being led to think that
she was under no obligation to him, he evidently felt so sanguine and
had so much delight, that Nicholas would not breathe a doubt upon the
subject.

All this time, however, there hovered upon the tip of his tongue a
confession that the very same objections which Mr. Cheeryble had stated
to the employment of his nephew in this commission applied with at least
equal force and validity to himself, and a hundred times had he been
upon the point of avowing the real state of his feelings, and entreating
to be released from it. But as often, treading upon the heels of this
impulse, came another which urged him to refrain, and to keep his secret
to his own breast. ‘Why should I,’ thought Nicholas, ‘why should I throw
difficulties in the way of this benevolent and high-minded design? What
if I do love and reverence this good and lovely creature. Should I not
appear a most arrogant and shallow coxcomb if I gravely represented that
there was any danger of her falling in love with me? Besides, have I
no confidence in myself? Am I not now bound in honour to repress these
thoughts? Has not this excellent man a right to my best and heartiest
services, and should any considerations of self deter me from rendering
them?’

Asking himself such questions as these, Nicholas mentally answered
with great emphasis ‘No!’ and persuading himself that he was a most
conscientious and glorious martyr, nobly resolved to do what, if he had
examined his own heart a little more carefully, he would have found he
could not resist. Such is the sleight of hand by which we juggle
with ourselves, and change our very weaknesses into stanch and most
magnanimous virtues!

Mr. Cheeryble, being of course wholly unsuspicious that such reflections
were presenting themselves to his young friend, proceeded to give him
the needful credentials and directions for his first visit, which was
to be made next morning; and all preliminaries being arranged, and the
strictest secrecy enjoined, Nicholas walked home for the night very
thoughtfully indeed.

The place to which Mr. Cheeryble had directed him was a row of mean and
not over-cleanly houses, situated within ‘the Rules’ of the King’s
Bench Prison, and not many hundred paces distant from the obelisk in St
George’s Fields. The Rules are a certain liberty adjoining the prison,
and comprising some dozen streets in which debtors who can raise money
to pay large fees, from which their creditors do NOT derive any benefit,
are permitted to reside by the wise provisions of the same enlightened
laws which leave the debtor who can raise no money to starve in jail,
without the food, clothing, lodging, or warmth, which are provided
for felons convicted of the most atrocious crimes that can disgrace
humanity. There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant
operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as
that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial
eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men,
without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.

To the row of houses indicated to him by Mr. Charles Cheeryble, Nicholas
directed his steps, without much troubling his head with such matters
as these; and at this row of houses--after traversing a very dirty
and dusty suburb, of which minor theatricals, shell-fish, ginger-beer,
spring vans, greengrocery, and brokers’ shops, appeared to compose
the main and most prominent features--he at length arrived with a
palpitating heart. There were small gardens in front which, being wholly
neglected in all other respects, served as little pens for the dust to
collect in, until the wind came round the corner and blew it down the
road. Opening the rickety gate which, dangling on its broken hinges
before one of these, half admitted and half repulsed the visitor,
Nicholas knocked at the street door with a faltering hand.

It was in truth a shabby house outside, with very dim parlour windows
and very small show of blinds, and very dirty muslin curtains dangling
across the lower panes on very loose and limp strings. Neither, when the
door was opened, did the inside appear to belie the outward promise,
as there was faded carpeting on the stairs and faded oil-cloth in the
passage; in addition to which discomforts a gentleman Ruler was smoking
hard in the front parlour (though it was not yet noon), while the lady
of the house was busily engaged in turpentining the disjointed fragments
of a tent-bedstead at the door of the back parlour, as if in preparation
for the reception of some new lodger who had been fortunate enough to
engage it.

Nicholas had ample time to make these observations while the little boy,
who went on errands for the lodgers, clattered down the kitchen stairs
and was heard to scream, as in some remote cellar, for Miss Bray’s
servant, who, presently appearing and requesting him to follow her,
caused him to evince greater symptoms of nervousness and disorder than
so natural a consequence of his having inquired for that young lady
would seem calculated to occasion.

Upstairs he went, however, and into a front room he was shown, and
there, seated at a little table by the window, on which were drawing
materials with which she was occupied, sat the beautiful girl who had
so engrossed his thoughts, and who, surrounded by all the new and strong
interest which Nicholas attached to her story, seemed now, in his eyes,
a thousand times more beautiful than he had ever yet supposed her.

But how the graces and elegancies which she had dispersed about the
poorly-furnished room went to the heart of Nicholas! Flowers, plants,
birds, the harp, the old piano whose notes had sounded so much sweeter
in bygone times; how many struggles had it cost her to keep these two
last links of that broken chain which bound her yet to home! With every
slender ornament, the occupation of her leisure hours, replete with that
graceful charm which lingers in every little tasteful work of woman’s
hands, how much patient endurance and how many gentle affections were
entwined! He felt as though the smile of Heaven were on the little
chamber; as though the beautiful devotion of so young and weak a
creature had shed a ray of its own on the inanimate things around,
and made them beautiful as itself; as though the halo with which old
painters surround the bright angels of a sinless world played about a
being akin in spirit to them, and its light were visibly before him.

And yet Nicholas was in the Rules of the King’s Bench Prison! If he
had been in Italy indeed, and the time had been sunset, and the scene
a stately terrace! But, there is one broad sky over all the world, and
whether it be blue or cloudy, the same heaven beyond it; so, perhaps, he
had no need of compunction for thinking as he did.

It is not to be supposed that he took in everything at one glance, for
he had as yet been unconscious of the presence of a sick man propped up
with pillows in an easy-chair, who, moving restlessly and impatiently in
his seat, attracted his attention.

He was scarce fifty, perhaps, but so emaciated as to appear much older.
His features presented the remains of a handsome countenance, but one
in which the embers of strong and impetuous passions were easier to be
traced than any expression which would have rendered a far plainer face
much more prepossessing. His looks were very haggard, and his limbs and
body literally worn to the bone, but there was something of the old fire
in the large sunken eye notwithstanding, and it seemed to kindle afresh
as he struck a thick stick, with which he seemed to have supported
himself in his seat, impatiently on the floor twice or thrice, and
called his daughter by her name.

‘Madeline, who is this? What does anybody want here? Who told a stranger
we could be seen? What is it?’

‘I believe--’ the young lady began, as she inclined her head with an air
of some confusion, in reply to the salutation of Nicholas.

‘You always believe,’ returned her father, petulantly. ‘What is it?’

By this time Nicholas had recovered sufficient presence of mind to speak
for himself, so he said (as it had been agreed he should say) that he
had called about a pair of hand-screens, and some painted velvet for an
ottoman, both of which were required to be of the most elegant design
possible, neither time nor expense being of the smallest consideration.
He had also to pay for the two drawings, with many thanks, and,
advancing to the little table, he laid upon it a bank note, folded in an
envelope and sealed.

‘See that the money is right, Madeline,’ said the father. ‘Open the
paper, my dear.’

‘It’s quite right, papa, I’m sure.’

‘Here!’ said Mr. Bray, putting out his hand, and opening and shutting
his bony fingers with irritable impatience. ‘Let me see. What are you
talking about, Madeline? You’re sure? How can you be sure of any such
thing? Five pounds--well, is THAT right?’

‘Quite,’ said Madeline, bending over him. She was so busily employed in
arranging the pillows that Nicholas could not see her face, but as she
stooped he thought he saw a tear fall.

‘Ring the bell, ring the bell,’ said the sick man, with the same nervous
eagerness, and motioning towards it with such a quivering hand that the
bank note rustled in the air. ‘Tell her to get it changed, to get me a
newspaper, to buy me some grapes, another bottle of the wine that I had
last week--and--and--I forget half I want just now, but she can go out
again. Let her get those first, those first. Now, Madeline, my love,
quick, quick! Good God, how slow you are!’

‘He remembers nothing that SHE wants!’ thought Nicholas. Perhaps
something of what he thought was expressed in his countenance, for the
sick man, turning towards him with great asperity, demanded to know if
he waited for a receipt.

‘It is no matter at all,’ said Nicholas.

‘No matter! what do you mean, sir?’ was the tart rejoinder. ‘No matter!
Do you think you bring your paltry money here as a favour or a gift;
or as a matter of business, and in return for value received? D--n you,
sir, because you can’t appreciate the time and taste which are bestowed
upon the goods you deal in, do you think you give your money away? Do
you know that you are talking to a gentleman, sir, who at one time
could have bought up fifty such men as you and all you have? What do you
mean?’

‘I merely mean that as I shall have many dealings with this lady, if
she will kindly allow me, I will not trouble her with such forms,’ said
Nicholas.

‘Then I mean, if you please, that we’ll have as many forms as we can,
returned the father. ‘My daughter, sir, requires no kindness from you
or anybody else. Have the goodness to confine your dealings strictly to
trade and business, and not to travel beyond it. Every petty tradesman
is to begin to pity her now, is he? Upon my soul! Very pretty. Madeline,
my dear, give him a receipt; and mind you always do so.’

While she was feigning to write it, and Nicholas was ruminating upon the
extraordinary but by no means uncommon character thus presented to his
observation, the invalid, who appeared at times to suffer great bodily
pain, sank back in his chair and moaned out a feeble complaint that the
girl had been gone an hour, and that everybody conspired to goad him.

‘When,’ said Nicholas, as he took the piece of paper, ‘when shall I call
again?’

This was addressed to the daughter, but the father answered immediately.

‘When you’re requested to call, sir, and not before. Don’t worry and
persecute. Madeline, my dear, when is this person to call again?’

‘Oh, not for a long time, not for three or four weeks; it is not
necessary, indeed; I can do without,’ said the young lady, with great
eagerness.

‘Why, how are we to do without?’ urged her father, not speaking above
his breath. ‘Three or four weeks, Madeline! Three or four weeks!’

‘Then sooner, sooner, if you please,’ said the young lady, turning to
Nicholas.

‘Three or four weeks!’ muttered the father. ‘Madeline, what on earth--do
nothing for three or four weeks!’

‘It is a long time, ma’am,’ said Nicholas.

‘YOU think so, do you?’ retorted the father, angrily. ‘If I chose to
beg, sir, and stoop to ask assistance from people I despise, three or
four months would not be a long time; three or four years would not be a
long time. Understand, sir, that is if I chose to be dependent; but as I
don’t, you may call in a week.’

Nicholas bowed low to the young lady and retired, pondering upon Mr
Bray’s ideas of independence, and devoutly hoping that there might
be few such independent spirits as he mingling with the baser clay of
humanity.

He heard a light footstep above him as he descended the stairs, and
looking round saw that the young lady was standing there, and glancing
timidly towards him, seemed to hesitate whether she should call him back
or no. The best way of settling the question was to turn back at once,
which Nicholas did.

‘I don’t know whether I do right in asking you, sir,’ said Madeline,
hurriedly, ‘but pray, pray, do not mention to my poor mother’s dear
friends what has passed here today. He has suffered much, and is worse
this morning. I beg you, sir, as a boon, a favour to myself.’

‘You have but to hint a wish,’ returned Nicholas fervently, ‘and I would
hazard my life to gratify it.’

‘You speak hastily, sir.’

‘Truly and sincerely,’ rejoined Nicholas, his lips trembling as he
formed the words, ‘if ever man spoke truly yet. I am not skilled in
disguising my feelings, and if I were, I could not hide my heart from
you. Dear madam, as I know your history, and feel as men and angels must
who hear and see such things, I do entreat you to believe that I would
die to serve you.’

The young lady turned away her head, and was plainly weeping.

‘Forgive me,’ said Nicholas, with respectful earnestness, ‘if I seem to
say too much, or to presume upon the confidence which has been intrusted
to me. But I could not leave you as if my interest and sympathy expired
with the commission of the day. I am your faithful servant, humbly
devoted to you from this hour, devoted in strict truth and honour to him
who sent me here, and in pure integrity of heart, and distant respect
for you. If I meant more or less than this, I should be unworthy his
regard, and false to the very nature that prompts the honest words I
utter.’

She waved her hand, entreating him to be gone, but answered not a word.
Nicholas could say no more, and silently withdrew. And thus ended his
first interview with Madeline Bray.



CHAPTER 47

Mr. Ralph Nickleby has some confidential Intercourse with another old
Friend. They concert between them a Project, which promises well for
both


‘There go the three-quarters past!’ muttered Newman Noggs, listening
to the chimes of some neighbouring church ‘and my dinner time’s two. He
does it on purpose. He makes a point of it. It’s just like him.’

It was in his own little den of an office and on the top of his official
stool that Newman thus soliloquised; and the soliloquy referred, as
Newman’s grumbling soliloquies usually did, to Ralph Nickleby.

‘I don’t believe he ever had an appetite,’ said Newman, ‘except for
pounds, shillings, and pence, and with them he’s as greedy as a wolf. I
should like to have him compelled to swallow one of every English coin.
The penny would be an awkward morsel--but the crown--ha! ha!’

His good-humour being in some degree restored by the vision of Ralph
Nickleby swallowing, perforce, a five-shilling piece, Newman slowly
brought forth from his desk one of those portable bottles, currently
known as pocket-pistols, and shaking the same close to his ear so as to
produce a rippling sound very cool and pleasant to listen to, suffered
his features to relax, and took a gurgling drink, which relaxed them
still more. Replacing the cork, he smacked his lips twice or thrice with
an air of great relish, and, the taste of the liquor having by this time
evaporated, recurred to his grievance again.

‘Five minutes to three,’ growled Newman; ‘it can’t want more by this
time; and I had my breakfast at eight o’clock, and SUCH a breakfast!
and my right dinner-time two! And I might have a nice little bit of hot
roast meat spoiling at home all this time--how does HE know I haven’t?
“Don’t go till I come back,” “Don’t go till I come back,” day after day.
What do you always go out at my dinner-time for then--eh? Don’t you know
it’s nothing but aggravation--eh?’

These words, though uttered in a very loud key, were addressed to
nothing but empty air. The recital of his wrongs, however, seemed to
have the effect of making Newman Noggs desperate; for he flattened his
old hat upon his head, and drawing on the everlasting gloves, declared
with great vehemence, that come what might, he would go to dinner that
very minute.

Carrying this resolution into instant effect, he had advanced as far as
the passage, when the sound of the latch-key in the street door caused
him to make a precipitate retreat into his own office again.

‘Here he is,’ growled Newman, ‘and somebody with him. Now it’ll be “Stop
till this gentleman’s gone.” But I won’t. That’s flat.’

So saying, Newman slipped into a tall empty closet which opened with two
half doors, and shut himself up; intending to slip out directly Ralph
was safe inside his own room.

‘Noggs!’ cried Ralph, ‘where is that fellow, Noggs?’

But not a word said Newman.

‘The dog has gone to his dinner, though I told him not,’ muttered Ralph,
looking into the office, and pulling out his watch. ‘Humph!’ You had
better come in here, Gride. My man’s out, and the sun is hot upon my
room. This is cool and in the shade, if you don’t mind roughing it.’

‘Not at all, Mr. Nickleby, oh not at all! All places are alike to me,
sir. Ah! very nice indeed. Oh! very nice!’

The parson who made this reply was a little old man, of about seventy or
seventy-five years of age, of a very lean figure, much bent and slightly
twisted. He wore a grey coat with a very narrow collar, an old-fashioned
waistcoat of ribbed black silk, and such scanty trousers as displayed
his shrunken spindle-shanks in their full ugliness. The only articles of
display or ornament in his dress were a steel watch-chain to which
were attached some large gold seals; and a black ribbon into which, in
compliance with an old fashion scarcely ever observed in these days,
his grey hair was gathered behind. His nose and chin were sharp and
prominent, his jaws had fallen inwards from loss of teeth, his face
was shrivelled and yellow, save where the cheeks were streaked with
the colour of a dry winter apple; and where his beard had been, there
lingered yet a few grey tufts which seemed, like the ragged eyebrows, to
denote the badness of the soil from which they sprung. The whole air and
attitude of the form was one of stealthy cat-like obsequiousness;
the whole expression of the face was concentrated in a wrinkled leer,
compounded of cunning, lecherousness, slyness, and avarice.

Such was old Arthur Gride, in whose face there was not a wrinkle, in
whose dress there was not one spare fold or plait, but expressed
the most covetous and griping penury, and sufficiently indicated his
belonging to that class of which Ralph Nickleby was a member. Such was
old Arthur Gride, as he sat in a low chair looking up into the face of
Ralph Nickleby, who, lounging upon the tall office stool, with his arms
upon his knees, looked down into his; a match for him on whatever errand
he had come.

‘And how have you been?’ said Gride, feigning great interest in Ralph’s
state of health. ‘I haven’t seen you for--oh! not for--’

‘Not for a long time,’ said Ralph, with a peculiar smile, importing
that he very well knew it was not on a mere visit of compliment that his
friend had come. ‘It was a narrow chance that you saw me now, for I had
only just come up to the door as you turned the corner.’

‘I am very lucky,’ observed Gride.

‘So men say,’ replied Ralph, drily.

The older money-lender wagged his chin and smiled, but he originated no
new remark, and they sat for some little time without speaking. Each was
looking out to take the other at a disadvantage.

‘Come, Gride,’ said Ralph, at length; ‘what’s in the wind today?’

‘Aha! you’re a bold man, Mr. Nickleby,’ cried the other, apparently very
much relieved by Ralph’s leading the way to business. ‘Oh dear, dear,
what a bold man you are!’

‘Why, you have a sleek and slinking way with you that makes me seem so
by contrast,’ returned Ralph. ‘I don’t know but that yours may answer
better, but I want the patience for it.’

‘You were born a genius, Mr. Nickleby,’ said old Arthur. ‘Deep, deep,
deep. Ah!’

‘Deep enough,’ retorted Ralph, ‘to know that I shall need all the depth
I have, when men like you begin to compliment. You know I have stood by
when you fawned and flattered other people, and I remember pretty well
what THAT always led to.’

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ rejoined Arthur, rubbing his hands. ‘So you do, so you do,
no doubt. Not a man knows it better. Well, it’s a pleasant thing now to
think that you remember old times. Oh dear!’

‘Now then,’ said Ralph, composedly; ‘what’s in the wind, I ask again?
What is it?’

‘See that now!’ cried the other. ‘He can’t even keep from business while
we’re chatting over bygones. Oh dear, dear, what a man it is!’

‘WHICH of the bygones do you want to revive?’ said Ralph. ‘One of them,
I know, or you wouldn’t talk about them.’

‘He suspects even me!’ cried old Arthur, holding up his hands. ‘Even
me! Oh dear, even me. What a man it is! Ha, ha, ha! What a man it is! Mr
Nickleby against all the world. There’s nobody like him. A giant among
pigmies, a giant, a giant!’

Ralph looked at the old dog with a quiet smile as he chuckled on in this
strain, and Newman Noggs in the closet felt his heart sink within him as
the prospect of dinner grew fainter and fainter.

‘I must humour him though,’ cried old Arthur; ‘he must have his way--a
wilful man, as the Scotch say--well, well, they’re a wise people, the
Scotch. He will talk about business, and won’t give away his time for
nothing. He’s very right. Time is money, time is money.’

‘He was one of us who made that saying, I should think,’ said Ralph.
‘Time is money, and very good money too, to those who reckon interest by
it. Time IS money! Yes, and time costs money; it’s rather an expensive
article to some people we could name, or I forget my trade.’

In rejoinder to this sally, old Arthur again raised his hands, again
chuckled, and again ejaculated ‘What a man it is!’ which done, he
dragged the low chair a little nearer to Ralph’s high stool, and looking
upwards into his immovable face, said,

‘What would you say to me, if I was to tell you that I was--that I
was--going to be married?’

‘I should tell you,’ replied Ralph, looking coldly down upon him, ‘that
for some purpose of your own you told a lie, and that it wasn’t the
first time and wouldn’t be the last; that I wasn’t surprised and wasn’t
to be taken in.’

‘Then I tell you seriously that I am,’ said old Arthur.

‘And I tell you seriously,’ rejoined Ralph, ‘what I told you this
minute. Stay. Let me look at you. There’s a liquorish devilry in your
face. What is this?’

‘I wouldn’t deceive YOU, you know,’ whined Arthur Gride; ‘I couldn’t do
it, I should be mad to try. I, I, to deceive Mr. Nickleby! The pigmy to
impose upon the giant. I ask again--he, he, he!--what should you say to
me if I was to tell you that I was going to be married?’

‘To some old hag?’ said Ralph.

‘No, No,’ cried Arthur, interrupting him, and rubbing his hands in an
ecstasy. ‘Wrong, wrong again. Mr. Nickleby for once at fault; out, quite
out! To a young and beautiful girl; fresh, lovely, bewitching, and not
nineteen. Dark eyes, long eyelashes, ripe and ruddy lips that to look at
is to long to kiss, beautiful clustering hair that one’s fingers itch to
play with, such a waist as might make a man clasp the air involuntarily,
thinking of twining his arm about it, little feet that tread so lightly
they hardly seem to walk upon the ground--to marry all this, sir,
this--hey, hey!’

‘This is something more than common drivelling,’ said Ralph, after
listening with a curled lip to the old sinner’s raptures. ‘The girl’s
name?’

‘Oh deep, deep! See now how deep that is!’ exclaimed old Arthur. ‘He
knows I want his help, he knows he can give it me, he knows it must all
turn to his advantage, he sees the thing already. Her name--is there
nobody within hearing?’

‘Why, who the devil should there be?’ retorted Ralph, testily.

‘I didn’t know but that perhaps somebody might be passing up or down the
stairs,’ said Arthur Gride, after looking out at the door and carefully
reclosing it; ‘or but that your man might have come back and might have
been listening outside. Clerks and servants have a trick of listening,
and I should have been very uncomfortable if Mr. Noggs--’

‘Curse Mr. Noggs,’ said Ralph, sharply, ‘and go on with what you have to
say.’

‘Curse Mr. Noggs, by all means,’ rejoined old Arthur; ‘I am sure I have
not the least objection to that. Her name is--’

‘Well,’ said Ralph, rendered very irritable by old Arthur’s pausing
again ‘what is it?’

‘Madeline Bray.’

Whatever reasons there might have been--and Arthur Gride appeared to
have anticipated some--for the mention of this name producing an effect
upon Ralph, or whatever effect it really did produce upon him, he
permitted none to manifest itself, but calmly repeated the name several
times, as if reflecting when and where he had heard it before.

‘Bray,’ said Ralph. ‘Bray--there was young Bray of--no, he never had a
daughter.’

‘You remember Bray?’ rejoined Arthur Gride.

‘No,’ said Ralph, looking vacantly at him.

‘Not Walter Bray! The dashing man, who used his handsome wife so ill?’

‘If you seek to recall any particular dashing man to my recollection
by such a trait as that,’ said Ralph, shrugging his shoulders, ‘I shall
confound him with nine-tenths of the dashing men I have ever known.’

‘Tut, tut. That Bray who is now in the Rules of the Bench,’ said old
Arthur. ‘You can’t have forgotten Bray. Both of us did business with
him. Why, he owes you money!’

‘Oh HIM!’ rejoined Ralph. ‘Ay, ay. Now you speak. Oh! It’s HIS daughter,
is it?’

Naturally as this was said, it was not said so naturally but that a
kindred spirit like old Arthur Gride might have discerned a design upon
the part of Ralph to lead him on to much more explicit statements and
explanations than he would have volunteered, or that Ralph could in all
likelihood have obtained by any other means. Old Arthur, however, was so
intent upon his own designs, that he suffered himself to be overreached,
and had no suspicion but that his good friend was in earnest.

‘I knew you couldn’t forget him, when you came to think for a moment,’
he said.

‘You were right,’ answered Ralph. ‘But old Arthur Gride and matrimony
is a most anomalous conjunction of words; old Arthur Gride and dark
eyes and eyelashes, and lips that to look at is to long to kiss, and
clustering hair that he wants to play with, and waists that he wants to
span, and little feet that don’t tread upon anything--old Arthur Gride
and such things as these is more monstrous still; but old Arthur Gride
marrying the daughter of a ruined “dashing man” in the Rules of the
Bench, is the most monstrous and incredible of all. Plainly, friend
Arthur Gride, if you want any help from me in this business (which of
course you do, or you would not be here), speak out, and to the purpose.
And, above all, don’t talk to me of its turning to my advantage, for I
know it must turn to yours also, and to a good round tune too, or you
would have no finger in such a pie as this.’

There was enough acerbity and sarcasm not only in the matter of Ralph’s
speech, but in the tone of voice in which he uttered it, and the looks
with which he eked it out, to have fired even the ancient usurer’s
cold blood and flushed even his withered cheek. But he gave vent to no
demonstration of anger, contenting himself with exclaiming as before,
‘What a man it is!’ and rolling his head from side to side, as if in
unrestrained enjoyment of his freedom and drollery. Clearly observing,
however, from the expression in Ralph’s features, that he had best
come to the point as speedily as might be, he composed himself for
more serious business, and entered upon the pith and marrow of his
negotiation.

First, he dwelt upon the fact that Madeline Bray was devoted to the
support and maintenance, and was a slave to every wish, of her only
parent, who had no other friend on earth; to which Ralph rejoined that
he had heard something of the kind before, and that if she had known a
little more of the world, she wouldn’t have been such a fool.

Secondly, he enlarged upon the character of her father, arguing, that
even taking it for granted that he loved her in return with the utmost
affection of which he was capable, yet he loved himself a great deal
better; which Ralph said it was quite unnecessary to say anything more
about, as that was very natural, and probable enough.

And, thirdly, old Arthur premised that the girl was a delicate and
beautiful creature, and that he had really a hankering to have her for
his wife. To this Ralph deigned no other rejoinder than a harsh smile,
and a glance at the shrivelled old creature before him, which were,
however, sufficiently expressive.

‘Now,’ said Gride, ‘for the little plan I have in my mind to bring
this about; because, I haven’t offered myself even to the father yet, I
should have told you. But that you have gathered already? Ah! oh dear,
oh dear, what an edged tool you are!’

‘Don’t play with me then,’ said Ralph impatiently. ‘You know the
proverb.’

‘A reply always on the tip of his tongue!’ cried old Arthur, raising his
hands and eyes in admiration. ‘He is always prepared! Oh dear, what a
blessing to have such a ready wit, and so much ready money to back it!’
Then, suddenly changing his tone, he went on: ‘I have been backwards and
forwards to Bray’s lodgings several times within the last six months.
It is just half a year since I first saw this delicate morsel, and, oh
dear, what a delicate morsel it is! But that is neither here nor there.
I am his detaining creditor for seventeen hundred pounds!’

‘You talk as if you were the only detaining creditor,’ said Ralph,
pulling out his pocket-book. ‘I am another for nine hundred and
seventy-five pounds four and threepence.’

‘The only other, Mr. Nickleby,’ said old Arthur, eagerly. ‘The only
other. Nobody else went to the expense of lodging a detainer, trusting
to our holding him fast enough, I warrant you. We both fell into the
same snare; oh dear, what a pitfall it was; it almost ruined me! And
lent him our money upon bills, with only one name besides his own, which
to be sure everybody supposed to be a good one, and was as negotiable
as money, but which turned out you know how. Just as we should have come
upon him, he died insolvent. Ah! it went very nigh to ruin me, that loss
did!’

‘Go on with your scheme,’ said Ralph. ‘It’s of no use raising the cry of
our trade just now; there’s nobody to hear us!’

‘It’s always as well to talk that way,’ returned old Arthur, with a
chuckle, ‘whether there’s anybody to hear us or not. Practice makes
perfect, you know. Now, if I offer myself to Bray as his son-in-law,
upon one simple condition that the moment I am fast married he shall be
quietly released, and have an allowance to live just t’other side the
water like a gentleman (he can’t live long, for I have asked his
doctor, and he declares that his complaint is one of the Heart and it
is impossible), and if all the advantages of this condition are properly
stated and dwelt upon to him, do you think he could resist me? And if
he could not resist ME, do you think his daughter could resist HIM?
Shouldn’t I have her Mrs. Arthur Gride--pretty Mrs. Arthur Gride--a
tit-bit--a dainty chick--shouldn’t I have her Mrs. Arthur Gride in a
week, a month, a day--any time I chose to name?’

‘Go on,’ said Ralph, nodding his head deliberately, and speaking in
a tone whose studied coldness presented a strange contrast to the
rapturous squeak to which his friend had gradually mounted. ‘Go on. You
didn’t come here to ask me that.’

‘Oh dear, how you talk!’ cried old Arthur, edging himself closer still
to Ralph. ‘Of course I didn’t, I don’t pretend I did! I came to ask what
you would take from me, if I prospered with the father, for this debt of
yours. Five shillings in the pound, six and-eightpence, ten shillings? I
WOULD go as far as ten for such a friend as you, we have always been on
such good terms, but you won’t be so hard upon me as that, I know. Now,
will you?’

‘There’s something more to be told,’ said Ralph, as stony and immovable
as ever.

‘Yes, yes, there is, but you won’t give me time,’ returned Arthur Gride.
‘I want a backer in this matter; one who can talk, and urge, and press a
point, which you can do as no man can. I can’t do that, for I am a poor,
timid, nervous creature. Now, if you get a good composition for this
debt, which you long ago gave up for lost, you’ll stand my friend, and
help me. Won’t you?’

‘There’s something more,’ said Ralph.

‘No, no, indeed,’ cried Arthur Gride.

‘Yes, yes, indeed. I tell you yes,’ said Ralph.

‘Oh!’ returned old Arthur feigning to be suddenly enlightened. ‘You mean
something more, as concerns myself and my intention. Ay, surely, surely.
Shall I mention that?’

‘I think you had better,’ rejoined Ralph, drily.

‘I didn’t like to trouble you with that, because I supposed your
interest would cease with your own concern in the affair,’ said Arthur
Gride. ‘That’s kind of you to ask. Oh dear, how very kind of you! Why,
supposing I had a knowledge of some property--some little property--very
little--to which this pretty chick was entitled; which nobody does or
can know of at this time, but which her husband could sweep into his
pouch, if he knew as much as I do, would that account for--’

‘For the whole proceeding,’ rejoined Ralph, abruptly. ‘Now, let me turn
this matter over, and consider what I ought to have if I should help you
to success.’

‘But don’t be hard,’ cried old Arthur, raising his hands with an
imploring gesture, and speaking, in a tremulous voice. ‘Don’t be too
hard upon me. It’s a very small property, it is indeed. Say the ten
shillings, and we’ll close the bargain. It’s more than I ought to give,
but you’re so kind--shall we say the ten? Do now, do.’

Ralph took no notice of these supplications, but sat for three or four
minutes in a brown study, looking thoughtfully at the person from whom
they proceeded. After sufficient cogitation he broke silence, and
it certainly could not be objected that he used any needless
circumlocution, or failed to speak directly to the purpose.

‘If you married this girl without me,’ said Ralph, ‘you must pay my debt
in full, because you couldn’t set her father free otherwise. It’s plain,
then, that I must have the whole amount, clear of all deduction or
incumbrance, or I should lose from being honoured with your confidence,
instead of gaining by it. That’s the first article of the treaty. For
the second, I shall stipulate that for my trouble in negotiation and
persuasion, and helping you to this fortune, I have five hundred pounds.
That’s very little, because you have the ripe lips, and the clustering
hair, and what not, all to yourself. For the third and last article, I
require that you execute a bond to me, this day, binding yourself in the
payment of these two sums, before noon of the day of your marriage with
Madeline Bray. You have told me I can urge and press a point. I press
this one, and will take nothing less than these terms. Accept them if
you like. If not, marry her without me if you can. I shall still get my
debt.’

To all entreaties, protestations, and offers of compromise between his
own proposals and those which Arthur Gride had first suggested, Ralph
was deaf as an adder. He would enter into no further discussion of the
subject, and while old Arthur dilated upon the enormity of his demands
and proposed modifications of them, approaching by degrees nearer and
nearer to the terms he resisted, sat perfectly mute, looking with an
air of quiet abstraction over the entries and papers in his pocket-book.
Finding that it was impossible to make any impression upon his staunch
friend, Arthur Gride, who had prepared himself for some such result
before he came, consented with a heavy heart to the proposed treaty, and
upon the spot filled up the bond required (Ralph kept such instruments
handy), after exacting the condition that Mr. Nickleby should accompany
him to Bray’s lodgings that very hour, and open the negotiation at once,
should circumstances appear auspicious and favourable to their designs.

In pursuance of this last understanding the worthy gentlemen went out
together shortly afterwards, and Newman Noggs emerged, bottle in hand,
from the cupboard, out of the upper door of which, at the imminent risk
of detection, he had more than once thrust his red nose when such parts
of the subject were under discussion as interested him most.

‘I have no appetite now,’ said Newman, putting the flask in his pocket.
‘I’ve had MY dinner.’

Having delivered this observation in a very grievous and doleful
tone, Newman reached the door in one long limp, and came back again in
another.

‘I don’t know who she may be, or what she may be,’ he said: ‘but I pity
her with all my heart and soul; and I can’t help her, nor can I any of
the people against whom a hundred tricks, but none so vile as this, are
plotted every day! Well, that adds to my pain, but not to theirs. The
thing is no worse because I know it, and it tortures me as well as
them. Gride and Nickleby! Good pair for a curricle. Oh roguery! roguery!
roguery!’

With these reflections, and a very hard knock on the crown of his
unfortunate hat at each repetition of the last word, Newman Noggs,
whose brain was a little muddled by so much of the contents of
the pocket-pistol as had found their way there during his recent
concealment, went forth to seek such consolation as might be derivable
from the beef and greens of some cheap eating-house.

Meanwhile the two plotters had betaken themselves to the same house
whither Nicholas had repaired for the first time but a few mornings
before, and having obtained access to Mr. Bray, and found his daughter
from home, had by a train of the most masterly approaches that Ralph’s
utmost skill could frame, at length laid open the real object of their
visit.

‘There he sits, Mr. Bray,’ said Ralph, as the invalid, not yet recovered
from his surprise, reclined in his chair, looking alternately at him
and Arthur Gride. ‘What if he has had the ill-fortune to be one cause
of your detention in this place? I have been another; men must live; you
are too much a man of the world not to see that in its true light. We
offer the best reparation in our power. Reparation! Here is an offer
of marriage, that many a titled father would leap at, for his child. Mr
Arthur Gride, with the fortune of a prince. Think what a haul it is!’

‘My daughter, sir,’ returned Bray, haughtily, ‘as I have brought her
up, would be a rich recompense for the largest fortune that a man could
bestow in exchange for her hand.’

‘Precisely what I told you,’ said the artful Ralph, turning to his
friend, old Arthur. ‘Precisely what made me consider the thing so fair
and easy. There is no obligation on either side. You have money, and
Miss Madeline has beauty and worth. She has youth, you have money.
She has not money, you have not youth. Tit for tat, quits, a match of
Heaven’s own making!’

‘Matches are made in Heaven, they say,’ added Arthur Gride, leering
hideously at the father-in-law he wanted. ‘If we are married, it will be
destiny, according to that.’

‘Then think, Mr. Bray,’ said Ralph, hastily substituting for this
argument considerations more nearly allied to earth, ‘think what a stake
is involved in the acceptance or rejection of these proposals of my
friend.’

‘How can I accept or reject,’ interrupted Mr. Bray, with an irritable
consciousness that it really rested with him to decide. ‘It is for my
daughter to accept or reject; it is for my daughter. You know that.’

‘True,’ said Ralph, emphatically; ‘but you have still the power to
advise; to state the reasons for and against; to hint a wish.’

‘To hint a wish, sir!’ returned the debtor, proud and mean by turns, and
selfish at all times. ‘I am her father, am I not? Why should I hint, and
beat about the bush? Do you suppose, like her mother’s friends and my
enemies--a curse upon them all!--that there is anything in what she has
done for me but duty, sir, but duty? Or do you think that my having been
unfortunate is a sufficient reason why our relative positions should
be changed, and that she should command and I should obey? Hint a wish,
too! Perhaps you think, because you see me in this place and
scarcely able to leave this chair without assistance, that I am some
broken-spirited dependent creature, without the courage or power to do
what I may think best for my own child. Still the power to hint a wish!
I hope so!’

‘Pardon me,’ returned Ralph, who thoroughly knew his man, and had taken
his ground accordingly; ‘you do not hear me out. I was about to say that
your hinting a wish, even hinting a wish, would surely be equivalent to
commanding.’

‘Why, of course it would,’ retorted Mr. Bray, in an exasperated tone. ‘If
you don’t happen to have heard of the time, sir, I tell you that there
was a time, when I carried every point in triumph against her mother’s
whole family, although they had power and wealth on their side, by my
will alone.’

‘Still,’ rejoined Ralph, as mildly as his nature would allow him, ‘you
have not heard me out. You are a man yet qualified to shine in society,
with many years of life before you; that is, if you lived in freer air,
and under brighter skies, and chose your own companions. Gaiety is
your element, you have shone in it before. Fashion and freedom for you.
France, and an annuity that would support you there in luxury, would
give you a new lease of life, would transfer you to a new existence. The
town rang with your expensive pleasures once, and you could blaze up
on a new scene again, profiting by experience, and living a little at
others’ cost, instead of letting others live at yours. What is there on
the reverse side of the picture? What is there? I don’t know which is
the nearest churchyard, but a gravestone there, wherever it is, and a
date, perhaps two years hence, perhaps twenty. That’s all.’

Mr. Bray rested his elbow on the arm of his chair, and shaded his face
with his hand.

‘I speak plainly,’ said Ralph, sitting down beside him, ‘because I feel
strongly. It’s my interest that you should marry your daughter to my
friend Gride, because then he sees me paid--in part, that is. I don’t
disguise it. I acknowledge it openly. But what interest have you in
recommending her to such a step? Keep that in view. She might object,
remonstrate, shed tears, talk of his being too old, and plead that her
life would be rendered miserable. But what is it now?’

Several slight gestures on the part of the invalid showed that these
arguments were no more lost upon him, than the smallest iota of his
demeanour was upon Ralph.

‘What is it now, I say,’ pursued the wily usurer, ‘or what has it a
chance of being? If you died, indeed, the people you hate would make her
happy. But can you bear the thought of that?’

‘No!’ returned Bray, urged by a vindictive impulse he could not repress.

‘I should imagine not, indeed!’ said Ralph, quietly. ‘If she profits
by anybody’s death,’ this was said in a lower tone, ‘let it be by her
husband’s. Don’t let her have to look back to yours, as the event from
which to date a happier life. Where is the objection? Let me hear it
stated. What is it? That her suitor is an old man? Why, how often do men
of family and fortune, who haven’t your excuse, but have all the means
and superfluities of life within their reach, how often do they marry
their daughters to old men, or (worse still) to young men without heads
or hearts, to tickle some idle vanity, strengthen some family interest,
or secure some seat in Parliament! Judge for her, sir, judge for her.
You must know best, and she will live to thank you.’

‘Hush! hush!’ cried Mr. Bray, suddenly starting up, and covering Ralph’s
mouth with his trembling hand. ‘I hear her at the door!’

There was a gleam of conscience in the shame and terror of this hasty
action, which, in one short moment, tore the thin covering of sophistry
from the cruel design, and laid it bare in all its meanness and
heartless deformity. The father fell into his chair pale and trembling;
Arthur Gride plucked and fumbled at his hat, and durst not raise his
eyes from the floor; even Ralph crouched for the moment like a beaten
hound, cowed by the presence of one young innocent girl!

The effect was almost as brief as sudden. Ralph was the first to recover
himself, and observing Madeline’s looks of alarm, entreated the poor
girl to be composed, assuring her that there was no cause for fear.

‘A sudden spasm,’ said Ralph, glancing at Mr. Bray. ‘He is quite well
now.’

It might have moved a very hard and worldly heart to see the young and
beautiful creature, whose certain misery they had been contriving but
a minute before, throw her arms about her father’s neck, and pour forth
words of tender sympathy and love, the sweetest a father’s ear can know,
or child’s lips form. But Ralph looked coldly on; and Arthur Gride,
whose bleared eyes gloated only over the outward beauties, and were
blind to the spirit which reigned within, evinced--a fantastic kind of
warmth certainly, but not exactly that kind of warmth of feeling which
the contemplation of virtue usually inspires.

‘Madeline,’ said her father, gently disengaging himself, ‘it was
nothing.’

‘But you had that spasm yesterday, and it is terrible to see you in such
pain. Can I do nothing for you?’

‘Nothing just now. Here are two gentlemen, Madeline, one of whom you
have seen before. She used to say,’ added Mr. Bray, addressing Arthur
Gride, ‘that the sight of you always made me worse. That was natural,
knowing what she did, and only what she did, of our connection and its
results. Well, well. Perhaps she may change her mind on that point;
girls have leave to change their minds, you know. You are very tired, my
dear.’

‘I am not, indeed.’

‘Indeed you are. You do too much.’

‘I wish I could do more.’

‘I know you do, but you overtask your strength. This wretched life, my
love, of daily labour and fatigue, is more than you can bear, I am sure
it is. Poor Madeline!’

With these and many more kind words, Mr. Bray drew his daughter to him
and kissed her cheek affectionately. Ralph, watching him sharply and
closely in the meantime, made his way towards the door, and signed to
Gride to follow him.

‘You will communicate with us again?’ said Ralph.

‘Yes, yes,’ returned Mr. Bray, hastily thrusting his daughter aside. ‘In
a week. Give me a week.’

‘One week,’ said Ralph, turning to his companion, ‘from today.
Good-morning. Miss Madeline, I kiss your hand.’

‘We will shake hands, Gride,’ said Mr. Bray, extending his, as old Arthur
bowed. ‘You mean well, no doubt. I am bound to say so now. If I owed you
money, that was not your fault. Madeline, my love, your hand here.’

‘Oh dear! If the young lady would condescent! Only the tips of her
fingers,’ said Arthur, hesitating and half retreating.

Madeline shrunk involuntarily from the goblin figure, but she placed the
tips of her fingers in his hand and instantly withdrew them. After an
ineffectual clutch, intended to detain and carry them to his lips,
old Arthur gave his own fingers a mumbling kiss, and with many amorous
distortions of visage went in pursuit of his friend, who was by this
time in the street.

‘What does he say, what does he say? What does the giant say to the
pigmy?’ inquired Arthur Gride, hobbling up to Ralph.

‘What does the pigmy say to the giant?’ rejoined Ralph, elevating his
eyebrows and looking down upon his questioner.

‘He doesn’t know what to say,’ replied Arthur Gride. ‘He hopes and
fears. But is she not a dainty morsel?’

‘I have no great taste for beauty,’ growled Ralph.

‘But I have,’ rejoined Arthur, rubbing his hands. ‘Oh dear! How handsome
her eyes looked when she was stooping over him! Such long lashes, such
delicate fringe! She--she--looked at me so soft.’

‘Not over-lovingly, I think,’ said Ralph. ‘Did she?’

‘No, you think not?’ replied old Arthur. ‘But don’t you think it can be
brought about? Don’t you think it can?’

Ralph looked at him with a contemptuous frown, and replied with a sneer,
and between his teeth:

‘Did you mark his telling her she was tired and did too much, and
overtasked her strength?’

‘Ay, ay. What of it?’

‘When do you think he ever told her that before? The life is more than
she can bear. Yes, yes. He’ll change it for her.’

‘D’ye think it’s done?’ inquired old Arthur, peering into his
companion’s face with half-closed eyes.

‘I am sure it’s done,’ said Ralph. ‘He is trying to deceive himself,
even before our eyes, already. He is making believe that he thinks
of her good and not his own. He is acting a virtuous part, and so
considerate and affectionate, sir, that the daughter scarcely knew him.
I saw a tear of surprise in her eye. There’ll be a few more tears of
surprise there before long, though of a different kind. Oh! we may wait
with confidence for this day week.’



CHAPTER 48

Being for the Benefit of Mr. Vincent Crummles, and positively his last
Appearance on this Stage


It was with a very sad and heavy heart, oppressed by many painful ideas,
that Nicholas retraced his steps eastward and betook himself to the
counting-house of Cheeryble Brothers. Whatever the idle hopes he had
suffered himself to entertain, whatever the pleasant visions which had
sprung up in his mind and grouped themselves round the fair image of
Madeline Bray, they were now dispelled, and not a vestige of their
gaiety and brightness remained.

It would be a poor compliment to Nicholas’s better nature, and one which
he was very far from deserving, to insinuate that the solution, and such
a solution, of the mystery which had seemed to surround Madeline Bray,
when he was ignorant even of her name, had damped his ardour or cooled
the fervour of his admiration. If he had regarded her before, with
such a passion as young men attracted by mere beauty and elegance may
entertain, he was now conscious of much deeper and stronger feelings.
But, reverence for the truth and purity of her heart, respect for the
helplessness and loneliness of her situation, sympathy with the trials
of one so young and fair and admiration of her great and noble spirit,
all seemed to raise her far above his reach, and, while they imparted
new depth and dignity to his love, to whisper that it was hopeless.

‘I will keep my word, as I have pledged it to her,’ said Nicholas,
manfully. ‘This is no common trust that I have to discharge, and I will
perform the double duty that is imposed upon me most scrupulously and
strictly. My secret feelings deserve no consideration in such a case as
this, and they shall have none.’

Still, there were the secret feelings in existence just the same, and in
secret Nicholas rather encouraged them than otherwise; reasoning (if
he reasoned at all) that there they could do no harm to anybody but
himself, and that if he kept them to himself from a sense of duty, he
had an additional right to entertain himself with them as a reward for
his heroism.

All these thoughts, coupled with what he had seen that morning and the
anticipation of his next visit, rendered him a very dull and abstracted
companion; so much so, indeed, that Tim Linkinwater suspected he must
have made the mistake of a figure somewhere, which was preying upon his
mind, and seriously conjured him, if such were the case, to make a clean
breast and scratch it out, rather than have his whole life embittered by
the tortures of remorse.

But in reply to these considerate representations, and many others both
from Tim and Mr. Frank, Nicholas could only be brought to state that
he was never merrier in his life; and so went on all day, and so went
towards home at night, still turning over and over again the same
subjects, thinking over and over again the same things, and arriving
over and over again at the same conclusions.

In this pensive, wayward, and uncertain state, people are apt to lounge
and loiter without knowing why, to read placards on the walls with great
attention and without the smallest idea of one word of their contents,
and to stare most earnestly through shop-windows at things which they
don’t see. It was thus that Nicholas found himself poring with the
utmost interest over a large play-bill hanging outside a Minor Theatre
which he had to pass on his way home, and reading a list of the actors
and actresses who had promised to do honour to some approaching benefit,
with as much gravity as if it had been a catalogue of the names of those
ladies and gentlemen who stood highest upon the Book of Fate, and he had
been looking anxiously for his own. He glanced at the top of the bill,
with a smile at his own dulness, as he prepared to resume his walk, and
there saw announced, in large letters with a large space between each
of them, ‘Positively the last appearance of Mr. Vincent Crummles of
Provincial Celebrity!!!’

‘Nonsense!’ said Nicholas, turning back again. ‘It can’t be.’

But there it was. In one line by itself was an announcement of the first
night of a new melodrama; in another line by itself was an announcement
of the last six nights of an old one; a third line was devoted to the
re-engagement of the unrivalled African Knife-swallower, who had kindly
suffered himself to be prevailed upon to forego his country engagements
for one week longer; a fourth line announced that Mr. Snittle Timberry,
having recovered from his late severe indisposition, would have the
honour of appearing that evening; a fifth line said that there were
‘Cheers, Tears, and Laughter!’ every night; a sixth, that that was
positively the last appearance of Mr. Vincent Crummles of Provincial
Celebrity.

‘Surely it must be the same man,’ thought Nicholas. ‘There can’t be two
Vincent Crummleses.’

The better to settle this question he referred to the bill again, and
finding that there was a Baron in the first piece, and that Roberto (his
son) was enacted by one Master Crummles, and Spaletro (his nephew) by
one Master Percy Crummles--THEIR last appearances--and that, incidental
to the piece, was a characteristic dance by the characters, and a
castanet pas seul by the Infant Phenomenon--HER last appearance--he no
longer entertained any doubt; and presenting himself at the stage-door,
and sending in a scrap of paper with ‘Mr. Johnson’ written thereon in
pencil, was presently conducted by a Robber, with a very large belt and
buckle round his waist, and very large leather gauntlets on his hands,
into the presence of his former manager.

Mr. Crummles was unfeignedly glad to see him, and starting up from before
a small dressing-glass, with one very bushy eyebrow stuck on crooked
over his left eye, and the fellow eyebrow and the calf of one of his
legs in his hand, embraced him cordially; at the same time observing,
that it would do Mrs. Crummles’s heart good to bid him goodbye before
they went.

‘You were always a favourite of hers, Johnson,’ said Crummles, ‘always
were from the first. I was quite easy in my mind about you from that
first day you dined with us. One that Mrs. Crummles took a fancy to, was
sure to turn out right. Ah! Johnson, what a woman that is!’

‘I am sincerely obliged to her for her kindness in this and all other
respects,’ said Nicholas. ‘But where are you going, that you talk about
bidding goodbye?’

‘Haven’t you seen it in the papers?’ said Crummles, with some dignity.

‘No,’ replied Nicholas.

‘I wonder at that,’ said the manager. ‘It was among the varieties. I had
the paragraph here somewhere--but I don’t know--oh, yes, here it is.’

So saying, Mr. Crummles, after pretending that he thought he must have
lost it, produced a square inch of newspaper from the pocket of the
pantaloons he wore in private life (which, together with the plain
clothes of several other gentlemen, lay scattered about on a kind of
dresser in the room), and gave it to Nicholas to read:

‘The talented Vincent Crummles, long favourably known to fame as a
country manager and actor of no ordinary pretensions, is about to cross
the Atlantic on a histrionic expedition. Crummles is to be accompanied,
we hear, by his lady and gifted family. We know no man superior to
Crummles in his particular line of character, or one who, whether as a
public or private individual, could carry with him the best wishes of a
larger circle of friends. Crummles is certain to succeed.’

‘Here’s another bit,’ said Mr. Crummles, handing over a still smaller
scrap. ‘This is from the notices to correspondents, this one.’

Nicholas read it aloud. ‘“Philo-Dramaticus. Crummles, the country
manager and actor, cannot be more than forty-three, or forty-four
years of age. Crummles is NOT a Prussian, having been born at Chelsea.”
 Humph!’ said Nicholas, ‘that’s an odd paragraph.’

‘Very,’ returned Crummles, scratching the side of his nose, and looking
at Nicholas with an assumption of great unconcern. ‘I can’t think who
puts these things in. I didn’t.’

Still keeping his eye on Nicholas, Mr. Crummles shook his head twice or
thrice with profound gravity, and remarking, that he could not for the
life of him imagine how the newspapers found out the things they did,
folded up the extracts and put them in his pocket again.

‘I am astonished to hear this news,’ said Nicholas. ‘Going to America!
You had no such thing in contemplation when I was with you.’

‘No,’ replied Crummles, ‘I hadn’t then. The fact is that Mrs
Crummles--most extraordinary woman, Johnson.’ Here he broke off and
whispered something in his ear.

‘Oh!’ said Nicholas, smiling. ‘The prospect of an addition to your
family?’

‘The seventh addition, Johnson,’ returned Mr. Crummles, solemnly. ‘I
thought such a child as the Phenomenon must have been a closer; but it
seems we are to have another. She is a very remarkable woman.’

‘I congratulate you,’ said Nicholas, ‘and I hope this may prove a
phenomenon too.’

‘Why, it’s pretty sure to be something uncommon, I suppose,’ rejoined
Mr. Crummles. ‘The talent of the other three is principally in combat and
serious pantomime. I should like this one to have a turn for juvenile
tragedy; I understand they want something of that sort in America very
much. However, we must take it as it comes. Perhaps it may have a genius
for the tight-rope. It may have any sort of genius, in short, if it
takes after its mother, Johnson, for she is an universal genius; but,
whatever its genius is, that genius shall be developed.’

Expressing himself after these terms, Mr. Crummles put on his other
eyebrow, and the calves of his legs, and then put on his legs, which
were of a yellowish flesh-colour, and rather soiled about the knees,
from frequent going down upon those joints, in curses, prayers, last
struggles, and other strong passages.

While the ex-manager completed his toilet, he informed Nicholas that as
he should have a fair start in America from the proceeds of a tolerably
good engagement which he had been fortunate enough to obtain, and as
he and Mrs. Crummles could scarcely hope to act for ever (not being
immortal, except in the breath of Fame and in a figurative sense) he had
made up his mind to settle there permanently, in the hope of acquiring
some land of his own which would support them in their old age, and
which they could afterwards bequeath to their children. Nicholas, having
highly commended the resolution, Mr. Crummles went on to impart such
further intelligence relative to their mutual friends as he thought
might prove interesting; informing Nicholas, among other things, that
Miss Snevellicci was happily married to an affluent young wax-chandler
who had supplied the theatre with candles, and that Mr. Lillyvick didn’t
dare to say his soul was his own, such was the tyrannical sway of Mrs
Lillyvick, who reigned paramount and supreme.

Nicholas responded to this confidence on the part of Mr. Crummles, by
confiding to him his own name, situation, and prospects, and informing
him, in as few general words as he could, of the circumstances which
had led to their first acquaintance. After congratulating him with great
heartiness on the improved state of his fortunes, Mr. Crummles gave him
to understand that next morning he and his were to start for Liverpool,
where the vessel lay which was to carry them from the shores of England,
and that if Nicholas wished to take a last adieu of Mrs. Crummles, he
must repair with him that night to a farewell supper, given in honour of
the family at a neighbouring tavern; at which Mr. Snittle Timberry would
preside, while the honours of the vice-chair would be sustained by the
African Swallower.

The room being by this time very warm and somewhat crowded, in
consequence of the influx of four gentlemen, who had just killed
each other in the piece under representation, Nicholas accepted
the invitation, and promised to return at the conclusion of the
performances; preferring the cool air and twilight out of doors to the
mingled perfume of gas, orange-peel, and gunpowder, which pervaded the
hot and glaring theatre.

He availed himself of this interval to buy a silver snuff-box--the best
his funds would afford--as a token of remembrance for Mr. Crummles,
and having purchased besides a pair of ear-rings for Mrs. Crummles, a
necklace for the Phenomenon, and a flaming shirt-pin for each of the
young gentlemen, he refreshed himself with a walk, and returning a
little after the appointed time, found the lights out, the theatre
empty, the curtain raised for the night, and Mr. Crummles walking up and
down the stage expecting his arrival.

‘Timberry won’t be long,’ said Mr. Crummles. ‘He played the audience out
tonight. He does a faithful black in the last piece, and it takes him a
little longer to wash himself.’

‘A very unpleasant line of character, I should think?’ said Nicholas.

‘No, I don’t know,’ replied Mr. Crummles; ‘it comes off easily enough,
and there’s only the face and neck. We had a first-tragedy man in our
company once, who, when he played Othello, used to black himself all
over. But that’s feeling a part and going into it as if you meant it; it
isn’t usual; more’s the pity.’

Mr. Snittle Timberry now appeared, arm-in-arm with the African Swallower,
and, being introduced to Nicholas, raised his hat half a foot, and said
he was proud to know him. The Swallower said the same, and looked and
spoke remarkably like an Irishman.

‘I see by the bills that you have been ill, sir,’ said Nicholas to Mr
Timberry. ‘I hope you are none the worse for your exertions tonight?’

Mr. Timberry, in reply, shook his head with a gloomy air, tapped his
chest several times with great significancy, and drawing his cloak more
closely about him, said, ‘But no matter, no matter. Come!’

It is observable that when people upon the stage are in any strait
involving the very last extremity of weakness and exhaustion, they
invariably perform feats of strength requiring great ingenuity and
muscular power. Thus, a wounded prince or bandit chief, who is bleeding
to death and too faint to move, except to the softest music (and then
only upon his hands and knees), shall be seen to approach a cottage
door for aid in such a series of writhings and twistings, and with
such curlings up of the legs, and such rollings over and over, and such
gettings up and tumblings down again, as could never be achieved save
by a very strong man skilled in posture-making. And so natural did this
sort of performance come to Mr. Snittle Timberry, that on their way out
of the theatre and towards the tavern where the supper was to be holden,
he testified the severity of his recent indisposition and its wasting
effects upon the nervous system, by a series of gymnastic performances
which were the admiration of all witnesses.

‘Why this is indeed a joy I had not looked for!’ said Mrs. Crummles, when
Nicholas was presented.

‘Nor I,’ replied Nicholas. ‘It is by a mere chance that I have this
opportunity of seeing you, although I would have made a great exertion
to have availed myself of it.’

‘Here is one whom you know,’ said Mrs. Crummles, thrusting forward the
Phenomenon in a blue gauze frock, extensively flounced, and trousers
of the same; ‘and here another--and another,’ presenting the Master
Crummleses. ‘And how is your friend, the faithful Digby?’

‘Digby!’ said Nicholas, forgetting at the instant that this had been
Smike’s theatrical name. ‘Oh yes. He’s quite--what am I saying?--he is
very far from well.’

‘How!’ exclaimed Mrs. Crummles, with a tragic recoil.

‘I fear,’ said Nicholas, shaking his head, and making an attempt to
smile, ‘that your better-half would be more struck with him now than
ever.’

‘What mean you?’ rejoined Mrs. Crummles, in her most popular manner.
‘Whence comes this altered tone?’

‘I mean that a dastardly enemy of mine has struck at me through him, and
that while he thinks to torture me, he inflicts on him such agonies of
terror and suspense as--You will excuse me, I am sure,’ said Nicholas,
checking himself. ‘I should never speak of this, and never do, except to
those who know the facts, but for a moment I forgot myself.’

With this hasty apology Nicholas stooped down to salute the Phenomenon,
and changed the subject; inwardly cursing his precipitation, and very
much wondering what Mrs. Crummles must think of so sudden an explosion.

That lady seemed to think very little about it, for the supper being by
this time on table, she gave her hand to Nicholas and repaired with a
stately step to the left hand of Mr. Snittle Timberry. Nicholas had the
honour to support her, and Mr. Crummles was placed upon the chairman’s
right; the Phenomenon and the Master Crummleses sustained the vice.

The company amounted in number to some twenty-five or thirty, being
composed of such members of the theatrical profession, then engaged or
disengaged in London, as were numbered among the most intimate friends
of Mr. and Mrs. Crummles. The ladies and gentlemen were pretty equally
balanced; the expenses of the entertainment being defrayed by the
latter, each of whom had the privilege of inviting one of the former as
his guest.

It was upon the whole a very distinguished party, for independently of
the lesser theatrical lights who clustered on this occasion round
Mr. Snittle Timberry, there was a literary gentleman present who had
dramatised in his time two hundred and forty-seven novels as fast as
they had come out--some of them faster than they had come out--and who
WAS a literary gentleman in consequence.

This gentleman sat on the left hand of Nicholas, to whom he was
introduced by his friend the African Swallower, from the bottom of the
table, with a high eulogium upon his fame and reputation.

‘I am happy to know a gentleman of such great distinction,’ said
Nicholas, politely.

‘Sir,’ replied the wit, ‘you’re very welcome, I’m sure. The honour is
reciprocal, sir, as I usually say when I dramatise a book. Did you ever
hear a definition of fame, sir?’

‘I have heard several,’ replied Nicholas, with a smile. ‘What is yours?’

‘When I dramatise a book, sir,’ said the literary gentleman, ‘THAT’S
fame. For its author.’

‘Oh, indeed!’ rejoined Nicholas.

‘That’s fame, sir,’ said the literary gentleman.

‘So Richard Turpin, Tom King, and Jerry Abershaw have handed down to
fame the names of those on whom they committed their most impudent
robberies?’ said Nicholas.

‘I don’t know anything about that, sir,’ answered the literary
gentleman.

‘Shakespeare dramatised stories which had previously appeared in print,
it is true,’ observed Nicholas.

‘Meaning Bill, sir?’ said the literary gentleman. ‘So he did. Bill
was an adapter, certainly, so he was--and very well he adapted
too--considering.’

‘I was about to say,’ rejoined Nicholas, ‘that Shakespeare derived some
of his plots from old tales and legends in general circulation; but it
seems to me, that some of the gentlemen of your craft, at the present
day, have shot very far beyond him--’

‘You’re quite right, sir,’ interrupted the literary gentleman, leaning
back in his chair and exercising his toothpick. ‘Human intellect, sir,
has progressed since his time, is progressing, will progress.’

‘Shot beyond him, I mean,’ resumed Nicholas, ‘in quite another
respect, for, whereas he brought within the magic circle of his genius,
traditions peculiarly adapted for his purpose, and turned familiar
things into constellations which should enlighten the world for ages,
you drag within the magic circle of your dulness, subjects not at all
adapted to the purposes of the stage, and debase as he exalted. For
instance, you take the uncompleted books of living authors, fresh from
their hands, wet from the press, cut, hack, and carve them to the powers
and capacities of your actors, and the capability of your theatres,
finish unfinished works, hastily and crudely vamp up ideas not yet
worked out by their original projector, but which have doubtless cost
him many thoughtful days and sleepless nights; by a comparison of
incidents and dialogue, down to the very last word he may have written
a fortnight before, do your utmost to anticipate his plot--all this
without his permission, and against his will; and then, to crown the
whole proceeding, publish in some mean pamphlet, an unmeaning farrago of
garbled extracts from his work, to which your name as author, with the
honourable distinction annexed, of having perpetrated a hundred other
outrages of the same description. Now, show me the distinction between
such pilfering as this, and picking a man’s pocket in the street:
unless, indeed, it be, that the legislature has a regard for
pocket-handkerchiefs, and leaves men’s brains, except when they are
knocked out by violence, to take care of themselves.’

‘Men must live, sir,’ said the literary gentleman, shrugging his
shoulders.

‘That would be an equally fair plea in both cases,’ replied Nicholas;
‘but if you put it upon that ground, I have nothing more to say, than,
that if I were a writer of books, and you a thirsty dramatist, I would
rather pay your tavern score for six months, large as it might be, than
have a niche in the Temple of Fame with you for the humblest corner of
my pedestal, through six hundred generations.’

The conversation threatened to take a somewhat angry tone when it had
arrived thus far, but Mrs. Crummles opportunely interposed to prevent
its leading to any violent outbreak, by making some inquiries of the
literary gentleman relative to the plots of the six new pieces which he
had written by contract to introduce the African Knife-swallower in
his various unrivalled performances. This speedily engaged him in an
animated conversation with that lady, in the interest of which, all
recollection of his recent discussion with Nicholas very quickly
evaporated.

The board being now clear of the more substantial articles of food,
and punch, wine, and spirits being placed upon it and handed about, the
guests, who had been previously conversing in little groups of three
or four, gradually fell off into a dead silence, while the majority of
those present glanced from time to time at Mr. Snittle Timberry, and
the bolder spirits did not even hesitate to strike the table with their
knuckles, and plainly intimate their expectations, by uttering such
encouragements as ‘Now, Tim,’ ‘Wake up, Mr. Chairman,’ ‘All charged, sir,
and waiting for a toast,’ and so forth.

To these remonstrances Mr. Timberry deigned no other rejoinder than
striking his chest and gasping for breath, and giving many other
indications of being still the victim of indisposition--for a man
must not make himself too cheap either on the stage or off--while
Mr. Crummles, who knew full well that he would be the subject of the
forthcoming toast, sat gracefully in his chair with his arm thrown
carelessly over the back, and now and then lifted his glass to his mouth
and drank a little punch, with the same air with which he was accustomed
to take long draughts of nothing, out of the pasteboard goblets in
banquet scenes.

At length Mr. Snittle Timberry rose in the most approved attitude, with
one hand in the breast of his waistcoat and the other on the nearest
snuff-box, and having been received with great enthusiasm, proposed,
with abundance of quotations, his friend Mr. Vincent Crummles: ending a
pretty long speech by extending his right hand on one side and his left
on the other, and severally calling upon Mr. and Mrs. Crummles to grasp
the same. This done, Mr. Vincent Crummles returned thanks, and that done,
the African Swallower proposed Mrs. Vincent Crummles, in affecting terms.
Then were heard loud moans and sobs from Mrs. Crummles and the ladies,
despite of which that heroic woman insisted upon returning thanks
herself, which she did, in a manner and in a speech which has never been
surpassed and seldom equalled. It then became the duty of Mr. Snittle
Timberry to give the young Crummleses, which he did; after which
Mr. Vincent Crummles, as their father, addressed the company in a
supplementary speech, enlarging on their virtues, amiabilities, and
excellences, and wishing that they were the sons and daughter of every
lady and gentleman present. These solemnities having been succeeded by
a decent interval, enlivened by musical and other entertainments,
Mr. Crummles proposed that ornament of the profession, the African
Swallower, his very dear friend, if he would allow him to call him so;
which liberty (there being no particular reason why he should not allow
it) the African Swallower graciously permitted. The literary gentleman
was then about to be drunk, but it being discovered that he had been
drunk for some time in another acceptation of the term, and was then
asleep on the stairs, the intention was abandoned, and the honour
transferred to the ladies. Finally, after a very long sitting, Mr
Snittle Timberry vacated the chair, and the company with many adieux and
embraces dispersed.

Nicholas waited to the last to give his little presents. When he had
said goodbye all round and came to Mr. Crummles, he could not but mark
the difference between their present separation and their parting at
Portsmouth. Not a jot of his theatrical manner remained; he put out his
hand with an air which, if he could have summoned it at will, would have
made him the best actor of his day in homely parts, and when Nicholas
shook it with the warmth he honestly felt, appeared thoroughly melted.

‘We were a very happy little company, Johnson,’ said poor Crummles. ‘You
and I never had a word. I shall be very glad tomorrow morning to think
that I saw you again, but now I almost wish you hadn’t come.’

Nicholas was about to return a cheerful reply, when he was greatly
disconcerted by the sudden apparition of Mrs. Grudden, who it seemed had
declined to attend the supper in order that she might rise earlier in
the morning, and who now burst out of an adjoining bedroom, habited in
very extraordinary white robes; and throwing her arms about his neck,
hugged him with great affection.

‘What! Are you going too?’ said Nicholas, submitting with as good a
grace as if she had been the finest young creature in the world.

‘Going?’ returned Mrs. Grudden. ‘Lord ha’ mercy, what do you think they’d
do without me?’

Nicholas submitted to another hug with even a better grace than before,
if that were possible, and waving his hat as cheerfully as he could,
took farewell of the Vincent Crummleses.



CHAPTER 49

Chronicles the further Proceedings of the Nickleby Family, and the
Sequel of the Adventure of the Gentleman in the Small-clothes


While Nicholas, absorbed in the one engrossing subject of interest which
had recently opened upon him, occupied his leisure hours with thoughts
of Madeline Bray, and in execution of the commissions which the anxiety
of brother Charles in her behalf imposed upon him, saw her again and
again, and each time with greater danger to his peace of mind and a more
weakening effect upon the lofty resolutions he had formed, Mrs. Nickleby
and Kate continued to live in peace and quiet, agitated by no other
cares than those which were connected with certain harassing proceedings
taken by Mr. Snawley for the recovery of his son, and their anxiety for
Smike himself, whose health, long upon the wane, began to be so much
affected by apprehension and uncertainty as sometimes to occasion both
them and Nicholas considerable uneasiness, and even alarm.

It was no complaint or murmur on the part of the poor fellow himself
that thus disturbed them. Ever eager to be employed in such slight
services as he could render, and always anxious to repay his benefactors
with cheerful and happy looks, less friendly eyes might have seen in him
no cause for any misgiving. But there were times, and often too, when
the sunken eye was too bright, the hollow cheek too flushed, the breath
too thick and heavy in its course, the frame too feeble and exhausted,
to escape their regard and notice.

There is a dread disease which so prepares its victim, as it were, for
death; which so refines it of its grosser aspect, and throws around
familiar looks unearthly indications of the coming change; a dread
disease, in which the struggle between soul and body is so gradual,
quiet, and solemn, and the result so sure, that day by day, and grain by
grain, the mortal part wastes and withers away, so that the spirit grows
light and sanguine with its lightening load, and, feeling immortality at
hand, deems it but a new term of mortal life; a disease in which death
and life are so strangely blended, that death takes the glow and hue
of life, and life the gaunt and grisly form of death; a disease which
medicine never cured, wealth never warded off, or poverty could boast
exemption from; which sometimes moves in giant strides, and sometimes at
a tardy sluggish pace, but, slow or quick, is ever sure and certain.

It was with some faint reference in his own mind to this disorder,
though he would by no means admit it, even to himself, that Nicholas had
already carried his faithful companion to a physician of great repute.
There was no cause for immediate alarm, he said. There were no present
symptoms which could be deemed conclusive. The constitution had been
greatly tried and injured in childhood, but still it MIGHT not be--and
that was all.

But he seemed to grow no worse, and, as it was not difficult to find a
reason for these symptoms of illness in the shock and agitation he had
recently undergone, Nicholas comforted himself with the hope that his
poor friend would soon recover. This hope his mother and sister shared
with him; and as the object of their joint solicitude seemed to have
no uneasiness or despondency for himself, but each day answered with a
quiet smile that he felt better than he had upon the day before, their
fears abated, and the general happiness was by degrees restored.

Many and many a time in after years did Nicholas look back to this
period of his life, and tread again the humble quiet homely scenes that
rose up as of old before him. Many and many a time, in the twilight of a
summer evening, or beside the flickering winter’s fire--but not so often
or so sadly then--would his thoughts wander back to these old days, and
dwell with a pleasant sorrow upon every slight remembrance which they
brought crowding home. The little room in which they had so often sat
long after it was dark, figuring such happy futures; Kate’s cheerful
voice and merry laugh; how, if she were from home, they used to sit and
watch for her return scarcely breaking silence but to say how dull it
seemed without her; the glee with which poor Smike would start from the
darkened corner where he used to sit, and hurry to admit her, and the
tears they often saw upon his face, half wondering to see them too, and
he so pleased and happy; every little incident, and even slight words
and looks of those old days little heeded then, but well remembered when
busy cares and trials were quite forgotten, came fresh and thick before
him many and many a time, and, rustling above the dusty growth of years,
came back green boughs of yesterday.

But there were other persons associated with these recollections, and
many changes came about before they had being. A necessary reflection
for the purposes of these adventures, which at once subside into their
accustomed train, and shunning all flighty anticipations or wayward
wanderings, pursue their steady and decorous course.

If the brothers Cheeryble, as they found Nicholas worthy of trust and
confidence, bestowed upon him every day some new and substantial mark
of kindness, they were not less mindful of those who depended on him.
Various little presents to Mrs. Nickleby, always of the very things
they most required, tended in no slight degree to the improvement and
embellishment of the cottage. Kate’s little store of trinkets became
quite dazzling; and for company! If brother Charles and brother Ned
failed to look in for at least a few minutes every Sunday, or one
evening in the week, there was Mr. Tim Linkinwater (who had never made
half-a-dozen other acquaintances in all his life, and who took such
delight in his new friends as no words can express) constantly coming
and going in his evening walks, and stopping to rest; while Mr. Frank
Cheeryble happened, by some strange conjunction of circumstances, to be
passing the door on some business or other at least three nights in the
week.

‘He is the most attentive young man I ever saw, Kate,’ said Mrs. Nickleby
to her daughter one evening, when this last-named gentleman had been the
subject of the worthy lady’s eulogium for some time, and Kate had sat
perfectly silent.

‘Attentive, mama!’ rejoined Kate.

‘Bless my heart, Kate!’ cried Mrs. Nickleby, with her wonted suddenness,
‘what a colour you have got; why, you’re quite flushed!’

‘Oh, mama! what strange things you fancy!’

‘It wasn’t fancy, Kate, my dear, I’m certain of that,’ returned her
mother. ‘However, it’s gone now at any rate, so it don’t much matter
whether it was or not. What was it we were talking about? Oh! Mr. Frank.
I never saw such attention in MY life, never.’

‘Surely you are not serious,’ returned Kate, colouring again; and this
time beyond all dispute.

‘Not serious!’ returned Mrs. Nickleby; ‘why shouldn’t I be serious?
I’m sure I never was more serious. I will say that his politeness and
attention to me is one of the most becoming, gratifying, pleasant
things I have seen for a very long time. You don’t often meet with such
behaviour in young men, and it strikes one more when one does meet with
it.’

‘Oh! attention to YOU, mama,’ rejoined Kate quickly--‘oh yes.’

‘Dear me, Kate,’ retorted Mrs. Nickleby, ‘what an extraordinary girl you
are! Was it likely I should be talking of his attention to anybody else?
I declare I’m quite sorry to think he should be in love with a German
lady, that I am.’

‘He said very positively that it was no such thing, mama,’ returned
Kate. ‘Don’t you remember his saying so that very first night he came
here? Besides,’ she added, in a more gentle tone, ‘why should WE be
sorry if it is the case? What is it to us, mama?’

‘Nothing to US, Kate, perhaps,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, emphatically; ‘but
something to ME, I confess. I like English people to be thorough English
people, and not half English and half I don’t know what. I shall tell
him point-blank next time he comes, that I wish he would marry one of
his own country-women; and see what he says to that.’

‘Pray don’t think of such a thing, mama,’ returned Kate, hastily; ‘not
for the world. Consider. How very--’

‘Well, my dear, how very what?’ said Mrs. Nickleby, opening her eyes in
great astonishment.

Before Kate had returned any reply, a queer little double knock
announced that Miss La Creevy had called to see them; and when Miss La
Creevy presented herself, Mrs. Nickleby, though strongly disposed to be
argumentative on the previous question, forgot all about it in a gush
of supposes about the coach she had come by; supposing that the man who
drove must have been either the man in the shirt-sleeves or the man with
the black eye; that whoever he was, he hadn’t found that parasol she
left inside last week; that no doubt they had stopped a long while at
the Halfway House, coming down; or that perhaps being full, they had
come straight on; and, lastly, that they, surely, must have passed
Nicholas on the road.

‘I saw nothing of him,’ answered Miss La Creevy; ‘but I saw that dear
old soul Mr. Linkinwater.’

‘Taking his evening walk, and coming on to rest here, before he turns
back to the city, I’ll be bound!’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

‘I should think he was,’ returned Miss La Creevy; ‘especially as young
Mr. Cheeryble was with him.’

‘Surely that is no reason why Mr. Linkinwater should be coming here,’
said Kate.

‘Why I think it is, my dear,’ said Miss La Creevy. ‘For a young man, Mr
Frank is not a very great walker; and I observe that he generally falls
tired, and requires a good long rest, when he has come as far as this.
But where is my friend?’ said the little woman, looking about, after
having glanced slyly at Kate. ‘He has not been run away with again, has
he?’

‘Ah! where is Mr. Smike?’ said Mrs. Nickleby; ‘he was here this instant.’

Upon further inquiry, it turned out, to the good lady’s unbounded
astonishment, that Smike had, that moment, gone upstairs to bed.

‘Well now,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘he is the strangest creature! Last
Tuesday--was it Tuesday? Yes, to be sure it was; you recollect, Kate, my
dear, the very last time young Mr. Cheeryble was here--last Tuesday night
he went off in just the same strange way, at the very moment the knock
came to the door. It cannot be that he don’t like company, because he is
always fond of people who are fond of Nicholas, and I am sure young Mr
Cheeryble is. And the strangest thing is, that he does not go to bed;
therefore it cannot be because he is tired. I know he doesn’t go to bed,
because my room is the next one, and when I went upstairs last Tuesday,
hours after him, I found that he had not even taken his shoes off; and
he had no candle, so he must have sat moping in the dark all the time.
Now, upon my word,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘when I come to think of it,
that’s very extraordinary!’

As the hearers did not echo this sentiment, but remained profoundly
silent, either as not knowing what to say, or as being unwilling to
interrupt, Mrs. Nickleby pursued the thread of her discourse after her
own fashion.

‘I hope,’ said that lady, ‘that this unaccountable conduct may not be
the beginning of his taking to his bed and living there all his life,
like the Thirsty Woman of Tutbury, or the Cock-lane Ghost, or some of
those extraordinary creatures. One of them had some connection with
our family. I forget, without looking back to some old letters I have
upstairs, whether it was my great-grandfather who went to school with
the Cock-lane Ghost, or the Thirsty Woman of Tutbury who went to school
with my grandmother. Miss La Creevy, you know, of course. Which was it
that didn’t mind what the clergyman said? The Cock-lane Ghost or the
Thirsty Woman of Tutbury?’

‘The Cock-lane Ghost, I believe.’

‘Then I have no doubt,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘that it was with him my
great-grandfather went to school; for I know the master of his school
was a dissenter, and that would, in a great measure, account for the
Cock-lane Ghost’s behaving in such an improper manner to the clergyman
when he grew up. Ah! Train up a Ghost--child, I mean--’

Any further reflections on this fruitful theme were abruptly cut short
by the arrival of Tim Linkinwater and Mr. Frank Cheeryble; in the hurry
of receiving whom, Mrs. Nickleby speedily lost sight of everything else.

‘I am so sorry Nicholas is not at home,’ said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Kate, my
dear, you must be both Nicholas and yourself.’

‘Miss Nickleby need be but herself,’ said Frank. ‘I--if I may venture to
say so--oppose all change in her.’

‘Then at all events she shall press you to stay,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby.
‘Mr. Linkinwater says ten minutes, but I cannot let you go so soon;
Nicholas would be very much vexed, I am sure. Kate, my dear!’

In obedience to a great number of nods, and winks, and frowns of extra
significance, Kate added her entreaties that the visitors would remain;
but it was observable that she addressed them exclusively to Tim
Linkinwater; and there was, besides, a certain embarrassment in her
manner, which, although it was as far from impairing its graceful
character as the tinge it communicated to her cheek was from diminishing
her beauty, was obvious at a glance even to Mrs. Nickleby. Not being of
a very speculative character, however, save under circumstances when her
speculations could be put into words and uttered aloud, that discreet
matron attributed the emotion to the circumstance of her daughter’s
not happening to have her best frock on: ‘though I never saw her look
better, certainly,’ she reflected at the same time. Having settled the
question in this way, and being most complacently satisfied that in
this, and in all other instances, her conjecture could not fail to be
the right one, Mrs. Nickleby dismissed it from her thoughts, and inwardly
congratulated herself on being so shrewd and knowing.

Nicholas did not come home nor did Smike reappear; but neither
circumstance, to say the truth, had any great effect upon the little
party, who were all in the best humour possible. Indeed, there sprung up
quite a flirtation between Miss La Creevy and Tim Linkinwater, who said
a thousand jocose and facetious things, and became, by degrees, quite
gallant, not to say tender. Little Miss La Creevy, on her part, was in
high spirits, and rallied Tim on having remained a bachelor all his life
with so much success, that Tim was actually induced to declare, that
if he could get anybody to have him, he didn’t know but what he might
change his condition even yet. Miss La Creevy earnestly recommended a
lady she knew, who would exactly suit Mr. Linkinwater, and had a very
comfortable property of her own; but this latter qualification had very
little effect upon Tim, who manfully protested that fortune would be
no object with him, but that true worth and cheerfulness of disposition
were what a man should look for in a wife, and that if he had these, he
could find money enough for the moderate wants of both. This avowal was
considered so honourable to Tim, that neither Mrs. Nickleby nor Miss La
Creevy could sufficiently extol it; and stimulated by their praises,
Tim launched out into several other declarations also manifesting the
disinterestedness of his heart, and a great devotion to the fair sex:
which were received with no less approbation. This was done and said
with a comical mixture of jest and earnest, and, leading to a great
amount of laughter, made them very merry indeed.

Kate was commonly the life and soul of the conversation at home; but she
was more silent than usual upon this occasion (perhaps because Tim and
Miss La Creevy engrossed so much of it), and, keeping aloof from the
talkers, sat at the window watching the shadows as the evening closed
in, and enjoying the quiet beauty of the night, which seemed to have
scarcely less attractions to Frank, who first lingered near, and then
sat down beside, her. No doubt, there are a great many things to be said
appropriate to a summer evening, and no doubt they are best said in a
low voice, as being most suitable to the peace and serenity of the hour;
long pauses, too, at times, and then an earnest word or so, and then
another interval of silence which, somehow, does not seem like silence
either, and perhaps now and then a hasty turning away of the head, or
drooping of the eyes towards the ground, all these minor circumstances,
with a disinclination to have candles introduced and a tendency to
confuse hours with minutes, are doubtless mere influences of the time,
as many lovely lips can clearly testify. Neither is there the slightest
reason why Mrs. Nickleby should have expressed surprise when, candles
being at length brought in, Kate’s bright eyes were unable to bear the
light which obliged her to avert her face, and even to leave the room
for some short time; because, when one has sat in the dark so long,
candles ARE dazzling, and nothing can be more strictly natural than that
such results should be produced, as all well-informed young people know.
For that matter, old people know it too, or did know it once, but they
forget these things sometimes, and more’s the pity.

The good lady’s surprise, however, did not end here. It was greatly
increased when it was discovered that Kate had not the least appetite
for supper: a discovery so alarming that there is no knowing in what
unaccountable efforts of oratory Mrs. Nickleby’s apprehensions might have
been vented, if the general attention had not been attracted, at the
moment, by a very strange and uncommon noise, proceeding, as the pale
and trembling servant girl affirmed, and as everybody’s sense of hearing
seemed to affirm also, ‘right down’ the chimney of the adjoining room.

It being quite plain to the comprehension of all present that, however
extraordinary and improbable it might appear, the noise did nevertheless
proceed from the chimney in question; and the noise (which was a strange
compound of various shuffling, sliding, rumbling, and struggling sounds,
all muffled by the chimney) still continuing, Frank Cheeryble caught
up a candle, and Tim Linkinwater the tongs, and they would have very
quickly ascertained the cause of this disturbance if Mrs. Nickleby
had not been taken very faint, and declined being left behind, on any
account. This produced a short remonstrance, which terminated in their
all proceeding to the troubled chamber in a body, excepting only Miss La
Creevy, who, as the servant girl volunteered a confession of having been
subject to fits in her infancy, remained with her to give the alarm and
apply restoratives, in case of extremity.

Advancing to the door of the mysterious apartment, they were not
a little surprised to hear a human voice, chanting with a highly
elaborated expression of melancholy, and in tones of suffocation which
a human voice might have produced from under five or six feather-beds
of the best quality, the once popular air of ‘Has she then failed in
her truth, the beautiful maid I adore?’ Nor, on bursting into the room
without demanding a parley, was their astonishment lessened by the
discovery that these romantic sounds certainly proceeded from the throat
of some man up the chimney, of whom nothing was visible but a pair of
legs, which were dangling above the grate; apparently feeling, with
extreme anxiety, for the top bar whereon to effect a landing.

A sight so unusual and unbusiness-like as this, completely paralysed
Tim Linkinwater, who, after one or two gentle pinches at the stranger’s
ankles, which were productive of no effect, stood clapping the tongs
together, as if he were sharpening them for another assault, and did
nothing else.

‘This must be some drunken fellow,’ said Frank. ‘No thief would announce
his presence thus.’

As he said this, with great indignation, he raised the candle to obtain
a better view of the legs, and was darting forward to pull them down
with very little ceremony, when Mrs. Nickleby, clasping her hands,
uttered a sharp sound, something between a scream and an exclamation,
and demanded to know whether the mysterious limbs were not clad in
small-clothes and grey worsted stockings, or whether her eyes had
deceived her.

‘Yes,’ cried Frank, looking a little closer. ‘Small-clothes certainly,
and--and--rough grey stockings, too. Do you know him, ma’am?’

‘Kate, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, deliberately sitting herself down
in a chair with that sort of desperate resignation which seemed to imply
that now matters had come to a crisis, and all disguise was useless,
‘you will have the goodness, my love, to explain precisely how this
matter stands. I have given him no encouragement--none whatever--not the
least in the world. You know that, my dear, perfectly well. He was very
respectful, exceedingly respectful, when he declared, as you were a
witness to; still at the same time, if I am to be persecuted in this
way, if vegetable what’s-his-names and all kinds of garden-stuff are
to strew my path out of doors, and gentlemen are to come choking up our
chimneys at home, I really don’t know--upon my word I do NOT know--what
is to become of me. It’s a very hard case--harder than anything I was
ever exposed to, before I married your poor dear papa, though I suffered
a good deal of annoyance then--but that, of course, I expected, and made
up my mind for. When I was not nearly so old as you, my dear, there
was a young gentleman who sat next us at church, who used, almost every
Sunday, to cut my name in large letters in the front of his pew while
the sermon was going on. It was gratifying, of course, naturally so,
but still it was an annoyance, because the pew was in a very conspicuous
place, and he was several times publicly taken out by the beadle for
doing it. But that was nothing to this. This is a great deal worse, and
a great deal more embarrassing. I would rather, Kate, my dear,’ said
Mrs. Nickleby, with great solemnity, and an effusion of tears: ‘I would
rather, I declare, have been a pig-faced lady, than be exposed to such a
life as this!’

Frank Cheeryble and Tim Linkinwater looked, in irrepressible
astonishment, first at each other and then at Kate, who felt that some
explanation was necessary, but who, between her terror at the apparition
of the legs, her fear lest their owner should be smothered, and her
anxiety to give the least ridiculous solution of the mystery that it was
capable of bearing, was quite unable to utter a single word.

‘He gives me great pain,’ continued Mrs. Nickleby, drying her eyes,
‘great pain; but don’t hurt a hair of his head, I beg. On no account
hurt a hair of his head.’

It would not, under existing circumstances, have been quite so easy to
hurt a hair of the gentleman’s head as Mrs. Nickleby seemed to imagine,
inasmuch as that part of his person was some feet up the chimney, which
was by no means a wide one. But, as all this time he had never left off
singing about the bankruptcy of the beautiful maid in respect of truth,
and now began not only to croak very feebly, but to kick with great
violence as if respiration became a task of difficulty, Frank Cheeryble,
without further hesitation, pulled at the shorts and worsteds with
such heartiness as to bring him floundering into the room with greater
precipitation than he had quite calculated upon.

‘Oh! yes, yes,’ said Kate, directly the whole figure of this singular
visitor appeared in this abrupt manner. ‘I know who it is. Pray don’t be
rough with him. Is he hurt? I hope not. Oh, pray see if he is hurt.’

‘He is not, I assure you,’ replied Frank, handling the object of his
surprise, after this appeal, with sudden tenderness and respect. ‘He is
not hurt in the least.’

‘Don’t let him come any nearer,’ said Kate, retiring as far as she
could.

‘Oh, no, he shall not,’ rejoined Frank. ‘You see I have him secure here.
But may I ask you what this means, and whether you expected this old
gentleman?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Kate, ‘of course not; but he--mama does not think so, I
believe--but he is a mad gentleman who has escaped from the next house,
and must have found an opportunity of secreting himself here.’

‘Kate,’ interposed Mrs. Nickleby with severe dignity, ‘I am surprised at
you.’

‘Dear mama,’ Kate gently remonstrated.

‘I am surprised at you,’ repeated Mrs. Nickleby; ‘upon my word, Kate,
I am quite astonished that you should join the persecutors of this
unfortunate gentleman, when you know very well that they have the basest
designs upon his property, and that that is the whole secret of it. It
would be much kinder of you, Kate, to ask Mr. Linkinwater or Mr. Cheeryble
to interfere in his behalf, and see him righted. You ought not to allow
your feelings to influence you; it’s not right, very far from it. What
should my feelings be, do you suppose? If anybody ought to be indignant,
who is it? I, of course, and very properly so. Still, at the same time,
I wouldn’t commit such an injustice for the world. No,’ continued Mrs
Nickleby, drawing herself up, and looking another way with a kind of
bashful stateliness; ‘this gentleman will understand me when I tell him
that I repeat the answer I gave him the other day; that I always will
repeat it, though I do believe him to be sincere when I find him placing
himself in such dreadful situations on my account; and that I request
him to have the goodness to go away directly, or it will be impossible
to keep his behaviour a secret from my son Nicholas. I am obliged to
him, very much obliged to him, but I cannot listen to his addresses for
a moment. It’s quite impossible.’

While this address was in course of delivery, the old gentleman, with
his nose and cheeks embellished with large patches of soot, sat upon the
ground with his arms folded, eyeing the spectators in profound silence,
and with a very majestic demeanour. He did not appear to take the
smallest notice of what Mrs. Nickleby said, but when she ceased to
speak he honoured her with a long stare, and inquired if she had quite
finished.

‘I have nothing more to say,’ replied that lady modestly. ‘I really
cannot say anything more.’

‘Very good,’ said the old gentleman, raising his voice, ‘then bring in
the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.’

Nobody executing this order, the old gentleman, after a short pause,
raised his voice again and demanded a thunder sandwich. This article not
being forthcoming either, he requested to be served with a fricassee of
boot-tops and goldfish sauce, and then laughing heartily, gratified his
hearers with a very long, very loud, and most melodious bellow.

But still Mrs. Nickleby, in reply to the significant looks of all about
her, shook her head as though to assure them that she saw nothing
whatever in all this, unless, indeed, it were a slight degree of
eccentricity. She might have remained impressed with these opinions
down to the latest moment of her life, but for a slight train of
circumstances, which, trivial as they were, altered the whole complexion
of the case.

It happened that Miss La Creevy, finding her patient in no very
threatening condition, and being strongly impelled by curiosity to see
what was going forward, bustled into the room while the old gentleman
was in the very act of bellowing. It happened, too, that the instant the
old gentleman saw her, he stopped short, skipped suddenly on his feet,
and fell to kissing his hand violently: a change of demeanour which
almost terrified the little portrait painter out of her senses, and
caused her to retreat behind Tim Linkinwater with the utmost expedition.

‘Aha!’ cried the old gentleman, folding his hands, and squeezing them
with great force against each other. ‘I see her now; I see her now! My
love, my life, my bride, my peerless beauty. She is come at last--at
last--and all is gas and gaiters!’

Mrs. Nickleby looked rather disconcerted for a moment, but immediately
recovering, nodded to Miss La Creevy and the other spectators several
times, and frowned, and smiled gravely, giving them to understand that
she saw where the mistake was, and would set it all to rights in a
minute or two.

‘She is come!’ said the old gentleman, laying his hand upon his heart.
‘Cormoran and Blunderbore! She is come! All the wealth I have is hers
if she will take me for her slave. Where are grace, beauty, and
blandishments, like those? In the Empress of Madagascar? No. In the
Queen of Diamonds? No. In Mrs. Rowland, who every morning bathes in
Kalydor for nothing? No. Melt all these down into one, with the three
Graces, the nine Muses, and fourteen biscuit-bakers’ daughters from
Oxford Street, and make a woman half as lovely. Pho! I defy you.’

After uttering this rhapsody, the old gentleman snapped his fingers
twenty or thirty times, and then subsided into an ecstatic contemplation
of Miss La Creevy’s charms. This affording Mrs. Nickleby a favourable
opportunity of explanation, she went about it straight.

‘I am sure,’ said the worthy lady, with a prefatory cough, ‘that it’s a
great relief, under such trying circumstances as these, to have anybody
else mistaken for me--a very great relief; and it’s a circumstance that
never occurred before, although I have several times been mistaken for
my daughter Kate. I have no doubt the people were very foolish, and
perhaps ought to have known better, but still they did take me for
her, and of course that was no fault of mine, and it would be very
hard indeed if I was to be made responsible for it. However, in this
instance, of course, I must feel that I should do exceedingly wrong if
I suffered anybody--especially anybody that I am under great obligations
to--to be made uncomfortable on my account. And therefore I think it my
duty to tell that gentleman that he is mistaken, that I am the lady
who he was told by some impertinent person was niece to the Council of
Paving-stones, and that I do beg and entreat of him to go quietly away,
if it’s only for,’ here Mrs. Nickleby simpered and hesitated, ‘for MY
sake.’

It might have been expected that the old gentleman would have been
penetrated to the heart by the delicacy and condescension of this
appeal, and that he would at least have returned a courteous and
suitable reply. What, then, was the shock which Mrs. Nickleby received,
when, accosting HER in the most unmistakable manner, he replied in a
loud and sonourous voice: ‘Avaunt! Cat!’

‘Sir!’ cried Mrs. Nickleby, in a faint tone.

‘Cat!’ repeated the old gentleman. ‘Puss, Kit, Tit, Grimalkin, Tabby,
Brindle! Whoosh!’ with which last sound, uttered in a hissing manner
between his teeth, the old gentleman swung his arms violently round and
round, and at the same time alternately advanced on Mrs. Nickleby, and
retreated from her, in that species of savage dance with which boys on
market-days may be seen to frighten pigs, sheep, and other animals, when
they give out obstinate indications of turning down a wrong street.

Mrs. Nickleby wasted no words, but uttered an exclamation of horror and
surprise, and immediately fainted away.

‘I’ll attend to mama,’ said Kate, hastily; ‘I am not at all frightened.
But pray take him away: pray take him away!’

Frank was not at all confident of his power of complying with this
request, until he bethought himself of the stratagem of sending Miss La
Creevy on a few paces in advance, and urging the old gentleman to
follow her. It succeeded to a miracle; and he went away in a rapture of
admiration, strongly guarded by Tim Linkinwater on one side, and Frank
himself on the other.

‘Kate,’ murmured Mrs. Nickleby, reviving when the coast was clear, ‘is he
gone?’

She was assured that he was.

‘I shall never forgive myself, Kate,’ said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Never! That
gentleman has lost his senses, and I am the unhappy cause.’

‘YOU the cause!’ said Kate, greatly astonished.

‘I, my love,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby, with a desperate calmness. ‘You saw
what he was the other day; you see what he is now. I told your brother,
weeks and weeks ago, Kate, that I hoped a disappointment might not be
too much for him. You see what a wreck he is. Making allowance for
his being a little flighty, you know how rationally, and sensibly, and
honourably he talked, when we saw him in the garden. You have heard the
dreadful nonsense he has been guilty of this night, and the manner in
which he has gone on with that poor unfortunate little old maid. Can
anybody doubt how all this has been brought about?’

‘I should scarcely think they could,’ said Kate mildly.

‘I should scarcely think so, either,’ rejoined her mother. ‘Well! if
I am the unfortunate cause of this, I have the satisfaction of knowing
that I am not to blame. I told Nicholas, I said to him, “Nicholas, my
dear, we should be very careful how we proceed.” He would scarcely hear
me. If the matter had only been properly taken up at first, as I wished
it to be! But you are both of you so like your poor papa. However, I
have MY consolation, and that should be enough for me!’

Washing her hands, thus, of all responsibility under this head, past,
present, or to come, Mrs. Nickleby kindly added that she hoped her
children might never have greater cause to reproach themselves than she
had, and prepared herself to receive the escort, who soon returned with
the intelligence that the old gentleman was safely housed, and that
they found his custodians, who had been making merry with some friends,
wholly ignorant of his absence.

Quiet being again restored, a delicious half-hour--so Frank called it,
in the course of subsequent conversation with Tim Linkinwater as they
were walking home--was spent in conversation, and Tim’s watch at length
apprising him that it was high time to depart, the ladies were left
alone, though not without many offers on the part of Frank to remain
until Nicholas arrived, no matter what hour of the night it might be,
if, after the late neighbourly irruption, they entertained the least
fear of being left to themselves. As their freedom from all further
apprehension, however, left no pretext for his insisting on mounting
guard, he was obliged to abandon the citadel, and to retire with the
trusty Tim.

Nearly three hours of silence passed away. Kate blushed to find, when
Nicholas returned, how long she had been sitting alone, occupied with
her own thoughts.

‘I really thought it had not been half an hour,’ she said.

‘They must have been pleasant thoughts, Kate,’ rejoined Nicholas gaily,
‘to make time pass away like that. What were they now?’

Kate was confused; she toyed with some trifle on the table, looked up
and smiled, looked down and dropped a tear.

‘Why, Kate,’ said Nicholas, drawing his sister towards him and kissing
her, ‘let me see your face. No? Ah! that was but a glimpse; that’s
scarcely fair. A longer look than that, Kate. Come--and I’ll read your
thoughts for you.’

There was something in this proposition, albeit it was said without the
slightest consciousness or application, which so alarmed his sister,
that Nicholas laughingly changed the subject to domestic matters, and
thus gathered, by degrees, as they left the room and went upstairs
together, how lonely Smike had been all night--and by very slow
degrees, too; for on this subject also, Kate seemed to speak with some
reluctance.

‘Poor fellow,’ said Nicholas, tapping gently at his door, ‘what can be
the cause of all this?’

Kate was hanging on her brother’s arm. The door being quickly opened,
she had not time to disengage herself, before Smike, very pale and
haggard, and completely dressed, confronted them.

‘And have you not been to bed?’ said Nicholas.

‘N--n--no,’ was the reply.

Nicholas gently detained his sister, who made an effort to retire; and
asked, ‘Why not?’

‘I could not sleep,’ said Smike, grasping the hand which his friend
extended to him.

‘You are not well?’ rejoined Nicholas.

‘I am better, indeed. A great deal better,’ said Smike quickly.

‘Then why do you give way to these fits of melancholy?’ inquired
Nicholas, in his kindest manner; ‘or why not tell us the cause? You grow
a different creature, Smike.’

‘I do; I know I do,’ he replied. ‘I will tell you the reason one day,
but not now. I hate myself for this; you are all so good and kind. But I
cannot help it. My heart is very full; you do not know how full it is.’

He wrung Nicholas’s hand before he released it; and glancing, for a
moment, at the brother and sister as they stood together, as if there
were something in their strong affection which touched him very deeply,
withdrew into his chamber, and was soon the only watcher under that
quiet roof.



CHAPTER 50

Involves a serious Catastrophe


The little race-course at Hampton was in the full tide and height of
its gaiety; the day as dazzling as day could be; the sun high in the
cloudless sky, and shining in its fullest splendour. Every gaudy colour
that fluttered in the air from carriage seat and garish tent top, shone
out in its gaudiest hues. Old dingy flags grew new again, faded gilding
was re-burnished, stained rotten canvas looked a snowy white, the very
beggars’ rags were freshened up, and sentiment quite forgot its charity
in its fervent admiration of poverty so picturesque.

It was one of those scenes of life and animation, caught in its very
brightest and freshest moments, which can scarcely fail to please;
for if the eye be tired of show and glare, or the ear be weary with a
ceaseless round of noise, the one may repose, turn almost where it
will, on eager, happy, and expectant faces, and the other deaden
all consciousness of more annoying sounds in those of mirth and
exhilaration. Even the sunburnt faces of gypsy children, half naked
though they be, suggest a drop of comfort. It is a pleasant thing to see
that the sun has been there; to know that the air and light are on them
every day; to feel that they ARE children, and lead children’s lives;
that if their pillows be damp, it is with the dews of Heaven, and not
with tears; that the limbs of their girls are free, and that they are
not crippled by distortions, imposing an unnatural and horrible penance
upon their sex; that their lives are spent, from day to day, at least
among the waving trees, and not in the midst of dreadful engines which
make young children old before they know what childhood is, and give
them the exhaustion and infirmity of age, without, like age, the
privilege to die. God send that old nursery tales were true, and that
gypsies stole such children by the score!

The great race of the day had just been run; and the close lines of
people, on either side of the course, suddenly breaking up and pouring
into it, imparted a new liveliness to the scene, which was again all
busy movement. Some hurried eagerly to catch a glimpse of the winning
horse; others darted to and fro, searching, no less eagerly, for the
carriages they had left in quest of better stations. Here, a little knot
gathered round a pea and thimble table to watch the plucking of some
unhappy greenhorn; and there, another proprietor with his confederates
in various disguises--one man in spectacles; another, with an eyeglass
and a stylish hat; a third, dressed as a farmer well to do in the world,
with his top-coat over his arm and his flash notes in a large leathern
pocket-book; and all with heavy-handled whips to represent most innocent
country fellows who had trotted there on horseback--sought, by loud and
noisy talk and pretended play, to entrap some unwary customer, while the
gentlemen confederates (of more villainous aspect still, in clean linen
and good clothes), betrayed their close interest in the concern by
the anxious furtive glance they cast on all new comers. These would be
hanging on the outskirts of a wide circle of people assembled round some
itinerant juggler, opposed, in his turn, by a noisy band of music,
or the classic game of ‘Ring the Bull,’ while ventriloquists holding
dialogues with wooden dolls, and fortune-telling women smothering the
cries of real babies, divided with them, and many more, the general
attention of the company. Drinking-tents were full, glasses began to
clink in carriages, hampers to be unpacked, tempting provisions to be
set forth, knives and forks to rattle, champagne corks to fly, eyes to
brighten that were not dull before, and pickpockets to count their gains
during the last heat. The attention so recently strained on one object
of interest, was now divided among a hundred; and look where you would,
there was a motley assemblage of feasting, laughing, talking, begging,
gambling, and mummery.

Of the gambling-booths there was a plentiful show, flourishing in all
the splendour of carpeted ground, striped hangings, crimson cloth,
pinnacled roofs, geranium pots, and livery servants. There were the
Stranger’s club-house, the Athenaeum club-house, the Hampton club-house,
the St James’s club-house, and half a mile of club-houses to play IN;
and there were ROUGE-ET-NOIR, French hazard, and other games to play AT.
It is into one of these booths that our story takes its way.

Fitted up with three tables for the purposes of play, and crowded with
players and lookers on, it was, although the largest place of the kind
upon the course, intensely hot, notwithstanding that a portion of the
canvas roof was rolled back to admit more air, and there were two doors
for a free passage in and out. Excepting one or two men who, each with a
long roll of half-crowns, chequered with a few stray sovereigns, in
his left hand, staked their money at every roll of the ball with a
business-like sedateness which showed that they were used to it, and had
been playing all day, and most probably all the day before, there was
no very distinctive character about the players, who were chiefly young
men, apparently attracted by curiosity, or staking small sums as part
of the amusement of the day, with no very great interest in winning or
losing. There were two persons present, however, who, as peculiarly good
specimens of a class, deserve a passing notice.

Of these, one was a man of six or eight and fifty, who sat on a chair
near one of the entrances of the booth, with his hands folded on the
top of his stick, and his chin appearing above them. He was a tall, fat,
long-bodied man, buttoned up to the throat in a light green coat, which
made his body look still longer than it was. He wore, besides, drab
breeches and gaiters, a white neckerchief, and a broad-brimmed white
hat. Amid all the buzzing noise of the games, and the perpetual passing
in and out of the people, he seemed perfectly calm and abstracted,
without the smallest particle of excitement in his composition. He
exhibited no indication of weariness, nor, to a casual observer, of
interest either. There he sat, quite still and collected. Sometimes, but
very rarely, he nodded to some passing face, or beckoned to a waiter to
obey a call from one of the tables. The next instant he subsided into
his old state. He might have been some profoundly deaf old gentleman,
who had come in to take a rest, or he might have been patiently waiting
for a friend, without the least consciousness of anybody’s presence, or
fixed in a trance, or under the influence of opium. People turned round
and looked at him; he made no gesture, caught nobody’s eye, let them
pass away, and others come on and be succeeded by others, and took no
notice. When he did move, it seemed wonderful how he could have seen
anything to occasion it. And so, in truth, it was. But there was not a
face that passed in or out, which this man failed to see; not a gesture
at any one of the three tables that was lost upon him; not a word,
spoken by the bankers, but reached his ear; not a winner or loser he
could not have marked. And he was the proprietor of the place.

The other presided over the ROUGE-ET-NOIR table. He was probably some
ten years younger, and was a plump, paunchy, sturdy-looking fellow, with
his under-lip a little pursed, from a habit of counting money inwardly
as he paid it, but with no decidedly bad expression in his face, which
was rather an honest and jolly one than otherwise. He wore no coat,
the weather being hot, and stood behind the table with a huge mound of
crowns and half-crowns before him, and a cash-box for notes. This game
was constantly playing. Perhaps twenty people would be staking at the
same time. This man had to roll the ball, to watch the stakes as they
were laid down, to gather them off the colour which lost, to pay those
who won, to do it all with the utmost dispatch, to roll the ball again,
and to keep this game perpetually alive. He did it all with a rapidity
absolutely marvellous; never hesitating, never making a mistake, never
stopping, and never ceasing to repeat such unconnected phrases as
the following, which, partly from habit, and partly to have something
appropriate and business-like to say, he constantly poured out with the
same monotonous emphasis, and in nearly the same order, all day long:

‘Rooge-a-nore from Paris! Gentlemen, make your game and back your
own opinions--any time while the ball rolls--rooge-a-nore from Paris,
gentlemen, it’s a French game, gentlemen, I brought it over myself, I
did indeed!--Rooge-a-nore from Paris--black wins--black--stop a minute,
sir, and I’ll pay you, directly--two there, half a pound there, three
there--and one there--gentlemen, the ball’s a rolling--any time, sir,
while the ball rolls!--The beauty of this game is, that you can double
your stakes or put down your money, gentlemen, any time while the ball
rolls--black again--black wins--I never saw such a thing--I never did,
in all my life, upon my word I never did; if any gentleman had
been backing the black in the last five minutes he must have won
five-and-forty pound in four rolls of the ball, he must indeed.
Gentlemen, we’ve port, sherry, cigars, and most excellent champagne.
Here, wai-ter, bring a bottle of champagne, and let’s have a dozen or
fifteen cigars here--and let’s be comfortable, gentlemen--and bring some
clean glasses--any time while the ball rolls!--I lost one hundred and
thirty-seven pound yesterday, gentlemen, at one roll of the ball, I
did indeed!--how do you do, sir?’ (recognising some knowing gentleman
without any halt or change of voice, and giving a wink so slight that
it seems an accident), ‘will you take a glass of sherry, sir?--here,
wai-ter! bring a clean glass, and hand the sherry to this gentleman--and
hand it round, will you, waiter?--this is the rooge-a-nore from Paris,
gentlemen--any time while the ball rolls!--gentlemen, make your game,
and back your own opinions--it’s the rooge-a-nore from Paris--quite a
new game, I brought it over myself, I did indeed--gentlemen, the ball’s
a-rolling!’

This officer was busily plying his vocation when half-a-dozen persons
sauntered through the booth, to whom, but without stopping either in his
speech or work, he bowed respectfully; at the same time directing, by
a look, the attention of a man beside him to the tallest figure in the
group, in recognition of whom the proprietor pulled off his hat. This
was Sir Mulberry Hawk, with whom were his friend and pupil, and a small
train of gentlemanly-dressed men, of characters more doubtful than
obscure.

The proprietor, in a low voice, bade Sir Mulberry good-day. Sir
Mulberry, in the same tone, bade the proprietor go to the devil, and
turned to speak with his friends.

There was evidently an irritable consciousness about him that he was an
object of curiosity, on this first occasion of showing himself in public
after the accident that had befallen him; and it was easy to perceive
that he appeared on the race-course, that day, more in the hope of
meeting with a great many people who knew him, and so getting over as
much as possible of the annoyance at once, than with any purpose of
enjoying the sport. There yet remained a slight scar upon his face,
and whenever he was recognised, as he was almost every minute by people
sauntering in and out, he made a restless effort to conceal it with his
glove; showing how keenly he felt the disgrace he had undergone.

‘Ah! Hawk,’ said one very sprucely-dressed personage in a Newmarket
coat, a choice neckerchief, and all other accessories of the most
unexceptionable kind. ‘How d’ye do, old fellow?’

This was a rival trainer of young noblemen and gentlemen, and the person
of all others whom Sir Mulberry most hated and dreaded to meet. They
shook hands with excessive cordiality.

‘And how are you now, old fellow, hey?’

‘Quite well, quite well,’ said Sir Mulberry.

‘That’s right,’ said the other. ‘How d’ye do, Verisopht? He’s a little
pulled down, our friend here. Rather out of condition still, hey?’

It should be observed that the gentleman had very white teeth, and that
when there was no excuse for laughing, he generally finished with the
same monosyllable, which he uttered so as to display them.

‘He’s in very good condition; there’s nothing the matter with him,’ said
the young man carelessly.

‘Upon my soul I’m glad to hear it,’ rejoined the other. ‘Have you just
returned from Brussels?’

‘We only reached town late last night,’ said Lord Frederick. Sir
Mulberry turned away to speak to one of his own party, and feigned not
to hear.

‘Now, upon my life,’ said the friend, affecting to speak in a whisper,
‘it’s an uncommonly bold and game thing in Hawk to show himself so soon.
I say it advisedly; there’s a vast deal of courage in it. You see he has
just rusticated long enough to excite curiosity, and not long enough for
men to have forgotten that deuced unpleasant--by-the-bye--you know the
rights of the affair, of course? Why did you never give those confounded
papers the lie? I seldom read the papers, but I looked in the papers for
that, and may I be--’

‘Look in the papers,’ interrupted Sir Mulberry, turning suddenly round,
‘tomorrow--no, next day, will you?’

‘Upon my life, my dear fellow, I seldom or never read the papers,’ said
the other, shrugging his shoulders, ‘but I will, at your recommendation.
What shall I look for?’

‘Good day,’ said Sir Mulberry, turning abruptly on his heel, and drawing
his pupil with him. Falling, again, into the loitering, careless pace at
which they had entered, they lounged out, arm in arm.

‘I won’t give him a case of murder to read,’ muttered Sir Mulberry with
an oath; ‘but it shall be something very near it if whipcord cuts and
bludgeons bruise.’

His companion said nothing, but there was something in his manner which
galled Sir Mulberry to add, with nearly as much ferocity as if his
friend had been Nicholas himself:

‘I sent Jenkins to old Nickleby before eight o’clock this morning. He’s
a staunch one; he was back with me before the messenger. I had it all
from him in the first five minutes. I know where this hound is to be met
with; time and place both. But there’s no need to talk; tomorrow will
soon be here.’

‘And wha-at’s to be done tomorrow?’ inquired Lord Frederick.

Sir Mulberry Hawk honoured him with an angry glance, but condescended
to return no verbal answer to this inquiry. Both walked sullenly on, as
though their thoughts were busily occupied, until they were quite clear
of the crowd, and almost alone, when Sir Mulberry wheeled round to
return.

‘Stop,’ said his companion, ‘I want to speak to you in earnest. Don’t
turn back. Let us walk here, a few minutes.’

‘What have you to say to me, that you could not say yonder as well as
here?’ returned his Mentor, disengaging his arm.

‘Hawk,’ rejoined the other, ‘tell me; I must know.’

‘MUST know,’ interrupted the other disdainfully. ‘Whew! Go on. If you
must know, of course there’s no escape for me. Must know!’

‘Must ask then,’ returned Lord Frederick, ‘and must press you for a
plain and straightforward answer. Is what you have just said only a
mere whim of the moment, occasioned by your being out of humour and
irritated, or is it your serious intention, and one that you have
actually contemplated?’

‘Why, don’t you remember what passed on the subject one night, when I
was laid up with a broken limb?’ said Sir Mulberry, with a sneer.

‘Perfectly well.’

‘Then take that for an answer, in the devil’s name,’ replied Sir
Mulberry, ‘and ask me for no other.’

Such was the ascendancy he had acquired over his dupe, and such the
latter’s general habit of submission, that, for the moment, the young
man seemed half afraid to pursue the subject. He soon overcame this
feeling, however, if it had restrained him at all, and retorted angrily:

‘If I remember what passed at the time you speak of, I expressed a
strong opinion on this subject, and said that, with my knowledge or
consent, you never should do what you threaten now.’

‘Will you prevent me?’ asked Sir Mulberry, with a laugh.

‘Ye-es, if I can,’ returned the other, promptly.

‘A very proper saving clause, that last,’ said Sir Mulberry; ‘and one
you stand in need of. Oh! look to your own business, and leave me to
look to mine.’

‘This IS mine,’ retorted Lord Frederick. ‘I make it mine; I will make it
mine. It’s mine already. I am more compromised than I should be, as it
is.’

‘Do as you please, and what you please, for yourself,’ said Sir
Mulberry, affecting an easy good-humour. ‘Surely that must content
you! Do nothing for me; that’s all. I advise no man to interfere in
proceedings that I choose to take. I am sure you know me better than
to do so. The fact is, I see, you mean to offer me advice. It is well
meant, I have no doubt, but I reject it. Now, if you please, we will
return to the carriage. I find no entertainment here, but quite the
reverse. If we prolong this conversation, we might quarrel, which would
be no proof of wisdom in either you or me.’

With this rejoinder, and waiting for no further discussion, Sir Mulberry
Hawk yawned, and very leisurely turned back.

There was not a little tact and knowledge of the young lord’s
disposition in this mode of treating him. Sir Mulberry clearly saw that
if his dominion were to last, it must be established now. He knew that
the moment he became violent, the young man would become violent too.
He had, many times, been enabled to strengthen his influence, when
any circumstance had occurred to weaken it, by adopting this cool and
laconic style; and he trusted to it now, with very little doubt of its
entire success.

But while he did this, and wore the most careless and indifferent
deportment that his practised arts enabled him to assume, he inwardly
resolved, not only to visit all the mortification of being compelled to
suppress his feelings, with additional severity upon Nicholas, but also
to make the young lord pay dearly for it, one day, in some shape or
other. So long as he had been a passive instrument in his hands, Sir
Mulberry had regarded him with no other feeling than contempt; but, now
that he presumed to avow opinions in opposition to his, and even to turn
upon him with a lofty tone and an air of superiority, he began to hate
him. Conscious that, in the vilest and most worthless sense of the term,
he was dependent upon the weak young lord, Sir Mulberry could the less
brook humiliation at his hands; and when he began to dislike him he
measured his dislike--as men often do--by the extent of the injuries he
had inflicted upon its object. When it is remembered that Sir Mulberry
Hawk had plundered, duped, deceived, and fooled his pupil in every
possible way, it will not be wondered at, that, beginning to hate him,
he began to hate him cordially.

On the other hand, the young lord having thought--which he very seldom
did about anything--and seriously too, upon the affair with Nicholas,
and the circumstances which led to it, had arrived at a manly and
honest conclusion. Sir Mulberry’s coarse and insulting behaviour on
the occasion in question had produced a deep impression on his mind; a
strong suspicion of his having led him on to pursue Miss Nickleby for
purposes of his own, had been lurking there for some time; he was really
ashamed of his share in the transaction, and deeply mortified by the
misgiving that he had been gulled. He had had sufficient leisure to
reflect upon these things, during their late retirement; and, at times,
when his careless and indolent nature would permit, had availed himself
of the opportunity. Slight circumstances, too, had occurred to increase
his suspicion. It wanted but a very slight circumstance to kindle his
wrath against Sir Mulberry. This his disdainful and insolent tone in
their recent conversation (the only one they had held upon the subject
since the period to which Sir Mulberry referred), effected.

Thus they rejoined their friends: each with causes of dislike against
the other rankling in his breast: and the young man haunted, besides,
with thoughts of the vindictive retaliation which was threatened against
Nicholas, and the determination to prevent it by some strong step, if
possible. But this was not all. Sir Mulberry, conceiving that he had
silenced him effectually, could not suppress his triumph, or forbear
from following up what he conceived to be his advantage. Mr. Pyke was
there, and Mr. Pluck was there, and Colonel Chowser, and other gentlemen
of the same caste, and it was a great point for Sir Mulberry to show
them that he had not lost his influence. At first, the young lord
contented himself with a silent determination to take measures for
withdrawing himself from the connection immediately. By degrees, he grew
more angry, and was exasperated by jests and familiarities which, a few
hours before, would have been a source of amusement to him. This did not
serve him; for, at such bantering or retort as suited the company, he
was no match for Sir Mulberry. Still, no violent rupture took place.
They returned to town; Messrs Pyke and Pluck and other gentlemen
frequently protesting, on the way thither, that Sir Mulberry had never
been in such tiptop spirits in all his life.

They dined together, sumptuously. The wine flowed freely, as indeed
it had done all day. Sir Mulberry drank to recompense himself for his
recent abstinence; the young lord, to drown his indignation; and the
remainder of the party, because the wine was of the best and they had
nothing to pay. It was nearly midnight when they rushed out, wild,
burning with wine, their blood boiling, and their brains on fire, to the
gaming-table.

Here, they encountered another party, mad like themselves. The
excitement of play, hot rooms, and glaring lights was not calculated to
allay the fever of the time. In that giddy whirl of noise and confusion,
the men were delirious. Who thought of money, ruin, or the morrow, in
the savage intoxication of the moment? More wine was called for, glass
after glass was drained, their parched and scalding mouths were cracked
with thirst. Down poured the wine like oil on blazing fire. And still
the riot went on. The debauchery gained its height; glasses were dashed
upon the floor by hands that could not carry them to lips; oaths were
shouted out by lips which could scarcely form the words to vent them
in; drunken losers cursed and roared; some mounted on the tables, waving
bottles above their heads and bidding defiance to the rest; some danced,
some sang, some tore the cards and raved. Tumult and frenzy reigned
supreme; when a noise arose that drowned all others, and two men,
seizing each other by the throat, struggled into the middle of the room.

A dozen voices, until now unheard, called aloud to part them. Those who
had kept themselves cool, to win, and who earned their living in such
scenes, threw themselves upon the combatants, and, forcing them asunder,
dragged them some space apart.

‘Let me go!’ cried Sir Mulberry, in a thick hoarse voice; ‘he struck
me! Do you hear? I say, he struck me. Have I a friend here? Who is this?
Westwood. Do you hear me say he struck me?’

‘I hear, I hear,’ replied one of those who held him. ‘Come away for
tonight!’

‘I will not, by G--,’ he replied. ‘A dozen men about us saw the blow.’

‘Tomorrow will be ample time,’ said the friend.

‘It will not be ample time!’ cried Sir Mulberry. ‘Tonight, at once,
here!’ His passion was so great, that he could not articulate, but stood
clenching his fist, tearing his hair, and stamping upon the ground.

‘What is this, my lord?’ said one of those who surrounded him. ‘Have
blows passed?’

‘ONE blow has,’ was the panting reply. ‘I struck him. I proclaim it
to all here! I struck him, and he knows why. I say, with him, let this
quarrel be adjusted now. Captain Adams,’ said the young lord, looking
hurriedly about him, and addressing one of those who had interposed,
‘let me speak with you, I beg.’

The person addressed stepped forward, and taking the young man’s arm,
they retired together, followed shortly afterwards by Sir Mulberry and
his friend.

It was a profligate haunt of the worst repute, and not a place in which
such an affair was likely to awaken any sympathy for either party, or
to call forth any further remonstrance or interposition. Elsewhere, its
further progress would have been instantly prevented, and time allowed
for sober and cool reflection; but not there. Disturbed in their orgies,
the party broke up; some reeled away with looks of tipsy gravity; others
withdrew noisily discussing what had just occurred; the gentlemen of
honour who lived upon their winnings remarked to each other, as they
went out, that Hawk was a good shot; and those who had been most noisy,
fell fast asleep upon the sofas, and thought no more about it.

Meanwhile, the two seconds, as they may be called now, after a long
conference, each with his principal, met together in another room. Both
utterly heartless, both men upon town, both thoroughly initiated in its
worst vices, both deeply in debt, both fallen from some higher estate,
both addicted to every depravity for which society can find some genteel
name and plead its most depraving conventionalities as an excuse, they
were naturally gentlemen of most unblemished honour themselves, and of
great nicety concerning the honour of other people.

These two gentlemen were unusually cheerful just now; for the affair was
pretty certain to make some noise, and could scarcely fail to enhance
their reputations.

‘This is an awkward affair, Adams,’ said Mr. Westwood, drawing himself
up.

‘Very,’ returned the captain; ‘a blow has been struck, and there is but
one course, OF course.’

‘No apology, I suppose?’ said Mr. Westwood.

‘Not a syllable, sir, from my man, if we talk till doomsday,’ returned
the captain. ‘The original cause of dispute, I understand, was some
girl or other, to whom your principal applied certain terms, which
Lord Frederick, defending the girl, repelled. But this led to a
long recrimination upon a great many sore subjects, charges, and
counter-charges. Sir Mulberry was sarcastic; Lord Frederick was excited,
and struck him in the heat of provocation, and under circumstances of
great aggravation. That blow, unless there is a full retraction on the
part of Sir Mulberry, Lord Frederick is ready to justify.’

‘There is no more to be said,’ returned the other, ‘but to settle the
hour and the place of meeting. It’s a responsibility; but there is a
strong feeling to have it over. Do you object to say at sunrise?’

‘Sharp work,’ replied the captain, referring to his watch; ‘however, as
this seems to have been a long time breeding, and negotiation is only a
waste of words, no.’

‘Something may possibly be said, out of doors, after what passed in the
other room, which renders it desirable that we should be off without
delay, and quite clear of town,’ said Mr. Westwood. ‘What do you say to
one of the meadows opposite Twickenham, by the river-side?’

The captain saw no objection.

‘Shall we join company in the avenue of trees which leads from Petersham
to Ham House, and settle the exact spot when we arrive there?’ said Mr
Westwood.

To this the captain also assented. After a few other preliminaries,
equally brief, and having settled the road each party should take to
avoid suspicion, they separated.

‘We shall just have comfortable time, my lord,’ said the captain, when
he had communicated the arrangements, ‘to call at my rooms for a case of
pistols, and then jog coolly down. If you will allow me to dismiss your
servant, we’ll take my cab; for yours, perhaps, might be recognised.’

What a contrast, when they reached the street, to the scene they had
just left! It was already daybreak. For the flaring yellow light within,
was substituted the clear, bright, glorious morning; for a hot, close
atmosphere, tainted with the smell of expiring lamps, and reeking with
the steams of riot and dissipation, the free, fresh, wholesome air. But
to the fevered head on which that cool air blew, it seemed to come laden
with remorse for time misspent and countless opportunities neglected.
With throbbing veins and burning skin, eyes wild and heavy, thoughts
hurried and disordered, he felt as though the light were a reproach, and
shrunk involuntarily from the day as if he were some foul and hideous
thing.

‘Shivering?’ said the captain. ‘You are cold.’

‘Rather.’

‘It does strike cool, coming out of those hot rooms. Wrap that cloak
about you. So, so; now we’re off.’

They rattled through the quiet streets, made their call at the captain’s
lodgings, cleared the town, and emerged upon the open road, without
hindrance or molestation.

Fields, trees, gardens, hedges, everything looked very beautiful; the
young man scarcely seemed to have noticed them before, though he had
passed the same objects a thousand times. There was a peace and serenity
upon them all, strangely at variance with the bewilderment and confusion
of his own half-sobered thoughts, and yet impressive and welcome. He had
no fear upon his mind; but, as he looked about him, he had less anger;
and though all old delusions, relative to his worthless late companion,
were now cleared away, he rather wished he had never known him than
thought of its having come to this.

The past night, the day before, and many other days and nights beside,
all mingled themselves up in one unintelligible and senseless whirl; he
could not separate the transactions of one time from those of another.
Now, the noise of the wheels resolved itself into some wild tune in
which he could recognise scraps of airs he knew; now, there was nothing
in his ears but a stunning and bewildering sound, like rushing water.
But his companion rallied him on being so silent, and they talked and
laughed boisterously. When they stopped, he was a little surprised to
find himself in the act of smoking; but, on reflection, he remembered
when and where he had taken the cigar.

They stopped at the avenue gate and alighted, leaving the carriage to
the care of the servant, who was a smart fellow, and nearly as well
accustomed to such proceedings as his master. Sir Mulberry and his
friend were already there. All four walked in profound silence up the
aisle of stately elm trees, which, meeting far above their heads, formed
a long green perspective of Gothic arches, terminating, like some old
ruin, in the open sky.

After a pause, and a brief conference between the seconds, they, at
length, turned to the right, and taking a track across a little meadow,
passed Ham House and came into some fields beyond. In one of these, they
stopped. The ground was measured, some usual forms gone through, the two
principals were placed front to front at the distance agreed upon, and
Sir Mulberry turned his face towards his young adversary for the first
time. He was very pale, his eyes were bloodshot, his dress disordered,
and his hair dishevelled. For the face, it expressed nothing but violent
and evil passions. He shaded his eyes with his hand; grazed at his
opponent, steadfastly, for a few moments; and, then taking the weapon
which was tendered to him, bent his eyes upon that, and looked up no
more until the word was given, when he instantly fired.

The two shots were fired, as nearly as possible, at the same instant. In
that instant, the young lord turned his head sharply round, fixed upon
his adversary a ghastly stare, and without a groan or stagger, fell down
dead.

‘He’s gone!’ cried Westwood, who, with the other second, had run up to
the body, and fallen on one knee beside it.

‘His blood on his own head,’ said Sir Mulberry. ‘He brought this upon
himself, and forced it upon me.’

‘Captain Adams,’ cried Westwood, hastily, ‘I call you to witness that
this was fairly done. Hawk, we have not a moment to lose. We must leave
this place immediately, push for Brighton, and cross to France with all
speed. This has been a bad business, and may be worse, if we delay
a moment. Adams, consult your own safety, and don’t remain here; the
living before the dead; goodbye!’

With these words, he seized Sir Mulberry by the arm, and hurried him
away. Captain Adams--only pausing to convince himself, beyond all
question, of the fatal result--sped off in the same direction, to
concert measures with his servant for removing the body, and securing
his own safety likewise.

So died Lord Frederick Verisopht, by the hand which he had loaded with
gifts, and clasped a thousand times; by the act of him, but for whom,
and others like him, he might have lived a happy man, and died with
children’s faces round his bed.

The sun came proudly up in all his majesty, the noble river ran its
winding course, the leaves quivered and rustled in the air, the birds
poured their cheerful songs from every tree, the short-lived butterfly
fluttered its little wings; all the light and life of day came on; and,
amidst it all, and pressing down the grass whose every blade bore twenty
tiny lives, lay the dead man, with his stark and rigid face turned
upwards to the sky.



CHAPTER 51

The Project of Mr. Ralph Nickleby and his Friend approaching a successful
Issue, becomes unexpectedly known to another Party, not admitted into
their Confidence


In an old house, dismal dark and dusty, which seemed to have withered,
like himself, and to have grown yellow and shrivelled in hoarding him
from the light of day, as he had in hoarding his money, lived Arthur
Gride. Meagre old chairs and tables, of spare and bony make, and hard
and cold as misers’ hearts, were ranged, in grim array, against the
gloomy walls; attenuated presses, grown lank and lantern-jawed in
guarding the treasures they enclosed, and tottering, as though from
constant fear and dread of thieves, shrunk up in dark corners, whence
they cast no shadows on the ground, and seemed to hide and cower from
observation. A tall grim clock upon the stairs, with long lean hands and
famished face, ticked in cautious whispers; and when it struck the time,
in thin and piping sounds, like an old man’s voice, rattled, as if it
were pinched with hunger.

No fireside couch was there, to invite repose and comfort. Elbow-chairs
there were, but they looked uneasy in their minds, cocked their arms
suspiciously and timidly, and kept upon their guard. Others, were
fantastically grim and gaunt, as having drawn themselves up to their
utmost height, and put on their fiercest looks to stare all comers out
of countenance. Others, again, knocked up against their neighbours, or
leant for support against the wall--somewhat ostentatiously, as if to
call all men to witness that they were not worth the taking. The dark
square lumbering bedsteads seemed built for restless dreams; the musty
hangings seemed to creep in scanty folds together, whispering among
themselves, when rustled by the wind, their trembling knowledge of the
tempting wares that lurked within the dark and tight-locked closets.

From out the most spare and hungry room in all this spare and hungry
house there came, one morning, the tremulous tones of old Gride’s voice,
as it feebly chirruped forth the fag end of some forgotten song, of
which the burden ran:

     Ta--ran--tan--too,
     Throw the old shoe,
     And may the wedding be lucky!

which he repeated, in the same shrill quavering notes, again and again,
until a violent fit of coughing obliged him to desist, and to pursue in
silence, the occupation upon which he was engaged.

This occupation was, to take down from the shelves of a worm-eaten
wardrobe a quantity of frouzy garments, one by one; to subject each to
a careful and minute inspection by holding it up against the light, and
after folding it with great exactness, to lay it on one or other of
two little heaps beside him. He never took two articles of clothing out
together, but always brought them forth, singly, and never failed to
shut the wardrobe door, and turn the key, between each visit to its
shelves.

‘The snuff-coloured suit,’ said Arthur Gride, surveying a threadbare
coat. ‘Did I look well in snuff-colour? Let me think.’

The result of his cogitations appeared to be unfavourable, for he folded
the garment once more, laid it aside, and mounted on a chair to get down
another, chirping while he did so:

     Young, loving, and fair,
     Oh what happiness there!
     The wedding is sure to be lucky!

‘They always put in “young,”’ said old Arthur, ‘but songs are only
written for the sake of rhyme, and this is a silly one that the poor
country-people sang, when I was a little boy. Though stop--young is
quite right too--it means the bride--yes. He, he, he! It means the
bride. Oh dear, that’s good. That’s very good. And true besides, quite
true!’

In the satisfaction of this discovery, he went over the verse again,
with increased expression, and a shake or two here and there. He then
resumed his employment.

‘The bottle-green,’ said old Arthur; ‘the bottle-green was a famous
suit to wear, and I bought it very cheap at a pawnbroker’s, and there
was--he, he, he!--a tarnished shilling in the waistcoat pocket. To think
that the pawnbroker shouldn’t have known there was a shilling in it! I
knew it! I felt it when I was examining the quality. Oh, what a dull dog
of a pawnbroker! It was a lucky suit too, this bottle-green. The very
day I put it on first, old Lord Mallowford was burnt to death in
his bed, and all the post-obits fell in. I’ll be married in the
bottle-green. Peg. Peg Sliderskew--I’ll wear the bottle-green!’

This call, loudly repeated twice or thrice at the room-door, brought
into the apartment a short, thin, weasen, blear-eyed old woman,
palsy-stricken and hideously ugly, who, wiping her shrivelled face upon
her dirty apron, inquired, in that subdued tone in which deaf people
commonly speak:

‘Was that you a calling, or only the clock a striking? My hearing gets
so bad, I never know which is which; but when I hear a noise, I know it
must be one of you, because nothing else never stirs in the house.’

‘Me, Peg, me,’ said Arthur Gride, tapping himself on the breast to
render the reply more intelligible.

‘You, eh?’ returned Peg. ‘And what do YOU want?’

‘I’ll be married in the bottle-green,’ cried Arthur Gride.

‘It’s a deal too good to be married in, master,’ rejoined Peg, after
a short inspection of the suit. ‘Haven’t you got anything worse than
this?’

‘Nothing that’ll do,’ replied old Arthur.

‘Why not do?’ retorted Peg. ‘Why don’t you wear your every-day clothes,
like a man--eh?’

‘They an’t becoming enough, Peg,’ returned her master.

‘Not what enough?’ said Peg.

‘Becoming.’

‘Becoming what?’ said Peg, sharply. ‘Not becoming too old to wear?’

Arthur Gride muttered an imprecation on his housekeeper’s deafness, as
he roared in her ear:

‘Not smart enough! I want to look as well as I can.’

‘Look?’ cried Peg. ‘If she’s as handsome as you say she is, she won’t
look much at you, master, take your oath of that; and as to how you look
yourself--pepper-and-salt, bottle-green, sky-blue, or tartan-plaid will
make no difference in you.’

With which consolatory assurance, Peg Sliderskew gathered up the chosen
suit, and folding her skinny arms upon the bundle, stood, mouthing, and
grinning, and blinking her watery eyes, like an uncouth figure in some
monstrous piece of carving.

‘You’re in a funny humour, an’t you, Peg?’ said Arthur, with not the
best possible grace.

‘Why, isn’t it enough to make me?’ rejoined the old woman. ‘I shall,
soon enough, be put out, though, if anybody tries to domineer it over
me: and so I give you notice, master. Nobody shall be put over Peg
Sliderskew’s head, after so many years; you know that, and so I needn’t
tell you! That won’t do for me--no, no, nor for you. Try that once, and
come to ruin--ruin--ruin!’

‘Oh dear, dear, I shall never try it,’ said Arthur Gride, appalled by
the mention of the word, ‘not for the world. It would be very easy to
ruin me; we must be very careful; more saving than ever, with another
mouth to feed. Only we--we mustn’t let her lose her good looks, Peg,
because I like to see ‘em.’

‘Take care you don’t find good looks come expensive,’ returned Peg,
shaking her forefinger.

‘But she can earn money herself, Peg,’ said Arthur Gride, eagerly
watching what effect his communication produced upon the old woman’s
countenance: ‘she can draw, paint, work all manner of pretty things for
ornamenting stools and chairs: slippers, Peg, watch-guards, hair-chains,
and a thousand little dainty trifles that I couldn’t give you half the
names of. Then she can play the piano, (and, what’s more, she’s got
one), and sing like a little bird. She’ll be very cheap to dress and
keep, Peg; don’t you think she will?’

‘If you don’t let her make a fool of you, she may,’ returned Peg.

‘A fool of ME!’ exclaimed Arthur. ‘Trust your old master not to be
fooled by pretty faces, Peg; no, no, no--nor by ugly ones neither, Mrs
Sliderskew,’ he softly added by way of soliloquy.

‘You’re a saying something you don’t want me to hear,’ said Peg; ‘I know
you are.’

‘Oh dear! the devil’s in this woman,’ muttered Arthur; adding with an
ugly leer, ‘I said I trusted everything to you, Peg. That was all.’

‘You do that, master, and all your cares are over,’ said Peg
approvingly.

‘WHEN I do that, Peg Sliderskew,’ thought Arthur Gride, ‘they will be.’

Although he thought this very distinctly, he durst not move his lips
lest the old woman should detect him. He even seemed half afraid that
she might have read his thoughts; for he leered coaxingly upon her, as
he said aloud:

‘Take up all loose stitches in the bottle-green with the best black
silk. Have a skein of the best, and some new buttons for the coat,
and--this is a good idea, Peg, and one you’ll like, I know--as I have
never given her anything yet, and girls like such attentions, you shall
polish up a sparking necklace that I have got upstairs, and I’ll give
it her upon the wedding morning--clasp it round her charming little neck
myself--and take it away again next day. He, he, he! I’ll lock it up for
her, Peg, and lose it. Who’ll be made the fool of there, I wonder, to
begin with--eh, Peg?’

Mrs. Sliderskew appeared to approve highly of this ingenious scheme, and
expressed her satisfaction by various rackings and twitchings of
her head and body, which by no means enhanced her charms. These she
prolonged until she had hobbled to the door, when she exchanged them
for a sour malignant look, and twisting her under-jaw from side to side,
muttered hearty curses upon the future Mrs. Gride, as she crept slowly
down the stairs, and paused for breath at nearly every one.

‘She’s half a witch, I think,’ said Arthur Gride, when he found himself
again alone. ‘But she’s very frugal, and she’s very deaf. Her living
costs me next to nothing; and it’s no use her listening at keyholes; for
she can’t hear. She’s a charming woman--for the purpose; a most discreet
old housekeeper, and worth her weight in--copper.’

Having extolled the merits of his domestic in these high terms, old
Arthur went back to the burden of his song. The suit destined to grace
his approaching nuptials being now selected, he replaced the others with
no less care than he had displayed in drawing them from the musty nooks
where they had silently reposed for many years.

Startled by a ring at the door, he hastily concluded this operation, and
locked the press; but there was no need for any particular hurry, as the
discreet Peg seldom knew the bell was rung unless she happened to cast
her dim eyes upwards, and to see it shaking against the kitchen ceiling.
After a short delay, however, Peg tottered in, followed by Newman Noggs.

‘Ah! Mr. Noggs!’ cried Arthur Gride, rubbing his hands. ‘My good friend,
Mr. Noggs, what news do you bring for me?’

Newman, with a steadfast and immovable aspect, and his fixed eye very
fixed indeed, replied, suiting the action to the word, ‘A letter. From
Mr. Nickleby. Bearer waits.’

‘Won’t you take a--a--’

Newman looked up, and smacked his lips.

‘--A chair?’ said Arthur Gride.

‘No,’ replied Newman. ‘Thankee.’

Arthur opened the letter with trembling hands, and devoured its contents
with the utmost greediness; chuckling rapturously over it, and reading
it several times, before he could take it from before his eyes. So
many times did he peruse and re-peruse it, that Newman considered it
expedient to remind him of his presence.

‘Answer,’ said Newman. ‘Bearer waits.’

‘True,’ replied old Arthur. ‘Yes--yes; I almost forgot, I do declare.’

‘I thought you were forgetting,’ said Newman.

‘Quite right to remind me, Mr. Noggs. Oh, very right indeed,’ said
Arthur. ‘Yes. I’ll write a line. I’m--I’m--rather flurried, Mr. Noggs.
The news is--’

‘Bad?’ interrupted Newman.

‘No, Mr. Noggs, thank you; good, good. The very best of news. Sit down.
I’ll get the pen and ink, and write a line in answer. I’ll not detain
you long. I know you’re a treasure to your master, Mr. Noggs. He speaks
of you in such terms, sometimes, that, oh dear! you’d be astonished. I
may say that I do too, and always did. I always say the same of you.’

‘That’s “Curse Mr. Noggs with all my heart!” then, if you do,’ thought
Newman, as Gride hurried out.

The letter had fallen on the ground. Looking carefully about him for an
instant, Newman, impelled by curiosity to know the result of the design
he had overheard from his office closet, caught it up and rapidly read
as follows:


‘GRIDE.

‘I saw Bray again this morning, and proposed the day after tomorrow (as
you suggested) for the marriage. There is no objection on his part, and
all days are alike to his daughter. We will go together, and you must be
with me by seven in the morning. I need not tell you to be punctual.

‘Make no further visits to the girl in the meantime. You have been
there, of late, much oftener than you should. She does not languish for
you, and it might have been dangerous. Restrain your youthful ardour for
eight-and-forty hours, and leave her to the father. You only undo what
he does, and does well.

‘Yours,

‘RALPH NICKLEBY.’


A footstep was heard without. Newman dropped the letter on the same spot
again, pressed it with his foot to prevent its fluttering away, regained
his seat in a single stride, and looked as vacant and unconscious as
ever mortal looked. Arthur Gride, after peering nervously about him,
spied it on the ground, picked it up, and sitting down to write, glanced
at Newman Noggs, who was staring at the wall with an intensity so
remarkable, that Arthur was quite alarmed.

‘Do you see anything particular, Mr. Noggs?’ said Arthur, trying to
follow the direction of Newman’s eyes--which was an impossibility, and a
thing no man had ever done.

‘Only a cobweb,’ replied Newman.

‘Oh! is that all?’

‘No,’ said Newman. ‘There’s a fly in it.’

‘There are a good many cobwebs here,’ observed Arthur Gride.

‘So there are in our place,’ returned Newman; ‘and flies too.’

Newman appeared to derive great entertainment from this repartee, and
to the great discomposure of Arthur Gride’s nerves, produced a series of
sharp cracks from his finger-joints, resembling the noise of a distant
discharge of small artillery. Arthur succeeded in finishing his reply
to Ralph’s note, nevertheless, and at length handed it over to the
eccentric messenger for delivery.

‘That’s it, Mr. Noggs,’ said Gride.

Newman gave a nod, put it in his hat, and was shuffling away, when
Gride, whose doting delight knew no bounds, beckoned him back again, and
said, in a shrill whisper, and with a grin which puckered up his whole
face, and almost obscured his eyes:

‘Will you--will you take a little drop of something--just a taste?’

In good fellowship (if Arthur Gride had been capable of it) Newman would
not have drunk with him one bubble of the richest wine that was ever
made; but to see what he would be at, and to punish him as much as he
could, he accepted the offer immediately.

Arthur Gride, therefore, again applied himself to the press, and from a
shelf laden with tall Flemish drinking-glasses, and quaint bottles:
some with necks like so many storks, and others with square Dutch-built
bodies and short fat apoplectic throats: took down one dusty bottle of
promising appearance, and two glasses of curiously small size.

‘You never tasted this,’ said Arthur. ‘It’s EAU-D’OR--golden water. I
like it on account of its name. It’s a delicious name. Water of gold,
golden water! O dear me, it seems quite a sin to drink it!’

As his courage appeared to be fast failing him, and he trifled with the
stopper in a manner which threatened the dismissal of the bottle to its
old place, Newman took up one of the little glasses, and clinked it,
twice or thrice, against the bottle, as a gentle reminder that he
had not been helped yet. With a deep sigh, Arthur Gride slowly filled
it--though not to the brim--and then filled his own.

‘Stop, stop; don’t drink it yet,’ he said, laying his hand on Newman’s;
‘it was given to me, twenty years ago, and when I take a little taste,
which is ve--ry seldom, I like to think of it beforehand, and tease
myself. We’ll drink a toast. Shall we drink a toast, Mr. Noggs?’

‘Ah!’ said Newman, eyeing his little glass impatiently. ‘Look sharp.
Bearer waits.’

‘Why, then, I’ll tell you what,’ tittered Arthur, ‘we’ll drink--he, he,
he!--we’ll drink a lady.’

‘THE ladies?’ said Newman.

‘No, no, Mr. Noggs,’ replied Gride, arresting his hand, ‘A lady. You
wonder to hear me say A lady. I know you do, I know you do. Here’s
little Madeline. That’s the toast. Mr. Noggs. Little Madeline!’

‘Madeline!’ said Newman; inwardly adding, ‘and God help her!’

The rapidity and unconcern with which Newman dismissed his portion of
the golden water, had a great effect upon the old man, who sat upright
in his chair, and gazed at him, open-mouthed, as if the sight had taken
away his breath. Quite unmoved, however, Newman left him to sip his own
at leisure, or to pour it back again into the bottle, if he chose,
and departed; after greatly outraging the dignity of Peg Sliderskew
by brushing past her, in the passage, without a word of apology or
recognition.

Mr. Gride and his housekeeper, immediately on being left alone, resolved
themselves into a committee of ways and means, and discussed the
arrangements which should be made for the reception of the young bride.
As they were, like some other committees, extremely dull and prolix in
debate, this history may pursue the footsteps of Newman Noggs; thereby
combining advantage with necessity; for it would have been necessary
to do so under any circumstances, and necessity has no law, as all the
world knows.

‘You’ve been a long time,’ said Ralph, when Newman returned.

‘HE was a long time,’ replied Newman.

‘Bah!’ cried Ralph impatiently. ‘Give me his note, if he gave you one:
his message, if he didn’t. And don’t go away. I want a word with you,
sir.’

Newman handed in the note, and looked very virtuous and innocent while
his employer broke the seal, and glanced his eye over it.

‘He’ll be sure to come,’ muttered Ralph, as he tore it to pieces; ‘why
of course, I know he’ll be sure to come. What need to say that? Noggs!
Pray, sir, what man was that, with whom I saw you in the street last
night?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Newman.

‘You had better refresh your memory, sir,’ said Ralph, with a
threatening look.

‘I tell you,’ returned Newman boldly, ‘that I don’t know. He came here
twice, and asked for you. You were out. He came again. You packed him
off, yourself. He gave the name of Brooker.’

‘I know he did,’ said Ralph; ‘what then?’

‘What then? Why, then he lurked about and dogged me in the street. He
follows me, night after night, and urges me to bring him face to face
with you; as he says he has been once, and not long ago either. He
wants to see you face to face, he says, and you’ll soon hear him out, he
warrants.’

‘And what say you to that?’ inquired Ralph, looking keenly at his
drudge.

‘That it’s no business of mine, and I won’t. I told him he might catch
you in the street, if that was all he wanted, but no! that wouldn’t do.
You wouldn’t hear a word there, he said. He must have you alone in a
room with the door locked, where he could speak without fear, and you’d
soon change your tone, and hear him patiently.’

‘An audacious dog!’ Ralph muttered.

‘That’s all I know,’ said Newman. ‘I say again, I don’t know what man
he is. I don’t believe he knows himself. You have seen him; perhaps YOU
do.’

‘I think I do,’ replied Ralph.

‘Well,’ retored Newman, sulkily, ‘don’t expect me to know him too;
that’s all. You’ll ask me, next, why I never told you this before. What
would you say, if I was to tell you all that people say of you? What
do you call me when I sometimes do? “Brute, ass!” and snap at me like a
dragon.’

This was true enough; though the question which Newman anticipated, was,
in fact, upon Ralph’s lips at the moment.

‘He is an idle ruffian,’ said Ralph; ‘a vagabond from beyond the sea
where he travelled for his crimes; a felon let loose to run his neck
into the halter; a swindler, who has the audacity to try his schemes on
me who know him well. The next time he tampers with you, hand him over
to the police, for attempting to extort money by lies and threats,--d’ye
hear?--and leave the rest to me. He shall cool his heels in jail a
little time, and I’ll be bound he looks for other folks to fleece, when
he comes out. You mind what I say, do you?’

‘I hear,’ said Newman.

‘Do it then,’ returned Ralph, ‘and I’ll reward you. Now, you may go.’

Newman readily availed himself of the permission, and, shutting himself
up in his little office, remained there, in very serious cogitation,
all day. When he was released at night, he proceeded, with all the
expedition he could use, to the city, and took up his old position
behind the pump, to watch for Nicholas. For Newman Noggs was proud in
his way, and could not bear to appear as his friend, before the brothers
Cheeryble, in the shabby and degraded state to which he was reduced.

He had not occupied this position many minutes, when he was rejoiced to
see Nicholas approaching, and darted out from his ambuscade to meet him.
Nicholas, on his part, was no less pleased to encounter his friend, whom
he had not seen for some time; so, their greeting was a warm one.

‘I was thinking of you, at that moment,’ said Nicholas.

‘That’s right,’ rejoined Newman, ‘and I of you. I couldn’t help coming
up, tonight. I say, I think I am going to find out something.’

‘And what may that be?’ returned Nicholas, smiling at this odd
communication.

‘I don’t know what it may be, I don’t know what it may not be,’ said
Newman; ‘it’s some secret in which your uncle is concerned, but
what, I’ve not yet been able to discover, although I have my strong
suspicions. I’ll not hint ‘em now, in case you should be disappointed.’

‘I disappointed!’ cried Nicholas; ‘am I interested?’

‘I think you are,’ replied Newman. ‘I have a crotchet in my head that it
must be so. I have found out a man, who plainly knows more than he cares
to tell at once. And he has already dropped such hints to me as puzzle
me--I say, as puzzle me,’ said Newman, scratching his red nose into
a state of violent inflammation, and staring at Nicholas with all his
might and main meanwhile.

Admiring what could have wound his friend up to such a pitch of mystery,
Nicholas endeavoured, by a series of questions, to elucidate the cause;
but in vain. Newman could not be drawn into any more explicit statement
than a repetition of the perplexities he had already thrown out, and
a confused oration, showing, How it was necessary to use the utmost
caution; how the lynx-eyed Ralph had already seen him in company with
his unknown correspondent; and how he had baffled the said Ralph by
extreme guardedness of manner and ingenuity of speech; having prepared
himself for such a contingency from the first.

Remembering his companion’s propensity,--of which his nose, indeed,
perpetually warned all beholders like a beacon,--Nicholas had drawn him
into a sequestered tavern. Here, they fell to reviewing the origin and
progress of their acquaintance, as men sometimes do, and tracing out the
little events by which it was most strongly marked, came at last to Miss
Cecilia Bobster.

‘And that reminds me,’ said Newman, ‘that you never told me the young
lady’s real name.’

‘Madeline!’ said Nicholas.

‘Madeline!’ cried Newman. ‘What Madeline? Her other name. Say her other
name.’

‘Bray,’ said Nicholas, in great astonishment.

‘It’s the same!’ cried Newman. ‘Sad story! Can you stand idly by, and
let that unnatural marriage take place without one attempt to save her?’

‘What do you mean?’ exclaimed Nicholas, starting up; ‘marriage! are you
mad?’

‘Are you? Is she? Are you blind, deaf, senseless, dead?’ said Newman.
‘Do you know that within one day, by means of your uncle Ralph, she will
be married to a man as bad as he, and worse, if worse there is? Do you
know that, within one day, she will be sacrificed, as sure as you stand
there alive, to a hoary wretch--a devil born and bred, and grey in
devils’ ways?’

‘Be careful what you say,’ replied Nicholas. ‘For Heaven’s sake be
careful! I am left here alone, and those who could stretch out a hand to
rescue her are far away. What is it that you mean?’

‘I never heard her name,’ said Newman, choking with his energy. ‘Why
didn’t you tell me? How was I to know? We might, at least, have had some
time to think!’

‘What is it that you mean?’ cried Nicholas.

It was not an easy task to arrive at this information; but, after a
great quantity of extraordinary pantomime, which in no way assisted it,
Nicholas, who was almost as wild as Newman Noggs himself, forced the
latter down upon his seat and held him down until he began his tale.

Rage, astonishment, indignation, and a storm of passions, rushed through
the listener’s heart, as the plot was laid bare. He no sooner understood
it all, than with a face of ashy paleness, and trembling in every limb,
he darted from the house.

‘Stop him!’ cried Newman, bolting out in pursuit. ‘He’ll be doing
something desperate; he’ll murder somebody. Hallo! there, stop him. Stop
thief! stop thief!’



CHAPTER 52

Nicholas despairs of rescuing Madeline Bray, but plucks up his Spirits
again, and determines to attempt it. Domestic Intelligence of the
Kenwigses and Lillyvicks


Finding that Newman was determined to arrest his progress at any hazard,
and apprehensive that some well-intentioned passenger, attracted by the
cry of ‘Stop thief,’ might lay violent hands upon his person, and
place him in a disagreeable predicament from which he might have some
difficulty in extricating himself, Nicholas soon slackened his pace,
and suffered Newman Noggs to come up with him: which he did, in so
breathless a condition, that it seemed impossible he could have held out
for a minute longer.

‘I will go straight to Bray’s,’ said Nicholas. ‘I will see this man.
If there is a feeling of humanity lingering in his breast, a spark of
consideration for his own child, motherless and friendless as she is, I
will awaken it.’

‘You will not,’ replied Newman. ‘You will not, indeed.’

‘Then,’ said Nicholas, pressing onward, ‘I will act upon my first
impulse, and go straight to Ralph Nickleby.’

‘By the time you reach his house he will be in bed,’ said Newman.

‘I’ll drag him from it,’ cried Nicholas.

‘Tut, tut,’ said Noggs. ‘Be yourself.’

‘You are the best of friends to me, Newman,’ rejoined Nicholas after a
pause, and taking his hand as he spoke. ‘I have made head against many
trials; but the misery of another, and such misery, is involved in this
one, that I declare to you I am rendered desperate, and know not how to
act.’

In truth, it did seem a hopeless case. It was impossible to make any use
of such intelligence as Newman Noggs had gleaned, when he lay concealed
in the closet. The mere circumstance of the compact between Ralph
Nickleby and Gride would not invalidate the marriage, or render Bray
averse to it, who, if he did not actually know of the existence of some
such understanding, doubtless suspected it. What had been hinted with
reference to some fraud on Madeline, had been put, with sufficient
obscurity by Arthur Gride, but coming from Newman Noggs, and obscured
still further by the smoke of his pocket-pistol, it became wholly
unintelligible, and involved in utter darkness.

‘There seems no ray of hope,’ said Nicholas.

‘The greater necessity for coolness, for reason, for consideration,
for thought,’ said Newman, pausing at every alternate word, to look
anxiously in his friend’s face. ‘Where are the brothers?’

‘Both absent on urgent business, as they will be for a week to come.’

‘Is there no way of communicating with them? No way of getting one of
them here by tomorrow night?’

‘Impossible!’ said Nicholas, ‘the sea is between us and them. With the
fairest winds that ever blew, to go and return would take three days and
nights.’

‘Their nephew,’ said Newman, ‘their old clerk.’

‘What could either do, that I cannot?’ rejoined Nicholas. ‘With
reference to them, especially, I am enjoined to the strictest silence on
this subject. What right have I to betray the confidence reposed in me,
when nothing but a miracle can prevent this sacrifice?’

‘Think,’ urged Newman. ‘Is there no way?’

‘There is none,’ said Nicholas, in utter dejection. ‘Not one. The father
urges, the daughter consents. These demons have her in their toils;
legal right, might, power, money, and every influence are on their side.
How can I hope to save her?’

‘Hope to the last!’ said Newman, clapping him on the back. ‘Always hope;
that’s a dear boy. Never leave off hoping; it don’t answer. Do you mind
me, Nick? It don’t answer. Don’t leave a stone unturned. It’s always
something, to know you’ve done the most you could. But, don’t leave off
hoping, or it’s of no use doing anything. Hope, hope, to the last!’

Nicholas needed encouragement. The suddenness with which intelligence of
the two usurers’ plans had come upon him, the little time which remained
for exertion, the probability, almost amounting to certainty itself,
that a few hours would place Madeline Bray for ever beyond his reach,
consign her to unspeakable misery, and perhaps to an untimely death; all
this quite stunned and overwhelmed him. Every hope connected with her
that he had suffered himself to form, or had entertained unconsciously,
seemed to fall at his feet, withered and dead. Every charm with which
his memory or imagination had surrounded her, presented itself before
him, only to heighten his anguish and add new bitterness to his despair.
Every feeling of sympathy for her forlorn condition, and of admiration
for her heroism and fortitude, aggravated the indignation which shook
him in every limb, and swelled his heart almost to bursting.

But, if Nicholas’s own heart embarrassed him, Newman’s came to his
relief. There was so much earnestness in his remonstrance, and such
sincerity and fervour in his manner, odd and ludicrous as it always was,
that it imparted to Nicholas new firmness, and enabled him to say, after
he had walked on for some little way in silence:

‘You read me a good lesson, Newman, and I will profit by it. One step,
at least, I may take--am bound to take indeed--and to that I will apply
myself tomorrow.’

‘What is that?’ asked Noggs wistfully. ‘Not to threaten Ralph? Not to
see the father?’

‘To see the daughter, Newman,’ replied Nicholas. ‘To do what, after all,
is the utmost that the brothers could do, if they were here, as Heaven
send they were! To reason with her upon this hideous union, to point out
to her all the horrors to which she is hastening; rashly, it may be, and
without due reflection. To entreat her, at least, to pause. She can have
had no counsellor for her good. Perhaps even I may move her so far yet,
though it is the eleventh hour, and she upon the very brink of ruin.’

‘Bravely spoken!’ said Newman. ‘Well done, well done! Yes. Very good.’

‘And I do declare,’ cried Nicholas, with honest enthusiasm, ‘that in
this effort I am influenced by no selfish or personal considerations,
but by pity for her, and detestation and abhorrence of this scheme; and
that I would do the same, were there twenty rivals in the field, and I
the last and least favoured of them all.’

‘You would, I believe,’ said Newman. ‘But where are you hurrying now?’

‘Homewards,’ answered Nicholas. ‘Do you come with me, or I shall say
good-night?’

‘I’ll come a little way, if you will but walk: not run,’ said Noggs.

‘I cannot walk tonight, Newman,’ returned Nicholas, hurriedly. ‘I must
move rapidly, or I could not draw my breath. I’ll tell you what I’ve
said and done tomorrow.’

Without waiting for a reply, he darted off at a rapid pace, and,
plunging into the crowds which thronged the street, was quickly lost to
view.

‘He’s a violent youth at times,’ said Newman, looking after him; ‘and
yet I like him for it. There’s cause enough now, or the deuce is in it.
Hope! I SAID hope, I think! Ralph Nickleby and Gride with their heads
together! And hope for the opposite party! Ho! ho!’

It was with a very melancholy laugh that Newman Noggs concluded this
soliloquy; and it was with a very melancholy shake of the head, and a
very rueful countenance, that he turned about, and went plodding on his
way.

This, under ordinary circumstances, would have been to some small tavern
or dram-shop; that being his way, in more senses than one. But, Newman
was too much interested, and too anxious, to betake himself even to
this resource, and so, with many desponding and dismal reflections, went
straight home.

It had come to pass, that afternoon, that Miss Morleena Kenwigs had
received an invitation to repair next day, per steamer from Westminster
Bridge, unto the Eel-pie Island at Twickenham: there to make merry upon
a cold collation, bottled beer, shrub, and shrimps, and to dance in the
open air to the music of a locomotive band, conveyed thither for the
purpose: the steamer being specially engaged by a dancing-master of
extensive connection for the accommodation of his numerous pupils,
and the pupils displaying their appreciation of the dancing-master’s
services, by purchasing themselves, and inducing their friends to do the
like, divers light-blue tickets, entitling them to join the expedition.
Of these light-blue tickets, one had been presented by an ambitious
neighbour to Miss Morleena Kenwigs, with an invitation to join her
daughters; and Mrs. Kenwigs, rightly deeming that the honour of the
family was involved in Miss Morleena’s making the most splendid
appearance possible on so short a notice, and testifying to the
dancing-master that there were other dancing-masters besides him, and to
all fathers and mothers present that other people’s children could learn
to be genteel besides theirs, had fainted away twice under the magnitude
of her preparations, but, upheld by a determination to sustain the
family name or perish in the attempt, was still hard at work when Newman
Noggs came home.

Now, between the italian-ironing of frills, the flouncing of trousers,
the trimming of frocks, the faintings and the comings-to again,
incidental to the occasion, Mrs. Kenwigs had been so entirely occupied,
that she had not observed, until within half an hour before, that the
flaxen tails of Miss Morleena’s hair were, in a manner, run to seed; and
that, unless she were put under the hands of a skilful hairdresser, she
never could achieve that signal triumph over the daughters of all other
people, anything less than which would be tantamount to defeat. This
discovery drove Mrs. Kenwigs to despair; for the hairdresser lived three
streets and eight dangerous crossings off; Morleena could not be trusted
to go there alone, even if such a proceeding were strictly proper:
of which Mrs. Kenwigs had her doubts; Mr. Kenwigs had not returned from
business; and there was nobody to take her. So, Mrs. Kenwigs first
slapped Miss Kenwigs for being the cause of her vexation, and then shed
tears.

‘You ungrateful child!’ said Mrs. Kenwigs, ‘after I have gone through
what I have, this night, for your good.’

‘I can’t help it, ma,’ replied Morleena, also in tears; ‘my hair WILL
grow.’

‘Don’t talk to me, you naughty thing!’ said Mrs. Kenwigs, ‘don’t! Even if
I was to trust you by yourself and you were to escape being run over,
I know you’d run in to Laura Chopkins,’ who was the daughter of the
ambitious neighbour, ‘and tell her what you’re going to wear tomorrow,
I know you would. You’ve no proper pride in yourself, and are not to be
trusted out of sight for an instant.’

Deploring the evil-mindedness of her eldest daughter in these terms, Mrs
Kenwigs distilled fresh drops of vexation from her eyes, and declared
that she did believe there never was anybody so tried as she was.
Thereupon, Morleena Kenwigs wept afresh, and they bemoaned themselves
together.

Matters were at this point, as Newman Noggs was heard to limp past the
door on his way upstairs; when Mrs. Kenwigs, gaining new hope from the
sound of his footsteps, hastily removed from her countenance as many
traces of her late emotion as were effaceable on so short a notice: and
presenting herself before him, and representing their dilemma, entreated
that he would escort Morleena to the hairdresser’s shop.

‘I wouldn’t ask you, Mr. Noggs,’ said Mrs. Kenwigs, ‘if I didn’t know what
a good, kind-hearted creature you are; no, not for worlds. I am a weak
constitution, Mr. Noggs, but my spirit would no more let me ask a favour
where I thought there was a chance of its being refused, than it would
let me submit to see my children trampled down and trod upon, by envy
and lowness!’

Newman was too good-natured not to have consented, even without this
avowal of confidence on the part of Mrs. Kenwigs. Accordingly, a very few
minutes had elapsed, when he and Miss Morleena were on their way to the
hairdresser’s.

It was not exactly a hairdresser’s; that is to say, people of a coarse
and vulgar turn of mind might have called it a barber’s; for they not
only cut and curled ladies elegantly, and children carefully, but shaved
gentlemen easily. Still, it was a highly genteel establishment--quite
first-rate in fact--and there were displayed in the window, besides
other elegancies, waxen busts of a light lady and a dark gentleman which
were the admiration of the whole neighbourhood. Indeed, some ladies
had gone so far as to assert, that the dark gentleman was actually
a portrait of the spirted young proprietor; and the great similarity
between their head-dresses--both wore very glossy hair, with a narrow
walk straight down the middle, and a profusion of flat circular curls
on both sides--encouraged the idea. The better informed among the sex,
however, made light of this assertion, for however willing they were
(and they were very willing) to do full justice to the handsome face
and figure of the proprietor, they held the countenance of the dark
gentleman in the window to be an exquisite and abstract idea of
masculine beauty, realised sometimes, perhaps, among angels and military
men, but very rarely embodied to gladden the eyes of mortals.

It was to this establishment that Newman Noggs led Miss Kenwigs in
safety. The proprietor, knowing that Miss Kenwigs had three sisters,
each with two flaxen tails, and all good for sixpence apiece, once a
month at least, promptly deserted an old gentleman whom he had just
lathered for shaving, and handing him over to the journeyman, (who was
not very popular among the ladies, by reason of his obesity and middle
age,) waited on the young lady himself.

Just as this change had been effected, there presented himself for
shaving, a big, burly, good-humoured coal-heaver with a pipe in his
mouth, who, drawing his hand across his chin, requested to know when a
shaver would be disengaged.

The journeyman, to whom this question was put, looked doubtfully at
the young proprietor, and the young proprietor looked scornfully at the
coal-heaver: observing at the same time:

‘You won’t get shaved here, my man.’

‘Why not?’ said the coal-heaver.

‘We don’t shave gentlemen in your line,’ remarked the young proprietor.

‘Why, I see you a shaving of a baker, when I was a looking through the
winder, last week,’ said the coal-heaver.

‘It’s necessary to draw the line somewheres, my fine feller,’ replied
the principal. ‘We draw the line there. We can’t go beyond bakers. If we
was to get any lower than bakers, our customers would desert us, and
we might shut up shop. You must try some other establishment, sir. We
couldn’t do it here.’

The applicant stared; grinned at Newman Noggs, who appeared highly
entertained; looked slightly round the shop, as if in depreciation of
the pomatum pots and other articles of stock; took his pipe out of his
mouth and gave a very loud whistle; and then put it in again, and walked
out.

The old gentleman who had just been lathered, and who was sitting in a
melancholy manner with his face turned towards the wall, appeared quite
unconscious of this incident, and to be insensible to everything around
him in the depth of a reverie--a very mournful one, to judge from the
sighs he occasionally vented--in which he was absorbed. Affected by this
example, the proprietor began to clip Miss Kenwigs, the journeyman to
scrape the old gentleman, and Newman Noggs to read last Sunday’s paper,
all three in silence: when Miss Kenwigs uttered a shrill little scream,
and Newman, raising his eyes, saw that it had been elicited by the
circumstance of the old gentleman turning his head, and disclosing the
features of Mr. Lillyvick the collector.

The features of Mr. Lillyvick they were, but strangely altered. If ever
an old gentleman had made a point of appearing in public, shaved close
and clean, that old gentleman was Mr. Lillyvick. If ever a collector had
borne himself like a collector, and assumed, before all men, a solemn
and portentous dignity as if he had the world on his books and it was
all two quarters in arrear, that collector was Mr. Lillyvick. And
now, there he sat, with the remains of a beard at least a week old
encumbering his chin; a soiled and crumpled shirt-frill crouching, as
it were, upon his breast, instead of standing boldly out; a demeanour so
abashed and drooping, so despondent, and expressive of such humiliation,
grief, and shame; that if the souls of forty unsubstantial housekeepers,
all of whom had had their water cut off for non-payment of the rate,
could have been concentrated in one body, that one body could hardly
have expressed such mortification and defeat as were now expressed in
the person of Mr. Lillyvick the collector.

Newman Noggs uttered his name, and Mr. Lillyvick groaned: then coughed to
hide it. But the groan was a full-sized groan, and the cough was but a
wheeze.

‘Is anything the matter?’ said Newman Noggs.

‘Matter, sir!’ cried Mr. Lillyvick. ‘The plug of life is dry, sir, and
but the mud is left.’

This speech--the style of which Newman attributed to Mr. Lillyvick’s
recent association with theatrical characters--not being quite
explanatory, Newman looked as if he were about to ask another question,
when Mr. Lillyvick prevented him by shaking his hand mournfully, and then
waving his own.

‘Let me be shaved!’ said Mr. Lillyvick. ‘It shall be done before
Morleena; it IS Morleena, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Newman.

‘Kenwigses have got a boy, haven’t they?’ inquired the collector.

Again Newman said ‘Yes.’

‘Is it a nice boy?’ demanded the collector.

‘It ain’t a very nasty one,’ returned Newman, rather embarrassed by the
question.

‘Susan Kenwigs used to say,’ observed the collector, ‘that if ever she
had another boy, she hoped it might be like me. Is this one like me, Mr
Noggs?’

This was a puzzling inquiry; but Newman evaded it, by replying to Mr
Lillyvick, that he thought the baby might possibly come like him in
time.

‘I should be glad to have somebody like me, somehow,’ said Mr. Lillyvick,
‘before I die.’

‘You don’t mean to do that, yet awhile?’ said Newman.

Unto which Mr. Lillyvick replied in a solemn voice, ‘Let me be shaved!’
and again consigning himself to the hands of the journeyman, said no
more.

This was remarkable behaviour. So remarkable did it seem to Miss
Morleena, that that young lady, at the imminent hazard of having her ear
sliced off, had not been able to forbear looking round, some score of
times, during the foregoing colloquy. Of her, however, Mr. Lillyvick took
no notice: rather striving (so, at least, it seemed to Newman Noggs) to
evade her observation, and to shrink into himself whenever he attracted
her regards. Newman wondered very much what could have occasioned this
altered behaviour on the part of the collector; but, philosophically
reflecting that he would most likely know, sooner or later, and that
he could perfectly afford to wait, he was very little disturbed by the
singularity of the old gentleman’s deportment.

The cutting and curling being at last concluded, the old gentleman, who
had been some time waiting, rose to go, and, walking out with Newman
and his charge, took Newman’s arm, and proceeded for some time without
making any observation. Newman, who in power of taciturnity was excelled
by few people, made no attempt to break silence; and so they went
on, until they had very nearly reached Miss Morleena’s home, when Mr
Lillyvick said:

‘Were the Kenwigses very much overpowered, Mr. Noggs, by that news?’

‘What news?’ returned Newman.

‘That about--my--being--’

‘Married?’ suggested Newman.

‘Ah!’ replied Mr. Lillyvick, with another groan; this time not even
disguised by a wheeze.

‘It made ma cry when she knew it,’ interposed Miss Morleena, ‘but we
kept it from her for a long time; and pa was very low in his spirits,
but he is better now; and I was very ill, but I am better too.’

‘Would you give your great-uncle Lillyvick a kiss if he was to ask you,
Morleena?’ said the collector, with some hesitation.

‘Yes; uncle Lillyvick, I would,’ returned Miss Morleena, with the energy
of both her parents combined; ‘but not aunt Lillyvick. She’s not an aunt
of mine, and I’ll never call her one.’

Immediately upon the utterance of these words, Mr. Lillyvick caught Miss
Morleena up in his arms, and kissed her; and, being by this time at the
door of the house where Mr. Kenwigs lodged (which, as has been before
mentioned, usually stood wide open), he walked straight up into Mr
Kenwigs’s sitting-room, and put Miss Morleena down in the midst. Mr. and
Mrs. Kenwigs were at supper. At sight of their perjured relative, Mrs
Kenwigs turned faint and pale, and Mr. Kenwigs rose majestically.

‘Kenwigs,’ said the collector, ‘shake hands.’

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, ‘the time has been, when I was proud to shake
hands with such a man as that man as now surweys me. The time has been,
sir,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, ‘when a wisit from that man has excited in me and
my family’s boozums sensations both nateral and awakening. But, now, I
look upon that man with emotions totally surpassing everythink, and I
ask myself where is his Honour, where is his straight-for’ardness, and
where is his human natur?’

‘Susan Kenwigs,’ said Mr. Lillyvick, turning humbly to his niece, ‘don’t
you say anything to me?’

‘She is not equal to it, sir,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, striking the table
emphatically. ‘What with the nursing of a healthy babby, and the
reflections upon your cruel conduct, four pints of malt liquor a day is
hardly able to sustain her.’

‘I am glad,’ said the poor collector meekly, ‘that the baby is a healthy
one. I am very glad of that.’

This was touching the Kenwigses on their tenderest point. Mrs. Kenwigs
instantly burst into tears, and Mr. Kenwigs evinced great emotion.

‘My pleasantest feeling, all the time that child was expected,’ said Mr
Kenwigs, mournfully, ‘was a thinking, “If it’s a boy, as I hope it may
be; for I have heard its uncle Lillyvick say again and again he would
prefer our having a boy next, if it’s a boy, what will his uncle
Lillyvick say? What will he like him to be called? Will he be Peter, or
Alexander, or Pompey, or Diorgeenes, or what will he be?” And now when
I look at him; a precious, unconscious, helpless infant, with no use
in his little arms but to tear his little cap, and no use in his little
legs but to kick his little self--when I see him a lying on his mother’s
lap, cooing and cooing, and, in his innocent state, almost a choking
hisself with his little fist--when I see him such a infant as he is, and
think that that uncle Lillyvick, as was once a-going to be so fond of
him, has withdrawed himself away, such a feeling of wengeance comes over
me as no language can depicter, and I feel as if even that holy babe was
a telling me to hate him.’

This affecting picture moved Mrs. Kenwigs deeply. After several imperfect
words, which vainly attempted to struggle to the surface, but were
drowned and washed away by the strong tide of her tears, she spake.

‘Uncle,’ said Mrs. Kenwigs, ‘to think that you should have turned your
back upon me and my dear children, and upon Kenwigs which is the author
of their being--you who was once so kind and affectionate, and who, if
anybody had told us such a thing of, we should have withered with scorn
like lightning--you that little Lillyvick, our first and earliest boy,
was named after at the very altar! Oh gracious!’

‘Was it money that we cared for?’ said Mr. Kenwigs. ‘Was it property that
we ever thought of?’

‘No,’ cried Mrs. Kenwigs, ‘I scorn it.’

‘So do I,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, ‘and always did.’

‘My feelings have been lancerated,’ said Mrs. Kenwigs, ‘my heart has been
torn asunder with anguish, I have been thrown back in my confinement,
my unoffending infant has been rendered uncomfortable and fractious,
Morleena has pined herself away to nothing; all this I forget and
forgive, and with you, uncle, I never can quarrel. But never ask me to
receive HER, never do it, uncle. For I will not, I will not, I won’t, I
won’t, I won’t!’

‘Susan, my dear,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, ‘consider your child.’

‘Yes,’ shrieked Mrs. Kenwigs, ‘I will consider my child! I will consider
my child! My own child, that no uncles can deprive me of; my own hated,
despised, deserted, cut-off little child.’ And, here, the emotions of
Mrs. Kenwigs became so violent, that Mr. Kenwigs was fain to administer
hartshorn internally, and vinegar externally, and to destroy a staylace,
four petticoat strings, and several small buttons.

Newman had been a silent spectator of this scene; for Mr. Lillyvick had
signed to him not to withdraw, and Mr. Kenwigs had further solicited
his presence by a nod of invitation. When Mrs. Kenwigs had been, in some
degree, restored, and Newman, as a person possessed of some influence
with her, had remonstrated and begged her to compose herself, Mr
Lillyvick said in a faltering voice:

‘I never shall ask anybody here to receive my--I needn’t mention the
word; you know what I mean. Kenwigs and Susan, yesterday was a week she
eloped with a half-pay captain!’

Mr. and Mrs. Kenwigs started together.

‘Eloped with a half-pay captain,’ repeated Mr. Lillyvick, ‘basely and
falsely eloped with a half-pay captain. With a bottle-nosed captain that
any man might have considered himself safe from. It was in this room,’
said Mr. Lillyvick, looking sternly round, ‘that I first see Henrietta
Petowker. It is in this room that I turn her off, for ever.’

This declaration completely changed the whole posture of affairs.
Mrs. Kenwigs threw herself upon the old gentleman’s neck, bitterly
reproaching herself for her late harshness, and exclaiming, if she had
suffered, what must his sufferings have been! Mr. Kenwigs grasped
his hand, and vowed eternal friendship and remorse. Mrs. Kenwigs was
horror-stricken to think that she should ever have nourished in her
bosom such a snake, adder, viper, serpent, and base crocodile as
Henrietta Petowker. Mr. Kenwigs argued that she must have been bad indeed
not to have improved by so long a contemplation of Mrs. Kenwigs’s virtue.
Mrs. Kenwigs remembered that Mr. Kenwigs had often said that he was
not quite satisfied of the propriety of Miss Petowker’s conduct, and
wondered how it was that she could have been blinded by such a wretch.
Mr. Kenwigs remembered that he had had his suspicions, but did not wonder
why Mrs. Kenwigs had not had hers, as she was all chastity, purity, and
truth, and Henrietta all baseness, falsehood, and deceit. And Mr. and
Mrs. Kenwigs both said, with strong feelings and tears of sympathy, that
everything happened for the best; and conjured the good collector not to
give way to unavailing grief, but to seek consolation in the society
of those affectionate relations whose arms and hearts were ever open to
him.

‘Out of affection and regard for you, Susan and Kenwigs,’ said Mr
Lillyvick, ‘and not out of revenge and spite against her, for she is
below it, I shall, tomorrow morning, settle upon your children, and make
payable to the survivors of them when they come of age of marry, that
money that I once meant to leave ‘em in my will. The deed shall be
executed tomorrow, and Mr. Noggs shall be one of the witnesses. He hears
me promise this, and he shall see it done.’

Overpowered by this noble and generous offer, Mr. Kenwigs, Mrs. Kenwigs,
and Miss Morleena Kenwigs, all began to sob together; and the noise of
their sobbing, communicating itself to the next room, where the children
lay a-bed, and causing them to cry too, Mr. Kenwigs rushed wildly in,
and bringing them out in his arms, by two and two, tumbled them down in
their nightcaps and gowns at the feet of Mr. Lillyvick, and called upon
them to thank and bless him.

‘And now,’ said Mr. Lillyvick, when a heart-rending scene had ensued and
the children were cleared away again, ‘give me some supper. This took
place twenty mile from town. I came up this morning, and have being
lingering about all day, without being able to make up my mind to come
and see you. I humoured her in everything, she had her own way, she
did just as she pleased, and now she has done this. There was twelve
teaspoons and twenty-four pound in sovereigns--I missed them first--it’s
a trial--I feel I shall never be able to knock a double knock again,
when I go my rounds--don’t say anything more about it, please--the
spoons were worth--never mind--never mind!’

With such muttered outpourings as these, the old gentleman shed a few
tears; but, they got him into the elbow-chair, and prevailed upon him,
without much pressing, to make a hearty supper, and by the time he had
finished his first pipe, and disposed of half-a-dozen glasses out of a
crown bowl of punch, ordered by Mr. Kenwigs, in celebration of his return
to the bosom of his family, he seemed, though still very humble, quite
resigned to his fate, and rather relieved than otherwise by the flight
of his wife.

‘When I see that man,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, with one hand round Mrs
Kenwigs’s waist: his other hand supporting his pipe (which made him wink
and cough very much, for he was no smoker): and his eyes on Morleena,
who sat upon her uncle’s knee, ‘when I see that man as mingling, once
again, in the spear which he adorns, and see his affections deweloping
themselves in legitimate sitiwations, I feel that his nature is as
elewated and expanded, as his standing afore society as a public
character is unimpeached, and the woices of my infant children purvided
for in life, seem to whisper to me softly, “This is an ewent at which
Evins itself looks down!”’



CHAPTER 53

Containing the further Progress of the Plot contrived by Mr. Ralph
Nickleby and Mr. Arthur Gride


With that settled resolution, and steadiness of purpose to which extreme
circumstances so often give birth, acting upon far less excitable and
more sluggish temperaments than that which was the lot of Madeline
Bray’s admirer, Nicholas started, at dawn of day, from the restless
couch which no sleep had visited on the previous night, and prepared
to make that last appeal, by whose slight and fragile thread her only
remaining hope of escape depended.

Although, to restless and ardent minds, morning may be the fitting
season for exertion and activity, it is not always at that time that
hope is strongest or the spirit most sanguine and buoyant. In trying
and doubtful positions, youth, custom, a steady contemplation of
the difficulties which surround us, and a familiarity with them,
imperceptibly diminish our apprehensions and beget comparative
indifference, if not a vague and reckless confidence in some relief,
the means or nature of which we care not to foresee. But when we come,
fresh, upon such things in the morning, with that dark and silent gap
between us and yesterday; with every link in the brittle chain of
hope, to rivet afresh; our hot enthusiasm subdued, and cool calm reason
substituted in its stead; doubt and misgiving revive. As the traveller
sees farthest by day, and becomes aware of rugged mountains and
trackless plains which the friendly darkness had shrouded from his sight
and mind together, so, the wayfarer in the toilsome path of human life
sees, with each returning sun, some new obstacle to surmount, some new
height to be attained. Distances stretch out before him which, last
night, were scarcely taken into account, and the light which gilds
all nature with its cheerful beams, seems but to shine upon the weary
obstacles that yet lie strewn between him and the grave.

So thought Nicholas, when, with the impatience natural to a situation
like his, he softly left the house, and, feeling as though to remain in
bed were to lose most precious time, and to be up and stirring were
in some way to promote the end he had in view, wandered into London;
perfectly well knowing that for hours to come he could not obtain speech
with Madeline, and could do nothing but wish the intervening time away.

And, even now, as he paced the streets, and listlessly looked round on
the gradually increasing bustle and preparation for the day, everything
appeared to yield him some new occasion for despondency. Last night, the
sacrifice of a young, affectionate, and beautiful creature, to such
a wretch, and in such a cause, had seemed a thing too monstrous to
succeed; and the warmer he grew, the more confident he felt that some
interposition must save her from his clutches. But now, when he thought
how regularly things went on, from day to day, in the same unvarying
round; how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering
on; how crafty avarice grew rich, and manly honest hearts were poor and
sad; how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many of
those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down each
night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon
race, and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or
the energies of one single man directed to their aid; how, in seeking,
not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched
and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one
town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the
noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to
drive most criminal and dreadful trades; how ignorance was punished and
never taught; how jail-doors gaped, and gallows loomed, for thousands
urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very
cradles’ heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest
bread and lived in peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of
life; how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they
would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could
scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he
or she done well, than even they had they done ill; how much injustice,
misery, and wrong, there was, and yet how the world rolled on, from year
to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or
redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the
one slight case on which his thoughts were bent, he felt, indeed, that
there was little ground for hope, and little reason why it should not
form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one
small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount.

But youth is not prone to contemplate the darkest side of a picture
it can shift at will. By dint of reflecting on what he had to do, and
reviving the train of thought which night had interrupted, Nicholas
gradually summoned up his utmost energy, and when the morning was
sufficiently advanced for his purpose, had no thought but that of using
it to the best advantage. A hasty breakfast taken, and such affairs of
business as required prompt attention disposed of, he directed his steps
to the residence of Madeline Bray: whither he lost no time in arriving.

It had occurred to him that, very possibly, the young lady might be
denied, although to him she never had been; and he was still pondering
upon the surest method of obtaining access to her in that case,
when, coming to the door of the house, he found it had been left
ajar--probably by the last person who had gone out. The occasion was
not one upon which to observe the nicest ceremony; therefore, availing
himself of this advantage, Nicholas walked gently upstairs and knocked
at the door of the room into which he had been accustomed to be shown.
Receiving permission to enter, from some person on the other side, he
opened the door and walked in.

Bray and his daughter were sitting there alone. It was nearly three
weeks since he had seen her last, but there was a change in the lovely
girl before him which told Nicholas, in startling terms, how much mental
suffering had been compressed into that short time. There are no words
which can express, nothing with which can be compared, the perfect
pallor, the clear transparent whiteness, of the beautiful face which
turned towards him when he entered. Her hair was a rich deep brown,
but shading that face, and straying upon a neck that rivalled it in
whiteness, it seemed by the strong contrast raven black. Something of
wildness and restlessness there was in the dark eye, but there was the
same patient look, the same expression of gentle mournfulness which he
well remembered, and no trace of a single tear. Most beautiful--more
beautiful, perhaps, than ever--there was something in her face which
quite unmanned him, and appeared far more touching than the wildest
agony of grief. It was not merely calm and composed, but fixed and
rigid, as though the violent effort which had summoned that composure
beneath her father’s eye, while it mastered all other thoughts, had
prevented even the momentary expression they had communicated to the
features from subsiding, and had fastened it there, as an evidence of
its triumph.

The father sat opposite to her; not looking directly in her face, but
glancing at her, as he talked with a gay air which ill disguised
the anxiety of his thoughts. The drawing materials were not on their
accustomed table, nor were any of the other tokens of her usual
occupations to be seen. The little vases which Nicholas had always
seen filled with fresh flowers were empty, or supplied only with a few
withered stalks and leaves. The bird was silent. The cloth that covered
his cage at night was not removed. His mistress had forgotten him.

There are times when, the mind being painfully alive to receive
impressions, a great deal may be noted at a glance. This was one, for
Nicholas had but glanced round him when he was recognised by Mr. Bray,
who said impatiently:

‘Now, sir, what do you want? Name your errand here, quickly, if you
please, for my daughter and I are busily engaged with other and more
important matters than those you come about. Come, sir, address yourself
to your business at once.’

Nicholas could very well discern that the irritability and impatience of
this speech were assumed, and that Bray, in his heart, was rejoiced at
any interruption which promised to engage the attention of his daughter.
He bent his eyes involuntarily upon the father as he spoke, and marked
his uneasiness; for he coloured and turned his head away.

The device, however, so far as it was a device for causing Madeline
to interfere, was successful. She rose, and advancing towards Nicholas
paused half-way, and stretched out her hand as expecting a letter.

‘Madeline,’ said her father impatiently, ‘my love, what are you doing?’

‘Miss Bray expects an inclosure perhaps,’ said Nicholas, speaking very
distinctly, and with an emphasis she could scarcely misunderstand. ‘My
employer is absent from England, or I should have brought a letter with
me. I hope she will give me time--a little time. I ask a very little
time.’

‘If that is all you come about, sir,’ said Mr. Bray, ‘you may make
yourself easy on that head. Madeline, my dear, I didn’t know this person
was in your debt?’

‘A--a trifle, I believe,’ returned Madeline, faintly.

‘I suppose you think now,’ said Bray, wheeling his chair round and
confronting Nicholas, ‘that, but for such pitiful sums as you bring
here, because my daughter has chosen to employ her time as she has, we
should starve?’

‘I have not thought about it,’ returned Nicholas.

‘You have not thought about it!’ sneered the invalid. ‘You know you HAVE
thought about it, and have thought that, and think so every time you
come here. Do you suppose, young man, that I don’t know what little
purse-proud tradesmen are, when, through some fortunate circumstances,
they get the upper hand for a brief day--or think they get the upper
hand--of a gentleman?’

‘My business,’ said Nicholas respectfully, ‘is with a lady.’

‘With a gentleman’s daughter, sir,’ returned the sick man, ‘and the
pettifogging spirit is the same. But perhaps you bring ORDERS, eh? Have
you any fresh ORDERS for my daughter, sir?’

Nicholas understood the tone of triumph in which this interrogatory was
put; but remembering the necessity of supporting his assumed character,
produced a scrap of paper purporting to contain a list of some subjects
for drawings which his employer desired to have executed; and with which
he had prepared himself in case of any such contingency.

‘Oh!’ said Mr. Bray. ‘These are the orders, are they?’

‘Since you insist upon the term, sir, yes,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Then you may tell your master,’ said Bray, tossing the paper back
again, with an exulting smile, ‘that my daughter, Miss Madeline Bray,
condescends to employ herself no longer in such labours as these; that
she is not at his beck and call, as he supposes her to be; that we don’t
live upon his money, as he flatters himself we do; that he may give
whatever he owes us, to the first beggar that passes his shop, or add it
to his own profits next time he calculates them; and that he may go to
the devil for me. That’s my acknowledgment of his orders, sir!’

‘And this is the independence of a man who sells his daughter as he has
sold that weeping girl!’ thought Nicholas.

The father was too much absorbed with his own exultation to mark the
look of scorn which, for an instant, Nicholas could not have suppressed
had he been upon the rack. ‘There,’ he continued, after a short
silence, ‘you have your message and can retire--unless you have any
further--ha!--any further orders.’

‘I have none,’ said Nicholas; ‘nor, in the consideration of the station
you once held, have I used that or any other word which, however
harmless in itself, could be supposed to imply authority on my part or
dependence on yours. I have no orders, but I have fears--fears that I
will express, chafe as you may--fears that you may be consigning that
young lady to something worse than supporting you by the labour of her
hands, had she worked herself dead. These are my fears, and these fears
I found upon your own demeanour. Your conscience will tell you, sir,
whether I construe it well or not.’

‘For Heaven’s sake!’ cried Madeline, interposing in alarm between them.
‘Remember, sir, he is ill.’

‘Ill!’ cried the invalid, gasping and catching for breath. ‘Ill! Ill! I
am bearded and bullied by a shop-boy, and she beseeches him to pity me
and remember I am ill!’

He fell into a paroxysm of his disorder, so violent that for a few
moments Nicholas was alarmed for his life; but finding that he began to
recover, he withdrew, after signifying by a gesture to the young lady
that he had something important to communicate, and would wait for her
outside the room. He could hear that the sick man came gradually, but
slowly, to himself, and that without any reference to what had just
occurred, as though he had no distinct recollection of it as yet, he
requested to be left alone.

‘Oh!’ thought Nicholas, ‘that this slender chance might not be lost,
and that I might prevail, if it were but for one week’s time and
reconsideration!’

‘You are charged with some commission to me, sir,’ said Madeline,
presenting herself in great agitation. ‘Do not press it now, I beg and
pray you. The day after tomorrow; come here then.’

‘It will be too late--too late for what I have to say,’ rejoined
Nicholas, ‘and you will not be here. Oh, madam, if you have but one
thought of him who sent me here, but one last lingering care for your
own peace of mind and heart, I do for God’s sake urge you to give me a
hearing.’

She attempted to pass him, but Nicholas gently detained her.

‘A hearing,’ said Nicholas. ‘I ask you but to hear me: not me alone, but
him for whom I speak, who is far away and does not know your danger. In
the name of Heaven hear me!’

The poor attendant, with her eyes swollen and red with weeping, stood
by; and to her Nicholas appealed in such passionate terms that she
opened a side-door, and, supporting her mistress into an adjoining room,
beckoned Nicholas to follow them.

‘Leave me, sir, pray,’ said the young lady.

‘I cannot, will not leave you thus,’ returned Nicholas. ‘I have a duty
to discharge; and, either here, or in the room from which we have just
now come, at whatever risk or hazard to Mr. Bray, I must beseech you to
contemplate again the fearful course to which you have been impelled.’

‘What course is this you speak of, and impelled by whom, sir?’ demanded
the young lady, with an effort to speak proudly.

‘I speak of this marriage,’ returned Nicholas, ‘of this marriage, fixed
for tomorrow, by one who never faltered in a bad purpose, or lent his
aid to any good design; of this marriage, the history of which is known
to me, better, far better, than it is to you. I know what web is wound
about you. I know what men they are from whom these schemes have come.
You are betrayed and sold for money; for gold, whose every coin is
rusted with tears, if not red with the blood of ruined men, who have
fallen desperately by their own mad hands.’

‘You say you have a duty to discharge,’ said Madeline, ‘and so have I.
And with the help of Heaven I will perform it.’

‘Say rather with the help of devils,’ replied Nicholas, ‘with the help
of men, one of them your destined husband, who are--’

‘I must not hear this,’ cried the young lady, striving to repress a
shudder, occasioned, as it seemed, even by this slight allusion to
Arthur Gride. ‘This evil, if evil it be, has been of my own seeking. I
am impelled to this course by no one, but follow it of my own free will.
You see I am not constrained or forced. Report this,’ said Madeline,
‘to my dear friend and benefactor, and, taking with you my prayers and
thanks for him and for yourself, leave me for ever!’

‘Not until I have besought you, with all the earnestness and fervour by
which I am animated,’ cried Nicholas, ‘to postpone this marriage for one
short week. Not until I have besought you to think more deeply than you
can have done, influenced as you are, upon the step you are about to
take. Although you cannot be fully conscious of the villainy of this man
to whom you are about to give your hand, some of his deeds you know. You
have heard him speak, and have looked upon his face. Reflect, reflect,
before it is too late, on the mockery of plighting to him at the altar,
faith in which your heart can have no share--of uttering solemn words,
against which nature and reason must rebel--of the degradation of
yourself in your own esteem, which must ensue, and must be aggravated
every day, as his detested character opens upon you more and more.
Shrink from the loathsome companionship of this wretch as you would from
corruption and disease. Suffer toil and labour if you will, but shun
him, shun him, and be happy. For, believe me, I speak the truth; the
most abject poverty, the most wretched condition of human life, with a
pure and upright mind, would be happiness to that which you must undergo
as the wife of such a man as this!’

Long before Nicholas ceased to speak, the young lady buried her face in
her hands, and gave her tears free way. In a voice at first inarticulate
with emotion, but gradually recovering strength as she proceeded, she
answered him:

‘I will not disguise from you, sir--though perhaps I ought--that I have
undergone great pain of mind, and have been nearly broken-hearted since
I saw you last. I do NOT love this gentleman. The difference between our
ages, tastes, and habits, forbids it. This he knows, and knowing, still
offers me his hand. By accepting it, and by that step alone, I can
release my father who is dying in this place; prolong his life, perhaps,
for many years; restore him to comfort--I may almost call it affluence;
and relieve a generous man from the burden of assisting one, by whom,
I grieve to say, his noble heart is little understood. Do not think so
poorly of me as to believe that I feign a love I do not feel. Do not
report so ill of me, for THAT I could not bear. If I cannot, in reason
or in nature, love the man who pays this price for my poor hand, I can
discharge the duties of a wife: I can be all he seeks in me, and will.
He is content to take me as I am. I have passed my word, and should
rejoice, not weep, that it is so. I do. The interest you take in one so
friendless and forlorn as I, the delicacy with which you have discharged
your trust, the faith you have kept with me, have my warmest thanks:
and, while I make this last feeble acknowledgment, move me to tears,
as you see. But I do not repent, nor am I unhappy. I am happy in the
prospect of all I can achieve so easily. I shall be more so when I look
back upon it, and all is done, I know.’

‘Your tears fall faster as you talk of happiness,’ said Nicholas, ‘and
you shun the contemplation of that dark future which must be laden
with so much misery to you. Defer this marriage for a week. For but one
week!’

‘He was talking, when you came upon us just now, with such smiles as I
remember to have seen of old, and have not seen for many and many a day,
of the freedom that was to come tomorrow,’ said Madeline, with momentary
firmness, ‘of the welcome change, the fresh air: all the new scenes and
objects that would bring fresh life to his exhausted frame. His eye grew
bright, and his face lightened at the thought. I will not defer it for
an hour.’

‘These are but tricks and wiles to urge you on,’ cried Nicholas.

‘I’ll hear no more,’ said Madeline, hurriedly; ‘I have heard too
much--more than I should--already. What I have said to you, sir, I have
said as to that dear friend to whom I trust in you honourably to repeat
it. Some time hence, when I am more composed and reconciled to my new
mode of life, if I should live so long, I will write to him. Meantime,
all holy angels shower blessings on his head, and prosper and preserve
him.’

She was hurrying past Nicholas, when he threw himself before her, and
implored her to think, but once again, upon the fate to which she was
precipitately hastening.

‘There is no retreat,’ said Nicholas, in an agony of supplication; ‘no
withdrawing! All regret will be unavailing, and deep and bitter it must
be. What can I say, that will induce you to pause at this last moment?
What can I do to save you?’

‘Nothing,’ she incoherently replied. ‘This is the hardest trial I have
had. Have mercy on me, sir, I beseech, and do not pierce my heart with
such appeals as these. I--I hear him calling. I--I--must not, will not,
remain here for another instant.’

‘If this were a plot,’ said Nicholas, with the same violent rapidity
with which she spoke, ‘a plot, not yet laid bare by me, but which, with
time, I might unravel; if you were (not knowing it) entitled to fortune
of your own, which, being recovered, would do all that this marriage can
accomplish, would you not retract?’

‘No, no, no! It is impossible; it is a child’s tale. Time would bring
his death. He is calling again!’

‘It may be the last time we shall ever meet on earth,’ said Nicholas,
‘it may be better for me that we should never meet more.’

‘For both, for both,’ replied Madeline, not heeding what she said. ‘The
time will come when to recall the memory of this one interview might
drive me mad. Be sure to tell them, that you left me calm and happy. And
God be with you, sir, and my grateful heart and blessing!’

She was gone. Nicholas, staggering from the house, thought of the
hurried scene which had just closed upon him, as if it were the phantom
of some wild, unquiet dream. The day wore on; at night, having been
enabled in some measure to collect his thoughts, he issued forth again.

That night, being the last of Arthur Gride’s bachelorship, found him in
tiptop spirits and great glee. The bottle-green suit had been brushed,
ready for the morrow. Peg Sliderskew had rendered the accounts of her
past housekeeping; the eighteen-pence had been rigidly accounted for
(she was never trusted with a larger sum at once, and the accounts were
not usually balanced more than twice a day); every preparation had
been made for the coming festival; and Arthur might have sat down and
contemplated his approaching happiness, but that he preferred sitting
down and contemplating the entries in a dirty old vellum-book with rusty
clasps.

‘Well-a-day!’ he chuckled, as sinking on his knees before a strong
chest screwed down to the floor, he thrust in his arm nearly up to the
shoulder, and slowly drew forth this greasy volume. ‘Well-a-day now,
this is all my library, but it’s one of the most entertaining books that
were ever written! It’s a delightful book, and all true and real--that’s
the best of it--true as the Bank of England, and real as its gold and
silver. Written by Arthur Gride. He, he, he! None of your storybook
writers will ever make as good a book as this, I warrant me. It’s
composed for private circulation, for my own particular reading, and
nobody else’s. He, he, he!’

Muttering this soliloquy, Arthur carried his precious volume to the
table, and, adjusting it upon a dusty desk, put on his spectacles, and
began to pore among the leaves.

‘It’s a large sum to Mr. Nickleby,’ he said, in a dolorous voice.
‘Debt to be paid in full, nine hundred and seventy-five, four, three.
Additional sum as per bond, five hundred pound. One thousand, four
hundred and seventy-five pounds, four shillings, and threepence,
tomorrow at twelve o’clock. On the other side, though, there’s the PER
CONTRA, by means of this pretty chick. But, again, there’s the question
whether I mightn’t have brought all this about, myself. “Faint heart
never won fair lady.” Why was my heart so faint? Why didn’t I boldly
open it to Bray myself, and save one thousand four hundred and
seventy-five, four, three?’

These reflections depressed the old usurer so much, as to wring a feeble
groan or two from his breast, and cause him to declare, with uplifted
hands, that he would die in a workhouse. Remembering on further
cogitation, however, that under any circumstances he must have paid, or
handsomely compounded for, Ralph’s debt, and being by no means confident
that he would have succeeded had he undertaken his enterprise alone, he
regained his equanimity, and chattered and mowed over more satisfactory
items, until the entrance of Peg Sliderskew interrupted him.

‘Aha, Peg!’ said Arthur, ‘what is it? What is it now, Peg?’

‘It’s the fowl,’ replied Peg, holding up a plate containing a little, a
very little one. Quite a phenomenon of a fowl. So very small and skinny.

‘A beautiful bird!’ said Arthur, after inquiring the price, and finding
it proportionate to the size. ‘With a rasher of ham, and an egg made
into sauce, and potatoes, and greens, and an apple pudding, Peg, and a
little bit of cheese, we shall have a dinner for an emperor. There’ll
only be she and me--and you, Peg, when we’ve done.’

‘Don’t you complain of the expense afterwards,’ said Mrs. Sliderskew,
sulkily.

‘I am afraid we must live expensively for the first week,’ returned
Arthur, with a groan, ‘and then we must make up for it. I won’t eat more
than I can help, and I know you love your old master too much to eat
more than YOU can help, don’t you, Peg?’

‘Don’t I what?’ said Peg.

‘Love your old master too much--’

‘No, not a bit too much,’ said Peg.

‘Oh, dear, I wish the devil had this woman!’ cried Arthur: ‘love him too
much to eat more than you can help at his expense.’

‘At his what?’ said Peg.

‘Oh dear! she can never hear the most important word, and hears all the
others!’ whined Gride. ‘At his expense--you catamaran!’

The last-mentioned tribute to the charms of Mrs. Sliderskew being uttered
in a whisper, that lady assented to the general proposition by a harsh
growl, which was accompanied by a ring at the street-door.

‘There’s the bell,’ said Arthur.

‘Ay, ay; I know that,’ rejoined Peg.

‘Then why don’t you go?’ bawled Arthur.

‘Go where?’ retorted Peg. ‘I ain’t doing any harm here, am I?’

Arthur Gride in reply repeated the word ‘bell’ as loud as he could roar;
and, his meaning being rendered further intelligible to Mrs. Sliderskew’s
dull sense of hearing by pantomime expressive of ringing at a
street-door, Peg hobbled out, after sharply demanding why he hadn’t said
there was a ring before, instead of talking about all manner of things
that had nothing to do with it, and keeping her half-pint of beer
waiting on the steps.

‘There’s a change come over you, Mrs. Peg,’ said Arthur, following her
out with his eyes. ‘What it means I don’t quite know; but, if it lasts,
we shan’t agree together long I see. You are turning crazy, I think. If
you are, you must take yourself off, Mrs. Peg--or be taken off. All’s one
to me.’ Turning over the leaves of his book as he muttered this, he soon
lighted upon something which attracted his attention, and forgot Peg
Sliderskew and everything else in the engrossing interest of its pages.

The room had no other light than that which it derived from a dim and
dirt-clogged lamp, whose lazy wick, being still further obscured by a
dark shade, cast its feeble rays over a very little space, and left all
beyond in heavy shadow. This lamp the money-lender had drawn so close to
him, that there was only room between it and himself for the book over
which he bent; and as he sat, with his elbows on the desk, and his sharp
cheek-bones resting on his hands, it only served to bring out his ugly
features in strong relief, together with the little table at which he
sat, and to shroud all the rest of the chamber in a deep sullen gloom.
Raising his eyes, and looking vacantly into this gloom as he made some
mental calculation, Arthur Gride suddenly met the fixed gaze of a man.

‘Thieves! thieves!’ shrieked the usurer, starting up and folding his
book to his breast. ‘Robbers! Murder!’

‘What is the matter?’ said the form, advancing.

‘Keep off!’ cried the trembling wretch. ‘Is it a man or a--a--’

‘For what do you take me, if not for a man?’ was the inquiry.

‘Yes, yes,’ cried Arthur Gride, shading his eyes with his hand, ‘it is a
man, and not a spirit. It is a man. Robbers! robbers!’

‘For what are these cries raised? Unless indeed you know me, and have
some purpose in your brain?’ said the stranger, coming close up to him.
‘I am no thief.’

‘What then, and how come you here?’ cried Gride, somewhat reassured, but
still retreating from his visitor: ‘what is your name, and what do you
want?’

‘My name you need not know,’ was the reply. ‘I came here, because I was
shown the way by your servant. I have addressed you twice or thrice, but
you were too profoundly engaged with your book to hear me, and I have
been silently waiting until you should be less abstracted. What I want
I will tell you, when you can summon up courage enough to hear and
understand me.’

Arthur Gride, venturing to regard his visitor more attentively, and
perceiving that he was a young man of good mien and bearing, returned to
his seat, and muttering that there were bad characters about, and
that this, with former attempts upon his house, had made him nervous,
requested his visitor to sit down. This, however, he declined.

‘Good God! I don’t stand up to have you at an advantage,’ said Nicholas
(for Nicholas it was), as he observed a gesture of alarm on the part of
Gride. ‘Listen to me. You are to be married tomorrow morning.’

‘N--n--no,’ rejoined Gride. ‘Who said I was? How do you know that?’

‘No matter how,’ replied Nicholas, ‘I know it. The young lady who is
to give you her hand hates and despises you. Her blood runs cold at the
mention of your name; the vulture and the lamb, the rat and the dove,
could not be worse matched than you and she. You see I know her.’

Gride looked at him as if he were petrified with astonishment, but did
not speak; perhaps lacking the power.

‘You and another man, Ralph Nickleby by name, have hatched this plot
between you,’ pursued Nicholas. ‘You pay him for his share in bringing
about this sale of Madeline Bray. You do. A lie is trembling on your
lips, I see.’

He paused; but, Arthur making no reply, resumed again.

‘You pay yourself by defrauding her. How or by what means--for I scorn
to sully her cause by falsehood or deceit--I do not know; at present I
do not know, but I am not alone or single-handed in this business. If
the energy of man can compass the discovery of your fraud and treachery
before your death; if wealth, revenge, and just hatred, can hunt and
track you through your windings; you will yet be called to a dear
account for this. We are on the scent already; judge you, who know what
we do not, when we shall have you down!’

He paused again, and still Arthur Gride glared upon him in silence.

‘If you were a man to whom I could appeal with any hope of touching
his compassion or humanity,’ said Nicholas, ‘I would urge upon you to
remember the helplessness, the innocence, the youth, of this lady; her
worth and beauty, her filial excellence, and last, and more than all,
as concerning you more nearly, the appeal she has made to your mercy and
your manly feeling. But, I take the only ground that can be taken with
men like you, and ask what money will buy you off. Remember the danger
to which you are exposed. You see I know enough to know much more with
very little help. Bate some expected gain for the risk you save, and say
what is your price.’

Old Arthur Gride moved his lips, but they only formed an ugly smile and
were motionless again.

‘You think,’ said Nicholas, ‘that the price would not be paid. Miss Bray
has wealthy friends who would coin their very hearts to save her in such
a strait as this. Name your price, defer these nuptials for but a few
days, and see whether those I speak of, shrink from the payment. Do you
hear me?’

When Nicholas began, Arthur Gride’s impression was, that Ralph Nickleby
had betrayed him; but, as he proceeded, he felt convinced that however
he had come by the knowledge he possessed, the part he acted was a
genuine one, and that with Ralph he had no concern. All he seemed to
know, for certain, was, that he, Gride, paid Ralph’s debt; but that,
to anybody who knew the circumstances of Bray’s detention--even to Bray
himself, on Ralph’s own statement--must be perfectly notorious. As to
the fraud on Madeline herself, his visitor knew so little about its
nature or extent, that it might be a lucky guess, or a hap-hazard
accusation. Whether or no, he had clearly no key to the mystery, and
could not hurt him who kept it close within his own breast. The
allusion to friends, and the offer of money, Gride held to be mere empty
vapouring, for purposes of delay. ‘And even if money were to be had,’
thought Arthur Gride, as he glanced at Nicholas, and trembled with
passion at his boldness and audacity, ‘I’d have that dainty chick for my
wife, and cheat YOU of her, young smooth-face!’

Long habit of weighing and noting well what clients said, and nicely
balancing chances in his mind and calculating odds to their faces,
without the least appearance of being so engaged, had rendered Gride
quick in forming conclusions, and arriving, from puzzling, intricate,
and often contradictory premises, at very cunning deductions. Hence
it was that, as Nicholas went on, he followed him closely with his own
constructions, and, when he ceased to speak, was as well prepared as if
he had deliberated for a fortnight.

‘I hear you,’ he cried, starting from his seat, casting back the
fastenings of the window-shutters, and throwing up the sash. ‘Help here!
Help! Help!’

‘What are you doing?’ said Nicholas, seizing him by the arm.

‘I’ll cry robbers, thieves, murder, alarm the neighbourhood, struggle
with you, let loose some blood, and swear you came to rob me, if
you don’t quit my house,’ replied Gride, drawing in his head with a
frightful grin, ‘I will!’

‘Wretch!’ cried Nicholas.

‘YOU’LL bring your threats here, will you?’ said Gride, whom jealousy
of Nicholas and a sense of his own triumph had converted into a perfect
fiend. ‘You, the disappointed lover? Oh dear! He! he! he! But you shan’t
have her, nor she you. She’s my wife, my doting little wife. Do you
think she’ll miss you? Do you think she’ll weep? I shall like to see her
weep, I shan’t mind it. She looks prettier in tears.’

‘Villain!’ said Nicholas, choking with his rage.

‘One minute more,’ cried Arthur Gride, ‘and I’ll rouse the street with
such screams, as, if they were raised by anybody else, should wake me
even in the arms of pretty Madeline.’

‘You hound!’ said Nicholas. ‘If you were but a younger man--’

‘Oh yes!’ sneered Arthur Gride, ‘If I was but a younger man it wouldn’t
be so bad; but for me, so old and ugly! To be jilted by little Madeline
for me!’

‘Hear me,’ said Nicholas, ‘and be thankful I have enough command over
myself not to fling you into the street, which no aid could prevent my
doing if I once grappled with you. I have been no lover of this lady’s.
No contract or engagement, no word of love, has ever passed between us.
She does not even know my name.’

‘I’ll ask it for all that. I’ll beg it of her with kisses,’ said Arthur
Gride. ‘Yes, and she’ll tell me, and pay them back, and we’ll laugh
together, and hug ourselves, and be very merry, when we think of the
poor youth that wanted to have her, but couldn’t because she was bespoke
by me!’

This taunt brought such an expression into the face of Nicholas, that
Arthur Gride plainly apprehended it to be the forerunner of his putting
his threat of throwing him into the street in immediate execution; for
he thrust his head out of the window, and holding tight on with both
hands, raised a pretty brisk alarm. Not thinking it necessary to abide
the issue of the noise, Nicholas gave vent to an indignant defiance,
and stalked from the room and from the house. Arthur Gride watched him
across the street, and then, drawing in his head, fastened the window as
before, and sat down to take breath.

‘If she ever turns pettish or ill-humoured, I’ll taunt her with that
spark,’ he said, when he had recovered. ‘She’ll little think I know
about him; and, if I manage it well, I can break her spirit by this
means and have her under my thumb. I’m glad nobody came. I didn’t call
too loud. The audacity to enter my house, and open upon me! But I shall
have a very good triumph tomorrow, and he’ll be gnawing his fingers off:
perhaps drown himself or cut his throat! I shouldn’t wonder! That would
make it quite complete, that would: quite.’

When he had become restored to his usual condition by these and other
comments on his approaching triumph, Arthur Gride put away his book,
and, having locked the chest with great caution, descended into the
kitchen to warn Peg Sliderskew to bed, and scold her for having afforded
such ready admission to a stranger.

The unconscious Peg, however, not being able to comprehend the offence
of which she had been guilty, he summoned her to hold the light, while
he made a tour of the fastenings, and secured the street-door with his
own hands.

‘Top bolt,’ muttered Arthur, fastening as he spoke, ‘bottom bolt, chain,
bar, double lock, and key out to put under my pillow! So, if any more
rejected admirers come, they may come through the keyhole. And now I’ll
go to sleep till half-past five, when I must get up to be married, Peg!’

With that, he jocularly tapped Mrs. Sliderskew under the chin, and
appeared, for the moment, inclined to celebrate the close of his
bachelor days by imprinting a kiss on her shrivelled lips. Thinking
better of it, however, he gave her chin another tap, in lieu of that
warmer familiarity, and stole away to bed.



CHAPTER 54

The Crisis of the Project and its Result


There are not many men who lie abed too late, or oversleep themselves,
on their wedding morning. A legend there is of somebody remarkable for
absence of mind, who opened his eyes upon the day which was to give him
a young wife, and forgetting all about the matter, rated his servants
for providing him with such fine clothes as had been prepared for the
festival. There is also a legend of a young gentleman, who, not having
before his eyes the fear of the canons of the church for such cases made
and provided, conceived a passion for his grandmother. Both cases are of
a singular and special kind and it is very doubtful whether either
can be considered as a precedent likely to be extensively followed by
succeeding generations.

Arthur Gride had enrobed himself in his marriage garments of
bottle-green, a full hour before Mrs. Sliderskew, shaking off her
more heavy slumbers, knocked at his chamber door; and he had hobbled
downstairs in full array and smacked his lips over a scanty taste of his
favourite cordial, ere that delicate piece of antiquity enlightened the
kitchen with her presence.

‘Faugh!’ said Peg, grubbing, in the discharge of her domestic functions,
among a scanty heap of ashes in the rusty grate. ‘Wedding indeed! A
precious wedding! He wants somebody better than his old Peg to take care
of him, does he? And what has he said to me, many and many a time, to
keep me content with short food, small wages, and little fire? “My will,
Peg! my will!” says he: “I’m a bachelor--no friends--no relations, Peg.”
 Lies! And now he’s to bring home a new mistress, a baby-faced chit of a
girl! If he wanted a wife, the fool, why couldn’t he have one suitable
to his age, and that knew his ways? She won’t come in MY way, he says.
No, that she won’t, but you little think why, Arthur boy!’

While Mrs. Sliderskew, influenced possibly by some lingering feelings
of disappointment and personal slight, occasioned by her old master’s
preference for another, was giving loose to these grumblings below
stairs, Arthur Gride was cogitating in the parlour upon what had taken
place last night.

‘I can’t think how he can have picked up what he knows,’ said Arthur,
‘unless I have committed myself--let something drop at Bray’s, for
instance--which has been overheard. Perhaps I may. I shouldn’t be
surprised if that was it. Mr. Nickleby was often angry at my talking to
him before we got outside the door. I mustn’t tell him that part of
the business, or he’ll put me out of sorts, and make me nervous for the
day.’

Ralph was universally looked up to, and recognised among his fellows as
a superior genius, but upon Arthur Gride his stern unyielding character
and consummate art had made so deep an impression, that he was actually
afraid of him. Cringing and cowardly to the core by nature, Arthur Gride
humbled himself in the dust before Ralph Nickleby, and, even when they
had not this stake in common, would have licked his shoes and crawled
upon the ground before him rather than venture to return him word
for word, or retort upon him in any other spirit than one of the most
slavish and abject sycophancy.

To Ralph Nickleby’s, Arthur Gride now betook himself according to
appointment; and to Ralph Nickleby he related how, last night, some
young blustering blade, whom he had never seen, forced his way into his
house, and tried to frighten him from the proposed nuptials. Told, in
short, what Nicholas had said and done, with the slight reservation upon
which he had determined.

‘Well, and what then?’ said Ralph.

‘Oh! nothing more,’ rejoined Gride.

‘He tried to frighten you,’ said Ralph, ‘and you WERE frightened I
suppose; is that it?’

‘I frightened HIM by crying thieves and murder,’ replied Gride. ‘Once
I was in earnest, I tell you that, for I had more than half a mind to
swear he uttered threats, and demanded my life or my money.’

‘Oho!’ said Ralph, eyeing him askew. ‘Jealous too!’

‘Dear now, see that!’ cried Arthur, rubbing his hands and affecting to
laugh.

‘Why do you make those grimaces, man?’ said Ralph; ‘you ARE jealous--and
with good cause I think.’

‘No, no, no; not with good cause, hey? You don’t think with good cause,
do you?’ cried Arthur, faltering. ‘Do you though, hey?’

‘Why, how stands the fact?’ returned Ralph. ‘Here is an old man about
to be forced in marriage upon a girl; and to this old man there comes a
handsome young fellow--you said he was handsome, didn’t you?’

‘No!’ snarled Arthur Gride.

‘Oh!’ rejoined Ralph, ‘I thought you did. Well! Handsome or not
handsome, to this old man there comes a young fellow who casts all
manner of fierce defiances in his teeth--gums I should rather say--and
tells him in plain terms that his mistress hates him. What does he do
that for? Philanthropy’s sake?’

‘Not for love of the lady,’ replied Gride, ‘for he said that no word of
love--his very words--had ever passed between ‘em.’

‘He said!’ repeated Ralph, contemptuously. ‘But I like him for one
thing, and that is, his giving you this fair warning to keep your--what
is it?--Tit-tit or dainty chick--which?--under lock and key. Be careful,
Gride, be careful. It’s a triumph, too, to tear her away from a gallant
young rival: a great triumph for an old man! It only remains to keep her
safe when you have her--that’s all.’

‘What a man it is!’ cried Arthur Gride, affecting, in the extremity of
his torture, to be highly amused. And then he added, anxiously, ‘Yes; to
keep her safe, that’s all. And that isn’t much, is it?’

‘Much!’ said Ralph, with a sneer. ‘Why, everybody knows what easy things
to understand and to control, women are. But come, it’s very nearly time
for you to be made happy. You’ll pay the bond now, I suppose, to save us
trouble afterwards.’

‘Oh what a man you are!’ croaked Arthur.

‘Why not?’ said Ralph. ‘Nobody will pay you interest for the money, I
suppose, between this and twelve o’clock; will they?’

‘But nobody would pay you interest for it either, you know,’ returned
Arthur, leering at Ralph with all the cunning and slyness he could throw
into his face.

‘Besides which,’ said Ralph, suffering his lip to curl into a smile,
‘you haven’t the money about you, and you weren’t prepared for this, or
you’d have brought it with you; and there’s nobody you’d so much like to
accommodate as me. I see. We trust each other in about an equal degree.
Are you ready?’

Gride, who had done nothing but grin, and nod, and chatter, during this
last speech of Ralph’s, answered in the affirmative; and, producing from
his hat a couple of large white favours, pinned one on his breast, and
with considerable difficulty induced his friend to do the like. Thus
accoutred, they got into a hired coach which Ralph had in waiting, and
drove to the residence of the fair and most wretched bride.

Gride, whose spirits and courage had gradually failed him more and more
as they approached nearer and nearer to the house, was utterly dismayed
and cowed by the mournful silence which pervaded it. The face of the
poor servant girl, the only person they saw, was disfigured with tears
and want of sleep. There was nobody to receive or welcome them; and they
stole upstairs into the usual sitting-room, more like two burglars than
the bridegroom and his friend.

‘One would think,’ said Ralph, speaking, in spite of himself, in a low
and subdued voice, ‘that there was a funeral going on here, and not a
wedding.’

‘He, he!’ tittered his friend, ‘you are so--so very funny!’

‘I need be,’ remarked Ralph, drily, ‘for this is rather dull and
chilling. Look a little brisker, man, and not so hangdog like!’

‘Yes, yes, I will,’ said Gride. ‘But--but--you don’t think she’s coming
just yet, do you?’

‘Why, I suppose she’ll not come till she is obliged,’ returned Ralph,
looking at his watch, ‘and she has a good half-hour to spare yet. Curb
your impatience.’

‘I--I--am not impatient,’ stammered Arthur. ‘I wouldn’t be hard with
her for the world. Oh dear, dear, not on any account. Let her take her
time--her own time. Her time shall be ours by all means.’

While Ralph bent upon his trembling friend a keen look, which showed
that he perfectly understood the reason of this great consideration and
regard, a footstep was heard upon the stairs, and Bray himself came into
the room on tiptoe, and holding up his hand with a cautious gesture, as
if there were some sick person near, who must not be disturbed.

‘Hush!’ he said, in a low voice. ‘She was very ill last night. I thought
she would have broken her heart. She is dressed, and crying bitterly in
her own room; but she’s better, and quite quiet. That’s everything!’

‘She is ready, is she?’ said Ralph.

‘Quite ready,’ returned the father.

‘And not likely to delay us by any young-lady weaknesses--fainting, or
so forth?’ said Ralph.

‘She may be safely trusted now,’ returned Bray. ‘I have been talking to
her this morning. Here! Come a little this way.’

He drew Ralph Nickleby to the further end of the room, and pointed
towards Gride, who sat huddled together in a corner, fumbling nervously
with the buttons of his coat, and exhibiting a face, of which every
skulking and base expression was sharpened and aggravated to the utmost
by his anxiety and trepidation.

‘Look at that man,’ whispered Bray, emphatically. ‘This seems a cruel
thing, after all.’

‘What seems a cruel thing?’ inquired Ralph, with as much stolidity of
face, as if he really were in utter ignorance of the other’s meaning.

‘This marriage,’ answered Bray. ‘Don’t ask me what. You know as well as
I do.’

Ralph shrugged his shoulders, in silent deprecation of Bray’s
impatience, and elevated his eyebrows, and pursed his lips, as men do
when they are prepared with a sufficient answer to some remark, but wait
for a more favourable opportunity of advancing it, or think it scarcely
worth while to answer their adversary at all.

‘Look at him. Does it not seem cruel?’ said Bray.

‘No!’ replied Ralph, boldly.

‘I say it does,’ retorted Bray, with a show of much irritation. ‘It is a
cruel thing, by all that’s bad and treacherous!’

When men are about to commit, or to sanction the commission of some
injustice, it is not uncommon for them to express pity for the object
either of that or some parallel proceeding, and to feel themselves, at
the time, quite virtuous and moral, and immensely superior to those
who express no pity at all. This is a kind of upholding of faith above
works, and is very comfortable. To do Ralph Nickleby justice, he seldom
practised this sort of dissimulation; but he understood those who
did, and therefore suffered Bray to say, again and again, with great
vehemence, that they were jointly doing a very cruel thing, before he
again offered to interpose a word.

‘You see what a dry, shrivelled, withered old chip it is,’ returned
Ralph, when the other was at length silent. ‘If he were younger, it
might be cruel, but as it is--harkee, Mr. Bray, he’ll die soon, and leave
her a rich young widow! Miss Madeline consults your tastes this time;
let her consult her own next.’

‘True, true,’ said Bray, biting his nails, and plainly very ill at ease.
‘I couldn’t do anything better for her than advise her to accept these
proposals, could I? Now, I ask you, Nickleby, as a man of the world;
could I?’

‘Surely not,’ answered Ralph. ‘I tell you what, sir; there are a hundred
fathers, within a circuit of five miles from this place; well off; good,
rich, substantial men; who would gladly give their daughters, and their
own ears with them, to that very man yonder, ape and mummy as he looks.’

‘So there are!’ exclaimed Bray, eagerly catching at anything which
seemed a justification of himself. ‘And so I told her, both last night
and today.’

‘You told her truth,’ said Ralph, ‘and did well to do so; though I
must say, at the same time, that if I had a daughter, and my freedom,
pleasure, nay, my very health and life, depended on her taking a husband
whom I pointed out, I should hope it would not be necessary to advance
any other arguments to induce her to consent to my wishes.’

Bray looked at Ralph as if to see whether he spoke in earnest, and
having nodded twice or thrice in unqualified assent to what had fallen
from him, said:

‘I must go upstairs for a few minutes, to finish dressing. When I come
down, I’ll bring Madeline with me. Do you know, I had a very strange
dream last night, which I have not remembered till this instant. I
dreamt that it was this morning, and you and I had been talking as we
have been this minute; that I went upstairs, for the very purpose
for which I am going now; and that as I stretched out my hand to take
Madeline’s, and lead her down, the floor sunk with me, and after falling
from such an indescribable and tremendous height as the imagination
scarcely conceives, except in dreams, I alighted in a grave.’

‘And you awoke, and found you were lying on your back, or with your head
hanging over the bedside, or suffering some pain from indigestion?’ said
Ralph. ‘Pshaw, Mr. Bray! Do as I do (you will have the opportunity, now
that a constant round of pleasure and enjoyment opens upon you), and,
occupying yourself a little more by day, have no time to think of what
you dream by night.’

Ralph followed him, with a steady look, to the door; and, turning to the
bridegroom, when they were again alone, said,

‘Mark my words, Gride, you won’t have to pay HIS annuity very long. You
have the devil’s luck in bargains, always. If he is not booked to make
the long voyage before many months are past and gone, I wear an orange
for a head!’

To this prophecy, so agreeable to his ears, Arthur returned no answer
than a cackle of great delight. Ralph, throwing himself into a chair,
they both sat waiting in profound silence. Ralph was thinking, with a
sneer upon his lips, on the altered manner of Bray that day, and
how soon their fellowship in a bad design had lowered his pride and
established a familiarity between them, when his attentive ear caught
the rustling of a female dress upon the stairs, and the footstep of a
man.

‘Wake up,’ he said, stamping his foot impatiently upon the ground, ‘and
be something like life, man, will you? They are here. Urge those dry old
bones of yours this way. Quick, man, quick!’

Gride shambled forward, and stood, leering and bowing, close by Ralph’s
side, when the door opened and there entered in haste--not Bray and his
daughter, but Nicholas and his sister Kate.

If some tremendous apparition from the world of shadows had suddenly
presented itself before him, Ralph Nickleby could not have been more
thunder-stricken than he was by this surprise. His hands fell powerless
by his side, he reeled back; and with open mouth, and a face of
ashy paleness, stood gazing at them in speechless rage: his eyes so
prominent, and his face so convulsed and changed by the passions which
raged within him, that it would have been difficult to recognise in him
the same stern, composed, hard-featured man he had been not a minute
ago.

‘The man that came to me last night,’ whispered Gride, plucking at his
elbow. ‘The man that came to me last night!’

‘I see,’ muttered Ralph, ‘I know! I might have guessed as much before.
Across my every path, at every turn, go where I will, do what I may, he
comes!’

The absence of all colour from the face; the dilated nostril; the
quivering of the lips which, though set firmly against each other, would
not be still; showed what emotions were struggling for the mastery
with Nicholas. But he kept them down, and gently pressing Kate’s arm
to reassure her, stood erect and undaunted, front to front with his
unworthy relative.

As the brother and sister stood side by side, with a gallant bearing
which became them well, a close likeness between them was apparent,
which many, had they only seen them apart, might have failed to remark.
The air, carriage, and very look and expression of the brother were all
reflected in the sister, but softened and refined to the nicest limit
of feminine delicacy and attraction. More striking still was some
indefinable resemblance, in the face of Ralph, to both. While they had
never looked more handsome, nor he more ugly; while they had never held
themselves more proudly, nor he shrunk half so low; there never had been
a time when this resemblance was so perceptible, or when all the worst
characteristics of a face rendered coarse and harsh by evil thoughts
were half so manifest as now.

‘Away!’ was the first word he could utter as he literally gnashed his
teeth. ‘Away! What brings you here? Liar, scoundrel, dastard, thief!’

‘I come here,’ said Nicholas in a low deep voice, ‘to save your victim
if I can. Liar and scoundrel you are, in every action of your life;
theft is your trade; and double dastard you must be, or you were not
here today. Hard words will not move me, nor would hard blows. Here I
stand, and will, till I have done my errand.’

‘Girl!’ said Ralph, ‘retire! We can use force to him, but I would not
hurt you if I could help it. Retire, you weak and silly wench, and leave
this dog to be dealt with as he deserves.’

‘I will not retire,’ cried Kate, with flashing eyes and the red blood
mantling in her cheeks. ‘You will do him no hurt that he will not repay.
You may use force with me; I think you will, for I AM a girl, and that
would well become you. But if I have a girl’s weakness, I have a woman’s
heart, and it is not you who in a cause like this can turn that from its
purpose.’

‘And what may your purpose be, most lofty lady?’ said Ralph.

‘To offer to the unhappy subject of your treachery, at this last
moment,’ replied Nicholas, ‘a refuge and a home. If the near prospect
of such a husband as you have provided will not prevail upon her, I hope
she may be moved by the prayers and entreaties of one of her own sex.
At all events they shall be tried. I myself, avowing to her father from
whom I come and by whom I am commissioned, will render it an act of
greater baseness, meanness, and cruelty in him if he still dares to
force this marriage on. Here I wait to see him and his daughter. For
this I came and brought my sister even into your presence. Our purpose
is not to see or speak with you; therefore to you we stoop to say no
more.’

‘Indeed!’ said Ralph. ‘You persist in remaining here, ma’am, do you?’

His niece’s bosom heaved with the indignant excitement into which he had
lashed her, but she gave him no reply.

‘Now, Gride, see here,’ said Ralph. ‘This fellow--I grieve to say my
brother’s son: a reprobate and profligate, stained with every mean
and selfish crime--this fellow, coming here today to disturb a solemn
ceremony, and knowing that the consequence of his presenting himself in
another man’s house at such a time, and persisting in remaining there,
must be his being kicked into the streets and dragged through them like
the vagabond he is--this fellow, mark you, brings with him his sister
as a protection, thinking we would not expose a silly girl to the
degradation and indignity which is no novelty to him; and, even after
I have warned her of what must ensue, he still keeps her by him, as
you see, and clings to her apron-strings like a cowardly boy to his
mother’s. Is not this a pretty fellow to talk as big as you have heard
him now?’

‘And as I heard him last night,’ said Arthur Gride; ‘as I heard him last
night when he sneaked into my house, and--he! he! he!--very soon sneaked
out again, when I nearly frightened him to death. And HE wanting to
marry Miss Madeline too! Oh dear! Is there anything else he’d like?
Anything else we can do for him, besides giving her up? Would he like
his debts paid and his house furnished, and a few bank notes for shaving
paper if he shaves at all? He! he! he!’

‘You will remain, girl, will you?’ said Ralph, turning upon Kate again,
‘to be hauled downstairs like a drunken drab, as I swear you shall if
you stop here? No answer! Thank your brother for what follows. Gride,
call down Bray--and not his daughter. Let them keep her above.’

‘If you value your head,’ said Nicholas, taking up a position before the
door, and speaking in the same low voice in which he had spoken before,
and with no more outward passion than he had before displayed; ‘stay
where you are!’

‘Mind me, and not him, and call down Bray,’ said Ralph.

‘Mind yourself rather than either of us, and stay where you are!’ said
Nicholas.

‘Will you call down Bray?’ cried Ralph.

‘Remember that you come near me at your peril,’ said Nicholas.

Gride hesitated. Ralph being, by this time, as furious as a baffled
tiger, made for the door, and, attempting to pass Kate, clasped her arm
roughly with his hand. Nicholas, with his eyes darting fire, seized him
by the collar. At that moment, a heavy body fell with great violence
on the floor above, and, in an instant afterwards, was heard a most
appalling and terrific scream.

They all stood still, and gazed upon each other. Scream succeeded
scream; a heavy pattering of feet succeeded; and many shrill voices
clamouring together were heard to cry, ‘He is dead!’

‘Stand off!’ cried Nicholas, letting loose all the passion he had
restrained till now; ‘if this is what I scarcely dare to hope it is, you
are caught, villains, in your own toils.’

He burst from the room, and, darting upstairs to the quarter from whence
the noise proceeded, forced his way through a crowd of persons who quite
filled a small bed-chamber, and found Bray lying on the floor quite
dead; his daughter clinging to the body.

‘How did this happen?’ he cried, looking wildly about him.

Several voices answered together, that he had been observed, through
the half-opened door, reclining in a strange and uneasy position upon a
chair; that he had been spoken to several times, and not answering, was
supposed to be asleep, until some person going in and shaking him by the
arm, he fell heavily to the ground and was discovered to be dead.

‘Who is the owner of this house?’ said Nicholas, hastily.

An elderly woman was pointed out to him; and to her he said, as he knelt
down and gently unwound Madeline’s arms from the lifeless mass round
which they were entwined: ‘I represent this lady’s nearest friends, as
her servant here knows, and must remove her from this dreadful scene.
This is my sister to whose charge you confide her. My name and address
are upon that card, and you shall receive from me all necessary
directions for the arrangements that must be made. Stand aside, every
one of you, and give me room and air for God’s sake!’

The people fell back, scarce wondering more at what had just occurred,
than at the excitement and impetuosity of him who spoke. Nicholas,
taking the insensible girl in his arms, bore her from the chamber and
downstairs into the room he had just quitted, followed by his sister and
the faithful servant, whom he charged to procure a coach directly, while
he and Kate bent over their beautiful charge and endeavoured, but in
vain, to restore her to animation. The girl performed her office with
such expedition, that in a very few minutes the coach was ready.

Ralph Nickleby and Gride, stunned and paralysed by the awful event
which had so suddenly overthrown their schemes (it would not otherwise,
perhaps, have made much impression on them), and carried away by the
extraordinary energy and precipitation of Nicholas, which bore down
all before him, looked on at these proceedings like men in a dream
or trance. It was not until every preparation was made for Madeline’s
immediate removal that Ralph broke silence by declaring she should not
be taken away.

‘Who says so?’ cried Nicholas, rising from his knee and confronting
them, but still retaining Madeline’s lifeless hand in his.

‘I!’ answered Ralph, hoarsely.

‘Hush, hush!’ cried the terrified Gride, catching him by the arm again.
‘Hear what he says.’

‘Ay!’ said Nicholas, extending his disengaged hand in the air, ‘hear
what he says. That both your debts are paid in the one great debt of
nature. That the bond, due today at twelve, is now waste paper. That
your contemplated fraud shall be discovered yet. That your schemes are
known to man, and overthrown by Heaven. Wretches, that he defies you
both to do your worst.’

‘This man,’ said Ralph, in a voice scarcely intelligible, ‘this man
claims his wife, and he shall have her.’

‘That man claims what is not his, and he should not have her if he were
fifty men, with fifty more to back him,’ said Nicholas.

‘Who shall prevent him?’

‘I will.’

‘By what right I should like to know,’ said Ralph. ‘By what right I
ask?’

‘By this right. That, knowing what I do, you dare not tempt me further,’
said Nicholas, ‘and by this better right; that those I serve, and with
whom you would have done me base wrong and injury, are her nearest and
her dearest friends. In their name I bear her hence. Give way!’

‘One word!’ cried Ralph, foaming at the mouth.

‘Not one,’ replied Nicholas, ‘I will not hear of one--save this. Look to
yourself, and heed this warning that I give you! Your day is past, and
night is comin’ on.’

‘My curse, my bitter, deadly curse, upon you, boy!’

‘Whence will curses come at your command? Or what avails a curse or
blessing from a man like you? I tell you, that misfortune and discovery
are thickening about your head; that the structures you have raised,
through all your ill-spent life, are crumbling into dust; that your path
is beset with spies; that this very day, ten thousand pounds of your
hoarded wealth have gone in one great crash!’

‘’Tis false!’ cried Ralph, shrinking back.

‘’Tis true, and you shall find it so. I have no more words to waste.
Stand from the door. Kate, do you go first. Lay not a hand on her, or on
that woman, or on me, or so much a brush their garments as they pass you
by!--You let them pass, and he blocks the door again!’

Arthur Gride happened to be in the doorway, but whether intentionally
or from confusion was not quite apparent. Nicholas swung him away, with
such violence as to cause him to spin round the room until he was caught
by a sharp angle of the wall, and there knocked down; and then taking
his beautiful burden in his arms rushed out. No one cared to stop him,
if any were so disposed. Making his way through a mob of people, whom a
report of the circumstances had attracted round the house, and carrying
Madeline, in his excitement, as easily as if she were an infant, he
reached the coach in which Kate and the girl were already waiting, and,
confiding his charge to them, jumped up beside the coachman and bade him
drive away.



CHAPTER 55

Of Family Matters, Cares, Hopes, Disappointments, and Sorrows


Although Mrs. Nickleby had been made acquainted by her son and daughter
with every circumstance of Madeline Bray’s history which was known to
them; although the responsible situation in which Nicholas stood had
been carefully explained to her, and she had been prepared, even for
the possible contingency of having to receive the young lady in her
own house, improbable as such a result had appeared only a few minutes
before it came about, still, Mrs. Nickleby, from the moment when this
confidence was first reposed in her, late on the previous evening, had
remained in an unsatisfactory and profoundly mystified state, from which
no explanations or arguments could relieve her, and which every fresh
soliloquy and reflection only aggravated more and more.

‘Bless my heart, Kate!’ so the good lady argued; ‘if the Mr. Cheerybles
don’t want this young lady to be married, why don’t they file a bill
against the Lord Chancellor, make her a Chancery ward, and shut her
up in the Fleet prison for safety?--I have read of such things in the
newspapers a hundred times. Or, if they are so very fond of her as
Nicholas says they are, why don’t they marry her themselves--one of them
I mean? And even supposing they don’t want her to be married, and don’t
want to marry her themselves, why in the name of wonder should Nicholas
go about the world, forbidding people’s banns?’

‘I don’t think you quite understand,’ said Kate, gently.

‘Well I am sure, Kate, my dear, you’re very polite!’ replied Mrs
Nickleby. ‘I have been married myself I hope, and I have seen other
people married. Not understand, indeed!’

‘I know you have had great experience, dear mama,’ said Kate; ‘I mean
that perhaps you don’t quite understand all the circumstances in this
instance. We have stated them awkwardly, I dare say.’

‘That I dare say you have,’ retorted her mother, briskly. ‘That’s very
likely. I am not to be held accountable for that; though, at the same
time, as the circumstances speak for themselves, I shall take the
liberty, my love, of saying that I do understand them, and perfectly
well too; whatever you and Nicholas may choose to think to the contrary.
Why is such a great fuss made because this Miss Magdalen is going to
marry somebody who is older than herself? Your poor papa was older than
I was, four years and a half older. Jane Dibabs--the Dibabses lived in
the beautiful little thatched white house one story high, covered all
over with ivy and creeping plants, with an exquisite little porch with
twining honysuckles and all sorts of things: where the earwigs used
to fall into one’s tea on a summer evening, and always fell upon their
backs and kicked dreadfully, and where the frogs used to get into the
rushlight shades when one stopped all night, and sit up and look through
the little holes like Christians--Jane Dibabs, SHE married a man who was
a great deal older than herself, and WOULD marry him, notwithstanding
all that could be said to the contrary, and she was so fond of him that
nothing was ever equal to it. There was no fuss made about Jane Dibabs,
and her husband was a most honourable and excellent man, and everybody
spoke well of him. Then why should there by any fuss about this
Magdalen?’

‘Her husband is much older; he is not her own choice; his character is
the very reverse of that which you have just described. Don’t you see a
broad destinction between the two cases?’ said Kate.

To this, Mrs. Nickleby only replied that she durst say she was very
stupid, indeed she had no doubt she was, for her own children almost as
much as told her so, every day of her life; to be sure she was a little
older than they, and perhaps some foolish people might think she ought
reasonably to know best. However, no doubt she was wrong; of course she
was; she always was, she couldn’t be right, she couldn’t be expected
to be; so she had better not expose herself any more; and to all Kate’s
conciliations and concessions for an hour ensuing, the good lady gave no
other replies than Oh, certainly, why did they ask HER?, HER opinion
was of no consequence, it didn’t matter what SHE said, with many other
rejoinders of the same class.

In this frame of mind (expressed, when she had become too resigned
for speech, by nods of the head, upliftings of the eyes, and little
beginnings of groans, converted, as they attracted attention, into short
coughs), Mrs. Nickleby remained until Nicholas and Kate returned with the
object of their solicitude; when, having by this time asserted her own
importance, and becoming besides interested in the trials of one
so young and beautiful, she not only displayed the utmost zeal and
solicitude, but took great credit to herself for recommending the course
of procedure which her son had adopted: frequently declaring, with an
expressive look, that it was very fortunate things were AS they were:
and hinting, that but for great encouragement and wisdom on her own
part, they never could have been brought to that pass.

Not to strain the question whether Mrs. Nickleby had or had not any great
hand in bringing matters about, it is unquestionable that she had strong
ground for exultation. The brothers, on their return, bestowed such
commendations on Nicholas for the part he had taken, and evinced so
much joy at the altered state of events and the recovery of their young
friend from trials so great and dangers so threatening, that, as she
more than once informed her daughter, she now considered the fortunes of
the family ‘as good as’ made. Mr. Charles Cheeryble, indeed, Mrs. Nickleby
positively asserted, had, in the first transports of his surprise and
delight, ‘as good as’ said so. Without precisely explaining what this
qualification meant, she subsided, whenever she mentioned the subject,
into such a mysterious and important state, and had such visions of
wealth and dignity in perspective, that (vague and clouded though they
were) she was, at such times, almost as happy as if she had really been
permanently provided for, on a scale of great splendour.

The sudden and terrible shock she had received, combined with the great
affliction and anxiety of mind which she had, for a long time, endured,
proved too much for Madeline’s strength. Recovering from the state of
stupefaction into which the sudden death of her father happily plunged
her, she only exchanged that condition for one of dangerous and active
illness. When the delicate physical powers which have been sustained
by an unnatural strain upon the mental energies and a resolute
determination not to yield, at last give way, their degree of
prostration is usually proportionate to the strength of the effort which
has previously upheld them. Thus it was that the illness which fell
on Madeline was of no slight or temporary nature, but one which, for a
time, threatened her reason, and--scarcely worse--her life itself.

Who, slowly recovering from a disorder so severe and dangerous, could
be insensible to the unremitting attentions of such a nurse as gentle,
tender, earnest Kate? On whom could the sweet soft voice, the light
step, the delicate hand, the quiet, cheerful, noiseless discharge of
those thousand little offices of kindness and relief which we feel so
deeply when we are ill, and forget so lightly when we are well--on whom
could they make so deep an impression as on a young heart stored with
every pure and true affection that women cherish; almost a stranger to
the endearments and devotion of its own sex, save as it learnt them from
itself; and rendered, by calamity and suffering, keenly susceptible of
the sympathy so long unknown and so long sought in vain? What wonder
that days became as years in knitting them together! What wonder,
if with every hour of returning health, there came some stronger and
sweeter recognition of the praises which Kate, when they recalled old
scenes--they seemed old now, and to have been acted years ago--would
lavish on her brother! Where would have been the wonder, even, if those
praises had found a quick response in the breast of Madeline, and if,
with the image of Nicholas so constantly recurring in the features of
his sister that she could scarcely separate the two, she had sometimes
found it equally difficult to assign to each the feelings they had first
inspired, and had imperceptibly mingled with her gratitude to Nicholas,
some of that warmer feeling which she had assigned to Kate?

‘My dear,’ Mrs. Nickleby would say, coming into the room with an
elaborate caution, calculated to discompose the nerves of an invalid
rather more than the entry of a horse-soldier at full gallop; ‘how do
you find yourself tonight? I hope you are better.’

‘Almost well, mama,’ Kate would reply, laying down her work, and taking
Madeline’s hand in hers.

‘Kate!’ Mrs. Nickleby would say, reprovingly, ‘don’t talk so loud’ (the
worthy lady herself talking in a whisper that would have made the blood
of the stoutest man run cold in his veins).

Kate would take this reproof very quietly, and Mrs. Nickleby, making
every board creak and every thread rustle as she moved stealthily about,
would add:

‘My son Nicholas has just come home, and I have come, according to
custom, my dear, to know, from your own lips, exactly how you are; for
he won’t take my account, and never will.’

‘He is later than usual to-night,’ perhaps Madeline would reply. ‘Nearly
half an hour.’

‘Well, I never saw such people in all my life as you are, for time, up
here!’ Mrs. Nickleby would exclaim in great astonishment; ‘I declare I
never did! I had not the least idea that Nicholas was after his time,
not the smallest. Mr. Nickleby used to say--your poor papa, I am speaking
of, Kate my dear--used to say, that appetite was the best clock in the
world, but you have no appetite, my dear Miss Bray, I wish you had, and
upon my word I really think you ought to take something that would give
you one. I am sure I don’t know, but I have heard that two or three
dozen native lobsters give an appetite, though that comes to the same
thing after all, for I suppose you must have an appetite before you can
take ‘em. If I said lobsters, I meant oysters, but of course it’s all
the same, though really how you came to know about Nicholas--’

‘We happened to be just talking about him, mama; that was it.’

‘You never seem to me to be talking about anything else, Kate, and upon
my word I am quite surprised at your being so very thoughtless. You
can find subjects enough to talk about sometimes, and when you know how
important it is to keep up Miss Bray’s spirits, and interest her, and
all that, it really is quite extraordinary to me what can induce you to
keep on prose, prose, prose, din, din, din, everlastingly, upon the same
theme. You are a very kind nurse, Kate, and a very good one, and I know
you mean very well; but I will say this--that if it wasn’t for me, I
really don’t know what would become of Miss Bray’s spirits, and so I
tell the doctor every day. He says he wonders how I sustain my own, and
I am sure I very often wonder myself how I can contrive to keep up as I
do. Of course it’s an exertion, but still, when I know how much
depends upon me in this house, I am obliged to make it. There’s nothing
praiseworthy in that, but it’s necessary, and I do it.’

With that, Mrs. Nickleby would draw up a chair, and for some
three-quarters of an hour run through a great variety of distracting
topics in the most distracting manner possible; tearing herself away,
at length, on the plea that she must now go and amuse Nicholas while
he took his supper. After a preliminary raising of his spirits with the
information that she considered the patient decidedly worse, she would
further cheer him up by relating how dull, listless, and low-spirited
Miss Bray was, because Kate foolishly talked about nothing else but him
and family matters. When she had made Nicholas thoroughly comfortable
with these and other inspiriting remarks, she would discourse at length
on the arduous duties she had performed that day; and, sometimes, be
moved to tears in wondering how, if anything were to happen to herself,
the family would ever get on without her.

At other times, when Nicholas came home at night, he would be
accompanied by Mr. Frank Cheeryble, who was commissioned by the brothers
to inquire how Madeline was that evening. On such occasions (and they
were of very frequent occurrence), Mrs. Nickleby deemed it of particular
importance that she should have her wits about her; for, from certain
signs and tokens which had attracted her attention, she shrewdly
suspected that Mr. Frank, interested as his uncles were in Madeline, came
quite as much to see Kate as to inquire after her; the more especially
as the brothers were in constant communication with the medical man,
came backwards and forwards very frequently themselves, and received a
full report from Nicholas every morning. These were proud times for Mrs
Nickleby; never was anybody half so discreet and sage as she, or half
so mysterious withal; and never were there such cunning generalship, and
such unfathomable designs, as she brought to bear upon Mr. Frank, with
the view of ascertaining whether her suspicions were well founded:
and if so, of tantalising him into taking her into his confidence and
throwing himself upon her merciful consideration. Extensive was the
artillery, heavy and light, which Mrs. Nickleby brought into play for the
furtherance of these great schemes; various and opposite the means which
she employed to bring about the end she had in view. At one time, she
was all cordiality and ease; at another, all stiffness and frigidity.
Now, she would seem to open her whole heart to her unhappy victim; the
next time they met, she would receive him with the most distant and
studious reserve, as if a new light had broken in upon her, and,
guessing his intentions, she had resolved to check them in the bud; as
if she felt it her bounden duty to act with Spartan firmness, and at
once and for ever to discourage hopes which never could be realised.
At other times, when Nicholas was not there to overhear, and Kate was
upstairs busily tending her sick friend, the worthy lady would throw out
dark hints of an intention to send her daughter to France for three or
four years, or to Scotland for the improvement of her health impaired by
her late fatigues, or to America on a visit, or anywhere that threatened
a long and tedious separation. Nay, she even went so far as to hint,
obscurely, at an attachment entertained for her daughter by the son of
an old neighbour of theirs, one Horatio Peltirogus (a young gentleman
who might have been, at that time, four years old, or thereabouts),
and to represent it, indeed, as almost a settled thing between the
families--only waiting for her daughter’s final decision, to come off
with the sanction of the church, and to the unspeakable happiness and
content of all parties.

It was in the full pride and glory of having sprung this last mine one
night with extraordinary success, that Mrs. Nickleby took the opportunity
of being left alone with her son before retiring to rest, to sound him
on the subject which so occupied her thoughts: not doubting that they
could have but one opinion respecting it. To this end, she approached
the question with divers laudatory and appropriate remarks touching the
general amiability of Mr. Frank Cheeryble.

‘You are quite right, mother,’ said Nicholas, ‘quite right. He is a fine
fellow.’

‘Good-looking, too,’ said Mrs. Nickleby.

‘Decidedly good-looking,’ answered Nicholas.

‘What may you call his nose, now, my dear?’ pursued Mrs. Nickleby,
wishing to interest Nicholas in the subject to the utmost.

‘Call it?’ repeated Nicholas.

‘Ah!’ returned his mother, ‘what style of nose? What order of
architecture, if one may say so. I am not very learned in noses. Do you
call it a Roman or a Grecian?’

‘Upon my word, mother,’ said Nicholas, laughing, ‘as well as I remember,
I should call it a kind of Composite, or mixed nose. But I have no
very strong recollection on the subject. If it will afford you any
gratification, I’ll observe it more closely, and let you know.’

‘I wish you would, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, with an earnest look.

‘Very well,’ returned Nicholas. ‘I will.’

Nicholas returned to the perusal of the book he had been reading, when
the dialogue had gone thus far. Mrs. Nickleby, after stopping a little
for consideration, resumed.

‘He is very much attached to you, Nicholas, my dear.’

Nicholas laughingly said, as he closed his book, that he was glad to
hear it, and observed that his mother seemed deep in their new friend’s
confidence already.

‘Hem!’ said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘I don’t know about that, my dear, but I think
it is very necessary that somebody should be in his confidence; highly
necessary.’

Elated by a look of curiosity from her son, and the consciousness of
possessing a great secret, all to herself, Mrs. Nickleby went on with
great animation:

‘I am sure, my dear Nicholas, how you can have failed to notice it, is,
to me, quite extraordinary; though I don’t know why I should say that,
either, because, of course, as far as it goes, and to a certain extent,
there is a great deal in this sort of thing, especially in this early
stage, which, however clear it may be to females, can scarcely be
expected to be so evident to men. I don’t say that I have any particular
penetration in such matters. I may have; those about me should know
best about that, and perhaps do know. Upon that point I shall express no
opinion, it wouldn’t become me to do so, it’s quite out of the question,
quite.’

Nicholas snuffed the candles, put his hands in his pockets, and, leaning
back in his chair, assumed a look of patient suffering and melancholy
resignation.

‘I think it my duty, Nicholas, my dear,’ resumed his mother, ‘to tell
you what I know: not only because you have a right to know it too, and
to know everything that happens in this family, but because you have it
in your power to promote and assist the thing very much; and there is
no doubt that the sooner one can come to a clear understanding on such
subjects, it is always better, every way. There are a great many things
you might do; such as taking a walk in the garden sometimes, or sitting
upstairs in your own room for a little while, or making believe to fall
asleep occasionally, or pretending that you recollected some business,
and going out for an hour or so, and taking Mr. Smike with you. These
seem very slight things, and I dare say you will be amused at my making
them of so much importance; at the same time, my dear, I can assure you
(and you’ll find this out, Nicholas, for yourself one of these days,
if you ever fall in love with anybody; as I trust and hope you will,
provided she is respectable and well conducted, and of course you’d
never dream of falling in love with anybody who was not), I say, I can
assure you that a great deal more depends upon these little things than
you would suppose possible. If your poor papa was alive, he would tell
you how much depended on the parties being left alone. Of course, you
are not to go out of the room as if you meant it and did it on purpose,
but as if it was quite an accident, and to come back again in the same
way. If you cough in the passage before you open the door, or whistle
carelessly, or hum a tune, or something of that sort, to let them know
you’re coming, it’s always better; because, of course, though it’s not
only natural but perfectly correct and proper under the circumstances,
still it is very confusing if you interrupt young people when they
are--when they are sitting on the sofa, and--and all that sort of thing:
which is very nonsensical, perhaps, but still they will do it.’

The profound astonishment with which her son regarded her during this
long address, gradually increasing as it approached its climax in no
way discomposed Mrs. Nickleby, but rather exalted her opinion of her own
cleverness; therefore, merely stopping to remark, with much complacency,
that she had fully expected him to be surprised, she entered on a vast
quantity of circumstantial evidence of a particularly incoherent and
perplexing kind; the upshot of which was, to establish, beyond the
possibility of doubt, that Mr. Frank Cheeryble had fallen desperately in
love with Kate.

‘With whom?’ cried Nicholas.

Mrs. Nickleby repeated, with Kate.

‘What! OUR Kate! My sister!’

‘Lord, Nicholas!’ returned Mrs. Nickleby, ‘whose Kate should it be, if
not ours; or what should I care about it, or take any interest in it
for, if it was anybody but your sister?’

‘Dear mother,’ said Nicholas, ‘surely it can’t be!’

‘Very good, my dear,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby, with great confidence. ‘Wait
and see.’

Nicholas had never, until that moment, bestowed a thought upon
the remote possibility of such an occurrence as that which was now
communicated to him; for, besides that he had been much from home of
late and closely occupied with other matters, his own jealous fears had
prompted the suspicion that some secret interest in Madeline, akin to
that which he felt himself, occasioned those visits of Frank Cheeryble
which had recently become so frequent. Even now, although he knew that
the observation of an anxious mother was much more likely to be correct
in such a case than his own, and although she reminded him of many
little circumstances which, taken together, were certainly susceptible
of the construction she triumphantly put upon them, he was not quite
convinced but that they arose from mere good-natured thoughtless
gallantry, which would have dictated the same conduct towards any
other girl who was young and pleasing. At all events, he hoped so, and
therefore tried to believe it.

‘I am very much disturbed by what you tell me,’ said Nicholas, after a
little reflection, ‘though I yet hope you may be mistaken.’

‘I don’t understand why you should hope so,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘I
confess; but you may depend upon it I am not.’

‘What of Kate?’ inquired Nicholas.

‘Why that, my dear,’ returned Mrs. Nickleby, ‘is just the point upon
which I am not yet satisfied. During this sickness, she has been
constantly at Madeline’s bedside--never were two people so fond of each
other as they have grown--and to tell you the truth, Nicholas, I have
rather kept her away now and then, because I think it’s a good plan, and
urges a young man on. He doesn’t get too sure, you know.’

She said this with such a mingling of high delight and
self-congratulation, that it was inexpressibly painful to Nicholas to
dash her hopes; but he felt that there was only one honourable course
before him, and that he was bound to take it.

‘Dear mother,’ he said kindly, ‘don’t you see that if there were really
any serious inclination on the part of Mr. Frank towards Kate, and we
suffered ourselves for a moment to encourage it, we should be acting a
most dishonourable and ungrateful part? I ask you if you don’t see it,
but I need not say that I know you don’t, or you would have been more
strictly on your guard. Let me explain my meaning to you. Remember how
poor we are.’

Mrs. Nickleby shook her head, and said, through her tears, that poverty
was not a crime.

‘No,’ said Nicholas, ‘and for that reason poverty should engender an
honest pride, that it may not lead and tempt us to unworthy actions, and
that we may preserve the self-respect which a hewer of wood and drawer
of water may maintain, and does better in maintaining than a monarch in
preserving his. Think what we owe to these two brothers: remember what
they have done, and what they do every day for us with a generosity
and delicacy for which the devotion of our whole lives would be a most
imperfect and inadequate return. What kind of return would that be which
would be comprised in our permitting their nephew, their only relative,
whom they regard as a son, and for whom it would be mere childishness to
suppose they have not formed plans suitably adapted to the education he
has had, and the fortune he will inherit--in our permitting him to marry
a portionless girl: so closely connected with us, that the irresistible
inference must be, that he was entrapped by a plot; that it was a
deliberate scheme, and a speculation amongst us three? Bring the matter
clearly before yourself, mother. Now, how would you feel, if they were
married, and the brothers, coming here on one of those kind errands
which bring them here so often, you had to break out to them the truth?
Would you be at ease, and feel that you had played an open part?’

Poor Mrs. Nickleby, crying more and more, murmured that of course Mr
Frank would ask the consent of his uncles first.

‘Why, to be sure, that would place HIM in a better situation with them,’
said Nicholas, ‘but we should still be open to the same suspicions; the
distance between us would still be as great; the advantages to be gained
would still be as manifest as now. We may be reckoning without our host
in all this,’ he added more cheerfully, ‘and I trust, and almost believe
we are. If it be otherwise, I have that confidence in Kate that I know
she will feel as I do--and in you, dear mother, to be assured that after
a little consideration you will do the same.’

After many more representations and entreaties, Nicholas obtained a
promise from Mrs. Nickleby that she would try all she could to think
as he did; and that if Mr. Frank persevered in his attentions she would
endeavour to discourage them, or, at the least, would render him no
countenance or assistance. He determined to forbear mentioning the
subject to Kate until he was quite convinced that there existed a real
necessity for his doing so; and resolved to assure himself, as well
as he could by close personal observation, of the exact position of
affairs. This was a very wise resolution, but he was prevented from
putting it in practice by a new source of anxiety and uneasiness.

Smike became alarmingly ill; so reduced and exhausted that he could
scarcely move from room to room without assistance; and so worn and
emaciated, that it was painful to look upon him. Nicholas was warned,
by the same medical authority to whom he had at first appealed, that the
last chance and hope of his life depended on his being instantly removed
from London. That part of Devonshire in which Nicholas had been
himself bred was named as the most favourable spot; but this advice was
cautiously coupled with the information, that whoever accompanied
him thither must be prepared for the worst; for every token of rapid
consumption had appeared, and he might never return alive.

The kind brothers, who were acquainted with the poor creature’s sad
history, dispatched old Tim to be present at this consultation. That
same morning, Nicholas was summoned by brother Charles into his private
room, and thus addressed:

‘My dear sir, no time must be lost. This lad shall not die, if such
human means as we can use can save his life; neither shall he die alone,
and in a strange place. Remove him tomorrow morning, see that he has
every comfort that his situation requires, and don’t leave him; don’t
leave him, my dear sir, until you know that there is no longer any
immediate danger. It would be hard, indeed, to part you now. No, no, no!
Tim shall wait upon you tonight, sir; Tim shall wait upon you tonight
with a parting word or two. Brother Ned, my dear fellow, Mr. Nickleby
waits to shake hands and say goodbye; Mr. Nickleby won’t be long gone;
this poor chap will soon get better, very soon get better; and then
he’ll find out some nice homely country-people to leave him with, and
will go backwards and forwards sometimes--backwards and forwards you
know, Ned. And there’s no cause to be downhearted, for he’ll very soon
get better, very soon. Won’t he, won’t he, Ned?’

What Tim Linkinwater said, or what he brought with him that night, needs
not to be told. Next morning Nicholas and his feeble companion began
their journey.

And who but one--and that one he who, but for those who crowded
round him then, had never met a look of kindness, or known a word
of pity--could tell what agony of mind, what blighted thoughts, what
unavailing sorrow, were involved in that sad parting?

‘See,’ cried Nicholas eagerly, as he looked from the coach window, ‘they
are at the corner of the lane still! And now there’s Kate, poor
Kate, whom you said you couldn’t bear to say goodbye to, waving her
handkerchief. Don’t go without one gesture of farewell to Kate!’

‘I cannot make it!’ cried his trembling companion, falling back in his
seat and covering his eyes. ‘Do you see her now? Is she there still?’

‘Yes, yes!’ said Nicholas earnestly. ‘There! She waves her hand again! I
have answered it for you--and now they are out of sight. Do not give way
so bitterly, dear friend, don’t. You will meet them all again.’

He whom he thus encouraged, raised his withered hands and clasped them
fervently together.

‘In heaven. I humbly pray to God in heaven.’

It sounded like the prayer of a broken heart.



CHAPTER 56

Ralph Nickleby, baffled by his Nephew in his late Design, hatches a
Scheme of Retaliation which Accident suggests to him, and takes into his
Counsels a tried Auxiliary


The course which these adventures shape out for themselves, and
imperatively call upon the historian to observe, now demands that they
should revert to the point they attained previously to the commencement
of the last chapter, when Ralph Nickleby and Arthur Gride were left
together in the house where death had so suddenly reared his dark and
heavy banner.

With clenched hands, and teeth ground together so firm and tight that
no locking of the jaws could have fixed and riveted them more securely,
Ralph stood, for some minutes, in the attitude in which he had last
addressed his nephew: breathing heavily, but as rigid and motionless
in other respects as if he had been a brazen statue. After a time, he
began, by slow degrees, as a man rousing himself from heavy slumber, to
relax. For a moment he shook his clasped fist towards the door by which
Nicholas had disappeared; and then thrusting it into his breast, as
if to repress by force even this show of passion, turned round and
confronted the less hardy usurer, who had not yet risen from the ground.

The cowering wretch, who still shook in every limb, and whose few grey
hairs trembled and quivered on his head with abject dismay, tottered to
his feet as he met Ralph’s eye, and, shielding his face with both hands,
protested, while he crept towards the door, that it was no fault of his.

‘Who said it was, man?’ returned Ralph, in a suppressed voice. ‘Who said
it was?’

‘You looked as if you thought I was to blame,’ said Gride, timidly.

‘Pshaw!’ Ralph muttered, forcing a laugh. ‘I blame him for not living an
hour longer. One hour longer would have been long enough. I blame no one
else.’

‘N--n--no one else?’ said Gride.

‘Not for this mischance,’ replied Ralph. ‘I have an old score to clear
with that young fellow who has carried off your mistress; but that has
nothing to do with his blustering just now, for we should soon have been
quit of him, but for this cursed accident.’

There was something so unnatural in the calmness with which Ralph
Nickleby spoke, when coupled with his face, the expression of the
features, to which every nerve and muscle, as it twitched and throbbed
with a spasm whose workings no effort could conceal, gave, every
instant, some new and frightful aspect--there was something so unnatural
and ghastly in the contrast between his harsh, slow, steady voice (only
altered by a certain halting of the breath which made him pause between
almost every word like a drunken man bent upon speaking plainly),
and these evidences of the most intense and violent passion, and the
struggle he made to keep them under; that if the dead body which lay
above had stood, instead of him, before the cowering Gride, it could
scarcely have presented a spectacle which would have terrified him more.

‘The coach,’ said Ralph after a time, during which he had struggled like
some strong man against a fit. ‘We came in a coach. Is it waiting?’

Gride gladly availed himself of the pretext for going to the window to
see. Ralph, keeping his face steadily the other way, tore at his shirt
with the hand which he had thrust into his breast, and muttered in a
hoarse whisper:

‘Ten thousand pounds! He said ten thousand! The precise sum paid in but
yesterday for the two mortgages, and which would have gone out again, at
heavy interest, tomorrow. If that house has failed, and he the first to
bring the news!--Is the coach there?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Gride, startled by the fierce tone of the inquiry.
‘It’s here. Dear, dear, what a fiery man you are!’

‘Come here,’ said Ralph, beckoning to him. ‘We mustn’t make a show of
being disturbed. We’ll go down arm in arm.’

‘But you pinch me black and blue,’ urged Gride.

Ralph let him go impatiently, and descending the stairs with his usual
firm and heavy tread, got into the coach. Arthur Gride followed. After
looking doubtfully at Ralph when the man asked where he was to drive,
and finding that he remained silent, and expressed no wish upon the
subject, Arthur mentioned his own house, and thither they proceeded.

On their way, Ralph sat in the furthest corner with folded arms, and
uttered not a word. With his chin sunk upon his breast, and his downcast
eyes quite hidden by the contraction of his knotted brows, he might
have been asleep for any sign of consciousness he gave until the coach
stopped, when he raised his head, and glancing through the window,
inquired what place that was.

‘My house,’ answered the disconsolate Gride, affected perhaps by its
loneliness. ‘Oh dear! my house.’

‘True,’ said Ralph ‘I have not observed the way we came. I should like a
glass of water. You have that in the house, I suppose?’

‘You shall have a glass of--of anything you like,’ answered Gride, with
a groan. ‘It’s no use knocking, coachman. Ring the bell!’

The man rang, and rang, and rang again; then, knocked until the street
re-echoed with the sounds; then, listened at the keyhole of the door.
Nobody came. The house was silent as the grave.

‘How’s this?’ said Ralph impatiently.

‘Peg is so very deaf,’ answered Gride with a look of anxiety and alarm.
‘Oh dear! Ring again, coachman. She SEES the bell.’

Again the man rang and knocked, and knocked and rang again. Some of the
neighbours threw up their windows, and called across the street to each
other that old Gride’s housekeeper must have dropped down dead. Others
collected round the coach, and gave vent to various surmises; some held
that she had fallen asleep; some, that she had burnt herself to death;
some, that she had got drunk; and one very fat man that she had seen
something to eat which had frightened her so much (not being used to
it) that she had fallen into a fit. This last suggestion particularly
delighted the bystanders, who cheered it rather uproariously, and were,
with some difficulty, deterred from dropping down the area and breaking
open the kitchen door to ascertain the fact. Nor was this all. Rumours
having gone abroad that Arthur was to be married that morning, very
particular inquiries were made after the bride, who was held by the
majority to be disguised in the person of Mr. Ralph Nickleby, which gave
rise to much jocose indignation at the public appearance of a bride in
boots and pantaloons, and called forth a great many hoots and groans.
At length, the two money-lenders obtained shelter in a house next door,
and, being accommodated with a ladder, clambered over the wall of the
back-yard--which was not a high one--and descended in safety on the
other side.

‘I am almost afraid to go in, I declare,’ said Arthur, turning to Ralph
when they were alone. ‘Suppose she should be murdered. Lying with her
brains knocked out by a poker, eh?’

‘Suppose she were,’ said Ralph. ‘I tell you, I wish such things were
more common than they are, and more easily done. You may stare and
shiver. I do!’

He applied himself to a pump in the yard; and, having taken a deep
draught of water and flung a quantity on his head and face, regained his
accustomed manner and led the way into the house: Gride following close
at his heels.

It was the same dark place as ever: every room dismal and silent as it
was wont to be, and every ghostly article of furniture in its customary
place. The iron heart of the grim old clock, undisturbed by all the
noise without, still beat heavily within its dusty case; the tottering
presses slunk from the sight, as usual, in their melancholy corners;
the echoes of footsteps returned the same dreary sound; the long-legged
spider paused in his nimble run, and, scared by the sight of men in that
his dull domain, hung motionless on the wall, counterfeiting death until
they should have passed him by.

From cellar to garret went the two usurers, opening every creaking door
and looking into every deserted room. But no Peg was there. At
last, they sat them down in the apartment which Arthur Gride usually
inhabited, to rest after their search.

‘The hag is out, on some preparation for your wedding festivities, I
suppose,’ said Ralph, preparing to depart. ‘See here! I destroy the
bond; we shall never need it now.’

Gride, who had been peering narrowly about the room, fell, at that
moment, upon his knees before a large chest, and uttered a terrible
yell.

‘How now?’ said Ralph, looking sternly round.

‘Robbed! robbed!’ screamed Arthur Gride.

‘Robbed! of money?’

‘No, no, no. Worse! far worse!’

‘Of what then?’ demanded Ralph.

‘Worse than money, worse than money!’ cried the old man, casting the
papers out of the chest, like some beast tearing up the earth. ‘She had
better have stolen money--all my money--I haven’t much! She had better
have made me a beggar than have done this!’

‘Done what?’ said Ralph. ‘Done what, you devil’s dotard?’

Still Gride made no answer, but tore and scratched among the papers, and
yelled and screeched like a fiend in torment.

‘There is something missing, you say,’ said Ralph, shaking him furiously
by the collar. ‘What is it?’

‘Papers, deeds. I am a ruined man. Lost, lost! I am robbed, I am ruined!
She saw me reading it--reading it of late--I did very often--She watched
me, saw me put it in the box that fitted into this, the box is gone, she
has stolen it. Damnation seize her, she has robbed me!’

‘Of WHAT?’ cried Ralph, on whom a sudden light appeared to break, for
his eyes flashed and his frame trembled with agitation as he clutched
Gride by his bony arm. ‘Of what?’

‘She don’t know what it is; she can’t read!’ shrieked Gride, not heeding
the inquiry. ‘There’s only one way in which money can be made of it, and
that is by taking it to her. Somebody will read it for her, and tell her
what to do. She and her accomplice will get money for it and be let off
besides; they’ll make a merit of it--say they found it--knew it--and be
evidence against me. The only person it will fall upon is me, me, me!’

‘Patience!’ said Ralph, clutching him still tighter and eyeing him with
a sidelong look, so fixed and eager as sufficiently to denote that he
had some hidden purpose in what he was about to say. ‘Hear reason.
She can’t have been gone long. I’ll call the police. Do you but give
information of what she has stolen, and they’ll lay hands upon her,
trust me. Here! Help!’

‘No, no, no!’ screamed the old man, putting his hand on Ralph’s mouth.
‘I can’t, I daren’t.’

‘Help! help!’ cried Ralph.

‘No, no, no!’ shrieked the other, stamping on the ground with the energy
of a madman. ‘I tell you no. I daren’t, I daren’t!’

‘Daren’t make this robbery public?’ said Ralph.

‘No!’ rejoined Gride, wringing his hands. ‘Hush! Hush! Not a word of
this; not a word must be said. I am undone. Whichever way I turn, I am
undone. I am betrayed. I shall be given up. I shall die in Newgate!’

With frantic exclamations such as these, and with many others in which
fear, grief, and rage, were strangely blended, the panic-stricken wretch
gradually subdued his first loud outcry, until it had softened down into
a low despairing moan, chequered now and then by a howl, as, going over
such papers as were left in the chest, he discovered some new loss.
With very little excuse for departing so abruptly, Ralph left him, and,
greatly disappointing the loiterers outside the house by telling them
there was nothing the matter, got into the coach, and was driven to his
own home.

A letter lay on his table. He let it lie there for some time, as if he
had not the courage to open it, but at length did so and turned deadly
pale.

‘The worst has happened,’ he said; ‘the house has failed. I see. The
rumour was abroad in the city last night, and reached the ears of those
merchants. Well, well!’

He strode violently up and down the room and stopped again.

‘Ten thousand pounds! And only lying there for a day--for one day! How
many anxious years, how many pinching days and sleepless nights, before
I scraped together that ten thousand pounds!--Ten thousand pounds! How
many proud painted dames would have fawned and smiled, and how many
spendthrift blockheads done me lip-service to my face and cursed me in
their hearts, while I turned that ten thousand pounds into twenty! While
I ground, and pinched, and used these needy borrowers for my pleasure
and profit, what smooth-tongued speeches, and courteous looks, and civil
letters, they would have given me! The cant of the lying world is,
that men like me compass our riches by dissimulation and treachery:
by fawning, cringing, and stooping. Why, how many lies, what mean and
abject evasions, what humbled behaviour from upstarts who, but for my
money, would spurn me aside as they do their betters every day, would
that ten thousand pounds have brought me in! Grant that I had doubled
it--made cent. per cent.--for every sovereign told another--there would
not be one piece of money in all the heap which wouldn’t represent ten
thousand mean and paltry lies, told, not by the money-lender, oh no!
but by the money-borrowers, your liberal, thoughtless, generous, dashing
folks, who wouldn’t be so mean as save a sixpence for the world!’

Striving, as it would seem, to lose part of the bitterness of his
regrets in the bitterness of these other thoughts, Ralph continued to
pace the room. There was less and less of resolution in his manner as
his mind gradually reverted to his loss; at length, dropping into his
elbow-chair and grasping its sides so firmly that they creaked again, he
said:

‘The time has been when nothing could have moved me like the loss of
this great sum. Nothing. For births, deaths, marriages, and all
the events which are of interest to most men, have (unless they are
connected with gain or loss of money) no interest for me. But now, I
swear, I mix up with the loss, his triumph in telling it. If he had
brought it about,--I almost feel as if he had,--I couldn’t hate him
more. Let me but retaliate upon him, by degrees, however slow--let me
but begin to get the better of him, let me but turn the scale--and I can
bear it.’

His meditations were long and deep. They terminated in his dispatching
a letter by Newman, addressed to Mr. Squeers at the Saracen’s Head, with
instructions to inquire whether he had arrived in town, and, if so, to
wait an answer. Newman brought back the information that Mr. Squeers had
come by mail that morning, and had received the letter in bed; but
that he sent his duty, and word that he would get up and wait upon Mr
Nickleby directly.

The interval between the delivery of this message, and the arrival of Mr
Squeers, was very short; but, before he came, Ralph had suppressed every
sign of emotion, and once more regained the hard, immovable, inflexible
manner which was habitual to him, and to which, perhaps, was ascribable
no small part of the influence which, over many men of no very strong
prejudices on the score of morality, he could exert, almost at will.

‘Well, Mr. Squeers,’ he said, welcoming that worthy with his accustomed
smile, of which a sharp look and a thoughtful frown were part and
parcel: ‘how do YOU do?’

‘Why, sir,’ said Mr. Squeers, ‘I’m pretty well. So’s the family, and so’s
the boys, except for a sort of rash as is a running through the school,
and rather puts ‘em off their feed. But it’s a ill wind as blows no good
to nobody; that’s what I always say when them lads has a wisitation. A
wisitation, sir, is the lot of mortality. Mortality itself, sir, is a
wisitation. The world is chock full of wisitations; and if a boy repines
at a wisitation and makes you uncomfortable with his noise, he must have
his head punched. That’s going according to the Scripter, that is.’

‘Mr. Squeers,’ said Ralph, drily.

‘Sir.’

‘We’ll avoid these precious morsels of morality if you please, and talk
of business.’

‘With all my heart, sir,’ rejoined Squeers, ‘and first let me say--’

‘First let ME say, if you please.--Noggs!’

Newman presented himself when the summons had been twice or thrice
repeated, and asked if his master called.

‘I did. Go to your dinner. And go at once. Do you hear?’

‘It an’t time,’ said Newman, doggedly.

‘My time is yours, and I say it is,’ returned Ralph.

‘You alter it every day,’ said Newman. ‘It isn’t fair.’

‘You don’t keep many cooks, and can easily apologise to them for the
trouble,’ retorted Ralph. ‘Begone, sir!’

Ralph not only issued this order in his most peremptory manner, but,
under pretence of fetching some papers from the little office, saw
it obeyed, and, when Newman had left the house, chained the door, to
prevent the possibility of his returning secretly, by means of his
latch-key.

‘I have reason to suspect that fellow,’ said Ralph, when he returned
to his own office. ‘Therefore, until I have thought of the shortest and
least troublesome way of ruining him, I hold it best to keep him at a
distance.’

‘It wouldn’t take much to ruin him, I should think,’ said Squeers, with
a grin.

‘Perhaps not,’ answered Ralph. ‘Nor to ruin a great many people whom I
know. You were going to say--?’

Ralph’s summary and matter-of-course way of holding up this example,
and throwing out the hint that followed it, had evidently an effect (as
doubtless it was designed to have) upon Mr. Squeers, who said, after a
little hesitation and in a much more subdued tone:

‘Why, what I was a-going to say, sir, is, that this here business
regarding of that ungrateful and hard-hearted chap, Snawley senior,
puts me out of my way, and occasions a inconveniency quite unparalleled,
besides, as I may say, making, for whole weeks together, Mrs. Squeers a
perfect widder. It’s a pleasure to me to act with you, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Ralph, drily.

‘Yes, I say of course,’ resumed Mr. Squeers, rubbing his knees, ‘but at
the same time, when one comes, as I do now, better than two hundred
and fifty mile to take a afferdavid, it does put a man out a good deal,
letting alone the risk.’

‘And where may the risk be, Mr. Squeers?’ said Ralph.

‘I said, letting alone the risk,’ replied Squeers, evasively.

‘And I said, where was the risk?’

‘I wasn’t complaining, you know, Mr. Nickleby,’ pleaded Squeers. ‘Upon my
word I never see such a--’

‘I ask you where is the risk?’ repeated Ralph, emphatically.

‘Where the risk?’ returned Squeers, rubbing his knees still harder.
‘Why, it an’t necessary to mention. Certain subjects is best awoided.
Oh, you know what risk I mean.’

‘How often have I told you,’ said Ralph, ‘and how often am I to tell
you, that you run no risk? What have you sworn, or what are you asked to
swear, but that at such and such a time a boy was left with you in the
name of Smike; that he was at your school for a given number of years,
was lost under such and such circumstances, is now found, and has been
identified by you in such and such keeping? This is all true; is it
not?’

‘Yes,’ replied Squeers, ‘that’s all true.’

‘Well, then,’ said Ralph, ‘what risk do you run? Who swears to a lie but
Snawley; a man whom I have paid much less than I have you?’

‘He certainly did it cheap, did Snawley,’ observed Squeers.

‘He did it cheap!’ retorted Ralph, testily; ‘yes, and he did it well,
and carries it off with a hypocritical face and a sanctified air, but
you! Risk! What do you mean by risk? The certificates are all genuine,
Snawley HAD another son, he HAS been married twice, his first wife IS
dead, none but her ghost could tell that she didn’t write that letter,
none but Snawley himself can tell that this is not his son, and that his
son is food for worms! The only perjury is Snawley’s, and I fancy he is
pretty well used to it. Where’s your risk?’

‘Why, you know,’ said Squeers, fidgeting in his chair, ‘if you come to
that, I might say where’s yours?’

‘You might say where’s mine!’ returned Ralph; ‘you may say where’s mine.
I don’t appear in the business, neither do you. All Snawley’s interest
is to stick well to the story he has told; and all his risk is, to
depart from it in the least. Talk of YOUR risk in the conspiracy!’

‘I say,’ remonstrated Squeers, looking uneasily round: ‘don’t call it
that! Just as a favour, don’t.’

‘Call it what you like,’ said Ralph, irritably, ‘but attend to me. This
tale was originally fabricated as a means of annoyance against one who
hurt your trade and half cudgelled you to death, and to enable you to
obtain repossession of a half-dead drudge, whom you wished to regain,
because, while you wreaked your vengeance on him for his share in the
business, you knew that the knowledge that he was again in your power
would be the best punishment you could inflict upon your enemy. Is that
so, Mr. Squeers?’

‘Why, sir,’ returned Squeers, almost overpowered by the determination
which Ralph displayed to make everything tell against him, and by his
stern unyielding manner, ‘in a measure it was.’

‘What does that mean?’ said Ralph.

‘Why, in a measure means,’ returned Squeers, ‘as it may be, that it
wasn’t all on my account, because you had some old grudge to satisfy,
too.’

‘If I had not had,’ said Ralph, in no way abashed by the reminder, ‘do
you think I should have helped you?’

‘Why no, I don’t suppose you would,’ Squeers replied. ‘I only wanted
that point to be all square and straight between us.’

‘How can it ever be otherwise?’ retorted Ralph. ‘Except that the account
is against me, for I spend money to gratify my hatred, and you pocket
it, and gratify yours at the same time. You are, at least, as avaricious
as you are revengeful. So am I. Which is best off? You, who win money
and revenge, at the same time and by the same process, and who are, at
all events, sure of money, if not of revenge; or I, who am only sure of
spending money in any case, and can but win bare revenge at last?’

As Mr. Squeers could only answer this proposition by shrugs and smiles,
Ralph bade him be silent, and thankful that he was so well off; and
then, fixing his eyes steadily upon him, proceeded to say:

First, that Nicholas had thwarted him in a plan he had formed for the
disposal in marriage of a certain young lady, and had, in the confusion
attendant on her father’s sudden death, secured that lady himself, and
borne her off in triumph.

Secondly, that by some will or settlement--certainly by some instrument
in writing, which must contain the young lady’s name, and could be,
therefore, easily selected from others, if access to the place where it
was deposited were once secured--she was entitled to property which,
if the existence of this deed ever became known to her, would make her
husband (and Ralph represented that Nicholas was certain to marry her) a
rich and prosperous man, and most formidable enemy.

Thirdly, that this deed had been, with others, stolen from one who had
himself obtained or concealed it fraudulently, and who feared to take
any steps for its recovery; and that he (Ralph) knew the thief.

To all this Mr. Squeers listened, with greedy ears that devoured every
syllable, and with his one eye and his mouth wide open: marvelling for
what special reason he was honoured with so much of Ralph’s confidence,
and to what it all tended.

‘Now,’ said Ralph, leaning forward, and placing his hand on Squeers’s
arm, ‘hear the design which I have conceived, and which I must--I say,
must, if I can ripen it--have carried into execution. No advantage can
be reaped from this deed, whatever it is, save by the girl herself, or
her husband; and the possession of this deed by one or other of them
is indispensable to any advantage being gained. THAT I have discovered
beyond the possibility of doubt. I want that deed brought here, that
I may give the man who brings it fifty pounds in gold, and burn it to
ashes before his face.’

Mr. Squeers, after following with his eye the action of Ralph’s hand
towards the fire-place as if he were at that moment consuming the paper,
drew a long breath, and said:

‘Yes; but who’s to bring it?’

‘Nobody, perhaps, for much is to be done before it can be got at,’ said
Ralph. ‘But if anybody--you!’

Mr. Squeers’s first tokens of consternation, and his flat relinquishment
of the task, would have staggered most men, if they had not immediately
occasioned an utter abandonment of the proposition. On Ralph they
produced not the slightest effect. Resuming, when the schoolmaster had
quite talked himself out of breath, as coolly as if he had never been
interrupted, Ralph proceeded to expatiate on such features of the case
as he deemed it most advisable to lay the greatest stress on.

These were, the age, decrepitude, and weakness of Mrs. Sliderskew; the
great improbability of her having any accomplice or even acquaintance:
taking into account her secluded habits, and her long residence in such
a house as Gride’s; the strong reason there was to suppose that the
robbery was not the result of a concerted plan: otherwise she would have
watched an opportunity of carrying off a sum of money; the difficulty
she would be placed in when she began to think on what she had done, and
found herself encumbered with documents of whose nature she was utterly
ignorant; and the comparative ease with which somebody, with a full
knowledge of her position, obtaining access to her, and working on her
fears, if necessary, might worm himself into her confidence and obtain,
under one pretence or another, free possession of the deed. To these
were added such considerations as the constant residence of Mr. Squeers
at a long distance from London, which rendered his association with Mrs
Sliderskew a mere masquerading frolic, in which nobody was likely to
recognise him, either at the time or afterwards; the impossibility of
Ralph’s undertaking the task himself, he being already known to her by
sight; and various comments on the uncommon tact and experience of Mr
Squeers: which would make his overreaching one old woman a mere matter
of child’s play and amusement. In addition to these influences and
persuasions, Ralph drew, with his utmost skill and power, a vivid
picture of the defeat which Nicholas would sustain, should they
succeed, in linking himself to a beggar, where he expected to wed an
heiress--glanced at the immeasurable importance it must be to a man
situated as Squeers, to preserve such a friend as himself--dwelt on a
long train of benefits, conferred since their first acquaintance, when
he had reported favourably of his treatment of a sickly boy who had died
under his hands (and whose death was very convenient to Ralph and his
clients, but this he did NOT say), and finally hinted that the fifty
pounds might be increased to seventy-five, or, in the event of very
great success, even to a hundred.

These arguments at length concluded, Mr. Squeers crossed his legs,
uncrossed them, scratched his head, rubbed his eye, examined the palms
of his hands, and bit his nails, and after exhibiting many other signs
of restlessness and indecision, asked ‘whether one hundred pound was the
highest that Mr. Nickleby could go.’ Being answered in the affirmative,
he became restless again, and, after some thought, and an unsuccessful
inquiry ‘whether he couldn’t go another fifty,’ said he supposed he must
try and do the most he could for a friend: which was always his maxim,
and therefore he undertook the job.

‘But how are you to get at the woman?’ he said; ‘that’s what it is as
puzzles me.’

‘I may not get at her at all,’ replied Ralph, ‘but I’ll try. I have
hunted people in this city, before now, who have been better hid than
she; and I know quarters in which a guinea or two, carefully spent, will
often solve darker riddles than this. Ay, and keep them close too, if
need be! I hear my man ringing at the door. We may as well part. You had
better not come to and fro, but wait till you hear from me.’

‘Good!’ returned Squeers. ‘I say! If you shouldn’t find her out, you’ll
pay expenses at the Saracen, and something for loss of time?’

‘Well,’ said Ralph, testily; ‘yes! You have nothing more to say?’

Squeers shaking his head, Ralph accompanied him to the streetdoor, and
audibly wondering, for the edification of Newman, why it was fastened
as if it were night, let him in and Squeers out, and returned to his own
room.

‘Now!’ he muttered, ‘come what come may, for the present I am firm and
unshaken. Let me but retrieve this one small portion of my loss and
disgrace; let me but defeat him in this one hope, dear to his heart as
I know it must be; let me but do this; and it shall be the first link in
such a chain which I will wind about him, as never man forged yet.’



CHAPTER 57

How Ralph Nickleby’s Auxiliary went about his Work, and how he prospered
with it


It was a dark, wet, gloomy night in autumn, when in an upper room of a
mean house situated in an obscure street, or rather court, near Lambeth,
there sat, all alone, a one-eyed man grotesquely habited, either
for lack of better garments or for purposes of disguise, in a loose
greatcoat, with arms half as long again as his own, and a capacity of
breadth and length which would have admitted of his winding himself
in it, head and all, with the utmost ease, and without any risk of
straining the old and greasy material of which it was composed.

So attired, and in a place so far removed from his usual haunts and
occupations, and so very poor and wretched in its character, perhaps Mrs
Squeers herself would have had some difficulty in recognising her lord:
quickened though her natural sagacity doubtless would have been by the
affectionate yearnings and impulses of a tender wife. But Mrs. Squeers’s
lord it was; and in a tolerably disconsolate mood Mrs. Squeers’s lord
appeared to be, as, helping himself from a black bottle which stood on
the table beside him, he cast round the chamber a look, in which very
slight regard for the objects within view was plainly mingled with some
regretful and impatient recollection of distant scenes and persons.

There were, certainly, no particular attractions, either in the room
over which the glance of Mr. Squeers so discontentedly wandered, or in
the narrow street into which it might have penetrated, if he had thought
fit to approach the window. The attic chamber in which he sat was
bare and mean; the bedstead, and such few other articles of necessary
furniture as it contained, were of the commonest description, in a most
crazy state, and of a most uninviting appearance. The street was muddy,
dirty, and deserted. Having but one outlet, it was traversed by few but
the inhabitants at any time; and the night being one of those on which
most people are glad to be within doors, it now presented no other signs
of life than the dull glimmering of poor candles from the dirty windows,
and few sounds but the pattering of the rain, and occasionally the heavy
closing of some creaking door.

Mr. Squeers continued to look disconsolately about him, and to listen
to these noises in profound silence, broken only by the rustling of his
large coat, as he now and then moved his arm to raise his glass to
his lips. Mr. Squeers continued to do this for some time, until the
increasing gloom warned him to snuff the candle. Seeming to be slightly
roused by this exertion, he raised his eye to the ceiling, and fixing it
upon some uncouth and fantastic figures, traced upon it by the wet and
damp which had penetrated through the roof, broke into the following
soliloquy:

‘Well, this is a pretty go, is this here! An uncommon pretty go! Here
have I been, a matter of how many weeks--hard upon six--a follering up
this here blessed old dowager petty larcenerer,’--Mr. Squeers delivered
himself of this epithet with great difficulty and effort,--‘and
Dotheboys Hall a-running itself regularly to seed the while! That’s the
worst of ever being in with a owdacious chap like that old Nickleby. You
never know when he’s done with you, and if you’re in for a penny, you’re
in for a pound.’

This remark, perhaps, reminded Mr. Squeers that he was in for a hundred
pound at any rate. His countenance relaxed, and he raised his glass to
his mouth with an air of greater enjoyment of its contents than he had
before evinced.

‘I never see,’ soliloquised Mr. Squeers in continuation, ‘I never see
nor come across such a file as that old Nickleby. Never! He’s out of
everybody’s depth, he is. He’s what you may call a rasper, is Nickleby.
To see how sly and cunning he grubbed on, day after day, a-worming and
plodding and tracing and turning and twining of hisself about, till he
found out where this precious Mrs. Peg was hid, and cleared the ground
for me to work upon. Creeping and crawling and gliding, like a ugly,
old, bright-eyed, stagnation-blooded adder! Ah! He’d have made a good
‘un in our line, but it would have been too limited for him; his genius
would have busted all bonds, and coming over every obstacle, broke down
all before it, till it erected itself into a monneyment of--Well, I’ll
think of the rest, and say it when conwenient.’

Making a halt in his reflections at this place, Mr. Squeers again put his
glass to his lips, and drawing a dirty letter from his pocket, proceeded
to con over its contents with the air of a man who had read it very
often, and now refreshed his memory rather in the absence of better
amusement than for any specific information.

‘The pigs is well,’ said Mr. Squeers, ‘the cows is well, and the boys is
bobbish. Young Sprouter has been a-winking, has he? I’ll wink him when
I get back. “Cobbey would persist in sniffing while he was a-eating his
dinner, and said that the beef was so strong it made him.”--Very good,
Cobbey, we’ll see if we can’t make you sniff a little without beef.
“Pitcher was took with another fever,”--of course he was--“and being
fetched by his friends, died the day after he got home,”--of course he
did, and out of aggravation; it’s part of a deep-laid system. There an’t
another chap in the school but that boy as would have died exactly at
the end of the quarter: taking it out of me to the very last, and then
carrying his spite to the utmost extremity. “The juniorest Palmer said
he wished he was in Heaven.” I really don’t know, I do NOT know what’s
to be done with that young fellow; he’s always a-wishing something
horrid. He said once, he wished he was a donkey, because then he
wouldn’t have a father as didn’t love him! Pretty wicious that for a
child of six!’

Mr. Squeers was so much moved by the contemplation of this hardened
nature in one so young, that he angrily put up the letter, and sought,
in a new train of ideas, a subject of consolation.

‘It’s a long time to have been a-lingering in London,’ he said; ‘and
this is a precious hole to come and live in, even if it has been only
for a week or so. Still, one hundred pound is five boys, and five boys
takes a whole year to pay one hundred pounds, and there’s their keep to
be substracted, besides. There’s nothing lost, neither, by one’s being
here; because the boys’ money comes in just the same as if I was at
home, and Mrs. Squeers she keeps them in order. There’ll be some lost
time to make up, of course. There’ll be an arrear of flogging as’ll have
to be gone through: still, a couple of days makes that all right, and
one don’t mind a little extra work for one hundred pound. It’s pretty
nigh the time to wait upon the old woman. From what she said last night,
I suspect that if I’m to succeed at all, I shall succeed tonight; so
I’ll have half a glass more, to wish myself success, and put myself in
spirits. Mrs. Squeers, my dear, your health!’

Leering with his one eye as if the lady to whom he drank had been
actually present, Mr. Squeers--in his enthusiasm, no doubt--poured out
a full glass, and emptied it; and as the liquor was raw spirits, and he
had applied himself to the same bottle more than once already, it is not
surprising that he found himself, by this time, in an extremely cheerful
state, and quite enough excited for his purpose.

What this purpose was soon appeared; for, after a few turns about the
room to steady himself, he took the bottle under his arm and the glass
in his hand, and blowing out the candle as if he purposed being gone
some time, stole out upon the staircase, and creeping softly to a door
opposite his own, tapped gently at it.

‘But what’s the use of tapping?’ he said, ‘She’ll never hear. I suppose
she isn’t doing anything very particular; and if she is, it don’t much
matter, that I see.’

With this brief preface, Mr. Squeers applied his hand to the latch of the
door, and thrusting his head into a garret far more deplorable than
that he had just left, and seeing that there was nobody there but an old
woman, who was bending over a wretched fire (for although the weather
was still warm, the evening was chilly), walked in, and tapped her on
the shoulder.

‘Well, my Slider,’ said Mr. Squeers, jocularly.

‘Is that you?’ inquired Peg.

‘Ah! it’s me, and me’s the first person singular, nominative case,
agreeing with the verb “it’s”, and governed by Squeers understood, as a
acorn, a hour; but when the h is sounded, the a only is to be used, as
a and, a art, a ighway,’ replied Mr. Squeers, quoting at random from the
grammar. ‘At least, if it isn’t, you don’t know any better, and if it
is, I’ve done it accidentally.’

Delivering this reply in his accustomed tone of voice, in which of
course it was inaudible to Peg, Mr. Squeers drew a stool to the fire, and
placing himself over against her, and the bottle and glass on the floor
between them, roared out again, very loud,

‘Well, my Slider!’

‘I hear you,’ said Peg, receiving him very graciously.

‘I’ve come according to promise,’ roared Squeers.

‘So they used to say in that part of the country I come from,’ observed
Peg, complacently, ‘but I think oil’s better.’

‘Better than what?’ roared Squeers, adding some rather strong language
in an undertone.

‘No,’ said Peg, ‘of course not.’

‘I never saw such a monster as you are!’ muttered Squeers, looking as
amiable as he possibly could the while; for Peg’s eye was upon him,
and she was chuckling fearfully, as though in delight at having made a
choice repartee, ‘Do you see this? This is a bottle.’

‘I see it,’ answered Peg.

‘Well, and do you see THIS?’ bawled Squeers. ‘This is a glass.’ Peg saw
that too.

‘See here, then,’ said Squeers, accompanying his remarks with
appropriate action, ‘I fill the glass from the bottle, and I say “Your
health, Slider,” and empty it; then I rinse it genteelly with a little
drop, which I’m forced to throw into the fire--hallo! we shall have the
chimbley alight next--fill it again, and hand it over to you.’

‘YOUR health,’ said Peg.

‘She understands that, anyways,’ muttered Squeers, watching Mrs
Sliderskew as she dispatched her portion, and choked and gasped in a
most awful manner after so doing. ‘Now then, let’s have a talk. How’s
the rheumatics?’

Mrs. Sliderskew, with much blinking and chuckling, and with looks
expressive of her strong admiration of Mr. Squeers, his person, manners,
and conversation, replied that the rheumatics were better.

‘What’s the reason,’ said Mr. Squeers, deriving fresh facetiousness from
the bottle; ‘what’s the reason of rheumatics? What do they mean? What do
people have’em for--eh?’

Mrs. Sliderskew didn’t know, but suggested that it was possibly because
they couldn’t help it.

‘Measles, rheumatics, hooping-cough, fevers, agers, and lumbagers,’ said
Mr. Squeers, ‘is all philosophy together; that’s what it is. The heavenly
bodies is philosophy, and the earthly bodies is philosophy. If there’s a
screw loose in a heavenly body, that’s philosophy; and if there’s
screw loose in a earthly body, that’s philosophy too; or it may be that
sometimes there’s a little metaphysics in it, but that’s not often.
Philosophy’s the chap for me. If a parent asks a question in the
classical, commercial, or mathematical line, says I, gravely, “Why, sir,
in the first place, are you a philosopher?”--“No, Mr. Squeers,” he says,
“I an’t.” “Then, sir,” says I, “I am sorry for you, for I shan’t be
able to explain it.” Naturally, the parent goes away and wishes he was a
philosopher, and, equally naturally, thinks I’m one.’

Saying this, and a great deal more, with tipsy profundity and a
serio-comic air, and keeping his eye all the time on Mrs. Sliderskew, who
was unable to hear one word, Mr. Squeers concluded by helping himself and
passing the bottle: to which Peg did becoming reverence.

‘That’s the time of day!’ said Mr. Squeers. ‘You look twenty pound ten
better than you did.’

Again Mrs. Sliderskew chuckled, but modesty forbade her assenting
verbally to the compliment.

‘Twenty pound ten better,’ repeated Mr. Squeers, ‘than you did that day
when I first introduced myself. Don’t you know?’

‘Ah!’ said Peg, shaking her head, ‘but you frightened me that day.’

‘Did I?’ said Squeers; ‘well, it was rather a startling thing for a
stranger to come and recommend himself by saying that he knew all about
you, and what your name was, and why you were living so quiet here, and
what you had boned, and who you boned it from, wasn’t it?’

Peg nodded her head in strong assent.

‘But I know everything that happens in that way, you see,’ continued
Squeers. ‘Nothing takes place, of that kind, that I an’t up to
entirely. I’m a sort of a lawyer, Slider, of first-rate standing, and
understanding too; I’m the intimate friend and confidential adwiser
of pretty nigh every man, woman, and child that gets themselves into
difficulties by being too nimble with their fingers, I’m--’

Mr. Squeers’s catalogue of his own merits and accomplishments, which
was partly the result of a concerted plan between himself and Ralph
Nickleby, and flowed, in part, from the black bottle, was here
interrupted by Mrs. Sliderskew.

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ she cried, folding her arms and wagging her head; ‘and so
he wasn’t married after all, wasn’t he. Not married after all?’

‘No,’ replied Squeers, ‘that he wasn’t!’

‘And a young lover come and carried off the bride, eh?’ said Peg.

‘From under his very nose,’ replied Squeers; ‘and I’m told the young
chap cut up rough besides, and broke the winders, and forced him to
swaller his wedding favour which nearly choked him.’

‘Tell me all about it again,’ cried Peg, with a malicious relish of her
old master’s defeat, which made her natural hideousness something quite
fearful; ‘let’s hear it all again, beginning at the beginning now, as
if you’d never told me. Let’s have it every word--now--now--beginning at
the very first, you know, when he went to the house that morning!’

Mr. Squeers, plying Mrs. Sliderskew freely with the liquor, and sustaining
himself under the exertion of speaking so loud by frequent applications
to it himself, complied with this request by describing the discomfiture
of Arthur Gride, with such improvements on the truth as happened to
occur to him, and the ingenious invention and application of which
had been very instrumental in recommending him to her notice in the
beginning of their acquaintance. Mrs. Sliderskew was in an ecstasy of
delight, rolling her head about, drawing up her skinny shoulders, and
wrinkling her cadaverous face into so many and such complicated forms of
ugliness, as awakened the unbounded astonishment and disgust even of Mr
Squeers.

‘He’s a treacherous old goat,’ said Peg, ‘and cozened me with cunning
tricks and lying promises, but never mind. I’m even with him. I’m even
with him.’

‘More than even, Slider,’ returned Squeers; ‘you’d have been even with
him if he’d got married; but with the disappointment besides, you’re
a long way ahead. Out of sight, Slider, quite out of sight. And that
reminds me,’ he added, handing her the glass, ‘if you want me to give
you my opinion of them deeds, and tell you what you’d better keep and
what you’d better burn, why, now’s your time, Slider.’

‘There an’t no hurry for that,’ said Peg, with several knowing looks and
winks.

‘Oh! very well!’ observed Squeers, ‘it don’t matter to me; you asked
me, you know. I shouldn’t charge you nothing, being a friend. You’re the
best judge of course. But you’re a bold woman, Slider.’

‘How do you mean, bold?’ said Peg.

‘Why, I only mean that if it was me, I wouldn’t keep papers as might
hang me, littering about when they might be turned into money--them as
wasn’t useful made away with, and them as was, laid by somewheres, safe;
that’s all,’ returned Squeers; ‘but everybody’s the best judge of their
own affairs. All I say is, Slider, I wouldn’t do it.’

‘Come,’ said Peg, ‘then you shall see ‘em.’

‘I don’t want to see ‘em,’ replied Squeers, affecting to be out of
humour; ‘don’t talk as if it was a treat. Show ‘em to somebody else, and
take their advice.’

Mr. Squeers would, very likely, have carried on the farce of being
offended a little longer, if Mrs. Sliderskew, in her anxiety to restore
herself to her former high position in his good graces, had not become
so extremely affectionate that he stood at some risk of being smothered
by her caresses. Repressing, with as good a grace as possible, these
little familiarities--for which, there is reason to believe, the black
bottle was at least as much to blame as any constitutional infirmity on
the part of Mrs. Sliderskew--he protested that he had only been joking:
and, in proof of his unimpaired good-humour, that he was ready to
examine the deeds at once, if, by so doing, he could afford any
satisfaction or relief of mind to his fair friend.

‘And now you’re up, my Slider,’ bawled Squeers, as she rose to fetch
them, ‘bolt the door.’

Peg trotted to the door, and after fumbling at the bolt, crept to the
other end of the room, and from beneath the coals which filled the
bottom of the cupboard, drew forth a small deal box. Having placed this
on the floor at Squeers’s feet, she brought, from under the pillow of
her bed, a small key, with which she signed to that gentleman to open
it. Mr. Squeers, who had eagerly followed her every motion, lost no time
in obeying this hint: and, throwing back the lid, gazed with rapture on
the documents which lay within.

‘Now you see,’ said Peg, kneeling down on the floor beside him, and
staying his impatient hand; ‘what’s of no use we’ll burn; what we can
get any money by, we’ll keep; and if there’s any we could get him into
trouble by, and fret and waste away his heart to shreds, those we’ll
take particular care of; for that’s what I want to do, and what I hoped
to do when I left him.’

‘I thought,’ said Squeers, ‘that you didn’t bear him any particular
good-will. But, I say, why didn’t you take some money besides?’

‘Some what?’ asked Peg.

‘Some money,’ roared Squeers. ‘I do believe the woman hears me, and
wants to make me break a wessel, so that she may have the pleasure of
nursing me. Some money, Slider, money!’

‘Why, what a man you are to ask!’ cried Peg, with some contempt. ‘If I
had taken money from Arthur Gride, he’d have scoured the whole earth to
find me--aye, and he’d have smelt it out, and raked it up, somehow, if
I had buried it at the bottom of the deepest well in England. No, no!
I knew better than that. I took what I thought his secrets were hid in:
and them he couldn’t afford to make public, let’em be worth ever so much
money. He’s an old dog; a sly, old, cunning, thankless dog! He first
starved, and then tricked me; and if I could I’d kill him.’

‘All right, and very laudable,’ said Squeers. ‘But, first and foremost,
Slider, burn the box. You should never keep things as may lead to
discovery. Always mind that. So while you pull it to pieces (which you
can easily do, for it’s very old and rickety) and burn it in little
bits, I’ll look over the papers and tell you what they are.’

Peg, expressing her acquiescence in this arrangement, Mr. Squeers turned
the box bottom upwards, and tumbling the contents upon the floor, handed
it to her; the destruction of the box being an extemporary device for
engaging her attention, in case it should prove desirable to distract it
from his own proceedings.

‘There!’ said Squeers; ‘you poke the pieces between the bars, and make
up a good fire, and I’ll read the while. Let me see, let me see.’ And
taking the candle down beside him, Mr. Squeers, with great eagerness
and a cunning grin overspreading his face, entered upon his task of
examination.

If the old woman had not been very deaf, she must have heard, when she
last went to the door, the breathing of two persons close behind it: and
if those two persons had been unacquainted with her infirmity, they must
probably have chosen that moment either for presenting themselves or
taking to flight. But, knowing with whom they had to deal, they remained
quite still, and now, not only appeared unobserved at the door--which
was not bolted, for the bolt had no hasp--but warily, and with noiseless
footsteps, advanced into the room.

As they stole farther and farther in by slight and scarcely perceptible
degrees, and with such caution that they scarcely seemed to breathe, the
old hag and Squeers little dreaming of any such invasion, and utterly
unconscious of there being any soul near but themselves, were busily
occupied with their tasks. The old woman, with her wrinkled face close
to the bars of the stove, puffing at the dull embers which had not yet
caught the wood; Squeers stooping down to the candle, which brought out
the full ugliness of his face, as the light of the fire did that of his
companion; both intently engaged, and wearing faces of exultation which
contrasted strongly with the anxious looks of those behind, who took
advantage of the slightest sound to cover their advance, and, almost
before they had moved an inch, and all was silent, stopped again. This,
with the large bare room, damp walls, and flickering doubtful light,
combined to form a scene which the most careless and indifferent
spectator (could any have been present) could scarcely have failed to
derive some interest from, and would not readily have forgotten.

Of the stealthy comers, Frank Cheeryble was one, and Newman Noggs
the other. Newman had caught up, by the rusty nozzle, an old pair of
bellows, which were just undergoing a flourish in the air preparatory
to a descent upon the head of Mr. Squeers, when Frank, with an earnest
gesture, stayed his arm, and, taking another step in advance, came so
close behind the schoolmaster that, by leaning slightly forward, he
could plainly distinguish the writing which he held up to his eye.

Mr. Squeers, not being remarkably erudite, appeared to be considerably
puzzled by this first prize, which was in an engrossing hand, and not
very legible except to a practised eye. Having tried it by reading from
left to right, and from right to left, and finding it equally clear both
ways, he turned it upside down with no better success.

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ chuckled Peg, who, on her knees before the fire, was
feeding it with fragments of the box, and grinning in most devilish
exultation. ‘What’s that writing about, eh?’

‘Nothing particular,’ replied Squeers, tossing it towards her. ‘It’s
only an old lease, as well as I can make out. Throw it in the fire.’

Mrs. Sliderskew complied, and inquired what the next one was.

‘This,’ said Squeers, ‘is a bundle of overdue acceptances and renewed
bills of six or eight young gentlemen, but they’re all MPs, so it’s of
no use to anybody. Throw it in the fire!’ Peg did as she was bidden, and
waited for the next.

‘This,’ said Squeers, ‘seems to be some deed of sale of the right of
presentation to the rectory of Purechurch, in the valley of Cashup. Take
care of that, Slider, literally for God’s sake. It’ll fetch its price at
the Auction Mart.’

‘What’s the next?’ inquired Peg.

‘Why, this,’ said Squeers, ‘seems, from the two letters that’s with it,
to be a bond from a curate down in the country, to pay half a year’s
wages of forty pound for borrowing twenty. Take care of that, for if he
don’t pay it, his bishop will very soon be down upon him. We know what
the camel and the needle’s eye means; no man as can’t live upon his
income, whatever it is, must expect to go to heaven at any price. It’s
very odd; I don’t see anything like it yet.’

‘What’s the matter?’ said Peg.

‘Nothing,’ replied Squeers, ‘only I’m looking for--’

Newman raised the bellows again. Once more, Frank, by a rapid motion of
his arm, unaccompanied by any noise, checked him in his purpose.

‘Here you are,’ said Squeers, ‘bonds--take care of them. Warrant of
attorney--take care of that. Two cognovits--take care of them. Lease and
release--burn that. Ah! “Madeline Bray--come of age or marry--the said
Madeline”--here, burn THAT!’

Eagerly throwing towards the old woman a parchment that he caught up for
the purpose, Squeers, as she turned her head, thrust into the breast of
his large coat, the deed in which these words had caught his eye, and
burst into a shout of triumph.

‘I’ve got it!’ said Squeers. ‘I’ve got it! Hurrah! The plan was a good
one, though the chance was desperate, and the day’s our own at last!’

Peg demanded what he laughed at, but no answer was returned. Newman’s
arm could no longer be restrained; the bellows, descending heavily and
with unerring aim on the very centre of Mr. Squeers’s head, felled him to
the floor, and stretched him on it flat and senseless.



CHAPTER 58

In which one Scene of this History is closed


Dividing the distance into two days’ journey, in order that his charge
might sustain the less exhaustion and fatigue from travelling so far,
Nicholas, at the end of the second day from their leaving home, found
himself within a very few miles of the spot where the happiest years
of his life had been passed, and which, while it filled his mind with
pleasant and peaceful thoughts, brought back many painful and vivid
recollections of the circumstances in which he and his had wandered
forth from their old home, cast upon the rough world and the mercy of
strangers.

It needed no such reflections as those which the memory of old days,
and wanderings among scenes where our childhood has been passed, usually
awaken in the most insensible minds, to soften the heart of Nicholas,
and render him more than usually mindful of his drooping friend. By
night and day, at all times and seasons: always watchful, attentive, and
solicitous, and never varying in the discharge of his self-imposed duty
to one so friendless and helpless as he whose sands of life were now
fast running out and dwindling rapidly away: he was ever at his side. He
never left him. To encourage and animate him, administer to his wants,
support and cheer him to the utmost of his power, was now his constant
and unceasing occupation.

They procured a humble lodging in a small farmhouse, surrounded by
meadows where Nicholas had often revelled when a child with a troop of
merry schoolfellows; and here they took up their rest.

At first, Smike was strong enough to walk about, for short distances
at a time, with no other support or aid than that which Nicholas could
afford him. At this time, nothing appeared to interest him so much as
visiting those places which had been most familiar to his friend in
bygone days. Yielding to this fancy, and pleased to find that its
indulgence beguiled the sick boy of many tedious hours, and never failed
to afford him matter for thought and conversation afterwards, Nicholas
made such spots the scenes of their daily rambles: driving him from
place to place in a little pony-chair, and supporting him on his arm
while they walked slowly among these old haunts, or lingered in the
sunlight to take long parting looks of those which were most quiet and
beautiful.

It was on such occasions as these, that Nicholas, yielding almost
unconsciously to the interest of old associations, would point out some
tree that he had climbed, a hundred times, to peep at the young birds in
their nest; and the branch from which he used to shout to little Kate,
who stood below terrified at the height he had gained, and yet urging
him higher still by the intensity of her admiration. There was the
old house too, which they would pass every day, looking up at the tiny
window through which the sun used to stream in and wake him on the
summer mornings--they were all summer mornings then--and climbing up
the garden-wall and looking over, Nicholas could see the very rose-bush
which had come, a present to Kate, from some little lover, and she had
planted with her own hands. There were the hedgerows where the brother
and sister had so often gathered wild flowers together, and the green
fields and shady paths where they had so often strayed. There was not
a lane, or brook, or copse, or cottage near, with which some childish
event was not entwined, and back it came upon the mind--as events of
childhood do--nothing in itself: perhaps a word, a laugh, a look, some
slight distress, a passing thought or fear: and yet more strongly and
distinctly marked, and better remembered, than the hardest trials or
severest sorrows of a year ago.

One of these expeditions led them through the churchyard where was his
father’s grave. ‘Even here,’ said Nicholas softly, ‘we used to loiter
before we knew what death was, and when we little thought whose ashes
would rest beneath; and, wondering at the silence, sit down to rest
and speak below our breath. Once, Kate was lost, and after an hour of
fruitless search, they found her, fast asleep, under that tree which
shades my father’s grave. He was very fond of her, and said when he took
her up in his arms, still sleeping, that whenever he died he would wish
to be buried where his dear little child had laid her head. You see his
wish was not forgotten.’

Nothing more passed at the time, but that night, as Nicholas sat beside
his bed, Smike started from what had seemed to be a slumber, and laying
his hand in his, prayed, as the tears coursed down his face, that he
would make him one solemn promise.

‘What is that?’ said Nicholas, kindly. ‘If I can redeem it, or hope to
do so, you know I will.’

‘I am sure you will,’ was the reply. ‘Promise me that when I die, I
shall be buried near--as near as they can make my grave--to the tree we
saw today.’

Nicholas gave the promise; he had few words to give it in, but they were
solemn and earnest. His poor friend kept his hand in his, and turned as
if to sleep. But there were stifled sobs; and the hand was pressed
more than once, or twice, or thrice, before he sank to rest, and slowly
loosed his hold.

In a fortnight’s time, he became too ill to move about. Once or twice,
Nicholas drove him out, propped up with pillows; but the motion of the
chaise was painful to him, and brought on fits of fainting, which, in
his weakened state, were dangerous. There was an old couch in the house,
which was his favourite resting-place by day; and when the sun shone,
and the weather was warm, Nicholas had this wheeled into a little
orchard which was close at hand, and his charge being well wrapped
up and carried out to it, they used to sit there sometimes for hours
together.

It was on one of these occasions that a circumstance took place, which
Nicholas, at the time, thoroughly believed to be the mere delusion of an
imagination affected by disease; but which he had, afterwards, too good
reason to know was of real and actual occurrence.

He had brought Smike out in his arms--poor fellow! a child might have
carried him then--to see the sunset, and, having arranged his couch, had
taken his seat beside it. He had been watching the whole of the night
before, and being greatly fatigued both in mind and body, gradually fell
asleep.

He could not have closed his eyes five minutes, when he was awakened by
a scream, and starting up in that kind of terror which affects a person
suddenly roused, saw, to his great astonishment, that his charge had
struggled into a sitting posture, and with eyes almost starting from
their sockets, cold dew standing on his forehead, and in a fit of
trembling which quite convulsed his frame, was calling to him for help.

‘Good Heaven, what is this?’ said Nicholas, bending over him. ‘Be calm;
you have been dreaming.’

‘No, no, no!’ cried Smike, clinging to him. ‘Hold me tight. Don’t let me
go. There, there. Behind the tree!’

Nicholas followed his eyes, which were directed to some distance behind
the chair from which he himself had just risen. But, there was nothing
there.

‘This is nothing but your fancy,’ he said, as he strove to compose him;
‘nothing else, indeed.’

‘I know better. I saw as plain as I see now,’ was the answer. ‘Oh! say
you’ll keep me with you. Swear you won’t leave me for an instant!’

‘Do I ever leave you?’ returned Nicholas. ‘Lie down again--there! You
see I’m here. Now, tell me; what was it?’

‘Do you remember,’ said Smike, in a low voice, and glancing fearfully
round, ‘do you remember my telling you of the man who first took me to
the school?’

‘Yes, surely.’

‘I raised my eyes, just now, towards that tree--that one with the thick
trunk--and there, with his eyes fixed on me, he stood!’

‘Only reflect for one moment,’ said Nicholas; ‘granting, for an instant,
that it’s likely he is alive and wandering about a lonely place like
this, so far removed from the public road, do you think that at this
distance of time you could possibly know that man again?’

‘Anywhere--in any dress,’ returned Smike; ‘but, just now, he stood
leaning upon his stick and looking at me, exactly as I told you I
remembered him. He was dusty with walking, and poorly dressed--I think
his clothes were ragged--but directly I saw him, the wet night, his face
when he left me, the parlour I was left in, and the people that were
there, all seemed to come back together. When he knew I saw him, he
looked frightened; for he started, and shrunk away. I have thought of
him by day, and dreamt of him by night. He looked in my sleep, when I
was quite a little child, and has looked in my sleep ever since, as he
did just now.’

Nicholas endeavoured, by every persuasion and argument he could think
of, to convince the terrified creature that his imagination had deceived
him, and that this close resemblance between the creation of his dreams
and the man he supposed he had seen was but a proof of it; but all in
vain. When he could persuade him to remain, for a few moments, in the
care of the people to whom the house belonged, he instituted a strict
inquiry whether any stranger had been seen, and searched himself
behind the tree, and through the orchard, and upon the land immediately
adjoining, and in every place near, where it was possible for a man
to lie concealed; but all in vain. Satisfied that he was right in his
original conjecture, he applied himself to calming the fears of Smike,
which, after some time, he partially succeeded in doing, though not in
removing the impression upon his mind; for he still declared, again and
again, in the most solemn and fervid manner, that he had positively seen
what he had described, and that nothing could ever remove his conviction
of its reality.

And now, Nicholas began to see that hope was gone, and that, upon the
partner of his poverty, and the sharer of his better fortune, the world
was closing fast. There was little pain, little uneasiness, but there
was no rallying, no effort, no struggle for life. He was worn and wasted
to the last degree; his voice had sunk so low, that he could scarce be
heard to speak. Nature was thoroughly exhausted, and he had lain him
down to die.

On a fine, mild autumn day, when all was tranquil and at peace: when the
soft sweet air crept in at the open window of the quiet room, and not a
sound was heard but the gentle rustling of the leaves: Nicholas sat in
his old place by the bedside, and knew that the time was nearly come.
So very still it was, that, every now and then, he bent down his ear to
listen for the breathing of him who lay asleep, as if to assure himself
that life was still there, and that he had not fallen into that deep
slumber from which on earth there is no waking.

While he was thus employed, the closed eyes opened, and on the pale face
there came a placid smile.

‘That’s well!’ said Nicholas. ‘The sleep has done you good.’

‘I have had such pleasant dreams,’ was the answer. ‘Such pleasant, happy
dreams!’

‘Of what?’ said Nicholas.

The dying boy turned towards him, and, putting his arm about his neck,
made answer, ‘I shall soon be there!’

After a short silence, he spoke again.

‘I am not afraid to die,’ he said. ‘I am quite contented. I almost think
that if I could rise from this bed quite well I would not wish to do
so, now. You have so often told me we shall meet again--so very often
lately, and now I feel the truth of that so strongly--that I can even
bear to part from you.’

The trembling voice and tearful eye, and the closer grasp of the
arm which accompanied these latter words, showed how they filled the
speaker’s heart; nor were there wanting indications of how deeply they
had touched the heart of him to whom they were addressed.

‘You say well,’ returned Nicholas at length, ‘and comfort me very much,
dear fellow. Let me hear you say you are happy, if you can.’

‘I must tell you something, first. I should not have a secret from you.
You would not blame me, at a time like this, I know.’

‘I blame you!’ exclaimed Nicholas.

‘I am sure you would not. You asked me why I was so changed, and--and
sat so much alone. Shall I tell you why?’

‘Not if it pains you,’ said Nicholas. ‘I only asked that I might make
you happier, if I could.’

‘I know. I felt that, at the time.’ He drew his friend closer to him.
‘You will forgive me; I could not help it, but though I would have
died to make her happy, it broke my heart to see--I know he loves her
dearly--Oh! who could find that out so soon as I?’

The words which followed were feebly and faintly uttered, and broken by
long pauses; but, from them, Nicholas learnt, for the first time, that
the dying boy, with all the ardour of a nature concentrated on one
absorbing, hopeless, secret passion, loved his sister Kate.

He had procured a lock of her hair, which hung at his breast, folded
in one or two slight ribbons she had worn. He prayed that, when he was
dead, Nicholas would take it off, so that no eyes but his might see it,
and that when he was laid in his coffin and about to be placed in the
earth, he would hang it round his neck again, that it might rest with
him in the grave.

Upon his knees Nicholas gave him this pledge, and promised again that
he should rest in the spot he had pointed out. They embraced, and kissed
each other on the cheek.

‘Now,’ he murmured, ‘I am happy.’

He fell into a light slumber, and waking smiled as before; then, spoke
of beautiful gardens, which he said stretched out before him, and were
filled with figures of men, women, and many children, all with light
upon their faces; then, whispered that it was Eden--and so died.



CHAPTER 59

The Plots begin to fail, and Doubts and Dangers to disturb the Plotter


Ralph sat alone, in the solitary room where he was accustomed to take
his meals, and to sit of nights when no profitable occupation called
him abroad. Before him was an untasted breakfast, and near to where his
fingers beat restlessly upon the table, lay his watch. It was long past
the time at which, for many years, he had put it in his pocket and gone
with measured steps downstairs to the business of the day, but he took
as little heed of its monotonous warning, as of the meat and drink
before him, and remained with his head resting on one hand, and his eyes
fixed moodily on the ground.

This departure from his regular and constant habit, in one so regular
and unvarying in all that appertained to the daily pursuit of riches,
would almost of itself have told that the usurer was not well. That he
laboured under some mental or bodily indisposition, and that it was one
of no slight kind so to affect a man like him, was sufficiently shown by
his haggard face, jaded air, and hollow languid eyes: which he raised
at last with a start and a hasty glance around him, as one who suddenly
awakes from sleep, and cannot immediately recognise the place in which
he finds himself.

‘What is this,’ he said, ‘that hangs over me, and I cannot shake off? I
have never pampered myself, and should not be ill. I have never moped,
and pined, and yielded to fancies; but what CAN a man do without rest?’

He pressed his hand upon his forehead.

‘Night after night comes and goes, and I have no rest. If I sleep, what
rest is that which is disturbed by constant dreams of the same detested
faces crowding round me--of the same detested people, in every variety
of action, mingling with all I say and do, and always to my defeat?
Waking, what rest have I, constantly haunted by this heavy shadow of--I
know not what--which is its worst character? I must have rest. One
night’s unbroken rest, and I should be a man again.’

Pushing the table from him while he spoke, as though he loathed the
sight of food, he encountered the watch: the hands of which were almost
upon noon.

‘This is strange!’ he said; ‘noon, and Noggs not here! What drunken
brawl keeps him away? I would give something now--something in money
even after that dreadful loss--if he had stabbed a man in a tavern
scuffle, or broken into a house, or picked a pocket, or done anything
that would send him abroad with an iron ring upon his leg, and rid me of
him. Better still, if I could throw temptation in his way, and lure him
on to rob me. He should be welcome to what he took, so I brought the law
upon him; for he is a traitor, I swear! How, or when, or where, I don’t
know, though I suspect.’

After waiting for another half-hour, he dispatched the woman who kept
his house to Newman’s lodging, to inquire if he were ill, and why he had
not come or sent. She brought back answer that he had not been home all
night, and that no one could tell her anything about him.

‘But there is a gentleman, sir,’ she said, ‘below, who was standing at
the door when I came in, and he says--’

‘What says he?’ demanded Ralph, turning angrily upon her. ‘I told you I
would see nobody.’

‘He says,’ replied the woman, abashed by his harshness, ‘that he comes
on very particular business which admits of no excuse; and I thought
perhaps it might be about--’

‘About what, in the devil’s name?’ said Ralph. ‘You spy and speculate on
people’s business with me, do you?’

‘Dear, no, sir! I saw you were anxious, and thought it might be about Mr
Noggs; that’s all.’

‘Saw I was anxious!’ muttered Ralph; ‘they all watch me, now. Where is
this person? You did not say I was not down yet, I hope?’

The woman replied that he was in the little office, and that she had
said her master was engaged, but she would take the message.

‘Well,’ said Ralph, ‘I’ll see him. Go you to your kitchen, and keep
there. Do you mind me?’

Glad to be released, the woman quickly disappeared. Collecting himself,
and assuming as much of his accustomed manner as his utmost resolution
could summon, Ralph descended the stairs. After pausing for a few
moments, with his hand upon the lock, he entered Newman’s room, and
confronted Mr. Charles Cheeryble.

Of all men alive, this was one of the last he would have wished to meet
at any time; but, now that he recognised in him only the patron
and protector of Nicholas, he would rather have seen a spectre. One
beneficial effect, however, the encounter had upon him. It instantly
roused all his dormant energies; rekindled in his breast the passions
that, for many years, had found an improving home there; called up all
his wrath, hatred, and malice; restored the sneer to his lip, and the
scowl to his brow; and made him again, in all outward appearance, the
same Ralph Nickleby whom so many had bitter cause to remember.

‘Humph!’ said Ralph, pausing at the door. ‘This is an unexpected favour,
sir.’

‘And an unwelcome one,’ said brother Charles; ‘an unwelcome one, I
know.’

‘Men say you are truth itself, sir,’ replied Ralph. ‘You speak truth
now, at all events, and I’ll not contradict you. The favour is, at
least, as unwelcome as it is unexpected. I can scarcely say more.’

‘Plainly, sir--’ began brother Charles.

‘Plainly, sir,’ interrupted Ralph, ‘I wish this conference to be a short
one, and to end where it begins. I guess the subject upon which you are
about to speak, and I’ll not hear you. You like plainness, I believe;
there it is. Here is the door as you see. Our way lies in very different
directions. Take yours, I beg of you, and leave me to pursue mine in
quiet.’

‘In quiet!’ repeated brother Charles mildly, and looking at him with
more of pity than reproach. ‘To pursue HIS way in quiet!’

‘You will scarcely remain in my house, I presume, sir, against my will,’
said Ralph; ‘or you can scarcely hope to make an impression upon a
man who closes his ears to all that you can say, and is firmly and
resolutely determined not to hear you.’

‘Mr. Nickleby, sir,’ returned brother Charles: no less mildly than
before, but firmly too: ‘I come here against my will, sorely and
grievously against my will. I have never been in this house before; and,
to speak my mind, sir, I don’t feel at home or easy in it, and have no
wish ever to be here again. You do not guess the subject on which I come
to speak to you; you do not indeed. I am sure of that, or your manner
would be a very different one.’

Ralph glanced keenly at him, but the clear eye and open countenance of
the honest old merchant underwent no change of expression, and met his
look without reserve.

‘Shall I go on?’ said Mr. Cheeryble.

‘Oh, by all means, if you please,’ returned Ralph drily. ‘Here are walls
to speak to, sir, a desk, and two stools: most attentive auditors, and
certain not to interrupt you. Go on, I beg; make my house yours, and
perhaps by the time I return from my walk, you will have finished what
you have to say, and will yield me up possession again.’

So saying, he buttoned his coat, and turning into the passage, took down
his hat. The old gentleman followed, and was about to speak, when Ralph
waved him off impatiently, and said:

‘Not a word. I tell you, sir, not a word. Virtuous as you are, you are
not an angel yet, to appear in men’s houses whether they will or no, and
pour your speech into unwilling ears. Preach to the walls I tell you;
not to me!’

‘I am no angel, Heaven knows,’ returned brother Charles, shaking his
head, ‘but an erring and imperfect man; nevertheless, there is
one quality which all men have, in common with the angels, blessed
opportunities of exercising, if they will; mercy. It is an errand of
mercy that brings me here. Pray let me discharge it.’

‘I show no mercy,’ retorted Ralph with a triumphant smile, ‘and I
ask none. Seek no mercy from me, sir, in behalf of the fellow who has
imposed upon your childish credulity, but let him expect the worst that
I can do.’

‘HE ask mercy at your hands!’ exclaimed the old merchant warmly; ‘ask it
at his, sir; ask it at his. If you will not hear me now, when you may,
hear me when you must, or anticipate what I would say, and take measures
to prevent our ever meeting again. Your nephew is a noble lad, sir, an
honest, noble lad. What you are, Mr. Nickleby, I will not say; but what
you have done, I know. Now, sir, when you go about the business in which
you have been recently engaged, and find it difficult of pursuing, come
to me and my brother Ned, and Tim Linkinwater, sir, and we’ll explain
it for you--and come soon, or it may be too late, and you may have it
explained with a little more roughness, and a little less delicacy--and
never forget, sir, that I came here this morning, in mercy to you, and
am still ready to talk to you in the same spirit.’

With these words, uttered with great emphasis and emotion, brother
Charles put on his broad-brimmed hat, and, passing Ralph Nickleby
without any other remark, trotted nimbly into the street. Ralph looked
after him, but neither moved nor spoke for some time: when he broke what
almost seemed the silence of stupefaction, by a scornful laugh.

‘This,’ he said, ‘from its wildness, should be another of those dreams
that have so broken my rest of late. In mercy to me! Pho! The old
simpleton has gone mad.’

Although he expressed himself in this derisive and contemptuous manner,
it was plain that, the more Ralph pondered, the more ill at ease he
became, and the more he laboured under some vague anxiety and alarm,
which increased as the time passed on and no tidings of Newman Noggs
arrived. After waiting until late in the afternoon, tortured by various
apprehensions and misgivings, and the recollection of the warning which
his nephew had given him when they last met: the further confirmation of
which now presented itself in one shape of probability, now in another,
and haunted him perpetually: he left home, and, scarcely knowing why,
save that he was in a suspicious and agitated mood, betook himself to
Snawley’s house. His wife presented herself; and, of her, Ralph inquired
whether her husband was at home.

‘No,’ she said sharply, ‘he is not indeed, and I don’t think he will be
at home for a very long time; that’s more.’

‘Do you know who I am?’ asked Ralph.

‘Oh yes, I know you very well; too well, perhaps, and perhaps he does
too, and sorry am I that I should have to say it.’

‘Tell him that I saw him through the window-blind above, as I crossed
the road just now, and that I would speak to him on business,’ said
Ralph. ‘Do you hear?’

‘I hear,’ rejoined Mrs. Snawley, taking no further notice of the request.

‘I knew this woman was a hypocrite, in the way of psalms and Scripture
phrases,’ said Ralph, passing quietly by, ‘but I never knew she drank
before.’

‘Stop! You don’t come in here,’ said Mr. Snawley’s better-half,
interposing her person, which was a robust one, in the doorway. ‘You
have said more than enough to him on business, before now. I always told
him what dealing with you and working out your schemes would come to.
It was either you or the schoolmaster--one of you, or the two between
you--that got the forged letter done; remember that! That wasn’t his
doing, so don’t lay it at his door.’

‘Hold your tongue, you Jezebel,’ said Ralph, looking fearfully round.

‘Ah, I know when to hold my tongue, and when to speak, Mr. Nickleby,’
retorted the dame. ‘Take care that other people know when to hold
theirs.’

‘You jade,’ said Ralph, ‘if your husband has been idiot enough to trust
you with his secrets, keep them; keep them, she-devil that you are!’

‘Not so much his secrets as other people’s secrets, perhaps,’ retorted
the woman; ‘not so much his secrets as yours. None of your black looks
at me! You’ll want ‘em all, perhaps, for another time. You had better
keep ‘em.’

‘Will you,’ said Ralph, suppressing his passion as well as he could,
and clutching her tightly by the wrist; ‘will you go to your husband and
tell him that I know he is at home, and that I must see him? And
will you tell me what it is that you and he mean by this new style of
behaviour?’

‘No,’ replied the woman, violently disengaging herself, ‘I’ll do
neither.’

‘You set me at defiance, do you?’ said Ralph.

‘Yes,’ was the answer. I do.’

For an instant Ralph had his hand raised, as though he were about to
strike her; but, checking himself, and nodding his head and muttering as
though to assure her he would not forget this, walked away.

Thence, he went straight to the inn which Mr. Squeers frequented, and
inquired when he had been there last; in the vague hope that, successful
or unsuccessful, he might, by this time, have returned from his mission
and be able to assure him that all was safe. But Mr. Squeers had not been
there for ten days, and all that the people could tell about him was,
that he had left his luggage and his bill.

Disturbed by a thousand fears and surmises, and bent upon ascertaining
whether Squeers had any suspicion of Snawley, or was, in any way, a
party to this altered behaviour, Ralph determined to hazard the
extreme step of inquiring for him at the Lambeth lodging, and having an
interview with him even there. Bent upon this purpose, and in that mood
in which delay is insupportable, he repaired at once to the place; and
being, by description, perfectly acquainted with the situation of his
room, crept upstairs and knocked gently at the door.

Not one, nor two, nor three, nor yet a dozen knocks, served to convince
Ralph, against his wish, that there was nobody inside. He reasoned that
he might be asleep; and, listening, almost persuaded himself that he
could hear him breathe. Even when he was satisfied that he could not be
there, he sat patiently on a broken stair and waited; arguing, that he
had gone out upon some slight errand, and must soon return.

Many feet came up the creaking stairs; and the step of some seemed to
his listening ear so like that of the man for whom he waited, that Ralph
often stood up to be ready to address him when he reached the top; but,
one by one, each person turned off into some room short of the place
where he was stationed: and at every such disappointment he felt quite
chilled and lonely.

At length he felt it was hopeless to remain, and going downstairs again,
inquired of one of the lodgers if he knew anything of Mr. Squeers’s
movements--mentioning that worthy by an assumed name which had been
agreed upon between them. By this lodger he was referred to another, and
by him to someone else, from whom he learnt, that, late on the previous
night, he had gone out hastily with two men, who had shortly afterwards
returned for the old woman who lived on the same floor; and that,
although the circumstance had attracted the attention of the informant,
he had not spoken to them at the time, nor made any inquiry afterwards.

This possessed him with the idea that, perhaps, Peg Sliderskew had been
apprehended for the robbery, and that Mr. Squeers, being with her at the
time, had been apprehended also, on suspicion of being a confederate. If
this were so, the fact must be known to Gride; and to Gride’s house he
directed his steps; now thoroughly alarmed, and fearful that there were
indeed plots afoot, tending to his discomfiture and ruin.

Arrived at the usurer’s house, he found the windows close shut, the
dingy blinds drawn down; all was silent, melancholy, and deserted. But
this was its usual aspect. He knocked--gently at first--then loud and
vigorously. Nobody came. He wrote a few words in pencil on a card, and
having thrust it under the door was going away, when a noise above, as
though a window-sash were stealthily raised, caught his ear, and looking
up he could just discern the face of Gride himself, cautiously peering
over the house parapet from the window of the garret. Seeing who was
below, he drew it in again; not so quickly, however, but that Ralph let
him know he was observed, and called to him to come down.

The call being repeated, Gride looked out again, so cautiously that no
part of the old man’s body was visible. The sharp features and white
hair appearing alone, above the parapet, looked like a severed head
garnishing the wall.

‘Hush!’ he cried. ‘Go away, go away!’

‘Come down,’ said Ralph, beckoning him.

‘Go a--way!’ squeaked Gride, shaking his head in a sort of ecstasy of
impatience. ‘Don’t speak to me, don’t knock, don’t call attention to the
house, but go away.’

‘I’ll knock, I swear, till I have your neighbours up in arms,’ said
Ralph, ‘if you don’t tell me what you mean by lurking there, you whining
cur.’

‘I can’t hear what you say--don’t talk to me--it isn’t safe--go away--go
away!’ returned Gride.

‘Come down, I say. Will you come down?’ said Ralph fiercely.

‘No--o--o--oo,’ snarled Gride. He drew in his head; and Ralph, left
standing in the street, could hear the sash closed, as gently and
carefully as it had been opened.

‘How is this,’ said he, ‘that they all fall from me, and shun me like
the plague, these men who have licked the dust from my feet? IS my
day past, and is this indeed the coming on of night? I’ll know what it
means! I will, at any cost. I am firmer and more myself, just now, than
I have been these many days.’

Turning from the door, which, in the first transport of his rage, he had
meditated battering upon until Gride’s very fears should impel him
to open it, he turned his face towards the city, and working his way
steadily through the crowd which was pouring from it (it was by this
time between five and six o’clock in the afternoon) went straight to the
house of business of the brothers Cheeryble, and putting his head into
the glass case, found Tim Linkinwater alone.

‘My name’s Nickleby,’ said Ralph.

‘I know it,’ replied Tim, surveying him through his spectacles.

‘Which of your firm was it who called on me this morning?’ demanded
Ralph.

‘Mr. Charles.’

‘Then, tell Mr. Charles I want to see him.’

‘You shall see,’ said Tim, getting off his stool with great agility,
‘you shall see, not only Mr. Charles, but Mr. Ned likewise.’

Tim stopped, looked steadily and severely at Ralph, nodded his head
once, in a curt manner which seemed to say there was a little more
behind, and vanished. After a short interval, he returned, and, ushering
Ralph into the presence of the two brothers, remained in the room
himself.

‘I want to speak to you, who spoke to me this morning,’ said Ralph,
pointing out with his finger the man whom he addressed.

‘I have no secrets from my brother Ned, or from Tim Linkinwater,’
observed brother Charles quietly.

‘I have,’ said Ralph.

‘Mr. Nickleby, sir,’ said brother Ned, ‘the matter upon which my brother
Charles called upon you this morning is one which is already perfectly
well known to us three, and to others besides, and must unhappily
soon become known to a great many more. He waited upon you, sir, this
morning, alone, as a matter of delicacy and consideration. We feel, now,
that further delicacy and consideration would be misplaced; and, if we
confer together, it must be as we are or not at all.’

‘Well, gentlemen,’ said Ralph with a curl of the lip, ‘talking in
riddles would seem to be the peculiar forte of you two, and I suppose
your clerk, like a prudent man, has studied the art also with a view to
your good graces. Talk in company, gentlemen, in God’s name. I’ll humour
you.’

‘Humour!’ cried Tim Linkinwater, suddenly growing very red in the face.
‘He’ll humour us! He’ll humour Cheeryble Brothers! Do you hear that? Do
you hear him? DO you hear him say he’ll humour Cheeryble Brothers?’

‘Tim,’ said Charles and Ned together, ‘pray, Tim, pray now, don’t.’

Tim, taking the hint, stifled his indignation as well as he could,
and suffered it to escape through his spectacles, with the additional
safety-valve of a short hysterical laugh now and then, which seemed to
relieve him mightily.

‘As nobody bids me to a seat,’ said Ralph, looking round, ‘I’ll take
one, for I am fatigued with walking. And now, if you please, gentlemen,
I wish to know--I demand to know; I have the right--what you have to
say to me, which justifies such a tone as you have assumed, and that
underhand interference in my affairs which, I have reason to suppose,
you have been practising. I tell you plainly, gentlemen, that little as
I care for the opinion of the world (as the slang goes), I don’t choose
to submit quietly to slander and malice. Whether you suffer yourselves
to be imposed upon too easily, or wilfully make yourselves parties to
it, the result to me is the same. In either case, you can’t expect from
a plain man like myself much consideration or forbearance.’

So coolly and deliberately was this said, that nine men out of ten,
ignorant of the circumstances, would have supposed Ralph to be really
an injured man. There he sat, with folded arms; paler than usual,
certainly, and sufficiently ill-favoured, but quite collected--far more
so than the brothers or the exasperated Tim--and ready to face out the
worst.

‘Very well, sir,’ said brother Charles. ‘Very well. Brother Ned, will
you ring the bell?’

‘Charles, my dear fellow! stop one instant,’ returned the other. ‘It
will be better for Mr. Nickleby and for our object that he should remain
silent, if he can, till we have said what we have to say. I wish him to
understand that.’

‘Quite right, quite right,’ said brother Charles.

Ralph smiled, but made no reply. The bell was rung; the room-door
opened; a man came in, with a halting walk; and, looking round, Ralph’s
eyes met those of Newman Noggs. From that moment, his heart began to
fail him.

‘This is a good beginning,’ he said bitterly. ‘Oh! this is a good
beginning. You are candid, honest, open-hearted, fair-dealing men! I
always knew the real worth of such characters as yours! To tamper with a
fellow like this, who would sell his soul (if he had one) for drink, and
whose every word is a lie. What men are safe if this is done? Oh, it’s a
good beginning!’

‘I WILL speak,’ cried Newman, standing on tiptoe to look over
Tim’s head, who had interposed to prevent him. ‘Hallo, you sir--old
Nickleby!--what do you mean when you talk of “a fellow like this”? Who
made me “a fellow like this”? If I would sell my soul for drink, why
wasn’t I a thief, swindler, housebreaker, area sneak, robber of pence
out of the trays of blind men’s dogs, rather than your drudge and
packhorse? If my every word was a lie, why wasn’t I a pet and favourite
of yours? Lie! When did I ever cringe and fawn to you. Tell me that!
I served you faithfully. I did more work, because I was poor, and took
more hard words from you because I despised you and them, than any
man you could have got from the parish workhouse. I did. I served you
because I was proud; because I was a lonely man with you, and there were
no other drudges to see my degradation; and because nobody knew, better
than you, that I was a ruined man: that I hadn’t always been what I
am: and that I might have been better off, if I hadn’t been a fool and
fallen into the hands of you and others who were knaves. Do you deny
that?’

‘Gently,’ reasoned Tim; ‘you said you wouldn’t.’

‘I said I wouldn’t!’ cried Newman, thrusting him aside, and moving his
hand as Tim moved, so as to keep him at arm’s length; ‘don’t tell me!
Here, you Nickleby! Don’t pretend not to mind me; it won’t do; I know
better. You were talking of tampering, just now. Who tampered with
Yorkshire schoolmasters, and, while they sent the drudge out, that he
shouldn’t overhear, forgot that such great caution might render him
suspicious, and that he might watch his master out at nights, and might
set other eyes to watch the schoolmaster? Who tampered with a selfish
father, urging him to sell his daughter to old Arthur Gride, and
tampered with Gride too, and did so in the little office, WITH A CLOSET
IN THE ROOM?’

Ralph had put a great command upon himself; but he could not have
suppressed a slight start, if he had been certain to be beheaded for it
next moment.

‘Aha!’ cried Newman, ‘you mind me now, do you? What first set this fag
to be jealous of his master’s actions, and to feel that, if he hadn’t
crossed him when he might, he would have been as bad as he, or worse?
That master’s cruel treatment of his own flesh and blood, and vile
designs upon a young girl who interested even his broken-down, drunken,
miserable hack, and made him linger in his service, in the hope of doing
her some good (as, thank God, he had done others once or twice before),
when he would, otherwise, have relieved his feelings by pummelling his
master soundly, and then going to the Devil. He would--mark that; and
mark this--that I’m here now, because these gentlemen thought it best.
When I sought them out (as I did; there was no tampering with me),
I told them I wanted help to find you out, to trace you down, to go
through with what I had begun, to help the right; and that when I had
done it, I’d burst into your room and tell you all, face to face, man
to man, and like a man. Now I’ve said my say, and let anybody else say
theirs, and fire away!’

With this concluding sentiment, Newman Noggs, who had been perpetually
sitting down and getting up again all through his speech, which he had
delivered in a series of jerks; and who was, from the violent exercise
and the excitement combined, in a state of most intense and fiery heat;
became, without passing through any intermediate stage, stiff, upright,
and motionless, and so remained, staring at Ralph Nickleby with all his
might and main.

Ralph looked at him for an instant, and for an instant only; then, waved
his hand, and beating the ground with his foot, said in a choking voice:

‘Go on, gentlemen, go on! I’m patient, you see. There’s law to be had,
there’s law. I shall call you to an account for this. Take care what you
say; I shall make you prove it.’

‘The proof is ready,’ returned brother Charles, ‘quite ready to our
hands. The man Snawley, last night, made a confession.’

‘Who may “the man Snawley” be,’ returned Ralph, ‘and what may his
“confession” have to do with my affairs?’

To this inquiry, put with a dogged inflexibility of manner, the old
gentleman returned no answer, but went on to say, that to show him how
much they were in earnest, it would be necessary to tell him, not only
what accusations were made against him, but what proof of them they
had, and how that proof had been acquired. This laying open of the whole
question brought up brother Ned, Tim Linkinwater, and Newman Noggs, all
three at once; who, after a vast deal of talking together, and a scene
of great confusion, laid before Ralph, in distinct terms, the following
statement.

That, Newman, having been solemnly assured by one not then producible
that Smike was not the son of Snawley, and this person having offered to
make oath to that effect, if necessary, they had by this communication
been first led to doubt the claim set up, which they would otherwise
have seen no reason to dispute, supported as it was by evidence which
they had no power of disproving. That, once suspecting the existence of
a conspiracy, they had no difficulty in tracing back its origin to the
malice of Ralph, and the vindictiveness and avarice of Squeers. That,
suspicion and proof being two very different things, they had been
advised by a lawyer, eminent for his sagacity and acuteness in such
practice, to resist the proceedings taken on the other side for the
recovery of the youth as slowly and artfully as possible, and meanwhile
to beset Snawley (with whom it was clear the main falsehood must rest);
to lead him, if possible, into contradictory and conflicting statements;
to harass him by all available means; and so to practise on his fears,
and regard for his own safety, as to induce him to divulge the whole
scheme, and to give up his employer and whomsoever else he could
implicate. That, all this had been skilfully done; but that Snawley,
who was well practised in the arts of low cunning and intrigue,
had successfully baffled all their attempts, until an unexpected
circumstance had brought him, last night, upon his knees.

It thus arose. When Newman Noggs reported that Squeers was again in
town, and that an interview of such secrecy had taken place between him
and Ralph that he had been sent out of the house, plainly lest he should
overhear a word, a watch was set upon the schoolmaster, in the hope
that something might be discovered which would throw some light upon
the suspected plot. It being found, however, that he held no further
communication with Ralph, nor any with Snawley, and lived quite alone,
they were completely at fault; the watch was withdrawn, and they would
have observed his motions no longer, if it had not happened that,
one night, Newman stumbled unobserved on him and Ralph in the street
together. Following them, he discovered, to his surprise, that they
repaired to various low lodging-houses, and taverns kept by broken
gamblers, to more than one of whom Ralph was known, and that they were
in pursuit--so he found by inquiries when they had left--of an
old woman, whose description exactly tallied with that of deaf Mrs
Sliderskew. Affairs now appearing to assume a more serious complexion,
the watch was renewed with increased vigilance; an officer was procured,
who took up his abode in the same tavern with Squeers: and by him and
Frank Cheeryble the footsteps of the unconscious schoolmaster were
dogged, until he was safely housed in the lodging at Lambeth. Mr. Squeers
having shifted his lodging, the officer shifted his, and lying concealed
in the same street, and, indeed, in the opposite house, soon found that
Mr. Squeers and Mrs. Sliderskew were in constant communication.

In this state of things, Arthur Gride was appealed to. The robbery,
partly owing to the inquisitiveness of the neighbours, and partly to
his own grief and rage, had, long ago, become known; but he positively
refused to give his sanction or yield any assistance to the old woman’s
capture, and was seized with such a panic at the idea of being called
upon to give evidence against her, that he shut himself up close in his
house, and refused to hold communication with anybody. Upon this, the
pursuers took counsel together, and, coming so near the truth as to
arrive at the conclusion that Gride and Ralph, with Squeers for their
instrument, were negotiating for the recovery of some of the stolen
papers which would not bear the light, and might possibly explain the
hints relative to Madeline which Newman had overheard, resolved that Mrs
Sliderskew should be taken into custody before she had parted with
them: and Squeers too, if anything suspicious could be attached to
him. Accordingly, a search-warrant being procured, and all prepared, Mr
Squeers’s window was watched, until his light was put out, and the time
arrived when, as had been previously ascertained, he usually visited
Mrs. Sliderskew. This done, Frank Cheeryble and Newman stole upstairs to
listen to their discourse, and to give the signal to the officer at the
most favourable time. At what an opportune moment they arrived, how
they listened, and what they heard, is already known to the reader. Mr
Squeers, still half stunned, was hurried off with a stolen deed in his
possession, and Mrs. Sliderskew was apprehended likewise. The information
being promptly carried to Snawley that Squeers was in custody--he was
not told for what--that worthy, first extorting a promise that he should
be kept harmless, declared the whole tale concerning Smike to be a
fiction and forgery, and implicated Ralph Nickleby to the fullest
extent. As to Mr. Squeers, he had, that morning, undergone a private
examination before a magistrate; and, being unable to account
satisfactorily for his possession of the deed or his companionship with
Mrs. Sliderskew, had been, with her, remanded for a week.

All these discoveries were now related to Ralph, circumstantially, and
in detail. Whatever impression they secretly produced, he suffered no
sign of emotion to escape him, but sat perfectly still, not raising his
frowning eyes from the ground, and covering his mouth with his hand.
When the narrative was concluded; he raised his head hastily, as if
about to speak, but on brother Charles resuming, fell into his old
attitude again.

‘I told you this morning,’ said the old gentleman, laying his hand upon
his brother’s shoulder, ‘that I came to you in mercy. How far you may be
implicated in this last transaction, or how far the person who is now
in custody may criminate you, you best know. But, justice must take its
course against the parties implicated in the plot against this poor,
unoffending, injured lad. It is not in my power, or in the power of my
brother Ned, to save you from the consequences. The utmost we can do is,
to warn you in time, and to give you an opportunity of escaping them. We
would not have an old man like you disgraced and punished by your near
relation; nor would we have him forget, like you, all ties of blood
and nature. We entreat you--brother Ned, you join me, I know, in this
entreaty, and so, Tim Linkinwater, do you, although you pretend to be an
obstinate dog, sir, and sit there frowning as if you didn’t--we entreat
you to retire from London, to take shelter in some place where you will
be safe from the consequences of these wicked designs, and where you may
have time, sir, to atone for them, and to become a better man.’

‘And do you think,’ returned Ralph, rising, ‘and do you think, you will
so easily crush ME? Do you think that a hundred well-arranged plans, or
a hundred suborned witnesses, or a hundred false curs at my heels, or a
hundred canting speeches full of oily words, will move me? I thank you
for disclosing your schemes, which I am now prepared for. You have not
the man to deal with that you think; try me! and remember that I
spit upon your fair words and false dealings, and dare you--provoke
you--taunt you--to do to me the very worst you can!’

Thus they parted, for that time; but the worst had not come yet.



CHAPTER 60

The Dangers thicken, and the Worst is told


Instead of going home, Ralph threw himself into the first street
cabriolet he could find, and, directing the driver towards the
police-office of the district in which Mr. Squeers’s misfortunes had
occurred, alighted at a short distance from it, and, discharging the
man, went the rest of his way thither on foot. Inquiring for the object
of his solicitude, he learnt that he had timed his visit well; for Mr
Squeers was, in fact, at that moment waiting for a hackney coach he had
ordered, and in which he purposed proceeding to his week’s retirement,
like a gentleman.

Demanding speech with the prisoner, he was ushered into a kind of
waiting-room in which, by reason of his scholastic profession and
superior respectability, Mr. Squeers had been permitted to pass the day.
Here, by the light of a guttering and blackened candle, he could barely
discern the schoolmaster, fast asleep on a bench in a remote corner.
An empty glass stood on a table before him, which, with his somnolent
condition and a very strong smell of brandy and water, forewarned
the visitor that Mr. Squeers had been seeking, in creature comforts, a
temporary forgetfulness of his unpleasant situation.

It was not a very easy matter to rouse him: so lethargic and heavy were
his slumbers. Regaining his faculties by slow and faint glimmerings, he
at length sat upright; and, displaying a very yellow face, a very
red nose, and a very bristly beard: the joint effect of which was
considerably heightened by a dirty white handkerchief, spotted with
blood, drawn over the crown of his head and tied under his chin: stared
ruefully at Ralph in silence, until his feelings found a vent in this
pithy sentence:

‘I say, young fellow, you’ve been and done it now; you have!’

‘What’s the matter with your head?’ asked Ralph.

‘Why, your man, your informing kidnapping man, has been and broke it,’
rejoined Squeers sulkily; ‘that’s what’s the matter with it. You’ve come
at last, have you?’

‘Why have you not sent to me?’ said Ralph. ‘How could I come till I knew
what had befallen you?’

‘My family!’ hiccuped Mr. Squeers, raising his eye to the ceiling: ‘my
daughter, as is at that age when all the sensibilities is a-coming out
strong in blow--my son as is the young Norval of private life, and the
pride and ornament of a doting willage--here’s a shock for my family!
The coat-of-arms of the Squeerses is tore, and their sun is gone down
into the ocean wave!’

‘You have been drinking,’ said Ralph, ‘and have not yet slept yourself
sober.’

‘I haven’t been drinking YOUR health, my codger,’ replied Mr. Squeers;
‘so you have nothing to do with that.’

Ralph suppressed the indignation which the schoolmaster’s altered and
insolent manner awakened, and asked again why he had not sent to him.

‘What should I get by sending to you?’ returned Squeers. ‘To be known to
be in with you wouldn’t do me a deal of good, and they won’t take bail
till they know something more of the case, so here am I hard and fast:
and there are you, loose and comfortable.’

‘And so must you be in a few days,’ retorted Ralph, with affected
good-humour. ‘They can’t hurt you, man.’

‘Why, I suppose they can’t do much to me, if I explain how it was that I
got into the good company of that there ca-daverous old Slider,’ replied
Squeers viciously, ‘who I wish was dead and buried, and resurrected and
dissected, and hung upon wires in a anatomical museum, before ever I’d
had anything to do with her. This is what him with the powdered head
says this morning, in so many words: “Prisoner! As you have been found
in company with this woman; as you were detected in possession of
this document; as you were engaged with her in fraudulently destroying
others, and can give no satisfactory account of yourself; I shall remand
you for a week, in order that inquiries may be made, and evidence got.
And meanwhile I can’t take any bail for your appearance.” Well then,
what I say now is, that I CAN give a satisfactory account of myself;
I can hand in the card of my establishment and say, “I am the Wackford
Squeers as is therein named, sir. I am the man as is guaranteed,
by unimpeachable references, to be a out-and-outer in morals and
uprightness of principle. Whatever is wrong in this business is no fault
of mine. I had no evil design in it, sir. I was not aware that anything
was wrong. I was merely employed by a friend, my friend Mr. Ralph
Nickleby, of Golden Square. Send for him, sir, and ask him what he has
to say; he’s the man; not me!”’

‘What document was it that you had?’ asked Ralph, evading, for the
moment, the point just raised.

‘What document? Why, THE document,’ replied Squeers. ‘The Madeline
What’s-her-name one. It was a will; that’s what it was.’

‘Of what nature, whose will, when dated, how benefiting her, to what
extent?’ asked Ralph hurriedly.

‘A will in her favour; that’s all I know,’ rejoined Squeers, ‘and that’s
more than you’d have known, if you’d had them bellows on your head. It’s
all owing to your precious caution that they got hold of it. If you had
let me burn it, and taken my word that it was gone, it would have been a
heap of ashes behind the fire, instead of being whole and sound, inside
of my great-coat.’

‘Beaten at every point!’ muttered Ralph.

‘Ah!’ sighed Squeers, who, between the brandy and water and his broken
head, wandered strangely, ‘at the delightful village of Dotheboys near
Greta Bridge in Yorkshire, youth are boarded, clothed, booked, washed,
furnished with pocket-money, provided with all necessaries, instructed
in all languages living and dead, mathematics, orthography, geometry,
astronomy, trigonometry--this is a altered state of trigonomics, this
is! A double 1--all, everything--a cobbler’s weapon. U-p-up, adjective,
not down. S-q-u-double e-r-s-Squeers, noun substantive, a educator of
youth. Total, all up with Squeers!’

His running on, in this way, had afforded Ralph an opportunity of
recovering his presence of mind, which at once suggested to him
the necessity of removing, as far as possible, the schoolmaster’s
misgivings, and leading him to believe that his safety and best policy
lay in the preservation of a rigid silence.

‘I tell you, once again,’ he said, ‘they can’t hurt you. You shall have
an action for false imprisonment, and make a profit of this, yet. We
will devise a story for you that should carry you through twenty times
such a trivial scrape as this; and if they want security in a thousand
pounds for your reappearance in case you should be called upon, you
shall have it. All you have to do is, to keep back the truth. You’re a
little fuddled tonight, and may not be able to see this as clearly as
you would at another time; but this is what you must do, and you’ll need
all your senses about you; for a slip might be awkward.’

‘Oh!’ said Squeers, who had looked cunningly at him, with his head stuck
on one side, like an old raven. ‘That’s what I’m to do, is it? Now then,
just you hear a word or two from me. I an’t a-going to have any stories
made for me, and I an’t a-going to stick to any. If I find matters going
again me, I shall expect you to take your share, and I’ll take care you
do. You never said anything about danger. I never bargained for being
brought into such a plight as this, and I don’t mean to take it as quiet
as you think. I let you lead me on, from one thing to another, because
we had been mixed up together in a certain sort of a way, and if you had
liked to be ill-natured you might perhaps have hurt the business, and
if you liked to be good-natured you might throw a good deal in my way.
Well; if all goes right now, that’s quite correct, and I don’t mind it;
but if anything goes wrong, then times are altered, and I shall just say
and do whatever I think may serve me most, and take advice from nobody.
My moral influence with them lads,’ added Mr. Squeers, with deeper
gravity, ‘is a tottering to its basis. The images of Mrs. Squeers, my
daughter, and my son Wackford, all short of vittles, is perpetually
before me; every other consideration melts away and vanishes, in front
of these; the only number in all arithmetic that I know of, as a husband
and a father, is number one, under this here most fatal go!’

How long Mr. Squeers might have declaimed, or how stormy a discussion his
declamation might have led to, nobody knows. Being interrupted, at this
point, by the arrival of the coach and an attendant who was to bear
him company, he perched his hat with great dignity on the top of the
handkerchief that bound his head; and, thrusting one hand in his pocket,
and taking the attendant’s arm with the other, suffered himself to be
led forth.

‘As I supposed from his not sending!’ thought Ralph. ‘This fellow, I
plainly see through all his tipsy fooling, has made up his mind to turn
upon me. I am so beset and hemmed in, that they are not only all struck
with fear, but, like the beasts in the fable, have their fling at me
now, though time was, and no longer ago than yesterday too, when they
were all civility and compliance. But they shall not move me. I’ll not
give way. I will not budge one inch!’

He went home, and was glad to find his housekeeper complaining of
illness, that he might have an excuse for being alone and sending her
away to where she lived: which was hard by. Then, he sat down by the
light of a single candle, and began to think, for the first time, on all
that had taken place that day.

He had neither eaten nor drunk since last night, and, in addition to the
anxiety of mind he had undergone, had been travelling about, from place
to place almost incessantly, for many hours. He felt sick and exhausted,
but could taste nothing save a glass of water, and continued to sit with
his head upon his hand; not resting nor thinking, but laboriously
trying to do both, and feeling that every sense but one of weariness and
desolation, was for the time benumbed.

It was nearly ten o’clock when he heard a knocking at the door, and
still sat quiet as before, as if he could not even bring his thoughts to
bear upon that. It had been often repeated, and he had, several times,
heard a voice outside, saying there was a light in the window (meaning,
as he knew, his own candle), before he could rouse himself and go
downstairs.

‘Mr. Nickleby, there is terrible news for you, and I am sent to beg you
will come with me directly,’ said a voice he seemed to recognise. He
held his hand above his eyes, and, looking out, saw Tim Linkinwater on
the steps.

‘Come where?’ demanded Ralph.

‘To our house, where you came this morning. I have a coach here.’

‘Why should I go there?’ said Ralph.

‘Don’t ask me why, but pray come with me.’

‘Another edition of today!’ returned Ralph, making as though he would
shut the door.

‘No, no!’ cried Tim, catching him by the arm and speaking most
earnestly; ‘it is only that you may hear something that has occurred:
something very dreadful, Mr. Nickleby, which concerns you nearly. Do you
think I would tell you so or come to you like this, if it were not the
case?’

Ralph looked at him more closely. Seeing that he was indeed greatly
excited, he faltered, and could not tell what to say or think.

‘You had better hear this now, than at any other time,’ said Tim; ‘it
may have some influence with you. For Heaven’s sake come!’

Perhaps, at, another time, Ralph’s obstinacy and dislike would have
been proof against any appeal from such a quarter, however emphatically
urged; but now, after a moment’s hesitation, he went into the hall for
his hat, and returning, got into the coach without speaking a word.

Tim well remembered afterwards, and often said, that as Ralph Nickleby
went into the house for this purpose, he saw him, by the light of the
candle which he had set down upon a chair, reel and stagger like a
drunken man. He well remembered, too, that when he had placed his foot
upon the coach-steps, he turned round and looked upon him with a face so
ashy pale and so very wild and vacant that it made him shudder, and for
the moment almost afraid to follow. People were fond of saying that
he had some dark presentiment upon him then, but his emotion might,
perhaps, with greater show of reason, be referred to what he had
undergone that day.

A profound silence was observed during the ride. Arrived at their place
of destination, Ralph followed his conductor into the house, and into a
room where the two brothers were. He was so astounded, not to say awed,
by something of a mute compassion for himself which was visible in their
manner and in that of the old clerk, that he could scarcely speak.

Having taken a seat, however, he contrived to say, though in broken
words, ‘What--what have you to say to me--more than has been said
already?’

The room was old and large, very imperfectly lighted, and terminated in
a bay window, about which hung some heavy drapery. Casting his eyes in
this direction as he spoke, he thought he made out the dusky figure of
a man. He was confirmed in this impression by seeing that the object
moved, as if uneasy under his scrutiny.

‘Who’s that yonder?’ he said.

‘One who has conveyed to us, within these two hours, the intelligence
which caused our sending to you,’ replied brother Charles. ‘Let him be,
sir, let him be for the present.’

‘More riddles!’ said Ralph, faintly. ‘Well, sir?’

In turning his face towards the brothers he was obliged to avert it from
the window; but, before either of them could speak, he had looked round
again. It was evident that he was rendered restless and uncomfortable by
the presence of the unseen person; for he repeated this action several
times, and at length, as if in a nervous state which rendered him
positively unable to turn away from the place, sat so as to have it
opposite him, muttering as an excuse that he could not bear the light.

The brothers conferred apart for a short time: their manner showing
that they were agitated. Ralph glanced at them twice or thrice, and
ultimately said, with a great effort to recover his self-possession,
‘Now, what is this? If I am brought from home at this time of night, let
it be for something. What have you got to tell me?’ After a short pause,
he added, ‘Is my niece dead?’

He had struck upon a key which rendered the task of commencement an
easier one. Brother Charles turned, and said that it was a death of
which they had to tell him, but that his niece was well.

‘You don’t mean to tell me,’ said Ralph, as his eyes brightened, ‘that
her brother’s dead? No, that’s too good. I’d not believe it, if you told
me so. It would be too welcome news to be true.’

‘Shame on you, you hardened and unnatural man,’ cried the other brother,
warmly. ‘Prepare yourself for intelligence which, if you have any human
feeling in your breast, will make even you shrink and tremble. What if
we tell you that a poor unfortunate boy: a child in everything but never
having known one of those tender endearments, or one of those lightsome
hours which make our childhood a time to be remembered like a happy
dream through all our after life: a warm-hearted, harmless, affectionate
creature, who never offended you, or did you wrong, but on whom you have
vented the malice and hatred you have conceived for your nephew, and
whom you have made an instrument for wreaking your bad passions upon
him: what if we tell you that, sinking under your persecution, sir, and
the misery and ill-usage of a life short in years but long in suffering,
this poor creature has gone to tell his sad tale where, for your part in
it, you must surely answer?’

‘If you tell me,’ said Ralph; ‘if you tell me that he is dead, I forgive
you all else. If you tell me that he is dead, I am in your debt and
bound to you for life. He is! I see it in your faces. Who triumphs now?
Is this your dreadful news; this your terrible intelligence? You see
how it moves me. You did well to send. I would have travelled a hundred
miles afoot, through mud, mire, and darkness, to hear this news just at
this time.’

Even then, moved as he was by this savage joy, Ralph could see in the
faces of the two brothers, mingling with their look of disgust and
horror, something of that indefinable compassion for himself which he
had noticed before.

‘And HE brought you the intelligence, did he?’ said Ralph, pointing
with his finger towards the recess already mentioned; ‘and sat there,
no doubt, to see me prostrated and overwhelmed by it! Ha, ha, ha! But I
tell him that I’ll be a sharp thorn in his side for many a long day to
come; and I tell you two, again, that you don’t know him yet; and that
you’ll rue the day you took compassion on the vagabond.’

‘You take me for your nephew,’ said a hollow voice; ‘it would be better
for you, and for me too, if I were he indeed.’

The figure that he had seen so dimly, rose, and came slowly down. He
started back, for he found that he confronted--not Nicholas, as he had
supposed, but Brooker.

Ralph had no reason, that he knew, to fear this man; he had never feared
him before; but the pallor which had been observed in his face when he
issued forth that night, came upon him again. He was seen to tremble,
and his voice changed as he said, keeping his eyes upon him,

‘What does this fellow here? Do you know he is a convict, a felon, a
common thief?’

‘Hear what he has to tell you. Oh, Mr. Nickleby, hear what he has to
tell you, be he what he may!’ cried the brothers, with such emphatic
earnestness, that Ralph turned to them in wonder. They pointed to
Brooker. Ralph again gazed at him: as it seemed mechanically.

‘That boy,’ said the man, ‘that these gentlemen have been talking of--’

‘That boy,’ repeated Ralph, looking vacantly at him.

‘Whom I saw, stretched dead and cold upon his bed, and who is now in his
grave--’

‘Who is now in his grave,’ echoed Ralph, like one who talks in his
sleep.

The man raised his eyes, and clasped his hands solemnly together:

‘--Was your only son, so help me God in heaven!’

In the midst of a dead silence, Ralph sat down, pressing his two hands
upon his temples. He removed them, after a minute, and never was there
seen, part of a living man undisfigured by any wound, such a ghastly
face as he then disclosed. He looked at Brooker, who was by this time
standing at a short distance from him; but did not say one word, or make
the slightest sound or gesture.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the man, ‘I offer no excuses for myself. I am long
past that. If, in telling you how this has happened, I tell you that I
was harshly used, and perhaps driven out of my real nature, I do it only
as a necessary part of my story, and not to shield myself. I am a guilty
man.’

He stopped, as if to recollect, and looking away from Ralph, and
addressing himself to the brothers, proceeded in a subdued and humble
tone:

‘Among those who once had dealings with this man, gentlemen--that’s from
twenty to five-and-twenty years ago--there was one: a rough fox-hunting,
hard-drinking gentleman, who had run through his own fortune, and wanted
to squander away that of his sister: they were both orphans, and she
lived with him and managed his house. I don’t know whether it was,
originally, to back his influence and try to over-persuade the young
woman or not, but he,’ pointing, to Ralph, ‘used to go down to the house
in Leicestershire pretty often, and stop there many days at a time. They
had had a great many dealings together, and he may have gone on some
of those, or to patch up his client’s affairs, which were in a ruinous
state; of course he went for profit. The gentlewoman was not a girl,
but she was, I have heard say, handsome, and entitled to a pretty large
property. In course of time, he married her. The same love of gain
which led him to contract this marriage, led to its being kept strictly
private; for a clause in her father’s will declared that if she married
without her brother’s consent, the property, in which she had only some
life interest while she remained single, should pass away altogether to
another branch of the family. The brother would give no consent that the
sister didn’t buy, and pay for handsomely; Mr. Nickleby would consent to
no such sacrifice; and so they went on, keeping their marriage secret,
and waiting for him to break his neck or die of a fever. He did neither,
and meanwhile the result of this private marriage was a son. The child
was put out to nurse, a long way off; his mother never saw him but once
or twice, and then by stealth; and his father--so eagerly did he thirst
after the money which seemed to come almost within his grasp now,
for his brother-in-law was very ill, and breaking more and more every
day--never went near him, to avoid raising any suspicion. The brother
lingered on; Mr. Nickleby’s wife constantly urged him to avow their
marriage; he peremptorily refused. She remained alone in a dull country
house: seeing little or no company but riotous, drunken sportsmen.
He lived in London and clung to his business. Angry quarrels and
recriminations took place, and when they had been married nearly seven
years, and were within a few weeks of the time when the brother’s death
would have adjusted all, she eloped with a younger man, and left him.’

Here he paused, but Ralph did not stir, and the brothers signed to him
to proceed.

‘It was then that I became acquainted with these circumstances from his
own lips. They were no secrets then; for the brother, and others, knew
them; but they were communicated to me, not on this account, but because
I was wanted. He followed the fugitives. Some said to make money of his
wife’s shame, but, I believe, to take some violent revenge, for that was
as much his character as the other; perhaps more. He didn’t find them,
and she died not long after. I don’t know whether he began to think he
might like the child, or whether he wished to make sure that it should
never fall into its mother’s hands; but, before he went, he intrusted me
with the charge of bringing it home. And I did so.’

He went on, from this point, in a still more humble tone, and spoke in a
very low voice; pointing to Ralph as he resumed.

‘He had used me ill--cruelly--I reminded him in what, not long ago when
I met him in the street--and I hated him. I brought the child home to
his own house, and lodged him in the front garret. Neglect had made him
very sickly, and I was obliged to call in a doctor, who said he must be
removed for change of air, or he would die. I think that first put it in
my head. I did it then. He was gone six weeks, and when he came back, I
told him--with every circumstance well planned and proved; nobody could
have suspected me--that the child was dead and buried. He might have
been disappointed in some intention he had formed, or he might have had
some natural affection, but he WAS grieved at THAT, and I was confirmed
in my design of opening up the secret one day, and making it a means of
getting money from him. I had heard, like most other men, of Yorkshire
schools. I took the child to one kept by a man named Squeers, and left
it there. I gave him the name of Smike. Year by year, I paid twenty
pounds a-year for him for six years; never breathing the secret all the
time; for I had left his father’s service after more hard usage, and
quarrelled with him again. I was sent away from this country. I have
been away nearly eight years. Directly I came home again, I travelled
down into Yorkshire, and, skulking in the village of an evening-time,
made inquiries about the boys at the school, and found that this one,
whom I had placed there, had run away with a young man bearing the name
of his own father. I sought his father out in London, and hinting at
what I could tell him, tried for a little money to support life; but he
repulsed me with threats. I then found out his clerk, and, going on
from little to little, and showing him that there were good reasons for
communicating with me, learnt what was going on; and it was I who told
him that the boy was no son of the man who claimed to be his father. All
this time I had never seen the boy. At length, I heard from this same
source that he was very ill, and where he was. I travelled down there,
that I might recall myself, if possible, to his recollection and confirm
my story. I came upon him unexpectedly; but before I could speak he knew
me--he had good cause to remember me, poor lad!--and I would have sworn
to him if I had met him in the Indies. I knew the piteous face I had
seen in the little child. After a few days’ indecision, I applied to the
young gentleman in whose care he was, and I found that he was dead. He
knows how quickly he recognised me again, how often he had described
me and my leaving him at the school, and how he told him of a garret
he recollected: which is the one I have spoken of, and in his father’s
house to this day. This is my story. I demand to be brought face to face
with the schoolmaster, and put to any possible proof of any part of it,
and I will show that it’s too true, and that I have this guilt upon my
soul.’

‘Unhappy man!’ said the brothers. ‘What reparation can you make for
this?’

‘None, gentlemen, none! I have none to make, and nothing to hope now. I
am old in years, and older still in misery and care. This confession can
bring nothing upon me but new suffering and punishment; but I make it,
and will abide by it whatever comes. I have been made the instrument of
working out this dreadful retribution upon the head of a man who, in
the hot pursuit of his bad ends, has persecuted and hunted down his own
child to death. It must descend upon me too. I know it must fall. My
reparation comes too late; and, neither in this world nor in the next,
can I have hope again!’

He had hardly spoken, when the lamp, which stood upon the table close
to where Ralph was seated, and which was the only one in the room, was
thrown to the ground, and left them in darkness. There was some trifling
confusion in obtaining another light; the interval was a mere nothing;
but when the light appeared, Ralph Nickleby was gone.

The good brothers and Tim Linkinwater occupied some time in discussing
the probability of his return; and, when it became apparent that he
would not come back, they hesitated whether or no to send after him.
At length, remembering how strangely and silently he had sat in one
immovable position during the interview, and thinking he might possibly
be ill, they determined, although it was now very late, to send to his
house on some pretence. Finding an excuse in the presence of Brooker,
whom they knew not how to dispose of without consulting his wishes, they
concluded to act upon this resolution before going to bed.



CHAPTER 61

Wherein Nicholas and his Sister forfeit the good Opinion of all worldly
and prudent People


On the next morning after Brooker’s disclosure had been made, Nicholas
returned home. The meeting between him and those whom he had left there
was not without strong emotion on both sides; for they had been informed
by his letters of what had occurred: and, besides that his griefs
were theirs, they mourned with him the death of one whose forlorn and
helpless state had first established a claim upon their compassion,
and whose truth of heart and grateful earnest nature had, every day,
endeared him to them more and more.

‘I am sure,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, wiping her eyes, and sobbing bitterly,
‘I have lost the best, the most zealous, and most attentive creature
that has ever been a companion to me in my life--putting you, my dear
Nicholas, and Kate, and your poor papa, and that well-behaved nurse who
ran away with the linen and the twelve small forks, out of the question,
of course. Of all the tractable, equal-tempered, attached, and faithful
beings that ever lived, I believe he was the most so. To look round upon
the garden, now, that he took so much pride in, or to go into his room
and see it filled with so many of those little contrivances for our
comfort that he was so fond of making, and made so well, and so little
thought he would leave unfinished--I can’t bear it, I cannot really. Ah!
This is a great trial to me, a great trial. It will be comfort to you,
my dear Nicholas, to the end of your life, to recollect how kind
and good you always were to him--so it will be to me, to think what
excellent terms we were always upon, and how fond he always was of me,
poor fellow! It was very natural you should have been attached to him,
my dear--very--and of course you were, and are very much cut up by this.
I am sure it’s only necessary to look at you and see how changed
you are, to see that; but nobody knows what my feelings are--nobody
can--it’s quite impossible!’

While Mrs. Nickleby, with the utmost sincerity, gave vent to her sorrows
after her own peculiar fashion of considering herself foremost, she
was not the only one who indulged such feelings. Kate, although well
accustomed to forget herself when others were to be considered, could
not repress her grief; Madeline was scarcely less moved than she; and
poor, hearty, honest little Miss La Creevy, who had come upon one of her
visits while Nicholas was away, and had done nothing, since the sad news
arrived, but console and cheer them all, no sooner beheld him coming
in at the door, than she sat herself down upon the stairs, and bursting
into a flood of tears, refused for a long time to be comforted.

‘It hurts me so,’ cried the poor body, ‘to see him come back alone. I
can’t help thinking what he must have suffered himself. I wouldn’t mind
so much if he gave way a little more; but he bears it so manfully.’

‘Why, so I should,’ said Nicholas, ‘should I not?’

‘Yes, yes,’ replied the little woman, ‘and bless you for a good
creature! but this does seem at first to a simple soul like me--I know
it’s wrong to say so, and I shall be sorry for it presently--this does
seem such a poor reward for all you have done.’

‘Nay,’ said Nicholas gently, ‘what better reward could I have, than
the knowledge that his last days were peaceful and happy, and the
recollection that I was his constant companion, and was not prevented,
as I might have been by a hundred circumstances, from being beside him?’

‘To be sure,’ sobbed Miss La Creevy; ‘it’s very true, and I’m an
ungrateful, impious, wicked little fool, I know.’

With that, the good soul fell to crying afresh, and, endeavouring to
recover herself, tried to laugh. The laugh and the cry, meeting each
other thus abruptly, had a struggle for the mastery; the result was,
that it was a drawn battle, and Miss La Creevy went into hysterics.

Waiting until they were all tolerably quiet and composed again,
Nicholas, who stood in need of some rest after his long journey, retired
to his own room, and throwing himself, dressed as he was, upon the bed,
fell into a sound sleep. When he awoke, he found Kate sitting by his
bedside, who, seeing that he had opened his eyes, stooped down to kiss
him.

‘I came to tell you how glad I am to see you home again.’

‘But I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you, Kate.’

‘We have been wearying so for your return,’ said Kate, ‘mama and I,
and--and Madeline.’

‘You said in your last letter that she was quite well,’ said Nicholas,
rather hastily, and colouring as he spoke. ‘Has nothing been said, since
I have been away, about any future arrangements that the brothers have
in contemplation for her?’

‘Oh, not a word,’ replied Kate. ‘I can’t think of parting from her
without sorrow; and surely, Nicholas, YOU don’t wish it!’

Nicholas coloured again, and, sitting down beside his sister on a little
couch near the window, said:

‘No, Kate, no, I do not. I might strive to disguise my real feelings
from anybody but you; but I will tell you that--briefly and plainly,
Kate--that I love her.’

Kate’s eyes brightened, and she was going to make some reply, when
Nicholas laid his hand upon her arm, and went on:

‘Nobody must know this but you. She, last of all.’

‘Dear Nicholas!’

‘Last of all; never, though never is a long day. Sometimes, I try to
think that the time may come when I may honestly tell her this; but it
is so far off; in such distant perspective, so many years must elapse
before it comes, and when it does come (if ever) I shall be so
unlike what I am now, and shall have so outlived my days of youth and
romance--though not, I am sure, of love for her--that even I feel how
visionary all such hopes must be, and try to crush them rudely myself,
and have the pain over, rather than suffer time to wither them, and keep
the disappointment in store. No, Kate! Since I have been absent, I
have had, in that poor fellow who is gone, perpetually before my eyes,
another instance of the munificent liberality of these noble brothers.
As far as in me lies, I will deserve it, and if I have wavered in
my bounden duty to them before, I am now determined to discharge it
rigidly, and to put further delays and temptations beyond my reach.’

‘Before you say another word, dear Nicholas,’ said Kate, turning pale,
‘you must hear what I have to tell you. I came on purpose, but I had not
the courage. What you say now, gives me new heart.’ She faltered, and
burst into tears.

There was that in her manner which prepared Nicholas for what was
coming. Kate tried to speak, but her tears prevented her.

‘Come, you foolish girl,’ said Nicholas; ‘why, Kate, Kate, be a woman! I
think I know what you would tell me. It concerns Mr. Frank, does it not?’

Kate sunk her head upon his shoulder, and sobbed out ‘Yes.’

‘And he has offered you his hand, perhaps, since I have been away,’ said
Nicholas; ‘is that it? Yes. Well, well; it is not so difficult, you see,
to tell me, after all. He offered you his hand?’

‘Which I refused,’ said Kate.

‘Yes; and why?’

‘I told him,’ she said, in a trembling voice, ‘all that I have since
found you told mama; and while I could not conceal from him, and cannot
from you, that--that it was a pang and a great trial, I did so firmly,
and begged him not to see me any more.’

‘That’s my own brave Kate!’ said Nicholas, pressing her to his breast.
‘I knew you would.’

‘He tried to alter my resolution,’ said Kate, ‘and declared that, be my
decision what it might, he would not only inform his uncles of the
step he had taken, but would communicate it to you also, directly you
returned. I am afraid,’ she added, her momentary composure forsaking
her, ‘I am afraid I may not have said, strongly enough, how deeply I
felt such disinterested love, and how earnestly I prayed for his future
happiness. If you do talk together, I should--I should like him to know
that.’

‘And did you suppose, Kate, when you had made this sacrifice to what
you knew was right and honourable, that I should shrink from mine?’ said
Nicholas tenderly.

‘Oh no! not if your position had been the same, but--’

‘But it is the same,’ interrupted Nicholas. ‘Madeline is not the near
relation of our benefactors, but she is closely bound to them by ties as
dear; and I was first intrusted with her history, specially because they
reposed unbounded confidence in me, and believed that I was as true as
steel. How base would it be of me to take advantage of the circumstances
which placed her here, or of the slight service I was happily able to
render her, and to seek to engage her affections when the result must
be, if I succeeded, that the brothers would be disappointed in their
darling wish of establishing her as their own child, and that I must
seem to hope to build my fortunes on their compassion for the young
creature whom I had so meanly and unworthily entrapped: turning her very
gratitude and warmth of heart to my own purpose and account, and trading
in her misfortunes! I, too, whose duty, and pride, and pleasure, Kate,
it is to have other claims upon me which I will never forget; and who
have the means of a comfortable and happy life already, and have no
right to look beyond it! I have determined to remove this weight from my
mind. I doubt whether I have not done wrong, even now; and today I
will, without reserve or equivocation, disclose my real reasons to Mr
Cherryble, and implore him to take immediate measures for removing this
young lady to the shelter of some other roof.’

‘Today? so very soon?’

‘I have thought of this for weeks, and why should I postpone it? If the
scene through which I have just passed has taught me to reflect, and has
awakened me to a more anxious and careful sense of duty, why should I
wait until the impression has cooled? You would not dissuade me, Kate;
now would you?’

‘You may grow rich, you know,’ said Kate.

‘I may grow rich!’ repeated Nicholas, with a mournful smile, ‘ay, and
I may grow old! But rich or poor, or old or young, we shall ever be the
same to each other, and in that our comfort lies. What if we have but
one home? It can never be a solitary one to you and me. What if we were
to remain so true to these first impressions as to form no others? It is
but one more link to the strong chain that binds us together. It seems
but yesterday that we were playfellows, Kate, and it will seem but
tomorrow when we are staid old people, looking back to these cares as we
look back, now, to those of our childish days: and recollecting with a
melancholy pleasure that the time was, when they could move us. Perhaps
then, when we are quaint old folks and talk of the times when our step
was lighter and our hair not grey, we may be even thankful for the
trials that so endeared us to each other, and turned our lives into that
current, down which we shall have glided so peacefully and calmly. And
having caught some inkling of our story, the young people about us--as
young as you and I are now, Kate--may come to us for sympathy, and pour
distresses which hope and inexperience could scarcely feel enough for,
into the compassionate ears of the old bachelor brother and his maiden
sister.’

Kate smiled through her tears as Nicholas drew this picture; but they
were not tears of sorrow, although they continued to fall when he had
ceased to speak.

‘Am I not right, Kate?’ he said, after a short silence.

‘Quite, quite, dear brother; and I cannot tell you how happy I am that I
have acted as you would have had me.’

‘You don’t regret?’

‘N--n--no,’ said Kate timidly, tracing some pattern upon the ground with
her little foot. ‘I don’t regret having done what was honourable
and right, of course; but I do regret that this should have ever
happened--at least sometimes I regret it, and sometimes I--I don’t know
what I say; I am but a weak girl, Nicholas, and it has agitated me very
much.’

It is no vaunt to affirm that if Nicholas had had ten thousand pounds
at the minute, he would, in his generous affection for the owner of the
blushing cheek and downcast eye, have bestowed its utmost farthing, in
perfect forgetfulness of himself, to secure her happiness. But all he
could do was to comfort and console her by kind words; and words they
were of such love and kindness, and cheerful encouragement, that poor
Kate threw her arms about his neck, and declared she would weep no more.

‘What man,’ thought Nicholas proudly, while on his way, soon afterwards,
to the brothers’ house, ‘would not be sufficiently rewarded for any
sacrifice of fortune by the possession of such a heart as Kate’s, which,
but that hearts weigh light, and gold and silver heavy, is beyond all
praise? Frank has money, and wants no more. Where would it buy him such
a treasure as Kate? And yet, in unequal marriages, the rich party is
always supposed to make a great sacrifice, and the other to get a good
bargain! But I am thinking like a lover, or like an ass: which I suppose
is pretty nearly the same.’

Checking thoughts so little adapted to the business on which he was
bound, by such self-reproofs as this and many others no less sturdy, he
proceeded on his way and presented himself before Tim Linkinwater.

‘Ah! Mr. Nickleby!’ cried Tim, ‘God bless you! how d’ye do? Well? Say
you’re quite well and never better. Do now.’

‘Quite,’ said Nicholas, shaking him by both hands.

‘Ah!’ said Tim, ‘you look tired though, now I come to look at you. Hark!
there he is, d’ye hear him? That was Dick, the blackbird. He hasn’t been
himself since you’ve been gone. He’d never get on without you, now; he
takes as naturally to you as he does to me.’

‘Dick is a far less sagacious fellow than I supposed him, if he thinks I
am half so well worthy of his notice as you,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Why, I’ll tell you what, sir,’ said Tim, standing in his favourite
attitude and pointing to the cage with the feather of his pen, ‘it’s a
very extraordinary thing about that bird, that the only people he ever
takes the smallest notice of, are Mr. Charles, and Mr. Ned, and you, and
me.’

Here, Tim stopped and glanced anxiously at Nicholas; then unexpectedly
catching his eye repeated, ‘And you and me, sir, and you and me.’ And
then he glanced at Nicholas again, and, squeezing his hand, said, ‘I am
a bad one at putting off anything I am interested in. I didn’t mean to
ask you, but I should like to hear a few particulars about that poor
boy. Did he mention Cheeryble Brothers at all?’

‘Yes,’ said Nicholas, ‘many and many a time.’

‘That was right of him,’ returned Tim, wiping his eyes; ‘that was very
right of him.’

‘And he mentioned your name a score of times,’ said Nicholas, ‘and often
bade me carry back his love to Mr. Linkinwater.’

‘No, no, did he though?’ rejoined Tim, sobbing outright. ‘Poor fellow!
I wish we could have had him buried in town. There isn’t such a
burying-ground in all London as that little one on the other side of the
square--there are counting-houses all round it, and if you go in there,
on a fine day, you can see the books and safes through the open windows.
And he sent his love to me, did he? I didn’t expect he would have
thought of me. Poor fellow, poor fellow! His love too!’

Tim was so completely overcome by this little mark of recollection, that
he was quite unequal to any more conversation at the moment. Nicholas
therefore slipped quietly out, and went to brother Charles’s room.

If he had previously sustained his firmness and fortitude, it had been
by an effort which had cost him no little pain; but the warm welcome,
the hearty manner, the homely unaffected commiseration, of the good old
man, went to his heart, and no inward struggle could prevent his showing
it.

‘Come, come, my dear sir,’ said the benevolent merchant; ‘we must not
be cast down; no, no. We must learn to bear misfortune, and we must
remember that there are many sources of consolation even in death.
Every day that this poor lad had lived, he must have been less and
less qualified for the world, and more and more unhappy in is own
deficiencies. It is better as it is, my dear sir. Yes, yes, yes, it’s
better as it is.’

‘I have thought of all that, sir,’ replied Nicholas, clearing his
throat. ‘I feel it, I assure you.’

‘Yes, that’s well,’ replied Mr. Cheeryble, who, in the midst of all his
comforting, was quite as much taken aback as honest old Tim; ‘that’s
well. Where is my brother Ned? Tim Linkinwater, sir, where is my brother
Ned?’

‘Gone out with Mr. Trimmers, about getting that unfortunate man into the
hospital, and sending a nurse to his children,’ said Tim.

‘My brother Ned is a fine fellow, a great fellow!’ exclaimed brother
Charles as he shut the door and returned to Nicholas. ‘He will be
overjoyed to see you, my dear sir. We have been speaking of you every
day.’

‘To tell you the truth, sir, I am glad to find you alone,’ said
Nicholas, with some natural hesitation; ‘for I am anxious to say
something to you. Can you spare me a very few minutes?’

‘Surely, surely,’ returned brother Charles, looking at him with an
anxious countenance. ‘Say on, my dear sir, say on.’

‘I scarcely know how, or where, to begin,’ said Nicholas. ‘If ever one
mortal had reason to be penetrated with love and reverence for another:
with such attachment as would make the hardest service in his behalf a
pleasure and delight: with such grateful recollections as must rouse the
utmost zeal and fidelity of his nature: those are the feelings which I
should entertain for you, and do, from my heart and soul, believe me!’

‘I do believe you,’ replied the old gentleman, ‘and I am happy in
the belief. I have never doubted it; I never shall. I am sure I never
shall.’

‘Your telling me that so kindly,’ said Nicholas, ‘emboldens me to
proceed. When you first took me into your confidence, and dispatched me
on those missions to Miss Bray, I should have told you that I had seen
her long before; that her beauty had made an impression upon me which I
could not efface; and that I had fruitlessly endeavoured to trace her,
and become acquainted with her history. I did not tell you so, because
I vainly thought I could conquer my weaker feelings, and render every
consideration subservient to my duty to you.’

‘Mr. Nickleby,’ said brother Charles, ‘you did not violate the confidence
I placed in you, or take an unworthy advantage of it. I am sure you did
not.’

‘I did not,’ said Nicholas, firmly. ‘Although I found that the necessity
for self-command and restraint became every day more imperious, and the
difficulty greater, I never, for one instant, spoke or looked but as I
would have done had you been by. I never, for one moment, deserted my
trust, nor have I to this instant. But I find that constant association
and companionship with this sweet girl is fatal to my peace of mind, and
may prove destructive to the resolutions I made in the beginning, and up
to this time have faithfully kept. In short, sir, I cannot trust myself,
and I implore and beseech you to remove this young lady from under the
charge of my mother and sister without delay. I know that to anyone but
myself--to you, who consider the immeasurable distance between me and
this young lady, who is now your ward, and the object of your peculiar
care--my loving her, even in thought, must appear the height of rashness
and presumption. I know it is so. But who can see her as I have seen,
who can know what her life has been, and not love her? I have no excuse
but that; and as I cannot fly from this temptation, and cannot repress
this passion, with its object constantly before me, what can I do but
pray and beseech you to remove it, and to leave me to forget her?’

‘Mr. Nickleby,’ said the old man, after a short silence, ‘you can do no
more. I was wrong to expose a young man like you to this trial. I might
have foreseen what would happen. Thank you, sir, thank you. Madeline
shall be removed.’

‘If you would grant me one favour, dear sir, and suffer her to remember
me with esteem, by never revealing to her this confession--’

‘I will take care,’ said Mr. Cheeryble. ‘And now, is this all you have to
tell me?’

‘No!’ returned Nicholas, meeting his eye, ‘it is not.’

‘I know the rest,’ said Mr. Cheeryble, apparently very much relieved by
this prompt reply. ‘When did it come to your knowledge?’

‘When I reached home this morning.’

‘You felt it your duty immediately to come to me, and tell me what your
sister no doubt acquainted you with?’

‘I did,’ said Nicholas, ‘though I could have wished to have spoken to Mr
Frank first.’

‘Frank was with me last night,’ replied the old gentleman. ‘You have
done well, Mr. Nickleby--very well, sir--and I thank you again.’

Upon this head, Nicholas requested permission to add a few words. He
ventured to hope that nothing he had said would lead to the estrangement
of Kate and Madeline, who had formed an attachment for each other, any
interruption of which would, he knew, be attended with great pain to
them, and, most of all, with remorse and pain to him, as its unhappy
cause. When these things were all forgotten, he hoped that Frank and he
might still be warm friends, and that no word or thought of his humble
home, or of her who was well contented to remain there and share his
quiet fortunes, would ever again disturb the harmony between them. He
recounted, as nearly as he could, what had passed between himself
and Kate that morning: speaking of her with such warmth of pride and
affection, and dwelling so cheerfully upon the confidence they had of
overcoming any selfish regrets and living contented and happy in each
other’s love, that few could have heard him unmoved. More moved
himself than he had been yet, he expressed in a few hurried words--as
expressive, perhaps, as the most eloquent phrases--his devotion to the
brothers, and his hope that he might live and die in their service.

To all this, brother Charles listened in profound silence, and with his
chair so turned from Nicholas that his face could not be seen. He
had not spoken either, in his accustomed manner, but with a certain
stiffness and embarrassment very foreign to it. Nicholas feared he had
offended him. He said, ‘No, no, he had done quite right,’ but that was
all.

‘Frank is a heedless, foolish fellow,’ he said, after Nicholas had
paused for some time; ‘a very heedless, foolish fellow. I will take care
that this is brought to a close without delay. Let us say no more upon
the subject; it’s a very painful one to me. Come to me in half an hour;
I have strange things to tell you, my dear sir, and your uncle has
appointed this afternoon for your waiting upon him with me.’

‘Waiting upon him! With you, sir!’ cried Nicholas.

‘Ay, with me,’ replied the old gentleman. ‘Return to me in half an hour,
and I’ll tell you more.’

Nicholas waited upon him at the time mentioned, and then learnt all
that had taken place on the previous day, and all that was known of the
appointment Ralph had made with the brothers; which was for that night;
and for the better understanding of which it will be requisite to
return and follow his own footsteps from the house of the twin brothers.
Therefore, we leave Nicholas somewhat reassured by the restored kindness
of their manner towards him, and yet sensible that it was different from
what it had been (though he scarcely knew in what respect): so he was
full of uneasiness, uncertainty, and disquiet.



CHAPTER 62

Ralph makes one last Appointment--and keeps it


Creeping from the house, and slinking off like a thief; groping with his
hands, when first he got into the street, as if he were a blind man; and
looking often over his shoulder while he hurried away, as though he were
followed in imagination or reality by someone anxious to question or
detain him; Ralph Nickleby left the city behind him, and took the road
to his own home.

The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds, furiously
and fast, before it. There was one black, gloomy mass that seemed
to follow him: not hurrying in the wild chase with the others, but
lingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and stealthily on. He
often looked back at this, and, more than once, stopped to let it pass
over; but, somehow, when he went forward again, it was still behind him,
coming mournfully and slowly up, like a shadowy funeral train.

He had to pass a poor, mean burial-ground--a dismal place, raised a
few feet above the level of the street, and parted from it by a low
parapet-wall and an iron railing; a rank, unwholesome, rotten spot,
where the very grass and weeds seemed, in their frouzy growth, to tell
that they had sprung from paupers’ bodies, and had struck their roots in
the graves of men, sodden, while alive, in steaming courts and drunken
hungry dens. And here, in truth, they lay, parted from the living by a
little earth and a board or two--lay thick and close--corrupting in body
as they had in mind--a dense and squalid crowd. Here they lay, cheek by
jowl with life: no deeper down than the feet of the throng that passed
there every day, and piled high as their throats. Here they lay, a
grisly family, all these dear departed brothers and sisters of the ruddy
clergyman who did his task so speedily when they were hidden in the
ground!

As he passed here, Ralph called to mind that he had been one of a jury,
long before, on the body of a man who had cut his throat; and that he
was buried in this place. He could not tell how he came to recollect it
now, when he had so often passed and never thought about him, or how it
was that he felt an interest in the circumstance; but he did both; and
stopping, and clasping the iron railings with his hands, looked eagerly
in, wondering which might be his grave.

While he was thus engaged, there came towards him, with noise of shouts
and singing, some fellows full of drink, followed by others, who were
remonstrating with them and urging them to go home in quiet. They were
in high good-humour; and one of them, a little, weazen, hump-backed
man, began to dance. He was a grotesque, fantastic figure, and the few
bystanders laughed. Ralph himself was moved to mirth, and echoed the
laugh of one who stood near and who looked round in his face. When they
had passed on, and he was left alone again, he resumed his speculation
with a new kind of interest; for he recollected that the last person who
had seen the suicide alive, had left him very merry, and he remembered
how strange he and the other jurors had thought that at the time.

He could not fix upon the spot among such a heap of graves, but he
conjured up a strong and vivid idea of the man himself, and how he
looked, and what had led him to do it; all of which he recalled with
ease. By dint of dwelling upon this theme, he carried the impression
with him when he went away; as he remembered, when a child, to have had
frequently before him the figure of some goblin he had once seen chalked
upon a door. But as he drew nearer and nearer home he forgot it again,
and began to think how very dull and solitary the house would be inside.

This feeling became so strong at last, that when he reached his own
door, he could hardly make up his mind to turn the key and open it. When
he had done that, and gone into the passage, he felt as though to shut
it again would be to shut out the world. But he let it go, and it closed
with a loud noise. There was no light. How very dreary, cold, and still
it was!

Shivering from head to foot, he made his way upstairs into the room
where he had been last disturbed. He had made a kind of compact with
himself that he would not think of what had happened until he got home.
He was at home now, and suffered himself to consider it.

His own child, his own child! He never doubted the tale; he felt it was
true; knew it as well, now, as if he had been privy to it all along. His
own child! And dead too. Dying beside Nicholas, loving him, and looking
upon him as something like an angel. That was the worst!

They had all turned from him and deserted him in his very first need.
Even money could not buy them now; everything must come out, and
everybody must know all. Here was the young lord dead, his companion
abroad and beyond his reach, ten thousand pounds gone at one blow, his
plot with Gride overset at the very moment of triumph, his after-schemes
discovered, himself in danger, the object of his persecution and
Nicholas’s love, his own wretched boy; everything crumbled and fallen
upon him, and he beaten down beneath the ruins and grovelling in the
dust.

If he had known his child to be alive; if no deceit had been ever
practised, and he had grown up beneath his eye; he might have been a
careless, indifferent, rough, harsh father--like enough--he felt that;
but the thought would come that he might have been otherwise, and that
his son might have been a comfort to him, and they two happy together.
He began to think now, that his supposed death and his wife’s flight had
had some share in making him the morose, hard man he was. He seemed to
remember a time when he was not quite so rough and obdurate; and almost
thought that he had first hated Nicholas because he was young and
gallant, and perhaps like the stripling who had brought dishonour and
loss of fortune on his head.

But one tender thought, or one of natural regret, in his whirlwind of
passion and remorse, was as a drop of calm water in a stormy maddened
sea. His hatred of Nicholas had been fed upon his own defeat, nourished
on his interference with his schemes, fattened upon his old defiance
and success. There were reasons for its increase; it had grown and
strengthened gradually. Now it attained a height which was sheer wild
lunacy. That his, of all others, should have been the hands to rescue
his miserable child; that he should have been his protector and faithful
friend; that he should have shown him that love and tenderness which,
from the wretched moment of his birth, he had never known; that he
should have taught him to hate his own parent and execrate his very
name; that he should now know and feel all this, and triumph in the
recollection; was gall and madness to the usurer’s heart. The dead
boy’s love for Nicholas, and the attachment of Nicholas to him, was
insupportable agony. The picture of his deathbed, with Nicholas at his
side, tending and supporting him, and he breathing out his thanks, and
expiring in his arms, when he would have had them mortal enemies and
hating each other to the last, drove him frantic. He gnashed his teeth
and smote the air, and looking wildly round, with eyes which gleamed
through the darkness, cried aloud:

‘I am trampled down and ruined. The wretch told me true. The night has
come! Is there no way to rob them of further triumph, and spurn their
mercy and compassion? Is there no devil to help me?’

Swiftly, there glided again into his brain the figure he had raised that
night. It seemed to lie before him. The head was covered now. So it
was when he first saw it. The rigid, upturned, marble feet too, he
remembered well. Then came before him the pale and trembling relatives
who had told their tale upon the inquest--the shrieks of women--the
silent dread of men--the consternation and disquiet--the victory
achieved by that heap of clay, which, with one motion of its hand, had
let out the life and made this stir among them--

He spoke no more; but, after a pause, softly groped his way out of
the room, and up the echoing stairs--up to the top--to the front
garret--where he closed the door behind him, and remained.

It was a mere lumber-room now, but it yet contained an old dismantled
bedstead; the one on which his son had slept; for no other had ever been
there. He avoided it hastily, and sat down as far from it as he could.

The weakened glare of the lights in the street below, shining through
the window which had no blind or curtain to intercept it, was enough to
show the character of the room, though not sufficient fully to reveal
the various articles of lumber, old corded trunks and broken furniture,
which were scattered about. It had a shelving roof; high in one part,
and at another descending almost to the floor. It was towards the
highest part that Ralph directed his eyes; and upon it he kept them
fixed steadily for some minutes, when he rose, and dragging thither an
old chest upon which he had been seated, mounted on it, and felt along
the wall above his head with both hands. At length, they touched a large
iron hook, firmly driven into one of the beams.

At that moment, he was interrupted by a loud knocking at the door below.
After a little hesitation he opened the window, and demanded who it was.

‘I want Mr. Nickleby,’ replied a voice.

‘What with him?’

‘That’s not Mr. Nickleby’s voice, surely?’ was the rejoinder.

It was not like it; but it was Ralph who spoke, and so he said.

The voice made answer that the twin brothers wished to know whether the
man whom he had seen that night was to be detained; and that although it
was now midnight they had sent, in their anxiety to do right.

‘Yes,’ cried Ralph, ‘detain him till tomorrow; then let them bring him
here--him and my nephew--and come themselves, and be sure that I will be
ready to receive them.’

‘At what hour?’ asked the voice.

‘At any hour,’ replied Ralph fiercely. ‘In the afternoon, tell them. At
any hour, at any minute. All times will be alike to me.’

He listened to the man’s retreating footsteps until the sound had
passed, and then, gazing up into the sky, saw, or thought he saw, the
same black cloud that had seemed to follow him home, and which now
appeared to hover directly above the house.

‘I know its meaning now,’ he muttered, ‘and the restless nights, the
dreams, and why I have quailed of late. All pointed to this. Oh! if men
by selling their own souls could ride rampant for a term, for how short
a term would I barter mine tonight!’

The sound of a deep bell came along the wind. One.

‘Lie on!’ cried the usurer, ‘with your iron tongue! Ring merrily for
births that make expectants writhe, and marriages that are made in hell,
and toll ruefully for the dead whose shoes are worn already! Call men
to prayers who are godly because not found out, and ring chimes for the
coming in of every year that brings this cursed world nearer to its end.
No bell or book for me! Throw me on a dunghill, and let me rot there, to
infect the air!’

With a wild look around, in which frenzy, hatred, and despair were
horribly mingled, he shook his clenched hand at the sky above him, which
was still dark and threatening, and closed the window.

The rain and hail pattered against the glass; the chimneys quaked and
rocked; the crazy casement rattled with the wind, as though an impatient
hand inside were striving to burst it open. But no hand was there, and
it opened no more.


‘How’s this?’ cried one. ‘The gentleman say they can’t make anybody
hear, and have been trying these two hours.’

‘And yet he came home last night,’ said another; ‘for he spoke to
somebody out of that window upstairs.’

They were a little knot of men, and, the window being mentioned, went
out into the road to look up at it. This occasioned their observing that
the house was still close shut, as the housekeeper had said she had left
it on the previous night, and led to a great many suggestions: which
terminated in two or three of the boldest getting round to the back, and
so entering by a window, while the others remained outside, in impatient
expectation.

They looked into all the rooms below: opening the shutters as they went,
to admit the fading light: and still finding nobody, and everything
quiet and in its place, doubted whether they should go farther. One man,
however, remarking that they had not yet been into the garret, and that
it was there he had been last seen, they agreed to look there too, and
went up softly; for the mystery and silence made them timid.

After they had stood for an instant, on the landing, eyeing each other,
he who had proposed their carrying the search so far, turned the handle
of the door, and, pushing it open, looked through the chink, and fell
back directly.

‘It’s very odd,’ he whispered, ‘he’s hiding behind the door! Look!’

They pressed forward to see; but one among them thrusting the others
aside with a loud exclamation, drew a clasp-knife from his pocket, and
dashing into the room, cut down the body.

He had torn a rope from one of the old trunks, and hung himself on an
iron hook immediately below the trap-door in the ceiling--in the very
place to which the eyes of his son, a lonely, desolate, little creature,
had so often been directed in childish terror, fourteen years before.



CHAPTER 63

The Brothers Cheeryble make various Declarations for themselves and
others. Tim Linkinwater makes a Declaration for himself


Some weeks had passed, and the first shock of these events had subsided.
Madeline had been removed; Frank had been absent; and Nicholas and Kate
had begun to try in good earnest to stifle their own regrets, and to
live for each other and for their mother--who, poor lady, could in
nowise be reconciled to this dull and altered state of affairs--when
there came one evening, per favour of Mr. Linkinwater, an invitation from
the brothers to dinner on the next day but one: comprehending, not only
Mrs. Nickleby, Kate, and Nicholas, but little Miss La Creevy, who was
most particularly mentioned.

‘Now, my dears,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, when they had rendered becoming
honour to the bidding, and Tim had taken his departure, ‘what does THIS
mean?’

‘What do YOU mean, mother?’ asked Nicholas, smiling.

‘I say, my dear,’ rejoined that lady, with a face of unfathomable
mystery, ‘what does this invitation to dinner mean? What is its
intention and object?’

‘I conclude it means, that on such a day we are to eat and drink in
their house, and that its intent and object is to confer pleasure upon
us,’ said Nicholas.

‘And that’s all you conclude it is, my dear?’

‘I have not yet arrived at anything deeper, mother.’

‘Then I’ll just tell you one thing,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, you’ll find
yourself a little surprised; that’s all. You may depend upon it that
this means something besides dinner.’

‘Tea and supper, perhaps,’ suggested Nicholas.

‘I wouldn’t be absurd, my dear, if I were you,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby,
in a lofty manner, ‘because it’s not by any means becoming, and doesn’t
suit you at all. What I mean to say is, that the Mr. Cheerybles don’t ask
us to dinner with all this ceremony for nothing. Never mind; wait and
see. You won’t believe anything I say, of course. It’s much better to
wait; a great deal better; it’s satisfactory to all parties, and there
can be no disputing. All I say is, remember what I say now, and when I
say I said so, don’t say I didn’t.’

With this stipulation, Mrs. Nickleby, who was troubled, night and day,
with a vision of a hot messenger tearing up to the door to announce that
Nicholas had been taken into partnership, quitted that branch of the
subject, and entered upon a new one.

‘It’s a very extraordinary thing,’ she said, ‘a most extraordinary
thing, that they should have invited Miss La Creevy. It quite astonishes
me, upon my word it does. Of course it’s very pleasant that she should
be invited, very pleasant, and I have no doubt that she’ll conduct
herself extremely well; she always does. It’s very gratifying to think
that we should have been the means of introducing her into such society,
and I’m quite glad of it--quite rejoiced--for she certainly is an
exceedingly well-behaved and good-natured little person. I could wish
that some friend would mention to her how very badly she has her cap
trimmed, and what very preposterous bows those are, but of course that’s
impossible, and if she likes to make a fright of herself, no doubt she
has a perfect right to do so. We never see ourselves--never do, and
never did--and I suppose we never shall.’

This moral reflection reminding her of the necessity of being peculiarly
smart on the occasion, so as to counterbalance Miss La Creevy, and be
herself an effectual set-off and atonement, led Mrs. Nickleby into a
consultation with her daughter relative to certain ribbons, gloves, and
trimmings: which, being a complicated question, and one of paramount
importance, soon routed the previous one, and put it to flight.

The great day arriving, the good lady put herself under Kate’s hands an
hour or so after breakfast, and, dressing by easy stages, completed
her toilette in sufficient time to allow of her daughter’s making hers,
which was very simple, and not very long, though so satisfactory that
she had never appeared more charming or looked more lovely. Miss La
Creevy, too, arrived with two bandboxes (whereof the bottoms fell out as
they were handed from the coach) and something in a newspaper, which a
gentleman had sat upon, coming down, and which was obliged to be ironed
again, before it was fit for service. At last, everybody was dressed,
including Nicholas, who had come home to fetch them, and they went away
in a coach sent by the brothers for the purpose: Mrs. Nickleby wondering
very much what they would have for dinner, and cross-examining Nicholas
as to the extent of his discoveries in the morning; whether he had smelt
anything cooking at all like turtle, and if not, what he had smelt; and
diversifying the conversation with reminiscences of dinners to which she
had gone some twenty years ago, concerning which she particularised not
only the dishes but the guests, in whom her hearers did not feel a very
absorbing interest, as not one of them had ever chanced to hear their
names before.

The old butler received them with profound respect and many smiles,
and ushered them into the drawing-room, where they were received by
the brothers with so much cordiality and kindness that Mrs. Nickleby was
quite in a flutter, and had scarcely presence of mind enough, even to
patronise Miss La Creevy. Kate was still more affected by the reception:
for, knowing that the brothers were acquainted with all that had passed
between her and Frank, she felt her position a most delicate and trying
one, and was trembling on the arm of Nicholas, when Mr. Charles took her
in his, and led her to another part of the room.

‘Have you seen Madeline, my dear,’ he said, ‘since she left your house?’

‘No, sir!’ replied Kate. ‘Not once.’

‘And not heard from her, eh? Not heard from her?’

‘I have only had one letter,’ rejoined Kate, gently. ‘I thought she
would not have forgotten me quite so soon.’

‘Ah,’ said the old man, patting her on the head, and speaking as
affectionately as if she had been his favourite child. ‘Poor dear! what
do you think of this, brother Ned? Madeline has only written to her
once, only once, Ned, and she didn’t think she would have forgotten her
quite so soon, Ned.’

‘Oh! sad, sad; very sad!’ said Ned.

The brothers interchanged a glance, and looking at Kate for a little
time without speaking, shook hands, and nodded as if they were
congratulating each other on something very delightful.

‘Well, well,’ said brother Charles, ‘go into that room, my dear--that
door yonder--and see if there’s not a letter for you from her. I think
there’s one upon the table. You needn’t hurry back, my love, if there
is, for we don’t dine just yet, and there’s plenty of time. Plenty of
time.’

Kate retired as she was directed. Brother Charles, having followed her
graceful figure with his eyes, turned to Mrs. Nickleby, and said:

‘We took the liberty of naming one hour before the real dinner-time,
ma’am, because we had a little business to speak about, which would
occupy the interval. Ned, my dear fellow, will you mention what we
agreed upon? Mr. Nickleby, sir, have the goodness to follow me.’

Without any further explanation, Mrs. Nickleby, Miss La Creevy, and
brother Ned, were left alone together, and Nicholas followed brother
Charles into his private room; where, to his great astonishment, he
encountered Frank, whom he supposed to be abroad.

‘Young men,’ said Mr. Cheeryble, ‘shake hands!’

‘I need no bidding to do that,’ said Nicholas, extending his.

‘Nor I,’ rejoined Frank, as he clasped it heartily.

The old gentleman thought that two handsomer or finer young fellows
could scarcely stand side by side than those on whom he looked with so
much pleasure. Suffering his eyes to rest upon them, for a short time in
silence, he said, while he seated himself at his desk:

‘I wish to see you friends--close and firm friends--and if I thought
you otherwise, I should hesitate in what I am about to say. Frank, look
here! Mr. Nickleby, will you come on the other side?’

The young men stepped up on either hand of brother Charles, who produced
a paper from his desk, and unfolded it.

‘This,’ he said, ‘is a copy of the will of Madeline’s maternal
grandfather, bequeathing her the sum of twelve thousand pounds, payable
either upon her coming of age or marrying. It would appear that this
gentleman, angry with her (his only relation) because she would not put
herself under his protection, and detach herself from the society of her
father, in compliance with his repeated overtures, made a will leaving
this property (which was all he possessed) to a charitable institution.
He would seem to have repented this determination, however, for three
weeks afterwards, and in the same month, he executed this. By some
fraud, it was abstracted immediately after his decease, and the
other--the only will found--was proved and administered. Friendly
negotiations, which have only just now terminated, have been proceeding
since this instrument came into our hands, and, as there is no doubt
of its authenticity, and the witnesses have been discovered (after some
trouble), the money has been refunded. Madeline has therefore obtained
her right, and is, or will be, when either of the contingencies which I
have mentioned has arisen, mistress of this fortune. You understand me?’

Frank replied in the affirmative. Nicholas, who could not trust himself
to speak lest his voice should be heard to falter, bowed his head.

‘Now, Frank,’ said the old gentleman, ‘you were the immediate means
of recovering this deed. The fortune is but a small one; but we love
Madeline; and such as it is, we would rather see you allied to her with
that, than to any other girl we know who has three times the money. Will
you become a suitor to her for her hand?’

‘No, sir. I interested myself in the recovery of that instrument,
believing that her hand was already pledged to one who has a thousand
times the claims upon her gratitude, and, if I mistake not, upon her
heart, that I or any other man can ever urge. In this it seems I judged
hastily.’

‘As you always do, sir,’ cried brother Charles, utterly forgetting his
assumed dignity, ‘as you always do. How dare you think, Frank, that we
would have you marry for money, when youth, beauty, and every amiable
virtue and excellence were to be had for love? How dared you, Frank, go
and make love to Mr. Nickleby’s sister without telling us first what you
meant to do, and letting us speak for you?’

‘I hardly dared to hope--’

‘You hardly dared to hope! Then, so much the greater reason for having
our assistance! Mr. Nickleby, sir, Frank, although he judged hastily,
judged, for once, correctly. Madeline’s heart IS occupied. Give me
your hand, sir; it is occupied by you, and worthily and naturally. This
fortune is destined to be yours, but you have a greater fortune in her,
sir, than you would have in money were it forty times told. She chooses
you, Mr. Nickleby. She chooses as we, her dearest friends, would have her
choose. Frank chooses as we would have HIM choose. He should have your
sister’s little hand, sir, if she had refused it a score of times; ay,
he should, and he shall! You acted nobly, not knowing our sentiments,
but now you know them, sir, you must do as you are bid. What! You are
the children of a worthy gentleman! The time was, sir, when my dear
brother Ned and I were two poor simple-hearted boys, wandering, almost
barefoot, to seek our fortunes: are we changed in anything but years
and worldly circumstances since that time? No, God forbid! Oh, Ned, Ned,
Ned, what a happy day this is for you and me! If our poor mother had
only lived to see us now, Ned, how proud it would have made her dear
heart at last!’

Thus apostrophised, brother Ned, who had entered with Mrs. Nickleby, and
who had been before unobserved by the young men, darted forward, and
fairly hugged brother Charles in his arms.

‘Bring in my little Kate,’ said the latter, after a short silence.
‘Bring her in, Ned. Let me see Kate, let me kiss her. I have a right
to do so now; I was very near it when she first came; I have often
been very near it. Ah! Did you find the letter, my bird? Did you find
Madeline herself, waiting for you and expecting you? Did you find that
she had not quite forgotten her friend and nurse and sweet companion?
Why, this is almost the best of all!’

‘Come, come,’ said Ned, ‘Frank will be jealous, and we shall have some
cutting of throats before dinner.’

‘Then let him take her away, Ned, let him take her away. Madeline’s in
the next room. Let all the lovers get out of the way, and talk among
themselves, if they’ve anything to say. Turn ‘em out, Ned, every one!’

Brother Charles began the clearance by leading the blushing girl to the
door, and dismissing her with a kiss. Frank was not very slow to follow,
and Nicholas had disappeared first of all. So there only remained Mrs
Nickleby and Miss La Creevy, who were both sobbing heartily; the two
brothers; and Tim Linkinwater, who now came in to shake hands with
everybody: his round face all radiant and beaming with smiles.

‘Well, Tim Linkinwater, sir,’ said brother Charles, who was always
spokesman, ‘now the young folks are happy, sir.’

‘You didn’t keep ‘em in suspense as long as you said you would, though,’
returned Tim, archly. ‘Why, Mr. Nickleby and Mr. Frank were to have
been in your room for I don’t know how long; and I don’t know what you
weren’t to have told them before you came out with the truth.’

‘Now, did you ever know such a villain as this, Ned?’ said the old
gentleman; ‘did you ever know such a villain as Tim Linkinwater?
He accusing me of being impatient, and he the very man who has been
wearying us morning, noon, and night, and torturing us for leave to go
and tell ‘em what was in store, before our plans were half complete, or
we had arranged a single thing. A treacherous dog!’

‘So he is, brother Charles,’ returned Ned; ‘Tim is a treacherous dog.
Tim is not to be trusted. Tim is a wild young fellow. He wants gravity
and steadiness; he must sow his wild oats, and then perhaps he’ll become
in time a respectable member of society.’

This being one of the standing jokes between the old fellows and Tim,
they all three laughed very heartily, and might have laughed much
longer, but that the brothers, seeing that Mrs. Nickleby was labouring to
express her feelings, and was really overwhelmed by the happiness of the
time, took her between them, and led her from the room under pretence of
having to consult her on some most important arrangements.

Now, Tim and Miss La Creevy had met very often, and had always been
very chatty and pleasant together--had always been great friends--and
consequently it was the most natural thing in the world that Tim,
finding that she still sobbed, should endeavour to console her. As Miss
La Creevy sat on a large old-fashioned window-seat, where there was
ample room for two, it was also natural that Tim should sit down beside
her; and as to Tim’s being unusually spruce and particular in his attire
that day, why it was a high festival and a great occasion, and that was
the most natural thing of all.

Tim sat down beside Miss La Creevy, and, crossing one leg over the other
so that his foot--he had very comely feet and happened to be wearing
the neatest shoes and black silk stockings possible--should come easily
within the range of her eye, said in a soothing way:

‘Don’t cry!’

‘I must,’ rejoined Miss La Creevy.

‘No, don’t,’ said Tim. ‘Please don’t; pray don’t.’

‘I am so happy!’ sobbed the little woman.

‘Then laugh,’ said Tim. ‘Do laugh.’

What in the world Tim was doing with his arm, it is impossible to
conjecture, but he knocked his elbow against that part of the window
which was quite on the other side of Miss La Creevy; and it is clear
that it could have no business there.

‘Do laugh,’ said Tim, ‘or I’ll cry.’

‘Why should you cry?’ asked Miss La Creevy, smiling.

‘Because I’m happy too,’ said Tim. ‘We are both happy, and I should like
to do as you do.’

Surely, there never was a man who fidgeted as Tim must have done then;
for he knocked the window again--almost in the same place--and Miss La
Creevy said she was sure he’d break it.

‘I knew,’ said Tim, ‘that you would be pleased with this scene.’

‘It was very thoughtful and kind to remember me,’ returned Miss La
Creevy. ‘Nothing could have delighted me half so much.’

Why on earth should Miss La Creevy and Tim Linkinwater have said all
this in a whisper? It was no secret. And why should Tim Linkinwater have
looked so hard at Miss La Creevy, and why should Miss La Creevy have
looked so hard at the ground?

‘It’s a pleasant thing,’ said Tim, ‘to people like us, who have passed
all our lives in the world alone, to see young folks that we are fond
of, brought together with so many years of happiness before them.’

‘Ah!’ cried the little woman with all her heart, ‘that it is!’

‘Although,’ pursued Tim ‘although it makes one feel quite solitary and
cast away. Now don’t it?’

Miss La Creevy said she didn’t know. And why should she say she didn’t
know? Because she must have known whether it did or not.

‘It’s almost enough to make us get married after all, isn’t it?’ said
Tim.

‘Oh, nonsense!’ replied Miss La Creevy, laughing. ‘We are too old.’

‘Not a bit,’ said Tim; ‘we are too old to be single. Why shouldn’t we
both be married, instead of sitting through the long winter evenings by
our solitary firesides? Why shouldn’t we make one fireside of it, and
marry each other?’

‘Oh, Mr. Linkinwater, you’re joking!’

‘No, no, I’m not. I’m not indeed,’ said Tim. ‘I will, if you will. Do,
my dear!’

‘It would make people laugh so.’

‘Let ‘em laugh,’ cried Tim stoutly; ‘we have good tempers I know, and
we’ll laugh too. Why, what hearty laughs we have had since we’ve known
each other!’

‘So we have,’ cried Miss La Creevy--giving way a little, as Tim
thought.

‘It has been the happiest time in all my life; at least, away from the
counting-house and Cheeryble Brothers,’ said Tim. ‘Do, my dear! Now say
you will.’

‘No, no, we mustn’t think of it,’ returned Miss La Creevy. ‘What would
the brothers say?’

‘Why, God bless your soul!’ cried Tim, innocently, ‘you don’t suppose I
should think of such a thing without their knowing it! Why they left us
here on purpose.’

‘I can never look ‘em in the face again!’ exclaimed Miss La Creevy,
faintly.

‘Come,’ said Tim, ‘let’s be a comfortable couple. We shall live in the
old house here, where I have been for four-and-forty year; we shall go
to the old church, where I’ve been, every Sunday morning, all through
that time; we shall have all my old friends about us--Dick, the archway,
the pump, the flower-pots, and Mr. Frank’s children, and Mr. Nickleby’s
children, that we shall seem like grandfather and grandmother to. Let’s
be a comfortable couple, and take care of each other! And if we should
get deaf, or lame, or blind, or bed-ridden, how glad we shall be that we
have somebody we are fond of, always to talk to and sit with! Let’s be a
comfortable couple. Now, do, my dear!’

Five minutes after this honest and straightforward speech, little Miss
La Creevy and Tim were talking as pleasantly as if they had been married
for a score of years, and had never once quarrelled all the time; and
five minutes after that, when Miss La Creevy had bustled out to see if
her eyes were red and put her hair to rights, Tim moved with a stately
step towards the drawing-room, exclaiming as he went, ‘There an’t such
another woman in all London! I KNOW there an’t!’

By this time, the apoplectic butler was nearly in fits, in consequence
of the unheard-of postponement of dinner. Nicholas, who had been engaged
in a manner in which every reader may imagine for himself or herself,
was hurrying downstairs in obedience to his angry summons, when he
encountered a new surprise.

On his way down, he overtook, in one of the passages, a stranger
genteelly dressed in black, who was also moving towards the dining-room.
As he was rather lame, and walked slowly, Nicholas lingered behind, and
was following him step by step, wondering who he was, when he suddenly
turned round and caught him by both hands.

‘Newman Noggs!’ cried Nicholas joyfully

‘Ah! Newman, your own Newman, your own old faithful Newman! My dear boy,
my dear Nick, I give you joy--health, happiness, every blessing! I can’t
bear it--it’s too much, my dear boy--it makes a child of me!’

‘Where have you been?’ said Nicholas. ‘What have you been doing? How
often have I inquired for you, and been told that I should hear before
long!’

‘I know, I know!’ returned Newman. ‘They wanted all the happiness to
come together. I’ve been helping ‘em. I--I--look at me, Nick, look at
me!’

‘You would never let ME do that,’ said Nicholas in a tone of gentle
reproach.

‘I didn’t mind what I was, then. I shouldn’t have had the heart to put
on gentleman’s clothes. They would have reminded me of old times and
made me miserable. I am another man now, Nick. My dear boy, I can’t
speak. Don’t say anything to me. Don’t think the worse of me for these
tears. You don’t know what I feel today; you can’t, and never will!’

They walked in to dinner arm-in-arm, and sat down side by side.

Never was such a dinner as that, since the world began. There was the
superannuated bank clerk, Tim Linkinwater’s friend; and there was
the chubby old lady, Tim Linkinwater’s sister; and there was so much
attention from Tim Linkinwater’s sister to Miss La Creevy, and
there were so many jokes from the superannuated bank clerk, and Tim
Linkinwater himself was in such tiptop spirits, and little Miss La
Creevy was in such a comical state, that of themselves they would
have composed the pleasantest party conceivable. Then, there was Mrs
Nickleby, so grand and complacent; Madeline and Kate, so blushing and
beautiful; Nicholas and Frank, so devoted and proud; and all four so
silently and tremblingly happy; there was Newman so subdued yet
so overjoyed, and there were the twin brothers so delighted and
interchanging such looks, that the old servant stood transfixed behind
his master’s chair, and felt his eyes grow dim as they wandered round
the table.

When the first novelty of the meeting had worn off, and they began truly
to feel how happy they were, the conversation became more general, and
the harmony and pleasure if possible increased. The brothers were in a
perfect ecstasy; and their insisting on saluting the ladies all
round, before they would permit them to retire, gave occasion to the
superannuated bank clerk to say so many good things, that he quite
outshone himself, and was looked upon as a prodigy of humour.

‘Kate, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, taking her daughter aside, as soon
as they got upstairs, ‘you don’t really mean to tell me that this is
actually true about Miss La Creevy and Mr. Linkinwater?’

‘Indeed it is, mama.’

‘Why, I never heard such a thing in my life!’ exclaimed Mrs. Nickleby.

‘Mr. Linkinwater is a most excellent creature,’ reasoned Kate, ‘and, for
his age, quite young still.’

‘For HIS age, my dear!’ returned Mrs. Nickleby, ‘yes; nobody says
anything against him, except that I think he is the weakest and most
foolish man I ever knew. It’s HER age I speak of. That he should have
gone and offered himself to a woman who must be--ah, half as old again
as I am--and that she should have dared to accept him! It don’t signify,
Kate; I’m disgusted with her!’

Shaking her head very emphatically indeed, Mrs. Nickleby swept away;
and all the evening, in the midst of the merriment and enjoyment that
ensued, and in which with that exception she freely participated,
conducted herself towards Miss La Creevy in a stately and distant
manner, designed to mark her sense of the impropriety of her
conduct, and to signify her extreme and cutting disapprobation of the
misdemeanour she had so flagrantly committed.



CHAPTER 64

An old Acquaintance is recognised under melancholy Circumstances, and
Dotheboys Hall breaks up for ever


Nicholas was one of those whose joy is incomplete unless it is shared
by the friends of adverse and less fortunate days. Surrounded by every
fascination of love and hope, his warm heart yearned towards plain
John Browdie. He remembered their first meeting with a smile, and their
second with a tear; saw poor Smike once again with the bundle on
his shoulder trudging patiently by his side; and heard the honest
Yorkshireman’s rough words of encouragement as he left them on their
road to London.

Madeline and he sat down, very many times, jointly to produce a letter
which should acquaint John at full length with his altered fortunes,
and assure him of his friendship and gratitude. It so happened, however,
that the letter could never be written. Although they applied themselves
to it with the best intentions in the world, it chanced that they always
fell to talking about something else, and when Nicholas tried it by
himself, he found it impossible to write one-half of what he wished to
say, or to pen anything, indeed, which on reperusal did not appear cold
and unsatisfactory compared with what he had in his mind. At last, after
going on thus from day to day, and reproaching himself more and more,
he resolved (the more readily as Madeline strongly urged him) to make a
hasty trip into Yorkshire, and present himself before Mr. and Mrs. Browdie
without a word of notice.

Thus it was that between seven and eight o’clock one evening, he and
Kate found themselves in the Saracen’s Head booking-office, securing
a place to Greta Bridge by the next morning’s coach. They had to go
westward, to procure some little necessaries for his journey, and, as it
was a fine night, they agreed to walk there, and ride home.

The place they had just been in called up so many recollections, and
Kate had so many anecdotes of Madeline, and Nicholas so many anecdotes
of Frank, and each was so interested in what the other said, and both
were so happy and confiding, and had so much to talk about, that it was
not until they had plunged for a full half-hour into that labyrinth of
streets which lies between Seven Dials and Soho, without emerging into
any large thoroughfare, that Nicholas began to think it just possible
they might have lost their way.

The possibility was soon converted into a certainty; for, on looking
about, and walking first to one end of the street and then to the other,
he could find no landmark he could recognise, and was fain to turn back
again in quest of some place at which he could seek a direction.

It was a by-street, and there was nobody about, or in the few wretched
shops they passed. Making towards a faint gleam of light which streamed
across the pavement from a cellar, Nicholas was about to descend two or
three steps so as to render himself visible to those below and make his
inquiry, when he was arrested by a loud noise of scolding in a woman’s
voice.

‘Oh come away!’ said Kate, ‘they are quarrelling. You’ll be hurt.’

‘Wait one instant, Kate. Let us hear if there’s anything the matter,’
returned her brother. ‘Hush!’

‘You nasty, idle, vicious, good-for-nothing brute,’ cried the woman,
stamping on the ground, ‘why don’t you turn the mangle?’

‘So I am, my life and soul!’ replied the man’s voice. ‘I am always
turning. I am perpetually turning, like a demd old horse in a demnition
mill. My life is one demd horrid grind!’

‘Then why don’t you go and list for a soldier?’ retorted the woman;
‘you’re welcome to.’

‘For a soldier!’ cried the man. ‘For a soldier! Would his joy and
gladness see him in a coarse red coat with a little tail? Would she hear
of his being slapped and beat by drummers demnebly? Would she have him
fire off real guns, and have his hair cut, and his whiskers shaved, and
his eyes turned right and left, and his trousers pipeclayed?’

‘Dear Nicholas,’ whispered Kate, ‘you don’t know who that is. It’s Mr
Mantalini I am confident.’

‘Do make sure! Peep at him while I ask the way,’ said Nicholas. ‘Come
down a step or two. Come!’

Drawing her after him, Nicholas crept down the steps and looked into
a small boarded cellar. There, amidst clothes-baskets and clothes,
stripped up to his shirt-sleeves, but wearing still an old patched
pair of pantaloons of superlative make, a once brilliant waistcoat,
and moustache and whiskers as of yore, but lacking their lustrous
dye--there, endeavouring to mollify the wrath of a buxom female--not
the lawful Madame Mantalini, but the proprietress of the concern--and
grinding meanwhile as if for very life at the mangle, whose creaking
noise, mingled with her shrill tones, appeared almost to deafen
him--there was the graceful, elegant, fascinating, and once dashing
Mantalini.

‘Oh you false traitor!’ cried the lady, threatening personal violence on
Mr. Mantalini’s face.

‘False! Oh dem! Now my soul, my gentle, captivating, bewitching, and
most demnebly enslaving chick-a-biddy, be calm,’ said Mr. Mantalini,
humbly.

‘I won’t!’ screamed the woman. ‘I’ll tear your eyes out!’

‘Oh! What a demd savage lamb!’ cried Mr. Mantalini.

‘You’re never to be trusted,’ screamed the woman; ‘you were out all day
yesterday, and gallivanting somewhere I know. You know you were! Isn’t
it enough that I paid two pound fourteen for you, and took you out of
prison and let you live here like a gentleman, but must you go on like
this: breaking my heart besides?’

‘I will never break its heart, I will be a good boy, and never do so any
more; I will never be naughty again; I beg its little pardon,’ said
Mr. Mantalini, dropping the handle of the mangle, and folding his palms
together; ‘it is all up with its handsome friend! He has gone to the
demnition bow-wows. It will have pity? It will not scratch and claw, but
pet and comfort? Oh, demmit!’

Very little affected, to judge from her action, by this tender appeal,
the lady was on the point of returning some angry reply, when Nicholas,
raising his voice, asked his way to Piccadilly.

Mr. Mantalini turned round, caught sight of Kate, and, without another
word, leapt at one bound into a bed which stood behind the door, and
drew the counterpane over his face: kicking meanwhile convulsively.

‘Demmit,’ he cried, in a suffocating voice, ‘it’s little Nickleby! Shut
the door, put out the candle, turn me up in the bedstead! Oh, dem, dem,
dem!’

The woman looked, first at Nicholas, and then at Mr. Mantalini, as
if uncertain on whom to visit this extraordinary behaviour; but Mr
Mantalini happening by ill-luck to thrust his nose from under the
bedclothes, in his anxiety to ascertain whether the visitors were gone,
she suddenly, and with a dexterity which could only have been acquired
by long practice, flung a pretty heavy clothes-basket at him, with so
good an aim that he kicked more violently than before, though without
venturing to make any effort to disengage his head, which was quite
extinguished. Thinking this a favourable opportunity for departing
before any of the torrent of her wrath discharged itself upon him,
Nicholas hurried Kate off, and left the unfortunate subject of this
unexpected recognition to explain his conduct as he best could.

The next morning he began his journey. It was now cold, winter weather:
forcibly recalling to his mind under what circumstances he had first
travelled that road, and how many vicissitudes and changes he had
since undergone. He was alone inside the greater part of the way, and
sometimes, when he had fallen into a doze, and, rousing himself, looked
out of the window, and recognised some place which he well remembered as
having passed, either on his journey down, or in the long walk back
with poor Smike, he could hardly believe but that all which had since
happened had been a dream, and that they were still plodding wearily on
towards London, with the world before them.

To render these recollections the more vivid, it came on to snow as
night set in; and, passing through Stamford and Grantham, and by the
little alehouse where he had heard the story of the bold Baron of
Grogzwig, everything looked as if he had seen it but yesterday, and
not even a flake of the white crust on the roofs had melted away.
Encouraging the train of ideas which flocked upon him, he could almost
persuade himself that he sat again outside the coach, with Squeers and
the boys; that he heard their voices in the air; and that he felt again,
but with a mingled sensation of pain and pleasure now, that old sinking
of the heart, and longing after home. While he was yet yielding himself
up to these fancies he fell asleep, and, dreaming of Madeline, forgot
them.

He slept at the inn at Greta Bridge on the night of his arrival, and,
rising at a very early hour next morning, walked to the market town, and
inquired for John Browdie’s house. John lived in the outskirts, now he
was a family man; and as everbody knew him, Nicholas had no difficulty
in finding a boy who undertook to guide him to his residence.

Dismissing his guide at the gate, and in his impatience not even
stopping to admire the thriving look of cottage or garden either,
Nicholas made his way to the kitchen door, and knocked lustily with his
stick.

‘Halloa!’ cried a voice inside. ‘Wa’et be the matther noo? Be the toon
a-fire? Ding, but thou mak’st noise eneaf!’

With these words, John Browdie opened the door himself, and opening his
eyes too to their utmost width, cried, as he clapped his hands together,
and burst into a hearty roar:

‘Ecod, it be the godfeyther, it be the godfeyther! Tilly, here be
Misther Nickleby. Gi’ us thee hond, mun. Coom awa’, coom awa’. In wi
‘un, doon beside the fire; tak’ a soop o’ thot. Dinnot say a word till
thou’st droonk it a’! Oop wi’ it, mun. Ding! but I’m reeght glod to see
thee.’

Adapting his action to his text, John dragged Nicholas into the kitchen,
forced him down upon a huge settle beside a blazing fire, poured out
from an enormous bottle about a quarter of a pint of spirits, thrust it
into his hand, opened his mouth and threw back his head as a sign to
him to drink it instantly, and stood with a broad grin of welcome
overspreading his great red face like a jolly giant.

‘I might ha’ knowa’d,’ said John, ‘that nobody but thou would ha’
coom wi’ sike a knock as you. Thot was the wa’ thou knocked at
schoolmeasther’s door, eh? Ha, ha, ha! But I say; wa’at be a’ this aboot
schoolmeasther?’

‘You know it then?’ said Nicholas.

‘They were talking aboot it, doon toon, last neeght,’ replied John, ‘but
neane on ‘em seemed quite to un’erstan’ it, loike.’

‘After various shiftings and delays,’ said Nicholas, ‘he has been
sentenced to be transported for seven years, for being in the unlawful
possession of a stolen will; and, after that, he has to suffer the
consequence of a conspiracy.’

‘Whew!’ cried John, ‘a conspiracy! Soom’at in the pooder-plot wa’? Eh?
Soom’at in the Guy Faux line?’

‘No, no, no, a conspiracy connected with his school; I’ll explain it
presently.’

‘Thot’s reeght!’ said John, ‘explain it arter breakfast, not noo, for
thou be’est hoongry, and so am I; and Tilly she mun’ be at the bottom o’
a’ explanations, for she says thot’s the mutual confidence. Ha, ha, ha!
Ecod, it’s a room start, is the mutual confidence!’

The entrance of Mrs. Browdie, with a smart cap on, and very many
apologies for their having been detected in the act of breakfasting in
the kitchen, stopped John in his discussion of this grave subject, and
hastened the breakfast: which, being composed of vast mounds of toast,
new-laid eggs, boiled ham, Yorkshire pie, and other cold substantials
(of which heavy relays were constantly appearing from another kitchen
under the direction of a very plump servant), was admirably adapted
to the cold bleak morning, and received the utmost justice from all
parties. At last, it came to a close; and the fire which had been
lighted in the best parlour having by this time burnt up, they adjourned
thither, to hear what Nicholas had to tell.

Nicholas told them all, and never was there a story which awakened so
many emotions in the breasts of two eager listeners. At one time, honest
John groaned in sympathy, and at another roared with joy; at one time
he vowed to go up to London on purpose to get a sight of the brothers
Cheeryble; and, at another, swore that Tim Linkinwater should receive
such a ham by coach, and carriage free, as mortal knife had never
carved. When Nicholas began to describe Madeline, he sat with his mouth
wide open, nudging Mrs. Browdie from time to time, and exclaiming under
his breath that she must be ‘raa’ther a tidy sart,’ and when he heard
at last that his young friend had come down purposely to communicate his
good fortune, and to convey to him all those assurances of friendship
which he could not state with sufficient warmth in writing--that the
only object of his journey was to share his happiness with them, and
to tell them that when he was married they must come up to see him,
and that Madeline insisted on it as well as he--John could hold out no
longer, but after looking indignantly at his wife, and demanding to
know what she was whimpering for, drew his coat sleeve over his eyes and
blubbered outright.

‘Tell’ee wa’at though,’ said John seriously, when a great deal had been
said on both sides, ‘to return to schoolmeasther. If this news aboot ‘un
has reached school today, the old ‘ooman wean’t have a whole boan in her
boddy, nor Fanny neither.’

‘Oh, John!’ cried Mrs. Browdie.

‘Ah! and Oh, John agean,’ replied the Yorkshireman. ‘I dinnot know what
they lads mightn’t do. When it first got aboot that schoolmeasther was
in trouble, some feythers and moothers sent and took their young chaps
awa’. If them as is left, should know waat’s coom tiv’un, there’ll be
sike a revolution and rebel!--Ding! But I think they’ll a’ gang daft,
and spill bluid like wather!’

In fact, John Browdie’s apprehensions were so strong that he determined
to ride over to the school without delay, and invited Nicholas to
accompany him, which, however, he declined, pleading that his presence
might perhaps aggravate the bitterness of their adversity.

‘Thot’s true!’ said John; ‘I should ne’er ha’ thought o’ thot.’

‘I must return tomorrow,’ said Nicholas, ‘but I mean to dine with you
today, and if Mrs. Browdie can give me a bed--’

‘Bed!’ cried John, ‘I wish thou couldst sleep in fower beds at once.
Ecod, thou shouldst have ‘em a’. Bide till I coom back; on’y bide till I
coom back, and ecod we’ll make a day of it.’

Giving his wife a hearty kiss, and Nicholas a no less hearty shake of
the hand, John mounted his horse and rode off: leaving Mrs. Browdie to
apply herself to hospitable preparations, and his young friend to stroll
about the neighbourhood, and revisit spots which were rendered familiar
to him by many a miserable association.

John cantered away, and arriving at Dotheboys Hall, tied his horse to a
gate and made his way to the schoolroom door, which he found locked on
the inside. A tremendous noise and riot arose from within, and, applying
his eye to a convenient crevice in the wall, he did not remain long in
ignorance of its meaning.

The news of Mr. Squeers’s downfall had reached Dotheboys; that was quite
clear. To all appearance, it had very recently become known to the young
gentlemen; for the rebellion had just broken out.

It was one of the brimstone-and-treacle mornings, and Mrs. Squeers
had entered school according to custom with the large bowl and spoon,
followed by Miss Squeers and the amiable Wackford: who, during his
father’s absence, had taken upon him such minor branches of the
executive as kicking the pupils with his nailed boots, pulling the hair
of some of the smaller boys, pinching the others in aggravating places,
and rendering himself, in various similar ways, a great comfort and
happiness to his mother. Their entrance, whether by premeditation or
a simultaneous impulse, was the signal of revolt. While one detachment
rushed to the door and locked it, and another mounted on the desks and
forms, the stoutest (and consequently the newest) boy seized the cane,
and confronting Mrs. Squeers with a stern countenance, snatched off her
cap and beaver bonnet, put them on his own head, armed himself with the
wooden spoon, and bade her, on pain of death, go down upon her knees and
take a dose directly. Before that estimable lady could recover herself,
or offer the slightest retaliation, she was forced into a kneeling
posture by a crowd of shouting tormentors, and compelled to swallow a
spoonful of the odious mixture, rendered more than usually savoury by
the immersion in the bowl of Master Wackford’s head, whose ducking
was intrusted to another rebel. The success of this first achievement
prompted the malicious crowd, whose faces were clustered together in
every variety of lank and half-starved ugliness, to further acts of
outrage. The leader was insisting upon Mrs. Squeers repeating her dose,
Master Squeers was undergoing another dip in the treacle, and a violent
assault had been commenced on Miss Squeers, when John Browdie, bursting
open the door with a vigorous kick, rushed to the rescue. The shouts,
screams, groans, hoots, and clapping of hands, suddenly ceased, and a
dead silence ensued.

‘Ye be noice chaps,’ said John, looking steadily round. ‘What’s to do
here, thou yoong dogs?’

‘Squeers is in prison, and we are going to run away!’ cried a score of
shrill voices. ‘We won’t stop, we won’t stop!’

‘Weel then, dinnot stop,’ replied John; ‘who waants thee to stop? Roon
awa’ loike men, but dinnot hurt the women.’

‘Hurrah!’ cried the shrill voices, more shrilly still.

‘Hurrah?’ repeated John. ‘Weel, hurrah loike men too. Noo then, look
out. Hip--hip,--hip--hurrah!’

‘Hurrah!’ cried the voices.

‘Hurrah! Agean;’ said John. ‘Looder still.’

The boys obeyed.

‘Anoother!’ said John. ‘Dinnot be afeared on it. Let’s have a good ‘un!’

‘Hurrah!’

‘Noo then,’ said John, ‘let’s have yan more to end wi’, and then
coot off as quick as you loike. Tak’a good breath noo--Squeers be in
jail--the school’s brokken oop--it’s a’ ower--past and gane--think o’
thot, and let it be a hearty ‘un! Hurrah!’

Such a cheer arose as the walls of Dotheboys Hall had never echoed
before, and were destined never to respond to again. When the sound had
died away, the school was empty; and of the busy noisy crowd which had
peopled it but five minutes before, not one remained.

‘Very well, Mr. Browdie!’ said Miss Squeers, hot and flushed from the
recent encounter, but vixenish to the last; ‘you’ve been and excited our
boys to run away. Now see if we don’t pay you out for that, sir! If
my pa IS unfortunate and trod down by henemies, we’re not going to be
basely crowed and conquered over by you and ‘Tilda.’

‘Noa!’ replied John bluntly, ‘thou bean’t. Tak’ thy oath o’ thot. Think
betther o’ us, Fanny. I tell ‘ee both, that I’m glod the auld man has
been caught out at last--dom’d glod--but ye’ll sooffer eneaf wi’out any
crowin’ fra’ me, and I be not the mun to crow, nor be Tilly the lass,
so I tell ‘ee flat. More than thot, I tell ‘ee noo, that if thou need’st
friends to help thee awa’ from this place--dinnot turn up thy nose,
Fanny, thou may’st--thou’lt foind Tilly and I wi’ a thout o’ old times
aboot us, ready to lend thee a hond. And when I say thot, dinnot think
I be asheamed of waa’t I’ve deane, for I say again, Hurrah! and dom the
schoolmeasther. There!’

His parting words concluded, John Browdie strode heavily out, remounted
his nag, put him once more into a smart canter, and, carolling lustily
forth some fragments of an old song, to which the horse’s hoofs rang a
merry accompaniment, sped back to his pretty wife and to Nicholas.

For some days afterwards, the neighbouring country was overrun with
boys, who, the report went, had been secretly furnished by Mr. and Mrs
Browdie, not only with a hearty meal of bread and meat, but with sundry
shillings and sixpences to help them on their way. To this rumour John
always returned a stout denial, which he accompanied, however, with a
lurking grin, that rendered the suspicious doubtful, and fully confirmed
all previous believers.

There were a few timid young children, who, miserable as they had been,
and many as were the tears they had shed in the wretched school, still
knew no other home, and had formed for it a sort of attachment, which
made them weep when the bolder spirits fled, and cling to it as a
refuge. Of these, some were found crying under hedges and in such
places, frightened at the solitude. One had a dead bird in a little
cage; he had wandered nearly twenty miles, and when his poor favourite
died, lost courage, and lay down beside him. Another was discovered in a
yard hard by the school, sleeping with a dog, who bit at those who came
to remove him, and licked the sleeping child’s pale face.

They were taken back, and some other stragglers were recovered, but
by degrees they were claimed, or lost again; and, in course of time,
Dotheboys Hall and its last breaking-up began to be forgotten by the
neighbours, or to be only spoken of as among the things that had been.



CHAPTER 65

Conclusion


When her term of mourning had expired, Madeline gave her hand and
fortune to Nicholas; and, on the same day and at the same time, Kate
became Mrs. Frank Cheeryble. It was expected that Tim Linkinwater and
Miss La Creevy would have made a third couple on the occasion, but
they declined, and two or three weeks afterwards went out together one
morning before breakfast, and, coming back with merry faces, were found
to have been quietly married that day.

The money which Nicholas acquired in right of his wife he invested in
the firm of Cheeryble Brothers, in which Frank had become a partner.
Before many years elapsed, the business began to be carried on in the
names of ‘Cheeryble and Nickleby,’ so that Mrs. Nickleby’s prophetic
anticipations were realised at last.

The twin brothers retired. Who needs to be told that THEY were happy?
They were surrounded by happiness of their own creation, and lived but
to increase it.

Tim Linkinwater condescended, after much entreaty and brow-beating, to
accept a share in the house; but he could never be prevailed upon to
suffer the publication of his name as a partner, and always persisted in
the punctual and regular discharge of his clerkly duties.

He and his wife lived in the old house, and occupied the very bedchamber
in which he had slept for four-and-forty years. As his wife grew older,
she became even a more cheerful and light-hearted little creature; and
it was a common saying among their friends, that it was impossible
to say which looked the happier, Tim as he sat calmly smiling in his
elbow-chair on one side of the fire, or his brisk little wife chatting
and laughing, and constantly bustling in and out of hers, on the other.

Dick, the blackbird, was removed from the counting-house and promoted
to a warm corner in the common sitting-room. Beneath his cage hung two
miniatures, of Mrs. Linkinwater’s execution; one representing herself,
and the other Tim; and both smiling very hard at all beholders. Tim’s
head being powdered like a twelfth cake, and his spectacles copied with
great nicety, strangers detected a close resemblance to him at the first
glance, and this leading them to suspect that the other must be his
wife, and emboldening them to say so without scruple, Mrs. Linkinwater
grew very proud of these achievements in time, and considered them
among the most successful likenesses she had ever painted. Tim had
the profoundest faith in them, likewise; for on this, as on all
other subjects, they held but one opinion; and if ever there were a
‘comfortable couple’ in the world, it was Mr. and Mrs. Linkinwater.

Ralph, having died intestate, and having no relations but those with
whom he had lived in such enmity, they would have become in legal course
his heirs. But they could not bear the thought of growing rich on money
so acquired, and felt as though they could never hope to prosper with
it. They made no claim to his wealth; and the riches for which he had
toiled all his days, and burdened his soul with so many evil deeds, were
swept at last into the coffers of the state, and no man was the better
or the happier for them.

Arthur Gride was tried for the unlawful possession of the will, which
he had either procured to be stolen, or had dishonestly acquired and
retained by other means as bad. By dint of an ingenious counsel, and
a legal flaw, he escaped; but only to undergo a worse punishment;
for, some years afterwards, his house was broken open in the night by
robbers, tempted by the rumours of his great wealth, and he was found
murdered in his bed.

Mrs. Sliderskew went beyond the seas at nearly the same time as Mr
Squeers, and in the course of nature never returned. Brooker died
penitent. Sir Mulberry Hawk lived abroad for some years, courted and
caressed, and in high repute as a fine dashing fellow. Ultimately,
returning to this country, he was thrown into jail for debt, and there
perished miserably, as such high spirits generally do.

The first act of Nicholas, when he became a rich and prosperous
merchant, was to buy his father’s old house. As time crept on, and there
came gradually about him a group of lovely children, it was altered and
enlarged; but none of the old rooms were ever pulled down, no old tree
was ever rooted up, nothing with which there was any association of
bygone times was ever removed or changed.

Within a stone’s throw was another retreat, enlivened by children’s
pleasant voices too; and here was Kate, with many new cares and
occupations, and many new faces courting her sweet smile (and one so
like her own, that to her mother she seemed a child again), the same
true gentle creature, the same fond sister, the same in the love of all
about her, as in her girlish days.

Mrs. Nickleby lived, sometimes with her daughter, and sometimes with her
son, accompanying one or other of them to London at those periods when
the cares of business obliged both families to reside there, and always
preserving a great appearance of dignity, and relating her experiences
(especially on points connected with the management and bringing-up of
children) with much solemnity and importance. It was a very long time
before she could be induced to receive Mrs. Linkinwater into favour, and
it is even doubtful whether she ever thoroughly forgave her.

There was one grey-haired, quiet, harmless gentleman, who, winter and
summer, lived in a little cottage hard by Nicholas’s house, and, when
he was not there, assumed the superintendence of affairs. His chief
pleasure and delight was in the children, with whom he was a child
himself, and master of the revels. The little people could do nothing
without dear Newman Noggs.

The grass was green above the dead boy’s grave, and trodden by feet
so small and light, that not a daisy drooped its head beneath their
pressure. Through all the spring and summertime, garlands of fresh
flowers, wreathed by infant hands, rested on the stone; and, when the
children came to change them lest they should wither and be pleasant
to him no longer, their eyes filled with tears, and they spoke low and
softly of their poor dead cousin.





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Title: Oliver Twist

Author: Charles Dickens

Posting Date: October 10, 2008 [EBook #730]
Release Date: November, 1996

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLIVER TWIST ***




Produced by Peggy Gaugy and Leigh Little.  HTML version by Al Haines.









OLIVER TWIST

OR

THE PARISH BOY'S PROGRESS


BY

CHARLES DICKENS




CONTENTS

       I  TREATS OF THE PLACE WHERE OLIVER TWIST WAS BORN AND OF THE
          CIRCUMSTANCES ATTENDING HIS BIRTH
      II  TREATS OF OLIVER TWIST'S GROWTH, EDUCATION, AND BOARD
     III  RELATES HOW OLIVER TWIST WAS VERY NEAR GETTING A PLACE WHICH
          WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN A SINECURE
      IV  OLIVER, BEING OFFERED ANOTHER PLACE, MAKES HIS FIRST ENTRY INTO
          PUBLIC LIFE
       V  OLIVER MINGLES WITH NEW ASSOCIATES.  GOING TO A FUNERAL FOR THE
          FIRST TIME, HE FORMS AN UNFAVOURABLE NOTION OF HIS MASTER'S
          BUSINESS
      VI  OLIVER, BEING GOADED BY THE TAUNTS OF NOAH, ROUSES INTO ACTION,
          AND RATHER ASTONISHES HIM
     VII  OLIVER CONTINUES REFRACTORY
    VIII  OLIVER WALKS TO LONDON.  HE ENCOUNTERS ON THE ROAD A STRANGE
          SORT OF YOUNG GENTLEMAN
      IX  CONTAINING FURTHER PARTICULARS CONCERNING THE PLEASANT OLD
          GENTLEMAN, AND HIS HOPEFUL PUPILS
       X  OLIVER BECOMES BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH THE CHARACTERS OF HIS NEW
          ASSOCIATES; AND PURCHASES EXPERIENCE AT A HIGH PRICE. BEING A
          SHORT, BUT VERY IMPORTANT CHAPTER, IN THIS HISTORY
      XI  TREATS OF MR. FANG THE POLICE MAGISTRATE; AND FURNISHES A
          SLIGHT SPECIMEN OF HIS MODE OF ADMINISTERING JUSTICE
     XII  IN WHICH OLIVER IS TAKEN BETTER CARE OF THAN HE EVER WAS
          BEFORE.  AND IN WHICH THE NARRATIVE REVERTS TO THE MERRY OLD
          GENTLEMAN AND HIS YOUTHFUL FRIENDS.
    XIII  SOME NEW ACQUAINTANCES ARE INTRODUCED TO THE INTELLIGENT READER,
          CONNECTED WITH WHOM VARIOUS PLEASANT MATTERS ARE RELATED,
          APPERTAINING TO THIS HISTORY
     XIV  COMPRISING FURTHER PARTICULARS OF OLIVER'S STAY AT MR.
          BROWNLOW'S, WITH THE REMARKABLE PREDICTION WHICH ONE MR. GRIMWIG
          UTTERED CONCERNING HIM, WHEN HE WENT OUT ON AN ERRAND
      XV  SHOWING HOW VERY FOND OF OLIVER TWIST, THE MERRY OLD JEW AND
          MISS NANCY WERE
     XVI  RELATES WHAT BECAME OF OLIVER TWIST, AFTER HE HAD BEEN CLAIMED
          BY NANCY
    XVII  OLIVER'S DESTINY CONTINUING UNPROPITIOUS, BRINGS A GREAT MAN TO
          LONDON TO INJURE HIS REPUTATION
   XVIII  HOW OLIVER PASSED HIS TIME IN THE IMPROVING SOCIETY OF HIS
          REPUTABLE FRIENDS
     XIX  IN WHICH A NOTABLE PLAN IS DISCUSSED AND DETERMINED ON
      XX  WHEREIN OLIVER IS DELIVERED OVER TO MR. WILLIAM SIKES
     XXI  THE EXPEDITION
    XXII  THE BURGLARY
   XXIII  WHICH CONTAINS THE SUBSTANCE OF A PLEASANT CONVERSATION BETWEEN
          MR. BUMBLE AND A LADY; AND SHOWS THAT EVEN A BEADLE MAY BE
          SUSCEPTIBLE ON SOME POINTS
    XXIV  TREATS ON A VERY POOR SUBJECT.  BUT IS A SHORT ONE, AND MAY BE
          FOUND OF IMPORTANCE IN THIS HISTORY
     XXV  WHEREIN THIS HISTORY REVERTS TO MR. FAGIN AND COMPANY
    XXVI  IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS CHARACTER APPEARS UPON THE SCENE; AND MANY
          THINGS, INSEPARABLE FROM THIS HISTORY, ARE DONE AND PERFORMED
   XXVII  ATONES FOR THE UNPOLITENESS OF A FORMER CHAPTER; WHICH DESERTED
          A LADY, MOST UNCEREMONIOUSLY
  XXVIII  LOOKS AFTER OLIVER, AND PROCEEDS WITH HIS ADVENTURES
    XXIX  HAS AN INTRODUCTORY ACCOUNT OF THE INMATES OF THE HOUSE, TO
          WHICH OLIVER RESORTED
     XXX  RELATES WHAT OLIVER'S NEW VISITORS THOUGHT OF HIM
    XXXI  INVOLVES A CRITICAL POSITION
   XXXII  OF THE HAPPY LIFE OLIVER BEGAN TO LEAD WITH HIS KIND FRIENDS
  XXXIII  WHEREIN THE HAPPINESS OF OLIVER AND HIS FRIENDS, EXPERIENCES A
          SUDDEN CHECK
   XXXIV  CONTAINS SOME INTRODUCTORY PARTICULARS RELATIVE TO A YOUNG
          GENTLEMAN WHO NOW ARRIVES UPON THE SCENE; AND A NEW ADVENTURE
          WHICH HAPPENED TO OLIVER
    XXXV  CONTAINING THE UNSATISFACTORY RESULT OF OLIVER'S ADVENTURE; AND
          A CONVERSATION OF SOME IMPORTANCE BETWEEN HARRY MAYLIE AND ROSE
   XXXVI  IS A VERY SHORT ONE, AND MAY APPEAR OF NO GREAT IMPORTANCE IN
          ITS PLACE, BUT IT SHOULD BE READ NOTWITHSTANDING, AS A SEQUEL
          TO THE LAST, AND A KEY TO ONE THAT WILL FOLLOW WHEN ITS TIME
          ARRIVES
  XXXVII  IN WHICH THE READER MAY PERCEIVE A CONTRAST, NOT UNCOMMON IN
          MATRIMONIAL CASES
 XXXVIII  CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF WHAT PASSED BETWEEN MR. AND MRS.
          BUMBLE, AND MR. MONKS, AT THEIR NOCTURNAL INTERVIEW
   XXXIX  INTRODUCES SOME RESPECTABLE CHARACTERS WITH WHOM THE READER IS
          ALREADY ACQUAINTED, AND SHOWS HOW MONKS AND THE JEW LAID THEIR
          WORTHY HEADS TOGETHER
      XL  A STRANGE INTERVIEW, WHICH IS A SEQUEL TO THE LAST CHAMBER
     XLI  CONTAINING FRESH DISCOVERIES, AND SHOWING THAT SUPRISES, LIKE
          MISFORTUNES, SELDOM COME ALONE
    XLII  AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE OF OLIVER'S, EXHIBITING DECIDED MARKS OF
          GENIUS, BECOMES A PUBLIC CHARACTER IN THE METROPOLIS
   XLIII  WHEREIN IS SHOWN HOW THE ARTFUL DODGER GOT INTO TROUBLE
    XLIV  THE TIME ARRIVES FOR NANCY TO REDEEM HER PLEDGE TO ROSE MAYLIE.
          SHE FAILS.
     XLV  NOAH CLAYPOLE IS EMPLOYED BY FAGIN ON A SECRET MISSION
    XLVI  THE APPOINTMENT KEPT
   XLVII  FATAL CONSEQUENCES
  XLVIII  THE FLIGHT OF SIKES
    XLIX  MONKS AND MR. BROWNLOW AT LENGTH MEET.  THEIR CONVERSATION,
          AND THE INTELLIGENCE THAT INTERRUPTS IT
       L  THE PURSUIT AND ESCAPE
      LI  AFFORDING AN EXPLANATION OF MORE MYSTERIES THAN ONE, AND
          COMPREHENDING A PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE WITH NO WORD OF SETTLEMENT
          OR PIN-MONEY
     LII  FAGIN'S LAST NIGHT ALIVE
    LIII  AND LAST




CHAPTER I

TREATS OF THE PLACE WHERE OLIVER TWIST WAS BORN AND OF THE
CIRCUMSTANCES ATTENDING HIS BIRTH

Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons
it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will
assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns,
great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on
a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as
it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of
the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is
prefixed to the head of this chapter.

For a long time after it was ushered into this world of sorrow and
trouble, by the parish surgeon, it remained a matter of considerable
doubt whether the child would survive to bear any name at all; in which
case it is somewhat more than probable that these memoirs would never
have appeared; or, if they had, that being comprised within a couple of
pages, they would have possessed the inestimable merit of being the
most concise and faithful specimen of biography, extant in the
literature of any age or country.

Although I am not disposed to maintain that the being born in a
workhouse, is in itself the most fortunate and enviable circumstance
that can possibly befall a human being, I do mean to say that in this
particular instance, it was the best thing for Oliver Twist that could
by possibility have occurred.  The fact is, that there was considerable
difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of
respiration,--a troublesome practice, but one which custom has rendered
necessary to our easy existence; and for some time he lay gasping on a
little flock mattress, rather unequally poised between this world and
the next: the balance being decidedly in favour of the latter.  Now,
if, during this brief period, Oliver had been surrounded by careful
grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of
profound wisdom, he would most inevitably and indubitably have been
killed in no time.  There being nobody by, however, but a pauper old
woman, who was rendered rather misty by an unwonted allowance of beer;
and a parish surgeon who did such matters by contract; Oliver and
Nature fought out the point between them.  The result was, that, after
a few struggles, Oliver breathed, sneezed, and proceeded to advertise
to the inmates of the workhouse the fact of a new burden having been
imposed  upon the parish, by setting up as loud a cry as could
reasonably have been expected from a male infant who had not been
possessed of that very useful appendage, a voice, for a much longer
space of time than three minutes and a quarter.

As Oliver gave this first proof of the free and proper action of his
lungs, the patchwork coverlet which was carelessly flung over the iron
bedstead, rustled; the pale face of a young woman was raised feebly
from the pillow; and a faint voice imperfectly articulated the words,
'Let me see the child, and die.'

The surgeon had been sitting with his face turned towards the fire:
giving the palms of his hands a warm and a rub alternately.  As the
young woman spoke, he rose, and advancing to the bed's head, said, with
more kindness than might have been expected of him:

'Oh, you must not talk about dying yet.'

'Lor bless her dear heart, no!' interposed the nurse, hastily
depositing in her pocket a green glass bottle, the contents of which
she had been tasting in a corner with evident satisfaction.

'Lor bless her dear heart, when she has lived as long as I have, sir,
and had thirteen children of her own, and all on 'em dead except two,
and them in the wurkus with me, she'll know better than to take on in
that way, bless her dear heart!  Think what it is to be a mother,
there's a dear young lamb do.'

Apparently this consolatory perspective of a mother's prospects failed
in producing its due effect.  The patient shook her head, and stretched
out her hand towards the child.

The surgeon deposited it in her arms.  She imprinted her cold white
lips passionately on its forehead; passed her hands over her face;
gazed wildly round; shuddered; fell back--and died. They chafed her
breast, hands, and temples; but the blood had stopped forever.  They
talked of hope and comfort. They had been strangers too long.

'It's all over, Mrs. Thingummy!' said the surgeon at last.

'Ah, poor dear, so it is!' said the nurse, picking up the cork of the
green bottle, which had fallen out on the pillow, as she stooped to
take up the child.  'Poor dear!'

'You needn't mind sending up to me, if the child cries, nurse,' said
the surgeon, putting on his gloves with great deliberation. 'It's very
likely it _will_ be troublesome. Give it a little gruel if it is.'  He
put on his hat, and, pausing by the bed-side on his way to the door,
added, 'She was a good-looking girl, too; where did she come from?'

'She was brought here last night,' replied the old woman, 'by the
overseer's order.  She was found lying in the street.  She had walked
some distance, for her shoes were worn to pieces; but where she came
from, or where she was going to, nobody knows.'

The surgeon leaned over the body, and raised the left hand.  'The old
story,' he said, shaking his head: 'no wedding-ring, I see. Ah!
Good-night!'

The medical gentleman walked away to dinner; and the nurse, having once
more applied herself to the green bottle, sat down on a low chair
before the fire, and proceeded to dress the infant.

What an excellent example of the power of dress, young Oliver Twist
was!  Wrapped in the blanket which had hitherto formed his only
covering, he might have been the child of a nobleman or a beggar; it
would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have assigned him
his proper station in society.  But now that he was enveloped in the
old calico robes which had grown yellow in the same service, he was
badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once--a parish
child--the orphan of a workhouse--the humble, half-starved drudge--to
be cuffed and buffeted through the world--despised by all, and pitied
by none.

Oliver cried lustily. If he could have known that he was an orphan,
left to the tender mercies of church-wardens and overseers, perhaps he
would have cried the louder.



CHAPTER II

TREATS OF OLIVER TWIST'S GROWTH, EDUCATION, AND BOARD

For the next eight or ten months, Oliver was the victim of a systematic
course of treachery and deception.  He was brought up by hand.  The
hungry and destitute situation of the infant orphan was duly reported
by the workhouse authorities to the parish authorities.  The parish
authorities inquired with dignity of the workhouse authorities, whether
there was no female then domiciled in 'the house' who was in a
situation to impart to Oliver Twist, the consolation and nourishment of
which he stood in need.  The workhouse authorities replied with
humility, that there was not. Upon this, the parish authorities
magnanimously and humanely resolved, that Oliver should be 'farmed,'
or, in other words, that he should be dispatched to a branch-workhouse
some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders
against the poor-laws, rolled about the floor all day, without the
inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the parental
superintendence of an elderly female, who received the culprits at and
for the consideration of sevenpence-halfpenny per small head per week.
Sevenpence-halfpenny's worth per week is a good round diet for a child;
a great deal may be got for sevenpence-halfpenny, quite enough to
overload its stomach, and make it uncomfortable. The elderly female was
a woman of wisdom and experience; she knew what was good for children;
and she had a very accurate perception of what was good for herself.
So, she appropriated the greater part of the weekly stipend to her own
use, and consigned the rising parochial generation to even a shorter
allowance than was originally provided for them.  Thereby finding in
the lowest depth a deeper still; and proving herself a very great
experimental philosopher.

Everybody knows the story of another experimental philosopher who had a
great theory about a horse being able to live without eating, and who
demonstrated it so well, that he had got his own horse down to a straw
a day, and would unquestionably have rendered him a very spirited and
rampacious animal on nothing at all, if he had not died,
four-and-twenty hours before he was to have had his first comfortable
bait of air.  Unfortunately for, the experimental philosophy of the
female to whose protecting care Oliver Twist was delivered over, a
similar result usually attended the operation of _her_ system; for at
the very moment when the child had contrived to exist upon the smallest
possible portion of the weakest possible food, it did perversely happen
in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it sickened from want
and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by
accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable little being was
usually summoned into another world, and there gathered to the fathers
it had never known in this.

Occasionally, when there was some more than usually interesting inquest
upon a parish child who had been overlooked in turning up a bedstead,
or inadvertently scalded to death when there happened to be a
washing--though the latter accident was very scarce, anything
approaching to a washing being of rare occurrence in the farm--the jury
would take it into their heads to ask troublesome questions, or the
parishioners would rebelliously affix their signatures to a
remonstrance.  But these impertinences were speedily checked by the
evidence of the surgeon, and the testimony of the beadle; the former of
whom had always opened the body and found nothing inside (which was
very probable indeed), and the latter of whom invariably swore whatever
the parish wanted; which was very self-devotional.  Besides, the board
made periodical pilgrimages to the farm, and always sent the beadle the
day before, to say they were going.  The children were neat and clean
to behold, when _they_ went; and what more would the people have!

It cannot be expected that this system of farming would produce any
very extraordinary or luxuriant crop.  Oliver Twist's ninth birthday
found him a pale thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and
decidedly small in circumference.  But nature or inheritance had
implanted a good sturdy spirit in Oliver's breast.  It had had plenty
of room to expand, thanks to the spare diet of the establishment; and
perhaps to this circumstance may be attributed his having any ninth
birth-day at all.  Be this as it may, however, it was his ninth
birthday; and he was keeping it in the coal-cellar with a select party
of two other young gentleman, who, after participating with him in a
sound thrashing, had been locked up for atrociously presuming to be
hungry, when Mrs. Mann, the good lady of the house, was unexpectedly
startled by the apparition of Mr. Bumble, the beadle, striving to undo
the wicket of the garden-gate.

'Goodness gracious!  Is that you, Mr. Bumble, sir?' said Mrs. Mann,
thrusting her head out of the window in well-affected ecstasies of joy.
'(Susan, take Oliver and them two brats upstairs, and wash 'em
directly.)--My heart alive!  Mr. Bumble, how glad I am to see you,
sure-ly!'

Now, Mr. Bumble was a fat man, and a choleric; so, instead of
responding to this open-hearted salutation in a kindred spirit, he gave
the little wicket a tremendous shake, and then bestowed upon it a kick
which could have emanated from no leg but a beadle's.

'Lor, only think,' said Mrs. Mann, running out,--for the three boys had
been removed by this time,--'only think of that!  That I should have
forgotten that the gate was bolted on the inside, on account of them
dear children!  Walk in sir; walk in, pray, Mr. Bumble, do, sir.'

Although this invitation was accompanied with a curtsey that might have
softened the heart of a church-warden, it by no means mollified the
beadle.

'Do you think this respectful or proper conduct, Mrs. Mann,' inquired
Mr. Bumble, grasping his cane, 'to keep the parish officers a waiting
at your garden-gate, when they come here upon porochial business with
the porochial orphans?  Are you aweer, Mrs. Mann, that you are, as I
may say, a porochial delegate, and a stipendiary?'

'I'm sure Mr. Bumble, that I was only a telling one or two of the dear
children as is so fond of you, that it was you a coming,' replied Mrs.
Mann with great humility.

Mr. Bumble had a great idea of his oratorical powers and his
importance.  He had displayed the one, and vindicated the other. He
relaxed.

'Well, well, Mrs. Mann,' he replied in a calmer tone; 'it may be as you
say; it may be.  Lead the way in, Mrs. Mann, for I come on business,
and have something to say.'

Mrs. Mann ushered the beadle into a small parlour with a brick floor;
placed a seat for him; and officiously deposited his cocked hat and
cane on the table before him.  Mr. Bumble wiped from his forehead the
perspiration which his walk had engendered, glanced complacently at the
cocked hat, and smiled.  Yes, he smiled.  Beadles are but men: and Mr.
Bumble smiled.

'Now don't you be offended at what I'm a going to say,' observed Mrs.
Mann, with captivating sweetness.  'You've had a long walk, you know,
or I wouldn't mention it.  Now, will you take a little drop of
somethink, Mr. Bumble?'

'Not a drop.  Nor a drop,' said Mr. Bumble, waving his right hand in a
dignified, but placid manner.

'I think you will,' said Mrs. Mann, who had noticed the tone of the
refusal, and the gesture that had accompanied it.  'Just a leetle drop,
with a little cold water, and a lump of sugar.'

Mr. Bumble coughed.

'Now, just a leetle drop,' said Mrs. Mann persuasively.

'What is it?' inquired the beadle.

'Why, it's what I'm obliged to keep a little of in the house, to put
into the blessed infants' Daffy, when they ain't well, Mr. Bumble,'
replied Mrs. Mann as she opened a corner cupboard, and took down a
bottle and glass.  'It's gin.  I'll not deceive you, Mr. B.  It's gin.'

'Do you give the children Daffy, Mrs. Mann?' inquired Bumble, following
with his eyes the interesting process of mixing.

'Ah, bless 'em, that I do, dear as it is,' replied the nurse. 'I
couldn't see 'em suffer before my very eyes, you know sir.'

'No'; said Mr. Bumble approvingly; 'no, you could not.  You are a
humane woman, Mrs. Mann.'  (Here she set down the glass.)  'I shall
take a early opportunity of mentioning it to the board, Mrs. Mann.'
(He drew it towards him.)  'You feel as a mother, Mrs. Mann.'  (He
stirred the gin-and-water.) 'I--I drink your health with cheerfulness,
Mrs. Mann'; and he swallowed half of it.

'And now about business,' said the beadle, taking out a leathern
pocket-book.  'The child that was half-baptized Oliver Twist, is nine
year old to-day.'

'Bless him!' interposed Mrs. Mann, inflaming her left eye with the
corner of her apron.

'And notwithstanding a offered reward of ten pound, which was
afterwards increased to twenty pound.  Notwithstanding the most
superlative, and, I may say, supernat'ral exertions on the part of this
parish,' said Bumble, 'we have never been able to discover who is his
father, or what was his mother's settlement, name, or condition.'

Mrs. Mann raised her hands in astonishment; but added, after a moment's
reflection, 'How comes he to have any name at all, then?'

The beadle drew himself up with great pride, and said, 'I inwented it.'

'You, Mr. Bumble!'

'I, Mrs. Mann.  We name our fondlings in alphabetical order. The last
was a S,--Swubble, I named him. This was a T,--Twist, I named _him_.
The next one comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins.  I have got
names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it
again, when we come to Z.'

'Why, you're quite a literary character, sir!' said Mrs. Mann.

'Well, well,' said the beadle, evidently gratified with the compliment;
'perhaps I may be.  Perhaps I may be, Mrs. Mann.' He finished the
gin-and-water, and added, 'Oliver being now too old to remain here, the
board have determined to have him back into the house.  I have come out
myself to take him there.  So let me see him at once.'

'I'll fetch him directly,' said Mrs. Mann, leaving the room for that
purpose.  Oliver, having had by this time as much of the outer coat of
dirt which encrusted his face and hands, removed, as could be scrubbed
off in one washing, was led into the room by his benevolent protectress.

'Make a bow to the gentleman, Oliver,' said Mrs. Mann.

Oliver made a bow, which was divided between the beadle on the chair,
and the cocked hat on the table.

'Will you go along with me, Oliver?' said Mr. Bumble, in a majestic
voice.

Oliver was about to say that he would go along with anybody with great
readiness, when, glancing upward, he caught sight of Mrs. Mann, who had
got behind the beadle's chair, and was shaking her fist at him with a
furious countenance.  He took the hint at once, for the fist had been
too often impressed upon his body not to be deeply impressed upon his
recollection.

'Will she go with me?' inquired poor Oliver.

'No, she can't,' replied Mr. Bumble.  'But she'll come and see you
sometimes.'

This was no very great consolation to the child.  Young as he was,
however, he had sense enough to make a feint of feeling great regret at
going away.  It was no very difficult matter for the boy to call tears
into his eyes.  Hunger and recent ill-usage are great assistants if you
want to cry; and Oliver cried very naturally indeed.  Mrs. Mann gave
him a thousand embraces, and what Oliver wanted a great deal more, a
piece of bread and butter, less he should seem too hungry when he got
to the workhouse. With the slice of bread in his hand, and the little
brown-cloth parish cap on his head, Oliver was then led away by Mr.
Bumble from the wretched home where one kind word or look had never
lighted the gloom of his infant years.  And yet he burst into an agony
of childish grief, as the cottage-gate closed after him.  Wretched as
were the little companions in misery he was leaving behind, they were
the only friends he had ever known; and a sense of his loneliness in
the great wide world, sank into the child's heart for the first time.

Mr. Bumble walked on with long strides; little Oliver, firmly grasping
his gold-laced cuff, trotted beside him, inquiring at the end of every
quarter of a mile whether they were 'nearly there.' To these
interrogations Mr. Bumble returned very brief and snappish replies; for
the temporary blandness which gin-and-water awakens in some bosoms had
by this time evaporated; and he was once again a beadle.

Oliver had not been within the walls of the workhouse a quarter of an
hour, and had scarcely completed the demolition of a second slice of
bread, when Mr. Bumble, who had handed him over to the care of an old
woman, returned; and, telling him it was a board night, informed him
that the board had said he was to appear before it forthwith.

Not having a very clearly defined notion of what a live board was,
Oliver was rather astounded by this intelligence, and was not quite
certain whether he ought to laugh or cry.  He had no time to think
about the matter, however; for Mr. Bumble gave him a tap on the head,
with his cane, to wake him up: and another on the back to make him
lively: and bidding him to follow, conducted him into a large
white-washed room, where eight or ten fat gentlemen were sitting round
a table.  At the top of the table, seated in an arm-chair rather higher
than the rest, was a particularly fat gentleman with a very round, red
face.

'Bow to the board,' said Bumble.  Oliver brushed away two or three
tears that were lingering in his eyes; and seeing no board but the
table, fortunately bowed to that.

'What's your name, boy?' said the gentleman in the high chair.

Oliver was frightened at the sight of so many gentlemen, which made him
tremble: and the beadle gave him another tap behind, which made him
cry.  These two causes made him answer in a very low and hesitating
voice; whereupon a gentleman in a white waistcoat said he was a fool.
Which was a capital way of raising his spirits, and putting him quite
at his ease.

'Boy,' said the gentleman in the high chair, 'listen to me. You know
you're an orphan, I suppose?'

'What's that, sir?' inquired poor Oliver.

'The boy _is_ a fool--I thought he was,' said the gentleman in the
white waistcoat.

'Hush!' said the gentleman who had spoken first.  'You know you've got
no father or mother, and that you were brought up by the parish, don't
you?'

'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver, weeping bitterly.

'What are you crying for?' inquired the gentleman in the white
waistcoat.  And to be sure it was very extraordinary.  What _could_ the
boy be crying for?

'I hope you say your prayers every night,' said another gentleman in a
gruff voice; 'and pray for the people who feed you, and take care of
you--like a Christian.'

'Yes, sir,' stammered the boy.  The gentleman who spoke last was
unconsciously right.  It would have been very like a Christian, and a
marvellously good Christian too, if Oliver had prayed for the people
who fed and took care of _him_. But he hadn't, because nobody had
taught him.

'Well!  You have come here to be educated, and taught a useful trade,'
said the red-faced gentleman in the high chair.

'So you'll begin to pick oakum to-morrow morning at six o'clock,' added
the surly one in the white waistcoat.

For the combination of both these blessings in the one simple process
of picking oakum, Oliver bowed low by the direction of the beadle, and
was then hurried away to a large ward; where, on a rough, hard bed, he
sobbed himself to sleep.  What a novel illustration of the tender laws
of England!  They let the paupers go to sleep!

Poor Oliver!  He little thought, as he lay sleeping in happy
unconsciousness of all around him, that the board had that very day
arrived at a decision which would exercise the most material influence
over all his future fortunes.  But they had.  And this was it:

The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and
when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out
at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered--the poor
people liked it!  It was a regular place of public entertainment for
the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public
breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all the year round; a brick and
mortar elysium, where it was all play and no work.  'Oho!' said the
board, looking very knowing; 'we are the fellows to set this to rights;
we'll stop it all, in no time.'  So, they established the rule, that
all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel
nobody, not they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house,
or by a quick one out of it.  With this view, they contracted with the
water-works to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a
corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and
issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and
half a roll of Sundays.  They made a great many other wise and humane
regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary
to repeat; kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in
consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctors' Commons; and,
instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had
theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a
bachelor!  There is no saying how many applicants for relief, under
these last two heads, might have started up in all classes of society,
if it had not been coupled with the workhouse; but the board were
long-headed men, and had provided for this difficulty.  The relief was
inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened
people.

For the first six months after Oliver Twist was removed, the system was
in full operation.  It was rather expensive at first, in consequence of
the increase in the undertaker's bill, and the necessity of taking in
the clothes of all the paupers, which fluttered loosely on their
wasted, shrunken forms, after a week or two's gruel.  But the number of
workhouse inmates got thin as well as the paupers; and the board were
in ecstasies.

The room in which the boys were fed, was a large stone hall, with a
copper at one end: out of which the master, dressed in an apron for the
purpose, and assisted by one or two women, ladled the gruel at
mealtimes.  Of this festive composition each boy had one porringer, and
no more--except on occasions of great public rejoicing, when he had two
ounces and a quarter of bread besides.

The bowls never wanted washing.  The boys polished them with their
spoons till they shone again; and when they had performed this
operation (which never took very long, the spoons being nearly as large
as the bowls), they would sit staring at the copper, with such eager
eyes, as if they could have devoured the very bricks of which it was
composed; employing themselves, meanwhile, in sucking their fingers
most assiduously, with the view of catching up any stray splashes of
gruel that might have been cast thereon.  Boys have generally excellent
appetites. Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of
slow starvation for three months: at last they got so voracious and
wild with hunger, that one boy, who was tall for his age, and hadn't
been used to that sort of thing (for his father had kept a small
cook-shop), hinted darkly to his companions, that unless he had another
basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he might some night happen to
eat the boy who slept next him, who happened to be a weakly youth of
tender age.  He had a wild, hungry eye; and they implicitly believed
him. A council was held; lots were cast who should walk up to the
master after supper that evening, and ask for more; and it fell to
Oliver Twist.

The evening arrived; the boys took their places.  The master, in his
cook's uniform, stationed himself at the copper; his pauper assistants
ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was served out; and a long
grace was said over the short commons.  The gruel disappeared; the boys
whispered each other, and winked at Oliver; while his next neighbors
nudged him.  Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and
reckless with misery.  He rose from the table; and advancing to the
master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own
temerity:

'Please, sir, I want some more.'

The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in
stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then
clung for support to the copper.  The assistants were paralysed with
wonder; the boys with fear.

'What!' said the master at length, in a faint voice.

'Please, sir,' replied Oliver, 'I want some more.'

The master aimed a blow at Oliver's head with the ladle; pinioned him
in his arm; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.

The board were sitting in solemn conclave, when Mr. Bumble rushed into
the room in great excitement, and addressing the gentleman in the high
chair, said,

'Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir!  Oliver Twist has asked for
more!'

There was a general start.  Horror was depicted on every countenance.

'For _more_!' said Mr. Limbkins.  'Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer
me distinctly.  Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had
eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?'

'He did, sir,' replied Bumble.

'That boy will be hung,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.  'I
know that boy will be hung.'

Nobody controverted the prophetic gentleman's opinion.  An animated
discussion took place.  Oliver was ordered into instant confinement;
and a bill was next morning pasted on the outside of the gate, offering
a reward of five pounds to anybody who would take Oliver Twist off the
hands of the parish.  In other words, five pounds and Oliver Twist were
offered to any man or woman who wanted an apprentice to any trade,
business, or calling.

'I never was more convinced of anything in my life,' said the gentleman
in the white waistcoat, as he knocked at the gate and read the bill
next morning: 'I never was more convinced of anything in my life, than
I am that that boy will come to be hung.'

As I purpose to show in the sequel whether the white waistcoated
gentleman was right or not, I should perhaps mar the interest of this
narrative (supposing it to possess any at all), if I ventured to hint
just yet, whether the life of Oliver Twist had this violent termination
or no.



CHAPTER III

RELATES HOW OLIVER TWIST WAS VERY NEAR GETTING A PLACE WHICH WOULD NOT
HAVE BEEN A SINECURE

For a week after the commission of the impious and profane offence of
asking for more, Oliver remained a close prisoner in the dark and
solitary room to which he had been consigned by the wisdom and mercy of
the board.  It appears, at first sight not unreasonable to suppose,
that, if he had entertained a becoming feeling of respect for the
prediction of the gentleman in the white waistcoat, he would have
established that sage individual's prophetic character, once and for
ever, by tying one end of his pocket-handkerchief to a hook in the
wall, and attaching himself to the other.  To the performance of this
feat, however, there was one obstacle: namely, that
pocket-handkerchiefs being decided articles of luxury, had been, for
all future times and ages, removed from the noses of paupers by the
express order of the board, in council assembled: solemnly given and
pronounced under their hands and seals.  There was a still greater
obstacle in Oliver's youth and childishness.  He only cried bitterly
all day; and, when the long, dismal night came on, spread his little
hands before his eyes to shut out the darkness, and crouching in the
corner, tried to sleep: ever and anon waking with a start and tremble,
and drawing himself closer and closer to the wall, as if to feel even
its cold hard surface were a protection in the gloom and loneliness
which surrounded him.

Let it not be supposed by the enemies of 'the system,' that, during the
period of his solitary incarceration, Oliver was denied the benefit of
exercise, the pleasure of society, or the advantages of religious
consolation.  As for exercise, it was nice cold weather, and he was
allowed to perform his ablutions every morning under the pump, in a
stone yard, in the presence of Mr. Bumble, who prevented his catching
cold, and caused a tingling sensation to pervade his frame, by repeated
applications of the cane.  As for society, he was carried every other
day into the hall where the boys dined, and there sociably flogged as a
public warning and example.  And so far from being denied the
advantages of religious consolation, he was kicked into the same
apartment every evening at prayer-time, and there permitted to listen
to, and console his mind with, a general supplication of the boys,
containing a special clause, therein inserted by authority of the
board, in which they entreated to be made good, virtuous, contented,
and obedient, and to be guarded from the sins and vices of Oliver
Twist: whom the supplication distinctly set forth to be under the
exclusive patronage and protection of the powers of wickedness, and an
article direct from the manufactory of the very Devil himself.

It chanced one morning, while Oliver's affairs were in this auspicious
and comfortable state, that Mr. Gamfield, chimney-sweep, went his way
down the High Street, deeply cogitating in his mind his ways and means
of paying certain arrears of rent, for which his landlord had become
rather pressing.  Mr. Gamfield's most sanguine estimate of his finances
could not raise them within full five pounds of the desired amount;
and, in a species of arithmetical desperation, he was alternately
cudgelling his brains and his donkey, when passing the workhouse, his
eyes encountered the bill on the gate.

'Wo--o!' said Mr. Gamfield to the donkey.

The donkey was in a state of profound abstraction: wondering, probably,
whether he was destined to be regaled with a cabbage-stalk or two when
he had disposed of the two sacks of soot with which the little cart was
laden; so, without noticing the word of command, he jogged onward.

Mr. Gamfield growled a fierce imprecation on the donkey generally, but
more particularly on his eyes; and, running after him, bestowed a blow
on his head, which would inevitably have beaten in any skull but a
donkey's.  Then, catching hold of the bridle, he gave his jaw a sharp
wrench, by way of gentle reminder that he was not his own master; and
by these means turned him round.  He then gave him another blow on the
head, just to stun him till he came back again.  Having completed these
arrangements, he walked up to the gate, to read the bill.

The gentleman with the white waistcoat was standing at the gate with
his hands behind him, after having delivered himself of some profound
sentiments in the board-room.  Having witnessed the little dispute
between Mr. Gamfield and the donkey, he smiled joyously when that
person came up to read the bill, for he saw at once that Mr. Gamfield
was exactly the sort of master Oliver Twist wanted.  Mr. Gamfield
smiled, too, as he perused the document; for five pounds was just the
sum he had been wishing for; and, as to the boy with which it was
encumbered, Mr. Gamfield, knowing what the dietary of the workhouse
was, well knew he would be a nice small pattern, just the very thing
for register stoves.  So, he spelt the bill through again, from
beginning to end; and then, touching his fur cap in token of humility,
accosted the gentleman in the white waistcoat.

'This here boy, sir, wot the parish wants to 'prentis,' said Mr.
Gamfield.

'Ay, my man,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat, with a
condescending smile.  'What of him?'

'If the parish vould like him to learn a right pleasant trade, in a
good 'spectable chimbley-sweepin' bisness,' said Mr. Gamfield, 'I wants
a 'prentis, and I am ready to take him.'

'Walk in,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.  Mr. Gamfield
having lingered behind, to give the donkey another blow on the head,
and another wrench of the jaw, as a caution not to run away in his
absence, followed the gentleman with the white waistcoat into the room
where Oliver had first seen him.

'It's a nasty trade,' said Mr. Limbkins, when Gamfield had again stated
his wish.

'Young boys have been smothered in chimneys before now,' said another
gentleman.

'That's acause they damped the straw afore they lit it in the chimbley
to make 'em come down again,' said Gamfield; 'that's all smoke, and no
blaze; vereas smoke ain't o' no use at all in making a boy come down,
for it only sinds him to sleep, and that's wot he likes.  Boys is wery
obstinit, and wery lazy, Gen'l'men, and there's nothink like a good hot
blaze to make 'em come down vith a run.  It's humane too, gen'l'men,
acause, even if they've stuck in the chimbley, roasting their feet
makes 'em struggle to hextricate theirselves.'

The gentleman in the white waistcoat appeared very much amused by this
explanation; but his mirth was speedily checked by a look from Mr.
Limbkins.  The board then proceeded to converse among themselves for a
few minutes, but in so low a tone, that the words 'saving of
expenditure,' 'looked well in the accounts,' 'have a printed report
published,' were alone audible.  These only chanced to be heard,
indeed, or account of their being very frequently repeated with great
emphasis.

At length the whispering ceased; and the members of the board, having
resumed their seats and their solemnity, Mr. Limbkins said:

'We have considered your proposition, and we don't approve of it.'

'Not at all,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.

'Decidedly not,' added the other members.

As Mr. Gamfield did happen to labour under the slight imputation of
having bruised three or four boys to death already, it occurred to him
that the board had, perhaps, in some unaccountable freak, taken it into
their heads that this extraneous circumstance ought to influence their
proceedings. It was very unlike their general mode of doing business,
if they had; but still, as he had no particular wish to revive the
rumour, he twisted his cap in his hands, and walked slowly from the
table.

'So you won't let me have him, gen'l'men?' said Mr. Gamfield, pausing
near the door.

'No,' replied Mr. Limbkins; 'at least, as it's a nasty business, we
think you ought to take something less than the premium we offered.'

Mr. Gamfield's countenance brightened, as, with a quick step, he
returned to the table, and said,

'What'll you give, gen'l'men?  Come!  Don't be too hard on a poor man.
What'll you give?'

'I should say, three pound ten was plenty,' said Mr. Limbkins.

'Ten shillings too much,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.

'Come!' said Gamfield; 'say four pound, gen'l'men.  Say four pound, and
you've got rid of him for good and all.  There!'

'Three pound ten,' repeated Mr. Limbkins, firmly.

'Come!  I'll split the diff'erence, gen'l'men,' urged Gamfield. 'Three
pound fifteen.'

'Not a farthing more,' was the firm reply of Mr. Limbkins.

'You're desperate hard upon me, gen'l'men,' said Gamfield, wavering.

'Pooh!  pooh!  nonsense!' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.
'He'd be cheap with nothing at all, as a premium. Take him, you silly
fellow!  He's just the boy for you.  He wants the stick, now and then:
it'll do him good; and his board needn't come very expensive, for he
hasn't been overfed since he was born.  Ha!  ha!  ha!'

Mr. Gamfield gave an arch look at the faces round the table, and,
observing a smile on all of them, gradually broke into a smile himself.
The bargain was made.  Mr. Bumble, was at once instructed that Oliver
Twist and his indentures were to be conveyed before the magistrate, for
signature and approval, that very afternoon.

In pursuance of this determination, little Oliver, to his excessive
astonishment, was released from bondage, and ordered to put himself
into a clean shirt.  He had hardly achieved this very unusual gymnastic
performance, when Mr. Bumble brought him, with his own hands, a basin
of gruel, and the holiday allowance of two ounces and a quarter of
bread. At this tremendous sight, Oliver began to cry very piteously:
thinking, not unnaturally, that the board must have determined to kill
him for some useful purpose, or they never would have begun to fatten
him up in that way.

'Don't make your eyes red, Oliver, but eat your food and be thankful,'
said Mr. Bumble, in a tone of impressive pomposity. 'You're a going to
be made a 'prentice of, Oliver.'

'A prentice, sir!' said the child, trembling.

'Yes, Oliver,' said Mr. Bumble.  'The kind and blessed gentleman which
is so many parents to you, Oliver, when you have none of your own: are
a going to 'prentice' you: and to set you up in life, and make a man of
you: although the expense to the parish is three pound ten!--three
pound ten, Oliver!--seventy shillins--one hundred and forty
sixpences!--and all for a naughty orphan which nobody can't love.'

As Mr. Bumble paused to take breath, after delivering this address in
an awful voice, the tears rolled down the poor child's face, and he
sobbed bitterly.

'Come,' said Mr. Bumble, somewhat less pompously, for it was gratifying
to his feelings to observe the effect his eloquence had produced;
'Come, Oliver!  Wipe your eyes with the cuffs of your jacket, and don't
cry into your gruel; that's a very foolish action, Oliver.'  It
certainly was, for there was quite enough water in it already.

On their way to the magistrate, Mr. Bumble instructed Oliver that all
he would have to do, would be to look very happy, and say, when the
gentleman asked him if he wanted to be apprenticed, that he should like
it very much indeed; both of which injunctions Oliver promised to obey:
the rather as Mr. Bumble threw in a gentle hint, that if he failed in
either particular, there was no telling what would be done to him. When
they arrived at the office, he was shut up in a little room by himself,
and admonished by Mr. Bumble to stay there, until he came back to fetch
him.

There the boy remained, with a palpitating heart, for half an hour.  At
the expiration of which time Mr. Bumble thrust in his head, unadorned
with the cocked hat, and said aloud:

'Now, Oliver, my dear, come to the gentleman.'  As Mr. Bumble said
this, he put on a grim and threatening look, and added, in a low voice,
'Mind what I told you, you young rascal!'

Oliver stared innocently in Mr. Bumble's face at this somewhat
contradictory style of address; but that gentleman prevented his
offering any remark thereupon, by leading him at once into an adjoining
room: the door of which was open. It was a large room, with a great
window.  Behind a desk, sat two old gentleman with powdered heads: one
of whom was reading the newspaper; while the other was perusing, with
the aid of a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles, a small piece of
parchment which lay before him.  Mr. Limbkins was standing in front of
the desk on one side; and Mr. Gamfield, with a partially washed face,
on the other; while two or three bluff-looking men, in top-boots, were
lounging about.

The old gentleman with the spectacles gradually dozed off, over the
little bit of parchment; and there was a short pause, after Oliver had
been stationed by Mr. Bumble in front of the desk.

'This is the boy, your worship,' said Mr. Bumble.

The old gentleman who was reading the newspaper raised his head for a
moment, and pulled the other old gentleman by the sleeve; whereupon,
the last-mentioned old gentleman woke up.

'Oh, is this the boy?' said the old gentleman.

'This is him, sir,' replied Mr. Bumble.  'Bow to the magistrate, my
dear.'

Oliver roused himself, and made his best obeisance.  He had been
wondering, with his eyes fixed on the magistrates' powder, whether all
boards were born with that white stuff on their heads, and were boards
from thenceforth on that account.

'Well,' said the old gentleman, 'I suppose he's fond of
chimney-sweeping?'

'He doats on it, your worship,' replied Bumble; giving Oliver a sly
pinch, to intimate that he had better not say he didn't.

'And he _will_ be a sweep, will he?' inquired the old gentleman.

'If we was to bind him to any other trade to-morrow, he'd run away
simultaneous, your worship,' replied Bumble.

'And this man that's to be his master--you, sir--you'll treat him well,
and feed him, and do all that sort of thing, will you?' said the old
gentleman.

'When I says I will, I means I will,' replied Mr. Gamfield doggedly.

'You're a rough speaker, my friend, but you look an honest,
open-hearted man,' said the old gentleman: turning his spectacles in
the direction of the candidate for Oliver's premium, whose villainous
countenance was a regular stamped receipt for cruelty.  But the
magistrate was half blind and half childish, so he couldn't reasonably
be expected to discern what other people did.

'I hope I am, sir,' said Mr. Gamfield, with an ugly leer.

'I have no doubt you are, my friend,' replied the old gentleman: fixing
his spectacles more firmly on his nose, and looking about him for the
inkstand.

It was the critical moment of Oliver's fate.  If the inkstand had been
where the old gentleman thought it was, he would have dipped his pen
into it, and signed the indentures, and Oliver would have been
straightway hurried off.  But, as it chanced to be immediately under
his nose, it followed, as a matter of course, that he looked all over
his desk for it, without finding it; and happening in the course of his
search to look straight before him, his gaze encountered the pale and
terrified face of Oliver Twist: who, despite all the admonitory looks
and pinches of Bumble, was regarding the repulsive countenance of his
future master, with a mingled expression of horror and fear, too
palpable to be mistaken, even by a half-blind magistrate.

The old gentleman stopped, laid down his pen, and looked from Oliver to
Mr. Limbkins; who attempted to take snuff with a cheerful and
unconcerned aspect.

'My boy!' said the old gentleman, 'you look pale and alarmed. What is
the matter?'

'Stand a little away from him, Beadle,' said the other magistrate:
laying aside the paper, and leaning forward with an expression of
interest.  'Now, boy, tell us what's the matter: don't be afraid.'

Oliver fell on his knees, and clasping his hands together, prayed that
they would order him back to the dark room--that they would starve
him--beat him--kill him if they pleased--rather than send him away with
that dreadful man.

'Well!' said Mr. Bumble, raising his hands and eyes with most
impressive solemnity.  'Well! of all the artful and designing orphans
that ever I see, Oliver, you are one of the most bare-facedest.'

'Hold your tongue, Beadle,' said the second old gentleman, when Mr.
Bumble had given vent to this compound adjective.

'I beg your worship's pardon,' said Mr. Bumble, incredulous of having
heard aright.  'Did your worship speak to me?'

'Yes.  Hold your tongue.'

Mr. Bumble was stupefied with astonishment.  A beadle ordered to hold
his tongue!  A moral revolution!

The old gentleman in the tortoise-shell spectacles looked at his
companion, he nodded significantly.

'We refuse to sanction these indentures,' said the old gentleman:
tossing aside the piece of parchment as he spoke.

'I hope,' stammered Mr. Limbkins:  'I hope the magistrates will not
form the opinion that the authorities have been guilty of any improper
conduct, on the unsupported testimony of a child.'

'The magistrates are not called upon to pronounce any opinion on the
matter,' said the second old gentleman sharply.  'Take the boy back to
the workhouse, and treat him kindly.  He seems to want it.'

That same evening, the gentleman in the white waistcoat most positively
and decidedly affirmed, not only that Oliver would be hung, but that he
would be drawn and quartered into the bargain. Mr. Bumble shook his
head with gloomy mystery, and said he wished he might come to good;
whereunto Mr. Gamfield replied, that he wished he might come to him;
which, although he agreed with the beadle in most matters, would seem
to be a wish of a totally opposite description.

The next morning, the public were once informed that Oliver Twist was
again To Let, and that five pounds would be paid to anybody who would
take possession of him.



CHAPTER IV

OLIVER, BEING OFFERED ANOTHER PLACE, MAKES HIS FIRST ENTRY INTO PUBLIC
LIFE

In great families, when an advantageous place cannot be obtained,
either in possession, reversion, remainder, or expectancy, for the
young man who is growing up, it is a very general custom to send him to
sea.  The board, in imitation of so wise and salutary an example, took
counsel together on the expediency of shipping off Oliver Twist, in
some small trading vessel bound to a good unhealthy port.  This
suggested itself as the very best thing that could possibly be done
with him: the probability being, that the skipper would flog him to
death, in a playful mood, some day after dinner, or would knock his
brains out with an iron bar; both pastimes being, as is pretty
generally known, very favourite and common recreations among gentleman
of that class.  The more the case presented itself to the board, in
this point of view, the more manifold the advantages of the step
appeared; so, they came to the conclusion that the only way of
providing for Oliver effectually, was to send him to sea without delay.

Mr. Bumble had been despatched to make various preliminary inquiries,
with the view of finding out some captain or other who wanted a
cabin-boy without any friends; and was returning to the workhouse to
communicate the result of his mission; when he encountered at the gate,
no less a person than Mr. Sowerberry, the parochial undertaker.

Mr. Sowerberry was a tall gaunt, large-jointed man, attired in a suit
of threadbare black, with darned cotton stockings of the same colour,
and shoes to answer.  His features were not naturally intended to wear
a smiling aspect, but he was in general rather given to professional
jocosity.  His step was elastic, and his face betokened inward
pleasantry, as he advanced to Mr. Bumble, and shook him cordially by
the hand.

'I have taken the measure of the two women that died last night, Mr.
Bumble,' said the undertaker.

'You'll make your fortune, Mr. Sowerberry,' said the beadle, as he
thrust his thumb and forefinger into the proffered snuff-box of the
undertaker: which was an ingenious little model of a patent coffin.  'I
say you'll make your fortune, Mr. Sowerberry,' repeated Mr. Bumble,
tapping the undertaker on the shoulder, in a friendly manner, with his
cane.

'Think so?' said the undertaker in a tone which half admitted and half
disputed the probability of the event.  'The prices allowed by the
board are very small, Mr. Bumble.'

'So are the coffins,' replied the beadle: with precisely as near an
approach to a laugh as a great official ought to indulge in.

Mr. Sowerberry was much tickled at this: as of course he ought to be;
and laughed a long time without cessation.  'Well, well, Mr. Bumble,'
he said at length, 'there's no denying that, since the new system of
feeding has come in, the coffins are something narrower and more
shallow than they used to be; but we must have some profit, Mr. Bumble.
Well-seasoned timber is an expensive article, sir; and all the iron
handles come, by canal, from Birmingham.'

'Well, well,' said Mr. Bumble, 'every trade has its drawbacks. A fair
profit is, of course, allowable.'

'Of course, of course,' replied the undertaker; 'and if I don't get a
profit upon this or that particular article, why, I make it up in the
long-run, you see--he! he! he!'

'Just so,' said Mr. Bumble.

'Though I must say,' continued the undertaker, resuming the current of
observations which the beadle had interrupted: 'though I must say, Mr.
Bumble, that I have to contend against one very great disadvantage:
which is, that all the stout people go off the quickest.  The people
who have been better off, and have paid rates for many years, are the
first to sink when they come into the house; and let me tell you, Mr.
Bumble, that three or four inches over one's calculation makes a great
hole in one's profits: especially when one has a family to provide for,
sir.'

As Mr. Sowerberry said this, with the becoming indignation of an
ill-used man; and as Mr. Bumble felt that it rather tended to convey a
reflection on the honour of the parish; the latter gentleman thought it
advisable to change the subject.  Oliver Twist being uppermost in his
mind, he made him his theme.

'By the bye,' said Mr. Bumble, 'you don't know anybody who wants a boy,
do you?  A porochial 'prentis, who is at present a dead-weight; a
millstone, as I may say, round the porochial throat?  Liberal terms,
Mr. Sowerberry, liberal terms?'  As Mr. Bumble spoke, he raised his
cane to the bill above him, and gave three distinct raps upon the words
'five pounds':  which were printed thereon in Roman capitals of
gigantic size.

'Gadso!' said the undertaker: taking Mr. Bumble by the gilt-edged
lappel of his official coat; 'that's just the very thing I wanted to
speak to you about.  You know--dear me, what a very elegant button this
is, Mr. Bumble!  I never noticed it before.'

'Yes, I think it rather pretty,' said the beadle, glancing proudly
downwards at the large brass buttons which embellished his coat. 'The
die is the same as the porochial seal--the Good Samaritan healing the
sick and bruised man. The board presented it to me on Newyear's
morning, Mr. Sowerberry.  I put it on, I remember, for the first time,
to attend the inquest on that reduced tradesman, who died in a doorway
at midnight.'

'I recollect,' said the undertaker. 'The jury brought it in, "Died from
exposure to the cold, and want of the common necessaries of life,"
didn't they?'

Mr. Bumble nodded.

'And they made it a special verdict, I think,' said the undertaker, 'by
adding some words to the effect, that if the relieving officer had--'

'Tush!  Foolery!' interposed the beadle.  'If the board attended to all
the nonsense that ignorant jurymen talk, they'd have enough to do.'

'Very true,' said the undertaker; 'they would indeed.'

'Juries,' said Mr. Bumble, grasping his cane tightly, as was his wont
when working into a passion: 'juries is ineddicated, vulgar, grovelling
wretches.'

'So they are,' said the undertaker.

'They haven't no more philosophy nor political economy about 'em than
that,' said the beadle, snapping his fingers contemptuously.

'No more they have,' acquiesced the undertaker.

'I despise 'em,' said the beadle, growing very red in the face.

'So do I,' rejoined the undertaker.

'And I only wish we'd a jury of the independent sort, in the house for
a week or two,' said the beadle; 'the rules and regulations of the
board would soon bring their spirit down for 'em.'

'Let 'em alone for that,' replied the undertaker.  So saying, he
smiled, approvingly: to calm the rising wrath of the indignant parish
officer.

Mr Bumble lifted off his cocked hat; took a handkerchief from the
inside of the crown; wiped from his forehead the perspiration which his
rage had engendered; fixed the cocked hat on again; and, turning to the
undertaker, said in a calmer voice:

'Well; what about the boy?'

'Oh!' replied the undertaker; 'why, you know, Mr. Bumble, I pay a good
deal towards the poor's rates.'

'Hem!' said Mr. Bumble.  'Well?'

'Well,' replied the undertaker, 'I was thinking that if I pay so much
towards 'em, I've a right to get as much out of 'em as I can, Mr.
Bumble; and so--I think I'll take the boy myself.'

Mr. Bumble grasped the undertaker by the arm, and led him into the
building.  Mr. Sowerberry was closeted with the board for five minutes;
and it was arranged that Oliver should go to him that evening 'upon
liking'--a phrase which means, in the case of a parish apprentice, that
if the master find, upon a short trial, that he can get enough work out
of a boy without putting too much food into him, he shall have him for
a term of years, to do what he likes with.

When little Oliver was taken before 'the gentlemen' that evening; and
informed that he was to go, that night, as general house-lad to a
coffin-maker's; and that if he complained of his situation, or ever
came back to the parish again, he would be sent to sea, there to be
drowned, or knocked on the head, as the case might be, he evinced so
little emotion, that they by common consent pronounced him a hardened
young rascal, and ordered Mr. Bumble to remove him forthwith.

Now, although it was very natural that the board, of all people in the
world, should feel in a great state of virtuous astonishment and horror
at the smallest tokens of want of feeling on the part of anybody, they
were rather out, in this particular instance.  The simple fact was,
that Oliver, instead of possessing too little feeling, possessed rather
too much; and was in a fair way of being reduced, for life, to a state
of brutal stupidity and sullenness by the ill usage he had received.
He heard the news of his destination, in perfect silence; and, having
had his luggage put into his hand--which was not very difficult to
carry, inasmuch as it was all comprised within the limits of a brown
paper parcel, about half a foot square by three inches deep--he pulled
his cap over his eyes; and once more attaching himself to Mr. Bumble's
coat cuff, was led away by that dignitary to a new scene of suffering.

For some time, Mr. Bumble drew Oliver along, without notice or remark;
for the beadle carried his head very erect, as a beadle always should:
and, it being a windy day, little Oliver was completely enshrouded by
the skirts of Mr. Bumble's coat as they blew open, and disclosed to
great advantage his flapped waistcoat and drab plush knee-breeches.  As
they drew near to their destination, however, Mr. Bumble thought it
expedient to look down, and see that the boy was in good order for
inspection by his new master: which he accordingly did, with a fit and
becoming air of gracious patronage.

'Oliver!'  said Mr. Bumble.

'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver, in a low, tremulous voice.

'Pull that cap off your eyes, and hold up your head, sir.'

Although Oliver did as he was desired, at once; and passed the back of
his unoccupied hand briskly across his eyes, he left a tear in them
when he looked up at his conductor.  As Mr. Bumble gazed sternly upon
him, it rolled down his cheek. It was followed by another, and another.
The child made a strong effort, but it was an unsuccessful one.
Withdrawing his other hand from Mr. Bumble's he covered his face with
both; and wept until the tears sprung out from between his chin and
bony fingers.

'Well!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble, stopping short, and darting at his little
charge a look of intense malignity.  'Well!  Of _all_ the
ungratefullest, and worst-disposed boys as ever I see, Oliver, you are
the--'

'No, no, sir,' sobbed Oliver, clinging to the hand which held the
well-known cane; 'no, no, sir; I will be good indeed; indeed, indeed I
will, sir!  I am a very little boy, sir; and it is so--so--'

'So what?' inquired Mr. Bumble in amazement.

'So lonely, sir!  So very lonely!' cried the child.  'Everybody hates
me.  Oh! sir, don't, don't pray be cross to me!'  The child beat his
hand upon his heart; and looked in his companion's face, with tears of
real agony.

Mr. Bumble regarded Oliver's piteous and helpless look, with some
astonishment, for a few seconds; hemmed three or four times in a husky
manner; and after muttering something about 'that troublesome cough,'
bade Oliver dry his eyes and be a good boy. Then once more taking his
hand, he walked on with him in silence.

The undertaker, who had just put up the shutters of his shop, was
making some entries in his day-book by the light of a most appropriate
dismal candle, when Mr. Bumble entered.

'Aha!' said the undertaker; looking up from the book, and pausing in
the middle of a word; 'is that you, Bumble?'

'No one else, Mr. Sowerberry,' replied the beadle.  'Here! I've brought
the boy.'  Oliver made a bow.

'Oh! that's the boy, is it?' said the undertaker:  raising the candle
above his head, to get a better view of Oliver. 'Mrs. Sowerberry, will
you have the goodness to come here a moment, my dear?'

Mrs. Sowerberry emerged from a little room behind the shop, and
presented the form of a short, then, squeezed-up woman, with a vixenish
countenance.

'My dear,' said Mr. Sowerberry, deferentially, 'this is the boy from
the workhouse that I told you of.'  Oliver bowed again.

'Dear me!' said the undertaker's wife, 'he's very small.'

'Why, he _is_ rather small,' replied Mr. Bumble: looking at Oliver as
if it were his fault that he was no bigger; 'he is small. There's no
denying it.  But he'll grow, Mrs. Sowerberry--he'll grow.'

'Ah!  I dare say he will,' replied the lady pettishly, 'on our victuals
and our drink.  I see no saving in parish children, not I; for they
always cost more to keep, than they're worth. However, men always think
they know best. There!  Get downstairs, little bag o' bones.'  With
this, the undertaker's wife opened a side door, and pushed Oliver down
a steep flight of stairs into a stone cell, damp and dark: forming the
ante-room to the coal-cellar, and denominated 'kitchen'; wherein sat a
slatternly girl, in shoes down at heel, and blue worsted stockings very
much out of repair.

'Here, Charlotte,' said Mr. Sowerberry, who had followed Oliver down,
'give this boy some of the cold bits that were put by for Trip.  He
hasn't come home since the morning, so he may go without 'em.  I dare
say the boy isn't too dainty to eat 'em--are you, boy?'

Oliver, whose eyes had glistened at the mention of meat, and who was
trembling with eagerness to devour it, replied in the negative; and a
plateful of coarse broken victuals was set before him.

I wish some well-fed philosopher, whose meat and drink turn to gall
within him; whose blood is ice, whose heart is iron; could have seen
Oliver Twist clutching at the dainty viands that the dog had neglected.
I wish he could have witnessed the horrible avidity with which Oliver
tore the bits asunder with all the ferocity of famine.  There is only
one thing I should like better; and that would be to see the
Philosopher making the same sort of meal himself, with the same relish.

'Well,' said the undertaker's wife, when Oliver had finished his
supper: which she had regarded in silent horror, and with fearful
auguries of his future appetite: 'have you done?'

There being nothing eatable within his reach, Oliver replied in the
affirmative.

'Then come with me,' said Mrs. Sowerberry: taking up a dim and dirty
lamp, and leading the way upstairs; 'your bed's under the counter.  You
don't mind sleeping among the coffins, I suppose? But it doesn't much
matter whether you do or don't, for you can't sleep anywhere else.
Come; don't keep me here all night!'

Oliver lingered no longer, but meekly followed his new mistress.



CHAPTER V

OLIVER MINGLES WITH NEW ASSOCIATES.  GOING TO A FUNERAL FOR THE FIRST
TIME, HE FORMS AN UNFAVOURABLE NOTION OF HIS MASTER'S BUSINESS

Oliver, being left to himself in the undertaker's shop, set the lamp
down on a workman's bench, and gazed timidly about him with a feeling
of awe and dread, which many people a good deal older than he will be
at no loss to understand.  An unfinished coffin on black tressels,
which stood in the middle of the shop, looked so gloomy and death-like
that a cold tremble came over him, every time his eyes wandered in the
direction of the dismal object: from which he almost expected to see
some frightful form slowly rear its head, to drive him mad with terror.
Against the wall were ranged, in regular array, a long row of elm
boards cut in the same shape: looking in the dim light, like
high-shouldered ghosts with their hands in their breeches pockets.
Coffin-plates, elm-chips, bright-headed nails, and shreds of black
cloth, lay scattered on the floor; and the wall behind the counter was
ornamented with a lively representation of two mutes in very stiff
neckcloths, on duty at a large private door, with a hearse drawn by
four black steeds, approaching in the distance. The shop was close and
hot.  The atmosphere seemed tainted with the smell of coffins.  The
recess beneath the counter in which his flock mattress was thrust,
looked like a grave.

Nor were these the only dismal feelings which depressed Oliver. He was
alone in a strange place; and we all know how chilled and desolate the
best of us will sometimes feel in such a situation. The boy had no
friends to care for, or to care for him.  The regret of no recent
separation was fresh in his mind; the absence of no loved and
well-remembered face sank heavily into his heart.

But his heart was heavy, notwithstanding; and he wished, as he crept
into his narrow bed, that that were his coffin, and that he could be
lain in a calm and lasting sleep in the churchyard ground, with the
tall grass waving gently above his head, and the sound of the old deep
bell to soothe him in his sleep.

Oliver was awakened in the morning, by a loud kicking at the outside of
the shop-door: which, before he could huddle on his clothes, was
repeated, in an angry and impetuous manner, about twenty-five times.
When he began to undo the chain, the legs desisted, and a voice began.

'Open the door, will yer?' cried the voice which belonged to the legs
which had kicked at the door.

'I will, directly, sir,' replied Oliver: undoing the chain, and turning
the key.

'I suppose yer the new boy, ain't yer?' said the voice through the
key-hole.

'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver.

'How old are yer?' inquired the voice.

'Ten, sir,' replied Oliver.

'Then I'll whop yer when I get in,' said the voice; 'you just see if I
don't, that's all, my work'us brat!' and having made this obliging
promise, the voice began to whistle.

Oliver had been too often subjected to the process to which the very
expressive monosyllable just recorded bears reference, to entertain the
smallest doubt that the owner of the voice, whoever he might be, would
redeem his pledge, most honourably. He drew back the bolts with a
trembling hand, and opened the door.

For a second or two, Oliver glanced up the street, and down the street,
and over the way: impressed with the belief that the unknown, who had
addressed him through the key-hole, had walked a few paces off, to warm
himself; for nobody did he see but a big charity-boy, sitting on a post
in front of the house, eating a slice of bread and butter: which he cut
into wedges, the size of his mouth, with a clasp-knife, and then
consumed with great dexterity.

'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Oliver at length: seeing that no other
visitor made his appearance; 'did you knock?'

'I kicked,' replied the charity-boy.

'Did you want a coffin, sir?' inquired Oliver, innocently.

At this, the charity-boy looked monstrous fierce; and said that Oliver
would want one before long, if he cut jokes with his superiors in that
way.

'Yer don't know who I am, I suppose, Work'us?' said the charity-boy, in
continuation: descending from the top of the post, meanwhile, with
edifying gravity.

'No, sir,' rejoined Oliver.

'I'm Mister Noah Claypole,' said the charity-boy, 'and you're under me.
Take down the shutters, yer idle young ruffian!' With this, Mr.
Claypole administered a kick to Oliver, and entered the shop with a
dignified air, which did him great credit.  It is difficult for a
large-headed, small-eyed youth, of lumbering make and heavy
countenance, to look dignified under any circumstances; but it is more
especially so, when superadded to these personal attractions are a red
nose and yellow smalls.

Oliver, having taken down the shutters, and broken a pane of glass in
his effort to stagger away beneath the weight of the first one to a
small court at the side of the house in which they were kept during the
day, was graciously assisted by Noah: who having consoled him with the
assurance that 'he'd catch it,' condescended to help him.  Mr.
Sowerberry came down soon after. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Sowerberry
appeared.  Oliver having 'caught it,' in fulfilment of Noah's
prediction, followed that young gentleman down the stairs to breakfast.

'Come near the fire, Noah,' said Charlotte.  'I saved a nice little bit
of bacon for you from master's breakfast.  Oliver, shut that door at
Mister Noah's back, and take them bits that I've put out on the cover
of the bread-pan.  There's your tea; take it away to that box, and
drink it there, and make haste, for they'll want you to mind the shop.
D'ye hear?'

'D'ye hear, Work'us?' said Noah Claypole.

'Lor, Noah!' said Charlotte, 'what a rum creature you are!  Why don't
you let the boy alone?'

'Let him alone!' said Noah.  'Why everybody lets him alone enough, for
the matter of that.  Neither his father nor his mother will ever
interfere with him.  All his relations let him have his own way pretty
well.  Eh, Charlotte?  He! he! he!'

'Oh, you queer soul!' said Charlotte, bursting into a hearty laugh, in
which she was joined by Noah; after which they both looked scornfully
at poor Oliver Twist, as he sat shivering on the box in the coldest
corner of the room, and ate the stale pieces which had been specially
reserved for him.

Noah was a charity-boy, but not a workhouse orphan.  No chance-child
was he, for he could trace his genealogy all the way back to his
parents, who lived hard by; his mother being a washerwoman, and his
father a drunken soldier, discharged with a wooden leg, and a diurnal
pension of twopence-halfpenny and an unstateable fraction.  The
shop-boys in the neighbourhood had long been in the habit of branding
Noah in the public streets, with the ignominious epithets of
'leathers,' 'charity,' and the like; and Noah had bourne them without
reply.  But, now that fortune had cast in his way a nameless orphan, at
whom even the meanest could point the finger of scorn, he retorted on
him with interest.  This affords charming food for contemplation.  It
shows us what a beautiful thing human nature may be made to be; and how
impartially the same amiable qualities are developed in the finest lord
and the dirtiest charity-boy.

Oliver had been sojourning at the undertaker's some three weeks or a
month.  Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry--the shop being shut up--were taking
their supper in the little back-parlour, when Mr. Sowerberry, after
several deferential glances at his wife, said,

'My dear--'  He was going to say more; but, Mrs. Sowerberry looking up,
with a peculiarly unpropitious aspect, he stopped short.

'Well,' said Mrs. Sowerberry, sharply.

'Nothing, my dear, nothing,' said Mr. Sowerberry.

'Ugh, you brute!' said Mrs. Sowerberry.

'Not at all, my dear,' said Mr. Sowerberry humbly.  'I thought you
didn't want to hear, my dear.  I was only going to say--'

'Oh, don't tell me what you were going to say,' interposed Mrs.
Sowerberry.  'I am nobody; don't consult me, pray.  _I_ don't want to
intrude upon your secrets.'  As Mrs. Sowerberry said this, she gave an
hysterical laugh, which threatened violent consequences.

'But, my dear,' said Sowerberry, 'I want to ask your advice.'

'No, no, don't ask mine,' replied Mrs. Sowerberry, in an affecting
manner: 'ask somebody else's.'  Here, there was another hysterical
laugh, which frightened Mr. Sowerberry very much.  This is a very
common and much-approved matrimonial course of treatment, which is
often very effective. It at once reduced Mr. Sowerberry to begging, as
a special favour, to be allowed to say what Mrs. Sowerberry was most
curious to hear.  After a short duration, the permission was most
graciously conceded.

'It's only about young Twist, my dear,' said Mr. Sowerberry. 'A very
good-looking boy, that, my dear.'

'He need be, for he eats enough,' observed the lady.

'There's an expression of melancholy in his face, my dear,' resumed Mr.
Sowerberry, 'which is very interesting.  He would make a delightful
mute, my love.'

Mrs. Sowerberry looked up with an expression of considerable
wonderment.  Mr. Sowerberry remarked it and, without allowing time for
any observation on the good lady's part, proceeded.

'I don't mean a regular mute to attend grown-up people, my dear, but
only for children's practice.  It would be very new to have a mute in
proportion, my dear.  You may depend upon it, it would have a superb
effect.'

Mrs. Sowerberry, who had a good deal of taste in the undertaking way,
was much struck by the novelty of this idea; but, as it would have been
compromising her dignity to have said so, under existing circumstances,
she merely inquired, with much sharpness, why such an obvious
suggestion had not presented itself to her husband's mind before?  Mr.
Sowerberry rightly construed this, as an acquiescence in his
proposition; it was speedily determined, therefore, that Oliver should
be at once initiated into the mysteries of the trade; and, with this
view, that he should accompany his master on the very next occasion of
his services being required.

The occasion was not long in coming.  Half an hour after breakfast next
morning, Mr. Bumble entered the shop; and supporting his cane against
the counter, drew forth his large leathern pocket-book: from which he
selected a small scrap of paper, which he handed over to Sowerberry.

'Aha!' said the undertaker, glancing over it with a lively countenance;
'an order for a coffin, eh?'

'For a coffin first, and a porochial funeral afterwards,' replied Mr.
Bumble, fastening the strap of the leathern pocket-book: which, like
himself, was very corpulent.

'Bayton,' said the undertaker, looking from the scrap of paper to Mr.
Bumble.  'I never heard the name before.'

Bumble shook his head, as he replied, 'Obstinate people, Mr.
Sowerberry; very obstinate.  Proud, too, I'm afraid, sir.'

'Proud, eh?' exclaimed Mr. Sowerberry with a sneer.  'Come, that's too
much.'

'Oh, it's sickening,' replied the beadle.  'Antimonial, Mr. Sowerberry!'

'So it is,' acquiesced the undertaker.

'We only heard of the family the night before last,' said the beadle;
'and we shouldn't have known anything about them, then, only a woman
who lodges in the same house made an application to the porochial
committee for them to send the porochial surgeon to see a woman as was
very bad.  He had gone out to dinner; but his 'prentice (which is a
very clever lad) sent 'em some medicine in a blacking-bottle, offhand.'

'Ah, there's promptness,' said the undertaker.

'Promptness, indeed!' replied the beadle.  'But what's the consequence;
what's the ungrateful behaviour of these rebels, sir?  Why, the husband
sends back word that the medicine won't suit his wife's complaint, and
so she shan't take it--says she shan't take it, sir!  Good, strong,
wholesome medicine, as was given with great success to two Irish
labourers and a coal-heaver, only a week before--sent 'em for nothing,
with a blackin'-bottle in,--and he sends back word that she shan't take
it, sir!'

As the atrocity presented itself to Mr. Bumble's mind in full force, he
struck the counter sharply with his cane, and became flushed with
indignation.

'Well,' said the undertaker, 'I ne--ver--did--'

'Never did, sir!' ejaculated the beadle.  'No, nor nobody never did;
but now she's dead, we've got to bury her; and that's the direction;
and the sooner it's done, the better.'

Thus saying, Mr. Bumble put on his cocked hat wrong side first, in a
fever of parochial excitement; and flounced out of the shop.

'Why, he was so angry, Oliver, that he forgot even to ask after you!'
said Mr. Sowerberry, looking after the beadle as he strode down the
street.

'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver, who had carefully kept himself out of
sight, during the interview; and who was shaking from head to foot at
the mere recollection of the sound of Mr. Bumble's voice.

He needn't haven taken the trouble to shrink from Mr. Bumble's glance,
however; for that functionary, on whom the prediction of the gentleman
in the white waistcoat had made a very strong impression, thought that
now the undertaker had got Oliver upon trial the subject was better
avoided, until such time as he should be firmly bound for seven years,
and all danger of his being returned upon the hands of the parish
should be thus effectually and legally overcome.

'Well,' said Mr. Sowerberry, taking up his hat, 'the sooner this job is
done, the better.  Noah, look after the shop. Oliver, put on your cap,
and come with me.'  Oliver obeyed, and followed his master on his
professional mission.

They walked on, for some time, through the most crowded and densely
inhabited part of the town; and then, striking down a narrow street
more dirty and miserable than any they had yet passed through, paused
to look for the house which was the object of their search.  The houses
on either side were high and large, but very old, and tenanted by
people of the poorest class: as their neglected appearance would have
sufficiently denoted, without the concurrent testimony afforded by the
squalid looks of the few men and women who, with folded arms and bodies
half doubled, occasionally skulked along.  A great many of the
tenements had shop-fronts; but these were fast closed, and mouldering
away; only the upper rooms being inhabited.  Some houses which had
become insecure from age and decay, were prevented from falling into
the street, by huge beams of wood reared against the walls, and firmly
planted in the road; but even these crazy dens seemed to have been
selected as the nightly haunts of some houseless wretches, for many of
the rough boards which supplied the place of door and window, were
wrenched from their positions, to afford an aperture wide enough for
the passage of a human body.  The kennel was stagnant and filthy. The
very rats, which here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness, were
hideous with famine.

There was neither knocker nor bell-handle at the open door where Oliver
and his master stopped; so, groping his way cautiously through the dark
passage, and bidding Oliver keep close to him and not be afraid the
undertaker mounted to the top of the first flight of stairs.  Stumbling
against a door on the landing, he rapped at it with his knuckles.

It was opened by a young girl of thirteen or fourteen.  The undertaker
at once saw enough of what the room contained, to know it was the
apartment to which he had been directed.  He stepped in; Oliver
followed him.

There was no fire in the room; but a man was crouching, mechanically,
over the empty stove.  An old woman, too, had drawn a low stool to the
cold hearth, and was sitting beside him. There were some ragged
children in another corner; and in a small recess, opposite the door,
there lay upon the ground, something covered with an old blanket.
Oliver shuddered as he cast his eyes toward the place, and crept
involuntarily closer to his master; for though it was covered up, the
boy felt that it was a corpse.

The man's face was thin and very pale; his hair and beard were grizzly;
his eyes were bloodshot.  The old woman's face was wrinkled; her two
remaining teeth protruded over her under lip; and her eyes were bright
and piercing.  Oliver was afraid to look at either her or the man.
They seemed so like the rats he had seen outside.

'Nobody shall go near her,' said the man, starting fiercely up, as the
undertaker approached the recess. 'Keep back! Damn you, keep back, if
you've a life to lose!'

'Nonsense, my good man,' said the undertaker, who was pretty well used
to misery in all its shapes.  'Nonsense!'

'I tell you,' said the man:  clenching his hands, and stamping
furiously on the floor,--'I tell you I won't have her put into the
ground.  She couldn't rest there.  The worms would worry her--not eat
her--she is so worn away.'

The undertaker offered no reply to this raving; but producing a tape
from his pocket, knelt down for a moment by the side of the body.

'Ah!' said the man: bursting into tears, and sinking on his knees at
the feet of the dead woman; 'kneel down, kneel down--kneel round her,
every one of you, and mark my words!  I say she was starved to death.
I never knew how bad she was, till the fever came upon her; and then
her bones were starting through the skin.  There was neither fire nor
candle; she died in the dark--in the dark!  She couldn't even see her
children's faces, though we heard her gasping out their names. I begged
for her in the streets: and they sent me to prison. When I came back,
she was dying; and all the blood in my heart has dried up, for they
starved her to death.  I swear it before the God that saw it! They
starved her!'  He twined his hands in his hair; and, with a loud
scream, rolled grovelling upon the floor: his eyes fixed, and the foam
covering his lips.

The terrified children cried bitterly; but the old woman, who had
hitherto remained as quiet as if she had been wholly deaf to all that
passed, menaced them into silence.  Having unloosened the cravat of the
man who still remained extended on the ground, she tottered towards the
undertaker.

'She was my daughter,' said the old woman, nodding her head in the
direction of the corpse; and speaking with an idiotic leer, more
ghastly than even the presence of death in such a place. 'Lord, Lord!
Well, it _is_ strange that I who gave birth to her, and was a woman
then, should be alive and merry now, and she lying there: so cold and
stiff!  Lord, Lord!--to think of it; it's as good as a play--as good as
a play!'

As the wretched creature mumbled and chuckled in her hideous merriment,
the undertaker turned to go away.

'Stop, stop!' said the old woman in a loud whisper.  'Will she be
buried to-morrow, or next day, or to-night?  I laid her out; and I must
walk, you know.  Send me a large cloak: a good warm one: for it is
bitter cold.  We should have cake and wine, too, before we go!  Never
mind; send some bread--only a loaf of bread and a cup of water.  Shall
we have some bread, dear?' she said eagerly: catching at the
undertaker's coat, as he once more moved towards the door.

'Yes, yes,' said the undertaker,'of course.  Anything you like!' He
disengaged himself from the old woman's grasp; and, drawing Oliver
after him, hurried away.

The next day, (the family having been meanwhile relieved with a
half-quartern loaf and a piece of cheese, left with them by Mr. Bumble
himself,) Oliver and his master returned to the miserable abode; where
Mr. Bumble had already arrived, accompanied by four men from the
workhouse, who were to act as bearers.  An old black cloak had been
thrown over the rags of the old woman and the man; and the bare coffin
having been screwed down, was hoisted on the shoulders of the bearers,
and carried into the street.

'Now, you must put your best leg foremost, old lady!' whispered
Sowerberry in the old woman's ear; 'we are rather late; and it won't
do, to keep the clergyman waiting.  Move on, my men,--as quick as you
like!'

Thus directed, the bearers trotted on under their light burden; and the
two mourners kept as near them, as they could.  Mr. Bumble and
Sowerberry walked at a good smart pace in front; and Oliver, whose legs
were not so long as his master's, ran by the side.

There was not so great a necessity for hurrying as Mr. Sowerberry had
anticipated, however; for when they reached the obscure corner of the
churchyard in which the nettles grew, and where the parish graves were
made, the clergyman had not arrived; and the clerk, who was sitting by
the vestry-room fire, seemed to think it by no means improbable that it
might be an hour or so, before he came.  So, they put the bier on the
brink of the grave; and the two mourners waited patiently in the damp
clay, with a cold rain drizzling down, while the ragged boys whom the
spectacle had attracted into the churchyard played a noisy game at
hide-and-seek among the tombstones, or varied their amusements by
jumping backwards and forwards over the coffin.  Mr. Sowerberry and
Bumble, being personal friends of the clerk, sat by the fire with him,
and read the paper.

At length, after a lapse of something more than an hour, Mr. Bumble,
and Sowerberry, and the clerk, were seen running towards the grave.
Immediately afterwards, the clergyman appeared: putting on his surplice
as he came along.  Mr. Bumble then thrashed a boy or two, to keep up
appearances; and the reverend gentleman, having read as much of the
burial service as could be compressed into four minutes, gave his
surplice to the clerk, and walked away again.

'Now, Bill!' said Sowerberry to the grave-digger. 'Fill up!'

It was no very difficult task, for the grave was so full, that the
uppermost coffin was within a few feet of the surface.  The
grave-digger shovelled in the earth; stamped it loosely down with his
feet: shouldered his spade; and walked off, followed by the boys, who
murmured very loud complaints at the fun being over so soon.

'Come, my good fellow!' said Bumble, tapping the man on the back. 'They
want to shut up the yard.'

The man who had never once moved, since he had taken his station by the
grave side, started, raised his head, stared at the person who had
addressed him, walked forward for a few paces; and fell down in a
swoon.  The crazy old woman was too much occupied in bewailing the loss
of her cloak (which the undertaker had taken off), to pay him any
attention; so they threw a can of cold water over him; and when he came
to, saw him safely out of the churchyard, locked the gate, and departed
on their different ways.

'Well, Oliver,' said Sowerberry, as they walked home, 'how do you like
it?'

'Pretty well, thank you, sir' replied Oliver, with considerable
hesitation.  'Not very much, sir.'

'Ah, you'll get used to it in time, Oliver,' said Sowerberry. 'Nothing
when you _are_ used to it, my boy.'

Oliver wondered, in his own mind, whether it had taken a very long time
to get Mr. Sowerberry used to it.  But he thought it better not to ask
the question; and walked back to the shop: thinking over all he had
seen and heard.



CHAPTER VI

OLIVER, BEING GOADED BY THE TAUNTS OF NOAH, ROUSES INTO ACTION, AND
RATHER ASTONISHES HIM

The month's trial over, Oliver was formally apprenticed.  It was a nice
sickly season just at this time.  In commercial phrase, coffins were
looking up; and, in the course of a few weeks, Oliver acquired a great
deal of experience.  The success of Mr. Sowerberry's ingenious
speculation, exceeded even his most sanguine hopes.  The oldest
inhabitants recollected no period at which measles had been so
prevalent, or so fatal to infant existence; and many were the mournful
processions which little Oliver headed, in a hat-band reaching down to
his knees, to the indescribable admiration and emotion of all the
mothers in the town.  As Oliver accompanied his master in most of his
adult expeditions too, in order that he might acquire that equanimity
of demeanour and full command of nerve which was essential to a
finished undertaker, he had many opportunities of observing the
beautiful resignation and fortitude with which some strong-minded
people bear their trials and losses.

For instance; when Sowerberry had an order for the burial of some rich
old lady or gentleman, who was surrounded by a great number of nephews
and nieces, who had been perfectly inconsolable during the previous
illness, and whose grief had been wholly irrepressible even on the most
public occasions, they would be as happy among themselves as need
be--quite cheerful and contented--conversing together with as much
freedom and gaiety, as if nothing whatever had happened to disturb
them.  Husbands, too, bore the loss of their wives with the most heroic
calmness. Wives, again, put on weeds for their husbands, as if, so far
from grieving in the garb of sorrow, they had made up their minds to
render it as becoming and attractive as possible.  It was observable,
too, that ladies and gentlemen who were in passions of anguish during
the ceremony of interment, recovered almost as soon as they reached
home, and became quite composed before the tea-drinking was over.  All
this was very pleasant and improving to see; and Oliver beheld it with
great admiration.

That Oliver Twist was moved to resignation by the example of these good
people, I cannot, although I am his biographer, undertake to affirm
with any degree of confidence; but I can most distinctly say, that for
many months he continued meekly to submit to the domination and
ill-treatment of Noah Claypole: who used him far worse than before, now
that his jealousy was roused by seeing the new boy promoted to the
black stick and hatband, while he, the old one, remained stationary in
the muffin-cap and leathers.  Charlotte treated him ill, because Noah
did; and Mrs. Sowerberry was his decided enemy, because Mr. Sowerberry
was disposed to be his friend; so, between these three on one side, and
a glut of funerals on the other, Oliver was not altogether as
comfortable as the hungry pig was, when he was shut up, by mistake, in
the grain department of a brewery.

And now, I come to a very important passage in Oliver's history; for I
have to record an act, slight and unimportant perhaps in appearance,
but which indirectly produced a material change in all his future
prospects and proceedings.

One day, Oliver and Noah had descended into the kitchen at the usual
dinner-hour, to banquet upon a small joint of mutton--a pound and a
half of the worst end of the neck--when Charlotte being called out of
the way, there ensued a brief interval of time, which Noah Claypole,
being hungry and vicious, considered he could not possibly devote to a
worthier purpose than aggravating and tantalising young Oliver Twist.

Intent upon this innocent amusement, Noah put his feet on the
table-cloth; and pulled Oliver's hair; and twitched his ears; and
expressed his opinion that he was a 'sneak'; and furthermore announced
his intention of coming to see him hanged, whenever that desirable
event should take place; and entered upon various topics of petty
annoyance, like a malicious and ill-conditioned charity-boy as he was.
But, making Oliver cry, Noah attempted to be more facetious still; and
in his attempt, did what many sometimes do to this day, when they want
to be funny.  He got rather personal.

'Work'us,' said Noah, 'how's your mother?'

'She's dead,' replied Oliver; 'don't you say anything about her to me!'

Oliver's colour rose as he said this; he breathed quickly; and there
was a curious working of the mouth and nostrils, which Mr. Claypole
thought must be the immediate precursor of a violent fit of crying.
Under this impression he returned to the charge.

'What did she die of, Work'us?' said Noah.

'Of a broken heart, some of our old nurses told me,' replied Oliver:
more as if he were talking to himself, than answering Noah. 'I think I
know what it must be to die of that!'

'Tol de rol lol lol, right fol lairy, Work'us,' said Noah, as a tear
rolled down Oliver's cheek.  'What's set you a snivelling now?'

'Not _you_,' replied Oliver, sharply. 'There; that's enough. Don't say
anything more to me about her; you'd better not!'

'Better not!' exclaimed Noah. 'Well!  Better not!  Work'us, don't be
impudent.  _Your_ mother, too!  She was a nice 'un she was.  Oh, Lor!'
And here, Noah nodded his head expressively; and curled up as much of
his small red nose as muscular action could collect together, for the
occasion.

'Yer know, Work'us,' continued Noah, emboldened by Oliver's silence,
and speaking in a jeering tone of affected pity: of all tones the most
annoying: 'Yer know, Work'us, it can't be helped now; and of course yer
couldn't help it then; and I am very sorry for it; and I'm sure we all
are, and pity yer very much.  But yer must know, Work'us, yer mother
was a regular right-down bad 'un.'

'What did you say?' inquired Oliver, looking up very quickly.

'A regular right-down bad 'un, Work'us,' replied Noah, coolly. 'And
it's a great deal better, Work'us, that she died when she did, or else
she'd have been hard labouring in Bridewell, or transported, or hung;
which is more likely than either, isn't it?'

Crimson with fury, Oliver started up; overthrew the chair and table;
seized Noah by the throat; shook him, in the violence of his rage, till
his teeth chattered in his head; and collecting his whole force into
one heavy blow, felled him to the ground.

A minute ago, the boy had looked the quiet child, mild, dejected
creature that harsh treatment had made him.  But his spirit was roused
at last; the cruel insult to his dead mother had set his blood on fire.
His breast heaved; his attitude was erect; his eye bright and vivid;
his whole person changed, as he stood glaring over the cowardly
tormentor who now lay crouching at his feet; and defied him with an
energy he had never known before.

'He'll murder me!' blubbered Noah.  'Charlotte!  missis!  Here's the
new boy a murdering of me!  Help! help!  Oliver's gone mad!
Char--lotte!'

Noah's shouts were responded to, by a loud scream from Charlotte, and a
louder from Mrs. Sowerberry; the former of whom rushed into the kitchen
by a side-door, while the latter paused on the staircase till she was
quite certain that it was consistent with the preservation of human
life, to come further down.

'Oh, you little wretch!' screamed Charlotte: seizing Oliver with her
utmost force, which was about equal to that of a moderately strong man
in particularly good training.  'Oh, you little un-grate-ful,
mur-de-rous, hor-rid villain!'  And between every syllable, Charlotte
gave Oliver a blow with all her might: accompanying it with a scream,
for the benefit of society.

Charlotte's fist was by no means a light one; but, lest it should not
be effectual in calming Oliver's wrath, Mrs. Sowerberry plunged into
the kitchen, and assisted to hold him with one hand, while she
scratched his face with the other. In this favourable position of
affairs, Noah rose from the ground, and pommelled him behind.

This was rather too violent exercise to last long.  When they were all
wearied out, and could tear and beat no longer, they dragged Oliver,
struggling and shouting, but nothing daunted, into the dust-cellar, and
there locked him up.  This being done, Mrs. Sowerberry sunk into a
chair, and burst into tears.

'Bless her, she's going off!' said Charlotte.  'A glass of water, Noah,
dear.  Make haste!'

'Oh!  Charlotte,' said Mrs. Sowerberry:  speaking as well as she could,
through a deficiency of breath, and a sufficiency of cold water, which
Noah had poured over her head and shoulders.  'Oh! Charlotte, what a
mercy we have not all been murdered in our beds!'

'Ah! mercy indeed, ma'am,' was the reply.  I only hope this'll teach
master not to have any more of these dreadful creatures, that are born
to be murderers and robbers from their very cradle. Poor Noah!  He was
all but killed, ma'am, when I come in.'

'Poor fellow!' said Mrs. Sowerberry: looking piteously on the
charity-boy.

Noah, whose top waistcoat-button might have been somewhere on a level
with the crown of Oliver's head, rubbed his eyes with the inside of his
wrists while this commiseration was bestowed upon him, and performed
some affecting tears and sniffs.

'What's to be done!' exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.  'Your master's not at
home; there's not a man in the house, and he'll kick that door down in
ten minutes.'  Oliver's vigorous plunges against the bit of timber in
question, rendered this occurance highly probable.

'Dear, dear!  I don't know, ma'am,' said Charlotte, 'unless we send for
the police-officers.'

'Or the millingtary,' suggested Mr. Claypole.

'No, no,' said Mrs. Sowerberry: bethinking herself of Oliver's old
friend.  'Run to Mr. Bumble, Noah, and tell him to come here directly,
and not to lose a minute; never mind your cap!  Make haste!  You can
hold a knife to that black eye, as you run along. It'll keep the
swelling down.'

Noah stopped to make no reply, but started off at his fullest speed;
and very much it astonished the people who were out walking, to see a
charity-boy tearing through the streets pell-mell, with no cap on his
head, and a clasp-knife at his eye.



CHAPTER VII

OLIVER CONTINUES REFRACTORY

Noah Claypole ran along the streets at his swiftest pace, and paused
not once for breath, until he reached the workhouse-gate. Having rested
here, for a minute or so, to collect a good burst of sobs and an
imposing show of tears and terror, he knocked loudly at the wicket; and
presented such a rueful face to the aged pauper who opened it, that
even he, who saw nothing but rueful faces about him at the best of
times, started back in astonishment.

'Why, what's the matter with the boy!' said the old pauper.

'Mr. Bumble!  Mr. Bumble!' cried Noah, with well-affected dismay: and
in tones so loud and agitated, that they not only caught the ear of Mr.
Bumble himself, who happened to be hard by, but alarmed him so much
that he rushed into the yard without his cocked hat,--which is a very
curious and remarkable circumstance: as showing that even a beadle,
acted upon a sudden and powerful impulse, may be afflicted with a
momentary visitation of loss of self-possession, and forgetfulness of
personal dignity.

'Oh, Mr. Bumble, sir!' said Noah:  'Oliver, sir,--Oliver has--'

'What?  What?' interposed Mr. Bumble: with a gleam of pleasure in his
metallic eyes. 'Not run away; he hasn't run away, has he, Noah?'

'No, sir, no.  Not run away, sir, but he's turned wicious,' replied
Noah. 'He tried to murder me, sir; and then he tried to murder
Charlotte; and then missis.  Oh! what dreadful pain it is!

Such agony, please, sir!'  And here, Noah writhed and twisted his body
into an extensive variety of eel-like positions; thereby giving Mr.
Bumble to understand that, from the violent and sanguinary onset of
Oliver Twist, he had sustained severe internal injury and damage, from
which he was at that moment suffering the acutest torture.

When Noah saw that the intelligence he communicated perfectly paralysed
Mr. Bumble, he imparted additional effect thereunto, by bewailing his
dreadful wounds ten times louder than before; and when he observed a
gentleman in a white waistcoat crossing the yard, he was more tragic in
his lamentations than ever: rightly conceiving it highly expedient to
attract the notice, and rouse the indignation, of the gentleman
aforesaid.

The gentleman's notice was very soon attracted; for he had not walked
three paces, when he turned angrily round, and inquired what that young
cur was howling for, and why Mr. Bumble did not favour him with
something which would render the series of vocular exclamations so
designated, an involuntary process?

'It's a poor boy from the free-school, sir,' replied Mr. Bumble, 'who
has been nearly murdered--all but murdered, sir,--by young Twist.'

'By Jove!' exclaimed the gentleman in the white waistcoat, stopping
short.  'I knew it!  I felt a strange presentiment from the very first,
that that audacious young savage would come to be hung!'

'He has likewise attempted, sir, to murder the female servant,' said
Mr. Bumble, with a face of ashy paleness.

'And his missis,' interposed Mr. Claypole.

'And his master, too, I think you said, Noah?' added Mr. Bumble.

'No! he's out, or he would have murdered him,' replied Noah. 'He said
he wanted to.'

'Ah!  Said he wanted to, did he, my boy?' inquired the gentleman in the
white waistcoat.

'Yes, sir,' replied Noah.  'And please, sir, missis wants to know
whether Mr. Bumble can spare time to step up there, directly, and flog
him--'cause master's out.'

'Certainly, my boy; certainly,' said the gentleman in the white
waistcoat: smiling benignly, and patting Noah's head, which was about
three inches higher than his own.  'You're a good boy--a very good boy.
Here's a penny for you.  Bumble, just step up to Sowerberry's with your
cane, and see what's best to be done. Don't spare him, Bumble.'

'No, I will not, sir,' replied the beadle.  And the cocked hat and cane
having been, by this time, adjusted to their owner's satisfaction, Mr.
Bumble and Noah Claypole betook themselves with all speed to the
undertaker's shop.

Here the position of affairs had not at all improved.  Sowerberry had
not yet returned, and Oliver continued to kick, with undiminished
vigour, at the cellar-door.  The accounts of his ferocity as related by
Mrs. Sowerberry and Charlotte, were of so startling a nature, that Mr.
Bumble judged it prudent to parley, before opening the door.  With this
view he gave a kick at the outside, by way of prelude; and, then,
applying his mouth to the keyhole, said, in a deep and impressive tone:

'Oliver!'

'Come; you let me out!' replied Oliver, from the inside.

'Do you know this here voice, Oliver?' said Mr. Bumble.

'Yes,' replied Oliver.

'Ain't you afraid of it, sir?  Ain't you a-trembling while I speak,
sir?' said Mr. Bumble.

'No!' replied Oliver, boldly.

An answer so different from the one he had expected to elicit, and was
in the habit of receiving, staggered Mr. Bumble not a little.  He
stepped back from the keyhole; drew himself up to his full height; and
looked from one to another of the three bystanders, in mute
astonishment.

'Oh, you know, Mr. Bumble, he must be mad,' said Mrs. Sowerberry.

'No boy in half his senses could venture to speak so to you.'

'It's not Madness, ma'am,' replied Mr. Bumble, after a few moments of
deep meditation.  'It's Meat.'

'What?' exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.

'Meat, ma'am, meat,' replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. 'You've
over-fed him, ma'am.  You've raised a artificial soul and spirit in
him, ma'am unbecoming a person of his condition: as the board, Mrs.
Sowerberry, who are practical philosophers, will tell you.  What have
paupers to do with soul or spirit?  It's quite enough that we let 'em
have live bodies.  If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma'am, this would
never have happened.'

'Dear, dear!' ejaculated Mrs. Sowerberry, piously raising her eyes to
the kitchen ceiling: 'this comes of being liberal!'

The liberality of Mrs. Sowerberry to Oliver, had consisted of a profuse
bestowal upon him of all the dirty odds and ends which nobody else
would eat; so there was a great deal of meekness and self-devotion in
her voluntarily remaining under Mr. Bumble's heavy accusation.  Of
which, to do her justice, she was wholly innocent, in thought, word, or
deed.

'Ah!' said Mr. Bumble, when the lady brought her eyes down to earth
again; 'the only thing that can be done now, that I know of, is to
leave him in the cellar for a day or so, till he's a little starved
down; and then to take him out, and keep him on gruel all through the
apprenticeship.  He comes of a bad family. Excitable natures, Mrs.
Sowerberry!  Both the nurse and doctor said, that that mother of his
made her way here, against difficulties and pain that would have killed
any well-disposed woman, weeks before.'

At this point of Mr. Bumble's discourse, Oliver, just hearing enough to
know that some allusion was being made to his mother, recommenced
kicking, with a violence that rendered every other sound inaudible.
Sowerberry returned at this juncture.  Oliver's offence having been
explained to him, with such exaggerations as the ladies thought best
calculated to rouse his ire, he unlocked the cellar-door in a
twinkling, and dragged his rebellious apprentice out, by the collar.

Oliver's clothes had been torn in the beating he had received; his face
was bruised and scratched; and his hair scattered over his forehead.
The angry flush had not disappeared, however; and when he was pulled
out of his prison, he scowled boldly on Noah, and looked quite
undismayed.

'Now, you are a nice young fellow, ain't you?' said Sowerberry; giving
Oliver a shake, and a box on the ear.

'He called my mother names,' replied Oliver.

'Well, and what if he did, you little ungrateful wretch?' said Mrs.
Sowerberry.  'She deserved what he said, and worse.'

'She didn't' said Oliver.

'She did,' said Mrs. Sowerberry.

'It's a lie!' said Oliver.

Mrs. Sowerberry burst into a flood of tears.

This flood of tears left Mr. Sowerberry no alternative.  If he had
hesitated for one instant to punish Oliver most severely, it must be
quite clear to every experienced reader that he would have been,
according to all precedents in disputes of matrimony established, a
brute, an unnatural husband, an insulting creature, a base imitation of
a man, and various other agreeable characters too numerous for recital
within the limits of this chapter.  To do him justice, he was, as far
as his power went--it was not very extensive--kindly disposed towards
the boy; perhaps, because it was his interest to be so; perhaps,
because his wife disliked him. The flood of tears, however, left him no
resource; so he at once gave him a drubbing, which satisfied even Mrs.
Sowerberry herself, and rendered Mr. Bumble's subsequent application of
the parochial cane, rather unnecessary.  For the rest of the day, he
was shut up in the back kitchen, in company with a pump and a slice of
bread; and at night, Mrs. Sowerberry, after making various remarks
outside the door, by no means complimentary to the memory of his
mother, looked into the room, and, amidst the jeers and pointings of
Noah and Charlotte, ordered him upstairs to his dismal bed.

It was not until he was left alone in the silence and stillness of the
gloomy workshop of the undertaker, that Oliver gave way to the feelings
which the day's treatment may be supposed likely to have awakened in a
mere child.  He had listened to their taunts with a look of contempt;
he had borne the lash without a cry: for he felt that pride swelling in
his heart which would have kept down a shriek to the last, though they
had roasted him alive.  But now, when there were none to see or hear
him, he fell upon his knees on the floor; and, hiding his face in his
hands, wept such tears as, God send for the credit of our nature, few
so young may ever have cause to pour out before him!

For a long time, Oliver remained motionless in this attitude. The
candle was burning low in the socket when he rose to his feet. Having
gazed cautiously round him, and listened intently, he gently undid the
fastenings of the door, and looked abroad.

It was a cold, dark night.  The stars seemed, to the boy's eyes,
farther from the earth than he had ever seen them before; there was no
wind; and the sombre shadows thrown by the trees upon the ground,
looked sepulchral and death-like, from being so still. He softly
reclosed the door.  Having availed himself of the expiring light of the
candle to tie up in a handkerchief the few articles of wearing apparel
he had, sat himself down upon a bench, to wait for morning.

With the first ray of light that struggled through the crevices in the
shutters, Oliver arose, and again unbarred the door.  One timid look
around--one moment's pause of hesitation--he had closed it behind him,
and was in the open street.

He looked to the right and to the left, uncertain whither to fly.

He remembered to have seen the waggons, as they went out, toiling up
the hill.  He took the same route; and arriving at a footpath across
the fields: which he knew, after some distance, led out again into the
road; struck into it, and walked quickly on.

Along this same footpath, Oliver well-remembered he had trotted beside
Mr. Bumble, when he first carried him to the workhouse from the farm.
His way lay directly in front of the cottage. His heart beat quickly
when he bethought himself of this; and he half resolved to turn back.
He had come a long way though, and should lose a great deal of time by
doing so.  Besides, it was so early that there was very little fear of
his being seen; so he walked on.

He reached the house.  There was no appearance of its inmates stirring
at that early hour.  Oliver stopped, and peeped into the garden.  A
child was weeding one of the little beds; as he stopped, he raised his
pale face and disclosed the features of one of his former companions.
Oliver felt glad to see him, before he went; for, though younger than
himself, he had been his little friend and playmate.  They had been
beaten, and starved, and shut up together, many and many a time.

'Hush, Dick!' said Oliver, as the boy ran to the gate, and thrust his
thin arm between the rails to greet him.  'Is any one up?'

'Nobody but me,' replied the child.

'You musn't say you saw me, Dick,' said Oliver.  'I am running away.
They beat and ill-use me, Dick; and I am going to seek my fortune, some
long way off.  I don't know where.  How pale you are!'

'I heard the doctor tell them I was dying,' replied the child with a
faint smile.  'I am very glad to see you, dear; but don't stop, don't
stop!'

'Yes, yes, I will, to say good-b'ye to you,' replied Oliver. 'I shall
see you again, Dick.  I know I shall!  You will be well and happy!'

'I hope so,' replied the child.  'After I am dead, but not before.  I
know the doctor must be right, Oliver, because I dream so much of
Heaven, and Angels, and kind faces that I never see when I am awake.
Kiss me,' said the child,  climbing up the low gate, and flinging his
little arms round Oliver's neck. 'Good-b'ye, dear!  God bless you!'

The blessing was from a young child's lips, but it was the first that
Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through the struggles
and sufferings, and troubles and changes, of his after life, he never
once forgot it.



CHAPTER VIII

OLIVER WALKS TO LONDON.  HE ENCOUNTERS ON THE ROAD A STRANGE SORT OF
YOUNG GENTLEMAN

Oliver reached the stile at which the by-path terminated; and once more
gained the high-road.  It was eight o'clock now. Though he was nearly
five miles away from the town, he ran, and hid behind the hedges, by
turns, till noon: fearing that he might be pursued and overtaken.  Then
he sat down to rest by the side of the milestone, and began to think,
for the first time, where he had better go and try to live.

The stone by which he was seated, bore, in large characters, an
intimation that it was just seventy miles from that spot to London. The
name awakened a new train of ideas in the boy's mind.

London!--that great place!--nobody--not even Mr. Bumble--could ever
find him there!  He had often heard the old men in the workhouse, too,
say that no lad of spirit need want in London; and that there were ways
of living in that vast city, which those who had been bred up in
country parts had no idea of.  It was the very place for a homeless
boy, who must die in the streets unless some one helped him. As these
things passed through his thoughts, he jumped upon his feet, and again
walked forward.

He had diminished the distance between himself and London by full four
miles more, before he recollected how much he must undergo ere he could
hope to reach his place of destination. As this consideration forced
itself upon him, he slackened his pace a little, and meditated upon his
means of getting there.  He had a crust of bread, a coarse shirt, and
two pairs of stockings, in his bundle.  He had a penny too--a gift of
Sowerberry's after some funeral in which he had acquitted himself more
than ordinarily well--in his pocket. 'A clean shirt,' thought Oliver,
'is a very comfortable thing; and so are two pairs of darned stockings;
and so is a penny; but they are small helps to a sixty-five miles' walk
in winter time.'  But Oliver's thoughts, like those of most other
people, although they were extremely ready and active to point out his
difficulties, were wholly at a loss to suggest any feasible mode of
surmounting them; so, after a good deal of thinking to no particular
purpose, he changed his little bundle over to the other shoulder, and
trudged on.

Oliver walked twenty miles that day; and all that time tasted nothing
but the crust of dry bread, and a few draughts of water, which he
begged at the cottage-doors by the road-side.  When the night came, he
turned into a meadow; and, creeping close under a hay-rick, determined
to lie there, till morning.  He felt frightened at first, for the wind
moaned dismally over the empty fields: and he was cold and hungry, and
more alone than he had ever felt before.  Being very tired with his
walk, however, he soon fell asleep and forgot his troubles.

He felt cold and stiff, when he got up next morning, and so hungry that
he was obliged to exchange the penny for a small loaf, in the very
first village through which he passed.  He had walked no more than
twelve miles, when night closed in again. His feet were sore, and his
legs so weak that they trembled beneath him.  Another night passed in
the bleak damp air, made him worse; when he set forward on his journey
next morning he could hardly crawl along.

He waited at the bottom of a steep hill till a stage-coach came up, and
then begged of the outside passengers; but there were very few who took
any notice of him: and even those told him to wait till they got to the
top of the hill, and then let them see how far he could run for a
halfpenny.  Poor Oliver tried to keep up with the coach a little way,
but was unable to do it, by reason of his fatigue and sore feet.  When
the outsides saw this, they put their halfpence back into their pockets
again, declaring that he was an idle young dog, and didn't deserve
anything; and the coach rattled away and left only a cloud of dust
behind.

In some villages, large painted boards were fixed up: warning all
persons who begged within the district, that they would be sent to
jail.  This frightened Oliver very much, and made him glad to get out
of those villages with all possible expedition.  In others, he would
stand about the inn-yards, and look mournfully at every one who passed:
a proceeding which generally terminated in the landlady's ordering one
of the post-boys who were lounging about, to drive that strange boy out
of the place, for she was sure he had come to steal something.  If he
begged at a farmer's house, ten to one but they threatened to set the
dog on him; and when he showed his nose in a shop, they talked about
the beadle--which brought Oliver's heart into his mouth,--very often
the only thing he had there, for many hours together.

In fact, if it had not been for a good-hearted turnpike-man, and a
benevolent old lady, Oliver's troubles would have been shortened by the
very same process which had put an end to his mother's; in other words,
he would most assuredly have fallen dead upon the king's highway.  But
the turnpike-man gave him a meal of bread and cheese; and the old lady,
who had a shipwrecked grandson wandering barefoot in some distant part
of the earth, took pity upon the poor orphan, and gave him what little
she could afford--and more--with such kind and gentle words, and such
tears of sympathy and compassion, that they sank deeper into Oliver's
soul, than all the sufferings he had ever undergone.

Early on the seventh morning after he had left his native place, Oliver
limped slowly into the little town of Barnet. The window-shutters were
closed; the street was empty; not a soul had awakened to the business
of the day.  The sun was rising in all its splendid beauty; but the
light only served to show the boy his own lonesomeness and desolation,
as he sat, with bleeding feet and covered with dust, upon a door-step.

By degrees, the shutters were opened; the window-blinds were drawn up;
and people began passing to and fro.  Some few stopped to gaze at
Oliver for a moment or two, or turned round to stare at him as they
hurried by; but none relieved him, or troubled themselves to inquire
how he came there. He had no heart to beg. And there he sat.

He had been crouching on the step for some time: wondering at the great
number of public-houses (every other house in Barnet was a tavern,
large or small), gazing listlessly at the coaches as they passed
through, and thinking how strange it seemed that they could do, with
ease, in a few hours, what it had taken him a whole week of courage and
determination beyond his years to accomplish: when he was roused by
observing that a boy, who had passed him carelessly some minutes
before, had returned, and was now surveying him most earnestly from the
opposite side of the way.  He took little heed of this at first; but
the boy remained in the same attitude of close observation so long,
that Oliver raised his head, and returned his steady look.  Upon this,
the boy crossed over; and walking close up to Oliver, said,

'Hullo, my covey!  What's the row?'

The boy who addressed this inquiry to the young wayfarer, was about his
own age: but one of the queerest looking boys that Oliver had even
seen.  He was a snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy enough; and
as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had about him all
the airs and manners of a man.  He was short of his age: with rather
bow-legs, and little, sharp, ugly eyes.  His hat was stuck on the top
of his head so lightly, that it threatened to fall off every
moment--and would have done so, very often, if the wearer had not had a
knack of every now and then giving his head a sudden twitch, which
brought it back to its old place again.  He wore a man's coat, which
reached nearly to his heels.  He had turned the cuffs back, half-way up
his arm, to get his hands out of the sleeves: apparently with the
ultimate view of thrusting them into the pockets of his corduroy
trousers; for there he kept them.  He was, altogether, as roystering
and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six, or
something less, in the bluchers.

'Hullo, my covey!  What's the row?' said this strange young gentleman
to Oliver.

'I am very hungry and tired,' replied Oliver: the tears standing in his
eyes as he spoke. 'I have walked a long way.  I have been walking these
seven days.'

'Walking for sivin days!' said the young gentleman.  'Oh, I see. Beak's
order, eh?  But,' he added, noticing Oliver's look of surprise, 'I
suppose you don't know what a beak is, my flash com-pan-i-on.'

Oliver mildly replied, that he had always heard a bird's mouth
described by the term in question.

'My eyes, how green!' exclaimed the young gentleman. 'Why, a beak's a
madgst'rate; and when you walk by a beak's order, it's not straight
forerd, but always agoing up, and niver a coming down agin.  Was you
never on the mill?'

'What mill?' inquired Oliver.

'What mill!  Why, _the_ mill--the mill as takes up so little room that
it'll work inside a Stone Jug; and always goes better when the wind's
low with people, than when it's high; acos then they can't get workmen.
But come,' said the young gentleman; 'you want grub, and you shall have
it.  I'm at low-water-mark myself--only one bob and a magpie; but, as
far as it goes, I'll fork out and stump.  Up with you on your pins.
There!  Now then! 'Morrice!'

Assisting Oliver to rise, the young gentleman took him to an adjacent
chandler's shop, where he purchased a sufficiency of ready-dressed ham
and a half-quartern loaf, or, as he himself expressed it, 'a fourpenny
bran!' the ham being kept clean and preserved from dust, by the
ingenious expedient of making a hole in the loaf by pulling out a
portion of the crumb, and stuffing it therein.  Taking the bread under
his arm, the young gentlman turned into a small public-house, and led
the way to a tap-room in the rear of the premises. Here, a pot of beer
was brought in, by direction of the mysterious youth; and Oliver,
falling to, at his new friend's bidding, made a long and hearty meal,
during the progress of which the strange boy eyed him from time to time
with great attention.

'Going to London?' said the strange boy, when Oliver had at length
concluded.

'Yes.'

'Got any lodgings?'

'No.'

'Money?'

'No.'

The strange boy whistled; and put his arms into his pockets, as far as
the big coat-sleeves would let them go.

'Do you live in London?' inquired Oliver.

'Yes. I do, when I'm at home,' replied the boy. 'I suppose you want
some place to sleep in to-night, don't you?'

'I do, indeed,' answered Oliver. 'I have not slept under a roof since I
left the country.'

'Don't fret your eyelids on that score,' said the young gentleman.
'I've got to be in London to-night; and I know a 'spectable old
gentleman as lives there, wot'll give you lodgings for nothink, and
never ask for the change--that is, if any genelman he knows interduces
you. And don't he know me?  Oh, no! Not in the least!  By no means.
Certainly not!'

The young gentleman smiled, as if to intimate that the latter fragments
of discourse were playfully ironical; and finished the beer as he did
so.

This unexpected offer of shelter was too tempting to be resisted;
especially as it was immediately followed up, by the assurance that the
old gentleman referred to, would doubtless provide Oliver with a
comfortable place, without loss of time.  This led to a more friendly
and confidential dialogue; from which Oliver discovered that his
friend's name was Jack Dawkins, and that he was a peculiar pet and
protege of the elderly gentleman before mentioned.

Mr. Dawkin's appearance did not say a vast deal in favour of the
comforts which his patron's interest obtained for those whom he took
under his protection; but, as he had a rather flightly and dissolute
mode of conversing, and furthermore avowed that among his intimate
friends he was better known by the sobriquet of 'The Artful Dodger,'
Oliver concluded that, being of a dissipated and careless turn, the
moral precepts of his benefactor had hitherto been thrown away upon
him.  Under this impression, he secretly resolved to cultivate the good
opinion of the old gentleman as quickly as possible; and, if he found
the Dodger incorrigible, as he more than half suspected he should, to
decline the honour of his farther acquaintance.

As John Dawkins objected to their entering London before nightfall, it
was nearly eleven o'clock when they reached the turnpike at Islington.
They crossed from the Angel into St. John's Road; struck down the small
street which terminates at Sadler's Wells Theatre; through Exmouth
Street and Coppice Row; down the little court by the side of the
workhouse; across the classic ground which once bore the name of
Hockley-in-the-Hole; thence into Little Saffron Hill; and so into
Saffron Hill the Great: along which the Dodger scudded at a rapid pace,
directing Oliver to follow close at his heels.

Although Oliver had enough to occupy his attention in keeping sight of
his leader, he could not help bestowing a few hasty glances on either
side of the way, as he passed along.  A dirtier or more wretched place
he had never seen.  The street was very narrow and muddy, and the air
was impregnated with filthy odours.

There were a good many small shops; but the only stock in trade
appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were
crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from the inside.  The
sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the
place, were the public-houses; and in them, the lowest orders of Irish
were wrangling with might and main. Covered ways and yards, which here
and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of
houses, where drunken men and women were positively wallowing in filth;
and from several of the door-ways, great ill-looking fellows were
cautiously emerging, bound, to all appearance, on no very well-disposed
or harmless errands.

Oliver was just considering whether he hadn't better run away, when
they reached the bottom of the hill.  His conductor, catching him by
the arm, pushed open the door of a house near Field Lane; and drawing
him into the passage, closed it behind them.

'Now, then!' cried a voice from below, in reply to a whistle from the
Dodger.

'Plummy and slam!' was the reply.

This seemed to be some watchword or signal that all was right; for the
light of a feeble candle gleamed on the wall at the remote end of the
passage; and a man's face peeped out, from where a balustrade of the
old kitchen staircase had been broken away.

'There's two on you,' said the man, thrusting the candle farther out,
and shielding his eyes with his hand.  'Who's the t'other one?'

'A new pal,' replied Jack Dawkins, pulling Oliver forward.

'Where did he come from?'

'Greenland. Is Fagin upstairs?'

'Yes, he's a sortin' the wipes.  Up with you!'  The candle was drawn
back, and the face disappeared.

Oliver, groping his way with one hand, and having the other firmly
grasped by his companion, ascended with much difficulty the dark and
broken stairs: which his conductor mounted with an ease and expedition
that showed he was well acquainted with them.

He threw open the door of a back-room, and drew Oliver in after him.

The walls and ceiling of the room were perfectly black with age and
dirt.  There was a deal table before the fire: upon which were a
candle, stuck in a ginger-beer bottle, two or three pewter pots, a loaf
and butter, and a plate.  In a frying-pan, which was on the fire, and
which was secured to the mantelshelf by a string, some sausages were
cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was
a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face
was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a
greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare; and seemed to be dividing
his attention between the frying-pan and the clothes-horse, over which
a great number of silk handkerchiefs were hanging.  Several rough beds
made of old sacks, were huddled side by side on the floor. Seated round
the table were four or five boys, none older than the Dodger, smoking
long clay pipes, and drinking spirits with the air of middle-aged men.
These all crowded about their associate as he whispered a few words to
the Jew; and then turned round and grinned at Oliver.  So did the Jew
himself, toasting-fork in hand.

'This is him, Fagin,' said Jack Dawkins;'my friend Oliver Twist.'

The Jew grinned; and, making a low obeisance to Oliver, took him by the
hand, and hoped he should have the honour of his intimate acquaintance.
Upon this, the young gentleman with the pipes came round him, and shook
both his hands very hard--especially the one in which he held his
little bundle.  One young gentleman was very anxious to hang up his cap
for him; and another was so obliging as to put his hands in his
pockets, in order that, as he was very tired, he might not have the
trouble of emptying them, himself, when he went to bed.  These
civilities would probably be extended much farther, but for a liberal
exercise of the Jew's toasting-fork on the heads and shoulders of the
affectionate youths who offered them.

'We are very glad to see you, Oliver, very,' said the Jew. 'Dodger,
take off the sausages; and draw a tub near the fire for Oliver.  Ah,
you're a-staring at the pocket-handkerchiefs! eh, my dear. There are a
good many of 'em, ain't there? We've just looked 'em out, ready for the
wash; that's all, Oliver; that's all. Ha! ha! ha!'

The latter part of this speech, was hailed by a boisterous shout from
all the hopeful pupils of the merry old gentleman. In the midst of
which they went to supper.

Oliver ate his share, and the Jew then mixed him a glass of hot
gin-and-water: telling him he must drink it off directly, because
another gentleman wanted the tumbler. Oliver did as he was desired.
Immediately afterwards he felt himself gently lifted on to one of the
sacks; and then he sunk into a deep sleep.



CHAPTER IX

CONTAINING FURTHER PARTICULARS CONCERNING THE PLEASANT OLD GENTLEMAN,
AND HIS HOPEFUL PUPILS

It was late next morning when Oliver awoke, from a sound, long sleep.
There was no other person in the room but the old Jew, who was boiling
some coffee in a saucepan for breakfast, and whistling softly to
himself as he stirred it round and round, with an iron spoon. He would
stop every now and then to listen when there was the least noise below:
and when he had satisfied himself, he would go on whistling and
stirring again, as before.

Although Oliver had roused himself from sleep, he was not thoroughly
awake. There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you
dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half
conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in
five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in
perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of
what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its
mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space,
when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.

Oliver was precisely in this condition. He saw the Jew with his
half-closed eyes; heard his low whistling; and recognised the sound of
the spoon grating against the saucepan's sides: and yet the self-same
senses were mentally engaged, at the same time, in busy action with
almost everybody he had ever known.

When the coffee was done, the Jew drew the saucepan to the hob.
Standing, then in an irresolute attitude for a few minutes, as if he
did not well know how to employ himself, he turned round and looked at
Oliver, and called him by his name. He did not answer, and was to all
appearances asleep.

After satisfying himself upon this head, the Jew stepped gently to the
door: which he fastened. He then drew forth: as it seemed to Oliver,
from some trap in the floor: a small box, which he placed carefully on
the table. His eyes glistened as he raised the lid, and looked in.
Dragging an old chair to the table, he sat down; and took from it a
magnificent gold watch, sparkling with jewels.

'Aha!' said the Jew, shrugging up his shoulders, and distorting every
feature with a hideous grin. 'Clever dogs! Clever dogs! Staunch to the
last! Never told the old parson where they were. Never poached upon old
Fagin! And why should they? It wouldn't have loosened the knot, or kept
the drop up, a minute longer. No, no, no! Fine fellows! Fine fellows!'

With these, and other muttered reflections of the like nature, the Jew
once more deposited the watch in its place of safety. At least half a
dozen more were severally drawn forth from the same box, and surveyed
with equal pleasure; besides rings, brooches, bracelets, and other
articles of jewellery, of such magnificent materials, and costly
workmanship, that Oliver had no idea, even of their names.

Having replaced these trinkets, the Jew took out another: so small that
it lay in the palm of his hand. There seemed to be some very minute
inscription on it; for the Jew laid it flat upon the table, and shading
it with his hand, pored over it, long and earnestly. At length he put
it down, as if despairing of success; and, leaning back in his chair,
muttered:

'What a fine thing capital punishment is! Dead men never repent; dead
men never bring awkward stories to light. Ah, it's a fine thing for the
trade! Five of 'em strung up in a row, and none left to play booty, or
turn white-livered!'

As the Jew uttered these words, his bright dark eyes, which had been
staring vacantly before him, fell on Oliver's face; the boy's eyes were
fixed on his in mute curiousity; and although the recognition was only
for an instant--for the briefest space of time that can possibly be
conceived--it was enough to show the old man that he had been observed.

He closed the lid of the box with a loud crash; and, laying his hand on
a bread knife which was on the table, started furiously up. He trembled
very much though; for, even in his terror, Oliver could see that the
knife quivered in the air.

'What's that?' said the Jew. 'What do you watch me for? Why are you
awake? What have you seen? Speak out, boy! Quick--quick! for your life.

'I wasn't able to sleep any longer, sir,' replied Oliver, meekly. 'I am
very sorry if I have disturbed you, sir.'

'You were not awake an hour ago?' said the Jew, scowling fiercely on
the boy.

'No! No, indeed!' replied Oliver.

'Are you sure?' cried the Jew: with a still fiercer look than before:
and a threatening attitude.

'Upon my word I was not, sir,' replied Oliver, earnestly. 'I was not,
indeed, sir.'

'Tush, tush, my dear!' said the Jew, abruptly resuming his old manner,
and playing with the knife a little, before he laid it down; as if to
induce the belief that he had caught it up, in mere sport. 'Of course I
know that, my dear. I only tried to frighten you. You're a brave boy.
Ha! ha! you're a brave boy, Oliver.' The Jew rubbed his hands with a
chuckle, but glanced uneasily at the box, notwithstanding.

'Did you see any of these pretty things, my dear?' said the Jew, laying
his hand upon it after a short pause.

'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver.

'Ah!' said the Jew, turning rather pale. 'They--they're mine, Oliver;
my little property. All I have to live upon, in my old age. The folks
call me a miser, my dear. Only a miser; that's all.'

Oliver thought the old gentleman must be a decided miser to live in
such a dirty place, with so many watches; but, thinking that perhaps
his fondness for the Dodger and the other boys, cost him a good deal of
money, he only cast a deferential look at the Jew, and asked if he
might get up.

'Certainly, my dear, certainly,' replied the old gentleman. 'Stay.
There's a pitcher of water in the corner by the door. Bring it here;
and I'll give you a basin to wash in, my dear.'

Oliver got up; walked across the room; and stooped for an instant to
raise the pitcher.  When he turned his head, the box was gone.

He had scarcely washed himself, and made everything tidy, by emptying
the basin out of the window, agreeably to the Jew's directions, when
the Dodger returned: accompanied by a very sprightly young friend, whom
Oliver had seen smoking on the previous night, and who was now formally
introduced to him as Charley Bates. The four sat down, to breakfast, on
the coffee, and some hot rolls and ham which the Dodger had brought
home in the crown of his hat.

'Well,' said the Jew, glancing slyly at Oliver, and addressing himself
to the Dodger, 'I hope you've been at work this morning, my dears?'

'Hard,' replied the Dodger.

'As nails,' added Charley Bates.

'Good boys, good boys!' said the Jew. 'What have you got, Dodger?'

'A couple of pocket-books,' replied that young gentlman.

'Lined?' inquired the Jew, with eagerness.

'Pretty well,' replied the Dodger, producing two pocket-books; one
green, and the other red.

'Not so heavy as they might be,' said the Jew, after looking at the
insides carefully; 'but very neat and nicely made.  Ingenious workman,
ain't he, Oliver?'

'Very indeed, sir,' said Oliver. At which Mr. Charles Bates laughed
uproariously; very much to the amazement of Oliver, who saw nothing to
laugh at, in anything that had passed.

'And what have you got, my dear?' said Fagin to Charley Bates.

'Wipes,' replied Master Bates; at the same time producing four
pocket-handkerchiefs.

'Well,' said the Jew, inspecting them closely; 'they're very good ones,
very. You haven't marked them well, though, Charley; so the marks shall
be picked out with a needle, and we'll teach Oliver how to do it. Shall
us, Oliver, eh? Ha! ha! ha!'

'If you please, sir,' said Oliver.

'You'd like to be able to make pocket-handkerchiefs as easy as Charley
Bates, wouldn't you, my dear?' said the Jew.

'Very much, indeed, if you'll teach me, sir,' replied Oliver.

Master Bates saw something so exquisitely ludicrous in this reply, that
he burst into another laugh; which laugh, meeting the coffee he was
drinking, and carrying it down some wrong channel, very nearly
terminated in his premature suffocation.

'He is so jolly green!' said Charley when he recovered, as an apology
to the company for his unpolite behaviour.

The Dodger said nothing, but he smoothed Oliver's hair over his eyes,
and said he'd know better, by and by; upon which the old gentleman,
observing Oliver's colour mounting, changed the subject by asking
whether there had been much of a crowd at the execution that morning?
This made him wonder more and more; for it was plain from the replies
of the two boys that they had both been there; and Oliver naturally
wondered how they could possibly have found time to be so very
industrious.

When the breakfast was cleared away; the merry old gentlman and the two
boys played at a very curious and uncommon game, which was performed in
this way. The merry old gentleman, placing a snuff-box in one pocket of
his trousers, a note-case in the other, and a watch in his waistcoat
pocket, with a guard-chain round his neck, and sticking a mock diamond
pin in his shirt: buttoned his coat tight round him, and putting his
spectacle-case and handkerchief in his pockets, trotted up and down the
room with a stick, in imitation of the manner in which old gentlemen
walk about the streets any hour in the day.  Sometimes he stopped at
the fire-place, and sometimes at the door, making believe that he was
staring with all his might into shop-windows.  At such times, he would
look constantly round him, for fear of thieves, and would keep slapping
all his pockets in turn, to see that he hadn't lost anything, in such a
very funny and natural manner, that Oliver laughed till the tears ran
down his face.  All this time, the two boys followed him closely about:
getting out of his sight, so nimbly, every time he turned round, that
it was impossible to follow their motions. At last, the Dodger trod
upon his toes, or ran upon his boot accidently, while Charley Bates
stumbled up against him behind; and in that one moment they took from
him, with the most extraordinary rapidity, snuff-box, note-case,
watch-guard, chain, shirt-pin, pocket-handkerchief, even the
spectacle-case.  If the old gentlman felt a hand in any one of his
pockets, he cried out where it was; and then the game began all over
again.

When this game had been played a great many times, a couple of young
ladies called to see the young gentleman; one of whom was named Bet,
and the other Nancy.  They wore a good deal of hair, not very neatly
turned up behind, and were rather untidy about the shoes and stockings.
They were not exactly pretty, perhaps; but they had a great deal of
colour in their faces, and looked quite stout and hearty.  Being
remarkably free and agreeable in their manners, Oliver thought them
very nice girls indeed.  As there is no doubt they were.

The visitors stopped a long time. Spirits were produced, in consequence
of one of the young ladies complaining of a coldness in her inside; and
the conversation took a very convivial and improving turn. At length,
Charley Bates expressed his opinion that it was time to pad the hoof.
This, it occurred to Oliver, must be French for going out; for directly
afterwards, the Dodger, and Charley, and the two young ladies, went
away together, having been kindly furnished by the amiable old Jew with
money to spend.

'There, my dear,' said Fagin. 'That's a pleasant life, isn't it? They
have gone out for the day.'

'Have they done work, sir?' inquired Oliver.

'Yes,' said the Jew; 'that is, unless they should unexpectedly come
across any, when they are out; and they won't neglect it, if they do,
my dear, depend upon it.  Make 'em your models, my dear. Make 'em your
models,' tapping the fire-shovel on the hearth to add force to his
words; 'do everything they bid you, and take their advice in all
matters--especially the Dodger's, my dear. He'll be a great man
himself, and will make you one too, if you take pattern by him.--Is my
handkerchief hanging out of my pocket, my dear?' said the Jew, stopping
short.

'Yes, sir,' said Oliver.

'See if you can take it out, without my feeling it; as you saw them do,
when we were at play this morning.'

Oliver held up the bottom of the pocket with one hand, as he had seen
the Dodger hold it, and drew the handkerchief lightly out of it with
the other.

'Is it gone?' cried the Jew.

'Here it is, sir,' said Oliver, showing it in his hand.

'You're a clever boy, my dear,' said the playful old gentleman, patting
Oliver on the head approvingly. 'I never saw a sharper lad. Here's a
shilling for you. If you go on, in this way, you'll be the greatest man
of the time. And now come here, and I'll show you how to take the marks
out of the handkerchiefs.'

Oliver wondered what picking the old gentleman's pocket in play, had to
do with his chances of being a great man.  But, thinking that the Jew,
being so much his senior, must know best, he followed him quietly to
the table, and was soon deeply involved in his new study.



CHAPTER X

OLIVER BECOMES BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH THE CHARACTERS OF HIS NEW
ASSOCIATES; AND PURCHASES EXPERIENCE AT A HIGH PRICE. BEING A SHORT,
BUT VERY IMPORTANT CHAPTER, IN THIS HISTORY

For many days, Oliver remained in the Jew's room, picking the marks out
of the pocket-handkerchief, (of which a great number were brought
home,) and sometimes taking part in the game already described: which
the two boys and the Jew played, regularly, every morning. At length,
he began to languish for fresh air, and took many occasions of
earnestly entreating the old gentleman to allow him to go out to work
with his two companions.

Oliver was rendered the more anxious to be actively employed, by what
he had seen of the stern morality of the old gentleman's character.
Whenever the Dodger or Charley Bates came home at night, empty-handed,
he would expatiate with great vehemence on the misery of idle and lazy
habits; and would enforce upon them the necessity of an active life, by
sending them supperless to bed. On one occasion, indeed, he even went
so far as to knock them both down a flight of stairs; but this was
carrying out his virtuous precepts to an unusual extent.

At length, one morning, Oliver obtained the permission he had so
eagerly sought. There had been no handkerchiefs to work upon, for two
or three days, and the dinners had been rather meagre. Perhaps these
were reasons for the old gentleman's giving his assent; but, whether
they were or no, he told Oliver he might go, and placed him under the
joint guardianship of Charley Bates, and his friend the Dodger.

The three boys sallied out; the Dodger with his coat-sleeves tucked up,
and his hat cocked, as usual; Master Bates sauntering along with his
hands in his pockets; and Oliver between them, wondering where they
were going, and what branch of manufacture he would be instructed in,
first.

The pace at which they went, was such a very lazy, ill-looking saunter,
that Oliver soon began to think his companions were going to deceive
the old gentleman, by not going to work at all. The Dodger had a
vicious propensity, too, of pulling the caps from the heads of small
boys and tossing them down areas; while Charley Bates exhibited some
very loose notions concerning the rights of property, by pilfering
divers apples and onions from the stalls at the kennel sides, and
thrusting them into pockets which were so surprisingly capacious, that
they seemed to undermine his whole suit of clothes in every direction.
These things looked so bad, that Oliver was on the point of declaring
his intention of seeking his way back, in the best way he could; when
his thoughts were suddenly directed into another channel, by a very
mysterious change of behaviour on the part of the Dodger.

They were just emerging from a narrow court not far from the open
square in Clerkenwell, which is yet called, by some strange perversion
of terms, 'The Green': when the Dodger made a sudden stop; and, laying
his finger on his lip, drew his companions back again, with the
greatest caution and circumspection.

'What's the matter?' demanded Oliver.

'Hush!' replied the Dodger. 'Do you see that old cove at the
book-stall?'

'The old gentleman over the way?' said Oliver. 'Yes, I see him.'

'He'll do,' said the Dodger.

'A prime plant,' observed Master Charley Bates.

Oliver looked from one to the other, with the greatest surprise; but he
was not permitted to make any inquiries; for the two boys walked
stealthily across the road, and slunk close behind the old gentleman
towards whom his attention had been directed. Oliver walked a few paces
after them; and, not knowing whether to advance or retire, stood
looking on in silent amazement.

The old gentleman was a very respectable-looking personage, with a
powdered head and gold spectacles. He was dressed in a bottle-green
coat with a black velvet collar; wore white trousers; and carried a
smart bamboo cane under his arm. He had taken up a book from the stall,
and there he stood, reading away, as hard as if he were in his
elbow-chair, in his own study. It is very possible that he fancied
himself there, indeed; for it was plain, from his abstraction, that he
saw not the book-stall, nor the street, nor the boys, nor, in short,
anything but the book itself: which he was reading straight through:
turning over the leaf when he got to the bottom of a page, beginning at
the top line of the next one, and going regularly on, with the greatest
interest and eagerness.

What was Oliver's horror and alarm as he stood a few paces off, looking
on with his eyelids as wide open as they would possibly go, to see the
Dodger plunge his hand into the old gentleman's pocket, and draw from
thence a handkerchief! To see him hand the same to Charley Bates; and
finally to behold them, both running away round the corner at full
speed!

In an instant the whole mystery of the hankerchiefs, and the watches,
and the jewels, and the Jew, rushed upon the boy's mind.

He stood, for a moment, with the blood so tingling through all his
veins from terror, that he felt as if he were in a burning fire; then,
confused and frightened, he took to his heels; and, not knowing what he
did, made off as fast as he could lay his feet to the ground.

This was all done in a minute's space. In the very instant when Oliver
began to run, the old gentleman, putting his hand to his pocket, and
missing his handkerchief, turned sharp round. Seeing the boy scudding
away at such a rapid pace, he very naturally concluded him to be the
depredator; and shouting 'Stop thief!' with all his might, made off
after him, book in hand.

But the old gentleman was not the only person who raised the
hue-and-cry. The Dodger and Master Bates, unwilling to attract public
attention by running down the open street, had merely retired into the
very first doorway round the corner. They no sooner heard the cry, and
saw Oliver running, than, guessing exactly how the matter stood, they
issued forth with great promptitude; and, shouting 'Stop thief!' too,
joined in the pursuit like good citizens.

Although Oliver had been brought up by philosophers, he was not
theoretically acquainted with the beautiful axiom that
self-preservation is the first law of nature. If he had been, perhaps
he would have been prepared for this. Not being prepared, however, it
alarmed him the more; so away he went like the wind, with the old
gentleman and the two boys roaring and shouting behind him.

'Stop thief! Stop thief!' There is a magic in the sound. The tradesman
leaves his counter, and the car-man his waggon; the butcher throws down
his tray; the baker his basket; the milkman his pail; the errand-boy
his parcels; the school-boy his marbles; the paviour his pickaxe; the
child his battledore. Away they run, pell-mell, helter-skelter,
slap-dash: tearing, yelling, screaming, knocking down the passengers as
they turn the corners, rousing up the dogs, and astonishing the fowls:
and streets, squares, and courts, re-echo with the sound.

'Stop thief! Stop thief!' The cry is taken up by a hundred voices, and
the crowd accumulate at every turning. Away they fly, splashing through
the mud, and rattling along the pavements: up go the windows, out run
the people, onward bear the mob, a whole audience desert Punch in the
very thickest of the plot, and, joining the rushing throng, swell the
shout, and lend fresh vigour to the cry, 'Stop thief! Stop thief!'

'Stop thief! Stop thief!' There is a passion FOR _hunting_ _something_
deeply implanted in the human breast.  One wretched breathless child,
panting with exhaustion; terror in his looks; agony in his eyes; large
drops of perspiration streaming down his face; strains every nerve to
make head upon his pursuers; and as they follow on his track, and gain
upon him every instant, they hail his decreasing strength with joy.
'Stop thief!'  Ay, stop him for God's sake, were it only in mercy!

Stopped at last!  A clever blow.  He is down upon the pavement; and the
crowd eagerly gather round him:  each new comer, jostling and
struggling with the others to catch a glimpse.  'Stand aside!'  'Give
him a little air!'  'Nonsense! he don't deserve it.'  'Where's the
gentleman?'  'Here his is, coming down the street.'  'Make room there
for the gentleman!' 'Is this the boy, sir!'  'Yes.'

Oliver lay, covered with mud and dust, and bleeding from the mouth,
looking wildly round upon the heap of faces that surrounded him, when
the old gentleman was officiously dragged and pushed into the circle by
the foremost of the pursuers.

'Yes,' said the gentleman, 'I am afraid it is the boy.'

'Afraid!' murmured the crowd.  'That's a good 'un!'

'Poor fellow!' said the gentleman, 'he has hurt himself.'

'_I_ did that, sir,' said a great lubberly fellow, stepping forward;
'and preciously I cut my knuckle agin' his mouth.  I stopped him, sir.'

The fellow touched his hat with a grin, expecting something for his
pains; but, the old gentleman, eyeing him with an expression of
dislike, look anxiously round, as if he contemplated running away
himself:  which it is very possible he might have attempted to do, and
thus have afforded another chase, had not a police officer (who is
generally the last person to arrive in such cases) at that moment made
his way through the crowd, and seized Oliver by the collar.

'Come, get up,' said the man, roughly.

'It wasn't me indeed, sir.  Indeed, indeed, it was two other boys,'
said Oliver, clasping his hands passionately, and looking round.  'They
are here somewhere.'

'Oh no, they ain't,' said the officer.  He meant this to be ironical,
but it was true besides; for the Dodger and Charley Bates had filed off
down the first convenient court they came to.

'Come, get up!'

'Don't hurt him,' said the old gentleman, compassionately.

'Oh no, I won't hurt him,' replied the officer, tearing his jacket half
off his back, in proof thereof.  'Come, I know you; it won't do.  Will
you stand upon your legs, you young devil?'

Oliver, who could hardly stand, made a shift to raise himself on his
feet, and was at once lugged along the streets by the jacket-collar, at
a rapid pace.  The gentleman walked on with them by the officer's side;
and as many of the crowd as could achieve the feat, got a little ahead,
and stared back at Oliver from time to time.  The boys shouted in
triumph; and on they went.



CHAPTER XI

TREATS OF MR. FANG THE POLICE MAGISTRATE; AND FURNISHES A SLIGHT
SPECIMEN OF HIS MODE OF ADMINISTERING JUSTICE

The offence had been committed within the district, and indeed in the
immediate neighborhood of, a very notorious metropolitan police office.
The crowd had only the satisfaction of accompanying Oliver through two
or three streets, and down a place called Mutton Hill, when he was led
beneath a low archway, and up a dirty court, into this dispensary of
summary justice, by the back way.  It was a small paved yard into which
they turned; and here they encountered a stout man with a bunch of
whiskers on his face, and a bunch of keys in his hand.

'What's the matter now?' said the man carelessly.

'A young fogle-hunter,' replied the man who had Oliver in charge.

'Are you the party that's been robbed, sir?' inquired the man with the
keys.

'Yes, I am,' replied the old gentleman; 'but I am not sure that this
boy actually took the handkerchief.  I--I would rather not press the
case.'

'Must go before the magistrate now, sir,' replied the man. 'His worship
will be disengaged in half a minute.  Now, young gallows!'

This was an invitation for Oliver to enter through a door which he
unlocked as he spoke, and which led into a stone cell.  Here he was
searched; and nothing being found upon him, locked up.

This cell was in shape and size something like an area cellar, only not
so light.  It was most intolerably dirty; for it was Monday morning;
and it had been tenanted by six drunken people, who had been locked up,
elsewhere, since Saturday night.  But this is little.  In our
station-houses, men and women are every night confined on the most
trivial charges--the word is worth noting--in dungeons, compared with
which, those in Newgate, occupied by the most atrocious felons, tried,
found guilty, and under sentence of death, are palaces. Let any one who
doubts this, compare the two.

The old gentleman looked almost as rueful as Oliver when the key grated
in the lock.  He turned with a sigh to the book, which had been the
innocent cause of all this disturbance.

'There is something in that boy's face,' said the old gentleman to
himself as he walked slowly away, tapping his chin with the cover of
the book, in a thoughtful manner; 'something that touches and interests
me.  _Can_ he be innocent?  He looked like--Bye the bye,' exclaimed the
old gentleman, halting very abruptly, and staring up into the sky,
'Bless my soul!--where have I seen something like that look before?'

After musing for some minutes, the old gentleman walked, with the same
meditative face, into a back anteroom opening from the yard; and there,
retiring into a corner, called up before his mind's eye a vast
amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had hung for many
years.  'No,' said the old gentleman, shaking his head; 'it must be
imagination.'

He wandered over them again.  He had called them into view, and it was
not easy to replace the shroud that had so long concealed them.  There
were the faces of friends, and foes, and of many that had been almost
strangers peering intrusively from the crowd; there were the faces of
young and blooming girls that were now old women; there were faces that
the grave had changed and closed upon, but which the mind, superior to
its power, still dressed in their old freshness and beauty, calling
back the lustre of the eyes, the brightness of the smile, the beaming
of the soul through its mask of clay, and whispering of beauty beyond
the tomb, changed but to be heightened, and taken from earth only to be
set up as a light, to shed a soft and gentle glow upon the path to
Heaven.

But the old gentleman could recall no one countenance of which Oliver's
features bore a trace.  So, he heaved a sigh over the recollections he
awakened; and being, happily for himself, an absent old gentleman,
buried them again in the pages of the musty book.

He was roused by a touch on the shoulder, and a request from the man
with the keys to follow him into the office.  He closed his book
hastily; and was at once ushered into the imposing presence of the
renowned Mr. Fang.

The office was a front parlour, with a panelled wall.  Mr. Fang sat
behind a bar, at the upper end; and on one side the door was a sort of
wooden pen in which poor little Oliver was already deposited; trembling
very much at the awfulness of the scene.

Mr. Fang was a lean, long-backed, stiff-necked, middle-sized man, with
no great quantity of hair, and what he had, growing on the back and
sides of his head.  His face was stern, and much flushed.  If he were
really not in the habit of drinking rather more than was exactly good
for him, he might have brought action against his countenance for
libel, and have recovered heavy damages.

The old gentleman bowed respectfully; and advancing to the magistrate's
desk, said, suiting the action to the word, 'That is my name and
address, sir.'  He then withdrew a pace or two; and, with another
polite and gentlemanly inclination of the head, waited to be questioned.

Now, it so happened that Mr. Fang was at that moment perusing a leading
article in a newspaper of the morning, adverting to some recent
decision of his, and commending him, for the three hundred and fiftieth
time, to the special and particular notice of the Secretary of State
for the Home Department.  He was out of temper; and he looked up with
an angry scowl.

'Who are you?' said Mr. Fang.

The old gentleman pointed, with some surprise, to his card.

'Officer!' said Mr. Fang, tossing the card contemptuously away with the
newspaper.  'Who is this fellow?'

'My name, sir,' said the old gentleman, speaking _like_ a gentleman,
'my name, sir, is Brownlow.  Permit me to inquire the name of the
magistrate who offers a gratuitous and unprovoked insult to a
respectable person, under the protection of the bench.'  Saying this,
Mr. Brownlow looked around the office as if in search of some person
who would afford him the required information.

'Officer!' said Mr. Fang, throwing the paper on one side, 'what's this
fellow charged with?'

'He's not charged at all, your worship,' replied the officer. 'He
appears against this boy, your worship.'

His worship knew this perfectly well; but it was a good annoyance, and
a safe one.

'Appears against the boy, does he?' said Mr. Fang, surveying Mr.
Brownlow contemptuously from head to foot.  'Swear him!'

'Before I am sworn, I must beg to say one word,' said Mr. Brownlow;
'and that is, that I really never, without actual experience, could
have believed--'

'Hold your tongue, sir!' said Mr. Fang, peremptorily.

'I will not, sir!' replied the old gentleman.

'Hold your tongue this instant, or I'll have you turned out of the
office!' said Mr. Fang.  'You're an insolent impertinent fellow.  How
dare you bully a magistrate!'

'What!' exclaimed the old gentleman, reddening.

'Swear this person!' said Fang to the clerk.  'I'll not hear another
word.  Swear him.'

Mr. Brownlow's indignation was greatly roused; but reflecting perhaps,
that he might only injure the boy by giving vent to it, he suppressed
his feelings and submitted to be sworn at once.

'Now,' said Fang, 'what's the charge against this boy?  What have you
got to say, sir?'

'I was standing at a bookstall--' Mr. Brownlow began.

'Hold your tongue, sir,' said Mr. Fang.  'Policeman!  Where's the
policeman?  Here, swear this policeman.  Now, policeman, what is this?'

The policeman, with becoming humility, related how he had taken the
charge; how he had searched Oliver, and found nothing on his person;
and how that was all he knew about it.

'Are there any witnesses?' inquired Mr. Fang.

'None, your worship,' replied the policeman.

Mr. Fang sat silent for some minutes, and then, turning round to the
prosecutor, said in a towering passion.

'Do you mean to state what your complaint against this boy is, man, or
do you not?  You have been sworn.  Now, if you stand there, refusing to
give evidence, I'll punish you for disrespect to the bench; I will,
by--'

By what, or by whom, nobody knows, for the clerk and jailor coughed
very loud, just at the right moment; and the former dropped a heavy
book upon the floor, thus preventing the word from being
heard--accidently, of course.

With many interruptions, and repeated insults, Mr. Brownlow contrived
to state his case;  observing that, in the surprise of the moment, he
had run after the boy because he had saw him running away; and
expressing his hope that, if the magistrate should believe him,
although not actually the thief, to be connected with the thieves, he
would deal as leniently with him as justice would allow.

'He has been hurt already,' said the old gentleman in conclusion. 'And
I fear,' he added, with great energy, looking towards the bar, 'I
really fear that he is ill.'

'Oh! yes, I dare say!' said Mr. Fang, with a sneer.  'Come, none of
your tricks here, you young vagabond; they won't do. What's your name?'

Oliver tried to reply but his tongue failed him.  He was deadly pale;
and the whole place seemed turning round and round.

'What's your name, you hardened scoundrel?' demanded Mr. Fang.
'Officer, what's his name?'

This was addressed to a bluff old fellow, in a striped waistcoat, who
was standing by the bar.  He bent over Oliver, and repeated the
inquiry; but finding him really incapable of understanding the
question; and knowing that his not replying would only infuriate the
magistrate the more, and add to the severity of his sentence; he
hazarded a guess.

'He says his name's Tom White, your worship,' said the kind-hearted
thief-taker.

'Oh, he won't speak out, won't he?' said Fang.  'Very well, very well.
Where does he live?'

'Where he can, your worship,' replied the officer; again pretending to
receive Oliver's answer.

'Has he any parents?' inquired Mr. Fang.

'He says they died in his infancy, your worship,' replied the officer:
hazarding the usual reply.

At this point of the inquiry, Oliver raised his head; and, looking
round with imploring eyes, murmured a feeble prayer for a draught of
water.

'Stuff and nonsense!' said Mr. Fang:  'don't try to make a fool of me.'

'I think he really is ill, your worship,' remonstrated the officer.

'I know better,' said Mr. Fang.

'Take care of him, officer,' said the old gentleman, raising his hands
instinctively; 'he'll fall down.'

'Stand away, officer,' cried Fang;  'let him, if he likes.'

Oliver availed himself of the kind permission, and fell to the floor in
a fainting fit.  The men in the office looked at each other, but no one
dared to stir.

'I knew he was shamming,' said Fang, as if this were incontestable
proof of the fact.  'Let him lie there; he'll soon be tired of that.'

'How do you propose to deal with the case, sir?'  inquired the clerk in
a low voice.

'Summarily,' replied Mr. Fang.  'He stands committed for three
months--hard labour of course.  Clear the office.'

The door was opened for this purpose, and a couple of men were
preparing to carry the insensible boy to his cell; when an elderly man
of decent but poor appearance, clad in an old suit of black, rushed
hastily into the office, and advanced towards the bench.

'Stop, stop!  don't take him away!  For Heaven's sake stop a moment!'
cried the new comer, breathless with haste.

Although the presiding Genii in such an office as this, exercise a
summary and arbitrary power over the liberties, the good name, the
character, almost the lives, of Her Majesty's subjects, expecially of
the poorer class; and although, within such walls, enough fantastic
tricks are daily played to make the angels blind with weeping; they are
closed to the public, save through the medium of the daily
press.[Footnote:  Or were virtually, then.] Mr. Fang was consequently
not a little indignant to see an unbidden guest enter in such
irreverent disorder.

'What is this?  Who is this?  Turn this man out.  Clear the office!'
cried Mr. Fang.

'I _will_ speak,' cried the man; 'I will not be turned out.  I saw it
all.  I keep the book-stall.  I demand to be sworn. I will not be put
down.  Mr. Fang, you must hear me.  You must not refuse, sir.'

The man was right.  His manner was determined; and the matter was
growing rather too serious to be hushed up.

'Swear the man,' growled Mr. Fang, with a very ill grace. 'Now, man,
what have you got to say?'

'This,' said the man:  'I saw three boys:  two others and the prisoner
here:  loitering on the opposite side of the way, when this gentleman
was reading.  The robbery was committed by another boy.  I saw it done;
and I saw that this boy was perfectly amazed and stupified by it.'
Having by this time recovered a little breath, the worthy book-stall
keeper proceeded to relate, in a more coherent manner the exact
circumstances of the robbery.

'Why didn't you come here before?' said Fang, after a pause.

'I hadn't a soul to mind the shop,' replied the man.  'Everybody who
could have helped me, had joined in the pursuit.  I could get nobody
till five minutes ago; and I've run here all the way.'

'The prosecutor was reading, was he?' inquired Fang, after another
pause.

'Yes,' replied the man.  'The very book he has in his hand.'

'Oh, that book, eh?' said Fang.  'Is it paid for?'

'No, it is not,' replied the man, with a smile.

'Dear me, I forgot all about it!' exclaimed the absent old gentleman,
innocently.

'A nice person to prefer a charge against a poor boy!' said Fang, with
a comical effort to look humane.  'I consider, sir, that you have
obtained possession of that book, under very suspicious and
disreputable circumstances; and you may think yourself very fortunate
that the owner of the property declines to prosecute. Let this be a
lesson to you, my man, or the law will overtake you yet.  The boy is
discharged.  Clear the office!'

'D--n me!' cried the old gentleman, bursting out with the rage he had
kept down so long, 'd--n me!   I'll--'

'Clear the office!' said the magistrate.  'Officers, do you hear? Clear
the office!'

The mandate was obeyed; and the indignant Mr. Brownlow was conveyed
out, with the book in one hand, and the bamboo cane in the other:  in a
perfect phrenzy of rage and defiance.  He reached the yard; and his
passion vanished in a moment.  Little Oliver Twist lay on his back on
the pavement, with his shirt unbuttoned, and his temples bathed with
water; his face a deadly white; and a cold tremble convulsing his whole
frame.

'Poor boy, poor boy!' said Mr. Brownlow, bending over him. 'Call a
coach, somebody, pray.  Directly!'

A coach was obtained, and Oliver having been carefully laid on the
seat, the old gentleman got in and sat himself on the other.

'May I accompany you?' said the book-stall keeper, looking in.

'Bless me, yes, my dear sir,' said Mr. Brownlow quickly.  'I forgot
you.  Dear, dear!  I have this unhappy book still! Jump in.  Poor
fellow!  There's no time to lose.'

The book-stall keeper got into the coach; and away they drove.



CHAPTER XII

IN WHICH OLIVER IS TAKEN BETTER CARE OF THAN HE EVER WAS BEFORE. AND IN
WHICH THE NARRATIVE REVERTS TO THE MERRY OLD GENTLEMAN AND HIS YOUTHFUL
FRIENDS.

The coach rattled away, over nearly the same ground as that which
Oliver had traversed when he first entered London in company with the
Dodger; and, turning a different way when it reached the Angel at
Islington, stopped at length before a neat house, in a quiet shady
street near Pentonville.  Here, a bed was prepared, without loss of
time, in which Mr. Brownlow saw his young charge carefully and
comfortably deposited; and here, he was tended with a kindness and
solicitude that knew no bounds.

But, for many days, Oliver remained insensible to all the goodness of
his new friends.  The sun rose and sank, and rose and sank again, and
many times after that; and still the boy lay stretched on his uneasy
bed, dwindling away beneath the dry and wasting heat of fever.  The
worm does not work more surely on the dead body, than does this slow
creeping fire upon the living frame.

Weak, and thin, and pallid, he awoke at last from what seemed to have
been a long and troubled dream.  Feebly raising himself in the bed,
with his head resting on his trembling arm, he looked anxiously around.

'What room is this?  Where have I been brought to?' said Oliver. 'This
is not the place I went to sleep in.'

He uttered these words in a feeble voice, being very faint and weak;
but they were overheard at once.  The curtain at the bed's head was
hastily drawn back, and a motherly old lady, very neatly and precisely
dressed, rose as she undrew it, from an arm-chair close by, in which
she had been sitting at needle-work.

'Hush, my dear,' said the old lady softly.  'You must be very quiet, or
you will be ill again; and you have been very bad,--as bad as bad could
be, pretty nigh.  Lie down again; there's a dear!'  With those words,
the old lady very gently placed Oliver's head upon the pillow; and,
smoothing back his hair from his forehead, looked so kindly and loving
in his face, that he could not help placing his little withered hand in
hers, and drawing it round his neck.

'Save us!' said the old lady, with tears in her eyes.  'What a grateful
little dear it is.  Pretty creetur!  What would his mother feel if she
had sat by him as I have, and could see him now!'

'Perhaps she does see me,' whispered Oliver, folding his hands
together; 'perhaps she has sat by me.  I almost feel as if she had.'

'That was the fever, my dear,' said the old lady mildly.

'I suppose it was,' replied Oliver, 'because heaven is a long way off;
and they are too happy there, to come down to the bedside of a poor
boy.  But if she knew I was ill, she must have pitied me, even there;
for she was very ill herself before she died.  She can't know anything
about me though,' added Oliver after a moment's silence.  'If she had
seen me hurt, it would have made her sorrowful; and her face has always
looked sweet and happy, when I have dreamed of her.'

The old lady made no reply to this; but wiping her eyes first, and her
spectacles, which lay on the counterpane, afterwards, as if they were
part and parcel of those features, brought some cool stuff for Oliver
to drink; and then, patting him on the cheek, told him he must lie very
quiet, or he would be ill again.

So, Oliver kept very still; partly because he was anxious to obey the
kind old lady in all things; and partly, to tell the truth, because he
was completely exhausted with what he had already said.  He soon fell
into a gentle doze, from which he was awakened by the light of a
candle:  which, being brought near the bed, showed him a gentleman with
a very large and loud-ticking gold watch in his hand, who felt his
pulse, and said he was a great deal better.

'You _are_ a great deal better, are you not, my dear?' said the
gentleman.

'Yes, thank you, sir,' replied Oliver.

'Yes,  I know you are,' said the gentleman:  'You're hungry too, an't
you?'

'No, sir,' answered Oliver.

'Hem!' said the gentleman.  'No, I know you're not.  He is not hungry,
Mrs. Bedwin,' said the gentleman:  looking very wise.

The old lady made a respectful inclination of the head, which seemed to
say that she thought the doctor was a very clever man. The doctor
appeared much of the same opinion himself.

'You feel sleepy, don't you, my dear?' said the doctor.

'No, sir,' replied Oliver.

'No,' said the doctor, with a very shrewd and satisfied look. 'You're
not sleepy.  Nor thirsty.  Are you?'

'Yes, sir, rather thirsty,' answered Oliver.

'Just as I expected, Mrs. Bedwin,' said the doctor.  'It's very natural
that he should be thirsty.  You may give him a little tea, ma'am, and
some dry toast without any butter.  Don't keep him too warm, ma'am; but
be careful that you don't let him be too cold; will you have the
goodness?'

The old lady dropped a curtsey.  The doctor, after tasting the cool
stuff, and expressing a qualified approval of it, hurried away:  his
boots creaking in a very important and wealthy manner as he went
downstairs.

Oliver dozed off again, soon after this; when he awoke, it was nearly
twelve o'clock.  The old lady tenderly bade him good-night shortly
afterwards, and left him in charge of a fat old woman who had just
come:  bringing with her, in a little bundle, a small Prayer Book and a
large nightcap. Putting the latter on her head and the former on the
table, the old woman, after telling Oliver that she had come to sit up
with him, drew her chair close to the fire and went off into a series
of short naps, chequered at frequent intervals with sundry tumblings
forward, and divers moans and chokings. These, however, had no worse
effect than causing her to rub her nose very hard, and then fall asleep
again.

And thus the night crept slowly on.  Oliver lay awake for some time,
counting the little circles of light which the reflection of the
rushlight-shade threw upon the ceiling; or tracing with his languid
eyes the intricate pattern of the paper on the wall. The darkness and
the deep stillness of the room were very solemn; as they brought into
the boy's mind the thought that death had been hovering there, for many
days and nights, and might yet fill it with the gloom and dread of his
awful presence, he turned his face upon the pillow, and fervently
prayed to Heaven.

Gradually, he fell into that deep tranquil sleep which ease from recent
suffering alone imparts; that calm and peaceful rest which it is pain
to wake from.  Who, if this were death, would be roused again to all
the struggles and turmoils of life; to all its cares for the present;
its anxieties for the future; more than all, its weary recollections of
the past!

It had been bright day, for hours, when Oliver opened his eyes; he felt
cheerful and happy.  The crisis of the disease was safely past.  He
belonged to the world again.

In three days' time he was able to sit in an easy-chair, well propped
up with pillows; and, as he was still too weak to walk, Mrs. Bedwin had
him carried downstairs into the little housekeeper's room, which
belonged to her.  Having him set, here, by the fire-side, the good old
lady sat herself down too; and, being in a state of considerable
delight at seeing him so much better, forthwith began to cry most
violently.

'Never mind me, my dear,' said the old lady; 'I'm only having a regular
good cry.  There; it's all over now; and I'm quite comfortable.'

'You're very, very kind to me, ma'am,' said Oliver.

'Well, never you mind that, my dear,' said the old lady; 'that's got
nothing to do with your broth; and it's full time you had it; for the
doctor says Mr. Brownlow may come in to see you this morning; and we
must get up our best looks, because the better we look, the more he'll
be pleased.'  And with this, the old lady applied herself to warming
up, in a little saucepan, a basin full of broth:  strong enough, Oliver
thought, to furnish an ample dinner, when reduced to the regulation
strength, for three hundred and fifty paupers, at the lowest
computation.

'Are you fond of pictures, dear?' inquired the old lady, seeing that
Oliver had fixed his eyes, most intently, on a portrait which hung
against the wall; just opposite his chair.

'I don't quite know, ma'am,' said Oliver, without taking his eyes from
the canvas; 'I have seen so few that I hardly know.  What a beautiful,
mild face that lady's is!'

'Ah!' said the old lady, 'painters always make ladies out prettier than
they are, or they wouldn't get any custom, child. The man that invented
the machine for taking likenesses might have known that would never
succeed; it's a deal too honest.  A deal,' said the old lady, laughing
very heartily at her own acuteness.

'Is--is that a likeness, ma'am?' said Oliver.

'Yes,' said the old lady, looking up for a moment from the broth;
'that's a portrait.'

'Whose, ma'am?' asked Oliver.

'Why, really, my dear, I don't know,' answered the old lady in a
good-humoured manner.  'It's not a likeness of anybody that you or I
know, I expect.  It seems to strike your fancy, dear.'

'It is so pretty,' replied Oliver.

'Why, sure you're not afraid of it?' said the old lady: observing in
great surprise, the look of awe with which the child regarded the
painting.

'Oh no, no,' returned Oliver quickly; 'but the eyes look so sorrowful;
and where I sit, they seem fixed upon me.  It makes my heart beat,'
added Oliver in a low voice, 'as if it was alive, and wanted to speak
to me, but couldn't.'

'Lord save us!' exclaimed the old lady, starting; 'don't talk in that
way, child.  You're weak and nervous after your illness. Let me wheel
your chair round to the other side; and then you won't see it.  There!'
said the old lady, suiting the action to the word; 'you don't see it
now, at all events.'

Oliver _did_ see it in his mind's eye as distinctly as if he had not
altered his position; but he thought it better not to worry the kind
old lady; so he smiled gently when she looked at him; and Mrs. Bedwin,
satisfied that he felt more comfortable, salted and broke bits of
toasted bread into the broth, with all the bustle befitting so solemn a
preparation. Oliver got through it with extraordinary expedition.  He
had scarcely swallowed the last spoonful, when there came a soft rap at
the door.  'Come in,' said the old lady; and in walked Mr. Brownlow.

Now, the old gentleman came in as brisk as need be; but, he had no
sooner raised his spectacles on his forehead, and thrust his hands
behind the skirts of his dressing-gown to take a good long look at
Oliver, than his countenance underwent a very great variety of odd
contortions.  Oliver looked very worn and shadowy from sickness, and
made an ineffectual attempt to stand up, out of respect to his
benefactor, which terminated in his sinking back into the chair again;
and the fact is, if the truth must be told, that Mr. Brownlow's heart,
being large enough for any six ordinary old gentlemen of humane
disposition, forced a supply of tears into his eyes, by some hydraulic
process which we are not sufficiently philosophical to be in a
condition to explain.

'Poor boy, poor boy!' said Mr. Brownlow, clearing his throat. 'I'm
rather hoarse this morning, Mrs. Bedwin.  I'm afraid I have caught
cold.'

'I hope not, sir,' said Mrs. Bedwin.  'Everything you have had, has
been well aired, sir.'

'I don't know, Bedwin.  I don't know,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'I rather
think I had a damp napkin at dinner-time yesterday; but never mind
that.  How do you feel, my dear?'

'Very happy, sir,' replied Oliver.  'And very grateful indeed, sir, for
your goodness to me.'

'Good by,' said Mr. Brownlow, stoutly.  'Have you given him any
nourishment, Bedwin?  Any slops, eh?'

'He has just had a basin of beautiful strong broth, sir,' replied Mrs.
Bedwin:  drawing herself up slightly, and laying strong emphasis on the
last word:  to intimate that between slops, and broth will compounded,
there existed no affinity or connection whatsoever.

'Ugh!' said Mr. Brownlow, with a slight shudder; 'a couple of glasses
of port wine would have done him a great deal more good. Wouldn't they,
Tom White, eh?'

'My name is Oliver, sir,' replied the little invalid:  with a look of
great astonishment.

'Oliver,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'Oliver what?  Oliver White, eh?'

'No, sir, Twist, Oliver Twist.'

'Queer name!' said the old gentleman.  'What made you tell the
magistrate your name was White?'

'I never told him so, sir,' returned Oliver in amazement.

This sounded so like a falsehood, that the old gentleman looked
somewhat sternly in Oliver's face.  It was impossible to doubt him;
there was truth in every one of its thin and sharpened lineaments.

'Some mistake,' said Mr. Brownlow.  But, although his motive for
looking steadily at Oliver no longer existed, the old idea of the
resemblance between his features and some familiar face came upon him
so strongly, that he could not withdraw his gaze.

'I hope you are not angry with me, sir?' said Oliver, raising his eyes
beseechingly.

'No, no,' replied the old gentleman.  'Why! what's this?  Bedwin, look
there!'

As he spoke, he pointed hastily to the picture over Oliver's head, and
then to the boy's face.  There was its living copy. The eyes, the head,
the mouth; every feature was the same. The expression was, for the
instant, so precisely alike, that the minutest line seemed copied with
startling accuracy!

Oliver knew not the cause of this sudden exclamation; for, not being
strong enough to bear the start it gave him, he fainted away.  A
weakness on his part, which affords the narrative an opportunity of
relieving the reader from suspense, in behalf of the two young pupils
of the Merry Old Gentleman; and of recording--

That when the Dodger, and his accomplished friend Master Bates, joined
in the hue-and-cry which was raised at Oliver's heels, in consequence
of their executing an illegal conveyance of Mr. Brownlow's personal
property, as has been already described, they were actuated by a very
laudable and becoming regard for themselves; and forasmuch as the
freedom of the subject and the liberty of the individual are among the
first and proudest boasts of a true-hearted Englishman, so, I need
hardly beg the reader to observe, that this action should tend to exalt
them in the opinion of all public and patriotic men, in almost as great
a degree as this strong proof of their anxiety for their own
preservation and safety goes to corroborate and confirm the little code
of laws which certain profound and sound-judging philosophers have laid
down as the main-springs of all Nature's deeds and actions:  the said
philosophers very wisely reducing the good lady's proceedings to
matters of maxim and theory:  and, by a very neat and pretty compliment
to her exalted wisdom and understanding, putting entirely out of sight
any considerations of heart, or generous impulse and feeling. For,
these are matters totally beneath a female who is acknowledged by
universal admission to be far above the numerous little foibles and
weaknesses of her sex.

If I wanted any further proof of the strictly philosophical nature of
the conduct of these young gentlemen in their very delicate
predicament, I should at once find it in the fact (also recorded in a
foregoing part of this narrative), of their quitting the pursuit, when
the general attention was fixed upon Oliver; and making immediately for
their home by the shortest possible cut.  Although I do not mean to
assert that it is usually the practice of renowned and learned sages,
to shorten the road to any great conclusion (their course indeed being
rather to lengthen the distance, by various circumlocutions and
discursive staggerings, like unto those in which drunken men under the
pressure of a too mighty flow of ideas, are prone to indulge); still, I
do mean to say, and do say distinctly, that it is the invariable
practice of many mighty philosophers, in carrying out their theories,
to evince great wisdom and foresight in providing against every
possible contingency which can be supposed at all likely to affect
themselves.  Thus, to do a great right, you may do a little wrong; and
you may take any means which the end to be attained, will justify; the
amount of the right, or the amount of the wrong, or indeed the
distinction between the two, being left entirely to the philosopher
concerned, to be settled and determined by his clear, comprehensive,
and impartial view of his own particular case.

It was not until the two boys had scoured, with great rapidity, through
a most intricate maze of narrow streets and courts, that they ventured
to halt beneath a low and dark archway.  Having remained silent here,
just long enough to recover breath to speak, Master Bates uttered an
exclamation of amusement and delight; and, bursting into an
uncontrollable fit of laughter, flung himself upon a doorstep, and
rolled thereon in a transport of mirth.

'What's the matter?' inquired the Dodger.

'Ha! ha! ha!' roared Charley Bates.

'Hold your noise,' remonstrated the Dodger, looking cautiously round.
'Do you want to be grabbed, stupid?'

'I can't help it,' said Charley, 'I can't help it!  To see him
splitting away at that pace, and cutting round the corners, and
knocking up again' the posts, and starting on again as if he was made
of iron as well as them, and me with the wipe in my pocket, singing out
arter him--oh, my eye!' The vivid imagination of Master Bates presented
the scene before him in too strong colours.  As he arrived at this
apostrophe, he again rolled upon the door-step, and laughed louder than
before.

'What'll Fagin say?' inquired the Dodger; taking advantage of the next
interval of breathlessness on the part of his friend to propound the
question.

'What?' repeated Charley Bates.

'Ah, what?' said the Dodger.

'Why, what should he say?' inquired Charley:  stopping rather suddenly
in his merriment; for the Dodger's manner was impressive.  'What should
he say?'

Mr. Dawkins whistled for a couple of minutes; then, taking off his hat,
scratched his head, and nodded thrice.

'What do you mean?' said Charley.

'Toor rul lol loo, gammon and spinnage, the frog he wouldn't, and high
cockolorum,' said the Dodger:  with a slight sneer on his intellectual
countenance.

This was explanatory, but not satisfactory.  Master Bates felt it so;
and again said, 'What do you mean?'

The Dodger made no reply; but putting his hat on again, and gathering
the skirts of his long-tailed coat under his arm, thrust his tongue
into his cheek, slapped the bridge of his nose some half-dozen times in
a familiar but expressive manner, and turning on his heel, slunk down
the court.  Master Bates followed, with a thoughtful countenance.

The noise of footsteps on the creaking stairs, a few minutes after the
occurrence of this conversation, roused the merry old gentleman as he
sat over the fire with a saveloy and a small loaf in his hand; a
pocket-knife in his right; and a pewter pot on the trivet.  There was a
rascally smile on his white face as he turned round, and looking
sharply out from under his thick red eyebrows, bent his ear towards the
door, and listened.

'Why, how's this?' muttered the Jew:  changing countenance; 'only two
of 'em?  Where's the third?  They can't have got into trouble.  Hark!'

The footsteps approached nearer; they reached the landing. The door was
slowly opened; and the Dodger and Charley Bates entered, closing it
behind them.



CHAPTER XIII

SOME NEW ACQUAINTANCES ARE INTRODUCED TO THE INTELLIGENT READER,
CONNECTED WITH WHOM VARIOUS PLEASANT MATTERS ARE RELATED, APPERTAINING
TO THIS HISTORY

'Where's Oliver?' said the Jew, rising with a menacing look. 'Where's
the boy?'

The young thieves eyed their preceptor as if they were alarmed at his
violence; and looked uneasily at each other.  But they made no reply.

'What's become of the boy?' said the Jew, seizing the Dodger tightly by
the collar, and threatening him with horrid imprecations.  'Speak out,
or I'll throttle you!'

Mr. Fagin looked so very much in earnest, that Charley Bates, who
deemed it prudent in all cases to be on the safe side, and who
conceived it by no means improbable that it might be his turn to be
throttled second, dropped upon his knees, and raised a loud,
well-sustained, and continuous roar--something between a mad bull and a
speaking trumpet.

'Will you speak?' thundered the Jew:  shaking the Dodger so much that
his keeping in the big coat at all, seemed perfectly miraculous.

'Why, the traps have got him, and that's all about it,' said the
Dodger, sullenly.  'Come, let go o' me, will you!'  And, swinging
himself, at one jerk, clean out of the big coat, which he left in the
Jew's hands, the Dodger snatched up the toasting fork, and made a pass
at the merry old gentleman's waistcoat; which, if it had taken effect,
would have let a little more merriment out than could have been easily
replaced.

The Jew stepped back in this emergency, with more agility than could
have been anticipated in a man of his apparent decrepitude; and,
seizing up the pot, prepared to hurl it at his assailant's head.  But
Charley Bates, at this moment, calling his attention by a perfectly
terrific howl, he suddenly altered its destination, and flung it full
at that young gentleman.

'Why, what the blazes is in the wind now!' growled a deep voice. 'Who
pitched that 'ere at me?  It's well it's the beer, and not the pot, as
hit me, or I'd have settled somebody.  I might have know'd, as nobody
but an infernal, rich, plundering, thundering old Jew could afford to
throw away any drink but water--and not that, unless he done the River
Company every quarter.  Wot's it all about, Fagin?  D--me, if my
neck-handkercher an't lined with beer!  Come in, you sneaking warmint;
wot are you stopping outside for, as if you was ashamed of your master!
Come in!'

The man who growled out these words, was a stoutly-built fellow of
about five-and-thirty, in a black velveteen coat, very soiled drab
breeches, lace-up half boots, and grey cotton stockings which inclosed
a bulky pair of legs, with large swelling calves;--the kind of legs,
which in such costume, always look in an unfinished and incomplete
state without a set of fetters to garnish them.  He had a brown hat on
his head, and a dirty belcher handkerchief round his neck:  with the
long frayed ends of which he smeared the beer from his face as he
spoke.  He disclosed, when he had done so, a broad heavy countenance
with a beard of three days' growth, and two scowling eyes; one of which
displayed various parti-coloured symptoms of having been recently
damaged by a blow.

'Come in, d'ye hear?' growled this engaging ruffian.

A white shaggy dog, with his face scratched and torn in twenty
different places, skulked into the room.

'Why didn't you come in afore?' said the man.  'You're getting too
proud to own me afore company, are you?  Lie down!'

This command was accompanied with a kick, which sent the animal to the
other end of the room.  He appeared well used to it, however; for he
coiled himself up in a corner very quietly, without uttering a sound,
and winking his very ill-looking eyes twenty times in a minute,
appeared to occupy himself in taking a survey of the apartment.

'What are you up to?  Ill-treating the boys, you covetous, avaricious,
in-sa-ti-a-ble old fence?' said the man, seating himself deliberately.
'I wonder they don't murder you!  I would if I was them.  If I'd been
your 'prentice, I'd have done it long ago, and--no, I couldn't have
sold you afterwards, for you're fit for nothing but keeping as a
curiousity of ugliness in a glass bottle, and I suppose they don't blow
glass bottles large enough.'

'Hush! hush! Mr. Sikes,' said the Jew, trembling; 'don't speak so loud!'

'None of your mistering,' replied the ruffian; 'you always mean
mischief when you come that.  You know my name:  out with it!  I shan't
disgrace it when the time comes.'

'Well, well, then--Bill Sikes,' said the Jew, with abject humility.
'You seem out of humour, Bill.'

'Perhaps I am,' replied Sikes; 'I should think you was rather out of
sorts too, unless you mean as little harm when you throw pewter pots
about, as you do when you blab and--'

'Are you mad?' said the Jew, catching the man by the sleeve, and
pointing towards the boys.

Mr. Sikes contented himself with tying an imaginary knot under his left
ear, and jerking his head over on the right shoulder; a piece of dumb
show which the Jew appeared to understand perfectly.  He then, in cant
terms, with which his whole conversation was plentifully besprinkled,
but which would be quite unintelligible if they were recorded here,
demanded a glass of liquor.

'And mind you don't poison it,' said Mr. Sikes, laying his hat upon the
table.

This was said in jest; but if the speaker could have seen the evil leer
with which the Jew bit his pale lip as he turned round to the cupboard,
he might have thought the caution not wholly unnecessary, or the wish
(at all events) to improve upon the distiller's ingenuity not very far
from the old gentleman's merry heart.

After swallowing two of three glasses of spirits, Mr. Sikes
condescended to take some notice of the young gentlemen; which gracious
act led to a conversation, in which the cause and manner of Oliver's
capture were circumstantially detailed, with such alterations and
improvements on the truth, as to the Dodger appeared most advisable
under the circumstances.

'I'm afraid,' said the Jew, 'that he may say something which will get
us into trouble.'

'That's very likely,' returned Sikes with a malicious grin. 'You're
blowed upon, Fagin.'

'And I'm afraid, you see,' added the Jew, speaking as if he had not
noticed the interruption; and regarding the other closely as he did
so,--'I'm afraid that, if the game was up with us, it might be up with
a good many more, and that it would come out rather worse for you than
it would for me, my dear.'

The man started, and turned round upon the Jew.  But the old
gentleman's shoulders were shrugged up to his ears; and his eyes were
vacantly staring on the opposite wall.

There was a long pause. Every member of the respectable coterie
appeared plunged in his own reflections; not excepting the dog, who by
a certain malicious licking of his lips seemed to be meditating an
attack upon the legs of the first gentleman or lady he might encounter
in the streets when he went out.

'Somebody must find out wot's been done at the office,' said Mr. Sikes
in a much lower tone than he had taken since he came in.

The Jew nodded assent.

'If he hasn't peached, and is committed, there's no fear till he comes
out again,' said Mr. Sikes, 'and then he must be taken care on.  You
must get hold of him somehow.'

Again the Jew nodded.

The prudence of this line of action, indeed, was obvious; but,
unfortunately, there was one very strong objection to its being
adopted.  This was, that the Dodger, and Charley Bates, and Fagin, and
Mr. William Sikes, happened, one and all, to entertain a violent and
deeply-rooted antipathy to going near a police-office on any ground or
pretext whatever.

How long they might have sat and looked at each other, in a state of
uncertainty not the most pleasant of its kind, it is difficult to
guess.  It is not necessary to make any guesses on the subject,
however; for the sudden entrance of the two young ladies whom Oliver
had seen on a former occasion, caused the conversation to flow afresh.

'The very thing!' said the Jew.  'Bet will go; won't you, my dear?'

'Wheres?' inquired the young lady.

'Only just up to the office, my dear,' said the Jew coaxingly.

It is due to the young lady to say that she did not positively affirm
that she would not, but that she merely expressed an emphatic and
earnest desire to be 'blessed' if she would; a polite and delicate
evasion of the request, which shows the young lady to have been
possessed of that natural good breeding which cannot bear to inflict
upon a fellow-creature, the pain of a direct and pointed refusal.

The Jew's countenance fell.  He turned from this young lady, who was
gaily, not to say gorgeously attired, in a red gown, green boots, and
yellow curl-papers, to the other female.

'Nancy, my dear,' said the Jew in a soothing manner, 'what do YOU say?'

'That it won't do; so it's no use a-trying it on, Fagin,' replied Nancy.

'What do you mean by that?' said Mr. Sikes, looking up in a surly
manner.

'What I say, Bill,' replied the lady collectedly.

'Why, you're just the very person for it,' reasoned Mr. Sikes: 'nobody
about here knows anything of you.'

'And as I don't want 'em to, neither,' replied Nancy in the same
composed manner, 'it's rather more no than yes with me, Bill.'

'She'll go, Fagin,' said Sikes.

'No, she won't, Fagin,' said Nancy.

'Yes, she will, Fagin,' said Sikes.

And Mr. Sikes was right.  By dint of alternate threats, promises, and
bribes, the lady in question was ultimately prevailed upon to undertake
the commission.  She was not, indeed, withheld by the same
considerations as her agreeable friend; for, having recently removed
into the neighborhood of Field Lane from the remote but genteel suburb
of Ratcliffe, she was not under the same apprehension of being
recognised by any of her numerous acquaintances.

Accordingly, with a clean white apron tied over her gown, and her
curl-papers tucked up under a straw bonnet,--both articles of dress
being provided from the Jew's inexhaustible stock,--Miss Nancy prepared
to issue forth on her errand.

'Stop a minute, my dear,' said the Jew, producing, a little covered
basket.  'Carry that in one hand.  It looks more respectable, my dear.'

'Give her a door-key to carry in her t'other one, Fagin,' said Sikes;
'it looks real and genivine like.'

'Yes, yes, my dear, so it does,' said the Jew, hanging a large
street-door key on the forefinger of the young lady's right hand.

'There; very good!  Very good indeed, my dear!' said the Jew, rubbing
his hands.

'Oh, my brother!  My poor, dear, sweet, innocent little brother!'
exclaimed Nancy, bursting into tears, and wringing the little basket
and the street-door key in an agony of distress.  'What has become of
him!  Where have they taken him to!  Oh, do have pity, and tell me
what's been done with the dear boy, gentlemen; do, gentlemen, if you
please, gentlemen!'

Having uttered those words in a most lamentable and heart-broken tone:
to the immeasurable delight of her hearers:  Miss Nancy paused, winked
to the company, nodded smilingly round, and disappeared.

'Ah, she's a clever girl, my dears,' said the Jew, turning round to his
young friends, and shaking his head gravely, as if in mute admonition
to them to follow the bright example they had just beheld.

'She's a honour to her sex,' said Mr. Sikes, filling his glass, and
smiting the table with his enormous fist.  'Here's her health, and
wishing they was all like her!'

While these, and many other encomiums, were being passed on the
accomplished Nancy, that young lady made the best of her way to the
police-office; whither, notwithstanding a little natural timidity
consequent upon walking through the streets alone and unprotected, she
arrived in perfect safety shortly afterwards.

Entering by the back way, she tapped softly with the key at one of the
cell-doors, and listened.  There was no sound within:  so she coughed
and listened again.  Still there was no reply:  so she spoke.

'Nolly, dear?' murmured Nancy in a gentle voice; 'Nolly?'

There was nobody inside but a miserable shoeless criminal, who had been
taken up for playing the flute, and who, the offence against society
having been clearly proved, had been very properly committed by Mr.
Fang to the House of Correction for one month; with the appropriate and
amusing remark that since he had so much breath to spare, it would be
more wholesomely expended on the treadmill than in a musical
instrument.  He made no answer: being occupied mentally bewailing the
loss of the flute, which had been confiscated for the use of the
county:  so Nancy passed on to the next cell, and knocked there.

'Well!' cried a faint and feeble voice.

'Is there a little boy here?' inquired Nancy, with a preliminary sob.

'No,' replied the voice; 'God forbid.'

This was a vagrant of sixty-five, who was going to prison for _not_
playing the flute; or, in other words, for begging in the streets, and
doing nothing for his livelihood.  In the next cell was another man,
who was going to the same prison for hawking tin saucepans without
license; thereby doing something for his living, in defiance of the
Stamp-office.

But, as neither of these criminals answered to the name of Oliver, or
knew anything about him, Nancy made straight up to the bluff officer in
the striped waistcoat; and with the most piteous wailings and
lamentations, rendered more piteous by a prompt and efficient use of
the street-door key and the little basket, demanded her own dear
brother.

'I haven't got him, my dear,' said the old man.

'Where is he?' screamed Nancy, in a distracted manner.

'Why, the gentleman's got him,' replied the officer.

'What gentleman!  Oh, gracious heavens!  What gentleman?' exclaimed
Nancy.

In reply to this incoherent questioning, the old man informed the
deeply affected sister that Oliver had been taken ill in the office,
and discharged in consequence of a witness having proved the robbery to
have been committed by another boy, not in custody; and that the
prosecutor had carried him away, in an insensible condition, to his own
residence:  of and concerning which, all the informant knew was, that
it was somewhere in Pentonville, he having heard that word mentioned in
the directions to the coachman.

In a dreadful state of doubt and uncertainty, the agonised young woman
staggered to the gate, and then, exchanging her faltering walk for a
swift run, returned by the most devious and complicated route she could
think of, to the domicile of the Jew.

Mr. Bill Sikes no sooner heard the account of the expedition delivered,
than he very hastily called up the white dog, and, putting on his hat,
expeditiously departed:  without devoting any time to the formality of
wishing the company good-morning.

'We must know where he is, my dears; he must be found,' said the Jew
greatly excited.  'Charley, do nothing but skulk about, till you bring
home some news of him!  Nancy, my dear, I must have him found.  I trust
to you, my dear,--to you and the Artful for everything!  Stay, stay,'
added the Jew, unlocking a drawer with a shaking hand; 'there's money,
my dears.  I shall shut up this shop to-night.  You'll know where to
find me!  Don't stop here a minute.  Not an instant, my dears!'

With these words, he pushed them from the room:  and carefully
double-locking and barring the door behind them, drew from its place of
concealment the box which he had unintentionally disclosed to Oliver.
Then, he hastily proceeded to dispose the watches and jewellery beneath
his clothing.

A rap at the door startled him in this occupation.  'Who's there?' he
cried in a shrill tone.

'Me!' replied the voice of the Dodger, through the key-hole.

'What now?' cried the Jew impatiently.

'Is he to be kidnapped to the other ken, Nancy says?' inquired the
Dodger.

'Yes,' replied the Jew, 'wherever she lays hands on him.  Find him,
find him out, that's all.  I shall know what to do next; never fear.'

The boy murmured a reply of intelligence:  and hurried downstairs after
his companions.

'He has not peached so far,' said the Jew as he pursued his occupation.
'If he means to blab us among his new friends, we may stop his mouth
yet.'



CHAPTER XIV

COMPRISING FURTHER PARTICULARS OF OLIVER'S STAY AT MR. BROWNLOW'S, WITH
THE REMARKABLE PREDICTION WHICH ONE MR. GRIMWIG UTTERED CONCERNING HIM,
WHEN HE WENT OUT ON AN ERRAND

Oliver soon recovering from the fainting-fit into which Mr. Brownlow's
abrupt exclamation had thrown him, the subject of the picture was
carefully avoided, both by the old gentleman and Mrs. Bedwin, in the
conversation that ensued:  which indeed bore no reference to Oliver's
history or prospects, but was confined to such topics as might amuse
without exciting him.  He was still too weak to get up to breakfast;
but, when he came down into the housekeeper's room next day, his first
act was to cast an eager glance at the wall, in the hope of again
looking on the face of the beautiful lady.  His expectations were
disappointed, however, for the picture had been removed.

'Ah!' said the housekeeper, watching the direction of Oliver's eyes.
'It is gone, you see.'

'I see it is ma'am,' replied Oliver.  'Why have they taken it away?'

'It has been taken down, child, because Mr. Brownlow said, that as it
seemed to worry you, perhaps it might prevent your getting well, you
know,' rejoined the old lady.

'Oh, no, indeed.  It didn't worry me, ma'am,' said Oliver. 'I liked to
see it.  I quite loved it.'

'Well, well!' said the old lady, good-humouredly; 'you get well as fast
as ever you can, dear, and it shall be hung up again. There!  I promise
you that!  Now, let us talk about something else.'

This was all the information Oliver could obtain about the picture at
that time.  As the old lady had been so kind to him in his illness, he
endeavoured to think no more of the subject just then; so he listened
attentively to a great many stories she told him, about an amiable and
handsome daughter of hers, who was married to an amiable and handsome
man, and lived in the country; and about a son, who was clerk to a
merchant in the West Indies; and who was, also, such a good young man,
and wrote such dutiful letters home four times a-year, that it brought
the tears into her eyes to talk about them.  When the old lady had
expatiated, a long time, on the excellences of her children, and the
merits of her kind good husband besides, who had been dead and gone,
poor dear soul! just six-and-twenty years, it was time to have tea.
After tea she began to teach Oliver cribbage: which he learnt as
quickly as she could teach:  and at which game they played, with great
interest and gravity, until it was time for the invalid to have some
warm wine and water, with a slice of dry toast, and then to go cosily
to bed.

They were happy days, those of Oliver's recovery.  Everything was so
quiet, and neat, and orderly; everybody so kind and gentle; that after
the noise and turbulence in the midst of which he had always lived, it
seemed like Heaven itself.  He was no sooner strong enough to put his
clothes on, properly, than Mr. Brownlow caused a complete new suit, and
a new cap, and a new pair of shoes, to be provided for him.  As Oliver
was told that he might do what he liked with the old clothes, he gave
them to a servant who had been very kind to him, and asked her to sell
them to a Jew, and keep the money for herself.  This she very readily
did; and, as Oliver looked out of the parlour window, and saw the Jew
roll them up in his bag and walk away, he felt quite delighted to think
that they were safely gone, and that there was now no possible danger
of his ever being able to wear them again.  They were sad rags, to tell
the truth; and Oliver had never had a new suit before.

One evening, about a week after the affair of the picture, as he was
sitting talking to Mrs. Bedwin, there came a message down from Mr.
Brownlow, that if Oliver Twist felt pretty well, he should like to see
him in his study, and talk to him a little while.

'Bless us, and save us!  Wash your hands, and let me part your hair
nicely for you, child,' said Mrs. Bedwin.  'Dear heart alive!  If we
had known he would have asked for you, we would have put you a clean
collar on, and made you as smart as sixpence!'

Oliver did as the old lady bade him; and, although she lamented
grievously, meanwhile, that there was not even time to crimp the little
frill that bordered his shirt-collar; he looked so delicate and
handsome, despite that important personal advantage, that she went so
far as to say:  looking at him with great complacency from head to
foot, that she really didn't think it would have been possible, on the
longest notice, to have made much difference in him for the better.

Thus encouraged, Oliver tapped at the study door.  On Mr. Brownlow
calling to him to come in, he found himself in a little back room,
quite full of books, with a window, looking into some pleasant little
gardens.  There was a table drawn up before the window, at which Mr.
Brownlow was seated reading.  When he saw Oliver, he pushed the book
away from him, and told him to come near the table, and sit down.
Oliver complied; marvelling where the people could be found to read
such a great number of books as seemed to be written to make the world
wiser.  Which is still a marvel to more experienced people than Oliver
Twist, every day of their lives.

'There are a good many books, are there not, my boy?' said Mr.
Brownlow, observing the curiosity with which Oliver surveyed the
shelves that reached from the floor to the ceiling.

'A great number, sir,' replied Oliver.  'I never saw so many.'

'You shall read them, if you behave well,' said the old gentleman
kindly; 'and you will like that, better than looking at the
outsides,--that is, some cases; because there are books of which the
backs and covers are by far the best parts.'

'I suppose they are those heavy ones, sir,' said Oliver, pointing to
some large quartos, with a good deal of gilding about the binding.

'Not always those,' said the old gentleman, patting Oliver on the head,
and smiling as he did so; 'there are other equally heavy ones, though
of a much smaller size.  How should you like to grow up a clever man,
and write books, eh?'

'I think I would rather read them, sir,' replied Oliver.

'What! wouldn't you like to be a book-writer?' said the old gentleman.

Oliver considered a little while; and at last said, he should think it
would be a much better thing to be a book-seller; upon which the old
gentleman laughed heartily, and declared he had said a very good thing.
Which Oliver felt glad to have done, though he by no means knew what it
was.

'Well, well,' said the old gentleman, composing his features. 'Don't be
afraid!  We won't make an author of you, while there's an honest trade
to be learnt, or brick-making to turn to.'

'Thank you, sir,' said Oliver.  At the earnest manner of his reply, the
old gentleman laughed again; and said something about a curious
instinct, which Oliver, not understanding, paid no very great attention
to.

'Now,' said Mr. Brownlow, speaking if possible in a kinder, but at the
same time in a much more serious manner, than Oliver had ever known him
assume yet, 'I want you to pay great attention, my boy, to what I am
going to say.  I shall talk to you without any reserve; because I am
sure you are well able to understand me, as many older persons would
be.'

'Oh, don't tell you are going to send me away, sir, pray!' exclaimed
Oliver, alarmed at the serious tone of the old gentleman's
commencement!  'Don't turn me out of doors to wander in the streets
again.  Let me stay here, and be a servant.  Don't send me back to the
wretched place I came from.  Have mercy upon a poor boy, sir!'

'My dear child,' said the old gentleman, moved by the warmth of
Oliver's sudden appeal; 'you need not be afraid of my deserting you,
unless you give me cause.'

'I never, never will, sir,' interposed Oliver.

'I hope not,' rejoined the old gentleman.  'I do not think you ever
will.  I have been deceived, before, in the objects whom I have
endeavoured to benefit; but I feel strongly disposed to trust you,
nevertheless; and I am more interested in your behalf than I can well
account for, even to myself.  The persons on whom I have bestowed my
dearest love, lie deep in their graves; but, although the happiness and
delight of my life lie buried there too, I have not made a coffin of my
heart, and sealed it up, forever, on my best affections.  Deep
affliction has but strengthened and refined them.'

As the old gentleman said this in a low voice:  more to himself than to
his companion:  and as he remained silent for a short time afterwards:
Oliver sat quite still.

'Well, well!' said the old gentleman at length, in a more cheerful
tone, 'I only say this, because you have a young heart; and knowing
that I have suffered great pain and sorrow, you will be more careful,
perhaps, not to wound me again.  You say you are an orphan, without a
friend in the world; all the inquiries I have been able to make,
confirm the statement.  Let me hear your story; where you come from;
who brought you up; and how you got into the company in which I found
you.  Speak the truth, and you shall not be friendless while I live.'

Oliver's sobs checked his utterance for some minutes; when he was on
the point of beginning to relate how he had been brought up at the
farm, and carried to the workhouse by Mr. Bumble, a peculiarly
impatient little double-knock was heard at the street-door:  and the
servant, running upstairs, announced Mr. Grimwig.

'Is he coming up?' inquired Mr. Brownlow.

'Yes, sir,' replied the servant.  'He asked if there were any muffins
in the house; and, when I told him yes, he said he had come to tea.'

Mr. Brownlow smiled; and, turning to Oliver, said that Mr. Grimwig was
an old friend of his, and he must not mind his being a little rough in
his manners; for he was a worthy creature at bottom, as he had reason
to know.

'Shall I go downstairs, sir?' inquired Oliver.

'No,' replied Mr. Brownlow, 'I would rather you remained here.'

At this moment, there walked into the room:  supporting himself by a
thick stick:  a stout old gentleman, rather lame in one leg, who was
dressed in a blue coat, striped waistcoat, nankeen breeches and
gaiters, and a broad-brimmed white hat, with the sides turned up with
green.  A very small-plaited shirt frill stuck out from his waistcoat;
and a very long steel watch-chain, with nothing but a key at the end,
dangled loosely below it.  The ends of his white neckerchief were
twisted into a ball about the size of an orange; the variety of shapes
into which his countenance was twisted, defy description.  He had a
manner of screwing his head on one side when he spoke; and of looking
out of the corners of his eyes at the same time:  which irresistibly
reminded the beholder of a parrot.  In this attitude, he fixed himself,
the moment he made his appearance; and, holding out a small piece of
orange-peel at arm's length, exclaimed, in a growling, discontented
voice.

'Look here! do you see this!  Isn't it a most wonderful and
extraordinary thing that I can't call at a man's house but I find a
piece of this poor surgeon's friend on the staircase? I've been lamed
with orange-peel once, and I know orange-peel will be my death, or I'll
be content to eat my own head, sir!'

This was the handsome offer with which Mr. Grimwig backed and confirmed
nearly every assertion he made; and it was the more singular in his
case, because, even admitting for the sake of argument, the possibility
of scientific improvements being brought to that pass which will enable
a gentleman to eat his own head in the event of his being so disposed,
Mr. Grimwig's head was such a particularly large one, that the most
sanguine man alive could hardly entertain a hope of being able to get
through it at a sitting--to put entirely out of the question, a very
thick coating of powder.

'I'll eat my head, sir,' repeated Mr. Grimwig, striking his stick upon
the ground.  'Hallo! what's that!' looking at Oliver, and retreating a
pace or two.

'This is young Oliver Twist, whom we were speaking about,' said Mr.
Brownlow.

Oliver bowed.

'You don't mean to say that's the boy who had the fever, I hope?' said
Mr. Grimwig, recoiling a little more.  'Wait a minute! Don't speak!
Stop--' continued Mr. Grimwig, abruptly, losing all dread of the fever
in his triumph at the discovery; 'that's the boy who had the orange!
If that's not the boy, sir, who had the orange, and threw this bit of
peel upon the staircase, I'll eat my head, and his too.'

'No, no, he has not had one,' said Mr. Brownlow, laughing. 'Come!  Put
down your hat; and speak to my young friend.'

'I feel strongly on this subject, sir,' said the irritable old
gentleman, drawing off his gloves.  'There's always more or less
orange-peel on the pavement in our street; and I _know_ it's put there
by the surgeon's boy at the corner.  A young woman stumbled over a bit
last night, and fell against my garden-railings; directly she got up I
saw her look towards his infernal red lamp with the pantomime-light.
"Don't go to him," I called out of the window, "he's an assassin!  A
man-trap!"  So he is.  If he is not--'  Here the irascible old
gentleman gave a great knock on the ground with his stick; which was
always understood, by his friends, to imply the customary offer,
whenever it was not expressed in words. Then, still keeping his stick
in his hand, he sat down; and, opening a double eye-glass, which he
wore attached to a broad black riband, took a view of Oliver:  who,
seeing that he was the object of inspection, coloured, and bowed again.

'That's the boy, is it?' said Mr. Grimwig, at length.

'That's the boy,' replied Mr. Brownlow.

'How are you, boy?' said Mr. Grimwig.

'A great deal better, thank you, sir,' replied Oliver.

Mr. Brownlow, seeming to apprehend that his singular friend was about
to say something disagreeable, asked Oliver to step downstairs and tell
Mrs. Bedwin they were ready for tea; which, as he did not half like the
visitor's manner, he was very happy to do.

'He is a nice-looking boy, is he not?' inquired Mr. Brownlow.

'I don't know,' replied Mr. Grimwig, pettishly.

'Don't know?'

'No.  I don't know.  I never see any difference in boys.  I only knew
two sort of boys.  Mealy boys, and beef-faced boys.'

'And which is Oliver?'

'Mealy.  I know a friend who has a beef-faced boy; a fine boy, they
call him; with a round head, and red cheeks, and glaring eyes; a horrid
boy; with a body and limbs that appear to be swelling out of the seams
of his blue clothes; with the voice of a pilot, and the appetite of a
wolf.  I know him!  The wretch!'

'Come,' said Mr. Brownlow, 'these are not the characteristics of young
Oliver Twist; so he needn't excite your wrath.'

'They are not,' replied Mr. Grimwig.  'He may have worse.'

Here, Mr. Brownlow coughed impatiently; which appeared to afford Mr.
Grimwig the most exquisite delight.

'He may have worse, I say,' repeated Mr. Grimwig.  'Where does he come
from!  Who is he?  What is he?  He has had a fever.  What of that?
Fevers are not peculiar to good people; are they?  Bad people have
fevers sometimes; haven't they, eh?  I knew a man who was hung in
Jamaica for murdering his master.  He had had a fever six times; he
wasn't recommended to mercy on that account.  Pooh! nonsense!'

Now, the fact was, that in the inmost recesses of his own heart, Mr.
Grimwig was strongly disposed to admit that Oliver's appearance and
manner were unusually prepossessing; but he had a strong appetite for
contradiction, sharpened on this occasion by the finding of the
orange-peel; and, inwardly determining that no man should dictate to
him whether a boy was well-looking or not, he had resolved, from the
first, to oppose his friend.  When Mr. Brownlow admitted that on no one
point of inquiry could he yet return a satisfactory answer; and that he
had postponed any investigation into Oliver's previous history until he
thought the boy was strong enough to hear it; Mr. Grimwig chuckled
maliciously.  And he demanded, with a sneer, whether the housekeeper
was in the habit of counting the plate at night; because if she didn't
find a table-spoon or two missing some sunshiny morning, why, he would
be content to--and so forth.

All this, Mr. Brownlow, although himself somewhat of an impetuous
gentleman:  knowing his friend's peculiarities, bore with great good
humour; as Mr. Grimwig, at tea, was graciously pleased to express his
entire approval of the muffins, matters went on very smoothly; and
Oliver, who made one of the party, began to feel more at his ease than
he had yet done in the fierce old gentleman's presence.

'And when are you going to hear a full, true, and particular account of
the life and adventures of Oliver Twist?' asked Grimwig of Mr.
Brownlow, at the conclusion of the meal; looking sideways at Oliver, as
he resumed his subject.

'To-morrow morning,' replied Mr. Brownlow.  'I would rather he was
alone with me at the time.  Come up to me to-morrow morning at ten
o'clock, my dear.'

'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver.  He answered with some hesitation, because
he was confused by Mr. Grimwig's looking so hard at him.

'I'll tell you what,' whispered that gentleman to Mr. Brownlow; 'he
won't come up to you to-morrow morning.  I saw him hesitate. He is
deceiving you, my good friend.'

'I'll swear he is not,' replied Mr. Brownlow, warmly.

'If he is not,' said Mr. Grimwig, 'I'll--' and down went the stick.

'I'll answer for that boy's truth with my life!' said Mr. Brownlow,
knocking the table.

'And I for his falsehood with my head!' rejoined Mr. Grimwig, knocking
the table also.

'We shall see,' said Mr. Brownlow, checking his rising anger.

'We will,' replied Mr. Grimwig, with a provoking smile;  'we will.'

As fate would have it, Mrs. Bedwin chanced to bring in, at this moment,
a small parcel of books, which Mr. Brownlow had that morning purchased
of the identical bookstall-keeper, who has already figured in this
history; having laid them on the table, she prepared to leave the room.

'Stop the boy, Mrs. Bedwin!' said Mr. Brownlow; 'there is something to
go back.'

'He has gone, sir,' replied Mrs. Bedwin.

'Call after him,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'it's particular.  He is a poor
man, and they are not paid for.  There are some books to be taken back,
too.'

The street-door was opened.  Oliver ran one way; and the girl ran
another; and Mrs. Bedwin stood on the step and screamed for the boy;
but there was no boy in sight.  Oliver and the girl returned, in a
breathless state, to report that there were no tidings of him.

'Dear me, I am very sorry for that,' exclaimed Mr. Brownlow; 'I
particularly wished those books to be returned to-night.'

'Send Oliver with them,' said Mr. Grimwig, with an ironical smile; 'he
will be sure to deliver them safely, you know.'

'Yes; do let me take them, if you please, sir,' said Oliver. 'I'll run
all the way, sir.'

The old gentleman was just going to say that Oliver should not go out
on any account; when a most malicious cough from Mr. Grimwig determined
him that he should; and that, by his prompt discharge of the
commission, he should prove to him the injustice of his suspicions:  on
this head at least:  at once.

'You _shall_ go, my dear,' said the old gentleman.  'The books are on a
chair by my table.  Fetch them down.'

Oliver, delighted to be of use, brought down the books under his arm in
a great bustle; and waited, cap in hand, to hear what message he was to
take.

'You are to say,' said Mr. Brownlow, glancing steadily at Grimwig; 'you
are to say that you have brought those books back; and that you have
come to pay the four pound ten I owe him.  This is a five-pound note,
so you will have to bring me back, ten shillings change.'

'I won't be ten minutes, sir,' said Oliver, eagerly.  Having buttoned
up the bank-note in his jacket pocket, and placed the books carefully
under his arm, he made a respectful bow, and left the room.  Mrs.
Bedwin followed him to the street-door, giving him many directions
about the nearest way, and the name of the bookseller, and the name of
the street:  all of which Oliver said he clearly understood.  Having
superadded many injunctions to be sure and not take cold, the old lady
at length permitted him to depart.

'Bless his sweet face!' said the old lady, looking after him. 'I can't
bear, somehow, to let him go out of my sight.'

At this moment, Oliver looked gaily round, and nodded before he turned
the corner.  The old lady smilingly returned his salutation, and,
closing the door, went back to her own room.

'Let me see; he'll be back in twenty minutes, at the longest,' said Mr.
Brownlow, pulling out his watch, and placing it on the table.  'It will
be dark by that time.'

'Oh! you really expect him to come back, do you?' inquired Mr. Grimwig.

'Don't you?' asked Mr. Brownlow, smiling.

The spirit of contradiction was strong in Mr. Grimwig's breast, at the
moment; and it was rendered stronger by his friend's confident smile.

'No,' he said, smiting the table with his fist, 'I do not. The boy has
a new suit of clothes on his back, a set of valuable books under his
arm, and a five-pound note in his pocket.  He'll join his old friends
the thieves, and laugh at you.  If ever that boy returns to this house,
sir, I'll eat my head.'

With these words he drew his chair closer to the table; and there the
two friends sat, in silent expectation, with the watch between them.

It is worthy of remark, as illustrating the importance we attach to our
own judgments, and the pride with which we put forth our most rash and
hasty conclusions, that, although Mr. Grimwig was not by any means a
bad-hearted man, and though he would have been unfeignedly sorry to see
his respected friend duped and deceived, he really did most earnestly
and strongly hope at that moment, that Oliver Twist might not come back.

It grew so dark, that the figures on the dial-plate were scarcely
discernible; but there the two old gentlemen continued to sit, in
silence, with the watch between them.



CHAPTER XV

SHOWING HOW VERY FOND OF OLIVER TWIST, THE MERRY OLD JEW AND MISS NANCY
WERE

In the obscure parlour of a low public-house, in the filthiest part of
Little Saffron Hill; a dark and gloomy den, where a flaring gas-light
burnt all day in the winter-time; and where no ray of sun ever shone in
the summer:  there sat, brooding over a little pewter measure and a
small glass, strongly impregnated with the smell of liquor, a man in a
velveteen coat, drab shorts, half-boots and stockings, whom even by
that dim light no experienced agent of the police would have hesitated
to recognise as Mr. William Sikes.  At his feet, sat a white-coated,
red-eyed dog; who occupied himself, alternately, in winking at his
master with both eyes at the same time; and in licking a large, fresh
cut on one side of his mouth, which appeared to be the result of some
recent conflict.

'Keep quiet, you warmint!  Keep quiet!' said Mr. Sikes, suddenly
breaking silence.  Whether his meditations were so intense as to be
disturbed by the dog's winking, or whether his feelings were so wrought
upon by his reflections that they required all the relief derivable
from kicking an unoffending animal to allay them, is matter for
argument and consideration.  Whatever was the cause, the effect was a
kick and a curse, bestowed upon the dog simultaneously.

Dogs are not generally apt to revenge injuries inflicted upon them by
their masters; but Mr. Sikes's dog, having faults of temper in common
with his owner, and labouring, perhaps, at this moment, under a
powerful sense of injury, made no more ado but at once fixed his teeth
in one of the half-boots.  Having given in a hearty shake, he retired,
growling, under a form; just escaping the pewter measure which Mr.
Sikes levelled at his head.

'You would, would you?' said Sikes, seizing the poker in one hand, and
deliberately opening with the other a large clasp-knife, which he drew
from his pocket.  'Come here, you born devil!  Come here!  D'ye hear?'

The dog no doubt heard; because Mr. Sikes spoke in the very harshest
key of a very harsh voice; but, appearing to entertain some
unaccountable objection to having his throat cut, he remained where he
was, and growled more fiercely than before:  at the same time grasping
the end of the poker between his teeth, and biting at it like a wild
beast.

This resistance only infuriated Mr. Sikes the more; who, dropping on
his knees, began to assail the animal most furiously.  The dog jumped
from right to left, and from left to right; snapping, growling, and
barking; the man thrust and swore, and struck and blasphemed; and the
struggle was reaching a most critical point for one or other; when, the
door suddenly opening, the dog darted out:  leaving Bill Sikes with the
poker and the clasp-knife in his hands.

There must always be two parties to a quarrel, says the old adage.  Mr.
Sikes, being disappointed of the dog's participation, at once
transferred his share in the quarrel to the new comer.

'What the devil do you come in between me and my dog for?' said Sikes,
with a fierce gesture.

'I didn't know, my dear, I didn't know,' replied Fagin, humbly; for the
Jew was the new comer.

'Didn't know, you white-livered thief!' growled Sikes. 'Couldn't you
hear the noise?'

'Not a sound of it, as I'm a living man, Bill,' replied the Jew.

'Oh no!  You hear nothing, you don't,' retorted Sikes with a fierce
sneer.  'Sneaking in and out, so as nobody hears how you come or go!  I
wish you had been the dog, Fagin, half a minute ago.'

'Why?' inquired the Jew with a forced smile.

'Cause the government, as cares for the lives of such men as you, as
haven't half the pluck of curs, lets a man kill a dog how he likes,'
replied Sikes, shutting up the knife with a very expressive look;
'that's why.'

The Jew rubbed his hands; and, sitting down at the table, affected to
laugh at the pleasantry of his friend.  He was obviously very ill at
ease, however.

'Grin away,' said Sikes, replacing the poker, and surveying him with
savage contempt; 'grin away.  You'll never have the laugh at me,
though, unless it's behind a nightcap.  I've got the upper hand over
you, Fagin; and, d--me, I'll keep it.  There!  If I go, you go; so take
care of me.'

'Well, well, my dear,' said the Jew, 'I know all that; we--we--have a
mutual interest, Bill,--a mutual interest.'

'Humph,' said Sikes, as if he thought the interest lay rather more on
the Jew's side than on his.  'Well, what have you got to say to me?'

'It's all passed safe through the melting-pot,' replied Fagin, 'and
this is your share.  It's rather more than it ought to be, my dear; but
as I know you'll do me a good turn another time, and--'

'Stow that gammon,' interposed the robber, impatiently. 'Where is it?
Hand over!'

'Yes, yes, Bill; give me time, give me time,' replied the Jew,
soothingly.  'Here it is!  All safe!'  As he spoke, he drew forth an
old cotton handkerchief from his breast; and untying a large knot in
one corner, produced a small brown-paper packet.  Sikes, snatching it
from him, hastily opened it; and proceeded to count the sovereigns it
contained.

'This is all, is it?' inquired Sikes.

'All,' replied the Jew.

'You haven't opened the parcel and swallowed one or two as you come
along, have you?' inquired Sikes, suspiciously. 'Don't put on an
injured look at the question; you've done it many a time. Jerk the
tinkler.'

These words, in plain English, conveyed an injunction to ring the bell.
It was answered by another Jew:  younger than Fagin, but nearly as vile
and repulsive in appearance.

Bill Sikes merely pointed to the empty measure.  The Jew, perfectly
understanding the hint, retired to fill it:  previously exchanging a
remarkable look with Fagin, who raised his eyes for an instant, as if
in expectation of it, and shook his head in reply; so slightly that the
action would have been almost imperceptible to an observant third
person.  It was lost upon Sikes, who was stooping at the moment to tie
the boot-lace which the dog had torn.  Possibly, if he had observed the
brief interchange of signals, he might have thought that it boded no
good to him.

'Is anybody here, Barney?' inquired Fagin; speaking, now that that
Sikes was looking on, without raising his eyes from the ground.

'Dot a shoul,' replied Barney; whose words:  whether they came from the
heart or not:  made their way through the nose.

'Nobody?' inquired Fagin, in a tone of surprise:  which perhaps might
mean that Barney was at liberty to tell the truth.

'Dobody but Biss Dadsy,' replied Barney.

'Nancy!' exclaimed Sikes.  'Where?  Strike me blind, if I don't honour
that 'ere girl, for her native talents.'

'She's bid havid a plate of boiled beef id the bar,' replied Barney.

'Send her here,' said Sikes, pouring out a glass of liquor. 'Send her
here.'

Barney looked timidly at Fagin, as if for permission; the Jew remaining
silent, and not lifting his eyes from the ground, he retired; and
presently returned, ushering in Nancy; who was decorated with the
bonnet, apron, basket, and street-door key, complete.

'You are on the scent, are you, Nancy?' inquired Sikes, proffering the
glass.

'Yes, I am, Bill,' replied the young lady, disposing of its contents;
'and tired enough of it I am, too.  The young brat's been ill and
confined to the crib; and--'

'Ah, Nancy, dear!' said Fagin, looking up.

Now, whether a peculiar contraction of the Jew's red eye-brows, and a
half closing of his deeply-set eyes, warned Miss Nancy that she was
disposed to be too communicative, is not a matter of much importance.
The fact is all we need care for here; and the fact is, that she
suddenly checked herself, and with several gracious smiles upon Mr.
Sikes, turned the conversation to other matters. In about ten minutes'
time, Mr. Fagin was seized with a fit of coughing; upon which Nancy
pulled her shawl over her shoulders, and declared it was time to go.
Mr. Sikes, finding that he was walking a short part of her way himself,
expressed his intention of accompanying her; they went away together,
followed, at a little distant, by the dog, who slunk out of a back-yard
as soon as his master was out of sight.

The Jew thrust his head out of the room door when Sikes had left it;
looked after him as he walked up the dark passage; shook his clenched
fist; muttered a deep curse; and then, with a horrible grin, reseated
himself at the table; where he was soon deeply absorbed in the
interesting pages of the Hue-and-Cry.

Meanwhile, Oliver Twist, little dreaming that he was within so very
short a distance of the merry old gentleman, was on his way to the
book-stall.  When he got into Clerkenwell, he accidently turned down a
by-street which was not exactly in his way; but not discovering his
mistake until he had got half-way down it, and knowing it must lead in
the right direction, he did not think it worth while to turn back; and
so marched on, as quickly as he could, with the books under his arm.

He was walking along, thinking how happy and contented he ought to
feel; and how much he would give for only one look at poor little Dick,
who, starved and beaten, might be weeping bitterly at that very moment;
when he was startled by a young woman screaming out very loud.  'Oh, my
dear brother!'  And he had hardly looked up, to see what the matter
was, when he was stopped by having a pair of arms thrown tight round
his neck.

'Don't,' cried Oliver, struggling.  'Let go of me.  Who is it? What are
you stopping me for?'

The only reply to this, was a great number of loud lamentations from
the young woman who had embraced him; and who had a little basket and a
street-door key in her hand.

'Oh my gracious!' said the young woman, 'I have found him!  Oh! Oliver!
Oliver!  Oh you naughty boy, to make me suffer such distress on your
account!  Come home, dear, come.  Oh, I've found him.  Thank gracious
goodness heavins, I've found him!'  With these incoherent exclamations,
the young woman burst into another fit of crying, and got so dreadfully
hysterical, that a couple of women who came up at the moment asked a
butcher's boy with a shiny head of hair anointed with suet, who was
also looking on, whether he didn't think he had better run for the
doctor.  To which, the butcher's boy:  who appeared of a lounging, not
to say indolent disposition:  replied, that he thought not.

'Oh, no, no, never mind,' said the young woman, grasping Oliver's hand;
'I'm better now.  Come home directly, you cruel boy! Come!'

'Oh, ma'am,' replied the young woman, 'he ran away, near a month ago,
from his parents, who are hard-working and respectable people; and went
and joined a set of thieves and bad characters; and almost broke his
mother's heart.'

'Young wretch!' said one woman.

'Go home, do, you little brute,' said the other.

'I am not,' replied Oliver, greatly alarmed.  'I don't know her. I
haven't any sister, or father and mother either.  I'm an orphan; I live
at Pentonville.'

'Only hear him, how he braves it out!' cried the young woman.

'Why, it's Nancy!' exclaimed Oliver; who now saw her face for the first
time; and started back, in irrepressible astonishment.

'You see he knows me!' cried Nancy, appealing to the bystanders. 'He
can't help himself.  Make him come home, there's good people, or he'll
kill his dear mother and father, and break my heart!'

'What the devil's this?' said a man, bursting out of a beer-shop, with
a white dog at his heels; 'young Oliver! Come home to your poor mother,
you young dog!  Come home directly.'

'I don't belong to them.  I don't know them.  Help! help!' cried
Oliver, struggling in the man's powerful grasp.

'Help!' repeated the man.  'Yes; I'll help you, you young rascal!

What books are these?  You've been a stealing 'em, have you? Give 'em
here.'  With these words, the man tore the volumes from his grasp, and
struck him on the head.

'That's right!' cried a looker-on, from a garret-window. 'That's the
only way of bringing him to his senses!'

'To be sure!' cried a sleepy-faced carpenter, casting an approving look
at the garret-window.

'It'll do him good!' said the two women.

'And he shall have it, too!' rejoined the man, administering another
blow, and seizing Oliver by the collar.  'Come on, you young villain!
Here, Bull's-eye, mind him, boy!  Mind him!'

Weak with recent illness; stupified by the blows and the suddenness of
the attack; terrified by the fierce growling of the dog, and the
brutality of the man; overpowered by the conviction of the bystanders
that he really was the hardened little wretch he was described to be;
what could one poor child do!  Darkness had set in; it was a low
neighborhood; no help was near; resistance was useless.  In another
moment he was dragged into a labyrinth of dark narrow courts, and was
forced along them at a pace which rendered the few cries he dared to
give utterance to, unintelligible.  It was of little moment, indeed,
whether they were intelligible or no; for there was nobody to care for
them, had they been ever so plain.


      *      *      *      *      *

The gas-lamps were lighted; Mrs. Bedwin was waiting anxiously at the
open door; the servant had run up the street twenty times to see if
there were any traces of Oliver; and still the two old gentlemen sat,
perseveringly, in the dark parlour, with the watch between them.



CHAPTER XVI

RELATES WHAT BECAME OF OLIVER TWIST, AFTER HE HAD BEEN CLAIMED BY NANCY

The narrow streets and courts, at length, terminated in a large open
space; scattered about which, were pens for beasts, and other
indications of a cattle-market.  Sikes slackened his pace when they
reached this spot:  the girl being quite unable to support any longer,
the rapid rate at which they had hitherto walked.  Turning to Oliver,
he roughly commanded him to take hold of Nancy's hand.

'Do you hear?' growled Sikes, as Oliver hesitated, and looked round.

They were in a dark corner, quite out of the track of passengers.

Oliver saw, but too plainly, that resistance would be of no avail.  He
held out his hand, which Nancy clasped tight in hers.

'Give me the other,' said Sikes, seizing Oliver's unoccupied hand.
'Here, Bull's-Eye!'

The dog looked up, and growled.

'See here, boy!' said Sikes, putting his other hand to Oliver's throat;
'if he speaks ever so soft a word, hold him!  D'ye mind!'

The dog growled again; and licking his lips, eyed Oliver as if he were
anxious to attach himself to his windpipe without delay.

'He's as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn't!' said
Sikes, regarding the animal with a kind of grim and ferocious approval.
'Now, you know what you've got to expect, master, so call away as quick
as you like; the dog will soon stop that game.  Get on, young'un!'

Bull's-eye wagged his tail in acknowledgment of this unusually
endearing form of speech; and, giving vent to another admonitory growl
for the benefit of Oliver, led the way onward.

It was Smithfield that they were crossing, although it might have been
Grosvenor Square, for anything Oliver knew to the contrary. The night
was dark and foggy.  The lights in the shops could scarecely struggle
through the heavy mist, which thickened every moment and shrouded the
streets and houses in gloom; rendering the strange place still stranger
in Oliver's eyes; and making his uncertainty the more dismal and
depressing.

They had hurried on a few paces, when a deep church-bell struck the
hour.  With its first stroke, his two conductors stopped, and turned
their heads in the direction whence the sound proceeded.

'Eight o' clock, Bill,' said Nancy, when the bell ceased.

'What's the good of telling me that; I can hear it, can't I!' replied
Sikes.

'I wonder whether THEY can hear it,' said Nancy.

'Of course they can,' replied Sikes.  'It was Bartlemy time when I was
shopped; and there warn't a penny trumpet in the fair, as I couldn't
hear the squeaking on.  Arter I was locked up for the night, the row
and din outside made the thundering old jail so silent, that I could
almost have beat my brains out against the iron plates of the door.'

'Poor fellow!' said Nancy, who still had her face turned towards the
quarter in which the bell had sounded.  'Oh, Bill, such fine young
chaps as them!'

'Yes; that's all you women think of,' answered Sikes.  'Fine young
chaps!  Well, they're as good as dead, so it don't much matter.'

With this consolation, Mr. Sikes appeared to repress a rising tendency
to jealousy, and, clasping Oliver's wrist more firmly, told him to step
out again.

'Wait a minute!' said the girl:  'I wouldn't hurry by, if it was you
that was coming out to be hung, the next time eight o'clock struck,
Bill.  I'd walk round and round the place till I dropped, if the snow
was on the ground, and I hadn't a shawl to cover me.'

'And what good would that do?' inquired the unsentimental Mr. Sikes.
'Unless you could pitch over a file and twenty yards of good stout
rope, you might as well be walking fifty mile off, or not walking at
all, for all the good it would do me.  Come on, and don't stand
preaching there.'

The girl burst into a laugh; drew her shawl more closely round her; and
they walked away.  But Oliver felt her hand tremble, and, looking up in
her face as they passed a gas-lamp, saw that it had turned a deadly
white.

They walked on, by little-frequented and dirty ways, for a full
half-hour:  meeting very few people, and those appearing from their
looks to hold much the same position in society as Mr. Sikes himself.
At length they turned into a very filthy narrow street, nearly full of
old-clothes shops; the dog running forward, as if conscious that there
was no further occasion for his keeping on guard, stopped before the
door of a shop that was closed and apparently untenanted; the house was
in a ruinous condition, and on the door was nailed a board, intimating
that it was to let:  which looked as if it had hung there for many
years.

'All right,' cried Sikes, glancing cautiously about.

Nancy stooped below the shutters, and Oliver heard the sound of a bell.
They crossed to the opposite side of the street, and stood for a few
moments under a lamp.  A noise, as if a sash window were gently raised,
was heard; and soon afterwards the door softly opened.  Mr. Sikes then
seized the terrified boy by the collar with very little ceremony; and
all three were quickly inside the house.

The passage was perfectly dark.  They waited, while the person who had
let them in, chained and barred the door.

'Anybody here?' inquired Sikes.

'No,' replied a voice, which Oliver thought he had heard before.

'Is the old 'un here?' asked the robber.

'Yes,' replied the voice, 'and precious down in the mouth he has been.
Won't he be glad to see you?  Oh, no!'

The style of this reply, as well as the voice which delivered it,
seemed familiar to Oliver's ears:  but it was impossible to distinguish
even the form of the speaker in the darkness.

'Let's have a glim,' said Sikes, 'or we shall go breaking our necks, or
treading on the dog.  Look after your legs if you do!'

'Stand still a moment, and I'll get you one,' replied the voice. The
receding footsteps of the speaker were heard; and, in another minute,
the form of Mr. John Dawkins, otherwise the Artful Dodger, appeared.
He bore in his right hand a tallow candle stuck in the end of a cleft
stick.

The young gentleman did not stop to bestow any other mark of
recognition upon Oliver than a humourous grin; but, turning away,
beckoned the visitors to follow him down a flight of stairs. They
crossed an empty kitchen; and, opening the door of a low
earthy-smelling room, which seemed to have been built in a small
back-yard, were received with a shout of laughter.

'Oh, my wig, my wig!' cried Master Charles Bates, from whose lungs the
laughter had proceeded:  'here he is! oh, cry, here he is!  Oh, Fagin,
look at him!  Fagin, do look at him! I can't bear it; it is such a
jolly game, I cant' bear it.  Hold me, somebody, while I laugh it out.'

With this irrepressible ebullition of mirth, Master Bates laid himself
flat on the floor: and kicked convulsively for five minutes, in an
ectasy of facetious joy.  Then jumping to his feet, he snatched the
cleft stick from the Dodger; and, advancing to Oliver, viewed him round
and round; while the Jew, taking off his nightcap, made a great number
of low bows to the bewildered boy.  The Artful, meantime, who was of a
rather saturnine disposition, and seldom gave way to merriment when it
interfered with business, rifled Oliver's pockets with steady assiduity.

'Look at his togs, Fagin!' said Charley, putting the light so close to
his new jacket as nearly to set him on fire.  'Look at his togs!
Superfine cloth, and the heavy swell cut!  Oh, my eye, what a game!
And his books, too!  Nothing but a gentleman, Fagin!'

'Delighted to see you looking so well, my dear,' said the Jew, bowing
with mock humility.  'The Artful shall give you another suit, my dear,
for fear you should spoil that Sunday one.  Why didn't you write, my
dear, and say you were coming?  We'd have got something warm for
supper.'

At his, Master Bates roared again: so loud, that Fagin himself relaxed,
and even the Dodger smiled; but as the Artful drew forth the five-pound
note at that instant, it is doubtful whether the sally of the discovery
awakened his merriment.

'Hallo, what's that?' inquired Sikes, stepping forward as the Jew
seized the note.  'That's mine, Fagin.'

'No, no, my dear,' said the Jew.  'Mine, Bill, mine.  You shall have
the books.'

'If that ain't mine!' said Bill Sikes, putting on his hat with a
determined air; 'mine and Nancy's that is; I'll take the boy back
again.'

The Jew started.  Oliver started too, though from a very different
cause; for he hoped that the dispute might really end in his being
taken back.

'Come!  Hand over, will you?' said Sikes.

'This is hardly fair, Bill; hardly fair, is it, Nancy?' inquired the
Jew.

'Fair, or not fair,' retorted Sikes, 'hand over, I tell you! Do you
think Nancy and me has got nothing else to do with our precious time
but to spend it in scouting arter, and kidnapping, every young boy as
gets grabbed through you?  Give it here, you avaricious old skeleton,
give it here!'

With this gentle remonstrance, Mr. Sikes plucked the note from between
the Jew's finger and thumb; and looking the old man coolly in the face,
folded it up small, and tied it in his neckerchief.

'That's for our share of the trouble,' said Sikes; 'and not half
enough, neither.  You may keep the books, if you're fond of reading.
If you ain't, sell 'em.'

'They're very pretty,' said Charley Bates: who, with sundry grimaces,
had been affecting to read one of the volumes in question; 'beautiful
writing, isn't is, Oliver?'  At sight of the dismayed look with which
Oliver regarded his tormentors, Master Bates, who was blessed with a
lively sense of the ludicrous, fell into another ectasy, more
boisterous than the first.

'They belong to the old gentleman,' said Oliver, wringing his hands;
'to the good, kind, old gentleman who took me into his house, and had
me nursed, when I was near dying of the fever. Oh, pray send them back;
send him back the books and money.  Keep me here all my life long; but
pray, pray send them back.  He'll think I stole them; the old lady:
all of them who were so kind to me: will think I stole them.  Oh, do
have mercy upon me, and send them back!'

With these words, which were uttered with all the energy of passionate
grief, Oliver fell upon his knees at the Jew's feet; and beat his hands
together, in perfect desperation.

'The boy's right,' remarked Fagin, looking covertly round, and knitting
his shaggy eyebrows into a hard knot.  'You're right, Oliver, you're
right; they WILL think you have stolen 'em.  Ha! ha!' chuckled the Jew,
rubbing his hands, 'it couldn't have happened better, if we had chosen
our time!'

'Of course it couldn't,' replied Sikes; 'I know'd that, directly I see
him coming through Clerkenwell, with the books under his arm.  It's all
right enough.  They're soft-hearted psalm-singers, or they wouldn't
have taken him in at all; and they'll ask no questions after him, fear
they should be obliged to prosecute, and so get him lagged.  He's safe
enough.'

Oliver had looked from one to the other, while these words were being
spoken, as if he were bewildered, and could scarecely understand what
passed; but when Bill Sikes concluded, he jumped suddenly to his feet,
and tore wildly from the room:  uttering shrieks for help, which made
the bare old house echo to the roof.

'Keep back the dog, Bill!' cried Nancy, springing before the door, and
closing it, as the Jew and his two pupils darted out in pursuit.  'Keep
back the dog; he'll tear the boy to pieces.'

'Serve him right!' cried Sikes, struggling to disengage himself from
the girl's grasp.  'Stand off from me, or I'll split your head against
the wall.'

'I don't care for that, Bill, I don't care for that,' screamed the
girl, struggling violently with the man, 'the child shan't be torn down
by the dog, unless you kill me first.'

'Shan't he!' said Sikes, setting his teeth.  'I'll soon do that, if you
don't keep off.'

The housebreaker flung the girl from him to the further end of the
room, just as the Jew and the two boys returned, dragging Oliver among
them.

'What's the matter here!' said Fagin, looking round.

'The girl's gone mad, I think,' replied Sikes, savagely.

'No, she hasn't,' said Nancy, pale and breathless from the scuffle;
'no, she hasn't, Fagin; don't think it.'

'Then keep quiet, will you?' said the Jew, with a threatening look.

'No, I won't do that, neither,' replied Nancy, speaking very loud.
'Come!  What do you think of that?'

Mr. Fagin was sufficiently well acquainted with the manners and customs
of that particular species of humanity to which Nancy belonged, to feel
tolerably certain that it would be rather unsafe to prolong any
conversation with her, at present.  With the view of diverting the
attention of the company, he turned to Oliver.

'So you wanted to get away, my dear, did you?' said the Jew, taking up
a jagged and knotted club which law in a corner of the fireplace; 'eh?'

Oliver made no reply.  But he watched the Jew's motions, and breathed
quickly.

'Wanted to get assistance; called for the police; did you?' sneered the
Jew, catching the boy by the arm.  'We'll cure you of that, my young
master.'

The Jew inflicted a smart blow on Oliver's shoulders with the club; and
was raising it for a second, when the girl, rushing forward, wrested it
from his hand.  She flung it into the fire, with a force that brought
some of the glowing coals whirling out into the room.

'I won't stand by and see it done, Fagin,' cried the girl. 'You've got
the boy, and what more would you have?--Let him be--let him be--or I
shall put that mark on some of you, that will bring me to the gallows
before my time.'

The girl stamped her foot violently on the floor as she vented this
threat; and with her lips compressed, and her hands clenched, looked
alternately at the Jew and the other robber: her face quite colourless
from the passion of rage into which she had gradually worked herself.

'Why, Nancy!' said the Jew, in a soothing tone; after a pause, during
which he and Mr. Sikes had stared at one another in a disconcerted
manner; 'you,--you're more clever than ever to-night.  Ha! ha! my dear,
you are acting beautifully.'

'Am I!' said the girl.  'Take care I don't overdo it.  You will be the
worse for it, Fagin, if I do; and so I tell you in good time to keep
clear of me.'

There is something about a roused woman: especially if she add to all
her other strong passions, the fierce impulses of recklessness and
despair; which few men like to provoke. The Jew saw that it would be
hopeless to affect any further mistake regarding the reality of Miss
Nancy's rage; and, shrinking involuntarily back a few paces, cast a
glance, half imploring and half cowardly, at Sikes: as if to hint that
he was the fittest person to pursue the dialogue.

Mr. Sikes, thus mutely appealed to; and possibly feeling his personal
pride and influence interested in the immediate reduction of Miss Nancy
to reason; gave utterance to about a couple of score of curses and
threats, the rapid production of which reflected great credit on the
fertility of his invention. As they produced no visible effect on the
object against whom they were discharged, however, he resorted to more
tangible arguments.

'What do you mean by this?' said Sikes; backing the inquiry with a very
common imprecation concerning the most beautiful of human features:
which, if it were heard above, only once out of every fifty thousand
times that it is uttered below, would render blindness as common a
disorder as measles: 'what do you mean by it?  Burn my body!  Do you
know who you are, and what you are?'

'Oh, yes, I know all about it,' replied the girl, laughing
hysterically; and shaking her head from side to side, with a poor
assumption of indifference.

'Well, then, keep quiet,' rejoined Sikes, with a growl like that he was
accustomed to use when addressing his dog, 'or I'll quiet you for a
good long time to come.'

The girl laughed again: even less composedly than before; and, darting
a hasty look at Sikes, turned her face aside, and bit her lip till the
blood came.

'You're a nice one,' added Sikes, as he surveyed her with a
contemptuous air, 'to take up the humane and gen--teel side!  A pretty
subject for the child, as you call him, to make a friend of!'

'God Almighty help me, I am!' cried the girl passionately; 'and I wish
I had been struck dead in the street, or had changed places with them
we passed so near to-night, before I had lent a hand in bringing him
here.  He's a thief, a liar, a devil, all that's bad, from this night
forth.  Isn't that enough for the old wretch, without blows?'

'Come, come, Sikes,' said the Jew appealing to him in a remonstratory
tone, and motioning towards the boys, who were eagerly attentive to all
that passed; 'we must have civil words; civil words, Bill.'

'Civil words!' cried the girl, whose passion was frightful to see.
'Civil words, you villain!  Yes, you deserve 'em from me. I thieved for
you when I was a child not half as old as this!' pointing to Oliver.
'I have been in the same trade, and in the same service, for twelve
years since.  Don't you know it?  Speak out!  Don't you know it?'

'Well, well,' replied the Jew, with an attempt at pacification; 'and,
if you have, it's your living!'

'Aye, it is!' returned the girl; not speaking, but pouring out the
words in one continuous and vehement scream.  'It is my living; and the
cold, wet, dirty streets are my home; and you're the wretch that drove
me to them long ago, and that'll keep me there, day and night, day and
night, till I die!'

'I shall do you a mischief!' interposed the Jew, goaded by these
reproaches; 'a mischief worse than that, if you say much more!'

The girl said nothing more; but, tearing her hair and dress in a
transport of passion, made such a rush at the Jew as would probably
have left signal marks of her revenge upon him, had not her wrists been
seized by Sikes at the right moment; upon which, she made a few
ineffectual struggles, and fainted.

'She's all right now,' said Sikes, laying her down in a corner. 'She's
uncommon strong in the arms, when she's up in this way.'

The Jew wiped his forehead: and smiled, as if it were a relief to have
the disturbance over; but neither he, nor Sikes, nor the dog, nor the
boys, seemed to consider it in any other light than a common occurance
incidental to business.

'It's the worst of having to do with women,' said the Jew, replacing
his club; 'but they're clever, and we can't get on, in our line,
without 'em.  Charley, show Oliver to bed.'

'I suppose he'd better not wear his best clothes tomorrow, Fagin, had
he?' inquired Charley Bates.

'Certainly not,' replied the Jew, reciprocating the grin with which
Charley put the question.

Master Bates, apparently much delighted with his commission, took the
cleft stick: and led Oliver into an adjacent kitchen, where there were
two or three of the beds on which he had slept before; and here, with
many uncontrollable bursts of laughter, he produced the identical old
suit of clothes which Oliver had so much congratulated himself upon
leaving off at Mr. Brownlow's; and the accidental display of which, to
Fagin, by the Jew who purchased them, had been the very first clue
received, of his whereabout.

'Put off the smart ones,' said Charley, 'and I'll give 'em to Fagin to
take care of.  What fun it is!'

Poor Oliver unwillingly complied.  Master Bates rolling up the new
clothes under his arm, departed from the room, leaving Oliver in the
dark, and locking the door behind him.

The noise of Charley's laughter, and the voice of Miss Betsy, who
opportunely arrived to throw water over her friend, and perform other
feminine offices for the promotion of her recovery, might have kept
many people awake under more happy circumstances than those in which
Oliver was placed.  But he was sick and weary; and he soon fell sound
asleep.



CHAPTER XVII

OLIVER'S DESTINY CONTINUING UNPROPITIOUS, BRINGS A GREAT MAN TO LONDON
TO INJURE HIS REPUTATION

It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to
present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as
the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.  The hero sinks
upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; in the
next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience
with a comic song.  We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in
the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike
in danger, drawing forth her dagger to preserve the one at the cost of
the other; and just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest
pitch, a whistle is heard, and we are straightway transported to the
great hall of the castle; where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny
chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of
places, from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company,
carolling perpetually.

Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would
seem at first sight.  The transitions in real life from well-spread
boards to death-beds, and from mourning-weeds to holiday garments, are
not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of
passive lookers-on, which makes a vast difference.  The actors in the
mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt
impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of
mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous.

As sudden shiftings of the scene, and rapid changes of time and place,
are not only sanctioned in books by long usage, but are by many
considered as the great art of authorship: an author's skill in his
craft being, by such critics, chiefly estimated with relation to the
dilemmas in which he leaves his characters at the end of every chapter:
this brief introduction to the present one may perhaps be deemed
unnecessary.  If so, let it be considered a delicate intimation on the
part of the historian that he is going back to the town in which Oliver
Twist was born; the reader taking it for granted that there are good
and substantial reasons for making the journey, or he would not be
invited to proceed upon such an expedition.

Mr. Bumble emerged at early morning from the workhouse-gate, and walked
with portly carriage and commanding steps, up the High Street.  He was
in the full bloom and pride of beadlehood; his cocked hat and coat were
dazzling in the morning sun; he clutched his cane with the vigorous
tenacity of health and power.  Mr. Bumble always carried his head high;
but this morning it was higher than usual.  There was an abstraction in
his eye, an elevation in his air, which might have warned an observant
stranger that thoughts were passing in the beadle's mind, too great for
utterance.

Mr. Bumble stopped not to converse with the small shopkeepers and
others who spoke to him, deferentially, as he passed along.  He merely
returned their salutations with a wave of his hand, and relaxed not in
his dignified pace, until he reached the farm where Mrs. Mann tended
the infant paupers with parochial care.

'Drat that beadle!' said Mrs. Mann, hearing the well-known shaking at
the garden-gate.  'If it isn't him at this time in the morning!  Lauk,
Mr. Bumble, only think of its being you!  Well, dear me, it IS a
pleasure, this is!  Come into the parlour, sir, please.'

The first sentence was addressed to Susan; and the exclamations of
delight were uttered to Mr. Bumble: as the good lady unlocked the
garden-gate: and showed him, with great attention and respect, into the
house.

'Mrs. Mann,' said Mr. Bumble; not sitting upon, or dropping himself
into a seat, as any common jackanapes would: but letting himself
gradually and slowly down into a chair; 'Mrs. Mann, ma'am, good
morning.'

'Well, and good morning to _you_, sir,' replied Mrs. Mann, with many
smiles; 'and hoping you find yourself well, sir!'

'So-so, Mrs. Mann,' replied the beadle.  'A porochial life is not a bed
of roses, Mrs. Mann.'

'Ah, that it isn't indeed, Mr. Bumble,' rejoined the lady. And all the
infant paupers might have chorussed the rejoinder with great propriety,
if they had heard it.

'A porochial life, ma'am,' continued Mr. Bumble, striking the table
with his cane, 'is a life of worrit, and vexation, and hardihood; but
all public characters, as I may say, must suffer prosecution.'

Mrs. Mann, not very well knowing what the beadle meant, raised her
hands with a look of sympathy, and sighed.

'Ah!  You may well sigh, Mrs. Mann!' said the beadle.

Finding she had done right, Mrs. Mann sighed again:  evidently to the
satisfaction of the public character:  who, repressing a complacent
smile by looking sternly at his cocked hat, said,

'Mrs. Mann, I am going to London.'

'Lauk, Mr. Bumble!' cried Mrs. Mann, starting back.

'To London, ma'am,' resumed the inflexible beadle, 'by coach.  I and
two paupers, Mrs. Mann!  A legal action is a coming on, about a
settlement; and the board has appointed me--me, Mrs. Mann--to dispose
to the matter before the quarter-sessions at Clerkinwell.

And I very much question,' added Mr. Bumble, drawing himself up,
'whether the Clerkinwell Sessions will not find themselves in the wrong
box before they have done with me.'

'Oh! you mustn't be too hard upon them, sir,' said Mrs. Mann, coaxingly.

'The Clerkinwell Sessions have brought it upon themselves, ma'am,'
replied Mr. Bumble; 'and if the Clerkinwell Sessions find that they
come off rather worse than they expected, the Clerkinwell Sessions have
only themselves to thank.'

There was so much determination and depth of purpose about the menacing
manner in which Mr. Bumble delivered himself of these words, that Mrs.
Mann appeared quite awed by them. At length she said,

'You're going by coach, sir?  I thought it was always usual to send
them paupers in carts.'

'That's when they're ill, Mrs. Mann,' said the beadle.  'We put the
sick paupers into open carts in the rainy weather, to prevent their
taking cold.'

'Oh!' said Mrs. Mann.

'The opposition coach contracts for these two; and takes them cheap,'
said Mr. Bumble.  'They are both in a very low state, and we find it
would come two pound cheaper to move 'em than to bury 'em--that is, if
we can throw 'em upon another parish, which I think we shall be able to
do, if they don't die upon the road to spite us.  Ha! ha! ha!'

When Mr. Bumble had laughed a little while, his eyes again encountered
the cocked hat; and he became grave.

'We are forgetting business, ma'am,' said the beadle; 'here is your
porochial stipend for the month.'

Mr. Bumble produced some silver money rolled up in paper, from his
pocket-book; and requested a receipt:  which Mrs. Mann wrote.

'It's very much blotted, sir,' said the farmer of infants; 'but it's
formal enough, I dare say.  Thank you, Mr. Bumble, sir, I am very much
obliged to you, I'm sure.'

Mr. Bumble nodded, blandly, in acknowledgment of Mrs. Mann's curtsey;
and inquired how the children were.

'Bless their dear little hearts!' said Mrs. Mann with emotion, 'they're
as well as can be, the dears!  Of course, except the two that died last
week.  And little Dick.'

'Isn't that boy no better?' inquired Mr. Bumble.

Mrs. Mann shook her head.

'He's a ill-conditioned, wicious, bad-disposed porochial child that,'
said Mr. Bumble angrily.  'Where is he?'

'I'll bring him to you in one minute, sir,' replied Mrs. Mann. 'Here,
you Dick!'

After some calling, Dick was discovered.  Having had his face put under
the pump, and dried upon Mrs. Mann's gown, he was led into the awful
presence of Mr. Bumble, the beadle.

The child was pale and thin; his cheeks were sunken; and his eyes large
and bright.  The scanty parish dress, the livery of his misery, hung
loosely on his feeble body; and his young limbs had wasted away, like
those of an old man.

Such was the little being who stood trembling beneath Mr. Bumble's
glance; not daring to lift his eyes from the floor; and dreading even
to hear the beadle's voice.

'Can't you look at the gentleman, you obstinate boy?' said Mrs. Mann.

The child meekly raised his eyes, and encountered those of Mr. Bumble.

'What's the matter with you, porochial Dick?' inquired Mr. Bumble, with
well-timed jocularity.

'Nothing, sir,' replied the child faintly.

'I should think not,' said Mrs. Mann, who had of course laughed very
much at Mr. Bumble's humour.

'You want for nothing, I'm sure.'

'I should like--' faltered the child.

'Hey-day!' interposed Mr. Mann, 'I suppose you're going to say that you
DO want for something, now?  Why, you little wretch--'

'Stop, Mrs. Mann, stop!' said the beadle, raising his hand with a show
of authority.  'Like what, sir, eh?'

'I should like,' faltered the child, 'if somebody that can write, would
put a few words down for me on a piece of paper, and fold it up and
seal it, and keep it for me, after I am laid in the ground.'

'Why, what does the boy mean?' exclaimed Mr. Bumble, on whom the
earnest manner and wan aspect of the child had made some impression:
accustomed as he was to such things.  'What do you mean, sir?'

'I should like,' said the child, 'to leave my dear love to poor Oliver
Twist; and to let him know how often I have sat by myself and cried to
think of his wandering about in the dark nights with nobody to help
him.  And I should like to tell him,' said the child pressing his small
hands together, and speaking with great fervour, 'that I was glad to
die when I was very young; for, perhaps, if I had lived to be a man,
and had grown old, my little sister who is in Heaven, might forget me,
or be unlike me; and it would be so much happier if we were both
children there together.'

Mr. Bumble surveyed the little speaker, from head to foot, with
indescribable astonishment; and, turning to his companion, said,
'They're all in one story, Mrs. Mann.  That out-dacious Oliver had
demogalized them all!'

'I couldn't have believed it, sir' said Mrs Mann, holding up her hands,
and looking malignantly at Dick.  'I never see such a hardened little
wretch!'

'Take him away, ma'am!' said Mr. Bumble imperiously.  'This must be
stated to the board, Mrs. Mann.

'I hope the gentleman will understand that it isn't my fault, sir?'
said Mrs. Mann, whimpering pathetically.

'They shall understand that, ma'am; they shall be acquainted with the
true state of the case,' said Mr. Bumble.  'There; take him away, I
can't bear the sight on him.'

Dick was immediately taken away, and locked up in the coal-cellar.  Mr.
Bumble shortly afterwards took himself off, to prepare for his journey.

At six o'clock next morning, Mr. Bumble:  having exchanged his cocked
hat for a round one, and encased his person in a blue great-coat with a
cape to it:  took his place on the outside of the coach, accompanied by
the criminals whose settlement was disputed; with whom, in due course
of time, he arrived in London.

He experienced no other crosses on the way, than those which originated
in the perverse behaviour of the two paupers, who persisted in
shivering, and complaining of the cold, in a manner which, Mr. Bumble
declared, caused his teeth to chatter in his head, and made him feel
quite uncomfortable; although he had a great-coat on.

Having disposed of these evil-minded persons for the night, Mr. Bumble
sat himself down in the house at which the coach stopped; and took a
temperate dinner of steaks, oyster sauce, and porter. Putting a glass
of hot gin-and-water on the chimney-piece, he drew his chair to the
fire; and, with sundry moral reflections on the too-prevalent sin of
discontent and complaining, composed himself to read the paper.

The very first paragraph upon which Mr. Bumble's eye rested, was the
following advertisement.

                 'FIVE GUINEAS REWARD

'Whereas a young boy, named Oliver Twist, absconded, or was enticed, on
Thursday evening last, from his home, at Pentonville; and has not since
been heard of.  The above reward will be paid to any person who will
give such information as will lead to the discovery of the said Oliver
Twist, or tend to throw any light upon his previous history, in which
the advertiser is, for many reasons, warmly interested.'

And then followed a full description of Oliver's dress, person,
appearance, and disappearance:  with the name and address of Mr.
Brownlow at full length.

Mr. Bumble opened his eyes; read the advertisement, slowly and
carefully, three several times; and in something more than five minutes
was on his way to Pentonville: having actually, in his excitement, left
the glass of hot gin-and-water, untasted.

'Is Mr. Brownlow at home?' inquired Mr. Bumble of the girl who opened
the door.

To this inquiry the girl returned the not uncommon, but rather evasive
reply of 'I don't know; where do you come from?'

Mr. Bumble no sooner uttered Oliver's name, in explanation of his
errand, than Mrs. Bedwin, who had been listening at the parlour door,
hastened into the passage in a breathless state.

'Come in, come in,' said the old lady: 'I knew we should hear of him.
Poor dear!  I knew we should!  I was certain of it.  Bless his heart!
I said so all along.'

Having heard this, the worthy old lady hurried back into the parlour
again; and seating herself on a sofa, burst into tears. The girl, who
was not quite so susceptible, had run upstairs meanwhile; and now
returned with a request that Mr. Bumble would follow her immediately:
which he did.

He was shown into the little back study, where sat Mr. Brownlow and his
friend Mr. Grimwig, with decanters and glasses before them.  The latter
gentleman at once burst into the exclamation:

'A beadle.  A parish beadle, or I'll eat my head.'

'Pray don't interrupt just now,' said Mr. Brownlow.  'Take a seat, will
you?'

Mr. Bumble sat himself down; quite confounded by the oddity of Mr.
Grimwig's manner.  Mr. Brownlow moved the lamp, so as to obtain an
uninterrupted view of the beadle's countenance; and said, with a little
impatience,

'Now, sir, you come in consequence of having seen the advertisement?'

'Yes, sir,' said Mr. Bumble.

'And you ARE a beadle, are you not?' inquired Mr. Grimwig.

'I am a porochial beadle, gentlemen,' rejoined Mr. Bumble proudly.

'Of course,' observed Mr. Grimwig aside to his friend, 'I knew he was.
A beadle all over!'

Mr. Brownlow gently shook his head to impose silence on his friend, and
resumed:

'Do you know where this poor boy is now?'

'No more than nobody,' replied Mr. Bumble.

'Well, what DO you know of him?' inquired the old gentleman. 'Speak
out, my friend, if you have anything to say.  What DO you know of him?'

'You don't happen to know any good of him, do you?' said Mr. Grimwig,
caustically; after an attentive perusal of Mr. Bumble's features.

Mr. Bumble, catching at the inquiry very quickly, shook his head with
portentous solemnity.

'You see?' said Mr. Grimwig, looking triumphantly at Mr. Brownlow.

Mr. Brownlow looked apprehensively at Mr. Bumble's pursed-up
countenance; and requested him to communicate what he knew regarding
Oliver, in as few words as possible.

Mr. Bumble put down his hat; unbuttoned his coat; folded his arms;
inclined his head in a retrospective manner; and, after a few moments'
reflection, commenced his story.

It would be tedious if given in the beadle's words:  occupying, as it
did, some twenty minutes in the telling; but the sum and substance of
it was, that Oliver was a foundling, born of low and vicious parents.
That he had, from his birth, displayed no better qualities than
treachery, ingratitude, and malice.  That he had terminated his brief
career in the place of his birth, by making a sanguinary and cowardly
attack on an unoffending lad, and running away in the night-time from
his master's house.  In proof of his really being the person he
represented himself, Mr. Bumble laid upon the table the papers he had
brought to town. Folding his arms again, he then awaited Mr. Brownlow's
observations.

'I fear it is all too true,' said the old gentleman sorrowfully, after
looking over the papers.  'This is not much for your intelligence; but
I would gladly have given you treble the money, if it had been
favourable to the boy.'

It is not improbable that if Mr. Bumble had been possessed of this
information at an earlier period of the interview, he might have
imparted a very different colouring to his little history. It was too
late to do it now, however; so he shook his head gravely, and,
pocketing the five guineas, withdrew.

Mr. Brownlow paced the room to and fro for some minutes; evidently so
much disturbed by the beadle's tale, that even Mr. Grimwig forbore to
vex him further.

At length he stopped, and rang the bell violently.

'Mrs. Bedwin,' said Mr. Brownlow, when the housekeeper appeared; 'that
boy, Oliver, is an imposter.'

'It can't be, sir.  It cannot be,' said the old lady energetically.

'I tell you he is,' retorted the old gentleman.  'What do you mean by
can't be?  We have just heard a full account of him from his birth; and
he has been a thorough-paced little villain, all his life.'

'I never will believe it, sir,' replied the old lady, firmly. 'Never!'

'You old women never believe anything but quack-doctors, and lying
story-books,' growled Mr. Grimwig.  'I knew it all along. Why didn't
you take my advise in the beginning; you would if he hadn't had a
fever, I suppose, eh?  He was interesting, wasn't he?  Interesting!
Bah!'  And Mr. Grimwig poked the fire with a flourish.

'He was a dear, grateful, gentle child, sir,' retorted Mrs. Bedwin,
indignantly.  'I know what children are, sir; and have done these forty
years; and people who can't say the same, shouldn't say anything about
them.  That's my opinion!'

This was a hard hit at Mr. Grimwig, who was a bachelor.  As it extorted
nothing from that gentleman but a smile, the old lady tossed her head,
and smoothed down her apron preparatory to another speech, when she was
stopped by Mr. Brownlow.

'Silence!' said the old gentleman, feigning an anger he was far from
feeling.  'Never let me hear the boy's name again.  I rang to tell you
that.  Never.  Never, on any pretence, mind!  You may leave the room,
Mrs. Bedwin.  Remember!  I am in earnest.'

There were sad hearts at Mr. Brownlow's that night.

Oliver's heart sank within him, when he thought of his good friends; it
was well for him that he could not know what they had heard, or it
might have broken outright.



CHAPTER XVIII

HOW OLIVER PASSED HIS TIME IN THE IMPROVING SOCIETY OF HIS REPUTABLE
FRIENDS

About noon next day, when the Dodger and Master Bates had gone out to
pursue their customary avocations, Mr. Fagin took the opportunity of
reading Oliver a long lecture on the crying sin of ingratitude; of
which he clearly demonstrated he had been guilty, to no ordinary
extent, in wilfully absenting himself from the society of his anxious
friends; and, still more, in endeavouring to escape from them after so
much trouble and expense had been incurred in his recovery. Mr. Fagin
laid great stress on the fact of his having taken Oliver in, and
cherished him, when, without his timely aid, he might have perished
with hunger; and he related the dismal and affecting history of a young
lad whom, in his philanthropy, he had succoured under parallel
circumstances, but who, proving unworthy of his confidence and evincing
a desire to communicate with the police, had unfortunately come to be
hanged at the Old Bailey one morning.  Mr. Fagin did not seek to
conceal his share in the catastrophe, but lamented with tears in his
eyes that the wrong-headed and treacherous behaviour of the young
person in question, had rendered it necessary that he should become the
victim of certain evidence for the crown: which, if it were not
precisely true, was indispensably necessary for the safety of him (Mr.
Fagin) and a few select friends.  Mr. Fagin concluded by drawing a
rather disagreeable picture of the discomforts of hanging; and, with
great friendliness and politeness of manner, expressed his anxious
hopes that he might never be obliged to submit Oliver Twist to that
unpleasant operation.

Little Oliver's blood ran cold, as he listened to the Jew's words, and
imperfectly comprehended the dark threats conveyed in them.  That it
was possible even for justice itself to confound the innocent with the
guilty when they were in accidental companionship, he knew already; and
that deeply-laid plans for the destruction of inconveniently knowing or
over-communicative persons, had been really devised and carried out by
the Jew on more occasions than one, he thought by no means unlikely,
when he recollected the general nature of the altercations between that
gentleman and Mr. Sikes: which seemed to bear reference to some
foregone conspiracy of the kind.  As he glanced timidly up, and met the
Jew's searching look, he felt that his pale face and trembling limbs
were neither unnoticed nor unrelished by that wary old gentleman.

The Jew, smiling hideously, patted Oliver on the head, and said, that
if he kept himself quiet, and applied himself to business, he saw they
would be very good friends yet.  Then, taking his hat, and covering
himself with an old patched great-coat, he went out, and locked the
room-door behind him.

And so Oliver remained all that day, and for the greater part of many
subsequent days, seeing nobody, between early morning and midnight, and
left during the long hours to commune with his own thoughts.  Which,
never failing to revert to his kind friends, and the opinion they must
long ago have formed of him, were sad indeed.

After the lapse of a week or so, the Jew left the room-door unlocked;
and he was at liberty to wander about the house.

It was a very dirty place.  The rooms upstairs had great high wooden
chimney-pieces and large doors, with panelled walls and cornices to the
ceiling; which, although they were black with neglect and dust, were
ornamented in various ways.  From all of these tokens Oliver concluded
that a long time ago, before the old Jew was born, it had belonged to
better people, and had perhaps been quite gay and handsome:  dismal and
dreary as it looked now.

Spiders had built their webs in the angles of the walls and ceilings;
and sometimes, when Oliver walked softly into a room, the mice would
scamper across the floor, and run back terrified to their holes.  With
these exceptions, there was neither sight nor sound of any living
thing; and often, when it grew dark, and he was tired of wandering from
room to room, he would crouch in the corner of the passage by the
street-door, to be as near living people as he could; and would remain
there, listening and counting the hours, until the Jew or the boys
returned.

In all the rooms, the mouldering shutters were fast closed:  the bars
which held them were screwed tight into the wood; the only light which
was admitted, stealing its way through round holes at the top: which
made the rooms more gloomy, and filled them with strange shadows.
There was a back-garret window with rusty bars outside, which had no
shutter; and out of this, Oliver often gazed with a melancholy face for
hours together; but nothing was to be descried from it but a confused
and crowded mass of housetops, blackened chimneys, and gable-ends.
Sometimes, indeed, a grizzly head might be seen, peering over the
parapet-wall of a distant house; but it was quickly withdrawn again;
and as the window of Oliver's observatory was nailed down, and dimmed
with the rain and smoke of years, it was as much as he could do to make
out the forms of the different objects beyond, without making any
attempt to be seen or heard,--which he had as much chance of being, as
if he had lived inside the ball of St. Paul's Cathedral.

One afternoon, the Dodger and Master Bates being engaged out that
evening, the first-named young gentleman took it into his head to
evince some anxiety regarding the decoration of his person (to do him
justice, this was by no means an habitual weakness with him); and, with
this end and aim, he condescendingly commanded Oliver to assist him in
his toilet, straightway.

Oliver was but too glad to make himself useful; too happy to have some
faces, however bad, to look upon; too desirous to conciliate those
about him when he could honestly do so; to throw any objection in the
way of this proposal.  So he at once expressed his readiness; and,
kneeling on the floor, while the Dodger sat upon the table so that he
could take his foot in his laps, he applied himself to a process which
Mr. Dawkins designated as 'japanning his trotter-cases.'  The phrase,
rendered into plain English, signifieth, cleaning his boots.

Whether it was the sense of freedom and independence which a rational
animal may be supposed to feel when he sits on a table in an easy
attitude smoking a pipe, swinging one leg carelessly to and fro, and
having his boots cleaned all the time, without even the past trouble of
having taken them off, or the prospective misery of putting them on, to
disturb his reflections; or whether it was the goodness of the tobacco
that soothed the feelings of the Dodger, or the mildness of the beer
that mollified his thoughts; he was evidently tinctured, for the nonce,
with a spice of romance and enthusiasm, foreign to his general nature.
He looked down on Oliver, with a thoughtful countenance, for a brief
space; and then, raising his head, and heaving a gentle sign, said,
half in abstraction, and half to Master Bates:

'What a pity it is he isn't a prig!'

'Ah!' said Master Charles Bates; 'he don't know what's good for him.'

The Dodger sighed again, and resumed his pipe: as did Charley Bates.
They both smoked, for some seconds, in silence.

'I suppose you don't even know what a prig is?' said the Dodger
mournfully.

'I think I know that,' replied Oliver, looking up.  'It's a the--;
you're one, are you not?' inquired Oliver, checking himself.

'I am,' replied the Dodger.  'I'd scorn to be anything else.'  Mr.
Dawkins gave his hat a ferocious cock, after delivering this sentiment,
and looked at Master Bates, as if to denote that he would feel obliged
by his saying anything to the contrary.

'I am,' repeated the Dodger.  'So's Charley.  So's Fagin. So's Sikes.
So's Nancy.  So's Bet.  So we all are, down to the dog. And he's the
downiest one of the lot!'

'And the least given to peaching,' added Charley Bates.

'He wouldn't so much as bark in a witness-box, for fear of committing
himself; no, not if you tied him up in one, and left him there without
wittles for a fortnight,' said the Dodger.

'Not a bit of it,' observed Charley.

'He's a rum dog.  Don't he look fierce at any strange cove that laughs
or sings when he's in company!' pursued the Dodger. 'Won't he growl at
all, when he hears a fiddle playing!  And don't he hate other dogs as
ain't of his breed!  Oh, no!'

'He's an out-and-out Christian,' said Charley.

This was merely intended as a tribute to the animal's abilities, but it
was an appropriate remark in another sense, if Master Bates had only
known it; for there are a good many ladies and gentlemen, claiming to
be out-and-out Christians, between whom, and Mr. Sikes' dog, there
exist strong and singular points of resemblance.

'Well, well,' said the Dodger, recurring to the point from which they
had strayed: with that mindfulness of his profession which influenced
all his proceedings.  'This hasn't go anything to do with young Green
here.'

'No more it has,' said Charley.  'Why don't you put yourself under
Fagin, Oliver?'

'And make your fortun' out of hand?' added the Dodger, with a grin.

'And so be able to retire on your property, and do the gen-teel: as I
mean to, in the very next leap-year but four that ever comes, and the
forty-second Tuesday in Trinity-week,' said Charley Bates.

'I don't like it,' rejoined Oliver, timidly; 'I wish they would let me
go.  I--I--would rather go.'

'And Fagin would RATHER not!' rejoined Charley.

Oliver knew this too well; but thinking it might be dangerous to
express his feelings more openly, he only sighed, and went on with his
boot-cleaning.

'Go!' exclaimed the Dodger.  'Why, where's your spirit?' Don't you take
any pride out of yourself?  Would you go and be dependent on your
friends?'

'Oh, blow that!' said Master Bates: drawing two or three silk
handkerchiefs from his pocket, and tossing them into a cupboard,
'that's too mean; that is.'

'_I_ couldn't do it,' said the Dodger, with an air of haughty disgust.

'You can leave your friends, though,' said Oliver with a half smile;
'and let them be punished for what you did.'

'That,' rejoined the Dodger, with a wave of his pipe, 'That was all out
of consideration for Fagin, 'cause the traps know that we work
together, and he might have got into trouble if we hadn't made our
lucky; that was the move, wasn't it, Charley?'

Master Bates nodded assent, and would have spoken, but the recollection
of Oliver's flight came so suddenly upon him, that the smoke he was
inhaling got entangled with a laugh, and went up into his head, and
down into his throat: and brought on a fit of coughing and stamping,
about five minutes long.

'Look here!' said the Dodger, drawing forth a handful of shillings and
halfpence. 'Here's a jolly life!  What's the odds where it comes from?
Here, catch hold; there's plenty more where they were took from.  You
won't, won't you?  Oh, you precious flat!'

'It's naughty, ain't it, Oliver?' inquired Charley Bates. 'He'll come
to be scragged, won't he?'

'I don't know what that means,' replied Oliver.

'Something in this way, old feller,' said Charly.  As he said it,
Master Bates caught up an end of his neckerchief; and, holding it erect
in the air, dropped his head on his shoulder, and jerked a curious
sound through his teeth; thereby indicating, by a lively pantomimic
representation, that scragging and hanging were one and the same thing.

'That's what it means,' said Charley.  'Look how he stares, Jack!

I never did see such prime company as that 'ere boy; he'll be the death
of me, I know he will.'  Master Charley Bates, having laughed heartily
again, resumed his pipe with tears in his eyes.

'You've been brought up bad,' said the Dodger, surveying his boots with
much satisfaction when Oliver had polished them. 'Fagin will make
something of you, though, or you'll be the first he ever had that
turned out unprofitable.  You'd better begin at once; for you'll come
to the trade long before you think of it; and you're only losing time,
Oliver.'

Master Bates backed this advice with sundry moral admonitions of his
own:  which, being exhausted, he and his friend Mr. Dawkins launched
into a glowing description of the numerous pleasures incidental to the
life they led, interspersed with a variety of hints to Oliver that the
best thing he could do, would be to secure Fagin's favour without more
delay, by the means which they themselves had employed to gain it.

'And always put this in your pipe, Nolly,' said the Dodger, as the Jew
was heard unlocking the door above, 'if you don't take fogels and
tickers--'

'What's the good of talking in that way?' interposed Master Bates; 'he
don't know what you mean.'

'If you don't take pocket-handkechers and watches,' said the Dodger,
reducing his conversation to the level of Oliver's capacity, 'some
other cove will; so that the coves that lose 'em will be all the worse,
and you'll be all the worse, too, and nobody half a ha'p'orth the
better, except the chaps wot gets them--and you've just as good a right
to them as they have.'

'To be sure, to be sure!' said the Jew, who had entered unseen by
Oliver.  'It all lies in a nutshell my dear; in a nutshell, take the
Dodger's word for it.  Ha! ha! ha!  He understands the catechism of his
trade.'

The old man rubbed his hands gleefully together, as he corroborated the
Dodger's reasoning in these terms; and chuckled with delight at his
pupil's proficiency.

The conversation proceeded no farther at this time, for the Jew had
returned home accompanied by Miss Betsy, and a gentleman whom Oliver
had never seen before, but who was accosted by the Dodger as Tom
Chitling; and who, having lingered on the stairs to exchange a few
gallantries with the lady, now made his appearance.

Mr. Chitling was older in years than the Dodger: having perhaps
numbered eighteen winters; but there was a degree of deference in his
deportment towards that young gentleman which seemed to indicate that
he felt himself conscious of a slight inferiority in point of genius
and professional aquirements.  He had small twinkling eyes, and a
pock-marked face; wore a fur cap, a dark corduroy jacket, greasy
fustian trousers, and an apron.  His wardrobe was, in truth, rather out
of repair; but he excused himself to the company by stating that his
'time' was only out an hour before; and that, in consequence of having
worn the regimentals for six weeks past, he had not been able to bestow
any attention on his private clothes.  Mr. Chitling added, with strong
marks of irritation, that the new way of fumigating clothes up yonder
was infernal unconstitutional, for it burnt holes in them, and there
was no remedy against the County.  The same remark he considered to
apply to the regulation mode of cutting the hair: which he held to be
decidedly unlawful.  Mr. Chitling wound up his observations by stating
that he had not touched a drop of anything for forty-two moral long
hard-working days; and that he 'wished he might be busted if he warn't
as dry as a lime-basket.'

'Where do you think the gentleman has come from, Oliver?' inquired the
Jew, with a grin, as the other boys put a bottle of spirits on the
table.

'I--I--don't know, sir,' replied Oliver.

'Who's that?' inquired Tom Chitling, casting a contemptuous look at
Oliver.

'A young friend of mine, my dear,' replied the Jew.

'He's in luck, then,' said the young man, with a meaning look at Fagin.
'Never mind where I came from, young 'un; you'll find your way there,
soon enough, I'll bet a crown!'

At this sally, the boys laughed.  After some more jokes on the same
subject, they exchanged a few short whispers with Fagin; and withdrew.

After some words apart between the last comer and Fagin, they drew
their chairs towards the fire; and the Jew, telling Oliver to come and
sit by him, led the conversation to the topics most calculated to
interest his hearers.  These were, the great advantages of the trade,
the proficiency of the Dodger, the amiability of Charley Bates, and the
liberality of the Jew himself.  At length these subjects displayed
signs of being thoroughly exhausted; and Mr. Chitling did the same:
for the house of correction becomes fatiguing after a week or two.
Miss Betsy accordingly withdrew; and left the party to their repose.

From this day, Oliver was seldom left alone; but was placed in almost
constant communication with the two boys, who played the old game with
the Jew every day: whether for their own improvement or Oliver's, Mr.
Fagin best knew.  At other times the old man would tell them stories of
robberies he had committed in his younger days:  mixed up with so much
that was droll and curious, that Oliver could not help laughing
heartily, and showing that he was amused in spite of all his better
feelings.

In short, the wily old Jew had the boy in his toils.  Having prepared
his mind, by solitude and gloom, to prefer any society to the
companionship of his own sad thoughts in such a dreary place, he was
now slowly instilling into his soul the poison which he hoped would
blacken it, and change its hue for ever.



CHAPTER XIX

IN WHICH A NOTABLE PLAN IS DISCUSSED AND DETERMINED ON

It was a chill, damp, windy night, when the Jew: buttoning his
great-coat tight round his shrivelled body, and pulling the collar up
over his ears so as completely to obscure the lower part of his face:
emerged from his den.  He paused on the step as the door was locked and
chained behind him; and having listened while the boys made all secure,
and until their retreating footsteps were no longer audible, slunk down
the street as quickly as he could.

The house to which Oliver had been conveyed, was in the neighborhood of
Whitechapel.  The Jew stopped for an instant at the corner of the
street; and, glancing suspiciously round, crossed the road, and struck
off in the direction of the Spitalfields.

The mud lay thick upon the stones, and a black mist hung over the
streets; the rain fell sluggishly down, and everything felt cold and
clammy to the touch.  It seemed just the night when it befitted such a
being as the Jew to be abroad.  As he glided stealthily along, creeping
beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man
seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and
darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of
some rich offal for a meal.

He kept on his course, through many winding and narrow ways, until he
reached Bethnal Green; then, turning suddenly off to the left, he soon
became involved in a maze of the mean and dirty streets which abound in
that close and densely-populated quarter.

The Jew was evidently too familiar with the ground he traversed to be
at all bewildered, either by the darkness of the night, or the
intricacies of the way.  He hurried through several alleys and streets,
and at length turned into one, lighted only by a single lamp at the
farther end.  At the door of a house in this street, he knocked; having
exchanged a few muttered words with the person who opened it, he walked
upstairs.

A dog growled as he touched the handle of a room-door; and a man's
voice demanded who was there.

'Only me, Bill; only me, my dear,' said the Jew looking in.

'Bring in your body then,' said Sikes.  'Lie down, you stupid brute!
Don't you know the devil when he's got a great-coat on?'

Apparently, the dog had been somewhat deceived by Mr. Fagin's outer
garment; for as the Jew unbuttoned it, and threw it over the back of a
chair, he retired to the corner from which he had risen:  wagging his
tail as he went, to show that he was as well satisfied as it was in his
nature to be.

'Well!' said Sikes.

'Well, my dear,' replied the Jew.--'Ah! Nancy.'

The latter recognition was uttered with just enough of embarrassment to
imply a doubt of its reception; for Mr. Fagin and his young friend had
not met, since she had interfered in behalf of Oliver.  All doubts upon
the subject, if he had any, were speedily removed by the young lady's
behaviour.  She took her feet off the fender, pushed back her chair,
and bade Fagin draw up his, without saying more about it:  for it was a
cold night, and no mistake.

'It is cold, Nancy dear,' said the Jew, as he warmed his skinny hands
over the fire.  'It seems to go right through one,' added the old man,
touching his side.

'It must be a piercer, if it finds its way through your heart,' said
Mr. Sikes.  'Give him something to drink, Nancy.  Burn my body, make
haste!  It's enough to turn a man ill, to see his lean old carcase
shivering in that way, like a ugly ghost just rose from the grave.'

Nancy quickly brought a bottle from a cupboard, in which there were
many:  which, to judge from the diversity of their appearance, were
filled with several kinds of liquids.  Sikes pouring out a glass of
brandy, bade the Jew drink it off.

'Quite enough, quite, thankye, Bill,' replied the Jew, putting down the
glass after just setting his lips to it.

'What!  You're afraid of our getting the better of you, are you?'
inquired Sikes, fixing his eyes on the Jew.  'Ugh!'

With a hoarse grunt of contempt, Mr. Sikes seized the glass, and threw
the remainder of its contents into the ashes: as a preparatory ceremony
to filling it again for himself:  which he did at once.

The Jew glanced round the room, as his companion tossed down the second
glassful; not in curiousity, for he had seen it often before; but in a
restless and suspicious manner habitual to him. It was a meanly
furnished apartment, with nothing but the contents of the closet to
induce the belief that its occupier was anything but a working man; and
with no more suspicious articles displayed to view than two or three
heavy bludgeons which stood in a corner, and a 'life-preserver' that
hung over the chimney-piece.

'There,' said Sikes, smacking his lips. 'Now I'm ready.'

'For business?' inquired the Jew.

'For business,' replied Sikes; 'so say what you've got to say.'

'About the crib at Chertsey, Bill?' said the Jew, drawing his chair
forward, and speaking in a very low voice.

'Yes.  Wot about it?' inquired Sikes.

'Ah! you know what I mean, my dear,' said the Jew.  'He knows what I
mean, Nancy; don't he?'

'No, he don't,' sneered Mr. Sikes.  'Or he won't, and that's the same
thing.  Speak out, and call things by their right names; don't sit
there, winking and blinking, and talking to me in hints, as if you
warn't the very first that thought about the robbery.  Wot d'ye mean?'

'Hush, Bill, hush!' said the Jew, who had in vain attempted to stop
this burst of indignation; 'somebody will hear us, my dear. Somebody
will hear us.'

'Let 'em hear!' said Sikes; 'I don't care.'  But as Mr. Sikes DID care,
on reflection, he dropped his voice as he said the words, and grew
calmer.

'There, there,' said the Jew, coaxingly.  'It was only my caution,
nothing more.  Now, my dear, about that crib at Chertsey; when is it to
be done, Bill, eh?  When is it to be done?  Such plate, my dear, such
plate!' said the Jew:  rubbing his hands, and elevating his eyebrows in
a rapture of anticipation.

'Not at all,' replied Sikes coldly.

'Not to be done at all!' echoed the Jew, leaning back in his chair.

'No, not at all,' rejoined Sikes.  'At least it can't be a put-up job,
as we expected.'

'Then it hasn't been properly gone about,' said the Jew, turning pale
with anger.  'Don't tell me!'

'But I will tell you,' retorted Sikes.  'Who are you that's not to be
told?  I tell you that Toby Crackit has been hanging about the place
for a fortnight, and he can't get one of the servants in line.'

'Do you mean to tell me, Bill,' said the Jew: softening as the other
grew heated:  'that neither of the two men in the house can be got
over?'

'Yes, I do mean to tell you so,' replied Sikes.  'The old lady has had
'em these twenty years; and if you were to give 'em five hundred pound,
they wouldn't be in it.'

'But do you mean to say, my dear,' remonstrated the Jew, 'that the
women can't be got over?'

'Not a bit of it,' replied Sikes.

'Not by flash Toby Crackit?' said the Jew incredulously. 'Think what
women are, Bill,'

'No; not even by flash Toby Crackit,' replied Sikes.  'He says he's
worn sham whiskers, and a canary waistcoat, the whole blessed time he's
been loitering down there, and it's all of no use.'

'He should have tried mustachios and a pair of military trousers, my
dear,' said the Jew.

'So he did,' rejoined Sikes, 'and they warn't of no more use than the
other plant.'

The Jew looked blank at this information.  After ruminating for some
minutes with his chin sunk on his breast, he raised his head and said,
with a deep sigh, that if flash Toby Crackit reported aright, he feared
the game was up.

'And yet,' said the old man, dropping his hands on his knees, 'it's a
sad thing, my dear, to lose so much when we had set our hearts upon it.'

'So it is,' said Mr. Sikes.  'Worse luck!'

A long silence ensued; during which the Jew was plunged in deep
thought, with his face wrinkled into an expression of villainy
perfectly demoniacal.  Sikes eyed him furtively from time to time.
Nancy, apparently fearful of irritating the housebreaker, sat with her
eyes fixed upon the fire, as if she had been deaf to all that passed.

'Fagin,' said Sikes, abruptly breaking the stillness that prevailed;
'is it worth fifty shiners extra, if it's safely done from the outside?'

'Yes,' said the Jew, as suddenly rousing himself.

'Is it a bargain?' inquired Sikes.

'Yes, my dear, yes,' rejoined the Jew; his eyes glistening, and every
muscle in his face working, with the excitement that the inquiry had
awakened.

'Then,' said Sikes, thrusting aside the Jew's hand, with some disdain,
'let it come off as soon as you like.  Toby and me were over the
garden-wall the night afore last, sounding the panels of the door and
shutters.  The crib's barred up at night like a jail; but there's one
part we can crack, safe and softly.'

'Which is that, Bill?' asked the Jew eagerly.

'Why,' whispered Sikes, 'as you cross the lawn--'

'Yes?' said the Jew, bending his head forward, with his eyes almost
starting out of it.

'Umph!' cried Sikes, stopping short, as the girl, scarcely moving her
head, looked suddenly round, and pointed for an instant to the Jew's
face.  'Never mind which part it is. You can't do it without me, I
know; but it's best to be on the safe side when one deals with you.'

'As you like, my dear, as you like' replied the Jew.  'Is there no help
wanted, but yours and Toby's?'

'None,' said Sikes.  'Cept a centre-bit and a boy.  The first we've
both got; the second you must find us.'

'A boy!' exclaimed the Jew.  'Oh! then it's a panel, eh?'

'Never mind wot it is!' replied Sikes.  'I want a boy, and he musn't be
a big 'un.  Lord!' said Mr. Sikes, reflectively, 'if I'd only got that
young boy of Ned, the chimbley-sweeper's!  He kept him small on
purpose, and let him out by the job.  But the father gets lagged; and
then the Juvenile Delinquent Society comes, and takes the boy away from
a trade where he was earning money, teaches him to read and write, and
in time makes a 'prentice of him.  And so they go on,' said Mr. Sikes,
his wrath rising with the recollection of his wrongs, 'so they go on;
and, if they'd got money enough (which it's a Providence they haven't,)
we shouldn't have half a dozen boys left in the whole trade, in a year
or two.'

'No more we should,' acquiesced the Jew, who had been considering
during this speech, and had only caught the last sentence. 'Bill!'

'What now?' inquired Sikes.

The Jew nodded his head towards Nancy, who was still gazing at the
fire; and intimated, by a sign, that he would have her told to leave
the room.  Sikes shrugged his shoulders impatiently, as if he thought
the precaution unnecessary; but complied, nevertheless, by requesting
Miss Nancy to fetch him a jug of beer.

'You don't want any beer,' said Nancy, folding her arms, and retaining
her seat very composedly.

'I tell you I do!' replied Sikes.

'Nonsense,' rejoined the girl coolly, 'Go on, Fagin.  I know what he's
going to say, Bill; he needn't mind me.'

The Jew still hesitated.  Sikes looked from one to the other in some
surprise.

'Why, you don't mind the old girl, do you, Fagin?' he asked at length.
'You've known her long enough to trust her, or the Devil's in it.  She
ain't one to blab.  Are you Nancy?'

'_I_ should think not!' replied the young lady:  drawing her chair up
to the table, and putting her elbows upon it.

'No, no, my dear, I know you're not,' said the Jew; 'but--' and again
the old man paused.

'But wot?' inquired Sikes.

'I didn't know whether she mightn't p'r'aps be out of sorts, you know,
my dear, as she was the other night,' replied the Jew.

At this confession, Miss Nancy burst into a loud laugh; and, swallowing
a glass of brandy, shook her head with an air of defiance, and burst
into sundry exclamations of 'Keep the game a-going!'  'Never say die!'
and the like.  These seemed to have the effect of re-assuring both
gentlemen; for the Jew nodded his head with a satisfied air, and
resumed his seat: as did Mr. Sikes likewise.

'Now, Fagin,' said Nancy with a laugh.  'Tell Bill at once, about
Oliver!'

'Ha! you're a clever one, my dear: the sharpest girl I ever saw!' said
the Jew, patting her on the neck.  'It WAS about Oliver I was going to
speak, sure enough.  Ha! ha! ha!'

'What about him?' demanded Sikes.

'He's the boy for you, my dear,' replied the Jew in a hoarse whisper;
laying his finger on the side of his nose, and grinning frightfully.

'He!' exclaimed Sikes.

'Have him, Bill!' said Nancy.  'I would, if I was in your place. He
mayn't be so much up, as any of the others; but that's not what you
want, if he's only to open a door for you.  Depend upon it he's a safe
one, Bill.'

'I know he is,' rejoined Fagin.  'He's been in good training these last
few weeks, and it's time he began to work for his bread.  Besides, the
others are all too big.'

'Well, he is just the size I want,' said Mr. Sikes, ruminating.

'And will do everything you want, Bill, my dear,' interposed the Jew;
'he can't help himself.  That is, if you frighten him enough.'

'Frighten him!' echoed Sikes.  'It'll be no sham frightening, mind you.
If there's anything queer about him when we once get into the work; in
for a penny, in for a pound.  You won't see him alive again, Fagin.
Think of that, before you send him.  Mark my words!' said the robber,
poising a crowbar, which he had drawn from under the bedstead.

'I've thought of it all,' said the Jew with energy. 'I've--I've had my
eye upon him, my dears, close--close. Once let him feel that he is one
of us; once fill his mind with the idea that he has been a thief; and
he's ours!  Ours for his life.  Oho!  It couldn't have come about
better!  The old man crossed his arms upon his breast; and, drawing his
head and shoulders into a heap, literally hugged himself for joy.

'Ours!' said Sikes.  'Yours, you mean.'

'Perhaps I do, my dear,' said the Jew, with a shrill chuckle. 'Mine, if
you like, Bill.'

'And wot,' said Sikes, scowling fiercely on his agreeable friend, 'wot
makes you take so much pains about one chalk-faced kid, when you know
there are fifty boys snoozing about Common Garden every night, as you
might pick and choose from?'

'Because they're of no use to me, my dear,' replied the Jew, with some
confusion, 'not worth the taking.  Their looks convict 'em when they
get into trouble, and I lose 'em all.  With this boy, properly managed,
my dears, I could do what I couldn't with twenty of them.  Besides,'
said the Jew, recovering his self-possession, 'he has us now if he
could only give us leg-bail again; and he must be in the same boat with
us.  Never mind how he came there; it's quite enough for my power over
him that he was in a robbery; that's all I want.  Now, how much better
this is, than being obliged to put the poor leetle boy out of the
way--which would be dangerous, and we should lose by it besides.'

'When is it to be done?' asked Nancy, stopping some turbulent
exclamation on the part of Mr. Sikes, expressive of the disgust with
which he received Fagin's affectation of humanity.

'Ah, to be sure,' said the Jew; 'when is it to be done, Bill?'

'I planned with Toby, the night arter to-morrow,' rejoined Sikes in a
surly voice, 'if he heerd nothing from me to the contrairy.'

'Good,' said the Jew; 'there's no moon.'

'No,' rejoined Sikes.

'It's all arranged about bringing off the swag, is it?' asked the Jew.

Sikes nodded.

'And about--'

'Oh, ah, it's all planned,' rejoined Sikes, interrupting him. 'Never
mind particulars.  You'd better bring the boy here to-morrow night.  I
shall get off the stone an hour arter daybreak.  Then you hold your
tongue, and keep the melting-pot ready, and that's all you'll have to
do.'

After some discussion, in which all three took an active part, it was
decided that Nancy should repair to the Jew's next evening when the
night had set in, and bring Oliver away with her; Fagin craftily
observing, that, if he evinced any disinclination to the task, he would
be more willing to accompany the girl who had so recently interfered in
his behalf, than anybody else.  It was also solemnly arranged that poor
Oliver should, for the purposes of the contemplated expedition, be
unreservedly consigned to the care and custody of Mr. William Sikes;
and further, that the said Sikes should deal with him as he thought
fit; and should not be held responsible by the Jew for any mischance or
evil that might be necessary to visit him: it being understood that, to
render the compact in this respect binding, any representations made by
Mr. Sikes on his return should be required to be confirmed and
corroborated, in all important particulars, by the testimony of flash
Toby Crackit.

These preliminaries adjusted, Mr. Sikes proceeded to drink brandy at a
furious rate, and to flourish the crowbar in an alarming manner;
yelling forth, at the same time, most unmusical snatches of song,
mingled with wild execrations.  At length, in a fit of professional
enthusiasm, he insisted upon producing his box of housebreaking tools:
which he had no sooner stumbled in with, and opened for the purpose of
explaining the nature and properties of the various implements it
contained, and the peculiar beauties of their construction, than he
fell over the box upon the floor, and went to sleep where he fell.

'Good-night, Nancy,' said the Jew, muffling himself up as before.

'Good-night.'

Their eyes met, and the Jew scrutinised her, narrowly.  There was no
flinching about the girl.  She was as true and earnest in the matter as
Toby Crackit himself could be.

The Jew again bade her good-night, and, bestowing a sly kick upon the
prostrate form of Mr. Sikes while her back was turned, groped
downstairs.

'Always the way!' muttered the Jew to himself as he turned homeward.
'The worst of these women is, that a very little thing serves to call
up some long-forgotten feeling; and, the best of them is, that it never
lasts.  Ha! ha!  The man against the child, for a bag of gold!'

Beguiling the time with these pleasant reflections, Mr. Fagin wended
his way, through mud and mire, to his gloomy abode:  where the Dodger
was sitting up, impatiently awaiting his return.

'Is Oliver a-bed?  I want to speak to him,' was his first remark as
they descended the stairs.

'Hours ago,' replied the Dodger, throwing open a door.  'Here he is!'

The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale
with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he
looked like death; not death as it shows in shroud and coffin, but in
the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle
spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven, and the gross air of the
world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed.

'Not now,' said the Jew, turning softly away.  'To-morrow. To-morrow.'



CHAPTER XX

WHEREIN OLIVER IS DELIVERED OVER TO MR. WILLIAM SIKES

When Oliver awoke in the morning, he was a good deal surprised to find
that a new pair of shoes, with strong thick soles, had been placed at
his bedside; and that his old shoes had been removed. At first, he was
pleased with the discovery: hoping that it might be the forerunner of
his release; but such thoughts were quickly dispelled, on his sitting
down to breakfast along with the Jew, who told him, in a tone and
manner which increased his alarm, that he was to be taken to the
residence of Bill Sikes that night.

'To--to--stop there, sir?' asked Oliver, anxiously.

'No, no, my dear.  Not to stop there,' replied the Jew.  'We shouldn't
like to lose you.  Don't be afraid, Oliver, you shall come back to us
again.  Ha! ha! ha!  We won't be so cruel as to send you away, my dear.
Oh no, no!'

The old man, who was stooping over the fire toasting a piece of bread,
looked round as he bantered Oliver thus; and chuckled as if to show
that he knew he would still be very glad to get away if he could.

'I suppose,' said the Jew, fixing his eyes on Oliver, 'you want to know
what you're going to Bill's for---eh, my dear?'

Oliver coloured, involuntarily, to find that the old thief had been
reading his thoughts; but boldly said, Yes, he did want to know.

'Why, do you think?' inquired Fagin, parrying the question.

'Indeed I don't know, sir,' replied Oliver.

'Bah!' said the Jew, turning away with a disappointed countenance from
a close perusal of the boy's face.  'Wait till Bill tells you, then.'

The Jew seemed much vexed by Oliver's not expressing any greater
curiosity on the subject; but the truth is, that, although Oliver felt
very anxious, he was too much confused by the earnest cunning of
Fagin's looks, and his own speculations, to make any further inquiries
just then.  He had no other opportunity:  for the Jew remained very
surly and silent till night:  when he prepared to go abroad.

'You may burn a candle,' said the Jew, putting one upon the table.
'And here's a book for you to read, till they come to fetch you.
Good-night!'

'Good-night!' replied Oliver, softly.

The Jew walked to the door: looking over his shoulder at the boy as he
went.  Suddenly stopping, he called him by his name.

Oliver looked up; the Jew, pointing to the candle, motioned him to
light it.  He did so; and, as he placed the candlestick upon the table,
saw that the Jew was gazing fixedly at him, with lowering and
contracted brows, from the dark end of the room.

'Take heed, Oliver! take heed!' said the old man, shaking his right
hand before him in a warning manner.  'He's a rough man, and thinks
nothing of blood when his own is up. Whatever falls out, say nothing;
and do what he bids you.  Mind!'  Placing a strong emphasis on the last
word, he suffered his features gradually to resolve themselves into a
ghastly grin, and, nodding his head, left the room.

Oliver leaned his head upon his hand when the old man disappeared, and
pondered, with a trembling heart, on the words he had just heard.  The
more he thought of the Jew's admonition, the more he was at a loss to
divine its real purpose and meaning.

He could think of no bad object to be attained by sending him to Sikes,
which would not be equally well answered by his remaining with Fagin;
and after meditating for a long time, concluded that he had been
selected to perform some ordinary menial offices for the housebreaker,
until another boy, better suited for his purpose could be engaged.  He
was too well accustomed to suffering, and had suffered too much where
he was, to bewail the prospect of change very severely.  He remained
lost in thought for some minutes; and then, with a heavy sigh, snuffed
the candle, and, taking up the book which the Jew had left with him,
began to read.

He turned over the leaves.  Carelessly at first; but, lighting on a
passage which attracted his attention, he soon became intent upon the
volume.  It was a history of the lives and trials of great criminals;
and the pages were soiled and thumbed with use. Here, he read of
dreadful crimes that made the blood run cold; of secret murders that
had been committed by the lonely wayside; of bodies hidden from the eye
of man in deep pits and wells: which would not keep them down, deep as
they were, but had yielded them up at last, after many years, and so
maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had
confessed their guilt, and yelled for the gibbet to end their agony.
Here, too, he read of men who, lying in their beds at dead of night,
had been tempted (so they said) and led on, by their own bad thoughts,
to such dreadful bloodshed as it made the flesh creep, and the limbs
quail, to think of.  The terrible descriptions were so real and vivid,
that the sallow pages seemed to turn red with gore; and the words upon
them, to be sounded in his ears, as if they were whispered, in hollow
murmurs, by the spirits of the dead.

In a paroxysm of fear, the boy closed the book, and thrust it from him.
Then, falling upon his knees, he prayed Heaven to spare him from such
deeds; and rather to will that he should die at once, than be reserved
for crimes, so fearful and appalling. By degrees, he grew more calm,
and besought, in a low and broken voice, that he might be rescued from
his present dangers; and that if any aid were to be raised up for a
poor outcast boy who had never known the love of friends or kindred, it
might come to him now, when, desolate and deserted, he stood alone in
the midst of wickedness and guilt.

He had concluded his prayer, but still remained with his head buried in
his hands, when a rustling noise aroused him.

'What's that!' he cried, starting up, and catching sight of a figure
standing by the door.  'Who's there?'

'Me.  Only me,' replied a tremulous voice.

Oliver raised the candle above his head: and looked towards the door.
It was Nancy.

'Put down the light,' said the girl, turning away her head. 'It hurts
my eyes.'

Oliver saw that she was very pale, and gently inquired if she were ill.
The girl threw herself into a chair, with her back towards him:  and
wrung her hands; but made no reply.

'God forgive me!' she cried after a while, 'I never thought of this.'

'Has anything happened?' asked Oliver.  'Can I help you?  I will if I
can.  I will, indeed.'

She rocked herself to and fro; caught her throat; and, uttering a
gurgling sound, gasped for breath.

'Nancy!' cried Oliver, 'What is it?'

The girl beat her hands upon her knees, and her feet upon the ground;
and, suddenly stopping, drew her shawl close round her: and shivered
with cold.

Oliver stirred the fire.  Drawing her chair close to it, she sat there,
for a little time, without speaking; but at length she raised her head,
and looked round.

'I don't know what comes over me sometimes,' said she, affecting to
busy herself in arranging her dress; 'it's this damp dirty room, I
think.  Now, Nolly, dear, are you ready?'

'Am I to go with you?' asked Oliver.

'Yes.  I have come from Bill,' replied the girl.  'You are to go with
me.'

'What for?' asked Oliver, recoiling.

'What for?' echoed the girl, raising her eyes, and averting them again,
the moment they encountered the boy's face.  'Oh!  For no harm.'

'I don't believe it,' said Oliver:  who had watched her closely.

'Have it your own way,' rejoined the girl, affecting to laugh. 'For no
good, then.'

Oliver could see that he had some power over the girl's better
feelings, and, for an instant, thought of appealing to her compassion
for his helpless state.  But, then, the thought darted across his mind
that it was barely eleven o'clock; and that many people were still in
the streets:  of whom surely some might be found to give credence to
his tale.  As the reflection occured to him, he stepped forward:  and
said, somewhat hastily, that he was ready.

Neither his brief consideration, nor its purport, was lost on his
companion.  She eyed him narrowly, while he spoke; and cast upon him a
look of intelligence which sufficiently showed that she guessed what
had been passing in his thoughts.

'Hush!' said the girl, stooping over him, and pointing to the door as
she looked cautiously round.  'You can't help yourself. I have tried
hard for you, but all to no purpose.  You are hedged round and round.
If ever you are to get loose from here, this is not the time.'

Struck by the energy of her manner, Oliver looked up in her face with
great surprise.  She seemed to speak the truth; her countenance was
white and agitated; and she trembled with very earnestness.

'I have saved you from being ill-used once, and I will again, and I do
now,' continued the girl aloud; 'for those who would have fetched you,
if I had not, would have been far more rough than me.  I have promised
for your being quiet and silent; if you are not, you will only do harm
to yourself and me too, and perhaps be my death.  See here!  I have
borne all this for you already, as true as God sees me show it.'

She pointed, hastily, to some livid bruises on her neck and arms; and
continued, with great rapidity:

'Remember this!  And don't let me suffer more for you, just now. If I
could help you, I would; but I have not the power.  They don't mean to
harm you; whatever they make you do, is no fault of yours.  Hush!
Every word from you is a blow for me.  Give me your hand.  Make haste!
Your hand!'

She caught the hand which Oliver instinctively placed in hers, and,
blowing out the light, drew him after her up the stairs. The door was
opened, quickly, by some one shrouded in the darkness, and was as
quickly closed, when they had passed out.  A hackney-cabriolet was in
waiting; with the same vehemence which she had exhibited in addressing
Oliver, the girl pulled him in with her, and drew the curtains close.
The driver wanted no directions, but lashed his horse into full speed,
without the delay of an instant.

The girl still held Oliver fast by the hand, and continued to pour into
his ear, the warnings and assurances she had already imparted.  All was
so quick and hurried, that he had scarcely time to recollect where he
was, or how he came there, when the carriage stopped at the house to
which the Jew's steps had been directed on the previous evening.

For one brief moment, Oliver cast a hurried glance along the empty
street, and a cry for help hung upon his lips.  But the girl's voice
was in his ear, beseeching him in such tones of agony to remember her,
that he had not the heart to utter it. While he hesitated, the
opportunity was gone; he was already in the house, and the door was
shut.

'This way,' said the girl, releasing her hold for the first time.
'Bill!'

'Hallo!' replied Sikes: appearing at the head of the stairs, with a
candle.  'Oh!  That's the time of day.  Come on!'

This was a very strong expression of approbation, an uncommonly hearty
welcome, from a person of Mr. Sikes' temperament.  Nancy, appearing
much gratified thereby, saluted him cordially.

'Bull's-eye's gone home with Tom,' observed Sikes, as he lighted them
up.  'He'd have been in the way.'

'That's right,' rejoined Nancy.

'So you've got the kid,' said Sikes when they had all reached the room:
closing the door as he spoke.

'Yes, here he is,' replied Nancy.

'Did he come quiet?' inquired Sikes.

'Like a lamb,' rejoined Nancy.

'I'm glad to hear it,' said Sikes, looking grimly at Oliver; 'for the
sake of his young carcase:  as would otherways have suffered for it.
Come here, young 'un; and let me read you a lectur', which is as well
got over at once.'

Thus addressing his new pupil, Mr. Sikes pulled off Oliver's cap and
threw it into a corner; and then, taking him by the shoulder, sat
himself down by the table, and stood the boy in front of him.

'Now, first:  do you know wot this is?' inquired Sikes, taking up a
pocket-pistol which lay on the table.

Oliver replied in the affirmative.

'Well, then, look here,' continued Sikes.  'This is powder; that 'ere's
a bullet; and this is a little bit of a old hat for waddin'.'

Oliver murmured his comprehension of the different bodies referred to;
and Mr. Sikes proceeded to load the pistol, with great nicety and
deliberation.

'Now it's loaded,' said Mr. Sikes, when he had finished.

'Yes, I see it is, sir,' replied Oliver.

'Well,' said the robber, grasping Oliver's wrist, and putting the
barrel so close to his temple that they touched; at which moment the
boy could not repress a start; 'if you speak a word when you're out
o'doors with me, except when I speak to you, that loading will be in
your head without notice.  So, if you _do_ make up your mind to speak
without leave, say your prayers first.'

Having bestowed a scowl upon the object of this warning, to increase
its effect, Mr. Sikes continued.

'As near as I know, there isn't anybody as would be asking very
partickler arter you, if you _was_ disposed of; so I needn't take this
devil-and-all of trouble to explain matters to you, if it warn't for
your own good.  D'ye hear me?'

'The short and the long of what you mean,' said Nancy:  speaking very
emphatically, and slightly frowning at Oliver as if to bespeak his
serious attention to her words:  'is, that if you're crossed by him in
this job you have on hand, you'll prevent his ever telling tales
afterwards, by shooting him through the head, and will take your chance
of swinging for it, as you do for a great many other things in the way
of business, every month of your life.'

'That's it!' observed Mr. Sikes, approvingly; 'women can always put
things in fewest words.--Except when it's blowing up; and then they
lengthens it out.  And now that he's thoroughly up to it, let's have
some supper, and get a snooze before starting.'

In pursuance of this request, Nancy quickly laid the cloth;
disappearing for a few minutes, she presently returned with a pot of
porter and a dish of sheep's heads: which gave occasion to several
pleasant witticisms on the part of Mr. Sikes, founded upon the singular
coincidence of 'jemmies' being a can name, common to them, and also to
an ingenious implement much used in his profession.  Indeed, the worthy
gentleman, stimulated perhaps by the immediate prospect of being on
active service, was in great spirits and good humour; in proof whereof,
it may be here remarked, that he humourously drank all the beer at a
draught, and did not utter, on a rough calculation, more than
four-score oaths during the whole progress of the meal.

Supper being ended--it may be easily conceived that Oliver had no great
appetite for it--Mr. Sikes disposed of a couple of glasses of spirits
and water, and threw himself on the bed; ordering Nancy, with many
imprecations in case of failure, to call him at five precisely.  Oliver
stretched himself in his clothes, by command of the same authority, on
a mattress upon the floor; and the girl, mending the fire, sat before
it, in readiness to rouse them at the appointed time.

For a long time Oliver lay awake, thinking it not impossible that Nancy
might seek that opportunity of whispering some further advice; but the
girl sat brooding over the fire, without moving, save now and then to
trim the light.  Weary with watching and anxiety, he at length fell
asleep.

When he awoke, the table was covered with tea-things, and Sikes was
thrusting various articles into the pockets of his great-coat, which
hung over the back of a chair.  Nancy was busily engaged in preparing
breakfast.  It was not yet daylight; for the candle was still burning,
and it was quite dark outside. A sharp rain, too, was beating against
the window-panes; and the sky looked black and cloudy.

'Now, then!' growled Sikes, as Oliver started up; 'half-past five!
Look sharp, or you'll get no breakfast; for it's late as it is.'

Oliver was not long in making his toilet; having taken some breakfast,
he replied to a surly inquiry from Sikes, by saying that he was quite
ready.

Nancy, scarcely looking at the boy, threw him a handkerchief to tie
round his throat; Sikes gave him a large rough cape to button over his
shoulders.  Thus attired, he gave his hand to the robber, who, merely
pausing to show him with a menacing gesture that he had that same
pistol in a side-pocket of his great-coat, clasped it firmly in his,
and, exchanging a farewell with Nancy, led him away.

Oliver turned, for an instant, when they reached the door, in the hope
of meeting a look from the girl.  But she had resumed her old seat in
front of the fire, and sat, perfectly motionless before it.



CHAPTER XXI

THE EXPEDITION

It was a cheerless morning when they got into the street; blowing and
raining hard; and the clouds looking dull and stormy.  The night had
been very wet: large pools of water had collected in the road: and the
kennels were overflowing.  There was a faint glimmering of the coming
day in the sky; but it rather aggravated than relieved the gloom of the
scene:  the sombre light only serving to pale that which the street
lamps afforded, without shedding any warmer or brighter tints upon the
wet house-tops, and dreary streets.  There appeared to be nobody
stirring in that quarter of the town; the windows of the houses were
all closely shut; and the streets through which they passed, were
noiseless and empty.

By the time they had turned into the Bethnal Green Road, the day had
fairly begun to break.  Many of the lamps were already extinguished; a
few country waggons were slowly toiling on, towards London; now and
then, a stage-coach, covered with mud, rattled briskly by: the driver
bestowing, as he passed, an admonitory lash upon the heavy waggoner
who, by keeping on the wrong side of the road, had endangered his
arriving at the office, a quarter of a minute after his time.  The
public-houses, with gas-lights burning inside, were already open.  By
degrees, other shops began to be unclosed, and a few scattered people
were met with.  Then, came straggling groups of labourers going to
their work; then, men and women with fish-baskets on their heads;
donkey-carts laden with vegetables; chaise-carts filled with live-stock
or whole carcasses of meat; milk-women with pails; an unbroken
concourse of people, trudging out with various supplies to the eastern
suburbs of the town.  As they approached the City, the noise and
traffic gradually increased; when they threaded the streets between
Shoreditch and Smithfield, it had swelled into a roar of sound and
bustle.  It was as light as it was likely to be, till night came on
again, and the busy morning of half the London population had begun.

Turning down Sun Street and Crown Street, and crossing Finsbury square,
Mr. Sikes struck, by way of Chiswell Street, into Barbican: thence into
Long Lane, and so into Smithfield; from which latter place arose a
tumult of discordant sounds that filled Oliver Twist with amazement.

It was market-morning.  The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with
filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking
bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest
upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above.  All the pens in the centre
of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into
the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the
gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep.
Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and
vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the
whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of
the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs,
the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides;
the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every
public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and
yelling; the hideous and discordant dim that resounded from every
corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty
figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the
throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite
confounded the senses.

Mr. Sikes, dragging Oliver after him, elbowed his way through the
thickest of the crowd, and bestowed very little attention on the
numerous sights and sounds, which so astonished the boy.  He nodded,
twice or thrice, to a passing friend; and, resisting as many
invitations to take a morning dram, pressed steadily onward, until they
were clear of the turmoil, and had made their way through Hosier Lane
into Holborn.

'Now, young 'un!' said Sikes, looking up at the clock of St. Andrew's
Church, 'hard upon seven! you must step out.  Come, don't lag behind
already, Lazy-legs!'

Mr. Sikes accompanied this speech with a jerk at his little companion's
wrist; Oliver, quickening his pace into a kind of trot between a fast
walk and a run, kept up with the rapid strides of the house-breaker as
well as he could.

They held their course at this rate, until they had passed Hyde Park
corner, and were on their way to Kensington:  when Sikes relaxed his
pace, until an empty cart which was at some little distance behind,
came up.  Seeing 'Hounslow' written on it, he asked the driver with as
much civility as he could assume, if he would give them a lift as far
as Isleworth.

'Jump up,' said the man.  'Is that your boy?'

'Yes; he's my boy,' replied Sikes, looking hard at Oliver, and putting
his hand abstractedly into the pocket where the pistol was.

'Your father walks rather too quick for you, don't he, my man?'
inquired the driver: seeing that Oliver was out of breath.

'Not a bit of it,' replied Sikes, interposing.  'He's used to it.

Here, take hold of my hand, Ned.  In with you!'

Thus addressing Oliver, he helped him into the cart; and the driver,
pointing to a heap of sacks, told him to lie down there, and rest
himself.

As they passed the different mile-stones, Oliver wondered, more and
more, where his companion meant to take him.  Kensington, Hammersmith,
Chiswick, Kew Bridge, Brentford, were all passed; and yet they went on
as steadily as if they had only just begun their journey.  At length,
they came to a public-house called the Coach and Horses; a little way
beyond which, another road appeared to run off.  And here, the cart
stopped.

Sikes dismounted with great precipitation, holding Oliver by the hand
all the while; and lifting him down directly, bestowed a furious look
upon him, and rapped the side-pocket with his fist, in a significant
manner.

'Good-bye, boy,' said the man.

'He's sulky,' replied Sikes, giving him a shake; 'he's sulky.  A young
dog!  Don't mind him.'

'Not I!' rejoined the other, getting into his cart.  'It's a fine day,
after all.'  And he drove away.

Sikes waited until he had fairly gone; and then, telling Oliver he
might look about him if he wanted, once again led him onward on his
journey.

They turned round to the left, a short way past the public-house; and
then, taking a right-hand road, walked on for a long time: passing many
large gardens and gentlemen's houses on both sides of the way, and
stopping for nothing but a little beer, until they reached a town.
Here against the wall of a house, Oliver saw written up in pretty large
letters, 'Hampton.'  They lingered about, in the fields, for some
hours.  At length they came back into the town; and, turning into an
old public-house with a defaced sign-board, ordered some dinner by the
kitchen fire.

The kitchen was an old, low-roofed room; with a great beam across the
middle of the ceiling, and benches, with high backs to them, by the
fire; on which were seated several rough men in smock-frocks, drinking
and smoking.  They took no notice of Oliver; and very little of Sikes;
and, as Sikes took very little notice of them, he and his young comrade
sat in a corner by themselves, without being much troubled by their
company.

They had some cold meat for dinner, and sat so long after it, while Mr.
Sikes indulged himself with three or four pipes, that Oliver began to
feel quite certain they were not going any further.  Being much tired
with the walk, and getting up so early, he dozed a little at first;
then, quite overpowered by fatigue and the fumes of the tobacco, fell
asleep.

It was quite dark when he was awakened by a push from Sikes. Rousing
himself sufficiently to sit up and look about him, he found that worthy
in close fellowship and communication with a labouring man, over a pint
of ale.

'So, you're going on to Lower Halliford, are you?' inquired Sikes.

'Yes, I am,' replied the man, who seemed a little the worse--or better,
as the case might be--for drinking; 'and not slow about it neither.  My
horse hasn't got a load behind him going back, as he had coming up in
the mornin'; and he won't be long a-doing of it.  Here's luck to him.
Ecod! he's a good 'un!'

'Could you give my boy and me a lift as far as there?' demanded Sikes,
pushing the ale towards his new friend.

'If you're going directly, I can,' replied the man, looking out of the
pot.  'Are you going to Halliford?'

'Going on to Shepperton,' replied Sikes.

'I'm your man, as far as I go,' replied the other.  'Is all paid,
Becky?'

'Yes, the other gentleman's paid,' replied the girl.

'I say!' said the man, with tipsy gravity; 'that won't do, you know.'

'Why not?' rejoined Sikes.  'You're a-going to accommodate us, and
wot's to prevent my standing treat for a pint or so, in return?'

The stranger reflected upon this argument, with a very profound face;
having done so, he seized Sikes by the hand:  and declared he was a
real good fellow.  To which Mr. Sikes replied, he was joking; as, if he
had been sober, there would have been strong reason to suppose he was.

After the exchange of a few more compliments, they bade the company
good-night, and went out; the girl gathering up the pots and glasses as
they did so, and lounging out to the door, with her hands full, to see
the party start.

The horse, whose health had been drunk in his absence, was standing
outside:  ready harnessed to the cart.  Oliver and Sikes got in without
any further ceremony; and the man to whom he belonged, having lingered
for a minute or two 'to bear him up,' and to defy the hostler and the
world to produce his equal, mounted also.  Then, the hostler was told
to give the horse his head; and, his head being given him, he made a
very unpleasant use of it:  tossing it into the air with great disdain,
and running into the parlour windows over the way; after performing
those feats, and supporting himself for a short time on his hind-legs,
he started off at great speed, and rattled out of the town right
gallantly.

The night was very dark.  A damp mist rose from the river, and the
marshy ground about; and spread itself over the dreary fields.  It was
piercing cold, too; all was gloomy and black. Not a word was spoken;
for the driver had grown sleepy; and Sikes was in no mood to lead him
into conversation.  Oliver sat huddled together, in a corner of the
cart; bewildered with alarm and apprehension; and figuring strange
objects in the gaunt trees, whose branches waved grimly to and fro, as
if in some fantastic joy at the desolation of the scene.

As they passed Sunbury Church, the clock struck seven.  There was a
light in the ferry-house window opposite:  which streamed across the
road, and threw into more sombre shadow a dark yew-tree with graves
beneath it.  There was a dull sound of falling water not far off; and
the leaves of the old tree stirred gently in the night wind.  It seemed
like quiet music for the repose of the dead.

Sunbury was passed through, and they came again into the lonely road.
Two or three miles more, and the cart stopped.  Sikes alighted, took
Oliver by the hand, and they once again walked on.

They turned into no house at Shepperton, as the weary boy had expected;
but still kept walking on, in mud and darkness, through gloomy lanes
and over cold open wastes, until they came within sight of the lights
of a town at no great distance.  On looking intently forward, Oliver
saw that the water was just below them, and that they were coming to
the foot of a bridge.

Sikes kept straight on, until they were close upon the bridge; then
turned suddenly down a bank upon the left.

'The water!' thought Oliver, turning sick with fear.  'He has brought
me to this lonely place to murder me!'

He was about to throw himself on the ground, and make one struggle for
his young life, when he saw that they stood before a solitary house:
all ruinous and decayed.  There was a window on each side of the
dilapidated entrance; and one story above; but no light was visible.
The house was dark, dismantled: and the all appearance, uninhabited.

Sikes, with Oliver's hand still in his, softly approached the low
porch, and raised the latch.  The door yielded to the pressure, and
they passed in together.



CHAPTER XXII

THE BURGLARY

'Hallo!' cried a loud, hoarse voice, as soon as they set foot in the
passage.

'Don't make such a row,' said Sikes, bolting the door.  'Show a glim,
Toby.'

'Aha! my pal!' cried the same voice.  'A glim, Barney, a glim! Show the
gentleman in, Barney; wake up first, if convenient.'

The speaker appeared to throw a boot-jack, or some such article, at the
person he addressed, to rouse him from his slumbers:  for the noise of
a wooden body, falling violently, was heard; and then an indistinct
muttering, as of a man between sleep and awake.

'Do you hear?' cried the same voice.  'There's Bill Sikes in the
passage with nobody to do the civil to him; and you sleeping there, as
if you took laudanum with your meals, and nothing stronger.  Are you
any fresher now, or do you want the iron candlestick to wake you
thoroughly?'

A pair of slipshod feet shuffled, hastily, across the bare floor of the
room, as this interrogatory was put; and there issued, from a door on
the right hand; first, a feeble candle:  and next, the form of the same
individual who has been heretofore described as labouring under the
infirmity of speaking through his nose, and officiating as waiter at
the public-house on Saffron Hill.

'Bister Sikes!' exclaimed Barney, with real or counterfeit joy; 'cub
id, sir; cub id.'

'Here! you get on first,' said Sikes, putting Oliver in front of him.
'Quicker! or I shall tread upon your heels.'

Muttering a curse upon his tardiness, Sikes pushed Oliver before him;
and they entered a low dark room with a smoky fire, two or three broken
chairs, a table, and a very old couch:  on which, with his legs much
higher than his head, a man was reposing at full length, smoking a long
clay pipe.  He was dressed in a smartly-cut snuff-coloured coat, with
large brass buttons; an orange neckerchief; a coarse, staring,
shawl-pattern waistcoat; and drab breeches.  Mr. Crackit (for he it
was) had no very great quantity of hair, either upon his head or face;
but what he had, was of a reddish dye, and tortured into long corkscrew
curls, through which he occasionally thrust some very dirty fingers,
ornamented with large common rings.  He was a trifle above the middle
size, and apparently rather weak in the legs; but this circumstance by
no means detracted from his own admiration of his top-boots, which he
contemplated, in their elevated situation, with lively satisfaction.

'Bill, my boy!' said this figure, turning his head towards the door,
'I'm glad to see you.  I was almost afraid you'd given it up:  in which
case I should have made a personal wentur.  Hallo!'

Uttering this exclamation in a tone of great surprise, as his eyes
rested on Oliver, Mr. Toby Crackit brought himself into a sitting
posture, and demanded who that was.

'The boy.  Only the boy!' replied Sikes, drawing a chair towards the
fire.

'Wud of Bister Fagid's lads,' exclaimed Barney, with a grin.

'Fagin's, eh!' exclaimed Toby, looking at Oliver.  'Wot an inwalable
boy that'll make, for the old ladies' pockets in chapels!  His mug is a
fortin' to him.'

'There--there's enough of that,' interposed Sikes, impatiently; and
stooping over his recumbant friend, he whispered a few words in his
ear:  at which Mr. Crackit laughed immensely, and honoured Oliver with
a long stare of astonishment.

'Now,' said Sikes, as he resumed his seat, 'if you'll give us something
to eat and drink while we're waiting, you'll put some heart in us; or
in me, at all events.  Sit down by the fire, younker, and rest
yourself; for you'll have to go out with us again to-night, though not
very far off.'

Oliver looked at Sikes, in mute and timid wonder; and drawing a stool
to the fire, sat with his aching head upon his hands, scarecely knowing
where he was, or what was passing around him.

'Here,' said Toby, as the young Jew placed some fragments of food, and
a bottle upon the table,  'Success to the crack!'  He rose to honour
the toast; and, carefully depositing his empty pipe in a corner,
advanced to the table, filled a glass with spirits, and drank off its
contents.  Mr. Sikes did the same.

'A drain for the boy,' said Toby, half-filling a wine-glass. 'Down with
it, innocence.'

'Indeed,' said Oliver, looking piteously up into the man's face;
'indeed, I--'

'Down with it!' echoed Toby.  'Do you think I don't know what's good
for you?  Tell him to drink it, Bill.'

'He had better!' said Sikes clapping his hand upon his pocket. 'Burn my
body, if he isn't more trouble than a whole family of Dodgers.  Drink
it, you perwerse imp; drink it!'

Frightened by the menacing gestures of the two men, Oliver hastily
swallowed the contents of the glass, and immediately fell into a
violent fit of coughing:  which delighted Toby Crackit and Barney, and
even drew a smile from the surly Mr. Sikes.

This done, and Sikes having satisfied his appetite (Oliver could eat
nothing but a small crust of bread which they made him swallow), the
two men laid themselves down on chairs for a short nap.  Oliver
retained his stool by the fire; Barney wrapped in a blanket, stretched
himself on the floor:  close outside the fender.

They slept, or appeared to sleep, for some time; nobody stirring but
Barney, who rose once or twice to throw coals on the fire. Oliver fell
into a heavy doze:  imagining himself straying along the gloomy lanes,
or wandering about the dark churchyard, or retracing some one or other
of the scenes of the past day:  when he was roused by Toby Crackit
jumping up and declaring it was half-past one.

In an instant, the other two were on their legs, and all were actively
engaged in busy preparation.  Sikes and his companion enveloped their
necks and chins in large dark shawls, and drew on their great-coats;
Barney, opening a cupboard, brought forth several articles, which he
hastily crammed into the pockets.

'Barkers for me, Barney,' said Toby Crackit.

'Here they are,' replied Barney, producing a pair of pistols. 'You
loaded them yourself.'

'All right!' replied Toby, stowing them away.  'The persuaders?'

'I've got 'em,' replied Sikes.

'Crape, keys, centre-bits, darkies--nothing forgotten?' inquired Toby:
fastening a small crowbar to a loop inside the skirt of his coat.

'All right,' rejoined his companion.  'Bring them bits of timber,
Barney.  That's the time of day.'

With these words, he took a thick stick from Barney's hands, who,
having delivered another to Toby, busied himself in fastening on
Oliver's cape.

'Now then!' said Sikes, holding out his hand.

Oliver:  who was completely stupified by the unwonted exercise, and the
air, and the drink which had been forced upon him:  put his hand
mechanically into that which Sikes extended for the purpose.

'Take his other hand, Toby,' said Sikes.  'Look out, Barney.'

The man went to the door, and returned to announce that all was quiet.
The two robbers issued forth with Oliver between them. Barney, having
made all fast, rolled himself up as before, and was soon asleep again.

It was now intensely dark.  The fog was much heavier than it had been
in the early part of the night; and the atmosphere was so damp, that,
although no rain fell, Oliver's hair and eyebrows, within a few minutes
after leaving the house, had become stiff with the half-frozen moisture
that was floating about.  They crossed the bridge, and kept on towards
the lights which he had seen before.  They were at no great distance
off; and, as they walked pretty briskly, they soon arrived at Chertsey.

'Slap through the town,' whispered Sikes; 'there'll be nobody in the
way, to-night, to see us.'

Toby acquiesced; and they hurried through the main street of the little
town, which at that late hour was wholly deserted.  A dim light shone
at intervals from some bed-room window; and the hoarse barking of dogs
occasionally broke the silence of the night.  But there was nobody
abroad.  They had cleared the town, as the church-bell struck two.

Quickening their pace, they turned up a road upon the left hand. After
walking about a quarter of a mile, they stopped before a detached house
surrounded by a wall:  to the top of which, Toby Crackit, scarcely
pausing to take breath, climbed in a twinkling.

'The boy next,' said Toby.  'Hoist him up; I'll catch hold of him.'

Before Oliver had time to look round, Sikes had caught him under the
arms; and in three or four seconds he and Toby were lying on the grass
on the other side.  Sikes followed directly.  And they stole cautiously
towards the house.

And now, for the first time, Oliver, well-nigh mad with grief and
terror, saw that housebreaking and robbery, if not murder, were the
objects of the expedition.  He clasped his hands together, and
involuntarily uttered a subdued exclamation of horror.  A mist came
before his eyes; the cold sweat stood upon his ashy face; his limbs
failed him; and he sank upon his knees.

'Get up!' murmured Sikes, trembling with rage, and drawing the pistol
from his pocket; 'Get up, or I'll strew your brains upon the grass.'

'Oh! for God's sake let me go!' cried Oliver; 'let me run away and die
in the fields.  I will never come near London; never, never!  Oh! pray
have mercy on me, and do not make me steal.  For the love of all the
bright Angels that rest in Heaven, have mercy upon me!'

The man to whom this appeal was made, swore a dreadful oath, and had
cocked the pistol, when Toby, striking it from his grasp, placed his
hand upon the boy's mouth, and dragged him to the house.

'Hush!' cried the man; 'it won't answer here.  Say another word, and
I'll do your business myself with a crack on the head.  That makes no
noise, and is quite as certain, and more genteel.  Here, Bill, wrench
the shutter open.  He's game enough now, I'll engage.  I've seen older
hands of his age took the same way, for a minute or two, on a cold
night.'

Sikes, invoking terrific imprecations upon Fagin's head for sending
Oliver on such an errand, plied the crowbar vigorously, but with little
noise.  After some delay, and some assistance from Toby, the shutter to
which he had referred, swung open on its hinges.

It was a little lattice window, about five feet and a half above the
ground, at the back of the house:  which belonged to a scullery, or
small brewing-place, at the end of the passage.  The aperture was so
small, that the inmates had probably not thought it worth while to
defend it more securely; but it was large enough to admit a boy of
Oliver's size, nevertheless.  A very brief exercise of Mr. Sike's art,
sufficed to overcome the fastening of the lattice; and it soon stood
wide open also.

'Now listen, you young limb,' whispered Sikes, drawing a dark lantern
from his pocket, and throwing the glare full on Oliver's face; 'I'm a
going to put you through there.  Take this light; go softly up the
steps straight afore you, and along the little hall, to the street
door; unfasten it, and let us in.'

'There's a bolt at the top, you won't be able to reach,' interposed
Toby. 'Stand upon one of the hall chairs.  There are three there, Bill,
with a jolly large blue unicorn and gold pitchfork on 'em:  which is
the old lady's arms.'

'Keep quiet, can't you?' replied Sikes, with a threatening look. 'The
room-door is open, is it?'

'Wide,' replied Toby, after peeping in to satisfy himself. 'The game of
that is, that they always leave it open with a catch, so that the dog,
who's got a bed in here, may walk up and down the passage when he feels
wakeful.  Ha! ha! Barney 'ticed him away to-night.  So neat!'

Although Mr. Crackit spoke in a scarcely audible whisper, and laughed
without noise, Sikes imperiously commanded him to be silent, and to get
to work.  Toby complied, by first producing his lantern, and placing it
on the ground; then by planting himself firmly with his head against
the wall beneath the window, and his hands upon his knees, so as to
make a step of his back. This was no sooner done, than Sikes, mounting
upon him, put Oliver gently through the window with his feet first;
and, without leaving hold of his collar, planted him safely on the
floor inside.

'Take this lantern,' said Sikes, looking into the room.  'You see the
stairs afore you?'

Oliver, more dead than alive, gasped out, 'Yes.'  Sikes, pointing to
the street-door with the pistol-barrel, briefly advised him to take
notice that he was within shot all the way; and that if he faltered, he
would fall dead that instant.

'It's done in a minute,' said Sikes, in the same low whisper. 'Directly
I leave go of you, do your work.  Hark!'

'What's that?' whispered the other man.

They listened intently.

'Nothing,' said Sikes, releasing his hold of Oliver.  'Now!'

In the short time he had had to collect his senses, the boy had firmly
resolved that, whether he died in the attempt or not, he would make one
effort to dart upstairs from the hall, and alarm the family.  Filled
with this idea, he advanced at once, but stealthily.

'Come back!' suddenly cried Sikes aloud.  'Back! back!'

Scared by the sudden breaking of the dead stillness of the place, and
by a loud cry which followed it, Oliver let his lantern fall, and knew
not whether to advance or fly.

The cry was repeated--a light appeared--a vision of two terrified
half-dressed men at the top of the stairs swam before his eyes--a
flash--a loud noise--a smoke--a crash somewhere, but where he knew
not,--and he staggered back.

Sikes had disappeared for an instant; but he was up again, and had him
by the collar before the smoke had cleared away.  He fired his own
pistol after the men, who were already retreating; and dragged the boy
up.

'Clasp your arm tighter,' said Sikes, as he drew him through the
window.  'Give me a shawl here.  They've hit him.  Quick!  How the boy
bleeds!'

Then came the loud ringing of a bell, mingled with the noise of
fire-arms, and the shouts of men, and the sensation of being carried
over uneven ground at a rapid pace.  And then, the noises grew confused
in the distance; and a cold deadly feeling crept over the boy's heart;
and he saw or heard no more.



CHAPTER XXIII

WHICH CONTAINS THE SUBSTANCE OF A PLEASANT CONVERSATION BETWEEN MR.
BUMBLE AND A LADY; AND SHOWS THAT EVEN A BEADLE MAY BE SUSCEPTIBLE ON
SOME POINTS

The night was bitter cold.  The snow lay on the ground, frozen into a
hard thick crust, so that only the heaps that had drifted into byways
and corners were affected by the sharp wind that howled abroad:  which,
as if expending increased fury on such prey as it found, caught it
savagely up in clouds, and, whirling it into a thousand misty eddies,
scattered it in air.  Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night
for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire and thank God
they were at home; and for the homeless, starving wretch to lay him
down and die.  Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare
streets, at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may,
can hardly open them in a more bitter world.

Such was the aspect of out-of-doors affairs, when Mrs. Corney, the
matron of the workhouse to which our readers have been already
introduced as the birthplace of Oliver Twist, sat herself down before a
cheerful fire in her own little room, and glanced, with no small degree
of complacency, at a small round table:  on which stood a tray of
corresponding size, furnished with all necessary materials for the most
grateful meal that matrons enjoy.  In fact, Mrs. Corney was about to
solace herself with a cup of tea. As she glanced from the table to the
fireplace, where the smallest of all possible kettles was singing a
small song in a small voice, her inward satisfaction evidently
increased,--so much so, indeed, that Mrs. Corney smiled.

'Well!' said the matron, leaning her elbow on the table, and looking
reflectively at the fire; 'I'm sure we have all on us a great deal to
be grateful for!  A great deal, if we did but know it.  Ah!'

Mrs. Corney shook her head mournfully, as if deploring the mental
blindness of those paupers who did not know it; and thrusting a silver
spoon (private property) into the inmost recesses of a two-ounce tin
tea-caddy, proceeded to make the tea.

How slight a thing will disturb the equanimity of our frail minds!  The
black teapot, being very small and easily filled, ran over while Mrs.
Corney was moralising; and the water slightly scalded Mrs. Corney's
hand.

'Drat the pot!' said the worthy matron, setting it down very hastily on
the hob; 'a little stupid thing, that only holds a couple of cups!
What use is it of, to anybody!  Except,' said Mrs. Corney, pausing,
'except to a poor desolate creature like me.  Oh dear!'

With these words, the matron dropped into her chair, and, once more
resting her elbow on the table, thought of her solitary fate.  The
small teapot, and the single cup, had awakened in her mind sad
recollections of Mr. Corney (who had not been dead more than
five-and-twenty years); and she was overpowered.

'I shall never get another!' said Mrs. Corney, pettishly; 'I shall
never get another--like him.'

Whether this remark bore reference to the husband, or the teapot, is
uncertain.  It might have been the latter; for Mrs. Corney looked at it
as she spoke; and took it up afterwards.  She had just tasted her first
cup, when she was disturbed by a soft tap at the room-door.

'Oh, come in with you!' said Mrs. Corney, sharply.  'Some of the old
women dying, I suppose.  They always die when I'm at meals. Don't stand
there, letting the cold air in, don't.  What's amiss now, eh?'

'Nothing, ma'am, nothing,' replied a man's voice.

'Dear me!' exclaimed the matron, in a much sweeter tone, 'is that Mr.
Bumble?'

'At your service, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble, who had been stopping
outside to rub his shoes clean, and to shake the snow off his coat; and
who now made his appearance, bearing the cocked hat in one hand and a
bundle in the other.  'Shall I shut the door, ma'am?'

The lady modestly hesitated to reply, lest there should be any
impropriety in holding an interview with Mr. Bumble, with closed doors.
Mr. Bumble taking advantage of the hesitation, and being very cold
himself, shut it without permission.

'Hard weather, Mr. Bumble,' said the matron.

'Hard, indeed, ma'am,' replied the beadle.  'Anti-porochial weather
this, ma'am.  We have given away, Mrs. Corney, we have given away a
matter of twenty quartern loaves and a cheese and a half, this very
blessed afternoon; and yet them paupers are not contented.'

'Of course not.  When would they be, Mr. Bumble?' said the matron,
sipping her tea.

'When, indeed, ma'am!' rejoined Mr. Bumble.  'Why here's one man that,
in consideration of his wife and large family, has a quartern loaf and
a good pound of cheese, full weight.  Is he grateful, ma'am?  Is he
grateful?  Not a copper farthing's worth of it!  What does he do,
ma'am, but ask for a few coals; if it's only a pocket handkerchief
full, he says!  Coals! What would he do with coals?  Toast his cheese
with 'em and then come back for more.  That's the way with these
people, ma'am; give 'em a apron full of coals to-day, and they'll come
back for another, the day after to-morrow, as brazen as alabaster.'

The matron expressed her entire concurrence in this intelligible
simile; and the beadle went on.

'I never,' said Mr. Bumble, 'see anything like the pitch it's got to.
The day afore yesterday, a man--you have been a married woman, ma'am,
and I may mention it to you--a man, with hardly a rag upon his back
(here Mrs. Corney looked at the floor), goes to our overseer's door
when he has got company coming to dinner; and says, he must be
relieved, Mrs. Corney.  As he wouldn't go away, and shocked the company
very much, our overseer sent him out a pound of potatoes and half a
pint of oatmeal.  "My heart!" says the ungrateful villain, "what's the
use of _this_ to me?  You might as well give me a pair of iron
spectacles!"  "Very good," says our overseer, taking 'em away again,
"you won't get anything else here."  "Then I'll die in the streets!"
says the vagrant.  "Oh no, you won't," says our overseer.'

'Ha! ha!  That was very good!  So like Mr. Grannett, wasn't it?'
interposed the matron.  'Well, Mr. Bumble?'

'Well, ma'am,' rejoined the beadle, 'he went away; and he _did_ die in
the streets.  There's a obstinate pauper for you!'

'It beats anything I could have believed,' observed the matron
emphatically.  'But don't you think out-of-door relief a very bad
thing, any way, Mr. Bumble?  You're a gentleman of experience, and
ought to know.  Come.'

'Mrs. Corney,' said the beadle, smiling as men smile who are conscious
of superior information, 'out-of-door relief, properly managed:
properly managed, ma'am: is the porochial safeguard.  The great
principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what
they don't want; and then they get tired of coming.'

'Dear me!' exclaimed Mrs. Corney.  'Well, that is a good one, too!'

'Yes.  Betwixt you and me, ma'am,' returned Mr. Bumble, 'that's the
great principle; and that's the reason why, if you look at any cases
that get into them owdacious newspapers, you'll always observe that
sick families have been relieved with slices of cheese.  That's the
rule now, Mrs. Corney, all over the country. But, however,' said the
beadle, stopping to unpack his bundle, 'these are official secrets,
ma'am; not to be spoken of; except, as I may say, among the porochial
officers, such as ourselves. This is the port wine, ma'am, that the
board ordered for the infirmary; real, fresh, genuine port wine; only
out of the cask this forenoon; clear as a bell, and no sediment!'

Having held the first bottle up to the light, and shaken it well to
test its excellence, Mr. Bumble placed them both on top of a chest of
drawers; folded the handkerchief in which they had been wrapped; put it
carefully in his pocket; and took up his hat, as if to go.

'You'll have a very cold walk, Mr. Bumble,' said the matron.

'It blows, ma'am,' replied Mr. Bumble, turning up his coat-collar,
'enough to cut one's ears off.'

The matron looked, from the little kettle, to the beadle, who was
moving towards the door; and as the beadle coughed, preparatory to
bidding her good-night, bashfully inquired whether--whether he wouldn't
take a cup of tea?

Mr. Bumble instantaneously turned back his collar again; laid his hat
and stick upon a chair; and drew another chair up to the table.  As he
slowly seated himself, he looked at the lady.  She fixed her eyes upon
the little teapot.  Mr. Bumble coughed again, and slightly smiled.

Mrs. Corney rose to get another cup and saucer from the closet. As she
sat down, her eyes once again encountered those of the gallant beadle;
she coloured, and applied herself to the task of making his tea.  Again
Mr. Bumble coughed--louder this time than he had coughed yet.

'Sweet?  Mr. Bumble?' inquired the matron, taking up the sugar-basin.

'Very sweet, indeed, ma'am,' replied Mr. Bumble.  He fixed his eyes on
Mrs. Corney as he said this; and if ever a beadle looked tender, Mr.
Bumble was that beadle at that moment.

The tea was made, and handed in silence.  Mr. Bumble, having spread a
handkerchief over his knees to prevent the crumbs from sullying the
splendour of his shorts, began to eat and drink; varying these
amusements, occasionally, by fetching a deep sigh; which, however, had
no injurious effect upon his appetite, but, on the contrary, rather
seemed to facilitate his operations in the tea and toast department.

'You have a cat, ma'am, I see,' said Mr. Bumble, glancing at one who,
in the centre of her family, was basking before the fire; 'and kittens
too, I declare!'

'I am so fond of them, Mr. Bumble, you can't think,' replied the
matron.  'They're _so_ happy, _so_ frolicsome, and _so_ cheerful, that
they are quite companions for me.'

'Very nice animals, ma'am,' replied Mr. Bumble, approvingly; 'so very
domestic.'

'Oh, yes!' rejoined the matron with enthusiasm; 'so fond of their home
too, that it's quite a pleasure, I'm sure.'

'Mrs. Corney, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble, slowly, and marking the time
with his teaspoon, 'I mean to say this, ma'am; that any cat, or kitten,
that could live with you, ma'am, and _not_ be fond of its home, must be
a ass, ma'am.'

'Oh, Mr. Bumble!' remonstrated Mrs. Corney.

'It's of no use disguising facts, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble, slowly
flourishing the teaspoon with a kind of amorous dignity which made him
doubly impressive; 'I would drown it myself, with pleasure.'

'Then you're a cruel man,' said the matron vivaciously, as she held out
her hand for the beadle's cup; 'and a very hard-hearted man besides.'

'Hard-hearted, ma'am?' said Mr. Bumble.  'Hard?'  Mr. Bumble resigned
his cup without another word; squeezed Mrs. Corney's little finger as
she took it; and inflicting two open-handed slaps upon his laced
waistcoat, gave a mighty sigh, and hitched his chair a very little
morsel farther from the fire.

It was a round table; and as Mrs. Corney and Mr. Bumble had been
sitting opposite each other, with no great space between them, and
fronting the fire, it will be seen that Mr. Bumble, in receding from
the fire, and still keeping at the table, increased the distance
between himself and Mrs. Corney; which proceeding, some prudent readers
will doubtless be disposed to admire, and to consider an act of great
heroism on Mr. Bumble's part:  he being in some sort tempted by time,
place, and opportunity, to give utterance to certain soft nothings,
which however well they may become the lips of the light and
thoughtless, do seem immeasurably beneath the dignity of judges of the
land, members of parliament, ministers of state, lord mayors, and other
great public functionaries, but more particularly beneath the
stateliness and gravity of a beadle:  who (as is well known) should be
the sternest and most inflexible among them all.

Whatever were Mr. Bumble's intentions, however (and no doubt they were
of the best): it unfortunately happened, as has been twice before
remarked, that the table was a round one; consequently Mr. Bumble,
moving his chair by little and little, soon began to diminish the
distance between himself and the matron; and, continuing to travel
round the outer edge of the circle, brought his chair, in time, close
to that in which the matron was seated.

Indeed, the two chairs touched; and when they did so, Mr. Bumble
stopped.

Now, if the matron had moved her chair to the right, she would have
been scorched by the fire; and if to the left, she must have fallen
into Mr. Bumble's arms; so (being a discreet matron, and no doubt
foreseeing these consequences at a glance) she remained where she was,
and handed Mr. Bumble another cup of tea.

'Hard-hearted, Mrs. Corney?' said Mr. Bumble, stirring his tea, and
looking up into the matron's face; 'are _you_ hard-hearted, Mrs.
Corney?'

'Dear me!' exclaimed the matron, 'what a very curious question from a
single man.  What can you want to know for, Mr. Bumble?'

The beadle drank his tea to the last drop; finished a piece of toast;
whisked the crumbs off his knees; wiped his lips; and deliberately
kissed the matron.

'Mr. Bumble!' cried that discreet lady in a whisper; for the fright was
so great, that she had quite lost her voice, 'Mr. Bumble, I shall
scream!'  Mr. Bumble made no reply; but in a slow and dignified manner,
put his arm round the matron's waist.

As the lady had stated her intention of screaming, of course she would
have screamed at this additional boldness, but that the exertion was
rendered unnecessary by a hasty knocking at the door:  which was no
sooner heard, than Mr. Bumble darted, with much agility, to the wine
bottles, and began dusting them with great violence:  while the matron
sharply demanded who was there.

It is worthy of remark, as a curious physical instance of the efficacy
of a sudden surprise in counteracting the effects of extreme fear, that
her voice had quite recovered all its official asperity.

'If you please, mistress,' said a withered old female pauper, hideously
ugly:  putting her head in at the door, 'Old Sally is a-going fast.'

'Well, what's that to me?' angrily demanded the matron.  'I can't keep
her alive, can I?'

'No, no, mistress,' replied the old woman, 'nobody can; she's far
beyond the reach of help.  I've seen a many people die; little babes
and great strong men; and I know when death's a-coming, well enough.
But she's troubled in her mind: and when the fits are not on her,--and
that's not often, for she is dying very hard,--she says she has got
something to tell, which you must hear.  She'll never die quiet till
you come, mistress.'

At this intelligence, the worthy Mrs. Corney muttered a variety of
invectives against old women who couldn't even die without purposely
annoying their betters; and, muffling herself in a thick shawl which
she hastily caught up, briefly requested Mr. Bumble to stay till she
came back, lest anything particular should occur.  Bidding the
messenger walk fast, and not be all night hobbling up the stairs, she
followed her from the room with a very ill grace, scolding all the way.

Mr. Bumble's conduct on being left to himself, was rather inexplicable.
He opened the closet, counted the teaspoons, weighed the sugar-tongs,
closely inspected a silver milk-pot to ascertain that it was of the
genuine metal, and, having satisfied his curiosity on these points, put
on his cocked hat corner-wise, and danced with much gravity four
distinct times round the table.

Having gone through this very extraordinary performance, he took off
the cocked hat again, and, spreading himself before the fire with his
back towards it, seemed to be mentally engaged in taking an exact
inventory of the furniture.



CHAPTER XXIV

TREATS ON A VERY POOR SUBJECT.  BUT IS A SHORT ONE, AND MAY BE FOUND OF
IMPORTANCE IN THIS HISTORY

It was no unfit messenger of death, who had disturbed the quiet of the
matron's room.  Her body was bent by age; her limbs trembled with
palsy; her face, distorted into a mumbling leer, resembled more the
grotesque shaping of some wild pencil, than the work of Nature's hand.

Alas!  How few of Nature's faces are left alone to gladden us with
their beauty!  The cares, and sorrows, and hungerings, of the world,
change them as they change hearts; and it is only when those passions
sleep, and have lost their hold for ever, that the troubled clouds pass
off, and leave Heaven's surface clear.  It is a common thing for the
countenances of the dead, even in that fixed and rigid state, to
subside into the long-forgotten expression of sleeping infancy, and
settle into the very look of early life; so calm, so peaceful, do they
grow again, that those who knew them in their happy childhood, kneel by
the coffin's side in awe, and see the Angel even upon earth.

The old crone tottered along the passages, and up the stairs, muttering
some indistinct answers to the chidings of her companion; being at
length compelled to pause for breath, she gave the light into her hand,
and remained behind to follow as she might: while the more nimble
superior made her way to the room where the sick woman lay.

It was a bare garret-room, with a dim light burning at the farther end.
There was another old woman watching by the bed; the parish
apothecary's apprentice was standing by the fire, making a toothpick
out of a quill.

'Cold night, Mrs. Corney,' said this young gentleman, as the matron
entered.

'Very cold, indeed, sir,' replied the mistress, in her most civil
tones, and dropping a curtsey as she spoke.

'You should get better coals out of your contractors,' said the
apothecary's deputy, breaking a lump on the top of the fire with the
rusty poker; 'these are not at all the sort of thing for a cold night.'

'They're the board's choosing, sir,' returned the matron. 'The least
they could do, would be to keep us pretty warm:  for our places are
hard enough.'

The conversation was here interrupted by a moan from the sick woman.

'Oh!' said the young mag, turning his face towards the bed, as if he
had previously quite forgotten the patient, 'it's all U.P. there, Mrs.
Corney.'

'It is, is it, sir?' asked the matron.

'If she lasts a couple of hours, I shall be surprised,' said the
apothecary's apprentice, intent upon the toothpick's point. 'It's a
break-up of the system altogether.  Is she dozing, old lady?'

The attendant stooped over the bed, to ascertain; and nodded in the
affirmative.

'Then perhaps she'll go off in that way, if you don't make a row,' said
the young man.  'Put the light on the floor.  She won't see it there.'

The attendant did as she was told:  shaking her head meanwhile, to
intimate that the woman would not die so easily; having done so, she
resumed her seat by the side of the other nurse, who had by this time
returned.  The mistress, with an expression of impatience, wrapped
herself in her shawl, and sat at the foot of the bed.

The apothecary's apprentice, having completed the manufacture of the
toothpick, planted himself in front of the fire and made good use of it
for ten minutes or so:  when apparently growing rather dull, he wished
Mrs. Corney joy of her job, and took himself off on tiptoe.

When they had sat in silence for some time, the two old women rose from
the bed, and crouching over the fire, held out their withered hands to
catch the heat.  The flame threw a ghastly light on their shrivelled
faces, and made their ugliness appear terrible, as, in this position,
they began to converse in a low voice.

'Did she say any more, Anny dear, while I was gone?' inquired the
messenger.

'Not a word,' replied the other.  'She plucked and tore at her arms for
a little time; but I held her hands, and she soon dropped off.  She
hasn't much strength in her, so I easily kept her quiet.  I ain't so
weak for an old woman, although I am on parish allowance; no, no!'

'Did she drink the hot wine the doctor said she was to have?' demanded
the first.

'I tried to get it down,' rejoined the other.  'But her teeth were
tight set, and she clenched the mug so hard that it was as much as I
could do to get it back again.  So I drank it; and it did me good!'

Looking cautiously round, to ascertain that they were not overheard,
the two hags cowered nearer to the fire, and chuckled heartily.

'I mind the time,' said the first speaker, 'when she would have done
the same, and made rare fun of it afterwards.'

'Ay, that she would,' rejoined the other; 'she had a merry heart. 'A
many, many, beautiful corpses she laid out, as nice and neat as
waxwork.  My old eyes have seen them--ay, and those old hands touched
them too; for I have helped her, scores of times.'

Stretching forth her trembling fingers as she spoke, the old creature
shook them exultingly before her face, and fumbling in her pocket,
brought out an old time-discoloured tin snuff-box, from which she shook
a few grains into the outstretched palm of her companion, and a few
more into her own.  While they were thus employed, the matron, who had
been impatiently watching until the dying woman should awaken from her
stupor, joined them by the fire, and sharply asked how long she was to
wait?

'Not long, mistress,' replied the second woman, looking up into her
face.  'We have none of us long to wait for Death.  Patience, patience!
He'll be here soon enough for us all.'

'Hold your tongue, you doting idiot!' said the matron sternly. 'You,
Martha, tell me; has she been in this way before?'

'Often,' answered the first woman.

'But will never be again,' added the second one; 'that is, she'll never
wake again but once--and mind, mistress, that won't be for long!'

'Long or short,' said the matron, snappishly, 'she won't find me here
when she does wake; take care, both of you, how you worry me again for
nothing.  It's no part of my duty to see all the old women in the house
die, and I won't--that's more. Mind that, you impudent old harridans.
If you make a fool of me again, I'll soon cure you, I warrant you!'

She was bouncing away, when a cry from the two women, who had turned
towards the bed, caused her to look round.  The patient had raised
herself upright, and was stretching her arms towards them.

'Who's that?' she cried, in a hollow voice.

'Hush, hush!' said one of the women, stooping over her.  'Lie down, lie
down!'

'I'll never lie down again alive!' said the woman, struggling. 'I
_will_ tell her!  Come here!  Nearer!  Let me whisper in your ear.'

She clutched the matron by the arm, and forcing her into a chair by the
bedside, was about to speak, when looking round, she caught sight of
the two old women bending forward in the attitude of eager listeners.

'Turn them away,' said the woman, drowsily; 'make haste! make haste!'

The two old crones, chiming in together, began pouring out many piteous
lamentations that the poor dear was too far gone to know her best
friends; and were uttering sundry protestations that they would never
leave her, when the superior pushed them from the room, closed the
door, and returned to the bedside.  On being excluded, the old ladies
changed their tone, and cried through the keyhole that old Sally was
drunk; which, indeed, was not unlikely; since, in addition to a
moderate dose of opium prescribed by the apothecary, she was labouring
under the effects of a final taste of gin-and-water which had been
privily administered, in the openness of their hearts, by the worthy
old ladies themselves.

'Now listen to me,' said the dying woman aloud, as if making a great
effort to revive one latent spark of energy.  'In this very room--in
this very bed--I once nursed a pretty young creetur', that was brought
into the house with her feet cut and bruised with walking, and all
soiled with dust and blood.  She gave birth to a boy, and died.  Let me
think--what was the year again!'

'Never mind the year,' said the impatient auditor; 'what about her?'

'Ay,' murmured the sick woman, relapsing into her former drowsy state,
'what about her?--what about--I know!' she cried, jumping fiercely up:
her face flushed, and her eyes starting from her head--'I robbed her,
so I did!  She wasn't cold--I tell you she wasn't cold, when I stole
it!'

'Stole what, for God's sake?' cried the matron, with a gesture as if
she would call for help.

'_It_!' replied the woman, laying her hand over the other's mouth. 'The
only thing she had.  She wanted clothes to keep her warm, and food to
eat; but she had kept it safe, and had it in her bosom.  It was gold, I
tell you!  Rich gold, that might have saved her life!'

'Gold!' echoed the matron, bending eagerly over the woman as she fell
back.  'Go on, go on--yes--what of it?  Who was the mother? When was
it?'

'She charged me to keep it safe,' replied the woman with a groan, 'and
trusted me as the only woman about her.  I stole it in my heart when
she first showed it me hanging round her neck; and the child's death,
perhaps, is on me besides!  They would have treated him better, if they
had known it all!'

'Known what?' asked the other.  'Speak!'

'The boy grew so like his mother,' said the woman, rambling on, and not
heeding the question, 'that I could never forget it when I saw his
face.  Poor girl! poor girl!  She was so young, too! Such a gentle
lamb!  Wait; there's more to tell.  I have not told you all, have I?'

'No, no,' replied the matron, inclining her head to catch the words, as
they came more faintly from the dying woman.  'Be quick, or it may be
too late!'

'The mother,' said the woman, making a more violent effort than before;
'the mother, when the pains of death first came upon her, whispered in
my ear that if her baby was born alive, and thrived, the day might come
when it would not feel so much disgraced to hear its poor young mother
named. "And oh, kind Heaven!" she said, folding her thin hands
together, "whether it be boy or girl, raise up some friends for it in
this troubled world, and take pity upon a lonely desolate child,
abandoned to its mercy!"'

'The boy's name?' demanded the matron.

'They _called_ him Oliver,' replied the woman, feebly.  'The gold I
stole was--'

'Yes, yes--what?' cried the other.

She was bending eagerly over the woman to hear her reply; but drew
back, instinctively, as she once again rose, slowly and stiffly, into a
sitting posture; then, clutching the coverlid with both hands, muttered
some indistinct sounds in her throat, and fell lifeless on the bed.

      *      *      *      *      *

'Stone dead!' said one of the old women, hurrying in as soon as the
door was opened.

'And nothing to tell, after all,' rejoined the matron, walking
carelessly away.

The two crones, to all appearance, too busily occupied in the
preparations for their dreadful duties to make any reply, were left
alone, hovering about the body.



CHAPTER XXV

WHEREIN THIS HISTORY REVERTS TO MR. FAGIN AND COMPANY

While these things were passing in the country workhouse, Mr. Fagin sat
in the old den--the same from which Oliver had been removed by the
girl--brooding over a dull, smoky fire.  He held a pair of bellows upon
his knee, with which he had apparently been endeavouring to rouse it
into more cheerful action; but he had fallen into deep thought; and
with his arms folded on them, and his chin resting on his thumbs, fixed
his eyes, abstractedly, on the rusty bars.

At a table behind him sat the Artful Dodger, Master Charles Bates, and
Mr. Chitling: all intent upon a game of whist; the Artful taking dummy
against Master Bates and Mr. Chitling.  The countenance of the
first-named gentleman, peculiarly intelligent at all times, acquired
great additional interest from his close observance of the game, and
his attentive perusal of Mr. Chitling's hand; upon which, from time to
time, as occasion served, he bestowed a variety of earnest glances:
wisely regulating his own play by the result of his observations upon
his neighbour's cards.  It being a cold night, the Dodger wore his hat,
as, indeed, was often his custom within doors.  He also sustained a
clay pipe between his teeth, which he only removed for a brief space
when he deemed it necessary to apply for refreshment to a quart pot
upon the table, which stood ready filled with gin-and-water for the
accommodation of the company.

Master Bates was also attentive to the play; but being of a more
excitable nature than his accomplished friend, it was observable that
he more frequently applied himself to the gin-and-water, and moreover
indulged in many jests and irrelevant remarks, all highly unbecoming a
scientific rubber.  Indeed, the Artful, presuming upon their close
attachment, more than once took occasion to reason gravely with his
companion upon these improprieties; all of which remonstrances, Master
Bates received in extremely good part; merely requesting his friend to
be 'blowed,' or to insert his head in a sack, or replying with some
other neatly-turned witticism of a similar kind, the happy application
of which, excited considerable admiration in the mind of Mr. Chitling.
It was remarkable that the latter gentleman and his partner invariably
lost; and that the circumstance, so far from angering Master Bates,
appeared to afford him the highest amusement, inasmuch as he laughed
most uproariously at the end of every deal, and protested that he had
never seen such a jolly game in all his born days.

'That's two doubles and the rub,' said Mr. Chitling, with a very long
face, as he drew half-a-crown from his waistcoat-pocket.  'I never see
such a feller as you, Jack; you win everything.  Even when we've good
cards, Charley and I can't make nothing of 'em.'

Either the master or the manner of this remark, which was made very
ruefully, delighted Charley Bates so much, that his consequent shout of
laughter roused the Jew from his reverie, and induced him to inquire
what was the matter.

'Matter, Fagin!' cried Charley.  'I wish you had watched the play.
Tommy Chitling hasn't won a point; and I went partners with him against
the Artfull and dumb.'

'Ay, ay!' said the Jew, with a grin, which sufficiently demonstrated
that he was at no loss to understand the reason. 'Try 'em again, Tom;
try 'em again.'

'No more of it for me, thank 'ee, Fagin,' replied Mr. Chitling; 'I've
had enough.  That 'ere Dodger has such a run of luck that there's no
standing again' him.'

'Ha! ha! my dear,' replied the Jew, 'you must get up very early in the
morning, to win against the Dodger.'

'Morning!' said Charley Bates; 'you must put your boots on over-night,
and have a telescope at each eye, and a opera-glass between your
shoulders, if you want to come over him.'

Mr. Dawkins received these handsome compliments with much philosophy,
and offered to cut any gentleman in company, for the first
picture-card, at a shilling at a time.  Nobody accepting the challenge,
and his pipe being by this time smoked out, he proceeded to amuse
himself by sketching a ground-plan of Newgate on the table with the
piece of chalk which had served him in lieu of counters; whistling,
meantime, with peculiar shrillness.

'How precious dull you are, Tommy!' said the Dodger, stopping short
when there had been a long silence; and addressing Mr. Chitling.  'What
do you think he's thinking of, Fagin?'

'How should I know, my dear?' replied the Jew, looking round as he
plied the bellows.  'About his losses, maybe; or the little retirement
in the country that he's just left, eh?  Ha! ha!  Is that it, my dear?'

'Not a bit of it,' replied the Dodger, stopping the subject of
discourse as Mr. Chitling was about to reply.  'What do _you_ say,
Charley?'

'_I_ should say,' replied Master Bates, with a grin, 'that he was
uncommon sweet upon Betsy.  See how he's a-blushing!  Oh, my eye!
here's a merry-go-rounder!  Tommy Chitling's in love!  Oh, Fagin,
Fagin! what a spree!'

Thoroughly overpowered with the notion of Mr. Chitling being the victim
of the tender passion, Master Bates threw himself back in his chair
with such violence, that he lost his balance, and pitched over upon the
floor; where (the accident abating nothing of his merriment) he lay at
full length until his laugh was over, when he resumed his former
position, and began another laugh.

'Never mind him, my dear,' said the Jew, winking at Mr. Dawkins, and
giving Master Bates a reproving tap with the nozzle of the bellows.
'Betsy's a fine girl.  Stick up to her, Tom.  Stick up to her.'

'What I mean to say, Fagin,' replied Mr. Chitling, very red in the
face, 'is, that that isn't anything to anybody here.'

'No more it is,' replied the Jew; 'Charley will talk.  Don't mind him,
my dear; don't mind him.  Betsy's a fine girl.  Do as she bids you,
Tom, and you will make your fortune.'

'So I _do_ do as she bids me,' replied Mr. Chitling; 'I shouldn't have
been milled, if it hadn't been for her advice.  But it turned out a
good job for you; didn't it, Fagin!  And what's six weeks of it?  It
must come, some time or another, and why not in the winter time when
you don't want to go out a-walking so much; eh, Fagin?'

'Ah, to be sure, my dear,' replied the Jew.

'You wouldn't mind it again, Tom, would you,' asked the Dodger, winking
upon Charley and the Jew, 'if Bet was all right?'

'I mean to say that I shouldn't,' replied Tom, angrily. 'There, now.
Ah!  Who'll say as much as that, I should like to know; eh, Fagin?'

'Nobody, my dear,' replied the Jew; 'not a soul, Tom.  I don't know one
of 'em that would do it besides you; not one of 'em, my dear.'

'I might have got clear off, if I'd split upon her; mightn't I, Fagin?'
angrily pursued the poor half-witted dupe.  'A word from me would have
done it; wouldn't it, Fagin?'

'To be sure it would, my dear,' replied the Jew.

'But I didn't blab it; did I, Fagin?' demanded Tom, pouring question
upon question with great volubility.

'No, no, to be sure,' replied the Jew; 'you were too stout-hearted for
that.  A deal too stout, my dear!'

'Perhaps I was,' rejoined Tom, looking round; 'and if I was, what's to
laugh at, in that; eh, Fagin?'

The Jew, perceiving that Mr. Chitling was considerably roused, hastened
to assure him that nobody was laughing; and to prove the gravity of the
company, appealed to Master Bates, the principal offender.  But,
unfortunately, Charley, in opening his mouth to reply that he was never
more serious in his life, was unable to prevent the escape of such a
violent roar, that the abused Mr. Chitling, without any preliminary
ceremonies, rushed across the room and aimed a blow at the offender;
who, being skilful in evading pursuit, ducked to avoid it, and chose
his time so well that it lighted on the chest of the merry old
gentleman, and caused him to stagger to the wall, where he stood
panting for breath, while Mr. Chitling looked on in intense dismay.

'Hark!' cried the Dodger at this moment, 'I heard the tinkler.'
Catching up the light, he crept softly upstairs.

The bell was rung again, with some impatience, while the party were in
darkness.  After a short pause, the Dodger reappeared, and whispered
Fagin mysteriously.

'What!' cried the Jew, 'alone?'

The Dodger nodded in the affirmative, and, shading the flame of the
candle with his hand, gave Charley Bates a private intimation, in dumb
show, that he had better not be funny just then.  Having performed this
friendly office, he fixed his eyes on the Jew's face, and awaited his
directions.

The old man bit his yellow fingers, and meditated for some seconds; his
face working with agitation the while, as if he dreaded something, and
feared to know the worst.  At length he raised his head.

'Where is he?' he asked.

The Dodger pointed to the floor above, and made a gesture, as if to
leave the room.

'Yes,' said the Jew, answering the mute inquiry; 'bring him down. Hush!
Quiet, Charley!  Gently, Tom!  Scarce, scarce!'

This brief direction to Charley Bates, and his recent antagonist, was
softly and immediately obeyed.  There was no sound of their whereabout,
when the Dodger descended the stairs, bearing the light in his hand,
and followed by a man in a coarse smock-frock; who, after casting a
hurried glance round the room, pulled off a large wrapper which had
concealed the lower portion of his face, and disclosed: all haggard,
unwashed, and unshorn: the features of flash Toby Crackit.

'How are you, Faguey?' said this worthy, nodding to the Jew. 'Pop that
shawl away in my castor, Dodger, so that I may know where to find it
when I cut; that's the time of day!  You'll be a fine young cracksman
afore the old file now.'

With these words he pulled up the smock-frock; and, winding it round
his middle, drew a chair to the fire, and placed his feet upon the hob.

'See there, Faguey,' he said, pointing disconsolately to his top boots;
'not a drop of Day and Martin since you know when; not a bubble of
blacking, by Jove!   But don't look at me in that way, man.  All in
good time.  I can't talk about business till I've eat and drank; so
produce the sustainance, and let's have a quiet fill-out for the first
time these three days!'

The Jew motioned to the Dodger to place what eatables there were, upon
the table; and, seating himself opposite the housebreaker, waited his
leisure.

To judge from appearances, Toby was by no means in a hurry to open the
conversation.  At first, the Jew contented himself with patiently
watching his countenance, as if to gain from its expression some clue
to the intelligence he brought; but in vain.

He looked tired and worn, but there was the same complacent repose upon
his features that they always wore:  and through dirt, and beard, and
whisker, there still shone, unimpaired, the self-satisfied smirk of
flash Toby Crackit. Then the Jew, in an agony of impatience, watched
every morsel he put into his mouth; pacing up and down the room,
meanwhile, in irrepressible excitement.  It was all of no use.  Toby
continued to eat with the utmost outward indifference, until he could
eat no more; then, ordering the Dodger out, he closed the door, mixed a
glass of spirits and water, and composed himself for talking.

'First and foremost, Faguey,' said Toby.

'Yes, yes!' interposed the Jew, drawing up his chair.

Mr. Crackit stopped to take a draught of spirits and water, and to
declare that the gin was excellent; then placing his feet against the
low mantelpiece, so as to bring his boots to about the level of his
eye, he quietly resumed.

'First and foremost, Faguey,' said the housebreaker, 'how's Bill?'

'What!' screamed the Jew, starting from his seat.

'Why, you don't mean to say--' began Toby, turning pale.

'Mean!' cried the Jew, stamping furiously on the ground. 'Where are
they?  Sikes and the boy!  Where are they?  Where have they been?
Where are they hiding?  Why have they not been here?'

'The crack failed,' said Toby faintly.

'I know it,' replied the Jew, tearing a newspaper from his pocket and
pointing to it.  'What more?'

'They fired and hit the boy.  We cut over the fields at the back, with
him between us--straight as the crow flies--through hedge and ditch.
They gave chase.  Damme! the whole country was awake, and the dogs upon
us.'

'The boy!'

'Bill had him on his back, and scudded like the wind.  We stopped to
take him between us; his head hung down, and he was cold. They were
close upon our heels; every man for himself, and each from the gallows!
We parted company, and left the youngster lying in a ditch.  Alive or
dead, that's all I know about him.'

The Jew stopped to hear no more; but uttering a loud yell, and twining
his hands in his hair, rushed from the room, and from the house.



CHAPTER XXVI

IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS CHARACTER APPEARS UPON THE SCENE; AND MANY
THINGS, INSEPARABLE FROM THIS HISTORY, ARE DONE AND PERFORMED

The old man had gained the street corner, before he began to recover
the effect of Toby Crackit's intelligence.  He had relaxed nothing of
his unusual speed; but was still pressing onward, in the same wild and
disordered manner, when the sudden dashing past of a carriage: and a
boisterous cry from the foot passengers, who saw his danger:  drove him
back upon the pavement.  Avoiding, as much as was possible, all the
main streets, and skulking only through the by-ways and alleys, he at
length emerged on Snow Hill.  Here he walked even faster than before;
nor did he linger until he had again turned into a court; when, as if
conscious that he was now in his proper element, he fell into his usual
shuffling pace, and seemed to breathe more freely.

Near to the spot on which Snow Hill and Holborn Hill meet, opens, upon
the right hand as you come out of the City, a narrow and dismal alley,
leading to Saffron Hill.  In its filthy shops are exposed for sale huge
bunches of second-hand silk handkerchiefs, of all sizes and patterns;
for here reside the traders who purchase them from pick-pockets.
Hundreds of these handkerchiefs hang dangling from pegs outside the
windows or flaunting from the door-posts; and the shelves, within, are
piled with them. Confined as the limits of Field Lane are, it has its
barber, its coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its fried-fish warehouse.
It is a commercial colony of itself:  the emporium of petty larceny:
visited at early morning, and setting-in of dusk, by silent merchants,
who traffic in dark back-parlours, and who go as strangely as they
come.  Here, the clothesman, the shoe-vamper, and the rag-merchant,
display their goods, as sign-boards to the petty thief; here, stores of
old iron and bones, and heaps of mildewy fragments of woollen-stuff and
linen, rust and rot in the grimy cellars.

It was into this place that the Jew turned.  He was well known to the
sallow denizens of the lane; for such of them as were on the look-out
to buy or sell, nodded, familiarly, as he passed along. He replied to
their salutations in the same way; but bestowed no closer recognition
until he reached the further end of the alley; when he stopped, to
address a salesman of small stature, who had squeezed as much of his
person into a child's chair as the chair would hold, and was smoking a
pipe at his warehouse door.

'Why, the sight of you, Mr. Fagin, would cure the hoptalmy!' said this
respectable trader, in acknowledgment of the Jew's inquiry after his
health.

'The neighbourhood was a little too hot, Lively,' said Fagin, elevating
his eyebrows, and crossing his hands upon his shoulders.

'Well, I've heerd that complaint of it, once or twice before,' replied
the trader; 'but it soon cools down again; don't you find it so?'

Fagin nodded in the affirmative.  Pointing in the direction of Saffron
Hill, he inquired whether any one was up yonder to-night.

'At the Cripples?' inquired the man.

The Jew nodded.

'Let me see,' pursued the merchant, reflecting.

'Yes, there's some half-dozen of 'em gone in, that I knows. I don't
think your friend's there.'

'Sikes is not, I suppose?' inquired the Jew, with a disappointed
countenance.

'_Non istwentus_, as the lawyers say,' replied the little man, shaking
his head, and looking amazingly sly.  'Have you got anything in my line
to-night?'

'Nothing to-night,' said the Jew, turning away.

'Are you going up to the Cripples, Fagin?' cried the little man,
calling after him.  'Stop!  I don't mind if I have a drop there with
you!'

But as the Jew, looking back, waved his hand to intimate that he
preferred being alone; and, moreover, as the little man could not very
easily disengage himself from the chair; the sign of the Cripples was,
for a time, bereft of the advantage of Mr. Lively's presence.  By the
time he had got upon his legs, the Jew had disappeared; so Mr. Lively,
after ineffectually standing on tiptoe, in the hope of catching sight
of him, again forced himself into the little chair, and, exchanging a
shake of the head with a lady in the opposite shop, in which doubt and
mistrust were plainly mingled, resumed his pipe with a grave demeanour.

The Three Cripples, or rather the Cripples; which was the sign by which
the establishment was familiarly known to its patrons:  was the
public-house in which Mr. Sikes and his dog have already figured.
Merely making a sign to a man at the bar, Fagin walked straight
upstairs, and opening the door of a room, and softly insinuating
himself into the chamber, looked anxiously about: shading his eyes with
his hand, as if in search of some particular person.

The room was illuminated by two gas-lights; the glare of which was
prevented by the barred shutters, and closely-drawn curtains of faded
red, from being visible outside.  The ceiling was blackened, to prevent
its colour from being injured by the flaring of the lamps; and the
place was so full of dense tobacco smoke, that at first it was scarcely
possible to discern anything more.  By degrees, however, as some of it
cleared away through the open door, an assemblage of heads, as confused
as the noises that greeted the ear, might be made out; and as the eye
grew more accustomed to the scene, the spectator gradually became aware
of the presence of a numerous company, male and female, crowded round a
long table: at the upper end of which, sat a chairman with a hammer of
office in his hand; while a professional gentleman with a bluish nose,
and his face tied up for the benefit of a toothache, presided at a
jingling piano in a remote corner.

As Fagin stepped softly in, the professional gentleman, running over
the keys by way of prelude, occasioned a general cry of order for a
song; which having subsided, a young lady proceeded to entertain the
company with a ballad in four verses, between each of which the
accompanyist played the melody all through, as loud as he could.  When
this was over, the chairman gave a sentiment, after which, the
professional gentleman on the chairman's right and left volunteered a
duet, and sang it, with great applause.

It was curious to observe some faces which stood out prominently from
among the group.  There was the chairman himself, (the landlord of the
house,) a coarse, rough, heavy built fellow, who, while the songs were
proceeding, rolled his eyes hither and thither, and, seeming to give
himself up to joviality, had an eye for everything that was done, and
an ear for everything that was said--and sharp ones, too.  Near him
were the singers: receiving, with professional indifference, the
compliments of the company, and applying themselves, in turn, to a
dozen proffered glasses of spirits and water, tendered by their more
boisterous admirers; whose countenances, expressive of almost every
vice in almost every grade, irresistibly attracted the attention, by
their very repulsiveness.  Cunning, ferocity, and drunkeness in all its
stages, were there, in their strongest aspect; and women: some with the
last lingering tinge of their early freshness almost fading as you
looked:  others with every mark and stamp of their sex utterly beaten
out, and presenting but one loathsome blank of profligacy and crime;
some mere girls, others but young women, and none past the prime of
life; formed the darkest and saddest portion of this dreary picture.

Fagin, troubled by no grave emotions, looked eagerly from face to face
while these proceedings were in progress; but apparently without
meeting that of which he was in search. Succeeding, at length, in
catching the eye of the man who occupied the chair, he beckoned to him
slightly, and left the room, as quietly as he had entered it.

'What can I do for you, Mr. Fagin?' inquired the man, as he followed
him out to the landing.  'Won't you join us?  They'll be delighted,
every one of 'em.'

The Jew shook his head impatiently, and said in a whisper, 'Is _he_
here?'

'No,' replied the man.

'And no news of Barney?' inquired Fagin.

'None,' replied the landlord of the Cripples; for it was he. 'He won't
stir till it's all safe.  Depend on it, they're on the scent down
there; and that if he moved, he'd blow upon the thing at once.  He's
all right enough, Barney is, else I should have heard of him.  I'll
pound it, that Barney's managing properly. Let him alone for that.'

'Will _he_ be here to-night?' asked the Jew, laying the same emphasis
on the pronoun as before.

'Monks, do you mean?' inquired the landlord, hesitating.

'Hush!' said the Jew.  'Yes.'

'Certain,' replied the man, drawing a gold watch from his fob; 'I
expected him here before now.  If you'll wait ten minutes, he'll be--'

'No, no,' said the Jew, hastily; as though, however desirous he might
be to see the person in question, he was nevertheless relieved by his
absence.  'Tell him I came here to see him; and that he must come to me
to-night.  No, say to-morrow.  As he is not here, to-morrow will be
time enough.'

'Good!' said the man.  'Nothing more?'

'Not a word now,' said the Jew, descending the stairs.

'I say,' said the other, looking over the rails, and speaking in a
hoarse whisper; 'what a time this would be for a sell!  I've got Phil
Barker here: so drunk, that a boy might take him!'

'Ah!  But it's not Phil Barker's time,' said the Jew, looking up.

'Phil has something more to do, before we can afford to part with him;
so go back to the company, my dear, and tell them to lead merry
lives--_while they last_.  Ha! ha! ha!'

The landlord reciprocated the old man's laugh; and returned to his
guests.  The Jew was no sooner alone, than his countenance resumed its
former expression of anxiety and thought.  After a brief reflection, he
called a hack-cabriolet, and bade the man drive towards Bethnal Green.
He dismissed him within some quarter of a mile of Mr. Sikes's
residence, and performed the short remainder of the distance, on foot.

'Now,' muttered the Jew, as he knocked at the door, 'if there is any
deep play here, I shall have it out of you, my girl, cunning as you
are.'

She was in her room, the woman said.  Fagin crept softly upstairs, and
entered it without any previous ceremony.  The girl was alone; lying
with her head upon the table, and her hair straggling over it.

'She has been drinking,' thought the Jew, cooly, 'or perhaps she is
only miserable.'

The old man turned to close the door, as he made this reflection; the
noise thus occasioned, roused the girl.  She eyed his crafty face
narrowly, as she inquired to his recital of Toby Crackit's story.  When
it was concluded, she sank into her former attitude, but spoke not a
word.  She pushed the candle impatiently away; and once or twice as she
feverishly changed her position, shuffled her feet upon the ground; but
this was all.

During the silence, the Jew looked restlessly about the room, as if to
assure himself that there were no appearances of Sikes having covertly
returned.  Apparently satisfied with his inspection, he coughed twice
or thrice, and made as many efforts to open a conversation; but the
girl heeded him no more than if he had been made of stone.  At length
he made another attempt; and rubbing his hands together, said, in his
most conciliatory tone,

'And where should you think Bill was now, my dear?'

The girl moaned out some half intelligible reply, that she could not
tell; and seemed, from the smothered noise that escaped her, to be
crying.

'And the boy, too,' said the Jew, straining his eyes to catch a glimpse
of her face.  'Poor leetle child!  Left in a ditch, Nance; only think!'

'The child,' said the girl, suddenly looking up, 'is better where he
is, than among us; and if no harm comes to Bill from it, I hope he lies
dead in the ditch and that his young bones may rot there.'

'What!' cried the Jew, in amazement.

'Ay, I do,' returned the girl, meeting his gaze.  'I shall be glad to
have him away from my eyes, and to know that the worst is over.  I
can't bear to have him about me.  The sight of him turns me against
myself, and all of you.'

'Pooh!' said the Jew, scornfully.  'You're drunk.'

'Am I?' cried the girl bitterly.  'It's no fault of yours, if I am not!
You'd never have me anything else, if you had your will, except
now;--the humour doesn't suit you, doesn't it?'

'No!' rejoined the Jew, furiously.  'It does not.'

'Change it, then!' responded the girl, with a laugh.

'Change it!' exclaimed the Jew, exasperated beyond all bounds by his
companion's unexpected obstinacy, and the vexation of the night, 'I
_will_ change it!  Listen to me, you drab.  Listen to me, who with six
words, can strangle Sikes as surely as if I had his bull's throat
between my fingers now.  If he comes back, and leaves the boy behind
him; if he gets off free, and dead or alive, fails to restore him to
me; murder him yourself if you would have him escape Jack Ketch.  And
do it the moment he sets foot in this room, or mind me, it will be too
late!'

'What is all this?' cried the girl involuntarily.

'What is it?' pursued Fagin, mad with rage.  'When the boy's worth
hundreds of pounds to me, am I to lose what chance threw me in the way
of getting safely, through the whims of a drunken gang that I could
whistle away the lives of!  And me bound, too, to a born devil that
only wants the will, and has the power to, to--'

Panting for breath, the old man stammered for a word; and in that
instant checked the torrent of his wrath, and changed his whole
demeanour.  A moment before, his clenched hands had grasped the air;
his eyes had dilated; and his face grown livid with passion; but now,
he shrunk into a chair, and, cowering together, trembled with the
apprehension of having himself disclosed some hidden villainy.  After a
short silence, he ventured to look round at his companion.  He appeared
somewhat reassured, on beholding her in the same listless attitude from
which he had first roused her.

'Nancy, dear!' croaked the Jew, in his usual voice.  'Did you mind me,
dear?'

'Don't worry me now, Fagin!' replied the girl, raising her head
languidly.  'If Bill has not done it this time, he will another. He has
done many a good job for you, and will do many more when he can; and
when he can't he won't; so no more about that.'

'Regarding this boy, my dear?' said the Jew, rubbing the palms of his
hands nervously together.

'The boy must take his chance with the rest,' interrupted Nancy,
hastily; 'and I say again, I hope he is dead, and out of harm's way,
and out of yours,--that is, if Bill comes to no harm.  And if Toby got
clear off, Bill's pretty sure to be safe; for Bill's worth two of Toby
any time.'

'And about what I was saying, my dear?' observed the Jew, keeping his
glistening eye steadily upon her.

'You must say it all over again, if it's anything you want me to do,'
rejoined Nancy; 'and if it is, you had better wait till to-morrow.  You
put me up for a minute; but now I'm stupid again.'

Fagin put several other questions: all with the same drift of
ascertaining whether the girl had profited by his unguarded hints; but,
she answered them so readily, and was withal so utterly unmoved by his
searching looks, that his original impression of her being more than a
trifle in liquor, was confirmed.  Nancy, indeed, was not exempt from a
failing which was very common among the Jew's female pupils; and in
which, in their tenderer years, they were rather encouraged than
checked. Her disordered appearance, and a wholesale perfume of Geneva
which pervaded the apartment, afforded strong confirmatory evidence of
the justice of the Jew's supposition; and when, after indulging in the
temporary display of violence above described, she subsided, first into
dullness, and afterwards into a compound of feelings: under the
influence of which she shed tears one minute, and in the next gave
utterance to various exclamations of 'Never say die!' and divers
calculations as to what might be the amount of the odds so long as a
lady or gentleman was happy, Mr. Fagin, who had had considerable
experience of such matters in his time, saw, with great satisfaction,
that she was very far gone indeed.

Having eased his mind by this discovery; and having accomplished his
twofold object of imparting to the girl what he had, that night, heard,
and of ascertaining, with his own eyes, that Sikes had not returned,
Mr. Fagin again turned his face homeward: leaving his young friend
asleep, with her head upon the table.

It was within an hour of midnight.  The weather being dark, and
piercing cold, he had no great temptation to loiter.  The sharp wind
that scoured the streets, seemed to have cleared them of passengers, as
of dust and mud, for few people were abroad, and they were to all
appearance hastening fast home. It blew from the right quarter for the
Jew, however, and straight before it he went: trembling, and shivering,
as every fresh gust drove him rudely on his way.

He had reached the corner of his own street, and was already fumbling
in his pocket for the door-key, when a dark figure emerged from a
projecting entrance which lay in deep shadow, and, crossing the road,
glided up to him unperceived.

'Fagin!' whispered a voice close to his ear.

'Ah!' said the Jew, turning quickly round, 'is that--'

'Yes!' interrupted the stranger.  'I have been lingering here these two
hours.  Where the devil have you been?'

'On your business, my dear,' replied the Jew, glancing uneasily at his
companion, and slackening his pace as he spoke.  'On your business all
night.'

'Oh, of course!' said the stranger, with a sneer.  'Well; and what's
come of it?'

'Nothing good,' said the Jew.

'Nothing bad, I hope?' said the stranger, stopping short, and turning a
startled look on his companion.

The Jew shook his head, and was about to reply, when the stranger,
interrupting him, motioned to the house, before which they had by this
time arrived:  remarking, that he had better say what he had got to
say, under cover:  for his blood was chilled with standing about so
long, and the wind blew through him.

Fagin looked as if he could have willingly excused himself from taking
home a visitor at that unseasonable hour; and, indeed, muttered
something about having no fire; but his companion repeating his request
in a peremptory manner, he unlocked the door, and requested him to
close it softly, while he got a light.

'It's as dark as the grave,' said the man, groping forward a few steps.
'Make haste!'

'Shut the door,' whispered Fagin from the end of the passage. As he
spoke, it closed with a loud noise.

'That wasn't my doing,' said the other man, feeling his way. 'The wind
blew it to, or it shut of its own accord: one or the other. Look sharp
with the light, or I shall knock my brains out against something in
this confounded hole.'

Fagin stealthily descended the kitchen stairs.  After a short absence,
he returned with a lighted candle, and the intelligence that Toby
Crackit was asleep in the back room below, and that the boys were in
the front one.  Beckoning the man to follow him, he led the way
upstairs.

'We can say the few words we've got to say in here, my dear,' said the
Jew, throwing open a door on the first floor; 'and as there are holes
in the shutters, and we never show lights to our neighbours, we'll set
the candle on the stairs.  There!'

With those words, the Jew, stooping down, placed the candle on an upper
flight of stairs, exactly opposite to the room door.  This done, he led
the way into the apartment; which was destitute of all movables save a
broken arm-chair, and an old couch or sofa without covering, which
stood behind the door.  Upon this piece of furniture, the stranger sat
himself with the air of a weary man; and the Jew, drawing up the
arm-chair opposite, they sat face to face.  It was not quite dark; the
door was partially open; and the candle outside, threw a feeble
reflection on the opposite wall.

They conversed for some time in whispers.  Though nothing of the
conversation was distinguishable beyond a few disjointed words here and
there, a listener might easily have perceived that Fagin appeared to be
defending himself against some remarks of the stranger; and that the
latter was in a state of considerable irritation.  They might have been
talking, thus, for a quarter of an hour or more, when Monks--by which
name the Jew had designated the strange man several times in the course
of their colloquy--said, raising his voice a little,

'I tell you again, it was badly planned.  Why not have kept him here
among the rest, and made a sneaking, snivelling pickpocket of him at
once?'

'Only hear him!' exclaimed the Jew, shrugging his shoulders.

'Why, do you mean to say you couldn't have done it, if you had chosen?'
demanded Monks, sternly.  'Haven't you done it, with other boys, scores
of times?  If you had had patience for a twelvemonth, at most, couldn't
you have got him convicted, and sent safely out of the kingdom; perhaps
for life?'

'Whose turn would that have served, my dear?' inquired the Jew humbly.

'Mine,' replied Monks.

'But not mine,' said the Jew, submissively.  'He might have become of
use to me.  When there are two parties to a bargain, it is only
reasonable that the interests of both should be consulted; is it, my
good friend?'

'What then?' demanded Monks.

'I saw it was not easy to train him to the business,' replied the Jew;
'he was not like other boys in the same circumstances.'

'Curse him, no!' muttered the man, 'or he would have been a thief, long
ago.'

'I had no hold upon him to make him worse,' pursued the Jew, anxiously
watching the countenance of his companion.  'His hand was not in.  I
had nothing to frighten him with; which we always must have in the
beginning, or we labour in vain.  What could I do?  Send him out with
the Dodger and Charley?  We had enough of that, at first, my dear; I
trembled for us all.'

'_That_ was not my doing,' observed Monks.

'No, no, my dear!' renewed the Jew.  'And I don't quarrel with it now;
because, if it had never happened, you might never have clapped eyes on
the boy to notice him, and so led to the discovery that it was him you
were looking for.  Well!  I got him back for you by means of the girl;
and then _she_ begins to favour him.'

'Throttle the girl!' said Monks, impatiently.

'Why, we can't afford to do that just now, my dear,' replied the Jew,
smiling; 'and, besides, that sort of thing is not in our way; or, one
of these days, I might be glad to have it done.  I know what these
girls are, Monks, well.  As soon as the boy begins to harden, she'll
care no more for him, than for a block of wood.  You want him made a
thief.  If he is alive, I can make him one from this time; and,
if--if--' said the Jew, drawing nearer to the other,--'it's not likely,
mind,--but if the worst comes to the worst, and he is dead--'

'It's no fault of mine if he is!' interposed the other man, with a look
of terror, and clasping the Jew's arm with trembling hands.  'Mind
that.  Fagin!  I had no hand in it.  Anything but his death, I told you
from the first.  I won't shed blood; it's always found out, and haunts
a man besides.  If they shot him dead, I was not the cause; do you hear
me?  Fire this infernal den!  What's that?'

'What!' cried the Jew, grasping the coward round the body, with both
arms, as he sprung to his feet.  'Where?'

'Yonder! replied the man, glaring at the opposite wall.  'The shadow!
I saw the shadow of a woman, in a cloak and bonnet, pass along the
wainscot like a breath!'

The Jew released his hold, and they rushed tumultuously from the room.
The candle, wasted by the draught, was standing where it had been
placed.  It showed them only the empty staircase, and their own white
faces.  They listened intently:  a profound silence reigned throughout
the house.

'It's your fancy,' said the Jew, taking up the light and turning to his
companion.

'I'll swear I saw it!' replied Monks, trembling.  'It was bending
forward when I saw it first; and when I spoke, it darted away.'

The Jew glanced contemptuously at the pale face of his associate, and,
telling him he could follow, if he pleased, ascended the stairs.  They
looked into all the rooms; they were cold, bare, and empty.  They
descended into the passage, and thence into the cellars below.  The
green damp hung upon the low walls; the tracks of the snail and slug
glistened in the light of the candle; but all was still as death.

'What do you think now?' said the Jew, when they had regained the
passage.  'Besides ourselves, there's not a creature in the house
except Toby and the boys; and they're safe enough. See here!'

As a proof of the fact, the Jew drew forth two keys from his pocket;
and explained, that when he first went downstairs, he had locked them
in, to prevent any intrusion on the conference.

This accumulated testimony effectually staggered Mr. Monks. His
protestations had gradually become less and less vehement as they
proceeded in their search without making any discovery; and, now, he
gave vent to several very grim laughs, and confessed it could only have
been his excited imagination.  He declined any renewal of the
conversation, however, for that night:  suddenly remembering that it
was past one o'clock.  And so the amiable couple parted.



CHAPTER XXVII

ATONES FOR THE UNPOLITENESS OF A FORMER CHAPTER; WHICH DESERTED A LADY,
MOST UNCEREMONIOUSLY

As it would be, by no means, seemly in a humble author to keep so
mighty a personage as a beadle waiting, with his back to the fire, and
the skirts of his coat gathered up under his arms, until such time as
it might suit his pleasure to relieve him; and as it would still less
become his station, or his gallantry to involve in the same neglect a
lady on whom that beadle had looked with an eye of tenderness and
affection, and in whose ear he had whispered sweet words, which, coming
from such a quarter, might well thrill the bosom of maid or matron of
whatsoever degree; the historian whose pen traces these words--trusting
that he knows his place, and that he entertains a becoming reverence
for those upon earth to whom high and important authority is
delegated--hastens to pay them that respect which their position
demands, and to treat them with all that duteous ceremony which their
exalted rank, and (by consequence) great virtues, imperatively claim at
his hands.  Towards this end, indeed, he had purposed to introduce, in
this place, a dissertation touching the divine right of beadles, and
elucidative of the position, that a beadle can do no wrong:  which
could not fail to have been both pleasurable and profitable to the
right-minded reader but which he is unfortunately compelled, by want of
time and space, to postpone to some more convenient and fitting
opportunity; on the arrival of which, he will be prepared to show, that
a beadle properly constituted:  that is to say, a parochial beadle,
attached to a parochial workhouse, and attending in his official
capacity the parochial church:  is, in right and virtue of his office,
possessed of all the excellences and best qualities of humanity; and
that to none of those excellences, can mere companies' beadles, or
court-of-law beadles, or even chapel-of-ease beadles (save the last,
and they in a very lowly and inferior degree), lay the remotest
sustainable claim.

Mr. Bumble had re-counted the teaspoons, re-weighed the sugar-tongs,
made a closer inspection of the milk-pot, and ascertained to a nicety
the exact condition of the furniture, down to the very horse-hair seats
of the chairs; and had repeated each process full half a dozen times;
before he began to think that it was time for Mrs. Corney to return.
Thinking begets thinking; as there were no sounds of Mrs. Corney's
approach, it occured to Mr. Bumble that it would be an innocent and
virtuous way of spending the time, if he were further to allay his
curiousity by a cursory glance at the interior of Mrs. Corney's chest
of drawers.

Having listened at the keyhole, to assure himself that nobody was
approaching the chamber, Mr. Bumble, beginning at the bottom, proceeded
to make himself acquainted with the contents of the three long drawers:
which, being filled with various garments of good fashion and texture,
carefully preserved between two layers of old newspapers, speckled with
dried lavender: seemed to yield him exceeding satisfaction.  Arriving,
in course of time, at the right-hand corner drawer (in which was the
key), and beholding therein a small padlocked box, which, being shaken,
gave forth a pleasant sound, as of the chinking of coin, Mr. Bumble
returned with a stately walk to the fireplace; and, resuming his old
attitude, said, with a grave and determined air, 'I'll do it!' He
followed up this remarkable declaration, by shaking his head in a
waggish manner for ten minutes, as though he were remonstrating with
himself for being such a pleasant dog; and then, he took a view of his
legs in profile, with much seeming pleasure and interest.

He was still placidly engaged in this latter survey, when Mrs. Corney,
hurrying into the room, threw herself, in a breathless state, on a
chair by the fireside, and covering her eyes with one hand, placed the
other over her heart, and gasped for breath.

'Mrs. Corney,' said Mr. Bumble, stooping over the matron, 'what is
this, ma'am?  Has anything happened, ma'am?  Pray answer me: I'm
on--on--' Mr. Bumble, in his alarm, could not immediately think of the
word 'tenterhooks,' so he said 'broken bottles.'

'Oh, Mr. Bumble!' cried the lady, 'I have been so dreadfully put out!'

'Put out, ma'am!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble; 'who has dared to--?  I know!'
said Mr. Bumble, checking himself, with native majesty, 'this is them
wicious paupers!'

'It's dreadful to think of!' said the lady, shuddering.

'Then _don't_ think of it, ma'am,' rejoined Mr. Bumble.

'I can't help it,' whimpered the lady.

'Then take something, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble soothingly.  'A little of
the wine?'

'Not for the world!' replied Mrs. Corney.  'I couldn't,--oh!  The top
shelf in the right-hand corner--oh!'  Uttering these words, the good
lady pointed, distractedly, to the cupboard, and underwent a convulsion
from internal spasms.  Mr. Bumble rushed to the closet; and, snatching
a pint green-glass bottle from the shelf thus incoherently indicated,
filled a tea-cup with its contents, and held it to the lady's lips.

'I'm better now,' said Mrs. Corney, falling back, after drinking half
of it.

Mr. Bumble raised his eyes piously to the ceiling in thankfulness; and,
bringing them down again to the brim of the cup, lifted it to his nose.

'Peppermint,' exclaimed Mrs. Corney, in a faint voice, smiling gently
on the beadle as she spoke.  'Try it!  There's a little--a little
something else in it.'

Mr. Bumble tasted the medicine with a doubtful look; smacked his lips;
took another taste; and put the cup down empty.

'It's very comforting,' said Mrs. Corney.

'Very much so indeed, ma'am,' said the beadle.  As he spoke, he drew a
chair beside the matron, and tenderly inquired what had happened to
distress her.

'Nothing,' replied Mrs. Corney.  'I am a foolish, excitable, weak
creetur.'

'Not weak, ma'am,' retorted Mr. Bumble, drawing his chair a little
closer.  'Are you a weak creetur, Mrs. Corney?'

'We are all weak creeturs,' said Mrs. Corney, laying down a general
principle.

'So we are,' said the beadle.

Nothing was said on either side, for a minute or two afterwards. By the
expiration of that time, Mr. Bumble had illustrated the position by
removing his left arm from the back of Mrs. Corney's chair, where it
had previously rested, to Mrs. Corney's apron-string, round which it
gradually became entwined.

'We are all weak creeturs,' said Mr. Bumble.

Mrs. Corney sighed.

'Don't sigh, Mrs. Corney,' said Mr. Bumble.

'I can't help it,' said Mrs. Corney.  And she sighed again.

'This is a very comfortable room, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble looking
round.  'Another room, and this, ma'am, would be a complete thing.'

'It would be too much for one,' murmured the lady.

'But not for two, ma'am,' rejoined Mr. Bumble, in soft accents. 'Eh,
Mrs. Corney?'

Mrs. Corney drooped her head, when the beadle said this; the beadle
drooped his, to get a view of Mrs. Corney's face.  Mrs. Corney, with
great propriety, turned her head away, and released her hand to get at
her pocket-handkerchief; but insensibly replaced it in that of Mr.
Bumble.

'The board allows you coals, don't they, Mrs. Corney?' inquired the
beadle, affectionately pressing her hand.

'And candles,' replied Mrs. Corney, slightly returning the pressure.

'Coals, candles, and house-rent free,' said Mr. Bumble.  'Oh, Mrs.
Corney, what an Angel you are!'

The lady was not proof against this burst of feeling.  She sank into
Mr. Bumble's arms; and that gentleman in his agitation, imprinted a
passionate kiss upon her chaste nose.

'Such porochial perfection!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble, rapturously. 'You
know that Mr. Slout is worse to-night, my fascinator?'

'Yes,' replied Mrs. Corney, bashfully.

'He can't live a week, the doctor says,' pursued Mr. Bumble. 'He is the
master of this establishment; his death will cause a wacancy; that
wacancy must be filled up.  Oh, Mrs. Corney, what a prospect this
opens!  What a opportunity for a jining of hearts and housekeepings!'

Mrs. Corney sobbed.

'The little word?' said Mr. Bumble, bending over the bashful beauty.
'The one little, little, little word, my blessed Corney?'

'Ye--ye--yes!' sighed out the matron.

'One more,' pursued the beadle; 'compose your darling feelings for only
one more.  When is it to come off?'

Mrs. Corney twice essayed to speak:  and twice failed.  At length
summoning up courage, she threw her arms around Mr. Bumble's neck, and
said, it might be as soon as ever he pleased, and that he was 'a
irresistible duck.'

Matters being thus amicably and satisfactorily arranged, the contract
was solemnly ratified in another teacupful of the peppermint mixture;
which was rendered the more necessary, by the flutter and agitation of
the lady's spirits.  While it was being disposed of, she acquainted Mr.
Bumble with the old woman's decease.

'Very good,' said that gentleman, sipping his peppermint; 'I'll call at
Sowerberry's as I go home, and tell him to send to-morrow morning.  Was
it that as frightened you, love?'

'It wasn't anything particular, dear,' said the lady evasively.

'It must have been something, love,' urged Mr. Bumble. 'Won't you tell
your own B.?'

'Not now,' rejoined the lady; 'one of these days.  After we're married,
dear.'

'After we're married!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble.  'It wasn't any impudence
from any of them male paupers as--'

'No, no, love!' interposed the lady, hastily.

'If I thought it was,' continued Mr. Bumble; 'if I thought as any one
of 'em had dared to lift his wulgar eyes to that lovely countenance--'

'They wouldn't have dared to do it, love,' responded the lady.

'They had better not!' said Mr. Bumble, clenching his fist. 'Let me see
any man, porochial or extra-porochial, as would presume to do it; and I
can tell him that he wouldn't do it a second time!'

Unembellished by any violence of gesticulation, this might have seemed
no very high compliment to the lady's charms; but, as Mr. Bumble
accompanied the threat with many warlike gestures, she was much touched
with this proof of his devotion, and protested, with great admiration,
that he was indeed a dove.

The dove then turned up his coat-collar, and put on his cocked hat;
and, having exchanged a long and affectionate embrace with his future
partner, once again braved the cold wind of the night: merely pausing,
for a few minutes, in the male paupers' ward, to abuse them a little,
with the view of satisfying himself that he could fill the office of
workhouse-master with needful acerbity. Assured of his qualifications,
Mr. Bumble left the building with a light heart, and bright visions of
his future promotion:  which served to occupy his mind until he reached
the shop of the undertaker.

Now, Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry having gone out to tea and supper: and
Noah Claypole not being at any time disposed to take upon himself a
greater amount of physical exertion than is necessary to a convenient
performance of the two functions of eating and drinking, the shop was
not closed, although it was past the usual hour of shutting-up.  Mr.
Bumble tapped with his cane on the counter several times; but,
attracting no attention, and beholding a light shining through the
glass-window of the little parlour at the back of the shop, he made
bold to peep in and see what was going forward; and when he saw what
was going forward, he was not a little surprised.

The cloth was laid for supper; the table was covered with bread and
butter, plates and glasses; a porter-pot and a wine-bottle. At the
upper end of the table, Mr. Noah Claypole lolled negligently in an
easy-chair, with his legs thrown over one of the arms: an open
clasp-knife in one hand, and a mass of buttered bread in the other.
Close beside him stood Charlotte, opening oysters from a barrel: which
Mr. Claypole condescended to swallow, with remarkable avidity.  A more
than ordinary redness in the region of the young gentleman's nose, and
a kind of fixed wink in his right eye, denoted that he was in a slight
degree intoxicated; these symptoms were confirmed by the intense relish
with which he took his oysters, for which nothing but a strong
appreciation of their cooling properties, in cases of internal fever,
could have sufficiently accounted.

'Here's a delicious fat one, Noah, dear!' said Charlotte; 'try him, do;
only this one.'

'What a delicious thing is a oyster!' remarked Mr. Claypole, after he
had swallowed it.  'What a pity it is, a number of 'em should ever make
you feel uncomfortable; isn't it, Charlotte?'

'It's quite a cruelty,' said Charlotte.

'So it is,' acquiesced Mr. Claypole. 'An't yer fond of oysters?'

'Not overmuch,' replied Charlotte.  'I like to see you eat 'em, Noah
dear, better than eating 'em myself.'

'Lor!' said Noah, reflectively; 'how queer!'

'Have another,' said Charlotte.  'Here's one with such a beautiful,
delicate beard!'

'I can't manage any more,' said Noah.  'I'm very sorry.  Come here,
Charlotte, and I'll kiss yer.'

'What!' said Mr. Bumble, bursting into the room.  'Say that again, sir.'

Charlotte uttered a scream, and hid her face in her apron.  Mr.
Claypole, without making any further change in his position than
suffering his legs to reach the ground, gazed at the beadle in drunken
terror.

'Say it again, you wile, owdacious fellow!' said Mr. Bumble. 'How dare
you mention such a thing, sir?  And how dare you encourage him, you
insolent minx?  Kiss her!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble, in strong indignation.
'Faugh!'

'I didn't mean to do it!' said Noah, blubbering.  'She's always
a-kissing of me, whether I like it, or not.'

'Oh, Noah,' cried Charlotte, reproachfully.

'Yer are; yer know yer are!' retorted Noah.  'She's always a-doin' of
it, Mr. Bumble, sir; she chucks me under the chin, please, sir; and
makes all manner of love!'

'Silence!' cried Mr. Bumble, sternly.  'Take yourself downstairs,
ma'am.  Noah, you shut up the shop; say another word till your master
comes home, at your peril; and, when he does come home, tell him that
Mr. Bumble said he was to send a old woman's shell after breakfast
to-morrow morning.  Do you hear sir?  Kissing!' cried Mr. Bumble,
holding up his hands.  'The sin and wickedness of the lower orders in
this porochial district is frightful!  If Parliament don't take their
abominable courses under consideration, this country's ruined, and the
character of the peasantry gone for ever!'  With these words, the
beadle strode, with a lofty and gloomy air, from the undertaker's
premises.

And now that we have accompanied him so far on his road home, and have
made all necessary preparations for the old woman's funeral, let us set
on foot a few inquires after young Oliver Twist, and ascertain whether
he be still lying in the ditch where Toby Crackit left him.



CHAPTER XXVIII

LOOKS AFTER OLIVER, AND PROCEEDS WITH HIS ADVENTURES

'Wolves tear your throats!' muttered Sikes, grinding his teeth. 'I wish
I was among some of you; you'd howl the hoarser for it.'

As Sikes growled forth this imprecation, with the most desperate
ferocity that his desperate nature was capable of, he rested the body
of the wounded boy across his bended knee; and turned his head, for an
instant, to look back at his pursuers.

There was little to be made out, in the mist and darkness; but the loud
shouting of men vibrated through the air, and the barking of the
neighbouring dogs, roused by the sound of the alarm bell, resounded in
every direction.

'Stop, you white-livered hound!' cried the robber, shouting after Toby
Crackit, who, making the best use of his long legs, was already ahead.
'Stop!'

The repetition of the word, brought Toby to a dead stand-still. For he
was not quite satisfied that he was beyond the range of pistol-shot;
and Sikes was in no mood to be played with.

'Bear a hand with the boy,' cried Sikes, beckoning furiously to his
confederate.  'Come back!'

Toby made a show of returning; but ventured, in a low voice, broken for
want of breath, to intimate considerable reluctance as he came slowly
along.

'Quicker!' cried Sikes, laying the boy in a dry ditch at his feet, and
drawing a pistol from his pocket.  'Don't play booty with me.'

At this moment the noise grew louder.  Sikes, again looking round,
could discern that the men who had given chase were already climbing
the gate of the field in which he stood; and that a couple of dogs were
some paces in advance of them.

'It's all up, Bill!' cried Toby; 'drop the kid, and show 'em your
heels.'  With this parting advice, Mr. Crackit, preferring the chance
of being shot by his friend, to the certainty of being taken by his
enemies, fairly turned tail, and darted off at full speed.  Sikes
clenched his teeth; took one look around; threw over the prostrate form
of Oliver, the cape in which he had been hurriedly muffled; ran along
the front of the hedge, as if to distract the attention of those
behind, from the spot where the boy lay; paused, for a second, before
another hedge which met it at right angles; and whirling his pistol
high into the air, cleared it at a bound, and was gone.

'Ho, ho, there!' cried a tremulous voice in the rear. 'Pincher!
Neptune!  Come here, come here!'

The dogs, who, in common with their masters, seemed to have no
particular relish for the sport in which they were engaged, readily
answered to the command.  Three men, who had by this time advanced some
distance into the field, stopped to take counsel together.

'My advice, or, leastways, I should say, my _orders_, is,' said the
fattest man of the party, 'that we 'mediately go home again.'

'I am agreeable to anything which is agreeable to Mr. Giles,' said a
shorter man; who was by no means of a slim figure, and who was very
pale in the face, and very polite: as frightened men frequently are.

'I shouldn't wish to appear ill-mannered, gentlemen,' said the third,
who had called the dogs back, 'Mr. Giles ought to know.'

'Certainly,' replied the shorter man; 'and whatever Mr. Giles says, it
isn't our place to contradict him.  No, no, I know my sitiwation!
Thank my stars, I know my sitiwation.'  To tell the truth, the little
man _did_ seem to know his situation, and to know perfectly well that
it was by no means a desirable one; for his teeth chattered in his head
as he spoke.

'You are afraid, Brittles,' said Mr. Giles.

'I an't,' said Brittles.

'You are,' said Giles.

'You're a falsehood, Mr. Giles,' said Brittles.

'You're a lie, Brittles,' said Mr. Giles.

Now, these four retorts arose from Mr. Giles's taunt; and Mr. Giles's
taunt had arisen from his indignation at having the responsibility of
going home again, imposed upon himself under cover of a compliment.
The third man brought the dispute to a close, most philosophically.

'I'll tell you what it is, gentlemen,' said he, 'we're all afraid.'

'Speak for yourself, sir,' said Mr. Giles, who was the palest of the
party.

'So I do,' replied the man.  'It's natural and proper to be afraid,
under such circumstances.  I am.'

'So am I,' said Brittles; 'only there's no call to tell a man he is, so
bounceably.'

These frank admissions softened Mr. Giles, who at once owned that _he_
was afraid; upon which, they all three faced about, and ran back again
with the completest unanimity, until Mr. Giles (who had the shortest
wind of the party, as was encumbered with a pitchfork) most handsomely
insisted on stopping, to make an apology for his hastiness of speech.

'But it's wonderful,' said Mr. Giles, when he had explained, 'what a
man will do, when his blood is up.  I should have committed murder--I
know I should--if we'd caught one of them rascals.'

As the other two were impressed with a similar presentiment; and as
their blood, like his, had all gone down again; some speculation ensued
upon the cause of this sudden change in their temperament.

'I know what it was,' said Mr. Giles; 'it was the gate.'

'I shouldn't wonder if it was,' exclaimed Brittles, catching at the
idea.

'You may depend upon it,' said Giles, 'that that gate stopped the flow
of the excitement.  I felt all mine suddenly going away, as I was
climbing over it.'

By a remarkable coincidence, the other two had been visited with the
same unpleasant sensation at that precise moment.  It was quite
obvious, therefore, that it was the gate; especially as there was no
doubt regarding the time at which the change had taken place, because
all three remembered that they had come in sight of the robbers at the
instant of its occurance.

This dialogue was held between the two men who had surprised the
burglars, and a travelling tinker who had been sleeping in an outhouse,
and who had been roused, together with his two mongrel curs, to join in
the pursuit.  Mr. Giles acted in the double capacity of butler and
steward to the old lady of the mansion; Brittles was a lad of all-work:
who, having entered her service a mere child, was treated as a
promising young boy still, though he was something past thirty.

Encouraging each other with such converse as this; but, keeping very
close together, notwithstanding, and looking apprehensively round,
whenever a fresh gust rattled through the boughs; the three men hurried
back to a tree, behind which they had left their lantern, lest its
light should inform the thieves in what direction to fire.  Catching up
the light, they made the best of their way home, at a good round trot;
and long after their dusky forms had ceased to be discernible, the
light might have been seen twinkling and dancing in the distance, like
some exhalation of the damp and gloomy atmosphere through which it was
swiftly borne.

The air grew colder, as day came slowly on; and the mist rolled along
the ground like a dense cloud of smoke.  The grass was wet; the
pathways, and low places, were all mire and water; the damp breath of
an unwholesome wind went languidly by, with a hollow moaning.  Still,
Oliver lay motionless and insensible on the spot where Sikes had left
him.

Morning drew on apace.  The air become more sharp and piercing, as its
first dull hue--the death of night, rather than the birth of
day--glimmered faintly in the sky.  The objects which had looked dim
and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually
resolved into their familiar shapes.  The rain came down, thick and
fast, and pattered noisily among the leafless bushes.  But, Oliver felt
it not, as it beat against him; for he still lay stretched, helpless
and unconscious, on his bed of clay.

At length, a low cry of pain broke the stillness that prevailed; and
uttering it, the boy awoke.  His left arm, rudely bandaged in a shawl,
hung heavy and useless at his side; the bandage was saturated with
blood.  He was so weak, that he could scarcely raise himself into a
sitting posture; when he had done so, he looked feebly round for help,
and groaned with pain.  Trembling in every joint, from cold and
exhaustion, he made an effort to stand upright; but, shuddering from
head to foot, fell prostrate on the ground.

After a short return of the stupor in which he had been so long
plunged, Oliver:  urged by a creeping sickness at his heart, which
seemed to warn him that if he lay there, he must surely die:  got upon
his feet, and essayed to walk. His head was dizzy, and he staggered to
and fro like a drunken man.  But he kept up, nevertheless, and, with
his head drooping languidly on his breast, went stumbling onward, he
knew not whither.

And now, hosts of bewildering and confused ideas came crowding on his
mind.  He seemed to be still walking between Sikes and Crackit, who
were angrily disputing--for the very words they said, sounded in his
ears; and when he caught his own attention, as it were, by making some
violent effort to save himself from falling, he found that he was
talking to them. Then, he was alone with Sikes, plodding on as on the
previous day; and as shadowy people passed them, he felt the robber's
grasp upon his wrist. Suddenly, he started back at the report of
firearms; there rose into the air, loud cries and shouts; lights
gleamed before his eyes; all was noise and tumult, as some unseen hand
bore him hurriedly away.  Through all these rapid visions, there ran an
undefined, uneasy consciousness of pain, which wearied and tormented
him incessantly.

Thus he staggered on, creeping, almost mechanically, between the bars
of gates, or through hedge-gaps as they came in his way, until he
reached a road.  Here the rain began to fall so heavily, that it roused
him.

He looked about, and saw that at no great distance there was a house,
which perhaps he could reach.  Pitying his condition, they might have
compassion on him; and if they did not, it would be better, he thought,
to die near human beings, than in the lonely open fields.  He summoned
up all his strength for one last trial, and bent his faltering steps
towards it.

As he drew nearer to this house, a feeling come over him that he had
seen it before.  He remembered nothing of its details; but the shape
and aspect of the building seemed familiar to him.

That garden wall!  On the grass inside, he had fallen on his knees last
night, and prayed the two men's mercy.  It was the very house they had
attempted to rob.

Oliver felt such fear come over him when he recognised the place, that,
for the instant, he forgot the agony of his wound, and thought only of
flight.  Flight!  He could scarcely stand:  and if he were in full
possession of all the best powers of his slight and youthful frame,
whither could he fly?  He pushed against the garden-gate; it was
unlocked, and swung open on its hinges.  He tottered across the lawn;
climbed the steps; knocked faintly at the door; and, his whole strength
failing him, sunk down against one of the pillars of the little portico.

It happened that about this time, Mr. Giles, Brittles, and the tinker,
were recruiting themselves, after the fatigues and terrors of the
night, with tea and sundries, in the kitchen.  Not that it was Mr.
Giles's habit to admit to too great familiarity the humbler servants:
towards whom it was rather his wont to deport himself with a lofty
affability, which, while it gratified, could not fail to remind them of
his superior position in society.  But, death, fires, and burglary,
make all men equals; so Mr. Giles sat with his legs stretched out
before the kitchen fender, leaning his left arm on the table, while,
with his right, he illustrated a circumstantial and minute account of
the robbery, to which his bearers (but especially the cook and
housemaid, who were of the party) listened with breathless interest.

'It was about half-past two,' said Mr. Giles, 'or I wouldn't swear that
it mightn't have been a little nearer three, when I woke up, and,
turning round in my bed, as it might be so, (here Mr. Giles turned
round in his chair, and pulled the corner of the table-cloth over him
to imitate bed-clothes,) I fancied I heerd a noise.'

At this point of the narrative the cook turned pale, and asked the
housemaid to shut the door: who asked Brittles, who asked the tinker,
who pretended not to hear.

'--Heerd a noise,' continued Mr. Giles.  'I says, at first, "This is
illusion"; and was composing myself off to sleep, when I heerd the
noise again, distinct.'

'What sort of a noise?' asked the cook.

'A kind of a busting noise,' replied Mr. Giles, looking round him.

'More like the noise of powdering a iron bar on a nutmeg-grater,'
suggested Brittles.

'It was, when _you_ heerd it, sir,' rejoined Mr. Giles; 'but, at this
time, it had a busting sound.  I turned down the clothes'; continued
Giles, rolling back the table-cloth, 'sat up in bed; and listened.'

The cook and housemaid simultaneously ejaculated 'Lor!' and drew their
chairs closer together.

'I heerd it now, quite apparent,' resumed Mr. Giles. '"Somebody," I
says, "is forcing of a door, or window; what's to be done? I'll call up
that poor lad, Brittles, and save him from being murdered in his bed;
or his throat," I says, "may be cut from his right ear to his left,
without his ever knowing it."'

Here, all eyes were turned upon Brittles, who fixed his upon the
speaker, and stared at him, with his mouth wide open, and his face
expressive of the most unmitigated horror.

'I tossed off the clothes,' said Giles, throwing away the table-cloth,
and looking very hard at the cook and housemaid, 'got softly out of
bed; drew on a pair of--'

'Ladies present, Mr. Giles,' murmured the tinker.

'--Of _shoes_, sir,' said Giles, turning upon him, and laying great
emphasis on the word; 'seized the loaded pistol that always goes
upstairs with the plate-basket; and walked on tiptoes to his room.
"Brittles," I says, when I had woke him, "don't be frightened!"'

'So you did,' observed Brittles, in a low voice.

'"We're dead men, I think, Brittles," I says,' continued Giles; '"but
don't be frightened."'

'_Was_ he frightened?' asked the cook.

'Not a bit of it,' replied Mr. Giles.  'He was as firm--ah! pretty near
as firm as I was.'

'I should have died at once, I'm sure, if it had been me,' observed the
housemaid.

'You're a woman,' retorted Brittles, plucking up a little.

'Brittles is right,' said Mr. Giles, nodding his head, approvingly;
'from a woman, nothing else was to be expected. We, being men, took a
dark lantern that was standing on Brittle's hob, and groped our way
downstairs in the pitch dark,--as it might be so.'

Mr. Giles had risen from his seat, and taken two steps with his eyes
shut, to accompany his description with appropriate action, when he
started violently, in common with the rest of the company, and hurried
back to his chair.  The cook and housemaid screamed.

'It was a knock,' said Mr. Giles, assuming perfect serenity. 'Open the
door, somebody.'

Nobody moved.

'It seems a strange sort of a thing, a knock coming at such a time in
the morning,' said Mr. Giles, surveying the pale faces which surrounded
him, and looking very blank himself; 'but the door must be opened.  Do
you hear, somebody?'

Mr. Giles, as he spoke, looked at Brittles; but that young man, being
naturally modest, probably considered himself nobody, and so held that
the inquiry could not have any application to him; at all events, he
tendered no reply. Mr. Giles directed an appealing glance at the
tinker; but he had suddenly fallen asleep.  The women were out of the
question.

'If Brittles would rather open the door, in the presence of witnesses,'
said Mr. Giles, after a short silence, 'I am ready to make one.'

'So am I,' said the tinker, waking up, as suddenly as he had fallen
asleep.

Brittles capitulated on these terms; and the party being somewhat
re-assured by the discovery (made on throwing open the shutters) that
it was now broad day, took their way upstairs; with the dogs in front.
The two women, who were afraid to stay below, brought up the rear.  By
the advice of Mr. Giles, they all talked very loud, to warn any
evil-disposed person outside, that they were strong in numbers; and by
a master-stoke of policy, originating in the brain of the same
ingenious gentleman, the dogs' tails were well pinched, in the hall, to
make them bark savagely.

These precautions having been taken, Mr. Giles held on fast by the
tinker's arm (to prevent his running away, as he pleasantly said), and
gave the word of command to open the door.  Brittles obeyed; the group,
peeping timorously over each other's shoulders, beheld no more
formidable object than poor little Oliver Twist, speechless and
exhausted, who raised his heavy eyes, and mutely solicited their
compassion.

'A boy!' exclaimed Mr. Giles, valiantly, pushing the tinker into the
background.  'What's the matter with the--eh?--Why--Brittles--look
here--don't you know?'

Brittles, who had got behind the door to open it, no sooner saw Oliver,
than he uttered a loud cry.  Mr. Giles, seizing the boy by one leg and
one arm (fortunately not the broken limb) lugged him straight into the
hall, and deposited him at full length on the floor thereof.

'Here he is!' bawled Giles, calling in a state of great excitement, up
the staircase; 'here's one of the thieves, ma'am! Here's a thief, miss!
Wounded, miss!  I shot him, miss; and Brittles held the light.'

'--In a lantern, miss,' cried Brittles, applying one hand to the side
of his mouth, so that his voice might travel the better.

The two women-servants ran upstairs to carry the intelligence that Mr.
Giles had captured a robber; and the tinker busied himself in
endeavouring to restore Oliver, lest he should die before he could be
hanged.  In the midst of all this noise and commotion, there was heard
a sweet female voice, which quelled it in an instant.

'Giles!' whispered the voice from the stair-head.

'I'm here, miss,' replied Mr. Giles.  'Don't be frightened, miss; I
ain't much injured.  He didn't make a very desperate resistance, miss!
I was soon too many for him.'

'Hush!' replied the young lady; 'you frighten my aunt as much as the
thieves did.  Is the poor creature much hurt?'

'Wounded desperate, miss,' replied Giles, with indescribable
complacency.

'He looks as if he was a-going, miss,' bawled Brittles, in the same
manner as before.  'Wouldn't you like to come and look at him, miss, in
case he should?'

'Hush, pray; there's a good man!' rejoined the lady.  'Wait quietly
only one instant, while I speak to aunt.'

With a footstep as soft and gentle as the voice, the speaker tripped
away.  She soon returned, with the direction that the wounded person
was to be carried, carefully, upstairs to Mr. Giles's room; and that
Brittles was to saddle the pony and betake himself instantly to
Chertsey:  from which place, he was to despatch, with all speed, a
constable and doctor.

'But won't you take one look at him, first, miss?' asked Mr. Giles,
with as much pride as if Oliver were some bird of rare plumage, that he
had skilfully brought down.  'Not one little peep, miss?'

'Not now, for the world,' replied the young lady.  'Poor fellow! Oh!
treat him kindly, Giles for my sake!'

The old servant looked up at the speaker, as she turned away, with a
glance as proud and admiring as if she had been his own child.  Then,
bending over Oliver, he helped to carry him upstairs, with the care and
solicitude of a woman.



CHAPTER XXIX

HAS AN INTRODUCTORY ACCOUNT OF THE INMATES OF THE HOUSE, TO WHICH
OLIVER RESORTED

In a handsome room:  though its furniture had rather the air of
old-fashioned comfort, than of modern elegance:  there sat two ladies
at a well-spread breakfast-table.  Mr. Giles, dressed with scrupulous
care in a full suit of black, was in attendance upon them.  He had
taken his station some half-way between the side-board and the
breakfast-table; and, with his body drawn up to its full height, his
head thrown back, and inclined the merest trifle on one side, his left
leg advanced, and his right hand thrust into his waist-coat, while his
left hung down by his side, grasping a waiter, looked like one who
laboured under a very agreeable sense of his own merits and importance.

Of the two ladies, one was well advanced in years; but the high-backed
oaken chair in which she sat, was not more upright than she.  Dressed
with the utmost nicety and precision, in a quaint mixture of by-gone
costume, with some slight concessions to the prevailing taste, which
rather served to point the old style pleasantly than to impair its
effect, she sat, in a stately manner, with her hands folded on the
table before her.  Her eyes (and age had dimmed but little of their
brightness) were attentively upon her young companion.

The younger lady was in the lovely bloom and spring-time of womanhood;
at that age, when, if ever angels be for God's good purposes enthroned
in mortal forms, they may be, without impiety, supposed to abide in
such as hers.

She was not past seventeen.  Cast in so slight and exquisite a mould;
so mild and gentle; so pure and beautiful; that earth seemed not her
element, nor its rough creatures her fit companions.  The very
intelligence that shone in her deep blue eye, and was stamped upon her
noble head, seemed scarcely of her age, or of the world; and yet the
changing expression of sweetness and good humour, the thousand lights
that played about the face, and left no shadow there; above all, the
smile, the cheerful, happy smile, were made for Home, and fireside
peace and happiness.

She was busily engaged in the little offices of the table. Chancing to
raise her eyes as the elder lady was regarding her, she playfully put
back her hair, which was simply braided on her forehead; and threw into
her beaming look, such an expression of affection and artless
loveliness, that blessed spirits might have smiled to look upon her.

'And Brittles has been gone upwards of an hour, has he?' asked the old
lady, after a pause.

'An hour and twelve minutes, ma'am,' replied Mr. Giles, referring to a
silver watch, which he drew forth by a black ribbon.

'He is always slow,' remarked the old lady.

'Brittles always was a slow boy, ma'am,' replied the attendant. And
seeing, by the bye, that Brittles had been a slow boy for upwards of
thirty years, there appeared no great probability of his ever being a
fast one.

'He gets worse instead of better, I think,' said the elder lady.

'It is very inexcusable in him if he stops to play with any other
boys,' said the young lady, smiling.

Mr. Giles was apparently considering the propriety of indulging in a
respectful smile himself, when a gig drove up to the garden-gate: out
of which there jumped a fat gentleman, who ran straight up to the door:
and who, getting quickly into the house by some mysterious process,
burst into the room, and nearly overturned Mr. Giles and the
breakfast-table together.

'I never heard of such a thing!' exclaimed the fat gentleman. 'My dear
Mrs. Maylie--bless my soul--in the silence of the night, too--I _never_
heard of such a thing!'

With these expressions of condolence, the fat gentleman shook hands
with both ladies, and drawing up a chair, inquired how they found
themselves.

'You ought to be dead; positively dead with the fright,' said the fat
gentleman.  'Why didn't you send?  Bless me, my man should have come in
a minute; and so would I; and my assistant would have been delighted;
or anybody, I'm sure, under such circumstances.  Dear, dear!  So
unexpected!  In the silence of the night, too!'

The doctor seemed expecially troubled by the fact of the robbery having
been unexpected, and attempted in the night-time; as if it were the
established custom of gentlemen in the housebreaking way to transact
business at noon, and to make an appointment, by post, a day or two
previous.

'And you, Miss Rose,' said the doctor, turning to the young lady, 'I--'

'Oh! very much so, indeed,' said Rose, interrupting him; 'but there is
a poor creature upstairs, whom aunt wishes you to see.'

'Ah! to be sure,' replied the doctor, 'so there is.  That was your
handiwork, Giles, I understand.'

Mr. Giles, who had been feverishly putting the tea-cups to rights,
blushed very red, and said that he had had that honour.

'Honour, eh?' said the doctor; 'well, I don't know; perhaps it's as
honourable to hit a thief in a back kitchen, as to hit your man at
twelve paces.  Fancy that he fired in the air, and you've fought a
duel, Giles.'

Mr. Giles, who thought this light treatment of the matter an unjust
attempt at diminishing his glory, answered respectfully, that it was
not for the like of him to judge about that; but he rather thought it
was no joke to the opposite party.

'Gad, that's true!' said the doctor.  'Where is he?  Show me the way.
I'll look in again, as I come down, Mrs. Maylie.  That's the little
window that he got in at, eh?  Well, I couldn't have believed it!'

Talking all the way, he followed Mr. Giles upstairs; and while he is
going upstairs, the reader may be informed, that Mr. Losberne, a
surgeon in the neighbourhood, known through a circuit of ten miles
round as 'the doctor,' had grown fat, more from good-humour than from
good living:  and was as kind and hearty, and withal as eccentric an
old bachelor, as will be found in five times that space, by any
explorer alive.

The doctor was absent, much longer than either he or the ladies had
anticipated.  A large flat box was fetched out of the gig; and a
bedroom bell was rung very often; and the servants ran up and down
stairs perpetually; from which tokens it was justly concluded that
something important was going on above.  At length he returned; and in
reply to an anxious inquiry after his patient; looked very mysterious,
and closed the door, carefully.

'This is a very extraordinary thing, Mrs. Maylie,' said the doctor,
standing with his back to the door, as if to keep it shut.

'He is not in danger, I hope?' said the old lady.

'Why, that would _not_ be an extraordinary thing, under the
circumstances,' replied the doctor; 'though I don't think he is. Have
you seen the thief?'

'No,' rejoined the old lady.

'Nor heard anything about him?'

'No.'

'I beg your pardon, ma'am, interposed Mr. Giles; 'but I was going to
tell you about him when Doctor Losberne came in.'

The fact was, that Mr. Giles had not, at first, been able to bring his
mind to the avowal, that he had only shot a boy.  Such commendations
had been bestowed upon his bravery, that he could not, for the life of
him, help postponing the explanation for a few delicious minutes;
during which he had flourished, in the very zenith of a brief
reputation for undaunted courage.

'Rose wished to see the man,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'but I wouldn't hear of
it.'

'Humph!' rejoined the doctor.  'There is nothing very alarming in his
appearance.  Have you any objection to see him in my presence?'

'If it be necessary,' replied the old lady, 'certainly not.'

'Then I think it is necessary,' said the doctor; 'at all events, I am
quite sure that you would deeply regret not having done so, if you
postponed it.  He is perfectly quiet and comfortable now. Allow
me--Miss Rose, will you permit me?  Not the slightest fear, I pledge
you my honour!'



CHAPTER XXX

RELATES WHAT OLIVER'S NEW VISITORS THOUGHT OF HIM

With many loquacious assurances that they would be agreeably surprised
in the aspect of the criminal, the doctor drew the young lady's arm
through one of his; and offering his disengaged hand to Mrs. Maylie,
led them, with much ceremony and stateliness, upstairs.

'Now,' said the doctor, in a whisper, as he softly turned the handle of
a bedroom-door, 'let us hear what you think of him.  He has not been
shaved very recently, but he don't look at all ferocious
notwithstanding.  Stop, though!  Let me first see that he is in
visiting order.'

Stepping before them, he looked into the room.  Motioning them to
advance, he closed the door when they had entered; and gently drew back
the curtains of the bed.  Upon it, in lieu of the dogged, black-visaged
ruffian they had expected to behold, there lay a mere child:  worn with
pain and exhaustion, and sunk into a deep sleep.  His wounded arm,
bound and splintered up, was crossed upon his breast; his head reclined
upon the other arm, which was half hidden by his long hair, as it
streamed over the pillow.

The honest gentleman held the curtain in his hand, and looked on, for a
minute or so, in silence.  Whilst he was watching the patient thus, the
younger lady glided softly past, and seating herself in a chair by the
bedside, gathered Oliver's hair from his face.  As she stooped over
him, her tears fell upon his forehead.

The boy stirred, and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity
and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection
he had never known.  Thus, a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of
water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or the mention of a
familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes
that never were, in this life; which vanish like a breath; which some
brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have
awakened; which no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall.

'What can this mean?' exclaimed the elder lady.  'This poor child can
never have been the pupil of robbers!'

'Vice,' said the surgeon, replacing the curtain, 'takes up her abode in
many temples; and who can say that a fair outside shell not enshrine
her?'

'But at so early an age!' urged Rose.

'My dear young lady,' rejoined the surgeon, mournfully shaking his
head; 'crime, like death, is not confined to the old and withered
alone.  The youngest and fairest are too often its chosen victims.'

'But, can you--oh! can you really believe that this delicate boy has
been the voluntary associate of the worst outcasts of society?' said
Rose.

The surgeon shook his head, in a manner which intimated that he feared
it was very possible; and observing that they might disturb the
patient, led the way into an adjoining apartment.

'But even if he has been wicked,' pursued Rose, 'think how young he is;
think that he may never have known a mother's love, or the comfort of a
home; that ill-usage and blows, or the want of bread, may have driven
him to herd with men who have forced him to guilt.  Aunt, dear aunt,
for mercy's sake, think of this, before you let them drag this sick
child to a prison, which in any case must be the grave of all his
chances of amendment.  Oh! as you love me, and know that I have never
felt the want of parents in your goodness and affection, but that I
might have done so, and might have been equally helpless and
unprotected with this poor child, have pity upon him before it is too
late!'

'My dear love,' said the elder lady, as she folded the weeping girl to
her bosom, 'do you think I would harm a hair of his head?'

'Oh, no!' replied Rose, eagerly.

'No, surely,' said the old lady; 'my days are drawing to their close:
and may mercy be shown to me as I show it to others! What can I do to
save him, sir?'

'Let me think, ma'am,' said the doctor; 'let me think.'

Mr. Losberne thrust his hands into his pockets, and took several turns
up and down the room; often stopping, and balancing himself on his
toes, and frowning frightfully.  After various exclamations of 'I've
got it now' and 'no, I haven't,' and as many renewals of the walking
and frowning, he at length made a dead halt, and spoke as follows:

'I think if you give me a full and unlimited commission to bully Giles,
and that little boy, Brittles, I can manage it.  Giles is a faithful
fellow and an old servant, I know; but you can make it up to him in a
thousand ways, and reward him for being such a good shot besides.  You
don't object to that?'

'Unless there is some other way of preserving the child,' replied Mrs.
Maylie.

'There is no other,' said the doctor.  'No other, take my word for it.'

'Then my aunt invests you with full power,' said Rose, smiling through
her tears; 'but pray don't be harder upon the poor fellows than is
indispensably necessary.'

'You seem to think,' retorted the doctor, 'that everybody is disposed
to be hard-hearted to-day, except yourself, Miss Rose. I only hope, for
the sake of the rising male sex generally, that you may be found in as
vulnerable and soft-hearted a mood by the first eligible young fellow
who appeals to your compassion; and I wish I were a young fellow, that
I might avail myself, on the spot, of such a favourable opportunity for
doing so, as the present.'

'You are as great a boy as poor Brittles himself,' returned Rose,
blushing.

'Well,' said the doctor, laughing heartily, 'that is no very difficult
matter.  But to return to this boy.  The great point of our agreement
is yet to come.  He will wake in an hour or so, I dare say; and
although I have told that thick-headed constable-fellow downstairs that
he musn't be moved or spoken to, on peril of his life, I think we may
converse with him without danger.  Now I make this stipulation--that I
shall examine him in your presence, and that, if, from what he says, we
judge, and I can show to the satisfaction of your cool reason, that he
is a real and thorough bad one (which is more than possible), he shall
be left to his fate, without any farther interference on my part, at
all events.'

'Oh no, aunt!' entreated Rose.

'Oh yes, aunt!' said the doctor.  'Is is a bargain?'

'He cannot be hardened in vice,' said Rose; 'It is impossible.'

'Very good,' retorted the doctor; 'then so much the more reason for
acceding to my proposition.'

Finally the treaty was entered into; and the parties thereunto sat down
to wait, with some impatience, until Oliver should awake.

The patience of the two ladies was destined to undergo a longer trial
than Mr. Losberne had led them to expect; for hour after hour passed
on, and still Oliver slumbered heavily.  It was evening, indeed, before
the kind-hearted doctor brought them the intelligence, that he was at
length sufficiently restored to be spoken to.  The boy was very ill, he
said, and weak from the loss of blood; but his mind was so troubled
with anxiety to disclose something, that he deemed it better to give
him the opportunity, than to insist upon his remaining quiet until next
morning: which he should otherwise have done.

The conference was a long one.  Oliver told them all his simple
history, and was often compelled to stop, by pain and want of strength.
It was a solemn thing, to hear, in the darkened room, the feeble voice
of the sick child recounting a weary catalogue of evils and calamities
which hard men had brought upon him.  Oh! if when we oppress and grind
our fellow-creatures, we bestowed but one thought on the dark evidences
of human error, which, like dense and heavy clouds, are rising, slowly
it is true, but not less surely, to Heaven, to pour their
after-vengeance on our heads; if we heard but one instant, in
imagination, the deep testimony of dead men's voices, which no power
can stifle, and no pride shut out; where would be the injury and
injustice, the suffering, misery, cruelty, and wrong, that each day's
life brings with it!

Oliver's pillow was smoothed by gentle hands that night; and loveliness
and virtue watched him as he slept.  He felt calm and happy, and could
have died without a murmur.

The momentous interview was no sooner concluded, and Oliver composed to
rest again, than the doctor, after wiping his eyes, and condemning them
for being weak all at once, betook himself downstairs to open upon Mr.
Giles.  And finding nobody about the parlours, it occurred to him, that
he could perhaps originate the proceedings with better effect in the
kitchen; so into the kitchen he went.

There were assembled, in that lower house of the domestic parliament,
the women-servants, Mr. Brittles, Mr. Giles, the tinker (who had
received a special invitation to regale himself for the remainder of
the day, in consideration of his services), and the constable.  The
latter gentleman had a large staff, a large head, large features, and
large half-boots; and he looked as if he had been taking a
proportionate allowance of ale--as indeed he had.

The adventures of the previous night were still under discussion; for
Mr. Giles was expatiating upon his presence of mind, when the doctor
entered; Mr. Brittles, with a mug of ale in his hand, was corroborating
everything, before his superior said it.

'Sit still!' said the doctor, waving his hand.

'Thank you, sir, said Mr. Giles.  'Misses wished some ale to be given
out, sir; and as I felt no ways inclined for my own little room, sir,
and was disposed for company, I am taking mine among 'em here.'

Brittles headed a low murmur, by which the ladies and gentlemen
generally were understood to express the gratification they derived
from Mr. Giles's condescension.  Mr. Giles looked round with a
patronising air, as much as to say that so long as they behaved
properly, he would never desert them.

'How is the patient to-night, sir?' asked Giles.

'So-so'; returned the doctor.  'I am afraid you have got yourself into
a scrape there, Mr. Giles.'

'I hope you don't mean to say, sir,' said Mr. Giles, trembling, 'that
he's going to die.  If I thought it, I should never be happy again.  I
wouldn't cut a boy off:  no, not even Brittles here; not for all the
plate in the county, sir.'

'That's not the point,' said the doctor, mysteriously.  'Mr. Giles, are
you a Protestant?'

'Yes, sir, I hope so,' faltered Mr. Giles, who had turned very pale.

'And what are _you_, boy?' said the doctor, turning sharply upon
Brittles.

'Lord bless me, sir!' replied Brittles, starting violently; 'I'm the
same as Mr. Giles, sir.'

'Then tell me this,' said the doctor, 'both of you, both of you! Are
you going to take upon yourselves to swear, that that boy upstairs is
the boy that was put through the little window last night?  Out with
it!  Come!  We are prepared for you!'

The doctor, who was universally considered one of the best-tempered
creatures on earth, made this demand in such a dreadful tone of anger,
that Giles and Brittles, who were considerably muddled by ale and
excitement, stared at each other in a state of stupefaction.

'Pay attention to the reply, constable, will you?' said the doctor,
shaking his forefinger with great solemnity of manner, and tapping the
bridge of his nose with it, to bespeak the exercise of that worthy's
utmost acuteness. 'Something may come of this before long.'

The constable looked as wise as he could, and took up his staff of
office: which had been reclining indolently in the chimney-corner.

'It's a simple question of identity, you will observe,' said the doctor.

'That's what it is, sir,' replied the constable, coughing with great
violence; for he had finished his ale in a hurry, and some of it had
gone the wrong way.

'Here's the house broken into,' said the doctor, 'and a couple of men
catch one moment's glimpse of a boy, in the midst of gunpowder smoke,
and in all the distraction of alarm and darkness.  Here's a boy comes
to that very same house, next morning, and because he happens to have
his arm tied up, these men lay violent hands upon him--by doing which,
they place his life in great danger--and swear he is the thief.  Now,
the question is, whether these men are justified by the fact; if not,
in what situation do they place themselves?'

The constable nodded profoundly.  He said, if that wasn't law, he would
be glad to know what was.

'I ask you again,' thundered the doctor, 'are you, on your solemn
oaths, able to identify that boy?'

Brittles looked doubtfully at Mr. Giles; Mr. Giles looked doubtfully at
Brittles; the constable put his hand behind his ear, to catch the
reply; the two women and the tinker leaned forward to listen; the
doctor glanced keenly round; when a ring was heard at the gate, and at
the same moment, the sound of wheels.

'It's the runners!' cried Brittles, to all appearance much relieved.

'The what?' exclaimed the doctor, aghast in his turn.

'The Bow Street officers, sir,' replied Brittles, taking up a candle;
'me and Mr. Giles sent for 'em this morning.'

'What?' cried the doctor.

'Yes,' replied Brittles; 'I sent a message up by the coachman, and I
only wonder they weren't here before, sir.'

'You did, did you?  Then confound your--slow coaches down here; that's
all,' said the doctor, walking away.



CHAPTER XXXI

INVOLVES A CRITICAL POSITION

'Who's that?' inquired Brittles, opening the door a little way, with
the chain up, and peeping out, shading the candle with his hand.

'Open the door,' replied a man outside; 'it's the officers from Bow
Street, as was sent to to-day.'

Much comforted by this assurance, Brittles opened the door to its full
width, and confronted a portly man in a great-coat; who walked in,
without saying anything more, and wiped his shoes on the mat, as coolly
as if he lived there.

'Just send somebody out to relieve my mate, will you, young man?' said
the officer; 'he's in the gig, a-minding the prad.  Have you got a
coach 'us here, that you could put it up in, for five or ten minutes?'

Brittles replying in the affirmative, and pointing out the building,
the portly man stepped back to the garden-gate, and helped his
companion to put up the gig:  while Brittles lighted them, in a state
of great admiration.  This done, they returned to the house, and, being
shown into a parlour, took off their great-coats and hats, and showed
like what they were.

The man who had knocked at the door, was a stout personage of middle
height, aged about fifty: with shiny black hair, cropped pretty close;
half-whiskers, a round face, and sharp eyes.  The other was a
red-headed, bony man, in top-boots; with a rather ill-favoured
countenance, and a turned-up sinister-looking nose.

'Tell your governor that Blathers and Duff is here, will you?' said the
stouter man, smoothing down his hair, and laying a pair of handcuffs on
the table.  'Oh!  Good-evening, master.  Can I have a word or two with
you in private, if you please?'

This was addressed to Mr. Losberne, who now made his appearance; that
gentleman, motioning Brittles to retire, brought in the two ladies, and
shut the door.

'This is the lady of the house,' said Mr. Losberne, motioning towards
Mrs. Maylie.

Mr. Blathers made a bow.  Being desired to sit down, he put his hat on
the floor, and taking a chair, motioned to Duff to do the same.  The
latter gentleman, who did not appear quite so much accustomed to good
society, or quite so much at his ease in it--one of the two--seated
himself, after undergoing several muscular affections of the limbs, and
the head of his stick into his mouth, with some embarrassment.

'Now, with regard to this here robbery, master,' said Blathers. 'What
are the circumstances?'

Mr. Losberne, who appeared desirous of gaining time, recounted them at
great length, and with much circumlocution.  Messrs. Blathers and Duff
looked very knowing meanwhile, and occasionally exchanged a nod.

'I can't say, for certain, till I see the work, of course,' said
Blathers; 'but my opinion at once is,--I don't mind committing myself
to that extent,--that this wasn't done by a yokel; eh, Duff?'

'Certainly not,' replied Duff.

'And, translating the word yokel for the benefit of the ladies, I
apprehend your meaning to be, that this attempt was not made by a
countryman?' said Mr. Losberne, with a smile.

'That's it, master,' replied Blathers.  'This is all about the robbery,
is it?'

'All,' replied the doctor.

'Now, what is this, about this here boy that the servants are a-talking
on?' said Blathers.

'Nothing at all,' replied the doctor.  'One of the frightened servants
chose to take it into his head, that he had something to do with this
attempt to break into the house; but it's nonsense: sheer absurdity.'

'Wery easy disposed of, if it is,' remarked Duff.

'What he says is quite correct,' observed Blathers, nodding his head in
a confirmatory way, and playing carelessly with the handcuffs, as if
they were a pair of castanets.  'Who is the boy? What account does he
give of himself?  Where did he come from? He didn't drop out of the
clouds, did he, master?'

'Of course not,' replied the doctor, with a nervous glance at the two
ladies.  'I know his whole history: but we can talk about that
presently.  You would like, first, to see the place where the thieves
made their attempt, I suppose?'

'Certainly,' rejoined Mr. Blathers.  'We had better inspect the
premises first, and examine the servants afterwards. That's the usual
way of doing business.'

Lights were then procured; and Messrs. Blathers and Duff, attended by
the native constable, Brittles, Giles, and everybody else in short,
went into the little room at the end of the passage and looked out at
the window; and afterwards went round by way of the lawn, and looked in
at the window; and after that, had a candle handed out to inspect the
shutter with; and after that, a lantern to trace the footsteps with;
and after that, a pitchfork to poke the bushes with.  This done, amidst
the breathless interest of all beholders, they came in again; and Mr.
Giles and Brittles were put through a melodramatic representation of
their share in the previous night's adventures: which they performed
some six times over: contradicting each other, in not more than one
important respect, the first time, and in not more than a dozen the
last.  This consummation being arrived at, Blathers and Duff cleared
the room, and held a long council together, compared with which, for
secrecy and solemnity, a consultation of great doctors on the knottiest
point in medicine, would be mere child's play.

Meanwhile, the doctor walked up and down the next room in a very uneasy
state; and Mrs. Maylie and Rose looked on, with anxious faces.

'Upon my word,' he said, making a halt, after a great number of very
rapid turns, 'I hardly know what to do.'

'Surely,' said Rose, 'the poor child's story, faithfully repeated to
these men, will be sufficient to exonerate him.'

'I doubt it, my dear young lady,' said the doctor, shaking his head.
'I don't think it would exonerate him, either with them, or with legal
functionaries of a higher grade.  What is he, after all, they would
say?  A runaway.  Judged by mere worldly considerations and
probabilities, his story is a very doubtful one.'

'You believe it, surely?' interrupted Rose.

'_I_ believe it, strange as it is; and perhaps I may be an old fool for
doing so,' rejoined the doctor; 'but I don't think it is exactly the
tale for a practical police-officer, nevertheless.'

'Why not?' demanded Rose.

'Because, my pretty cross-examiner,' replied the doctor: 'because,
viewed with their eyes, there are many ugly points about it; he can
only prove the parts that look ill, and none of those that look well.
Confound the fellows, they _will_ have the why and the wherefore, and
will take nothing for granted.  On his own showing, you see, he has
been the companion of thieves for some time past; he has been carried
to a police-officer, on a charge of picking a gentleman's pocket; he
has been taken away, forcibly, from that gentleman's house, to a place
which he cannot describe or point out, and of the situation of which he
has not the remotest idea.  He is brought down to Chertsey, by men who
seem to have taken a violent fancy to him, whether he will or no; and
is put through a window to rob a house; and then, just at the very
moment when he is going to alarm the inmates, and so do the very thing
that would set him all to rights, there rushes into the way, a
blundering dog of a half-bred butler, and shoots him! As if on purpose
to prevent his doing any good for himself! Don't you see all this?'

'I see it, of course,' replied Rose, smiling at the doctor's
impetuosity; 'but still I do not see anything in it, to criminate the
poor child.'

'No,' replied the doctor; 'of course not!  Bless the bright eyes of
your sex!  They never see, whether for good or bad, more than one side
of any question; and that is, always, the one which first presents
itself to them.'

Having given vent to this result of experience, the doctor put his
hands into his pockets, and walked up and down the room with even
greater rapidity than before.

'The more I think of it,' said the doctor, 'the more I see that it will
occasion endless trouble and difficulty if we put these men in
possession of the boy's real story.  I am certain it will not be
believed; and even if they can do nothing to him in the end, still the
dragging it forward, and giving publicity to all the doubts that will
be cast upon it, must interfere, materially, with your benevolent plan
of rescuing him from misery.'

'Oh! what is to be done?' cried Rose.  'Dear, dear! why did they send
for these people?'

'Why, indeed!' exclaimed Mrs. Maylie.  'I would not have had them here,
for the world.'

'All I know is,' said Mr. Losberne, at last:  sitting down with a kind
of desperate calmness, 'that we must try and carry it off with a bold
face.  The object is a good one, and that must be our excuse.  The boy
has strong symptoms of fever upon him, and is in no condition to be
talked to any more; that's one comfort.  We must make the best of it;
and if bad be the best, it is no fault of ours.  Come in!'

'Well, master,' said Blathers, entering the room followed by his
colleague, and making the door fast, before he said any more. 'This
warn't a put-up thing.'

'And what the devil's a put-up thing?' demanded the doctor, impatiently.

'We call it a put-up robbery, ladies,' said Blathers, turning to them,
as if he pitied their ignorance, but had a contempt for the doctor's,
'when the servants is in it.'

'Nobody suspected them, in this case,' said Mrs. Maylie.

'Wery likely not, ma'am,' replied Blathers; 'but they might have been
in it, for all that.'

'More likely on that wery account,' said Duff.

'We find it was a town hand,' said Blathers, continuing his report;
'for the style of work is first-rate.'

'Wery pretty indeed it is,' remarked Duff, in an undertone.

'There was two of 'em in it,' continued Blathers; 'and they had a boy
with 'em; that's plain from the size of the window.  That's all to be
said at present.  We'll see this lad that you've got upstairs at once,
if you please.'

'Perhaps they will take something to drink first, Mrs. Maylie?' said
the doctor: his face brightening, as if some new thought had occurred
to him.

'Oh! to be sure!' exclaimed Rose, eagerly.  'You shall have it
immediately, if you will.'

'Why, thank you, miss!' said Blathers, drawing his coat-sleeve across
his mouth; 'it's dry work, this sort of duty.  Anythink that's handy,
miss; don't put yourself out of the way, on our accounts.'

'What shall it be?' asked the doctor, following the young lady to the
sideboard.

'A little drop of spirits, master, if it's all the same,' replied
Blathers.  'It's a cold ride from London, ma'am; and I always find that
spirits comes home warmer to the feelings.'

This interesting communication was addressed to Mrs. Maylie, who
received it very graciously.  While it was being conveyed to her, the
doctor slipped out of the room.

'Ah!' said Mr. Blathers:  not holding his wine-glass by the stem, but
grasping the bottom between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand:
and placing it in front of his chest; 'I have seen a good many pieces
of business like this, in my time, ladies.'

'That crack down in the back lane at Edmonton, Blathers,' said Mr.
Duff, assisting his colleague's memory.

'That was something in this way, warn't it?' rejoined Mr. Blathers;
'that was done by Conkey Chickweed, that was.'

'You always gave that to him' replied Duff.  'It was the Family Pet, I
tell you.  Conkey hadn't any more to do with it than I had.'

'Get out!' retorted Mr. Blathers; 'I know better.  Do you mind that
time when Conkey was robbed of his money, though?  What a start that
was!  Better than any novel-book _I_ ever see!'

'What was that?' inquired Rose:  anxious to encourage any symptoms of
good-humour in the unwelcome visitors.

'It was a robbery, miss, that hardly anybody would have been down
upon,' said Blathers.  'This here Conkey Chickweed--'

'Conkey means Nosey, ma'am,' interposed Duff.

'Of course the lady knows that, don't she?' demanded Mr. Blathers.
'Always interrupting, you are, partner!  This here Conkey Chickweed,
miss, kept a public-house over Battlebridge way, and he had a cellar,
where a good many young lords went to see cock-fighting, and
badger-drawing, and that; and a wery intellectual manner the sports was
conducted in, for I've seen 'em off'en.  He warn't one of the family,
at that time; and one night he was robbed of three hundred and
twenty-seven guineas in a canvas bag, that was stole out of his bedroom
in the dead of night, by a tall man with a black patch over his eye,
who had concealed himself under the bed, and after committing the
robbery, jumped slap out of window:  which was only a story high. He
was wery quick about it.  But Conkey was quick, too; for he fired a
blunderbuss arter him, and roused the neighbourhood. They set up a
hue-and-cry, directly, and when they came to look about 'em, found that
Conkey had hit the robber; for there was traces of blood, all the way
to some palings a good distance off; and there they lost 'em.  However,
he had made off with the blunt; and, consequently, the name of Mr.
Chickweed, licensed witler, appeared in the Gazette among the other
bankrupts; and all manner of benefits and subscriptions, and I don't
know what all, was got up for the poor man, who was in a wery low state
of mind about his loss, and went up and down the streets, for three or
four days, a pulling his hair off in such a desperate manner that many
people was afraid he might be going to make away with himself. One day
he came up to the office, all in a hurry, and had a private interview
with the magistrate, who, after a deal of talk, rings the bell, and
orders Jem Spyers in (Jem was a active officer), and tells him to go
and assist Mr. Chickweed in apprehending the man as robbed his house.
"I see him, Spyers," said Chickweed, "pass my house yesterday morning,"
"Why didn't you up, and collar him!" says Spyers.  "I was so struck all
of a heap, that you might have fractured my skull with a toothpick,"
says the poor man; "but we're sure to have him; for between ten and
eleven o'clock at night he passed again."  Spyers no sooner heard this,
than he put some clean linen and a comb, in his pocket, in case he
should have to stop a day or two; and away he goes, and sets himself
down at one of the public-house windows behind the little red curtain,
with his hat on, all ready to bolt out, at a moment's notice. He was
smoking his pipe here, late at night, when all of a sudden Chickweed
roars out, "Here he is! Stop thief!  Murder!"  Jem Spyers dashes out;
and there he sees Chickweed, a-tearing down the street full cry.  Away
goes Spyers; on goes Chickweed; round turns the people; everybody roars
out, "Thieves!" and Chickweed himself keeps on shouting, all the time,
like mad.  Spyers loses sight of him a minute as he turns a corner;
shoots round; sees a little crowd; dives in; "Which is the man?"
"D--me!" says Chickweed, "I've lost him again!"  It was a remarkable
occurrence, but he warn't to be seen nowhere, so they went back to the
public-house. Next morning, Spyers took his old place, and looked out,
from behind the curtain, for a tall man with a black patch over his
eye, till his own two eyes ached again.  At last, he couldn't help
shutting 'em, to ease 'em a minute; and the very moment he did so, he
hears Chickweed a-roaring out, "Here he is!"  Off he starts once more,
with Chickweed half-way down the street ahead of him; and after twice
as long a run as the yesterday's one, the man's lost again!  This was
done, once or twice more, till one-half the neighbours gave out that
Mr. Chickweed had been robbed by the devil, who was playing tricks with
him arterwards; and the other half, that poor Mr. Chickweed had gone
mad with grief.'

'What did Jem Spyers say?' inquired the doctor; who had returned to the
room shortly after the commencement of the story.

'Jem Spyers,' resumed the officer, 'for a long time said nothing at
all, and listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he
understood his business.  But, one morning, he walked into the bar, and
taking out his snuffbox, says "Chickweed, I've found out who done this
here robbery."  "Have you?" said Chickweed.  "Oh, my dear Spyers, only
let me have wengeance, and I shall die contented!  Oh, my dear Spyers,
where is the villain!"  "Come!" said Spyers, offering him a pinch of
snuff, "none of that gammon!  You did it yourself."  So he had; and a
good bit of money he had made by it, too; and nobody would never have
found it out, if he hadn't been so precious anxious to keep up
appearances!' said Mr. Blathers, putting down his wine-glass, and
clinking the handcuffs together.

'Very curious, indeed,' observed the doctor.  'Now, if you please, you
can walk upstairs.'

'If _you_ please, sir,' returned Mr. Blathers.  Closely following Mr.
Losberne, the two officers ascended to Oliver's bedroom; Mr. Giles
preceding the party, with a lighted candle.

Oliver had been dozing; but looked worse, and was more feverish than he
had appeared yet.  Being assisted by the doctor, he managed to sit up
in bed for a minute or so; and looked at the strangers without at all
understanding what was going forward--in fact, without seeming to
recollect where he was, or what had been passing.

'This,' said Mr. Losberne, speaking softly, but with great vehemence
notwithstanding, 'this is the lad, who, being accidently wounded by a
spring-gun in some boyish trespass on Mr. What-d' ye-call-him's
grounds, at the back here, comes to the house for assistance this
morning, and is immediately laid hold of and maltreated, by that
ingenious gentleman with the candle in his hand:  who has placed his
life in considerable danger, as I can professionally certify.'

Messrs. Blathers and Duff looked at Mr. Giles, as he was thus
recommended to their notice.  The bewildered butler gazed from them
towards Oliver, and from Oliver towards Mr. Losberne, with a most
ludicrous mixture of fear and perplexity.

'You don't mean to deny that, I suppose?' said the doctor, laying
Oliver gently down again.

'It was all done for the--for the best, sir,' answered Giles. 'I am
sure I thought it was the boy, or I wouldn't have meddled with him.  I
am not of an inhuman disposition, sir.'

'Thought it was what boy?' inquired the senior officer.

'The housebreaker's boy, sir!' replied Giles.  'They--they certainly
had a boy.'

'Well?  Do you think so now?' inquired Blathers.

'Think what, now?' replied Giles, looking vacantly at his questioner.

'Think it's the same boy, Stupid-head?' rejoined Blathers, impatiently.

'I don't know; I really don't know,' said Giles, with a rueful
countenance.  'I couldn't swear to him.'

'What do you think?' asked Mr. Blathers.

'I don't know what to think,' replied poor Giles.  'I don't think it is
the boy; indeed, I'm almost certain that it isn't.  You know it can't
be.'

'Has this man been a-drinking, sir?' inquired Blathers, turning to the
doctor.

'What a precious muddle-headed chap you are!' said Duff, addressing Mr.
Giles, with supreme contempt.

Mr. Losberne had been feeling the patient's pulse during this short
dialogue; but he now rose from the chair by the bedside, and remarked,
that if the officers had any doubts upon the subject, they would
perhaps like to step into the next room, and have Brittles before them.

Acting upon this suggestion, they adjourned to a neighbouring
apartment, where Mr. Brittles, being called in, involved himself and
his respected superior in such a wonderful maze of fresh contradictions
and impossibilities, as tended to throw no particular light on
anything, but the fact of his own strong mystification; except, indeed,
his declarations that he shouldn't know the real boy, if he were put
before him that instant; that he had only taken Oliver to be he,
because Mr. Giles had said he was; and that Mr. Giles had, five minutes
previously, admitted in the kitchen, that he began to be very much
afraid he had been a little too hasty.

Among other ingenious surmises, the question was then raised, whether
Mr. Giles had really hit anybody; and upon examination of the fellow
pistol to that which he had fired, it turned out to have no more
destructive loading than gunpowder and brown paper: a discovery which
made a considerable impression on everybody but the doctor, who had
drawn the ball about ten minutes before. Upon no one, however, did it
make a greater impression than on Mr. Giles himself; who, after
labouring, for some hours, under the fear of having mortally wounded a
fellow-creature, eagerly caught at this new idea, and favoured it to
the utmost.  Finally, the officers, without troubling themselves very
much about Oliver, left the Chertsey constable in the house, and took
up their rest for that night in the town; promising to return the next
morning.

With the next morning, there came a rumour, that two men and a boy were
in the cage at Kingston, who had been apprehended over night under
suspicious circumstances; and to Kingston Messrs. Blathers and Duff
journeyed accordingly. The suspicious circumstances, however, resolving
themselves, on investigation, into the one fact, that they had been
discovered sleeping under a haystack; which, although a great crime, is
only punishable by imprisonment, and is, in the merciful eye of the
English law, and its comprehensive love of all the King's subjects,
held to be no satisfactory proof, in the absence of all other evidence,
that the sleeper, or sleepers, have committed burglary accompanied with
violence, and have therefore rendered themselves liable to the
punishment of death; Messrs. Blathers and Duff came back again, as wise
as they went.

In short, after some more examination, and a great deal more
conversation, a neighbouring magistrate was readily induced to take the
joint bail of Mrs. Maylie and Mr. Losberne for Oliver's appearance if
he should ever be called upon; and Blathers and Duff, being rewarded
with a couple of guineas, returned to town with divided opinions on the
subject of their expedition: the latter gentleman on a mature
consideration of all the circumstances, inclining to the belief that
the burglarious attempt had originated with the Family Pet; and the
former being equally disposed to concede the full merit of it to the
great Mr. Conkey Chickweed.

Meanwhile, Oliver gradually throve and prospered under the united care
of Mrs. Maylie, Rose, and the kind-hearted Mr. Losberne.  If fervent
prayers, gushing from hearts overcharged with gratitude, be heard in
heaven--and if they be not, what prayers are!--the blessings which the
orphan child called down upon them, sunk into their souls, diffusing
peace and happiness.



CHAPTER XXXII

OF THE HAPPY LIFE OLIVER BEGAN TO LEAD WITH HIS KIND FRIENDS

Oliver's ailings were neither slight nor few.  In addition to the pain
and delay attendant on a broken limb, his exposure to the wet and cold
had brought on fever and ague:  which hung about him for many weeks,
and reduced him sadly. But, at length, he began, by slow degrees, to
get better, and to be able to say sometimes, in a few tearful words,
how deeply he felt the goodness of the two sweet ladies, and how
ardently he hoped that when he grew strong and well again, he could do
something to show his gratitude; only something, which would let them
see the love and duty with which his breast was full; something,
however slight, which would prove to them that their gentle kindness
had not been cast away; but that the poor boy whom their charity had
rescued from misery, or death, was eager to serve them with his whole
heart and soul.

'Poor fellow!' said Rose, when Oliver had been one day feebly
endeavouring to utter the words of thankfulness that rose to his pale
lips; 'you shall have many opportunities of serving us, if you will.
We are going into the country, and my aunt intends that you shall
accompany us.  The quiet place, the pure air, and all the pleasure and
beauties of spring, will restore you in a few days.  We will employ you
in a hundred ways, when you can bear the trouble.'

'The trouble!' cried Oliver.  'Oh! dear lady, if I could but work for
you; if I could only give you pleasure by watering your flowers, or
watching your birds, or running up and down the whole day long, to make
you happy; what would I give to do it!'

'You shall give nothing at all,' said Miss Maylie, smiling; 'for, as I
told you before, we shall employ you in a hundred ways; and if you only
take half the trouble to please us, that you promise now, you will make
me very happy indeed.'

'Happy, ma'am!' cried Oliver; 'how kind of you to say so!'

'You will make me happier than I can tell you,' replied the young lady.
'To think that my dear good aunt should have been the means of rescuing
any one from such sad misery as you have described to us, would be an
unspeakable pleasure to me; but to know that the object of her goodness
and compassion was sincerely grateful and attached, in consequence,
would delight me, more than you can well imagine.  Do you understand
me?' she inquired, watching Oliver's thoughtful face.

'Oh yes, ma'am, yes!' replied Oliver eagerly; 'but I was thinking that
I am ungrateful now.'

'To whom?' inquired the young lady.

'To the kind gentleman, and the dear old nurse, who took so much care
of me before,' rejoined Oliver.  'If they knew how happy I am, they
would be pleased, I am sure.'

'I am sure they would,' rejoined Oliver's benefactress; 'and Mr.
Losberne has already been kind enough to promise that when you are well
enough to bear the journey, he will carry you to see them.'

'Has he, ma'am?' cried Oliver, his face brightening with pleasure.  'I
don't know what I shall do for joy when I see their kind faces once
again!'

In a short time Oliver was sufficiently recovered to undergo the
fatigue of this expedition.  One morning he and Mr. Losberne set out,
accordingly, in a little carriage which belonged to Mrs. Maylie.  When
they came to Chertsey Bridge, Oliver turned very pale, and uttered a
loud exclamation.

'What's the matter with the boy?' cried the doctor, as usual, all in a
bustle.  'Do you see anything--hear anything--feel anything--eh?'

'That, sir,' cried Oliver, pointing out of the carriage window. 'That
house!'

'Yes; well, what of it?  Stop coachman.  Pull up here,' cried the
doctor.  'What of the house, my man; eh?'

'The thieves--the house they took me to!' whispered Oliver.

'The devil it is!' cried the doctor.  'Hallo, there! let me out!'

But, before the coachman could dismount from his box, he had tumbled
out of the coach, by some means or other; and, running down to the
deserted tenement, began kicking at the door like a madman.

'Halloa?' said a little ugly hump-backed man:  opening the door so
suddenly, that the doctor, from the very impetus of his last kick,
nearly fell forward into the passage. 'What's the matter here?'

'Matter!' exclaimed the other, collaring him, without a moment's
reflection.  'A good deal.  Robbery is the matter.'

'There'll be Murder the matter, too,' replied the hump-backed man,
coolly, 'if you don't take your hands off.  Do you hear me?'

'I hear you,' said the doctor, giving his captive a hearty shake.

'Where's--confound the fellow, what's his rascally name--Sikes; that's
it.  Where's Sikes, you thief?'

The hump-backed man stared, as if in excess of amazement and
indignation; then, twisting himself, dexterously, from the doctor's
grasp, growled forth a volley of horrid oaths, and retired into the
house.  Before he could shut the door, however, the doctor had passed
into the parlour, without a word of parley.

He looked anxiously round; not an article of furniture; not a vestige
of anything, animate or inanimate; not even the position of the
cupboards; answered Oliver's description!

'Now!' said the hump-backed man, who had watched him keenly, 'what do
you mean by coming into my house, in this violent way? Do you want to
rob me, or to murder me?  Which is it?'

'Did you ever know a man come out to do either, in a chariot and pair,
you ridiculous old vampire?' said the irritable doctor.

'What do you want, then?' demanded the hunchback.  'Will you take
yourself off, before I do you a mischief?  Curse you!'

'As soon as I think proper,' said Mr. Losberne, looking into the other
parlour; which, like the first, bore no resemblance whatever to
Oliver's account of it.  'I shall find you out, some day, my friend.'

'Will you?' sneered the ill-favoured cripple.  'If you ever want me,
I'm here.  I haven't lived here mad and all alone, for five-and-twenty
years, to be scared by you.  You shall pay for this; you shall pay for
this.'  And so saying, the mis-shapen little demon set up a yell, and
danced upon the ground, as if wild with rage.

'Stupid enough, this,' muttered the doctor to himself; 'the boy must
have made a mistake.  Here!  Put that in your pocket, and shut yourself
up again.'  With these words he flung the hunchback a piece of money,
and returned to the carriage.

The man followed to the chariot door, uttering the wildest imprecations
and curses all the way; but as Mr. Losberne turned to speak to the
driver, he looked into the carriage, and eyed Oliver for an instant
with a glance so sharp and fierce and at the same time so furious and
vindictive, that, waking or sleeping, he could not forget it for months
afterwards.  He continued to utter the most fearful imprecations, until
the driver had resumed his seat; and when they were once more on their
way, they could see him some distance behind: beating his feet upon the
ground, and tearing his hair, in transports of real or pretended rage.

'I am an ass!' said the doctor, after a long silence.  'Did you know
that before, Oliver?'

'No, sir.'

'Then don't forget it another time.'

'An ass,' said the doctor again, after a further silence of some
minutes.  'Even if it had been the right place, and the right fellows
had been there, what could I have done, single-handed? And if I had had
assistance, I see no good that I should have done, except leading to my
own exposure, and an unavoidable statement of the manner in which I
have hushed up this business. That would have served me right, though.
I am always involving myself in some scrape or other, by acting on
impulse.  It might have done me good.'

Now, the fact was that the excellent doctor had never acted upon
anything but impulse all through his life, and it was no bad compliment
to the nature of the impulses which governed him, that so far from
being involved in any peculiar troubles or misfortunes, he had the
warmest respect and esteem of all who knew him.  If the truth must be
told, he was a little out of temper, for a minute or two, at being
disappointed in procuring corroborative evidence of Oliver's story on
the very first occasion on which he had a chance of obtaining any.  He
soon came round again, however; and finding that Oliver's replies to
his questions, were still as straightforward and consistent, and still
delivered with as much apparent sincerity and truth, as they had ever
been, he made up his mind to attach full credence to them, from that
time forth.

As Oliver knew the name of the street in which Mr. Brownlow resided,
they were enabled to drive straight thither.  When the coach turned
into it, his heart beat so violently, that he could scarcely draw his
breath.

'Now, my boy, which house is it?' inquired Mr. Losberne.

'That!  That!' replied Oliver, pointing eagerly out of the window.
'The white house.  Oh! make haste!  Pray make haste! I feel as if I
should die: it makes me tremble so.'

'Come, come!' said the good doctor, patting him on the shoulder. 'You
will see them directly, and they will be overjoyed to find you safe and
well.'

'Oh!  I hope so!' cried Oliver.  'They were so good to me; so very,
very good to me.'

The coach rolled on.  It stopped.  No; that was the wrong house; the
next door.  It went on a few paces, and stopped again. Oliver looked up
at the windows, with tears of happy expectation coursing down his face.

Alas! the white house was empty, and there was a bill in the window.
'To Let.'

'Knock at the next door,' cried Mr. Losberne, taking Oliver's arm in
his.  'What has become of Mr. Brownlow, who used to live in the
adjoining house, do you know?'

The servant did not know; but would go and inquire.  She presently
returned, and said, that Mr. Brownlow had sold off his goods, and gone
to the West Indies, six weeks before.  Oliver clasped his hands, and
sank feebly backward.

'Has his housekeeper gone too?' inquired Mr. Losberne, after a moment's
pause.

'Yes, sir'; replied the servant.  'The old gentleman, the housekeeper,
and a gentleman who was a friend of Mr. Brownlow's, all went together.'

'Then turn towards home again,' said Mr. Losberne to the driver; 'and
don't stop to bait the horses, till you get out of this confounded
London!'

'The book-stall keeper, sir?' said Oliver.  'I know the way there.  See
him, pray, sir!  Do see him!'

'My poor boy, this is disappointment enough for one day,' said the
doctor.  'Quite enough for both of us.  If we go to the book-stall
keeper's, we shall certainly find that he is dead, or has set his house
on fire, or run away.  No; home again straight!'  And in obedience to
the doctor's impulse, home they went.

This bitter disappointment caused Oliver much sorrow and grief, even in
the midst of his happiness; for he had pleased himself, many times
during his illness, with thinking of all that Mr. Brownlow and Mrs.
Bedwin would say to him: and what delight it would be to tell them how
many long days and nights he had passed in reflecting on what they had
done for him, and in bewailing his cruel separation from them. The hope
of eventually clearing himself with them, too, and explaining how he
had been forced away, had buoyed him up, and sustained him, under many
of his recent trials; and now, the idea that they should have gone so
far, and carried with them the belief that he was an impostor and a
robber--a belief which might remain uncontradicted to his dying
day--was almost more than he could bear.

The circumstance occasioned no alteration, however, in the behaviour of
his benefactors.  After another fortnight, when the fine warm weather
had fairly begun, and every tree and flower was putting forth its young
leaves and rich blossoms, they made preparations for quitting the house
at Chertsey, for some months.

Sending the plate, which had so excited Fagin's cupidity, to the
banker's; and leaving Giles and another servant in care of the house,
they departed to a cottage at some distance in the country, and took
Oliver with them.

Who can describe the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft
tranquillity, the sickly boy felt in the balmy air, and among the green
hills and rich woods, of an inland village!  Who can tell how scenes of
peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close
and noisy places, and carry their own freshness, deep into their jaded
hearts!  Men who have lived in crowded, pent-up streets, through lives
of toil, and who have never wished for change; men, to whom custom has
indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick
and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks; even
they, with the hand of death upon them, have been known to yearn at
last for one short glimpse of Nature's face; and, carried far from the
scenes of their old pains and pleasures, have seemed to pass at once
into a new state of being.  Crawling forth, from day to day, to some
green sunny spot, they have had such memories wakened up within them by
the sight of the sky, and hill and plain, and glistening water, that a
foretaste of heaven itself has soothed their quick decline, and they
have sunk into their tombs, as peacefully as the sun whose setting they
watched from their lonely chamber window but a few hours before, faded
from their dim and feeble sight!  The memories which peaceful country
scenes call up, are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes.
Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands for the
graves of those we loved:  may purify our thoughts, and bear down
before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this, there lingers,
in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of
having held such feelings long before, in some remote and distant time,
which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down
pride and worldliness beneath it.

It was a lovely spot to which they repaired.  Oliver, whose days had
been spent among squalid crowds, and in the midst of noise and
brawling, seemed to enter on a new existence there.  The rose and
honeysuckle clung to the cottage walls; the ivy crept round the trunks
of the trees; and the garden-flowers perfumed the air with delicious
odours.  Hard by, was a little churchyard; not crowded with tall
unsightly gravestones, but full of humble mounds, covered with fresh
turf and moss: beneath which, the old people of the village lay at
rest.  Oliver often wandered here; and, thinking of the wretched grave
in which his mother lay, would sometimes sit him down and sob unseen;
but, when he raised his eyes to the deep sky overhead, he would cease
to think of her as lying in the ground, and would weep for her, sadly,
but without pain.

It was a happy time.  The days were peaceful and serene; the nights
brought with them neither fear nor care; no languishing in a wretched
prison, or associating with wretched men; nothing but pleasant and
happy thoughts.  Every morning he went to a white-headed old gentleman,
who lived near the little church: who taught him to read better, and to
write:  and who spoke so kindly, and took such pains, that Oliver could
never try enough to please him.  Then, he would walk with Mrs. Maylie
and Rose, and hear them talk of books; or perhaps sit near them, in
some shady place, and listen whilst the young lady read: which he could
have done, until it grew too dark to see the letters. Then, he had his
own lesson for the next day to prepare; and at this, he would work
hard, in a little room which looked into the garden, till evening came
slowly on, when the ladies would walk out again, and he with them:
listening with such pleasure to all they said:  and so happy if they
wanted a flower that he could climb to reach, or had forgotten anything
he could run to fetch: that he could never be quick enough about it.
When it became quite dark, and they returned home, the young lady would
sit down to the piano, and play some pleasant air, or sing, in a low
and gentle voice, some old song which it pleased her aunt to hear.
There would be no candles lighted at such times as these; and Oliver
would sit by one of the windows, listening to the sweet music, in a
perfect rapture.

And when Sunday came, how differently the day was spent, from any way
in which he had ever spent it yet! and how happily too; like all the
other days in that most happy time!  There was the little church, in
the morning, with the green leaves fluttering at the windows:  the
birds singing without:  and the sweet-smelling air stealing in at the
low porch, and filling the homely building with its fragrance. The poor
people were so neat and clean, and knelt so reverently in prayer, that
it seemed a pleasure, not a tedious duty, their assembling there
together; and though the singing might be rude, it was real, and
sounded more musical (to Oliver's ears at least) than any he had ever
heard in church before.  Then, there were the walks as usual, and many
calls at the clean houses of the labouring men; and at night, Oliver
read a chapter or two from the Bible, which he had been studying all
the week, and in the performance of which duty he felt more proud and
pleased, than if he had been the clergyman himself.

In the morning, Oliver would be a-foot by six o'clock, roaming the
fields, and plundering the hedges, far and wide, for nosegays of wild
flowers, with which he would return laden, home; and which it took
great care and consideration to arrange, to the best advantage, for the
embellishment of the breakfast-table. There was fresh groundsel, too,
for Miss Maylie's birds, with which Oliver, who had been studying the
subject under the able tuition of the village clerk, would decorate the
cages, in the most approved taste. When the birds were made all spruce
and smart for the day, there was usually some little commission of
charity to execute in the village; or, failing that, there was rare
cricket-playing, sometimes, on the green; or, failing that, there was
always something to do in the garden, or about the plants, to which
Oliver (who had studied this science also, under the same master, who
was a gardener by trade,) applied himself with hearty good-will, until
Miss Rose made her appearance:  when there were a thousand
commendations to be bestowed on all he had done.

So three months glided away; three months which, in the life of the
most blessed and favoured of mortals, might have been unmingled
happiness, and which, in Oliver's were true felicity. With the purest
and most amiable generosity on one side; and the truest, warmest,
soul-felt gratitude on the other; it is no wonder that, by the end of
that short time, Oliver Twist had become completely domesticated with
the old lady and her niece, and that the fervent attachment of his
young and sensitive heart, was repaid by their pride in, and attachment
to, himself.



CHAPTER XXXIII

WHEREIN THE HAPPINESS OF OLIVER AND HIS FRIENDS, EXPERIENCES A SUDDEN
CHECK

Spring flew swiftly by, and summer came.  If the village had been
beautiful at first it was now in the full glow and luxuriance of its
richness.  The great trees, which had looked shrunken and bare in the
earlier months, had now burst into strong life and health; and
stretching forth their green arms over the thirsty ground, converted
open and naked spots into choice nooks, where was a deep and pleasant
shade from which to look upon the wide prospect, steeped in sunshine,
which lay stretched beyond.  The earth had donned her mantle of
brightest green; and shed her richest perfumes abroad.  It was the
prime and vigour of the year; all things were glad and flourishing.

Still, the same quiet life went on at the little cottage, and the same
cheerful serenity prevailed among its inmates.  Oliver had long since
grown stout and healthy; but health or sickness made no difference in
his warm feelings of a great many people.  He was still the same
gentle, attached, affectionate creature that he had been when pain and
suffering had wasted his strength, and when he was dependent for every
slight attention, and comfort on those who tended him.

One beautiful night, when they had taken a longer walk than was
customary with them:  for the day had been unusually warm, and there
was a brilliant moon, and a light wind had sprung up, which was
unusually refreshing.  Rose had been in high spirits, too, and they had
walked on, in merry conversation, until they had far exceeded their
ordinary bounds.  Mrs. Maylie being fatigued, they returned more slowly
home.  The young lady merely throwing off her simple bonnet, sat down
to the piano as usual.  After running abstractedly over the keys for a
few minutes, she fell into a low and very solemn air; and as she played
it, they heard a sound as if she were weeping.

'Rose, my dear!' said the elder lady.

Rose made no reply, but played a little quicker, as though the words
had roused her from some painful thoughts.

'Rose, my love!' cried Mrs. Maylie, rising hastily, and bending over
her.  'What is this?  In tears!  My dear child, what distresses you?'

'Nothing, aunt; nothing,' replied the young lady.  'I don't know what
it is; I can't describe it; but I feel--'

'Not ill, my love?' interposed Mrs. Maylie.

'No, no!  Oh, not ill!' replied Rose: shuddering as though some deadly
chillness were passing over her, while she spoke; 'I shall be better
presently.  Close the window, pray!'

Oliver hastened to comply with her request.  The young lady, making an
effort to recover her cheerfulness, strove to play some livelier tune;
but her fingers dropped powerless over the keys. Covering her face with
her hands, she sank upon a sofa, and gave vent to the tears which she
was now unable to repress.

'My child!' said the elderly lady, folding her arms about her, 'I never
saw you so before.'

'I would not alarm you if I could avoid it,' rejoined Rose; 'but indeed
I have tried very hard, and cannot help this. I fear I _am_ ill, aunt.'

She was, indeed; for, when candles were brought, they saw that in the
very short time which had elapsed since their return home, the hue of
her countenance had changed to a marble whiteness. Its expression had
lost nothing of its beauty; but it was changed; and there was an
anxious haggard look about the gentle face, which it had never worn
before.  Another minute, and it was suffused with a crimson flush:  and
a heavy wildness came over the soft blue eye.  Again this disappeared,
like the shadow thrown by a passing cloud; and she was once more deadly
pale.

Oliver, who watched the old lady anxiously, observed that she was
alarmed by these appearances; and so in truth, was he; but seeing that
she affected to make light of them, he endeavoured to do the same, and
they so far succeeded, that when Rose was persuaded by her aunt to
retire for the night, she was in better spirits; and appeared even in
better health:  assuring them that she felt certain she should rise in
the morning, quite well.

'I hope,' said Oliver, when Mrs. Maylie returned, 'that nothing is the
matter?  She don't look well to-night, but--'

The old lady motioned to him not to speak; and sitting herself down in
a dark corner of the room, remained silent for some time. At length,
she said, in a trembling voice:

'I hope not, Oliver.  I have been very happy with her for some years:
too happy, perhaps.  It may be time that I should meet with some
misfortune; but I hope it is not this.'

'What?' inquired Oliver.

'The heavy blow,' said the old lady, 'of losing the dear girl who has
so long been my comfort and happiness.'

'Oh!  God forbid!' exclaimed Oliver, hastily.

'Amen to that, my child!' said the old lady, wringing her hands.

'Surely there is no danger of anything so dreadful?' said Oliver. 'Two
hours ago, she was quite well.'

'She is very ill now,' rejoined Mrs. Maylies; 'and will be worse, I am
sure.  My dear, dear Rose!  Oh, what shall I do without her!'

She gave way to such great grief, that Oliver, suppressing his own
emotion, ventured to remonstrate with her; and to beg, earnestly, that,
for the sake of the dear young lady herself, she would be more calm.

'And consider, ma'am,' said Oliver, as the tears forced themselves into
his eyes, despite of his efforts to the contrary. 'Oh! consider how
young and good she is, and what pleasure and comfort she gives to all
about her.  I am sure--certain--quite certain--that, for your sake, who
are so good yourself; and for her own; and for the sake of all she
makes so happy; she will not die.  Heaven will never let her die so
young.'

'Hush!' said Mrs. Maylie, laying her hand on Oliver's head. 'You think
like a child, poor boy.  But you teach me my duty, notwithstanding.  I
had forgotten it for a moment, Oliver, but I hope I may be pardoned,
for I am old, and have seen enough of illness and death to know the
agony of separation from the objects of our love.  I have seen enough,
too, to know that it is not always the youngest and best who are spared
to those that love them; but this should give us comfort in our sorrow;
for Heaven is just; and such things teach us, impressively, that there
is a brighter world than this; and that the passage to it is speedy.
God's will be done!  I love her; and He knows how well!'

Oliver was surprised to see that as Mrs. Maylie said these words, she
checked her lamentations as though by one effort; and drawing herself
up as she spoke, became composed and firm.  He was still more
astonished to find that this firmness lasted; and that, under all the
care and watching which ensued, Mrs. Maylie was ever ready and
collected: performing all the duties which had devolved upon her,
steadily, and, to all external appearances, even cheerfully.  But he
was young, and did not know what strong minds are capable of, under
trying circumstances.  How should he, when their possessors so seldom
know themselves?

An anxious night ensued.  When morning came, Mrs. Maylie's predictions
were but too well verified.  Rose was in the first stage of a high and
dangerous fever.

'We must be active, Oliver, and not give way to useless grief,' said
Mrs. Maylie, laying her finger on her lip, as she looked steadily into
his face; 'this letter must be sent, with all possible expedition, to
Mr. Losberne.  It must be carried to the market-town: which is not more
than four miles off, by the footpath across the field:  and thence
dispatched, by an express on horseback, straight to Chertsey. The
people at the inn will undertake to do this: and I can trust to you to
see it done, I know.'

Oliver could make no reply, but looked his anxiety to be gone at once.

'Here is another letter,' said Mrs. Maylie, pausing to reflect; 'but
whether to send it now, or wait until I see how Rose goes on, I
scarcely know.  I would not forward it, unless I feared the worst.'

'Is it for Chertsey, too, ma'am?' inquired Oliver; impatient to execute
his commission, and holding out his trembling hand for the letter.

'No,' replied the old lady, giving it to him mechanically. Oliver
glanced at it, and saw that it was directed to Harry Maylie, Esquire,
at some great lord's house in the country; where, he could not make out.

'Shall it go, ma'am?' asked Oliver, looking up, impatiently.

'I think not,' replied Mrs. Maylie, taking it back.  'I will wait until
to-morrow.'

With these words, she gave Oliver her purse, and he started off,
without more delay, at the greatest speed he could muster.

Swiftly he ran across the fields, and down the little lanes which
sometimes divided them: now almost hidden by the high corn on either
side, and now emerging on an open field, where the mowers and haymakers
were busy at their work:  nor did he stop once, save now and then, for
a few seconds, to recover breath, until he came, in a great heat, and
covered with dust, on the little market-place of the market-town.

Here he paused, and looked about for the inn.  There were a white bank,
and a red brewery, and a yellow town-hall; and in one corner there was
a large house, with all the wood about it painted green:  before which
was the sign of 'The George.'  To this he hastened, as soon as it
caught his eye.

He spoke to a postboy who was dozing under the gateway; and who, after
hearing what he wanted, referred him to the ostler; who after hearing
all he had to say again, referred him to the landlord; who was a tall
gentleman in a blue neckcloth, a white hat, drab breeches, and boots
with tops to match, leaning against a pump by the stable-door, picking
his teeth with a silver toothpick.

This gentleman walked with much deliberation into the bar to make out
the bill:  which took a long time making out:  and after it was ready,
and paid, a horse had to be saddled, and a man to be dressed, which
took up ten good minutes more.  Meanwhile Oliver was in such a
desperate state of impatience and anxiety, that he felt as if he could
have jumped upon the horse himself, and galloped away, full tear, to
the next stage.  At length, all was ready; and the little parcel having
been handed up, with many injunctions and entreaties for its speedy
delivery, the man set spurs to his horse, and rattling over the uneven
paving of the market-place, was out of the town, and galloping along
the turnpike-road, in a couple of minutes.

As it was something to feel certain that assistance was sent for, and
that no time had been lost, Oliver hurried up the inn-yard, with a
somewhat lighter heart.  He was turning out of the gateway when he
accidently stumbled against a tall man wrapped in a cloak, who was at
that moment coming out of the inn door.

'Hah!' cried the man, fixing his eyes on Oliver, and suddenly
recoiling.  'What the devil's this?'

'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Oliver; 'I was in a great hurry to get
home, and didn't see you were coming.'

'Death!' muttered the man to himself, glaring at the boy with his large
dark eyes.  'Who would have thought it! Grind him to ashes! He'd start
up from a stone coffin, to come in my way!'

'I am sorry,' stammered Oliver, confused by the strange man's wild
look.  'I hope I have not hurt you!'

'Rot you!' murmured the man, in a horrible passion; between his
clenched teeth; 'if I had only had the courage to say the word, I might
have been free of you in a night.  Curses on your head, and black death
on your heart, you imp!  What are you doing here?'

The man shook his fist, as he uttered these words incoherently. He
advanced towards Oliver, as if with the intention of aiming a blow at
him, but fell violently on the ground:  writhing and foaming, in a fit.

Oliver gazed, for a moment, at the struggles of the madman (for such he
supposed him to be); and then darted into the house for help.  Having
seen him safely carried into the hotel, he turned his face homewards,
running as fast as he could, to make up for lost time:  and recalling
with a great deal of astonishment and some fear, the extraordinary
behaviour of the person from whom he had just parted.

The circumstance did not dwell in his recollection long, however: for
when he reached the cottage, there was enough to occupy his mind, and
to drive all considerations of self completely from his memory.

Rose Maylie had rapidly grown worse; before mid-night she was
delirious.  A medical practitioner, who resided on the spot, was in
constant attendance upon her; and after first seeing the patient, he
had taken Mrs. Maylie aside, and pronounced her disorder to be one of a
most alarming nature. 'In fact,' he said, 'it would be little short of
a miracle, if she recovered.'

How often did Oliver start from his bed that night, and stealing out,
with noiseless footstep, to the staircase, listen for the slightest
sound from the sick chamber!  How often did a tremble shake his frame,
and cold drops of terror start upon his brow, when a sudden trampling
of feet caused him to fear that something too dreadful to think of, had
even then occurred!  And what had been the fervency of all the prayers
he had ever muttered, compared with those he poured forth, now, in the
agony and passion of his supplication for the life and health of the
gentle creature, who was tottering on the deep grave's verge!

Oh! the suspense, the fearful, acute suspense, of standing idly by
while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance!  Oh!
the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat
violently, and the breath come thick, by the force of the images they
conjure up before it; the desperate anxiety _to be doing something_ to
relieve the pain, or lessen the danger, which we have no power to
alleviate; the sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remembrance of
our helplessness produces; what tortures can equal these; what
reflections or endeavours can, in the full tide and fever of the time,
allay them!

Morning came; and the little cottage was lonely and still. People spoke
in whispers; anxious faces appeared at the gate, from time to time;
women and children went away in tears. All the livelong day, and for
hours after it had grown dark, Oliver paced softly up and down the
garden, raising his eyes every instant to the sick chamber, and
shuddering to see the darkened window, looking as if death lay
stretched inside.  Late that night, Mr. Losberne arrived.  'It is
hard,' said the good doctor, turning away as he spoke; 'so young; so
much beloved; but there is very little hope.'

Another morning.  The sun shone brightly; as brightly as if it looked
upon no misery or care; and, with every leaf and flower in full bloom
about her; with life, and health, and sounds and sights of joy,
surrounding her on every side: the fair young creature lay, wasting
fast.  Oliver crept away to the old churchyard, and sitting down on one
of the green mounds, wept and prayed for her, in silence.

There was such peace and beauty in the scene; so much of brightness and
mirth in the sunny landscape; such blithesome music in the songs of the
summer birds; such freedom in the rapid flight of the rook, careering
overhead; so much of life and joyousness in all; that, when the boy
raised his aching eyes, and looked about, the thought instinctively
occurred to him, that this was not a time for death; that Rose could
surely never die when humbler things were all so glad and gay; that
graves were for cold and cheerless winter:  not for sunlight and
fragrance. He almost thought that shrouds were for the old and
shrunken; and that they never wrapped the young and graceful form in
their ghastly folds.

A knell from the church bell broke harshly on these youthful thoughts.
Another!  Again!  It was tolling for the funeral service.  A group of
humble mourners entered the gate: wearing white favours; for the corpse
was young.  They stood uncovered by a grave; and there was a mother--a
mother once--among the weeping train.  But the sun shone brightly, and
the birds sang on.

Oliver turned homeward, thinking on the many kindnesses he had received
from the young lady, and wishing that the time could come again, that
he might never cease showing her how grateful and attached he was.  He
had no cause for self-reproach on the score of neglect, or want of
thought, for he had been devoted to her service; and yet a hundred
little occasions rose up before him, on which he fancied he might have
been more zealous, and more earnest, and wished he had been.  We need
be careful how we deal with those about us, when every death carries to
some small circle of survivors, thoughts of so much omitted, and so
little done--of so many things forgotten, and so many more which might
have been repaired!  There is no remorse so deep as that which is
unavailing; if we would be spared its tortures, let us remember this,
in time.

When he reached home Mrs. Maylie was sitting in the little parlour.
Oliver's heart sank at sight of her; for she had never left the bedside
of her niece; and he trembled to think what change could have driven
her away.  He learnt that she had fallen into a deep sleep, from which
she would waken, either to recovery and life, or to bid them farewell,
and die.

They sat, listening, and afraid to speak, for hours.  The untasted meal
was removed, with looks which showed that their thoughts were
elsewhere, they watched the sun as he sank lower and lower, and, at
length, cast over sky and earth those brilliant hues which herald his
departure.  Their quick ears caught the sound of an approaching
footstep.  They both involuntarily darted to the door, as Mr. Losberne
entered.

'What of Rose?' cried the old lady.  'Tell me at once!  I can bear it;
anything but suspense!  Oh, tell me! in the name of Heaven!'

'You must compose yourself,' said the doctor supporting her. 'Be calm,
my dear ma'am, pray.'

'Let me go, in God's name!  My dear child!  She is dead! She is dying!'

'No!' cried the doctor, passionately.  'As He is good and merciful, she
will live to bless us all, for years to come.'

The lady fell upon her knees, and tried to fold her hands together; but
the energy which had supported her so long, fled up to Heaven with her
first thanksgiving; and she sank into the friendly arms which were
extended to receive her.



CHAPTER XXXIV

CONTAINS SOME INTRODUCTORY PARTICULARS RELATIVE TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN
WHO NOW ARRIVES UPON THE SCENE; AND A NEW ADVENTURE WHICH HAPPENED TO
OLIVER

It was almost too much happiness to bear.  Oliver felt stunned and
stupefied by the unexpected intelligence; he could not weep, or speak,
or rest.  He had scarcely the power of understanding anything that had
passed, until, after a long ramble in the quiet evening air, a burst of
tears came to his relief, and he seemed to awaken, all at once, to a
full sense of the joyful change that had occurred, and the almost
insupportable load of anguish which had been taken from his breast.

The night was fast closing in, when he returned homeward:  laden with
flowers which he had culled, with peculiar care, for the adornment of
the sick chamber.  As he walked briskly along the road, he heard behind
him, the noise of some vehicle, approaching at a furious pace.  Looking
round, he saw that it was a post-chaise, driven at great speed; and as
the horses were galloping, and the road was narrow, he stood leaning
against a gate until it should have passed him.

As it dashed on, Oliver caught a glimpse of a man in a white nightcap,
whose face seemed familiar to him, although his view was so brief that
he could not identify the person.  In another second or two, the
nightcap was thrust out of the chaise-window, and a stentorian voice
bellowed to the driver to stop:  which he did, as soon as he could pull
up his horses.  Then, the nightcap once again appeared: and the same
voice called Oliver by his name.

'Here!' cried the voice.  'Oliver, what's the news?  Miss Rose! Master
O-li-ver!'

'Is it you, Giles?' cried Oliver, running up to the chaise-door.

Giles popped out his nightcap again, preparatory to making some reply,
when he was suddenly pulled back by a young gentleman who occupied the
other corner of the chaise, and who eagerly demanded what was the news.

'In a word!' cried the gentleman, 'Better or worse?'

'Better--much better!' replied Oliver, hastily.

'Thank Heaven!' exclaimed the gentleman.  'You are sure?'

'Quite, sir,' replied Oliver.  'The change took place only a few hours
ago; and Mr. Losberne says, that all danger is at an end.'

The gentleman said not another word, but, opening the chaise-door,
leaped out, and taking Oliver hurriedly by the arm, led him aside.

'You are quite certain?  There is no possibility of any mistake on your
part, my boy, is there?' demanded the gentleman in a tremulous voice.
'Do not deceive me, by awakening hopes that are not to be fulfilled.'

'I would not for the world, sir,' replied Oliver.  'Indeed you may
believe me.  Mr. Losberne's words were, that she would live to bless us
all for many years to come.  I heard him say so.'

The tears stood in Oliver's eyes as he recalled the scene which was the
beginning of so much happiness; and the gentleman turned his face away,
and remained silent, for some minutes.  Oliver thought he heard him
sob, more than once; but he feared to interrupt him by any fresh
remark--for he could well guess what his feelings were--and so stood
apart, feigning to be occupied with his nosegay.

All this time, Mr. Giles, with the white nightcap on, had been sitting
on the steps of the chaise, supporting an elbow on each knee, and
wiping his eyes with a blue cotton pocket-handkerchief dotted with
white spots.  That the honest fellow had not been feigning emotion, was
abundantly demonstrated by the very red eyes with which he regarded the
young gentleman, when he turned round and addressed him.

'I think you had better go on to my mother's in the chaise, Giles,'
said he.  'I would rather walk slowly on, so as to gain a little time
before I see her.  You can say I am coming.'

'I beg your pardon, Mr. Harry,' said Giles:  giving a final polish to
his ruffled countenance with the handkerchief; 'but if you would leave
the postboy to say that, I should be very much obliged to you.  It
wouldn't be proper for the maids to see me in this state, sir; I should
never have any more authority with them if they did.'

'Well,' rejoined Harry Maylie, smiling, 'you can do as you like. Let
him go on with the luggage, if you wish it, and do you follow with us.
Only first exchange that nightcap for some more appropriate covering,
or we shall be taken for madmen.'

Mr. Giles, reminded of his unbecoming costume, snatched off and
pocketed his nightcap; and substituted a hat, of grave and sober shape,
which he took out of the chaise.  This done, the postboy drove off;
Giles, Mr. Maylie, and Oliver, followed at their leisure.

As they walked along, Oliver glanced from time to time with much
interest and curiosity at the new comer.  He seemed about
five-and-twenty years of age, and was of the middle height; his
countenance was frank and handsome; and his demeanor easy and
prepossessing.  Notwithstanding the difference between youth and age,
he bore so strong a likeness to the old lady, that Oliver would have
had no great difficulty in imagining their relationship, if he had not
already spoken of her as his mother.

Mrs. Maylie was anxiously waiting to receive her son when he reached
the cottage.  The meeting did not take place without great emotion on
both sides.

'Mother!' whispered the young man; 'why did you not write before?'

'I did,' replied Mrs. Maylie; 'but, on reflection, I determined to keep
back the letter until I had heard Mr. Losberne's opinion.'

'But why,' said the young man, 'why run the chance of that occurring
which so nearly happened?  If Rose had--I cannot utter that word
now--if this illness had terminated differently, how could you ever
have forgiven yourself!  How could I ever have know happiness again!'

'If that _had_ been the case, Harry,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'I fear your
happiness would have been effectually blighted, and that your arrival
here, a day sooner or a day later, would have been of very, very little
import.'

'And who can wonder if it be so, mother?' rejoined the young man; 'or
why should I say, _if_?--It is--it is--you know it, mother--you must
know it!'

'I know that she deserves the best and purest love the heart of man can
offer,' said Mrs. Maylie; 'I know that the devotion and affection of
her nature require no ordinary return, but one that shall be deep and
lasting.  If I did not feel this, and know, besides, that a changed
behaviour in one she loved would break her heart, I should not feel my
task so difficult of performance, or have to encounter so many
struggles in my own bosom, when I take what seems to me to be the
strict line of duty.'

'This is unkind, mother,' said Harry.  'Do you still suppose that I am
a boy ignorant of my own mind, and mistaking the impulses of my own
soul?'

'I think, my dear son,' returned Mrs. Maylie, laying her hand upon his
shoulder, 'that youth has many generous impulses which do not last; and
that among them are some, which, being gratified, become only the more
fleeting.  Above all, I think' said the lady, fixing her eyes on her
son's face, 'that if an enthusiastic, ardent, and ambitious man marry a
wife on whose name there is a stain, which, though it originate in no
fault of hers, may be visited by cold and sordid people upon her, and
upon his children also: and, in exact proportion to his success in the
world, be cast in his teeth, and made the subject of sneers against
him:  he may, no matter how generous and good his nature, one day
repent of the connection he formed in early life.  And she may have the
pain of knowing that he does so.'

'Mother,' said the young man, impatiently, 'he would be a selfish
brute, unworthy alike of the name of man and of the woman you describe,
who acted thus.'

'You think so now, Harry,' replied his mother.

'And ever will!' said the young man.  'The mental agony I have
suffered, during the last two days, wrings from me the avowal to you of
a passion which, as you well know, is not one of yesterday, nor one I
have lightly formed.  On Rose, sweet, gentle girl! my heart is set, as
firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman.  I have no thought, no
view, no hope in life, beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great
stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to
the wind.  Mother, think better of this, and of me, and do not
disregard the happiness of which you seem to think so little.'

'Harry,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'it is because I think so much of warm and
sensitive hearts, that I would spare them from being wounded. But we
have said enough, and more than enough, on this matter, just now.'

'Let it rest with Rose, then,' interposed Harry.  'You will not press
these overstrained opinions of yours, so far, as to throw any obstacle
in my way?'

'I will not,' rejoined Mrs. Maylie; 'but I would have you consider--'

'I _have_ considered!' was the impatient reply; 'Mother, I have
considered, years and years.  I have considered, ever since I have been
capable of serious reflection.  My feelings remain unchanged, as they
ever will; and why should I suffer the pain of a delay in giving them
vent, which can be productive of no earthly good?  No!  Before I leave
this place, Rose shall hear me.'

'She shall,' said Mrs. Maylie.

'There is something in your manner, which would almost imply that she
will hear me coldly, mother,' said the young man.

'Not coldly,' rejoined the old lady; 'far from it.'

'How then?' urged the young man.  'She has formed no other attachment?'

'No, indeed,' replied his mother; 'you have, or I mistake, too strong a
hold on her affections already.  What I would say,' resumed the old
lady, stopping her son as he was about to speak, 'is this.  Before you
stake your all on this chance; before you suffer yourself to be carried
to the highest point of hope; reflect for a few moments, my dear child,
on Rose's history, and consider what effect the knowledge of her
doubtful birth may have on her decision:  devoted as she is to us, with
all the intensity of her noble mind, and with that perfect sacrifice of
self which, in all matters, great or trifling, has always been her
characteristic.'

'What do you mean?'

'That I leave you to discover,' replied Mrs. Maylie.  'I must go back
to her.  God bless you!'

'I shall see you again to-night?' said the young man, eagerly.

'By and by,' replied the lady; 'when I leave Rose.'

'You will tell her I am here?' said Harry.

'Of course,' replied Mrs. Maylie.

'And say how anxious I have been, and how much I have suffered, and how
I long to see her.  You will not refuse to do this, mother?'

'No,' said the old lady; 'I will tell her all.'  And pressing her son's
hand, affectionately, she hastened from the room.

Mr. Losberne and Oliver had remained at another end of the apartment
while this hurried conversation was proceeding.  The former now held
out his hand to Harry Maylie; and hearty salutations were exchanged
between them.  The doctor then communicated, in reply to multifarious
questions from his young friend, a precise account of his patient's
situation; which was quite as consolatory and full of promise, as
Oliver's statement had encouraged him to hope; and to the whole of
which, Mr. Giles, who affected to be busy about the luggage, listened
with greedy ears.

'Have you shot anything particular, lately, Giles?' inquired the
doctor, when he had concluded.

'Nothing particular, sir,' replied Mr. Giles, colouring up to the eyes.

'Nor catching any thieves, nor identifying any house-breakers?' said
the doctor.

'None at all, sir,' replied Mr. Giles, with much gravity.

'Well,' said the doctor, 'I am sorry to hear it, because you do that
sort of thing admirably.  Pray, how is Brittles?'

'The boy is very well, sir,' said Mr. Giles, recovering his usual tone
of patronage; 'and sends his respectful duty, sir.'

'That's well,' said the doctor.  'Seeing you here, reminds me, Mr.
Giles, that on the day before that on which I was called away so
hurriedly, I executed, at the request of your good mistress, a small
commission in your favour.  Just step into this corner a moment, will
you?'

Mr. Giles walked into the corner with much importance, and some wonder,
and was honoured with a short whispering conference with the doctor, on
the termination of which, he made a great many bows, and retired with
steps of unusual stateliness.  The subject matter of this conference
was not disclosed in the parlour, but the kitchen was speedily
enlightened concerning it; for Mr. Giles walked straight thither, and
having called for a mug of ale, announced, with an air of majesty,
which was highly effective, that it had pleased his mistress, in
consideration of his gallant behaviour on the occasion of that
attempted robbery, to deposit, in the local savings-bank, the sum of
five-and-twenty pounds, for his sole use and benefit.  At this, the two
women-servants lifted up their hands and eyes, and supposed that Mr.
Giles, pulling out his shirt-frill, replied, 'No, no'; and that if they
observed that he was at all haughty to his inferiors, he would thank
them to tell him so.  And then he made a great many other remarks, no
less illustrative of his humility, which were received with equal
favour and applause, and were, withal, as original and as much to the
purpose, as the remarks of great men commonly are.

Above stairs, the remainder of the evening passed cheerfully away; for
the doctor was in high spirits; and however fatigued or thoughtful
Harry Maylie might have been at first, he was not proof against the
worthy gentleman's good humour, which displayed itself in a great
variety of sallies and professional recollections, and an abundance of
small jokes, which struck Oliver as being the drollest things he had
ever heard, and caused him to laugh proportionately; to the evident
satisfaction of the doctor, who laughed immoderately at himself, and
made Harry laugh almost as heartily, by the very force of sympathy.
So, they were as pleasant a party as, under the circumstances, they
could well have been; and it was late before they retired, with light
and thankful hearts, to take that rest of which, after the doubt and
suspense they had recently undergone, they stood much in need.

Oliver rose next morning, in better heart, and went about his usual
occupations, with more hope and pleasure than he had known for many
days.  The birds were once more hung out, to sing, in their old places;
and the sweetest wild flowers that could be found, were once more
gathered to gladden Rose with their beauty. The melancholy which had
seemed to the sad eyes of the anxious boy to hang, for days past, over
every object, beautiful as all were, was dispelled by magic.  The dew
seemed to sparkle more brightly on the green leaves; the air to rustle
among them with a sweeter music; and the sky itself to look more blue
and bright. Such is the influence which the condition of our own
thoughts, exercise, even over the appearance of external objects.  Men
who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and
gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from
their own jaundiced eyes and hearts.  The real hues are delicate, and
need a clearer vision.

It is worthy of remark, and Oliver did not fail to note it at the time,
that his morning expeditions were no longer made alone. Harry Maylie,
after the very first morning when he met Oliver coming laden home, was
seized with such a passion for flowers, and displayed such a taste in
their arrangement, as left his young companion far behind.  If Oliver
were behindhand in these respects, he knew where the best were to be
found; and morning after morning they scoured the country together, and
brought home the fairest that blossomed.  The window of the young
lady's chamber was opened now; for she loved to feel the rich summer
air stream in, and revive her with its freshness; but there always
stood in water, just inside the lattice, one particular little bunch,
which was made up with great care, every morning.  Oliver could not
help noticing that the withered flowers were never thrown away,
although the little vase was regularly replenished; nor, could he help
observing, that whenever the doctor came into the garden, he invariably
cast his eyes up to that particular corner, and nodded his head most
expressively, as he set forth on his morning's walk.  Pending these
observations, the days were flying by; and Rose was rapidly recovering.

Nor did Oliver's time hang heavy on his hands, although the young lady
had not yet left her chamber, and there were no evening walks, save now
and then, for a short distance, with Mrs. Maylie. He applied himself,
with redoubled assiduity, to the instructions of the white-headed old
gentleman, and laboured so hard that his quick progress surprised even
himself.  It was while he was engaged in this pursuit, that he was
greatly startled and distressed by a most unexpected occurrence.

The little room in which he was accustomed to sit, when busy at his
books, was on the ground-floor, at the back of the house.  It was quite
a cottage-room, with a lattice-window: around which were clusters of
jessamine and honeysuckle, that crept over the casement, and filled the
place with their delicious perfume.  It looked into a garden, whence a
wicket-gate opened into a small paddock; all beyond, was fine
meadow-land and wood.  There was no other dwelling near, in that
direction; and the prospect it commanded was very extensive.

One beautiful evening, when the first shades of twilight were beginning
to settle upon the earth, Oliver sat at this window, intent upon his
books.  He had been poring over them for some time; and, as the day had
been uncommonly sultry, and he had exerted himself a great deal, it is
no disparagement to the authors, whoever they may have been, to say,
that gradually and by slow degrees, he fell asleep.

There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it
holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things
about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure.  So far as an
overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter
inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called
sleep, this is it; and yet, we have a consciousness of all that is
going on about us, and, if we dream at such a time, words which are
really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate
themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and
imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost
matter of impossibility to separate the two.  Nor is this, the most
striking phenomenon incidental to such a state.  It is an undoubted
fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead,
yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before
us, will be influenced and materially influenced, by the _mere silent
presence_ of some external object; which may not have been near us when
we closed our eyes:  and of whose vicinity we have had no waking
consciousness.

Oliver knew, perfectly well, that he was in his own little room; that
his books were lying on the table before him; that the sweet air was
stirring among the creeping plants outside.  And yet he was asleep.
Suddenly, the scene changed; the air became close and confined; and he
thought, with a glow of terror, that he was in the Jew's house again.
There sat the hideous old man, in his accustomed corner, pointing at
him, and whispering to another man, with his face averted, who sat
beside him.

'Hush, my dear!' he thought he heard the Jew say; 'it is he, sure
enough.  Come away.'

'He!' the other man seemed to answer; 'could I mistake him, think you?
If a crowd of ghosts were to put themselves into his exact shape, and
he stood amongst them, there is something that would tell me how to
point him out.  If you buried him fifty feet deep, and took me across
his grave, I fancy I should know, if there wasn't a mark above it, that
he lay buried there?'

The man seemed to say this, with such dreadful hatred, that Oliver
awoke with the fear, and started up.

Good Heaven!  what was that, which sent the blood tingling to his
heart, and deprived him of his voice, and of power to move!
There--there--at the window--close before him--so close, that he could
have almost touched him before he started back:  with his eyes peering
into the room, and meeting his:  there stood the Jew!  And beside him,
white with rage or fear, or both, were the scowling features of the man
who had accosted him in the inn-yard.

It was but an instant, a glance, a flash, before his eyes; and they
were gone.  But they had recognised him, and he them; and their look
was as firmly impressed upon his memory, as if it had been deeply
carved in stone, and set before him from his birth. He stood transfixed
for a moment; then, leaping from the window into the garden, called
loudly for help.



CHAPTER XXXV

CONTAINING THE UNSATISFACTORY RESULT OF OLIVER'S ADVENTURE; AND A
CONVERSATION OF SOME IMPORTANCE BETWEEN HARRY MAYLIE AND ROSE

When the inmates of the house, attracted by Oliver's cries, hurried to
the spot from which they proceeded, they found him, pale and agitated,
pointing in the direction of the meadows behind the house, and scarcely
able to articulate the words, 'The Jew! the Jew!'

Mr. Giles was at a loss to comprehend what this outcry meant; but Harry
Maylie, whose perceptions were something quicker, and who had heard
Oliver's history from his mother, understood it at once.

'What direction did he take?' he asked, catching up a heavy stick which
was standing in a corner.

'That,' replied Oliver, pointing out the course the man had taken; 'I
missed them in an instant.'

'Then, they are in the ditch!' said Harry.  'Follow!  And keep as near
me, as you can.' So saying, he sprang over the hedge, and darted off
with a speed which rendered it matter of exceeding difficulty for the
others to keep near him.

Giles followed as well as he could; and Oliver followed too; and in the
course of a minute or two, Mr. Losberne, who had been out walking, and
just then returned, tumbled over the hedge after them, and picking
himself up with more agility than he could have been supposed to
possess, struck into the same course at no contemptible speed, shouting
all the while, most prodigiously, to know what was the matter.

On they all went; nor stopped they once to breathe, until the leader,
striking off into an angle of the field indicated by Oliver, began to
search, narrowly, the ditch and hedge adjoining; which afforded time
for the remainder of the party to come up; and for Oliver to
communicate to Mr. Losberne the circumstances that had led to so
vigorous a pursuit.

The search was all in vain.  There were not even the traces of recent
footsteps, to be seen.  They stood now, on the summit of a little hill,
commanding the open fields in every direction for three or four miles.
There was the village in the hollow on the left; but, in order to gain
that, after pursuing the track Oliver had pointed out, the men must
have made a circuit of open ground, which it was impossible they could
have accomplished in so short a time.  A thick wood skirted the
meadow-land in another direction; but they could not have gained that
covert for the same reason.

'It must have been a dream, Oliver,' said Harry Maylie.

'Oh no, indeed, sir,' replied Oliver, shuddering at the very
recollection of the old wretch's countenance; 'I saw him too plainly
for that.  I saw them both, as plainly as I see you now.'

'Who was the other?' inquired Harry and Mr. Losberne, together.

'The very same man I told you of, who came so suddenly upon me at the
inn,' said Oliver.  'We had our eyes fixed full upon each other; and I
could swear to him.'

'They took this way?' demanded Harry:  'are you sure?'

'As I am that the men were at the window,' replied Oliver, pointing
down, as he spoke, to the hedge which divided the cottage-garden from
the meadow.  'The tall man leaped over, just there; and the Jew,
running a few paces to the right, crept through that gap.'

The two gentlemen watched Oliver's earnest face, as he spoke, and
looking from him to each other, seemed to feel satisfied of the
accuracy of what he said.  Still, in no direction were there any
appearances of the trampling of men in hurried flight.  The grass was
long; but it was trodden down nowhere, save where their own feet had
crushed it.  The sides and brinks of the ditches were of damp clay; but
in no one place could they discern the print of men's shoes, or the
slightest mark which would indicate that any feet had pressed the
ground for hours before.

'This is strange!' said Harry.

'Strange?' echoed the doctor.  'Blathers and Duff, themselves, could
make nothing of it.'

Notwithstanding the evidently useless nature of their search, they did
not desist until the coming on of night rendered its further
prosecution hopeless; and even then, they gave it up with reluctance.
Giles was dispatched to the different ale-houses in the village,
furnished with the best description Oliver could give of the appearance
and dress of the strangers.  Of these, the Jew was, at all events,
sufficiently remarkable to be remembered, supposing he had been seen
drinking, or loitering about; but Giles returned without any
intelligence, calculated to dispel or lessen the mystery.

On the next day, fresh search was made, and the inquiries renewed; but
with no better success.  On the day following, Oliver and Mr. Maylie
repaired to the market-town, in the hope of seeing or hearing something
of the men there; but this effort was equally fruitless.  After a few
days, the affair began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when
wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.

Meanwhile, Rose was rapidly recovering.  She had left her room: was
able to go out; and mixing once more with the family, carried joy into
the hearts of all.

But, although this happy change had a visible effect on the little
circle; and although cheerful voices and merry laughter were once more
heard in the cottage; there was at times, an unwonted restraint upon
some there:  even upon Rose herself: which Oliver could not fail to
remark.  Mrs. Maylie and her son were often closeted together for a
long time; and more than once Rose appeared with traces of tears upon
her face.  After Mr. Losberne had fixed a day for his departure to
Chertsey, these symptoms increased; and it became evident that
something was in progress which affected the peace of the young lady,
and of somebody else besides.

At length, one morning, when Rose was alone in the breakfast-parlour,
Harry Maylie entered; and, with some hesitation, begged permission to
speak with her for a few moments.

'A few--a very few--will suffice, Rose,' said the young man, drawing
his chair towards her.  'What I shall have to say, has already
presented itself to your mind; the most cherished hopes of my heart are
not unknown to you, though from my lips you have not heard them stated.'

Rose had been very pale from the moment of his entrance; but that might
have been the effect of her recent illness.  She merely bowed; and
bending over some plants that stood near, waited in silence for him to
proceed.

'I--I--ought to have left here, before,' said Harry.

'You should, indeed,' replied Rose.  'Forgive me for saying so, but I
wish you had.'

'I was brought here, by the most dreadful and agonising of all
apprehensions,' said the young man; 'the fear of losing the one dear
being on whom my every wish and hope are fixed.  You had been dying;
trembling between earth and heaven.  We know that when the young, the
beautiful, and good, are visited with sickness, their pure spirits
insensibly turn towards their bright home of lasting rest; we know,
Heaven help us! that the best and fairest of our kind, too often fade
in blooming.'

There were tears in the eyes of the gentle girl, as these words were
spoken; and when one fell upon the flower over which she bent, and
glistened brightly in its cup, making it more beautiful, it seemed as
though the outpouring of her fresh young heart, claimed kindred
naturally, with the loveliest things in nature.

'A creature,' continued the young man, passionately, 'a creature as
fair and innocent of guile as one of God's own angels, fluttered
between life and death.  Oh! who could hope, when the distant world to
which she was akin, half opened to her view, that she would return to
the sorrow and calamity of this!  Rose, Rose, to know that you were
passing away like some soft shadow, which a light from above, casts
upon the earth; to have no hope that you would be spared to those who
linger here; hardly to know a reason why you should be; to feel that
you belonged to that bright sphere whither so many of the fairest and
the best have winged their early flight; and yet to pray, amid all
these consolations, that you might be restored to those who loved
you--these were distractions almost too great to bear. They were mine,
by day and night; and with them, came such a rushing torrent of fears,
and apprehensions, and selfish regrets, lest you should die, and never
know how devotedly I loved you, as almost bore down sense and reason in
its course.  You recovered. Day by day, and almost hour by hour, some
drop of health came back, and mingling with the spent and feeble stream
of life which circulated languidly within you, swelled it again to a
high and rushing tide.  I have watched you change almost from death, to
life, with eyes that turned blind with their eagerness and deep
affection. Do not tell me that you wish I had lost this; for it has
softened my heart to all mankind.'

'I did not mean that,' said Rose, weeping; 'I only wish you had left
here, that you might have turned to high and noble pursuits again; to
pursuits well worthy of you.'

'There is no pursuit more worthy of me:  more worthy of the highest
nature that exists:  than the struggle to win such a heart as yours,'
said the young man, taking her hand. 'Rose, my own dear Rose!  For
years--for years--I have loved you; hoping to win my way to fame, and
then come proudly home and tell you it had been pursued only for you to
share; thinking, in my daydreams, how I would remind you, in that happy
moment, of the many silent tokens I had given of a boy's attachment,
and claim your hand, as in redemption of some old mute contract that
had been sealed between us!  That time has not arrived; but here, with
not fame won, and no young vision realised, I offer you the heart so
long your own, and stake my all upon the words with which you greet the
offer.'

'Your behaviour has ever been kind and noble.' said Rose, mastering the
emotions by which she was agitated.  'As you believe that I am not
insensible or ungrateful, so hear my answer.'

'It is, that I may endeavour to deserve you; it is, dear Rose?'

'It is,' replied Rose, 'that you must endeavour to forget me; not as
your old and dearly-attached companion, for that would wound me deeply;
but, as the object of your love.  Look into the world; think how many
hearts you would be proud to gain, are there. Confide some other
passion to me, if you will; I will be the truest, warmest, and most
faithful friend you have.'

There was a pause, during which, Rose, who had covered her face with
one hand, gave free vent to her tears.  Harry still retained the other.

'And your reasons, Rose,' he said, at length, in a low voice; 'your
reasons for this decision?'

'You have a right to know them,' rejoined Rose.  'You can say nothing
to alter my resolution.  It is a duty that I must perform.  I owe it,
alike to others, and to myself.'

'To yourself?'

'Yes, Harry.  I owe it to myself, that I, a friendless, portionless,
girl, with a blight upon my name, should not give your friends reason
to suspect that I had sordidly yielded to your first passion, and
fastened myself, a clog, on all your hopes and projects.  I owe it to
you and yours, to prevent you from opposing, in the warmth of your
generous nature, this great obstacle to your progress in the world.'

'If your inclinations chime with your sense of duty--' Harry began.

'They do not,' replied Rose, colouring deeply.

'Then you return my love?' said Harry.  'Say but that, dear Rose; say
but that; and soften the bitterness of this hard disappointment!'

'If I could have done so, without doing heavy wrong to him I loved,'
rejoined Rose, 'I could have--'

'Have received this declaration very differently?' said Harry. 'Do not
conceal that from me, at least, Rose.'

'I could,' said Rose.  'Stay!' she added, disengaging her hand, 'why
should we prolong this painful interview?  Most painful to me, and yet
productive of lasting happiness, notwithstanding; for it _will_ be
happiness to know that I once held the high place in your regard which
I now occupy, and every triumph you achieve in life will animate me
with new fortitude and firmness.  Farewell, Harry!  As we have met
to-day, we meet no more; but in other relations than those in which
this conversation have placed us, we may be long and happily entwined;
and may every blessing that the prayers of a true and earnest heart can
call down from the source of all truth and sincerity, cheer and prosper
you!'

'Another word, Rose,' said Harry.  'Your reason in your own words.
From your own lips, let me hear it!'

'The prospect before you,' answered Rose, firmly, 'is a brilliant one.
All the honours to which great talents and powerful connections can
help men in public life, are in store for you. But those connections
are proud; and I will neither mingle with such as may hold in scorn the
mother who gave me life; nor bring disgrace or failure on the son of
her who has so well supplied that mother's place.  In a word,' said the
young lady, turning away, as her temporary firmness forsook her, 'there
is a stain upon my name, which the world visits on innocent heads.  I
will carry it into no blood but my own; and the reproach shall rest
alone on me.'

'One word more, Rose.  Dearest Rose! one more!' cried Harry, throwing
himself before her.  'If I had been less--less fortunate, the world
would call it--if some obscure and peaceful life had been my
destiny--if I had been poor, sick, helpless--would you have turned from
me then?  Or has my probable advancement to riches and honour, given
this scruple birth?'

'Do not press me to reply,' answered Rose.  'The question does not
arise, and never will.  It is unfair, almost unkind, to urge it.'

'If your answer be what I almost dare to hope it is,' retorted Harry,
'it will shed a gleam of happiness upon my lonely way, and light the
path before me.  It is not an idle thing to do so much, by the
utterance of a few brief words, for one who loves you beyond all else.
Oh, Rose: in the name of my ardent and enduring attachment; in the name
of all I have suffered for you, and all you doom me to undergo; answer
me this one question!'

'Then, if your lot had been differently cast,' rejoined Rose; 'if you
had been even a little, but not so far, above me; if I could have been
a help and comfort to you in any humble scene of peace and retirement,
and not a blot and drawback in ambitious and distinguished crowds; I
should have been spared this trial.  I have every reason to be happy,
very happy, now; but then, Harry, I own I should have been happier.'

Busy recollections of old hopes, cherished as a girl, long ago, crowded
into the mind of Rose, while making this avowal; but they brought tears
with them, as old hopes will when they come back withered; and they
relieved her.

'I cannot help this weakness, and it makes my purpose stronger,' said
Rose, extending her hand.  'I must leave you now, indeed.'

'I ask one promise,' said Harry.  'Once, and only once more,--say
within a year, but it may be much sooner,--I may speak to you again on
this subject, for the last time.'

'Not to press me to alter my right determination,' replied Rose, with a
melancholy smile; 'it will be useless.'

'No,' said Harry; 'to hear you repeat it, if you will--finally repeat
it!  I will lay at your feet, whatever of station of fortune I may
possess; and if you still adhere to your present resolution, will not
seek, by word or act, to change it.'

'Then let it be so,' rejoined Rose; 'it is but one pang the more, and
by that time I may be enabled to bear it better.'

She extended her hand again.  But the young man caught her to his
bosom; and imprinting one kiss on her beautiful forehead, hurried from
the room.



CHAPTER XXXVI

IS A VERY SHORT ONE, AND MAY APPEAR OF NO GREAT IMPORTANCE IN ITS
PLACE, BUT IT SHOULD BE READ NOTWITHSTANDING, AS A SEQUEL TO THE LAST,
AND A KEY TO ONE THAT WILL FOLLOW WHEN ITS TIME ARRIVES

'And so you are resolved to be my travelling companion this morning;
eh?' said the doctor, as Harry Maylie joined him and Oliver at the
breakfast-table.  'Why, you are not in the same mind or intention two
half-hours together!'

'You will tell me a different tale one of these days,' said Harry,
colouring without any perceptible reason.

'I hope I may have good cause to do so,' replied Mr. Losberne; 'though
I confess I don't think I shall.  But yesterday morning you had made up
your mind, in a great hurry, to stay here, and to accompany your
mother, like a dutiful son, to the sea-side. Before noon, you announce
that you are going to do me the honour of accompanying me as far as I
go, on your road to London.  And at night, you urge me, with great
mystery, to start before the ladies are stirring; the consequence of
which is, that young Oliver here is pinned down to his breakfast when
he ought to be ranging the meadows after botanical phenomena of all
kinds. Too bad, isn't it, Oliver?'

'I should have been very sorry not to have been at home when you and
Mr. Maylie went away, sir,' rejoined Oliver.

'That's a fine fellow,' said the doctor; 'you shall come and see me
when you return.  But, to speak seriously, Harry; has any communication
from the great nobs produced this sudden anxiety on your part to be
gone?'

'The great nobs,' replied Harry, 'under which designation, I presume,
you include my most stately uncle, have not communicated with me at
all, since I have been here; nor, at this time of the year, is it
likely that anything would occur to render necessary my immediate
attendance among them.'

'Well,' said the doctor, 'you are a queer fellow.  But of course they
will get you into parliament at the election before Christmas, and
these sudden shiftings and changes are no bad preparation for political
life.  There's something in that.  Good training is always desirable,
whether the race be for place, cup, or sweepstakes.'

Harry Maylie looked as if he could have followed up this short dialogue
by one or two remarks that would have staggered the doctor not a
little; but he contented himself with saying, 'We shall see,' and
pursued the subject no farther.  The post-chaise drove up to the door
shortly afterwards; and Giles coming in for the luggage, the good
doctor bustled out, to see it packed.

'Oliver,' said Harry Maylie, in a low voice, 'let me speak a word with
you.'

Oliver walked into the window-recess to which Mr. Maylie beckoned him;
much surprised at the mixture of sadness and boisterous spirits, which
his whole behaviour displayed.

'You can write well now?' said Harry, laying his hand upon his arm.

'I hope so, sir,' replied Oliver.

'I shall not be at home again, perhaps for some time; I wish you would
write to me--say once a fort-night:  every alternate Monday: to the
General Post Office in London.  Will you?'

'Oh! certainly, sir; I shall be proud to do it,' exclaimed Oliver,
greatly delighted with the commission.

'I should like to know how--how my mother and Miss Maylie are,' said
the young man; 'and you can fill up a sheet by telling me what walks
you take, and what you talk about, and whether she--they, I mean--seem
happy and quite well. You understand me?'

'Oh! quite, sir, quite,' replied Oliver.

'I would rather you did not mention it to them,' said Harry, hurrying
over his words; 'because it might make my mother anxious to write to me
oftener, and it is a trouble and worry to her. Let it be a secret
between you and me; and mind you tell me everything!  I depend upon
you.'

Oliver, quite elated and honoured by a sense of his importance,
faithfully promised to be secret and explicit in his communications.
Mr. Maylie took leave of him, with many assurances of his regard and
protection.

The doctor was in the chaise; Giles (who, it had been arranged, should
be left behind) held the door open in his hand; and the women-servants
were in the garden, looking on.  Harry cast one slight glance at the
latticed window, and jumped into the carriage.

'Drive on!' he cried, 'hard, fast, full gallop!  Nothing short of
flying will keep pace with me, to-day.'

'Halloa!' cried the doctor, letting down the front glass in a great
hurry, and shouting to the postillion; 'something very short of flying
will keep pace with _me_.  Do you hear?'

Jingling and clattering, till distance rendered its noise inaudible,
and its rapid progress only perceptible to the eye, the vehicle wound
its way along the road, almost hidden in a cloud of dust: now wholly
disappearing, and now becoming visible again, as intervening objects,
or the intricacies of the way, permitted.  It was not until even the
dusty cloud was no longer to be seen, that the gazers dispersed.

And there was one looker-on, who remained with eyes fixed upon the spot
where the carriage had disappeared, long after it was many miles away;
for, behind the white curtain which had shrouded her from view when
Harry raised his eyes towards the window, sat Rose herself.

'He seems in high spirits and happy,' she said, at length. 'I feared
for a time he might be otherwise.  I was mistaken.  I am very, very
glad.'

Tears are signs of gladness as well as grief; but those which coursed
down Rose's face, as she sat pensively at the window, still gazing in
the same direction, seemed to tell more of sorrow than of joy.



CHAPTER XXXVII

IN WHICH THE READER MAY PERCEIVE A CONTRAST, NOT UNCOMMON IN
MATRIMONIAL CASES

Mr. Bumble sat in the workhouse parlour, with his eyes moodily fixed on
the cheerless grate, whence, as it was summer time, no brighter gleam
proceeded, than the reflection of certain sickly rays of the sun, which
were sent back from its cold and shining surface.  A paper fly-cage
dangled from the ceiling, to which he occasionally raised his eyes in
gloomy thought; and, as the heedless insects hovered round the gaudy
net-work, Mr. Bumble would heave a deep sigh, while a more gloomy
shadow overspread his countenance.  Mr. Bumble was meditating; it might
be that the insects brought to mind, some painful passage in his own
past life.

Nor was Mr. Bumble's gloom the only thing calculated to awaken a
pleasing melancholy in the bosom of a spectator. There were not wanting
other appearances, and those closely connected with his own person,
which announced that a great change had taken place in the position of
his affairs.  The laced coat, and the cocked hat; where were they?  He
still wore knee-breeches, and dark cotton stockings on his nether
limbs; but they were not _the_ breeches.  The coat was wide-skirted;
and in that respect like _the_ coat, but, oh how different!  The mighty
cocked hat was replaced by a modest round one.  Mr. Bumble was no
longer a beadle.

There are some promotions in life, which, independent of the more
substantial rewards they offer, require peculiar value and dignity from
the coats and waistcoats connected with them.  A field-marshal has his
uniform; a bishop his silk apron; a counsellor his silk gown; a beadle
his cocked hat.  Strip the bishop of his apron, or the beadle of his
hat and lace; what are they?  Men.  Mere men.  Dignity, and even
holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than
some people imagine.

Mr. Bumble had married Mrs. Corney, and was master of the workhouse.
Another beadle had come into power.  On him the cocked hat, gold-laced
coat, and staff, had all three descended.

'And to-morrow two months it was done!' said Mr. Bumble, with a sigh.
'It seems a age.'

Mr. Bumble might have meant that he had concentrated a whole existence
of happiness into the short space of eight weeks; but the sigh--there
was a vast deal of meaning in the sigh.

'I sold myself,' said Mr. Bumble, pursuing the same train of relection,
'for six teaspoons, a pair of sugar-tongs, and a milk-pot; with a small
quantity of second-hand furniture, and twenty pound in money.  I went
very reasonable.  Cheap, dirt cheap!'

'Cheap!' cried a shrill voice in Mr. Bumble's ear: 'you would have been
dear at any price; and dear enough I paid for you, Lord above knows
that!'

Mr. Bumble turned, and encountered the face of his interesting consort,
who, imperfectly comprehending the few words she had overheard of his
complaint, had hazarded the foregoing remark at a venture.

'Mrs. Bumble, ma'am!' said Mr. Bumble, with a sentimental sternness.

'Well!' cried the lady.

'Have the goodness to look at me,' said Mr. Bumble, fixing his eyes
upon her.  (If she stands such a eye as that,' said Mr. Bumble to
himself, 'she can stand anything.  It is a eye I never knew to fail
with paupers.  If it fails with her, my power is gone.')

Whether an exceedingly small expansion of eye be sufficient to quell
paupers, who, being lightly fed, are in no very high condition; or
whether the late Mrs. Corney was particularly proof against eagle
glances; are matters of opinion.  The matter of fact, is, that the
matron was in no way overpowered by Mr. Bumble's scowl, but, on the
contrary, treated it with great disdain, and even raised a laugh
thereat, which sounded as though it were genuine.

On hearing this most unexpected sound, Mr. Bumble looked, first
incredulous, and afterwards amazed.  He then relapsed into his former
state; nor did he rouse himself until his attention was again awakened
by the voice of his partner.

'Are you going to sit snoring there, all day?' inquired Mrs. Bumble.

'I am going to sit here, as long as I think proper, ma'am,' rejoined
Mr. Bumble; 'and although I was _not_ snoring, I shall snore, gape,
sneeze, laugh, or cry, as the humour strikes me; such being my
prerogative.'

'_Your_ prerogative!' sneered Mrs. Bumble, with ineffable contempt.

'I said the word, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble.  'The prerogative of a man
is to command.'

'And what's the prerogative of a woman, in the name of Goodness?' cried
the relict of Mr. Corney deceased.

'To obey, ma'am,' thundered Mr. Bumble.  'Your late unfortunate husband
should have taught it you; and then, perhaps, he might have been alive
now.  I wish he was, poor man!'

Mrs. Bumble, seeing at a glance, that the decisive moment had now
arrived, and that a blow struck for the mastership on one side or
other, must necessarily be final and conclusive, no sooner heard this
allusion to the dead and gone, than she dropped into a chair, and with
a loud scream that Mr. Bumble was a hard-hearted brute, fell into a
paroxysm of tears.

But, tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble's soul;
his heart was waterproof.  Like washable beaver hats that improve with
rain, his nerves were rendered stouter and more vigorous, by showers of
tears, which, being tokens of weakness, and so far tacit admissions of
his own power, pleased and exalted him.  He eyed his good lady with
looks of great satisfaction, and begged, in an encouraging manner, that
she should cry her hardest:  the exercise being looked upon, by the
faculty, as strongly conducive to health.

'It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and
softens down the temper,' said Mr. Bumble.  'So cry away.'

As he discharged himself of this pleasantry, Mr. Bumble took his hat
from a peg, and putting it on, rather rakishly, on one side, as a man
might, who felt he had asserted his superiority in a becoming manner,
thrust his hands into his pockets, and sauntered towards the door, with
much ease and waggishness depicted in his whole appearance.

Now, Mrs. Corney that was, had tried the tears, because they were less
troublesome than a manual assault; but, she was quite prepared to make
trial of the latter mode of proceeding, as Mr. Bumble was not long in
discovering.

The first proof he experienced of the fact, was conveyed in a hollow
sound, immediately succeeded by the sudden flying off of his hat to the
opposite end of the room.  This preliminary proceeding laying bare his
head, the expert lady, clasping him tightly round the throat with one
hand, inflicted a shower of blows (dealt with singular vigour and
dexterity) upon it with the other.  This done, she created a little
variety by scratching his face, and tearing his hair; and, having, by
this time, inflicted as much punishment as she deemed necessary for the
offence, she pushed him over a chair, which was luckily well situated
for the purpose:  and defied him to talk about his prerogative again,
if he dared.

'Get up!' said Mrs. Bumble, in a voice of command.  'And take yourself
away from here, unless you want me to do something desperate.'

Mr. Bumble rose with a very rueful countenance:  wondering much what
something desperate might be.  Picking up his hat, he looked towards
the door.

'Are you going?' demanded Mrs. Bumble.

'Certainly, my dear, certainly,' rejoined Mr. Bumble, making a quicker
motion towards the door.  'I didn't intend to--I'm going, my dear!  You
are so very violent, that really I--'

At this instant, Mrs. Bumble stepped hastily forward to replace the
carpet, which had been kicked up in the scuffle.  Mr. Bumble
immediately darted out of the room, without bestowing another thought
on his unfinished sentence:  leaving the late Mrs. Corney in full
possession of the field.

Mr. Bumble was fairly taken by surprise, and fairly beaten.  He had a
decided propensity for bullying:  derived no inconsiderable pleasure
from the exercise of petty cruelty; and, consequently, was (it is
needless to say) a coward.  This is by no means a disparagement to his
character; for many official personages, who are held in high respect
and admiration, are the victims of similar infirmities.  The remark is
made, indeed, rather in his favour than otherwise, and with a view of
impressing the reader with a just sense of his qualifications for
office.

But, the measure of his degradation was not yet full.  After making a
tour of the house, and thinking, for the first time, that the poor-laws
really were too hard on people; and that men who ran away from their
wives, leaving them chargeable to the parish, ought, in justice to be
visited with no punishment at all, but rather rewarded as meritorious
individuals who had suffered much; Mr. Bumble came to a room where some
of the female paupers were usually employed in washing the parish
linen:  when the sound of voices in conversation, now proceeded.

'Hem!' said Mr. Bumble, summoning up all his native dignity. 'These
women at least shall continue to respect the prerogative. Hallo! hallo
there!  What do you mean by this noise, you hussies?'

With these words, Mr. Bumble opened the door, and walked in with a very
fierce and angry manner:  which was at once exchanged for a most
humiliated and cowering air, as his eyes unexpectedly rested on the
form of his lady wife.

'My dear,' said Mr. Bumble, 'I didn't know you were here.'

'Didn't know I was here!' repeated Mrs. Bumble.  'What do _you_ do
here?'

'I thought they were talking rather too much to be doing their work
properly, my dear,' replied Mr. Bumble:  glancing distractedly at a
couple of old women at the wash-tub, who were comparing notes of
admiration at the workhouse-master's humility.

'_You_ thought they were talking too much?' said Mrs. Bumble. 'What
business is it of yours?'

'Why, my dear--' urged Mr. Bumble submissively.

'What business is it of yours?' demanded Mrs. Bumble, again.

'It's very true, you're matron here, my dear,' submitted Mr. Bumble;
'but I thought you mightn't be in the way just then.'

'I'll tell you what, Mr. Bumble,' returned his lady.  'We don't want
any of your interference.  You're a great deal too fond of poking your
nose into things that don't concern you, making everybody in the house
laugh, the moment your back is turned, and making yourself look like a
fool every hour in the day.  Be off; come!'

Mr. Bumble, seeing with excruciating feelings, the delight of the two
old paupers, who were tittering together most rapturously, hesitated
for an instant.  Mrs. Bumble, whose patience brooked no delay, caught
up a bowl of soap-suds, and motioning him towards the door, ordered him
instantly to depart, on pain of receiving the contents upon his portly
person.

What could Mr. Bumble do?  He looked dejectedly round, and slunk away;
and, as he reached the door, the titterings of the paupers broke into a
shrill chuckle of irrepressible delight.  It wanted but this.  He was
degraded in their eyes; he had lost caste and station before the very
paupers; he had fallen from all the height and pomp of beadleship, to
the lowest depth of the most snubbed hen-peckery.

'All in two months!' said Mr. Bumble, filled with dismal thoughts.
'Two months!  No more than two months ago, I was not only my own
master, but everybody else's, so far as the porochial workhouse was
concerned, and now!--'

It was too much.  Mr. Bumble boxed the ears of the boy who opened the
gate for him (for he had reached the portal in his reverie); and
walked, distractedly, into the street.

He walked up one street, and down another, until exercise had abated
the first passion of his grief; and then the revulsion of feeling made
him thirsty.  He passed a great many public-houses; but, at length
paused before one in a by-way, whose parlour, as he gathered from a
hasty peep over the blinds, was deserted, save by one solitary
customer.  It began to rain, heavily, at the moment.  This determined
him.  Mr. Bumble stepped in; and ordering something to drink, as he
passed the bar, entered the apartment into which he had looked from the
street.

The man who was seated there, was tall and dark, and wore a large
cloak.  He had the air of a stranger; and seemed, by a certain
haggardness in his look, as well as by the dusty soils on his dress, to
have travelled some distance.  He eyed Bumble askance, as he entered,
but scarcely deigned to nod his head in acknowledgment of his
salutation.

Mr. Bumble had quite dignity enough for two; supposing even that the
stranger had been more familiar:  so he drank his gin-and-water in
silence, and read the paper with great show of pomp and circumstance.

It so happened, however: as it will happen very often, when men fall
into company under such circumstances:  that Mr. Bumble felt, every now
and then, a powerful inducement, which he could not resist, to steal a
look at the stranger:  and that whenever he did so, he withdrew his
eyes, in some confusion, to find that the stranger was at that moment
stealing a look at him.  Mr. Bumble's awkwardness was enhanced by the
very remarkable expression of the stranger's eye, which was keen and
bright, but shadowed by a scowl of distrust and suspicion, unlike
anything he had ever observed before, and repulsive to behold.

When they had encountered each other's glance several times in this
way, the stranger, in a harsh, deep voice, broke silence.

'Were you looking for me,' he said, 'when you peered in at the window?'

'Not that I am aware of, unless you're Mr.--'  Here Mr. Bumble stopped
short; for he was curious to know the stranger's name, and thought in
his impatience, he might supply the blank.

'I see you were not,' said the stranger; an expression of quiet sarcasm
playing about his mouth; 'or you have known my name.  You don't know
it.  I would recommend you not to ask for it.'

'I meant no harm, young man,' observed Mr. Bumble, majestically.

'And have done none,' said the stranger.

Another silence succeeded this short dialogue:  which was again broken
by the stranger.

'I have seen you before, I think?' said he.  'You were differently
dressed at that time, and I only passed you in the street, but I should
know you again.  You were beadle here, once; were you not?'

'I was,' said Mr. Bumble, in some surprise; 'porochial beadle.'

'Just so,' rejoined the other, nodding his head.  'It was in that
character I saw you.  What are you now?'

'Master of the workhouse,' rejoined Mr. Bumble, slowly and
impressively, to check any undue familiarity the stranger might
otherwise assume.  'Master of the workhouse, young man!'

'You have the same eye to your own interest, that you always had, I
doubt not?' resumed the stranger, looking keenly into Mr. Bumble's
eyes, as he raised them in astonishment at the question.

'Don't scruple to answer freely, man.  I know you pretty well, you see.'

'I suppose, a married man,' replied Mr. Bumble, shading his eyes with
his hand, and surveying the stranger, from head to foot, in evident
perplexity, 'is not more averse to turning an honest penny when he can,
than a single one.  Porochial officers are not so well paid that they
can afford to refuse any little extra fee, when it comes to them in a
civil and proper manner.'

The stranger smiled, and nodded his head again: as much to say, he had
not mistaken his man; then rang the bell.

'Fill this glass again,' he said, handing Mr. Bumble's empty tumbler to
the landlord.  'Let it be strong and hot.  You like it so, I suppose?'

'Not too strong,' replied Mr. Bumble, with a delicate cough.

'You understand what that means, landlord!' said the stranger, drily.

The host smiled, disappeared, and shortly afterwards returned with a
steaming jorum: of which, the first gulp brought the water into Mr.
Bumble's eyes.

'Now listen to me,' said the stranger, after closing the door and
window.  'I came down to this place, to-day, to find you out; and, by
one of those chances which the devil throws in the way of his friends
sometimes, you walked into the very room I was sitting in, while you
were uppermost in my mind.  I want some information from you.  I don't
ask you to give it for nothing, slight as it is.  Put up that, to begin
with.'

As he spoke, he pushed a couple of sovereigns across the table to his
companion, carefully, as though unwilling that the chinking of money
should be heard without.  When Mr. Bumble had scrupulously examined the
coins, to see that they were genuine, and had put them up, with much
satisfaction, in his waistcoat-pocket, he went on:

'Carry your memory back--let me see--twelve years, last winter.'

'It's a long time,' said Mr. Bumble.  'Very good.  I've done it.'

'The scene, the workhouse.'

'Good!'

'And the time, night.'

'Yes.'

'And the place, the crazy hole, wherever it was, in which miserable
drabs brought forth the life and health so often denied to
themselves--gave birth to puling children for the parish to rear; and
hid their shame, rot 'em in the grave!'

'The lying-in room, I suppose?' said Mr. Bumble, not quite following
the stranger's excited description.

'Yes,' said the stranger.  'A boy was born there.'

'A many boys,' observed Mr. Bumble, shaking his head, despondingly.

'A murrain on the young devils!' cried the stranger; 'I speak of one; a
meek-looking, pale-faced boy, who was apprenticed down here, to a
coffin-maker--I wish he had made his coffin, and screwed his body in
it--and who afterwards ran away to London, as it was supposed.

'Why, you mean Oliver!  Young Twist!' said Mr. Bumble; 'I remember him,
of course.  There wasn't a obstinater young rascal--'

'It's not of him I want to hear; I've heard enough of him,' said the
stranger, stopping Mr. Bumble in the outset of a tirade on the subject
of poor Oliver's vices.  'It's of a woman; the hag that nursed his
mother.  Where is she?'

'Where is she?' said Mr. Bumble, whom the gin-and-water had rendered
facetious.  'It would be hard to tell.  There's no midwifery there,
whichever place she's gone to; so I suppose she's out of employment,
anyway.'

'What do you mean?' demanded the stranger, sternly.

'That she died last winter,' rejoined Mr. Bumble.

The man looked fixedly at him when he had given this information, and
although he did not withdraw his eyes for some time afterwards, his
gaze gradually became vacant and abstracted, and he seemed lost in
thought.  For some time, he appeared doubtful whether he ought to be
relieved or disappointed by the intelligence; but at length he breathed
more freely; and withdrawing his eyes, observed that it was no great
matter. With that he rose, as if to depart.

But Mr. Bumble was cunning enough; and he at once saw that an
opportunity was opened, for the lucrative disposal of some secret in
the possession of his better half.  He well remembered the night of old
Sally's death, which the occurrences of that day had given him good
reason to recollect, as the occasion on which he had proposed to Mrs.
Corney; and although that lady had never confided to him the disclosure
of which she had been the solitary witness, he had heard enough to know
that it related to something that had occurred in the old woman's
attendance, as workhouse nurse, upon the young mother of Oliver Twist.
Hastily calling this circumstance to mind, he informed the stranger,
with an air of mystery, that one woman had been closeted with the old
harridan shortly before she died; and that she could, as he had reason
to believe, throw some light on the subject of his inquiry.

'How can I find her?' said the stranger, thrown off his guard; and
plainly showing that all his fears (whatever they were) were aroused
afresh by the intelligence.

'Only through me,' rejoined Mr. Bumble.

'When?' cried the stranger, hastily.

'To-morrow,' rejoined Bumble.

'At nine in the evening,' said the stranger, producing a scrap of
paper, and writing down upon it, an obscure address by the water-side,
in characters that betrayed his agitation; 'at nine in the evening,
bring her to me there.  I needn't tell you to be secret.  It's your
interest.'

With these words, he led the way to the door, after stopping to pay for
the liquor that had been drunk.  Shortly remarking that their roads
were different, he departed, without more ceremony than an emphatic
repetition of the hour of appointment for the following night.

On glancing at the address, the parochial functionary observed that it
contained no name.  The stranger had not gone far, so he made after him
to ask it.

'What do you want?' cried the man, turning quickly round, as Bumble
touched him on the arm.  'Following me?'

'Only to ask a question,' said the other, pointing to the scrap of
paper.  'What name am I to ask for?'

'Monks!' rejoined the man; and strode hastily, away.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF WHAT PASSED BETWEEN MR. AND MRS. BUMBLE, AND
MR. MONKS, AT THEIR NOCTURNAL INTERVIEW

It was a dull, close, overcast summer evening.  The clouds, which had
been threatening all day, spread out in a dense and sluggish mass of
vapour, already yielded large drops of rain, and seemed to presage a
violent thunder-storm, when Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, turning out of the
main street of the town, directed their course towards a scattered
little colony of ruinous houses, distant from it some mile and a-half,
or thereabouts, and erected on a low unwholesome swamp, bordering upon
the river.

They were both wrapped in old and shabby outer garments, which might,
perhaps, serve the double purpose of protecting their persons from the
rain, and sheltering them from observation.  The husband carried a
lantern, from which, however, no light yet shone; and trudged on, a few
paces in front, as though--the way being dirty--to give his wife the
benefit of treading in his heavy footprints.  They went on, in profound
silence; every now and then, Mr. Bumble relaxed his pace, and turned
his head as if to make sure that his helpmate was following; then,
discovering that she was close at his heels, he mended his rate of
walking, and proceeded, at a considerable increase of speed, towards
their place of destination.

This was far from being a place of doubtful character; for it had long
been known as the residence of none but low ruffians, who, under
various pretences of living by their labour, subsisted chiefly on
plunder and crime.  It was a collection of mere hovels:  some, hastily
built with loose bricks: others, of old worm-eaten ship-timber: jumbled
together without any attempt at order or arrangement, and planted, for
the most part, within a few feet of the river's bank.  A few leaky
boats drawn up on the mud, and made fast to the dwarf wall which
skirted it:  and here and there an oar or coil of rope:  appeared, at
first, to indicate that the inhabitants of these miserable cottages
pursued some avocation on the river; but a glance at the shattered and
useless condition of the articles thus displayed, would have led a
passer-by, without much difficulty, to the conjecture that they were
disposed there, rather for the preservation of appearances, than with
any view to their being actually employed.

In the heart of this cluster of huts; and skirting the river, which its
upper stories overhung; stood a large building, formerly used as a
manufactory of some kind.  It had, in its day, probably furnished
employment to the inhabitants of the surrounding tenements.  But it had
long since gone to ruin.  The rat, the worm, and the action of the
damp, had weakened and rotted the piles on which it stood; and a
considerable portion of the building had already sunk down into the
water; while the remainder, tottering and bending over the dark stream,
seemed to wait a favourable opportunity of following its old companion,
and involving itself in the same fate.

It was before this ruinous building that the worthy couple paused, as
the first peal of distant thunder reverberated in the air, and the rain
commenced pouring violently down.

'The place should be somewhere here,' said Bumble, consulting a scrap
of paper he held in his hand.

'Halloa there!' cried a voice from above.

Following the sound, Mr. Bumble raised his head and descried a man
looking out of a door, breast-high, on the second story.

'Stand still, a minute,' cried the voice; 'I'll be with you directly.'
With which the head disappeared, and the door closed.

'Is that the man?' asked Mr. Bumble's good lady.

Mr. Bumble nodded in the affirmative.

'Then, mind what I told you,' said the matron: 'and be careful to say
as little as you can, or you'll betray us at once.'

Mr. Bumble, who had eyed the building with very rueful looks, was
apparently about to express some doubts relative to the advisability of
proceeding any further with the enterprise just then, when he was
prevented by the appearance of Monks: who opened a small door, near
which they stood, and beckoned them inwards.

'Come in!' he cried impatiently, stamping his foot upon the ground.
'Don't keep me here!'

The woman, who had hesitated at first, walked boldly in, without any
other invitation.  Mr. Bumble, who was ashamed or afraid to lag behind,
followed:  obviously very ill at ease and with scarcely any of that
remarkable dignity which was usually his chief characteristic.

'What the devil made you stand lingering there, in the wet?' said
Monks, turning round, and addressing Bumble, after he had bolted the
door behind them.

'We--we were only cooling ourselves,' stammered Bumble, looking
apprehensively about him.

'Cooling yourselves!' retorted Monks.  'Not all the rain that ever
fell, or ever will fall, will put as much of hell's fire out, as a man
can carry about with him.  You won't cool yourself so easily; don't
think it!'

With this agreeable speech, Monks turned short upon the matron, and
bent his gaze upon her, till even she, who was not easily cowed, was
fain to withdraw her eyes, and turn them towards the ground.

'This is the woman, is it?' demanded Monks.

'Hem!  That is the woman,' replied Mr. Bumble, mindful of his wife's
caution.

'You think women never can keep secrets, I suppose?' said the matron,
interposing, and returning, as she spoke, the searching look of Monks.

'I know they will always keep _one_ till it's found out,' said Monks.

'And what may that be?' asked the matron.

'The loss of their own good name,' replied Monks.  'So, by the same
rule, if a woman's a party to a secret that might hang or transport
her, I'm not afraid of her telling it to anybody; not I!  Do you
understand, mistress?'

'No,' rejoined the matron, slightly colouring as she spoke.

'Of course you don't!' said Monks.  'How should you?'

Bestowing something half-way between a smile and a frown upon his two
companions, and again beckoning them to follow him, the man hastened
across the apartment, which was of considerable extent, but low in the
roof.  He was preparing to ascend a steep staircase, or rather ladder,
leading to another floor of warehouses above:  when a bright flash of
lightning streamed down the aperture, and a peal of thunder followed,
which shook the crazy building to its centre.

'Hear it!' he cried, shrinking back.  'Hear it!  Rolling and crashing
on as if it echoed through a thousand caverns where the devils were
hiding from it.  I hate the sound!'

He remained silent for a few moments; and then, removing his hands
suddenly from his face, showed, to the unspeakable discomposure of Mr.
Bumble, that it was much distorted and discoloured.

'These fits come over me, now and then,' said Monks, observing his
alarm; 'and thunder sometimes brings them on. Don't mind me now; it's
all over for this once.'

Thus speaking, he led the way up the ladder; and hastily closing the
window-shutter of the room into which it led, lowered a lantern which
hung at the end of a rope and pulley passed through one of the heavy
beams in the ceiling:  and which cast a dim light upon an old table and
three chairs that were placed beneath it.

'Now,' said Monks, when they had all three seated themselves, 'the
sooner we come to our business, the better for all.  The woman know
what it is, does she?'

The question was addressed to Bumble; but his wife anticipated the
reply, by intimating that she was perfectly acquainted with it.

'He is right in saying that you were with this hag the night she died;
and that she told you something--'

'About the mother of the boy you named,' replied the matron
interrupting him.  'Yes.'

'The first question is, of what nature was her communication?' said
Monks.

'That's the second,' observed the woman with much deliberation. 'The
first is, what may the communication be worth?'

'Who the devil can tell that, without knowing of what kind it is?'
asked Monks.

'Nobody better than you, I am persuaded,' answered Mrs. Bumble: who did
not want for spirit, as her yoke-fellow could abundantly testify.

'Humph!' said Monks significantly, and with a look of eager inquiry;
'there may be money's worth to get, eh?'

'Perhaps there may,' was the composed reply.

'Something that was taken from her,' said Monks.  'Something that she
wore.  Something that--'

'You had better bid,' interrupted Mrs. Bumble.  'I have heard enough,
already, to assure me that you are the man I ought to talk to.'

Mr. Bumble, who had not yet been admitted by his better half into any
greater share of the secret than he had originally possessed, listened
to this dialogue with outstretched neck and distended eyes:  which he
directed towards his wife and Monks, by turns, in undisguised
astonishment; increased, if possible, when the latter sternly demanded,
what sum was required for the disclosure.

'What's it worth to you?' asked the woman, as collectedly as before.

'It may be nothing; it may be twenty pounds,' replied Monks. 'Speak
out, and let me know which.'

'Add five pounds to the sum you have named; give me five-and-twenty
pounds in gold,' said the woman; 'and I'll tell you all I know.  Not
before.'

'Five-and-twenty pounds!' exclaimed Monks, drawing back.

'I spoke as plainly as I could,' replied Mrs. Bumble.  'It's not a
large sum, either.'

'Not a large sum for a paltry secret, that may be nothing when it's
told!' cried Monks impatiently; 'and which has been lying dead for
twelve years past or more!'

'Such matters keep well, and, like good wine, often double their value
in course of time,' answered the matron, still preserving the resolute
indifference she had assumed.  'As to lying dead, there are those who
will lie dead for twelve thousand years to come, or twelve million, for
anything you or I know, who will tell strange tales at last!'

'What if I pay it for nothing?' asked Monks, hesitating.

'You can easily take it away again,' replied the matron. 'I am but a
woman; alone here; and unprotected.'

'Not alone, my dear, nor unprotected, neither,' submitted Mr. Bumble,
in a voice tremulous with fear: '_I_ am here, my dear. And besides,'
said Mr. Bumble, his teeth chattering as he spoke, 'Mr. Monks is too
much of a gentleman to attempt any violence on porochial persons.  Mr.
Monks is aware that I am not a young man, my dear, and also that I am a
little run to seed, as I may say; bu he has heerd:  I say I have no
doubt Mr. Monks has heerd, my dear:  that I am a very determined
officer, with very uncommon strength, if I'm once roused.  I only want
a little rousing; that's all.'

As Mr. Bumble spoke, he made a melancholy feint of grasping his lantern
with fierce determination; and plainly showed, by the alarmed
expression of every feature, that he _did_ want a little rousing, and
not a little, prior to making any very warlike demonstration: unless,
indeed, against paupers, or other person or persons trained down for
the purpose.

'You are a fool,' said Mrs. Bumble, in reply; 'and had better hold your
tongue.'

'He had better have cut it out, before he came, if he can't speak in a
lower tone,' said Monks, grimly.  'So!  He's your husband, eh?'

'He my husband!' tittered the matron, parrying the question.

'I thought as much, when you came in,' rejoined Monks, marking the
angry glance which the lady darted at her spouse as she spoke.  'So
much the better; I have less hesitation in dealing with two people,
when I find that there's only one will between them.  I'm in earnest.
See here!'

He thrust his hand into a side-pocket; and producing a canvas bag, told
out twenty-five sovereigns on the table, and pushed them over to the
woman.

'Now,' he said, 'gather them up; and when this cursed peal of thunder,
which I feel is coming up to break over the house-top, is gone, let's
hear your story.'

The thunder, which seemed in fact much nearer, and to shiver and break
almost over their heads, having subsided, Monks, raising his face from
the table, bent forward to listen to what the woman should say.  The
faces of the three nearly touched, as the two men leant over the small
table in their eagerness to hear, and the woman also leant forward to
render her whisper audible.  The sickly rays of the suspended lantern
falling directly upon them, aggravated the paleness and anxiety of
their countenances: which, encircled by the deepest gloom and darkness,
looked ghastly in the extreme.

'When this woman, that we called old Sally, died,' the matron began,
'she and I were alone.'

'Was there no one by?' asked Monks, in the same hollow whisper; 'No
sick wretch or idiot in some other bed?  No one who could hear, and
might, by possibility, understand?'

'Not a soul,' replied the woman; 'we were alone.  _I_ stood alone
beside the body when death came over it.'

'Good,' said Monks, regarding her attentively.  'Go on.'

'She spoke of a young creature,' resumed the matron, 'who had brought a
child into the world some years before; not merely in the same room,
but in the same bed, in which she then lay dying.'

'Ay?' said Monks, with quivering lip, and glancing over his shoulder,
'Blood!  How things come about!'

'The child was the one you named to him last night,' said the matron,
nodding carelessly towards her husband; 'the mother this nurse had
robbed.'

'In life?' asked Monks.

'In death,' replied the woman, with something like a shudder. 'She
stole from the corpse, when it had hardly turned to one, that which the
dead mother had prayed her, with her last breath, to keep for the
infant's sake.'

'She sold it,' cried Monks, with desperate eagerness; 'did she sell it?
Where?  When?  To whom?  How long before?'

'As she told me, with great difficulty, that she had done this,' said
the matron, 'she fell back and died.'

'Without saying more?' cried Monks, in a voice which, from its very
suppression, seemed only the more furious.  'It's a lie! I'll not be
played with.  She said more.  I'll tear the life out of you both, but
I'll know what it was.'

'She didn't utter another word,' said the woman, to all appearance
unmoved (as Mr. Bumble was very far from being) by the strange man's
violence; 'but she clutched my gown, violently, with one hand, which
was partly closed; and when I saw that she was dead, and so removed the
hand by force, I found it clasped a scrap of dirty paper.'

'Which contained--' interposed Monks, stretching forward.

'Nothing,' replied the woman; 'it was a pawnbroker's duplicate.'

'For what?' demanded Monks.

'In good time I'll tell you.' said the woman.  'I judge that she had
kept the trinket, for some time, in the hope of turning it to better
account; and then had pawned it; and had saved or scraped together
money to pay the pawnbroker's interest year by year, and prevent its
running out; so that if anything came of it, it could still be
redeemed.  Nothing had come of it; and, as I tell you, she died with
the scrap of paper, all worn and tattered, in her hand.  The time was
out in two days; I thought something might one day come of it too; and
so redeemed the pledge.'

'Where is it now?' asked Monks quickly.

'_There_,' replied the woman.  And, as if glad to be relieved of it,
she hastily threw upon the table a small kid bag scarcely large enough
for a French watch, which Monks pouncing upon, tore open with trembling
hands.  It contained a little gold locket: in which were two locks of
hair, and a plain gold wedding-ring.

'It has the word "Agnes" engraved on the inside,' said the woman.

'There is a blank left for the surname; and then follows the date;
which is within a year before the child was born.  I found out that.'

'And this is all?' said Monks, after a close and eager scrutiny of the
contents of the little packet.

'All,' replied the woman.

Mr. Bumble drew a long breath, as if he were glad to find that the
story was over, and no mention made of taking the five-and-twenty
pounds back again; and now he took courage to wipe the perspiration
which had been trickling over his nose, unchecked, during the whole of
the previous dialogue.

'I know nothing of the story, beyond what I can guess at,' said his
wife addressing Monks, after a short silence; 'and I want to know
nothing; for it's safer not.  But I may ask you two questions, may I?'

'You may ask,' said Monks, with some show of surprise; 'but whether I
answer or not is another question.'

'--Which makes three,' observed Mr. Bumble, essaying a stroke of
facetiousness.

'Is that what you expected to get from me?' demanded the matron.

'It is,' replied Monks.  'The other question?'

'What do you propose to do with it?  Can it be used against me?'

'Never,' rejoined Monks; 'nor against me either.  See here!  But don't
move a step forward, or your life is not worth a bulrush.'

With these words, he suddenly wheeled the table aside, and pulling an
iron ring in the boarding, threw back a large trap-door which opened
close at Mr. Bumble's feet, and caused that gentleman to retire several
paces backward, with great precipitation.

'Look down,' said Monks, lowering the lantern into the gulf. 'Don't
fear me.  I could have let you down, quietly enough, when you were
seated over it, if that had been my game.'

Thus encouraged, the matron drew near to the brink; and even Mr. Bumble
himself, impelled by curiousity, ventured to do the same. The turbid
water, swollen by the heavy rain, was rushing rapidly on below; and all
other sounds were lost in the noise of its plashing and eddying against
the green and slimy piles.  There had once been a water-mill beneath;
the tide foaming and chafing round the few rotten stakes, and fragments
of machinery that yet remained, seemed to dart onward, with a new
impulse, when freed from the obstacles which had unavailingly attempted
to stem its headlong course.

'If you flung a man's body down there, where would it be to-morrow
morning?' said Monks, swinging the lantern to and fro in the dark well.

'Twelve miles down the river, and cut to pieces besides,' replied
Bumble, recoiling at the thought.

Monks drew the little packet from his breast, where he had hurriedly
thrust it; and tying it to a leaden weight, which had formed a part of
some pulley, and was lying on the floor, dropped it into the stream.
It fell straight, and true as a die; clove the water with a scarcely
audible splash; and was gone.

The three looking into each other's faces, seemed to breathe more
freely.

'There!' said Monks, closing the trap-door, which fell heavily back
into its former position.  'If the sea ever gives up its dead, as books
say it will, it will keep its gold and silver to itself, and that trash
among it.  We have nothing more to say, and may break up our pleasant
party.'

'By all means,' observed Mr. Bumble, with great alacrity.

'You'll keep a quiet tongue in your head, will you?' said Monks, with a
threatening look.  'I am not afraid of your wife.'

'You may depend upon me, young man,' answered Mr. Bumble, bowing
himself gradually towards the ladder, with excessive politeness. 'On
everybody's account, young man; on my own, you know, Mr. Monks.'

'I am glad, for your sake, to hear it,' remarked Monks. 'Light your
lantern!  And get away from here as fast as you can.'

It was fortunate that the conversation terminated at this point, or Mr.
Bumble, who had bowed himself to within six inches of the ladder, would
infallibly have pitched headlong into the room below.  He lighted his
lantern from that which Monks had detached from the rope, and now
carried in his hand; and making no effort to prolong the discourse,
descended in silence, followed by his wife.  Monks brought up the rear,
after pausing on the steps to satisfy himself that there were no other
sounds to be heard than the beating of the rain without, and the
rushing of the water.

They traversed the lower room, slowly, and with caution; for Monks
started at every shadow; and Mr. Bumble, holding his lantern a foot
above the ground, walked not only with remarkable care, but with a
marvellously light step for a gentleman of his figure:  looking
nervously about him for hidden trap-doors.  The gate at which they had
entered, was softly unfastened and opened by Monks; merely exchanging a
nod with their mysterious acquaintance, the married couple emerged into
the wet and darkness outside.

They were no sooner gone, than Monks, who appeared to entertain an
invincible repugnance to being left alone, called to a boy who had been
hidden somewhere below. Bidding him go first, and bear the light, he
returned to the chamber he had just quitted.



CHAPTER XXXIX

INTRODUCES SOME RESPECTABLE CHARACTERS WITH WHOM THE READER IS ALREADY
ACQUAINTED, AND SHOWS HOW MONKS AND THE JEW LAID THEIR WORTHY HEADS
TOGETHER

On the evening following that upon which the three worthies mentioned
in the last chapter, disposed of their little matter of business as
therein narrated, Mr. William Sikes, awakening from a nap, drowsily
growled forth an inquiry what time of night it was.

The room in which Mr. Sikes propounded this question, was not one of
those he had tenanted, previous to the Chertsey expedition, although it
was in the same quarter of the town, and was situated at no great
distance from his former lodgings.  It was not, in appearance, so
desirable a habitation as his old quarters:  being a mean and
badly-furnished apartment, of very limited size; lighted only by one
small window in the shelving roof, and abutting on a close and dirty
lane.  Nor were there wanting other indications of the good gentleman's
having gone down in the world of late:  for a great scarcity of
furniture, and total absence of comfort, together with the
disappearance of all such small moveables as spare clothes and linen,
bespoke a state of extreme poverty; while the meagre and attenuated
condition of Mr. Sikes himself would have fully confirmed these
symptoms, if they had stood in any need of corroboration.

The housebreaker was lying on the bed, wrapped in his white great-coat,
by way of dressing-gown, and displaying a set of features in no degree
improved by the cadaverous hue of illness, and the addition of a soiled
nightcap, and a stiff, black beard of a week's growth.  The dog sat at
the bedside:  now eyeing his master with a wistful look, and now
pricking his ears, and uttering a low growl as some noise in the
street, or in the lower part of the house, attracted his attention.
Seated by the window, busily engaged in patching an old waistcoat which
formed a portion of the robber's ordinary dress, was a female:  so pale
and reduced with watching and privation, that there would have been
considerable difficulty in recognising her as the same Nancy who has
already figured in this tale, but for the voice in which she replied to
Mr. Sikes's question.

'Not long gone seven,' said the girl.  'How do you feel to-night, Bill?'

'As weak as water,' replied Mr. Sikes, with an imprecation on his eyes
and limbs.  'Here; lend us a hand, and let me get off this thundering
bed anyhow.'

Illness had not improved Mr. Sikes's temper; for, as the girl raised
him up and led him to a chair, he muttered various curses on her
awkwardness, and struck her.

'Whining are you?' said Sikes.  'Come!  Don't stand snivelling there.
If you can't do anything better than that, cut off altogether.  D'ye
hear me?'

'I hear you,' replied the girl, turning her face aside, and forcing a
laugh.  'What fancy have you got in your head now?'

'Oh! you've thought better of it, have you?' growled Sikes, marking the
tear which trembled in her eye.  'All the better for you, you have.'

'Why, you don't mean to say, you'd be hard upon me to-night, Bill,'
said the girl, laying her hand upon his shoulder.

'No!' cried Mr. Sikes.  'Why not?'

'Such a number of nights,' said the girl, with a touch of woman's
tenderness, which communicated something like sweetness of tone, even
to her voice: 'such a number of nights as I've been patient with you,
nursing and caring for you, as if you had been a child: and this the
first that I've seen you like yourself; you wouldn't have served me as
you did just now, if you'd thought of that, would you?  Come, come; say
you wouldn't.'

'Well, then,' rejoined Mr. Sikes, 'I wouldn't.  Why, damme, now, the
girls's whining again!'

'It's nothing,' said the girl, throwing herself into a chair. 'Don't
you seem to mind me.  It'll soon be over.'

'What'll be over?' demanded Mr. Sikes in a savage voice. 'What foolery
are you up to, now, again?  Get up and bustle about, and don't come
over me with your woman's nonsense.'

At any other time, this remonstrance, and the tone in which it was
delivered, would have had the desired effect; but the girl being really
weak and exhausted, dropped her head over the back of the chair, and
fainted, before Mr. Sikes could get out a few of the appropriate oaths
with which, on similar occasions, he was accustomed to garnish his
threats.  Not knowing, very well, what to do, in this uncommon
emergency; for Miss Nancy's hysterics were usually of that violent kind
which the patient fights and struggles out of, without much assistance;
Mr. Sikes tried a little blasphemy: and finding that mode of treatment
wholly ineffectual, called for assistance.

'What's the matter here, my dear?' said Fagin, looking in.

'Lend a hand to the girl, can't you?' replied Sikes impatiently. 'Don't
stand chattering and grinning at me!'

With an exclamation of surprise, Fagin hastened to the girl's
assistance, while Mr. John Dawkins (otherwise the Artful Dodger), who
had followed his venerable friend into the room, hastily deposited on
the floor a bundle with which he was laden; and snatching a bottle from
the grasp of Master Charles Bates who came close at his heels, uncorked
it in a twinkling with his teeth, and poured a portion of its contents
down the patient's throat:  previously taking a taste, himself, to
prevent mistakes.

'Give her a whiff of fresh air with the bellows, Charley,' said Mr.
Dawkins; 'and you slap her hands, Fagin, while Bill undoes the
petticuts.'

These united restoratives, administered with great energy: especially
that department consigned to Master Bates, who appeared to consider his
share in the proceedings, a piece of unexampled pleasantry:  were not
long in producing the desired effect.  The girl gradually recovered her
senses; and, staggering to a chair by the bedside, hid her face upon
the pillow:  leaving Mr. Sikes to confront the new comers, in some
astonishment at their unlooked-for appearance.

'Why, what evil wind has blowed you here?' he asked Fagin.

'No evil wind at all, my dear, for evil winds blow nobody any good; and
I've brought something good with me, that you'll be glad to see.
Dodger, my dear, open the bundle; and give Bill the little trifles that
we spent all our money on, this morning.'

In compliance with Mr. Fagin's request, the Artful untied this bundle,
which was of large size, and formed of an old table-cloth; and handed
the articles it contained, one by one, to Charley Bates: who placed
them on the table, with various encomiums on their rarity and
excellence.

'Sitch a rabbit pie, Bill,' exclaimed that young gentleman, disclosing
to view a huge pasty; 'sitch delicate creeturs, with sitch tender
limbs, Bill, that the wery bones melt in your mouth, and there's no
occasion to pick 'em; half a pound of seven and six-penny green, so
precious strong that if you mix it with biling water, it'll go nigh to
blow the lid of the tea-pot off; a pound and a half of moist sugar that
the niggers didn't work at all at, afore they got it up to sitch a
pitch of goodness,--oh no!  Two half-quartern brans; pound of best
fresh; piece of double Glo'ster; and, to wind up all, some of the
richest sort you ever lushed!'

Uttering this last panegyric, Master Bates produced, from one of his
extensive pockets, a full-sized wine-bottle, carefully corked; while
Mr. Dawkins, at the same instant, poured out a wine-glassful of raw
spirits from the bottle he carried:  which the invalid tossed down his
throat without a moment's hesitation.

'Ah!' said Fagin, rubbing his hands with great satisfaction. 'You'll
do, Bill; you'll do now.'

'Do!' exclaimed Mr. Sikes; 'I might have been done for, twenty times
over, afore you'd have done anything to help me.  What do you mean by
leaving a man in this state, three weeks and more, you false-hearted
wagabond?'

'Only hear him, boys!' said Fagin, shrugging his shoulders. 'And us
come to bring him all these beau-ti-ful things.'

'The things is well enough in their way,' observed Mr. Sikes:  a little
soothed as he glanced over the table; 'but what have you got to say for
yourself, why you should leave me here, down in the mouth, health,
blunt, and everything else; and take no more notice of me, all this
mortal time, than if I was that 'ere dog.--Drive him down, Charley!'

'I never see such a jolly dog as that,' cried Master Bates, doing as he
was desired.  'Smelling the grub like a old lady a going to market!
He'd make his fortun' on the stage that dog would, and rewive the
drayma besides.'

'Hold your din,' cried Sikes, as the dog retreated under the bed: still
growling angrily.  'What have you got to say for yourself, you withered
old fence, eh?'

'I was away from London, a week and more, my dear, on a plant,' replied
the Jew.

'And what about the other fortnight?' demanded Sikes.  'What about the
other fortnight that you've left me lying here, like a sick rat in his
hole?'

'I couldn't help it, Bill.  I can't go into a long explanation before
company; but I couldn't help it, upon my honour.'

'Upon your what?' growled Sikes, with excessive disgust. 'Here! Cut me
off a piece of that pie, one of you boys, to take the taste of that out
of my mouth, or it'll choke me dead.'

'Don't be out of temper, my dear,' urged Fagin, submissively. 'I have
never forgot you, Bill; never once.'

'No!  I'll pound it that you han't,' replied Sikes, with a bitter grin.
'You've been scheming and plotting away, every hour that I have laid
shivering and burning here; and Bill was to do this; and Bill was to do
that; and Bill was to do it all, dirt cheap, as soon as he got well:
and was quite poor enough for your work. If it hadn't been for the
girl, I might have died.'

'There now, Bill,' remonstrated Fagin, eagerly catching at the word.
'If it hadn't been for the girl!  Who but poor ould Fagin was the means
of your having such a handy girl about you?'

'He says true enough there!' said Nancy, coming hastily forward. 'Let
him be; let him be.'

Nancy's appearance gave a new turn to the conversation; for the boys,
receiving a sly wink from the wary old Jew, began to ply her with
liquor: of which, however, she took very sparingly; while Fagin,
assuming an unusual flow of spirits, gradually brought Mr. Sikes into a
better temper, by affecting to regard his threats as a little pleasant
banter; and, moreover, by laughing very heartily at one or two rough
jokes, which, after repeated applications to the spirit-bottle, he
condescended to make.

'It's all very well,' said Mr. Sikes; 'but I must have some blunt from
you to-night.'

'I haven't a piece of coin about me,' replied the Jew.

'Then you've got lots at home,' retorted Sikes; 'and I must have some
from there.'

'Lots!' cried Fagin, holding up is hands.  'I haven't so much as
would--'

'I don't know how much you've got, and I dare say you hardly know
yourself, as it would take a pretty long time to count it,' said Sikes;
'but I must have some to-night; and that's flat.'

'Well, well,' said Fagin, with a sigh, 'I'll send the Artful round
presently.'

'You won't do nothing of the kind,' rejoined Mr. Sikes. 'The Artful's a
deal too artful, and would forget to come, or lose his way, or get
dodged by traps and so be perwented, or anything for an excuse, if you
put him up to it.  Nancy shall go to the ken and fetch it, to make all
sure; and I'll lie down and have a snooze while she's gone.'

After a great deal of haggling and squabbling, Fagin beat down the
amount of the required advance from five pounds to three pounds four
and sixpence: protesting with many solemn asseverations that that would
only leave him eighteen-pence to keep house with; Mr. Sikes sullenly
remarking that if he couldn't get any more he must accompany him home;
with the Dodger and Master Bates put the eatables in the cupboard.  The
Jew then, taking leave of his affectionate friend, returned homeward,
attended by Nancy and the boys:  Mr. Sikes, meanwhile, flinging himself
on the bed, and composing himself to sleep away the time until the
young lady's return.

In due course, they arrived at Fagin's abode, where they found Toby
Crackit and Mr. Chitling intent upon their fifteenth game at cribbage,
which it is scarcely necessary to say the latter gentleman lost, and
with it, his fifteenth and last sixpence: much to the amusement of his
young friends.  Mr. Crackit, apparently somewhat ashamed at being found
relaxing himself with a gentleman so much his inferior in station and
mental endowments, yawned, and inquiring after Sikes, took up his hat
to go.

'Has nobody been, Toby?' asked Fagin.

'Not a living leg,' answered Mr. Crackit, pulling up his collar; 'it's
been as dull as swipes.  You ought to stand something handsome, Fagin,
to recompense me for keeping house so long. Damme, I'm as flat as a
juryman; and should have gone to sleep, as fast as Newgate, if I hadn't
had the good natur' to amuse this youngster.  Horrid dull, I'm blessed
if I an't!'

With these and other ejaculations of the same kind, Mr. Toby Crackit
swept up his winnings, and crammed them into his waistcoat pocket with
a haughty air, as though such small pieces of silver were wholly
beneath the consideration of a man of his figure; this done, he
swaggered out of the room, with so much elegance and gentility, that
Mr. Chitling, bestowing numerous admiring glances on his legs and boots
till they were out of sight, assured the company that he considered his
acquaintance cheap at fifteen sixpences an interview, and that he
didn't value his losses the snap of his little finger.

'Wot a rum chap you are, Tom!' said Master Bates, highly amused by this
declaration.

'Not a bit of it,' replied Mr. Chitling.  'Am I, Fagin?'

'A very clever fellow, my dear,' said Fagin, patting him on the
shoulder, and winking to his other pupils.

'And Mr. Crackit is a heavy swell; an't he, Fagin?' asked Tom.

'No doubt at all of that, my dear.'

'And it is a creditable thing to have his acquaintance; an't it,
Fagin?' pursued Tom.

'Very much so, indeed, my dear.  They're only jealous, Tom, because he
won't give it to them.'

'Ah!' cried Tom, triumphantly, 'that's where it is!  He has cleaned me
out.  But I can go and earn some more, when I like; can't I, Fagin?'

'To be sure you can, and the sooner you go the better, Tom; so make up
your loss at once, and don't lose any more time.  Dodger! Charley!
It's time you were on the lay.  Come!  It's near ten, and nothing done
yet.'

In obedience to this hint, the boys, nodding to Nancy, took up their
hats, and left the room; the Dodger and his vivacious friend indulging,
as they went, in many witticisms at the expense of Mr. Chitling; in
whose conduct, it is but justice to say, there was nothing very
conspicuous or peculiar:  inasmuch as there are a great number of
spirited young bloods upon town, who pay a much higher price than Mr.
Chitling for being seen in good society:  and a great number of fine
gentlemen (composing the good society aforesaid) who established their
reputation upon very much the same footing as flash Toby Crackit.

'Now,' said Fagin, when they had left the room, 'I'll go and get you
that cash, Nancy.  This is only the key of a little cupboard where I
keep a few odd things the boys get, my dear.  I never lock up my money,
for I've got none to lock up, my dear--ha! ha! ha!--none to lock up.
It's a poor trade, Nancy, and no thanks; but I'm fond of seeing the
young people about me; and I bear it all, I bear it all.  Hush!' he
said, hastily concealing the key in his breast; 'who's that?  Listen!'

The girl, who was sitting at the table with her arms folded, appeared
in no way interested in the arrival: or to care whether the person,
whoever he was, came or went:  until the murmur of a man's voice
reached her ears.  The instant she caught the sound, she tore off her
bonnet and shawl, with the rapidity of lightning, and thrust them under
the table. The Jew, turning round immediately afterwards, she muttered
a complaint of the heat:  in a tone of languor that contrasted, very
remarkably, with the extreme haste and violence of this action:  which,
however, had been unobserved by Fagin, who had his back towards her at
the time.

'Bah!' he whispered, as though nettled by the interruption; 'it's the
man I expected before; he's coming downstairs.  Not a word about the
money while he's here, Nance.  He won't stop long.  Not ten minutes, my
dear.'

Laying his skinny forefinger upon his lip, the Jew carried a candle to
the door, as a man's step was heard upon the stairs without.  He
reached it, at the same moment as the visitor, who, coming hastily into
the room, was close upon the girl before he observed her.

It was Monks.

'Only one of my young people,' said Fagin, observing that Monks drew
back, on beholding a stranger.  'Don't move, Nancy.'

The girl drew closer to the table, and glancing at Monks with an air of
careless levity, withdrew her eyes; but as he turned towards Fagin, she
stole another look; so keen and searching, and full of purpose, that if
there had been any bystander to observe the change, he could hardly
have believed the two looks to have proceeded from the same person.

'Any news?' inquired Fagin.

'Great.'

'And--and--good?' asked Fagin, hesitating as though he feared to vex
the other man by being too sanguine.

'Not bad, any way,' replied Monks with a smile.  'I have been prompt
enough this time.  Let me have a word with you.'

The girl drew closer to the table, and made no offer to leave the room,
although she could see that Monks was pointing to her.  The Jew:
perhaps fearing she might say something aloud about the money, if he
endeavoured to get rid of her:  pointed upward, and took Monks out of
the room.

'Not that infernal hole we were in before,' she could hear the man say
as they went upstairs.  Fagin laughed; and making some reply which did
not reach her, seemed, by the creaking of the boards, to lead his
companion to the second story.

Before the sound of their footsteps had ceased to echo through the
house, the girl had slipped off her shoes; and drawing her gown loosely
over her head, and muffling her arms in it, stood at the door,
listening with breathless interest.  The moment the noise ceased, she
glided from the room; ascended the stairs with incredible softness and
silence; and was lost in the gloom above.

The room remained deserted for a quarter of an hour or more; the girl
glided back with the same unearthly tread; and, immediately afterwards,
the two men were heard descending.  Monks went at once into the street;
and the Jew crawled upstairs again for the money.  When he returned,
the girl was adjusting her shawl and bonnet, as if preparing to be gone.

'Why, Nance!' exclaimed the Jew, starting back as he put down the
candle, 'how pale you are!'

'Pale!' echoed the girl, shading her eyes with her hands, as if to look
steadily at him.

'Quite horrible.  What have you been doing to yourself?'

'Nothing that I know of, except sitting in this close place for I don't
know how long and all,' replied the girl carelessly. 'Come!  Let me get
back; that's a dear.'

With a sigh for every piece of money, Fagin told the amount into her
hand.  They parted without more conversation, merely interchanging a
'good-night.'

When the girl got into the open street, she sat down upon a doorstep;
and seemed, for a few moments, wholly bewildered and unable to pursue
her way.  Suddenly she arose; and hurrying on, in a direction quite
opposite to that in which Sikes was awaiting her returned, quickened
her pace, until it gradually resolved into a violent run.  After
completely exhausting herself, she stopped to take breath:  and, as if
suddenly recollecting herself, and deploring her inability to do
something she was bent upon, wrung her hands, and burst into tears.

It might be that her tears relieved her, or that she felt the full
hopelessness of her condition; but she turned back; and hurrying with
nearly as great rapidity in the contrary direction; partly to recover
lost time, and partly to keep pace with the violent current of her own
thoughts:  soon reached the dwelling where she had left the
housebreaker.

If she betrayed any agitation, when she presented herself to Mr. Sikes,
he did not observe it; for merely inquiring if she had brought the
money, and receiving a reply in the affirmative, he uttered a growl of
satisfaction, and replacing his head upon the pillow, resumed the
slumbers which her arrival had interrupted.

It was fortunate for her that the possession of money occasioned him so
much employment next day in the way of eating and drinking; and withal
had so beneficial an effect in smoothing down the asperities of his
temper; that he had neither time nor inclination to be very critical
upon her behaviour and deportment.  That she had all the abstracted and
nervous manner of one who is on the eve of some bold and hazardous
step, which it has required no common struggle to resolve upon, would
have been obvious to the lynx-eyed Fagin, who would most probably have
taken the alarm at once; but Mr. Sikes lacking the niceties of
discrimination, and being troubled with no more subtle misgivings than
those which resolve themselves into a dogged roughness of behaviour
towards everybody; and being, furthermore, in an unusually amiable
condition, as has been already observed; saw nothing unusual in her
demeanor, and indeed, troubled himself so little about her, that, had
her agitation been far more perceptible than it was, it would have been
very unlikely to have awakened his suspicions.

As that day closed in, the girl's excitement increased; and, when night
came on, and she sat by, watching until the housebreaker should drink
himself asleep, there was an unusual paleness in her cheek, and a fire
in her eye, that even Sikes observed with astonishment.

Mr. Sikes being weak from the fever, was lying in bed, taking hot water
with his gin to render it less inflammatory; and had pushed his glass
towards Nancy to be replenished for the third or fourth time, when
these symptoms first struck him.

'Why, burn my body!' said the man, raising himself on his hands as he
stared the girl in the face.  'You look like a corpse come to life
again.  What's the matter?'

'Matter!' replied the girl.  'Nothing.  What do you look at me so hard
for?'

'What foolery is this?' demanded Sikes, grasping her by the arm, and
shaking her roughly.  'What is it?  What do you mean?  What are you
thinking of?'

'Of many things, Bill,' replied the girl, shivering, and as she did so,
pressing her hands upon her eyes.  'But, Lord!  What odds in that?'

The tone of forced gaiety in which the last words were spoken, seemed
to produce a deeper impression on Sikes than the wild and rigid look
which had preceded them.

'I tell you wot it is,' said Sikes; 'if you haven't caught the fever,
and got it comin' on, now, there's something more than usual in the
wind, and something dangerous too.  You're not a-going to--.  No,
damme! you wouldn't do that!'

'Do what?' asked the girl.

'There ain't,' said Sikes, fixing his eyes upon her, and muttering the
words to himself; 'there ain't a stauncher-hearted gal going, or I'd
have cut her throat three months ago.  She's got the fever coming on;
that's it.'

Fortifying himself with this assurance, Sikes drained the glass to the
bottom, and then, with many grumbling oaths, called for his physic.
The girl jumped up, with great alacrity; poured it quickly out, but
with her back towards him; and held the vessel to his lips, while he
drank off the contents.

'Now,' said the robber, 'come and sit aside of me, and put on your own
face; or I'll alter it so, that you won't know it agin when you do want
it.'

The girl obeyed.  Sikes, locking her hand in his, fell back upon the
pillow: turning his eyes upon her face.  They closed; opened again;
closed once more; again opened.  He shifted his position restlessly;
and, after dozing again, and again, for two or three minutes, and as
often springing up with a look of terror, and gazing vacantly about
him, was suddenly stricken, as it were, while in the very attitude of
rising, into a deep and heavy sleep.  The grasp of his hand relaxed;
the upraised arm fell languidly by his side; and he lay like one in a
profound trance.

'The laudanum has taken effect at last,' murmured the girl, as she rose
from the bedside.  'I may be too late, even now.'

She hastily dressed herself in her bonnet and shawl:  looking fearfully
round, from time to time, as if, despite the sleeping draught, she
expected every moment to feel the pressure of Sikes's heavy hand upon
her shoulder; then, stooping softly over the bed, she kissed the
robber's lips; and then opening and closing the room-door with
noiseless touch, hurried from the house.

A watchman was crying half-past nine, down a dark passage through which
she had to pass, in gaining the main thoroughfare.

'Has it long gone the half-hour?' asked the girl.

'It'll strike the hour in another quarter,' said the man: raising his
lantern to her face.

'And I cannot get there in less than an hour or more,' muttered Nancy:
brushing swiftly past him, and gliding rapidly down the street.

Many of the shops were already closing in the back lanes and avenues
through which she tracked her way, in making from Spitalfields towards
the West-End of London.  The clock struck ten, increasing her
impatience.  She tore along the narrow pavement:  elbowing the
passengers from side to side; and darting almost under the horses'
heads, crossed crowded streets, where clusters of persons were eagerly
watching their opportunity to do the like.

'The woman is mad!' said the people, turning to look after her as she
rushed away.

When she reached the more wealthy quarter of the town, the streets were
comparatively deserted; and here her headlong progress excited a still
greater curiosity in the stragglers whom she hurried past.  Some
quickened their pace behind, as though to see whither she was hastening
at such an unusual rate; and a few made head upon her, and looked back,
surprised at her undiminished speed; but they fell off one by one; and
when she neared her place of destination, she was alone.

It was a family hotel in a quiet but handsome street near Hyde Park.
As the brilliant light of the lamp which burnt before its door, guided
her to the spot, the clock struck eleven.  She had loitered for a few
paces as though irresolute, and making up her mind to advance; but the
sound determined her, and she stepped into the hall.  The porter's seat
was vacant.  She looked round with an air of incertitude, and advanced
towards the stairs.

'Now, young woman!' said a smartly-dressed female, looking out from a
door behind her, 'who do you want here?'

'A lady who is stopping in this house,' answered the girl.

'A lady!' was the reply, accompanied with a scornful look. 'What lady?'

'Miss Maylie,' said Nancy.

The young woman, who had by this time, noted her appearance, replied
only by a look of virtuous disdain; and summoned a man to answer her.
To him, Nancy repeated her request.

'What name am I to say?' asked the waiter.

'It's of no use saying any,' replied Nancy.

'Nor business?' said the man.

'No, nor that neither,' rejoined the girl.  'I must see the lady.'

'Come!' said the man, pushing her towards the door.  'None of this.
Take yourself off.'

'I shall be carried out if I go!' said the girl violently; 'and I can
make that a job that two of you won't like to do.  Isn't there anybody
here,' she said, looking round, 'that will see a simple message carried
for a poor wretch like me?'

This appeal produced an effect on a good-tempered-faced man-cook, who
with some of the other servants was looking on, and who stepped forward
to interfere.

'Take it up for her, Joe; can't you?' said this person.

'What's the good?' replied the man.  'You don't suppose the young lady
will see such as her; do you?'

This allusion to Nancy's doubtful character, raised a vast quantity of
chaste wrath in the bosoms of four housemaids, who remarked, with great
fervour, that the creature was a disgrace to her sex; and strongly
advocated her being thrown, ruthlessly, into the kennel.

'Do what you like with me,' said the girl, turning to the men again;
'but do what I ask you first, and I ask you to give this message for
God Almighty's sake.'

The soft-hearted cook added his intercession, and the result was that
the man who had first appeared undertook its delivery.

'What's it to be?' said the man, with one foot on the stairs.

'That a young woman earnestly asks to speak to Miss Maylie alone,' said
Nancy; 'and that if the lady will only hear the first word she has to
say, she will know whether to hear her business, or to have her turned
out of doors as an impostor.'

'I say,' said the man, 'you're coming it strong!'

'You give the message,' said the girl firmly; 'and let me hear the
answer.'

The man ran upstairs.  Nancy remained, pale and almost breathless,
listening with quivering lip to the very audible expressions of scorn,
of which the chaste housemaids were very prolific; and of which they
became still more so, when the man returned, and said the young woman
was to walk upstairs.

'It's no good being proper in this world,' said the first housemaid.

'Brass can do better than the gold what has stood the fire,' said the
second.

The third contented herself with wondering 'what ladies was made of';
and the fourth took the first in a quartette of 'Shameful!' with which
the Dianas concluded.

Regardless of all this: for she had weightier matters at heart: Nancy
followed the man, with trembling limbs, to a small ante-chamber,
lighted by a lamp from the ceiling. Here he left her, and retired.



CHAPTER XL

A STRANGE INTERVIEW, WHICH IS A SEQUEL TO THE LAST CHAMBER

The girl's life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most
noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was something of the
woman's original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light
step approaching the door opposite to that by which she had entered,
and thought of the wide contrast which the small room would in another
moment contain, she felt burdened with the sense of her own deep shame,
and shrunk as though she could scarcely bear the presence of her with
whom she had sought this interview.

But struggling with these better feelings was pride,--the vice of the
lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and
self-assured.  The miserable companion of thieves and ruffians, the
fallen outcast of low haunts, the associate of the scourings of the
jails and hulks, living within the shadow of the gallows itself,--even
this degraded being felt too proud to betray a feeble gleam of the
womanly feeling which she thought a weakness, but which alone connected
her with that humanity, of which her wasting life had obliterated so
many, many traces when a very child.

She raised her eyes sufficiently to observe that the figure which
presented itself was that of a slight and beautiful girl; then, bending
them on the ground, she tossed her head with affected carelessness as
she said:

'It's a hard matter to get to see you, lady.  If I had taken offence,
and gone away, as many would have done, you'd have been sorry for it
one day, and not without reason either.'

'I am very sorry if any one has behaved harshly to you,' replied Rose.
'Do not think of that.  Tell me why you wished to see me. I am the
person you inquired for.'

The kind tone of this answer, the sweet voice, the gentle manner, the
absence of any accent of haughtiness or displeasure, took the girl
completely by surprise, and she burst into tears.

'Oh, lady, lady!' she said, clasping her hands passionately before her
face, 'if there was more like you, there would be fewer like me,--there
would--there would!'

'Sit down,' said Rose, earnestly.  'If you are in poverty or affliction
I shall be truly glad to relieve you if I can,--I shall indeed.  Sit
down.'

'Let me stand, lady,' said the girl, still weeping, 'and do not speak
to me so kindly till you know me better.  It is growing late.
Is--is--that door shut?'

'Yes,' said Rose, recoiling a few steps, as if to be nearer assistance
in case she should require it.  'Why?'

'Because,' said the girl, 'I am about to put my life and the lives of
others in your hands.  I am the girl that dragged little Oliver back to
old Fagin's on the night he went out from the house in Pentonville.'

'You!' said Rose Maylie.

'I, lady!' replied the girl.  'I am the infamous creature you have
heard of, that lives among the thieves, and that never from the first
moment I can recollect my eyes and senses opening on London streets
have known any better life, or kinder words than they have given me, so
help me God!  Do not mind shrinking openly from me, lady.  I am younger
than you would think, to look at me, but I am well used to it. The
poorest women fall back, as I make my way along the crowded pavement.'

'What dreadful things are these!' said Rose, involuntarily falling from
her strange companion.

'Thank Heaven upon your knees, dear lady,' cried the girl, 'that you
had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood, and that you
were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness,
and--and--something worse than all--as I have been from my cradle.  I
may use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will
be my deathbed.'

'I pity you!' said Rose, in a broken voice.  'It wrings my heart to
hear you!'

'Heaven bless you for your goodness!' rejoined the girl. 'If you knew
what I am sometimes, you would pity me, indeed. But I have stolen away
from those who would surely murder me, if they knew I had been here, to
tell you what I have overheard.  Do you know a man named Monks?'

'No,' said Rose.

'He knows you,' replied the girl; 'and knew you were here, for it was
by hearing him tell the place that I found you out.'

'I never heard the name,' said Rose.

'Then he goes by some other amongst us,' rejoined the girl, 'which I
more than thought before.  Some time ago, and soon after Oliver was put
into your house on the night of the robbery, I--suspecting this
man--listened to a conversation held between him and Fagin in the dark.
I found out, from what I heard, that Monks--the man I asked you about,
you know--'

'Yes,' said Rose, 'I understand.'

'--That Monks,' pursued the girl, 'had seen him accidently with two of
our boys on the day we first lost him, and had known him directly to be
the same child that he was watching for, though I couldn't make out
why.  A bargain was struck with Fagin, that if Oliver was got back he
should have a certain sum; and he was to have more for making him a
thief, which this Monks wanted for some purpose of his own.'

'For what purpose?' asked Rose.

'He caught sight of my shadow on the wall as I listened, in the hope of
finding out,' said the girl; 'and there are not many people besides me
that could have got out of their way in time to escape discovery.  But
I did; and I saw him no more till last night.'

'And what occurred then?'

'I'll tell you, lady.  Last night he came again.  Again they went
upstairs, and I, wrapping myself up so that my shadow would not betray
me, again listened at the door.  The first words I heard Monks say were
these:  "So the only proofs of the boy's identity lie at the bottom of
the river, and the old hag that received them from the mother is
rotting in her coffin."  They laughed, and talked of his success in
doing this; and Monks, talking on about the boy, and getting very wild,
said that though he had got the young devil's money safely now, he'd
rather have had it the other way; for, what a game it would have been
to have brought down the boast of the father's will, by driving him
through every jail in town, and then hauling him up for some capital
felony which Fagin could easily manage, after having made a good profit
of him besides.'

'What is all this!' said Rose.

'The truth, lady, though it comes from my lips,' replied the girl.
'Then, he said, with oaths common enough in my ears, but strange to
yours, that if he could gratify his hatred by taking the boy's life
without bringing his own neck in danger, he would; but, as he couldn't,
he'd be upon the watch to meet him at every turn in life; and if he
took advantage of his birth and history, he might harm him yet. "In
short, Fagin," he says, "Jew as you are, you never laid such snares as
I'll contrive for my young brother, Oliver."'

'His brother!' exclaimed Rose.

'Those were his words,' said Nancy, glancing uneasily round, as she had
scarcely ceased to do, since she began to speak, for a vision of Sikes
haunted her perpetually.  'And more. When he spoke of you and the other
lady, and said it seemed contrived by Heaven, or the devil, against
him, that Oliver should come into your hands, he laughed, and said
there was some comfort in that too, for how many thousands and hundreds
of thousands of pounds would you not give, if you had them, to know who
your two-legged spaniel was.'

'You do not mean,' said Rose, turning very pale, 'to tell me that this
was said in earnest?'

'He spoke in hard and angry earnest, if a man ever did,' replied the
girl, shaking her head.  'He is an earnest man when his hatred is up.
I know many who do worse things; but I'd rather listen to them all a
dozen times, than to that Monks once.  It is growing late, and I have
to reach home without suspicion of having been on such an errand as
this.  I must get back quickly.'

'But what can I do?' said Rose.  'To what use can I turn this
communication without you?  Back!  Why do you wish to return to
companions you paint in such terrible colors?  If you repeat this
information to a gentleman whom I can summon in an instant from the
next room, you can be consigned to some place of safety without half an
hour's delay.'

'I wish to go back,' said the girl.  'I must go back, because--how can
I tell such things to an innocent lady like you?--because among the men
I have told you of, there is one: the most desperate among them all;
that I can't leave:  no, not even to be saved from the life I am
leading now.'

'Your having interfered in this dear boy's behalf before,' said Rose;
'your coming here, at so great a risk, to tell me what you have heard;
your manner, which convinces me of the truth of what you say; your
evident contrition, and sense of shame; all lead me to believe that you
might yet be reclaimed.  Oh!' said the earnest girl, folding her hands
as the tears coursed down her face, 'do not turn a deaf ear to the
entreaties of one of your own sex; the first--the first, I do believe,
who ever appealed to you in the voice of pity and compassion.  Do hear
my words, and let me save you yet, for better things.'

'Lady,' cried the girl, sinking on her knees, 'dear, sweet, angel lady,
you _are_ the first that ever blessed me with such words as these, and
if I had heard them years ago, they might have turned me from a life of
sin and sorrow; but it is too late, it is too late!'

'It is never too late,' said Rose, 'for penitence and atonement.'

'It is,' cried the girl, writhing in agony of her mind; 'I cannot leave
him now!  I could not be his death.'

'Why should you be?' asked Rose.

'Nothing could save him,' cried the girl.  'If I told others what I
have told you, and led to their being taken, he would be sure to die.
He is the boldest, and has been so cruel!'

'Is it possible,' cried Rose, 'that for such a man as this, you can
resign every future hope, and the certainty of immediate rescue?  It is
madness.'

'I don't know what it is,' answered the girl; 'I only know that it is
so, and not with me alone, but with hundreds of others as bad and
wretched as myself.  I must go back.  Whether it is God's wrath for the
wrong I have done, I do not know; but I am drawn back to him through
every suffering and ill usage; and I should be, I believe, if I knew
that I was to die by his hand at last.'

'What am I to do?' said Rose.  'I should not let you depart from me
thus.'

'You should, lady, and I know you will,' rejoined the girl, rising.
'You will not stop my going because I have trusted in your goodness,
and forced no promise from you, as I might have done.'

'Of what use, then, is the communication you have made?' said Rose.
'This mystery must be investigated, or how will its disclosure to me,
benefit Oliver, whom you are anxious to serve?'

'You must have some kind gentleman about you that will hear it as a
secret, and advise you what to do,' rejoined the girl.

'But where can I find you again when it is necessary?' asked Rose.  'I
do not seek to know where these dreadful people live, but where will
you be walking or passing at any settled period from this time?'

'Will you promise me that you will have my secret strictly kept, and
come alone, or with the only other person that knows it; and that I
shall not be watched or followed?' asked the girl.

'I promise you solemnly,' answered Rose.

'Every Sunday night, from eleven until the clock strikes twelve,' said
the girl without hesitation, 'I will walk on London Bridge if I am
alive.'

'Stay another moment,' interposed Rose, as the girl moved hurriedly
towards the door.  'Think once again on your own condition, and the
opportunity you have of escaping from it.  You have a claim on me:  not
only as the voluntary bearer of this intelligence, but as a woman lost
almost beyond redemption.  Will you return to this gang of robbers, and
to this man, when a word can save you?  What fascination is it that can
take you back, and make you cling to wickedness and misery?  Oh! is
there no chord in your heart that I can touch!  Is there nothing left,
to which I can appeal against this terrible infatuation!'

'When ladies as young, and good, and beautiful as you are,' replied the
girl steadily, 'give away your hearts, love will carry you all
lengths--even such as you, who have home, friends, other admirers,
everything, to fill them.  When such as I, who have no certain roof but
the coffinlid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital
nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place
that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to
cure us?  Pity us, lady--pity us for having only one feeling of the
woman left, and for having that turned, by a heavy judgment, from a
comfort and a pride, into a new means of violence and suffering.'

'You will,' said Rose, after a pause, 'take some money from me, which
may enable you to live without dishonesty--at all events until we meet
again?'

'Not a penny,' replied the girl, waving her hand.

'Do not close your heart against all my efforts to help you,' said
Rose, stepping gently forward.  'I wish to serve you indeed.'

'You would serve me best, lady,' replied the girl, wringing her hands,
'if you could take my life at once; for I have felt more grief to think
of what I am, to-night, than I ever did before, and it would be
something not to die in the hell in which I have lived.  God bless you,
sweet lady, and send as much happiness on your head as I have brought
shame on mine!'

Thus speaking, and sobbing aloud, the unhappy creature turned away;
while Rose Maylie, overpowered by this extraordinary interview, which
had more the semblance of a rapid dream than an actual occurrence, sank
into a chair, and endeavoured to collect her wandering thoughts.



CHAPTER XLI

CONTAINING FRESH DISCOVERIES, AND SHOWING THAT SUPRISES, LIKE
MISFORTUNES, SELDOM COME ALONE

Her situation was, indeed, one of no common trial and difficulty. While
she felt the most eager and burning desire to penetrate the mystery in
which Oliver's history was enveloped, she could not but hold sacred the
confidence which the miserable woman with whom she had just conversed,
had reposed in her, as a young and guileless girl.  Her words and
manner had touched Rose Maylie's heart; and, mingled with her love for
her young charge, and scarcely less intense in its truth and fervour,
was her fond wish to win the outcast back to repentance and hope.

They purposed remaining in London only three days, prior to departing
for some weeks to a distant part of the coast.  It was now midnight of
the first day.  What course of action could she determine upon, which
could be adopted in eight-and-forty hours? Or how could she postpone
the journey without exciting suspicion?

Mr. Losberne was with them, and would be for the next two days; but
Rose was too well acquainted with the excellent gentleman's
impetuosity, and foresaw too clearly the wrath with which, in the first
explosion of his indignation, he would regard the instrument of
Oliver's recapture, to trust him with the secret, when her
representations in the girl's behalf could be seconded by no
experienced person.  These were all reasons for the greatest caution
and most circumspect behaviour in communicating it to Mrs. Maylie,
whose first impulse would infallibly be to hold a conference with the
worthy doctor on the subject.  As to resorting to any legal adviser,
even if she had known how to do so, it was scarcely to be thought of,
for the same reason.  Once the thought occurred to her of seeking
assistance from Harry; but this awakened the recollection of their last
parting, and it seemed unworthy of her to call him back, when--the
tears rose to her eyes as she pursued this train of reflection--he
might have by this time learnt to forget her, and to be happier away.

Disturbed by these different reflections; inclining now to one course
and then to another, and again recoiling from all, as each successive
consideration presented itself to her mind; Rose passed a sleepless and
anxious night.  After more communing with herself next day, she arrived
at the desperate conclusion of consulting Harry.

'If it be painful to him,' she thought, 'to come back here, how painful
it will be to me!  But perhaps he will not come; he may write, or he
may come himself, and studiously abstain from meeting me--he did when
he went away.  I hardly thought he would; but it was better for us
both.'  And here Rose dropped the pen, and turned away, as though the
very paper which was to be her messenger should not see her weep.

She had taken up the same pen, and laid it down again fifty times, and
had considered and reconsidered the first line of her letter without
writing the first word, when Oliver, who had been walking in the
streets, with Mr. Giles for a body-guard, entered the room in such
breathless haste and violent agitation, as seemed to betoken some new
cause of alarm.

'What makes you look so flurried?' asked Rose, advancing to meet him.

'I hardly know how; I feel as if I should be choked,' replied the boy.
'Oh dear!  To think that I should see him at last, and you should be
able to know that I have told you the truth!'

'I never thought you had told us anything but the truth,' said Rose,
soothing him.  'But what is this?--of whom do you speak?'

'I have seen the gentleman,' replied Oliver, scarcely able to
articulate, 'the gentleman who was so good to me--Mr. Brownlow, that we
have so often talked about.'

'Where?' asked Rose.

'Getting out of a coach,' replied Oliver, shedding tears of delight,
'and going into a house.  I didn't speak to him--I couldn't speak to
him, for he didn't see me, and I trembled so, that I was not able to go
up to him.  But Giles asked, for me, whether he lived there, and they
said he did.  Look here,' said Oliver, opening a scrap of paper, 'here
it is; here's where he lives--I'm going there directly!  Oh, dear me,
dear me!  What shall I do when I come to see him and hear him speak
again!'

With her attention not a little distracted by these and a great many
other incoherent exclamations of joy, Rose read the address, which was
Craven Street, in the Strand.  She very soon determined upon turning
the discovery to account.

'Quick!' she said.  'Tell them to fetch a hackney-coach, and be ready
to go with me.  I will take you there directly, without a minute's loss
of time.  I will only tell my aunt that we are going out for an hour,
and be ready as soon as you are.'

Oliver needed no prompting to despatch, and in little more than five
minutes they were on their way to Craven Street.  When they arrived
there, Rose left Oliver in the coach, under pretence of preparing the
old gentleman to receive him; and sending up her card by the servant,
requested to see Mr. Brownlow on very pressing business.  The servant
soon returned, to beg that she would walk upstairs; and following him
into an upper room, Miss Maylie was presented to an elderly gentleman
of benevolent appearance, in a bottle-green coat.  At no great distance
from whom, was seated another old gentleman, in nankeen breeches and
gaiters; who did not look particularly benevolent, and who was sitting
with his hands clasped on the top of a thick stick, and his chin
propped thereupon.

'Dear me,' said the gentleman, in the bottle-green coat, hastily rising
with great politeness, 'I beg your pardon, young lady--I imagined it
was some importunate person who--I beg you will excuse me.  Be seated,
pray.'

'Mr. Brownlow, I believe, sir?' said Rose, glancing from the other
gentleman to the one who had spoken.

'That is my name,' said the old gentleman.  'This is my friend, Mr.
Grimwig.  Grimwig, will you leave us for a few minutes?'

'I believe,' interposed Miss Maylie, 'that at this period of our
interview, I need not give that gentleman the trouble of going away.
If I am correctly informed, he is cognizant of the business on which I
wish to speak to you.'

Mr. Brownlow inclined his head.  Mr. Grimwig, who had made one very
stiff bow, and risen from his chair, made another very stiff bow, and
dropped into it again.

'I shall surprise you very much, I have no doubt,' said Rose, naturally
embarrassed; 'but you once showed great benevolence and goodness to a
very dear young friend of mine, and I am sure you will take an interest
in hearing of him again.'

'Indeed!' said Mr. Brownlow.

'Oliver Twist you knew him as,' replied Rose.

The words no sooner escaped her lips, than Mr. Grimwig, who had been
affecting to dip into a large book that lay on the table, upset it with
a great crash, and falling back in his chair, discharged from his
features every expression but one of unmitigated wonder, and indulged
in a prolonged and vacant stare; then, as if ashamed of having betrayed
so much emotion, he jerked himself, as it were, by a convulsion into
his former attitude, and looking out straight before him emitted a long
deep whistle, which seemed, at last, not to be discharged on empty air,
but to die away in the innermost recesses of his stomach.

Mr. Browlow was no less surprised, although his astonishment was not
expressed in the same eccentric manner.  He drew his chair nearer to
Miss Maylie's, and said,

'Do me the favour, my dear young lady, to leave entirely out of the
question that goodness and benevolence of which you speak, and of which
nobody else knows anything; and if you have it in your power to produce
any evidence which will alter the unfavourable opinion I was once
induced to entertain of that poor child, in Heaven's name put me in
possession of it.'

'A bad one!  I'll eat my head if he is not a bad one,' growled Mr.
Grimwig, speaking by some ventriloquial power, without moving a muscle
of his face.

'He is a child of a noble nature and a warm heart,' said Rose,
colouring; 'and that Power which has thought fit to try him beyond his
years, has planted in his breast affections and feelings which would do
honour to many who have numbered his days six times over.'

'I'm only sixty-one,' said Mr. Grimwig, with the same rigid face. 'And,
as the devil's in it if this Oliver is not twelve years old at least, I
don't see the application of that remark.'

'Do not heed my friend, Miss Maylie,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'he does not
mean what he says.'

'Yes, he does,' growled Mr. Grimwig.

'No, he does not,' said Mr. Brownlow, obviously rising in wrath as he
spoke.

'He'll eat his head, if he doesn't,' growled Mr. Grimwig.

'He would deserve to have it knocked off, if he does,' said Mr.
Brownlow.

'And he'd uncommonly like to see any man offer to do it,' responded Mr.
Grimwig, knocking his stick upon the floor.

Having gone thus far, the two old gentlemen severally took snuff, and
afterwards shook hands, according to their invariable custom.

'Now, Miss Maylie,' said Mr. Brownlow, 'to return to the subject in
which your humanity is so much interested.  Will you let me know what
intelligence you have of this poor child:  allowing me to promise that
I exhausted every means in my power of discovering him, and that since
I have been absent from this country, my first impression that he had
imposed upon me, and had been persuaded by his former associates to rob
me, has been considerably shaken.'

Rose, who had had time to collect her thoughts, at once related, in a
few natural words, all that had befallen Oliver since he left Mr.
Brownlow's house; reserving Nancy's information for that gentleman's
private ear, and concluding with the assurance that his only sorrow,
for some months past, had been not being able to meet with his former
benefactor and friend.

'Thank God!' said the old gentleman.  'This is great happiness to me,
great happiness.  But you have not told me where he is now, Miss
Maylie.  You must pardon my finding fault with you,--but why not have
brought him?'

'He is waiting in a coach at the door,' replied Rose.

'At this door!' cried the old gentleman.  With which he hurried out of
the room, down the stairs, up the coachsteps, and into the coach,
without another word.

When the room-door closed behind him, Mr. Grimwig lifted up his head,
and converting one of the hind legs of his chair into a pivot,
described three distinct circles with the assistance of his stick and
the table; sitting in it all the time.  After performing this
evolution, he rose and limped as fast as he could up and down the room
at least a dozen times, and then stopping suddenly before Rose, kissed
her without the slightest preface.

'Hush!' he said, as the young lady rose in some alarm at this unusual
proceeding.  'Don't be afraid.  I'm old enough to be your grandfather.
You're a sweet girl.  I like you.  Here they are!'

In fact, as he threw himself at one dexterous dive into his former
seat, Mr. Brownlow returned, accompanied by Oliver, whom Mr. Grimwig
received very graciously; and if the gratification of that moment had
been the only reward for all her anxiety and care in Oliver's behalf,
Rose Maylie would have been well repaid.

'There is somebody else who should not be forgotten, by the bye,' said
Mr. Brownlow, ringing the bell.  'Send Mrs. Bedwin here, if you please.'

The old housekeeper answered the summons with all dispatch; and
dropping a curtsey at the door, waited for orders.

'Why, you get blinder every day, Bedwin,' said Mr. Brownlow, rather
testily.

'Well, that I do, sir,' replied the old lady.  'People's eyes, at my
time of life, don't improve with age, sir.'

'I could have told you that,' rejoined Mr. Brownlow; 'but put on your
glasses, and see if you can't find out what you were wanted for, will
you?'

The old lady began to rummage in her pocket for her spectacles. But
Oliver's patience was not proof against this new trial; and yielding to
his first impulse, he sprang into her arms.

'God be good to me!' cried the old lady, embracing him; 'it is my
innocent boy!'

'My dear old nurse!' cried Oliver.

'He would come back--I knew he would,' said the old lady, holding him
in her arms.  'How well he looks, and how like a gentleman's son he is
dressed again!  Where have you been, this long, long while?  Ah! the
same sweet face, but not so pale; the same soft eye, but not so sad.  I
have never forgotten them or his quiet smile, but have seen them every
day, side by side with those of my own dear children, dead and gone
since I was a lightsome young creature.'  Running on thus, and now
holding Oliver from her to mark how he had grown, now clasping him to
her and passing her fingers fondly through his hair, the good soul
laughed and wept upon his neck by turns.

Leaving her and Oliver to compare notes at leisure, Mr. Brownlow led
the way into another room; and there, heard from Rose a full narration
of her interview with Nancy, which occasioned him no little surprise
and perplexity.  Rose also explained her reasons for not confiding in
her friend Mr. Losberne in the first instance.  The old gentleman
considered that she had acted prudently, and readily undertook to hold
solemn conference with the worthy doctor himself.  To afford him an
early opportunity for the execution of this design, it was arranged
that he should call at the hotel at eight o'clock that evening, and
that in the meantime Mrs. Maylie should be cautiously informed of all
that had occurred.  These preliminaries adjusted, Rose and Oliver
returned home.

Rose had by no means overrated the measure of the good doctor's wrath.
Nancy's history was no sooner unfolded to him, than he poured forth a
shower of mingled threats and execrations; threatened to make her the
first victim of the combined ingenuity of Messrs. Blathers and Duff;
and actually put on his hat preparatory to sallying forth to obtain the
assistance of those worthies.  And, doubtless, he would, in this first
outbreak, have carried the intention into effect without a moment's
consideration of the consequences, if he had not been restrained, in
part, by corresponding violence on the side of Mr. Brownlow, who was
himself of an irascible temperament, and party by such arguments and
representations as seemed best calculated to dissuade him from his
hotbrained purpose.

'Then what the devil is to be done?' said the impetuous doctor, when
they had rejoined the two ladies.  'Are we to pass a vote of thanks to
all these vagabonds, male and female, and beg them to accept a hundred
pounds, or so, apiece, as a trifling mark of our esteem, and some
slight acknowledgment of their kindness to Oliver?'

'Not exactly that,' rejoined Mr. Brownlow, laughing; 'but we must
proceed gently and with great care.'

'Gentleness and care,' exclaimed the doctor.  'I'd send them one and
all to--'

'Never mind where,' interposed Mr. Brownlow.  'But reflect whether
sending them anywhere is likely to attain the object we have in view.'

'What object?' asked the doctor.

'Simply, the discovery of Oliver's parentage, and regaining for him the
inheritance of which, if this story be true, he has been fraudulently
deprived.'

'Ah!' said Mr. Losberne, cooling himself with his pocket-handkerchief;
'I almost forgot that.'

'You see,' pursued Mr. Brownlow; 'placing this poor girl entirely out
of the question, and supposing it were possible to bring these
scoundrels to justice without compromising her safety, what good should
we bring about?'

'Hanging a few of them at least, in all probability,' suggested the
doctor, 'and transporting the rest.'

'Very good,' replied Mr. Brownlow, smiling; 'but no doubt they will
bring that about for themselves in the fulness of time, and if we step
in to forestall them, it seems to me that we shall be performing a very
Quixotic act, in direct opposition to our own interest--or at least to
Oliver's, which is the same thing.'

'How?' inquired the doctor.

'Thus.  It is quite clear that we shall have extreme difficulty in
getting to the bottom of this mystery, unless we can bring this man,
Monks, upon his knees.  That can only be done by stratagem, and by
catching him when he is not surrounded by these people.  For, suppose
he were apprehended, we have no proof against him.  He is not even (so
far as we know, or as the facts appear to us) concerned with the gang
in any of their robberies. If he were not discharged, it is very
unlikely that he could receive any further punishment than being
committed to prison as a rogue and vagabond; and of course ever
afterwards his mouth would be so obstinately closed that he might as
well, for our purposes, be deaf, dumb, blind, and an idiot.'

'Then,' said the doctor impetuously, 'I put it to you again, whether
you think it reasonable that this promise to the girl should be
considered binding; a promise made with the best and kindest
intentions, but really--'

'Do not discuss the point, my dear young lady, pray,' said Mr.
Brownlow, interrupting Rose as she was about to speak. 'The promise
shall be kept.  I don't think it will, in the slightest degree,
interfere with our proceedings.  But, before we can resolve upon any
precise course of action, it will be necessary to see the girl; to
ascertain from her whether she will point out this Monks, on the
understanding that he is to be dealt with by us, and not by the law;
or, if she will not, or cannot do that, to procure from her such an
account of his haunts and description of his person, as will enable us
to identify him.  She cannot be seen until next Sunday night; this is
Tuesday.  I would suggest that in the meantime, we remain perfectly
quiet, and keep these matters secret even from Oliver himself.'

Although Mr. Losberne received with many wry faces a proposal involving
a delay of five whole days, he was fain to admit that no better course
occurred to him just then; and as both Rose and Mrs. Maylie sided very
strongly with Mr. Brownlow, that gentleman's proposition was carried
unanimously.

'I should like,' he said, 'to call in the aid of my friend Grimwig.  He
is a strange creature, but a shrewd one, and might prove of material
assistance to us; I should say that he was bred a lawyer, and quitted
the Bar in disgust because he had only one brief and a motion of
course, in twenty years, though whether that is recommendation or not,
you must determine for yourselves.'

'I have no objection to your calling in your friend if I may call in
mine,' said the doctor.

'We must put it to the vote,' replied Mr. Brownlow, 'who may he be?'

'That lady's son, and this young lady's--very old friend,' said the
doctor, motioning towards Mrs. Maylie, and concluding with an
expressive glance at her niece.

Rose blushed deeply, but she did not make any audible objection to this
motion (possibly she felt in a hopeless minority); and Harry Maylie and
Mr. Grimwig were accordingly added to the committee.

'We stay in town, of course,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'while there remains
the slightest prospect of prosecuting this inquiry with a chance of
success.  I will spare neither trouble nor expense in behalf of the
object in which we are all so deeply interested, and I am content to
remain here, if it be for twelve months, so long as you assure me that
any hope remains.'

'Good!' rejoined Mr. Brownlow.  'And as I see on the faces about me, a
disposition to inquire how it happened that I was not in the way to
corroborate Oliver's tale, and had so suddenly left the kingdom, let me
stipulate that I shall be asked no questions until such time as I may
deem it expedient to forestall them by telling my own story.  Believe
me, I make this request with good reason, for I might otherwise excite
hopes destined never to be realised, and only increase difficulties and
disappointments already quite numerous enough.  Come!  Supper has been
announced, and young Oliver, who is all alone in the next room, will
have begun to think, by this time, that we have wearied of his company,
and entered into some dark conspiracy to thrust him forth upon the
world.'

With these words, the old gentleman gave his hand to Mrs. Maylie, and
escorted her into the supper-room.  Mr. Losberne followed, leading
Rose; and the council was, for the present, effectually broken up.



CHAPTER XLII

AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE OF OLIVER'S, EXHIBITING DECIDED MARKS OF GENIUS,
BECOMES A PUBLIC CHARACTER IN THE METROPOLIS

Upon the night when Nancy, having lulled Mr. Sikes to sleep, hurried on
her self-imposed mission to Rose Maylie, there advanced towards London,
by the Great North Road, two persons, upon whom it is expedient that
this history should bestow some attention.

They were a man and woman; or perhaps they would be better described as
a male and female:  for the former was one of those long-limbed,
knock-kneed, shambling, bony people, to whom it is difficult to assign
any precise age,--looking as they do, when they are yet boys, like
undergrown men, and when they are almost men, like overgrown boys.  The
woman was young, but of a robust and hardy make, as she need have been
to bear the weight of the heavy bundle which was strapped to her back.
Her companion was not encumbered with much luggage, as there merely
dangled from a stick which he carried over his shoulder, a small parcel
wrapped in a common handkerchief, and apparently light enough.  This
circumstance, added to the length of his legs, which were of unusual
extent, enabled him with much ease to keep some half-dozen paces in
advance of his companion, to whom he occasionally turned with an
impatient jerk of the head:  as if reproaching her tardiness, and
urging her to greater exertion.

Thus, they had toiled along the dusty road, taking little heed of any
object within sight, save when they stepped aside to allow a wider
passage for the mail-coaches which were whirling out of town, until
they passed through Highgate archway; when the foremost traveller
stopped and called impatiently to his companion,

'Come on, can't yer?  What a lazybones yer are, Charlotte.'

'It's a heavy load, I can tell you,' said the female, coming up, almost
breathless with fatigue.

'Heavy!  What are yer talking about?  What are yer made for?' rejoined
the male traveller, changing his own little bundle as he spoke, to the
other shoulder.  'Oh, there yer are, resting again! Well, if yer ain't
enough to tire anybody's patience out, I don't know what is!'

'Is it much farther?' asked the woman, resting herself against a bank,
and looking up with the perspiration streaming from her face.

'Much farther!  Yer as good as there,' said the long-legged tramper,
pointing out before him.  'Look there!  Those are the lights of London.'

'They're a good two mile off, at least,' said the woman despondingly.

'Never mind whether they're two mile off, or twenty,' said Noah
Claypole; for he it was; 'but get up and come on, or I'll kick yer, and
so I give yer notice.'

As Noah's red nose grew redder with anger, and as he crossed the road
while speaking, as if fully prepared to put his threat into execution,
the woman rose without any further remark, and trudged onward by his
side.

'Where do you mean to stop for the night, Noah?' she asked, after they
had walked a few hundred yards.

'How should I know?' replied Noah, whose temper had been considerably
impaired by walking.

'Near, I hope,' said Charlotte.

'No, not near,' replied Mr. Claypole.  'There!  Not near; so don't
think it.'

'Why not?'

'When I tell yer that I don't mean to do a thing, that's enough,
without any why or because either,' replied Mr. Claypole with dignity.

'Well, you needn't be so cross,' said his companion.

'A pretty thing it would be, wouldn't it to go and stop at the very
first public-house outside the town, so that Sowerberry, if he come up
after us, might poke in his old nose, and have us taken back in a cart
with handcuffs on,' said Mr. Claypole in a jeering tone.  'No!  I shall
go and lose myself among the narrowest streets I can find, and not stop
till we come to the very out-of-the-wayest house I can set eyes on.
'Cod, yer may thanks yer stars I've got a head; for if we hadn't gone,
at first, the wrong road a purpose, and come back across country, yer'd
have been locked up hard and fast a week ago, my lady.  And serve yer
right for being a fool.'

'I know I ain't as cunning as you are,' replied Charlotte; 'but don't
put all the blame on me, and say I should have been locked up.  You
would have been if I had been, any way.'

'Yer took the money from the till, yer know yer did,' said Mr. Claypole.

'I took it for you, Noah, dear,' rejoined Charlotte.

'Did I keep it?' asked Mr. Claypole.

'No; you trusted in me, and let me carry it like a dear, and so you
are,' said the lady, chucking him under the chin, and drawing her arm
through his.

This was indeed the case; but as it was not Mr. Claypole's habit to
repose a blind and foolish confidence in anybody, it should be
observed, in justice to that gentleman, that he had trusted Charlotte
to this extent, in order that, if they were pursued, the money might be
found on her:  which would leave him an opportunity of asserting his
innocence of any theft, and would greatly facilitate his chances of
escape.  Of course, he entered at this juncture, into no explanation of
his motives, and they walked on very lovingly together.

In pursuance of this cautious plan, Mr. Claypole went on, without
halting, until he arrived at the Angel at Islington, where he wisely
judged, from the crowd of passengers and numbers of vehicles, that
London began in earnest.  Just pausing to observe which appeared the
most crowded streets, and consequently the most to be avoided, he
crossed into Saint John's Road, and was soon deep in the obscurity of
the intricate and dirty ways, which, lying between Gray's Inn Lane and
Smithfield, render that part of the town one of the lowest and worst
that improvement has left in the midst of London.

Through these streets, Noah Claypole walked, dragging Charlotte after
him; now stepping into the kennel to embrace at a glance the whole
external character of some small public-house; now jogging on again, as
some fancied appearance induced him to believe it too public for his
purpose.  At length, he stopped in front of one, more humble in
appearance and more dirty than any he had yet seen; and, having crossed
over and surveyed it from the opposite pavement, graciously announced
his intention of putting up there, for the night.

'So give us the bundle,' said Noah, unstrapping it from the woman's
shoulders, and slinging it over his own; 'and don't yer speak, except
when yer spoke to.  What's the name of the house--t-h-r--three what?'

'Cripples,' said Charlotte.

'Three Cripples,' repeated Noah, 'and a very good sign too.  Now, then!
Keep close at my heels, and come along.'  With these injunctions, he
pushed the rattling door with his shoulder, and entered the house,
followed by his companion.

There was nobody in the bar but a young Jew, who, with his two elbows
on the counter, was reading a dirty newspaper. He stared very hard at
Noah, and Noah stared very hard at him.

If Noah had been attired in his charity-boy's dress, there might have
been some reason for the Jew opening his eyes so wide; but as he had
discarded the coat and badge, and wore a short smock-frock over his
leathers, there seemed no particular reason for his appearance exciting
so much attention in a public-house.

'Is this the Three Cripples?' asked Noah.

'That is the dabe of this 'ouse,' replied the Jew.

'A gentleman we met on the road, coming up from the country,
recommended us here,' said Noah, nudging Charlotte, perhaps to call her
attention to this most ingenious device for attracting respect, and
perhaps to warn her to betray no surprise.  'We want to sleep here
to-night.'

'I'b dot certaid you cad,' said Barney, who was the attendant sprite;
'but I'll idquire.'

'Show us the tap, and give us a bit of cold meat and a drop of beer
while yer inquiring, will yer?' said Noah.

Barney complied by ushering them into a small back-room, and setting
the required viands before them; having done which, he informed the
travellers that they could be lodged that night, and left the amiable
couple to their refreshment.

Now, this back-room was immediately behind the bar, and some steps
lower, so that any person connected with the house, undrawing a small
curtain which concealed a single pane of glass fixed in the wall of the
last-named apartment, about five feet from its flooring, could not only
look down upon any guests in the back-room without any great hazard of
being observed (the glass being in a dark angle of the wall, between
which and a large upright beam the observer had to thrust himself), but
could, by applying his ear to the partition, ascertain with tolerable
distinctness, their subject of conversation.  The landlord of the house
had not withdrawn his eye from this place of espial for five minutes,
and Barney had only just returned from making the communication above
related, when Fagin, in the course of his evening's business, came into
the bar to inquire after some of his young pupils.

'Hush!' said Barney:  'stradegers id the next roob.'

'Strangers!' repeated the old man in a whisper.

'Ah!  Ad rub uds too,' added Barney.  'Frob the cuttry, but subthig in
your way, or I'b bistaked.'

Fagin appeared to receive this communication with great interest.

Mounting a stool, he cautiously applied his eye to the pane of glass,
from which secret post he could see Mr. Claypole taking cold beef from
the dish, and porter from the pot, and administering homeopathic doses
of both to Charlotte, who sat patiently by, eating and drinking at his
pleasure.

'Aha!' he whispered, looking round to Barney, 'I like that fellow's
looks.  He'd be of use to us; he knows how to train the girl already.
Don't make as much noise as a mouse, my dear, and let me hear 'em
talk--let me hear 'em.'

He again applied his eye to the glass, and turning his ear to the
partition, listened attentively:  with a subtle and eager look upon his
face, that might have appertained to some old goblin.

'So I mean to be a gentleman,' said Mr. Claypole, kicking out his legs,
and continuing a conversation, the commencement of which Fagin had
arrived too late to hear. 'No more jolly old coffins, Charlotte, but a
gentleman's life for me:  and, if yer like, yer shall be a lady.'

'I should like that well enough, dear,' replied Charlotte; 'but tills
ain't to be emptied every day, and people to get clear off after it.'

'Tills be blowed!' said Mr. Claypole; 'there's more things besides
tills to be emptied.'

'What do you mean?' asked his companion.

'Pockets, women's ridicules, houses, mail-coaches, banks!' said Mr.
Claypole, rising with the porter.

'But you can't do all that, dear,' said Charlotte.

'I shall look out to get into company with them as can,' replied Noah.
'They'll be able to make us useful some way or another. Why, you
yourself are worth fifty women; I never see such a precious sly and
deceitful creetur as yer can be when I let yer.'

'Lor, how nice it is to hear yer say so!' exclaimed Charlotte,
imprinting a kiss upon his ugly face.

'There, that'll do:  don't yer be too affectionate, in case I'm cross
with yer,' said Noah, disengaging himself with great gravity.  'I
should like to be the captain of some band, and have the whopping of
'em, and follering 'em about, unbeknown to themselves.  That would suit
me, if there was good profit; and if we could only get in with some
gentleman of this sort, I say it would be cheap at that twenty-pound
note you've got,--especially as we don't very well know how to get rid
of it ourselves.'

After expressing this opinion, Mr. Claypole looked into the porter-pot
with an aspect of deep wisdom; and having well shaken its contents,
nodded condescendingly to Charlotte, and took a draught, wherewith he
appeared greatly refreshed.  He was meditating another, when the sudden
opening of the door, and the appearance of a stranger, interrupted him.

The stranger was Mr. Fagin.  And very amiable he looked, and a very low
bow he made, as he advanced, and setting himself down at the nearest
table, ordered something to drink of the grinning Barney.

'A pleasant night, sir, but cool for the time of year,' said Fagin,
rubbing his hands.  'From the country, I see, sir?'

'How do yer see that?' asked Noah Claypole.

'We have not so much dust as that in London,' replied Fagin, pointing
from Noah's shoes to those of his companion, and from them to the two
bundles.

'Yer a sharp feller,' said Noah.  'Ha! ha! only hear that, Charlotte!'

'Why, one need be sharp in this town, my dear,' replied the Jew,
sinking his voice to a confidential whisper; 'and that's the truth.'

Fagin followed up this remark by striking the side of his nose with his
right forefinger,--a gesture which Noah attempted to imitate, though
not with complete success, in consequence of his own nose not being
large enough for the purpose.  However, Mr. Fagin seemed to interpret
the endeavour as expressing a perfect coincidence with his opinion, and
put about the liquor which Barney reappeared with, in a very friendly
manner.

'Good stuff that,' observed Mr. Claypole, smacking his lips.

'Dear!' said Fagin.  'A man need be always emptying a till, or a
pocket, or a woman's reticule, or a house, or a mail-coach, or a bank,
if he drinks it regularly.'

Mr. Claypole no sooner heard this extract from his own remarks than he
fell back in his chair, and looked from the Jew to Charlotte with a
countenance of ashy paleness and excessive terror.

'Don't mind me, my dear,' said Fagin, drawing his chair closer. 'Ha!
ha! it was lucky it was only me that heard you by chance. It was very
lucky it was only me.'

'I didn't take it,' stammered Noah, no longer stretching out his legs
like an independent gentleman, but coiling them up as well as he could
under his chair; 'it was all her doing; yer've got it now, Charlotte,
yer know yer have.'

'No matter who's got it, or who did it, my dear,' replied Fagin,
glancing, nevertheless, with a hawk's eye at the girl and the two
bundles.  'I'm in that way myself, and I like you for it.'

'In what way?' asked Mr. Claypole, a little recovering.

'In that way of business,' rejoined Fagin; 'and so are the people of
the house.  You've hit the right nail upon the head, and are as safe
here as you could be.  There is not a safer place in all this town than
is the Cripples; that is, when I like to make it so.  And I have taken
a fancy to you and the young woman; so I've said the word, and you may
make your minds easy.'

Noah Claypole's mind might have been at ease after this assurance, but
his body certainly was not; for he shuffled and writhed about, into
various uncouth positions:  eyeing his new friend meanwhile with
mingled fear and suspicion.

'I'll tell you more,' said Fagin, after he had reassured the girl, by
dint of friendly nods and muttered encouragements. 'I have got a friend
that I think can gratify your darling wish, and put you in the right
way, where you can take whatever department of the business you think
will suit you best at first, and be taught all the others.'

'Yer speak as if yer were in earnest,' replied Noah.

'What advantage would it be to me to be anything else?' inquired Fagin,
shrugging his shoulders.  'Here!  Let me have a word with you outside.'

'There's no occasion to trouble ourselves to move,' said Noah, getting
his legs by gradual degrees abroad again. 'She'll take the luggage
upstairs the while.  Charlotte, see to them bundles.'

This mandate, which had been delivered with great majesty, was obeyed
without the slightest demur; and Charlotte made the best of her way off
with the packages while Noah held the door open and watched her out.

'She's kept tolerably well under, ain't she?' he asked as he resumed
his seat:  in the tone of a keeper who had tamed some wild animal.

'Quite perfect,' rejoined Fagin, clapping him on the shoulder. 'You're
a genius, my dear.'

'Why, I suppose if I wasn't, I shouldn't be here,' replied Noah. 'But,
I say, she'll be back if yer lose time.'

'Now, what do you think?' said Fagin.  'If you was to like my friend,
could you do better than join him?'

'Is he in a good way of business; that's where it is!' responded Noah,
winking one of his little eyes.

'The top of the tree; employs a power of hands; has the very best
society in the profession.'

'Regular town-maders?' asked Mr. Claypole.

'Not a countryman among 'em; and I don't think he'd take you, even on
my recommendation, if he didn't run rather short of assistants just
now,' replied Fagin.

'Should I have to hand over?' said Noah, slapping his breeches-pocket.

'It couldn't possibly be done without,' replied Fagin, in a most
decided manner.

'Twenty pound, though--it's a lot of money!'

'Not when it's in a note you can't get rid of,' retorted Fagin. 'Number
and date taken, I suppose?  Payment stopped at the Bank? Ah!  It's not
worth much to him.  It'll have to go abroad, and he couldn't sell it
for a great deal in the market.'

'When could I see him?' asked Noah doubtfully.

'To-morrow morning.'

'Where?'

'Here.'

'Um!' said Noah.  'What's the wages?'

'Live like a gentleman--board and lodging, pipes and spirits free--half
of all you earn, and half of all the young woman earns,' replied Mr.
Fagin.

Whether Noah Claypole, whose rapacity was none of the least
comprehensive, would have acceded even to these glowing terms, had he
been a perfectly free agent, is very doubtful; but as he recollected
that, in the event of his refusal, it was in the power of his new
acquaintance to give him up to justice immediately (and more unlikely
things had come to pass), he gradually relented, and said he thought
that would suit him.

'But, yer see,' observed Noah, 'as she will be able to do a good deal,
I should like to take something very light.'

'A little fancy work?' suggested Fagin.

'Ah! something of that sort,' replied Noah.  'What do you think would
suit me now?  Something not too trying for the strength, and not very
dangerous, you know.  That's the sort of thing!'

'I heard you talk of something in the spy way upon the others, my
dear,' said Fagin.  'My friend wants somebody who would do that well,
very much.'

'Why, I did mention that, and I shouldn't mind turning my hand to it
sometimes,' rejoined Mr. Claypole slowly; 'but it wouldn't pay by
itself, you know.'

'That's true!' observed the Jew, ruminating or pretending to ruminate.
'No, it might not.'

'What do you think, then?' asked Noah, anxiously regarding him.
'Something in the sneaking way, where it was pretty sure work, and not
much more risk than being at home.'

'What do you think of the old ladies?' asked Fagin. 'There's a good
deal of money made in snatching their bags and parcels, and running
round the corner.'

'Don't they holler out a good deal, and scratch sometimes?' asked Noah,
shaking his head.  'I don't think that would answer my purpose.  Ain't
there any other line open?'

'Stop!' said Fagin, laying his hand on Noah's knee.  'The kinchin lay.'

'What's that?' demanded Mr. Claypole.

'The kinchins, my dear,' said Fagin, 'is the young children that's sent
on errands by their mothers, with sixpences and shillings; and the lay
is just to take their money away--they've always got it ready in their
hands,--then knock 'em into the kennel, and walk off very slow, as if
there were nothing else the matter but a child fallen down and hurt
itself.  Ha! ha! ha!'

'Ha! ha!' roared Mr. Claypole, kicking up his legs in an ecstasy.
'Lord, that's the very thing!'

'To be sure it is,' replied Fagin; 'and you can have a few good beats
chalked out in Camden Town, and Battle Bridge, and neighborhoods like
that, where they're always going errands; and you can upset as many
kinchins as you want, any hour in the day. Ha! ha! ha!'

With this, Fagin poked Mr. Claypole in the side, and they joined in a
burst of laughter both long and loud.

'Well, that's all right!' said Noah, when he had recovered himself, and
Charlotte had returned.  'What time to-morrow shall we say?'

'Will ten do?' asked Fagin, adding, as Mr. Claypole nodded assent,
'What name shall I tell my good friend.'

'Mr. Bolter,' replied Noah, who had prepared himself for such
emergency.  'Mr. Morris Bolter.  This is Mrs. Bolter.'

'Mrs. Bolter's humble servant,' said Fagin, bowing with grotesque
politeness.  'I hope I shall know her better very shortly.'

'Do you hear the gentleman, Charlotte?' thundered Mr. Claypole.

'Yes, Noah, dear!' replied Mrs. Bolter, extending her hand.

'She calls me Noah, as a sort of fond way of talking,' said Mr. Morris
Bolter, late Claypole, turning to Fagin.  'You understand?'

'Oh yes, I understand--perfectly,' replied Fagin, telling the truth for
once.  'Good-night!  Good-night!'

With many adieus and good wishes, Mr. Fagin went his way. Noah
Claypole, bespeaking his good lady's attention, proceeded to enlighten
her relative to the arrangement he had made, with all that haughtiness
and air of superiority, becoming, not only a member of the sterner sex,
but a gentleman who appreciated the dignity of a special appointment on
the kinchin lay, in London and its vicinity.



CHAPTER XLIII

WHEREIN IS SHOWN HOW THE ARTFUL DODGER GOT INTO TROUBLE

'And so it was you that was your own friend, was it?' asked Mr.
Claypole, otherwise Bolter, when, by virtue of the compact entered into
between them, he had removed next day to Fagin's house.  ''Cod, I
thought as much last night!'

'Every man's his own friend, my dear,' replied Fagin, with his most
insinuating grin.  'He hasn't as good a one as himself anywhere.'

'Except sometimes,' replied Morris Bolter, assuming the air of a man of
the world.  'Some people are nobody's enemies but their own, yer know.'

'Don't believe that,' said Fagin.  'When a man's his own enemy, it's
only because he's too much his own friend; not because he's careful for
everybody but himself.  Pooh! pooh!  There ain't such a thing in
nature.'

'There oughn't to be, if there is,' replied Mr. Bolter.

'That stands to reason.  Some conjurers say that number three is the
magic number, and some say number seven.  It's neither, my friend,
neither.  It's number one.

'Ha! ha!' cried Mr. Bolter.  'Number one for ever.'

'In a little community like ours, my dear,' said Fagin, who felt it
necessary to qualify this position, 'we have a general number one,
without considering me too as the same, and all the other young people.'

'Oh, the devil!' exclaimed Mr. Bolter.

'You see,' pursued Fagin, affecting to disregard this interruption, 'we
are so mixed up together, and identified in our interests, that it must
be so.  For instance, it's your object to take care of number
one--meaning yourself.'

'Certainly,' replied Mr. Bolter.  'Yer about right there.'

'Well!  You can't take care of yourself, number one, without taking
care of me, number one.'

'Number two, you mean,' said Mr. Bolter, who was largely endowed with
the quality of selfishness.

'No, I don't!' retorted Fagin.  'I'm of the same importance to you, as
you are to yourself.'

'I say,' interrupted Mr. Bolter, 'yer a very nice man, and I'm very
fond of yer; but we ain't quite so thick together, as all that comes
to.'

'Only think,' said Fagin, shrugging his shoulders, and stretching out
his hands; 'only consider.  You've done what's a very pretty thing, and
what I love you for doing; but what at the same time would put the
cravat round your throat, that's so very easily tied and so very
difficult to unloose--in plain English, the halter!'

Mr. Bolter put his hand to his neckerchief, as if he felt it
inconveniently tight; and murmured an assent, qualified in tone but not
in substance.

'The gallows,' continued Fagin, 'the gallows, my dear, is an ugly
finger-post, which points out a very short and sharp turning that has
stopped many a bold fellow's career on the broad highway.  To keep in
the easy road, and keep it at a distance, is object number one with
you.'

'Of course it is,' replied Mr. Bolter.  'What do yer talk about such
things for?'

'Only to show you my meaning clearly,' said the Jew, raising his
eyebrows.  'To be able to do that, you depend upon me. To keep my
little business all snug, I depend upon you. The first is your number
one, the second my number one.  The more you value your number one, the
more careful you must be of mine; so we come at last to what I told you
at first--that a regard for number one holds us all together, and must
do so, unless we would all go to pieces in company.'

'That's true,' rejoined Mr. Bolter, thoughtfully.  'Oh! yer a cunning
old codger!'

Mr. Fagin saw, with delight, that this tribute to his powers was no
mere compliment, but that he had really impressed his recruit with a
sense of his wily genius, which it was most important that he should
entertain in the outset of their acquaintance.  To strengthen an
impression so desirable and useful, he followed up the blow by
acquainting him, in some detail, with the magnitude and extent of his
operations; blending truth and fiction together, as best served his
purpose; and bringing both to bear, with so much art, that Mr. Bolter's
respect visibly increased, and became tempered, at the same time, with
a degree of wholesome fear, which it was highly desirable to awaken.

'It's this mutual trust we have in each other that consoles me under
heavy losses,' said Fagin.  'My best hand was taken from me, yesterday
morning.'

'You don't mean to say he died?' cried Mr. Bolter.

'No, no,' replied Fagin, 'not so bad as that.  Not quite so bad.'

'What, I suppose he was--'

'Wanted,' interposed Fagin.  'Yes, he was wanted.'

'Very particular?' inquired Mr. Bolter.

'No,' replied Fagin, 'not very.  He was charged with attempting to pick
a pocket, and they found a silver snuff-box on him,--his own, my dear,
his own, for he took snuff himself, and was very fond of it.  They
remanded him till to-day, for they thought they knew the owner.  Ah! he
was worth fifty boxes, and I'd give the price of as many to have him
back.  You should have known the Dodger, my dear; you should have known
the Dodger.'

'Well, but I shall know him, I hope; don't yer think so?' said Mr.
Bolter.

'I'm doubtful about it,' replied Fagin, with a sigh.  'If they don't
get any fresh evidence, it'll only be a summary conviction, and we
shall have him back again after six weeks or so; but, if they do, it's
a case of lagging.  They know what a clever lad he is; he'll be a
lifer.  They'll make the Artful nothing less than a lifer.'

'What do you mean by lagging and a lifer?' demanded Mr. Bolter. 'What's
the good of talking in that way to me; why don't yer speak so as I can
understand yer?'

Fagin was about to translate these mysterious expressions into the
vulgar tongue; and, being interpreted, Mr. Bolter would have been
informed that they represented that combination of words,
'transportation for life,' when the dialogue was cut short by the entry
of Master Bates, with his hands in his breeches-pockets, and his face
twisted into a look of semi-comical woe.

'It's all up, Fagin,' said Charley, when he and his new companion had
been made known to each other.

'What do you mean?'

'They've found the gentleman as owns the box; two or three more's a
coming to 'dentify him; and the Artful's booked for a passage out,'
replied Master Bates.  'I must have a full suit of mourning, Fagin, and
a hatband, to wisit him in, afore he sets out upon his travels.  To
think of Jack Dawkins--lummy Jack--the Dodger--the Artful Dodger--going
abroad for a common twopenny-halfpenny sneeze-box!  I never thought
he'd a done it under a gold watch, chain, and seals, at the lowest.
Oh, why didn't he rob some rich old gentleman of all his walables, and
go out as a gentleman, and not like a common prig, without no honour
nor glory!'

With this expression of feeling for his unfortunate friend, Master
Bates sat himself on the nearest chair with an aspect of chagrin and
despondency.

'What do you talk about his having neither honour nor glory for!'
exclaimed Fagin, darting an angry look at his pupil. 'Wasn't he always
the top-sawyer among you all!  Is there one of you that could touch him
or come near him on any scent!  Eh?'

'Not one,' replied Master Bates, in a voice rendered husky by regret;
'not one.'

'Then what do you talk of?' replied Fagin angrily; 'what are you
blubbering for?'

''Cause it isn't on the rec-ord, is it?' said Charley, chafed into
perfect defiance of his venerable friend by the current of his regrets;
''cause it can't come out in the 'dictment; 'cause nobody will never
know half of what he was.  How will he stand in the Newgate Calendar?
P'raps not be there at all.  Oh, my eye, my eye, wot a blow it is!'

'Ha! ha!' cried Fagin, extending his right hand, and turning to Mr.
Bolter in a fit of chuckling which shook him as though he had the
palsy; 'see what a pride they take in their profession, my dear.  Ain't
it beautiful?'

Mr. Bolter nodded assent, and Fagin, after contemplating the grief of
Charley Bates for some seconds with evident satisfaction, stepped up to
that young gentleman and patted him on the shoulder.

'Never mind, Charley,' said Fagin soothingly; 'it'll come out, it'll be
sure to come out.  They'll all know what a clever fellow he was; he'll
show it himself, and not disgrace his old pals and teachers.  Think how
young he is too!  What a distinction, Charley, to be lagged at his time
of life!'

'Well, it is a honour that is!' said Charley, a little consoled.

'He shall have all he wants,' continued the Jew.  'He shall be kept in
the Stone Jug, Charley, like a gentleman.  Like a gentleman!  With his
beer every day, and money in his pocket to pitch and toss with, if he
can't spend it.'

'No, shall he though?' cried Charley Bates.

'Ay, that he shall,' replied Fagin, 'and we'll have a big-wig, Charley:
one that's got the greatest gift of the gab:  to carry on his defence;
and he shall make a speech for himself too, if he likes; and we'll read
it all in the papers--"Artful Dodger--shrieks of laughter--here the
court was convulsed"--eh, Charley, eh?'

'Ha! ha!' laughed Master Bates, 'what a lark that would be, wouldn't
it, Fagin?  I say, how the Artful would bother 'em wouldn't he?'

'Would!' cried Fagin.  'He shall--he will!'

'Ah, to be sure, so he will,' repeated Charley, rubbing his hands.

'I think I see him now,' cried the Jew, bending his eyes upon his pupil.

'So do I,' cried Charley Bates.  'Ha! ha! ha! so do I.  I see it all
afore me, upon my soul I do, Fagin.  What a game!  What a regular game!
All the big-wigs trying to look solemn, and Jack Dawkins addressing of
'em as intimate and comfortable as if he was the judge's own son making
a speech arter dinner--ha! ha! ha!'

In fact, Mr. Fagin had so well humoured his young friend's eccentric
disposition, that Master Bates, who had at first been disposed to
consider the imprisoned Dodger rather in the light of a victim, now
looked upon him as the chief actor in a scene of most uncommon and
exquisite humour, and felt quite impatient for the arrival of the time
when his old companion should have so favourable an opportunity of
displaying his abilities.

'We must know how he gets on to-day, by some handy means or other,'
said Fagin.  'Let me think.'

'Shall I go?' asked Charley.

'Not for the world,' replied Fagin.  'Are you mad, my dear, stark mad,
that you'd walk into the very place where--No, Charley, no. One is
enough to lose at a time.'

'You don't mean to go yourself, I suppose?' said Charley with a
humorous leer.

'That wouldn't quite fit,' replied Fagin shaking his head.

'Then why don't you send this new cove?' asked Master Bates, laying his
hand on Noah's arm.  'Nobody knows him.'

'Why, if he didn't mind--' observed Fagin.

'Mind!' interposed Charley.  'What should he have to mind?'

'Really nothing, my dear,' said Fagin, turning to Mr. Bolter, 'really
nothing.'

'Oh, I dare say about that, yer know,' observed Noah, backing towards
the door, and shaking his head with a kind of sober alarm.  'No,
no--none of that.  It's not in my department, that ain't.'

'Wot department has he got, Fagin?' inquired Master Bates, surveying
Noah's lank form with much disgust.  'The cutting away when there's
anything wrong, and the eating all the wittles when there's everything
right; is that his branch?'

'Never mind,' retorted Mr. Bolter; 'and don't yer take liberties with
yer superiors, little boy, or yer'll find yerself in the wrong shop.'

Master Bates laughed so vehemently at this magnificent threat, that it
was some time before Fagin could interpose, and represent to Mr. Bolter
that he incurred no possible danger in visiting the police-office;
that, inasmuch as no account of the little affair in which he had
engaged, nor any description of his person, had yet been forwarded to
the metropolis, it was very probable that he was not even suspected of
having resorted to it for shelter; and that, if he were properly
disguised, it would be as safe a spot for him to visit as any in
London, inasmuch as it would be, of all places, the very last, to which
he could be supposed likely to resort of his own free will.

Persuaded, in part, by these representations, but overborne in a much
greater degree by his fear of Fagin, Mr. Bolter at length consented,
with a very bad grace, to undertake the expedition. By Fagin's
directions, he immediately substituted for his own attire, a waggoner's
frock, velveteen breeches, and leather leggings:  all of which articles
the Jew had at hand.  He was likewise furnished with a felt hat well
garnished with turnpike tickets; and a carter's whip.  Thus equipped,
he was to saunter into the office, as some country fellow from Covent
Garden market might be supposed to do for the gratification of his
curiousity; and as he was as awkward, ungainly, and raw-boned a fellow
as need be, Mr. Fagin had no fear but that he would look the part to
perfection.

These arrangements completed, he was informed of the necessary signs
and tokens by which to recognise the Artful Dodger, and was conveyed by
Master Bates through dark and winding ways to within a very short
distance of Bow Street. Having described the precise situation of the
office, and accompanied it with copious directions how he was to walk
straight up the passage, and when he got into the side, and pull off
his hat as he went into the room, Charley Bates bade him hurry on
alone, and promised to bide his return on the spot of their parting.

Noah Claypole, or Morris Bolter as the reader pleases, punctually
followed the directions he had received, which--Master Bates being
pretty well acquainted with the locality--were so exact that he was
enabled to gain the magisterial presence without asking any question,
or meeting with any interruption by the way.

He found himself jostled among a crowd of people, chiefly women, who
were huddled together in a dirty frowsy room, at the upper end of which
was a raised platform railed off from the rest, with a dock for the
prisoners on the left hand against the wall, a box for the witnesses in
the middle, and a desk for the magistrates on the right; the awful
locality last named, being screened off by a partition which concealed
the bench from the common gaze, and left the vulgar to imagine (if they
could) the full majesty of justice.

There were only a couple of women in the dock, who were nodding to
their admiring friends, while the clerk read some depositions to a
couple of policemen and a man in plain clothes who leant over the
table.  A jailer stood reclining against the dock-rail, tapping his
nose listlessly with a large key, except when he repressed an undue
tendency to conversation among the idlers, by proclaiming silence; or
looked sternly up to bid some woman 'Take that baby out,' when the
gravity of justice was disturbed by feeble cries, half-smothered in the
mother's shawl, from some meagre infant.  The room smelt close and
unwholesome; the walls were dirt-discoloured; and the ceiling
blackened.  There was an old smoky bust over the mantel-shelf, and a
dusty clock above the dock--the only thing present, that seemed to go
on as it ought; for depravity, or poverty, or an habitual acquaintance
with both, had left a taint on all the animate matter, hardly less
unpleasant than the thick greasy scum on every inanimate object that
frowned upon it.

Noah looked eagerly about him for the Dodger; but although there were
several women who would have done very well for that distinguished
character's mother or sister, and more than one man who might be
supposed to bear a strong resemblance to his father, nobody at all
answering the description given him of Mr. Dawkins was to be seen.  He
waited in a state of much suspense and uncertainty until the women,
being committed for trial, went flaunting out; and then was quickly
relieved by the appearance of another prisoner who he felt at once
could be no other than the object of his visit.

It was indeed Mr. Dawkins, who, shuffling into the office with the big
coat sleeves tucked up as usual, his left hand in his pocket, and his
hat in his right hand, preceded the jailer, with a rolling gait
altogether indescribable, and, taking his place in the dock, requested
in an audible voice to know what he was placed in that 'ere disgraceful
sitivation for.

'Hold your tongue, will you?' said the jailer.

'I'm an Englishman, ain't I?' rejoined the Dodger.  'Where are my
priwileges?'

'You'll get your privileges soon enough,' retorted the jailer, 'and
pepper with 'em.'

'We'll see wot the Secretary of State for the Home Affairs has got to
say to the beaks, if I don't,' replied Mr. Dawkins.  'Now then!  Wot is
this here business?  I shall thank the madg'strates to dispose of this
here little affair, and not to keep me while they read the paper, for
I've got an appointment with a genelman in the City, and as I am a man
of my word and wery punctual in business matters, he'll go away if I
ain't there to my time, and then pr'aps ther won't be an action for
damage against them as kep me away.  Oh no, certainly not!'

At this point, the Dodger, with a show of being very particular with a
view to proceedings to be had thereafter, desired the jailer to
communicate 'the names of them two files as was on the bench.'  Which
so tickled the spectators, that they laughed almost as heartily as
Master Bates could have done if he had heard the request.

'Silence there!' cried the jailer.

'What is this?' inquired one of the magistrates.

'A pick-pocketing case, your worship.'

'Has the boy ever been here before?'

'He ought to have been, a many times,' replied the jailer. 'He has been
pretty well everywhere else.  _I_ know him well, your worship.'

'Oh! you know me, do you?' cried the Artful, making a note of the
statement.  'Wery good.  That's a case of deformation of character, any
way.'

Here there was another laugh, and another cry of silence.

'Now then, where are the witnesses?' said the clerk.

'Ah! that's right,' added the Dodger.  'Where are they?  I should like
to see 'em.'

This wish was immediately gratified, for a policeman stepped forward
who had seen the prisoner attempt the pocket of an unknown gentleman in
a crowd, and indeed take a handkerchief therefrom, which, being a very
old one, he deliberately put back again, after trying it on his own
countenance.  For this reason, he took the Dodger into custody as soon
as he could get near him, and the said Dodger, being searched, had upon
his person a silver snuff-box, with the owner's name engraved upon the
lid.  This gentleman had been discovered on reference to the Court
Guide, and being then and there present, swore that the snuff-box was
his, and that he had missed it on the previous day, the moment he had
disengaged himself from the crowd before referred to.  He had also
remarked a young gentleman in the throng, particularly active in making
his way about, and that young gentleman was the prisoner before him.

'Have you anything to ask this witness, boy?' said the magistrate.

'I wouldn't abase myself by descending to hold no conversation with
him,' replied the Dodger.

'Have you anything to say at all?'

'Do you hear his worship ask if you've anything to say?' inquired the
jailer, nudging the silent Dodger with his elbow.

'I beg your pardon,' said the Dodger, looking up with an air of
abstraction.  'Did you redress yourself to me, my man?'

'I never see such an out-and-out young wagabond, your worship,'
observed the officer with a grin.  'Do you mean to say anything, you
young shaver?'

'No,' replied the Dodger, 'not here, for this ain't the shop for
justice:  besides which, my attorney is a-breakfasting this morning
with the Wice President of the House of Commons; but I shall have
something to say elsewhere, and so will he, and so will a wery numerous
and 'spectable circle of acquaintance as'll make them beaks wish they'd
never been born, or that they'd got their footmen to hang 'em up to
their own hat-pegs, afore they let 'em come out this morning to try it
on upon me.  I'll--'

'There!  He's fully committed!' interposed the clerk. 'Take him away.'

'Come on,' said the jailer.

'Oh ah!  I'll come on,' replied the Dodger, brushing his hat with the
palm of his hand.  'Ah! (to the Bench) it's no use your looking
frightened; I won't show you no mercy, not a ha'porth of it.  _You'll_
pay for this, my fine fellers.  I wouldn't be you for something!  I
wouldn't go free, now, if you was to fall down on your knees and ask
me.  Here, carry me off to prison!  Take me away!'

With these last words, the Dodger suffered himself to be led off by the
collar; threatening, till he got into the yard, to make a parliamentary
business of it; and then grinning in the officer's face, with great
glee and self-approval.

Having seen him locked up by himself in a little cell, Noah made the
best of his way back to where he had left Master Bates. After waiting
here some time, he was joined by that young gentleman, who had
prudently abstained from showing himself until he had looked carefully
abroad from a snug retreat, and ascertained that his new friend had not
been followed by any impertinent person.

The two hastened back together, to bear to Mr. Fagin the animating news
that the Dodger was doing full justice to his bringing-up, and
establishing for himself a glorious reputation.



CHAPTER XLIV

THE TIME ARRIVES FOR NANCY TO REDEEM HER PLEDGE TO ROSE MAYLIE. SHE
FAILS.

Adept as she was, in all the arts of cunning and dissimulation, the
girl Nancy could not wholly conceal the effect which the knowledge of
the step she had taken, wrought upon her mind.  She remembered that
both the crafty Jew and the brutal Sikes had confided to her schemes,
which had been hidden from all others: in the full confidence that she
was trustworthy and beyond the reach of their suspicion.  Vile as those
schemes were, desperate as were their originators, and bitter as were
her feelings towards Fagin, who had led her, step by step, deeper and
deeper down into an abyss of crime and misery, whence was no escape;
still, there were times when, even towards him, she felt some
relenting, lest her disclosure should bring him within the iron grasp
he had so long eluded, and he should fall at last--richly as he merited
such a fate--by her hand.

But, these were the mere wanderings of a mind unable wholly to detach
itself from old companions and associations, though enabled to fix
itself steadily on one object, and resolved not to be turned aside by
any consideration.  Her fears for Sikes would have been more powerful
inducements to recoil while there was yet time; but she had stipulated
that her secret should be rigidly kept, she had dropped no clue which
could lead to his discovery, she had refused, even for his sake, a
refuge from all the guilt and wretchedness that encompasses her--and
what more could she do! She was resolved.

Though all her mental struggles terminated in this conclusion, they
forced themselves upon her, again and again, and left their traces too.
She grew pale and thin, even within a few days.  At times, she took no
heed of what was passing before her, or no part in conversations where
once, she would have been the loudest.  At other times, she laughed
without merriment, and was noisy without a moment afterwards--she sat
silent and dejected, brooding with her head upon her hands, while the
very effort by which she roused herself, told, more forcibly than even
these indications, that she was ill at ease, and that her thoughts were
occupied with matters very different and distant from those in the
course of discussion by her companions.

It was Sunday night, and the bell of the nearest church struck the
hour.  Sikes and the Jew were talking, but they paused to listen.  The
girl looked up from the low seat on which she crouched, and listened
too.  Eleven.

'An hour this side of midnight,' said Sikes, raising the blind to look
out and returning to his seat.  'Dark and heavy it is too. A good night
for business this.'

'Ah!' replied Fagin.  'What a pity, Bill, my dear, that there's none
quite ready to be done.'

'You're right for once,' replied Sikes gruffly.  'It is a pity, for I'm
in the humour too.'

Fagin sighed, and shook his head despondingly.

'We must make up for lost time when we've got things into a good train.
That's all I know,' said Sikes.

'That's the way to talk, my dear,' replied Fagin, venturing to pat him
on the shoulder.  'It does me good to hear you.'

'Does you good, does it!' cried Sikes.  'Well, so be it.'

'Ha! ha! ha!' laughed Fagin, as if he were relieved by even this
concession.  'You're like yourself to-night, Bill.  Quite like
yourself.'

'I don't feel like myself when you lay that withered old claw on my
shoulder, so take it away,' said Sikes, casting off the Jew's hand.

'It make you nervous, Bill,--reminds you of being nabbed, does it?'
said Fagin, determined not to be offended.

'Reminds me of being nabbed by the devil,' returned Sikes. 'There never
was another man with such a face as yours, unless it was your father,
and I suppose _he_ is singeing his grizzled red beard by this time,
unless you came straight from the old 'un without any father at all
betwixt you; which I shouldn't wonder at, a bit.'

Fagin offered no reply to this compliment:  but, pulling Sikes by the
sleeve, pointed his finger towards Nancy, who had taken advantage of
the foregoing conversation to put on her bonnet, and was now leaving
the room.

'Hallo!' cried Sikes.  'Nance.  Where's the gal going to at this time
of night?'

'Not far.'

'What answer's that?' retorted Sikes.  'Do you hear me?'

'I don't know where,' replied the girl.

'Then I do,' said Sikes, more in the spirit of obstinacy than because
he had any real objection to the girl going where she listed.
'Nowhere.  Sit down.'

'I'm not well.  I told you that before,' rejoined the girl.  'I want a
breath of air.'

'Put your head out of the winder,' replied Sikes.

'There's not enough there,' said the girl.  'I want it in the street.'

'Then you won't have it,' replied Sikes.  With which assurance he rose,
locked the door, took the key out, and pulling her bonnet from her
head, flung it up to the top of an old press.  'There,' said the
robber.  'Now stop quietly where you are, will you?'

'It's not such a matter as a bonnet would keep me,' said the girl
turning very pale.  'What do you mean, Bill?  Do you know what you're
doing?'

'Know what I'm--Oh!' cried Sikes, turning to Fagin, 'she's out of her
senses, you know, or she daren't talk to me in that way.'

'You'll drive me on the something desperate,' muttered the girl placing
both hands upon her breast, as though to keep down by force some
violent outbreak.  'Let me go, will you,--this minute--this instant.'

'No!' said Sikes.

'Tell him to let me go, Fagin.  He had better.  It'll be better for
him.  Do you hear me?' cried Nancy stamping her foot upon the ground.

'Hear you!' repeated Sikes turning round in his chair to confront her.
'Aye!  And if I hear you for half a minute longer, the dog shall have
such a grip on your throat as'll tear some of that screaming voice out.
Wot has come over you, you jade!  Wot is it?'

'Let me go,' said the girl with great earnestness; then sitting herself
down on the floor, before the door, she said, 'Bill, let me go; you
don't know what you are doing. You don't, indeed.  For only one
hour--do--do!'

'Cut my limbs off one by one!' cried Sikes, seizing her roughly by the
arm, 'If I don't think the gal's stark raving mad.  Get up.'

'Not till you let me go--not till you let me go--Never--never!'
screamed the girl.  Sikes looked on, for a minute, watching his
opportunity, and suddenly pinioning her hands dragged her, struggling
and wrestling with him by the way, into a small room adjoining, where
he sat himself on a bench, and thrusting her into a chair, held her
down by force.  She struggled and implored by turns until twelve
o'clock had struck, and then, wearied and exhausted, ceased to contest
the point any further.  With a caution, backed by many oaths, to make
no more efforts to go out that night, Sikes left her to recover at
leisure and rejoined Fagin.

'Whew!' said the housebreaker wiping the perspiration from his face.
'Wot a precious strange gal that is!'

'You may say that, Bill,' replied Fagin thoughtfully.  'You may say
that.'

'Wot did she take it into her head to go out to-night for, do you
think?' asked Sikes.  'Come; you should know her better than me. Wot
does it mean?'

'Obstinacy; woman's obstinacy, I suppose, my dear.'

'Well, I suppose it is,' growled Sikes.  'I thought I had tamed her,
but she's as bad as ever.'

'Worse,' said Fagin thoughtfully.  'I never knew her like this, for
such a little cause.'

'Nor I,' said Sikes.  'I think she's got a touch of that fever in her
blood yet, and it won't come out--eh?'

'Like enough.'

'I'll let her a little blood, without troubling the doctor, if she's
took that way again,' said Sikes.

Fagin nodded an expressive approval of this mode of treatment.

'She was hanging about me all day, and night too, when I was stretched
on my back; and you, like a blackhearted wolf as you are, kept yourself
aloof,' said Sikes.  'We was poor too, all the time, and I think, one
way or other, it's worried and fretted her; and that being shut up here
so long has made her restless--eh?'

'That's it, my dear,' replied the Jew in a whisper.  'Hush!'

As he uttered these words, the girl herself appeared and resumed her
former seat.  Her eyes were swollen and red; she rocked herself to and
fro; tossed her head; and, after a little time, burst out laughing.

'Why, now she's on the other tack!' exclaimed Sikes, turning a look of
excessive surprise on his companion.

Fagin nodded to him to take no further notice just then; and, in a few
minutes, the girl subsided into her accustomed demeanour. Whispering
Sikes that there was no fear of her relapsing, Fagin took up his hat
and bade him good-night.  He paused when he reached the room-door, and
looking round, asked if somebody would light him down the dark stairs.

'Light him down,' said Sikes, who was filling his pipe. 'It's a pity he
should break his neck himself, and disappoint the sight-seers.  Show
him a light.'

Nancy followed the old man downstairs, with a candle.  When they
reached the passage, he laid his finger on his lip, and drawing close
to the girl, said, in a whisper.

'What is it, Nancy, dear?'

'What do you mean?' replied the girl, in the same tone.

'The reason of all this,' replied Fagin.  'If _he_'--he pointed with
his skinny fore-finger up the stairs--'is so hard with you (he's a
brute, Nance, a brute-beast), why don't you--'

'Well?' said the girl, as Fagin paused, with his mouth almost touching
her ear, and his eyes looking into hers.

'No matter just now.  We'll talk of this again.  You have a friend in
me, Nance; a staunch friend.  I have the means at hand, quiet and
close.  If you want revenge on those that treat you like a dog--like a
dog!  worse than his dog, for he humours him sometimes--come to me.  I
say, come to me.  He is the mere hound of a day, but you know me of
old, Nance.'

'I know you well,' replied the girl, without manifesting the least
emotion.  'Good-night.'

She shrank back, as Fagin offered to lay his hand on hers, but said
good-night again, in a steady voice, and, answering his parting look
with a nod of intelligence, closed the door between them.

Fagin walked towards his home, intent upon the thoughts that were
working within his brain.  He had conceived the idea--not from what had
just passed though that had tended to confirm him, but slowly and by
degrees--that Nancy, wearied of the housebreaker's brutality, had
conceived an attachment for some new friend.  Her altered manner, her
repeated absences from home alone, her comparative indifference to the
interests of the gang for which she had once been so zealous, and,
added to these, her desperate impatience to leave home that night at a
particular hour, all favoured the supposition, and rendered it, to him
at least, almost matter of certainty.  The object of this new liking
was not among his myrmidons.  He would be a valuable acquisition with
such an assistant as Nancy, and must (thus Fagin argued) be secured
without delay.

There was another, and a darker object, to be gained.  Sikes knew too
much, and his ruffian taunts had not galled Fagin the less, because the
wounds were hidden.  The girl must know, well, that if she shook him
off, she could never be safe from his fury, and that it would be surely
wreaked--to the maiming of limbs, or perhaps the loss of life--on the
object of her more recent fancy.

'With a little persuasion,' thought Fagin, 'what more likely than that
she would consent to poison him?  Women have done such things, and
worse, to secure the same object before now.  There would be the
dangerous villain:  the man I hate:  gone; another secured in his
place; and my influence over the girl, with a knowledge of this crime
to back it, unlimited.'

These things passed through the mind of Fagin, during the short time he
sat alone, in the housebreaker's room; and with them uppermost in his
thoughts, he had taken the opportunity afterwards afforded him, of
sounding the girl in the broken hints he threw out at parting.  There
was no expression of surprise, no assumption of an inability to
understand his meaning.  The girl clearly comprehended it.  Her glance
at parting showed _that_.

But perhaps she would recoil from a plot to take the life of Sikes, and
that was one of the chief ends to be attained. 'How,' thought Fagin, as
he crept homeward, 'can I increase my influence with her?  What new
power can I acquire?'

Such brains are fertile in expedients.  If, without extracting a
confession from herself, he laid a watch, discovered the object of her
altered regard, and threatened to reveal the whole history to Sikes (of
whom she stood in no common fear) unless she entered into his designs,
could he not secure her compliance?

'I can,' said Fagin, almost aloud.  'She durst not refuse me then.  Not
for her life, not for her life!  I have it all.  The means are ready,
and shall be set to work.  I shall have you yet!'

He cast back a dark look, and a threatening motion of the hand, towards
the spot where he had left the bolder villain; and went on his way:
busying his bony hands in the folds of his tattered garment, which he
wrenched tightly in his grasp, as though there were a hated enemy
crushed with every motion of his fingers.



CHAPTER XLV

NOAH CLAYPOLE IS EMPLOYED BY FAGIN ON A SECRET MISSION

The old man was up, betimes, next morning, and waited impatiently for
the appearance of his new associate, who after a delay that seemed
interminable, at length presented himself, and commenced a voracious
assault on the breakfast.

'Bolter,' said Fagin, drawing up a chair and seating himself opposite
Morris Bolter.

'Well, here I am,' returned Noah.  'What's the matter?  Don't yer ask
me to do anything till I have done eating. That's a great fault in this
place.  Yer never get time enough over yer meals.'

'You can talk as you eat, can't you?' said Fagin, cursing his dear
young friend's greediness from the very bottom of his heart.

'Oh yes, I can talk.  I get on better when I talk,' said Noah, cutting
a monstrous slice of bread.  'Where's Charlotte?'

'Out,' said Fagin.  'I sent her out this morning with the other young
woman, because I wanted us to be alone.'

'Oh!' said Noah.  'I wish yer'd ordered her to make some buttered toast
first.  Well.  Talk away.  Yer won't interrupt me.'

There seemed, indeed, no great fear of anything interrupting him, as he
had evidently sat down with a determination to do a great deal of
business.

'You did well yesterday, my dear,' said Fagin.  'Beautiful!  Six
shillings and ninepence halfpenny on the very first day!  The kinchin
lay will be a fortune to you.'

'Don't you forget to add three pint-pots and a milk-can,' said Mr.
Bolter.

'No, no, my dear.  The pint-pots were great strokes of genius: but the
milk-can was a perfect masterpiece.'

'Pretty well, I think, for a beginner,' remarked Mr. Bolter
complacently.  'The pots I took off airy railings, and the milk-can was
standing by itself outside a public-house.  I thought it might get
rusty with the rain, or catch cold, yer know.  Eh?  Ha! ha! ha!'

Fagin affected to laugh very heartily; and Mr. Bolter having had his
laugh out, took a series of large bites, which finished his first hunk
of bread and butter, and assisted himself to a second.

'I want you, Bolter,' said Fagin, leaning over the table, 'to do a
piece of work for me, my dear, that needs great care and caution.'

'I say,' rejoined Bolter, 'don't yer go shoving me into danger, or
sending me any more o' yer police-offices. That don't suit me, that
don't; and so I tell yer.'

'That's not the smallest danger in it--not the very smallest,' said the
Jew; 'it's only to dodge a woman.'

'An old woman?' demanded Mr. Bolter.

'A young one,' replied Fagin.

'I can do that pretty well, I know,' said Bolter.  'I was a regular
cunning sneak when I was at school.  What am I to dodge her for?  Not
to--'

'Not to do anything, but to tell me where she goes, who she sees, and,
if possible, what she says; to remember the street, if it is a street,
or the house, if it is a house; and to bring me back all the
information you can.'

'What'll yer give me?' asked Noah, setting down his cup, and looking
his employer, eagerly, in the face.

'If you do it well, a pound, my dear.  One pound,' said Fagin, wishing
to interest him in the scent as much as possible.  'And that's what I
never gave yet, for any job of work where there wasn't valuable
consideration to be gained.'

'Who is she?' inquired Noah.

'One of us.'

'Oh Lor!' cried Noah, curling up his nose.  'Yer doubtful of her, are
yer?'

'She has found out some new friends, my dear, and I must know who they
are,' replied Fagin.

'I see,' said Noah.  'Just to have the pleasure of knowing them, if
they're respectable people, eh?  Ha! ha! ha! I'm your man.'

'I knew you would be,' cried Fagin, elated by the success of his
proposal.

'Of course, of course,' replied Noah.  'Where is she? Where am I to
wait for her?  Where am I to go?'

'All that, my dear, you shall hear from me.  I'll point her out at the
proper time,' said Fagin.  'You keep ready, and leave the rest to me.'

That night, and the next, and the next again, the spy sat booted and
equipped in his carter's dress:  ready to turn out at a word from
Fagin.  Six nights passed--six long weary nights--and on each, Fagin
came home with a disappointed face, and briefly intimated that it was
not yet time.  On the seventh, he returned earlier, and with an
exultation he could not conceal.  It was Sunday.

'She goes abroad to-night,' said Fagin, 'and on the right errand, I'm
sure; for she has been alone all day, and the man she is afraid of will
not be back much before daybreak.  Come with me. Quick!'

Noah started up without saying a word; for the Jew was in a state of
such intense excitement that it infected him.  They left the house
stealthily, and hurrying through a labyrinth of streets, arrived at
length before a public-house, which Noah recognised as the same in
which he had slept, on the night of his arrival in London.

It was past eleven o'clock, and the door was closed.  It opened softly
on its hinges as Fagin gave a low whistle. They entered, without noise;
and the door was closed behind them.

Scarcely venturing to whisper, but substituting dumb show for words,
Fagin, and the young Jew who had admitted them, pointed out the pane of
glass to Noah, and signed to him to climb up and observe the person in
the adjoining room.

'Is that the woman?' he asked, scarcely above his breath.

Fagin nodded yes.

'I can't see her face well,' whispered Noah.  'She is looking down, and
the candle is behind her.

'Stay there,' whispered Fagin.  He signed to Barney, who withdrew.  In
an instant, the lad entered the room adjoining, and, under pretence of
snuffing the candle, moved it in the required position, and, speaking
to the girl, caused her to raise her face.

'I see her now,' cried the spy.

'Plainly?'

'I should know her among a thousand.'

He hastily descended, as the room-door opened, and the girl came out.
Fagin drew him behind a small partition which was curtained off, and
they held their breaths as she passed within a few feet of their place
of concealment, and emerged by the door at which they had entered.

'Hist!' cried the lad who held the door.  'Dow.'

Noah exchanged a look with Fagin, and darted out.

'To the left,' whispered the lad; 'take the left had, and keep od the
other side.'

He did so; and, by the light of the lamps, saw the girl's retreating
figure, already at some distance before him.  He advanced as near as he
considered prudent, and kept on the opposite side of the street, the
better to observe her motions. She looked nervously round, twice or
thrice, and once stopped to let two men who were following close behind
her, pass on.  She seemed to gather courage as she advanced, and to
walk with a steadier and firmer step.  The spy preserved the same
relative distance between them, and followed:  with his eye upon her.



CHAPTER XLVI

THE APPOINTMENT KEPT

The church clocks chimed three quarters past eleven, as two figures
emerged on London Bridge.  One, which advanced with a swift and rapid
step, was that of a woman who looked eagerly about her as though in
quest of some expected object; the other figure was that of a man, who
slunk along in the deepest shadow he could find, and, at some distance,
accommodated his pace to hers:  stopping when she stopped:  and as she
moved again, creeping stealthily on:  but never allowing himself, in
the ardour of his pursuit, to gain upon her footsteps.  Thus, they
crossed the bridge, from the Middlesex to the Surrey shore, when the
woman, apparently disappointed in her anxious scrutiny of the
foot-passengers, turned back.  The movement was sudden; but he who
watched her, was not thrown off his guard by it; for, shrinking into
one of the recesses which surmount the piers of the bridge, and leaning
over the parapet the better to conceal his figure, he suffered her to
pass on the opposite pavement. When she was about the same distance in
advance as she had been before, he slipped quietly down, and followed
her again. At nearly the centre of the bridge, she stopped.  The man
stopped too.

It was a very dark night.  The day had been unfavourable, and at that
hour and place there were few people stirring. Such as there were,
hurried quickly past:  very possibly without seeing, but certainly
without noticing, either the woman, or the man who kept her in view.
Their appearance was not calculated to attract the importunate regards
of such of London's destitute population, as chanced to take their way
over the bridge that night in search of some cold arch or doorless
hovel wherein to lay their heads; they stood there in silence:  neither
speaking nor spoken to, by any one who passed.

A mist hung over the river, deepening the red glare of the fires that
burnt upon the small craft moored off the different wharfs, and
rendering darker and more indistinct the murky buildings on the banks.
The old smoke-stained storehouses on either side, rose heavy and dull
from the dense mass of roofs and gables, and frowned sternly upon water
too black to reflect even their lumbering shapes. The tower of old
Saint Saviour's Church, and the spire of Saint Magnus, so long the
giant-warders of the ancient bridge, were visible in the gloom; but the
forest of shipping below bridge, and the thickly scattered spires of
churches above, were nearly all hidden from sight.

The girl had taken a few restless turns to and fro--closely watched
meanwhile by her hidden observer--when the heavy bell of St. Paul's
tolled for the death of another day.  Midnight had come upon the
crowded city.  The palace, the night-cellar, the jail, the madhouse:
the chambers of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid face
of the corpse and the calm sleep of the child:  midnight was upon them
all.

The hour had not struck two minutes, when a young lady, accompanied by
a grey-haired gentleman, alighted from a hackney-carriage within a
short distance of the bridge, and, having dismissed the vehicle, walked
straight towards it.  They had scarcely set foot upon its pavement,
when the girl started, and immediately made towards them.

They walked onward, looking about them with the air of persons who
entertained some very slight expectation which had little chance of
being realised, when they were suddenly joined by this new associate.
They halted with an exclamation of surprise, but suppressed it
immediately; for a man in the garments of a countryman came close
up--brushed against them, indeed--at that precise moment.

'Not here,' said Nancy hurriedly, 'I am afraid to speak to you here.
Come away--out of the public road--down the steps yonder!'

As she uttered these words, and indicated, with her hand, the direction
in which she wished them to proceed, the countryman looked round, and
roughly asking what they took up the whole pavement for, passed on.

The steps to which the girl had pointed, were those which, on the
Surrey bank, and on the same side of the bridge as Saint Saviour's
Church, form a landing-stairs from the river.  To this spot, the man
bearing the appearance of a countryman, hastened unobserved; and after
a moment's survey of the place, he began to descend.

These stairs are a part of the bridge; they consist of three flights.
Just below the end of the second, going down, the stone wall on the
left terminates in an ornamental pilaster facing towards the Thames.
At this point the lower steps widen:  so that a person turning that
angle of the wall, is necessarily unseen by any others on the stairs
who chance to be above him, if only a step. The countryman looked
hastily round, when he reached this point; and as there seemed no
better place of concealment, and, the tide being out, there was plenty
of room, he slipped aside, with his back to the pilaster, and there
waited:  pretty certain that they would come no lower, and that even if
he could not hear what was said, he could follow them again, with
safety.

So tardily stole the time in this lonely place, and so eager was the
spy to penetrate the motives of an interview so different from what he
had been led to expect, that he more than once gave the matter up for
lost, and persuaded himself, either that they had stopped far above, or
had resorted to some entirely different spot to hold their mysterious
conversation.  He was on the point of emerging from his hiding-place,
and regaining the road above, when he heard the sound of footsteps, and
directly afterwards of voices almost close at his ear.

He drew himself straight upright against the wall, and, scarcely
breathing, listened attentively.

'This is far enough,' said a voice, which was evidently that of the
gentleman.  'I will not suffer the young lady to go any farther.  Many
people would have distrusted you too much to have come even so far, but
you see I am willing to humour you.'

'To humour me!' cried the voice of the girl whom he had followed.
'You're considerate, indeed, sir.  To humour me!  Well, well, it's no
matter.'

'Why, for what,' said the gentleman in a kinder tone, 'for what purpose
can you have brought us to this strange place?  Why not have let me
speak to you, above there, where it is light, and there is something
stirring, instead of bringing us to this dark and dismal hole?'

'I told you before,' replied Nancy, 'that I was afraid to speak to you
there.  I don't know why it is,' said the girl, shuddering, 'but I have
such a fear and dread upon me to-night that I can hardly stand.'

'A fear of what?' asked the gentleman, who seemed to pity her.

'I scarcely know of what,' replied the girl.  'I wish I did. Horrible
thoughts of death, and shrouds with blood upon them, and a fear that
has made me burn as if I was on fire, have been upon me all day.  I was
reading a book to-night, to wile the time away, and the same things
came into the print.'

'Imagination,' said the gentleman, soothing her.

'No imagination,' replied the girl in a hoarse voice. 'I'll swear I saw
"coffin" written in every page of the book in large black
letters,--aye, and they carried one close to me, in the streets
to-night.'

'There is nothing unusual in that,' said the gentleman. 'They have
passed me often.'

'_Real ones_,' rejoined the girl.  'This was not.'

There was something so uncommon in her manner, that the flesh of the
concealed listener crept as he heard the girl utter these words, and
the blood chilled within him.  He had never experienced a greater
relief than in hearing the sweet voice of the young lady as she begged
her to be calm, and not allow herself to become the prey of such
fearful fancies.

'Speak to her kindly,' said the young lady to her companion. 'Poor
creature!  She seems to need it.'

'Your haughty religious people would have held their heads up to see me
as I am to-night, and preached of flames and vengeance,' cried the
girl.  'Oh, dear lady, why ar'n't those who claim to be God's own folks
as gentle and as kind to us poor wretches as you, who, having youth,
and beauty, and all that they have lost, might be a little proud
instead of so much humbler?'

'Ah!' said the gentleman.  'A Turk turns his face, after washing it
well, to the East, when he says his prayers; these good people, after
giving their faces such a rub against the World as to take the smiles
off, turn with no less regularity, to the darkest side of Heaven.
Between the Mussulman and the Pharisee, commend me to the first!'

These words appeared to be addressed to the young lady, and were
perhaps uttered with the view of affording Nancy time to recover
herself.  The gentleman, shortly afterwards, addressed himself to her.

'You were not here last Sunday night,' he said.

'I couldn't come,' replied Nancy; 'I was kept by force.'

'By whom?'

'Him that I told the young lady of before.'

'You were not suspected of holding any communication with anybody on
the subject which has brought us here to-night, I hope?' asked the old
gentleman.

'No,' replied the girl, shaking her head.  'It's not very easy for me
to leave him unless he knows why; I couldn't give him a drink of
laudanum before I came away.'

'Did he awake before you returned?' inquired the gentleman.

'No; and neither he nor any of them suspect me.'

'Good,' said the gentleman.  'Now listen to me.'

'I am ready,' replied the girl, as he paused for a moment.

'This young lady,' the gentleman began, 'has communicated to me, and to
some other friends who can be safely trusted, what you told her nearly
a fortnight since.  I confess to you that I had doubts, at first,
whether you were to be implicitly relied upon, but now I firmly believe
you are.'

'I am,' said the girl earnestly.

'I repeat that I firmly believe it.  To prove to you that I am disposed
to trust you, I tell you without reserve, that we propose to extort the
secret, whatever it may be, from the fear of this man Monks.  But
if--if--' said the gentleman, 'he cannot be secured, or, if secured,
cannot be acted upon as we wish, you must deliver up the Jew.'

'Fagin,' cried the girl, recoiling.

'That man must be delivered up by you,' said the gentleman.

'I will not do it!  I will never do it!' replied the girl. 'Devil that
he is, and worse than devil as he has been to me, I will never do that.'

'You will not?' said the gentleman, who seemed fully prepared for this
answer.

'Never!' returned the girl.

'Tell me why?'

'For one reason,' rejoined the girl firmly, 'for one reason, that the
lady knows and will stand by me in, I know she will, for I have her
promise:  and for this other reason, besides, that, bad life as he has
led, I have led a bad life too; there are many of us who have kept the
same courses together, and I'll not turn upon them, who might--any of
them--have turned upon me, but didn't, bad as they are.'

'Then,' said the gentleman, quickly, as if this had been the point he
had been aiming to attain; 'put Monks into my hands, and leave him to
me to deal with.'

'What if he turns against the others?'

'I promise you that in that case, if the truth is forced from him,
there the matter will rest; there must be circumstances in Oliver's
little history which it would be painful to drag before the public eye,
and if the truth is once elicited, they shall go scot free.'

'And if it is not?' suggested the girl.

'Then,' pursued the gentleman, 'this Fagin shall not be brought to
justice without your consent.  In such a case I could show you reasons,
I think, which would induce you to yield it.'

'Have I the lady's promise for that?' asked the girl.

'You have,' replied Rose.  'My true and faithful pledge.'

'Monks would never learn how you knew what you do?' said the girl,
after a short pause.

'Never,' replied the gentleman.  'The intelligence should be brought to
bear upon him, that he could never even guess.'

'I have been a liar, and among liars from a little child,' said the
girl after another interval of silence, 'but I will take your words.'

After receiving an assurance from both, that she might safely do so,
she proceeded in a voice so low that it was often difficult for the
listener to discover even the purport of what she said, to describe, by
name and situation, the public-house whence she had been followed that
night.  From the manner in which she occasionally paused, it appeared
as if the gentleman were making some hasty notes of the information she
communicated.  When she had thoroughly explained the localities of the
place, the best position from which to watch it without exciting
observation, and the night and hour on which Monks was most in the
habit of frequenting it, she seemed to consider for a few moments, for
the purpose of recalling his features and appearances more forcibly to
her recollection.

'He is tall,' said the girl, 'and a strongly made man, but not stout;
he has a lurking walk; and as he walks, constantly looks over his
shoulder, first on one side, and then on the other. Don't forget that,
for his eyes are sunk in his head so much deeper than any other man's,
that you might almost tell him by that alone.  His face is dark, like
his hair and eyes; and, although he can't be more than six or eight and
twenty, withered and haggard. His lips are often discoloured and
disfigured with the marks of teeth; for he has desperate fits, and
sometimes even bites his hands and covers them with wounds--why did you
start?' said the girl, stopping suddenly.

The gentleman replied, in a hurried manner, that he was not conscious
of having done so, and begged her to proceed.

'Part of this,' said the girl, 'I have drawn out from other people at
the house I tell you of, for I have only seen him twice, and both times
he was covered up in a large cloak.  I think that's all I can give you
to know him by.  Stay though,' she added.  'Upon his throat:  so high
that you can see a part of it below his neckerchief when he turns his
face:  there is--'

'A broad red mark, like a burn or scald?' cried the gentleman.

'How's this?' said the girl.  'You know him!'

The young lady uttered a cry of surprise, and for a few moments they
were so still that the listener could distinctly hear them breathe.

'I think I do,' said the gentleman, breaking silence.  'I should by
your description.  We shall see.  Many people are singularly like each
other.  It may not be the same.'

As he expressed himself to this effect, with assumed carelessness, he
took a step or two nearer the concealed spy, as the latter could tell
from the distinctness with which he heard him mutter, 'It must be he!'

'Now,' he said, returning:  so it seemed by the sound:  to the spot
where he had stood before, 'you have given us most valuable assistance,
young woman, and I wish you to be the better for it. What can I do to
serve you?'

'Nothing,' replied Nancy.

'You will not persist in saying that,' rejoined the gentleman, with a
voice and emphasis of kindness that might have touched a much harder
and more obdurate heart. 'Think now.  Tell me.'

'Nothing, sir,' rejoined the girl, weeping.  'You can do nothing to
help me.  I am past all hope, indeed.'

'You put yourself beyond its pale,' said the gentleman. 'The past has
been a dreary waste with you, of youthful energies mis-spent, and such
priceless treasures lavished, as the Creator bestows but once and never
grants again, but, for the future, you may hope. I do not say that it
is in our power to offer you peace of heart and mind, for that must
come as you seek it; but a quiet asylum, either in England, or, if you
fear to remain here, in some foreign country, it is not only within the
compass of our ability but our most anxious wish to secure you. Before
the dawn of morning, before this river wakes to the first glimpse of
day-light, you shall be placed as entirely beyond the reach of your
former associates, and leave as utter an absence of all trace behind
you, as if you were to disappear from the earth this moment.  Come!  I
would not have you go back to exchange one word with any old companion,
or take one look at any old haunt, or breathe the very air which is
pestilence and death to you.  Quit them all, while there is time and
opportunity!'

'She will be persuaded now,' cried the young lady.  'She hesitates, I
am sure.'

'I fear not, my dear,' said the gentleman.

'No sir, I do not,' replied the girl, after a short struggle.  'I am
chained to my old life.  I loathe and hate it now, but I cannot leave
it.  I must have gone too far to turn back,--and yet I don't know, for
if you had spoken to me so, some time ago, I should have laughed it
off.  But,' she said, looking hastily round, 'this fear comes over me
again.  I must go home.'

'Home!' repeated the young lady, with great stress upon the word.

'Home, lady,' rejoined the girl.  'To such a home as I have raised for
myself with the work of my whole life.  Let us part. I shall be watched
or seen.  Go!  Go!  If I have done you any service all I ask is, that
you leave me, and let me go my way alone.'

'It is useless,' said the gentleman, with a sigh.  'We compromise her
safety, perhaps, by staying here.  We may have detained her longer than
she expected already.'

'Yes, yes,' urged the girl. 'You have.'

'What,' cried the young lady, 'can be the end of this poor creature's
life!'

'What!' repeated the girl.  'Look before you, lady.  Look at that dark
water.  How many times do you read of such as I who spring into the
tide, and leave no living thing, to care for, or bewail them.  It may
be years hence, or it may be only months, but I shall come to that at
last.'

'Do not speak thus, pray,' returned the young lady, sobbing.

'It will never reach your ears, dear lady, and God forbid such horrors
should!' replied the girl.  'Good-night, good-night!'

The gentleman turned away.

'This purse,' cried the young lady.  'Take it for my sake, that you may
have some resource in an hour of need and trouble.'

'No!' replied the girl.  'I have not done this for money.  Let me have
that to think of.  And yet--give me something that you have worn:  I
should like to have something--no, no, not a ring--your gloves or
handkerchief--anything that I can keep, as having belonged to you,
sweet lady.  There.  Bless you!  God bless you. Good-night, good-night!'

The violent agitation of the girl, and the apprehension of some
discovery which would subject her to ill-usage and violence, seemed to
determine the gentleman to leave her, as she requested.

The sound of retreating footsteps were audible and the voices ceased.

The two figures of the young lady and her companion soon afterwards
appeared upon the bridge.  They stopped at the summit of the stairs.

'Hark!' cried the young lady, listening.  'Did she call!  I thought I
heard her voice.'

'No, my love,' replied Mr. Brownlow, looking sadly back. 'She has not
moved, and will not till we are gone.'

Rose Maylie lingered, but the old gentleman drew her arm through his,
and led her, with gentle force, away.  As they disappeared, the girl
sunk down nearly at her full length upon one of the stone stairs, and
vented the anguish of her heart in bitter tears.

After a time she arose, and with feeble and tottering steps ascended
the street.  The astonished listener remained motionless on his post
for some minutes afterwards, and having ascertained, with many cautious
glances round him, that he was again alone, crept slowly from his
hiding-place, and returned, stealthily and in the shade of the wall, in
the same manner as he had descended.

Peeping out, more than once, when he reached the top, to make sure that
he was unobserved, Noah Claypole darted away at his utmost speed, and
made for the Jew's house as fast as his legs would carry him.



CHAPTER XLVII

FATAL CONSEQUENCES

It was nearly two hours before day-break; that time which in the autumn
of the year, may be truly called the dead of night; when the streets
are silent and deserted; when even sounds appear to slumber, and
profligacy and riot have staggered home to dream; it was at this still
and silent hour, that Fagin sat watching in his old lair, with face so
distorted and pale, and eyes so red and blood-shot, that he looked less
like a man, than like some hideous phantom, moist from the grave, and
worried by an evil spirit.

He sat crouching over a cold hearth, wrapped in an old torn coverlet,
with his face turned towards a wasting candle that stood upon a table
by his side.  His right hand was raised to his lips, and as, absorbed
in thought, he hit his long black nails, he disclosed among his
toothless gums a few such fangs as should have been a dog's or rat's.

Stretched upon a mattress on the floor, lay Noah Claypole, fast asleep.
Towards him the old man sometimes directed his eyes for an instant, and
then brought them back again to the candle; which with a long-burnt
wick drooping almost double, and hot grease falling down in clots upon
the table, plainly showed that his thoughts were busy elsewhere.

Indeed they were.  Mortification at the overthrow of his notable
scheme; hatred of the girl who had dared to palter with strangers; and
utter distrust of the sincerity of her refusal to yield him up; bitter
disappointment at the loss of his revenge on Sikes; the fear of
detection, and ruin, and death; and a fierce and deadly rage kindled by
all; these were the passionate considerations which, following close
upon each other with rapid and ceaseless whirl, shot through the brain
of Fagin, as every evil thought and blackest purpose lay working at his
heart.

He sat without changing his attitude in the least, or appearing to take
the smallest heed of time, until his quick ear seemed to be attracted
by a footstep in the street.

'At last,' he muttered, wiping his dry and fevered mouth. 'At last!'

The bell rang gently as he spoke.  He crept upstairs to the door, and
presently returned accompanied by a man muffled to the chin, who
carried a bundle under one arm. Sitting down and throwing back his
outer coat, the man displayed the burly frame of Sikes.

'There!' he said, laying the bundle on the table.  'Take care of that,
and do the most you can with it.  It's been trouble enough to get; I
thought I should have been here, three hours ago.'

Fagin laid his hand upon the bundle, and locking it in the cupboard,
sat down again without speaking.  But he did not take his eyes off the
robber, for an instant, during this action; and now that they sat over
against each other, face to face, he looked fixedly at him, with his
lips quivering so violently, and his face so altered by the emotions
which had mastered him, that the housebreaker involuntarily drew back
his chair, and surveyed him with a look of real affright.

'Wot now?' cried Sikes.  'Wot do you look at a man so for?'

Fagin raised his right hand, and shook his trembling forefinger in the
air; but his passion was so great, that the power of speech was for the
moment gone.

'Damme!' said Sikes, feeling in his breast with a look of alarm. 'He's
gone mad.  I must look to myself here.'

'No, no,' rejoined Fagin, finding his voice.  'It's not--you're not the
person, Bill.  I've no--no fault to find with you.'

'Oh, you haven't, haven't you?' said Sikes, looking sternly at him, and
ostentatiously passing a pistol into a more convenient pocket.  'That's
lucky--for one of us.  Which one that is, don't matter.'

'I've got that to tell you, Bill,' said Fagin, drawing his chair
nearer, 'will make you worse than me.'

'Aye?' returned the robber with an incredulous air.  'Tell away! Look
sharp, or Nance will think I'm lost.'

'Lost!' cried Fagin.  'She has pretty well settled that, in her own
mind, already.'

Sikes looked with an aspect of great perplexity into the Jew's face,
and reading no satisfactory explanation of the riddle there, clenched
his coat collar in his huge hand and shook him soundly.

'Speak, will you!' he said; 'or if you don't, it shall be for want of
breath.  Open your mouth and say wot you've got to say in plain words.
Out with it, you thundering old cur, out with it!'

'Suppose that lad that's laying there--' Fagin began.

Sikes turned round to where Noah was sleeping, as if he had not
previously observed him.  'Well!' he said, resuming his former position.

'Suppose that lad,' pursued Fagin, 'was to peach--to blow upon us
all--first seeking out the right folks for the purpose, and then having
a meeting with 'em in the street to paint our likenesses, describe
every mark that they might know us by, and the crib where we might be
most easily taken.  Suppose he was to do all this, and besides to blow
upon a plant we've all been in, more or less--of his own fancy; not
grabbed, trapped, tried, earwigged by the parson and brought to it on
bread and water,--but of his own fancy; to please his own taste;
stealing out at nights to find those most interested against us, and
peaching to them.  Do you hear me?' cried the Jew, his eyes flashing
with rage.  'Suppose he did all this, what then?'

'What then!' replied Sikes; with a tremendous oath.  'If he was left
alive till I came, I'd grind his skull under the iron heel of my boot
into as many grains as there are hairs upon his head.'

'What if I did it!' cried Fagin almost in a yell.  'I, that knows so
much, and could hang so many besides myself!'

'I don't know,' replied Sikes, clenching his teeth and turning white at
the mere suggestion.  'I'd do something in the jail that 'ud get me put
in irons; and if I was tried along with you, I'd fall upon you with
them in the open court, and beat your brains out afore the people. I
should have such strength,' muttered the robber, poising his brawny
arm, 'that I could smash your head as if a loaded waggon had gone over
it.'

'You would?'

'Would I!' said the housebreaker.  'Try me.'

'If it was Charley, or the Dodger, or Bet, or--'

'I don't care who,' replied Sikes impatiently.  'Whoever it was, I'd
serve them the same.'

Fagin looked hard at the robber; and, motioning him to be silent,
stooped over the bed upon the floor, and shook the sleeper to rouse
him.  Sikes leant forward in his chair:  looking on with his hands upon
his knees, as if wondering much what all this questioning and
preparation was to end in.

'Bolter, Bolter!  Poor lad!' said Fagin, looking up with an expression
of devilish anticipation, and speaking slowly and with marked emphasis.
'He's tired--tired with watching for her so long,--watching for _her_,
Bill.'

'Wot d'ye mean?' asked Sikes, drawing back.

Fagin made no answer, but bending over the sleeper again, hauled him
into a sitting posture.  When his assumed name had been repeated
several times, Noah rubbed his eyes, and, giving a heavy yawn, looked
sleepily about him.

'Tell me that again--once again, just for him to hear,' said the Jew,
pointing to Sikes as he spoke.

'Tell yer what?' asked the sleepy Noah, shaking himself pettishly.

'That about-- _Nancy_,' said Fagin, clutching Sikes by the wrist, as if
to prevent his leaving the house before he had heard enough. 'You
followed her?'

'Yes.'

'To London Bridge?'

'Yes.'

'Where she met two people.'

'So she did.'

'A gentleman and a lady that she had gone to of her own accord before,
who asked her to give up all her pals, and Monks first, which she
did--and to describe him, which she did--and to tell her what house it
was that we meet at, and go to, which she did--and where it could be
best watched from, which she did--and what time the people went there,
which she did.  She did all this.  She told it all every word without a
threat, without a murmur--she did--did she not?' cried Fagin, half mad
with fury.

'All right,' replied Noah, scratching his head.  'That's just what it
was!'

'What did they say, about last Sunday?'

'About last Sunday!' replied Noah, considering.  'Why I told yer that
before.'

'Again.  Tell it again!' cried Fagin, tightening his grasp on Sikes,
and brandishing his other hand aloft, as the foam flew from his lips.

'They asked her,' said Noah, who, as he grew more wakeful, seemed to
have a dawning perception who Sikes was, 'they asked her why she didn't
come, last Sunday, as she promised.  She said she couldn't.'

'Why--why?  Tell him that.'

'Because she was forcibly kept at home by Bill, the man she had told
them of before,' replied Noah.

'What more of him?' cried Fagin.  'What more of the man she had told
them of before?  Tell him that, tell him that.'

'Why, that she couldn't very easily get out of doors unless he knew
where she was going to,' said Noah; 'and so the first time she went to
see the lady, she--ha! ha! ha! it made me laugh when she said it, that
it did--she gave him a drink of laudanum.'

'Hell's fire!' cried Sikes, breaking fiercely from the Jew.  'Let me
go!'

Flinging the old man from him, he rushed from the room, and darted,
wildly and furiously, up the stairs.

'Bill, Bill!' cried Fagin, following him hastily.  'A word. Only a
word.'

The word would not have been exchanged, but that the housebreaker was
unable to open the door:  on which he was expending fruitless oaths and
violence, when the Jew came panting up.

'Let me out,' said Sikes.  'Don't speak to me; it's not safe. Let me
out, I say!'

'Hear me speak a word,' rejoined Fagin, laying his hand upon the lock.
'You won't be--'

'Well,' replied the other.

'You won't be--too--violent, Bill?'

The day was breaking, and there was light enough for the men to see
each other's faces.  They exchanged one brief glance; there was a fire
in the eyes of both, which could not be mistaken.

'I mean,' said Fagin, showing that he felt all disguise was now
useless, 'not too violent for safety.  Be crafty, Bill, and not too
bold.'

Sikes made no reply; but, pulling open the door, of which Fagin had
turned the lock, dashed into the silent streets.

Without one pause, or moment's consideration; without once turning his
head to the right or left, or raising his eyes to the sky, or lowering
them to the ground, but looking straight before him with savage
resolution:  his teeth so tightly compressed that the strained jaw
seemed starting through his skin; the robber held on his headlong
course, nor muttered a word, nor relaxed a muscle, until he reached his
own door.  He opened it, softly, with a key; strode lightly up the
stairs; and entering his own room, double-locked the door, and lifting
a heavy table against it, drew back the curtain of the bed.

The girl was lying, half-dressed, upon it.  He had roused her from her
sleep, for she raised herself with a hurried and startled look.

'Get up!' said the man.

'It is you, Bill!' said the girl, with an expression of pleasure at his
return.

'It is,' was the reply.  'Get up.'

There was a candle burning, but the man hastily drew it from the
candlestick, and hurled it under the grate.  Seeing the faint light of
early day without, the girl rose to undraw the curtain.

'Let it be,' said Sikes, thrusting his hand before her. 'There's enough
light for wot I've got to do.'

'Bill,' said the girl, in the low voice of alarm, 'why do you look like
that at me!'

The robber sat regarding her, for a few seconds, with dilated nostrils
and heaving breast; and then, grasping her by the head and throat,
dragged her into the middle of the room, and looking once towards the
door, placed his heavy hand upon her mouth.

'Bill, Bill!' gasped the girl, wrestling with the strength of mortal
fear,--'I--I won't scream or cry--not once--hear me--speak to me--tell
me what I have done!'

'You know, you she devil!' returned the robber, suppressing his breath.
'You were watched to-night; every word you said was heard.'

'Then spare my life for the love of Heaven, as I spared yours,'
rejoined the girl, clinging to him.  'Bill, dear Bill, you cannot have
the heart to kill me.  Oh! think of all I have given up, only this one
night, for you.  You _shall_ have time to think, and save yourself this
crime; I will not loose my hold, you cannot throw me off.  Bill, Bill,
for dear God's sake, for your own, for mine, stop before you spill my
blood!  I have been true to you, upon my guilty soul I have!'

The man struggled violently, to release his arms; but those of the girl
were clasped round his, and tear her as he would, he could not tear
them away.

'Bill,' cried the girl, striving to lay her head upon his breast, 'the
gentleman and that dear lady, told me to-night of a home in some
foreign country where I could end my days in solitude and peace.  Let
me see them again, and beg them, on my knees, to show the same mercy
and goodness to you; and let us both leave this dreadful place, and far
apart lead better lives, and forget how we have lived, except in
prayers, and never see each other more. It is never too late to repent.
They told me so--I feel it now--but we must have time--a little, little
time!'

The housebreaker freed one arm, and grasped his pistol. The certainty
of immediate detection if he fired, flashed across his mind even in the
midst of his fury; and he beat it twice with all the force he could
summon, upon the upturned face that almost touched his own.

She staggered and fell:  nearly blinded with the blood that rained down
from a deep gash in her forehead; but raising herself, with difficulty,
on her knees, drew from her bosom a white handkerchief--Rose Maylie's
own--and holding it up, in her folded hands, as high towards Heaven as
her feeble strength would allow, breathed one prayer for mercy to her
Maker.

It was a ghastly figure to look upon.  The murderer staggering backward
to the wall, and shutting out the sight with his hand, seized a heavy
club and struck her down.



CHAPTER XLVIII

THE FLIGHT OF SIKES

Of all bad deeds that, under cover of the darkness, had been committed
within wide London's bounds since night hung over it, that was the
worst.  Of all the horrors that rose with an ill scent upon the morning
air, that was the foulest and most cruel.

The sun--the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new
life, and hope, and freshness to man--burst upon the crowded city in
clear and radiant glory.  Through costly-coloured glass and
paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed
its equal ray.  It lighted up the room where the murdered woman lay.
It did.  He tried to shut it out, but it would stream in.  If the sight
had been a ghastly one in the dull morning, what was it, now, in all
that brilliant light!

He had not moved; he had been afraid to stir.  There had been a moan
and motion of the hand; and, with terror added to rage, he had struck
and struck again.  Once he threw a rug over it; but it was worse to
fancy the eyes, and imagine them moving towards him, than to see them
glaring upward, as if watching the reflection of the pool of gore that
quivered and danced in the sunlight on the ceiling.  He had plucked it
off again.  And there was the body--mere flesh and blood, no more--but
such flesh, and so much blood!

He struck a light, kindled a fire, and thrust the club into it. There
was hair upon the end, which blazed and shrunk into a light cinder,
and, caught by the air, whirled up the chimney.  Even that frightened
him, sturdy as he was; but he held the weapon till it broke, and then
piled it on the coals to burn away, and smoulder into ashes.  He washed
himself, and rubbed his clothes; there were spots that would not be
removed, but he cut the pieces out, and burnt them.  How those stains
were dispersed about the room!  The very feet of the dog were bloody.

All this time he had, never once, turned his back upon the corpse; no,
not for a moment.  Such preparations completed, he moved, backward,
towards the door:  dragging the dog with him, lest he should soil his
feet anew and carry out new evidence of the crime into the streets. He
shut the door softly, locked it, took the key, and left the house.

He crossed over, and glanced up at the window, to be sure that nothing
was visible from the outside.  There was the curtain still drawn, which
she would have opened to admit the light she never saw again.  It lay
nearly under there.  _He_ knew that.  God, how the sun poured down upon
the very spot!

The glance was instantaneous.  It was a relief to have got free of the
room.  He whistled on the dog, and walked rapidly away.

He went through Islington; strode up the hill at Highgate on which
stands the stone in honour of Whittington; turned down to Highgate
Hill, unsteady of purpose, and uncertain where to go; struck off to the
right again, almost as soon as he began to descend it; and taking the
foot-path across the fields, skirted Caen Wood, and so came on
Hampstead Heath.  Traversing the hollow by the Vale of Heath, he
mounted the opposite bank, and crossing the road which joins the
villages of Hampstead and Highgate, made along the remaining portion of
the heath to the fields at North End, in one of which he laid himself
down under a hedge, and slept.

Soon he was up again, and away,--not far into the country, but back
towards London by the high-road--then back again--then over another
part of the same ground as he already traversed--then wandering up and
down in fields, and lying on ditches' brinks to rest, and starting up
to make for some other spot, and do the same, and ramble on again.

Where could he go, that was near and not too public, to get some meat
and drink?  Hendon.  That was a good place, not far off, and out of
most people's way.  Thither he directed his steps,--running sometimes,
and sometimes, with a strange perversity, loitering at a snail's pace,
or stopping altogether and idly breaking the hedges with a stick.  But
when he got there, all the people he met--the very children at the
doors--seemed to view him with suspicion.  Back he turned again,
without the courage to purchase bit or drop, though he had tasted no
food for many hours; and once more he lingered on the Heath, uncertain
where to go.

He wandered over miles and miles of ground, and still came back to the
old place.  Morning and noon had passed, and the day was on the wane,
and still he rambled to and fro, and up and down, and round and round,
and still lingered about the same spot.  At last he got away, and
shaped his course for Hatfield.

It was nine o'clock at night, when the man, quite tired out, and the
dog, limping and lame from the unaccustomed exercise, turned down the
hill by the church of the quiet village, and plodding along the little
street, crept into a small public-house, whose scanty light had guided
them to the spot.  There was a fire in the tap-room, and some
country-labourers were drinking before it.

They made room for the stranger, but he sat down in the furthest
corner, and ate and drank alone, or rather with his dog:  to whom he
cast a morsel of food from time to time.

The conversation of the men assembled here, turned upon the
neighbouring land, and farmers; and when those topics were exhausted,
upon the age of some old man who had been buried on the previous
Sunday; the young men present considering him very old, and the old men
present declaring him to have been quite young--not older, one
white-haired grandfather said, than he was--with ten or fifteen year of
life in him at least--if he had taken care; if he had taken care.

There was nothing to attract attention, or excite alarm in this. The
robber, after paying his reckoning, sat silent and unnoticed in his
corner, and had almost dropped asleep, when he was half wakened by the
noisy entrance of a new comer.

This was an antic fellow, half pedlar and half mountebank, who
travelled about the country on foot to vend hones, strops, razors,
washballs, harness-paste, medicine for dogs and horses, cheap
perfumery, cosmetics, and such-like wares, which he carried in a case
slung to his back.  His entrance was the signal for various homely
jokes with the countrymen, which slackened not until he had made his
supper, and opened his box of treasures, when he ingeniously contrived
to unite business with amusement.

'And what be that stoof?  Good to eat, Harry?' asked a grinning
countryman, pointing to some composition-cakes in one corner.

'This,' said the fellow, producing one, 'this is the infallible and
invaluable composition for removing all sorts of stain, rust, dirt,
mildew, spick, speck, spot, or spatter, from silk, satin, linen,
cambric, cloth, crape, stuff, carpet, merino, muslin, bombazeen, or
woollen stuff.  Wine-stains, fruit-stains, beer-stains, water-stains,
paint-stains, pitch-stains, any stains, all come out at one rub with
the infallible and invaluable composition.  If a lady stains her
honour, she has only need to swallow one cake and she's cured at
once--for it's poison.  If a gentleman wants to prove this, he has only
need to bolt one little square, and he has put it beyond question--for
it's quite as satisfactory as a pistol-bullet, and a great deal nastier
in the flavour, consequently the more credit in taking it.  One penny a
square.  With all these virtues, one penny a square!'

There were two buyers directly, and more of the listeners plainly
hesitated.  The vendor observing this, increased in loquacity.

'It's all bought up as fast as it can be made,' said the fellow. 'There
are fourteen water-mills, six steam-engines, and a galvanic battery,
always a-working upon it, and they can't make it fast enough, though
the men work so hard that they die off, and the widows is pensioned
directly, with twenty pound a-year for each of the children, and a
premium of fifty for twins.  One penny a square!  Two half-pence is all
the same, and four farthings is received with joy.  One penny a square!
Wine-stains, fruit-stains, beer-stains, water-stains, paint-stains,
pitch-stains, mud-stains, blood-stains!  Here is a stain upon the hat
of a gentleman in company, that I'll take clean out, before he can
order me a pint of ale.'

'Hah!' cried Sikes starting up.  'Give that back.'

'I'll take it clean out, sir,' replied the man, winking to the company,
'before you can come across the room to get it. Gentlemen all, observe
the dark stain upon this gentleman's hat, no wider than a shilling, but
thicker than a half-crown.  Whether it is a wine-stain, fruit-stain,
beer-stain, water-stain, paint-stain, pitch-stain, mud-stain, or
blood-stain--'

The man got no further, for Sikes with a hideous imprecation overthrew
the table, and tearing the hat from him, burst out of the house.

With the same perversity of feeling and irresolution that had fastened
upon him, despite himself, all day, the murderer, finding that he was
not followed, and that they most probably considered him some drunken
sullen fellow, turned back up the town, and getting out of the glare of
the lamps of a stage-coach that was standing in the street, was walking
past, when he recognised the mail from London, and saw that it was
standing at the little post-office.  He almost knew what was to come;
but he crossed over, and listened.

The guard was standing at the door, waiting for the letter-bag. A man,
dressed like a game-keeper, came up at the moment, and he handed him a
basket which lay ready on the pavement.

'That's for your people,' said the guard.  'Now, look alive in there,
will you.  Damn that 'ere bag, it warn't ready night afore last; this
won't do, you know!'

'Anything new up in town, Ben?' asked the game-keeper, drawing back to
the window-shutters, the better to admire the horses.

'No, nothing that I knows on,' replied the man, pulling on his gloves.
'Corn's up a little.  I heerd talk of a murder, too, down Spitalfields
way, but I don't reckon much upon it.'

'Oh, that's quite true,' said a gentleman inside, who was looking out
of the window.  'And a dreadful murder it was.'

'Was it, sir?' rejoined the guard, touching his hat.  'Man or woman,
pray, sir?'

'A woman,' replied the gentleman.  'It is supposed--'

'Now, Ben,' replied the coachman impatiently.

'Damn that 'ere bag,' said the guard; 'are you gone to sleep in there?'

'Coming!' cried the office keeper, running out.

'Coming,' growled the guard.  'Ah, and so's the young 'ooman of
property that's going to take a fancy to me, but I don't know when.
Here, give hold.  All ri--ight!'

The horn sounded a few cheerful notes, and the coach was gone.

Sikes remained standing in the street, apparently unmoved by what he
had just heard, and agitated by no stronger feeling than a doubt where
to go.  At length he went back again, and took the road which leads
from Hatfield to St. Albans.

He went on doggedly; but as he left the town behind him, and plunged
into the solitude and darkness of the road, he felt a dread and awe
creeping upon him which shook him to the core. Every object before him,
substance or shadow, still or moving, took the semblance of some
fearful thing; but these fears were nothing compared to the sense that
haunted him of that morning's ghastly figure following at his heels.
He could trace its shadow in the gloom, supply the smallest item of the
outline, and note how stiff and solemn it seemed to stalk along.  He
could hear its garments rustling in the leaves, and every breath of
wind came laden with that last low cry.  If he stopped it did the same.
If he ran, it followed--not running too:  that would have been a
relief:  but like a corpse endowed with the mere machinery of life, and
borne on one slow melancholy wind that never rose or fell.

At times, he turned, with desperate determination, resolved to beat
this phantom off, though it should look him dead; but the hair rose on
his head, and his blood stood still, for it had turned with him and was
behind him then.  He had kept it before him that morning, but it was
behind now--always.  He leaned his back against a bank, and felt that
it stood above him, visibly out against the cold night-sky.  He threw
himself upon the road--on his back upon the road.  At his head it
stood, silent, erect, and still--a living grave-stone, with its epitaph
in blood.

Let no man talk of murderers escaping justice, and hint that Providence
must sleep.  There were twenty score of violent deaths in one long
minute of that agony of fear.

There was a shed in a field he passed, that offered shelter for the
night.  Before the door, were three tall poplar trees, which made it
very dark within; and the wind moaned through them with a dismal wail.
He _could not_ walk on, till daylight came again; and here he stretched
himself close to the wall--to undergo new torture.

For now, a vision came before him, as constant and more terrible than
that from which he had escaped.  Those widely staring eyes, so
lustreless and so glassy, that he had better borne to see them than
think upon them, appeared in the midst of the darkness: light in
themselves, but giving light to nothing.  There were but two, but they
were everywhere.  If he shut out the sight, there came the room with
every well-known object--some, indeed, that he would have forgotten, if
he had gone over its contents from memory--each in its accustomed
place.  The body was in _its_ place, and its eyes were as he saw them
when he stole away.  He got up, and rushed into the field without.  The
figure was behind him. He re-entered the shed, and shrunk down once
more.  The eyes were there, before he had laid himself along.

And here he remained in such terror as none but he can know, trembling
in every limb, and the cold sweat starting from every pore, when
suddenly there arose upon the night-wind the noise of distant shouting,
and the roar of voices mingled in alarm and wonder.  Any sound of men
in that lonely place, even though it conveyed a real cause of alarm,
was something to him.  He regained his strength and energy at the
prospect of personal danger; and springing to his feet, rushed into the
open air.

The broad sky seemed on fire.  Rising into the air with showers of
sparks, and rolling one above the other, were sheets of flame, lighting
the atmosphere for miles round, and driving clouds of smoke in the
direction where he stood.  The shouts grew louder as new voices swelled
the roar, and he could hear the cry of Fire! mingled with the ringing
of an alarm-bell, the fall of heavy bodies, and the crackling of flames
as they twined round some new obstacle, and shot aloft as though
refreshed by food.  The noise increased as he looked.  There were
people there--men and women--light, bustle.  It was like new life to
him.  He darted onward--straight, headlong--dashing through brier and
brake, and leaping gate and fence as madly as his dog, who careered
with loud and sounding bark before him.

He came upon the spot.  There were half-dressed figures tearing to and
fro, some endeavouring to drag the frightened horses from the stables,
others driving the cattle from the yard and out-houses, and others
coming laden from the burning pile, amidst a shower of falling sparks,
and the tumbling down of red-hot beams.  The apertures, where doors and
windows stood an hour ago, disclosed a mass of raging fire; walls
rocked and crumbled into the burning well; the molten lead and iron
poured down, white hot, upon the ground.  Women and children shrieked,
and men encouraged each other with noisy shouts and cheers.  The
clanking of the engine-pumps, and the spirting and hissing of the water
as it fell upon the blazing wood, added to the tremendous roar.  He
shouted, too, till he was hoarse; and flying from memory and himself,
plunged into the thickest of the throng.  Hither and thither he dived
that night:  now working at the pumps, and now hurrying through the
smoke and flame, but never ceasing to engage himself wherever noise and
men were thickest.  Up and down the ladders, upon the roofs of
buildings, over floors that quaked and trembled with his weight, under
the lee of falling bricks and stones, in every part of that great fire
was he; but he bore a charmed life, and had neither scratch nor bruise,
nor weariness nor thought, till morning dawned again, and only smoke
and blackened ruins remained.

This mad excitement over, there returned, with ten-fold force, the
dreadful consciousness of his crime.  He looked suspiciously about him,
for the men were conversing in groups, and he feared to be the subject
of their talk.  The dog obeyed the significant beck of his finger, and
they drew off, stealthily, together.  He passed near an engine where
some men were seated, and they called to him to share in their
refreshment.  He took some bread and meat; and as he drank a draught of
beer, heard the firemen, who were from London, talking about the
murder.  'He has gone to Birmingham, they say,' said one:  'but they'll
have him yet, for the scouts are out, and by to-morrow night there'll
be a cry all through the country.'

He hurried off, and walked till he almost dropped upon the ground; then
lay down in a lane, and had a long, but broken and uneasy sleep.  He
wandered on again, irresolute and undecided, and oppressed with the
fear of another solitary night.

Suddenly, he took the desperate resolution to going back to London.

'There's somebody to speak to there, at all event,' he thought. 'A good
hiding-place, too.  They'll never expect to nab me there, after this
country scent.  Why can't I lie by for a week or so, and, forcing blunt
from Fagin, get abroad to France?  Damme, I'll risk it.'

He acted upon this impulse without delay, and choosing the least
frequented roads began his journey back, resolved to lie concealed
within a short distance of the metropolis, and, entering it at dusk by
a circuitous route, to proceed straight to that part of it which he had
fixed on for his destination.

The dog, though.  If any description of him were out, it would not be
forgotten that the dog was missing, and had probably gone with him.
This might lead to his apprehension as he passed along the streets.  He
resolved to drown him, and walked on, looking about for a pond:
picking up a heavy stone and tying it to his handkerchief as he went.

The animal looked up into his master's face while these preparations
were making; whether his instinct apprehended something of their
purpose, or the robber's sidelong look at him was sterner than
ordinary, he skulked a little farther in the rear than usual, and
cowered as he came more slowly along.  When his master halted at the
brink of a pool, and looked round to call him, he stopped outright.

'Do you hear me call?  Come here!' cried Sikes.

The animal came up from the very force of habit; but as Sikes stooped
to attach the handkerchief to his throat, he uttered a low growl and
started back.

'Come back!' said the robber.

The dog wagged his tail, but moved not.  Sikes made a running noose and
called him again.

The dog advanced, retreated, paused an instant, and scoured away at his
hardest speed.

The man whistled again and again, and sat down and waited in the
expectation that he would return.  But no dog appeared, and at length
he resumed his journey.



CHAPTER XLIX

MONKS AND MR. BROWNLOW AT LENGTH MEET.  THEIR CONVERSATION, AND THE
INTELLIGENCE THAT INTERRUPTS IT

 The twilight was beginning to close in, when Mr. Brownlow
alighted from a hackney-coach at his own door, and knocked softly.  The
door being opened, a sturdy man got out of the coach and stationed
himself on one side of the steps, while another man, who had been
seated on the box, dismounted too, and stood upon the other side.  At a
sign from Mr. Brownlow, they helped out a third man, and taking him
between them, hurried him into the house. This man was Monks.

They walked in the same manner up the stairs without speaking, and Mr.
Brownlow, preceding them, led the way into a back-room. At the door of
this apartment, Monks, who had ascended with evident reluctance,
stopped.  The two men looked at the old gentleman as if for
instructions.

'He knows the alternative,' said Mr. Browlow.  'If he hesitates or
moves a finger but as you bid him, drag him into the street, call for
the aid of the police, and impeach him as a felon in my name.'

'How dare you say this of me?' asked Monks.

'How dare you urge me to it, young man?' replied Mr. Brownlow,
confronting him with a steady look.  'Are you mad enough to leave this
house?  Unhand him.  There, sir. You are free to go, and we to follow.
But I warn you, by all I hold most solemn and most sacred, that instant
will have you apprehended on a charge of fraud and robbery.  I am
resolute and immoveable.  If you are determined to be the same, your
blood be upon your own head!'

'By what authority am I kidnapped in the street, and brought here by
these dogs?' asked Monks, looking from one to the other of the men who
stood beside him.

'By mine,' replied Mr. Brownlow.  'Those persons are indemnified by me.
If you complain of being deprived of your liberty--you had power and
opportunity to retrieve it as you came along, but you deemed it
advisable to remain quiet--I say again, throw yourself for protection
on the law.  I will appeal to the law too; but when you have gone too
far to recede, do not sue to me for leniency, when the power will have
passed into other hands; and do not say I plunged you down the gulf
into which you rushed, yourself.'

Monks was plainly disconcerted, and alarmed besides.  He hesitated.

'You will decide quickly,' said Mr. Brownlow, with perfect firmness and
composure.  'If you wish me to prefer my charges publicly, and consign
you to a punishment the extent of which, although I can, with a
shudder, foresee, I cannot control, once more, I say, for you know the
way.  If not, and you appeal to my forbearance, and the mercy of those
you have deeply injured, seat yourself, without a word, in that chair.
It has waited for you two whole days.'

Monks muttered some unintelligible words, but wavered still.

'You will be prompt,' said Mr. Brownlow.  'A word from me, and the
alternative has gone for ever.'

Still the man hesitated.

'I have not the inclination to parley,' said Mr. Brownlow, 'and, as I
advocate the dearest interests of others, I have not the right.'

'Is there--' demanded Monks with a faltering tongue,--'is there--no
middle course?'

'None.'

Monks looked at the old gentleman, with an anxious eye; but, reading in
his countenance nothing but severity and determination, walked into the
room, and, shrugging his shoulders, sat down.

'Lock the door on the outside,' said Mr. Brownlow to the attendants,
'and come when I ring.'

The men obeyed, and the two were left alone together.

'This is pretty treatment, sir,' said Monks, throwing down his hat and
cloak, 'from my father's oldest friend.'

'It is because I was your father's oldest friend, young man,' returned
Mr. Brownlow; 'it is because the hopes and wishes of young and happy
years were bound up with him, and that fair creature of his blood and
kindred who rejoined her God in youth, and left me here a solitary,
lonely man:  it is because he knelt with me beside his only sisters's
death-bed when he was yet a boy, on the morning that would--but Heaven
willed otherwise--have made her my young wife; it is because my seared
heart clung to him, from that time forth, through all his trials and
errors, till he died; it is because old recollections and associations
filled my heart, and even the sight of you brings with it old thoughts
of him; it is because of all these things that I am moved to treat you
gently now--yes, Edward Leeford, even now--and blush for your
unworthiness who bear the name.'

'What has the name to do with it?' asked the other, after
contemplating, half in silence, and half in dogged wonder, the
agitation of his companion.  'What is the name to me?'

'Nothing,' replied Mr. Brownlow, 'nothing to you.  But it was _hers_,
and even at this distance of time brings back to me, an old man, the
glow and thrill which I once felt, only to hear it repeated by a
stranger.  I am very glad you have changed it--very--very.'

'This is all mighty fine,' said Monks (to retain his assumed
designation) after a long silence, during which he had jerked himself
in sullen defiance to and fro, and Mr. Brownlow had sat, shading his
face with his hand. 'But what do you want with me?'

'You have a brother,' said Mr. Brownlow, rousing himself:  'a brother,
the whisper of whose name in your ear when I came behind you in the
street, was, in itself, almost enough to make you accompany me hither,
in wonder and alarm.'

'I have no brother,' replied Monks.  'You know I was an only child.
Why do you talk to me of brothers?  You know that, as well as I.'

'Attend to what I do know, and you may not,' said Mr. Brownlow. 'I
shall interest you by and by.  I know that of the wretched marriage,
into which family pride, and the most sordid and narrowest of all
ambition, forced your unhappy father when a mere boy, you were the sole
and most unnatural issue.'

'I don't care for hard names,' interrupted Monks with a jeering laugh.
'You know the fact, and that's enough for me.'

'But I also know,' pursued the old gentleman, 'the misery, the slow
torture, the protracted anguish of that ill-assorted union. I know how
listlessly and wearily each of that wretched pair dragged on their
heavy chain through a world that was poisoned to them both.  I know how
cold formalities were succeeded by open taunts; how indifference gave
place to dislike, dislike to hate, and hate to loathing, until at last
they wrenched the clanking bond asunder, and retiring a wide space
apart, carried each a galling fragment, of which nothing but death
could break the rivets, to hide it in new society beneath the gayest
looks they could assume.  Your mother succeeded; she forgot it soon.
But it rusted and cankered at your father's heart for years.'

'Well, they were separated,' said Monks, 'and what of that?'

'When they had been separated for some time,' returned Mr. Brownlow,
'and your mother, wholly given up to continental frivolities, had
utterly forgotten the young husband ten good years her junior, who,
with prospects blighted, lingered on at home, he fell among new
friends.  This circumstance, at least, you know already.'

'Not I,' said Monks, turning away his eyes and beating his foot upon
the ground, as a man who is determined to deny everything. 'Not I.'

'Your manner, no less than your actions, assures me that you have never
forgotten it, or ceased to think of it with bitterness,' returned Mr.
Brownlow.  'I speak of fifteen years ago, when you were not more than
eleven years old, and your father but one-and-thirty--for he was, I
repeat, a boy, when _his_ father ordered him to marry. Must I go back
to events which cast a shade upon the memory of your parent, or will
you spare it, and disclose to me the truth?'

'I have nothing to disclose,' rejoined Monks.  'You must talk on if you
will.'

'These new friends, then,' said Mr. Brownlow, 'were a naval officer
retired from active service, whose wife had died some half-a-year
before, and left him with two children--there had been more, but, of
all their family, happily but two survived. They were both daughters;
one a beautiful creature of nineteen, and the other a mere child of two
or three years old.'

'What's this to me?' asked Monks.

'They resided,' said Mr. Brownlow, without seeming to hear the
interruption, 'in a part of the country to which your father in his
wandering had repaired, and where he had taken up his abode.
Acquaintance, intimacy, friendship, fast followed on each other. Your
father was gifted as few men are.  He had his sister's soul and person.
As the old officer knew him more and more, he grew to love him.  I
would that it had ended there.  His daughter did the same.'

The old gentleman paused; Monks was biting his lips, with his eyes
fixed upon the floor; seeing this, he immediately resumed:

'The end of a year found him contracted, solemnly contracted, to that
daughter; the object of the first, true, ardent, only passion of a
guileless girl.'

'Your tale is of the longest,' observed Monks, moving restlessly in his
chair.

'It is a true tale of grief and trial, and sorrow, young man,' returned
Mr. Brownlow, 'and such tales usually are; if it were one of unmixed
joy and happiness, it would be very brief.  At length one of those rich
relations to strengthen whose interest and importance your father had
been sacrificed, as others are often--it is no uncommon case--died, and
to repair the misery he had been instrumental in occasioning, left him
his panacea for all griefs--Money.  It was necessary that he should
immediately repair to Rome, whither this man had sped for health, and
where he had died, leaving his affairs in great confusion.  He went;
was seized with mortal illness there; was followed, the moment the
intelligence reached Paris, by your mother who carried you with her; he
died the day after her arrival, leaving no will--_no will_--so that the
whole property fell to her and you.'

At this part of the recital Monks held his breath, and listened with a
face of intense eagerness, though his eyes were not directed towards
the speaker.  As Mr. Brownlow paused, he changed his position with the
air of one who has experienced a sudden relief, and wiped his hot face
and hands.

'Before he went abroad, and as he passed through London on his way,'
said Mr. Brownlow, slowly, and fixing his eyes upon the other's face,
'he came to me.'

'I never heard of that,' interrupted Monks in a tone intended to appear
incredulous, but savouring more of disagreeable surprise.

'He came to me, and left with me, among some other things, a picture--a
portrait painted by himself--a likeness of this poor girl--which he did
not wish to leave behind, and could not carry forward on his hasty
journey.  He was worn by anxiety and remorse almost to a shadow; talked
in a wild, distracted way, of ruin and dishonour worked by himself;
confided to me his intention to convert his whole property, at any
loss, into money, and, having settled on his wife and you a portion of
his recent acquisition, to fly the country--I guessed too well he would
not fly alone--and never see it more.  Even from me, his old and early
friend, whose strong attachment had taken root in the earth that
covered one most dear to both--even from me he withheld any more
particular confession, promising to write and tell me all, and after
that to see me once again, for the last time on earth. Alas!  _That_
was the last time.  I had no letter, and I never saw him more.'

'I went,' said Mr. Brownlow, after a short pause, 'I went, when all was
over, to the scene of his--I will use the term the world would freely
use, for worldly harshness or favour are now alike to him--of his
guilty love, resolved that if my fears were realised that erring child
should find one heart and home to shelter and compassionate her.  The
family had left that part a week before; they had called in such
trifling debts as were outstanding, discharged them, and left the place
by night.  Why, or whither, none can tell.'

Monks drew his breath yet more freely, and looked round with a smile of
triumph.

'When your brother,' said Mr. Brownlow, drawing nearer to the other's
chair, 'When your brother:  a feeble, ragged, neglected child:  was
cast in my way by a stronger hand than chance, and rescued by me from a
life of vice and infamy--'

'What?' cried Monks.

'By me,' said Mr. Brownlow.  'I told you I should interest you before
long.  I say by me--I see that your cunning associate suppressed my
name, although for ought he knew, it would be quite strange to your
ears.  When he was rescued by me, then, and lay recovering from
sickness in my house, his strong resemblance to this picture I have
spoken of, struck me with astonishment.  Even when I first saw him in
all his dirt and misery, there was a lingering expression in his face
that came upon me like a glimpse of some old friend flashing on one in
a vivid dream.  I need not tell you he was snared away before I knew
his history--'

'Why not?' asked Monks hastily.

'Because you know it well.'

'I!'

'Denial to me is vain,' replied Mr. Brownlow.  'I shall show you that I
know more than that.'

'You--you--can't prove anything against me,' stammered Monks.  'I defy
you to do it!'

'We shall see,' returned the old gentleman with a searching glance.  'I
lost the boy, and no efforts of mine could recover him.  Your mother
being dead, I knew that you alone could solve the mystery if anybody
could, and as when I had last heard of you you were on your own estate
in the West Indies--whither, as you well know, you retired upon your
mother's death to escape the consequences of vicious courses here--I
made the voyage.  You had left it, months before, and were supposed to
be in London, but no one could tell where.  I returned.  Your agents
had no clue to your residence.  You came and went, they said, as
strangely as you had ever done:  sometimes for days together and
sometimes not for months:  keeping to all appearance the same low
haunts and mingling with the same infamous herd who had been your
associates when a fierce ungovernable boy.  I wearied them with new
applications.  I paced the streets by night and day, but until two
hours ago, all my efforts were fruitless, and I never saw you for an
instant.'

'And now you do see me,' said Monks, rising boldly, 'what then? Fraud
and robbery are high-sounding words--justified, you think, by a fancied
resemblance in some young imp to an idle daub of a dead man's Brother!
You don't even know that a child was born of this maudlin pair; you
don't even know that.'

'I _did not_,' replied Mr. Brownlow, rising too; 'but within the last
fortnight I have learnt it all.  You have a brother; you know it, and
him.  There was a will, which your mother destroyed, leaving the secret
and the gain to you at her own death.  It contained a reference to some
child likely to be the result of this sad connection, which child was
born, and accidentally encountered by you, when your suspicions were
first awakened by his resemblance to your father.  You repaired to the
place of his birth. There existed proofs--proofs long suppressed--of
his birth and parentage.  Those proofs were destroyed by you, and now,
in your own words to your accomplice the Jew, "_the only proofs of the
boy's identity lie at the bottom of the river, and the old hag that
received them from the mother is rotting in her coffin_." Unworthy son,
coward, liar,--you, who hold your councils with thieves and murderers
in dark rooms at night,--you, whose plots and wiles have brought a
violent death upon the head of one worth millions such as you,--you,
who from your cradle were gall and bitterness to your own father's
heart, and in whom all evil passions, vice, and profligacy, festered,
till they found a vent in a hideous disease which had made your face an
index even to your mind--you, Edward Leeford, do you still brave me!'

'No, no, no!' returned the coward, overwhelmed by these accumulated
charges.

'Every word!' cried the gentleman, 'every word that has passed between
you and this detested villain, is known to me.  Shadows on the wall
have caught your whispers, and brought them to my ear; the sight of the
persecuted child has turned vice itself, and given it the courage and
almost the attributes of virtue. Murder has been done, to which you
were morally if not really a party.'

'No, no,' interposed Monks.  'I--I knew nothing of that; I was going to
inquire the truth of the story when you overtook me.  I didn't know the
cause.  I thought it was a common quarrel.'

'It was the partial disclosure of your secrets,' replied Mr. Brownlow.
'Will you disclose the whole?'

'Yes, I will.'

'Set your hand to a statement of truth and facts, and repeat it before
witnesses?'

'That I promise too.'

'Remain quietly here, until such a document is drawn up, and proceed
with me to such a place as I may deem most advisable, for the purpose
of attesting it?'

'If you insist upon that, I'll do that also,' replied Monks.

'You must do more than that,' said Mr. Brownlow.  'Make restitution to
an innocent and unoffending child, for such he is, although the
offspring of a guilty and most miserable love.  You have not forgotten
the provisions of the will.  Carry them into execution so far as your
brother is concerned, and then go where you please.  In this world you
need meet no more.'

While Monks was pacing up and down, meditating with dark and evil looks
on this proposal and the possibilities of evading it:  torn by his
fears on the one hand and his hatred on the other:  the door was
hurriedly unlocked, and a gentleman (Mr. Losberne) entered the room in
violent agitation.

'The man will be taken,' he cried.  'He will be taken to-night!'

'The murderer?' asked Mr. Brownlow.

'Yes, yes,' replied the other.  'His dog has been seen lurking about
some old haunt, and there seems little doubt that his master either is,
or will be, there, under cover of the darkness.  Spies are hovering
about in every direction.  I have spoken to the men who are charged
with his capture, and they tell me he cannot escape.  A reward of a
hundred pounds is proclaimed by Government to-night.'

'I will give fifty more,' said Mr. Brownlow, 'and proclaim it with my
own lips upon the spot, if I can reach it.  Where is Mr. Maylie?'

'Harry?  As soon as he had seen your friend here, safe in a coach with
you, he hurried off to where he heard this,' replied the doctor, 'and
mounting his horse sallied forth to join the first party at some place
in the outskirts agreed upon between them.'

'Fagin,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'what of him?'

'When I last heard, he had not been taken, but he will be, or is, by
this time.  They're sure of him.'

'Have you made up your mind?' asked Mr. Brownlow, in a low voice, of
Monks.

'Yes,' he replied.  'You--you--will be secret with me?'

'I will.  Remain here till I return.  It is your only hope of safety.'

They left the room, and the door was again locked.

'What have you done?' asked the doctor in a whisper.

'All that I could hope to do, and even more.  Coupling the poor girl's
intelligence with my previous knowledge, and the result of our good
friend's inquiries on the spot, I left him no loophole of escape, and
laid bare the whole villainy which by these lights became plain as day.
Write and appoint the evening after to-morrow, at seven, for the
meeting.  We shall be down there, a few hours before, but shall require
rest:  especially the young lady, who _may_ have greater need of
firmness than either you or I can quite foresee just now.  But my blood
boils to avenge this poor murdered creature.  Which way have they
taken?'

'Drive straight to the office and you will be in time,' replied Mr.
Losberne.  'I will remain here.'

The two gentlemen hastily separated; each in a fever of excitement
wholly uncontrollable.



CHAPTER L

THE PURSUIT AND ESCAPE

Near to that part of the Thames on which the church at Rotherhithe
abuts, where the buildings on the banks are dirtiest and the vessels on
the river blackest with the dust of colliers and the smoke of
close-built low-roofed houses, there exists the filthiest, the
strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are
hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of
its inhabitants.

To reach this place, the visitor has to penetrate through a maze of
close, narrow, and muddy streets, thronged by the roughest and poorest
of waterside people, and devoted to the traffic they may be supposed to
occasion.  The cheapest and least delicate provisions are heaped in the
shops; the coarsest and commonest articles of wearing apparel dangle at
the salesman's door, and stream from the house-parapet and windows.
Jostling with unemployed labourers of the lowest class,
ballast-heavers, coal-whippers, brazen women, ragged children, and the
raff and refuse of the river, he makes his way with difficulty along,
assailed by offensive sights and smells from the narrow alleys which
branch off on the right and left, and deafened by the clash of
ponderous waggons that bear great piles of merchandise from the stacks
of warehouses that rise from every corner.  Arriving, at length, in
streets remoter and less-frequented than those through which he has
passed, he walks beneath tottering house-fronts projecting over the
pavement, dismantled walls that seem to totter as he passes, chimneys
half crushed half hesitating to fall, windows guarded by rusty iron
bars that time and dirt have almost eaten away, every imaginable sign
of desolation and neglect.

In such a neighborhood, beyond Dockhead in the Borough of Southwark,
stands Jacob's Island, surrounded by a muddy ditch, six or eight feet
deep and fifteen or twenty wide when the tide is in, once called Mill
Pond, but known in the days of this story as Folly Ditch.  It is a
creek or inlet from the Thames, and can always be filled at high water
by opening the sluices at the Lead Mills from which it took its old
name.  At such times, a stranger, looking from one of the wooden
bridges thrown across it at Mill Lane, will see the inhabitants of the
houses on either side lowering from their back doors and windows,
buckets, pails, domestic utensils of all kinds, in which to haul the
water up; and when his eye is turned from these operations to the
houses themselves, his utmost astonishment will be excited by the scene
before him.  Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen
houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows,
broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen
that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the
air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they
shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and
threatening to fall into it--as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls
and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every
loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the
banks of Folly Ditch.

In Jacob's Island, the warehouses are roofless and empty; the walls are
crumbling down; the windows are windows no more; the doors are falling
into the streets; the chimneys are blackened, but they yield no smoke.
Thirty or forty years ago, before losses and chancery suits came upon
it, it was a thriving place; but now it is a desolate island indeed.
The houses have no owners; they are broken open, and entered upon by
those who have the courage; and there they live, and there they die.
They must have powerful motives for a secret residence, or be reduced
to a destitute condition indeed, who seek a refuge in Jacob's Island.

In an upper room of one of these houses--a detached house of fair size,
ruinous in other respects, but strongly defended at door and window:
of which house the back commanded the ditch in manner already
described--there were assembled three men, who, regarding each other
every now and then with looks expressive of perplexity and expectation,
sat for some time in profound and gloomy silence.  One of these was
Toby Crackit, another Mr. Chitling, and the third a robber of fifty
years, whose nose had been almost beaten in, in some old scuffle, and
whose face bore a frightful scar which might probably be traced to the
same occasion.  This man was a returned transport, and his name was
Kags.

'I wish,' said Toby turning to Mr. Chitling, 'that you had picked out
some other crib when the two old ones got too warm, and had not come
here, my fine feller.'

'Why didn't you, blunder-head!' said Kags.

'Well, I thought you'd have been a little more glad to see me than
this,' replied Mr. Chitling, with a melancholy air.

'Why, look'e, young gentleman,' said Toby, 'when a man keeps himself so
very ex-clusive as I have done, and by that means has a snug house over
his head with nobody a prying and smelling about it, it's rather a
startling thing to have the honour of a wisit from a young gentleman
(however respectable and pleasant a person he may be to play cards with
at conweniency) circumstanced as you are.'

'Especially, when the exclusive young man has got a friend stopping
with him, that's arrived sooner than was expected from foreign parts,
and is too modest to want to be presented to the Judges on his return,'
added Mr. Kags.

There was a short silence, after which Toby Crackit, seeming to abandon
as hopeless any further effort to maintain his usual devil-may-care
swagger, turned to Chitling and said,

'When was Fagin took then?'

'Just at dinner-time--two o'clock this afternoon.  Charley and I made
our lucky up the wash-us chimney, and Bolter got into the empty
water-butt, head downwards; but his legs were so precious long that
they stuck out at the top, and so they took him too.'

'And Bet?'

'Poor Bet!  She went to see the Body, to speak to who it was,' replied
Chitling, his countenance falling more and more, 'and went off mad,
screaming and raving, and beating her head against the boards; so they
put a strait-weskut on her and took her to the hospital--and there she
is.'

'Wot's come of young Bates?' demanded Kags.

'He hung about, not to come over here afore dark, but he'll be here
soon,' replied Chitling.  'There's nowhere else to go to now, for the
people at the Cripples are all in custody, and the bar of the ken--I
went up there and see it with my own eyes--is filled with traps.'

'This is a smash,' observed Toby, biting his lips. 'There's more than
one will go with this.'

'The sessions are on,' said Kags:  'if they get the inquest over, and
Bolter turns King's evidence:  as of course he will, from what he's
said already:  they can prove Fagin an accessory before the fact, and
get the trial on on Friday, and he'll swing in six days from this, by
G--!'

'You should have heard the people groan,' said Chitling; 'the officers
fought like devils, or they'd have torn him away.  He was down once,
but they made a ring round him, and fought their way along.  You should
have seen how he looked about him, all muddy and bleeding, and clung to
them as if they were his dearest friends.  I can see 'em now, not able
to stand upright with the pressing of the mob, and draggin him along
amongst 'em; I can see the people jumping up, one behind another, and
snarling with their teeth and making at him; I can see the blood upon
his hair and beard, and hear the cries with which the women worked
themselves into the centre of the crowd at the street corner, and swore
they'd tear his heart out!'

The horror-stricken witness of this scene pressed his hands upon his
ears, and with his eyes closed got up and paced violently to and fro,
like one distracted.

While he was thus engaged, and the two men sat by in silence with their
eyes fixed upon the floor, a pattering noise was heard upon the stairs,
and Sikes's dog bounded into the room.  They ran to the window,
downstairs, and into the street.  The dog had jumped in at an open
window; he made no attempt to follow them, nor was his master to be
seen.

'What's the meaning of this?' said Toby when they had returned. 'He
can't be coming here.  I--I--hope not.'

'If he was coming here, he'd have come with the dog,' said Kags,
stooping down to examine the animal, who lay panting on the floor.
'Here!  Give us some water for him; he has run himself faint.'

'He's drunk it all up, every drop,' said Chitling after watching the
dog some time in silence.  'Covered with mud--lame--half blind--he must
have come a long way.'

'Where can he have come from!' exclaimed Toby.  'He's been to the other
kens of course, and finding them filled with strangers come on here,
where he's been many a time and often.  But where can he have come from
first, and how comes he here alone without the other!'

'He'--(none of them called the murderer by his old name)--'He can't
have made away with himself.  What do you think?' said Chitling.

Toby shook his head.

'If he had,' said Kags, 'the dog 'ud want to lead us away to where he
did it.  No.  I think he's got out of the country, and left the dog
behind.  He must have given him the slip somehow, or he wouldn't be so
easy.'

This solution, appearing the most probable one, was adopted as the
right; the dog, creeping under a chair, coiled himself up to sleep,
without more notice from anybody.

It being now dark, the shutter was closed, and a candle lighted and
placed upon the table.  The terrible events of the last two days had
made a deep impression on all three, increased by the danger and
uncertainty of their own position.  They drew their chairs closer
together, starting at every sound.  They spoke little, and that in
whispers, and were as silent and awe-stricken as if the remains of the
murdered woman lay in the next room.

They had sat thus, some time, when suddenly was heard a hurried
knocking at the door below.

'Young Bates,' said Kags, looking angrily round, to check the fear he
felt himself.

The knocking came again.  No, it wasn't he.  He never knocked like that.

Crackit went to the window, and shaking all over, drew in his head.
There was no need to tell them who it was; his pale face was enough.
The dog too was on the alert in an instant, and ran whining to the door.

'We must let him in,' he said, taking up the candle.

'Isn't there any help for it?' asked the other man in a hoarse voice.

'None.  He _must_ come in.'

'Don't leave us in the dark,' said Kags, taking down a candle from the
chimney-piece, and lighting it, with such a trembling hand that the
knocking was twice repeated before he had finished.

Crackit went down to the door, and returned followed by a man with the
lower part of his face buried in a handkerchief, and another tied over
his head under his hat.  He drew them slowly off.  Blanched face,
sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, beard of three days' growth, wasted flesh,
short thick breath; it was the very ghost of Sikes.

He laid his hand upon a chair which stood in the middle of the room,
but shuddering as he was about to drop into it, and seeming to glance
over his shoulder, dragged it back close to the wall--as close as it
would go--and ground it against it--and sat down.

Not a word had been exchanged.  He looked from one to another in
silence.  If an eye were furtively raised and met his, it was instantly
averted.  When his hollow voice broke silence, they all three started.
They seemed never to have heard its tones before.

'How came that dog here?' he asked.

'Alone.  Three hours ago.'

'To-night's paper says that Fagin's took.  Is it true, or a lie?'

'True.'

They were silent again.

'Damn you all!' said Sikes, passing his hand across his forehead.

'Have you nothing to say to me?'

There was an uneasy movement among them, but nobody spoke.

'You that keep this house,' said Sikes, turning his face to Crackit,
'do you mean to sell me, or to let me lie here till this hunt is over?'

'You may stop here, if you think it safe,' returned the person
addressed, after some hesitation.

Sikes carried his eyes slowly up the wall behind him:  rather trying to
turn his head than actually doing it:  and said, 'Is--it--the body--is
it buried?'

They shook their heads.

'Why isn't it!' he retorted with the same glance behind him. 'Wot do
they keep such ugly things above the ground for?--Who's that knocking?'

Crackit intimated, by a motion of his hand as he left the room, that
there was nothing to fear; and directly came back with Charley Bates
behind him.  Sikes sat opposite the door, so that the moment the boy
entered the room he encountered his figure.

'Toby,' said the boy falling back, as Sikes turned his eyes towards
him, 'why didn't you tell me this, downstairs?'

There had been something so tremendous in the shrinking off of the
three, that the wretched man was willing to propitiate even this lad.
Accordingly he nodded, and made as though he would shake hands with him.

'Let me go into some other room,' said the boy, retreating still
farther.

'Charley!' said Sikes, stepping forward.  'Don't you--don't you know
me?'

'Don't come nearer me,' answered the boy, still retreating, and
looking, with horror in his eyes, upon the murderer's face.  'You
monster!'

The man stopped half-way, and they looked at each other; but Sikes's
eyes sunk gradually to the ground.

'Witness you three,' cried the boy shaking his clenched fist, and
becoming more and more excited as he spoke. 'Witness you three--I'm not
afraid of him--if they come here after him, I'll give him up; I will.
I tell you out at once.  He may kill me for it if he likes, or if he
dares, but if I am here I'll give him up.  I'd give him up if he was to
be boiled alive.  Murder! Help!  If there's the pluck of a man among
you three, you'll help me.  Murder!  Help!  Down with him!'

Pouring out these cries, and accompanying them with violent
gesticulation, the boy actually threw himself, single-handed, upon the
strong man, and in the intensity of his energy and the suddenness of
his surprise, brought him heavily to the ground.

The three spectators seemed quite stupefied.  They offered no
interference, and the boy and man rolled on the ground together; the
former, heedless of the blows that showered upon him, wrenching his
hands tighter and tighter in the garments about the murderer's breast,
and never ceasing to call for help with all his might.

The contest, however, was too unequal to last long.  Sikes had him
down, and his knee was on his throat, when Crackit pulled him back with
a look of alarm, and pointed to the window.  There were lights gleaming
below, voices in loud and earnest conversation, the tramp of hurried
footsteps--endless they seemed in number--crossing the nearest wooden
bridge.  One man on horseback seemed to be among the crowd; for there
was the noise of hoofs rattling on the uneven pavement.  The gleam of
lights increased; the footsteps came more thickly and noisily on.
Then, came a loud knocking at the door, and then a hoarse murmur from
such a multitude of angry voices as would have made the boldest quail.

'Help!' shrieked the boy in a voice that rent the air.

'He's here!  Break down the door!'

'In the King's name,' cried the voices without; and the hoarse cry
arose again, but louder.

'Break down the door!' screamed the boy.  'I tell you they'll never
open it.  Run straight to the room where the light is. Break down the
door!'

Strokes, thick and heavy, rattled upon the door and lower
window-shutters as he ceased to speak, and a loud huzzah burst from the
crowd; giving the listener, for the first time, some adequate idea of
its immense extent.

'Open the door of some place where I can lock this screeching
Hell-babe,' cried Sikes fiercely; running to and fro, and dragging the
boy, now, as easily as if he were an empty sack. 'That door.  Quick!'
He flung him in, bolted it, and turned the key.  'Is the downstairs
door fast?'

'Double-locked and chained,' replied Crackit, who, with the other two
men, still remained quite helpless and bewildered.

'The panels--are they strong?'

'Lined with sheet-iron.'

'And the windows too?'

'Yes, and the windows.'

'Damn you!' cried the desperate ruffian, throwing up the sash and
menacing the crowd.  'Do your worst!  I'll cheat you yet!'

Of all the terrific yells that ever fell on mortal ears, none could
exceed the cry of the infuriated throng.  Some shouted to those who
were nearest to set the house on fire; others roared to the officers to
shoot him dead.  Among them all, none showed such fury as the man on
horseback, who, throwing himself out of the saddle, and bursting
through the crowd as if he were parting water, cried, beneath the
window, in a voice that rose above all others, 'Twenty guineas to the
man who brings a ladder!'

The nearest voices took up the cry, and hundreds echoed it.  Some
called for ladders, some for sledge-hammers; some ran with torches to
and fro as if to seek them, and still came back and roared again; some
spent their breath in impotent curses and execrations; some pressed
forward with the ecstasy of madmen, and thus impeded the progress of
those below; some among the boldest attempted to climb up by the
water-spout and crevices in the wall; and all waved to and fro, in the
darkness beneath, like a field of corn moved by an angry wind:  and
joined from time to time in one loud furious roar.

'The tide,' cried the murderer, as he staggered back into the room, and
shut the faces out, 'the tide was in as I came up. Give me a rope, a
long rope.  They're all in front.  I may drop into the Folly Ditch, and
clear off that way.  Give me a rope, or I shall do three more murders
and kill myself.'

The panic-stricken men pointed to where such articles were kept; the
murderer, hastily selecting the longest and strongest cord, hurried up
to the house-top.

All the window in the rear of the house had been long ago bricked up,
except one small trap in the room where the boy was locked, and that
was too small even for the passage of his body.  But, from this
aperture, he had never ceased to call on those without, to guard the
back; and thus, when the murderer emerged at last on the house-top by
the door in the roof, a loud shout proclaimed the fact to those in
front, who immediately began to pour round, pressing upon each other in
an unbroken stream.

He planted a board, which he had carried up with him for the purpose,
so firmly against the door that it must be matter of great difficulty
to open it from the inside; and creeping over the tiles, looked over
the low parapet.

The water was out, and the ditch a bed of mud.

The crowd had been hushed during these few moments, watching his
motions and doubtful of his purpose, but the instant they perceived it
and knew it was defeated, they raised a cry of triumphant execration to
which all their previous shouting had been whispers.  Again and again
it rose.  Those who were at too great a distance to know its meaning,
took up the sound; it echoed and re-echoed; it seemed as though the
whole city had poured its population out to curse him.

On pressed the people from the front--on, on, on, in a strong
struggling current of angry faces, with here and there a glaring torch
to lighten them up, and show them out in all their wrath and passion.
The houses on the opposite side of the ditch had been entered by the
mob; sashes were thrown up, or torn bodily out; there were tiers and
tiers of faces in every window; cluster upon cluster of people clinging
to every house-top.  Each little bridge (and there were three in sight)
bent beneath the weight of the crowd upon it.  Still the current poured
on to find some nook or hole from which to vent their shouts, and only
for an instant see the wretch.

'They have him now,' cried a man on the nearest bridge. 'Hurrah!'

The crowd grew light with uncovered heads; and again the shout uprose.

'I will give fifty pounds,' cried an old gentleman from the same
quarter, 'to the man who takes him alive.  I will remain here, till he
come to ask me for it.'

There was another roar.  At this moment the word was passed among the
crowd that the door was forced at last, and that he who had first
called for the ladder had mounted into the room.  The stream abruptly
turned, as this intelligence ran from mouth to mouth; and the people at
the windows, seeing those upon the bridges pouring back, quitted their
stations, and running into the street, joined the concourse that now
thronged pell-mell to the spot they had left:  each man crushing and
striving with his neighbor, and all panting with impatience to get near
the door, and look upon the criminal as the officers brought him out.
The cries and shrieks of those who were pressed almost to suffocation,
or trampled down and trodden under foot in the confusion, were
dreadful; the narrow ways were completely blocked up; and at this time,
between the rush of some to regain the space in front of the house, and
the unavailing struggles of others to extricate themselves from the
mass, the immediate attention was distracted from the murderer,
although the universal eagerness for his capture was, if possible,
increased.

The man had shrunk down, thoroughly quelled by the ferocity of the
crowd, and the impossibility of escape; but seeing this sudden change
with no less rapidity than it had occurred, he sprang upon his feet,
determined to make one last effort for his life by dropping into the
ditch, and, at the risk of being stifled, endeavouring to creep away in
the darkness and confusion.

Roused into new strength and energy, and stimulated by the noise within
the house which announced that an entrance had really been effected, he
set his foot against the stack of chimneys, fastened one end of the
rope tightly and firmly round it, and with the other made a strong
running noose by the aid of his hands and teeth almost in a second.  He
could let himself down by the cord to within a less distance of the
ground than his own height, and had his knife ready in his hand to cut
it then and drop.

At the very instant when he brought the loop over his head previous to
slipping it beneath his arm-pits, and when the old gentleman
before-mentioned (who had clung so tight to the railing of the bridge
as to resist the force of the crowd, and retain his position) earnestly
warned those about him that the man was about to lower himself down--at
that very instant the murderer, looking behind him on the roof, threw
his arms above his head, and uttered a yell of terror.

'The eyes again!' he cried in an unearthly screech.

Staggering as if struck by lightning, he lost his balance and tumbled
over the parapet.  The noose was on his neck. It ran up with his
weight, tight as a bow-string, and swift as the arrow it speeds.  He
fell for five-and-thirty feet.  There was a sudden jerk, a terrific
convulsion of the limbs; and there he hung, with the open knife
clenched in his stiffening hand.

The old chimney quivered with the shock, but stood it bravely. The
murderer swung lifeless against the wall; and the boy, thrusting aside
the dangling body which obscured his view, called to the people to come
and take him out, for God's sake.

A dog, which had lain concealed till now, ran backwards and forwards on
the parapet with a dismal howl, and collecting himself for a spring,
jumped for the dead man's shoulders. Missing his aim, he fell into the
ditch, turning completely over as he went; and striking his head
against a stone, dashed out his brains.



CHAPTER LI

AFFORDING AN EXPLANATION OF MORE MYSTERIES THAN ONE, AND COMPREHENDING
A PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE WITH NO WORD OF SETTLEMENT OR PIN-MONEY

The events narrated in the last chapter were yet but two days old, when
Oliver found himself, at three o'clock in the afternoon, in a
travelling-carriage rolling fast towards his native town.  Mrs. Maylie,
and Rose, and Mrs. Bedwin, and the good doctor were with him:  and Mr.
Brownlow followed in a post-chaise, accompanied by one other person
whose name had not been mentioned.

They had not talked much upon the way; for Oliver was in a flutter of
agitation and uncertainty which deprived him of the power of collecting
his thoughts, and almost of speech, and appeared to have scarcely less
effect on his companions, who shared it, in at least an equal degree.
He and the two ladies had been very carefully made acquainted by Mr.
Brownlow with the nature of the admissions which had been forced from
Monks; and although they knew that the object of their present journey
was to complete the work which had been so well begun, still the whole
matter was enveloped in enough of doubt and mystery to leave them in
endurance of the most intense suspense.

The same kind friend had, with Mr. Losberne's assistance, cautiously
stopped all channels of communication through which they could receive
intelligence of the dreadful occurrences that so recently taken place.
'It was quite true,' he said, 'that they must know them before long,
but it might be at a better time than the present, and it could not be
at a worse.'  So, they travelled on in silence:  each busied with
reflections on the object which had brought them together:  and no one
disposed to give utterance to the thoughts which crowded upon all.

But if Oliver, under these influences, had remained silent while they
journeyed towards his birth-place by a road he had never seen, how the
whole current of his recollections ran back to old times, and what a
crowd of emotions were wakened up in his breast, when they turned into
that which he had traversed on foot:  a poor houseless, wandering boy,
without a friend to help him, or a roof to shelter his head.

'See there, there!' cried Oliver, eagerly clasping the hand of Rose,
and pointing out at the carriage window; 'that's the stile I came over;
there are the hedges I crept behind, for fear any one should overtake
me and force me back!  Yonder is the path across the fields, leading to
the old house where I was a little child!  Oh Dick, Dick, my dear old
friend, if I could only see you now!'

'You will see him soon,' replied Rose, gently taking his folded hands
between her own.  'You shall tell him how happy you are, and how rich
you have grown, and that in all your happiness you have none so great
as the coming back to make him happy too.'

'Yes, yes,' said Oliver, 'and we'll--we'll take him away from here, and
have him clothed and taught, and send him to some quiet country place
where he may grow strong and well,--shall we?'

Rose nodded 'yes,' for the boy was smiling through such happy tears
that she could not speak.

'You will be kind and good to him, for you are to every one,' said
Oliver.  'It will make you cry, I know, to hear what he can tell; but
never mind, never mind, it will be all over, and you will smile
again--I know that too--to think how changed he is; you did the same
with me.  He said "God bless you" to me when I ran away,' cried the boy
with a burst of affectionate emotion; 'and I will say "God bless you"
now, and show him how I love him for it!'

As they approached the town, and at length drove through its narrow
streets, it became matter of no small difficulty to restrain the boy
within reasonable bounds.  There was Sowerberry's the undertaker's just
as it used to be, only smaller and less imposing in appearance than he
remembered it--there were all the well-known shops and houses, with
almost every one of which he had some slight incident connected--there
was Gamfield's cart, the very cart he used to have, standing at the old
public-house door--there was the workhouse, the dreary prison of his
youthful days, with its dismal windows frowning on the street--there
was the same lean porter standing at the gate, at sight of whom Oliver
involuntarily shrunk back, and then laughed at himself for being so
foolish, then cried, then laughed again--there were scores of faces at
the doors and windows that he knew quite well--there was nearly
everything as if he had left it but yesterday, and all his recent life
had been but a happy dream.

But it was pure, earnest, joyful reality.  They drove straight to the
door of the chief hotel (which Oliver used to stare up at, with awe,
and think a mighty palace, but which had somehow fallen off in grandeur
and size); and here was Mr. Grimwig all ready to receive them, kissing
the young lady, and the old one too, when they got out of the coach, as
if he were the grandfather of the whole party, all smiles and kindness,
and not offering to eat his head--no, not once; not even when he
contradicted a very old postboy about the nearest road to London, and
maintained he knew it best, though he had only come that way once, and
that time fast asleep.  There was dinner prepared, and there were
bedrooms ready, and everything was arranged as if by magic.

Notwithstanding all this, when the hurry of the first half-hour was
over, the same silence and constraint prevailed that had marked their
journey down.  Mr. Brownlow did not join them at dinner, but remained
in a separate room.  The two other gentlemen hurried in and out with
anxious faces, and, during the short intervals when they were present,
conversed apart.  Once, Mrs. Maylie was called away, and after being
absent for nearly an hour, returned with eyes swollen with weeping.
All these things made Rose and Oliver, who were not in any new secrets,
nervous and uncomfortable.  They sat wondering, in silence; or, if they
exchanged a few words, spoke in whispers, as if they were afraid to
hear the sound of their own voices.

At length, when nine o'clock had come, and they began to think they
were to hear no more that night, Mr. Losberne and Mr. Grimwig entered
the room, followed by Mr. Brownlow and a man whom Oliver almost
shrieked with surprise to see; for they told him it was his brother,
and it was the same man he had met at the market-town, and seen looking
in with Fagin at the window of his little room.  Monks cast a look of
hate, which, even then, he could not dissemble, at the astonished boy,
and sat down near the door.  Mr. Brownlow, who had papers in his hand,
walked to a table near which Rose and Oliver were seated.

'This is a painful task,' said he, 'but these declarations, which have
been signed in London before many gentlemen, must be in substance
repeated here.  I would have spared you the degradation, but we must
hear them from your own lips before we part, and you know why.'

'Go on,' said the person addressed, turning away his face. 'Quick.  I
have almost done enough, I think.  Don't keep me here.'

'This child,' said Mr. Brownlow, drawing Oliver to him, and laying his
hand upon his head, 'is your half-brother; the illegitimate son of your
father, my dear friend Edwin Leeford, by poor young Agnes Fleming, who
died in giving him birth.'

'Yes,' said Monks, scowling at the trembling boy:  the beating of whose
heart he might have heard.  'That is the bastard child.'

'The term you use,' said Mr. Brownlow, sternly, 'is a reproach to those
long since passed beyond the feeble censure of the world. It reflects
disgrace on no one living, except you who use it. Let that pass.  He
was born in this town.'

'In the workhouse of this town,' was the sullen reply. 'You have the
story there.'  He pointed impatiently to the papers as he spoke.

'I must have it here, too,' said Mr. Brownlow, looking round upon the
listeners.

'Listen then!  You!' returned Monks.  'His father being taken ill at
Rome, was joined by his wife, my mother, from whom he had been long
separated, who went from Paris and took me with her--to look after his
property, for what I know, for she had no great affection for him, nor
he for her.  He knew nothing of us, for his senses were gone, and he
slumbered on till next day, when he died.  Among the papers in his
desk, were two, dated on the night his illness first came on, directed
to yourself'; he addressed himself to Mr. Brownlow; 'and enclosed in a
few short lines to you, with an intimation on the cover of the package
that it was not to be forwarded till after he was dead.  One of these
papers was a letter to this girl Agnes; the other a will.'

'What of the letter?' asked Mr. Brownlow.

'The letter?--A sheet of paper crossed and crossed again, with a
penitent confession, and prayers to God to help her.  He had palmed a
tale on the girl that some secret mystery--to be explained one
day--prevented his marrying her just then; and so she had gone on,
trusting patiently to him, until she trusted too far, and lost what
none could ever give her back.  She was, at that time, within a few
months of her confinement.  He told her all he had meant to do, to hide
her shame, if he had lived, and prayed her, if he died, not to curse
his memory, or think the consequences of their sin would be visited on
her or their young child; for all the guilt was his.  He reminded her
of the day he had given her the little locket and the ring with her
christian name engraved upon it, and a blank left for that which he
hoped one day to have bestowed upon her--prayed her yet to keep it, and
wear it next her heart, as she had done before--and then ran on,
wildly, in the same words, over and over again, as if he had gone
distracted.  I believe he had.'

'The will,' said Mr. Brownlow, as Oliver's tears fell fast.

Monks was silent.

'The will,' said Mr. Brownlow, speaking for him, 'was in the same
spirit as the letter.  He talked of miseries which his wife had brought
upon him; of the rebellious disposition, vice, malice, and premature
bad passions of you his only son, who had been trained to hate him; and
left you, and your mother, each an annuity of eight hundred pounds.
The bulk of his property he divided into two equal portions--one for
Agnes Fleming, and the other for their child, if it should be born
alive, and ever come of age.  If it were a girl, it was to inherit the
money unconditionally; but if a boy, only on the stipulation that in
his minority he should never have stained his name with any public act
of dishonour, meanness, cowardice, or wrong.  He did this, he said, to
mark his confidence in the other, and his conviction--only strengthened
by approaching death--that the child would share her gentle heart, and
noble nature.  If he were disappointed in this expectation, then the
money was to come to you:  for then, and not till then, when both
children were equal, would he recognise your prior claim upon his
purse, who had none upon his heart, but had, from an infant, repulsed
him with coldness and aversion.'

'My mother,' said Monks, in a louder tone, 'did what a woman should
have done.  She burnt this will.  The letter never reached its
destination; but that, and other proofs, she kept, in case they ever
tried to lie away the blot.  The girl's father had the truth from her
with every aggravation that her violent hate--I love her for it
now--could add.  Goaded by shame and dishonour he fled with his
children into a remote corner of Wales, changing his very name that his
friends might never know of his retreat; and here, no great while
afterwards, he was found dead in his bed.  The girl had left her home,
in secret, some weeks before; he had searched for her, on foot, in
every town and village near; it was on the night when he returned home,
assured that she had destroyed herself, to hide her shame and his, that
his old heart broke.'

There was a short silence here, until Mr. Brownlow took up the thread
of the narrative.

'Years after this,' he said, 'this man's--Edward Leeford's--mother came
to me.  He had left her, when only eighteen; robbed her of jewels and
money; gambled, squandered, forged, and fled to London:  where for two
years he had associated with the lowest outcasts.  She was sinking
under a painful and incurable disease, and wished to recover him before
she died.  Inquiries were set on foot, and strict searches made. They
were unavailing for a long time, but ultimately successful; and he went
back with her to France.'

'There she died,' said Monks, 'after a lingering illness; and, on her
death-bed, she bequeathed these secrets to me, together with her
unquenchable and deadly hatred of all whom they involved--though she
need not have left me that, for I had inherited it long before.  She
would not believe that the girl had destroyed herself, and the child
too, but was filled with the impression that a male child had been
born, and was alive.  I swore to her, if ever it crossed my path, to
hunt it down; never to let it rest; to pursue it with the bitterest and
most unrelenting animosity; to vent upon it the hatred that I deeply
felt, and to spit upon the empty vaunt of that insulting will by
draggin it, if I could, to the very gallows-foot.  She was right. He
came in my way at last.  I began well; and, but for babbling drabs, I
would have finished as I began!'

As the villain folded his arms tight together, and muttered curses on
himself in the impotence of baffled malice, Mr. Brownlow turned to the
terrified group beside him, and explained that the Jew, who had been
his old accomplice and confidant, had a large reward for keeping Oliver
ensnared:  of which some part was to be given up, in the event of his
being rescued:  and that a dispute on this head had led to their visit
to the country house for the purpose of identifying him.

'The locket and ring?' said Mr. Brownlow, turning to Monks.

'I bought them from the man and woman I told you of, who stole them
from the nurse, who stole them from the corpse,' answered Monks without
raising his eyes.  'You know what became of them.'

Mr. Brownlow merely nodded to Mr. Grimwig, who disappearing with great
alacrity, shortly returned, pushing in Mrs. Bumble, and dragging her
unwilling consort after him.

'Do my hi's deceive me!' cried Mr. Bumble, with ill-feigned enthusiasm,
'or is that little Oliver?  Oh O-li-ver, if you know'd how I've been
a-grieving for you--'

'Hold your tongue, fool,' murmured Mrs. Bumble.

'Isn't natur, natur, Mrs. Bumble?' remonstrated the workhouse master.
'Can't I be supposed to feel--_I_ as brought him up porochially--when I
see him a-setting here among ladies and gentlemen of the very affablest
description!  I always loved that boy as if he'd been my--my--my own
grandfather,' said Mr. Bumble, halting for an appropriate comparison.
'Master Oliver, my dear, you remember the blessed gentleman in the
white waistcoat?  Ah! he went to heaven last week, in a oak coffin with
plated handles, Oliver.'

'Come, sir,' said Mr. Grimwig, tartly; 'suppress your feelings.'

'I will do my endeavours, sir,' replied Mr. Bumble.  'How do you do,
sir?  I hope you are very well.'

This salutation was addressed to Mr. Brownlow, who had stepped up to
within a short distance of the respectable couple.  He inquired, as he
pointed to Monks,

'Do you know that person?'

'No,' replied Mrs. Bumble flatly.

'Perhaps _you_ don't?' said Mr. Brownlow, addressing her spouse.

'I never saw him in all my life,' said Mr. Bumble.

'Nor sold him anything, perhaps?'

'No,' replied Mrs. Bumble.

'You never had, perhaps, a certain gold locket and ring?' said Mr.
Brownlow.

'Certainly not,' replied the matron.  'Why are we brought here to
answer to such nonsense as this?'

Again Mr. Brownlow nodded to Mr. Grimwig; and again that gentleman
limped away with extraordinary readiness.  But not again did he return
with a stout man and wife; for this time, he led in two palsied women,
who shook and tottered as they walked.

'You shut the door the night old Sally died,' said the foremost one,
raising her shrivelled hand, 'but you couldn't shut out the sound, nor
stop the chinks.'

'No, no,' said the other, looking round her and wagging her toothless
jaws.  'No, no, no.'

'We heard her try to tell you what she'd done, and saw you take a paper
from her hand, and watched you too, next day, to the pawnbroker's
shop,' said the first.

'Yes,' added the second, 'and it was a "locket and gold ring." We found
out that, and saw it given you.  We were by.  Oh! we were by.'

'And we know more than that,' resumed the first, 'for she told us
often, long ago, that the young mother had told her that, feeling she
should never get over it, she was on her way, at the time that she was
taken ill, to die near the grave of the father of the child.'

'Would you like to see the pawnbroker himself?' asked Mr. Grimwig with
a motion towards the door.

'No,' replied the woman; 'if he'--she pointed to Monks--'has been coward
enough to confess, as I see he has, and you have sounded all these hags
till you have found the right ones, I have nothing more to say.  I
_did_ sell them, and they're where you'll never get them.  What then?'

'Nothing,' replied Mr. Brownlow, 'except that it remains for us to take
care that neither of you is employed in a situation of trust again.
You may leave the room.'

'I hope,' said Mr. Bumble, looking about him with great ruefulness, as
Mr. Grimwig disappeared with the two old women: 'I hope that this
unfortunate little circumstance will not deprive me of my porochial
office?'

'Indeed it will,' replied Mr. Brownlow.  'You may make up your mind to
that, and think yourself well off besides.'

'It was all Mrs. Bumble.  She _would_ do it,' urged Mr. Bumble; first
looking round to ascertain that his partner had left the room.

'That is no excuse,' replied Mr. Brownlow.  'You were present on the
occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and indeed are the more
guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that
your wife acts under your direction.'

'If the law supposes that,' said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat
emphatically in both hands, 'the law is a ass--a idiot.  If that's the
eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is,
that his eye may be opened by experience--by experience.'

Laying great stress on the repetition of these two words, Mr. Bumble
fixed his hat on very tight, and putting his hands in his pockets,
followed his helpmate downstairs.

'Young lady,' said Mr. Brownlow, turning to Rose, 'give me your hand.
Do not tremble.  You need not fear to hear the few remaining words we
have to say.'

'If they have--I do not know how they can, but if they have--any
reference to me,' said Rose, 'pray let me hear them at some other time.
I have not strength or spirits now.'

'Nay,' returned the old gentlman, drawing her arm through his; 'you
have more fortitude than this, I am sure.  Do you know this young lady,
sir?'

'Yes,' replied Monks.

'I never saw you before,' said Rose faintly.

'I have seen you often,' returned Monks.

'The father of the unhappy Agnes had _two_ daughters,' said Mr.
Brownlow.  'What was the fate of the other--the child?'

'The child,' replied Monks, 'when her father died in a strange place,
in a strange name, without a letter, book, or scrap of paper that
yielded the faintest clue by which his friends or relatives could be
traced--the child was taken by some wretched cottagers, who reared it
as their own.'

'Go on,' said Mr. Brownlow, signing to Mrs. Maylie to approach. 'Go on!'

'You couldn't find the spot to which these people had repaired,' said
Monks, 'but where friendship fails, hatred will often force a way.  My
mother found it, after a year of cunning search--ay, and found the
child.'

'She took it, did she?'

'No.  The people were poor and began to sicken--at least the man
did--of their fine humanity; so she left it with them, giving them a
small present of money which would not last long, and promised more,
which she never meant to send.  She didn't quite rely, however, on
their discontent and poverty for the child's unhappiness, but told the
history of the sister's shame, with such alterations as suited her;
bade them take good heed of the child, for she came of bad blood; and
told them she was illegitimate, and sure to go wrong at one time or
other.  The circumstances countenanced all this; the people believed
it; and there the child dragged on an existence, miserable enough even
to satisfy us, until a widow lady, residing, then, at Chester, saw the
girl by chance, pitied her, and took her home.  There was some cursed
spell, I think, against us; for in spite of all our efforts she
remained there and was happy.  I lost sight of her, two or three years
ago, and saw her no more until a few months back.'

'Do you see her now?'

'Yes.  Leaning on your arm.'

'But not the less my niece,' cried Mrs. Maylie, folding the fainting
girl in her arms; 'not the less my dearest child.  I would not lose her
now, for all the treasures of the world.  My sweet companion, my own
dear girl!'

'The only friend I ever had,' cried Rose, clinging to her. 'The
kindest, best of friends.  My heart will burst.  I cannot bear all
this.'

'You have borne more, and have been, through all, the best and gentlest
creature that ever shed happiness on every one she knew,' said Mrs.
Maylie, embracing her tenderly. 'Come, come, my love, remember who this
is who waits to clasp you in his arms, poor child!  See here--look,
look, my dear!'

'Not aunt,' cried Oliver, throwing his arms about her neck; 'I'll never
call her aunt--sister, my own dear sister, that something taught my
heart to love so dearly from the first!  Rose, dear, darling Rose!'

Let the tears which fell, and the broken words which were exchanged in
the long close embrace between the orphans, be sacred.  A father,
sister, and mother, were gained, and lost, in that one moment.  Joy and
grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears:  for
even grief itself arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and
tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all
character of pain.

They were a long, long time alone.  A soft tap at the door, at length
announced that some one was without.  Oliver opened it, glided away,
and gave place to Harry Maylie.

'I know it all,' he said, taking a seat beside the lovely girl. 'Dear
Rose, I know it all.'

'I am not here by accident,' he added after a lengthened silence; 'nor
have I heard all this to-night, for I knew it yesterday--only
yesterday.  Do you guess that I have come to remind you of a promise?'

'Stay,' said Rose.  'You _do_ know all.'

'All.  You gave me leave, at any time within a year, to renew the
subject of our last discourse.'

'I did.'

'Not to press you to alter your determination,' pursued the young man,
'but to hear you repeat it, if you would. I was to lay whatever of
station or fortune I might possess at your feet, and if you still
adhered to your former determination, I pledged myself, by no word or
act, to seek to change it.'

'The same reasons which influenced me then, will influence me now,'
said Rose firmly.  'If I ever owed a strict and rigid duty to her,
whose goodness saved me from a life of indigence and suffering, when
should I ever feel it, as I should to-night?  It is a struggle,' said
Rose, 'but one I am proud to make; it is a pang, but one my heart shall
bear.'

'The disclosure of to-night,'--Harry began.

'The disclosure of to-night,' replied Rose softly, 'leaves me in the
same position, with reference to you, as that in which I stood before.'

'You harden your heart against me, Rose,' urged her lover.

'Oh Harry, Harry,' said the young lady, bursting into tears; 'I wish I
could, and spare myself this pain.'

'Then why inflict it on yourself?' said Harry, taking her hand. 'Think,
dear Rose, think what you have heard to-night.'

'And what have I heard!  What have I heard!' cried Rose. 'That a sense
of his deep disgrace so worked upon my own father that he shunned
all--there, we have said enough, Harry, we have said enough.'

'Not yet, not yet,' said the young man, detaining her as she rose.  'My
hopes, my wishes, prospects, feeling:  every thought in life except my
love for you:  have undergone a change.  I offer you, now, no
distinction among a bustling crowd; no mingling with a world of malice
and detraction, where the blood is called into honest cheeks by aught
but real disgrace and shame; but a home--a heart and home--yes, dearest
Rose, and those, and those alone, are all I have to offer.'

'What do you mean!' she faltered.

'I mean but this--that when I left you last, I left you with a firm
determination to level all fancied barriers between yourself and me;
resolved that if my world could not be yours, I would make yours mine;
that no pride of birth should curl the lip at you, for I would turn
from it.  This I have done.  Those who have shrunk from me because of
this, have shrunk from you, and proved you so far right.  Such power
and patronage:  such relatives of influence and rank:  as smiled upon
me then, look coldly now; but there are smiling fields and waving trees
in England's richest county; and by one village church--mine, Rose, my
own!--there stands a rustic dwelling which you can make me prouder of,
than all the hopes I have renounced, measured a thousandfold.  This is
my rank and station now, and here I lay it down!'

      *      *      *      *      *

'It's a trying thing waiting supper for lovers,' said Mr. Grimwig,
waking up, and pulling his pocket-handkerchief from over his head.

Truth to tell, the supper had been waiting a most unreasonable time.
Neither Mrs. Maylie, nor Harry, nor Rose (who all came in together),
could offer a word in extenuation.

'I had serious thoughts of eating my head to-night,' said Mr. Grimwig,
'for I began to think I should get nothing else.  I'll take the
liberty, if you'll allow me, of saluting the bride that is to be.'

Mr. Grimwig lost no time in carrying this notice into effect upon the
blushing girl; and the example, being contagious, was followed both by
the doctor and Mr. Brownlow:  some people affirm that Harry Maylie had
been observed to set it, originally, in a dark room adjoining; but the
best authorities consider this downright scandal:  he being young and a
clergyman.

'Oliver, my child,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'where have you been, and why do
you look so sad?  There are tears stealing down your face at this
moment.  What is the matter?'

It is a world of disappointment:  often to the hopes we most cherish,
and hopes that do our nature the greatest honour.

Poor Dick was dead!



CHAPTER LII

FAGIN'S LAST NIGHT ALIVE

The court was paved, from floor to roof, with human faces. Inquisitive
and eager eyes peered from every inch of space. From the rail before
the dock, away into the sharpest angle of the smallest corner in the
galleries, all looks were fixed upon one man--Fagin.  Before him and
behind:  above, below, on the right and on the left:  he seemed to
stand surrounded by a firmament, all bright with gleaming eyes.

He stood there, in all this glare of living light, with one hand
resting on the wooden slab before him, the other held to his ear, and
his head thrust forward to enable him to catch with greater
distinctness every word that fell from the presiding judge, who was
delivering his charge to the jury.  At times, he turned his eyes
sharply upon them to observe the effect of the slightest featherweight
in his favour; and when the points against him were stated with
terrible distinctness, looked towards his counsel, in mute appeal that
he would, even then, urge something in his behalf.  Beyond these
manifestations of anxiety, he stirred not hand or foot.  He had
scarcely moved since the trial began; and now that the judge ceased to
speak, he still remained in the same strained attitude of close
attention, with his gaze bent on him, as though he listened still.

A slight bustle in the court, recalled him to himself.  Looking round,
he saw that the juryman had turned together, to consider their verdict.
As his eyes wandered to the gallery, he could see the people rising
above each other to see his face:  some hastily applying their glasses
to their eyes:  and others whispering their neighbours with looks
expressive of abhorrence.  A few there were, who seemed unmindful of
him, and looked only to the jury, in impatient wonder how they could
delay.  But in no one face--not even among the women, of whom there
were many there--could he read the faintest sympathy with himself, or
any feeling but one of all-absorbing interest that he should be
condemned.

As he saw all this in one bewildered glance, the deathlike stillness
came again, and looking back he saw that the jurymen had turned towards
the judge.  Hush!

They only sought permission to retire.

He looked, wistfully, into their faces, one by one when they passed
out, as though to see which way the greater number leant; but that was
fruitless.  The jailer touched him on the shoulder. He followed
mechanically to the end of the dock, and sat down on a chair.  The man
pointed it out, or he would not have seen it.

He looked up into the gallery again.  Some of the people were eating,
and some fanning themselves with handkerchiefs; for the crowded place
was very hot.  There was one young man sketching his face in a little
note-book.  He wondered whether it was like, and looked on when the
artist broke his pencil-point, and made another with his knife, as any
idle spectator might have done.

In the same way, when he turned his eyes towards the judge, his mind
began to busy itself with the fashion of his dress, and what it cost,
and how he put it on.  There was an old fat gentleman on the bench,
too, who had gone out, some half an hour before, and now come back.  He
wondered within himself whether this man had been to get his dinner,
what he had had, and where he had had it; and pursued this train of
careless thought until some new object caught his eye and roused
another.

Not that, all this time, his mind was, for an instant, free from one
oppressive overwhelming sense of the grave that opened at his feet; it
was ever present to him, but in a vague and general way, and he could
not fix his thoughts upon it.  Thus, even while he trembled, and turned
burning hot at the idea of speedy death, he fell to counting the iron
spikes before him, and wondering how the head of one had been broken
off, and whether they would mend it, or leave it as it was.  Then, he
thought of all the horrors of the gallows and the scaffold--and stopped
to watch a man sprinkling the floor to cool it--and then went on to
think again.

At length there was a cry of silence, and a breathless look from all
towards the door.  The jury returned, and passed him close. He could
glean nothing from their faces; they might as well have been of stone.
Perfect stillness ensued--not a rustle--not a breath--Guilty.

The building rang with a tremendous shout, and another, and another,
and then it echoed loud groans, that gathered strength as they swelled
out, like angry thunder.  It was a peal of joy from the populace
outside, greeting the news that he would die on Monday.

The noise subsided, and he was asked if he had anything to say why
sentence of death should not be passed upon him. He had resumed his
listening attitude, and looked intently at his questioner while the
demand was made; but it was twice repeated before he seemed to hear it,
and then he only muttered that he was an old man--an old man--and so,
dropping into a whisper, was silent again.

The judge assumed the black cap, and the prisoner still stood with the
same air and gesture.  A woman in the gallery, uttered some
exclamation, called forth by this dread solemnity; he looked hastily up
as if angry at the interruption, and bent forward yet more attentively.
The address was solemn and impressive; the sentence fearful to hear.
But he stood, like a marble figure, without the motion of a nerve.  His
haggard face was still thrust forward, his under-jaw hanging down, and
his eyes staring out before him, when the jailer put his hand upon his
arm, and beckoned him away.  He gazed stupidly about him for an
instant, and obeyed.

They led him through a paved room under the court, where some prisoners
were waiting till their turns came, and others were talking to their
friends, who crowded round a grate which looked into the open yard.
There was nobody there to speak to _him_; but, as he passed, the
prisoners fell back to render him more visible to the people who were
clinging to the bars:  and they assailed him with opprobrious names,
and screeched and hissed.  He shook his fist, and would have spat upon
them; but his conductors hurried him on, through a gloomy passage
lighted by a few dim lamps, into the interior of the prison.

Here, he was searched, that he might not have about him the means of
anticipating the law; this ceremony performed, they led him to one of
the condemned cells, and left him there--alone.

He sat down on a stone bench opposite the door, which served for seat
and bedstead; and casting his blood-shot eyes upon the ground, tried to
collect his thoughts. After awhile, he began to remember a few
disjointed fragments of what the judge had said: though it had seemed
to him, at the time, that he could not hear a word.  These gradually
fell into their proper places, and by degrees suggested more:  so that
in a little time he had the whole, almost as it was delivered.  To be
hanged by the neck, till he was dead--that was the end.  To be hanged
by the neck till he was dead.

As it came on very dark, he began to think of all the men he had known
who had died upon the scaffold; some of them through his means.  They
rose up, in such quick succession, that he could hardly count them.  He
had seen some of them die,--and had joked too, because they died with
prayers upon their lips.  With what a rattling noise the drop went
down; and how suddenly they changed, from strong and vigorous men to
dangling heaps of clothes!

Some of them might have inhabited that very cell--sat upon that very
spot.  It was very dark; why didn't they bring a light?  The cell had
been built for many years.  Scores of men must have passed their last
hours there.  It was like sitting in a vault strewn with dead
bodies--the cap, the noose, the pinioned arms, the faces that he knew,
even beneath that hideous veil.--Light, light!

At length, when his hands were raw with beating against the heavy door
and walls, two men appeared:  one bearing a candle, which he thrust
into an iron candlestick fixed against the wall:  the other dragging in
a mattress on which to pass the night; for the prisoner was to be left
alone no more.

Then came the night--dark, dismal, silent night.  Other watchers are
glad to hear this church-clock strike, for they tell of life and coming
day.  To him they brought despair.  The boom of every iron bell came
laden with the one, deep, hollow sound--Death. What availed the noise
and bustle of cheerful morning, which penetrated even there, to him?
It was another form of knell, with mockery added to the warning.

The day passed off.  Day?  There was no day; it was gone as soon as
come--and night came on again; night so long, and yet so short; long in
its dreadful silence, and short in its fleeting hours.  At one time he
raved and blasphemed; and at another howled and tore his hair.
Venerable men of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but he
had driven them away with curses.  They renewed their charitable
efforts, and he beat them off.

Saturday night.  He had only one night more to live.  And as he thought
of this, the day broke--Sunday.

It was not until the night of this last awful day, that a withering
sense of his helpless, desperate state came in its full intensity upon
his blighted soul; not that he had ever held any defined or positive
hope of mercy, but that he had never been able to consider more than
the dim probability of dying so soon. He had spoken little to either of
the two men, who relieved each other in their attendance upon him; and
they, for their parts, made no effort to rouse his attention.  He had
sat there, awake, but dreaming.  Now, he started up, every minute, and
with gasping mouth and burning skin, hurried to and fro, in such a
paroxysm of fear and wrath that even they--used to such
sights--recoiled from him with horror.  He grew so terrible, at last,
in all the tortures of his evil conscience, that one man could not bear
to sit there, eyeing him alone; and so the two kept watch together.

He cowered down upon his stone bed, and thought of the past. He had
been wounded with some missiles from the crowd on the day of his
capture, and his head was bandaged with a linen cloth.  His red hair
hung down upon his bloodless face; his beard was torn, and twisted into
knots; his eyes shone with a terrible light; his unwashed flesh
crackled with the fever that burnt him up. Eight--nine--then.  If it
was not a trick to frighten him, and those were the real hours treading
on each other's heels, where would he be, when they came round again!
Eleven!  Another struck, before the voice of the previous hour had
ceased to vibrate.  At eight, he would be the only mourner in his own
funeral train; at eleven--

Those dreadful walls of Newgate, which have hidden so much misery and
such unspeakable anguish, not only from the eyes, but, too often, and
too long, from the thoughts, of men, never held so dread a spectacle as
that.  The few who lingered as they passed, and wondered what the man
was doing who was to be hanged to-morrow, would have slept but ill that
night, if they could have seen him.

From early in the evening until nearly midnight, little groups of two
and three presented themselves at the lodge-gate, and inquired, with
anxious faces, whether any reprieve had been received.  These being
answered in the negative, communicated the welcome intelligence to
clusters in the street, who pointed out to one another the door from
which he must come out, and showed where the scaffold would be built,
and, walking with unwilling steps away, turned back to conjure up the
scene.  By degrees they fell off, one by one; and, for an hour, in the
dead of night, the street was left to solitude and darkness.

The space before the prison was cleared, and a few strong barriers,
painted black, had been already thrown across the road to break the
pressure of the expected crowd, when Mr. Brownlow and Oliver appeared
at the wicket, and presented an order of admission to the prisoner,
signed by one of the sheriffs.  They were immediately admitted into the
lodge.

'Is the young gentleman to come too, sir?' said the man whose duty it
was to conduct them.  'It's not a sight for children, sir.'

'It is not indeed, my friend,' rejoined Mr. Brownlow; 'but my business
with this man is intimately connected with him; and as this child has
seen him in the full career of his success and villainy, I think it as
well--even at the cost of some pain and fear--that he should see him
now.'

These few words had been said apart, so as to be inaudible to Oliver.
The man touched his hat; and glancing at Oliver with some curiousity,
opened another gate, opposite to that by which they had entered, and
led them on, through dark and winding ways, towards the cells.

'This,' said the man, stopping in a gloomy passage where a couple of
workmen were making some preparations in profound silence--'this is the
place he passes through.  If you step this way, you can see the door he
goes out at.'

He led them into a stone kitchen, fitted with coppers for dressing the
prison food, and pointed to a door.  There was an open grating above
it, through which came the sound of men's voices, mingled with the
noise of hammering, and the throwing down of boards.  They were
putting up the scaffold.

From this place, they passed through several strong gates, opened by
other turnkeys from the inner side; and, having entered an open yard,
ascended a flight of narrow steps, and came into a passage with a row
of strong doors on the left hand.  Motioning them to remain where they
were, the turnkey knocked at one of these with his bunch of keys. The
two attendants, after a little whispering, came out into the passage,
stretching themselves as if glad of the temporary relief, and motioned
the visitors to follow the jailer into the cell.  They did so.

The condemned criminal was seated on his bed, rocking himself from side
to side, with a countenance more like that of a snared beast than the
face of a man.  His mind was evidently wandering to his old life, for
he continued to mutter, without appearing conscious of their presence
otherwise than as a part of his vision.

'Good boy, Charley--well done--' he mumbled.  'Oliver, too, ha! ha! ha!
Oliver too--quite the gentleman now--quite the--take that boy away to
bed!'

The jailer took the disengaged hand of Oliver; and, whispering him not
to be alarmed, looked on without speaking.

'Take him away to bed!' cried Fagin.  'Do you hear me, some of you?  He
has been the--the--somehow the cause of all this.  It's worth the money
to bring him up to it--Bolter's throat, Bill; never mind the
girl--Bolter's throat as deep as you can cut.  Saw his head off!'

'Fagin,' said the jailer.

'That's me!' cried the Jew, falling instantly, into the attitude of
listening he had assumed upon his trial.  'An old man, my Lord; a very
old, old man!'

'Here,' said the turnkey, laying his hand upon his breast to keep him
down.  'Here's somebody wants to see you, to ask you some questions, I
suppose.  Fagin, Fagin!  Are you a man?'

'I shan't be one long,' he replied, looking up with a face retaining no
human expression but rage and terror.  'Strike them all dead!  What
right have they to butcher me?'

As he spoke he caught sight of Oliver and Mr. Brownlow. Shrinking to
the furthest corner of the seat, he demanded to know what they wanted
there.

'Steady,' said the turnkey, still holding him down.  'Now, sir, tell
him what you want.  Quick, if you please, for he grows worse as the
time gets on.'

'You have some papers,' said Mr. Brownlow advancing, 'which were placed
in your hands, for better security, by a man called Monks.'

'It's all a lie together,' replied Fagin.  'I haven't one--not one.'

'For the love of God,' said Mr. Brownlow solemnly, 'do not say that
now, upon the very verge of death; but tell me where they are.  You
know that Sikes is dead; that Monks has confessed; that there is no
hope of any further gain.  Where are those papers?'

'Oliver,' cried Fagin, beckoning to him.  'Here, here! Let me whisper
to you.'

'I am not afraid,' said Oliver in a low voice, as he relinquished Mr.
Brownlow's hand.

'The papers,' said Fagin, drawing Oliver towards him, 'are in a canvas
bag, in a hole a little way up the chimney in the top front-room.  I
want to talk to you, my dear.  I want to talk to you.'

'Yes, yes,' returned Oliver.  'Let me say a prayer.  Do!  Let me say
one prayer.  Say only one, upon your knees, with me, and we will talk
till morning.'

'Outside, outside,' replied Fagin, pushing the boy before him towards
the door, and looking vacantly over his head. 'Say I've gone to
sleep--they'll believe you.  You can get me out, if you take me so.
Now then, now then!'

'Oh!  God forgive this wretched man!' cried the boy with a burst of
tears.

'That's right, that's right,' said Fagin.  'That'll help us on. This
door first.  If I shake and tremble, as we pass the gallows, don't you
mind, but hurry on.  Now, now, now!'

'Have you nothing else to ask him, sir?' inquired the turnkey.

'No other question,' replied Mr. Brownlow.  'If I hoped we could recall
him to a sense of his position--'

'Nothing will do that, sir,' replied the man, shaking his head. 'You
had better leave him.'

The door of the cell opened, and the attendants returned.

'Press on, press on,' cried Fagin.  'Softly, but not so slow. Faster,
faster!'

The men laid hands upon him, and disengaging Oliver from his grasp,
held him back.  He struggled with the power of desperation, for an
instant; and then sent up cry upon cry that penetrated even those
massive walls, and rang in their ears until they reached the open yard.

It was some time before they left the prison.  Oliver nearly swooned
after this frightful scene, and was so weak that for an hour or more,
he had not the strength to walk.

Day was dawning when they again emerged.  A great multitude had already
assembled; the windows were filled with people, smoking and playing
cards to beguile the time; the crowd were pushing, quarrelling, joking.
Everything told of life and animation, but one dark cluster of objects
in the centre of all--the black stage, the cross-beam, the rope, and
all the hideous apparatus of death.



CHAPTER LIII

AND LAST

The fortunes of those who have figured in this tale are nearly closed.
The little that remains to their historian to relate, is told in few
and simple words.

Before three months had passed, Rose Fleming and Harry Maylie were
married in the village church which was henceforth to be the scene of
the young clergyman's labours; on the same day they entered into
possession of their new and happy home.

Mrs. Maylie took up her abode with her son and daughter-in-law, to
enjoy, during the tranquil remainder of her days, the greatest felicity
that age and worth can know--the contemplation of the happiness of
those on whom the warmest affections and tenderest cares of a
well-spent life, have been unceasingly bestowed.

It appeared, on full and careful investigation, that if the wreck of
property remaining in the custody of Monks (which had never prospered
either in his hands or in those of his mother) were equally divided
between himself and Oliver, it would yield, to each, little more than
three thousand pounds.  By the provisions of his father's will, Oliver
would have been entitled to the whole; but Mr. Brownlow, unwilling to
deprive the elder son of the opportunity of retrieving his former vices
and pursuing an honest career, proposed this mode of distribution, to
which his young charge joyfully acceded.

Monks, still bearing that assumed name, retired with his portion to a
distant part of the New World; where, having quickly squandered it, he
once more fell into his old courses, and, after undergoing a long
confinement for some fresh act of fraud and knavery, at length sunk
under an attack of his old disorder, and died in prison.  As far from
home, died the chief remaining members of his friend Fagin's gang.

Mr. Brownlow adopted Oliver as his son.  Removing with him and the old
housekeeper to within a mile of the parsonage-house, where his dear
friends resided, he gratified the only remaining wish of Oliver's warm
and earnest heart, and thus linked together a little society, whose
condition approached as nearly to one of perfect happiness as can ever
be known in this changing world.

Soon after the marriage of the young people, the worthy doctor returned
to Chertsey, where, bereft of the presence of his old friends, he would
have been discontented if his temperament had admitted of such a
feeling; and would have turned quite peevish if he had known how.  For
two or three months, he contented himself with hinting that he feared
the air began to disagree with him; then, finding that the place really
no longer was, to him, what it had been, he settled his business on his
assistant, took a bachelor's cottage outside the village of which his
young friend was pastor, and instantaneously recovered.  Here he took
to gardening, planting, fishing, carpentering, and various other
pursuits of a similar kind:  all undertaken with his characteristic
impetuosity.  In each and all he has since become famous throughout the
neighborhood, as a most profound authority.

Before his removal, he had managed to contract a strong friendship for
Mr. Grimwig, which that eccentric gentleman cordially reciprocated.  He
is accordingly visited by Mr. Grimwig a great many times in the course
of the year.  On all such occasions, Mr. Grimwig plants, fishes, and
carpenters, with great ardour; doing everything in a very singular and
unprecedented manner, but always maintaining with his favourite
asseveration, that his mode is the right one.  On Sundays, he never
fails to criticise the sermon to the young clergyman's face:  always
informing Mr. Losberne, in strict confidence afterwards, that he
considers it an excellent performance, but deems it as well not to say
so.  It is a standing and very favourite joke, for Mr. Brownlow to
rally him on his old prophecy concerning Oliver, and to remind him of
the night on which they sat with the watch between them, waiting his
return; but Mr. Grimwig contends that he was right in the main, and, in
proof thereof, remarks that Oliver did not come back after all; which
always calls forth a laugh on his side, and increases his good humour.

Mr. Noah Claypole:  receiving a free pardon from the Crown in
consequence of being admitted approver against Fagin:  and considering
his profession not altogether as safe a one as he could wish:  was, for
some little time, at a loss for the means of a livelihood, not burdened
with too much work.  After some consideration, he went into business as
an informer, in which calling he realises a genteel subsistence.  His
plan is, to walk out once a week during church time attended by
Charlotte in respectable attire.  The lady faints away at the doors of
charitable publicans, and the gentleman being accommodated with
three-penny worth of brandy to restore her, lays an information next
day, and pockets half the penalty.  Sometimes Mr. Claypole faints
himself, but the result is the same.

Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, deprived of their situations, were gradually
reduced to great indigence and misery, and finally became paupers in
that very same workhouse in which they had once lorded it over others.
Mr. Bumble has been heard to say, that in this reverse and degradation,
he has not even spirits to be thankful for being separated from his
wife.

As to Mr. Giles and Brittles, they still remain in their old posts,
although the former is bald, and the last-named boy quite grey.  They
sleep at the parsonage, but divide their attentions so equally among
its inmates, and Oliver and Mr. Brownlow, and Mr. Losberne, that to
this day the villagers have never been able to discover to which
establishment they properly belong.

Master Charles Bates, appalled by Sikes's crime, fell into a train of
reflection whether an honest life was not, after all, the best.
Arriving at the conclusion that it certainly was, he turned his back
upon the scenes of the past, resolved to amend it in some new sphere of
action.  He struggled hard, and suffered much, for some time; but,
having a contented disposition, and a good purpose, succeeded in the
end; and, from being a farmer's drudge, and a carrier's lad, he is now
the merriest young grazier in all Northamptonshire.

And now, the hand that traces these words, falters, as it approaches
the conclusion of its task; and would weave, for a little longer space,
the thread of these adventures.

I would fain linger yet with a few of those among whom I have so long
moved, and share their happiness by endeavouring to depict it.  I would
show Rose Maylie in all the bloom and grace of early womanhood,
shedding on her secluded path in life soft and gentle light, that fell
on all who trod it with her, and shone into their hearts.  I would
paint her the life and joy of the fire-side circle and the lively
summer group; I would follow her through the sultry fields at noon, and
hear the low tones of her sweet voice in the moonlit evening walk; I
would watch her in all her goodness and charity abroad, and the smiling
untiring discharge of domestic duties at home; I would paint her and
her dead sister's child happy in their love for one another, and
passing whole hours together in picturing the friends whom they had so
sadly lost; I would summon before me, once again, those joyous little
faces that clustered round her knee, and listen to their merry prattle;
I would recall the tones of that clear laugh, and conjure up the
sympathising tear that glistened in the soft blue eye.  These, and a
thousand looks and smiles, and turns of thought and speech--I would
fain recall them every one.

How Mr. Brownlow went on, from day to day, filling the mind of his
adopted child with stores of knowledge, and becoming attached to him,
more and more, as his nature developed itself, and showed the thriving
seeds of all he wished him to become--how he traced in him new traits
of his early friend, that awakened in his own bosom old remembrances,
melancholy and yet sweet and soothing--how the two orphans, tried by
adversity, remembered its lessons in mercy to others, and mutual love,
and fervent thanks to Him who had protected and preserved them--these
are all matters which need not to be told.  I have said that they were
truly happy; and without strong affection and humanity of heart, and
gratitude to that Being whose code is Mercy, and whose great attribute
is Benevolence to all things that breathe, happiness can never be
attained.

Within the altar of the old village church there stands a white marble
tablet, which bears as yet but one word:  'AGNES.'  There is no coffin
in that tomb; and may it be many, many years, before another name is
placed above it!  But, if the spirits of the Dead ever come back to
earth, to visit spots hallowed by the love--the love beyond the
grave--of those whom they knew in life, I believe that the shade of
Agnes sometimes hovers round that solemn nook. I believe it none the
less because that nook is in a Church, and she was weak and erring.










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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: Our Mutual Friend

Author: Charles Dickens

Release Date: April 27, 2006 [EBook #883]
Last Updated: February 8, 2019


Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR MUTUAL FRIEND ***




Produced by Donald Lainson





OUR MUTUAL FRIEND

Charles Dickens



CONTENTS


     Book the First

     THE CUP AND THE LIP


     1. ON THE LOOK OUT
     2. THE MAN FROM SOMEWHERE
     3. ANOTHER MAN
     4. THE R. WILFER FAMILY
     5. BOFFIN’S BOWER
     6. CUT ADRIFT
     7. MR WEGG LOOKS AFTER HIMSELF
     8. MR BOFFIN IN CONSULTATION
     9. MR AND MRS BOFFIN IN CONSULTATION
     10. A MARRIAGE CONTRACT
     11. PODSNAPPERY
     12. THE SWEAT OF AN HONEST MAN’S BROW
     13. TRACKING THE BIRD OF PREY
     14. THE BIRD OF PREY BROUGHT DOWN
     15. TWO NEW SERVANTS
     16. MINDERS AND RE-MINDERS
     17. A DISMAL SWAMP



     Book the Second

     BIRDS OF A FEATHER


     1. OF AN EDUCATIONAL CHARACTER
     2. STILL EDUCATIONAL
     3. A PIECE OF WORK
     4. CUPID PROMPTED
     5. MERCURY PROMPTING
     6. A RIDDLE WITHOUT AN ANSWER
     7. IN WHICH A FRIENDLY MOVE IS ORIGINATED
     8. IN WHICH AN INNOCENT ELOPEMENT OCCURS
     9. IN WHICH THE ORPHAN MAKES HIS WILL
     10. A SUCCESSOR
     11. SOME AFFAIRS OF THE HEART
     12. MORE BIRDS OF PREY
     13. A SOLO AND A DUETT
     14. STRONG OF PURPOSE
     15. THE WHOLE CASE SO FAR
     16. AN ANNIVERSARY OCCASION



     Book the Third

     A LONG LANE


     1. LODGERS IN QUEER STREET
     2. A RESPECTED FRIEND IN A NEW ASPECT
     3. THE SAME RESPECTED FRIEND IN MORE ASPECTS THAN ONE
     4. A HAPPY RETURN OF THE DAY
     5. THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN FALLS INTO BAD COMPANY
     6. THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN FALLS INTO WORSE COMPANY
     7. THE FRIENDLY MOVE TAKES UP A STRONG POSITION
     8. THE END OF A LONG JOURNEY
     9. SOMEBODY BECOMES THE SUBJECT OF A PREDICTION
     10. SCOUTS OUT
     11. IN THE DARK
     12. MEANING MISCHIEF
     13. GIVE A DOG A BAD NAME, AND HANG HIM
     14. MR WEGG PREPARES A GRINDSTONE FOR MR BOFFIN’S NOSE
     15. THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN AT HIS WORST
     16. THE FEAST OF THE THREE HOBGOBLINS
     17. A SOCIAL CHORUS



     Book the Fourth

     A TURNING


     1. SETTING TRAPS
     2. THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN RISES A LITTLE
     3. THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN SINKS AGAIN
     4. A RUNAWAY MATCH
     5. CONCERNING THE MENDICANT’S BRIDE
     6. A CRY FOR HELP
     7. BETTER TO BE ABEL THAN CAIN
     8. A FEW GRAINS OF PEPPER
     9. TWO PLACES VACATED
     10. THE DOLLS’ DRESSMAKER DISCOVERS A WORD
     11. EFFECT IS GIVEN TO THE DOLLS’ DRESSMAKER’S DISCOVERY
     12. THE PASSING SHADOW
     13. SHOWING HOW THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN HELPED TO SCATTER DUST
     14. CHECKMATE TO THE FRIENDLY MOVE
     15. WHAT WAS CAUGHT IN THE TRAPS THAT WERE SET
     16. PERSONS AND THINGS IN GENERAL
     17. THE VOICE OF SOCIETY


     POSTSCRIPT, IN LIEU OF PREFACE




BOOK THE FIRST -- THE CUP AND THE LIP



Chapter 1

ON THE LOOK OUT


In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no
need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with
two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which
is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening
was closing in.

The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled
hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty,
sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girl
rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the
rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband,
kept an eager look out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he could
not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no
inscription, no appliance beyond a rusty boathook and a coil of rope,
and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small
to take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or
river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked
for something, with a most intent and searching gaze. The tide, which
had turned an hour before, was running down, and his eyes watched
every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as the boat made slight
head-way against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he
directed his daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his face
as earnestly as he watched the river. But, in the intensity of her look
there was a touch of dread or horror.

Allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface, by reason of
the slime and ooze with which it was covered, and its sodden state, this
boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that they
often did, and were seeking what they often sought. Half savage as the
man showed, with no covering on his matted head, with his brown arms
bare to between the elbow and the shoulder, with the loose knot of a
looser kerchief lying low on his bare breast in a wilderness of beard
and whisker, with such dress as he wore seeming to be made out of the
mud that begrimed his boat, still there was a business-like usage in his
steady gaze. So with every lithe action of the girl, with every turn of
her wrist, perhaps most of all with her look of dread or horror; they
were things of usage.

‘Keep her out, Lizzie. Tide runs strong here. Keep her well afore the
sweep of it.’

Trusting to the girl’s skill and making no use of the rudder, he eyed
the coming tide with an absorbed attention. So the girl eyed him. But,
it happened now, that a slant of light from the setting sun glanced into
the bottom of the boat, and, touching a rotten stain there which bore
some resemblance to the outline of a muffled human form, coloured it as
though with diluted blood. This caught the girl’s eye, and she shivered.

‘What ails you?’ said the man, immediately aware of it, though so intent
on the advancing waters; ‘I see nothing afloat.’

The red light was gone, the shudder was gone, and his gaze, which had
come back to the boat for a moment, travelled away again. Wheresoever
the strong tide met with an impediment, his gaze paused for an instant.
At every mooring-chain and rope, at every stationery boat or barge that
split the current into a broad-arrowhead, at the offsets from the piers
of Southwark Bridge, at the paddles of the river steamboats as they beat
the filthy water, at the floating logs of timber lashed together lying
off certain wharves, his shining eyes darted a hungry look. After a
darkening hour or so, suddenly the rudder-lines tightened in his hold,
and he steered hard towards the Surrey shore.

Always watching his face, the girl instantly answered to the action in
her sculling; presently the boat swung round, quivered as from a sudden
jerk, and the upper half of the man was stretched out over the stern.

The girl pulled the hood of a cloak she wore, over her head and over her
face, and, looking backward so that the front folds of this hood were
turned down the river, kept the boat in that direction going before the
tide. Until now, the boat had barely held her own, and had hovered about
one spot; but now, the banks changed swiftly, and the deepening shadows
and the kindling lights of London Bridge were passed, and the tiers of
shipping lay on either hand.

It was not until now that the upper half of the man came back into the
boat. His arms were wet and dirty, and he washed them over the side. In
his right hand he held something, and he washed that in the river too.
It was money. He chinked it once, and he blew upon it once, and he spat
upon it once,--‘for luck,’ he hoarsely said--before he put it in his
pocket.

‘Lizzie!’

The girl turned her face towards him with a start, and rowed in silence.
Her face was very pale. He was a hook-nosed man, and with that and his
bright eyes and his ruffled head, bore a certain likeness to a roused
bird of prey.

‘Take that thing off your face.’

She put it back.

‘Here! and give me hold of the sculls. I’ll take the rest of the spell.’

‘No, no, father! No! I can’t indeed. Father!--I cannot sit so near it!’

He was moving towards her to change places, but her terrified
expostulation stopped him and he resumed his seat.

‘What hurt can it do you?’

‘None, none. But I cannot bear it.’

‘It’s my belief you hate the sight of the very river.’

‘I--I do not like it, father.’

‘As if it wasn’t your living! As if it wasn’t meat and drink to you!’

At these latter words the girl shivered again, and for a moment paused
in her rowing, seeming to turn deadly faint. It escaped his attention,
for he was glancing over the stern at something the boat had in tow.

‘How can you be so thankless to your best friend, Lizzie? The very
fire that warmed you when you were a babby, was picked out of the river
alongside the coal barges. The very basket that you slept in, the tide
washed ashore. The very rockers that I put it upon to make a cradle
of it, I cut out of a piece of wood that drifted from some ship or
another.’

Lizzie took her right hand from the scull it held, and touched her
lips with it, and for a moment held it out lovingly towards him: then,
without speaking, she resumed her rowing, as another boat of similar
appearance, though in rather better trim, came out from a dark place and
dropped softly alongside.

‘In luck again, Gaffer?’ said a man with a squinting leer, who sculled
her and who was alone, ‘I know’d you was in luck again, by your wake as
you come down.’

‘Ah!’ replied the other, drily. ‘So you’re out, are you?’

‘Yes, pardner.’

There was now a tender yellow moonlight on the river, and the new comer,
keeping half his boat’s length astern of the other boat looked hard at
its track.

‘I says to myself,’ he went on, ‘directly you hove in view, yonder’s
Gaffer, and in luck again, by George if he ain’t! Scull it is,
pardner--don’t fret yourself--I didn’t touch him.’ This was in answer
to a quick impatient movement on the part of Gaffer: the speaker at the
same time unshipping his scull on that side, and laying his hand on the
gunwale of Gaffer’s boat and holding to it.

‘He’s had touches enough not to want no more, as well as I make him
out, Gaffer! Been a knocking about with a pretty many tides, ain’t he
pardner? Such is my out-of-luck ways, you see! He must have passed me
when he went up last time, for I was on the lookout below bridge here. I
a’most think you’re like the wulturs, pardner, and scent ‘em out.’

He spoke in a dropped voice, and with more than one glance at Lizzie who
had pulled on her hood again. Both men then looked with a weird unholy
interest in the wake of Gaffer’s boat.

‘Easy does it, betwixt us. Shall I take him aboard, pardner?’

‘No,’ said the other. In so surly a tone that the man, after a blank
stare, acknowledged it with the retort:

‘--Arn’t been eating nothing as has disagreed with you, have you,
pardner?’

‘Why, yes, I have,’ said Gaffer. ‘I have been swallowing too much of
that word, Pardner. I am no pardner of yours.’

‘Since when was you no pardner of mine, Gaffer Hexam Esquire?’

‘Since you was accused of robbing a man. Accused of robbing a live man!’
said Gaffer, with great indignation.

‘And what if I had been accused of robbing a dead man, Gaffer?’

‘You COULDN’T do it.’

‘Couldn’t you, Gaffer?’

‘No. Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to
have money? What world does a dead man belong to? ‘Tother world. What
world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse’s? Can
a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it? Don’t try to go
confounding the rights and wrongs of things in that way. But it’s worthy
of the sneaking spirit that robs a live man.’

‘I’ll tell you what it is--.’

‘No you won’t. I’ll tell you what it is. You got off with a short time
of it for putting your hand in the pocket of a sailor, a live sailor.
Make the most of it and think yourself lucky, but don’t think after
that to come over ME with your pardners. We have worked together in time
past, but we work together no more in time present nor yet future. Let
go. Cast off!’

‘Gaffer! If you think to get rid of me this way--.’

‘If I don’t get rid of you this way, I’ll try another, and chop you over
the fingers with the stretcher, or take a pick at your head with the
boat-hook. Cast off! Pull you, Lizzie. Pull home, since you won’t let
your father pull.’

Lizzie shot ahead, and the other boat fell astern. Lizzie’s father,
composing himself into the easy attitude of one who had asserted the
high moralities and taken an unassailable position, slowly lighted a
pipe, and smoked, and took a survey of what he had in tow. What he had
in tow, lunged itself at him sometimes in an awful manner when the boat
was checked, and sometimes seemed to try to wrench itself away, though
for the most part it followed submissively. A neophyte might have
fancied that the ripples passing over it were dreadfully like faint
changes of expression on a sightless face; but Gaffer was no neophyte
and had no fancies.



Chapter 2

THE MAN FROM SOMEWHERE


Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a
bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick
and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new,
all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was
new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures
were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was
lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had
set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the
Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown
of his head.

For, in the Veneering establishment, from the hall-chairs with the new
coat of arms, to the grand pianoforte with the new action, and upstairs
again to the new fire-escape, all things were in a state of high varnish
and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in
the Veneerings--the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and
was a trifle sticky.

There was an innocent piece of dinner-furniture that went upon easy
castors and was kept over a livery stable-yard in Duke Street, Saint
James’s, when not in use, to whom the Veneerings were a source of blind
confusion. The name of this article was Twemlow. Being first cousin
to Lord Snigsworth, he was in frequent requisition, and at many houses
might be said to represent the dining-table in its normal state. Mr and
Mrs Veneering, for example, arranging a dinner, habitually started with
Twemlow, and then put leaves in him, or added guests to him. Sometimes,
the table consisted of Twemlow and half a dozen leaves; sometimes, of
Twemlow and a dozen leaves; sometimes, Twemlow was pulled out to his
utmost extent of twenty leaves. Mr and Mrs Veneering on occasions of
ceremony faced each other in the centre of the board, and thus the
parallel still held; for, it always happened that the more Twemlow was
pulled out, the further he found himself from the center, and nearer
to the sideboard at one end of the room, or the window-curtains at the
other.

But, it was not this which steeped the feeble soul of Twemlow in
confusion. This he was used to, and could take soundings of. The abyss
to which he could find no bottom, and from which started forth the
engrossing and ever-swelling difficulty of his life, was the insoluble
question whether he was Veneering’s oldest friend, or newest friend.
To the excogitation of this problem, the harmless gentleman had devoted
many anxious hours, both in his lodgings over the livery stable-yard,
and in the cold gloom, favourable to meditation, of Saint James’s
Square. Thus. Twemlow had first known Veneering at his club, where
Veneering then knew nobody but the man who made them known to one
another, who seemed to be the most intimate friend he had in the world,
and whom he had known two days--the bond of union between their souls,
the nefarious conduct of the committee respecting the cookery of
a fillet of veal, having been accidentally cemented at that date.
Immediately upon this, Twemlow received an invitation to dine with
Veneering, and dined: the man being of the party. Immediately upon
that, Twemlow received an invitation to dine with the man, and dined:
Veneering being of the party. At the man’s were a Member, an Engineer, a
Payer-off of the National Debt, a Poem on Shakespeare, a Grievance, and
a Public Office, who all seem to be utter strangers to Veneering. And
yet immediately after that, Twemlow received an invitation to dine at
Veneerings, expressly to meet the Member, the Engineer, the Payer-off
of the National Debt, the Poem on Shakespeare, the Grievance, and the
Public Office, and, dining, discovered that all of them were the most
intimate friends Veneering had in the world, and that the wives of all
of them (who were all there) were the objects of Mrs Veneering’s most
devoted affection and tender confidence.

Thus it had come about, that Mr Twemlow had said to himself in his
lodgings, with his hand to his forehead: ‘I must not think of this. This
is enough to soften any man’s brain,’--and yet was always thinking of
it, and could never form a conclusion.

This evening the Veneerings give a banquet. Eleven leaves in the
Twemlow; fourteen in company all told. Four pigeon-breasted retainers in
plain clothes stand in line in the hall. A fifth retainer, proceeding up
the staircase with a mournful air--as who should say, ‘Here is another
wretched creature come to dinner; such is life!’--announces, ‘Mis-ter
Twemlow!’

Mrs Veneering welcomes her sweet Mr Twemlow. Mr Veneering welcomes
his dear Twemlow. Mrs Veneering does not expect that Mr Twemlow can in
nature care much for such insipid things as babies, but so old a friend
must please to look at baby. ‘Ah! You will know the friend of your
family better, Tootleums,’ says Mr Veneering, nodding emotionally at
that new article, ‘when you begin to take notice.’ He then begs to make
his dear Twemlow known to his two friends, Mr Boots and Mr Brewer--and
clearly has no distinct idea which is which.

But now a fearful circumstance occurs.

‘Mis-ter and Mis-sus Podsnap!’

‘My dear,’ says Mr Veneering to Mrs Veneering, with an air of much
friendly interest, while the door stands open, ‘the Podsnaps.’

A too, too smiling large man, with a fatal freshness on him, appearing
with his wife, instantly deserts his wife and darts at Twemlow with:

‘How do you do? So glad to know you. Charming house you have here. I
hope we are not late. So glad of the opportunity, I am sure!’

When the first shock fell upon him, Twemlow twice skipped back in
his neat little shoes and his neat little silk stockings of a bygone
fashion, as if impelled to leap over a sofa behind him; but the large
man closed with him and proved too strong.

‘Let me,’ says the large man, trying to attract the attention of his
wife in the distance, ‘have the pleasure of presenting Mrs Podsnap
to her host. She will be,’ in his fatal freshness he seems to find
perpetual verdure and eternal youth in the phrase, ‘she will be so glad
of the opportunity, I am sure!’

In the meantime, Mrs Podsnap, unable to originate a mistake on her own
account, because Mrs Veneering is the only other lady there, does her
best in the way of handsomely supporting her husband’s, by looking
towards Mr Twemlow with a plaintive countenance and remarking to Mrs
Veneering in a feeling manner, firstly, that she fears he has been
rather bilious of late, and, secondly, that the baby is already very
like him.

It is questionable whether any man quite relishes being mistaken for
any other man; but, Mr Veneering having this very evening set up the
shirt-front of the young Antinous in new worked cambric just come home,
is not at all complimented by being supposed to be Twemlow, who is dry
and weazen and some thirty years older. Mrs Veneering equally resents
the imputation of being the wife of Twemlow. As to Twemlow, he is
so sensible of being a much better bred man than Veneering, that he
considers the large man an offensive ass.

In this complicated dilemma, Mr Veneering approaches the large man with
extended hand and, smilingly assures that incorrigible personage that he
is delighted to see him: who in his fatal freshness instantly replies:

‘Thank you. I am ashamed to say that I cannot at this moment recall
where we met, but I am so glad of this opportunity, I am sure!’

Then pouncing upon Twemlow, who holds back with all his feeble might, he
is haling him off to present him, as Veneering, to Mrs Podsnap, when the
arrival of more guests unravels the mistake. Whereupon, having re-shaken
hands with Veneering as Veneering, he re-shakes hands with Twemlow as
Twemlow, and winds it all up to his own perfect satisfaction by saying
to the last-named, ‘Ridiculous opportunity--but so glad of it, I am
sure!’

Now, Twemlow having undergone this terrific experience, having likewise
noted the fusion of Boots in Brewer and Brewer in Boots, and having
further observed that of the remaining seven guests four discrete
characters enter with wandering eyes and wholly declined to commit
themselves as to which is Veneering, until Veneering has them in his
grasp;--Twemlow having profited by these studies, finds his brain
wholesomely hardening as he approaches the conclusion that he really is
Veneering’s oldest friend, when his brain softens again and all is
lost, through his eyes encountering Veneering and the large man linked
together as twin brothers in the back drawing-room near the conservatory
door, and through his ears informing him in the tones of Mrs Veneering
that the same large man is to be baby’s godfather.

‘Dinner is on the table!’

Thus the melancholy retainer, as who should say, ‘Come down and be
poisoned, ye unhappy children of men!’

Twemlow, having no lady assigned him, goes down in the rear, with
his hand to his forehead. Boots and Brewer, thinking him indisposed,
whisper, ‘Man faint. Had no lunch.’ But he is only stunned by the
unvanquishable difficulty of his existence.

Revived by soup, Twemlow discourses mildly of the Court Circular with
Boots and Brewer. Is appealed to, at the fish stage of the banquet, by
Veneering, on the disputed question whether his cousin Lord Snigsworth
is in or out of town? Gives it that his cousin is out of town. ‘At
Snigsworthy Park?’ Veneering inquires. ‘At Snigsworthy,’ Twemlow
rejoins. Boots and Brewer regard this as a man to be cultivated; and
Veneering is clear that he is a remunerative article. Meantime the
retainer goes round, like a gloomy Analytical Chemist: always seeming
to say, after ‘Chablis, sir?’--‘You wouldn’t if you knew what it’s made
of.’

The great looking-glass above the sideboard, reflects the table and the
company. Reflects the new Veneering crest, in gold and eke in silver,
frosted and also thawed, a camel of all work. The Heralds’ College found
out a Crusading ancestor for Veneering who bore a camel on his shield
(or might have done it if he had thought of it), and a caravan of camels
take charge of the fruits and flowers and candles, and kneel down be
loaded with the salt. Reflects Veneering; forty, wavy-haired, dark,
tending to corpulence, sly, mysterious, filmy--a kind of sufficiently
well-looking veiled-prophet, not prophesying. Reflects Mrs Veneering;
fair, aquiline-nosed and fingered, not so much light hair as she might
have, gorgeous in raiment and jewels, enthusiastic, propitiatory,
conscious that a corner of her husband’s veil is over herself. Reflects
Podsnap; prosperously feeding, two little light-coloured wiry wings, one
on either side of his else bald head, looking as like his hairbrushes as
his hair, dissolving view of red beads on his forehead, large allowance
of crumpled shirt-collar up behind. Reflects Mrs Podsnap; fine woman
for Professor Owen, quantity of bone, neck and nostrils like a
rocking-horse, hard features, majestic head-dress in which Podsnap has
hung golden offerings. Reflects Twemlow; grey, dry, polite, susceptible
to east wind, First-Gentleman-in-Europe collar and cravat, cheeks drawn
in as if he had made a great effort to retire into himself some years
ago, and had got so far and had never got any farther. Reflects mature
young lady; raven locks, and complexion that lights up well when well
powdered--as it is--carrying on considerably in the captivation of
mature young gentleman; with too much nose in his face, too much ginger
in his whiskers, too much torso in his waistcoat, too much sparkle in
his studs, his eyes, his buttons, his talk, and his teeth. Reflects
charming old Lady Tippins on Veneering’s right; with an immense obtuse
drab oblong face, like a face in a tablespoon, and a dyed Long Walk up
the top of her head, as a convenient public approach to the bunch of
false hair behind, pleased to patronize Mrs Veneering opposite, who
is pleased to be patronized. Reflects a certain ‘Mortimer’, another
of Veneering’s oldest friends; who never was in the house before,
and appears not to want to come again, who sits disconsolate on Mrs
Veneering’s left, and who was inveigled by Lady Tippins (a friend of
his boyhood) to come to these people’s and talk, and who won’t talk.
Reflects Eugene, friend of Mortimer; buried alive in the back of his
chair, behind a shoulder--with a powder-epaulette on it--of the mature
young lady, and gloomily resorting to the champagne chalice whenever
proffered by the Analytical Chemist. Lastly, the looking-glass reflects
Boots and Brewer, and two other stuffed Buffers interposed between the
rest of the company and possible accidents.

The Veneering dinners are excellent dinners--or new people wouldn’t
come--and all goes well. Notably, Lady Tippins has made a series of
experiments on her digestive functions, so extremely complicated and
daring, that if they could be published with their results it might
benefit the human race. Having taken in provisions from all parts of the
world, this hardy old cruiser has last touched at the North Pole, when,
as the ice-plates are being removed, the following words fall from her:

‘I assure you, my dear Veneering--’

(Poor Twemlow’s hand approaches his forehead, for it would seem now,
that Lady Tippins is going to be the oldest friend.)

‘I assure you, my dear Veneering, that it is the oddest affair! Like
the advertising people, I don’t ask you to trust me, without offering
a respectable reference. Mortimer there, is my reference, and knows all
about it.’

Mortimer raises his drooping eyelids, and slightly opens his mouth. But
a faint smile, expressive of ‘What’s the use!’ passes over his face, and
he drops his eyelids and shuts his mouth.

‘Now, Mortimer,’ says Lady Tippins, rapping the sticks of her closed
green fan upon the knuckles of her left hand--which is particularly rich
in knuckles, ‘I insist upon your telling all that is to be told about
the man from Jamaica.’

‘Give you my honour I never heard of any man from Jamaica, except the
man who was a brother,’ replies Mortimer.

‘Tobago, then.’

‘Nor yet from Tobago.’

‘Except,’ Eugene strikes in: so unexpectedly that the mature young lady,
who has forgotten all about him, with a start takes the epaulette out
of his way: ‘except our friend who long lived on rice-pudding and
isinglass, till at length to his something or other, his physician said
something else, and a leg of mutton somehow ended in daygo.’

A reviving impression goes round the table that Eugene is coming out. An
unfulfilled impression, for he goes in again.

‘Now, my dear Mrs Veneering,’ quoth Lady Tippins, I appeal to you
whether this is not the basest conduct ever known in this world? I carry
my lovers about, two or three at a time, on condition that they are very
obedient and devoted; and here is my oldest lover-in-chief, the head of
all my slaves, throwing off his allegiance before company! And here is
another of my lovers, a rough Cymon at present certainly, but of whom
I had most hopeful expectations as to his turning out well in course of
time, pretending that he can’t remember his nursery rhymes! On purpose
to annoy me, for he knows how I doat upon them!’

A grisly little fiction concerning her lovers is Lady Tippins’s point.
She is always attended by a lover or two, and she keeps a little list
of her lovers, and she is always booking a new lover, or striking out an
old lover, or putting a lover in her black list, or promoting a lover to
her blue list, or adding up her lovers, or otherwise posting her book.
Mrs Veneering is charmed by the humour, and so is Veneering. Perhaps it
is enhanced by a certain yellow play in Lady Tippins’s throat, like the
legs of scratching poultry.

‘I banish the false wretch from this moment, and I strike him out of
my Cupidon (my name for my Ledger, my dear,) this very night. But I am
resolved to have the account of the man from Somewhere, and I beg you
to elicit it for me, my love,’ to Mrs Veneering, ‘as I have lost my own
influence. Oh, you perjured man!’ This to Mortimer, with a rattle of her
fan.

‘We are all very much interested in the man from Somewhere,’ Veneering
observes.

Then the four Buffers, taking heart of grace all four at once, say:

‘Deeply interested!’

‘Quite excited!’

‘Dramatic!’

‘Man from Nowhere, perhaps!’

And then Mrs Veneering--for the Lady Tippins’s winning wiles are
contagious--folds her hands in the manner of a supplicating child, turns
to her left neighbour, and says, ‘Tease! Pay! Man from Tumwhere!’ At
which the four Buffers, again mysteriously moved all four at once,
explain, ‘You can’t resist!’

‘Upon my life,’ says Mortimer languidly, ‘I find it immensely
embarrassing to have the eyes of Europe upon me to this extent, and my
only consolation is that you will all of you execrate Lady Tippins in
your secret hearts when you find, as you inevitably will, the man from
Somewhere a bore. Sorry to destroy romance by fixing him with a local
habitation, but he comes from the place, the name of which escapes me,
but will suggest itself to everybody else here, where they make the
wine.’

Eugene suggests ‘Day and Martin’s.’

‘No, not that place,’ returns the unmoved Mortimer, ‘that’s where they
make the Port. My man comes from the country where they make the Cape
Wine. But look here, old fellow; its not at all statistical and it’s
rather odd.’

It is always noticeable at the table of the Veneerings, that no man
troubles himself much about the Veneerings themselves, and that any
one who has anything to tell, generally tells it to anybody else in
preference.

‘The man,’ Mortimer goes on, addressing Eugene, ‘whose name is Harmon,
was only son of a tremendous old rascal who made his money by Dust.’

‘Red velveteens and a bell?’ the gloomy Eugene inquires.

‘And a ladder and basket if you like. By which means, or by others, he
grew rich as a Dust Contractor, and lived in a hollow in a hilly country
entirely composed of Dust. On his own small estate the growling old
vagabond threw up his own mountain range, like an old volcano, and its
geological formation was Dust. Coal-dust, vegetable-dust, bone-dust,
crockery dust, rough dust and sifted dust,--all manner of Dust.’

A passing remembrance of Mrs Veneering, here induces Mortimer to address
his next half-dozen words to her; after which he wanders away again,
tries Twemlow and finds he doesn’t answer, ultimately takes up with the
Buffers who receive him enthusiastically.

‘The moral being--I believe that’s the right expression--of this
exemplary person, derived its highest gratification from anathematizing
his nearest relations and turning them out of doors. Having begun (as
was natural) by rendering these attentions to the wife of his bosom,
he next found himself at leisure to bestow a similar recognition on the
claims of his daughter. He chose a husband for her, entirely to his own
satisfaction and not in the least to hers, and proceeded to settle upon
her, as her marriage portion, I don’t know how much Dust, but something
immense. At this stage of the affair the poor girl respectfully
intimated that she was secretly engaged to that popular character whom
the novelists and versifiers call Another, and that such a marriage
would make Dust of her heart and Dust of her life--in short, would
set her up, on a very extensive scale, in her father’s business.
Immediately, the venerable parent--on a cold winter’s night, it is
said--anathematized and turned her out.’

Here, the Analytical Chemist (who has evidently formed a very low
opinion of Mortimer’s story) concedes a little claret to the Buffers;
who, again mysteriously moved all four at once, screw it slowly into
themselves with a peculiar twist of enjoyment, as they cry in chorus,
‘Pray go on.’

‘The pecuniary resources of Another were, as they usually are, of a very
limited nature. I believe I am not using too strong an expression when
I say that Another was hard up. However, he married the young lady, and
they lived in a humble dwelling, probably possessing a porch ornamented
with honeysuckle and woodbine twining, until she died. I must refer
you to the Registrar of the District in which the humble dwelling was
situated, for the certified cause of death; but early sorrow and anxiety
may have had to do with it, though they may not appear in the ruled
pages and printed forms. Indisputably this was the case with Another,
for he was so cut up by the loss of his young wife that if he outlived
her a year it was as much as he did.’

There is that in the indolent Mortimer, which seems to hint that if good
society might on any account allow itself to be impressible, he, one of
good society, might have the weakness to be impressed by what he here
relates. It is hidden with great pains, but it is in him. The gloomy
Eugene too, is not without some kindred touch; for, when that appalling
Lady Tippins declares that if Another had survived, he should have gone
down at the head of her list of lovers--and also when the mature young
lady shrugs her epaulettes, and laughs at some private and confidential
comment from the mature young gentleman--his gloom deepens to that
degree that he trifles quite ferociously with his dessert-knife.

Mortimer proceeds.

‘We must now return, as novelists say, and as we all wish they wouldn’t,
to the man from Somewhere. Being a boy of fourteen, cheaply educated
at Brussels when his sister’s expulsion befell, it was some little time
before he heard of it--probably from herself, for the mother was dead;
but that I don’t know. Instantly, he absconded, and came over here. He
must have been a boy of spirit and resource, to get here on a stopped
allowance of five sous a week; but he did it somehow, and he burst in
on his father, and pleaded his sister’s cause. Venerable parent promptly
resorts to anathematization, and turns him out. Shocked and terrified
boy takes flight, seeks his fortune, gets aboard ship, ultimately
turns up on dry land among the Cape wine: small proprietor, farmer,
grower--whatever you like to call it.’

At this juncture, shuffling is heard in the hall, and tapping is heard
at the dining-room door. Analytical Chemist goes to the door, confers
angrily with unseen tapper, appears to become mollified by descrying
reason in the tapping, and goes out.

‘So he was discovered, only the other day, after having been expatriated
about fourteen years.’

A Buffer, suddenly astounding the other three, by detaching himself, and
asserting individuality, inquires: ‘How discovered, and why?’

‘Ah! To be sure. Thank you for reminding me. Venerable parent dies.’

Same Buffer, emboldened by success, says: ‘When?’

‘The other day. Ten or twelve months ago.’

Same Buffer inquires with smartness, ‘What of?’ But herein perishes a
melancholy example; being regarded by the three other Buffers with a
stony stare, and attracting no further attention from any mortal.

‘Venerable parent,’ Mortimer repeats with a passing remembrance that
there is a Veneering at table, and for the first time addressing
him--‘dies.’

The gratified Veneering repeats, gravely, ‘dies’; and folds his arms,
and composes his brow to hear it out in a judicial manner, when he finds
himself again deserted in the bleak world.

‘His will is found,’ said Mortimer, catching Mrs Podsnap’s
rocking-horse’s eye. ‘It is dated very soon after the son’s flight. It
leaves the lowest of the range of dust-mountains, with some sort of a
dwelling-house at its foot, to an old servant who is sole executor, and
all the rest of the property--which is very considerable--to the son.
He directs himself to be buried with certain eccentric ceremonies and
precautions against his coming to life, with which I need not bore you,
and that’s all--except--’ and this ends the story.

The Analytical Chemist returning, everybody looks at him. Not because
anybody wants to see him, but because of that subtle influence in nature
which impels humanity to embrace the slightest opportunity of looking at
anything, rather than the person who addresses it.

‘--Except that the son’s inheriting is made conditional on his marrying
a girl, who at the date of the will, was a child of four or five years
old, and who is now a marriageable young woman. Advertisement and
inquiry discovered the son in the man from Somewhere, and at the present
moment, he is on his way home from there--no doubt, in a state of great
astonishment--to succeed to a very large fortune, and to take a wife.’

Mrs Podsnap inquires whether the young person is a young person of
personal charms? Mortimer is unable to report.

Mr Podsnap inquires what would become of the very large fortune, in the
event of the marriage condition not being fulfilled? Mortimer replies,
that by special testamentary clause it would then go to the old servant
above mentioned, passing over and excluding the son; also, that if
the son had not been living, the same old servant would have been sole
residuary legatee.

Mrs Veneering has just succeeded in waking Lady Tippins from a snore, by
dexterously shunting a train of plates and dishes at her knuckles across
the table; when everybody but Mortimer himself becomes aware that the
Analytical Chemist is, in a ghostly manner, offering him a folded paper.
Curiosity detains Mrs Veneering a few moments.

Mortimer, in spite of all the arts of the chemist, placidly refreshes
himself with a glass of Madeira, and remains unconscious of the Document
which engrosses the general attention, until Lady Tippins (who has a
habit of waking totally insensible), having remembered where she is, and
recovered a perception of surrounding objects, says: ‘Falser man than
Don Juan; why don’t you take the note from the commendatore?’ Upon
which, the chemist advances it under the nose of Mortimer, who looks
round at him, and says:

‘What’s this?’

Analytical Chemist bends and whispers.

‘WHO?’ Says Mortimer.

Analytical Chemist again bends and whispers.

Mortimer stares at him, and unfolds the paper. Reads it, reads it twice,
turns it over to look at the blank outside, reads it a third time.

‘This arrives in an extraordinarily opportune manner,’ says Mortimer
then, looking with an altered face round the table: ‘this is the
conclusion of the story of the identical man.’

‘Already married?’ one guesses.

‘Declines to marry?’ another guesses.

‘Codicil among the dust?’ another guesses.

‘Why, no,’ says Mortimer; ‘remarkable thing, you are all wrong. The
story is completer and rather more exciting than I supposed. Man’s
drowned!’



Chapter 3

ANOTHER MAN


As the disappearing skirts of the ladies ascended the Veneering
staircase, Mortimer, following them forth from the dining-room, turned
into a library of bran-new books, in bran-new bindings liberally gilded,
and requested to see the messenger who had brought the paper. He was a
boy of about fifteen. Mortimer looked at the boy, and the boy looked
at the bran-new pilgrims on the wall, going to Canterbury in more gold
frame than procession, and more carving than country.

‘Whose writing is this?’

‘Mine, sir.’

‘Who told you to write it?’

‘My father, Jesse Hexam.’

‘Is it he who found the body?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What is your father?’

The boy hesitated, looked reproachfully at the pilgrims as if they had
involved him in a little difficulty, then said, folding a plait in the
right leg of his trousers, ‘He gets his living along-shore.’

‘Is it far?’

‘Is which far?’ asked the boy, upon his guard, and again upon the road
to Canterbury.

‘To your father’s?’

‘It’s a goodish stretch, sir. I come up in a cab, and the cab’s waiting
to be paid. We could go back in it before you paid it, if you liked.
I went first to your office, according to the direction of the papers
found in the pockets, and there I see nobody but a chap of about my age
who sent me on here.’

There was a curious mixture in the boy, of uncompleted savagery, and
uncompleted civilization. His voice was hoarse and coarse, and his face
was coarse, and his stunted figure was coarse; but he was cleaner than
other boys of his type; and his writing, though large and round,
was good; and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened
curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks
at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.

‘Were any means taken, do you know, boy, to ascertain if it was possible
to restore life?’ Mortimer inquired, as he sought for his hat.

‘You wouldn’t ask, sir, if you knew his state. Pharaoh’s multitude that
were drowned in the Red Sea, ain’t more beyond restoring to life. If
Lazarus was only half as far gone, that was the greatest of all the
miracles.’

‘Halloa!’ cried Mortimer, turning round with his hat upon his head, ‘you
seem to be at home in the Red Sea, my young friend?’

‘Read of it with teacher at the school,’ said the boy.

‘And Lazarus?’

‘Yes, and him too. But don’t you tell my father! We should have no peace
in our place, if that got touched upon. It’s my sister’s contriving.’

‘You seem to have a good sister.’

‘She ain’t half bad,’ said the boy; ‘but if she knows her letters it’s
the most she does--and them I learned her.’

The gloomy Eugene, with his hands in his pockets, had strolled in and
assisted at the latter part of the dialogue; when the boy spoke these
words slightingly of his sister, he took him roughly enough by the chin,
and turned up his face to look at it.

‘Well, I’m sure, sir!’ said the boy, resisting; ‘I hope you’ll know me
again.’

Eugene vouchsafed no answer; but made the proposal to Mortimer, ‘I’ll
go with you, if you like?’ So, they all three went away together in the
vehicle that had brought the boy; the two friends (once boys together at
a public school) inside, smoking cigars; the messenger on the box beside
the driver.

‘Let me see,’ said Mortimer, as they went along; ‘I have been, Eugene,
upon the honourable roll of solicitors of the High Court of Chancery,
and attorneys at Common Law, five years; and--except gratuitously taking
instructions, on an average once a fortnight, for the will of Lady
Tippins who has nothing to leave--I have had no scrap of business but
this romantic business.’

‘And I,’ said Eugene, ‘have been “called” seven years, and have had no
business at all, and never shall have any. And if I had, I shouldn’t
know how to do it.’

‘I am far from being clear as to the last particular,’ returned
Mortimer, with great composure, ‘that I have much advantage over you.’

‘I hate,’ said Eugene, putting his legs up on the opposite seat, ‘I hate
my profession.’

‘Shall I incommode you, if I put mine up too?’ returned Mortimer. ‘Thank
you. I hate mine.’

‘It was forced upon me,’ said the gloomy Eugene, ‘because it was
understood that we wanted a barrister in the family. We have got a
precious one.’

‘It was forced upon me,’ said Mortimer, ‘because it was understood that
we wanted a solicitor in the family. And we have got a precious one.’

‘There are four of us, with our names painted on a door-post in right of
one black hole called a set of chambers,’ said Eugene; ‘and each of us
has the fourth of a clerk--Cassim Baba, in the robber’s cave--and Cassim
is the only respectable member of the party.’

‘I am one by myself, one,’ said Mortimer, ‘high up an awful staircase
commanding a burial-ground, and I have a whole clerk to myself, and he
has nothing to do but look at the burial-ground, and what he will turn
out when arrived at maturity, I cannot conceive. Whether, in that shabby
rook’s nest, he is always plotting wisdom, or plotting murder; whether
he will grow up, after so much solitary brooding, to enlighten his
fellow-creatures, or to poison them; is the only speck of interest that
presents itself to my professional view. Will you give me a light? Thank
you.’

‘Then idiots talk,’ said Eugene, leaning back, folding his arms, smoking
with his eyes shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, ‘of Energy.
If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that
I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such
parrot gabble! What the deuce! Am I to rush out into the street, collar
the first man of a wealthy appearance that I meet, shake him, and say,
“Go to law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I’ll be the death
of you”? Yet that would be energy.’

‘Precisely my view of the case, Eugene. But show me a good opportunity,
show me something really worth being energetic about, and I’ll show you
energy.’

‘And so will I,’ said Eugene.

And it is likely enough that ten thousand other young men, within the
limits of the London Post-office town delivery, made the same hopeful
remark in the course of the same evening.

The wheels rolled on, and rolled down by the Monument and by the Tower,
and by the Docks; down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe; down by where
accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher grounds,
like so much moral sewage, and to be pausing until its own weight forced
it over the bank and sunk it in the river. In and out among vessels
that seemed to have got ashore, and houses that seemed to have got
afloat--among bow-splits staring into windows, and windows staring
into ships--the wheels rolled on, until they stopped at a dark corner,
river-washed and otherwise not washed at all, where the boy alighted and
opened the door.

‘You must walk the rest, sir; it’s not many yards.’ He spoke in the
singular number, to the express exclusion of Eugene.

‘This is a confoundedly out-of-the-way place,’ said Mortimer, slipping
over the stones and refuse on the shore, as the boy turned the corner
sharp.

‘Here’s my father’s, sir; where the light is.’

The low building had the look of having once been a mill. There was a
rotten wart of wood upon its forehead that seemed to indicate where
the sails had been, but the whole was very indistinctly seen in the
obscurity of the night. The boy lifted the latch of the door, and they
passed at once into a low circular room, where a man stood before a red
fire, looking down into it, and a girl sat engaged in needlework. The
fire was in a rusty brazier, not fitted to the hearth; and a common
lamp, shaped like a hyacinth-root, smoked and flared in the neck of a
stone bottle on the table. There was a wooden bunk or berth in a corner,
and in another corner a wooden stair leading above--so clumsy and steep
that it was little better than a ladder. Two or three old sculls and
oars stood against the wall, and against another part of the wall was a
small dresser, making a spare show of the commonest articles of crockery
and cooking-vessels. The roof of the room was not plastered, but was
formed of the flooring of the room above. This, being very old, knotted,
seamed, and beamed, gave a lowering aspect to the chamber; and roof, and
walls, and floor, alike abounding in old smears of flour, red-lead (or
some such stain which it had probably acquired in warehousing), and
damp, alike had a look of decomposition.

‘The gentleman, father.’

The figure at the red fire turned, raised its ruffled head, and looked
like a bird of prey.

‘You’re Mortimer Lightwood Esquire; are you, sir?’

‘Mortimer Lightwood is my name. What you found,’ said Mortimer, glancing
rather shrinkingly towards the bunk; ‘is it here?’

‘’Tain’t not to say here, but it’s close by. I do everything reg’lar.
I’ve giv’ notice of the circumstarnce to the police, and the police have
took possession of it. No time ain’t been lost, on any hand. The police
have put into print already, and here’s what the print says of it.’

Taking up the bottle with the lamp in it, he held it near a paper on
the wall, with the police heading, BODY FOUND. The two friends read the
handbill as it stuck against the wall, and Gaffer read them as he held
the light.

‘Only papers on the unfortunate man, I see,’ said Lightwood, glancing
from the description of what was found, to the finder.

‘Only papers.’

Here the girl arose with her work in her hand, and went out at the door.

‘No money,’ pursued Mortimer; ‘but threepence in one of the
skirt-pockets.’

‘Three. Penny. Pieces,’ said Gaffer Hexam, in as many sentences.

‘The trousers pockets empty, and turned inside out.’

Gaffer Hexam nodded. ‘But that’s common. Whether it’s the wash of the
tide or no, I can’t say. Now, here,’ moving the light to another similar
placard, ‘HIS pockets was found empty, and turned inside out. And here,’
moving the light to another, ‘HER pocket was found empty, and turned
inside out. And so was this one’s. And so was that one’s. I can’t read,
nor I don’t want to it, for I know ‘em by their places on the wall. This
one was a sailor, with two anchors and a flag and G. F. T. on his arm.
Look and see if he warn’t.’

‘Quite right.’

‘This one was the young woman in grey boots, and her linen marked with a
cross. Look and see if she warn’t.’

‘Quite right.’

‘This is him as had a nasty cut over the eye. This is them two young
sisters what tied themselves together with a handkecher. This the
drunken old chap, in a pair of list slippers and a nightcap, wot had
offered--it afterwards come out--to make a hole in the water for a
quartern of rum stood aforehand, and kept to his word for the first and
last time in his life. They pretty well papers the room, you see; but I
know ‘em all. I’m scholar enough!’

He waved the light over the whole, as if to typify the light of his
scholarly intelligence, and then put it down on the table and stood
behind it looking intently at his visitors. He had the special
peculiarity of some birds of prey, that when he knitted his brow, his
ruffled crest stood highest.

‘You did not find all these yourself; did you?’ asked Eugene.

To which the bird of prey slowly rejoined, ‘And what might YOUR name be,
now?’

‘This is my friend,’ Mortimer Lightwood interposed; ‘Mr Eugene
Wrayburn.’

‘Mr Eugene Wrayburn, is it? And what might Mr Eugene Wrayburn have asked
of me?’

‘I asked you, simply, if you found all these yourself?’

‘I answer you, simply, most on ‘em.’

‘Do you suppose there has been much violence and robbery, beforehand,
among these cases?’

‘I don’t suppose at all about it,’ returned Gaffer. ‘I ain’t one of the
supposing sort. If you’d got your living to haul out of the river every
day of your life, you mightn’t be much given to supposing. Am I to show
the way?’

As he opened the door, in pursuance of a nod from Lightwood, an
extremely pale and disturbed face appeared in the doorway--the face of a
man much agitated.

‘A body missing?’ asked Gaffer Hexam, stopping short; ‘or a body found?
Which?’

‘I am lost!’ replied the man, in a hurried and an eager manner.

‘Lost?’

‘I--I--am a stranger, and don’t know the way. I--I--want to find the
place where I can see what is described here. It is possible I may know
it.’ He was panting, and could hardly speak; but, he showed a copy of
the newly-printed bill that was still wet upon the wall. Perhaps its
newness, or perhaps the accuracy of his observation of its general look,
guided Gaffer to a ready conclusion.

‘This gentleman, Mr Lightwood, is on that business.’

‘Mr Lightwood?’

During a pause, Mortimer and the stranger confronted each other. Neither
knew the other.

‘I think, sir,’ said Mortimer, breaking the awkward silence with his
airy self-possession, ‘that you did me the honour to mention my name?’

‘I repeated it, after this man.’

‘You said you were a stranger in London?’

‘An utter stranger.’

‘Are you seeking a Mr Harmon?’

‘No.’

‘Then I believe I can assure you that you are on a fruitless errand, and
will not find what you fear to find. Will you come with us?’

A little winding through some muddy alleys that might have been
deposited by the last ill-savoured tide, brought them to the
wicket-gate and bright lamp of a Police Station; where they found the
Night-Inspector, with a pen and ink, and ruler, posting up his books in
a whitewashed office, as studiously as if he were in a monastery on
top of a mountain, and no howling fury of a drunken woman were banging
herself against a cell-door in the back-yard at his elbow. With the
same air of a recluse much given to study, he desisted from his books to
bestow a distrustful nod of recognition upon Gaffer, plainly importing,
‘Ah! we know all about YOU, and you’ll overdo it some day;’ and to
inform Mr Mortimer Lightwood and friends, that he would attend them
immediately. Then, he finished ruling the work he had in hand (it might
have been illuminating a missal, he was so calm), in a very neat and
methodical manner, showing not the slightest consciousness of the woman
who was banging herself with increased violence, and shrieking most
terrifically for some other woman’s liver.

‘A bull’s-eye,’ said the Night-Inspector, taking up his keys. Which a
deferential satellite produced. ‘Now, gentlemen.’

With one of his keys, he opened a cool grot at the end of the yard,
and they all went in. They quickly came out again, no one speaking but
Eugene: who remarked to Mortimer, in a whisper, ‘Not MUCH worse than
Lady Tippins.’

So, back to the whitewashed library of the monastery--with that liver
still in shrieking requisition, as it had been loudly, while they looked
at the silent sight they came to see--and there through the merits of
the case as summed up by the Abbot. No clue to how body came into river.
Very often was no clue. Too late to know for certain, whether injuries
received before or after death; one excellent surgical opinion said,
before; other excellent surgical opinion said, after. Steward of ship in
which gentleman came home passenger, had been round to view, and could
swear to identity. Likewise could swear to clothes. And then, you
see, you had the papers, too. How was it he had totally disappeared on
leaving ship, ‘till found in river? Well! Probably had been upon some
little game. Probably thought it a harmless game, wasn’t up to things,
and it turned out a fatal game. Inquest to-morrow, and no doubt open
verdict.

‘It appears to have knocked your friend over--knocked him completely off
his legs,’ Mr Inspector remarked, when he had finished his summing up.
‘It has given him a bad turn to be sure!’ This was said in a very low
voice, and with a searching look (not the first he had cast) at the
stranger.

Mr Lightwood explained that it was no friend of his.

‘Indeed?’ said Mr Inspector, with an attentive ear; ‘where did you pick
him up?’

Mr Lightwood explained further.

Mr Inspector had delivered his summing up, and had added these words,
with his elbows leaning on his desk, and the fingers and thumb of his
right hand, fitting themselves to the fingers and thumb of his left.
Mr Inspector moved nothing but his eyes, as he now added, raising his
voice:

‘Turned you faint, sir! Seems you’re not accustomed to this kind of
work?’

The stranger, who was leaning against the chimneypiece with drooping
head, looked round and answered, ‘No. It’s a horrible sight!’

‘You expected to identify, I am told, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘HAVE you identified?’

‘No. It’s a horrible sight. O! a horrible, horrible sight!’

‘Who did you think it might have been?’ asked Mr Inspector. ‘Give us a
description, sir. Perhaps we can help you.’

‘No, no,’ said the stranger; ‘it would be quite useless. Good-night.’

Mr Inspector had not moved, and had given no order; but, the satellite
slipped his back against the wicket, and laid his left arm along the top
of it, and with his right hand turned the bull’s-eye he had taken from
his chief--in quite a casual manner--towards the stranger.

‘You missed a friend, you know; or you missed a foe, you know; or you
wouldn’t have come here, you know. Well, then; ain’t it reasonable to
ask, who was it?’ Thus, Mr Inspector.

‘You must excuse my telling you. No class of man can understand better
than you, that families may not choose to publish their disagreements
and misfortunes, except on the last necessity. I do not dispute that you
discharge your duty in asking me the question; you will not dispute my
right to withhold the answer. Good-night.’

Again he turned towards the wicket, where the satellite, with his eye
upon his chief, remained a dumb statue.

‘At least,’ said Mr Inspector, ‘you will not object to leave me your
card, sir?’

‘I should not object, if I had one; but I have not.’ He reddened and was
much confused as he gave the answer.

‘At least,’ said Mr Inspector, with no change of voice or manner, ‘you
will not object to write down your name and address?’

‘Not at all.’

Mr Inspector dipped a pen in his inkstand, and deftly laid it on a
piece of paper close beside him; then resumed his former attitude.
The stranger stepped up to the desk, and wrote in a rather tremulous
hand--Mr Inspector taking sidelong note of every hair of his head when
it was bent down for the purpose--‘Mr Julius Handford, Exchequer Coffee
House, Palace Yard, Westminster.’

‘Staying there, I presume, sir?’

‘Staying there.’

‘Consequently, from the country?’

‘Eh? Yes--from the country.’

‘Good-night, sir.’

The satellite removed his arm and opened the wicket, and Mr Julius
Handford went out.

‘Reserve!’ said Mr Inspector. ‘Take care of this piece of paper, keep
him in view without giving offence, ascertain that he IS staying there,
and find out anything you can about him.’

The satellite was gone; and Mr Inspector, becoming once again the quiet
Abbot of that Monastery, dipped his pen in his ink and resumed
his books. The two friends who had watched him, more amused by the
professional manner than suspicious of Mr Julius Handford, inquired
before taking their departure too whether he believed there was anything
that really looked bad here?

The Abbot replied with reticence, couldn’t say. If a murder, anybody
might have done it. Burglary or pocket-picking wanted ‘prenticeship. Not
so, murder. We were all of us up to that. Had seen scores of people come
to identify, and never saw one person struck in that particular way.
Might, however, have been Stomach and not Mind. If so, rum stomach.
But to be sure there were rum everythings. Pity there was not a word
of truth in that superstition about bodies bleeding when touched by the
hand of the right person; you never got a sign out of bodies. You got
row enough out of such as her--she was good for all night now (referring
here to the banging demands for the liver), ‘but you got nothing out of
bodies if it was ever so.’

There being nothing more to be done until the Inquest was held next day,
the friends went away together, and Gaffer Hexam and his son went their
separate way. But, arriving at the last corner, Gaffer bade his boy go
home while he turned into a red-curtained tavern, that stood dropsically
bulging over the causeway, ‘for a half-a-pint.’

The boy lifted the latch he had lifted before, and found his sister
again seated before the fire at her work. Who raised her head upon his
coming in and asking:

‘Where did you go, Liz?’

‘I went out in the dark.’

‘There was no necessity for that. It was all right enough.’

‘One of the gentlemen, the one who didn’t speak while I was there,
looked hard at me. And I was afraid he might know what my face meant.
But there! Don’t mind me, Charley! I was all in a tremble of another
sort when you owned to father you could write a little.’

‘Ah! But I made believe I wrote so badly, as that it was odds if any one
could read it. And when I wrote slowest and smeared but with my finger
most, father was best pleased, as he stood looking over me.’

The girl put aside her work, and drawing her seat close to his seat by
the fire, laid her arm gently on his shoulder.

‘You’ll make the most of your time, Charley; won’t you?’

‘Won’t I? Come! I like that. Don’t I?’

‘Yes, Charley, yes. You work hard at your learning, I know. And I work
a little, Charley, and plan and contrive a little (wake out of my
sleep contriving sometimes), how to get together a shilling now, and a
shilling then, that shall make father believe you are beginning to earn
a stray living along shore.’

‘You are father’s favourite, and can make him believe anything.’

‘I wish I could, Charley! For if I could make him believe that learning
was a good thing, and that we might lead better lives, I should be
a’most content to die.’

‘Don’t talk stuff about dying, Liz.’

She placed her hands in one another on his shoulder, and laying her
rich brown cheek against them as she looked down at the fire, went on
thoughtfully:

‘Of an evening, Charley, when you are at the school, and father’s--’

‘At the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters,’ the boy struck in, with a
backward nod of his head towards the public-house.

‘Yes. Then as I sit a-looking at the fire, I seem to see in the burning
coal--like where that glow is now--’

‘That’s gas, that is,’ said the boy, ‘coming out of a bit of a forest
that’s been under the mud that was under the water in the days of Noah’s
Ark. Look here! When I take the poker--so--and give it a dig--’

‘Don’t disturb it, Charley, or it’ll be all in a blaze. It’s that dull
glow near it, coming and going, that I mean. When I look at it of an
evening, it comes like pictures to me, Charley.’

‘Show us a picture,’ said the boy. ‘Tell us where to look.’

‘Ah! It wants my eyes, Charley.’

‘Cut away then, and tell us what your eyes make of it.’

‘Why, there are you and me, Charley, when you were quite a baby that
never knew a mother--’

‘Don’t go saying I never knew a mother,’ interposed the boy, ‘for I knew
a little sister that was sister and mother both.’

The girl laughed delightedly, and her eyes filled with pleasant tears,
as he put both his arms round her waist and so held her.

‘There are you and me, Charley, when father was away at work and locked
us out, for fear we should set ourselves afire or fall out of window,
sitting on the door-sill, sitting on other door-steps, sitting on the
bank of the river, wandering about to get through the time. You
are rather heavy to carry, Charley, and I am often obliged to rest.
Sometimes we are sleepy and fall asleep together in a corner, sometimes
we are very hungry, sometimes we are a little frightened, but what is
oftenest hard upon us is the cold. You remember, Charley?’

‘I remember,’ said the boy, pressing her to him twice or thrice, ‘that I
snuggled under a little shawl, and it was warm there.’

‘Sometimes it rains, and we creep under a boat or the like of that:
sometimes it’s dark, and we get among the gaslights, sitting watching
the people as they go along the streets. At last, up comes father and
takes us home. And home seems such a shelter after out of doors! And
father pulls my shoes off, and dries my feet at the fire, and has me
to sit by him while he smokes his pipe long after you are abed, and
I notice that father’s is a large hand but never a heavy one when it
touches me, and that father’s is a rough voice but never an angry one
when it speaks to me. So, I grow up, and little by little father trusts
me, and makes me his companion, and, let him be put out as he may, never
once strikes me.’

The listening boy gave a grunt here, as much as to say ‘But he strikes
ME though!’

‘Those are some of the pictures of what is past, Charley.’

‘Cut away again,’ said the boy, ‘and give us a fortune-telling one; a
future one.’

‘Well! There am I, continuing with father and holding to father, because
father loves me and I love father. I can’t so much as read a book,
because, if I had learned, father would have thought I was deserting
him, and I should have lost my influence. I have not the influence I
want to have, I cannot stop some dreadful things I try to stop, but I
go on in the hope and trust that the time will come. In the meanwhile
I know that I am in some things a stay to father, and that if I was
not faithful to him he would--in revenge-like, or in disappointment, or
both--go wild and bad.’

‘Give us a touch of the fortune-telling pictures about me.’

‘I was passing on to them, Charley,’ said the girl, who had not changed
her attitude since she began, and who now mournfully shook her head;
‘the others were all leading up. There are you--’

‘Where am I, Liz?’

‘Still in the hollow down by the flare.’

‘There seems to be the deuce-and-all in the hollow down by the flare,’
said the boy, glancing from her eyes to the brazier, which had a grisly
skeleton look on its long thin legs.

‘There are you, Charley, working your way, in secret from father, at
the school; and you get prizes; and you go on better and better; and you
come to be a--what was it you called it when you told me about that?’

‘Ha, ha! Fortune-telling not know the name!’ cried the boy, seeming to
be rather relieved by this default on the part of the hollow down by the
flare. ‘Pupil-teacher.’

‘You come to be a pupil-teacher, and you still go on better and better,
and you rise to be a master full of learning and respect. But the secret
has come to father’s knowledge long before, and it has divided you from
father, and from me.’

‘No it hasn’t!’

‘Yes it has, Charley. I see, as plain as plain can be, that your way is
not ours, and that even if father could be got to forgive your taking
it (which he never could be), that way of yours would be darkened by our
way. But I see too, Charley--’

‘Still as plain as plain can be, Liz?’ asked the boy playfully.

‘Ah! Still. That it is a great work to have cut you away from father’s
life, and to have made a new and good beginning. So there am I, Charley,
left alone with father, keeping him as straight as I can, watching
for more influence than I have, and hoping that through some fortunate
chance, or when he is ill, or when--I don’t know what--I may turn him to
wish to do better things.’

‘You said you couldn’t read a book, Lizzie. Your library of books is the
hollow down by the flare, I think.’

‘I should be very glad to be able to read real books. I feel my want of
learning very much, Charley. But I should feel it much more, if I didn’t
know it to be a tie between me and father.--Hark! Father’s tread!’

It being now past midnight, the bird of prey went straight to roost. At
mid-day following he reappeared at the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, in
the character, not new to him, of a witness before a Coroner’s Jury.

Mr Mortimer Lightwood, besides sustaining the character of one of the
witnesses, doubled the part with that of the eminent solicitor who
watched the proceedings on behalf of the representatives of the
deceased, as was duly recorded in the newspapers. Mr Inspector watched
the proceedings too, and kept his watching closely to himself. Mr Julius
Handford having given his right address, and being reported in solvent
circumstances as to his bill, though nothing more was known of him at
his hotel except that his way of life was very retired, had no summons
to appear, and was merely present in the shades of Mr Inspector’s mind.

The case was made interesting to the public, by Mr Mortimer Lightwood’s
evidence touching the circumstances under which the deceased, Mr John
Harmon, had returned to England; exclusive private proprietorship in
which circumstances was set up at dinner-tables for several days, by
Veneering, Twemlow, Podsnap, and all the Buffers: who all related them
irreconcilably with one another, and contradicted themselves. It was
also made interesting by the testimony of Job Potterson, the ship’s
steward, and one Mr Jacob Kibble, a fellow-passenger, that the deceased
Mr John Harmon did bring over, in a hand-valise with which he did
disembark, the sum realized by the forced sale of his little landed
property, and that the sum exceeded, in ready money, seven hundred
pounds. It was further made interesting, by the remarkable experiences
of Jesse Hexam in having rescued from the Thames so many dead bodies,
and for whose behoof a rapturous admirer subscribing himself ‘A friend
to Burial’ (perhaps an undertaker), sent eighteen postage stamps, and
five ‘Now Sir’s to the editor of the Times.

Upon the evidence adduced before them, the Jury found, That the body
of Mr John Harmon had been discovered floating in the Thames, in an
advanced state of decay, and much injured; and that the said Mr John
Harmon had come by his death under highly suspicious circumstances,
though by whose act or in what precise manner there was no evidence
before this Jury to show. And they appended to their verdict, a
recommendation to the Home Office (which Mr Inspector appeared to think
highly sensible), to offer a reward for the solution of the mystery.
Within eight-and-forty hours, a reward of One Hundred Pounds was
proclaimed, together with a free pardon to any person or persons not the
actual perpetrator or perpetrators, and so forth in due form.

This Proclamation rendered Mr Inspector additionally studious, and
caused him to stand meditating on river-stairs and causeways, and to go
lurking about in boats, putting this and that together. But, according
to the success with which you put this and that together, you get a
woman and a fish apart, or a Mermaid in combination. And Mr Inspector
could turn out nothing better than a Mermaid, which no Judge and Jury
would believe in.

Thus, like the tides on which it had been borne to the knowledge of men,
the Harmon Murder--as it came to be popularly called--went up and down,
and ebbed and flowed, now in the town, now in the country, now among
palaces, now among hovels, now among lords and ladies and gentlefolks,
now among labourers and hammerers and ballast-heavers, until at last,
after a long interval of slack water it got out to sea and drifted away.



Chapter 4

THE R. WILFER FAMILY


Reginald Wilfer is a name with rather a grand sound, suggesting on
first acquaintance brasses in country churches, scrolls in stained-glass
windows, and generally the De Wilfers who came over with the Conqueror.
For, it is a remarkable fact in genealogy that no De Any ones ever came
over with Anybody else.

But, the Reginald Wilfer family were of such commonplace extraction and
pursuits that their forefathers had for generations modestly subsisted
on the Docks, the Excise Office, and the Custom House, and the existing
R. Wilfer was a poor clerk. So poor a clerk, though having a limited
salary and an unlimited family, that he had never yet attained the
modest object of his ambition: which was, to wear a complete new suit
of clothes, hat and boots included, at one time. His black hat was brown
before he could afford a coat, his pantaloons were white at the seams
and knees before he could buy a pair of boots, his boots had worn out
before he could treat himself to new pantaloons, and, by the time he
worked round to the hat again, that shining modern article roofed-in an
ancient ruin of various periods.

If the conventional Cherub could ever grow up and be clothed, he might
be photographed as a portrait of Wilfer. His chubby, smooth, innocent
appearance was a reason for his being always treated with condescension
when he was not put down. A stranger entering his own poor house at
about ten o’clock P.M. might have been surprised to find him sitting up
to supper. So boyish was he in his curves and proportions, that his
old schoolmaster meeting him in Cheapside, might have been unable to
withstand the temptation of caning him on the spot. In short, he was
the conventional cherub, after the supposititious shoot just mentioned,
rather grey, with signs of care on his expression, and in decidedly
insolvent circumstances.

He was shy, and unwilling to own to the name of Reginald, as being too
aspiring and self-assertive a name. In his signature he used only the
initial R., and imparted what it really stood for, to none but chosen
friends, under the seal of confidence. Out of this, the facetious habit
had arisen in the neighbourhood surrounding Mincing Lane of making
christian names for him of adjectives and participles beginning with R.
Some of these were more or less appropriate: as Rusty, Retiring, Ruddy,
Round, Ripe, Ridiculous, Ruminative; others, derived their point from
their want of application: as Raging, Rattling, Roaring, Raffish. But,
his popular name was Rumty, which in a moment of inspiration had been
bestowed upon him by a gentleman of convivial habits connected with the
drug-markets, as the beginning of a social chorus, his leading part in
the execution of which had led this gentleman to the Temple of Fame, and
of which the whole expressive burden ran:

     ‘Rumty iddity, row dow dow,
     Sing toodlely, teedlely, bow wow wow.’

Thus he was constantly addressed, even in minor notes on business, as
‘Dear Rumty’; in answer to which, he sedately signed himself, ‘Yours
truly, R. Wilfer.’

He was clerk in the drug-house of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles.
Chicksey and Stobbles, his former masters, had both become absorbed in
Veneering, once their traveller or commission agent: who had signalized
his accession to supreme power by bringing into the business a quantity
of plate-glass window and French-polished mahogany partition, and a
gleaming and enormous doorplate.

R. Wilfer locked up his desk one evening, and, putting his bunch of keys
in his pocket much as if it were his peg-top, made for home. His home
was in the Holloway region north of London, and then divided from it by
fields and trees. Between Battle Bridge and that part of the Holloway
district in which he dwelt, was a tract of suburban Sahara, where tiles
and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was
shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by contractors. Skirting
the border of this desert, by the way he took, when the light of its
kiln-fires made lurid smears on the fog, R. Wilfer sighed and shook his
head.

‘Ah me!’ said he, ‘what might have been is not what is!’

With which commentary on human life, indicating an experience of it
not exclusively his own, he made the best of his way to the end of his
journey.

Mrs Wilfer was, of course, a tall woman and an angular. Her lord being
cherubic, she was necessarily majestic, according to the principle which
matrimonially unites contrasts. She was much given to tying up her head
in a pocket-handkerchief, knotted under the chin. This head-gear, in
conjunction with a pair of gloves worn within doors, she seemed to
consider as at once a kind of armour against misfortune (invariably
assuming it when in low spirits or difficulties), and as a species of
full dress. It was therefore with some sinking of the spirit that her
husband beheld her thus heroically attired, putting down her candle in
the little hall, and coming down the doorsteps through the little front
court to open the gate for him.

Something had gone wrong with the house-door, for R. Wilfer stopped on
the steps, staring at it, and cried:

‘Hal-loa?’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Wilfer, ‘the man came himself with a pair of pincers,
and took it off, and took it away. He said that as he had no expectation
of ever being paid for it, and as he had an order for another LADIES’
SCHOOL door-plate, it was better (burnished up) for the interests of all
parties.’

‘Perhaps it was, my dear; what do you think?’

‘You are master here, R. W.,’ returned his wife. ‘It is as you think;
not as I do. Perhaps it might have been better if the man had taken the
door too?’

‘My dear, we couldn’t have done without the door.’

‘Couldn’t we?’

‘Why, my dear! Could we?’

‘It is as you think, R. W.; not as I do.’ With those submissive words,
the dutiful wife preceded him down a few stairs to a little basement
front room, half kitchen, half parlour, where a girl of about nineteen,
with an exceedingly pretty figure and face, but with an impatient and
petulant expression both in her face and in her shoulders (which in
her sex and at her age are very expressive of discontent), sat playing
draughts with a younger girl, who was the youngest of the House of
Wilfer. Not to encumber this page by telling off the Wilfers in detail
and casting them up in the gross, it is enough for the present that the
rest were what is called ‘out in the world,’ in various ways, and that
they were Many. So many, that when one of his dutiful children called in
to see him, R. Wilfer generally seemed to say to himself, after a little
mental arithmetic, ‘Oh! here’s another of ‘em!’ before adding aloud,
‘How de do, John,’ or Susan, as the case might be.

‘Well Piggywiggies,’ said R. W., ‘how de do to-night? What I was
thinking of, my dear,’ to Mrs Wilfer already seated in a corner with
folded gloves, ‘was, that as we have let our first floor so well, and as
we have now no place in which you could teach pupils even if pupils--’

‘The milkman said he knew of two young ladies of the highest
respectability who were in search of a suitable establishment, and he
took a card,’ interposed Mrs Wilfer, with severe monotony, as if she
were reading an Act of Parliament aloud. ‘Tell your father whether it
was last Monday, Bella.’

‘But we never heard any more of it, ma,’ said Bella, the elder girl.

‘In addition to which, my dear,’ her husband urged, ‘if you have no
place to put two young persons into--’

‘Pardon me,’ Mrs Wilfer again interposed; ‘they were not young persons.
Two young ladies of the highest respectability. Tell your father, Bella,
whether the milkman said so.’

‘My dear, it is the same thing.’

‘No it is not,’ said Mrs Wilfer, with the same impressive monotony.
‘Pardon me!’

‘I mean, my dear, it is the same thing as to space. As to space. If you
have no space in which to put two youthful fellow-creatures, however
eminently respectable, which I do not doubt, where are those youthful
fellow-creatures to be accommodated? I carry it no further than that.
And solely looking at it,’ said her husband, making the stipulation at
once in a conciliatory, complimentary, and argumentative tone--‘as I am
sure you will agree, my love--from a fellow-creature point of view, my
dear.’

‘I have nothing more to say,’ returned Mrs Wilfer, with a meek
renunciatory action of her gloves. ‘It is as you think, R. W.; not as I
do.’

Here, the huffing of Miss Bella and the loss of three of her men at a
swoop, aggravated by the coronation of an opponent, led to that young
lady’s jerking the draught-board and pieces off the table: which her
sister went down on her knees to pick up.

‘Poor Bella!’ said Mrs Wilfer.

‘And poor Lavinia, perhaps, my dear?’ suggested R. W.

‘Pardon me,’ said Mrs Wilfer, ‘no!’

It was one of the worthy woman’s specialities that she had an amazing
power of gratifying her splenetic or worldly-minded humours by extolling
her own family: which she thus proceeded, in the present case, to do.

‘No, R. W. Lavinia has not known the trial that Bella has known. The
trial that your daughter Bella has undergone, is, perhaps, without
a parallel, and has been borne, I will say, Nobly. When you see your
daughter Bella in her black dress, which she alone of all the family
wears, and when you remember the circumstances which have led to
her wearing it, and when you know how those circumstances have been
sustained, then, R. W., lay your head upon your pillow and say, “Poor
Lavinia!”’

Here, Miss Lavinia, from her kneeling situation under the table, put in
that she didn’t want to be ‘poored by pa’, or anybody else.

‘I am sure you do not, my dear,’ returned her mother, ‘for you have a
fine brave spirit. And your sister Cecilia has a fine brave spirit
of another kind, a spirit of pure devotion, a beau-ti-ful spirit! The
self-sacrifice of Cecilia reveals a pure and womanly character, very
seldom equalled, never surpassed. I have now in my pocket a letter from
your sister Cecilia, received this morning--received three months after
her marriage, poor child!--in which she tells me that her husband must
unexpectedly shelter under their roof his reduced aunt. “But I will be
true to him, mamma,” she touchingly writes, “I will not leave him, I
must not forget that he is my husband. Let his aunt come!” If this is
not pathetic, if this is not woman’s devotion--!’ The good lady waved
her gloves in a sense of the impossibility of saying more, and tied the
pocket-handkerchief over her head in a tighter knot under her chin.

Bella, who was now seated on the rug to warm herself, with her brown
eyes on the fire and a handful of her brown curls in her mouth, laughed
at this, and then pouted and half cried.

‘I am sure,’ said she, ‘though you have no feeling for me, pa, I am one
of the most unfortunate girls that ever lived. You know how poor we are’
(it is probable he did, having some reason to know it!), ‘and what a
glimpse of wealth I had, and how it melted away, and how I am here in
this ridiculous mourning--which I hate!--a kind of a widow who never was
married. And yet you don’t feel for me.--Yes you do, yes you do.’

This abrupt change was occasioned by her father’s face. She stopped
to pull him down from his chair in an attitude highly favourable to
strangulation, and to give him a kiss and a pat or two on the cheek.

‘But you ought to feel for me, you know, pa.’

‘My dear, I do.’

‘Yes, and I say you ought to. If they had only left me alone and told
me nothing about it, it would have mattered much less. But that nasty Mr
Lightwood feels it his duty, as he says, to write and tell me what is in
reserve for me, and then I am obliged to get rid of George Sampson.’

Here, Lavinia, rising to the surface with the last draughtman rescued,
interposed, ‘You never cared for George Sampson, Bella.’

‘And did I say I did, miss?’ Then, pouting again, with the curls in her
mouth; ‘George Sampson was very fond of me, and admired me very much,
and put up with everything I did to him.’

‘You were rude enough to him,’ Lavinia again interposed.

‘And did I say I wasn’t, miss? I am not setting up to be sentimental
about George Sampson. I only say George Sampson was better than
nothing.’

‘You didn’t show him that you thought even that,’ Lavinia again
interposed.

‘You are a chit and a little idiot,’ returned Bella, ‘or you wouldn’t
make such a dolly speech. What did you expect me to do? Wait till you
are a woman, and don’t talk about what you don’t understand. You only
show your ignorance!’ Then, whimpering again, and at intervals biting
the curls, and stopping to look how much was bitten off, ‘It’s a shame!
There never was such a hard case! I shouldn’t care so much if it wasn’t
so ridiculous. It was ridiculous enough to have a stranger coming over
to marry me, whether he liked it or not. It was ridiculous enough to
know what an embarrassing meeting it would be, and how we never
could pretend to have an inclination of our own, either of us. It was
ridiculous enough to know I shouldn’t like him--how COULD I like him,
left to him in a will, like a dozen of spoons, with everything cut and
dried beforehand, like orange chips. Talk of orange flowers indeed!
I declare again it’s a shame! Those ridiculous points would have been
smoothed away by the money, for I love money, and want money--want it
dreadfully. I hate to be poor, and we are degradingly poor, offensively
poor, miserably poor, beastly poor. But here I am, left with all the
ridiculous parts of the situation remaining, and, added to them all,
this ridiculous dress! And if the truth was known, when the Harmon
murder was all over the town, and people were speculating on its being
suicide, I dare say those impudent wretches at the clubs and places made
jokes about the miserable creature’s having preferred a watery grave to
me. It’s likely enough they took such liberties; I shouldn’t wonder! I
declare it’s a very hard case indeed, and I am a most unfortunate girl.
The idea of being a kind of a widow, and never having been married!
And the idea of being as poor as ever after all, and going into black,
besides, for a man I never saw, and should have hated--as far as HE was
concerned--if I had seen!’

The young lady’s lamentations were checked at this point by a knuckle,
knocking at the half-open door of the room. The knuckle had knocked two
or three times already, but had not been heard.

‘Who is it?’ said Mrs Wilfer, in her Act-of-Parliament manner. ‘Enter!’

A gentleman coming in, Miss Bella, with a short and sharp exclamation,
scrambled off the hearth-rug and massed the bitten curls together in
their right place on her neck.

‘The servant girl had her key in the door as I came up, and directed me
to this room, telling me I was expected. I am afraid I should have asked
her to announce me.’

‘Pardon me,’ returned Mrs Wilfer. ‘Not at all. Two of my daughters. R.
W., this is the gentleman who has taken your first-floor. He was so good
as to make an appointment for to-night, when you would be at home.’

A dark gentleman. Thirty at the utmost. An expressive, one might say
handsome, face. A very bad manner. In the last degree constrained,
reserved, diffident, troubled. His eyes were on Miss Bella for an
instant, and then looked at the ground as he addressed the master of the
house.

‘Seeing that I am quite satisfied, Mr Wilfer, with the rooms, and with
their situation, and with their price, I suppose a memorandum between us
of two or three lines, and a payment down, will bind the bargain? I wish
to send in furniture without delay.’

Two or three times during this short address, the cherub addressed had
made chubby motions towards a chair. The gentleman now took it, laying
a hesitating hand on a corner of the table, and with another hesitating
hand lifting the crown of his hat to his lips, and drawing it before his
mouth.

‘The gentleman, R. W.,’ said Mrs Wilfer, ‘proposes to take your
apartments by the quarter. A quarter’s notice on either side.’

‘Shall I mention, sir,’ insinuated the landlord, expecting it to be
received as a matter of course, ‘the form of a reference?’

‘I think,’ returned the gentleman, after a pause, ‘that a reference is
not necessary; neither, to say the truth, is it convenient, for I am
a stranger in London. I require no reference from you, and perhaps,
therefore, you will require none from me. That will be fair on both
sides. Indeed, I show the greater confidence of the two, for I will pay
in advance whatever you please, and I am going to trust my furniture
here. Whereas, if you were in embarrassed circumstances--this is merely
supposititious--’

Conscience causing R. Wilfer to colour, Mrs Wilfer, from a corner (she
always got into stately corners) came to the rescue with a deep-toned
‘Per-fectly.’

‘--Why then I--might lose it.’

‘Well!’ observed R. Wilfer, cheerfully, ‘money and goods are certainly
the best of references.’

‘Do you think they ARE the best, pa?’ asked Miss Bella, in a low voice,
and without looking over her shoulder as she warmed her foot on the
fender.

‘Among the best, my dear.’

‘I should have thought, myself, it was so easy to add the usual kind of
one,’ said Bella, with a toss of her curls.

The gentleman listened to her, with a face of marked attention, though
he neither looked up nor changed his attitude. He sat, still and silent,
until his future landlord accepted his proposals, and brought writing
materials to complete the business. He sat, still and silent, while the
landlord wrote.

When the agreement was ready in duplicate (the landlord having worked
at it like some cherubic scribe, in what is conventionally called a
doubtful, which means a not at all doubtful, Old Master), it was signed
by the contracting parties, Bella looking on as scornful witness. The
contracting parties were R. Wilfer, and John Rokesmith Esquire.

When it came to Bella’s turn to sign her name, Mr Rokesmith, who was
standing, as he had sat, with a hesitating hand upon the table, looked
at her stealthily, but narrowly. He looked at the pretty figure bending
down over the paper and saying, ‘Where am I to go, pa? Here, in this
corner?’ He looked at the beautiful brown hair, shading the coquettish
face; he looked at the free dash of the signature, which was a bold one
for a woman’s; and then they looked at one another.

‘Much obliged to you, Miss Wilfer.’

‘Obliged?’

‘I have given you so much trouble.’

‘Signing my name? Yes, certainly. But I am your landlord’s daughter,
sir.’

As there was nothing more to do but pay eight sovereigns in earnest of
the bargain, pocket the agreement, appoint a time for the arrival of his
furniture and himself, and go, Mr Rokesmith did that as awkwardly as it
might be done, and was escorted by his landlord to the outer air. When
R. Wilfer returned, candlestick in hand, to the bosom of his family, he
found the bosom agitated.

‘Pa,’ said Bella, ‘we have got a Murderer for a tenant.’

‘Pa,’ said Lavinia, ‘we have got a Robber.’

‘To see him unable for his life to look anybody in the face!’ said
Bella. ‘There never was such an exhibition.’

‘My dears,’ said their father, ‘he is a diffident gentleman, and I
should say particularly so in the society of girls of your age.’

‘Nonsense, our age!’ cried Bella, impatiently. ‘What’s that got to do
with him?’

‘Besides, we are not of the same age:--which age?’ demanded Lavinia.

‘Never YOU mind, Lavvy,’ retorted Bella; ‘you wait till you are of an
age to ask such questions. Pa, mark my words! Between Mr Rokesmith and
me, there is a natural antipathy and a deep distrust; and something will
come of it!’

‘My dear, and girls,’ said the cherub-patriarch, ‘between Mr Rokesmith
and me, there is a matter of eight sovereigns, and something for supper
shall come of it, if you’ll agree upon the article.’

This was a neat and happy turn to give the subject, treats being rare in
the Wilfer household, where a monotonous appearance of Dutch-cheese at
ten o’clock in the evening had been rather frequently commented on by
the dimpled shoulders of Miss Bella. Indeed, the modest Dutchman himself
seemed conscious of his want of variety, and generally came before the
family in a state of apologetic perspiration. After some discussion on
the relative merits of veal-cutlet, sweetbread, and lobster, a decision
was pronounced in favour of veal-cutlet. Mrs Wilfer then solemnly
divested herself of her handkerchief and gloves, as a preliminary
sacrifice to preparing the frying-pan, and R. W. himself went out
to purchase the viand. He soon returned, bearing the same in a fresh
cabbage-leaf, where it coyly embraced a rasher of ham. Melodious sounds
were not long in rising from the frying-pan on the fire, or in seeming,
as the firelight danced in the mellow halls of a couple of full bottles
on the table, to play appropriate dance-music.

The cloth was laid by Lavvy. Bella, as the acknowledged ornament of the
family, employed both her hands in giving her hair an additional
wave while sitting in the easiest chair, and occasionally threw in a
direction touching the supper: as, ‘Very brown, ma;’ or, to her sister,
‘Put the saltcellar straight, miss, and don’t be a dowdy little puss.’

Meantime her father, chinking Mr Rokesmith’s gold as he sat expectant
between his knife and fork, remarked that six of those sovereigns came
just in time for their landlord, and stood them in a little pile on the
white tablecloth to look at.

‘I hate our landlord!’ said Bella.

But, observing a fall in her father’s face, she went and sat down by him
at the table, and began touching up his hair with the handle of a fork.
It was one of the girl’s spoilt ways to be always arranging the family’s
hair--perhaps because her own was so pretty, and occupied so much of her
attention.

‘You deserve to have a house of your own; don’t you, poor pa?’

‘I don’t deserve it better than another, my dear.’

‘At any rate I, for one, want it more than another,’ said Bella, holding
him by the chin, as she stuck his flaxen hair on end, ‘and I grudge
this money going to the Monster that swallows up so much, when we all
want--Everything. And if you say (as you want to say; I know you want
to say so, pa) “that’s neither reasonable nor honest, Bella,” then I
answer, “Maybe not, pa--very likely--but it’s one of the consequences
of being poor, and of thoroughly hating and detesting to be poor, and
that’s my case.” Now, you look lovely, pa; why don’t you always wear
your hair like that? And here’s the cutlet! If it isn’t very brown, ma,
I can’t eat it, and must have a bit put back to be done expressly.’

However, as it was brown, even to Bella’s taste, the young lady
graciously partook of it without reconsignment to the frying-pan, and
also, in due course, of the contents of the two bottles: whereof
one held Scotch ale and the other rum. The latter perfume, with
the fostering aid of boiling water and lemon-peel, diffused itself
throughout the room, and became so highly concentrated around the warm
fireside, that the wind passing over the house roof must have rushed off
charged with a delicious whiff of it, after buzzing like a great bee at
that particular chimneypot.

‘Pa,’ said Bella, sipping the fragrant mixture and warming her favourite
ankle; ‘when old Mr Harmon made such a fool of me (not to mention
himself, as he is dead), what do you suppose he did it for?’

‘Impossible to say, my dear. As I have told you time out of number since
his will was brought to light, I doubt if I ever exchanged a hundred
words with the old gentleman. If it was his whim to surprise us, his
whim succeeded. For he certainly did it.’

‘And I was stamping my foot and screaming, when he first took notice of
me; was I?’ said Bella, contemplating the ankle before mentioned.

‘You were stamping your little foot, my dear, and screaming with your
little voice, and laying into me with your little bonnet, which you
had snatched off for the purpose,’ returned her father, as if the
remembrance gave a relish to the rum; ‘you were doing this one Sunday
morning when I took you out, because I didn’t go the exact way you
wanted, when the old gentleman, sitting on a seat near, said, “That’s a
nice girl; that’s a VERY nice girl; a promising girl!” And so you were,
my dear.’

‘And then he asked my name, did he, pa?’

‘Then he asked your name, my dear, and mine; and on other Sunday
mornings, when we walked his way, we saw him again, and--and really
that’s all.’

As that was all the rum and water too, or, in other words, as R. W.
delicately signified that his glass was empty, by throwing back his head
and standing the glass upside down on his nose and upper lip, it might
have been charitable in Mrs Wilfer to suggest replenishment. But that
heroine briefly suggesting ‘Bedtime’ instead, the bottles were put away,
and the family retired; she cherubically escorted, like some severe
saint in a painting, or merely human matron allegorically treated.

‘And by this time to-morrow,’ said Lavinia when the two girls were alone
in their room, ‘we shall have Mr Rokesmith here, and shall be expecting
to have our throats cut.’

‘You needn’t stand between me and the candle for all that,’ retorted
Bella. ‘This is another of the consequences of being poor! The idea of a
girl with a really fine head of hair, having to do it by one flat candle
and a few inches of looking-glass!’

‘You caught George Sampson with it, Bella, bad as your means of dressing
it are.’

‘You low little thing. Caught George Sampson with it! Don’t talk about
catching people, miss, till your own time for catching--as you call
it--comes.’

‘Perhaps it has come,’ muttered Lavvy, with a toss of her head.

‘What did you say?’ asked Bella, very sharply. ‘What did you say, miss?’

Lavvy declining equally to repeat or to explain, Bella gradually lapsed
over her hair-dressing into a soliloquy on the miseries of being poor,
as exemplified in having nothing to put on, nothing to go out in,
nothing to dress by, only a nasty box to dress at instead of a
commodious dressing-table, and being obliged to take in suspicious
lodgers. On the last grievance as her climax, she laid great stress--and
might have laid greater, had she known that if Mr Julius Handford had a
twin brother upon earth, Mr John Rokesmith was the man.



Chapter 5

BOFFIN’S BOWER


Over against a London house, a corner house not far from Cavendish
Square, a man with a wooden leg had sat for some years, with his
remaining foot in a basket in cold weather, picking up a living on
this wise:--Every morning at eight o’clock, he stumped to the corner,
carrying a chair, a clothes-horse, a pair of trestles, a board, a
basket, and an umbrella, all strapped together. Separating these, the
board and trestles became a counter, the basket supplied the few small
lots of fruit and sweets that he offered for sale upon it and became a
foot-warmer, the unfolded clothes-horse displayed a choice collection of
halfpenny ballads and became a screen, and the stool planted within it
became his post for the rest of the day. All weathers saw the man at the
post. This is to be accepted in a double sense, for he contrived a
back to his wooden stool, by placing it against the lamp-post. When the
weather was wet, he put up his umbrella over his stock in trade, not
over himself; when the weather was dry, he furled that faded article,
tied it round with a piece of yarn, and laid it cross-wise under the
trestles: where it looked like an unwholesomely-forced lettuce that had
lost in colour and crispness what it had gained in size.

He had established his right to the corner, by imperceptible
prescription. He had never varied his ground an inch, but had in the
beginning diffidently taken the corner upon which the side of the house
gave. A howling corner in the winter time, a dusty corner in the summer
time, an undesirable corner at the best of times. Shelterless fragments
of straw and paper got up revolving storms there, when the main street
was at peace; and the water-cart, as if it were drunk or short-sighted,
came blundering and jolting round it, making it muddy when all else was
clean.

On the front of his sale-board hung a little placard, like a
kettle-holder, bearing the inscription in his own small text:

     Errands gone
     On with fi
     Delity By
     Ladies and Gentlemen
     I remain
     Your humble Servt:
     Silas Wegg

He had not only settled it with himself in course of time, that he
was errand-goer by appointment to the house at the corner (though he
received such commissions not half a dozen times in a year, and then
only as some servant’s deputy), but also that he was one of the house’s
retainers and owed vassalage to it and was bound to leal and loyal
interest in it. For this reason, he always spoke of it as ‘Our House,’
and, though his knowledge of its affairs was mostly speculative and
all wrong, claimed to be in its confidence. On similar grounds he never
beheld an inmate at any one of its windows but he touched his hat. Yet,
he knew so little about the inmates that he gave them names of his own
invention: as ‘Miss Elizabeth’, ‘Master George’, ‘Aunt Jane’, ‘Uncle
Parker ‘--having no authority whatever for any such designations, but
particularly the last--to which, as a natural consequence, he stuck with
great obstinacy.

Over the house itself, he exercised the same imaginary power as over its
inhabitants and their affairs. He had never been in it, the length of
a piece of fat black water-pipe which trailed itself over the area-door
into a damp stone passage, and had rather the air of a leech on the
house that had ‘taken’ wonderfully; but this was no impediment to his
arranging it according to a plan of his own. It was a great dingy house
with a quantity of dim side window and blank back premises, and it
cost his mind a world of trouble so to lay it out as to account for
everything in its external appearance. But, this once done, was quite
satisfactory, and he rested persuaded, that he knew his way about the
house blindfold: from the barred garrets in the high roof, to the two
iron extinguishers before the main door--which seemed to request all
lively visitors to have the kindness to put themselves out, before
entering.

Assuredly, this stall of Silas Wegg’s was the hardest little stall of
all the sterile little stalls in London. It gave you the face-ache
to look at his apples, the stomach-ache to look at his oranges, the
tooth-ache to look at his nuts. Of the latter commodity he had always
a grim little heap, on which lay a little wooden measure which had
no discernible inside, and was considered to represent the penn’orth
appointed by Magna Charta. Whether from too much east wind or no--it was
an easterly corner--the stall, the stock, and the keeper, were all as
dry as the Desert. Wegg was a knotty man, and a close-grained, with a
face carved out of very hard material, that had just as much play
of expression as a watchman’s rattle. When he laughed, certain jerks
occurred in it, and the rattle sprung. Sooth to say, he was so wooden
a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg naturally, and rather
suggested to the fanciful observer, that he might be expected--if his
development received no untimely check--to be completely set up with a
pair of wooden legs in about six months.

Mr Wegg was an observant person, or, as he himself said, ‘took a
powerful sight of notice’. He saluted all his regular passers-by every
day, as he sat on his stool backed up by the lamp-post; and on the
adaptable character of these salutes he greatly plumed himself. Thus,
to the rector, he addressed a bow, compounded of lay deference, and
a slight touch of the shady preliminary meditation at church; to the
doctor, a confidential bow, as to a gentleman whose acquaintance with
his inside he begged respectfully to acknowledge; before the Quality he
delighted to abase himself; and for Uncle Parker, who was in the army
(at least, so he had settled it), he put his open hand to the side
of his hat, in a military manner which that angry-eyed buttoned-up
inflammatory-faced old gentleman appeared but imperfectly to appreciate.

The only article in which Silas dealt, that was not hard, was
gingerbread. On a certain day, some wretched infant having purchased the
damp gingerbread-horse (fearfully out of condition), and the adhesive
bird-cage, which had been exposed for the day’s sale, he had taken a tin
box from under his stool to produce a relay of those dreadful specimens,
and was going to look in at the lid, when he said to himself, pausing:
‘Oh! Here you are again!’

The words referred to a broad, round-shouldered, one-sided old fellow in
mourning, coming comically ambling towards the corner, dressed in a pea
over-coat, and carrying a large stick. He wore thick shoes, and thick
leather gaiters, and thick gloves like a hedger’s. Both as to his dress
and to himself, he was of an overlapping rhinoceros build, with folds
in his cheeks, and his forehead, and his eyelids, and his lips, and his
ears; but with bright, eager, childishly-inquiring, grey eyes, under his
ragged eyebrows, and broad-brimmed hat. A very odd-looking old fellow
altogether.

‘Here you are again,’ repeated Mr Wegg, musing. ‘And what are you now?
Are you in the Funns, or where are you? Have you lately come to settle
in this neighbourhood, or do you own to another neighbourhood? Are you
in independent circumstances, or is it wasting the motions of a bow on
you? Come! I’ll speculate! I’ll invest a bow in you.’

Which Mr Wegg, having replaced his tin box, accordingly did, as he rose
to bait his gingerbread-trap for some other devoted infant. The salute
was acknowledged with:

‘Morning, sir! Morning! Morning!’

[‘Calls me Sir!’ said Mr Wegg, to himself; ‘HE won’t answer. A bow
gone!’)

‘Morning, morning, morning!’

‘Appears to be rather a ‘arty old cock, too,’ said Mr Wegg, as before;
‘Good morning to YOU, sir.’

‘Do you remember me, then?’ asked his new acquaintance, stopping in
his amble, one-sided, before the stall, and speaking in a pounding way,
though with great good-humour.

‘I have noticed you go past our house, sir, several times in the course
of the last week or so.’

‘Our house,’ repeated the other. ‘Meaning--?’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Wegg, nodding, as the other pointed the clumsy forefinger
of his right glove at the corner house.

‘Oh! Now, what,’ pursued the old fellow, in an inquisitive manner,
carrying his knotted stick in his left arm as if it were a baby, ‘what
do they allow you now?’

‘It’s job work that I do for our house,’ returned Silas, drily, and with
reticence; ‘it’s not yet brought to an exact allowance.’

‘Oh! It’s not yet brought to an exact allowance? No! It’s not yet
brought to an exact allowance. Oh!--Morning, morning, morning!’

‘Appears to be rather a cracked old cock,’ thought Silas, qualifying his
former good opinion, as the other ambled off. But, in a moment he was
back again with the question:

‘How did you get your wooden leg?’

Mr Wegg replied, (tartly to this personal inquiry), ‘In an accident.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘Well! I haven’t got to keep it warm,’ Mr Wegg made answer, in a sort of
desperation occasioned by the singularity of the question.

‘He hasn’t,’ repeated the other to his knotted stick, as he gave it a
hug; ‘he hasn’t got--ha!--ha!--to keep it warm! Did you ever hear of the
name of Boffin?’

‘No,’ said Mr Wegg, who was growing restive under this examination. ‘I
never did hear of the name of Boffin.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘Why, no,’ retorted Mr Wegg, again approaching desperation; ‘I can’t say
I do.’

‘Why don’t you like it?’

‘I don’t know why I don’t,’ retorted Mr Wegg, approaching frenzy, ‘but I
don’t at all.’

‘Now, I’ll tell you something that’ll make you sorry for that,’ said the
stranger, smiling. ‘My name’s Boffin.’

‘I can’t help it!’ returned Mr Wegg. Implying in his manner the
offensive addition, ‘and if I could, I wouldn’t.’

‘But there’s another chance for you,’ said Mr Boffin, smiling still, ‘Do
you like the name of Nicodemus? Think it over. Nick, or Noddy.’

‘It is not, sir,’ Mr Wegg rejoined, as he sat down on his stool, with an
air of gentle resignation, combined with melancholy candour; ‘it is not
a name as I could wish any one that I had a respect for, to call ME
by; but there may be persons that would not view it with the same
objections.--I don’t know why,’ Mr Wegg added, anticipating another
question.

‘Noddy Boffin,’ said that gentleman. ‘Noddy. That’s my name. Noddy--or
Nick--Boffin. What’s your name?’

‘Silas Wegg.--I don’t,’ said Mr Wegg, bestirring himself to take the
same precaution as before, ‘I don’t know why Silas, and I don’t know why
Wegg.’

‘Now, Wegg,’ said Mr Boffin, hugging his stick closer, ‘I want to make a
sort of offer to you. Do you remember when you first see me?’

The wooden Wegg looked at him with a meditative eye, and also with a
softened air as descrying possibility of profit. ‘Let me think. I ain’t
quite sure, and yet I generally take a powerful sight of notice, too.
Was it on a Monday morning, when the butcher-boy had been to our house
for orders, and bought a ballad of me, which, being unacquainted with
the tune, I run it over to him?’

‘Right, Wegg, right! But he bought more than one.’

‘Yes, to be sure, sir; he bought several; and wishing to lay out his
money to the best, he took my opinion to guide his choice, and we went
over the collection together. To be sure we did. Here was him as it
might be, and here was myself as it might be, and there was you, Mr
Boffin, as you identically are, with your self-same stick under your
very same arm, and your very same back towards us. To--be--sure!’ added
Mr Wegg, looking a little round Mr Boffin, to take him in the rear,
and identify this last extraordinary coincidence, ‘your wery self-same
back!’

‘What do you think I was doing, Wegg?’

‘I should judge, sir, that you might be glancing your eye down the
street.’

‘No, Wegg. I was a listening.’

‘Was you, indeed?’ said Mr Wegg, dubiously.

‘Not in a dishonourable way, Wegg, because you was singing to the
butcher; and you wouldn’t sing secrets to a butcher in the street, you
know.’

‘It never happened that I did so yet, to the best of my remembrance,’
said Mr Wegg, cautiously. ‘But I might do it. A man can’t say what he
might wish to do some day or another.’ (This, not to release any little
advantage he might derive from Mr Boffin’s avowal.)

‘Well,’ repeated Boffin, ‘I was a listening to you and to him. And what
do you--you haven’t got another stool, have you? I’m rather thick in my
breath.’

‘I haven’t got another, but you’re welcome to this,’ said Wegg,
resigning it. ‘It’s a treat to me to stand.’

‘Lard!’ exclaimed Mr Boffin, in a tone of great enjoyment, as he settled
himself down, still nursing his stick like a baby, ‘it’s a pleasant
place, this! And then to be shut in on each side, with these ballads,
like so many book-leaf blinkers! Why, its delightful!’

‘If I am not mistaken, sir,’ Mr Wegg delicately hinted, resting a hand
on his stall, and bending over the discursive Boffin, ‘you alluded to
some offer or another that was in your mind?’

‘I’m coming to it! All right. I’m coming to it! I was going to say that
when I listened that morning, I listened with hadmiration amounting to
haw. I thought to myself, “Here’s a man with a wooden leg--a literary
man with--“’

‘N--not exactly so, sir,’ said Mr Wegg.

‘Why, you know every one of these songs by name and by tune, and if you
want to read or to sing any one on ‘em off straight, you’ve only to whip
on your spectacles and do it!’ cried Mr Boffin. ‘I see you at it!’

‘Well, sir,’ returned Mr Wegg, with a conscious inclination of the head;
‘we’ll say literary, then.’

‘“A literary man--WITH a wooden leg--and all Print is open to him!”
 That’s what I thought to myself, that morning,’ pursued Mr Boffin,
leaning forward to describe, uncramped by the clotheshorse, as large an
arc as his right arm could make; ‘“all Print is open to him!” And it is,
ain’t it?’

‘Why, truly, sir,’ Mr Wegg admitted, with modesty; ‘I believe you
couldn’t show me the piece of English print, that I wouldn’t be equal to
collaring and throwing.’

‘On the spot?’ said Mr Boffin.

‘On the spot.’

‘I know’d it! Then consider this. Here am I, a man without a wooden leg,
and yet all print is shut to me.’

‘Indeed, sir?’ Mr Wegg returned with increasing self-complacency.
‘Education neglected?’

‘Neg--lected!’ repeated Boffin, with emphasis. ‘That ain’t no word for
it. I don’t mean to say but what if you showed me a B, I could so far
give you change for it, as to answer Boffin.’

‘Come, come, sir,’ said Mr Wegg, throwing in a little encouragement,
‘that’s something, too.’

‘It’s something,’ answered Mr Boffin, ‘but I’ll take my oath it ain’t
much.’

‘Perhaps it’s not as much as could be wished by an inquiring mind, sir,’
Mr Wegg admitted.

‘Now, look here. I’m retired from business. Me and Mrs
Boffin--Henerietty Boffin--which her father’s name was Henery, and her
mother’s name was Hetty, and so you get it--we live on a compittance,
under the will of a diseased governor.’

‘Gentleman dead, sir?’

‘Man alive, don’t I tell you? A diseased governor? Now, it’s too late
for me to begin shovelling and sifting at alphabeds and grammar-books.
I’m getting to be a old bird, and I want to take it easy. But I want
some reading--some fine bold reading, some splendid book in a gorging
Lord-Mayor’s-Show of wollumes’ (probably meaning gorgeous, but misled
by association of ideas); ‘as’ll reach right down your pint of view, and
take time to go by you. How can I get that reading, Wegg? By,’ tapping
him on the breast with the head of his thick stick, ‘paying a man truly
qualified to do it, so much an hour (say twopence) to come and do it.’

‘Hem! Flattered, sir, I am sure,’ said Wegg, beginning to regard himself
in quite a new light. ‘Hew! This is the offer you mentioned, sir?’

‘Yes. Do you like it?’

‘I am considering of it, Mr Boffin.’

‘I don’t,’ said Boffin, in a free-handed manner, ‘want to tie a literary
man--WITH a wooden leg--down too tight. A halfpenny an hour shan’t part
us. The hours are your own to choose, after you’ve done for the day
with your house here. I live over Maiden-Lane way--out Holloway
direction--and you’ve only got to go East-and-by-North when you’ve
finished here, and you’re there. Twopence halfpenny an hour,’ said
Boffin, taking a piece of chalk from his pocket and getting off the
stool to work the sum on the top of it in his own way; ‘two long’uns and
a short’un--twopence halfpenny; two short’uns is a long’un and two two
long’uns is four long’uns--making five long’uns; six nights a week at
five long’uns a night,’ scoring them all down separately, ‘and you mount
up to thirty long’uns. A round’un! Half a crown!’

Pointing to this result as a large and satisfactory one, Mr Boffin
smeared it out with his moistened glove, and sat down on the remains.

‘Half a crown,’ said Wegg, meditating. ‘Yes. (It ain’t much, sir.) Half
a crown.’

‘Per week, you know.’

‘Per week. Yes. As to the amount of strain upon the intellect now. Was
you thinking at all of poetry?’ Mr Wegg inquired, musing.

‘Would it come dearer?’ Mr Boffin asked.

‘It would come dearer,’ Mr Wegg returned. ‘For when a person comes to
grind off poetry night after night, it is but right he should expect to
be paid for its weakening effect on his mind.’

‘To tell you the truth Wegg,’ said Boffin, ‘I wasn’t thinking of poetry,
except in so fur as this:--If you was to happen now and then to feel
yourself in the mind to tip me and Mrs Boffin one of your ballads, why
then we should drop into poetry.’

‘I follow you, sir,’ said Wegg. ‘But not being a regular musical
professional, I should be loath to engage myself for that; and therefore
when I dropped into poetry, I should ask to be considered so fur, in the
light of a friend.’

At this, Mr Boffin’s eyes sparkled, and he shook Silas earnestly by the
hand: protesting that it was more than he could have asked, and that he
took it very kindly indeed.

‘What do you think of the terms, Wegg?’ Mr Boffin then demanded, with
unconcealed anxiety.

Silas, who had stimulated this anxiety by his hard reserve of manner,
and who had begun to understand his man very well, replied with an air;
as if he were saying something extraordinarily generous and great:

‘Mr Boffin, I never bargain.’

‘So I should have thought of you!’ said Mr Boffin, admiringly. ‘No, sir.
I never did ‘aggle and I never will ‘aggle. Consequently I meet you at
once, free and fair, with--Done, for double the money!’

Mr Boffin seemed a little unprepared for this conclusion, but assented,
with the remark, ‘You know better what it ought to be than I do, Wegg,’
and again shook hands with him upon it.

‘Could you begin to night, Wegg?’ he then demanded.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Mr Wegg, careful to leave all the eagerness to him.
‘I see no difficulty if you wish it. You are provided with the needful
implement--a book, sir?’

‘Bought him at a sale,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Eight wollumes. Red and gold.
Purple ribbon in every wollume, to keep the place where you leave off.
Do you know him?’

‘The book’s name, sir?’ inquired Silas.

‘I thought you might have know’d him without it,’ said Mr
Boffin slightly disappointed. ‘His name is
Decline-And-Fall-Off-The-Rooshan-Empire.’ (Mr Boffin went over these
stones slowly and with much caution.)

‘Ay indeed!’ said Mr Wegg, nodding his head with an air of friendly
recognition.

‘You know him, Wegg?’

‘I haven’t been not to say right slap through him, very lately,’ Mr Wegg
made answer, ‘having been otherways employed, Mr Boffin. But know him?
Old familiar declining and falling off the Rooshan? Rather, sir! Ever
since I was not so high as your stick. Ever since my eldest brother left
our cottage to enlist into the army. On which occasion, as the ballad
that was made about it describes:

     ‘Beside that cottage door, Mr Boffin,
             A girl was on her knees;
     She held aloft a snowy scarf, Sir,
             Which (my eldest brother noticed) fluttered in the breeze.
     She breathed a prayer for him, Mr Boffin;
             A prayer he coold not hear.
     And my eldest brother lean’d upon his sword, Mr Boffin,
              And wiped away a tear.’

Much impressed by this family circumstance, and also by the friendly
disposition of Mr Wegg, as exemplified in his so soon dropping into
poetry, Mr Boffin again shook hands with that ligneous sharper, and
besought him to name his hour. Mr Wegg named eight.

‘Where I live,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘is called The Bower. Boffin’s Bower is
the name Mrs Boffin christened it when we come into it as a property.
If you should meet with anybody that don’t know it by that name (which
hardly anybody does), when you’ve got nigh upon about a odd mile, or
say and a quarter if you like, up Maiden Lane, Battle Bridge, ask for
Harmony Jail, and you’ll be put right. I shall expect you, Wegg,’ said
Mr Boffin, clapping him on the shoulder with the greatest enthusiasm,
‘most joyfully. I shall have no peace or patience till you come. Print
is now opening ahead of me. This night, a literary man--WITH a wooden
leg--’ he bestowed an admiring look upon that decoration, as if it
greatly enhanced the relish of Mr Wegg’s attainments--‘will begin to
lead me a new life! My fist again, Wegg. Morning, morning, morning!’

Left alone at his stall as the other ambled off, Mr Wegg subsided
into his screen, produced a small pocket-handkerchief of a
penitentially-scrubbing character, and took himself by the nose with
a thoughtful aspect. Also, while he still grasped that feature, he
directed several thoughtful looks down the street, after the retiring
figure of Mr Boffin. But, profound gravity sat enthroned on Wegg’s
countenance. For, while he considered within himself that this was
an old fellow of rare simplicity, that this was an opportunity to
be improved, and that here might be money to be got beyond present
calculation, still he compromised himself by no admission that his new
engagement was at all out of his way, or involved the least element of
the ridiculous. Mr Wegg would even have picked a handsome quarrel with
any one who should have challenged his deep acquaintance with those
aforesaid eight volumes of Decline and Fall. His gravity was unusual,
portentous, and immeasurable, not because he admitted any doubt of
himself but because he perceived it necessary to forestall any doubt of
himself in others. And herein he ranged with that very numerous class
of impostors, who are quite as determined to keep up appearances to
themselves, as to their neighbours.

A certain loftiness, likewise, took possession of Mr Wegg; a
condescending sense of being in request as an official expounder of
mysteries. It did not move him to commercial greatness, but rather to
littleness, insomuch that if it had been within the possibilities of
things for the wooden measure to hold fewer nuts than usual, it would
have done so that day. But, when night came, and with her veiled eyes
beheld him stumping towards Boffin’s Bower, he was elated too.

The Bower was as difficult to find, as Fair Rosamond’s without the clue.
Mr Wegg, having reached the quarter indicated, inquired for the Bower
half a dozen times without the least success, until he remembered to
ask for Harmony Jail. This occasioned a quick change in the spirits of a
hoarse gentleman and a donkey, whom he had much perplexed.

‘Why, yer mean Old Harmon’s, do yer?’ said the hoarse gentleman, who was
driving his donkey in a truck, with a carrot for a whip. ‘Why didn’t yer
niver say so? Eddard and me is a goin’ by HIM! Jump in.’

Mr Wegg complied, and the hoarse gentleman invited his attention to the
third person in company, thus;

‘Now, you look at Eddard’s ears. What was it as you named, agin?
Whisper.’

Mr Wegg whispered, ‘Boffin’s Bower.’

‘Eddard! (keep yer hi on his ears) cut away to Boffin’s Bower!’

Edward, with his ears lying back, remained immoveable.

‘Eddard! (keep yer hi on his ears) cut away to Old Harmon’s.’ Edward
instantly pricked up his ears to their utmost, and rattled off at such
a pace that Mr Wegg’s conversation was jolted out of him in a most
dislocated state.

‘Was-it-Ev-verajail?’ asked Mr Wegg, holding on.

‘Not a proper jail, wot you and me would get committed to,’ returned
his escort; ‘they giv’ it the name, on accounts of Old Harmon living
solitary there.’

‘And-why-did-they-callitharm-Ony?’ asked Wegg.

‘On accounts of his never agreeing with nobody. Like a speeches of
chaff. Harmon’s Jail; Harmony Jail. Working it round like.’

‘Doyouknow-Mist-Erboff-in?’ asked Wegg.

‘I should think so! Everybody do about here. Eddard knows him. (Keep yer
hi on his ears.) Noddy Boffin, Eddard!’

The effect of the name was so very alarming, in respect of causing a
temporary disappearance of Edward’s head, casting his hind hoofs in the
air, greatly accelerating the pace and increasing the jolting, that Mr
Wegg was fain to devote his attention exclusively to holding on, and to
relinquish his desire of ascertaining whether this homage to Boffin was
to be considered complimentary or the reverse.

Presently, Edward stopped at a gateway, and Wegg discreetly lost no time
in slipping out at the back of the truck. The moment he was landed, his
late driver with a wave of the carrot, said ‘Supper, Eddard!’ and he,
the hind hoofs, the truck, and Edward, all seemed to fly into the air
together, in a kind of apotheosis.

Pushing the gate, which stood ajar, Wegg looked into an enclosed space
where certain tall dark mounds rose high against the sky, and where the
pathway to the Bower was indicated, as the moonlight showed, between two
lines of broken crockery set in ashes. A white figure advancing along
this path, proved to be nothing more ghostly than Mr Boffin, easily
attired for the pursuit of knowledge, in an undress garment of short
white smock-frock. Having received his literary friend with great
cordiality, he conducted him to the interior of the Bower and there
presented him to Mrs Boffin:--a stout lady of a rubicund and cheerful
aspect, dressed (to Mr Wegg’s consternation) in a low evening-dress of
sable satin, and a large black velvet hat and feathers.

‘Mrs Boffin, Wegg,’ said Boffin, ‘is a highflyer at Fashion. And her
make is such, that she does it credit. As to myself I ain’t yet as
Fash’nable as I may come to be. Henerietty, old lady, this is the
gentleman that’s a going to decline and fall off the Rooshan Empire.’

‘And I am sure I hope it’ll do you both good,’ said Mrs Boffin.

It was the queerest of rooms, fitted and furnished more like a luxurious
amateur tap-room than anything else within the ken of Silas Wegg. There
were two wooden settles by the fire, one on either side of it, with
a corresponding table before each. On one of these tables, the eight
volumes were ranged flat, in a row, like a galvanic battery; on the
other, certain squat case-bottles of inviting appearance seemed to stand
on tiptoe to exchange glances with Mr Wegg over a front row of tumblers
and a basin of white sugar. On the hob, a kettle steamed; on the hearth,
a cat reposed. Facing the fire between the settles, a sofa, a footstool,
and a little table, formed a centrepiece devoted to Mrs Boffin.
They were garish in taste and colour, but were expensive articles of
drawing-room furniture that had a very odd look beside the settles
and the flaring gaslight pendent from the ceiling. There was a flowery
carpet on the floor; but, instead of reaching to the fireside, its
glowing vegetation stopped short at Mrs Boffin’s footstool, and gave
place to a region of sand and sawdust. Mr Wegg also noticed, with
admiring eyes, that, while the flowery land displayed such hollow
ornamentation as stuffed birds and waxen fruits under glass-shades,
there were, in the territory where vegetation ceased, compensatory
shelves on which the best part of a large pie and likewise of a cold
joint were plainly discernible among other solids. The room itself was
large, though low; and the heavy frames of its old-fashioned windows,
and the heavy beams in its crooked ceiling, seemed to indicate that it
had once been a house of some mark standing alone in the country.

‘Do you like it, Wegg?’ asked Mr Boffin, in his pouncing manner.

‘I admire it greatly, sir,’ said Wegg. ‘Peculiar comfort at this
fireside, sir.’

‘Do you understand it, Wegg?’

‘Why, in a general way, sir,’ Mr Wegg was beginning slowly and
knowingly, with his head stuck on one side, as evasive people do begin,
when the other cut him short:

‘You DON’T understand it, Wegg, and I’ll explain it. These arrangements
is made by mutual consent between Mrs Boffin and me. Mrs Boffin, as I’ve
mentioned, is a highflyer at Fashion; at present I’m not. I don’t go
higher than comfort, and comfort of the sort that I’m equal to the
enjoyment of. Well then. Where would be the good of Mrs Boffin and me
quarrelling over it? We never did quarrel, before we come into Boffin’s
Bower as a property; why quarrel when we HAVE come into Boffin’s Bower
as a property? So Mrs Boffin, she keeps up her part of the room, in her
way; I keep up my part of the room in mine. In consequence of which
we have at once, Sociability (I should go melancholy mad without Mrs
Boffin), Fashion, and Comfort. If I get by degrees to be a higher-flyer
at Fashion, then Mrs Boffin will by degrees come for’arder. If Mrs
Boffin should ever be less of a dab at Fashion than she is at the
present time, then Mrs Boffin’s carpet would go back’arder. If we should
both continny as we are, why then HERE we are, and give us a kiss, old
lady.’

Mrs Boffin who, perpetually smiling, had approached and drawn her plump
arm through her lord’s, most willingly complied. Fashion, in the form
of her black velvet hat and feathers, tried to prevent it; but got
deservedly crushed in the endeavour.

‘So now, Wegg,’ said Mr Boffin, wiping his mouth with an air of much
refreshment, ‘you begin to know us as we are. This is a charming spot,
is the Bower, but you must get to apprechiate it by degrees. It’s a spot
to find out the merits of; little by little, and a new’un every day.
There’s a serpentining walk up each of the mounds, that gives you the
yard and neighbourhood changing every moment. When you get to the top,
there’s a view of the neighbouring premises, not to be surpassed. The
premises of Mrs Boffin’s late father (Canine Provision Trade), you look
down into, as if they was your own. And the top of the High Mound is
crowned with a lattice-work Arbour, in which, if you don’t read out loud
many a book in the summer, ay, and as a friend, drop many a time into
poetry too, it shan’t be my fault. Now, what’ll you read on?’

‘Thank you, sir,’ returned Wegg, as if there were nothing new in his
reading at all. ‘I generally do it on gin and water.’

‘Keeps the organ moist, does it, Wegg?’ asked Mr Boffin, with innocent
eagerness.

‘N-no, sir,’ replied Wegg, coolly, ‘I should hardly describe it so, sir.
I should say, mellers it. Mellers it, is the word I should employ, Mr
Boffin.’

His wooden conceit and craft kept exact pace with the delighted
expectation of his victim. The visions rising before his mercenary mind,
of the many ways in which this connexion was to be turned to account,
never obscured the foremost idea natural to a dull overreaching man,
that he must not make himself too cheap.

Mrs Boffin’s Fashion, as a less inexorable deity than the idol usually
worshipped under that name, did not forbid her mixing for her literary
guest, or asking if he found the result to his liking. On his returning
a gracious answer and taking his place at the literary settle, Mr Boffin
began to compose himself as a listener, at the opposite settle, with
exultant eyes.

‘Sorry to deprive you of a pipe, Wegg,’ he said, filling his own, ‘but
you can’t do both together. Oh! and another thing I forgot to name! When
you come in here of an evening, and look round you, and notice anything
on a shelf that happens to catch your fancy, mention it.’

Wegg, who had been going to put on his spectacles, immediately laid them
down, with the sprightly observation:

‘You read my thoughts, sir. DO my eyes deceive me, or is that object up
there a--a pie? It can’t be a pie.’

‘Yes, it’s a pie, Wegg,’ replied Mr Boffin, with a glance of some little
discomfiture at the Decline and Fall.

‘HAVE I lost my smell for fruits, or is it a apple pie, sir?’ asked
Wegg.

‘It’s a veal and ham pie,’ said Mr Boffin.

‘Is it indeed, sir? And it would be hard, sir, to name the pie that is
a better pie than a weal and hammer,’ said Mr Wegg, nodding his head
emotionally.

‘Have some, Wegg?’

‘Thank you, Mr Boffin, I think I will, at your invitation. I wouldn’t
at any other party’s, at the present juncture; but at yours, sir!--And
meaty jelly too, especially when a little salt, which is the case where
there’s ham, is mellering to the organ, is very mellering to the organ.’
Mr Wegg did not say what organ, but spoke with a cheerful generality.

So, the pie was brought down, and the worthy Mr Boffin exercised his
patience until Wegg, in the exercise of his knife and fork, had finished
the dish: only profiting by the opportunity to inform Wegg that although
it was not strictly Fashionable to keep the contents of a larder thus
exposed to view, he (Mr Boffin) considered it hospitable; for the
reason, that instead of saying, in a comparatively unmeaning manner, to
a visitor, ‘There are such and such edibles down stairs; will you have
anything up?’ you took the bold practical course of saying, ‘Cast your
eye along the shelves, and, if you see anything you like there, have it
down.’

And now, Mr Wegg at length pushed away his plate and put on his
spectacles, and Mr Boffin lighted his pipe and looked with beaming
eyes into the opening world before him, and Mrs Boffin reclined in a
fashionable manner on her sofa: as one who would be part of the audience
if she found she could, and would go to sleep if she found she couldn’t.

‘Hem!’ began Wegg, ‘This, Mr Boffin and Lady, is the first chapter of
the first wollume of the Decline and Fall off--’ here he looked hard at
the book, and stopped.

‘What’s the matter, Wegg?’

‘Why, it comes into my mind, do you know, sir,’ said Wegg with an air
of insinuating frankness (having first again looked hard at the book),
‘that you made a little mistake this morning, which I had meant to set
you right in, only something put it out of my head. I think you said
Rooshan Empire, sir?’

‘It is Rooshan; ain’t it, Wegg?’

‘No, sir. Roman. Roman.’

‘What’s the difference, Wegg?’

‘The difference, sir?’ Mr Wegg was faltering and in danger of breaking
down, when a bright thought flashed upon him. ‘The difference, sir?
There you place me in a difficulty, Mr Boffin. Suffice it to observe,
that the difference is best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs
Boffin does not honour us with her company. In Mrs Boffin’s presence,
sir, we had better drop it.’

Mr Wegg thus came out of his disadvantage with quite a chivalrous air,
and not only that, but by dint of repeating with a manly delicacy,
‘In Mrs Boffin’s presence, sir, we had better drop it!’ turned the
disadvantage on Boffin, who felt that he had committed himself in a very
painful manner.

Then, Mr Wegg, in a dry unflinching way, entered on his task; going
straight across country at everything that came before him; taking all
the hard words, biographical and geographical; getting rather shaken by
Hadrian, Trajan, and the Antonines; stumbling at Polybius (pronounced
Polly Beeious, and supposed by Mr Boffin to be a Roman virgin, and by
Mrs Boffin to be responsible for that necessity of dropping it); heavily
unseated by Titus Antoninus Pius; up again and galloping smoothly with
Augustus; finally, getting over the ground well with Commodus: who,
under the appellation of Commodious, was held by Mr Boffin to have been
quite unworthy of his English origin, and ‘not to have acted up to his
name’ in his government of the Roman people. With the death of this
personage, Mr Wegg terminated his first reading; long before which
consummation several total eclipses of Mrs Boffin’s candle behind
her black velvet disc, would have been very alarming, but for being
regularly accompanied by a potent smell of burnt pens when her feathers
took fire, which acted as a restorative and woke her. Mr Wegg, having
read on by rote and attached as few ideas as possible to the text, came
out of the encounter fresh; but, Mr Boffin, who had soon laid down his
unfinished pipe, and had ever since sat intently staring with his eyes
and mind at the confounding enormities of the Romans, was so severely
punished that he could hardly wish his literary friend Good-night, and
articulate ‘Tomorrow.’

‘Commodious,’ gasped Mr Boffin, staring at the moon, after letting
Wegg out at the gate and fastening it: ‘Commodious fights in that
wild-beast-show, seven hundred and thirty-five times, in one character
only! As if that wasn’t stunning enough, a hundred lions is turned into
the same wild-beast-show all at once! As if that wasn’t stunning enough,
Commodious, in another character, kills ‘em all off in a hundred goes!
As if that wasn’t stunning enough, Vittle-us (and well named too) eats
six millions’ worth, English money, in seven months! Wegg takes it easy,
but upon-my-soul to a old bird like myself these are scarers. And even
now that Commodious is strangled, I don’t see a way to our bettering
ourselves.’ Mr Boffin added as he turned his pensive steps towards the
Bower and shook his head, ‘I didn’t think this morning there was half so
many Scarers in Print. But I’m in for it now!’



Chapter 6

CUT ADRIFT


The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, already mentioned as a tavern of
a dropsical appearance, had long settled down into a state of hale
infirmity. In its whole constitution it had not a straight floor, and
hardly a straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly would yet
outlast, many a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer public-house.
Externally, it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows
heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges,
with a crazy wooden verandah impending over the water; indeed the whole
house, inclusive of the complaining flag-staff on the roof, impended
over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a
faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will
never go in at all.

This description applies to the river-frontage of the Six Jolly
Fellowship Porters. The back of the establishment, though the chief
entrance was there, so contracted that it merely represented in its
connexion with the front, the handle of a flat iron set upright on its
broadest end. This handle stood at the bottom of a wilderness of court
and alley: which wilderness pressed so hard and close upon the Six Jolly
Fellowship Porters as to leave the hostelry not an inch of ground beyond
its door. For this reason, in combination with the fact that the house
was all but afloat at high water, when the Porters had a family wash the
linen subjected to that operation might usually be seen drying on lines
stretched across the reception-rooms and bed-chambers.

The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors and
doors, of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, seemed in its old age
fraught with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had
become gnarled and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots
started out of it; and here and there it seemed to twist itself into
some likeness of boughs. In this state of second childhood, it had an
air of being in its own way garrulous about its early life. Not without
reason was it often asserted by the regular frequenters of the Porters,
that when the light shone full upon the grain of certain panels, and
particularly upon an old corner cupboard of walnut-wood in the bar, you
might trace little forests there, and tiny trees like the parent tree,
in full umbrageous leaf.

The bar of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters was a bar to soften the
human breast. The available space in it was not much larger than a
hackney-coach; but no one could have wished the bar bigger, that space
was so girt in by corpulent little casks, and by cordial-bottles
radiant with fictitious grapes in bunches, and by lemons in nets, and
by biscuits in baskets, and by the polite beer-pulls that made low
bows when customers were served with beer, and by the cheese in a snug
corner, and by the landlady’s own small table in a snugger corner near
the fire, with the cloth everlastingly laid. This haven was divided from
the rough world by a glass partition and a half-door, with a leaden
sill upon it for the convenience of resting your liquor; but, over this
half-door the bar’s snugness so gushed forth that, albeit customers
drank there standing, in a dark and draughty passage where they were
shouldered by other customers passing in and out, they always appeared
to drink under an enchanting delusion that they were in the bar itself.

For the rest, both the tap and parlour of the Six Jolly Fellowship
Porters gave upon the river, and had red curtains matching the noses of
the regular customers, and were provided with comfortable fireside tin
utensils, like models of sugar-loaf hats, made in that shape that they
might, with their pointed ends, seek out for themselves glowing nooks
in the depths of the red coals, when they mulled your ale, or heated for
you those delectable drinks, Purl, Flip, and Dog’s Nose. The first of
these humming compounds was a speciality of the Porters, which, through
an inscription on its door-posts, gently appealed to your feelings as,
‘The Early Purl House’. For, it would seem that Purl must always be
taken early; though whether for any more distinctly stomachic reason
than that, as the early bird catches the worm, so the early purl catches
the customer, cannot here be resolved. It only remains to add that in
the handle of the flat iron, and opposite the bar, was a very little
room like a three-cornered hat, into which no direct ray of sun, moon,
or star, ever penetrated, but which was superstitiously regarded as a
sanctuary replete with comfort and retirement by gaslight, and on the
door of which was therefore painted its alluring name: Cosy.

Miss Potterson, sole proprietor and manager of the Fellowship Porters,
reigned supreme on her throne, the Bar, and a man must have drunk
himself mad drunk indeed if he thought he could contest a point with
her. Being known on her own authority as Miss Abbey Potterson, some
water-side heads, which (like the water) were none of the clearest,
harboured muddled notions that, because of her dignity and firmness, she
was named after, or in some sort related to, the Abbey at Westminster.
But, Abbey was only short for Abigail, by which name Miss Potterson had
been christened at Limehouse Church, some sixty and odd years before.

‘Now, you mind, you Riderhood,’ said Miss Abbey Potterson, with emphatic
forefinger over the half-door, ‘the Fellowship don’t want you at all,
and would rather by far have your room than your company; but if you
were as welcome here as you are not, you shouldn’t even then have
another drop of drink here this night, after this present pint of beer.
So make the most of it.’

‘But you know, Miss Potterson,’ this was suggested very meekly though,
‘if I behave myself, you can’t help serving me, miss.’

‘CAN’T I!’ said Abbey, with infinite expression.

‘No, Miss Potterson; because, you see, the law--’

‘I am the law here, my man,’ returned Miss Abbey, ‘and I’ll soon
convince you of that, if you doubt it at all.’

‘I never said I did doubt it at all, Miss Abbey.’

‘So much the better for you.’

Abbey the supreme threw the customer’s halfpence into the till, and,
seating herself in her fireside-chair, resumed the newspaper she had
been reading. She was a tall, upright, well-favoured woman, though
severe of countenance, and had more of the air of a schoolmistress than
mistress of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters. The man on the other side
of the half-door, was a waterside-man with a squinting leer, and he eyed
her as if he were one of her pupils in disgrace.

‘You’re cruel hard upon me, Miss Potterson.’

Miss Potterson read her newspaper with contracted brows, and took no
notice until he whispered:

‘Miss Potterson! Ma’am! Might I have half a word with you?’

Deigning then to turn her eyes sideways towards the suppliant, Miss
Potterson beheld him knuckling his low forehead, and ducking at her with
his head, as if he were asking leave to fling himself head foremost over
the half-door and alight on his feet in the bar.

‘Well?’ said Miss Potterson, with a manner as short as she herself was
long, ‘say your half word. Bring it out.’

‘Miss Potterson! Ma’am! Would you ‘sxcuse me taking the liberty of
asking, is it my character that you take objections to?’

‘Certainly,’ said Miss Potterson.

‘Is it that you’re afraid of--’

‘I am not afraid OF YOU,’ interposed Miss Potterson, ‘if you mean that.’

‘But I humbly don’t mean that, Miss Abbey.’

‘Then what do you mean?’

‘You really are so cruel hard upon me! What I was going to make
inquiries was no more than, might you have any apprehensions--leastways
beliefs or suppositions--that the company’s property mightn’t be
altogether to be considered safe, if I used the house too regular?’

‘What do you want to know for?’

‘Well, Miss Abbey, respectfully meaning no offence to you, it would
be some satisfaction to a man’s mind, to understand why the Fellowship
Porters is not to be free to such as me, and is to be free to such as
Gaffer.’

The face of the hostess darkened with some shadow of perplexity, as she
replied: ‘Gaffer has never been where you have been.’

‘Signifying in Quod, Miss? Perhaps not. But he may have merited it. He
may be suspected of far worse than ever I was.’

‘Who suspects him?’

‘Many, perhaps. One, beyond all doubts. I do.’

‘YOU are not much,’ said Miss Abbey Potterson, knitting her brows again
with disdain.

‘But I was his pardner. Mind you, Miss Abbey, I was his pardner. As
such I know more of the ins and outs of him than any person living does.
Notice this! I am the man that was his pardner, and I am the man that
suspects him.’

‘Then,’ suggested Miss Abbey, though with a deeper shade of perplexity
than before, ‘you criminate yourself.’

‘No I don’t, Miss Abbey. For how does it stand? It stands this way. When
I was his pardner, I couldn’t never give him satisfaction. Why couldn’t
I never give him satisfaction? Because my luck was bad; because I
couldn’t find many enough of ‘em. How was his luck? Always good. Notice
this! Always good! Ah! There’s a many games, Miss Abbey, in which
there’s chance, but there’s a many others in which there’s skill too,
mixed along with it.’

‘That Gaffer has a skill in finding what he finds, who doubts, man?’
asked Miss Abbey.

‘A skill in purwiding what he finds, perhaps,’ said Riderhood, shaking
his evil head.

Miss Abbey knitted her brow at him, as he darkly leered at her. ‘If
you’re out upon the river pretty nigh every tide, and if you want to
find a man or woman in the river, you’ll greatly help your luck, Miss
Abbey, by knocking a man or woman on the head aforehand and pitching ‘em
in.’

‘Gracious Lud!’ was the involuntary exclamation of Miss Potterson.

‘Mind you!’ returned the other, stretching forward over the half door
to throw his words into the bar; for his voice was as if the head of his
boat’s mop were down his throat; ‘I say so, Miss Abbey! And mind you!
I’ll follow him up, Miss Abbey! And mind you! I’ll bring him to hook at
last, if it’s twenty year hence, I will! Who’s he, to be favoured along
of his daughter? Ain’t I got a daughter of my own!’

With that flourish, and seeming to have talked himself rather more drunk
and much more ferocious than he had begun by being, Mr Riderhood took up
his pint pot and swaggered off to the taproom.

Gaffer was not there, but a pretty strong muster of Miss Abbey’s pupils
were, who exhibited, when occasion required, the greatest docility. On
the clock’s striking ten, and Miss Abbey’s appearing at the door, and
addressing a certain person in a faded scarlet jacket, with ‘George
Jones, your time’s up! I told your wife you should be punctual,’
Jones submissively rose, gave the company good-night, and retired. At
half-past ten, on Miss Abbey’s looking in again, and saying, ‘William
Williams, Bob Glamour, and Jonathan, you are all due,’ Williams, Bob,
and Jonathan with similar meekness took their leave and evaporated.
Greater wonder than these, when a bottle-nosed person in a glazed hat
had after some considerable hesitation ordered another glass of gin and
water of the attendant potboy, and when Miss Abbey, instead of sending
it, appeared in person, saying, ‘Captain Joey, you have had as much as
will do you good,’ not only did the captain feebly rub his knees and
contemplate the fire without offering a word of protest, but the rest
of the company murmured, ‘Ay, ay, Captain! Miss Abbey’s right; you
be guided by Miss Abbey, Captain.’ Nor, was Miss Abbey’s vigilance in
anywise abated by this submission, but rather sharpened; for, looking
round on the deferential faces of her school, and descrying two other
young persons in need of admonition, she thus bestowed it: ‘Tom Tootle,
it’s time for a young fellow who’s going to be married next month, to
be at home and asleep. And you needn’t nudge him, Mr Jack Mullins, for
I know your work begins early tomorrow, and I say the same to you.
So come! Good-night, like good lads!’ Upon which, the blushing Tootle
looked to Mullins, and the blushing Mullins looked to Tootle, on the
question who should rise first, and finally both rose together and went
out on the broad grin, followed by Miss Abbey; in whose presence the
company did not take the liberty of grinning likewise.

In such an establishment, the white-aproned pot-boy with his
shirt-sleeves arranged in a tight roll on each bare shoulder, was a mere
hint of the possibility of physical force, thrown out as a matter of
state and form. Exactly at the closing hour, all the guests who were
left, filed out in the best order: Miss Abbey standing at the half door
of the bar, to hold a ceremony of review and dismissal. All wished
Miss Abbey good-night and Miss Abbey wished good-night to all, except
Riderhood. The sapient pot-boy, looking on officially, then had the
conviction borne in upon his soul, that the man was evermore outcast and
excommunicate from the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters.

‘You Bob Gliddery,’ said Miss Abbey to this pot-boy, ‘run round to
Hexam’s and tell his daughter Lizzie that I want to speak to her.’

With exemplary swiftness Bob Gliddery departed, and returned. Lizzie,
following him, arrived as one of the two female domestics of the
Fellowship Porters arranged on the snug little table by the bar fire,
Miss Potterson’s supper of hot sausages and mashed potatoes.

‘Come in and sit ye down, girl,’ said Miss Abbey. ‘Can you eat a bit?’

‘No thank you, Miss. I have had my supper.’

‘I have had mine too, I think,’ said Miss Abbey, pushing away the
untasted dish, ‘and more than enough of it. I am put out, Lizzie.’

‘I am very sorry for it, Miss.’

‘Then why, in the name of Goodness,’ quoth Miss Abbey, sharply, ‘do you
do it?’

‘I do it, Miss!’

‘There, there. Don’t look astonished. I ought to have begun with a word
of explanation, but it’s my way to make short cuts at things. I always
was a pepperer. You Bob Gliddery there, put the chain upon the door and
get ye down to your supper.’

With an alacrity that seemed no less referable to the pepperer fact
than to the supper fact, Bob obeyed, and his boots were heard descending
towards the bed of the river.

‘Lizzie Hexam, Lizzie Hexam,’ then began Miss Potterson, ‘how often have
I held out to you the opportunity of getting clear of your father, and
doing well?’

‘Very often, Miss.’

‘Very often? Yes! And I might as well have spoken to the iron funnel of
the strongest sea-going steamer that passes the Fellowship Porters.’

‘No, Miss,’ Lizzie pleaded; ‘because that would not be thankful, and I
am.’

‘I vow and declare I am half ashamed of myself for taking such an
interest in you,’ said Miss Abbey, pettishly, ‘for I don’t believe I
should do it if you were not good-looking. Why ain’t you ugly?’

Lizzie merely answered this difficult question with an apologetic
glance.

‘However, you ain’t,’ resumed Miss Potterson, ‘so it’s no use going into
that. I must take you as I find you. Which indeed is what I’ve done. And
you mean to say you are still obstinate?’

‘Not obstinate, Miss, I hope.’

‘Firm (I suppose you call it) then?’

‘Yes, Miss. Fixed like.’

‘Never was an obstinate person yet, who would own to the word!’ remarked
Miss Potterson, rubbing her vexed nose; ‘I’m sure I would, if I was
obstinate; but I am a pepperer, which is different. Lizzie Hexam, Lizzie
Hexam, think again. Do you know the worst of your father?’

‘Do I know the worst of father!’ she repeated, opening her eyes.

‘Do you know the suspicions to which your father makes himself liable?
Do you know the suspicions that are actually about, against him?’

The consciousness of what he habitually did, oppressed the girl heavily,
and she slowly cast down her eyes.

‘Say, Lizzie. Do you know?’ urged Miss Abbey.

‘Please to tell me what the suspicions are, Miss,’ she asked after a
silence, with her eyes upon the ground.

‘It’s not an easy thing to tell a daughter, but it must be told. It is
thought by some, then, that your father helps to their death a few of
those that he finds dead.’

The relief of hearing what she felt sure was a false suspicion, in place
of the expected real and true one, so lightened Lizzie’s breast for the
moment, that Miss Abbey was amazed at her demeanour. She raised her eyes
quickly, shook her head, and, in a kind of triumph, almost laughed.

‘They little know father who talk like that!’

[‘She takes it,’ thought Miss Abbey, ‘very quietly. She takes it with
extraordinary quietness!’)

‘And perhaps,’ said Lizzie, as a recollection flashed upon her, ‘it is
some one who has a grudge against father; some one who has threatened
father! Is it Riderhood, Miss?’

‘Well; yes it is.’

‘Yes! He was father’s partner, and father broke with him, and now he
revenges himself. Father broke with him when I was by, and he was very
angry at it. And besides, Miss Abbey!--Will you never, without strong
reason, let pass your lips what I am going to say?’

She bent forward to say it in a whisper.

‘I promise,’ said Miss Abbey.

‘It was on the night when the Harmon murder was found out, through
father, just above bridge. And just below bridge, as we were sculling
home, Riderhood crept out of the dark in his boat. And many and many
times afterwards, when such great pains were taken to come to the bottom
of the crime, and it never could be come near, I thought in my own
thoughts, could Riderhood himself have done the murder, and did he
purposely let father find the body? It seemed a’most wicked and cruel
to so much as think such a thing; but now that he tries to throw it upon
father, I go back to it as if it was a truth. Can it be a truth? That
was put into my mind by the dead?’

She asked this question, rather of the fire than of the hostess of the
Fellowship Porters, and looked round the little bar with troubled eyes.

But, Miss Potterson, as a ready schoolmistress accustomed to bring her
pupils to book, set the matter in a light that was essentially of this
world.

‘You poor deluded girl,’ she said, ‘don’t you see that you can’t open
your mind to particular suspicions of one of the two, without opening
your mind to general suspicions of the other? They had worked together.
Their goings-on had been going on for some time. Even granting that it
was as you have had in your thoughts, what the two had done together
would come familiar to the mind of one.’

‘You don’t know father, Miss, when you talk like that. Indeed, indeed,
you don’t know father.’

‘Lizzie, Lizzie,’ said Miss Potterson. ‘Leave him. You needn’t break
with him altogether, but leave him. Do well away from him; not because
of what I have told you to-night--we’ll pass no judgment upon that,
and we’ll hope it may not be--but because of what I have urged on you
before. No matter whether it’s owing to your good looks or not, I like
you and I want to serve you. Lizzie, come under my direction. Don’t
fling yourself away, my girl, but be persuaded into being respectable
and happy.’

In the sound good feeling and good sense of her entreaty, Miss Abbey
had softened into a soothing tone, and had even drawn her arm round the
girl’s waist. But, she only replied, ‘Thank you, thank you! I can’t. I
won’t. I must not think of it. The harder father is borne upon, the more
he needs me to lean on.’

And then Miss Abbey, who, like all hard people when they do soften,
felt that there was considerable compensation owing to her, underwent
reaction and became frigid.

‘I have done what I can,’ she said, ‘and you must go your way. You make
your bed, and you must lie on it. But tell your father one thing: he
must not come here any more.’

‘Oh, Miss, will you forbid him the house where I know he’s safe?’

‘The Fellowships,’ returned Miss Abbey, ‘has itself to look to, as well
as others. It has been hard work to establish order here, and make the
Fellowships what it is, and it is daily and nightly hard work to keep it
so. The Fellowships must not have a taint upon it that may give it a bad
name. I forbid the house to Riderhood, and I forbid the house to Gaffer.
I forbid both, equally. I find from Riderhood and you together, that
there are suspicions against both men, and I’m not going to take upon
myself to decide betwixt them. They are both tarred with a dirty brush,
and I can’t have the Fellowships tarred with the same brush. That’s all
I know.’

‘Good-night, Miss!’ said Lizzie Hexam, sorrowfully.

‘Hah!--Good-night!’ returned Miss Abbey with a shake of her head.

‘Believe me, Miss Abbey, I am truly grateful all the same.’

‘I can believe a good deal,’ returned the stately Abbey, ‘so I’ll try to
believe that too, Lizzie.’

No supper did Miss Potterson take that night, and only half her usual
tumbler of hot Port Negus. And the female domestics--two robust sisters,
with staring black eyes, shining flat red faces, blunt noses, and strong
black curls, like dolls--interchanged the sentiment that Missis had had
her hair combed the wrong way by somebody. And the pot-boy afterwards
remarked, that he hadn’t been ‘so rattled to bed’, since his late mother
had systematically accelerated his retirement to rest with a poker.

The chaining of the door behind her, as she went forth, disenchanted
Lizzie Hexam of that first relief she had felt. The night was black and
shrill, the river-side wilderness was melancholy, and there was a sound
of casting-out, in the rattling of the iron-links, and the grating of
the bolts and staples under Miss Abbey’s hand. As she came beneath
the lowering sky, a sense of being involved in a murky shade of Murder
dropped upon her; and, as the tidal swell of the river broke at her feet
without her seeing how it gathered, so, her thoughts startled her by
rushing out of an unseen void and striking at her heart.

Of her father’s being groundlessly suspected, she felt sure. Sure. Sure.
And yet, repeat the word inwardly as often as she would, the attempt to
reason out and prove that she was sure, always came after it and failed.
Riderhood had done the deed, and entrapped her father. Riderhood had
not done the deed, but had resolved in his malice to turn against her
father, the appearances that were ready to his hand to distort. Equally
and swiftly upon either putting of the case, followed the frightful
possibility that her father, being innocent, yet might come to be
believed guilty. She had heard of people suffering Death for bloodshed
of which they were afterwards proved pure, and those ill-fated persons
were not, first, in that dangerous wrong in which her father stood. Then
at the best, the beginning of his being set apart, whispered against,
and avoided, was a certain fact. It dated from that very night. And as
the great black river with its dreary shores was soon lost to her view
in the gloom, so, she stood on the river’s brink unable to see into the
vast blank misery of a life suspected, and fallen away from by good and
bad, but knowing that it lay there dim before her, stretching away to
the great ocean, Death.

One thing only, was clear to the girl’s mind. Accustomed from her very
babyhood promptly to do the thing that could be done--whether to keep
out weather, to ward off cold, to postpone hunger, or what not--she
started out of her meditation, and ran home.

The room was quiet, and the lamp burnt on the table. In the bunk in the
corner, her brother lay asleep. She bent over him softly, kissed him,
and came to the table.

‘By the time of Miss Abbey’s closing, and by the run of the tide, it
must be one. Tide’s running up. Father at Chiswick, wouldn’t think of
coming down, till after the turn, and that’s at half after four. I’ll
call Charley at six. I shall hear the church-clocks strike, as I sit
here.’

Very quietly, she placed a chair before the scanty fire, and sat down in
it, drawing her shawl about her.

‘Charley’s hollow down by the flare is not there now. Poor Charley!’

The clock struck two, and the clock struck three, and the clock struck
four, and she remained there, with a woman’s patience and her own
purpose. When the morning was well on between four and five, she slipped
off her shoes (that her going about might not wake Charley), trimmed
the fire sparingly, put water on to boil, and set the table for
breakfast. Then she went up the ladder, lamp in hand, and came down
again, and glided about and about, making a little bundle. Lastly, from
her pocket, and from the chimney-piece, and from an inverted basin
on the highest shelf she brought halfpence, a few sixpences, fewer
shillings, and fell to laboriously and noiselessly counting them, and
setting aside one little heap. She was still so engaged, when she was
startled by:

‘Hal-loa!’ From her brother, sitting up in bed.

‘You made me jump, Charley.’

‘Jump! Didn’t you make ME jump, when I opened my eyes a moment ago, and
saw you sitting there, like the ghost of a girl miser, in the dead of
the night.’

‘It’s not the dead of the night, Charley. It’s nigh six in the morning.’

‘Is it though? But what are you up to, Liz?’

‘Still telling your fortune, Charley.’

‘It seems to be a precious small one, if that’s it,’ said the boy. ‘What
are you putting that little pile of money by itself for?’

‘For you, Charley.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Get out of bed, Charley, and get washed and dressed, and then I’ll tell
you.’

Her composed manner, and her low distinct voice, always had an influence
over him. His head was soon in a basin of water, and out of it again,
and staring at her through a storm of towelling.

‘I never,’ towelling at himself as if he were his bitterest enemy, ‘saw
such a girl as you are. What IS the move, Liz?’

‘Are you almost ready for breakfast, Charley?’

‘You can pour it out. Hal-loa! I say? And a bundle?’

‘And a bundle, Charley.’

‘You don’t mean it’s for me, too?’

‘Yes, Charley; I do; indeed.’

More serious of face, and more slow of action, than he had been, the
boy completed his dressing, and came and sat down at the little
breakfast-table, with his eyes amazedly directed to her face.

‘You see, Charley dear, I have made up my mind that this is the right
time for your going away from us. Over and above all the blessed change
of by-and-bye, you’ll be much happier, and do much better, even so soon
as next month. Even so soon as next week.’

‘How do you know I shall?’

‘I don’t quite know how, Charley, but I do.’ In spite of her unchanged
manner of speaking, and her unchanged appearance of composure, she
scarcely trusted herself to look at him, but kept her eyes employed on
the cutting and buttering of his bread, and on the mixing of his tea,
and other such little preparations. ‘You must leave father to me,
Charley--I will do what I can with him--but you must go.’

‘You don’t stand upon ceremony, I think,’ grumbled the boy, throwing his
bread and butter about, in an ill-humour.

She made him no answer.

‘I tell you what,’ said the boy, then, bursting out into an angry
whimpering, ‘you’re a selfish jade, and you think there’s not enough for
three of us, and you want to get rid of me.’

‘If you believe so, Charley,--yes, then I believe too, that I am a
selfish jade, and that I think there’s not enough for three of us, and
that I want to get rid of you.’

It was only when the boy rushed at her, and threw his arms round her
neck, that she lost her self-restraint. But she lost it then, and wept
over him.

‘Don’t cry, don’t cry! I am satisfied to go, Liz; I am satisfied to go.
I know you send me away for my good.’

‘O, Charley, Charley, Heaven above us knows I do!’

‘Yes yes. Don’t mind what I said. Don’t remember it. Kiss me.’

After a silence, she loosed him, to dry her eyes and regain her strong
quiet influence.

‘Now listen, Charley dear. We both know it must be done, and I alone
know there is good reason for its being done at once. Go straight to the
school, and say that you and I agreed upon it--that we can’t overcome
father’s opposition--that father will never trouble them, but will never
take you back. You are a credit to the school, and you will be a greater
credit to it yet, and they will help you to get a living. Show what
clothes you have brought, and what money, and say that I will send some
more money. If I can get some in no other way, I will ask a little help
of those two gentlemen who came here that night.’

‘I say!’ cried her brother, quickly. ‘Don’t you have it of that chap
that took hold of me by the chin! Don’t you have it of that Wrayburn
one!’

Perhaps a slight additional tinge of red flushed up into her face and
brow, as with a nod she laid a hand upon his lips to keep him silently
attentive.

‘And above all things mind this, Charley! Be sure you always speak well
of father. Be sure you always give father his full due. You can’t deny
that because father has no learning himself he is set against it in
you; but favour nothing else against him, and be sure you say--as you
know--that your sister is devoted to him. And if you should ever happen
to hear anything said against father that is new to you, it will not be
true. Remember, Charley! It will not be true.’

The boy looked at her with some doubt and surprise, but she went on
again without heeding it.

‘Above all things remember! It will not be true. I have nothing more to
say, Charley dear, except, be good, and get learning, and only think of
some things in the old life here, as if you had dreamed them in a dream
last night. Good-bye, my Darling!’

Though so young, she infused in these parting words a love that was far
more like a mother’s than a sister’s, and before which the boy was quite
bowed down. After holding her to his breast with a passionate cry, he
took up his bundle and darted out at the door, with an arm across his
eyes.

The white face of the winter day came sluggishly on, veiled in a
frosty mist; and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black
substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark
masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on
fire. Lizzie, looking for her father, saw him coming, and stood upon the
causeway that he might see her.

He had nothing with him but his boat, and came on apace. A knot of those
amphibious human-creatures who appear to have some mysterious power
of extracting a subsistence out of tidal water by looking at it, were
gathered together about the causeway. As her father’s boat grounded,
they became contemplative of the mud, and dispersed themselves. She saw
that the mute avoidance had begun.

Gaffer saw it, too, in so far as that he was moved when he set foot on
shore, to stare around him. But, he promptly set to work to haul up his
boat, and make her fast, and take the sculls and rudder and rope out of
her. Carrying these with Lizzie’s aid, he passed up to his dwelling.

‘Sit close to the fire, father, dear, while I cook your breakfast.
It’s all ready for cooking, and only been waiting for you. You must be
frozen.’

‘Well, Lizzie, I ain’t of a glow; that’s certain. And my hands seem
nailed through to the sculls. See how dead they are!’ Something
suggestive in their colour, and perhaps in her face, struck him as he
held them up; he turned his shoulder and held them down to the fire.

‘You were not out in the perishing night, I hope, father?’

‘No, my dear. Lay aboard a barge, by a blazing coal-fire.--Where’s that
boy?’

‘There’s a drop of brandy for your tea, father, if you’ll put it in
while I turn this bit of meat. If the river was to get frozen, there
would be a deal of distress; wouldn’t there, father?’

‘Ah! there’s always enough of that,’ said Gaffer, dropping the liquor
into his cup from a squat black bottle, and dropping it slowly that it
might seem more; ‘distress is for ever a going about, like sut in the
air--Ain’t that boy up yet?’

‘The meat’s ready now, father. Eat it while it’s hot and comfortable.
After you have finished, we’ll turn round to the fire and talk.’

But, he perceived that he was evaded, and, having thrown a hasty angry
glance towards the bunk, plucked at a corner of her apron and asked:

‘What’s gone with that boy?’

‘Father, if you’ll begin your breakfast, I’ll sit by and tell you.’ He
looked at her, stirred his tea and took two or three gulps, then cut at
his piece of hot steak with his case-knife, and said, eating:

‘Now then. What’s gone with that boy?’

‘Don’t be angry, dear. It seems, father, that he has quite a gift of
learning.’

‘Unnat’ral young beggar!’ said the parent, shaking his knife in the air.

‘And that having this gift, and not being equally good at other things,
he has made shift to get some schooling.’

‘Unnat’ral young beggar!’ said the parent again, with his former action.

‘--And that knowing you have nothing to spare, father, and not wishing
to be a burden on you, he gradually made up his mind to go seek his
fortune out of learning. He went away this morning, father, and he cried
very much at going, and he hoped you would forgive him.’

‘Let him never come a nigh me to ask me my forgiveness,’ said the
father, again emphasizing his words with the knife. ‘Let him never come
within sight of my eyes, nor yet within reach of my arm. His own father
ain’t good enough for him. He’s disowned his own father. His own father
therefore, disowns him for ever and ever, as a unnat’ral young beggar.’

He had pushed away his plate. With the natural need of a strong rough
man in anger, to do something forcible, he now clutched his knife
overhand, and struck downward with it at the end of every succeeding
sentence. As he would have struck with his own clenched fist if there
had chanced to be nothing in it.

‘He’s welcome to go. He’s more welcome to go than to stay. But let him
never come back. Let him never put his head inside that door. And let
you never speak a word more in his favour, or you’ll disown your own
father, likewise, and what your father says of him he’ll have to come to
say of you. Now I see why them men yonder held aloof from me. They says
to one another, “Here comes the man as ain’t good enough for his own
son!” Lizzie--!’

But, she stopped him with a cry. Looking at her he saw her, with a face
quite strange to him, shrinking back against the wall, with her hands
before her eyes.

‘Father, don’t! I can’t bear to see you striking with it. Put it down!’

He looked at the knife; but in his astonishment still held it.

‘Father, it’s too horrible. O put it down, put it down!’

Confounded by her appearance and exclamation, he tossed it away, and
stood up with his open hands held out before him.

‘What’s come to you, Liz? Can you think I would strike at you with a
knife?’

‘No, father, no; you would never hurt me.’

‘What should I hurt?’

‘Nothing, dear father. On my knees, I am certain, in my heart and soul
I am certain, nothing! But it was too dreadful to bear; for it looked--’
her hands covering her face again, ‘O it looked--’

‘What did it look like?’

The recollection of his murderous figure, combining with her trial of
last night, and her trial of the morning, caused her to drop at his
feet, without having answered.

He had never seen her so before. He raised her with the utmost
tenderness, calling her the best of daughters, and ‘my poor pretty
creetur’, and laid her head upon his knee, and tried to restore her. But
failing, he laid her head gently down again, got a pillow and placed it
under her dark hair, and sought on the table for a spoonful of brandy.
There being none left, he hurriedly caught up the empty bottle, and ran
out at the door.

He returned as hurriedly as he had gone, with the bottle still empty.
He kneeled down by her, took her head on his arm, and moistened her lips
with a little water into which he dipped his fingers: saying, fiercely,
as he looked around, now over this shoulder, now over that:

‘Have we got a pest in the house? Is there summ’at deadly sticking to my
clothes? What’s let loose upon us? Who loosed it?’



Chapter 7

MR WEGG LOOKS AFTER HIMSELF


Silas Wegg, being on his road to the Roman Empire, approaches it by way
of Clerkenwell. The time is early in the evening; the weather moist and
raw. Mr Wegg finds leisure to make a little circuit, by reason that he
folds his screen early, now that he combines another source of income
with it, and also that he feels it due to himself to be anxiously
expected at the Bower. ‘Boffin will get all the eagerer for waiting a
bit,’ says Silas, screwing up, as he stumps along, first his right eye,
and then his left. Which is something superfluous in him, for Nature has
already screwed both pretty tight.

‘If I get on with him as I expect to get on,’ Silas pursues, stumping
and meditating, ‘it wouldn’t become me to leave it here. It wouldn’t be
respectable.’ Animated by this reflection, he stumps faster, and looks
a long way before him, as a man with an ambitious project in abeyance
often will do.

Aware of a working-jeweller population taking sanctuary about the church
in Clerkenwell, Mr Wegg is conscious of an interest in, and a respect
for, the neighbourhood. But, his sensations in this regard halt as to
their strict morality, as he halts in his gait; for, they suggest the
delights of a coat of invisibility in which to walk off safely with the
precious stones and watch-cases, but stop short of any compunction for
the people who would lose the same.

Not, however, towards the ‘shops’ where cunning artificers work in
pearls and diamonds and gold and silver, making their hands so rich,
that the enriched water in which they wash them is bought for the
refiners;--not towards these does Mr Wegg stump, but towards the poorer
shops of small retail traders in commodities to eat and drink and keep
folks warm, and of Italian frame-makers, and of barbers, and of brokers,
and of dealers in dogs and singing-birds. From these, in a narrow and
a dirty street devoted to such callings, Mr Wegg selects one dark
shop-window with a tallow candle dimly burning in it, surrounded by a
muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick,
but among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct, save
the candle itself in its old tin candlestick, and two preserved frogs
fighting a small-sword duel. Stumping with fresh vigour, he goes in at
the dark greasy entry, pushes a little greasy dark reluctant side-door,
and follows the door into the little dark greasy shop. It is so dark
that nothing can be made out in it, over a little counter, but another
tallow candle in another old tin candlestick, close to the face of a man
stooping low in a chair.

Mr Wegg nods to the face, ‘Good evening.’

The face looking up is a sallow face with weak eyes, surmounted by a
tangle of reddish-dusty hair. The owner of the face has no cravat on,
and has opened his tumbled shirt-collar to work with the more ease.
For the same reason he has no coat on: only a loose waistcoat over his
yellow linen. His eyes are like the over-tried eyes of an engraver, but
he is not that; his expression and stoop are like those of a shoemaker,
but he is not that.

‘Good evening, Mr Venus. Don’t you remember?’

With slowly dawning remembrance, Mr Venus rises, and holds his candle
over the little counter, and holds it down towards the legs, natural and
artificial, of Mr Wegg.

‘To be SURE!’ he says, then. ‘How do you do?’

‘Wegg, you know,’ that gentleman explains.

‘Yes, yes,’ says the other. ‘Hospital amputation?’

‘Just so,’ says Mr Wegg.

‘Yes, yes,’ quoth Venus. ‘How do you do? Sit down by the fire, and warm
your--your other one.’

The little counter being so short a counter that it leaves the
fireplace, which would have been behind it if it had been longer,
accessible, Mr Wegg sits down on a box in front of the fire, and inhales
a warm and comfortable smell which is not the smell of the shop. ‘For
that,’ Mr Wegg inwardly decides, as he takes a corrective sniff or two,
‘is musty, leathery, feathery, cellary, gluey, gummy, and,’ with another
sniff, ‘as it might be, strong of old pairs of bellows.’

‘My tea is drawing, and my muffin is on the hob, Mr Wegg; will you
partake?’

It being one of Mr Wegg’s guiding rules in life always to partake, he
says he will. But, the little shop is so excessively dark, is stuck so
full of black shelves and brackets and nooks and corners, that he sees
Mr Venus’s cup and saucer only because it is close under the candle, and
does not see from what mysterious recess Mr Venus produces another
for himself until it is under his nose. Concurrently, Wegg perceives a
pretty little dead bird lying on the counter, with its head drooping
on one side against the rim of Mr Venus’s saucer, and a long stiff wire
piercing its breast. As if it were Cock Robin, the hero of the ballad,
and Mr Venus were the sparrow with his bow and arrow, and Mr Wegg were
the fly with his little eye.

Mr Venus dives, and produces another muffin, yet untoasted; taking the
arrow out of the breast of Cock Robin, he proceeds to toast it on the
end of that cruel instrument. When it is brown, he dives again and
produces butter, with which he completes his work.

Mr Wegg, as an artful man who is sure of his supper by-and-bye, presses
muffin on his host to soothe him into a compliant state of mind, or, as
one might say, to grease his works. As the muffins disappear, little by
little, the black shelves and nooks and corners begin to appear, and Mr
Wegg gradually acquires an imperfect notion that over against him on the
chimney-piece is a Hindoo baby in a bottle, curved up with his big
head tucked under him, as he would instantly throw a summersault if the
bottle were large enough.

When he deems Mr Venus’s wheels sufficiently lubricated, Mr Wegg
approaches his object by asking, as he lightly taps his hands together,
to express an undesigning frame of mind:

‘And how have I been going on, this long time, Mr Venus?’

‘Very bad,’ says Mr Venus, uncompromisingly.

‘What? Am I still at home?’ asks Wegg, with an air of surprise.

‘Always at home.’

This would seem to be secretly agreeable to Wegg, but he veils his
feelings, and observes, ‘Strange. To what do you attribute it?’

‘I don’t know,’ replies Venus, who is a haggard melancholy man, speaking
in a weak voice of querulous complaint, ‘to what to attribute it, Mr
Wegg. I can’t work you into a miscellaneous one, no how. Do what I will,
you can’t be got to fit. Anybody with a passable knowledge would pick
you out at a look, and say,--“No go! Don’t match!”’

‘Well, but hang it, Mr Venus,’ Wegg expostulates with some little
irritation, ‘that can’t be personal and peculiar in ME. It must often
happen with miscellaneous ones.’

‘With ribs (I grant you) always. But not else. When I prepare a
miscellaneous one, I know beforehand that I can’t keep to nature, and
be miscellaneous with ribs, because every man has his own ribs, and no
other man’s will go with them; but elseways I can be miscellaneous. I
have just sent home a Beauty--a perfect Beauty--to a school of art. One
leg Belgian, one leg English, and the pickings of eight other people in
it. Talk of not being qualified to be miscellaneous! By rights you OUGHT
to be, Mr Wegg.’

Silas looks as hard at his one leg as he can in the dim light, and after
a pause sulkily opines ‘that it must be the fault of the other people.
Or how do you mean to say it comes about?’ he demands impatiently.

‘I don’t know how it comes about. Stand up a minute. Hold the light.’
Mr Venus takes from a corner by his chair, the bones of a leg and foot,
beautifully pure, and put together with exquisite neatness. These he
compares with Mr Wegg’s leg; that gentleman looking on, as if he were
being measured for a riding-boot. ‘No, I don’t know how it is, but so it
is. You have got a twist in that bone, to the best of my belief. I never
saw the likes of you.’

Mr Wegg having looked distrustfully at his own limb, and suspiciously at
the pattern with which it has been compared, makes the point:

‘I’ll bet a pound that ain’t an English one!’

‘An easy wager, when we run so much into foreign! No, it belongs to that
French gentleman.’

As he nods towards a point of darkness behind Mr Wegg, the latter, with
a slight start, looks round for ‘that French gentleman,’ whom he at
length descries to be represented (in a very workmanlike manner) by his
ribs only, standing on a shelf in another corner, like a piece of armour
or a pair of stays.

‘Oh!’ says Mr Wegg, with a sort of sense of being introduced; ‘I
dare say you were all right enough in your own country, but I hope no
objections will be taken to my saying that the Frenchman was never yet
born as I should wish to match.’

At this moment the greasy door is violently pushed inward, and a boy
follows it, who says, after having let it slam:

‘Come for the stuffed canary.’

‘It’s three and ninepence,’ returns Venus; ‘have you got the money?’

The boy produces four shillings. Mr Venus, always in exceedingly low
spirits and making whimpering sounds, peers about for the stuffed
canary. On his taking the candle to assist his search, Mr Wegg observes
that he has a convenient little shelf near his knees, exclusively
appropriated to skeleton hands, which have very much the appearance of
wanting to lay hold of him. From these Mr Venus rescues the canary in a
glass case, and shows it to the boy.

‘There!’ he whimpers. ‘There’s animation! On a twig, making up his mind
to hop! Take care of him; he’s a lovely specimen.--And three is four.’

The boy gathers up his change and has pulled the door open by a leather
strap nailed to it for the purpose, when Venus cries out:

‘Stop him! Come back, you young villain! You’ve got a tooth among them
halfpence.’

‘How was I to know I’d got it? You giv it me. I don’t want none of your
teeth; I’ve got enough of my own.’ So the boy pipes, as he selects it
from his change, and throws it on the counter.

‘Don’t sauce ME, in the wicious pride of your youth,’ Mr Venus retorts
pathetically. ‘Don’t hit ME because you see I’m down. I’m low enough
without that. It dropped into the till, I suppose. They drop into
everything. There was two in the coffee-pot at breakfast time. Molars.’

‘Very well, then,’ argues the boy, ‘what do you call names for?’

To which Mr Venus only replies, shaking his shock of dusty hair, and
winking his weak eyes, ‘Don’t sauce ME, in the wicious pride of your
youth; don’t hit ME, because you see I’m down. You’ve no idea how small
you’d come out, if I had the articulating of you.’

This consideration seems to have its effect on the boy, for he goes out
grumbling.

‘Oh dear me, dear me!’ sighs Mr Venus, heavily, snuffing the candle,
‘the world that appeared so flowery has ceased to blow! You’re casting
your eye round the shop, Mr Wegg. Let me show you a light. My working
bench. My young man’s bench. A Wice. Tools. Bones, warious. Skulls,
warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto. Bottled preparations,
warious. Everything within reach of your hand, in good preservation.
The mouldy ones a-top. What’s in those hampers over them again, I don’t
quite remember. Say, human warious. Cats. Articulated English baby.
Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Dried cuticle, warious.
Oh, dear me! That’s the general panoramic view.’

Having so held and waved the candle as that all these heterogeneous
objects seemed to come forward obediently when they were named, and
then retire again, Mr Venus despondently repeats, ‘Oh dear me, dear
me!’ resumes his seat, and with drooping despondency upon him, falls to
pouring himself out more tea.

‘Where am I?’ asks Mr Wegg.

‘You’re somewhere in the back shop across the yard, sir; and speaking
quite candidly, I wish I’d never bought you of the Hospital Porter.’

‘Now, look here, what did you give for me?’

‘Well,’ replies Venus, blowing his tea: his head and face peering out
of the darkness, over the smoke of it, as if he were modernizing the old
original rise in his family: ‘you were one of a warious lot, and I don’t
know.’

Silas puts his point in the improved form of ‘What will you take for
me?’

‘Well,’ replies Venus, still blowing his tea, ‘I’m not prepared, at a
moment’s notice, to tell you, Mr Wegg.’

‘Come! According to your own account I’m not worth much,’ Wegg reasons
persuasively.

‘Not for miscellaneous working in, I grant you, Mr Wegg; but you might
turn out valuable yet, as a--’ here Mr Venus takes a gulp of tea, so
hot that it makes him choke, and sets his weak eyes watering; ‘as a
Monstrosity, if you’ll excuse me.’

Repressing an indignant look, indicative of anything but a disposition
to excuse him, Silas pursues his point.

‘I think you know me, Mr Venus, and I think you know I never bargain.’

Mr Venus takes gulps of hot tea, shutting his eyes at every gulp, and
opening them again in a spasmodic manner; but does not commit himself to
assent.

‘I have a prospect of getting on in life and elevating myself by my own
independent exertions,’ says Wegg, feelingly, ‘and I shouldn’t like--I
tell you openly I should NOT like--under such circumstances, to be what
I may call dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there, but
should wish to collect myself like a genteel person.’

‘It’s a prospect at present, is it, Mr Wegg? Then you haven’t got the
money for a deal about you? Then I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you;
I’ll hold you over. I am a man of my word, and you needn’t be afraid of
my disposing of you. I’ll hold you over. That’s a promise. Oh dear me,
dear me!’

Fain to accept his promise, and wishing to propitiate him, Mr Wegg looks
on as he sighs and pours himself out more tea, and then says, trying to
get a sympathetic tone into his voice:

‘You seem very low, Mr Venus. Is business bad?’

‘Never was so good.’

‘Is your hand out at all?’

‘Never was so well in. Mr Wegg, I’m not only first in the trade, but I’m
THE trade. You may go and buy a skeleton at the West End if you like,
and pay the West End price, but it’ll be my putting together. I’ve as
much to do as I can possibly do, with the assistance of my young man,
and I take a pride and a pleasure in it.’

Mr Venus thus delivers himself, his right hand extended, his smoking
saucer in his left hand, protesting as though he were going to burst
into a flood of tears.

‘That ain’t a state of things to make you low, Mr Venus.’

‘Mr Wegg, I know it ain’t. Mr Wegg, not to name myself as a workman
without an equal, I’ve gone on improving myself in my knowledge of
Anatomy, till both by sight and by name I’m perfect. Mr Wegg, if you was
brought here loose in a bag to be articulated, I’d name your smallest
bones blindfold equally with your largest, as fast as I could pick ‘em
out, and I’d sort ‘em all, and sort your wertebrae, in a manner that
would equally surprise and charm you.’

‘Well,’ remarks Silas (though not quite so readily as last time), ‘THAT
ain’t a state of things to be low about.--Not for YOU to be low about,
leastways.’

‘Mr Wegg, I know it ain’t; Mr Wegg, I know it ain’t. But it’s the heart
that lowers me, it is the heart! Be so good as take and read that card
out loud.’

Silas receives one from his hand, which Venus takes from a wonderful
litter in a drawer, and putting on his spectacles, reads:

‘“Mr Venus,”’

‘Yes. Go on.’

‘“Preserver of Animals and Birds,”’

‘Yes. Go on.’

‘“Articulator of human bones.”’

‘That’s it,’ with a groan. ‘That’s it! Mr Wegg, I’m thirty-two, and a
bachelor. Mr Wegg, I love her. Mr Wegg, she is worthy of being loved by
a Potentate!’ Here Silas is rather alarmed by Mr Venus’s springing to
his feet in the hurry of his spirits, and haggardly confronting him with
his hand on his coat collar; but Mr Venus, begging pardon, sits down
again, saying, with the calmness of despair, ‘She objects to the
business.’

‘Does she know the profits of it?’

‘She knows the profits of it, but she don’t appreciate the art of
it, and she objects to it. “I do not wish,” she writes in her own
handwriting, “to regard myself, nor yet to be regarded, in that boney
light”.’

Mr Venus pours himself out more tea, with a look and in an attitude of
the deepest desolation.

‘And so a man climbs to the top of the tree, Mr Wegg, only to see that
there’s no look-out when he’s up there! I sit here of a night surrounded
by the lovely trophies of my art, and what have they done for me? Ruined
me. Brought me to the pass of being informed that “she does not wish to
regard herself, nor yet to be regarded, in that boney light”!’ Having
repeated the fatal expressions, Mr Venus drinks more tea by gulps, and
offers an explanation of his doing so.

‘It lowers me. When I’m equally lowered all over, lethargy sets in. By
sticking to it till one or two in the morning, I get oblivion. Don’t let
me detain you, Mr Wegg. I’m not company for any one.’

‘It is not on that account,’ says Silas, rising, ‘but because I’ve got
an appointment. It’s time I was at Harmon’s.’

‘Eh?’ said Mr Venus. ‘Harmon’s, up Battle Bridge way?’

Mr Wegg admits that he is bound for that port.

‘You ought to be in a good thing, if you’ve worked yourself in there.
There’s lots of money going, there.’

‘To think,’ says Silas, ‘that you should catch it up so quick, and know
about it. Wonderful!’

‘Not at all, Mr Wegg. The old gentleman wanted to know the nature and
worth of everything that was found in the dust; and many’s the bone, and
feather, and what not, that he’s brought to me.’

‘Really, now!’

‘Yes. (Oh dear me, dear me!) And he’s buried quite in this
neighbourhood, you know. Over yonder.’

Mr Wegg does not know, but he makes as if he did, by responsively
nodding his head. He also follows with his eyes, the toss of Venus’s
head: as if to seek a direction to over yonder.

‘I took an interest in that discovery in the river,’ says Venus.
‘(She hadn’t written her cutting refusal at that time.) I’ve got up
there--never mind, though.’

He had raised the candle at arm’s length towards one of the dark
shelves, and Mr Wegg had turned to look, when he broke off.

‘The old gentleman was well known all round here. There used to be
stories about his having hidden all kinds of property in those dust
mounds. I suppose there was nothing in ‘em. Probably you know, Mr Wegg?’

‘Nothing in ‘em,’ says Wegg, who has never heard a word of this before.

‘Don’t let me detain you. Good night!’

The unfortunate Mr Venus gives him a shake of the hand with a shake of
his own head, and drooping down in his chair, proceeds to pour himself
out more tea. Mr Wegg, looking back over his shoulder as he pulls the
door open by the strap, notices that the movement so shakes the crazy
shop, and so shakes a momentary flare out of the candle, as that the
babies--Hindoo, African, and British--the ‘human warious’, the French
gentleman, the green glass-eyed cats, the dogs, the ducks, and all
the rest of the collection, show for an instant as if paralytically
animated; while even poor little Cock Robin at Mr Venus’s elbow turns
over on his innocent side. Next moment, Mr Wegg is stumping under the
gaslights and through the mud.



Chapter 8

MR BOFFIN IN CONSULTATION


Whosoever had gone out of Fleet Street into the Temple at the date of
this history, and had wandered disconsolate about the Temple until he
stumbled on a dismal churchyard, and had looked up at the dismal windows
commanding that churchyard until at the most dismal window of them
all he saw a dismal boy, would in him have beheld, at one grand
comprehensive swoop of the eye, the managing clerk, junior clerk,
common-law clerk, conveyancing clerk, chancery clerk, every refinement
and department of clerk, of Mr Mortimer Lightwood, erewhile called in
the newspapers eminent solicitor.

Mr Boffin having been several times in communication with this clerkly
essence, both on its own ground and at the Bower, had no difficulty in
identifying it when he saw it up in its dusty eyrie. To the second floor
on which the window was situated, he ascended, much pre-occupied in mind
by the uncertainties besetting the Roman Empire, and much regretting the
death of the amiable Pertinax: who only last night had left the Imperial
affairs in a state of great confusion, by falling a victim to the fury
of the praetorian guards.

‘Morning, morning, morning!’ said Mr Boffin, with a wave of his hand, as
the office door was opened by the dismal boy, whose appropriate name was
Blight. ‘Governor in?’

‘Mr Lightwood gave you an appointment, sir, I think?’

‘I don’t want him to give it, you know,’ returned Mr Boffin; ‘I’ll pay
my way, my boy.’

‘No doubt, sir. Would you walk in? Mr Lightwood ain’t in at the present
moment, but I expect him back very shortly. Would you take a seat in Mr
Lightwood’s room, sir, while I look over our Appointment Book?’
Young Blight made a great show of fetching from his desk a long thin
manuscript volume with a brown paper cover, and running his finger down
the day’s appointments, murmuring, ‘Mr Aggs, Mr Baggs, Mr Caggs, Mr
Daggs, Mr Faggs, Mr Gaggs, Mr Boffin. Yes, sir; quite right. You are a
little before your time, sir. Mr Lightwood will be in directly.’

‘I’m not in a hurry,’ said Mr Boffin

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll take the opportunity, if you please, of entering
your name in our Callers’ Book for the day.’ Young Blight made another
great show of changing the volume, taking up a pen, sucking it, dipping
it, and running over previous entries before he wrote. As, ‘Mr Alley,
Mr Balley, Mr Calley, Mr Dalley, Mr Falley, Mr Galley, Mr Halley, Mr
Lalley, Mr Malley. And Mr Boffin.’

‘Strict system here; eh, my lad?’ said Mr Boffin, as he was booked.

‘Yes, sir,’ returned the boy. ‘I couldn’t get on without it.’

By which he probably meant that his mind would have been shattered to
pieces without this fiction of an occupation. Wearing in his solitary
confinement no fetters that he could polish, and being provided with no
drinking-cup that he could carve, he had fallen on the device of ringing
alphabetical changes into the two volumes in question, or of entering
vast numbers of persons out of the Directory as transacting business
with Mr Lightwood. It was the more necessary for his spirits, because,
being of a sensitive temperament, he was apt to consider it personally
disgraceful to himself that his master had no clients.

‘How long have you been in the law, now?’ asked Mr Boffin, with a
pounce, in his usual inquisitive way.

‘I’ve been in the law, now, sir, about three years.’

‘Must have been as good as born in it!’ said Mr Boffin, with admiration.
‘Do you like it?’

‘I don’t mind it much,’ returned Young Blight, heaving a sigh, as if its
bitterness were past.

‘What wages do you get?’

‘Half what I could wish,’ replied young Blight.

‘What’s the whole that you could wish?’

‘Fifteen shillings a week,’ said the boy.

‘About how long might it take you now, at a average rate of going, to be
a Judge?’ asked Mr Boffin, after surveying his small stature in silence.

The boy answered that he had not yet quite worked out that little
calculation.

‘I suppose there’s nothing to prevent your going in for it?’ said Mr
Boffin.

The boy virtually replied that as he had the honour to be a Briton who
never never never, there was nothing to prevent his going in for it. Yet
he seemed inclined to suspect that there might be something to prevent
his coming out with it.

‘Would a couple of pound help you up at all?’ asked Mr Boffin.

On this head, young Blight had no doubt whatever, so Mr Boffin made him
a present of that sum of money, and thanked him for his attention to his
(Mr Boffin’s) affairs; which, he added, were now, he believed, as good
as settled.

Then Mr Boffin, with his stick at his ear, like a Familiar Spirit
explaining the office to him, sat staring at a little bookcase of Law
Practice and Law Reports, and at a window, and at an empty blue bag, and
at a stick of sealing-wax, and a pen, and a box of wafers, and an apple,
and a writing-pad--all very dusty--and at a number of inky smears
and blots, and at an imperfectly-disguised gun-case pretending to be
something legal, and at an iron box labelled HARMON ESTATE, until Mr
Lightwood appeared.

Mr Lightwood explained that he came from the proctor’s, with whom he had
been engaged in transacting Mr Boffin’s affairs.

‘And they seem to have taken a deal out of you!’ said Mr Boffin, with
commiseration.

Mr Lightwood, without explaining that his weariness was chronic,
proceeded with his exposition that, all forms of law having been at
length complied with, will of Harmon deceased having been proved, death
of Harmon next inheriting having been proved, &c., and so forth, Court
of Chancery having been moved, &c. and so forth, he, Mr Lightwood, had
now the gratification, honour, and happiness, again &c. and so forth, of
congratulating Mr Boffin on coming into possession as residuary legatee,
of upwards of one hundred thousand pounds, standing in the books of the
Governor and Company of the Bank of England, again &c. and so forth.

‘And what is particularly eligible in the property Mr Boffin, is, that
it involves no trouble. There are no estates to manage, no rents to
return so much per cent upon in bad times (which is an extremely dear
way of getting your name into the newspapers), no voters to become
parboiled in hot water with, no agents to take the cream off the
milk before it comes to table. You could put the whole in a cash-box
to-morrow morning, and take it with you to--say, to the Rocky Mountains.
Inasmuch as every man,’ concluded Mr Lightwood, with an indolent smile,
‘appears to be under a fatal spell which obliges him, sooner or later,
to mention the Rocky Mountains in a tone of extreme familiarity to some
other man, I hope you’ll excuse my pressing you into the service of that
gigantic range of geographical bores.’

Without following this last remark very closely, Mr Boffin cast his
perplexed gaze first at the ceiling, and then at the carpet.

‘Well,’ he remarked, ‘I don’t know what to say about it, I am sure. I
was a’most as well as I was. It’s a great lot to take care of.’

‘My dear Mr Boffin, then DON’T take care of it!’

‘Eh?’ said that gentleman.

‘Speaking now,’ returned Mortimer, ‘with the irresponsible imbecility
of a private individual, and not with the profundity of a professional
adviser, I should say that if the circumstance of its being too much,
weighs upon your mind, you have the haven of consolation open to you
that you can easily make it less. And if you should be apprehensive of
the trouble of doing so, there is the further haven of consolation that
any number of people will take the trouble off your hands.’

‘Well! I don’t quite see it,’ retorted Mr Boffin, still perplexed.
‘That’s not satisfactory, you know, what you’re a-saying.’

‘Is Anything satisfactory, Mr Boffin?’ asked Mortimer, raising his
eyebrows.

‘I used to find it so,’ answered Mr Boffin, with a wistful look. ‘While
I was foreman at the Bower--afore it WAS the Bower--I considered the
business very satisfactory. The old man was a awful Tartar (saying
it, I’m sure, without disrespect to his memory) but the business was
a pleasant one to look after, from before daylight to past dark. It’s
a’most a pity,’ said Mr Boffin, rubbing his ear, ‘that he ever went and
made so much money. It would have been better for him if he hadn’t so
given himself up to it. You may depend upon it,’ making the discovery
all of a sudden, ‘that HE found it a great lot to take care of!’

Mr Lightwood coughed, not convinced.

‘And speaking of satisfactory,’ pursued Mr Boffin, ‘why, Lord save
us! when we come to take it to pieces, bit by bit, where’s the
satisfactoriness of the money as yet? When the old man does right the
poor boy after all, the poor boy gets no good of it. He gets made away
with, at the moment when he’s lifting (as one may say) the cup and
sarser to his lips. Mr Lightwood, I will now name to you, that on behalf
of the poor dear boy, me and Mrs Boffin have stood out against the old
man times out of number, till he has called us every name he could lay
his tongue to. I have seen him, after Mrs Boffin has given him her mind
respecting the claims of the nat’ral affections, catch off Mrs Boffin’s
bonnet (she wore, in general, a black straw, perched as a matter of
convenience on the top of her head), and send it spinning across
the yard. I have indeed. And once, when he did this in a manner that
amounted to personal, I should have given him a rattler for himself, if
Mrs Boffin hadn’t thrown herself betwixt us, and received flush on the
temple. Which dropped her, Mr Lightwood. Dropped her.’

Mr Lightwood murmured ‘Equal honour--Mrs Boffin’s head and heart.’

‘You understand; I name this,’ pursued Mr Boffin, ‘to show you, now the
affairs are wound up, that me and Mrs Boffin have ever stood as we were
in Christian honour bound, the children’s friend. Me and Mrs Boffin
stood the poor girl’s friend; me and Mrs Boffin stood the poor boy’s
friend; me and Mrs Boffin up and faced the old man when we momently
expected to be turned out for our pains. As to Mrs Boffin,’ said Mr
Boffin lowering his voice, ‘she mightn’t wish it mentioned now she’s
Fashionable, but she went so far as to tell him, in my presence, he was
a flinty-hearted rascal.’

Mr Lightwood murmured ‘Vigorous Saxon spirit--Mrs Boffin’s
ancestors--bowmen--Agincourt and Cressy.’

‘The last time me and Mrs Boffin saw the poor boy,’ said Mr Boffin,
warming (as fat usually does) with a tendency to melt, ‘he was a child
of seven year old. For when he came back to make intercession for his
sister, me and Mrs Boffin were away overlooking a country contract which
was to be sifted before carted, and he was come and gone in a single
hour. I say he was a child of seven year old. He was going away, all
alone and forlorn, to that foreign school, and he come into our place,
situate up the yard of the present Bower, to have a warm at our fire.
There was his little scanty travelling clothes upon him. There was his
little scanty box outside in the shivering wind, which I was going to
carry for him down to the steamboat, as the old man wouldn’t hear of
allowing a sixpence coach-money. Mrs Boffin, then quite a young woman
and pictur of a full-blown rose, stands him by her, kneels down at the
fire, warms her two open hands, and falls to rubbing his cheeks; but
seeing the tears come into the child’s eyes, the tears come fast into
her own, and she holds him round the neck, like as if she was protecting
him, and cries to me, “I’d give the wide wide world, I would, to run
away with him!” I don’t say but what it cut me, and but what it at the
same time heightened my feelings of admiration for Mrs Boffin. The poor
child clings to her for awhile, as she clings to him, and then, when
the old man calls, he says “I must go! God bless you!” and for a moment
rests his heart against her bosom, and looks up at both of us, as if it
was in pain--in agony. Such a look! I went aboard with him (I gave him
first what little treat I thought he’d like), and I left him when he had
fallen asleep in his berth, and I came back to Mrs Boffin. But tell
her what I would of how I had left him, it all went for nothing, for,
according to her thoughts, he never changed that look that he had looked
up at us two. But it did one piece of good. Mrs Boffin and me had no
child of our own, and had sometimes wished that how we had one. But not
now. “We might both of us die,” says Mrs Boffin, “and other eyes might
see that lonely look in our child.” So of a night, when it was very
cold, or when the wind roared, or the rain dripped heavy, she would
wake sobbing, and call out in a fluster, “Don’t you see the poor child’s
face? O shelter the poor child!”--till in course of years it gently wore
out, as many things do.’

‘My dear Mr Boffin, everything wears to rags,’ said Mortimer, with a
light laugh.

‘I won’t go so far as to say everything,’ returned Mr Boffin, on whom
his manner seemed to grate, ‘because there’s some things that I never
found among the dust. Well, sir. So Mrs Boffin and me grow older and
older in the old man’s service, living and working pretty hard in it,
till the old man is discovered dead in his bed. Then Mrs Boffin and me
seal up his box, always standing on the table at the side of his bed,
and having frequently heerd tell of the Temple as a spot where lawyer’s
dust is contracted for, I come down here in search of a lawyer to
advise, and I see your young man up at this present elevation, chopping
at the flies on the window-sill with his penknife, and I give him a Hoy!
not then having the pleasure of your acquaintance, and by that
means come to gain the honour. Then you, and the gentleman in the
uncomfortable neck-cloth under the little archway in Saint Paul’s
Churchyard--’

‘Doctors’ Commons,’ observed Lightwood.

‘I understood it was another name,’ said Mr Boffin, pausing, ‘but you
know best. Then you and Doctor Scommons, you go to work, and you do the
thing that’s proper, and you and Doctor S. take steps for finding out
the poor boy, and at last you do find out the poor boy, and me and Mrs
Boffin often exchange the observation, “We shall see him again,
under happy circumstances.” But it was never to be; and the want of
satisfactoriness is, that after all the money never gets to him.’

‘But it gets,’ remarked Lightwood, with a languid inclination of the
head, ‘into excellent hands.’

‘It gets into the hands of me and Mrs Boffin only this very day and
hour, and that’s what I am working round to, having waited for this day
and hour a’ purpose. Mr Lightwood, here has been a wicked cruel
murder. By that murder me and Mrs Boffin mysteriously profit. For the
apprehension and conviction of the murderer, we offer a reward of one
tithe of the property--a reward of Ten Thousand Pound.’

‘Mr Boffin, it’s too much.’

‘Mr Lightwood, me and Mrs Boffin have fixed the sum together, and we
stand to it.’

‘But let me represent to you,’ returned Lightwood, ‘speaking now with
professional profundity, and not with individual imbecility, that the
offer of such an immense reward is a temptation to forced suspicion,
forced construction of circumstances, strained accusation, a whole
tool-box of edged tools.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Boffin, a little staggered, ‘that’s the sum we put o’
one side for the purpose. Whether it shall be openly declared in the new
notices that must now be put about in our names--’

‘In your name, Mr Boffin; in your name.’

‘Very well; in my name, which is the same as Mrs Boffin’s, and means
both of us, is to be considered in drawing ‘em up. But this is the first
instruction that I, as the owner of the property, give to my lawyer on
coming into it.’

‘Your lawyer, Mr Boffin,’ returned Lightwood, making a very short
note of it with a very rusty pen, ‘has the gratification of taking the
instruction. There is another?’

‘There is just one other, and no more. Make me as compact a little will
as can be reconciled with tightness, leaving the whole of the property
to “my beloved wife, Henerietty Boffin, sole executrix”. Make it as
short as you can, using those words; but make it tight.’

At some loss to fathom Mr Boffin’s notions of a tight will, Lightwood
felt his way.

‘I beg your pardon, but professional profundity must be exact. When you
say tight--’

‘I mean tight,’ Mr Boffin explained.

‘Exactly so. And nothing can be more laudable. But is the tightness to
bind Mrs Boffin to any and what conditions?’

‘Bind Mrs Boffin?’ interposed her husband. ‘No! What are you thinking
of! What I want is, to make it all hers so tight as that her hold of it
can’t be loosed.’

‘Hers freely, to do what she likes with? Hers absolutely?’

‘Absolutely?’ repeated Mr Boffin, with a short sturdy laugh. ‘Hah! I
should think so! It would be handsome in me to begin to bind Mrs Boffin
at this time of day!’

So that instruction, too, was taken by Mr Lightwood; and Mr Lightwood,
having taken it, was in the act of showing Mr Boffin out, when Mr Eugene
Wrayburn almost jostled him in the door-way. Consequently Mr Lightwood
said, in his cool manner, ‘Let me make you two known to one another,’
and further signified that Mr Wrayburn was counsel learned in the
law, and that, partly in the way of business and partly in the way of
pleasure, he had imparted to Mr Wrayburn some of the interesting facts
of Mr Boffin’s biography.

‘Delighted,’ said Eugene--though he didn’t look so--‘to know Mr Boffin.’

‘Thankee, sir, thankee,’ returned that gentleman. ‘And how do YOU like
the law?’

‘A--not particularly,’ returned Eugene.

‘Too dry for you, eh? Well, I suppose it wants some years of sticking
to, before you master it. But there’s nothing like work. Look at the
bees.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ returned Eugene, with a reluctant smile, ‘but will
you excuse my mentioning that I always protest against being referred to
the bees?’

‘Do you!’ said Mr Boffin.

‘I object on principle,’ said Eugene, ‘as a biped--’

‘As a what?’ asked Mr Boffin.

‘As a two-footed creature;--I object on principle, as a two-footed
creature, to being constantly referred to insects and four-footed
creatures. I object to being required to model my proceedings according
to the proceedings of the bee, or the dog, or the spider, or the camel.
I fully admit that the camel, for instance, is an excessively temperate
person; but he has several stomachs to entertain himself with, and I
have only one. Besides, I am not fitted up with a convenient cool cellar
to keep my drink in.’

‘But I said, you know,’ urged Mr Boffin, rather at a loss for an answer,
‘the bee.’

‘Exactly. And may I represent to you that it’s injudicious to say the
bee? For the whole case is assumed. Conceding for a moment that there is
any analogy between a bee, and a man in a shirt and pantaloons (which
I deny), and that it is settled that the man is to learn from the bee
(which I also deny), the question still remains, what is he to learn?
To imitate? Or to avoid? When your friends the bees worry themselves to
that highly fluttered extent about their sovereign, and become perfectly
distracted touching the slightest monarchical movement, are we men to
learn the greatness of Tuft-hunting, or the littleness of the
Court Circular? I am not clear, Mr Boffin, but that the hive may be
satirical.’

‘At all events, they work,’ said Mr Boffin.

‘Ye-es,’ returned Eugene, disparagingly, ‘they work; but don’t you think
they overdo it? They work so much more than they need--they make so much
more than they can eat--they are so incessantly boring and buzzing at
their one idea till Death comes upon them--that don’t you think they
overdo it? And are human labourers to have no holidays, because of the
bees? And am I never to have change of air, because the bees don’t? Mr
Boffin, I think honey excellent at breakfast; but, regarded in the light
of my conventional schoolmaster and moralist, I protest against the
tyrannical humbug of your friend the bee. With the highest respect for
you.’

‘Thankee,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Morning, morning!’

But, the worthy Mr Boffin jogged away with a comfortless impression he
could have dispensed with, that there was a deal of unsatisfactoriness
in the world, besides what he had recalled as appertaining to the Harmon
property. And he was still jogging along Fleet Street in this condition
of mind, when he became aware that he was closely tracked and observed
by a man of genteel appearance.

‘Now then?’ said Mr Boffin, stopping short, with his meditations brought
to an abrupt check, ‘what’s the next article?’

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Boffin.’

‘My name too, eh? How did you come by it? I don’t know you.’

‘No, sir, you don’t know me.’

Mr Boffin looked full at the man, and the man looked full at him.

‘No,’ said Mr Boffin, after a glance at the pavement, as if it were made
of faces and he were trying to match the man’s, ‘I DON’T know you.’

‘I am nobody,’ said the stranger, ‘and not likely to be known; but Mr
Boffin’s wealth--’

‘Oh! that’s got about already, has it?’ muttered Mr Boffin.

‘--And his romantic manner of acquiring it, make him conspicuous. You
were pointed out to me the other day.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘I should say I was a disappintment to you when
I WAS pinted out, if your politeness would allow you to confess it, for
I am well aware I am not much to look at. What might you want with me?
Not in the law, are you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘No information to give, for a reward?’

‘No, sir.’

There may have been a momentary mantling in the face of the man as he
made the last answer, but it passed directly.

‘If I don’t mistake, you have followed me from my lawyer’s and tried
to fix my attention. Say out! Have you? Or haven’t you?’ demanded Mr
Boffin, rather angry.

‘Yes.’

‘Why have you?’

‘If you will allow me to walk beside you, Mr Boffin, I will tell you.
Would you object to turn aside into this place--I think it is called
Clifford’s Inn--where we can hear one another better than in the roaring
street?’

[‘Now,’ thought Mr Boffin, ‘if he proposes a game at skittles, or meets
a country gentleman just come into property, or produces any article
of jewellery he has found, I’ll knock him down!’ With this discreet
reflection, and carrying his stick in his arms much as Punch carries
his, Mr Boffin turned into Clifford’s Inn aforesaid.)

‘Mr Boffin, I happened to be in Chancery Lane this morning, when I saw
you going along before me. I took the liberty of following you, trying
to make up my mind to speak to you, till you went into your lawyer’s.
Then I waited outside till you came out.’

[‘Don’t quite sound like skittles, nor yet country gentleman, nor yet
jewellery,’ thought Mr Boffin, ‘but there’s no knowing.’)

‘I am afraid my object is a bold one, I am afraid it has little of the
usual practical world about it, but I venture it. If you ask me, or if
you ask yourself--which is more likely--what emboldens me, I answer, I
have been strongly assured, that you are a man of rectitude and plain
dealing, with the soundest of sound hearts, and that you are blessed in
a wife distinguished by the same qualities.’

‘Your information is true of Mrs Boffin, anyhow,’ was Mr Boffin’s
answer, as he surveyed his new friend again. There was something
repressed in the strange man’s manner, and he walked with his eyes
on the ground--though conscious, for all that, of Mr Boffin’s
observation--and he spoke in a subdued voice. But his words came easily,
and his voice was agreeable in tone, albeit constrained.

‘When I add, I can discern for myself what the general tongue says of
you--that you are quite unspoiled by Fortune, and not uplifted--I trust
you will not, as a man of an open nature, suspect that I mean to flatter
you, but will believe that all I mean is to excuse myself, these being
my only excuses for my present intrusion.’

[‘How much?’ thought Mr Boffin. ‘It must be coming to money. How much?’)

‘You will probably change your manner of living, Mr Boffin, in your
changed circumstances. You will probably keep a larger house, have many
matters to arrange, and be beset by numbers of correspondents. If you
would try me as your Secretary--’

‘As WHAT?’ cried Mr Boffin, with his eyes wide open.

‘Your Secretary.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Boffin, under his breath, ‘that’s a queer thing!’

‘Or,’ pursued the stranger, wondering at Mr Boffin’s wonder, ‘if you
would try me as your man of business under any name, I know you would
find me faithful and grateful, and I hope you would find me useful. You
may naturally think that my immediate object is money. Not so, for
I would willingly serve you a year--two years--any term you might
appoint--before that should begin to be a consideration between us.’

‘Where do you come from?’ asked Mr Boffin.

‘I come,’ returned the other, meeting his eye, ‘from many countries.’

Boffin’s acquaintances with the names and situations of foreign lands
being limited in extent and somewhat confused in quality, he shaped his
next question on an elastic model.

‘From--any particular place?’

‘I have been in many places.’

‘What have you been?’ asked Mr Boffin.

Here again he made no great advance, for the reply was, ‘I have been a
student and a traveller.’

‘But if it ain’t a liberty to plump it out,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘what do
you do for your living?’

‘I have mentioned,’ returned the other, with another look at him, and
a smile, ‘what I aspire to do. I have been superseded as to some slight
intentions I had, and I may say that I have now to begin life.’

Not very well knowing how to get rid of this applicant, and feeling the
more embarrassed because his manner and appearance claimed a delicacy
in which the worthy Mr Boffin feared he himself might be deficient, that
gentleman glanced into the mouldy little plantation or cat-preserve, of
Clifford’s Inn, as it was that day, in search of a suggestion. Sparrows
were there, cats were there, dry-rot and wet-rot were there, but it was
not otherwise a suggestive spot.

‘All this time,’ said the stranger, producing a little pocket-book and
taking out a card, ‘I have not mentioned my name. My name is Rokesmith.
I lodge at one Mr Wilfer’s, at Holloway.’

Mr Boffin stared again.

‘Father of Miss Bella Wilfer?’ said he.

‘My landlord has a daughter named Bella. Yes; no doubt.’

Now, this name had been more or less in Mr Boffin’s thoughts all the
morning, and for days before; therefore he said:

‘That’s singular, too!’ unconsciously staring again, past all bounds of
good manners, with the card in his hand. ‘Though, by-the-bye, I suppose
it was one of that family that pinted me out?’

‘No. I have never been in the streets with one of them.’

‘Heard me talked of among ‘em, though?’

‘No. I occupy my own rooms, and have held scarcely any communication
with them.’

‘Odder and odder!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Well, sir, to tell you the truth, I
don’t know what to say to you.’

‘Say nothing,’ returned Mr Rokesmith; ‘allow me to call on you in a few
days. I am not so unconscionable as to think it likely that you would
accept me on trust at first sight, and take me out of the very street.
Let me come to you for your further opinion, at your leisure.’

‘That’s fair, and I don’t object,’ said Mr Boffin; ‘but it must be on
condition that it’s fully understood that I no more know that I shall
ever be in want of any gentleman as Secretary--it WAS Secretary you
said; wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

Again Mr Boffin’s eyes opened wide, and he stared at the applicant from
head to foot, repeating ‘Queer!--You’re sure it was Secretary? Are you?’

‘I am sure I said so.’

--‘As Secretary,’ repeated Mr Boffin, meditating upon the word; ‘I no
more know that I may ever want a Secretary, or what not, than I do that
I shall ever be in want of the man in the moon. Me and Mrs Boffin have
not even settled that we shall make any change in our way of life. Mrs
Boffin’s inclinations certainly do tend towards Fashion; but, being
already set up in a fashionable way at the Bower, she may not make
further alterations. However, sir, as you don’t press yourself, I wish
to meet you so far as saying, by all means call at the Bower if you
like. Call in the course of a week or two. At the same time, I consider
that I ought to name, in addition to what I have already named, that I
have in my employment a literary man--WITH a wooden leg--as I have no
thoughts of parting from.’

‘I regret to hear I am in some sort anticipated,’ Mr Rokesmith answered,
evidently having heard it with surprise; ‘but perhaps other duties might
arise?’

‘You see,’ returned Mr Boffin, with a confidential sense of dignity, ‘as
to my literary man’s duties, they’re clear. Professionally he declines
and he falls, and as a friend he drops into poetry.’

Without observing that these duties seemed by no means clear to Mr
Rokesmith’s astonished comprehension, Mr Boffin went on:

‘And now, sir, I’ll wish you good-day. You can call at the Bower any
time in a week or two. It’s not above a mile or so from you, and your
landlord can direct you to it. But as he may not know it by its new
name of Boffin’s Bower, say, when you inquire of him, it’s Harmon’s;
will you?’

‘Harmoon’s,’ repeated Mr Rokesmith, seeming to have caught the sound
imperfectly, ‘Harmarn’s. How do you spell it?’

‘Why, as to the spelling of it,’ returned Mr Boffin, with great presence
of mind, ‘that’s YOUR look out. Harmon’s is all you’ve got to say to
HIM. Morning, morning, morning!’ And so departed, without looking back.



Chapter 9

MR AND MRS BOFFIN IN CONSULTATION


Betaking himself straight homeward, Mr Boffin, without further let or
hindrance, arrived at the Bower, and gave Mrs Boffin (in a walking dress
of black velvet and feathers, like a mourning coach-horse) an account of
all he had said and done since breakfast.

‘This brings us round, my dear,’ he then pursued, ‘to the question
we left unfinished: namely, whether there’s to be any new go-in for
Fashion.’

‘Now, I’ll tell you what I want, Noddy,’ said Mrs Boffin, smoothing her
dress with an air of immense enjoyment, ‘I want Society.’

‘Fashionable Society, my dear?’

‘Yes!’ cried Mrs Boffin, laughing with the glee of a child. ‘Yes! It’s
no good my being kept here like Wax-Work; is it now?’

‘People have to pay to see Wax-Work, my dear,’ returned her husband,
‘whereas (though you’d be cheap at the same money) the neighbours is
welcome to see YOU for nothing.’

‘But it don’t answer,’ said the cheerful Mrs Boffin. ‘When we worked
like the neighbours, we suited one another. Now we have left work off;
we have left off suiting one another.’

‘What, do you think of beginning work again?’ Mr Boffin hinted.

‘Out of the question! We have come into a great fortune, and we must do
what’s right by our fortune; we must act up to it.’

Mr Boffin, who had a deep respect for his wife’s intuitive wisdom,
replied, though rather pensively: ‘I suppose we must.’

‘It’s never been acted up to yet, and, consequently, no good has come of
it,’ said Mrs Boffin.

‘True, to the present time,’ Mr Boffin assented, with his former
pensiveness, as he took his seat upon his settle. ‘I hope good may be
coming of it in the future time. Towards which, what’s your views, old
lady?’

Mrs Boffin, a smiling creature, broad of figure and simple of nature,
with her hands folded in her lap, and with buxom creases in her throat,
proceeded to expound her views.

‘I say, a good house in a good neighbourhood, good things about us,
good living, and good society. I say, live like our means, without
extravagance, and be happy.’

‘Yes. I say be happy, too,’ assented the still pensive Mr Boffin.
‘Lor-a-mussy!’ exclaimed Mrs Boffin, laughing and clapping her hands,
and gaily rocking herself to and fro, ‘when I think of me in a light
yellow chariot and pair, with silver boxes to the wheels--’

‘Oh! you was thinking of that, was you, my dear?’

‘Yes!’ cried the delighted creature. ‘And with a footman up behind, with
a bar across, to keep his legs from being poled! And with a coachman
up in front, sinking down into a seat big enough for three of him, all
covered with upholstery in green and white! And with two bay horses
tossing their heads and stepping higher than they trot long-ways! And
with you and me leaning back inside, as grand as ninepence! Oh-h-h-h My!
Ha ha ha ha ha!’

Mrs Boffin clapped her hands again, rocked herself again, beat her feet
upon the floor, and wiped the tears of laughter from her eyes.

‘And what, my old lady,’ inquired Mr Boffin, when he also had
sympathetically laughed: ‘what’s your views on the subject of the
Bower?’

‘Shut it up. Don’t part with it, but put somebody in it, to keep it.’

‘Any other views?’

‘Noddy,’ said Mrs Boffin, coming from her fashionable sofa to his side
on the plain settle, and hooking her comfortable arm through his,
‘Next I think--and I really have been thinking early and late--of the
disappointed girl; her that was so cruelly disappointed, you know, both
of her husband and his riches. Don’t you think we might do something for
her? Have her to live with us? Or something of that sort?’

‘Ne-ver once thought of the way of doing it!’ cried Mr Boffin, smiting
the table in his admiration. ‘What a thinking steam-ingein this old lady
is. And she don’t know how she does it. Neither does the ingein!’

Mrs Boffin pulled his nearest ear, in acknowledgment of this piece of
philosophy, and then said, gradually toning down to a motherly strain:
‘Last, and not least, I have taken a fancy. You remember dear little
John Harmon, before he went to school? Over yonder across the yard, at
our fire? Now that he is past all benefit of the money, and it’s come to
us, I should like to find some orphan child, and take the boy and adopt
him and give him John’s name, and provide for him. Somehow, it would
make me easier, I fancy. Say it’s only a whim--’

‘But I don’t say so,’ interposed her husband.

‘No, but deary, if you did--’

‘I should be a Beast if I did,’ her husband interposed again.

‘That’s as much as to say you agree? Good and kind of you, and like you,
deary! And don’t you begin to find it pleasant now,’ said Mrs Boffin,
once more radiant in her comely way from head to foot, and once more
smoothing her dress with immense enjoyment, ‘don’t you begin to find
it pleasant already, to think that a child will be made brighter, and
better, and happier, because of that poor sad child that day? And isn’t
it pleasant to know that the good will be done with the poor sad child’s
own money?’

‘Yes; and it’s pleasant to know that you are Mrs Boffin,’ said her
husband, ‘and it’s been a pleasant thing to know this many and many a
year!’ It was ruin to Mrs Boffin’s aspirations, but, having so spoken,
they sat side by side, a hopelessly Unfashionable pair.

These two ignorant and unpolished people had guided themselves so far on
in their journey of life, by a religious sense of duty and desire to do
right. Ten thousand weaknesses and absurdities might have been detected
in the breasts of both; ten thousand vanities additional, possibly, in
the breast of the woman. But the hard wrathful and sordid nature that
had wrung as much work out of them as could be got in their best days,
for as little money as could be paid to hurry on their worst, had never
been so warped but that it knew their moral straightness and respected
it. In its own despite, in a constant conflict with itself and them, it
had done so. And this is the eternal law. For, Evil often stops short at
itself and dies with the doer of it; but Good, never.

Through his most inveterate purposes, the dead Jailer of Harmony Jail
had known these two faithful servants to be honest and true. While he
raged at them and reviled them for opposing him with the speech of the
honest and true, it had scratched his stony heart, and he had perceived
the powerlessness of all his wealth to buy them if he had addressed
himself to the attempt. So, even while he was their griping taskmaster
and never gave them a good word, he had written their names down in his
will. So, even while it was his daily declaration that he mistrusted all
mankind--and sorely indeed he did mistrust all who bore any resemblance
to himself--he was as certain that these two people, surviving him,
would be trustworthy in all things from the greatest to the least, as he
was that he must surely die.

Mr and Mrs Boffin, sitting side by side, with Fashion withdrawn to an
immeasurable distance, fell to discussing how they could best find their
orphan. Mrs Boffin suggested advertisement in the newspapers, requesting
orphans answering annexed description to apply at the Bower on a certain
day; but Mr Boffin wisely apprehending obstruction of the neighbouring
thoroughfares by orphan swarms, this course was negatived. Mrs Boffin
next suggested application to their clergyman for a likely orphan. Mr
Boffin thinking better of this scheme, they resolved to call upon the
reverend gentleman at once, and to take the same opportunity of making
acquaintance with Miss Bella Wilfer. In order that these visits might be
visits of state, Mrs Boffin’s equipage was ordered out.

This consisted of a long hammer-headed old horse, formerly used in the
business, attached to a four-wheeled chaise of the same period, which
had long been exclusively used by the Harmony Jail poultry as the
favourite laying-place of several discreet hens. An unwonted application
of corn to the horse, and of paint and varnish to the carriage, when
both fell in as a part of the Boffin legacy, had made what Mr Boffin
considered a neat turn-out of the whole; and a driver being added, in
the person of a long hammer-headed young man who was a very good match
for the horse, left nothing to be desired. He, too, had been formerly
used in the business, but was now entombed by an honest jobbing tailor
of the district in a perfect Sepulchre of coat and gaiters, sealed with
ponderous buttons.

Behind this domestic, Mr and Mrs Boffin took their seats in the back
compartment of the vehicle: which was sufficiently commodious, but had
an undignified and alarming tendency, in getting over a rough crossing,
to hiccup itself away from the front compartment. On their being
descried emerging from the gates of the Bower, the neighbourhood turned
out at door and window to salute the Boffins. Among those who were ever
and again left behind, staring after the equipage, were many youthful
spirits, who hailed it in stentorian tones with such congratulations as
‘Nod-dy Bof-fin!’ ‘Bof-fin’s mon-ey!’ ‘Down with the dust, Bof-fin!’ and
other similar compliments. These, the hammer-headed young man took in
such ill part that he often impaired the majesty of the progress by
pulling up short, and making as though he would alight to exterminate
the offenders; a purpose from which he only allowed himself to be
dissuaded after long and lively arguments with his employers.

At length the Bower district was left behind, and the peaceful dwelling
of the Reverend Frank Milvey was gained. The Reverend Frank Milvey’s
abode was a very modest abode, because his income was a very modest
income. He was officially accessible to every blundering old woman who
had incoherence to bestow upon him, and readily received the Boffins.
He was quite a young man, expensively educated and wretchedly paid, with
quite a young wife and half a dozen quite young children. He was under
the necessity of teaching and translating from the classics, to eke out
his scanty means, yet was generally expected to have more time to spare
than the idlest person in the parish, and more money than the richest.
He accepted the needless inequalities and inconsistencies of his life,
with a kind of conventional submission that was almost slavish; and any
daring layman who would have adjusted such burdens as his, more decently
and graciously, would have had small help from him.

With a ready patient face and manner, and yet with a latent smile that
showed a quick enough observation of Mrs Boffin’s dress, Mr Milvey, in
his little book-room--charged with sounds and cries as though the six
children above were coming down through the ceiling, and the roasting
leg of mutton below were coming up through the floor--listened to Mrs
Boffin’s statement of her want of an orphan.

‘I think,’ said Mr Milvey, ‘that you have never had a child of your own,
Mr and Mrs Boffin?’

Never.

‘But, like the Kings and Queens in the Fairy Tales, I suppose you have
wished for one?’

In a general way, yes.

Mr Milvey smiled again, as he remarked to himself ‘Those kings and
queens were always wishing for children.’ It occurring to him, perhaps,
that if they had been Curates, their wishes might have tended in the
opposite direction.

‘I think,’ he pursued, ‘we had better take Mrs Milvey into our Council.
She is indispensable to me. If you please, I’ll call her.’

So, Mr Milvey called, ‘Margaretta, my dear!’ and Mrs Milvey came down.
A pretty, bright little woman, something worn by anxiety, who had
repressed many pretty tastes and bright fancies, and substituted in
their stead, schools, soup, flannel, coals, and all the week-day cares
and Sunday coughs of a large population, young and old. As gallantly had
Mr Milvey repressed much in himself that naturally belonged to his old
studies and old fellow-students, and taken up among the poor and their
children with the hard crumbs of life.

‘Mr and Mrs Boffin, my dear, whose good fortune you have heard of.’

Mrs Milvey, with the most unaffected grace in the world, congratulated
them, and was glad to see them. Yet her engaging face, being an open as
well as a perceptive one, was not without her husband’s latent smile.

‘Mrs Boffin wishes to adopt a little boy, my dear.’

Mrs Milvey, looking rather alarmed, her husband added:

‘An orphan, my dear.’

‘Oh!’ said Mrs Milvey, reassured for her own little boys.

‘And I was thinking, Margaretta, that perhaps old Mrs Goody’s grandchild
might answer the purpose.

‘Oh my DEAR Frank! I DON’T think that would do!’

‘No?’

‘Oh NO!’

The smiling Mrs Boffin, feeling it incumbent on her to take part in the
conversation, and being charmed with the emphatic little wife and her
ready interest, here offered her acknowledgments and inquired what there
was against him?

‘I DON’T think,’ said Mrs Milvey, glancing at the Reverend Frank, ‘--and
I believe my husband will agree with me when he considers it again--that
you could possibly keep that orphan clean from snuff. Because his
grandmother takes so MANY ounces, and drops it over him.’

‘But he would not be living with his grandmother then, Margaretta,’ said
Mr Milvey.

‘No, Frank, but it would be impossible to keep her from Mrs Boffin’s
house; and the MORE there was to eat and drink there, the oftener she
would go. And she IS an inconvenient woman. I HOPE it’s not uncharitable
to remember that last Christmas Eve she drank eleven cups of tea, and
grumbled all the time. And she is NOT a grateful woman, Frank. You
recollect her addressing a crowd outside this house, about her wrongs,
when, one night after we had gone to bed, she brought back the petticoat
of new flannel that had been given her, because it was too short.’

‘That’s true,’ said Mr Milvey. ‘I don’t think that would do. Would
little Harrison--’

‘Oh, FRANK!’ remonstrated his emphatic wife.

‘He has no grandmother, my dear.’

‘No, but I DON’T think Mrs Boffin would like an orphan who squints so
MUCH.’

‘That’s true again,’ said Mr Milvey, becoming haggard with perplexity.
‘If a little girl would do--’

‘But, my DEAR Frank, Mrs Boffin wants a boy.’

‘That’s true again,’ said Mr Milvey. ‘Tom Bocker is a nice boy’
(thoughtfully).

‘But I DOUBT, Frank,’ Mrs Milvey hinted, after a little hesitation, ‘if
Mrs Boffin wants an orphan QUITE nineteen, who drives a cart and waters
the roads.’

Mr Milvey referred the point to Mrs Boffin in a look; on that smiling
lady’s shaking her black velvet bonnet and bows, he remarked, in lower
spirits, ‘that’s true again.’

‘I am sure,’ said Mrs Boffin, concerned at giving so much trouble, ‘that
if I had known you would have taken so much pains, sir--and you too, ma’
am--I don’t think I would have come.’

‘PRAY don’t say that!’ urged Mrs Milvey.

‘No, don’t say that,’ assented Mr Milvey, ‘because we are so much
obliged to you for giving us the preference.’ Which Mrs Milvey
confirmed; and really the kind, conscientious couple spoke, as if they
kept some profitable orphan warehouse and were personally patronized.
‘But it is a responsible trust,’ added Mr Milvey, ‘and difficult to
discharge. At the same time, we are naturally very unwilling to lose the
chance you so kindly give us, and if you could afford us a day or two
to look about us,--you know, Margaretta, we might carefully examine the
workhouse, and the Infant School, and your District.’

‘To be SURE!’ said the emphatic little wife.

‘We have orphans, I know,’ pursued Mr Milvey, quite with the air as if
he might have added, ‘in stock,’ and quite as anxiously as if there were
great competition in the business and he were afraid of losing an order,
‘over at the clay-pits; but they are employed by relations or friends,
and I am afraid it would come at last to a transaction in the way of
barter. And even if you exchanged blankets for the child--or books
and firing--it would be impossible to prevent their being turned into
liquor.’

Accordingly, it was resolved that Mr and Mrs Milvey should search for
an orphan likely to suit, and as free as possible from the foregoing
objections, and should communicate again with Mrs Boffin. Then, Mr
Boffin took the liberty of mentioning to Mr Milvey that if Mr Milvey
would do him the kindness to be perpetually his banker to the extent
of ‘a twenty-pound note or so,’ to be expended without any reference
to him, he would be heartily obliged. At this, both Mr Milvey and Mrs
Milvey were quite as much pleased as if they had no wants of their own,
but only knew what poverty was, in the persons of other people; and
so the interview terminated with satisfaction and good opinion on all
sides.

‘Now, old lady,’ said Mr Boffin, as they resumed their seats behind the
hammer-headed horse and man: ‘having made a very agreeable visit there,
we’ll try Wilfer’s.’

It appeared, on their drawing up at the family gate, that to try
Wilfer’s was a thing more easily projected than done, on account of the
extreme difficulty of getting into that establishment; three pulls
at the bell producing no external result; though each was attended
by audible sounds of scampering and rushing within. At the fourth
tug--vindictively administered by the hammer-headed young man--Miss
Lavinia appeared, emerging from the house in an accidental manner, with
a bonnet and parasol, as designing to take a contemplative walk. The
young lady was astonished to find visitors at the gate, and expressed
her feelings in appropriate action.

‘Here’s Mr and Mrs Boffin!’ growled the hammer-headed young man through
the bars of the gate, and at the same time shaking it, as if he were on
view in a Menagerie; ‘they’ve been here half an hour.’

‘Who did you say?’ asked Miss Lavinia.

‘Mr and Mrs BOFFIN’ returned the young man, rising into a roar.

Miss Lavinia tripped up the steps to the house-door, tripped down the
steps with the key, tripped across the little garden, and opened the
gate. ‘Please to walk in,’ said Miss Lavinia, haughtily. ‘Our servant is
out.’

Mr and Mrs Boffin complying, and pausing in the little hall until Miss
Lavinia came up to show them where to go next, perceived three pairs of
listening legs upon the stairs above. Mrs Wilfer’s legs, Miss Bella’s
legs, Mr George Sampson’s legs.

‘Mr and Mrs Boffin, I think?’ said Lavinia, in a warning voice. Strained
attention on the part of Mrs Wilfer’s legs, of Miss Bella’s legs, of Mr
George Sampson’s legs.

‘Yes, Miss.’

‘If you’ll step this way--down these stairs--I’ll let Ma know.’
Excited flight of Mrs Wilfer’s legs, of Miss Bella’s legs, of Mr George
Sampson’s legs.

After waiting some quarter of an hour alone in the family sitting-room,
which presented traces of having been so hastily arranged after a meal,
that one might have doubted whether it was made tidy for visitors,
or cleared for blindman’s buff, Mr and Mrs Boffin became aware of the
entrance of Mrs Wilfer, majestically faint, and with a condescending
stitch in her side: which was her company manner.

‘Pardon me,’ said Mrs Wilfer, after the first salutations, and as soon
as she had adjusted the handkerchief under her chin, and waved her
gloved hands, ‘to what am I indebted for this honour?’

‘To make short of it, ma’am,’ returned Mr Boffin, ‘perhaps you may be
acquainted with the names of me and Mrs Boffin, as having come into a
certain property.’

‘I have heard, sir,’ returned Mrs Wilfer, with a dignified bend of her
head, ‘of such being the case.’

‘And I dare say, ma’am,’ pursued Mr Boffin, while Mrs Boffin added
confirmatory nods and smiles, ‘you are not very much inclined to take
kindly to us?’

‘Pardon me,’ said Mrs Wilfer. ‘’Twere unjust to visit upon Mr and Mrs
Boffin, a calamity which was doubtless a dispensation.’ These words
were rendered the more effective by a serenely heroic expression of
suffering.

‘That’s fairly meant, I am sure,’ remarked the honest Mr Boffin; ‘Mrs
Boffin and me, ma’am, are plain people, and we don’t want to pretend
to anything, nor yet to go round and round at anything because there’s
always a straight way to everything. Consequently, we make this call
to say, that we shall be glad to have the honour and pleasure of your
daughter’s acquaintance, and that we shall be rejoiced if your daughter
will come to consider our house in the light of her home equally with
this. In short, we want to cheer your daughter, and to give her
the opportunity of sharing such pleasures as we are a going to take
ourselves. We want to brisk her up, and brisk her about, and give her a
change.’

‘That’s it!’ said the open-hearted Mrs Boffin. ‘Lor! Let’s be
comfortable.’

Mrs Wilfer bent her head in a distant manner to her lady visitor, and
with majestic monotony replied to the gentleman:

‘Pardon me. I have several daughters. Which of my daughters am I to
understand is thus favoured by the kind intentions of Mr Boffin and his
lady?’

‘Don’t you see?’ the ever-smiling Mrs Boffin put in. ‘Naturally, Miss
Bella, you know.’

‘Oh-h!’ said Mrs Wilfer, with a severely unconvinced look. ‘My daughter
Bella is accessible and shall speak for herself.’ Then opening the door
a little way, simultaneously with a sound of scuttling outside it,
the good lady made the proclamation, ‘Send Miss Bella to me!’ which
proclamation, though grandly formal, and one might almost say heraldic,
to hear, was in fact enunciated with her maternal eyes reproachfully
glaring on that young lady in the flesh--and in so much of it that she
was retiring with difficulty into the small closet under the stairs,
apprehensive of the emergence of Mr and Mrs Boffin.

‘The avocations of R. W., my husband,’ Mrs Wilfer explained, on resuming
her seat, ‘keep him fully engaged in the City at this time of the day,
or he would have had the honour of participating in your reception
beneath our humble roof.’

‘Very pleasant premises!’ said Mr Boffin, cheerfully.

‘Pardon me, sir,’ returned Mrs Wilfer, correcting him, ‘it is the abode
of conscious though independent Poverty.’

Finding it rather difficult to pursue the conversation down this road,
Mr and Mrs Boffin sat staring at mid-air, and Mrs Wilfer sat silently
giving them to understand that every breath she drew required to be
drawn with a self-denial rarely paralleled in history, until Miss Bella
appeared: whom Mrs Wilfer presented, and to whom she explained the
purpose of the visitors.

‘I am much obliged to you, I am sure,’ said Miss Bella, coldly shaking
her curls, ‘but I doubt if I have the inclination to go out at all.’

‘Bella!’ Mrs Wilfer admonished her; ‘Bella, you must conquer this.’

‘Yes, do what your Ma says, and conquer it, my dear,’ urged Mrs Boffin,
‘because we shall be so glad to have you, and because you are much too
pretty to keep yourself shut up.’ With that, the pleasant creature gave
her a kiss, and patted her on her dimpled shoulders; Mrs Wilfer sitting
stiffly by, like a functionary presiding over an interview previous to
an execution.

‘We are going to move into a nice house,’ said Mrs Boffin, who was woman
enough to compromise Mr Boffin on that point, when he couldn’t very well
contest it; ‘and we are going to set up a nice carriage, and we’ll go
everywhere and see everything. And you mustn’t,’ seating Bella beside
her, and patting her hand, ‘you mustn’t feel a dislike to us to begin
with, because we couldn’t help it, you know, my dear.’

With the natural tendency of youth to yield to candour and sweet temper,
Miss Bella was so touched by the simplicity of this address that she
frankly returned Mrs Boffin’s kiss. Not at all to the satisfaction
of that good woman of the world, her mother, who sought to hold the
advantageous ground of obliging the Boffins instead of being obliged.

‘My youngest daughter, Lavinia,’ said Mrs Wilfer, glad to make a
diversion, as that young lady reappeared. ‘Mr George Sampson, a friend
of the family.’

The friend of the family was in that stage of tender passion which bound
him to regard everybody else as the foe of the family. He put the round
head of his cane in his mouth, like a stopper, when he sat down. As if
he felt himself full to the throat with affronting sentiments. And he
eyed the Boffins with implacable eyes.

‘If you like to bring your sister with you when you come to stay with
us,’ said Mrs Boffin, ‘of course we shall be glad. The better you please
yourself, Miss Bella, the better you’ll please us.’

‘Oh, my consent is of no consequence at all, I suppose?’ cried Miss
Lavinia.

‘Lavvy,’ said her sister, in a low voice, ‘have the goodness to be seen
and not heard.’

‘No, I won’t,’ replied the sharp Lavinia. ‘I’m not a child, to be taken
notice of by strangers.’

‘You ARE a child.’

‘I’m not a child, and I won’t be taken notice of. “Bring your sister,”
 indeed!’

‘Lavinia!’ said Mrs Wilfer. ‘Hold! I will not allow you to utter in my
presence the absurd suspicion that any strangers--I care not what their
names--can patronize my child. Do you dare to suppose, you ridiculous
girl, that Mr and Mrs Boffin would enter these doors upon a patronizing
errand; or, if they did, would remain within them, only for one single
instant, while your mother had the strength yet remaining in her vital
frame to request them to depart? You little know your mother if you
presume to think so.’

‘It’s all very fine,’ Lavinia began to grumble, when Mrs Wilfer
repeated:

‘Hold! I will not allow this. Do you not know what is due to guests?
Do you not comprehend that in presuming to hint that this lady and
gentleman could have any idea of patronizing any member of your
family--I care not which--you accuse them of an impertinence little less
than insane?’

‘Never mind me and Mrs Boffin, ma’am,’ said Mr Boffin, smilingly: ‘we
don’t care.’

‘Pardon me, but I do,’ returned Mrs Wilfer.

Miss Lavinia laughed a short laugh as she muttered, ‘Yes, to be sure.’

‘And I require my audacious child,’ proceeded Mrs Wilfer, with a
withering look at her youngest, on whom it had not the slightest effect,
‘to please to be just to her sister Bella; to remember that her sister
Bella is much sought after; and that when her sister Bella accepts an
attention, she considers herself to be conferring qui-i-ite as much
honour,’--this with an indignant shiver,--‘as she receives.’

But, here Miss Bella repudiated, and said quietly, ‘I can speak for
myself; you know, ma. You needn’t bring ME in, please.’

‘And it’s all very well aiming at others through convenient me,’ said
the irrepressible Lavinia, spitefully; ‘but I should like to ask George
Sampson what he says to it.’

‘Mr Sampson,’ proclaimed Mrs Wilfer, seeing that young gentleman take
his stopper out, and so darkly fixing him with her eyes as that he put
it in again: ‘Mr Sampson, as a friend of this family and a frequenter of
this house, is, I am persuaded, far too well-bred to interpose on such
an invitation.’

This exaltation of the young gentleman moved the conscientious Mrs
Boffin to repentance for having done him an injustice in her mind, and
consequently to saying that she and Mr Boffin would at any time be glad
to see him; an attention which he handsomely acknowledged by replying,
with his stopper unremoved, ‘Much obliged to you, but I’m always
engaged, day and night.’

However, Bella compensating for all drawbacks by responding to the
advances of the Boffins in an engaging way, that easy pair were on the
whole well satisfied, and proposed to the said Bella that as soon as
they should be in a condition to receive her in a manner suitable to
their desires, Mrs Boffin should return with notice of the fact. This
arrangement Mrs Wilfer sanctioned with a stately inclination of her
head and wave of her gloves, as who should say, ‘Your demerits shall be
overlooked, and you shall be mercifully gratified, poor people.’

‘By-the-bye, ma’am,’ said Mr Boffin, turning back as he was going, ‘you
have a lodger?’

‘A gentleman,’ Mrs Wilfer answered, qualifying the low expression,
‘undoubtedly occupies our first floor.’

‘I may call him Our Mutual Friend,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘What sort of a
fellow IS Our Mutual Friend, now? Do you like him?’

‘Mr Rokesmith is very punctual, very quiet, a very eligible inmate.’

‘Because,’ Mr Boffin explained, ‘you must know that I’m not particularly
well acquainted with Our Mutual Friend, for I have only seen him once.
You give a good account of him. Is he at home?’

‘Mr Rokesmith is at home,’ said Mrs Wilfer; ‘indeed,’ pointing through
the window, ‘there he stands at the garden gate. Waiting for you,
perhaps?’

‘Perhaps so,’ replied Mr Boffin. ‘Saw me come in, maybe.’

Bella had closely attended to this short dialogue. Accompanying Mrs
Boffin to the gate, she as closely watched what followed.

‘How are you, sir, how are you?’ said Mr Boffin. ‘This is Mrs Boffin. Mr
Rokesmith, that I told you of; my dear.’

She gave him good day, and he bestirred himself and helped her to her
seat, and the like, with a ready hand.

‘Good-bye for the present, Miss Bella,’ said Mrs Boffin, calling out a
hearty parting. ‘We shall meet again soon! And then I hope I shall have
my little John Harmon to show you.’

Mr Rokesmith, who was at the wheel adjusting the skirts of her dress,
suddenly looked behind him, and around him, and then looked up at her,
with a face so pale that Mrs Boffin cried:

‘Gracious!’ And after a moment, ‘What’s the matter, sir?’

‘How can you show her the Dead?’ returned Mr Rokesmith.

‘It’s only an adopted child. One I have told her of. One I’m going to
give the name to!’

‘You took me by surprise,’ said Mr Rokesmith, ‘and it sounded like an
omen, that you should speak of showing the Dead to one so young and
blooming.’

Now, Bella suspected by this time that Mr Rokesmith admired her. Whether
the knowledge (for it was rather that than suspicion) caused her to
incline to him a little more, or a little less, than she had done at
first; whether it rendered her eager to find out more about him, because
she sought to establish reason for her distrust, or because she sought
to free him from it; was as yet dark to her own heart. But at most
times he occupied a great amount of her attention, and she had set her
attention closely on this incident.

That he knew it as well as she, she knew as well as he, when they were
left together standing on the path by the garden gate.

‘Those are worthy people, Miss Wilfer.’

‘Do you know them well?’ asked Bella.

He smiled, reproaching her, and she coloured, reproaching herself--both,
with the knowledge that she had meant to entrap him into an answer not
true--when he said ‘I know OF them.’

‘Truly, he told us he had seen you but once.’

‘Truly, I supposed he did.’

Bella was nervous now, and would have been glad to recall her question.

‘You thought it strange that, feeling much interested in you, I should
start at what sounded like a proposal to bring you into contact with the
murdered man who lies in his grave. I might have known--of course in a
moment should have known--that it could not have that meaning. But my
interest remains.’

Re-entering the family-room in a meditative state, Miss Bella was
received by the irrepressible Lavinia with:

‘There, Bella! At last I hope you have got your wishes realized--by your
Boffins. You’ll be rich enough now--with your Boffins. You can have as
much flirting as you like--at your Boffins. But you won’t take ME to
your Boffins, I can tell you--you and your Boffins too!’

‘If,’ quoth Mr George Sampson, moodily pulling his stopper out, ‘Miss
Bella’s Mr Boffin comes any more of his nonsense to ME, I only wish him
to understand, as betwixt man and man, that he does it at his per--’ and
was going to say peril; but Miss Lavinia, having no confidence in his
mental powers, and feeling his oration to have no definite application
to any circumstances, jerked his stopper in again, with a sharpness that
made his eyes water.

And now the worthy Mrs Wilfer, having used her youngest daughter as a
lay-figure for the edification of these Boffins, became bland to her,
and proceeded to develop her last instance of force of character,
which was still in reserve. This was, to illuminate the family with her
remarkable powers as a physiognomist; powers that terrified R. W. when
ever let loose, as being always fraught with gloom and evil which no
inferior prescience was aware of. And this Mrs Wilfer now did, be it
observed, in jealousy of these Boffins, in the very same moments when
she was already reflecting how she would flourish these very same
Boffins and the state they kept, over the heads of her Boffinless
friends.

‘Of their manners,’ said Mrs Wilfer, ‘I say nothing. Of their
appearance, I say nothing. Of the disinterestedness of their intentions
towards Bella, I say nothing. But the craft, the secrecy, the dark
deep underhanded plotting, written in Mrs Boffin’s countenance, make me
shudder.’

As an incontrovertible proof that those baleful attributes were all
there, Mrs Wilfer shuddered on the spot.



Chapter 10

A MARRIAGE CONTRACT


There is excitement in the Veneering mansion. The mature young lady is
going to be married (powder and all) to the mature young gentleman, and
she is to be married from the Veneering house, and the Veneerings are to
give the breakfast. The Analytical, who objects as a matter of principle
to everything that occurs on the premises, necessarily objects to the
match; but his consent has been dispensed with, and a spring-van is
delivering its load of greenhouse plants at the door, in order that
to-morrow’s feast may be crowned with flowers.

The mature young lady is a lady of property. The mature young gentleman
is a gentleman of property. He invests his property. He goes, in
a condescending amateurish way, into the City, attends meetings of
Directors, and has to do with traffic in Shares. As is well known to the
wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to
do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no
cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to
be on Boards of Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious
business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does he come
from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares.
Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament?
Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never
originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all;
Shares. O mighty Shares! To set those blaring images so high, and to
cause us smaller vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to
cry out, night and day, ‘Relieve us of our money, scatter it for us, buy
us and sell us, ruin us, only we beseech ye take rank among the powers
of the earth, and fatten on us’!

While the Loves and Graces have been preparing this torch for Hymen,
which is to be kindled to-morrow, Mr Twemlow has suffered much in his
mind. It would seem that both the mature young lady and the mature young
gentleman must indubitably be Veneering’s oldest friends. Wards of his,
perhaps? Yet that can scarcely be, for they are older than himself.
Veneering has been in their confidence throughout, and has done much to
lure them to the altar. He has mentioned to Twemlow how he said to
Mrs Veneering, ‘Anastatia, this must be a match.’ He has mentioned to
Twemlow how he regards Sophronia Akershem (the mature young lady) in the
light of a sister, and Alfred Lammle (the mature young gentleman) in the
light of a brother. Twemlow has asked him whether he went to school as
a junior with Alfred? He has answered, ‘Not exactly.’ Whether Sophronia
was adopted by his mother? He has answered, ‘Not precisely so.’
Twemlow’s hand has gone to his forehead with a lost air.

But, two or three weeks ago, Twemlow, sitting over his newspaper,
and over his dry-toast and weak tea, and over the stable-yard in Duke
Street, St James’s, received a highly-perfumed cocked-hat and monogram
from Mrs Veneering, entreating her dearest Mr T., if not particularly
engaged that day, to come like a charming soul and make a fourth at
dinner with dear Mr Podsnap, for the discussion of an interesting family
topic; the last three words doubly underlined and pointed with a note
of admiration. And Twemlow replying, ‘Not engaged, and more than
delighted,’ goes, and this takes place:

‘My dear Twemlow,’ says Veneering, ‘your ready response to Anastatia’s
unceremonious invitation is truly kind, and like an old, old friend. You
know our dear friend Podsnap?’

Twemlow ought to know the dear friend Podsnap who covered him with so
much confusion, and he says he does know him, and Podsnap reciprocates.
Apparently, Podsnap has been so wrought upon in a short time, as to
believe that he has been intimate in the house many, many, many years.
In the friendliest manner he is making himself quite at home with his
back to the fire, executing a statuette of the Colossus at Rhodes.
Twemlow has before noticed in his feeble way how soon the Veneering
guests become infected with the Veneering fiction. Not, however, that he
has the least notion of its being his own case.

‘Our friends, Alfred and Sophronia,’ pursues Veneering the veiled
prophet: ‘our friends Alfred and Sophronia, you will be glad to hear, my
dear fellows, are going to be married. As my wife and I make it a family
affair the entire direction of which we take upon ourselves, of course
our first step is to communicate the fact to our family friends.’

[‘Oh!’ thinks Twemlow, with his eyes on Podsnap, ‘then there are only
two of us, and he’s the other.’)

‘I did hope,’ Veneering goes on, ‘to have had Lady Tippins to meet you;
but she is always in request, and is unfortunately engaged.’

[‘Oh!’ thinks Twemlow, with his eyes wandering, ‘then there are three of
us, and SHE’S the other.’)

‘Mortimer Lightwood,’ resumes Veneering, ‘whom you both know, is out of
town; but he writes, in his whimsical manner, that as we ask him to be
bridegroom’s best man when the ceremony takes place, he will not refuse,
though he doesn’t see what he has to do with it.’

[‘Oh!’ thinks Twemlow, with his eyes rolling, ‘then there are four of
us, and HE’S the other.’)

‘Boots and Brewer,’ observes Veneering, ‘whom you also know, I have not
asked to-day; but I reserve them for the occasion.’

[‘Then,’ thinks Twemlow, with his eyes shut, ‘there are si--’ But here
collapses and does not completely recover until dinner is over and the
Analytical has been requested to withdraw.)

‘We now come,’ says Veneering, ‘to the point, the real point, of our
little family consultation. Sophronia, having lost both father and
mother, has no one to give her away.’

‘Give her away yourself,’ says Podsnap.

‘My dear Podsnap, no. For three reasons. Firstly, because I couldn’t
take so much upon myself when I have respected family friends to
remember. Secondly, because I am not so vain as to think that I look
the part. Thirdly, because Anastatia is a little superstitious on the
subject and feels averse to my giving away anybody until baby is old
enough to be married.’

‘What would happen if he did?’ Podsnap inquires of Mrs Veneering.

‘My dear Mr Podsnap, it’s very foolish I know, but I have an instinctive
presentiment that if Hamilton gave away anybody else first, he would
never give away baby.’ Thus Mrs Veneering; with her open hands pressed
together, and each of her eight aquiline fingers looking so very like
her one aquiline nose that the bran-new jewels on them seem necessary
for distinction’s sake.

‘But, my dear Podsnap,’ quoth Veneering, ‘there IS a tried friend of
our family who, I think and hope you will agree with me, Podsnap, is
the friend on whom this agreeable duty almost naturally devolves. That
friend,’ saying the words as if the company were about a hundred and
fifty in number, ‘is now among us. That friend is Twemlow.’

‘Certainly!’ from Podsnap.

‘That friend,’ Veneering repeats with greater firmness, ‘is our dear
good Twemlow. And I cannot sufficiently express to you, my dear Podsnap,
the pleasure I feel in having this opinion of mine and Anastatia’s so
readily confirmed by you, that other equally familiar and tried friend
who stands in the proud position--I mean who proudly stands in the
position--or I ought rather to say, who places Anastatia and myself in
the proud position of himself standing in the simple position--of baby’s
godfather.’ And, indeed, Veneering is much relieved in mind to find that
Podsnap betrays no jealousy of Twemlow’s elevation.

So, it has come to pass that the spring-van is strewing flowers on
the rosy hours and on the staircase, and that Twemlow is surveying the
ground on which he is to play his distinguished part to-morrow. He has
already been to the church, and taken note of the various impediments in
the aisle, under the auspices of an extremely dreary widow who opens the
pews, and whose left hand appears to be in a state of acute rheumatism,
but is in fact voluntarily doubled up to act as a money-box.

And now Veneering shoots out of the Study wherein he is accustomed,
when contemplative, to give his mind to the carving and gilding of
the Pilgrims going to Canterbury, in order to show Twemlow the little
flourish he has prepared for the trumpets of fashion, describing how
that on the seventeenth instant, at St James’s Church, the Reverend
Blank Blank, assisted by the Reverend Dash Dash, united in the bonds of
matrimony, Alfred Lammle Esquire, of Sackville Street, Piccadilly,
to Sophronia, only daughter of the late Horatio Akershem, Esquire,
of Yorkshire. Also how the fair bride was married from the house of
Hamilton Veneering, Esquire, of Stucconia, and was given away by Melvin
Twemlow, Esquire, of Duke Street, St James’s, second cousin to Lord
Snigsworth, of Snigsworthy Park. While perusing which composition,
Twemlow makes some opaque approach to perceiving that if the Reverend
Blank Blank and the Reverend Dash Dash fail, after this introduction, to
become enrolled in the list of Veneering’s dearest and oldest friends,
they will have none but themselves to thank for it.

After which, appears Sophronia (whom Twemlow has seen twice in his
lifetime), to thank Twemlow for counterfeiting the late Horatio Akershem
Esquire, broadly of Yorkshire. And after her, appears Alfred (whom
Twemlow has seen once in his lifetime), to do the same and to make a
pasty sort of glitter, as if he were constructed for candle-light only,
and had been let out into daylight by some grand mistake. And after
that, comes Mrs Veneering, in a pervadingly aquiline state of figure,
and with transparent little knobs on her temper, like the little
transparent knob on the bridge of her nose, ‘Worn out by worry and
excitement,’ as she tells her dear Mr Twemlow, and reluctantly revived
with curacoa by the Analytical. And after that, the bridesmaids begin
to come by rail-road from various parts of the country, and to come like
adorable recruits enlisted by a sergeant not present; for, on arriving
at the Veneering depot, they are in a barrack of strangers.

So, Twemlow goes home to Duke Street, St James’s, to take a plate of
mutton broth with a chop in it, and a look at the marriage-service, in
order that he may cut in at the right place to-morrow; and he is low,
and feels it dull over the livery stable-yard, and is distinctly aware
of a dint in his heart, made by the most adorable of the adorable
bridesmaids. For, the poor little harmless gentleman once had his fancy,
like the rest of us, and she didn’t answer (as she often does not),
and he thinks the adorable bridesmaid is like the fancy as she was then
(which she is not at all), and that if the fancy had not married some
one else for money, but had married him for love, he and she would
have been happy (which they wouldn’t have been), and that she has a
tenderness for him still (whereas her toughness is a proverb). Brooding
over the fire, with his dried little head in his dried little hands,
and his dried little elbows on his dried little knees, Twemlow is
melancholy. ‘No Adorable to bear me company here!’ thinks he. ‘No
Adorable at the club! A waste, a waste, a waste, my Twemlow!’ And so
drops asleep, and has galvanic starts all over him.

Betimes next morning, that horrible old Lady Tippins (relict of the late
Sir Thomas Tippins, knighted in mistake for somebody else by His
Majesty King George the Third, who, while performing the ceremony, was
graciously pleased to observe, ‘What, what, what? Who, who, who?
Why, why, why?’) begins to be dyed and varnished for the interesting
occasion. She has a reputation for giving smart accounts of things, and
she must be at these people’s early, my dear, to lose nothing of the
fun. Whereabout in the bonnet and drapery announced by her name, any
fragment of the real woman may be concealed, is perhaps known to her
maid; but you could easily buy all you see of her, in Bond Street; or
you might scalp her, and peel her, and scrape her, and make two Lady
Tippinses out of her, and yet not penetrate to the genuine article. She
has a large gold eye-glass, has Lady Tippins, to survey the proceedings
with. If she had one in each eye, it might keep that other drooping
lid up, and look more uniform. But perennial youth is in her artificial
flowers, and her list of lovers is full.

‘Mortimer, you wretch,’ says Lady Tippins, turning the eyeglass about
and about, ‘where is your charge, the bridegroom?’

‘Give you my honour,’ returns Mortimer, ‘I don’t know, and I don’t
care.’

‘Miserable! Is that the way you do your duty?’

‘Beyond an impression that he is to sit upon my knee and be seconded
at some point of the solemnities, like a principal at a prizefight, I
assure you I have no notion what my duty is,’ returns Mortimer.

Eugene is also in attendance, with a pervading air upon him of having
presupposed the ceremony to be a funeral, and of being disappointed. The
scene is the Vestry-room of St James’s Church, with a number of leathery
old registers on shelves, that might be bound in Lady Tippinses.

But, hark! A carriage at the gate, and Mortimer’s man arrives, looking
rather like a spurious Mephistopheles and an unacknowledged member
of that gentleman’s family. Whom Lady Tippins, surveying through her
eye-glass, considers a fine man, and quite a catch; and of whom Mortimer
remarks, in the lowest spirits, as he approaches, ‘I believe this is my
fellow, confound him!’ More carriages at the gate, and lo the rest of
the characters. Whom Lady Tippins, standing on a cushion, surveying
through the eye-glass, thus checks off. ‘Bride; five-and-forty if a
day, thirty shillings a yard, veil fifteen pound, pocket-handkerchief
a present. Bridesmaids; kept down for fear of outshining bride,
consequently not girls, twelve and sixpence a yard, Veneering’s flowers,
snub-nosed one rather pretty but too conscious of her stockings, bonnets
three pound ten. Twemlow; blessed release for the dear man if she really
was his daughter, nervous even under the pretence that she is, well he
may be. Mrs Veneering; never saw such velvet, say two thousand pounds
as she stands, absolute jeweller’s window, father must have been a
pawnbroker, or how could these people do it? Attendant unknowns; pokey.’

Ceremony performed, register signed, Lady Tippins escorted out of sacred
edifice by Veneering, carriages rolling back to Stucconia, servants
with favours and flowers, Veneering’s house reached, drawing-rooms most
magnificent. Here, the Podsnaps await the happy party; Mr Podsnap, with
his hair-brushes made the most of; that imperial rocking-horse, Mrs
Podsnap, majestically skittish. Here, too, are Boots and Brewer, and
the two other Buffers; each Buffer with a flower in his button-hole, his
hair curled, and his gloves buttoned on tight, apparently come prepared,
if anything had happened to the bridegroom, to be married instantly.
Here, too, the bride’s aunt and next relation; a widowed female of
a Medusa sort, in a stoney cap, glaring petrifaction at her
fellow-creatures. Here, too, the bride’s trustee; an oilcake-fed style
of business-gentleman with mooney spectacles, and an object of much
interest. Veneering launching himself upon this trustee as his oldest
friend (which makes seven, Twemlow thought), and confidentially retiring
with him into the conservatory, it is understood that Veneering is his
co-trustee, and that they are arranging about the fortune. Buffers are
even overheard to whisper Thir-ty Thou-sand Pou-nds! with a smack and a
relish suggestive of the very finest oysters. Pokey unknowns, amazed
to find how intimately they know Veneering, pluck up spirit, fold
their arms, and begin to contradict him before breakfast. What time Mrs
Veneering, carrying baby dressed as a bridesmaid, flits about among
the company, emitting flashes of many-coloured lightning from diamonds,
emeralds, and rubies.

The Analytical, in course of time achieving what he feels to be due to
himself in bringing to a dignified conclusion several quarrels he has on
hand with the pastrycook’s men, announces breakfast. Dining-room no less
magnificent than drawing-room; tables superb; all the camels out, and
all laden. Splendid cake, covered with Cupids, silver, and true-lovers’
knots. Splendid bracelet, produced by Veneering before going down, and
clasped upon the arm of bride. Yet nobody seems to think much more of
the Veneerings than if they were a tolerable landlord and landlady
doing the thing in the way of business at so much a head. The bride and
bridegroom talk and laugh apart, as has always been their manner;
and the Buffers work their way through the dishes with systematic
perseverance, as has always been THEIR manner; and the pokey unknowns
are exceedingly benevolent to one another in invitations to take
glasses of champagne; but Mrs Podsnap, arching her mane and rocking her
grandest, has a far more deferential audience than Mrs Veneering; and
Podsnap all but does the honours.

Another dismal circumstance is, that Veneering, having the captivating
Tippins on one side of him and the bride’s aunt on the other, finds
it immensely difficult to keep the peace. For, Medusa, besides
unmistakingly glaring petrifaction at the fascinating Tippins, follows
every lively remark made by that dear creature, with an audible snort:
which may be referable to a chronic cold in the head, but may also be
referable to indignation and contempt. And this snort being regular in
its reproduction, at length comes to be expected by the company, who
make embarrassing pauses when it is falling due, and by waiting for it,
render it more emphatic when it comes. The stoney aunt has likewise an
injurious way of rejecting all dishes whereof Lady Tippins partakes:
saying aloud when they are proffered to her, ‘No, no, no, not for me.
Take it away!’ As with a set purpose of implying a misgiving that if
nourished upon similar meats, she might come to be like that charmer,
which would be a fatal consummation. Aware of her enemy, Lady Tippins
tries a youthful sally or two, and tries the eye-glass; but, from the
impenetrable cap and snorting armour of the stoney aunt all weapons
rebound powerless.

Another objectionable circumstance is, that the pokey unknowns support
each other in being unimpressible. They persist in not being frightened
by the gold and silver camels, and they are banded together to defy
the elaborately chased ice-pails. They even seem to unite in some vague
utterance of the sentiment that the landlord and landlady will make a
pretty good profit out of this, and they almost carry themselves
like customers. Nor is there compensating influence in the adorable
bridesmaids; for, having very little interest in the bride, and none
at all in one another, those lovely beings become, each one of her own
account, depreciatingly contemplative of the millinery present; while
the bridegroom’s man, exhausted, in the back of his chair, appears to be
improving the occasion by penitentially contemplating all the wrong he
has ever done; the difference between him and his friend Eugene, being,
that the latter, in the back of HIS chair, appears to be contemplating
all the wrong he would like to do--particularly to the present company.

In which state of affairs, the usual ceremonies rather droop and flag,
and the splendid cake when cut by the fair hand of the bride has but
an indigestible appearance. However, all the things indispensable to
be said are said, and all the things indispensable to be done are
done (including Lady Tippins’s yawning, falling asleep, and waking
insensible), and there is hurried preparation for the nuptial journey
to the Isle of Wight, and the outer air teems with brass bands and
spectators. In full sight of whom, the malignant star of the Analytical
has pre-ordained that pain and ridicule shall befall him. For he,
standing on the doorsteps to grace the departure, is suddenly caught a
most prodigious thump on the side of his head with a heavy shoe, which
a Buffer in the hall, champagne-flushed and wild of aim, has borrowed on
the spur of the moment from the pastrycook’s porter, to cast after the
departing pair as an auspicious omen.

So they all go up again into the gorgeous drawing-rooms--all of them
flushed with breakfast, as having taken scarlatina sociably--and there
the combined unknowns do malignant things with their legs to ottomans,
and take as much as possible out of the splendid furniture. And so, Lady
Tippins, quite undetermined whether today is the day before yesterday,
or the day after to-morrow, or the week after next, fades away; and
Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene fade away, and Twemlow fades away, and
the stoney aunt goes away--she declines to fade, proving rock to the
last--and even the unknowns are slowly strained off, and it is all over.

All over, that is to say, for the time being. But, there is another time
to come, and it comes in about a fortnight, and it comes to Mr and Mrs
Lammle on the sands at Shanklin, in the Isle of Wight.

Mr and Mrs Lammle have walked for some time on the Shanklin sands, and
one may see by their footprints that they have not walked arm in arm,
and that they have not walked in a straight track, and that they have
walked in a moody humour; for, the lady has prodded little spirting
holes in the damp sand before her with her parasol, and the gentleman
has trailed his stick after him. As if he were of the Mephistopheles
family indeed, and had walked with a drooping tail.

‘Do you mean to tell me, then, Sophronia--’

Thus he begins after a long silence, when Sophronia flashes fiercely,
and turns upon him.

‘Don’t put it upon ME, sir. I ask you, do YOU mean to tell me?’

Mr Lammle falls silent again, and they walk as before. Mrs Lammle opens
her nostrils and bites her under-lip; Mr Lammle takes his gingerous
whiskers in his left hand, and, bringing them together, frowns furtively
at his beloved, out of a thick gingerous bush.

‘Do I mean to say!’ Mrs Lammle after a time repeats, with indignation.
‘Putting it on me! The unmanly disingenuousness!’

Mr Lammle stops, releases his whiskers, and looks at her. ‘The what?’

Mrs Lammle haughtily replies, without stopping, and without looking
back. ‘The meanness.’

He is at her side again in a pace or two, and he retorts, ‘That is not
what you said. You said disingenuousness.’

‘What if I did?’

‘There is no “if” in the case. You did.’

‘I did, then. And what of it?’

‘What of it?’ says Mr Lammle. ‘Have you the face to utter the word to
me?’

‘The face, too!’ replied Mrs Lammle, staring at him with cold scorn.
‘Pray, how dare you, sir, utter the word to me?’

‘I never did.’

As this happens to be true, Mrs Lammle is thrown on the feminine
resource of saying, ‘I don’t care what you uttered or did not utter.’

After a little more walking and a little more silence, Mr Lammle breaks
the latter.

‘You shall proceed in your own way. You claim a right to ask me do I
mean to tell you. Do I mean to tell you what?’

‘That you are a man of property?’

‘No.’

‘Then you married me on false pretences?’

‘So be it. Next comes what you mean to say. Do you mean to say you are a
woman of property?’

‘No.’

‘Then you married me on false pretences.’

‘If you were so dull a fortune-hunter that you deceived yourself, or
if you were so greedy and grasping that you were over-willing to be
deceived by appearances, is it my fault, you adventurer?’ the lady
demands, with great asperity.

‘I asked Veneering, and he told me you were rich.’

‘Veneering!’ with great contempt.’ And what does Veneering know about
me!’

‘Was he not your trustee?’

‘No. I have no trustee, but the one you saw on the day when you
fraudulently married me. And his trust is not a very difficult one, for
it is only an annuity of a hundred and fifteen pounds. I think there are
some odd shillings or pence, if you are very particular.’

Mr Lammle bestows a by no means loving look upon the partner of his joys
and sorrows, and he mutters something; but checks himself.

‘Question for question. It is my turn again, Mrs Lammle. What made you
suppose me a man of property?’

‘You made me suppose you so. Perhaps you will deny that you always
presented yourself to me in that character?’

‘But you asked somebody, too. Come, Mrs Lammle, admission for admission.
You asked somebody?’

‘I asked Veneering.’

‘And Veneering knew as much of me as he knew of you, or as anybody knows
of him.’

After more silent walking, the bride stops short, to say in a passionate
manner:

‘I never will forgive the Veneerings for this!’

‘Neither will I,’ returns the bridegroom.

With that, they walk again; she, making those angry spirts in the sand;
he, dragging that dejected tail. The tide is low, and seems to have
thrown them together high on the bare shore. A gull comes sweeping by
their heads and flouts them. There was a golden surface on the brown
cliffs but now, and behold they are only damp earth. A taunting roar
comes from the sea, and the far-out rollers mount upon one another,
to look at the entrapped impostors, and to join in impish and exultant
gambols.

‘Do you pretend to believe,’ Mrs Lammle resumes, sternly, ‘when you talk
of my marrying you for worldly advantages, that it was within the bounds
of reasonable probability that I would have married you for yourself?’

‘Again there are two sides to the question, Mrs Lammle. What do you
pretend to believe?’

‘So you first deceive me and then insult me!’ cries the lady, with a
heaving bosom.

‘Not at all. I have originated nothing. The double-edged question was
yours.’

‘Was mine!’ the bride repeats, and her parasol breaks in her angry hand.

His colour has turned to a livid white, and ominous marks have come to
light about his nose, as if the finger of the very devil himself had,
within the last few moments, touched it here and there. But he has
repressive power, and she has none.

‘Throw it away,’ he coolly recommends as to the parasol; ‘you have made
it useless; you look ridiculous with it.’

Whereupon she calls him in her rage, ‘A deliberate villain,’ and so
casts the broken thing from her as that it strikes him in falling. The
finger-marks are something whiter for the instant, but he walks on at
her side.

She bursts into tears, declaring herself the wretchedest, the most
deceived, the worst-used, of women. Then she says that if she had
the courage to kill herself, she would do it. Then she calls him vile
impostor. Then she asks him, why, in the disappointment of his base
speculation, he does not take her life with his own hand, under the
present favourable circumstances. Then she cries again. Then she is
enraged again, and makes some mention of swindlers. Finally, she sits
down crying on a block of stone, and is in all the known and unknown
humours of her sex at once. Pending her changes, those aforesaid marks
in his face have come and gone, now here now there, like white steps
of a pipe on which the diabolical performer has played a tune. Also his
livid lips are parted at last, as if he were breathless with running.
Yet he is not.

‘Now, get up, Mrs Lammle, and let us speak reasonably.’

She sits upon her stone, and takes no heed of him.

‘Get up, I tell you.’

Raising her head, she looks contemptuously in his face, and repeats,
‘You tell me! Tell me, forsooth!’

She affects not to know that his eyes are fastened on her as she droops
her head again; but her whole figure reveals that she knows it uneasily.

‘Enough of this. Come! Do you hear? Get up.’

Yielding to his hand, she rises, and they walk again; but this time with
their faces turned towards their place of residence.

‘Mrs Lammle, we have both been deceiving, and we have both been
deceived. We have both been biting, and we have both been bitten. In a
nut-shell, there’s the state of the case.’

‘You sought me out--’

‘Tut! Let us have done with that. WE know very well how it was. Why
should you and I talk about it, when you and I can’t disguise it? To
proceed. I am disappointed and cut a poor figure.’

‘Am I no one?’

‘Some one--and I was coming to you, if you had waited a moment. You,
too, are disappointed and cut a poor figure.’

‘An injured figure!’

‘You are now cool enough, Sophronia, to see that you can’t be injured
without my being equally injured; and that therefore the mere word is
not to the purpose. When I look back, I wonder how I can have been such
a fool as to take you to so great an extent upon trust.’

‘And when I look back--’ the bride cries, interrupting.

‘And when you look back, you wonder how you can have been--you’ll excuse
the word?’

‘Most certainly, with so much reason.

‘--Such a fool as to take ME to so great an extent upon trust. But the
folly is committed on both sides. I cannot get rid of you; you cannot
get rid of me. What follows?’

‘Shame and misery,’ the bride bitterly replies.

‘I don’t know. A mutual understanding follows, and I think it may carry
us through. Here I split my discourse (give me your arm, Sophronia),
into three heads, to make it shorter and plainer. Firstly, it’s enough
to have been done, without the mortification of being known to have been
done. So we agree to keep the fact to ourselves. You agree?’

‘If it is possible, I do.’

‘Possible! We have pretended well enough to one another. Can’t we,
united, pretend to the world? Agreed. Secondly, we owe the Veneerings
a grudge, and we owe all other people the grudge of wishing them to be
taken in, as we ourselves have been taken in. Agreed?’

‘Yes. Agreed.’

‘We come smoothly to thirdly. You have called me an adventurer,
Sophronia. So I am. In plain uncomplimentary English, so I am. So are
you, my dear. So are many people. We agree to keep our own secret, and
to work together in furtherance of our own schemes.’

‘What schemes?’

‘Any scheme that will bring us money. By our own schemes, I mean our
joint interest. Agreed?’

She answers, after a little hesitation, ‘I suppose so. Agreed.’

‘Carried at once, you see! Now, Sophronia, only half a dozen words more.
We know one another perfectly. Don’t be tempted into twitting me with
the past knowledge that you have of me, because it is identical with
the past knowledge that I have of you, and in twitting me, you
twit yourself, and I don’t want to hear you do it. With this good
understanding established between us, it is better never done. To wind
up all:--You have shown temper today, Sophronia. Don’t be betrayed into
doing so again, because I have a Devil of a temper myself.’

So, the happy pair, with this hopeful marriage contract thus signed,
sealed, and delivered, repair homeward. If, when those infernal
finger-marks were on the white and breathless countenance of Alfred
Lammle, Esquire, they denoted that he conceived the purpose of subduing
his dear wife Mrs Alfred Lammle, by at once divesting her of any
lingering reality or pretence of self-respect, the purpose would seem
to have been presently executed. The mature young lady has mighty little
need of powder, now, for her downcast face, as he escorts her in the
light of the setting sun to their abode of bliss.



Chapter 11

PODSNAPPERY


Mr Podsnap was well to do, and stood very high in Mr Podsnap’s opinion.
Beginning with a good inheritance, he had married a good inheritance,
and had thriven exceedingly in the Marine Insurance way, and was
quite satisfied. He never could make out why everybody was not quite
satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a brilliant social example
in being particularly well satisfied with most things, and, above all
other things, with himself.

Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, Mr Podsnap
settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There
was a dignified conclusiveness--not to add a grand convenience--in
this way of getting rid of disagreeables which had done much towards
establishing Mr Podsnap in his lofty place in Mr Podsnap’s satisfaction.
‘I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t
admit it!’ Mr Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his
right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by
sweeping them behind him (and consequently sheer away) with those words
and a flushed face. For they affronted him.

Mr Podsnap’s world was not a very large world, morally; no, nor even
geographically: seeing that although his business was sustained upon
commerce with other countries, he considered other countries, with that
important reservation, a mistake, and of their manners and customs would
conclusively observe, ‘Not English!’ when, PRESTO! with a flourish of
the arm, and a flush of the face, they were swept away. Elsewise, the
world got up at eight, shaved close at a quarter-past, breakfasted at
nine, went to the City at ten, came home at half-past five, and dined
at seven. Mr Podsnap’s notions of the Arts in their integrity might have
been stated thus. Literature; large print, respectfully descriptive of
getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting
at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five,
and dining at seven. Painting and Sculpture; models and portraits
representing Professors of getting up at eight, shaving close at a
quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming
home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Music; a respectable
performance (without variations) on stringed and wind instruments,
sedately expressive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter
past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at
half-past five, and dining at seven. Nothing else to be permitted to
those same vagrants the Arts, on pain of excommunication. Nothing else
To Be--anywhere!

As a so eminently respectable man, Mr Podsnap was sensible of its being
required of him to take Providence under his protection. Consequently he
always knew exactly what Providence meant. Inferior and less respectable
men might fall short of that mark, but Mr Podsnap was always up to it.
And it was very remarkable (and must have been very comfortable) that
what Providence meant, was invariably what Mr Podsnap meant.

These may be said to have been the articles of a faith and school
which the present chapter takes the liberty of calling, after its
representative man, Podsnappery. They were confined within close bounds,
as Mr Podsnap’s own head was confined by his shirt-collar; and they
were enunciated with a sounding pomp that smacked of the creaking of Mr
Podsnap’s own boots.

There was a Miss Podsnap. And this young rocking-horse was being trained
in her mother’s art of prancing in a stately manner without ever getting
on. But the high parental action was not yet imparted to her, and
in truth she was but an undersized damsel, with high shoulders, low
spirits, chilled elbows, and a rasped surface of nose, who seemed to
take occasional frosty peeps out of childhood into womanhood, and to
shrink back again, overcome by her mother’s head-dress and her father
from head to foot--crushed by the mere dead-weight of Podsnappery.

A certain institution in Mr Podsnap’s mind which he called ‘the young
person’ may be considered to have been embodied in Miss Podsnap, his
daughter. It was an inconvenient and exacting institution, as requiring
everything in the universe to be filed down and fitted to it. The
question about everything was, would it bring a blush into the cheek of
the young person? And the inconvenience of the young person was, that,
according to Mr Podsnap, she seemed always liable to burst into
blushes when there was no need at all. There appeared to be no line of
demarcation between the young person’s excessive innocence, and another
person’s guiltiest knowledge. Take Mr Podsnap’s word for it, and the
soberest tints of drab, white, lilac, and grey, were all flaming red to
this troublesome Bull of a young person.

The Podsnaps lived in a shady angle adjoining Portman Square. They were
a kind of people certain to dwell in the shade, wherever they dwelt.
Miss Podsnap’s life had been, from her first appearance on this planet,
altogether of a shady order; for, Mr Podsnap’s young person was likely
to get little good out of association with other young persons, and had
therefore been restricted to companionship with not very congenial older
persons, and with massive furniture. Miss Podsnap’s early views of life
being principally derived from the reflections of it in her father’s
boots, and in the walnut and rosewood tables of the dim drawing-rooms,
and in their swarthy giants of looking-glasses, were of a sombre cast;
and it was not wonderful that now, when she was on most days solemnly
tooled through the Park by the side of her mother in a great tall
custard-coloured phaeton, she showed above the apron of that vehicle
like a dejected young person sitting up in bed to take a startled look
at things in general, and very strongly desiring to get her head under
the counterpane again.

Said Mr Podsnap to Mrs Podsnap, ‘Georgiana is almost eighteen.’

Said Mrs Podsnap to Mr Podsnap, assenting, ‘Almost eighteen.’

Said Mr Podsnap then to Mrs Podsnap, ‘Really I think we should have some
people on Georgiana’s birthday.’

Said Mrs Podsnap then to Mr Podsnap, ‘Which will enable us to clear off
all those people who are due.’

So it came to pass that Mr and Mrs Podsnap requested the honour of the
company of seventeen friends of their souls at dinner; and that they
substituted other friends of their souls for such of the seventeen
original friends of their souls as deeply regretted that a prior
engagement prevented their having the honour of dining with Mr and Mrs
Podsnap, in pursuance of their kind invitation; and that Mrs Podsnap
said of all these inconsolable personages, as she checked them off with
a pencil in her list, ‘Asked, at any rate, and got rid of;’ and that
they successfully disposed of a good many friends of their souls in this
way, and felt their consciences much lightened.

There were still other friends of their souls who were not entitled to
be asked to dinner, but had a claim to be invited to come and take a
haunch of mutton vapour-bath at half-past nine. For the clearing off
of these worthies, Mrs Podsnap added a small and early evening to the
dinner, and looked in at the music-shop to bespeak a well-conducted
automaton to come and play quadrilles for a carpet dance.

Mr and Mrs Veneering, and Mr and Mrs Veneering’s bran-new bride and
bridegroom, were of the dinner company; but the Podsnap establishment
had nothing else in common with the Veneerings. Mr Podsnap could
tolerate taste in a mushroom man who stood in need of that sort
of thing, but was far above it himself. Hideous solidity was the
characteristic of the Podsnap plate. Everything was made to look as
heavy as it could, and to take up as much room as possible. Everything
said boastfully, ‘Here you have as much of me in my ugliness as if I
were only lead; but I am so many ounces of precious metal worth so much
an ounce;--wouldn’t you like to melt me down?’ A corpulent straddling
epergne, blotched all over as if it had broken out in an eruption rather
than been ornamented, delivered this address from an unsightly silver
platform in the centre of the table. Four silver wine-coolers, each
furnished with four staring heads, each head obtrusively carrying a big
silver ring in each of its ears, conveyed the sentiment up and down the
table, and handed it on to the pot-bellied silver salt-cellars. All the
big silver spoons and forks widened the mouths of the company expressly
for the purpose of thrusting the sentiment down their throats with every
morsel they ate.

The majority of the guests were like the plate, and included several
heavy articles weighing ever so much. But there was a foreign gentleman
among them: whom Mr Podsnap had invited after much debate with
himself--believing the whole European continent to be in mortal alliance
against the young person--and there was a droll disposition, not only on
the part of Mr Podsnap but of everybody else, to treat him as if he were
a child who was hard of hearing.

As a delicate concession to this unfortunately-born foreigner, Mr
Podsnap, in receiving him, had presented his wife as ‘Madame Podsnap;’
also his daughter as ‘Mademoiselle Podsnap,’ with some inclination to
add ‘ma fille,’ in which bold venture, however, he checked himself. The
Veneerings being at that time the only other arrivals, he had added (in
a condescendingly explanatory manner), ‘Monsieur Vey-nair-reeng,’ and
had then subsided into English.

‘How Do You Like London?’ Mr Podsnap now inquired from his station of
host, as if he were administering something in the nature of a powder or
potion to the deaf child; ‘London, Londres, London?’

The foreign gentleman admired it.

‘You find it Very Large?’ said Mr Podsnap, spaciously.

The foreign gentleman found it very large.

‘And Very Rich?’

The foreign gentleman found it, without doubt, enormement riche.

‘Enormously Rich, We say,’ returned Mr Podsnap, in a condescending
manner. ‘Our English adverbs do Not terminate in Mong, and We Pronounce
the “ch” as if there were a “t” before it. We say Ritch.’

‘Reetch,’ remarked the foreign gentleman.

‘And Do You Find, Sir,’ pursued Mr Podsnap, with dignity, ‘Many
Evidences that Strike You, of our British Constitution in the Streets Of
The World’s Metropolis, London, Londres, London?’

The foreign gentleman begged to be pardoned, but did not altogether
understand.

‘The Constitution Britannique,’ Mr Podsnap explained, as if he were
teaching in an infant school. ‘We Say British, But You Say Britannique,
You Know’ (forgivingly, as if that were not his fault). ‘The
Constitution, Sir.’

The foreign gentleman said, ‘Mais, yees; I know eem.’

A youngish sallowish gentleman in spectacles, with a lumpy forehead,
seated in a supplementary chair at a corner of the table, here caused
a profound sensation by saying, in a raised voice, ‘ESKER,’ and then
stopping dead.

‘Mais oui,’ said the foreign gentleman, turning towards him. ‘Est-ce
que? Quoi donc?’

But the gentleman with the lumpy forehead having for the time delivered
himself of all that he found behind his lumps, spake for the time no
more.

‘I Was Inquiring,’ said Mr Podsnap, resuming the thread of his
discourse, ‘Whether You Have Observed in our Streets as We should say,
Upon our Pavvy as You would say, any Tokens--’

The foreign gentleman, with patient courtesy entreated pardon; ‘But what
was tokenz?’

‘Marks,’ said Mr Podsnap; ‘Signs, you know, Appearances--Traces.’

‘Ah! Of a Orse?’ inquired the foreign gentleman.

‘We call it Horse,’ said Mr Podsnap, with forbearance. ‘In England,
Angleterre, England, We Aspirate the “H,” and We Say “Horse.” Only our
Lower Classes Say “Orse!”’

‘Pardon,’ said the foreign gentleman; ‘I am alwiz wrong!’

‘Our Language,’ said Mr Podsnap, with a gracious consciousness of being
always right, ‘is Difficult. Ours is a Copious Language, and Trying to
Strangers. I will not Pursue my Question.’

But the lumpy gentleman, unwilling to give it up, again madly said,
‘ESKER,’ and again spake no more.

‘It merely referred,’ Mr Podsnap explained, with a sense of meritorious
proprietorship, ‘to Our Constitution, Sir. We Englishmen are Very Proud
of our Constitution, Sir. It Was Bestowed Upon Us By Providence. No
Other Country is so Favoured as This Country.’

‘And ozer countries?--’ the foreign gentleman was beginning, when Mr
Podsnap put him right again.

‘We do not say Ozer; we say Other: the letters are “T” and “H;” You say
Tay and Aish, You Know; (still with clemency). The sound is “th”--“th!”’

‘And OTHER countries,’ said the foreign gentleman. ‘They do how?’

‘They do, Sir,’ returned Mr Podsnap, gravely shaking his head; ‘they
do--I am sorry to be obliged to say it--AS they do.’

‘It was a little particular of Providence,’ said the foreign gentleman,
laughing; ‘for the frontier is not large.’

‘Undoubtedly,’ assented Mr Podsnap; ‘But So it is. It was the Charter
of the Land. This Island was Blest, Sir, to the Direct Exclusion of
such Other Countries as--as there may happen to be. And if we were all
Englishmen present, I would say,’ added Mr Podsnap, looking round upon
his compatriots, and sounding solemnly with his theme, ‘that there is in
the Englishman a combination of qualities, a modesty, an independence,
a responsibility, a repose, combined with an absence of everything
calculated to call a blush into the cheek of a young person, which one
would seek in vain among the Nations of the Earth.’

Having delivered this little summary, Mr Podsnap’s face flushed, as he
thought of the remote possibility of its being at all qualified by
any prejudiced citizen of any other country; and, with his favourite
right-arm flourish, he put the rest of Europe and the whole of Asia,
Africa, and America nowhere.

The audience were much edified by this passage of words; and Mr Podsnap,
feeling that he was in rather remarkable force to-day, became smiling
and conversational.

‘Has anything more been heard, Veneering,’ he inquired, ‘of the lucky
legatee?’

‘Nothing more,’ returned Veneering, ‘than that he has come into
possession of the property. I am told people now call him The Golden
Dustman. I mentioned to you some time ago, I think, that the young lady
whose intended husband was murdered is daughter to a clerk of mine?’

‘Yes, you told me that,’ said Podsnap; ‘and by-the-bye, I wish you would
tell it again here, for it’s a curious coincidence--curious that the
first news of the discovery should have been brought straight to your
table (when I was there), and curious that one of your people should
have been so nearly interested in it. Just relate that, will you?’

Veneering was more than ready to do it, for he had prospered exceedingly
upon the Harmon Murder, and had turned the social distinction it
conferred upon him to the account of making several dozen of bran-new
bosom-friends. Indeed, such another lucky hit would almost have set him
up in that way to his satisfaction. So, addressing himself to the most
desirable of his neighbours, while Mrs Veneering secured the next most
desirable, he plunged into the case, and emerged from it twenty minutes
afterwards with a Bank Director in his arms. In the mean time, Mrs
Veneering had dived into the same waters for a wealthy Ship-Broker, and
had brought him up, safe and sound, by the hair. Then Mrs Veneering had
to relate, to a larger circle, how she had been to see the girl, and how
she was really pretty, and (considering her station) presentable.
And this she did with such a successful display of her eight aquiline
fingers and their encircling jewels, that she happily laid hold of a
drifting General Officer, his wife and daughter, and not only restored
their animation which had become suspended, but made them lively friends
within an hour.

Although Mr Podsnap would in a general way have highly disapproved of
Bodies in rivers as ineligible topics with reference to the cheek of the
young person, he had, as one may say, a share in this affair which made
him a part proprietor. As its returns were immediate, too, in the way
of restraining the company from speechless contemplation of the
wine-coolers, it paid, and he was satisfied.

And now the haunch of mutton vapour-bath having received a gamey
infusion, and a few last touches of sweets and coffee, was quite ready,
and the bathers came; but not before the discreet automaton had got
behind the bars of the piano music-desk, and there presented the
appearance of a captive languishing in a rose-wood jail. And who now
so pleasant or so well assorted as Mr and Mrs Alfred Lammle, he all
sparkle, she all gracious contentment, both at occasional intervals
exchanging looks like partners at cards who played a game against All
England.

There was not much youth among the bathers, but there was no youth
(the young person always excepted) in the articles of Podsnappery. Bald
bathers folded their arms and talked to Mr Podsnap on the hearthrug;
sleek-whiskered bathers, with hats in their hands, lunged at Mrs Podsnap
and retreated; prowling bathers, went about looking into ornamental
boxes and bowls as if they had suspicions of larceny on the part of the
Podsnaps, and expected to find something they had lost at the bottom;
bathers of the gentler sex sat silently comparing ivory shoulders. All
this time and always, poor little Miss Podsnap, whose tiny efforts (if
she had made any) were swallowed up in the magnificence of her mother’s
rocking, kept herself as much out of sight and mind as she could,
and appeared to be counting on many dismal returns of the day. It was
somehow understood, as a secret article in the state proprieties of
Podsnappery that nothing must be said about the day. Consequently this
young damsel’s nativity was hushed up and looked over, as if it were
agreed on all hands that it would have been better that she had never
been born.

The Lammles were so fond of the dear Veneerings that they could not for
some time detach themselves from those excellent friends; but at length,
either a very open smile on Mr Lammle’s part, or a very secret elevation
of one of his gingerous eyebrows--certainly the one or the other--seemed
to say to Mrs Lammle, ‘Why don’t you play?’ And so, looking about her,
she saw Miss Podsnap, and seeming to say responsively, ‘That card?’ and
to be answered, ‘Yes,’ went and sat beside Miss Podsnap.

Mrs Lammle was overjoyed to escape into a corner for a little quiet
talk.

It promised to be a very quiet talk, for Miss Podsnap replied in a
flutter, ‘Oh! Indeed, it’s very kind of you, but I am afraid I DON’T
talk.’

‘Let us make a beginning,’ said the insinuating Mrs Lammle, with her
best smile.

‘Oh! I am afraid you’ll find me very dull. But Ma talks!’

That was plainly to be seen, for Ma was talking then at her usual
canter, with arched head and mane, opened eyes and nostrils.

‘Fond of reading perhaps?’

‘Yes. At least I--don’t mind that so much,’ returned Miss Podsnap.

‘M-m-m-m-music.’ So insinuating was Mrs Lammle that she got half a dozen
ms into the word before she got it out.

‘I haven’t nerve to play even if I could. Ma plays.’

(At exactly the same canter, and with a certain flourishing appearance
of doing something, Ma did, in fact, occasionally take a rock upon the
instrument.)

‘Of course you like dancing?’

‘Oh no, I don’t,’ said Miss Podsnap.

‘No? With your youth and attractions? Truly, my dear, you surprise me!’

‘I can’t say,’ observed Miss Podsnap, after hesitating considerably, and
stealing several timid looks at Mrs Lammle’s carefully arranged face,
‘how I might have liked it if I had been a--you won’t mention it, WILL
you?’

‘My dear! Never!’

‘No, I am sure you won’t. I can’t say then how I should have liked it,
if I had been a chimney-sweep on May-day.’

‘Gracious!’ was the exclamation which amazement elicited from Mrs
Lammle.

‘There! I knew you’d wonder. But you won’t mention it, will you?’

‘Upon my word, my love,’ said Mrs Lammle, ‘you make me ten times more
desirous, now I talk to you, to know you well than I was when I sat over
yonder looking at you. How I wish we could be real friends! Try me as a
real friend. Come! Don’t fancy me a frumpy old married woman, my dear;
I was married but the other day, you know; I am dressed as a bride now,
you see. About the chimney-sweeps?’

‘Hush! Ma’ll hear.’

‘She can’t hear from where she sits.’

‘Don’t you be too sure of that,’ said Miss Podsnap, in a lower voice.
‘Well, what I mean is, that they seem to enjoy it.’

‘And that perhaps you would have enjoyed it, if you had been one of
them?’

Miss Podsnap nodded significantly.

‘Then you don’t enjoy it now?’

‘How is it possible?’ said Miss Podsnap. ‘Oh it is such a dreadful
thing! If I was wicked enough--and strong enough--to kill anybody, it
should be my partner.’

This was such an entirely new view of the Terpsichorean art as
socially practised, that Mrs Lammle looked at her young friend in some
astonishment. Her young friend sat nervously twiddling her fingers in
a pinioned attitude, as if she were trying to hide her elbows. But this
latter Utopian object (in short sleeves) always appeared to be the great
inoffensive aim of her existence.

‘It sounds horrid, don’t it?’ said Miss Podsnap, with a penitential
face.

Mrs Lammle, not very well knowing what to answer, resolved herself into
a look of smiling encouragement.

‘But it is, and it always has been,’ pursued Miss Podsnap, ‘such a trial
to me! I so dread being awful. And it is so awful! No one knows what
I suffered at Madame Sauteuse’s, where I learnt to dance and make
presentation-curtseys, and other dreadful things--or at least where they
tried to teach me. Ma can do it.’

‘At any rate, my love,’ said Mrs Lammle, soothingly, ‘that’s over.’

‘Yes, it’s over,’ returned Miss Podsnap, ‘but there’s nothing gained by
that. It’s worse here, than at Madame Sauteuse’s. Ma was there, and Ma’s
here; but Pa wasn’t there, and company wasn’t there, and there were not
real partners there. Oh there’s Ma speaking to the man at the piano! Oh
there’s Ma going up to somebody! Oh I know she’s going to bring him
to me! Oh please don’t, please don’t, please don’t! Oh keep away, keep
away, keep away!’ These pious ejaculations Miss Podsnap uttered with her
eyes closed, and her head leaning back against the wall.

But the Ogre advanced under the pilotage of Ma, and Ma said, ‘Georgiana,
Mr Grompus,’ and the Ogre clutched his victim and bore her off to his
castle in the top couple. Then the discreet automaton who had surveyed
his ground, played a blossomless tuneless ‘set,’ and sixteen disciples
of Podsnappery went through the figures of - 1, Getting up at eight and
shaving close at a quarter past - 2, Breakfasting at nine - 3, Going to
the City at ten - 4, Coming home at half-past five - 5, Dining at seven,
and the grand chain.

While these solemnities were in progress, Mr Alfred Lammle (most loving
of husbands) approached the chair of Mrs Alfred Lammle (most loving of
wives), and bending over the back of it, trifled for some few seconds
with Mrs Lammle’s bracelet. Slightly in contrast with this brief airy
toying, one might have noticed a certain dark attention in Mrs Lammle’s
face as she said some words with her eyes on Mr Lammle’s waistcoat, and
seemed in return to receive some lesson. But it was all done as a breath
passes from a mirror.

And now, the grand chain riveted to the last link, the discreet
automaton ceased, and the sixteen, two and two, took a walk among
the furniture. And herein the unconsciousness of the Ogre Grompus was
pleasantly conspicuous; for, that complacent monster, believing that
he was giving Miss Podsnap a treat, prolonged to the utmost stretch
of possibility a peripatetic account of an archery meeting; while his
victim, heading the procession of sixteen as it slowly circled about,
like a revolving funeral, never raised her eyes except once to steal a
glance at Mrs Lammle, expressive of intense despair.

At length the procession was dissolved by the violent arrival of a
nutmeg, before which the drawing-room door bounced open as if it were a
cannon-ball; and while that fragrant article, dispersed through several
glasses of coloured warm water, was going the round of society, Miss
Podsnap returned to her seat by her new friend.

‘Oh my goodness,’ said Miss Podsnap. ‘THAT’S over! I hope you didn’t
look at me.’

‘My dear, why not?’

‘Oh I know all about myself,’ said Miss Podsnap.

‘I’ll tell you something I know about you, my dear,’ returned Mrs Lammle
in her winning way, ‘and that is, you are most unnecessarily shy.’

‘Ma ain’t,’ said Miss Podsnap. ‘--I detest you! Go along!’ This shot
was levelled under her breath at the gallant Grompus for bestowing an
insinuating smile upon her in passing.

‘Pardon me if I scarcely see, my dear Miss Podsnap,’ Mrs Lammle was
beginning when the young lady interposed.

‘If we are going to be real friends (and I suppose we are, for you are
the only person who ever proposed it) don’t let us be awful. It’s awful
enough to BE Miss Podsnap, without being called so. Call me Georgiana.’

‘Dearest Georgiana,’ Mrs Lammle began again.

‘Thank you,’ said Miss Podsnap.

‘Dearest Georgiana, pardon me if I scarcely see, my love, why your
mamma’s not being shy, is a reason why you should be.’

‘Don’t you really see that?’ asked Miss Podsnap, plucking at her fingers
in a troubled manner, and furtively casting her eyes now on Mrs Lammle,
now on the ground. ‘Then perhaps it isn’t?’

‘My dearest Georgiana, you defer much too readily to my poor opinion.
Indeed it is not even an opinion, darling, for it is only a confession
of my dullness.’

‘Oh YOU are not dull,’ returned Miss Podsnap. ‘I am dull, but you
couldn’t have made me talk if you were.’

Some little touch of conscience answering this perception of her having
gained a purpose, called bloom enough into Mrs Lammle’s face to make it
look brighter as she sat smiling her best smile on her dear Georgiana,
and shaking her head with an affectionate playfulness. Not that it meant
anything, but that Georgiana seemed to like it.

‘What I mean is,’ pursued Georgiana, ‘that Ma being so endowed with
awfulness, and Pa being so endowed with awfulness, and there being
so much awfulness everywhere--I mean, at least, everywhere where I
am--perhaps it makes me who am so deficient in awfulness, and frightened
at it--I say it very badly--I don’t know whether you can understand what
I mean?’

‘Perfectly, dearest Georgiana!’ Mrs Lammle was proceeding with every
reassuring wile, when the head of that young lady suddenly went back
against the wall again and her eyes closed.

‘Oh there’s Ma being awful with somebody with a glass in his eye! Oh I
know she’s going to bring him here! Oh don’t bring him, don’t bring him!
Oh he’ll be my partner with his glass in his eye! Oh what shall I do!’
This time Georgiana accompanied her ejaculations with taps of her feet
upon the floor, and was altogether in quite a desperate condition. But,
there was no escape from the majestic Mrs Podsnap’s production of an
ambling stranger, with one eye screwed up into extinction and the other
framed and glazed, who, having looked down out of that organ, as if he
descried Miss Podsnap at the bottom of some perpendicular shaft, brought
her to the surface, and ambled off with her. And then the captive at the
piano played another ‘set,’ expressive of his mournful aspirations after
freedom, and other sixteen went through the former melancholy motions,
and the ambler took Miss Podsnap for a furniture walk, as if he had
struck out an entirely original conception.

In the mean time a stray personage of a meek demeanour, who had wandered
to the hearthrug and got among the heads of tribes assembled there in
conference with Mr Podsnap, eliminated Mr Podsnap’s flush and
flourish by a highly unpolite remark; no less than a reference to the
circumstance that some half-dozen people had lately died in the streets,
of starvation. It was clearly ill-timed after dinner. It was not adapted
to the cheek of the young person. It was not in good taste.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Mr Podsnap, putting it behind him.

The meek man was afraid we must take it as proved, because there were
the Inquests and the Registrar’s returns.

‘Then it was their own fault,’ said Mr Podsnap.

Veneering and other elders of tribes commended this way out of it. At
once a short cut and a broad road.

The man of meek demeanour intimated that truly it would seem from
the facts, as if starvation had been forced upon the culprits in
question--as if, in their wretched manner, they had made their weak
protests against it--as if they would have taken the liberty of staving
it off if they could--as if they would rather not have been starved upon
the whole, if perfectly agreeable to all parties.

‘There is not,’ said Mr Podsnap, flushing angrily, ‘there is not a
country in the world, sir, where so noble a provision is made for the
poor as in this country.’

The meek man was quite willing to concede that, but perhaps it
rendered the matter even worse, as showing that there must be something
appallingly wrong somewhere.

‘Where?’ said Mr Podsnap.

The meek man hinted Wouldn’t it be well to try, very seriously, to find
out where?

‘Ah!’ said Mr Podsnap. ‘Easy to say somewhere; not so easy to say
where! But I see what you are driving at. I knew it from the first.
Centralization. No. Never with my consent. Not English.’

An approving murmur arose from the heads of tribes; as saying, ‘There
you have him! Hold him!’

He was not aware (the meek man submitted of himself) that he was driving
at any ization. He had no favourite ization that he knew of. But he
certainly was more staggered by these terrible occurrences than he was
by names, of howsoever so many syllables. Might he ask, was dying of
destitution and neglect necessarily English?

‘You know what the population of London is, I suppose,’ said Mr Podsnap.

The meek man supposed he did, but supposed that had absolutely nothing
to do with it, if its laws were well administered.

‘And you know; at least I hope you know;’ said Mr Podsnap, with
severity, ‘that Providence has declared that you shall have the poor
always with you?’

The meek man also hoped he knew that.

‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Mr Podsnap with a portentous air. ‘I am
glad to hear it. It will render you cautious how you fly in the face of
Providence.’

In reference to that absurd and irreverent conventional phrase, the meek
man said, for which Mr Podsnap was not responsible, he the meek man had
no fear of doing anything so impossible; but--

But Mr Podsnap felt that the time had come for flushing and flourishing
this meek man down for good. So he said:

‘I must decline to pursue this painful discussion. It is not pleasant to
my feelings; it is repugnant to my feelings. I have said that I do not
admit these things. I have also said that if they do occur (not that I
admit it), the fault lies with the sufferers themselves. It is not for
ME’--Mr Podsnap pointed ‘me’ forcibly, as adding by implication though
it may be all very well for YOU--‘it is not for me to impugn the
workings of Providence. I know better than that, I trust, and I have
mentioned what the intentions of Providence are. Besides,’ said
Mr Podsnap, flushing high up among his hair-brushes, with a strong
consciousness of personal affront, ‘the subject is a very disagreeable
one. I will go so far as to say it is an odious one. It is not one to be
introduced among our wives and young persons, and I--’ He finished with
that flourish of his arm which added more expressively than any words,
And I remove it from the face of the earth.

Simultaneously with this quenching of the meek man’s ineffectual fire;
Georgiana having left the ambler up a lane of sofa, in a No Thoroughfare
of back drawing-room, to find his own way out, came back to Mrs Lammle.
And who should be with Mrs Lammle, but Mr Lammle. So fond of her!

‘Alfred, my love, here is my friend. Georgiana, dearest girl, you must
like my husband next to me.’

Mr Lammle was proud to be so soon distinguished by this special
commendation to Miss Podsnap’s favour. But if Mr Lammle were prone to be
jealous of his dear Sophronia’s friendships, he would be jealous of her
feeling towards Miss Podsnap.

‘Say Georgiana, darling,’ interposed his wife.

‘Towards--shall I?--Georgiana.’ Mr Lammle uttered the name, with a
delicate curve of his right hand, from his lips outward. ‘For never have
I known Sophronia (who is not apt to take sudden likings) so attracted
and so captivated as she is by--shall I once more?--Georgiana.’

The object of this homage sat uneasily enough in receipt of it, and then
said, turning to Mrs Lammle, much embarrassed:

‘I wonder what you like me for! I am sure I can’t think.’

‘Dearest Georgiana, for yourself. For your difference from all around
you.’

‘Well! That may be. For I think I like you for your difference from all
around me,’ said Georgiana with a smile of relief.

‘We must be going with the rest,’ observed Mrs Lammle, rising with a
show of unwillingness, amidst a general dispersal. ‘We are real friends,
Georgiana dear?’

‘Real.’

‘Good night, dear girl!’

She had established an attraction over the shrinking nature upon which
her smiling eyes were fixed, for Georgiana held her hand while she
answered in a secret and half-frightened tone:

‘Don’t forget me when you are gone away. And come again soon. Good
night!’

Charming to see Mr and Mrs Lammle taking leave so gracefully, and going
down the stairs so lovingly and sweetly. Not quite so charming to see
their smiling faces fall and brood as they dropped moodily into separate
corners of their little carriage. But to be sure that was a sight behind
the scenes, which nobody saw, and which nobody was meant to see.

Certain big, heavy vehicles, built on the model of the Podsnap plate,
took away the heavy articles of guests weighing ever so much; and the
less valuable articles got away after their various manners; and the
Podsnap plate was put to bed. As Mr Podsnap stood with his back to the
drawing-room fire, pulling up his shirtcollar, like a veritable cock
of the walk literally pluming himself in the midst of his possessions,
nothing would have astonished him more than an intimation that Miss
Podsnap, or any other young person properly born and bred, could not be
exactly put away like the plate, brought out like the plate, polished
like the plate, counted, weighed, and valued like the plate. That such
a young person could possibly have a morbid vacancy in the heart for
anything younger than the plate, or less monotonous than the plate;
or that such a young person’s thoughts could try to scale the region
bounded on the north, south, east, and west, by the plate; was a
monstrous imagination which he would on the spot have flourished into
space. This perhaps in some sort arose from Mr Podsnap’s blushing young
person being, so to speak, all cheek; whereas there is a possibility
that there may be young persons of a rather more complex organization.

If Mr Podsnap, pulling up his shirt-collar, could only have heard
himself called ‘that fellow’ in a certain short dialogue, which passed
between Mr and Mrs Lammle in their opposite corners of their little
carriage, rolling home!

‘Sophronia, are you awake?’

‘Am I likely to be asleep, sir?’

‘Very likely, I should think, after that fellow’s company. Attend to
what I am going to say.’

‘I have attended to what you have already said, have I not? What else
have I been doing all to-night.’

‘Attend, I tell you,’ (in a raised voice) ‘to what I am going to say.
Keep close to that idiot girl. Keep her under your thumb. You have her
fast, and you are not to let her go. Do you hear?’

‘I hear you.’

‘I foresee there is money to be made out of this, besides taking that
fellow down a peg. We owe each other money, you know.’

Mrs Lammle winced a little at the reminder, but only enough to shake her
scents and essences anew into the atmosphere of the little carriage, as
she settled herself afresh in her own dark corner.



Chapter 12

THE SWEAT OF AN HONEST MAN’S BROW


Mr Mortimer Lightwood and Mr Eugene Wrayburn took a coffee-house dinner
together in Mr Lightwood’s office. They had newly agreed to set up a
joint establishment together. They had taken a bachelor cottage near
Hampton, on the brink of the Thames, with a lawn, and a boat-house; and
all things fitting, and were to float with the stream through the summer
and the Long Vacation.

It was not summer yet, but spring; and it was not gentle spring
ethereally mild, as in Thomson’s Seasons, but nipping spring with an
easterly wind, as in Johnson’s, Jackson’s, Dickson’s, Smith’s, and
Jones’s Seasons. The grating wind sawed rather than blew; and as it
sawed, the sawdust whirled about the sawpit. Every street was a sawpit,
and there were no top-sawyers; every passenger was an under-sawyer, with
the sawdust blinding him and choking him.

That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the
wind blows, gyrated here and there and everywhere. Whence can it come,
whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is
caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at
every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass,
seeks rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails. In Paris, where
nothing is wasted, costly and luxurious city though it be, but where
wonderful human ants creep out of holes and pick up every scrap, there
is no such thing. There, it blows nothing but dust. There, sharp eyes
and sharp stomachs reap even the east wind, and get something out of it.

The wind sawed, and the sawdust whirled. The shrubs wrung their many
hands, bemoaning that they had been over-persuaded by the sun to bud;
the young leaves pined; the sparrows repented of their early marriages,
like men and women; the colours of the rainbow were discernible, not
in floral spring, but in the faces of the people whom it nibbled and
pinched. And ever the wind sawed, and the sawdust whirled.

When the spring evenings are too long and light to shut out, and such
weather is rife, the city which Mr Podsnap so explanatorily called
London, Londres, London, is at its worst. Such a black shrill city,
combining the qualities of a smoky house and a scolding wife; such a
gritty city; such a hopeless city, with no rent in the leaden canopy of
its sky; such a beleaguered city, invested by the great Marsh Forces of
Essex and Kent. So the two old schoolfellows felt it to be, as, their
dinner done, they turned towards the fire to smoke. Young Blight was
gone, the coffee-house waiter was gone, the plates and dishes were gone,
the wine was going--but not in the same direction.

‘The wind sounds up here,’ quoth Eugene, stirring the fire, ‘as if we
were keeping a lighthouse. I wish we were.’

‘Don’t you think it would bore us?’ Lightwood asked.

‘Not more than any other place. And there would be no Circuit to go. But
that’s a selfish consideration, personal to me.’

‘And no clients to come,’ added Lightwood. ‘Not that that’s a selfish
consideration at all personal to ME.’

‘If we were on an isolated rock in a stormy sea,’ said Eugene, smoking
with his eyes on the fire, ‘Lady Tippins couldn’t put off to visit us,
or, better still, might put off and get swamped. People couldn’t ask one
to wedding breakfasts. There would be no Precedents to hammer at,
except the plain-sailing Precedent of keeping the light up. It would be
exciting to look out for wrecks.’

‘But otherwise,’ suggested Lightwood, ‘there might be a degree of
sameness in the life.’

‘I have thought of that also,’ said Eugene, as if he really had been
considering the subject in its various bearings with an eye to the
business; ‘but it would be a defined and limited monotony. It would
not extend beyond two people. Now, it’s a question with me, Mortimer,
whether a monotony defined with that precision and limited to that
extent, might not be more endurable than the unlimited monotony of one’s
fellow-creatures.’

As Lightwood laughed and passed the wine, he remarked, ‘We shall have an
opportunity, in our boating summer, of trying the question.’

‘An imperfect one,’ Eugene acquiesced, with a sigh, ‘but so we shall. I
hope we may not prove too much for one another.’

‘Now, regarding your respected father,’ said Lightwood, bringing him
to a subject they had expressly appointed to discuss: always the most
slippery eel of eels of subjects to lay hold of.

‘Yes, regarding my respected father,’ assented Eugene, settling himself
in his arm-chair. ‘I would rather have approached my respected father by
candlelight, as a theme requiring a little artificial brilliancy; but we
will take him by twilight, enlivened with a glow of Wallsend.’

He stirred the fire again as he spoke, and having made it blaze,
resumed.

‘My respected father has found, down in the parental neighbourhood, a
wife for his not-generally-respected son.’

‘With some money, of course?’

‘With some money, of course, or he would not have found her. My
respected father--let me shorten the dutiful tautology by substituting
in future M. R. F., which sounds military, and rather like the Duke of
Wellington.’

‘What an absurd fellow you are, Eugene!’

‘Not at all, I assure you. M. R. F. having always in the clearest manner
provided (as he calls it) for his children by pre-arranging from the
hour of the birth of each, and sometimes from an earlier period, what
the devoted little victim’s calling and course in life should be, M. R.
F. pre-arranged for myself that I was to be the barrister I am (with
the slight addition of an enormous practice, which has not accrued), and
also the married man I am not.’

‘The first you have often told me.’

‘The first I have often told you. Considering myself sufficiently
incongruous on my legal eminence, I have until now suppressed my
domestic destiny. You know M. R. F., but not as well as I do. If you
knew him as well as I do, he would amuse you.’

‘Filially spoken, Eugene!’

‘Perfectly so, believe me; and with every sentiment of affectionate
deference towards M. R. F. But if he amuses me, I can’t help it. When my
eldest brother was born, of course the rest of us knew (I mean the rest
of us would have known, if we had been in existence) that he was heir
to the Family Embarrassments--we call it before the company the Family
Estate. But when my second brother was going to be born by-and-by,
“this,” says M. R. F., “is a little pillar of the church.” Was born,
and became a pillar of the church; a very shaky one. My third brother
appeared, considerably in advance of his engagement to my mother; but
M. R. F., not at all put out by surprise, instantly declared him
a Circumnavigator. Was pitch-forked into the Navy, but has not
circumnavigated. I announced myself and was disposed of with the highly
satisfactory results embodied before you. When my younger brother was
half an hour old, it was settled by M. R. F. that he should have a
mechanical genius. And so on. Therefore I say that M. R. F. amuses me.’

‘Touching the lady, Eugene.’

‘There M. R. F. ceases to be amusing, because my intentions are opposed
to touching the lady.’

‘Do you know her?’

‘Not in the least.’

‘Hadn’t you better see her?’

‘My dear Mortimer, you have studied my character. Could I possibly go
down there, labelled “ELIGIBLE. ON VIEW,” and meet the lady, similarly
labelled? Anything to carry out M. R. F.’s arrangements, I am sure, with
the greatest pleasure--except matrimony. Could I possibly support it? I,
so soon bored, so constantly, so fatally?’

‘But you are not a consistent fellow, Eugene.’

‘In susceptibility to boredom,’ returned that worthy, ‘I assure you I am
the most consistent of mankind.’

‘Why, it was but now that you were dwelling in the advantages of a
monotony of two.’

‘In a lighthouse. Do me the justice to remember the condition. In a
lighthouse.’

Mortimer laughed again, and Eugene, having laughed too for the first
time, as if he found himself on reflection rather entertaining, relapsed
into his usual gloom, and drowsily said, as he enjoyed his cigar, ‘No,
there is no help for it; one of the prophetic deliveries of M. R. F.
must for ever remain unfulfilled. With every disposition to oblige him,
he must submit to a failure.’

It had grown darker as they talked, and the wind was sawing and the
sawdust was whirling outside paler windows. The underlying churchyard
was already settling into deep dim shade, and the shade was creeping up
to the housetops among which they sat. ‘As if,’ said Eugene, ‘as if the
churchyard ghosts were rising.’

He had walked to the window with his cigar in his mouth, to exalt its
flavour by comparing the fireside with the outside, when he stopped
midway on his return to his arm-chair, and said:

‘Apparently one of the ghosts has lost its way, and dropped in to be
directed. Look at this phantom!’

Lightwood, whose back was towards the door, turned his head, and there,
in the darkness of the entry, stood a something in the likeness of a
man: to whom he addressed the not irrelevant inquiry, ‘Who the devil are
you?’

‘I ask your pardons, Governors,’ replied the ghost, in a hoarse
double-barrelled whisper, ‘but might either on you be Lawyer Lightwood?’

‘What do you mean by not knocking at the door?’ demanded Mortimer.

‘I ask your pardons, Governors,’ replied the ghost, as before, ‘but
probable you was not aware your door stood open.’

‘What do you want?’

Hereunto the ghost again hoarsely replied, in its double-barrelled
manner, ‘I ask your pardons, Governors, but might one on you be Lawyer
Lightwood?’

‘One of us is,’ said the owner of that name.

‘All right, Governors Both,’ returned the ghost, carefully closing the
room door; ‘’tickler business.’

Mortimer lighted the candles. They showed the visitor to be an
ill-looking visitor with a squinting leer, who, as he spoke, fumbled
at an old sodden fur cap, formless and mangey, that looked like a furry
animal, dog or cat, puppy or kitten, drowned and decaying.

‘Now,’ said Mortimer, ‘what is it?’

‘Governors Both,’ returned the man, in what he meant to be a wheedling
tone, ‘which on you might be Lawyer Lightwood?’

‘I am.’

‘Lawyer Lightwood,’ ducking at him with a servile air, ‘I am a man as
gets my living, and as seeks to get my living, by the sweat of my brow.
Not to risk being done out of the sweat of my brow, by any chances, I
should wish afore going further to be swore in.’

‘I am not a swearer in of people, man.’

The visitor, clearly anything but reliant on this assurance, doggedly
muttered ‘Alfred David.’

‘Is that your name?’ asked Lightwood.

‘My name?’ returned the man. ‘No; I want to take a Alfred David.’

(Which Eugene, smoking and contemplating him, interpreted as meaning
Affidavit.)

‘I tell you, my good fellow,’ said Lightwood, with his indolent laugh,
‘that I have nothing to do with swearing.’

‘He can swear AT you,’ Eugene explained; ‘and so can I. But we can’t do
more for you.’

Much discomfited by this information, the visitor turned the drowned
dog or cat, puppy or kitten, about and about, and looked from one of
the Governors Both to the other of the Governors Both, while he deeply
considered within himself. At length he decided:

‘Then I must be took down.’

‘Where?’ asked Lightwood.

‘Here,’ said the man. ‘In pen and ink.’

‘First, let us know what your business is about.’

‘It’s about,’ said the man, taking a step forward, dropping his hoarse
voice, and shading it with his hand, ‘it’s about from five to ten
thousand pound reward. That’s what it’s about. It’s about Murder. That’s
what it’s about.’

‘Come nearer the table. Sit down. Will you have a glass of wine?’

‘Yes, I will,’ said the man; ‘and I don’t deceive you, Governors.’

It was given him. Making a stiff arm to the elbow, he poured the wine
into his mouth, tilted it into his right cheek, as saying, ‘What do you
think of it?’ tilted it into his left cheek, as saying, ‘What do YOU
think of it?’ jerked it into his stomach, as saying, ‘What do YOU think
of it?’ To conclude, smacked his lips, as if all three replied, ‘We
think well of it.’

‘Will you have another?’

‘Yes, I will,’ he repeated, ‘and I don’t deceive you, Governors.’ And
also repeated the other proceedings.

‘Now,’ began Lightwood, ‘what’s your name?’

‘Why, there you’re rather fast, Lawyer Lightwood,’ he replied, in a
remonstrant manner. ‘Don’t you see, Lawyer Lightwood? There you’re a
little bit fast. I’m going to earn from five to ten thousand pound by
the sweat of my brow; and as a poor man doing justice to the sweat of my
brow, is it likely I can afford to part with so much as my name without
its being took down?’

Deferring to the man’s sense of the binding powers of pen and ink and
paper, Lightwood nodded acceptance of Eugene’s nodded proposal to take
those spells in hand. Eugene, bringing them to the table, sat down as
clerk or notary.

‘Now,’ said Lightwood, ‘what’s your name?’

But further precaution was still due to the sweat of this honest
fellow’s brow.

‘I should wish, Lawyer Lightwood,’ he stipulated, ‘to have that T’other
Governor as my witness that what I said I said. Consequent, will the
T’other Governor be so good as chuck me his name and where he lives?’

Eugene, cigar in mouth and pen in hand, tossed him his card. After
spelling it out slowly, the man made it into a little roll, and tied it
up in an end of his neckerchief still more slowly.

‘Now,’ said Lightwood, for the third time, ‘if you have quite completed
your various preparations, my friend, and have fully ascertained that
your spirits are cool and not in any way hurried, what’s your name?’

‘Roger Riderhood.’

‘Dwelling-place?’

‘Lime’us Hole.’

‘Calling or occupation?’

Not quite so glib with this answer as with the previous two, Mr
Riderhood gave in the definition, ‘Waterside character.’

‘Anything against you?’ Eugene quietly put in, as he wrote.

Rather baulked, Mr Riderhood evasively remarked, with an innocent air,
that he believed the T’other Governor had asked him summa’t.

‘Ever in trouble?’ said Eugene.

‘Once.’ (Might happen to any man, Mr Riderhood added incidentally.)

‘On suspicion of--’

‘Of seaman’s pocket,’ said Mr Riderhood. ‘Whereby I was in reality the
man’s best friend, and tried to take care of him.’

‘With the sweat of your brow?’ asked Eugene.

‘Till it poured down like rain,’ said Roger Riderhood.

Eugene leaned back in his chair, and smoked with his eyes negligently
turned on the informer, and his pen ready to reduce him to more writing.
Lightwood also smoked, with his eyes negligently turned on the informer.

‘Now let me be took down again,’ said Riderhood, when he had turned the
drowned cap over and under, and had brushed it the wrong way (if it had
a right way) with his sleeve. ‘I give information that the man that done
the Harmon Murder is Gaffer Hexam, the man that found the body. The hand
of Jesse Hexam, commonly called Gaffer on the river and along shore, is
the hand that done that deed. His hand and no other.’

The two friends glanced at one another with more serious faces than they
had shown yet.

‘Tell us on what grounds you make this accusation,’ said Mortimer
Lightwood.

‘On the grounds,’ answered Riderhood, wiping his face with his sleeve,
‘that I was Gaffer’s pardner, and suspected of him many a long day and
many a dark night. On the grounds that I knowed his ways. On the grounds
that I broke the pardnership because I see the danger; which I warn you
his daughter may tell you another story about that, for anythink I can
say, but you know what it’ll be worth, for she’d tell you lies, the
world round and the heavens broad, to save her father. On the grounds
that it’s well understood along the cause’ays and the stairs that he
done it. On the grounds that he’s fell off from, because he done it. On
the grounds that I will swear he done it. On the grounds that you may
take me where you will, and get me sworn to it. I don’t want to back out
of the consequences. I have made up MY mind. Take me anywheres.’

‘All this is nothing,’ said Lightwood.

‘Nothing?’ repeated Riderhood, indignantly and amazedly.

‘Merely nothing. It goes to no more than that you suspect this man of
the crime. You may do so with some reason, or you may do so with no
reason, but he cannot be convicted on your suspicion.’

‘Haven’t I said--I appeal to the T’other Governor as my witness--haven’t
I said from the first minute that I opened my mouth in this here
world-without-end-everlasting chair’ (he evidently used that form of
words as next in force to an affidavit), ‘that I was willing to swear
that he done it? Haven’t I said, Take me and get me sworn to it? Don’t I
say so now? You won’t deny it, Lawyer Lightwood?’

‘Surely not; but you only offer to swear to your suspicion, and I tell
you it is not enough to swear to your suspicion.’

‘Not enough, ain’t it, Lawyer Lightwood?’ he cautiously demanded.

‘Positively not.’

‘And did I say it WAS enough? Now, I appeal to the T’other Governor.
Now, fair! Did I say so?’

‘He certainly has not said that he had no more to tell,’ Eugene observed
in a low voice without looking at him, ‘whatever he seemed to imply.’

‘Hah!’ cried the informer, triumphantly perceiving that the remark was
generally in his favour, though apparently not closely understanding it.
‘Fort’nate for me I had a witness!’

‘Go on, then,’ said Lightwood. ‘Say out what you have to say. No
after-thought.’

‘Let me be took down then!’ cried the informer, eagerly and anxiously.
‘Let me be took down, for by George and the Draggin I’m a coming to it
now! Don’t do nothing to keep back from a honest man the fruits of the
sweat of his brow! I give information, then, that he told me that he
done it. Is THAT enough?’

‘Take care what you say, my friend,’ returned Mortimer.

‘Lawyer Lightwood, take care, you, what I say; for I judge you’ll be
answerable for follering it up!’ Then, slowly and emphatically beating
it all out with his open right hand on the palm of his left; ‘I,
Roger Riderhood, Lime’us Hole, Waterside character, tell you, Lawyer
Lightwood, that the man Jesse Hexam, commonly called upon the river and
along-shore Gaffer, told me that he done the deed. What’s more, he told
me with his own lips that he done the deed. What’s more, he said that he
done the deed. And I’ll swear it!’

‘Where did he tell you so?’

‘Outside,’ replied Riderhood, always beating it out, with his head
determinedly set askew, and his eyes watchfully dividing their
attention between his two auditors, ‘outside the door of the Six Jolly
Fellowships, towards a quarter after twelve o’clock at midnight--but I
will not in my conscience undertake to swear to so fine a matter as
five minutes--on the night when he picked up the body. The Six Jolly
Fellowships won’t run away. If it turns out that he warn’t at the Six
Jolly Fellowships that night at midnight, I’m a liar.’

‘What did he say?’

‘I’ll tell you (take me down, T’other Governor, I ask no better). He
come out first; I come out last. I might be a minute arter him; I might
be half a minute, I might be a quarter of a minute; I cannot swear to
that, and therefore I won’t. That’s knowing the obligations of a Alfred
David, ain’t it?’

‘Go on.’

‘I found him a waiting to speak to me. He says to me, “Rogue
Riderhood”--for that’s the name I’m mostly called by--not for any
meaning in it, for meaning it has none, but because of its being similar
to Roger.’

‘Never mind that.’

‘’Scuse ME, Lawyer Lightwood, it’s a part of the truth, and as such I
do mind it, and I must mind it and I will mind it. “Rogue Riderhood,”
 he says, “words passed betwixt us on the river tonight.” Which they had;
ask his daughter! “I threatened you,” he says, “to chop you over the
fingers with my boat’s stretcher, or take a aim at your brains with my
boathook. I did so on accounts of your looking too hard at what I had in
tow, as if you was suspicious, and on accounts of your holding on to the
gunwale of my boat.” I says to him, “Gaffer, I know it.” He says to me,
“Rogue Riderhood, you are a man in a dozen”--I think he said in a score,
but of that I am not positive, so take the lowest figure, for precious
be the obligations of a Alfred David. “And,” he says, “when your
fellow-men is up, be it their lives or be it their watches, sharp is
ever the word with you. Had you suspicions?” I says, “Gaffer, I had;
and what’s more, I have.” He falls a shaking, and he says, “Of what?” I
says, “Of foul play.” He falls a shaking worse, and he says, “There WAS
foul play then. I done it for his money. Don’t betray me!” Those were
the words as ever he used.’

There was a silence, broken only by the fall of the ashes in the grate.
An opportunity which the informer improved by smearing himself all
over the head and neck and face with his drowned cap, and not at all
improving his own appearance.

‘What more?’ asked Lightwood.

‘Of him, d’ye mean, Lawyer Lightwood?’

‘Of anything to the purpose.’

‘Now, I’m blest if I understand you, Governors Both,’ said the informer,
in a creeping manner: propitiating both, though only one had spoken.
‘What? Ain’t THAT enough?’

‘Did you ask him how he did it, where he did it, when he did it?’

‘Far be it from me, Lawyer Lightwood! I was so troubled in my mind, that
I wouldn’t have knowed more, no, not for the sum as I expect to earn
from you by the sweat of my brow, twice told! I had put an end to the
pardnership. I had cut the connexion. I couldn’t undo what was done; and
when he begs and prays, “Old pardner, on my knees, don’t split upon me!”
 I only makes answer “Never speak another word to Roger Riderhood, nor
look him in the face!” and I shuns that man.’

Having given these words a swing to make them mount the higher and go
the further, Rogue Riderhood poured himself out another glass of wine
unbidden, and seemed to chew it, as, with the half-emptied glass in his
hand, he stared at the candles.

Mortimer glanced at Eugene, but Eugene sat glowering at his paper,
and would give him no responsive glance. Mortimer again turned to the
informer, to whom he said:

‘You have been troubled in your mind a long time, man?’

Giving his wine a final chew, and swallowing it, the informer answered
in a single word:

‘Hages!’

‘When all that stir was made, when the Government reward was offered,
when the police were on the alert, when the whole country rang with the
crime!’ said Mortimer, impatiently.

‘Hah!’ Mr Riderhood very slowly and hoarsely chimed in, with several
retrospective nods of his head. ‘Warn’t I troubled in my mind then!’

‘When conjecture ran wild, when the most extravagant suspicions were
afloat, when half a dozen innocent people might have been laid by the
heels any hour in the day!’ said Mortimer, almost warming.

‘Hah!’ Mr Riderhood chimed in, as before. ‘Warn’t I troubled in my mind
through it all!’

‘But he hadn’t,’ said Eugene, drawing a lady’s head upon his
writing-paper, and touching it at intervals, ‘the opportunity then of
earning so much money, you see.’

‘The T’other Governor hits the nail, Lawyer Lightwood! It was that as
turned me. I had many times and again struggled to relieve myself of the
trouble on my mind, but I couldn’t get it off. I had once very nigh
got it off to Miss Abbey Potterson which keeps the Six Jolly
Fellowships--there is the ‘ouse, it won’t run away,--there lives the
lady, she ain’t likely to be struck dead afore you get there--ask
her!--but I couldn’t do it. At last, out comes the new bill with your
own lawful name, Lawyer Lightwood, printed to it, and then I asks the
question of my own intellects, Am I to have this trouble on my mind for
ever? Am I never to throw it off? Am I always to think more of Gaffer
than of my own self? If he’s got a daughter, ain’t I got a daughter?’

‘And echo answered--?’ Eugene suggested.

‘“You have,”’ said Mr Riderhood, in a firm tone.

‘Incidentally mentioning, at the same time, her age?’ inquired Eugene.

‘Yes, governor. Two-and-twenty last October. And then I put it to
myself, “Regarding the money. It is a pot of money.” For it IS a pot,’
said Mr Riderhood, with candour, ‘and why deny it?’

‘Hear!’ from Eugene as he touched his drawing.

‘“It is a pot of money; but is it a sin for a labouring man that
moistens every crust of bread he earns, with his tears--or if not with
them, with the colds he catches in his head--is it a sin for that man to
earn it? Say there is anything again earning it.” This I put to myself
strong, as in duty bound; “how can it be said without blaming Lawyer
Lightwood for offering it to be earned?” And was it for ME to blame
Lawyer Lightwood? No.’

‘No,’ said Eugene.

‘Certainly not, Governor,’ Mr Riderhood acquiesced. ‘So I made up my
mind to get my trouble off my mind, and to earn by the sweat of my brow
what was held out to me. And what’s more,’ he added, suddenly turning
bloodthirsty, ‘I mean to have it! And now I tell you, once and away,
Lawyer Lightwood, that Jesse Hexam, commonly called Gaffer, his hand and
no other, done the deed, on his own confession to me. And I give him up
to you, and I want him took. This night!’

After another silence, broken only by the fall of the ashes in the
grate, which attracted the informer’s attention as if it were the
chinking of money, Mortimer Lightwood leaned over his friend, and said
in a whisper:

‘I suppose I must go with this fellow to our imperturbable friend at the
police-station.’

‘I suppose,’ said Eugene, ‘there is no help for it.’

‘Do you believe him?’

‘I believe him to be a thorough rascal. But he may tell the truth, for
his own purpose, and for this occasion only.’

‘It doesn’t look like it.’

‘HE doesn’t,’ said Eugene. ‘But neither is his late partner, whom he
denounces, a prepossessing person. The firm are cut-throat Shepherds
both, in appearance. I should like to ask him one thing.’

The subject of this conference sat leering at the ashes, trying with
all his might to overhear what was said, but feigning abstraction as the
‘Governors Both’ glanced at him.

‘You mentioned (twice, I think) a daughter of this Hexam’s,’ said
Eugene, aloud. ‘You don’t mean to imply that she had any guilty
knowledge of the crime?’

The honest man, after considering--perhaps considering how his answer
might affect the fruits of the sweat of his brow--replied, unreservedly,
‘No, I don’t.’

‘And you implicate no other person?’

‘It ain’t what I implicate, it’s what Gaffer implicated,’ was the dogged
and determined answer. ‘I don’t pretend to know more than that his words
to me was, “I done it.” Those was his words.’

‘I must see this out, Mortimer,’ whispered Eugene, rising. ‘How shall we
go?’

‘Let us walk,’ whispered Lightwood, ‘and give this fellow time to think
of it.’

Having exchanged the question and answer, they prepared themselves
for going out, and Mr Riderhood rose. While extinguishing the candles,
Lightwood, quite as a matter of course took up the glass from which that
honest gentleman had drunk, and coolly tossed it under the grate, where
it fell shivering into fragments.

‘Now, if you will take the lead,’ said Lightwood, ‘Mr Wrayburn and I
will follow. You know where to go, I suppose?’

‘I suppose I do, Lawyer Lightwood.’

‘Take the lead, then.’

The waterside character pulled his drowned cap over his ears with both
hands, and making himself more round-shouldered than nature had made
him, by the sullen and persistent slouch with which he went, went
down the stairs, round by the Temple Church, across the Temple into
Whitefriars, and so on by the waterside streets.

‘Look at his hang-dog air,’ said Lightwood, following.

‘It strikes me rather as a hang-MAN air,’ returned Eugene. ‘He has
undeniable intentions that way.’

They said little else as they followed. He went on before them as an
ugly Fate might have done, and they kept him in view, and would have
been glad enough to lose sight of him. But on he went before them,
always at the same distance, and the same rate. Aslant against the hard
implacable weather and the rough wind, he was no more to be driven back
than hurried forward, but held on like an advancing Destiny. There came,
when they were about midway on their journey, a heavy rush of hail,
which in a few minutes pelted the streets clear, and whitened them. It
made no difference to him. A man’s life being to be taken and the price
of it got, the hailstones to arrest the purpose must lie larger and
deeper than those. He crashed through them, leaving marks in the
fast-melting slush that were mere shapeless holes; one might have
fancied, following, that the very fashion of humanity had departed from
his feet.

The blast went by, and the moon contended with the fast-flying clouds,
and the wild disorder reigning up there made the pitiful little tumults
in the streets of no account. It was not that the wind swept all
the brawlers into places of shelter, as it had swept the hail still
lingering in heaps wherever there was refuge for it; but that it seemed
as if the streets were absorbed by the sky, and the night were all in
the air.

‘If he has had time to think of it,’ said Eugene, ‘he has not had time to
think better of it--or differently of it, if that’s better. There is no
sign of drawing back in him; and as I recollect this place, we must be
close upon the corner where we alighted that night.’

In fact, a few abrupt turns brought them to the river side, where they
had slipped about among the stones, and where they now slipped more; the
wind coming against them in slants and flaws, across the tide and the
windings of the river, in a furious way. With that habit of getting
under the lee of any shelter which waterside characters acquire, the
waterside character at present in question led the way to the leeside of
the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters before he spoke.

‘Look round here, Lawyer Lightwood, at them red curtains. It’s the
Fellowships, the ‘ouse as I told you wouldn’t run away. And has it run
away?’

Not showing himself much impressed by this remarkable confirmation of
the informer’s evidence, Lightwood inquired what other business they had
there?

‘I wished you to see the Fellowships for yourself, Lawyer Lightwood,
that you might judge whether I’m a liar; and now I’ll see Gaffer’s
window for myself, that we may know whether he’s at home.’

With that, he crept away.

‘He’ll come back, I suppose?’ murmured Lightwood.

‘Ay! and go through with it,’ murmured Eugene.

He came back after a very short interval indeed.

‘Gaffer’s out, and his boat’s out. His daughter’s at home, sitting
a-looking at the fire. But there’s some supper getting ready, so
Gaffer’s expected. I can find what move he’s upon, easy enough,
presently.’

Then he beckoned and led the way again, and they came to the
police-station, still as clean and cool and steady as before, saving
that the flame of its lamp--being but a lamp-flame, and only attached to
the Force as an outsider--flickered in the wind.

Also, within doors, Mr Inspector was at his studies as of yore.
He recognized the friends the instant they reappeared, but their
reappearance had no effect on his composure. Not even the circumstance
that Riderhood was their conductor moved him, otherwise than that as he
took a dip of ink he seemed, by a settlement of his chin in his stock,
to propound to that personage, without looking at him, the question,
‘What have YOU been up to, last?’

Mortimer Lightwood asked him, would he be so good as look at those
notes? Handing him Eugene’s.

Having read the first few lines, Mr Inspector mounted to that (for him)
extraordinary pitch of emotion that he said, ‘Does either of you two
gentlemen happen to have a pinch of snuff about him?’ Finding that
neither had, he did quite as well without it, and read on.

‘Have you heard these read?’ he then demanded of the honest man.

‘No,’ said Riderhood.

‘Then you had better hear them.’ And so read them aloud, in an official
manner.

‘Are these notes correct, now, as to the information you bring here and
the evidence you mean to give?’ he asked, when he had finished reading.

‘They are. They are as correct,’ returned Mr Riderhood, ‘as I am. I
can’t say more than that for ‘em.’

‘I’ll take this man myself, sir,’ said Mr Inspector to Lightwood. Then
to Riderhood, ‘Is he at home? Where is he? What’s he doing? You have
made it your business to know all about him, no doubt.’

Riderhood said what he did know, and promised to find out in a few
minutes what he didn’t know.

‘Stop,’ said Mr Inspector; ‘not till I tell you: We mustn’t look like
business. Would you two gentlemen object to making a pretence of taking
a glass of something in my company at the Fellowships? Well-conducted
house, and highly respectable landlady.’

They replied that they would be happy to substitute a reality for the
pretence, which, in the main, appeared to be as one with Mr Inspector’s
meaning.

‘Very good,’ said he, taking his hat from its peg, and putting a pair of
handcuffs in his pocket as if they were his gloves. ‘Reserve!’ Reserve
saluted. ‘You know where to find me?’ Reserve again saluted. ‘Riderhood,
when you have found out concerning his coming home, come round to the
window of Cosy, tap twice at it, and wait for me. Now, gentlemen.’

As the three went out together, and Riderhood slouched off from under
the trembling lamp his separate way, Lightwood asked the officer what he
thought of this?

Mr Inspector replied, with due generality and reticence, that it was
always more likely that a man had done a bad thing than that he hadn’t.
That he himself had several times ‘reckoned up’ Gaffer, but had never
been able to bring him to a satisfactory criminal total. That if this
story was true, it was only in part true. That the two men, very shy
characters, would have been jointly and pretty equally ‘in it;’ but that
this man had ‘spotted’ the other, to save himself and get the money.

‘And I think,’ added Mr Inspector, in conclusion, ‘that if all goes
well with him, he’s in a tolerable way of getting it. But as this is the
Fellowships, gentlemen, where the lights are, I recommend dropping
the subject. You can’t do better than be interested in some lime works
anywhere down about Northfleet, and doubtful whether some of your lime
don’t get into bad company as it comes up in barges.’

‘You hear Eugene?’ said Lightwood, over his shoulder. ‘You are deeply
interested in lime.’

‘Without lime,’ returned that unmoved barrister-at-law, ‘my existence
would be unilluminated by a ray of hope.’



Chapter 13

TRACKING THE BIRD OF PREY


The two lime merchants, with their escort, entered the dominions of
Miss Abbey Potterson, to whom their escort (presenting them and their
pretended business over the half-door of the bar, in a confidential
way) preferred his figurative request that ‘a mouthful of fire’ might
be lighted in Cosy. Always well disposed to assist the constituted
authorities, Miss Abbey bade Bob Gliddery attend the gentlemen to
that retreat, and promptly enliven it with fire and gaslight. Of this
commission the bare-armed Bob, leading the way with a flaming wisp of
paper, so speedily acquitted himself, that Cosy seemed to leap out of a
dark sleep and embrace them warmly, the moment they passed the lintels
of its hospitable door.

‘They burn sherry very well here,’ said Mr Inspector, as a piece of
local intelligence. ‘Perhaps you gentlemen might like a bottle?’

The answer being By all means, Bob Gliddery received his instructions
from Mr Inspector, and departed in a becoming state of alacrity
engendered by reverence for the majesty of the law.

‘It’s a certain fact,’ said Mr Inspector, ‘that this man we have
received our information from,’ indicating Riderhood with his thumb over
his shoulder, ‘has for some time past given the other man a bad name
arising out of your lime barges, and that the other man has been avoided
in consequence. I don’t say what it means or proves, but it’s a certain
fact. I had it first from one of the opposite sex of my acquaintance,’
vaguely indicating Miss Abbey with his thumb over his shoulder, ‘down
away at a distance, over yonder.’

Then probably Mr Inspector was not quite unprepared for their visit that
evening? Lightwood hinted.

‘Well you see,’ said Mr Inspector, ‘it was a question of making a move.
It’s of no use moving if you don’t know what your move is. You had
better by far keep still. In the matter of this lime, I certainly had
an idea that it might lie betwixt the two men; I always had that idea.
Still I was forced to wait for a start, and I wasn’t so lucky as to get
a start. This man that we have received our information from, has got
a start, and if he don’t meet with a check he may make the running and
come in first. There may turn out to be something considerable for him
that comes in second, and I don’t mention who may or who may not try
for that place. There’s duty to do, and I shall do it, under any
circumstances; to the best of my judgment and ability.’

‘Speaking as a shipper of lime--’ began Eugene.

‘Which no man has a better right to do than yourself, you know,’ said Mr
Inspector.

‘I hope not,’ said Eugene; ‘my father having been a shipper of lime
before me, and my grandfather before him--in fact we having been a
family immersed to the crowns of our heads in lime during several
generations--I beg to observe that if this missing lime could be got
hold of without any young female relative of any distinguished gentleman
engaged in the lime trade (which I cherish next to my life) being
present, I think it might be a more agreeable proceeding to the
assisting bystanders, that is to say, lime-burners.’

‘I also,’ said Lightwood, pushing his friend aside with a laugh, ‘should
much prefer that.’

‘It shall be done, gentlemen, if it can be done conveniently,’ said
Mr Inspector, with coolness. ‘There is no wish on my part to cause any
distress in that quarter. Indeed, I am sorry for that quarter.’

‘There was a boy in that quarter,’ remarked Eugene. ‘He is still there?’

‘No,’ said Mr Inspector. ‘He has quitted those works. He is otherwise
disposed of.’

‘Will she be left alone then?’ asked Eugene.

‘She will be left,’ said Mr Inspector, ‘alone.’

Bob’s reappearance with a steaming jug broke off the conversation. But
although the jug steamed forth a delicious perfume, its contents had not
received that last happy touch which the surpassing finish of the Six
Jolly Fellowship Porters imparted on such momentous occasions. Bob
carried in his left hand one of those iron models of sugar-loaf hats,
before mentioned, into which he emptied the jug, and the pointed end of
which he thrust deep down into the fire, so leaving it for a few moments
while he disappeared and reappeared with three bright drinking-glasses.
Placing these on the table and bending over the fire, meritoriously
sensible of the trying nature of his duty, he watched the wreaths of
steam, until at the special instant of projection he caught up the iron
vessel and gave it one delicate twirl, causing it to send forth one
gentle hiss. Then he restored the contents to the jug; held over the
steam of the jug, each of the three bright glasses in succession;
finally filled them all, and with a clear conscience awaited the
applause of his fellow-creatures.

It was bestowed (Mr Inspector having proposed as an appropriate
sentiment ‘The lime trade!’) and Bob withdrew to report the
commendations of the guests to Miss Abbey in the bar. It may be here
in confidence admitted that, the room being close shut in his absence,
there had not appeared to be the slightest reason for the elaborate
maintenance of this same lime fiction. Only it had been regarded by Mr
Inspector as so uncommonly satisfactory, and so fraught with mysterious
virtues, that neither of his clients had presumed to question it.

Two taps were now heard on the outside of the window. Mr Inspector,
hastily fortifying himself with another glass, strolled out with a
noiseless foot and an unoccupied countenance. As one might go to survey
the weather and the general aspect of the heavenly bodies.

‘This is becoming grim, Mortimer,’ said Eugene, in a low voice. ‘I don’t
like this.’

‘Nor I’ said Lightwood. ‘Shall we go?’

‘Being here, let us stay. You ought to see it out, and I won’t leave
you. Besides, that lonely girl with the dark hair runs in my head. It
was little more than a glimpse we had of her that last time, and yet
I almost see her waiting by the fire to-night. Do you feel like a dark
combination of traitor and pickpocket when you think of that girl?’

‘Rather,’ returned Lightwood. ‘Do you?’

‘Very much so.’

Their escort strolled back again, and reported. Divested of its various
lime-lights and shadows, his report went to the effect that Gaffer was
away in his boat, supposed to be on his old look-out; that he had been
expected last high-water; that having missed it for some reason or
other, he was not, according to his usual habits at night, to be counted
on before next high-water, or it might be an hour or so later; that his
daughter, surveyed through the window, would seem to be so expecting
him, for the supper was not cooking, but set out ready to be cooked;
that it would be high-water at about one, and that it was now barely
ten; that there was nothing to be done but watch and wait; that the
informer was keeping watch at the instant of that present reporting, but
that two heads were better than one (especially when the second was
Mr Inspector’s); and that the reporter meant to share the watch. And
forasmuch as crouching under the lee of a hauled-up boat on a night when
it blew cold and strong, and when the weather was varied with blasts of
hail at times, might be wearisome to amateurs, the reporter closed with
the recommendation that the two gentlemen should remain, for a while at
any rate, in their present quarters, which were weather-tight and warm.

They were not inclined to dispute this recommendation, but they wanted
to know where they could join the watchers when so disposed. Rather than
trust to a verbal description of the place, which might mislead, Eugene
(with a less weighty sense of personal trouble on him than he usually
had) would go out with Mr Inspector, note the spot, and come back.

On the shelving bank of the river, among the slimy stones of a
causeway--not the special causeway of the Six Jolly Fellowships, which
had a landing-place of its own, but another, a little removed, and
very near to the old windmill which was the denounced man’s
dwelling-place--were a few boats; some, moored and already beginning to
float; others, hauled up above the reach of the tide. Under one of these
latter, Eugene’s companion disappeared. And when Eugene had observed its
position with reference to the other boats, and had made sure that he
could not miss it, he turned his eyes upon the building where, as he had
been told, the lonely girl with the dark hair sat by the fire.

He could see the light of the fire shining through the window. Perhaps
it drew him on to look in. Perhaps he had come out with the express
intention. That part of the bank having rank grass growing on it, there
was no difficulty in getting close, without any noise of footsteps: it
was but to scramble up a ragged face of pretty hard mud some three or
four feet high and come upon the grass and to the window. He came to the
window by that means.

She had no other light than the light of the fire. The unkindled lamp
stood on the table. She sat on the ground, looking at the brazier, with
her face leaning on her hand. There was a kind of film or flicker on
her face, which at first he took to be the fitful firelight; but, on a
second look, he saw that she was weeping. A sad and solitary spectacle,
as shown him by the rising and the falling of the fire.

It was a little window of but four pieces of glass, and was not
curtained; he chose it because the larger window near it was. It showed
him the room, and the bills upon the wall respecting the drowned people
starting out and receding by turns. But he glanced slightly at them,
though he looked long and steadily at her. A deep rich piece of colour,
with the brown flush of her cheek and the shining lustre of her hair,
though sad and solitary, weeping by the rising and the falling of the
fire.

She started up. He had been so very still that he felt sure it was not
he who had disturbed her, so merely withdrew from the window and stood
near it in the shadow of the wall. She opened the door, and said in an
alarmed tone, ‘Father, was that you calling me?’ And again, ‘Father!’
And once again, after listening, ‘Father! I thought I heard you call me
twice before!’

No response. As she re-entered at the door, he dropped over the bank and
made his way back, among the ooze and near the hiding-place, to Mortimer
Lightwood: to whom he told what he had seen of the girl, and how this
was becoming very grim indeed.

‘If the real man feels as guilty as I do,’ said Eugene, ‘he is
remarkably uncomfortable.’

‘Influence of secrecy,’ suggested Lightwood.

‘I am not at all obliged to it for making me Guy Fawkes in the vault and
a Sneak in the area both at once,’ said Eugene. ‘Give me some more of
that stuff.’

Lightwood helped him to some more of that stuff, but it had been
cooling, and didn’t answer now.

‘Pooh,’ said Eugene, spitting it out among the ashes. ‘Tastes like the
wash of the river.’

‘Are you so familiar with the flavour of the wash of the river?’

‘I seem to be to-night. I feel as if I had been half drowned, and
swallowing a gallon of it.’

‘Influence of locality,’ suggested Lightwood.

‘You are mighty learned to-night, you and your influences,’ returned
Eugene. ‘How long shall we stay here?’

‘How long do you think?’

‘If I could choose, I should say a minute,’ replied Eugene, ‘for the
Jolly Fellowship Porters are not the jolliest dogs I have known. But
I suppose we are best here until they turn us out with the other
suspicious characters, at midnight.’

Thereupon he stirred the fire, and sat down on one side of it. It struck
eleven, and he made believe to compose himself patiently. But gradually
he took the fidgets in one leg, and then in the other leg, and then in
one arm, and then in the other arm, and then in his chin, and then in
his back, and then in his forehead, and then in his hair, and then in
his nose; and then he stretched himself recumbent on two chairs, and
groaned; and then he started up.

‘Invisible insects of diabolical activity swarm in this place. I am
tickled and twitched all over. Mentally, I have now committed a burglary
under the meanest circumstances, and the myrmidons of justice are at my
heels.’

‘I am quite as bad,’ said Lightwood, sitting up facing him, with a
tumbled head; after going through some wonderful evolutions, in which
his head had been the lowest part of him. ‘This restlessness began with
me, long ago. All the time you were out, I felt like Gulliver with the
Lilliputians firing upon him.’

‘It won’t do, Mortimer. We must get into the air; we must join our dear
friend and brother, Riderhood. And let us tranquillize ourselves by
making a compact. Next time (with a view to our peace of mind) we’ll
commit the crime, instead of taking the criminal. You swear it?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Sworn! Let Tippins look to it. Her life’s in danger.’

Mortimer rang the bell to pay the score, and Bob appeared to transact
that business with him: whom Eugene, in his careless extravagance, asked
if he would like a situation in the lime-trade?

‘Thankee sir, no sir,’ said Bob. ‘I’ve a good sitiwation here, sir.’

‘If you change your mind at any time,’ returned Eugene, ‘come to me at
my works, and you’ll always find an opening in the lime-kiln.’

‘Thankee sir,’ said Bob.

‘This is my partner,’ said Eugene, ‘who keeps the books and attends to
the wages. A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work is ever my partner’s
motto.’

‘And a very good ‘un it is, gentlemen,’ said Bob, receiving his fee, and
drawing a bow out of his head with his right hand, very much as he would
have drawn a pint of beer out of the beer engine.

‘Eugene,’ Mortimer apostrophized him, laughing quite heartily when they
were alone again, ‘how CAN you be so ridiculous?’

‘I am in a ridiculous humour,’ quoth Eugene; ‘I am a ridiculous fellow.
Everything is ridiculous. Come along!’

It passed into Mortimer Lightwood’s mind that a change of some sort,
best expressed perhaps as an intensification of all that was wildest and
most negligent and reckless in his friend, had come upon him in the last
half-hour or so. Thoroughly used to him as he was, he found something
new and strained in him that was for the moment perplexing. This passed
into his mind, and passed out again; but he remembered it afterwards.

‘There’s where she sits, you see,’ said Eugene, when they were standing
under the bank, roared and riven at by the wind. ‘There’s the light of
her fire.’

‘I’ll take a peep through the window,’ said Mortimer.

‘No, don’t!’ Eugene caught him by the arm. ‘Best, not make a show of
her. Come to our honest friend.’

He led him to the post of watch, and they both dropped down and crept
under the lee of the boat; a better shelter than it had seemed before,
being directly contrasted with the blowing wind and the bare night.

‘Mr Inspector at home?’ whispered Eugene.

‘Here I am, sir.’

‘And our friend of the perspiring brow is at the far corner there? Good.
Anything happened?’

‘His daughter has been out, thinking she heard him calling, unless it
was a sign to him to keep out of the way. It might have been.’

‘It might have been Rule Britannia,’ muttered Eugene, ‘but it wasn’t.
Mortimer!’

‘Here!’ (On the other side of Mr Inspector.)

‘Two burglaries now, and a forgery!’

With this indication of his depressed state of mind, Eugene fell silent.

They were all silent for a long while. As it got to be flood-tide, and
the water came nearer to them, noises on the river became more frequent,
and they listened more. To the turning of steam-paddles, to the clinking
of iron chain, to the creaking of blocks, to the measured working
of oars, to the occasional violent barking of some passing dog on
shipboard, who seemed to scent them lying in their hiding-place. The
night was not so dark but that, besides the lights at bows and mastheads
gliding to and fro, they could discern some shadowy bulk attached; and
now and then a ghostly lighter with a large dark sail, like a warning
arm, would start up very near them, pass on, and vanish. At this time
of their watch, the water close to them would be often agitated by some
impulsion given it from a distance. Often they believed this beat and
plash to be the boat they lay in wait for, running in ashore; and again
and again they would have started up, but for the immobility with which
the informer, well used to the river, kept quiet in his place.

The wind carried away the striking of the great multitude of city
church clocks, for those lay to leeward of them; but there were bells to
windward that told them of its being One--Two--Three. Without that aid
they would have known how the night wore, by the falling of the tide,
recorded in the appearance of an ever-widening black wet strip of shore,
and the emergence of the paved causeway from the river, foot by foot.

As the time so passed, this slinking business became a more and more
precarious one. It would seem as if the man had had some intimation of
what was in hand against him, or had taken fright? His movements might
have been planned to gain for him, in getting beyond their reach, twelve
hours’ advantage? The honest man who had expended the sweat of his brow
became uneasy, and began to complain with bitterness of the proneness of
mankind to cheat him--him invested with the dignity of Labour!

Their retreat was so chosen that while they could watch the river, they
could watch the house. No one had passed in or out, since the daughter
thought she heard the father calling. No one could pass in or out
without being seen.

‘But it will be light at five,’ said Mr Inspector, ‘and then WE shall be
seen.’

‘Look here,’ said Riderhood, ‘what do you say to this? He may have
been lurking in and out, and just holding his own betwixt two or three
bridges, for hours back.’

‘What do you make of that?’ said Mr Inspector. Stoical, but
contradictory.

‘He may be doing so at this present time.’

‘What do you make of that?’ said Mr Inspector.

‘My boat’s among them boats here at the cause’ay.’

‘And what do you make of your boat?’ said Mr Inspector.

‘What if I put off in her and take a look round? I know his ways, and
the likely nooks he favours. I know where he’d be at such a time of the
tide, and where he’d be at such another time. Ain’t I been his pardner?
None of you need show. None of you need stir. I can shove her off
without help; and as to me being seen, I’m about at all times.’

‘You might have given a worse opinion,’ said Mr Inspector, after brief
consideration. ‘Try it.’

‘Stop a bit. Let’s work it out. If I want you, I’ll drop round under the
Fellowships and tip you a whistle.’

‘If I might so far presume as to offer a suggestion to my honourable and
gallant friend, whose knowledge of naval matters far be it from me to
impeach,’ Eugene struck in with great deliberation, ‘it would be, that
to tip a whistle is to advertise mystery and invite speculation.
My honourable and gallant friend will, I trust, excuse me, as an
independent member, for throwing out a remark which I feel to be due to
this house and the country.’

‘Was that the T’other Governor, or Lawyer Lightwood?’ asked Riderhood.
For, they spoke as they crouched or lay, without seeing one another’s
faces.

‘In reply to the question put by my honourable and gallant friend,’
said Eugene, who was lying on his back with his hat on his face, as an
attitude highly expressive of watchfulness, ‘I can have no hesitation in
replying (it not being inconsistent with the public service) that those
accents were the accents of the T’other Governor.’

‘You’ve tolerable good eyes, ain’t you, Governor? You’ve all tolerable
good eyes, ain’t you?’ demanded the informer.

All.

‘Then if I row up under the Fellowship and lay there, no need to
whistle. You’ll make out that there’s a speck of something or another
there, and you’ll know it’s me, and you’ll come down that cause’ay to
me. Understood all?’

Understood all.

‘Off she goes then!’

In a moment, with the wind cutting keenly at him sideways, he was
staggering down to his boat; in a few moments he was clear, and creeping
up the river under their own shore.

Eugene had raised himself on his elbow to look into the darkness after
him. ‘I wish the boat of my honourable and gallant friend,’ he murmured,
lying down again and speaking into his hat, ‘may be endowed
with philanthropy enough to turn bottom-upward and extinguish
him!--Mortimer.’

‘My honourable friend.’

‘Three burglaries, two forgeries, and a midnight assassination.’ Yet
in spite of having those weights on his conscience, Eugene was somewhat
enlivened by the late slight change in the circumstances of affairs. So
were his two companions. Its being a change was everything. The suspense
seemed to have taken a new lease, and to have begun afresh from a recent
date. There was something additional to look for. They were all three
more sharply on the alert, and less deadened by the miserable influences
of the place and time.

More than an hour had passed, and they were even dozing, when one of the
three--each said it was he, and he had NOT dozed--made out Riderhood
in his boat at the spot agreed on. They sprang up, came out from their
shelter, and went down to him. When he saw them coming, he dropped
alongside the causeway; so that they, standing on the causeway, could
speak with him in whispers, under the shadowy mass of the Six Jolly
Fellowship Porters fast asleep.

‘Blest if I can make it out!’ said he, staring at them.

‘Make what out? Have you seen him?’

‘No.’

‘What HAVE you seen?’ asked Lightwood. For, he was staring at them in
the strangest way.

‘I’ve seen his boat.’

‘Not empty?’

‘Yes, empty. And what’s more,--adrift. And what’s more,--with one scull
gone. And what’s more,--with t’other scull jammed in the thowels and
broke short off. And what’s more,--the boat’s drove tight by the tide
‘atwixt two tiers of barges. And what’s more,--he’s in luck again, by
George if he ain’t!’



Chapter 14

THE BIRD OF PREY BROUGHT DOWN


Cold on the shore, in the raw cold of that leaden crisis in the
four-and-twenty hours when the vital force of all the noblest and
prettiest things that live is at its lowest, the three watchers looked
each at the blank faces of the other two, and all at the blank face of
Riderhood in his boat.

‘Gaffer’s boat, Gaffer in luck again, and yet no Gaffer!’ So spake
Riderhood, staring disconsolate.

As if with one accord, they all turned their eyes towards the light of
the fire shining through the window. It was fainter and duller. Perhaps
fire, like the higher animal and vegetable life it helps to sustain, has
its greatest tendency towards death, when the night is dying and the day
is not yet born.

‘If it was me that had the law of this here job in hand,’ growled
Riderhood with a threatening shake of his head, ‘blest if I wouldn’t lay
hold of HER, at any rate!’

‘Ay, but it is not you,’ said Eugene. With something so suddenly fierce
in him that the informer returned submissively; ‘Well, well, well,
t’other governor, I didn’t say it was. A man may speak.’

‘And vermin may be silent,’ said Eugene. ‘Hold your tongue, you
water-rat!’

Astonished by his friend’s unusual heat, Lightwood stared too, and then
said: ‘What can have become of this man?’

‘Can’t imagine. Unless he dived overboard.’ The informer wiped his
brow ruefully as he said it, sitting in his boat and always staring
disconsolate.

‘Did you make his boat fast?’

‘She’s fast enough till the tide runs back. I couldn’t make her faster
than she is. Come aboard of mine, and see for your own-selves.’

There was a little backwardness in complying, for the freight looked too
much for the boat; but on Riderhood’s protesting ‘that he had had half a
dozen, dead and alive, in her afore now, and she was nothing deep in the
water nor down in the stern even then, to speak of;’ they carefully took
their places, and trimmed the crazy thing. While they were doing so,
Riderhood still sat staring disconsolate.

‘All right. Give way!’ said Lightwood.

‘Give way, by George!’ repeated Riderhood, before shoving off. ‘If he’s
gone and made off any how Lawyer Lightwood, it’s enough to make me give
way in a different manner. But he always WAS a cheat, con-found him!
He always was a infernal cheat, was Gaffer. Nothing straightfor’ard,
nothing on the square. So mean, so underhanded. Never going through with
a thing, nor carrying it out like a man!’

‘Hallo! Steady!’ cried Eugene (he had recovered immediately on
embarking), as they bumped heavily against a pile; and then in a lower
voice reversed his late apostrophe by remarking [‘I wish the boat of my
honourable and gallant friend may be endowed with philanthropy enough
not to turn bottom-upward and extinguish us!) Steady, steady! Sit close,
Mortimer. Here’s the hail again. See how it flies, like a troop of wild
cats, at Mr Riderhood’s eyes!’

Indeed he had the full benefit of it, and it so mauled him, though he
bent his head low and tried to present nothing but the mangy cap to it,
that he dropped under the lee of a tier of shipping, and they lay there
until it was over. The squall had come up, like a spiteful messenger
before the morning; there followed in its wake a ragged tear of light
which ripped the dark clouds until they showed a great grey hole of day.

They were all shivering, and everything about them seemed to be
shivering; the river itself; craft, rigging, sails, such early smoke as
there yet was on the shore. Black with wet, and altered to the eye by
white patches of hail and sleet, the huddled buildings looked lower
than usual, as if they were cowering, and had shrunk with the cold. Very
little life was to be seen on either bank, windows and doors were shut,
and the staring black and white letters upon wharves and warehouses
‘looked,’ said Eugene to Mortimer, ‘like inscriptions over the graves of
dead businesses.’

As they glided slowly on, keeping under the shore and sneaking in and
out among the shipping by back-alleys of water, in a pilfering way
that seemed to be their boatman’s normal manner of progression, all
the objects among which they crept were so huge in contrast with their
wretched boat, as to threaten to crush it. Not a ship’s hull, with its
rusty iron links of cable run out of hawse-holes long discoloured with
the iron’s rusty tears, but seemed to be there with a fell intention.
Not a figure-head but had the menacing look of bursting forward to run
them down. Not a sluice gate, or a painted scale upon a post or wall,
showing the depth of water, but seemed to hint, like the dreadfully
facetious Wolf in bed in Grandmamma’s cottage, ‘That’s to drown YOU in,
my dears!’ Not a lumbering black barge, with its cracked and blistered
side impending over them, but seemed to suck at the river with a
thirst for sucking them under. And everything so vaunted the spoiling
influences of water--discoloured copper, rotten wood, honey-combed
stone, green dank deposit--that the after-consequences of being crushed,
sucked under, and drawn down, looked as ugly to the imagination as the
main event.

Some half-hour of this work, and Riderhood unshipped his sculls, stood
holding on to a barge, and hand over hand long-wise along the barge’s
side gradually worked his boat under her head into a secret little
nook of scummy water. And driven into that nook, and wedged as he had
described, was Gaffer’s boat; that boat with the stain still in it,
bearing some resemblance to a muffled human form.

‘Now tell me I’m a liar!’ said the honest man.

[‘With a morbid expectation,’ murmured Eugene to Lightwood, ‘that
somebody is always going to tell him the truth.’)

‘This is Hexam’s boat,’ said Mr Inspector. ‘I know her well.’

‘Look at the broken scull. Look at the t’other scull gone. NOW tell me I
am a liar!’ said the honest man.

Mr Inspector stepped into the boat. Eugene and Mortimer looked on.

‘And see now!’ added Riderhood, creeping aft, and showing a stretched
rope made fast there and towing overboard. ‘Didn’t I tell you he was in
luck again?’

‘Haul in,’ said Mr Inspector.

‘Easy to say haul in,’ answered Riderhood. ‘Not so easy done. His luck’s
got fouled under the keels of the barges. I tried to haul in last time,
but I couldn’t. See how taut the line is!’

‘I must have it up,’ said Mr Inspector. ‘I am going to take this boat
ashore, and his luck along with it. Try easy now.’

He tried easy now; but the luck resisted; wouldn’t come.

‘I mean to have it, and the boat too,’ said Mr Inspector, playing the
line.

But still the luck resisted; wouldn’t come.

‘Take care,’ said Riderhood. ‘You’ll disfigure. Or pull asunder
perhaps.’

‘I am not going to do either, not even to your Grandmother,’ said Mr
Inspector; ‘but I mean to have it. Come!’ he added, at once persuasively
and with authority to the hidden object in the water, as he played the
line again; ‘it’s no good this sort of game, you know. You MUST come up.
I mean to have you.’

There was so much virtue in this distinctly and decidedly meaning to
have it, that it yielded a little, even while the line was played.

‘I told you so,’ quoth Mr Inspector, pulling off his outer coat, and
leaning well over the stern with a will. ‘Come!’

It was an awful sort of fishing, but it no more disconcerted Mr
Inspector than if he had been fishing in a punt on a summer evening by
some soothing weir high up the peaceful river. After certain minutes,
and a few directions to the rest to ‘ease her a little for’ard,’ and
‘now ease her a trifle aft,’ and the like, he said composedly, ‘All
clear!’ and the line and the boat came free together.

Accepting Lightwood’s proffered hand to help him up, he then put on his
coat, and said to Riderhood, ‘Hand me over those spare sculls of yours,
and I’ll pull this in to the nearest stairs. Go ahead you, and keep out
in pretty open water, that I mayn’t get fouled again.’

His directions were obeyed, and they pulled ashore directly; two in one
boat, two in the other.

‘Now,’ said Mr Inspector, again to Riderhood, when they were all on the
slushy stones; ‘you have had more practice in this than I have had, and
ought to be a better workman at it. Undo the tow-rope, and we’ll help
you haul in.’

Riderhood got into the boat accordingly. It appeared as if he had
scarcely had a moment’s time to touch the rope or look over the stern,
when he came scrambling back, as pale as the morning, and gasped out:

‘By the Lord, he’s done me!’

‘What do you mean?’ they all demanded.

He pointed behind him at the boat, and gasped to that degree that he
dropped upon the stones to get his breath.

‘Gaffer’s done me. It’s Gaffer!’

They ran to the rope, leaving him gasping there. Soon, the form of the
bird of prey, dead some hours, lay stretched upon the shore, with a new
blast storming at it and clotting the wet hair with hail-stones.

Father, was that you calling me? Father! I thought I heard you call me
twice before! Words never to be answered, those, upon the earth-side
of the grave. The wind sweeps jeeringly over Father, whips him with the
frayed ends of his dress and his jagged hair, tries to turn him where he
lies stark on his back, and force his face towards the rising sun, that
he may be shamed the more. A lull, and the wind is secret and prying
with him; lifts and lets falls a rag; hides palpitating under another
rag; runs nimbly through his hair and beard. Then, in a rush, it cruelly
taunts him. Father, was that you calling me? Was it you, the voiceless
and the dead? Was it you, thus buffeted as you lie here in a heap? Was
it you, thus baptized unto Death, with these flying impurities now flung
upon your face? Why not speak, Father? Soaking into this filthy ground
as you lie here, is your own shape. Did you never see such a shape
soaked into your boat? Speak, Father. Speak to us, the winds, the only
listeners left you!

‘Now see,’ said Mr Inspector, after mature deliberation: kneeling on one
knee beside the body, when they had stood looking down on the drowned
man, as he had many a time looked down on many another man: ‘the way of
it was this. Of course you gentlemen hardly failed to observe that he
was towing by the neck and arms.’

They had helped to release the rope, and of course not.

‘And you will have observed before, and you will observe now, that this
knot, which was drawn chock-tight round his neck by the strain of his
own arms, is a slip-knot’: holding it up for demonstration.

Plain enough.

‘Likewise you will have observed how he had run the other end of this
rope to his boat.’

It had the curves and indentations in it still, where it had been twined
and bound.

‘Now see,’ said Mr Inspector, ‘see how it works round upon him. It’s a
wild tempestuous evening when this man that was,’ stooping to wipe
some hailstones out of his hair with an end of his own drowned jacket,
‘--there! Now he’s more like himself; though he’s badly bruised,--when
this man that was, rows out upon the river on his usual lay. He carries
with him this coil of rope. He always carries with him this coil of
rope. It’s as well known to me as he was himself. Sometimes it lay in
the bottom of his boat. Sometimes he hung it loose round his neck.
He was a light-dresser was this man;--you see?’ lifting the loose
neckerchief over his breast, and taking the opportunity of wiping the
dead lips with it--‘and when it was wet, or freezing, or blew cold, he
would hang this coil of line round his neck. Last evening he does this.
Worse for him! He dodges about in his boat, does this man, till he gets
chilled. His hands,’ taking up one of them, which dropped like a leaden
weight, ‘get numbed. He sees some object that’s in his way of business,
floating. He makes ready to secure that object. He unwinds the end of
his coil that he wants to take some turns on in his boat, and he takes
turns enough on it to secure that it shan’t run out. He makes it too
secure, as it happens. He is a little longer about this than usual, his
hands being numbed. His object drifts up, before he is quite ready for
it. He catches at it, thinks he’ll make sure of the contents of the
pockets anyhow, in case he should be parted from it, bends right over
the stern, and in one of these heavy squalls, or in the cross-swell of
two steamers, or in not being quite prepared, or through all or most or
some, gets a lurch, overbalances and goes head-foremost overboard. Now
see! He can swim, can this man, and instantly he strikes out. But in
such striking-out he tangles his arms, pulls strong on the slip-knot,
and it runs home. The object he had expected to take in tow, floats by,
and his own boat tows him dead, to where we found him, all entangled
in his own line. You’ll ask me how I make out about the pockets? First,
I’ll tell you more; there was silver in ‘em. How do I make that out?
Simple and satisfactory. Because he’s got it here.’ The lecturer held up
the tightly clenched right hand.

‘What is to be done with the remains?’ asked Lightwood.

‘If you wouldn’t object to standing by him half a minute, sir,’ was
the reply, ‘I’ll find the nearest of our men to come and take charge of
him;--I still call it HIM, you see,’ said Mr Inspector, looking back as
he went, with a philosophical smile upon the force of habit.

‘Eugene,’ said Lightwood and was about to add ‘we may wait at a little
distance,’ when turning his head he found that no Eugene was there.

He raised his voice and called ‘Eugene! Holloa!’ But no Eugene replied.

It was broad daylight now, and he looked about. But no Eugene was in all
the view.

Mr Inspector speedily returning down the wooden stairs, with a police
constable, Lightwood asked him if he had seen his friend leave them? Mr
Inspector could not exactly say that he had seen him go, but had noticed
that he was restless.

‘Singular and entertaining combination, sir, your friend.’

‘I wish it had not been a part of his singular entertaining combination
to give me the slip under these dreary circumstances at this time of the
morning,’ said Lightwood. ‘Can we get anything hot to drink?’

We could, and we did. In a public-house kitchen with a large fire. We
got hot brandy and water, and it revived us wonderfully. Mr Inspector
having to Mr Riderhood announced his official intention of ‘keeping
his eye upon him’, stood him in a corner of the fireplace, like a wet
umbrella, and took no further outward and visible notice of that honest
man, except ordering a separate service of brandy and water for him:
apparently out of the public funds.

As Mortimer Lightwood sat before the blazing fire, conscious of drinking
brandy and water then and there in his sleep, and yet at one and the
same time drinking burnt sherry at the Six Jolly Fellowships, and
lying under the boat on the river shore, and sitting in the boat that
Riderhood rowed, and listening to the lecture recently concluded, and
having to dine in the Temple with an unknown man, who described himself
as M. H. F. Eugene Gaffer Harmon, and said he lived at Hailstorm,--as
he passed through these curious vicissitudes of fatigue and slumber,
arranged upon the scale of a dozen hours to the second, he became aware
of answering aloud a communication of pressing importance that had
never been made to him, and then turned it into a cough on beholding
Mr Inspector. For, he felt, with some natural indignation, that that
functionary might otherwise suspect him of having closed his eyes, or
wandered in his attention.

‘Here just before us, you see,’ said Mr Inspector.

‘I see,’ said Lightwood, with dignity.

‘And had hot brandy and water too, you see,’ said Mr Inspector, ‘and
then cut off at a great rate.’

‘Who?’ said Lightwood.

‘Your friend, you know.’

‘I know,’ he replied, again with dignity.

After hearing, in a mist through which Mr Inspector loomed vague and
large, that the officer took upon himself to prepare the dead man’s
daughter for what had befallen in the night, and generally that he took
everything upon himself, Mortimer Lightwood stumbled in his sleep to
a cab-stand, called a cab, and had entered the army and committed a
capital military offence and been tried by court martial and found
guilty and had arranged his affairs and been marched out to be shot,
before the door banged.

Hard work rowing the cab through the City to the Temple, for a cup of
from five to ten thousand pounds value, given by Mr Boffin; and hard
work holding forth at that immeasurable length to Eugene (when he had
been rescued with a rope from the running pavement) for making off in
that extraordinary manner! But he offered such ample apologies, and was
so very penitent, that when Lightwood got out of the cab, he gave
the driver a particular charge to be careful of him. Which the driver
(knowing there was no other fare left inside) stared at prodigiously.

In short, the night’s work had so exhausted and worn out this actor in
it, that he had become a mere somnambulist. He was too tired to rest in
his sleep, until he was even tired out of being too tired, and dropped
into oblivion. Late in the afternoon he awoke, and in some anxiety sent
round to Eugene’s lodging hard by, to inquire if he were up yet?

Oh yes, he was up. In fact, he had not been to bed. He had just come
home. And here he was, close following on the heels of the message.

‘Why what bloodshot, draggled, dishevelled spectacle is this!’ cried
Mortimer.

‘Are my feathers so very much rumpled?’ said Eugene, coolly going up to
the looking-glass. They ARE rather out of sorts. But consider. Such a
night for plumage!’

‘Such a night?’ repeated Mortimer. ‘What became of you in the morning?’

‘My dear fellow,’ said Eugene, sitting on his bed, ‘I felt that we
had bored one another so long, that an unbroken continuance of those
relations must inevitably terminate in our flying to opposite points of
the earth. I also felt that I had committed every crime in the Newgate
Calendar. So, for mingled considerations of friendship and felony, I
took a walk.’



Chapter 15

TWO NEW SERVANTS


Mr and Mrs Boffin sat after breakfast, in the Bower, a prey to
prosperity. Mr Boffin’s face denoted Care and Complication. Many
disordered papers were before him, and he looked at them about as
hopefully as an innocent civilian might look at a crowd of troops whom
he was required at five minutes’ notice to manoeuvre and review. He had
been engaged in some attempts to make notes of these papers; but being
troubled (as men of his stamp often are) with an exceedingly distrustful
and corrective thumb, that busy member had so often interposed to
smear his notes, that they were little more legible than the various
impressions of itself; which blurred his nose and forehead. It is
curious to consider, in such a case as Mr Boffin’s, what a cheap article
ink is, and how far it may be made to go. As a grain of musk will scent
a drawer for many years, and still lose nothing appreciable of its
original weight, so a halfpenny-worth of ink would blot Mr Boffin to the
roots of his hair and the calves of his legs, without inscribing a line
on the paper before him, or appearing to diminish in the inkstand.

Mr Boffin was in such severe literary difficulties that his eyes were
prominent and fixed, and his breathing was stertorous, when, to the
great relief of Mrs Boffin, who observed these symptoms with alarm, the
yard bell rang.

‘Who’s that, I wonder!’ said Mrs Boffin.

Mr Boffin drew a long breath, laid down his pen, looked at his notes
as doubting whether he had the pleasure of their acquaintance, and
appeared, on a second perusal of their countenances, to be confirmed
in his impression that he had not, when there was announced by the
hammer-headed young man:

‘Mr Rokesmith.’

‘Oh!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Oh indeed! Our and the Wilfers’ Mutual Friend, my
dear. Yes. Ask him to come in.’

Mr Rokesmith appeared.

‘Sit down, sir,’ said Mr Boffin, shaking hands with him. ‘Mrs Boffin
you’re already acquainted with. Well, sir, I am rather unprepared to see
you, for, to tell you the truth, I’ve been so busy with one thing and
another, that I’ve not had time to turn your offer over.’

‘That’s apology for both of us: for Mr Boffin, and for me as well,’ said
the smiling Mrs Boffin. ‘But Lor! we can talk it over now; can’t us?’

Mr Rokesmith bowed, thanked her, and said he hoped so.

‘Let me see then,’ resumed Mr Boffin, with his hand to his chin. ‘It was
Secretary that you named; wasn’t it?’

‘I said Secretary,’ assented Mr Rokesmith.

‘It rather puzzled me at the time,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘and it rather
puzzled me and Mrs Boffin when we spoke of it afterwards, because (not
to make a mystery of our belief) we have always believed a Secretary to
be a piece of furniture, mostly of mahogany, lined with green baize or
leather, with a lot of little drawers in it. Now, you won’t think I take
a liberty when I mention that you certainly ain’t THAT.’

Certainly not, said Mr Rokesmith. But he had used the word in the sense
of Steward.

‘Why, as to Steward, you see,’ returned Mr Boffin, with his hand still
to his chin, ‘the odds are that Mrs Boffin and me may never go upon the
water. Being both bad sailors, we should want a Steward if we did; but
there’s generally one provided.’

Mr Rokesmith again explained; defining the duties he sought to
undertake, as those of general superintendent, or manager, or
overlooker, or man of business.

‘Now, for instance--come!’ said Mr Boffin, in his pouncing way. ‘If you
entered my employment, what would you do?’

‘I would keep exact accounts of all the expenditure you sanctioned,
Mr Boffin. I would write your letters, under your direction. I would
transact your business with people in your pay or employment. I would,’
with a glance and a half-smile at the table, ‘arrange your papers--’

Mr Boffin rubbed his inky ear, and looked at his wife.

‘--And so arrange them as to have them always in order for immediate
reference, with a note of the contents of each outside it.’

‘I tell you what,’ said Mr Boffin, slowly crumpling his own blotted note
in his hand; ‘if you’ll turn to at these present papers, and see what
you can make of ‘em, I shall know better what I can make of you.’

No sooner said than done. Relinquishing his hat and gloves, Mr Rokesmith
sat down quietly at the table, arranged the open papers into an orderly
heap, cast his eyes over each in succession, folded it, docketed it on
the outside, laid it in a second heap, and, when that second heap was
complete and the first gone, took from his pocket a piece of string and
tied it together with a remarkably dexterous hand at a running curve and
a loop.

‘Good!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Very good! Now let us hear what they’re all
about; will you be so good?’

John Rokesmith read his abstracts aloud. They were all about the new
house. Decorator’s estimate, so much. Furniture estimate, so much.
Estimate for furniture of offices, so much. Coach-maker’s estimate, so
much. Horse-dealer’s estimate, so much. Harness-maker’s estimate, so
much. Goldsmith’s estimate, so much. Total, so very much. Then came
correspondence. Acceptance of Mr Boffin’s offer of such a date, and to
such an effect. Rejection of Mr Boffin’s proposal of such a date and to
such an effect. Concerning Mr Boffin’s scheme of such another date to
such another effect. All compact and methodical.

‘Apple-pie order!’ said Mr Boffin, after checking off each inscription
with his hand, like a man beating time. ‘And whatever you do with your
ink, I can’t think, for you’re as clean as a whistle after it. Now, as
to a letter. Let’s,’ said Mr Boffin, rubbing his hands in his pleasantly
childish admiration, ‘let’s try a letter next.’

‘To whom shall it be addressed, Mr Boffin?’

‘Anyone. Yourself.’

Mr Rokesmith quickly wrote, and then read aloud:

‘“Mr Boffin presents his compliments to Mr John Rokesmith, and begs
to say that he has decided on giving Mr John Rokesmith a trial in the
capacity he desires to fill. Mr Boffin takes Mr John Rokesmith at his
word, in postponing to some indefinite period, the consideration of
salary. It is quite understood that Mr Boffin is in no way committed
on that point. Mr Boffin has merely to add, that he relies on Mr John
Rokesmith’s assurance that he will be faithful and serviceable. Mr John
Rokesmith will please enter on his duties immediately.”’

‘Well! Now, Noddy!’ cried Mrs Boffin, clapping her hands, ‘That IS a
good one!’

Mr Boffin was no less delighted; indeed, in his own bosom, he regarded
both the composition itself and the device that had given birth to it,
as a very remarkable monument of human ingenuity.

‘And I tell you, my deary,’ said Mrs Boffin, ‘that if you don’t close
with Mr Rokesmith now at once, and if you ever go a muddling yourself
again with things never meant nor made for you, you’ll have an
apoplexy--besides iron-moulding your linen--and you’ll break my heart.’

Mr Boffin embraced his spouse for these words of wisdom, and then,
congratulating John Rokesmith on the brilliancy of his achievements,
gave him his hand in pledge of their new relations. So did Mrs Boffin.

‘Now,’ said Mr Boffin, who, in his frankness, felt that it did not
become him to have a gentleman in his employment five minutes, without
reposing some confidence in him, ‘you must be let a little more into our
affairs, Rokesmith. I mentioned to you, when I made your acquaintance,
or I might better say when you made mine, that Mrs Boffin’s inclinations
was setting in the way of Fashion, but that I didn’t know how
fashionable we might or might not grow. Well! Mrs Boffin has carried the
day, and we’re going in neck and crop for Fashion.’

‘I rather inferred that, sir,’ replied John Rokesmith, ‘from the scale
on which your new establishment is to be maintained.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘it’s to be a Spanker. The fact is, my
literary man named to me that a house with which he is, as I may say,
connected--in which he has an interest--’

‘As property?’ inquired John Rokesmith.

‘Why no,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘not exactly that; a sort of a family tie.’

‘Association?’ the Secretary suggested.

‘Ah!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Perhaps. Anyhow, he named to me that the house
had a board up, “This Eminently Aristocratic Mansion to be let or sold.”
 Me and Mrs Boffin went to look at it, and finding it beyond a doubt
Eminently Aristocratic (though a trifle high and dull, which after all
may be part of the same thing) took it. My literary man was so friendly
as to drop into a charming piece of poetry on that occasion, in which he
complimented Mrs Boffin on coming into possession of--how did it go, my
dear?’

Mrs Boffin replied:

     ‘“The gay, the gay and festive scene,
     The halls, the halls of dazzling light.”’

‘That’s it! And it was made neater by there really being two halls
in the house, a front ‘un and a back ‘un, besides the servants’.
He likewise dropped into a very pretty piece of poetry to be sure,
respecting the extent to which he would be willing to put himself out
of the way to bring Mrs Boffin round, in case she should ever get low
in her spirits in the house. Mrs Boffin has a wonderful memory. Will you
repeat it, my dear?’

Mrs Boffin complied, by reciting the verses in which this obliging offer
had been made, exactly as she had received them.

     ‘“I’ll tell thee how the maiden wept, Mrs Boffin,
     When her true love was slain ma’am,
     And how her broken spirit slept, Mrs Boffin,
     And never woke again ma’am.
     I’ll tell thee (if agreeable to Mr Boffin) how the steed drew
     nigh,
     And left his lord afar;
     And if my tale (which I hope Mr Boffin might excuse) should
     make you sigh,
     I’ll strike the light guitar.”’

‘Correct to the letter!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘And I consider that the poetry
brings us both in, in a beautiful manner.’

The effect of the poem on the Secretary being evidently to astonish
him, Mr Boffin was confirmed in his high opinion of it, and was greatly
pleased.

‘Now, you see, Rokesmith,’ he went on, ‘a literary man--WITH a wooden
leg--is liable to jealousy. I shall therefore cast about for comfortable
ways and means of not calling up Wegg’s jealousy, but of keeping you in
your department, and keeping him in his.’

‘Lor!’ cried Mrs Boffin. ‘What I say is, the world’s wide enough for all
of us!’

‘So it is, my dear,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘when not literary. But when so,
not so. And I am bound to bear in mind that I took Wegg on, at a time
when I had no thought of being fashionable or of leaving the Bower. To
let him feel himself anyways slighted now, would be to be guilty of
a meanness, and to act like having one’s head turned by the halls of
dazzling light. Which Lord forbid! Rokesmith, what shall we say about
your living in the house?’

‘In this house?’

‘No, no. I have got other plans for this house. In the new house?’

‘That will be as you please, Mr Boffin. I hold myself quite at your
disposal. You know where I live at present.’

‘Well!’ said Mr Boffin, after considering the point; ‘suppose you keep
as you are for the present, and we’ll decide by-and-by. You’ll begin to
take charge at once, of all that’s going on in the new house, will you?’

‘Most willingly. I will begin this very day. Will you give me the
address?’

Mr Boffin repeated it, and the Secretary wrote it down in his
pocket-book. Mrs Boffin took the opportunity of his being so engaged,
to get a better observation of his face than she had yet taken. It
impressed her in his favour, for she nodded aside to Mr Boffin, ‘I like
him.’

‘I will see directly that everything is in train, Mr Boffin.’

‘Thank’ee. Being here, would you care at all to look round the Bower?’

‘I should greatly like it. I have heard so much of its story.’

‘Come!’ said Mr Boffin. And he and Mrs Boffin led the way.

A gloomy house the Bower, with sordid signs on it of having been,
through its long existence as Harmony Jail, in miserly holding. Bare of
paint, bare of paper on the walls, bare of furniture, bare of experience
of human life. Whatever is built by man for man’s occupation, must,
like natural creations, fulfil the intention of its existence, or soon
perish. This old house had wasted--more from desuetude than it would
have wasted from use, twenty years for one.

A certain leanness falls upon houses not sufficiently imbued with life
(as if they were nourished upon it), which was very noticeable here.
The staircase, balustrades, and rails, had a spare look--an air of being
denuded to the bone--which the panels of the walls and the jambs of the
doors and windows also bore. The scanty moveables partook of it; save
for the cleanliness of the place, the dust--into which they were all
resolving would have lain thick on the floors; and those, both in colour
and in grain, were worn like old faces that had kept much alone.

The bedroom where the clutching old man had lost his grip on life, was
left as he had left it. There was the old grisly four-post bedstead,
without hangings, and with a jail-like upper rim of iron and spikes; and
there was the old patch-work counterpane. There was the tight-clenched
old bureau, receding atop like a bad and secret forehead; there was the
cumbersome old table with twisted legs, at the bed-side; and there
was the box upon it, in which the will had lain. A few old chairs with
patch-work covers, under which the more precious stuff to be preserved
had slowly lost its quality of colour without imparting pleasure to any
eye, stood against the wall. A hard family likeness was on all these
things.

‘The room was kept like this, Rokesmith,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘against the
son’s return. In short, everything in the house was kept exactly as it
came to us, for him to see and approve. Even now, nothing is changed
but our own room below-stairs that you have just left. When the son came
home for the last time in his life, and for the last time in his life
saw his father, it was most likely in this room that they met.’

As the Secretary looked all round it, his eyes rested on a side door in
a corner.

‘Another staircase,’ said Mr Boffin, unlocking the door, ‘leading down
into the yard. We’ll go down this way, as you may like to see the yard,
and it’s all in the road. When the son was a little child, it was up
and down these stairs that he mostly came and went to his father. He was
very timid of his father. I’ve seen him sit on these stairs, in his
shy way, poor child, many a time. Mr and Mrs Boffin have comforted him,
sitting with his little book on these stairs, often.’

‘Ah! And his poor sister too,’ said Mrs Boffin. ‘And here’s the sunny
place on the white wall where they one day measured one another. Their
own little hands wrote up their names here, only with a pencil; but the
names are here still, and the poor dears gone for ever.’

‘We must take care of the names, old lady,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘We must
take care of the names. They shan’t be rubbed out in our time, nor yet,
if we can help it, in the time after us. Poor little children!’

‘Ah, poor little children!’ said Mrs Boffin.

They had opened the door at the bottom of the staircase giving on the
yard, and they stood in the sunlight, looking at the scrawl of the two
unsteady childish hands two or three steps up the staircase. There was
something in this simple memento of a blighted childhood, and in the
tenderness of Mrs Boffin, that touched the Secretary.

Mr Boffin then showed his new man of business the Mounds, and his own
particular Mound which had been left him as his legacy under the will
before he acquired the whole estate.

‘It would have been enough for us,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘in case it had
pleased God to spare the last of those two young lives and sorrowful
deaths. We didn’t want the rest.’

At the treasures of the yard, and at the outside of the house, and at
the detached building which Mr Boffin pointed out as the residence
of himself and his wife during the many years of their service, the
Secretary looked with interest. It was not until Mr Boffin had shown
him every wonder of the Bower twice over, that he remembered his having
duties to discharge elsewhere.

‘You have no instructions to give me, Mr Boffin, in reference to this
place?’

‘Not any, Rokesmith. No.’

‘Might I ask, without seeming impertinent, whether you have any
intention of selling it?’

‘Certainly not. In remembrance of our old master, our old master’s
children, and our old service, me and Mrs Boffin mean to keep it up as
it stands.’

The Secretary’s eyes glanced with so much meaning in them at the Mounds,
that Mr Boffin said, as if in answer to a remark:

‘Ay, ay, that’s another thing. I may sell THEM, though I should be sorry
to see the neighbourhood deprived of ‘em too. It’ll look but a poor dead
flat without the Mounds. Still I don’t say that I’m going to keep ‘em
always there, for the sake of the beauty of the landscape. There’s no
hurry about it; that’s all I say at present. I ain’t a scholar in much,
Rokesmith, but I’m a pretty fair scholar in dust. I can price the Mounds
to a fraction, and I know how they can be best disposed of; and likewise
that they take no harm by standing where they do. You’ll look in
to-morrow, will you be so kind?’

‘Every day. And the sooner I can get you into your new house, complete,
the better you will be pleased, sir?’

‘Well, it ain’t that I’m in a mortal hurry,’ said Mr Boffin; ‘only when
you DO pay people for looking alive, it’s as well to know that they ARE
looking alive. Ain’t that your opinion?’

‘Quite!’ replied the Secretary; and so withdrew.

‘Now,’ said Mr Boffin to himself; subsiding into his regular series of
turns in the yard, ‘if I can make it comfortable with Wegg, my affairs
will be going smooth.’

The man of low cunning had, of course, acquired a mastery over the man
of high simplicity. The mean man had, of course, got the better of the
generous man. How long such conquests last, is another matter; that they
are achieved, is every-day experience, not even to be flourished away by
Podsnappery itself. The undesigning Boffin had become so far immeshed
by the wily Wegg that his mind misgave him he was a very designing man
indeed in purposing to do more for Wegg. It seemed to him (so skilful
was Wegg) that he was plotting darkly, when he was contriving to do the
very thing that Wegg was plotting to get him to do. And thus, while he
was mentally turning the kindest of kind faces on Wegg this morning, he
was not absolutely sure but that he might somehow deserve the charge of
turning his back on him.

For these reasons Mr Boffin passed but anxious hours until evening came,
and with it Mr Wegg, stumping leisurely to the Roman Empire. At about
this period Mr Boffin had become profoundly interested in the fortunes
of a great military leader known to him as Bully Sawyers, but perhaps
better known to fame and easier of identification by the classical
student, under the less Britannic name of Belisarius. Even this
general’s career paled in interest for Mr Boffin before the clearing of
his conscience with Wegg; and hence, when that literary gentleman had
according to custom eaten and drunk until he was all a-glow, and when
he took up his book with the usual chirping introduction, ‘And now, Mr
Boffin, sir, we’ll decline and we’ll fall!’ Mr Boffin stopped him.

‘You remember, Wegg, when I first told you that I wanted to make a sort
of offer to you?’

‘Let me get on my considering cap, sir,’ replied that gentleman, turning
the open book face downward. ‘When you first told me that you wanted
to make a sort of offer to me? Now let me think.’ (as if there were the
least necessity) ‘Yes, to be sure I do, Mr Boffin. It was at my corner.
To be sure it was! You had first asked me whether I liked your name,
and Candour had compelled a reply in the negative case. I little thought
then, sir, how familiar that name would come to be!’

‘I hope it will be more familiar still, Wegg.’

‘Do you, Mr Boffin? Much obliged to you, I’m sure. Is it your pleasure,
sir, that we decline and we fall?’ with a feint of taking up the book.

‘Not just yet awhile, Wegg. In fact, I have got another offer to make
you.’

Mr Wegg (who had had nothing else in his mind for several nights) took
off his spectacles with an air of bland surprise.

‘And I hope you’ll like it, Wegg.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ returned that reticent individual. ‘I hope it may
prove so. On all accounts, I am sure.’ (This, as a philanthropic
aspiration.)

‘What do you think,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘of not keeping a stall, Wegg?’

‘I think, sir,’ replied Wegg, ‘that I should like to be shown the
gentleman prepared to make it worth my while!’

‘Here he is,’ said Mr Boffin.

Mr Wegg was going to say, My Benefactor, and had said My Bene, when a
grandiloquent change came over him.

‘No, Mr Boffin, not you sir. Anybody but you. Do not fear, Mr Boffin,
that I shall contaminate the premises which your gold has bought, with
MY lowly pursuits. I am aware, sir, that it would not become me to carry
on my little traffic under the windows of your mansion. I have already
thought of that, and taken my measures. No need to be bought out, sir.
Would Stepney Fields be considered intrusive? If not remote enough, I
can go remoter. In the words of the poet’s song, which I do not quite
remember:

     Thrown on the wide world, doom’d to wander and roam,
     Bereft of my parents, bereft of a home,
     A stranger to something and what’s his name joy,
     Behold little Edmund the poor Peasant boy.

--And equally,’ said Mr Wegg, repairing the want of direct application
in the last line, ‘behold myself on a similar footing!’

‘Now, Wegg, Wegg, Wegg,’ remonstrated the excellent Boffin. ‘You are too
sensitive.’

‘I know I am, sir,’ returned Wegg, with obstinate magnanimity. ‘I am
acquainted with my faults. I always was, from a child, too sensitive.’

‘But listen,’ pursued the Golden Dustman; ‘hear me out, Wegg. You have
taken it into your head that I mean to pension you off.’

‘True, sir,’ returned Wegg, still with an obstinate magnanimity. ‘I am
acquainted with my faults. Far be it from me to deny them. I HAVE taken
it into my head.’

‘But I DON’T mean it.’

The assurance seemed hardly as comforting to Mr Wegg, as Mr Boffin
intended it to be. Indeed, an appreciable elongation of his visage might
have been observed as he replied:

‘Don’t you, indeed, sir?’

‘No,’ pursued Mr Boffin; ‘because that would express, as I understand
it, that you were not going to do anything to deserve your money. But
you are; you are.’

‘That, sir,’ replied Mr Wegg, cheering up bravely, ‘is quite another
pair of shoes. Now, my independence as a man is again elevated. Now, I
no longer

     Weep for the hour,
     When to Boffinses bower,
     The Lord of the valley with offers came;
     Neither does the moon hide her light
     From the heavens to-night,
     And weep behind her clouds o’er any individual in the present
     Company’s shame.

--Please to proceed, Mr Boffin.’

‘Thank’ee, Wegg, both for your confidence in me and for your frequent
dropping into poetry; both of which is friendly. Well, then; my idea is,
that you should give up your stall, and that I should put you into the
Bower here, to keep it for us. It’s a pleasant spot; and a man with
coals and candles and a pound a week might be in clover here.’

‘Hem! Would that man, sir--we will say that man, for the purposes of
argueyment;’ Mr Wegg made a smiling demonstration of great perspicuity
here; ‘would that man, sir, be expected to throw any other capacity in,
or would any other capacity be considered extra? Now let us (for the
purposes of argueyment) suppose that man to be engaged as a reader: say
(for the purposes of argueyment) in the evening. Would that man’s pay as
a reader in the evening, be added to the other amount, which, adopting
your language, we will call clover; or would it merge into that amount,
or clover?’

‘Well,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘I suppose it would be added.’

‘I suppose it would, sir. You are right, sir. Exactly my own views,
Mr Boffin.’ Here Wegg rose, and balancing himself on his wooden leg,
fluttered over his prey with extended hand. ‘Mr Boffin, consider it
done. Say no more, sir, not a word more. My stall and I are for ever
parted. The collection of ballads will in future be reserved for private
study, with the object of making poetry tributary’--Wegg was so proud
of having found this word, that he said it again, with a capital
letter--‘Tributary, to friendship. Mr Boffin, don’t allow yourself to
be made uncomfortable by the pang it gives me to part from my stock and
stall. Similar emotion was undergone by my own father when promoted
for his merits from his occupation as a waterman to a situation under
Government. His Christian name was Thomas. His words at the time (I was
then an infant, but so deep was their impression on me, that I committed
them to memory) were:

     Then farewell my trim-built wherry,
     Oars and coat and badge farewell!
     Never more at Chelsea Ferry,
     Shall your Thomas take a spell!

--My father got over it, Mr Boffin, and so shall I.’

While delivering these valedictory observations, Wegg continually
disappointed Mr Boffin of his hand by flourishing it in the air. He now
darted it at his patron, who took it, and felt his mind relieved of a
great weight: observing that as they had arranged their joint affairs
so satisfactorily, he would now be glad to look into those of Bully
Sawyers. Which, indeed, had been left over-night in a very unpromising
posture, and for whose impending expedition against the Persians the
weather had been by no means favourable all day.

Mr Wegg resumed his spectacles therefore. But Sawyers was not to be of
the party that night; for, before Wegg had found his place, Mrs Boffin’s
tread was heard upon the stairs, so unusually heavy and hurried, that Mr
Boffin would have started up at the sound, anticipating some occurrence
much out of the common course, even though she had not also called to
him in an agitated tone.

Mr Boffin hurried out, and found her on the dark staircase, panting,
with a lighted candle in her hand.

‘What’s the matter, my dear?’

‘I don’t know; I don’t know; but I wish you’d come up-stairs.’

Much surprised, Mr Boffin went up stairs and accompanied Mrs Boffin into
their own room: a second large room on the same floor as the room in
which the late proprietor had died. Mr Boffin looked all round him,
and saw nothing more unusual than various articles of folded linen on a
large chest, which Mrs Boffin had been sorting.

‘What is it, my dear? Why, you’re frightened! YOU frightened?’

‘I am not one of that sort certainly,’ said Mrs Boffin, as she sat down
in a chair to recover herself, and took her husband’s arm; ‘but it’s
very strange!’

‘What is, my dear?’

‘Noddy, the faces of the old man and the two children are all over the
house to-night.’

‘My dear?’ exclaimed Mr Boffin. But not without a certain uncomfortable
sensation gliding down his back.

‘I know it must sound foolish, and yet it is so.’

‘Where did you think you saw them?’

‘I don’t know that I think I saw them anywhere. I felt them.’

‘Touched them?’

‘No. Felt them in the air. I was sorting those things on the chest, and
not thinking of the old man or the children, but singing to myself, when
all in a moment I felt there was a face growing out of the dark.’

‘What face?’ asked her husband, looking about him.

‘For a moment it was the old man’s, and then it got younger. For a
moment it was both the children’s, and then it got older. For a moment
it was a strange face, and then it was all the faces.’

‘And then it was gone?’

‘Yes; and then it was gone.’

‘Where were you then, old lady?’

‘Here, at the chest. Well; I got the better of it, and went on sorting,
and went on singing to myself. “Lor!” I says, “I’ll think of something
else--something comfortable--and put it out of my head.” So I thought
of the new house and Miss Bella Wilfer, and was thinking at a great rate
with that sheet there in my hand, when all of a sudden, the faces seemed
to be hidden in among the folds of it and I let it drop.’

As it still lay on the floor where it had fallen, Mr Boffin picked it up
and laid it on the chest.

‘And then you ran down stairs?’

‘No. I thought I’d try another room, and shake it off. I says to myself,
“I’ll go and walk slowly up and down the old man’s room three times,
from end to end, and then I shall have conquered it.” I went in with the
candle in my hand; but the moment I came near the bed, the air got thick
with them.’

‘With the faces?’

‘Yes, and I even felt that they were in the dark behind the side-door,
and on the little staircase, floating away into the yard. Then, I called
you.’

Mr Boffin, lost in amazement, looked at Mrs Boffin. Mrs Boffin, lost in
her own fluttered inability to make this out, looked at Mr Boffin.

‘I think, my dear,’ said the Golden Dustman, ‘I’ll at once get rid of
Wegg for the night, because he’s coming to inhabit the Bower, and it
might be put into his head or somebody else’s, if he heard this and it
got about that the house is haunted. Whereas we know better. Don’t we?’

‘I never had the feeling in the house before,’ said Mrs Boffin; ‘and I
have been about it alone at all hours of the night. I have been in the
house when Death was in it, and I have been in the house when Murder was
a new part of its adventures, and I never had a fright in it yet.’

‘And won’t again, my dear,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Depend upon it, it comes of
thinking and dwelling on that dark spot.’

‘Yes; but why didn’t it come before?’ asked Mrs Boffin.

This draft on Mr Boffin’s philosophy could only be met by that gentleman
with the remark that everything that is at all, must begin at some time.
Then, tucking his wife’s arm under his own, that she might not be left
by herself to be troubled again, he descended to release Wegg. Who,
being something drowsy after his plentiful repast, and constitutionally
of a shirking temperament, was well enough pleased to stump away,
without doing what he had come to do, and was paid for doing.

Mr Boffin then put on his hat, and Mrs Boffin her shawl; and the pair,
further provided with a bunch of keys and a lighted lantern, went
all over the dismal house--dismal everywhere, but in their own two
rooms--from cellar to cock-loft. Not resting satisfied with giving that
much chace to Mrs Boffin’s fancies, they pursued them into the yard and
outbuildings, and under the Mounds. And setting the lantern, when all
was done, at the foot of one of the Mounds, they comfortably trotted to
and fro for an evening walk, to the end that the murky cobwebs in Mrs
Boffin’s brain might be blown away.

‘There, my dear!’ said Mr Boffin when they came in to supper. ‘That was
the treatment, you see. Completely worked round, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, deary,’ said Mrs Boffin, laying aside her shawl. ‘I’m not nervous
any more. I’m not a bit troubled now. I’d go anywhere about the house
the same as ever. But--’

‘Eh!’ said Mr Boffin.

‘But I’ve only to shut my eyes.’

‘And what then?’

‘Why then,’ said Mrs Boffin, speaking with her eyes closed, and her
left hand thoughtfully touching her brow, ‘then, there they are! The old
man’s face, and it gets younger. The two children’s faces, and they get
older. A face that I don’t know. And then all the faces!’

Opening her eyes again, and seeing her husband’s face across the table,
she leaned forward to give it a pat on the cheek, and sat down to
supper, declaring it to be the best face in the world.



Chapter 16

MINDERS AND RE-MINDERS


The Secretary lost no time in getting to work, and his vigilance
and method soon set their mark on the Golden Dustman’s affairs. His
earnestness in determining to understand the length and breadth and
depth of every piece of work submitted to him by his employer, was as
special as his despatch in transacting it. He accepted no information
or explanation at second hand, but made himself the master of everything
confided to him.

One part of the Secretary’s conduct, underlying all the rest, might have
been mistrusted by a man with a better knowledge of men than the
Golden Dustman had. The Secretary was as far from being inquisitive
or intrusive as Secretary could be, but nothing less than a complete
understanding of the whole of the affairs would content him. It soon
became apparent (from the knowledge with which he set out) that he must
have been to the office where the Harmon will was registered, and must
have read the will. He anticipated Mr Boffin’s consideration whether he
should be advised with on this or that topic, by showing that he
already knew of it and understood it. He did this with no attempt at
concealment, seeming to be satisfied that it was part of his duty to
have prepared himself at all attainable points for its utmost discharge.

This might--let it be repeated--have awakened some little vague mistrust
in a man more worldly-wise than the Golden Dustman. On the other hand,
the Secretary was discerning, discreet, and silent, though as zealous as
if the affairs had been his own. He showed no love of patronage or the
command of money, but distinctly preferred resigning both to Mr
Boffin. If, in his limited sphere, he sought power, it was the power
of knowledge; the power derivable from a perfect comprehension of his
business.

As on the Secretary’s face there was a nameless cloud, so on his
manner there was a shadow equally indefinable. It was not that he was
embarrassed, as on that first night with the Wilfer family; he was
habitually unembarrassed now, and yet the something remained. It was not
that his manner was bad, as on that occasion; it was now very good, as
being modest, gracious, and ready. Yet the something never left it. It
has been written of men who have undergone a cruel captivity, or who
have passed through a terrible strait, or who in self-preservation have
killed a defenceless fellow-creature, that the record thereof has never
faded from their countenances until they died. Was there any such record
here?

He established a temporary office for himself in the new house, and all
went well under his hand, with one singular exception. He manifestly
objected to communicate with Mr Boffin’s solicitor. Two or three times,
when there was some slight occasion for his doing so, he transferred
the task to Mr Boffin; and his evasion of it soon became so curiously
apparent, that Mr Boffin spoke to him on the subject of his reluctance.

‘It is so,’ the Secretary admitted. ‘I would rather not.’

Had he any personal objection to Mr Lightwood?

‘I don’t know him.’

Had he suffered from law-suits?

‘Not more than other men,’ was his short answer.

Was he prejudiced against the race of lawyers?

‘No. But while I am in your employment, sir, I would rather be excused
from going between the lawyer and the client. Of course if you press it,
Mr Boffin, I am ready to comply. But I should take it as a great favour
if you would not press it without urgent occasion.’

Now, it could not be said that there WAS urgent occasion, for Lightwood
retained no other affairs in his hands than such as still lingered and
languished about the undiscovered criminal, and such as arose out of the
purchase of the house. Many other matters that might have travelled to
him, now stopped short at the Secretary, under whose administration they
were far more expeditiously and satisfactorily disposed of than they
would have been if they had got into Young Blight’s domain. This the
Golden Dustman quite understood. Even the matter immediately in hand
was of very little moment as requiring personal appearance on the
Secretary’s part, for it amounted to no more than this:--The death of
Hexam rendering the sweat of the honest man’s brow unprofitable, the
honest man had shufflingly declined to moisten his brow for nothing,
with that severe exertion which is known in legal circles as swearing
your way through a stone wall. Consequently, that new light had gone
sputtering out. But, the airing of the old facts had led some one
concerned to suggest that it would be well before they were reconsigned
to their gloomy shelf--now probably for ever--to induce or compel that
Mr Julius Handford to reappear and be questioned. And all traces of Mr
Julius Handford being lost, Lightwood now referred to his client for
authority to seek him through public advertisement.

‘Does your objection go to writing to Lightwood, Rokesmith?’

‘Not in the least, sir.’

‘Then perhaps you’ll write him a line, and say he is free to do what he
likes. I don’t think it promises.’

‘I don’t think it promises,’ said the Secretary.

‘Still, he may do what he likes.’

‘I will write immediately. Let me thank you for so considerately
yielding to my disinclination. It may seem less unreasonable, if I avow
to you that although I don’t know Mr Lightwood, I have a disagreeable
association connected with him. It is not his fault; he is not at all to
blame for it, and does not even know my name.’

Mr Boffin dismissed the matter with a nod or two. The letter was
written, and next day Mr Julius Handford was advertised for. He was
requested to place himself in communication with Mr Mortimer Lightwood,
as a possible means of furthering the ends of justice, and a reward was
offered to any one acquainted with his whereabout who would communicate
the same to the said Mr Mortimer Lightwood at his office in the Temple.
Every day for six weeks this advertisement appeared at the head of all
the newspapers, and every day for six weeks the Secretary, when he
saw it, said to himself; in the tone in which he had said to his
employer,--‘I don’t think it promises!’

Among his first occupations the pursuit of that orphan wanted by
Mrs Boffin held a conspicuous place. From the earliest moment of his
engagement he showed a particular desire to please her, and, knowing her
to have this object at heart, he followed it up with unwearying alacrity
and interest.

Mr and Mrs Milvey had found their search a difficult one. Either an
eligible orphan was of the wrong sex (which almost always happened)
or was too old, or too young, or too sickly, or too dirty, or too much
accustomed to the streets, or too likely to run away; or, it was found
impossible to complete the philanthropic transaction without buying the
orphan. For, the instant it became known that anybody wanted the orphan,
up started some affectionate relative of the orphan who put a price upon
the orphan’s head. The suddenness of an orphan’s rise in the market was
not to be paralleled by the maddest records of the Stock Exchange. He
would be at five thousand per cent discount out at nurse making a mud
pie at nine in the morning, and (being inquired for) would go up to
five thousand per cent premium before noon. The market was ‘rigged’ in
various artful ways. Counterfeit stock got into circulation. Parents
boldly represented themselves as dead, and brought their orphans with
them. Genuine orphan-stock was surreptitiously withdrawn from the
market. It being announced, by emissaries posted for the purpose, that
Mr and Mrs Milvey were coming down the court, orphan scrip would be
instantly concealed, and production refused, save on a condition usually
stated by the brokers as ‘a gallon of beer’. Likewise, fluctuations of
a wild and South-Sea nature were occasioned, by orphan-holders keeping
back, and then rushing into the market a dozen together. But, the
uniform principle at the root of all these various operations was
bargain and sale; and that principle could not be recognized by Mr and
Mrs Milvey.

At length, tidings were received by the Reverend Frank of a charming
orphan to be found at Brentford. One of the deceased parents (late his
parishioners) had a poor widowed grandmother in that agreeable town, and
she, Mrs Betty Higden, had carried off the orphan with maternal care,
but could not afford to keep him.

The Secretary proposed to Mrs Boffin, either to go down himself and
take a preliminary survey of this orphan, or to drive her down, that
she might at once form her own opinion. Mrs Boffin preferring the latter
course, they set off one morning in a hired phaeton, conveying the
hammer-headed young man behind them.

The abode of Mrs Betty Higden was not easy to find, lying in such
complicated back settlements of muddy Brentford that they left their
equipage at the sign of the Three Magpies, and went in search of it on
foot. After many inquiries and defeats, there was pointed out to them
in a lane, a very small cottage residence, with a board across the open
doorway, hooked on to which board by the armpits was a young gentleman
of tender years, angling for mud with a headless wooden horse and line.
In this young sportsman, distinguished by a crisply curling auburn head
and a bluff countenance, the Secretary descried the orphan.

It unfortunately happened as they quickened their pace, that the orphan,
lost to considerations of personal safety in the ardour of the moment,
overbalanced himself and toppled into the street. Being an orphan of a
chubby conformation, he then took to rolling, and had rolled into the
gutter before they could come up. From the gutter he was rescued by John
Rokesmith, and thus the first meeting with Mrs Higden was inaugurated by
the awkward circumstance of their being in possession--one would say at
first sight unlawful possession--of the orphan, upside down and purple
in the countenance. The board across the doorway too, acting as a trap
equally for the feet of Mrs Higden coming out, and the feet of Mrs
Boffin and John Rokesmith going in, greatly increased the difficulty of
the situation: to which the cries of the orphan imparted a lugubrious
and inhuman character.

At first, it was impossible to explain, on account of the orphan’s
‘holding his breath’: a most terrific proceeding, super-inducing in the
orphan lead-colour rigidity and a deadly silence, compared with which
his cries were music yielding the height of enjoyment. But as he
gradually recovered, Mrs Boffin gradually introduced herself; and
smiling peace was gradually wooed back to Mrs Betty Higden’s home.

It was then perceived to be a small home with a large mangle in it, at
the handle of which machine stood a very long boy, with a very little
head, and an open mouth of disproportionate capacity that seemed to
assist his eyes in staring at the visitors. In a corner below the
mangle, on a couple of stools, sat two very little children: a boy and a
girl; and when the very long boy, in an interval of staring, took a turn
at the mangle, it was alarming to see how it lunged itself at those two
innocents, like a catapult designed for their destruction, harmlessly
retiring when within an inch of their heads. The room was clean and
neat. It had a brick floor, and a window of diamond panes, and a flounce
hanging below the chimney-piece, and strings nailed from bottom to top
outside the window on which scarlet-beans were to grow in the coming
season if the Fates were propitious. However propitious they might have
been in the seasons that were gone, to Betty Higden in the matter of
beans, they had not been very favourable in the matter of coins; for it
was easy to see that she was poor.

She was one of those old women, was Mrs Betty Higden, who by dint of
an indomitable purpose and a strong constitution fight out many years,
though each year has come with its new knock-down blows fresh to the
fight against her, wearied by it; an active old woman, with a bright
dark eye and a resolute face, yet quite a tender creature too; not a
logically-reasoning woman, but God is good, and hearts may count in
Heaven as high as heads.

‘Yes sure!’ said she, when the business was opened, ‘Mrs Milvey had the
kindness to write to me, ma’am, and I got Sloppy to read it. It was a
pretty letter. But she’s an affable lady.’

The visitors glanced at the long boy, who seemed to indicate by a
broader stare of his mouth and eyes that in him Sloppy stood confessed.

‘For I aint, you must know,’ said Betty, ‘much of a hand at reading
writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a
newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a
newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.’

The visitors again considered it a point of politeness to look at
Sloppy, who, looking at them, suddenly threw back his head, extended his
mouth to its utmost width, and laughed loud and long. At this the two
innocents, with their brains in that apparent danger, laughed, and Mrs
Higden laughed, and the orphan laughed, and then the visitors laughed.
Which was more cheerful than intelligible.

Then Sloppy seeming to be seized with an industrious mania or fury,
turned to at the mangle, and impelled it at the heads of the innocents
with such a creaking and rumbling, that Mrs Higden stopped him.

‘The gentlefolks can’t hear themselves speak, Sloppy. Bide a bit, bide a
bit!’

‘Is that the dear child in your lap?’ said Mrs Boffin.

‘Yes, ma’am, this is Johnny.’

‘Johnny, too!’ cried Mrs Boffin, turning to the Secretary; ‘already
Johnny! Only one of the two names left to give him! He’s a pretty boy.’

With his chin tucked down in his shy childish manner, he was looking
furtively at Mrs Boffin out of his blue eyes, and reaching his fat
dimpled hand up to the lips of the old woman, who was kissing it by
times.

‘Yes, ma’am, he’s a pretty boy, he’s a dear darling boy, he’s the child
of my own last left daughter’s daughter. But she’s gone the way of all
the rest.’

‘Those are not his brother and sister?’ said Mrs Boffin.

‘Oh, dear no, ma’am. Those are Minders.’

‘Minders?’ the Secretary repeated.

‘Left to be Minded, sir. I keep a Minding-School. I can take only three,
on account of the Mangle. But I love children, and Four-pence a week is
Four-pence. Come here, Toddles and Poddles.’

Toddles was the pet-name of the boy; Poddles of the girl. At their
little unsteady pace, they came across the floor, hand-in-hand, as if
they were traversing an extremely difficult road intersected by brooks,
and, when they had had their heads patted by Mrs Betty Higden, made
lunges at the orphan, dramatically representing an attempt to bear him,
crowing, into captivity and slavery. All the three children enjoyed this
to a delightful extent, and the sympathetic Sloppy again laughed long
and loud. When it was discreet to stop the play, Betty Higden said
‘Go to your seats Toddles and Poddles,’ and they returned hand-in-hand
across country, seeming to find the brooks rather swollen by late rains.

‘And Master--or Mister--Sloppy?’ said the Secretary, in doubt whether he
was man, boy, or what.

‘A love-child,’ returned Betty Higden, dropping her voice; ‘parents
never known; found in the street. He was brought up in the--’ with a
shiver of repugnance, ‘--the House.’

‘The Poor-house?’ said the Secretary.

Mrs Higden set that resolute old face of hers, and darkly nodded yes.

‘You dislike the mention of it.’

‘Dislike the mention of it?’ answered the old woman. ‘Kill me sooner
than take me there. Throw this pretty child under cart-horses feet and
a loaded waggon, sooner than take him there. Come to us and find us all
a-dying, and set a light to us all where we lie and let us all blaze
away with the house into a heap of cinders sooner than move a corpse of
us there!’

A surprising spirit in this lonely woman after so many years of hard
working, and hard living, my Lords and Gentlemen and Honourable
Boards! What is it that we call it in our grandiose speeches? British
independence, rather perverted? Is that, or something like it, the ring
of the cant?

‘Do I never read in the newspapers,’ said the dame, fondling the
child--‘God help me and the like of me!--how the worn-out people that
do come down to that, get driven from post to pillar and pillar to post,
a-purpose to tire them out! Do I never read how they are put off, put
off, put off--how they are grudged, grudged, grudged, the shelter, or
the doctor, or the drop of physic, or the bit of bread? Do I never
read how they grow heartsick of it and give it up, after having let
themselves drop so low, and how they after all die out for want of help?
Then I say, I hope I can die as well as another, and I’ll die without
that disgrace.’

Absolutely impossible my Lords and Gentlemen and Honourable Boards, by
any stretch of legislative wisdom to set these perverse people right in
their logic?

‘Johnny, my pretty,’ continued old Betty, caressing the child, and
rather mourning over it than speaking to it, ‘your old Granny Betty is
nigher fourscore year than threescore and ten. She never begged nor had
a penny of the Union money in all her life. She paid scot and she
paid lot when she had money to pay; she worked when she could, and
she starved when she must. You pray that your Granny may have strength
enough left her at the last (she’s strong for an old one, Johnny), to
get up from her bed and run and hide herself and swown to death in a
hole, sooner than fall into the hands of those Cruel Jacks we read of
that dodge and drive, and worry and weary, and scorn and shame, the
decent poor.’

A brilliant success, my Lords and Gentlemen and Honourable Boards to
have brought it to this in the minds of the best of the poor! Under
submission, might it be worth thinking of at any odd time?

The fright and abhorrence that Mrs Betty Higden smoothed out of her
strong face as she ended this diversion, showed how seriously she had
meant it.

‘And does he work for you?’ asked the Secretary, gently bringing the
discourse back to Master or Mister Sloppy.

‘Yes,’ said Betty with a good-humoured smile and nod of the head. ‘And
well too.’

‘Does he live here?’

‘He lives more here than anywhere. He was thought to be no better than a
Natural, and first come to me as a Minder. I made interest with Mr Blogg
the Beadle to have him as a Minder, seeing him by chance up at church,
and thinking I might do something with him. For he was a weak ricketty
creetur then.’

‘Is he called by his right name?’

‘Why, you see, speaking quite correctly, he has no right name. I always
understood he took his name from being found on a Sloppy night.’

‘He seems an amiable fellow.’

‘Bless you, sir, there’s not a bit of him,’ returned Betty, ‘that’s not
amiable. So you may judge how amiable he is, by running your eye along
his heighth.’

Of an ungainly make was Sloppy. Too much of him longwise, too little of
him broadwise, and too many sharp angles of him angle-wise. One of those
shambling male human creatures, born to be indiscreetly candid in the
revelation of buttons; every button he had about him glaring at the
public to a quite preternatural extent. A considerable capital of knee
and elbow and wrist and ankle, had Sloppy, and he didn’t know how to
dispose of it to the best advantage, but was always investing it in
wrong securities, and so getting himself into embarrassed circumstances.
Full-Private Number One in the Awkward Squad of the rank and file of
life, was Sloppy, and yet had his glimmering notions of standing true to
the Colours.

‘And now,’ said Mrs Boffin, ‘concerning Johnny.’

As Johnny, with his chin tucked in and lips pouting, reclined in Betty’s
lap, concentrating his blue eyes on the visitors and shading them from
observation with a dimpled arm, old Betty took one of his fresh fat
hands in her withered right, and fell to gently beating it on her
withered left.

‘Yes, ma’am. Concerning Johnny.’

‘If you trust the dear child to me,’ said Mrs Boffin, with a face
inviting trust, ‘he shall have the best of homes, the best of care, the
best of education, the best of friends. Please God I will be a true good
mother to him!’

‘I am thankful to you, ma’am, and the dear child would be thankful if
he was old enough to understand.’ Still lightly beating the little hand
upon her own. ‘I wouldn’t stand in the dear child’s light, not if I had
all my life before me instead of a very little of it. But I hope you
won’t take it ill that I cleave to the child closer than words can tell,
for he’s the last living thing left me.’

‘Take it ill, my dear soul? Is it likely? And you so tender of him as to
bring him home here!’

‘I have seen,’ said Betty, still with that light beat upon her hard
rough hand, ‘so many of them on my lap. And they are all gone but this
one! I am ashamed to seem so selfish, but I don’t really mean it. It’ll
be the making of his fortune, and he’ll be a gentleman when I am dead.
I--I--don’t know what comes over me. I--try against it. Don’t notice
me!’ The light beat stopped, the resolute mouth gave way, and the fine
strong old face broke up into weakness and tears.

Now, greatly to the relief of the visitors, the emotional Sloppy no
sooner beheld his patroness in this condition, than, throwing back his
head and throwing open his mouth, he lifted up his voice and bellowed.
This alarming note of something wrong instantly terrified Toddles and
Poddles, who were no sooner heard to roar surprisingly, than Johnny,
curving himself the wrong way and striking out at Mrs Boffin with a pair
of indifferent shoes, became a prey to despair. The absurdity of the
situation put its pathos to the rout. Mrs Betty Higden was herself in
a moment, and brought them all to order with that speed, that Sloppy,
stopping short in a polysyllabic bellow, transferred his energy to
the mangle, and had taken several penitential turns before he could be
stopped.

‘There, there, there!’ said Mrs Boffin, almost regarding her kind self
as the most ruthless of women. ‘Nothing is going to be done. Nobody need
be frightened. We’re all comfortable; ain’t we, Mrs Higden?’

‘Sure and certain we are,’ returned Betty.

‘And there really is no hurry, you know,’ said Mrs Boffin in a lower
voice. ‘Take time to think of it, my good creature!’

‘Don’t you fear ME no more, ma’am,’ said Betty; ‘I thought of it for
good yesterday. I don’t know what come over me just now, but it’ll never
come again.’

‘Well, then, Johnny shall have more time to think of it,’ returned Mrs
Boffin; ‘the pretty child shall have time to get used to it. And you’ll
get him more used to it, if you think well of it; won’t you?’

Betty undertook that, cheerfully and readily.

‘Lor,’ cried Mrs Boffin, looking radiantly about her, ‘we want to make
everybody happy, not dismal!--And perhaps you wouldn’t mind letting me
know how used to it you begin to get, and how it all goes on?’

‘I’ll send Sloppy,’ said Mrs Higden.

‘And this gentleman who has come with me will pay him for his trouble,’
said Mrs Boffin. ‘And Mr Sloppy, whenever you come to my house, be
sure you never go away without having had a good dinner of meat, beer,
vegetables, and pudding.’

This still further brightened the face of affairs; for, the highly
sympathetic Sloppy, first broadly staring and grinning, and then roaring
with laughter, Toddles and Poddles followed suit, and Johnny trumped
the trick. T and P considering these favourable circumstances for
the resumption of that dramatic descent upon Johnny, again came
across-country hand-in-hand upon a buccaneering expedition; and this
having been fought out in the chimney corner behind Mrs Higden’s chair,
with great valour on both sides, those desperate pirates returned
hand-in-hand to their stools, across the dry bed of a mountain torrent.

‘You must tell me what I can do for you, Betty my friend,’ said Mrs
Boffin confidentially, ‘if not to-day, next time.’

‘Thank you all the same, ma’am, but I want nothing for myself. I can
work. I’m strong. I can walk twenty mile if I’m put to it.’ Old Betty
was proud, and said it with a sparkle in her bright eyes.

‘Yes, but there are some little comforts that you wouldn’t be the worse
for,’ returned Mrs Boffin. ‘Bless ye, I wasn’t born a lady any more than
you.’

‘It seems to me,’ said Betty, smiling, ‘that you were born a lady, and
a true one, or there never was a lady born. But I couldn’t take anything
from you, my dear. I never did take anything from any one. It ain’t that
I’m not grateful, but I love to earn it better.’

‘Well, well!’ returned Mrs Boffin. ‘I only spoke of little things, or I
wouldn’t have taken the liberty.’

Betty put her visitor’s hand to her lips, in acknowledgment of the
delicate answer. Wonderfully upright her figure was, and wonderfully
self-reliant her look, as, standing facing her visitor, she explained
herself further.

‘If I could have kept the dear child, without the dread that’s always
upon me of his coming to that fate I have spoken of, I could never have
parted with him, even to you. For I love him, I love him, I love him! I
love my husband long dead and gone, in him; I love my children dead and
gone, in him; I love my young and hopeful days dead and gone, in him. I
couldn’t sell that love, and look you in your bright kind face. It’s a
free gift. I am in want of nothing. When my strength fails me, if I
can but die out quick and quiet, I shall be quite content. I have stood
between my dead and that shame I have spoken of; and it has been kept
off from every one of them. Sewed into my gown,’ with her hand upon
her breast, ‘is just enough to lay me in the grave. Only see that it’s
rightly spent, so as I may rest free to the last from that cruelty and
disgrace, and you’ll have done much more than a little thing for me, and
all that in this present world my heart is set upon.’

Mrs Betty Higden’s visitor pressed her hand. There was no more breaking
up of the strong old face into weakness. My Lords and Gentlemen and
Honourable Boards, it really was as composed as our own faces, and
almost as dignified.

And now, Johnny was to be inveigled into occupying a temporary
position on Mrs Boffin’s lap. It was not until he had been piqued into
competition with the two diminutive Minders, by seeing them successively
raised to that post and retire from it without injury, that he could be
by any means induced to leave Mrs Betty Higden’s skirts; towards which
he exhibited, even when in Mrs Boffin’s embrace, strong yearnings,
spiritual and bodily; the former expressed in a very gloomy visage,
the latter in extended arms. However, a general description of the
toy-wonders lurking in Mr Boffin’s house, so far conciliated this
worldly-minded orphan as to induce him to stare at her frowningly,
with a fist in his mouth, and even at length to chuckle when a
richly-caparisoned horse on wheels, with a miraculous gift of cantering
to cake-shops, was mentioned. This sound being taken up by the Minders,
swelled into a rapturous trio which gave general satisfaction.

So, the interview was considered very successful, and Mrs Boffin was
pleased, and all were satisfied. Not least of all, Sloppy, who undertook
to conduct the visitors back by the best way to the Three Magpies, and
whom the hammer-headed young man much despised.

This piece of business thus put in train, the Secretary drove Mrs Boffin
back to the Bower, and found employment for himself at the new house
until evening. Whether, when evening came, he took a way to his lodgings
that led through fields, with any design of finding Miss Bella Wilfer
in those fields, is not so certain as that she regularly walked there at
that hour.

And, moreover, it is certain that there she was.

No longer in mourning, Miss Bella was dressed in as pretty colours as
she could muster. There is no denying that she was as pretty as they,
and that she and the colours went very prettily together. She was
reading as she walked, and of course it is to be inferred, from her
showing no knowledge of Mr Rokesmith’s approach, that she did not know
he was approaching.

‘Eh?’ said Miss Bella, raising her eyes from her book, when he stopped
before her. ‘Oh! It’s you.’

‘Only I. A fine evening!’

‘Is it?’ said Bella, looking coldly round. ‘I suppose it is, now you
mention it. I have not been thinking of the evening.’

‘So intent upon your book?’

‘Ye-e-es,’ replied Bella, with a drawl of indifference.

‘A love story, Miss Wilfer?’

‘Oh dear no, or I shouldn’t be reading it. It’s more about money than
anything else.’

‘And does it say that money is better than anything?’

‘Upon my word,’ returned Bella, ‘I forget what it says, but you can find
out for yourself if you like, Mr Rokesmith. I don’t want it any more.’

The Secretary took the book--she had fluttered the leaves as if it were
a fan--and walked beside her.

‘I am charged with a message for you, Miss Wilfer.’

‘Impossible, I think!’ said Bella, with another drawl.

‘From Mrs Boffin. She desired me to assure you of the pleasure she has
in finding that she will be ready to receive you in another week or two
at furthest.’

Bella turned her head towards him, with her prettily-insolent eyebrows
raised, and her eyelids drooping. As much as to say, ‘How did YOU come
by the message, pray?’

‘I have been waiting for an opportunity of telling you that I am Mr
Boffin’s Secretary.’

‘I am as wise as ever,’ said Miss Bella, loftily, ‘for I don’t know what
a Secretary is. Not that it signifies.’

‘Not at all.’

A covert glance at her face, as he walked beside her, showed him that
she had not expected his ready assent to that proposition.

‘Then are you going to be always there, Mr Rokesmith?’ she inquired, as
if that would be a drawback.

‘Always? No. Very much there? Yes.’

‘Dear me!’ drawled Bella, in a tone of mortification.

‘But my position there as Secretary, will be very different from yours
as guest. You will know little or nothing about me. I shall transact
the business: you will transact the pleasure. I shall have my salary to
earn; you will have nothing to do but to enjoy and attract.’

‘Attract, sir?’ said Bella, again with her eyebrows raised, and her
eyelids drooping. ‘I don’t understand you.’

Without replying on this point, Mr Rokesmith went on.

‘Excuse me; when I first saw you in your black dress--’

[‘There!’ was Miss Bella’s mental exclamation. ‘What did I say to them
at home? Everybody noticed that ridiculous mourning.’)

‘When I first saw you in your black dress, I was at a loss to account
for that distinction between yourself and your family. I hope it was not
impertinent to speculate upon it?’

‘I hope not, I am sure,’ said Miss Bella, haughtily. ‘But you ought to
know best how you speculated upon it.’

Mr Rokesmith inclined his head in a deprecatory manner, and went on.

‘Since I have been entrusted with Mr Boffin’s affairs, I have
necessarily come to understand the little mystery. I venture to remark
that I feel persuaded that much of your loss may be repaired. I
speak, of course, merely of wealth, Miss Wilfer. The loss of a perfect
stranger, whose worth, or worthlessness, I cannot estimate--nor you
either--is beside the question. But this excellent gentleman and lady
are so full of simplicity, so full of generosity, so inclined towards
you, and so desirous to--how shall I express it?--to make amends for
their good fortune, that you have only to respond.’

As he watched her with another covert look, he saw a certain ambitious
triumph in her face which no assumed coldness could conceal.

‘As we have been brought under one roof by an accidental combination of
circumstances, which oddly extends itself to the new relations before
us, I have taken the liberty of saying these few words. You don’t
consider them intrusive I hope?’ said the Secretary with deference.

‘Really, Mr Rokesmith, I can’t say what I consider them,’ returned the
young lady. ‘They are perfectly new to me, and may be founded altogether
on your own imagination.’

‘You will see.’

These same fields were opposite the Wilfer premises. The discreet
Mrs Wilfer now looking out of window and beholding her daughter in
conference with her lodger, instantly tied up her head and came out for
a casual walk.

‘I have been telling Miss Wilfer,’ said John Rokesmith, as the majestic
lady came stalking up, ‘that I have become, by a curious chance, Mr
Boffin’s Secretary or man of business.’

‘I have not,’ returned Mrs Wilfer, waving her gloves in her chronic
state of dignity, and vague ill-usage, ‘the honour of any intimate
acquaintance with Mr Boffin, and it is not for me to congratulate that
gentleman on the acquisition he has made.’

‘A poor one enough,’ said Rokesmith.

‘Pardon me,’ returned Mrs Wilfer, ‘the merits of Mr Boffin may be highly
distinguished--may be more distinguished than the countenance of Mrs
Boffin would imply--but it were the insanity of humility to deem him
worthy of a better assistant.’

‘You are very good. I have also been telling Miss Wilfer that she is
expected very shortly at the new residence in town.’

‘Having tacitly consented,’ said Mrs Wilfer, with a grand shrug of her
shoulders, and another wave of her gloves, ‘to my child’s acceptance of
the proffered attentions of Mrs Boffin, I interpose no objection.’

Here Miss Bella offered the remonstrance: ‘Don’t talk nonsense, ma,
please.’

‘Peace!’ said Mrs Wilfer.

‘No, ma, I am not going to be made so absurd. Interposing objections!’

‘I say,’ repeated Mrs Wilfer, with a vast access of grandeur, ‘that I am
NOT going to interpose objections. If Mrs Boffin (to whose countenance
no disciple of Lavater could possibly for a single moment subscribe),’
with a shiver, ‘seeks to illuminate her new residence in town with the
attractions of a child of mine, I am content that she should be favoured
by the company of a child of mine.’

‘You use the word, ma’am, I have myself used,’ said Rokesmith, with a
glance at Bella, ‘when you speak of Miss Wilfer’s attractions there.’

‘Pardon me,’ returned Mrs Wilfer, with dreadful solemnity, ‘but I had
not finished.’

‘Pray excuse me.’

‘I was about to say,’ pursued Mrs Wilfer, who clearly had not had
the faintest idea of saying anything more: ‘that when I use the term
attractions, I do so with the qualification that I do not mean it in any
way whatever.’

The excellent lady delivered this luminous elucidation of her views
with an air of greatly obliging her hearers, and greatly distinguishing
herself. Whereat Miss Bella laughed a scornful little laugh and said:

‘Quite enough about this, I am sure, on all sides. Have the goodness, Mr
Rokesmith, to give my love to Mrs Boffin--’

‘Pardon me!’ cried Mrs Wilfer. ‘Compliments.’

‘Love!’ repeated Bella, with a little stamp of her foot.

‘No!’ said Mrs Wilfer, monotonously. ‘Compliments.’

[‘Say Miss Wilfer’s love, and Mrs Wilfer’s compliments,’ the Secretary
proposed, as a compromise.)

‘And I shall be very glad to come when she is ready for me. The sooner,
the better.’

‘One last word, Bella,’ said Mrs Wilfer, ‘before descending to the
family apartment. I trust that as a child of mine you will ever be
sensible that it will be graceful in you, when associating with Mr
and Mrs Boffin upon equal terms, to remember that the Secretary, Mr
Rokesmith, as your father’s lodger, has a claim on your good word.’

The condescension with which Mrs Wilfer delivered this proclamation of
patronage, was as wonderful as the swiftness with which the lodger
had lost caste in the Secretary. He smiled as the mother retired down
stairs; but his face fell, as the daughter followed.

‘So insolent, so trivial, so capricious, so mercenary, so careless, so
hard to touch, so hard to turn!’ he said, bitterly.

And added as he went upstairs. ‘And yet so pretty, so pretty!’

And added presently, as he walked to and fro in his room. ‘And if she
knew!’

She knew that he was shaking the house by his walking to and fro; and
she declared it another of the miseries of being poor, that you couldn’t
get rid of a haunting Secretary, stump--stump--stumping overhead in the
dark, like a Ghost.



Chapter 17

A DISMAL SWAMP


And now, in the blooming summer days, behold Mr and Mrs Boffin
established in the eminently aristocratic family mansion, and behold
all manner of crawling, creeping, fluttering, and buzzing creatures,
attracted by the gold dust of the Golden Dustman!

Foremost among those leaving cards at the eminently aristocratic door
before it is quite painted, are the Veneerings: out of breath, one
might imagine, from the impetuosity of their rush to the eminently
aristocratic steps. One copper-plate Mrs Veneering, two copper-plate
Mr Veneerings, and a connubial copper-plate Mr and Mrs Veneering,
requesting the honour of Mr and Mrs Boffin’s company at dinner with
the utmost Analytical solemnities. The enchanting Lady Tippins leaves a
card. Twemlow leaves cards. A tall custard-coloured phaeton tooling up
in a solemn manner leaves four cards, to wit, a couple of Mr Podsnaps, a
Mrs Podsnap, and a Miss Podsnap. All the world and his wife and daughter
leave cards. Sometimes the world’s wife has so many daughters, that her
card reads rather like a Miscellaneous Lot at an Auction; comprising Mrs
Tapkins, Miss Tapkins, Miss Frederica Tapkins, Miss Antonina Tapkins,
Miss Malvina Tapkins, and Miss Euphemia Tapkins; at the same time,
the same lady leaves the card of Mrs Henry George Alfred Swoshle, NEE
Tapkins; also, a card, Mrs Tapkins at Home, Wednesdays, Music, Portland
Place.

Miss Bella Wilfer becomes an inmate, for an indefinite period, of the
eminently aristocratic dwelling. Mrs Boffin bears Miss Bella away to
her Milliner’s and Dressmaker’s, and she gets beautifully dressed. The
Veneerings find with swift remorse that they have omitted to invite Miss
Bella Wilfer. One Mrs Veneering and one Mr and Mrs Veneering requesting
that additional honour, instantly do penance in white cardboard on
the hall table. Mrs Tapkins likewise discovers her omission, and
with promptitude repairs it; for herself; for Miss Tapkins, for Miss
Frederica Tapkins, for Miss Antonina Tapkins, for Miss Malvina Tapkins,
and for Miss Euphemia Tapkins. Likewise, for Mrs Henry George Alfred
Swoshle NEE Tapkins. Likewise, for Mrs Tapkins at Home, Wednesdays,
Music, Portland Place.

Tradesmen’s books hunger, and tradesmen’s mouths water, for the gold
dust of the Golden Dustman. As Mrs Boffin and Miss Wilfer drive out, or
as Mr Boffin walks out at his jog-trot pace, the fishmonger pulls off
his hat with an air of reverence founded on conviction. His men cleanse
their fingers on their woollen aprons before presuming to touch their
foreheads to Mr Boffin or Lady. The gaping salmon and the golden mullet
lying on the slab seem to turn up their eyes sideways, as they would
turn up their hands if they had any, in worshipping admiration. The
butcher, though a portly and a prosperous man, doesn’t know what to do
with himself; so anxious is he to express humility when discovered by
the passing Boffins taking the air in a mutton grove. Presents are made
to the Boffin servants, and bland strangers with business-cards
meeting said servants in the street, offer hypothetical corruption. As,
‘Supposing I was to be favoured with an order from Mr Boffin, my dear
friend, it would be worth my while’--to do a certain thing that I hope
might not prove wholly disagreeable to your feelings.

But no one knows so well as the Secretary, who opens and reads the
letters, what a set is made at the man marked by a stroke of notoriety.
Oh the varieties of dust for ocular use, offered in exchange for the
gold dust of the Golden Dustman! Fifty-seven churches to be erected with
half-crowns, forty-two parsonage houses to be repaired with shillings,
seven-and-twenty organs to be built with halfpence, twelve hundred
children to be brought up on postage stamps. Not that a half-crown,
shilling, halfpenny, or postage stamp, would be particularly acceptable
from Mr Boffin, but that it is so obvious he is the man to make up the
deficiency. And then the charities, my Christian brother! And mostly in
difficulties, yet mostly lavish, too, in the expensive articles of print
and paper. Large fat private double letter, sealed with ducal coronet.
‘Nicodemus Boffin, Esquire. My Dear Sir,--Having consented to preside
at the forthcoming Annual Dinner of the Family Party Fund, and feeling
deeply impressed with the immense usefulness of that noble Institution
and the great importance of its being supported by a List of Stewards
that shall prove to the public the interest taken in it by popular and
distinguished men, I have undertaken to ask you to become a Steward on
that occasion. Soliciting your favourable reply before the 14th instant,
I am, My Dear Sir, Your faithful Servant, LINSEED. P.S. The Steward’s
fee is limited to three Guineas.’ Friendly this, on the part of the Duke
of Linseed (and thoughtful in the postscript), only lithographed by
the hundred and presenting but a pale individuality of an address to
Nicodemus Boffin, Esquire, in quite another hand. It takes two noble
Earls and a Viscount, combined, to inform Nicodemus Boffin, Esquire,
in an equally flattering manner, that an estimable lady in the West of
England has offered to present a purse containing twenty pounds, to
the Society for Granting Annuities to Unassuming Members of the Middle
Classes, if twenty individuals will previously present purses of one
hundred pounds each. And those benevolent noblemen very kindly point out
that if Nicodemus Boffin, Esquire, should wish to present two or more
purses, it will not be inconsistent with the design of the estimable
lady in the West of England, provided each purse be coupled with the
name of some member of his honoured and respected family.

These are the corporate beggars. But there are, besides, the individual
beggars; and how does the heart of the Secretary fail him when he has to
cope with THEM! And they must be coped with to some extent, because they
all enclose documents (they call their scraps documents; but they are,
as to papers deserving the name, what minced veal is to a calf), the
non-return of which would be their ruin. That is say, they are utterly
ruined now, but they would be more utterly ruined then. Among these
correspondents are several daughters of general officers, long
accustomed to every luxury of life (except spelling), who little
thought, when their gallant fathers waged war in the Peninsula,
that they would ever have to appeal to those whom Providence, in its
inscrutable wisdom, has blessed with untold gold, and from among whom
they select the name of Nicodemus Boffin, Esquire, for a maiden effort
in this wise, understanding that he has such a heart as never was. The
Secretary learns, too, that confidence between man and wife would seem
to obtain but rarely when virtue is in distress, so numerous are the
wives who take up their pens to ask Mr Boffin for money without the
knowledge of their devoted husbands, who would never permit it; while,
on the other hand, so numerous are the husbands who take up their pens
to ask Mr Boffin for money without the knowledge of their devoted
wives, who would instantly go out of their senses if they had the least
suspicion of the circumstance. There are the inspired beggars, too.
These were sitting, only yesterday evening, musing over a fragment of
candle which must soon go out and leave them in the dark for the rest
of their nights, when surely some Angel whispered the name of Nicodemus
Boffin, Esquire, to their souls, imparting rays of hope, nay
confidence, to which they had long been strangers! Akin to these are the
suggestively-befriended beggars. They were partaking of a cold potato
and water by the flickering and gloomy light of a lucifer-match, in
their lodgings (rent considerably in arrear, and heartless landlady
threatening expulsion ‘like a dog’ into the streets), when a gifted
friend happening to look in, said, ‘Write immediately to Nicodemus
Boffin, Esquire,’ and would take no denial. There are the nobly
independent beggars too. These, in the days of their abundance, ever
regarded gold as dross, and have not yet got over that only impediment
in the way of their amassing wealth, but they want no dross from
Nicodemus Boffin, Esquire; No, Mr Boffin; the world may term it pride,
paltry pride if you will, but they wouldn’t take it if you offered it;
a loan, sir--for fourteen weeks to the day, interest calculated at the
rate of five per cent per annum, to be bestowed upon any charitable
institution you may name--is all they want of you, and if you have the
meanness to refuse it, count on being despised by these great spirits.
There are the beggars of punctual business-habits too. These will
make an end of themselves at a quarter to one P.M. on Tuesday, if no
Post-office order is in the interim received from Nicodemus Boffin,
Esquire; arriving after a quarter to one P.M. on Tuesday, it need not
be sent, as they will then (having made an exact memorandum of the
heartless circumstances) be ‘cold in death.’ There are the beggars on
horseback too, in another sense from the sense of the proverb. These
are mounted and ready to start on the highway to affluence. The goal is
before them, the road is in the best condition, their spurs are on,
the steed is willing, but, at the last moment, for want of some special
thing--a clock, a violin, an astronomical telescope, an electrifying
machine--they must dismount for ever, unless they receive its equivalent
in money from Nicodemus Boffin, Esquire. Less given to detail are the
beggars who make sporting ventures. These, usually to be addressed
in reply under initials at a country post-office, inquire in feminine
hands, Dare one who cannot disclose herself to Nicodemus Boffin,
Esquire, but whose name might startle him were it revealed, solicit
the immediate advance of two hundred pounds from unexpected riches
exercising their noblest privilege in the trust of a common humanity?

In such a Dismal Swamp does the new house stand, and through it does
the Secretary daily struggle breast-high. Not to mention all the people
alive who have made inventions that won’t act, and all the jobbers who
job in all the jobberies jobbed; though these may be regarded as the
Alligators of the Dismal Swamp, and are always lying by to drag the
Golden Dustman under.

But the old house. There are no designs against the Golden Dustman
there? There are no fish of the shark tribe in the Bower waters? Perhaps
not. Still, Wegg is established there, and would seem, judged by his
secret proceedings, to cherish a notion of making a discovery. For,
when a man with a wooden leg lies prone on his stomach to peep under
bedsteads; and hops up ladders, like some extinct bird, to survey the
tops of presses and cupboards; and provides himself an iron rod which he
is always poking and prodding into dust-mounds; the probability is that
he expects to find something.





BOOK THE SECOND -- BIRDS OF A FEATHER



Chapter 1

OF AN EDUCATIONAL CHARACTER


The school at which young Charley Hexam had first learned from a
book--the streets being, for pupils of his degree, the great Preparatory
Establishment in which very much that is never unlearned is learned
without and before book--was a miserable loft in an unsavoury yard. Its
atmosphere was oppressive and disagreeable; it was crowded, noisy,
and confusing; half the pupils dropped asleep, or fell into a state of
waking stupefaction; the other half kept them in either condition by
maintaining a monotonous droning noise, as if they were performing, out
of time and tune, on a ruder sort of bagpipe. The teachers, animated
solely by good intentions, had no idea of execution, and a lamentable
jumble was the upshot of their kind endeavours.

It was a school for all ages, and for both sexes. The latter were kept
apart, and the former were partitioned off into square assortments. But,
all the place was pervaded by a grimly ludicrous pretence that every
pupil was childish and innocent. This pretence, much favoured by the
lady-visitors, led to the ghastliest absurdities. Young women old in
the vices of the commonest and worst life, were expected to profess
themselves enthralled by the good child’s book, the Adventures of
Little Margery, who resided in the village cottage by the mill; severely
reproved and morally squashed the miller, when she was five and he was
fifty; divided her porridge with singing birds; denied herself a new
nankeen bonnet, on the ground that the turnips did not wear nankeen
bonnets, neither did the sheep who ate them; who plaited straw and
delivered the dreariest orations to all comers, at all sorts of
unseasonable times. So, unwieldy young dredgers and hulking mudlarks
were referred to the experiences of Thomas Twopence, who, having
resolved not to rob (under circumstances of uncommon atrocity) his
particular friend and benefactor, of eighteenpence, presently came into
supernatural possession of three and sixpence, and lived a shining light
ever afterwards. (Note, that the benefactor came to no good.) Several
swaggering sinners had written their own biographies in the same strain;
it always appearing from the lessons of those very boastful persons,
that you were to do good, not because it WAS good, but because you were
to make a good thing of it. Contrariwise, the adult pupils were taught
to read (if they could learn) out of the New Testament; and by dint of
stumbling over the syllables and keeping their bewildered eyes on the
particular syllables coming round to their turn, were as absolutely
ignorant of the sublime history, as if they had never seen or heard of
it. An exceedingly and confoundingly perplexing jumble of a school,
in fact, where black spirits and grey, red spirits and white, jumbled
jumbled jumbled jumbled, jumbled every night. And particularly every
Sunday night. For then, an inclined plane of unfortunate infants would
be handed over to the prosiest and worst of all the teachers with good
intentions, whom nobody older would endure. Who, taking his stand on
the floor before them as chief executioner, would be attended by a
conventional volunteer boy as executioner’s assistant. When and where it
first became the conventional system that a weary or inattentive infant
in a class must have its face smoothed downward with a hot hand, or when
and where the conventional volunteer boy first beheld such system in
operation, and became inflamed with a sacred zeal to administer it,
matters not. It was the function of the chief executioner to hold forth,
and it was the function of the acolyte to dart at sleeping infants,
yawning infants, restless infants, whimpering infants, and smooth their
wretched faces; sometimes with one hand, as if he were anointing them
for a whisker; sometimes with both hands, applied after the fashion of
blinkers. And so the jumble would be in action in this department for a
mortal hour; the exponent drawling on to My Dearert Childerrenerr, let
us say, for example, about the beautiful coming to the Sepulchre; and
repeating the word Sepulchre (commonly used among infants) five hundred
times, and never once hinting what it meant; the conventional boy
smoothing away right and left, as an infallible commentary; the whole
hot-bed of flushed and exhausted infants exchanging measles, rashes,
whooping-cough, fever, and stomach disorders, as if they were assembled
in High Market for the purpose.

Even in this temple of good intentions, an exceptionally sharp boy
exceptionally determined to learn, could learn something, and, having
learned it, could impart it much better than the teachers; as being
more knowing than they, and not at the disadvantage in which they stood
towards the shrewder pupils. In this way it had come about that Charley
Hexam had risen in the jumble, taught in the jumble, and been received
from the jumble into a better school.

‘So you want to go and see your sister, Hexam?’

‘If you please, Mr Headstone.’

‘I have half a mind to go with you. Where does your sister live?’

‘Why, she is not settled yet, Mr Headstone. I’d rather you didn’t see
her till she is settled, if it was all the same to you.’

‘Look here, Hexam.’ Mr Bradley Headstone, highly certificated
stipendiary schoolmaster, drew his right forefinger through one of the
buttonholes of the boy’s coat, and looked at it attentively. ‘I hope
your sister may be good company for you?’

‘Why do you doubt it, Mr Headstone?’

‘I did not say I doubted it.’

‘No, sir; you didn’t say so.’

Bradley Headstone looked at his finger again, took it out of the
buttonhole and looked at it closer, bit the side of it and looked at it
again.

‘You see, Hexam, you will be one of us. In good time you are sure to
pass a creditable examination and become one of us. Then the question
is--’

The boy waited so long for the question, while the schoolmaster looked
at a new side of his finger, and bit it, and looked at it again, that at
length the boy repeated:

‘The question is, sir--?’

‘Whether you had not better leave well alone.’

‘Is it well to leave my sister alone, Mr Headstone?’

‘I do not say so, because I do not know. I put it to you. I ask you to
think of it. I want you to consider. You know how well you are doing
here.’

‘After all, she got me here,’ said the boy, with a struggle.

‘Perceiving the necessity of it,’ acquiesced the schoolmaster, ‘and
making up her mind fully to the separation. Yes.’

The boy, with a return of that former reluctance or struggle or whatever
it was, seemed to debate with himself. At length he said, raising his
eyes to the master’s face:

‘I wish you’d come with me and see her, Mr Headstone, though she is not
settled. I wish you’d come with me, and take her in the rough, and judge
her for yourself.’

‘You are sure you would not like,’ asked the schoolmaster, ‘to prepare
her?’

‘My sister Lizzie,’ said the boy, proudly, ‘wants no preparing, Mr
Headstone. What she is, she is, and shows herself to be. There’s no
pretending about my sister.’

His confidence in her, sat more easily upon him than the indecision with
which he had twice contended. It was his better nature to be true to
her, if it were his worse nature to be wholly selfish. And as yet the
better nature had the stronger hold.

‘Well, I can spare the evening,’ said the schoolmaster. ‘I am ready to
walk with you.’

‘Thank you, Mr Headstone. And I am ready to go.’

Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent
white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of
pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its
decent hair-guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man
of six-and-twenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there
was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there were
a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics in
their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store of
teacher’s knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing
at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even
play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up,
his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of
his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the
demands of retail dealers history here, geography there, astronomy to
the right, political economy to the left--natural history, the physical
sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics, and what not, all in
their several places--this care had imparted to his countenance a look
of care; while the habit of questioning and being questioned had given
him a suspicious manner, or a manner that would be better described as
one of lying in wait. There was a kind of settled trouble in the face.
It was the face belonging to a naturally slow or inattentive intellect
that had toiled hard to get what it had won, and that had to hold it now
that it was gotten. He always seemed to be uneasy lest anything should
be missing from his mental warehouse, and taking stock to assure
himself.

Suppression of so much to make room for so much, had given him a
constrained manner, over and above. Yet there was enough of what was
animal, and of what was fiery (though smouldering), still visible in
him, to suggest that if young Bradley Headstone, when a pauper lad, had
chanced to be told off for the sea, he would not have been the last man
in a ship’s crew. Regarding that origin of his, he was proud, moody, and
sullen, desiring it to be forgotten. And few people knew of it.

In some visits to the Jumble his attention had been attracted to this
boy Hexam. An undeniable boy for a pupil-teacher; an undeniable boy
to do credit to the master who should bring him on. Combined with this
consideration, there may have been some thought of the pauper lad now
never to be mentioned. Be that how it might, he had with pains gradually
worked the boy into his own school, and procured him some offices to
discharge there, which were repaid with food and lodging. Such were the
circumstances that had brought together, Bradley Headstone and young
Charley Hexam that autumn evening. Autumn, because full half a year had
come and gone since the bird of prey lay dead upon the river-shore.

The schools--for they were twofold, as the sexes--were down in that
district of the flat country tending to the Thames, where Kent and
Surrey meet, and where the railways still bestride the market-gardens
that will soon die under them. The schools were newly built, and there
were so many like them all over the country, that one might have thought
the whole were but one restless edifice with the locomotive gift of
Aladdin’s palace. They were in a neighbourhood which looked like a toy
neighbourhood taken in blocks out of a box by a child of particularly
incoherent mind, and set up anyhow; here, one side of a new street;
there, a large solitary public-house facing nowhere; here, another
unfinished street already in ruins; there, a church; here, an immense
new warehouse; there, a dilapidated old country villa; then, a medley
of black ditch, sparkling cucumber-frame, rank field, richly cultivated
kitchen-garden, brick viaduct, arch-spanned canal, and disorder of
frowziness and fog. As if the child had given the table a kick, and gone
to sleep.

But, even among school-buildings, school-teachers, and school-pupils,
all according to pattern and all engendered in the light of the latest
Gospel according to Monotony, the older pattern into which so many
fortunes have been shaped for good and evil, comes out. It came out in
Miss Peecher the schoolmistress, watering her flowers, as Mr Bradley
Headstone walked forth. It came out in Miss Peecher the schoolmistress,
watering the flowers in the little dusty bit of garden attached to her
small official residence, with little windows like the eyes in needles,
and little doors like the covers of school-books.

Small, shining, neat, methodical, and buxom was Miss Peecher;
cherry-cheeked and tuneful of voice. A little pincushion, a little
housewife, a little book, a little workbox, a little set of tables and
weights and measures, and a little woman, all in one. She could write
a little essay on any subject, exactly a slate long, beginning at the
left-hand top of one side and ending at the right-hand bottom of the
other, and the essay should be strictly according to rule. If Mr Bradley
Headstone had addressed a written proposal of marriage to her, she would
probably have replied in a complete little essay on the theme exactly a
slate long, but would certainly have replied Yes. For she loved him. The
decent hair-guard that went round his neck and took care of his decent
silver watch was an object of envy to her. So would Miss Peecher have
gone round his neck and taken care of him. Of him, insensible. Because
he did not love Miss Peecher.

Miss Peecher’s favourite pupil, who assisted her in her little
household, was in attendance with a can of water to replenish her little
watering-pot, and sufficiently divined the state of Miss Peecher’s
affections to feel it necessary that she herself should love young
Charley Hexam. So, there was a double palpitation among the double
stocks and double wall-flowers, when the master and the boy looked over
the little gate.

‘A fine evening, Miss Peecher,’ said the Master.

‘A very fine evening, Mr Headstone,’ said Miss Peecher. ‘Are you taking
a walk?’

‘Hexam and I are going to take a long walk.’

‘Charming weather,’ remarked Miss Peecher, ‘FOR a long walk.’

‘Ours is rather on business than mere pleasure,’ said the Master. Miss
Peecher inverting her watering-pot, and very carefully shaking out the
few last drops over a flower, as if there were some special virtue in
them which would make it a Jack’s beanstalk before morning, called for
replenishment to her pupil, who had been speaking to the boy.

‘Good-night, Miss Peecher,’ said the Master.

‘Good-night, Mr Headstone,’ said the Mistress.

The pupil had been, in her state of pupilage, so imbued with the
class-custom of stretching out an arm, as if to hail a cab or omnibus,
whenever she found she had an observation on hand to offer to Miss
Peecher, that she often did it in their domestic relations; and she did
it now.

‘Well, Mary Anne?’ said Miss Peecher.

‘If you please, ma’am, Hexam said they were going to see his sister.’

‘But that can’t be, I think,’ returned Miss Peecher: ‘because Mr
Headstone can have no business with HER.’

Mary Anne again hailed.

‘Well, Mary Anne?’

‘If you please, ma’am, perhaps it’s Hexam’s business?’

‘That may be,’ said Miss Peecher. ‘I didn’t think of that. Not that it
matters at all.’

Mary Anne again hailed.

‘Well, Mary Anne?’

‘They say she’s very handsome.’

‘Oh, Mary Anne, Mary Anne!’ returned Miss Peecher, slightly colouring
and shaking her head, a little out of humour; ‘how often have I told you
not to use that vague expression, not to speak in that general way? When
you say THEY say, what do you mean? Part of speech They?’

Mary Anne hooked her right arm behind her in her left hand, as being
under examination, and replied:

‘Personal pronoun.’

‘Person, They?’

‘Third person.’

‘Number, They?’

‘Plural number.’

‘Then how many do you mean, Mary Anne? Two? Or more?’

‘I beg your pardon, ma’am,’ said Mary Anne, disconcerted now she came
to think of it; ‘but I don’t know that I mean more than her brother
himself.’ As she said it, she unhooked her arm.

‘I felt convinced of it,’ returned Miss Peecher, smiling again. ‘Now
pray, Mary Anne, be careful another time. He says is very different from
they say, remember. Difference between he says and they say? Give it
me.’

Mary Anne immediately hooked her right arm behind her in her left
hand--an attitude absolutely necessary to the situation--and replied:
‘One is indicative mood, present tense, third person singular, verb
active to say. Other is indicative mood, present tense, third person
plural, verb active to say.’

‘Why verb active, Mary Anne?’

‘Because it takes a pronoun after it in the objective case, Miss
Peecher.’

‘Very good indeed,’ remarked Miss Peecher, with encouragement. ‘In fact,
could not be better. Don’t forget to apply it, another time, Mary Anne.’
This said, Miss Peecher finished the watering of her flowers, and
went into her little official residence, and took a refresher of the
principal rivers and mountains of the world, their breadths, depths, and
heights, before settling the measurements of the body of a dress for her
own personal occupation.

Bradley Headstone and Charley Hexam duly got to the Surrey side of
Westminster Bridge, and crossed the bridge, and made along the Middlesex
shore towards Millbank. In this region are a certain little street
called Church Street, and a certain little blind square, called Smith
Square, in the centre of which last retreat is a very hideous church
with four towers at the four corners, generally resembling some
petrified monster, frightful and gigantic, on its back with its legs
in the air. They found a tree near by in a corner, and a blacksmith’s
forge, and a timber yard, and a dealer’s in old iron. What a rusty
portion of a boiler and a great iron wheel or so meant by lying
half-buried in the dealer’s fore-court, nobody seemed to know or to want
to know. Like the Miller of questionable jollity in the song, They cared
for Nobody, no not they, and Nobody cared for them.

After making the round of this place, and noting that there was a deadly
kind of repose on it, more as though it had taken laudanum than fallen
into a natural rest, they stopped at the point where the street and the
square joined, and where there were some little quiet houses in a row.
To these Charley Hexam finally led the way, and at one of these stopped.

‘This must be where my sister lives, sir. This is where she came for a
temporary lodging, soon after father’s death.’

‘How often have you seen her since?’

‘Why, only twice, sir,’ returned the boy, with his former reluctance;
‘but that’s as much her doing as mine.’

‘How does she support herself?’

‘She was always a fair needlewoman, and she keeps the stockroom of a
seaman’s outfitter.’

‘Does she ever work at her own lodging here?’

‘Sometimes; but her regular hours and regular occupation are at their
place of business, I believe, sir. This is the number.’

The boy knocked at a door, and the door promptly opened with a spring
and a click. A parlour door within a small entry stood open, and
disclosed a child--a dwarf--a girl--a something--sitting on a little low
old-fashioned arm-chair, which had a kind of little working bench before
it.

‘I can’t get up,’ said the child, ‘because my back’s bad, and my legs
are queer. But I’m the person of the house.’

‘Who else is at home?’ asked Charley Hexam, staring.

‘Nobody’s at home at present,’ returned the child, with a glib assertion
of her dignity, ‘except the person of the house. What did you want,
young man?’

‘I wanted to see my sister.’

‘Many young men have sisters,’ returned the child. ‘Give me your name,
young man?’

The queer little figure, and the queer but not ugly little face, with
its bright grey eyes, were so sharp, that the sharpness of the manner
seemed unavoidable. As if, being turned out of that mould, it must be
sharp.

‘Hexam is my name.’

‘Ah, indeed?’ said the person of the house. ‘I thought it might be. Your
sister will be in, in about a quarter of an hour. I am very fond of your
sister. She’s my particular friend. Take a seat. And this gentleman’s
name?’

‘Mr Headstone, my schoolmaster.’

‘Take a seat. And would you please to shut the street door first? I
can’t very well do it myself; because my back’s so bad, and my legs are
so queer.’

They complied in silence, and the little figure went on with its work of
gumming or gluing together with a camel’s-hair brush certain pieces
of cardboard and thin wood, previously cut into various shapes. The
scissors and knives upon the bench showed that the child herself had cut
them; and the bright scraps of velvet and silk and ribbon also strewn
upon the bench showed that when duly stuffed (and stuffing too was
there), she was to cover them smartly. The dexterity of her nimble
fingers was remarkable, and, as she brought two thin edges accurately
together by giving them a little bite, she would glance at the visitors
out of the corners of her grey eyes with a look that out-sharpened all
her other sharpness.

‘You can’t tell me the name of my trade, I’ll be bound,’ she said, after
taking several of these observations.

‘You make pincushions,’ said Charley.

‘What else do I make?’

‘Pen-wipers,’ said Bradley Headstone.

‘Ha! ha! What else do I make? You’re a schoolmaster, but you can’t tell
me.’

‘You do something,’ he returned, pointing to a corner of the little
bench, ‘with straw; but I don’t know what.’

‘Well done you!’ cried the person of the house. ‘I only make pincushions
and pen-wipers, to use up my waste. But my straw really does belong to
my business. Try again. What do I make with my straw?’

‘Dinner-mats?’

‘A schoolmaster, and says dinner-mats! I’ll give you a clue to my trade,
in a game of forfeits. I love my love with a B because she’s Beautiful;
I hate my love with a B because she is Brazen; I took her to the sign of
the Blue Boar, and I treated her with Bonnets; her name’s Bouncer, and
she lives in Bedlam.--Now, what do I make with my straw?’

‘Ladies’ bonnets?’

‘Fine ladies’,’ said the person of the house, nodding assent. ‘Dolls’.
I’m a Doll’s Dressmaker.’

‘I hope it’s a good business?’

The person of the house shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. ‘No.
Poorly paid. And I’m often so pressed for time! I had a doll married,
last week, and was obliged to work all night. And it’s not good for me,
on account of my back being so bad and my legs so queer.’

They looked at the little creature with a wonder that did not diminish,
and the schoolmaster said: ‘I am sorry your fine ladies are so
inconsiderate.’

‘It’s the way with them,’ said the person of the house, shrugging her
shoulders again. ‘And they take no care of their clothes, and they
never keep to the same fashions a month. I work for a doll with three
daughters. Bless you, she’s enough to ruin her husband!’ The person of
the house gave a weird little laugh here, and gave them another look out
of the corners of her eyes. She had an elfin chin that was capable of
great expression; and whenever she gave this look, she hitched this chin
up. As if her eyes and her chin worked together on the same wires.

‘Are you always as busy as you are now?’

‘Busier. I’m slack just now. I finished a large mourning order the day
before yesterday. Doll I work for, lost a canary-bird.’ The person of
the house gave another little laugh, and then nodded her head several
times, as who should moralize, ‘Oh this world, this world!’

‘Are you alone all day?’ asked Bradley Headstone. ‘Don’t any of the
neighbouring children--?’

‘Ah, lud!’ cried the person of the house, with a little scream, as
if the word had pricked her. ‘Don’t talk of children. I can’t bear
children. I know their tricks and their manners.’ She said this with an
angry little shake of her tight fist close before her eyes.

Perhaps it scarcely required the teacher-habit, to perceive that the
doll’s dressmaker was inclined to be bitter on the difference between
herself and other children. But both master and pupil understood it so.

‘Always running about and screeching, always playing and fighting,
always skip-skip-skipping on the pavement and chalking it for their
games! Oh! I know their tricks and their manners!’ Shaking the little
fist as before. ‘And that’s not all. Ever so often calling names in
through a person’s keyhole, and imitating a person’s back and legs. Oh!
I know their tricks and their manners. And I’ll tell you what I’d do, to
punish ‘em. There’s doors under the church in the Square--black doors,
leading into black vaults. Well! I’d open one of those doors, and I’d
cram ‘em all in, and then I’d lock the door and through the keyhole I’d
blow in pepper.’

‘What would be the good of blowing in pepper?’ asked Charley Hexam.

‘To set ‘em sneezing,’ said the person of the house, ‘and make their
eyes water. And when they were all sneezing and inflamed, I’d mock ‘em
through the keyhole. Just as they, with their tricks and their manners,
mock a person through a person’s keyhole!’

An uncommonly emphatic shake of her little fist close before her eyes,
seemed to ease the mind of the person of the house; for she added
with recovered composure, ‘No, no, no. No children for me. Give me
grown-ups.’

It was difficult to guess the age of this strange creature, for her poor
figure furnished no clue to it, and her face was at once so young and so
old. Twelve, or at the most thirteen, might be near the mark.

‘I always did like grown-ups,’ she went on, ‘and always kept company
with them. So sensible. Sit so quiet. Don’t go prancing and capering
about! And I mean always to keep among none but grown-ups till I marry.
I suppose I must make up my mind to marry, one of these days.’

She listened to a step outside that caught her ear, and there was a soft
knock at the door. Pulling at a handle within her reach, she said,
with a pleased laugh: ‘Now here, for instance, is a grown-up that’s my
particular friend!’ and Lizzie Hexam in a black dress entered the room.

‘Charley! You!’

Taking him to her arms in the old way--of which he seemed a little
ashamed--she saw no one else.

‘There, there, there, Liz, all right my dear. See! Here’s Mr Headstone
come with me.’

Her eyes met those of the schoolmaster, who had evidently expected
to see a very different sort of person, and a murmured word or two
of salutation passed between them. She was a little flurried by the
unexpected visit, and the schoolmaster was not at his ease. But he never
was, quite.

‘I told Mr Headstone you were not settled, Liz, but he was so kind as to
take an interest in coming, and so I brought him. How well you look!’

Bradley seemed to think so.

‘Ah! Don’t she, don’t she?’ cried the person of the house, resuming her
occupation, though the twilight was falling fast. ‘I believe you she
does! But go on with your chat, one and all:

     You one two three,
     My com-pa-nie,
     And don’t mind me.’

--pointing this impromptu rhyme with three points of her thin
fore-finger.

‘I didn’t expect a visit from you, Charley,’ said his sister. ‘I
supposed that if you wanted to see me you would have sent to me,
appointing me to come somewhere near the school, as I did last time.
I saw my brother near the school, sir,’ to Bradley Headstone, ‘because
it’s easier for me to go there, than for him to come here. I work about
midway between the two places.’

‘You don’t see much of one another,’ said Bradley, not improving in
respect of ease.

‘No.’ With a rather sad shake of her head. ‘Charley always does well, Mr
Headstone?’

‘He could not do better. I regard his course as quite plain before him.’

‘I hoped so. I am so thankful. So well done of you, Charley dear! It is
better for me not to come (except when he wants me) between him and his
prospects. You think so, Mr Headstone?’

Conscious that his pupil-teacher was looking for his answer, that he
himself had suggested the boy’s keeping aloof from this sister, now seen
for the first time face to face, Bradley Headstone stammered:

‘Your brother is very much occupied, you know. He has to work hard. One
cannot but say that the less his attention is diverted from his work,
the better for his future. When he shall have established himself, why
then--it will be another thing then.’

Lizzie shook her head again, and returned, with a quiet smile: ‘I always
advised him as you advise him. Did I not, Charley?’

‘Well, never mind that now,’ said the boy. ‘How are you getting on?’

‘Very well, Charley. I want for nothing.’

‘You have your own room here?’

‘Oh yes. Upstairs. And it’s quiet, and pleasant, and airy.’

‘And she always has the use of this room for visitors,’ said the
person of the house, screwing up one of her little bony fists, like an
opera-glass, and looking through it, with her eyes and her chin in that
quaint accordance. ‘Always this room for visitors; haven’t you, Lizzie
dear?’

It happened that Bradley Headstone noticed a very slight action of
Lizzie Hexam’s hand, as though it checked the doll’s dressmaker. And it
happened that the latter noticed him in the same instant; for she made
a double eyeglass of her two hands, looked at him through it, and cried,
with a waggish shake of her head: ‘Aha! Caught you spying, did I?’

It might have fallen out so, any way; but Bradley Headstone also noticed
that immediately after this, Lizzie, who had not taken off her bonnet,
rather hurriedly proposed that as the room was getting dark they should
go out into the air. They went out; the visitors saying good-night to
the doll’s dressmaker, whom they left, leaning back in her chair with
her arms crossed, singing to herself in a sweet thoughtful little voice.

‘I’ll saunter on by the river,’ said Bradley. ‘You will be glad to talk
together.’

As his uneasy figure went on before them among the evening shadows, the
boy said to his sister, petulantly:

‘When are you going to settle yourself in some Christian sort of place,
Liz? I thought you were going to do it before now.’

‘I am very well where I am, Charley.’

‘Very well where you are! I am ashamed to have brought Mr Headstone with
me. How came you to get into such company as that little witch’s?’

‘By chance at first, as it seemed, Charley. But I think it must have
been by something more than chance, for that child--You remember the
bills upon the walls at home?’

‘Confound the bills upon the walls at home! I want to forget the bills
upon the walls at home, and it would be better for you to do the same,’
grumbled the boy. ‘Well; what of them?’

‘This child is the grandchild of the old man.’

‘What old man?’

‘The terrible drunken old man, in the list slippers and the night-cap.’

The boy asked, rubbing his nose in a manner that half expressed vexation
at hearing so much, and half curiosity to hear more: ‘How came you to
make that out? What a girl you are!’

‘The child’s father is employed by the house that employs me; that’s how
I came to know it, Charley. The father is like his own father, a weak
wretched trembling creature, falling to pieces, never sober. But a good
workman too, at the work he does. The mother is dead. This poor ailing
little creature has come to be what she is, surrounded by drunken people
from her cradle--if she ever had one, Charley.’

‘I don’t see what you have to do with her, for all that,’ said the boy.

‘Don’t you, Charley?’

The boy looked doggedly at the river. They were at Millbank, and
the river rolled on their left. His sister gently touched him on the
shoulder, and pointed to it.

‘Any compensation--restitution--never mind the word, you know my
meaning. Father’s grave.’

But he did not respond with any tenderness. After a moody silence he
broke out in an ill-used tone:

‘It’ll be a very hard thing, Liz, if, when I am trying my best to get up
in the world, you pull me back.’

‘I, Charley?’

‘Yes, you, Liz. Why can’t you let bygones be bygones? Why can’t you, as
Mr Headstone said to me this very evening about another matter, leave
well alone? What we have got to do, is, to turn our faces full in our
new direction, and keep straight on.’

‘And never look back? Not even to try to make some amends?’

‘You are such a dreamer,’ said the boy, with his former petulance. ‘It
was all very well when we sat before the fire--when we looked into the
hollow down by the flare--but we are looking into the real world, now.’

‘Ah, we were looking into the real world then, Charley!’

‘I understand what you mean by that, but you are not justified in it. I
don’t want, as I raise myself to shake you off, Liz. I want to carry you
up with me. That’s what I want to do, and mean to do. I know what I owe
you. I said to Mr Headstone this very evening, “After all, my sister got
me here.” Well, then. Don’t pull me back, and hold me down. That’s all I
ask, and surely that’s not unconscionable.’

She had kept a steadfast look upon him, and she answered with composure:

‘I am not here selfishly, Charley. To please myself I could not be too
far from that river.’

‘Nor could you be too far from it to please me. Let us get quit of it
equally. Why should you linger about it any more than I? I give it a
wide berth.’

‘I can’t get away from it, I think,’ said Lizzie, passing her hand
across her forehead. ‘It’s no purpose of mine that I live by it still.’

‘There you go, Liz! Dreaming again! You lodge yourself of your own
accord in a house with a drunken--tailor, I suppose--or something of the
sort, and a little crooked antic of a child, or old person, or whatever
it is, and then you talk as if you were drawn or driven there. Now, do
be more practical.’

She had been practical enough with him, in suffering and striving
for him; but she only laid her hand upon his shoulder--not
reproachfully--and tapped it twice or thrice. She had been used to
do so, to soothe him when she carried him about, a child as heavy as
herself. Tears started to his eyes.

‘Upon my word, Liz,’ drawing the back of his hand across them, ‘I mean
to be a good brother to you, and to prove that I know what I owe you.
All I say is, that I hope you’ll control your fancies a little, on my
account. I’ll get a school, and then you must come and live with me,
and you’ll have to control your fancies then, so why not now? Now, say I
haven’t vexed you.’

‘You haven’t, Charley, you haven’t.’

‘And say I haven’t hurt you.’

‘You haven’t, Charley.’ But this answer was less ready.

‘Say you are sure I didn’t mean to. Come! There’s Mr Headstone stopping
and looking over the wall at the tide, to hint that it’s time to go.
Kiss me, and tell me that you know I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

She told him so, and they embraced, and walked on and came up with the
schoolmaster.

‘But we go your sister’s way,’ he remarked, when the boy told him he was
ready. And with his cumbrous and uneasy action he stiffly offered her
his arm. Her hand was just within it, when she drew it back. He looked
round with a start, as if he thought she had detected something that
repelled her, in the momentary touch.

‘I will not go in just yet,’ said Lizzie. ‘And you have a distance
before you, and will walk faster without me.’

Being by this time close to Vauxhall Bridge, they resolved, in
consequence, to take that way over the Thames, and they left her;
Bradley Headstone giving her his hand at parting, and she thanking him
for his care of her brother.

The master and the pupil walked on, rapidly and silently. They had
nearly crossed the bridge, when a gentleman came coolly sauntering
towards them, with a cigar in his mouth, his coat thrown back, and his
hands behind him. Something in the careless manner of this person,
and in a certain lazily arrogant air with which he approached, holding
possession of twice as much pavement as another would have claimed,
instantly caught the boy’s attention. As the gentleman passed the boy
looked at him narrowly, and then stood still, looking after him.

‘Who is it that you stare after?’ asked Bradley.

‘Why!’ said the boy, with a confused and pondering frown upon his face,
‘It IS that Wrayburn one!’

Bradley Headstone scrutinized the boy as closely as the boy had
scrutinized the gentleman.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Headstone, but I couldn’t help wondering what in
the world brought HIM here!’

Though he said it as if his wonder were past--at the same time resuming
the walk--it was not lost upon the master that he looked over his
shoulder after speaking, and that the same perplexed and pondering frown
was heavy on his face.

‘You don’t appear to like your friend, Hexam?’

‘I DON’T like him,’ said the boy.

‘Why not?’

‘He took hold of me by the chin in a precious impertinent way, the first
time I ever saw him,’ said the boy.

‘Again, why?’

‘For nothing. Or--it’s much the same--because something I happened to
say about my sister didn’t happen to please him.’

‘Then he knows your sister?’

‘He didn’t at that time,’ said the boy, still moodily pondering.

‘Does now?’

The boy had so lost himself that he looked at Mr Bradley Headstone
as they walked on side by side, without attempting to reply until the
question had been repeated; then he nodded and answered, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Going to see her, I dare say.’

‘It can’t be!’ said the boy, quickly. ‘He doesn’t know her well enough.
I should like to catch him at it!’

When they had walked on for a time, more rapidly than before, the master
said, clasping the pupil’s arm between the elbow and the shoulder with
his hand:

‘You were going to tell me something about that person. What did you say
his name was?’

‘Wrayburn. Mr Eugene Wrayburn. He is what they call a barrister, with
nothing to do. The first time he came to our old place was when my
father was alive. He came on business; not that it was HIS business--HE
never had any business--he was brought by a friend of his.’

‘And the other times?’

‘There was only one other time that I know of. When my father was killed
by accident, he chanced to be one of the finders. He was mooning about,
I suppose, taking liberties with people’s chins; but there he was,
somehow. He brought the news home to my sister early in the morning, and
brought Miss Abbey Potterson, a neighbour, to help break it to her.
He was mooning about the house when I was fetched home in the
afternoon--they didn’t know where to find me till my sister could be
brought round sufficiently to tell them--and then he mooned away.’

‘And is that all?’

‘That’s all, sir.’

Bradley Headstone gradually released the boy’s arm, as if he were
thoughtful, and they walked on side by side as before. After a long
silence between them, Bradley resumed the talk.

‘I suppose--your sister--’ with a curious break both before and after
the words, ‘has received hardly any teaching, Hexam?’

‘Hardly any, sir.’

‘Sacrificed, no doubt, to her father’s objections. I remember them in
your case. Yet--your sister--scarcely looks or speaks like an ignorant
person.’

‘Lizzie has as much thought as the best, Mr Headstone. Too much,
perhaps, without teaching. I used to call the fire at home, her books,
for she was always full of fancies--sometimes quite wise fancies,
considering--when she sat looking at it.’

‘I don’t like that,’ said Bradley Headstone.

His pupil was a little surprised by this striking in with so sudden
and decided and emotional an objection, but took it as a proof of the
master’s interest in himself. It emboldened him to say:

‘I have never brought myself to mention it openly to you, Mr Headstone,
and you’re my witness that I couldn’t even make up my mind to take it
from you before we came out to-night; but it’s a painful thing to think
that if I get on as well as you hope, I shall be--I won’t say disgraced,
because I don’t mean disgraced--but--rather put to the blush if it was
known--by a sister who has been very good to me.’

‘Yes,’ said Bradley Headstone in a slurring way, for his mind scarcely
seemed to touch that point, so smoothly did it glide to another, ‘and
there is this possibility to consider. Some man who had worked his way
might come to admire--your sister--and might even in time bring himself
to think of marrying--your sister--and it would be a sad drawback and a
heavy penalty upon him, if; overcoming in his mind other inequalities of
condition and other considerations against it, this inequality and this
consideration remained in full force.’

‘That’s much my own meaning, sir.’

‘Ay, ay,’ said Bradley Headstone, ‘but you spoke of a mere brother.
Now, the case I have supposed would be a much stronger case; because an
admirer, a husband, would form the connexion voluntarily, besides being
obliged to proclaim it: which a brother is not. After all, you know, it
must be said of you that you couldn’t help yourself: while it would be
said of him, with equal reason, that he could.’

‘That’s true, sir. Sometimes since Lizzie was left free by father’s
death, I have thought that such a young woman might soon acquire more
than enough to pass muster. And sometimes I have even thought that
perhaps Miss Peecher--’

‘For the purpose, I would advise Not Miss Peecher,’ Bradley Headstone
struck in with a recurrence of his late decision of manner.

‘Would you be so kind as to think of it for me, Mr Headstone?’

‘Yes, Hexam, yes. I’ll think of it. I’ll think maturely of it. I’ll
think well of it.’

Their walk was almost a silent one afterwards, until it ended at the
school-house. There, one of neat Miss Peecher’s little windows, like the
eyes in needles, was illuminated, and in a corner near it sat Mary Anne
watching, while Miss Peecher at the table stitched at the neat little
body she was making up by brown paper pattern for her own wearing. N.B.
Miss Peecher and Miss Peecher’s pupils were not much encouraged in the
unscholastic art of needlework, by Government.

Mary Anne with her face to the window, held her arm up.

‘Well, Mary Anne?’

‘Mr Headstone coming home, ma’am.’

In about a minute, Mary Anne again hailed.

‘Yes, Mary Anne?’

‘Gone in and locked his door, ma’am.’

Miss Peecher repressed a sigh as she gathered her work together for bed,
and transfixed that part of her dress where her heart would have been if
she had had the dress on, with a sharp, sharp needle.



Chapter 2

STILL EDUCATIONAL


The person of the house, doll’s dressmaker and manufacturer of
ornamental pincushions and pen-wipers, sat in her quaint little low
arm-chair, singing in the dark, until Lizzie came back. The person
of the house had attained that dignity while yet of very tender years
indeed, through being the only trustworthy person IN the house.

‘Well Lizzie-Mizzie-Wizzie,’ said she, breaking off in her song, ‘what’s
the news out of doors?’

‘What’s the news in doors?’ returned Lizzie, playfully smoothing the
bright long fair hair which grew very luxuriant and beautiful on the
head of the doll’s dressmaker.

‘Let me see, said the blind man. Why the last news is, that I don’t mean
to marry your brother.’

‘No?’

‘No-o,’ shaking her head and her chin. ‘Don’t like the boy.’

‘What do you say to his master?’

‘I say that I think he’s bespoke.’

Lizzie finished putting the hair carefully back over the misshapen
shoulders, and then lighted a candle. It showed the little parlour to
be dingy, but orderly and clean. She stood it on the mantelshelf, remote
from the dressmaker’s eyes, and then put the room door open, and the
house door open, and turned the little low chair and its occupant
towards the outer air. It was a sultry night, and this was a
fine-weather arrangement when the day’s work was done. To complete
it, she seated herself in a chair by the side of the little chair, and
protectingly drew under her arm the spare hand that crept up to her.

‘This is what your loving Jenny Wren calls the best time in the day and
night,’ said the person of the house. Her real name was Fanny Cleaver;
but she had long ago chosen to bestow upon herself the appellation of
Miss Jenny Wren.

‘I have been thinking,’ Jenny went on, ‘as I sat at work to-day, what
a thing it would be, if I should be able to have your company till I am
married, or at least courted. Because when I am courted, I shall make
Him do some of the things that you do for me. He couldn’t brush my hair
like you do, or help me up and down stairs like you do, and he couldn’t
do anything like you do; but he could take my work home, and he could
call for orders in his clumsy way. And he shall too. I’LL trot him
about, I can tell him!’

Jenny Wren had her personal vanities--happily for her--and no intentions
were stronger in her breast than the various trials and torments that
were, in the fulness of time, to be inflicted upon ‘him.’

‘Wherever he may happen to be just at present, or whoever he may happen
to be,’ said Miss Wren, ‘I know his tricks and his manners, and I give
him warning to look out.’

‘Don’t you think you are rather hard upon him?’ asked her friend,
smiling, and smoothing her hair.

‘Not a bit,’ replied the sage Miss Wren, with an air of vast experience.
‘My dear, they don’t care for you, those fellows, if you’re NOT hard
upon ‘em. But I was saying If I should be able to have your company. Ah!
What a large If! Ain’t it?’

‘I have no intention of parting company, Jenny.’

‘Don’t say that, or you’ll go directly.’

‘Am I so little to be relied upon?’

‘You’re more to be relied upon than silver and gold.’ As she said it,
Miss Wren suddenly broke off, screwed up her eyes and her chin, and
looked prodigiously knowing. ‘Aha!

     Who comes here?
     A Grenadier.
     What does he want?
     A pot of beer.

And nothing else in the world, my dear!’

A man’s figure paused on the pavement at the outer door. ‘Mr Eugene
Wrayburn, ain’t it?’ said Miss Wren.

‘So I am told,’ was the answer.

‘You may come in, if you’re good.’

‘I am not good,’ said Eugene, ‘but I’ll come in.’

He gave his hand to Jenny Wren, and he gave his hand to Lizzie, and he
stood leaning by the door at Lizzie’s side. He had been strolling with
his cigar, he said, (it was smoked out and gone by this time,) and he
had strolled round to return in that direction that he might look in as
he passed. Had she not seen her brother to-night?

‘Yes,’ said Lizzie, whose manner was a little troubled.

Gracious condescension on our brother’s part! Mr Eugene Wrayburn thought
he had passed my young gentleman on the bridge yonder. Who was his
friend with him?

‘The schoolmaster.’

‘To be sure. Looked like it.’

Lizzie sat so still, that one could not have said wherein the fact of
her manner being troubled was expressed; and yet one could not have
doubted it. Eugene was as easy as ever; but perhaps, as she sat with
her eyes cast down, it might have been rather more perceptible that
his attention was concentrated upon her for certain moments, than its
concentration upon any subject for any short time ever was, elsewhere.

‘I have nothing to report, Lizzie,’ said Eugene. ‘But, having promised
you that an eye should be always kept on Mr Riderhood through my friend
Lightwood, I like occasionally to renew my assurance that I keep my
promise, and keep my friend up to the mark.’

‘I should not have doubted it, sir.’

‘Generally, I confess myself a man to be doubted,’ returned Eugene,
coolly, ‘for all that.’

‘Why are you?’ asked the sharp Miss Wren.

‘Because, my dear,’ said the airy Eugene, ‘I am a bad idle dog.’

‘Then why don’t you reform and be a good dog?’ inquired Miss Wren.

‘Because, my dear,’ returned Eugene, ‘there’s nobody who makes it worth
my while. Have you considered my suggestion, Lizzie?’ This in a lower
voice, but only as if it were a graver matter; not at all to the
exclusion of the person of the house.

‘I have thought of it, Mr Wrayburn, but I have not been able to make up
my mind to accept it.’

‘False pride!’ said Eugene.

‘I think not, Mr Wrayburn. I hope not.’

‘False pride!’ repeated Eugene. ‘Why, what else is it? The thing is
worth nothing in itself. The thing is worth nothing to me. What can it
be worth to me? You know the most I make of it. I propose to be of some
use to somebody--which I never was in this world, and never shall be on
any other occasion--by paying some qualified person of your own sex and
age, so many (or rather so few) contemptible shillings, to come here,
certain nights in the week, and give you certain instruction which you
wouldn’t want if you hadn’t been a self-denying daughter and sister.
You know that it’s good to have it, or you would never have so devoted
yourself to your brother’s having it. Then why not have it: especially
when our friend Miss Jenny here would profit by it too? If I proposed to
be the teacher, or to attend the lessons--obviously incongruous!--but
as to that, I might as well be on the other side of the globe, or not
on the globe at all. False pride, Lizzie. Because true pride wouldn’t
shame, or be shamed by, your thankless brother. True pride wouldn’t have
schoolmasters brought here, like doctors, to look at a bad case. True
pride would go to work and do it. You know that, well enough, for you
know that your own true pride would do it to-morrow, if you had the ways
and means which false pride won’t let me supply. Very well. I add no
more than this. Your false pride does wrong to yourself and does wrong
to your dead father.’

‘How to my father, Mr Wrayburn?’ she asked, with an anxious face.

‘How to your father? Can you ask! By perpetuating the consequences of
his ignorant and blind obstinacy. By resolving not to set right the
wrong he did you. By determining that the deprivation to which he
condemned you, and which he forced upon you, shall always rest upon his
head.’

It chanced to be a subtle string to sound, in her who had so spoken to
her brother within the hour. It sounded far more forcibly, because of
the change in the speaker for the moment; the passing appearance of
earnestness, complete conviction, injured resentment of suspicion,
generous and unselfish interest. All these qualities, in him usually so
light and careless, she felt to be inseparable from some touch of their
opposites in her own breast. She thought, had she, so far below him
and so different, rejected this disinterestedness, because of some vain
misgiving that he sought her out, or heeded any personal attractions
that he might descry in her? The poor girl, pure of heart and purpose,
could not bear to think it. Sinking before her own eyes, as she
suspected herself of it, she drooped her head as though she had done him
some wicked and grievous injury, and broke into silent tears.

‘Don’t be distressed,’ said Eugene, very, very kindly. ‘I hope it is not
I who have distressed you. I meant no more than to put the matter in its
true light before you; though I acknowledge I did it selfishly enough,
for I am disappointed.’

Disappointed of doing her a service. How else COULD he be disappointed?

‘It won’t break my heart,’ laughed Eugene; ‘it won’t stay by me
eight-and-forty hours; but I am genuinely disappointed. I had set my
fancy on doing this little thing for you and for our friend Miss Jenny.
The novelty of my doing anything in the least useful, had its charms. I
see, now, that I might have managed it better. I might have affected to
do it wholly for our friend Miss J. I might have got myself up, morally,
as Sir Eugene Bountiful. But upon my soul I can’t make flourishes, and I
would rather be disappointed than try.’

If he meant to follow home what was in Lizzie’s thoughts, it was
skilfully done. If he followed it by mere fortuitous coincidence, it was
done by an evil chance.

‘It opened out so naturally before me,’ said Eugene. ‘The ball seemed so
thrown into my hands by accident! I happen to be originally brought into
contact with you, Lizzie, on those two occasions that you know of. I
happen to be able to promise you that a watch shall be kept upon that
false accuser, Riderhood. I happen to be able to give you some little
consolation in the darkest hour of your distress, by assuring you that I
don’t believe him. On the same occasion I tell you that I am the idlest
and least of lawyers, but that I am better than none, in a case I have
noted down with my own hand, and that you may be always sure of my best
help, and incidentally of Lightwood’s too, in your efforts to clear
your father. So, it gradually takes my fancy that I may help you--so
easily!--to clear your father of that other blame which I mentioned
a few minutes ago, and which is a just and real one. I hope I have
explained myself; for I am heartily sorry to have distressed you. I hate
to claim to mean well, but I really did mean honestly and simply well,
and I want you to know it.’

‘I have never doubted that, Mr Wrayburn,’ said Lizzie; the more
repentant, the less he claimed.

‘I am very glad to hear it. Though if you had quite understood my whole
meaning at first, I think you would not have refused. Do you think you
would?’

‘I--don’t know that I should, Mr Wrayburn.’

‘Well! Then why refuse now you do understand it?’

‘It’s not easy for me to talk to you,’ returned Lizzie, in some
confusion, ‘for you see all the consequences of what I say, as soon as I
say it.’

‘Take all the consequences,’ laughed Eugene, ‘and take away my
disappointment. Lizzie Hexam, as I truly respect you, and as I am your
friend and a poor devil of a gentleman, I protest I don’t even now
understand why you hesitate.’

There was an appearance of openness, trustfulness, unsuspecting
generosity, in his words and manner, that won the poor girl over; and
not only won her over, but again caused her to feel as though she had
been influenced by the opposite qualities, with vanity at their head.

‘I will not hesitate any longer, Mr Wrayburn. I hope you will not
think the worse of me for having hesitated at all. For myself and for
Jenny--you let me answer for you, Jenny dear?’

The little creature had been leaning back, attentive, with her elbows
resting on the elbows of her chair, and her chin upon her hands. Without
changing her attitude, she answered, ‘Yes!’ so suddenly that it rather
seemed as if she had chopped the monosyllable than spoken it.

‘For myself and for Jenny, I thankfully accept your kind offer.’

‘Agreed! Dismissed!’ said Eugene, giving Lizzie his hand before lightly
waving it, as if he waved the whole subject away. ‘I hope it may not be
often that so much is made of so little!’

Then he fell to talking playfully with Jenny Wren. ‘I think of setting
up a doll, Miss Jenny,’ he said.

‘You had better not,’ replied the dressmaker.

‘Why not?’

‘You are sure to break it. All you children do.’

‘But that makes good for trade, you know, Miss Wren,’ returned Eugene.
‘Much as people’s breaking promises and contracts and bargains of all
sorts, makes good for MY trade.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Miss Wren retorted; ‘but you had better by
half set up a pen-wiper, and turn industrious, and use it.’

‘Why, if we were all as industrious as you, little Busy-Body, we should
begin to work as soon as we could crawl, and there would be a bad
thing!’

‘Do you mean,’ returned the little creature, with a flush suffusing her
face, ‘bad for your backs and your legs?’

‘No, no, no,’ said Eugene; shocked--to do him justice--at the thought of
trifling with her infirmity. ‘Bad for business, bad for business. If we
all set to work as soon as we could use our hands, it would be all over
with the dolls’ dressmakers.’

‘There’s something in that,’ replied Miss Wren; ‘you have a sort of an
idea in your noddle sometimes.’ Then, in a changed tone; ‘Talking of
ideas, my Lizzie,’ they were sitting side by side as they had sat at
first, ‘I wonder how it happens that when I am work, work, working here,
all alone in the summer-time, I smell flowers.’

‘As a commonplace individual, I should say,’ Eugene suggested
languidly--for he was growing weary of the person of the house--‘that
you smell flowers because you DO smell flowers.’

‘No I don’t,’ said the little creature, resting one arm upon the elbow
of her chair, resting her chin upon that hand, and looking vacantly
before her; ‘this is not a flowery neighbourhood. It’s anything but
that. And yet as I sit at work, I smell miles of flowers. I smell roses,
till I think I see the rose-leaves lying in heaps, bushels, on the
floor. I smell fallen leaves, till I put down my hand--so--and expect to
make them rustle. I smell the white and the pink May in the hedges, and
all sorts of flowers that I never was among. For I have seen very few
flowers indeed, in my life.’

‘Pleasant fancies to have, Jenny dear!’ said her friend: with a glance
towards Eugene as if she would have asked him whether they were given
the child in compensation for her losses.

‘So I think, Lizzie, when they come to me. And the birds I hear! Oh!’
cried the little creature, holding out her hand and looking upward, ‘how
they sing!’

There was something in the face and action for the moment, quite
inspired and beautiful. Then the chin dropped musingly upon the hand
again.

‘I dare say my birds sing better than other birds, and my flowers smell
better than other flowers. For when I was a little child,’ in a tone as
though it were ages ago, ‘the children that I used to see early in the
morning were very different from any others that I ever saw. They were
not like me; they were not chilled, anxious, ragged, or beaten; they
were never in pain. They were not like the children of the neighbours;
they never made me tremble all over, by setting up shrill noises, and
they never mocked me. Such numbers of them too! All in white dresses,
and with something shining on the borders, and on their heads, that I
have never been able to imitate with my work, though I know it so
well. They used to come down in long bright slanting rows, and say all
together, “Who is this in pain! Who is this in pain!” When I told them
who it was, they answered, “Come and play with us!” When I said “I never
play! I can’t play!” they swept about me and took me up, and made me
light. Then it was all delicious ease and rest till they laid me
down, and said, all together, “Have patience, and we will come again.”
 Whenever they came back, I used to know they were coming before I saw
the long bright rows, by hearing them ask, all together a long way off,
“Who is this in pain! Who is this in pain!” And I used to cry out, “O my
blessed children, it’s poor me. Have pity on me. Take me up and make me
light!”’

By degrees, as she progressed in this remembrance, the hand was raised,
the late ecstatic look returned, and she became quite beautiful. Having
so paused for a moment, silent, with a listening smile upon her face,
she looked round and recalled herself.

‘What poor fun you think me; don’t you, Mr Wrayburn? You may well look
tired of me. But it’s Saturday night, and I won’t detain you.’

‘That is to say, Miss Wren,’ observed Eugene, quite ready to profit by
the hint, ‘you wish me to go?’

‘Well, it’s Saturday night,’ she returned, ‘and my child’s coming
home. And my child is a troublesome bad child, and costs me a world of
scolding. I would rather you didn’t see my child.’

‘A doll?’ said Eugene, not understanding, and looking for an
explanation.

But Lizzie, with her lips only, shaping the two words, ‘Her father,’ he
delayed no longer. He took his leave immediately. At the corner of the
street he stopped to light another cigar, and possibly to ask himself
what he was doing otherwise. If so, the answer was indefinite and vague.
Who knows what he is doing, who is careless what he does!

A man stumbled against him as he turned away, who mumbled some maudlin
apology. Looking after this man, Eugene saw him go in at the door by
which he himself had just come out.

On the man’s stumbling into the room, Lizzie rose to leave it.

‘Don’t go away, Miss Hexam,’ he said in a submissive manner, speaking
thickly and with difficulty. ‘Don’t fly from unfortunate man in
shattered state of health. Give poor invalid honour of your company. It
ain’t--ain’t catching.’

Lizzie murmured that she had something to do in her own room, and went
away upstairs.

‘How’s my Jenny?’ said the man, timidly. ‘How’s my Jenny Wren, best of
children, object dearest affections broken-hearted invalid?’

To which the person of the house, stretching out her arm in an attitude
of command, replied with irresponsive asperity: ‘Go along with you! Go
along into your corner! Get into your corner directly!’

The wretched spectacle made as if he would have offered some
remonstrance; but not venturing to resist the person of the house,
thought better of it, and went and sat down on a particular chair of
disgrace.

‘Oh-h-h!’ cried the person of the house, pointing her little finger,
‘You bad old boy! Oh-h-h you naughty, wicked creature! WHAT do you mean
by it?’

The shaking figure, unnerved and disjointed from head to foot, put
out its two hands a little way, as making overtures of peace and
reconciliation. Abject tears stood in its eyes, and stained the blotched
red of its cheeks. The swollen lead-coloured under lip trembled with a
shameful whine. The whole indecorous threadbare ruin, from the broken
shoes to the prematurely-grey scanty hair, grovelled. Not with any sense
worthy to be called a sense, of this dire reversal of the places of
parent and child, but in a pitiful expostulation to be let off from a
scolding.

‘I know your tricks and your manners,’ cried Miss Wren. ‘I know where
you’ve been to!’ (which indeed it did not require discernment to
discover). ‘Oh, you disgraceful old chap!’

The very breathing of the figure was contemptible, as it laboured and
rattled in that operation, like a blundering clock.

‘Slave, slave, slave, from morning to night,’ pursued the person of the
house, ‘and all for this! WHAT do you mean by it?’

There was something in that emphasized ‘What,’ which absurdly frightened
the figure. As often as the person of the house worked her way round to
it--even as soon as he saw that it was coming--he collapsed in an extra
degree.

‘I wish you had been taken up, and locked up,’ said the person of the
house. ‘I wish you had been poked into cells and black holes, and run
over by rats and spiders and beetles. I know their tricks and their
manners, and they’d have tickled you nicely. Ain’t you ashamed of
yourself?’

‘Yes, my dear,’ stammered the father.

‘Then,’ said the person of the house, terrifying him by a grand muster
of her spirits and forces before recurring to the emphatic word, ‘WHAT
do you mean by it?’

‘Circumstances over which had no control,’ was the miserable creature’s
plea in extenuation.

‘I’LL circumstance you and control you too,’ retorted the person of the
house, speaking with vehement sharpness, ‘if you talk in that way. I’ll
give you in charge to the police, and have you fined five shillings when
you can’t pay, and then I won’t pay the money for you, and you’ll be
transported for life. How should you like to be transported for life?’

‘Shouldn’t like it. Poor shattered invalid. Trouble nobody long,’ cried
the wretched figure.

‘Come, come!’ said the person of the house, tapping the table near her
in a business-like manner, and shaking her head and her chin; ‘you know
what you’ve got to do. Put down your money this instant.’

The obedient figure began to rummage in its pockets.

‘Spent a fortune out of your wages, I’ll be bound!’ said the person of
the house. ‘Put it here! All you’ve got left! Every farthing!’

Such a business as he made of collecting it from his dogs’-eared
pockets; of expecting it in this pocket, and not finding it; of not
expecting it in that pocket, and passing it over; of finding no pocket
where that other pocket ought to be!

‘Is this all?’ demanded the person of the house, when a confused heap of
pence and shillings lay on the table.

‘Got no more,’ was the rueful answer, with an accordant shake of the
head.

‘Let me make sure. You know what you’ve got to do. Turn all your pockets
inside out, and leave ‘em so!’ cried the person of the house.

He obeyed. And if anything could have made him look more abject or more
dismally ridiculous than before, it would have been his so displaying
himself.

‘Here’s but seven and eightpence halfpenny!’ exclaimed Miss Wren, after
reducing the heap to order. ‘Oh, you prodigal old son! Now you shall be
starved.’

‘No, don’t starve me,’ he urged, whimpering.

‘If you were treated as you ought to be,’ said Miss Wren, ‘you’d be fed
upon the skewers of cats’ meat;--only the skewers, after the cats had
had the meat. As it is, go to bed.’

When he stumbled out of the corner to comply, he again put out both his
hands, and pleaded: ‘Circumstances over which no control--’

‘Get along with you to bed!’ cried Miss Wren, snapping him up. ‘Don’t
speak to me. I’m not going to forgive you. Go to bed this moment!’

Seeing another emphatic ‘What’ upon its way, he evaded it by complying
and was heard to shuffle heavily up stairs, and shut his door, and throw
himself on his bed. Within a little while afterwards, Lizzie came down.

‘Shall we have our supper, Jenny dear?’

‘Ah! bless us and save us, we need have something to keep us going,’
returned Miss Jenny, shrugging her shoulders.

Lizzie laid a cloth upon the little bench (more handy for the person of
the house than an ordinary table), and put upon it such plain fare as
they were accustomed to have, and drew up a stool for herself.

‘Now for supper! What are you thinking of, Jenny darling?’

‘I was thinking,’ she returned, coming out of a deep study, ‘what I
would do to Him, if he should turn out a drunkard.’

‘Oh, but he won’t,’ said Lizzie. ‘You’ll take care of that, beforehand.’

‘I shall try to take care of it beforehand, but he might deceive me.
Oh, my dear, all those fellows with their tricks and their manners do
deceive!’ With the little fist in full action. ‘And if so, I tell you
what I think I’d do. When he was asleep, I’d make a spoon red hot, and
I’d have some boiling liquor bubbling in a saucepan, and I’d take it
out hissing, and I’d open his mouth with the other hand--or perhaps he’d
sleep with his mouth ready open--and I’d pour it down his throat, and
blister it and choke him.’

‘I am sure you would do no such horrible thing,’ said Lizzie.

‘Shouldn’t I? Well; perhaps I shouldn’t. But I should like to!’

‘I am equally sure you would not.’

‘Not even like to? Well, you generally know best. Only you haven’t
always lived among it as I have lived--and your back isn’t bad and your
legs are not queer.’

As they went on with their supper, Lizzie tried to bring her round to
that prettier and better state. But, the charm was broken. The person
of the house was the person of a house full of sordid shames and cares,
with an upper room in which that abased figure was infecting even
innocent sleep with sensual brutality and degradation. The doll’s
dressmaker had become a little quaint shrew; of the world, worldly; of
the earth, earthy.

Poor doll’s dressmaker! How often so dragged down by hands that should
have raised her up; how often so misdirected when losing her way on the
eternal road, and asking guidance! Poor, poor little doll’s dressmaker!



Chapter 3

A PIECE OF WORK


Britannia, sitting meditating one fine day (perhaps in the attitude in
which she is presented on the copper coinage), discovers all of a sudden
that she wants Veneering in Parliament. It occurs to her that Veneering
is ‘a representative man’--which cannot in these times be doubted--and
that Her Majesty’s faithful Commons are incomplete without him. So,
Britannia mentions to a legal gentleman of her acquaintance that if
Veneering will ‘put down’ five thousand pounds, he may write a couple
of initial letters after his name at the extremely cheap rate of two
thousand five hundred per letter. It is clearly understood between
Britannia and the legal gentleman that nobody is to take up the five
thousand pounds, but that being put down they will disappear by magical
conjuration and enchantment.

The legal gentleman in Britannia’s confidence going straight from that
lady to Veneering, thus commissioned, Veneering declares himself highly
flattered, but requires breathing time to ascertain ‘whether his friends
will rally round him.’ Above all things, he says, it behoves him to be
clear, at a crisis of this importance, ‘whether his friends will rally
round him.’ The legal gentleman, in the interests of his client cannot
allow much time for this purpose, as the lady rather thinks she knows
somebody prepared to put down six thousand pounds; but he says he will
give Veneering four hours.

Veneering then says to Mrs Veneering, ‘We must work,’ and throws himself
into a Hansom cab. Mrs Veneering in the same moment relinquishes baby
to Nurse; presses her aquiline hands upon her brow, to arrange the
throbbing intellect within; orders out the carriage; and repeats in
a distracted and devoted manner, compounded of Ophelia and any
self-immolating female of antiquity you may prefer, ‘We must work.’

Veneering having instructed his driver to charge at the Public in the
streets, like the Life-Guards at Waterloo, is driven furiously to Duke
Street, Saint James’s. There, he finds Twemlow in his lodgings, fresh
from the hands of a secret artist who has been doing something to his
hair with yolks of eggs. The process requiring that Twemlow shall, for
two hours after the application, allow his hair to stick upright and dry
gradually, he is in an appropriate state for the receipt of startling
intelligence; looking equally like the Monument on Fish Street Hill, and
King Priam on a certain incendiary occasion not wholly unknown as a neat
point from the classics.

‘My dear Twemlow,’ says Veneering, grasping both his hands, ‘as the
dearest and oldest of my friends--’

[‘Then there can be no more doubt about it in future,’ thinks Twemlow,
‘and I AM!’)

‘--Are you of opinion that your cousin, Lord Snigsworth, would give his
name as a Member of my Committee? I don’t go so far as to ask for his
lordship; I only ask for his name. Do you think he would give me his
name?’

In sudden low spirits, Twemlow replies, ‘I don’t think he would.’

‘My political opinions,’ says Veneering, not previously aware of having
any, ‘are identical with those of Lord Snigsworth, and perhaps as a
matter of public feeling and public principle, Lord Snigsworth would
give me his name.’

‘It might be so,’ says Twemlow; ‘but--’ And perplexedly scratching his
head, forgetful of the yolks of eggs, is the more discomfited by being
reminded how stickey he is.

‘Between such old and intimate friends as ourselves,’ pursues Veneering,
‘there should in such a case be no reserve. Promise me that if I ask you
to do anything for me which you don’t like to do, or feel the slightest
difficulty in doing, you will freely tell me so.’

This, Twemlow is so kind as to promise, with every appearance of most
heartily intending to keep his word.

‘Would you have any objection to write down to Snigsworthy Park, and ask
this favour of Lord Snigsworth? Of course if it were granted I should
know that I owed it solely to you; while at the same time you would put
it to Lord Snigsworth entirely upon public grounds. Would you have any
objection?’

Says Twemlow, with his hand to his forehead, ‘You have exacted a promise
from me.’

‘I have, my dear Twemlow.’

‘And you expect me to keep it honourably.’

‘I do, my dear Twemlow.’

‘ON the whole, then;--observe me,’ urges Twemlow with great nicety, as
if; in the case of its having been off the whole, he would have done it
directly--‘ON the whole, I must beg you to excuse me from addressing any
communication to Lord Snigsworth.’

‘Bless you, bless you!’ says Veneering; horribly disappointed, but
grasping him by both hands again, in a particularly fervent manner.

It is not to be wondered at that poor Twemlow should decline to inflict
a letter on his noble cousin (who has gout in the temper), inasmuch
as his noble cousin, who allows him a small annuity on which he lives,
takes it out of him, as the phrase goes, in extreme severity; putting
him, when he visits at Snigsworthy Park, under a kind of martial law;
ordaining that he shall hang his hat on a particular peg, sit on a
particular chair, talk on particular subjects to particular people, and
perform particular exercises: such as sounding the praises of the Family
Varnish (not to say Pictures), and abstaining from the choicest of the
Family Wines unless expressly invited to partake.

‘One thing, however, I CAN do for you,’ says Twemlow; ‘and that is, work
for you.’

Veneering blesses him again.

‘I’ll go,’ says Twemlow, in a rising hurry of spirits, ‘to the
club;--let us see now; what o’clock is it?’

‘Twenty minutes to eleven.’

‘I’ll be,’ says Twemlow, ‘at the club by ten minutes to twelve, and I’ll
never leave it all day.’

Veneering feels that his friends are rallying round him, and says,
‘Thank you, thank you. I knew I could rely upon you. I said to Anastatia
before leaving home just now to come to you--of course the first friend
I have seen on a subject so momentous to me, my dear Twemlow--I said to
Anastatia, “We must work.”’

‘You were right, you were right,’ replies Twemlow. ‘Tell me. Is SHE
working?’

‘She is,’ says Veneering.

‘Good!’ cries Twemlow, polite little gentleman that he is. ‘A woman’s
tact is invaluable. To have the dear sex with us, is to have everything
with us.’

‘But you have not imparted to me,’ remarks Veneering, ‘what you think of
my entering the House of Commons?’

‘I think,’ rejoins Twemlow, feelingly, ‘that it is the best club in
London.’

Veneering again blesses him, plunges down stairs, rushes into his
Hansom, and directs the driver to be up and at the British Public, and
to charge into the City.

Meanwhile Twemlow, in an increasing hurry of spirits, gets his hair down
as well as he can--which is not very well; for, after these glutinous
applications it is restive, and has a surface on it somewhat in the
nature of pastry--and gets to the club by the appointed time. At the
club he promptly secures a large window, writing materials, and all
the newspapers, and establishes himself; immoveable, to be respectfully
contemplated by Pall Mall. Sometimes, when a man enters who nods to
him, Twemlow says, ‘Do you know Veneering?’ Man says, ‘No; member of
the club?’ Twemlow says, ‘Yes. Coming in for Pocket-Breaches.’ Man says,
‘Ah! Hope he may find it worth the money!’ yawns, and saunters out.
Towards six o’clock of the afternoon, Twemlow begins to persuade
himself that he is positively jaded with work, and thinks it much to be
regretted that he was not brought up as a Parliamentary agent.

From Twemlow’s, Veneering dashes at Podsnap’s place of business. Finds
Podsnap reading the paper, standing, and inclined to be oratorical
over the astonishing discovery he has made, that Italy is not England.
Respectfully entreats Podsnap’s pardon for stopping the flow of his
words of wisdom, and informs him what is in the wind. Tells Podsnap that
their political opinions are identical. Gives Podsnap to understand that
he, Veneering, formed his political opinions while sitting at the feet
of him, Podsnap. Seeks earnestly to know whether Podsnap ‘will rally
round him?’

Says Podsnap, something sternly, ‘Now, first of all, Veneering, do you
ask my advice?’

Veneering falters that as so old and so dear a friend--

‘Yes, yes, that’s all very well,’ says Podsnap; ‘but have you made up
your mind to take this borough of Pocket-Breaches on its own terms, or
do you ask my opinion whether you shall take it or leave it alone?’

Veneering repeats that his heart’s desire and his soul’s thirst are,
that Podsnap shall rally round him.

‘Now, I’ll be plain with you, Veneering,’ says Podsnap, knitting his
brows. ‘You will infer that I don’t care about Parliament, from the fact
of my not being there?’

Why, of course Veneering knows that! Of course Veneering knows that if
Podsnap chose to go there, he would be there, in a space of time that
might be stated by the light and thoughtless as a jiffy.

‘It is not worth my while,’ pursues Podsnap, becoming handsomely
mollified, ‘and it is the reverse of important to my position. But it
is not my wish to set myself up as law for another man, differently
situated. You think it IS worth YOUR while, and IS important to YOUR
position. Is that so?’

Always with the proviso that Podsnap will rally round him, Veneering
thinks it is so.

‘Then you don’t ask my advice,’ says Podsnap. ‘Good. Then I won’t give
it you. But you do ask my help. Good. Then I’ll work for you.’

Veneering instantly blesses him, and apprises him that Twemlow is
already working. Podsnap does not quite approve that anybody should
be already working--regarding it rather in the light of a liberty--but
tolerates Twemlow, and says he is a well-connected old female who will
do no harm.

‘I have nothing very particular to do to-day,’ adds Podsnap, ‘and I’ll
mix with some influential people. I had engaged myself to dinner, but
I’ll send Mrs Podsnap and get off going myself; and I’ll dine with you
at eight. It’s important we should report progress and compare notes.
Now, let me see. You ought to have a couple of active energetic fellows,
of gentlemanly manners, to go about.’

Veneering, after cogitation, thinks of Boots and Brewer.

‘Whom I have met at your house,’ says Podsnap. ‘Yes. They’ll do very
well. Let them each have a cab, and go about.’

Veneering immediately mentions what a blessing he feels it, to possess
a friend capable of such grand administrative suggestions, and really
is elated at this going about of Boots and Brewer, as an idea wearing
an electioneering aspect and looking desperately like business. Leaving
Podsnap, at a hand-gallop, he descends upon Boots and Brewer, who
enthusiastically rally round him by at once bolting off in cabs, taking
opposite directions. Then Veneering repairs to the legal gentleman in
Britannia’s confidence, and with him transacts some delicate affairs
of business, and issues an address to the independent electors of
Pocket-Breaches, announcing that he is coming among them for their
suffrages, as the mariner returns to the home of his early childhood: a
phrase which is none the worse for his never having been near the place
in his life, and not even now distinctly knowing where it is.

Mrs Veneering, during the same eventful hours, is not idle. No sooner
does the carriage turn out, all complete, than she turns into it, all
complete, and gives the word ‘To Lady Tippins’s.’ That charmer dwells
over a staymaker’s in the Belgravian Borders, with a life-size model
in the window on the ground floor of a distinguished beauty in a blue
petticoat, stay-lace in hand, looking over her shoulder at the town in
innocent surprise. As well she may, to find herself dressing under the
circumstances.

Lady Tippins at home? Lady Tippins at home, with the room darkened,
and her back (like the lady’s at the ground-floor window, though for a
different reason) cunningly turned towards the light. Lady Tippins is
so surprised by seeing her dear Mrs Veneering so early--in the middle of
the night, the pretty creature calls it--that her eyelids almost go up,
under the influence of that emotion.

To whom Mrs Veneering incoherently communicates, how that Veneering
has been offered Pocket-Breaches; how that it is the time for rallying
round; how that Veneering has said ‘We must work’; how that she is here,
as a wife and mother, to entreat Lady Tippins to work; how that the
carriage is at Lady Tippins’s disposal for purposes of work; how that
she, proprietress of said bran new elegant equipage, will return home on
foot--on bleeding feet if need be--to work (not specifying how), until
she drops by the side of baby’s crib.

‘My love,’ says Lady Tippins, ‘compose yourself; we’ll bring him in.’
And Lady Tippins really does work, and work the Veneering horses too;
for she clatters about town all day, calling upon everybody she knows,
and showing her entertaining powers and green fan to immense advantage,
by rattling on with, My dear soul, what do you think? What do
you suppose me to be? You’ll never guess. I’m pretending to be an
electioneering agent. And for what place of all places? Pocket-Breaches.
And why? Because the dearest friend I have in the world has bought it.
And who is the dearest friend I have in the world? A man of the name of
Veneering. Not omitting his wife, who is the other dearest friend I have
in the world; and I positively declare I forgot their baby, who is the
other. And we are carrying on this little farce to keep up appearances,
and isn’t it refreshing! Then, my precious child, the fun of it is that
nobody knows who these Veneerings are, and that they know nobody, and
that they have a house out of the Tales of the Genii, and give dinners
out of the Arabian Nights. Curious to see ‘em, my dear? Say you’ll know
‘em. Come and dine with ‘em. They shan’t bore you. Say who shall meet
you. We’ll make up a party of our own, and I’ll engage that they shall
not interfere with you for one single moment. You really ought to see
their gold and silver camels. I call their dinner-table, the Caravan.
Do come and dine with my Veneerings, my own Veneerings, my exclusive
property, the dearest friends I have in the world! And above all, my
dear, be sure you promise me your vote and interest and all sorts of
plumpers for Pocket-Breaches; for we couldn’t think of spending sixpence
on it, my love, and can only consent to be brought in by the spontaneous
thingummies of the incorruptible whatdoyoucallums.

Now, the point of view seized by the bewitching Tippins, that this same
working and rallying round is to keep up appearances, may have something
in it, but not all the truth. More is done, or considered to be
done--which does as well--by taking cabs, and ‘going about,’ than the
fair Tippins knew of. Many vast vague reputations have been made,
solely by taking cabs and going about. This particularly obtains in all
Parliamentary affairs. Whether the business in hand be to get a man in,
or get a man out, or get a man over, or promote a railway, or jockey
a railway, or what else, nothing is understood to be so effectual as
scouring nowhere in a violent hurry--in short, as taking cabs and going
about.

Probably because this reason is in the air, Twemlow, far from being
singular in his persuasion that he works like a Trojan, is capped by
Podsnap, who in his turn is capped by Boots and Brewer. At eight o’clock
when all these hard workers assemble to dine at Veneering’s, it is
understood that the cabs of Boots and Brewer mustn’t leave the door, but
that pails of water must be brought from the nearest baiting-place,
and cast over the horses’ legs on the very spot, lest Boots and Brewer
should have instant occasion to mount and away. Those fleet messengers
require the Analytical to see that their hats are deposited where they
can be laid hold of at an instant’s notice; and they dine (remarkably
well though) with the air of firemen in charge of an engine, expecting
intelligence of some tremendous conflagration.

Mrs Veneering faintly remarks, as dinner opens, that many such days
would be too much for her.

‘Many such days would be too much for all of us,’ says Podsnap; ‘but
we’ll bring him in!’

‘We’ll bring him in,’ says Lady Tippins, sportively waving her green
fan. ‘Veneering for ever!’

‘We’ll bring him in!’ says Twemlow.

‘We’ll bring him in!’ say Boots and Brewer.

Strictly speaking, it would be hard to show cause why they should not
bring him in, Pocket-Breaches having closed its little bargain, and
there being no opposition. However, it is agreed that they must ‘work’
to the last, and that if they did not work, something indefinite would
happen. It is likewise agreed that they are all so exhausted with the
work behind them, and need to be so fortified for the work before them,
as to require peculiar strengthening from Veneering’s cellar. Therefore,
the Analytical has orders to produce the cream of the cream of his
binns, and therefore it falls out that rallying becomes rather a trying
word for the occasion; Lady Tippins being observed gamely to inculcate
the necessity of rearing round their dear Veneering; Podsnap advocating
roaring round him; Boots and Brewer declaring their intention of reeling
round him; and Veneering thanking his devoted friends one and all, with
great emotion, for rarullarulling round him.

In these inspiring moments, Brewer strikes out an idea which is the
great hit of the day. He consults his watch, and says (like Guy Fawkes),
he’ll now go down to the House of Commons and see how things look.

‘I’ll keep about the lobby for an hour or so,’ says Brewer, with a
deeply mysterious countenance, ‘and if things look well, I won’t come
back, but will order my cab for nine in the morning.’

‘You couldn’t do better,’ says Podsnap.

Veneering expresses his inability ever to acknowledge this last service.
Tears stand in Mrs Veneering’s affectionate eyes. Boots shows envy,
loses ground, and is regarded as possessing a second-rate mind. They all
crowd to the door, to see Brewer off. Brewer says to his driver, ‘Now,
is your horse pretty fresh?’ eyeing the animal with critical scrutiny.
Driver says he’s as fresh as butter. ‘Put him along then,’ says Brewer;
‘House of Commons.’ Driver darts up, Brewer leaps in, they cheer him as
he departs, and Mr Podsnap says, ‘Mark my words, sir. That’s a man of
resource; that’s a man to make his way in life.’

When the time comes for Veneering to deliver a neat and appropriate
stammer to the men of Pocket-Breaches, only Podsnap and Twemlow
accompany him by railway to that sequestered spot. The legal gentleman
is at the Pocket-Breaches Branch Station, with an open carriage with a
printed bill ‘Veneering for ever’ stuck upon it, as if it were a wall;
and they gloriously proceed, amidst the grins of the populace, to a
feeble little town hall on crutches, with some onions and bootlaces
under it, which the legal gentleman says are a Market; and from the
front window of that edifice Veneering speaks to the listening earth.
In the moment of his taking his hat off, Podsnap, as per agreement made
with Mrs Veneering, telegraphs to that wife and mother, ‘He’s up.’

Veneering loses his way in the usual No Thoroughfares of speech, and
Podsnap and Twemlow say Hear hear! and sometimes, when he can’t by any
means back himself out of some very unlucky No Thoroughfare, ‘He-a-a-r
He-a-a-r!’ with an air of facetious conviction, as if the ingenuity of
the thing gave them a sensation of exquisite pleasure. But Veneering
makes two remarkably good points; so good, that they are supposed
to have been suggested to him by the legal gentleman in Britannia’s
confidence, while briefly conferring on the stairs.

Point the first is this. Veneering institutes an original comparison
between the country, and a ship; pointedly calling the ship, the Vessel
of the State, and the Minister the Man at the Helm. Veneering’s object
is to let Pocket-Breaches know that his friend on his right (Podsnap) is
a man of wealth. Consequently says he, ‘And, gentlemen, when the timbers
of the Vessel of the State are unsound and the Man at the Helm is
unskilful, would those great Marine Insurers, who rank among our
world-famed merchant-princes--would they insure her, gentlemen? Would
they underwrite her? Would they incur a risk in her? Would they have
confidence in her? Why, gentlemen, if I appealed to my honourable friend
upon my right, himself among the greatest and most respected of that
great and much respected class, he would answer No!’

Point the second is this. The telling fact that Twemlow is related to
Lord Snigsworth, must be let off. Veneering supposes a state of public
affairs that probably never could by any possibility exist (though this
is not quite certain, in consequence of his picture being unintelligible
to himself and everybody else), and thus proceeds. ‘Why, gentlemen, if
I were to indicate such a programme to any class of society, I say it
would be received with derision, would be pointed at by the finger of
scorn. If I indicated such a programme to any worthy and intelligent
tradesman of your town--nay, I will here be personal, and say Our
town--what would he reply? He would reply, “Away with it!” That’s what
HE would reply, gentlemen. In his honest indignation he would reply,
“Away with it!” But suppose I mounted higher in the social scale.
Suppose I drew my arm through the arm of my respected friend upon my
left, and, walking with him through the ancestral woods of his family,
and under the spreading beeches of Snigsworthy Park, approached the
noble hall, crossed the courtyard, entered by the door, went up the
staircase, and, passing from room to room, found myself at last in
the august presence of my friend’s near kinsman, Lord Snigsworth. And
suppose I said to that venerable earl, “My Lord, I am here before your
lordship, presented by your lordship’s near kinsman, my friend upon my
left, to indicate that programme;” what would his lordship answer? Why,
he would answer, “Away with it!” That’s what he would answer, gentlemen.
“Away with it!” Unconsciously using, in his exalted sphere, the exact
language of the worthy and intelligent tradesman of our town, the near
and dear kinsman of my friend upon my left would answer in his wrath,
“Away with it!”’

Veneering finishes with this last success, and Mr Podsnap telegraphs to
Mrs Veneering, ‘He’s down.’

Then, dinner is had at the Hotel with the legal gentleman, and then
there are in due succession, nomination, and declaration. Finally Mr
Podsnap telegraphs to Mrs Veneering, ‘We have brought him in.’

Another gorgeous dinner awaits them on their return to the Veneering
halls, and Lady Tippins awaits them, and Boots and Brewer await
them. There is a modest assertion on everybody’s part that everybody
single-handed ‘brought him in’; but in the main it is conceded by all,
that that stroke of business on Brewer’s part, in going down to the
house that night to see how things looked, was the master-stroke.

A touching little incident is related by Mrs Veneering, in the course of
the evening. Mrs Veneering is habitually disposed to be tearful, and
has an extra disposition that way after her late excitement. Previous
to withdrawing from the dinner-table with Lady Tippins, she says, in a
pathetic and physically weak manner:

‘You will all think it foolish of me, I know, but I must mention it. As
I sat by Baby’s crib, on the night before the election, Baby was very
uneasy in her sleep.’

The Analytical chemist, who is gloomily looking on, has diabolical
impulses to suggest ‘Wind’ and throw up his situation; but represses
them.

‘After an interval almost convulsive, Baby curled her little hands in
one another and smiled.’

Mrs Veneering stopping here, Mr Podsnap deems it incumbent on him to
say: ‘I wonder why!’

‘Could it be, I asked myself,’ says Mrs Veneering, looking about her for
her pocket-handkerchief, ‘that the Fairies were telling Baby that her
papa would shortly be an M. P.?’

So overcome by the sentiment is Mrs Veneering, that they all get up
to make a clear stage for Veneering, who goes round the table to the
rescue, and bears her out backward, with her feet impressively scraping
the carpet: after remarking that her work has been too much for her
strength. Whether the fairies made any mention of the five thousand
pounds, and it disagreed with Baby, is not speculated upon.

Poor little Twemlow, quite done up, is touched, and still continues
touched after he is safely housed over the livery-stable yard in
Duke Street, Saint James’s. But there, upon his sofa, a tremendous
consideration breaks in upon the mild gentleman, putting all softer
considerations to the rout.

‘Gracious heavens! Now I have time to think of it, he never saw one of
his constituents in all his days, until we saw them together!’

After having paced the room in distress of mind, with his hand to his
forehead, the innocent Twemlow returns to his sofa and moans:

‘I shall either go distracted, or die, of this man. He comes upon me too
late in life. I am not strong enough to bear him!’



Chapter 4

CUPID PROMPTED


To use the cold language of the world, Mrs Alfred Lammle rapidly
improved the acquaintance of Miss Podsnap. To use the warm language of
Mrs Lammle, she and her sweet Georgiana soon became one: in heart, in
mind, in sentiment, in soul.

Whenever Georgiana could escape from the thraldom of Podsnappery; could
throw off the bedclothes of the custard-coloured phaeton, and get up;
could shrink out of the range of her mother’s rocking, and (so to speak)
rescue her poor little frosty toes from being rocked over; she repaired
to her friend, Mrs Alfred Lammle. Mrs Podsnap by no means objected. As
a consciously ‘splendid woman,’ accustomed to overhear herself so
denominated by elderly osteologists pursuing their studies in dinner
society, Mrs Podsnap could dispense with her daughter. Mr Podsnap, for
his part, on being informed where Georgiana was, swelled with patronage
of the Lammles. That they, when unable to lay hold of him, should
respectfully grasp at the hem of his mantle; that they, when they could
not bask in the glory of him the sun, should take up with the pale
reflected light of the watery young moon his daughter; appeared quite
natural, becoming, and proper. It gave him a better opinion of the
discretion of the Lammles than he had heretofore held, as showing that
they appreciated the value of the connexion. So, Georgiana repairing
to her friend, Mr Podsnap went out to dinner, and to dinner, and yet to
dinner, arm in arm with Mrs Podsnap: settling his obstinate head in his
cravat and shirt-collar, much as if he were performing on the Pandean
pipes, in his own honour, the triumphal march, See the conquering
Podsnap comes, Sound the trumpets, beat the drums!

It was a trait in Mr Podsnap’s character (and in one form or other
it will be generally seen to pervade the depths and shallows of
Podsnappery), that he could not endure a hint of disparagement of any
friend or acquaintance of his. ‘How dare you?’ he would seem to say, in
such a case. ‘What do you mean? I have licensed this person. This person
has taken out MY certificate. Through this person you strike at me,
Podsnap the Great. And it is not that I particularly care for the
person’s dignity, but that I do most particularly care for Podsnap’s.’
Hence, if any one in his presence had presumed to doubt the
responsibility of the Lammles, he would have been mightily huffed. Not
that any one did, for Veneering, M.P., was always the authority for
their being very rich, and perhaps believed it. As indeed he might, if
he chose, for anything he knew of the matter.

Mr and Mrs Lammle’s house in Sackville Street, Piccadilly, was but
a temporary residence. It has done well enough, they informed their
friends, for Mr Lammle when a bachelor, but it would not do now. So,
they were always looking at palatial residences in the best situations,
and always very nearly taking or buying one, but never quite concluding
the bargain. Hereby they made for themselves a shining little reputation
apart. People said, on seeing a vacant palatial residence, ‘The very
thing for the Lammles!’ and wrote to the Lammles about it, and the
Lammles always went to look at it, but unfortunately it never exactly
answered. In short, they suffered so many disappointments, that they
began to think it would be necessary to build a palatial residence.
And hereby they made another shining reputation; many persons of their
acquaintance becoming by anticipation dissatisfied with their own
houses, and envious of the non-existent Lammle structure.

The handsome fittings and furnishings of the house in Sackville Street
were piled thick and high over the skeleton up-stairs, and if it ever
whispered from under its load of upholstery, ‘Here I am in the closet!’
it was to very few ears, and certainly never to Miss Podsnap’s. What
Miss Podsnap was particularly charmed with, next to the graces of
her friend, was the happiness of her friend’s married life. This was
frequently their theme of conversation.

‘I am sure,’ said Miss Podsnap, ‘Mr Lammle is like a lover. At least
I--I should think he was.’

‘Georgiana, darling!’ said Mrs Lammle, holding up a forefinger, ‘Take
care!’

‘Oh my goodness me!’ exclaimed Miss Podsnap, reddening. ‘What have I
said now?’

‘Alfred, you know,’ hinted Mrs Lammle, playfully shaking her head. ‘You
were never to say Mr Lammle any more, Georgiana.’

‘Oh! Alfred, then. I am glad it’s no worse. I was afraid I had said
something shocking. I am always saying something wrong to ma.’

‘To me, Georgiana dearest?’

‘No, not to you; you are not ma. I wish you were.’

Mrs Lammle bestowed a sweet and loving smile upon her friend, which Miss
Podsnap returned as she best could. They sat at lunch in Mrs Lammle’s
own boudoir.

‘And so, dearest Georgiana, Alfred is like your notion of a lover?’

‘I don’t say that, Sophronia,’ Georgiana replied, beginning to conceal
her elbows. ‘I haven’t any notion of a lover. The dreadful wretches that
ma brings up at places to torment me, are not lovers. I only mean that
Mr--’

‘Again, dearest Georgiana?’

‘That Alfred--’

‘Sounds much better, darling.’

‘--Loves you so. He always treats you with such delicate gallantry and
attention. Now, don’t he?’

‘Truly, my dear,’ said Mrs Lammle, with a rather singular expression
crossing her face. ‘I believe that he loves me, fully as much as I love
him.’

‘Oh, what happiness!’ exclaimed Miss Podsnap.

‘But do you know, my Georgiana,’ Mrs Lammle resumed presently, ‘that
there is something suspicious in your enthusiastic sympathy with
Alfred’s tenderness?’

‘Good gracious no, I hope not!’

‘Doesn’t it rather suggest,’ said Mrs Lammle archly, ‘that my
Georgiana’s little heart is--’

‘Oh don’t!’ Miss Podsnap blushingly besought her. ‘Please don’t! I
assure you, Sophronia, that I only praise Alfred, because he is your
husband and so fond of you.’

Sophronia’s glance was as if a rather new light broke in upon her. It
shaded off into a cool smile, as she said, with her eyes upon her lunch,
and her eyebrows raised:

‘You are quite wrong, my love, in your guess at my meaning. What I
insinuated was, that my Georgiana’s little heart was growing conscious
of a vacancy.’

‘No, no, no,’ said Georgiana. ‘I wouldn’t have anybody say anything to
me in that way for I don’t know how many thousand pounds.’

‘In what way, my Georgiana?’ inquired Mrs Lammle, still smiling coolly
with her eyes upon her lunch, and her eyebrows raised.

‘YOU know,’ returned poor little Miss Podsnap. ‘I think I should go out
of my mind, Sophronia, with vexation and shyness and detestation, if
anybody did. It’s enough for me to see how loving you and your husband
are. That’s a different thing. I couldn’t bear to have anything of that
sort going on with myself. I should beg and pray to--to have the person
taken away and trampled upon.’

Ah! here was Alfred. Having stolen in unobserved, he playfully leaned on
the back of Sophronia’s chair, and, as Miss Podsnap saw him, put one
of Sophronia’s wandering locks to his lips, and waved a kiss from it
towards Miss Podsnap.

‘What is this about husbands and detestations?’ inquired the captivating
Alfred.

‘Why, they say,’ returned his wife, ‘that listeners never hear any good
of themselves; though you--but pray how long have you been here, sir?’

‘This instant arrived, my own.’

‘Then I may go on--though if you had been here but a moment or two
sooner, you would have heard your praises sounded by Georgiana.’

‘Only, if they were to be called praises at all which I really don’t
think they were,’ explained Miss Podsnap in a flutter, ‘for being so
devoted to Sophronia.’

‘Sophronia!’ murmured Alfred. ‘My life!’ and kissed her hand. In return
for which she kissed his watch-chain.

‘But it was not I who was to be taken away and trampled upon, I hope?’
said Alfred, drawing a seat between them.

‘Ask Georgiana, my soul,’ replied his wife.

Alfred touchingly appealed to Georgiana.

‘Oh, it was nobody,’ replied Miss Podsnap. ‘It was nonsense.’

‘But if you are determined to know, Mr Inquisitive Pet, as I suppose you
are,’ said the happy and fond Sophronia, smiling, ‘it was any one who
should venture to aspire to Georgiana.’

‘Sophronia, my love,’ remonstrated Mr Lammle, becoming graver, ‘you are
not serious?’

‘Alfred, my love,’ returned his wife, ‘I dare say Georgiana was not, but
I am.’

‘Now this,’ said Mr Lammle, ‘shows the accidental combinations that
there are in things! Could you believe, my Ownest, that I came in here
with the name of an aspirant to our Georgiana on my lips?’

‘Of course I could believe, Alfred,’ said Mrs Lammle, ‘anything that YOU
told me.’

‘You dear one! And I anything that YOU told me.’

How delightful those interchanges, and the looks accompanying them! Now,
if the skeleton up-stairs had taken that opportunity, for instance, of
calling out ‘Here I am, suffocating in the closet!’

‘I give you my honour, my dear Sophronia--’

‘And I know what that is, love,’ said she.

‘You do, my darling--that I came into the room all but uttering young
Fledgeby’s name. Tell Georgiana, dearest, about young Fledgeby.’

‘Oh no, don’t! Please don’t!’ cried Miss Podsnap, putting her fingers in
her ears. ‘I’d rather not.’

Mrs Lammle laughed in her gayest manner, and, removing her Georgiana’s
unresisting hands, and playfully holding them in her own at arms’
length, sometimes near together and sometimes wide apart, went on:

‘You must know, you dearly beloved little goose, that once upon a
time there was a certain person called young Fledgeby. And this young
Fledgeby, who was of an excellent family and rich, was known to two
other certain persons, dearly attached to one another and called Mr and
Mrs Alfred Lammle. So this young Fledgeby, being one night at the play,
there sees with Mr and Mrs Alfred Lammle, a certain heroine called--’

‘No, don’t say Georgiana Podsnap!’ pleaded that young lady almost in
tears. ‘Please don’t. Oh do do do say somebody else! Not Georgiana
Podsnap. Oh don’t, don’t, don’t!’

‘No other,’ said Mrs Lammle, laughing airily, and, full of affectionate
blandishments, opening and closing Georgiana’s arms like a pair of
compasses, ‘than my little Georgiana Podsnap. So this young Fledgeby goes
to that Alfred Lammle and says--’

‘Oh ple-e-e-ease don’t!’ Georgiana, as if the supplication were being
squeezed out of her by powerful compression. ‘I so hate him for saying
it!’

‘For saying what, my dear?’ laughed Mrs Lammle.

‘Oh, I don’t know what he said,’ cried Georgiana wildly, ‘but I hate him
all the same for saying it.’

‘My dear,’ said Mrs Lammle, always laughing in her most captivating way,
‘the poor young fellow only says that he is stricken all of a heap.’

‘Oh, what shall I ever do!’ interposed Georgiana. ‘Oh my goodness what a
Fool he must be!’

‘--And implores to be asked to dinner, and to make a fourth at the play
another time. And so he dines to-morrow and goes to the Opera with
us. That’s all. Except, my dear Georgiana--and what will you think of
this!--that he is infinitely shyer than you, and far more afraid of you
than you ever were of any one in all your days!’

In perturbation of mind Miss Podsnap still fumed and plucked at her
hands a little, but could not help laughing at the notion of anybody’s
being afraid of her. With that advantage, Sophronia flattered her and
rallied her more successfully, and then the insinuating Alfred flattered
her and rallied her, and promised that at any moment when she might
require that service at his hands, he would take young Fledgeby out and
trample on him. Thus it remained amicably understood that young Fledgeby
was to come to admire, and that Georgiana was to come to be admired; and
Georgiana with the entirely new sensation in her breast of having that
prospect before her, and with many kisses from her dear Sophronia in
present possession, preceded six feet one of discontented footman (an
amount of the article that always came for her when she walked home) to
her father’s dwelling.

The happy pair being left together, Mrs Lammle said to her husband:

‘If I understand this girl, sir, your dangerous fascinations have
produced some effect upon her. I mention the conquest in good time
because I apprehend your scheme to be more important to you than your
vanity.’

There was a mirror on the wall before them, and her eyes just caught
him smirking in it. She gave the reflected image a look of the deepest
disdain, and the image received it in the glass. Next moment they
quietly eyed each other, as if they, the principals, had had no part in
that expressive transaction.

It may have been that Mrs Lammle tried in some manner to excuse her
conduct to herself by depreciating the poor little victim of whom she
spoke with acrimonious contempt. It may have been too that in this she
did not quite succeed, for it is very difficult to resist confidence,
and she knew she had Georgiana’s.

Nothing more was said between the happy pair. Perhaps conspirators
who have once established an understanding, may not be over-fond of
repeating the terms and objects of their conspiracy. Next day came; came
Georgiana; and came Fledgeby.

Georgiana had by this time seen a good deal of the house and its
frequenters. As there was a certain handsome room with a billiard table
in it--on the ground floor, eating out a backyard--which might have
been Mr Lammle’s office, or library, but was called by neither name, but
simply Mr Lammle’s room, so it would have been hard for stronger female
heads than Georgiana’s to determine whether its frequenters were men
of pleasure or men of business. Between the room and the men there were
strong points of general resemblance. Both were too gaudy, too slangey,
too odorous of cigars, and too much given to horseflesh; the latter
characteristic being exemplified in the room by its decorations, and in
the men by their conversation. High-stepping horses seemed necessary to
all Mr Lammle’s friends--as necessary as their transaction of business
together in a gipsy way at untimely hours of the morning and evening,
and in rushes and snatches. There were friends who seemed to be always
coming and going across the Channel, on errands about the Bourse, and
Greek and Spanish and India and Mexican and par and premium and discount
and three quarters and seven eighths. There were other friends who
seemed to be always lolling and lounging in and out of the City, on
questions of the Bourse, and Greek and Spanish and India and Mexican and
par and premium and discount and three quarters and seven eighths. They
were all feverish, boastful, and indefinably loose; and they all ate and
drank a great deal; and made bets in eating and drinking. They all spoke
of sums of money, and only mentioned the sums and left the money to
be understood; as ‘five and forty thousand Tom,’ or ‘Two hundred and
twenty-two on every individual share in the lot Joe.’ They seemed to
divide the world into two classes of people; people who were making
enormous fortunes, and people who were being enormously ruined. They
were always in a hurry, and yet seemed to have nothing tangible to do;
except a few of them (these, mostly asthmatic and thick-lipped) who were
for ever demonstrating to the rest, with gold pencil-cases which they
could hardly hold because of the big rings on their forefingers, how
money was to be made. Lastly, they all swore at their grooms, and the
grooms were not quite as respectful or complete as other men’s grooms;
seeming somehow to fall short of the groom point as their masters fell
short of the gentleman point.

Young Fledgeby was none of these. Young Fledgeby had a peachy cheek,
or a cheek compounded of the peach and the red red red wall on which
it grows, and was an awkward, sandy-haired, small-eyed youth, exceeding
slim (his enemies would have said lanky), and prone to self-examination
in the articles of whisker and moustache. While feeling for the whisker
that he anxiously expected, Fledgeby underwent remarkable fluctuations
of spirits, ranging along the whole scale from confidence to despair.
There were times when he started, as exclaiming ‘By Jupiter here it is
at last!’ There were other times when, being equally depressed, he would
be seen to shake his head, and give up hope. To see him at those periods
leaning on a chimneypiece, like as on an urn containing the ashes of his
ambition, with the cheek that would not sprout, upon the hand on which
that cheek had forced conviction, was a distressing sight.

Not so was Fledgeby seen on this occasion. Arrayed in superb raiment,
with his opera hat under his arm, he concluded his self-examination
hopefully, awaited the arrival of Miss Podsnap, and talked small-talk
with Mrs Lammle. In facetious homage to the smallness of his talk, and
the jerky nature of his manners, Fledgeby’s familiars had agreed to
confer upon him (behind his back) the honorary title of Fascination
Fledgeby.

‘Warm weather, Mrs Lammle,’ said Fascination Fledgeby. Mrs Lammle
thought it scarcely as warm as it had been yesterday. ‘Perhaps not,’
said Fascination Fledgeby, with great quickness of repartee; ‘but I
expect it will be devilish warm to-morrow.’

He threw off another little scintillation. ‘Been out to-day, Mrs
Lammle?’

Mrs Lammle answered, for a short drive.

‘Some people,’ said Fascination Fledgeby, ‘are accustomed to take long
drives; but it generally appears to me that if they make ‘em too long,
they overdo it.’

Being in such feather, he might have surpassed himself in his next
sally, had not Miss Podsnap been announced. Mrs Lammle flew to embrace
her darling little Georgy, and when the first transports were over,
presented Mr Fledgeby. Mr Lammle came on the scene last, for he was
always late, and so were the frequenters always late; all hands being
bound to be made late, by private information about the Bourse, and
Greek and Spanish and India and Mexican and par and premium and discount
and three quarters and seven eighths.

A handsome little dinner was served immediately, and Mr Lammle sat
sparkling at his end of the table, with his servant behind his chair,
and HIS ever-lingering doubts upon the subject of his wages behind
himself. Mr Lammle’s utmost powers of sparkling were in requisition
to-day, for Fascination Fledgeby and Georgiana not only struck each
other speechless, but struck each other into astonishing attitudes;
Georgiana, as she sat facing Fledgeby, making such efforts to conceal
her elbows as were totally incompatible with the use of a knife and
fork; and Fledgeby, as he sat facing Georgiana, avoiding her countenance
by every possible device, and betraying the discomposure of his mind in
feeling for his whiskers with his spoon, his wine glass, and his bread.

So, Mr and Mrs Alfred Lammle had to prompt, and this is how they
prompted.

‘Georgiana,’ said Mr Lammle, low and smiling, and sparkling all over,
like a harlequin; ‘you are not in your usual spirits. Why are you not in
your usual spirits, Georgiana?’

Georgiana faltered that she was much the same as she was in general; she
was not aware of being different.

‘Not aware of being different!’ retorted Mr Alfred Lammle. ‘You, my dear
Georgiana! Who are always so natural and unconstrained with us! Who are
such a relief from the crowd that are all alike! Who are the embodiment
of gentleness, simplicity, and reality!’

Miss Podsnap looked at the door, as if she entertained confused thoughts
of taking refuge from these compliments in flight.

‘Now, I will be judged,’ said Mr Lammle, raising his voice a little, ‘by
my friend Fledgeby.’

‘Oh DON’T!’ Miss Podsnap faintly ejaculated: when Mrs Lammle took the
prompt-book.

‘I beg your pardon, Alfred, my dear, but I cannot part with Mr Fledgeby
quite yet; you must wait for him a moment. Mr Fledgeby and I are engaged
in a personal discussion.’

Fledgeby must have conducted it on his side with immense art, for no
appearance of uttering one syllable had escaped him.

‘A personal discussion, Sophronia, my love? What discussion? Fledgeby, I
am jealous. What discussion, Fledgeby?’

‘Shall I tell him, Mr Fledgeby?’ asked Mrs Lammle.

Trying to look as if he knew anything about it, Fascination replied,
‘Yes, tell him.’

‘We were discussing then,’ said Mrs Lammle, ‘if you MUST know, Alfred,
whether Mr Fledgeby was in his usual flow of spirits.’

‘Why, that is the very point, Sophronia, that Georgiana and I were
discussing as to herself! What did Fledgeby say?’

‘Oh, a likely thing, sir, that I am going to tell you everything, and be
told nothing! What did Georgiana say?’

‘Georgiana said she was doing her usual justice to herself to-day, and I
said she was not.’

‘Precisely,’ exclaimed Mrs Lammle, ‘what I said to Mr Fledgeby.’ Still,
it wouldn’t do. They would not look at one another. No, not even
when the sparkling host proposed that the quartette should take an
appropriately sparkling glass of wine. Georgiana looked from her wine
glass at Mr Lammle and at Mrs Lammle; but mightn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t,
wouldn’t, look at Mr Fledgeby. Fascination looked from his wine glass
at Mrs Lammle and at Mr Lammle; but mightn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t,
wouldn’t, look at Georgiana.

More prompting was necessary. Cupid must be brought up to the mark. The
manager had put him down in the bill for the part, and he must play it.

‘Sophronia, my dear,’ said Mr Lammle, ‘I don’t like the colour of your
dress.’

‘I appeal,’ said Mrs Lammle, ‘to Mr Fledgeby.’

‘And I,’ said Mr Lammle, ‘to Georgiana.’

‘Georgy, my love,’ remarked Mrs Lammle aside to her dear girl, ‘I rely
upon you not to go over to the opposition. Now, Mr Fledgeby.’

Fascination wished to know if the colour were not called rose-colour?
Yes, said Mr Lammle; actually he knew everything; it was really
rose-colour. Fascination took rose-colour to mean the colour of roses.
(In this he was very warmly supported by Mr and Mrs Lammle.) Fascination
had heard the term Queen of Flowers applied to the Rose. Similarly, it
might be said that the dress was the Queen of Dresses. [‘Very happy,
Fledgeby!’ from Mr Lammle.) Notwithstanding, Fascination’s opinion
was that we all had our eyes--or at least a large majority of us--and
that--and--and his farther opinion was several ands, with nothing beyond
them.

‘Oh, Mr Fledgeby,’ said Mrs Lammle, ‘to desert me in that way! Oh, Mr
Fledgeby, to abandon my poor dear injured rose and declare for blue!’

‘Victory, victory!’ cried Mr Lammle; ‘your dress is condemned, my dear.’

‘But what,’ said Mrs Lammle, stealing her affectionate hand towards her
dear girl’s, ‘what does Georgy say?’

‘She says,’ replied Mr Lammle, interpreting for her, ‘that in her eyes
you look well in any colour, Sophronia, and that if she had expected to
be embarrassed by so pretty a compliment as she has received, she would
have worn another colour herself. Though I tell her, in reply, that it
would not have saved her, for whatever colour she had worn would have
been Fledgeby’s colour. But what does Fledgeby say?’

‘He says,’ replied Mrs Lammle, interpreting for him, and patting the
back of her dear girl’s hand, as if it were Fledgeby who was patting it,
‘that it was no compliment, but a little natural act of homage that
he couldn’t resist. And,’ expressing more feeling as if it were more
feeling on the part of Fledgeby, ‘he is right, he is right!’

Still, no not even now, would they look at one another. Seeming to gnash
his sparkling teeth, studs, eyes, and buttons, all at once, Mr Lammle
secretly bent a dark frown on the two, expressive of an intense desire
to bring them together by knocking their heads together.

‘Have you heard this opera of to-night, Fledgeby?’ he asked, stopping
very short, to prevent himself from running on into ‘confound you.’

‘Why no, not exactly,’ said Fledgeby. ‘In fact I don’t know a note of
it.’

‘Neither do you know it, Georgy?’ said Mrs Lammle. ‘N-no,’ replied
Georgiana, faintly, under the sympathetic coincidence.

‘Why, then,’ said Mrs Lammle, charmed by the discovery which flowed from
the premises, ‘you neither of you know it! How charming!’

Even the craven Fledgeby felt that the time was now come when he must
strike a blow. He struck it by saying, partly to Mrs Lammle and partly
to the circumambient air, ‘I consider myself very fortunate in being
reserved by--’

As he stopped dead, Mr Lammle, making that gingerous bush of his
whiskers to look out of, offered him the word ‘Destiny.’

‘No, I wasn’t going to say that,’ said Fledgeby. ‘I was going to say
Fate. I consider it very fortunate that Fate has written in the book
of--in the book which is its own property--that I should go to that
opera for the first time under the memorable circumstances of going with
Miss Podsnap.’

To which Georgiana replied, hooking her two little fingers in one
another, and addressing the tablecloth, ‘Thank you, but I generally go
with no one but you, Sophronia, and I like that very much.’

Content perforce with this success for the time, Mr Lammle let Miss
Podsnap out of the room, as if he were opening her cage door, and Mrs
Lammle followed. Coffee being presently served up stairs, he kept a
watch on Fledgeby until Miss Podsnap’s cup was empty, and then directed
him with his finger (as if that young gentleman were a slow Retriever)
to go and fetch it. This feat he performed, not only without failure,
but even with the original embellishment of informing Miss Podsnap that
green tea was considered bad for the nerves. Though there Miss Podsnap
unintentionally threw him out by faltering, ‘Oh, is it indeed? How does
it act?’ Which he was not prepared to elucidate.

The carriage announced, Mrs Lammle said; ‘Don’t mind me, Mr Fledgeby, my
skirts and cloak occupy both my hands, take Miss Podsnap.’ And he
took her, and Mrs Lammle went next, and Mr Lammle went last, savagely
following his little flock, like a drover.

But he was all sparkle and glitter in the box at the Opera, and there he
and his dear wife made a conversation between Fledgeby and Georgiana in
the following ingenious and skilful manner. They sat in this order:
Mrs Lammle, Fascination Fledgeby, Georgiana, Mr Lammle. Mrs Lammle made
leading remarks to Fledgeby, only requiring monosyllabic replies. Mr
Lammle did the like with Georgiana. At times Mrs Lammle would lean
forward to address Mr Lammle to this purpose.

‘Alfred, my dear, Mr Fledgeby very justly says, apropos of the last
scene, that true constancy would not require any such stimulant as the
stage deems necessary.’ To which Mr Lammle would reply, ‘Ay, Sophronia,
my love, but as Georgiana has observed to me, the lady had no sufficient
reason to know the state of the gentleman’s affections.’ To which Mrs
Lammle would rejoin, ‘Very true, Alfred; but Mr Fledgeby points
out,’ this. To which Alfred would demur: ‘Undoubtedly, Sophronia, but
Georgiana acutely remarks,’ that. Through this device the two young
people conversed at great length and committed themselves to a variety
of delicate sentiments, without having once opened their lips, save to
say yes or no, and even that not to one another.

Fledgeby took his leave of Miss Podsnap at the carriage door, and the
Lammles dropped her at her own home, and on the way Mrs Lammle archly
rallied her, in her fond and protecting manner, by saying at intervals,
‘Oh little Georgiana, little Georgiana!’ Which was not much; but the
tone added, ‘You have enslaved your Fledgeby.’

And thus the Lammles got home at last, and the lady sat down moody and
weary, looking at her dark lord engaged in a deed of violence with a
bottle of soda-water as though he were wringing the neck of some unlucky
creature and pouring its blood down his throat. As he wiped his dripping
whiskers in an ogreish way, he met her eyes, and pausing, said, with no
very gentle voice:

‘Well?’

‘Was such an absolute Booby necessary to the purpose?’

‘I know what I am doing. He is no such dolt as you suppose.’

‘A genius, perhaps?’

‘You sneer, perhaps; and you take a lofty air upon yourself perhaps!
But I tell you this:--when that young fellow’s interest is concerned,
he holds as tight as a horse-leech. When money is in question with that
young fellow, he is a match for the Devil.’

‘Is he a match for you?’

‘He is. Almost as good a one as you thought me for you. He has no
quality of youth in him, but such as you have seen to-day. Touch him
upon money, and you touch no booby then. He really is a dolt, I suppose,
in other things; but it answers his one purpose very well.’

‘Has she money in her own right in any case?’

‘Ay! she has money in her own right in any case. You have done so well
to-day, Sophronia, that I answer the question, though you know I object
to any such questions. You have done so well to-day, Sophronia, that you
must be tired. Get to bed.’



Chapter 5

MERCURY PROMPTING


Fledgeby deserved Mr Alfred Lammle’s eulogium. He was the meanest
cur existing, with a single pair of legs. And instinct (a word we all
clearly understand) going largely on four legs, and reason always on
two, meanness on four legs never attains the perfection of meanness on
two.

The father of this young gentleman had been a money-lender, who
had transacted professional business with the mother of this
young gentleman, when he, the latter, was waiting in the vast dark
ante-chambers of the present world to be born. The lady, a widow, being
unable to pay the money-lender, married him; and in due course, Fledgeby
was summoned out of the vast dark ante-chambers to come and be presented
to the Registrar-General. Rather a curious speculation how Fledgeby
would otherwise have disposed of his leisure until Doomsday.

Fledgeby’s mother offended her family by marrying Fledgeby’s father. It
is one of the easiest achievements in life to offend your family when
your family want to get rid of you. Fledgeby’s mother’s family had
been very much offended with her for being poor, and broke with her
for becoming comparatively rich. Fledgeby’s mother’s family was the
Snigsworth family. She had even the high honour to be cousin to Lord
Snigsworth--so many times removed that the noble Earl would have had no
compunction in removing her one time more and dropping her clean outside
the cousinly pale; but cousin for all that.

Among her pre-matrimonial transactions with Fledgeby’s father,
Fledgeby’s mother had raised money of him at a great disadvantage on a
certain reversionary interest. The reversion falling in soon after they
were married, Fledgeby’s father laid hold of the cash for his separate
use and benefit. This led to subjective differences of opinion, not to
say objective interchanges of boot-jacks, backgammon boards, and other
such domestic missiles, between Fledgeby’s father and Fledgeby’s mother,
and those led to Fledgeby’s mother spending as much money as she
could, and to Fledgeby’s father doing all he couldn’t to restrain her.
Fledgeby’s childhood had been, in consequence, a stormy one; but the
winds and the waves had gone down in the grave, and Fledgeby flourished
alone.

He lived in chambers in the Albany, did Fledgeby, and maintained a
spruce appearance. But his youthful fire was all composed of sparks from
the grindstone; and as the sparks flew off, went out, and never warmed
anything, be sure that Fledgeby had his tools at the grindstone, and
turned it with a wary eye.

Mr Alfred Lammle came round to the Albany to breakfast with Fledgeby.
Present on the table, one scanty pot of tea, one scanty loaf, two scanty
pats of butter, two scanty rashers of bacon, two pitiful eggs, and an
abundance of handsome china bought a secondhand bargain.

‘What did you think of Georgiana?’ asked Mr Lammle.

‘Why, I’ll tell you,’ said Fledgeby, very deliberately.

‘Do, my boy.’

‘You misunderstand me,’ said Fledgeby. ‘I don’t mean I’ll tell you that.
I mean I’ll tell you something else.’

‘Tell me anything, old fellow!’

‘Ah, but there you misunderstand me again,’ said Fledgeby. ‘I mean I’ll
tell you nothing.’

Mr Lammle sparkled at him, but frowned at him too.

‘Look here,’ said Fledgeby. ‘You’re deep and you’re ready. Whether I am
deep or not, never mind. I am not ready. But I can do one thing, Lammle,
I can hold my tongue. And I intend always doing it.’

‘You are a long-headed fellow, Fledgeby.’

‘May be, or may not be. If I am a short-tongued fellow, it may amount to
the same thing. Now, Lammle, I am never going to answer questions.’

‘My dear fellow, it was the simplest question in the world.’

‘Never mind. It seemed so, but things are not always what they seem. I
saw a man examined as a witness in Westminster Hall. Questions put to
him seemed the simplest in the world, but turned out to be anything
rather than that, after he had answered ‘em. Very well. Then he should
have held his tongue. If he had held his tongue he would have kept out
of scrapes that he got into.’

‘If I had held my tongue, you would never have seen the subject of my
question,’ remarked Lammle, darkening.

‘Now, Lammle,’ said Fascination Fledgeby, calmly feeling for his
whisker, ‘it won’t do. I won’t be led on into a discussion. I can’t
manage a discussion. But I can manage to hold my tongue.’

‘Can?’ Mr Lammle fell back upon propitiation. ‘I should think you could!
Why, when these fellows of our acquaintance drink and you drink with
them, the more talkative they get, the more silent you get. The more
they let out, the more you keep in.’

‘I don’t object, Lammle,’ returned Fledgeby, with an internal chuckle,
‘to being understood, though I object to being questioned. That
certainly IS the way I do it.’

‘And when all the rest of us are discussing our ventures, none of us
ever know what a single venture of yours is!’

‘And none of you ever will from me, Lammle,’ replied Fledgeby, with
another internal chuckle; ‘that certainly IS the way I do it.’

‘Why of course it is, I know!’ rejoined Lammle, with a flourish of
frankness, and a laugh, and stretching out his hands as if to show
the universe a remarkable man in Fledgeby. ‘If I hadn’t known it of my
Fledgeby, should I have proposed our little compact of advantage, to my
Fledgeby?’

‘Ah!’ remarked Fascination, shaking his head slyly. ‘But I am not to
be got at in that way. I am not vain. That sort of vanity don’t pay,
Lammle. No, no, no. Compliments only make me hold my tongue the more.’

Alfred Lammle pushed his plate away (no great sacrifice under the
circumstances of there being so little in it), thrust his hands in his
pockets, leaned back in his chair, and contemplated Fledgeby in silence.
Then he slowly released his left hand from its pocket, and made that
bush of his whiskers, still contemplating him in silence. Then he slowly
broke silence, and slowly said: ‘What--the--Dev-il is this fellow about
this morning?’

‘Now, look here, Lammle,’ said Fascination Fledgeby, with the meanest
of twinkles in his meanest of eyes: which were too near together, by
the way: ‘look here, Lammle; I am very well aware that I didn’t show to
advantage last night, and that you and your wife--who, I consider, is
a very clever woman and an agreeable woman--did. I am not calculated to
show to advantage under that sort of circumstances. I know very well you
two did show to advantage, and managed capitally. But don’t you on that
account come talking to me as if I was your doll and puppet, because I
am not.

‘And all this,’ cried Alfred, after studying with a look the meanness
that was fain to have the meanest help, and yet was so mean as to turn
upon it: ‘all this because of one simple natural question!’

‘You should have waited till I thought proper to say something about it
of myself. I don’t like your coming over me with your Georgianas, as if
you was her proprietor and mine too.’

‘Well, when you are in the gracious mind to say anything about it of
yourself,’ retorted Lammle, ‘pray do.’

‘I have done it. I have said you managed capitally. You and your wife
both. If you’ll go on managing capitally, I’ll go on doing my part. Only
don’t crow.’

‘I crow!’ exclaimed Lammle, shrugging his shoulders.

‘Or,’ pursued the other--‘or take it in your head that people are your
puppets because they don’t come out to advantage at the particular
moments when you do, with the assistance of a very clever and agreeable
wife. All the rest keep on doing, and let Mrs Lammle keep on doing. Now,
I have held my tongue when I thought proper, and I have spoken when I
thought proper, and there’s an end of that. And now the question is,’
proceeded Fledgeby, with the greatest reluctance, ‘will you have another
egg?’

‘No, I won’t,’ said Lammle, shortly.

‘Perhaps you’re right and will find yourself better without it,’ replied
Fascination, in greatly improved spirits. ‘To ask you if you’ll have
another rasher would be unmeaning flattery, for it would make you
thirsty all day. Will you have some more bread and butter?’

‘No, I won’t,’ repeated Lammle.

‘Then I will,’ said Fascination. And it was not a mere retort for the
sound’s sake, but was a cheerful cogent consequence of the refusal; for
if Lammle had applied himself again to the loaf, it would have been so
heavily visited, in Fledgeby’s opinion, as to demand abstinence from
bread, on his part, for the remainder of that meal at least, if not for
the whole of the next.

Whether this young gentleman (for he was but three-and-twenty) combined
with the miserly vice of an old man, any of the open-handed vices of
a young one, was a moot point; so very honourably did he keep his own
counsel. He was sensible of the value of appearances as an investment,
and liked to dress well; but he drove a bargain for every moveable about
him, from the coat on his back to the china on his breakfast-table;
and every bargain by representing somebody’s ruin or somebody’s loss,
acquired a peculiar charm for him. It was a part of his avarice to take,
within narrow bounds, long odds at races; if he won, he drove harder
bargains; if he lost, he half starved himself until next time. Why money
should be so precious to an Ass too dull and mean to exchange it for any
other satisfaction, is strange; but there is no animal so sure to get
laden with it, as the Ass who sees nothing written on the face of the
earth and sky but the three letters L. S. D.--not Luxury, Sensuality,
Dissoluteness, which they often stand for, but the three dry letters.
Your concentrated Fox is seldom comparable to your concentrated Ass in
money-breeding.

Fascination Fledgeby feigned to be a young gentleman living on his
means, but was known secretly to be a kind of outlaw in the bill-broking
line, and to put money out at high interest in various ways. His circle
of familiar acquaintance, from Mr Lammle round, all had a touch of the
outlaw, as to their rovings in the merry greenwood of Jobbery Forest,
lying on the outskirts of the Share-Market and the Stock Exchange.

‘I suppose you, Lammle,’ said Fledgeby, eating his bread and butter,
‘always did go in for female society?’

‘Always,’ replied Lammle, glooming considerably under his late
treatment.

‘Came natural to you, eh?’ said Fledgeby.

‘The sex were pleased to like me, sir,’ said Lammle sulkily, but with
the air of a man who had not been able to help himself.

‘Made a pretty good thing of marrying, didn’t you?’ asked Fledgeby.

The other smiled (an ugly smile), and tapped one tap upon his nose.

‘My late governor made a mess of it,’ said Fledgeby. ‘But Geor--is the
right name Georgina or Georgiana?’

‘Georgiana.’

‘I was thinking yesterday, I didn’t know there was such a name. I
thought it must end in ina.’

‘Why?’

‘Why, you play--if you can--the Concertina, you know,’ replied
Fledgeby, meditating very slowly. ‘And you have--when you catch it--the
Scarlatina. And you can come down from a balloon in a parach--no you
can’t though. Well, say Georgeute--I mean Georgiana.’

‘You were going to remark of Georgiana--?’ Lammle moodily hinted, after
waiting in vain.

‘I was going to remark of Georgiana, sir,’ said Fledgeby, not at all
pleased to be reminded of his having forgotten it, ‘that she don’t seem
to be violent. Don’t seem to be of the pitching-in order.’

‘She has the gentleness of the dove, Mr Fledgeby.’

‘Of course you’ll say so,’ replied Fledgeby, sharpening, the moment his
interest was touched by another. ‘But you know, the real look-out is
this:--what I say, not what you say. I say having my late governor
and my late mother in my eye--that Georgiana don’t seem to be of the
pitching-in order.’

The respected Mr Lammle was a bully, by nature and by usual practice.
Perceiving, as Fledgeby’s affronts cumulated, that conciliation by no
means answered the purpose here, he now directed a scowling look
into Fledgeby’s small eyes for the effect of the opposite treatment.
Satisfied by what he saw there, he burst into a violent passion and
struck his hand upon the table, making the china ring and dance.

‘You are a very offensive fellow, sir,’ cried Mr Lammle, rising. ‘You
are a highly offensive scoundrel. What do you mean by this behaviour?’

‘I say!’ remonstrated Fledgeby. ‘Don’t break out.’

‘You are a very offensive fellow sir,’ repeated Mr Lammle. ‘You are a
highly offensive scoundrel!’

‘I SAY, you know!’ urged Fledgeby, quailing.

‘Why, you coarse and vulgar vagabond!’ said Mr Lammle, looking fiercely
about him, ‘if your servant was here to give me sixpence of your
money to get my boots cleaned afterwards--for you are not worth the
expenditure--I’d kick you.’

‘No you wouldn’t,’ pleaded Fledgeby. ‘I am sure you’d think better of
it.’

‘I tell you what, Mr Fledgeby,’ said Lammle advancing on him. ‘Since
you presume to contradict me, I’ll assert myself a little. Give me your
nose!’

Fledgeby covered it with his hand instead, and said, retreating, ‘I beg
you won’t!’

‘Give me your nose, sir,’ repeated Lammle.

Still covering that feature and backing, Mr Fledgeby reiterated
(apparently with a severe cold in his head), ‘I beg, I beg, you won’t.’

‘And this fellow,’ exclaimed Lammle, stopping and making the most of his
chest--‘This fellow presumes on my having selected him out of all the
young fellows I know, for an advantageous opportunity! This fellow
presumes on my having in my desk round the corner, his dirty note of
hand for a wretched sum payable on the occurrence of a certain event,
which event can only be of my and my wife’s bringing about! This fellow,
Fledgeby, presumes to be impertinent to me, Lammle. Give me your nose
sir!’

‘No! Stop! I beg your pardon,’ said Fledgeby, with humility.

‘What do you say, sir?’ demanded Mr Lammle, seeming too furious to
understand.

‘I beg your pardon,’ repeated Fledgeby.

‘Repeat your words louder, sir. The just indignation of a gentleman has
sent the blood boiling to my head. I don’t hear you.’

‘I say,’ repeated Fledgeby, with laborious explanatory politeness, ‘I
beg your pardon.’

Mr Lammle paused. ‘As a man of honour,’ said he, throwing himself into a
chair, ‘I am disarmed.’

Mr Fledgeby also took a chair, though less demonstratively, and by
slow approaches removed his hand from his nose. Some natural diffidence
assailed him as to blowing it, so shortly after its having assumed a
personal and delicate, not to say public, character; but he overcame
his scruples by degrees, and modestly took that liberty under an implied
protest.

‘Lammle,’ he said sneakingly, when that was done, ‘I hope we are friends
again?’

‘Mr Fledgeby,’ returned Lammle, ‘say no more.’

‘I must have gone too far in making myself disagreeable,’ said Fledgeby,
‘but I never intended it.’

‘Say no more, say no more!’ Mr Lammle repeated in a magnificent tone.
‘Give me your’--Fledgeby started--‘hand.’

They shook hands, and on Mr Lammle’s part, in particular, there ensued
great geniality. For, he was quite as much of a dastard as the other,
and had been in equal danger of falling into the second place for good,
when he took heart just in time, to act upon the information conveyed to
him by Fledgeby’s eye.

The breakfast ended in a perfect understanding. Incessant machinations
were to be kept at work by Mr and Mrs Lammle; love was to be made for
Fledgeby, and conquest was to be insured to him; he on his part
very humbly admitting his defects as to the softer social arts, and
entreating to be backed to the utmost by his two able coadjutors.

Little recked Mr Podsnap of the traps and toils besetting his Young
Person. He regarded her as safe within the Temple of Podsnappery, hiding
the fulness of time when she, Georgiana, should take him, Fitz-Podsnap,
who with all his worldly goods should her endow. It would call a blush
into the cheek of his standard Young Person to have anything to do with
such matters save to take as directed, and with worldly goods as per
settlement to be endowed. Who giveth this woman to be married to this
man? I, Podsnap. Perish the daring thought that any smaller creation
should come between!

It was a public holiday, and Fledgeby did not recover his spirits or his
usual temperature of nose until the afternoon. Walking into the City in
the holiday afternoon, he walked against a living stream setting out of
it; and thus, when he turned into the precincts of St Mary Axe, he found
a prevalent repose and quiet there. A yellow overhanging plaster-fronted
house at which he stopped was quiet too. The blinds were all drawn down,
and the inscription Pubsey and Co. seemed to doze in the counting-house
window on the ground-floor giving on the sleepy street.

Fledgeby knocked and rang, and Fledgeby rang and knocked, but no
one came. Fledgeby crossed the narrow street and looked up at the
house-windows, but nobody looked down at Fledgeby. He got out of temper,
crossed the narrow street again, and pulled the housebell as if it were
the house’s nose, and he were taking a hint from his late experience.
His ear at the keyhole seemed then, at last, to give him assurance that
something stirred within. His eye at the keyhole seemed to confirm his
ear, for he angrily pulled the house’s nose again, and pulled and pulled
and continued to pull, until a human nose appeared in the dark doorway.

‘Now you sir!’ cried Fledgeby. ‘These are nice games!’

He addressed an old Jewish man in an ancient coat, long of skirt, and
wide of pocket. A venerable man, bald and shining at the top of his
head, and with long grey hair flowing down at its sides and mingling
with his beard. A man who with a graceful Eastern action of homage bent
his head, and stretched out his hands with the palms downward, as if to
deprecate the wrath of a superior.

‘What have you been up to?’ said Fledgeby, storming at him.

‘Generous Christian master,’ urged the Jewish man, ‘it being holiday, I
looked for no one.’

‘Holiday he blowed!’ said Fledgeby, entering. ‘What have YOU got to do
with holidays? Shut the door.’

With his former action the old man obeyed. In the entry hung his rusty
large-brimmed low-crowned hat, as long out of date as his coat; in the
corner near it stood his staff--no walking-stick but a veritable staff.
Fledgeby turned into the counting-house, perched himself on a business
stool, and cocked his hat. There were light boxes on shelves in the
counting-house, and strings of mock beads hanging up. There were samples
of cheap clocks, and samples of cheap vases of flowers. Foreign toys,
all.

Perched on the stool with his hat cocked on his head and one of his legs
dangling, the youth of Fledgeby hardly contrasted to advantage with the
age of the Jewish man as he stood with his bare head bowed, and his eyes
(which he only raised in speaking) on the ground. His clothing was worn
down to the rusty hue of the hat in the entry, but though he looked
shabby he did not look mean. Now, Fledgeby, though not shabby, did look
mean.

‘You have not told me what you were up to, you sir,’ said Fledgeby,
scratching his head with the brim of his hat.

‘Sir, I was breathing the air.’

‘In the cellar, that you didn’t hear?’

‘On the house-top.’

‘Upon my soul! That’s a way of doing business.’

‘Sir,’ the old man represented with a grave and patient air, ‘there must
be two parties to the transaction of business, and the holiday has left
me alone.’

‘Ah! Can’t be buyer and seller too. That’s what the Jews say; ain’t it?’

‘At least we say truly, if we say so,’ answered the old man with a
smile.

‘Your people need speak the truth sometimes, for they lie enough,’
remarked Fascination Fledgeby.

‘Sir, there is,’ returned the old man with quiet emphasis, ‘too much
untruth among all denominations of men.’

Rather dashed, Fascination Fledgeby took another scratch at his
intellectual head with his hat, to gain time for rallying.

‘For instance,’ he resumed, as though it were he who had spoken last,
‘who but you and I ever heard of a poor Jew?’

‘The Jews,’ said the old man, raising his eyes from the ground with his
former smile. ‘They hear of poor Jews often, and are very good to them.’

‘Bother that!’ returned Fledgeby. ‘You know what I mean. You’d persuade
me if you could, that you are a poor Jew. I wish you’d confess how much
you really did make out of my late governor. I should have a better
opinion of you.’

The old man only bent his head, and stretched out his hands as before.

‘Don’t go on posturing like a Deaf and Dumb School,’ said the ingenious
Fledgeby, ‘but express yourself like a Christian--or as nearly as you
can.’

‘I had had sickness and misfortunes, and was so poor,’ said the old
man, ‘as hopelessly to owe the father, principal and interest. The son
inheriting, was so merciful as to forgive me both, and place me here.’

He made a little gesture as though he kissed the hem of an imaginary
garment worn by the noble youth before him. It was humbly done, but
picturesquely, and was not abasing to the doer.

‘You won’t say more, I see,’ said Fledgeby, looking at him as if he
would like to try the effect of extracting a double-tooth or two, ‘and
so it’s of no use my putting it to you. But confess this, Riah; who
believes you to be poor now?’

‘No one,’ said the old man.

‘There you’re right,’ assented Fledgeby.

‘No one,’ repeated the old man with a grave slow wave of his head. ‘All
scout it as a fable. Were I to say “This little fancy business is not
mine”;’ with a lithe sweep of his easily-turning hand around him,
to comprehend the various objects on the shelves; ‘“it is the little
business of a Christian young gentleman who places me, his servant, in
trust and charge here, and to whom I am accountable for every single
bead,” they would laugh. When, in the larger money-business, I tell the
borrowers--’

‘I say, old chap!’ interposed Fledgeby, ‘I hope you mind what you DO
tell ‘em?’

‘Sir, I tell them no more than I am about to repeat. When I tell them,
“I cannot promise this, I cannot answer for the other, I must see my
principal, I have not the money, I am a poor man and it does not rest
with me,” they are so unbelieving and so impatient, that they sometimes
curse me in Jehovah’s name.’

‘That’s deuced good, that is!’ said Fascination Fledgeby.

‘And at other times they say, “Can it never be done without these
tricks, Mr Riah? Come, come, Mr Riah, we know the arts of your
people”--my people!--“If the money is to be lent, fetch it, fetch it; if
it is not to be lent, keep it and say so.” They never believe me.’

‘THAT’S all right,’ said Fascination Fledgeby.

‘They say, “We know, Mr Riah, we know. We have but to look at you, and
we know.”’

‘Oh, a good ‘un are you for the post,’ thought Fledgeby, ‘and a good ‘un
was I to mark you out for it! I may be slow, but I am precious sure.’

Not a syllable of this reflection shaped itself in any scrap of Mr
Fledgeby’s breath, lest it should tend to put his servant’s price up.
But looking at the old man as he stood quiet with his head bowed and his
eyes cast down, he felt that to relinquish an inch of his baldness,
an inch of his grey hair, an inch of his coat-skirt, an inch of his
hat-brim, an inch of his walking-staff, would be to relinquish hundreds
of pounds.

‘Look here, Riah,’ said Fledgeby, mollified by these self-approving
considerations. ‘I want to go a little more into buying-up queer bills.
Look out in that direction.’

‘Sir, it shall be done.’

‘Casting my eye over the accounts, I find that branch of business pays
pretty fairly, and I am game for extending it. I like to know people’s
affairs likewise. So look out.’

‘Sir, I will, promptly.’

‘Put it about in the right quarters, that you’ll buy queer bills by the
lump--by the pound weight if that’s all--supposing you see your way to a
fair chance on looking over the parcel. And there’s one thing more. Come
to me with the books for periodical inspection as usual, at eight on
Monday morning.’

Riah drew some folding tablets from his breast and noted it down.

‘That’s all I wanted to say at the present time,’ continued Fledgeby in
a grudging vein, as he got off the stool, ‘except that I wish you’d take
the air where you can hear the bell, or the knocker, either one of the
two or both. By-the-by how DO you take the air at the top of the house?
Do you stick your head out of a chimney-pot?’

‘Sir, there are leads there, and I have made a little garden there.’

‘To bury your money in, you old dodger?’

‘A thumbnail’s space of garden would hold the treasure I bury, master,’
said Riah. ‘Twelve shillings a week, even when they are an old man’s
wages, bury themselves.’

‘I should like to know what you really are worth,’ returned Fledgeby,
with whom his growing rich on that stipend and gratitude was a very
convenient fiction. ‘But come! Let’s have a look at your garden on the
tiles, before I go!’

The old man took a step back, and hesitated.

‘Truly, sir, I have company there.’

‘Have you, by George!’ said Fledgeby; ‘I suppose you happen to know
whose premises these are?’

‘Sir, they are yours, and I am your servant in them.’

‘Oh! I thought you might have overlooked that,’ retorted Fledgeby, with
his eyes on Riah’s beard as he felt for his own; ‘having company on my
premises, you know!’

‘Come up and see the guests, sir. I hope for your admission that they
can do no harm.’

Passing him with a courteous reverence, specially unlike any action that
Mr Fledgeby could for his life have imparted to his own head and hands,
the old man began to ascend the stairs. As he toiled on before, with his
palm upon the stair-rail, and his long black skirt, a very gaberdine,
overhanging each successive step, he might have been the leader in some
pilgrimage of devotional ascent to a prophet’s tomb. Not troubled by any
such weak imagining, Fascination Fledgeby merely speculated on the time
of life at which his beard had begun, and thought once more what a good
‘un he was for the part.

Some final wooden steps conducted them, stooping under a low penthouse
roof, to the house-top. Riah stood still, and, turning to his master,
pointed out his guests.

Lizzie Hexam and Jenny Wren. For whom, perhaps with some old instinct of
his race, the gentle Jew had spread a carpet. Seated on it, against
no more romantic object than a blackened chimney-stack over which some
bumble creeper had been trained, they both pored over one book; both
with attentive faces; Jenny with the sharper; Lizzie with the more
perplexed. Another little book or two were lying near, and a common
basket of common fruit, and another basket full of strings of beads and
tinsel scraps. A few boxes of humble flowers and evergreens completed
the garden; and the encompassing wilderness of dowager old chimneys
twirled their cowls and fluttered their smoke, rather as if they were
bridling, and fanning themselves, and looking on in a state of airy
surprise.

Taking her eyes off the book, to test her memory of something in it,
Lizzie was the first to see herself observed. As she rose, Miss Wren
likewise became conscious, and said, irreverently addressing the great
chief of the premises: ‘Whoever you are, I can’t get up, because my
back’s bad and my legs are queer.’

‘This is my master,’ said Riah, stepping forward.

[‘Don’t look like anybody’s master,’ observed Miss Wren to herself, with
a hitch of her chin and eyes.)

‘This, sir,’ pursued the old man, ‘is a little dressmaker for little
people. Explain to the master, Jenny.’

‘Dolls; that’s all,’ said Jenny, shortly. ‘Very difficult to fit too,
because their figures are so uncertain. You never know where to expect
their waists.’

‘Her friend,’ resumed the old man, motioning towards Lizzie; ‘and as
industrious as virtuous. But that they both are. They are busy early and
late, sir, early and late; and in bye-times, as on this holiday, they go
to book-learning.’

‘Not much good to be got out of that,’ remarked Fledgeby.

‘Depends upon the person!’ quoth Miss Wren, snapping him up.

‘I made acquaintance with my guests, sir,’ pursued the Jew, with an
evident purpose of drawing out the dressmaker, ‘through their coming
here to buy of our damage and waste for Miss Jenny’s millinery. Our
waste goes into the best of company, sir, on her rosy-cheeked little
customers. They wear it in their hair, and on their ball-dresses, and
even (so she tells me) are presented at Court with it.’

‘Ah!’ said Fledgeby, on whose intelligence this doll-fancy made rather
strong demands; ‘she’s been buying that basketful to-day, I suppose?’

‘I suppose she has,’ Miss Jenny interposed; ‘and paying for it too, most
likely!’

‘Let’s have a look at it,’ said the suspicious chief. Riah handed it to
him. ‘How much for this now?’

‘Two precious silver shillings,’ said Miss Wren.

Riah confirmed her with two nods, as Fledgeby looked to him. A nod for
each shilling.

‘Well,’ said Fledgeby, poking into the contents of the basket with his
forefinger, ‘the price is not so bad. You have got good measure, Miss
What-is-it.’

‘Try Jenny,’ suggested that young lady with great calmness.

‘You have got good measure, Miss Jenny; but the price is not so
bad.--And you,’ said Fledgeby, turning to the other visitor, ‘do you buy
anything here, miss?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Nor sell anything neither, miss?’

‘No, sir.’

Looking askew at the questioner, Jenny stole her hand up to her
friend’s, and drew her friend down, so that she bent beside her on her
knee.

‘We are thankful to come here for rest, sir,’ said Jenny. ‘You see, you
don’t know what the rest of this place is to us; does he, Lizzie? It’s
the quiet, and the air.’

‘The quiet!’ repeated Fledgeby, with a contemptuous turn of his head
towards the City’s roar. ‘And the air!’ with a ‘Poof!’ at the smoke.

‘Ah!’ said Jenny. ‘But it’s so high. And you see the clouds rushing
on above the narrow streets, not minding them, and you see the golden
arrows pointing at the mountains in the sky from which the wind comes,
and you feel as if you were dead.’

The little creature looked above her, holding up her slight transparent
hand.

‘How do you feel when you are dead?’ asked Fledgeby, much perplexed.

‘Oh, so tranquil!’ cried the little creature, smiling. ‘Oh, so peaceful
and so thankful! And you hear the people who are alive, crying, and
working, and calling to one another down in the close dark streets, and
you seem to pity them so! And such a chain has fallen from you, and such
a strange good sorrowful happiness comes upon you!’

Her eyes fell on the old man, who, with his hands folded, quietly looked
on.

‘Why it was only just now,’ said the little creature, pointing at him,
‘that I fancied I saw him come out of his grave! He toiled out at
that low door so bent and worn, and then he took his breath and stood
upright, and looked all round him at the sky, and the wind blew upon
him, and his life down in the dark was over!--Till he was called back
to life,’ she added, looking round at Fledgeby with that lower look of
sharpness. ‘Why did you call him back?’

‘He was long enough coming, anyhow,’ grumbled Fledgeby.

‘But you are not dead, you know,’ said Jenny Wren. ‘Get down to life!’

Mr Fledgeby seemed to think it rather a good suggestion, and with a nod
turned round. As Riah followed to attend him down the stairs, the little
creature called out to the Jew in a silvery tone, ‘Don’t be long gone.
Come back, and be dead!’ And still as they went down they heard the
little sweet voice, more and more faintly, half calling and half
singing, ‘Come back and be dead, Come back and be dead!’

When they got down into the entry, Fledgeby, pausing under the shadow of
the broad old hat, and mechanically poising the staff, said to the old
man:

‘That’s a handsome girl, that one in her senses.’

‘And as good as handsome,’ answered Riah.

‘At all events,’ observed Fledgeby, with a dry whistle, ‘I hope she
ain’t bad enough to put any chap up to the fastenings, and get the
premises broken open. You look out. Keep your weather eye awake and
don’t make any more acquaintances, however handsome. Of course you
always keep my name to yourself?’

‘Sir, assuredly I do.’

‘If they ask it, say it’s Pubsey, or say it’s Co, or say it’s anything
you like, but what it is.’

His grateful servant--in whose race gratitude is deep, strong, and
enduring--bowed his head, and actually did now put the hem of his coat
to his lips: though so lightly that the wearer knew nothing of it.

Thus, Fascination Fledgeby went his way, exulting in the artful
cleverness with which he had turned his thumb down on a Jew, and the old
man went his different way up-stairs. As he mounted, the call or song
began to sound in his ears again, and, looking above, he saw the face
of the little creature looking down out of a Glory of her long bright
radiant hair, and musically repeating to him, like a vision:

‘Come up and be dead! Come up and be dead!’



Chapter 6

A RIDDLE WITHOUT AN ANSWER


Again Mr Mortimer Lightwood and Mr Eugene Wrayburn sat together in the
Temple. This evening, however, they were not together in the place of
business of the eminent solicitor, but in another dismal set of
chambers facing it on the same second-floor; on whose dungeon-like black
outer-door appeared the legend:

		PRIVATE

		MR EUGENE WRAYBURN

		MR MORTIMER LIGHTWOOD

		(Mr Lightwood’s Offices opposite.)

Appearances indicated that this establishment was a very recent
institution. The white letters of the inscription were extremely white
and extremely strong to the sense of smell, the complexion of the
tables and chairs was (like Lady Tippins’s) a little too blooming to
be believed in, and the carpets and floorcloth seemed to rush at the
beholder’s face in the unusual prominency of their patterns. But the
Temple, accustomed to tone down both the still life and the human life
that has much to do with it, would soon get the better of all that.

‘Well!’ said Eugene, on one side of the fire, ‘I feel tolerably
comfortable. I hope the upholsterer may do the same.’

‘Why shouldn’t he?’ asked Lightwood, from the other side of the fire.

‘To be sure,’ pursued Eugene, reflecting, ‘he is not in the secret of
our pecuniary affairs, so perhaps he may be in an easy frame of mind.’

‘We shall pay him,’ said Mortimer.

‘Shall we, really?’ returned Eugene, indolently surprised. ‘You don’t
say so!’

‘I mean to pay him, Eugene, for my part,’ said Mortimer, in a slightly
injured tone.

‘Ah! I mean to pay him too,’ retorted Eugene. ‘But then I mean so much
that I--that I don’t mean.’

‘Don’t mean?’

‘So much that I only mean and shall always only mean and nothing more,
my dear Mortimer. It’s the same thing.’

His friend, lying back in his easy chair, watched him lying back in his
easy chair, as he stretched out his legs on the hearth-rug, and said,
with the amused look that Eugene Wrayburn could always awaken in him
without seeming to try or care:

‘Anyhow, your vagaries have increased the bill.’

‘Calls the domestic virtues vagaries!’ exclaimed Eugene, raising his
eyes to the ceiling.

‘This very complete little kitchen of ours,’ said Mortimer, ‘in which
nothing will ever be cooked--’

‘My dear, dear Mortimer,’ returned his friend, lazily lifting his head
a little to look at him, ‘how often have I pointed out to you that its
moral influence is the important thing?’

‘Its moral influence on this fellow!’ exclaimed Lightwood, laughing.

‘Do me the favour,’ said Eugene, getting out of his chair with much
gravity, ‘to come and inspect that feature of our establishment which
you rashly disparage.’ With that, taking up a candle, he conducted
his chum into the fourth room of the set of chambers--a little narrow
room--which was very completely and neatly fitted as a kitchen. ‘See!’
said Eugene, ‘miniature flour-barrel, rolling-pin, spice-box, shelf of
brown jars, chopping-board, coffee-mill, dresser elegantly furnished
with crockery, saucepans and pans, roasting jack, a charming kettle, an
armoury of dish-covers. The moral influence of these objects, in forming
the domestic virtues, may have an immense influence upon me; not upon
you, for you are a hopeless case, but upon me. In fact, I have an idea
that I feel the domestic virtues already forming. Do me the favour to
step into my bedroom. Secretaire, you see, and abstruse set of solid
mahogany pigeon-holes, one for every letter of the alphabet. To what use
do I devote them? I receive a bill--say from Jones. I docket it neatly
at the secretaire, JONES, and I put it into pigeonhole J. It’s the next
thing to a receipt and is quite as satisfactory to ME. And I very much
wish, Mortimer,’ sitting on his bed, with the air of a philosopher
lecturing a disciple, ‘that my example might induce YOU to cultivate
habits of punctuality and method; and, by means of the moral influences
with which I have surrounded you, to encourage the formation of the
domestic virtues.’

Mortimer laughed again, with his usual commentaries of ‘How CAN you be
so ridiculous, Eugene!’ and ‘What an absurd fellow you are!’ but when
his laugh was out, there was something serious, if not anxious, in his
face. Despite that pernicious assumption of lassitude and indifference,
which had become his second nature, he was strongly attached to his
friend. He had founded himself upon Eugene when they were yet boys at
school; and at this hour imitated him no less, admired him no less,
loved him no less, than in those departed days.

‘Eugene,’ said he, ‘if I could find you in earnest for a minute, I would
try to say an earnest word to you.’

‘An earnest word?’ repeated Eugene. ‘The moral influences are beginning
to work. Say on.’

‘Well, I will,’ returned the other, ‘though you are not earnest yet.’

‘In this desire for earnestness,’ murmured Eugene, with the air of one
who was meditating deeply, ‘I trace the happy influences of the little
flour-barrel and the coffee-mill. Gratifying.’

‘Eugene,’ resumed Mortimer, disregarding the light interruption, and
laying a hand upon Eugene’s shoulder, as he, Mortimer, stood before him
seated on his bed, ‘you are withholding something from me.’

Eugene looked at him, but said nothing.

‘All this past summer, you have been withholding something from me.
Before we entered on our boating vacation, you were as bent upon it as I
have seen you upon anything since we first rowed together. But you cared
very little for it when it came, often found it a tie and a drag upon
you, and were constantly away. Now it was well enough half-a-dozen
times, a dozen times, twenty times, to say to me in your own odd manner,
which I know so well and like so much, that your disappearances were
precautions against our boring one another; but of course after a short
while I began to know that they covered something. I don’t ask what it
is, as you have not told me; but the fact is so. Say, is it not?’

‘I give you my word of honour, Mortimer,’ returned Eugene, after a
serious pause of a few moments, ‘that I don’t know.’

‘Don’t know, Eugene?’

‘Upon my soul, don’t know. I know less about myself than about most
people in the world, and I don’t know.’

‘You have some design in your mind?’

‘Have I? I don’t think I have.’

‘At any rate, you have some subject of interest there which used not to
be there?’

‘I really can’t say,’ replied Eugene, shaking his head blankly, after
pausing again to reconsider. ‘At times I have thought yes; at other
times I have thought no. Now, I have been inclined to pursue such a
subject; now I have felt that it was absurd, and that it tired and
embarrassed me. Absolutely, I can’t say. Frankly and faithfully, I would
if I could.’

So replying, he clapped a hand, in his turn, on his friend’s shoulder,
as he rose from his seat upon the bed, and said:

‘You must take your friend as he is. You know what I am, my dear
Mortimer. You know how dreadfully susceptible I am to boredom. You know
that when I became enough of a man to find myself an embodied conundrum,
I bored myself to the last degree by trying to find out what I meant.
You know that at length I gave it up, and declined to guess any more.
Then how can I possibly give you the answer that I have not discovered?
The old nursery form runs, “Riddle-me-riddle-me-ree, p’raps you can’t
tell me what this may be?” My reply runs, “No. Upon my life, I can’t.”’

So much of what was fantastically true to his own knowledge of this
utterly careless Eugene, mingled with the answer, that Mortimer could
not receive it as a mere evasion. Besides, it was given with an engaging
air of openness, and of special exemption of the one friend he valued,
from his reckless indifference.

‘Come, dear boy!’ said Eugene. ‘Let us try the effect of smoking. If it
enlightens me at all on this question, I will impart unreservedly.’

They returned to the room they had come from, and, finding it heated,
opened a window. Having lighted their cigars, they leaned out of this
window, smoking, and looking down at the moonlight, as it shone into the
court below.

‘No enlightenment,’ resumed Eugene, after certain minutes of silence. ‘I
feel sincerely apologetic, my dear Mortimer, but nothing comes.’

‘If nothing comes,’ returned Mortimer, ‘nothing can come from it. So
I shall hope that this may hold good throughout, and that there may be
nothing on foot. Nothing injurious to you, Eugene, or--’

Eugene stayed him for a moment with his hand on his arm, while he took a
piece of earth from an old flowerpot on the window-sill and dexterously
shot it at a little point of light opposite; having done which to his
satisfaction, he said, ‘Or?’

‘Or injurious to any one else.’

‘How,’ said Eugene, taking another little piece of earth, and shooting
it with great precision at the former mark, ‘how injurious to any one
else?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And,’ said Eugene, taking, as he said the word, another shot, ‘to whom
else?’

‘I don’t know.’

Checking himself with another piece of earth in his hand, Eugene looked
at his friend inquiringly and a little suspiciously. There was no
concealed or half-expressed meaning in his face.

‘Two belated wanderers in the mazes of the law,’ said Eugene, attracted
by the sound of footsteps, and glancing down as he spoke, ‘stray into
the court. They examine the door-posts of number one, seeking the name
they want. Not finding it at number one, they come to number two. On the
hat of wanderer number two, the shorter one, I drop this pellet. Hitting
him on the hat, I smoke serenely, and become absorbed in contemplation
of the sky.’

Both the wanderers looked up towards the window; but, after
interchanging a mutter or two, soon applied themselves to the door-posts
below. There they seemed to discover what they wanted, for they
disappeared from view by entering at the doorway. ‘When they emerge,’
said Eugene, ‘you shall see me bring them both down’; and so prepared
two pellets for the purpose.

He had not reckoned on their seeking his name, or Lightwood’s. But
either the one or the other would seem to be in question, for now there
came a knock at the door. ‘I am on duty to-night,’ said Mortimer, ‘stay
you where you are, Eugene.’ Requiring no persuasion, he stayed there,
smoking quietly, and not at all curious to know who knocked, until
Mortimer spoke to him from within the room, and touched him. Then,
drawing in his head, he found the visitors to be young Charley Hexam
and the schoolmaster; both standing facing him, and both recognized at a
glance.

‘You recollect this young fellow, Eugene?’ said Mortimer.

‘Let me look at him,’ returned Wrayburn, coolly. ‘Oh, yes, yes. I
recollect him!’

He had not been about to repeat that former action of taking him by the
chin, but the boy had suspected him of it, and had thrown up his arm
with an angry start. Laughingly, Wrayburn looked to Lightwood for an
explanation of this odd visit.

‘He says he has something to say.’

‘Surely it must be to you, Mortimer.’

‘So I thought, but he says no. He says it is to you.’

‘Yes, I do say so,’ interposed the boy. ‘And I mean to say what I want
to say, too, Mr Eugene Wrayburn!’

Passing him with his eyes as if there were nothing where he stood,
Eugene looked on to Bradley Headstone. With consummate indolence, he
turned to Mortimer, inquiring: ‘And who may this other person be?’

‘I am Charles Hexam’s friend,’ said Bradley; ‘I am Charles Hexam’s
schoolmaster.’

‘My good sir, you should teach your pupils better manners,’ returned
Eugene.

Composedly smoking, he leaned an elbow on the chimneypiece, at the side
of the fire, and looked at the schoolmaster. It was a cruel look, in its
cold disdain of him, as a creature of no worth. The schoolmaster looked
at him, and that, too, was a cruel look, though of the different kind,
that it had a raging jealousy and fiery wrath in it.

Very remarkably, neither Eugene Wrayburn nor Bradley Headstone looked at
all at the boy. Through the ensuing dialogue, those two, no matter
who spoke, or whom was addressed, looked at each other. There was some
secret, sure perception between them, which set them against one another
in all ways.

‘In some high respects, Mr Eugene Wrayburn,’ said Bradley, answering
him with pale and quivering lips, ‘the natural feelings of my pupils are
stronger than my teaching.’

‘In most respects, I dare say,’ replied Eugene, enjoying his cigar,
‘though whether high or low is of no importance. You have my name very
correctly. Pray what is yours?’

‘It cannot concern you much to know, but--’

‘True,’ interposed Eugene, striking sharply and cutting him short at his
mistake, ‘it does not concern me at all to know. I can say Schoolmaster,
which is a most respectable title. You are right, Schoolmaster.’

It was not the dullest part of this goad in its galling of Bradley
Headstone, that he had made it himself in a moment of incautious anger.
He tried to set his lips so as to prevent their quivering, but they
quivered fast.

‘Mr Eugene Wrayburn,’ said the boy, ‘I want a word with you. I have
wanted it so much, that we have looked out your address in the book, and
we have been to your office, and we have come from your office here.’

‘You have given yourself much trouble, Schoolmaster,’ observed
Eugene, blowing the feathery ash from his cigar. ‘I hope it may prove
remunerative.’

‘And I am glad to speak,’ pursued the boy, ‘in presence of Mr Lightwood,
because it was through Mr Lightwood that you ever saw my sister.’

For a mere moment, Wrayburn turned his eyes aside from the schoolmaster
to note the effect of the last word on Mortimer, who, standing on the
opposite side of the fire, as soon as the word was spoken, turned his
face towards the fire and looked down into it.

‘Similarly, it was through Mr Lightwood that you ever saw her again, for
you were with him on the night when my father was found, and so I found
you with her on the next day. Since then, you have seen my sister often.
You have seen my sister oftener and oftener. And I want to know why?’

‘Was this worth while, Schoolmaster?’ murmured Eugene, with the air of
a disinterested adviser. ‘So much trouble for nothing? You should know
best, but I think not.’

‘I don’t know, Mr Wrayburn,’ answered Bradley, with his passion rising,
‘why you address me--’

‘Don’t you? said Eugene. ‘Then I won’t.’

He said it so tauntingly in his perfect placidity, that the respectable
right-hand clutching the respectable hair-guard of the respectable watch
could have wound it round his throat and strangled him with it. Not
another word did Eugene deem it worth while to utter, but stood leaning
his head upon his hand, smoking, and looking imperturbably at the
chafing Bradley Headstone with his clutching right-hand, until Bradley
was wellnigh mad.

‘Mr Wrayburn,’ proceeded the boy, ‘we not only know this that I have
charged upon you, but we know more. It has not yet come to my sister’s
knowledge that we have found it out, but we have. We had a plan, Mr
Headstone and I, for my sister’s education, and for its being advised
and overlooked by Mr Headstone, who is a much more competent authority,
whatever you may pretend to think, as you smoke, than you could produce,
if you tried. Then, what do we find? What do we find, Mr Lightwood? Why,
we find that my sister is already being taught, without our knowing
it. We find that while my sister gives an unwilling and cold ear to our
schemes for her advantage--I, her brother, and Mr Headstone, the most
competent authority, as his certificates would easily prove, that could
be produced--she is wilfully and willingly profiting by other schemes.
Ay, and taking pains, too, for I know what such pains are. And so does
Mr Headstone! Well! Somebody pays for this, is a thought that naturally
occurs to us; who pays? We apply ourselves to find out, Mr Lightwood,
and we find that your friend, this Mr Eugene Wrayburn, here, pays. Then
I ask him what right has he to do it, and what does he mean by it, and
how comes he to be taking such a liberty without my consent, when I
am raising myself in the scale of society by my own exertions and Mr
Headstone’s aid, and have no right to have any darkness cast upon my
prospects, or any imputation upon my respectability, through my sister?’

The boyish weakness of this speech, combined with its great selfishness,
made it a poor one indeed. And yet Bradley Headstone, used to the little
audience of a school, and unused to the larger ways of men, showed a
kind of exultation in it.

‘Now I tell Mr Eugene Wrayburn,’ pursued the boy, forced into the use
of the third person by the hopelessness of addressing him in the first,
‘that I object to his having any acquaintance at all with my sister, and
that I request him to drop it altogether. He is not to take it into his
head that I am afraid of my sister’s caring for HIM--’

(As the boy sneered, the Master sneered, and Eugene blew off the
feathery ash again.)

--‘But I object to it, and that’s enough. I am more important to my
sister than he thinks. As I raise myself, I intend to raise her;
she knows that, and she has to look to me for her prospects. Now I
understand all this very well, and so does Mr Headstone. My sister is an
excellent girl, but she has some romantic notions; not about such things
as your Mr Eugene Wrayburns, but about the death of my father and other
matters of that sort. Mr Wrayburn encourages those notions to make
himself of importance, and so she thinks she ought to be grateful to
him, and perhaps even likes to be. Now I don’t choose her to be grateful
to him, or to be grateful to anybody but me, except Mr Headstone. And
I tell Mr Wrayburn that if he don’t take heed of what I say, it will be
worse for her. Let him turn that over in his memory, and make sure of
it. Worse for her!’

A pause ensued, in which the schoolmaster looked very awkward.

‘May I suggest, Schoolmaster,’ said Eugene, removing his fast-waning
cigar from his lips to glance at it, ‘that you can now take your pupil
away.’

‘And Mr Lightwood,’ added the boy, with a burning face, under the
flaming aggravation of getting no sort of answer or attention, ‘I hope
you’ll take notice of what I have said to your friend, and of what
your friend has heard me say, word by word, whatever he pretends to the
contrary. You are bound to take notice of it, Mr Lightwood, for, as I
have already mentioned, you first brought your friend into my sister’s
company, and but for you we never should have seen him. Lord knows none
of us ever wanted him, any more than any of us will ever miss him. Now
Mr Headstone, as Mr Eugene Wrayburn has been obliged to hear what I had
to say, and couldn’t help himself, and as I have said it out to the last
word, we have done all we wanted to do, and may go.’

‘Go down-stairs, and leave me a moment, Hexam,’ he returned. The boy
complying with an indignant look and as much noise as he could make,
swung out of the room; and Lightwood went to the window, and leaned
there, looking out.

‘You think me of no more value than the dirt under your feet,’ said
Bradley to Eugene, speaking in a carefully weighed and measured tone, or
he could not have spoken at all.

‘I assure you, Schoolmaster,’ replied Eugene, ‘I don’t think about you.’

‘That’s not true,’ returned the other; ‘you know better.’

‘That’s coarse,’ Eugene retorted; ‘but you DON’T know better.’

‘Mr Wrayburn, at least I know very well that it would be idle to set
myself against you in insolent words or overbearing manners. That lad
who has just gone out could put you to shame in half-a-dozen branches of
knowledge in half an hour, but you can throw him aside like an inferior.
You can do as much by me, I have no doubt, beforehand.’

‘Possibly,’ remarked Eugene.

‘But I am more than a lad,’ said Bradley, with his clutching hand, ‘and
I WILL be heard, sir.’

‘As a schoolmaster,’ said Eugene, ‘you are always being heard. That
ought to content you.’

‘But it does not content me,’ replied the other, white with passion. ‘Do
you suppose that a man, in forming himself for the duties I discharge,
and in watching and repressing himself daily to discharge them well,
dismisses a man’s nature?’

‘I suppose you,’ said Eugene, ‘judging from what I see as I look at you,
to be rather too passionate for a good schoolmaster.’ As he spoke, he
tossed away the end of his cigar.

‘Passionate with you, sir, I admit I am. Passionate with you, sir, I
respect myself for being. But I have not Devils for my pupils.’

‘For your Teachers, I should rather say,’ replied Eugene.

‘Mr Wrayburn.’

‘Schoolmaster.’

‘Sir, my name is Bradley Headstone.’

‘As you justly said, my good sir, your name cannot concern me. Now, what
more?’

‘This more. Oh, what a misfortune is mine,’ cried Bradley, breaking off
to wipe the starting perspiration from his face as he shook from head to
foot, ‘that I cannot so control myself as to appear a stronger creature
than this, when a man who has not felt in all his life what I have felt
in a day can so command himself!’ He said it in a very agony, and even
followed it with an errant motion of his hands as if he could have torn
himself.

Eugene Wrayburn looked on at him, as if he found him beginning to be
rather an entertaining study.

‘Mr Wrayburn, I desire to say something to you on my own part.’

‘Come, come, Schoolmaster,’ returned Eugene, with a languid approach to
impatience as the other again struggled with himself; ‘say what you have
to say. And let me remind you that the door is standing open, and your
young friend waiting for you on the stairs.’

‘When I accompanied that youth here, sir, I did so with the purpose of
adding, as a man whom you should not be permitted to put aside, in case
you put him aside as a boy, that his instinct is correct and right.’
Thus Bradley Headstone, with great effort and difficulty.

‘Is that all?’ asked Eugene.

‘No, sir,’ said the other, flushed and fierce. ‘I strongly support him
in his disapproval of your visits to his sister, and in his objection to
your officiousness--and worse--in what you have taken upon yourself to
do for her.’

‘Is THAT all?’ asked Eugene.

‘No, sir. I determined to tell you that you are not justified in these
proceedings, and that they are injurious to his sister.’

‘Are you her schoolmaster as well as her brother’s?--Or perhaps you
would like to be?’ said Eugene.

It was a stab that the blood followed, in its rush to Bradley
Headstone’s face, as swiftly as if it had been dealt with a dagger.
‘What do you mean by that?’ was as much as he could utter.

‘A natural ambition enough,’ said Eugene, coolly. ‘Far be it from me
to say otherwise. The sister who is something too much upon your lips,
perhaps--is so very different from all the associations to which she had
been used, and from all the low obscure people about her, that it is a
very natural ambition.’

‘Do you throw my obscurity in my teeth, Mr Wrayburn?’

‘That can hardly be, for I know nothing concerning it, Schoolmaster, and
seek to know nothing.’

‘You reproach me with my origin,’ said Bradley Headstone; ‘you cast
insinuations at my bringing-up. But I tell you, sir, I have worked my
way onward, out of both and in spite of both, and have a right to be
considered a better man than you, with better reasons for being proud.’

‘How I can reproach you with what is not within my knowledge, or how
I can cast stones that were never in my hand, is a problem for the
ingenuity of a schoolmaster to prove,’ returned Eugene. ‘Is THAT all?’

‘No, sir. If you suppose that boy--’

‘Who really will be tired of waiting,’ said Eugene, politely.

‘If you suppose that boy to be friendless, Mr Wrayburn, you deceive
yourself. I am his friend, and you shall find me so.’

‘And you will find HIM on the stairs,’ remarked Eugene.

‘You may have promised yourself, sir, that you could do what you
chose here, because you had to deal with a mere boy, inexperienced,
friendless, and unassisted. But I give you warning that this mean
calculation is wrong. You have to do with a man also. You have to do
with me. I will support him, and, if need be, require reparation for
him. My hand and heart are in this cause, and are open to him.’

‘And--quite a coincidence--the door is open,’ remarked Eugene.

‘I scorn your shifty evasions, and I scorn you,’ said the schoolmaster.
‘In the meanness of your nature you revile me with the meanness of my
birth. I hold you in contempt for it. But if you don’t profit by this
visit, and act accordingly, you will find me as bitterly in earnest
against you as I could be if I deemed you worth a second thought on my
own account.’

With a consciously bad grace and stiff manner, as Wrayburn looked so
easily and calmly on, he went out with these words, and the heavy door
closed like a furnace-door upon his red and white heats of rage.

‘A curious monomaniac,’ said Eugene. ‘The man seems to believe that
everybody was acquainted with his mother!’

Mortimer Lightwood being still at the window, to which he had in
delicacy withdrawn, Eugene called to him, and he fell to slowly pacing
the room.

‘My dear fellow,’ said Eugene, as he lighted another cigar, ‘I fear my
unexpected visitors have been troublesome. If as a set-off (excuse the
legal phrase from a barrister-at-law) you would like to ask Tippins to
tea, I pledge myself to make love to her.’

‘Eugene, Eugene, Eugene,’ replied Mortimer, still pacing the room, ‘I am
sorry for this. And to think that I have been so blind!’

‘How blind, dear boy?’ inquired his unmoved friend.

‘What were your words that night at the river-side public-house?’ said
Lightwood, stopping. ‘What was it that you asked me? Did I feel like a
dark combination of traitor and pickpocket when I thought of that girl?’

‘I seem to remember the expression,’ said Eugene.

‘How do YOU feel when you think of her just now?’

His friend made no direct reply, but observed, after a few whiffs of his
cigar, ‘Don’t mistake the situation. There is no better girl in all this
London than Lizzie Hexam. There is no better among my people at home; no
better among your people.’

‘Granted. What follows?’

‘There,’ said Eugene, looking after him dubiously as he paced away to
the other end of the room, ‘you put me again upon guessing the riddle
that I have given up.’

‘Eugene, do you design to capture and desert this girl?’

‘My dear fellow, no.’

‘Do you design to marry her?’

‘My dear fellow, no.’

‘Do you design to pursue her?’

‘My dear fellow, I don’t design anything. I have no design whatever.
I am incapable of designs. If I conceived a design, I should speedily
abandon it, exhausted by the operation.’

‘Oh Eugene, Eugene!’

‘My dear Mortimer, not that tone of melancholy reproach, I entreat. What
can I do more than tell you all I know, and acknowledge my ignorance
of all I don’t know! How does that little old song go, which, under
pretence of being cheerful, is by far the most lugubrious I ever heard
in my life?

     “Away with melancholy,
     Nor doleful changes ring
     On life and human folly,
     But merrily merrily sing
                              Fal la!”

Don’t let us sing Fal la, my dear Mortimer (which is comparatively
unmeaning), but let us sing that we give up guessing the riddle
altogether.’

‘Are you in communication with this girl, Eugene, and is what these
people say true?’

‘I concede both admissions to my honourable and learned friend.’

‘Then what is to come of it? What are you doing? Where are you going?’

‘My dear Mortimer, one would think the schoolmaster had left behind him
a catechizing infection. You are ruffled by the want of another cigar.
Take one of these, I entreat. Light it at mine, which is in perfect
order. So! Now do me the justice to observe that I am doing all I can
towards self-improvement, and that you have a light thrown on those
household implements which, when you only saw them as in a glass darkly,
you were hastily--I must say hastily--inclined to depreciate. Sensible
of my deficiencies, I have surrounded myself with moral influences
expressly meant to promote the formation of the domestic virtues.
To those influences, and to the improving society of my friend from
boyhood, commend me with your best wishes.’

‘Ah, Eugene!’ said Lightwood, affectionately, now standing near him,
so that they both stood in one little cloud of smoke; ‘I would that you
answered my three questions! What is to come of it? What are you doing?
Where are you going?’

‘And my dear Mortimer,’ returned Eugene, lightly fanning away the smoke
with his hand for the better exposition of his frankness of face and
manner, ‘believe me, I would answer them instantly if I could. But
to enable me to do so, I must first have found out the troublesome
conundrum long abandoned. Here it is. Eugene Wrayburn.’ Tapping his
forehead and breast. ‘Riddle-me, riddle-me-ree, perhaps you can’t tell
me what this may be?--No, upon my life I can’t. I give it up!’



Chapter 7

IN WHICH A FRIENDLY MOVE IS ORIGINATED


The arrangement between Mr Boffin and his literary man, Mr Silas Wegg,
so far altered with the altered habits of Mr Boffin’s life, as that
the Roman Empire usually declined in the morning and in the eminently
aristocratic family mansion, rather than in the evening, as of yore,
and in Boffin’s Bower. There were occasions, however, when Mr Boffin,
seeking a brief refuge from the blandishments of fashion, would present
himself at the Bower after dark, to anticipate the next sallying
forth of Wegg, and would there, on the old settle, pursue the downward
fortunes of those enervated and corrupted masters of the world who were
by this time on their last legs. If Wegg had been worse paid for his
office, or better qualified to discharge it, he would have considered
these visits complimentary and agreeable; but, holding the position of
a handsomely-remunerated humbug, he resented them. This was quite
according to rule, for the incompetent servant, by whomsoever employed,
is always against his employer. Even those born governors, noble and
right honourable creatures, who have been the most imbecile in high
places, have uniformly shown themselves the most opposed (sometimes in
belying distrust, sometimes in vapid insolence) to THEIR employer. What
is in such wise true of the public master and servant, is equally true
of the private master and servant all the world over.

When Mr Silas Wegg did at last obtain free access to ‘Our House’, as he
had been wont to call the mansion outside which he had sat shelterless
so long, and when he did at last find it in all particulars as different
from his mental plans of it as according to the nature of things it
well could be, that far-seeing and far-reaching character, by way of
asserting himself and making out a case for compensation, affected to
fall into a melancholy strain of musing over the mournful past; as if
the house and he had had a fall in life together.

‘And this, sir,’ Silas would say to his patron, sadly nodding his head
and musing, ‘was once Our House! This, sir, is the building from which I
have so often seen those great creatures, Miss Elizabeth, Master
George, Aunt Jane, and Uncle Parker’--whose very names were of his own
inventing--‘pass and repass! And has it come to this, indeed! Ah dear
me, dear me!’

So tender were his lamentations, that the kindly Mr Boffin was quite
sorry for him, and almost felt mistrustful that in buying the house he
had done him an irreparable injury.

Two or three diplomatic interviews, the result of great subtlety on Mr
Wegg’s part, but assuming the mask of careless yielding to a fortuitous
combination of circumstances impelling him towards Clerkenwell, had
enabled him to complete his bargain with Mr Venus.

‘Bring me round to the Bower,’ said Silas, when the bargain was closed,
‘next Saturday evening, and if a sociable glass of old Jamaikey warm
should meet your views, I am not the man to begrudge it.’

‘You are aware of my being poor company, sir,’ replied Mr Venus, ‘but be
it so.’

It being so, here is Saturday evening come, and here is Mr Venus come,
and ringing at the Bower-gate.

Mr Wegg opens the gate, descries a sort of brown paper truncheon under
Mr Venus’s arm, and remarks, in a dry tone: ‘Oh! I thought perhaps you
might have come in a cab.’

‘No, Mr Wegg,’ replies Venus. ‘I am not above a parcel.’

‘Above a parcel! No!’ says Wegg, with some dissatisfaction. But does not
openly growl, ‘a certain sort of parcel might be above you.’

‘Here is your purchase, Mr Wegg,’ says Venus, politely handing it over,
‘and I am glad to restore it to the source from whence it--flowed.’

‘Thankee,’ says Wegg. ‘Now this affair is concluded, I may mention to
you in a friendly way that I’ve my doubts whether, if I had consulted a
lawyer, you could have kept this article back from me. I only throw it
out as a legal point.’

‘Do you think so, Mr Wegg? I bought you in open contract.’

‘You can’t buy human flesh and blood in this country, sir; not alive,
you can’t,’ says Wegg, shaking his head. ‘Then query, bone?’

‘As a legal point?’ asks Venus.

‘As a legal point.’

‘I am not competent to speak upon that, Mr Wegg,’ says Venus, reddening
and growing something louder; ‘but upon a point of fact I think myself
competent to speak; and as a point of fact I would have seen you--will
you allow me to say, further?’

‘I wouldn’t say more than further, if I was you,’ Mr Wegg suggests,
pacifically.

--‘Before I’d have given that packet into your hand without being paid
my price for it. I don’t pretend to know how the point of law may stand,
but I’m thoroughly confident upon the point of fact.’

As Mr Venus is irritable (no doubt owing to his disappointment in love),
and as it is not the cue of Mr Wegg to have him out of temper, the
latter gentleman soothingly remarks, ‘I only put it as a little case; I
only put it ha’porthetically.’

‘Then I’d rather, Mr Wegg, you put it another time, penn’orth-etically,’
is Mr Venus’s retort, ‘for I tell you candidly I don’t like your little
cases.’

Arrived by this time in Mr Wegg’s sitting-room, made bright on the
chilly evening by gaslight and fire, Mr Venus softens and compliments
him on his abode; profiting by the occasion to remind Wegg that he
(Venus) told him he had got into a good thing.

‘Tolerable,’ Wegg rejoins. ‘But bear in mind, Mr Venus, that there’s
no gold without its alloy. Mix for yourself and take a seat in the
chimbley-corner. Will you perform upon a pipe, sir?’

‘I am but an indifferent performer, sir,’ returns the other; ‘but I’ll
accompany you with a whiff or two at intervals.’

So, Mr Venus mixes, and Wegg mixes; and Mr Venus lights and puffs, and
Wegg lights and puffs.

‘And there’s alloy even in this metal of yours, Mr Wegg, you was
remarking?’

‘Mystery,’ returns Wegg. ‘I don’t like it, Mr Venus. I don’t like to
have the life knocked out of former inhabitants of this house, in the
gloomy dark, and not know who did it.’

‘Might you have any suspicions, Mr Wegg?’

‘No,’ returns that gentleman. ‘I know who profits by it. But I’ve no
suspicions.’

Having said which, Mr Wegg smokes and looks at the fire with a most
determined expression of Charity; as if he had caught that cardinal
virtue by the skirts as she felt it her painful duty to depart from him,
and held her by main force.

‘Similarly,’ resumes Wegg, ‘I have observations as I can offer upon
certain points and parties; but I make no objections, Mr Venus. Here
is an immense fortune drops from the clouds upon a person that shall be
nameless. Here is a weekly allowance, with a certain weight of coals,
drops from the clouds upon me. Which of us is the better man? Not the
person that shall be nameless. That’s an observation of mine, but I
don’t make it an objection. I take my allowance and my certain weight of
coals. He takes his fortune. That’s the way it works.’

‘It would be a good thing for me, if I could see things in the calm
light you do, Mr Wegg.’

‘Again look here,’ pursues Silas, with an oratorical flourish of his
pipe and his wooden leg: the latter having an undignified tendency
to tilt him back in his chair; ‘here’s another observation, Mr Venus,
unaccompanied with an objection. Him that shall be nameless is liable to
be talked over. He gets talked over. Him that shall be nameless, having
me at his right hand, naturally looking to be promoted higher, and you
may perhaps say meriting to be promoted higher--’

(Mr Venus murmurs that he does say so.)

‘--Him that shall be nameless, under such circumstances passes me by,
and puts a talking-over stranger above my head. Which of us two is the
better man? Which of us two can repeat most poetry? Which of us two has,
in the service of him that shall be nameless, tackled the Romans, both
civil and military, till he has got as husky as if he’d been weaned and
ever since brought up on sawdust? Not the talking-over stranger. Yet the
house is as free to him as if it was his, and he has his room, and is
put upon a footing, and draws about a thousand a year. I am banished to
the Bower, to be found in it like a piece of furniture whenever wanted.
Merit, therefore, don’t win. That’s the way it works. I observe it,
because I can’t help observing it, being accustomed to take a powerful
sight of notice; but I don’t object. Ever here before, Mr Venus?’

‘Not inside the gate, Mr Wegg.’

‘You’ve been as far as the gate then, Mr Venus?’

‘Yes, Mr Wegg, and peeped in from curiosity.’

‘Did you see anything?’

‘Nothing but the dust-yard.’

Mr Wegg rolls his eyes all round the room, in that ever unsatisfied
quest of his, and then rolls his eyes all round Mr Venus; as if
suspicious of his having something about him to be found out.

‘And yet, sir,’ he pursues, ‘being acquainted with old Mr Harmon, one
would have thought it might have been polite in you, too, to give him a
call. And you’re naturally of a polite disposition, you are.’ This last
clause as a softening compliment to Mr Venus.

‘It is true, sir,’ replies Venus, winking his weak eyes, and running
his fingers through his dusty shock of hair, ‘that I was so, before a
certain observation soured me. You understand to what I allude, Mr Wegg?
To a certain written statement respecting not wishing to be regarded in
a certain light. Since that, all is fled, save gall.’

‘Not all,’ says Mr Wegg, in a tone of sentimental condolence.

‘Yes, sir,’ returns Venus, ‘all! The world may deem it harsh, but I’d
quite as soon pitch into my best friend as not. Indeed, I’d sooner!’

Involuntarily making a pass with his wooden leg to guard himself as Mr
Venus springs up in the emphasis of this unsociable declaration, Mr Wegg
tilts over on his back, chair and all, and is rescued by that harmless
misanthrope, in a disjointed state and ruefully rubbing his head.

‘Why, you lost your balance, Mr Wegg,’ says Venus, handing him his pipe.

‘And about time to do it,’ grumbles Silas, ‘when a man’s visitors,
without a word of notice, conduct themselves with the sudden wiciousness
of Jacks-in-boxes! Don’t come flying out of your chair like that, Mr
Venus!’

‘I ask your pardon, Mr Wegg. I am so soured.’

‘Yes, but hang it,’ says Wegg argumentatively, ‘a well-governed mind can
be soured sitting! And as to being regarded in lights, there’s bumpey
lights as well as bony. IN which,’ again rubbing his head, ‘I object to
regard myself.’

‘I’ll bear it in memory, sir.’

‘If you’ll be so good.’ Mr Wegg slowly subdues his ironical tone and his
lingering irritation, and resumes his pipe. ‘We were talking of old Mr
Harmon being a friend of yours.’

‘Not a friend, Mr Wegg. Only known to speak to, and to have a little
deal with now and then. A very inquisitive character, Mr Wegg, regarding
what was found in the dust. As inquisitive as secret.’

‘Ah! You found him secret?’ returns Wegg, with a greedy relish.

‘He had always the look of it, and the manner of it.’

‘Ah!’ with another roll of his eyes. ‘As to what was found in the dust
now. Did you ever hear him mention how he found it, my dear friend?
Living on the mysterious premises, one would like to know. For instance,
where he found things? Or, for instance, how he set about it? Whether
he began at the top of the mounds, or whether he began at the bottom.
Whether he prodded’; Mr Wegg’s pantomime is skilful and expressive here;
‘or whether he scooped? Should you say scooped, my dear Mr Venus; or
should you as a man--say prodded?’

‘I should say neither, Mr Wegg.’

‘As a fellow-man, Mr Venus--mix again--why neither?’

‘Because I suppose, sir, that what was found, was found in the sorting
and sifting. All the mounds are sorted and sifted?’

‘You shall see ‘em and pass your opinion. Mix again.’

On each occasion of his saying ‘mix again’, Mr Wegg, with a hop on
his wooden leg, hitches his chair a little nearer; more as if he were
proposing that himself and Mr Venus should mix again, than that they
should replenish their glasses.

‘Living (as I said before) on the mysterious premises,’ says Wegg when
the other has acted on his hospitable entreaty, ‘one likes to know.
Would you be inclined to say now--as a brother--that he ever hid things
in the dust, as well as found ‘em?’

‘Mr Wegg, on the whole I should say he might.’

Mr Wegg claps on his spectacles, and admiringly surveys Mr Venus from
head to foot.

‘As a mortal equally with myself, whose hand I take in mine for the
first time this day, having unaccountably overlooked that act so full of
boundless confidence binding a fellow-creetur TO a fellow creetur,’ says
Wegg, holding Mr Venus’s palm out, flat and ready for smiting, and now
smiting it; ‘as such--and no other--for I scorn all lowlier ties betwixt
myself and the man walking with his face erect that alone I call my
Twin--regarded and regarding in this trustful bond--what do you think he
might have hid?’

‘It is but a supposition, Mr Wegg.’

‘As a Being with his hand upon his heart,’ cries Wegg; and the
apostrophe is not the less impressive for the Being’s hand being
actually upon his rum and water; ‘put your supposition into language,
and bring it out, Mr Venus!’

‘He was the species of old gentleman, sir,’ slowly returns that
practical anatomist, after drinking, ‘that I should judge likely to
take such opportunities as this place offered, of stowing away money,
valuables, maybe papers.’

‘As one that was ever an ornament to human life,’ says Mr Wegg, again
holding out Mr Venus’s palm as if he were going to tell his fortune by
chiromancy, and holding his own up ready for smiting it when the time
should come; ‘as one that the poet might have had his eye on, in writing
the national naval words:

     Helm a-weather, now lay her close,
            Yard arm and yard arm she lies;
     Again, cried I, Mr Venus, give her t’other dose,
            Man shrouds and grapple, sir, or she flies!

--that is to say, regarded in the light of true British Oak, for such
you are explain, Mr Venus, the expression “papers”!’

‘Seeing that the old gentleman was generally cutting off some near
relation, or blocking out some natural affection,’ Mr Venus rejoins, ‘he
most likely made a good many wills and codicils.’

The palm of Silas Wegg descends with a sounding smack upon the palm
of Venus, and Wegg lavishly exclaims, ‘Twin in opinion equally with
feeling! Mix a little more!’

Having now hitched his wooden leg and his chair close in front of Mr
Venus, Mr Wegg rapidly mixes for both, gives his visitor his glass,
touches its rim with the rim of his own, puts his own to his lips, puts
it down, and spreading his hands on his visitor’s knees thus addresses
him:

‘Mr Venus. It ain’t that I object to being passed over for a stranger,
though I regard the stranger as a more than doubtful customer. It ain’t
for the sake of making money, though money is ever welcome. It ain’t for
myself, though I am not so haughty as to be above doing myself a good
turn. It’s for the cause of the right.’

Mr Venus, passively winking his weak eyes both at once, demands: ‘What
is, Mr Wegg?’

‘The friendly move, sir, that I now propose. You see the move, sir?’

‘Till you have pointed it out, Mr Wegg, I can’t say whether I do or
not.’

‘If there IS anything to be found on these premises, let us find it
together. Let us make the friendly move of agreeing to look for it
together. Let us make the friendly move of agreeing to share the
profits of it equally betwixt us. In the cause of the right.’ Thus Silas
assuming a noble air.

‘Then,’ says Mr Venus, looking up, after meditating with his hair held
in his hands, as if he could only fix his attention by fixing his head;
‘if anything was to be unburied from under the dust, it would be kept a
secret by you and me? Would that be it, Mr Wegg?’

‘That would depend upon what it was, Mr Venus. Say it was money, or
plate, or jewellery, it would be as much ours as anybody else’s.’

Mr Venus rubs an eyebrow, interrogatively.

‘In the cause of the right it would. Because it would be unknowingly
sold with the mounds else, and the buyer would get what he was never
meant to have, and never bought. And what would that be, Mr Venus, but
the cause of the wrong?’

‘Say it was papers,’ Mr Venus propounds.

‘According to what they contained we should offer to dispose of ‘em to
the parties most interested,’ replies Wegg, promptly.

‘In the cause of the right, Mr Wegg?’

‘Always so, Mr Venus. If the parties should use them in the cause of the
wrong, that would be their act and deed. Mr Venus. I have an opinion of
you, sir, to which it is not easy to give mouth. Since I called upon you
that evening when you were, as I may say, floating your powerful mind in
tea, I have felt that you required to be roused with an object. In this
friendly move, sir, you will have a glorious object to rouse you.’

Mr Wegg then goes on to enlarge upon what throughout has been uppermost
in his crafty mind:--the qualifications of Mr Venus for such a search.
He expatiates on Mr Venus’s patient habits and delicate manipulation; on
his skill in piecing little things together; on his knowledge of various
tissues and textures; on the likelihood of small indications leading him
on to the discovery of great concealments. ‘While as to myself,’ says
Wegg, ‘I am not good at it. Whether I gave myself up to prodding,
or whether I gave myself up to scooping, I couldn’t do it with that
delicate touch so as not to show that I was disturbing the mounds.
Quite different with YOU, going to work (as YOU would) in the light of
a fellow-man, holily pledged in a friendly move to his brother man.’ Mr
Wegg next modestly remarks on the want of adaptation in a wooden leg
to ladders and such like airy perches, and also hints at an inherent
tendency in that timber fiction, when called into action for the
purposes of a promenade on an ashey slope, to stick itself into the
yielding foothold, and peg its owner to one spot. Then, leaving this
part of the subject, he remarks on the special phenomenon that before
his installation in the Bower, it was from Mr Venus that he first heard
of the legend of hidden wealth in the Mounds: ‘which’, he observes with
a vaguely pious air, ‘was surely never meant for nothing.’ Lastly,
he returns to the cause of the right, gloomily foreshadowing the
possibility of something being unearthed to criminate Mr Boffin (of whom
he once more candidly admits it cannot be denied that he profits by a
murder), and anticipating his denunciation by the friendly movers to
avenging justice. And this, Mr Wegg expressly points out, not at all for
the sake of the reward--though it would be a want of principle not to
take it.

To all this, Mr Venus, with his shock of dusty hair cocked after the
manner of a terrier’s ears, attends profoundly. When Mr Wegg, having
finished, opens his arms wide, as if to show Mr Venus how bare his
breast is, and then folds them pending a reply, Mr Venus winks at him
with both eyes some little time before speaking.

‘I see you have tried it by yourself, Mr Wegg,’ he says when he does
speak. ‘You have found out the difficulties by experience.’

‘No, it can hardly be said that I have tried it,’ replies Wegg, a little
dashed by the hint. ‘I have just skimmed it. Skimmed it.’

‘And found nothing besides the difficulties?’

Wegg shakes his head.

‘I scarcely know what to say to this, Mr Wegg,’ observes Venus, after
ruminating for a while.

‘Say yes,’ Wegg naturally urges.

‘If I wasn’t soured, my answer would be no. But being soured, Mr Wegg,
and driven to reckless madness and desperation, I suppose it’s Yes.’

Wegg joyfully reproduces the two glasses, repeats the ceremony of
clinking their rims, and inwardly drinks with great heartiness to the
health and success in life of the young lady who has reduced Mr Venus to
his present convenient state of mind.

The articles of the friendly move are then severally recited and agreed
upon. They are but secrecy, fidelity, and perseverance. The Bower to
be always free of access to Mr Venus for his researches, and every
precaution to be taken against their attracting observation in the
neighbourhood.

‘There’s a footstep!’ exclaims Venus.

‘Where?’ cries Wegg, starting.

‘Outside. St!’

They are in the act of ratifying the treaty of friendly move, by shaking
hands upon it. They softly break off, light their pipes which have gone
out, and lean back in their chairs. No doubt, a footstep. It approaches
the window, and a hand taps at the glass. ‘Come in!’ calls Wegg; meaning
come round by the door. But the heavy old-fashioned sash is slowly
raised, and a head slowly looks in out of the dark background of night.

‘Pray is Mr Silas Wegg here? Oh! I see him!’

The friendly movers might not have been quite at their ease, even
though the visitor had entered in the usual manner. But, leaning on the
breast-high window, and staring in out of the darkness, they find the
visitor extremely embarrassing. Especially Mr Venus: who removes his
pipe, draws back his head, and stares at the starer, as if it were his
own Hindoo baby come to fetch him home.

‘Good evening, Mr Wegg. The yard gate-lock should be looked to, if you
please; it don’t catch.’

‘Is it Mr Rokesmith?’ falters Wegg.

‘It is Mr Rokesmith. Don’t let me disturb you. I am not coming in. I
have only a message for you, which I undertook to deliver on my way home
to my lodgings. I was in two minds about coming beyond the gate without
ringing: not knowing but you might have a dog about.’

‘I wish I had,’ mutters Wegg, with his back turned as he rose from his
chair. ‘St! Hush! The talking-over stranger, Mr Venus.’

‘Is that any one I know?’ inquires the staring Secretary.

‘No, Mr Rokesmith. Friend of mine. Passing the evening with me.’

‘Oh! I beg his pardon. Mr Boffin wishes you to know that he does not
expect you to stay at home any evening, on the chance of his coming. It
has occurred to him that he may, without intending it, have been a tie
upon you. In future, if he should come without notice, he will take his
chance of finding you, and it will be all the same to him if he does
not. I undertook to tell you on my way. That’s all.’

With that, and ‘Good night,’ the Secretary lowers the window, and
disappears. They listen, and hear his footsteps go back to the gate, and
hear the gate close after him.

‘And for that individual, Mr Venus,’ remarks Wegg, when he is fully
gone, ‘I have been passed over! Let me ask you what you think of him?’

Apparently, Mr Venus does not know what to think of him, for he makes
sundry efforts to reply, without delivering himself of any other
articulate utterance than that he has ‘a singular look’.

‘A double look, you mean, sir,’ rejoins Wegg, playing bitterly upon the
word. ‘That’s HIS look. Any amount of singular look for me, but not a
double look! That’s an under-handed mind, sir.’

‘Do you say there’s something against him?’ Venus asks.

‘Something against him?’ repeats Wegg. ‘Something? What would the relief
be to my feelings--as a fellow-man--if I wasn’t the slave of truth, and
didn’t feel myself compelled to answer, Everything!’

See into what wonderful maudlin refuges, featherless ostriches plunge
their heads! It is such unspeakable moral compensation to Wegg, to be
overcome by the consideration that Mr Rokesmith has an underhanded mind!

‘On this starlight night, Mr Venus,’ he remarks, when he is showing that
friendly mover out across the yard, and both are something the worse
for mixing again and again: ‘on this starlight night to think that
talking-over strangers, and underhanded minds, can go walking home under
the sky, as if they was all square!’

‘The spectacle of those orbs,’ says Mr Venus, gazing upward with his hat
tumbling off; ‘brings heavy on me her crushing words that she did not
wish to regard herself nor yet to be regarded in that--’

‘I know! I know! You needn’t repeat ‘em,’ says Wegg, pressing his hand.
‘But think how those stars steady me in the cause of the right against
some that shall be nameless. It isn’t that I bear malice. But see how
they glisten with old remembrances! Old remembrances of what, sir?’

Mr Venus begins drearily replying, ‘Of her words, in her own
handwriting, that she does not wish to regard herself, nor yet--’ when
Silas cuts him short with dignity.

‘No, sir! Remembrances of Our House, of Master George, of Aunt Jane, of
Uncle Parker, all laid waste! All offered up sacrifices to the minion of
fortune and the worm of the hour!’



Chapter 8

IN WHICH AN INNOCENT ELOPEMENT OCCURS


The minion of fortune and the worm of the hour, or in less cutting
language, Nicodemus Boffin, Esquire, the Golden Dustman, had become
as much at home in his eminently aristocratic family mansion as he
was likely ever to be. He could not but feel that, like an eminently
aristocratic family cheese, it was much too large for his wants, and
bred an infinite amount of parasites; but he was content to regard this
drawback on his property as a sort of perpetual Legacy Duty. He felt the
more resigned to it, forasmuch as Mrs Boffin enjoyed herself completely,
and Miss Bella was delighted.

That young lady was, no doubt, an acquisition to the Boffins. She
was far too pretty to be unattractive anywhere, and far too quick of
perception to be below the tone of her new career. Whether it improved
her heart might be a matter of taste that was open to question; but as
touching another matter of taste, its improvement of her appearance and
manner, there could be no question whatever.

And thus it soon came about that Miss Bella began to set Mrs Boffin
right; and even further, that Miss Bella began to feel ill at ease, and
as it were responsible, when she saw Mrs Boffin going wrong. Not that so
sweet a disposition and so sound a nature could ever go very wrong even
among the great visiting authorities who agreed that the Boffins were
‘charmingly vulgar’ (which for certain was not their own case in saying
so), but that when she made a slip on the social ice on which all the
children of Podsnappery, with genteel souls to be saved, are required to
skate in circles, or to slide in long rows, she inevitably tripped Miss
Bella up (so that young lady felt), and caused her to experience great
confusion under the glances of the more skilful performers engaged in
those ice-exercises.

At Miss Bella’s time of life it was not to be expected that she should
examine herself very closely on the congruity or stability of her
position in Mr Boffin’s house. And as she had never been sparing of
complaints of her old home when she had no other to compare it with,
so there was no novelty of ingratitude or disdain in her very much
preferring her new one.

‘An invaluable man is Rokesmith,’ said Mr Boffin, after some two or
three months. ‘But I can’t quite make him out.’

Neither could Bella, so she found the subject rather interesting.

‘He takes more care of my affairs, morning, noon, and night,’ said Mr
Boffin, ‘than fifty other men put together either could or would; and
yet he has ways of his own that are like tying a scaffolding-pole right
across the road, and bringing me up short when I am almost a-walking arm
in arm with him.’

‘May I ask how so, sir?’ inquired Bella.

‘Well, my dear,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘he won’t meet any company here, but
you. When we have visitors, I should wish him to have his regular place
at the table like ourselves; but no, he won’t take it.’

‘If he considers himself above it,’ said Miss Bella, with an airy toss
of her head, ‘I should leave him alone.’

‘It ain’t that, my dear,’ replied Mr Boffin, thinking it over. ‘He don’t
consider himself above it.’

‘Perhaps he considers himself beneath it,’ suggested Bella. ‘If so, he
ought to know best.’

‘No, my dear; nor it ain’t that, neither. No,’ repeated Mr Boffin, with
a shake of his head, after again thinking it over; ‘Rokesmith’s a modest
man, but he don’t consider himself beneath it.’

‘Then what does he consider, sir?’ asked Bella.

‘Dashed if I know!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘It seemed at first as if it
was only Lightwood that he objected to meet. And now it seems to be
everybody, except you.’

Oho! thought Miss Bella. ‘In--deed! That’s it, is it!’ For Mr Mortimer
Lightwood had dined there two or three times, and she had met him
elsewhere, and he had shown her some attention. ‘Rather cool in a
Secretary--and Pa’s lodger--to make me the subject of his jealousy!’

That Pa’s daughter should be so contemptuous of Pa’s lodger was odd;
but there were odder anomalies than that in the mind of the spoilt girl:
spoilt first by poverty, and then by wealth. Be it this history’s part,
however, to leave them to unravel themselves.

‘A little too much, I think,’ Miss Bella reflected scornfully, ‘to
have Pa’s lodger laying claim to me, and keeping eligible people off!
A little too much, indeed, to have the opportunities opened to me by Mr
and Mrs Boffin, appropriated by a mere Secretary and Pa’s lodger!’

Yet it was not so very long ago that Bella had been fluttered by the
discovery that this same Secretary and lodger seem to like her. Ah! but
the eminently aristocratic mansion and Mrs Boffin’s dressmaker had not
come into play then.

In spite of his seemingly retiring manners a very intrusive person, this
Secretary and lodger, in Miss Bella’s opinion. Always a light in his
office-room when we came home from the play or Opera, and he always at
the carriage-door to hand us out. Always a provoking radiance too on
Mrs Boffin’s face, and an abominably cheerful reception of him, as if it
were possible seriously to approve what the man had in his mind!

‘You never charge me, Miss Wilfer,’ said the Secretary, encountering her
by chance alone in the great drawing-room, ‘with commissions for home.
I shall always be happy to execute any commands you may have in that
direction.’

‘Pray what may you mean, Mr Rokesmith?’ inquired Miss Bella, with
languidly drooping eyelids.

‘By home? I mean your father’s house at Holloway.’

She coloured under the retort--so skilfully thrust, that the words
seemed to be merely a plain answer, given in plain good faith--and said,
rather more emphatically and sharply:

‘What commissions and commands are you speaking of?’

‘Only little words of remembrance as I assume you sent somehow or
other,’ replied the Secretary with his former air. ‘It would be a
pleasure to me if you would make me the bearer of them. As you know, I
come and go between the two houses every day.’

‘You needn’t remind me of that, sir.’

She was too quick in this petulant sally against ‘Pa’s lodger’; and she
felt that she had been so when she met his quiet look.

‘They don’t send many--what was your expression?--words of remembrance
to me,’ said Bella, making haste to take refuge in ill-usage.

‘They frequently ask me about you, and I give them such slight
intelligence as I can.’

‘I hope it’s truly given,’ exclaimed Bella.

‘I hope you cannot doubt it, for it would be very much against you, if
you could.’

‘No, I do not doubt it. I deserve the reproach, which is very just
indeed. I beg your pardon, Mr Rokesmith.’

‘I should beg you not to do so, but that it shows you to such admirable
advantage,’ he replied with earnestness. ‘Forgive me; I could not help
saying that. To return to what I have digressed from, let me add that
perhaps they think I report them to you, deliver little messages, and
the like. But I forbear to trouble you, as you never ask me.’

‘I am going, sir,’ said Bella, looking at him as if he had reproved her,
‘to see them tomorrow.’

‘Is that,’ he asked, hesitating, ‘said to me, or to them?’

‘To which you please.’

‘To both? Shall I make it a message?’

‘You can if you like, Mr Rokesmith. Message or no message, I am going to
see them tomorrow.’

‘Then I will tell them so.’

He lingered a moment, as though to give her the opportunity of
prolonging the conversation if she wished. As she remained silent, he
left her. Two incidents of the little interview were felt by Miss Bella
herself, when alone again, to be very curious. The first was, that he
unquestionably left her with a penitent air upon her, and a penitent
feeling in her heart. The second was, that she had not an intention or
a thought of going home, until she had announced it to him as a settled
design.

‘What can I mean by it, or what can he mean by it?’ was her mental
inquiry: ‘He has no right to any power over me, and how do I come to
mind him when I don’t care for him?’

Mrs Boffin, insisting that Bella should make tomorrow’s expedition
in the chariot, she went home in great grandeur. Mrs Wilfer and Miss
Lavinia had speculated much on the probabilities and improbabilities of
her coming in this gorgeous state, and, on beholding the chariot from
the window at which they were secreted to look out for it, agreed
that it must be detained at the door as long as possible, for the
mortification and confusion of the neighbours. Then they repaired to
the usual family room, to receive Miss Bella with a becoming show of
indifference.

The family room looked very small and very mean, and the downward
staircase by which it was attained looked very narrow and very crooked.
The little house and all its arrangements were a poor contrast to the
eminently aristocratic dwelling. ‘I can hardly believe,’ thought Bella,
‘that I ever did endure life in this place!’

Gloomy majesty on the part of Mrs Wilfer, and native pertness on the
part of Lavvy, did not mend the matter. Bella really stood in natural
need of a little help, and she got none.

‘This,’ said Mrs Wilfer, presenting a cheek to be kissed, as sympathetic
and responsive as the back of the bowl of a spoon, ‘is quite an honour!
You will probably find your sister Lavvy grown, Bella.’

‘Ma,’ Miss Lavinia interposed, ‘there can be no objection to your being
aggravating, because Bella richly deserves it; but I really must request
that you will not drag in such ridiculous nonsense as my having grown
when I am past the growing age.’

‘I grew, myself,’ Mrs Wilfer sternly proclaimed, ‘after I was married.’

‘Very well, Ma,’ returned Lavvy, ‘then I think you had much better have
left it alone.’

The lofty glare with which the majestic woman received this answer,
might have embarrassed a less pert opponent, but it had no effect upon
Lavinia: who, leaving her parent to the enjoyment of any amount of
glaring at she might deem desirable under the circumstances, accosted
her sister, undismayed.

‘I suppose you won’t consider yourself quite disgraced, Bella, if I give
you a kiss? Well! And how do you do, Bella? And how are your Boffins?’

‘Peace!’ exclaimed Mrs Wilfer. ‘Hold! I will not suffer this tone of
levity.’

‘My goodness me! How are your Spoffins, then?’ said Lavvy, ‘since Ma so
very much objects to your Boffins.’

‘Impertinent girl! Minx!’ said Mrs Wilfer, with dread severity.

‘I don’t care whether I am a Minx, or a Sphinx,’ returned Lavinia,
coolly, tossing her head; ‘it’s exactly the same thing to me, and I’d
every bit as soon be one as the other; but I know this--I’ll not grow
after I’m married!’

‘You will not? YOU will not?’ repeated Mrs Wilfer, solemnly.

‘No, Ma, I will not. Nothing shall induce me.’

Mrs Wilfer, having waved her gloves, became loftily pathetic.

‘But it was to be expected;’ thus she spake. ‘A child of mine deserts me
for the proud and prosperous, and another child of mine despises me. It
is quite fitting.’

‘Ma,’ Bella struck in, ‘Mr and Mrs Boffin are prosperous, no doubt; but
you have no right to say they are proud. You must know very well that
they are not.’

‘In short, Ma,’ said Lavvy, bouncing over to the enemy without a word
of notice, ‘you must know very well--or if you don’t, more shame for
you!--that Mr and Mrs Boffin are just absolute perfection.’

‘Truly,’ returned Mrs Wilfer, courteously receiving the deserter, ‘it
would seem that we are required to think so. And this, Lavinia, is
my reason for objecting to a tone of levity. Mrs Boffin (of whose
physiognomy I can never speak with the composure I would desire to
preserve), and your mother, are not on terms of intimacy. It is not
for a moment to be supposed that she and her husband dare to presume to
speak of this family as the Wilfers. I cannot therefore condescend to
speak of them as the Boffins. No; for such a tone--call it familiarity,
levity, equality, or what you will--would imply those social
interchanges which do not exist. Do I render myself intelligible?’

Without taking the least notice of this inquiry, albeit delivered in an
imposing and forensic manner, Lavinia reminded her sister, ‘After all,
you know, Bella, you haven’t told us how your Whatshisnames are.’

‘I don’t want to speak of them here,’ replied Bella, suppressing
indignation, and tapping her foot on the floor. ‘They are much too kind
and too good to be drawn into these discussions.’

‘Why put it so?’ demanded Mrs Wilfer, with biting sarcasm. ‘Why adopt a
circuitous form of speech? It is polite and it is obliging; but why do
it? Why not openly say that they are much too kind and too good for US?
We understand the allusion. Why disguise the phrase?’

‘Ma,’ said Bella, with one beat of her foot, ‘you are enough to drive a
saint mad, and so is Lavvy.’

‘Unfortunate Lavvy!’ cried Mrs Wilfer, in a tone of commiseration. ‘She
always comes for it. My poor child!’ But Lavvy, with the suddenness of
her former desertion, now bounced over to the other enemy: very sharply
remarking, ‘Don’t patronize ME, Ma, because I can take care of myself.’

‘I only wonder,’ resumed Mrs Wilfer, directing her observations to her
elder daughter, as safer on the whole than her utterly unmanageable
younger, ‘that you found time and inclination to tear yourself from
Mr and Mrs Boffin, and come to see us at all. I only wonder that our
claims, contending against the superior claims of Mr and Mrs Boffin,
had any weight. I feel I ought to be thankful for gaining so much, in
competition with Mr and Mrs Boffin.’ (The good lady bitterly emphasized
the first letter of the word Boffin, as if it represented her chief
objection to the owners of that name, and as if she could have born
Doffin, Moffin, or Poffin much better.)

‘Ma,’ said Bella, angrily, ‘you force me to say that I am truly sorry I
did come home, and that I never will come home again, except when poor
dear Pa is here. For, Pa is too magnanimous to feel envy and spite
towards my generous friends, and Pa is delicate enough and gentle enough
to remember the sort of little claim they thought I had upon them and
the unusually trying position in which, through no act of my own, I had
been placed. And I always did love poor dear Pa better than all the rest
of you put together, and I always do and I always shall!’

Here Bella, deriving no comfort from her charming bonnet and her elegant
dress, burst into tears.

‘I think, R.W.,’ cried Mrs Wilfer, lifting up her eyes and
apostrophising the air, ‘that if you were present, it would be a
trial to your feelings to hear your wife and the mother of your family
depreciated in your name. But Fate has spared you this, R.W., whatever
it may have thought proper to inflict upon her!’

Here Mrs Wilfer burst into tears.

‘I hate the Boffins!’ protested Miss Lavinia. ‘I don’t care who objects
to their being called the Boffins. I WILL call ‘em the Boffins. The
Boffins, the Boffins, the Boffins! And I say they are mischief-making
Boffins, and I say the Boffins have set Bella against me, and I tell the
Boffins to their faces:’ which was not strictly the fact, but the
young lady was excited: ‘that they are detestable Boffins, disreputable
Boffins, odious Boffins, beastly Boffins. There!’

Here Miss Lavinia burst into tears.

The front garden-gate clanked, and the Secretary was seen coming at a
brisk pace up the steps. ‘Leave Me to open the door to him,’ said Mrs
Wilfer, rising with stately resignation as she shook her head and dried
her eyes; ‘we have at present no stipendiary girl to do so. We have
nothing to conceal. If he sees these traces of emotion on our cheeks,
let him construe them as he may.’

With those words she stalked out. In a few moments she stalked in again,
proclaiming in her heraldic manner, ‘Mr Rokesmith is the bearer of a
packet for Miss Bella Wilfer.’

Mr Rokesmith followed close upon his name, and of course saw what was
amiss. But he discreetly affected to see nothing, and addressed Miss
Bella.

‘Mr Boffin intended to have placed this in the carriage for you
this morning. He wished you to have it, as a little keepsake he had
prepared--it is only a purse, Miss Wilfer--but as he was disappointed in
his fancy, I volunteered to come after you with it.’

Bella took it in her hand, and thanked him.

‘We have been quarrelling here a little, Mr Rokesmith, but not more than
we used; you know our agreeable ways among ourselves. You find me just
going. Good-bye, mamma. Good-bye, Lavvy!’ and with a kiss for each Miss
Bella turned to the door. The Secretary would have attended her, but
Mrs Wilfer advancing and saying with dignity, ‘Pardon me! Permit me to
assert my natural right to escort my child to the equipage which is
in waiting for her,’ he begged pardon and gave place. It was a very
magnificent spectacle indeed, to see Mrs Wilfer throw open the
house-door, and loudly demand with extended gloves, ‘The male domestic
of Mrs Boffin!’ To whom presenting himself, she delivered the brief but
majestic charge, ‘Miss Wilfer. Coming out!’ and so delivered her over,
like a female Lieutenant of the Tower relinquishing a State Prisoner.
The effect of this ceremonial was for some quarter of an hour afterwards
perfectly paralyzing on the neighbours, and was much enhanced by the
worthy lady airing herself for that term in a kind of splendidly serene
trance on the top step.

When Bella was seated in the carriage, she opened the little packet in
her hand. It contained a pretty purse, and the purse contained a bank
note for fifty pounds. ‘This shall be a joyful surprise for poor dear
Pa,’ said Bella, ‘and I’ll take it myself into the City!’

As she was uninformed respecting the exact locality of the place of
business of Chicksey Veneering and Stobbles, but knew it to be near
Mincing Lane, she directed herself to be driven to the corner of that
darksome spot. Thence she despatched ‘the male domestic of Mrs Boffin,’
in search of the counting-house of Chicksey Veneering and Stobbles, with
a message importing that if R. Wilfer could come out, there was a lady
waiting who would be glad to speak with him. The delivery of these
mysterious words from the mouth of a footman caused so great an
excitement in the counting-house, that a youthful scout was instantly
appointed to follow Rumty, observe the lady, and come in with his
report. Nor was the agitation by any means diminished, when the scout
rushed back with the intelligence that the lady was ‘a slap-up gal in a
bang-up chariot.’

Rumty himself, with his pen behind his ear under his rusty hat, arrived
at the carriage-door in a breathless condition, and had been fairly
lugged into the vehicle by his cravat and embraced almost unto choking,
before he recognized his daughter. ‘My dear child!’ he then panted,
incoherently. ‘Good gracious me! What a lovely woman you are! I thought
you had been unkind and forgotten your mother and sister.’

‘I have just been to see them, Pa dear.’

‘Oh! and how--how did you find your mother?’ asked R. W., dubiously.

‘Very disagreeable, Pa, and so was Lavvy.’

‘They are sometimes a little liable to it,’ observed the patient cherub;
‘but I hope you made allowances, Bella, my dear?’

‘No. I was disagreeable too, Pa; we were all of us disagreeable
together. But I want you to come and dine with me somewhere, Pa.’

‘Why, my dear, I have already partaken of a--if one might mention such
an article in this superb chariot--of a--Saveloy,’ replied R. Wilfer,
modestly dropping his voice on the word, as he eyed the canary-coloured
fittings.

‘Oh! That’s nothing, Pa!’

‘Truly, it ain’t as much as one could sometimes wish it to be, my
dear,’ he admitted, drawing his hand across his mouth. ‘Still, when
circumstances over which you have no control, interpose obstacles
between yourself and Small Germans, you can’t do better than bring a
contented mind to hear on’--again dropping his voice in deference to the
chariot--‘Saveloys!’

‘You poor good Pa! Pa, do, I beg and pray, get leave for the rest of the
day, and come and pass it with me!’

‘Well, my dear, I’ll cut back and ask for leave.’

‘But before you cut back,’ said Bella, who had already taken him by the
chin, pulled his hat off, and begun to stick up his hair in her old way,
‘do say that you are sure I am giddy and inconsiderate, but have never
really slighted you, Pa.’

‘My dear, I say it with all my heart. And might I likewise observe,’ her
father delicately hinted, with a glance out at window, ‘that perhaps
it might be calculated to attract attention, having one’s hair publicly
done by a lovely woman in an elegant turn-out in Fenchurch Street?’

Bella laughed and put on his hat again. But when his boyish figure
bobbed away, its shabbiness and cheerful patience smote the tears out
of her eyes. ‘I hate that Secretary for thinking it of me,’ she said to
herself, ‘and yet it seems half true!’

Back came her father, more like a boy than ever, in his release from
school. ‘All right, my dear. Leave given at once. Really very handsomely
done!’

‘Now where can we find some quiet place, Pa, in which I can wait for you
while you go on an errand for me, if I send the carriage away?’

It demanded cogitation. ‘You see, my dear,’ he explained, ‘you really
have become such a very lovely woman, that it ought to be a very quiet
place.’ At length he suggested, ‘Near the garden up by the Trinity House
on Tower Hill.’ So, they were driven there, and Bella dismissed the
chariot; sending a pencilled note by it to Mrs Boffin, that she was with
her father.

‘Now, Pa, attend to what I am going to say, and promise and vow to be
obedient.’

‘I promise and vow, my dear.’

‘You ask no questions. You take this purse; you go to the nearest place
where they keep everything of the very very best, ready made; you buy
and put on, the most beautiful suit of clothes, the most beautiful hat,
and the most beautiful pair of bright boots (patent leather, Pa, mind!)
that are to be got for money; and you come back to me.’

‘But, my dear Bella--’

‘Take care, Pa!’ pointing her forefinger at him, merrily. ‘You have
promised and vowed. It’s perjury, you know.’

There was water in the foolish little fellow’s eyes, but she kissed them
dry (though her own were wet), and he bobbed away again. After half an
hour, he came back, so brilliantly transformed, that Bella was obliged
to walk round him in ecstatic admiration twenty times, before she could
draw her arm through his, and delightedly squeeze it.

‘Now, Pa,’ said Bella, hugging him close, ‘take this lovely woman out to
dinner.’

‘Where shall we go, my dear?’

‘Greenwich!’ said Bella, valiantly. ‘And be sure you treat this lovely
woman with everything of the best.’

While they were going along to take boat, ‘Don’t you wish, my dear,’
said R. W., timidly, ‘that your mother was here?’

‘No, I don’t, Pa, for I like to have you all to myself to-day. I was
always your little favourite at home, and you were always mine. We have
run away together often, before now; haven’t we, Pa?’

‘Ah, to be sure we have! Many a Sunday when your mother was--was a
little liable to it,’ repeating his former delicate expression after
pausing to cough.

‘Yes, and I am afraid I was seldom or never as good as I ought to have
been, Pa. I made you carry me, over and over again, when you should
have made me walk; and I often drove you in harness, when you would much
rather have sat down and read your news-paper: didn’t I?’

‘Sometimes, sometimes. But Lor, what a child you were! What a companion
you were!’

‘Companion? That’s just what I want to be to-day, Pa.’

‘You are safe to succeed, my love. Your brothers and sisters have all
in their turns been companions to me, to a certain extent, but only to a
certain extent. Your mother has, throughout life, been a companion that
any man might--might look up to--and--and commit the sayings of, to
memory--and--form himself upon--if he--’

‘If he liked the model?’ suggested Bella.

‘We-ell, ye-es,’ he returned, thinking about it, not quite satisfied
with the phrase: ‘or perhaps I might say, if it was in him. Supposing,
for instance, that a man wanted to be always marching, he would find
your mother an inestimable companion. But if he had any taste for
walking, or should wish at any time to break into a trot, he might
sometimes find it a little difficult to keep step with your mother.
Or take it this way, Bella,’ he added, after a moment’s reflection;
‘Supposing that a man had to go through life, we won’t say with a
companion, but we’ll say to a tune. Very good. Supposing that the tune
allotted to him was the Dead March in Saul. Well. It would be a very
suitable tune for particular occasions--none better--but it would
be difficult to keep time with in the ordinary run of domestic
transactions. For instance, if he took his supper after a hard day, to
the Dead March in Saul, his food might be likely to sit heavy on him.
Or, if he was at any time inclined to relieve his mind by singing a
comic song or dancing a hornpipe, and was obliged to do it to the Dead
March in Saul, he might find himself put out in the execution of his
lively intentions.’

‘Poor Pa!’ thought Bella, as she hung upon his arm.

‘Now, what I will say for you, my dear,’ the cherub pursued mildly and
without a notion of complaining, ‘is, that you are so adaptable. So
adaptable.’

‘Indeed I am afraid I have shown a wretched temper, Pa. I am afraid
I have been very complaining, and very capricious. I seldom or never
thought of it before. But when I sat in the carriage just now and saw
you coming along the pavement, I reproached myself.’

‘Not at all, my dear. Don’t speak of such a thing.’

A happy and a chatty man was Pa in his new clothes that day. Take it
for all in all, it was perhaps the happiest day he had ever known in his
life; not even excepting that on which his heroic partner had approached
the nuptial altar to the tune of the Dead March in Saul.

The little expedition down the river was delightful, and the little
room overlooking the river into which they were shown for dinner was
delightful. Everything was delightful. The park was delightful, the
punch was delightful, the dishes of fish were delightful, the wine
was delightful. Bella was more delightful than any other item in the
festival; drawing Pa out in the gayest manner; making a point of always
mentioning herself as the lovely woman; stimulating Pa to order things,
by declaring that the lovely woman insisted on being treated with them;
and in short causing Pa to be quite enraptured with the consideration
that he WAS the Pa of such a charming daughter.

And then, as they sat looking at the ships and steamboats making their
way to the sea with the tide that was running down, the lovely woman
imagined all sorts of voyages for herself and Pa. Now, Pa, in the
character of owner of a lumbering square-sailed collier, was tacking
away to Newcastle, to fetch black diamonds to make his fortune with;
now, Pa was going to China in that handsome threemasted ship, to bring
home opium, with which he would for ever cut out Chicksey Veneering
and Stobbles, and to bring home silks and shawls without end for the
decoration of his charming daughter. Now, John Harmon’s disastrous fate
was all a dream, and he had come home and found the lovely woman just
the article for him, and the lovely woman had found him just the article
for her, and they were going away on a trip, in their gallant bark,
to look after their vines, with streamers flying at all points, a band
playing on deck and Pa established in the great cabin. Now, John Harmon
was consigned to his grave again, and a merchant of immense wealth
(name unknown) had courted and married the lovely woman, and he was
so enormously rich that everything you saw upon the river sailing or
steaming belonged to him, and he kept a perfect fleet of yachts for
pleasure, and that little impudent yacht which you saw over there, with
the great white sail, was called The Bella, in honour of his wife, and
she held her state aboard when it pleased her, like a modern Cleopatra.
Anon, there would embark in that troop-ship when she got to Gravesend, a
mighty general, of large property (name also unknown), who wouldn’t
hear of going to victory without his wife, and whose wife was the lovely
woman, and she was destined to become the idol of all the red coats and
blue jackets alow and aloft. And then again: you saw that ship being
towed out by a steam-tug? Well! where did you suppose she was going to?
She was going among the coral reefs and cocoa-nuts and all that sort of
thing, and she was chartered for a fortunate individual of the name
of Pa (himself on board, and much respected by all hands), and she
was going, for his sole profit and advantage, to fetch a cargo of
sweet-smelling woods, the most beautiful that ever were seen, and the
most profitable that ever were heard of; and her cargo would be a great
fortune, as indeed it ought to be: the lovely woman who had purchased
her and fitted her expressly for this voyage, being married to an Indian
Prince, who was a Something-or-Other, and who wore Cashmere shawls all
over himself and diamonds and emeralds blazing in his turban, and was
beautifully coffee-coloured and excessively devoted, though a little too
jealous. Thus Bella ran on merrily, in a manner perfectly enchanting to
Pa, who was as willing to put his head into the Sultan’s tub of water as
the beggar-boys below the window were to put THEIR heads in the mud.

‘I suppose, my dear,’ said Pa after dinner, ‘we may come to the
conclusion at home, that we have lost you for good?’

Bella shook her head. Didn’t know. Couldn’t say. All she was able to
report was, that she was most handsomely supplied with everything she
could possibly want, and that whenever she hinted at leaving Mr and Mrs
Boffin, they wouldn’t hear of it.

‘And now, Pa,’ pursued Bella, ‘I’ll make a confession to you. I am the
most mercenary little wretch that ever lived in the world.’

‘I should hardly have thought it of you, my dear,’ returned her father,
first glancing at himself; and then at the dessert.

‘I understand what you mean, Pa, but it’s not that. It’s not that I care
for money to keep as money, but I do care so much for what it will buy!’

‘Really I think most of us do,’ returned R. W.

‘But not to the dreadful extent that I do, Pa. O-o!’ cried Bella,
screwing the exclamation out of herself with a twist of her dimpled
chin. ‘I AM so mercenary!’

With a wistful glance R. W. said, in default of having anything better
to say: ‘About when did you begin to feel it coming on, my dear?’

‘That’s it, Pa. That’s the terrible part of it. When I was at home, and
only knew what it was to be poor, I grumbled but didn’t so much mind.
When I was at home expecting to be rich, I thought vaguely of all the
great things I would do. But when I had been disappointed of my splendid
fortune, and came to see it from day to day in other hands, and to have
before my eyes what it could really do, then I became the mercenary
little wretch I am.’

‘It’s your fancy, my dear.’

‘I can assure you it’s nothing of the sort, Pa!’ said Bella, nodding at
him, with her very pretty eyebrows raised as high as they would go, and
looking comically frightened. ‘It’s a fact. I am always avariciously
scheming.’

‘Lor! But how?’

‘I’ll tell you, Pa. I don’t mind telling YOU, because we have always
been favourites of each other’s, and because you are not like a Pa, but
more like a sort of a younger brother with a dear venerable chubbiness
on him. And besides,’ added Bella, laughing as she pointed a rallying
finger at his face, ‘because I have got you in my power. This is a
secret expedition. If ever you tell of me, I’ll tell of you. I’ll tell
Ma that you dined at Greenwich.’

‘Well; seriously, my dear,’ observed R. W., with some trepidation of
manner, ‘it might be as well not to mention it.’

‘Aha!’ laughed Bella. ‘I knew you wouldn’t like it, sir! So you keep my
confidence, and I’ll keep yours. But betray the lovely woman, and you
shall find her a serpent. Now, you may give me a kiss, Pa, and I should
like to give your hair a turn, because it has been dreadfully neglected
in my absence.’

R. W. submitted his head to the operator, and the operator went on
talking; at the same time putting separate locks of his hair through
a curious process of being smartly rolled over her two revolving
forefingers, which were then suddenly pulled out of it in opposite
lateral directions. On each of these occasions the patient winced and
winked.

‘I have made up my mind that I must have money, Pa. I feel that I can’t
beg it, borrow it, or steal it; and so I have resolved that I must marry
it.’

R. W. cast up his eyes towards her, as well as he could under the
operating circumstances, and said in a tone of remonstrance, ‘My de-ar
Bella!’

‘Have resolved, I say, Pa, that to get money I must marry money. In
consequence of which, I am always looking out for money to captivate.’

‘My de-a-r Bella!’

‘Yes, Pa, that is the state of the case. If ever there was a mercenary
plotter whose thoughts and designs were always in her mean occupation, I
am the amiable creature. But I don’t care. I hate and detest being
poor, and I won’t be poor if I can marry money. Now you are deliciously
fluffy, Pa, and in a state to astonish the waiter and pay the bill.’

‘But, my dear Bella, this is quite alarming at your age.’

‘I told you so, Pa, but you wouldn’t believe it,’ returned Bella, with a
pleasant childish gravity. ‘Isn’t it shocking?’

‘It would be quite so, if you fully knew what you said, my dear, or
meant it.’

‘Well, Pa, I can only tell you that I mean nothing else. Talk to me of
love!’ said Bella, contemptuously: though her face and figure certainly
rendered the subject no incongruous one. ‘Talk to me of fiery dragons!
But talk to me of poverty and wealth, and there indeed we touch upon
realities.’

‘My De-ar, this is becoming Awful--’ her father was emphatically
beginning: when she stopped him.

‘Pa, tell me. Did you marry money?’

‘You know I didn’t, my dear.’

Bella hummed the Dead March in Saul, and said, after all it signified
very little! But seeing him look grave and downcast, she took him round
the neck and kissed him back to cheerfulness again.

‘I didn’t mean that last touch, Pa; it was only said in joke. Now mind!
You are not to tell of me, and I’ll not tell of you. And more than that;
I promise to have no secrets from you, Pa, and you may make certain
that, whatever mercenary things go on, I shall always tell you all about
them in strict confidence.’

Fain to be satisfied with this concession from the lovely woman, R. W.
rang the bell, and paid the bill. ‘Now, all the rest of this, Pa,’ said
Bella, rolling up the purse when they were alone again, hammering it
small with her little fist on the table, and cramming it into one of the
pockets of his new waistcoat, ‘is for you, to buy presents with for them
at home, and to pay bills with, and to divide as you like, and spend
exactly as you think proper. Last of all take notice, Pa, that it’s
not the fruit of any avaricious scheme. Perhaps if it was, your little
mercenary wretch of a daughter wouldn’t make so free with it!’

After which, she tugged at his coat with both hands, and pulled him all
askew in buttoning that garment over the precious waistcoat pocket, and
then tied her dimples into her bonnet-strings in a very knowing way, and
took him back to London. Arrived at Mr Boffin’s door, she set him with
his back against it, tenderly took him by the ears as convenient handles
for her purpose, and kissed him until he knocked muffled double knocks
at the door with the back of his head. That done, she once more reminded
him of their compact and gaily parted from him.

Not so gaily, however, but that tears filled her eyes as he went away
down the dark street. Not so gaily, but that she several times said,
‘Ah, poor little Pa! Ah, poor dear struggling shabby little Pa!’
before she took heart to knock at the door. Not so gaily, but that the
brilliant furniture seemed to stare her out of countenance as if it
insisted on being compared with the dingy furniture at home. Not so
gaily, but that she fell into very low spirits sitting late in her own
room, and very heartily wept, as she wished, now that the deceased old
John Harmon had never made a will about her, now that the deceased young
John Harmon had lived to marry her. ‘Contradictory things to wish,’ said
Bella, ‘but my life and fortunes are so contradictory altogether that
what can I expect myself to be!’



Chapter 9

IN WHICH THE ORPHAN MAKES HIS WILL


The Secretary, working in the Dismal Swamp betimes next morning, was
informed that a youth waited in the hall who gave the name of Sloppy.
The footman who communicated this intelligence made a decent pause
before uttering the name, to express that it was forced on his
reluctance by the youth in question, and that if the youth had had
the good sense and good taste to inherit some other name it would have
spared the feelings of him the bearer.

‘Mrs Boffin will be very well pleased,’ said the Secretary in a
perfectly composed way. ‘Show him in.’

Mr Sloppy being introduced, remained close to the door: revealing
in various parts of his form many surprising, confounding, and
incomprehensible buttons.

‘I am glad to see you,’ said John Rokesmith, in a cheerful tone of
welcome. ‘I have been expecting you.’

Sloppy explained that he had meant to come before, but that the Orphan
(of whom he made mention as Our Johnny) had been ailing, and he had
waited to report him well.

‘Then he is well now?’ said the Secretary.

‘No he ain’t,’ said Sloppy.

Mr Sloppy having shaken his head to a considerable extent, proceeded
to remark that he thought Johnny ‘must have took ‘em from the Minders.’
Being asked what he meant, he answered, them that come out upon him and
partickler his chest. Being requested to explain himself, he stated that
there was some of ‘em wot you couldn’t kiver with a sixpence. Pressed to
fall back upon a nominative case, he opined that they wos about as
red as ever red could be. ‘But as long as they strikes out’ards, sir,’
continued Sloppy, ‘they ain’t so much. It’s their striking in’ards
that’s to be kep off.’

John Rokesmith hoped the child had had medical attendance? Oh yes, said
Sloppy, he had been took to the doctor’s shop once. And what did the
doctor call it? Rokesmith asked him. After some perplexed reflection,
Sloppy answered, brightening, ‘He called it something as wos wery
long for spots.’ Rokesmith suggested measles. ‘No,’ said Sloppy with
confidence, ‘ever so much longer than THEM, sir!’ (Mr Sloppy was
elevated by this fact, and seemed to consider that it reflected credit
on the poor little patient.)

‘Mrs Boffin will be sorry to hear this,’ said Rokesmith.

‘Mrs Higden said so, sir, when she kep it from her, hoping as Our Johnny
would work round.’

‘But I hope he will?’ said Rokesmith, with a quick turn upon the
messenger.

‘I hope so,’ answered Sloppy. ‘It all depends on their striking
in’ards.’ He then went on to say that whether Johnny had ‘took ‘em’
from the Minders, or whether the Minders had ‘took ’em from Johnny,
the Minders had been sent home and had ‘got ’em.’ Furthermore, that Mrs
Higden’s days and nights being devoted to Our Johnny, who was never out
of her lap, the whole of the mangling arrangements had devolved upon
himself, and he had had ‘rayther a tight time’. The ungainly piece of
honesty beamed and blushed as he said it, quite enraptured with the
remembrance of having been serviceable.

‘Last night,’ said Sloppy, ‘when I was a-turning at the wheel pretty
late, the mangle seemed to go like Our Johnny’s breathing. It begun
beautiful, then as it went out it shook a little and got unsteady, then
as it took the turn to come home it had a rattle-like and lumbered a
bit, then it come smooth, and so it went on till I scarce know’d which
was mangle and which was Our Johnny. Nor Our Johnny, he scarce know’d
either, for sometimes when the mangle lumbers he says, “Me choking,
Granny!” and Mrs Higden holds him up in her lap and says to me “Bide a
bit, Sloppy,” and we all stops together. And when Our Johnny gets his
breathing again, I turns again, and we all goes on together.’

Sloppy had gradually expanded with his description into a stare and a
vacant grin. He now contracted, being silent, into a half-repressed gush
of tears, and, under pretence of being heated, drew the under part of
his sleeve across his eyes with a singularly awkward, laborious, and
roundabout smear.

‘This is unfortunate,’ said Rokesmith. ‘I must go and break it to Mrs
Boffin. Stay you here, Sloppy.’

Sloppy stayed there, staring at the pattern of the paper on the wall,
until the Secretary and Mrs Boffin came back together. And with Mrs
Boffin was a young lady (Miss Bella Wilfer by name) who was better worth
staring at, it occurred to Sloppy, than the best of wall-papering.

‘Ah, my poor dear pretty little John Harmon!’ exclaimed Mrs Boffin.

‘Yes mum,’ said the sympathetic Sloppy.

‘You don’t think he is in a very, very bad way, do you?’ asked the
pleasant creature with her wholesome cordiality.

Put upon his good faith, and finding it in collision with his
inclinations, Sloppy threw back his head and uttered a mellifluous howl,
rounded off with a sniff.

‘So bad as that!’ cried Mrs Boffin. ‘And Betty Higden not to tell me of
it sooner!’

‘I think she might have been mistrustful, mum,’ answered Sloppy,
hesitating.

‘Of what, for Heaven’s sake?’

‘I think she might have been mistrustful, mum,’ returned Sloppy with
submission, ‘of standing in Our Johnny’s light. There’s so much trouble
in illness, and so much expense, and she’s seen such a lot of its being
objected to.’

‘But she never can have thought,’ said Mrs Boffin, ‘that I would grudge
the dear child anything?’

‘No mum, but she might have thought (as a habit-like) of its standing
in Johnny’s light, and might have tried to bring him through it
unbeknownst.’

Sloppy knew his ground well. To conceal herself in sickness, like a
lower animal; to creep out of sight and coil herself away and die; had
become this woman’s instinct. To catch up in her arms the sick child who
was dear to her, and hide it as if it were a criminal, and keep off all
ministration but such as her own ignorant tenderness and patience could
supply, had become this woman’s idea of maternal love, fidelity, and
duty. The shameful accounts we read, every week in the Christian year,
my lords and gentlemen and honourable boards, the infamous records of
small official inhumanity, do not pass by the people as they pass by
us. And hence these irrational, blind, and obstinate prejudices, so
astonishing to our magnificence, and having no more reason in them--God
save the Queen and Confound their politics--no, than smoke has in coming
from fire!

‘It’s not a right place for the poor child to stay in,’ said Mrs Boffin.
‘Tell us, dear Mr Rokesmith, what to do for the best.’

He had already thought what to do, and the consultation was very short.
He could pave the way, he said, in half an hour, and then they would go
down to Brentford. ‘Pray take me,’ said Bella. Therefore a carriage was
ordered, of capacity to take them all, and in the meantime Sloppy
was regaled, feasting alone in the Secretary’s room, with a complete
realization of that fairy vision--meat, beer, vegetables, and pudding.
In consequence of which his buttons became more importunate of public
notice than before, with the exception of two or three about the region
of the waistband, which modestly withdrew into a creasy retirement.

Punctual to the time, appeared the carriage and the Secretary. He sat
on the box, and Mr Sloppy graced the rumble. So, to the Three Magpies as
before: where Mrs Boffin and Miss Bella were handed out, and whence they
all went on foot to Mrs Betty Higden’s.

But, on the way down, they had stopped at a toy-shop, and had bought
that noble charger, a description of whose points and trappings had on
the last occasion conciliated the then worldly-minded orphan, and also a
Noah’s ark, and also a yellow bird with an artificial voice in him,
and also a military doll so well dressed that if he had only been of
life-size his brother-officers in the Guards might never have found him
out. Bearing these gifts, they raised the latch of Betty Higden’s door,
and saw her sitting in the dimmest and furthest corner with poor Johnny
in her lap.

‘And how’s my boy, Betty?’ asked Mrs Boffin, sitting down beside her.

‘He’s bad! He’s bad!’ said Betty. ‘I begin to be afeerd he’ll not be
yours any more than mine. All others belonging to him have gone to
the Power and the Glory, and I have a mind that they’re drawing him to
them--leading him away.’

‘No, no, no,’ said Mrs Boffin.

‘I don’t know why else he clenches his little hand as if it had hold of
a finger that I can’t see. Look at it,’ said Betty, opening the wrappers
in which the flushed child lay, and showing his small right hand lying
closed upon his breast. ‘It’s always so. It don’t mind me.’

‘Is he asleep?’

‘No, I think not. You’re not asleep, my Johnny?’

‘No,’ said Johnny, with a quiet air of pity for himself; and without
opening his eyes.

‘Here’s the lady, Johnny. And the horse.’

Johnny could bear the lady, with complete indifference, but not the
horse. Opening his heavy eyes, he slowly broke into a smile on beholding
that splendid phenomenon, and wanted to take it in his arms. As it was
much too big, it was put upon a chair where he could hold it by the mane
and contemplate it. Which he soon forgot to do.

But, Johnny murmuring something with his eyes closed, and Mrs Boffin
not knowing what, old Betty bent her ear to listen and took pains to
understand. Being asked by her to repeat what he had said, he did so two
or three times, and then it came out that he must have seen more than
they supposed when he looked up to see the horse, for the murmur was,
‘Who is the boofer lady?’ Now, the boofer, or beautiful, lady was Bella;
and whereas this notice from the poor baby would have touched her of
itself; it was rendered more pathetic by the late melting of her heart
to her poor little father, and their joke about the lovely woman. So,
Bella’s behaviour was very tender and very natural when she kneeled on
the brick floor to clasp the child, and when the child, with a child’s
admiration of what is young and pretty, fondled the boofer lady.

‘Now, my good dear Betty,’ said Mrs Boffin, hoping that she saw her
opportunity, and laying her hand persuasively on her arm; ‘we have come
to remove Johnny from this cottage to where he can be taken better care
of.’

Instantly, and before another word could be spoken, the old woman
started up with blazing eyes, and rushed at the door with the sick
child.

‘Stand away from me every one of ye!’ she cried out wildly. ‘I see what
ye mean now. Let me go my way, all of ye. I’d sooner kill the Pretty,
and kill myself!’

‘Stay, stay!’ said Rokesmith, soothing her. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘I understand too well. I know too much about it, sir. I’ve run from
it too many a year. No! Never for me, nor for the child, while there’s
water enough in England to cover us!’

The terror, the shame, the passion of horror and repugnance, firing the
worn face and perfectly maddening it, would have been a quite terrible
sight, if embodied in one old fellow-creature alone. Yet it ‘crops
up’--as our slang goes--my lords and gentlemen and honourable boards, in
other fellow-creatures, rather frequently!

‘It’s been chasing me all my life, but it shall never take me nor mine
alive!’ cried old Betty. ‘I’ve done with ye. I’d have fastened door and
window and starved out, afore I’d ever have let ye in, if I had known
what ye came for!’

But, catching sight of Mrs Boffin’s wholesome face, she relented, and
crouching down by the door and bending over her burden to hush it, said
humbly: ‘Maybe my fears has put me wrong. If they have so, tell me, and
the good Lord forgive me! I’m quick to take this fright, I know, and my
head is summ’at light with wearying and watching.’

‘There, there, there!’ returned Mrs Boffin. ‘Come, come! Say no more of
it, Betty. It was a mistake, a mistake. Any one of us might have made it
in your place, and felt just as you do.’

‘The Lord bless ye!’ said the old woman, stretching out her hand.

‘Now, see, Betty,’ pursued the sweet compassionate soul, holding the
hand kindly, ‘what I really did mean, and what I should have begun by
saying out, if I had only been a little wiser and handier. We want to
move Johnny to a place where there are none but children; a place set
up on purpose for sick children; where the good doctors and nurses pass
their lives with children, talk to none but children, touch none but
children, comfort and cure none but children.’

‘Is there really such a place?’ asked the old woman, with a gaze of
wonder.

‘Yes, Betty, on my word, and you shall see it. If my home was a better
place for the dear boy, I’d take him to it; but indeed indeed it’s not.’

‘You shall take him,’ returned Betty, fervently kissing the comforting
hand, ‘where you will, my deary. I am not so hard, but that I believe
your face and voice, and I will, as long as I can see and hear.’

This victory gained, Rokesmith made haste to profit by it, for he saw
how woefully time had been lost. He despatched Sloppy to bring the
carriage to the door; caused the child to be carefully wrapped up; bade
old Betty get her bonnet on; collected the toys, enabling the little
fellow to comprehend that his treasures were to be transported with
him; and had all things prepared so easily that they were ready for
the carriage as soon as it appeared, and in a minute afterwards were
on their way. Sloppy they left behind, relieving his overcharged breast
with a paroxysm of mangling.

At the Children’s Hospital, the gallant steed, the Noah’s ark, yellow
bird, and the officer in the Guards, were made as welcome as their
child-owner. But the doctor said aside to Rokesmith, ‘This should have
been days ago. Too late!’

However, they were all carried up into a fresh airy room, and there
Johnny came to himself, out of a sleep or a swoon or whatever it was,
to find himself lying in a little quiet bed, with a little platform over
his breast, on which were already arranged, to give him heart and urge
him to cheer up, the Noah’s ark, the noble steed, and the yellow bird;
with the officer in the Guards doing duty over the whole, quite as much
to the satisfaction of his country as if he had been upon Parade. And at
the bed’s head was a coloured picture beautiful to see, representing as
it were another Johnny seated on the knee of some Angel surely who loved
little children. And, marvellous fact, to lie and stare at: Johnny had
become one of a little family, all in little quiet beds (except two
playing dominoes in little arm-chairs at a little table on the hearth):
and on all the little beds were little platforms whereon were to be
seen dolls’ houses, woolly dogs with mechanical barks in them not very
dissimilar from the artificial voice pervading the bowels of the yellow
bird, tin armies, Moorish tumblers, wooden tea things, and the riches of
the earth.

As Johnny murmured something in his placid admiration, the ministering
women at his bed’s head asked him what he said. It seemed that he wanted
to know whether all these were brothers and sisters of his? So they told
him yes. It seemed then, that he wanted to know whether God had brought
them all together there? So they told him yes again. They made out then,
that he wanted to know whether they would all get out of pain? So they
answered yes to that question likewise, and made him understand that the
reply included himself.

Johnny’s powers of sustaining conversation were as yet so very
imperfectly developed, even in a state of health, that in sickness they
were little more than monosyllabic. But, he had to be washed and tended,
and remedies were applied, and though those offices were far, far more
skilfully and lightly done than ever anything had been done for him in
his little life, so rough and short, they would have hurt and tired him
but for an amazing circumstance which laid hold of his attention. This
was no less than the appearance on his own little platform in pairs,
of All Creation, on its way into his own particular ark: the elephant
leading, and the fly, with a diffident sense of his size, politely
bringing up the rear. A very little brother lying in the next bed with a
broken leg, was so enchanted by this spectacle that his delight exalted
its enthralling interest; and so came rest and sleep.

‘I see you are not afraid to leave the dear child here, Betty,’
whispered Mrs Boffin.

‘No, ma’am. Most willingly, most thankfully, with all my heart and
soul.’

So, they kissed him, and left him there, and old Betty was to come back
early in the morning, and nobody but Rokesmith knew for certain how that
the doctor had said, ‘This should have been days ago. Too late!’

But, Rokesmith knowing it, and knowing that his bearing it in mind would
be acceptable thereafter to that good woman who had been the only light
in the childhood of desolate John Harmon dead and gone, resolved that
late at night he would go back to the bedside of John Harmon’s namesake,
and see how it fared with him.

The family whom God had brought together were not all asleep, but were
all quiet. From bed to bed, a light womanly tread and a pleasant fresh
face passed in the silence of the night. A little head would lift itself
up into the softened light here and there, to be kissed as the face went
by--for these little patients are very loving--and would then submit
itself to be composed to rest again. The mite with the broken leg was
restless, and moaned; but after a while turned his face towards Johnny’s
bed, to fortify himself with a view of the ark, and fell asleep. Over
most of the beds, the toys were yet grouped as the children had left
them when they last laid themselves down, and, in their innocent
grotesqueness and incongruity, they might have stood for the children’s
dreams.

The doctor came in too, to see how it fared with Johnny. And he and
Rokesmith stood together, looking down with compassion on him.

‘What is it, Johnny?’ Rokesmith was the questioner, and put an arm round
the poor baby as he made a struggle.

‘Him!’ said the little fellow. ‘Those!’

The doctor was quick to understand children, and, taking the horse,
the ark, the yellow bird, and the man in the Guards, from Johnny’s bed,
softly placed them on that of his next neighbour, the mite with the
broken leg.

With a weary and yet a pleased smile, and with an action as if he
stretched his little figure out to rest, the child heaved his body on
the sustaining arm, and seeking Rokesmith’s face with his lips, said:

‘A kiss for the boofer lady.’

Having now bequeathed all he had to dispose of, and arranged his affairs
in this world, Johnny, thus speaking, left it.



Chapter 10

A SUCCESSOR


Some of the Reverend Frank Milvey’s brethren had found themselves
exceedingly uncomfortable in their minds, because they were required to
bury the dead too hopefully. But, the Reverend Frank, inclining to the
belief that they were required to do one or two other things (say out of
nine-and-thirty) calculated to trouble their consciences rather more if
they would think as much about them, held his peace.

Indeed, the Reverend Frank Milvey was a forbearing man, who noticed many
sad warps and blights in the vineyard wherein he worked, and did not
profess that they made him savagely wise. He only learned that the more
he himself knew, in his little limited human way, the better he could
distantly imagine what Omniscience might know.

Wherefore, if the Reverend Frank had had to read the words that troubled
some of his brethren, and profitably touched innumerable hearts, in
a worse case than Johnny’s, he would have done so out of the pity and
humility of his soul. Reading them over Johnny, he thought of his own
six children, but not of his poverty, and read them with dimmed eyes.
And very seriously did he and his bright little wife, who had been
listening, look down into the small grave and walk home arm-in-arm.

There was grief in the aristocratic house, and there was joy in the
Bower. Mr Wegg argued, if an orphan were wanted, was he not an orphan
himself; and could a better be desired? And why go beating about
Brentford bushes, seeking orphans forsooth who had established no claims
upon you and made no sacrifices for you, when here was an orphan ready
to your hand who had given up in your cause, Miss Elizabeth, Master
George, Aunt Jane, and Uncle Parker?

Mr Wegg chuckled, consequently, when he heard the tidings. Nay, it was
afterwards affirmed by a witness who shall at present be nameless,
that in the seclusion of the Bower he poked out his wooden leg, in the
stage-ballet manner, and executed a taunting or triumphant pirouette on
the genuine leg remaining to him.

John Rokesmith’s manner towards Mrs Boffin at this time, was more the
manner of a young man towards a mother, than that of a Secretary towards
his employer’s wife. It had always been marked by a subdued affectionate
deference that seemed to have sprung up on the very day of his
engagement; whatever was odd in her dress or her ways had seemed to have
no oddity for him; he had sometimes borne a quietly-amused face in her
company, but still it had seemed as if the pleasure her genial temper
and radiant nature yielded him, could have been quite as naturally
expressed in a tear as in a smile. The completeness of his sympathy with
her fancy for having a little John Harmon to protect and rear, he
had shown in every act and word, and now that the kind fancy was
disappointed, he treated it with a manly tenderness and respect for
which she could hardly thank him enough.

‘But I do thank you, Mr Rokesmith,’ said Mrs Boffin, ‘and I thank you
most kindly. You love children.’

‘I hope everybody does.’

‘They ought,’ said Mrs Boffin; ‘but we don’t all of us do what we ought,
do us?’

John Rokesmith replied, ‘Some among us supply the short-comings of the
rest. You have loved children well, Mr Boffin has told me.’

‘Not a bit better than he has, but that’s his way; he puts all the good
upon me. You speak rather sadly, Mr Rokesmith.’

‘Do I?’

‘It sounds to me so. Were you one of many children?’ He shook his head.

‘An only child?’

‘No there was another. Dead long ago.’

‘Father or mother alive?’

‘Dead.’--

‘And the rest of your relations?’

‘Dead--if I ever had any living. I never heard of any.’

At this point of the dialogue Bella came in with a light step. She
paused at the door a moment, hesitating whether to remain or retire;
perplexed by finding that she was not observed.

‘Now, don’t mind an old lady’s talk,’ said Mrs Boffin, ‘but tell me. Are
you quite sure, Mr Rokesmith, that you have never had a disappointment
in love?’

‘Quite sure. Why do you ask me?’

‘Why, for this reason. Sometimes you have a kind of kept-down manner
with you, which is not like your age. You can’t be thirty?’

‘I am not yet thirty.’

Deeming it high time to make her presence known, Bella coughed here to
attract attention, begged pardon, and said she would go, fearing that
she interrupted some matter of business.

‘No, don’t go,’ rejoined Mrs Boffin, ‘because we are coming to business,
instead of having begun it, and you belong to it as much now, my dear
Bella, as I do. But I want my Noddy to consult with us. Would somebody
be so good as find my Noddy for me?’

Rokesmith departed on that errand, and presently returned accompanied by
Mr Boffin at his jog-trot. Bella felt a little vague trepidation as to
the subject-matter of this same consultation, until Mrs Boffin announced
it.

‘Now, you come and sit by me, my dear,’ said that worthy soul, taking
her comfortable place on a large ottoman in the centre of the room,
and drawing her arm through Bella’s; ‘and Noddy, you sit here, and Mr
Rokesmith you sit there. Now, you see, what I want to talk about, is
this. Mr and Mrs Milvey have sent me the kindest note possible (which
Mr Rokesmith just now read to me out aloud, for I ain’t good at
handwritings), offering to find me another little child to name and
educate and bring up. Well. This has set me thinking.’

[‘And she is a steam-ingein at it,’ murmured Mr Boffin, in an admiring
parenthesis, ‘when she once begins. It mayn’t be so easy to start her;
but once started, she’s a ingein.’)

‘--This has set me thinking, I say,’ repeated Mrs Boffin, cordially
beaming under the influence of her husband’s compliment, ‘and I have
thought two things. First of all, that I have grown timid of reviving
John Harmon’s name. It’s an unfortunate name, and I fancy I should
reproach myself if I gave it to another dear child, and it proved again
unlucky.’

‘Now, whether,’ said Mr Boffin, gravely propounding a case for his
Secretary’s opinion; ‘whether one might call that a superstition?’

‘It is a matter of feeling with Mrs Boffin,’ said Rokesmith, gently.
‘The name has always been unfortunate. It has now this new unfortunate
association connected with it. The name has died out. Why revive it?
Might I ask Miss Wilfer what she thinks?’

‘It has not been a fortunate name for me,’ said Bella, colouring--‘or
at least it was not, until it led to my being here--but that is not the
point in my thoughts. As we had given the name to the poor child, and as
the poor child took so lovingly to me, I think I should feel jealous of
calling another child by it. I think I should feel as if the name had
become endeared to me, and I had no right to use it so.’

‘And that’s your opinion?’ remarked Mr Boffin, observant of the
Secretary’s face and again addressing him.

‘I say again, it is a matter of feeling,’ returned the Secretary. ‘I
think Miss Wilfer’s feeling very womanly and pretty.’

‘Now, give us your opinion, Noddy,’ said Mrs Boffin.

‘My opinion, old lady,’ returned the Golden Dustman, ‘is your opinion.’

‘Then,’ said Mrs Boffin, ‘we agree not to revive John Harmon’s name, but
to let it rest in the grave. It is, as Mr Rokesmith says, a matter of
feeling, but Lor how many matters ARE matters of feeling! Well; and so
I come to the second thing I have thought of. You must know, Bella,
my dear, and Mr Rokesmith, that when I first named to my husband my
thoughts of adopting a little orphan boy in remembrance of John Harmon,
I further named to my husband that it was comforting to think that how
the poor boy would be benefited by John’s own money, and protected from
John’s own forlornness.’

‘Hear, hear!’ cried Mr Boffin. ‘So she did. Ancoar!’

‘No, not Ancoar, Noddy, my dear,’ returned Mrs Boffin, ‘because I am
going to say something else. I meant that, I am sure, as much as
I still mean it. But this little death has made me ask myself the
question, seriously, whether I wasn’t too bent upon pleasing myself.
Else why did I seek out so much for a pretty child, and a child quite to
my liking? Wanting to do good, why not do it for its own sake, and put
my tastes and likings by?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Bella; and perhaps she said it with some little
sensitiveness arising out of those old curious relations of hers towards
the murdered man; ‘perhaps, in reviving the name, you would not have
liked to give it to a less interesting child than the original. He
interested you very much.’

‘Well, my dear,’ returned Mrs Boffin, giving her a squeeze, ‘it’s kind
of you to find that reason out, and I hope it may have been so, and
indeed to a certain extent I believe it was so, but I am afraid not to
the whole extent. However, that don’t come in question now, because we
have done with the name.’

‘Laid it up as a remembrance,’ suggested Bella, musingly.

‘Much better said, my dear; laid it up as a remembrance. Well then; I
have been thinking if I take any orphan to provide for, let it not be
a pet and a plaything for me, but a creature to be helped for its own
sake.’

‘Not pretty then?’ said Bella.

‘No,’ returned Mrs Boffin, stoutly.

‘Nor prepossessing then?’ said Bella.

‘No,’ returned Mrs Boffin. ‘Not necessarily so. That’s as it may happen.
A well-disposed boy comes in my way who may be even a little wanting in
such advantages for getting on in life, but is honest and industrious
and requires a helping hand and deserves it. If I am very much in
earnest and quite determined to be unselfish, let me take care of HIM.’

Here the footman whose feelings had been hurt on the former occasion,
appeared, and crossing to Rokesmith apologetically announced the
objectionable Sloppy.

The four members of Council looked at one another, and paused. ‘Shall he
be brought here, ma’am?’ asked Rokesmith.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Boffin. Whereupon the footman disappeared, reappeared
presenting Sloppy, and retired much disgusted.

The consideration of Mrs Boffin had clothed Mr Sloppy in a suit of
black, on which the tailor had received personal directions from
Rokesmith to expend the utmost cunning of his art, with a view to the
concealment of the cohering and sustaining buttons. But, so much
more powerful were the frailties of Sloppy’s form than the strongest
resources of tailoring science, that he now stood before the Council,
a perfect Argus in the way of buttons: shining and winking and gleaming
and twinkling out of a hundred of those eyes of bright metal, at the
dazzled spectators. The artistic taste of some unknown hatter had
furnished him with a hatband of wholesale capacity which was fluted
behind, from the crown of his hat to the brim, and terminated in a black
bunch, from which the imagination shrunk discomfited and the reason
revolted. Some special powers with which his legs were endowed, had
already hitched up his glossy trousers at the ankles, and bagged them at
the knees; while similar gifts in his arms had raised his coat-sleeves
from his wrists and accumulated them at his elbows. Thus set forth, with
the additional embellishments of a very little tail to his coat, and a
yawning gulf at his waistband, Sloppy stood confessed.

‘And how is Betty, my good fellow?’ Mrs Boffin asked him.

‘Thankee, mum,’ said Sloppy, ‘she do pretty nicely, and sending her
dooty and many thanks for the tea and all faviours and wishing to know
the family’s healths.’

‘Have you just come, Sloppy?’

‘Yes, mum.’

‘Then you have not had your dinner yet?’

‘No, mum. But I mean to it. For I ain’t forgotten your handsome orders
that I was never to go away without having had a good ‘un off of meat
and beer and pudding--no: there was four of ‘em, for I reckoned ‘em
up when I had ‘em; meat one, beer two, vegetables three, and which was
four?--Why, pudding, HE was four!’ Here Sloppy threw his head back,
opened his mouth wide, and laughed rapturously.

‘How are the two poor little Minders?’ asked Mrs Boffin.

‘Striking right out, mum, and coming round beautiful.’

Mrs Boffin looked on the other three members of Council, and then said,
beckoning with her finger:

‘Sloppy.’

‘Yes, mum.’

‘Come forward, Sloppy. Should you like to dine here every day?’

‘Off of all four on ‘em, mum? O mum!’ Sloppy’s feelings obliged him to
squeeze his hat, and contract one leg at the knee.

‘Yes. And should you like to be always taken care of here, if you were
industrious and deserving?’

‘Oh, mum!--But there’s Mrs Higden,’ said Sloppy, checking himself in his
raptures, drawing back, and shaking his head with very serious meaning.
‘There’s Mrs Higden. Mrs Higden goes before all. None can ever be better
friends to me than Mrs Higden’s been. And she must be turned for, must
Mrs Higden. Where would Mrs Higden be if she warn’t turned for!’ At the
mere thought of Mrs Higden in this inconceivable affliction, Mr Sloppy’s
countenance became pale, and manifested the most distressful emotions.

‘You are as right as right can be, Sloppy,’ said Mrs Boffin ‘and far be
it from me to tell you otherwise. It shall be seen to. If Betty Higden
can be turned for all the same, you shall come here and be taken care of
for life, and be made able to keep her in other ways than the turning.’

‘Even as to that, mum,’ answered the ecstatic Sloppy, ‘the turning might
be done in the night, don’t you see? I could be here in the day, and
turn in the night. I don’t want no sleep, I don’t. Or even if I any ways
should want a wink or two,’ added Sloppy, after a moment’s apologetic
reflection, ‘I could take ‘em turning. I’ve took ‘em turning many a
time, and enjoyed ‘em wonderful!’

On the grateful impulse of the moment, Mr Sloppy kissed Mrs Boffin’s
hand, and then detaching himself from that good creature that he might
have room enough for his feelings, threw back his head, opened his mouth
wide, and uttered a dismal howl. It was creditable to his tenderness of
heart, but suggested that he might on occasion give some offence to the
neighbours: the rather, as the footman looked in, and begged pardon,
finding he was not wanted, but excused himself; on the ground ‘that he
thought it was Cats.’



Chapter 11

SOME AFFAIRS OF THE HEART


Little Miss Peecher, from her little official dwelling-house, with its
little windows like the eyes in needles, and its little doors like the
covers of school-books, was very observant indeed of the object of her
quiet affections. Love, though said to be afflicted with blindness, is
a vigilant watchman, and Miss Peecher kept him on double duty over Mr
Bradley Headstone. It was not that she was naturally given to playing
the spy--it was not that she was at all secret, plotting, or mean--it
was simply that she loved the irresponsive Bradley with all the
primitive and homely stock of love that had never been examined or
certificated out of her. If her faithful slate had had the latent
qualities of sympathetic paper, and its pencil those of invisible ink,
many a little treatise calculated to astonish the pupils would have come
bursting through the dry sums in school-time under the warming influence
of Miss Peecher’s bosom. For, oftentimes when school was not, and her
calm leisure and calm little house were her own, Miss Peecher would
commit to the confidential slate an imaginary description of how, upon
a balmy evening at dusk, two figures might have been observed in the
market-garden ground round the corner, of whom one, being a manly form,
bent over the other, being a womanly form of short stature and some
compactness, and breathed in a low voice the words, ‘Emma Peecher, wilt
thou be my own?’ after which the womanly form’s head reposed upon the
manly form’s shoulder, and the nightingales tuned up. Though all unseen,
and unsuspected by the pupils, Bradley Headstone even pervaded the
school exercises. Was Geography in question? He would come triumphantly
flying out of Vesuvius and Aetna ahead of the lava, and would boil
unharmed in the hot springs of Iceland, and would float majestically
down the Ganges and the Nile. Did History chronicle a king of men?
Behold him in pepper-and-salt pantaloons, with his watch-guard round
his neck. Were copies to be written? In capital B’s and H’s most of the
girls under Miss Peecher’s tuition were half a year ahead of every other
letter in the alphabet. And Mental Arithmetic, administered by Miss
Peecher, often devoted itself to providing Bradley Headstone with a
wardrobe of fabulous extent: fourscore and four neck-ties at two and
ninepence-halfpenny, two gross of silver watches at four pounds fifteen
and sixpence, seventy-four black hats at eighteen shillings; and many
similar superfluities.

The vigilant watchman, using his daily opportunities of turning his eyes
in Bradley’s direction, soon apprized Miss Peecher that Bradley was more
preoccupied than had been his wont, and more given to strolling about
with a downcast and reserved face, turning something difficult in his
mind that was not in the scholastic syllabus. Putting this and that
together--combining under the head ‘this,’ present appearances and the
intimacy with Charley Hexam, and ranging under the head ‘that’ the
visit to his sister, the watchman reported to Miss Peecher his strong
suspicions that the sister was at the bottom of it.

‘I wonder,’ said Miss Peecher, as she sat making up her weekly report on
a half-holiday afternoon, ‘what they call Hexam’s sister?’

Mary Anne, at her needlework, attendant and attentive, held her arm up.

‘Well, Mary Anne?’

‘She is named Lizzie, ma’am.’

‘She can hardly be named Lizzie, I think, Mary Anne,’ returned Miss
Peecher, in a tunefully instructive voice. ‘Is Lizzie a Christian name,
Mary Anne?’

Mary Anne laid down her work, rose, hooked herself behind, as being
under catechization, and replied: ‘No, it is a corruption, Miss
Peecher.’

‘Who gave her that name?’ Miss Peecher was going on, from the mere force
of habit, when she checked herself; on Mary Anne’s evincing theological
impatience to strike in with her godfathers and her godmothers, and
said: ‘I mean of what name is it a corruption?’

‘Elizabeth, or Eliza, Miss Peecher.’

‘Right, Mary Anne. Whether there were any Lizzies in the early Christian
Church must be considered very doubtful, very doubtful.’ Miss Peecher
was exceedingly sage here. ‘Speaking correctly, we say, then, that
Hexam’s sister is called Lizzie; not that she is named so. Do we not,
Mary Anne?’

‘We do, Miss Peecher.’

‘And where,’ pursued Miss Peecher, complacent in her little transparent
fiction of conducting the examination in a semiofficial manner for Mary
Anne’s benefit, not her own, ‘where does this young woman, who is called
but not named Lizzie, live? Think, now, before answering.’

‘In Church Street, Smith Square, by Mill Bank, ma’am.’

‘In Church Street, Smith Square, by Mill Bank,’ repeated Miss Peecher,
as if possessed beforehand of the book in which it was written. Exactly
so. And what occupation does this young woman pursue, Mary Anne? Take
time.’

‘She has a place of trust at an outfitter’s in the City, ma’am.’

‘Oh!’ said Miss Peecher, pondering on it; but smoothly added, in a
confirmatory tone, ‘At an outfitter’s in the City. Ye-es?’

‘And Charley--’ Mary Anne was proceeding, when Miss Peecher stared.

‘I mean Hexam, Miss Peecher.’

‘I should think you did, Mary Anne. I am glad to hear you do. And
Hexam--’

‘Says,’ Mary Anne went on, ‘that he is not pleased with his sister, and
that his sister won’t be guided by his advice, and persists in being
guided by somebody else’s; and that--’

‘Mr Headstone coming across the garden!’ exclaimed Miss Peecher, with a
flushed glance at the looking-glass. ‘You have answered very well, Mary
Anne. You are forming an excellent habit of arranging your thoughts
clearly. That will do.’

The discreet Mary Anne resumed her seat and her silence, and stitched,
and stitched, and was stitching when the schoolmaster’s shadow came in
before him, announcing that he might be instantly expected.

‘Good evening, Miss Peecher,’ he said, pursuing the shadow, and taking
its place.

‘Good evening, Mr Headstone. Mary Anne, a chair.’

‘Thank you,’ said Bradley, seating himself in his constrained manner.
‘This is but a flying visit. I have looked in, on my way, to ask a
kindness of you as a neighbour.’

‘Did you say on your way, Mr Headstone?’ asked Miss Peecher.

‘On my way to--where I am going.’

‘Church Street, Smith Square, by Mill Bank,’ repeated Miss Peecher, in
her own thoughts.

‘Charley Hexam has gone to get a book or two he wants, and will probably
be back before me. As we leave my house empty, I took the liberty of
telling him I would leave the key here. Would you kindly allow me to do
so?’

‘Certainly, Mr Headstone. Going for an evening walk, sir?’

‘Partly for a walk, and partly for--on business.’

‘Business in Church Street, Smith Square, by Mill Bank,’ repeated Miss
Peecher to herself.

‘Having said which,’ pursued Bradley, laying his door-key on the table,
‘I must be already going. There is nothing I can do for you, Miss
Peecher?’

‘Thank you, Mr Headstone. In which direction?’

‘In the direction of Westminster.’

‘Mill Bank,’ Miss Peecher repeated in her own thoughts once again. ‘No,
thank you, Mr Headstone; I’ll not trouble you.’

‘You couldn’t trouble me,’ said the schoolmaster.

‘Ah!’ returned Miss Peecher, though not aloud; ‘but you can trouble
ME!’ And for all her quiet manner, and her quiet smile, she was full of
trouble as he went his way.

She was right touching his destination. He held as straight a course
for the house of the dolls’ dressmaker as the wisdom of his ancestors,
exemplified in the construction of the intervening streets, would let
him, and walked with a bent head hammering at one fixed idea. It had
been an immoveable idea since he first set eyes upon her. It seemed to
him as if all that he could suppress in himself he had suppressed, as
if all that he could restrain in himself he had restrained, and the time
had come--in a rush, in a moment--when the power of self-command had
departed from him. Love at first sight is a trite expression quite
sufficiently discussed; enough that in certain smouldering natures like
this man’s, that passion leaps into a blaze, and makes such head as fire
does in a rage of wind, when other passions, but for its mastery, could
be held in chains. As a multitude of weak, imitative natures are
always lying by, ready to go mad upon the next wrong idea that may be
broached--in these times, generally some form of tribute to Somebody
for something that never was done, or, if ever done, that was done by
Somebody Else--so these less ordinary natures may lie by for years,
ready on the touch of an instant to burst into flame.

The schoolmaster went his way, brooding and brooding, and a sense of
being vanquished in a struggle might have been pieced out of his worried
face. Truly, in his breast there lingered a resentful shame to find
himself defeated by this passion for Charley Hexam’s sister, though in
the very self-same moments he was concentrating himself upon the object
of bringing the passion to a successful issue.

He appeared before the dolls’ dressmaker, sitting alone at her work.
‘Oho!’ thought that sharp young personage, ‘it’s you, is it? I know your
tricks and your manners, my friend!’

‘Hexam’s sister,’ said Bradley Headstone, ‘is not come home yet?’

‘You are quite a conjuror,’ returned Miss Wren.

‘I will wait, if you please, for I want to speak to her.’

‘Do you?’ returned Miss Wren. ‘Sit down. I hope it’s mutual.’ Bradley
glanced distrustfully at the shrewd face again bending over the work,
and said, trying to conquer doubt and hesitation:

‘I hope you don’t imply that my visit will be unacceptable to Hexam’s
sister?’

‘There! Don’t call her that. I can’t bear you to call her that,’
returned Miss Wren, snapping her fingers in a volley of impatient snaps,
‘for I don’t like Hexam.’

‘Indeed?’

‘No.’ Miss Wren wrinkled her nose, to express dislike. ‘Selfish. Thinks
only of himself. The way with all of you.’

‘The way with all of us? Then you don’t like ME?’

‘So-so,’ replied Miss Wren, with a shrug and a laugh. ‘Don’t know much
about you.’

‘But I was not aware it was the way with all of us,’ said Bradley,
returning to the accusation, a little injured. ‘Won’t you say, some of
us?’

‘Meaning,’ returned the little creature, ‘every one of you, but you.
Hah! Now look this lady in the face. This is Mrs Truth. The Honourable.
Full-dressed.’

Bradley glanced at the doll she held up for his observation--which had
been lying on its face on her bench, while with a needle and thread she
fastened the dress on at the back--and looked from it to her.

‘I stand the Honourable Mrs T. on my bench in this corner against the
wall, where her blue eyes can shine upon you,’ pursued Miss Wren, doing
so, and making two little dabs at him in the air with her needle, as
if she pricked him with it in his own eyes; ‘and I defy you to tell me,
with Mrs T. for a witness, what you have come here for.’

‘To see Hexam’s sister.’

‘You don’t say so!’ retorted Miss Wren, hitching her chin. ‘But on whose
account?’

‘Her own.’

‘O Mrs T.!’ exclaimed Miss Wren. ‘You hear him!’

‘To reason with her,’ pursued Bradley, half humouring what was present,
and half angry with what was not present; ‘for her own sake.’

‘Oh Mrs T.!’ exclaimed the dressmaker.

‘For her own sake,’ repeated Bradley, warming, ‘and for her brother’s,
and as a perfectly disinterested person.’

‘Really, Mrs T.,’ remarked the dressmaker, ‘since it comes to this, we
must positively turn you with your face to the wall.’ She had hardly
done so, when Lizzie Hexam arrived, and showed some surprise on seeing
Bradley Headstone there, and Jenny shaking her little fist at him close
before her eyes, and the Honourable Mrs T. with her face to the wall.

‘Here’s a perfectly disinterested person, Lizzie dear,’ said the knowing
Miss Wren, ‘come to talk with you, for your own sake and your brother’s.
Think of that. I am sure there ought to be no third party present at
anything so very kind and so very serious; and so, if you’ll remove the
third party upstairs, my dear, the third party will retire.’

Lizzie took the hand which the dolls’ dressmaker held out to her for
the purpose of being supported away, but only looked at her with an
inquiring smile, and made no other movement.

‘The third party hobbles awfully, you know, when she’s left to herself;’
said Miss Wren, ‘her back being so bad, and her legs so queer; so she
can’t retire gracefully unless you help her, Lizzie.’

‘She can do no better than stay where she is,’ returned Lizzie,
releasing the hand, and laying her own lightly on Miss Jenny’s curls.
And then to Bradley: ‘From Charley, sir?’

In an irresolute way, and stealing a clumsy look at her, Bradley rose to
place a chair for her, and then returned to his own.

‘Strictly speaking,’ said he, ‘I come from Charley, because I left him
only a little while ago; but I am not commissioned by Charley. I come of
my own spontaneous act.’

With her elbows on her bench, and her chin upon her hands, Miss Jenny
Wren sat looking at him with a watchful sidelong look. Lizzie, in her
different way, sat looking at him too.

‘The fact is,’ began Bradley, with a mouth so dry that he had some
difficulty in articulating his words: the consciousness of which
rendered his manner still more ungainly and undecided; ‘the truth is,
that Charley, having no secrets from me (to the best of my belief), has
confided the whole of this matter to me.’

He came to a stop, and Lizzie asked: ‘what matter, sir?’

‘I thought,’ returned the schoolmaster, stealing another look at her,
and seeming to try in vain to sustain it; for the look dropped as it
lighted on her eyes, ‘that it might be so superfluous as to be almost
impertinent, to enter upon a definition of it. My allusion was to this
matter of your having put aside your brother’s plans for you, and
given the preference to those of Mr--I believe the name is Mr Eugene
Wrayburn.’

He made this point of not being certain of the name, with another uneasy
look at her, which dropped like the last.

Nothing being said on the other side, he had to begin again, and began
with new embarrassment.

‘Your brother’s plans were communicated to me when he first had them in
his thoughts. In point of fact he spoke to me about them when I was
last here--when we were walking back together, and when I--when the
impression was fresh upon me of having seen his sister.’

There might have been no meaning in it, but the little dressmaker here
removed one of her supporting hands from her chin, and musingly turned
the Honourable Mrs T. with her face to the company. That done, she fell
into her former attitude.

‘I approved of his idea,’ said Bradley, with his uneasy look wandering
to the doll, and unconsciously resting there longer than it had
rested on Lizzie, ‘both because your brother ought naturally to be the
originator of any such scheme, and because I hoped to be able to promote
it. I should have had inexpressible pleasure, I should have taken
inexpressible interest, in promoting it. Therefore I must acknowledge
that when your brother was disappointed, I too was disappointed. I wish
to avoid reservation or concealment, and I fully acknowledge that.’

He appeared to have encouraged himself by having got so far. At all
events he went on with much greater firmness and force of emphasis:
though with a curious disposition to set his teeth, and with a curious
tight-screwing movement of his right hand in the clenching palm of his
left, like the action of one who was being physically hurt, and was
unwilling to cry out.

‘I am a man of strong feelings, and I have strongly felt this
disappointment. I do strongly feel it. I don’t show what I feel; some
of us are obliged habitually to keep it down. To keep it down. But to
return to your brother. He has taken the matter so much to heart that
he has remonstrated (in my presence he remonstrated) with Mr Eugene
Wrayburn, if that be the name. He did so, quite ineffectually. As any
one not blinded to the real character of Mr--Mr Eugene Wrayburn--would
readily suppose.’

He looked at Lizzie again, and held the look. And his face turned from
burning red to white, and from white back to burning red, and so for the
time to lasting deadly white.

‘Finally, I resolved to come here alone, and appeal to you. I resolved
to come here alone, and entreat you to retract the course you have
chosen, and instead of confiding in a mere stranger--a person of most
insolent behaviour to your brother and others--to prefer your brother
and your brother’s friend.’

Lizzie Hexam had changed colour when those changes came over him, and
her face now expressed some anger, more dislike, and even a touch of
fear. But she answered him very steadily.

‘I cannot doubt, Mr Headstone, that your visit is well meant. You have
been so good a friend to Charley that I have no right to doubt it. I
have nothing to tell Charley, but that I accepted the help to which he
so much objects before he made any plans for me; or certainly before I
knew of any. It was considerately and delicately offered, and there were
reasons that had weight with me which should be as dear to Charley as to
me. I have no more to say to Charley on this subject.’

His lips trembled and stood apart, as he followed this repudiation of
himself; and limitation of her words to her brother.

‘I should have told Charley, if he had come to me,’ she resumed, as
though it were an after-thought, ‘that Jenny and I find our teacher very
able and very patient, and that she takes great pains with us. So much
so, that we have said to her we hope in a very little while to be able
to go on by ourselves. Charley knows about teachers, and I should also
have told him, for his satisfaction, that ours comes from an institution
where teachers are regularly brought up.’

‘I should like to ask you,’ said Bradley Headstone, grinding his words
slowly out, as though they came from a rusty mill; ‘I should like to
ask you, if I may without offence, whether you would have objected--no;
rather, I should like to say, if I may without offence, that I wish I
had had the opportunity of coming here with your brother and devoting my
poor abilities and experience to your service.’

‘Thank you, Mr Headstone.’

‘But I fear,’ he pursued, after a pause, furtively wrenching at the seat
of his chair with one hand, as if he would have wrenched the chair to
pieces, and gloomily observing her while her eyes were cast down, ‘that
my humble services would not have found much favour with you?’

She made no reply, and the poor stricken wretch sat contending with
himself in a heat of passion and torment. After a while he took out his
handkerchief and wiped his forehead and hands.

‘There is only one thing more I had to say, but it is the most
important. There is a reason against this matter, there is a personal
relation concerned in this matter, not yet explained to you. It might--I
don’t say it would--it might--induce you to think differently. To
proceed under the present circumstances is out of the question. Will you
please come to the understanding that there shall be another interview
on the subject?’

‘With Charley, Mr Headstone?’

‘With--well,’ he answered, breaking off, ‘yes! Say with him too.
Will you please come to the understanding that there must be another
interview under more favourable circumstances, before the whole case can
be submitted?’

‘I don’t,’ said Lizzie, shaking her head, ‘understand your meaning, Mr
Headstone.’

‘Limit my meaning for the present,’ he interrupted, ‘to the whole case
being submitted to you in another interview.’

‘What case, Mr Headstone? What is wanting to it?’

‘You--you shall be informed in the other interview.’ Then he said, as
if in a burst of irrepressible despair, ‘I--I leave it all incomplete!
There is a spell upon me, I think!’ And then added, almost as if he
asked for pity, ‘Good-night!’

He held out his hand. As she, with manifest hesitation, not to say
reluctance, touched it, a strange tremble passed over him, and his face,
so deadly white, was moved as by a stroke of pain. Then he was gone.

The dolls’ dressmaker sat with her attitude unchanged, eyeing the door
by which he had departed, until Lizzie pushed her bench aside and sat
down near her. Then, eyeing Lizzie as she had previously eyed Bradley
and the door, Miss Wren chopped that very sudden and keen chop in which
her jaws sometimes indulged, leaned back in her chair with folded arms,
and thus expressed herself:

‘Humph! If he--I mean, of course, my dear, the party who is coming to
court me when the time comes--should be THAT sort of man, he may spare
himself the trouble. HE wouldn’t do to be trotted about and made useful.
He’d take fire and blow up while he was about it.’

‘And so you would be rid of him,’ said Lizzie, humouring her.

‘Not so easily,’ returned Miss Wren. ‘He wouldn’t blow up alone. He’d
carry me up with him. I know his tricks and his manners.’

‘Would he want to hurt you, do you mean?’ asked Lizzie.

‘Mightn’t exactly want to do it, my dear,’ returned Miss Wren; ‘but a
lot of gunpowder among lighted lucifer-matches in the next room might
almost as well be here.’

‘He is a very strange man,’ said Lizzie, thoughtfully.

‘I wish he was so very strange a man as to be a total stranger,’
answered the sharp little thing.

It being Lizzie’s regular occupation when they were alone of an evening
to brush out and smooth the long fair hair of the dolls’ dressmaker, she
unfastened a ribbon that kept it back while the little creature was at
her work, and it fell in a beautiful shower over the poor shoulders that
were much in need of such adorning rain. ‘Not now, Lizzie, dear,’ said
Jenny; ‘let us have a talk by the fire.’ With those words, she in her
turn loosened her friend’s dark hair, and it dropped of its own weight
over her bosom, in two rich masses. Pretending to compare the colours
and admire the contrast, Jenny so managed a mere touch or two of her
nimble hands, as that she herself laying a cheek on one of the dark
folds, seemed blinded by her own clustering curls to all but the fire,
while the fine handsome face and brow of Lizzie were revealed without
obstruction in the sombre light.

‘Let us have a talk,’ said Jenny, ‘about Mr Eugene Wrayburn.’

Something sparkled down among the fair hair resting on the dark hair;
and if it were not a star--which it couldn’t be--it was an eye; and
if it were an eye, it was Jenny Wren’s eye, bright and watchful as the
bird’s whose name she had taken.

‘Why about Mr Wrayburn?’ Lizzie asked.

‘For no better reason than because I’m in the humour. I wonder whether
he’s rich!’

‘No, not rich.’

‘Poor?’

‘I think so, for a gentleman.’

‘Ah! To be sure! Yes, he’s a gentleman. Not of our sort; is he?’ A shake
of the head, a thoughtful shake of the head, and the answer, softly
spoken, ‘Oh no, oh no!’

The dolls’ dressmaker had an arm round her friend’s waist. Adjusting the
arm, she slyly took the opportunity of blowing at her own hair where
it fell over her face; then the eye down there, under lighter shadows
sparkled more brightly and appeared more watchful.

‘When He turns up, he shan’t be a gentleman; I’ll very soon send him
packing, if he is. However, he’s not Mr Wrayburn; I haven’t captivated
HIM. I wonder whether anybody has, Lizzie!’

‘It is very likely.’

‘Is it very likely? I wonder who!’

‘Is it not very likely that some lady has been taken by him, and that he
may love her dearly?’

‘Perhaps. I don’t know. What would you think of him, Lizzie, if you were
a lady?’

‘I a lady!’ she repeated, laughing. ‘Such a fancy!’

‘Yes. But say: just as a fancy, and for instance.’

‘I a lady! I, a poor girl who used to row poor father on the river. I,
who had rowed poor father out and home on the very night when I saw him
for the first time. I, who was made so timid by his looking at me, that
I got up and went out!’

[‘He did look at you, even that night, though you were not a lady!’
thought Miss Wren.)

‘I a lady!’ Lizzie went on in a low voice, with her eyes upon the fire.
‘I, with poor father’s grave not even cleared of undeserved stain and
shame, and he trying to clear it for me! I a lady!’

‘Only as a fancy, and for instance,’ urged Miss Wren.

‘Too much, Jenny, dear, too much! My fancy is not able to get that far.’
As the low fire gleamed upon her, it showed her smiling, mournfully and
abstractedly.

‘But I am in the humour, and I must be humoured, Lizzie, because after
all I am a poor little thing, and have had a hard day with my bad child.
Look in the fire, as I like to hear you tell how you used to do when you
lived in that dreary old house that had once been a windmill. Look in
the--what was its name when you told fortunes with your brother that I
DON’T like?’

‘The hollow down by the flare?’

‘Ah! That’s the name! You can find a lady there, I know.’

‘More easily than I can make one of such material as myself, Jenny.’

The sparkling eye looked steadfastly up, as the musing face looked
thoughtfully down. ‘Well?’ said the dolls’ dressmaker, ‘We have found
our lady?’

Lizzie nodded, and asked, ‘Shall she be rich?’

‘She had better be, as he’s poor.’

‘She is very rich. Shall she be handsome?’

‘Even you can be that, Lizzie, so she ought to be.’

‘She is very handsome.’

‘What does she say about him?’ asked Miss Jenny, in a low voice:
watchful, through an intervening silence, of the face looking down at
the fire.

‘She is glad, glad, to be rich, that he may have the money. She is glad,
glad, to be beautiful, that he may be proud of her. Her poor heart--’

‘Eh? Her poor heart?’ said Miss Wren.

‘Her heart--is given him, with all its love and truth. She would
joyfully die with him, or, better than that, die for him. She knows he
has failings, but she thinks they have grown up through his being like
one cast away, for the want of something to trust in, and care for, and
think well of. And she says, that lady rich and beautiful that I can
never come near, “Only put me in that empty place, only try how little
I mind myself, only prove what a world of things I will do and bear for
you, and I hope that you might even come to be much better than you are,
through me who am so much worse, and hardly worth the thinking of beside
you.”’

As the face looking at the fire had become exalted and forgetful in the
rapture of these words, the little creature, openly clearing away
her fair hair with her disengaged hand, had gazed at it with earnest
attention and something like alarm. Now that the speaker ceased, the
little creature laid down her head again, and moaned, ‘O me, O me, O
me!’

‘In pain, dear Jenny?’ asked Lizzie, as if awakened.

‘Yes, but not the old pain. Lay me down, lay me down. Don’t go out of
my sight to-night. Lock the door and keep close to me.’ Then turning away
her face, she said in a whisper to herself, ‘My Lizzie, my poor Lizzie!
O my blessed children, come back in the long bright slanting rows, and
come for her, not me. She wants help more than I, my blessed children!’

She had stretched her hands up with that higher and better look, and
now she turned again, and folded them round Lizzie’s neck, and rocked
herself on Lizzie’s breast.



Chapter 12

MORE BIRDS OF PREY


Rogue Riderhood dwelt deep and dark in Limehouse Hole, among the
riggers, and the mast, oar and block makers, and the boat-builders, and
the sail-lofts, as in a kind of ship’s hold stored full of waterside
characters, some no better than himself, some very much better, and
none much worse. The Hole, albeit in a general way not over nice in
its choice of company, was rather shy in reference to the honour of
cultivating the Rogue’s acquaintance; more frequently giving him the
cold shoulder than the warm hand, and seldom or never drinking with him
unless at his own expense. A part of the Hole, indeed, contained so
much public spirit and private virtue that not even this strong leverage
could move it to good fellowship with a tainted accuser. But, there may
have been the drawback on this magnanimous morality, that its exponents
held a true witness before Justice to be the next unneighbourly and
accursed character to a false one.

Had it not been for the daughter whom he often mentioned, Mr Riderhood
might have found the Hole a mere grave as to any means it would yield
him of getting a living. But Miss Pleasant Riderhood had some little
position and connection in Limehouse Hole. Upon the smallest of small
scales, she was an unlicensed pawnbroker, keeping what was popularly
called a Leaving Shop, by lending insignificant sums on insignificant
articles of property deposited with her as security. In her
four-and-twentieth year of life, Pleasant was already in her fifth year
of this way of trade. Her deceased mother had established the business,
and on that parent’s demise she had appropriated a secret capital of
fifteen shillings to establishing herself in it; the existence of
such capital in a pillow being the last intelligible confidential
communication made to her by the departed, before succumbing to
dropsical conditions of snuff and gin, incompatible equally with
coherence and existence.

Why christened Pleasant, the late Mrs Riderhood might possibly have
been at some time able to explain, and possibly not. Her daughter had no
information on that point. Pleasant she found herself, and she couldn’t
help it. She had not been consulted on the question, any more than on
the question of her coming into these terrestrial parts, to want a name.
Similarly, she found herself possessed of what is colloquially termed
a swivel eye (derived from her father), which she might perhaps have
declined if her sentiments on the subject had been taken. She was not
otherwise positively ill-looking, though anxious, meagre, of a muddy
complexion, and looking as old again as she really was.

As some dogs have it in the blood, or are trained, to worry certain
creatures to a certain point, so--not to make the comparison
disrespectfully--Pleasant Riderhood had it in the blood, or had been
trained, to regard seamen, within certain limits, as her prey. Show
her a man in a blue jacket, and, figuratively speaking, she pinned him
instantly. Yet, all things considered, she was not of an evil mind or an
unkindly disposition. For, observe how many things were to be considered
according to her own unfortunate experience. Show Pleasant Riderhood a
Wedding in the street, and she only saw two people taking out a regular
licence to quarrel and fight. Show her a Christening, and she saw a
little heathen personage having a quite superfluous name bestowed upon
it, inasmuch as it would be commonly addressed by some abusive epithet:
which little personage was not in the least wanted by anybody, and would
be shoved and banged out of everybody’s way, until it should grow
big enough to shove and bang. Show her a Funeral, and she saw an
unremunerative ceremony in the nature of a black masquerade, conferring
a temporary gentility on the performers, at an immense expense, and
representing the only formal party ever given by the deceased. Show her
a live father, and she saw but a duplicate of her own father, who from
her infancy had been taken with fits and starts of discharging his duty
to her, which duty was always incorporated in the form of a fist or a
leathern strap, and being discharged hurt her. All things considered,
therefore, Pleasant Riderhood was not so very, very bad. There was even
a touch of romance in her--of such romance as could creep into Limehouse
Hole--and maybe sometimes of a summer evening, when she stood with
folded arms at her shop-door, looking from the reeking street to the
sky where the sun was setting, she may have had some vaporous visions
of far-off islands in the southern seas or elsewhere (not being
geographically particular), where it would be good to roam with a
congenial partner among groves of bread-fruit, waiting for ships to be
wafted from the hollow ports of civilization. For, sailors to be got the
better of, were essential to Miss Pleasant’s Eden.

Not on a summer evening did she come to her little shop-door, when a
certain man standing over against the house on the opposite side of
the street took notice of her. That was on a cold shrewd windy evening,
after dark. Pleasant Riderhood shared with most of the lady inhabitants
of the Hole, the peculiarity that her hair was a ragged knot, constantly
coming down behind, and that she never could enter upon any undertaking
without first twisting it into place. At that particular moment, being
newly come to the threshold to take a look out of doors, she was winding
herself up with both hands after this fashion. And so prevalent was the
fashion, that on the occasion of a fight or other disturbance in the
Hole, the ladies would be seen flocking from all quarters universally
twisting their back-hair as they came along, and many of them, in the
hurry of the moment, carrying their back-combs in their mouths.

It was a wretched little shop, with a roof that any man standing in it
could touch with his hand; little better than a cellar or cave, down
three steps. Yet in its ill-lighted window, among a flaring handkerchief
or two, an old peacoat or so, a few valueless watches and compasses, a
jar of tobacco and two crossed pipes, a bottle of walnut ketchup, and
some horrible sweets these creature discomforts serving as a blind to
the main business of the Leaving Shop--was displayed the inscription
SEAMAN’S BOARDING-HOUSE.

Taking notice of Pleasant Riderhood at the door, the man crossed so
quickly that she was still winding herself up, when he stood close
before her.

‘Is your father at home?’ said he.

‘I think he is,’ returned Pleasant, dropping her arms; ‘come in.’

It was a tentative reply, the man having a seafaring appearance. Her
father was not at home, and Pleasant knew it. ‘Take a seat by the fire,’
were her hospitable words when she had got him in; ‘men of your calling
are always welcome here.’

‘Thankee,’ said the man.

His manner was the manner of a sailor, and his hands were the hands of
a sailor, except that they were smooth. Pleasant had an eye for sailors,
and she noticed the unused colour and texture of the hands, sunburnt
though they were, as sharply as she noticed their unmistakable looseness
and suppleness, as he sat himself down with his left arm carelessly
thrown across his left leg a little above the knee, and the right arm
as carelessly thrown over the elbow of the wooden chair, with the hand
curved, half open and half shut, as if it had just let go a rope.

‘Might you be looking for a Boarding-House?’ Pleasant inquired, taking
her observant stand on one side of the fire.

‘I don’t rightly know my plans yet,’ returned the man.

‘You ain’t looking for a Leaving Shop?’

‘No,’ said the man.

‘No,’ assented Pleasant, ‘you’ve got too much of an outfit on you for
that. But if you should want either, this is both.’

‘Ay, ay!’ said the man, glancing round the place. ‘I know. I’ve been
here before.’

‘Did you Leave anything when you were here before?’ asked Pleasant, with
a view to principal and interest.

‘No.’ The man shook his head.

‘I am pretty sure you never boarded here?’

‘No.’ The man again shook his head.

‘What DID you do here when you were here before?’ asked Pleasant. ‘For I
don’t remember you.’

‘It’s not at all likely you should. I only stood at the door, one
night--on the lower step there--while a shipmate of mine looked in to
speak to your father. I remember the place well.’ Looking very curiously
round it.

‘Might that have been long ago?’

‘Ay, a goodish bit ago. When I came off my last voyage.’

‘Then you have not been to sea lately?’

‘No. Been in the sick bay since then, and been employed ashore.’

‘Then, to be sure, that accounts for your hands.’

The man with a keen look, a quick smile, and a change of manner, caught
her up. ‘You’re a good observer. Yes. That accounts for my hands.’

Pleasant was somewhat disquieted by his look, and returned it
suspiciously. Not only was his change of manner, though very sudden,
quite collected, but his former manner, which he resumed, had a
certain suppressed confidence and sense of power in it that were half
threatening.

‘Will your father be long?’ he inquired.

‘I don’t know. I can’t say.’

‘As you supposed he was at home, it would seem that he has just gone
out? How’s that?’

‘I supposed he had come home,’ Pleasant explained.

‘Oh! You supposed he had come home? Then he has been some time out?
How’s that?’

‘I don’t want to deceive you. Father’s on the river in his boat.’

‘At the old work?’ asked the man.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Pleasant, shrinking a step back.
‘What on earth d’ye want?’

‘I don’t want to hurt your father. I don’t want to say I might, if I
chose. I want to speak to him. Not much in that, is there? There shall
be no secrets from you; you shall be by. And plainly, Miss Riderhood,
there’s nothing to be got out of me, or made of me. I am not good for
the Leaving Shop, I am not good for the Boarding-House, I am not good
for anything in your way to the extent of sixpenn’orth of halfpence. Put
the idea aside, and we shall get on together.’

‘But you’re a seafaring man?’ argued Pleasant, as if that were a
sufficient reason for his being good for something in her way.

‘Yes and no. I have been, and I may be again. But I am not for you.
Won’t you take my word for it?’

The conversation had arrived at a crisis to justify Miss Pleasant’s hair
in tumbling down. It tumbled down accordingly, and she twisted it up,
looking from under her bent forehead at the man. In taking stock of his
familiarly worn rough-weather nautical clothes, piece by piece, she took
stock of a formidable knife in a sheath at his waist ready to his hand,
and of a whistle hanging round his neck, and of a short jagged knotted
club with a loaded head that peeped out of a pocket of his loose
outer jacket or frock. He sat quietly looking at her; but, with these
appendages partially revealing themselves, and with a quantity
of bristling oakum-coloured head and whisker, he had a formidable
appearance.

‘Won’t you take my word for it?’ he asked again.

Pleasant answered with a short dumb nod. He rejoined with another short
dumb nod. Then he got up and stood with his arms folded, in front of
the fire, looking down into it occasionally, as she stood with her arms
folded, leaning against the side of the chimney-piece.

‘To wile away the time till your father comes,’ he said,--‘pray is there
much robbing and murdering of seamen about the water-side now?’

‘No,’ said Pleasant.

‘Any?’

‘Complaints of that sort are sometimes made, about Ratcliffe and Wapping
and up that way. But who knows how many are true?’

‘To be sure. And it don’t seem necessary.’

‘That’s what I say,’ observed Pleasant. ‘Where’s the reason for it?
Bless the sailors, it ain’t as if they ever could keep what they have,
without it.’

‘You’re right. Their money may be soon got out of them, without
violence,’ said the man.

‘Of course it may,’ said Pleasant; ‘and then they ship again and get
more. And the best thing for ‘em, too, to ship again as soon as ever
they can be brought to it. They’re never so well off as when they’re
afloat.’

‘I’ll tell you why I ask,’ pursued the visitor, looking up from the
fire. ‘I was once beset that way myself, and left for dead.’

‘No?’ said Pleasant. ‘Where did it happen?’

‘It happened,’ returned the man, with a ruminative air, as he drew his
right hand across his chin, and dipped the other in the pocket of his
rough outer coat, ‘it happened somewhere about here as I reckon. I don’t
think it can have been a mile from here.’

‘Were you drunk?’ asked Pleasant.

‘I was muddled, but not with fair drinking. I had not been drinking, you
understand. A mouthful did it.’

Pleasant with a grave look shook her head; importing that she understood
the process, but decidedly disapproved.

‘Fair trade is one thing,’ said she, ‘but that’s another. No one has a
right to carry on with Jack in THAT way.’

‘The sentiment does you credit,’ returned the man, with a grim smile;
and added, in a mutter, ‘the more so, as I believe it’s not your
father’s.--Yes, I had a bad time of it, that time. I lost everything,
and had a sharp struggle for my life, weak as I was.’

‘Did you get the parties punished?’ asked Pleasant.

‘A tremendous punishment followed,’ said the man, more seriously; ‘but
it was not of my bringing about.’

‘Of whose, then?’ asked Pleasant.

The man pointed upward with his forefinger, and, slowly recovering that
hand, settled his chin in it again as he looked at the fire. Bringing
her inherited eye to bear upon him, Pleasant Riderhood felt more
and more uncomfortable, his manner was so mysterious, so stern, so
self-possessed.

‘Anyways,’ said the damsel, ‘I am glad punishment followed, and I say
so. Fair trade with seafaring men gets a bad name through deeds of
violence. I am as much against deeds of violence being done to seafaring
men, as seafaring men can be themselves. I am of the same opinion as my
mother was, when she was living. Fair trade, my mother used to say, but
no robbery and no blows.’ In the way of trade Miss Pleasant would have
taken--and indeed did take when she could--as much as thirty shillings
a week for board that would be dear at five, and likewise conducted the
Leaving business upon correspondingly equitable principles; yet she had
that tenderness of conscience and those feelings of humanity, that the
moment her ideas of trade were overstepped, she became the seaman’s
champion, even against her father whom she seldom otherwise resisted.

But, she was here interrupted by her father’s voice exclaiming angrily,
‘Now, Poll Parrot!’ and by her father’s hat being heavily flung from his
hand and striking her face. Accustomed to such occasional manifestations
of his sense of parental duty, Pleasant merely wiped her face on her
hair (which of course had tumbled down) before she twisted it up. This
was another common procedure on the part of the ladies of the Hole, when
heated by verbal or fistic altercation.

‘Blest if I believe such a Poll Parrot as you was ever learned to
speak!’ growled Mr Riderhood, stooping to pick up his hat, and making
a feint at her with his head and right elbow; for he took the delicate
subject of robbing seamen in extraordinary dudgeon, and was out of
humour too. ‘What are you Poll Parroting at now? Ain’t you got nothing
to do but fold your arms and stand a Poll Parroting all night?’

‘Let her alone,’ urged the man. ‘She was only speaking to me.’

‘Let her alone too!’ retorted Mr Riderhood, eyeing him all over. ‘Do you
know she’s my daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘And don’t you know that I won’t have no Poll Parroting on the part of
my daughter? No, nor yet that I won’t take no Poll Parroting from no
man? And who may YOU be, and what may YOU want?’

‘How can I tell you until you are silent?’ returned the other fiercely.

‘Well,’ said Mr Riderhood, quailing a little, ‘I am willing to be silent
for the purpose of hearing. But don’t Poll Parrot me.’

‘Are you thirsty, you?’ the man asked, in the same fierce short way,
after returning his look.

‘Why nat’rally,’ said Mr Riderhood, ‘ain’t I always thirsty!’ (Indignant
at the absurdity of the question.)

‘What will you drink?’ demanded the man.

‘Sherry wine,’ returned Mr Riderhood, in the same sharp tone, ‘if you’re
capable of it.’

The man put his hand in his pocket, took out half a sovereign, and
begged the favour of Miss Pleasant that she would fetch a bottle. ‘With
the cork undrawn,’ he added, emphatically, looking at her father.

‘I’ll take my Alfred David,’ muttered Mr Riderhood, slowly relaxing into
a dark smile, ‘that you know a move. Do I know YOU? N--n--no, I don’t
know you.’

The man replied, ‘No, you don’t know me.’ And so they stood looking at
one another surlily enough, until Pleasant came back.

‘There’s small glasses on the shelf,’ said Riderhood to his daughter.
‘Give me the one without a foot. I gets my living by the sweat of my
brow, and it’s good enough for ME.’ This had a modest self-denying
appearance; but it soon turned out that as, by reason of the
impossibility of standing the glass upright while there was anything in
it, it required to be emptied as soon as filled, Mr Riderhood managed to
drink in the proportion of three to one.

With his Fortunatus’s goblet ready in his hand, Mr Riderhood sat down on
one side of the table before the fire, and the strange man on the other:
Pleasant occupying a stool between the latter and the fireside. The
background, composed of handkerchiefs, coats, shirts, hats, and other
old articles ‘On Leaving,’ had a general dim resemblance to human
listeners; especially where a shiny black sou’wester suit and hat hung,
looking very like a clumsy mariner with his back to the company, who
was so curious to overhear, that he paused for the purpose with his
coat half pulled on, and his shoulders up to his ears in the uncompleted
action.

The visitor first held the bottle against the light of the candle,
and next examined the top of the cork. Satisfied that it had not been
tampered with, he slowly took from his breastpocket a rusty clasp-knife,
and, with a corkscrew in the handle, opened the wine. That done,
he looked at the cork, unscrewed it from the corkscrew, laid each
separately on the table, and, with the end of the sailor’s knot of his
neckerchief, dusted the inside of the neck of the bottle. All this with
great deliberation.

At first Riderhood had sat with his footless glass extended at arm’s
length for filling, while the very deliberate stranger seemed absorbed
in his preparations. But, gradually his arm reverted home to him, and
his glass was lowered and lowered until he rested it upside down upon
the table. By the same degrees his attention became concentrated on
the knife. And now, as the man held out the bottle to fill all round,
Riderhood stood up, leaned over the table to look closer at the knife,
and stared from it to him.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked the man.

‘Why, I know that knife!’ said Riderhood.

‘Yes, I dare say you do.’

He motioned to him to hold up his glass, and filled it. Riderhood
emptied it to the last drop and began again.

‘That there knife--’

‘Stop,’ said the man, composedly. ‘I was going to drink to your
daughter. Your health, Miss Riderhood.’

‘That knife was the knife of a seaman named George Radfoot.’

‘It was.’

‘That seaman was well beknown to me.’

‘He was.’

‘What’s come to him?’

‘Death has come to him. Death came to him in an ugly shape. He looked,’
said the man, ‘very horrible after it.’

‘Arter what?’ said Riderhood, with a frowning stare.

‘After he was killed.’

‘Killed? Who killed him?’

Only answering with a shrug, the man filled the footless glass, and
Riderhood emptied it: looking amazedly from his daughter to his visitor.

‘You don’t mean to tell a honest man--’ he was recommencing with
his empty glass in his hand, when his eye became fascinated by the
stranger’s outer coat. He leaned across the table to see it nearer,
touched the sleeve, turned the cuff to look at the sleeve-lining (the
man, in his perfect composure, offering not the least objection), and
exclaimed, ‘It’s my belief as this here coat was George Radfoot’s too!’

‘You are right. He wore it the last time you ever saw him, and the last
time you ever will see him--in this world.’

‘It’s my belief you mean to tell me to my face you killed him!’
exclaimed Riderhood; but, nevertheless, allowing his glass to be filled
again.

The man only answered with another shrug, and showed no symptom of
confusion.

‘Wish I may die if I know what to be up to with this chap!’ said
Riderhood, after staring at him, and tossing his last glassful down his
throat. ‘Let’s know what to make of you. Say something plain.’

‘I will,’ returned the other, leaning forward across the table, and
speaking in a low impressive voice. ‘What a liar you are!’

The honest witness rose, and made as though he would fling his glass in
the man’s face. The man not wincing, and merely shaking his forefinger
half knowingly, half menacingly, the piece of honesty thought better of
it and sat down again, putting the glass down too.

‘And when you went to that lawyer yonder in the Temple with that
invented story,’ said the stranger, in an exasperatingly comfortable
sort of confidence, ‘you might have had your strong suspicions of a
friend of your own, you know. I think you had, you know.’

‘Me my suspicions? Of what friend?’

‘Tell me again whose knife was this?’ demanded the man.

‘It was possessed by, and was the property of--him as I have made
mention on,’ said Riderhood, stupidly evading the actual mention of the
name.

‘Tell me again whose coat was this?’

‘That there article of clothing likeways belonged to, and was wore
by--him as I have made mention on,’ was again the dull Old Bailey
evasion.

‘I suspect that you gave him the credit of the deed, and of keeping
cleverly out of the way. But there was small cleverness in HIS keeping
out of the way. The cleverness would have been, to have got back for one
single instant to the light of the sun.’

‘Things is come to a pretty pass,’ growled Mr Riderhood, rising to his
feet, goaded to stand at bay, ‘when bullyers as is wearing dead men’s
clothes, and bullyers as is armed with dead men’s knives, is to come
into the houses of honest live men, getting their livings by the sweats
of their brows, and is to make these here sort of charges with no rhyme
and no reason, neither the one nor yet the other! Why should I have had
my suspicions of him?’

‘Because you knew him,’ replied the man; ‘because you had been one with
him, and knew his real character under a fair outside; because on the
night which you had afterwards reason to believe to be the very night of
the murder, he came in here, within an hour of his having left his ship
in the docks, and asked you in what lodgings he could find room. Was
there no stranger with him?’

‘I’ll take my world-without-end everlasting Alfred David that you warn’t
with him,’ answered Riderhood. ‘You talk big, you do, but things look
pretty black against yourself, to my thinking. You charge again’ me that
George Radfoot got lost sight of, and was no more thought of. What’s
that for a sailor? Why there’s fifty such, out of sight and out of
mind, ten times as long as him--through entering in different names,
re-shipping when the out’ard voyage is made, and what not--a turning
up to light every day about here, and no matter made of it. Ask my
daughter. You could go on Poll Parroting enough with her, when I warn’t
come in: Poll Parrot a little with her on this pint. You and your
suspicions of my suspicions of him! What are my suspicions of you? You
tell me George Radfoot got killed. I ask you who done it and how you
know it. You carry his knife and you wear his coat. I ask you how you
come by ‘em? Hand over that there bottle!’ Here Mr Riderhood appeared
to labour under a virtuous delusion that it was his own property. ‘And
you,’ he added, turning to his daughter, as he filled the footless
glass, ‘if it warn’t wasting good sherry wine on you, I’d chuck this at
you, for Poll Parroting with this man. It’s along of Poll Parroting
that such like as him gets their suspicions, whereas I gets mine by
argueyment, and being nat’rally a honest man, and sweating away at the
brow as a honest man ought.’ Here he filled the footless goblet again,
and stood chewing one half of its contents and looking down into the
other as he slowly rolled the wine about in the glass; while Pleasant,
whose sympathetic hair had come down on her being apostrophised,
rearranged it, much in the style of the tail of a horse when proceeding
to market to be sold.

‘Well? Have you finished?’ asked the strange man.

‘No,’ said Riderhood, ‘I ain’t. Far from it. Now then! I want to know
how George Radfoot come by his death, and how you come by his kit?’

‘If you ever do know, you won’t know now.’

‘And next I want to know,’ proceeded Riderhood ‘whether you mean to
charge that what-you-may-call-it-murder--’

‘Harmon murder, father,’ suggested Pleasant.

‘No Poll Parroting!’ he vociferated, in return. ‘Keep your mouth
shut!--I want to know, you sir, whether you charge that there crime on
George Radfoot?’

‘If you ever do know, you won’t know now.’

‘Perhaps you done it yourself?’ said Riderhood, with a threatening
action.

‘I alone know,’ returned the man, sternly shaking his head, ‘the
mysteries of that crime. I alone know that your trumped-up story cannot
possibly be true. I alone know that it must be altogether false, and
that you must know it to be altogether false. I come here to-night to
tell you so much of what I know, and no more.’

Mr Riderhood, with his crooked eye upon his visitor, meditated for some
moments, and then refilled his glass, and tipped the contents down his
throat in three tips.

‘Shut the shop-door!’ he then said to his daughter, putting the glass
suddenly down. ‘And turn the key and stand by it! If you know all this,
you sir,’ getting, as he spoke, between the visitor and the door, ‘why
han’t you gone to Lawyer Lightwood?’

‘That, also, is alone known to myself,’ was the cool answer.

‘Don’t you know that, if you didn’t do the deed, what you say you could
tell is worth from five to ten thousand pound?’ asked Riderhood.

‘I know it very well, and when I claim the money you shall share it.’

The honest man paused, and drew a little nearer to the visitor, and a
little further from the door.

‘I know it,’ repeated the man, quietly, ‘as well as I know that you and
George Radfoot were one together in more than one dark business; and as
well as I know that you, Roger Riderhood, conspired against an innocent
man for blood-money; and as well as I know that I can--and that I swear
I will!--give you up on both scores, and be the proof against you in my
own person, if you defy me!’

‘Father!’ cried Pleasant, from the door. ‘Don’t defy him! Give way to
him! Don’t get into more trouble, father!’

‘Will you leave off a Poll Parroting, I ask you?’ cried Mr Riderhood,
half beside himself between the two. Then, propitiatingly and
crawlingly: ‘You sir! You han’t said what you want of me. Is it fair, is
it worthy of yourself, to talk of my defying you afore ever you say what
you want of me?’

‘I don’t want much,’ said the man. ‘This accusation of yours must not be
left half made and half unmade. What was done for the blood-money must
be thoroughly undone.’

‘Well; but Shipmate--’

‘Don’t call me Shipmate,’ said the man.

‘Captain, then,’ urged Mr Riderhood; ‘there! You won’t object to
Captain. It’s a honourable title, and you fully look it. Captain! Ain’t
the man dead? Now I ask you fair. Ain’t Gaffer dead?’

‘Well,’ returned the other, with impatience, ‘yes, he is dead. What
then?’

‘Can words hurt a dead man, Captain? I only ask you fair.’

‘They can hurt the memory of a dead man, and they can hurt his living
children. How many children had this man?’

‘Meaning Gaffer, Captain?’

‘Of whom else are we speaking?’ returned the other, with a movement of
his foot, as if Rogue Riderhood were beginning to sneak before him in
the body as well as the spirit, and he spurned him off. ‘I have heard
of a daughter, and a son. I ask for information; I ask YOUR daughter; I
prefer to speak to her. What children did Hexam leave?’

Pleasant, looking to her father for permission to reply, that honest man
exclaimed with great bitterness:

‘Why the devil don’t you answer the Captain? You can Poll Parrot enough
when you ain’t wanted to Poll Parrot, you perwerse jade!’

Thus encouraged, Pleasant explained that there were only Lizzie, the
daughter in question, and the youth. Both very respectable, she added.

‘It is dreadful that any stigma should attach to them,’ said the
visitor, whom the consideration rendered so uneasy that he rose, and
paced to and fro, muttering, ‘Dreadful! Unforeseen? How could it be
foreseen!’ Then he stopped, and asked aloud: ‘Where do they live?’

Pleasant further explained that only the daughter had resided with the
father at the time of his accidental death, and that she had immediately
afterwards quitted the neighbourhood.

‘I know that,’ said the man, ‘for I have been to the place they dwelt
in, at the time of the inquest. Could you quietly find out for me where
she lives now?’

Pleasant had no doubt she could do that. Within what time, did she
think? Within a day. The visitor said that was well, and he would return
for the information, relying on its being obtained. To this dialogue
Riderhood had attended in silence, and he now obsequiously bespake the
Captain.

‘Captain! Mentioning them unfort’net words of mine respecting Gaffer,
it is contrairily to be bore in mind that Gaffer always were a precious
rascal, and that his line were a thieving line. Likeways when I went to
them two Governors, Lawyer Lightwood and the t’other Governor, with
my information, I may have been a little over-eager for the cause of
justice, or (to put it another way) a little over-stimilated by them
feelings which rouses a man up, when a pot of money is going about,
to get his hand into that pot of money for his family’s sake. Besides
which, I think the wine of them two Governors was--I will not say
a hocussed wine, but fur from a wine as was elthy for the mind. And
there’s another thing to be remembered, Captain. Did I stick to them
words when Gaffer was no more, and did I say bold to them two Governors,
“Governors both, wot I informed I still inform; wot was took down I hold
to”? No. I says, frank and open--no shuffling, mind you, Captain!--“I
may have been mistook, I’ve been a thinking of it, it mayn’t have been
took down correct on this and that, and I won’t swear to thick and thin,
I’d rayther forfeit your good opinions than do it.” And so far as
I know,’ concluded Mr Riderhood, by way of proof and evidence to
character, ‘I HAVE actiwally forfeited the good opinions of several
persons--even your own, Captain, if I understand your words--but I’d
sooner do it than be forswore. There; if that’s conspiracy, call me
conspirator.’

‘You shall sign,’ said the visitor, taking very little heed of this
oration, ‘a statement that it was all utterly false, and the poor girl
shall have it. I will bring it with me for your signature, when I come
again.’

‘When might you be expected, Captain?’ inquired Riderhood, again
dubiously getting between him and door.

‘Quite soon enough for you. I shall not disappoint you; don’t be
afraid.’

‘Might you be inclined to leave any name, Captain?’

‘No, not at all. I have no such intention.’

‘“Shall” is summ’at of a hard word, Captain,’ urged Riderhood, still
feebly dodging between him and the door, as he advanced. ‘When you say a
man “shall” sign this and that and t’other, Captain, you order him about
in a grand sort of a way. Don’t it seem so to yourself?’

The man stood still, and angrily fixed him with his eyes.

‘Father, father!’ entreated Pleasant, from the door, with her disengaged
hand nervously trembling at her lips; ‘don’t! Don’t get into trouble any
more!’

‘Hear me out, Captain, hear me out! All I was wishing to mention,
Captain, afore you took your departer,’ said the sneaking Mr Riderhood,
falling out of his path, ‘was, your handsome words relating to the
reward.’

‘When I claim it,’ said the man, in a tone which seemed to leave some
such words as ‘you dog,’ very distinctly understood, ‘you shall share
it.’

Looking stedfastly at Riderhood, he once more said in a low voice, this
time with a grim sort of admiration of him as a perfect piece of evil,
‘What a liar you are!’ and, nodding his head twice or thrice over the
compliment, passed out of the shop. But, to Pleasant he said good-night
kindly.

The honest man who gained his living by the sweat of his brow remained
in a state akin to stupefaction, until the footless glass and the
unfinished bottle conveyed themselves into his mind. From his mind he
conveyed them into his hands, and so conveyed the last of the wine into
his stomach. When that was done, he awoke to a clear perception that
Poll Parroting was solely chargeable with what had passed. Therefore,
not to be remiss in his duty as a father, he threw a pair of sea-boots
at Pleasant, which she ducked to avoid, and then cried, poor thing,
using her hair for a pocket-handkerchief.



Chapter 13

A SOLO AND A DUETT


The wind was blowing so hard when the visitor came out at the shop-door
into the darkness and dirt of Limehouse Hole, that it almost blew him
in again. Doors were slamming violently, lamps were flickering or blown
out, signs were rocking in their frames, the water of the kennels,
wind-dispersed, flew about in drops like rain. Indifferent to the
weather, and even preferring it to better weather for its clearance of
the streets, the man looked about him with a scrutinizing glance. ‘Thus
much I know,’ he murmured. ‘I have never been here since that night, and
never was here before that night, but thus much I recognize. I wonder
which way did we take when we came out of that shop. We turned to the
right as I have turned, but I can recall no more. Did we go by this
alley? Or down that little lane?’

He tried both, but both confused him equally, and he came straying
back to the same spot. ‘I remember there were poles pushed out of upper
windows on which clothes were drying, and I remember a low public-house,
and the sound flowing down a narrow passage belonging to it of the
scraping of a fiddle and the shuffling of feet. But here are all these
things in the lane, and here are all these things in the alley. And I
have nothing else in my mind but a wall, a dark doorway, a flight of
stairs, and a room.’

He tried a new direction, but made nothing of it; walls, dark doorways,
flights of stairs and rooms, were too abundant. And, like most people so
puzzled, he again and again described a circle, and found himself at
the point from which he had begun. ‘This is like what I have read in
narratives of escape from prison,’ said he, ‘where the little track of
the fugitives in the night always seems to take the shape of the great
round world, on which they wander; as if it were a secret law.’

Here he ceased to be the oakum-headed, oakum-whiskered man on whom Miss
Pleasant Riderhood had looked, and, allowing for his being still wrapped
in a nautical overcoat, became as like that same lost wanted Mr Julius
Handford, as never man was like another in this world. In the breast of
the coat he stowed the bristling hair and whisker, in a moment, as the
favouring wind went with him down a solitary place that it had swept
clear of passengers. Yet in that same moment he was the Secretary also,
Mr Boffin’s Secretary. For John Rokesmith, too, was as like that same
lost wanted Mr Julius Handford as never man was like another in this
world.

‘I have no clue to the scene of my death,’ said he. ‘Not that it matters
now. But having risked discovery by venturing here at all, I should have
been glad to track some part of the way.’ With which singular words he
abandoned his search, came up out of Limehouse Hole, and took the way
past Limehouse Church. At the great iron gate of the churchyard he
stopped and looked in. He looked up at the high tower spectrally
resisting the wind, and he looked round at the white tombstones, like
enough to the dead in their winding-sheets, and he counted the nine
tolls of the clock-bell.

‘It is a sensation not experienced by many mortals,’ said he, ‘to be
looking into a churchyard on a wild windy night, and to feel that I no
more hold a place among the living than these dead do, and even to know
that I lie buried somewhere else, as they lie buried here. Nothing uses
me to it. A spirit that was once a man could hardly feel stranger or
lonelier, going unrecognized among mankind, than I feel.

‘But this is the fanciful side of the situation. It has a real side, so
difficult that, though I think of it every day, I never thoroughly think
it out. Now, let me determine to think it out as I walk home. I know
I evade it, as many men--perhaps most men--do evade thinking their way
through their greatest perplexity. I will try to pin myself to mine.
Don’t evade it, John Harmon; don’t evade it; think it out!


‘When I came to England, attracted to the country with which I had none
but most miserable associations, by the accounts of my fine inheritance
that found me abroad, I came back, shrinking from my father’s money,
shrinking from my father’s memory, mistrustful of being forced on a
mercenary wife, mistrustful of my father’s intention in thrusting that
marriage on me, mistrustful that I was already growing avaricious,
mistrustful that I was slackening in gratitude to the two dear noble
honest friends who had made the only sunlight in my childish life or
that of my heartbroken sister. I came back, timid, divided in my mind,
afraid of myself and everybody here, knowing of nothing but wretchedness
that my father’s wealth had ever brought about. Now, stop, and so far
think it out, John Harmon. Is that so? That is exactly so.

‘On board serving as third mate was George Radfoot. I knew nothing of
him. His name first became known to me about a week before we sailed,
through my being accosted by one of the ship-agent’s clerks as
“Mr Radfoot.” It was one day when I had gone aboard to look to my
preparations, and the clerk, coming behind me as I stood on deck, tapped
me on the shoulder, and said, “Mr Rad-foot, look here,” referring to
some papers that he had in his hand. And my name first became known to
Radfoot, through another clerk within a day or two, and while the ship
was yet in port, coming up behind him, tapping him on the shoulder and
beginning, “I beg your pardon, Mr Harmon--.” I believe we were alike
in bulk and stature but not otherwise, and that we were not strikingly
alike, even in those respects, when we were together and could be
compared.

‘However, a sociable word or two on these mistakes became an easy
introduction between us, and the weather was hot, and he helped me to a
cool cabin on deck alongside his own, and his first school had been at
Brussels as mine had been, and he had learnt French as I had learnt it,
and he had a little history of himself to relate--God only knows how
much of it true, and how much of it false--that had its likeness to
mine. I had been a seaman too. So we got to be confidential together,
and the more easily yet, because he and every one on board had known
by general rumour what I was making the voyage to England for. By such
degrees and means, he came to the knowledge of my uneasiness of mind,
and of its setting at that time in the direction of desiring to see and
form some judgment of my allotted wife, before she could possibly know
me for myself; also to try Mrs Boffin and give her a glad surprise. So
the plot was made out of our getting common sailors’ dresses (as he was
able to guide me about London), and throwing ourselves in Bella Wilfer’s
neighbourhood, and trying to put ourselves in her way, and doing
whatever chance might favour on the spot, and seeing what came of it. If
nothing came of it, I should be no worse off, and there would merely
be a short delay in my presenting myself to Lightwood. I have all these
facts right? Yes. They are all accurately right.

‘His advantage in all this was, that for a time I was to be lost. It
might be for a day or for two days, but I must be lost sight of on
landing, or there would be recognition, anticipation, and failure.
Therefore, I disembarked with my valise in my hand--as Potterson
the steward and Mr Jacob Kibble my fellow-passenger afterwards
remembered--and waited for him in the dark by that very Limehouse Church
which is now behind me.

‘As I had always shunned the port of London, I only knew the church
through his pointing out its spire from on board. Perhaps I might
recall, if it were any good to try, the way by which I went to it alone
from the river; but how we two went from it to Riderhood’s shop, I don’t
know--any more than I know what turns we took and doubles we made, after
we left it. The way was purposely confused, no doubt.

‘But let me go on thinking the facts out, and avoid confusing them with
my speculations. Whether he took me by a straight way or a crooked way,
what is that to the purpose now? Steady, John Harmon.

‘When we stopped at Riderhood’s, and he asked that scoundrel a question
or two, purporting to refer only to the lodging-houses in which there
was accommodation for us, had I the least suspicion of him? None.
Certainly none until afterwards when I held the clue. I think he must
have got from Riderhood in a paper, the drug, or whatever it was, that
afterwards stupefied me, but I am far from sure. All I felt safe in
charging on him to-night, was old companionship in villainy between
them. Their undisguised intimacy, and the character I now know Riderhood
to bear, made that not at all adventurous. But I am not clear about the
drug. Thinking out the circumstances on which I found my suspicion, they
are only two. One: I remember his changing a small folded paper from one
pocket to another, after we came out, which he had not touched before.
Two: I now know Riderhood to have been previously taken up for being
concerned in the robbery of an unlucky seaman, to whom some such poison
had been given.

‘It is my conviction that we cannot have gone a mile from that shop,
before we came to the wall, the dark doorway, the flight of stairs, and
the room. The night was particularly dark and it rained hard. As I think
the circumstances back, I hear the rain splashing on the stone pavement
of the passage, which was not under cover. The room overlooked the
river, or a dock, or a creek, and the tide was out. Being possessed of
the time down to that point, I know by the hour that it must have been
about low water; but while the coffee was getting ready, I drew back the
curtain (a dark-brown curtain), and, looking out, knew by the kind
of reflection below, of the few neighbouring lights, that they were
reflected in tidal mud.

‘He had carried under his arm a canvas bag, containing a suit of his
clothes. I had no change of outer clothes with me, as I was to buy
slops. “You are very wet, Mr Harmon,”--I can hear him saying--“and I am
quite dry under this good waterproof coat. Put on these clothes of
mine. You may find on trying them that they will answer your purpose
to-morrow, as well as the slops you mean to buy, or better. While you
change, I’ll hurry the hot coffee.” When he came back, I had his clothes
on, and there was a black man with him, wearing a linen jacket, like
a steward, who put the smoking coffee on the table in a tray and never
looked at me. I am so far literal and exact? Literal and exact, I am
certain.

‘Now, I pass to sick and deranged impressions; they are so strong, that
I rely upon them; but there are spaces between them that I know nothing
about, and they are not pervaded by any idea of time.

‘I had drank some coffee, when to my sense of sight he began to swell
immensely, and something urged me to rush at him. We had a struggle near
the door. He got from me, through my not knowing where to strike, in the
whirling round of the room, and the flashing of flames of fire between
us. I dropped down. Lying helpless on the ground, I was turned over by
a foot. I was dragged by the neck into a corner. I heard men speak
together. I was turned over by other feet. I saw a figure like myself
lying dressed in my clothes on a bed. What might have been, for anything
I knew, a silence of days, weeks, months, years, was broken by a violent
wrestling of men all over the room. The figure like myself was assailed,
and my valise was in its hand. I was trodden upon and fallen over. I
heard a noise of blows, and thought it was a wood-cutter cutting down
a tree. I could not have said that my name was John Harmon--I could not
have thought it--I didn’t know it--but when I heard the blows, I thought
of the wood-cutter and his axe, and had some dead idea that I was lying
in a forest.

‘This is still correct? Still correct, with the exception that I cannot
possibly express it to myself without using the word I. But it was not
I. There was no such thing as I, within my knowledge.

‘It was only after a downward slide through something like a tube, and
then a great noise and a sparkling and crackling as of fires, that the
consciousness came upon me, “This is John Harmon drowning! John Harmon,
struggle for your life. John Harmon, call on Heaven and save yourself!”
 I think I cried it out aloud in a great agony, and then a heavy horrid
unintelligible something vanished, and it was I who was struggling there
alone in the water.

‘I was very weak and faint, frightfully oppressed with drowsiness, and
driving fast with the tide. Looking over the black water, I saw the
lights racing past me on the two banks of the river, as if they were
eager to be gone and leave me dying in the dark. The tide was running
down, but I knew nothing of up or down then. When, guiding myself safely
with Heaven’s assistance before the fierce set of the water, I at last
caught at a boat moored, one of a tier of boats at a causeway, I was
sucked under her, and came up, only just alive, on the other side.

‘Was I long in the water? Long enough to be chilled to the heart, but
I don’t know how long. Yet the cold was merciful, for it was the cold
night air and the rain that restored me from a swoon on the stones of
the causeway. They naturally supposed me to have toppled in, drunk, when
I crept to the public-house it belonged to; for I had no notion where
I was, and could not articulate--through the poison that had made me
insensible having affected my speech--and I supposed the night to be
the previous night, as it was still dark and raining. But I had lost
twenty-four hours.

‘I have checked the calculation often, and it must have been two nights
that I lay recovering in that public-house. Let me see. Yes. I am sure
it was while I lay in that bed there, that the thought entered my head
of turning the danger I had passed through, to the account of being
for some time supposed to have disappeared mysteriously, and of proving
Bella. The dread of our being forced on one another, and perpetuating
the fate that seemed to have fallen on my father’s riches--the fate that
they should lead to nothing but evil--was strong upon the moral timidity
that dates from my childhood with my poor sister.

‘As to this hour I cannot understand that side of the river where I
recovered the shore, being the opposite side to that on which I was
ensnared, I shall never understand it now. Even at this moment, while I
leave the river behind me, going home, I cannot conceive that it rolls
between me and that spot, or that the sea is where it is. But this is
not thinking it out; this is making a leap to the present time.

‘I could not have done it, but for the fortune in the waterproof
belt round my body. Not a great fortune, forty and odd pounds for the
inheritor of a hundred and odd thousand! But it was enough. Without it I
must have disclosed myself. Without it, I could never have gone to that
Exchequer Coffee House, or taken Mrs Wilfer’s lodgings.

‘Some twelve days I lived at that hotel, before the night when I saw the
corpse of Radfoot at the Police Station. The inexpressible mental horror
that I laboured under, as one of the consequences of the poison, makes
the interval seem greatly longer, but I know it cannot have been longer.
That suffering has gradually weakened and weakened since, and has only
come upon me by starts, and I hope I am free from it now; but even now,
I have sometimes to think, constrain myself, and stop before speaking,
or I could not say the words I want to say.

‘Again I ramble away from thinking it out to the end. It is not so far
to the end that I need be tempted to break off. Now, on straight!

‘I examined the newspapers every day for tidings that I was missing, but
saw none. Going out that night to walk (for I kept retired while it was
light), I found a crowd assembled round a placard posted at Whitehall.
It described myself, John Harmon, as found dead and mutilated in the
river under circumstances of strong suspicion, described my dress,
described the papers in my pockets, and stated where I was lying for
recognition. In a wild incautious way I hurried there, and there--with
the horror of the death I had escaped, before my eyes in its most
appalling shape, added to the inconceivable horror tormenting me at
that time when the poisonous stuff was strongest on me--I perceived that
Radfoot had been murdered by some unknown hands for the money for which
he would have murdered me, and that probably we had both been shot into
the river from the same dark place into the same dark tide, when the
stream ran deep and strong.

‘That night I almost gave up my mystery, though I suspected no one,
could offer no information, knew absolutely nothing save that the
murdered man was not I, but Radfoot. Next day while I hesitated, and
next day while I hesitated, it seemed as if the whole country were
determined to have me dead. The Inquest declared me dead, the Government
proclaimed me dead; I could not listen at my fireside for five minutes
to the outer noises, but it was borne into my ears that I was dead.

‘So John Harmon died, and Julius Handford disappeared, and John
Rokesmith was born. John Rokesmith’s intent to-night has been to repair
a wrong that he could never have imagined possible, coming to his ears
through the Lightwood talk related to him, and which he is bound by
every consideration to remedy. In that intent John Rokesmith will
persevere, as his duty is.

‘Now, is it all thought out? All to this time? Nothing omitted? No,
nothing. But beyond this time? To think it out through the future, is a
harder though a much shorter task than to think it out through the past.
John Harmon is dead. Should John Harmon come to life?

‘If yes, why? If no, why?’

‘Take yes, first. To enlighten human Justice concerning the offence of
one far beyond it who may have a living mother. To enlighten it with the
lights of a stone passage, a flight of stairs, a brown window-curtain,
and a black man. To come into possession of my father’s money, and with
it sordidly to buy a beautiful creature whom I love--I cannot help it;
reason has nothing to do with it; I love her against reason--but who
would as soon love me for my own sake, as she would love the beggar at
the corner. What a use for the money, and how worthy of its old misuses!

‘Now, take no. The reasons why John Harmon should not come to life.
Because he has passively allowed these dear old faithful friends to pass
into possession of the property. Because he sees them happy with it,
making a good use of it, effacing the old rust and tarnish on the money.
Because they have virtually adopted Bella, and will provide for her.
Because there is affection enough in her nature, and warmth enough in
her heart, to develop into something enduringly good, under favourable
conditions. Because her faults have been intensified by her place in my
father’s will, and she is already growing better. Because her marriage
with John Harmon, after what I have heard from her own lips, would be a
shocking mockery, of which both she and I must always be conscious, and
which would degrade her in her mind, and me in mine, and each of us in
the other’s. Because if John Harmon comes to life and does not marry
her, the property falls into the very hands that hold it now.

‘What would I have? Dead, I have found the true friends of my lifetime
still as true as tender and as faithful as when I was alive, and making
my memory an incentive to good actions done in my name. Dead, I have
found them when they might have slighted my name, and passed
greedily over my grave to ease and wealth, lingering by the way, like
single-hearted children, to recall their love for me when I was a poor
frightened child. Dead, I have heard from the woman who would have been
my wife if I had lived, the revolting truth that I should have purchased
her, caring nothing for me, as a Sultan buys a slave.

‘What would I have? If the dead could know, or do know, how the living
use them, who among the hosts of dead has found a more disinterested
fidelity on earth than I? Is not that enough for me? If I had come back,
these noble creatures would have welcomed me, wept over me, given up
everything to me with joy. I did not come back, and they have passed
unspoiled into my place. Let them rest in it, and let Bella rest in
hers.

‘What course for me then? This. To live the same quiet Secretary life,
carefully avoiding chances of recognition, until they shall have become
more accustomed to their altered state, and until the great swarm of
swindlers under many names shall have found newer prey. By that time,
the method I am establishing through all the affairs, and with which I
will every day take new pains to make them both familiar, will be, I may
hope, a machine in such working order as that they can keep it going.
I know I need but ask of their generosity, to have. When the right time
comes, I will ask no more than will replace me in my former path of
life, and John Rokesmith shall tread it as contentedly as he may. But
John Harmon shall come back no more.

‘That I may never, in the days to come afar off, have any weak misgiving
that Bella might, in any contingency, have taken me for my own sake if
I had plainly asked her, I WILL plainly ask her: proving beyond all
question what I already know too well. And now it is all thought out,
from the beginning to the end, and my mind is easier.’


So deeply engaged had the living-dead man been, in thus communing with
himself, that he had regarded neither the wind nor the way, and had
resisted the former instinctively as he had pursued the latter. But
being now come into the City, where there was a coach-stand, he stood
irresolute whether to go to his lodgings, or to go first to Mr Boffin’s
house. He decided to go round by the house, arguing, as he carried his
overcoat upon his arm, that it was less likely to attract notice if left
there, than if taken to Holloway: both Mrs Wilfer and Miss Lavinia being
ravenously curious touching every article of which the lodger stood
possessed.

Arriving at the house, he found that Mr and Mrs Boffin were out, but
that Miss Wilfer was in the drawing-room. Miss Wilfer had remained at
home, in consequence of not feeling very well, and had inquired in the
evening if Mr Rokesmith were in his room.

‘Make my compliments to Miss Wilfer, and say I am here now.’

Miss Wilfer’s compliments came down in return, and, if it were not too
much trouble, would Mr Rokesmith be so kind as to come up before he
went?

It was not too much trouble, and Mr Rokesmith came up.

Oh she looked very pretty, she looked very, very pretty! If the father
of the late John Harmon had but left his money unconditionally to his
son, and if his son had but lighted on this loveable girl for himself,
and had the happiness to make her loving as well as loveable!

‘Dear me! Are you not well, Mr Rokesmith?’

‘Yes, quite well. I was sorry to hear, when I came in, that YOU were
not.’

‘A mere nothing. I had a headache--gone now--and was not quite fit for
a hot theatre, so I stayed at home. I asked you if you were not well,
because you look so white.’

‘Do I? I have had a busy evening.’

She was on a low ottoman before the fire, with a little shining jewel
of a table, and her book and her work, beside her. Ah! what a different
life the late John Harmon’s, if it had been his happy privilege to take
his place upon that ottoman, and draw his arm about that waist, and say,
‘I hope the time has been long without me? What a Home Goddess you look,
my darling!’

But, the present John Rokesmith, far removed from the late John Harmon,
remained standing at a distance. A little distance in respect of space,
but a great distance in respect of separation.

‘Mr Rokesmith,’ said Bella, taking up her work, and inspecting it all
round the corners, ‘I wanted to say something to you when I could have
the opportunity, as an explanation why I was rude to you the other day.
You have no right to think ill of me, sir.’

The sharp little way in which she darted a look at him, half sensitively
injured, and half pettishly, would have been very much admired by the
late John Harmon.

‘You don’t know how well I think of you, Miss Wilfer.’

‘Truly, you must have a very high opinion of me, Mr Rokesmith, when you
believe that in prosperity I neglect and forget my old home.’

‘Do I believe so?’

‘You DID, sir, at any rate,’ returned Bella.

‘I took the liberty of reminding you of a little omission into which you
had fallen--insensibly and naturally fallen. It was no more than that.’

‘And I beg leave to ask you, Mr Rokesmith,’ said Bella, ‘why you took
that liberty?--I hope there is no offence in the phrase; it is your own,
remember.’

‘Because I am truly, deeply, profoundly interested in you, Miss Wilfer.
Because I wish to see you always at your best. Because I--shall I go
on?’

‘No, sir,’ returned Bella, with a burning face, ‘you have said more than
enough. I beg that you will NOT go on. If you have any generosity, any
honour, you will say no more.’

The late John Harmon, looking at the proud face with the down-cast eyes,
and at the quick breathing as it stirred the fall of bright brown hair
over the beautiful neck, would probably have remained silent.

‘I wish to speak to you, sir,’ said Bella, ‘once for all, and I don’t
know how to do it. I have sat here all this evening, wishing to speak to
you, and determining to speak to you, and feeling that I must. I beg for
a moment’s time.’

He remained silent, and she remained with her face averted, sometimes
making a slight movement as if she would turn and speak. At length she
did so.

‘You know how I am situated here, sir, and you know how I am situated
at home. I must speak to you for myself, since there is no one about
me whom I could ask to do so. It is not generous in you, it is not
honourable in you, to conduct yourself towards me as you do.’

‘Is it ungenerous or dishonourable to be devoted to you; fascinated by
you?’

‘Preposterous!’ said Bella.

The late John Harmon might have thought it rather a contemptuous and
lofty word of repudiation.

‘I now feel obliged to go on,’ pursued the Secretary, ‘though it were
only in self-explanation and self-defence. I hope, Miss Wilfer, that
it is not unpardonable--even in me--to make an honest declaration of an
honest devotion to you.’

‘An honest declaration!’ repeated Bella, with emphasis.

‘Is it otherwise?’

‘I must request, sir,’ said Bella, taking refuge in a touch of timely
resentment, ‘that I may not be questioned. You must excuse me if I
decline to be cross-examined.’

‘Oh, Miss Wilfer, this is hardly charitable. I ask you nothing but what
your own emphasis suggests. However, I waive even that question. But
what I have declared, I take my stand by. I cannot recall the avowal of
my earnest and deep attachment to you, and I do not recall it.’

‘I reject it, sir,’ said Bella.

‘I should be blind and deaf if I were not prepared for the reply.
Forgive my offence, for it carries its punishment with it.’

‘What punishment?’ asked Bella.

‘Is my present endurance none? But excuse me; I did not mean to
cross-examine you again.’

‘You take advantage of a hasty word of mine,’ said Bella with a little
sting of self-reproach, ‘to make me seem--I don’t know what. I spoke
without consideration when I used it. If that was bad, I am sorry; but
you repeat it after consideration, and that seems to me to be at least
no better. For the rest, I beg it may be understood, Mr Rokesmith, that
there is an end of this between us, now and for ever.’

‘Now and for ever,’ he repeated.

‘Yes. I appeal to you, sir,’ proceeded Bella with increasing spirit,
‘not to pursue me. I appeal to you not to take advantage of your
position in this house to make my position in it distressing and
disagreeable. I appeal to you to discontinue your habit of making your
misplaced attentions as plain to Mrs Boffin as to me.’

‘Have I done so?’

‘I should think you have,’ replied Bella. ‘In any case it is not your
fault if you have not, Mr Rokesmith.’

‘I hope you are wrong in that impression. I should be very sorry to
have justified it. I think I have not. For the future there is no
apprehension. It is all over.’

‘I am much relieved to hear it,’ said Bella. ‘I have far other views in
life, and why should you waste your own?’

‘Mine!’ said the Secretary. ‘My life!’

His curious tone caused Bella to glance at the curious smile with which
he said it. It was gone as he glanced back. ‘Pardon me, Miss Wilfer,’
he proceeded, when their eyes met; ‘you have used some hard words, for
which I do not doubt you have a justification in your mind, that I do
not understand. Ungenerous and dishonourable. In what?’

‘I would rather not be asked,’ said Bella, haughtily looking down.

‘I would rather not ask, but the question is imposed upon me. Kindly
explain; or if not kindly, justly.’

‘Oh, sir!’ said Bella, raising her eyes to his, after a little struggle
to forbear, ‘is it generous and honourable to use the power here which
your favour with Mr and Mrs Boffin and your ability in your place give
you, against me?’

‘Against you?’

‘Is it generous and honourable to form a plan for gradually bringing
their influence to bear upon a suit which I have shown you that I do not
like, and which I tell you that I utterly reject?’

The late John Harmon could have borne a good deal, but he would have
been cut to the heart by such a suspicion as this.

‘Would it be generous and honourable to step into your place--if you did
so, for I don’t know that you did, and I hope you did not--anticipating,
or knowing beforehand, that I should come here, and designing to take me
at this disadvantage?’

‘This mean and cruel disadvantage,’ said the Secretary.

‘Yes,’ assented Bella.

The Secretary kept silence for a little while; then merely said, ‘You
are wholly mistaken, Miss Wilfer; wonderfully mistaken. I cannot say,
however, that it is your fault. If I deserve better things of you, you
do not know it.’

‘At least, sir,’ retorted Bella, with her old indignation rising, ‘you
know the history of my being here at all. I have heard Mr Boffin say
that you are master of every line and word of that will, as you are
master of all his affairs. And was it not enough that I should have been
willed away, like a horse, or a dog, or a bird; but must you too begin
to dispose of me in your mind, and speculate in me, as soon as I had
ceased to be the talk and the laugh of the town? Am I for ever to be
made the property of strangers?’

‘Believe me,’ returned the Secretary, ‘you are wonderfully mistaken.’

‘I should be glad to know it,’ answered Bella.

‘I doubt if you ever will. Good-night. Of course I shall be careful to
conceal any traces of this interview from Mr and Mrs Boffin, as long as
I remain here. Trust me, what you have complained of is at an end for
ever.’

‘I am glad I have spoken, then, Mr Rokesmith. It has been painful and
difficult, but it is done. If I have hurt you, I hope you will forgive
me. I am inexperienced and impetuous, and I have been a little spoilt;
but I really am not so bad as I dare say I appear, or as you think me.’

He quitted the room when Bella had said this, relenting in her wilful
inconsistent way. Left alone, she threw herself back on her ottoman, and
said, ‘I didn’t know the lovely woman was such a Dragon!’ Then, she
got up and looked in the glass, and said to her image, ‘You have been
positively swelling your features, you little fool!’ Then, she took an
impatient walk to the other end of the room and back, and said, ‘I
wish Pa was here to have a talk about an avaricious marriage; but he
is better away, poor dear, for I know I should pull his hair if he WAS
here.’ And then she threw her work away, and threw her book after
it, and sat down and hummed a tune, and hummed it out of tune, and
quarrelled with it.

And John Rokesmith, what did he?

He went down to his room, and buried John Harmon many additional fathoms
deep. He took his hat, and walked out, and, as he went to Holloway or
anywhere else--not at all minding where--heaped mounds upon mounds of
earth over John Harmon’s grave. His walking did not bring him home until
the dawn of day. And so busy had he been all night, piling and piling
weights upon weights of earth above John Harmon’s grave, that by that
time John Harmon lay buried under a whole Alpine range; and still the
Sexton Rokesmith accumulated mountains over him, lightening his labour
with the dirge, ‘Cover him, crush him, keep him down!’



Chapter 14

STRONG OF PURPOSE


The sexton-task of piling earth above John Harmon all night long, was
not conducive to sound sleep; but Rokesmith had some broken morning
rest, and rose strengthened in his purpose. It was all over now. No
ghost should trouble Mr and Mrs Boffin’s peace; invisible and voiceless,
the ghost should look on for a little while longer at the state of
existence out of which it had departed, and then should for ever cease
to haunt the scenes in which it had no place.

He went over it all again. He had lapsed into the condition in which
he found himself, as many a man lapses into many a condition, without
perceiving the accumulative power of its separate circumstances. When
in the distrust engendered by his wretched childhood and the action for
evil--never yet for good within his knowledge then--of his father and
his father’s wealth on all within their influence, he conceived the idea
of his first deception, it was meant to be harmless, it was to last
but a few hours or days, it was to involve in it only the girl so
capriciously forced upon him and upon whom he was so capriciously
forced, and it was honestly meant well towards her. For, if he had
found her unhappy in the prospect of that marriage (through her heart
inclining to another man or for any other cause), he would seriously
have said: ‘This is another of the old perverted uses of the
misery-making money. I will let it go to my and my sister’s only
protectors and friends.’ When the snare into which he fell so
outstripped his first intention as that he found himself placarded by
the police authorities upon the London walls for dead, he confusedly
accepted the aid that fell upon him, without considering how firmly it
must seem to fix the Boffins in their accession to the fortune. When he
saw them, and knew them, and even from his vantage-ground of inspection
could find no flaw in them, he asked himself, ‘And shall I come to life
to dispossess such people as these?’ There was no good to set against
the putting of them to that hard proof. He had heard from Bella’s own
lips when he stood tapping at the door on that night of his taking
the lodgings, that the marriage would have been on her part thoroughly
mercenary. He had since tried her, in his own unknown person and
supposed station, and she not only rejected his advances but resented
them. Was it for him to have the shame of buying her, or the meanness of
punishing her? Yet, by coming to life and accepting the condition of the
inheritance, he must do the former; and by coming to life and rejecting
it, he must do the latter.

Another consequence that he had never foreshadowed, was the implication
of an innocent man in his supposed murder. He would obtain complete
retraction from the accuser, and set the wrong right; but clearly the
wrong could never have been done if he had never planned a deception.
Then, whatever inconvenience or distress of mind the deception cost him,
it was manful repentantly to accept as among its consequences, and make
no complaint.

Thus John Rokesmith in the morning, and it buried John Harmon still many
fathoms deeper than he had been buried in the night.

Going out earlier than he was accustomed to do, he encountered the
cherub at the door. The cherub’s way was for a certain space his way,
and they walked together.

It was impossible not to notice the change in the cherub’s appearance.
The cherub felt very conscious of it, and modestly remarked:

‘A present from my daughter Bella, Mr Rokesmith.’

The words gave the Secretary a stroke of pleasure, for he remembered the
fifty pounds, and he still loved the girl. No doubt it was very weak--it
always IS very weak, some authorities hold--but he loved the girl.

‘I don’t know whether you happen to have read many books of African
Travel, Mr Rokesmith?’ said R. W.

‘I have read several.’

‘Well, you know, there’s usually a King George, or a King Boy, or a King
Sambo, or a King Bill, or Bull, or Rum, or Junk, or whatever name the
sailors may have happened to give him.’

‘Where?’ asked Rokesmith.

‘Anywhere. Anywhere in Africa, I mean. Pretty well everywhere, I may
say; for black kings are cheap--and I think’--said R. W., with an
apologetic air, ‘nasty’.

‘I am much of your opinion, Mr Wilfer. You were going to say--?’

‘I was going to say, the king is generally dressed in a London hat only,
or a Manchester pair of braces, or one epaulette, or an uniform coat
with his legs in the sleeves, or something of that kind.’

‘Just so,’ said the Secretary.

‘In confidence, I assure you, Mr Rokesmith,’ observed the cheerful
cherub, ‘that when more of my family were at home and to be provided
for, I used to remind myself immensely of that king. You have no idea,
as a single man, of the difficulty I have had in wearing more than one
good article at a time.’

‘I can easily believe it, Mr Wilfer.’

‘I only mention it,’ said R. W. in the warmth of his heart, ‘as a proof
of the amiable, delicate, and considerate affection of my daughter
Bella. If she had been a little spoilt, I couldn’t have thought so very
much of it, under the circumstances. But no, not a bit. And she is so
very pretty! I hope you agree with me in finding her very pretty, Mr
Rokesmith?’

‘Certainly I do. Every one must.’

‘I hope so,’ said the cherub. ‘Indeed, I have no doubt of it. This is a
great advancement for her in life, Mr Rokesmith. A great opening of her
prospects?’

‘Miss Wilfer could have no better friends than Mr and Mrs Boffin.’

‘Impossible!’ said the gratified cherub. ‘Really I begin to think things
are very well as they are. If Mr John Harmon had lived--’

‘He is better dead,’ said the Secretary.

‘No, I won’t go so far as to say that,’ urged the cherub, a little
remonstrant against the very decisive and unpitying tone; ‘but he
mightn’t have suited Bella, or Bella mightn’t have suited him, or fifty
things, whereas now I hope she can choose for herself.’

‘Has she--as you place the confidence in me of speaking on the subject,
you will excuse my asking--has she--perhaps--chosen?’ faltered the
Secretary.

‘Oh dear no!’ returned R. W.

‘Young ladies sometimes,’ Rokesmith hinted, ‘choose without mentioning
their choice to their fathers.’

‘Not in this case, Mr Rokesmith. Between my daughter Bella and me there
is a regular league and covenant of confidence. It was ratified only the
other day. The ratification dates from--these,’ said the cherub,
giving a little pull at the lappels of his coat and the pockets of his
trousers. ‘Oh no, she has not chosen. To be sure, young George Sampson,
in the days when Mr John Harmon--’

‘Who I wish had never been born!’ said the Secretary, with a gloomy
brow.

R. W. looked at him with surprise, as thinking he had contracted an
unaccountable spite against the poor deceased, and continued: ‘In the
days when Mr John Harmon was being sought out, young George Sampson
certainly was hovering about Bella, and Bella let him hover. But it
never was seriously thought of, and it’s still less than ever to be
thought of now. For Bella is ambitious, Mr Rokesmith, and I think I may
predict will marry fortune. This time, you see, she will have the person
and the property before her together, and will be able to make her
choice with her eyes open. This is my road. I am very sorry to part
company so soon. Good morning, sir!’

The Secretary pursued his way, not very much elevated in spirits by this
conversation, and, arriving at the Boffin mansion, found Betty Higden
waiting for him.

‘I should thank you kindly, sir,’ said Betty, ‘if I might make so bold
as have a word or two wi’ you.’

She should have as many words as she liked, he told her; and took her
into his room, and made her sit down.

‘’Tis concerning Sloppy, sir,’ said Betty. ‘And that’s how I come here
by myself. Not wishing him to know what I’m a-going to say to you, I got
the start of him early and walked up.’

‘You have wonderful energy,’ returned Rokesmith. ‘You are as young as I
am.’

Betty Higden gravely shook her head. ‘I am strong for my time of life,
sir, but not young, thank the Lord!’

‘Are you thankful for not being young?’

‘Yes, sir. If I was young, it would all have to be gone through again,
and the end would be a weary way off, don’t you see? But never mind me;
‘tis concerning Sloppy.’

‘And what about him, Betty?’

‘’Tis just this, sir. It can’t be reasoned out of his head by any powers
of mine but what that he can do right by your kind lady and gentleman
and do his work for me, both together. Now he can’t. To give himself up
to being put in the way of arning a good living and getting on, he must
give me up. Well; he won’t.’

‘I respect him for it,’ said Rokesmith.

‘DO ye, sir? I don’t know but what I do myself. Still that don’t make it
right to let him have his way. So as he won’t give me up, I’m a-going to
give him up.’

‘How, Betty?’

‘I’m a-going to run away from him.’

With an astonished look at the indomitable old face and the bright eyes,
the Secretary repeated, ‘Run away from him?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Betty, with one nod. And in the nod and in the firm set
of her mouth, there was a vigour of purpose not to be doubted.

‘Come, come!’ said the Secretary. ‘We must talk about this. Let us take
our time over it, and try to get at the true sense of the case and the
true course, by degrees.’

‘Now, lookee here, by dear,’ returned old Betty--‘asking your excuse
for being so familiar, but being of a time of life a’most to be your
grandmother twice over. Now, lookee, here. ‘Tis a poor living and a
hard as is to be got out of this work that I’m a doing now, and but for
Sloppy I don’t know as I should have held to it this long. But it did
just keep us on, the two together. Now that I’m alone--with even Johnny
gone--I’d far sooner be upon my feet and tiring of myself out, than a
sitting folding and folding by the fire. And I’ll tell you why. There’s
a deadness steals over me at times, that the kind of life favours and I
don’t like. Now, I seem to have Johnny in my arms--now, his mother--now,
his mother’s mother--now, I seem to be a child myself, a lying once
again in the arms of my own mother--then I get numbed, thought and
sense, till I start out of my seat, afeerd that I’m a growing like the
poor old people that they brick up in the Unions, as you may sometimes
see when they let ‘em out of the four walls to have a warm in the sun,
crawling quite scared about the streets. I was a nimble girl, and have
always been a active body, as I told your lady, first time ever I see
her good face. I can still walk twenty mile if I am put to it. I’d far
better be a walking than a getting numbed and dreary. I’m a good fair
knitter, and can make many little things to sell. The loan from your
lady and gentleman of twenty shillings to fit out a basket with, would
be a fortune for me. Trudging round the country and tiring of myself
out, I shall keep the deadness off, and get my own bread by my own
labour. And what more can I want?’

‘And this is your plan,’ said the Secretary, ‘for running away?’

‘Show me a better! My deary, show me a better! Why, I know very well,’
said old Betty Higden, ‘and you know very well, that your lady and
gentleman would set me up like a queen for the rest of my life, if so be
that we could make it right among us to have it so. But we can’t make it
right among us to have it so. I’ve never took charity yet, nor yet has
any one belonging to me. And it would be forsaking of myself indeed, and
forsaking of my children dead and gone, and forsaking of their children
dead and gone, to set up a contradiction now at last.’

‘It might come to be justifiable and unavoidable at last,’ the Secretary
gently hinted, with a slight stress on the word.

‘I hope it never will! It ain’t that I mean to give offence by being
anyways proud,’ said the old creature simply, ‘but that I want to be of
a piece like, and helpful of myself right through to my death.’

‘And to be sure,’ added the Secretary, as a comfort for her, ‘Sloppy
will be eagerly looking forward to his opportunity of being to you what
you have been to him.’

‘Trust him for that, sir!’ said Betty, cheerfully. ‘Though he had need
to be something quick about it, for I’m a getting to be an old one. But
I’m a strong one too, and travel and weather never hurt me yet! Now, be
so kind as speak for me to your lady and gentleman, and tell ‘em what I
ask of their good friendliness to let me do, and why I ask it.’

The Secretary felt that there was no gainsaying what was urged by
this brave old heroine, and he presently repaired to Mrs Boffin and
recommended her to let Betty Higden have her way, at all events for the
time. ‘It would be far more satisfactory to your kind heart, I know,’
he said, ‘to provide for her, but it may be a duty to respect this
independent spirit.’ Mrs Boffin was not proof against the consideration
set before her. She and her husband had worked too, and had brought
their simple faith and honour clean out of dustheaps. If they owed a
duty to Betty Higden, of a surety that duty must be done.

‘But, Betty,’ said Mrs Boffin, when she accompanied John Rokesmith back
to his room, and shone upon her with the light of her radiant face,
‘granted all else, I think I wouldn’t run away’.

‘’Twould come easier to Sloppy,’ said Mrs Higden, shaking her head.
‘’Twould come easier to me too. But ‘tis as you please.’

‘When would you go?’

‘Now,’ was the bright and ready answer. ‘To-day, my deary, to-morrow.
Bless ye, I am used to it. I know many parts of the country well. When
nothing else was to be done, I have worked in many a market-garden afore
now, and in many a hop-garden too.’

‘If I give my consent to your going, Betty--which Mr Rokesmith thinks I
ought to do--’

Betty thanked him with a grateful curtsey.

‘--We must not lose sight of you. We must not let you pass out of our
knowledge. We must know all about you.’

‘Yes, my deary, but not through letter-writing, because
letter-writing--indeed, writing of most sorts hadn’t much come up for
such as me when I was young. But I shall be to and fro. No fear of
my missing a chance of giving myself a sight of your reviving face.
Besides,’ said Betty, with logical good faith, ‘I shall have a debt to
pay off, by littles, and naturally that would bring me back, if nothing
else would.’

‘MUST it be done?’ asked Mrs Boffin, still reluctant, of the Secretary.

‘I think it must.’

After more discussion it was agreed that it should be done, and Mrs
Boffin summoned Bella to note down the little purchases that were
necessary to set Betty up in trade. ‘Don’t ye be timorous for me, my
dear,’ said the stanch old heart, observant of Bella’s face: ‘when I
take my seat with my work, clean and busy and fresh, in a country
market-place, I shall turn a sixpence as sure as ever a farmer’s wife
there.’

The Secretary took that opportunity of touching on the practical
question of Mr Sloppy’s capabilities. He would have made a wonderful
cabinet-maker, said Mrs Higden, ‘if there had been the money to put him
to it.’ She had seen him handle tools that he had borrowed to mend
the mangle, or to knock a broken piece of furniture together, in a
surprising manner. As to constructing toys for the Minders, out of
nothing, he had done that daily. And once as many as a dozen people had
got together in the lane to see the neatness with which he fitted the
broken pieces of a foreign monkey’s musical instrument. ‘That’s well,’
said the Secretary. ‘It will not be hard to find a trade for him.’

John Harmon being buried under mountains now, the Secretary that very
same day set himself to finish his affairs and have done with him. He
drew up an ample declaration, to be signed by Rogue Riderhood (knowing
he could get his signature to it, by making him another and much shorter
evening call), and then considered to whom should he give the document?
To Hexam’s son, or daughter? Resolved speedily, to the daughter. But it
would be safer to avoid seeing the daughter, because the son had seen
Julius Handford, and--he could not be too careful--there might possibly
be some comparison of notes between the son and daughter, which would
awaken slumbering suspicion, and lead to consequences. ‘I might even,’
he reflected, ‘be apprehended as having been concerned in my own
murder!’ Therefore, best to send it to the daughter under cover by the
post. Pleasant Riderhood had undertaken to find out where she lived,
and it was not necessary that it should be attended by a single word of
explanation. So far, straight.

But, all that he knew of the daughter he derived from Mrs Boffin’s
accounts of what she heard from Mr Lightwood, who seemed to have a
reputation for his manner of relating a story, and to have made this
story quite his own. It interested him, and he would like to have
the means of knowing more--as, for instance, that she received the
exonerating paper, and that it satisfied her--by opening some channel
altogether independent of Lightwood: who likewise had seen Julius
Handford, who had publicly advertised for Julius Handford, and whom
of all men he, the Secretary, most avoided. ‘But with whom the common
course of things might bring me in a moment face to face, any day in the
week or any hour in the day.’

Now, to cast about for some likely means of opening such a channel. The
boy, Hexam, was training for and with a schoolmaster. The Secretary knew
it, because his sister’s share in that disposal of him seemed to be
the best part of Lightwood’s account of the family. This young fellow,
Sloppy, stood in need of some instruction. If he, the Secretary, engaged
that schoolmaster to impart it to him, the channel might be opened. The
next point was, did Mrs Boffin know the schoolmaster’s name? No, but she
knew where the school was. Quite enough. Promptly the Secretary wrote
to the master of that school, and that very evening Bradley Headstone
answered in person.

The Secretary stated to the schoolmaster how the object was, to send to
him for certain occasional evening instruction, a youth whom Mr and Mrs
Boffin wished to help to an industrious and useful place in life. The
schoolmaster was willing to undertake the charge of such a pupil. The
Secretary inquired on what terms? The schoolmaster stated on what terms.
Agreed and disposed of.

‘May I ask, sir,’ said Bradley Headstone, ‘to whose good opinion I owe a
recommendation to you?’

‘You should know that I am not the principal here. I am Mr Boffin’s
Secretary. Mr Boffin is a gentleman who inherited a property of which
you may have heard some public mention; the Harmon property.’

‘Mr Harmon,’ said Bradley: who would have been a great deal more at a
loss than he was, if he had known to whom he spoke: ‘was murdered and
found in the river.’

‘Was murdered and found in the river.’

‘It was not--’

‘No,’ interposed the Secretary, smiling, ‘it was not he who recommended
you. Mr Boffin heard of you through a certain Mr Lightwood. I think you
know Mr Lightwood, or know of him?’

‘I know as much of him as I wish to know, sir. I have no acquaintance
with Mr Lightwood, and I desire none. I have no objection to Mr
Lightwood, but I have a particular objection to some of Mr Lightwood’s
friends--in short, to one of Mr Lightwood’s friends. His great friend.’

He could hardly get the words out, even then and there, so fierce did
he grow (though keeping himself down with infinite pains of repression),
when the careless and contemptuous bearing of Eugene Wrayburn rose
before his mind.

The Secretary saw there was a strong feeling here on some sore point,
and he would have made a diversion from it, but for Bradley’s holding to
it in his cumbersome way.

‘I have no objection to mention the friend by name,’ he said, doggedly.
‘The person I object to, is Mr Eugene Wrayburn.’

The Secretary remembered him. In his disturbed recollection of that
night when he was striving against the drugged drink, there was but a
dim image of Eugene’s person; but he remembered his name, and his manner
of speaking, and how he had gone with them to view the body, and where
he had stood, and what he had said.

‘Pray, Mr Headstone, what is the name,’ he asked, again trying to make a
diversion, ‘of young Hexam’s sister?’

‘Her name is Lizzie,’ said the schoolmaster, with a strong contraction
of his whole face.

‘She is a young woman of a remarkable character; is she not?’

‘She is sufficiently remarkable to be very superior to Mr Eugene
Wrayburn--though an ordinary person might be that,’ said the
schoolmaster; ‘and I hope you will not think it impertinent in me, sir,
to ask why you put the two names together?’

‘By mere accident,’ returned the Secretary. ‘Observing that Mr Wrayburn
was a disagreeable subject with you, I tried to get away from it: though
not very successfully, it would appear.’

‘Do you know Mr Wrayburn, sir?’

‘No.’

‘Then perhaps the names cannot be put together on the authority of any
representation of his?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘I took the liberty to ask,’ said Bradley, after casting his eyes on
the ground, ‘because he is capable of making any representation, in the
swaggering levity of his insolence. I--I hope you will not misunderstand
me, sir. I--I am much interested in this brother and sister, and the
subject awakens very strong feelings within me. Very, very, strong
feelings.’ With a shaking hand, Bradley took out his handkerchief and
wiped his brow.

The Secretary thought, as he glanced at the schoolmaster’s face, that he
had opened a channel here indeed, and that it was an unexpectedly dark
and deep and stormy one, and difficult to sound. All at once, in the
midst of his turbulent emotions, Bradley stopped and seemed to challenge
his look. Much as though he suddenly asked him, ‘What do you see in me?’

‘The brother, young Hexam, was your real recommendation here,’ said the
Secretary, quietly going back to the point; ‘Mr and Mrs Boffin happening
to know, through Mr Lightwood, that he was your pupil. Anything that
I ask respecting the brother and sister, or either of them, I ask for
myself out of my own interest in the subject, and not in my official
character, or on Mr Boffin’s behalf. How I come to be interested, I need
not explain. You know the father’s connection with the discovery of Mr
Harmon’s body.’

‘Sir,’ replied Bradley, very restlessly indeed, ‘I know all the
circumstances of that case.’

‘Pray tell me, Mr Headstone,’ said the Secretary. ‘Does the sister
suffer under any stigma because of the impossible accusation--groundless
would be a better word--that was made against the father, and
substantially withdrawn?’

‘No, sir,’ returned Bradley, with a kind of anger.

‘I am very glad to hear it.’

‘The sister,’ said Bradley, separating his words over-carefully, and
speaking as if he were repeating them from a book, ‘suffers under no
reproach that repels a man of unimpeachable character who had made
for himself every step of his way in life, from placing her in his own
station. I will not say, raising her to his own station; I say, placing
her in it. The sister labours under no reproach, unless she should
unfortunately make it for herself. When such a man is not deterred from
regarding her as his equal, and when he has convinced himself that
there is no blemish on her, I think the fact must be taken to be pretty
expressive.’

‘And there is such a man?’ said the Secretary.

Bradley Headstone knotted his brows, and squared his large lower jaw,
and fixed his eyes on the ground with an air of determination that
seemed unnecessary to the occasion, as he replied: ‘And there is such a
man.’

The Secretary had no reason or excuse for prolonging the conversation,
and it ended here. Within three hours the oakum-headed apparition once
more dived into the Leaving Shop, and that night Rogue Riderhood’s
recantation lay in the post office, addressed under cover to Lizzie
Hexam at her right address.

All these proceedings occupied John Rokesmith so much, that it was not
until the following day that he saw Bella again. It seemed then to be
tacitly understood between them that they were to be as distantly easy
as they could, without attracting the attention of Mr and Mrs Boffin to
any marked change in their manner. The fitting out of old Betty Higden
was favourable to this, as keeping Bella engaged and interested, and as
occupying the general attention.

‘I think,’ said Rokesmith, when they all stood about her, while she
packed her tidy basket--except Bella, who was busily helping on her
knees at the chair on which it stood; ‘that at least you might keep a
letter in your pocket, Mrs Higden, which I would write for you and date
from here, merely stating, in the names of Mr and Mrs Boffin, that they
are your friends;--I won’t say patrons, because they wouldn’t like it.’

‘No, no, no,’ said Mr Boffin; ‘no patronizing! Let’s keep out of THAT,
whatever we come to.’

‘There’s more than enough of that about, without us; ain’t there,
Noddy?’ said Mrs Boffin.

‘I believe you, old lady!’ returned the Golden Dustman. ‘Overmuch
indeed!’

‘But people sometimes like to be patronized; don’t they, sir?’ asked
Bella, looking up.

‘I don’t. And if THEY do, my dear, they ought to learn better,’ said Mr
Boffin. ‘Patrons and Patronesses, and Vice-Patrons and Vice-Patronesses,
and Deceased Patrons and Deceased Patronesses, and Ex-Vice-Patrons and
Ex-Vice-Patronesses, what does it all mean in the books of the Charities
that come pouring in on Rokesmith as he sits among ‘em pretty well up to
his neck! If Mr Tom Noakes gives his five shillings ain’t he a Patron,
and if Mrs Jack Styles gives her five shillings ain’t she a Patroness?
What the deuce is it all about? If it ain’t stark staring impudence,
what do you call it?’

‘Don’t be warm, Noddy,’ Mrs Boffin urged.

‘Warm!’ cried Mr Boffin. ‘It’s enough to make a man smoking hot. I can’t
go anywhere without being Patronized. I don’t want to be Patronized. If
I buy a ticket for a Flower Show, or a Music Show, or any sort of Show,
and pay pretty heavy for it, why am I to be Patroned and Patronessed as
if the Patrons and Patronesses treated me? If there’s a good thing to be
done, can’t it be done on its own merits? If there’s a bad thing to
be done, can it ever be Patroned and Patronessed right? Yet when a new
Institution’s going to be built, it seems to me that the bricks and
mortar ain’t made of half so much consequence as the Patrons and
Patronesses; no, nor yet the objects. I wish somebody would tell me
whether other countries get Patronized to anything like the extent of
this one! And as to the Patrons and Patronesses themselves, I wonder
they’re not ashamed of themselves. They ain’t Pills, or Hair-Washes, or
Invigorating Nervous Essences, to be puffed in that way!’

Having delivered himself of these remarks, Mr Boffin took a trot,
according to his usual custom, and trotted back to the spot from which
he had started.

‘As to the letter, Rokesmith,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘you’re as right as a
trivet. Give her the letter, make her take the letter, put it in her
pocket by violence. She might fall sick. You know you might fall sick,’
said Mr Boffin. ‘Don’t deny it, Mrs Higden, in your obstinacy; you know
you might.’

Old Betty laughed, and said that she would take the letter and be
thankful.

‘That’s right!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Come! That’s sensible. And don’t be
thankful to us (for we never thought of it), but to Mr Rokesmith.’

The letter was written, and read to her, and given to her.

‘Now, how do you feel?’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Do you like it?’

‘The letter, sir?’ said Betty. ‘Ay, it’s a beautiful letter!’

‘No, no, no; not the letter,’ said Mr Boffin; ‘the idea. Are you sure
you’re strong enough to carry out the idea?’

‘I shall be stronger, and keep the deadness off better, this way, than
any way left open to me, sir.’

‘Don’t say than any way left open, you know,’ urged Mr Boffin; ‘because
there are ways without end. A housekeeper would be acceptable over
yonder at the Bower, for instance. Wouldn’t you like to see the
Bower, and know a retired literary man of the name of Wegg that lives
there--WITH a wooden leg?’

Old Betty was proof even against this temptation, and fell to adjusting
her black bonnet and shawl.

‘I wouldn’t let you go, now it comes to this, after all,’ said Mr
Boffin, ‘if I didn’t hope that it may make a man and a workman of
Sloppy, in as short a time as ever a man and workman was made yet. Why,
what have you got there, Betty? Not a doll?’

It was the man in the Guards who had been on duty over Johnny’s bed.
The solitary old woman showed what it was, and put it up quietly in her
dress. Then, she gratefully took leave of Mrs Boffin, and of Mr Boffin,
and of Rokesmith, and then put her old withered arms round Bella’s young
and blooming neck, and said, repeating Johnny’s words: ‘A kiss for the
boofer lady.’

The Secretary looked on from a doorway at the boofer lady thus
encircled, and still looked on at the boofer lady standing alone there,
when the determined old figure with its steady bright eyes was trudging
through the streets, away from paralysis and pauperism.



Chapter 15

THE WHOLE CASE SO FAR


Bradley Headstone held fast by that other interview he was to have with
Lizzie Hexam. In stipulating for it, he had been impelled by a feeling
little short of desperation, and the feeling abided by him. It was very
soon after his interview with the Secretary, that he and Charley Hexam
set out one leaden evening, not unnoticed by Miss Peecher, to have this
desperate interview accomplished.

‘That dolls’ dressmaker,’ said Bradley, ‘is favourable neither to me nor
to you, Hexam.’

‘A pert crooked little chit, Mr Headstone! I knew she would put herself
in the way, if she could, and would be sure to strike in with something
impertinent. It was on that account that I proposed our going to the
City to-night and meeting my sister.’

‘So I supposed,’ said Bradley, getting his gloves on his nervous hands
as he walked. ‘So I supposed.’

‘Nobody but my sister,’ pursued Charley, ‘would have found out such an
extraordinary companion. She has done it in a ridiculous fancy of giving
herself up to another. She told me so, that night when we went there.’

‘Why should she give herself up to the dressmaker?’ asked Bradley.

‘Oh!’ said the boy, colouring. ‘One of her romantic ideas! I tried to
convince her so, but I didn’t succeed. However, what we have got to do,
is, to succeed to-night, Mr Headstone, and then all the rest follows.’

‘You are still sanguine, Hexam.’

‘Certainly I am, sir. Why, we have everything on our side.’

‘Except your sister, perhaps,’ thought Bradley. But he only gloomily
thought it, and said nothing.

‘Everything on our side,’ repeated the boy with boyish confidence.
‘Respectability, an excellent connexion for me, common sense,
everything!’

‘To be sure, your sister has always shown herself a devoted sister,’
said Bradley, willing to sustain himself on even that low ground of
hope.

‘Naturally, Mr Headstone, I have a good deal of influence with her.
And now that you have honoured me with your confidence and spoken to me
first, I say again, we have everything on our side.’

And Bradley thought again, ‘Except your sister, perhaps.’

A grey dusty withered evening in London city has not a hopeful aspect.
The closed warehouses and offices have an air of death about them, and
the national dread of colour has an air of mourning. The towers and
steeples of the many house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the
sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom;
a sun-dial on a church-wall has the look, in its useless black shade, of
having failed in its business enterprise and stopped payment for ever;
melancholy waifs and strays of housekeepers and porter sweep melancholy
waifs and strays of papers and pins into the kennels, and other more
melancholy waifs and strays explore them, searching and stooping and
poking for anything to sell. The set of humanity outward from the City
is as a set of prisoners departing from gaol, and dismal Newgate
seems quite as fit a stronghold for the mighty Lord Mayor as his own
state-dwelling.

On such an evening, when the city grit gets into the hair and eyes and
skin, and when the fallen leaves of the few unhappy city trees grind
down in corners under wheels of wind, the schoolmaster and the pupil
emerged upon the Leadenhall Street region, spying eastward for Lizzie.
Being something too soon in their arrival, they lurked at a corner,
waiting for her to appear. The best-looking among us will not look very
well, lurking at a corner, and Bradley came out of that disadvantage
very poorly indeed.

‘Here she comes, Mr Headstone! Let us go forward and meet her.’

As they advanced, she saw them coming, and seemed rather troubled. But
she greeted her brother with the usual warmth, and touched the extended
hand of Bradley.

‘Why, where are you going, Charley, dear?’ she asked him then.

‘Nowhere. We came on purpose to meet you.’

‘To meet me, Charley?’

‘Yes. We are going to walk with you. But don’t let us take the great
leading streets where every one walks, and we can’t hear ourselves
speak. Let us go by the quiet backways. Here’s a large paved court by
this church, and quiet, too. Let us go up here.’

‘But it’s not in the way, Charley.’

‘Yes it is,’ said the boy, petulantly. ‘It’s in my way, and my way is
yours.’

She had not released his hand, and, still holding it, looked at him with
a kind of appeal. He avoided her eyes, under pretence of saying, ‘Come
along, Mr Headstone.’ Bradley walked at his side--not at hers--and the
brother and sister walked hand in hand. The court brought them to a
churchyard; a paved square court, with a raised bank of earth about
breast high, in the middle, enclosed by iron rails. Here, conveniently
and healthfully elevated above the level of the living, were the dead,
and the tombstones; some of the latter droopingly inclined from the
perpendicular, as if they were ashamed of the lies they told.

They paced the whole of this place once, in a constrained and
uncomfortable manner, when the boy stopped and said:

‘Lizzie, Mr Headstone has something to say to you. I don’t wish to be an
interruption either to him or to you, and so I’ll go and take a little
stroll and come back. I know in a general way what Mr Headstone intends
to say, and I very highly approve of it, as I hope--and indeed I do
not doubt--you will. I needn’t tell you, Lizzie, that I am under great
obligations to Mr Headstone, and that I am very anxious for Mr Headstone
to succeed in all he undertakes. As I hope--and as, indeed, I don’t
doubt--you must be.’

‘Charley,’ returned his sister, detaining his hand as he withdrew it, ‘I
think you had better stay. I think Mr Headstone had better not say what
he thinks of saying.’

‘Why, how do you know what it is?’ returned the boy.

‘Perhaps I don’t, but--’

‘Perhaps you don’t? No, Liz, I should think not. If you knew what
it was, you would give me a very different answer. There; let go; be
sensible. I wonder you don’t remember that Mr Headstone is looking on.’

She allowed him to separate himself from her, and he, after saying, ‘Now
Liz, be a rational girl and a good sister,’ walked away. She remained
standing alone with Bradley Headstone, and it was not until she raised
her eyes, that he spoke.

‘I said,’ he began, ‘when I saw you last, that there was something
unexplained, which might perhaps influence you. I have come this evening
to explain it. I hope you will not judge of me by my hesitating manner
when I speak to you. You see me at my greatest disadvantage. It is most
unfortunate for me that I wish you to see me at my best, and that I know
you see me at my worst.’

She moved slowly on when he paused, and he moved slowly on beside her.

‘It seems egotistical to begin by saying so much about myself,’ he
resumed, ‘but whatever I say to you seems, even in my own ears, below
what I want to say, and different from what I want to say. I can’t help
it. So it is. You are the ruin of me.’

She started at the passionate sound of the last words, and at the
passionate action of his hands, with which they were accompanied.

‘Yes! you are the ruin--the ruin--the ruin--of me. I have no resources
in myself, I have no confidence in myself, I have no government of
myself when you are near me or in my thoughts. And you are always in my
thoughts now. I have never been quit of you since I first saw you. Oh,
that was a wretched day for me! That was a wretched, miserable day!’

A touch of pity for him mingled with her dislike of him, and she said:
‘Mr Headstone, I am grieved to have done you any harm, but I have never
meant it.’

‘There!’ he cried, despairingly. ‘Now, I seem to have reproached you,
instead of revealing to you the state of my own mind! Bear with me. I am
always wrong when you are in question. It is my doom.’

Struggling with himself, and by times looking up at the deserted windows
of the houses as if there could be anything written in their grimy panes
that would help him, he paced the whole pavement at her side, before he
spoke again.

‘I must try to give expression to what is in my mind; it shall and must
be spoken. Though you see me so confounded--though you strike me so
helpless--I ask you to believe that there are many people who think well
of me; that there are some people who highly esteem me; that I have in
my way won a Station which is considered worth winning.’

‘Surely, Mr Headstone, I do believe it. Surely I have always known it
from Charley.’

‘I ask you to believe that if I were to offer my home such as it is, my
station such as it is, my affections such as they are, to any one of the
best considered, and best qualified, and most distinguished, among the
young women engaged in my calling, they would probably be accepted. Even
readily accepted.’

‘I do not doubt it,’ said Lizzie, with her eyes upon the ground.

‘I have sometimes had it in my thoughts to make that offer and to settle
down as many men of my class do: I on the one side of a school, my wife
on the other, both of us interested in the same work.’

‘Why have you not done so?’ asked Lizzie Hexam. ‘Why do you not do so?’

‘Far better that I never did! The only one grain of comfort I have had
these many weeks,’ he said, always speaking passionately, and, when
most emphatic, repeating that former action of his hands, which was
like flinging his heart’s blood down before her in drops upon the
pavement-stones; ‘the only one grain of comfort I have had these many
weeks is, that I never did. For if I had, and if the same spell had come
upon me for my ruin, I know I should have broken that tie asunder as if
it had been thread.’

She glanced at him with a glance of fear, and a shrinking gesture. He
answered, as if she had spoken.

‘No! It would not have been voluntary on my part, any more than it is
voluntary in me to be here now. You draw me to you. If I were shut up in
a strong prison, you would draw me out. I should break through the wall
to come to you. If I were lying on a sick bed, you would draw me up--to
stagger to your feet and fall there.’

The wild energy of the man, now quite let loose, was absolutely
terrible. He stopped and laid his hand upon a piece of the coping of the
burial-ground enclosure, as if he would have dislodged the stone.

‘No man knows till the time comes, what depths are within him. To some
men it never comes; let them rest and be thankful! To me, you brought
it; on me, you forced it; and the bottom of this raging sea,’ striking
himself upon the breast, ‘has been heaved up ever since.’

‘Mr Headstone, I have heard enough. Let me stop you here. It will be
better for you and better for me. Let us find my brother.’

‘Not yet. It shall and must be spoken. I have been in torments ever
since I stopped short of it before. You are alarmed. It is another of my
miseries that I cannot speak to you or speak of you without stumbling at
every syllable, unless I let the check go altogether and run mad. Here
is a man lighting the lamps. He will be gone directly. I entreat of you
let us walk round this place again. You have no reason to look alarmed;
I can restrain myself, and I will.’

She yielded to the entreaty--how could she do otherwise!--and they paced
the stones in silence. One by one the lights leaped up making the cold
grey church tower more remote, and they were alone again. He said no
more until they had regained the spot where he had broken off; there, he
again stood still, and again grasped the stone. In saying what he said
then, he never looked at her; but looked at it and wrenched at it.

‘You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean
when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am
under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted
in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could
draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to
any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could
draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my
thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the
ruin of me. But if you would return a favourable answer to my offer
of myself in marriage, you could draw me to any good--every good--with
equal force. My circumstances are quite easy, and you would want for
nothing. My reputation stands quite high, and would be a shield for
yours. If you saw me at my work, able to do it well and respected in
it, you might even come to take a sort of pride in me;--I would try hard
that you should. Whatever considerations I may have thought of against
this offer, I have conquered, and I make it with all my heart. Your
brother favours me to the utmost, and it is likely that we might live
and work together; anyhow, it is certain that he would have my best
influence and support. I don’t know what I could say more if I tried. I
might only weaken what is ill enough said as it is. I only add that
if it is any claim on you to be in earnest, I am in thorough earnest,
dreadful earnest.’

The powdered mortar from under the stone at which he wrenched, rattled
on the pavement to confirm his words.

‘Mr Headstone--’

‘Stop! I implore you, before you answer me, to walk round this place
once more. It will give you a minute’s time to think, and me a minute’s
time to get some fortitude together.’

Again she yielded to the entreaty, and again they came back to the same
place, and again he worked at the stone.

‘Is it,’ he said, with his attention apparently engrossed by it, ‘yes,
or no?’

‘Mr Headstone, I thank you sincerely, I thank you gratefully, and hope
you may find a worthy wife before long and be very happy. But it is no.’

‘Is no short time necessary for reflection; no weeks or days?’ he asked,
in the same half-suffocated way.

‘None whatever.’

‘Are you quite decided, and is there no chance of any change in my
favour?’

‘I am quite decided, Mr Headstone, and I am bound to answer I am certain
there is none.’

‘Then,’ said he, suddenly changing his tone and turning to her, and
bringing his clenched hand down upon the stone with a force that laid
the knuckles raw and bleeding; ‘then I hope that I may never kill him!’

The dark look of hatred and revenge with which the words broke from his
livid lips, and with which he stood holding out his smeared hand as
if it held some weapon and had just struck a mortal blow, made her so
afraid of him that she turned to run away. But he caught her by the arm.

‘Mr Headstone, let me go. Mr Headstone, I must call for help!’

‘It is I who should call for help,’ he said; ‘you don’t know yet how
much I need it.’

The working of his face as she shrank from it, glancing round for her
brother and uncertain what to do, might have extorted a cry from her in
another instant; but all at once he sternly stopped it and fixed it, as
if Death itself had done so.

‘There! You see I have recovered myself. Hear me out.’

With much of the dignity of courage, as she recalled her self-reliant
life and her right to be free from accountability to this man, she
released her arm from his grasp and stood looking full at him. She had
never been so handsome, in his eyes. A shade came over them while
he looked back at her, as if she drew the very light out of them to
herself.

‘This time, at least, I will leave nothing unsaid,’ he went on, folding
his hands before him, clearly to prevent his being betrayed into any
impetuous gesture; ‘this last time at least I will not be tortured with
after-thoughts of a lost opportunity. Mr Eugene Wrayburn.’

‘Was it of him you spoke in your ungovernable rage and violence?’ Lizzie
Hexam demanded with spirit.

He bit his lip, and looked at her, and said never a word.

‘Was it Mr Wrayburn that you threatened?’

He bit his lip again, and looked at her, and said never a word.

‘You asked me to hear you out, and you will not speak. Let me find my
brother.’

‘Stay! I threatened no one.’

Her look dropped for an instant to his bleeding hand. He lifted it to
his mouth, wiped it on his sleeve, and again folded it over the other.
‘Mr Eugene Wrayburn,’ he repeated.

‘Why do you mention that name again and again, Mr Headstone?’

‘Because it is the text of the little I have left to say. Observe! There
are no threats in it. If I utter a threat, stop me, and fasten it upon
me. Mr Eugene Wrayburn.’

A worse threat than was conveyed in his manner of uttering the name,
could hardly have escaped him.

‘He haunts you. You accept favours from him. You are willing enough to
listen to HIM. I know it, as well as he does.’

‘Mr Wrayburn has been considerate and good to me, sir,’ said Lizzie,
proudly, ‘in connexion with the death and with the memory of my poor
father.’

‘No doubt. He is of course a very considerate and a very good man, Mr
Eugene Wrayburn.’

‘He is nothing to you, I think,’ said Lizzie, with an indignation she
could not repress.

‘Oh yes, he is. There you mistake. He is much to me.’

‘What can he be to you?’

‘He can be a rival to me among other things,’ said Bradley.

‘Mr Headstone,’ returned Lizzie, with a burning face, ‘it is cowardly in
you to speak to me in this way. But it makes me able to tell you that
I do not like you, and that I never have liked you from the first, and
that no other living creature has anything to do with the effect you
have produced upon me for yourself.’

His head bent for a moment, as if under a weight, and he then looked up
again, moistening his lips. ‘I was going on with the little I had left
to say. I knew all this about Mr Eugene Wrayburn, all the while you were
drawing me to you. I strove against the knowledge, but quite in vain. It
made no difference in me. With Mr Eugene Wrayburn in my mind, I went
on. With Mr Eugene Wrayburn in my mind, I spoke to you just now. With Mr
Eugene Wrayburn in my mind, I have been set aside and I have been cast
out.’

‘If you give those names to my thanking you for your proposal
and declining it, is it my fault, Mr Headstone?’ said Lizzie,
compassionating the bitter struggle he could not conceal, almost as much
as she was repelled and alarmed by it.

‘I am not complaining,’ he returned, ‘I am only stating the case. I had
to wrestle with my self-respect when I submitted to be drawn to you in
spite of Mr Wrayburn. You may imagine how low my self-respect lies now.’

She was hurt and angry; but repressed herself in consideration of his
suffering, and of his being her brother’s friend.

‘And it lies under his feet,’ said Bradley, unfolding his hands in spite
of himself, and fiercely motioning with them both towards the stones of
the pavement. ‘Remember that! It lies under that fellow’s feet, and he
treads upon it and exults above it.’

‘He does not!’ said Lizzie.

‘He does!’ said Bradley. ‘I have stood before him face to face, and he
crushed me down in the dirt of his contempt, and walked over me. Why?
Because he knew with triumph what was in store for me to-night.’

‘O, Mr Headstone, you talk quite wildly.’

‘Quite collectedly. I know what I say too well. Now I have said all. I
have used no threat, remember; I have done no more than show you how the
case stands;--how the case stands, so far.’

At this moment her brother sauntered into view close by. She darted to
him, and caught him by the hand. Bradley followed, and laid his heavy
hand on the boy’s opposite shoulder.

‘Charley Hexam, I am going home. I must walk home by myself to-night,
and get shut up in my room without being spoken to. Give me half an
hour’s start, and let me be, till you find me at my work in the morning.
I shall be at my work in the morning just as usual.’

Clasping his hands, he uttered a short unearthly broken cry, and went
his way. The brother and sister were left looking at one another near
a lamp in the solitary churchyard, and the boy’s face clouded and
darkened, as he said in a rough tone: ‘What is the meaning of this? What
have you done to my best friend? Out with the truth!’

‘Charley!’ said his sister. ‘Speak a little more considerately!’

‘I am not in the humour for consideration, or for nonsense of any sort,’
replied the boy. ‘What have you been doing? Why has Mr Headstone gone
from us in that way?’

‘He asked me--you know he asked me--to be his wife, Charley.’

‘Well?’ said the boy, impatiently.

‘And I was obliged to tell him that I could not be his wife.’

‘You were obliged to tell him,’ repeated the boy angrily, between his
teeth, and rudely pushing her away. ‘You were obliged to tell him! Do
you know that he is worth fifty of you?’

‘It may easily be so, Charley, but I cannot marry him.’

‘You mean that you are conscious that you can’t appreciate him, and
don’t deserve him, I suppose?’

‘I mean that I do not like him, Charley, and that I will never marry
him.’

‘Upon my soul,’ exclaimed the boy, ‘you are a nice picture of a sister!
Upon my soul, you are a pretty piece of disinterestedness! And so all my
endeavours to cancel the past and to raise myself in the world, and to
raise you with me, are to be beaten down by YOUR low whims; are they?’

‘I will not reproach you, Charley.’

‘Hear her!’ exclaimed the boy, looking round at the darkness. ‘She won’t
reproach me! She does her best to destroy my fortunes and her own,
and she won’t reproach me! Why, you’ll tell me, next, that you won’t
reproach Mr Headstone for coming out of the sphere to which he is an
ornament, and putting himself at YOUR feet, to be rejected by YOU!’

‘No, Charley; I will only tell you, as I told himself, that I thank him
for doing so, that I am sorry he did so, and that I hope he will do much
better, and be happy.’

Some touch of compunction smote the boy’s hardening heart as he looked
upon her, his patient little nurse in infancy, his patient friend,
adviser, and reclaimer in boyhood, the self-forgetting sister who had
done everything for him. His tone relented, and he drew her arm through
his.

‘Now, come, Liz; don’t let us quarrel: let us be reasonable and talk
this over like brother and sister. Will you listen to me?’

‘Oh, Charley!’ she replied through her starting tears; ‘do I not listen
to you, and hear many hard things!’

‘Then I am sorry. There, Liz! I am unfeignedly sorry. Only you do put me
out so. Now see. Mr Headstone is perfectly devoted to you. He has told
me in the strongest manner that he has never been his old self for one
single minute since I first brought him to see you. Miss Peecher, our
schoolmistress--pretty and young, and all that--is known to be very much
attached to him, and he won’t so much as look at her or hear of her.
Now, his devotion to you must be a disinterested one; mustn’t it? If he
married Miss Peecher, he would be a great deal better off in all worldly
respects, than in marrying you. Well then; he has nothing to get by it,
has he?’

‘Nothing, Heaven knows!’

‘Very well then,’ said the boy; ‘that’s something in his favour, and a
great thing. Then I come in. Mr Headstone has always got me on, and he
has a good deal in his power, and of course if he was my brother-in-law
he wouldn’t get me on less, but would get me on more. Mr Headstone
comes and confides in me, in a very delicate way, and says, “I hope my
marrying your sister would be agreeable to you, Hexam, and useful to
you?” I say, “There’s nothing in the world, Mr Headstone, that I could
be better pleased with.” Mr Headstone says, “Then I may rely upon your
intimate knowledge of me for your good word with your sister, Hexam?”
 And I say, “Certainly, Mr Headstone, and naturally I have a good deal of
influence with her.” So I have; haven’t I, Liz?’

‘Yes, Charley.’

‘Well said! Now, you see, we begin to get on, the moment we begin to
be really talking it over, like brother and sister. Very well. Then
YOU come in. As Mr Headstone’s wife you would be occupying a most
respectable station, and you would be holding a far better place in
society than you hold now, and you would at length get quit of the
river-side and the old disagreeables belonging to it, and you would be
rid for good of dolls’ dressmakers and their drunken fathers, and the
like of that. Not that I want to disparage Miss Jenny Wren: I dare
say she is all very well in her way; but her way is not your way as
Mr Headstone’s wife. Now, you see, Liz, on all three accounts--on
Mr Headstone’s, on mine, on yours--nothing could be better or more
desirable.’

They were walking slowly as the boy spoke, and here he stood still, to
see what effect he had made. His sister’s eyes were fixed upon him; but
as they showed no yielding, and as she remained silent, he walked her on
again. There was some discomfiture in his tone as he resumed, though he
tried to conceal it.

‘Having so much influence with you, Liz, as I have, perhaps I should
have done better to have had a little chat with you in the first
instance, before Mr Headstone spoke for himself. But really all this in
his favour seemed so plain and undeniable, and I knew you to have always
been so reasonable and sensible, that I didn’t consider it worth while.
Very likely that was a mistake of mine. However, it’s soon set right.
All that need be done to set it right, is for you to tell me at once
that I may go home and tell Mr Headstone that what has taken place is
not final, and that it will all come round by-and-by.’

He stopped again. The pale face looked anxiously and lovingly at him,
but she shook her head.

‘Can’t you speak?’ said the boy sharply.

‘I am very unwilling to speak, Charley. If I must, I must. I cannot
authorize you to say any such thing to Mr Headstone: I cannot allow you
to say any such thing to Mr Headstone. Nothing remains to be said to him
from me, after what I have said for good and all, to-night.’

‘And this girl,’ cried the boy, contemptuously throwing her off again,
‘calls herself a sister!’

‘Charley, dear, that is the second time that you have almost struck
me. Don’t be hurt by my words. I don’t mean--Heaven forbid!--that you
intended it; but you hardly know with what a sudden swing you removed
yourself from me.’

‘However!’ said the boy, taking no heed of the remonstrance, and
pursuing his own mortified disappointment, ‘I know what this means, and
you shall not disgrace me.’

‘It means what I have told you, Charley, and nothing more.’

‘That’s not true,’ said the boy in a violent tone, ‘and you know it’s
not. It means your precious Mr Wrayburn; that’s what it means.’

‘Charley! If you remember any old days of ours together, forbear!’

‘But you shall not disgrace me,’ doggedly pursued the boy. ‘I am
determined that after I have climbed up out of the mire, you shall not
pull me down. You can’t disgrace me if I have nothing to do with you,
and I will have nothing to do with you for the future.’

‘Charley! On many a night like this, and many a worse night, I have sat
on the stones of the street, hushing you in my arms. Unsay those words
without even saying you are sorry for them, and my arms are open to you
still, and so is my heart.’

‘I’ll not unsay them. I’ll say them again. You are an inveterately bad
girl, and a false sister, and I have done with you. For ever, I have
done with you!’

He threw up his ungrateful and ungracious hand as if it set up a barrier
between them, and flung himself upon his heel and left her. She remained
impassive on the same spot, silent and motionless, until the striking
of the church clock roused her, and she turned away. But then, with the
breaking up of her immobility came the breaking up of the waters that
the cold heart of the selfish boy had frozen. And ‘O that I were lying
here with the dead!’ and ‘O Charley, Charley, that this should be the
end of our pictures in the fire!’ were all the words she said, as she
laid her face in her hands on the stone coping.

A figure passed by, and passed on, but stopped and looked round at
her. It was the figure of an old man with a bowed head, wearing a large
brimmed low-crowned hat, and a long-skirted coat. After hesitating a
little, the figure turned back, and, advancing with an air of gentleness
and compassion, said:

‘Pardon me, young woman, for speaking to you, but you are under some
distress of mind. I cannot pass upon my way and leave you weeping here
alone, as if there was nothing in the place. Can I help you? Can I do
anything to give you comfort?’

She raised her head at the sound of these kind words, and answered
gladly, ‘O, Mr Riah, is it you?’

‘My daughter,’ said the old man, ‘I stand amazed! I spoke as to a
stranger. Take my arm, take my arm. What grieves you? Who has done this?
Poor girl, poor girl!’

‘My brother has quarrelled with me,’ sobbed Lizzie, ‘and renounced me.’

‘He is a thankless dog,’ said the Jew, angrily. ‘Let him go. Shake the
dust from thy feet and let him go. Come, daughter! Come home with me--it
is but across the road--and take a little time to recover your peace and
to make your eyes seemly, and then I will bear you company through the
streets. For it is past your usual time, and will soon be late, and the
way is long, and there is much company out of doors to-night.’

She accepted the support he offered her, and they slowly passed out
of the churchyard. They were in the act of emerging into the main
thoroughfare, when another figure loitering discontentedly by, and
looking up the street and down it, and all about, started and exclaimed,
‘Lizzie! why, where have you been? Why, what’s the matter?’

As Eugene Wrayburn thus addressed her, she drew closer to the Jew, and
bent her head. The Jew having taken in the whole of Eugene at one sharp
glance, cast his eyes upon the ground, and stood mute.

‘Lizzie, what is the matter?’

‘Mr Wrayburn, I cannot tell you now. I cannot tell you to-night, if I
ever can tell you. Pray leave me.’

‘But, Lizzie, I came expressly to join you. I came to walk home with
you, having dined at a coffee-house in this neighbourhood and knowing
your hour. And I have been lingering about,’ added Eugene, ‘like a
bailiff; or,’ with a look at Riah, ‘an old clothesman.’

The Jew lifted up his eyes, and took in Eugene once more, at another
glance.

‘Mr Wrayburn, pray, pray, leave me with this protector. And one thing
more. Pray, pray be careful of yourself.’

‘Mysteries of Udolpho!’ said Eugene, with a look of wonder. ‘May I be
excused for asking, in the elderly gentleman’s presence, who is this
kind protector?’

‘A trustworthy friend,’ said Lizzie.

‘I will relieve him of his trust,’ returned Eugene. ‘But you must tell
me, Lizzie, what is the matter?’

‘Her brother is the matter,’ said the old man, lifting up his eyes
again.

‘Our brother the matter?’ returned Eugene, with airy contempt. ‘Our
brother is not worth a thought, far less a tear. What has our brother
done?’

The old man lifted up his eyes again, with one grave look at Wrayburn,
and one grave glance at Lizzie, as she stood looking down. Both were so
full of meaning that even Eugene was checked in his light career, and
subsided into a thoughtful ‘Humph!’

With an air of perfect patience the old man, remaining mute and keeping
his eyes cast down, stood, retaining Lizzie’s arm, as though in his
habit of passive endurance, it would be all one to him if he had stood
there motionless all night.

‘If Mr Aaron,’ said Eugene, who soon found this fatiguing, ‘will be good
enough to relinquish his charge to me, he will be quite free for any
engagement he may have at the Synagogue. Mr Aaron, will you have the
kindness?’

But the old man stood stock still.

‘Good evening, Mr Aaron,’ said Eugene, politely; ‘we need not detain
you.’ Then turning to Lizzie, ‘Is our friend Mr Aaron a little deaf?’

‘My hearing is very good, Christian gentleman,’ replied the old man,
calmly; ‘but I will hear only one voice to-night, desiring me to leave
this damsel before I have conveyed her to her home. If she requests it,
I will do it. I will do it for no one else.’

‘May I ask why so, Mr Aaron?’ said Eugene, quite undisturbed in his
ease.

‘Excuse me. If she asks me, I will tell her,’ replied the old man. ‘I
will tell no one else.’

‘I do not ask you,’ said Lizzie, ‘and I beg you to take me home. Mr
Wrayburn, I have had a bitter trial to-night, and I hope you will not
think me ungrateful, or mysterious, or changeable. I am neither; I am
wretched. Pray remember what I said to you. Pray, pray, take care.’

‘My dear Lizzie,’ he returned, in a low voice, bending over her on the
other side; ‘of what? Of whom?’

‘Of any one you have lately seen and made angry.’

He snapped his fingers and laughed. ‘Come,’ said he, ‘since no better
may be, Mr Aaron and I will divide this trust, and see you home
together. Mr Aaron on that side; I on this. If perfectly agreeable to Mr
Aaron, the escort will now proceed.’

He knew his power over her. He knew that she would not insist upon his
leaving her. He knew that, her fears for him being aroused, she would
be uneasy if he were out of her sight. For all his seeming levity and
carelessness, he knew whatever he chose to know of the thoughts of her
heart.

And going on at her side, so gaily, regardless of all that had been
urged against him; so superior in his sallies and self-possession to
the gloomy constraint of her suitor and the selfish petulance of her
brother; so faithful to her, as it seemed, when her own stock was
faithless; what an immense advantage, what an overpowering influence,
were his that night! Add to the rest, poor girl, that she had heard him
vilified for her sake, and that she had suffered for his, and where the
wonder that his occasional tones of serious interest (setting off his
carelessness, as if it were assumed to calm her), that his lightest
touch, his lightest look, his very presence beside her in the dark
common street, were like glimpses of an enchanted world, which it was
natural for jealousy and malice and all meanness to be unable to bear
the brightness of, and to gird at as bad spirits might.

Nothing more being said of repairing to Riah’s, they went direct to
Lizzie’s lodging. A little short of the house-door she parted from them,
and went in alone.

‘Mr Aaron,’ said Eugene, when they were left together in the street,
‘with many thanks for your company, it remains for me unwillingly to say
Farewell.’

‘Sir,’ returned the other, ‘I give you good night, and I wish that you
were not so thoughtless.’

‘Mr Aaron,’ returned Eugene, ‘I give you good night, and I wish (for you
are a little dull) that you were not so thoughtful.’

But now, that his part was played out for the evening, and when in
turning his back upon the Jew he came off the stage, he was thoughtful
himself. ‘How did Lightwood’s catechism run?’ he murmured, as he stopped
to light his cigar. ‘What is to come of it? What are you doing? Where
are you going? We shall soon know now. Ah!’ with a heavy sigh.

The heavy sigh was repeated as if by an echo, an hour afterwards, when
Riah, who had been sitting on some dark steps in a corner over against
the house, arose and went his patient way; stealing through the streets
in his ancient dress, like the ghost of a departed Time.



Chapter 16

AN ANNIVERSARY OCCASION


The estimable Twemlow, dressing himself in his lodgings over the
stable-yard in Duke Street, Saint James’s, and hearing the horses at
their toilette below, finds himself on the whole in a disadvantageous
position as compared with the noble animals at livery. For whereas, on
the one hand, he has no attendant to slap him soundingly and require him
in gruff accents to come up and come over, still, on the other hand,
he has no attendant at all; and the mild gentleman’s finger-joints and
other joints working rustily in the morning, he could deem it agreeable
even to be tied up by the countenance at his chamber-door, so he were
there skilfully rubbed down and slushed and sluiced and polished and
clothed, while himself taking merely a passive part in these trying
transactions.

How the fascinating Tippins gets on when arraying herself for the
bewilderment of the senses of men, is known only to the Graces and her
maid; but perhaps even that engaging creature, though not reduced to
the self-dependence of Twemlow could dispense with a good deal of the
trouble attendant on the daily restoration of her charms, seeing that
as to her face and neck this adorable divinity is, as it were, a diurnal
species of lobster--throwing off a shell every forenoon, and needing to
keep in a retired spot until the new crust hardens.

Howbeit, Twemlow doth at length invest himself with collar and cravat
and wristbands to his knuckles, and goeth forth to breakfast. And to
breakfast with whom but his near neighbours, the Lammles of Sackville
Street, who have imparted to him that he will meet his distant kinsman,
Mr Fledgely. The awful Snigsworth might taboo and prohibit Fledgely, but
the peaceable Twemlow reasons, If he IS my kinsman I didn’t make him so,
and to meet a man is not to know him.’

It is the first anniversary of the happy marriage of Mr and Mrs Lammle,
and the celebration is a breakfast, because a dinner on the desired
scale of sumptuosity cannot be achieved within less limits than those
of the non-existent palatial residence of which so many people are
madly envious. So, Twemlow trips with not a little stiffness across
Piccadilly, sensible of having once been more upright in figure and less
in danger of being knocked down by swift vehicles. To be sure that was
in the days when he hoped for leave from the dread Snigsworth to do
something, or be something, in life, and before that magnificent Tartar
issued the ukase, ‘As he will never distinguish himself, he must be a
poor gentleman-pensioner of mine, and let him hereby consider himself
pensioned.’

Ah! my Twemlow! Say, little feeble grey personage, what thoughts are in
thy breast to-day, of the Fancy--so still to call her who bruised thy
heart when it was green and thy head brown--and whether it be better or
worse, more painful or less, to believe in the Fancy to this hour, than
to know her for a greedy armour-plated crocodile, with no more capacity
of imagining the delicate and sensitive and tender spot behind thy
waistcoat, than of going straight at it with a knitting-needle. Say
likewise, my Twemlow, whether it be the happier lot to be a poor
relation of the great, or to stand in the wintry slush giving the hack
horses to drink out of the shallow tub at the coach-stand, into which
thou has so nearly set thy uncertain foot. Twemlow says nothing, and
goes on.

As he approaches the Lammles’ door, drives up a little one-horse
carriage, containing Tippins the divine. Tippins, letting down the
window, playfully extols the vigilance of her cavalier in being in
waiting there to hand her out. Twemlow hands her out with as much polite
gravity as if she were anything real, and they proceed upstairs. Tippins
all abroad about the legs, and seeking to express that those unsteady
articles are only skipping in their native buoyancy.

And dear Mrs Lammle and dear Mr Lammle, how do you do, and when are
you going down to what’s-its-name place--Guy, Earl of Warwick, you
know--what is it?--Dun Cow--to claim the flitch of bacon? And Mortimer,
whose name is for ever blotted out from my list of lovers, by reason
first of fickleness and then of base desertion, how do YOU do, wretch?
And Mr Wrayburn, YOU here! What can YOU come for, because we are all
very sure before-hand that you are not going to talk! And Veneering,
M.P., how are things going on down at the house, and when will you turn
out those terrible people for us? And Mrs Veneering, my dear, can it
positively be true that you go down to that stifling place night after
night, to hear those men prose? Talking of which, Veneering, why don’t
you prose, for you haven’t opened your lips there yet, and we are dying
to hear what you have got to say to us! Miss Podsnap, charmed to see
you. Pa, here? No! Ma, neither? Oh! Mr Boots! Delighted. Mr Brewer!
This IS a gathering of the clans. Thus Tippins, and surveys Fledgeby and
outsiders through golden glass, murmuring as she turns about and about,
in her innocent giddy way, Anybody else I know? No, I think not. Nobody
there. Nobody THERE. Nobody anywhere!

Mr Lammle, all a-glitter, produces his friend Fledgeby, as dying for the
honour of presentation to Lady Tippins. Fledgeby presented, has the air
of going to say something, has the air of going to say nothing, has an
air successively of meditation, of resignation, and of desolation,
backs on Brewer, makes the tour of Boots, and fades into the extreme
background, feeling for his whisker, as if it might have turned up since
he was there five minutes ago.

But Lammle has him out again before he has so much as completely
ascertained the bareness of the land. He would seem to be in a bad way,
Fledgeby; for Lammle represents him as dying again. He is dying now, of
want of presentation to Twemlow.

Twemlow offers his hand. Glad to see him. ‘Your mother, sir, was a
connexion of mine.’

‘I believe so,’ says Fledgeby, ‘but my mother and her family were two.’

‘Are you staying in town?’ asks Twemlow.

‘I always am,’ says Fledgeby.

‘You like town,’ says Twemlow. But is felled flat by Fledgeby’s taking
it quite ill, and replying, No, he don’t like town. Lammle tries to
break the force of the fall, by remarking that some people do not like
town. Fledgeby retorting that he never heard of any such case but his
own, Twemlow goes down again heavily.

‘There is nothing new this morning, I suppose?’ says Twemlow, returning
to the mark with great spirit.

Fledgeby has not heard of anything.

‘No, there’s not a word of news,’ says Lammle.

‘Not a particle,’ adds Boots.

‘Not an atom,’ chimes in Brewer.

Somehow the execution of this little concerted piece appears to raise
the general spirits as with a sense of duty done, and sets the company a
going. Everybody seems more equal than before, to the calamity of being
in the society of everybody else. Even Eugene standing in a window,
moodily swinging the tassel of a blind, gives it a smarter jerk now, as
if he found himself in better case.

Breakfast announced. Everything on table showy and gaudy, but with
a self-assertingly temporary and nomadic air on the decorations, as
boasting that they will be much more showy and gaudy in the palatial
residence. Mr Lammle’s own particular servant behind his chair; the
Analytical behind Veneering’s chair; instances in point that
such servants fall into two classes: one mistrusting the master’s
acquaintances, and the other mistrusting the master. Mr Lammle’s
servant, of the second class. Appearing to be lost in wonder and low
spirits because the police are so long in coming to take his master up
on some charge of the first magnitude.

Veneering, M.P., on the right of Mrs Lammle; Twemlow on her left; Mrs
Veneering, W.M.P. (wife of Member of Parliament), and Lady Tippins on Mr
Lammle’s right and left. But be sure that well within the fascination of
Mr Lammle’s eye and smile sits little Georgiana. And be sure that
close to little Georgiana, also under inspection by the same gingerous
gentleman, sits Fledgeby.

Oftener than twice or thrice while breakfast is in progress, Mr Twemlow
gives a little sudden turn towards Mrs Lammle, and then says to her, ‘I
beg your pardon!’ This not being Twemlow’s usual way, why is it his
way to-day? Why, the truth is, Twemlow repeatedly labours under the
impression that Mrs Lammle is going to speak to him, and turning finds
that it is not so, and mostly that she has her eyes upon Veneering.
Strange that this impression so abides by Twemlow after being corrected,
yet so it is.

Lady Tippins partaking plentifully of the fruits of the earth (including
grape-juice in the category) becomes livelier, and applies herself to
elicit sparks from Mortimer Lightwood. It is always understood among the
initiated, that that faithless lover must be planted at table opposite
to Lady Tippins, who will then strike conversational fire out of him.
In a pause of mastication and deglutition, Lady Tippins, contemplating
Mortimer, recalls that it was at our dear Veneerings, and in the
presence of a party who are surely all here, that he told them his
story of the man from somewhere, which afterwards became so horribly
interesting and vulgarly popular.

‘Yes, Lady Tippins,’ assents Mortimer; ‘as they say on the stage, “Even
so!”’

‘Then we expect you,’ retorts the charmer, ‘to sustain your reputation,
and tell us something else.’

‘Lady Tippins, I exhausted myself for life that day, and there is
nothing more to be got out of me.’

Mortimer parries thus, with a sense upon him that elsewhere it is Eugene
and not he who is the jester, and that in these circles where Eugene
persists in being speechless, he, Mortimer, is but the double of the
friend on whom he has founded himself.

‘But,’ quoth the fascinating Tippins, ‘I am resolved on getting
something more out of you. Traitor! what is this I hear about another
disappearance?’

‘As it is you who have heard it,’ returns Lightwood, ‘perhaps you’ll
tell us.’

‘Monster, away!’ retorts Lady Tippins. ‘Your own Golden Dustman referred
me to you.’

Mr Lammle, striking in here, proclaims aloud that there is a sequel
to the story of the man from somewhere. Silence ensues upon the
proclamation.

‘I assure you,’ says Lightwood, glancing round the table, ‘I have
nothing to tell.’ But Eugene adding in a low voice, ‘There, tell
it, tell it!’ he corrects himself with the addition, ‘Nothing worth
mentioning.’

Boots and Brewer immediately perceive that it is immensely worth
mentioning, and become politely clamorous. Veneering is also visited by
a perception to the same effect. But it is understood that his attention
is now rather used up, and difficult to hold, that being the tone of the
House of Commons.

‘Pray don’t be at the trouble of composing yourselves to listen,’ says
Mortimer Lightwood, ‘because I shall have finished long before you have
fallen into comfortable attitudes. It’s like--’

‘It’s like,’ impatiently interrupts Eugene, ‘the children’s narrative:

     “I’ll tell you a story
     Of Jack a Manory,
     And now my story’s begun;
     I’ll tell you another
     Of Jack and his brother,
     And now my story is done.”

--Get on, and get it over!’

Eugene says this with a sound of vexation in his voice, leaning back in
his chair and looking balefully at Lady Tippins, who nods to him as
her dear Bear, and playfully insinuates that she (a self-evident
proposition) is Beauty, and he Beast.

‘The reference,’ proceeds Mortimer, ‘which I suppose to be made by my
honourable and fair enslaver opposite, is to the following circumstance.
Very lately, the young woman, Lizzie Hexam, daughter of the late Jesse
Hexam, otherwise Gaffer, who will be remembered to have found the body
of the man from somewhere, mysteriously received, she knew not from
whom, an explicit retraction of the charges made against her father, by
another water-side character of the name of Riderhood. Nobody believed
them, because little Rogue Riderhood--I am tempted into the paraphrase
by remembering the charming wolf who would have rendered society a great
service if he had devoured Mr Riderhood’s father and mother in their
infancy--had previously played fast and loose with the said charges,
and, in fact, abandoned them. However, the retraction I have mentioned
found its way into Lizzie Hexam’s hands, with a general flavour on it
of having been favoured by some anonymous messenger in a dark cloak and
slouched hat, and was by her forwarded, in her father’s vindication, to
Mr Boffin, my client. You will excuse the phraseology of the shop, but
as I never had another client, and in all likelihood never shall have, I
am rather proud of him as a natural curiosity probably unique.’

Although as easy as usual on the surface, Lightwood is not quite as easy
as usual below it. With an air of not minding Eugene at all, he feels
that the subject is not altogether a safe one in that connexion.

‘The natural curiosity which forms the sole ornament of my professional
museum,’ he resumes, ‘hereupon desires his Secretary--an individual
of the hermit-crab or oyster species, and whose name, I think, is
Chokesmith--but it doesn’t in the least matter--say Artichoke--to put
himself in communication with Lizzie Hexam. Artichoke professes his
readiness so to do, endeavours to do so, but fails.’

‘Why fails?’ asks Boots.

‘How fails?’ asks Brewer.

‘Pardon me,’ returns Lightwood, ‘I must postpone the reply for one
moment, or we shall have an anti-climax. Artichoke failing signally, my
client refers the task to me: his purpose being to advance the interests
of the object of his search. I proceed to put myself in communication
with her; I even happen to possess some special means,’ with a glance
at Eugene, ‘of putting myself in communication with her; but I fail too,
because she has vanished.’

‘Vanished!’ is the general echo.

‘Disappeared,’ says Mortimer. ‘Nobody knows how, nobody knows when,
nobody knows where. And so ends the story to which my honourable and
fair enslaver opposite referred.’

Tippins, with a bewitching little scream, opines that we shall every one
of us be murdered in our beds. Eugene eyes her as if some of us would
be enough for him. Mrs Veneering, W.M.P., remarks that these social
mysteries make one afraid of leaving Baby. Veneering, M.P., wishes to
be informed (with something of a second-hand air of seeing the Right
Honourable Gentleman at the head of the Home Department in his place)
whether it is intended to be conveyed that the vanished person has been
spirited away or otherwise harmed? Instead of Lightwood’s answering,
Eugene answers, and answers hastily and vexedly: ‘No, no, no; he doesn’t
mean that; he means voluntarily vanished--but utterly--completely.’

However, the great subject of the happiness of Mr and Mrs Lammle must
not be allowed to vanish with the other vanishments--with the vanishing
of the murderer, the vanishing of Julius Handford, the vanishing of
Lizzie Hexam,--and therefore Veneering must recall the present sheep
to the pen from which they have strayed. Who so fit to discourse of
the happiness of Mr and Mrs Lammle, they being the dearest and oldest
friends he has in the world; or what audience so fit for him to take
into his confidence as that audience, a noun of multitude or signifying
many, who are all the oldest and dearest friends he has in the world?
So Veneering, without the formality of rising, launches into a familiar
oration, gradually toning into the Parliamentary sing-song, in which he
sees at that board his dear friend Twemlow who on that day twelvemonth
bestowed on his dear friend Lammle the fair hand of his dear friend
Sophronia, and in which he also sees at that board his dear friends
Boots and Brewer whose rallying round him at a period when his dear
friend Lady Tippins likewise rallied round him--ay, and in the foremost
rank--he can never forget while memory holds her seat. But he is free
to confess that he misses from that board his dear old friend Podsnap,
though he is well represented by his dear young friend Georgiana. And he
further sees at that board (this he announces with pomp, as if exulting
in the powers of an extraordinary telescope) his friend Mr Fledgeby, if
he will permit him to call him so. For all of these reasons, and many
more which he right well knows will have occurred to persons of your
exceptional acuteness, he is here to submit to you that the time has
arrived when, with our hearts in our glasses, with tears in our eyes,
with blessings on our lips, and in a general way with a profusion of
gammon and spinach in our emotional larders, we should one and all drink
to our dear friends the Lammles, wishing them many years as happy as
the last, and many many friends as congenially united as themselves. And
this he will add; that Anastatia Veneering (who is instantly heard to
weep) is formed on the same model as her old and chosen friend Sophronia
Lammle, in respect that she is devoted to the man who wooed and won her,
and nobly discharges the duties of a wife.

Seeing no better way out of it, Veneering here pulls up his oratorical
Pegasus extremely short, and plumps down, clean over his head, with:
‘Lammle, God bless you!’

Then Lammle. Too much of him every way; pervadingly too much nose of a
coarse wrong shape, and his nose in his mind and his manners; too much
smile to be real; too much frown to be false; too many large teeth to be
visible at once without suggesting a bite. He thanks you, dear friends,
for your kindly greeting, and hopes to receive you--it may be on the
next of these delightful occasions--in a residence better suited to
your claims on the rites of hospitality. He will never forget that at
Veneering’s he first saw Sophronia. Sophronia will never forget that at
Veneering’s she first saw him. ‘They spoke of it soon after they
were married, and agreed that they would never forget it. In fact, to
Veneering they owe their union. They hope to show their sense of this
some day [‘No, no, from Veneering)--oh yes, yes, and let him rely
upon it, they will if they can! His marriage with Sophronia was not a
marriage of interest on either side: she had her little fortune, he had
his little fortune: they joined their little fortunes: it was a marriage
of pure inclination and suitability. Thank you! Sophronia and he are
fond of the society of young people; but he is not sure that their house
would be a good house for young people proposing to remain single, since
the contemplation of its domestic bliss might induce them to change
their minds. He will not apply this to any one present; certainly not
to their darling little Georgiana. Again thank you! Neither, by-the-by,
will he apply it to his friend Fledgeby. He thanks Veneering for the
feeling manner in which he referred to their common friend Fledgeby, for
he holds that gentleman in the highest estimation. Thank you. In fact
(returning unexpectedly to Fledgeby), the better you know him, the more
you find in him that you desire to know. Again thank you! In his dear
Sophronia’s name and in his own, thank you!

Mrs Lammle has sat quite still, with her eyes cast down upon the
table-cloth. As Mr Lammle’s address ends, Twemlow once more turns to her
involuntarily, not cured yet of that often recurring impression that she
is going to speak to him. This time she really is going to speak to him.
Veneering is talking with his other next neighbour, and she speaks in a
low voice.

‘Mr Twemlow.’

He answers, ‘I beg your pardon? Yes?’ Still a little doubtful, because
of her not looking at him.

‘You have the soul of a gentleman, and I know I may trust you. Will you
give me the opportunity of saying a few words to you when you come up
stairs?’

‘Assuredly. I shall be honoured.’

‘Don’t seem to do so, if you please, and don’t think it inconsistent if
my manner should be more careless than my words. I may be watched.’

Intensely astonished, Twemlow puts his hand to his forehead, and sinks
back in his chair meditating. Mrs Lammle rises. All rise. The ladies go
up stairs. The gentlemen soon saunter after them. Fledgeby has devoted
the interval to taking an observation of Boots’s whiskers, Brewer’s
whiskers, and Lammle’s whiskers, and considering which pattern of
whisker he would prefer to produce out of himself by friction, if the
Genie of the cheek would only answer to his rubbing.

In the drawing-room, groups form as usual. Lightwood, Boots, and Brewer,
flutter like moths around that yellow wax candle--guttering down,
and with some hint of a winding-sheet in it--Lady Tippins. Outsiders
cultivate Veneering, M P., and Mrs Veneering, W.M.P. Lammle stands with
folded arms, Mephistophelean in a corner, with Georgiana and Fledgeby.
Mrs Lammle, on a sofa by a table, invites Mr Twemlow’s attention to a
book of portraits in her hand.

Mr Twemlow takes his station on a settee before her, and Mrs Lammle
shows him a portrait.

‘You have reason to be surprised,’ she says softly, ‘but I wish you
wouldn’t look so.’

Disturbed Twemlow, making an effort not to look so, looks much more so.

‘I think, Mr Twemlow, you never saw that distant connexion of yours
before to-day?’

‘No, never.’

‘Now that you do see him, you see what he is. You are not proud of him?’

‘To say the truth, Mrs Lammle, no.’

‘If you knew more of him, you would be less inclined to acknowledge him.
Here is another portrait. What do you think of it?’

Twemlow has just presence of mind enough to say aloud: ‘Very like!
Uncommonly like!’

‘You have noticed, perhaps, whom he favours with his attentions? You
notice where he is now, and how engaged?’

‘Yes. But Mr Lammle--’

She darts a look at him which he cannot comprehend, and shows him
another portrait.

‘Very good; is it not?’

‘Charming!’ says Twemlow.

‘So like as to be almost a caricature?--Mr Twemlow, it is impossible
to tell you what the struggle in my mind has been, before I could bring
myself to speak to you as I do now. It is only in the conviction that I
may trust you never to betray me, that I can proceed. Sincerely promise
me that you never will betray my confidence--that you will respect it,
even though you may no longer respect me,--and I shall be as satisfied
as if you had sworn it.’

‘Madam, on the honour of a poor gentleman--’

‘Thank you. I can desire no more. Mr Twemlow, I implore you to save that
child!’

‘That child?’

‘Georgiana. She will be sacrificed. She will be inveigled and married
to that connexion of yours. It is a partnership affair, a
money-speculation. She has no strength of will or character to help
herself and she is on the brink of being sold into wretchedness for
life.’

‘Amazing! But what can I do to prevent it?’ demands Twemlow, shocked and
bewildered to the last degree.

‘Here is another portrait. And not good, is it?’

Aghast at the light manner of her throwing her head back to look at it
critically, Twemlow still dimly perceives the expediency of throwing his
own head back, and does so. Though he no more sees the portrait than if
it were in China.

‘Decidedly not good,’ says Mrs Lammle. ‘Stiff and exaggerated!’

‘And ex--’ But Twemlow, in his demolished state, cannot command the
word, and trails off into ‘--actly so.’

‘Mr Twemlow, your word will have weight with her pompous, self-blinded
father. You know how much he makes of your family. Lose no time. Warn
him.’

‘But warn him against whom?’

‘Against me.’

By great good fortune Twemlow receives a stimulant at this critical
instant. The stimulant is Lammle’s voice.

‘Sophronia, my dear, what portraits are you showing Twemlow?’

‘Public characters, Alfred.’

‘Show him the last of me.’

‘Yes, Alfred.’

She puts the book down, takes another book up, turns the leaves, and
presents the portrait to Twemlow.

‘That is the last of Mr Lammle. Do you think it good?--Warn her father
against me. I deserve it, for I have been in the scheme from the first.
It is my husband’s scheme, your connexion’s, and mine. I tell you this,
only to show you the necessity of the poor little foolish affectionate
creature’s being befriended and rescued. You will not repeat this to her
father. You will spare me so far, and spare my husband. For, though this
celebration of to-day is all a mockery, he is my husband, and we must
live.--Do you think it like?’

Twemlow, in a stunned condition, feigns to compare the portrait in his
hand with the original looking towards him from his Mephistophelean
corner.

‘Very well indeed!’ are at length the words which Twemlow with great
difficulty extracts from himself.

‘I am glad you think so. On the whole, I myself consider it the best.
The others are so dark. Now here, for instance, is another of Mr
Lammle--’

‘But I don’t understand; I don’t see my way,’ Twemlow stammers, as he
falters over the book with his glass at his eye. ‘How warn her father,
and not tell him? Tell him how much? Tell him how little? I--I--am
getting lost.’

‘Tell him I am a match-maker; tell him I am an artful and designing
woman; tell him you are sure his daughter is best out of my house and my
company. Tell him any such things of me; they will all be true. You know
what a puffed-up man he is, and how easily you can cause his vanity to
take the alarm. Tell him as much as will give him the alarm and make
him careful of her, and spare me the rest. Mr Twemlow, I feel my sudden
degradation in your eyes; familiar as I am with my degradation in my own
eyes, I keenly feel the change that must have come upon me in yours,
in these last few moments. But I trust to your good faith with me as
implicitly as when I began. If you knew how often I have tried to speak
to you to-day, you would almost pity me. I want no new promise from you
on my own account, for I am satisfied, and I always shall be satisfied,
with the promise you have given me. I can venture to say no more, for
I see that I am watched. If you would set my mind at rest with the
assurance that you will interpose with the father and save this harmless
girl, close that book before you return it to me, and I shall know what
you mean, and deeply thank you in my heart.--Alfred, Mr Twemlow thinks
the last one the best, and quite agrees with you and me.’

Alfred advances. The groups break up. Lady Tippins rises to go, and Mrs
Veneering follows her leader. For the moment, Mrs Lammle does not turn
to them, but remains looking at Twemlow looking at Alfred’s portrait
through his eyeglass. The moment past, Twemlow drops his eyeglass at its
ribbon’s length, rises, and closes the book with an emphasis which makes
that fragile nursling of the fairies, Tippins, start.

Then good-bye and good-bye, and charming occasion worthy of the Golden
Age, and more about the flitch of bacon, and the like of that; and
Twemlow goes staggering across Piccadilly with his hand to his forehead,
and is nearly run down by a flushed lettercart, and at last drops
safe in his easy-chair, innocent good gentleman, with his hand to his
forehead still, and his head in a whirl.





BOOK THE THIRD -- A LONG LANE



Chapter 1

LODGERS IN QUEER STREET


It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate
London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing,
and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose
between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither.
Gaslights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing
themselves to be night-creatures that had no business abroad under the
sun; while the sun itself when it was for a few moments dimly indicated
through circling eddies of fog, showed as if it had gone out and were
collapsing flat and cold. Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy
day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about
the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then
browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City--which call
Saint Mary Axe--it was rusty-black. From any point of the high ridge of
land northward, it might have been discerned that the loftiest buildings
made an occasional struggle to get their heads above the foggy sea, and
especially that the great dome of Saint Paul’s seemed to die hard; but
this was not perceivable in the streets at their feet, where the whole
metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with muffled sound of wheels,
and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.

At nine o’clock on such a morning, the place of business of Pubsey and
Co. was not the liveliest object even in Saint Mary Axe--which is not a
very lively spot--with a sobbing gaslight in the counting-house window,
and a burglarious stream of fog creeping in to strangle it through the
keyhole of the main door. But the light went out, and the main door
opened, and Riah came forth with a bag under his arm.

Almost in the act of coming out at the door, Riah went into the fog, and
was lost to the eyes of Saint Mary Axe. But the eyes of this history
can follow him westward, by Cornhill, Cheapside, Fleet Street, and the
Strand, to Piccadilly and the Albany. Thither he went at his grave and
measured pace, staff in hand, skirt at heel; and more than one head,
turning to look back at his venerable figure already lost in the mist,
supposed it to be some ordinary figure indistinctly seen, which fancy
and the fog had worked into that passing likeness.

Arrived at the house in which his master’s chambers were on the
second floor, Riah proceeded up the stairs, and paused at Fascination
Fledgeby’s door. Making free with neither bell nor knocker, he struck
upon the door with the top of his staff, and, having listened, sat down
on the threshold. It was characteristic of his habitual submission,
that he sat down on the raw dark staircase, as many of his ancestors
had probably sat down in dungeons, taking what befell him as it might
befall.

After a time, when he had grown so cold as to be fain to blow upon his
fingers, he arose and knocked with his staff again, and listened again,
and again sat down to wait. Thrice he repeated these actions before his
listening ears were greeted by the voice of Fledgeby, calling from his
bed, ‘Hold your row!--I’ll come and open the door directly!’ But, in
lieu of coming directly, he fell into a sweet sleep for some quarter of
an hour more, during which added interval Riah sat upon the stairs and
waited with perfect patience.

At length the door stood open, and Mr Fledgeby’s retreating drapery
plunged into bed again. Following it at a respectful distance, Riah
passed into the bed-chamber, where a fire had been sometime lighted, and
was burning briskly.

‘Why, what time of night do you mean to call it?’ inquired Fledgeby,
turning away beneath the clothes, and presenting a comfortable rampart
of shoulder to the chilled figure of the old man.

‘Sir, it is full half-past ten in the morning.’

‘The deuce it is! Then it must be precious foggy?’

‘Very foggy, sir.’

‘And raw, then?’

‘Chill and bitter,’ said Riah, drawing out a handkerchief, and wiping
the moisture from his beard and long grey hair as he stood on the verge
of the rug, with his eyes on the acceptable fire.

With a plunge of enjoyment, Fledgeby settled himself afresh.

‘Any snow, or sleet, or slush, or anything of that sort?’ he asked.

‘No, sir, no. Not quite so bad as that. The streets are pretty clean.’

‘You needn’t brag about it,’ returned Fledgeby, disappointed in his
desire to heighten the contrast between his bed and the streets. ‘But
you’re always bragging about something. Got the books there?’

‘They are here, sir.’

‘All right. I’ll turn the general subject over in my mind for a minute
or two, and while I’m about it you can empty your bag and get ready for
me.’

With another comfortable plunge, Mr Fledgeby fell asleep again. The old
man, having obeyed his directions, sat down on the edge of a chair, and,
folding his hands before him, gradually yielded to the influence of the
warmth, and dozed. He was roused by Mr Fledgeby’s appearing erect at
the foot of the bed, in Turkish slippers, rose-coloured Turkish trousers
(got cheap from somebody who had cheated some other somebody out of
them), and a gown and cap to correspond. In that costume he would have
left nothing to be desired, if he had been further fitted out with a
bottomless chair, a lantern, and a bunch of matches.

‘Now, old ‘un!’ cried Fascination, in his light raillery, ‘what dodgery
are you up to next, sitting there with your eyes shut? You ain’t asleep.
Catch a weasel at it, and catch a Jew!’

‘Truly, sir, I fear I nodded,’ said the old man.

‘Not you!’ returned Fledgeby, with a cunning look. ‘A telling move with
a good many, I dare say, but it won’t put ME off my guard. Not a bad
notion though, if you want to look indifferent in driving a bargain. Oh,
you are a dodger!’

The old man shook his head, gently repudiating the imputation, and
suppressed a sigh, and moved to the table at which Mr Fledgeby was now
pouring out for himself a cup of steaming and fragrant coffee from a pot
that had stood ready on the hob. It was an edifying spectacle, the young
man in his easy chair taking his coffee, and the old man with his grey
head bent, standing awaiting his pleasure.

‘Now!’ said Fledgeby. ‘Fork out your balance in hand, and prove by
figures how you make it out that it ain’t more. First of all, light that
candle.’

Riah obeyed, and then taking a bag from his breast, and referring to
the sum in the accounts for which they made him responsible, told it out
upon the table. Fledgeby told it again with great care, and rang every
sovereign.

‘I suppose,’ he said, taking one up to eye it closely, ‘you haven’t been
lightening any of these; but it’s a trade of your people’s, you know.
YOU understand what sweating a pound means, don’t you?’

‘Much as you do, sir,’ returned the old man, with his hands under
opposite cuffs of his loose sleeves, as he stood at the table,
deferentially observant of the master’s face. ‘May I take the liberty to
say something?’

‘You may,’ Fledgeby graciously conceded.

‘Do you not, sir--without intending it--of a surety without intending
it--sometimes mingle the character I fairly earn in your employment,
with the character which it is your policy that I should bear?’

‘I don’t find it worth my while to cut things so fine as to go into the
inquiry,’ Fascination coolly answered.

‘Not in justice?’

‘Bother justice!’ said Fledgeby.

‘Not in generosity?’

‘Jews and generosity!’ said Fledgeby. ‘That’s a good connexion! Bring
out your vouchers, and don’t talk Jerusalem palaver.’

The vouchers were produced, and for the next half-hour Mr Fledgeby
concentrated his sublime attention on them. They and the accounts were
all found correct, and the books and the papers resumed their places in
the bag.

‘Next,’ said Fledgeby, ‘concerning that bill-broking branch of the
business; the branch I like best. What queer bills are to be bought, and
at what prices? You have got your list of what’s in the market?’

‘Sir, a long list,’ replied Riah, taking out a pocket-book, and
selecting from its contents a folded paper, which, being unfolded,
became a sheet of foolscap covered with close writing.

‘Whew!’ whistled Fledgeby, as he took it in his hand. ‘Queer Street is
full of lodgers just at present! These are to be disposed of in parcels;
are they?’

‘In parcels as set forth,’ returned the old man, looking over his
master’s shoulder; ‘or the lump.’

‘Half the lump will be waste-paper, one knows beforehand,’ said
Fledgeby. ‘Can you get it at waste-paper price? That’s the question.’

Riah shook his head, and Fledgeby cast his small eyes down the list.
They presently began to twinkle, and he no sooner became conscious of
their twinkling, than he looked up over his shoulder at the grave face
above him, and moved to the chimney-piece. Making a desk of it, he stood
there with his back to the old man, warming his knees, perusing the list
at his leisure, and often returning to some lines of it, as though
they were particularly interesting. At those times he glanced in the
chimney-glass to see what note the old man took of him. He took none
that could be detected, but, aware of his employer’s suspicions, stood
with his eyes on the ground.

Mr Fledgeby was thus amiably engaged when a step was heard at the outer
door, and the door was heard to open hastily. ‘Hark! That’s your doing,
you Pump of Israel,’ said Fledgeby; ‘you can’t have shut it.’ Then the
step was heard within, and the voice of Mr Alfred Lammle called aloud,
‘Are you anywhere here, Fledgeby?’ To which Fledgeby, after cautioning
Riah in a low voice to take his cue as it should be given him, replied,
‘Here I am!’ and opened his bedroom door.

‘Come in!’ said Fledgeby. ‘This gentleman is only Pubsey and Co. of
Saint Mary Axe, that I am trying to make terms for an unfortunate friend
with in a matter of some dishonoured bills. But really Pubsey and Co.
are so strict with their debtors, and so hard to move, that I seem to be
wasting my time. Can’t I make ANY terms with you on my friend’s part, Mr
Riah?’

‘I am but the representative of another, sir,’ returned the Jew in a low
voice. ‘I do as I am bidden by my principal. It is not my capital that
is invested in the business. It is not my profit that arises therefrom.’

‘Ha ha!’ laughed Fledgeby. ‘Lammle?’

‘Ha ha!’ laughed Lammle. ‘Yes. Of course. We know.’

‘Devilish good, ain’t it, Lammle?’ said Fledgeby, unspeakably amused by
his hidden joke.

‘Always the same, always the same!’ said Lammle. ‘Mr--’

‘Riah, Pubsey and Co. Saint Mary Axe,’ Fledgeby put in, as he wiped away
the tears that trickled from his eyes, so rare was his enjoyment of his
secret joke.

‘Mr Riah is bound to observe the invariable forms for such cases made
and provided,’ said Lammle.

‘He is only the representative of another!’ cried Fledgeby. ‘Does as
he is told by his principal! Not his capital that’s invested in the
business. Oh, that’s good! Ha ha ha ha!’ Mr Lammle joined in the laugh
and looked knowing; and the more he did both, the more exquisite the
secret joke became for Mr Fledgeby.

‘However,’ said that fascinating gentleman, wiping his eyes again, ‘if
we go on in this way, we shall seem to be almost making game of Mr Riah,
or of Pubsey and Co. Saint Mary Axe, or of somebody: which is far from
our intention. Mr Riah, if you would have the kindness to step into the
next room for a few moments while I speak with Mr Lammle here, I should
like to try to make terms with you once again before you go.’

The old man, who had never raised his eyes during the whole transaction
of Mr Fledgeby’s joke, silently bowed and passed out by the door which
Fledgeby opened for him. Having closed it on him, Fledgeby returned to
Lammle, standing with his back to the bedroom fire, with one hand under
his coat-skirts, and all his whiskers in the other.

‘Halloa!’ said Fledgeby. ‘There’s something wrong!’

‘How do you know it?’ demanded Lammle.

‘Because you show it,’ replied Fledgeby in unintentional rhyme.

‘Well then; there is,’ said Lammle; ‘there IS something wrong; the whole
thing’s wrong.’

‘I say!’ remonstrated Fascination very slowly, and sitting down with his
hands on his knees to stare at his glowering friend with his back to the
fire.

‘I tell you, Fledgeby,’ repeated Lammle, with a sweep of his right arm,
‘the whole thing’s wrong. The game’s up.’

‘What game’s up?’ demanded Fledgeby, as slowly as before, and more
sternly.

‘THE game. OUR game. Read that.’

Fledgeby took a note from his extended hand and read it aloud. ‘Alfred
Lammle, Esquire. Sir: Allow Mrs Podsnap and myself to express our united
sense of the polite attentions of Mrs Alfred Lammle and yourself towards
our daughter, Georgiana. Allow us also, wholly to reject them for the
future, and to communicate our final desire that the two families
may become entire strangers. I have the honour to be, Sir, your most
obedient and very humble servant, JOHN PODSNAP.’ Fledgeby looked at the
three blank sides of this note, quite as long and earnestly as at the
first expressive side, and then looked at Lammle, who responded with
another extensive sweep of his right arm.

‘Whose doing is this?’ said Fledgeby.

‘Impossible to imagine,’ said Lammle.

‘Perhaps,’ suggested Fledgeby, after reflecting with a very discontented
brow, ‘somebody has been giving you a bad character.’

‘Or you,’ said Lammle, with a deeper frown.

Mr Fledgeby appeared to be on the verge of some mutinous expressions,
when his hand happened to touch his nose. A certain remembrance
connected with that feature operating as a timely warning, he took it
thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger, and pondered; Lammle
meanwhile eyeing him with furtive eyes.

‘Well!’ said Fledgeby. ‘This won’t improve with talking about. If we
ever find out who did it, we’ll mark that person. There’s nothing more
to be said, except that you undertook to do what circumstances prevent
your doing.’

‘And that you undertook to do what you might have done by this time, if
you had made a prompter use of circumstances,’ snarled Lammle.

‘Hah! That,’ remarked Fledgeby, with his hands in the Turkish trousers,
‘is matter of opinion.’

‘Mr Fledgeby,’ said Lammle, in a bullying tone, ‘am I to understand that
you in any way reflect upon me, or hint dissatisfaction with me, in this
affair?’

‘No,’ said Fledgeby; ‘provided you have brought my promissory note in
your pocket, and now hand it over.’

Lammle produced it, not without reluctance. Fledgeby looked at it,
identified it, twisted it up, and threw it into the fire. They both
looked at it as it blazed, went out, and flew in feathery ash up the
chimney.

‘NOW, Mr Fledgeby,’ said Lammle, as before; ‘am I to understand that
you in any way reflect upon me, or hint dissatisfaction with me, in this
affair?’

‘No,’ said Fledgeby.

‘Finally and unreservedly no?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fledgeby, my hand.’

Mr Fledgeby took it, saying, ‘And if we ever find out who did this,
we’ll mark that person. And in the most friendly manner, let me mention
one thing more. I don’t know what your circumstances are, and I don’t
ask. You have sustained a loss here. Many men are liable to be involved
at times, and you may be, or you may not be. But whatever you do,
Lammle, don’t--don’t--don’t, I beg of you--ever fall into the hands of
Pubsey and Co. in the next room, for they are grinders. Regular flayers
and grinders, my dear Lammle,’ repeated Fledgeby with a peculiar relish,
‘and they’ll skin you by the inch, from the nape of your neck to the
sole of your foot, and grind every inch of your skin to tooth-powder.
You have seen what Mr Riah is. Never fall into his hands, Lammle, I beg
of you as a friend!’

Mr Lammle, disclosing some alarm at the solemnity of this affectionate
adjuration, demanded why the devil he ever should fall into the hands of
Pubsey and Co.?

‘To confess the fact, I was made a little uneasy,’ said the candid
Fledgeby, ‘by the manner in which that Jew looked at you when he heard
your name. I didn’t like his eye. But it may have been the heated
fancy of a friend. Of course if you are sure that you have no personal
security out, which you may not be quite equal to meeting, and which can
have got into his hands, it must have been fancy. Still, I didn’t like
his eye.’

The brooding Lammle, with certain white dints coming and going in his
palpitating nose, looked as if some tormenting imp were pinching it.
Fledgeby, watching him with a twitch in his mean face which did duty
there for a smile, looked very like the tormentor who was pinching.

‘But I mustn’t keep him waiting too long,’ said Fledgeby, ‘or he’ll
revenge it on my unfortunate friend. How’s your very clever and
agreeable wife? She knows we have broken down?’

‘I showed her the letter.’

‘Very much surprised?’ asked Fledgeby.

‘I think she would have been more so,’ answered Lammle, ‘if there had
been more go in YOU?’

‘Oh!--She lays it upon me, then?’

‘Mr Fledgeby, I will not have my words misconstrued.’

‘Don’t break out, Lammle,’ urged Fledgeby, in a submissive tone,
‘because there’s no occasion. I only asked a question. Then she don’t
lay it upon me? To ask another question.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Very good,’ said Fledgeby, plainly seeing that she did. ‘My compliments
to her. Good-bye!’

They shook hands, and Lammle strode out pondering. Fledgeby saw him
into the fog, and, returning to the fire and musing with his face to it,
stretched the legs of the rose-coloured Turkish trousers wide apart, and
meditatively bent his knees, as if he were going down upon them.

‘You have a pair of whiskers, Lammle, which I never liked,’ murmured
Fledgeby, ‘and which money can’t produce; you are boastful of your
manners and your conversation; you wanted to pull my nose, and you have
let me in for a failure, and your wife says I am the cause of it. I’ll
bowl you down. I will, though I have no whiskers,’ here he rubbed the
places where they were due, ‘and no manners, and no conversation!’

Having thus relieved his noble mind, he collected the legs of the
Turkish trousers, straightened himself on his knees, and called out
to Riah in the next room, ‘Halloa, you sir!’ At sight of the old man
re-entering with a gentleness monstrously in contrast with the character
he had given him, Mr Fledgeby was so tickled again, that he exclaimed,
laughing, ‘Good! Good! Upon my soul it is uncommon good!’

‘Now, old ‘un,’ proceeded Fledgeby, when he had had his laugh out,
‘you’ll buy up these lots that I mark with my pencil--there’s a tick
there, and a tick there, and a tick there--and I wager two-pence you’ll
afterwards go on squeezing those Christians like the Jew you are. Now,
next you’ll want a cheque--or you’ll say you want it, though you’ve
capital enough somewhere, if one only knew where, but you’d be peppered
and salted and grilled on a gridiron before you’d own to it--and that
cheque I’ll write.’

When he had unlocked a drawer and taken a key from it to open another
drawer, in which was another key that opened another drawer, in which
was another key that opened another drawer, in which was the cheque
book; and when he had written the cheque; and when, reversing the key
and drawer process, he had placed his cheque book in safety again; he
beckoned the old man, with the folded cheque, to come and take it.

‘Old ‘un,’ said Fledgeby, when the Jew had put it in his pocketbook, and
was putting that in the breast of his outer garment; ‘so much at present
for my affairs. Now a word about affairs that are not exactly mine.
Where is she?’

With his hand not yet withdrawn from the breast of his garment, Riah
started and paused.

‘Oho!’ said Fledgeby. ‘Didn’t expect it! Where have you hidden her?’

Showing that he was taken by surprise, the old man looked at his master
with some passing confusion, which the master highly enjoyed.

‘Is she in the house I pay rent and taxes for in Saint Mary Axe?’
demanded Fledgeby.

‘No, sir.’

‘Is she in your garden up atop of that house--gone up to be dead, or
whatever the game is?’ asked Fledgeby.

‘No, sir.’

‘Where is she then?’

Riah bent his eyes upon the ground, as if considering whether he could
answer the question without breach of faith, and then silently raised
them to Fledgeby’s face, as if he could not.

‘Come!’ said Fledgeby. ‘I won’t press that just now. But I want to know
this, and I will know this, mind you. What are you up to?’

The old man, with an apologetic action of his head and hands, as not
comprehending the master’s meaning, addressed to him a look of mute
inquiry.

‘You can’t be a gallivanting dodger,’ said Fledgeby. ‘For you’re a
“regular pity the sorrows”, you know--if you DO know any Christian
rhyme--“whose trembling limbs have borne him to”--et cetrer. You’re one
of the Patriarchs; you’re a shaky old card; and you can’t be in love
with this Lizzie?’

‘O, sir!’ expostulated Riah. ‘O, sir, sir, sir!’

‘Then why,’ retorted Fledgeby, with some slight tinge of a blush, ‘don’t
you out with your reason for having your spoon in the soup at all?’

‘Sir, I will tell you the truth. But (your pardon for the stipulation)
it is in sacred confidence; it is strictly upon honour.’

‘Honour too!’ cried Fledgeby, with a mocking lip. ‘Honour among Jews.
Well. Cut away.’

‘It is upon honour, sir?’ the other still stipulated, with respectful
firmness.

‘Oh, certainly. Honour bright,’ said Fledgeby.

The old man, never bidden to sit down, stood with an earnest hand laid
on the back of the young man’s easy chair. The young man sat looking at
the fire with a face of listening curiosity, ready to check him off and
catch him tripping.

‘Cut away,’ said Fledgeby. ‘Start with your motive.’

‘Sir, I have no motive but to help the helpless.’

Mr Fledgeby could only express the feelings to which this incredible
statement gave rise in his breast, by a prodigiously long derisive
sniff.

‘How I came to know, and much to esteem and to respect, this damsel, I
mentioned when you saw her in my poor garden on the house-top,’ said the
Jew.

‘Did you?’ said Fledgeby, distrustfully. ‘Well. Perhaps you did,
though.’

‘The better I knew her, the more interest I felt in her fortunes. They
gathered to a crisis. I found her beset by a selfish and ungrateful
brother, beset by an unacceptable wooer, beset by the snares of a more
powerful lover, beset by the wiles of her own heart.’

‘She took to one of the chaps then?’

‘Sir, it was only natural that she should incline towards him, for he
had many and great advantages. But he was not of her station, and to
marry her was not in his mind. Perils were closing round her, and the
circle was fast darkening, when I--being as you have said, sir, too
old and broken to be suspected of any feeling for her but a
father’s--stepped in, and counselled flight. I said, “My daughter, there
are times of moral danger when the hardest virtuous resolution to form
is flight, and when the most heroic bravery is flight.” She answered,
she had had this in her thoughts; but whither to fly without help she
knew not, and there were none to help her. I showed her there was one to
help her, and it was I. And she is gone.’

‘What did you do with her?’ asked Fledgeby, feeling his cheek.

‘I placed her,’ said the old man, ‘at a distance;’ with a grave smooth
outward sweep from one another of his two open hands at arm’s length;
‘at a distance--among certain of our people, where her industry would
serve her, and where she could hope to exercise it, unassailed from any
quarter.’

Fledgeby’s eyes had come from the fire to notice the action of his hands
when he said ‘at a distance.’ Fledgeby now tried (very unsuccessfully)
to imitate that action, as he shook his head and said, ‘Placed her in
that direction, did you? Oh you circular old dodger!’

With one hand across his breast and the other on the easy chair, Riah,
without justifying himself, waited for further questioning. But, that it
was hopeless to question him on that one reserved point, Fledgeby, with
his small eyes too near together, saw full well.

‘Lizzie,’ said Fledgeby, looking at the fire again, and then looking up.
‘Humph, Lizzie. You didn’t tell me the other name in your garden atop of
the house. I’ll be more communicative with you. The other name’s Hexam.’

Riah bent his head in assent.

‘Look here, you sir,’ said Fledgeby. ‘I have a notion I know something
of the inveigling chap, the powerful one. Has he anything to do with the
law?’

‘Nominally, I believe it his calling.’

‘I thought so. Name anything like Lightwood?’

‘Sir, not at all like.’

‘Come, old ‘un,’ said Fledgeby, meeting his eyes with a wink, ‘say the
name.’

‘Wrayburn.’

‘By Jupiter!’ cried Fledgeby. ‘That one, is it? I thought it might be
the other, but I never dreamt of that one! I shouldn’t object to your
baulking either of the pair, dodger, for they are both conceited enough;
but that one is as cool a customer as ever I met with. Got a beard
besides, and presumes upon it. Well done, old ‘un! Go on and prosper!’

Brightened by this unexpected commendation, Riah asked were there more
instructions for him?

‘No,’ said Fledgeby, ‘you may toddle now, Judah, and grope about on the
orders you have got.’ Dismissed with those pleasing words, the old man
took his broad hat and staff, and left the great presence: more as if he
were some superior creature benignantly blessing Mr Fledgeby, than the
poor dependent on whom he set his foot. Left alone, Mr Fledgeby locked
his outer door, and came back to his fire.

‘Well done you!’ said Fascination to himself. ‘Slow, you may be; sure,
you are!’ This he twice or thrice repeated with much complacency, as he
again dispersed the legs of the Turkish trousers and bent the knees.

‘A tidy shot that, I flatter myself,’ he then soliloquised. ‘And a Jew
brought down with it! Now, when I heard the story told at Lammle’s, I
didn’t make a jump at Riah. Not a hit of it; I got at him by degrees.’
Herein he was quite accurate; it being his habit, not to jump, or
leap, or make an upward spring, at anything in life, but to crawl at
everything.

‘I got at him,’ pursued Fledgeby, feeling for his whisker, ‘by degrees.
If your Lammles or your Lightwoods had got at him anyhow, they would
have asked him the question whether he hadn’t something to do with that
gal’s disappearance. I knew a better way of going to work. Having got
behind the hedge, and put him in the light, I took a shot at him and
brought him down plump. Oh! It don’t count for much, being a Jew, in a
match against ME!’

Another dry twist in place of a smile, made his face crooked here.

‘As to Christians,’ proceeded Fledgeby, ‘look out, fellow-Christians,
particularly you that lodge in Queer Street! I have got the run of Queer
Street now, and you shall see some games there. To work a lot of power
over you and you not know it, knowing as you think yourselves, would
be almost worth laying out money upon. But when it comes to squeezing a
profit out of you into the bargain, it’s something like!’

With this apostrophe Mr Fledgeby appropriately proceeded to divest
himself of his Turkish garments, and invest himself with Christian
attire. Pending which operation, and his morning ablutions, and his
anointing of himself with the last infallible preparation for the
production of luxuriant and glossy hair upon the human countenance
(quacks being the only sages he believed in besides usurers), the murky
fog closed about him and shut him up in its sooty embrace. If it had
never let him out any more, the world would have had no irreparable
loss, but could have easily replaced him from its stock on hand.



Chapter 2

A RESPECTED FRIEND IN A NEW ASPECT


In the evening of this same foggy day when the yellow window-blind of
Pubsey and Co. was drawn down upon the day’s work, Riah the Jew once
more came forth into Saint Mary Axe. But this time he carried no bag,
and was not bound on his master’s affairs. He passed over London Bridge,
and returned to the Middlesex shore by that of Westminster, and so, ever
wading through the fog, waded to the doorstep of the dolls’ dressmaker.

Miss Wren expected him. He could see her through the window by the light
of her low fire--carefully banked up with damp cinders that it might
last the longer and waste the less when she was out--sitting waiting
for him in her bonnet. His tap at the glass roused her from the musing
solitude in which she sat, and she came to the door to open it; aiding
her steps with a little crutch-stick.

‘Good evening, godmother!’ said Miss Jenny Wren.

The old man laughed, and gave her his arm to lean on.

‘Won’t you come in and warm yourself, godmother?’ asked Miss Jenny Wren.

‘Not if you are ready, Cinderella, my dear.’

‘Well!’ exclaimed Miss Wren, delighted. ‘Now you ARE a clever old boy!
If we gave prizes at this establishment (but we only keep blanks), you
should have the first silver medal, for taking me up so quick.’ As she
spake thus, Miss Wren removed the key of the house-door from the keyhole
and put it in her pocket, and then bustlingly closed the door, and tried
it as they both stood on the step. Satisfied that her dwelling was safe,
she drew one hand through the old man’s arm and prepared to ply her
crutch-stick with the other. But the key was an instrument of such
gigantic proportions, that before they started Riah proposed to carry
it.

‘No, no, no! I’ll carry it myself,’ returned Miss Wren. ‘I’m awfully
lopsided, you know, and stowed down in my pocket it’ll trim the ship. To
let you into a secret, godmother, I wear my pocket on my high side, o’
purpose.’

With that they began their plodding through the fog.

‘Yes, it was truly sharp of you, godmother,’ resumed Miss Wren with
great approbation, ‘to understand me. But, you see, you ARE so like the
fairy godmother in the bright little books! You look so unlike the rest
of people, and so much as if you had changed yourself into that shape,
just this moment, with some benevolent object. Boh!’ cried Miss Jenny,
putting her face close to the old man’s. ‘I can see your features,
godmother, behind the beard.’

‘Does the fancy go to my changing other objects too, Jenny?’

‘Ah! That it does! If you’d only borrow my stick and tap this piece of
pavement--this dirty stone that my foot taps--it would start up a coach
and six. I say! Let’s believe so!’

‘With all my heart,’ replied the good old man.

‘And I’ll tell you what I must ask you to do, godmother. I must ask you
to be so kind as give my child a tap, and change him altogether. O my
child has been such a bad, bad child of late! It worries me nearly
out of my wits. Not done a stroke of work these ten days. Has had the
horrors, too, and fancied that four copper-coloured men in red wanted to
throw him into a fiery furnace.’

‘But that’s dangerous, Jenny.’

‘Dangerous, godmother? My child is always dangerous, more or less. He
might’--here the little creature glanced back over her shoulder at the
sky--‘be setting the house on fire at this present moment. I don’t know
who would have a child, for my part! It’s no use shaking him. I have
shaken him till I have made myself giddy. “Why don’t you mind your
Commandments and honour your parent, you naughty old boy?” I said to him
all the time. But he only whimpered and stared at me.’

‘What shall be changed, after him?’ asked Riah in a compassionately
playful voice.

‘Upon my word, godmother, I am afraid I must be selfish next, and get
you to set me right in the back and the legs. It’s a little thing to you
with your power, godmother, but it’s a great deal to poor weak aching
me.’

There was no querulous complaining in the words, but they were not the
less touching for that.

‘And then?’

‘Yes, and then--YOU know, godmother. We’ll both jump up into the coach
and six and go to Lizzie. This reminds me, godmother, to ask you a
serious question. You are as wise as wise can be (having been brought
up by the fairies), and you can tell me this: Is it better to have had a
good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?’

‘Explain, god-daughter.’

‘I feel so much more solitary and helpless without Lizzie now, than I
used to feel before I knew her.’ (Tears were in her eyes as she said
so.)

‘Some beloved companionship fades out of most lives, my dear,’ said the
Jew,--‘that of a wife, and a fair daughter, and a son of promise, has
faded out of my own life--but the happiness was.’

‘Ah!’ said Miss Wren thoughtfully, by no means convinced, and chopping
the exclamation with that sharp little hatchet of hers; ‘then I tell you
what change I think you had better begin with, godmother. You had better
change Is into Was and Was into Is, and keep them so.’

‘Would that suit your case? Would you not be always in pain then?’ asked
the old man tenderly.

‘Right!’ exclaimed Miss Wren with another chop. ‘You have changed me
wiser, godmother.--Not,’ she added with the quaint hitch of her chin and
eyes, ‘that you need be a very wonderful godmother to do that deed.’

Thus conversing, and having crossed Westminster Bridge, they traversed
the ground that Riah had lately traversed, and new ground likewise; for,
when they had recrossed the Thames by way of London Bridge, they struck
down by the river and held their still foggier course that way.

But previously, as they were going along, Jenny twisted her venerable
friend aside to a brilliantly-lighted toy-shop window, and said: ‘Now
look at ‘em! All my work!’

This referred to a dazzling semicircle of dolls in all the colours of
the rainbow, who were dressed for presentation at court, for going to
balls, for going out driving, for going out on horseback, for going out
walking, for going to get married, for going to help other dolls to get
married, for all the gay events of life.

‘Pretty, pretty, pretty!’ said the old man with a clap of his hands.
‘Most elegant taste!’

‘Glad you like ‘em,’ returned Miss Wren, loftily. ‘But the fun is,
godmother, how I make the great ladies try my dresses on. Though it’s
the hardest part of my business, and would be, even if my back were not
bad and my legs queer.’

He looked at her as not understanding what she said.

‘Bless you, godmother,’ said Miss Wren, ‘I have to scud about town at
all hours. If it was only sitting at my bench, cutting out and sewing,
it would be comparatively easy work; but it’s the trying-on by the great
ladies that takes it out of me.’

‘How, the trying-on?’ asked Riah.

‘What a mooney godmother you are, after all!’ returned Miss Wren. ‘Look
here. There’s a Drawing Room, or a grand day in the Park, or a Show, or
a Fete, or what you like. Very well. I squeeze among the crowd, and I
look about me. When I see a great lady very suitable for my business, I
say “You’ll do, my dear!” and I take particular notice of her, and run
home and cut her out and baste her. Then another day, I come scudding
back again to try on, and then I take particular notice of her again.
Sometimes she plainly seems to say, ‘How that little creature is
staring!’ and sometimes likes it and sometimes don’t, but much more
often yes than no. All the time I am only saying to myself, “I must
hollow out a bit here; I must slope away there;” and I am making a
perfect slave of her, with making her try on my doll’s dress. Evening
parties are severer work for me, because there’s only a doorway for a
full view, and what with hobbling among the wheels of the carriages
and the legs of the horses, I fully expect to be run over some night.
However, there I have ‘em, just the same. When they go bobbing into the
hall from the carriage, and catch a glimpse of my little physiognomy
poked out from behind a policeman’s cape in the rain, I dare say they
think I am wondering and admiring with all my eyes and heart, but they
little think they’re only working for my dolls! There was Lady Belinda
Whitrose. I made her do double duty in one night. I said when she came
out of the carriage, “YOU’ll do, my dear!” and I ran straight home and
cut her out and basted her. Back I came again, and waited behind the men
that called the carriages. Very bad night too. At last, “Lady Belinda
Whitrose’s carriage! Lady Belinda Whitrose coming down!” And I made her
try on--oh! and take pains about it too--before she got seated. That’s
Lady Belinda hanging up by the waist, much too near the gaslight for a
wax one, with her toes turned in.’

When they had plodded on for some time nigh the river, Riah asked
the way to a certain tavern called the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters.
Following the directions he received, they arrived, after two or three
puzzled stoppages for consideration, and some uncertain looking about
them, at the door of Miss Abbey Potterson’s dominions. A peep through
the glass portion of the door revealed to them the glories of the bar,
and Miss Abbey herself seated in state on her snug throne, reading the
newspaper. To whom, with deference, they presented themselves.

Taking her eyes off her newspaper, and pausing with a suspended
expression of countenance, as if she must finish the paragraph in hand
before undertaking any other business whatever, Miss Abbey demanded,
with some slight asperity: ‘Now then, what’s for you?’

‘Could we see Miss Potterson?’ asked the old man, uncovering his head.

‘You not only could, but you can and you do,’ replied the hostess.

‘Might we speak with you, madam?’

By this time Miss Abbey’s eyes had possessed themselves of the small
figure of Miss Jenny Wren. For the closer observation of which, Miss
Abbey laid aside her newspaper, rose, and looked over the half-door of
the bar. The crutch-stick seemed to entreat for its owner leave to come
in and rest by the fire; so, Miss Abbey opened the half-door, and said,
as though replying to the crutch-stick:

‘Yes, come in and rest by the fire.’

‘My name is Riah,’ said the old man, with courteous action, ‘and my
avocation is in London city. This, my young companion--’

‘Stop a bit,’ interposed Miss Wren. ‘I’ll give the lady my card.’ She
produced it from her pocket with an air, after struggling with the
gigantic door-key which had got upon the top of it and kept it down.
Miss Abbey, with manifest tokens of astonishment, took the diminutive
document, and found it to run concisely thus:--


		MISS JENNY WREN

	       DOLLS’ DRESSMAKER.

	Dolls attended at their own residences.


‘Lud!’ exclaimed Miss Potterson, staring. And dropped the card.

‘We take the liberty of coming, my young companion and I, madam,’ said
Riah, ‘on behalf of Lizzie Hexam.’

Miss Potterson was stooping to loosen the bonnet-strings of the dolls’
dressmaker. She looked round rather angrily, and said: ‘Lizzie Hexam is
a very proud young woman.’

‘She would be so proud,’ returned Riah, dexterously, ‘to stand well in
your good opinion, that before she quitted London for--’

‘For where, in the name of the Cape of Good Hope?’ asked Miss Potterson,
as though supposing her to have emigrated.

‘For the country,’ was the cautious answer,--‘she made us promise to
come and show you a paper, which she left in our hands for that special
purpose. I am an unserviceable friend of hers, who began to know her
after her departure from this neighbourhood. She has been for some time
living with my young companion, and has been a helpful and a comfortable
friend to her. Much needed, madam,’ he added, in a lower voice. ‘Believe
me; if you knew all, much needed.’

‘I can believe that,’ said Miss Abbey, with a softening glance at the
little creature.

‘And if it’s proud to have a heart that never hardens, and a temper
that never tires, and a touch that never hurts,’ Miss Jenny struck in,
flushed, ‘she is proud. And if it’s not, she is NOT.’

Her set purpose of contradicting Miss Abbey point blank, was so far from
offending that dread authority, as to elicit a gracious smile. ‘You do
right, child,’ said Miss Abbey, ‘to speak well of those who deserve well
of you.’

‘Right or wrong,’ muttered Miss Wren, inaudibly, with a visible hitch of
her chin, ‘I mean to do it, and you may make up your mind to THAT, old
lady.’

‘Here is the paper, madam,’ said the Jew, delivering into Miss
Potterson’s hands the original document drawn up by Rokesmith, and
signed by Riderhood. ‘Will you please to read it?’

‘But first of all,’ said Miss Abbey, ‘--did you ever taste shrub,
child?’

Miss Wren shook her head.

‘Should you like to?’

‘Should if it’s good,’ returned Miss Wren.

‘You shall try. And, if you find it good, I’ll mix some for you with hot
water. Put your poor little feet on the fender. It’s a cold, cold night,
and the fog clings so.’ As Miss Abbey helped her to turn her chair, her
loosened bonnet dropped on the floor. ‘Why, what lovely hair!’ cried
Miss Abbey. ‘And enough to make wigs for all the dolls in the world.
What a quantity!’

‘Call THAT a quantity?’ returned Miss Wren. ‘Poof! What do you say to
the rest of it?’ As she spoke, she untied a band, and the golden stream
fell over herself and over the chair, and flowed down to the ground.
Miss Abbey’s admiration seemed to increase her perplexity. She beckoned
the Jew towards her, as she reached down the shrub-bottle from its
niche, and whispered:

‘Child, or woman?’

‘Child in years,’ was the answer; ‘woman in self-reliance and trial.’

‘You are talking about Me, good people,’ thought Miss Jenny, sitting in
her golden bower, warming her feet. ‘I can’t hear what you say, but I
know your tricks and your manners!’

The shrub, when tasted from a spoon, perfectly harmonizing with Miss
Jenny’s palate, a judicious amount was mixed by Miss Potterson’s skilful
hands, whereof Riah too partook. After this preliminary, Miss Abbey read
the document; and, as often as she raised her eyebrows in so doing,
the watchful Miss Jenny accompanied the action with an expressive and
emphatic sip of the shrub and water.

‘As far as this goes,’ said Miss Abbey Potterson, when she had read it
several times, and thought about it, ‘it proves (what didn’t much need
proving) that Rogue Riderhood is a villain. I have my doubts whether he
is not the villain who solely did the deed; but I have no expectation of
those doubts ever being cleared up now. I believe I did Lizzie’s father
wrong, but never Lizzie’s self; because when things were at the worst I
trusted her, had perfect confidence in her, and tried to persuade her
to come to me for a refuge. I am very sorry to have done a man wrong,
particularly when it can’t be undone. Be kind enough to let Lizzie know
what I say; not forgetting that if she will come to the Porters, after
all, bygones being bygones, she will find a home at the Porters, and a
friend at the Porters. She knows Miss Abbey of old, remind her, and she
knows what-like the home, and what-like the friend, is likely to turn
out. I am generally short and sweet--or short and sour, according as it
may be and as opinions vary--’ remarked Miss Abbey, ‘and that’s about
all I have got to say, and enough too.’

But before the shrub and water was sipped out, Miss Abbey bethought
herself that she would like to keep a copy of the paper by her. ‘It’s
not long, sir,’ said she to Riah, ‘and perhaps you wouldn’t mind just
jotting it down.’ The old man willingly put on his spectacles, and,
standing at the little desk in the corner where Miss Abbey filed her
receipts and kept her sample phials (customers’ scores were interdicted
by the strict administration of the Porters), wrote out the copy in
a fair round character. As he stood there, doing his methodical
penmanship, his ancient scribelike figure intent upon the work, and the
little dolls’ dressmaker sitting in her golden bower before the fire,
Miss Abbey had her doubts whether she had not dreamed those two rare
figures into the bar of the Six Jolly Fellowships, and might not wake
with a nod next moment and find them gone.

Miss Abbey had twice made the experiment of shutting her eyes and
opening them again, still finding the figures there, when, dreamlike,
a confused hubbub arose in the public room. As she started up, and they
all three looked at one another, it became a noise of clamouring voices
and of the stir of feet; then all the windows were heard to be hastily
thrown up, and shouts and cries came floating into the house from
the river. A moment more, and Bob Gliddery came clattering along the
passage, with the noise of all the nails in his boots condensed into
every separate nail.

‘What is it?’ asked Miss Abbey.

‘It’s summut run down in the fog, ma’am,’ answered Bob. ‘There’s ever so
many people in the river.’

‘Tell ‘em to put on all the kettles!’ cried Miss Abbey. ‘See that the
boiler’s full. Get a bath out. Hang some blankets to the fire. Heat some
stone bottles. Have your senses about you, you girls down stairs, and
use ‘em.’

While Miss Abbey partly delivered these directions to Bob--whom she
seized by the hair, and whose head she knocked against the wall, as a
general injunction to vigilance and presence of mind--and partly hailed
the kitchen with them--the company in the public room, jostling one
another, rushed out to the causeway, and the outer noise increased.

‘Come and look,’ said Miss Abbey to her visitors. They all three hurried
to the vacated public room, and passed by one of the windows into the
wooden verandah overhanging the river.

‘Does anybody down there know what has happened?’ demanded Miss Abbey,
in her voice of authority.

‘It’s a steamer, Miss Abbey,’ cried one blurred figure in the fog.

‘It always IS a steamer, Miss Abbey,’ cried another.

‘Them’s her lights, Miss Abbey, wot you see a-blinking yonder,’ cried
another.

‘She’s a-blowing off her steam, Miss Abbey, and that’s what makes the
fog and the noise worse, don’t you see?’ explained another.

Boats were putting off, torches were lighting up, people were rushing
tumultuously to the water’s edge. Some man fell in with a splash, and
was pulled out again with a roar of laughter. The drags were called for.
A cry for the life-buoy passed from mouth to mouth. It was impossible to
make out what was going on upon the river, for every boat that put off
sculled into the fog and was lost to view at a boat’s length. Nothing
was clear but that the unpopular steamer was assailed with reproaches
on all sides. She was the Murderer, bound for Gallows Bay; she was the
Manslaughterer, bound for Penal Settlement; her captain ought to be
tried for his life; her crew ran down men in row-boats with a relish;
she mashed up Thames lightermen with her paddles; she fired property
with her funnels; she always was, and she always would be, wreaking
destruction upon somebody or something, after the manner of all her
kind. The whole bulk of the fog teemed with such taunts, uttered in
tones of universal hoarseness. All the while, the steamer’s lights moved
spectrally a very little, as she lay-to, waiting the upshot of whatever
accident had happened. Now, she began burning blue-lights. These made a
luminous patch about her, as if she had set the fog on fire, and in the
patch--the cries changing their note, and becoming more fitful and more
excited--shadows of men and boats could be seen moving, while voices
shouted: ‘There!’ ‘There again!’ ‘A couple more strokes a-head!’
‘Hurrah!’ ‘Look out!’ ‘Hold on!’ ‘Haul in!’ and the like. Lastly, with
a few tumbling clots of blue fire, the night closed in dark again,
the wheels of the steamer were heard revolving, and her lights glided
smoothly away in the direction of the sea.

It appeared to Miss Abbey and her two companions that a considerable
time had been thus occupied. There was now as eager a set towards the
shore beneath the house as there had been from it; and it was only
on the first boat of the rush coming in that it was known what had
occurred.

‘If that’s Tom Tootle,’ Miss Abbey made proclamation, in her most
commanding tones, ‘let him instantly come underneath here.’

The submissive Tom complied, attended by a crowd.

‘What is it, Tootle?’ demanded Miss Abbey.

‘It’s a foreign steamer, miss, run down a wherry.’

‘How many in the wherry?’

‘One man, Miss Abbey.’

‘Found?’

‘Yes. He’s been under water a long time, Miss; but they’ve grappled up
the body.’

‘Let ‘em bring it here. You, Bob Gliddery, shut the house-door and stand
by it on the inside, and don’t you open till I tell you. Any police down
there?’

‘Here, Miss Abbey,’ was official rejoinder.

‘After they have brought the body in, keep the crowd out, will you? And
help Bob Gliddery to shut ‘em out.’

‘All right, Miss Abbey.’

The autocratic landlady withdrew into the house with Riah and Miss
Jenny, and disposed those forces, one on either side of her, within the
half-door of the bar, as behind a breastwork.

‘You two stand close here,’ said Miss Abbey, ‘and you’ll come to no
hurt, and see it brought in. Bob, you stand by the door.’

That sentinel, smartly giving his rolled shirt-sleeves an extra and a
final tuck on his shoulders, obeyed.

Sound of advancing voices, sound of advancing steps. Shuffle and talk
without. Momentary pause. Two peculiarly blunt knocks or pokes at the
door, as if the dead man arriving on his back were striking at it with
the soles of his motionless feet.

‘That’s the stretcher, or the shutter, whichever of the two they are
carrying,’ said Miss Abbey, with experienced ear. ‘Open, you Bob!’

Door opened. Heavy tread of laden men. A halt. A rush. Stoppage of rush.
Door shut. Baffled boots from the vexed souls of disappointed outsiders.

‘Come on, men!’ said Miss Abbey; for so potent was she with her subjects
that even then the bearers awaited her permission. ‘First floor.’

The entry being low, and the staircase being low, they so took up the
burden they had set down, as to carry that low. The recumbent figure, in
passing, lay hardly as high as the half door.

Miss Abbey started back at sight of it. ‘Why, good God!’ said she,
turning to her two companions, ‘that’s the very man who made the
declaration we have just had in our hands. That’s Riderhood!’



Chapter 3

THE SAME RESPECTED FRIEND IN MORE ASPECTS THAN ONE


In sooth, it is Riderhood and no other, or it is the outer husk and
shell of Riderhood and no other, that is borne into Miss Abbey’s
first-floor bedroom. Supple to twist and turn as the Rogue has ever
been, he is sufficiently rigid now; and not without much shuffling of
attendant feet, and tilting of his bier this way and that way, and
peril even of his sliding off it and being tumbled in a heap over the
balustrades, can he be got up stairs.

‘Fetch a doctor,’ quoth Miss Abbey. And then, ‘Fetch his daughter.’ On
both of which errands, quick messengers depart.

The doctor-seeking messenger meets the doctor halfway, coming under
convoy of police. Doctor examines the dank carcase, and pronounces, not
hopefully, that it is worth while trying to reanimate the same. All the
best means are at once in action, and everybody present lends a hand,
and a heart and soul. No one has the least regard for the man; with them
all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but
the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now,
and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it IS life, and
they are living and must die.

In answer to the doctor’s inquiry how did it happen, and was anyone to
blame, Tom Tootle gives in his verdict, unavoidable accident and no one
to blame but the sufferer. ‘He was slinking about in his boat,’ says
Tom, ‘which slinking were, not to speak ill of the dead, the manner of
the man, when he come right athwart the steamer’s bows and she cut him
in two.’ Mr Tootle is so far figurative, touching the dismemberment, as
that he means the boat, and not the man. For, the man lies whole before
them.

Captain Joey, the bottle-nosed regular customer in the glazed hat, is a
pupil of the much-respected old school, and (having insinuated himself
into the chamber, in the execution of the important service of carrying
the drowned man’s neck-kerchief) favours the doctor with a sagacious
old-scholastic suggestion that the body should be hung up by the heels,
‘sim’lar’, says Captain Joey, ‘to mutton in a butcher’s shop,’ and
should then, as a particularly choice manoeuvre for promoting easy
respiration, be rolled upon casks. These scraps of the wisdom of the
captain’s ancestors are received with such speechless indignation by
Miss Abbey, that she instantly seizes the Captain by the collar, and
without a single word ejects him, not presuming to remonstrate, from the
scene.

There then remain, to assist the doctor and Tom, only those three other
regular customers, Bob Glamour, William Williams, and Jonathan (family
name of the latter, if any, unknown to man-kind), who are quite enough.
Miss Abbey having looked in to make sure that nothing is wanted,
descends to the bar, and there awaits the result, with the gentle Jew
and Miss Jenny Wren.

If you are not gone for good, Mr Riderhood, it would be something to
know where you are hiding at present. This flabby lump of mortality that
we work so hard at with such patient perseverance, yields no sign of
you. If you are gone for good, Rogue, it is very solemn, and if you are
coming back, it is hardly less so. Nay, in the suspense and mystery of
the latter question, involving that of where you may be now, there is a
solemnity even added to that of death, making us who are in attendance
alike afraid to look on you and to look off you, and making those below
start at the least sound of a creaking plank in the floor.

Stay! Did that eyelid tremble? So the doctor, breathing low, and closely
watching, asks himself.

No.

Did that nostril twitch?

No.

This artificial respiration ceasing, do I feel any faint flutter under
my hand upon the chest?

No.

Over and over again No. No. But try over and over again, nevertheless.

See! A token of life! An indubitable token of life! The spark may
smoulder and go out, or it may glow and expand, but see! The four
rough fellows, seeing, shed tears. Neither Riderhood in this world, nor
Riderhood in the other, could draw tears from them; but a striving human
soul between the two can do it easily.

He is struggling to come back. Now, he is almost here, now he is far
away again. Now he is struggling harder to get back. And yet--like us
all, when we swoon--like us all, every day of our lives when we wake--he
is instinctively unwilling to be restored to the consciousness of this
existence, and would be left dormant, if he could.

Bob Gliddery returns with Pleasant Riderhood, who was out when sought
for, and hard to find. She has a shawl over her head, and her first
action, when she takes it off weeping, and curtseys to Miss Abbey, is to
wind her hair up.

‘Thank you, Miss Abbey, for having father here.’

‘I am bound to say, girl, I didn’t know who it was,’ returns Miss Abbey;
‘but I hope it would have been pretty much the same if I had known.’

Poor Pleasant, fortified with a sip of brandy, is ushered into the
first-floor chamber. She could not express much sentiment about her
father if she were called upon to pronounce his funeral oration, but she
has a greater tenderness for him than he ever had for her, and crying
bitterly when she sees him stretched unconscious, asks the doctor, with
clasped hands: ‘Is there no hope, sir? O poor father! Is poor father
dead?’

To which the doctor, on one knee beside the body, busy and watchful,
only rejoins without looking round: ‘Now, my girl, unless you have the
self-command to be perfectly quiet, I cannot allow you to remain in the
room.’

Pleasant, consequently, wipes her eyes with her back-hair, which is in
fresh need of being wound up, and having got it out of the way, watches
with terrified interest all that goes on. Her natural woman’s aptitude
soon renders her able to give a little help. Anticipating the doctor’s
want of this or that, she quietly has it ready for him, and so by
degrees is intrusted with the charge of supporting her father’s head
upon her arm.

It is something so new to Pleasant to see her father an object of
sympathy and interest, to find any one very willing to tolerate his
society in this world, not to say pressingly and soothingly entreating
him to belong to it, that it gives her a sensation she never experienced
before. Some hazy idea that if affairs could remain thus for a long time
it would be a respectable change, floats in her mind. Also some vague
idea that the old evil is drowned out of him, and that if he should
happily come back to resume his occupation of the empty form that lies
upon the bed, his spirit will be altered. In which state of mind she
kisses the stony lips, and quite believes that the impassive hand she
chafes will revive a tender hand, if it revive ever.

Sweet delusion for Pleasant Riderhood. But they minister to him with
such extraordinary interest, their anxiety is so keen, their vigilance
is so great, their excited joy grows so intense as the signs of life
strengthen, that how can she resist it, poor thing! And now he begins
to breathe naturally, and he stirs, and the doctor declares him to have
come back from that inexplicable journey where he stopped on the dark
road, and to be here.

Tom Tootle, who is nearest to the doctor when he says this, grasps
the doctor fervently by the hand. Bob Glamour, William Williams, and
Jonathan of the no surname, all shake hands with one another round, and
with the doctor too. Bob Glamour blows his nose, and Jonathan of the
no surname is moved to do likewise, but lacking a pocket handkerchief
abandons that outlet for his emotion. Pleasant sheds tears deserving her
own name, and her sweet delusion is at its height.

There is intelligence in his eyes. He wants to ask a question. He
wonders where he is. Tell him.

‘Father, you were run down on the river, and are at Miss Abbey
Potterson’s.’

He stares at his daughter, stares all around him, closes his eyes, and
lies slumbering on her arm.

The short-lived delusion begins to fade. The low, bad, unimpressible
face is coming up from the depths of the river, or what other depths, to
the surface again. As he grows warm, the doctor and the four men cool.
As his lineaments soften with life, their faces and their hearts harden
to him.

‘He will do now,’ says the doctor, washing his hands, and looking at the
patient with growing disfavour.

‘Many a better man,’ moralizes Tom Tootle with a gloomy shake of the
head, ‘ain’t had his luck.’

‘It’s to be hoped he’ll make a better use of his life,’ says Bob
Glamour, ‘than I expect he will.’

‘Or than he done afore,’ adds William Williams.

‘But no, not he!’ says Jonathan of the no surname, clinching the
quartette.

They speak in a low tone because of his daughter, but she sees that they
have all drawn off, and that they stand in a group at the other end of
the room, shunning him. It would be too much to suspect them of being
sorry that he didn’t die when he had done so much towards it, but they
clearly wish that they had had a better subject to bestow their pains
on. Intelligence is conveyed to Miss Abbey in the bar, who reappears on
the scene, and contemplates from a distance, holding whispered discourse
with the doctor. The spark of life was deeply interesting while it was
in abeyance, but now that it has got established in Mr Riderhood, there
appears to be a general desire that circumstances had admitted of its
being developed in anybody else, rather than that gentleman.

‘However,’ says Miss Abbey, cheering them up, ‘you have done your duty
like good and true men, and you had better come down and take something
at the expense of the Porters.’

This they all do, leaving the daughter watching the father. To whom, in
their absence, Bob Gliddery presents himself.

‘His gills looks rum; don’t they?’ says Bob, after inspecting the
patient.

Pleasant faintly nods.

‘His gills’ll look rummer when he wakes; won’t they?’ says Bob.

Pleasant hopes not. Why?

‘When he finds himself here, you know,’ Bob explains. ‘Cause Miss Abbey
forbid him the house and ordered him out of it. But what you may call
the Fates ordered him into it again. Which is rumness; ain’t it?’

‘He wouldn’t have come here of his own accord,’ returns poor Pleasant,
with an effort at a little pride.

‘No,’ retorts Bob. ‘Nor he wouldn’t have been let in, if he had.’

The short delusion is quite dispelled now. As plainly as she sees on her
arm the old father, unimproved, Pleasant sees that everybody there will
cut him when he recovers consciousness. ‘I’ll take him away ever so soon
as I can,’ thinks Pleasant with a sigh; ‘he’s best at home.’

Presently they all return, and wait for him to become conscious that
they will all be glad to get rid of him. Some clothes are got together
for him to wear, his own being saturated with water, and his present
dress being composed of blankets.

Becoming more and more uncomfortable, as though the prevalent dislike
were finding him out somewhere in his sleep and expressing itself to
him, the patient at last opens his eyes wide, and is assisted by his
daughter to sit up in bed.

‘Well, Riderhood,’ says the doctor, ‘how do you feel?’

He replies gruffly, ‘Nothing to boast on.’ Having, in fact, returned to
life in an uncommonly sulky state.

‘I don’t mean to preach; but I hope,’ says the doctor, gravely shaking
his head, ‘that this escape may have a good effect upon you, Riderhood.’

The patient’s discontented growl of a reply is not intelligible; his
daughter, however, could interpret, if she would, that what he says is,
he ‘don’t want no Poll-Parroting’.

Mr Riderhood next demands his shirt; and draws it on over his head (with
his daughter’s help) exactly as if he had just had a Fight.

‘Warn’t it a steamer?’ he pauses to ask her.

‘Yes, father.’

‘I’ll have the law on her, bust her! and make her pay for it.’

He then buttons his linen very moodily, twice or thrice stopping to
examine his arms and hands, as if to see what punishment he has received
in the Fight. He then doggedly demands his other garments, and slowly
gets them on, with an appearance of great malevolence towards his late
opponent and all the spectators. He has an impression that his nose is
bleeding, and several times draws the back of his hand across it, and
looks for the result, in a pugilistic manner, greatly strengthening that
incongruous resemblance.

‘Where’s my fur cap?’ he asks in a surly voice, when he has shuffled his
clothes on.

‘In the river,’ somebody rejoins.

‘And warn’t there no honest man to pick it up? O’ course there was
though, and to cut off with it arterwards. You are a rare lot, all on
you!’

Thus, Mr Riderhood: taking from the hands of his daughter, with special
ill-will, a lent cap, and grumbling as he pulls it down over his ears.
Then, getting on his unsteady legs, leaning heavily upon her, and
growling, ‘Hold still, can’t you? What! You must be a staggering next,
must you?’ he takes his departure out of the ring in which he has had
that little turn-up with Death.



Chapter 4

A HAPPY RETURN OF THE DAY


Mr and Mrs Wilfer had seen a full quarter of a hundred more
anniversaries of their wedding day than Mr and Mrs Lammle had seen of
theirs, but they still celebrated the occasion in the bosom of
their family. Not that these celebrations ever resulted in anything
particularly agreeable, or that the family was ever disappointed by that
circumstance on account of having looked forward to the return of the
auspicious day with sanguine anticipations of enjoyment. It was kept
morally, rather as a Fast than a Feast, enabling Mrs Wilfer to hold
a sombre darkling state, which exhibited that impressive woman in her
choicest colours.

The noble lady’s condition on these delightful occasions was one
compounded of heroic endurance and heroic forgiveness. Lurid indications
of the better marriages she might have made, shone athwart the awful
gloom of her composure, and fitfully revealed the cherub as a little
monster unaccountably favoured by Heaven, who had possessed himself of a
blessing for which many of his superiors had sued and contended in vain.
So firmly had this his position towards his treasure become established,
that when the anniversary arrived, it always found him in an apologetic
state. It is not impossible that his modest penitence may have even gone
the length of sometimes severely reproving him for that he ever took the
liberty of making so exalted a character his wife.

As for the children of the union, their experience of these festivals
had been sufficiently uncomfortable to lead them annually to wish, when
out of their tenderest years, either that Ma had married somebody else
instead of much-teased Pa, or that Pa had married somebody else instead
of Ma. When there came to be but two sisters left at home, the daring
mind of Bella on the next of these occasions scaled the height of
wondering with droll vexation ‘what on earth Pa ever could have seen in
Ma, to induce him to make such a little fool of himself as to ask her to
have him.’

The revolving year now bringing the day round in its orderly sequence,
Bella arrived in the Boffin chariot to assist at the celebration. It was
the family custom when the day recurred, to sacrifice a pair of fowls
on the altar of Hymen; and Bella had sent a note beforehand, to intimate
that she would bring the votive offering with her. So, Bella and the
fowls, by the united energies of two horses, two men, four wheels, and a
plum-pudding carriage dog with as uncomfortable a collar on as if he
had been George the Fourth, were deposited at the door of the parental
dwelling. They were there received by Mrs Wilfer in person, whose
dignity on this, as on most special occasions, was heightened by a
mysterious toothache.

‘I shall not require the carriage at night,’ said Bella. ‘I shall walk
back.’

The male domestic of Mrs Boffin touched his hat, and in the act of
departure had an awful glare bestowed upon him by Mrs Wilfer, intended
to carry deep into his audacious soul the assurance that, whatever his
private suspicions might be, male domestics in livery were no rarity
there.

‘Well, dear Ma,’ said Bella, ‘and how do you do?’

‘I am as well, Bella,’ replied Mrs Wilfer, ‘as can be expected.’

‘Dear me, Ma,’ said Bella; ‘you talk as if one was just born!’

‘That’s exactly what Ma has been doing,’ interposed Lavvy, over the
maternal shoulder, ‘ever since we got up this morning. It’s all very
well to laugh, Bella, but anything more exasperating it is impossible to
conceive.’

Mrs Wilfer, with a look too full of majesty to be accompanied by any
words, attended both her daughters to the kitchen, where the sacrifice
was to be prepared.

‘Mr Rokesmith,’ said she, resignedly, ‘has been so polite as to place
his sitting-room at our disposal to-day. You will therefore, Bella, be
entertained in the humble abode of your parents, so far in accordance
with your present style of living, that there will be a drawing-room for
your reception as well as a dining-room. Your papa invited Mr Rokesmith
to partake of our lowly fare. In excusing himself on account of a
particular engagement, he offered the use of his apartment.’

Bella happened to know that he had no engagement out of his own room at
Mr Boffin’s, but she approved of his staying away. ‘We should only have
put one another out of countenance,’ she thought, ‘and we do that quite
often enough as it is.’

Yet she had sufficient curiosity about his room, to run up to it with
the least possible delay, and make a close inspection of its contents.
It was tastefully though economically furnished, and very neatly
arranged. There were shelves and stands of books, English, French, and
Italian; and in a portfolio on the writing-table there were sheets upon
sheets of memoranda and calculations in figures, evidently referring to
the Boffin property. On that table also, carefully backed with canvas,
varnished, mounted, and rolled like a map, was the placard descriptive
of the murdered man who had come from afar to be her husband. She shrank
from this ghostly surprise, and felt quite frightened as she rolled and
tied it up again. Peeping about here and there, she came upon a print, a
graceful head of a pretty woman, elegantly framed, hanging in the corner
by the easy chair. ‘Oh, indeed, sir!’ said Bella, after stopping to
ruminate before it. ‘Oh, indeed, sir! I fancy I can guess whom you
think THAT’S like. But I’ll tell you what it’s much more like--your
impudence!’ Having said which she decamped: not solely because she was
offended, but because there was nothing else to look at.

‘Now, Ma,’ said Bella, reappearing in the kitchen with some remains of a
blush, ‘you and Lavvy think magnificent me fit for nothing, but I intend
to prove the contrary. I mean to be Cook today.’

‘Hold!’ rejoined her majestic mother. ‘I cannot permit it. Cook, in that
dress!’

‘As for my dress, Ma,’ returned Bella, merrily searching in a
dresser-drawer, ‘I mean to apron it and towel it all over the front; and
as to permission, I mean to do without.’

‘YOU cook?’ said Mrs Wilfer. ‘YOU, who never cooked when you were at
home?’

‘Yes, Ma,’ returned Bella; ‘that is precisely the state of the case.’

She girded herself with a white apron, and busily with knots and pins
contrived a bib to it, coming close and tight under her chin, as if it
had caught her round the neck to kiss her. Over this bib her dimples
looked delightful, and under it her pretty figure not less so. ‘Now,
Ma,’ said Bella, pushing back her hair from her temples with both hands,
‘what’s first?’

‘First,’ returned Mrs Wilfer solemnly, ‘if you persist in what I cannot
but regard as conduct utterly incompatible with the equipage in which
you arrived--’

[‘Which I do, Ma.’)

‘First, then, you put the fowls down to the fire.’

‘To--be--sure!’ cried Bella; ‘and flour them, and twirl them round, and
there they go!’ sending them spinning at a great rate. ‘What’s next,
Ma?’

‘Next,’ said Mrs Wilfer with a wave of her gloves, expressive of
abdication under protest from the culinary throne, ‘I would recommend
examination of the bacon in the saucepan on the fire, and also of the
potatoes by the application of a fork. Preparation of the greens will
further become necessary if you persist in this unseemly demeanour.’

‘As of course I do, Ma.’

Persisting, Bella gave her attention to one thing and forgot the
other, and gave her attention to the other and forgot the third, and
remembering the third was distracted by the fourth, and made amends
whenever she went wrong by giving the unfortunate fowls an extra spin,
which made their chance of ever getting cooked exceedingly doubtful. But
it was pleasant cookery too. Meantime Miss Lavinia, oscillating between
the kitchen and the opposite room, prepared the dining-table in the
latter chamber. This office she (always doing her household spiriting
with unwillingness) performed in a startling series of whisks and bumps;
laying the table-cloth as if she were raising the wind, putting down
the glasses and salt-cellars as if she were knocking at the door, and
clashing the knives and forks in a skirmishing manner suggestive of
hand-to-hand conflict.

‘Look at Ma,’ whispered Lavinia to Bella when this was done, and they
stood over the roasting fowls. ‘If one was the most dutiful child in
existence (of course on the whole one hopes one is), isn’t she enough
to make one want to poke her with something wooden, sitting there bolt
upright in a corner?’

‘Only suppose,’ returned Bella, ‘that poor Pa was to sit bolt upright in
another corner.’

‘My dear, he couldn’t do it,’ said Lavvy. ‘Pa would loll directly. But
indeed I do not believe there ever was any human creature who could keep
so bolt upright as Ma, ‘or put such an amount of aggravation into one
back! What’s the matter, Ma? Ain’t you well, Ma?’

‘Doubtless I am very well,’ returned Mrs Wilfer, turning her eyes upon
her youngest born, with scornful fortitude. ‘What should be the matter
with Me?’

‘You don’t seem very brisk, Ma,’ retorted Lavvy the bold.

‘Brisk?’ repeated her parent, ‘Brisk? Whence the low expression,
Lavinia? If I am uncomplaining, if I am silently contented with my lot,
let that suffice for my family.’

‘Well, Ma,’ returned Lavvy, ‘since you will force it out of me, I must
respectfully take leave to say that your family are no doubt under
the greatest obligations to you for having an annual toothache on your
wedding day, and that it’s very disinterested in you, and an immense
blessing to them. Still, on the whole, it is possible to be too boastful
even of that boon.’

‘You incarnation of sauciness,’ said Mrs Wilfer, ‘do you speak like that
to me? On this day, of all days in the year? Pray do you know what
would have become of you, if I had not bestowed my hand upon R. W., your
father, on this day?’

‘No, Ma,’ replied Lavvy, ‘I really do not; and, with the greatest
respect for your abilities and information, I very much doubt if you do
either.’

Whether or no the sharp vigour of this sally on a weak point of Mrs
Wilfer’s entrenchments might have routed that heroine for the time, is
rendered uncertain by the arrival of a flag of truce in the person of
Mr George Sampson: bidden to the feast as a friend of the family, whose
affections were now understood to be in course of transference from
Bella to Lavinia, and whom Lavinia kept--possibly in remembrance of his
bad taste in having overlooked her in the first instance--under a course
of stinging discipline.

‘I congratulate you, Mrs Wilfer,’ said Mr George Sampson, who had
meditated this neat address while coming along, ‘on the day.’ Mrs Wilfer
thanked him with a magnanimous sigh, and again became an unresisting
prey to that inscrutable toothache.

‘I am surprised,’ said Mr Sampson feebly, ‘that Miss Bella condescends
to cook.’

Here Miss Lavinia descended on the ill-starred young gentleman with a
crushing supposition that at all events it was no business of his. This
disposed of Mr Sampson in a melancholy retirement of spirit, until the
cherub arrived, whose amazement at the lovely woman’s occupation was
great.

However, she persisted in dishing the dinner as well as cooking it, and
then sat down, bibless and apronless, to partake of it as an illustrious
guest: Mrs Wilfer first responding to her husband’s cheerful ‘For what
we are about to receive--’ with a sepulchral Amen, calculated to cast a
damp upon the stoutest appetite.

‘But what,’ said Bella, as she watched the carving of the fowls, ‘makes
them pink inside, I wonder, Pa! Is it the breed?’

‘No, I don’t think it’s the breed, my dear,’ returned Pa. ‘I rather
think it is because they are not done.’

‘They ought to be,’ said Bella.

‘Yes, I am aware they ought to be, my dear,’ rejoined her father, ‘but
they--ain’t.’

So, the gridiron was put in requisition, and the good-tempered cherub,
who was often as un-cherubically employed in his own family as if he had
been in the employment of some of the Old Masters, undertook to grill
the fowls. Indeed, except in respect of staring about him (a branch of
the public service to which the pictorial cherub is much addicted), this
domestic cherub discharged as many odd functions as his prototype; with
the difference, say, that he performed with a blacking-brush on the
family’s boots, instead of performing on enormous wind instruments and
double-basses, and that he conducted himself with cheerful alacrity to
much useful purpose, instead of foreshortening himself in the air with
the vaguest intentions.

Bella helped him with his supplemental cookery, and made him very happy,
but put him in mortal terror too by asking him when they sat down at
table again, how he supposed they cooked fowls at the Greenwich dinners,
and whether he believed they really were such pleasant dinners as people
said? His secret winks and nods of remonstrance, in reply, made the
mischievous Bella laugh until she choked, and then Lavinia was obliged
to slap her on the back, and then she laughed the more.

But her mother was a fine corrective at the other end of the table; to
whom her father, in the innocence of his good-fellowship, at intervals
appealed with: ‘My dear, I am afraid you are not enjoying yourself?’

‘Why so, R. W.?’ she would sonorously reply.

‘Because, my dear, you seem a little out of sorts.’

‘Not at all,’ would be the rejoinder, in exactly the same tone.

‘Would you take a merry-thought, my dear?’

‘Thank you. I will take whatever you please, R. W.’

‘Well, but my dear, do you like it?’

‘I like it as well as I like anything, R. W.’ The stately woman would
then, with a meritorious appearance of devoting herself to the general
good, pursue her dinner as if she were feeding somebody else on high
public grounds.

Bella had brought dessert and two bottles of wine, thus shedding
unprecedented splendour on the occasion. Mrs Wilfer did the honours of
the first glass by proclaiming: ‘R. W. I drink to you.

‘Thank you, my dear. And I to you.’

‘Pa and Ma!’ said Bella.

‘Permit me,’ Mrs Wilfer interposed, with outstretched glove. ‘No. I
think not. I drank to your papa. If, however, you insist on including
me, I can in gratitude offer no objection.’

‘Why, Lor, Ma,’ interposed Lavvy the bold, ‘isn’t it the day that made
you and Pa one and the same? I have no patience!’

‘By whatever other circumstance the day may be marked, it is not the
day, Lavinia, on which I will allow a child of mine to pounce upon me.
I beg--nay, command!--that you will not pounce. R. W., it is appropriate
to recall that it is for you to command and for me to obey. It is your
house, and you are master at your own table. Both our healths!’ Drinking
the toast with tremendous stiffness.

‘I really am a little afraid, my dear,’ hinted the cherub meekly, ‘that
you are not enjoying yourself?’

‘On the contrary,’ returned Mrs Wilfer, ‘quite so. Why should I not?’

‘I thought, my dear, that perhaps your face might--’

‘My face might be a martyrdom, but what would that import, or who should
know it, if I smiled?’

And she did smile; manifestly freezing the blood of Mr George Sampson
by so doing. For that young gentleman, catching her smiling eye, was so
very much appalled by its expression as to cast about in his thoughts
concerning what he had done to bring it down upon himself.

‘The mind naturally falls,’ said Mrs Wilfer, ‘shall I say into a
reverie, or shall I say into a retrospect? on a day like this.’

Lavvy, sitting with defiantly folded arms, replied (but not audibly),
‘For goodness’ sake say whichever of the two you like best, Ma, and get
it over.’

‘The mind,’ pursued Mrs Wilfer in an oratorical manner, ‘naturally
reverts to Papa and Mamma--I here allude to my parents--at a period
before the earliest dawn of this day. I was considered tall; perhaps I
was. Papa and Mamma were unquestionably tall. I have rarely seen a finer
women than my mother; never than my father.’

The irrepressible Lavvy remarked aloud, ‘Whatever grandpapa was, he
wasn’t a female.’

‘Your grandpapa,’ retorted Mrs Wilfer, with an awful look, and in an
awful tone, ‘was what I describe him to have been, and would have struck
any of his grandchildren to the earth who presumed to question it. It
was one of mamma’s cherished hopes that I should become united to a
tall member of society. It may have been a weakness, but if so, it was
equally the weakness, I believe, of King Frederick of Prussia.’ These
remarks being offered to Mr George Sampson, who had not the courage to
come out for single combat, but lurked with his chest under the table
and his eyes cast down, Mrs Wilfer proceeded, in a voice of increasing
sternness and impressiveness, until she should force that skulker
to give himself up. ‘Mamma would appear to have had an indefinable
foreboding of what afterwards happened, for she would frequently urge
upon me, “Not a little man. Promise me, my child, not a little man.
Never, never, never, marry a little man!” Papa also would remark to me
(he possessed extraordinary humour), “that a family of whales must not
ally themselves with sprats.” His company was eagerly sought, as may
be supposed, by the wits of the day, and our house was their continual
resort. I have known as many as three copper-plate engravers exchanging
the most exquisite sallies and retorts there, at one time.’ (Here Mr
Sampson delivered himself captive, and said, with an uneasy movement on
his chair, that three was a large number, and it must have been highly
entertaining.) ‘Among the most prominent members of that distinguished
circle, was a gentleman measuring six feet four in height. HE was NOT
an engraver.’ (Here Mr Sampson said, with no reason whatever, Of course
not.) ‘This gentleman was so obliging as to honour me with attentions
which I could not fail to understand.’ (Here Mr Sampson murmured that
when it came to that, you could always tell.) ‘I immediately announced
to both my parents that those attentions were misplaced, and that I
could not favour his suit. They inquired was he too tall? I replied it
was not the stature, but the intellect was too lofty. At our house,
I said, the tone was too brilliant, the pressure was too high, to be
maintained by me, a mere woman, in every-day domestic life. I well
remember mamma’s clasping her hands, and exclaiming “This will end in
a little man!”’ (Here Mr Sampson glanced at his host and shook his head
with despondency.) ‘She afterwards went so far as to predict that it
would end in a little man whose mind would be below the average, but
that was in what I may denominate a paroxysm of maternal disappointment.
Within a month,’ said Mrs Wilfer, deepening her voice, as if she were
relating a terrible ghost story, ‘within a-month, I first saw R. W. my
husband. Within a year, I married him. It is natural for the mind to
recall these dark coincidences on the present day.’

Mr Sampson at length released from the custody of Mrs Wilfer’s eye, now
drew a long breath, and made the original and striking remark that there
was no accounting for these sort of presentiments. R. W. scratched his
head and looked apologetically all round the table until he came to his
wife, when observing her as it were shrouded in a more sombre veil than
before, he once more hinted, ‘My dear, I am really afraid you are not
altogether enjoying yourself?’ To which she once more replied, ‘On the
contrary, R. W. Quite so.’

The wretched Mr Sampson’s position at this agreeable entertainment
was truly pitiable. For, not only was he exposed defenceless to the
harangues of Mrs Wilfer, but he received the utmost contumely at the
hands of Lavinia; who, partly to show Bella that she (Lavinia) could do
what she liked with him, and partly to pay him off for still obviously
admiring Bella’s beauty, led him the life of a dog. Illuminated on the
one hand by the stately graces of Mrs Wilfer’s oratory, and shadowed
on the other by the checks and frowns of the young lady to whom he
had devoted himself in his destitution, the sufferings of this young
gentleman were distressing to witness. If his mind for the moment reeled
under them, it may be urged, in extenuation of its weakness, that it
was constitutionally a knock-knee’d mind and never very strong upon its
legs.

The rosy hours were thus beguiled until it was time for Bella to have
Pa’s escort back. The dimples duly tied up in the bonnet-strings and the
leave-taking done, they got out into the air, and the cherub drew a long
breath as if he found it refreshing.

‘Well, dear Pa,’ said Bella, ‘the anniversary may be considered over.’

‘Yes, my dear,’ returned the cherub, ‘there’s another of ‘em gone.’

Bella drew his arm closer through hers as they walked along, and gave it
a number of consolatory pats. ‘Thank you, my dear,’ he said, as if
she had spoken; ‘I am all right, my dear. Well, and how do you get on,
Bella?’

‘I am not at all improved, Pa.’

‘Ain’t you really though?’

‘No, Pa. On the contrary, I am worse.’

‘Lor!’ said the cherub.

‘I am worse, Pa. I make so many calculations how much a year I must have
when I marry, and what is the least I can manage to do with, that I am
beginning to get wrinkles over my nose. Did you notice any wrinkles over
my nose this evening, Pa?’

Pa laughing at this, Bella gave him two or three shakes.

‘You won’t laugh, sir, when you see your lovely woman turning haggard.
You had better be prepared in time, I can tell you. I shall not be able
to keep my greediness for money out of my eyes long, and when you see it
there you’ll be sorry, and serve you right for not being warned in time.
Now, sir, we entered into a bond of confidence. Have you anything to
impart?’

‘I thought it was you who was to impart, my love.’

‘Oh! did you indeed, sir? Then why didn’t you ask me, the moment we came
out? The confidences of lovely women are not to be slighted. However, I
forgive you this once, and look here, Pa; that’s’--Bella laid the
little forefinger of her right glove on her lip, and then laid it on her
father’s lip--‘that’s a kiss for you. And now I am going seriously
to tell you--let me see how many--four secrets. Mind! Serious, grave,
weighty secrets. Strictly between ourselves.’

‘Number one, my dear?’ said her father, settling her arm comfortably and
confidentially.

‘Number one,’ said Bella, ‘will electrify you, Pa. Who do you think
has’--she was confused here in spite of her merry way of beginning ‘has
made an offer to me?’

Pa looked in her face, and looked at the ground, and looked in her face
again, and declared he could never guess.

‘Mr Rokesmith.’

‘You don’t tell me so, my dear!’

‘Mis--ter Roke--smith, Pa,’ said Bella separating the syllables for
emphasis. ‘What do you say to THAT?’

Pa answered quietly with the counter-question, ‘What did YOU say to
that, my love?’

‘I said No,’ returned Bella sharply. ‘Of course.’

‘Yes. Of course,’ said her father, meditating.

‘And I told him why I thought it a betrayal of trust on his part, and an
affront to me,’ said Bella.

‘Yes. To be sure. I am astonished indeed. I wonder he committed himself
without seeing more of his way first. Now I think of it, I suspect he
always has admired you though, my dear.’

‘A hackney coachman may admire me,’ remarked Bella, with a touch of her
mother’s loftiness.

‘It’s highly probable, my love. Number two, my dear?’

‘Number two, Pa, is much to the same purpose, though not so
preposterous. Mr Lightwood would propose to me, if I would let him.’

‘Then I understand, my dear, that you don’t intend to let him?’

Bella again saying, with her former emphasis, ‘Why, of course not!’ her
father felt himself bound to echo, ‘Of course not.’

‘I don’t care for him,’ said Bella.

‘That’s enough,’ her father interposed.

‘No, Pa, it’s NOT enough,’ rejoined Bella, giving him another shake or
two. ‘Haven’t I told you what a mercenary little wretch I am? It
only becomes enough when he has no money, and no clients, and no
expectations, and no anything but debts.’

‘Hah!’ said the cherub, a little depressed. ‘Number three, my dear?’

‘Number three, Pa, is a better thing. A generous thing, a noble thing, a
delightful thing. Mrs Boffin has herself told me, as a secret, with her
own kind lips--and truer lips never opened or closed in this life, I am
sure--that they wish to see me well married; and that when I marry with
their consent they will portion me most handsomely.’ Here the grateful
girl burst out crying very heartily.

‘Don’t cry, my darling,’ said her father, with his hand to his eyes;
‘it’s excusable in me to be a little overcome when I find that my dear
favourite child is, after all disappointments, to be so provided for
and so raised in the world; but don’t YOU cry, don’t YOU cry. I am very
thankful. I congratulate you with all my heart, my dear.’ The good soft
little fellow, drying his eyes, here, Bella put her arms round his neck
and tenderly kissed him on the high road, passionately telling him
he was the best of fathers and the best of friends, and that on her
wedding-morning she would go down on her knees to him and beg his pardon
for having ever teased him or seemed insensible to the worth of such
a patient, sympathetic, genial, fresh young heart. At every one of her
adjectives she redoubled her kisses, and finally kissed his hat off, and
then laughed immoderately when the wind took it and he ran after it.

When he had recovered his hat and his breath, and they were going on
again once more, said her father then: ‘Number four, my dear?’

Bella’s countenance fell in the midst of her mirth. ‘After all, perhaps
I had better put off number four, Pa. Let me try once more, if for never
so short a time, to hope that it may not really be so.’

The change in her, strengthened the cherub’s interest in number four,
and he said quietly: ‘May not be so, my dear? May not be how, my dear?’

Bella looked at him pensively, and shook her head.

‘And yet I know right well it is so, Pa. I know it only too well.’

‘My love,’ returned her father, ‘you make me quite uncomfortable. Have
you said No to anybody else, my dear?’

‘No, Pa.’

‘Yes to anybody?’ he suggested, lifting up his eyebrows.

‘No, Pa.’

‘Is there anybody else who would take his chance between Yes and No, if
you would let him, my dear?’

‘Not that I know of, Pa.’

‘There can’t be somebody who won’t take his chance when you want him
to?’ said the cherub, as a last resource.

‘Why, of course not, Pa,’ said Bella, giving him another shake or two.

‘No, of course not,’ he assented. ‘Bella, my dear, I am afraid I must
either have no sleep to-night, or I must press for number four.’

‘Oh, Pa, there is no good in number four! I am so sorry for it, I am so
unwilling to believe it, I have tried so earnestly not to see it, that
it is very hard to tell, even to you. But Mr Boffin is being spoilt by
prosperity, and is changing every day.’

‘My dear Bella, I hope and trust not.’

‘I have hoped and trusted not too, Pa; but every day he changes for
the worse, and for the worse. Not to me--he is always much the same
to me--but to others about him. Before my eyes he grows suspicious,
capricious, hard, tyrannical, unjust. If ever a good man were ruined by
good fortune, it is my benefactor. And yet, Pa, think how terrible the
fascination of money is! I see this, and hate this, and dread this, and
don’t know but that money might make a much worse change in me. And yet
I have money always in my thoughts and my desires; and the whole life I
place before myself is money, money, money, and what money can make of
life!’



Chapter 5

THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN FALLS INTO BAD COMPANY


Were Bella Wilfer’s bright and ready little wits at fault, or was the
Golden Dustman passing through the furnace of proof and coming out
dross? Ill news travels fast. We shall know full soon.

On that very night of her return from the Happy Return, something
chanced which Bella closely followed with her eyes and ears. There was
an apartment at the side of the Boffin mansion, known as Mr Boffin’s
room. Far less grand than the rest of the house, it was far more
comfortable, being pervaded by a certain air of homely snugness, which
upholstering despotism had banished to that spot when it inexorably set
its face against Mr Boffin’s appeals for mercy in behalf of any other
chamber. Thus, although a room of modest situation--for its windows gave
on Silas Wegg’s old corner--and of no pretensions to velvet, satin, or
gilding, it had got itself established in a domestic position analogous
to that of an easy dressing-gown or pair of slippers; and whenever the
family wanted to enjoy a particularly pleasant fireside evening, they
enjoyed it, as an institution that must be, in Mr Boffin’s room.

Mr and Mrs Boffin were reported sitting in this room, when Bella got
back. Entering it, she found the Secretary there too; in official
attendance it would appear, for he was standing with some papers in his
hand by a table with shaded candles on it, at which Mr Boffin was seated
thrown back in his easy chair.

‘You are busy, sir,’ said Bella, hesitating at the door.

‘Not at all, my dear, not at all. You’re one of ourselves. We never
make company of you. Come in, come in. Here’s the old lady in her usual
place.’

Mrs Boffin adding her nod and smile of welcome to Mr Boffin’s words,
Bella took her book to a chair in the fireside corner, by Mrs Boffin’s
work-table. Mr Boffin’s station was on the opposite side.

‘Now, Rokesmith,’ said the Golden Dustman, so sharply rapping the table
to bespeak his attention as Bella turned the leaves of her book, that
she started; ‘where were we?’

‘You were saying, sir,’ returned the Secretary, with an air of some
reluctance and a glance towards those others who were present, ‘that you
considered the time had come for fixing my salary.’

‘Don’t be above calling it wages, man,’ said Mr Boffin, testily. ‘What
the deuce! I never talked of any salary when I was in service.’

‘My wages,’ said the Secretary, correcting himself.

‘Rokesmith, you are not proud, I hope?’ observed Mr Boffin, eyeing him
askance.

‘I hope not, sir.’

‘Because I never was, when I was poor,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Poverty and
pride don’t go at all well together. Mind that. How can they go well
together? Why it stands to reason. A man, being poor, has nothing to be
proud of. It’s nonsense.’

With a slight inclination of his head, and a look of some surprise,
the Secretary seemed to assent by forming the syllables of the word
‘nonsense’ on his lips.

‘Now, concerning these same wages,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Sit down.’

The Secretary sat down.

‘Why didn’t you sit down before?’ asked Mr Boffin, distrustfully. ‘I
hope that wasn’t pride? But about these wages. Now, I’ve gone into the
matter, and I say two hundred a year. What do you think of it? Do you
think it’s enough?’

‘Thank you. It is a fair proposal.’

‘I don’t say, you know,’ Mr Boffin stipulated, ‘but what it may be more
than enough. And I’ll tell you why, Rokesmith. A man of property, like
me, is bound to consider the market-price. At first I didn’t enter into
that as much as I might have done; but I’ve got acquainted with other
men of property since, and I’ve got acquainted with the duties of
property. I mustn’t go putting the market-price up, because money may
happen not to be an object with me. A sheep is worth so much in the
market, and I ought to give it and no more. A secretary is worth so much
in the market, and I ought to give it and no more. However, I don’t mind
stretching a point with you.’

‘Mr Boffin, you are very good,’ replied the Secretary, with an effort.

‘Then we put the figure,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘at two hundred a year.
Then the figure’s disposed of. Now, there must be no misunderstanding
regarding what I buy for two hundred a year. If I pay for a sheep, I buy
it out and out. Similarly, if I pay for a secretary, I buy HIM out and
out.’

‘In other words, you purchase my whole time?’

‘Certainly I do. Look here,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘it ain’t that I want to
occupy your whole time; you can take up a book for a minute or two when
you’ve nothing better to do, though I think you’ll a’most always find
something useful to do. But I want to keep you in attendance. It’s
convenient to have you at all times ready on the premises. Therefore,
betwixt your breakfast and your supper,--on the premises I expect to
find you.’

The Secretary bowed.

‘In bygone days, when I was in service myself,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘I
couldn’t go cutting about at my will and pleasure, and you won’t expect
to go cutting about at your will and pleasure. You’ve rather got into
a habit of that, lately; but perhaps it was for want of a right
specification betwixt us. Now, let there be a right specification
betwixt us, and let it be this. If you want leave, ask for it.’

Again the Secretary bowed. His manner was uneasy and astonished, and
showed a sense of humiliation.

‘I’ll have a bell,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘hung from this room to yours,
and when I want you, I’ll touch it. I don’t call to mind that I have
anything more to say at the present moment.’

The Secretary rose, gathered up his papers, and withdrew. Bella’s eyes
followed him to the door, lighted on Mr Boffin complacently thrown back
in his easy chair, and drooped over her book.

‘I have let that chap, that young man of mine,’ said Mr Boffin, taking a
trot up and down the room, ‘get above his work. It won’t do. I must have
him down a peg. A man of property owes a duty to other men of property,
and must look sharp after his inferiors.’

Bella felt that Mrs Boffin was not comfortable, and that the eyes of
that good creature sought to discover from her face what attention she
had given to this discourse, and what impression it had made upon her.
For which reason Bella’s eyes drooped more engrossedly over her book,
and she turned the page with an air of profound absorption in it.

‘Noddy,’ said Mrs Boffin, after thoughtfully pausing in her work.

‘My dear,’ returned the Golden Dustman, stopping short in his trot.

‘Excuse my putting it to you, Noddy, but now really! Haven’t you been
a little strict with Mr Rokesmith to-night? Haven’t you been a
little--just a little little--not quite like your old self?’

‘Why, old woman, I hope so,’ returned Mr Boffin, cheerfully, if not
boastfully.

‘Hope so, deary?’

‘Our old selves wouldn’t do here, old lady. Haven’t you found that out
yet? Our old selves would be fit for nothing here but to be robbed and
imposed upon. Our old selves weren’t people of fortune; our new selves
are; it’s a great difference.’

‘Ah!’ said Mrs Boffin, pausing in her work again, softly to draw a long
breath and to look at the fire. ‘A great difference.’

‘And we must be up to the difference,’ pursued her husband; ‘we must be
equal to the change; that’s what we must be. We’ve got to hold our own
now, against everybody (for everybody’s hand is stretched out to be
dipped into our pockets), and we have got to recollect that money makes
money, as well as makes everything else.’

‘Mentioning recollecting,’ said Mrs Boffin, with her work abandoned,
her eyes upon the fire, and her chin upon her hand, ‘do you recollect,
Noddy, how you said to Mr Rokesmith when he first came to see us at the
Bower, and you engaged him--how you said to him that if it had pleased
Heaven to send John Harmon to his fortune safe, we could have been
content with the one Mound which was our legacy, and should never have
wanted the rest?’

‘Ay, I remember, old lady. But we hadn’t tried what it was to have the
rest then. Our new shoes had come home, but we hadn’t put ‘em on. We’re
wearing ‘em now, we’re wearing ‘em, and must step out accordingly.’

Mrs Boffin took up her work again, and plied her needle in silence.

‘As to Rokesmith, that young man of mine,’ said Mr Boffin, dropping
his voice and glancing towards the door with an apprehension of being
overheard by some eavesdropper there, ‘it’s the same with him as with
the footmen. I have found out that you must either scrunch them, or let
them scrunch you. If you ain’t imperious with ‘em, they won’t believe
in your being any better than themselves, if as good, after the stories
(lies mostly) that they have heard of your beginnings. There’s nothing
betwixt stiffening yourself up, and throwing yourself away; take my word
for that, old lady.’

Bella ventured for a moment to look stealthily towards him under her
eyelashes, and she saw a dark cloud of suspicion, covetousness, and
conceit, overshadowing the once open face.

‘Hows’ever,’ said he, ‘this isn’t entertaining to Miss Bella. Is it,
Bella?’

A deceiving Bella she was, to look at him with that pensively abstracted
air, as if her mind were full of her book, and she had not heard a
single word!

‘Hah! Better employed than to attend to it,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘That’s
right, that’s right. Especially as you have no call to be told how to
value yourself, my dear.’

Colouring a little under this compliment, Bella returned, ‘I hope sir,
you don’t think me vain?’

‘Not a bit, my dear,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘But I think it’s very creditable
in you, at your age, to be so well up with the pace of the world, and to
know what to go in for. You are right. Go in for money, my love. Money’s
the article. You’ll make money of your good looks, and of the money Mrs
Boffin and me will have the pleasure of settling upon you, and you’ll
live and die rich. That’s the state to live and die in!’ said Mr Boffin,
in an unctuous manner. ‘R--r--rich!’

There was an expression of distress in Mrs Boffin’s face, as, after
watching her husband’s, she turned to their adopted girl, and said:

‘Don’t mind him, Bella, my dear.’

‘Eh?’ cried Mr Boffin. ‘What! Not mind him?’

‘I don’t mean that,’ said Mrs Boffin, with a worried look, ‘but I mean,
don’t believe him to be anything but good and generous, Bella, because
he is the best of men. No, I must say that much, Noddy. You are always
the best of men.’

She made the declaration as if he were objecting to it: which assuredly
he was not in any way.

‘And as to you, my dear Bella,’ said Mrs Boffin, still with that
distressed expression, ‘he is so much attached to you, whatever he says,
that your own father has not a truer interest in you and can hardly like
you better than he does.’

‘Says too!’ cried Mr Boffin. ‘Whatever he says! Why, I say so, openly.
Give me a kiss, my dear child, in saying Good Night, and let me confirm
what my old lady tells you. I am very fond of you, my dear, and I am
entirely of your mind, and you and I will take care that you shall be
rich. These good looks of yours (which you have some right to be vain
of; my dear, though you are not, you know) are worth money, and you
shall make money of ‘em. The money you will have, will be worth money,
and you shall make money of that too. There’s a golden ball at your
feet. Good night, my dear.’

Somehow, Bella was not so well pleased with this assurance and this
prospect as she might have been. Somehow, when she put her arms
round Mrs Boffin’s neck and said Good Night, she derived a sense of
unworthiness from the still anxious face of that good woman and her
obvious wish to excuse her husband. ‘Why, what need to excuse him?’
thought Bella, sitting down in her own room. ‘What he said was very
sensible, I am sure, and very true, I am sure. It is only what I often
say to myself. Don’t I like it then? No, I don’t like it, and, though
he is my liberal benefactor, I disparage him for it. Then pray,’ said
Bella, sternly putting the question to herself in the looking-glass as
usual, ‘what do you mean by this, you inconsistent little Beast?’

The looking-glass preserving a discreet ministerial silence when thus
called upon for explanation, Bella went to bed with a weariness upon her
spirit which was more than the weariness of want of sleep. And again
in the morning, she looked for the cloud, and for the deepening of the
cloud, upon the Golden Dustman’s face.

She had begun by this time to be his frequent companion in his morning
strolls about the streets, and it was at this time that he made her a
party to his engaging in a curious pursuit. Having been hard at work in
one dull enclosure all his life, he had a child’s delight in looking
at shops. It had been one of the first novelties and pleasures of his
freedom, and was equally the delight of his wife. For many years their
only walks in London had been taken on Sundays when the shops were shut;
and when every day in the week became their holiday, they derived an
enjoyment from the variety and fancy and beauty of the display in the
windows, which seemed incapable of exhaustion. As if the principal
streets were a great Theatre and the play were childishly new to them,
Mr and Mrs Boffin, from the beginning of Bella’s intimacy in their
house, had been constantly in the front row, charmed with all they saw
and applauding vigorously. But now, Mr Boffin’s interest began to centre
in book-shops; and more than that--for that of itself would not have
been much--in one exceptional kind of book.

‘Look in here, my dear,’ Mr Boffin would say, checking Bella’s arm at a
bookseller’s window; ‘you can read at sight, and your eyes are as sharp
as they’re bright. Now, look well about you, my dear, and tell me if you
see any book about a Miser.’

If Bella saw such a book, Mr Boffin would instantly dart in and buy
it. And still, as if they had not found it, they would seek out another
book-shop, and Mr Boffin would say, ‘Now, look well all round, my
dear, for a Life of a Miser, or any book of that sort; any Lives of odd
characters who may have been Misers.’

Bella, thus directed, would examine the window with the greatest
attention, while Mr Boffin would examine her face. The moment she
pointed out any book as being entitled Lives of eccentric personages,
Anecdotes of strange characters, Records of remarkable individuals, or
anything to that purpose, Mr Boffin’s countenance would light up, and
he would instantly dart in and buy it. Size, price, quality, were of no
account. Any book that seemed to promise a chance of miserly biography,
Mr Boffin purchased without a moment’s delay and carried home. Happening
to be informed by a bookseller that a portion of the Annual Register was
devoted to ‘Characters’, Mr Boffin at once bought a whole set of that
ingenious compilation, and began to carry it home piecemeal, confiding
a volume to Bella, and bearing three himself. The completion of this
labour occupied them about a fortnight. When the task was done, Mr
Boffin, with his appetite for Misers whetted instead of satiated, began
to look out again.

It very soon became unnecessary to tell Bella what to look for, and an
understanding was established between her and Mr Boffin that she was
always to look for Lives of Misers. Morning after morning they roamed
about the town together, pursuing this singular research. Miserly
literature not being abundant, the proportion of failures to successes
may have been as a hundred to one; still Mr Boffin, never wearied,
remained as avaricious for misers as he had been at the first onset. It
was curious that Bella never saw the books about the house, nor did she
ever hear from Mr Boffin one word of reference to their contents. He
seemed to save up his Misers as they had saved up their money. As they
had been greedy for it, and secret about it, and had hidden it, so he
was greedy for them, and secret about them, and hid them. But beyond all
doubt it was to be noticed, and was by Bella very clearly noticed, that,
as he pursued the acquisition of those dismal records with the ardour of
Don Quixote for his books of chivalry, he began to spend his money with
a more sparing hand. And often when he came out of a shop with some new
account of one of those wretched lunatics, she would almost shrink from
the sly dry chuckle with which he would take her arm again and trot
away. It did not appear that Mrs Boffin knew of this taste. He made
no allusion to it, except in the morning walks when he and Bella were
always alone; and Bella, partly under the impression that he took her
into his confidence by implication, and partly in remembrance of Mrs
Boffin’s anxious face that night, held the same reserve.

While these occurrences were in progress, Mrs Lammle made the discovery
that Bella had a fascinating influence over her. The Lammles, originally
presented by the dear Veneerings, visited the Boffins on all grand
occasions, and Mrs Lammle had not previously found this out; but now the
knowledge came upon her all at once. It was a most extraordinary thing
(she said to Mrs Boffin); she was foolishly susceptible of the power of
beauty, but it wasn’t altogether that; she never had been able to resist
a natural grace of manner, but it wasn’t altogether that; it was more
than that, and there was no name for the indescribable extent and degree
to which she was captivated by this charming girl.

This charming girl having the words repeated to her by Mrs Boffin (who
was proud of her being admired, and would have done anything to give her
pleasure), naturally recognized in Mrs Lammle a woman of penetration
and taste. Responding to the sentiments, by being very gracious to Mrs
Lammle, she gave that lady the means of so improving her opportunity,
as that the captivation became reciprocal, though always wearing an
appearance of greater sobriety on Bella’s part than on the enthusiastic
Sophronia’s. Howbeit, they were so much together that, for a time, the
Boffin chariot held Mrs Lammle oftener than Mrs Boffin: a preference
of which the latter worthy soul was not in the least jealous, placidly
remarking, ‘Mrs Lammle is a younger companion for her than I am, and
Lor! she’s more fashionable.’

But between Bella Wilfer and Georgiana Podsnap there was this one
difference, among many others, that Bella was in no danger of being
captivated by Alfred. She distrusted and disliked him. Indeed, her
perception was so quick, and her observation so sharp, that after all
she mistrusted his wife too, though with her giddy vanity and wilfulness
she squeezed the mistrust away into a corner of her mind, and blocked it
up there.

Mrs Lammle took the friendliest interest in Bella’s making a good match.
Mrs Lammle said, in a sportive way, she really must show her beautiful
Bella what kind of wealthy creatures she and Alfred had on hand, who
would as one man fall at her feet enslaved. Fitting occasion made,
Mrs Lammle accordingly produced the most passable of those feverish,
boastful, and indefinably loose gentlemen who were always lounging in
and out of the City on questions of the Bourse and Greek and Spanish and
India and Mexican and par and premium and discount and three-quarters
and seven-eighths. Who in their agreeable manner did homage to Bella
as if she were a compound of fine girl, thorough-bred horse, well-built
drag, and remarkable pipe. But without the least effect, though even Mr
Fledgeby’s attractions were cast into the scale.

‘I fear, Bella dear,’ said Mrs Lammle one day in the chariot, ‘that you
will be very hard to please.’

‘I don’t expect to be pleased, dear,’ said Bella, with a languid turn of
her eyes.

‘Truly, my love,’ returned Sophronia, shaking her head, and smiling
her best smile, ‘it would not be very easy to find a man worthy of your
attractions.’

‘The question is not a man, my dear,’ said Bella, coolly, ‘but an
establishment.’

‘My love,’ returned Mrs Lammle, ‘your prudence amazes me--where DID you
study life so well!--you are right. In such a case as yours, the object
is a fitting establishment. You could not descend to an inadequate one
from Mr Boffin’s house, and even if your beauty alone could not command
it, it is to be assumed that Mr and Mrs Boffin will--’

‘Oh! they have already,’ Bella interposed.

‘No! Have they really?’

A little vexed by a suspicion that she had spoken precipitately, and
withal a little defiant of her own vexation, Bella determined not to
retreat.

‘That is to say,’ she explained, ‘they have told me they mean to portion
me as their adopted child, if you mean that. But don’t mention it.’

‘Mention it!’ replied Mrs Lammle, as if she were full of awakened
feeling at the suggestion of such an impossibility. ‘Men-tion it!’

‘I don’t mind telling you, Mrs Lammle--’ Bella began again.

‘My love, say Sophronia, or I must not say Bella.’

With a little short, petulant ‘Oh!’ Bella complied. ‘Oh!--Sophronia
then--I don’t mind telling you, Sophronia, that I am convinced I have
no heart, as people call it; and that I think that sort of thing is
nonsense.’

‘Brave girl!’ murmured Mrs Lammle.

‘And so,’ pursued Bella, ‘as to seeking to please myself, I don’t;
except in the one respect I have mentioned. I am indifferent otherwise.’

‘But you can’t help pleasing, Bella,’ said Mrs Lammle, rallying her with
an arch look and her best smile, ‘you can’t help making a proud and an
admiring husband. You may not care to please yourself, and you may not
care to please him, but you are not a free agent as to pleasing: you
are forced to do that, in spite of yourself, my dear; so it may be a
question whether you may not as well please yourself too, if you can.’

Now, the very grossness of this flattery put Bella upon proving that she
actually did please in spite of herself. She had a misgiving that she
was doing wrong--though she had an indistinct foreshadowing that some
harm might come of it thereafter, she little thought what consequences
it would really bring about--but she went on with her confidence.

‘Don’t talk of pleasing in spite of one’s self, dear,’ said Bella. ‘I
have had enough of that.’

‘Ay?’ cried Mrs Lammle. ‘Am I already corroborated, Bella?’

‘Never mind, Sophronia, we will not speak of it any more. Don’t ask me
about it.’

This plainly meaning Do ask me about it, Mrs Lammle did as she was
requested.

‘Tell me, Bella. Come, my dear. What provoking burr has been
inconveniently attracted to the charming skirts, and with difficulty
shaken off?’

‘Provoking indeed,’ said Bella, ‘and no burr to boast of! But don’t ask
me.’

‘Shall I guess?’

‘You would never guess. What would you say to our Secretary?’

‘My dear! The hermit Secretary, who creeps up and down the back stairs,
and is never seen!’

‘I don’t know about his creeping up and down the back stairs,’ said
Bella, rather contemptuously, ‘further than knowing that he does no such
thing; and as to his never being seen, I should be content never to have
seen him, though he is quite as visible as you are. But I pleased HIM
(for my sins) and he had the presumption to tell me so.’

‘The man never made a declaration to you, my dear Bella!’

‘Are you sure of that, Sophronia?’ said Bella. ‘I am not. In fact, I am
sure of the contrary.’

‘The man must be mad,’ said Mrs Lammle, with a kind of resignation.

‘He appeared to be in his senses,’ returned Bella, tossing her head,
‘and he had plenty to say for himself. I told him my opinion of his
declaration and his conduct, and dismissed him. Of course this has all
been very inconvenient to me, and very disagreeable. It has remained a
secret, however. That word reminds me to observe, Sophronia, that I have
glided on into telling you the secret, and that I rely upon you never to
mention it.’

‘Mention it!’ repeated Mrs Lammle with her former feeling. ‘Men-tion
it!’

This time Sophronia was so much in earnest that she found it necessary
to bend forward in the carriage and give Bella a kiss. A Judas order of
kiss; for she thought, while she yet pressed Bella’s hand after giving
it, ‘Upon your own showing, you vain heartless girl, puffed up by the
doting folly of a dustman, I need have no relenting towards YOU. If my
husband, who sends me here, should form any schemes for making YOU a
victim, I should certainly not cross him again.’ In those very same
moments, Bella was thinking, ‘Why am I always at war with myself? Why
have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to
have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in
spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?’

As usual, there was no answer in the looking-glass when she got home and
referred these questions to it. Perhaps if she had consulted some better
oracle, the result might have been more satisfactory; but she did not,
and all things consequent marched the march before them.

On one point connected with the watch she kept on Mr Boffin, she felt
very inquisitive, and that was the question whether the Secretary
watched him too, and followed the sure and steady change in him, as she
did? Her very limited intercourse with Mr Rokesmith rendered this hard
to find out. Their communication now, at no time extended beyond the
preservation of commonplace appearances before Mr and Mrs Boffin; and if
Bella and the Secretary were ever left alone together by any chance,
he immediately withdrew. She consulted his face when she could do so
covertly, as she worked or read, and could make nothing of it. He looked
subdued; but he had acquired a strong command of feature, and, whenever
Mr Boffin spoke to him in Bella’s presence, or whatever revelation of
himself Mr Boffin made, the Secretary’s face changed no more than a
wall. A slightly knitted brow, that expressed nothing but an almost
mechanical attention, and a compression of the mouth, that might have
been a guard against a scornful smile--these she saw from morning to
night, from day to day, from week to week, monotonous, unvarying, set,
as in a piece of sculpture.

The worst of the matter was, that it thus fell out insensibly--and most
provokingly, as Bella complained to herself, in her impetuous little
manner--that her observation of Mr Boffin involved a continual
observation of Mr Rokesmith. ‘Won’t THAT extract a look from him?’--‘Can
it be possible THAT makes no impression on him?’ Such questions Bella
would propose to herself, often as many times in a day as there were
hours in it. Impossible to know. Always the same fixed face.

‘Can he be so base as to sell his very nature for two hundred a year?’
Bella would think. And then, ‘But why not? It’s a mere question of price
with others besides him. I suppose I would sell mine, if I could get
enough for it.’ And so she would come round again to the war with
herself.

A kind of illegibility, though a different kind, stole over Mr
Boffin’s face. Its old simplicity of expression got masked by a certain
craftiness that assimilated even his good-humour to itself. His very
smile was cunning, as if he had been studying smiles among the portraits
of his misers. Saving an occasional burst of impatience, or coarse
assertion of his mastery, his good-humour remained to him, but it had
now a sordid alloy of distrust; and though his eyes should twinkle and
all his face should laugh, he would sit holding himself in his own
arms, as if he had an inclination to hoard himself up, and must always
grudgingly stand on the defensive.

What with taking heed of these two faces, and what with feeling
conscious that the stealthy occupation must set some mark on her own,
Bella soon began to think that there was not a candid or a natural face
among them all but Mrs Boffin’s. None the less because it was far less
radiant than of yore, faithfully reflecting in its anxiety and regret
every line of change in the Golden Dustman’s.

‘Rokesmith,’ said Mr Boffin one evening when they were all in his room
again, and he and the Secretary had been going over some accounts, ‘I
am spending too much money. Or leastways, you are spending too much for
me.’

‘You are rich, sir.’

‘I am not,’ said Mr Boffin.

The sharpness of the retort was next to telling the Secretary that he
lied. But it brought no change of expression into the set face.

‘I tell you I am not rich,’ repeated Mr Boffin, ‘and I won’t have it.’

‘You are not rich, sir?’ repeated the Secretary, in measured words.

‘Well,’ returned Mr Boffin, ‘if I am, that’s my business. I am not going
to spend at this rate, to please you, or anybody. You wouldn’t like it,
if it was your money.’

‘Even in that impossible case, sir, I--’

‘Hold your tongue!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘You oughtn’t to like it in any
case. There! I didn’t mean to be rude, but you put me out so, and after
all I’m master. I didn’t intend to tell you to hold your tongue. I beg
your pardon. Don’t hold your tongue. Only, don’t contradict. Did you
ever come across the life of Mr Elwes?’ referring to his favourite
subject at last.

‘The miser?’

‘Ah, people called him a miser. People are always calling other people
something. Did you ever read about him?’

‘I think so.’

‘He never owned to being rich, and yet he might have bought me twice
over. Did you ever hear of Daniel Dancer?’

‘Another miser? Yes.’

‘He was a good ‘un,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘and he had a sister worthy of him.
They never called themselves rich neither. If they HAD called themselves
rich, most likely they wouldn’t have been so.’

‘They lived and died very miserably. Did they not, sir?’

‘No, I don’t know that they did,’ said Mr Boffin, curtly.

‘Then they are not the Misers I mean. Those abject wretches--’

‘Don’t call names, Rokesmith,’ said Mr Boffin.

‘--That exemplary brother and sister--lived and died in the foulest and
filthiest degradation.’

‘They pleased themselves,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘and I suppose they could
have done no more if they had spent their money. But however, I ain’t
going to fling mine away. Keep the expenses down. The fact is, you ain’t
enough here, Rokesmith. It wants constant attention in the littlest
things. Some of us will be dying in a workhouse next.’

‘As the persons you have cited,’ quietly remarked the Secretary,
‘thought they would, if I remember, sir.’

‘And very creditable in ‘em too,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Very independent in
‘em! But never mind them just now. Have you given notice to quit your
lodgings?’

‘Under your direction, I have, sir.’

‘Then I tell you what,’ said Mr Boffin; ‘pay the quarter’s rent--pay the
quarter’s rent, it’ll be the cheapest thing in the end--and come here at
once, so that you may be always on the spot, day and night, and keep the
expenses down. You’ll charge the quarter’s rent to me, and we must try
and save it somewhere. You’ve got some lovely furniture; haven’t you?’

‘The furniture in my rooms is my own.’

‘Then we shan’t have to buy any for you. In case you was to think it,’
said Mr Boffin, with a look of peculiar shrewdness, ‘so honourably
independent in you as to make it a relief to your mind, to make that
furniture over to me in the light of a set-off against the quarter’s
rent, why ease your mind, ease your mind. I don’t ask it, but I won’t
stand in your way if you should consider it due to yourself. As to your
room, choose any empty room at the top of the house.’

‘Any empty room will do for me,’ said the Secretary.

‘You can take your pick,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘and it’ll be as good as eight
or ten shillings a week added to your income. I won’t deduct for it; I
look to you to make it up handsomely by keeping the expenses down. Now,
if you’ll show a light, I’ll come to your office-room and dispose of a
letter or two.’

On that clear, generous face of Mrs Boffin’s, Bella had seen such traces
of a pang at the heart while this dialogue was being held, that she
had not the courage to turn her eyes to it when they were left alone.
Feigning to be intent on her embroidery, she sat plying her needle until
her busy hand was stopped by Mrs Boffin’s hand being lightly laid upon
it. Yielding to the touch, she felt her hand carried to the good soul’s
lips, and felt a tear fall on it.

‘Oh, my loved husband!’ said Mrs Boffin. ‘This is hard to see and hear.
But my dear Bella, believe me that in spite of all the change in him, he
is the best of men.’

He came back, at the moment when Bella had taken the hand comfortingly
between her own.

‘Eh?’ said he, mistrustfully looking in at the door. ‘What’s she telling
you?’

‘She is only praising you, sir,’ said Bella.

‘Praising me? You are sure? Not blaming me for standing on my own
defence against a crew of plunderers, who could suck me dry by driblets?
Not blaming me for getting a little hoard together?’

He came up to them, and his wife folded her hands upon his shoulder, and
shook her head as she laid it on her hands.

‘There, there, there!’ urged Mr Boffin, not unkindly. ‘Don’t take on,
old lady.’

‘But I can’t bear to see you so, my dear.’

‘Nonsense! Recollect we are not our old selves. Recollect, we must
scrunch or be scrunched. Recollect, we must hold our own. Recollect,
money makes money. Don’t you be uneasy, Bella, my child; don’t you be
doubtful. The more I save, the more you shall have.’

Bella thought it was well for his wife that she was musing with her
affectionate face on his shoulder; for there was a cunning light in
his eyes as he said all this, which seemed to cast a disagreeable
illumination on the change in him, and make it morally uglier.



Chapter 6

THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN FALLS INTO WORSE COMPANY


It had come to pass that Mr Silas Wegg now rarely attended the minion of
fortune and the worm of the hour, at his (the worm’s and minion’s) own
house, but lay under general instructions to await him within a certain
margin of hours at the Bower. Mr Wegg took this arrangement in great
dudgeon, because the appointed hours were evening hours, and those he
considered precious to the progress of the friendly move. But it was
quite in character, he bitterly remarked to Mr Venus, that the upstart
who had trampled on those eminent creatures, Miss Elizabeth, Master
George, Aunt Jane, and Uncle Parker, should oppress his literary man.

The Roman Empire having worked out its destruction, Mr Boffin next
appeared in a cab with Rollin’s Ancient History, which valuable work
being found to possess lethargic properties, broke down, at about the
period when the whole of the army of Alexander the Macedonian (at that
time about forty thousand strong) burst into tears simultaneously, on
his being taken with a shivering fit after bathing. The Wars of the
Jews, likewise languishing under Mr Wegg’s generalship, Mr Boffin
arrived in another cab with Plutarch: whose Lives he found in the sequel
extremely entertaining, though he hoped Plutarch might not expect him to
believe them all. What to believe, in the course of his reading, was Mr
Boffin’s chief literary difficulty indeed; for some time he was divided
in his mind between half, all, or none; at length, when he decided, as a
moderate man, to compound with half, the question still remained, which
half? And that stumbling-block he never got over.

One evening, when Silas Wegg had grown accustomed to the arrival of
his patron in a cab, accompanied by some profane historian charged with
unutterable names of incomprehensible peoples, of impossible descent,
waging wars any number of years and syllables long, and carrying
illimitable hosts and riches about, with the greatest ease, beyond the
confines of geography--one evening the usual time passed by, and no
patron appeared. After half an hour’s grace, Mr Wegg proceeded to the
outer gate, and there executed a whistle, conveying to Mr Venus,
if perchance within hearing, the tidings of his being at home and
disengaged. Forth from the shelter of a neighbouring wall, Mr Venus then
emerged.

‘Brother in arms,’ said Mr Wegg, in excellent spirits, ‘welcome!’

In return, Mr Venus gave him a rather dry good evening.

‘Walk in, brother,’ said Silas, clapping him on the shoulder, ‘and take
your seat in my chimley corner; for what says the ballad?

     “No malice to dread, sir,
     And no falsehood to fear,
     But truth to delight me, Mr Venus,
     And I forgot what to cheer.
     Li toddle de om dee.
     And something to guide,
     My ain fireside, sir,
     My ain fireside.”’

With this quotation (depending for its neatness rather on the spirit
than the words), Mr Wegg conducted his guest to his hearth.

‘And you come, brother,’ said Mr Wegg, in a hospitable glow, ‘you come
like I don’t know what--exactly like it--I shouldn’t know you from
it--shedding a halo all around you.’

‘What kind of halo?’ asked Mr Venus.

‘’Ope sir,’ replied Silas. ‘That’s YOUR halo.’

Mr Venus appeared doubtful on the point, and looked rather
discontentedly at the fire.

‘We’ll devote the evening, brother,’ exclaimed Wegg, ‘to prosecute our
friendly move. And arterwards, crushing a flowing wine-cup--which I
allude to brewing rum and water--we’ll pledge one another. For what says
the Poet?

     “And you needn’t Mr Venus be your black bottle,
     For surely I’ll be mine,
     And we’ll take a glass with a slice of lemon in it to which
     you’re partial,
     For auld lang syne.”’

This flow of quotation and hospitality in Wegg indicated his observation
of some little querulousness on the part of Venus.

‘Why, as to the friendly move,’ observed the last-named gentleman,
rubbing his knees peevishly, ‘one of my objections to it is, that it
DON’T move.’

‘Rome, brother,’ returned Wegg: ‘a city which (it may not be generally
known) originated in twins and a wolf; and ended in Imperial marble:
wasn’t built in a day.’

‘Did I say it was?’ asked Venus.

‘No, you did not, brother. Well-inquired.’

‘But I do say,’ proceeded Venus, ‘that I am taken from among my trophies
of anatomy, am called upon to exchange my human warious for mere
coal-ashes warious, and nothing comes of it. I think I must give up.’

‘No, sir!’ remonstrated Wegg, enthusiastically. ‘No, Sir!

     “Charge, Chester, charge,
     On, Mr Venus, on!”

Never say die, sir! A man of your mark!’

‘It’s not so much saying it that I object to,’ returned Mr Venus, ‘as
doing it. And having got to do it whether or no, I can’t afford to waste
my time on groping for nothing in cinders.’

‘But think how little time you have given to the move, sir, after all,’
urged Wegg. ‘Add the evenings so occupied together, and what do they
come to? And you, sir, harmonizer with myself in opinions, views, and
feelings, you with the patience to fit together on wires the whole
framework of society--I allude to the human skelinton--you to give in so
soon!’

‘I don’t like it,’ returned Mr Venus moodily, as he put his head between
his knees and stuck up his dusty hair. ‘And there’s no encouragement to
go on.’

‘Not them Mounds without,’ said Mr Wegg, extending his right hand with
an air of solemn reasoning, ‘encouragement? Not them Mounds now looking
down upon us?’

‘They’re too big,’ grumbled Venus. ‘What’s a scratch here and a scrape
there, a poke in this place and a dig in the other, to them. Besides;
what have we found?’

‘What HAVE we found?’ cried Wegg, delighted to be able to acquiesce.
‘Ah! There I grant you, comrade. Nothing. But on the contrary, comrade,
what MAY we find? There you’ll grant me. Anything.’

‘I don’t like it,’ pettishly returned Venus as before. ‘I came into
it without enough consideration. And besides again. Isn’t your own Mr
Boffin well acquainted with the Mounds? And wasn’t he well acquainted
with the deceased and his ways? And has he ever showed any expectation
of finding anything?’

At that moment wheels were heard.

‘Now, I should be loth,’ said Mr Wegg, with an air of patient injury,
‘to think so ill of him as to suppose him capable of coming at this time
of night. And yet it sounds like him.’

A ring at the yard bell.

‘It is him,’ said Mr Wegg, ‘and he is capable of it. I am sorry, because
I could have wished to keep up a little lingering fragment of respect
for him.’

Here Mr Boffin was heard lustily calling at the yard gate, ‘Halloa!
Wegg! Halloa!’

‘Keep your seat, Mr Venus,’ said Wegg. ‘He may not stop.’ And then
called out, ‘Halloa, sir! Halloa! I’m with you directly, sir! Half a
minute, Mr Boffin. Coming, sir, as fast as my leg will bring me!’ And
so with a show of much cheerful alacrity stumped out to the gate with
a light, and there, through the window of a cab, descried Mr Boffin
inside, blocked up with books.

‘Here! lend a hand, Wegg,’ said Mr Boffin excitedly, ‘I can’t get out
till the way is cleared for me. This is the Annual Register, Wegg, in a
cab-full of wollumes. Do you know him?’

‘Know the Animal Register, sir?’ returned the Impostor, who had caught
the name imperfectly. ‘For a trifling wager, I think I could find any
Animal in him, blindfold, Mr Boffin.’

‘And here’s Kirby’s Wonderful Museum,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘and Caulfield’s
Characters, and Wilson’s. Such Characters, Wegg, such Characters! I must
have one or two of the best of ‘em to-night. It’s amazing what places
they used to put the guineas in, wrapped up in rags. Catch hold of that
pile of wollumes, Wegg, or it’ll bulge out and burst into the mud. Is
there anyone about, to help?’

‘There’s a friend of mine, sir, that had the intention of spending
the evening with me when I gave you up--much against my will--for the
night.’

‘Call him out,’ cried Mr Boffin in a bustle; ‘get him to bear a hand.
Don’t drop that one under your arm. It’s Dancer. Him and his sister made
pies of a dead sheep they found when they were out a walking. Where’s
your friend? Oh, here’s your friend. Would you be so good as help Wegg
and myself with these books? But don’t take Jemmy Taylor of Southwark,
nor yet Jemmy Wood of Gloucester. These are the two Jemmys. I’ll carry
them myself.’

Not ceasing to talk and bustle, in a state of great excitement, Mr
Boffin directed the removal and arrangement of the books, appearing
to be in some sort beside himself until they were all deposited on the
floor, and the cab was dismissed.

‘There!’ said Mr Boffin, gloating over them. ‘There they are, like the
four-and-twenty fiddlers--all of a row. Get on your spectacles, Wegg;
I know where to find the best of ‘em, and we’ll have a taste at once of
what we have got before us. What’s your friend’s name?’

Mr Wegg presented his friend as Mr Venus.

‘Eh?’ cried Mr Boffin, catching at the name. ‘Of Clerkenwell?’

‘Of Clerkenwell, sir,’ said Mr Venus.

‘Why, I’ve heard of you,’ cried Mr Boffin, ‘I heard of you in the
old man’s time. You knew him. Did you ever buy anything of him?’ With
piercing eagerness.

‘No, sir,’ returned Venus.

‘But he showed you things; didn’t he?’

Mr Venus, with a glance at his friend, replied in the affirmative.

‘What did he show you?’ asked Mr Boffin, putting his hands behind him,
and eagerly advancing his head. ‘Did he show you boxes, little cabinets,
pocket-books, parcels, anything locked or sealed, anything tied up?’

Mr Venus shook his head.

‘Are you a judge of china?’

Mr Venus again shook his head.

‘Because if he had ever showed you a teapot, I should be glad to know of
it,’ said Mr Boffin. And then, with his right hand at his lips, repeated
thoughtfully, ‘a Teapot, a Teapot’, and glanced over the books on the
floor, as if he knew there was something interesting connected with a
teapot, somewhere among them.

Mr Wegg and Mr Venus looked at one another wonderingly: and Mr Wegg, in
fitting on his spectacles, opened his eyes wide, over their rims, and
tapped the side of his nose: as an admonition to Venus to keep himself
generally wide awake.

‘A Teapot,’ repeated Mr Boffin, continuing to muse and survey the books;
‘a Teapot, a Teapot. Are you ready, Wegg?’

‘I am at your service, sir,’ replied that gentleman, taking his usual
seat on the usual settle, and poking his wooden leg under the table
before it. ‘Mr Venus, would you make yourself useful, and take a seat
beside me, sir, for the conveniency of snuffing the candles?’

Venus complying with the invitation while it was yet being given, Silas
pegged at him with his wooden leg, to call his particular attention to
Mr Boffin standing musing before the fire, in the space between the two
settles.

‘Hem! Ahem!’ coughed Mr Wegg to attract his employer’s attention. ‘Would
you wish to commence with an Animal, sir--from the Register?’

‘No,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘no, Wegg.’ With that, producing a little book
from his breast-pocket, he handed it with great care to the literary
gentlemen, and inquired, ‘What do you call that, Wegg?’

‘This, sir,’ replied Silas, adjusting his spectacles, and referring to
the title-page, ‘is Merryweather’s Lives and Anecdotes of Misers. Mr
Venus, would you make yourself useful and draw the candles a little
nearer, sir?’ This to have a special opportunity of bestowing a stare
upon his comrade.

‘Which of ‘em have you got in that lot?’ asked Mr Boffin. ‘Can you find
out pretty easy?’

‘Well, sir,’ replied Silas, turning to the table of contents and slowly
fluttering the leaves of the book, ‘I should say they must be pretty
well all here, sir; here’s a large assortment, sir; my eye catches John
Overs, sir, John Little, sir, Dick Jarrel, John Elwes, the Reverend Mr
Jones of Blewbury, Vulture Hopkins, Daniel Dancer--’

‘Give us Dancer, Wegg,’ said Mr Boffin.

With another stare at his comrade, Silas sought and found the place.

‘Page a hundred and nine, Mr Boffin. Chapter eight. Contents of chapter,
“His birth and estate. His garments and outward appearance. Miss Dancer
and her feminine graces. The Miser’s Mansion. The finding of a treasure.
The Story of the Mutton Pies. A Miser’s Idea of Death. Bob, the Miser’s
cur. Griffiths and his Master. How to turn a penny. A substitute for a
Fire. The Advantages of keeping a Snuff-box. The Miser dies without a
Shirt. The Treasures of a Dunghill--“’

‘Eh? What’s that?’ demanded Mr Boffin.

‘“The Treasures,” sir,’ repeated Silas, reading very distinctly, ‘“of a
Dunghill.” Mr Venus, sir, would you obleege with the snuffers?’ This, to
secure attention to his adding with his lips only, ‘Mounds!’

Mr Boffin drew an arm-chair into the space where he stood, and said,
seating himself and slyly rubbing his hands:

‘Give us Dancer.’

Mr Wegg pursued the biography of that eminent man through its various
phases of avarice and dirt, through Miss Dancer’s death on a sick
regimen of cold dumpling, and through Mr Dancer’s keeping his rags
together with a hayband, and warming his dinner by sitting upon it, down
to the consolatory incident of his dying naked in a sack. After which he
read on as follows:

‘“The house, or rather the heap of ruins, in which Mr Dancer lived, and
which at his death devolved to the right of Captain Holmes, was a most
miserable, decayed building, for it had not been repaired for more than
half a century.”’

(Here Mr Wegg eyes his comrade and the room in which they sat: which had
not been repaired for a long time.)

‘“But though poor in external structure, the ruinous fabric was very
rich in the interior. It took many weeks to explore its whole contents;
and Captain Holmes found it a very agreeable task to dive into the
miser’s secret hoards.”’

(Here Mr Wegg repeated ‘secret hoards’, and pegged his comrade again.)

‘“One of Mr Dancer’s richest escretoires was found to be a dungheap in
the cowhouse; a sum but little short of two thousand five hundred
pounds was contained in this rich piece of manure; and in an old jacket,
carefully tied, and strongly nailed down to the manger, in bank notes
and gold were found five hundred pounds more.”’

(Here Mr Wegg’s wooden leg started forward under the table, and slowly
elevated itself as he read on.)

‘“Several bowls were discovered filled with guineas and half-guineas;
and at different times on searching the corners of the house they found
various parcels of bank notes. Some were crammed into the crevices of
the wall”’;

(Here Mr Venus looked at the wall.)

‘“Bundles were hid under the cushions and covers of the chairs”’;

(Here Mr Venus looked under himself on the settle.)

‘“Some were reposing snugly at the back of the drawers; and notes
amounting to six hundred pounds were found neatly doubled up in the
inside of an old teapot. In the stable the Captain found jugs full of
old dollars and shillings. The chimney was not left unsearched, and paid
very well for the trouble; for in nineteen different holes, all filled
with soot, were found various sums of money, amounting together to more
than two hundred pounds.”’

On the way to this crisis Mr Wegg’s wooden leg had gradually elevated
itself more and more, and he had nudged Mr Venus with his opposite
elbow deeper and deeper, until at length the preservation of his balance
became incompatible with the two actions, and he now dropped over
sideways upon that gentleman, squeezing him against the settle’s edge.
Nor did either of the two, for some few seconds, make any effort to
recover himself; both remaining in a kind of pecuniary swoon.

But the sight of Mr Boffin sitting in the arm-chair hugging himself,
with his eyes upon the fire, acted as a restorative. Counterfeiting a
sneeze to cover their movements, Mr Wegg, with a spasmodic ‘Tish-ho!’
pulled himself and Mr Venus up in a masterly manner.

‘Let’s have some more,’ said Mr Boffin, hungrily.

‘John Elwes is the next, sir. Is it your pleasure to take John Elwes?’

‘Ah!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Let’s hear what John did.’

He did not appear to have hidden anything, so went off rather flatly.
But an exemplary lady named Wilcocks, who had stowed away gold and
silver in a pickle-pot in a clock-case, a canister-full of treasure in
a hole under her stairs, and a quantity of money in an old rat-trap,
revived the interest. To her succeeded another lady, claiming to be a
pauper, whose wealth was found wrapped up in little scraps of paper and
old rag. To her, another lady, apple-woman by trade, who had saved a
fortune of ten thousand pounds and hidden it ‘here and there, in cracks
and corners, behind bricks and under the flooring.’ To her, a French
gentleman, who had crammed up his chimney, rather to the detriment
of its drawing powers, ‘a leather valise, containing twenty thousand
francs, gold coins, and a large quantity of precious stones,’ as
discovered by a chimneysweep after his death. By these steps Mr Wegg
arrived at a concluding instance of the human Magpie:

‘Many years ago, there lived at Cambridge a miserly old couple of the
name of Jardine: they had two sons: the father was a perfect miser, and
at his death one thousand guineas were discovered secreted in his bed.
The two sons grew up as parsimonious as their sire. When about twenty
years of age, they commenced business at Cambridge as drapers, and
they continued there until their death. The establishment of the Messrs
Jardine was the most dirty of all the shops in Cambridge. Customers
seldom went in to purchase, except perhaps out of curiosity. The
brothers were most disreputable-looking beings; for, although surrounded
with gay apparel as their staple in trade, they wore the most filthy
rags themselves. It is said that they had no bed, and, to save the
expense of one, always slept on a bundle of packing-cloths under the
counter. In their housekeeping they were penurious in the extreme. A
joint of meat did not grace their board for twenty years. Yet when the
first of the brothers died, the other, much to his surprise, found large
sums of money which had been secreted even from him.’

‘There!’ cried Mr Boffin. ‘Even from him, you see! There was only two of
‘em, and yet one of ‘em hid from the other.’

Mr Venus, who since his introduction to the French gentleman, had been
stooping to peer up the chimney, had his attention recalled by the last
sentence, and took the liberty of repeating it.

‘Do you like it?’ asked Mr Boffin, turning suddenly.

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘Do you like what Wegg’s been a-reading?’

Mr Venus answered that he found it extremely interesting.

‘Then come again,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘and hear some more. Come when you
like; come the day after to-morrow, half an hour sooner. There’s plenty
more; there’s no end to it.’

Mr Venus expressed his acknowledgments and accepted the invitation.

‘It’s wonderful what’s been hid, at one time and another,’ said Mr
Boffin, ruminating; ‘truly wonderful.’

‘Meaning sir,’ observed Wegg, with a propitiatory face to draw him out,
and with another peg at his friend and brother, ‘in the way of money?’

‘Money,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Ah! And papers.’

Mr Wegg, in a languid transport, again dropped over on Mr Venus, and
again recovering himself, masked his emotions with a sneeze.

‘Tish-ho! Did you say papers too, sir? Been hidden, sir?’

‘Hidden and forgot,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Why the bookseller that sold me
the Wonderful Museum--where’s the Wonderful Museum?’ He was on his knees
on the floor in a moment, groping eagerly among the books.

‘Can I assist you, sir?’ asked Wegg.

‘No, I have got it; here it is,’ said Mr Boffin, dusting it with the
sleeve of his coat. ‘Wollume four. I know it was the fourth wollume,
that the bookseller read it to me out of. Look for it, Wegg.’

Silas took the book and turned the leaves.

‘Remarkable petrefaction, sir?’

‘No, that’s not it,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘It can’t have been a
petrefaction.’

‘Memoirs of General John Reid, commonly called The Walking Rushlight,
sir? With portrait?’

‘No, nor yet him,’ said Mr Boffin.

‘Remarkable case of a person who swallowed a crown-piece, sir?’

‘To hide it?’ asked Mr Boffin.

‘Why, no, sir,’ replied Wegg, consulting the text, ‘it appears to have
been done by accident. Oh! This next must be it. “Singular discovery of
a will, lost twenty-one years.”’

‘That’s it!’ cried Mr Boffin. ‘Read that.’

‘“A most extraordinary case,”’ read Silas Wegg aloud, ‘“was tried at
the last Maryborough assizes in Ireland. It was briefly this. Robert
Baldwin, in March 1782, made his will, in which he devised the lands now
in question, to the children of his youngest son; soon after which his
faculties failed him, and he became altogether childish and died, above
eighty years old. The defendant, the eldest son, immediately afterwards
gave out that his father had destroyed the will; and no will being
found, he entered into possession of the lands in question, and so
matters remained for twenty-one years, the whole family during all
that time believing that the father had died without a will. But after
twenty-one years the defendant’s wife died, and he very soon afterwards,
at the age of seventy-eight, married a very young woman: which caused
some anxiety to his two sons, whose poignant expressions of this feeling
so exasperated their father, that he in his resentment executed a will
to disinherit his eldest son, and in his fit of anger showed it to his
second son, who instantly determined to get at it, and destroy it, in
order to preserve the property to his brother. With this view, he broke
open his father’s desk, where he found--not his father’s will which he
sought after, but the will of his grandfather, which was then altogether
forgotten in the family.”’

‘There!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘See what men put away and forget, or mean to
destroy, and don’t!’ He then added in a slow tone, ‘As--ton--ish--ing!’
And as he rolled his eyes all round the room, Wegg and Venus likewise
rolled their eyes all round the room. And then Wegg, singly, fixed his
eyes on Mr Boffin looking at the fire again; as if he had a mind to
spring upon him and demand his thoughts or his life.

‘However, time’s up for to-night,’ said Mr Boffin, waving his hand after
a silence. ‘More, the day after to-morrow. Range the books upon the
shelves, Wegg. I dare say Mr Venus will be so kind as help you.’

While speaking, he thrust his hand into the breast of his outer coat,
and struggled with some object there that was too large to be got out
easily. What was the stupefaction of the friendly movers when this
object at last emerging, proved to be a much-dilapidated dark lantern!

Without at all noticing the effect produced by this little instrument,
Mr Boffin stood it on his knee, and, producing a box of matches,
deliberately lighted the candle in the lantern, blew out the kindled
match, and cast the end into the fire. ‘I’m going, Wegg,’ he then
announced, ‘to take a turn about the place and round the yard. I don’t
want you. Me and this same lantern have taken hundreds--thousands--of
such turns in our time together.’

‘But I couldn’t think, sir--not on any account, I couldn’t,’--Wegg was
politely beginning, when Mr Boffin, who had risen and was going towards
the door, stopped:

‘I have told you that I don’t want you, Wegg.’

Wegg looked intelligently thoughtful, as if that had not occurred to his
mind until he now brought it to bear on the circumstance. He had nothing
for it but to let Mr Boffin go out and shut the door behind him. But,
the instant he was on the other side of it, Wegg clutched Venus
with both hands, and said in a choking whisper, as if he were being
strangled:

‘Mr Venus, he must be followed, he must be watched, he mustn’t be lost
sight of for a moment.’

‘Why mustn’t he?’ asked Venus, also strangling.

‘Comrade, you might have noticed I was a little elewated in spirits when
you come in to-night. I’ve found something.’

‘What have you found?’ asked Venus, clutching him with both hands, so
that they stood interlocked like a couple of preposterous gladiators.

‘There’s no time to tell you now. I think he must have gone to look for
it. We must have an eye upon him instantly.’

Releasing each other, they crept to the door, opened it softly, and
peeped out. It was a cloudy night, and the black shadow of the Mounds
made the dark yard darker. ‘If not a double swindler,’ whispered Wegg,
‘why a dark lantern? We could have seen what he was about, if he had
carried a light one. Softly, this way.’

Cautiously along the path that was bordered by fragments of crockery set
in ashes, the two stole after him. They could hear him at his peculiar
trot, crushing the loose cinders as he went. ‘He knows the place by
heart,’ muttered Silas, ‘and don’t need to turn his lantern on, confound
him!’ But he did turn it on, almost in that same instant, and flashed
its light upon the first of the Mounds.

‘Is that the spot?’ asked Venus in a whisper.

‘He’s warm,’ said Silas in the same tone. ‘He’s precious warm. He’s
close. I think he must be going to look for it. What’s that he’s got in
his hand?’

‘A shovel,’ answered Venus. ‘And he knows how to use it, remember, fifty
times as well as either of us.’

‘If he looks for it and misses it, partner,’ suggested Wegg, ‘what shall
we do?’

‘First of all, wait till he does,’ said Venus.

Discreet advice too, for he darkened his lantern again, and the mound
turned black. After a few seconds, he turned the light on once more, and
was seen standing at the foot of the second mound, slowly raising the
lantern little by little until he held it up at arm’s length, as if he
were examining the condition of the whole surface.

‘That can’t be the spot too?’ said Venus.

‘No,’ said Wegg, ‘he’s getting cold.’

‘It strikes me,’ whispered Venus, ‘that he wants to find out whether any
one has been groping about there.’

‘Hush!’ returned Wegg, ‘he’s getting colder and colder.--Now he’s
freezing!’

This exclamation was elicited by his having turned the lantern off
again, and on again, and being visible at the foot of the third mound.

‘Why, he’s going up it!’ said Venus.

‘Shovel and all!’ said Wegg.

At a nimbler trot, as if the shovel over his shoulder stimulated him by
reviving old associations, Mr Boffin ascended the ‘serpentining walk’,
up the Mound which he had described to Silas Wegg on the occasion of
their beginning to decline and fall. On striking into it he turned his
lantern off. The two followed him, stooping low, so that their figures
might make no mark in relief against the sky when he should turn his
lantern on again. Mr Venus took the lead, towing Mr Wegg, in order that
his refractory leg might be promptly extricated from any pitfalls it
should dig for itself. They could just make out that the Golden Dustman
stopped to breathe. Of course they stopped too, instantly.

‘This is his own Mound,’ whispered Wegg, as he recovered his wind, ‘this
one.

‘Why all three are his own,’ returned Venus.

‘So he thinks; but he’s used to call this his own, because it’s the one
first left to him; the one that was his legacy when it was all he took
under the will.’

‘When he shows his light,’ said Venus, keeping watch upon his dusky
figure all the time, ‘drop lower and keep closer.’

He went on again, and they followed again. Gaining the top of the Mound,
he turned on his light--but only partially--and stood it on the ground.
A bare lopsided weatherbeaten pole was planted in the ashes there,
and had been there many a year. Hard by this pole, his lantern stood:
lighting a few feet of the lower part of it and a little of the ashy
surface around, and then casting off a purposeless little clear trail of
light into the air.

‘He can never be going to dig up the pole!’ whispered Venus as they
dropped low and kept close.

‘Perhaps it’s holler and full of something,’ whispered Wegg.

He was going to dig, with whatsoever object, for he tucked up his cuffs
and spat on his hands, and then went at it like an old digger as he
was. He had no design upon the pole, except that he measured a shovel’s
length from it before beginning, nor was it his purpose to dig deep.
Some dozen or so of expert strokes sufficed. Then, he stopped, looked
down into the cavity, bent over it, and took out what appeared to be an
ordinary case-bottle: one of those squat, high-shouldered, short-necked
glass bottles which the Dutchman is said to keep his Courage in. As soon
as he had done this, he turned off his lantern, and they could hear that
he was filling up the hole in the dark. The ashes being easily moved by
a skilful hand, the spies took this as a hint to make off in good time.
Accordingly, Mr Venus slipped past Mr Wegg and towed him down. But Mr
Wegg’s descent was not accomplished without some personal inconvenience,
for his self-willed leg sticking into the ashes about half way down, and
time pressing, Mr Venus took the liberty of hauling him from his tether
by the collar: which occasioned him to make the rest of the journey on
his back, with his head enveloped in the skirts of his coat, and his
wooden leg coming last, like a drag. So flustered was Mr Wegg by this
mode of travelling, that when he was set on the level ground with his
intellectual developments uppermost, he was quite unconscious of his
bearings, and had not the least idea where his place of residence was
to be found, until Mr Venus shoved him into it. Even then he staggered
round and round, weakly staring about him, until Mr Venus with a hard
brush brushed his senses into him and the dust out of him.

Mr Boffin came down leisurely, for this brushing process had been well
accomplished, and Mr Venus had had time to take his breath, before he
reappeared. That he had the bottle somewhere about him could not be
doubted; where, was not so clear. He wore a large rough coat, buttoned
over, and it might be in any one of half a dozen pockets.

‘What’s the matter, Wegg?’ said Mr Boffin. ‘You are as pale as a
candle.’

Mr Wegg replied, with literal exactness, that he felt as if he had had a
turn.

‘Bile,’ said Mr Boffin, blowing out the light in the lantern, shutting
it up, and stowing it away in the breast of his coat as before. ‘Are you
subject to bile, Wegg?’

Mr Wegg again replied, with strict adherence to truth, that he didn’t
think he had ever had a similar sensation in his head, to anything like
the same extent.

‘Physic yourself to-morrow, Wegg,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘to be in order
for next night. By-the-by, this neighbourhood is going to have a loss,
Wegg.’

‘A loss, sir?’

‘Going to lose the Mounds.’

The friendly movers made such an obvious effort not to look at one
another, that they might as well have stared at one another with all
their might.

‘Have you parted with them, Mr Boffin?’ asked Silas.

‘Yes; they’re going. Mine’s as good as gone already.’

‘You mean the little one of the three, with the pole atop, sir.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Boffin, rubbing his ear in his old way, with that new
touch of craftiness added to it. ‘It has fetched a penny. It’ll begin to
be carted off to-morrow.’

‘Have you been out to take leave of your old friend, sir?’ asked Silas,
jocosely.

‘No,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘What the devil put that in your head?’

He was so sudden and rough, that Wegg, who had been hovering closer
and closer to his skirts, despatching the back of his hand on exploring
expeditions in search of the bottle’s surface, retired two or three
paces.

‘No offence, sir,’ said Wegg, humbly. ‘No offence.’

Mr Boffin eyed him as a dog might eye another dog who wanted his bone;
and actually retorted with a low growl, as the dog might have retorted.

‘Good-night,’ he said, after having sunk into a moody silence, with
his hands clasped behind him, and his eyes suspiciously wandering about
Wegg.--‘No! stop there. I know the way out, and I want no light.’

Avarice, and the evening’s legends of avarice, and the inflammatory
effect of what he had seen, and perhaps the rush of his ill-conditioned
blood to his brain in his descent, wrought Silas Wegg to such a pitch of
insatiable appetite, that when the door closed he made a swoop at it and
drew Venus along with him.

‘He mustn’t go,’ he cried. ‘We mustn’t let him go? He has got that
bottle about him. We must have that bottle.’

‘Why, you wouldn’t take it by force?’ said Venus, restraining him.

‘Wouldn’t I? Yes I would. I’d take it by any force, I’d have it at any
price! Are you so afraid of one old man as to let him go, you coward?’

‘I am so afraid of you, as not to let YOU go,’ muttered Venus, sturdily,
clasping him in his arms.

‘Did you hear him?’ retorted Wegg. ‘Did you hear him say that he was
resolved to disappoint us? Did you hear him say, you cur, that he was
going to have the Mounds cleared off, when no doubt the whole place will
be rummaged? If you haven’t the spirit of a mouse to defend your rights,
I have. Let me go after him.’

As in his wildness he was making a strong struggle for it, Mr Venus
deemed it expedient to lift him, throw him, and fall with him; well
knowing that, once down, he would not be up again easily with his wooden
leg. So they both rolled on the floor, and, as they did so, Mr Boffin
shut the gate.



Chapter 7

THE FRIENDLY MOVE TAKES UP A STRONG POSITION


The friendly movers sat upright on the floor, panting and eyeing one
another, after Mr Boffin had slammed the gate and gone away. In the weak
eyes of Venus, and in every reddish dust-coloured hair in his shock of
hair, there was a marked distrust of Wegg and an alertness to fly at him
on perceiving the smallest occasion. In the hard-grained face of Wegg,
and in his stiff knotty figure (he looked like a German wooden toy),
there was expressed a politic conciliation, which had no spontaneity in
it. Both were flushed, flustered, and rumpled, by the late scuffle; and
Wegg, in coming to the ground, had received a humming knock on the back
of his devoted head, which caused him still to rub it with an air of
having been highly--but disagreeably--astonished. Each was silent for
some time, leaving it to the other to begin.

‘Brother,’ said Wegg, at length breaking the silence, ‘you were right,
and I was wrong. I forgot myself.’

Mr Venus knowingly cocked his shock of hair, as rather thinking Mr Wegg
had remembered himself, in respect of appearing without any disguise.

‘But comrade,’ pursued Wegg, ‘it was never your lot to know Miss
Elizabeth, Master George, Aunt Jane, nor Uncle Parker.’

Mr Venus admitted that he had never known those distinguished persons,
and added, in effect, that he had never so much as desired the honour of
their acquaintance.

‘Don’t say that, comrade!’ retorted Wegg: ‘No, don’t say that! Because,
without having known them, you never can fully know what it is to be
stimilated to frenzy by the sight of the Usurper.’

Offering these excusatory words as if they reflected great credit on
himself, Mr Wegg impelled himself with his hands towards a chair in
a corner of the room, and there, after a variety of awkward gambols,
attained a perpendicular position. Mr Venus also rose.

‘Comrade,’ said Wegg, ‘take a seat. Comrade, what a speaking countenance
is yours!’

Mr Venus involuntarily smoothed his countenance, and looked at his hand,
as if to see whether any of its speaking properties came off.

‘For clearly do I know, mark you,’ pursued Wegg, pointing his words
with his forefinger, ‘clearly do I know what question your expressive
features puts to me.’

‘What question?’ said Venus.

‘The question,’ returned Wegg, with a sort of joyful affability, ‘why
I didn’t mention sooner, that I had found something. Says your speaking
countenance to me: “Why didn’t you communicate that, when I first come
in this evening? Why did you keep it back till you thought Mr Boffin had
come to look for the article?” Your speaking countenance,’ said Wegg,
‘puts it plainer than language. Now, you can’t read in my face what
answer I give?’

‘No, I can’t,’ said Venus.

‘I knew it! And why not?’ returned Wegg, with the same joyful candour.
‘Because I lay no claims to a speaking countenance. Because I am well
aware of my deficiencies. All men are not gifted alike. But I can answer
in words. And in what words? These. I wanted to give you a delightful
sap--pur--IZE!’

Having thus elongated and emphasized the word Surprise, Mr Wegg shook
his friend and brother by both hands, and then clapped him on both
knees, like an affectionate patron who entreated him not to mention so
small a service as that which it had been his happy privilege to render.

‘Your speaking countenance,’ said Wegg, ‘being answered to its
satisfaction, only asks then, “What have you found?” Why, I hear it say
the words!’

‘Well?’ retorted Venus snappishly, after waiting in vain. ‘If you hear
it say the words, why don’t you answer it?’

‘Hear me out!’ said Wegg. ‘I’m a-going to. Hear me out! Man and brother,
partner in feelings equally with undertakings and actions, I have found
a cash-box.’

‘Where?’

‘--Hear me out!’ said Wegg. (He tried to reserve whatever he could, and,
whenever disclosure was forced upon him, broke into a radiant gush of
Hear me out.) ‘On a certain day, sir--’

‘When?’ said Venus bluntly.

‘N--no,’ returned Wegg, shaking his head at once observantly,
thoughtfully, and playfully. ‘No, sir! That’s not your expressive
countenance which asks that question. That’s your voice; merely your
voice. To proceed. On a certain day, sir, I happened to be walking in
the yard--taking my lonely round--for in the words of a friend of my own
family, the author of All’s Well arranged as a duett:

     “Deserted, as you will remember Mr Venus, by the waning
     moon,
     When stars, it will occur to you before I mention it, proclaim
     night’s cheerless noon,
     On tower, fort, or tented ground,
     The sentry walks his lonely round,
     The sentry walks:”

--under those circumstances, sir, I happened to be walking in the yard
early one afternoon, and happened to have an iron rod in my hand, with
which I have been sometimes accustomed to beguile the monotony of a
literary life, when I struck it against an object not necessary to
trouble you by naming--’

‘It is necessary. What object?’ demanded Venus, in a wrathful tone.

‘--Hear me out!’ said Wegg. ‘The Pump.--When I struck it against the
Pump, and found, not only that the top was loose and opened with a lid,
but that something in it rattled. That something, comrade, I discovered
to be a small flat oblong cash-box. Shall I say it was disappointingly
light?’

‘There were papers in it,’ said Venus.

‘There your expressive countenance speaks indeed!’ cried Wegg. ‘A
paper. The box was locked, tied up, and sealed, and on the outside was
a parchment label, with the writing, “MY WILL, JOHN HARMON, TEMPORARILY
DEPOSITED HERE.”’

‘We must know its contents,’ said Venus.

‘--Hear me out!’ cried Wegg. ‘I said so, and I broke the box open.’

‘Without coming to me!’ exclaimed Venus.

‘Exactly so, sir!’ returned Wegg, blandly and buoyantly. ‘I see I take
you with me! Hear, hear, hear! Resolved, as your discriminating good
sense perceives, that if you was to have a sap--pur--IZE, it should be
a complete one! Well, sir. And so, as you have honoured me by
anticipating, I examined the document. Regularly executed, regularly
witnessed, very short. Inasmuch as he has never made friends, and has
ever had a rebellious family, he, John Harmon, gives to Nicodemus Boffin
the Little Mound, which is quite enough for him, and gives the whole
rest and residue of his property to the Crown.’

‘The date of the will that has been proved, must be looked to,’ remarked
Venus. ‘It may be later than this one.’

‘--Hear me out!’ cried Wegg. ‘I said so. I paid a shilling (never mind
your sixpence of it) to look up that will. Brother, that will is dated
months before this will. And now, as a fellow-man, and as a partner in a
friendly move,’ added Wegg, benignantly taking him by both hands again,
and clapping him on both knees again, ‘say have I completed my labour of
love to your perfect satisfaction, and are you sap--pur--IZED?’

Mr Venus contemplated his fellow-man and partner with doubting eyes, and
then rejoined stiffly:

‘This is great news indeed, Mr Wegg. There’s no denying it. But I could
have wished you had told it me before you got your fright to-night, and
I could have wished you had ever asked me as your partner what we were
to do, before you thought you were dividing a responsibility.’

‘--Hear me out!’ cried Wegg. ‘I knew you was a-going to say so. But
alone I bore the anxiety, and alone I’ll bear the blame!’ This with an
air of great magnanimity.

‘No,’ said Venus. ‘Let’s see this will and this box.’

‘Do I understand, brother,’ returned Wegg with considerable reluctance,
‘that it is your wish to see this will and this--?’

Mr Venus smote the table with his hand.

‘--Hear me out!’ said Wegg. ‘Hear me out! I’ll go and fetch ‘em.’

After being some time absent, as if in his covetousness he could hardly
make up his mind to produce the treasure to his partner, he returned
with an old leathern hat-box, into which he had put the other box,
for the better preservation of commonplace appearances, and for the
disarming of suspicion. ‘But I don’t half like opening it here,’ said
Silas in a low voice, looking around: ‘he might come back, he may not be
gone; we don’t know what he may be up to, after what we’ve seen.’

‘There’s something in that,’ assented Venus. ‘Come to my place.’

Jealous of the custody of the box, and yet fearful of opening it under
the existing circumstances, Wegg hesitated. ‘Come, I tell you,’ repeated
Venus, chafing, ‘to my place.’ Not very well seeing his way to a
refusal, Mr Wegg then rejoined in a gush, ‘--Hear me out!--Certainly.’
So he locked up the Bower and they set forth: Mr Venus taking his arm,
and keeping it with remarkable tenacity.

They found the usual dim light burning in the window of Mr Venus’s
establishment, imperfectly disclosing to the public the usual pair
of preserved frogs, sword in hand, with their point of honour still
unsettled. Mr Venus had closed his shop door on coming out, and now
opened it with the key and shut it again as soon as they were within;
but not before he had put up and barred the shutters of the shop window.
‘No one can get in without being let in,’ said he then, ‘and we couldn’t
be more snug than here.’ So he raked together the yet warm cinders in
the rusty grate, and made a fire, and trimmed the candle on the little
counter. As the fire cast its flickering gleams here and there upon the
dark greasy walls; the Hindoo baby, the African baby, the articulated
English baby, the assortment of skulls, and the rest of the collection,
came starting to their various stations as if they had all been out,
like their master and were punctual in a general rendezvous to assist
at the secret. The French gentleman had grown considerably since Mr Wegg
last saw him, being now accommodated with a pair of legs and a head,
though his arms were yet in abeyance. To whomsoever the head had
originally belonged, Silas Wegg would have regarded it as a personal
favour if he had not cut quite so many teeth.

Silas took his seat in silence on the wooden box before the fire, and
Venus dropping into his low chair produced from among his skeleton
hands, his tea-tray and tea-cups, and put the kettle on. Silas inwardly
approved of these preparations, trusting they might end in Mr Venus’s
diluting his intellect.

‘Now, sir,’ said Venus, ‘all is safe and quiet. Let us see this
discovery.’

With still reluctant hands, and not without several glances towards the
skeleton hands, as if he mistrusted that a couple of them might spring
forth and clutch the document, Wegg opened the hat-box and revealed the
cash-box, opened the cash-box and revealed the will. He held a corner
of it tight, while Venus, taking hold of another corner, searchingly and
attentively read it.

‘Was I correct in my account of it, partner?’ said Mr Wegg at length.

‘Partner, you were,’ said Mr Venus.

Mr Wegg thereupon made an easy, graceful movement, as though he would
fold it up; but Mr Venus held on by his corner.

‘No, sir,’ said Mr Venus, winking his weak eyes and shaking his head.
‘No, partner. The question is now brought up, who is going to take care
of this. Do you know who is going to take care of this, partner?’

‘I am,’ said Wegg.

‘Oh dear no, partner,’ retorted Venus. ‘That’s a mistake. I am. Now look
here, Mr Wegg. I don’t want to have any words with you, and still less
do I want to have any anatomical pursuits with you.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Wegg, quickly.

‘I mean, partner,’ replied Venus, slowly, ‘that it’s hardly possible
for a man to feel in a more amiable state towards another man than I
do towards you at this present moment. But I am on my own ground, I am
surrounded by the trophies of my art, and my tools is very handy.’

‘What do you mean, Mr Venus?’ asked Wegg again.

‘I am surrounded, as I have observed,’ said Mr Venus, placidly, ‘by
the trophies of my art. They are numerous, my stock of human warious is
large, the shop is pretty well crammed, and I don’t just now want any
more trophies of my art. But I like my art, and I know how to exercise
my art.’

‘No man better,’ assented Mr Wegg, with a somewhat staggered air.

‘There’s the Miscellanies of several human specimens,’ said Venus,
‘(though you mightn’t think it) in the box on which you’re sitting.
There’s the Miscellanies of several human specimens, in the lovely
compo-one behind the door’; with a nod towards the French gentleman. ‘It
still wants a pair of arms. I DON’T say that I’m in any hurry for ‘em.’

‘You must be wandering in your mind, partner,’ Silas remonstrated.

‘You’ll excuse me if I wander,’ returned Venus; ‘I am sometimes rather
subject to it. I like my art, and I know how to exercise my art, and I
mean to have the keeping of this document.’

‘But what has that got to do with your art, partner?’ asked Wegg, in an
insinuating tone.

Mr Venus winked his chronically-fatigued eyes both at once, and
adjusting the kettle on the fire, remarked to himself, in a hollow
voice, ‘She’ll bile in a couple of minutes.’

Silas Wegg glanced at the kettle, glanced at the shelves, glanced at the
French gentleman behind the door, and shrank a little as he glanced at
Mr Venus winking his red eyes, and feeling in his waistcoat pocket--as
for a lancet, say--with his unoccupied hand. He and Venus were
necessarily seated close together, as each held a corner of the
document, which was but a common sheet of paper.

‘Partner,’ said Wegg, even more insinuatingly than before, ‘I propose
that we cut it in half, and each keep a half.’

Venus shook his shock of hair, as he replied, ‘It wouldn’t do to
mutilate it, partner. It might seem to be cancelled.’

‘Partner,’ said Wegg, after a silence, during which they had
contemplated one another, ‘don’t your speaking countenance say that
you’re a-going to suggest a middle course?’

Venus shook his shock of hair as he replied, ‘Partner, you have kept
this paper from me once. You shall never keep it from me again. I offer
you the box and the label to take care of, but I’ll take care of the
paper.’

Silas hesitated a little longer, and then suddenly releasing his corner,
and resuming his buoyant and benignant tone, exclaimed, ‘What’s life
without trustfulness! What’s a fellow-man without honour! You’re welcome
to it, partner, in a spirit of trust and confidence.’

Continuing to wink his red eyes both together--but in a self-communing
way, and without any show of triumph--Mr Venus folded the paper now left
in his hand, and locked it in a drawer behind him, and pocketed the key.
He then proposed ‘A cup of tea, partner?’ To which Mr Wegg returned,
‘Thank’ee, partner,’ and the tea was made and poured out.

‘Next,’ said Venus, blowing at his tea in his saucer, and looking over
it at his confidential friend, ‘comes the question, What’s the course to
be pursued?’

On this head, Silas Wegg had much to say. Silas had to say That, he
would beg to remind his comrade, brother, and partner, of the impressive
passages they had read that evening; of the evident parallel in Mr
Boffin’s mind between them and the late owner of the Bower, and the
present circumstances of the Bower; of the bottle; and of the box. That,
the fortunes of his brother and comrade, and of himself were evidently
made, inasmuch as they had but to put their price upon this document,
and get that price from the minion of fortune and the worm of the hour:
who now appeared to be less of a minion and more of a worm than had been
previously supposed. That, he considered it plain that such price was
stateable in a single expressive word, and that the word was, ‘Halves!’
That, the question then arose when ‘Halves!’ should be called. That,
here he had a plan of action to recommend, with a conditional clause.
That, the plan of action was that they should lie by with patience;
that, they should allow the Mounds to be gradually levelled and cleared
away, while retaining to themselves their present opportunity of
watching the process--which would be, he conceived, to put the trouble
and cost of daily digging and delving upon somebody else, while they
might nightly turn such complete disturbance of the dust to the account
of their own private investigations--and that, when the Mounds were
gone, and they had worked those chances for their own joint benefit
solely, they should then, and not before, explode on the minion and
worm. But here came the conditional clause, and to this he entreated the
special attention of his comrade, brother, and partner. It was not to
be borne that the minion and worm should carry off any of that property
which was now to be regarded as their own property. When he, Mr Wegg,
had seen the minion surreptitiously making off with that bottle, and its
precious contents unknown, he had looked upon him in the light of a mere
robber, and, as such, would have despoiled him of his ill-gotten gain,
but for the judicious interference of his comrade, brother, and partner.
Therefore, the conditional clause he proposed was, that, if the minion
should return in his late sneaking manner, and if, being closely
watched, he should be found to possess himself of anything, no matter
what, the sharp sword impending over his head should be instantly shown
him, he should be strictly examined as to what he knew or suspected,
should be severely handled by them his masters, and should be kept in
a state of abject moral bondage and slavery until the time when they
should see fit to permit him to purchase his freedom at the price of
half his possessions. If, said Mr Wegg by way of peroration, he had
erred in saying only ‘Halves!’ he trusted to his comrade, brother, and
partner not to hesitate to set him right, and to reprove his weakness.
It might be more according to the rights of things, to say
Two-thirds; it might be more according to the rights of things, to say
Three-fourths. On those points he was ever open to correction.

Mr Venus, having wafted his attention to this discourse over three
successive saucers of tea, signified his concurrence in the views
advanced. Inspirited hereby, Mr Wegg extended his right hand, and
declared it to be a hand which never yet. Without entering into more
minute particulars. Mr Venus, sticking to his tea, briefly professed his
belief as polite forms required of him, that it WAS a hand which never
yet. But contented himself with looking at it, and did not take it to
his bosom.

‘Brother,’ said Wegg, when this happy understanding was established, ‘I
should like to ask you something. You remember the night when I first
looked in here, and found you floating your powerful mind in tea?’

Still swilling tea, Mr Venus nodded assent.

‘And there you sit, sir,’ pursued Wegg with an air of thoughtful
admiration, ‘as if you had never left off! There you sit, sir, as if you
had an unlimited capacity of assimilating the flagrant article! There
you sit, sir, in the midst of your works, looking as if you’d been
called upon for Home, Sweet Home, and was obleeging the company!

     “A exile from home splendour dazzles in vain,
     O give you your lowly Preparations again,
     The birds stuffed so sweetly that can’t be expected to come at
     your call,
     Give you these with the peace of mind dearer than all.
     Home, Home, Home, sweet Home!”

--Be it ever,’ added Mr Wegg in prose as he glanced about the shop,
‘ever so ghastly, all things considered there’s no place like it.’

‘You said you’d like to ask something; but you haven’t asked it,’
remarked Venus, very unsympathetic in manner.

‘Your peace of mind,’ said Wegg, offering condolence, ‘your peace of
mind was in a poor way that night. HOW’S it going on? IS it looking up
at all?’

‘She does not wish,’ replied Mr Venus with a comical mixture of
indignant obstinacy and tender melancholy, ‘to regard herself, nor yet
to be regarded, in that particular light. There’s no more to be said.’

‘Ah, dear me, dear me!’ exclaimed Wegg with a sigh, but eyeing him while
pretending to keep him company in eyeing the fire, ‘such is Woman! And
I remember you said that night, sitting there as I sat here--said that
night when your peace of mind was first laid low, that you had taken an
interest in these very affairs. Such is coincidence!’

‘Her father,’ rejoined Venus, and then stopped to swallow more tea, ‘her
father was mixed up in them.’

‘You didn’t mention her name, sir, I think?’ observed Wegg, pensively.
‘No, you didn’t mention her name that night.’

‘Pleasant Riderhood.’

‘In--deed!’ cried Wegg. ‘Pleasant Riderhood. There’s something moving in
the name. Pleasant. Dear me! Seems to express what she might have
been, if she hadn’t made that unpleasant remark--and what she ain’t,
in consequence of having made it. Would it at all pour balm into your
wounds, Mr Venus, to inquire how you came acquainted with her?’

‘I was down at the water-side,’ said Venus, taking another gulp of
tea and mournfully winking at the fire--‘looking for parrots’--taking
another gulp and stopping.

Mr Wegg hinted, to jog his attention: ‘You could hardly have been out
parrot-shooting, in the British climate, sir?’

‘No, no, no,’ said Venus fretfully. ‘I was down at the water-side,
looking for parrots brought home by sailors, to buy for stuffing.’

‘Ay, ay, ay, sir!’

‘--And looking for a nice pair of rattlesnakes, to articulate for a
Museum--when I was doomed to fall in with her and deal with her. It was
just at the time of that discovery in the river. Her father had seen the
discovery being towed in the river. I made the popularity of the subject
a reason for going back to improve the acquaintance, and I have never
since been the man I was. My very bones is rendered flabby by brooding
over it. If they could be brought to me loose, to sort, I should hardly
have the face to claim ‘em as mine. To such an extent have I fallen off
under it.’

Mr Wegg, less interested than he had been, glanced at one particular
shelf in the dark.

‘Why I remember, Mr Venus,’ he said in a tone of friendly commiseration
‘(for I remember every word that falls from you, sir), I remember that
you said that night, you had got up there--and then your words was,
“Never mind.”’

‘--The parrot that I bought of her,’ said Venus, with a despondent rise
and fall of his eyes. ‘Yes; there it lies on its side, dried up; except
for its plumage, very like myself. I’ve never had the heart to prepare
it, and I never shall have now.’

With a disappointed face, Silas mentally consigned this parrot to
regions more than tropical, and, seeming for the time to have lost
his power of assuming an interest in the woes of Mr Venus, fell to
tightening his wooden leg as a preparation for departure: its gymnastic
performances of that evening having severely tried its constitution.

After Silas had left the shop, hat-box in hand, and had left Mr Venus
to lower himself to oblivion-point with the requisite weight of tea, it
greatly preyed on his ingenuous mind that he had taken this artist into
partnership at all. He bitterly felt that he had overreached himself in
the beginning, by grasping at Mr Venus’s mere straws of hints, now shown
to be worthless for his purpose. Casting about for ways and means of
dissolving the connexion without loss of money, reproaching himself for
having been betrayed into an avowal of his secret, and complimenting
himself beyond measure on his purely accidental good luck, he beguiled
the distance between Clerkenwell and the mansion of the Golden Dustman.

For, Silas Wegg felt it to be quite out of the question that he could
lay his head upon his pillow in peace, without first hovering over
Mr Boffin’s house in the superior character of its Evil Genius. Power
(unless it be the power of intellect or virtue) has ever the greatest
attraction for the lowest natures; and the mere defiance of the
unconscious house-front, with his power to strip the roof off the
inhabiting family like the roof of a house of cards, was a treat which
had a charm for Silas Wegg.

As he hovered on the opposite side of the street, exulting, the carriage
drove up.

‘There’ll shortly be an end of YOU,’ said Wegg, threatening it with the
hat-box. ‘YOUR varnish is fading.’

Mrs Boffin descended and went in.

‘Look out for a fall, my Lady Dustwoman,’ said Wegg.

Bella lightly descended, and ran in after her.

‘How brisk we are!’ said Wegg. ‘You won’t run so gaily to your old
shabby home, my girl. You’ll have to go there, though.’

A little while, and the Secretary came out.

‘I was passed over for you,’ said Wegg. ‘But you had better provide
yourself with another situation, young man.’

Mr Boffin’s shadow passed upon the blinds of three large windows as he
trotted down the room, and passed again as he went back.

‘Yoop!’ cried Wegg. ‘You’re there, are you? Where’s the bottle? You
would give your bottle for my box, Dustman!’

Having now composed his mind for slumber, he turned homeward. Such
was the greed of the fellow, that his mind had shot beyond halves,
two-thirds, three-fourths, and gone straight to spoliation of the whole.
‘Though that wouldn’t quite do,’ he considered, growing cooler as he got
away. ‘That’s what would happen to him if he didn’t buy us up. We should
get nothing by that.’

We so judge others by ourselves, that it had never come into his head
before, that he might not buy us up, and might prove honest, and prefer
to be poor. It caused him a slight tremor as it passed; but a very
slight one, for the idle thought was gone directly.

‘He’s grown too fond of money for that,’ said Wegg; ‘he’s grown too fond
of money.’ The burden fell into a strain or tune as he stumped along the
pavements. All the way home he stumped it out of the rattling streets,
PIANO with his own foot, and FORTE with his wooden leg, ‘He’s GROWN too
FOND of MONEY for THAT, he’s GROWN too FOND of MONEY.’

Even next day Silas soothed himself with this melodious strain, when he
was called out of bed at daybreak, to set open the yard-gate and admit
the train of carts and horses that came to carry off the little Mound.
And all day long, as he kept unwinking watch on the slow process which
promised to protract itself through many days and weeks, whenever
(to save himself from being choked with dust) he patrolled a little
cinderous beat he established for the purpose, without taking his eyes
from the diggers, he still stumped to the tune: He’s GROWN too FOND of
MONEY for THAT, he’s GROWN too FOND of MONEY.’



Chapter 8

THE END OF A LONG JOURNEY


The train of carts and horses came and went all day from dawn to
nightfall, making little or no daily impression on the heap of ashes,
though, as the days passed on, the heap was seen to be slowly melting.
My lords and gentlemen and honourable boards, when you in the course
of your dust-shovelling and cinder-raking have piled up a mountain of
pretentious failure, you must off with your honourable coats for the
removal of it, and fall to the work with the power of all the queen’s
horses and all the queen’s men, or it will come rushing down and bury us
alive.

Yes, verily, my lords and gentlemen and honourable boards, adapting your
Catechism to the occasion, and by God’s help so you must. For when we
have got things to the pass that with an enormous treasure at disposal
to relieve the poor, the best of the poor detest our mercies, hide their
heads from us, and shame us by starving to death in the midst of us, it
is a pass impossible of prosperity, impossible of continuance. It may
not be so written in the Gospel according to Podsnappery; you may not
‘find these words’ for the text of a sermon, in the Returns of the Board
of Trade; but they have been the truth since the foundations of the
universe were laid, and they will be the truth until the foundations of
the universe are shaken by the Builder. This boastful handiwork of
ours, which fails in its terrors for the professional pauper, the sturdy
breaker of windows and the rampant tearer of clothes, strikes with a
cruel and a wicked stab at the stricken sufferer, and is a horror to
the deserving and unfortunate. We must mend it, lords and gentlemen and
honourable boards, or in its own evil hour it will mar every one of us.

Old Betty Higden fared upon her pilgrimage as many ruggedly honest
creatures, women and men, fare on their toiling way along the roads
of life. Patiently to earn a spare bare living, and quietly to die,
untouched by workhouse hands--this was her highest sublunary hope.

Nothing had been heard of her at Mr Boffin’s house since she trudged
off. The weather had been hard and the roads had been bad, and her
spirit was up. A less stanch spirit might have been subdued by such
adverse influences; but the loan for her little outfit was in no part
repaid, and it had gone worse with her than she had foreseen, and she
was put upon proving her case and maintaining her independence.

Faithful soul! When she had spoken to the Secretary of that ‘deadness
that steals over me at times’, her fortitude had made too little of it.
Oftener and ever oftener, it came stealing over her; darker and ever
darker, like the shadow of advancing Death. That the shadow should
be deep as it came on, like the shadow of an actual presence, was in
accordance with the laws of the physical world, for all the Light that
shone on Betty Higden lay beyond Death.

The poor old creature had taken the upward course of the river Thames as
her general track; it was the track in which her last home lay, and of
which she had last had local love and knowledge. She had hovered for a
little while in the near neighbourhood of her abandoned dwelling, and
had sold, and knitted and sold, and gone on. In the pleasant towns of
Chertsey, Walton, Kingston, and Staines, her figure came to be quite
well known for some short weeks, and then again passed on.

She would take her stand in market-places, where there were such things,
on market days; at other times, in the busiest (that was seldom very
busy) portion of the little quiet High Street; at still other times she
would explore the outlying roads for great houses, and would ask leave
at the Lodge to pass in with her basket, and would not often get it. But
ladies in carriages would frequently make purchases from her trifling
stock, and were usually pleased with her bright eyes and her hopeful
speech. In these and her clean dress originated a fable that she was
well to do in the world: one might say, for her station, rich. As making
a comfortable provision for its subject which costs nobody anything,
this class of fable has long been popular.

In those pleasant little towns on Thames, you may hear the fall of
the water over the weirs, or even, in still weather, the rustle of the
rushes; and from the bridge you may see the young river, dimpled like a
young child, playfully gliding away among the trees, unpolluted by the
defilements that lie in wait for it on its course, and as yet out of
hearing of the deep summons of the sea. It were too much to pretend that
Betty Higden made out such thoughts; no; but she heard the tender river
whispering to many like herself, ‘Come to me, come to me! When the cruel
shame and terror you have so long fled from, most beset you, come to me!
I am the Relieving Officer appointed by eternal ordinance to do my work;
I am not held in estimation according as I shirk it. My breast is softer
than the pauper-nurse’s; death in my arms is peacefuller than among the
pauper-wards. Come to me!’

There was abundant place for gentler fancies too, in her untutored mind.
Those gentlefolks and their children inside those fine houses, could
they think, as they looked out at her, what it was to be really hungry,
really cold? Did they feel any of the wonder about her, that she felt
about them? Bless the dear laughing children! If they could have seen
sick Johnny in her arms, would they have cried for pity? If they could
have seen dead Johnny on that little bed, would they have understood it?
Bless the dear children for his sake, anyhow! So with the humbler houses
in the little street, the inner firelight shining on the panes as the
outer twilight darkened. When the families gathered in-doors there, for
the night, it was only a foolish fancy to feel as if it were a little
hard in them to close the shutter and blacken the flame. So with the
lighted shops, and speculations whether their masters and mistresses
taking tea in a perspective of back-parlour--not so far within but that
the flavour of tea and toast came out, mingled with the glow of light,
into the street--ate or drank or wore what they sold, with the greater
relish because they dealt in it. So with the churchyard on a branch of
the solitary way to the night’s sleeping-place. ‘Ah me! The dead and
I seem to have it pretty much to ourselves in the dark and in this
weather! But so much the better for all who are warmly housed at home.’
The poor soul envied no one in bitterness, and grudged no one anything.

But, the old abhorrence grew stronger on her as she grew weaker, and
it found more sustaining food than she did in her wanderings. Now, she
would light upon the shameful spectacle of some desolate creature--or
some wretched ragged groups of either sex, or of both sexes, with
children among them, huddled together like the smaller vermin for
a little warmth--lingering and lingering on a doorstep, while the
appointed evader of the public trust did his dirty office of trying to
weary them out and so get rid of them. Now, she would light upon some
poor decent person, like herself, going afoot on a pilgrimage of
many weary miles to see some worn-out relative or friend who had been
charitably clutched off to a great blank barren Union House, as far from
old home as the County Jail (the remoteness of which is always its worst
punishment for small rural offenders), and in its dietary, and in
its lodging, and in its tending of the sick, a much more penal
establishment. Sometimes she would hear a newspaper read out, and would
learn how the Registrar General cast up the units that had within the
last week died of want and of exposure to the weather: for which that
Recording Angel seemed to have a regular fixed place in his sum, as if
they were its halfpence. All such things she would hear discussed, as
we, my lords and gentlemen and honourable boards, in our unapproachable
magnificence never hear them, and from all such things she would fly
with the wings of raging Despair.

This is not to be received as a figure of speech. Old Betty Higden
however tired, however footsore, would start up and be driven away
by her awakened horror of falling into the hands of Charity. It is a
remarkable Christian improvement, to have made a pursuing Fury of the
Good Samaritan; but it was so in this case, and it is a type of many,
many, many.

Two incidents united to intensify the old unreasoning
abhorrence--granted in a previous place to be unreasoning, because the
people always are unreasoning, and invariably make a point of producing
all their smoke without fire.

One day she was sitting in a market-place on a bench outside an inn,
with her little wares for sale, when the deadness that she strove
against came over her so heavily that the scene departed from before
her eyes; when it returned, she found herself on the ground, her head
supported by some good-natured market-women, and a little crowd about
her.

‘Are you better now, mother?’ asked one of the women. ‘Do you think you
can do nicely now?’

‘Have I been ill then?’ asked old Betty.

‘You have had a faint like,’ was the answer, ‘or a fit. It ain’t that
you’ve been a-struggling, mother, but you’ve been stiff and numbed.’

‘Ah!’ said Betty, recovering her memory. ‘It’s the numbness. Yes. It
comes over me at times.’

Was it gone? the women asked her.

‘It’s gone now,’ said Betty. ‘I shall be stronger than I was afore.
Many thanks to ye, my dears, and when you come to be as old as I am, may
others do as much for you!’

They assisted her to rise, but she could not stand yet, and they
supported her when she sat down again upon the bench.

‘My head’s a bit light, and my feet are a bit heavy,’ said old Betty,
leaning her face drowsily on the breast of the woman who had spoken
before. ‘They’ll both come nat’ral in a minute. There’s nothing more the
matter.’

‘Ask her,’ said some farmers standing by, who had come out from their
market-dinner, ‘who belongs to her.’

‘Are there any folks belonging to you, mother?’ said the woman.

‘Yes sure,’ answered Betty. ‘I heerd the gentleman say it, but I
couldn’t answer quick enough. There’s plenty belonging to me. Don’t ye
fear for me, my dear.’

‘But are any of ‘em near here?’ said the men’s voices; the women’s
voices chiming in when it was said, and prolonging the strain.

‘Quite near enough,’ said Betty, rousing herself. ‘Don’t ye be afeard
for me, neighbours.’

‘But you are not fit to travel. Where are you going?’ was the next
compassionate chorus she heard.

‘I’m a going to London when I’ve sold out all,’ said Betty, rising with
difficulty. ‘I’ve right good friends in London. I want for nothing. I
shall come to no harm. Thankye. Don’t ye be afeard for me.’

A well-meaning bystander, yellow-legginged and purple-faced, said
hoarsely over his red comforter, as she rose to her feet, that she
‘oughtn’t to be let to go’.

‘For the Lord’s love don’t meddle with me!’ cried old Betty, all her
fears crowding on her. ‘I am quite well now, and I must go this minute.’

She caught up her basket as she spoke and was making an unsteady rush
away from them, when the same bystander checked her with his hand on
her sleeve, and urged her to come with him and see the parish-doctor.
Strengthening herself by the utmost exercise of her resolution, the poor
trembling creature shook him off, almost fiercely, and took to flight.
Nor did she feel safe until she had set a mile or two of by-road between
herself and the marketplace, and had crept into a copse, like a hunted
animal, to hide and recover breath. Not until then for the first time
did she venture to recall how she had looked over her shoulder before
turning out of the town, and had seen the sign of the White Lion hanging
across the road, and the fluttering market booths, and the old grey
church, and the little crowd gazing after her but not attempting to
follow her.

The second frightening incident was this. She had been again as bad, and
had been for some days better, and was travelling along by a part of
the road where it touched the river, and in wet seasons was so often
overflowed by it that there were tall white posts set up to mark the
way. A barge was being towed towards her, and she sat down on the bank
to rest and watch it. As the tow-rope was slackened by a turn of the
stream and dipped into the water, such a confusion stole into her
mind that she thought she saw the forms of her dead children and dead
grandchildren peopling the barge, and waving their hands to her in
solemn measure; then, as the rope tightened and came up, dropping
diamonds, it seemed to vibrate into two parallel ropes and strike her,
with a twang, though it was far off. When she looked again, there was no
barge, no river, no daylight, and a man whom she had never before seen
held a candle close to her face.

‘Now, Missis,’ said he; ‘where did you come from and where are you going
to?’

The poor soul confusedly asked the counter-question where she was?

‘I am the Lock,’ said the man.

‘The Lock?’

‘I am the Deputy Lock, on job, and this is the Lock-house. (Lock or
Deputy Lock, it’s all one, while the t’other man’s in the hospital.)
What’s your Parish?’

‘Parish!’ She was up from the truckle-bed directly, wildly feeling about
her for her basket, and gazing at him in affright.

‘You’ll be asked the question down town,’ said the man. ‘They won’t let
you be more than a Casual there. They’ll pass you on to your settlement,
Missis, with all speed. You’re not in a state to be let come upon
strange parishes ‘ceptin as a Casual.’

‘’Twas the deadness again!’ murmured Betty Higden, with her hand to her
head.

‘It was the deadness, there’s not a doubt about it,’ returned the man.
‘I should have thought the deadness was a mild word for it, if it had
been named to me when we brought you in. Have you got any friends,
Missis?’

‘The best of friends, Master.’

‘I should recommend your looking ‘em up if you consider ‘em game to do
anything for you,’ said the Deputy Lock. ‘Have you got any money?’

‘Just a morsel of money, sir.’

‘Do you want to keep it?’

‘Sure I do!’

‘Well, you know,’ said the Deputy Lock, shrugging his shoulders with his
hands in his pockets, and shaking his head in a sulkily ominous manner,
‘the parish authorities down town will have it out of you, if you go on,
you may take your Alfred David.’

‘Then I’ll not go on.’

‘They’ll make you pay, as fur as your money will go,’ pursued the
Deputy, ‘for your relief as a Casual and for your being passed to your
Parish.’

‘Thank ye kindly, Master, for your warning, thank ye for your shelter,
and good night.’

‘Stop a bit,’ said the Deputy, striking in between her and the door.
‘Why are you all of a shake, and what’s your hurry, Missis?’

‘Oh, Master, Master,’ returned Betty Higden, ‘I’ve fought against the
Parish and fled from it, all my life, and I want to die free of it!’

‘I don’t know,’ said the Deputy, with deliberation, ‘as I ought to let
you go. I’m a honest man as gets my living by the sweat of my brow, and
I may fall into trouble by letting you go. I’ve fell into trouble afore
now, by George, and I know what it is, and it’s made me careful. You
might be took with your deadness again, half a mile off--or half of half
a quarter, for the matter of that--and then it would be asked, Why did
that there honest Deputy Lock, let her go, instead of putting her safe
with the Parish? That’s what a man of his character ought to have done,
it would be argueyfied,’ said the Deputy Lock, cunningly harping on the
strong string of her terror; ‘he ought to have handed her over safe to
the Parish. That was to be expected of a man of his merits.’

As he stood in the doorway, the poor old careworn wayworn woman burst
into tears, and clasped her hands, as if in a very agony she prayed to
him.

‘As I’ve told you, Master, I’ve the best of friends. This letter will
show how true I spoke, and they will be thankful for me.’

The Deputy Lock opened the letter with a grave face, which underwent no
change as he eyed its contents. But it might have done, if he could have
read them.

‘What amount of small change, Missis,’ he said, with an abstracted air,
after a little meditation, ‘might you call a morsel of money?’

Hurriedly emptying her pocket, old Betty laid down on the table, a
shilling, and two sixpenny pieces, and a few pence.

‘If I was to let you go instead of handing you over safe to the Parish,’
said the Deputy, counting the money with his eyes, ‘might it be your own
free wish to leave that there behind you?’

‘Take it, Master, take it, and welcome and thankful!’

‘I’m a man,’ said the Deputy, giving her back the letter, and pocketing
the coins, one by one, ‘as earns his living by the sweat of his brow;’
here he drew his sleeve across his forehead, as if this particular
portion of his humble gains were the result of sheer hard labour and
virtuous industry; ‘and I won’t stand in your way. Go where you like.’

She was gone out of the Lock-house as soon as he gave her this
permission, and her tottering steps were on the road again. But, afraid
to go back and afraid to go forward; seeing what she fled from, in the
sky-glare of the lights of the little town before her, and leaving a
confused horror of it everywhere behind her, as if she had escaped it
in every stone of every market-place; she struck off by side ways, among
which she got bewildered and lost. That night she took refuge from the
Samaritan in his latest accredited form, under a farmer’s rick; and
if--worth thinking of, perhaps, my fellow-Christians--the Samaritan had
in the lonely night, ‘passed by on the other side’, she would have most
devoutly thanked High Heaven for her escape from him.

The morning found her afoot again, but fast declining as to the
clearness of her thoughts, though not as to the steadiness of her
purpose. Comprehending that her strength was quitting her, and that the
struggle of her life was almost ended, she could neither reason out the
means of getting back to her protectors, nor even form the idea. The
overmastering dread, and the proud stubborn resolution it engendered
in her to die undegraded, were the two distinct impressions left in her
failing mind. Supported only by a sense that she was bent on conquering
in her life-long fight, she went on.

The time was come, now, when the wants of this little life were passing
away from her. She could not have swallowed food, though a table had
been spread for her in the next field. The day was cold and wet, but
she scarcely knew it. She crept on, poor soul, like a criminal afraid of
being taken, and felt little beyond the terror of falling down while it
was yet daylight, and being found alive. She had no fear that she would
live through another night.

Sewn in the breast of her gown, the money to pay for her burial was
still intact. If she could wear through the day, and then lie down to
die under cover of the darkness, she would die independent. If she were
captured previously, the money would be taken from her as a pauper who
had no right to it, and she would be carried to the accursed workhouse.
Gaining her end, the letter would be found in her breast, along with
the money, and the gentlefolks would say when it was given back to them,
‘She prized it, did old Betty Higden; she was true to it; and while she
lived, she would never let it be disgraced by falling into the hands
of those that she held in horror.’ Most illogical, inconsequential, and
light-headed, this; but travellers in the valley of the shadow of death
are apt to be light-headed; and worn-out old people of low estate have
a trick of reasoning as indifferently as they live, and doubtless
would appreciate our Poor Law more philosophically on an income of ten
thousand a year.

So, keeping to byways, and shunning human approach, this troublesome
old woman hid herself, and fared on all through the dreary day. Yet so
unlike was she to vagrant hiders in general, that sometimes, as the day
advanced, there was a bright fire in her eyes, and a quicker beating at
her feeble heart, as though she said exultingly, ‘The Lord will see me
through it!’

By what visionary hands she was led along upon that journey of escape
from the Samaritan; by what voices, hushed in the grave, she seemed
to be addressed; how she fancied the dead child in her arms again, and
times innumerable adjusted her shawl to keep it warm; what infinite
variety of forms of tower and roof and steeple the trees took; how many
furious horsemen rode at her, crying, ‘There she goes! Stop! Stop,
Betty Higden!’ and melted away as they came close; be these things left
untold. Faring on and hiding, hiding and faring on, the poor harmless
creature, as though she were a Murderess and the whole country were up
after her, wore out the day, and gained the night.

‘Water-meadows, or such like,’ she had sometimes murmured, on the day’s
pilgrimage, when she had raised her head and taken any note of the real
objects about her. There now arose in the darkness, a great building,
full of lighted windows. Smoke was issuing from a high chimney in
the rear of it, and there was the sound of a water-wheel at the side.
Between her and the building, lay a piece of water, in which the lighted
windows were reflected, and on its nearest margin was a plantation of
trees. ‘I humbly thank the Power and the Glory,’ said Betty Higden,
holding up her withered hands, ‘that I have come to my journey’s end!’

She crept among the trees to the trunk of a tree whence she could see,
beyond some intervening trees and branches, the lighted windows, both in
their reality and their reflection in the water. She placed her orderly
little basket at her side, and sank upon the ground, supporting herself
against the tree. It brought to her mind the foot of the Cross, and
she committed herself to Him who died upon it. Her strength held out to
enable her to arrange the letter in her breast, so as that it could
be seen that she had a paper there. It had held out for this, and it
departed when this was done.

‘I am safe here,’ was her last benumbed thought. ‘When I am found dead
at the foot of the Cross, it will be by some of my own sort; some of
the working people who work among the lights yonder. I cannot see the
lighted windows now, but they are there. I am thankful for all!’


The darkness gone, and a face bending down.

‘It cannot be the boofer lady?’

‘I don’t understand what you say. Let me wet your lips again with this
brandy. I have been away to fetch it. Did you think that I was long
gone?’

It is as the face of a woman, shaded by a quantity of rich dark hair.
It is the earnest face of a woman who is young and handsome. But all is
over with me on earth, and this must be an Angel.

‘Have I been long dead?’

‘I don’t understand what you say. Let me wet your lips again. I hurried
all I could, and brought no one back with me, lest you should die of the
shock of strangers.’

‘Am I not dead?’

‘I cannot understand what you say. Your voice is so low and broken that
I cannot hear you. Do you hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you mean Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was coming from my work just now, along the path outside (I was up
with the night-hands last night), and I heard a groan, and found you
lying here.’

‘What work, deary?’

‘Did you ask what work? At the paper-mill.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Your face is turned up to the sky, and you can’t see it. It is close
by. You can see my face, here, between you and the sky?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dare I lift you?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Not even lift your head to get it on my arm? I will do it by very
gentle degrees. You shall hardly feel it.’

‘Not yet. Paper. Letter.’

‘This paper in your breast?’

‘Bless ye!’

‘Let me wet your lips again. Am I to open it? To read it?’

‘Bless ye!’

She reads it with surprise, and looks down with a new expression and an
added interest on the motionless face she kneels beside.

‘I know these names. I have heard them often.’

‘Will you send it, my dear?’

‘I cannot understand you. Let me wet your lips again, and your forehead.
There. O poor thing, poor thing!’ These words through her fast-dropping
tears. ‘What was it that you asked me? Wait till I bring my ear quite
close.’

‘Will you send it, my dear?’

‘Will I send it to the writers? Is that your wish? Yes, certainly.’

‘You’ll not give it up to any one but them?’

‘No.’

‘As you must grow old in time, and come to your dying hour, my dear,
you’ll not give it up to any one but them?’

‘No. Most solemnly.’

‘Never to the Parish!’ with a convulsed struggle.

‘No. Most solemnly.’

‘Nor let the Parish touch me, not yet so much as look at me!’ with
another struggle.

‘No. Faithfully.’

A look of thankfulness and triumph lights the worn old face.

The eyes, which have been darkly fixed upon the sky, turn with meaning
in them towards the compassionate face from which the tears are
dropping, and a smile is on the aged lips as they ask:

‘What is your name, my dear?’

‘My name is Lizzie Hexam.’

‘I must be sore disfigured. Are you afraid to kiss me?’

The answer is, the ready pressure of her lips upon the cold but smiling
mouth.

‘Bless ye! NOW lift me, my love.’

Lizzie Hexam very softly raised the weather-stained grey head, and
lifted her as high as Heaven.



Chapter 9

SOMEBODY BECOMES THE SUBJECT OF A PREDICTION


‘“We give thee hearty thanks for that it hath pleased thee to deliver
this our sister out of the miseries of this sinful world.”’ So read the
Reverend Frank Milvey in a not untroubled voice, for his heart misgave
him that all was not quite right between us and our sister--or say our
sister in Law--Poor Law--and that we sometimes read these words in an
awful manner, over our Sister and our Brother too.

And Sloppy--on whom the brave deceased had never turned her back until
she ran away from him, knowing that otherwise he would not be separated
from her--Sloppy could not in his conscience as yet find the hearty
thanks required of it. Selfish in Sloppy, and yet excusable, it may be
humbly hoped, because our sister had been more than his mother.

The words were read above the ashes of Betty Higden, in a corner of a
churchyard near the river; in a churchyard so obscure that there was
nothing in it but grass-mounds, not so much as one single tombstone.
It might not be to do an unreasonably great deal for the diggers and
hewers, in a registering age, if we ticketed their graves at the common
charge; so that a new generation might know which was which: so that the
soldier, sailor, emigrant, coming home, should be able to identify the
resting-place of father, mother, playmate, or betrothed. For, we turn up
our eyes and say that we are all alike in death, and we might turn
them down and work the saying out in this world, so far. It would
be sentimental, perhaps? But how say ye, my lords and gentleman and
honourable boards, shall we not find good standing-room left for a
little sentiment, if we look into our crowds?

Near unto the Reverend Frank Milvey as he read, stood his little wife,
John Rokesmith the Secretary, and Bella Wilfer. These, over and above
Sloppy, were the mourners at the lowly grave. Not a penny had been
added to the money sewn in her dress: what her honest spirit had so long
projected, was fulfilled.

‘I’ve took it in my head,’ said Sloppy, laying it, inconsolable, against
the church door, when all was done: ‘I’ve took it in my wretched head
that I might have sometimes turned a little harder for her, and it cuts
me deep to think so now.’

The Reverend Frank Milvey, comforting Sloppy, expounded to him how the
best of us were more or less remiss in our turnings at our respective
Mangles--some of us very much so--and how we were all a halting,
failing, feeble, and inconstant crew.

‘SHE warn’t, sir,’ said Sloppy, taking this ghostly counsel rather ill,
in behalf of his late benefactress. ‘Let us speak for ourselves, sir.
She went through with whatever duty she had to do. She went through with
me, she went through with the Minders, she went through with herself,
she went through with everythink. O Mrs Higden, Mrs Higden, you was a
woman and a mother and a mangler in a million million!’

With those heartfelt words, Sloppy removed his dejected head from the
church door, and took it back to the grave in the corner, and laid it
down there, and wept alone. ‘Not a very poor grave,’ said the Reverend
Frank Milvey, brushing his hand across his eyes, ‘when it has that
homely figure on it. Richer, I think, than it could be made by most of
the sculpture in Westminster Abbey!’

They left him undisturbed, and passed out at the wicket-gate. The
water-wheel of the paper-mill was audible there, and seemed to have a
softening influence on the bright wintry scene. They had arrived but a
little while before, and Lizzie Hexam now told them the little she could
add to the letter in which she had enclosed Mr Rokesmith’s letter and
had asked for their instructions. This was merely how she had heard the
groan, and what had afterwards passed, and how she had obtained leave
for the remains to be placed in that sweet, fresh, empty store-room of
the mill from which they had just accompanied them to the churchyard,
and how the last requests had been religiously observed.

‘I could not have done it all, or nearly all, of myself,’ said Lizzie.
‘I should not have wanted the will; but I should not have had the power,
without our managing partner.’

‘Surely not the Jew who received us?’ said Mrs Milvey.

[‘My dear,’ observed her husband in parenthesis, ‘why not?’)

‘The gentleman certainly is a Jew,’ said Lizzie, ‘and the lady, his
wife, is a Jewess, and I was first brought to their notice by a Jew. But
I think there cannot be kinder people in the world.’

‘But suppose they try to convert you!’ suggested Mrs Milvey, bristling
in her good little way, as a clergyman’s wife.

‘To do what, ma’am?’ asked Lizzie, with a modest smile.

‘To make you change your religion,’ said Mrs Milvey.

Lizzie shook her head, still smiling. ‘They have never asked me what
my religion is. They asked me what my story was, and I told them. They
asked me to be industrious and faithful, and I promised to be so.
They most willingly and cheerfully do their duty to all of us who are
employed here, and we try to do ours to them. Indeed they do much more
than their duty to us, for they are wonderfully mindful of us in many
ways.’

‘It is easy to see you’re a favourite, my dear,’ said little Mrs Milvey,
not quite pleased.

‘It would be very ungrateful in me to say I am not,’ returned Lizzie,
‘for I have been already raised to a place of confidence here. But that
makes no difference in their following their own religion and leaving
all of us to ours. They never talk of theirs to us, and they never talk
of ours to us. If I was the last in the mill, it would be just the same.
They never asked me what religion that poor thing had followed.’

‘My dear,’ said Mrs Milvey, aside to the Reverend Frank, ‘I wish you
would talk to her.’

‘My dear,’ said the Reverend Frank aside to his good little wife, ‘I
think I will leave it to somebody else. The circumstances are hardly
favourable. There are plenty of talkers going about, my love, and she
will soon find one.’

While this discourse was interchanging, both Bella and the Secretary
observed Lizzie Hexam with great attention. Brought face to face for the
first time with the daughter of his supposed murderer, it was natural
that John Harmon should have his own secret reasons for a careful
scrutiny of her countenance and manner. Bella knew that Lizzie’s
father had been falsely accused of the crime which had had so great an
influence on her own life and fortunes; and her interest, though it had
no secret springs, like that of the Secretary, was equally natural. Both
had expected to see something very different from the real Lizzie Hexam,
and thus it fell out that she became the unconscious means of bringing
them together.

For, when they had walked on with her to the little house in the clean
village by the paper-mill, where Lizzie had a lodging with an elderly
couple employed in the establishment, and when Mrs Milvey and Bella
had been up to see her room and had come down, the mill bell rang.
This called Lizzie away for the time, and left the Secretary and Bella
standing rather awkwardly in the small street; Mrs Milvey being engaged
in pursuing the village children, and her investigations whether they
were in danger of becoming children of Israel; and the Reverend Frank
being engaged--to say the truth--in evading that branch of his spiritual
functions, and getting out of sight surreptitiously.

Bella at length said:

‘Hadn’t we better talk about the commission we have undertaken, Mr
Rokesmith?’

‘By all means,’ said the Secretary.

‘I suppose,’ faltered Bella, ‘that we ARE both commissioned, or we
shouldn’t both be here?’

‘I suppose so,’ was the Secretary’s answer.

‘When I proposed to come with Mr and Mrs Milvey,’ said Bella, ‘Mrs
Boffin urged me to do so, in order that I might give her my small
report--it’s not worth anything, Mr Rokesmith, except for it’s being
a woman’s--which indeed with you may be a fresh reason for it’s being
worth nothing--of Lizzie Hexam.’

‘Mr Boffin,’ said the Secretary, ‘directed me to come for the same
purpose.’

As they spoke they were leaving the little street and emerging on the
wooded landscape by the river.

‘You think well of her, Mr Rokesmith?’ pursued Bella, conscious of
making all the advances.

‘I think highly of her.’

‘I am so glad of that! Something quite refined in her beauty, is there
not?’

‘Her appearance is very striking.’

‘There is a shade of sadness upon her that is quite touching. At least
I--I am not setting up my own poor opinion, you know, Mr Rokesmith,’
said Bella, excusing and explaining herself in a pretty shy way; ‘I am
consulting you.’

‘I noticed that sadness. I hope it may not,’ said the Secretary in
a lower voice, ‘be the result of the false accusation which has been
retracted.’

When they had passed on a little further without speaking, Bella, after
stealing a glance or two at the Secretary, suddenly said:

‘Oh, Mr Rokesmith, don’t be hard with me, don’t be stern with me; be
magnanimous! I want to talk with you on equal terms.’

The Secretary as suddenly brightened, and returned: ‘Upon my honour I
had no thought but for you. I forced myself to be constrained, lest you
might misinterpret my being more natural. There. It’s gone.’

‘Thank you,’ said Bella, holding out her little hand. ‘Forgive me.’

‘No!’ cried the Secretary, eagerly. ‘Forgive ME!’ For there were tears
in her eyes, and they were prettier in his sight (though they smote him
on the heart rather reproachfully too) than any other glitter in the
world.

When they had walked a little further:

‘You were going to speak to me,’ said the Secretary, with the shadow so
long on him quite thrown off and cast away, ‘about Lizzie Hexam. So was
I going to speak to you, if I could have begun.’

‘Now that you CAN begin, sir,’ returned Bella, with a look as if she
italicized the word by putting one of her dimples under it, ‘what were
you going to say?’

‘You remember, of course, that in her short letter to Mrs Boffin--short,
but containing everything to the purpose--she stipulated that either
her name, or else her place of residence, must be kept strictly a secret
among us.’

Bella nodded Yes.

‘It is my duty to find out why she made that stipulation. I have it in
charge from Mr Boffin to discover, and I am very desirous for myself to
discover, whether that retracted accusation still leaves any stain upon
her. I mean whether it places her at any disadvantage towards any one,
even towards herself.’

‘Yes,’ said Bella, nodding thoughtfully; ‘I understand. That seems wise,
and considerate.’

‘You may not have noticed, Miss Wilfer, that she has the same kind of
interest in you, that you have in her. Just as you are attracted by her
beaut--by her appearance and manner, she is attracted by yours.’

‘I certainly have NOT noticed it,’ returned Bella, again italicizing
with the dimple, ‘and I should have given her credit for--’

The Secretary with a smile held up his hand, so plainly interposing ‘not
for better taste’, that Bella’s colour deepened over the little piece of
coquetry she was checked in.

‘And so,’ resumed the Secretary, ‘if you would speak with her alone
before we go away from here, I feel quite sure that a natural and easy
confidence would arise between you. Of course you would not be asked to
betray it; and of course you would not, if you were. But if you do not
object to put this question to her--to ascertain for us her own feeling
in this one matter--you can do so at a far greater advantage than I or
any else could. Mr Boffin is anxious on the subject. And I am,’ added
the Secretary after a moment, ‘for a special reason, very anxious.’

‘I shall be happy, Mr Rokesmith,’ returned Bella, ‘to be of the least
use; for I feel, after the serious scene of to-day, that I am useless
enough in this world.’

‘Don’t say that,’ urged the Secretary.

‘Oh, but I mean that,’ said Bella, raising her eyebrows.

‘No one is useless in this world,’ retorted the Secretary, ‘who lightens
the burden of it for any one else.’

‘But I assure you I DON’T, Mr Rokesmith,’ said Bella, half-crying.

‘Not for your father?’

‘Dear, loving, self-forgetting, easily-satisfied Pa! Oh, yes! He thinks
so.’

‘It is enough if he only thinks so,’ said the Secretary. ‘Excuse the
interruption: I don’t like to hear you depreciate yourself.’

‘But YOU once depreciated ME, sir,’ thought Bella, pouting, ‘and I hope
you may be satisfied with the consequences you brought upon your head!’
However, she said nothing to that purpose; she even said something to a
different purpose.

‘Mr Rokesmith, it seems so long since we spoke together naturally, that
I am embarrassed in approaching another subject. Mr Boffin. You know I
am very grateful to him; don’t you? You know I feel a true respect for
him, and am bound to him by the strong ties of his own generosity; now
don’t you?’

‘Unquestionably. And also that you are his favourite companion.’

‘That makes it,’ said Bella, ‘so very difficult to speak of him. But--.
Does he treat you well?’

‘You see how he treats me,’ the Secretary answered, with a patient and
yet proud air.

‘Yes, and I see it with pain,’ said Bella, very energetically.

The Secretary gave her such a radiant look, that if he had thanked her a
hundred times, he could not have said as much as the look said.

‘I see it with pain,’ repeated Bella, ‘and it often makes me miserable.
Miserable, because I cannot bear to be supposed to approve of it, or
have any indirect share in it. Miserable, because I cannot bear to be
forced to admit to myself that Fortune is spoiling Mr Boffin.’

‘Miss Wilfer,’ said the Secretary, with a beaming face, ‘if you could
know with what delight I make the discovery that Fortune isn’t spoiling
YOU, you would know that it more than compensates me for any slight at
any other hands.’

‘Oh, don’t speak of ME,’ said Bella, giving herself an impatient little
slap with her glove. ‘You don’t know me as well as--’

‘As you know yourself?’ suggested the Secretary, finding that she
stopped. ‘DO you know yourself?’

‘I know quite enough of myself,’ said Bella, with a charming air of
being inclined to give herself up as a bad job, ‘and I don’t improve
upon acquaintance. But Mr Boffin.’

‘That Mr Boffin’s manner to me, or consideration for me, is not what it
used to be,’ observed the Secretary, ‘must be admitted. It is too plain
to be denied.’

‘Are you disposed to deny it, Mr Rokesmith?’ asked Bella, with a look of
wonder.

‘Ought I not to be glad to do so, if I could: though it were only for my
own sake?’

‘Truly,’ returned Bella, ‘it must try you very much, and--you must
please promise me that you won’t take ill what I am going to add, Mr
Rokesmith?’

‘I promise it with all my heart.’

‘--And it must sometimes, I should think,’ said Bella, hesitating, ‘a
little lower you in your own estimation?’

Assenting with a movement of his head, though not at all looking as if
it did, the Secretary replied:

‘I have very strong reasons, Miss Wilfer, for bearing with the drawbacks
of my position in the house we both inhabit. Believe that they are not
all mercenary, although I have, through a series of strange fatalities,
faded out of my place in life. If what you see with such a gracious
and good sympathy is calculated to rouse my pride, there are other
considerations (and those you do not see) urging me to quiet endurance.
The latter are by far the stronger.’

‘I think I have noticed, Mr Rokesmith,’ said Bella, looking at him with
curiosity, as not quite making him out, ‘that you repress yourself, and
force yourself, to act a passive part.’

‘You are right. I repress myself and force myself to act a part. It is
not in tameness of spirit that I submit. I have a settled purpose.’

‘And a good one, I hope,’ said Bella.

‘And a good one, I hope,’ he answered, looking steadily at her.

‘Sometimes I have fancied, sir,’ said Bella, turning away her eyes,
‘that your great regard for Mrs Boffin is a very powerful motive with
you.’

‘You are right again; it is. I would do anything for her, bear anything
for her. There are no words to express how I esteem that good, good
woman.’

‘As I do too! May I ask you one thing more, Mr Rokesmith?’

‘Anything more.’

‘Of course you see that she really suffers, when Mr Boffin shows how he
is changing?’

‘I see it, every day, as you see it, and am grieved to give her pain.’

‘To give her pain?’ said Bella, repeating the phrase quickly, with her
eyebrows raised.

‘I am generally the unfortunate cause of it.’

‘Perhaps she says to you, as she often says to me, that he is the best
of men, in spite of all.’

‘I often overhear her, in her honest and beautiful devotion to him,
saying so to you,’ returned the Secretary, with the same steady look,
‘but I cannot assert that she ever says so to me.’

Bella met the steady look for a moment with a wistful, musing little
look of her own, and then, nodding her pretty head several times, like
a dimpled philosopher (of the very best school) who was moralizing on
Life, heaved a little sigh, and gave up things in general for a bad job,
as she had previously been inclined to give up herself.

But, for all that, they had a very pleasant walk. The trees were bare of
leaves, and the river was bare of water-lilies; but the sky was not bare
of its beautiful blue, and the water reflected it, and a delicious
wind ran with the stream, touching the surface crisply. Perhaps the old
mirror was never yet made by human hands, which, if all the images it
has in its time reflected could pass across its surface again, would
fail to reveal some scene of horror or distress. But the great serene
mirror of the river seemed as if it might have reproduced all it had
ever reflected between those placid banks, and brought nothing to the
light save what was peaceful, pastoral, and blooming.

So, they walked, speaking of the newly filled-up grave, and of Johnny,
and of many things. So, on their return, they met brisk Mrs Milvey
coming to seek them, with the agreeable intelligence that there was no
fear for the village children, there being a Christian school in the
village, and no worse Judaical interference with it than to plant its
garden. So, they got back to the village as Lizzie Hexam was coming from
the paper-mill, and Bella detached herself to speak with her in her own
home.

‘I am afraid it is a poor room for you,’ said Lizzie, with a smile of
welcome, as she offered the post of honour by the fireside.

‘Not so poor as you think, my dear,’ returned Bella, ‘if you knew all.’
Indeed, though attained by some wonderful winding narrow stairs, which
seemed to have been erected in a pure white chimney, and though very low
in the ceiling, and very rugged in the floor, and rather blinking as
to the proportions of its lattice window, it was a pleasanter room than
that despised chamber once at home, in which Bella had first bemoaned
the miseries of taking lodgers.

The day was closing as the two girls looked at one another by the
fireside. The dusky room was lighted by the fire. The grate might have
been the old brazier, and the glow might have been the old hollow down
by the flare.

‘It’s quite new to me,’ said Lizzie, ‘to be visited by a lady so nearly
of my own age, and so pretty, as you. It’s a pleasure to me to look at
you.’

‘I have nothing left to begin with,’ returned Bella, blushing, ‘because
I was going to say that it was a pleasure to me to look at you, Lizzie.
But we can begin without a beginning, can’t we?’

Lizzie took the pretty little hand that was held out in as pretty a
little frankness.

‘Now, dear,’ said Bella, drawing her chair a little nearer, and taking
Lizzie’s arm as if they were going out for a walk, ‘I am commissioned
with something to say, and I dare say I shall say it wrong, but I
won’t if I can help it. It is in reference to your letter to Mr and Mrs
Boffin, and this is what it is. Let me see. Oh yes! This is what it is.’

With this exordium, Bella set forth that request of Lizzie’s touching
secrecy, and delicately spoke of that false accusation and its
retraction, and asked might she beg to be informed whether it had any
bearing, near or remote, on such request. ‘I feel, my dear,’ said Bella,
quite amazing herself by the business-like manner in which she was
getting on, ‘that the subject must be a painful one to you, but I
am mixed up in it also; for--I don’t know whether you may know it or
suspect it--I am the willed-away girl who was to have been married to
the unfortunate gentleman, if he had been pleased to approve of me. So
I was dragged into the subject without my consent, and you were dragged
into it without your consent, and there is very little to choose between
us.’

‘I had no doubt,’ said Lizzie, ‘that you were the Miss Wilfer I have
often heard named. Can you tell me who my unknown friend is?’

‘Unknown friend, my dear?’ said Bella.

‘Who caused the charge against poor father to be contradicted, and sent
me the written paper.’

Bella had never heard of him. Had no notion who he was.

‘I should have been glad to thank him,’ returned Lizzie. ‘He has done a
great deal for me. I must hope that he will let me thank him some day.
You asked me has it anything to do--’

‘It or the accusation itself,’ Bella put in.

‘Yes. Has either anything to do with my wishing to live quite secret and
retired here? No.’

As Lizzie Hexam shook her head in giving this reply and as her glance
sought the fire, there was a quiet resolution in her folded hands, not
lost on Bella’s bright eyes.

‘Have you lived much alone?’ asked Bella.

‘Yes. It’s nothing new to me. I used to be always alone many hours
together, in the day and in the night, when poor father was alive.’

‘You have a brother, I have been told?’

‘I have a brother, but he is not friendly with me. He is a very good
boy though, and has raised himself by his industry. I don’t complain of
him.’

As she said it, with her eyes upon the fire-glow, there was an
instantaneous escape of distress into her face. Bella seized the moment
to touch her hand.

‘Lizzie, I wish you would tell me whether you have any friend of your
own sex and age.’

‘I have lived that lonely kind of life, that I have never had one,’ was
the answer.

‘Nor I neither,’ said Bella. ‘Not that my life has been lonely, for I
could have sometimes wished it lonelier, instead of having Ma going on
like the Tragic Muse with a face-ache in majestic corners, and Lavvy
being spiteful--though of course I am very fond of them both. I wish
you could make a friend of me, Lizzie. Do you think you could? I have
no more of what they call character, my dear, than a canary-bird, but I
know I am trustworthy.’

The wayward, playful, affectionate nature, giddy for want of the
weight of some sustaining purpose, and capricious because it was always
fluttering among little things, was yet a captivating one. To Lizzie it
was so new, so pretty, at once so womanly and so childish, that it won
her completely. And when Bella said again, ‘Do you think you could,
Lizzie?’ with her eyebrows raised, her head inquiringly on one side,
and an odd doubt about it in her own bosom, Lizzie showed beyond all
question that she thought she could.

‘Tell me, my dear,’ said Bella, ‘what is the matter, and why you live
like this.’

Lizzie presently began, by way of prelude, ‘You must have many lovers--’
when Bella checked her with a little scream of astonishment.

‘My dear, I haven’t one!’

‘Not one?’

‘Well! Perhaps one,’ said Bella. ‘I am sure I don’t know. I HAD one, but
what he may think about it at the present time I can’t say. Perhaps I
have half a one (of course I don’t count that Idiot, George Sampson).
However, never mind me. I want to hear about you.’

‘There is a certain man,’ said Lizzie, ‘a passionate and angry man, who
says he loves me, and who I must believe does love me. He is the friend
of my brother. I shrank from him within myself when my brother first
brought him to me; but the last time I saw him he terrified me more than
I can say.’ There she stopped.

‘Did you come here to escape from him, Lizzie?’

‘I came here immediately after he so alarmed me.’

‘Are you afraid of him here?’

‘I am not timid generally, but I am always afraid of him. I am afraid
to see a newspaper, or to hear a word spoken of what is done in London,
lest he should have done some violence.’

‘Then you are not afraid of him for yourself, dear?’ said Bella, after
pondering on the words.

‘I should be even that, if I met him about here. I look round for him
always, as I pass to and fro at night.’

‘Are you afraid of anything he may do to himself in London, my dear?’

‘No. He might be fierce enough even to do some violence to himself, but
I don’t think of that.’

‘Then it would almost seem, dear,’ said Bella quaintly, ‘as if there
must be somebody else?’

Lizzie put her hands before her face for a moment before replying: ‘The
words are always in my ears, and the blow he struck upon a stone wall as
he said them is always before my eyes. I have tried hard to think it
not worth remembering, but I cannot make so little of it. His hand was
trickling down with blood as he said to me, “Then I hope that I may
never kill him!’

Rather startled, Bella made and clasped a girdle of her arms round
Lizzie’s waist, and then asked quietly, in a soft voice, as they both
looked at the fire:

‘Kill him! Is this man so jealous, then?’

‘Of a gentleman,’ said Lizzie. ‘--I hardly know how to tell you--of a
gentleman far above me and my way of life, who broke father’s death to
me, and has shown an interest in me since.’

‘Does he love you?’

Lizzie shook her head.

‘Does he admire you?’

Lizzie ceased to shake her head, and pressed her hand upon her living
girdle.

‘Is it through his influence that you came here?’

‘O no! And of all the world I wouldn’t have him know that I am here, or
get the least clue where to find me.’

‘Lizzie, dear! Why?’ asked Bella, in amazement at this burst. But then
quickly added, reading Lizzie’s face: ‘No. Don’t say why. That was a
foolish question of mine. I see, I see.’

There was silence between them. Lizzie, with a drooping head, glanced
down at the glow in the fire where her first fancies had been nursed,
and her first escape made from the grim life out of which she had
plucked her brother, foreseeing her reward.

‘You know all now,’ she said, raising her eyes to Bella’s. ‘There is
nothing left out. This is my reason for living secret here, with the aid
of a good old man who is my true friend. For a short part of my life
at home with father, I knew of things--don’t ask me what--that I set my
face against, and tried to better. I don’t think I could have done more,
then, without letting my hold on father go; but they sometimes lie heavy
on my mind. By doing all for the best, I hope I may wear them out.’

‘And wear out too,’ said Bella soothingly, ‘this weakness, Lizzie, in
favour of one who is not worthy of it.’

‘No. I don’t want to wear that out,’ was the flushed reply, ‘nor do I
want to believe, nor do I believe, that he is not worthy of it. What
should I gain by that, and how much should I lose!’

Bella’s expressive little eyebrows remonstrated with the fire for some
short time before she rejoined:

‘Don’t think that I press you, Lizzie; but wouldn’t you gain in peace,
and hope, and even in freedom? Wouldn’t it be better not to live a
secret life in hiding, and not to be shut out from your natural and
wholesome prospects? Forgive my asking you, would that be no gain?’

‘Does a woman’s heart that--that has that weakness in it which you have
spoken of,’ returned Lizzie, ‘seek to gain anything?’

The question was so directly at variance with Bella’s views in life, as
set forth to her father, that she said internally, ‘There, you little
mercenary wretch! Do you hear that? Ain’t you ashamed of your self?’
and unclasped the girdle of her arms, expressly to give herself a
penitential poke in the side.

‘But you said, Lizzie,’ observed Bella, returning to her subject when
she had administered this chastisement, ‘that you would lose, besides.
Would you mind telling me what you would lose, Lizzie?’

‘I should lose some of the best recollections, best encouragements,
and best objects, that I carry through my daily life. I should lose my
belief that if I had been his equal, and he had loved me, I should have
tried with all my might to make him better and happier, as he would have
made me. I should lose almost all the value that I put upon the little
learning I have, which is all owing to him, and which I conquered the
difficulties of, that he might not think it thrown away upon me. I
should lose a kind of picture of him--or of what he might have been,
if I had been a lady, and he had loved me--which is always with me, and
which I somehow feel that I could not do a mean or a wrong thing before.
I should leave off prizing the remembrance that he has done me nothing
but good since I have known him, and that he has made a change within
me, like--like the change in the grain of these hands, which were
coarse, and cracked, and hard, and brown when I rowed on the river with
father, and are softened and made supple by this new work as you see
them now.’

They trembled, but with no weakness, as she showed them.

‘Understand me, my dear;’ thus she went on. ‘I have never dreamed of
the possibility of his being anything to me on this earth but the
kind picture that I know I could not make you understand, if the
understanding was not in your own breast already. I have no more dreamed
of the possibility of MY being his wife, than he ever has--and words
could not be stronger than that. And yet I love him. I love him so much,
and so dearly, that when I sometimes think my life may be but a weary
one, I am proud of it and glad of it. I am proud and glad to suffer
something for him, even though it is of no service to him, and he will
never know of it or care for it.’

Bella sat enchained by the deep, unselfish passion of this girl or woman
of her own age, courageously revealing itself in the confidence of her
sympathetic perception of its truth. And yet she had never experienced
anything like it, or thought of the existence of anything like it.

‘It was late upon a wretched night,’ said Lizzie, ‘when his eyes first
looked at me in my old river-side home, very different from this. His
eyes may never look at me again. I would rather that they never did; I
hope that they never may. But I would not have the light of them taken
out of my life, for anything my life can give me. I have told you
everything now, my dear. If it comes a little strange to me to have
parted with it, I am not sorry. I had no thought of ever parting with a
single word of it, a moment before you came in; but you came in, and my
mind changed.’

Bella kissed her on the cheek, and thanked her warmly for her
confidence. ‘I only wish,’ said Bella, ‘I was more deserving of it.’

‘More deserving of it?’ repeated Lizzie, with an incredulous smile.

‘I don’t mean in respect of keeping it,’ said Bella, ‘because any
one should tear me to bits before getting at a syllable of it--though
there’s no merit in that, for I am naturally as obstinate as a Pig. What
I mean is, Lizzie, that I am a mere impertinent piece of conceit, and
you shame me.’

Lizzie put up the pretty brown hair that came tumbling down, owing to
the energy with which Bella shook her head; and she remonstrated while
thus engaged, ‘My dear!’

‘Oh, it’s all very well to call me your dear,’ said Bella, with a
pettish whimper, ‘and I am glad to be called so, though I have slight
enough claim to be. But I AM such a nasty little thing!’

‘My dear!’ urged Lizzie again.

‘Such a shallow, cold, worldly, Limited little brute!’ said Bella,
bringing out her last adjective with culminating force.

‘Do you think,’ inquired Lizzie with her quiet smile, the hair being now
secured, ‘that I don’t know better?’

‘DO you know better though?’ said Bella. ‘Do you really believe you know
better? Oh, I should be so glad if you did know better, but I am so very
much afraid that I must know best!’

Lizzie asked her, laughing outright, whether she ever saw her own face
or heard her own voice?

‘I suppose so,’ returned Bella; ‘I look in the glass often enough, and I
chatter like a Magpie.’

‘I have seen your face, and heard your voice, at any rate,’ said Lizzie,
‘and they have tempted me to say to you--with a certainty of not going
wrong--what I thought I should never say to any one. Does that look
ill?’

‘No, I hope it doesn’t,’ pouted Bella, stopping herself in something
between a humoured laugh and a humoured sob.

‘I used once to see pictures in the fire,’ said Lizzie playfully, ‘to
please my brother. Shall I tell you what I see down there where the fire
is glowing?’

They had risen, and were standing on the hearth, the time being come for
separating; each had drawn an arm around the other to take leave.

‘Shall I tell you,’ asked Lizzie, ‘what I see down there?’

‘Limited little b?’ suggested Bella with her eyebrows raised.

‘A heart well worth winning, and well won. A heart that, once won, goes
through fire and water for the winner, and never changes, and is never
daunted.’

‘Girl’s heart?’ asked Bella, with accompanying eyebrows.

Lizzie nodded. ‘And the figure to which it belongs--’

‘Is yours,’ suggested Bella.

‘No. Most clearly and distinctly yours.’

So the interview terminated with pleasant words on both sides, and with
many reminders on the part of Bella that they were friends, and pledges
that she would soon come down into that part of the country again. There
with Lizzie returned to her occupation, and Bella ran over to the little
inn to rejoin her company.

‘You look rather serious, Miss Wilfer,’ was the Secretary’s first
remark.

‘I feel rather serious,’ returned Miss Wilfer.

She had nothing else to tell him but that Lizzie Hexam’s secret had
no reference whatever to the cruel charge, or its withdrawal. Oh yes
though! said Bella; she might as well mention one other thing; Lizzie
was very desirous to thank her unknown friend who had sent her the
written retractation. Was she, indeed? observed the Secretary. Ah! Bella
asked him, had he any notion who that unknown friend might be? He had no
notion whatever.

They were on the borders of Oxfordshire, so far had poor old Betty
Higden strayed. They were to return by the train presently, and, the
station being near at hand, the Reverend Frank and Mrs Frank, and Sloppy
and Bella and the Secretary, set out to walk to it. Few rustic paths are
wide enough for five, and Bella and the Secretary dropped behind.

‘Can you believe, Mr Rokesmith,’ said Bella, ‘that I feel as if whole
years had passed since I went into Lizzie Hexam’s cottage?’

‘We have crowded a good deal into the day,’ he returned, ‘and you were
much affected in the churchyard. You are over-tired.’

‘No, I am not at all tired. I have not quite expressed what I mean. I
don’t mean that I feel as if a great space of time had gone by, but that
I feel as if much had happened--to myself, you know.’

‘For good, I hope?’

‘I hope so,’ said Bella.

‘You are cold; I felt you tremble. Pray let me put this wrapper of mine
about you. May I fold it over this shoulder without injuring your dress?
Now, it will be too heavy and too long. Let me carry this end over my
arm, as you have no arm to give me.’

Yes she had though. How she got it out, in her muffled state, Heaven
knows; but she got it out somehow--there it was--and slipped it through
the Secretary’s.

‘I have had a long and interesting talk with Lizzie, Mr Rokesmith, and
she gave me her full confidence.’

‘She could not withhold it,’ said the Secretary.

‘I wonder how you come,’ said Bella, stopping short as she glanced at
him, ‘to say to me just what she said about it!’

‘I infer that it must be because I feel just as she felt about it.’

‘And how was that, do you mean to say, sir?’ asked Bella, moving again.

‘That if you were inclined to win her confidence--anybody’s
confidence--you were sure to do it.’

The railway, at this point, knowingly shutting a green eye and opening
a red one, they had to run for it. As Bella could not run easily so
wrapped up, the Secretary had to help her. When she took her opposite
place in the carriage corner, the brightness in her face was so charming
to behold, that on her exclaiming, ‘What beautiful stars and what a
glorious night!’ the Secretary said ‘Yes,’ but seemed to prefer to see
the night and the stars in the light of her lovely little countenance,
to looking out of window.

O boofer lady, fascinating boofer lady! If I were but legally executor
of Johnny’s will! If I had but the right to pay your legacy and to take
your receipt!--Something to this purpose surely mingled with the blast
of the train as it cleared the stations, all knowingly shutting up their
green eyes and opening their red ones when they prepared to let the
boofer lady pass.



Chapter 10

SCOUTS OUT


‘And so, Miss Wren,’ said Mr Eugene Wrayburn, ‘I cannot persuade you to
dress me a doll?’

‘No,’ replied Miss Wren snappishly; ‘if you want one, go and buy one at
the shop.’

‘And my charming young goddaughter,’ said Mr Wrayburn plaintively, ‘down
in Hertfordshire--’

[‘Humbugshire you mean, I think,’ interposed Miss Wren.)

‘--is to be put upon the cold footing of the general public, and is
to derive no advantage from my private acquaintance with the Court
Dressmaker?’

‘If it’s any advantage to your charming godchild--and oh, a precious
godfather she has got!’--replied Miss Wren, pricking at him in the air
with her needle, ‘to be informed that the Court Dressmaker knows
your tricks and your manners, you may tell her so by post, with my
compliments.’

Miss Wren was busy at her work by candle-light, and Mr Wrayburn, half
amused and half vexed, and all idle and shiftless, stood by her bench
looking on. Miss Wren’s troublesome child was in the corner in deep
disgrace, and exhibiting great wretchedness in the shivering stage of
prostration from drink.

‘Ugh, you disgraceful boy!’ exclaimed Miss Wren, attracted by the sound
of his chattering teeth, ‘I wish they’d all drop down your throat and
play at dice in your stomach! Boh, wicked child! Bee-baa, black sheep!’

On her accompanying each of these reproaches with a threatening stamp of
the foot, the wretched creature protested with a whine.

‘Pay five shillings for you indeed!’ Miss Wren proceeded; ‘how many
hours do you suppose it costs me to earn five shillings, you infamous
boy?--Don’t cry like that, or I’ll throw a doll at you. Pay five
shillings fine for you indeed. Fine in more ways than one, I think! I’d
give the dustman five shillings, to carry you off in the dust cart.’

‘No, no,’ pleaded the absurd creature. ‘Please!’

‘He’s enough to break his mother’s heart, is this boy,’ said Miss Wren,
half appealing to Eugene. ‘I wish I had never brought him up. He’d be
sharper than a serpent’s tooth, if he wasn’t as dull as ditch water.
Look at him. There’s a pretty object for a parent’s eyes!’

Assuredly, in his worse than swinish state (for swine at least fatten on
their guzzling, and make themselves good to eat), he was a pretty object
for any eyes.

‘A muddling and a swipey old child,’ said Miss Wren, rating him with
great severity, ‘fit for nothing but to be preserved in the liquor
that destroys him, and put in a great glass bottle as a sight for other
swipey children of his own pattern,--if he has no consideration for his
liver, has he none for his mother?’

‘Yes. Deration, oh don’t!’ cried the subject of these angry remarks.

‘Oh don’t and oh don’t,’ pursued Miss Wren. ‘It’s oh do and oh do. And
why do you?’

‘Won’t do so any more. Won’t indeed. Pray!’

‘There!’ said Miss Wren, covering her eyes with her hand. ‘I can’t
bear to look at you. Go up stairs and get me my bonnet and shawl. Make
yourself useful in some way, bad boy, and let me have your room instead
of your company, for one half minute.’

Obeying her, he shambled out, and Eugene Wrayburn saw the tears exude
from between the little creature’s fingers as she kept her hand before
her eyes. He was sorry, but his sympathy did not move his carelessness
to do anything but feel sorry.

‘I’m going to the Italian Opera to try on,’ said Miss Wren, taking away
her hand after a little while, and laughing satirically to hide that she
had been crying; ‘I must see your back before I go, Mr Wrayburn. Let me
first tell you, once for all, that it’s of no use your paying visits
to me. You wouldn’t get what you want, of me, no, not if you brought
pincers with you to tear it out.’

‘Are you so obstinate on the subject of a doll’s dress for my godchild?’

‘Ah!’ returned Miss Wren with a hitch of her chin, ‘I am so
obstinate. And of course it’s on the subject of a doll’s dress--or
ADdress--whichever you like. Get along and give it up!’

Her degraded charge had come back, and was standing behind her with the
bonnet and shawl.

‘Give ‘em to me and get back into your corner, you naughty old thing!’
said Miss Wren, as she turned and espied him. ‘No, no, I won’t have your
help. Go into your corner, this minute!’

The miserable man, feebly rubbing the back of his faltering hands
downward from the wrists, shuffled on to his post of disgrace; but not
without a curious glance at Eugene in passing him, accompanied with what
seemed as if it might have been an action of his elbow, if any action of
any limb or joint he had, would have answered truly to his will. Taking
no more particular notice of him than instinctively falling away from
the disagreeable contact, Eugene, with a lazy compliment or so to Miss
Wren, begged leave to light his cigar, and departed.

‘Now you prodigal old son,’ said Jenny, shaking her head and her
emphatic little forefinger at her burden, ‘you sit there till I come
back. You dare to move out of your corner for a single instant while I’m
gone, and I’ll know the reason why.’

With this admonition, she blew her work candles out, leaving him to the
light of the fire, and, taking her big door-key in her pocket and her
crutch-stick in her hand, marched off.

Eugene lounged slowly towards the Temple, smoking his cigar, but saw
no more of the dolls’ dressmaker, through the accident of their taking
opposite sides of the street. He lounged along moodily, and stopped at
Charing Cross to look about him, with as little interest in the crowd
as any man might take, and was lounging on again, when a most unexpected
object caught his eyes. No less an object than Jenny Wren’s bad boy
trying to make up his mind to cross the road.

A more ridiculous and feeble spectacle than this tottering wretch making
unsteady sallies into the roadway, and as often staggering back again,
oppressed by terrors of vehicles that were a long way off or were
nowhere, the streets could not have shown. Over and over again, when the
course was perfectly clear, he set out, got half way, described a loop,
turned, and went back again; when he might have crossed and re-crossed
half a dozen times. Then, he would stand shivering on the edge of the
pavement, looking up the street and looking down, while scores of people
jostled him, and crossed, and went on. Stimulated in course of time
by the sight of so many successes, he would make another sally, make
another loop, would all but have his foot on the opposite pavement,
would see or imagine something coming, and would stagger back again.
There, he would stand making spasmodic preparations as if for a great
leap, and at last would decide on a start at precisely the wrong moment,
and would be roared at by drivers, and would shrink back once more, and
stand in the old spot shivering, with the whole of the proceedings to go
through again.

‘It strikes me,’ remarked Eugene coolly, after watching him for some
minutes, ‘that my friend is likely to be rather behind time if he has
any appointment on hand.’ With which remark he strolled on, and took no
further thought of him.

Lightwood was at home when he got to the Chambers, and had dined alone
there. Eugene drew a chair to the fire by which he was having his wine
and reading the evening paper, and brought a glass, and filled it for
good fellowship’s sake.

‘My dear Mortimer, you are the express picture of contented industry,
reposing (on credit) after the virtuous labours of the day.’

‘My dear Eugene, you are the express picture of discontented idleness
not reposing at all. Where have you been?’

‘I have been,’ replied Wrayburn, ‘--about town. I have turned up at the
present juncture, with the intention of consulting my highly intelligent
and respected solicitor on the position of my affairs.’

‘Your highly intelligent and respect solicitor is of opinion that your
affairs are in a bad way, Eugene.’

‘Though whether,’ said Eugene thoughtfully, ‘that can be intelligently
said, now, of the affairs of a client who has nothing to lose and who
cannot possibly be made to pay, may be open to question.’

‘You have fallen into the hands of the Jews, Eugene.’

‘My dear boy,’ returned the debtor, very composedly taking up his glass,
‘having previously fallen into the hands of some of the Christians, I
can bear it with philosophy.’

‘I have had an interview to-day, Eugene, with a Jew, who seems
determined to press us hard. Quite a Shylock, and quite a Patriarch. A
picturesque grey-headed and grey-bearded old Jew, in a shovel-hat and
gaberdine.’

‘Not,’ said Eugene, pausing in setting down his glass, ‘surely not my
worthy friend Mr Aaron?’

‘He calls himself Mr Riah.’

‘By-the-by,’ said Eugene, ‘it comes into my mind that--no doubt with an
instinctive desire to receive him into the bosom of our Church--I gave
him the name of Aaron!’

‘Eugene, Eugene,’ returned Lightwood, ‘you are more ridiculous than
usual. Say what you mean.’

‘Merely, my dear fellow, that I have the honour and pleasure of a
speaking acquaintance with such a Patriarch as you describe, and that I
address him as Mr Aaron, because it appears to me Hebraic, expressive,
appropriate, and complimentary. Notwithstanding which strong reasons for
its being his name, it may not be his name.’

‘I believe you are the absurdest man on the face of the earth,’ said
Lightwood, laughing.

‘Not at all, I assure you. Did he mention that he knew me?’

‘He did not. He only said of you that he expected to be paid by you.’

‘Which looks,’ remarked Eugene with much gravity, ‘like NOT knowing me.
I hope it may not be my worthy friend Mr Aaron, for, to tell you the
truth, Mortimer, I doubt he may have a prepossession against me. I
strongly suspect him of having had a hand in spiriting away Lizzie.’

‘Everything,’ returned Lightwood impatiently, ‘seems, by a fatality,
to bring us round to Lizzie. “About town” meant about Lizzie, just now,
Eugene.’

‘My solicitor, do you know,’ observed Eugene, turning round to the
furniture, ‘is a man of infinite discernment!’

‘Did it not, Eugene?’

‘Yes it did, Mortimer.’

‘And yet, Eugene, you know you do not really care for her.’

Eugene Wrayburn rose, and put his hands in his pockets, and stood with a
foot on the fender, indolently rocking his body and looking at the fire.
After a prolonged pause, he replied: ‘I don’t know that. I must ask you
not to say that, as if we took it for granted.’

‘But if you do care for her, so much the more should you leave her to
herself.’

Having again paused as before, Eugene said: ‘I don’t know that, either.
But tell me. Did you ever see me take so much trouble about anything, as
about this disappearance of hers? I ask, for information.’

‘My dear Eugene, I wish I ever had!’

‘Then you have not? Just so. You confirm my own impression. Does that
look as if I cared for her? I ask, for information.’

‘I asked YOU for information, Eugene,’ said Mortimer reproachfully.

‘Dear boy, I know it, but I can’t give it. I thirst for information.
What do I mean? If my taking so much trouble to recover her does not
mean that I care for her, what does it mean? “If Peter Piper picked a
peck of pickled pepper, where’s the peck,” &c.?’

Though he said this gaily, he said it with a perplexed and inquisitive
face, as if he actually did not know what to make of himself. ‘Look on
to the end--’ Lightwood was beginning to remonstrate, when he caught at
the words:

‘Ah! See now! That’s exactly what I am incapable of doing. How very
acute you are, Mortimer, in finding my weak place! When we were at
school together, I got up my lessons at the last moment, day by day and
bit by bit; now we are out in life together, I get up my lessons in the
same way. In the present task I have not got beyond this:--I am bent
on finding Lizzie, and I mean to find her, and I will take any means
of finding her that offer themselves. Fair means or foul means, are all
alike to me. I ask you--for information--what does that mean? When I
have found her I may ask you--also for information--what do I mean now?
But it would be premature in this stage, and it’s not the character of
my mind.’

Lightwood was shaking his head over the air with which his friend held
forth thus--an air so whimsically open and argumentative as almost to
deprive what he said of the appearance of evasion--when a shuffling was
heard at the outer door, and then an undecided knock, as though
some hand were groping for the knocker. ‘The frolicsome youth of the
neighbourhood,’ said Eugene, ‘whom I should be delighted to pitch from
this elevation into the churchyard below, without any intermediate
ceremonies, have probably turned the lamp out. I am on duty to-night,
and will see to the door.’

His friend had barely had time to recall the unprecedented gleam of
determination with which he had spoken of finding this girl, and which
had faded out of him with the breath of the spoken words, when Eugene
came back, ushering in a most disgraceful shadow of a man, shaking from
head to foot, and clothed in shabby grease and smear.

‘This interesting gentleman,’ said Eugene, ‘is the son--the
occasionally rather trying son, for he has his failings--of a lady of my
acquaintance. My dear Mortimer--Mr Dolls.’ Eugene had no idea what his
name was, knowing the little dressmaker’s to be assumed, but presented
him with easy confidence under the first appellation that his
associations suggested.

‘I gather, my dear Mortimer,’ pursued Eugene, as Lightwood stared at
the obscene visitor, ‘from the manner of Mr Dolls--which is occasionally
complicated--that he desires to make some communication to me. I have
mentioned to Mr Dolls that you and I are on terms of confidence, and
have requested Mr Dolls to develop his views here.’

The wretched object being much embarrassed by holding what remained
of his hat, Eugene airily tossed it to the door, and put him down in a
chair.

‘It will be necessary, I think,’ he observed, ‘to wind up Mr Dolls,
before anything to any mortal purpose can be got out of him. Brandy, Mr
Dolls, or--?’

‘Threepenn’orth Rum,’ said Mr Dolls.

A judiciously small quantity of the spirit was given him in a
wine-glass, and he began to convey it to his mouth, with all kinds of
falterings and gyrations on the road.

‘The nerves of Mr Dolls,’ remarked Eugene to Lightwood, ‘are
considerably unstrung. And I deem it on the whole expedient to fumigate
Mr Dolls.’

He took the shovel from the grate, sprinkled a few live ashes on it, and
from a box on the chimney-piece took a few pastiles, which he set upon
them; then, with great composure began placidly waving the shovel in
front of Mr Dolls, to cut him off from his company.

‘Lord bless my soul, Eugene!’ cried Lightwood, laughing again, ‘what a
mad fellow you are! Why does this creature come to see you?’

‘We shall hear,’ said Wrayburn, very observant of his face withal. ‘Now
then. Speak out. Don’t be afraid. State your business, Dolls.’

‘Mist Wrayburn!’ said the visitor, thickly and huskily. ‘--‘TIS Mist
Wrayburn, ain’t?’ With a stupid stare.

‘Of course it is. Look at me. What do you want?’

Mr Dolls collapsed in his chair, and faintly said ‘Threepenn’orth Rum.’

‘Will you do me the favour, my dear Mortimer, to wind up Mr Dolls
again?’ said Eugene. ‘I am occupied with the fumigation.’

A similar quantity was poured into his glass, and he got it to his lips
by similar circuitous ways. Having drunk it, Mr Dolls, with an evident
fear of running down again unless he made haste, proceeded to business.

‘Mist Wrayburn. Tried to nudge you, but you wouldn’t. You want that
drection. You want t’know where she lives. DO you Mist Wrayburn?’

With a glance at his friend, Eugene replied to the question sternly, ‘I
do.’

‘I am er man,’ said Mr Dolls, trying to smite himself on the breast, but
bringing his hand to bear upon the vicinity of his eye, ‘er do it. I am
er man er do it.’

‘What are you the man to do?’ demanded Eugene, still sternly.

‘Er give up that drection.’

‘Have you got it?’

With a most laborious attempt at pride and dignity, Mr Dolls rolled
his head for some time, awakening the highest expectations, and then
answered, as if it were the happiest point that could possibly be
expected of him: ‘No.’

‘What do you mean then?’

Mr Dolls, collapsing in the drowsiest manner after his late intellectual
triumph, replied: ‘Threepenn’orth Rum.’

‘Wind him up again, my dear Mortimer,’ said Wrayburn; ‘wind him up
again.’

‘Eugene, Eugene,’ urged Lightwood in a low voice, as he complied, ‘can
you stoop to the use of such an instrument as this?’

‘I said,’ was the reply, made with that former gleam of determination,
‘that I would find her out by any means, fair or foul. These are foul,
and I’ll take them--if I am not first tempted to break the head of Mr
Dolls with the fumigator. Can you get the direction? Do you mean that?
Speak! If that’s what you have come for, say how much you want.’

‘Ten shillings--Threepenn’orths Rum,’ said Mr Dolls.

‘You shall have it.’

‘Fifteen shillings--Threepenn’orths Rum,’ said Mr Dolls, making an
attempt to stiffen himself.

‘You shall have it. Stop at that. How will you get the direction you
talk of?’

‘I am er man,’ said Mr Dolls, with majesty, ‘er get it, sir.’

‘How will you get it, I ask you?’

‘I am ill-used vidual,’ said Mr Dolls. ‘Blown up morning t’night. Called
names. She makes Mint money, sir, and never stands Threepenn’orth Rum.’

‘Get on,’ rejoined Eugene, tapping his palsied head with the
fire-shovel, as it sank on his breast. ‘What comes next?’

Making a dignified attempt to gather himself together, but, as it were,
dropping half a dozen pieces of himself while he tried in vain to pick
up one, Mr Dolls, swaying his head from side to side, regarded his
questioner with what he supposed to be a haughty smile and a scornful
glance.

‘She looks upon me as mere child, sir. I am NOT mere child, sir. Man.
Man talent. Lerrers pass betwixt ‘em. Postman lerrers. Easy for man
talent er get drection, as get his own drection.’

‘Get it then,’ said Eugene; adding very heartily under his breath,
‘--You Brute! Get it, and bring it here to me, and earn the money for
sixty threepenn’orths of rum, and drink them all, one a top of another,
and drink yourself dead with all possible expedition.’ The latter
clauses of these special instructions he addressed to the fire, as he
gave it back the ashes he had taken from it, and replaced the shovel.

Mr Dolls now struck out the highly unexpected discovery that he had been
insulted by Lightwood, and stated his desire to ‘have it out with him’
on the spot, and defied him to come on, upon the liberal terms of
a sovereign to a halfpenny. Mr Dolls then fell a crying, and then
exhibited a tendency to fall asleep. This last manifestation as by far
the most alarming, by reason of its threatening his prolonged stay
on the premises, necessitated vigorous measures. Eugene picked up his
worn-out hat with the tongs, clapped it on his head, and, taking him by
the collar--all this at arm’s length--conducted him down stairs and out
of the precincts into Fleet Street. There, he turned his face westward,
and left him.

When he got back, Lightwood was standing over the fire, brooding in a
sufficiently low-spirited manner.

‘I’ll wash my hands of Mr Dolls physically--’ said Eugene, ‘and be with
you again directly, Mortimer.’

‘I would much prefer,’ retorted Mortimer, ‘your washing your hands of Mr
Dolls, morally, Eugene.’

‘So would I,’ said Eugene; ‘but you see, dear boy, I can’t do without
him.’

In a minute or two he resumed his chair, as perfectly unconcerned as
usual, and rallied his friend on having so narrowly escaped the prowess
of their muscular visitor.

‘I can’t be amused on this theme,’ said Mortimer, restlessly. ‘You can
make almost any theme amusing to me, Eugene, but not this.’

‘Well!’ cried Eugene, ‘I am a little ashamed of it myself, and therefore
let us change the subject.’

‘It is so deplorably underhanded,’ said Mortimer. ‘It is so unworthy of
you, this setting on of such a shameful scout.’

‘We have changed the subject!’ exclaimed Eugene, airily. ‘We have found
a new one in that word, scout. Don’t be like Patience on a mantelpiece
frowning at Dolls, but sit down, and I’ll tell you something that you
really will find amusing. Take a cigar. Look at this of mine. I
light it--draw one puff--breathe the smoke out--there it goes--it’s
Dolls!--it’s gone--and being gone you are a man again.’

‘Your subject,’ said Mortimer, after lighting a cigar, and comforting
himself with a whiff or two, ‘was scouts, Eugene.’

‘Exactly. Isn’t it droll that I never go out after dark, but I find
myself attended, always by one scout, and often by two?’

Lightwood took his cigar from his lips in surprise, and looked at his
friend, as if with a latent suspicion that there must be a jest or
hidden meaning in his words.

‘On my honour, no,’ said Wrayburn, answering the look and smiling
carelessly; ‘I don’t wonder at your supposing so, but on my honour, no.
I say what I mean. I never go out after dark, but I find myself in the
ludicrous situation of being followed and observed at a distance, always
by one scout, and often by two.’

‘Are you sure, Eugene?’

‘Sure? My dear boy, they are always the same.’

‘But there’s no process out against you. The Jews only threaten. They
have done nothing. Besides, they know where to find you, and I represent
you. Why take the trouble?’

‘Observe the legal mind!’ remarked Eugene, turning round to the
furniture again, with an air of indolent rapture. ‘Observe the dyer’s
hand, assimilating itself to what it works in,--or would work in, if
anybody would give it anything to do. Respected solicitor, it’s not
that. The schoolmaster’s abroad.’

‘The schoolmaster?’

‘Ay! Sometimes the schoolmaster and the pupil are both abroad. Why, how
soon you rust in my absence! You don’t understand yet? Those fellows
who were here one night. They are the scouts I speak of, as doing me the
honour to attend me after dark.’

‘How long has this been going on?’ asked Lightwood, opposing a serious
face to the laugh of his friend.

‘I apprehend it has been going on, ever since a certain person went off.
Probably, it had been going on some little time before I noticed it:
which would bring it to about that time.’

‘Do you think they suppose you to have inveigled her away?’

‘My dear Mortimer, you know the absorbing nature of my professional
occupations; I really have not had leisure to think about it.’

‘Have you asked them what they want? Have you objected?’

‘Why should I ask them what they want, dear fellow, when I am
indifferent what they want? Why should I express objection, when I don’t
object?’

‘You are in your most reckless mood. But you called the situation just
now, a ludicrous one; and most men object to that, even those who are
utterly indifferent to everything else.’

‘You charm me, Mortimer, with your reading of my weaknesses. (By-the-by,
that very word, Reading, in its critical use, always charms me. An
actress’s Reading of a chambermaid, a dancer’s Reading of a hornpipe, a
singer’s Reading of a song, a marine painter’s Reading of the sea,
the kettle-drum’s Reading of an instrumental passage, are phrases
ever youthful and delightful.) I was mentioning your perception of my
weaknesses. I own to the weakness of objecting to occupy a ludicrous
position, and therefore I transfer the position to the scouts.’

‘I wish, Eugene, you would speak a little more soberly and plainly, if
it were only out of consideration for my feeling less at ease than you
do.’

‘Then soberly and plainly, Mortimer, I goad the schoolmaster to madness.
I make the schoolmaster so ridiculous, and so aware of being made
ridiculous, that I see him chafe and fret at every pore when we cross
one another. The amiable occupation has been the solace of my life,
since I was baulked in the manner unnecessary to recall. I have derived
inexpressible comfort from it. I do it thus: I stroll out after dark,
stroll a little way, look in at a window and furtively look out for the
schoolmaster. Sooner or later, I perceive the schoolmaster on the watch;
sometimes accompanied by his hopeful pupil; oftener, pupil-less. Having
made sure of his watching me, I tempt him on, all over London. One
night I go east, another night north, in a few nights I go all round the
compass. Sometimes, I walk; sometimes, I proceed in cabs, draining the
pocket of the schoolmaster who then follows in cabs. I study and get
up abstruse No Thoroughfares in the course of the day. With Venetian
mystery I seek those No Thoroughfares at night, glide into them by means
of dark courts, tempt the schoolmaster to follow, turn suddenly, and
catch him before he can retreat. Then we face one another, and I pass
him as unaware of his existence, and he undergoes grinding torments.
Similarly, I walk at a great pace down a short street, rapidly turn the
corner, and, getting out of his view, as rapidly turn back. I catch him
coming on post, again pass him as unaware of his existence, and again
he undergoes grinding torments. Night after night his disappointment is
acute, but hope springs eternal in the scholastic breast, and he follows
me again to-morrow. Thus I enjoy the pleasures of the chase, and derive
great benefit from the healthful exercise. When I do not enjoy the
pleasures of the chase, for anything I know he watches at the Temple
Gate all night.’

‘This is an extraordinary story,’ observed Lightwood, who had heard it
out with serious attention. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘You are a little hipped, dear fellow,’ said Eugene; ‘you have been too
sedentary. Come and enjoy the pleasures of the chase.’

‘Do you mean that you believe he is watching now?’

‘I have not the slightest doubt he is.’

‘Have you seen him to-night?’

‘I forgot to look for him when I was last out,’ returned Eugene with the
calmest indifference; ‘but I dare say he was there. Come! Be a British
sportsman and enjoy the pleasures of the chase. It will do you good.’

Lightwood hesitated; but, yielding to his curiosity, rose.

‘Bravo!’ cried Eugene, rising too. ‘Or, if Yoicks would be in better
keeping, consider that I said Yoicks. Look to your feet, Mortimer, for
we shall try your boots. When you are ready, I am--need I say with a Hey
Ho Chivey, and likewise with a Hark Forward, Hark Forward, Tantivy?’

‘Will nothing make you serious?’ said Mortimer, laughing through his
gravity.

‘I am always serious, but just now I am a little excited by the glorious
fact that a southerly wind and a cloudy sky proclaim a hunting evening.
Ready? So. We turn out the lamp and shut the door, and take the field.’

As the two friends passed out of the Temple into the public street,
Eugene demanded with a show of courteous patronage in which direction
Mortimer would you like the run to be? ‘There is a rather difficult
country about Bethnal Green,’ said Eugene, ‘and we have not taken in
that direction lately. What is your opinion of Bethnal Green?’ Mortimer
assented to Bethnal Green, and they turned eastward. ‘Now, when we come
to St Paul’s churchyard,’ pursued Eugene, ‘we’ll loiter artfully, and
I’ll show you the schoolmaster.’ But, they both saw him, before they got
there; alone, and stealing after them in the shadow of the houses, on
the opposite side of the way.

‘Get your wind,’ said Eugene, ‘for I am off directly. Does it occur
to you that the boys of Merry England will begin to deteriorate in an
educational light, if this lasts long? The schoolmaster can’t attend to
me and the boys too. Got your wind? I am off!’

At what a rate he went, to breathe the schoolmaster; and how he then
lounged and loitered, to put his patience to another kind of wear;
what preposterous ways he took, with no other object on earth than to
disappoint and punish him; and how he wore him out by every piece of
ingenuity that his eccentric humour could devise; all this Lightwood
noted, with a feeling of astonishment that so careless a man could be so
wary, and that so idle a man could take so much trouble. At last, far on
in the third hour of the pleasures of the chase, when he had brought the
poor dogging wretch round again into the City, he twisted Mortimer up
a few dark entries, twisted him into a little square court, twisted him
sharp round again, and they almost ran against Bradley Headstone.

‘And you see, as I was saying, Mortimer,’ remarked Eugene aloud with
the utmost coolness, as though there were no one within hearing
by themselves: ‘and you see, as I was saying--undergoing grinding
torments.’

It was not too strong a phrase for the occasion. Looking like the hunted
and not the hunter, baffled, worn, with the exhaustion of deferred
hope and consuming hate and anger in his face, white-lipped, wild-eyed,
draggle-haired, seamed with jealousy and anger, and torturing himself
with the conviction that he showed it all and they exulted in it, he
went by them in the dark, like a haggard head suspended in the air: so
completely did the force of his expression cancel his figure.

Mortimer Lightwood was not an extraordinarily impressible man, but this
face impressed him. He spoke of it more than once on the remainder of
the way home, and more than once when they got home.

They had been abed in their respective rooms two or three hours, when
Eugene was partly awakened by hearing a footstep going about, and was
fully awakened by seeing Lightwood standing at his bedside.

‘Nothing wrong, Mortimer?’

‘No.’

‘What fancy takes you, then, for walking about in the night?’

‘I am horribly wakeful.’

‘How comes that about, I wonder!’

‘Eugene, I cannot lose sight of that fellow’s face.’

‘Odd!’ said Eugene with a light laugh, ‘I can.’ And turned over, and
fell asleep again.



Chapter 11

IN THE DARK


There was no sleep for Bradley Headstone on that night when Eugene
Wrayburn turned so easily in his bed; there was no sleep for little
Miss Peecher. Bradley consumed the lonely hours, and consumed himself in
haunting the spot where his careless rival lay a dreaming; little Miss
Peecher wore them away in listening for the return home of the master
of her heart, and in sorrowfully presaging that much was amiss with him.
Yet more was amiss with him than Miss Peecher’s simply arranged little
work-box of thoughts, fitted with no gloomy and dark recesses, could
hold. For, the state of the man was murderous.

The state of the man was murderous, and he knew it. More; he irritated
it, with a kind of perverse pleasure akin to that which a sick man
sometimes has in irritating a wound upon his body. Tied up all day with
his disciplined show upon him, subdued to the performance of his routine
of educational tricks, encircled by a gabbling crowd, he broke loose at
night like an ill-tamed wild animal. Under his daily restraint, it was
his compensation, not his trouble, to give a glance towards his state at
night, and to the freedom of its being indulged. If great criminals told
the truth--which, being great criminals, they do not--they would very
rarely tell of their struggles against the crime. Their struggles are
towards it. They buffet with opposing waves, to gain the bloody shore,
not to recede from it. This man perfectly comprehended that he hated his
rival with his strongest and worst forces, and that if he tracked him to
Lizzie Hexam, his so doing would never serve himself with her, or serve
her. All his pains were taken, to the end that he might incense himself
with the sight of the detested figure in her company and favour, in her
place of concealment. And he knew as well what act of his would follow
if he did, as he knew that his mother had borne him. Granted, that he
may not have held it necessary to make express mention to himself of the
one familiar truth any more than of the other.

He knew equally well that he fed his wrath and hatred, and that he
accumulated provocation and self-justification, by being made the
nightly sport of the reckless and insolent Eugene. Knowing all
this,--and still always going on with infinite endurance, pains, and
perseverance, could his dark soul doubt whither he went?

Baffled, exasperated, and weary, he lingered opposite the Temple gate
when it closed on Wrayburn and Lightwood, debating with himself should
he go home for that time or should he watch longer. Possessed in his
jealousy by the fixed idea that Wrayburn was in the secret, if it were
not altogether of his contriving, Bradley was as confident of getting
the better of him at last by sullenly sticking to him, as he would have
been--and often had been--of mastering any piece of study in the way
of his vocation, by the like slow persistent process. A man of rapid
passions and sluggish intelligence, it had served him often and should
serve him again.

The suspicion crossed him as he rested in a doorway with his eyes upon
the Temple gate, that perhaps she was even concealed in that set of
Chambers. It would furnish another reason for Wrayburn’s purposeless
walks, and it might be. He thought of it and thought of it, until
he resolved to steal up the stairs, if the gatekeeper would let him
through, and listen. So, the haggard head suspended in the air flitted
across the road, like the spectre of one of the many heads erst hoisted
upon neighbouring Temple Bar, and stopped before the watchman.

The watchman looked at it, and asked: ‘Who for?’

‘Mr Wrayburn.’

‘It’s very late.’

‘He came back with Mr Lightwood, I know, near upon two hours ago. But if
he has gone to bed, I’ll put a paper in his letter-box. I am expected.’

The watchman said no more, but opened the gate, though rather
doubtfully. Seeing, however, that the visitor went straight and fast in
the right direction, he seemed satisfied.

The haggard head floated up the dark staircase, and softly descended
nearer to the floor outside the outer door of the chambers. The doors
of the rooms within, appeared to be standing open. There were rays of
candlelight from one of them, and there was the sound of a footstep
going about. There were two voices. The words they uttered were not
distinguishable, but they were both the voices of men. In a few moments
the voices were silent, and there was no sound of footstep, and the
inner light went out. If Lightwood could have seen the face which kept
him awake, staring and listening in the darkness outside the door as
he spoke of it, he might have been less disposed to sleep, through the
remainder of the night.

‘Not there,’ said Bradley; ‘but she might have been.’ The head arose to
its former height from the ground, floated down the stair-case again,
and passed on to the gate. A man was standing there, in parley with the
watchman.

‘Oh!’ said the watchman. ‘Here he is!’

Perceiving himself to be the antecedent, Bradley looked from the
watchman to the man.

‘This man is leaving a letter for Mr Lightwood,’ the watchman explained,
showing it in his hand; ‘and I was mentioning that a person had just
gone up to Mr Lightwood’s chambers. It might be the same business
perhaps?’

‘No,’ said Bradley, glancing at the man, who was a stranger to him.

‘No,’ the man assented in a surly way; ‘my letter--it’s wrote by my
daughter, but it’s mine--is about my business, and my business ain’t
nobody else’s business.’

As Bradley passed out at the gate with an undecided foot, he heard it
shut behind him, and heard the footstep of the man coming after him.

‘’Scuse me,’ said the man, who appeared to have been drinking and rather
stumbled at him than touched him, to attract his attention: ‘but might
you be acquainted with the T’other Governor?’

‘With whom?’ asked Bradley.

‘With,’ returned the man, pointing backward over his right shoulder with
his right thumb, ‘the T’other Governor?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Why look here,’ hooking his proposition on his left-hand fingers with
the forefinger of his right. ‘There’s two Governors, ain’t there? One
and one, two--Lawyer Lightwood, my first finger, he’s one, ain’t he?
Well; might you be acquainted with my middle finger, the T’other?’

‘I know quite as much of him,’ said Bradley, with a frown and a distant
look before him, ‘as I want to know.’

‘Hooroar!’ cried the man. ‘Hooroar T’other t’other Governor. Hooroar
T’otherest Governor! I am of your way of thinkin’.’

‘Don’t make such a noise at this dead hour of the night. What are you
talking about?’

‘Look here, T’otherest Governor,’ replied the man, becoming hoarsely
confidential. ‘The T’other Governor he’s always joked his jokes agin me,
owing, as I believe, to my being a honest man as gets my living by the
sweat of my brow. Which he ain’t, and he don’t.’

‘What is that to me?’

‘T’otherest Governor,’ returned the man in a tone of injured innocence,
‘if you don’t care to hear no more, don’t hear no more. You begun it.
You said, and likeways showed pretty plain, as you warn’t by no means
friendly to him. But I don’t seek to force my company nor yet my
opinions on no man. I am a honest man, that’s what I am. Put me in the
dock anywhere--I don’t care where--and I says, “My Lord, I am a honest
man.” Put me in the witness-box anywhere--I don’t care where--and I
says the same to his lordship, and I kisses the book. I don’t kiss my
coat-cuff; I kisses the book.’

It was not so much in deference to these strong testimonials to
character, as in his restless casting about for any way or help towards
the discovery on which he was concentrated, that Bradley Headstone
replied: ‘You needn’t take offence. I didn’t mean to stop you. You were
too--loud in the open street; that was all.’

‘’Totherest Governor,’ replied Mr Riderhood, mollified and mysterious,
‘I know wot it is to be loud, and I know wot it is to be soft. Nat’rally
I do. It would be a wonder if I did not, being by the Chris’en name of
Roger, which took it arter my own father, which took it from his own
father, though which of our fam’ly fust took it nat’ral I will not in
any ways mislead you by undertakin’ to say. And wishing that your elth
may be better than your looks, which your inside must be bad indeed if
it’s on the footing of your out.’

Startled by the implication that his face revealed too much of his mind,
Bradley made an effort to clear his brow. It might be worth knowing what
this strange man’s business was with Lightwood, or Wrayburn, or both, at
such an unseasonable hour. He set himself to find out, for the man might
prove to be a messenger between those two.

‘You call at the Temple late,’ he remarked, with a lumbering show of
ease.

‘Wish I may die,’ cried Mr Riderhood, with a hoarse laugh, ‘if I warn’t
a goin’ to say the self-same words to you, T’otherest Governor!’

‘It chanced so with me,’ said Bradley, looking disconcertedly about him.

‘And it chanced so with me,’ said Riderhood. ‘But I don’t mind telling
you how. Why should I mind telling you? I’m a Deputy Lock-keeper up the
river, and I was off duty yes’day, and I shall be on to-morrow.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes, and I come to London to look arter my private affairs. My private
affairs is to get appinted to the Lock as reg’lar keeper at fust hand,
and to have the law of a busted B’low-Bridge steamer which drownded of
me. I ain’t a goin’ to be drownded and not paid for it!’

Bradley looked at him, as though he were claiming to be a Ghost.

‘The steamer,’ said Mr Riderhood, obstinately, ‘run me down and drownded
of me. Interference on the part of other parties brought me round; but
I never asked ‘em to bring me round, nor yet the steamer never asked ‘em
to it. I mean to be paid for the life as the steamer took.’

‘Was that your business at Mr Lightwood’s chambers in the middle of the
night?’ asked Bradley, eyeing him with distrust.

‘That and to get a writing to be fust-hand Lock Keeper. A recommendation
in writing being looked for, who else ought to give it to me? As I says
in the letter in my daughter’s hand, with my mark put to it to make it
good in law, Who but you, Lawyer Lightwood, ought to hand over this here
stifficate, and who but you ought to go in for damages on my account
agin the Steamer? For (as I says under my mark) I have had trouble
enough along of you and your friend. If you, Lawyer Lightwood, had
backed me good and true, and if the T’other Governor had took me down
correct (I says under my mark), I should have been worth money at the
present time, instead of having a barge-load of bad names chucked at me,
and being forced to eat my words, which is a unsatisfying sort of food
wotever a man’s appetite! And when you mention the middle of the night,
T’otherest Governor,’ growled Mr Riderhood, winding up his monotonous
summary of his wrongs, ‘throw your eye on this here bundle under my arm,
and bear in mind that I’m a walking back to my Lock, and that the Temple
laid upon my line of road.’

Bradley Headstone’s face had changed during this latter recital, and he
had observed the speaker with a more sustained attention.

‘Do you know,’ said he, after a pause, during which they walked on side
by side, ‘that I believe I could tell you your name, if I tried?’

‘Prove your opinion,’ was the answer, accompanied with a stop and a
stare. ‘Try.’

‘Your name is Riderhood.’

‘I’m blest if it ain’t,’ returned that gentleman. ‘But I don’t know
your’n.’

‘That’s quite another thing,’ said Bradley. ‘I never supposed you did.’

As Bradley walked on meditating, the Rogue walked on at his side
muttering. The purport of the muttering was: ‘that Rogue Riderhood, by
George! seemed to be made public property on, now, and that every man
seemed to think himself free to handle his name as if it was a Street
Pump.’ The purport of the meditating was: ‘Here is an instrument. Can I
use it?’

They had walked along the Strand, and into Pall Mall, and had turned
up-hill towards Hyde Park Corner; Bradley Headstone waiting on the pace
and lead of Riderhood, and leaving him to indicate the course. So slow
were the schoolmaster’s thoughts, and so indistinct his purposes when
they were but tributary to the one absorbing purpose or rather when,
like dark trees under a stormy sky, they only lined the long vista at
the end of which he saw those two figures of Wrayburn and Lizzie on
which his eyes were fixed--that at least a good half-mile was traversed
before he spoke again. Even then, it was only to ask:

‘Where is your Lock?’

‘Twenty mile and odd--call it five-and-twenty mile and odd, if you
like--up stream,’ was the sullen reply.

‘How is it called?’

‘Plashwater Weir Mill Lock.’

‘Suppose I was to offer you five shillings; what then?’

‘Why, then, I’d take it,’ said Mr Riderhood.

The schoolmaster put his hand in his pocket, and produced two
half-crowns, and placed them in Mr Riderhood’s palm: who stopped at
a convenient doorstep to ring them both, before acknowledging their
receipt.

‘There’s one thing about you, T’otherest Governor,’ said Riderhood,
faring on again, ‘as looks well and goes fur. You’re a ready money man.
Now;’ when he had carefully pocketed the coins on that side of himself
which was furthest from his new friend; ‘what’s this for?’

‘For you.’

‘Why, o’ course I know THAT,’ said Riderhood, as arguing something that
was self-evident. ‘O’ course I know very well as no man in his right
senses would suppose as anythink would make me give it up agin when I’d
once got it. But what do you want for it?’

‘I don’t know that I want anything for it. Or if I do want anything
for it, I don’t know what it is.’ Bradley gave this answer in a stolid,
vacant, and self-communing manner, which Mr Riderhood found very
extraordinary.

‘You have no goodwill towards this Wrayburn,’ said Bradley, coming to
the name in a reluctant and forced way, as if he were dragged to it.

‘No.’

‘Neither have I.’

Riderhood nodded, and asked: ‘Is it for that?’

‘It’s as much for that as anything else. It’s something to be agreed
with, on a subject that occupies so much of one’s thoughts.’

‘It don’t agree with YOU,’ returned Mr Riderhood, bluntly. ‘No! It
don’t, T’otherest Governor, and it’s no use a lookin’ as if you wanted
to make out that it did. I tell you it rankles in you. It rankles in
you, rusts in you, and pisons you.’

‘Say that it does so,’ returned Bradley with quivering lips; ‘is there
no cause for it?’

‘Cause enough, I’ll bet a pound!’ cried Mr Riderhood.

‘Haven’t you yourself declared that the fellow has heaped provocations,
insults, and affronts on you, or something to that effect? He has done
the same by me. He is made of venomous insults and affronts, from the
crown of his head to the sole of his foot. Are you so hopeful or so
stupid, as not to know that he and the other will treat your application
with contempt, and light their cigars with it?’

‘I shouldn’t wonder if they did, by George!’ said Riderhood, turning
angry.

‘If they did! They will. Let me ask you a question. I know something
more than your name about you; I knew something about Gaffer Hexam. When
did you last set eyes upon his daughter?’

‘When did I last set eyes upon his daughter, T’otherest Governor?’
repeated Mr Riderhood, growing intentionally slower of comprehension as
the other quickened in his speech.

‘Yes. Not to speak to her. To see her--anywhere?’

The Rogue had got the clue he wanted, though he held it with a clumsy
hand. Looking perplexedly at the passionate face, as if he were trying
to work out a sum in his mind, he slowly answered:

‘I ain’t set eyes upon her--never once--not since the day of Gaffer’s
death.’

‘You know her well, by sight?’

‘I should think I did! No one better.’

‘And you know him as well?’

‘Who’s him?’ asked Riderhood, taking off his hat and rubbing his
forehead, as he directed a dull look at his questioner.

‘Curse the name! Is it so agreeable to you that you want to hear it
again?’

‘Oh! HIM!’ said Riderhood, who had craftily worked the schoolmaster into
this corner, that he might again take note of his face under its evil
possession. ‘I’d know HIM among a thousand.’

‘Did you--’ Bradley tried to ask it quietly; but, do what he might
with his voice, he could not subdue his face;--‘did you ever see them
together?’

(The Rogue had got the clue in both hands now.)

‘I see ‘em together, T’otherest Governor, on the very day when Gaffer
was towed ashore.’

Bradley could have hidden a reserved piece of information from the sharp
eyes of a whole inquisitive class, but he could not veil from the eyes
of the ignorant Riderhood the withheld question next in his breast.
‘You shall put it plain if you want it answered,’ thought the Rogue,
doggedly; ‘I ain’t a-going a wolunteering.’

‘Well! was he insolent to her too?’ asked Bradley after a struggle. ‘Or
did he make a show of being kind to her?’

‘He made a show of being most uncommon kind to her,’ said Riderhood. ‘By
George! now I--’

His flying off at a tangent was indisputably natural. Bradley looked at
him for the reason.

‘Now I think of it,’ said Mr Riderhood, evasively, for he was
substituting those words for ‘Now I see you so jealous,’ which was the
phrase really in his mind; ‘P’r’aps he went and took me down wrong, a
purpose, on account o’ being sweet upon her!’

The baseness of confirming him in this suspicion or pretence of one (for
he could not have really entertained it), was a line’s breadth beyond
the mark the schoolmaster had reached. The baseness of communing and
intriguing with the fellow who would have set that stain upon her, and
upon her brother too, was attained. The line’s breadth further, lay
beyond. He made no reply, but walked on with a lowering face.

What he might gain by this acquaintance, he could not work out in his
slow and cumbrous thoughts. The man had an injury against the object of
his hatred, and that was something; though it was less than he supposed,
for there dwelt in the man no such deadly rage and resentment as burned
in his own breast. The man knew her, and might by a fortunate chance see
her, or hear of her; that was something, as enlisting one pair of eyes
and ears the more. The man was a bad man, and willing enough to be in
his pay. That was something, for his own state and purpose were as
bad as bad could be, and he seemed to derive a vague support from the
possession of a congenial instrument, though it might never be used.

Suddenly he stood still, and asked Riderhood point-blank if he knew
where she was? Clearly, he did not know. He asked Riderhood if he would
be willing, in case any intelligence of her, or of Wrayburn as seeking
her or associating with her, should fall in his way, to communicate it
if it were paid for? He would be very willing indeed. He was ‘agin ‘em
both,’ he said with an oath, and for why? ‘Cause they had both stood
betwixt him and his getting his living by the sweat of his brow.

‘It will not be long then,’ said Bradley Headstone, after some more
discourse to this effect, ‘before we see one another again. Here is the
country road, and here is the day. Both have come upon me by surprise.’

‘But, T’otherest Governor,’ urged Mr Riderhood, ‘I don’t know where to
find you.’

‘It is of no consequence. I know where to find you, and I’ll come to
your Lock.’

‘But, T’otherest Governor,’ urged Mr Riderhood again, ‘no luck never
come yet of a dry acquaintance. Let’s wet it, in a mouth-fill of rum and
milk, T’otherest Governor.’

Bradley assenting, went with him into an early public-house, haunted by
unsavoury smells of musty hay and stale straw, where returning carts,
farmers’ men, gaunt dogs, fowls of a beery breed, and certain human
nightbirds fluttering home to roost, were solacing themselves after
their several manners; and where not one of the nightbirds hovering
about the sloppy bar failed to discern at a glance in the passion-wasted
nightbird with respectable feathers, the worst nightbird of all.

An inspiration of affection for a half-drunken carter going his way led
to Mr Riderhood’s being elevated on a high heap of baskets on a waggon,
and pursuing his journey recumbent on his back with his head on his
bundle. Bradley then turned to retrace his steps, and by-and-by struck
off through little-traversed ways, and by-and-by reached school and
home. Up came the sun to find him washed and brushed, methodically
dressed in decent black coat and waistcoat, decent formal black tie, and
pepper-and-salt pantaloons, with his decent silver watch in its pocket,
and its decent hair-guard round his neck: a scholastic huntsman clad for
the field, with his fresh pack yelping and barking around him.

Yet more really bewitched than the miserable creatures of the
much-lamented times, who accused themselves of impossibilities under a
contagion of horror and the strongly suggestive influences of Torture,
he had been ridden hard by Evil Spirits in the night that was newly
gone. He had been spurred and whipped and heavily sweated. If a record
of the sport had usurped the places of the peaceful texts from Scripture
on the wall, the most advanced of the scholars might have taken fright
and run away from the master.



Chapter 12

MEANING MISCHIEF


Up came the sun, streaming all over London, and in its glorious
impartiality even condescending to make prismatic sparkles in the
whiskers of Mr Alfred Lammle as he sat at breakfast. In need of some
brightening from without, was Mr Alfred Lammle, for he had the air of
being dull enough within, and looked grievously discontented.

Mrs Alfred Lammle faced her lord. The happy pair of swindlers, with
the comfortable tie between them that each had swindled the other, sat
moodily observant of the tablecloth. Things looked so gloomy in the
breakfast-room, albeit on the sunny side of Sackville Street, that any
of the family tradespeople glancing through the blinds might have taken
the hint to send in his account and press for it. But this, indeed, most
of the family tradespeople had already done, without the hint.

‘It seems to me,’ said Mrs Lammle, ‘that you have had no money at all,
ever since we have been married.’

‘What seems to you,’ said Mr Lammle, ‘to have been the case, may
possibly have been the case. It doesn’t matter.’

Was it the speciality of Mr and Mrs Lammle, or does it ever obtain
with other loving couples? In these matrimonial dialogues they never
addressed each other, but always some invisible presence that appeared
to take a station about midway between them. Perhaps the skeleton in the
cupboard comes out to be talked to, on such domestic occasions?

‘I have never seen any money in the house,’ said Mrs Lammle to the
skeleton, ‘except my own annuity. That I swear.’

‘You needn’t take the trouble of swearing,’ said Mr Lammle to the
skeleton; ‘once more, it doesn’t matter. You never turned your annuity
to so good an account.’

‘Good an account! In what way?’ asked Mrs Lammle.

‘In the way of getting credit, and living well,’ said Mr Lammle. Perhaps
the skeleton laughed scornfully on being intrusted with this question
and this answer; certainly Mrs Lammle did, and Mr Lammle did.

‘And what is to happen next?’ asked Mrs Lammle of the skeleton.

‘Smash is to happen next,’ said Mr Lammle to the same authority.

After this, Mrs Lammle looked disdainfully at the skeleton--but without
carrying the look on to Mr Lammle--and drooped her eyes. After that, Mr
Lammle did exactly the same thing, and drooped HIS eyes. A servant then
entering with toast, the skeleton retired into the closet, and shut
itself up.

‘Sophronia,’ said Mr Lammle, when the servant had withdrawn. And then,
very much louder: ‘Sophronia!’

‘Well?’

‘Attend to me, if you please.’ He eyed her sternly until she did attend,
and then went on. ‘I want to take counsel with you. Come, come; no more
trifling. You know our league and covenant. We are to work together for
our joint interest, and you are as knowing a hand as I am. We shouldn’t
be together, if you were not. What’s to be done? We are hemmed into a
corner. What shall we do?’

‘Have you no scheme on foot that will bring in anything?’

Mr Lammle plunged into his whiskers for reflection, and came out
hopeless: ‘No; as adventurers we are obliged to play rash games for
chances of high winnings, and there has been a run of luck against us.’

She was resuming, ‘Have you nothing--’ when he stopped her.

‘We, Sophronia. We, we, we.’

‘Have we nothing to sell?’

‘Deuce a bit. I have given a Jew a bill of sale on this furniture, and
he could take it to-morrow, to-day, now. He would have taken it before
now, I believe, but for Fledgeby.’

‘What has Fledgeby to do with him?’

‘Knew him. Cautioned me against him before I got into his claws.
Couldn’t persuade him then, in behalf of somebody else.’

‘Do you mean that Fledgeby has at all softened him towards you?’

‘Us, Sophronia. Us, us, us.’

‘Towards us?’

‘I mean that the Jew has not yet done what he might have done, and that
Fledgeby takes the credit of having got him to hold his hand.’

‘Do you believe Fledgeby?’

‘Sophronia, I never believe anybody. I never have, my dear, since I
believed you. But it looks like it.’

Having given her this back-handed reminder of her mutinous observations
to the skeleton, Mr Lammle rose from table--perhaps, the better to
conceal a smile, and a white dint or two about his nose--and took a turn
on the carpet and came to the hearthrug.

‘If we could have packed the brute off with Georgiana;--but however;
that’s spilled milk.’

As Lammle, standing gathering up the skirts of his dressing-gown with
his back to the fire, said this, looking down at his wife, she turned
pale and looked down at the ground. With a sense of disloyalty upon
her, and perhaps with a sense of personal danger--for she was afraid of
him--even afraid of his hand and afraid of his foot, though he had never
done her violence--she hastened to put herself right in his eyes.

‘If we could borrow money, Alfred--’

‘Beg money, borrow money, or steal money. It would be all one to us,
Sophronia,’ her husband struck in.

‘--Then, we could weather this?’

‘No doubt. To offer another original and undeniable remark, Sophronia,
two and two make four.’

But, seeing that she was turning something in her mind, he gathered up
the skirts of his dressing-gown again, and, tucking them under one arm,
and collecting his ample whiskers in his other hand, kept his eye upon
her, silently.

‘It is natural, Alfred,’ she said, looking up with some timidity into
his face, ‘to think in such an emergency of the richest people we know,
and the simplest.’

‘Just so, Sophronia.’

‘The Boffins.’

‘Just so, Sophronia.’

‘Is there nothing to be done with them?’

‘What is there to be done with them, Sophronia?’

She cast about in her thoughts again, and he kept his eye upon her as
before.

‘Of course I have repeatedly thought of the Boffins, Sophronia,’ he
resumed, after a fruitless silence; ‘but I have seen my way to nothing.
They are well guarded. That infernal Secretary stands between them
and--people of merit.’

‘If he could be got rid of?’ said she, brightening a little, after more
casting about.

‘Take time, Sophronia,’ observed her watchful husband, in a patronizing
manner.

‘If working him out of the way could be presented in the light of a
service to Mr Boffin?’

‘Take time, Sophronia.’

‘We have remarked lately, Alfred, that the old man is turning very
suspicious and distrustful.’

‘Miserly too, my dear; which is far the most unpromising for us.
Nevertheless, take time, Sophronia, take time.’

She took time and then said:

‘Suppose we should address ourselves to that tendency in him of which we
have made ourselves quite sure. Suppose my conscience--’

‘And we know what a conscience it is, my soul. Yes?’

‘Suppose my conscience should not allow me to keep to myself any
longer what that upstart girl told me of the Secretary’s having made a
declaration to her. Suppose my conscience should oblige me to repeat it
to Mr Boffin.’

‘I rather like that,’ said Lammle.

‘Suppose I so repeated it to Mr Boffin, as to insinuate that my
sensitive delicacy and honour--’

‘Very good words, Sophronia.’

‘--As to insinuate that OUR sensitive delicacy and honour,’ she resumed,
with a bitter stress upon the phrase, ‘would not allow us to be silent
parties to so mercenary and designing a speculation on the Secretary’s
part, and so gross a breach of faith towards his confiding employer.
Suppose I had imparted my virtuous uneasiness to my excellent husband,
and he had said, in his integrity, “Sophronia, you must immediately
disclose this to Mr Boffin.”’

‘Once more, Sophronia,’ observed Lammle, changing the leg on which he
stood, ‘I rather like that.’

‘You remark that he is well guarded,’ she pursued. ‘I think so too. But
if this should lead to his discharging his Secretary, there would be a
weak place made.’

‘Go on expounding, Sophronia. I begin to like this very much.’

‘Having, in our unimpeachable rectitude, done him the service of opening
his eyes to the treachery of the person he trusted, we shall have
established a claim upon him and a confidence with him. Whether it
can be made much of, or little of, we must wait--because we can’t help
it--to see. Probably we shall make the most of it that is to be made.’

‘Probably,’ said Lammle.

‘Do you think it impossible,’ she asked, in the same cold plotting way,
‘that you might replace the Secretary?’

‘Not impossible, Sophronia. It might be brought about. At any rate it
might be skilfully led up to.’

She nodded her understanding of the hint, as she looked at the fire. ‘Mr
Lammle,’ she said, musingly: not without a slight ironical touch: ‘Mr
Lammle would be so delighted to do anything in his power. Mr Lammle,
himself a man of business as well as a capitalist. Mr Lammle, accustomed
to be intrusted with the most delicate affairs. Mr Lammle, who has
managed my own little fortune so admirably, but who, to be sure, began
to make his reputation with the advantage of being a man of property,
above temptation, and beyond suspicion.’

Mr Lammle smiled, and even patted her on the head. In his sinister
relish of the scheme, as he stood above her, making it the subject of
his cogitations, he seemed to have twice as much nose on his face as he
had ever had in his life.

He stood pondering, and she sat looking at the dusty fire without
moving, for some time. But, the moment he began to speak again she
looked up with a wince and attended to him, as if that double-dealing of
hers had been in her mind, and the fear were revived in her of his hand
or his foot.

‘It appears to me, Sophronia, that you have omitted one branch of the
subject. Perhaps not, for women understand women. We might oust the girl
herself?’

Mrs Lammle shook her head. ‘She has an immensely strong hold upon them
both, Alfred. Not to be compared with that of a paid secretary.’

‘But the dear child,’ said Lammle, with a crooked smile, ‘ought to have
been open with her benefactor and benefactress. The darling love
ought to have reposed unbounded confidence in her benefactor and
benefactress.’

Sophronia shook her head again.

‘Well! Women understand women,’ said her husband, rather disappointed.
‘I don’t press it. It might be the making of our fortune to make a
clean sweep of them both. With me to manage the property, and my wife to
manage the people--Whew!’

Again shaking her head, she returned: ‘They will never quarrel with the
girl. They will never punish the girl. We must accept the girl, rely
upon it.’

‘Well!’ cried Lammle, shrugging his shoulders, ‘so be it: only always
remember that we don’t want her.’

‘Now, the sole remaining question is,’ said Mrs Lammle, ‘when shall I
begin?’

‘You cannot begin too soon, Sophronia. As I have told you, the condition
of our affairs is desperate, and may be blown upon at any moment.’

‘I must secure Mr Boffin alone, Alfred. If his wife was present, she
would throw oil upon the waters. I know I should fail to move him to an
angry outburst, if his wife was there. And as to the girl herself--as I
am going to betray her confidence, she is equally out of the question.’

‘It wouldn’t do to write for an appointment?’ said Lammle.

‘No, certainly not. They would wonder among themselves why I wrote, and
I want to have him wholly unprepared.’

‘Call, and ask to see him alone?’ suggested Lammle.

‘I would rather not do that either. Leave it to me. Spare me the little
carriage for to-day, and for to-morrow (if I don’t succeed to-day), and
I’ll lie in wait for him.’

It was barely settled when a manly form was seen to pass the windows
and heard to knock and ring. ‘Here’s Fledgeby,’ said Lammle. ‘He admires
you, and has a high opinion of you. I’ll be out. Coax him to use his
influence with the Jew. His name is Riah, of the House of Pubsey and
Co.’ Adding these words under his breath, lest he should be audible
in the erect ears of Mr Fledgeby, through two keyholes and the hall,
Lammle, making signals of discretion to his servant, went softly up
stairs.

‘Mr Fledgeby,’ said Mrs Lammle, giving him a very gracious reception,
‘so glad to see you! My poor dear Alfred, who is greatly worried just
now about his affairs, went out rather early. Dear Mr Fledgeby, do sit
down.’

Dear Mr Fledgeby did sit down, and satisfied himself (or, judging from
the expression of his countenance, DISsatisfied himself) that nothing
new had occurred in the way of whisker-sprout since he came round the
corner from the Albany.

‘Dear Mr Fledgeby, it was needless to mention to you that my poor dear
Alfred is much worried about his affairs at present, for he has told me
what a comfort you are to him in his temporary difficulties, and what a
great service you have rendered him.’

‘Oh!’ said Mr Fledgeby.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Lammle.

‘I didn’t know,’ remarked Mr Fledgeby, trying a new part of his chair,
‘but that Lammle might be reserved about his affairs.’

‘Not to me,’ said Mrs Lammle, with deep feeling.

‘Oh, indeed?’ said Fledgeby.

‘Not to me, dear Mr Fledgeby. I am his wife.’

‘Yes. I--I always understood so,’ said Mr Fledgeby.

‘And as the wife of Alfred, may I, dear Mr Fledgeby, wholly without his
authority or knowledge, as I am sure your discernment will perceive,
entreat you to continue that great service, and once more use your
well-earned influence with Mr Riah for a little more indulgence? The
name I have heard Alfred mention, tossing in his dreams, IS Riah; is it
not?’

‘The name of the Creditor is Riah,’ said Mr Fledgeby, with a rather
uncompromising accent on his noun-substantive. ‘Saint Mary Axe. Pubsey
and Co.’

‘Oh yes!’ exclaimed Mrs Lammle, clasping her hands with a certain
gushing wildness. ‘Pubsey and Co.!’

‘The pleading of the feminine--’ Mr Fledgeby began, and there stuck so
long for a word to get on with, that Mrs Lammle offered him sweetly,
‘Heart?’

‘No,’ said Mr Fledgeby, ‘Gender--is ever what a man is bound to listen
to, and I wish it rested with myself. But this Riah is a nasty one, Mrs
Lammle; he really is.’

‘Not if YOU speak to him, dear Mr Fledgeby.’

‘Upon my soul and body he is!’ said Fledgeby.

‘Try. Try once more, dearest Mr Fledgeby. What is there you cannot do,
if you will!’

‘Thank you,’ said Fledgeby, ‘you’re very complimentary to say so. I
don’t mind trying him again, at your request. But of course I can’t
answer for the consequences. Riah is a tough subject, and when he says
he’ll do a thing, he’ll do it.’

‘Exactly so,’ cried Mrs Lammle, ‘and when he says to you he’ll wait,
he’ll wait.’

[‘She is a devilish clever woman,’ thought Fledgeby. ‘I didn’t see that
opening, but she spies it out and cuts into it as soon as it’s made.’)

‘In point of fact, dear Mr Fledgeby,’ Mrs Lammle went on in a very
interesting manner, ‘not to affect concealment of Alfred’s hopes, to you
who are so much his friend, there is a distant break in his horizon.’

This figure of speech seemed rather mysterious to Fascination Fledgeby,
who said, ‘There’s a what in his--eh?’

‘Alfred, dear Mr Fledgeby, discussed with me this very morning before he
went out, some prospects he has, which might entirely change the aspect
of his present troubles.’

‘Really?’ said Fledgeby.

‘O yes!’ Here Mrs Lammle brought her handkerchief into play. ‘And you
know, dear Mr Fledgeby--you who study the human heart, and study the
world--what an affliction it would be to lose position and to lose
credit, when ability to tide over a very short time might save all
appearances.’

‘Oh!’ said Fledgeby. ‘Then you think, Mrs Lammle, that if Lammle
got time, he wouldn’t burst up?--To use an expression,’ Mr Fledgeby
apologetically explained, ‘which is adopted in the Money Market.’

‘Indeed yes. Truly, truly, yes!’

‘That makes all the difference,’ said Fledgeby. ‘I’ll make a point of
seeing Riah at once.’

‘Blessings on you, dearest Mr Fledgeby!’

‘Not at all,’ said Fledgeby. She gave him her hand. ‘The hand,’ said Mr
Fledgeby, ‘of a lovely and superior-minded female is ever the repayment
of a--’

‘Noble action!’ said Mrs Lammle, extremely anxious to get rid of him.

‘It wasn’t what I was going to say,’ returned Fledgeby, who never would,
under any circumstances, accept a suggested expression, ‘but you’re very
complimentary. May I imprint a--a one--upon it? Good morning!’

‘I may depend upon your promptitude, dearest Mr Fledgeby?’

Said Fledgeby, looking back at the door and respectfully kissing his
hand, ‘You may depend upon it.’

In fact, Mr Fledgeby sped on his errand of mercy through the streets,
at so brisk a rate that his feet might have been winged by all the good
spirits that wait on Generosity. They might have taken up their station
in his breast, too, for he was blithe and merry. There was quite a fresh
trill in his voice, when, arriving at the counting-house in St Mary Axe,
and finding it for the moment empty, he trolled forth at the foot of the
staircase: ‘Now, Judah, what are you up to there?’

The old man appeared, with his accustomed deference.

‘Halloa!’ said Fledgeby, falling back, with a wink. ‘You mean mischief,
Jerusalem!’

The old man raised his eyes inquiringly.

‘Yes you do,’ said Fledgeby. ‘Oh, you sinner! Oh, you dodger! What!
You’re going to act upon that bill of sale at Lammle’s, are you? Nothing
will turn you, won’t it? You won’t be put off for another single minute,
won’t you?’

Ordered to immediate action by the master’s tone and look, the old man
took up his hat from the little counter where it lay.

‘You have been told that he might pull through it, if you didn’t go in
to win, Wide-Awake; have you?’ said Fledgeby. ‘And it’s not your game
that he should pull through it; ain’t it? You having got security, and
there being enough to pay you? Oh, you Jew!’

The old man stood irresolute and uncertain for a moment, as if there
might be further instructions for him in reserve.

‘Do I go, sir?’ he at length asked in a low voice.

‘Asks me if he is going!’ exclaimed Fledgeby. ‘Asks me, as if he didn’t
know his own purpose! Asks me, as if he hadn’t got his hat on ready!
Asks me, as if his sharp old eye--why, it cuts like a knife--wasn’t
looking at his walking-stick by the door!’

‘Do I go, sir?’

‘Do you go?’ sneered Fledgeby. ‘Yes, you do go. Toddle, Judah!’



Chapter 13

GIVE A DOG A BAD NAME, AND HANG HIM


Fascination Fledgeby, left alone in the counting-house, strolled about
with his hat on one side, whistling, and investigating the drawers, and
prying here and there for any small evidences of his being cheated,
but could find none. ‘Not his merit that he don’t cheat me,’ was Mr
Fledgeby’s commentary delivered with a wink, ‘but my precaution.’ He
then with a lazy grandeur asserted his rights as lord of Pubsey and
Co. by poking his cane at the stools and boxes, and spitting in the
fireplace, and so loitered royally to the window and looked out into the
narrow street, with his small eyes just peering over the top of Pubsey
and Co.’s blind. As a blind in more senses than one, it reminded him
that he was alone in the counting-house with the front door open. He was
moving away to shut it, lest he should be injudiciously identified with
the establishment, when he was stopped by some one coming to the door.

This some one was the dolls’ dressmaker, with a little basket on her
arm, and her crutch stick in her hand. Her keen eyes had espied Mr
Fledgeby before Mr Fledgeby had espied her, and he was paralysed in his
purpose of shutting her out, not so much by her approaching the door, as
by her favouring him with a shower of nods, the instant he saw her. This
advantage she improved by hobbling up the steps with such despatch that
before Mr Fledgeby could take measures for her finding nobody at home,
she was face to face with him in the counting-house.

‘Hope I see you well, sir,’ said Miss Wren. ‘Mr Riah in?’

Fledgeby had dropped into a chair, in the attitude of one waiting
wearily. ‘I suppose he will be back soon,’ he replied; ‘he has cut
out and left me expecting him back, in an odd way. Haven’t I seen you
before?’

‘Once before--if you had your eyesight,’ replied Miss Wren; the
conditional clause in an under-tone.

‘When you were carrying on some games up at the top of the house. I
remember. How’s your friend?’

‘I have more friends than one, sir, I hope,’ replied Miss Wren. ‘Which
friend?’

‘Never mind,’ said Mr Fledgeby, shutting up one eye, ‘any of your
friends, all your friends. Are they pretty tolerable?’

Somewhat confounded, Miss Wren parried the pleasantry, and sat down in a
corner behind the door, with her basket in her lap. By-and-by, she said,
breaking a long and patient silence:

‘I beg your pardon, sir, but I am used to find Mr Riah at this time, and
so I generally come at this time. I only want to buy my poor little two
shillings’ worth of waste. Perhaps you’ll kindly let me have it, and
I’ll trot off to my work.’

‘I let you have it?’ said Fledgeby, turning his head towards her; for he
had been sitting blinking at the light, and feeling his cheek. ‘Why, you
don’t really suppose that I have anything to do with the place, or the
business; do you?’

‘Suppose?’ exclaimed Miss Wren. ‘He said, that day, you were the
master!’

‘The old cock in black said? Riah said? Why, he’d say anything.’

‘Well; but you said so too,’ returned Miss Wren. ‘Or at least you took
on like the master, and didn’t contradict him.’

‘One of his dodges,’ said Mr Fledgeby, with a cool and contemptuous
shrug. ‘He’s made of dodges. He said to me, “Come up to the top of the
house, sir, and I’ll show you a handsome girl. But I shall call you
the master.” So I went up to the top of the house and he showed me the
handsome girl (very well worth looking at she was), and I was called the
master. I don’t know why. I dare say he don’t. He loves a dodge for
its own sake; being,’ added Mr Fledgeby, after casting about for an
expressive phrase, ‘the dodgerest of all the dodgers.’

‘Oh my head!’ cried the dolls’ dressmaker, holding it with both her
hands, as if it were cracking. ‘You can’t mean what you say.’

‘I can, my little woman, retorted Fledgeby, ‘and I do, I assure you.’

This repudiation was not only an act of deliberate policy on Fledgeby’s
part, in case of his being surprised by any other caller, but was also a
retort upon Miss Wren for her over-sharpness, and a pleasant instance
of his humour as regarded the old Jew. ‘He has got a bad name as an old
Jew, and he is paid for the use of it, and I’ll have my money’s worth
out of him.’ This was Fledgeby’s habitual reflection in the way of
business, and it was sharpened just now by the old man’s presuming
to have a secret from him: though of the secret itself, as annoying
somebody else whom he disliked, he by no means disapproved.

Miss Wren with a fallen countenance sat behind the door looking
thoughtfully at the ground, and the long and patient silence had
again set in for some time, when the expression of Mr Fledgeby’s face
betokened that through the upper portion of the door, which was of
glass, he saw some one faltering on the brink of the counting-house.
Presently there was a rustle and a tap, and then some more rustling and
another tap. Fledgeby taking no notice, the door was at length softly
opened, and the dried face of a mild little elderly gentleman looked in.

‘Mr Riah?’ said this visitor, very politely.

‘I am waiting for him, sir,’ returned Mr Fledgeby. ‘He went out and left
me here. I expect him back every minute. Perhaps you had better take a
chair.’

The gentleman took a chair, and put his hand to his forehead, as if
he were in a melancholy frame of mind. Mr Fledgeby eyed him aside, and
seemed to relish his attitude.

‘A fine day, sir,’ remarked Fledgeby.

The little dried gentleman was so occupied with his own depressed
reflections that he did not notice the remark until the sound of Mr
Fledgeby’s voice had died out of the counting-house. Then he started,
and said: ‘I beg your pardon, sir. I fear you spoke to me?’

‘I said,’ remarked Fledgeby, a little louder than before, ‘it was a fine
day.’

‘I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon. Yes.’

Again the little dried gentleman put his hand to his forehead, and again
Mr Fledgeby seemed to enjoy his doing it. When the gentleman changed his
attitude with a sigh, Fledgeby spake with a grin.

‘Mr Twemlow, I think?’

The dried gentleman seemed much surprised.

‘Had the pleasure of dining with you at Lammle’s,’ said Fledgeby. ‘Even
have the honour of being a connexion of yours. An unexpected sort of
place this to meet in; but one never knows, when one gets into the City,
what people one may knock up against. I hope you have your health, and
are enjoying yourself.’

There might have been a touch of impertinence in the last words; on the
other hand, it might have been but the native grace of Mr Fledgeby’s
manner. Mr Fledgeby sat on a stool with a foot on the rail of another
stool, and his hat on. Mr Twemlow had uncovered on looking in at the
door, and remained so. Now the conscientious Twemlow, knowing what he
had done to thwart the gracious Fledgeby, was particularly disconcerted
by this encounter. He was as ill at ease as a gentleman well could be.
He felt himself bound to conduct himself stiffly towards Fledgeby,
and he made him a distant bow. Fledgeby made his small eyes smaller
in taking special note of his manner. The dolls’ dressmaker sat in her
corner behind the door, with her eyes on the ground and her hands folded
on her basket, holding her crutch-stick between them, and appearing to
take no heed of anything.

‘He’s a long time,’ muttered Mr Fledgeby, looking at his watch. ‘What
time may you make it, Mr Twemlow?’

Mr Twemlow made it ten minutes past twelve, sir.

‘As near as a toucher,’ assented Fledgeby. ‘I hope, Mr Twemlow, your
business here may be of a more agreeable character than mine.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Mr Twemlow.

Fledgeby again made his small eyes smaller, as he glanced with great
complacency at Twemlow, who was timorously tapping the table with a
folded letter.

‘What I know of Mr Riah,’ said Fledgeby, with a very disparaging
utterance of his name, ‘leads me to believe that this is about the shop
for disagreeable business. I have always found him the bitingest and
tightest screw in London.’

Mr Twemlow acknowledged the remark with a little distant bow. It
evidently made him nervous.

‘So much so,’ pursued Fledgeby, ‘that if it wasn’t to be true to a
friend, nobody should catch me waiting here a single minute. But if you
have friends in adversity, stand by them. That’s what I say and act up
to.’

The equitable Twemlow felt that this sentiment, irrespective of the
utterer, demanded his cordial assent. ‘You are very right, sir,’ he
rejoined with spirit. ‘You indicate the generous and manly course.’

‘Glad to have your approbation,’ returned Fledgeby. ‘It’s a coincidence,
Mr Twemlow;’ here he descended from his perch, and sauntered towards
him; ‘that the friends I am standing by to-day are the friends at whose
house I met you! The Lammles. She’s a very taking and agreeable woman?’

Conscience smote the gentle Twemlow pale. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She is.’

‘And when she appealed to me this morning, to come and try what I could
do to pacify their creditor, this Mr Riah--that I certainly have gained
some little influence with in transacting business for another friend,
but nothing like so much as she supposes--and when a woman like that
spoke to me as her dearest Mr Fledgeby, and shed tears--why what could I
do, you know?’

Twemlow gasped ‘Nothing but come.’

‘Nothing but come. And so I came. But why,’ said Fledgeby, putting
his hands in his pockets and counterfeiting deep meditation, ‘why Riah
should have started up, when I told him that the Lammles entreated him
to hold over a Bill of Sale he has on all their effects; and why he
should have cut out, saying he would be back directly; and why he should
have left me here alone so long; I cannot understand.’

The chivalrous Twemlow, Knight of the Simple Heart, was not in a
condition to offer any suggestion. He was too penitent, too remorseful.
For the first time in his life he had done an underhanded action, and he
had done wrong. He had secretly interposed against this confiding young
man, for no better real reason than because the young man’s ways were
not his ways.

But, the confiding young man proceeded to heap coals of fire on his
sensitive head.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Twemlow; you see I am acquainted with the nature
of the affairs that are transacted here. Is there anything I can do for
you here? You have always been brought up as a gentleman, and never as a
man of business;’ another touch of possible impertinence in this place;
‘and perhaps you are but a poor man of business. What else is to be
expected!’

‘I am even a poorer man of business than I am a man, sir,’ returned
Twemlow, ‘and I could hardly express my deficiency in a stronger way. I
really do not so much as clearly understand my position in the matter
on which I am brought here. But there are reasons which make me
very delicate of accepting your assistance. I am greatly, greatly,
disinclined to profit by it. I don’t deserve it.’

Good childish creature! Condemned to a passage through the world by such
narrow little dimly-lighted ways, and picking up so few specks or spots
on the road!

‘Perhaps,’ said Fledgeby, ‘you may be a little proud of entering on the
topic,--having been brought up as a gentleman.’

‘It’s not that, sir,’ returned Twemlow, ‘it’s not that. I hope I
distinguish between true pride and false pride.’

‘I have no pride at all, myself,’ said Fledgeby, ‘and perhaps I don’t
cut things so fine as to know one from t’other. But I know this is a
place where even a man of business needs his wits about him; and if mine
can be of any use to you here, you’re welcome to them.’

‘You are very good,’ said Twemlow, faltering. ‘But I am most
unwilling--’

‘I don’t, you know,’ proceeded Fledgeby with an ill-favoured glance,
‘entertain the vanity of supposing that my wits could be of any use
to you in society, but they might be here. You cultivate society and
society cultivates you, but Mr Riah’s not society. In society, Mr Riah
is kept dark; eh, Mr Twemlow?’

Twemlow, much disturbed, and with his hand fluttering about his
forehead, replied: ‘Quite true.’

The confiding young man besought him to state his case. The innocent
Twemlow, expecting Fledgeby to be astounded by what he should unfold,
and not for an instant conceiving the possibility of its happening every
day, but treating of it as a terrible phenomenon occurring in the course
of ages, related how that he had had a deceased friend, a married civil
officer with a family, who had wanted money for change of place or
change of post, and how he, Twemlow, had ‘given him his name,’ with the
usual, but in the eyes of Twemlow almost incredible result that he had
been left to repay what he had never had. How, in the course of years,
he had reduced the principal by trifling sums, ‘having,’ said Twemlow,
‘always to observe great economy, being in the enjoyment of a fixed
income limited in extent, and that depending on the munificence of
a certain nobleman,’ and had always pinched the full interest out of
himself with punctual pinches. How he had come, in course of time,
to look upon this one only debt of his life as a regular quarterly
drawback, and no worse, when ‘his name’ had some way fallen into the
possession of Mr Riah, who had sent him notice to redeem it by paying up
in full, in one plump sum, or take tremendous consequences. This, with
hazy remembrances of how he had been carried to some office to ‘confess
judgment’ (as he recollected the phrase), and how he had been carried
to another office where his life was assured for somebody not wholly
unconnected with the sherry trade whom he remembered by the remarkable
circumstance that he had a Straduarius violin to dispose of, and also a
Madonna, formed the sum and substance of Mr Twemlow’s narrative. Through
which stalked the shadow of the awful Snigsworth, eyed afar off by
money-lenders as Security in the Mist, and menacing Twemlow with his
baronial truncheon.

To all, Mr Fledgeby listened with the modest gravity becoming a
confiding young man who knew it all beforehand, and, when it was
finished, seriously shook his head. ‘I don’t like, Mr Twemlow,’ said
Fledgeby, ‘I don’t like Riah’s calling in the principal. If he’s
determined to call it in, it must come.’

‘But supposing, sir,’ said Twemlow, downcast, ‘that it can’t come?’

‘Then,’ retorted Fledgeby, ‘you must go, you know.’

‘Where?’ asked Twemlow, faintly.

‘To prison,’ returned Fledgeby. Whereat Mr Twemlow leaned his innocent
head upon his hand, and moaned a little moan of distress and disgrace.

‘However,’ said Fledgeby, appearing to pluck up his spirits, ‘we’ll hope
it’s not so bad as that comes to. If you’ll allow me, I’ll mention to Mr
Riah when he comes in, who you are, and I’ll tell him you’re my friend,
and I’ll say my say for you, instead of your saying it for yourself; I
may be able to do it in a more business-like way. You won’t consider it
a liberty?’

‘I thank you again and again, sir,’ said Twemlow. ‘I am strong,
strongly, disinclined to avail myself of your generosity, though my
helplessness yields. For I cannot but feel that I--to put it in the
mildest form of speech--that I have done nothing to deserve it.’

‘Where CAN he be?’ muttered Fledgeby, referring to his watch again.
‘What CAN he have gone out for? Did you ever see him, Mr Twemlow?’

‘Never.’

‘He is a thorough Jew to look at, but he is a more thorough Jew to deal
with. He’s worst when he’s quiet. If he’s quiet, I shall take it as a
very bad sign. Keep your eye upon him when he comes in, and, if he’s
quiet, don’t be hopeful. Here he is!--He looks quiet.’

With these words, which had the effect of causing the harmless Twemlow
painful agitation, Mr Fledgeby withdrew to his former post, and the old
man entered the counting-house.

‘Why, Mr Riah,’ said Fledgeby, ‘I thought you were lost!’

The old man, glancing at the stranger, stood stock-still. He perceived
that his master was leading up to the orders he was to take, and he
waited to understand them.

‘I really thought,’ repeated Fledgeby slowly, ‘that you were lost, Mr
Riah. Why, now I look at you--but no, you can’t have done it; no, you
can’t have done it!’

Hat in hand, the old man lifted his head, and looked distressfully at
Fledgeby as seeking to know what new moral burden he was to bear.

‘You can’t have rushed out to get the start of everybody else, and put
in that bill of sale at Lammle’s?’ said Fledgeby. ‘Say you haven’t, Mr
Riah.’

‘Sir, I have,’ replied the old man in a low voice.

‘Oh my eye!’ cried Fledgeby. ‘Tut, tut, tut! Dear, dear, dear! Well! I
knew you were a hard customer, Mr Riah, but I never thought you were as
hard as that.’

‘Sir,’ said the old man, with great uneasiness, ‘I do as I am directed.
I am not the principal here. I am but the agent of a superior, and I
have no choice, no power.’

‘Don’t say so,’ retorted Fledgeby, secretly exultant as the old man
stretched out his hands, with a shrinking action of defending himself
against the sharp construction of the two observers. ‘Don’t play the
tune of the trade, Mr Riah. You’ve a right to get in your debts, if
you’re determined to do it, but don’t pretend what every one in your
line regularly pretends. At least, don’t do it to me. Why should you, Mr
Riah? You know I know all about you.’

The old man clasped the skirt of his long coat with his disengaged hand,
and directed a wistful look at Fledgeby.

‘And don’t,’ said Fledgeby, ‘don’t, I entreat you as a favour, Mr Riah,
be so devilish meek, for I know what’ll follow if you are. Look here, Mr
Riah. This gentleman is Mr Twemlow.’

The Jew turned to him and bowed. That poor lamb bowed in return; polite,
and terrified.

‘I have made such a failure,’ proceeded Fledgeby, ‘in trying to do
anything with you for my friend Lammle, that I’ve hardly a hope of doing
anything with you for my friend (and connexion indeed) Mr Twemlow. But
I do think that if you would do a favour for anybody, you would for me,
and I won’t fail for want of trying, and I’ve passed my promise to Mr
Twemlow besides. Now, Mr Riah, here is Mr Twemlow. Always good for his
interest, always coming up to time, always paying his little way. Now,
why should you press Mr Twemlow? You can’t have any spite against Mr
Twemlow! Why not be easy with Mr Twemlow?’

The old man looked into Fledgeby’s little eyes for any sign of leave to
be easy with Mr Twemlow; but there was no sign in them.

‘Mr Twemlow is no connexion of yours, Mr Riah,’ said Fledgeby; ‘you
can’t want to be even with him for having through life gone in for a
gentleman and hung on to his Family. If Mr Twemlow has a contempt for
business, what can it matter to you?’

‘But pardon me,’ interposed the gentle victim, ‘I have not. I should
consider it presumption.’

‘There, Mr Riah!’ said Fledgeby, ‘isn’t that handsomely said? Come! Make
terms with me for Mr Twemlow.’

The old man looked again for any sign of permission to spare the poor
little gentleman. No. Mr Fledgeby meant him to be racked.

‘I am very sorry, Mr Twemlow,’ said Riah. ‘I have my instructions. I am
invested with no authority for diverging from them. The money must be
paid.’

‘In full and slap down, do you mean, Mr Riah?’ asked Fledgeby, to make
things quite explicit.

‘In full, sir, and at once,’ was Riah’s answer.

Mr Fledgeby shook his head deploringly at Twemlow, and mutely expressed
in reference to the venerable figure standing before him with eyes upon
the ground: ‘What a Monster of an Israelite this is!’

‘Mr Riah,’ said Fledgeby.

The old man lifted up his eyes once more to the little eyes in Mr
Fledgeby’s head, with some reviving hope that the sign might be coming
yet.

‘Mr Riah, it’s of no use my holding back the fact. There’s a certain
great party in the background in Mr Twemlow’s case, and you know it.’

‘I know it,’ the old man admitted.

‘Now, I’ll put it as a plain point of business, Mr Riah. Are you fully
determined (as a plain point of business) either to have that said great
party’s security, or that said great party’s money?’

‘Fully determined,’ answered Riah, as he read his master’s face, and
learnt the book.

‘Not at all caring for, and indeed as it seems to me rather enjoying,’
said Fledgeby, with peculiar unction, ‘the precious kick-up and row that
will come off between Mr Twemlow and the said great party?’

This required no answer, and received none. Poor Mr Twemlow, who had
betrayed the keenest mental terrors since his noble kinsman loomed in
the perspective, rose with a sigh to take his departure. ‘I thank you
very much, sir,’ he said, offering Fledgeby his feverish hand. ‘You have
done me an unmerited service. Thank you, thank you!’

‘Don’t mention it,’ answered Fledgeby. ‘It’s a failure so far, but I’ll
stay behind, and take another touch at Mr Riah.’

‘Do not deceive yourself Mr Twemlow,’ said the Jew, then addressing him
directly for the first time. ‘There is no hope for you. You must expect
no leniency here. You must pay in full, and you cannot pay too promptly,
or you will be put to heavy charges. Trust nothing to me, sir. Money,
money, money.’ When he had said these words in an emphatic manner, he
acknowledged Mr Twemlow’s still polite motion of his head, and that
amiable little worthy took his departure in the lowest spirits.

Fascination Fledgeby was in such a merry vein when the counting-house
was cleared of him, that he had nothing for it but to go to the window,
and lean his arms on the frame of the blind, and have his silent laugh
out, with his back to his subordinate. When he turned round again with a
composed countenance, his subordinate still stood in the same place, and
the dolls’ dressmaker sat behind the door with a look of horror.

‘Halloa!’ cried Mr Fledgeby, ‘you’re forgetting this young lady, Mr
Riah, and she has been waiting long enough too. Sell her her waste,
please, and give her good measure if you can make up your mind to do the
liberal thing for once.’

He looked on for a time, as the Jew filled her little basket with such
scraps as she was used to buy; but, his merry vein coming on again, he
was obliged to turn round to the window once more, and lean his arms on
the blind.

‘There, my Cinderella dear,’ said the old man in a whisper, and with a
worn-out look, ‘the basket’s full now. Bless you! And get you gone!’

‘Don’t call me your Cinderella dear,’ returned Miss Wren. ‘O you cruel
godmother!’

She shook that emphatic little forefinger of hers in his face at
parting, as earnestly and reproachfully as she had ever shaken it at her
grim old child at home.

‘You are not the godmother at all!’ said she. ‘You are the Wolf in
the Forest, the wicked Wolf! And if ever my dear Lizzie is sold and
betrayed, I shall know who sold and betrayed her!’



Chapter 14

MR WEGG PREPARES A GRINDSTONE FOR MR BOFFIN’S NOSE


Having assisted at a few more expositions of the lives of Misers, Mr
Venus became almost indispensable to the evenings at the Bower. The
circumstance of having another listener to the wonders unfolded by
Wegg, or, as it were, another calculator to cast up the guineas found in
teapots, chimneys, racks and mangers, and other such banks of deposit,
seemed greatly to heighten Mr Boffin’s enjoyment; while Silas Wegg, for
his part, though of a jealous temperament which might under ordinary
circumstances have resented the anatomist’s getting into favour, was
so very anxious to keep his eye on that gentleman--lest, being too
much left to himself, he should be tempted to play any tricks with the
precious document in his keeping--that he never lost an opportunity of
commending him to Mr Boffin’s notice as a third party whose company was
much to be desired. Another friendly demonstration towards him Mr Wegg
now regularly gratified. After each sitting was over, and the patron
had departed, Mr Wegg invariably saw Mr Venus home. To be sure, he as
invariably requested to be refreshed with a sight of the paper in which
he was a joint proprietor; but he never failed to remark that it was the
great pleasure he derived from Mr Venus’s improving society which had
insensibly lured him round to Clerkenwell again, and that, finding
himself once more attracted to the spot by the social powers of Mr V.,
he would beg leave to go through that little incidental procedure, as a
matter of form. ‘For well I know, sir,’ Mr Wegg would add, ‘that a
man of your delicate mind would wish to be checked off whenever the
opportunity arises, and it is not for me to baulk your feelings.’

A certain rustiness in Mr Venus, which never became so lubricated by
the oil of Mr Wegg but that he turned under the screw in a creaking and
stiff manner, was very noticeable at about this period. While assisting
at the literary evenings, he even went so far, on two or three
occasions, as to correct Mr Wegg when he grossly mispronounced a word,
or made nonsense of a passage; insomuch that Mr Wegg took to surveying
his course in the day, and to making arrangements for getting round
rocks at night instead of running straight upon them. Of the slightest
anatomical reference he became particularly shy, and, if he saw a bone
ahead, would go any distance out of his way rather than mention it by
name.

The adverse destinies ordained that one evening Mr Wegg’s labouring
bark became beset by polysyllables, and embarrassed among a perfect
archipelago of hard words. It being necessary to take soundings every
minute, and to feel the way with the greatest caution, Mr Wegg’s
attention was fully employed. Advantage was taken of this dilemma by
Mr Venus, to pass a scrap of paper into Mr Boffin’s hand, and lay his
finger on his own lip.

When Mr Boffin got home at night he found that the paper contained Mr
Venus’s card and these words: ‘Should be glad to be honoured with a call
respecting business of your own, about dusk on an early evening.’

The very next evening saw Mr Boffin peeping in at the preserved frogs
in Mr Venus’s shop-window, and saw Mr Venus espying Mr Boffin with the
readiness of one on the alert, and beckoning that gentleman into his
interior. Responding, Mr Boffin was invited to seat himself on the box
of human miscellanies before the fire, and did so, looking round the
place with admiring eyes. The fire being low and fitful, and the dusk
gloomy, the whole stock seemed to be winking and blinking with both
eyes, as Mr Venus did. The French gentleman, though he had no eyes, was
not at all behind-hand, but appeared, as the flame rose and fell, to
open and shut his no eyes, with the regularity of the glass-eyed dogs
and ducks and birds. The big-headed babies were equally obliging in
lending their grotesque aid to the general effect.

‘You see, Mr Venus, I’ve lost no time,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Here I am.’

‘Here you are, sir,’ assented Mr Venus.

‘I don’t like secrecy,’ pursued Mr Boffin--‘at least, not in a general
way I don’t--but I dare say you’ll show me good reason for being secret
so far.’

‘I think I shall, sir,’ returned Venus.

‘Good,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘You don’t expect Wegg, I take it for granted?’

‘No, sir. I expect no one but the present company.’

Mr Boffin glanced about him, as accepting under that inclusive
denomination the French gentleman and the circle in which he didn’t
move, and repeated, ‘The present company.’

‘Sir,’ said Mr Venus, ‘before entering upon business, I shall have to
ask you for your word and honour that we are in confidence.’

‘Let’s wait a bit and understand what the expression means,’ answered Mr
Boffin. ‘In confidence for how long? In confidence for ever and a day?’

‘I take your hint, sir,’ said Venus; ‘you think you might consider the
business, when you came to know it, to be of a nature incompatible with
confidence on your part?’

‘I might,’ said Mr Boffin with a cautious look.

‘True, sir. Well, sir,’ observed Venus, after clutching at his dusty
hair, to brighten his ideas, ‘let us put it another way. I open the
business with you, relying upon your honour not to do anything in it,
and not to mention me in it, without my knowledge.’

‘That sounds fair,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘I agree to that.’

‘I have your word and honour, sir?’

‘My good fellow,’ retorted Mr Boffin, ‘you have my word; and how you
can have that, without my honour too, I don’t know. I’ve sorted a lot
of dust in my time, but I never knew the two things go into separate
heaps.’

This remark seemed rather to abash Mr Venus. He hesitated, and said,
‘Very true, sir;’ and again, ‘Very true, sir,’ before resuming the
thread of his discourse.

‘Mr Boffin, if I confess to you that I fell into a proposal of which you
were the subject, and of which you oughtn’t to have been the subject,
you will allow me to mention, and will please take into favourable
consideration, that I was in a crushed state of mind at the time.’

The Golden Dustman, with his hands folded on the top of his stout
stick, with his chin resting upon them, and with something leering and
whimsical in his eyes, gave a nod, and said, ‘Quite so, Venus.’

‘That proposal, sir, was a conspiring breach of your confidence, to
such an extent, that I ought at once to have made it known to you. But I
didn’t, Mr Boffin, and I fell into it.’

Without moving eye or finger, Mr Boffin gave another nod, and placidly
repeated, ‘Quite so, Venus.’

‘Not that I was ever hearty in it, sir,’ the penitent anatomist went
on, ‘or that I ever viewed myself with anything but reproach for having
turned out of the paths of science into the paths of--’ he was going
to say ‘villany,’ but, unwilling to press too hard upon himself,
substituted with great emphasis--‘Weggery.’

Placid and whimsical of look as ever, Mr Boffin answered:

‘Quite so, Venus.’

‘And now, sir,’ said Venus, ‘having prepared your mind in the rough, I
will articulate the details.’ With which brief professional exordium, he
entered on the history of the friendly move, and truly recounted it. One
might have thought that it would have extracted some show of surprise or
anger, or other emotion, from Mr Boffin, but it extracted nothing beyond
his former comment:

‘Quite so, Venus.’

‘I have astonished you, sir, I believe?’ said Mr Venus, pausing
dubiously.

Mr Boffin simply answered as aforesaid: ‘Quite so, Venus.’

By this time the astonishment was all on the other side. It did not,
however, so continue. For, when Venus passed to Wegg’s discovery, and
from that to their having both seen Mr Boffin dig up the Dutch bottle,
that gentleman changed colour, changed his attitude, became extremely
restless, and ended (when Venus ended) by being in a state of manifest
anxiety, trepidation, and confusion.

‘Now, sir,’ said Venus, finishing off; ‘you best know what was in that
Dutch bottle, and why you dug it up, and took it away. I don’t pretend
to know anything more about it than I saw. All I know is this: I am
proud of my calling after all (though it has been attended by one
dreadful drawback which has told upon my heart, and almost equally upon
my skeleton), and I mean to live by my calling. Putting the same meaning
into other words, I do not mean to turn a single dishonest penny by this
affair. As the best amends I can make you for having ever gone into it,
I make known to you, as a warning, what Wegg has found out. My opinion
is, that Wegg is not to be silenced at a modest price, and I build that
opinion on his beginning to dispose of your property the moment he knew
his power. Whether it’s worth your while to silence him at any price,
you will decide for yourself, and take your measures accordingly. As
far as I am concerned, I have no price. If I am ever called upon for
the truth, I tell it, but I want to do no more than I have now done and
ended.’

‘Thank’ee, Venus!’ said Mr Boffin, with a hearty grip of his hand;
‘thank’ee, Venus, thank’ee, Venus!’ And then walked up and down the
little shop in great agitation. ‘But look here, Venus,’ he by-and-by
resumed, nervously sitting down again; ‘if I have to buy Wegg up, I
shan’t buy him any cheaper for your being out of it. Instead of his
having half the money--it was to have been half, I suppose? Share and
share alike?’

‘It was to have been half, sir,’ answered Venus.

‘Instead of that, he’ll now have all. I shall pay the same, if not more.
For you tell me he’s an unconscionable dog, a ravenous rascal.’

‘He is,’ said Venus.

‘Don’t you think, Venus,’ insinuated Mr Boffin, after looking at the
fire for a while--‘don’t you feel as if--you might like to pretend to be
in it till Wegg was bought up, and then ease your mind by handing over
to me what you had made believe to pocket?’

‘No I don’t, sir,’ returned Venus, very positively.

‘Not to make amends?’ insinuated Mr Boffin.

‘No, sir. It seems to me, after maturely thinking it over, that the best
amends for having got out of the square is to get back into the square.’

‘Humph!’ mused Mr Boffin. ‘When you say the square, you mean--’

‘I mean,’ said Venus, stoutly and shortly, ‘the right.’

‘It appears to me,’ said Mr Boffin, grumbling over the fire in an
injured manner, ‘that the right is with me, if it’s anywhere. I have
much more right to the old man’s money than the Crown can ever have.
What was the Crown to him except the King’s Taxes? Whereas, me and my
wife, we was all in all to him.’

Mr Venus, with his head upon his hands, rendered melancholy by the
contemplation of Mr Boffin’s avarice, only murmured to steep himself
in the luxury of that frame of mind: ‘She did not wish so to regard
herself, nor yet to be so regarded.’

‘And how am I to live,’ asked Mr Boffin, piteously, ‘if I’m to be going
buying fellows up out of the little that I’ve got? And how am I to set
about it? When am I to get my money ready? When am I to make a bid? You
haven’t told me when he threatens to drop down upon me.’

Venus explained under what conditions, and with what views, the dropping
down upon Mr Boffin was held over until the Mounds should be cleared
away. Mr Boffin listened attentively. ‘I suppose,’ said he, with a
gleam of hope, ‘there’s no doubt about the genuineness and date of this
confounded will?’

‘None whatever,’ said Mr Venus.

‘Where might it be deposited at present?’ asked Mr Boffin, in a
wheedling tone.

‘It’s in my possession, sir.’

‘Is it?’ he cried, with great eagerness. ‘Now, for any liberal sum of
money that could be agreed upon, Venus, would you put it in the fire?’

‘No, sir, I wouldn’t,’ interrupted Mr Venus.

‘Nor pass it over to me?’

‘That would be the same thing. No, sir,’ said Mr Venus.

The Golden Dustman seemed about to pursue these questions, when a
stumping noise was heard outside, coming towards the door. ‘Hush! here’s
Wegg!’ said Venus. ‘Get behind the young alligator in the corner, Mr
Boffin, and judge him for yourself. I won’t light a candle till he’s
gone; there’ll only be the glow of the fire; Wegg’s well acquainted with
the alligator, and he won’t take particular notice of him. Draw your
legs in, Mr Boffin, at present I see a pair of shoes at the end of his
tail. Get your head well behind his smile, Mr Boffin, and you’ll lie
comfortable there; you’ll find plenty of room behind his smile. He’s a
little dusty, but he’s very like you in tone. Are you right, sir?’

Mr Boffin had but whispered an affirmative response, when Wegg came
stumping in. ‘Partner,’ said that gentleman in a sprightly manner,
‘how’s yourself?’

‘Tolerable,’ returned Mr Venus. ‘Not much to boast of.’

‘In-deed!’ said Wegg: ‘sorry, partner, that you’re not picking up
faster, but your soul’s too large for your body, sir; that’s where
it is. And how’s our stock in trade, partner? Safe bind, safe find,
partner? Is that about it?’

‘Do you wish to see it?’ asked Venus.

‘If you please, partner,’ said Wegg, rubbing his hands. ‘I wish to see
it jintly with yourself. Or, in similar words to some that was set to
music some time back:

     “I wish you to see it with your eyes,
     And I will pledge with mine.”’

Turning his back and turning a key, Mr Venus produced the document,
holding on by his usual corner. Mr Wegg, holding on by the opposite
corner, sat down on the seat so lately vacated by Mr Boffin, and looked
it over. ‘All right, sir,’ he slowly and unwillingly admitted, in his
reluctance to loose his hold, ‘all right!’ And greedily watched his
partner as he turned his back again, and turned his key again.

‘There’s nothing new, I suppose?’ said Venus, resuming his low chair
behind the counter.

‘Yes there is, sir,’ replied Wegg; ‘there was something new this
morning. That foxey old grasper and griper--’

‘Mr Boffin?’ inquired Venus, with a glance towards the alligator’s yard
or two of smile.

‘Mister be blowed!’ cried Wegg, yielding to his honest indignation.
‘Boffin. Dusty Boffin. That foxey old grunter and grinder, sir, turns
into the yard this morning, to meddle with our property, a menial tool
of his own, a young man by the name of Sloppy. Ecod, when I say to him,
“What do you want here, young man? This is a private yard,” he pulls out
a paper from Boffin’s other blackguard, the one I was passed over for.
“This is to authorize Sloppy to overlook the carting and to watch the
work.” That’s pretty strong, I think, Mr Venus?’

‘Remember he doesn’t know yet of our claim on the property,’ suggested
Venus.

‘Then he must have a hint of it,’ said Wegg, ‘and a strong one that’ll
jog his terrors a bit. Give him an inch, and he’ll take an ell. Let him
alone this time, and what’ll he do with our property next? I tell you
what, Mr Venus; it comes to this; I must be overbearing with Boffin, or
I shall fly into several pieces. I can’t contain myself when I look
at him. Every time I see him putting his hand in his pocket, I see him
putting it into my pocket. Every time I hear him jingling his money, I
hear him taking liberties with my money. Flesh and blood can’t bear it.
No,’ said Mr Wegg, greatly exasperated, ‘and I’ll go further. A wooden
leg can’t bear it!’

‘But, Mr Wegg,’ urged Venus, ‘it was your own idea that he should not be
exploded upon, till the Mounds were carted away.’

‘But it was likewise my idea, Mr Venus,’ retorted Wegg, ‘that if he came
sneaking and sniffing about the property, he should be threatened, given
to understand that he has no right to it, and be made our slave. Wasn’t
that my idea, Mr Venus?’

‘It certainly was, Mr Wegg.’

‘It certainly was, as you say, partner,’ assented Wegg, put into
a better humour by the ready admission. ‘Very well. I consider his
planting one of his menial tools in the yard, an act of sneaking and
sniffing. And his nose shall be put to the grindstone for it.’

‘It was not your fault, Mr Wegg, I must admit,’ said Venus, ‘that he got
off with the Dutch bottle that night.’

‘As you handsomely say again, partner! No, it was not my fault. I’d have
had that bottle out of him. Was it to be borne that he should come, like
a thief in the dark, digging among stuff that was far more ours than his
(seeing that we could deprive him of every grain of it, if he didn’t buy
us at our own figure), and carrying off treasure from its bowels? No,
it was not to be borne. And for that, too, his nose shall be put to the
grindstone.’

‘How do you propose to do it, Mr Wegg?’

‘To put his nose to the grindstone? I propose,’ returned that estimable
man, ‘to insult him openly. And, if looking into this eye of mine, he
dares to offer a word in answer, to retort upon him before he can take
his breath, “Add another word to that, you dusty old dog, and you’re a
beggar.”’

‘Suppose he says nothing, Mr Wegg?’

‘Then,’ replied Wegg, ‘we shall have come to an understanding with very
little trouble, and I’ll break him and drive him, Mr Venus. I’ll put
him in harness, and I’ll bear him up tight, and I’ll break him and drive
him. The harder the old Dust is driven, sir, the higher he’ll pay. And I
mean to be paid high, Mr Venus, I promise you.’

‘You speak quite revengefully, Mr Wegg.’

‘Revengefully, sir? Is it for him that I have declined and falled,
night after night? Is it for his pleasure that I’ve waited at home of an
evening, like a set of skittles, to be set up and knocked over, set up
and knocked over, by whatever balls--or books--he chose to bring against
me? Why, I’m a hundred times the man he is, sir; five hundred times!’

Perhaps it was with the malicious intent of urging him on to his worst
that Mr Venus looked as if he doubted that.

‘What? Was it outside the house at present ockypied, to its disgrace,
by that minion of fortune and worm of the hour,’ said Wegg, falling back
upon his strongest terms of reprobation, and slapping the counter,
‘that I, Silas Wegg, five hundred times the man he ever was, sat in all
weathers, waiting for a errand or a customer? Was it outside that very
house as I first set eyes upon him, rolling in the lap of luxury, when I
was selling halfpenny ballads there for a living? And am I to grovel in
the dust for HIM to walk over? No!’

There was a grin upon the ghastly countenance of the French gentleman
under the influence of the firelight, as if he were computing how many
thousand slanderers and traitors array themselves against the fortunate,
on premises exactly answering to those of Mr Wegg. One might have
fancied that the big-headed babies were toppling over with their
hydrocephalic attempts to reckon up the children of men who transform
their benefactors into their injurers by the same process. The yard or
two of smile on the part of the alligator might have been invested with
the meaning, ‘All about this was quite familiar knowledge down in the
depths of the slime, ages ago.’

‘But,’ said Wegg, possibly with some slight perception to the foregoing
effect, ‘your speaking countenance remarks, Mr Venus, that I’m duller
and savager than usual. Perhaps I HAVE allowed myself to brood too much.
Begone, dull Care! ‘Tis gone, sir. I’ve looked in upon you, and empire
resumes her sway. For, as the song says--subject to your correction,
sir--

     “When the heart of a man is depressed with cares,
     The mist is dispelled if Venus appears.
     Like the notes of a fiddle, you sweetly, sir, sweetly,
     Raises our spirits and charms our ears.”

Good-night, sir.’

‘I shall have a word or two to say to you, Mr Wegg, before long,’
remarked Venus, ‘respecting my share in the project we’ve been speaking
of.’

‘My time, sir,’ returned Wegg, ‘is yours. In the meanwhile let it be
fully understood that I shall not neglect bringing the grindstone to
bear, nor yet bringing Dusty Boffin’s nose to it. His nose once brought
to it, shall be held to it by these hands, Mr Venus, till the sparks
flies out in showers.’

With this agreeable promise Wegg stumped out, and shut the shop-door
after him. ‘Wait till I light a candle, Mr Boffin,’ said Venus, ‘and
you’ll come out more comfortable.’ So, he lighting a candle and holding
it up at arm’s length, Mr Boffin disengaged himself from behind the
alligator’s smile, with an expression of countenance so very downcast
that it not only appeared as if the alligator had the whole of the joke
to himself, but further as if it had been conceived and executed at Mr
Boffin’s expense.

‘That’s a treacherous fellow,’ said Mr Boffin, dusting his arms and legs
as he came forth, the alligator having been but musty company. ‘That’s a
dreadful fellow.’

‘The alligator, sir?’ said Venus.

‘No, Venus, no. The Serpent.’

‘You’ll have the goodness to notice, Mr Boffin,’ remarked Venus, ‘that I
said nothing to him about my going out of the affair altogether, because
I didn’t wish to take you anyways by surprise. But I can’t be too soon
out of it for my satisfaction, Mr Boffin, and I now put it to you when
it will suit your views for me to retire?’

‘Thank’ee, Venus, thank’ee, Venus; but I don’t know what to say,’
returned Mr Boffin, ‘I don’t know what to do. He’ll drop down on me any
way. He seems fully determined to drop down; don’t he?’

Mr Venus opined that such was clearly his intention.

‘You might be a sort of protection for me, if you remained in it,’ said
Mr Boffin; ‘you might stand betwixt him and me, and take the edge off
him. Don’t you feel as if you could make a show of remaining in it,
Venus, till I had time to turn myself round?’

Venus naturally inquired how long Mr Boffin thought it might take him to
turn himself round?

‘I am sure I don’t know,’ was the answer, given quite at a loss.
‘Everything is so at sixes and sevens. If I had never come into the
property, I shouldn’t have minded. But being in it, it would be very
trying to be turned out; now, don’t you acknowledge that it would,
Venus?’

Mr Venus preferred, he said, to leave Mr Boffin to arrive at his own
conclusions on that delicate question.

‘I am sure I don’t know what to do,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘If I ask advice of
any one else, it’s only letting in another person to be bought out, and
then I shall be ruined that way, and might as well have given up the
property and gone slap to the workhouse. If I was to take advice of my
young man, Rokesmith, I should have to buy HIM out. Sooner or later, of
course, he’d drop down upon me, like Wegg. I was brought into the world
to be dropped down upon, it appears to me.’

Mr Venus listened to these lamentations in silence, while Mr Boffin
jogged to and fro, holding his pockets as if he had a pain in them.

‘After all, you haven’t said what you mean to do yourself, Venus. When
you do go out of it, how do you mean to go?’

Venus replied that as Wegg had found the document and handed it to him,
it was his intention to hand it back to Wegg, with the declaration that
he himself would have nothing to say to it, or do with it, and that Wegg
must act as he chose, and take the consequences.

‘And then he drops down with his whole weight upon ME!’ cried Mr Boffin,
ruefully. ‘I’d sooner be dropped upon by you than by him, or even by you
jintly, than by him alone!’

Mr Venus could only repeat that it was his fixed intention to betake
himself to the paths of science, and to walk in the same all the days
of his life; not dropping down upon his fellow-creatures until they were
deceased, and then only to articulate them to the best of his humble
ability.

‘How long could you be persuaded to keep up the appearance of remaining
in it?’ asked Mr Boffin, retiring on his other idea. ‘Could you be got
to do so, till the Mounds are gone?’

No. That would protract the mental uneasiness of Mr Venus too long, he
said.

‘Not if I was to show you reason now?’ demanded Mr Boffin; ‘not if I was
to show you good and sufficient reason?’

If by good and sufficient reason Mr Boffin meant honest and
unimpeachable reason, that might weigh with Mr Venus against his
personal wishes and convenience. But he must add that he saw no opening
to the possibility of such reason being shown him.

‘Come and see me, Venus,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘at my house.’

‘Is the reason there, sir?’ asked Mr Venus, with an incredulous smile
and blink.

‘It may be, or may not be,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘just as you view it. But
in the meantime don’t go out of the matter. Look here. Do this. Give me
your word that you won’t take any steps with Wegg, without my knowledge,
just as I have given you my word that I won’t without yours.’

‘Done, Mr Boffin!’ said Venus, after brief consideration.

‘Thank’ee, Venus, thank’ee, Venus! Done!’

‘When shall I come to see you, Mr Boffin.’

‘When you like. The sooner the better. I must be going now. Good-night,
Venus.’

‘Good-night, sir.’

‘And good-night to the rest of the present company,’ said Mr Boffin,
glancing round the shop. ‘They make a queer show, Venus, and I should
like to be better acquainted with them some day. Good-night, Venus,
good-night! Thankee, Venus, thankee, Venus!’ With that he jogged out
into the street, and jogged upon his homeward way.

‘Now, I wonder,’ he meditated as he went along, nursing his stick,
‘whether it can be, that Venus is setting himself to get the better of
Wegg? Whether it can be, that he means, when I have bought Wegg out, to
have me all to himself and to pick me clean to the bones!’

It was a cunning and suspicious idea, quite in the way of his school
of Misers, and he looked very cunning and suspicious as he went jogging
through the streets. More than once or twice, more than twice or thrice,
say half a dozen times, he took his stick from the arm on which he
nursed it, and hit a straight sharp rap at the air with its head.
Possibly the wooden countenance of Mr Silas Wegg was incorporeally
before him at those moments, for he hit with intense satisfaction.

He was within a few streets of his own house, when a little private
carriage, coming in the contrary direction, passed him, turned round,
and passed him again. It was a little carriage of eccentric movement,
for again he heard it stop behind him and turn round, and again he saw
it pass him. Then it stopped, and then went on, out of sight. But, not
far out of sight, for, when he came to the corner of his own street,
there it stood again.

There was a lady’s face at the window as he came up with this carriage,
and he was passing it when the lady softly called to him by his name.

‘I beg your pardon, Ma’am?’ said Mr Boffin, coming to a stop.

‘It is Mrs Lammle,’ said the lady.

Mr Boffin went up to the window, and hoped Mrs Lammle was well.

‘Not very well, dear Mr Boffin; I have fluttered myself by
being--perhaps foolishly--uneasy and anxious. I have been waiting for
you some time. Can I speak to you?’

Mr Boffin proposed that Mrs Lammle should drive on to his house, a few
hundred yards further.

‘I would rather not, Mr Boffin, unless you particularly wish it. I feel
the difficulty and delicacy of the matter so much that I would rather
avoid speaking to you at your own home. You must think this very
strange?’

Mr Boffin said no, but meant yes.

‘It is because I am so grateful for the good opinion of all my
friends, and am so touched by it, that I cannot bear to run the risk of
forfeiting it in any case, even in the cause of duty. I have asked my
husband (my dear Alfred, Mr Boffin) whether it is the cause of duty,
and he has most emphatically said Yes. I wish I had asked him sooner. It
would have spared me much distress.’

[‘Can this be more dropping down upon me!’ thought Mr Boffin, quite
bewildered.)

‘It was Alfred who sent me to you, Mr Boffin. Alfred said, “Don’t
come back, Sophronia, until you have seen Mr Boffin, and told him all.
Whatever he may think of it, he ought certainly to know it.” Would you
mind coming into the carriage?’

Mr Boffin answered, ‘Not at all,’ and took his seat at Mrs Lammle’s
side.

‘Drive slowly anywhere,’ Mrs Lammle called to her coachman, ‘and don’t
let the carriage rattle.’

‘It MUST be more dropping down, I think,’ said Mr Boffin to himself.
‘What next?’



Chapter 15

THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN AT HIS WORST


The breakfast table at Mr Boffin’s was usually a very pleasant one, and
was always presided over by Bella. As though he began each new day in
his healthy natural character, and some waking hours were necessary to
his relapse into the corrupting influences of his wealth, the face and
the demeanour of the Golden Dustman were generally unclouded at that
meal. It would have been easy to believe then, that there was no change
in him. It was as the day went on that the clouds gathered, and the
brightness of the morning became obscured. One might have said that the
shadows of avarice and distrust lengthened as his own shadow lengthened,
and that the night closed around him gradually.

But, one morning long afterwards to be remembered, it was black midnight
with the Golden Dustman when he first appeared. His altered character
had never been so grossly marked. His bearing towards his Secretary was
so charged with insolent distrust and arrogance, that the latter rose
and left the table before breakfast was half done. The look he directed
at the Secretary’s retiring figure was so cunningly malignant, that
Bella would have sat astounded and indignant, even though he had not
gone the length of secretly threatening Rokesmith with his clenched
fist as he closed the door. This unlucky morning, of all mornings in the
year, was the morning next after Mr Boffin’s interview with Mrs Lammle
in her little carriage.

Bella looked to Mrs Boffin’s face for comment on, or explanation of,
this stormy humour in her husband, but none was there. An anxious and
a distressed observation of her own face was all she could read in it.
When they were left alone together--which was not until noon, for Mr
Boffin sat long in his easy-chair, by turns jogging up and down
the breakfast-room, clenching his fist and muttering--Bella, in
consternation, asked her what had happened, what was wrong? ‘I am
forbidden to speak to you about it, Bella dear; I mustn’t tell you,’
was all the answer she could get. And still, whenever, in her wonder and
dismay, she raised her eyes to Mrs Boffin’s face, she saw in it the same
anxious and distressed observation of her own.

Oppressed by her sense that trouble was impending, and lost in
speculations why Mrs Boffin should look at her as if she had any part in
it, Bella found the day long and dreary. It was far on in the afternoon
when, she being in her own room, a servant brought her a message from Mr
Boffin begging her to come to his.

Mrs Boffin was there, seated on a sofa, and Mr Boffin was jogging up and
down. On seeing Bella he stopped, beckoned her to him, and drew her arm
through his. ‘Don’t be alarmed, my dear,’ he said, gently; ‘I am not
angry with you. Why you actually tremble! Don’t be alarmed, Bella my
dear. I’ll see you righted.’

‘See me righted?’ thought Bella. And then repeated aloud in a tone of
astonishment: ‘see me righted, sir?’

‘Ay, ay!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘See you righted. Send Mr Rokesmith here, you
sir.’

Bella would have been lost in perplexity if there had been pause
enough; but the servant found Mr Rokesmith near at hand, and he almost
immediately presented himself.

‘Shut the door, sir!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘I have got something to say to
you which I fancy you’ll not be pleased to hear.’

‘I am sorry to reply, Mr Boffin,’ returned the Secretary, as, having
closed the door, he turned and faced him, ‘that I think that very
likely.’

‘What do you mean?’ blustered Mr Boffin.

‘I mean that it has become no novelty to me to hear from your lips what
I would rather not hear.’

‘Oh! Perhaps we shall change that,’ said Mr Boffin with a threatening
roll of his head.

‘I hope so,’ returned the Secretary. He was quiet and respectful; but
stood, as Bella thought (and was glad to think), on his manhood too.

‘Now, sir,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘look at this young lady on my arm.’

Bella involuntarily raising her eyes, when this sudden reference was
made to herself, met those of Mr Rokesmith. He was pale and seemed
agitated. Then her eyes passed on to Mrs Boffin’s, and she met the look
again. In a flash it enlightened her, and she began to understand what
she had done.

‘I say to you, sir,’ Mr Boffin repeated, ‘look at this young lady on my
arm.’

‘I do so,’ returned the Secretary.

As his glance rested again on Bella for a moment, she thought there was
reproach in it. But it is possible that the reproach was within herself.

‘How dare you, sir,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘tamper, unknown to me, with this
young lady? How dare you come out of your station, and your place in my
house, to pester this young lady with your impudent addresses?’

‘I must decline to answer questions,’ said the Secretary, ‘that are so
offensively asked.’

‘You decline to answer?’ retorted Mr Boffin. ‘You decline to answer,
do you? Then I’ll tell you what it is, Rokesmith; I’ll answer for you.
There are two sides to this matter, and I’ll take ‘em separately. The
first side is, sheer Insolence. That’s the first side.’

The Secretary smiled with some bitterness, as though he would have said,
‘So I see and hear.’

‘It was sheer Insolence in you, I tell you,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘even to
think of this young lady. This young lady was far above YOU. This young
lady was no match for YOU. This young lady was lying in wait (as she was
qualified to do) for money, and you had no money.’

Bella hung her head and seemed to shrink a little from Mr Boffin’s
protecting arm.

‘What are you, I should like to know,’ pursued Mr Boffin, ‘that you were
to have the audacity to follow up this young lady? This young lady was
looking about the market for a good bid; she wasn’t in it to be snapped
up by fellows that had no money to lay out; nothing to buy with.’

‘Oh, Mr Boffin! Mrs Boffin, pray say something for me!’ murmured Bella,
disengaging her arm, and covering her face with her hands.

‘Old lady,’ said Mr Boffin, anticipating his wife, ‘you hold your
tongue. Bella, my dear, don’t you let yourself be put out. I’ll right
you.’

‘But you don’t, you don’t right me!’ exclaimed Bella, with great
emphasis. ‘You wrong me, wrong me!’

‘Don’t you be put out, my dear,’ complacently retorted Mr Boffin. ‘I’ll
bring this young man to book. Now, you Rokesmith! You can’t decline
to hear, you know, as well as to answer. You hear me tell you that the
first side of your conduct was Insolence--Insolence and Presumption.
Answer me one thing, if you can. Didn’t this young lady tell you so
herself?’

‘Did I, Mr Rokesmith?’ asked Bella with her face still covered. ‘O say,
Mr Rokesmith! Did I?’

‘Don’t be distressed, Miss Wilfer; it matters very little now.’

‘Ah! You can’t deny it, though!’ said Mr Boffin, with a knowing shake of
his head.

‘But I have asked him to forgive me since,’ cried Bella; ‘and I would
ask him to forgive me now again, upon my knees, if it would spare him!’

Here Mrs Boffin broke out a-crying.

‘Old lady,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘stop that noise! Tender-hearted in you,
Miss Bella; but I mean to have it out right through with this young man,
having got him into a corner. Now, you Rokesmith. I tell you that’s one
side of your conduct--Insolence and Presumption. Now, I’m a-coming to
the other, which is much worse. This was a speculation of yours.’

‘I indignantly deny it.’

‘It’s of no use your denying it; it doesn’t signify a bit whether
you deny it or not; I’ve got a head upon my shoulders, and it ain’t a
baby’s. What!’ said Mr Boffin, gathering himself together in his most
suspicious attitude, and wrinkling his face into a very map of curves
and corners. ‘Don’t I know what grabs are made at a man with money? If
I didn’t keep my eyes open, and my pockets buttoned, shouldn’t I
be brought to the workhouse before I knew where I was? Wasn’t the
experience of Dancer, and Elwes, and Hopkins, and Blewbury Jones, and
ever so many more of ‘em, similar to mine? Didn’t everybody want to make
grabs at what they’d got, and bring ‘em to poverty and ruin? Weren’t
they forced to hide everything belonging to ‘em, for fear it should be
snatched from ‘em? Of course they was. I shall be told next that they
didn’t know human natur!’

‘They! Poor creatures,’ murmured the Secretary.

‘What do you say?’ asked Mr Boffin, snapping at him. ‘However, you
needn’t be at the trouble of repeating it, for it ain’t worth hearing,
and won’t go down with ME. I’m a-going to unfold your plan, before this
young lady; I’m a-going to show this young lady the second view of you;
and nothing you can say will stave it off. (Now, attend here, Bella, my
dear.) Rokesmith, you’re a needy chap. You’re a chap that I pick up in
the street. Are you, or ain’t you?’

‘Go on, Mr Boffin; don’t appeal to me.’

‘Not appeal to YOU,’ retorted Mr Boffin as if he hadn’t done so. ‘No,
I should hope not! Appealing to YOU, would be rather a rum course. As I
was saying, you’re a needy chap that I pick up in the street. You come
and ask me in the street to take you for a Secretary, and I take you.
Very good.’

‘Very bad,’ murmured the Secretary.

‘What do you say?’ asked Mr Boffin, snapping at him again.

He returned no answer. Mr Boffin, after eyeing him with a comical look
of discomfited curiosity, was fain to begin afresh.

‘This Rokesmith is a needy young man that I take for my Secretary out
of the open street. This Rokesmith gets acquainted with my affairs, and
gets to know that I mean to settle a sum of money on this young lady.
“Oho!” says this Rokesmith;’ here Mr Boffin clapped a finger against
his nose, and tapped it several times with a sneaking air, as embodying
Rokesmith confidentially confabulating with his own nose; ‘“This will
be a good haul; I’ll go in for this!” And so this Rokesmith, greedy and
hungering, begins a-creeping on his hands and knees towards the money.
Not so bad a speculation either: for if this young lady had had less
spirit, or had had less sense, through being at all in the romantic
line, by George he might have worked it out and made it pay! But
fortunately she was too many for him, and a pretty figure he cuts now
he is exposed. There he stands!’ said Mr Boffin, addressing Rokesmith
himself with ridiculous inconsistency. ‘Look at him!’

‘Your unfortunate suspicions, Mr Boffin--’ began the Secretary.

‘Precious unfortunate for you, I can tell you,’ said Mr Boffin.

‘--are not to be combated by any one, and I address myself to no such
hopeless task. But I will say a word upon the truth.’

‘Yah! Much you care about the truth,’ said Mr Boffin, with a snap of his
fingers.

‘Noddy! My dear love!’ expostulated his wife.

‘Old lady,’ returned Mr Boffin, ‘you keep still. I say to this Rokesmith
here, much he cares about the truth. I tell him again, much he cares
about the truth.’

‘Our connexion being at an end, Mr Boffin,’ said the Secretary, ‘it can
be of very little moment to me what you say.’

‘Oh! You are knowing enough,’ retorted Mr Boffin, with a sly look, ‘to
have found out that our connexion’s at an end, eh? But you can’t get
beforehand with me. Look at this in my hand. This is your pay, on your
discharge. You can only follow suit. You can’t deprive me of the lead.
Let’s have no pretending that you discharge yourself. I discharge you.’

‘So that I go,’ remarked the Secretary, waving the point aside with his
hand, ‘it is all one to me.’

‘Is it?’ said Mr Boffin. ‘But it’s two to me, let me tell you.
Allowing a fellow that’s found out, to discharge himself, is one thing;
discharging him for insolence and presumption, and likewise for designs
upon his master’s money, is another. One and one’s two; not one. (Old
lady, don’t you cut in. You keep still.)’

‘Have you said all you wish to say to me?’ demanded the Secretary.

‘I don’t know whether I have or not,’ answered Mr Boffin. ‘It depends.’

‘Perhaps you will consider whether there are any other strong
expressions that you would like to bestow upon me?’

‘I’ll consider that,’ said Mr Boffin, obstinately, ‘at my convenience,
and not at yours. You want the last word. It may not be suitable to let
you have it.’

‘Noddy! My dear, dear Noddy! You sound so hard!’ cried poor Mrs Boffin,
not to be quite repressed.

‘Old lady,’ said her husband, but without harshness, ‘if you cut in when
requested not, I’ll get a pillow and carry you out of the room upon it.
What do you want to say, you Rokesmith?’

‘To you, Mr Boffin, nothing. But to Miss Wilfer and to your good kind
wife, a word.’

‘Out with it then,’ replied Mr Boffin, ‘and cut it short, for we’ve had
enough of you.’

‘I have borne,’ said the Secretary, in a low voice, ‘with my false
position here, that I might not be separated from Miss Wilfer. To be
near her, has been a recompense to me from day to day, even for the
undeserved treatment I have had here, and for the degraded aspect in
which she has often seen me. Since Miss Wilfer rejected me, I have never
again urged my suit, to the best of my belief, with a spoken syllable or
a look. But I have never changed in my devotion to her, except--if she
will forgive my saying so--that it is deeper than it was, and better
founded.’

‘Now, mark this chap’s saying Miss Wilfer, when he means L.s.d.!’ cried
Mr Boffin, with a cunning wink. ‘Now, mark this chap’s making Miss
Wilfer stand for Pounds, Shillings, and Pence!’

‘My feeling for Miss Wilfer,’ pursued the Secretary, without deigning to
notice him, ‘is not one to be ashamed of. I avow it. I love her. Let
me go where I may when I presently leave this house, I shall go into a
blank life, leaving her.’

‘Leaving L.s.d. behind me,’ said Mr Boffin, by way of commentary, with
another wink.

‘That I am incapable,’ the Secretary went on, still without heeding him,
‘of a mercenary project, or a mercenary thought, in connexion with Miss
Wilfer, is nothing meritorious in me, because any prize that I could
put before my fancy would sink into insignificance beside her. If
the greatest wealth or the highest rank were hers, it would only be
important in my sight as removing her still farther from me, and making
me more hopeless, if that could be. Say,’ remarked the Secretary,
looking full at his late master, ‘say that with a word she could strip
Mr Boffin of his fortune and take possession of it, she would be of no
greater worth in my eyes than she is.’

‘What do you think by this time, old lady,’ asked Mr Boffin, turning to
his wife in a bantering tone, ‘about this Rokesmith here, and his caring
for the truth? You needn’t say what you think, my dear, because I don’t
want you to cut in, but you can think it all the same. As to taking
possession of my property, I warrant you he wouldn’t do that himself if
he could.’

‘No,’ returned the Secretary, with another full look.

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ laughed Mr Boffin. ‘There’s nothing like a good ‘un while
you ARE about it.’

‘I have been for a moment,’ said the Secretary, turning from him and
falling into his former manner, ‘diverted from the little I have to say.
My interest in Miss Wilfer began when I first saw her; even began when I
had only heard of her. It was, in fact, the cause of my throwing myself
in Mr Boffin’s way, and entering his service. Miss Wilfer has never
known this until now. I mention it now, only as a corroboration (though
I hope it may be needless) of my being free from the sordid design
attributed to me.’

‘Now, this is a very artful dog,’ said Mr Boffin, with a deep look.
‘This is a longer-headed schemer than I thought him. See how patiently
and methodically he goes to work. He gets to know about me and my
property, and about this young lady, and her share in poor young John’s
story, and he puts this and that together, and he says to himself, “I’ll
get in with Boffin, and I’ll get in with this young lady, and I’ll work
‘em both at the same time, and I’ll bring my pigs to market somewhere.”
 I hear him say it, bless you! I look at him, now, and I see him say it!’

Mr Boffin pointed at the culprit, as it were in the act, and hugged
himself in his great penetration.

‘But luckily he hadn’t to deal with the people he supposed, Bella, my
dear!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘No! Luckily he had to deal with you, and with
me, and with Daniel and Miss Dancer, and with Elwes, and with Vulture
Hopkins, and with Blewbury Jones and all the rest of us, one down
t’other come on. And he’s beat; that’s what he is; regularly beat. He
thought to squeeze money out of us, and he has done for himself instead,
Bella my dear!’

Bella my dear made no response, gave no sign of acquiescence. When she
had first covered her face she had sunk upon a chair with her hands
resting on the back of it, and had never moved since. There was a short
silence at this point, and Mrs Boffin softly rose as if to go to her.
But, Mr Boffin stopped her with a gesture, and she obediently sat down
again and stayed where she was.

‘There’s your pay, Mister Rokesmith,’ said the Golden Dustman,
jerking the folded scrap of paper he had in his hand, towards his late
Secretary. ‘I dare say you can stoop to pick it up, after what you have
stooped to here.’

‘I have stooped to nothing but this,’ Rokesmith answered as he took it
from the ground; ‘and this is mine, for I have earned it by the hardest
of hard labour.’

‘You’re a pretty quick packer, I hope,’ said Mr Boffin; ‘because the
sooner you are gone, bag and baggage, the better for all parties.’

‘You need have no fear of my lingering.’

‘There’s just one thing though,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘that I should like to
ask you before we come to a good riddance, if it was only to show this
young lady how conceited you schemers are, in thinking that nobody finds
out how you contradict yourselves.’

‘Ask me anything you wish to ask,’ returned Rokesmith, ‘but use the
expedition that you recommend.’

‘You pretend to have a mighty admiration for this young lady?’ said Mr
Boffin, laying his hand protectingly on Bella’s head without looking
down at her.

‘I do not pretend.’

‘Oh! Well. You HAVE a mighty admiration for this young lady--since you
are so particular?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you reconcile that, with this young lady’s being a
weak-spirited, improvident idiot, not knowing what was due to herself,
flinging up her money to the church-weathercocks, and racing off at a
splitting pace for the workhouse?’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘Don’t you? Or won’t you? What else could you have made this young lady
out to be, if she had listened to such addresses as yours?’

‘What else, if I had been so happy as to win her affections and possess
her heart?’

‘Win her affections,’ retorted Mr Boffin, with ineffable contempt,
‘and possess her heart! Mew says the cat, Quack-quack says the duck,
Bow-wow-wow says the dog! Win her affections and possess her heart! Mew,
Quack-quack, Bow-wow!’

John Rokesmith stared at him in his outburst, as if with some faint idea
that he had gone mad.

‘What is due to this young lady,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘is Money, and this
young lady right well knows it.’

‘You slander the young lady.’

‘YOU slander the young lady; you with your affections and hearts and
trumpery,’ returned Mr Boffin. ‘It’s of a piece with the rest of your
behaviour. I heard of these doings of yours only last night, or you
should have heard of ‘em from me, sooner, take your oath of it. I heard
of ‘em from a lady with as good a headpiece as the best, and she knows
this young lady, and I know this young lady, and we all three know that
it’s Money she makes a stand for--money, money, money--and that you and
your affections and hearts are a Lie, sir!’

‘Mrs Boffin,’ said Rokesmith, quietly turning to her, ‘for your delicate
and unvarying kindness I thank you with the warmest gratitude. Good-bye!
Miss Wilfer, good-bye!’

‘And now, my dear,’ said Mr Boffin, laying his hand on Bella’s head
again, ‘you may begin to make yourself quite comfortable, and I hope you
feel that you’ve been righted.’

But, Bella was so far from appearing to feel it, that she shrank from
his hand and from the chair, and, starting up in an incoherent passion
of tears, and stretching out her arms, cried, ‘O Mr Rokesmith, before
you go, if you could but make me poor again! O! Make me poor again,
Somebody, I beg and pray, or my heart will break if this goes on! Pa,
dear, make me poor again and take me home! I was bad enough there, but
I have been so much worse here. Don’t give me money, Mr Boffin, I won’t
have money. Keep it away from me, and only let me speak to good little
Pa, and lay my head upon his shoulder, and tell him all my griefs.
Nobody else can understand me, nobody else can comfort me, nobody else
knows how unworthy I am, and yet can love me like a little child. I am
better with Pa than any one--more innocent, more sorry, more glad!’ So,
crying out in a wild way that she could not bear this, Bella drooped her
head on Mrs Boffin’s ready breast.

John Rokesmith from his place in the room, and Mr Boffin from his,
looked on at her in silence until she was silent herself. Then Mr Boffin
observed in a soothing and comfortable tone, ‘There, my dear, there; you
are righted now, and it’s ALL right. I don’t wonder, I’m sure, at your
being a little flurried by having a scene with this fellow, but it’s all
over, my dear, and you’re righted, and it’s--and it’s ALL right!’ Which
Mr Boffin repeated with a highly satisfied air of completeness and
finality.

‘I hate you!’ cried Bella, turning suddenly upon him, with a stamp of
her little foot--‘at least, I can’t hate you, but I don’t like you!’

‘HUL--LO!’ exclaimed Mr Boffin in an amazed under-tone.

‘You’re a scolding, unjust, abusive, aggravating, bad old creature!’
cried Bella. ‘I am angry with my ungrateful self for calling you names;
but you are, you are; you know you are!’

Mr Boffin stared here, and stared there, as misdoubting that he must be
in some sort of fit.

‘I have heard you with shame,’ said Bella. ‘With shame for myself, and
with shame for you. You ought to be above the base tale-bearing of a
time-serving woman; but you are above nothing now.’

Mr Boffin, seeming to become convinced that this was a fit, rolled his
eyes and loosened his neckcloth.

‘When I came here, I respected you and honoured you, and I soon loved
you,’ cried Bella. ‘And now I can’t bear the sight of you. At least, I
don’t know that I ought to go so far as that--only you’re a--you’re a
Monster!’ Having shot this bolt out with a great expenditure of force,
Bella hysterically laughed and cried together.

‘The best wish I can wish you is,’ said Bella, returning to the charge,
‘that you had not one single farthing in the world. If any true friend
and well-wisher could make you a bankrupt, you would be a Duck; but as a
man of property you are a Demon!’

After despatching this second bolt with a still greater expenditure of
force, Bella laughed and cried still more.

‘Mr Rokesmith, pray stay one moment. Pray hear one word from me before
you go! I am deeply sorry for the reproaches you have borne on my
account. Out of the depths of my heart I earnestly and truly beg your
pardon.’

As she stepped towards him, he met her. As she gave him her hand, he put
it to his lips, and said, ‘God bless you!’ No laughing was mixed with
Bella’s crying then; her tears were pure and fervent.

‘There is not an ungenerous word that I have heard addressed to
you--heard with scorn and indignation, Mr Rokesmith--but it has wounded
me far more than you, for I have deserved it, and you never have. Mr
Rokesmith, it is to me you owe this perverted account of what passed
between us that night. I parted with the secret, even while I was angry
with myself for doing so. It was very bad in me, but indeed it was not
wicked. I did it in a moment of conceit and folly--one of my many such
moments--one of my many such hours--years. As I am punished for it
severely, try to forgive it!’

‘I do with all my soul.’

‘Thank you. O thank you! Don’t part from me till I have said one other
word, to do you justice. The only fault you can be truly charged with,
in having spoken to me as you did that night--with how much delicacy
and how much forbearance no one but I can know or be grateful to you
for--is, that you laid yourself open to be slighted by a worldly shallow
girl whose head was turned, and who was quite unable to rise to the
worth of what you offered her. Mr Rokesmith, that girl has often seen
herself in a pitiful and poor light since, but never in so pitiful
and poor a light as now, when the mean tone in which she answered
you--sordid and vain girl that she was--has been echoed in her ears by
Mr Boffin.’

He kissed her hand again.

‘Mr Boffin’s speeches were detestable to me, shocking to me,’ said
Bella, startling that gentleman with another stamp of her little
foot. ‘It is quite true that there was a time, and very lately, when I
deserved to be so “righted,” Mr Rokesmith; but I hope that I shall never
deserve it again!’

He once more put her hand to his lips, and then relinquished it, and
left the room. Bella was hurrying back to the chair in which she had
hidden her face so long, when, catching sight of Mrs Boffin by the
way, she stopped at her. ‘He is gone,’ sobbed Bella indignantly,
despairingly, in fifty ways at once, with her arms round Mrs Boffin’s
neck. ‘He has been most shamefully abused, and most unjustly and most
basely driven away, and I am the cause of it!’

All this time, Mr Boffin had been rolling his eyes over his loosened
neckerchief, as if his fit were still upon him. Appearing now to think
that he was coming to, he stared straight before him for a while, tied
his neckerchief again, took several long inspirations, swallowed several
times, and ultimately exclaimed with a deep sigh, as if he felt himself
on the whole better: ‘Well!’

No word, good or bad, did Mrs Boffin say; but she tenderly took care of
Bella, and glanced at her husband as if for orders. Mr Boffin, without
imparting any, took his seat on a chair over against them, and there
sat leaning forward, with a fixed countenance, his legs apart, a hand on
each knee, and his elbows squared, until Bella should dry her eyes and
raise her head, which in the fulness of time she did.

‘I must go home,’ said Bella, rising hurriedly. ‘I am very grateful to
you for all you have done for me, but I can’t stay here.’

‘My darling girl!’ remonstrated Mrs Boffin.

‘No, I can’t stay here,’ said Bella; ‘I can’t indeed.--Ugh! you vicious
old thing!’ (This to Mr Boffin.)

‘Don’t be rash, my love,’ urged Mrs Boffin. ‘Think well of what you do.’

‘Yes, you had better think well,’ said Mr Boffin.

‘I shall never more think well of YOU,’ cried Bella, cutting him
short, with intense defiance in her expressive little eyebrows, and
championship of the late Secretary in every dimple. ‘No! Never again!
Your money has changed you to marble. You are a hard-hearted Miser. You
are worse than Dancer, worse than Hopkins, worse than Blackberry Jones,
worse than any of the wretches. And more!’ proceeded Bella, breaking
into tears again, ‘you were wholly undeserving of the Gentleman you have
lost.’

‘Why, you don’t mean to say, Miss Bella,’ the Golden Dustman slowly
remonstrated, ‘that you set up Rokesmith against me?’

‘I do!’ said Bella. ‘He is worth a Million of you.’

Very pretty she looked, though very angry, as she made herself as
tall as she possibly could (which was not extremely tall), and utterly
renounced her patron with a lofty toss of her rich brown head.

‘I would rather he thought well of me,’ said Bella, ‘though he swept the
street for bread, than that you did, though you splashed the mud upon
him from the wheels of a chariot of pure gold.--There!’

‘Well I’m sure!’ cried Mr Boffin, staring.

‘And for a long time past, when you have thought you set yourself above
him, I have only seen you under his feet,’ said Bella--‘There! And
throughout I saw in him the master, and I saw in you the man--There! And
when you used him shamefully, I took his part and loved him--There! I
boast of it!’

After which strong avowal Bella underwent reaction, and cried to any
extent, with her face on the back of her chair.

‘Now, look here,’ said Mr Boffin, as soon as he could find an opening
for breaking the silence and striking in. ‘Give me your attention,
Bella. I am not angry.’

‘I AM!’ said Bella.

‘I say,’ resumed the Golden Dustman, ‘I am not angry, and I mean kindly
to you, and I want to overlook this. So you’ll stay where you are, and
we’ll agree to say no more about it.’

‘No, I can’t stay here,’ cried Bella, rising hurriedly again; ‘I can’t
think of staying here. I must go home for good.’

‘Now, don’t be silly,’ Mr Boffin reasoned. ‘Don’t do what you can’t
undo; don’t do what you’re sure to be sorry for.’

‘I shall never be sorry for it,’ said Bella; ‘and I should always be
sorry, and should every minute of my life despise myself if I remained
here after what has happened.’

‘At least, Bella,’ argued Mr Boffin, ‘let there be no mistake about it.
Look before you leap, you know. Stay where you are, and all’s well, and
all’s as it was to be. Go away, and you can never come back.’

‘I know that I can never come back, and that’s what I mean,’ said Bella.

‘You mustn’t expect,’ Mr Boffin pursued, ‘that I’m a-going to settle
money on you, if you leave us like this, because I am not. No, Bella! Be
careful! Not one brass farthing.’

‘Expect!’ said Bella, haughtily. ‘Do you think that any power on earth
could make me take it, if you did, sir?’

But there was Mrs Boffin to part from, and, in the full flush of her
dignity, the impressible little soul collapsed again. Down upon her
knees before that good woman, she rocked herself upon her breast, and
cried, and sobbed, and folded her in her arms with all her might.

‘You’re a dear, a dear, the best of dears!’ cried Bella. ‘You’re the
best of human creatures. I can never be thankful enough to you, and I
can never forget you. If I should live to be blind and deaf I know I
shall see and hear you, in my fancy, to the last of my dim old days!’

Mrs Boffin wept most heartily, and embraced her with all fondness; but
said not one single word except that she was her dear girl. She said
that often enough, to be sure, for she said it over and over again; but
not one word else.

Bella broke from her at length, and was going weeping out of the room,
when in her own little queer affectionate way, she half relented towards
Mr Boffin.

‘I am very glad,’ sobbed Bella, ‘that I called you names, sir, because
you richly deserved it. But I am very sorry that I called you names,
because you used to be so different. Say good-bye!’

‘Good-bye,’ said Mr Boffin, shortly.

‘If I knew which of your hands was the least spoilt, I would ask you
to let me touch it,’ said Bella, ‘for the last time. But not because I
repent of what I have said to you. For I don’t. It’s true!’

‘Try the left hand,’ said Mr Boffin, holding it out in a stolid manner;
‘it’s the least used.’

‘You have been wonderfully good and kind to me,’ said Bella, ‘and I kiss
it for that. You have been as bad as bad could be to Mr Rokesmith, and I
throw it away for that. Thank you for myself, and good-bye!’

‘Good-bye,’ said Mr Boffin as before.

Bella caught him round the neck and kissed him, and ran out for ever.

She ran up-stairs, and sat down on the floor in her own room, and cried
abundantly. But the day was declining and she had no time to lose. She
opened all the places where she kept her dresses; selected only those
she had brought with her, leaving all the rest; and made a great
misshapen bundle of them, to be sent for afterwards.

‘I won’t take one of the others,’ said Bella, tying the knots of the
bundle very tight, in the severity of her resolution. ‘I’ll leave all
the presents behind, and begin again entirely on my own account.’ That
the resolution might be thoroughly carried into practice, she even
changed the dress she wore, for that in which she had come to the grand
mansion. Even the bonnet she put on, was the bonnet that had mounted
into the Boffin chariot at Holloway.

‘Now, I am complete,’ said Bella. ‘It’s a little trying, but I have
steeped my eyes in cold water, and I won’t cry any more. You have been
a pleasant room to me, dear room. Adieu! We shall never see each other
again.’

With a parting kiss of her fingers to it, she softly closed the door and
went with a light foot down the great staircase, pausing and listening
as she went, that she might meet none of the household. No one chanced
to be about, and she got down to the hall in quiet. The door of the late
Secretary’s room stood open. She peeped in as she passed, and divined
from the emptiness of his table, and the general appearance of things,
that he was already gone. Softly opening the great hall door, and
softly closing it upon herself, she turned and kissed it on the
outside--insensible old combination of wood and iron that it
was!--before she ran away from the house at a swift pace.

‘That was well done!’ panted Bella, slackening in the next street, and
subsiding into a walk. ‘If I had left myself any breath to cry with, I
should have cried again. Now poor dear darling little Pa, you are going
to see your lovely woman unexpectedly.’



Chapter 16

THE FEAST OF THE THREE HOBGOBLINS


The City looked unpromising enough, as Bella made her way along its
gritty streets. Most of its money-mills were slackening sail, or had
left off grinding for the day. The master-millers had already departed,
and the journeymen were departing. There was a jaded aspect on
the business lanes and courts, and the very pavements had a weary
appearance, confused by the tread of a million of feet. There must be
hours of night to temper down the day’s distraction of so feverish a
place. As yet the worry of the newly-stopped whirling and grinding on
the part of the money-mills seemed to linger in the air, and the quiet
was more like the prostration of a spent giant than the repose of one
who was renewing his strength.

If Bella thought, as she glanced at the mighty Bank, how agreeable it
would be to have an hour’s gardening there, with a bright copper shovel,
among the money, still she was not in an avaricious vein. Much improved
in that respect, and with certain half-formed images which had little
gold in their composition, dancing before her bright eyes, she arrived
in the drug-flavoured region of Mincing Lane, with the sensation of
having just opened a drawer in a chemist’s shop.

The counting-house of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles was pointed out
by an elderly female accustomed to the care of offices, who dropped upon
Bella out of a public-house, wiping her mouth, and accounted for its
humidity on natural principles well known to the physical sciences, by
explaining that she had looked in at the door to see what o’clock it
was. The counting-house was a wall-eyed ground floor by a dark gateway,
and Bella was considering, as she approached it, could there be any
precedent in the City for her going in and asking for R. Wilfer, when
whom should she see, sitting at one of the windows with the plate-glass
sash raised, but R. Wilfer himself, preparing to take a slight
refection.

On approaching nearer, Bella discerned that the refection had
the appearance of a small cottage-loaf and a pennyworth of milk.
Simultaneously with this discovery on her part, her father discovered
her, and invoked the echoes of Mincing Lane to exclaim ‘My gracious me!’

He then came cherubically flying out without a hat, and embraced her,
and handed her in. ‘For it’s after hours and I am all alone, my dear,’
he explained, ‘and am having--as I sometimes do when they are all
gone--a quiet tea.’

Looking round the office, as if her father were a captive and this his
cell, Bella hugged him and choked him to her heart’s content.

‘I never was so surprised, my dear!’ said her father. ‘I couldn’t
believe my eyes. Upon my life, I thought they had taken to lying! The
idea of your coming down the Lane yourself! Why didn’t you send the
footman down the Lane, my dear?’

‘I have brought no footman with me, Pa.’

‘Oh indeed! But you have brought the elegant turn-out, my love?’

‘No, Pa.’

‘You never can have walked, my dear?’

‘Yes, I have, Pa.’

He looked so very much astonished, that Bella could not make up her mind
to break it to him just yet.

‘The consequence is, Pa, that your lovely woman feels a little faint,
and would very much like to share your tea.’

The cottage loaf and the pennyworth of milk had been set forth on a
sheet of paper on the window-seat. The cherubic pocket-knife, with the
first bit of the loaf still on its point, lay beside them where it had
been hastily thrown down. Bella took the bit off, and put it in her
mouth. ‘My dear child,’ said her father, ‘the idea of your partaking of
such lowly fare! But at least you must have your own loaf and your own
penn’orth. One moment, my dear. The Dairy is just over the way and round
the corner.’

Regardless of Bella’s dissuasions he ran out, and quickly returned with
the new supply. ‘My dear child,’ he said, as he spread it on another
piece of paper before her, ‘the idea of a splendid--!’ and then looked
at her figure, and stopped short.

‘What’s the matter, Pa?’

‘--of a splendid female,’ he resumed more slowly, ‘putting up with
such accommodation as the present!--Is that a new dress you have on, my
dear?’

‘No, Pa, an old one. Don’t you remember it?’

‘Why, I THOUGHT I remembered it, my dear!’

‘You should, for you bought it, Pa.’

‘Yes, I THOUGHT I bought it my dear!’ said the cherub, giving himself a
little shake, as if to rouse his faculties.

‘And have you grown so fickle that you don’t like your own taste, Pa
dear?’

‘Well, my love,’ he returned, swallowing a bit of the cottage loaf with
considerable effort, for it seemed to stick by the way: ‘I should have
thought it was hardly sufficiently splendid for existing circumstances.’

‘And so, Pa,’ said Bella, moving coaxingly to his side instead of
remaining opposite, ‘you sometimes have a quiet tea here all alone? I
am not in the tea’s way, if I draw my arm over your shoulder like this,
Pa?’

‘Yes, my dear, and no, my dear. Yes to the first question, and Certainly
Not to the second. Respecting the quiet tea, my dear, why you see the
occupations of the day are sometimes a little wearing; and if there’s
nothing interposed between the day and your mother, why SHE is sometimes
a little wearing, too.’

‘I know, Pa.’

‘Yes, my dear. So sometimes I put a quiet tea at the window here, with
a little quiet contemplation of the Lane (which comes soothing), between
the day, and domestic--’

‘Bliss,’ suggested Bella, sorrowfully.

‘And domestic Bliss,’ said her father, quite contented to accept the
phrase.

Bella kissed him. ‘And it is in this dark dingy place of captivity,
poor dear, that you pass all the hours of your life when you are not at
home?’

‘Not at home, or not on the road there, or on the road here, my love.
Yes. You see that little desk in the corner?’

‘In the dark corner, furthest both from the light and from the
fireplace? The shabbiest desk of all the desks?’

‘Now, does it really strike you in that point of view, my dear?’ said
her father, surveying it artistically with his head on one side: ‘that’s
mine. That’s called Rumty’s Perch.’

‘Whose Perch?’ asked Bella with great indignation.

‘Rumty’s. You see, being rather high and up two steps they call it a
Perch. And they call ME Rumty.’

‘How dare they!’ exclaimed Bella.

‘They’re playful, Bella my dear; they’re playful. They’re more or less
younger than I am, and they’re playful. What does it matter? It might
be Surly, or Sulky, or fifty disagreeable things that I really shouldn’t
like to be considered. But Rumty! Lor, why not Rumty?’

To inflict a heavy disappointment on this sweet nature, which had been,
through all her caprices, the object of her recognition, love, and
admiration from infancy, Bella felt to be the hardest task of her hard
day. ‘I should have done better,’ she thought, ‘to tell him at first;
I should have done better to tell him just now, when he had some slight
misgiving; he is quite happy again, and I shall make him wretched.’

He was falling back on his loaf and milk, with the pleasantest
composure, and Bella stealing her arm a little closer about him, and at
the same time sticking up his hair with an irresistible propensity
to play with him founded on the habit of her whole life, had prepared
herself to say: ‘Pa dear, don’t be cast down, but I must tell you
something disagreeable!’ when he interrupted her in an unlooked-for
manner.

‘My gracious me!’ he exclaimed, invoking the Mincing Lane echoes as
before. ‘This is very extraordinary!’

‘What is, Pa?’

‘Why here’s Mr Rokesmith now!’

‘No, no, Pa, no,’ cried Bella, greatly flurried. ‘Surely not.’

‘Yes there is! Look here!’

Sooth to say, Mr Rokesmith not only passed the window, but came into the
counting-house. And not only came into the counting-house, but, finding
himself alone there with Bella and her father, rushed at Bella and
caught her in his arms, with the rapturous words ‘My dear, dear girl; my
gallant, generous, disinterested, courageous, noble girl!’ And not only
that even, (which one might have thought astonishment enough for one
dose), but Bella, after hanging her head for a moment, lifted it up and
laid it on his breast, as if that were her head’s chosen and lasting
resting-place!

‘I knew you would come to him, and I followed you,’ said Rokesmith. ‘My
love, my life! You ARE mine?’

To which Bella responded, ‘Yes, I AM yours if you think me worth
taking!’ And after that, seemed to shrink to next to nothing in the
clasp of his arms, partly because it was such a strong one on his part,
and partly because there was such a yielding to it on hers.

The cherub, whose hair would have done for itself under the influence of
this amazing spectacle, what Bella had just now done for it, staggered
back into the window-seat from which he had risen, and surveyed the pair
with his eyes dilated to their utmost.

‘But we must think of dear Pa,’ said Bella; ‘I haven’t told dear Pa; let
us speak to Pa.’ Upon which they turned to do so.

‘I wish first, my dear,’ remarked the cherub faintly, ‘that you’d have
the kindness to sprinkle me with a little milk, for I feel as if I
was--Going.’

In fact, the good little fellow had become alarmingly limp, and his
senses seemed to be rapidly escaping, from the knees upward. Bella
sprinkled him with kisses instead of milk, but gave him a little of that
article to drink; and he gradually revived under her caressing care.

‘We’ll break it to you gently, dearest Pa,’ said Bella.

‘My dear,’ returned the cherub, looking at them both, ‘you broke so much
in the first--Gush, if I may so express myself--that I think I am equal
to a good large breakage now.’

‘Mr Wilfer,’ said John Rokesmith, excitedly and joyfully, ‘Bella takes
me, though I have no fortune, even no present occupation; nothing but
what I can get in the life before us. Bella takes me!’

‘Yes, I should rather have inferred, my dear sir,’ returned the cherub
feebly, ‘that Bella took you, from what I have within these few minutes
remarked.’

‘You don’t know, Pa,’ said Bella, ‘how ill I have used him!’

‘You don’t know, sir,’ said Rokesmith, ‘what a heart she has!’

‘You don’t know, Pa,’ said Bella, ‘what a shocking creature I was
growing, when he saved me from myself!’

‘You don’t know, sir,’ said Rokesmith, ‘what a sacrifice she has made
for me!’

‘My dear Bella,’ replied the cherub, still pathetically scared, ‘and my
dear John Rokesmith, if you will allow me so to call you--’

‘Yes do, Pa, do!’ urged Bella. ‘I allow you, and my will is his law.
Isn’t it--dear John Rokesmith?’

There was an engaging shyness in Bella, coupled with an engaging
tenderness of love and confidence and pride, in thus first calling him
by name, which made it quite excusable in John Rokesmith to do what he
did. What he did was, once more to give her the appearance of vanishing
as aforesaid.

‘I think, my dears,’ observed the cherub, ‘that if you could make it
convenient to sit one on one side of me, and the other on the other, we
should get on rather more consecutively, and make things rather
plainer. John Rokesmith mentioned, a while ago, that he had no present
occupation.’

‘None,’ said Rokesmith.

‘No, Pa, none,’ said Bella.

‘From which I argue,’ proceeded the cherub, ‘that he has left Mr
Boffin?’

‘Yes, Pa. And so--’

‘Stop a bit, my dear. I wish to lead up to it by degrees. And that Mr
Boffin has not treated him well?’

‘Has treated him most shamefully, dear Pa!’ cried Bella with a flashing
face.

‘Of which,’ pursued the cherub, enjoining patience with his hand, ‘a
certain mercenary young person distantly related to myself, could not
approve? Am I leading up to it right?’

‘Could not approve, sweet Pa,’ said Bella, with a tearful laugh and a
joyful kiss.

‘Upon which,’ pursued the cherub, ‘the certain mercenary young person
distantly related to myself, having previously observed and mentioned
to myself that prosperity was spoiling Mr Boffin, felt that she must not
sell her sense of what was right and what was wrong, and what was true
and what was false, and what was just and what was unjust, for any
price that could be paid to her by any one alive? Am I leading up to it
right?’

With another tearful laugh Bella joyfully kissed him again.

‘And therefore--and therefore,’ the cherub went on in a glowing voice,
as Bella’s hand stole gradually up his waistcoat to his neck, ‘this
mercenary young person distantly related to myself, refused the
price, took off the splendid fashions that were part of it, put on the
comparatively poor dress that I had last given her, and trusting to my
supporting her in what was right, came straight to me. Have I led up to
it?’

Bella’s hand was round his neck by this time, and her face was on it.

‘The mercenary young person distantly related to myself,’ said her
good father, ‘did well! The mercenary young person distantly related
to myself, did not trust to me in vain! I admire this mercenary young
person distantly related to myself, more in this dress than if she had
come to me in China silks, Cashmere shawls, and Golconda diamonds. I
love this young person dearly. I say to the man of this young person’s
heart, out of my heart and with all of it, “My blessing on this
engagement betwixt you, and she brings you a good fortune when she
brings you the poverty she has accepted for your sake and the honest
truth’s!”’

The stanch little man’s voice failed him as he gave John Rokesmith his
hand, and he was silent, bending his face low over his daughter. But,
not for long. He soon looked up, saying in a sprightly tone:

‘And now, my dear child, if you think you can entertain John Rokesmith
for a minute and a half, I’ll run over to the Dairy, and fetch HIM a
cottage loaf and a drink of milk, that we may all have tea together.’

It was, as Bella gaily said, like the supper provided for the three
nursery hobgoblins at their house in the forest, without their
thunderous low growlings of the alarming discovery, ‘Somebody’s been
drinking MY milk!’ It was a delicious repast; by far the most delicious
that Bella, or John Rokesmith, or even R. Wilfer had ever made. The
uncongenial oddity of its surroundings, with the two brass knobs of the
iron safe of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles staring from a corner,
like the eyes of some dull dragon, only made it the more delightful.

‘To think,’ said the cherub, looking round the office with unspeakable
enjoyment, ‘that anything of a tender nature should come off here, is
what tickles me. To think that ever I should have seen my Bella folded
in the arms of her future husband, HERE, you know!’

It was not until the cottage loaves and the milk had for some time
disappeared, and the foreshadowings of night were creeping over Mincing
Lane, that the cherub by degrees became a little nervous, and said to
Bella, as he cleared his throat:

‘Hem!--Have you thought at all about your mother, my dear?’

‘Yes, Pa.’

‘And your sister Lavvy, for instance, my dear?’

‘Yes, Pa. I think we had better not enter into particulars at home. I
think it will be quite enough to say that I had a difference with Mr
Boffin, and have left for good.’

‘John Rokesmith being acquainted with your Ma, my love,’ said her
father, after some slight hesitation, ‘I need have no delicacy in
hinting before him that you may perhaps find your Ma a little wearing.’

‘A little, patient Pa?’ said Bella with a tuneful laugh: the tune fuller
for being so loving in its tone.

‘Well! We’ll say, strictly in confidence among ourselves, wearing;
we won’t qualify it,’ the cherub stoutly admitted. ‘And your sister’s
temper is wearing.’

‘I don’t mind, Pa.’

‘And you must prepare yourself you know, my precious,’ said her father,
with much gentleness, ‘for our looking very poor and meagre at home, and
being at the best but very uncomfortable, after Mr Boffin’s house.’

‘I don’t mind, Pa. I could bear much harder trials--for John.’

The closing words were not so softly and blushingly said but that John
heard them, and showed that he heard them by again assisting Bella to
another of those mysterious disappearances.

‘Well!’ said the cherub gaily, and not expressing disapproval, ‘when
you--when you come back from retirement, my love, and reappear on the
surface, I think it will be time to lock up and go.’

If the counting-house of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles had ever been
shut up by three happier people, glad as most people were to shut it up,
they must have been superlatively happy indeed. But first Bella mounted
upon Rumty’s Perch, and said, ‘Show me what you do here all day long,
dear Pa. Do you write like this?’ laying her round cheek upon her plump
left arm, and losing sight of her pen in waves of hair, in a highly
unbusiness-like manner. Though John Rokesmith seemed to like it.

So, the three hobgoblins, having effaced all traces of their feast, and
swept up the crumbs, came out of Mincing Lane to walk to Holloway; and
if two of the hobgoblins didn’t wish the distance twice as long as it
was, the third hobgoblin was much mistaken. Indeed, that modest spirit
deemed himself so much in the way of their deep enjoyment of the
journey, that he apologetically remarked: ‘I think, my dears, I’ll take
the lead on the other side of the road, and seem not to belong to you.’
Which he did, cherubically strewing the path with smiles, in the absence
of flowers.

It was almost ten o’clock when they stopped within view of Wilfer
Castle; and then, the spot being quiet and deserted, Bella began a
series of disappearances which threatened to last all night.

‘I think, John,’ the cherub hinted at last, ‘that if you can spare me
the young person distantly related to myself, I’ll take her in.’

‘I can’t spare her,’ answered John, ‘but I must lend her to you.--My
Darling!’ A word of magic which caused Bella instantly to disappear
again.

‘Now, dearest Pa,’ said Bella, when she became visible, ‘put your hand
in mine, and we’ll run home as fast as ever we can run, and get it over.
Now, Pa. Once!--’

‘My dear,’ the cherub faltered, with something of a craven air, ‘I was
going to observe that if your mother--’

‘You mustn’t hang back, sir, to gain time,’ cried Bella, putting out her
right foot; ‘do you see that, sir? That’s the mark; come up to the mark,
sir. Once! Twice! Three times and away, Pa!’ Off she skimmed, bearing
the cherub along, nor ever stopped, nor suffered him to stop, until she
had pulled at the bell. ‘Now, dear Pa,’ said Bella, taking him by both
ears as if he were a pitcher, and conveying his face to her rosy lips,
‘we are in for it!’

Miss Lavvy came out to open the gate, waited on by that attentive
cavalier and friend of the family, Mr George Sampson. ‘Why, it’s never
Bella!’ exclaimed Miss Lavvy starting back at the sight. And then
bawled, ‘Ma! Here’s Bella!’

This produced, before they could get into the house, Mrs Wilfer. Who,
standing in the portal, received them with ghostly gloom, and all her
other appliances of ceremony.

‘My child is welcome, though unlooked for,’ said she, at the time
presenting her cheek as if it were a cool slate for visitors to enrol
themselves upon. ‘You too, R. W., are welcome, though late. Does the
male domestic of Mrs Boffin hear me there?’ This deep-toned inquiry was
cast forth into the night, for response from the menial in question.

‘There is no one waiting, Ma, dear,’ said Bella.

‘There is no one waiting?’ repeated Mrs Wilfer in majestic accents.

‘No, Ma, dear.’

A dignified shiver pervaded Mrs Wilfer’s shoulders and gloves, as
who should say, ‘An Enigma!’ and then she marched at the head of the
procession to the family keeping-room, where she observed:

‘Unless, R. W.’: who started on being solemnly turned upon: ‘you have
taken the precaution of making some addition to our frugal supper on
your way home, it will prove but a distasteful one to Bella. Cold neck
of mutton and a lettuce can ill compete with the luxuries of Mr Boffin’s
board.’

‘Pray don’t talk like that, Ma dear,’ said Bella; ‘Mr Boffin’s board is
nothing to me.’

But, here Miss Lavinia, who had been intently eyeing Bella’s bonnet,
struck in with ‘Why, Bella!’

‘Yes, Lavvy, I know.’

The Irrepressible lowered her eyes to Bella’s dress, and stooped to look
at it, exclaiming again: ‘Why, Bella!’

‘Yes, Lavvy, I know what I have got on. I was going to tell Ma when you
interrupted. I have left Mr Boffin’s house for good, Ma, and I have come
home again.’

Mrs Wilfer spake no word, but, having glared at her offspring for a
minute or two in an awful silence, retired into her corner of state
backward, and sat down: like a frozen article on sale in a Russian
market.

‘In short, dear Ma,’ said Bella, taking off the depreciated bonnet and
shaking out her hair, ‘I have had a very serious difference with Mr
Boffin on the subject of his treatment of a member of his household, and
it’s a final difference, and there’s an end of all.’

‘And I am bound to tell you, my dear,’ added R. W., submissively, ‘that
Bella has acted in a truly brave spirit, and with a truly right feeling.
And therefore I hope, my dear, you’ll not allow yourself to be greatly
disappointed.’

‘George!’ said Miss Lavvy, in a sepulchral, warning voice, founded on
her mother’s; ‘George Sampson, speak! What did I tell you about those
Boffins?’

Mr Sampson perceiving his frail bark to be labouring among shoals and
breakers, thought it safest not to refer back to any particular thing
that he had been told, lest he should refer back to the wrong thing.
With admirable seamanship he got his bark into deep water by murmuring
‘Yes indeed.’

‘Yes! I told George Sampson, as George Sampson tells you,’ said Miss
Lavvy, ‘that those hateful Boffins would pick a quarrel with Bella, as
soon as her novelty had worn off. Have they done it, or have they not?
Was I right, or was I wrong? And what do you say to us, Bella, of your
Boffins now?’

‘Lavvy and Ma,’ said Bella, ‘I say of Mr and Mrs Boffin what I always
have said; and I always shall say of them what I always have said. But
nothing will induce me to quarrel with any one to-night. I hope you
are not sorry to see me, Ma dear,’ kissing her; ‘and I hope you are not
sorry to see me, Lavvy,’ kissing her too; ‘and as I notice the lettuce
Ma mentioned, on the table, I’ll make the salad.’

Bella playfully setting herself about the task, Mrs Wilfer’s impressive
countenance followed her with glaring eyes, presenting a combination
of the once popular sign of the Saracen’s Head, with a piece of
Dutch clock-work, and suggesting to an imaginative mind that from the
composition of the salad, her daughter might prudently omit the vinegar.
But no word issued from the majestic matron’s lips. And this was more
terrific to her husband (as perhaps she knew) than any flow of eloquence
with which she could have edified the company.

‘Now, Ma dear,’ said Bella in due course, ‘the salad’s ready, and it’s
past supper-time.’

Mrs Wilfer rose, but remained speechless. ‘George!’ said Miss Lavinia
in her voice of warning, ‘Ma’s chair!’ Mr Sampson flew to the excellent
lady’s back, and followed her up close chair in hand, as she stalked
to the banquet. Arrived at the table, she took her rigid seat, after
favouring Mr Sampson with a glare for himself, which caused the young
gentleman to retire to his place in much confusion.

The cherub not presuming to address so tremendous an object, transacted
her supper through the agency of a third person, as ‘Mutton to your Ma,
Bella, my dear’; and ‘Lavvy, I dare say your Ma would take some lettuce
if you were to put it on her plate.’ Mrs Wilfer’s manner of receiving
those viands was marked by petrified absence of mind; in which state,
likewise, she partook of them, occasionally laying down her knife and
fork, as saying within her own spirit, ‘What is this I am doing?’ and
glaring at one or other of the party, as if in indignant search of
information. A magnetic result of such glaring was, that the person
glared at could not by any means successfully pretend to be ignorant of
the fact: so that a bystander, without beholding Mrs Wilfer at all, must
have known at whom she was glaring, by seeing her refracted from the
countenance of the beglared one.

Miss Lavinia was extremely affable to Mr Sampson on this special
occasion, and took the opportunity of informing her sister why.

‘It was not worth troubling you about, Bella, when you were in a sphere
so far removed from your family as to make it a matter in which you
could be expected to take very little interest,’ said Lavinia with a
toss of her chin; ‘but George Sampson is paying his addresses to me.’

Bella was glad to hear it. Mr Sampson became thoughtfully red, and
felt called upon to encircle Miss Lavinia’s waist with his arm; but,
encountering a large pin in the young lady’s belt, scarified a finger,
uttered a sharp exclamation, and attracted the lightning of Mrs Wilfer’s
glare.

‘George is getting on very well,’ said Miss Lavinia which might not have
been supposed at the moment--‘and I dare say we shall be married, one of
these days. I didn’t care to mention it when you were with your Bof--’
here Miss Lavinia checked herself in a bounce, and added more placidly,
‘when you were with Mr and Mrs Boffin; but now I think it sisterly to
name the circumstance.’

‘Thank you, Lavvy dear. I congratulate you.’

‘Thank you, Bella. The truth is, George and I did discuss whether
I should tell you; but I said to George that you wouldn’t be much
interested in so paltry an affair, and that it was far more likely you
would rather detach yourself from us altogether, than have him added to
the rest of us.’

‘That was a mistake, dear Lavvy,’ said Bella.

‘It turns out to be,’ replied Miss Lavinia; ‘but circumstances have
changed, you know, my dear. George is in a new situation, and his
prospects are very good indeed. I shouldn’t have had the courage to tell
you so yesterday, when you would have thought his prospects poor, and
not worth notice; but I feel quite bold tonight.’

‘When did you begin to feel timid, Lavvy?’ inquired Bella, with a smile.

‘I didn’t say that I ever felt timid, Bella,’ replied the Irrepressible.
‘But perhaps I might have said, if I had not been restrained by delicacy
towards a sister’s feelings, that I have for some time felt independent;
too independent, my dear, to subject myself to have my intended match
(you’ll prick yourself again, George) looked down upon. It is not that I
could have blamed you for looking down upon it, when you were looking up
to a rich and great match, Bella; it is only that I was independent.’

Whether the Irrepressible felt slighted by Bella’s declaration that she
would not quarrel, or whether her spitefulness was evoked by Bella’s
return to the sphere of Mr George Sampson’s courtship, or whether it was
a necessary fillip to her spirits that she should come into collision
with somebody on the present occasion,--anyhow she made a dash at her
stately parent now, with the greatest impetuosity.

‘Ma, pray don’t sit staring at me in that intensely aggravating manner!
If you see a black on my nose, tell me so; if you don’t, leave me
alone.’

‘Do you address Me in those words?’ said Mrs Wilfer. ‘Do you presume?’

‘Don’t talk about presuming, Ma, for goodness’ sake. A girl who is old
enough to be engaged, is quite old enough to object to be stared at as
if she was a Clock.’

‘Audacious one!’ said Mrs Wilfer. ‘Your grandmamma, if so addressed by
one of her daughters, at any age, would have insisted on her retiring to
a dark apartment.’

‘My grandmamma,’ returned Lavvy, folding her arms and leaning back
in her chair, ‘wouldn’t have sat staring people out of countenance, I
think.’

‘She would!’ said Mrs Wilfer.

‘Then it’s a pity she didn’t know better,’ said Lavvy. ‘And if my
grandmamma wasn’t in her dotage when she took to insisting on people’s
retiring to dark apartments, she ought to have been. A pretty exhibition
my grandmamma must have made of herself! I wonder whether she ever
insisted on people’s retiring into the ball of St Paul’s; and if she
did, how she got them there!’

‘Silence!’ proclaimed Mrs Wilfer. ‘I command silence!’

‘I have not the slightest intention of being silent, Ma,’ returned
Lavinia coolly, ‘but quite the contrary. I am not going to be eyed as if
I had come from the Boffins, and sit silent under it. I am not going
to have George Sampson eyed as if HE had come from the Boffins, and sit
silent under it. If Pa thinks proper to be eyed as if HE had come from
the Boffins also, well and good. I don’t choose to. And I won’t!’

Lavinia’s engineering having made this crooked opening at Bella, Mrs
Wilfer strode into it.

‘You rebellious spirit! You mutinous child! Tell me this, Lavinia. If
in violation of your mother’s sentiments, you had condescended to allow
yourself to be patronized by the Boffins, and if you had come from those
halls of slavery--’

‘That’s mere nonsense, Ma,’ said Lavinia.

‘How!’ exclaimed Mrs Wilfer, with sublime severity.

‘Halls of slavery, Ma, is mere stuff and nonsense,’ returned the unmoved
Irrepressible.

‘I say, presumptuous child, if you had come from the neighbourhood of
Portland Place, bending under the yoke of patronage and attended by its
domestics in glittering garb to visit me, do you think my deep-seated
feelings could have been expressed in looks?’

‘All I think about it, is,’ returned Lavinia, ‘that I should wish them
expressed to the right person.’

‘And if,’ pursued her mother, ‘if making light of my warnings that the
face of Mrs Boffin alone was a face teeming with evil, you had clung to
Mrs Boffin instead of to me, and had after all come home rejected by Mrs
Boffin, trampled under foot by Mrs Boffin, and cast out by Mrs Boffin,
do you think my feelings could have been expressed in looks?’

Lavinia was about replying to her honoured parent that she might as well
have dispensed with her looks altogether then, when Bella rose and said,
‘Good night, dear Ma. I have had a tiring day, and I’ll go to bed.’ This
broke up the agreeable party. Mr George Sampson shortly afterwards took
his leave, accompanied by Miss Lavinia with a candle as far as the hall,
and without a candle as far as the garden gate; Mrs Wilfer, washing her
hands of the Boffins, went to bed after the manner of Lady Macbeth; and
R. W. was left alone among the dilapidations of the supper table, in a
melancholy attitude.

But, a light footstep roused him from his meditations, and it was
Bella’s. Her pretty hair was hanging all about her, and she had tripped
down softly, brush in hand, and barefoot, to say good-night to him.

‘My dear, you most unquestionably ARE a lovely woman,’ said the cherub,
taking up a tress in his hand.

‘Look here, sir,’ said Bella; ‘when your lovely woman marries, you shall
have that piece if you like, and she’ll make you a chain of it. Would
you prize that remembrance of the dear creature?’

‘Yes, my precious.’

‘Then you shall have it if you’re good, sir. I am very, very sorry,
dearest Pa, to have brought home all this trouble.’

‘My pet,’ returned her father, in the simplest good faith, ‘don’t make
yourself uneasy about that. It really is not worth mentioning, because
things at home would have taken pretty much the same turn any way. If
your mother and sister don’t find one subject to get at times a little
wearing on, they find another. We’re never out of a wearing subject,
my dear, I assure you. I am afraid you find your old room with Lavvy,
dreadfully inconvenient, Bella?’

‘No I don’t, Pa; I don’t mind. Why don’t I mind, do you think, Pa?’

‘Well, my child, you used to complain of it when it wasn’t such a
contrast as it must be now. Upon my word, I can only answer, because you
are so much improved.’

‘No, Pa. Because I am so thankful and so happy!’

Here she choked him until her long hair made him sneeze, and then she
laughed until she made him laugh, and then she choked him again that
they might not be overheard.

‘Listen, sir,’ said Bella. ‘Your lovely woman was told her fortune
to night on her way home. It won’t be a large fortune, because if the
lovely woman’s Intended gets a certain appointment that he hopes to get
soon, she will marry on a hundred and fifty pounds a year. But that’s at
first, and even if it should never be more, the lovely woman will make
it quite enough. But that’s not all, sir. In the fortune there’s a
certain fair man--a little man, the fortune-teller said--who, it seems,
will always find himself near the lovely woman, and will always have
kept, expressly for him, such a peaceful corner in the lovely woman’s
little house as never was. Tell me the name of that man, sir.’

‘Is he a Knave in the pack of cards?’ inquired the cherub, with a
twinkle in his eyes.

‘Yes!’ cried Bella, in high glee, choking him again. ‘He’s the Knave of
Wilfers! Dear Pa, the lovely woman means to look forward to this fortune
that has been told for her, so delightfully, and to cause it to make her
a much better lovely woman than she ever has been yet. What the little
fair man is expected to do, sir, is to look forward to it also, by
saying to himself when he is in danger of being over-worried, “I see
land at last!”

‘I see land at last!’ repeated her father.

‘There’s a dear Knave of Wilfers!’ exclaimed Bella; then putting out her
small white bare foot, ‘That’s the mark, sir. Come to the mark. Put your
boot against it. We keep to it together, mind! Now, sir, you may kiss
the lovely woman before she runs away, so thankful and so happy. O yes,
fair little man, so thankful and so happy!’



Chapter 17

A SOCIAL CHORUS


Amazement sits enthroned upon the countenances of Mr and Mrs Alfred
Lammle’s circle of acquaintance, when the disposal of their first-class
furniture and effects (including a Billiard Table in capital letters),
‘by auction, under a bill of sale,’ is publicly announced on a waving
hearthrug in Sackville Street. But, nobody is half so much amazed as
Hamilton Veneering, Esquire, M.P. for Pocket-Breaches, who instantly
begins to find out that the Lammles are the only people ever entered on
his soul’s register, who are NOT the oldest and dearest friends he has
in the world. Mrs Veneering, W.M.P. for Pocket-Breaches, like a faithful
wife shares her husband’s discovery and inexpressible astonishment.
Perhaps the Veneerings twain may deem the last unutterable feeling
particularly due to their reputation, by reason that once upon a time
some of the longer heads in the City are whispered to have shaken
themselves, when Veneering’s extensive dealings and great wealth were
mentioned. But, it is certain that neither Mr nor Mrs Veneering can
find words to wonder in, and it becomes necessary that they give to the
oldest and dearest friends they have in the world, a wondering dinner.

For, it is by this time noticeable that, whatever befals, the Veneerings
must give a dinner upon it. Lady Tippins lives in a chronic state
of invitation to dine with the Veneerings, and in a chronic state of
inflammation arising from the dinners. Boots and Brewer go about in
cabs, with no other intelligible business on earth than to beat up
people to come and dine with the Veneerings. Veneering pervades the
legislative lobbies, intent upon entrapping his fellow-legislators to
dinner. Mrs Veneering dined with five-and-twenty bran-new faces over
night; calls upon them all to day; sends them every one a dinner-card
to-morrow, for the week after next; before that dinner is digested,
calls upon their brothers and sisters, their sons and daughters, their
nephews and nieces, their aunts and uncles and cousins, and invites
them all to dinner. And still, as at first, howsoever, the dining circle
widens, it is to be observed that all the diners are consistent in
appearing to go to the Veneerings, not to dine with Mr and Mrs Veneering
(which would seem to be the last thing in their minds), but to dine with
one another.

Perhaps, after all,--who knows?--Veneering may find this dining, though
expensive, remunerative, in the sense that it makes champions.
Mr Podsnap, as a representative man, is not alone in caring very
particularly for his own dignity, if not for that of his acquaintances,
and therefore in angrily supporting the acquaintances who have taken out
his Permit, lest, in their being lessened, he should be. The gold and
silver camels, and the ice-pails, and the rest of the Veneering table
decorations, make a brilliant show, and when I, Podsnap, casually remark
elsewhere that I dined last Monday with a gorgeous caravan of camels,
I find it personally offensive to have it hinted to me that they are
broken-kneed camels, or camels labouring under suspicion of any sort. ‘I
don’t display camels myself, I am above them: I am a more solid man; but
these camels have basked in the light of my countenance, and how dare
you, sir, insinuate to me that I have irradiated any but unimpeachable
camels?’

The camels are polishing up in the Analytical’s pantry for the dinner
of wonderment on the occasion of the Lammles going to pieces, and Mr
Twemlow feels a little queer on the sofa at his lodgings over the stable
yard in Duke Street, Saint James’s, in consequence of having taken
two advertised pills at about mid-day, on the faith of the printed
representation accompanying the box (price one and a penny halfpenny,
government stamp included), that the same ‘will be found highly salutary
as a precautionary measure in connection with the pleasures of the
table.’ To whom, while sickly with the fancy of an insoluble pill
sticking in his gullet, and also with the sensation of a deposit of warm
gum languidly wandering within him a little lower down, a servant enters
with the announcement that a lady wishes to speak with him.

‘A lady!’ says Twemlow, pluming his ruffled feathers. ‘Ask the favour of
the lady’s name.’

The lady’s name is Lammle. The lady will not detain Mr Twemlow longer
than a very few minutes. The lady is sure that Mr Twemlow will do her
the kindness to see her, on being told that she particularly desires
a short interview. The lady has no doubt whatever of Mr Twemlow’s
compliance when he hears her name. Has begged the servant to be
particular not to mistake her name. Would have sent in a card, but has
none.

‘Show the lady in.’ Lady shown in, comes in.

Mr Twemlow’s little rooms are modestly furnished, in an old-fashioned
manner (rather like the housekeeper’s room at Snigsworthy Park), and
would be bare of mere ornament, were it not for a full-length engraving
of the sublime Snigsworth over the chimneypiece, snorting at a
Corinthian column, with an enormous roll of paper at his feet, and a
heavy curtain going to tumble down on his head; those accessories being
understood to represent the noble lord as somehow in the act of saving
his country.

‘Pray take a seat, Mrs Lammle.’ Mrs Lammle takes a seat and opens the
conversation.

‘I have no doubt, Mr Twemlow, that you have heard of a reverse of
fortune having befallen us. Of course you have heard of it, for no kind
of news travels so fast--among one’s friends especially.’

Mindful of the wondering dinner, Twemlow, with a little twinge, admits
the imputation.

‘Probably it will not,’ says Mrs Lammle, with a certain hardened manner
upon her, that makes Twemlow shrink, ‘have surprised you so much as some
others, after what passed between us at the house which is now turned
out at windows. I have taken the liberty of calling upon you, Mr
Twemlow, to add a sort of postscript to what I said that day.’

Mr Twemlow’s dry and hollow cheeks become more dry and hollow at the
prospect of some new complication.

‘Really,’ says the uneasy little gentleman, ‘really, Mrs Lammle, I
should take it as a favour if you could excuse me from any further
confidence. It has ever been one of the objects of my life--which,
unfortunately, has not had many objects--to be inoffensive, and to keep
out of cabals and interferences.’

Mrs Lammle, by far the more observant of the two, scarcely finds it
necessary to look at Twemlow while he speaks, so easily does she read
him.

‘My postscript--to retain the term I have used’--says Mrs Lammle, fixing
her eyes on his face, to enforce what she says herself--‘coincides
exactly with what you say, Mr Twemlow. So far from troubling you with
any new confidence, I merely wish to remind you what the old one was. So
far from asking you for interference, I merely wish to claim your strict
neutrality.’

Twemlow going on to reply, she rests her eyes again, knowing her ears to
be quite enough for the contents of so weak a vessel.

‘I can, I suppose,’ says Twemlow, nervously, ‘offer no reasonable
objection to hearing anything that you do me the honour to wish to say
to me under those heads. But if I may, with all possible delicacy and
politeness, entreat you not to range beyond them, I--I beg to do so.’

‘Sir,’ says Mrs Lammle, raising her eyes to his face again, and quite
daunting him with her hardened manner, ‘I imparted to you a certain
piece of knowledge, to be imparted again, as you thought best, to a
certain person.’

‘Which I did,’ says Twemlow.

‘And for doing which, I thank you; though, indeed, I scarcely know why
I turned traitress to my husband in the matter, for the girl is a poor
little fool. I was a poor little fool once myself; I can find no better
reason.’ Seeing the effect she produces on him by her indifferent laugh
and cold look, she keeps her eyes upon him as she proceeds. ‘Mr Twemlow,
if you should chance to see my husband, or to see me, or to see both of
us, in the favour or confidence of any one else--whether of our common
acquaintance or not, is of no consequence--you have no right to use
against us the knowledge I intrusted you with, for one special purpose
which has been accomplished. This is what I came to say. It is not a
stipulation; to a gentleman it is simply a reminder.’

Twemlow sits murmuring to himself with his hand to his forehead.

‘It is so plain a case,’ Mrs Lammle goes on, ‘as between me (from the
first relying on your honour) and you, that I will not waste another
word upon it.’ She looks steadily at Mr Twemlow, until, with a shrug,
he makes her a little one-sided bow, as though saying ‘Yes, I think you
have a right to rely upon me,’ and then she moistens her lips, and shows
a sense of relief.

‘I trust I have kept the promise I made through your servant, that I
would detain you a very few minutes. I need trouble you no longer, Mr
Twemlow.’

‘Stay!’ says Twemlow, rising as she rises. ‘Pardon me a moment. I should
never have sought you out, madam, to say what I am going to say, but
since you have sought me out and are here, I will throw it off my mind.
Was it quite consistent, in candour, with our taking that resolution
against Mr Fledgeby, that you should afterwards address Mr Fledgeby as
your dear and confidential friend, and entreat a favour of Mr Fledgeby?
Always supposing that you did; I assert no knowledge of my own on the
subject; it has been represented to me that you did.’

‘Then he told you?’ retorts Mrs Lammle, who again has saved her eyes
while listening, and uses them with strong effect while speaking.

‘Yes.’

‘It is strange that he should have told you the truth,’ says Mrs
Lammle, seriously pondering. ‘Pray where did a circumstance so very
extraordinary happen?’

Twemlow hesitates. He is shorter than the lady as well as weaker, and,
as she stands above him with her hardened manner and her well-used eyes,
he finds himself at such a disadvantage that he would like to be of the
opposite sex.

‘May I ask where it happened, Mr Twemlow? In strict confidence?’

‘I must confess,’ says the mild little gentleman, coming to his answer
by degrees, ‘that I felt some compunctions when Mr Fledgeby mentioned
it. I must admit that I could not regard myself in an agreeable light.
More particularly, as Mr Fledgeby did, with great civility, which I
could not feel that I deserved from him, render me the same service that
you had entreated him to render you.’

It is a part of the true nobility of the poor gentleman’s soul to say
this last sentence. ‘Otherwise,’ he has reflected, ‘I shall assume the
superior position of having no difficulties of my own, while I know of
hers. Which would be mean, very mean.’

‘Was Mr Fledgeby’s advocacy as effectual in your case as in ours?’ Mrs
Lammle demands.

‘As ineffectual.’

‘Can you make up your mind to tell me where you saw Mr Fledgeby, Mr
Twemlow?’

‘I beg your pardon. I fully intended to have done so. The reservation
was not intentional. I encountered Mr Fledgeby, quite by accident, on
the spot.--By the expression, on the spot, I mean at Mr Riah’s in Saint
Mary Axe.’

‘Have you the misfortune to be in Mr Riah’s hands then?’

‘Unfortunately, madam,’ returns Twemlow, ‘the one money obligation to
which I stand committed, the one debt of my life (but it is a just debt;
pray observe that I don’t dispute it), has fallen into Mr Riah’s hands.’

‘Mr Twemlow,’ says Mrs Lammle, fixing his eyes with hers: which he would
prevent her doing if he could, but he can’t; ‘it has fallen into Mr
Fledgeby’s hands. Mr Riah is his mask. It has fallen into Mr Fledgeby’s
hands. Let me tell you that, for your guidance. The information may be
of use to you, if only to prevent your credulity, in judging another
man’s truthfulness by your own, from being imposed upon.’

‘Impossible!’ cries Twemlow, standing aghast. ‘How do you know it?’

‘I scarcely know how I know it. The whole train of circumstances seemed
to take fire at once, and show it to me.’

‘Oh! Then you have no proof.’

‘It is very strange,’ says Mrs Lammle, coldly and boldly, and with some
disdain, ‘how like men are to one another in some things, though their
characters are as different as can be! No two men can have less affinity
between them, one would say, than Mr Twemlow and my husband. Yet my
husband replies to me “You have no proof,” and Mr Twemlow replies to me
with the very same words!’

‘But why, madam?’ Twemlow ventures gently to argue. ‘Consider why
the very same words? Because they state the fact. Because you HAVE no
proof.’

‘Men are very wise in their way,’ quoth Mrs Lammle, glancing haughtily
at the Snigsworth portrait, and shaking out her dress before departing;
‘but they have wisdom to learn. My husband, who is not over-confiding,
ingenuous, or inexperienced, sees this plain thing no more than Mr
Twemlow does--because there is no proof! Yet I believe five women out of
six, in my place, would see it as clearly as I do. However, I will never
rest (if only in remembrance of Mr Fledgeby’s having kissed my hand)
until my husband does see it. And you will do well for yourself to see
it from this time forth, Mr Twemlow, though I CAN give you no proof.’

As she moves towards the door, Mr Twemlow, attending on her, expresses
his soothing hope that the condition of Mr Lammle’s affairs is not
irretrievable.

‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Lammle answers, stopping, and sketching out the
pattern of the paper on the wall with the point of her parasol; ‘it
depends. There may be an opening for him dawning now, or there may be
none. We shall soon find out. If none, we are bankrupt here, and must go
abroad, I suppose.’

Mr Twemlow, in his good-natured desire to make the best of it, remarks
that there are pleasant lives abroad.

‘Yes,’ returns Mrs Lammle, still sketching on the wall; ‘but I doubt
whether billiard-playing, card-playing, and so forth, for the means to
live under suspicion at a dirty table-d’hote, is one of them.’

It is much for Mr Lammle, Twemlow politely intimates (though greatly
shocked), to have one always beside him who is attached to him in all
his fortunes, and whose restraining influence will prevent him from
courses that would be discreditable and ruinous. As he says it, Mrs
Lammle leaves off sketching, and looks at him.

‘Restraining influence, Mr Twemlow? We must eat and drink, and dress,
and have a roof over our heads. Always beside him and attached in all
his fortunes? Not much to boast of in that; what can a woman at my age
do? My husband and I deceived one another when we married; we must bear
the consequences of the deception--that is to say, bear one another, and
bear the burden of scheming together for to-day’s dinner and to-morrow’s
breakfast--till death divorces us.’

With those words, she walks out into Duke Street, Saint James’s. Mr
Twemlow returning to his sofa, lays down his aching head on its slippery
little horsehair bolster, with a strong internal conviction that a
painful interview is not the kind of thing to be taken after the dinner
pills which are so highly salutary in connexion with the pleasures of
the table.

But, six o’clock in the evening finds the worthy little gentleman
getting better, and also getting himself into his obsolete little silk
stockings and pumps, for the wondering dinner at the Veneerings. And
seven o’clock in the evening finds him trotting out into Duke Street, to
trot to the corner and save a sixpence in coach-hire.

Tippins the divine has dined herself into such a condition by this time,
that a morbid mind might desire her, for a blessed change, to sup
at last, and turn into bed. Such a mind has Mr Eugene Wrayburn, whom
Twemlow finds contemplating Tippins with the moodiest of visages,
while that playful creature rallies him on being so long overdue at the
woolsack. Skittish is Tippins with Mortimer Lightwood too, and has raps
to give him with her fan for having been best man at the nuptials of
these deceiving what’s-their-names who have gone to pieces. Though,
indeed, the fan is generally lively, and taps away at the men in
all directions, with something of a grisly sound suggestive of the
clattering of Lady Tippins’s bones.

A new race of intimate friends has sprung up at Veneering’s since he
went into Parliament for the public good, to whom Mrs Veneering is very
attentive. These friends, like astronomical distances, are only to be
spoken of in the very largest figures. Boots says that one of them is a
Contractor who (it has been calculated) gives employment, directly and
indirectly, to five hundred thousand men. Brewer says that another of
them is a Chairman, in such request at so many Boards, so far apart,
that he never travels less by railway than three thousand miles a week.
Buffer says that another of them hadn’t a sixpence eighteen months ago,
and, through the brilliancy of his genius in getting those shares issued
at eighty-five, and buying them all up with no money and selling them
at par for cash, has now three hundred and seventy-five thousand
pounds--Buffer particularly insisting on the odd seventy-five, and
declining to take a farthing less. With Buffer, Boots, and Brewer, Lady
Tippins is eminently facetious on the subject of these Fathers of the
Scrip-Church: surveying them through her eyeglass, and inquiring whether
Boots and Brewer and Buffer think they will make her fortune if she
makes love to them? with other pleasantries of that nature. Veneering,
in his different way, is much occupied with the Fathers too, piously
retiring with them into the conservatory, from which retreat the word
‘Committee’ is occasionally heard, and where the Fathers instruct
Veneering how he must leave the valley of the piano on his left,
take the level of the mantelpiece, cross by an open cutting at the
candelabra, seize the carrying-traffic at the console, and cut up the
opposition root and branch at the window curtains.

Mr and Mrs Podsnap are of the company, and the Fathers descry in Mrs
Podsnap a fine woman. She is consigned to a Father--Boots’s Father,
who employs five hundred thousand men--and is brought to anchor on
Veneering’s left; thus affording opportunity to the sportive Tippins on
his right (he, as usual, being mere vacant space), to entreat to be told
something about those loves of Navvies, and whether they really do live
on raw beefsteaks, and drink porter out of their barrows. But, in spite
of such little skirmishes it is felt that this was to be a wondering
dinner, and that the wondering must not be neglected. Accordingly,
Brewer, as the man who has the greatest reputation to sustain, becomes
the interpreter of the general instinct.

‘I took,’ says Brewer in a favourable pause, ‘a cab this morning, and I
rattled off to that Sale.’

Boots (devoured by envy) says, ‘So did I.’

Buffer says, ‘So did I’; but can find nobody to care whether he did or
not.

‘And what was it like?’ inquires Veneering.

‘I assure you,’ replies Brewer, looking about for anybody else to
address his answer to, and giving the preference to Lightwood; ‘I assure
you, the things were going for a song. Handsome things enough, but
fetching nothing.’

‘So I heard this afternoon,’ says Lightwood.

Brewer begs to know now, would it be fair to ask a professional man
how--on--earth--these--people--ever--did--come--TO--such--A--total
smash? (Brewer’s divisions being for emphasis.)

Lightwood replies that he was consulted certainly, but could give no
opinion which would pay off the Bill of Sale, and therefore violates no
confidence in supposing that it came of their living beyond their means.

‘But how,’ says Veneering, ‘CAN people do that!’

Hah! That is felt on all hands to be a shot in the bull’s eye. How CAN
people do that! The Analytical Chemist going round with champagne, looks
very much as if HE could give them a pretty good idea how people did
that, if he had a mind.

‘How,’ says Mrs Veneering, laying down her fork to press her aquiline
hands together at the tips of the fingers, and addressing the Father who
travels the three thousand miles per week: ‘how a mother can look at
her baby, and know that she lives beyond her husband’s means, I cannot
imagine.’

Eugene suggests that Mrs Lammle, not being a mother, had no baby to look
at.

‘True,’ says Mrs Veneering, ‘but the principle is the same.’

Boots is clear that the principle is the same. So is Buffer. It is the
unfortunate destiny of Buffer to damage a cause by espousing it. The
rest of the company have meekly yielded to the proposition that the
principle is the same, until Buffer says it is; when instantly a general
murmur arises that the principle is not the same.

‘But I don’t understand,’ says the Father of the three hundred and
seventy-five thousand pounds, ‘--if these people spoken of, occupied the
position of being in society--they were in society?’

Veneering is bound to confess that they dined here, and were even
married from here.

‘Then I don’t understand,’ pursues the Father, ‘how even their living
beyond their means could bring them to what has been termed a total
smash. Because, there is always such a thing as an adjustment of
affairs, in the case of people of any standing at all.’

Eugene (who would seem to be in a gloomy state of suggestiveness),
suggests, ‘Suppose you have no means and live beyond them?’

This is too insolvent a state of things for the Father to entertain. It
is too insolvent a state of things for any one with any self-respect
to entertain, and is universally scouted. But, it is so amazing how any
people can have come to a total smash, that everybody feels bound to
account for it specially. One of the Fathers says, ‘Gaming table.’
Another of the Fathers says, ‘Speculated without knowing that
speculation is a science.’ Boots says ‘Horses.’ Lady Tippins says to her
fan, ‘Two establishments.’ Mr Podsnap, saying nothing, is referred
to for his opinion; which he delivers as follows; much flushed and
extremely angry:

‘Don’t ask me. I desire to take no part in the discussion of these
people’s affairs. I abhor the subject. It is an odious subject, an
offensive subject, a subject that makes me sick, and I--’ And with his
favourite right-arm flourish which sweeps away everything and settles it
for ever, Mr Podsnap sweeps these inconveniently unexplainable wretches
who have lived beyond their means and gone to total smash, off the face
of the universe.

Eugene, leaning back in his chair, is observing Mr Podsnap with an
irreverent face, and may be about to offer a new suggestion, when
the Analytical is beheld in collision with the Coachman; the Coachman
manifesting a purpose of coming at the company with a silver salver,
as though intent upon making a collection for his wife and family; the
Analytical cutting him off at the sideboard. The superior stateliness,
if not the superior generalship, of the Analytical prevails over a man
who is as nothing off the box; and the Coachman, yielding up his salver,
retires defeated.

Then, the Analytical, perusing a scrap of paper lying on the salver,
with the air of a literary Censor, adjusts it, takes his time about
going to the table with it, and presents it to Mr Eugene Wrayburn.
Whereupon the pleasant Tippins says aloud, ‘The Lord Chancellor has
resigned!’

With distracting coolness and slowness--for he knows the curiosity of
the Charmer to be always devouring--Eugene makes a pretence of getting
out an eyeglass, polishing it, and reading the paper with difficulty,
long after he has seen what is written on it. What is written on it in
wet ink, is:

‘Young Blight.’

‘Waiting?’ says Eugene over his shoulder, in confidence, with the
Analytical.

‘Waiting,’ returns the Analytical in responsive confidence.

Eugene looks ‘Excuse me,’ towards Mrs Veneering, goes out, and finds
Young Blight, Mortimer’s clerk, at the hall-door.

‘You told me to bring him, sir, to wherever you was, if he come while
you was out and I was in,’ says that discreet young gentleman, standing
on tiptoe to whisper; ‘and I’ve brought him.’

‘Sharp boy. Where is he?’ asks Eugene.

‘He’s in a cab, sir, at the door. I thought it best not to show him, you
see, if it could be helped; for he’s a-shaking all over, like--Blight’s
simile is perhaps inspired by the surrounding dishes of sweets--‘like
Glue Monge.’

‘Sharp boy again,’ returns Eugene. ‘I’ll go to him.’

Goes out straightway, and, leisurely leaning his arms on the open window
of a cab in waiting, looks in at Mr Dolls: who has brought his own
atmosphere with him, and would seem from its odour to have brought it,
for convenience of carriage, in a rum-cask.

‘Now Dolls, wake up!’

‘Mist Wrayburn? Drection! Fifteen shillings!’

After carefully reading the dingy scrap of paper handed to him, and as
carefully tucking it into his waistcoat pocket, Eugene tells out the
money; beginning incautiously by telling the first shilling into Mr
Dolls’s hand, which instantly jerks it out of window; and ending by
telling the fifteen shillings on the seat.

‘Give him a ride back to Charing Cross, sharp boy, and there get rid of
him.’

Returning to the dining-room, and pausing for an instant behind the
screen at the door, Eugene overhears, above the hum and clatter, the
fair Tippins saying: ‘I am dying to ask him what he was called out for!’

‘Are you?’ mutters Eugene, ‘then perhaps if you can’t ask him, you’ll
die. So I’ll be a benefactor to society, and go. A stroll and a cigar,
and I can think this over. Think this over.’ Thus, with a thoughtful
face, he finds his hat and cloak, unseen of the Analytical, and goes his
way.





BOOK THE FOURTH -- A TURNING



Chapter 1

SETTING TRAPS


Plashwater Weir Mill Lock looked tranquil and pretty on an evening in
the summer time. A soft air stirred the leaves of the fresh green trees,
and passed like a smooth shadow over the river, and like a smoother
shadow over the yielding grass. The voice of the falling water, like
the voices of the sea and the wind, were as an outer memory to a
contemplative listener; but not particularly so to Mr Riderhood, who sat
on one of the blunt wooden levers of his lock-gates, dozing. Wine must
be got into a butt by some agency before it can be drawn out; and the
wine of sentiment never having been got into Mr Riderhood by any agency,
nothing in nature tapped him.

As the Rogue sat, ever and again nodding himself off his balance, his
recovery was always attended by an angry stare and growl, as if, in the
absence of any one else, he had aggressive inclinations towards himself.
In one of these starts the cry of ‘Lock, ho! Lock!’ prevented his
relapse into a doze. Shaking himself as he got up like the surly brute
he was, he gave his growl a responsive twist at the end, and turned his
face down-stream to see who hailed.

It was an amateur-sculler, well up to his work though taking it easily,
in so light a boat that the Rogue remarked: ‘A little less on you, and
you’d a’most ha’ been a Wagerbut’; then went to work at his windlass
handles and sluices, to let the sculler in. As the latter stood in his
boat, holding on by the boat-hook to the woodwork at the lock side,
waiting for the gates to open, Rogue Riderhood recognized his ‘T’other
governor,’ Mr Eugene Wrayburn; who was, however, too indifferent or too
much engaged to recognize him.

The creaking lock-gates opened slowly, and the light boat passed in as
soon as there was room enough, and the creaking lock-gates closed upon
it, and it floated low down in the dock between the two sets of gates,
until the water should rise and the second gates should open and let it
out. When Riderhood had run to his second windlass and turned it, and
while he leaned against the lever of that gate to help it to swing
open presently, he noticed, lying to rest under the green hedge by the
towing-path astern of the Lock, a Bargeman.

The water rose and rose as the sluice poured in, dispersing the scum
which had formed behind the lumbering gates, and sending the boat up,
so that the sculler gradually rose like an apparition against the light
from the bargeman’s point of view. Riderhood observed that the bargeman
rose too, leaning on his arm, and seemed to have his eyes fastened on
the rising figure.

But, there was the toll to be taken, as the gates were now complaining
and opening. The T’other governor tossed it ashore, twisted in a piece
of paper, and as he did so, knew his man.

‘Ay, ay? It’s you, is it, honest friend?’ said Eugene, seating himself
preparatory to resuming his sculls. ‘You got the place, then?’

‘I got the place, and no thanks to you for it, nor yet none to Lawyer
Lightwood,’ gruffly answered Riderhood.

‘We saved our recommendation, honest fellow,’ said Eugene, ‘for the next
candidate--the one who will offer himself when you are transported or
hanged. Don’t be long about it; will you be so good?’

So imperturbable was the air with which he gravely bent to his work that
Riderhood remained staring at him, without having found a retort, until
he had rowed past a line of wooden objects by the weir, which showed
like huge teetotums standing at rest in the water, and was almost hidden
by the drooping boughs on the left bank, as he rowed away, keeping
out of the opposing current. It being then too late to retort with
any effect--if that could ever have been done--the honest man confined
himself to cursing and growling in a grim under-tone. Having then
got his gates shut, he crossed back by his plank lock-bridge to the
towing-path side of the river.

If, in so doing, he took another glance at the bargeman, he did it by
stealth. He cast himself on the grass by the Lock side, in an indolent
way, with his back in that direction, and, having gathered a few blades,
fell to chewing them. The dip of Eugene Wrayburn’s sculls had become
hardly audible in his ears when the bargeman passed him, putting the
utmost width that he could between them, and keeping under the hedge.
Then, Riderhood sat up and took a long look at his figure, and then
cried: ‘Hi--I--i! Lock, ho! Lock! Plashwater Weir Mill Lock!’

The bargeman stopped, and looked back.

‘Plashwater Weir Mill Lock, T’otherest gov--er--nor--or--or--or!’ cried
Mr Riderhood, with his hands to his mouth.

The bargeman turned back. Approaching nearer and nearer, the bargeman
became Bradley Headstone, in rough water-side second-hand clothing.

‘Wish I may die,’ said Riderhood, smiting his right leg, and laughing,
as he sat on the grass, ‘if you ain’t ha’ been a imitating me,
T’otherest governor! Never thought myself so good-looking afore!’

Truly, Bradley Headstone had taken careful note of the honest man’s
dress in the course of that night-walk they had had together. He must
have committed it to memory, and slowly got it by heart. It was
exactly reproduced in the dress he now wore. And whereas, in his own
schoolmaster clothes, he usually looked as if they were the clothes of
some other man, he now looked, in the clothes of some other man or men,
as if they were his own.

‘THIS your Lock?’ said Bradley, whose surprise had a genuine air; ‘they
told me, where I last inquired, it was the third I should come to. This
is only the second.’

‘It’s my belief, governor,’ returned Riderhood, with a wink and shake of
his head, ‘that you’ve dropped one in your counting. It ain’t Locks as
YOU’VE been giving your mind to. No, no!’

As he expressively jerked his pointing finger in the direction the boat
had taken, a flush of impatience mounted into Bradley’s face, and he
looked anxiously up the river.

‘It ain’t Locks as YOU’VE been a reckoning up,’ said Riderhood, when the
schoolmaster’s eyes came back again. ‘No, no!’

‘What other calculations do you suppose I have been occupied with?
Mathematics?’

‘I never heerd it called that. It’s a long word for it. Hows’ever,
p’raps you call it so,’ said Riderhood, stubbornly chewing his grass.

‘It. What?’

‘I’ll say them, instead of it, if you like,’ was the coolly growled
reply. ‘It’s safer talk too.’

‘What do you mean that I should understand by them?’

‘Spites, affronts, offences giv’ and took, deadly aggrawations, such
like,’ answered Riderhood.

Do what Bradley Headstone would, he could not keep that former flush of
impatience out of his face, or so master his eyes as to prevent their
again looking anxiously up the river.

‘Ha ha! Don’t be afeerd, T’otherest,’ said Riderhood. ‘The T’other’s got
to make way agin the stream, and he takes it easy. You can soon come up
with him. But wot’s the good of saying that to you! YOU know how fur
you could have outwalked him betwixt anywheres about where he lost the
tide--say Richmond--and this, if you had a mind to it.’

‘You think I have been following him?’ said Bradley.

‘I KNOW you have,’ said Riderhood.

‘Well! I have, I have,’ Bradley admitted. ‘But,’ with another anxious
look up the river, ‘he may land.’

‘Easy you! He won’t be lost if he does land,’ said Riderhood. ‘He must
leave his boat behind him. He can’t make a bundle or a parcel on it, and
carry it ashore with him under his arm.’

‘He was speaking to you just now,’ said Bradley, kneeling on one knee on
the grass beside the Lock-keeper. ‘What did he say?’

‘Cheek,’ said Riderhood.

‘What?’

‘Cheek,’ repeated Riderhood, with an angry oath; ‘cheek is what he said.
He can’t say nothing but cheek. I’d ha’ liked to plump down aboard of
him, neck and crop, with a heavy jump, and sunk him.’

Bradley turned away his haggard face for a few moments, and then said,
tearing up a tuft of grass:

‘Damn him!’

‘Hooroar!’ cried Riderhood. ‘Does you credit! Hooroar! I cry chorus to
the T’otherest.’

‘What turn,’ said Bradley, with an effort at self-repression that forced
him to wipe his face, ‘did his insolence take to-day?’

‘It took the turn,’ answered Riderhood, with sullen ferocity, ‘of hoping
as I was getting ready to be hanged.’

‘Let him look to that,’ cried Bradley. ‘Let him look to that! It will
be bad for him when men he has injured, and at whom he has jeered, are
thinking of getting hanged. Let HIM get ready for HIS fate, when that
comes about. There was more meaning in what he said than he knew of, or
he wouldn’t have had brains enough to say it. Let him look to it; let
him look to it! When men he has wronged, and on whom he has bestowed
his insolence, are getting ready to be hanged, there is a death-bell
ringing. And not for them.’

Riderhood, looking fixedly at him, gradually arose from his recumbent
posture while the schoolmaster said these words with the utmost
concentration of rage and hatred. So, when the words were all spoken,
he too kneeled on one knee on the grass, and the two men looked at one
another.

‘Oh!’ said Riderhood, very deliberately spitting out the grass he had
been chewing. ‘Then, I make out, T’otherest, as he is a-going to her?’

‘He left London,’ answered Bradley, ‘yesterday. I have hardly a doubt,
this time, that at last he is going to her.’

‘You ain’t sure, then?’

‘I am as sure here,’ said Bradley, with a clutch at the breast of his
coarse shirt, ‘as if it was written there;’ with a blow or a stab at the
sky.

‘Ah! But judging from the looks on you,’ retorted Riderhood, completely
ridding himself of his grass, and drawing his sleeve across his mouth,
‘you’ve made ekally sure afore, and have got disapinted. It has told
upon you.’

‘Listen,’ said Bradley, in a low voice, bending forward to lay his hand
upon the Lock-keeper’s shoulder. ‘These are my holidays.’

‘Are they, by George!’ muttered Riderhood, with his eyes on the
passion-wasted face. ‘Your working days must be stiff ‘uns, if these is
your holidays.’

‘And I have never left him,’ pursued Bradley, waving the interruption
aside with an impatient hand, ‘since they began. And I never will leave
him now, till I have seen him with her.’

‘And when you have seen him with her?’ said Riderhood.

‘--I’ll come back to you.’

Riderhood stiffened the knee on which he had been resting, got up, and
looked gloomily at his new friend. After a few moments they walked side
by side in the direction the boat had taken, as if by tacit consent;
Bradley pressing forward, and Riderhood holding back; Bradley getting
out his neat prim purse into his hand (a present made him by penny
subscription among his pupils); and Riderhood, unfolding his arms to
smear his coat-cuff across his mouth with a thoughtful air.

‘I have a pound for you,’ said Bradley.

‘You’ve two,’ said Riderhood.

Bradley held a sovereign between his fingers. Slouching at his side with
his eyes upon the towing-path, Riderhood held his left hand open, with
a certain slight drawing action towards himself. Bradley dipped in his
purse for another sovereign, and two chinked in Riderhood’s hand, the
drawing action of which, promptly strengthening, drew them home to his
pocket.

‘Now, I must follow him,’ said Bradley Headstone. ‘He takes this
river-road--the fool!--to confuse observation, or divert attention, if
not solely to baffle me. But he must have the power of making himself
invisible before he can shake Me off.’

Riderhood stopped. ‘If you don’t get disapinted agin, T’otherest, maybe
you’ll put up at the Lock-house when you come back?’

‘I will.’

Riderhood nodded, and the figure of the bargeman went its way along the
soft turf by the side of the towing-path, keeping near the hedge and
moving quickly. They had turned a point from which a long stretch of
river was visible. A stranger to the scene might have been certain that
here and there along the line of hedge a figure stood, watching the
bargeman, and waiting for him to come up. So he himself had often
believed at first, until his eyes became used to the posts, bearing the
dagger that slew Wat Tyler, in the City of London shield.

Within Mr Riderhood’s knowledge all daggers were as one. Even to Bradley
Headstone, who could have told to the letter without book all about Wat
Tyler, Lord Mayor Walworth, and the King, that it is dutiful for youth
to know, there was but one subject living in the world for every sharp
destructive instrument that summer evening. So, Riderhood looking after
him as he went, and he with his furtive hand laid upon the dagger as he
passed it, and his eyes upon the boat, were much upon a par.

The boat went on, under the arching trees, and over their tranquil
shadows in the water. The bargeman skulking on the opposite bank of the
stream, went on after it. Sparkles of light showed Riderhood when
and where the rower dipped his blades, until, even as he stood idly
watching, the sun went down and the landscape was dyed red. And then the
red had the appearance of fading out of it and mounting up to Heaven, as
we say that blood, guiltily shed, does.

Turning back towards his Lock (he had not gone out of view of it), the
Rogue pondered as deeply as it was within the contracted power of such
a fellow to do. ‘Why did he copy my clothes? He could have looked like
what he wanted to look like, without that.’ This was the subject-matter
in his thoughts; in which, too, there came lumbering up, by times, like
any half floating and half sinking rubbish in the river, the question,
Was it done by accident? The setting of a trap for finding out whether
it was accidentally done, soon superseded, as a practical piece of
cunning, the abstruser inquiry why otherwise it was done. And he devised
a means.

Rogue Riderhood went into his Lock-house, and brought forth, into the
now sober grey light, his chest of clothes. Sitting on the grass beside
it, he turned out, one by one, the articles it contained, until he came
to a conspicuous bright red neckerchief stained black here and there by
wear. It arrested his attention, and he sat pausing over it, until he
took off the rusty colourless wisp that he wore round his throat, and
substituted the red neckerchief, leaving the long ends flowing. ‘Now,’
said the Rogue, ‘if arter he sees me in this neckhankecher, I see him in
a sim’lar neckhankecher, it won’t be accident!’ Elated by his device, he
carried his chest in again and went to supper.

‘Lock ho! Lock!’ It was a light night, and a barge coming down summoned
him out of a long doze. In due course he had let the barge through
and was alone again, looking to the closing of his gates, when Bradley
Headstone appeared before him, standing on the brink of the Lock.

‘Halloa!’ said Riderhood. ‘Back a’ ready, T’otherest?’

‘He has put up for the night, at an Angler’s Inn,’ was the fatigued and
hoarse reply. ‘He goes on, up the river, at six in the morning. I have
come back for a couple of hours’ rest.’

‘You want ‘em,’ said Riderhood, making towards the schoolmaster by his
plank bridge.

‘I don’t want them,’ returned Bradley, irritably, ‘because I would
rather not have them, but would much prefer to follow him all night.
However, if he won’t lead, I can’t follow. I have been waiting about,
until I could discover, for a certainty, at what time he starts; if I
couldn’t have made sure of it, I should have stayed there.--This would
be a bad pit for a man to be flung into with his hands tied. These
slippery smooth walls would give him no chance. And I suppose those
gates would suck him down?’

‘Suck him down, or swaller him up, he wouldn’t get out,’ said Riderhood.
‘Not even, if his hands warn’t tied, he wouldn’t. Shut him in at both
ends, and I’d give him a pint o’ old ale ever to come up to me standing
here.’

Bradley looked down with a ghastly relish. ‘You run about the brink, and
run across it, in this uncertain light, on a few inches width of rotten
wood,’ said he. ‘I wonder you have no thought of being drowned.’

‘I can’t be!’ said Riderhood.

‘You can’t be drowned?’

‘No!’ said Riderhood, shaking his head with an air of thorough
conviction, ‘it’s well known. I’ve been brought out o’ drowning, and I
can’t be drowned. I wouldn’t have that there busted B’lowbridger aware
on it, or her people might make it tell agin’ the damages I mean to get.
But it’s well known to water-side characters like myself, that him as
has been brought out o drowning, can never be drowned.’

Bradley smiled sourly at the ignorance he would have corrected in one of
his pupils, and continued to look down into the water, as if the place
had a gloomy fascination for him.

‘You seem to like it,’ said Riderhood.

He took no notice, but stood looking down, as if he had not heard the
words. There was a very dark expression on his face; an expression
that the Rogue found it hard to understand. It was fierce, and full
of purpose; but the purpose might have been as much against himself as
against another. If he had stepped back for a spring, taken a leap, and
thrown himself in, it would have been no surprising sequel to the look.
Perhaps his troubled soul, set upon some violence, did hover for the
moment between that violence and another.

‘Didn’t you say,’ asked Riderhood, after watching him for a while with
a sidelong glance, ‘as you had come back for a couple o’ hours’ rest?’
But, even then he had to jog him with his elbow before he answered.

‘Eh? Yes.’

‘Hadn’t you better come in and take your couple o’ hours’ rest?’

‘Thank you. Yes.’

With the look of one just awakened, he followed Riderhood into the
Lock-house, where the latter produced from a cupboard some cold salt
beef and half a loaf, some gin in a bottle, and some water in a jug. The
last he brought in, cool and dripping, from the river.

‘There, T’otherest,’ said Riderhood, stooping over him to put it on
the table. ‘You’d better take a bite and a sup, afore you takes
your snooze.’ The draggling ends of the red neckerchief caught the
schoolmaster’s eyes. Riderhood saw him look at it.

‘Oh!’ thought that worthy. ‘You’re a-taking notice, are you? Come! You
shall have a good squint at it then.’ With which reflection he sat down
on the other side of the table, threw open his vest, and made a pretence
of re-tying the neckerchief with much deliberation.

Bradley ate and drank. As he sat at his platter and mug, Riderhood saw
him, again and yet again, steal a look at the neckerchief, as if he were
correcting his slow observation and prompting his sluggish memory.
‘When you’re ready for your snooze,’ said that honest creature, ‘chuck
yourself on my bed in the corner, T’otherest. It’ll be broad day afore
three. I’ll call you early.’

‘I shall require no calling,’ answered Bradley. And soon afterwards,
divesting himself only of his shoes and coat, laid himself down.

Riderhood, leaning back in his wooden arm-chair with his arms folded
on his breast, looked at him lying with his right hand clenched in his
sleep and his teeth set, until a film came over his own sight, and he
slept too. He awoke to find that it was daylight, and that his
visitor was already astir, and going out to the river-side to cool his
head:--‘Though I’m blest,’ muttered Riderhood at the Lock-house door,
looking after him, ‘if I think there’s water enough in all the Thames
to do THAT for you!’ Within five minutes he had taken his departure,
and was passing on into the calm distance as he had passed yesterday.
Riderhood knew when a fish leaped, by his starting and glancing round.

‘Lock ho! Lock!’ at intervals all day, and ‘Lock ho! Lock!’ thrice in
the ensuing night, but no return of Bradley. The second day was sultry
and oppressive. In the afternoon, a thunderstorm came up, and had but
newly broken into a furious sweep of rain when he rushed in at the door,
like the storm itself.

‘You’ve seen him with her!’ exclaimed Riderhood, starting up.

‘I have.’

‘Where?’

‘At his journey’s end. His boat’s hauled up for three days. I heard
him give the order. Then, I saw him wait for her and meet her. I saw
them’--he stopped as though he were suffocating, and began again--‘I saw
them walking side by side, last night.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What are you going to do?’

He dropped into a chair, and laughed. Immediately afterwards, a great
spirt of blood burst from his nose.

‘How does that happen?’ asked Riderhood.

‘I don’t know. I can’t keep it back. It has happened twice--three
times--four times--I don’t know how many times--since last night. I
taste it, smell it, see it, it chokes me, and then it breaks out like
this.’

He went into the pelting rain again with his head bare, and, bending low
over the river, and scooping up the water with his two hands, washed the
blood away. All beyond his figure, as Riderhood looked from the door,
was a vast dark curtain in solemn movement towards one quarter of the
heavens. He raised his head and came back, wet from head to foot, but
with the lower parts of his sleeves, where he had dipped into the river,
streaming water.

‘Your face is like a ghost’s,’ said Riderhood.

‘Did you ever see a ghost?’ was the sullen retort.

‘I mean to say, you’re quite wore out.’

‘That may well be. I have had no rest since I left here. I don’t
remember that I have so much as sat down since I left here.’

‘Lie down now, then,’ said Riderhood.

‘I will, if you’ll give me something to quench my thirst first.’

The bottle and jug were again produced, and he mixed a weak draught, and
another, and drank both in quick succession. ‘You asked me something,’
he said then.

‘No, I didn’t,’ replied Riderhood.

‘I tell you,’ retorted Bradley, turning upon him in a wild and desperate
manner, ‘you asked me something, before I went out to wash my face in
the river.

‘Oh! Then?’ said Riderhood, backing a little. ‘I asked you wot you wos
a-going to do.’

‘How can a man in this state know?’ he answered, protesting with both
his tremulous hands, with an action so vigorously angry that he shook
the water from his sleeves upon the floor, as if he had wrung them. ‘How
can I plan anything, if I haven’t sleep?’

‘Why, that’s what I as good as said,’ returned the other. ‘Didn’t I say
lie down?’

‘Well, perhaps you did.’

‘Well! Anyways I says it again. Sleep where you slept last; the sounder
and longer you can sleep, the better you’ll know arterwards what you’re
up to.’

His pointing to the truckle bed in the corner, seemed gradually to bring
that poor couch to Bradley’s wandering remembrance. He slipped off his
worn down-trodden shoes, and cast himself heavily, all wet as he was,
upon the bed.

Riderhood sat down in his wooden arm-chair, and looked through the
window at the lightning, and listened to the thunder. But, his thoughts
were far from being absorbed by the thunder and the lightning, for again
and again and again he looked very curiously at the exhausted man upon
the bed. The man had turned up the collar of the rough coat he wore,
to shelter himself from the storm, and had buttoned it about his neck.
Unconscious of that, and of most things, he had left the coat so, both
when he had laved his face in the river, and when he had cast himself
upon the bed; though it would have been much easier to him if he had
unloosened it.

The thunder rolled heavily, and the forked lightning seemed to make
jagged rents in every part of the vast curtain without, as Riderhood sat
by the window, glancing at the bed. Sometimes, he saw the man upon the
bed, by a red light; sometimes, by a blue; sometimes, he scarcely saw
him in the darkness of the storm; sometimes he saw nothing of him in
the blinding glare of palpitating white fire. Anon, the rain would come
again with a tremendous rush, and the river would seem to rise to meet
it, and a blast of wind, bursting upon the door, would flutter the hair
and dress of the man, as if invisible messengers were come around the
bed to carry him away. From all these phases of the storm, Riderhood
would turn, as if they were interruptions--rather striking interruptions
possibly, but interruptions still--of his scrutiny of the sleeper.

‘He sleeps sound,’ he said within himself; ‘yet he’s that up to me and
that noticing of me that my getting out of my chair may wake him, when a
rattling peal won’t; let alone my touching of him.’

He very cautiously rose to his feet. ‘T’otherest,’ he said, in a low,
calm voice, ‘are you a lying easy? There’s a chill in the air, governor.
Shall I put a coat over you?’

No answer.

‘That’s about what it is a’ready, you see,’ muttered Riderhood in a
lower and a different voice; ‘a coat over you, a coat over you!’

The sleeper moving an arm, he sat down again in his chair, and feigned
to watch the storm from the window. It was a grand spectacle, but not so
grand as to keep his eyes, for half a minute together, from stealing a
look at the man upon the bed.

It was at the concealed throat of the sleeper that Riderhood so often
looked so curiously, until the sleep seemed to deepen into the stupor
of the dead-tired in mind and body. Then, Riderhood came from the window
cautiously, and stood by the bed.

‘Poor man!’ he murmured in a low tone, with a crafty face, and a very
watchful eye and ready foot, lest he should start up; ‘this here coat
of his must make him uneasy in his sleep. Shall I loosen it for him,
and make him more comfortable? Ah! I think I ought to do it, poor man. I
think I will.’

He touched the first button with a very cautious hand, and a step
backward. But, the sleeper remaining in profound unconsciousness, he
touched the other buttons with a more assured hand, and perhaps the more
lightly on that account. Softly and slowly, he opened the coat and drew
it back.

The draggling ends of a bright-red neckerchief were then disclosed, and
he had even been at the pains of dipping parts of it in some liquid,
to give it the appearance of having become stained by wear. With a
much-perplexed face, Riderhood looked from it to the sleeper, and from
the sleeper to it, and finally crept back to his chair, and there, with
his hand to his chin, sat long in a brown study, looking at both.



Chapter 2

THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN RISES A LITTLE


Mr and Mrs Lammle had come to breakfast with Mr and Mrs Boffin. They
were not absolutely uninvited, but had pressed themselves with so much
urgency on the golden couple, that evasion of the honour and pleasure
of their company would have been difficult, if desired. They were in a
charming state of mind, were Mr and Mrs Lammle, and almost as fond of Mr
and Mrs Boffin as of one another.

‘My dear Mrs Boffin,’ said Mrs Lammle, ‘it imparts new life to me, to
see my Alfred in confidential communication with Mr Boffin. The two
were formed to become intimate. So much simplicity combined with so much
force of character, such natural sagacity united to such amiability and
gentleness--these are the distinguishing characteristics of both.’

This being said aloud, gave Mr Lammle an opportunity, as he came with Mr
Boffin from the window to the breakfast table, of taking up his dear and
honoured wife.

‘My Sophronia,’ said that gentleman, ‘your too partial estimate of your
husband’s character--’

‘No! Not too partial, Alfred,’ urged the lady, tenderly moved; ‘never
say that.’

‘My child, your favourable opinion, then, of your husband--you don’t
object to that phrase, darling?’

‘How can I, Alfred?’

‘Your favourable opinion then, my Precious, does less than justice to Mr
Boffin, and more than justice to me.’

‘To the first charge, Alfred, I plead guilty. But to the second, oh no,
no!’

‘Less than justice to Mr Boffin, Sophronia,’ said Mr Lammle, soaring
into a tone of moral grandeur, ‘because it represents Mr Boffin as on my
lower level; more than justice to me, Sophronia, because it represents
me as on Mr Boffin’s higher level. Mr Boffin bears and forbears far more
than I could.’

‘Far more than you could for yourself, Alfred?’

‘My love, that is not the question.’

‘Not the question, Lawyer?’ said Mrs Lammle, archly.

‘No, dear Sophronia. From my lower level, I regard Mr Boffin as too
generous, as possessed of too much clemency, as being too good to
persons who are unworthy of him and ungrateful to him. To those noble
qualities I can lay no claim. On the contrary, they rouse my indignation
when I see them in action.’

‘Alfred!’

‘They rouse my indignation, my dear, against the unworthy persons,
and give me a combative desire to stand between Mr Boffin and all such
persons. Why? Because, in my lower nature I am more worldly and less
delicate. Not being so magnanimous as Mr Boffin, I feel his injuries
more than he does himself, and feel more capable of opposing his
injurers.’

It struck Mrs Lammle that it appeared rather difficult this morning
to bring Mr and Mrs Boffin into agreeable conversation. Here had been
several lures thrown out, and neither of them had uttered a word. Here
were she, Mrs Lammle, and her husband discoursing at once affectingly
and effectively, but discoursing alone. Assuming that the dear old
creatures were impressed by what they heard, still one would like to be
sure of it, the more so, as at least one of the dear old creatures
was somewhat pointedly referred to. If the dear old creatures were too
bashful or too dull to assume their required places in the discussion,
why then it would seem desirable that the dear old creatures should be
taken by their heads and shoulders and brought into it.

‘But is not my husband saying in effect,’ asked Mrs Lammle, therefore,
with an innocent air, of Mr and Mrs Boffin, ‘that he becomes unmindful
of his own temporary misfortunes in his admiration of another whom he is
burning to serve? And is not that making an admission that his nature is
a generous one? I am wretched in argument, but surely this is so, dear
Mr and Mrs Boffin?’

Still, neither Mr and Mrs Boffin said a word. He sat with his eyes on
his plate, eating his muffins and ham, and she sat shyly looking at the
teapot. Mrs Lammle’s innocent appeal was merely thrown into the air, to
mingle with the steam of the urn. Glancing towards Mr and Mrs Boffin,
she very slightly raised her eyebrows, as though inquiring of her
husband: ‘Do I notice anything wrong here?’

Mr Lammle, who had found his chest effective on a variety of occasions,
manoeuvred his capacious shirt front into the largest demonstration
possible, and then smiling retorted on his wife, thus:

‘Sophronia, darling, Mr and Mrs Boffin will remind you of the old adage,
that self-praise is no recommendation.’

‘Self-praise, Alfred? Do you mean because we are one and the same?’

‘No, my dear child. I mean that you cannot fail to remember, if you
reflect for a single moment, that what you are pleased to compliment me
upon feeling in the case of Mr Boffin, you have yourself confided to me
as your own feeling in the case of Mrs Boffin.’

[‘I shall be beaten by this Lawyer,’ Mrs Lammle gaily whispered to
Mrs Boffin. ‘I am afraid I must admit it, if he presses me, for it’s
damagingly true.’)

Several white dints began to come and go about Mr Lammle’s nose, as he
observed that Mrs Boffin merely looked up from the teapot for a moment
with an embarrassed smile, which was no smile, and then looked down
again.

‘Do you admit the charge, Sophronia?’ inquired Alfred, in a rallying
tone.

‘Really, I think,’ said Mrs Lammle, still gaily, ‘I must throw myself
on the protection of the Court. Am I bound to answer that question, my
Lord?’ To Mr Boffin.

‘You needn’t, if you don’t like, ma’am,’ was his answer. ‘It’s not of
the least consequence.’

Both husband and wife glanced at him, very doubtfully. His manner was
grave, but not coarse, and derived some dignity from a certain repressed
dislike of the tone of the conversation.

Again Mrs Lammle raised her eyebrows for instruction from her husband.
He replied in a slight nod, ‘Try ‘em again.’

‘To protect myself against the suspicion of covert self-laudation, my
dear Mrs Boffin,’ said the airy Mrs Lammle therefore, ‘I must tell you
how it was.’

‘No. Pray don’t,’ Mr Boffin interposed.

Mrs Lammle turned to him laughingly. ‘The Court objects?’

‘Ma’am,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘the Court (if I am the Court) does object. The
Court objects for two reasons. First, because the Court don’t think it
fair. Secondly, because the dear old lady, Mrs Court (if I am Mr) gets
distressed by it.’

A very remarkable wavering between two bearings--between her
propitiatory bearing there, and her defiant bearing at Mr Twemlow’s--was
observable on the part of Mrs Lammle as she said:

‘What does the Court not consider fair?’

‘Letting you go on,’ replied Mr Boffin, nodding his head soothingly, as
who should say, We won’t be harder on you than we can help; we’ll make
the best of it. ‘It’s not above-board and it’s not fair. When the old
lady is uncomfortable, there’s sure to be good reason for it. I see she
is uncomfortable, and I plainly see this is the good reason wherefore.
HAVE you breakfasted, ma’am.’

Mrs Lammle, settling into her defiant manner, pushed her plate away,
looked at her husband, and laughed; but by no means gaily.

‘Have YOU breakfasted, sir?’ inquired Mr Boffin.

‘Thank you,’ replied Alfred, showing all his teeth. ‘If Mrs Boffin will
oblige me, I’ll take another cup of tea.’

He spilled a little of it over the chest which ought to have been so
effective, and which had done so little; but on the whole drank it with
something of an air, though the coming and going dints got almost as
large, the while, as if they had been made by pressure of the teaspoon.
‘A thousand thanks,’ he then observed. ‘I have breakfasted.’

‘Now, which,’ said Mr Boffin softly, taking out a pocket-book, ‘which of
you two is Cashier?’

‘Sophronia, my dear,’ remarked her husband, as he leaned back in his
chair, waving his right hand towards her, while he hung his left hand
by the thumb in the arm-hole of his waistcoat: ‘it shall be your
department.’

‘I would rather,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘that it was your husband’s, ma’am,
because--but never mind, because, I would rather have to do with him.
However, what I have to say, I will say with as little offence as
possible; if I can say it without any, I shall be heartily glad. You two
have done me a service, a very great service, in doing what you did (my
old lady knows what it was), and I have put into this envelope a bank
note for a hundred pound. I consider the service well worth a hundred
pound, and I am well pleased to pay the money. Would you do me the
favour to take it, and likewise to accept my thanks?’

With a haughty action, and without looking towards him, Mrs Lammle held
out her left hand, and into it Mr Boffin put the little packet. When she
had conveyed it to her bosom, Mr Lammle had the appearance of feeling
relieved, and breathing more freely, as not having been quite certain
that the hundred pounds were his, until the note had been safely
transferred out of Mr Boffin’s keeping into his own Sophronia’s.

‘It is not impossible,’ said Mr Boffin, addressing Alfred, ‘that you
have had some general idea, sir, of replacing Rokesmith, in course of
time?’

‘It is not,’ assented Alfred, with a glittering smile and a great deal
of nose, ‘not impossible.’

‘And perhaps, ma’am,’ pursued Mr Boffin, addressing Sophronia, ‘you have
been so kind as to take up my old lady in your own mind, and to do her
the honour of turning the question over whether you mightn’t one of
these days have her in charge, like? Whether you mightn’t be a sort of
Miss Bella Wilfer to her, and something more?’

‘I should hope,’ returned Mrs Lammle, with a scornful look and in a loud
voice, ‘that if I were anything to your wife, sir, I could hardly fail
to be something more than Miss Bella Wilfer, as you call her.’

‘What do YOU call her, ma’am?’ asked Mr Boffin.

Mrs Lammle disdained to reply, and sat defiantly beating one foot on the
ground.

‘Again I think I may say, that’s not impossible. Is it, sir?’ asked Mr
Boffin, turning to Alfred.

‘It is not,’ said Alfred, smiling assent as before, ‘not impossible.’

‘Now,’ said Mr Boffin, gently, ‘it won’t do. I don’t wish to say a
single word that might be afterwards remembered as unpleasant; but it
won’t do.’

‘Sophronia, my love,’ her husband repeated in a bantering manner, ‘you
hear? It won’t do.’

‘No,’ said Mr Boffin, with his voice still dropped, ‘it really won’t.
You positively must excuse us. If you’ll go your way, we’ll go ours, and
so I hope this affair ends to the satisfaction of all parties.’

Mrs Lammle gave him the look of a decidedly dissatisfied party demanding
exemption from the category; but said nothing.

‘The best thing we can make of the affair,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘is a matter
of business, and as a matter of business it’s brought to a conclusion.
You have done me a great service, a very great service, and I have paid
for it. Is there any objection to the price?’

Mr and Mrs Lammle looked at one another across the table, but neither
could say that there was. Mr Lammle shrugged his shoulders, and Mrs
Lammle sat rigid.

‘Very good,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘We hope (my old lady and me) that you’ll
give us credit for taking the plainest and honestest short-cut that
could be taken under the circumstances. We have talked it over with a
deal of care (my old lady and me), and we have felt that at all to lead
you on, or even at all to let you go on of your own selves, wouldn’t be
the right thing. So, I have openly given you to understand that--’
Mr Boffin sought for a new turn of speech, but could find none so
expressive as his former one, repeated in a confidential tone, ‘--that
it won’t do. If I could have put the case more pleasantly I would; but
I hope I haven’t put it very unpleasantly; at all events I haven’t meant
to. So,’ said Mr Boffin, by way of peroration, ‘wishing you well in the
way you go, we now conclude with the observation that perhaps you’ll go
it.’

Mr Lammle rose with an impudent laugh on his side of the table, and Mrs
Lammle rose with a disdainful frown on hers. At this moment a hasty foot
was heard on the staircase, and Georgiana Podsnap broke into the room,
unannounced and in tears.

‘Oh, my dear Sophronia,’ cried Georgiana, wringing her hands as she ran
up to embrace her, ‘to think that you and Alfred should be ruined! Oh,
my poor dear Sophronia, to think that you should have had a Sale at your
house after all your kindness to me! Oh, Mr and Mrs Boffin, pray forgive
me for this intrusion, but you don’t know how fond I was of Sophronia
when Pa wouldn’t let me go there any more, or what I have felt for
Sophronia since I heard from Ma of her having been brought low in the
world. You don’t, you can’t, you never can, think, how I have lain awake
at night and cried for my good Sophronia, my first and only friend!’

Mrs Lammle’s manner changed under the poor silly girl’s embraces, and
she turned extremely pale: directing one appealing look, first to Mrs
Boffin, and then to Mr Boffin. Both understood her instantly, with
a more delicate subtlety than much better educated people, whose
perception came less directly from the heart, could have brought to bear
upon the case.

‘I haven’t a minute,’ said poor little Georgiana, ‘to stay. I am out
shopping early with Ma, and I said I had a headache and got Ma to leave
me outside in the phaeton, in Piccadilly, and ran round to Sackville
Street, and heard that Sophronia was here, and then Ma came to see, oh
such a dreadful old stony woman from the country in a turban in Portland
Place, and I said I wouldn’t go up with Ma but would drive round and
leave cards for the Boffins, which is taking a liberty with the name;
but oh my goodness I am distracted, and the phaeton’s at the door, and
what would Pa say if he knew it!’

‘Don’t ye be timid, my dear,’ said Mrs Boffin. ‘You came in to see us.’

‘Oh, no, I didn’t,’ cried Georgiana. ‘It’s very impolite, I know, but
I came to see my poor Sophronia, my only friend. Oh! how I felt the
separation, my dear Sophronia, before I knew you were brought low in the
world, and how much more I feel it now!’

There were actually tears in the bold woman’s eyes, as the soft-headed
and soft-hearted girl twined her arms about her neck.

‘But I’ve come on business,’ said Georgiana, sobbing and drying her
face, and then searching in a little reticule, ‘and if I don’t despatch
it I shall have come for nothing, and oh good gracious! what would Pa
say if he knew of Sackville Street, and what would Ma say if she was
kept waiting on the doorsteps of that dreadful turban, and there never
were such pawing horses as ours unsettling my mind every moment more
and more when I want more mind than I have got, by pawing up Mr Boffin’s
street where they have no business to be. Oh! where is, where is it?
Oh! I can’t find it!’ All this time sobbing, and searching in the little
reticule.

‘What do you miss, my dear?’ asked Mr Boffin, stepping forward.

‘Oh! it’s little enough,’ replied Georgiana, ‘because Ma always treats
me as if I was in the nursery (I am sure I wish I was!), but I hardly
ever spend it and it has mounted up to fifteen pounds, Sophronia, and I
hope three five-pound notes are better than nothing, though so little,
so little! And now I have found that--oh, my goodness! there’s the other
gone next! Oh no, it isn’t, here it is!’

With that, always sobbing and searching in the reticule, Georgiana
produced a necklace.

‘Ma says chits and jewels have no business together,’ pursued Georgiana,
‘and that’s the reason why I have no trinkets except this, but I suppose
my aunt Hawkinson was of a different opinion, because she left me this,
though I used to think she might just as well have buried it, for it’s
always kept in jewellers’ cotton. However, here it is, I am thankful
to say, and of use at last, and you’ll sell it, dear Sophronia, and buy
things with it.’

‘Give it to me,’ said Mr Boffin, gently taking it. ‘I’ll see that it’s
properly disposed of.’

‘Oh! are you such a friend of Sophronia’s, Mr Boffin?’ cried Georgiana.
‘Oh, how good of you! Oh, my gracious! there was something else, and
it’s gone out of my head! Oh no, it isn’t, I remember what it was. My
grandmamma’s property, that’ll come to me when I am of age, Mr Boffin,
will be all my own, and neither Pa nor Ma nor anybody else will have
any control over it, and what I wish to do it so make some of it over
somehow to Sophronia and Alfred, by signing something somewhere that’ll
prevail on somebody to advance them something. I want them to have
something handsome to bring them up in the world again. Oh, my goodness
me! Being such a friend of my dear Sophronia’s, you won’t refuse me,
will you?’

‘No, no,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘it shall be seen to.’

‘Oh, thank you, thank you!’ cried Georgiana. ‘If my maid had a little
note and half a crown, I could run round to the pastrycook’s to sign
something, or I could sign something in the Square if somebody would
come and cough for me to let ‘em in with the key, and would bring a pen
and ink with ‘em and a bit of blotting-paper. Oh, my gracious! I must
tear myself away, or Pa and Ma will both find out! Dear, dear Sophronia,
good, good-bye!’

The credulous little creature again embraced Mrs Lammle most
affectionately, and then held out her hand to Mr Lammle.

‘Good-bye, dear Mr Lammle--I mean Alfred. You won’t think after to-day
that I have deserted you and Sophronia because you have been brought low
in the world, will you? Oh me! oh me! I have been crying my eyes out of
my head, and Ma will be sure to ask me what’s the matter. Oh, take me
down, somebody, please, please, please!’

Mr Boffin took her down, and saw her driven away, with her poor
little red eyes and weak chin peering over the great apron of the
custard-coloured phaeton, as if she had been ordered to expiate some
childish misdemeanour by going to bed in the daylight, and were peeping
over the counterpane in a miserable flutter of repentance and low
spirits. Returning to the breakfast-room, he found Mrs Lammle still
standing on her side of the table, and Mr Lammle on his.

‘I’ll take care,’ said Mr Boffin, showing the money and the necklace,
‘that these are soon given back.’

Mrs Lammle had taken up her parasol from a side table, and stood
sketching with it on the pattern of the damask cloth, as she had
sketched on the pattern of Mr Twemlow’s papered wall.

‘You will not undeceive her I hope, Mr Boffin?’ she said, turning her
head towards him, but not her eyes.

‘No,’ said Mr Boffin.

‘I mean, as to the worth and value of her friend,’ Mrs Lammle explained,
in a measured voice, and with an emphasis on her last word.

‘No,’ he returned. ‘I may try to give a hint at her home that she is in
want of kind and careful protection, but I shall say no more than that
to her parents, and I shall say nothing to the young lady herself.’

‘Mr and Mrs Boffin,’ said Mrs Lammle, still sketching, and seeming to
bestow great pains upon it, ‘there are not many people, I think, who,
under the circumstances, would have been so considerate and sparing as
you have been to me just now. Do you care to be thanked?’

‘Thanks are always worth having,’ said Mrs Boffin, in her ready good
nature.

‘Then thank you both.’

‘Sophronia,’ asked her husband, mockingly, ‘are you sentimental?’

‘Well, well, my good sir,’ Mr Boffin interposed, ‘it’s a very good
thing to think well of another person, and it’s a very good thing to be
thought well of BY another person. Mrs Lammle will be none the worse for
it, if she is.’

‘Much obliged. But I asked Mrs Lammle if she was.’

She stood sketching on the table-cloth, with her face clouded and set,
and was silent.

‘Because,’ said Alfred, ‘I am disposed to be sentimental myself, on
your appropriation of the jewels and the money, Mr Boffin. As our little
Georgiana said, three five-pound notes are better than nothing, and if
you sell a necklace you can buy things with the produce.’

‘IF you sell it,’ was Mr Boffin’s comment, as he put it in his pocket.

Alfred followed it with his looks, and also greedily pursued the notes
until they vanished into Mr Boffin’s waistcoat pocket. Then he directed
a look, half exasperated and half jeering, at his wife. She still stood
sketching; but, as she sketched, there was a struggle within her, which
found expression in the depth of the few last lines the parasol point
indented into the table-cloth, and then some tears fell from her eyes.

‘Why, confound the woman,’ exclaimed Lammle, ‘she IS sentimental!

She walked to the window, flinching under his angry stare, looked out
for a moment, and turned round quite coldly.

‘You have had no former cause of complaint on the sentimental score,
Alfred, and you will have none in future. It is not worth your noticing.
We go abroad soon, with the money we have earned here?’

‘You know we do; you know we must.’

‘There is no fear of my taking any sentiment with me. I should soon be
eased of it, if I did. But it will be all left behind. It IS all left
behind. Are you ready, Alfred?’

‘What the deuce have I been waiting for but you, Sophronia?’

‘Let us go then. I am sorry I have delayed our dignified departure.’

She passed out and he followed her. Mr and Mrs Boffin had the curiosity
softly to raise a window and look after them as they went down the long
street. They walked arm-in-arm, showily enough, but without appearing
to interchange a syllable. It might have been fanciful to suppose that
under their outer bearing there was something of the shamed air of two
cheats who were linked together by concealed handcuffs; but, not so, to
suppose that they were haggardly weary of one another, of themselves,
and of all this world. In turning the street corner they might have
turned out of this world, for anything Mr and Mrs Boffin ever saw of
them to the contrary; for, they set eyes on the Lammles never more.



Chapter 3

THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN SINKS AGAIN


The evening of that day being one of the reading evenings at the Bower,
Mr Boffin kissed Mrs Boffin after a five o’clock dinner, and trotted
out, nursing his big stick in both arms, so that, as of old, it seemed
to be whispering in his ear. He carried so very attentive an expression
on his countenance that it appeared as if the confidential discourse of
the big stick required to be followed closely. Mr Boffin’s face was like
the face of a thoughtful listener to an intricate communication, and, in
trotting along, he occasionally glanced at that companion with the look
of a man who was interposing the remark: ‘You don’t mean it!’

Mr Boffin and his stick went on alone together, until they arrived at
certain cross-ways where they would be likely to fall in with any one
coming, at about the same time, from Clerkenwell to the Bower. Here they
stopped, and Mr Boffin consulted his watch.

‘It wants five minutes, good, to Venus’s appointment,’ said he. ‘I’m
rather early.’

But Venus was a punctual man, and, even as Mr Boffin replaced his watch
in its pocket, was to be descried coming towards him. He quickened his
pace on seeing Mr Boffin already at the place of meeting, and was soon
at his side.

‘Thank’ee, Venus,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Thank’ee, thank’ee, thank’ee!’

It would not have been very evident why he thanked the anatomist, but
for his furnishing the explanation in what he went on to say.

‘All right, Venus, all right. Now, that you’ve been to see me, and have
consented to keep up the appearance before Wegg of remaining in it for a
time, I have got a sort of a backer. All right, Venus. Thank’ee, Venus.
Thank’ee, thank’ee, thank’ee!’

Mr Venus shook the proffered hand with a modest air, and they pursued
the direction of the Bower.

‘Do you think Wegg is likely to drop down upon me to-night, Venus?’
inquired Mr Boffin, wistfully, as they went along.

‘I think he is, sir.’

‘Have you any particular reason for thinking so, Venus?’

‘Well, sir,’ returned that personage, ‘the fact is, he has given me
another look-in, to make sure of what he calls our stock-in-trade being
correct, and he has mentioned his intention that he was not to be put
off beginning with you the very next time you should come. And this,’
hinted Mr Venus, delicately, ‘being the very next time, you know, sir--’

--‘Why, therefore you suppose he’ll turn to at the grindstone, eh,
Wegg?’ said Mr Boffin.

‘Just so, sir.’

Mr Boffin took his nose in his hand, as if it were already excoriated,
and the sparks were beginning to fly out of that feature. ‘He’s a
terrible fellow, Venus; he’s an awful fellow. I don’t know how ever I
shall go through with it. You must stand by me, Venus like a good man
and true. You’ll do all you can to stand by me, Venus; won’t you?’

Mr Venus replied with the assurance that he would; and Mr Boffin,
looking anxious and dispirited, pursued the way in silence until they
rang at the Bower gate. The stumping approach of Wegg was soon heard
behind it, and as it turned upon its hinges he became visible with his
hand on the lock.

‘Mr Boffin, sir?’ he remarked. ‘You’re quite a stranger!’

‘Yes. I’ve been otherwise occupied, Wegg.’

‘Have you indeed, sir?’ returned the literary gentleman, with a
threatening sneer. ‘Hah! I’ve been looking for you, sir, rather what I
may call specially.’

‘You don’t say so, Wegg?’

‘Yes, I do say so, sir. And if you hadn’t come round to me tonight, dash
my wig if I wouldn’t have come round to you tomorrow. Now! I tell you!’

‘Nothing wrong, I hope, Wegg?’

‘Oh no, Mr Boffin,’ was the ironical answer. ‘Nothing wrong! What should
be wrong in Boffinses Bower! Step in, sir.’

     ‘“If you’ll come to the Bower I’ve shaded for you,
     Your bed shan’t be roses all spangled with doo:
     Will you, will you, will you, will you, come to the Bower?
     Oh, won’t you, won’t you, won’t you, won’t you, come to the
          Bower?”’

An unholy glare of contradiction and offence shone in the eyes of Mr
Wegg, as he turned the key on his patron, after ushering him into the
yard with this vocal quotation. Mr Boffin’s air was crestfallen and
submissive. Whispered Wegg to Venus, as they crossed the yard behind
him: ‘Look at the worm and minion; he’s down in the mouth already.’
Whispered Venus to Wegg: ‘That’s because I’ve told him. I’ve prepared
the way for you.’

Mr Boffin, entering the usual chamber, laid his stick upon the settle
usually reserved for him, thrust his hands into his pockets, and,
with his shoulders raised and his hat drooping back upon them, looking
disconsolately at Wegg. ‘My friend and partner, Mr Venus, gives me to
understand,’ remarked that man of might, addressing him, ‘that you are
aware of our power over you. Now, when you have took your hat off, we’ll
go into that pint.’

Mr Boffin shook it off with one shake, so that it dropped on the floor
behind him, and remained in his former attitude with his former rueful
look upon him.

‘First of all, I’m a-going to call you Boffin, for short,’ said Wegg.
‘If you don’t like it, it’s open to you to lump it.’

‘I don’t mind it, Wegg,’ Mr Boffin replied.

‘That’s lucky for you, Boffin. Now, do you want to be read to?’

‘I don’t particularly care about it to-night, Wegg.’

‘Because if you did want to,’ pursued Mr Wegg, the brilliancy of whose
point was dimmed by his having been unexpectedly answered: ‘you wouldn’t
be. I’ve been your slave long enough. I’m not to be trampled under-foot
by a dustman any more. With the single exception of the salary, I
renounce the whole and total sitiwation.’

‘Since you say it is to be so, Wegg,’ returned Mr Boffin, with folded
hands, ‘I suppose it must be.’

‘I suppose it must be,’ Wegg retorted. ‘Next (to clear the ground before
coming to business), you’ve placed in this yard a skulking, a sneaking,
and a sniffing, menial.’

‘He hadn’t a cold in his head when I sent him here,’ said Mr Boffin.

‘Boffin!’ retorted Wegg, ‘I warn you not to attempt a joke with me!’

Here Mr Venus interposed, and remarked that he conceived Mr Boffin to
have taken the description literally; the rather, forasmuch as he, Mr
Venus, had himself supposed the menial to have contracted an affliction
or a habit of the nose, involving a serious drawback on the pleasures of
social intercourse, until he had discovered that Mr Wegg’s description
of him was to be accepted as merely figurative.

‘Anyhow, and every how,’ said Wegg, ‘he has been planted here, and he
is here. Now, I won’t have him here. So I call upon Boffin, before I say
another word, to fetch him in and send him packing to the right-about.’

The unsuspecting Sloppy was at that moment airing his many buttons
within view of the window. Mr Boffin, after a short interval of
impassive discomfiture, opened the window and beckoned him to come in.

‘I call upon Boffin,’ said Wegg, with one arm a-kimbo and his head on
one side, like a bullying counsel pausing for an answer from a witness,
‘to inform that menial that I am Master here!’

In humble obedience, when the button-gleaming Sloppy entered Mr Boffin
said to him: ‘Sloppy, my fine fellow, Mr Wegg is Master here. He doesn’t
want you, and you are to go from here.’

‘For good!’ Mr Wegg severely stipulated.

‘For good,’ said Mr Boffin.

Sloppy stared, with both his eyes and all his buttons, and his mouth
wide open; but was without loss of time escorted forth by Silas Wegg,
pushed out at the yard gate by the shoulders, and locked out.

‘The atomspear,’ said Wegg, stumping back into the room again, a
little reddened by his late exertion, ‘is now freer for the purposes of
respiration. Mr Venus, sir, take a chair. Boffin, you may sit down.’

Mr Boffin, still with his hands ruefully stuck in his pockets, sat on
the edge of the settle, shrunk into a small compass, and eyed the potent
Silas with conciliatory looks.

‘This gentleman,’ said Silas Wegg, pointing out Venus, ‘this gentleman,
Boffin, is more milk and watery with you than I’ll be. But he hasn’t
borne the Roman yoke as I have, nor yet he hasn’t been required to
pander to your depraved appetite for miserly characters.’

‘I never meant, my dear Wegg--’ Mr Boffin was beginning, when Silas
stopped him.

‘Hold your tongue, Boffin! Answer when you’re called upon to answer.
You’ll find you’ve got quite enough to do. Now, you’re aware--are
you--that you’re in possession of property to which you’ve no right at
all? Are you aware of that?’

‘Venus tells me so,’ said Mr Boffin, glancing towards him for any
support he could give.

‘I tell you so,’ returned Silas. ‘Now, here’s my hat, Boffin, and here’s
my walking-stick. Trifle with me, and instead of making a bargain with
you, I’ll put on my hat and take up my walking-stick, and go out, and
make a bargain with the rightful owner. Now, what do you say?’

‘I say,’ returned Mr Boffin, leaning forward in alarmed appeal, with his
hands on his knees, ‘that I am sure I don’t want to trifle. Wegg. I have
said so to Venus.’

‘You certainly have, sir,’ said Venus.

‘You’re too milk and watery with our friend, you are indeed,’
remonstrated Silas, with a disapproving shake of his wooden head. ‘Then
at once you confess yourself desirous to come to terms, do you Boffin?
Before you answer, keep this hat well in your mind and also this
walking-stick.’

‘I am willing, Wegg, to come to terms.’

‘Willing won’t do, Boffin. I won’t take willing. Are you desirous to
come to terms? Do you ask to be allowed as a favour to come to terms?’
Mr Wegg again planted his arm, and put his head on one side.

‘Yes.’

‘Yes what?’ said the inexorable Wegg: ‘I won’t take yes. I’ll have it
out of you in full, Boffin.’

‘Dear me!’ cried that unfortunate gentleman. ‘I am so worrited! I ask to
be allowed to come to terms, supposing your document is all correct.’

‘Don’t you be afraid of that,’ said Silas, poking his head at him. ‘You
shall be satisfied by seeing it. Mr Venus will show it you, and I’ll
hold you the while. Then you want to know what the terms are. Is
that about the sum and substance of it? Will you or won’t you answer,
Boffin?’ For he had paused a moment.

‘Dear me!’ cried that unfortunate gentleman again, ‘I am worrited to
that degree that I’m almost off my head. You hurry me so. Be so good as
name the terms, Wegg.’

‘Now, mark, Boffin,’ returned Silas: ‘Mark ‘em well, because they’re
the lowest terms and the only terms. You’ll throw your Mound (the little
Mound as comes to you any way) into the general estate, and then you’ll
divide the whole property into three parts, and you’ll keep one and hand
over the others.’

Mr Venus’s mouth screwed itself up, as Mr Boffin’s face lengthened
itself, Mr Venus not having been prepared for such a rapacious demand.

‘Now, wait a bit, Boffin,’ Wegg proceeded, ‘there’s something more.
You’ve been a squandering this property--laying some of it out on
yourself. THAT won’t do. You’ve bought a house. You’ll be charged for
it.’

‘I shall be ruined, Wegg!’ Mr Boffin faintly protested.

‘Now, wait a bit, Boffin; there’s something more. You’ll leave me in
sole custody of these Mounds till they’re all laid low. If any waluables
should be found in ‘em, I’ll take care of such waluables. You’ll produce
your contract for the sale of the Mounds, that we may know to a penny
what they’re worth, and you’ll make out likewise an exact list of
all the other property. When the Mounds is cleared away to the last
shovel-full, the final diwision will come off.’

‘Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful! I shall die in a workhouse!’ cried the
Golden Dustman, with his hands to his head.

‘Now, wait a bit, Boffin; there’s something more. You’ve been unlawfully
ferreting about this yard. You’ve been seen in the act of ferreting
about this yard. Two pair of eyes at the present moment brought to bear
upon you, have seen you dig up a Dutch bottle.’

‘It was mine, Wegg,’ protested Mr Boffin. ‘I put it there myself.’

‘What was in it, Boffin?’ inquired Silas.

‘Not gold, not silver, not bank notes, not jewels, nothing that you
could turn into money, Wegg; upon my soul!’

‘Prepared, Mr Venus,’ said Wegg, turning to his partner with a knowing
and superior air, ‘for an ewasive answer on the part of our dusty friend
here, I have hit out a little idea which I think will meet your views.
We charge that bottle against our dusty friend at a thousand pound.’

Mr Boffin drew a deep groan.

‘Now, wait a bit, Boffin; there’s something more. In your employment
is an under-handed sneak, named Rokesmith. It won’t answer to have HIM
about, while this business of ours is about. He must be discharged.’

‘Rokesmith is already discharged,’ said Mr Boffin, speaking in a muffled
voice, with his hands before his face, as he rocked himself on the
settle.

‘Already discharged, is he?’ returned Wegg, surprised. ‘Oh! Then,
Boffin, I believe there’s nothing more at present.’

The unlucky gentleman continuing to rock himself to and fro, and to
utter an occasional moan, Mr Venus besought him to bear up against his
reverses, and to take time to accustom himself to the thought of his new
position. But, his taking time was exactly the thing of all others that
Silas Wegg could not be induced to hear of. ‘Yes or no, and no half
measures!’ was the motto which that obdurate person many times repeated;
shaking his fist at Mr Boffin, and pegging his motto into the floor with
his wooden leg, in a threatening and alarming manner.

At length, Mr Boffin entreated to be allowed a quarter of an hour’s
grace, and a cooling walk of that duration in the yard. With some
difficulty Mr Wegg granted this great favour, but only on condition
that he accompanied Mr Boffin in his walk, as not knowing what he might
fraudulently unearth if he were left to himself. A more absurd sight
than Mr Boffin in his mental irritation trotting very nimbly, and Mr
Wegg hopping after him with great exertion, eager to watch the slightest
turn of an eyelash, lest it should indicate a spot rich with some
secret, assuredly had never been seen in the shadow of the Mounds. Mr
Wegg was much distressed when the quarter of an hour expired, and came
hopping in, a very bad second.

‘I can’t help myself!’ cried Mr Boffin, flouncing on the settle in a
forlorn manner, with his hands deep in his pockets, as if his pockets
had sunk. ‘What’s the good of my pretending to stand out, when I can’t
help myself? I must give in to the terms. But I should like to see the
document.’

Wegg, who was all for clinching the nail he had so strongly driven home,
announced that Boffin should see it without an hour’s delay. Taking him
into custody for that purpose, or overshadowing him as if he really were
his Evil Genius in visible form, Mr Wegg clapped Mr Boffin’s hat
upon the back of his head, and walked him out by the arm, asserting a
proprietorship over his soul and body that was at once more grim and
more ridiculous than anything in Mr Venus’s rare collection. That
light-haired gentleman followed close upon their heels, at least backing
up Mr Boffin in a literal sense, if he had not had recent opportunities
of doing so spiritually; while Mr Boffin, trotting on as hard as he
could trot, involved Silas Wegg in frequent collisions with the public,
much as a pre-occupied blind man’s dog may be seen to involve his
master.

Thus they reached Mr Venus’s establishment, somewhat heated by the
nature of their progress thither. Mr Wegg, especially, was in a flaming
glow, and stood in the little shop, panting and mopping his head with
his pocket-handkerchief, speechless for several minutes.

Meanwhile, Mr Venus, who had left the duelling frogs to fight it out in
his absence by candlelight for the public delectation, put the shutters
up. When all was snug, and the shop-door fastened, he said to the
perspiring Silas: ‘I suppose, Mr Wegg, we may now produce the paper?’

‘Hold on a minute, sir,’ replied that discreet character; ‘hold on a
minute. Will you obligingly shove that box--which you mentioned on a
former occasion as containing miscellanies--towards me in the midst of
the shop here?’

Mr Venus did as he was asked.

‘Very good,’ said Silas, looking about: ‘ve--ry good. Will you hand me
that chair, sir, to put a-top of it?’

Venus handed him the chair.

‘Now, Boffin,’ said Wegg, ‘mount up here and take your seat, will you?’

Mr Boffin, as if he were about to have his portrait painted, or to be
electrified, or to be made a Freemason, or to be placed at any other
solitary disadvantage, ascended the rostrum prepared for him.

‘Now, Mr Venus,’ said Silas, taking off his coat, ‘when I catches our
friend here round the arms and body, and pins him tight to the back of
the chair, you may show him what he wants to see. If you’ll open it and
hold it well up in one hand, sir, and a candle in the other, he can read
it charming.’

Mr Boffin seemed rather inclined to object to these precautionary
arrangements, but, being immediately embraced by Wegg, resigned himself.
Venus then produced the document, and Mr Boffin slowly spelt it out
aloud: so very slowly, that Wegg, who was holding him in the chair
with the grip of a wrestler, became again exceedingly the worse for his
exertions. ‘Say when you’ve put it safe back, Mr Venus,’ he uttered with
difficulty, ‘for the strain of this is terrimenjious.’

At length the document was restored to its place; and Wegg, whose
uncomfortable attitude had been that of a very persevering man
unsuccessfully attempting to stand upon his head, took a seat to recover
himself. Mr Boffin, for his part, made no attempt to come down, but
remained aloft disconsolate.

‘Well, Boffin!’ said Wegg, as soon as he was in a condition to speak.
‘Now, you know.’

‘Yes, Wegg,’ said Mr Boffin, meekly. ‘Now, I know.’

‘You have no doubts about it, Boffin.’

‘No, Wegg. No, Wegg. None,’ was the slow and sad reply.

‘Then, take care, you,’ said Wegg, ‘that you stick to your conditions.
Mr Venus, if on this auspicious occasion, you should happen to have a
drop of anything not quite so mild as tea in the ‘ouse, I think I’d take
the friendly liberty of asking you for a specimen of it.’

Mr Venus, reminded of the duties of hospitality, produced some rum.
In answer to the inquiry, ‘Will you mix it, Mr Wegg?’ that gentleman
pleasantly rejoined, ‘I think not, sir. On so auspicious an occasion, I
prefer to take it in the form of a Gum-Tickler.’

Mr Boffin, declining rum, being still elevated on his pedestal, was in
a convenient position to be addressed. Wegg having eyed him with an
impudent air at leisure, addressed him, therefore, while refreshing
himself with his dram.

‘Bof--fin!’

‘Yes, Wegg,’ he answered, coming out of a fit of abstraction, with a
sigh.

‘I haven’t mentioned one thing, because it’s a detail that comes of
course. You must be followed up, you know. You must be kept under
inspection.’

‘I don’t quite understand,’ said Mr Boffin.

‘Don’t you?’ sneered Wegg. ‘Where’s your wits, Boffin? Till the Mounds
is down and this business completed, you’re accountable for all the
property, recollect. Consider yourself accountable to me. Mr Venus here
being too milk and watery with you, I am the boy for you.’

‘I’ve been a-thinking,’ said Mr Boffin, in a tone of despondency, ‘that
I must keep the knowledge from my old lady.’

‘The knowledge of the diwision, d’ye mean?’ inquired Wegg, helping
himself to a third Gum-Tickler--for he had already taken a second.

‘Yes. If she was to die first of us two she might then think all her
life, poor thing, that I had got the rest of the fortune still, and was
saving it.’

‘I suspect, Boffin,’ returned Wegg, shaking his head sagaciously, and
bestowing a wooden wink upon him, ‘that you’ve found out some account
of some old chap, supposed to be a Miser, who got himself the credit of
having much more money than he had. However, I don’t mind.’

‘Don’t you see, Wegg?’ Mr Boffin feelingly represented to him: ‘don’t
you see? My old lady has got so used to the property. It would be such a
hard surprise.’

‘I don’t see it at all,’ blustered Wegg. ‘You’ll have as much as I
shall. And who are you?’

‘But then, again,’ Mr Boffin gently represented; ‘my old lady has very
upright principles.’

‘Who’s your old lady,’ returned Wegg, ‘to set herself up for having
uprighter principles than mine?’

Mr Boffin seemed a little less patient at this point than at any other
of the negotiations. But he commanded himself, and said tamely enough:
‘I think it must be kept from my old lady, Wegg.’

‘Well,’ said Wegg, contemptuously, though, perhaps, perceiving some hint
of danger otherwise, ‘keep it from your old lady. I ain’t going to tell
her. I can have you under close inspection without that. I’m as good a
man as you, and better. Ask me to dinner. Give me the run of your ‘ouse.
I was good enough for you and your old lady once, when I helped you out
with your weal and hammers. Was there no Miss Elizabeth, Master George,
Aunt Jane, and Uncle Parker, before YOU two?’

‘Gently, Mr Wegg, gently,’ Venus urged.

‘Milk and water-erily you mean, sir,’ he returned, with some little
thickness of speech, in consequence of the Gum-Ticklers having tickled
it. ‘I’ve got him under inspection, and I’ll inspect him.

     “Along the line the signal ran
     England expects as this present man
     Will keep Boffin to his duty.”

--Boffin, I’ll see you home.’

Mr Boffin descended with an air of resignation, and gave himself up,
after taking friendly leave of Mr Venus. Once more, Inspector and
Inspected went through the streets together, and so arrived at Mr
Boffin’s door.

But even there, when Mr Boffin had given his keeper good-night, and had
let himself in with his key, and had softly closed the door, even there
and then, the all-powerful Silas must needs claim another assertion of
his newly-asserted power.

‘Bof--fin!’ he called through the keyhole.

‘Yes, Wegg,’ was the reply through the same channel.

‘Come out. Show yourself again. Let’s have another look at you!’
Mr Boffin--ah, how fallen from the high estate of his honest
simplicity!--opened the door and obeyed.

‘Go in. You may get to bed now,’ said Wegg, with a grin.

The door was hardly closed, when he again called through the keyhole:
‘Bof--fin!’

‘Yes, Wegg.’

This time Silas made no reply, but laboured with a will at turning an
imaginary grindstone outside the keyhole, while Mr Boffin stooped at it
within; he then laughed silently, and stumped home.



Chapter 4

A RUNAWAY MATCH


Cherubic Pa arose with as little noise as possible from beside majestic
Ma, one morning early, having a holiday before him. Pa and the lovely
woman had a rather particular appointment to keep.

Yet Pa and the lovely woman were not going out together. Bella was up
before four, but had no bonnet on. She was waiting at the foot of the
stairs--was sitting on the bottom stair, in fact--to receive Pa when he
came down, but her only object seemed to be to get Pa well out of the
house.

‘Your breakfast is ready, sir,’ whispered Bella, after greeting him with
a hug, ‘and all you have to do, is, to eat it up and drink it up, and
escape. How do you feel, Pa?’

‘To the best of my judgement, like a housebreaker new to the business,
my dear, who can’t make himself quite comfortable till he is off the
premises.’

Bella tucked her arm in his with a merry noiseless laugh, and they went
down to the kitchen on tiptoe; she stopping on every separate stair to
put the tip of her forefinger on her rosy lips, and then lay it on his
lips, according to her favourite petting way of kissing Pa.

‘How do YOU feel, my love?’ asked R. W., as she gave him his breakfast.

‘I feel as if the Fortune-teller was coming true, dear Pa, and the fair
little man was turning out as was predicted.’

‘Ho! Only the fair little man?’ said her father.

Bella put another of those finger-seals upon his lips, and then said,
kneeling down by him as he sat at table: ‘Now, look here, sir. If you
keep well up to the mark this day, what do you think you deserve?
What did I promise you should have, if you were good, upon a certain
occasion?’

‘Upon my word I don’t remember, Precious. Yes, I do, though. Wasn’t
it one of these beau--tiful tresses?’ with his caressing hand upon her
hair.

‘Wasn’t it, too!’ returned Bella, pretending to pout. ‘Upon my word! Do
you know, sir, that the Fortune-teller would give five thousand guineas
(if it was quite convenient to him, which it isn’t) for the lovely piece
I have cut off for you? You can form no idea, sir, of the number of
times he kissed quite a scrubby little piece--in comparison--that I cut
off for HIM. And he wears it, too, round his neck, I can tell you! Near
his heart!’ said Bella, nodding. ‘Ah! very near his heart! However, you
have been a good, good boy, and you are the best of all the dearest boys
that ever were, this morning, and here’s the chain I have made of
it, Pa, and you must let me put it round your neck with my own loving
hands.’

As Pa bent his head, she cried over him a little, and then said (after
having stopped to dry her eyes on his white waistcoat, the discovery of
which incongruous circumstance made her laugh): ‘Now, darling Pa,
give me your hands that I may fold them together, and do you say after
me:--My little Bella.’

‘My little Bella,’ repeated Pa.

‘I am very fond of you.’

‘I am very fond of you, my darling,’ said Pa.

‘You mustn’t say anything not dictated to you, sir. You daren’t do it in
your responses at Church, and you mustn’t do it in your responses out of
Church.’

‘I withdraw the darling,’ said Pa.

‘That’s a pious boy! Now again:--You were always--’

‘You were always,’ repeated Pa.

‘A vexatious--’

‘No you weren’t,’ said Pa.

‘A vexatious (do you hear, sir?), a vexatious, capricious, thankless,
troublesome, Animal; but I hope you’ll do better in the time to come,
and I bless you and forgive you!’ Here, she quite forgot that it was
Pa’s turn to make the responses, and clung to his neck. ‘Dear Pa, if you
knew how much I think this morning of what you told me once, about the
first time of our seeing old Mr Harmon, when I stamped and screamed
and beat you with my detestable little bonnet! I feel as if I had been
stamping and screaming and beating you with my hateful little bonnet,
ever since I was born, darling!’

‘Nonsense, my love. And as to your bonnets, they have always been nice
bonnets, for they have always become you--or you have become them;
perhaps it was that--at every age.’

‘Did I hurt you much, poor little Pa?’ asked Bella, laughing
(notwithstanding her repentance), with fantastic pleasure in the
picture, ‘when I beat you with my bonnet?’

‘No, my child. Wouldn’t have hurt a fly!’

‘Ay, but I am afraid I shouldn’t have beat you at all, unless I had
meant to hurt you,’ said Bella. ‘Did I pinch your legs, Pa?’

‘Not much, my dear; but I think it’s almost time I--’

‘Oh, yes!’ cried Bella. ‘If I go on chattering, you’ll be taken alive.
Fly, Pa, fly!’

So, they went softly up the kitchen stairs on tiptoe, and Bella with
her light hand softly removed the fastenings of the house door, and Pa,
having received a parting hug, made off. When he had gone a little way,
he looked back. Upon which, Bella set another of those finger seals upon
the air, and thrust out her little foot expressive of the mark. Pa, in
appropriate action, expressed fidelity to the mark, and made off as fast
as he could go.

Bella walked thoughtfully in the garden for an hour and more, and then,
returning to the bedroom where Lavvy the Irrepressible still slumbered,
put on a little bonnet of quiet, but on the whole of sly appearance,
which she had yesterday made. ‘I am going for a walk, Lavvy,’ she said,
as she stooped down and kissed her. The Irrepressible, with a bounce in
the bed, and a remark that it wasn’t time to get up yet, relapsed into
unconsciousness, if she had come out of it.

Behold Bella tripping along the streets, the dearest girl afoot under
the summer sun! Behold Pa waiting for Bella behind a pump, at least
three miles from the parental roof-tree. Behold Bella and Pa aboard an
early steamboat for Greenwich.

Were they expected at Greenwich? Probably. At least, Mr John Rokesmith
was on the pier looking out, about a couple of hours before the coaly
(but to him gold-dusty) little steamboat got her steam up in London.
Probably. At least, Mr John Rokesmith seemed perfectly satisfied when
he descried them on board. Probably. At least, Bella no sooner stepped
ashore than she took Mr John Rokesmith’s arm, without evincing surprise,
and the two walked away together with an ethereal air of happiness
which, as it were, wafted up from the earth and drew after them a gruff
and glum old pensioner to see it out. Two wooden legs had this gruff and
glum old pensioner, and, a minute before Bella stepped out of the boat,
and drew that confiding little arm of hers through Rokesmith’s, he had
had no object in life but tobacco, and not enough of that. Stranded was
Gruff and Glum in a harbour of everlasting mud, when all in an instant
Bella floated him, and away he went.

Say, cherubic parent taking the lead, in what direction do we steer
first? With some such inquiry in his thoughts, Gruff and Glum, stricken
by so sudden an interest that he perked his neck and looked over the
intervening people, as if he were trying to stand on tiptoe with his two
wooden legs, took an observation of R. W. There was no ‘first’ in the
case, Gruff and Glum made out; the cherubic parent was bearing down and
crowding on direct for Greenwich church, to see his relations.

For, Gruff and Glum, though most events acted on him simply as
tobacco-stoppers, pressing down and condensing the quids within him,
might be imagined to trace a family resemblance between the cherubs in
the church architecture, and the cherub in the white waistcoat. Some
remembrance of old Valentines, wherein a cherub, less appropriately
attired for a proverbially uncertain climate, had been seen conducting
lovers to the altar, might have been fancied to inflame the ardour of
his timber toes. Be it as it might, he gave his moorings the slip, and
followed in chase.

The cherub went before, all beaming smiles; Bella and John Rokesmith
followed; Gruff and Glum stuck to them like wax. For years, the wings
of his mind had gone to look after the legs of his body; but Bella had
brought them back for him per steamer, and they were spread again.

He was a slow sailer on a wind of happiness, but he took a cross cut
for the rendezvous, and pegged away as if he were scoring furiously
at cribbage. When the shadow of the church-porch swallowed them up,
victorious Gruff and Glum likewise presented himself to be swallowed up.
And by this time the cherubic parent was so fearful of surprise, that,
but for the two wooden legs on which Gruff and Glum was reassuringly
mounted, his conscience might have introduced, in the person of that
pensioner, his own stately lady disguised, arrived at Greenwich in a
car and griffins, like the spiteful Fairy at the christenings of the
Princesses, to do something dreadful to the marriage service. And truly
he had a momentary reason to be pale of face, and to whisper to Bella,
‘You don’t think that can be your Ma; do you, my dear?’ on account of
a mysterious rustling and a stealthy movement somewhere in the remote
neighbourhood of the organ, though it was gone directly and was heard no
more. Albeit it was heard of afterwards, as will afterwards be read in
this veracious register of marriage.

Who taketh? I, John, and so do I, Bella. Who giveth? I, R. W. Forasmuch,
Gruff and Glum, as John and Bella have consented together in holy
wedlock, you may (in short) consider it done, and withdraw your two
wooden legs from this temple. To the foregoing purport, the Minister
speaking, as directed by the Rubric, to the People, selectly represented
in the present instance by G. and G. above mentioned.

And now, the church-porch having swallowed up Bella Wilfer for ever and
ever, had it not in its power to relinquish that young woman, but slid
into the happy sunlight, Mrs John Rokesmith instead. And long on the
bright steps stood Gruff and Glum, looking after the pretty bride, with
a narcotic consciousness of having dreamed a dream.

After which, Bella took out from her pocket a little letter, and read it
aloud to Pa and John; this being a true copy of the same.


‘DEAREST MA,

I hope you won’t be angry, but I am most happily married to Mr John
Rokesmith, who loves me better than I can ever deserve, except by loving
him with all my heart. I thought it best not to mention it beforehand,
in case it should cause any little difference at home. Please tell
darling Pa. With love to Lavvy,

Ever dearest Ma, Your affectionate daughter, BELLA (P.S.--Rokesmith).’


Then, John Rokesmith put the queen’s countenance on the letter--when had
Her Gracious Majesty looked so benign as on that blessed morning!--and
then Bella popped it into the post-office, and said merrily, ‘Now,
dearest Pa, you are safe, and will never be taken alive!’

Pa was, at first, in the stirred depths of his conscience, so far from
sure of being safe yet, that he made out majestic matrons lurking in
ambush among the harmless trees of Greenwich Park, and seemed to see a
stately countenance tied up in a well-known pocket-handkerchief glooming
down at him from a window of the Observatory, where the Familiars of the
Astronomer Royal nightly outwatch the winking stars. But, the minutes
passing on and no Mrs Wilfer in the flesh appearing, he became more
confident, and so repaired with good heart and appetite to Mr and Mrs
John Rokesmith’s cottage on Blackheath, where breakfast was ready.

A modest little cottage but a bright and a fresh, and on the snowy
tablecloth the prettiest of little breakfasts. In waiting, too, like
an attendant summer breeze, a fluttering young damsel, all pink and
ribbons, blushing as if she had been married instead of Bella, and yet
asserting the triumph of her sex over both John and Pa, in an exulting
and exalted flurry: as who should say, ‘This is what you must all come
to, gentlemen, when we choose to bring you to book.’ This same young
damsel was Bella’s serving-maid, and unto her did deliver a bunch of
keys, commanding treasures in the way of dry-saltery, groceries, jams
and pickles, the investigation of which made pastime after breakfast,
when Bella declared that ‘Pa must taste everything, John dear, or it
will never be lucky,’ and when Pa had all sorts of things poked into
his mouth, and didn’t quite know what to do with them when they were put
there.

Then they, all three, out for a charming ride, and for a charming stroll
among heath in bloom, and there behold the identical Gruff and Glum with
his wooden legs horizontally disposed before him, apparently sitting
meditating on the vicissitudes of life! To whom said Bella, in her
light-hearted surprise: ‘Oh! How do you do again? What a dear old
pensioner you are!’ To which Gruff and Glum responded that he see her
married this morning, my Beauty, and that if it warn’t a liberty he
wished her ji and the fairest of fair wind and weather; further, in a
general way requesting to know what cheer? and scrambling up on his two
wooden legs to salute, hat in hand, ship-shape, with the gallantry of a
man-of-warsman and a heart of oak.

It was a pleasant sight, in the midst of the golden bloom, to see this
salt old Gruff and Glum, waving his shovel hat at Bella, while his thin
white hair flowed free, as if she had once more launched him into blue
water again. ‘You are a charming old pensioner,’ said Bella, ‘and I am
so happy that I wish I could make you happy, too.’ Answered Gruff and
Glum, ‘Give me leave to kiss your hand, my Lovely, and it’s done!’ So it
was done to the general contentment; and if Gruff and Glum didn’t in the
course of the afternoon splice the main brace, it was not for want of
the means of inflicting that outrage on the feelings of the Infant Bands
of Hope.

But, the marriage dinner was the crowning success, for what had bride
and bridegroom plotted to do, but to have and to hold that dinner in the
very room of the very hotel where Pa and the lovely woman had once dined
together! Bella sat between Pa and John, and divided her attentions
pretty equally, but felt it necessary (in the waiter’s absence before
dinner) to remind Pa that she was HIS lovely woman no longer.

‘I am well aware of it, my dear,’ returned the cherub, ‘and I resign you
willingly.’

‘Willingly, sir? You ought to be brokenhearted.’

‘So I should be, my dear, if I thought that I was going to lose you.’

‘But you know you are not; don’t you, poor dear Pa? You know that you
have only made a new relation who will be as fond of you and as thankful
to you--for my sake and your own sake both--as I am; don’t you, dear
little Pa? Look here, Pa!’ Bella put her finger on her own lip, and then
on Pa’s, and then on her own lip again, and then on her husband’s. ‘Now,
we are a partnership of three, dear Pa.’

The appearance of dinner here cut Bella short in one of her
disappearances: the more effectually, because it was put on under the
auspices of a solemn gentleman in black clothes and a white cravat, who
looked much more like a clergyman than THE clergyman, and seemed to
have mounted a great deal higher in the church: not to say, scaled the
steeple. This dignitary, conferring in secrecy with John Rokesmith on
the subject of punch and wines, bent his head as though stooping to
the Papistical practice of receiving auricular confession. Likewise,
on John’s offering a suggestion which didn’t meet his views, his face
became overcast and reproachful, as enjoining penance.

What a dinner! Specimens of all the fishes that swim in the sea, surely
had swum their way to it, and if samples of the fishes of divers
colours that made a speech in the Arabian Nights (quite a ministerial
explanation in respect of cloudiness), and then jumped out of the
frying-pan, were not to be recognized, it was only because they had all
become of one hue by being cooked in batter among the whitebait. And the
dishes being seasoned with Bliss--an article which they are sometimes
out of, at Greenwich--were of perfect flavour, and the golden drinks
had been bottled in the golden age and hoarding up their sparkles ever
since.

The best of it was, that Bella and John and the cherub had made a
covenant that they would not reveal to mortal eyes any appearance
whatever of being a wedding party. Now, the supervising dignitary, the
Archbishop of Greenwich, knew this as well as if he had performed the
nuptial ceremony. And the loftiness with which his Grace entered into
their confidence without being invited, and insisted on a show
of keeping the waiters out of it, was the crowning glory of the
entertainment.

There was an innocent young waiter of a slender form and with weakish
legs, as yet unversed in the wiles of waiterhood, and but too evidently
of a romantic temperament, and deeply (it were not too much to add
hopelessly) in love with some young female not aware of his merit.
This guileless youth, descrying the position of affairs, which even
his innocence could not mistake, limited his waiting to languishing
admiringly against the sideboard when Bella didn’t want anything, and
swooping at her when she did. Him, his Grace the Archbishop perpetually
obstructed, cutting him out with his elbow in the moment of success,
despatching him in degrading quest of melted butter, and, when by any
chance he got hold of any dish worth having, bereaving him of it, and
ordering him to stand back.

‘Pray excuse him, madam,’ said the Archbishop in a low stately voice;
‘he is a very young man on liking, and we DON’T like him.’

This induced John Rokesmith to observe--by way of making the thing more
natural--‘Bella, my love, this is so much more successful than any
of our past anniversaries, that I think we must keep our future
anniversaries here.’

Whereunto Bella replied, with probably the least successful attempt at
looking matronly that ever was seen: ‘Indeed, I think so, John, dear.’

Here the Archbishop of Greenwich coughed a stately cough to attract the
attention of three of his ministers present, and staring at them, seemed
to say: ‘I call upon you by your fealty to believe this!’

With his own hands he afterwards put on the dessert, as remarking to the
three guests, ‘The period has now arrived at which we can dispense with
the assistance of those fellows who are not in our confidence,’ and
would have retired with complete dignity but for a daring action issuing
from the misguided brain of the young man on liking. He finding, by
ill-fortune, a piece of orange flower somewhere in the lobbies now
approached undetected with the same in a finger-glass, and placed it on
Bella’s right hand. The Archbishop instantly ejected and excommunicated
him; but the thing was done.

‘I trust, madam,’ said his Grace, returning alone, ‘that you will have
the kindness to overlook it, in consideration of its being the act of a
very young man who is merely here on liking, and who will never answer.’

With that, he solemnly bowed and retired, and they all burst into
laughter, long and merry. ‘Disguise is of no use,’ said Bella; ‘they
all find me out; I think it must be, Pa and John dear, because I look so
happy!’

Her husband feeling it necessary at this point to demand one of those
mysterious disappearances on Bella’s part, she dutifully obeyed; saying
in a softened voice from her place of concealment:

‘You remember how we talked about the ships that day, Pa?’

‘Yes, my dear.’

‘Isn’t it strange, now, to think that there was no John in all the
ships, Pa?’

‘Not at all, my dear.’

‘Oh, Pa! Not at all?’

‘No, my dear. How can we tell what coming people are aboard the ships
that may be sailing to us now from the unknown seas!’

Bella remaining invisible and silent, her father remained at his
dessert and wine, until he remembered it was time for him to get home to
Holloway. ‘Though I positively cannot tear myself away,’ he cherubically
added, ‘--it would be a sin--without drinking to many, many happy
returns of this most happy day.’

‘Here! ten thousand times!’ cried John. ‘I fill my glass and my precious
wife’s.’

‘Gentlemen,’ said the cherub, inaudibly addressing, in his Anglo-Saxon
tendency to throw his feelings into the form of a speech, the boys down
below, who were bidding against each other to put their heads in the mud
for sixpence: ‘Gentlemen--and Bella and John--you will readily suppose
that it is not my intention to trouble you with many observations on the
present occasion. You will also at once infer the nature and even
the terms of the toast I am about to propose on the present occasion.
Gentlemen--and Bella and John--the present occasion is an occasion
fraught with feelings that I cannot trust myself to express. But
gentlemen--and Bella and John--for the part I have had in it, for the
confidence you have placed in me, and for the affectionate good-nature
and kindness with which you have determined not to find me in the way,
when I am well aware that I cannot be otherwise than in it more or less,
I do most heartily thank you. Gentlemen--and Bella and John--my love
to you, and may we meet, as on the present occasion, on many future
occasions; that is to say, gentlemen--and Bella and John--on many happy
returns of the present happy occasion.’

Having thus concluded his address, the amiable cherub embraced his
daughter, and took his flight to the steamboat which was to convey him
to London, and was then lying at the floating pier, doing its best to
bump the same to bits. But, the happy couple were not going to part with
him in that way, and before he had been on board two minutes, there they
were, looking down at him from the wharf above.

‘Pa, dear!’ cried Bella, beckoning him with her parasol to approach the
side, and bending gracefully to whisper.

‘Yes, my darling.’

‘Did I beat you much with that horrid little bonnet, Pa?’

‘Nothing to speak of; my dear.’

‘Did I pinch your legs, Pa?’

‘Only nicely, my pet.’

‘You are sure you quite forgive me, Pa? Please, Pa, please, forgive me
quite!’ Half laughing at him and half crying to him, Bella besought him
in the prettiest manner; in a manner so engaging and so playful and
so natural, that her cherubic parent made a coaxing face as if she had
never grown up, and said, ‘What a silly little Mouse it is!’

‘But you do forgive me that, and everything else; don’t you, Pa?’

‘Yes, my dearest.’

‘And you don’t feel solitary or neglected, going away by yourself; do
you, Pa?’

‘Lord bless you! No, my Life!’

‘Good-bye, dearest Pa. Good-bye!’

‘Good-bye, my darling! Take her away, my dear John. Take her home!’

So, she leaning on her husband’s arm, they turned homeward by a rosy
path which the gracious sun struck out for them in its setting. And O
there are days in this life, worth life and worth death. And O what a
bright old song it is, that O ‘tis love, ‘tis love, ‘tis love that makes
the world go round!



Chapter 5

CONCERNING THE MENDICANT’S BRIDE


The impressive gloom with which Mrs Wilfer received her husband on his
return from the wedding, knocked so hard at the door of the cherubic
conscience, and likewise so impaired the firmness of the cherubic legs,
that the culprit’s tottering condition of mind and body might have
roused suspicion in less occupied persons that the grimly heroic lady,
Miss Lavinia, and that esteemed friend of the family, Mr George Sampson.
But, the attention of all three being fully possessed by the main
fact of the marriage, they had happily none to bestow on the guilty
conspirator; to which fortunate circumstance he owed the escape for
which he was in nowise indebted to himself.

‘You do not, R. W.’ said Mrs Wilfer from her stately corner, ‘inquire
for your daughter Bella.’

‘To be sure, my dear,’ he returned, with a most flagrant assumption of
unconsciousness, ‘I did omit it. How--or perhaps I should rather say
where--IS Bella?’

‘Not here,’ Mrs Wilfer proclaimed, with folded arms.

The cherub faintly muttered something to the abortive effect of ‘Oh,
indeed, my dear!’

‘Not here,’ repeated Mrs Wilfer, in a stern sonorous voice. ‘In a word,
R. W., you have no daughter Bella.’

‘No daughter Bella, my dear?’

‘No. Your daughter Bella,’ said Mrs Wilfer, with a lofty air of never
having had the least copartnership in that young lady: of whom she now
made reproachful mention as an article of luxury which her husband had
set up entirely on his own account, and in direct opposition to her
advice: ‘--your daughter Bella has bestowed herself upon a Mendicant.’

‘Good gracious, my dear!’

‘Show your father his daughter Bella’s letter, Lavinia,’ said Mrs
Wilfer, in her monotonous Act of Parliament tone, and waving her hand.
‘I think your father will admit it to be documentary proof of what I
tell him. I believe your father is acquainted with his daughter Bella’s
writing. But I do not know. He may tell you he is not. Nothing will
surprise me.’

‘Posted at Greenwich, and dated this morning,’ said the Irrepressible,
flouncing at her father in handing him the evidence. ‘Hopes Ma won’t be
angry, but is happily married to Mr John Rokesmith, and didn’t mention
it beforehand to avoid words, and please tell darling you, and love
to me, and I should like to know what you’d have said if any other
unmarried member of the family had done it!’

He read the letter, and faintly exclaimed ‘Dear me!’

‘You may well say Dear me!’ rejoined Mrs Wilfer, in a deep tone. Upon
which encouragement he said it again, though scarcely with the success
he had expected; for the scornful lady then remarked, with extreme
bitterness: ‘You said that before.’

‘It’s very surprising. But I suppose, my dear,’ hinted the cherub, as he
folded the letter after a disconcerting silence, ‘that we must make the
best of it? Would you object to my pointing out, my dear, that Mr
John Rokesmith is not (so far as I am acquainted with him), strictly
speaking, a Mendicant.’

‘Indeed?’ returned Mrs Wilfer, with an awful air of politeness. ‘Truly
so? I was not aware that Mr John Rokesmith was a gentleman of landed
property. But I am much relieved to hear it.’

‘I doubt if you HAVE heard it, my dear,’ the cherub submitted with
hesitation.

‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Wilfer. ‘I make false statements, it appears? So
be it. If my daughter flies in my face, surely my husband may. The one
thing is not more unnatural than the other. There seems a fitness in the
arrangement. By all means!’ Assuming, with a shiver of resignation, a
deadly cheerfulness.

But, here the Irrepressible skirmished into the conflict, dragging the
reluctant form of Mr Sampson after her.

‘Ma,’ interposed the young lady, ‘I must say I think it would be much
better if you would keep to the point, and not hold forth about
people’s flying into people’s faces, which is nothing more nor less than
impossible nonsense.’

‘How!’ exclaimed Mrs Wilfer, knitting her dark brows.

‘Just im-possible nonsense, Ma,’ returned Lavvy, ‘and George Sampson
knows it is, as well as I do.’

Mrs Wilfer suddenly becoming petrified, fixed her indignant eyes upon
the wretched George: who, divided between the support due from him to
his love, and the support due from him to his love’s mamma, supported
nobody, not even himself.

‘The true point is,’ pursued Lavinia, ‘that Bella has behaved in a most
unsisterly way to me, and might have severely compromised me with George
and with George’s family, by making off and getting married in this very
low and disreputable manner--with some pew-opener or other, I suppose,
for a bridesmaid--when she ought to have confided in me, and ought
to have said, “If, Lavvy, you consider it due to your engagement with
George, that you should countenance the occasion by being present, then
Lavvy, I beg you to BE present, keeping my secret from Ma and Pa.” As of
course I should have done.’

‘As of course you would have done? Ingrate!’ exclaimed Mrs Wilfer.
‘Viper!’

‘I say! You know ma’am. Upon my honour you mustn’t,’ Mr Sampson
remonstrated, shaking his head seriously, ‘With the highest respect for
you, ma’am, upon my life you mustn’t. No really, you know. When a man
with the feelings of a gentleman finds himself engaged to a young lady,
and it comes (even on the part of a member of the family) to vipers, you
know!--I would merely put it to your own good feeling, you know,’ said
Mr Sampson, in rather lame conclusion.

Mrs Wilfer’s baleful stare at the young gentleman in acknowledgment of
his obliging interference was of such a nature that Miss Lavinia burst
into tears, and caught him round the neck for his protection.

‘My own unnatural mother,’ screamed the young lady, ‘wants to annihilate
George! But you shan’t be annihilated, George. I’ll die first!’

Mr Sampson, in the arms of his mistress, still struggled to shake his
head at Mrs Wilfer, and to remark: ‘With every sentiment of respect for
you, you know, ma’am--vipers really doesn’t do you credit.’

‘You shall not be annihilated, George!’ cried Miss Lavinia. ‘Ma shall
destroy me first, and then she’ll be contented. Oh, oh, oh! Have I lured
George from his happy home to expose him to this! George, dear, be free!
Leave me, ever dearest George, to Ma and to my fate. Give my love to
your aunt, George dear, and implore her not to curse the viper that has
crossed your path and blighted your existence. Oh, oh, oh!’ The young
lady who, hysterically speaking, was only just come of age, and had
never gone off yet, here fell into a highly creditable crisis, which,
regarded as a first performance, was very successful; Mr Sampson,
bending over the body meanwhile, in a state of distraction, which
induced him to address Mrs Wilfer in the inconsistent expressions:
‘Demon--with the highest respect for you--behold your work!’

The cherub stood helplessly rubbing his chin and looking on, but on the
whole was inclined to welcome this diversion as one in which, by reason
of the absorbent properties of hysterics, the previous question would
become absorbed. And so, indeed, it proved, for the Irrepressible
gradually coming to herself; and asking with wild emotion, ‘George dear,
are you safe?’ and further, ‘George love, what has happened? Where is
Ma?’ Mr Sampson, with words of comfort, raised her prostrate form, and
handed her to Mrs Wilfer as if the young lady were something in the
nature of refreshments. Mrs Wilfer with dignity partaking of the
refreshments, by kissing her once on the brow (as if accepting an
oyster), Miss Lavvy, tottering, returned to the protection of Mr
Sampson; to whom she said, ‘George dear, I am afraid I have been
foolish; but I am still a little weak and giddy; don’t let go my hand,
George!’ And whom she afterwards greatly agitated at intervals, by
giving utterance, when least expected, to a sound between a sob and a
bottle of soda water, that seemed to rend the bosom of her frock.

Among the most remarkable effects of this crisis may be mentioned its
having, when peace was restored, an inexplicable moral influence, of an
elevating kind, on Miss Lavinia, Mrs Wilfer, and Mr George Sampson, from
which R. W. was altogether excluded, as an outsider and non-sympathizer.
Miss Lavinia assumed a modest air of having distinguished herself; Mrs
Wilfer, a serene air of forgiveness and resignation; Mr Sampson, an air
of having been improved and chastened. The influence pervaded the spirit
in which they returned to the previous question.

‘George dear,’ said Lavvy, with a melancholy smile, ‘after what has
passed, I am sure Ma will tell Pa that he may tell Bella we shall all be
glad to see her and her husband.’

Mr Sampson said he was sure of it too; murmuring how eminently he
respected Mrs Wilfer, and ever must, and ever would. Never more
eminently, he added, than after what had passed.

‘Far be it from me,’ said Mrs Wilfer, making deep proclamation from her
corner, ‘to run counter to the feelings of a child of mine, and of a
Youth,’ Mr Sampson hardly seemed to like that word, ‘who is the object
of her maiden preference. I may feel--nay, know--that I have been
deluded and deceived. I may feel--nay, know--that I have been set
aside and passed over. I may feel--nay, know--that after having so far
overcome my repugnance towards Mr and Mrs Boffin as to receive them
under this roof, and to consent to your daughter Bella’s,’ here turning
to her husband, ‘residing under theirs, it were well if your daughter
Bella,’ again turning to her husband, ‘had profited in a worldly
point of view by a connection so distasteful, so disreputable. I may
feel--nay, know--that in uniting herself to Mr Rokesmith she has united
herself to one who is, in spite of shallow sophistry, a Mendicant. And
I may feel well assured that your daughter Bella,’ again turning to her
husband, ‘does not exalt her family by becoming a Mendicant’s bride. But
I suppress what I feel, and say nothing of it.’

Mr Sampson murmured that this was the sort of thing you might expect
from one who had ever in her own family been an example and never
an outrage. And ever more so (Mr Sampson added, with some degree of
obscurity,) and never more so, than in and through what had passed. He
must take the liberty of adding, that what was true of the mother
was true of the youngest daughter, and that he could never forget the
touching feelings that the conduct of both had awakened within him. In
conclusion, he did hope that there wasn’t a man with a beating heart who
was capable of something that remained undescribed, in consequence of
Miss Lavinia’s stopping him as he reeled in his speech.

‘Therefore, R. W.’ said Mrs Wilfer, resuming her discourse and turning
to her lord again, ‘let your daughter Bella come when she will, and she
will be received. So,’ after a short pause, and an air of having taken
medicine in it, ‘so will her husband.’

‘And I beg, Pa,’ said Lavinia, ‘that you will not tell Bella what I
have undergone. It can do no good, and it might cause her to reproach
herself.’

‘My dearest girl,’ urged Mr Sampson, ‘she ought to know it.’

‘No, George,’ said Lavinia, in a tone of resolute self-denial. ‘No,
dearest George, let it be buried in oblivion.’

Mr Sampson considered that, ‘too noble.’

‘Nothing is too noble, dearest George,’ returned Lavinia. ‘And Pa, I
hope you will be careful not to refer before Bella, if you can help
it, to my engagement to George. It might seem like reminding her of her
having cast herself away. And I hope, Pa, that you will think it equally
right to avoid mentioning George’s rising prospects, when Bella is
present. It might seem like taunting her with her own poor fortunes.
Let me ever remember that I am her younger sister, and ever spare her
painful contrasts, which could not but wound her sharply.’

Mr Sampson expressed his belief that such was the demeanour of Angels.
Miss Lavvy replied with solemnity, ‘No, dearest George, I am but too
well aware that I am merely human.’

Mrs Wilfer, for her part, still further improved the occasion by sitting
with her eyes fastened on her husband, like two great black notes of
interrogation, severely inquiring, Are you looking into your breast? Do
you deserve your blessings? Can you lay your hand upon your heart and
say that you are worthy of so hysterical a daughter? I do not ask you if
you are worthy of such a wife--put Me out of the question--but are
you sufficiently conscious of, and thankful for, the pervading moral
grandeur of the family spectacle on which you are gazing? These
inquiries proved very harassing to R. W. who, besides being a little
disturbed by wine, was in perpetual terror of committing himself by the
utterance of stray words that would betray his guilty foreknowledge.
However, the scene being over, and--all things considered--well over, he
sought refuge in a doze; which gave his lady immense offence.

‘Can you think of your daughter Bella, and sleep?’ she disdainfully
inquired.

To which he mildly answered, ‘Yes, I think I can, my dear.’

‘Then,’ said Mrs Wilfer, with solemn indignation, ‘I would recommend
you, if you have a human feeling, to retire to bed.’

‘Thank you, my dear,’ he replied; ‘I think it IS the best place for me.’
And with these unsympathetic words very gladly withdrew.

Within a few weeks afterwards, the Mendicant’s bride (arm-in-arm with
the Mendicant) came to tea, in fulfilment of an engagement made through
her father. And the way in which the Mendicant’s bride dashed at the
unassailable position so considerately to be held by Miss Lavy, and
scattered the whole of the works in all directions in a moment, was
triumphant.

‘Dearest Ma,’ cried Bella, running into the room with a radiant face,
‘how do you do, dearest Ma?’ And then embraced her, joyously. ‘And Lavvy
darling, how do YOU do, and how’s George Sampson, and how is he getting
on, and when are you going to be married, and how rich are you going
to grow? You must tell me all about it, Lavvy dear, immediately.
John, love, kiss Ma and Lavvy, and then we shall all be at home and
comfortable.’

Mrs Wilfer stared, but was helpless. Miss Lavinia stared, but was
helpless. Apparently with no compunction, and assuredly with no
ceremony, Bella tossed her bonnet away, and sat down to make the tea.

‘Dearest Ma and Lavvy, you both take sugar, I know. And Pa (you good
little Pa), you don’t take milk. John does. I didn’t before I was
married; but I do now, because John does. John dear, did you kiss Ma and
Lavvy? Oh, you did! Quite correct, John dear; but I didn’t see you do
it, so I asked. Cut some bread and butter, John; that’s a love. Ma likes
it doubled. And now you must tell me, dearest Ma and Lavvy, upon your
words and honours! Didn’t you for a moment--just a moment--think I was a
dreadful little wretch when I wrote to say I had run away?’

Before Mrs Wilfer could wave her gloves, the Mendicant’s bride in her
merriest affectionate manner went on again.

‘I think it must have made you rather cross, dear Ma and Lavvy, and I
know I deserved that you should be very cross. But you see I had been
such a heedless, heartless creature, and had led you so to expect that
I should marry for money, and so to make sure that I was incapable of
marrying for love, that I thought you couldn’t believe me. Because, you
see, you didn’t know how much of Good, Good, Good, I had learnt from
John. Well! So I was sly about it, and ashamed of what you supposed me
to be, and fearful that we couldn’t understand one another and might
come to words, which we should all be sorry for afterwards, and so I
said to John that if he liked to take me without any fuss, he might. And
as he did like, I let him. And we were married at Greenwich church in
the presence of nobody--except an unknown individual who dropped in,’
here her eyes sparkled more brightly, ‘and half a pensioner. And now,
isn’t it nice, dearest Ma and Lavvy, to know that no words have been
said which any of us can be sorry for, and that we are all the best of
friends at the pleasantest of teas!’

Having got up and kissed them again, she slipped back to her chair
(after a loop on the road to squeeze her husband round the neck) and
again went on.

‘And now you will naturally want to know, dearest Ma and Lavvy, how
we live, and what we have got to live upon. Well! And so we live on
Blackheath, in the charm--ingest of dolls’ houses, de--lightfully
furnished, and we have a clever little servant who is de--cidedly
pretty, and we are economical and orderly, and do everything by
clockwork, and we have a hundred and fifty pounds a year, and we
have all we want, and more. And lastly, if you would like to know in
confidence, as perhaps you may, what is my opinion of my husband, my
opinion is--that I almost love him!’

‘And if you would like to know in confidence, as perhaps you may,’
said her husband, smiling, as he stood by her side, without her having
detected his approach, ‘my opinion of my wife, my opinion is--.’ But
Bella started up, and put her hand upon his lips.

‘Stop, Sir! No, John, dear! Seriously! Please not yet a while! I want to
be something so much worthier than the doll in the doll’s house.’

‘My darling, are you not?’

‘Not half, not a quarter, so much worthier as I hope you may some
day find me! Try me through some reverse, John--try me through some
trial--and tell them after THAT, what you think of me.’

‘I will, my Life,’ said John. ‘I promise it.’

‘That’s my dear John. And you won’t speak a word now; will you?’

‘And I won’t,’ said John, with a very expressive look of admiration
around him, ‘speak a word now!’

She laid her laughing cheek upon his breast to thank him, and said,
looking at the rest of them sideways out of her bright eyes: ‘I’ll go
further, Pa and Ma and Lavvy. John don’t suspect it--he has no idea of
it--but I quite love him!’

Even Mrs Wilfer relaxed under the influence of her married daughter, and
seemed in a majestic manner to imply remotely that if R. W. had been a
more deserving object, she too might have condescended to come down from
her pedestal for his beguilement. Miss Lavinia, on the other hand, had
strong doubts of the policy of the course of treatment, and whether it
might not spoil Mr Sampson, if experimented on in the case of that young
gentleman. R. W. himself was for his part convinced that he was father
of one of the most charming of girls, and that Rokesmith was the most
favoured of men; which opinion, if propounded to him, Rokesmith would
probably not have contested.

The newly-married pair left early, so that they might walk at leisure to
their starting-place from London, for Greenwich. At first they were
very cheerful and talked much; but after a while, Bella fancied that her
husband was turning somewhat thoughtful. So she asked him:

‘John dear, what’s the matter?’

‘Matter, my love?’

‘Won’t you tell me,’ said Bella, looking up into his face, ‘what you are
thinking of?’

‘There’s not much in the thought, my soul. I was thinking whether you
wouldn’t like me to be rich?’

‘You rich, John?’ repeated Bella, shrinking a little.

‘I mean, really rich. Say, as rich as Mr Boffin. You would like that?’

‘I should be almost afraid to try, John dear. Was he much the better for
his wealth? Was I much the better for the little part I once had in it?’

‘But all people are not the worse for riches, my own.’

‘Most people?’ Bella musingly suggested with raised eyebrows.

‘Nor even most people, it may be hoped. If you were rich, for instance,
you would have a great power of doing good to others.’

‘Yes, sir, for instance,’ Bella playfully rejoined; ‘but should I
exercise the power, for instance? And again, sir, for instance; should
I, at the same time, have a great power of doing harm to myself?’

Laughing and pressing her arm, he retorted: ‘But still, again for
instance; would you exercise that power?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Bella, thoughtfully shaking her head. ‘I hope not.
I think not. But it’s so easy to hope not and think not, without the
riches.’

‘Why don’t you say, my darling--instead of that phrase--being poor?’ he
asked, looking earnestly at her.

‘Why don’t I say, being poor! Because I am not poor. Dear John, it’s not
possible that you suppose I think we are poor?’

‘I do, my love.’

‘Oh John!’

‘Understand me, sweetheart. I know that I am rich beyond all wealth in
having you; but I think OF you, and think FOR you. In such a dress as
you are wearing now, you first charmed me, and in no dress could you
ever look, to my thinking, more graceful or more beautiful. But you have
admired many finer dresses this very day; and is it not natural that I
wish I could give them to you?’

‘It’s very nice that you should wish it, John. It brings these tears of
grateful pleasure into my eyes, to hear you say so with such tenderness.
But I don’t want them.’

‘Again,’ he pursued, ‘we are now walking through the muddy streets. I
love those pretty feet so dearly, that I feel as if I could not bear the
dirt to soil the sole of your shoe. Is it not natural that I wish you
could ride in a carriage?’

‘It’s very nice,’ said Bella, glancing downward at the feet in question,
‘to know that you admire them so much, John dear, and since you do, I
am sorry that these shoes are a full size too large. But I don’t want a
carriage, believe me.’

‘You would like one if you could have one, Bella?’

‘I shouldn’t like it for its own sake, half so well as such a wish for
it. Dear John, your wishes are as real to me as the wishes in the Fairy
story, that were all fulfilled as soon as spoken. Wish me everything
that you can wish for the woman you dearly love, and I have as good as
got it, John. I have better than got it, John!’

They were not the less happy for such talk, and home was not the less
home for coming after it. Bella was fast developing a perfect genius
for home. All the loves and graces seemed (her husband thought) to have
taken domestic service with her, and to help her to make home engaging.

Her married life glided happily on. She was alone all day, for, after an
early breakfast her husband repaired every morning to the City, and did
not return until their late dinner hour. He was ‘in a China house,’ he
explained to Bella: which she found quite satisfactory, without pursuing
the China house into minuter details than a wholesale vision of tea,
rice, odd-smelling silks, carved boxes, and tight-eyed people in more
than double-soled shoes, with their pigtails pulling their heads of
hair off, painted on transparent porcelain. She always walked with her
husband to the railroad, and was always there again to meet him; her old
coquettish ways a little sobered down (but not much), and her dress
as daintily managed as if she managed nothing else. But, John gone to
business and Bella returned home, the dress would be laid aside, trim
little wrappers and aprons would be substituted, and Bella, putting back
her hair with both hands, as if she were making the most business-like
arrangements for going dramatically distracted, would enter on the
household affairs of the day. Such weighing and mixing and chopping
and grating, such dusting and washing and polishing, such snipping
and weeding and trowelling and other small gardening, such making and
mending and folding and airing, such diverse arrangements, and above all
such severe study! For Mrs J. R., who had never been wont to do too much
at home as Miss B. W., was under the constant necessity of referring for
advice and support to a sage volume entitled The Complete British Family
Housewife, which she would sit consulting, with her elbows on the table
and her temples on her hands, like some perplexed enchantress poring
over the Black Art. This, principally because the Complete British
Housewife, however sound a Briton at heart, was by no means an expert
Briton at expressing herself with clearness in the British tongue,
and sometimes might have issued her directions to equal purpose in the
Kamskatchan language. In any crisis of this nature, Bella would suddenly
exclaim aloud, ‘Oh you ridiculous old thing, what do you mean by that?
You must have been drinking!’ And having made this marginal note, would
try the Housewife again, with all her dimples screwed into an expression
of profound research.

There was likewise a coolness on the part of the British Housewife,
which Mrs John Rokesmith found highly exasperating. She would say,
‘Take a salamander,’ as if a general should command a private to catch
a Tartar. Or, she would casually issue the order, ‘Throw in a handful--’
of something entirely unattainable. In these, the Housewife’s most
glaring moments of unreason, Bella would shut her up and knock her on
the table, apostrophising her with the compliment, ‘O you ARE a stupid
old Donkey! Where am I to get it, do you think?’

Another branch of study claimed the attention of Mrs John Rokesmith for
a regular period every day. This was the mastering of the newspaper, so
that she might be close up with John on general topics when John came
home. In her desire to be in all things his companion, she would have
set herself with equal zeal to master Algebra, or Euclid, if he had
divided his soul between her and either. Wonderful was the way in which
she would store up the City Intelligence, and beamingly shed it
upon John in the course of the evening; incidentally mentioning the
commodities that were looking up in the markets, and how much gold had
been taken to the Bank, and trying to look wise and serious over it
until she would laugh at herself most charmingly and would say, kissing
him: ‘It all comes of my love, John dear.’

For a City man, John certainly did appear to care as little as might be
for the looking up or looking down of things, as well as for the gold
that got taken to the Bank. But he cared, beyond all expression, for his
wife, as a most precious and sweet commodity that was always looking up,
and that never was worth less than all the gold in the world. And she,
being inspired by her affection, and having a quick wit and a fine ready
instinct, made amazing progress in her domestic efficiency, though,
as an endearing creature, she made no progress at all. This was her
husband’s verdict, and he justified it by telling her that she had begun
her married life as the most endearing creature that could possibly be.

‘And you have such a cheerful spirit!’ he said, fondly. ‘You are like a
bright light in the house.’

‘Am I truly, John?’

‘Are you truly? Yes, indeed. Only much more, and much better.’

‘Do you know, John dear,’ said Bella, taking him by a button of his
coat, ‘that I sometimes, at odd moments--don’t laugh, John, please.’

Nothing should induce John to do it, when she asked him not to do it.

‘--That I sometimes think, John, I feel a little serious.’

‘Are you too much alone, my darling?’

‘O dear, no, John! The time is so short that I have not a moment too
much in the week.’

‘Why serious, my life, then? When serious?’

‘When I laugh, I think,’ said Bella, laughing as she laid her head upon
his shoulder. ‘You wouldn’t believe, sir, that I feel serious now? But I
do.’ And she laughed again, and something glistened in her eyes.

‘Would you like to be rich, pet?’ he asked her coaxingly.

‘Rich, John! How CAN you ask such goose’s questions?’

‘Do you regret anything, my love?’

‘Regret anything? No!’ Bella confidently answered. But then, suddenly
changing, she said, between laughing and glistening: ‘Oh yes, I do
though. I regret Mrs Boffin.’

‘I, too, regret that separation very much. But perhaps it is only
temporary. Perhaps things may so fall out, as that you may sometimes see
her again--as that we may sometimes see her again.’ Bella might be very
anxious on the subject, but she scarcely seemed so at the moment. With
an absent air, she was investigating that button on her husband’s coat,
when Pa came in to spend the evening.

Pa had his special chair and his special corner reserved for him on
all occasions, and--without disparagement of his domestic joys--was far
happier there, than anywhere. It was always pleasantly droll to see Pa
and Bella together; but on this present evening her husband thought her
more than usually fantastic with him.

‘You are a very good little boy,’ said Bella, ‘to come unexpectedly,
as soon as you could get out of school. And how have they used you at
school to-day, you dear?’

‘Well, my pet,’ replied the cherub, smiling and rubbing his hands as she
sat him down in his chair, ‘I attend two schools. There’s the Mincing
Lane establishment, and there’s your mother’s Academy. Which might you
mean, my dear?’

‘Both,’ said Bella.

‘Both, eh? Why, to say the truth, both have taken a little out of me
to-day, my dear, but that was to be expected. There’s no royal road to
learning; and what is life but learning!’

‘And what do you do with yourself when you have got your learning by
heart, you silly child?’

‘Why then, my dear,’ said the cherub, after a little consideration, ‘I
suppose I die.’

‘You are a very bad boy,’ retorted Bella, ‘to talk about dismal things
and be out of spirits.’

‘My Bella,’ rejoined her father, ‘I am not out of spirits. I am as gay
as a lark.’ Which his face confirmed.

‘Then if you are sure and certain it’s not you, I suppose it must be
I,’ said Bella; ‘so I won’t do so any more. John dear, we must give this
little fellow his supper, you know.’

‘Of course we must, my darling.’

‘He has been grubbing and grubbing at school,’ said Bella, looking at
her father’s hand and lightly slapping it, ‘till he’s not fit to be
seen. O what a grubby child!’

‘Indeed, my dear,’ said her father, ‘I was going to ask to be allowed to
wash my hands, only you find me out so soon.’

‘Come here, sir!’ cried Bella, taking him by the front of his coat,
‘come here and be washed directly. You are not to be trusted to do it
for yourself. Come here, sir!’

The cherub, to his genial amusement, was accordingly conducted to a
little washing-room, where Bella soaped his face and rubbed his face,
and soaped his hands and rubbed his hands, and splashed him and rinsed
him and towelled him, until he was as red as beet-root, even to his very
ears: ‘Now you must be brushed and combed, sir,’ said Bella, busily.
‘Hold the light, John. Shut your eyes, sir, and let me take hold of your
chin. Be good directly, and do as you are told!’

Her father being more than willing to obey, she dressed his hair in her
most elaborate manner, brushing it out straight, parting it, winding it
over her fingers, sticking it up on end, and constantly falling back on
John to get a good look at the effect of it. Who always received her
on his disengaged arm, and detained her, while the patient cherub stood
waiting to be finished.

‘There!’ said Bella, when she had at last completed the final touches.
‘Now, you are something like a genteel boy! Put your jacket on, and come
and have your supper.’

The cherub investing himself with his coat was led back to his
corner--where, but for having no egotism in his pleasant nature, he
would have answered well enough for that radiant though self-sufficient
boy, Jack Horner--Bella with her own hands laid a cloth for him, and
brought him his supper on a tray. ‘Stop a moment,’ said she, ‘we must
keep his little clothes clean;’ and tied a napkin under his chin, in a
very methodical manner.

While he took his supper, Bella sat by him, sometimes admonishing him
to hold his fork by the handle, like a polite child, and at other times
carving for him, or pouring out his drink. Fantastic as it all was, and
accustomed as she ever had been to make a plaything of her good father,
ever delighted that she should put him to that account, still there was
an occasional something on Bella’s part that was new. It could not be
said that she was less playful, whimsical, or natural, than she always
had been; but it seemed, her husband thought, as if there were some
rather graver reason than he had supposed for what she had so lately
said, and as if throughout all this, there were glimpses of an
underlying seriousness.

It was a circumstance in support of this view of the case, that when she
had lighted her father’s pipe, and mixed him his glass of grog, she sat
down on a stool between her father and her husband, leaning her arm upon
the latter, and was very quiet. So quiet, that when her father rose to
take his leave, she looked round with a start, as if she had forgotten
his being there.

‘You go a little way with Pa, John?’

‘Yes, my dear. Do you?’

‘I have not written to Lizzie Hexam since I wrote and told her that I
really had a lover--a whole one. I have often thought I would like to
tell her how right she was when she pretended to read in the live coals
that I would go through fire and water for him. I am in the humour to
tell her so to-night, John, and I’ll stay at home and do it.’

‘You are tired.’

‘Not at all tired, John dear, but in the humour to write to Lizzie. Good
night, dear Pa. Good night, you dear, good, gentle Pa!’

Left to herself she sat down to write, and wrote Lizzie a long letter.
She had but completed it and read it over, when her husband came back.
‘You are just in time, sir,’ said Bella; ‘I am going to give you your
first curtain lecture. It shall be a parlour-curtain lecture. You shall
take this chair of mine when I have folded my letter, and I will take
the stool (though you ought to take it, I can tell you, sir, if it’s
the stool of repentance), and you’ll soon find yourself taken to task
soundly.’

Her letter folded, sealed, and directed, and her pen wiped, and her
middle finger wiped, and her desk locked up and put away, and these
transactions performed with an air of severe business sedateness, which
the Complete British Housewife might have assumed, and certainly would
not have rounded off and broken down in with a musical laugh, as Bella
did: she placed her husband in his chair, and placed herself upon her
stool.

‘Now, sir! To begin at the beginning. What is your name?’

A question more decidedly rushing at the secret he was keeping from
her, could not have astounded him. But he kept his countenance and his
secret, and answered, ‘John Rokesmith, my dear.’

‘Good boy! Who gave you that name?’

With a returning suspicion that something might have betrayed him to
her, he answered, interrogatively, ‘My godfathers and my godmothers,
dear love?’

‘Pretty good!’ said Bella. ‘Not goodest good, because you hesitate about
it. However, as you know your Catechism fairly, so far, I’ll let you off
the rest. Now, I am going to examine you out of my own head. John dear,
why did you go back, this evening, to the question you once asked me
before--would I like to be rich?’

Again, his secret! He looked down at her as she looked up at him, with
her hands folded on his knee, and it was as nearly told as ever secret
was.

Having no reply ready, he could do no better than embrace her.

‘In short, dear John,’ said Bella, ‘this is the topic of my lecture: I
want nothing on earth, and I want you to believe it.’

‘If that’s all, the lecture may be considered over, for I do.’

‘It’s not all, John dear,’ Bella hesitated. ‘It’s only Firstly. There’s
a dreadful Secondly, and a dreadful Thirdly to come--as I used to say to
myself in sermon-time when I was a very small-sized sinner at church.’

‘Let them come, my dearest.’

‘Are you sure, John dear; are you absolutely certain in your innermost
heart of hearts--?’

‘Which is not in my keeping,’ he rejoined.

‘No, John, but the key is.--Are you absolutely certain that down at the
bottom of that heart of hearts, which you have given to me as I
have given mine to you, there is no remembrance that I was once very
mercenary?’

‘Why, if there were no remembrance in me of the time you speak of,’ he
softly asked her with his lips to hers, ‘could I love you quite as well
as I do; could I have in the Calendar of my life the brightest of its
days; could I whenever I look at your dear face, or hear your dear
voice, see and hear my noble champion? It can never have been that which
made you serious, darling?’

‘No John, it wasn’t that, and still less was it Mrs Boffin, though I
love her. Wait a moment, and I’ll go on with the lecture. Give me a
moment, because I like to cry for joy. It’s so delicious, John dear, to
cry for joy.’

She did so on his neck, and, still clinging there, laughed a little when
she said, ‘I think I am ready now for Thirdly, John.’

‘I am ready for Thirdly,’ said John, ‘whatever it is.’

‘I believe, John,’ pursued Bella, ‘that you believe that I believe--’

‘My dear child,’ cried her husband gaily, ‘what a quantity of
believing!’

‘Isn’t there?’ said Bella, with another laugh. ‘I never knew such a
quantity! It’s like verbs in an exercise. But I can’t get on with less
believing. I’ll try again. I believe, dear John, that you believe that
I believe that we have as much money as we require, and that we want for
nothing.’

‘It is strictly true, Bella.’

‘But if our money should by any means be rendered not so much--if we
had to stint ourselves a little in purchases that we can afford to
make now--would you still have the same confidence in my being quite
contented, John?’

‘Precisely the same confidence, my soul.’

‘Thank you, John dear, thousands upon thousands of times. And I may take
it for granted, no doubt,’ with a little faltering, ‘that you would be
quite as contented yourself John? But, yes, I know I may. For, knowing
that I should be so, how surely I may know that you would be so; you who
are so much stronger, and firmer, and more reasonable and more generous,
than I am.’

‘Hush!’ said her husband, ‘I must not hear that. You are all wrong
there, though otherwise as right as can be. And now I am brought to a
little piece of news, my dearest, that I might have told you earlier
in the evening. I have strong reason for confidently believing that
we shall never be in the receipt of a smaller income than our present
income.’

She might have shown herself more interested in the intelligence;
but she had returned to the investigation of the coat-button that had
engaged her attention a few hours before, and scarcely seemed to heed
what he said.

‘And now we have got to the bottom of it at last,’ cried her husband,
rallying her, ‘and this is the thing that made you serious?’

‘No dear,’ said Bella, twisting the button and shaking her head, ‘it
wasn’t this.’

‘Why then, Lord bless this little wife of mine, there’s a Fourthly!’
exclaimed John.

‘This worried me a little, and so did Secondly,’ said Bella, occupied
with the button, ‘but it was quite another sort of seriousness--a much
deeper and quieter sort of seriousness--that I spoke of John dear.’

As he bent his face to hers, she raised hers to meet it, and laid her
little right hand on his eyes, and kept it there.

‘Do you remember, John, on the day we were married, Pa’s speaking of the
ships that might be sailing towards us from the unknown seas?’

‘Perfectly, my darling!’

‘I think...among them...there is a ship upon the ocean...bringing...to
you and me...a little baby, John.’



Chapter 6

A CRY FOR HELP


The Paper Mill had stopped work for the night, and the paths and roads
in its neighbourhood were sprinkled with clusters of people going home
from their day’s labour in it. There were men, women, and children in
the groups, and there was no want of lively colour to flutter in the
gentle evening wind. The mingling of various voices and the sound of
laughter made a cheerful impression upon the ear, analogous to that of
the fluttering colours upon the eye. Into the sheet of water reflecting
the flushed sky in the foreground of the living picture, a knot of
urchins were casting stones, and watching the expansion of the rippling
circles. So, in the rosy evening, one might watch the ever-widening
beauty of the landscape--beyond the newly-released workers wending
home--beyond the silver river--beyond the deep green fields of corn, so
prospering, that the loiterers in their narrow threads of pathway seemed
to float immersed breast-high--beyond the hedgerows and the clumps of
trees--beyond the windmills on the ridge--away to where the sky appeared
to meet the earth, as if there were no immensity of space between
mankind and Heaven.

It was a Saturday evening, and at such a time the village dogs, always
much more interested in the doings of humanity than in the affairs of
their own species, were particularly active. At the general shop, at
the butcher’s and at the public-house, they evinced an inquiring spirit
never to be satiated. Their especial interest in the public-house would
seem to imply some latent rakishness in the canine character; for little
was eaten there, and they, having no taste for beer or tobacco (Mrs
Hubbard’s dog is said to have smoked, but proof is wanting), could only
have been attracted by sympathy with loose convivial habits. Moreover,
a most wretched fiddle played within; a fiddle so unutterably vile, that
one lean long-bodied cur, with a better ear than the rest, found himself
under compulsion at intervals to go round the corner and howl. Yet, even
he returned to the public-house on each occasion with the tenacity of a
confirmed drunkard.

Fearful to relate, there was even a sort of little Fair in the village.
Some despairing gingerbread that had been vainly trying to dispose of
itself all over the country, and had cast a quantity of dust upon its
head in its mortification, again appealed to the public from an infirm
booth. So did a heap of nuts, long, long exiled from Barcelona, and yet
speaking English so indifferently as to call fourteen of themselves
a pint. A Peep-show which had originally started with the Battle of
Waterloo, and had since made it every other battle of later date
by altering the Duke of Wellington’s nose, tempted the student of
illustrated history. A Fat Lady, perhaps in part sustained upon
postponed pork, her professional associate being a Learned Pig,
displayed her life-size picture in a low dress as she appeared when
presented at Court, several yards round. All this was a vicious
spectacle as any poor idea of amusement on the part of the rougher
hewers of wood and drawers of water in this land of England ever is and
shall be. They MUST NOT vary the rheumatism with amusement. They may
vary it with fever and ague, or with as many rheumatic variations as
they have joints; but positively not with entertainment after their own
manner.

The various sounds arising from this scene of depravity, and floating
away into the still evening air, made the evening, at any point which
they just reached fitfully, mellowed by the distance, more still by
contrast. Such was the stillness of the evening to Eugene Wrayburn, as
he walked by the river with his hands behind him.

He walked slowly, and with the measured step and preoccupied air of one
who was waiting. He walked between the two points, an osier-bed at this
end and some floating lilies at that, and at each point stopped and
looked expectantly in one direction.

‘It is very quiet,’ said he.

It was very quiet. Some sheep were grazing on the grass by the
river-side, and it seemed to him that he had never before heard the
crisp tearing sound with which they cropped it. He stopped idly, and
looked at them.

‘You are stupid enough, I suppose. But if you are clever enough to get
through life tolerably to your satisfaction, you have got the better of
me, Man as I am, and Mutton as you are!’

A rustle in a field beyond the hedge attracted his attention. ‘What’s
here to do?’ he asked himself leisurely going towards the gate and
looking over. ‘No jealous paper-miller? No pleasures of the chase in
this part of the country? Mostly fishing hereabouts!’

The field had been newly mown, and there were yet the marks of the
scythe on the yellow-green ground, and the track of wheels where the hay
had been carried. Following the tracks with his eyes, the view closed
with the new hayrick in a corner.

Now, if he had gone on to the hayrick, and gone round it? But, say
that the event was to be, as the event fell out, and how idle are such
suppositions! Besides, if he had gone; what is there of warning in a
Bargeman lying on his face?

‘A bird flying to the hedge,’ was all he thought about it; and came
back, and resumed his walk.

‘If I had not a reliance on her being truthful,’ said Eugene, after
taking some half-dozen turns, ‘I should begin to think she had given me
the slip for the second time. But she promised, and she is a girl of her
word.’

Turning again at the water-lilies, he saw her coming, and advanced to
meet her.

‘I was saying to myself, Lizzie, that you were sure to come, though you
were late.’

‘I had to linger through the village as if I had no object before me,
and I had to speak to several people in passing along, Mr Wrayburn.’

‘Are the lads of the village--and the ladies--such scandal-mongers?’ he
asked, as he took her hand and drew it through his arm.

She submitted to walk slowly on, with downcast eyes. He put her hand to
his lips, and she quietly drew it away.

‘Will you walk beside me, Mr Wrayburn, and not touch me?’ For, his arm
was already stealing round her waist.

She stopped again, and gave him an earnest supplicating look. ‘Well,
Lizzie, well!’ said he, in an easy way though ill at ease with himself
‘don’t be unhappy, don’t be reproachful.’

‘I cannot help being unhappy, but I do not mean to be reproachful. Mr
Wrayburn, I implore you to go away from this neighbourhood, to-morrow
morning.’

‘Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie!’ he remonstrated. ‘As well be reproachful as
wholly unreasonable. I can’t go away.’

‘Why not?’

‘Faith!’ said Eugene in his airily candid manner. ‘Because you won’t let
me. Mind! I don’t mean to be reproachful either. I don’t complain that
you design to keep me here. But you do it, you do it.’

‘Will you walk beside me, and not touch me;’ for, his arm was coming
about her again; ‘while I speak to you very seriously, Mr Wrayburn?’

‘I will do anything within the limits of possibility, for you, Lizzie,’
he answered with pleasant gaiety as he folded his arms. ‘See here!
Napoleon Buonaparte at St Helena.’

‘When you spoke to me as I came from the Mill the night before last,’
said Lizzie, fixing her eyes upon him with the look of supplication
which troubled his better nature, ‘you told me that you were much
surprised to see me, and that you were on a solitary fishing excursion.
Was it true?’

‘It was not,’ replied Eugene composedly, ‘in the least true. I came
here, because I had information that I should find you here.’

‘Can you imagine why I left London, Mr Wrayburn?’

‘I am afraid, Lizzie,’ he openly answered, ‘that you left London to get
rid of me. It is not flattering to my self-love, but I am afraid you
did.’

‘I did.’

‘How could you be so cruel?’

‘O Mr Wrayburn,’ she answered, suddenly breaking into tears, ‘is the
cruelty on my side! O Mr Wrayburn, Mr Wrayburn, is there no cruelty in
your being here to-night!’

‘In the name of all that’s good--and that is not conjuring you in my
own name, for Heaven knows I am not good’--said Eugene, ‘don’t be
distressed!’

‘What else can I be, when I know the distance and the difference between
us? What else can I be, when to tell me why you came here, is to put me
to shame!’ said Lizzie, covering her face.

He looked at her with a real sentiment of remorseful tenderness and
pity. It was not strong enough to impell him to sacrifice himself and
spare her, but it was a strong emotion.

‘Lizzie! I never thought before, that there was a woman in the world who
could affect me so much by saying so little. But don’t be hard in your
construction of me. You don’t know what my state of mind towards you is.
You don’t know how you haunt me and bewilder me. You don’t know how the
cursed carelessness that is over-officious in helping me at every other
turning of my life, WON’T help me here. You have struck it dead, I
think, and I sometimes almost wish you had struck me dead along with
it.’

She had not been prepared for such passionate expressions, and they
awakened some natural sparks of feminine pride and joy in her breast. To
consider, wrong as he was, that he could care so much for her, and that
she had the power to move him so!

‘It grieves you to see me distressed, Mr Wrayburn; it grieves me to see
you distressed. I don’t reproach you. Indeed I don’t reproach you.
You have not felt this as I feel it, being so different from me, and
beginning from another point of view. You have not thought. But I
entreat you to think now, think now!’

‘What am I to think of?’ asked Eugene, bitterly.

‘Think of me.’

‘Tell me how NOT to think of you, Lizzie, and you’ll change me
altogether.’

‘I don’t mean in that way. Think of me, as belonging to another station,
and quite cut off from you in honour. Remember that I have no protector
near me, unless I have one in your noble heart. Respect my good name.
If you feel towards me, in one particular, as you might if I was a lady,
give me the full claims of a lady upon your generous behaviour. I am
removed from you and your family by being a working girl. How true a
gentleman to be as considerate of me as if I was removed by being a
Queen!’

He would have been base indeed to have stood untouched by her appeal.
His face expressed contrition and indecision as he asked:

‘Have I injured you so much, Lizzie?’

‘No, no. You may set me quite right. I don’t speak of the past, Mr
Wrayburn, but of the present and the future. Are we not here now,
because through two days you have followed me so closely where there
are so many eyes to see you, that I consented to this appointment as an
escape?’

‘Again, not very flattering to my self-love,’ said Eugene, moodily; ‘but
yes. Yes. Yes.’

‘Then I beseech you, Mr Wrayburn, I beg and pray you, leave this
neighbourhood. If you do not, consider to what you will drive me.’

He did consider within himself for a moment or two, and then retorted,
‘Drive you? To what shall I drive you, Lizzie?’

‘You will drive me away. I live here peacefully and respected, and I am
well employed here. You will force me to quit this place as I quitted
London, and--by following me again--will force me to quit the next place
in which I may find refuge, as I quitted this.’

‘Are you so determined, Lizzie--forgive the word I am going to use, for
its literal truth--to fly from a lover?’

‘I am so determined,’ she answered resolutely, though trembling, ‘to fly
from such a lover. There was a poor woman died here but a little while
ago, scores of years older than I am, whom I found by chance, lying on
the wet earth. You may have heard some account of her?’

‘I think I have,’ he answered, ‘if her name was Higden.’

‘Her name was Higden. Though she was so weak and old, she kept true to
one purpose to the very last. Even at the very last, she made me promise
that her purpose should be kept to, after she was dead, so settled
was her determination. What she did, I can do. Mr Wrayburn, if I
believed--but I do not believe--that you could be so cruel to me as
to drive me from place to place to wear me out, you should drive me to
death and not do it.’

He looked full at her handsome face, and in his own handsome face there
was a light of blended admiration, anger, and reproach, which she--who
loved him so in secret whose heart had long been so full, and he the
cause of its overflowing--drooped before. She tried hard to retain her
firmness, but he saw it melting away under his eyes. In the moment of
its dissolution, and of his first full knowledge of his influence upon
her, she dropped, and he caught her on his arm.

‘Lizzie! Rest so a moment. Answer what I ask you. If I had not been what
you call removed from you and cut off from you, would you have made this
appeal to me to leave you?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know. Don’t ask me, Mr Wrayburn. Let me go back.’

‘I swear to you, Lizzie, you shall go directly. I swear to you, you
shall go alone. I’ll not accompany you, I’ll not follow you, if you will
reply.’

‘How can I, Mr Wrayburn? How can I tell you what I should have done, if
you had not been what you are?’

‘If I had not been what you make me out to be,’ he struck in, skilfully
changing the form of words, ‘would you still have hated me?’

‘O Mr Wrayburn,’ she replied appealingly, and weeping, ‘you know me
better than to think I do!’

‘If I had not been what you make me out to be, Lizzie, would you still
have been indifferent to me?’

‘O Mr Wrayburn,’ she answered as before, ‘you know me better than that
too!’

There was something in the attitude of her whole figure as he supported
it, and she hung her head, which besought him to be merciful and not
force her to disclose her heart. He was not merciful with her, and he
made her do it.

‘If I know you better than quite to believe (unfortunate dog though I
am!) that you hate me, or even that you are wholly indifferent to me,
Lizzie, let me know so much more from yourself before we separate. Let
me know how you would have dealt with me if you had regarded me as being
what you would have considered on equal terms with you.’

‘It is impossible, Mr Wrayburn. How can I think of you as being on equal
terms with me? If my mind could put you on equal terms with me, you
could not be yourself. How could I remember, then, the night when I
first saw you, and when I went out of the room because you looked at
me so attentively? Or, the night that passed into the morning when you
broke to me that my father was dead? Or, the nights when you used to
come to see me at my next home? Or, your having known how uninstructed
I was, and having caused me to be taught better? Or, my having so looked
up to you and wondered at you, and at first thought you so good to be at
all mindful of me?’

‘Only “at first” thought me so good, Lizzie? What did you think me after
“at first”? So bad?’

‘I don’t say that. I don’t mean that. But after the first wonder and
pleasure of being noticed by one so different from any one who had ever
spoken to me, I began to feel that it might have been better if I had
never seen you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you WERE so different,’ she answered in a lower voice. ‘Because
it was so endless, so hopeless. Spare me!’

‘Did you think for me at all, Lizzie?’ he asked, as if he were a little
stung.

‘Not much, Mr Wrayburn. Not much until to-night.’

‘Will you tell me why?’

‘I never supposed until to-night that you needed to be thought for. But
if you do need to be; if you do truly feel at heart that you have indeed
been towards me what you have called yourself to-night, and that there
is nothing for us in this life but separation; then Heaven help you, and
Heaven bless you!’

The purity with which in these words she expressed something of her
own love and her own suffering, made a deep impression on him for the
passing time. He held her, almost as if she were sanctified to him by
death, and kissed her, once, almost as he might have kissed the dead.

‘I promised that I would not accompany you, nor follow you. Shall I keep
you in view? You have been agitated, and it’s growing dark.’

‘I am used to be out alone at this hour, and I entreat you not to do
so.’

‘I promise. I can bring myself to promise nothing more tonight, Lizzie,
except that I will try what I can do.’

‘There is but one means, Mr Wrayburn, of sparing yourself and of sparing
me, every way. Leave this neighbourhood to-morrow morning.’

‘I will try.’

As he spoke the words in a grave voice, she put her hand in his, removed
it, and went away by the river-side.

‘Now, could Mortimer believe this?’ murmured Eugene, still remaining,
after a while, where she had left him. ‘Can I even believe it myself?’

He referred to the circumstance that there were tears upon his hand,
as he stood covering his eyes. ‘A most ridiculous position this, to be
found out in!’ was his next thought. And his next struck its root in a
little rising resentment against the cause of the tears.

‘Yet I have gained a wonderful power over her, too, let her be as much
in earnest as she will!’

The reflection brought back the yielding of her face and form as she
had drooped under his gaze. Contemplating the reproduction, he seemed
to see, for the second time, in the appeal and in the confession of
weakness, a little fear.

‘And she loves me. And so earnest a character must be very earnest in
that passion. She cannot choose for herself to be strong in this fancy,
wavering in that, and weak in the other. She must go through with her
nature, as I must go through with mine. If mine exacts its pains and
penalties all round, so must hers, I suppose.’

Pursuing the inquiry into his own nature, he thought, ‘Now, if I married
her. If, outfacing the absurdity of the situation in correspondence with
M. R. F., I astonished M. R. F. to the utmost extent of his respected
powers, by informing him that I had married her, how would M. R. F.
reason with the legal mind? “You wouldn’t marry for some money and some
station, because you were frightfully likely to become bored. Are you
less frightfully likely to become bored, marrying for no money and no
station? Are you sure of yourself?” Legal mind, in spite of forensic
protestations, must secretly admit, “Good reasoning on the part of M. R.
F. NOT sure of myself.”’

In the very act of calling this tone of levity to his aid, he felt it to
be profligate and worthless, and asserted her against it.

‘And yet,’ said Eugene, ‘I should like to see the fellow (Mortimer
excepted) who would undertake to tell me that this was not a real
sentiment on my part, won out of me by her beauty and her worth,
in spite of myself, and that I would not be true to her. I should
particularly like to see the fellow to-night who would tell me so, or
who would tell me anything that could be construed to her disadvantage;
for I am wearily out of sorts with one Wrayburn who cuts a sorry figure,
and I would far rather be out of sorts with somebody else. “Eugene,
Eugene, Eugene, this is a bad business.” Ah! So go the Mortimer
Lightwood bells, and they sound melancholy to-night.’

Strolling on, he thought of something else to take himself to task for.
‘Where is the analogy, Brute Beast,’ he said impatiently, ‘between a
woman whom your father coolly finds out for you and a woman whom you
have found out for yourself, and have ever drifted after with more and
more of constancy since you first set eyes upon her? Ass! Can you reason
no better than that?’

But, again he subsided into a reminiscence of his first full knowledge
of his power just now, and of her disclosure of her heart. To try no
more to go away, and to try her again, was the reckless conclusion it
turned uppermost. And yet again, ‘Eugene, Eugene, Eugene, this is a bad
business!’ And, ‘I wish I could stop the Lightwood peal, for it sounds
like a knell.’

Looking above, he found that the young moon was up, and that the stars
were beginning to shine in the sky from which the tones of red and
yellow were flickering out, in favour of the calm blue of a summer
night. He was still by the river-side. Turning suddenly, he met a man,
so close upon him that Eugene, surprised, stepped back, to avoid a
collision. The man carried something over his shoulder which might
have been a broken oar, or spar, or bar, and took no notice of him, but
passed on.

‘Halloa, friend!’ said Eugene, calling after him, ‘are you blind?’

The man made no reply, but went his way.

Eugene Wrayburn went the opposite way, with his hands behind him and his
purpose in his thoughts. He passed the sheep, and passed the gate, and
came within hearing of the village sounds, and came to the bridge. The
inn where he stayed, like the village and the mill, was not across
the river, but on that side of the stream on which he walked. However,
knowing the rushy bank and the backwater on the other side to be a
retired place, and feeling out of humour for noise or company, he
crossed the bridge, and sauntered on: looking up at the stars as they
seemed one by one to be kindled in the sky, and looking down at the
river as the same stars seemed to be kindled deep in the water. A
landing-place overshadowed by a willow, and a pleasure-boat lying moored
there among some stakes, caught his eye as he passed along. The spot was
in such dark shadow, that he paused to make out what was there, and then
passed on again.

The rippling of the river seemed to cause a correspondent stir in his
uneasy reflections. He would have laid them asleep if he could, but they
were in movement, like the stream, and all tending one way with a strong
current. As the ripple under the moon broke unexpectedly now and then,
and palely flashed in a new shape and with a new sound, so parts of
his thoughts started, unbidden, from the rest, and revealed their
wickedness. ‘Out of the question to marry her,’ said Eugene, ‘and out of
the question to leave her. The crisis!’

He had sauntered far enough. Before turning to retrace his steps, he
stopped upon the margin, to look down at the reflected night. In an
instant, with a dreadful crash, the reflected night turned crooked,
flames shot jaggedly across the air, and the moon and stars came
bursting from the sky.

Was he struck by lightning? With some incoherent half-formed thought
to that effect, he turned under the blows that were blinding him and
mashing his life, and closed with a murderer, whom he caught by a red
neckerchief--unless the raining down of his own blood gave it that hue.

Eugene was light, active, and expert; but his arms were broken, or he
was paralysed, and could do no more than hang on to the man, with his
head swung back, so that he could see nothing but the heaving sky. After
dragging at the assailant, he fell on the bank with him, and then there
was another great crash, and then a splash, and all was done.

Lizzie Hexam, too, had avoided the noise, and the Saturday movement of
people in the straggling street, and chose to walk alone by the water
until her tears should be dry, and she could so compose herself as
to escape remark upon her looking ill or unhappy on going home. The
peaceful serenity of the hour and place, having no reproaches or evil
intentions within her breast to contend against, sank healingly into
its depths. She had meditated and taken comfort. She, too, was turning
homeward, when she heard a strange sound.

It startled her, for it was like a sound of blows. She stood still, and
listened. It sickened her, for blows fell heavily and cruelly on the
quiet of the night. As she listened, undecided, all was silent. As she
yet listened, she heard a faint groan, and a fall into the river.

Her old bold life and habit instantly inspired her. Without vain waste
of breath in crying for help where there were none to hear, she ran
towards the spot from which the sounds had come. It lay between her and
the bridge, but it was more removed from her than she had thought; the
night being so very quiet, and sound travelling far with the help of
water.

At length, she reached a part of the green bank, much and newly trodden,
where there lay some broken splintered pieces of wood and some torn
fragments of clothes. Stooping, she saw that the grass was bloody.
Following the drops and smears, she saw that the watery margin of the
bank was bloody. Following the current with her eyes, she saw a bloody
face turned up towards the moon, and drifting away.

Now, merciful Heaven be thanked for that old time, and grant, O Blessed
Lord, that through thy wonderful workings it may turn to good at last!
To whomsoever the drifting face belongs, be it man’s or woman’s, help
my humble hands, Lord God, to raise it from death and restore it to some
one to whom it must be dear!

It was thought, fervently thought, but not for a moment did the prayer
check her. She was away before it welled up in her mind, away, swift
and true, yet steady above all--for without steadiness it could never
be done--to the landing-place under the willow-tree, where she also had
seen the boat lying moored among the stakes.

A sure touch of her old practised hand, a sure step of her old practised
foot, a sure light balance of her body, and she was in the boat. A
quick glance of her practised eye showed her, even through the deep dark
shadow, the sculls in a rack against the red-brick garden-wall. Another
moment, and she had cast off (taking the line with her), and the boat
had shot out into the moonlight, and she was rowing down the stream as
never other woman rowed on English water.

Intently over her shoulder, without slackening speed, she looked ahead
for the driving face. She passed the scene of the struggle--yonder it
was, on her left, well over the boat’s stern--she passed on her right,
the end of the village street, a hilly street that almost dipped into
the river; its sounds were growing faint again, and she slackened;
looking as the boat drove, everywhere, everywhere, for the floating
face.

She merely kept the boat before the stream now, and rested on her oars,
knowing well that if the face were not soon visible, it had gone down,
and she would overshoot it. An untrained sight would never have seen by
the moonlight what she saw at the length of a few strokes astern. She
saw the drowning figure rise to the surface, slightly struggle, and as
if by instinct turn over on its back to float. Just so had she first
dimly seen the face which she now dimly saw again.

Firm of look and firm of purpose, she intently watched its coming on,
until it was very near; then, with a touch unshipped her sculls, and
crept aft in the boat, between kneeling and crouching. Once, she let the
body evade her, not being sure of her grasp. Twice, and she had seized
it by its bloody hair.

It was insensible, if not virtually dead; it was mutilated, and streaked
the water all about it with dark red streaks. As it could not help
itself, it was impossible for her to get it on board. She bent over the
stern to secure it with the line, and then the river and its shores rang
to the terrible cry she uttered.

But, as if possessed by supernatural spirit and strength, she lashed
it safe, resumed her seat, and rowed in, desperately, for the nearest
shallow water where she might run the boat aground. Desperately, but not
wildly, for she knew that if she lost distinctness of intention, all was
lost and gone.

She ran the boat ashore, went into the water, released him from the
line, and by main strength lifted him in her arms and laid him in the
bottom of the boat. He had fearful wounds upon him, and she bound them
up with her dress torn into strips. Else, supposing him to be still
alive, she foresaw that he must bleed to death before he could be landed
at his inn, which was the nearest place for succour.

This done very rapidly, she kissed his disfigured forehead, looked up
in anguish to the stars, and blessed him and forgave him, ‘if she had
anything to forgive.’ It was only in that instant that she thought of
herself, and then she thought of herself only for him.

Now, merciful Heaven be thanked for that old time, enabling me, without
a wasted moment, to have got the boat afloat again, and to row back
against the stream! And grant, O Blessed Lord God, that through poor me
he may be raised from death, and preserved to some one else to whom he
may be dear one day, though never dearer than to me!

She rowed hard--rowed desperately, but never wildly--and seldom removed
her eyes from him in the bottom of the boat. She had so laid him there,
as that she might see his disfigured face; it was so much disfigured
that his mother might have covered it, but it was above and beyond
disfigurement in her eyes.

The boat touched the edge of the patch of inn lawn, sloping gently to
the water. There were lights in the windows, but there chanced to be
no one out of doors. She made the boat fast, and again by main strength
took him up, and never laid him down until she laid him down in the
house.

Surgeons were sent for, and she sat supporting his head. She had
oftentimes heard in days that were gone, how doctors would lift the hand
of an insensible wounded person, and would drop it if the person were
dead. She waited for the awful moment when the doctors might lift this
hand, all broken and bruised, and let it fall.

The first of the surgeons came, and asked, before proceeding to his
examination, ‘Who brought him in?’

‘I brought him in, sir,’ answered Lizzie, at whom all present looked.

‘You, my dear? You could not lift, far less carry, this weight.’

‘I think I could not, at another time, sir; but I am sure I did.’

The surgeon looked at her with great attention, and with some
compassion. Having with a grave face touched the wounds upon the head,
and the broken arms, he took the hand.

O! would he let it drop?

He appeared irresolute. He did not retain it, but laid it gently down,
took a candle, looked more closely at the injuries on the head, and at
the pupils of the eyes. That done, he replaced the candle and took the
hand again. Another surgeon then coming in, the two exchanged a whisper,
and the second took the hand. Neither did he let it fall at once, but
kept it for a while and laid it gently down.

‘Attend to the poor girl,’ said the first surgeon then. ‘She is quite
unconscious. She sees nothing and hears nothing. All the better for
her! Don’t rouse her, if you can help it; only move her. Poor girl, poor
girl! She must be amazingly strong of heart, but it is much to be feared
that she has set her heart upon the dead. Be gentle with her.’



Chapter 7

BETTER TO BE ABEL THAN CAIN


Day was breaking at Plashwater Weir Mill Lock. Stars were yet visible,
but there was dull light in the east that was not the light of night.
The moon had gone down, and a mist crept along the banks of the river,
seen through which the trees were the ghosts of trees, and the water
was the ghost of water. This earth looked spectral, and so did the
pale stars: while the cold eastern glare, expressionless as to heat or
colour, with the eye of the firmament quenched, might have been likened
to the stare of the dead.

Perhaps it was so likened by the lonely Bargeman, standing on the brink
of the lock. For certain, Bradley Headstone looked that way, when a
chill air came up, and when it passed on murmuring, as if it
whispered something that made the phantom trees and water tremble--or
threaten--for fancy might have made it either.

He turned away, and tried the Lock-house door. It was fastened on the
inside.

‘Is he afraid of me?’ he muttered, knocking.

Rogue Riderhood was soon roused, and soon undrew the bolt and let him
in.

‘Why, T’otherest, I thought you had been and got lost! Two nights away!
I a’most believed as you’d giv’ me the slip, and I had as good as half a
mind for to advertise you in the newspapers to come for’ard.’

Bradley’s face turned so dark on this hint, that Riderhood deemed it
expedient to soften it into a compliment.

‘But not you, governor, not you,’ he went on, stolidly shaking his head.
‘For what did I say to myself arter having amused myself with that there
stretch of a comic idea, as a sort of a playful game? Why, I says to
myself; “He’s a man o’ honour.” That’s what I says to myself. “He’s a
man o’ double honour.”’

Very remarkably, Riderhood put no question to him. He had looked at him
on opening the door, and he now looked at him again (stealthily this
time), and the result of his looking was, that he asked him no question.

‘You’ll be for another forty on ‘em, governor, as I judges, afore you
turns your mind to breakfast,’ said Riderhood, when his visitor sat
down, resting his chin on his hand, with his eyes on the ground. And
very remarkably again: Riderhood feigned to set the scanty furniture in
order, while he spoke, to have a show of reason for not looking at him.

‘Yes. I had better sleep, I think,’ said Bradley, without changing his
position.

‘I myself should recommend it, governor,’ assented Riderhood. ‘Might you
be anyways dry?’

‘Yes. I should like a drink,’ said Bradley; but without appearing to
attend much.

Mr Riderhood got out his bottle, and fetched his jug-full of water,
and administered a potation. Then, he shook the coverlet of his bed and
spread it smooth, and Bradley stretched himself upon it in the clothes
he wore. Mr Riderhood poetically remarking that he would pick the bones
of his night’s rest, in his wooden chair, sat in the window as before;
but, as before, watched the sleeper narrowly until he was very sound
asleep. Then, he rose and looked at him close, in the bright daylight,
on every side, with great minuteness. He went out to his Lock to sum up
what he had seen.

‘One of his sleeves is tore right away below the elber, and the
t’other’s had a good rip at the shoulder. He’s been hung on to, pretty
tight, for his shirt’s all tore out of the neck-gathers. He’s been in
the grass and he’s been in the water. And he’s spotted, and I know with
what, and with whose. Hooroar!’

Bradley slept long. Early in the afternoon a barge came down. Other
barges had passed through, both ways, before it; but the Lock-keeper
hailed only this particular barge, for news, as if he had made a time
calculation with some nicety. The men on board told him a piece of news,
and there was a lingering on their part to enlarge upon it.

Twelve hours had intervened since Bradley’s lying down, when he got up.
‘Not that I swaller it,’ said Riderhood, squinting at his Lock, when he
saw Bradley coming out of the house, ‘as you’ve been a sleeping all the
time, old boy!’

Bradley came to him, sitting on his wooden lever, and asked what o’clock
it was? Riderhood told him it was between two and three.

‘When are you relieved?’ asked Bradley.

‘Day arter to-morrow, governor.’

‘Not sooner?’

‘Not a inch sooner, governor.’

On both sides, importance seemed attached to this question of relief.
Riderhood quite petted his reply; saying a second time, and prolonging a
negative roll of his head, ‘n--n--not a inch sooner, governor.’

‘Did I tell you I was going on to-night?’ asked Bradley.

‘No, governor,’ returned Riderhood, in a cheerful, affable, and
conversational manner, ‘you did not tell me so. But most like you meant
to it and forgot to it. How, otherways, could a doubt have come into
your head about it, governor?’

‘As the sun goes down, I intend to go on,’ said Bradley.

‘So much the more necessairy is a Peck,’ returned Riderhood. ‘Come in
and have it, T’otherest.’

The formality of spreading a tablecloth not being observed in Mr
Riderhood’s establishment, the serving of the ‘peck’ was the affair of
a moment; it merely consisting in the handing down of a capacious baking
dish with three-fourths of an immense meat pie in it, and the production
of two pocket-knives, an earthenware mug, and a large brown bottle of
beer.

Both ate and drank, but Riderhood much the more abundantly. In lieu of
plates, that honest man cut two triangular pieces from the thick crust
of the pie, and laid them, inside uppermost, upon the table: the one
before himself, and the other before his guest. Upon these platters he
placed two goodly portions of the contents of the pie, thus imparting
the unusual interest to the entertainment that each partaker scooped out
the inside of his plate, and consumed it with his other fare, besides
having the sport of pursuing the clots of congealed gravy over the plain
of the table, and successfully taking them into his mouth at last from
the blade of his knife, in case of their not first sliding off it.

Bradley Headstone was so remarkably awkward at these exercises, that the
Rogue observed it.

‘Look out, T’otherest!’ he cried, ‘you’ll cut your hand!’

But, the caution came too late, for Bradley gashed it at the instant.
And, what was more unlucky, in asking Riderhood to tie it up, and in
standing close to him for the purpose, he shook his hand under the smart
of the wound, and shook blood over Riderhood’s dress.

When dinner was done, and when what remained of the platters and what
remained of the congealed gravy had been put back into what remained of
the pie, which served as an economical investment for all miscellaneous
savings, Riderhood filled the mug with beer and took a long drink. And
now he did look at Bradley, and with an evil eye.

‘T’otherest!’ he said, hoarsely, as he bent across the table to touch
his arm. ‘The news has gone down the river afore you.’

‘What news?’

‘Who do you think,’ said Riderhood, with a hitch of his head, as if he
disdainfully jerked the feint away, ‘picked up the body? Guess.’

‘I am not good at guessing anything.’

‘She did. Hooroar! You had him there agin. She did.’

The convulsive twitching of Bradley Headstone’s face, and the sudden
hot humour that broke out upon it, showed how grimly the intelligence
touched him. But he said not a single word, good or bad. He only smiled
in a lowering manner, and got up and stood leaning at the window,
looking through it. Riderhood followed him with his eyes. Riderhood cast
down his eyes on his own besprinkled clothes. Riderhood began to have an
air of being better at a guess than Bradley owned to being.

‘I have been so long in want of rest,’ said the schoolmaster, ‘that with
your leave I’ll lie down again.’

‘And welcome, T’otherest!’ was the hospitable answer of his host. He had
laid himself down without waiting for it, and he remained upon the bed
until the sun was low. When he arose and came out to resume his journey,
he found his host waiting for him on the grass by the towing-path
outside the door.

‘Whenever it may be necessary that you and I should have any further
communication together,’ said Bradley, ‘I will come back. Good-night!’

‘Well, since no better can be,’ said Riderhood, turning on his heel,
‘Good-night!’ But he turned again as the other set forth, and added
under his breath, looking after him with a leer: ‘You wouldn’t be let to
go like that, if my Relief warn’t as good as come. I’ll catch you up in
a mile.’

In a word, his real time of relief being that evening at sunset, his
mate came lounging in, within a quarter of an hour. Not staying to fill
up the utmost margin of his time, but borrowing an hour or so, to be
repaid again when he should relieve his reliever, Riderhood straightway
followed on the track of Bradley Headstone.

He was a better follower than Bradley. It had been the calling of his
life to slink and skulk and dog and waylay, and he knew his calling
well. He effected such a forced march on leaving the Lock House that he
was close up with him--that is to say, as close up with him as he deemed
it convenient to be--before another Lock was passed. His man looked back
pretty often as he went, but got no hint of him. HE knew how to take
advantage of the ground, and where to put the hedge between them, and
where the wall, and when to duck, and when to drop, and had a thousand
arts beyond the doomed Bradley’s slow conception.

But, all his arts were brought to a standstill, like himself when
Bradley, turning into a green lane or riding by the river-side--a
solitary spot run wild in nettles, briars, and brambles, and encumbered
with the scathed trunks of a whole hedgerow of felled trees, on the
outskirts of a little wood--began stepping on these trunks and dropping
down among them and stepping on them again, apparently as a schoolboy
might have done, but assuredly with no schoolboy purpose, or want of
purpose.

‘What are you up to?’ muttered Riderhood, down in the ditch, and holding
the hedge a little open with both hands. And soon his actions made a
most extraordinary reply. ‘By George and the Draggin!’ cried Riderhood,
‘if he ain’t a going to bathe!’

He had passed back, on and among the trunks of trees again, and has
passed on to the water-side and had begun undressing on the grass. For
a moment it had a suspicious look of suicide, arranged to counterfeit
accident. ‘But you wouldn’t have fetched a bundle under your arm, from
among that timber, if such was your game!’ said Riderhood. Nevertheless
it was a relief to him when the bather after a plunge and a few strokes
came out. ‘For I shouldn’t,’ he said in a feeling manner, ‘have liked to
lose you till I had made more money out of you neither.’

Prone in another ditch (he had changed his ditch as his man had changed
his position), and holding apart so small a patch of the hedge that the
sharpest eyes could not have detected him, Rogue Riderhood watched the
bather dressing. And now gradually came the wonder that he stood up,
completely clothed, another man, and not the Bargeman.

‘Aha!’ said Riderhood. ‘Much as you was dressed that night. I see.
You’re a taking me with you, now. You’re deep. But I knows a deeper.’

When the bather had finished dressing, he kneeled on the grass, doing
something with his hands, and again stood up with his bundle under his
arm. Looking all around him with great attention, he then went to the
river’s edge, and flung it in as far, and yet as lightly as he could. It
was not until he was so decidedly upon his way again as to be beyond a
bend of the river and for the time out of view, that Riderhood scrambled
from the ditch.

‘Now,’ was his debate with himself ‘shall I foller you on, or shall I
let you loose for this once, and go a fishing?’ The debate continuing,
he followed, as a precautionary measure in any case, and got him again
in sight. ‘If I was to let you loose this once,’ said Riderhood then,
still following, ‘I could make you come to me agin, or I could find
you out in one way or another. If I wasn’t to go a fishing, others
might.--I’ll let you loose this once, and go a fishing!’ With that, he
suddenly dropped the pursuit and turned.

The miserable man whom he had released for the time, but not for long,
went on towards London. Bradley was suspicious of every sound he heard,
and of every face he saw, but was under a spell which very commonly
falls upon the shedder of blood, and had no suspicion of the real danger
that lurked in his life, and would have it yet. Riderhood was much
in his thoughts--had never been out of his thoughts since the
night-adventure of their first meeting; but Riderhood occupied a very
different place there, from the place of pursuer; and Bradley had been
at the pains of devising so many means of fitting that place to him, and
of wedging him into it, that his mind could not compass the possibility
of his occupying any other. And this is another spell against which
the shedder of blood for ever strives in vain. There are fifty doors by
which discovery may enter. With infinite pains and cunning, he double
locks and bars forty-nine of them, and cannot see the fiftieth standing
wide open.

Now, too, was he cursed with a state of mind more wearing and more
wearisome than remorse. He had no remorse; but the evildoer who can hold
that avenger at bay, cannot escape the slower torture of incessantly
doing the evil deed again and doing it more efficiently. In the
defensive declarations and pretended confessions of murderers, the
pursuing shadow of this torture may be traced through every lie they
tell. If I had done it as alleged, is it conceivable that I would have
made this and this mistake? If I had done it as alleged, should I have
left that unguarded place which that false and wicked witness against me
so infamously deposed to? The state of that wretch who continually finds
the weak spots in his own crime, and strives to strengthen them when
it is unchangeable, is a state that aggravates the offence by doing
the deed a thousand times instead of once; but it is a state, too, that
tauntingly visits the offence upon a sullen unrepentant nature with its
heaviest punishment every time.

Bradley toiled on, chained heavily to the idea of his hatred and his
vengeance, and thinking how he might have satiated both in many better
ways than the way he had taken. The instrument might have been better,
the spot and the hour might have been better chosen. To batter a man
down from behind in the dark, on the brink of a river, was well enough,
but he ought to have been instantly disabled, whereas he had turned and
seized his assailant; and so, to end it before chance-help came, and
to be rid of him, he had been hurriedly thrown backward into the river
before the life was fully beaten out of him. Now if it could be done
again, it must not be so done. Supposing his head had been held down
under water for a while. Supposing the first blow had been truer.
Supposing he had been shot. Supposing he had been strangled. Suppose
this way, that way, the other way. Suppose anything but getting
unchained from the one idea, for that was inexorably impossible.

The school reopened next day. The scholars saw little or no change in
their master’s face, for it always wore its slowly labouring expression.
But, as he heard his classes, he was always doing the deed and doing it
better. As he paused with his piece of chalk at the black board before
writing on it, he was thinking of the spot, and whether the water was
not deeper and the fall straighter, a little higher up, or a little
lower down. He had half a mind to draw a line or two upon the board, and
show himself what he meant. He was doing it again and improving on
the manner, at prayers, in his mental arithmetic, all through his
questioning, all through the day.

Charley Hexam was a master now, in another school, under another head.
It was evening, and Bradley was walking in his garden observed from
behind a blind by gentle little Miss Peecher, who contemplated offering
him a loan of her smelling salts for headache, when Mary Anne, in
faithful attendance, held up her arm.

‘Yes, Mary Anne?’

‘Young Mr Hexam, if you please, ma’am, coming to see Mr Headstone.’

‘Very good, Mary Anne.’

Again Mary Anne held up her arm.

‘You may speak, Mary Anne?’

‘Mr Headstone has beckoned young Mr Hexam into his house, ma’am, and he
has gone in himself without waiting for young Mr Hexam to come up, and
now HE has gone in too, ma’am, and has shut the door.’

‘With all my heart, Mary Anne.’

Again Mary Anne’s telegraphic arm worked.

‘What more, Mary Anne?’

‘They must find it rather dull and dark, Miss Peecher, for the parlour
blind’s down, and neither of them pulls it up.’

‘There is no accounting,’ said good Miss Peecher with a little sad sigh
which she repressed by laying her hand on her neat methodical boddice,
‘there is no accounting for tastes, Mary Anne.’

Charley, entering the dark room, stopped short when he saw his old
friend in its yellow shade.

‘Come in, Hexam, come in.’

Charley advanced to take the hand that was held out to him; but stopped
again, short of it. The heavy, bloodshot eyes of the schoolmaster,
rising to his face with an effort, met his look of scrutiny.

‘Mr Headstone, what’s the matter?’

‘Matter? Where?’

‘Mr Headstone, have you heard the news? This news about the fellow, Mr
Eugene Wrayburn? That he is killed?’

‘He is dead, then!’ exclaimed Bradley.

Young Hexam standing looking at him, he moistened his lips with his
tongue, looked about the room, glanced at his former pupil, and looked
down. ‘I heard of the outrage,’ said Bradley, trying to constrain his
working mouth, ‘but I had not heard the end of it.’

‘Where were you,’ said the boy, advancing a step as he lowered his
voice, ‘when it was done? Stop! I don’t ask that. Don’t tell me. If you
force your confidence upon me, Mr Headstone, I’ll give up every word of
it. Mind! Take notice. I’ll give up it, and I’ll give up you. I will!’

The wretched creature seemed to suffer acutely under this renunciation.
A desolate air of utter and complete loneliness fell upon him, like a
visible shade.

‘It’s for me to speak, not you,’ said the boy. ‘If you do, you’ll do
it at your peril. I am going to put your selfishness before you, Mr
Headstone--your passionate, violent, and ungovernable selfishness--to
show you why I can, and why I will, have nothing more to do with you.’

He looked at young Hexam as if he were waiting for a scholar to go on
with a lesson that he knew by heart and was deadly tired of. But he had
said his last word to him.

‘If you had any part--I don’t say what--in this attack,’ pursued the
boy; ‘or if you know anything about it--I don’t say how much--or if you
know who did it--I go no closer--you did an injury to me that’s never
to be forgiven. You know that I took you with me to his chambers in the
Temple when I told him my opinion of him, and made myself responsible
for my opinion of you. You know that I took you with me when I was
watching him with a view to recovering my sister and bringing her to her
senses; you know that I have allowed myself to be mixed up with you, all
through this business, in favouring your desire to marry my sister. And
how do you know that, pursuing the ends of your own violent temper, you
have not laid me open to suspicion? Is that your gratitude to me, Mr
Headstone?’

Bradley sat looking steadily before him at the vacant air. As often
as young Hexam stopped, he turned his eyes towards him, as if he were
waiting for him to go on with the lesson, and get it done. As often as
the boy resumed, Bradley resumed his fixed face.

‘I am going to be plain with you, Mr Headstone,’ said young Hexam,
shaking his head in a half-threatening manner, ‘because this is no time
for affecting not to know things that I do know--except certain things
at which it might not be very safe for you, to hint again. What I mean
is this: if you were a good master, I was a good pupil. I have done you
plenty of credit, and in improving my own reputation I have improved
yours quite as much. Very well then. Starting on equal terms, I want to
put before you how you have shown your gratitude to me, for doing all
I could to further your wishes with reference to my sister. You have
compromised me by being seen about with me, endeavouring to counteract
this Mr Eugene Wrayburn. That’s the first thing you have done. If my
character, and my now dropping you, help me out of that, Mr Headstone,
the deliverance is to be attributed to me, and not to you. No thanks to
you for it!’

The boy stopping again, he moved his eyes again.

‘I am going on, Mr Headstone, don’t you be afraid. I am going on to the
end, and I have told you beforehand what the end is. Now, you know my
story. You are as well aware as I am, that I have had many disadvantages
to leave behind me in life. You have heard me mention my father, and you
are sufficiently acquainted with the fact that the home from which I, as
I may say, escaped, might have been a more creditable one than it was.
My father died, and then it might have been supposed that my way to
respectability was pretty clear. No. For then my sister begins.’

He spoke as confidently, and with as entire an absence of any tell-tale
colour in his cheek, as if there were no softening old time behind him.
Not wonderful, for there WAS none in his hollow empty heart. What is
there but self, for selfishness to see behind it?

‘When I speak of my sister, I devoutly wish that you had never seen
her, Mr Headstone. However, you did see her, and that’s useless now. I
confided in you about her. I explained her character to you, and how she
interposed some ridiculous fanciful notions in the way of our being as
respectable as I tried for. You fell in love with her, and I favoured
you with all my might. She could not be induced to favour you, and so
we came into collision with this Mr Eugene Wrayburn. Now, what have you
done? Why, you have justified my sister in being firmly set against you
from first to last, and you have put me in the wrong again! And why
have you done it? Because, Mr Headstone, you are in all your passions
so selfish, and so concentrated upon yourself that you have not bestowed
one proper thought on me.’

The cool conviction with which the boy took up and held his position,
could have been derived from no other vice in human nature.

‘It is,’ he went on, actually with tears, ‘an extraordinary circumstance
attendant on my life, that every effort I make towards perfect
respectability, is impeded by somebody else through no fault of mine!
Not content with doing what I have put before you, you will drag my name
into notoriety through dragging my sister’s--which you are pretty sure
to do, if my suspicions have any foundation at all--and the worse you
prove to be, the harder it will be for me to detach myself from being
associated with you in people’s minds.’

When he had dried his eyes and heaved a sob over his injuries, he began
moving towards the door.

‘However, I have made up my mind that I will become respectable in the
scale of society, and that I will not be dragged down by others. I have
done with my sister as well as with you. Since she cares so little for
me as to care nothing for undermining my respectability, she shall go
her way and I will go mine. My prospects are very good, and I mean to
follow them alone. Mr Headstone, I don’t say what you have got upon your
conscience, for I don’t know. Whatever lies upon it, I hope you will see
the justice of keeping wide and clear of me, and will find a consolation
in completely exonerating all but yourself. I hope, before many years
are out, to succeed the master in my present school, and the mistress
being a single woman, though some years older than I am, I might even
marry her. If it is any comfort to you to know what plans I may work out
by keeping myself strictly respectable in the scale of society, these
are the plans at present occurring to me. In conclusion, if you feel a
sense of having injured me, and a desire to make some small reparation,
I hope you will think how respectable you might have been yourself and
will contemplate your blighted existence.’

Was it strange that the wretched man should take this heavily to
heart? Perhaps he had taken the boy to heart, first, through some
long laborious years; perhaps through the same years he had found
his drudgery lightened by communication with a brighter and more
apprehensive spirit than his own; perhaps a family resemblance of face
and voice between the boy and his sister, smote him hard in the gloom
of his fallen state. For whichsoever reason, or for all, he drooped his
devoted head when the boy was gone, and shrank together on the floor,
and grovelled there, with the palms of his hands tight-clasping his hot
temples, in unutterable misery, and unrelieved by a single tear.


Rogue Riderhood had been busy with the river that day. He had fished
with assiduity on the previous evening, but the light was short, and
he had fished unsuccessfully. He had fished again that day with better
luck, and had carried his fish home to Plashwater Weir Mill Lock-house,
in a bundle.



Chapter 8

A FEW GRAINS OF PEPPER


The dolls’ dressmaker went no more to the business-premises of Pubsey
and Co. in St Mary Axe, after chance had disclosed to her (as she
supposed) the flinty and hypocritical character of Mr Riah. She often
moralized over her work on the tricks and the manners of that venerable
cheat, but made her little purchases elsewhere, and lived a secluded
life. After much consultation with herself, she decided not to put
Lizzie Hexam on her guard against the old man, arguing that the
disappointment of finding him out would come upon her quite soon enough.
Therefore, in her communication with her friend by letter, she was
silent on this theme, and principally dilated on the backslidings of her
bad child, who every day grew worse and worse.

‘You wicked old boy,’ Miss Wren would say to him, with a menacing
forefinger, ‘you’ll force me to run away from you, after all, you will;
and then you’ll shake to bits, and there’ll be nobody to pick up the
pieces!’

At this foreshadowing of a desolate decease, the wicked old boy would
whine and whimper, and would sit shaking himself into the lowest of low
spirits, until such time as he could shake himself out of the house and
shake another threepennyworth into himself. But dead drunk or dead
sober (he had come to such a pass that he was least alive in the latter
state), it was always on the conscience of the paralytic scarecrow that
he had betrayed his sharp parent for sixty threepennyworths of rum,
which were all gone, and that her sharpness would infallibly detect his
having done it, sooner or later. All things considered therefore, and
addition made of the state of his body to the state of his mind, the bed
on which Mr Dolls reposed was a bed of roses from which the flowers
and leaves had entirely faded, leaving him to lie upon the thorns and
stalks.

On a certain day, Miss Wren was alone at her work, with the house-door
set open for coolness, and was trolling in a small sweet voice a
mournful little song which might have been the song of the doll she was
dressing, bemoaning the brittleness and meltability of wax, when whom
should she descry standing on the pavement, looking in at her, but Mr
Fledgeby.

‘I thought it was you?’ said Fledgeby, coming up the two steps.

‘Did you?’ Miss Wren retorted. ‘And I thought it was you, young man.
Quite a coincidence. You’re not mistaken, and I’m not mistaken. How
clever we are!’

‘Well, and how are you?’ said Fledgeby.

‘I am pretty much as usual, sir,’ replied Miss Wren. ‘A very unfortunate
parent, worried out of my life and senses by a very bad child.’

Fledgeby’s small eyes opened so wide that they might have passed for
ordinary-sized eyes, as he stared about him for the very young person
whom he supposed to be in question.

‘But you’re not a parent,’ said Miss Wren, ‘and consequently it’s of no
use talking to you upon a family subject.--To what am I to attribute the
honour and favour?’

‘To a wish to improve your acquaintance,’ Mr Fledgeby replied.

Miss Wren, stopping to bite her thread, looked at him very knowingly.

‘We never meet now,’ said Fledgeby; ‘do we?’

‘No,’ said Miss Wren, chopping off the word.

‘So I had a mind,’ pursued Fledgeby, ‘to come and have a talk with you
about our dodging friend, the child of Israel.’

‘So HE gave you my address; did he?’ asked Miss Wren.

‘I got it out of him,’ said Fledgeby, with a stammer.

‘You seem to see a good deal of him,’ remarked Miss Wren, with shrewd
distrust. ‘A good deal of him you seem to see, considering.’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Fledgeby. ‘Considering.’

‘Haven’t you,’ inquired the dressmaker, bending over the doll on which
her art was being exercised, ‘done interceding with him yet?’

‘No,’ said Fledgeby, shaking his head.

‘La! Been interceding with him all this time, and sticking to him
still?’ said Miss Wren, busy with her work.

‘Sticking to him is the word,’ said Fledgeby.

Miss Wren pursued her occupation with a concentrated air, and asked,
after an interval of silent industry:

‘Are you in the army?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Fledgeby, rather flattered by the question.

‘Navy?’ asked Miss Wren.

‘N--no,’ said Fledgeby. He qualified these two negatives, as if he were
not absolutely in either service, but was almost in both.

‘What are you then?’ demanded Miss Wren.

‘I am a gentleman, I am,’ said Fledgeby.

‘Oh!’ assented Jenny, screwing up her mouth with an appearance of
conviction. ‘Yes, to be sure! That accounts for your having so much
time to give to interceding. But only to think how kind and friendly a
gentleman you must be!’

Mr Fledgeby found that he was skating round a board marked Dangerous,
and had better cut out a fresh track. ‘Let’s get back to the dodgerest
of the dodgers,’ said he. ‘What’s he up to in the case of your friend
the handsome gal? He must have some object. What’s his object?’

‘Cannot undertake to say, sir, I am sure!’ returned Miss Wren,
composedly.

‘He won’t acknowledge where she’s gone,’ said Fledgeby; ‘and I have
a fancy that I should like to have another look at her. Now I know he
knows where she is gone.’

‘Cannot undertake to say, sir, I am sure!’ Miss Wren again rejoined.

‘And you know where she is gone,’ hazarded Fledgeby.

‘Cannot undertake to say, sir, really,’ replied Miss Wren.

The quaint little chin met Mr Fledgeby’s gaze with such a baffling
hitch, that that agreeable gentleman was for some time at a loss how to
resume his fascinating part in the dialogue. At length he said:

‘Miss Jenny!--That’s your name, if I don’t mistake?’

‘Probably you don’t mistake, sir,’ was Miss Wren’s cool answer; ‘because
you had it on the best authority. Mine, you know.’

‘Miss Jenny! Instead of coming up and being dead, let’s come out and
look alive. It’ll pay better, I assure you,’ said Fledgeby, bestowing
an inveigling twinkle or two upon the dressmaker. ‘You’ll find it pay
better.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Miss Jenny, holding out her doll at arm’s length, and
critically contemplating the effect of her art with her scissors on her
lips and her head thrown back, as if her interest lay there, and not in
the conversation; ‘perhaps you’ll explain your meaning, young man, which
is Greek to me.--You must have another touch of blue in your trimming,
my dear.’ Having addressed the last remark to her fair client, Miss
Wren proceeded to snip at some blue fragments that lay before her, among
fragments of all colours, and to thread a needle from a skein of blue
silk.

‘Look here,’ said Fledgeby.--‘Are you attending?’

‘I am attending, sir,’ replied Miss Wren, without the slightest
appearance of so doing. ‘Another touch of blue in your trimming, my
dear.’

‘Well, look here,’ said Fledgeby, rather discouraged by the
circumstances under which he found himself pursuing the conversation.
‘If you’re attending--’

[‘Light blue, my sweet young lady,’ remarked Miss Wren, in a sprightly
tone, ‘being best suited to your fair complexion and your flaxen
curls.’)

‘I say, if you’re attending,’ proceeded Fledgeby, ‘it’ll pay better in
this way. It’ll lead in a roundabout manner to your buying damage and
waste of Pubsey and Co. at a nominal price, or even getting it for
nothing.’

‘Aha!’ thought the dressmaker. ‘But you are not so roundabout, Little
Eyes, that I don’t notice your answering for Pubsey and Co. after all!
Little Eyes, Little Eyes, you’re too cunning by half.’

‘And I take it for granted,’ pursued Fledgeby, ‘that to get the most of
your materials for nothing would be well worth your while, Miss Jenny?’

‘You may take it for granted,’ returned the dressmaker with many knowing
nods, ‘that it’s always well worth my while to make money.’

‘Now,’ said Fledgeby approvingly, ‘you’re answering to a sensible
purpose. Now, you’re coming out and looking alive! So I make so free,
Miss Jenny, as to offer the remark, that you and Judah were too thick
together to last. You can’t come to be intimate with such a deep file
as Judah without beginning to see a little way into him, you know,’ said
Fledgeby with a wink.

‘I must own,’ returned the dressmaker, with her eyes upon her work,
‘that we are not good friends at present.’

‘I know you’re not good friends at present,’ said Fledgeby. ‘I know all
about it. I should like to pay off Judah, by not letting him have his
own deep way in everything. In most things he’ll get it by hook or
by crook, but--hang it all!--don’t let him have his own deep way in
everything. That’s too much.’ Mr Fledgeby said this with some display of
indignant warmth, as if he was counsel in the cause for Virtue.

‘How can I prevent his having his own way?’ began the dressmaker.

‘Deep way, I called it,’ said Fledgeby.

‘--His own deep way, in anything?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Fledgeby. ‘I like to hear you ask it, because
it’s looking alive. It’s what I should expect to find in one of your
sagacious understanding. Now, candidly.’

‘Eh?’ cried Miss Jenny.

‘I said, now candidly,’ Mr Fledgeby explained, a little put out.

‘Oh-h!’

‘I should be glad to countermine him, respecting the handsome gal, your
friend. He means something there. You may depend upon it, Judah means
something there. He has a motive, and of course his motive is a dark
motive. Now, whatever his motive is, it’s necessary to his motive’--Mr
Fledgeby’s constructive powers were not equal to the avoidance of some
tautology here--‘that it should be kept from me, what he has done with
her. So I put it to you, who know: What HAS he done with her? I ask no
more. And is that asking much, when you understand that it will pay?’

Miss Jenny Wren, who had cast her eyes upon the bench again after her
last interruption, sat looking at it, needle in hand but not working,
for some moments. She then briskly resumed her work, and said with a
sidelong glance of her eyes and chin at Mr Fledgeby:

‘Where d’ye live?’

‘Albany, Piccadilly,’ replied Fledgeby.

‘When are you at home?’

‘When you like.’

‘Breakfast-time?’ said Jenny, in her abruptest and shortest manner.

‘No better time in the day,’ said Fledgeby.

‘I’ll look in upon you to-morrow, young man. Those two ladies,’ pointing
to dolls, ‘have an appointment in Bond Street at ten precisely. When
I’ve dropped ‘em there, I’ll drive round to you.’ With a weird little
laugh, Miss Jenny pointed to her crutch-stick as her equipage.

‘This is looking alive indeed!’ cried Fledgeby, rising.

‘Mark you! I promise you nothing,’ said the dolls’ dressmaker, dabbing
two dabs at him with her needle, as if she put out both his eyes.

‘No no. I understand,’ returned Fledgeby. ‘The damage and waste question
shall be settled first. It shall be made to pay; don’t you be afraid.
Good-day, Miss Jenny.’

‘Good-day, young man.’

Mr Fledgeby’s prepossessing form withdrew itself; and the little
dressmaker, clipping and snipping and stitching, and stitching and
snipping and clipping, fell to work at a great rate; musing and
muttering all the time.

‘Misty, misty, misty. Can’t make it out. Little Eyes and the wolf in a
conspiracy? Or Little Eyes and the wolf against one another? Can’t make
it out. My poor Lizzie, have they both designs against you, either way?
Can’t make it out. Is Little Eyes Pubsey, and the wolf Co? Can’t make it
out. Pubsey true to Co, and Co to Pubsey? Pubsey false to Co, and Co to
Pubsey? Can’t make it out. What said Little Eyes? “Now, candidly?”
 Ah! However the cat jumps, HE’S a liar. That’s all I can make out at
present; but you may go to bed in the Albany, Piccadilly, with THAT for
your pillow, young man!’ Thereupon, the little dressmaker again dabbed
out his eyes separately, and making a loop in the air of her thread and
deftly catching it into a knot with her needle, seemed to bowstring him
into the bargain.

For the terrors undergone by Mr Dolls that evening when his little
parent sat profoundly meditating over her work, and when he imagined
himself found out, as often as she changed her attitude, or turned her
eyes towards him, there is no adequate name. Moreover it was her habit
to shake her head at that wretched old boy whenever she caught his eye
as he shivered and shook. What are popularly called ‘the trembles’ being
in full force upon him that evening, and likewise what are popularly
called ‘the horrors,’ he had a very bad time of it; which was not
made better by his being so remorseful as frequently to moan ‘Sixty
threepennorths.’ This imperfect sentence not being at all intelligible
as a confession, but sounding like a Gargantuan order for a dram,
brought him into new difficulties by occasioning his parent to pounce
at him in a more than usually snappish manner, and to overwhelm him with
bitter reproaches.

What was a bad time for Mr Dolls, could not fail to be a bad time for
the dolls’ dressmaker. However, she was on the alert next morning, and
drove to Bond Street, and set down the two ladies punctually, and then
directed her equipage to conduct her to the Albany. Arrived at the
doorway of the house in which Mr Fledgeby’s chambers were, she found a
lady standing there in a travelling dress, holding in her hand--of all
things in the world--a gentleman’s hat.

‘You want some one?’ said the lady in a stern manner.

‘I am going up stairs to Mr Fledgeby’s.’

‘You cannot do that at this moment. There is a gentleman with him. I am
waiting for the gentleman. His business with Mr Fledgeby will very soon
be transacted, and then you can go up. Until the gentleman comes down,
you must wait here.’

While speaking, and afterwards, the lady kept watchfully between her and
the staircase, as if prepared to oppose her going up, by force. The
lady being of a stature to stop her with a hand, and looking mightily
determined, the dressmaker stood still.

‘Well? Why do you listen?’ asked the lady.

‘I am not listening,’ said the dressmaker.

‘What do you hear?’ asked the lady, altering her phrase.

‘Is it a kind of a spluttering somewhere?’ said the dressmaker, with an
inquiring look.

‘Mr Fledgeby in his shower-bath, perhaps,’ remarked the lady, smiling.

‘And somebody’s beating a carpet, I think?’

‘Mr Fledgeby’s carpet, I dare say,’ replied the smiling lady.

Miss Wren had a reasonably good eye for smiles, being well accustomed
to them on the part of her young friends, though their smiles mostly ran
smaller than in nature. But she had never seen so singular a smile
as that upon this lady’s face. It twitched her nostrils open in a
remarkable manner, and contracted her lips and eyebrows. It was a smile
of enjoyment too, though of such a fierce kind that Miss Wren thought
she would rather not enjoy herself than do it in that way.

‘Well!’ said the lady, watching her. ‘What now?’

‘I hope there’s nothing the matter!’ said the dressmaker.

‘Where?’ inquired the lady.

‘I don’t know where,’ said Miss Wren, staring about her. ‘But I never
heard such odd noises. Don’t you think I had better call somebody?’

‘I think you had better not,’ returned the lady with a significant
frown, and drawing closer.

On this hint, the dressmaker relinquished the idea, and stood looking
at the lady as hard as the lady looked at her. Meanwhile the dressmaker
listened with amazement to the odd noises which still continued, and the
lady listened too, but with a coolness in which there was no trace of
amazement.

Soon afterwards, came a slamming and banging of doors; and then came
running down stairs, a gentleman with whiskers, and out of breath, who
seemed to be red-hot.

‘Is your business done, Alfred?’ inquired the lady.

‘Very thoroughly done,’ replied the gentleman, as he took his hat from
her.

‘You can go up to Mr Fledgeby as soon as you like,’ said the lady,
moving haughtily away.

‘Oh! And you can take these three pieces of stick with you,’ added the
gentleman politely, ‘and say, if you please, that they come from Mr
Alfred Lammle, with his compliments on leaving England. Mr Alfred
Lammle. Be so good as not to forget the name.’

The three pieces of stick were three broken and frayed fragments of a
stout lithe cane. Miss Jenny taking them wonderingly, and the gentleman
repeating with a grin, ‘Mr Alfred Lammle, if you’ll be so good.
Compliments, on leaving England,’ the lady and gentleman walked away
quite deliberately, and Miss Jenny and her crutch-stick went up stairs.
‘Lammle, Lammle, Lammle?’ Miss Jenny repeated as she panted from stair
to stair, ‘where have I heard that name? Lammle, Lammle? I know! Saint
Mary Axe!’

With a gleam of new intelligence in her sharp face, the dolls’
dressmaker pulled at Fledgeby’s bell. No one answered; but, from within
the chambers, there proceeded a continuous spluttering sound of a highly
singular and unintelligible nature.

‘Good gracious! Is Little Eyes choking?’ cried Miss Jenny.

Pulling at the bell again and getting no reply, she pushed the outer
door, and found it standing ajar. No one being visible on her opening it
wider, and the spluttering continuing, she took the liberty of opening
an inner door, and then beheld the extraordinary spectacle of Mr
Fledgeby in a shirt, a pair of Turkish trousers, and a Turkish cap,
rolling over and over on his own carpet, and spluttering wonderfully.

‘Oh Lord!’ gasped Mr Fledgeby. ‘Oh my eye! Stop thief! I am strangling.
Fire! Oh my eye! A glass of water. Give me a glass of water. Shut the
door. Murder! Oh Lord!’ And then rolled and spluttered more than ever.

Hurrying into another room, Miss Jenny got a glass of water, and brought
it for Fledgeby’s relief: who, gasping, spluttering, and rattling in his
throat betweenwhiles, drank some water, and laid his head faintly on her
arm.

‘Oh my eye!’ cried Fledgeby, struggling anew. ‘It’s salt and snuff. It’s
up my nose, and down my throat, and in my wind-pipe. Ugh! Ow! Ow! Ow!
Ah--h--h--h!’ And here, crowing fearfully, with his eyes starting out of
his head, appeared to be contending with every mortal disease incidental
to poultry.

‘And Oh my Eye, I’m so sore!’ cried Fledgeby, starting, over on his
back, in a spasmodic way that caused the dressmaker to retreat to the
wall. ‘Oh I smart so! Do put something to my back and arms, and legs and
shoulders. Ugh! It’s down my throat again and can’t come up. Ow! Ow! Ow!
Ah--h--h--h! Oh I smart so!’ Here Mr Fledgeby bounded up, and bounded
down, and went rolling over and over again.

The dolls’ dressmaker looked on until he rolled himself into a corner
with his Turkish slippers uppermost, and then, resolving in the first
place to address her ministration to the salt and snuff, gave him more
water and slapped his back. But, the latter application was by no means
a success, causing Mr Fledgeby to scream, and to cry out, ‘Oh my eye!
don’t slap me! I’m covered with weales and I smart so!’

However, he gradually ceased to choke and crow, saving at intervals,
and Miss Jenny got him into an easy-chair: where, with his eyes red and
watery, with his features swollen, and with some half-dozen livid bars
across his face, he presented a most rueful sight.

‘What ever possessed you to take salt and snuff, young man?’ inquired
Miss Jenny.

‘I didn’t take it,’ the dismal youth replied. ‘It was crammed into my
mouth.’

‘Who crammed it?’ asked Miss Jenny.

‘He did,’ answered Fledgeby. ‘The assassin. Lammle. He rubbed it into
my mouth and up my nose and down my throat--Ow! Ow! Ow! Ah--h--h--h!
Ugh!--to prevent my crying out, and then cruelly assaulted me.’

‘With this?’ asked Miss Jenny, showing the pieces of cane.

‘That’s the weapon,’ said Fledgeby, eyeing it with the air of an
acquaintance. ‘He broke it over me. Oh I smart so! How did you come by
it?’

‘When he ran down stairs and joined the lady he had left in the hall
with his hat’--Miss Jenny began.

‘Oh!’ groaned Mr Fledgeby, writhing, ‘she was holding his hat, was she?
I might have known she was in it.’

‘When he came down stairs and joined the lady who wouldn’t let me come
up, he gave me the pieces for you, and I was to say, “With Mr Alfred
Lammle’s compliments on his leaving England.”’ Miss Jenny said it with
such spiteful satisfaction, and such a hitch of her chin and eyes as
might have added to Mr Fledgeby’s miseries, if he could have noticed
either, in his bodily pain with his hand to his head.

‘Shall I go for the police?’ inquired Miss Jenny, with a nimble start
towards the door.

‘Stop! No, don’t!’ cried Fledgeby. ‘Don’t, please. We had better keep it
quiet. Will you be so good as shut the door? Oh I do smart so!’

In testimony of the extent to which he smarted, Mr Fledgeby came
wallowing out of the easy-chair, and took another roll on the carpet.

‘Now the door’s shut,’ said Mr Fledgeby, sitting up in anguish, with
his Turkish cap half on and half off, and the bars on his face getting
bluer, ‘do me the kindness to look at my back and shoulders. They must
be in an awful state, for I hadn’t got my dressing-gown on, when the
brute came rushing in. Cut my shirt away from the collar; there’s a pair
of scissors on that table. Oh!’ groaned Mr Fledgeby, with his hand to
his head again. ‘How I do smart, to be sure!’

‘There?’ inquired Miss Jenny, alluding to the back and shoulders.

‘Oh Lord, yes!’ moaned Fledgeby, rocking himself. ‘And all over!
Everywhere!’

The busy little dressmaker quickly snipped the shirt away, and laid
bare the results of as furious and sound a thrashing as even Mr Fledgeby
merited. ‘You may well smart, young man!’ exclaimed Miss Jenny. And
stealthily rubbed her little hands behind him, and poked a few exultant
pokes with her two forefingers over the crown of his head.

‘What do you think of vinegar and brown paper?’ inquired the suffering
Fledgeby, still rocking and moaning. ‘Does it look as if vinegar and
brown paper was the sort of application?’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Jenny, with a silent chuckle. ‘It looks as if it ought
to be Pickled.’

Mr Fledgeby collapsed under the word ‘Pickled,’ and groaned again.
‘My kitchen is on this floor,’ he said; ‘you’ll find brown paper in a
dresser-drawer there, and a bottle of vinegar on a shelf. Would you have
the kindness to make a few plasters and put ‘em on? It can’t be kept too
quiet.’

‘One, two--hum--five, six. You’ll want six,’ said the dress-maker.

‘There’s smart enough,’ whimpered Mr Fledgeby, groaning and writhing
again, ‘for sixty.’

Miss Jenny repaired to the kitchen, scissors in hand, found the brown
paper and found the vinegar, and skilfully cut out and steeped six
large plasters. When they were all lying ready on the dresser, an idea
occurred to her as she was about to gather them up.

‘I think,’ said Miss Jenny with a silent laugh, ‘he ought to have a
little pepper? Just a few grains? I think the young man’s tricks and
manners make a claim upon his friends for a little pepper?’

Mr Fledgeby’s evil star showing her the pepper-box on the chimneypiece,
she climbed upon a chair, and got it down, and sprinkled all the
plasters with a judicious hand. She then went back to Mr Fledgeby, and
stuck them all on him: Mr Fledgeby uttering a sharp howl as each was put
in its place.

‘There, young man!’ said the dolls’ dressmaker. ‘Now I hope you feel
pretty comfortable?’

Apparently, Mr Fledgeby did not, for he cried by way of answer, ‘Oh--h
how I do smart!’

Miss Jenny got his Persian gown upon him, extinguished his eyes
crookedly with his Persian cap, and helped him to his bed: upon which he
climbed groaning. ‘Business between you and me being out of the question
to-day, young man, and my time being precious,’ said Miss Jenny then,
‘I’ll make myself scarce. Are you comfortable now?’

‘Oh my eye!’ cried Mr Fledgeby. ‘No, I ain’t. Oh--h--h! how I do smart!’

The last thing Miss Jenny saw, as she looked back before closing the
room door, was Mr Fledgeby in the act of plunging and gambolling all
over his bed, like a porpoise or dolphin in its native element. She then
shut the bedroom door, and all the other doors, and going down stairs
and emerging from the Albany into the busy streets, took omnibus for
Saint Mary Axe: pressing on the road all the gaily-dressed ladies whom
she could see from the window, and making them unconscious lay-figures
for dolls, while she mentally cut them out and basted them.



Chapter 9

TWO PLACES VACATED


Set down by the omnibus at the corner of Saint Mary Axe, and trusting
to her feet and her crutch-stick within its precincts, the dolls’
dressmaker proceeded to the place of business of Pubsey and Co. All
there was sunny and quiet externally, and shady and quiet internally.
Hiding herself in the entry outside the glass door, she could see from
that post of observation the old man in his spectacles sitting writing
at his desk.

‘Boh!’ cried the dressmaker, popping in her head at the glass-door. ‘Mr
Wolf at home?’

The old man took his glasses off, and mildly laid them down beside him.
‘Ah Jenny, is it you? I thought you had given me up.’

‘And so I had given up the treacherous wolf of the forest,’ she replied;
‘but, godmother, it strikes me you have come back. I am not quite sure,
because the wolf and you change forms. I want to ask you a question or
two, to find out whether you are really godmother or really wolf. May
I?’

‘Yes, Jenny, yes.’ But Riah glanced towards the door, as if he thought
his principal might appear there, unseasonably.

‘If you’re afraid of the fox,’ said Miss Jenny, ‘you may dismiss all
present expectations of seeing that animal. HE won’t show himself
abroad, for many a day.’

‘What do you mean, my child?’

‘I mean, godmother,’ replied Miss Wren, sitting down beside the Jew,
‘that the fox has caught a famous flogging, and that if his skin and
bones are not tingling, aching, and smarting at this present instant, no
fox did ever tingle, ache, and smart.’ Therewith Miss Jenny related what
had come to pass in the Albany, omitting the few grains of pepper.

‘Now, godmother,’ she went on, ‘I particularly wish to ask you what has
taken place here, since I left the wolf here? Because I have an idea
about the size of a marble, rolling about in my little noddle. First and
foremost, are you Pubsey and Co., or are you either? Upon your solemn
word and honour.’

The old man shook his head.

‘Secondly, isn’t Fledgeby both Pubsey and Co.?’

The old man answered with a reluctant nod.

‘My idea,’ exclaimed Miss Wren, ‘is now about the size of an orange. But
before it gets any bigger, welcome back, dear godmother!’

The little creature folded her arms about the old man’s neck with great
earnestness, and kissed him. ‘I humbly beg your forgiveness, godmother.
I am truly sorry. I ought to have had more faith in you. But what could
I suppose when you said nothing for yourself, you know? I don’t mean to
offer that as a justification, but what could I suppose, when you were a
silent party to all he said? It did look bad; now didn’t it?’

‘It looked so bad, Jenny,’ responded the old man, with gravity, ‘that I
will straightway tell you what an impression it wrought upon me. I was
hateful in mine own eyes. I was hateful to myself, in being so hateful
to the debtor and to you. But more than that, and worse than that,
and to pass out far and broad beyond myself--I reflected that evening,
sitting alone in my garden on the housetop, that I was doing dishonour
to my ancient faith and race. I reflected--clearly reflected for the
first time--that in bending my neck to the yoke I was willing to wear,
I bent the unwilling necks of the whole Jewish people. For it is not, in
Christian countries, with the Jews as with other peoples. Men say, “This
is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there
are good Turks.” Not so with the Jews. Men find the bad among us easily
enough--among what peoples are the bad not easily found?--but they take
the worst of us as samples of the best; they take the lowest of us as
presentations of the highest; and they say “All Jews are alike.” If,
doing what I was content to do here, because I was grateful for the past
and have small need of money now, I had been a Christian, I could have
done it, compromising no one but my individual self. But doing it as a
Jew, I could not choose but compromise the Jews of all conditions and
all countries. It is a little hard upon us, but it is the truth. I would
that all our people remembered it! Though I have little right to say so,
seeing that it came home so late to me.’

The dolls’ dressmaker sat holding the old man by the hand, and looking
thoughtfully in his face.

‘Thus I reflected, I say, sitting that evening in my garden on the
housetop. And passing the painful scene of that day in review before
me many times, I always saw that the poor gentleman believed the story
readily, because I was one of the Jews--that you believed the story
readily, my child, because I was one of the Jews--that the story itself
first came into the invention of the originator thereof, because I was
one of the Jews. This was the result of my having had you three before
me, face to face, and seeing the thing visibly presented as upon a
theatre. Wherefore I perceived that the obligation was upon me to leave
this service. But Jenny, my dear,’ said Riah, breaking off, ‘I promised
that you should pursue your questions, and I obstruct them.’

‘On the contrary, godmother; my idea is as large now as a pumpkin--and
YOU know what a pumpkin is, don’t you? So you gave notice that you
were going? Does that come next?’ asked Miss Jenny with a look of close
attention.

‘I indited a letter to my master. Yes. To that effect.’

‘And what said Tingling-Tossing-Aching-Screaming-Scratching-Smarter?’
asked Miss Wren with an unspeakable enjoyment in the utterance of those
honourable titles and in the recollection of the pepper.

‘He held me to certain months of servitude, which were his lawful term
of notice. They expire to-morrow. Upon their expiration--not before--I
had meant to set myself right with my Cinderella.’

‘My idea is getting so immense now,’ cried Miss Wren, clasping her
temples, ‘that my head won’t hold it! Listen, godmother; I am going to
expound. Little Eyes (that’s Screaming-Scratching-Smarter) owes you a
heavy grudge for going. Little Eyes casts about how best to pay you off.
Little Eyes thinks of Lizzie. Little Eyes says to himself, “I’ll find
out where he has placed that girl, and I’ll betray his secret because
it’s dear to him.” Perhaps Little Eyes thinks, “I’ll make love to her
myself too;” but that I can’t swear--all the rest I can. So, Little Eyes
comes to me, and I go to Little Eyes. That’s the way of it. And now the
murder’s all out, I’m sorry,’ added the dolls’ dressmaker, rigid from
head to foot with energy as she shook her little fist before her eyes,
‘that I didn’t give him Cayenne pepper and chopped pickled Capsicum!’

This expression of regret being but partially intelligible to Mr Riah,
the old man reverted to the injuries Fledgeby had received, and hinted
at the necessity of his at once going to tend that beaten cur.

‘Godmother, godmother, godmother!’ cried Miss Wren irritably, ‘I really
lose all patience with you. One would think you believed in the Good
Samaritan. How can you be so inconsistent?’

‘Jenny dear,’ began the old man gently, ‘it is the custom of our people
to help--’

‘Oh! Bother your people!’ interposed Miss Wren, with a toss of her head.
‘If your people don’t know better than to go and help Little Eyes, it’s
a pity they ever got out of Egypt. Over and above that,’ she added, ‘he
wouldn’t take your help if you offered it. Too much ashamed. Wants to
keep it close and quiet, and to keep you out of the way.’

They were still debating this point when a shadow darkened the entry,
and the glass door was opened by a messenger who brought a letter
unceremoniously addressed, ‘Riah.’ To which he said there was an answer
wanted.

The letter, which was scrawled in pencil uphill and downhill and round
crooked corners, ran thus:


‘OLD RIAH,

Your accounts being all squared, go. Shut up the place, turn out
directly, and send me the key by bearer. Go. You are an unthankful dog
of a Jew. Get out.

F.’


The dolls’ dressmaker found it delicious to trace the screaming and
smarting of Little Eyes in the distorted writing of this epistle. She
laughed over it and jeered at it in a convenient corner (to the great
astonishment of the messenger) while the old man got his few goods
together in a black bag. That done, the shutters of the upper windows
closed, and the office blind pulled down, they issued forth upon the
steps with the attendant messenger. There, while Miss Jenny held the
bag, the old man locked the house door, and handed over the key to him;
who at once retired with the same.

‘Well, godmother,’ said Miss Wren, as they remained upon the steps
together, looking at one another. ‘And so you’re thrown upon the world!’

‘It would appear so, Jenny, and somewhat suddenly.’

‘Where are you going to seek your fortune?’ asked Miss Wren.

The old man smiled, but looked about him with a look of having lost his
way in life, which did not escape the dolls’ dressmaker.

‘Verily, Jenny,’ said he, ‘the question is to the purpose, and more
easily asked than answered. But as I have experience of the ready
goodwill and good help of those who have given occupation to Lizzie, I
think I will seek them out for myself.’

‘On foot?’ asked Miss Wren, with a chop.

‘Ay!’ said the old man. ‘Have I not my staff?’

It was exactly because he had his staff, and presented so quaint an
aspect, that she mistrusted his making the journey.

‘The best thing you can do,’ said Jenny, ‘for the time being, at all
events, is to come home with me, godmother. Nobody’s there but my bad
child, and Lizzie’s lodging stands empty.’ The old man when satisfied
that no inconvenience could be entailed on any one by his compliance,
readily complied; and the singularly-assorted couple once more went
through the streets together.

Now, the bad child having been strictly charged by his parent to remain
at home in her absence, of course went out; and, being in the very last
stage of mental decrepitude, went out with two objects; firstly,
to establish a claim he conceived himself to have upon any licensed
victualler living, to be supplied with threepennyworth of rum for
nothing; and secondly, to bestow some maudlin remorse on Mr Eugene
Wrayburn, and see what profit came of it. Stumblingly pursuing these
two designs--they both meant rum, the only meaning of which he was
capable--the degraded creature staggered into Covent Garden Market and
there bivouacked, to have an attack of the trembles succeeded by an
attack of the horrors, in a doorway.

This market of Covent Garden was quite out of the creature’s line of
road, but it had the attraction for him which it has for the worst of
the solitary members of the drunken tribe. It may be the companionship
of the nightly stir, or it may be the companionship of the gin and
beer that slop about among carters and hucksters, or it may be the
companionship of the trodden vegetable refuse which is so like their own
dress that perhaps they take the Market for a great wardrobe; but be
it what it may, you shall see no such individual drunkards on doorsteps
anywhere, as there. Of dozing women-drunkards especially, you shall come
upon such specimens there, in the morning sunlight, as you might
seek out of doors in vain through London. Such stale vapid rejected
cabbage-leaf and cabbage-stalk dress, such damaged-orange countenance,
such squashed pulp of humanity, are open to the day nowhere else. So,
the attraction of the Market drew Mr Dolls to it, and he had out his two
fits of trembles and horrors in a doorway on which a woman had had out
her sodden nap a few hours before.

There is a swarm of young savages always flitting about this same place,
creeping off with fragments of orange-chests, and mouldy litter--Heaven
knows into what holes they can convey them, having no home!--whose bare
feet fall with a blunt dull softness on the pavement as the policeman
hunts them, and who are (perhaps for that reason) little heard by
the Powers that be, whereas in top-boots they would make a deafening
clatter. These, delighting in the trembles and the horrors of Mr Dolls,
as in a gratuitous drama, flocked about him in his doorway, butted
at him, leaped at him, and pelted him. Hence, when he came out of
his invalid retirement and shook off that ragged train, he was much
bespattered, and in worse case than ever. But, not yet at his worst;
for, going into a public-house, and being supplied in stress of business
with his rum, and seeking to vanish without payment, he was collared,
searched, found penniless, and admonished not to try that again,
by having a pail of dirty water cast over him. This application
superinduced another fit of the trembles; after which Mr Dolls, as
finding himself in good cue for making a call on a professional friend,
addressed himself to the Temple.

There was nobody at the chambers but Young Blight. That discreet youth,
sensible of a certain incongruity in the association of such a
client with the business that might be coming some day, with the best
intentions temporized with Dolls, and offered a shilling for coach-hire
home. Mr Dolls, accepting the shilling, promptly laid it out in
two threepennyworths of conspiracy against his life, and two
threepennyworths of raging repentance. Returning to the Chambers with
which burden, he was descried coming round into the court, by the wary
young Blight watching from the window: who instantly closed the outer
door, and left the miserable object to expend his fury on the panels.

The more the door resisted him, the more dangerous and imminent became
that bloody conspiracy against his life. Force of police arriving,
he recognized in them the conspirators, and laid about him hoarsely,
fiercely, staringly, convulsively, foamingly. A humble machine, familiar
to the conspirators and called by the expressive name of Stretcher,
being unavoidably sent for, he was rendered a harmless bundle of torn
rags by being strapped down upon it, with voice and consciousness gone
out of him, and life fast going. As this machine was borne out at the
Temple gate by four men, the poor little dolls’ dressmaker and her
Jewish friend were coming up the street.

‘Let us see what it is,’ cried the dressmaker. ‘Let us make haste and
look, godmother.’

The brisk little crutch-stick was but too brisk. ‘O gentlemen,
gentlemen, he belongs to me!’

‘Belongs to you?’ said the head of the party, stopping it.

‘O yes, dear gentlemen, he’s my child, out without leave. My poor bad,
bad boy! and he don’t know me, he don’t know me! O what shall I do,’
cried the little creature, wildly beating her hands together, ‘when my
own child don’t know me!’

The head of the party looked (as well he might) to the old man for
explanation. He whispered, as the dolls’ dressmaker bent over the
exhausted form and vainly tried to extract some sign of recognition from
it: ‘It’s her drunken father.’

As the load was put down in the street, Riah drew the head of the party
aside, and whispered that he thought the man was dying. ‘No, surely
not?’ returned the other. But he became less confident, on looking, and
directed the bearers to ‘bring him to the nearest doctor’s shop.’

Thither he was brought; the window becoming from within, a wall of
faces, deformed into all kinds of shapes through the agency of globular
red bottles, green bottles, blue bottles, and other coloured bottles. A
ghastly light shining upon him that he didn’t need, the beast so furious
but a few minutes gone, was quiet enough now, with a strange mysterious
writing on his face, reflected from one of the great bottles, as if
Death had marked him: ‘Mine.’

The medical testimony was more precise and more to the purpose than it
sometimes is in a Court of Justice. ‘You had better send for something
to cover it. All’s over.’

Therefore, the police sent for something to cover it, and it was covered
and borne through the streets, the people falling away. After it,
went the dolls’ dressmaker, hiding her face in the Jewish skirts, and
clinging to them with one hand, while with the other she plied her
stick. It was carried home, and, by reason that the staircase was very
narrow, it was put down in the parlour--the little working-bench being
set aside to make room for it--and there, in the midst of the dolls with
no speculation in their eyes, lay Mr Dolls with no speculation in his.

Many flaunting dolls had to be gaily dressed, before the money was in
the dressmaker’s pocket to get mourning for Mr Dolls. As the old man,
Riah, sat by, helping her in such small ways as he could, he found it
difficult to make out whether she really did realize that the deceased
had been her father.

‘If my poor boy,’ she would say, ‘had been brought up better, he might
have done better. Not that I reproach myself. I hope I have no cause for
that.’

‘None indeed, Jenny, I am very certain.’

‘Thank you, godmother. It cheers me to hear you say so. But you see it
is so hard to bring up a child well, when you work, work, work, all day.
When he was out of employment, I couldn’t always keep him near me. He
got fractious and nervous, and I was obliged to let him go into the
streets. And he never did well in the streets, he never did well out of
sight. How often it happens with children!’

‘Too often, even in this sad sense!’ thought the old man.

‘How can I say what I might have turned out myself, but for my back
having been so bad and my legs so queer, when I was young!’ the
dressmaker would go on. ‘I had nothing to do but work, and so I worked.
I couldn’t play. But my poor unfortunate child could play, and it turned
out the worse for him.’

‘And not for him alone, Jenny.’

‘Well! I don’t know, godmother. He suffered heavily, did my unfortunate
boy. He was very, very ill sometimes. And I called him a quantity of
names;’ shaking her head over her work, and dropping tears. ‘I don’t
know that his going wrong was much the worse for me. If it ever was, let
us forget it.’

‘You are a good girl, you are a patient girl.’

‘As for patience,’ she would reply with a shrug, ‘not much of that,
godmother. If I had been patient, I should never have called him names.
But I hope I did it for his good. And besides, I felt my responsibility
as a mother, so much. I tried reasoning, and reasoning failed. I tried
coaxing, and coaxing failed. I tried scolding and scolding failed. But I
was bound to try everything, you know, with such a charge upon my hands.
Where would have been my duty to my poor lost boy, if I had not tried
everything!’

With such talk, mostly in a cheerful tone on the part of the industrious
little creature, the day-work and the night-work were beguiled until
enough of smart dolls had gone forth to bring into the kitchen,
where the working-bench now stood, the sombre stuff that the occasion
required, and to bring into the house the other sombre preparations.
‘And now,’ said Miss Jenny, ‘having knocked off my rosy-cheeked young
friends, I’ll knock off my white-cheeked self.’ This referred to her
making her own dress, which at last was done. ‘The disadvantage of
making for yourself,’ said Miss Jenny, as she stood upon a chair to look
at the result in the glass, ‘is, that you can’t charge anybody else for
the job, and the advantage is, that you haven’t to go out to try on.
Humph! Very fair indeed! If He could see me now (whoever he is) I hope
he wouldn’t repent of his bargain!’

The simple arrangements were of her own making, and were stated to Riah
thus:

‘I mean to go alone, godmother, in my usual carriage, and you’ll be so
kind as keep house while I am gone. It’s not far off. And when I return,
we’ll have a cup of tea, and a chat over future arrangements. It’s a
very plain last house that I have been able to give my poor unfortunate
boy; but he’ll accept the will for the deed if he knows anything about
it; and if he doesn’t know anything about it,’ with a sob, and wiping
her eyes, ‘why, it won’t matter to him. I see the service in the
Prayer-book says, that we brought nothing into this world and it is
certain we can take nothing out. It comforts me for not being able to
hire a lot of stupid undertaker’s things for my poor child, and seeming
as if I was trying to smuggle ‘em out of this world with him, when of
course I must break down in the attempt, and bring ‘em all back again.
As it is, there’ll be nothing to bring back but me, and that’s quite
consistent, for I shan’t be brought back, some day!’

After that previous carrying of him in the streets, the wretched old
fellow seemed to be twice buried. He was taken on the shoulders of half
a dozen blossom-faced men, who shuffled with him to the churchyard,
and who were preceded by another blossom-faced man, affecting a
stately stalk, as if he were a Policeman of the D(eath) Division, and
ceremoniously pretending not to know his intimate acquaintances, as he
led the pageant. Yet, the spectacle of only one little mourner hobbling
after, caused many people to turn their heads with a look of interest.

At last the troublesome deceased was got into the ground, to be buried
no more, and the stately stalker stalked back before the solitary
dressmaker, as if she were bound in honour to have no notion of the way
home. Those Furies, the conventionalities, being thus appeased, he left
her.

‘I must have a very short cry, godmother, before I cheer up for good,’
said the little creature, coming in. ‘Because after all a child is a
child, you know.’

It was a longer cry than might have been expected. Howbeit, it wore
itself out in a shadowy corner, and then the dressmaker came forth, and
washed her face, and made the tea. ‘You wouldn’t mind my cutting out
something while we are at tea, would you?’ she asked her Jewish friend,
with a coaxing air.

‘Cinderella, dear child,’ the old man expostulated, ‘will you never
rest?’

‘Oh! It’s not work, cutting out a pattern isn’t,’ said Miss Jenny, with
her busy little scissors already snipping at some paper. ‘The truth is,
godmother, I want to fix it while I have it correct in my mind.’

‘Have you seen it to-day then?’ asked Riah.

‘Yes, godmother. Saw it just now. It’s a surplice, that’s what it
is. Thing our clergymen wear, you know,’ explained Miss Jenny, in
consideration of his professing another faith.

‘And what have you to do with that, Jenny?’

‘Why, godmother,’ replied the dressmaker, ‘you must know that we
Professors who live upon our taste and invention, are obliged to keep
our eyes always open. And you know already that I have many extra
expenses to meet just now. So, it came into my head while I was weeping
at my poor boy’s grave, that something in my way might be done with a
clergyman.’

‘What can be done?’ asked the old man.

‘Not a funeral, never fear!’ returned Miss Jenny, anticipating his
objection with a nod. ‘The public don’t like to be made melancholy, I
know very well. I am seldom called upon to put my young friends into
mourning; not into real mourning, that is; Court mourning they are
rather proud of. But a doll clergyman, my dear,--glossy black curls
and whiskers--uniting two of my young friends in matrimony,’ said Miss
Jenny, shaking her forefinger, ‘is quite another affair. If you don’t
see those three at the altar in Bond Street, in a jiffy, my name’s Jack
Robinson!’

With her expert little ways in sharp action, she had got a doll into
whitey-brown paper orders, before the meal was over, and was displaying
it for the edification of the Jewish mind, when a knock was heard at the
street-door. Riah went to open it, and presently came back, ushering in,
with the grave and courteous air that sat so well upon him, a gentleman.

The gentleman was a stranger to the dressmaker; but even in the moment
of his casting his eyes upon her, there was something in his manner
which brought to her remembrance Mr Eugene Wrayburn.

‘Pardon me,’ said the gentleman. ‘You are the dolls’ dressmaker?’

‘I am the dolls’ dressmaker, sir.’

‘Lizzie Hexam’s friend?’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Miss Jenny, instantly on the defensive. ‘And Lizzie
Hexam’s friend.’

‘Here is a note from her, entreating you to accede to the request of
Mr Mortimer Lightwood, the bearer. Mr Riah chances to know that I am Mr
Mortimer Lightwood, and will tell you so.’

Riah bent his head in corroboration.

‘Will you read the note?’

‘It’s very short,’ said Jenny, with a look of wonder, when she had read
it.

‘There was no time to make it longer. Time was so very precious. My dear
friend Mr Eugene Wrayburn is dying.’

The dressmaker clasped her hands, and uttered a little piteous cry.

‘Is dying,’ repeated Lightwood, with emotion, ‘at some distance from
here. He is sinking under injuries received at the hands of a villain
who attacked him in the dark. I come straight from his bedside. He is
almost always insensible. In a short restless interval of sensibility,
or partial sensibility, I made out that he asked for you to be brought
to sit by him. Hardly relying on my own interpretation of the indistinct
sounds he made, I caused Lizzie to hear them. We were both sure that he
asked for you.’

The dressmaker, with her hands still clasped, looked affrightedly from
the one to the other of her two companions.

‘If you delay, he may die with his request ungratified, with his
last wish--intrusted to me--we have long been much more than
brothers--unfulfilled. I shall break down, if I try to say more.’

In a few moments the black bonnet and the crutch-stick were on duty, the
good Jew was left in possession of the house, and the dolls’ dressmaker,
side by side in a chaise with Mortimer Lightwood, was posting out of
town.



Chapter 10

THE DOLLS’ DRESSMAKER DISCOVERS A WORD


A darkened and hushed room; the river outside the windows flowing on
to the vast ocean; a figure on the bed, swathed and bandaged and bound,
lying helpless on its back, with its two useless arms in splints at its
sides. Only two days of usage so familiarized the little dressmaker
with this scene, that it held the place occupied two days ago by the
recollections of years.

He had scarcely moved since her arrival. Sometimes his eyes were open,
sometimes closed. When they were open, there was no meaning in their
unwinking stare at one spot straight before them, unless for a moment
the brow knitted into a faint expression of anger, or surprise. Then,
Mortimer Lightwood would speak to him, and on occasions he would be so
far roused as to make an attempt to pronounce his friend’s name. But, in
an instant consciousness was gone again, and no spirit of Eugene was in
Eugene’s crushed outer form.

They provided Jenny with materials for plying her work, and she had a
little table placed at the foot of his bed. Sitting there, with her rich
shower of hair falling over the chair-back, they hoped she might attract
his notice. With the same object, she would sing, just above her breath,
when he opened his eyes, or she saw his brow knit into that faint
expression, so evanescent that it was like a shape made in water. But
as yet he had not heeded. The ‘they’ here mentioned were the medical
attendant; Lizzie, who was there in all her intervals of rest; and
Lightwood, who never left him.

The two days became three, and the three days became four. At length,
quite unexpectedly, he said something in a whisper.

‘What was it, my dear Eugene?’

‘Will you, Mortimer--’

‘Will I--?

--‘Send for her?’

‘My dear fellow, she is here.’

Quite unconscious of the long blank, he supposed that they were still
speaking together.

The little dressmaker stood up at the foot of the bed, humming her song,
and nodded to him brightly. ‘I can’t shake hands, Jenny,’ said Eugene,
with something of his old look; ‘but I am very glad to see you.’

Mortimer repeated this to her, for it could only be made out by bending
over him and closely watching his attempts to say it. In a little while,
he added:

‘Ask her if she has seen the children.’

Mortimer could not understand this, neither could Jenny herself, until
he added:

‘Ask her if she has smelt the flowers.’

‘Oh! I know!’ cried Jenny. ‘I understand him now!’ Then, Lightwood
yielded his place to her quick approach, and she said, bending over the
bed, with that better look: ‘You mean my long bright slanting rows of
children, who used to bring me ease and rest? You mean the children who
used to take me up, and make me light?’

Eugene smiled, ‘Yes.’

‘I have not seen them since I saw you. I never see them now, but I am
hardly ever in pain now.’

‘It was a pretty fancy,’ said Eugene.

‘But I have heard my birds sing,’ cried the little creature, ‘and I have
smelt my flowers. Yes, indeed I have! And both were most beautiful and
most Divine!’

‘Stay and help to nurse me,’ said Eugene, quietly. ‘I should like you to
have the fancy here, before I die.’

She touched his lips with her hand, and shaded her eyes with that same
hand as she went back to her work and her little low song. He heard the
song with evident pleasure, until she allowed it gradually to sink away
into silence.

‘Mortimer.’

‘My dear Eugene.’

‘If you can give me anything to keep me here for only a few minutes--’

‘To keep you here, Eugene?’

‘To prevent my wandering away I don’t know where--for I begin to be
sensible that I have just come back, and that I shall lose myself
again--do so, dear boy!’

Mortimer gave him such stimulants as could be given him with safety
(they were always at hand, ready), and bending over him once more, was
about to caution him, when he said:

‘Don’t tell me not to speak, for I must speak. If you knew the
harassing anxiety that gnaws and wears me when I am wandering in those
places--where are those endless places, Mortimer? They must be at an
immense distance!’

He saw in his friend’s face that he was losing himself; for he added
after a moment: ‘Don’t be afraid--I am not gone yet. What was it?’

‘You wanted to tell me something, Eugene. My poor dear fellow, you
wanted to say something to your old friend--to the friend who has always
loved you, admired you, imitated you, founded himself upon you, been
nothing without you, and who, God knows, would be here in your place if
he could!’

‘Tut, tut!’ said Eugene with a tender glance as the other put his hand
before his face. ‘I am not worth it. I acknowledge that I like it,
dear boy, but I am not worth it. This attack, my dear Mortimer; this
murder--’

His friend leaned over him with renewed attention, saying: ‘You and I
suspect some one.’

‘More than suspect. But, Mortimer, while I lie here, and when I lie
here no longer, I trust to you that the perpetrator is never brought to
justice.’

‘Eugene?’

‘Her innocent reputation would be ruined, my friend. She would be
punished, not he. I have wronged her enough in fact; I have wronged her
still more in intention. You recollect what pavement is said to be made
of good intentions. It is made of bad intentions too. Mortimer, I am
lying on it, and I know!’

‘Be comforted, my dear Eugene.’

‘I will, when you have promised me. Dear Mortimer, the man must never be
pursued. If he should be accused, you must keep him silent and save
him. Don’t think of avenging me; think only of hushing the story
and protecting her. You can confuse the case, and turn aside the
circumstances. Listen to what I say to you. It was not the schoolmaster,
Bradley Headstone. Do you hear me? Twice; it was not the schoolmaster,
Bradley Headstone. Do you hear me? Three times; it was not the
schoolmaster, Bradley Headstone.’

He stopped, exhausted. His speech had been whispered, broken, and
indistinct; but by a great effort he had made it plain enough to be
unmistakeable.

‘Dear fellow, I am wandering away. Stay me for another moment, if you
can.’

Lightwood lifted his head at the neck, and put a wine-glass to his lips.
He rallied.

‘I don’t know how long ago it was done, whether weeks, days, or hours.
No matter. There is inquiry on foot, and pursuit. Say! Is there not?’

‘Yes.’

‘Check it; divert it! Don’t let her be brought in question. Shield
her. The guilty man, brought to justice, would poison her name. Let the
guilty man go unpunished. Lizzie and my reparation before all! Promise
me!’

‘Eugene, I do. I promise you!’

In the act of turning his eyes gratefully towards his friend, he
wandered away. His eyes stood still, and settled into that former intent
unmeaning stare.

Hours and hours, days and nights, he remained in this same condition.
There were times when he would calmly speak to his friend after a long
period of unconsciousness, and would say he was better, and would ask
for something. Before it could be given him, he would be gone again.

The dolls’ dressmaker, all softened compassion now, watched him with an
earnestness that never relaxed. She would regularly change the ice, or
the cooling spirit, on his head, and would keep her ear at the pillow
betweenwhiles, listening for any faint words that fell from him in his
wanderings. It was amazing through how many hours at a time she would
remain beside him, in a crouching attitude, attentive to his slightest
moan. As he could not move a hand, he could make no sign of distress;
but, through this close watching (if through no secret sympathy or
power) the little creature attained an understanding of him that
Lightwood did not possess. Mortimer would often turn to her, as if she
were an interpreter between this sentient world and the insensible man;
and she would change the dressing of a wound, or ease a ligature, or
turn his face, or alter the pressure of the bedclothes on him, with an
absolute certainty of doing right. The natural lightness and delicacy of
touch which had become very refined by practice in her miniature work,
no doubt was involved in this; but her perception was at least as fine.

The one word, Lizzie, he muttered millions of times. In a certain phase
of his distressful state, which was the worst to those who tended him,
he would roll his head upon the pillow, incessantly repeating the name
in a hurried and impatient manner, with the misery of a disturbed mind,
and the monotony of a machine. Equally, when he lay still and staring,
he would repeat it for hours without cessation, but then, always in a
tone of subdued warning and horror. Her presence and her touch upon his
breast or face would often stop this, and then they learned to expect
that he would for some time remain still, with his eyes closed, and that
he would be conscious on opening them. But, the heavy disappointment of
their hope--revived by the welcome silence of the room--was, that his
spirit would glide away again and be lost, in the moment of their joy
that it was there.

This frequent rising of a drowning man from the deep, to sink again, was
dreadful to the beholders. But, gradually the change stole upon him that
it became dreadful to himself. His desire to impart something that was
on his mind, his unspeakable yearning to have speech with his friend
and make a communication to him, so troubled him when he recovered
consciousness, that its term was thereby shortened. As the man rising
from the deep would disappear the sooner for fighting with the water, so
he in his desperate struggle went down again.

One afternoon when he had been lying still, and Lizzie, unrecognized,
had just stolen out of the room to pursue her occupation, he uttered
Lightwood’s name.

‘My dear Eugene, I am here.’

‘How long is this to last, Mortimer?’

Lightwood shook his head. ‘Still, Eugene, you are no worse than you
were.’

‘But I know there’s no hope. Yet I pray it may last long enough for you
to do me one last service, and for me to do one last action. Keep me
here a few moments, Mortimer. Try, try!’

His friend gave him what aid he could, and encouraged him to believe
that he was more composed, though even then his eyes were losing the
expression they so rarely recovered.

‘Hold me here, dear fellow, if you can. Stop my wandering away. I am
going!’

‘Not yet, not yet. Tell me, dear Eugene, what is it I shall do?’

‘Keep me here for only a single minute. I am going away again. Don’t let
me go. Hear me speak first. Stop me--stop me!’

‘My poor Eugene, try to be calm.’

‘I do try. I try so hard. If you only knew how hard! Don’t let me wander
till I have spoken. Give me a little more wine.’

Lightwood complied. Eugene, with a most pathetic struggle against the
unconsciousness that was coming over him, and with a look of appeal that
affected his friend profoundly, said:

‘You can leave me with Jenny, while you speak to her and tell her what I
beseech of her. You can leave me with Jenny, while you are gone. There’s
not much for you to do. You won’t be long away.’

‘No, no, no. But tell me what it is that I shall do, Eugene!’

‘I am going! You can’t hold me.’

‘Tell me in a word, Eugene!’

His eyes were fixed again, and the only word that came from his lips was
the word millions of times repeated. Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie.

But, the watchful little dressmaker had been vigilant as ever in her
watch, and she now came up and touched Lightwood’s arm as he looked down
at his friend, despairingly.

‘Hush!’ she said, with her finger on her lips. ‘His eyes are closing.
He’ll be conscious when he next opens them. Shall I give you a leading
word to say to him?’

‘O Jenny, if you could only give me the right word!’

‘I can. Stoop down.’

He stooped, and she whispered in his ear. She whispered in his ear one
short word of a single syllable. Lightwood started, and looked at her.

‘Try it,’ said the little creature, with an excited and exultant face.
She then bent over the unconscious man, and, for the first time, kissed
him on the cheek, and kissed the poor maimed hand that was nearest to
her. Then, she withdrew to the foot of the bed.

Some two hours afterwards, Mortimer Lightwood saw his consciousness come
back, and instantly, but very tranquilly, bent over him.

‘Don’t speak, Eugene. Do no more than look at me, and listen to me. You
follow what I say.’

He moved his head in assent.

‘I am going on from the point where we broke off. Is the word we should
soon have come to--is it--Wife?’

‘O God bless you, Mortimer!’

‘Hush! Don’t be agitated. Don’t speak. Hear me, dear Eugene. Your mind
will be more at peace, lying here, if you make Lizzie your wife. You
wish me to speak to her, and tell her so, and entreat her to be your
wife. You ask her to kneel at this bedside and be married to you, that
your reparation may be complete. Is that so?’

‘Yes. God bless you! Yes.’

‘It shall be done, Eugene. Trust it to me. I shall have to go away
for some few hours, to give effect to your wishes. You see this is
unavoidable?’

‘Dear friend, I said so.’

‘True. But I had not the clue then. How do you think I got it?’

Glancing wistfully around, Eugene saw Miss Jenny at the foot of the bed,
looking at him with her elbows on the bed, and her head upon her hands.
There was a trace of his whimsical air upon him, as he tried to smile at
her.

‘Yes indeed,’ said Lightwood, ‘the discovery was hers. Observe my dear
Eugene; while I am away you will know that I have discharged my trust
with Lizzie, by finding her here, in my present place at your bedside,
to leave you no more. A final word before I go. This is the right course
of a true man, Eugene. And I solemnly believe, with all my soul, that if
Providence should mercifully restore you to us, you will be blessed with
a noble wife in the preserver of your life, whom you will dearly love.’

‘Amen. I am sure of that. But I shall not come through it, Mortimer.’

‘You will not be the less hopeful or less strong, for this, Eugene.’

‘No. Touch my face with yours, in case I should not hold out till you
come back. I love you, Mortimer. Don’t be uneasy for me while you are
gone. If my dear brave girl will take me, I feel persuaded that I shall
live long enough to be married, dear fellow.’

Miss Jenny gave up altogether on this parting taking place between the
friends, and sitting with her back towards the bed in the bower made by
her bright hair, wept heartily, though noiselessly. Mortimer Lightwood
was soon gone. As the evening light lengthened the heavy reflections of
the trees in the river, another figure came with a soft step into the
sick room.

‘Is he conscious?’ asked the little dressmaker, as the figure took its
station by the pillow. For, Jenny had given place to it immediately, and
could not see the sufferer’s face, in the dark room, from her new and
removed position.

‘He is conscious, Jenny,’ murmured Eugene for himself. ‘He knows his
wife.’



Chapter 11

EFFECT IS GIVEN TO THE DOLLS’ DRESSMAKER’S DISCOVERY


Mrs John Rokesmith sat at needlework in her neat little room, beside a
basket of neat little articles of clothing, which presented so much of
the appearance of being in the dolls’ dressmaker’s way of business, that
one might have supposed she was going to set up in opposition to Miss
Wren. Whether the Complete British Family Housewife had imparted sage
counsel anent them, did not appear, but probably not, as that cloudy
oracle was nowhere visible. For certain, however, Mrs John Rokesmith
stitched at them with so dexterous a hand, that she must have taken
lessons of somebody. Love is in all things a most wonderful teacher,
and perhaps love (from a pictorial point of view, with nothing on but
a thimble), had been teaching this branch of needlework to Mrs John
Rokesmith.

It was near John’s time for coming home, but as Mrs John was desirous to
finish a special triumph of her skill before dinner, she did not go out
to meet him. Placidly, though rather consequentially smiling, she sat
stitching away with a regular sound, like a sort of dimpled little
charming Dresden-china clock by the very best maker.

A knock at the door, and a ring at the bell. Not John; or Bella would
have flown out to meet him. Then who, if not John? Bella was asking
herself the question, when that fluttering little fool of a servant
fluttered in, saying, ‘Mr Lightwood!’

Oh good gracious!

Bella had but time to throw a handkerchief over the basket, when Mr
Lightwood made his bow. There was something amiss with Mr Lightwood, for
he was strangely grave and looked ill.

With a brief reference to the happy time when it had been his privilege
to know Mrs Rokesmith as Miss Wilfer, Mr Lightwood explained what was
amiss with him and why he came. He came bearing Lizzie Hexam’s earnest
hope that Mrs John Rokesmith would see her married.

Bella was so fluttered by the request, and by the short narrative he had
feelingly given her, that there never was a more timely smelling-bottle
than John’s knock. ‘My husband,’ said Bella; ‘I’ll bring him in.’

But, that turned out to be more easily said than done; for, the instant
she mentioned Mr Lightwood’s name, John stopped, with his hand upon the
lock of the room door.

‘Come up stairs, my darling.’

Bella was amazed by the flush in his face, and by his sudden turning
away. ‘What can it mean?’ she thought, as she accompanied him up stairs.

‘Now, my life,’ said John, taking her on his knee, ‘tell me all about
it.’

All very well to say, ‘Tell me all about it;’ but John was very much
confused. His attention evidently trailed off, now and then, even while
Bella told him all about it. Yet she knew that he took a great interest
in Lizzie and her fortunes. What could it mean?

‘You will come to this marriage with me, John dear?’

‘N--no, my love; I can’t do that.’

‘You can’t do that, John?’

‘No, my dear, it’s quite out of the question. Not to be thought of.’

‘Am I to go alone, John?’

‘No, my dear, you will go with Mr Lightwood.’

‘Don’t you think it’s time we went down to Mr Lightwood, John dear?’
Bella insinuated.

‘My darling, it’s almost time you went, but I must ask you to excuse me
to him altogether.’

‘You never mean, John dear, that you are not going to see him? Why, he
knows you have come home. I told him so.’

‘That’s a little unfortunate, but it can’t be helped. Unfortunate or
fortunate, I positively cannot see him, my love.’

Bella cast about in her mind what could be his reason for this
unaccountable behaviour; as she sat on his knee looking at him in
astonishment and pouting a little. A weak reason presented itself.

‘John dear, you never can be jealous of Mr Lightwood?’

‘Why, my precious child,’ returned her husband, laughing outright: ‘how
could I be jealous of him? Why should I be jealous of him?’

‘Because, you know, John,’ pursued Bella, pouting a little more, ‘though
he did rather admire me once, it was not my fault.’

‘It was your fault that I admired you,’ returned her husband, with a
look of pride in her, ‘and why not your fault that he admired you? But,
I jealous on that account? Why, I must go distracted for life, if I
turned jealous of every one who used to find my wife beautiful and
winning!’

‘I am half angry with you, John dear,’ said Bella, laughing a little,
‘and half pleased with you; because you are such a stupid old fellow,
and yet you say nice things, as if you meant them. Don’t be mysterious,
sir. What harm do you know of Mr Lightwood?’

‘None, my love.’

‘What has he ever done to you, John?’

‘He has never done anything to me, my dear. I know no more against
him than I know against Mr Wrayburn; he has never done anything to me;
neither has Mr Wrayburn. And yet I have exactly the same objection to
both of them.’

‘Oh, John!’ retorted Bella, as if she were giving him up for a bad job,
as she used to give up herself. ‘You are nothing better than a sphinx!
And a married sphinx isn’t a--isn’t a nice confidential husband,’ said
Bella, in a tone of injury.

‘Bella, my life,’ said John Rokesmith, touching her cheek, with a grave
smile, as she cast down her eyes and pouted again; ‘look at me. I want
to speak to you.’

‘In earnest, Blue Beard of the secret chamber?’ asked Bella, clearing
her pretty face.

‘In earnest. And I confess to the secret chamber. Don’t you remember
that you asked me not to declare what I thought of your higher qualities
until you had been tried?’

‘Yes, John dear. And I fully meant it, and I fully mean it.’

‘The time will come, my darling--I am no prophet, but I say so,--when
you WILL be tried. The time will come, I think, when you will undergo
a trial through which you will never pass quite triumphantly for me,
unless you can put perfect faith in me.’

‘Then you may be sure of me, John dear, for I can put perfect faith in
you, and I do, and I always, always will. Don’t judge me by a little
thing like this, John. In little things, I am a little thing myself--I
always was. But in great things, I hope not; I don’t mean to boast, John
dear, but I hope not!’

He was even better convinced of the truth of what she said than she was,
as he felt her loving arms about him. If the Golden Dustman’s riches had
been his to stake, he would have staked them to the last farthing on the
fidelity through good and evil of her affectionate and trusting heart.

‘Now, I’ll go down to, and go away with, Mr Lightwood,’ said Bella,
springing up. ‘You are the most creasing and tumbling Clumsy-Boots of a
packer, John, that ever was; but if you’re quite good, and will promise
never to do so any more (though I don’t know what you have done!) you
may pack me a little bag for a night, while I get my bonnet on.’

He gaily complied, and she tied her dimpled chin up, and shook her head
into her bonnet, and pulled out the bows of her bonnet-strings, and
got her gloves on, finger by finger, and finally got them on her
little plump hands, and bade him good-bye and went down. Mr Lightwood’s
impatience was much relieved when he found her dressed for departure.

‘Mr Rokesmith goes with us?’ he said, hesitating, with a look towards
the door.

‘Oh, I forgot!’ replied Bella. ‘His best compliments. His face is
swollen to the size of two faces, and he is to go to bed directly, poor
fellow, to wait for the doctor, who is coming to lance him.’

‘It is curious,’ observed Lightwood, ‘that I have never yet seen Mr
Rokesmith, though we have been engaged in the same affairs.’

‘Really?’ said the unblushing Bella.

‘I begin to think,’ observed Lightwood, ‘that I never shall see him.’

‘These things happen so oddly sometimes,’ said Bella with a steady
countenance, ‘that there seems a kind of fatality in them. But I am
quite ready, Mr Lightwood.’

They started directly, in a little carriage that Lightwood had brought
with him from never-to-be-forgotten Greenwich; and from Greenwich they
started directly for London; and in London they waited at a railway
station until such time as the Reverend Frank Milvey, and Margaretta
his wife, with whom Mortimer Lightwood had been already in conference,
should come and join them.

That worthy couple were delayed by a portentous old parishioner of the
female gender, who was one of the plagues of their lives, and with whom
they bore with most exemplary sweetness and good-humour, notwithstanding
her having an infection of absurdity about her, that communicated itself
to everything with which, and everybody with whom, she came in contact.
She was a member of the Reverend Frank’s congregation, and made a point
of distinguishing herself in that body, by conspicuously weeping at
everything, however cheering, said by the Reverend Frank in his public
ministration; also by applying to herself the various lamentations of
David, and complaining in a personally injured manner (much in arrear of
the clerk and the rest of the respondents) that her enemies were digging
pit-falls about her, and breaking her with rods of iron. Indeed, this
old widow discharged herself of that portion of the Morning and Evening
Service as if she were lodging a complaint on oath and applying for
a warrant before a magistrate. But this was not her most inconvenient
characteristic, for that took the form of an impression, usually
recurring in inclement weather and at about daybreak, that she had
something on her mind and stood in immediate need of the Reverend Frank
to come and take it off. Many a time had that kind creature got up, and
gone out to Mrs Sprodgkin (such was the disciple’s name), suppressing
a strong sense of her comicality by his strong sense of duty, and
perfectly knowing that nothing but a cold would come of it. However,
beyond themselves, the Reverend Frank Milvey and Mrs Milvey seldom
hinted that Mrs Sprodgkin was hardly worth the trouble she gave; but
both made the best of her, as they did of all their troubles.

This very exacting member of the fold appeared to be endowed with a
sixth sense, in regard of knowing when the Reverend Frank Milvey least
desired her company, and with promptitude appearing in his little hall.
Consequently, when the Reverend Frank had willingly engaged that he and
his wife would accompany Lightwood back, he said, as a matter of course:
‘We must make haste to get out, Margaretta, my dear, or we shall be
descended on by Mrs Sprodgkin.’ To which Mrs Milvey replied, in her
pleasantly emphatic way, ‘Oh YES, for she IS such a marplot, Frank, and
DOES worry so!’ Words that were scarcely uttered when their theme
was announced as in faithful attendance below, desiring counsel on a
spiritual matter. The points on which Mrs Sprodgkin sought elucidation
being seldom of a pressing nature (as Who begat Whom, or some
information concerning the Amorites), Mrs Milvey on this special
occasion resorted to the device of buying her off with a present of tea
and sugar, and a loaf and butter. These gifts Mrs Sprodgkin accepted,
but still insisted on dutifully remaining in the hall, to curtsey to the
Reverend Frank as he came forth. Who, incautiously saying in his genial
manner, ‘Well, Sally, there you are!’ involved himself in a discursive
address from Mrs Sprodgkin, revolving around the result that she
regarded tea and sugar in the light of myrrh and frankincense, and
considered bread and butter identical with locusts and wild honey.
Having communicated this edifying piece of information, Mrs Sprodgkin
was left still unadjourned in the hall, and Mr and Mrs Milvey hurried in
a heated condition to the railway station. All of which is here recorded
to the honour of that good Christian pair, representatives of hundreds
of other good Christian pairs as conscientious and as useful, who merge
the smallness of their work in its greatness, and feel in no danger of
losing dignity when they adapt themselves to incomprehensible humbugs.

‘Detained at the last moment by one who had a claim upon me,’ was the
Reverend Frank’s apology to Lightwood, taking no thought of himself.
To which Mrs Milvey added, taking thought for him, like the championing
little wife she was; ‘Oh yes, detained at the last moment. But AS to
the claim, Frank, I MUST say that I DO think you are OVER-considerate
sometimes, and allow THAT to be a LITTLE abused.’

Bella felt conscious, in spite of her late pledge for herself, that her
husband’s absence would give disagreeable occasion for surprise to the
Milveys. Nor could she appear quite at her ease when Mrs Milvey asked:

‘HOW is Mr Rokesmith, and IS he gone before us, or DOES he follow us?’

It becoming necessary, upon this, to send him to bed again and hold him
in waiting to be lanced again, Bella did it. But not half as well on
the second occasion as on the first; for, a twice-told white one seems
almost to become a black one, when you are not used to it.

‘Oh DEAR!’ said Mrs Milvey, ‘I am SO sorry! Mr Rokesmith took SUCH an
interest in Lizzie Hexam, when we were there before. And if we had ONLY
known of his face, we COULD have given him something that would have
kept it down long enough for so SHORT a purpose.’

By way of making the white one whiter, Bella hastened to stipulate that
he was not in pain. Mrs Milvey was SO glad of it.

‘I don’t know HOW it is,’ said Mrs Milvey, ‘and I am SURE you don’t,
Frank, but the clergy and their wives seem to CAUSE swelled faces.
Whenever I take notice of a child in the school, it seems to me as if
its face swelled INSTANTLY. Frank NEVER makes acquaintance with a new
old woman, but she gets the face-ache. And another thing is, we DO make
the poor children sniff so. I don’t know HOW we do it, and I should
be so glad not to; but the MORE we take notice of them, the MORE they
sniff. Just as they do when the text is given out.--Frank, that’s a
schoolmaster. I have seen him somewhere.’

The reference was to a young man of reserved appearance, in a coat and
waistcoat of black, and pantaloons of pepper and salt. He had come
into the office of the station, from its interior, in an unsettled way,
immediately after Lightwood had gone out to the train; and he had been
hurriedly reading the printed bills and notices on the wall. He had had
a wandering interest in what was said among the people waiting there
and passing to and fro. He had drawn nearer, at about the time when
Mrs Milvey mentioned Lizzie Hexam, and had remained near, since: though
always glancing towards the door by which Lightwood had gone out. He
stood with his back towards them, and his gloved hands clasped behind
him. There was now so evident a faltering upon him, expressive of
indecision whether or no he should express his having heard himself
referred to, that Mr Milvey spoke to him.

‘I cannot recall your name,’ he said, ‘but I remember to have seen you
in your school.’

‘My name is Bradley Headstone, sir,’ he replied, backing into a more
retired place.

‘I ought to have remembered it,’ said Mr Milvey, giving him his hand. ‘I
hope you are well? A little overworked, I am afraid?’

‘Yes, I am overworked just at present, sir.’

‘Had no play in your last holiday time?’

‘No, sir.’

‘All work and no play, Mr Headstone, will not make dulness, in your
case, I dare say; but it will make dyspepsia, if you don’t take care.’

‘I will endeavour to take care, sir. Might I beg leave to speak to you,
outside, a moment?’

‘By all means.’

It was evening, and the office was well lighted. The schoolmaster, who
had never remitted his watch on Lightwood’s door, now moved by another
door to a corner without, where there was more shadow than light; and
said, plucking at his gloves:

‘One of your ladies, sir, mentioned within my hearing a name that I am
acquainted with; I may say, well acquainted with. The name of the sister
of an old pupil of mine. He was my pupil for a long time, and has got on
and gone upward rapidly. The name of Hexam. The name of Lizzie Hexam.’
He seemed to be a shy man, struggling against nervousness, and spoke in
a very constrained way. The break he set between his last two sentences
was quite embarrassing to his hearer.

‘Yes,’ replied Mr Milvey. ‘We are going down to see her.’

‘I gathered as much, sir. I hope there is nothing amiss with the sister
of my old pupil? I hope no bereavement has befallen her. I hope she is
in no affliction? Has lost no--relation?’

Mr Milvey thought this a man with a very odd manner, and a dark downward
look; but he answered in his usual open way.

‘I am glad to tell you, Mr Headstone, that the sister of your old pupil
has not sustained any such loss. You thought I might be going down to
bury some one?’

‘That may have been the connexion of ideas, sir, with your clerical
character, but I was not conscious of it.--Then you are not, sir?’

A man with a very odd manner indeed, and with a lurking look that was
quite oppressive.

‘No. In fact,’ said Mr Milvey, ‘since you are so interested in the
sister of your old pupil, I may as well tell you that I am going down to
marry her.’

The schoolmaster started back.

‘Not to marry her, myself,’ said Mr Milvey, with a smile, ‘because I
have a wife already. To perform the marriage service at her wedding.’

Bradley Headstone caught hold of a pillar behind him. If Mr Milvey knew
an ashy face when he saw it, he saw it then.

‘You are quite ill, Mr Headstone!’

‘It is not much, sir. It will pass over very soon. I am accustomed to be
seized with giddiness. Don’t let me detain you, sir; I stand in need
of no assistance, I thank you. Much obliged by your sparing me these
minutes of your time.’

As Mr Milvey, who had no more minutes to spare, made a suitable reply
and turned back into the office, he observed the schoolmaster to
lean against the pillar with his hat in his hand, and to pull at his
neckcloth as if he were trying to tear it off. The Reverend Frank
accordingly directed the notice of one of the attendants to him, by
saying: ‘There is a person outside who seems to be really ill, and to
require some help, though he says he does not.’

Lightwood had by this time secured their places, and the departure-bell
was about to be rung. They took their seats, and were beginning to
move out of the station, when the same attendant came running along the
platform, looking into all the carriages.

‘Oh! You are here, sir!’ he said, springing on the step, and holding
the window-frame by his elbow, as the carriage moved. ‘That person you
pointed out to me is in a fit.’

‘I infer from what he told me that he is subject to such attacks. He
will come to, in the air, in a little while.’

He was took very bad to be sure, and was biting and knocking about him
(the man said) furiously. Would the gentleman give him his card, as he
had seen him first? The gentleman did so, with the explanation that
he knew no more of the man attacked than that he was a man of a very
respectable occupation, who had said he was out of health, as his
appearance would of itself have indicated. The attendant received the
card, watched his opportunity for sliding down, slid down, and so it
ended.

Then, the train rattled among the house-tops, and among the ragged sides
of houses torn down to make way for it, and over the swarming streets,
and under the fruitful earth, until it shot across the river: bursting
over the quiet surface like a bomb-shell, and gone again as if it had
exploded in the rush of smoke and steam and glare. A little more, and
again it roared across the river, a great rocket: spurning the watery
turnings and doublings with ineffable contempt, and going straight to
its end, as Father Time goes to his. To whom it is no matter what living
waters run high or low, reflect the heavenly lights and darknesses,
produce their little growth of weeds and flowers, turn here, turn there,
are noisy or still, are troubled or at rest, for their course has one
sure termination, though their sources and devices are many.

Then, a carriage ride succeeded, near the solemn river, stealing away
by night, as all things steal away, by night and by day, so quietly
yielding to the attraction of the loadstone rock of Eternity; and the
nearer they drew to the chamber where Eugene lay, the more they feared
that they might find his wanderings done. At last they saw its dim light
shining out, and it gave them hope: though Lightwood faltered as he
thought: ‘If he were gone, she would still be sitting by him.’

But he lay quiet, half in stupor, half in sleep. Bella, entering with
a raised admonitory finger, kissed Lizzie softly, but said not a word.
Neither did any of them speak, but all sat down at the foot of the bed,
silently waiting. And now, in this night-watch, mingling with the flow
of the river and with the rush of the train, came the questions into
Bella’s mind again: What could be in the depths of that mystery of
John’s? Why was it that he had never been seen by Mr Lightwood, whom he
still avoided? When would that trial come, through which her faith
in, and her duty to, her dear husband, was to carry her, rendering him
triumphant? For, that had been his term. Her passing through the trial
was to make the man she loved with all her heart, triumphant. Term not
to sink out of sight in Bella’s breast.

Far on in the night, Eugene opened his eyes. He was sensible, and said
at once: ‘How does the time go? Has our Mortimer come back?’

Lightwood was there immediately, to answer for himself. ‘Yes, Eugene,
and all is ready.’

‘Dear boy!’ returned Eugene with a smile, ‘we both thank you heartily.
Lizzie, tell them how welcome they are, and that I would be eloquent if
I could.’

‘There is no need,’ said Mr Milvey. ‘We know it. Are you better, Mr
Wrayburn?’

‘I am much happier,’ said Eugene.

‘Much better too, I hope?’

Eugene turned his eyes towards Lizzie, as if to spare her, and answered
nothing.

Then, they all stood around the bed, and Mr Milvey, opening his book,
began the service; so rarely associated with the shadow of death; so
inseparable in the mind from a flush of life and gaiety and hope and
health and joy. Bella thought how different from her own sunny little
wedding, and wept. Mrs Milvey overflowed with pity, and wept too. The
dolls’ dressmaker, with her hands before her face, wept in her golden
bower. Reading in a low clear voice, and bending over Eugene, who kept
his eyes upon him, Mr Milvey did his office with suitable simplicity.
As the bridegroom could not move his hand, they touched his fingers with
the ring, and so put it on the bride. When the two plighted their troth,
she laid her hand on his and kept it there. When the ceremony was done,
and all the rest departed from the room, she drew her arm under his
head, and laid her own head down upon the pillow by his side.

‘Undraw the curtains, my dear girl,’ said Eugene, after a while, ‘and
let us see our wedding-day.’

The sun was rising, and his first rays struck into the room, as she came
back, and put her lips to his. ‘I bless the day!’ said Eugene. ‘I bless
the day!’ said Lizzie.

‘You have made a poor marriage of it, my sweet wife,’ said Eugene. ‘A
shattered graceless fellow, stretched at his length here, and next to
nothing for you when you are a young widow.’

‘I have made the marriage that I would have given all the world to dare
to hope for,’ she replied.

‘You have thrown yourself away,’ said Eugene, shaking his head. ‘But you
have followed the treasure of your heart. My justification is, that you
had thrown that away first, dear girl!’

‘No. I had given it to you.’

‘The same thing, my poor Lizzie!’

‘Hush! hush! A very different thing.’

There were tears in his eyes, and she besought him to close them. ‘No,’
said Eugene, again shaking his head; ‘let me look at you, Lizzie, while
I can. You brave devoted girl! You heroine!’

Her own eyes filled under his praises. And when he mustered strength to
move his wounded head a very little way, and lay it on her bosom, the
tears of both fell.

‘Lizzie,’ said Eugene, after a silence: ‘when you see me wandering away
from this refuge that I have so ill deserved, speak to me by my name,
and I think I shall come back.’

‘Yes, dear Eugene.’

‘There!’ he exclaimed, smiling. ‘I should have gone then, but for that!’

A little while afterwards, when he appeared to be sinking into
insensibility, she said, in a calm loving voice: ‘Eugene, my dear
husband!’ He immediately answered: ‘There again! You see how you can
recall me!’ And afterwards, when he could not speak, he still answered
by a slight movement of his head upon her bosom.

The sun was high in the sky, when she gently disengaged herself to give
him the stimulants and nourishment he required. The utter helplessness
of the wreck of him that lay cast ashore there, now alarmed her, but he
himself appeared a little more hopeful.

‘Ah, my beloved Lizzie!’ he said, faintly. ‘How shall I ever pay all I
owe you, if I recover!’

‘Don’t be ashamed of me,’ she replied, ‘and you will have more than paid
all.’

‘It would require a life, Lizzie, to pay all; more than a life.’

‘Live for that, then; live for me, Eugene; live to see how hard I will
try to improve myself, and never to discredit you.’

‘My darling girl,’ he replied, rallying more of his old manner than
he had ever yet got together. ‘On the contrary, I have been thinking
whether it is not the best thing I can do, to die.’

‘The best thing you can do, to leave me with a broken heart?’

‘I don’t mean that, my dear girl. I was not thinking of that. What I was
thinking of was this. Out of your compassion for me, in this maimed and
broken state, you make so much of me--you think so well of me--you love
me so dearly.’

‘Heaven knows I love you dearly!’

‘And Heaven knows I prize it! Well. If I live, you’ll find me out.’

‘I shall find out that my husband has a mine of purpose and energy, and
will turn it to the best account?’

‘I hope so, dearest Lizzie,’ said Eugene, wistfully, and yet somewhat
whimsically. ‘I hope so. But I can’t summon the vanity to think so. How
can I think so, looking back on such a trifling wasted youth as mine! I
humbly hope it; but I daren’t believe it. There is a sharp misgiving
in my conscience that if I were to live, I should disappoint your good
opinion and my own--and that I ought to die, my dear!’



Chapter 12

THE PASSING SHADOW


The winds and tides rose and fell a certain number of times, the earth
moved round the sun a certain number of times, the ship upon the ocean
made her voyage safely, and brought a baby-Bella home. Then who so blest
and happy as Mrs John Rokesmith, saving and excepting Mr John Rokesmith!

‘Would you not like to be rich NOW, my darling?’

‘How can you ask me such a question, John dear? Am I not rich?’

These were among the first words spoken near the baby Bella as she lay
asleep. She soon proved to be a baby of wonderful intelligence,
evincing the strongest objection to her grandmother’s society, and
being invariably seized with a painful acidity of the stomach when that
dignified lady honoured her with any attention.

It was charming to see Bella contemplating this baby, and finding out
her own dimples in that tiny reflection, as if she were looking in the
glass without personal vanity. Her cherubic father justly remarked
to her husband that the baby seemed to make her younger than before,
reminding him of the days when she had a pet doll and used to talk to it
as she carried it about. The world might have been challenged to produce
another baby who had such a store of pleasant nonsense said and sung
to it, as Bella said and sung to this baby; or who was dressed and
undressed as often in four-and-twenty hours as Bella dressed and
undressed this baby; or who was held behind doors and poked out to stop
its father’s way when he came home, as this baby was; or, in a word, who
did half the number of baby things, through the lively invention of a
gay and proud young mother, that this inexhaustible baby did.

The inexhaustible baby was two or three months old, when Bella began to
notice a cloud upon her husband’s brow. Watching it, she saw a gathering
and deepening anxiety there, which caused her great disquiet. More than
once, she awoke him muttering in his sleep; and, though he muttered
nothing worse than her own name, it was plain to her that his
restlessness originated in some load of care. Therefore, Bella at length
put in her claim to divide this load, and hear her half of it.

‘You know, John dear,’ she said, cheerily reverting to their former
conversation, ‘that I hope I may safely be trusted in great things. And
it surely cannot be a little thing that causes you so much uneasiness.
It’s very considerate of you to try to hide from me that you are
uncomfortable about something, but it’s quite impossible to be done,
John love.’

‘I admit that I am rather uneasy, my own.’

‘Then please to tell me what about, sir.’

But no, he evaded that. ‘Never mind!’ thought Bella, resolutely.
‘John requires me to put perfect faith in him, and he shall not be
disappointed.’

She went up to London one day, to meet him, in order that they might
make some purchases. She found him waiting for her at her journey’s
end, and they walked away together through the streets. He was in gay
spirits, though still harping on that notion of their being rich; and
he said, now let them make believe that yonder fine carriage was theirs,
and that it was waiting to take them home to a fine house they had; what
would Bella, in that case, best like to find in the house? Well! Bella
didn’t know: already having everything she wanted, she couldn’t say.
But, by degrees she was led on to confess that she would like to have
for the inexhaustible baby such a nursery as never was seen. It was
to be ‘a very rainbow for colours’, as she was quite sure baby noticed
colours; and the staircase was to be adorned with the most exquisite
flowers, as she was absolutely certain baby noticed flowers; and there
was to be an aviary somewhere, of the loveliest little birds, as there
was not the smallest doubt in the world that baby noticed birds.
Was there nothing else? No, John dear. The predilections of the
inexhaustible baby being provided for, Bella could think of nothing
else.

They were chatting on in this way, and John had suggested, ‘No jewels
for your own wear, for instance?’ and Bella had replied laughing. O! if
he came to that, yes, there might be a beautiful ivory case of jewels
on her dressing-table; when these pictures were in a moment darkened and
blotted out.

They turned a corner, and met Mr Lightwood.

He stopped as if he were petrified by the sight of Bella’s husband, who
in the same moment had changed colour.

‘Mr Lightwood and I have met before,’ he said.

‘Met before, John?’ Bella repeated in a tone of wonder. ‘Mr Lightwood
told me he had never seen you.’

‘I did not then know that I had,’ said Lightwood, discomposed on her
account. ‘I believed that I had only heard of--Mr Rokesmith.’ With an
emphasis on the name.

‘When Mr Lightwood saw me, my love,’ observed her husband, not avoiding
his eye, but looking at him, ‘my name was Julius Handford.’

Julius Handford! The name that Bella had so often seen in old
newspapers, when she was an inmate of Mr Boffin’s house! Julius
Handford, who had been publicly entreated to appear, and for
intelligence of whom a reward had been publicly offered!

‘I would have avoided mentioning it in your presence,’ said Lightwood to
Bella, delicately; ‘but since your husband mentions it himself, I must
confirm his strange admission. I saw him as Mr Julius Handford, and I
afterwards (unquestionably to his knowledge) took great pains to trace
him out.’

‘Quite true. But it was not my object or my interest,’ said Rokesmith,
quietly, ‘to be traced out.’

Bella looked from the one to the other, in amazement.

‘Mr Lightwood,’ pursued her husband, ‘as chance has brought us face to
face at last--which is not to be wondered at, for the wonder is, that,
in spite of all my pains to the contrary, chance has not confronted
us together sooner--I have only to remind you that you have been at my
house, and to add that I have not changed my residence.’

‘Sir’ returned Lightwood, with a meaning glance towards Bella, ‘my
position is a truly painful one. I hope that no complicity in a very
dark transaction may attach to you, but you cannot fail to know that
your own extraordinary conduct has laid you under suspicion.’

‘I know it has,’ was all the reply.

‘My professional duty,’ said Lightwood hesitating, with another glance
towards Bella, ‘is greatly at variance with my personal inclination; but
I doubt, Mr Handford, or Mr Rokesmith, whether I am justified in taking
leave of you here, with your whole course unexplained.’

Bella caught her husband by the hand.

‘Don’t be alarmed, my darling. Mr Lightwood will find that he is quite
justified in taking leave of me here. At all events,’ added Rokesmith,
‘he will find that I mean to take leave of him here.’

‘I think, sir,’ said Lightwood, ‘you can scarcely deny that when I came
to your house on the occasion to which you have referred, you avoided me
of a set purpose.’

‘Mr Lightwood, I assure you I have no disposition to deny it, or
intention to deny it. I should have continued to avoid you, in pursuance
of the same set purpose, for a short time longer, if we had not met now.
I am going straight home, and shall remain at home to-morrow until noon.
Hereafter, I hope we may be better acquainted. Good-day.’

Lightwood stood irresolute, but Bella’s husband passed him in the
steadiest manner, with Bella on his arm; and they went home without
encountering any further remonstrance or molestation from any one.

When they had dined and were alone, John Rokesmith said to his wife, who
had preserved her cheerfulness: ‘And you don’t ask me, my dear, why I
bore that name?’

‘No, John love. I should dearly like to know, of course;’ (which her
anxious face confirmed;) ‘but I wait until you can tell me of your own
free will. You asked me if I could have perfect faith in you, and I said
yes, and I meant it.’

It did not escape Bella’s notice that he began to look triumphant. She
wanted no strengthening in her firmness; but if she had had need of any,
she would have derived it from his kindling face.

‘You cannot have been prepared, my dearest, for such a discovery as that
this mysterious Mr Handford was identical with your husband?’

‘No, John dear, of course not. But you told me to prepare to be tried,
and I prepared myself.’

He drew her to nestle closer to him, and told her it would soon be over,
and the truth would soon appear. ‘And now,’ he went on, ‘lay stress,
my dear, on these words that I am going to add. I stand in no kind of
peril, and I can by possibility be hurt at no one’s hand.’

‘You are quite, quite sure of that, John dear?’

‘Not a hair of my head! Moreover, I have done no wrong, and have injured
no man. Shall I swear it?’

‘No, John!’ cried Bella, laying her hand upon his lips, with a proud
look. ‘Never to me!’

‘But circumstances,’ he went on ‘--I can, and I will, disperse them in
a moment--have surrounded me with one of the strangest suspicions ever
known. You heard Mr Lightwood speak of a dark transaction?’

‘Yes, John.’

‘You are prepared to hear explicitly what he meant?’

‘Yes, John.’

‘My life, he meant the murder of John Harmon, your allotted husband.’

With a fast palpitating heart, Bella grasped him by the arm. ‘You cannot
be suspected, John?’

‘Dear love, I can be--for I am!’

There was silence between them, as she sat looking in his face, with the
colour quite gone from her own face and lips. ‘How dare they!’ she cried
at length, in a burst of generous indignation. ‘My beloved husband, how
dare they!’

He caught her in his arms as she opened hers, and held her to his heart.
‘Even knowing this, you can trust me, Bella?’

‘I can trust you, John dear, with all my soul. If I could not trust you,
I should fall dead at your feet.’

The kindling triumph in his face was bright indeed, as he looked up and
rapturously exclaimed, what had he done to deserve the blessing of this
dear confiding creature’s heart! Again she put her hand upon his lips,
saying, ‘Hush!’ and then told him, in her own little natural pathetic
way, that if all the world were against him, she would be for him; that
if all the world repudiated him, she would believe him; that if he were
infamous in other eyes, he would be honoured in hers; and that, under
the worst unmerited suspicion, she could devote her life to consoling
him, and imparting her own faith in him to their little child.

A twilight calm of happiness then succeeding to their radiant noon, they
remained at peace, until a strange voice in the room startled them both.
The room being by that time dark, the voice said, ‘Don’t let the lady
be alarmed by my striking a light,’ and immediately a match rattled, and
glimmered in a hand. The hand and the match and the voice were then seen
by John Rokesmith to belong to Mr Inspector, once meditatively active in
this chronicle.

‘I take the liberty,’ said Mr Inspector, in a business-like manner, ‘to
bring myself to the recollection of Mr Julius Handford, who gave me his
name and address down at our place a considerable time ago. Would the
lady object to my lighting the pair of candles on the chimneypiece, to
throw a further light upon the subject? No? Thank you, ma’am. Now, we
look cheerful.’

Mr Inspector, in a dark-blue buttoned-up frock coat and pantaloons,
presented a serviceable, half-pay, Royal Arms kind of appearance, as he
applied his pocket handkerchief to his nose and bowed to the lady.

‘You favoured me, Mr Handford,’ said Mr Inspector, ‘by writing down your
name and address, and I produce the piece of paper on which you wrote
it. Comparing the same with the writing on the fly-leaf of this book on
the table--and a sweet pretty volume it is--I find the writing of the
entry, “Mrs John Rokesmith. From her husband on her birthday”--and very
gratifying to the feelings such memorials are--to correspond exactly.
Can I have a word with you?’

‘Certainly. Here, if you please,’ was the reply.

‘Why,’ retorted Mr Inspector, again using his pocket handkerchief,
‘though there’s nothing for the lady to be at all alarmed at, still,
ladies are apt to take alarm at matters of business--being of that
fragile sex that they’re not accustomed to them when not of a strictly
domestic character--and I do generally make it a rule to propose
retirement from the presence of ladies, before entering upon business
topics. Or perhaps,’ Mr Inspector hinted, ‘if the lady was to step
up-stairs, and take a look at baby now!’

‘Mrs Rokesmith,’--her husband was beginning; when Mr Inspector,
regarding the words as an introduction, said, ‘Happy I am sure, to have
the honour.’ And bowed, with gallantry.

‘Mrs Rokesmith,’ resumed her husband, ‘is satisfied that she can have no
reason for being alarmed, whatever the business is.’

‘Really? Is that so?’ said Mr Inspector. ‘But it’s a sex to live and
learn from, and there’s nothing a lady can’t accomplish when she once
fully gives her mind to it. It’s the case with my own wife. Well, ma’am,
this good gentleman of yours has given rise to a rather large amount
of trouble which might have been avoided if he had come forward and
explained himself. Well you see! He DIDN’T come forward and explain
himself. Consequently, now that we meet, him and me, you’ll say--and say
right--that there’s nothing to be alarmed at, in my proposing to him
TO come forward--or, putting the same meaning in another form, to come
along with me--and explain himself.’

When Mr Inspector put it in that other form, ‘to come along with me,’
there was a relishing roll in his voice, and his eye beamed with an
official lustre.

‘Do you propose to take me into custody?’ inquired John Rokesmith, very
coolly.

‘Why argue?’ returned Mr Inspector in a comfortable sort of
remonstrance; ‘ain’t it enough that I propose that you shall come along
with me?’

‘For what reason?’

‘Lord bless my soul and body!’ returned Mr Inspector, ‘I wonder at it in
a man of your education. Why argue?’

‘What do you charge against me?’

‘I wonder at you before a lady,’ said Mr Inspector, shaking his head
reproachfully: ‘I wonder, brought up as you have been, you haven’t a
more delicate mind! I charge you, then, with being some way concerned
in the Harmon Murder. I don’t say whether before, or in, or after, the
fact. I don’t say whether with having some knowledge of it that hasn’t
come out.’

‘You don’t surprise me. I foresaw your visit this afternoon.’

‘Don’t!’ said Mr Inspector. ‘Why, why argue? It’s my duty to inform you
that whatever you say, will be used against you.’

‘I don’t think it will.’

‘But I tell you it will,’ said Mr Inspector. ‘Now, having received the
caution, do you still say that you foresaw my visit this afternoon?’

‘Yes. And I will say something more, if you will step with me into the
next room.’

With a reassuring kiss on the lips of the frightened Bella, her husband
(to whom Mr Inspector obligingly offered his arm), took up a candle, and
withdrew with that gentleman. They were a full half-hour in conference.
When they returned, Mr Inspector looked considerably astonished.

‘I have invited this worthy officer, my dear,’ said John, ‘to make a
short excursion with me in which you shall be a sharer. He will take
something to eat and drink, I dare say, on your invitation, while you
are getting your bonnet on.’

Mr Inspector declined eating, but assented to the proposal of a glass of
brandy and water. Mixing this cold, and pensively consuming it, he broke
at intervals into such soliloquies as that he never did know such a
move, that he never had been so gravelled, and that what a game was
this to try the sort of stuff a man’s opinion of himself was made
of! Concurrently with these comments, he more than once burst out a
laughing, with the half-enjoying and half-piqued air of a man, who
had given up a good conundrum, after much guessing, and been told the
answer. Bella was so timid of him, that she noted these things in a
half-shrinking, half-perceptive way, and similarly noted that there was
a great change in his manner towards John. That coming-along-with-him
deportment was now lost in long musing looks at John and at herself and
sometimes in slow heavy rubs of his hand across his forehead, as if he
were ironing cut the creases which his deep pondering made there. He had
had some coughing and whistling satellites secretly gravitating towards
him about the premises, but they were now dismissed, and he eyed John as
if he had meant to do him a public service, but had unfortunately been
anticipated. Whether Bella might have noted anything more, if she
had been less afraid of him, she could not determine; but it was all
inexplicable to her, and not the faintest flash of the real state of the
case broke in upon her mind. Mr Inspector’s increased notice of herself
and knowing way of raising his eyebrows when their eyes by any chance
met, as if he put the question ‘Don’t you see?’ augmented her timidity,
and, consequently, her perplexity. For all these reasons, when he
and she and John, at towards nine o’clock of a winter evening went to
London, and began driving from London Bridge, among low-lying water-side
wharves and docks and strange places, Bella was in the state of a
dreamer; perfectly unable to account for her being there, perfectly
unable to forecast what would happen next, or whither she was going, or
why; certain of nothing in the immediate present, but that she confided
in John, and that John seemed somehow to be getting more triumphant. But
what a certainty was that!

They alighted at last at the corner of a court, where there was a
building with a bright lamp and wicket gate. Its orderly appearance was
very unlike that of the surrounding neighbourhood, and was explained by
the inscription POLICE STATION.

‘We are not going in here, John?’ said Bella, clinging to him.

‘Yes, my dear; but of our own accord. We shall come out again as easily,
never fear.’

The whitewashed room was pure white as of old, the methodical
book-keeping was in peaceful progress as of old, and some distant howler
was banging against a cell door as of old. The sanctuary was not a
permanent abiding-place, but a kind of criminal Pickford’s. The lower
passions and vices were regularly ticked off in the books, warehoused in
the cells, carted away as per accompanying invoice, and left little mark
upon it.

Mr Inspector placed two chairs for his visitors, before the fire, and
communed in a low voice with a brother of his order (also of a half-pay,
and Royal Arms aspect), who, judged only by his occupation at the
moment, might have been a writing-master, setting copies. Their
conference done, Mr Inspector returned to the fireplace, and, having
observed that he would step round to the Fellowships and see how matters
stood, went out. He soon came back again, saying, ‘Nothing could be
better, for they’re at supper with Miss Abbey in the bar;’ and then they
all three went out together.

Still, as in a dream, Bella found herself entering a snug old-fashioned
public-house, and found herself smuggled into a little three-cornered
room nearly opposite the bar of that establishment. Mr Inspector
achieved the smuggling of herself and John into this queer room, called
Cosy in an inscription on the door, by entering in the narrow passage
first in order, and suddenly turning round upon them with extended arms,
as if they had been two sheep. The room was lighted for their reception.

‘Now,’ said Mr Inspector to John, turning the gas lower; ‘I’ll mix with
‘em in a casual way, and when I say Identification, perhaps you’ll show
yourself.’

John nodded, and Mr Inspector went alone to the half-door of the bar.
From the dim doorway of Cosy, within which Bella and her husband stood,
they could see a comfortable little party of three persons sitting at
supper in the bar, and could hear everything that was said.

The three persons were Miss Abbey and two male guests. To whom
collectively, Mr Inspector remarked that the weather was getting sharp
for the time of year.

‘It need be sharp to suit your wits, sir,’ said Miss Abbey. ‘What have
you got in hand now?’

‘Thanking you for your compliment: not much, Miss Abbey,’ was Mr
Inspector’s rejoinder.

‘Who have you got in Cosy?’ asked Miss Abbey.

‘Only a gentleman and his wife, Miss.’

‘And who are they? If one may ask it without detriment to your deep
plans in the interests of the honest public?’ said Miss Abbey, proud of
Mr Inspector as an administrative genius.

‘They are strangers in this part of the town, Miss Abbey. They are
waiting till I shall want the gentleman to show himself somewhere, for
half a moment.’

‘While they’re waiting,’ said Miss Abbey, ‘couldn’t you join us?’

Mr Inspector immediately slipped into the bar, and sat down at the side
of the half-door, with his back towards the passage, and directly facing
the two guests. ‘I don’t take my supper till later in the night,’ said
he, ‘and therefore I won’t disturb the compactness of the table. But
I’ll take a glass of flip, if that’s flip in the jug in the fender.’

‘That’s flip,’ replied Miss Abbey, ‘and it’s my making, and if even you
can find out better, I shall be glad to know where.’ Filling him, with
hospitable hands, a steaming tumbler, Miss Abbey replaced the jug by
the fire; the company not having yet arrived at the flip-stage of their
supper, but being as yet skirmishing with strong ale.

‘Ah--h!’ cried Mr Inspector. ‘That’s the smack! There’s not a Detective
in the Force, Miss Abbey, that could find out better stuff than that.’

‘Glad to hear you say so,’ rejoined Miss Abbey. ‘You ought to know, if
anybody does.’

‘Mr Job Potterson,’ Mr Inspector continued, ‘I drink your health. Mr
Jacob Kibble, I drink yours. Hope you have made a prosperous voyage
home, gentlemen both.’

Mr Kibble, an unctuous broad man of few words and many mouthfuls, said,
more briefly than pointedly, raising his ale to his lips: ‘Same to you.’
Mr Job Potterson, a semi-seafaring man of obliging demeanour, said,
‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Lord bless my soul and body!’ cried Mr Inspector. ‘Talk of trades, Miss
Abbey, and the way they set their marks on men’ (a subject which nobody
had approached); ‘who wouldn’t know your brother to be a Steward!
There’s a bright and ready twinkle in his eye, there’s a neatness in his
action, there’s a smartness in his figure, there’s an air of reliability
about him in case you wanted a basin, which points out the steward! And
Mr Kibble; ain’t he Passenger, all over? While there’s that mercantile
cut upon him which would make you happy to give him credit for five
hundred pound, don’t you see the salt sea shining on him too?’

‘YOU do, I dare say,’ returned Miss Abbey, ‘but I don’t. And as for
stewarding, I think it’s time my brother gave that up, and took his
House in hand on his sister’s retiring. The House will go to pieces if
he don’t. I wouldn’t sell it for any money that could be told out, to a
person that I couldn’t depend upon to be a Law to the Porters, as I have
been.’

‘There you’re right, Miss,’ said Mr Inspector. ‘A better kept house is
not known to our men. What do I say? Half so well a kept house is not
known to our men. Show the Force the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters,
and the Force--to a constable--will show you a piece of perfection, Mr
Kibble.’

That gentleman, with a very serious shake of his head, subscribed the
article.

‘And talk of Time slipping by you, as if it was an animal at rustic
sports with its tail soaped,’ said Mr Inspector (again, a subject which
nobody had approached); ‘why, well you may. Well you may. How has it
slipped by us, since the time when Mr Job Potterson here present, Mr
Jacob Kibble here present, and an Officer of the Force here present,
first came together on a matter of Identification!’

Bella’s husband stepped softly to the half-door of the bar, and stood
there.

‘How has Time slipped by us,’ Mr Inspector went on slowly, with his eyes
narrowly observant of the two guests, ‘since we three very men, at an
Inquest in this very house--Mr Kibble? Taken ill, sir?’

Mr Kibble had staggered up, with his lower jaw dropped, catching
Potterson by the shoulder, and pointing to the half-door. He now cried
out: ‘Potterson! Look! Look there!’ Potterson started up, started back,
and exclaimed: ‘Heaven defend us, what’s that!’ Bella’s husband stepped
back to Bella, took her in his arms (for she was terrified by the
unintelligible terror of the two men), and shut the door of the little
room. A hurry of voices succeeded, in which Mr Inspector’s voice was
busiest; it gradually slackened and sank; and Mr Inspector reappeared.
‘Sharp’s the word, sir!’ he said, looking in with a knowing wink. ‘We’ll
get your lady out at once.’ Immediately, Bella and her husband were
under the stars, making their way back, alone, to the vehicle they had
kept in waiting.

All this was most extraordinary, and Bella could make nothing of it but
that John was in the right. How in the right, and how suspected of being
in the wrong, she could not divine. Some vague idea that he had never
really assumed the name of Handford, and that there was a remarkable
likeness between him and that mysterious person, was her nearest
approach to any definite explanation. But John was triumphant; that much
was made apparent; and she could wait for the rest.

When John came home to dinner next day, he said, sitting down on the
sofa by Bella and baby-Bella: ‘My dear, I have a piece of news to tell
you. I have left the China House.’

As he seemed to like having left it, Bella took it for granted that
there was no misfortune in the case.

‘In a word, my love,’ said John, ‘the China House is broken up and
abolished. There is no such thing any more.’

‘Then, are you already in another House, John?’

‘Yes, my darling. I am in another way of business. And I am rather
better off.’

The inexhaustible baby was instantly made to congratulate him, and
to say, with appropriate action on the part of a very limp arm and a
speckled fist: ‘Three cheers, ladies and gemplemorums. Hoo--ray!’

‘I am afraid, my life,’ said John, ‘that you have become very much
attached to this cottage?’

‘Afraid I have, John? Of course I have.’

‘The reason why I said afraid,’ returned John, ‘is, because we must
move.’

‘O John!’

‘Yes, my dear, we must move. We must have our head-quarters in London
now. In short, there’s a dwelling-house rent-free, attached to my new
position, and we must occupy it.’

‘That’s a gain, John.’

‘Yes, my dear, it is undoubtedly a gain.’

He gave her a very blithe look, and a very sly look. Which occasioned
the inexhaustible baby to square at him with the speckled fists, and
demand in a threatening manner what he meant?

‘My love, you said it was a gain, and I said it was a gain. A very
innocent remark, surely.’

‘I won’t,’ said the inexhaustible baby,
‘--allow--you--to--make--game--of--my--venerable--Ma.’ At each division
administering a soft facer with one of the speckled fists.

John having stooped down to receive these punishing visitations, Bella
asked him, would it be necessary to move soon? Why yes, indeed (said
John), he did propose that they should move very soon. Taking the
furniture with them, of course? (said Bella). Why, no (said John), the
fact was, that the house was--in a sort of a kind of a way--furnished
already.

The inexhaustible baby, hearing this, resumed the offensive, and said:
‘But there’s no nursery for me, sir. What do you mean, marble-hearted
parent?’ To which the marble-hearted parent rejoined that there was
a--sort of a kind of a--nursery, and it might be ‘made to do’. ‘Made to
do?’ returned the Inexhaustible, administering more punishment, ‘what do
you take me for?’ And was then turned over on its back in Bella’s lap,
and smothered with kisses.

‘But really, John dear,’ said Bella, flushed in quite a lovely manner
by these exercises, ‘will the new house, just as it stands, do for baby?
That’s the question.’

‘I felt that to be the question,’ he returned, ‘and therefore I arranged
that you should come with me and look at it, to-morrow morning.’
Appointment made, accordingly, for Bella to go up with him to-morrow
morning; John kissed; and Bella delighted.

When they reached London in pursuance of their little plan, they took
coach and drove westward. Not only drove westward, but drove into that
particular westward division, which Bella had seen last when she turned
her face from Mr Boffin’s door. Not only drove into that particular
division, but drove at last into that very street. Not only drove into
that very street, but stopped at last at that very house.

‘John dear!’ cried Bella, looking out of window in a flutter. ‘Do you
see where we are?’

‘Yes, my love. The coachman’s quite right.’

The house-door was opened without any knocking or ringing, and John
promptly helped her out. The servant who stood holding the door, asked
no question of John, neither did he go before them or follow them as
they went straight up-stairs. It was only her husband’s encircling arm,
urging her on, that prevented Bella from stopping at the foot of the
staircase. As they ascended, it was seen to be tastefully ornamented
with most beautiful flowers.

‘O John!’ said Bella, faintly. ‘What does this mean?’

‘Nothing, my darling, nothing. Let us go on.’

Going on a little higher, they came to a charming aviary, in which a
number of tropical birds, more gorgeous in colour than the flowers,
were flying about; and among those birds were gold and silver fish, and
mosses, and water-lilies, and a fountain, and all manner of wonders.

‘O my dear John!’ said Bella. ‘What does this mean?’

‘Nothing, my darling, nothing. Let us go on.’

They went on, until they came to a door. As John put out his hand to
open it, Bella caught his hand.

‘I don’t know what it means, but it’s too much for me. Hold me, John,
love.’

John caught her up in his arm, and lightly dashed into the room with
her.

Behold Mr and Mrs Boffin, beaming! Behold Mrs Boffin clapping her hands
in an ecstacy, running to Bella with tears of joy pouring down her
comely face, and folding her to her breast, with the words: ‘My deary
deary, deary girl, that Noddy and me saw married and couldn’t wish joy
to, or so much as speak to! My deary, deary, deary, wife of John and
mother of his little child! My loving loving, bright bright, Pretty
Pretty! Welcome to your house and home, my deary!’



Chapter 13

SHOWING HOW THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN HELPED TO SCATTER DUST


In all the first bewilderment of her wonder, the most bewilderingly
wonderful thing to Bella was the shining countenance of Mr Boffin. That
his wife should be joyous, open-hearted, and genial, or that her face
should express every quality that was large and trusting, and no quality
that was little or mean, was accordant with Bella’s experience. But,
that he, with a perfectly beneficent air and a plump rosy face, should
be standing there, looking at her and John, like some jovial good
spirit, was marvellous. For, how had he looked when she last saw him in
that very room (it was the room in which she had given him that piece of
her mind at parting), and what had become of all those crooked lines of
suspicion, avarice, and distrust, that twisted his visage then?

Mrs Boffin seated Bella on the large ottoman, and seated herself beside
her, and John her husband seated himself on the other side of her, and
Mr Boffin stood beaming at every one and everything he could see, with
surpassing jollity and enjoyment. Mrs Boffin was then taken with a
laughing fit of clapping her hands, and clapping her knees, and rocking
herself to and fro, and then with another laughing fit of embracing
Bella, and rocking her to and fro--both fits, of considerable duration.

‘Old lady, old lady,’ said Mr Boffin, at length; ‘if you don’t begin
somebody else must.’

‘I’m a going to begin, Noddy, my dear,’ returned Mrs Boffin. ‘Only it
isn’t easy for a person to know where to begin, when a person is in this
state of delight and happiness. Bella, my dear. Tell me, who’s this?’

‘Who is this?’ repeated Bella. ‘My husband.’

‘Ah! But tell me his name, deary!’ cried Mrs Boffin.

‘Rokesmith.’

‘No, it ain’t!’ cried Mrs Boffin, clapping her hands, and shaking her
head. ‘Not a bit of it.’

‘Handford then,’ suggested Bella.

‘No, it ain’t!’ cried Mrs Boffin, again clapping her hands and shaking
her head. ‘Not a bit of it.’

‘At least, his name is John, I suppose?’ said Bella.

‘Ah! I should think so, deary!’ cried Mrs Boffin. ‘I should hope so!
Many and many is the time I have called him by his name of John. But
what’s his other name, his true other name? Give a guess, my pretty!’

‘I can’t guess,’ said Bella, turning her pale face from one to another.

‘I could,’ cried Mrs Boffin, ‘and what’s more, I did! I found him out,
all in a flash as I may say, one night. Didn’t I, Noddy?’

‘Ay! That the old lady did!’ said Mr Boffin, with stout pride in the
circumstance.

‘Harkee to me, deary,’ pursued Mrs Boffin, taking Bella’s hands between
her own, and gently beating on them from time to time. ‘It was after a
particular night when John had been disappointed--as he thought--in
his affections. It was after a night when John had made an offer to a
certain young lady, and the certain young lady had refused it. It was
after a particular night, when he felt himself cast-away-like, and had
made up his mind to go seek his fortune. It was the very next night. My
Noddy wanted a paper out of his Secretary’s room, and I says to Noddy,
“I am going by the door, and I’ll ask him for it.” I tapped at his door,
and he didn’t hear me. I looked in, and saw him a sitting lonely by his
fire, brooding over it. He chanced to look up with a pleased kind of
smile in my company when he saw me, and then in a single moment every
grain of the gunpowder that had been lying sprinkled thick about him
ever since I first set eyes upon him as a man at the Bower, took fire!
Too many a time had I seen him sitting lonely, when he was a poor child,
to be pitied, heart and hand! Too many a time had I seen him in need of
being brightened up with a comforting word! Too many and too many a time
to be mistaken, when that glimpse of him come at last! No, no! I just
makes out to cry, “I know you now! You’re John!” And he catches me as
I drops.--So what,’ says Mrs Boffin, breaking off in the rush of her
speech to smile most radiantly, ‘might you think by this time that your
husband’s name was, dear?’

‘Not,’ returned Bella, with quivering lips; ‘not Harmon? That’s not
possible?’

‘Don’t tremble. Why not possible, deary, when so many things are
possible?’ demanded Mrs Boffin, in a soothing tone.

‘He was killed,’ gasped Bella.

‘Thought to be,’ said Mrs Boffin. ‘But if ever John Harmon drew the
breath of life on earth, that is certainly John Harmon’s arm round your
waist now, my pretty. If ever John Harmon had a wife on earth, that wife
is certainly you. If ever John Harmon and his wife had a child on earth,
that child is certainly this.’

By a master-stroke of secret arrangement, the inexhaustible baby here
appeared at the door, suspended in mid-air by invisible agency. Mrs
Boffin, plunging at it, brought it to Bella’s lap, where both Mrs and Mr
Boffin (as the saying is) ‘took it out of’ the Inexhaustible in a shower
of caresses. It was only this timely appearance that kept Bella from
swooning. This, and her husband’s earnestness in explaining further to
her how it had come to pass that he had been supposed to be slain, and
had even been suspected of his own murder; also, how he had put a pious
fraud upon her which had preyed upon his mind, as the time for its
disclosure approached, lest she might not make full allowance for
the object with which it had originated, and in which it had fully
developed.

‘But bless ye, my beauty!’ cried Mrs Boffin, taking him up short at this
point, with another hearty clap of her hands. ‘It wasn’t John only that
was in it. We was all of us in it.’

‘I don’t,’ said Bella, looking vacantly from one to another, ‘yet
understand--’

‘Of course you don’t, my deary,’ exclaimed Mrs Boffin. ‘How can you till
you’re told! So now I am a going to tell you. So you put your two hands
between my two hands again,’ cried the comfortable creature, embracing
her, ‘with that blessed little picter lying on your lap, and you shall
be told all the story. Now, I’m a going to tell the story. Once, twice,
three times, and the horses is off. Here they go! When I cries out that
night, “I know you now, you’re John!”--which was my exact words; wasn’t
they, John?’

‘Your exact words,’ said John, laying his hand on hers.

‘That’s a very good arrangement,’ cried Mrs Boffin. ‘Keep it there,
John. And as we was all of us in it, Noddy you come and lay yours a top
of his, and we won’t break the pile till the story’s done.’

Mr Boffin hitched up a chair, and added his broad brown right hand to
the heap.

‘That’s capital!’ said Mrs Boffin, giving it a kiss. ‘Seems quite a
family building; don’t it? But the horses is off. Well! When I cries
out that night, “I know you now! you’re John!” John catches of me, it
is true; but I ain’t a light weight, bless ye, and he’s forced to let me
down. Noddy, he hears a noise, and in he trots, and as soon as I anyways
comes to myself I calls to him, “Noddy, well I might say as I did say,
that night at the Bower, for the Lord be thankful this is John!” On
which he gives a heave, and down he goes likewise, with his head under
the writing-table. This brings me round comfortable, and that brings him
round comfortable, and then John and him and me we all fall a crying for
joy.’

‘Yes! They cry for joy, my darling,’ her husband struck in. ‘You
understand? These two, whom I come to life to disappoint and dispossess,
cry for joy!’

Bella looked at him confusedly, and looked again at Mrs Boffin’s radiant
face.

‘That’s right, my dear, don’t you mind him,’ said Mrs Boffin, ‘stick
to me. Well! Then we sits down, gradually gets cool, and holds a
confabulation. John, he tells us how he is despairing in his mind on
accounts of a certain fair young person, and how, if I hadn’t found him
out, he was going away to seek his fortune far and wide, and had fully
meant never to come to life, but to leave the property as our wrongful
inheritance for ever and a day. At which you never see a man so
frightened as my Noddy was. For to think that he should have come into
the property wrongful, however innocent, and--more than that--might have
gone on keeping it to his dying day, turned him whiter than chalk.’

‘And you too,’ said Mr Boffin.

‘Don’t you mind him, neither, my deary,’ resumed Mrs Boffin; ‘stick
to me. This brings up a confabulation regarding the certain fair young
person; when Noddy he gives it as his opinion that she is a deary
creetur. “She may be a leetle spoilt, and nat’rally spoilt,” he says,
“by circumstances, but that’s only the surface, and I lay my life,” he
says, “that she’s the true golden gold at heart.”’

‘So did you,’ said Mr Boffin.

‘Don’t you mind him a single morsel, my dear,’ proceeded Mrs Boffin,
‘but stick to me. Then says John, O, if he could but prove so! Then we
both of us ups and says, that minute, “Prove so!”’

With a start, Bella directed a hurried glance towards Mr Boffin. But,
he was sitting thoughtfully smiling at that broad brown hand of his, and
either didn’t see it, or would take no notice of it.

‘“Prove it, John!” we says,’ repeated Mrs Boffin. ‘“Prove it and
overcome your doubts with triumph, and be happy for the first time in
your life, and for the rest of your life.” This puts John in a state,
to be sure. Then we says, “What will content you? If she was to stand up
for you when you was slighted, if she was to show herself of a generous
mind when you was oppressed, if she was to be truest to you when you was
poorest and friendliest, and all this against her own seeming interest,
how would that do?” “Do?” says John, “it would raise me to the skies.”
 “Then,” says my Noddy, “make your preparations for the ascent, John, it
being my firm belief that up you go!”’

Bella caught Mr Boffin’s twinkling eye for half an instant; but he got
it away from her, and restored it to his broad brown hand.

‘From the first, you was always a special favourite of Noddy’s,’ said
Mrs Boffin, shaking her head. ‘O you were! And if I had been inclined
to be jealous, I don’t know what I mightn’t have done to you. But as I
wasn’t--why, my beauty,’ with a hearty laugh and an embrace, ‘I made you
a special favourite of my own too. But the horses is coming round the
corner. Well! Then says my Noddy, shaking his sides till he was fit to
make ‘em ache again: “Look out for being slighted and oppressed, John,
for if ever a man had a hard master, you shall find me from this present
time to be such to you.” And then he began!’ cried Mrs Boffin, in an
ecstacy of admiration. ‘Lord bless you, then he began! And how he DID
begin; didn’t he!’

Bella looked half frightened, and yet half laughed.

‘But, bless you,’ pursued Mrs Boffin, ‘if you could have seen him of a
night, at that time of it! The way he’d sit and chuckle over himself!
The way he’d say “I’ve been a regular brown bear to-day,” and take
himself in his arms and hug himself at the thoughts of the brute he had
pretended. But every night he says to me: “Better and better, old lady.
What did we say of her? She’ll come through it, the true golden gold.
This’ll be the happiest piece of work we ever done.” And then he’d say,
“I’ll be a grislier old growler to-morrow!” and laugh, he would, till
John and me was often forced to slap his back, and bring it out of his
windpipes with a little water.’

Mr Boffin, with his face bent over his heavy hand, made no sound,
but rolled his shoulders when thus referred to, as if he were vastly
enjoying himself.

‘And so, my good and pretty,’ pursued Mrs Boffin, ‘you was married, and
there was we hid up in the church-organ by this husband of yours; for
he wouldn’t let us out with it then, as was first meant. “No,” he says,
“she’s so unselfish and contented, that I can’t afford to be rich yet. I
must wait a little longer.” Then, when baby was expected, he says, “She
is such a cheerful, glorious housewife that I can’t afford to be rich
yet. I must wait a little longer.” Then when baby was born, he says,
“She is so much better than she ever was, that I can’t afford to be rich
yet. I must wait a little longer.” And so he goes on and on, till I says
outright, “Now, John, if you don’t fix a time for setting her up in her
own house and home, and letting us walk out of it, I’ll turn Informer.”
 Then he says he’ll only wait to triumph beyond what we ever thought
possible, and to show her to us better than even we ever supposed; and
he says, “She shall see me under suspicion of having murdered myself,
and YOU shall see how trusting and how true she’ll be.” Well! Noddy and
me agreed to that, and he was right, and here you are, and the horses is
in, and the story is done, and God bless you my Beauty, and God bless us
all!’

The pile of hands dispersed, and Bella and Mrs Boffin took a good long
hug of one another: to the apparent peril of the inexhaustible baby,
lying staring in Bella’s lap.

‘But IS the story done?’ said Bella, pondering. ‘Is there no more of
it?’

‘What more of it should there be, deary?’ returned Mrs Boffin, full of
glee.

‘Are you sure you have left nothing out of it?’ asked Bella.

‘I don’t think I have,’ said Mrs Boffin, archly.

‘John dear,’ said Bella, ‘you’re a good nurse; will you please hold
baby?’ Having deposited the Inexhaustible in his arms with those words,
Bella looked hard at Mr Boffin, who had moved to a table where he was
leaning his head upon his hand with his face turned away, and, quietly
settling herself on her knees at his side, and drawing one arm over his
shoulder, said: ‘Please I beg your pardon, and I made a small mistake of
a word when I took leave of you last. Please I think you are better (not
worse) than Hopkins, better (not worse) than Dancer, better (not worse)
than Blackberry Jones, better (not worse) than any of them! Please
something more!’ cried Bella, with an exultant ringing laugh as she
struggled with him and forced him to turn his delighted face to hers.
‘Please I have found out something not yet mentioned. Please I don’t
believe you are a hard-hearted miser at all, and please I don’t believe
you ever for one single minute were!’

At this, Mrs Boffin fairly screamed with rapture, and sat beating her
feet upon the floor, clapping her hands, and bobbing herself backwards
and forwards, like a demented member of some Mandarin’s family.

‘O, I understand you now, sir!’ cried Bella. ‘I want neither you nor any
one else to tell me the rest of the story. I can tell it to YOU, now, if
you would like to hear it.’

‘Can you, my dear?’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Tell it then.’

‘What?’ cried Bella, holding him prisoner by the coat with both hands.
‘When you saw what a greedy little wretch you were the patron of, you
determined to show her how much misused and misprized riches could
do, and often had done, to spoil people; did you? Not caring what she
thought of you (and Goodness knows THAT was of no consequence!) you
showed her, in yourself, the most detestable sides of wealth, saying in
your own mind, “This shallow creature would never work the truth out of
her own weak soul, if she had a hundred years to do it in; but a glaring
instance kept before her may open even her eyes and set her thinking.”
 That was what you said to yourself, was it, sir?’

‘I never said anything of the sort,’ Mr Boffin declared in a state of
the highest enjoyment.

‘Then you ought to have said it, sir,’ returned Bella, giving him two
pulls and one kiss, ‘for you must have thought and meant it. You saw
that good fortune was turning my stupid head and hardening my silly
heart--was making me grasping, calculating, insolent, insufferable--and
you took the pains to be the dearest and kindest fingerpost that ever
was set up anywhere, pointing out the road that I was taking and the end
it led to. Confess instantly!’

‘John,’ said Mr Boffin, one broad piece of sunshine from head to foot,
‘I wish you’d help me out of this.’

‘You can’t be heard by counsel, sir,’ returned Bella. ‘You must speak
for yourself. Confess instantly!’

‘Well, my dear,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘the truth is, that when we did go in
for the little scheme that my old lady has pinted out, I did put it to
John, what did he think of going in for some such general scheme as YOU
have pinted out? But I didn’t in any way so word it, because I didn’t in
any way so mean it. I only said to John, wouldn’t it be more consistent,
me going in for being a reg’lar brown bear respecting him, to go in as a
reg’lar brown bear all round?’

‘Confess this minute, sir,’ said Bella, ‘that you did it to correct and
amend me!’

‘Certainly, my dear child,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘I didn’t do it to harm you;
you may be sure of that. And I did hope it might just hint a caution.
Still, it ought to be mentioned that no sooner had my old lady found out
John, than John made known to her and me that he had had his eye upon a
thankless person by the name of Silas Wegg. Partly for the punishment of
which Wegg, by leading him on in a very unhandsome and underhanded
game that he was playing, them books that you and me bought so many
of together (and, by-the-by, my dear, he wasn’t Blackberry Jones, but
Blewberry) was read aloud to me by that person of the name of Silas Wegg
aforesaid.’

Bella, who was still on her knees at Mr Boffin’s feet, gradually sank
down into a sitting posture on the ground, as she meditated more and
more thoughtfully, with her eyes upon his beaming face.

‘Still,’ said Bella, after this meditative pause, ‘there remain two
things that I cannot understand. Mrs Boffin never supposed any part of
the change in Mr Boffin to be real; did she?--You never did; did you?’
asked Bella, turning to her.

‘No!’ returned Mrs Boffin, with a most rotund and glowing negative.

‘And yet you took it very much to heart,’ said Bella. ‘I remember its
making you very uneasy, indeed.’

‘Ecod, you see Mrs John has a sharp eye, John!’ cried Mr Boffin, shaking
his head with an admiring air. ‘You’re right, my dear. The old lady
nearly blowed us into shivers and smithers, many times.’

‘Why?’ asked Bella. ‘How did that happen, when she was in your secret?’

‘Why, it was a weakness in the old lady,’ said Mr Boffin; ‘and yet, to
tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth, I’m rather proud of
it. My dear, the old lady thinks so high of me that she couldn’t abear
to see and hear me coming out as a reg’lar brown one. Couldn’t abear
to make-believe as I meant it! In consequence of which, we was
everlastingly in danger with her.’

Mrs Boffin laughed heartily at herself; but a certain glistening in her
honest eyes revealed that she was by no means cured of that dangerous
propensity.

‘I assure you, my dear,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘that on the celebrated
day when I made what has since been agreed upon to be my grandest
demonstration--I allude to Mew says the cat, Quack quack says the
duck, and Bow-wow-wow says the dog--I assure you, my dear, that on that
celebrated day, them flinty and unbelieving words hit my old lady so hard
on my account, that I had to hold her, to prevent her running out after
you, and defending me by saying I was playing a part.’

Mrs Boffin laughed heartily again, and her eyes glistened again, and
it then appeared, not only that in that burst of sarcastic eloquence
Mr Boffin was considered by his two fellow-conspirators to have outdone
himself, but that in his own opinion it was a remarkable achievement.
‘Never thought of it afore the moment, my dear!’ he observed to Bella.
‘When John said, if he had been so happy as to win your affections and
possess your heart, it come into my head to turn round upon him with
“Win her affections and possess her heart! Mew says the cat, Quack quack
says the duck, and Bow-wow-wow says the dog.” I couldn’t tell you how
it come into my head or where from, but it had so much the sound of a
rasper that I own to you it astonished myself. I was awful nigh bursting
out a laughing though, when it made John stare!’

‘You said, my pretty,’ Mrs Boffin reminded Bella, ‘that there was one
other thing you couldn’t understand.’

‘O yes!’ cried Bella, covering her face with her hands; ‘but that I
never shall be able to understand as long as I live. It is, how John
could love me so when I so little deserved it, and how you, Mr and Mrs
Boffin, could be so forgetful of yourselves, and take such pains and
trouble, to make me a little better, and after all to help him to so
unworthy a wife. But I am very very grateful.’

It was John Harmon’s turn then--John Harmon now for good, and John
Rokesmith for nevermore--to plead with her (quite unnecessarily) in
behalf of his deception, and to tell her, over and over again, that it
had been prolonged by her own winning graces in her supposed station of
life. This led on to many interchanges of endearment and enjoyment
on all sides, in the midst of which the Inexhaustible being observed
staring, in a most imbecile manner, on Mrs Boffin’s breast, was
pronounced to be supernaturally intelligent as to the whole transaction,
and was made to declare to the ladies and gemplemorums, with a wave of
the speckled fist (with difficulty detached from an exceedingly short
waist), ‘I have already informed my venerable Ma that I know all about
it!’

Then, said John Harmon, would Mrs John Harmon come and see her house?
And a dainty house it was, and a tastefully beautiful; and they went
through it in procession; the Inexhaustible on Mrs Boffin’s bosom (still
staring) occupying the middle station, and Mr Boffin bringing up the
rear. And on Bella’s exquisite toilette table was an ivory casket, and
in the casket were jewels the like of which she had never dreamed of,
and aloft on an upper floor was a nursery garnished as with rainbows;
‘though we were hard put to it,’ said John Harmon, ‘to get it done in so
short a time.’

The house inspected, emissaries removed the Inexhaustible, who was
shortly afterwards heard screaming among the rainbows; whereupon Bella
withdrew herself from the presence and knowledge of gemplemorums, and
the screaming ceased, and smiling Peace associated herself with that
young olive branch.

‘Come and look in, Noddy!’ said Mrs Boffin to Mr Boffin.

Mr Boffin, submitting to be led on tiptoe to the nursery door, looked in
with immense satisfaction, although there was nothing to see but Bella
in a musing state of happiness, seated in a little low chair upon the
hearth, with her child in her fair young arms, and her soft eyelashes
shading her eyes from the fire.

‘It looks as if the old man’s spirit had found rest at last; don’t it?’
said Mrs Boffin.

‘Yes, old lady.’

‘And as if his money had turned bright again, after a long long rust in
the dark, and was at last a beginning to sparkle in the sunlight?’

‘Yes, old lady.’

‘And it makes a pretty and a promising picter; don’t it?’

‘Yes, old lady.’

But, aware at the instant of a fine opening for a point, Mr Boffin
quenched that observation in this--delivered in the grisliest growling
of the regular brown bear. ‘A pretty and a hopeful picter? Mew,
Quack quack, Bow-wow!’ And then trotted silently downstairs, with his
shoulders in a state of the liveliest commotion.



Chapter 14

CHECKMATE TO THE FRIENDLY MOVE


Mr and Mrs John Harmon had so timed their taking possession of their
rightful name and their London house, that the event befel on the very
day when the last waggon-load of the last Mound was driven out at the
gates of Boffin’s Bower. As it jolted away, Mr Wegg felt that the
last load was correspondingly removed from his mind, and hailed the
auspicious season when that black sheep, Boffin, was to be closely
sheared.

Over the whole slow process of levelling the Mounds, Silas had kept
watch with rapacious eyes. But, eyes no less rapacious had watched the
growth of the Mounds in years bygone, and had vigilantly sifted the dust
of which they were composed. No valuables turned up. How should there
be any, seeing that the old hard jailer of Harmony Jail had coined every
waif and stray into money, long before?

Though disappointed by this bare result, Mr Wegg felt too sensibly
relieved by the close of the labour, to grumble to any great extent.
A foreman-representative of the dust contractors, purchasers of the
Mounds, had worn Mr Wegg down to skin and bone. This supervisor of the
proceedings, asserting his employers’ rights to cart off by daylight,
nightlight, torchlight, when they would, must have been the death of
Silas if the work had lasted much longer. Seeming never to need sleep
himself, he would reappear, with a tied-up broken head, in fantail hat
and velveteen smalls, like an accursed goblin, at the most unholy and
untimely hours. Tired out by keeping close ward over a long day’s work
in fog and rain, Silas would have just crawled to bed and be dozing,
when a horrid shake and rumble under his pillow would announce an
approaching train of carts, escorted by this Demon of Unrest, to fall to
work again. At another time, he would be rumbled up out of his soundest
sleep, in the dead of the night; at another, would be kept at his post
eight-and-forty hours on end. The more his persecutor besought him not
to trouble himself to turn out, the more suspicious was the crafty Wegg
that indications had been observed of something hidden somewhere, and
that attempts were on foot to circumvent him. So continually broken was
his rest through these means, that he led the life of having wagered
to keep ten thousand dog-watches in ten thousand hours, and looked
piteously upon himself as always getting up and yet never going to bed.
So gaunt and haggard had he grown at last, that his wooden leg showed
disproportionate, and presented a thriving appearance in contrast
with the rest of his plagued body, which might almost have been termed
chubby.

However, Wegg’s comfort was, that all his disagreeables were now over,
and that he was immediately coming into his property. Of late, the
grindstone did undoubtedly appear to have been whirling at his own nose
rather than Boffin’s, but Boffin’s nose was now to be sharpened fine.
Thus far, Mr Wegg had let his dusty friend off lightly, having been
baulked in that amiable design of frequently dining with him, by the
machinations of the sleepless dustman. He had been constrained to depute
Mr Venus to keep their dusty friend, Boffin, under inspection, while he
himself turned lank and lean at the Bower.

To Mr Venus’s museum Mr Wegg repaired when at length the Mounds
were down and gone. It being evening, he found that gentleman, as he
expected, seated over his fire; but did not find him, as he expected,
floating his powerful mind in tea.

‘Why, you smell rather comfortable here!’ said Wegg, seeming to take it
ill, and stopping and sniffing as he entered.

‘I AM rather comfortable, sir,’ said Venus.

‘You don’t use lemon in your business, do you?’ asked Wegg, sniffing
again.

‘No, Mr Wegg,’ said Venus. ‘When I use it at all, I mostly use it in
cobblers’ punch.’

‘What do you call cobblers’ punch?’ demanded Wegg, in a worse humour
than before.

‘It’s difficult to impart the receipt for it, sir,’ returned Venus,
‘because, however particular you may be in allotting your materials,
so much will still depend upon the individual gifts, and there being a
feeling thrown into it. But the groundwork is gin.’

‘In a Dutch bottle?’ said Wegg gloomily, as he sat himself down.

‘Very good, sir, very good!’ cried Venus. ‘Will you partake, sir?’

‘Will I partake?’ returned Wegg very surlily. ‘Why, of course I will!
WILL a man partake, as has been tormented out of his five senses by
an everlasting dustman with his head tied up! WILL he, too! As if he
wouldn’t!’

‘Don’t let it put you out, Mr Wegg. You don’t seem in your usual
spirits.’

‘If you come to that, you don’t seem in your usual spirits,’ growled
Wegg. ‘You seem to be setting up for lively.’

This circumstance appeared, in his then state of mind, to give Mr Wegg
uncommon offence.

‘And you’ve been having your hair cut!’ said Wegg, missing the usual
dusty shock.

‘Yes, Mr Wegg. But don’t let that put you out, either.’

‘And I am blest if you ain’t getting fat!’ said Wegg, with culminating
discontent. ‘What are you going to do next?’

‘Well, Mr Wegg,’ said Venus, smiling in a sprightly manner, ‘I suspect
you could hardly guess what I am going to do next.’

‘I don’t want to guess,’ retorted Wegg. ‘All I’ve got to say is, that
it’s well for you that the diwision of labour has been what it has been.
It’s well for you to have had so light a part in this business, when
mine has been so heavy. You haven’t had YOUR rest broke, I’ll be bound.’

‘Not at all, sir,’ said Venus. ‘Never rested so well in all my life, I
thank you.’

‘Ah!’ grumbled Wegg, ‘you should have been me. If you had been me, and
had been fretted out of your bed, and your sleep, and your meals, and
your mind, for a stretch of months together, you’d have been out of
condition and out of sorts.’

‘Certainly, it has trained you down, Mr Wegg,’ said Venus, contemplating
his figure with an artist’s eye. ‘Trained you down very low, it has! So
weazen and yellow is the kivering upon your bones, that one might almost
fancy you had come to give a look-in upon the French gentleman in the
corner, instead of me.’

Mr Wegg, glancing in great dudgeon towards the French gentleman’s
corner, seemed to notice something new there, which induced him to
glance at the opposite corner, and then to put on his glasses and stare
at all the nooks and corners of the dim shop in succession.

‘Why, you’ve been having the place cleaned up!’ he exclaimed.

‘Yes, Mr Wegg. By the hand of adorable woman.’

‘Then what you’re going to do next, I suppose, is to get married?’

‘That’s it, sir.’

Silas took off his glasses again--finding himself too intensely
disgusted by the sprightly appearance of his friend and partner to bear
a magnified view of him and made the inquiry:

‘To the old party?’

‘Mr Wegg!’ said Venus, with a sudden flush of wrath. ‘The lady in
question is not a old party.’

‘I meant,’ exclaimed Wegg, testily, ‘to the party as formerly objected?’

‘Mr Wegg,’ said Venus, ‘in a case of so much delicacy, I must trouble
you to say what you mean. There are strings that must not be played
upon. No sir! Not sounded, unless in the most respectful and tuneful
manner. Of such melodious strings is Miss Pleasant Riderhood formed.’

‘Then it IS the lady as formerly objected?’ said Wegg.

‘Sir,’ returned Venus with dignity, ‘I accept the altered phrase. It is
the lady as formerly objected.’

‘When is it to come off?’ asked Silas.

‘Mr Wegg,’ said Venus, with another flush. ‘I cannot permit it to be
put in the form of a Fight. I must temperately but firmly call upon you,
sir, to amend that question.’

‘When is the lady,’ Wegg reluctantly demanded, constraining his ill
temper in remembrance of the partnership and its stock in trade, ‘a
going to give her ‘and where she has already given her ‘art?’

‘Sir,’ returned Venus, ‘I again accept the altered phrase, and with
pleasure. The lady is a going to give her ‘and where she has already
given her ‘art, next Monday.’

‘Then the lady’s objection has been met?’ said Silas.

‘Mr Wegg,’ said Venus, ‘as I did name to you, I think, on a former
occasion, if not on former occasions--’

‘On former occasions,’ interrupted Wegg.

‘--What,’ pursued Venus, ‘what the nature of the lady’s objection was, I
may impart, without violating any of the tender confidences since sprung
up between the lady and myself, how it has been met, through the kind
interference of two good friends of mine: one, previously acquainted
with the lady: and one, not. The pint was thrown out, sir, by those two
friends when they did me the great service of waiting on the lady to
try if a union betwixt the lady and me could not be brought to bear--the
pint, I say, was thrown out by them, sir, whether if, after marriage,
I confined myself to the articulation of men, children, and the lower
animals, it might not relieve the lady’s mind of her feeling respecting
being as a lady--regarded in a bony light. It was a happy thought, sir,
and it took root.’

‘It would seem, Mr Venus,’ observed Wegg, with a touch of distrust,
‘that you are flush of friends?’

‘Pretty well, sir,’ that gentleman answered, in a tone of placid
mystery. ‘So-so, sir. Pretty well.’

‘However,’ said Wegg, after eyeing him with another touch of distrust,
‘I wish you joy. One man spends his fortune in one way, and another in
another. You are going to try matrimony. I mean to try travelling.’

‘Indeed, Mr Wegg?’

‘Change of air, sea-scenery, and my natural rest, I hope may bring me
round after the persecutions I have undergone from the dustman with his
head tied up, which I just now mentioned. The tough job being ended and
the Mounds laid low, the hour is come for Boffin to stump up. Would ten
to-morrow morning suit you, partner, for finally bringing Boffin’s nose
to the grindstone?’

Ten to-morrow morning would quite suit Mr Venus for that excellent
purpose.

‘You have had him well under inspection, I hope?’ said Silas.

Mr Venus had had him under inspection pretty well every day.

‘Suppose you was just to step round to-night then, and give him orders
from me--I say from me, because he knows I won’t be played with--to be
ready with his papers, his accounts, and his cash, at that time in the
morning?’ said Wegg. ‘And as a matter of form, which will be agreeable
to your own feelings, before we go out (for I’ll walk with you part of
the way, though my leg gives under me with weariness), let’s have a look
at the stock in trade.’

Mr Venus produced it, and it was perfectly correct; Mr Venus undertook
to produce it again in the morning, and to keep tryst with Mr Wegg on
Boffin’s doorstep as the clock struck ten. At a certain point of the
road between Clerkenwell and Boffin’s house (Mr Wegg expressly insisted
that there should be no prefix to the Golden Dustman’s name) the
partners separated for the night.

It was a very bad night; to which succeeded a very bad morning. The
streets were so unusually slushy, muddy, and miserable, in the morning,
that Wegg rode to the scene of action; arguing that a man who was, as
it were, going to the Bank to draw out a handsome property, could well
afford that trifling expense.

Venus was punctual, and Wegg undertook to knock at the door, and conduct
the conference. Door knocked at. Door opened.

‘Boffin at home?’

The servant replied that MR Boffin was at home.

‘He’ll do,’ said Wegg, ‘though it ain’t what I call him.’

The servant inquired if they had any appointment?

‘Now, I tell you what, young fellow,’ said Wegg, ‘I won’t have it. This
won’t do for me. I don’t want menials. I want Boffin.’

They were shown into a waiting-room, where the all-powerful Wegg wore
his hat, and whistled, and with his forefinger stirred up a clock that
stood upon the chimneypiece, until he made it strike. In a few minutes
they were shown upstairs into what used to be Boffin’s room; which,
besides the door of entrance, had folding-doors in it, to make it one
of a suite of rooms when occasion required. Here, Boffin was seated at a
library-table, and here Mr Wegg, having imperiously motioned the servant
to withdraw, drew up a chair and seated himself, in his hat, close
beside him. Here, also, Mr Wegg instantly underwent the remarkable
experience of having his hat twitched off his head and thrown out of a
window, which was opened and shut for the purpose.

‘Be careful what insolent liberties you take in that gentleman’s
presence,’ said the owner of the hand which had done this, ‘or I will
throw you after it.’

Wegg involuntarily clapped his hand to his bare head, and stared at the
Secretary. For, it was he addressed him with a severe countenance, and
who had come in quietly by the folding-doors.

‘Oh!’ said Wegg, as soon as he recovered his suspended power of speech.
‘Very good! I gave directions for YOU to be dismissed. And you ain’t
gone, ain’t you? Oh! We’ll look into this presently. Very good!’

‘No, nor I ain’t gone,’ said another voice.

Somebody else had come in quietly by the folding-doors. Turning his
head, Wegg beheld his persecutor, the ever-wakeful dustman, accoutred
with fantail hat and velveteen smalls complete. Who, untying his
tied-up broken head, revealed a head that was whole, and a face that was
Sloppy’s.

‘Ha, ha, ha, gentlemen!’ roared Sloppy in a peal of laughter, and with
immeasureable relish. ‘He never thought as I could sleep standing, and
often done it when I turned for Mrs Higden! He never thought as I used
to give Mrs Higden the Police-news in different voices! But I did lead
him a life all through it, gentlemen, I hope I really and truly DID!’
Here, Mr Sloppy opening his mouth to a quite alarming extent, and
throwing back his head to peal again, revealed incalculable buttons.

‘Oh!’ said Wegg, slightly discomfited, but not much as yet: ‘one and one
is two not dismissed, is it? Bof--fin! Just let me ask a question. Who
set this chap on, in this dress, when the carting began? Who employed
this fellow?’

‘I say!’ remonstrated Sloppy, jerking his head forward. ‘No fellows, or
I’ll throw you out of winder!’

Mr Boffin appeased him with a wave of his hand, and said: ‘I employed
him, Wegg.’

‘Oh! You employed him, Boffin? Very good. Mr Venus, we raise our terms,
and we can’t do better than proceed to business. Bof--fin! I want the
room cleared of these two scum.’

‘That’s not going to be done, Wegg,’ replied Mr Boffin, sitting
composedly on the library-table, at one end, while the Secretary sat
composedly on it at the other.

‘Bof--fin! Not going to be done?’ repeated Wegg. ‘Not at your peril?’

‘No, Wegg,’ said Mr Boffin, shaking his head good-humouredly. ‘Not at my
peril, and not on any other terms.’

Wegg reflected a moment, and then said: ‘Mr Venus, will you be so good
as hand me over that same dockyment?’

‘Certainly, sir,’ replied Venus, handing it to him with much politeness.
‘There it is. Having now, sir, parted with it, I wish to make a small
observation: not so much because it is anyways necessary, or expresses
any new doctrine or discovery, as because it is a comfort to my mind.
Silas Wegg, you are a precious old rascal.’

Mr Wegg, who, as if anticipating a compliment, had been beating
time with the paper to the other’s politeness until this unexpected
conclusion came upon him, stopped rather abruptly.

‘Silas Wegg,’ said Venus, ‘know that I took the liberty of taking Mr
Boffin into our concern as a sleeping partner, at a very early period of
our firm’s existence.’

‘Quite true,’ added Mr Boffin; ‘and I tested Venus by making him a
pretended proposal or two; and I found him on the whole a very honest
man, Wegg.’

‘So Mr Boffin, in his indulgence, is pleased to say,’ Venus remarked:
‘though in the beginning of this dirt, my hands were not, for a few
hours, quite as clean as I could wish. But I hope I made early and full
amends.’

‘Venus, you did,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Certainly, certainly, certainly.’

Venus inclined his head with respect and gratitude. ‘Thank you, sir.
I am much obliged to you, sir, for all. For your good opinion now, for
your way of receiving and encouraging me when I first put myself in
communication with you, and for the influence since so kindly brought
to bear upon a certain lady, both by yourself and by Mr John Harmon.’ To
whom, when thus making mention of him, he also bowed.

Wegg followed the name with sharp ears, and the action with sharp eyes,
and a certain cringing air was infusing itself into his bullying air,
when his attention was re-claimed by Venus.

‘Everything else between you and me, Mr Wegg,’ said Venus, ‘now explains
itself, and you can now make out, sir, without further words from me.
But totally to prevent any unpleasantness or mistake that might arise on
what I consider an important point, to be made quite clear at the close
of our acquaintance, I beg the leave of Mr Boffin and Mr John Harmon to
repeat an observation which I have already had the pleasure of bringing
under your notice. You are a precious old rascal!’

‘You are a fool,’ said Wegg, with a snap of his fingers, ‘and I’d have
got rid of you before now, if I could have struck out any way of doing
it. I have thought it over, I can tell you. You may go, and welcome. You
leave the more for me. Because, you know,’ said Wegg, dividing his next
observation between Mr Boffin and Mr Harmon, ‘I am worth my price, and
I mean to have it. This getting off is all very well in its way, and it
tells with such an anatomical Pump as this one,’ pointing out Mr Venus,
‘but it won’t do with a Man. I am here to be bought off, and I have
named my figure. Now, buy me, or leave me.’

‘I’ll leave you, Wegg,’ said Mr Boffin, laughing, ‘as far as I am
concerned.’

‘Bof--fin!’ replied Wegg, turning upon him with a severe air, ‘I
understand YOUR new-born boldness. I see the brass underneath YOUR
silver plating. YOU have got YOUR nose out of joint. Knowing that you’ve
nothing at stake, you can afford to come the independent game. Why,
you’re just so much smeary glass to see through, you know! But Mr Harmon
is in another sitiwation. What Mr Harmon risks, is quite another pair
of shoes. Now, I’ve heerd something lately about this being Mr
Harmon--I make out now, some hints that I’ve met on that subject in
the newspaper--and I drop you, Bof--fin, as beneath my notice. I ask Mr
Harmon whether he has any idea of the contents of this present paper?’

‘It is a will of my late father’s, of more recent date than the will
proved by Mr Boffin (address whom again, as you have addressed him
already, and I’ll knock you down), leaving the whole of his property
to the Crown,’ said John Harmon, with as much indifference as was
compatible with extreme sternness.

‘Bight you are!’ cried Wegg. ‘Then,’ screwing the weight of his body
upon his wooden leg, and screwing his wooden head very much on one side,
and screwing up one eye: ‘then, I put the question to you, what’s this
paper worth?’

‘Nothing,’ said John Harmon.

Wegg had repeated the word with a sneer, and was entering on some
sarcastic retort, when, to his boundless amazement, he found himself
gripped by the cravat; shaken until his teeth chattered; shoved back,
staggering, into a corner of the room; and pinned there.

‘You scoundrel!’ said John Harmon, whose seafaring hold was like that of
a vice.

‘You’re knocking my head against the wall,’ urged Silas faintly.

‘I mean to knock your head against the wall,’ returned John Harmon,
suiting his action to his words, with the heartiest good will; ‘and I’d
give a thousand pounds for leave to knock your brains out. Listen, you
scoundrel, and look at that Dutch bottle.’

Sloppy held it up, for his edification.

‘That Dutch bottle, scoundrel, contained the latest will of the many
wills made by my unhappy self-tormenting father. That will gives
everything absolutely to my noble benefactor and yours, Mr Boffin,
excluding and reviling me, and my sister (then already dead of a broken
heart), by name. That Dutch bottle was found by my noble benefactor and
yours, after he entered on possession of the estate. That Dutch bottle
distressed him beyond measure, because, though I and my sister were
both no more, it cast a slur upon our memory which he knew we had
done nothing in our miserable youth, to deserve. That Dutch bottle,
therefore, he buried in the Mound belonging to him, and there it lay
while you, you thankless wretch, were prodding and poking--often very
near it, I dare say. His intention was, that it should never see the
light; but he was afraid to destroy it, lest to destroy such a document,
even with his great generous motive, might be an offence at law. After
the discovery was made here who I was, Mr Boffin, still restless on the
subject, told me, upon certain conditions impossible for such a hound as
you to appreciate, the secret of that Dutch bottle. I urged upon him the
necessity of its being dug up, and the paper being legally produced and
established. The first thing you saw him do, and the second thing has
been done without your knowledge. Consequently, the paper now rattling
in your hand as I shake you--and I should like to shake the life out
of you--is worth less than the rotten cork of the Dutch bottle, do you
understand?’

Judging from the fallen countenance of Silas as his head wagged
backwards and forwards in a most uncomfortable manner, he did
understand.

‘Now, scoundrel,’ said John Harmon, taking another sailor-like turn on
his cravat and holding him in his corner at arms’ length, ‘I shall make
two more short speeches to you, because I hope they will torment you.
Your discovery was a genuine discovery (such as it was), for nobody had
thought of looking into that place. Neither did we know you had made it,
until Venus spoke to Mr Boffin, though I kept you under good observation
from my first appearance here, and though Sloppy has long made it
the chief occupation and delight of his life, to attend you like your
shadow. I tell you this, that you may know we knew enough of you to
persuade Mr Boffin to let us lead you on, deluded, to the last possible
moment, in order that your disappointment might be the heaviest possible
disappointment. That’s the first short speech, do you understand?’

Here, John Harmon assisted his comprehension with another shake.

‘Now, scoundrel,’ he pursued, ‘I am going to finish. You supposed me
just now, to be the possessor of my father’s property.--So I am. But
through any act of my father’s, or by any right I have? No. Through the
munificence of Mr Boffin. The conditions that he made with me, before
parting with the secret of the Dutch bottle, were, that I should take
the fortune, and that he should take his Mound and no more. I owe
everything I possess, solely to the disinterestedness, uprightness,
tenderness, goodness (there are no words to satisfy me) of Mr and Mrs
Boffin. And when, knowing what I knew, I saw such a mud-worm as you
presume to rise in this house against this noble soul, the wonder is,’
added John Harmon through his clenched teeth, and with a very ugly turn
indeed on Wegg’s cravat, ‘that I didn’t try to twist your head off,
and fling THAT out of window! So. That’s the last short speech, do you
understand?’

Silas, released, put his hand to his throat, cleared it, and looked as
if he had a rather large fishbone in that region. Simultaneously with
this action on his part in his corner, a singular, and on the surface
an incomprehensible, movement was made by Mr Sloppy: who began backing
towards Mr Wegg along the wall, in the manner of a porter or heaver who
is about to lift a sack of flour or coals.

‘I am sorry, Wegg,’ said Mr Boffin, in his clemency, ‘that my old lady
and I can’t have a better opinion of you than the bad one we are forced
to entertain. But I shouldn’t like to leave you, after all said and
done, worse off in life than I found you. Therefore say in a word,
before we part, what it’ll cost to set you up in another stall.’

‘And in another place,’ John Harmon struck in. ‘You don’t come outside
these windows.’

‘Mr Boffin,’ returned Wegg in avaricious humiliation: ‘when I first had
the honour of making your acquaintance, I had got together a collection
of ballads which was, I may say, above price.’

‘Then they can’t be paid for,’ said John Harmon, ‘and you had better not
try, my dear sir.’

‘Pardon me, Mr Boffin,’ resumed Wegg, with a malignant glance in the
last speaker’s direction, ‘I was putting the case to you, who, if my
senses did not deceive me, put the case to me. I had a very choice
collection of ballads, and there was a new stock of gingerbread in the
tin box. I say no more, but would rather leave it to you.’

‘But it’s difficult to name what’s right,’ said Mr Boffin uneasily, with
his hand in his pocket, ‘and I don’t want to go beyond what’s right,
because you really have turned out such a very bad fellow. So artful,
and so ungrateful you have been, Wegg; for when did I ever injure you?’

‘There was also,’ Mr Wegg went on, in a meditative manner, ‘a errand
connection, in which I was much respected. But I would not wish to be
deemed covetous, and I would rather leave it to you, Mr Boffin.’

‘Upon my word, I don’t know what to put it at,’ the Golden Dustman
muttered.

‘There was likewise,’ resumed Wegg, ‘a pair of trestles, for which alone
a Irish person, who was deemed a judge of trestles, offered five and
six--a sum I would not hear of, for I should have lost by it--and there
was a stool, a umbrella, a clothes-horse, and a tray. But I leave it to
you, Mr Boffin.’

The Golden Dustman seeming to be engaged in some abstruse calculation,
Mr Wegg assisted him with the following additional items.

‘There was, further, Miss Elizabeth, Master George, Aunt Jane, and Uncle
Parker. Ah! When a man thinks of the loss of such patronage as that;
when a man finds so fair a garden rooted up by pigs; he finds it hard
indeed, without going high, to work it into money. But I leave it wholly
to you, sir.’

Mr Sloppy still continued his singular, and on the surface his
incomprehensible, movement.

‘Leading on has been mentioned,’ said Wegg with a melancholy air, ‘and
it’s not easy to say how far the tone of my mind may have been lowered
by unwholesome reading on the subject of Misers, when you was leading me
and others on to think you one yourself, sir. All I can say is, that
I felt my tone of mind a lowering at the time. And how can a man put a
price upon his mind! There was likewise a hat just now. But I leave the
ole to you, Mr Boffin.’

‘Come!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Here’s a couple of pound.’

‘In justice to myself, I couldn’t take it, sir.’

The words were but out of his mouth when John Harmon lifted his finger,
and Sloppy, who was now close to Wegg, backed to Wegg’s back, stooped,
grasped his coat collar behind with both hands, and deftly swung him
up like the sack of flour or coals before mentioned. A countenance of
special discontent and amazement Mr Wegg exhibited in this position,
with his buttons almost as prominently on view as Sloppy’s own, and
with his wooden leg in a highly unaccommodating state. But, not for many
seconds was his countenance visible in the room; for, Sloppy lightly
trotted out with him and trotted down the staircase, Mr Venus attending
to open the street door. Mr Sloppy’s instructions had been to deposit
his burden in the road; but, a scavenger’s cart happening to stand
unattended at the corner, with its little ladder planted against the
wheel, Mr S. found it impossible to resist the temptation of shooting Mr
Silas Wegg into the cart’s contents. A somewhat difficult feat, achieved
with great dexterity, and with a prodigious splash.



Chapter 15

WHAT WAS CAUGHT IN THE TRAPS THAT WERE SET


How Bradley Headstone had been racked and riven in his mind since the
quiet evening when by the river-side he had risen, as it were, out of
the ashes of the Bargeman, none but he could have told. Not even he
could have told, for such misery can only be felt.

First, he had to bear the combined weight of the knowledge of what he
had done, of that haunting reproach that he might have done it so much
better, and of the dread of discovery. This was load enough to crush
him, and he laboured under it day and night. It was as heavy on him in
his scanty sleep, as in his red-eyed waking hours. It bore him down with
a dread unchanging monotony, in which there was not a moment’s variety.
The overweighted beast of burden, or the overweighted slave, can for
certain instants shift the physical load, and find some slight respite
even in enforcing additional pain upon such a set of muscles or such
a limb. Not even that poor mockery of relief could the wretched man
obtain, under the steady pressure of the infernal atmosphere into which
he had entered.

Time went by, and no visible suspicion dogged him; time went by, and
in such public accounts of the attack as were renewed at intervals,
he began to see Mr Lightwood (who acted as lawyer for the injured man)
straying further from the fact, going wider of the issue, and evidently
slackening in his zeal. By degrees, a glimmering of the cause of this
began to break on Bradley’s sight. Then came the chance meeting with Mr
Milvey at the railway station (where he often lingered in his leisure
hours, as a place where any fresh news of his deed would be circulated,
or any placard referring to it would be posted), and then he saw in the
light what he had brought about.

For, then he saw that through his desperate attempt to separate those
two for ever, he had been made the means of uniting them. That he had
dipped his hands in blood, to mark himself a miserable fool and tool.
That Eugene Wrayburn, for his wife’s sake, set him aside and left him to
crawl along his blasted course. He thought of Fate, or Providence, or
be the directing Power what it might, as having put a fraud upon
him--overreached him--and in his impotent mad rage bit, and tore, and
had his fit.

New assurance of the truth came upon him in the next few following days,
when it was put forth how the wounded man had been married on his bed,
and to whom, and how, though always in a dangerous condition, he was a
shade better. Bradley would far rather have been seized for his murder,
than he would have read that passage, knowing himself spared, and
knowing why.

But, not to be still further defrauded and overreached--which he would
be, if implicated by Riderhood, and punished by the law for his abject
failure, as though it had been a success--he kept close in his school
during the day, ventured out warily at night, and went no more to the
railway station. He examined the advertisements in the newspapers for
any sign that Riderhood acted on his hinted threat of so summoning him
to renew their acquaintance, but found none. Having paid him handsomely
for the support and accommodation he had had at the Lock House, and
knowing him to be a very ignorant man who could not write, he began to
doubt whether he was to be feared at all, or whether they need ever meet
again.

All this time, his mind was never off the rack, and his raging sense of
having been made to fling himself across the chasm which divided those
two, and bridge it over for their coming together, never cooled down.
This horrible condition brought on other fits. He could not have said
how many, or when; but he saw in the faces of his pupils that they had
seen him in that state, and that they were possessed by a dread of his
relapsing.

One winter day when a slight fall of snow was feathering the sills and
frames of the schoolroom windows, he stood at his black board, crayon in
hand, about to commence with a class; when, reading in the countenances
of those boys that there was something wrong, and that they seemed in
alarm for him, he turned his eyes to the door towards which they faced.
He then saw a slouching man of forbidding appearance standing in the
midst of the school, with a bundle under his arm; and saw that it was
Riderhood.

He sat down on a stool which one of his boys put for him, and he had a
passing knowledge that he was in danger of falling, and that his face
was becoming distorted. But, the fit went off for that time, and he
wiped his mouth, and stood up again.

‘Beg your pardon, governor! By your leave!’ said Riderhood, knuckling
his forehead, with a chuckle and a leer. ‘What place may this be?’

‘This is a school.’

‘Where young folks learns wot’s right?’ said Riderhood, gravely nodding.
‘Beg your pardon, governor! By your leave! But who teaches this school?’

‘I do.’

‘You’re the master, are you, learned governor?’

‘Yes. I am the master.’

‘And a lovely thing it must be,’ said Riderhood, ‘fur to learn young
folks wot’s right, and fur to know wot THEY know wot you do it. Beg your
pardon, learned governor! By your leave!--That there black board; wot’s
it for?’

‘It is for drawing on, or writing on.’

‘Is it though!’ said Riderhood. ‘Who’d have thought it, from the
looks on it! WOULD you be so kind as write your name upon it, learned
governor?’ (In a wheedling tone.)

Bradley hesitated for a moment; but placed his usual signature,
enlarged, upon the board.

‘I ain’t a learned character myself,’ said Riderhood, surveying the
class, ‘but I do admire learning in others. I should dearly like to hear
these here young folks read that there name off, from the writing.’

The arms of the class went up. At the miserable master’s nod, the shrill
chorus arose: ‘Bradley Headstone!’

‘No?’ cried Riderhood. ‘You don’t mean it? Headstone! Why, that’s in a
churchyard. Hooroar for another turn!’

Another tossing of arms, another nod, and another shrill chorus:

‘Bradley Headstone!’

‘I’ve got it now!’ said Riderhood, after attentively listening, and
internally repeating: ‘Bradley. I see. Chris’en name, Bradley sim’lar to
Roger which is my own. Eh? Fam’ly name, Headstone, sim’lar to Riderhood
which is my own. Eh?’

Shrill chorus. ‘Yes!’

‘Might you be acquainted, learned governor,’ said Riderhood, ‘with a
person of about your own heighth and breadth, and wot ‘ud pull down in
a scale about your own weight, answering to a name sounding summat like
Totherest?’

With a desperation in him that made him perfectly quiet, though his jaw
was heavily squared; with his eyes upon Riderhood; and with traces of
quickened breathing in his nostrils; the schoolmaster replied, in a
suppressed voice, after a pause: ‘I think I know the man you mean.’

‘I thought you knowed the man I mean, learned governor. I want the man.’

With a half glance around him at his pupils, Bradley returned:

‘Do you suppose he is here?’

‘Begging your pardon, learned governor, and by your leave,’ said
Riderhood, with a laugh, ‘how could I suppose he’s here, when there’s
nobody here but you, and me, and these young lambs wot you’re a learning
on? But he is most excellent company, that man, and I want him to come
and see me at my Lock, up the river.’

‘I’ll tell him so.’

‘D’ye think he’ll come?’ asked Riderhood.

‘I am sure he will.’

‘Having got your word for him,’ said Riderhood, ‘I shall count upon him.
P’raps you’d so fur obleege me, learned governor, as tell him that if he
don’t come precious soon, I’ll look him up.’

‘He shall know it.’

‘Thankee. As I says a while ago,’ pursued Riderhood, changing his hoarse
tone and leering round upon the class again, ‘though not a learned
character my own self, I do admire learning in others, to be sure! Being
here and having met with your kind attention, Master, might I, afore I
go, ask a question of these here young lambs of yourn?’

‘If it is in the way of school,’ said Bradley, always sustaining his
dark look at the other, and speaking in his suppressed voice, ‘you may.’

‘Oh! It’s in the way of school!’ cried Riderhood. ‘I’ll pound it,
Master, to be in the way of school. Wot’s the diwisions of water, my
lambs? Wot sorts of water is there on the land?’

Shrill chorus: ‘Seas, rivers, lakes, and ponds.’

‘Seas, rivers, lakes, and ponds,’ said Riderhood. ‘They’ve got all the
lot, Master! Blowed if I shouldn’t have left out lakes, never having
clapped eyes upon one, to my knowledge. Seas, rivers, lakes, and ponds.
Wot is it, lambs, as they ketches in seas, rivers, lakes, and ponds?’

Shrill chorus (with some contempt for the ease of the question):

‘Fish!’

‘Good a-gin!’ said Riderhood. ‘But wot else is it, my lambs, as they
sometimes ketches in rivers?’

Chorus at a loss. One shrill voice: ‘Weed!’

‘Good agin!’ cried Riderhood. ‘But it ain’t weed neither. You’ll never
guess, my dears. Wot is it, besides fish, as they sometimes ketches in
rivers? Well! I’ll tell you. It’s suits o’ clothes.’

Bradley’s face changed.

‘Leastways, lambs,’ said Riderhood, observing him out of the corners
of his eyes, ‘that’s wot I my own self sometimes ketches in rivers. For
strike me blind, my lambs, if I didn’t ketch in a river the wery bundle
under my arm!’

The class looked at the master, as if appealing from the irregular
entrapment of this mode of examination. The master looked at the
examiner, as if he would have torn him to pieces.

‘I ask your pardon, learned governor,’ said Riderhood, smearing his
sleeve across his mouth as he laughed with a relish, ‘tain’t fair to the
lambs, I know. It wos a bit of fun of mine. But upon my soul I drawed
this here bundle out of a river! It’s a Bargeman’s suit of clothes. You
see, it had been sunk there by the man as wore it, and I got it up.’

‘How do you know it was sunk by the man who wore it?’ asked Bradley.

‘Cause I see him do it,’ said Riderhood.

They looked at each other. Bradley, slowly withdrawing his eyes, turned
his face to the black board and slowly wiped his name out.

‘A heap of thanks, Master,’ said Riderhood, ‘for bestowing so much of
your time, and of the lambses’ time, upon a man as hasn’t got no other
recommendation to you than being a honest man. Wishing to see at my Lock
up the river, the person as we’ve spoke of, and as you’ve answered for,
I takes my leave of the lambs and of their learned governor both.’

With those words, he slouched out of the school, leaving the master
to get through his weary work as he might, and leaving the whispering
pupils to observe the master’s face until he fell into the fit which had
been long impending.

The next day but one was Saturday, and a holiday. Bradley rose early,
and set out on foot for Plashwater Weir Mill Lock. He rose so early that
it was not yet light when he began his journey. Before extinguishing the
candle by which he had dressed himself, he made a little parcel of his
decent silver watch and its decent guard, and wrote inside the paper:
‘Kindly take care of these for me.’ He then addressed the parcel to Miss
Peecher, and left it on the most protected corner of the little seat in
her little porch.

It was a cold hard easterly morning when he latched the garden gate
and turned away. The light snowfall which had feathered his schoolroom
windows on the Thursday, still lingered in the air, and was falling
white, while the wind blew black. The tardy day did not appear until he
had been on foot two hours, and had traversed a greater part of London
from east to west. Such breakfast as he had, he took at the comfortless
public-house where he had parted from Riderhood on the occasion of
their night-walk. He took it, standing at the littered bar, and looked
loweringly at a man who stood where Riderhood had stood that early
morning.

He outwalked the short day, and was on the towing-path by the river,
somewhat footsore, when the night closed in. Still two or three miles
short of the Lock, he slackened his pace then, but went steadily on. The
ground was now covered with snow, though thinly, and there were floating
lumps of ice in the more exposed parts of the river, and broken sheets
of ice under the shelter of the banks. He took heed of nothing but the
ice, the snow, and the distance, until he saw a light ahead, which he
knew gleamed from the Lock House window. It arrested his steps, and he
looked all around. The ice, and the snow, and he, and the one light, had
absolute possession of the dreary scene. In the distance before him, lay
the place where he had struck the worse than useless blows that mocked
him with Lizzie’s presence there as Eugene’s wife. In the distance
behind him, lay the place where the children with pointing arms had
seemed to devote him to the demons in crying out his name. Within there,
where the light was, was the man who as to both distances could give him
up to ruin. To these limits had his world shrunk.

He mended his pace, keeping his eyes upon the light with a strange
intensity, as if he were taking aim at it. When he approached it so
nearly as that it parted into rays, they seemed to fasten themselves
to him and draw him on. When he struck the door with his hand, his foot
followed so quickly on his hand, that he was in the room before he was
bidden to enter.

The light was the joint product of a fire and a candle. Between the two,
with his feet on the iron fender, sat Riderhood, pipe in mouth.

He looked up with a surly nod when his visitor came in. His visitor
looked down with a surly nod. His outer clothing removed, the visitor
then took a seat on the opposite side of the fire.

‘Not a smoker, I think?’ said Riderhood, pushing a bottle to him across
the table.

‘No.’

They both lapsed into silence, with their eyes upon the fire.

‘You don’t need to be told I am here,’ said Bradley at length. ‘Who is
to begin?’

‘I’ll begin,’ said Riderhood, ‘when I’ve smoked this here pipe out.’

He finished it with great deliberation, knocked out the ashes on the
hob, and put it by.

‘I’ll begin,’ he then repeated, ‘Bradley Headstone, Master, if you wish
it.’

‘Wish it? I wish to know what you want with me.’

‘And so you shall.’ Riderhood had looked hard at his hands and his
pockets, apparently as a precautionary measure lest he should have any
weapon about him. But, he now leaned forward, turning the collar of
his waistcoat with an inquisitive finger, and asked, ‘Why, where’s your
watch?’

‘I have left it behind.’

‘I want it. But it can be fetched. I’ve took a fancy to it.’

Bradley answered with a contemptuous laugh.

‘I want it,’ repeated Riderhood, in a louder voice, ‘and I mean to have
it.’

‘That is what you want of me, is it?’

‘No,’ said Riderhood, still louder; ‘it’s on’y part of what I want of
you. I want money of you.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Everythink else!’ roared Riderhood, in a very loud and furious way.
‘Answer me like that, and I won’t talk to you at all.’

Bradley looked at him.

‘Don’t so much as look at me like that, or I won’t talk to you at all,’
vociferated Riderhood. ‘But, instead of talking, I’ll bring my hand
down upon you with all its weight,’ heavily smiting the table with great
force, ‘and smash you!’

‘Go on,’ said Bradley, after moistening his lips.

‘O! I’m a going on. Don’t you fear but I’ll go on full-fast enough for
you, and fur enough for you, without your telling. Look here, Bradley
Headstone, Master. You might have split the T’other governor to chips
and wedges, without my caring, except that I might have come upon you
for a glass or so now and then. Else why have to do with you at all? But
when you copied my clothes, and when you copied my neckhankercher, and
when you shook blood upon me after you had done the trick, you did wot
I’ll be paid for and paid heavy for. If it come to be throw’d upon you,
you was to be ready to throw it upon me, was you? Where else but
in Plashwater Weir Mill Lock was there a man dressed according as
described? Where else but in Plashwater Weir Mill Lock was there a
man as had had words with him coming through in his boat? Look at the
Lock-keeper in Plashwater Weir Mill Lock, in them same answering clothes
and with that same answering red neckhankercher, and see whether his
clothes happens to be bloody or not. Yes, they do happen to be bloody.
Ah, you sly devil!’

Bradley, very white, sat looking at him in silence.

‘But two could play at your game,’ said Riderhood, snapping his fingers
at him half a dozen times, ‘and I played it long ago; long afore you
tried your clumsy hand at it; in days when you hadn’t begun croaking
your lecters or what not in your school. I know to a figure how you
done it. Where you stole away, I could steal away arter you, and do it
knowinger than you. I know how you come away from London in your own
clothes, and where you changed your clothes, and hid your clothes. I see
you with my own eyes take your own clothes from their hiding-place
among them felled trees, and take a dip in the river to account for
your dressing yourself, to any one as might come by. I see you rise up
Bradley Headstone, Master, where you sat down Bargeman. I see you pitch
your Bargeman’s bundle into the river. I hooked your Bargeman’s bundle
out of the river. I’ve got your Bargeman’s clothes, tore this way and
that way with the scuffle, stained green with the grass, and spattered
all over with what bust from the blows. I’ve got them, and I’ve got you.
I don’t care a curse for the T’other governor, alive or dead, but I care
a many curses for my own self. And as you laid your plots agin me and
was a sly devil agin me, I’ll be paid for it--I’ll be paid for it--I’ll
be paid for it--till I’ve drained you dry!’

Bradley looked at the fire, with a working face, and was silent for a
while. At last he said, with what seemed an inconsistent composure of
voice and feature:

‘You can’t get blood out of a stone, Riderhood.’

‘I can get money out of a schoolmaster though.’

‘You can’t get out of me what is not in me. You can’t wrest from me what
I have not got. Mine is but a poor calling. You have had more than two
guineas from me, already. Do you know how long it has taken me (allowing
for a long and arduous training) to earn such a sum?’

‘I don’t know, nor I don’t care. Yours is a ‘spectable calling. To
save your ‘spectability, it’s worth your while to pawn every article of
clothes you’ve got, sell every stick in your house, and beg and borrow
every penny you can get trusted with. When you’ve done that and handed
over, I’ll leave you. Not afore.’

‘How do you mean, you’ll leave me?’

‘I mean as I’ll keep you company, wherever you go, when you go away from
here. Let the Lock take care of itself. I’ll take care of you, once I’ve
got you.’

Bradley again looked at the fire. Eyeing him aside, Riderhood took up
his pipe, refilled it, lighted it, and sat smoking. Bradley leaned his
elbows on his knees, and his head upon his hands, and looked at the fire
with a most intent abstraction.

‘Riderhood,’ he said, raising himself in his chair, after a long
silence, and drawing out his purse and putting it on the table. ‘Say
I part with this, which is all the money I have; say I let you have
my watch; say that every quarter, when I draw my salary, I pay you a
certain portion of it.’

‘Say nothink of the sort,’ retorted Riderhood, shaking his head as he
smoked. ‘You’ve got away once, and I won’t run the chance agin. I’ve had
trouble enough to find you, and shouldn’t have found you, if I hadn’t
seen you slipping along the street overnight, and watched you till you
was safe housed. I’ll have one settlement with you for good and all.’

‘Riderhood, I am a man who has lived a retired life. I have no resources
beyond myself. I have absolutely no friends.’

‘That’s a lie,’ said Riderhood. ‘You’ve got one friend as I knows of;
one as is good for a Savings-Bank book, or I’m a blue monkey!’

Bradley’s face darkened, and his hand slowly closed on the purse and
drew it back, as he sat listening for what the other should go on to
say.

‘I went into the wrong shop, fust, last Thursday,’ said Riderhood.
‘Found myself among the young ladies, by George! Over the young ladies,
I see a Missis. That Missis is sweet enough upon you, Master, to sell
herself up, slap, to get you out of trouble. Make her do it then.’

Bradley stared at him so very suddenly that Riderhood, not quite knowing
how to take it, affected to be occupied with the encircling smoke from
his pipe; fanning it away with his hand, and blowing it off.

‘You spoke to the mistress, did you?’ inquired Bradley, with that
former composure of voice and feature that seemed inconsistent, and with
averted eyes.

‘Poof! Yes,’ said Riderhood, withdrawing his attention from the smoke.
‘I spoke to her. I didn’t say much to her. She was put in a fluster by
my dropping in among the young ladies (I never did set up for a lady’s
man), and she took me into her parlour to hope as there was nothink
wrong. I tells her, “O no, nothink wrong. The master’s my wery good
friend.” But I see how the land laid, and that she was comfortable off.’

Bradley put the purse in his pocket, grasped his left wrist with his
right hand, and sat rigidly contemplating the fire.

‘She couldn’t live more handy to you than she does,’ said Riderhood,
‘and when I goes home with you (as of course I am a going), I recommend
you to clean her out without loss of time. You can marry her, arter you
and me have come to a settlement. She’s nice-looking, and I know
you can’t be keeping company with no one else, having been so lately
disapinted in another quarter.’

Not one other word did Bradley utter all that night. Not once did he
change his attitude, or loosen his hold upon his wrist. Rigid before the
fire, as if it were a charmed flame that was turning him old, he sat,
with the dark lines deepening in his face, its stare becoming more and
more haggard, its surface turning whiter and whiter as if it were being
overspread with ashes, and the very texture and colour of his hair
degenerating.

Not until the late daylight made the window transparent, did this
decaying statue move. Then it slowly arose, and sat in the window
looking out.

Riderhood had kept his chair all night. In the earlier part of the night
he had muttered twice or thrice that it was bitter cold; or that the
fire burnt fast, when he got up to mend it; but, as he could elicit from
his companion neither sound nor movement, he had afterwards held his
peace. He was making some disorderly preparations for coffee, when
Bradley came from the window and put on his outer coat and hat.

‘Hadn’t us better have a bit o’ breakfast afore we start?’ said
Riderhood. ‘It ain’t good to freeze a empty stomach, Master.’

Without a sign to show that he heard, Bradley walked out of the Lock
House. Catching up from the table a piece of bread, and taking his
Bargeman’s bundle under his arm, Riderhood immediately followed him.
Bradley turned towards London. Riderhood caught him up, and walked at
his side.

The two men trudged on, side by side, in silence, full three miles.
Suddenly, Bradley turned to retrace his course. Instantly, Riderhood
turned likewise, and they went back side by side.

Bradley re-entered the Lock House. So did Riderhood. Bradley sat down in
the window. Riderhood warmed himself at the fire. After an hour or more,
Bradley abruptly got up again, and again went out, but this time turned
the other way. Riderhood was close after him, caught him up in a few
paces, and walked at his side.

This time, as before, when he found his attendant not to be shaken off,
Bradley suddenly turned back. This time, as before, Riderhood turned
back along with him. But, not this time, as before, did they go into the
Lock House, for Bradley came to a stand on the snow-covered turf by the
Lock, looking up the river and down the river. Navigation was impeded by
the frost, and the scene was a mere white and yellow desert.

‘Come, come, Master,’ urged Riderhood, at his side. ‘This is a dry game.
And where’s the good of it? You can’t get rid of me, except by coming to
a settlement. I am a going along with you wherever you go.’

Without a word of reply, Bradley passed quickly from him over the wooden
bridge on the lock gates. ‘Why, there’s even less sense in this move
than t’other,’ said Riderhood, following. ‘The Weir’s there, and you’ll
have to come back, you know.’

Without taking the least notice, Bradley leaned his body against a post,
in a resting attitude, and there rested with his eyes cast down. ‘Being
brought here,’ said Riderhood, gruffly, ‘I’ll turn it to some use by
changing my gates.’ With a rattle and a rush of water, he then swung-to
the lock gates that were standing open, before opening the others. So,
both sets of gates were, for the moment, closed.

‘You’d better by far be reasonable, Bradley Headstone, Master,’ said
Riderhood, passing him, ‘or I’ll drain you all the dryer for it, when we
do settle.--Ah! Would you!’

Bradley had caught him round the body. He seemed to be girdled with an
iron ring. They were on the brink of the Lock, about midway between the
two sets of gates.

‘Let go!’ said Riderhood, ‘or I’ll get my knife out and slash you
wherever I can cut you. Let go!’

Bradley was drawing to the Lock-edge. Riderhood was drawing away from
it. It was a strong grapple, and a fierce struggle, arm and leg. Bradley
got him round, with his back to the Lock, and still worked him backward.

‘Let go!’ said Riderhood. ‘Stop! What are you trying at? You can’t drown
Me. Ain’t I told you that the man as has come through drowning can never
be drowned? I can’t be drowned.’

‘I can be!’ returned Bradley, in a desperate, clenched voice. ‘I am
resolved to be. I’ll hold you living, and I’ll hold you dead. Come
down!’

Riderhood went over into the smooth pit, backward, and Bradley Headstone
upon him. When the two were found, lying under the ooze and scum behind
one of the rotting gates, Riderhood’s hold had relaxed, probably in
falling, and his eyes were staring upward. But, he was girdled still
with Bradley’s iron ring, and the rivets of the iron ring held tight.



Chapter 16

PERSONS AND THINGS IN GENERAL


Mr and Mrs John Harmon’s first delightful occupation was, to set all
matters right that had strayed in any way wrong, or that might, could,
would, or should, have strayed in any way wrong, while their name was in
abeyance. In tracing out affairs for which John’s fictitious death was
to be considered in any way responsible, they used a very broad and free
construction; regarding, for instance, the dolls’ dressmaker as having
a claim on their protection, because of her association with Mrs Eugene
Wrayburn, and because of Mrs Eugene’s old association, in her turn, with
the dark side of the story. It followed that the old man, Riah, as a
good and serviceable friend to both, was not to be disclaimed. Nor even
Mr Inspector, as having been trepanned into an industrious hunt on a
false scent. It may be remarked, in connexion with that worthy officer,
that a rumour shortly afterwards pervaded the Force, to the effect that
he had confided to Miss Abbey Potterson, over a jug of mellow flip in
the bar of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, that he ‘didn’t stand to
lose a farthing’ through Mr Harmon’s coming to life, but was quite as
well satisfied as if that gentleman had been barbarously murdered, and
he (Mr Inspector) had pocketed the government reward.

In all their arrangements of such nature, Mr and Mrs John Harmon derived
much assistance from their eminent solicitor, Mr Mortimer Lightwood; who
laid about him professionally with such unwonted despatch and intention,
that a piece of work was vigorously pursued as soon as cut out; whereby
Young Blight was acted on as by that transatlantic dram which is
poetically named An Eye-Opener, and found himself staring at real
clients instead of out of window. The accessibility of Riah proving
very useful as to a few hints towards the disentanglement of Eugene’s
affairs, Lightwood applied himself with infinite zest to attacking and
harassing Mr Fledgeby: who, discovering himself in danger of being blown
into the air by certain explosive transactions in which he had been
engaged, and having been sufficiently flayed under his beating, came
to a parley and asked for quarter. The harmless Twemlow profited by
the conditions entered into, though he little thought it. Mr Riah
unaccountably melted; waited in person on him over the stable yard in
Duke Street, St James’s, no longer ravening but mild, to inform him
that payment of interest as heretofore, but henceforth at Mr Lightwood’s
offices, would appease his Jewish rancour; and departed with the secret
that Mr John Harmon had advanced the money and become the creditor.
Thus, was the sublime Snigsworth’s wrath averted, and thus did he snort
no larger amount of moral grandeur at the Corinthian column in the
print over the fireplace, than was normally in his (and the British)
constitution.


Mrs Wilfer’s first visit to the Mendicant’s bride at the new abode of
Mendicancy, was a grand event. Pa had been sent for into the City,
on the very day of taking possession, and had been stunned with
astonishment, and brought-to, and led about the house by one ear, to
behold its various treasures, and had been enraptured and enchanted. Pa
had also been appointed Secretary, and had been enjoined to give instant
notice of resignation to Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles, for ever and
ever. But Ma came later, and came, as was her due, in state.

The carriage was sent for Ma, who entered it with a bearing worthy of
the occasion, accompanied, rather than supported, by Miss Lavinia, who
altogether declined to recognize the maternal majesty. Mr George Sampson
meekly followed. He was received in the vehicle, by Mrs Wilfer, as if
admitted to the honour of assisting at a funeral in the family, and she
then issued the order, ‘Onward!’ to the Mendicant’s menial.

‘I wish to goodness, Ma,’ said Lavvy, throwing herself back among the
cushions, with her arms crossed, ‘that you’d loll a little.’

‘How!’ repeated Mrs Wilfer. ‘Loll!’

‘Yes, Ma.’

‘I hope,’ said the impressive lady, ‘I am incapable of it.’

‘I am sure you look so, Ma. But why one should go out to dine with one’s
own daughter or sister, as if one’s under-petticoat was a blackboard, I
do NOT understand.’

‘Neither do I understand,’ retorted Mrs Wilfer, with deep scorn, ‘how
a young lady can mention the garment in the name of which you have
indulged. I blush for you.’

‘Thank you, Ma,’ said Lavvy, yawning, ‘but I can do it for myself, I am
obliged to you, when there’s any occasion.’

Here, Mr Sampson, with the view of establishing harmony, which he never
under any circumstances succeeded in doing, said with an agreeable
smile: ‘After all, you know, ma’am, we know it’s there.’ And immediately
felt that he had committed himself.

‘We know it’s there!’ said Mrs Wilfer, glaring.

‘Really, George,’ remonstrated Miss Lavinia, ‘I must say that I don’t
understand your allusions, and that I think you might be more delicate
and less personal.’

‘Go it!’ cried Mr Sampson, becoming, on the shortest notice, a prey to
despair. ‘Oh yes! Go it, Miss Lavinia Wilfer!’

‘What you may mean, George Sampson, by your omnibus-driving expressions,
I cannot pretend to imagine. Neither,’ said Miss Lavinia, ‘Mr George
Sampson, do I wish to imagine. It is enough for me to know in my own
heart that I am not going to--’ having imprudently got into a sentence
without providing a way out of it, Miss Lavinia was constrained to
close with ‘going to it’. A weak conclusion which, however, derived some
appearance of strength from disdain.

‘Oh yes!’ cried Mr Sampson, with bitterness. ‘Thus it ever is. I
never--’

‘If you mean to say,’ Miss Lavvy cut him short, that you never brought
up a young gazelle, you may save yourself the trouble, because nobody
in this carriage supposes that you ever did. We know you better.’ (As if
this were a home-thrust.)

‘Lavinia,’ returned Mr Sampson, in a dismal vein, ‘I did not mean to
say so. What I did mean to say, was, that I never expected to retain my
favoured place in this family, after Fortune shed her beams upon it. Why
do you take me,’ said Mr Sampson, ‘to the glittering halls with which
I can never compete, and then taunt me with my moderate salary? Is it
generous? Is it kind?’

The stately lady, Mrs Wilfer, perceiving her opportunity of delivering a
few remarks from the throne, here took up the altercation.

‘Mr Sampson,’ she began, ‘I cannot permit you to misrepresent the
intentions of a child of mine.’

‘Let him alone, Ma,’ Miss Lavvy interposed with haughtiness. ‘It is
indifferent to me what he says or does.’

‘Nay, Lavinia,’ quoth Mrs Wilfer, ‘this touches the blood of the family.
If Mr George Sampson attributes, even to my youngest daughter--’

[‘I don’t see why you should use the word “even”, Ma,’ Miss Lavvy
interposed, ‘because I am quite as important as any of the others.’)

‘Peace!’ said Mrs Wilfer, solemnly. ‘I repeat, if Mr George Sampson
attributes, to my youngest daughter, grovelling motives, he attributes
them equally to the mother of my youngest daughter. That mother
repudiates them, and demands of Mr George Sampson, as a youth of honour,
what he WOULD have? I may be mistaken--nothing is more likely--but Mr
George Sampson,’ proceeded Mrs Wilfer, majestically waving her gloves,
‘appears to me to be seated in a first-class equipage. Mr George Sampson
appears to me to be on his way, by his own admission, to a residence
that may be termed Palatial. Mr George Sampson appears to me to be
invited to participate in the--shall I say the--Elevation which has
descended on the family with which he is ambitious, shall I say to
Mingle? Whence, then, this tone on Mr Sampson’s part?’

‘It is only, ma’am,’ Mr Sampson explained, in exceedingly low spirits,
‘because, in a pecuniary sense, I am painfully conscious of my
unworthiness. Lavinia is now highly connected. Can I hope that she will
still remain the same Lavinia as of old? And is it not pardonable if
I feel sensitive, when I see a disposition on her part to take me up
short?’

‘If you are not satisfied with your position, sir,’ observed Miss
Lavinia, with much politeness, ‘we can set you down at any turning you
may please to indicate to my sister’s coachman.’

‘Dearest Lavinia,’ urged Mr Sampson, pathetically, ‘I adore you.’

‘Then if you can’t do it in a more agreeable manner,’ returned the young
lady, ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’

‘I also,’ pursued Mr Sampson, ‘respect you, ma’am, to an extent which
must ever be below your merits, I am well aware, but still up to an
uncommon mark. Bear with a wretch, Lavinia, bear with a wretch, ma’am,
who feels the noble sacrifices you make for him, but is goaded almost to
madness,’ Mr Sampson slapped his forehead, ‘when he thinks of competing
with the rich and influential.’

‘When you have to compete with the rich and influential, it will
probably be mentioned to you,’ said Miss Lavvy, ‘in good time. At least,
it will if the case is MY case.’

Mr Sampson immediately expressed his fervent Opinion that this was ‘more
than human’, and was brought upon his knees at Miss Lavinia’s feet.

It was the crowning addition indispensable to the full enjoyment of both
mother and daughter, to bear Mr Sampson, a grateful captive, into the
glittering halls he had mentioned, and to parade him through the same,
at once a living witness of their glory, and a bright instance of their
condescension. Ascending the staircase, Miss Lavinia permitted him to
walk at her side, with the air of saying: ‘Notwithstanding all these
surroundings, I am yours as yet, George. How long it may last is another
question, but I am yours as yet.’ She also benignantly intimated to him,
aloud, the nature of the objects upon which he looked, and to which he
was unaccustomed: as, ‘Exotics, George,’ ‘An aviary, George,’ ‘An
ormolu clock, George,’ and the like. While, through the whole of the
decorations, Mrs Wilfer led the way with the bearing of a Savage Chief,
who would feel himself compromised by manifesting the slightest token of
surprise or admiration.

Indeed, the bearing of this impressive woman, throughout the day, was a
pattern to all impressive women under similar circumstances. She renewed
the acquaintance of Mr and Mrs Boffin, as if Mr and Mrs Boffin had said
of her what she had said of them, and as if Time alone could quite wear
her injury out. She regarded every servant who approached her, as her
sworn enemy, expressly intending to offer her affronts with the dishes,
and to pour forth outrages on her moral feelings from the decanters.
She sat erect at table, on the right hand of her son-in-law, as half
suspecting poison in the viands, and as bearing up with native force of
character against other deadly ambushes. Her carriage towards Bella was
as a carriage towards a young lady of good position, whom she had met in
society a few years ago. Even when, slightly thawing under the influence
of sparkling champagne, she related to her son-in-law some passages of
domestic interest concerning her papa, she infused into the narrative
such Arctic suggestions of her having been an unappreciated blessing to
mankind, since her papa’s days, and also of that gentleman’s having
been a frosty impersonation of a frosty race, as struck cold to the
very soles of the feet of the hearers. The Inexhaustible being produced,
staring, and evidently intending a weak and washy smile shortly, no
sooner beheld her, than it was stricken spasmodic and inconsolable. When
she took her leave at last, it would have been hard to say whether it
was with the air of going to the scaffold herself, or of leaving the
inmates of the house for immediate execution. Yet, John Harmon enjoyed
it all merrily, and told his wife, when he and she were alone, that her
natural ways had never seemed so dearly natural as beside this foil,
and that although he did not dispute her being her father’s daughter,
he should ever remain stedfast in the faith that she could not be her
mother’s.


This visit was, as has been said, a grand event. Another event, not
grand but deemed in the house a special one, occurred at about the same
period; and this was, the first interview between Mr Sloppy and Miss
Wren.

The dolls’ dressmaker, being at work for the Inexhaustible upon a
full-dressed doll some two sizes larger than that young person, Mr
Sloppy undertook to call for it, and did so.

‘Come in, sir,’ said Miss Wren, who was working at her bench. ‘And who
may you be?’

Mr Sloppy introduced himself by name and buttons.

‘Oh indeed!’ cried Jenny. ‘Ah! I have been looking forward to knowing
you. I heard of your distinguishing yourself.’

‘Did you, Miss?’ grinned Sloppy. ‘I am sure I am glad to hear it, but I
don’t know how.’

‘Pitching somebody into a mud-cart,’ said Miss Wren.

‘Oh! That way!’ cried Sloppy. ‘Yes, Miss.’ And threw back his head and
laughed.

‘Bless us!’ exclaimed Miss Wren, with a start. ‘Don’t open your mouth
as wide as that, young man, or it’ll catch so, and not shut again some
day.’

Mr Sloppy opened it, if possible, wider, and kept it open until his
laugh was out.

‘Why, you’re like the giant,’ said Miss Wren, ‘when he came home in the
land of Beanstalk, and wanted Jack for supper.’

‘Was he good-looking, Miss?’ asked Sloppy.

‘No,’ said Miss Wren. ‘Ugly.’

Her visitor glanced round the room--which had many comforts in it now,
that had not been in it before--and said: ‘This is a pretty place,
Miss.’

‘Glad you think so, sir,’ returned Miss Wren. ‘And what do you think of
Me?’

The honesty of Mr Sloppy being severely taxed by the question, he
twisted a button, grinned, and faltered.

‘Out with it!’ said Miss Wren, with an arch look. ‘Don’t you think me
a queer little comicality?’ In shaking her head at him after asking the
question, she shook her hair down.

‘Oh!’ cried Sloppy, in a burst of admiration. ‘What a lot, and what a
colour!’

Miss Wren, with her usual expressive hitch, went on with her work. But,
left her hair as it was; not displeased by the effect it had made.

‘You don’t live here alone; do you, Miss?’ asked Sloppy.

‘No,’ said Miss Wren, with a chop. ‘Live here with my fairy godmother.’

‘With;’ Mr Sloppy couldn’t make it out; ‘with who did you say, Miss?’

‘Well!’ replied Miss Wren, more seriously. ‘With my second father. Or
with my first, for that matter.’ And she shook her head, and drew a
sigh. ‘If you had known a poor child I used to have here,’ she added,
‘you’d have understood me. But you didn’t, and you can’t. All the
better!’

‘You must have been taught a long time,’ said Sloppy, glancing at the
array of dolls in hand, ‘before you came to work so neatly, Miss, and
with such a pretty taste.’

‘Never was taught a stitch, young man!’ returned the dress-maker,
tossing her head. ‘Just gobbled and gobbled, till I found out how to do
it. Badly enough at first, but better now.’

‘And here have I,’ said Sloppy, in something of a self-reproachful tone,
‘been a learning and a learning, and here has Mr Boffin been a paying
and a paying, ever so long!’

‘I have heard what your trade is,’ observed Miss Wren; ‘it’s
cabinet-making.’

Mr Sloppy nodded. ‘Now that the Mounds is done with, it is. I’ll tell
you what, Miss. I should like to make you something.’

‘Much obliged. But what?’

‘I could make you,’ said Sloppy, surveying the room, ‘I could make you
a handy set of nests to lay the dolls in. Or I could make you a handy
little set of drawers, to keep your silks and threads and scraps in. Or
I could turn you a rare handle for that crutch-stick, if it belongs to
him you call your father.’

‘It belongs to me,’ returned the little creature, with a quick flush of
her face and neck. ‘I am lame.’

Poor Sloppy flushed too, for there was an instinctive delicacy behind
his buttons, and his own hand had struck it. He said, perhaps, the best
thing in the way of amends that could be said. ‘I am very glad it’s
yours, because I’d rather ornament it for you than for any one else.
Please may I look at it?’

Miss Wren was in the act of handing it to him over her bench, when she
paused. ‘But you had better see me use it,’ she said, sharply. ‘This is
the way. Hoppetty, Kicketty, Pep-peg-peg. Not pretty; is it?’

‘It seems to me that you hardly want it at all,’ said Sloppy.

The little dressmaker sat down again, and gave it into his hand, saying,
with that better look upon her, and with a smile: ‘Thank you!’

‘And as concerning the nests and the drawers,’ said Sloppy, after
measuring the handle on his sleeve, and softly standing the stick aside
against the wall, ‘why, it would be a real pleasure to me. I’ve heerd
tell that you can sing most beautiful; and I should be better paid with
a song than with any money, for I always loved the likes of that, and
often giv’ Mrs Higden and Johnny a comic song myself, with “Spoken” in
it. Though that’s not your sort, I’ll wager.’

‘You are a very kind young man,’ returned the dressmaker; ‘a really kind
young man. I accept your offer.--I suppose He won’t mind,’ she added as
an afterthought, shrugging her shoulders; ‘and if he does, he may!’

‘Meaning him that you call your father, Miss,’ asked Sloppy.

‘No, no,’ replied Miss Wren. ‘Him, Him, Him!’

‘Him, him, him?’ repeated Sloppy; staring about, as if for Him.

‘Him who is coming to court and marry me,’ returned Miss Wren. ‘Dear me,
how slow you are!’

‘Oh! HIM!’ said Sloppy. And seemed to turn thoughtful and a little
troubled. ‘I never thought of him. When is he coming, Miss?’

‘What a question!’ cried Miss Wren. ‘How should I know!’

‘Where is he coming from, Miss?’

‘Why, good gracious, how can I tell! He is coming from somewhere or
other, I suppose, and he is coming some day or other, I suppose. I don’t
know any more about him, at present.’

This tickled Mr Sloppy as an extraordinarily good joke, and he threw
back his head and laughed with measureless enjoyment. At the sight of
him laughing in that absurd way, the dolls’ dressmaker laughed very
heartily indeed. So they both laughed, till they were tired.

‘There, there, there!’ said Miss Wren. ‘For goodness’ sake, stop, Giant,
or I shall be swallowed up alive, before I know it. And to this minute
you haven’t said what you’ve come for.’

‘I have come for little Miss Harmonses doll,’ said Sloppy.

‘I thought as much,’ remarked Miss Wren, ‘and here is little Miss
Harmonses doll waiting for you. She’s folded up in silver paper, you
see, as if she was wrapped from head to foot in new Bank notes. Take
care of her, and there’s my hand, and thank you again.’

‘I’ll take more care of her than if she was a gold image,’ said Sloppy,
‘and there’s both MY hands, Miss, and I’ll soon come back again.’


But, the greatest event of all, in the new life of Mr and Mrs John
Harmon, was a visit from Mr and Mrs Eugene Wrayburn. Sadly wan and worn
was the once gallant Eugene, and walked resting on his wife’s arm, and
leaning heavily upon a stick. But, he was daily growing stronger and
better, and it was declared by the medical attendants that he might not
be much disfigured by-and-by. It was a grand event, indeed, when Mr
and Mrs Eugene Wrayburn came to stay at Mr and Mrs John Harmon’s house:
where, by the way, Mr and Mrs Boffin (exquisitely happy, and daily
cruising about, to look at shops,) were likewise staying indefinitely.

To Mr Eugene Wrayburn, in confidence, did Mrs John Harmon impart what
she had known of the state of his wife’s affections, in his reckless
time. And to Mrs John Harmon, in confidence, did Mr Eugene Wrayburn
impart that, please God, she should see how his wife had changed him!

‘I make no protestations,’ said Eugene; ‘--who does, who means them!--I
have made a resolution.’

‘But would you believe, Bella,’ interposed his wife, coming to resume
her nurse’s place at his side, for he never got on well without her:
‘that on our wedding day he told me he almost thought the best thing he
could do, was to die?’

‘As I didn’t do it, Lizzie,’ said Eugene, ‘I’ll do that better thing you
suggested--for your sake.’

That same afternoon, Eugene lying on his couch in his own room upstairs,
Lightwood came to chat with him, while Bella took his wife out for a
ride. ‘Nothing short of force will make her go,’ Eugene had said; so,
Bella had playfully forced her.

‘Dear old fellow,’ Eugene began with Lightwood, reaching up his hand,
‘you couldn’t have come at a better time, for my mind is full, and I
want to empty it. First, of my present, before I touch upon my future.
M. R. F., who is a much younger cavalier than I, and a professed admirer
of beauty, was so affable as to remark the other day (he paid us a visit
of two days up the river there, and much objected to the accommodation
of the hotel), that Lizzie ought to have her portrait painted. Which,
coming from M. R. F., may be considered equivalent to a melodramatic
blessing.’

‘You are getting well,’ said Mortimer, with a smile.

‘Really,’ said Eugene, ‘I mean it. When M. R. F. said that, and followed
it up by rolling the claret (for which he called, and I paid), in his
mouth, and saying, “My dear son, why do you drink this trash?” it was
tantamount in him--to a paternal benediction on our union, accompanied
with a gush of tears. The coolness of M. R. F. is not to be measured by
ordinary standards.’

‘True enough,’ said Lightwood.

‘That’s all,’ pursued Eugene, ‘that I shall ever hear from M. R. F. on
the subject, and he will continue to saunter through the world with
his hat on one side. My marriage being thus solemnly recognized at the
family altar, I have no further trouble on that score. Next, you really
have done wonders for me, Mortimer, in easing my money-perplexities, and
with such a guardian and steward beside me, as the preserver of my life
(I am hardly strong yet, you see, for I am not man enough to refer
to her without a trembling voice--she is so inexpressibly dear to me,
Mortimer!), the little that I can call my own will be more than it ever
has been. It need be more, for you know what it always has been in my
hands. Nothing.’

‘Worse than nothing, I fancy, Eugene. My own small income (I devoutly
wish that my grandfather had left it to the Ocean rather than to me!)
has been an effective Something, in the way of preventing me from
turning to at Anything. And I think yours has been much the same.’

‘There spake the voice of wisdom,’ said Eugene. ‘We are shepherds both.
In turning to at last, we turn to in earnest. Let us say no more of
that, for a few years to come. Now, I have had an idea, Mortimer, of
taking myself and my wife to one of the colonies, and working at my
vocation there.’

‘I should be lost without you, Eugene; but you may be right.’

‘No,’ said Eugene, emphatically. ‘Not right. Wrong!’

He said it with such a lively--almost angry--flash, that Mortimer showed
himself greatly surprised.

‘You think this thumped head of mine is excited?’ Eugene went on, with a
high look; ‘not so, believe me. I can say to you of the healthful music
of my pulse what Hamlet said of his. My blood is up, but wholesomely up,
when I think of it. Tell me! Shall I turn coward to Lizzie, and sneak
away with her, as if I were ashamed of her! Where would your friend’s
part in this world be, Mortimer, if she had turned coward to him, and on
immeasurably better occasion?’

‘Honourable and stanch,’ said Lightwood. ‘And yet, Eugene--’

‘And yet what, Mortimer?’

‘And yet, are you sure that you might not feel (for her sake, I say for
her sake) any slight coldness towards her on the part of--Society?’

‘O! You and I may well stumble at the word,’ returned Eugene, laughing.
‘Do we mean our Tippins?’

‘Perhaps we do,’ said Mortimer, laughing also.

‘Faith, we DO!’ returned Eugene, with great animation. ‘We may hide
behind the bush and beat about it, but we DO! Now, my wife is something
nearer to my heart, Mortimer, than Tippins is, and I owe her a little
more than I owe to Tippins, and I am rather prouder of her than I ever
was of Tippins. Therefore, I will fight it out to the last gasp, with
her and for her, here, in the open field. When I hide her, or strike
for her, faint-heartedly, in a hole or a corner, do you whom I love next
best upon earth, tell me what I shall most righteously deserve to be
told:--that she would have done well to turn me over with her foot that
night when I lay bleeding to death, and spat in my dastard face.’

The glow that shone upon him as he spoke the words, so irradiated his
features that he looked, for the time, as though he had never been
mutilated. His friend responded as Eugene would have had him respond,
and they discoursed of the future until Lizzie came back. After resuming
her place at his side, and tenderly touching his hands and his head, she
said:

‘Eugene, dear, you made me go out, but I ought to have stayed with you.
You are more flushed than you have been for many days. What have you
been doing?’

‘Nothing,’ replied Eugene, ‘but looking forward to your coming back.’

‘And talking to Mr Lightwood,’ said Lizzie, turning to him with a smile.
‘But it cannot have been Society that disturbed you.’

‘Faith, my dear love!’ retorted Eugene, in his old airy manner, as he
laughed and kissed her, ‘I rather think it WAS Society though!’

The word ran so much in Mortimer Lightwood’s thoughts as he went home to
the Temple that night, that he resolved to take a look at Society, which
he had not seen for a considerable period.



Chapter 17

THE VOICE OF SOCIETY


Behoves Mortimer Lightwood, therefore, to answer a dinner card from Mr
and Mrs Veneering requesting the honour, and to signify that Mr Mortimer
Lightwood will be happy to have the other honour. The Veneerings have
been, as usual, indefatigably dealing dinner cards to Society, and
whoever desires to take a hand had best be quick about it, for it is
written in the Books of the Insolvent Fates that Veneering shall make a
resounding smash next week. Yes. Having found out the clue to that great
mystery how people can contrive to live beyond their means, and having
over-jobbed his jobberies as legislator deputed to the Universe by the
pure electors of Pocket-Breaches, it shall come to pass next week that
Veneering will accept the Chiltern Hundreds, that the legal gentleman in
Britannia’s confidence will again accept the Pocket-Breaches Thousands,
and that the Veneerings will retire to Calais, there to live on Mrs
Veneering’s diamonds (in which Mr Veneering, as a good husband, has from
time to time invested considerable sums), and to relate to Neptune and
others, how that, before Veneering retired from Parliament, the House
of Commons was composed of himself and the six hundred and fifty-seven
dearest and oldest friends he had in the world. It shall likewise come
to pass, at as nearly as possible the same period, that Society will
discover that it always did despise Veneering, and distrust Veneering,
and that when it went to Veneering’s to dinner it always had
misgivings--though very secretly at the time, it would seem, and in a
perfectly private and confidential manner.

The next week’s books of the Insolvent Fates, however, being not yet
opened, there is the usual rush to the Veneerings, of the people who go
to their house to dine with one another and not with them. There is Lady
Tippins. There are Podsnap the Great, and Mrs Podsnap. There is Twemlow.
There are Buffer, Boots, and Brewer. There is the Contractor, who
is Providence to five hundred thousand men. There is the Chairman,
travelling three thousand miles per week. There is the brilliant genius
who turned the shares into that remarkably exact sum of three hundred
and seventy five thousand pounds, no shillings, and nopence.

To whom, add Mortimer Lightwood, coming in among them with a
reassumption of his old languid air, founded on Eugene, and belonging to
the days when he told the story of the man from Somewhere.

That fresh fairy, Tippins, all but screams at sight of her false
swain. She summons the deserter to her with her fan; but the deserter,
predetermined not to come, talks Britain with Podsnap. Podsnap always
talks Britain, and talks as if he were a sort of Private Watchman
employed, in the British interests, against the rest of the world. ‘We
know what Russia means, sir,’ says Podsnap; ‘we know what France wants;
we see what America is up to; but we know what England is. That’s enough
for us.’

However, when dinner is served, and Lightwood drops into his old place
over against Lady Tippins, she can be fended off no longer. ‘Long
banished Robinson Crusoe,’ says the charmer, exchanging salutations,
‘how did you leave the Island?’

‘Thank you,’ says Lightwood. ‘It made no complaint of being in pain
anywhere.’

‘Say, how did you leave the savages?’ asks Lady Tippins.

‘They were becoming civilized when I left Juan Fernandez,’ says
Lightwood. ‘At least they were eating one another, which looked like
it.’

‘Tormentor!’ returns the dear young creature. ‘You know what I mean, and
you trifle with my impatience. Tell me something, immediately, about the
married pair. You were at the wedding.’

‘Was I, by-the-by?’ Mortimer pretends, at great leisure, to consider.
‘So I was!’

‘How was the bride dressed? In rowing costume?’

Mortimer looks gloomy, and declines to answer.

‘I hope she steered herself, skiffed herself, paddled herself,
larboarded and starboarded herself, or whatever the technical term may
be, to the ceremony?’ proceeds the playful Tippins.

‘However she got to it, she graced it,’ says Mortimer.

Lady Tippins with a skittish little scream, attracts the general
attention. ‘Graced it! Take care of me if I faint, Veneering. He means
to tell us, that a horrid female waterman is graceful!’

‘Pardon me. I mean to tell you nothing, Lady Tippins,’ replies
Lightwood. And keeps his word by eating his dinner with a show of the
utmost indifference.

‘You shall not escape me in this way, you morose backwoodsman,’ retorts
Lady Tippins. ‘You shall not evade the question, to screen your friend
Eugene, who has made this exhibition of himself. The knowledge shall be
brought home to you that such a ridiculous affair is condemned by the
voice of Society. My dear Mrs Veneering, do let us resolve ourselves
into a Committee of the whole House on the subject.’

Mrs Veneering, always charmed by this rattling sylph, cries. ‘Oh yes!
Do let us resolve ourselves into a Committee of the whole House!
So delicious!’ Veneering says, ‘As many as are of that opinion, say
Aye,--contrary, No--the Ayes have it.’ But nobody takes the slightest
notice of his joke.

‘Now, I am Chairwoman of Committees!’ cries Lady Tippins.

[‘What spirits she has!’ exclaims Mrs Veneering; to whom likewise nobody
attends.)

‘And this,’ pursues the sprightly one, ‘is a Committee of the whole
House to what-you-may-call-it--elicit, I suppose--the voice of Society.
The question before the Committee is, whether a young man of very fair
family, good appearance, and some talent, makes a fool or a wise man of
himself in marrying a female waterman, turned factory girl.’

‘Hardly so, I think,’ the stubborn Mortimer strikes in. ‘I take the
question to be, whether such a man as you describe, Lady Tippins, does
right or wrong in marrying a brave woman (I say nothing of her beauty),
who has saved his life, with a wonderful energy and address; whom he
knows to be virtuous, and possessed of remarkable qualities; whom he has
long admired, and who is deeply attached to him.’

‘But, excuse me,’ says Podsnap, with his temper and his shirt-collar
about equally rumpled; ‘was this young woman ever a female waterman?’

‘Never. But she sometimes rowed in a boat with her father, I believe.’

General sensation against the young woman. Brewer shakes his head. Boots
shakes his head. Buffer shakes his head.

‘And now, Mr Lightwood, was she ever,’ pursues Podsnap, with his
indignation rising high into those hair-brushes of his, ‘a factory
girl?’

‘Never. But she had some employment in a paper mill, I believe.’

General sensation repeated. Brewer says, ‘Oh dear!’ Boots says, ‘Oh
dear!’ Buffer says, ‘Oh dear!’ All, in a rumbling tone of protest.

‘Then all I have to say is,’ returns Podsnap, putting the thing away
with his right arm, ‘that my gorge rises against such a marriage--that
it offends and disgusts me--that it makes me sick--and that I desire to
know no more about it.’

[‘Now I wonder,’ thinks Mortimer, amused, ‘whether YOU are the Voice of
Society!’)

‘Hear, hear, hear!’ cries Lady Tippins. ‘Your opinion of this
MESALLIANCE, honourable colleagues of the honourable member who has just
sat down?’

Mrs Podsnap is of opinion that in these matters there should be an
equality of station and fortune, and that a man accustomed to Society
should look out for a woman accustomed to Society and capable of bearing
her part in it with--an ease and elegance of carriage--that.’ Mrs
Podsnap stops there, delicately intimating that every such man should
look out for a fine woman as nearly resembling herself as he may hope to
discover.

[‘Now I wonder,’ thinks Mortimer, ‘whether you are the Voice!’)

Lady Tippins next canvasses the Contractor, of five hundred thousand
power. It appears to this potentate, that what the man in question
should have done, would have been, to buy the young woman a boat and a
small annuity, and set her up for herself. These things are a question
of beefsteaks and porter. You buy the young woman a boat. Very good. You
buy her, at the same time, a small annuity. You speak of that annuity in
pounds sterling, but it is in reality so many pounds of beefsteaks and
so many pints of porter. On the one hand, the young woman has the boat.
On the other hand, she consumes so many pounds of beefsteaks and so many
pints of porter. Those beefsteaks and that porter are the fuel to that
young woman’s engine. She derives therefrom a certain amount of power to
row the boat; that power will produce so much money; you add that to the
small annuity; and thus you get at the young woman’s income. That (it
seems to the Contractor) is the way of looking at it.

The fair enslaver having fallen into one of her gentle sleeps during the
last exposition, nobody likes to wake her. Fortunately, she comes
awake of herself, and puts the question to the Wandering Chairman. The
Wanderer can only speak of the case as if it were his own. If such a
young woman as the young woman described, had saved his own life, he
would have been very much obliged to her, wouldn’t have married her, and
would have got her a berth in an Electric Telegraph Office, where young
women answer very well.

What does the Genius of the three hundred and seventy-five thousand
pounds, no shillings, and nopence, think? He can’t say what he thinks,
without asking: Had the young woman any money?

‘No,’ says Lightwood, in an uncompromising voice; ‘no money.’

‘Madness and moonshine,’ is then the compressed verdict of the Genius.
‘A man may do anything lawful, for money. But for no money!--Bosh!’

What does Boots say?

Boots says he wouldn’t have done it under twenty thousand pound.

What does Brewer say?

Brewer says what Boots says.

What does Buffer say?

Buffer says he knows a man who married a bathing-woman, and bolted.

Lady Tippins fancies she has collected the suffrages of the whole
Committee (nobody dreaming of asking the Veneerings for their opinion),
when, looking round the table through her eyeglass, she perceives Mr
Twemlow with his hand to his forehead.

Good gracious! My Twemlow forgotten! My dearest! My own! What is his
vote?

Twemlow has the air of being ill at ease, as he takes his hand from his
forehead and replies.

‘I am disposed to think,’ says he, ‘that this is a question of the
feelings of a gentleman.’

‘A gentleman can have no feelings who contracts such a marriage,’
flushes Podsnap.

‘Pardon me, sir,’ says Twemlow, rather less mildly than usual, ‘I don’t
agree with you. If this gentleman’s feelings of gratitude, of respect,
of admiration, and affection, induced him (as I presume they did) to
marry this lady--’

‘This lady!’ echoes Podsnap.

‘Sir,’ returns Twemlow, with his wristbands bristling a little, ‘YOU
repeat the word; I repeat the word. This lady. What else would you call
her, if the gentleman were present?’

This being something in the nature of a poser for Podsnap, he merely
waves it away with a speechless wave.

‘I say,’ resumes Twemlow, ‘if such feelings on the part of this
gentleman, induced this gentleman to marry this lady, I think he is the
greater gentleman for the action, and makes her the greater lady. I beg
to say, that when I use the word, gentleman, I use it in the sense in
which the degree may be attained by any man. The feelings of a gentleman
I hold sacred, and I confess I am not comfortable when they are made the
subject of sport or general discussion.’

‘I should like to know,’ sneers Podsnap, ‘whether your noble relation
would be of your opinion.’

‘Mr Podsnap,’ retorts Twemlow, ‘permit me. He might be, or he might not
be. I cannot say. But, I could not allow even him to dictate to me on a
point of great delicacy, on which I feel very strongly.’

Somehow, a canopy of wet blanket seems to descend upon the company, and
Lady Tippins was never known to turn so very greedy or so very cross.
Mortimer Lightwood alone brightens. He has been asking himself, as to
every other member of the Committee in turn, ‘I wonder whether you are
the Voice!’ But he does not ask himself the question after Twemlow has
spoken, and he glances in Twemlow’s direction as if he were grateful.
When the company disperse--by which time Mr and Mrs Veneering have had
quite as much as they want of the honour, and the guests have had quite
as much as THEY want of the other honour--Mortimer sees Twemlow home,
shakes hands with him cordially at parting, and fares to the Temple,
gaily.



POSTSCRIPT

IN LIEU OF PREFACE


When I devised this story, I foresaw the likelihood that a class of
readers and commentators would suppose that I was at great pains to
conceal exactly what I was at great pains to suggest: namely, that Mr
John Harmon was not slain, and that Mr John Rokesmith was he. Pleasing
myself with the idea that the supposition might in part arise out
of some ingenuity in the story, and thinking it worth while, in the
interests of art, to hint to an audience that an artist (of whatever
denomination) may perhaps be trusted to know what he is about in his
vocation, if they will concede him a little patience, I was not alarmed
by the anticipation.

To keep for a long time unsuspected, yet always working itself out,
another purpose originating in that leading incident, and turning it to
a pleasant and useful account at last, was at once the most interesting
and the most difficult part of my design. Its difficulty was much
enhanced by the mode of publication; for, it would be very unreasonable
to expect that many readers, pursuing a story in portions from month
to month through nineteen months, will, until they have it before them
complete, perceive the relations of its finer threads to the whole
pattern which is always before the eyes of the story-weaver at his loom.
Yet, that I hold the advantages of the mode of publication to outweigh
its disadvantages, may be easily believed of one who revived it in the
Pickwick Papers after long disuse, and has pursued it ever since.

There is sometimes an odd disposition in this country to dispute as
improbable in fiction, what are the commonest experiences in fact.
Therefore, I note here, though it may not be at all necessary, that
there are hundreds of Will Cases (as they are called), far more
remarkable than that fancied in this book; and that the stores of the
Prerogative Office teem with instances of testators who have made,
changed, contradicted, hidden, forgotten, left cancelled, and left
uncancelled, each many more wills than were ever made by the elder Mr
Harmon of Harmony Jail.

In my social experiences since Mrs Betty Higden came upon the scene and
left it, I have found Circumlocutional champions disposed to be
warm with me on the subject of my view of the Poor Law. Mr friend Mr
Bounderby could never see any difference between leaving the Coketown
‘hands’ exactly as they were, and requiring them to be fed with turtle
soup and venison out of gold spoons. Idiotic propositions of a parallel
nature have been freely offered for my acceptance, and I have been
called upon to admit that I would give Poor Law relief to anybody,
anywhere, anyhow. Putting this nonsense aside, I have observed a
suspicious tendency in the champions to divide into two parties; the
one, contending that there are no deserving Poor who prefer death by
slow starvation and bitter weather, to the mercies of some Relieving
Officers and some Union Houses; the other, admitting that there are such
Poor, but denying that they have any cause or reason for what they do.
The records in our newspapers, the late exposure by THE LANCET, and the
common sense and senses of common people, furnish too abundant evidence
against both defences. But, that my view of the Poor Law may not be
mistaken or misrepresented, I will state it. I believe there has been
in England, since the days of the STUARTS, no law so often infamously
administered, no law so often openly violated, no law habitually so
ill-supervised. In the majority of the shameful cases of disease and
death from destitution, that shock the Public and disgrace the country,
the illegality is quite equal to the inhumanity--and known language
could say no more of their lawlessness.

On Friday the Ninth of June in the present year, Mr and Mrs Boffin (in
their manuscript dress of receiving Mr and Mrs Lammle at breakfast)
were on the South Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly destructive
accident. When I had done what I could to help others, I climbed back
into my carriage--nearly turned over a viaduct, and caught aslant upon
the turn--to extricate the worthy couple. They were much soiled, but
otherwise unhurt. The same happy result attended Miss Bella Wilfer on
her wedding day, and Mr Riderhood inspecting Bradley Headstone’s red
neckerchief as he lay asleep. I remember with devout thankfulness that I
can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever, than
I was then, until there shall be written against my life, the two words
with which I have this day closed this book:--THE END.

September 2nd, 1865.





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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
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Title: The Pickwick Papers

Author: Charles Dickens

Release Date: April 22, 2009 [EBook #580]
Last Updated: September 25, 2016

Last Updated: February 20, 2016

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PICKWICK PAPERS ***



Produced by Jo Churcher, and David Widger



THE PICKWICK PAPERS


By Charles Dickens



CONTENTS


THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF THE PICKWICK CLUB


CHAPTER I.   THE PICKWICKIANS

CHAPTER II.   THE FIRST DAY’S JOURNEY, AND THE FIRST EVENING’S
ADVENTURES; WITH THEIR CONSEQUENCES

CHAPTER III.   A NEW ACQUAINTANCE--THE STROLLER’S TALE; A DISAGREEABLE
INTERRUPTION, AND AN UNPLEASANT ENCOUNTER

CHAPTER IV.   A FIELD DAY AND BIVOUAC--MORE NEW FRIENDS

CHAPTER V.   A SHORT ONE--SHOWING, AMONG OTHER MATTERS

CHAPTER VI.   AN OLD-FASHIONED CARD-PARTY--THE CLERGYMAN’S VERSES

CHAPTER VII.   HOW MR. WINKLE, INSTEAD OF SHOOTING AT THE PIGEON

CHAPTER VIII.   STRONGLY ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE POSITION

CHAPTER IX.   A DISCOVERY AND A CHASE

CHAPTER X.   CLEARING UP ALL DOUBTS (IF ANY EXISTED)

CHAPTER XI.   INVOLVING ANOTHER JOURNEY, AND AN ANTIQUARIAN DISCOVERY

CHAPTER XII.   DESCRIPTIVE OF A VERY IMPORTANT PROCEEDING

CHAPTER XIII.   SOME ACCOUNT OF EATANSWILL; OF THE STATE OF PARTIES

CHAPTER XIV.   COMPRISING A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE COMPANY

CHAPTER XV.   IN WHICH IS GIVEN A FAITHFUL PORTRAITURE

CHAPTER XVI.   TOO FULL OF ADVENTURE TO BE BRIEFLY DESCRIBED

CHAPTER XVII.   SHOWING THAT AN ATTACK OF RHEUMATISM

CHAPTER XVIII.   BRIEFLY ILLUSTRATIVE OF TWO POINTS

CHAPTER XIX.   A PLEASANT DAY WITH AN UNPLEASANT TERMINATION

CHAPTER XX.   SHOWING HOW DODSON AND FOGG WERE MEN OF BUSINESS

CHAPTER XXI.   IN WHICH THE OLD MAN LAUNCHES FORTH

CHAPTER XXII.   MR. PICKWICK JOURNEYS TO IPSWICH AND MEETS WITH A
ROMANTIC

CHAPTER XXIII.   IN WHICH MR. SAMUEL WELLER BEGINS TO DEVOTE HIS
ENERGIES

CHAPTER XXIV.   WHEREIN MR. PETER MAGNUS GROWS JEALOUS

CHAPTER XXV.   SHOWING, AMONG A VARIETY OF PLEASANT MATTERS, HOW
MAJESTIC

CHAPTER XXVI.   WHICH CONTAINS A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE PROGRESS

CHAPTER XXVII.   SAMUEL WELLER MAKES A PILGRIMAGE TO DORKING

CHAPTER XXVIII.   A GOOD-HUMOURED CHRISTMAS CHAPTER

CHAPTER XXIX.   THE STORY OF THE GOBLINS WHO STOLE A SEXTON

CHAPTER XXX.   HOW THE PICKWICKIANS MADE AND CULTIVATED THE ACQUAINTANCE

CHAPTER XXXI.   WHICH IS ALL ABOUT THE LAW, AND SUNDRY GREAT AUTHORITIES

CHAPTER XXXII.   DESCRIBES, FAR MORE FULLY THAN THE COURT NEWSMAN EVER

CHAPTER XXXIII.   MR. WELLER THE ELDER DELIVERS SOME CRITICAL SENTIMENTS

CHAPTER XXXIV.   IS WHOLLY DEVOTED TO A FULL AND FAITHFUL REPORT

CHAPTER XXXV.   IN WHICH MR. PICKWICK THINKS HE HAD BETTER GO TO BATH

CHAPTER XXXVI.   THE CHIEF FEATURES OF WHICH WILL BE FOUND

CHAPTER XXXVII.   HONOURABLY ACCOUNTS FOR MR. WELLER’S ABSENCE

CHAPTER XXXVIII.     HOW MR. WINKLE, WHEN HE STEPPED OUT OF THE FRYING-
PAN

CHAPTER XXXIX.   MR. SAMUEL WELLER, BEING INTRUSTED WITH A MISSION

CHAPTER XL.   INTRODUCES MR. PICKWICK TO A NEW AND NOT UNINTERESTING
SCENE

CHAPTER XLI.   WHAT BEFELL MR. PICKWICK WHEN HE GOT INTO THE FLEET

CHAPTER XLII.   ILLUSTRATIVE, LIKE THE PRECEDING ONE, OF THE OLD PROVERB

CHAPTER XLIII.   SHOWING HOW Mr. SAMUEL WELLER GOT INTO DIFFICULTIES

CHAPTER LXIV.   TREATS OF DIVERS LITTLE MATTERS WHICH OCCURRED

CHAPTER XLIV.   DESCRIPTIVE OF AN AFFECTING INTERVIEW

CHAPTER XLVI.   RECORDS A TOUCHING ACT OF DELICATE FEELING

CHAPTER XLVII.   IS CHIEFLY DEVOTED TO MATTERS OF BUSINESS

CHAPTER XLVIII.   RELATES HOW MR. PICKWICK, WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF
SAMUEL

CHAPTER XLIX.   CONTAINING THE STORY OF THE BAGMAN’S UNCLE

CHAPTER L.   HOW MR. PICKWICK SPED UPON HIS MISSION

CHAPTER LI.   IN WHICH MR. PICKWICK ENCOUNTERS AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

CHAPTER LII.   INVOLVING A SERIOUS CHANGE IN THE WELLER FAMILY

CHAPTER LIII.   COMPRISING THE FINAL EXIT OF MR. JINGLE AND JOB TROTTER

CHAPTER LIV.   CONTAINING SOME PARTICULARS RELATIVE TO THE DOUBLE KNOCK

CHAPTER LV.   MR. SOLOMON PELL, ASSISTED BY A SELECT COMMITTEE

CHAPTER LVI.   AN IMPORTANT CONFERENCE TAKES PLACE

CHAPTER LVII.   IN WHICH THE PICKWICK CLUB IS FINALLY DISSOLVED



DETAILED CONTENTS

1. The Pickwickians 2. The first Day’s Journey, and the first Evening’s
Adventures; with their Consequences 3. A new Acquaintance--The
Stroller’s Tale--A disagreeable Interruption, and an unpleasant
Encounter 4. A Field Day and Bivouac--More new Friends--An Invitation to
the Country 5. A short one--Showing, among other Matters, how Mr.
Pickwick undertook to drive, and Mr. Winkle to ride, and how they both
did it 6. An old-fashioned Card-party--The Clergyman’s verses--The Story
of the Convict’s Return 7. How Mr. Winkle, instead of shooting at the
Pigeon and killing the Crow, shot at the Crow and wounded the Pigeon;
how the Dingley Dell Cricket Club played All-Muggleton, and how All-
Muggleton dined at the Dingley Dell Expense; with other interesting and
instructive Matters 8. Strongly illustrative of the Position, that the
Course of True Love is not a Railway 9. A Discovery and a Chase 10.
Clearing up all Doubts (if any existed) of the Disinterestedness of Mr.
A. Jingle’s Character 11. Involving another Journey, and an Antiquarian
Discovery; Recording Mr. Pickwick’s Determination to be present at an
Election; and containing a Manuscript of the old Clergyman’s 12.
Descriptive of a very important Proceeding on the Part of Mr. Pickwick;
no less an Epoch in his Life, than in this History 13. Some Account of
Eatanswill; of the State of Parties therein; and of the Election of a
Member to serve in Parliament for that ancient, loyal, and patriotic
Borough 14. Comprising a brief Description of the Company at the Peacock
assembled; and a Tale told by a Bagman 15. In which is given a faithful
Portraiture of two distinguished Persons; and an accurate Description of
a public Breakfast in their House and Grounds: which public Breakfast
leads to the Recognition of an old Acquaintance, and the Commencement of
anothe r Chapter 16. Too full of Adventure to be briefly described 17.
Showing that an Attack of Rheumatism, in some Cases, acts as a Quickener
to inventive Genius 18. Briefly illustrative of two Points; first, the
Power of Hysterics, and, secondly, the Force of Circumstances 19. A
pleasant Day with an unpleasant Termination 20. Showing how Dodson and
Fogg were Men of Business, and their Clerks Men of pleasure; and how an
affecting Interview took place between Mr. Weller and his long-lost
Parent; showing also what Choice Spirits assembled at the Magpie and
Stump, and what a C apital Chapter the next one will be 21. In which the
old Man launches forth into his favourite Theme, and relates a Story
about a queer Client 22. Mr. Pickwick journeys to Ipswich and meets with
a romantic Adventure with a middle-aged Lady in yellow Curl-papers 23.
In which Mr. Samuel Weller begins to devote his Energies to the Return
Match between himself and Mr. Trotter 24. Wherein Mr. Peter Magnus grows
jealous, and the middle-aged Lady apprehensive, which brings the
Pickwickians within the Grasp of the Law 25. Showing, among a Variety of
pleasant Matters, how majestic and impartial Mr. Nupkins was; and how
Mr. Weller returned Mr. Job Trotter’s Shuttlecock as heavily as it came-
-With another Matter, which will be found in its Place 26. Which
contains a brief Account of the Progress of the Action of Bardell
against Pickwick 27. Samuel Weller makes a Pilgrimage to Dorking, and
beholds his Mother-in-law 28. A good-humoured Christmas Chapter,
containing an Account of a Wedding, and some other Sports beside: which
although in their Way even as good Customs as Marriage itself, are not
quite so religiously kept up, in these degenerate Times 29. The Story of
the Goblins who stole a Sexton 30. How the Pickwickians made and
cultivated the Acquaintance of a Couple of nice young Men belonging to
one of the liberal Professions; how they disported themselves on the
Ice; and how their Visit came to a Conclusion 31. Which is all about the
Law, and sundry Great Authorities learned therein 32. Describes, far
more fully than the Court Newsman ever did, a Bachelor’s Party, given by
Mr. Bob Sawyer at his Lodgings in the Borough 33. Mr. Weller the elder
delivers some Critical Sentiments respecting Literary Composition; and,
assisted by his Son Samuel, pays a small Instalment of Retaliation to
the Account of the Reverend Gentleman with the Red Nose 34. Is wholly
devoted to a full and faithful Report of the memorable Trial of Bardell
against Pickwick 35. In which Mr. Pickwick thinks he had better go to
Bath; and goes accordingly 36. The chief Features of which will be found
to be an authentic Version of the Legend of Prince Bladud, and a most
extraordinary Calamity that befell Mr. Winkle 37. Honourably accounts
for Mr. Weller’s Absence, by describing a Soiree to which he was invited
and went; also relates how he was intrusted by Mr. Pickwick with a
Private Mission of Delicacy and Importance 38. How Mr. Winkle, when he
stepped out of the Frying-pan, walked gently and comfortably into the
Fire 39. Mr. Samuel Weller, being intrusted with a Mission of Love,
proceeds to execute it; with what Success will hereinafter appear 40.
Introduces Mr. Pickwick to a new and not uninteresting Scene in the
great Drama of Life 41. What befell Mr. Pickwick when he got into the
Fleet; what Prisoners he saw there; and how he passed the Night 42.
Illustrative, like the preceding one, of the old Proverb, that Adversity
brings a Man acquainted with strange Bedfellows--Likewise containing Mr.
Pickwick’s extraordinary and startling Announcement to Mr. Samuel Weller
43. Showing how Mr. Samuel Weller got into Difficulties 44. Treats of
divers little Matters which occurred in the Fleet, and of Mr. Winkle’s
mysterious Behaviour; and shows how the poor Chancery Prisoner obtained
his Release at last 45. Descriptive of an affecting Interview between
Mr. Samuel Weller and a Family Party. Mr. Pickwick makes a Tour of the
diminutive World he inhabits, and resolves to mix with it, in Future, as
little as possible 46. Records a touching Act of delicate Feeling not
unmixed with Pleasantry, achieved and performed by Messrs. Dodson and
Fogg 47. Is chiefly devoted to Matters of Business, and the temporal
Advantage of Dodson and Fogg--Mr. Winkle reappears under extraordinary
Circumstances--Mr. Pickwick’s Benevolence proves stronger than his
Obstinacy 48. Relates how Mr. Pickwick, with the Assistance of Samuel
Weller, essayed to soften the Heart of Mr. Benjamin Allen, and to
mollify the Wrath of Mr. Robert Sawyer 49. Containing the Story of the
Bagman’s Uncle 50. How Mr. Pickwick sped upon his Mission, and how he
was reinforced in the Outset by a most unexpected Auxiliary 51. In which
Mr. Pickwick encounters an old Acquaintance--To which fortunate
Circumstance the Reader is mainly indebted for Matter of thrilling
Interest herein set down, concerning two great Public Men of Might and
Power 52. Involving a serious Change in the Weller Family, and the
untimely Downfall of Mr. Stiggins 53. Comprising the final Exit of Mr.
Jingle and Job Trotter, with a great Morning of business in Gray’s Inn
Square--Concluding with a Double Knock at Mr. Perker’s Door 54.
Containing some Particulars relative to the Double Knock, and other
Matters: among which certain interesting Disclosures relative to Mr.
Snodgrass and a Young Lady are by no Means irrelevant to this History
55. Mr. Solomon Pell, assisted by a Select Committee of Coachmen,
arranges the affairs of the elder Mr. Weller 56. An important Conference
takes place between Mr. Pickwick and Samuel Weller, at which his Parent
assists--An old Gentleman in a snuff-coloured Suit arrives unexpectedly
57. In which the Pickwick Club is finally dissolved, and everything
concluded to the Satisfaction of Everybody



THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF THE PICKWICK CLUB



CHAPTER I. THE PICKWICKIANS

The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a
dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the
public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is
derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of
the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest
pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful
attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which
his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been
conducted.

‘May 12, 1827. Joseph Smiggers, Esq., P.V.P.M.P.C. [Perpetual Vice-
President--Member Pickwick Club], presiding. The following resolutions
unanimously agreed to:--

‘That this Association has heard read, with feelings of unmingled
satisfaction, and unqualified approval, the paper communicated by Samuel
Pickwick, Esq., G.C.M.P.C. [General Chairman--Member Pickwick Club],
entitled “Speculations on the Source of the Hampstead Ponds, with some
Observations on the Theory of Tittlebats;” and that this Association
does hereby return its warmest thanks to the said Samuel Pickwick, Esq.,
G.C.M.P.C., for the same.

‘That while this Association is deeply sensible of the advantages which
must accrue to the cause of science, from the production to which they
have just adverted--no less than from the unwearied researches of Samuel
Pickwick, Esq., G.C.M.P.C., in Hornsey, Highgate, Brixton, and
Camberwell--they cannot but entertain a lively sense of the inestimable
benefits which must inevitably result from carrying the speculations of
that learned man into a wider field, from extending his travels, and,
consequently, enlarging his sphere of observation, to the advancement of
knowledge, and the diffusion of learning.

‘That, with the view just mentioned, this Association has taken into its
serious consideration a proposal, emanating from the aforesaid, Samuel
Pickwick, Esq., G.C.M.P.C., and three other Pickwickians hereinafter
named, for forming a new branch of United Pickwickians, under the title
of The Corresponding Society of the Pickwick Club.

‘That the said proposal has received the sanction and approval of this
Association.

‘That the Corresponding Society of the Pickwick Club is therefore hereby
constituted; and that Samuel Pickwick, Esq., G.C.M.P.C., Tracy Tupman,
Esq., M.P.C., Augustus Snodgrass, Esq., M.P.C., and Nathaniel Winkle,
Esq., M.P.C., are hereby nominated and appointed members of the same;
and that they be requested to forward, from time to time, authenticated
accounts of their journeys and investigations, of their observations of
character and manners, and of the whole of their adventures, together
with all tales and papers to which local scenery or associations may
give rise, to the Pickwick Club, stationed in London.

‘That this Association cordially recognises the principle of every
member of the Corresponding Society defraying his own travelling
expenses; and that it sees no objection whatever to the members of the
said society pursuing their inquiries for any length of time they
please, upon the same terms.

‘That the members of the aforesaid Corresponding Society be, and are
hereby informed, that their proposal to pay the postage of their
letters, and the carriage of their parcels, has been deliberated upon by
this Association: that this Association considers such proposal worthy
of the great minds from which it emanated, and that it hereby signifies
its perfect acquiescence therein.’

A casual observer, adds the secretary, to whose notes we are indebted
for the following account--a casual observer might possibly have
remarked nothing extraordinary in the bald head, and circular
spectacles, which were intently turned towards his (the secretary’s)
face, during the reading of the above resolutions: to those who knew
that the gigantic brain of Pickwick was working beneath that forehead,
and that the beaming eyes of Pickwick were twinkling behind those
glasses, the sight was indeed an interesting one. There sat the man who
had traced to their source the mighty ponds of Hampstead, and agitated
the scientific world with his Theory of Tittlebats, as calm and unmoved
as the deep waters of the one on a frosty day, or as a solitary specimen
of the other in the inmost recesses of an earthen jar. And how much more
interesting did the spectacle become, when, starting into full life and
animation, as a simultaneous call for ‘Pickwick’ burst from his
followers, that illustrious man slowly mounted into the Windsor chair,
on which he had been previously seated, and addressed the club himself
had founded. What a study for an artist did that exciting scene present!
The eloquent Pickwick, with one hand gracefully concealed behind his
coat tails, and the other waving in air to assist his glowing
declamation; his elevated position revealing those tights and gaiters,
which, had they clothed an ordinary man, might have passed without
observation, but which, when Pickwick clothed them--if we may use the
expression--inspired involuntary awe and respect; surrounded by the men
who had volunteered to share the perils of his travels, and who were
destined to participate in the glories of his discoveries. On his right
sat Mr. Tracy Tupman--the too susceptible Tupman, who to the wisdom and
experience of maturer years superadded the enthusiasm and ardour of a
boy in the most interesting and pardonable of human weaknesses--love.
Time and feeding had expanded that once romantic form; the black silk
waistcoat had become more and more developed; inch by inch had the gold
watch-chain beneath it disappeared from within the range of Tupman’s
vision; and gradually had the capacious chin encroached upon the borders
of the white cravat: but the soul of Tupman had known no change--
admiration of the fair sex was still its ruling passion. On the left of
his great leader sat the poetic Snodgrass, and near him again the
sporting Winkle; the former poetically enveloped in a mysterious blue
cloak with a canine-skin collar, and the latter communicating additional
lustre to a new green shooting-coat, plaid neckerchief, and closely-
fitted drabs.

Mr. Pickwick’s oration upon this occasion, together with the debate
thereon, is entered on the Transactions of the Club. Both bear a strong
affinity to the discussions of other celebrated bodies; and, as it is
always interesting to trace a resemblance between the proceedings of
great men, we transfer the entry to these pages.


‘Mr. Pickwick observed (says the secretary) that fame was dear to the
heart of every man. Poetic fame was dear to the heart of his friend
Snodgrass; the fame of conquest was equally dear to his friend Tupman;
and the desire of earning fame in the sports of the field, the air, and
the water was uppermost in the breast of his friend Winkle. He (Mr.
Pickwick) would not deny that he was influenced by human passions and
human feelings (cheers)--possibly by human weaknesses (loud cries of
“No”); but this he would say, that if ever the fire of self-importance
broke out in his bosom, the desire to benefit the human race in
preference effectually quenched it. The praise of mankind was his swing;
philanthropy was his insurance office. (Vehement cheering.) He had felt
some pride--he acknowledged it freely, and let his enemies make the most
of it--he had felt some pride when he presented his Tittlebatian Theory
to the world; it might be celebrated or it might not. (A cry of “It is,”
 and great cheering.) He would take the assertion of that honourable
Pickwickian whose voice he had just heard--it was celebrated; but if the
fame of that treatise were to extend to the farthest confines of the
known world, the pride with which he should reflect on the authorship of
that production would be as nothing compared with the pride with which
he looked around him, on this, the proudest moment of his existence.
(Cheers.) He was a humble individual. (“No, no.”) Still he could not but
feel that they had selected him for a service of great honour, and of
some danger. Travelling was in a troubled state, and the minds of
coachmen were unsettled. Let them look abroad and contemplate the scenes
which were enacting around them. Stage-coaches were upsetting in all
directions, horses were bolting, boats were overturning, and boilers
were bursting. (Cheers--a voice “No.”) No! (Cheers.) Let that honourable
Pickwickian who cried “No” so loudly come forward and deny it, if he
could. (Cheers.) Who was it that cried “No”? (Enthusiastic cheering.)
Was it some vain and disappointed man--he would not say haberdasher
(loud cheers)--who, jealous of the praise which had been--perhaps
undeservedly--bestowed on his (Mr. Pickwick’s) researches, and smarting
under the censure which had been heaped upon his own feeble attempts at
rivalry, now took this vile and calumnious mode of--

‘MR. BLOTTON (of Aldgate) rose to order. Did the honourable Pickwickian
allude to him? (Cries of “Order,” “Chair,” “Yes,” “No,” “Go on,” “Leave
off,” etc.)

‘MR. PICKWICK would not put up to be put down by clamour. He had alluded
to the honourable gentleman. (Great excitement.)

‘MR. BLOTTON would only say then, that he repelled the hon. gent.’s
false and scurrilous accusation, with profound contempt. (Great
cheering.) The hon. gent. was a humbug. (Immense confusion, and loud
cries of “Chair,” and “Order.”)

‘Mr. A. SNODGRASS rose to order. He threw himself upon the chair.
(Hear.) He wished to know whether this disgraceful contest between two
members of that club should be allowed to continue. (Hear, hear.)

‘The CHAIRMAN was quite sure the hon. Pickwickian would withdraw the
expression he had just made use of.

‘MR. BLOTTON, with all possible respect for the chair, was quite sure he
would not.

‘The CHAIRMAN felt it his imperative duty to demand of the honourable
gentleman, whether he had used the expression which had just escaped him
in a common sense.

‘MR. BLOTTON had no hesitation in saying that he had not--he had used
the word in its Pickwickian sense. (Hear, hear.) He was bound to
acknowledge that, personally, he entertained the highest regard and
esteem for the honourable gentleman; he had merely considered him a
humbug in a Pickwickian point of view. (Hear, hear.)

‘MR. PICKWICK felt much gratified by the fair, candid, and full
explanation of his honourable friend. He begged it to be at once
understood, that his own observations had been merely intended to bear a
Pickwickian construction. (Cheers.)’

Here the entry terminates, as we have no doubt the debate did also,
after arriving at such a highly satisfactory and intelligible point. We
have no official statement of the facts which the reader will find
recorded in the next chapter, but they have been carefully collated from
letters and other MS. authorities, so unquestionably genuine as to
justify their narration in a connected form.



CHAPTER II. THE FIRST DAY’S JOURNEY, AND THE FIRST EVENING’S ADVENTURES;
WITH THEIR CONSEQUENCES

That punctual servant of all work, the sun, had just risen, and begun to
strike a light on the morning of the thirteenth of May, one thousand
eight hundred and twenty-seven, when Mr. Samuel Pickwick burst like
another sun from his slumbers, threw open his chamber window, and looked
out upon the world beneath. Goswell Street was at his feet, Goswell
Street was on his right hand--as far as the eye could reach, Goswell
Street extended on his left; and the opposite side of Goswell Street was
over the way. ‘Such,’ thought Mr. Pickwick, ‘are the narrow views of
those philosophers who, content with examining the things that lie
before them, look not to the truths which are hidden beyond. As well
might I be content to gaze on Goswell Street for ever, without one
effort to penetrate to the hidden countries which on every side surround
it.’ And having given vent to this beautiful reflection, Mr. Pickwick
proceeded to put himself into his clothes, and his clothes into his
portmanteau. Great men are seldom over scrupulous in the arrangement of
their attire; the operation of shaving, dressing, and coffee-imbibing
was soon performed; and, in another hour, Mr. Pickwick, with his
portmanteau in his hand, his telescope in his greatcoat pocket, and his
note-book in his waistcoat, ready for the reception of any discoveries
worthy of being noted down, had arrived at the coach-stand in St.
Martin’s-le-Grand.

‘Cab!’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Here you are, sir,’ shouted a strange specimen of the human race, in a
sackcloth coat, and apron of the same, who, with a brass label and
number round his neck, looked as if he were catalogued in some
collection of rarities. This was the waterman. ‘Here you are, sir. Now,
then, fust cab!’ And the first cab having been fetched from the public-
house, where he had been smoking his first pipe, Mr. Pickwick and his
portmanteau were thrown into the vehicle.

‘Golden Cross,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Only a bob’s vorth, Tommy,’ cried the driver sulkily, for the
information of his friend the waterman, as the cab drove off.

‘How old is that horse, my friend?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, rubbing his
nose with the shilling he had reserved for the fare.

‘Forty-two,’ replied the driver, eyeing him askant.

‘What!’ ejaculated Mr. Pickwick, laying his hand upon his note-book. The
driver reiterated his former statement. Mr. Pickwick looked very hard at
the man’s face, but his features were immovable, so he noted down the
fact forthwith.

‘And how long do you keep him out at a time?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick,
searching for further information.

‘Two or three veeks,’ replied the man.

‘Weeks!’ said Mr. Pickwick in astonishment, and out came the note-book
again.

‘He lives at Pentonwil when he’s at home,’ observed the driver coolly,
‘but we seldom takes him home, on account of his weakness.’

‘On account of his weakness!’ reiterated the perplexed Mr. Pickwick.

‘He always falls down when he’s took out o’ the cab,’ continued the
driver, ‘but when he’s in it, we bears him up werry tight, and takes him
in werry short, so as he can’t werry well fall down; and we’ve got a
pair o’ precious large wheels on, so ven he does move, they run after
him, and he must go on--he can’t help it.’

Mr. Pickwick entered every word of this statement in his note-book, with
the view of communicating it to the club, as a singular instance of the
tenacity of life in horses under trying circumstances. The entry was
scarcely completed when they reached the Golden Cross. Down jumped the
driver, and out got Mr. Pickwick. Mr. Tupman, Mr. Snodgrass, and Mr.
Winkle, who had been anxiously waiting the arrival of their illustrious
leader, crowded to welcome him.


‘Here’s your fare,’ said Mr. Pickwick, holding out the shilling to the
driver.

What was the learned man’s astonishment, when that unaccountable person
flung the money on the pavement, and requested in figurative terms to be
allowed the pleasure of fighting him (Mr. Pickwick) for the amount!

‘You are mad,’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘Or drunk,’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘Or both,’ said Mr. Tupman.

‘Come on!’ said the cab-driver, sparring away like clockwork. ‘Come on--
all four on you.’

‘Here’s a lark!’ shouted half a dozen hackney coachmen. ‘Go to vork,
Sam!--and they crowded with great glee round the party.

‘What’s the row, Sam?’ inquired one gentleman in black calico sleeves.

‘Row!’ replied the cabman, ‘what did he want my number for?’

‘I didn’t want your number,’ said the astonished Mr. Pickwick.

‘What did you take it for, then?’ inquired the cabman.

‘I didn’t take it,’ said Mr. Pickwick indignantly.

‘Would anybody believe,’ continued the cab-driver, appealing to the
crowd, ‘would anybody believe as an informer’ud go about in a man’s cab,
not only takin’ down his number, but ev’ry word he says into the
bargain’ (a light flashed upon Mr. Pickwick--it was the note-book).

‘Did he though?’ inquired another cabman.

‘Yes, did he,’ replied the first; ‘and then arter aggerawatin’ me to
assault him, gets three witnesses here to prove it. But I’ll give it
him, if I’ve six months for it. Come on!’ and the cabman dashed his hat
upon the ground, with a reckless disregard of his own private property,
and knocked Mr. Pickwick’s spectacles off, and followed up the attack
with a blow on Mr. Pickwick’s nose, and another on Mr. Pickwick’s chest,
and a third in Mr. Snodgrass’s eye, and a fourth, by way of variety, in
Mr. Tupman’s waistcoat, and then danced into the road, and then back
again to the pavement, and finally dashed the whole temporary supply of
breath out of Mr. Winkle’s body; and all in half a dozen seconds.

‘Where’s an officer?’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘Put ‘em under the pump,’ suggested a hot-pieman.

‘You shall smart for this,’ gasped Mr. Pickwick.

‘Informers!’ shouted the crowd.

‘Come on,’ cried the cabman, who had been sparring without cessation the
whole time.

The mob hitherto had been passive spectators of the scene, but as the
intelligence of the Pickwickians being informers was spread among them,
they began to canvass with considerable vivacity the propriety of
enforcing the heated pastry-vendor’s proposition: and there is no saying
what acts of personal aggression they might have committed, had not the
affray been unexpectedly terminated by the interposition of a new-comer.

‘What’s the fun?’ said a rather tall, thin, young man, in a green coat,
emerging suddenly from the coach-yard.

‘Informers!’ shouted the crowd again.

‘We are not,’ roared Mr. Pickwick, in a tone which, to any dispassionate
listener, carried conviction with it.

‘Ain’t you, though--ain’t you?’ said the young man, appealing to Mr.
Pickwick, and making his way through the crowd by the infallible process
of elbowing the countenances of its component members.

That learned man in a few hurried words explained the real state of the
case.

‘Come along, then,’ said he of the green coat, lugging Mr. Pickwick
after him by main force, and talking the whole way. Here, No. 924, take
your fare, and take yourself off--respectable gentleman--know him well--
none of your nonsense--this way, sir--where’s your friends?--all a
mistake, I see--never mind--accidents will happen--best regulated
families--never say die--down upon your luck--Pull him _up_--Put that in
his pipe--like the flavour--damned rascals.’ And with a lengthened
string of similar broken sentences, delivered with extraordinary
volubility, the stranger led the way to the traveller’s waiting-room,
whither he was closely followed by Mr. Pickwick and his disciples.

‘Here, waiter!’ shouted the stranger, ringing the bell with tremendous
violence, ‘glasses round--brandy-and-water, hot and strong, and sweet,
and plenty,--eye damaged, Sir? Waiter! raw beef-steak for the
gentleman’s eye--nothing like raw beef-steak for a bruise, sir; cold
lamp-post very good, but lamp-post inconvenient--damned odd standing in
the open street half an hour, with your eye against a lamp-post--eh,--
very good--ha! ha!’ And the stranger, without stopping to take breath,
swallowed at a draught full half a pint of the reeking brandy-and-water,
and flung himself into a chair with as much ease as if nothing uncommon
had occurred.

While his three companions were busily engaged in proffering their
thanks to their new acquaintance, Mr. Pickwick had leisure to examine
his costume and appearance.

He was about the middle height, but the thinness of his body, and the
length of his legs, gave him the appearance of being much taller. The
green coat had been a smart dress garment in the days of swallow-tails,
but had evidently in those times adorned a much shorter man than the
stranger, for the soiled and faded sleeves scarcely reached to his
wrists. It was buttoned closely up to his chin, at the imminent hazard
of splitting the back; and an old stock, without a vestige of shirt
collar, ornamented his neck. His scanty black trousers displayed here
and there those shiny patches which bespeak long service, and were
strapped very tightly over a pair of patched and mended shoes, as if to
conceal the dirty white stockings, which were nevertheless distinctly
visible. His long, black hair escaped in negligent waves from beneath
each side of his old pinched-up hat; and glimpses of his bare wrists
might be observed between the tops of his gloves and the cuffs of his
coat sleeves. His face was thin and haggard; but an indescribable air of
jaunty impudence and perfect self-possession pervaded the whole man.

Such was the individual on whom Mr. Pickwick gazed through his
spectacles (which he had fortunately recovered), and to whom he
proceeded, when his friends had exhausted themselves, to return in
chosen terms his warmest thanks for his recent assistance.

‘Never mind,’ said the stranger, cutting the address very short, ‘said
enough--no more; smart chap that cabman--handled his fives well; but if
I’d been your friend in the green jemmy--damn me--punch his head,--‘cod
I would,--pig’s whisper--pieman too,--no gammon.’

This coherent speech was interrupted by the entrance of the Rochester
coachman, to announce that ‘the Commodore’ was on the point of starting.

‘Commodore!’ said the stranger, starting up, ‘my coach--place booked,--
one outside--leave you to pay for the brandy-and-water,--want change for
a five,--bad silver--Brummagem buttons--won’t do--no go--eh?’ and he
shook his head most knowingly.

Now it so happened that Mr. Pickwick and his three companions had
resolved to make Rochester their first halting-place too; and having
intimated to their new-found acquaintance that they were journeying to
the same city, they agreed to occupy the seat at the back of the coach,
where they could all sit together.

‘Up with you,’ said the stranger, assisting Mr. Pickwick on to the roof
with so much precipitation as to impair the gravity of that gentleman’s
deportment very materially.

‘Any luggage, Sir?’ inquired the coachman.

‘Who--I? Brown paper parcel here, that’s all--other luggage gone by
water--packing-cases, nailed up--big as houses--heavy, heavy, damned
heavy,’ replied the stranger, as he forced into his pocket as much as he
could of the brown paper parcel, which presented most suspicious
indications of containing one shirt and a handkerchief.

‘Heads, heads--take care of your heads!’ cried the loquacious stranger,
as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the
entrance to the coach-yard. ‘Terrible place--dangerous work--other day--
five children--mother--tall lady, eating sandwiches--forgot the arch--
crash--knock--children look round--mother’s head off--sandwich in her
hand--no mouth to put it in--head of a family off--shocking, shocking!
Looking at Whitehall, sir?--fine place--little window--somebody else’s
head off there, eh, sir?--he didn’t keep a sharp look-out enough either-
-eh, Sir, eh?’

‘I am ruminating,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘on the strange mutability of
human affairs.’

‘Ah! I see--in at the palace door one day, out at the window the next.
Philosopher, Sir?’

‘An observer of human nature, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Ah, so am I. Most people are when they’ve little to do and less to get.
Poet, Sir?’

‘My friend Mr. Snodgrass has a strong poetic turn,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘So have I,’ said the stranger. ‘Epic poem--ten thousand lines--
revolution of July--composed it on the spot--Mars by day, Apollo by
night--bang the field-piece, twang the lyre.’

‘You were present at that glorious scene, sir?’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘Present! think I was;* fired a musket--fired with an idea--rushed into
wine shop--wrote it down--back again--whiz, bang--another idea--wine
shop again--pen and ink--back again--cut and slash--noble time, Sir.
Sportsman, sir?’ abruptly turning to Mr. Winkle.


* A remarkable instance of the prophetic force of Mr. Jingle’s
imagination; this dialogue occurring in the year 1827, and the
Revolution in 1830.

‘A little, Sir,’ replied that gentleman.

‘Fine pursuit, sir--fine pursuit.--Dogs, Sir?’

‘Not just now,’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘Ah! you should keep dogs--fine animals--sagacious creatures--dog of my
own once--pointer--surprising instinct--out shooting one day--entering
inclosure--whistled--dog stopped--whistled again--Ponto--no go; stock
still--called him--Ponto, Ponto--wouldn’t move--dog transfixed--staring
at a board--looked up, saw an inscription--“Gamekeeper has orders to
shoot all dogs found in this inclosure”--wouldn’t pass it--wonderful
dog--valuable dog that--very.’

‘Singular circumstance that,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Will you allow me to
make a note of it?’


‘Certainly, Sir, certainly--hundred more anecdotes of the same animal.--
Fine girl, Sir’ (to Mr. Tracy Tupman, who had been bestowing sundry
anti-Pickwickian glances on a young lady by the roadside).

‘Very!’ said Mr. Tupman.

‘English girls not so fine as Spanish--noble creatures--jet hair--black
eyes--lovely forms--sweet creatures--beautiful.’

‘You have been in Spain, sir?’ said Mr. Tracy Tupman.

‘Lived there--ages.’

‘Many conquests, sir?’ inquired Mr. Tupman.

‘Conquests! Thousands. Don Bolaro Fizzgig--grandee--only daughter--Donna
Christina--splendid creature--loved me to distraction--jealous father--
high-souled daughter--handsome Englishman--Donna Christina in despair--
prussic acid--stomach pump in my portmanteau--operation performed--old
Bolaro in ecstasies--consent to our union--join hands and floods of
tears--romantic story--very.’

‘Is the lady in England now, sir?’ inquired Mr. Tupman, on whom the
description of her charms had produced a powerful impression.

‘Dead, sir--dead,’ said the stranger, applying to his right eye the
brief remnant of a very old cambric handkerchief. ‘Never recovered the
stomach pump--undermined constitution--fell a victim.’

‘And her father?’ inquired the poetic Snodgrass.

‘Remorse and misery,’ replied the stranger. ‘Sudden disappearance--talk
of the whole city--search made everywhere without success--public
fountain in the great square suddenly ceased playing--weeks elapsed--
still a stoppage--workmen employed to clean it--water drawn off--father-
in-law discovered sticking head first in the main pipe, with a full
confession in his right boot--took him out, and the fountain played away
again, as well as ever.’

‘Will you allow me to note that little romance down, Sir?’ said Mr.
Snodgrass, deeply affected.

‘Certainly, Sir, certainly--fifty more if you like to hear ‘em--strange
life mine--rather curious history--not extraordinary, but singular.’

In this strain, with an occasional glass of ale, by way of parenthesis,
when the coach changed horses, did the stranger proceed, until they
reached Rochester bridge, by which time the note-books, both of Mr.
Pickwick and Mr. Snodgrass, were completely filled with selections from
his adventures.

‘Magnificent ruin!’ said Mr. Augustus Snodgrass, with all the poetic
fervour that distinguished him, when they came in sight of the fine old
castle.

‘What a study for an antiquarian!’ were the very words which fell from
Mr. Pickwick’s mouth, as he applied his telescope to his eye.

‘Ah! fine place,’ said the stranger, ‘glorious pile--frowning walls--
tottering arches--dark nooks--crumbling staircases--old cathedral too--
earthy smell--pilgrims’ feet wore away the old steps--little Saxon
doors--confessionals like money-takers’ boxes at theatres--queer
customers those monks--popes, and lord treasurers, and all sorts of old
fellows, with great red faces, and broken noses, turning up every day--
buff jerkins too--match-locks--sarcophagus--fine place--old legends too-
-strange stories: capital;’ and the stranger continued to soliloquise
until they reached the Bull Inn, in the High Street, where the coach
stopped.

‘Do you remain here, Sir?’ inquired Mr. Nathaniel Winkle.

‘Here--not I--but you’d better--good house--nice beds--Wright’s next
house, dear--very dear--half-a-crown in the bill if you look at the
waiter--charge you more if you dine at a friend’s than they would if you
dined in the coffee-room--rum fellows--very.’

Mr. Winkle turned to Mr. Pickwick, and murmured a few words; a whisper
passed from Mr. Pickwick to Mr. Snodgrass, from Mr. Snodgrass to Mr.
Tupman, and nods of assent were exchanged. Mr. Pickwick addressed the
stranger.

‘You rendered us a very important service this morning, sir,’ said he,
‘will you allow us to offer a slight mark of our gratitude by begging
the favour of your company at dinner?’

‘Great pleasure--not presume to dictate, but broiled fowl and mushrooms-
-capital thing! What time?’

‘Let me see,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, referring to his watch, ‘it is now
nearly three. Shall we say five?’

‘Suit me excellently,’ said the stranger, ‘five precisely--till then--
care of yourselves;’ and lifting the pinched-up hat a few inches from
his head, and carelessly replacing it very much on one side, the
stranger, with half the brown paper parcel sticking out of his pocket,
walked briskly up the yard, and turned into the High Street.

‘Evidently a traveller in many countries, and a close observer of men
and things,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘I should like to see his poem,’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘I should like to have seen that dog,’ said Mr. Winkle.

Mr. Tupman said nothing; but he thought of Donna Christina, the stomach
pump, and the fountain; and his eyes filled with tears.

A private sitting-room having been engaged, bedrooms inspected, and
dinner ordered, the party walked out to view the city and adjoining
neighbourhood.

We do not find, from a careful perusal of Mr. Pickwick’s notes of the
four towns, Stroud, Rochester, Chatham, and Brompton, that his
impressions of their appearance differ in any material point from those
of other travellers who have gone over the same ground. His general
description is easily abridged.

‘The principal productions of these towns,’ says Mr. Pickwick, ‘appear
to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyard
men. The commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are
marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters. The streets
present a lively and animated appearance, occasioned chiefly by the
conviviality of the military. It is truly delightful to a philanthropic
mind to see these gallant men staggering along under the influence of an
overflow both of animal and ardent spirits; more especially when we
remember that the following them about, and jesting with them, affords a
cheap and innocent amusement for the boy population. Nothing,’ adds Mr.
Pickwick, ‘can exceed their good-humour. It was but the day before my
arrival that one of them had been most grossly insulted in the house of
a publican. The barmaid had positively refused to draw him any more
liquor; in return for which he had (merely in playfulness) drawn his
bayonet, and wounded the girl in the shoulder. And yet this fine fellow
was the very first to go down to the house next morning and express his
readiness to overlook the matter, and forget what had occurred!

‘The consumption of tobacco in these towns,’ continues Mr. Pickwick,
‘must be very great, and the smell which pervades the streets must be
exceedingly delicious to those who are extremely fond of smoking. A
superficial traveller might object to the dirt, which is their leading
characteristic; but to those who view it as an indication of traffic and
commercial prosperity, it is truly gratifying.’

Punctual to five o’clock came the stranger, and shortly afterwards the
dinner. He had divested himself of his brown paper parcel, but had made
no alteration in his attire, and was, if possible, more loquacious than
ever.

‘What’s that?’ he inquired, as the waiter removed one of the covers.

‘Soles, Sir.’

‘Soles--ah!--capital fish--all come from London-stage-coach proprietors
get up political dinners--carriage of soles--dozens of baskets--cunning
fellows. Glass of wine, Sir.’

‘With pleasure,’ said Mr. Pickwick; and the stranger took wine, first
with him, and then with Mr. Snodgrass, and then with Mr. Tupman, and
then with Mr. Winkle, and then with the whole party together, almost as
rapidly as he talked.

‘Devil of a mess on the staircase, waiter,’ said the stranger. ‘Forms
going up--carpenters coming down--lamps, glasses, harps. What’s going
forward?’

‘Ball, Sir,’ said the waiter.

‘Assembly, eh?’

‘No, Sir, not assembly, Sir. Ball for the benefit of a charity, Sir.’

‘Many fine women in this town, do you know, Sir?’ inquired Mr. Tupman,
with great interest.

‘Splendid--capital. Kent, sir--everybody knows Kent--apples, cherries,
hops, and women. Glass of wine, Sir!’

‘With great pleasure,’ replied Mr. Tupman. The stranger filled, and
emptied.

‘I should very much like to go,’ said Mr. Tupman, resuming the subject
of the ball, ‘very much.’

‘Tickets at the bar, Sir,’ interposed the waiter; ‘half-a-guinea each,
Sir.’

Mr. Tupman again expressed an earnest wish to be present at the
festivity; but meeting with no response in the darkened eye of Mr.
Snodgrass, or the abstracted gaze of Mr. Pickwick, he applied himself
with great interest to the port wine and dessert, which had just been
placed on the table. The waiter withdrew, and the party were left to
enjoy the cosy couple of hours succeeding dinner.

‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ said the stranger, ‘bottle stands--pass it
round--way of the sun--through the button-hole--no heeltaps,’ and he
emptied his glass, which he had filled about two minutes before, and
poured out another, with the air of a man who was used to it.

The wine was passed, and a fresh supply ordered. The visitor talked, the
Pickwickians listened. Mr. Tupman felt every moment more disposed for
the ball. Mr. Pickwick’s countenance glowed with an expression of
universal philanthropy, and Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass fell fast
asleep.

‘They’re beginning upstairs,’ said the stranger--‘hear the company--
fiddles tuning--now the harp--there they go.’ The various sounds which
found their way downstairs announced the commencement of the first
quadrille.

‘How I should like to go,’ said Mr. Tupman again.

‘So should I,’ said the stranger--‘confounded luggage,--heavy smacks--
nothing to go in--odd, ain’t it?’

Now general benevolence was one of the leading features of the
Pickwickian theory, and no one was more remarkable for the zealous
manner in which he observed so noble a principle than Mr. Tracy Tupman.
The number of instances recorded on the Transactions of the Society, in
which that excellent man referred objects of charity to the houses of
other members for left-off garments or pecuniary relief is almost
incredible.

‘I should be very happy to lend you a change of apparel for the
purpose,’ said Mr. Tracy Tupman, ‘but you are rather slim, and I am--’

‘Rather fat--grown-up Bacchus--cut the leaves--dismounted from the tub,
and adopted kersey, eh?--not double distilled, but double milled--ha!
ha! pass the wine.’

Whether Mr. Tupman was somewhat indignant at the peremptory tone in
which he was desired to pass the wine which the stranger passed so
quickly away, or whether he felt very properly scandalised at an
influential member of the Pickwick Club being ignominiously compared to
a dismounted Bacchus, is a fact not yet completely ascertained. He
passed the wine, coughed twice, and looked at the stranger for several
seconds with a stern intensity; as that individual, however, appeared
perfectly collected, and quite calm under his searching glance, he
gradually relaxed, and reverted to the subject of the ball.

‘I was about to observe, Sir,’ he said, ‘that though my apparel would be
too large, a suit of my friend Mr. Winkle’s would, perhaps, fit you
better.’

The stranger took Mr. Winkle’s measure with his eye, and that feature
glistened with satisfaction as he said, ‘Just the thing.’

Mr. Tupman looked round him. The wine, which had exerted its somniferous
influence over Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle, had stolen upon the senses
of Mr. Pickwick. That gentleman had gradually passed through the various
stages which precede the lethargy produced by dinner, and its
consequences. He had undergone the ordinary transitions from the height
of conviviality to the depth of misery, and from the depth of misery to
the height of conviviality. Like a gas-lamp in the street, with the wind
in the pipe, he had exhibited for a moment an unnatural brilliancy, then
sank so low as to be scarcely discernible; after a short interval, he
had burst out again, to enlighten for a moment; then flickered with an
uncertain, staggering sort of light, and then gone out altogether. His
head was sunk upon his bosom, and perpetual snoring, with a partial
choke occasionally, were the only audible indications of the great man’s
presence.

The temptation to be present at the ball, and to form his first
impressions of the beauty of the Kentish ladies, was strong upon Mr.
Tupman. The temptation to take the stranger with him was equally great.
He was wholly unacquainted with the place and its inhabitants, and the
stranger seemed to possess as great a knowledge of both as if he had
lived there from his infancy. Mr. Winkle was asleep, and Mr. Tupman had
had sufficient experience in such matters to know that the moment he
awoke he would, in the ordinary course of nature, roll heavily to bed.
He was undecided. ‘Fill your glass, and pass the wine,’ said the
indefatigable visitor.

Mr. Tupman did as he was requested; and the additional stimulus of the
last glass settled his determination.

‘Winkle’s bedroom is inside mine,’ said Mr. Tupman; ‘I couldn’t make him
understand what I wanted, if I woke him now, but I know he has a dress-
suit in a carpet bag; and supposing you wore it to the ball, and took it
off when we returned, I could replace it without troubling him at all
about the matter.’

‘Capital,’ said the stranger, ‘famous plan--damned odd situation--
fourteen coats in the packing-cases, and obliged to wear another man’s--
very good notion, that--very.’

‘We must purchase our tickets,’ said Mr. Tupman.

‘Not worth while splitting a guinea,’ said the stranger, ‘toss who shall
pay for both--I call; you spin--first time--woman--woman--bewitching
woman,’ and down came the sovereign with the dragon (called by courtesy
a woman) uppermost.

Mr. Tupman rang the bell, purchased the tickets, and ordered chamber
candlesticks. In another quarter of an hour the stranger was completely
arrayed in a full suit of Mr. Nathaniel Winkle’s.

‘It’s a new coat,’ said Mr. Tupman, as the stranger surveyed himself
with great complacency in a cheval glass; ‘the first that’s been made
with our club button,’ and he called his companions’ attention to the
large gilt button which displayed a bust of Mr. Pickwick in the centre,
and the letters ‘P. C.’ on either side.

‘“P. C.”’ said the stranger--‘queer set out--old fellow’s likeness, and
“P. C.”--What does “P. C.” stand for--Peculiar Coat, eh?’ Mr. Tupman,
with rising indignation and great importance, explained the mystic
device.

‘Rather short in the waist, ain’t it?’ said the stranger, screwing
himself round to catch a glimpse in the glass of the waist buttons,
which were half-way up his back. ‘Like a general postman’s coat--queer
coats those--made by contract--no measuring--mysterious dispensations of
Providence--all the short men get long coats--all the long men short
ones.’ Running on in this way, Mr. Tupman’s new companion adjusted his
dress, or rather the dress of Mr. Winkle; and, accompanied by Mr.
Tupman, ascended the staircase leading to the ballroom.

‘What names, sir?’ said the man at the door. Mr. Tracy Tupman was
stepping forward to announce his own titles, when the stranger prevented
him.

‘No names at all;’ and then he whispered Mr. Tupman, ‘names won’t do--
not known--very good names in their way, but not great ones--capital
names for a small party, but won’t make an impression in public
assemblies--incog. the thing--gentlemen from London--distinguished
foreigners--anything.’ The door was thrown open, and Mr. Tracy Tupman
and the stranger entered the ballroom.

It was a long room, with crimson-covered benches, and wax candles in
glass chandeliers. The musicians were securely confined in an elevated
den, and quadrilles were being systematically got through by two or
three sets of dancers. Two card-tables were made up in the adjoining
card-room, and two pair of old ladies, and a corresponding number of
stout gentlemen, were executing whist therein.

The finale concluded, the dancers promenaded the room, and Mr. Tupman
and his companion stationed themselves in a corner to observe the
company.

‘Charming women,’ said Mr. Tupman.

‘Wait a minute,’ said the stranger, ‘fun presently--nobs not come yet--
queer place--dockyard people of upper rank don’t know dockyard people of
lower rank--dockyard people of lower rank don’t know small gentry--small
gentry don’t know tradespeople--commissioner don’t know anybody.’

‘Who’s that little boy with the light hair and pink eyes, in a fancy
dress?’ inquired Mr. Tupman.

‘Hush, pray--pink eyes--fancy dress--little boy--nonsense--ensign 97th--
Honourable Wilmot Snipe--great family--Snipes--very.’

‘Sir Thomas Clubber, Lady Clubber, and the Misses Clubber!’ shouted the
man at the door in a stentorian voice. A great sensation was created
throughout the room by the entrance of a tall gentleman in a blue coat
and bright buttons, a large lady in blue satin, and two young ladies, on
a similar scale, in fashionably-made dresses of the same hue.

‘Commissioner--head of the yard--great man--remarkably great man,’
whispered the stranger in Mr. Tupman’s ear, as the charitable committee
ushered Sir Thomas Clubber and family to the top of the room. The
Honourable Wilmot Snipe, and other distinguished gentlemen crowded to
render homage to the Misses Clubber; and Sir Thomas Clubber stood bolt
upright, and looked majestically over his black kerchief at the
assembled company.

‘Mr. Smithie, Mrs. Smithie, and the Misses Smithie,’ was the next
announcement.

‘What’s Mr. Smithie?’ inquired Mr. Tracy Tupman.

‘Something in the yard,’ replied the stranger. Mr. Smithie bowed
deferentially to Sir Thomas Clubber; and Sir Thomas Clubber acknowledged
the salute with conscious condescension. Lady Clubber took a telescopic
view of Mrs. Smithie and family through her eye-glass and Mrs. Smithie
stared in her turn at Mrs. Somebody-else, whose husband was not in the
dockyard at all.

‘Colonel Bulder, Mrs. Colonel Bulder, and Miss Bulder,’ were the next
arrivals.

‘Head of the garrison,’ said the stranger, in reply to Mr. Tupman’s
inquiring look.

Miss Bulder was warmly welcomed by the Misses Clubber; the greeting
between Mrs. Colonel Bulder and Lady Clubber was of the most
affectionate description; Colonel Bulder and Sir Thomas Clubber
exchanged snuff-boxes, and looked very much like a pair of Alexander
Selkirks--‘Monarchs of all they surveyed.’

While the aristocracy of the place--the Bulders, and Clubbers, and
Snipes--were thus preserving their dignity at the upper end of the room,
the other classes of society were imitating their example in other parts
of it. The less aristocratic officers of the 97th devoted themselves to
the families of the less important functionaries from the dockyard. The
solicitors’ wives, and the wine-merchant’s wife, headed another grade
(the brewer’s wife visited the Bulders); and Mrs. Tomlinson, the post-
office keeper, seemed by mutual consent to have been chosen the leader
of the trade party.

One of the most popular personages, in his own circle, present, was a
little fat man, with a ring of upright black hair round his head, and an
extensive bald plain on the top of it--Doctor Slammer, surgeon to the
97th. The doctor took snuff with everybody, chatted with everybody,
laughed, danced, made jokes, played whist, did everything, and was
everywhere. To these pursuits, multifarious as they were, the little
doctor added a more important one than any--he was indefatigable in
paying the most unremitting and devoted attention to a little old widow,
whose rich dress and profusion of ornament bespoke her a most desirable
addition to a limited income.

Upon the doctor, and the widow, the eyes of both Mr. Tupman and his
companion had been fixed for some time, when the stranger broke silence.

‘Lots of money--old girl--pompous doctor--not a bad idea--good fun,’
were the intelligible sentences which issued from his lips. Mr. Tupman
looked inquisitively in his face.

‘I’ll dance with the widow,’ said the stranger.

‘Who is she?’ inquired Mr. Tupman.

‘Don’t know--never saw her in all my life--cut out the doctor--here
goes.’ And the stranger forthwith crossed the room; and, leaning against
a mantel-piece, commenced gazing with an air of respectful and
melancholy admiration on the fat countenance of the little old lady. Mr.
Tupman looked on, in mute astonishment. The stranger progressed rapidly;
the little doctor danced with another lady; the widow dropped her fan;
the stranger picked it up, and presented it--a smile--a bow--a curtsey--
a few words of conversation. The stranger walked boldly up to, and
returned with, the master of the ceremonies; a little introductory
pantomime; and the stranger and Mrs. Budger took their places in a
quadrille.

The surprise of Mr. Tupman at this summary proceeding, great as it was,
was immeasurably exceeded by the astonishment of the doctor. The
stranger was young, and the widow was flattered. The doctor’s attentions
were unheeded by the widow; and the doctor’s indignation was wholly lost
on his imperturbable rival. Doctor Slammer was paralysed. He, Doctor
Slammer, of the 97th, to be extinguished in a moment, by a man whom
nobody had ever seen before, and whom nobody knew even now! Doctor
Slammer--Doctor Slammer of the 97th rejected! Impossible! It could not
be! Yes, it was; there they were. What! introducing his friend! Could he
believe his eyes! He looked again, and was under the painful necessity
of admitting the veracity of his optics; Mrs. Budger was dancing with
Mr. Tracy Tupman; there was no mistaking the fact. There was the widow
before him, bouncing bodily here and there, with unwonted vigour; and
Mr. Tracy Tupman hopping about, with a face expressive of the most
intense solemnity, dancing (as a good many people do) as if a quadrille
were not a thing to be laughed at, but a severe trial to the feelings,
which it requires inflexible resolution to encounter.


Silently and patiently did the doctor bear all this, and all the
handings of negus, and watching for glasses, and darting for biscuits,
and coquetting, that ensued; but, a few seconds after the stranger had
disappeared to lead Mrs. Budger to her carriage, he darted swiftly from
the room with every particle of his hitherto-bottled-up indignation
effervescing, from all parts of his countenance, in a perspiration of
passion.

The stranger was returning, and Mr. Tupman was beside him. He spoke in a
low tone, and laughed. The little doctor thirsted for his life. He was
exulting. He had triumphed.

‘Sir!’ said the doctor, in an awful voice, producing a card, and
retiring into an angle of the passage, ‘my name is Slammer, Doctor
Slammer, sir--97th Regiment--Chatham Barracks--my card, Sir, my card.’
He would have added more, but his indignation choked him.

‘Ah!’ replied the stranger coolly, ‘Slammer--much obliged--polite
attention--not ill now, Slammer--but when I am--knock you up.’

‘You--you’re a shuffler, sir,’ gasped the furious doctor, ‘a poltroon--a
coward--a liar--a--a--will nothing induce you to give me your card,
sir!’

‘Oh! I see,’ said the stranger, half aside, ‘negus too strong here--
liberal landlord--very foolish--very--lemonade much better--hot rooms--
elderly gentlemen--suffer for it in the morning--cruel--cruel;’ and he
moved on a step or two.

‘You are stopping in this house, Sir,’ said the indignant little man;
‘you are intoxicated now, Sir; you shall hear from me in the morning,
sir. I shall find you out, sir; I shall find you out.’

‘Rather you found me out than found me at home,’ replied the unmoved
stranger.

Doctor Slammer looked unutterable ferocity, as he fixed his hat on his
head with an indignant knock; and the stranger and Mr. Tupman ascended
to the bedroom of the latter to restore the borrowed plumage to the
unconscious Winkle.

That gentleman was fast asleep; the restoration was soon made. The
stranger was extremely jocose; and Mr. Tracy Tupman, being quite
bewildered with wine, negus, lights, and ladies, thought the whole
affair was an exquisite joke. His new friend departed; and, after
experiencing some slight difficulty in finding the orifice in his
nightcap, originally intended for the reception of his head, and finally
overturning his candlestick in his struggles to put it on, Mr. Tracy
Tupman managed to get into bed by a series of complicated evolutions,
and shortly afterwards sank into repose.

Seven o’clock had hardly ceased striking on the following morning, when
Mr. Pickwick’s comprehensive mind was aroused from the state of
unconsciousness, in which slumber had plunged it, by a loud knocking at
his chamber door.

‘Who’s there?’ said Mr. Pickwick, starting up in bed.

‘Boots, sir.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Please, sir, can you tell me which gentleman of your party wears a
bright blue dress-coat, with a gilt button with “P. C.” on it?’

‘It’s been given out to brush,’ thought Mr. Pickwick, ‘and the man has
forgotten whom it belongs to.’

Mr. Winkle,’ he called out, ‘next room but two, on the right hand.’

‘Thank’ee, sir,’ said the Boots, and away he went.

‘What’s the matter?’ cried Mr. Tupman, as a loud knocking at his door
roused him from his oblivious repose.

‘Can I speak to Mr. Winkle, sir?’ replied Boots from the outside.

‘Winkle--Winkle!’ shouted Mr. Tupman, calling into the inner room.

‘Hollo!’ replied a faint voice from within the bed-clothes.

‘You’re wanted--some one at the door;’ and, having exerted himself to
articulate thus much, Mr. Tracy Tupman turned round and fell fast asleep
again.

‘Wanted!’ said Mr. Winkle, hastily jumping out of bed, and putting on a
few articles of clothing; ‘wanted! at this distance from town--who on
earth can want me?’

‘Gentleman in the coffee-room, sir,’ replied the Boots, as Mr. Winkle
opened the door and confronted him; ‘gentleman says he’ll not detain you
a moment, Sir, but he can take no denial.’

‘Very odd!’ said Mr. Winkle; ‘I’ll be down directly.’

He hurriedly wrapped himself in a travelling-shawl and dressing-gown,
and proceeded downstairs. An old woman and a couple of waiters were
cleaning the coffee-room, and an officer in undress uniform was looking
out of the window. He turned round as Mr. Winkle entered, and made a
stiff inclination of the head. Having ordered the attendants to retire,
and closed the door very carefully, he said, ‘Mr. Winkle, I presume?’

‘My name is Winkle, sir.’

‘You will not be surprised, sir, when I inform you that I have called
here this morning on behalf of my friend, Doctor Slammer, of the 97th.’

‘Doctor Slammer!’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘Doctor Slammer. He begged me to express his opinion that your conduct
of last evening was of a description which no gentleman could endure;
and’ (he added) ‘which no one gentleman would pursue towards another.’

Mr. Winkle’s astonishment was too real, and too evident, to escape the
observation of Doctor Slammer’s friend; he therefore proceeded--

‘My friend, Doctor Slammer, requested me to add, that he was firmly
persuaded you were intoxicated during a portion of the evening, and
possibly unconscious of the extent of the insult you were guilty of. He
commissioned me to say, that should this be pleaded as an excuse for
your behaviour, he will consent to accept a written apology, to be
penned by you, from my dictation.’

‘A written apology!’ repeated Mr. Winkle, in the most emphatic tone of
amazement possible.

‘Of course you know the alternative,’ replied the visitor coolly.

‘Were you intrusted with this message to me by name?’ inquired Mr.
Winkle, whose intellects were hopelessly confused by this extraordinary
conversation.

‘I was not present myself,’ replied the visitor, ‘and in consequence of
your firm refusal to give your card to Doctor Slammer, I was desired by
that gentleman to identify the wearer of a very uncommon coat--a bright
blue dress-coat, with a gilt button displaying a bust, and the letters
“P. C.”’

Mr. Winkle actually staggered with astonishment as he heard his own
costume thus minutely described. Doctor Slammer’s friend proceeded:--
‘From the inquiries I made at the bar, just now, I was convinced that
the owner of the coat in question arrived here, with three gentlemen,
yesterday afternoon. I immediately sent up to the gentleman who was
described as appearing the head of the party, and he at once referred me
to you.’

If the principal tower of Rochester Castle had suddenly walked from its
foundation, and stationed itself opposite the coffee-room window, Mr.
Winkle’s surprise would have been as nothing compared with the profound
astonishment with which he had heard this address. His first impression
was that his coat had been stolen. ‘Will you allow me to detain you one
moment?’ said he.

‘Certainly,’ replied the unwelcome visitor.

Mr. Winkle ran hastily upstairs, and with a trembling hand opened the
bag. There was the coat in its usual place, but exhibiting, on a close
inspection, evident tokens of having been worn on the preceding night.

‘It must be so,’ said Mr. Winkle, letting the coat fall from his hands.
‘I took too much wine after dinner, and have a very vague recollection
of walking about the streets, and smoking a cigar afterwards. The fact
is, I was very drunk;--I must have changed my coat--gone somewhere--and
insulted somebody--I have no doubt of it; and this message is the
terrible consequence.’ Saying which, Mr. Winkle retraced his steps in
the direction of the coffee-room, with the gloomy and dreadful resolve
of accepting the challenge of the warlike Doctor Slammer, and abiding by
the worst consequences that might ensue.

To this determination Mr. Winkle was urged by a variety of
considerations, the first of which was his reputation with the club. He
had always been looked up to as a high authority on all matters of
amusement and dexterity, whether offensive, defensive, or inoffensive;
and if, on this very first occasion of being put to the test, he shrunk
back from the trial, beneath his leader’s eye, his name and standing
were lost for ever. Besides, he remembered to have heard it frequently
surmised by the uninitiated in such matters that by an understood
arrangement between the seconds, the pistols were seldom loaded with
ball; and, furthermore, he reflected that if he applied to Mr. Snodgrass
to act as his second, and depicted the danger in glowing terms, that
gentleman might possibly communicate the intelligence to Mr. Pickwick,
who would certainly lose no time in transmitting it to the local
authorities, and thus prevent the killing or maiming of his follower.

Such were his thoughts when he returned to the coffee-room, and
intimated his intention of accepting the doctor’s challenge.

‘Will you refer me to a friend, to arrange the time and place of
meeting?’ said the officer.

‘Quite unnecessary,’ replied Mr. Winkle; ‘name them to me, and I can
procure the attendance of a friend afterwards.’

‘Shall we say--sunset this evening?’ inquired the officer, in a careless
tone.

‘Very good,’ replied Mr. Winkle, thinking in his heart it was very bad.

‘You know Fort Pitt?’

‘Yes; I saw it yesterday.’

‘If you will take the trouble to turn into the field which borders the
trench, take the foot-path to the left when you arrive at an angle of
the fortification, and keep straight on, till you see me, I will precede
you to a secluded place, where the affair can be conducted without fear
of interruption.’

‘Fear of interruption!’ thought Mr. Winkle.

‘Nothing more to arrange, I think,’ said the officer.

‘I am not aware of anything more,’ replied Mr. Winkle. ‘Good-morning.’

‘Good-morning;’ and the officer whistled a lively air as he strode away.

That morning’s breakfast passed heavily off. Mr. Tupman was not in a
condition to rise, after the unwonted dissipation of the previous night;
Mr. Snodgrass appeared to labour under a poetical depression of spirits;
and even Mr. Pickwick evinced an unusual attachment to silence and soda-
water. Mr. Winkle eagerly watched his opportunity: it was not long
wanting. Mr. Snodgrass proposed a visit to the castle, and as Mr. Winkle
was the only other member of the party disposed to walk, they went out
together.

‘Snodgrass,’ said Mr. Winkle, when they had turned out of the public
street.’Snodgrass, my dear fellow, can I rely upon your secrecy?’ As he
said this, he most devoutly and earnestly hoped he could not.

‘You can,’ replied Mr. Snodgrass. ‘Hear me swear--’

‘No, no,’ interrupted Winkle, terrified at the idea of his companion’s
unconsciously pledging himself not to give information; ‘don’t swear,
don’t swear; it’s quite unnecessary.’

Mr. Snodgrass dropped the hand which he had, in the spirit of poesy,
raised towards the clouds as he made the above appeal, and assumed an
attitude of attention.

‘I want your assistance, my dear fellow, in an affair of honour,’ said
Mr. Winkle.

‘You shall have it,’ replied Mr. Snodgrass, clasping his friend’s hand.

‘With a doctor--Doctor Slammer, of the 97th,’ said Mr. Winkle, wishing
to make the matter appear as solemn as possible; ‘an affair with an
officer, seconded by another officer, at sunset this evening, in a
lonely field beyond Fort Pitt.’

‘I will attend you,’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

He was astonished, but by no means dismayed. It is extraordinary how
cool any party but the principal can be in such cases. Mr. Winkle had
forgotten this. He had judged of his friend’s feelings by his own.

‘The consequences may be dreadful,’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘I hope not,’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘The doctor, I believe, is a very good shot,’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘Most of these military men are,’ observed Mr. Snodgrass calmly; ‘but so
are you, ain’t you?’

Mr. Winkle replied in the affirmative; and perceiving that he had not
alarmed his companion sufficiently, changed his ground.

‘Snodgrass,’ he said, in a voice tremulous with emotion, ‘if I fall, you
will find in a packet which I shall place in your hands a note for my--
for my father.’

This attack was a failure also. Mr. Snodgrass was affected, but he
undertook the delivery of the note as readily as if he had been a
twopenny postman.

‘If I fall,’ said Mr. Winkle, ‘or if the doctor falls, you, my dear
friend, will be tried as an accessory before the fact. Shall I involve
my friend in transportation--possibly for life!’

Mr. Snodgrass winced a little at this, but his heroism was invincible.
‘In the cause of friendship,’ he fervently exclaimed, ‘I would brave all
dangers.’

How Mr. Winkle cursed his companion’s devoted friendship internally, as
they walked silently along, side by side, for some minutes, each
immersed in his own meditations! The morning was wearing away; he grew
desperate.

‘Snodgrass,’ he said, stopping suddenly, ‘do not let me be balked in
this matter--do not give information to the local authorities--do not
obtain the assistance of several peace officers, to take either me or
Doctor Slammer, of the 97th Regiment, at present quartered in Chatham
Barracks, into custody, and thus prevent this duel!--I say, do not.’

Mr. Snodgrass seized his friend’s hand warmly, as he enthusiastically
replied, ‘Not for worlds!’

A thrill passed over Mr. Winkle’s frame as the conviction that he had
nothing to hope from his friend’s fears, and that he was destined to
become an animated target, rushed forcibly upon him.

The state of the case having been formally explained to Mr. Snodgrass,
and a case of satisfactory pistols, with the satisfactory accompaniments
of powder, ball, and caps, having been hired from a manufacturer in
Rochester, the two friends returned to their inn; Mr. Winkle to ruminate
on the approaching struggle, and Mr. Snodgrass to arrange the weapons of
war, and put them into proper order for immediate use.

It was a dull and heavy evening when they again sallied forth on their
awkward errand. Mr. Winkle was muffled up in a huge cloak to escape
observation, and Mr. Snodgrass bore under his the instruments of
destruction.

‘Have you got everything?’ said Mr. Winkle, in an agitated tone.

‘Everything,’ replied Mr. Snodgrass; ‘plenty of ammunition, in case the
shots don’t take effect. There’s a quarter of a pound of powder in the
case, and I have got two newspapers in my pocket for the loadings.’

These were instances of friendship for which any man might reasonably
feel most grateful. The presumption is, that the gratitude of Mr. Winkle
was too powerful for utterance, as he said nothing, but continued to
walk on--rather slowly.

‘We are in excellent time,’ said Mr. Snodgrass, as they climbed the
fence of the first field; ‘the sun is just going down.’ Mr. Winkle
looked up at the declining orb and painfully thought of the probability
of his ‘going down’ himself, before long.

‘There’s the officer,’ exclaimed Mr. Winkle, after a few minutes
walking.

‘Where?’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘There--the gentleman in the blue cloak.’ Mr. Snodgrass looked in the
direction indicated by the forefinger of his friend, and observed a
figure, muffled up, as he had described. The officer evinced his
consciousness of their presence by slightly beckoning with his hand; and
the two friends followed him at a little distance, as he walked away.

The evening grew more dull every moment, and a melancholy wind sounded
through the deserted fields, like a distant giant whistling for his
house-dog. The sadness of the scene imparted a sombre tinge to the
feelings of Mr. Winkle. He started as they passed the angle of the
trench--it looked like a colossal grave.

The officer turned suddenly from the path, and after climbing a paling,
and scaling a hedge, entered a secluded field. Two gentlemen were
waiting in it; one was a little, fat man, with black hair; and the
other--a portly personage in a braided surtout--was sitting with perfect
equanimity on a camp-stool.

‘The other party, and a surgeon, I suppose,’ said Mr. Snodgrass; ‘take a
drop of brandy.’ Mr. Winkle seized the wicker bottle which his friend
proffered, and took a lengthened pull at the exhilarating liquid.

‘My friend, Sir, Mr. Snodgrass,’ said Mr. Winkle, as the officer
approached. Doctor Slammer’s friend bowed, and produced a case similar
to that which Mr. Snodgrass carried.

‘We have nothing further to say, Sir, I think,’ he coldly remarked, as
he opened the case; ‘an apology has been resolutely declined.’

‘Nothing, Sir,’ said Mr. Snodgrass, who began to feel rather
uncomfortable himself.

‘Will you step forward?’ said the officer.

‘Certainly,’ replied Mr. Snodgrass. The ground was measured, and
preliminaries arranged.

‘You will find these better than your own,’ said the opposite second,
producing his pistols. ‘You saw me load them. Do you object to use
them?’

‘Certainly not,’ replied Mr. Snodgrass. The offer relieved him from
considerable embarrassment, for his previous notions of loading a pistol
were rather vague and undefined.

‘We may place our men, then, I think,’ observed the officer, with as
much indifference as if the principals were chess-men, and the seconds
players.

‘I think we may,’ replied Mr. Snodgrass; who would have assented to any
proposition, because he knew nothing about the matter. The officer
crossed to Doctor Slammer, and Mr. Snodgrass went up to Mr. Winkle.

‘It’s all ready,’ said he, offering the pistol. ‘Give me your cloak.’

‘You have got the packet, my dear fellow,’ said poor Winkle.

‘All right,’ said Mr. Snodgrass. ‘Be steady, and wing him.’

It occurred to Mr. Winkle that this advice was very like that which
bystanders invariably give to the smallest boy in a street fight,
namely, ‘Go in, and win’--an admirable thing to recommend, if you only
know how to do it. He took off his cloak, however, in silence--it always
took a long time to undo that cloak--and accepted the pistol. The
seconds retired, the gentleman on the camp-stool did the same, and the
belligerents approached each other.

Mr. Winkle was always remarkable for extreme humanity. It is conjectured
that his unwillingness to hurt a fellow-creature intentionally was the
cause of his shutting his eyes when he arrived at the fatal spot; and
that the circumstance of his eyes being closed, prevented his observing
the very extraordinary and unaccountable demeanour of Doctor Slammer.
That gentleman started, stared, retreated, rubbed his eyes, stared
again, and, finally, shouted, ‘Stop, stop!’

‘What’s all this?’ said Doctor Slammer, as his friend and Mr. Snodgrass
came running up; ‘that’s not the man.’

‘Not the man!’ said Doctor Slammer’s second.

‘Not the man!’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘Not the man!’ said the gentleman with the camp-stool in his hand.

‘Certainly not,’ replied the little doctor. ‘That’s not the person who
insulted me last night.’

‘Very extraordinary!’ exclaimed the officer.

‘Very,’ said the gentleman with the camp-stool. ‘The only question is,
whether the gentleman, being on the ground, must not be considered, as a
matter of form, to be the individual who insulted our friend, Doctor
Slammer, yesterday evening, whether he is really that individual or
not;’ and having delivered this suggestion, with a very sage and
mysterious air, the man with the camp-stool took a large pinch of snuff,
and looked profoundly round, with the air of an authority in such
matters.

Now Mr. Winkle had opened his eyes, and his ears too, when he heard his
adversary call out for a cessation of hostilities; and perceiving by
what he had afterwards said that there was, beyond all question, some
mistake in the matter, he at once foresaw the increase of reputation he
should inevitably acquire by concealing the real motive of his coming
out; he therefore stepped boldly forward, and said--

‘I am not the person. I know it.’

‘Then, that,’ said the man with the camp-stool, ‘is an affront to Doctor
Slammer, and a sufficient reason for proceeding immediately.’

‘Pray be quiet, Payne,’ said the doctor’s second. ‘Why did you not
communicate this fact to me this morning, Sir?’

‘To be sure--to be sure,’ said the man with the camp-stool indignantly.

‘I entreat you to be quiet, Payne,’ said the other. ‘May I repeat my
question, Sir?’

‘Because, Sir,’ replied Mr. Winkle, who had had time to deliberate upon
his answer, ‘because, Sir, you described an intoxicated and
ungentlemanly person as wearing a coat which I have the honour, not only
to wear but to have invented--the proposed uniform, Sir, of the Pickwick
Club in London. The honour of that uniform I feel bound to maintain, and
I therefore, without inquiry, accepted the challenge which you offered
me.’

‘My dear Sir,’ said the good-humoured little doctor advancing with
extended hand, ‘I honour your gallantry. Permit me to say, Sir, that I
highly admire your conduct, and extremely regret having caused you the
inconvenience of this meeting, to no purpose.’

‘I beg you won’t mention it, Sir,’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘I shall feel proud of your acquaintance, Sir,’ said the little doctor.

‘It will afford me the greatest pleasure to know you, sir,’ replied Mr.
Winkle. Thereupon the doctor and Mr. Winkle shook hands, and then Mr.
Winkle and Lieutenant Tappleton (the doctor’s second), and then Mr.
Winkle and the man with the camp-stool, and, finally, Mr. Winkle and Mr.
Snodgrass--the last-named gentleman in an excess of admiration at the
noble conduct of his heroic friend.

‘I think we may adjourn,’ said Lieutenant Tappleton.

‘Certainly,’ added the doctor.

‘Unless,’ interposed the man with the camp-stool, ‘unless Mr. Winkle
feels himself aggrieved by the challenge; in which case, I submit, he
has a right to satisfaction.’

Mr. Winkle, with great self-denial, expressed himself quite satisfied
already.

‘Or possibly,’ said the man with the camp-stool, ‘the gentleman’s second
may feel himself affronted with some observations which fell from me at
an early period of this meeting; if so, I shall be happy to give him
satisfaction immediately.’

Mr. Snodgrass hastily professed himself very much obliged with the
handsome offer of the gentleman who had spoken last, which he was only
induced to decline by his entire contentment with the whole proceedings.
The two seconds adjusted the cases, and the whole party left the ground
in a much more lively manner than they had proceeded to it.

‘Do you remain long here?’ inquired Doctor Slammer of Mr. Winkle, as
they walked on most amicably together.

‘I think we shall leave here the day after to-morrow,’ was the reply.

‘I trust I shall have the pleasure of seeing you and your friend at my
rooms, and of spending a pleasant evening with you, after this awkward
mistake,’ said the little doctor; ‘are you disengaged this evening?’

‘We have some friends here,’ replied Mr. Winkle, ‘and I should not like
to leave them to-night. Perhaps you and your friend will join us at the
Bull.’

‘With great pleasure,’ said the little doctor; ‘will ten o’clock be too
late to look in for half an hour?’

‘Oh dear, no,’ said Mr. Winkle. ‘I shall be most happy to introduce you
to my friends, Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Tupman.’

‘It will give me great pleasure, I am sure,’ replied Doctor Slammer,
little suspecting who Mr. Tupman was.

‘You will be sure to come?’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘Oh, certainly.’

By this time they had reached the road. Cordial farewells were
exchanged, and the party separated. Doctor Slammer and his friends
repaired to the barracks, and Mr. Winkle, accompanied by Mr. Snodgrass,
returned to their inn.



CHAPTER III. A NEW ACQUAINTANCE--THE STROLLER’S TALE--A DISAGREEABLE
INTERRUPTION, AND AN UNPLEASANT ENCOUNTER

Mr. Pickwick had felt some apprehensions in consequence of the unusual
absence of his two friends, which their mysterious behaviour during the
whole morning had by no means tended to diminish. It was, therefore,
with more than ordinary pleasure that he rose to greet them when they
again entered; and with more than ordinary interest that he inquired
what had occurred to detain them from his society. In reply to his
questions on this point, Mr. Snodgrass was about to offer an historical
account of the circumstances just now detailed, when he was suddenly
checked by observing that there were present, not only Mr. Tupman and
their stage-coach companion of the preceding day, but another stranger
of equally singular appearance. It was a careworn-looking man, whose
sallow face, and deeply-sunken eyes, were rendered still more striking
than Nature had made them, by the straight black hair which hung in
matted disorder half-way down his face. His eyes were almost unnaturally
bright and piercing; his cheek-bones were high and prominent; and his
jaws were so long and lank, that an observer would have supposed that he
was drawing the flesh of his face in, for a moment, by some contraction
of the muscles, if his half-opened mouth and immovable expression had
not announced that it was his ordinary appearance. Round his neck he
wore a green shawl, with the large ends straggling over his chest, and
making their appearance occasionally beneath the worn button-holes of
his old waistcoat. His upper garment was a long black surtout; and below
it he wore wide drab trousers, and large boots, running rapidly to seed.

It was on this uncouth-looking person that Mr. Winkle’s eye rested, and
it was towards him that Mr. Pickwick extended his hand when he said, ‘A
friend of our friend’s here. We discovered this morning that our friend
was connected with the theatre in this place, though he is not desirous
to have it generally known, and this gentleman is a member of the same
profession. He was about to favour us with a little anecdote connected
with it, when you entered.’

‘Lots of anecdote,’ said the green-coated stranger of the day before,
advancing to Mr. Winkle and speaking in a low and confidential tone.
‘Rum fellow--does the heavy business--no actor--strange man--all sorts
of miseries--Dismal Jemmy, we call him on the circuit.’ Mr. Winkle and
Mr. Snodgrass politely welcomed the gentleman, elegantly designated as
‘Dismal Jemmy’; and calling for brandy-and-water, in imitation of the
remainder of the company, seated themselves at the table.

‘Now sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘will you oblige us by proceeding with
what you were going to relate?’

The dismal individual took a dirty roll of paper from his pocket, and
turning to Mr. Snodgrass, who had just taken out his note-book, said in
a hollow voice, perfectly in keeping with his outward man--‘Are you the
poet?’

‘I--I do a little in that way,’ replied Mr. Snodgrass, rather taken
aback by the abruptness of the question.

‘Ah! poetry makes life what light and music do the stage--strip the one
of the false embellishments, and the other of its illusions, and what is
there real in either to live or care for?’

‘Very true, Sir,’ replied Mr. Snodgrass.

‘To be before the footlights,’ continued the dismal man, ‘is like
sitting at a grand court show, and admiring the silken dresses of the
gaudy throng; to be behind them is to be the people who make that
finery, uncared for and unknown, and left to sink or swim, to starve or
live, as fortune wills it.’

‘Certainly,’ said Mr. Snodgrass: for the sunken eye of the dismal man
rested on him, and he felt it necessary to say something.

‘Go on, Jemmy,’ said the Spanish traveller, ‘like black-eyed Susan--all
in the Downs--no croaking--speak out--look lively.’

‘Will you make another glass before you begin, Sir?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

The dismal man took the hint, and having mixed a glass of brandy-and-
water, and slowly swallowed half of it, opened the roll of paper and
proceeded, partly to read, and partly to relate, the following incident,
which we find recorded on the Transactions of the Club as ‘The
Stroller’s Tale.’


THE STROLLER’S TALE

‘There is nothing of the marvellous in what I am going to relate,’ said
the dismal man; ‘there is nothing even uncommon in it. Want and sickness
are too common in many stations of life to deserve more notice than is
usually bestowed on the most ordinary vicissitudes of human nature. I
have thrown these few notes together, because the subject of them was
well known to me for many years. I traced his progress downwards, step
by step, until at last he reached that excess of destitution from which
he never rose again.

‘The man of whom I speak was a low pantomime actor; and, like many
people of his class, an habitual drunkard. In his better days, before he
had become enfeebled by dissipation and emaciated by disease, he had
been in the receipt of a good salary, which, if he had been careful and
prudent, he might have continued to receive for some years--not many;
because these men either die early, or by unnaturally taxing their
bodily energies, lose, prematurely, those physical powers on which alone
they can depend for subsistence. His besetting sin gained so fast upon
him, however, that it was found impossible to employ him in the
situations in which he really was useful to the theatre. The public-
house had a fascination for him which he could not resist. Neglected
disease and hopeless poverty were as certain to be his portion as death
itself, if he persevered in the same course; yet he did persevere, and
the result may be guessed. He could obtain no engagement, and he wanted
bread.

‘Everybody who is at all acquainted with theatrical matters knows what a
host of shabby, poverty-stricken men hang about the stage of a large
establishment--not regularly engaged actors, but ballet people,
procession men, tumblers, and so forth, who are taken on during the run
of a pantomime, or an Easter piece, and are then discharged, until the
production of some heavy spectacle occasions a new demand for their
services. To this mode of life the man was compelled to resort; and
taking the chair every night, at some low theatrical house, at once put
him in possession of a few more shillings weekly, and enabled him to
gratify his old propensity. Even this resource shortly failed him; his
irregularities were too great to admit of his earning the wretched
pittance he might thus have procured, and he was actually reduced to a
state bordering on starvation, only procuring a trifle occasionally by
borrowing it of some old companion, or by obtaining an appearance at one
or other of the commonest of the minor theatres; and when he did earn
anything it was spent in the old way.

‘About this time, and when he had been existing for upwards of a year no
one knew how, I had a short engagement at one of the theatres on the
Surrey side of the water, and here I saw this man, whom I had lost sight
of for some time; for I had been travelling in the provinces, and he had
been skulking in the lanes and alleys of London. I was dressed to leave
the house, and was crossing the stage on my way out, when he tapped me
on the shoulder. Never shall I forget the repulsive sight that met my
eye when I turned round. He was dressed for the pantomimes in all the
absurdity of a clown’s costume. The spectral figures in the Dance of
Death, the most frightful shapes that the ablest painter ever portrayed
on canvas, never presented an appearance half so ghastly. His bloated
body and shrunken legs--their deformity enhanced a hundredfold by the
fantastic dress--the glassy eyes, contrasting fearfully with the thick
white paint with which the face was besmeared; the grotesquely-
ornamented head, trembling with paralysis, and the long skinny hands,
rubbed with white chalk--all gave him a hideous and unnatural
appearance, of which no description could convey an adequate idea, and
which, to this day, I shudder to think of. His voice was hollow and
tremulous as he took me aside, and in broken words recounted a long
catalogue of sickness and privations, terminating as usual with an
urgent request for the loan of a trifling sum of money. I put a few
shillings in his hand, and as I turned away I heard the roar of laughter
which followed his first tumble on the stage.

‘A few nights afterwards, a boy put a dirty scrap of paper in my hand,
on which were scrawled a few words in pencil, intimating that the man
was dangerously ill, and begging me, after the performance, to see him
at his lodgings in some street--I forget the name of it now--at no great
distance from the theatre. I promised to comply, as soon as I could get
away; and after the curtain fell, sallied forth on my melancholy errand.

‘It was late, for I had been playing in the last piece; and, as it was a
benefit night, the performances had been protracted to an unusual
length. It was a dark, cold night, with a chill, damp wind, which blew
the rain heavily against the windows and house-fronts. Pools of water
had collected in the narrow and little-frequented streets, and as many
of the thinly-scattered oil-lamps had been blown out by the violence of
the wind, the walk was not only a comfortless, but most uncertain one. I
had fortunately taken the right course, however, and succeeded, after a
little difficulty, in finding the house to which I had been directed--a
coal-shed, with one storey above it, in the back room of which lay the
object of my search.

‘A wretched-looking woman, the man’s wife, met me on the stairs, and,
telling me that he had just fallen into a kind of doze, led me softly
in, and placed a chair for me at the bedside. The sick man was lying
with his face turned towards the wall; and as he took no heed of my
presence, I had leisure to observe the place in which I found myself.

‘He was lying on an old bedstead, which turned up during the day. The
tattered remains of a checked curtain were drawn round the bed’s head,
to exclude the wind, which, however, made its way into the comfortless
room through the numerous chinks in the door, and blew it to and fro
every instant. There was a low cinder fire in a rusty, unfixed grate;
and an old three-cornered stained table, with some medicine bottles, a
broken glass, and a few other domestic articles, was drawn out before
it. A little child was sleeping on a temporary bed which had been made
for it on the floor, and the woman sat on a chair by its side. There
were a couple of shelves, with a few plates and cups and saucers; and a
pair of stage shoes and a couple of foils hung beneath them. With the
exception of little heaps of rags and bundles which had been carelessly
thrown into the corners of the room, these were the only things in the
apartment.

‘I had had time to note these little particulars, and to mark the heavy
breathing and feverish startings of the sick man, before he was aware of
my presence. In the restless attempts to procure some easy resting-place
for his head, he tossed his hand out of the bed, and it fell on mine. He
started up, and stared eagerly in my face.

‘“Mr. Hutley, John,” said his wife; “Mr. Hutley, that you sent for to-
night, you know.”

‘“Ah!” said the invalid, passing his hand across his forehead; “Hutley--
Hutley--let me see.” He seemed endeavouring to collect his thoughts for
a few seconds, and then grasping me tightly by the wrist said, “Don’t
leave me--don’t leave me, old fellow. She’ll murder me; I know she
will.”


‘“Has he been long so?” said I, addressing his weeping wife.

‘“Since yesterday night,” she replied. “John, John, don’t you know me?”

‘“Don’t let her come near me,” said the man, with a shudder, as she
stooped over him. “Drive her away; I can’t bear her near me.” He stared
wildly at her, with a look of deadly apprehension, and then whispered in
my ear, “I beat her, Jem; I beat her yesterday, and many times before. I
have starved her and the boy too; and now I am weak and helpless, Jem,
she’ll murder me for it; I know she will. If you’d seen her cry, as I
have, you’d know it too. Keep her off.” He relaxed his grasp, and sank
back exhausted on the pillow.

‘I knew but too well what all this meant. If I could have entertained
any doubt of it, for an instant, one glance at the woman’s pale face and
wasted form would have sufficiently explained the real state of the
case. “You had better stand aside,” said I to the poor creature. “You
can do him no good. Perhaps he will be calmer, if he does not see you.”
 She retired out of the man’s sight. He opened his eyes after a few
seconds, and looked anxiously round.

‘“Is she gone?” he eagerly inquired.

‘“Yes--yes,” said I; “she shall not hurt you.”

‘“I’ll tell you what, Jem,” said the man, in a low voice, “she does hurt
me. There’s something in her eyes wakes such a dreadful fear in my
heart, that it drives me mad. All last night, her large, staring eyes
and pale face were close to mine; wherever I turned, they turned; and
whenever I started up from my sleep, she was at the bedside looking at
me.” He drew me closer to him, as he said in a deep alarmed whisper,
“Jem, she must be an evil spirit--a devil! Hush! I know she is. If she
had been a woman she would have died long ago. No woman could have borne
what she has.”

‘I sickened at the thought of the long course of cruelty and neglect
which must have occurred to produce such an impression on such a man. I
could say nothing in reply; for who could offer hope, or consolation, to
the abject being before me?

‘I sat there for upwards of two hours, during which time he tossed
about, murmuring exclamations of pain or impatience, restlessly throwing
his arms here and there, and turning constantly from side to side. At
length he fell into that state of partial unconsciousness, in which the
mind wanders uneasily from scene to scene, and from place to place,
without the control of reason, but still without being able to divest
itself of an indescribable sense of present suffering. Finding from his
incoherent wanderings that this was the case, and knowing that in all
probability the fever would not grow immediately worse, I left him,
promising his miserable wife that I would repeat my visit next evening,
and, if necessary, sit up with the patient during the night.

‘I kept my promise. The last four-and-twenty hours had produced a
frightful alteration. The eyes, though deeply sunk and heavy, shone with
a lustre frightful to behold. The lips were parched, and cracked in many
places; the hard, dry skin glowed with a burning heat; and there was an
almost unearthly air of wild anxiety in the man’s face, indicating even
more strongly the ravages of the disease. The fever was at its height.

‘I took the seat I had occupied the night before, and there I sat for
hours, listening to sounds which must strike deep to the heart of the
most callous among human beings--the awful ravings of a dying man. From
what I had heard of the medical attendant’s opinion, I knew there was no
hope for him: I was sitting by his death-bed. I saw the wasted limbs--
which a few hours before had been distorted for the amusement of a
boisterous gallery, writhing under the tortures of a burning fever--I
heard the clown’s shrill laugh, blending with the low murmurings of the
dying man.

‘It is a touching thing to hear the mind reverting to the ordinary
occupations and pursuits of health, when the body lies before you weak
and helpless; but when those occupations are of a character the most
strongly opposed to anything we associate with grave and solemn ideas,
the impression produced is infinitely more powerful. The theatre and the
public-house were the chief themes of the wretched man’s wanderings. It
was evening, he fancied; he had a part to play that night; it was late,
and he must leave home instantly. Why did they hold him, and prevent his
going?--he should lose the money--he must go. No! they would not let
him. He hid his face in his burning hands, and feebly bemoaned his own
weakness, and the cruelty of his persecutors. A short pause, and he
shouted out a few doggerel rhymes--the last he had ever learned. He rose
in bed, drew up his withered limbs, and rolled about in uncouth
positions; he was acting--he was at the theatre. A minute’s silence, and
he murmured the burden of some roaring song. He had reached the old
house at last--how hot the room was. He had been ill, very ill, but he
was well now, and happy. Fill up his glass. Who was that, that dashed it
from his lips? It was the same persecutor that had followed him before.
He fell back upon his pillow and moaned aloud. A short period of
oblivion, and he was wandering through a tedious maze of low-arched
rooms--so low, sometimes, that he must creep upon his hands and knees to
make his way along; it was close and dark, and every way he turned, some
obstacle impeded his progress. There were insects, too, hideous crawling
things, with eyes that stared upon him, and filled the very air around,
glistening horribly amidst the thick darkness of the place. The walls
and ceiling were alive with reptiles--the vault expanded to an enormous
size--frightful figures flitted to and fro--and the faces of men he
knew, rendered hideous by gibing and mouthing, peered out from among
them; they were searing him with heated irons, and binding his head with
cords till the blood started; and he struggled madly for life.

‘At the close of one of these paroxysms, when I had with great
difficulty held him down in his bed, he sank into what appeared to be a
slumber. Overpowered with watching and exertion, I had closed my eyes
for a few minutes, when I felt a violent clutch on my shoulder. I awoke
instantly. He had raised himself up, so as to seat himself in bed--a
dreadful change had come over his face, but consciousness had returned,
for he evidently knew me. The child, who had been long since disturbed
by his ravings, rose from its little bed, and ran towards its father,
screaming with fright--the mother hastily caught it in her arms, lest he
should injure it in the violence of his insanity; but, terrified by the
alteration of his features, stood transfixed by the bedside. He grasped
my shoulder convulsively, and, striking his breast with the other hand,
made a desperate attempt to articulate. It was unavailing; he extended
his arm towards them, and made another violent effort. There was a
rattling noise in the throat--a glare of the eye--a short stifled groan-
-and he fell back--dead!’

It would afford us the highest gratification to be enabled to record Mr.
Pickwick’s opinion of the foregoing anecdote. We have little doubt that
we should have been enabled to present it to our readers, but for a most
unfortunate occurrence.

Mr. Pickwick had replaced on the table the glass which, during the last
few sentences of the tale, he had retained in his hand; and had just
made up his mind to speak--indeed, we have the authority of Mr.
Snodgrass’s note-book for stating, that he had actually opened his
mouth--when the waiter entered the room, and said--

‘Some gentlemen, Sir.’

It has been conjectured that Mr. Pickwick was on the point of delivering
some remarks which would have enlightened the world, if not the Thames,
when he was thus interrupted; for he gazed sternly on the waiter’s
countenance, and then looked round on the company generally, as if
seeking for information relative to the new-comers.

‘Oh!’ said Mr. Winkle, rising, ‘some friends of mine--show them in. Very
pleasant fellows,’ added Mr. Winkle, after the waiter had retired--
‘officers of the 97th, whose acquaintance I made rather oddly this
morning. You will like them very much.’

Mr. Pickwick’s equanimity was at once restored. The waiter returned, and
ushered three gentlemen into the room.

‘Lieutenant Tappleton,’ said Mr. Winkle, ‘Lieutenant Tappleton, Mr.
Pickwick--Doctor Payne, Mr. Pickwick--Mr. Snodgrass you have seen
before, my friend Mr. Tupman, Doctor Payne--Doctor Slammer, Mr.
Pickwick--Mr. Tupman, Doctor Slam--’

Here Mr. Winkle suddenly paused; for strong emotion was visible on the
countenance both of Mr. Tupman and the doctor.

‘I have met _this_ gentleman before,’ said the Doctor, with marked
emphasis.

‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘And--and that person, too, if I am not mistaken,’ said the doctor,
bestowing a scrutinising glance on the green-coated stranger. ‘I think I
gave that person a very pressing invitation last night, which he thought
proper to decline.’ Saying which the doctor scowled magnanimously on the
stranger, and whispered his friend Lieutenant Tappleton.

‘You don’t say so,’ said that gentleman, at the conclusion of the
whisper.

‘I do, indeed,’ replied Doctor Slammer.

‘You are bound to kick him on the spot,’ murmured the owner of the camp-
stool, with great importance.

‘Do be quiet, Payne,’ interposed the lieutenant. ‘Will you allow me to
ask you, sir,’ he said, addressing Mr. Pickwick, who was considerably
mystified by this very unpolite by-play--‘will you allow me to ask you,
Sir, whether that person belongs to your party?’

‘No, Sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, ‘he is a guest of ours.’

‘He is a member of your club, or I am mistaken?’ said the lieutenant
inquiringly.

‘Certainly not,’ responded Mr. Pickwick.

‘And never wears your club-button?’ said the lieutenant.

‘No--never!’ replied the astonished Mr. Pickwick.

Lieutenant Tappleton turned round to his friend Doctor Slammer, with a
scarcely perceptible shrug of the shoulder, as if implying some doubt of
the accuracy of his recollection. The little doctor looked wrathful, but
confounded; and Mr. Payne gazed with a ferocious aspect on the beaming
countenance of the unconscious Pickwick.

‘Sir,’ said the doctor, suddenly addressing Mr. Tupman, in a tone which
made that gentleman start as perceptibly as if a pin had been cunningly
inserted in the calf of his leg, ‘you were at the ball here last night!’

Mr. Tupman gasped a faint affirmative, looking very hard at Mr. Pickwick
all the while.

‘That person was your companion,’ said the doctor, pointing to the still
unmoved stranger.

Mr. Tupman admitted the fact.

‘Now, sir,’ said the doctor to the stranger, ‘I ask you once again, in
the presence of these gentlemen, whether you choose to give me your
card, and to receive the treatment of a gentleman; or whether you impose
upon me the necessity of personally chastising you on the spot?’

‘Stay, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I really cannot allow this matter to go
any further without some explanation. Tupman, recount the
circumstances.’

Mr. Tupman, thus solemnly adjured, stated the case in a few words;
touched slightly on the borrowing of the coat; expatiated largely on its
having been done ‘after dinner’; wound up with a little penitence on his
own account; and left the stranger to clear himself as best he could.

He was apparently about to proceed to do so, when Lieutenant Tappleton,
who had been eyeing him with great curiosity, said with considerable
scorn, ‘Haven’t I seen you at the theatre, Sir?’

‘Certainly,’ replied the unabashed stranger.

‘He is a strolling actor!’ said the lieutenant contemptuously, turning
to Doctor Slammer.--‘He acts in the piece that the officers of the 52nd
get up at the Rochester Theatre to-morrow night. You cannot proceed in
this affair, Slammer--impossible!’

‘Quite!’ said the dignified Payne.

‘Sorry to have placed you in this disagreeable situation,’ said
Lieutenant Tappleton, addressing Mr. Pickwick; ‘allow me to suggest,
that the best way of avoiding a recurrence of such scenes in future will
be to be more select in the choice of your companions. Good-evening,
Sir!’ and the lieutenant bounced out of the room.

‘And allow me to say, Sir,’ said the irascible Doctor Payne, ‘that if I
had been Tappleton, or if I had been Slammer, I would have pulled your
nose, Sir, and the nose of every man in this company. I would, sir--
every man. Payne is my name, sir--Doctor Payne of the 43rd. Good-
evening, Sir.’ Having concluded this speech, and uttered the last three
words in a loud key, he stalked majestically after his friend, closely
followed by Doctor Slammer, who said nothing, but contented himself by
withering the company with a look.

Rising rage and extreme bewilderment had swelled the noble breast of Mr.
Pickwick, almost to the bursting of his waistcoat, during the delivery
of the above defiance. He stood transfixed to the spot, gazing on
vacancy. The closing of the door recalled him to himself. He rushed
forward with fury in his looks, and fire in his eye. His hand was upon
the lock of the door; in another instant it would have been on the
throat of Doctor Payne of the 43rd, had not Mr. Snodgrass seized his
revered leader by the coat tail, and dragged him backwards.

‘Restrain him,’ cried Mr. Snodgrass; ‘Winkle, Tupman--he must not peril
his distinguished life in such a cause as this.’

‘Let me go,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Hold him tight,’ shouted Mr. Snodgrass; and by the united efforts of
the whole company, Mr. Pickwick was forced into an arm-chair.

‘Leave him alone,’ said the green-coated stranger; ‘brandy-and-water--
jolly old gentleman--lots of pluck--swallow this--ah!--capital stuff.’
Having previously tested the virtues of a bumper, which had been mixed
by the dismal man, the stranger applied the glass to Mr. Pickwick’s
mouth; and the remainder of its contents rapidly disappeared.

There was a short pause; the brandy-and-water had done its work; the
amiable countenance of Mr. Pickwick was fast recovering its customary
expression.

‘They are not worth your notice,’ said the dismal man.

‘You are right, sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, ‘they are not. I am ashamed
to have been betrayed into this warmth of feeling. Draw your chair up to
the table, Sir.’

The dismal man readily complied; a circle was again formed round the
table, and harmony once more prevailed. Some lingering irritability
appeared to find a resting-place in Mr. Winkle’s bosom, occasioned
possibly by the temporary abstraction of his coat--though it is scarcely
reasonable to suppose that so slight a circumstance can have excited
even a passing feeling of anger in a Pickwickian’s breast. With this
exception, their good-humour was completely restored; and the evening
concluded with the conviviality with which it had begun.



CHAPTER IV. A FIELD DAY AND BIVOUAC--MORE NEW FRIENDS--AN INVITATION TO
THE COUNTRY

Many authors entertain, not only a foolish, but a really dishonest
objection to acknowledge the sources whence they derive much valuable
information. We have no such feeling. We are merely endeavouring to
discharge, in an upright manner, the responsible duties of our editorial
functions; and whatever ambition we might have felt under other
circumstances to lay claim to the authorship of these adventures, a
regard for truth forbids us to do more than claim the merit of their
judicious arrangement and impartial narration. The Pickwick papers are
our New River Head; and we may be compared to the New River Company. The
labours of others have raised for us an immense reservoir of important
facts. We merely lay them on, and communicate them, in a clear and
gentle stream, through the medium of these pages, to a world thirsting
for Pickwickian knowledge.

Acting in this spirit, and resolutely proceeding on our determination to
avow our obligations to the authorities we have consulted, we frankly
say, that to the note-book of Mr. Snodgrass are we indebted for the
particulars recorded in this and the succeeding chapter--particulars
which, now that we have disburdened our consciences, we shall proceed to
detail without further comment.

The whole population of Rochester and the adjoining towns rose from
their beds at an early hour of the following morning, in a state of the
utmost bustle and excitement. A grand review was to take place upon the
lines. The manoeuvres of half a dozen regiments were to be inspected by
the eagle eye of the commander-in-chief; temporary fortifications had
been erected, the citadel was to be attacked and taken, and a mine was
to be sprung.

Mr. Pickwick was, as our readers may have gathered from the slight
extract we gave from his description of Chatham, an enthusiastic admirer
of the army. Nothing could have been more delightful to him--nothing
could have harmonised so well with the peculiar feeling of each of his
companions--as this sight. Accordingly they were soon afoot, and walking
in the direction of the scene of action, towards which crowds of people
were already pouring from a variety of quarters.

The appearance of everything on the lines denoted that the approaching
ceremony was one of the utmost grandeur and importance. There were
sentries posted to keep the ground for the troops, and servants on the
batteries keeping places for the ladies, and sergeants running to and
fro, with vellum-covered books under their arms, and Colonel Bulder, in
full military uniform, on horseback, galloping first to one place and
then to another, and backing his horse among the people, and prancing,
and curvetting, and shouting in a most alarming manner, and making
himself very hoarse in the voice, and very red in the face, without any
assignable cause or reason whatever. Officers were running backwards and
forwards, first communicating with Colonel Bulder, and then ordering the
sergeants, and then running away altogether; and even the very privates
themselves looked from behind their glazed stocks with an air of
mysterious solemnity, which sufficiently bespoke the special nature of
the occasion.

Mr. Pickwick and his three companions stationed themselves in the front
of the crowd, and patiently awaited the commencement of the proceedings.
The throng was increasing every moment; and the efforts they were
compelled to make, to retain the position they had gained, sufficiently
occupied their attention during the two hours that ensued. At one time
there was a sudden pressure from behind, and then Mr. Pickwick was
jerked forward for several yards, with a degree of speed and elasticity
highly inconsistent with the general gravity of his demeanour; at
another moment there was a request to ‘keep back’ from the front, and
then the butt-end of a musket was either dropped upon Mr. Pickwick’s
toe, to remind him of the demand, or thrust into his chest, to insure
its being complied with. Then some facetious gentlemen on the left,
after pressing sideways in a body, and squeezing Mr. Snodgrass into the
very last extreme of human torture, would request to know ‘vere he vos a
shovin’ to’; and when Mr. Winkle had done expressing his excessive
indignation at witnessing this unprovoked assault, some person behind
would knock his hat over his eyes, and beg the favour of his putting his
head in his pocket. These, and other practical witticisms, coupled with
the unaccountable absence of Mr. Tupman (who had suddenly disappeared,
and was nowhere to be found), rendered their situation upon the whole
rather more uncomfortable than pleasing or desirable.

At length that low roar of many voices ran through the crowd which
usually announces the arrival of whatever they have been waiting for.
All eyes were turned in the direction of the sally-port. A few moments
of eager expectation, and colours were seen fluttering gaily in the air,
arms glistened brightly in the sun, column after column poured on to the
plain. The troops halted and formed; the word of command rang through
the line; there was a general clash of muskets as arms were presented;
and the commander-in-chief, attended by Colonel Bulder and numerous
officers, cantered to the front. The military bands struck up
altogether; the horses stood upon two legs each, cantered backwards, and
whisked their tails about in all directions; the dogs barked, the mob
screamed, the troops recovered, and nothing was to be seen on either
side, as far as the eye could reach, but a long perspective of red coats
and white trousers, fixed and motionless.

Mr. Pickwick had been so fully occupied in falling about, and
disentangling himself, miraculously, from between the legs of horses,
that he had not enjoyed sufficient leisure to observe the scene before
him, until it assumed the appearance we have just described. When he was
at last enabled to stand firmly on his legs, his gratification and
delight were unbounded.

‘Can anything be finer or more delightful?’ he inquired of Mr. Winkle.

‘Nothing,’ replied that gentleman, who had had a short man standing on
each of his feet for the quarter of an hour immediately preceding.

‘It is indeed a noble and a brilliant sight,’ said Mr. Snodgrass, in
whose bosom a blaze of poetry was rapidly bursting forth, ‘to see the
gallant defenders of their country drawn up in brilliant array before
its peaceful citizens; their faces beaming--not with warlike ferocity,
but with civilised gentleness; their eyes flashing--not with the rude
fire of rapine or revenge, but with the soft light of humanity and
intelligence.’

Mr. Pickwick fully entered into the spirit of this eulogium, but he
could not exactly re-echo its terms; for the soft light of intelligence
burned rather feebly in the eyes of the warriors, inasmuch as the
command ‘eyes front’ had been given, and all the spectator saw before
him was several thousand pair of optics, staring straight forward,
wholly divested of any expression whatever.

‘We are in a capital situation now,’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking round
him. The crowd had gradually dispersed in their immediate vicinity, and
they were nearly alone.

‘Capital!’ echoed both Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle.

‘What are they doing now?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, adjusting his
spectacles.

‘I--I--rather think,’ said Mr. Winkle, changing colour--‘I rather think
they’re going to fire.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mr. Pickwick hastily.

‘I--I--really think they are,’ urged Mr. Snodgrass, somewhat alarmed.

‘Impossible,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. He had hardly uttered the word, when
the whole half-dozen regiments levelled their muskets as if they had but
one common object, and that object the Pickwickians, and burst forth
with the most awful and tremendous discharge that ever shook the earth
to its centres, or an elderly gentleman off his.

It was in this trying situation, exposed to a galling fire of blank
cartridges, and harassed by the operations of the military, a fresh body
of whom had begun to fall in on the opposite side, that Mr. Pickwick
displayed that perfect coolness and self-possession, which are the
indispensable accompaniments of a great mind. He seized Mr. Winkle by
the arm, and placing himself between that gentleman and Mr. Snodgrass,
earnestly besought them to remember that beyond the possibility of being
rendered deaf by the noise, there was no immediate danger to be
apprehended from the firing.

‘But--but--suppose some of the men should happen to have ball cartridges
by mistake,’ remonstrated Mr. Winkle, pallid at the supposition he was
himself conjuring up. ‘I heard something whistle through the air now--so
sharp; close to my ear.’

‘We had better throw ourselves on our faces, hadn’t we?’ said Mr.
Snodgrass.

‘No, no--it’s over now,’ said Mr. Pickwick. His lip might quiver, and
his cheek might blanch, but no expression of fear or concern escaped the
lips of that immortal man.

Mr. Pickwick was right--the firing ceased; but he had scarcely time to
congratulate himself on the accuracy of his opinion, when a quick
movement was visible in the line; the hoarse shout of the word of
command ran along it, and before either of the party could form a guess
at the meaning of this new manoeuvre, the whole of the half-dozen
regiments, with fixed bayonets, charged at double-quick time down upon
the very spot on which Mr. Pickwick and his friends were stationed.

Man is but mortal; and there is a point beyond which human courage
cannot extend. Mr. Pickwick gazed through his spectacles for an instant
on the advancing mass, and then fairly turned his back and--we will not
say fled; firstly, because it is an ignoble term, and, secondly, because
Mr. Pickwick’s figure was by no means adapted for that mode of retreat--
he trotted away, at as quick a rate as his legs would convey him; so
quickly, indeed, that he did not perceive the awkwardness of his
situation, to the full extent, until too late.

The opposite troops, whose falling-in had perplexed Mr. Pickwick a few
seconds before, were drawn up to repel the mimic attack of the sham
besiegers of the citadel; and the consequence was that Mr. Pickwick and
his two companions found themselves suddenly inclosed between two lines
of great length, the one advancing at a rapid pace, and the other firmly
waiting the collision in hostile array.

‘Hoi!’ shouted the officers of the advancing line.

‘Get out of the way!’ cried the officers of the stationary one.

‘Where are we to go to?’ screamed the agitated Pickwickians.

‘Hoi--hoi--hoi!’ was the only reply. There was a moment of intense
bewilderment, a heavy tramp of footsteps, a violent concussion, a
smothered laugh; the half-dozen regiments were half a thousand yards
off, and the soles of Mr. Pickwick’s boots were elevated in air.

Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle had each performed a compulsory somerset
with remarkable agility, when the first object that met the eyes of the
latter as he sat on the ground, staunching with a yellow silk
handkerchief the stream of life which issued from his nose, was his
venerated leader at some distance off, running after his own hat, which
was gambolling playfully away in perspective.

There are very few moments in a man’s existence when he experiences so
much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable
commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. A vast deal of
coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in catching a
hat. A man must not be precipitate, or he runs over it; he must not rush
into the opposite extreme, or he loses it altogether. The best way is to
keep gently up with the object of pursuit, to be wary and cautious, to
watch your opportunity well, get gradually before it, then make a rapid
dive, seize it by the crown, and stick it firmly on your head; smiling
pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody
else.

There was a fine gentle wind, and Mr. Pickwick’s hat rolled sportively
before it. The wind puffed, and Mr. Pickwick puffed, and the hat rolled
over and over as merrily as a lively porpoise in a strong tide: and on
it might have rolled, far beyond Mr. Pickwick’s reach, had not its
course been providentially stopped, just as that gentleman was on the
point of resigning it to its fate.

Mr. Pickwick, we say, was completely exhausted, and about to give up the
chase, when the hat was blown with some violence against the wheel of a
carriage, which was drawn up in a line with half a dozen other vehicles
on the spot to which his steps had been directed. Mr. Pickwick,
perceiving his advantage, darted briskly forward, secured his property,
planted it on his head, and paused to take breath. He had not been
stationary half a minute, when he heard his own name eagerly pronounced
by a voice, which he at once recognised as Mr. Tupman’s, and, looking
upwards, he beheld a sight which filled him with surprise and pleasure.


In an open barouche, the horses of which had been taken out, the better
to accommodate it to the crowded place, stood a stout old gentleman, in
a blue coat and bright buttons, corduroy breeches and top-boots, two
young ladies in scarfs and feathers, a young gentleman apparently
enamoured of one of the young ladies in scarfs and feathers, a lady of
doubtful age, probably the aunt of the aforesaid, and Mr. Tupman, as
easy and unconcerned as if he had belonged to the family from the first
moments of his infancy. Fastened up behind the barouche was a hamper of
spacious dimensions--one of those hampers which always awakens in a
contemplative mind associations connected with cold fowls, tongues, and
bottles of wine--and on the box sat a fat and red-faced boy, in a state
of somnolency, whom no speculative observer could have regarded for an
instant without setting down as the official dispenser of the contents
of the before-mentioned hamper, when the proper time for their
consumption should arrive.

Mr. Pickwick had bestowed a hasty glance on these interesting objects,
when he was again greeted by his faithful disciple.

‘Pickwick--Pickwick,’ said Mr. Tupman; ‘come up here. Make haste.’

‘Come along, Sir. Pray, come up,’ said the stout gentleman. ‘Joe!--damn
that boy, he’s gone to sleep again.--Joe, let down the steps.’ The fat
boy rolled slowly off the box, let down the steps, and held the carriage
door invitingly open. Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle came up at the
moment.

‘Room for you all, gentlemen,’ said the stout man. ‘Two inside, and one
out. Joe, make room for one of these gentlemen on the box. Now, Sir,
come along;’ and the stout gentleman extended his arm, and pulled first
Mr. Pickwick, and then Mr. Snodgrass, into the barouche by main force.
Mr. Winkle mounted to the box, the fat boy waddled to the same perch,
and fell fast asleep instantly.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ said the stout man, ‘very glad to see you. Know you
very well, gentlemen, though you mayn’t remember me. I spent some
ev’nin’s at your club last winter--picked up my friend Mr. Tupman here
this morning, and very glad I was to see him. Well, Sir, and how are
you? You do look uncommon well, to be sure.’

Mr. Pickwick acknowledged the compliment, and cordially shook hands with
the stout gentleman in the top-boots.

‘Well, and how are you, sir?’ said the stout gentleman, addressing Mr.
Snodgrass with paternal anxiety. ‘Charming, eh? Well, that’s right--
that’s right. And how are you, sir (to Mr. Winkle)? Well, I am glad to
hear you say you are well; very glad I am, to be sure. My daughters,
gentlemen--my gals these are; and that’s my sister, Miss Rachael Wardle.
She’s a Miss, she is; and yet she ain’t a Miss--eh, Sir, eh?’ And the
stout gentleman playfully inserted his elbow between the ribs of Mr.
Pickwick, and laughed very heartily.

‘Lor, brother!’ said Miss Wardle, with a deprecating smile.

‘True, true,’ said the stout gentleman; ‘no one can deny it. Gentlemen,
I beg your pardon; this is my friend Mr. Trundle. And now you all know
each other, let’s be comfortable and happy, and see what’s going
forward; that’s what I say.’ So the stout gentleman put on his
spectacles, and Mr. Pickwick pulled out his glass, and everybody stood
up in the carriage, and looked over somebody else’s shoulder at the
evolutions of the military.

Astounding evolutions they were, one rank firing over the heads of
another rank, and then running away; and then the other rank firing over
the heads of another rank, and running away in their turn; and then
forming squares, with officers in the centre; and then descending the
trench on one side with scaling-ladders, and ascending it on the other
again by the same means; and knocking down barricades of baskets, and
behaving in the most gallant manner possible. Then there was such a
ramming down of the contents of enormous guns on the battery, with
instruments like magnified mops; such a preparation before they were let
off, and such an awful noise when they did go, that the air resounded
with the screams of ladies. The young Misses Wardle were so frightened,
that Mr. Trundle was actually obliged to hold one of them up in the
carriage, while Mr. Snodgrass supported the other; and Mr. Wardle’s
sister suffered under such a dreadful state of nervous alarm, that Mr.
Tupman found it indispensably necessary to put his arm round her waist,
to keep her up at all. Everybody was excited, except the fat boy, and he
slept as soundly as if the roaring of cannon were his ordinary lullaby.

‘Joe, Joe!’ said the stout gentleman, when the citadel was taken, and
the besiegers and besieged sat down to dinner. ‘Damn that boy, he’s gone
to sleep again. Be good enough to pinch him, sir--in the leg, if you
please; nothing else wakes him--thank you. Undo the hamper, Joe.’

The fat boy, who had been effectually roused by the compression of a
portion of his leg between the finger and thumb of Mr. Winkle, rolled
off the box once again, and proceeded to unpack the hamper with more
expedition than could have been expected from his previous inactivity.

‘Now we must sit close,’ said the stout gentleman. After a great many
jokes about squeezing the ladies’ sleeves, and a vast quantity of
blushing at sundry jocose proposals, that the ladies should sit in the
gentlemen’s laps, the whole party were stowed down in the barouche; and
the stout gentleman proceeded to hand the things from the fat boy (who
had mounted up behind for the purpose) into the carriage.

‘Now, Joe, knives and forks.’ The knives and forks were handed in, and
the ladies and gentlemen inside, and Mr. Winkle on the box, were each
furnished with those useful instruments.

‘Plates, Joe, plates.’ A similar process employed in the distribution of
the crockery.

‘Now, Joe, the fowls. Damn that boy; he’s gone to sleep again. Joe!
Joe!’ (Sundry taps on the head with a stick, and the fat boy, with some
difficulty, roused from his lethargy.) ‘Come, hand in the eatables.’

There was something in the sound of the last word which roused the
unctuous boy. He jumped up, and the leaden eyes which twinkled behind
his mountainous cheeks leered horribly upon the food as he unpacked it
from the basket.

‘Now make haste,’ said Mr. Wardle; for the fat boy was hanging fondly
over a capon, which he seemed wholly unable to part with. The boy sighed
deeply, and, bestowing an ardent gaze upon its plumpness, unwillingly
consigned it to his master.

‘That’s right--look sharp. Now the tongue--now the pigeon pie. Take care
of that veal and ham--mind the lobsters--take the salad out of the
cloth--give me the dressing.’ Such were the hurried orders which issued
from the lips of Mr. Wardle, as he handed in the different articles
described, and placed dishes in everybody’s hands, and on everybody’s
knees, in endless number.

‘Now ain’t this capital?’ inquired that jolly personage, when the work
of destruction had commenced.

‘Capital!’ said Mr. Winkle, who was carving a fowl on the box.

‘Glass of wine?’

‘With the greatest pleasure.’

‘You’d better have a bottle to yourself up there, hadn’t you?’

‘You’re very good.’

‘Joe!’

‘Yes, Sir.’ (He wasn’t asleep this time, having just succeeded in
abstracting a veal patty.)

‘Bottle of wine to the gentleman on the box. Glad to see you, Sir.’

‘Thank’ee.’ Mr. Winkle emptied his glass, and placed the bottle on the
coach-box, by his side.

‘Will you permit me to have the pleasure, Sir?’ said Mr. Trundle to Mr.
Winkle.

‘With great pleasure,’ replied Mr. Winkle to Mr. Trundle, and then the
two gentlemen took wine, after which they took a glass of wine round,
ladies and all.

‘How dear Emily is flirting with the strange gentleman,’ whispered the
spinster aunt, with true spinster-aunt-like envy, to her brother, Mr.
Wardle.

‘Oh! I don’t know,’ said the jolly old gentleman; ‘all very natural, I
dare say--nothing unusual. Mr. Pickwick, some wine, Sir?’ Mr. Pickwick,
who had been deeply investigating the interior of the pigeon-pie,
readily assented.

‘Emily, my dear,’ said the spinster aunt, with a patronising air, ‘don’t
talk so loud, love.’

‘Lor, aunt!’

‘Aunt and the little old gentleman want to have it all to themselves, I
think,’ whispered Miss Isabella Wardle to her sister Emily. The young
ladies laughed very heartily, and the old one tried to look amiable, but
couldn’t manage it.

‘Young girls have such spirits,’ said Miss Wardle to Mr. Tupman, with an
air of gentle commiseration, as if animal spirits were contraband, and
their possession without a permit a high crime and misdemeanour.

‘Oh, they have,’ replied Mr. Tupman, not exactly making the sort of
reply that was expected from him. ‘It’s quite delightful.’

‘Hem!’ said Miss Wardle, rather dubiously.

‘Will you permit me?’ said Mr. Tupman, in his blandest manner, touching
the enchanting Rachael’s wrist with one hand, and gently elevating the
bottle with the other. ‘Will you permit me?’

‘Oh, sir!’ Mr. Tupman looked most impressive; and Rachael expressed her
fear that more guns were going off, in which case, of course, she should
have required support again.

‘Do you think my dear nieces pretty?’ whispered their affectionate aunt
to Mr. Tupman.

‘I should, if their aunt wasn’t here,’ replied the ready Pickwickian,
with a passionate glance.

‘Oh, you naughty man--but really, if their complexions were a little
better, don’t you think they would be nice-looking girls--by
candlelight?’

‘Yes; I think they would,’ said Mr. Tupman, with an air of indifference.

‘Oh, you quiz--I know what you were going to say.’

‘What?’ inquired Mr. Tupman, who had not precisely made up his mind to
say anything at all.

‘You were going to say that Isabel stoops--I know you were--you men are
such observers. Well, so she does; it can’t be denied; and, certainly,
if there is one thing more than another that makes a girl look ugly it
is stooping. I often tell her that when she gets a little older she’ll
be quite frightful. Well, you are a quiz!’

Mr. Tupman had no objection to earning the reputation at so cheap a
rate: so he looked very knowing, and smiled mysteriously.

‘What a sarcastic smile,’ said the admiring Rachael; ‘I declare I’m
quite afraid of you.’

‘Afraid of me!’

‘Oh, you can’t disguise anything from me--I know what that smile means
very well.’

‘What?’ said Mr. Tupman, who had not the slightest notion himself.

‘You mean,’ said the amiable aunt, sinking her voice still lower--‘you
mean, that you don’t think Isabella’s stooping is as bad as Emily’s
boldness. Well, she is bold! You cannot think how wretched it makes me
sometimes--I’m sure I cry about it for hours together--my dear brother
is _so_ good, and so unsuspicious, that he never sees it; if he did, I’m
quite certain it would break his heart. I wish I could think it was only
manner--I hope it may be--’ (Here the affectionate relative heaved a
deep sigh, and shook her head despondingly).

‘I’m sure aunt’s talking about us,’ whispered Miss Emily Wardle to her
sister--‘I’m quite certain of it--she looks so malicious.’

‘Is she?’ replied Isabella.--‘Hem! aunt, dear!’

‘Yes, my dear love!’

‘I’m _so_ afraid you’ll catch cold, aunt--have a silk handkerchief to
tie round your dear old head--you really should take care of yourself--
consider your age!’

However well deserved this piece of retaliation might have been, it was
as vindictive a one as could well have been resorted to. There is no
guessing in what form of reply the aunt’s indignation would have vented
itself, had not Mr. Wardle unconsciously changed the subject, by calling
emphatically for Joe.

‘Damn that boy,’ said the old gentleman, ‘he’s gone to sleep again.’

‘Very extraordinary boy, that,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘does he always sleep
in this way?’

‘Sleep!’ said the old gentleman, ‘he’s always asleep. Goes on errands
fast asleep, and snores as he waits at table.’

‘How very odd!’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Ah! odd indeed,’ returned the old gentleman; ‘I’m proud of that boy--
wouldn’t part with him on any account--he’s a natural curiosity! Here,
Joe--Joe--take these things away, and open another bottle--d’ye hear?’

The fat boy rose, opened his eyes, swallowed the huge piece of pie he
had been in the act of masticating when he last fell asleep, and slowly
obeyed his master’s orders--gloating languidly over the remains of the
feast, as he removed the plates, and deposited them in the hamper. The
fresh bottle was produced, and speedily emptied: the hamper was made
fast in its old place--the fat boy once more mounted the box--the
spectacles and pocket-glass were again adjusted--and the evolutions of
the military recommenced. There was a great fizzing and banging of guns,
and starting of ladies--and then a mine was sprung, to the gratification
of everybody--and when the mine had gone off, the military and the
company followed its example, and went off too.

‘Now, mind,’ said the old gentleman, as he shook hands with Mr. Pickwick
at the conclusion of a conversation which had been carried on at
intervals, during the conclusion of the proceedings, ‘we shall see you
all to-morrow.’

‘Most certainly,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘You have got the address?’

‘Manor Farm, Dingley Dell,’ said Mr. Pickwick, consulting his pocket-
book.

‘That’s it,’ said the old gentleman. ‘I don’t let you off, mind, under a
week; and undertake that you shall see everything worth seeing. If
you’ve come down for a country life, come to me, and I’ll give you
plenty of it. Joe--damn that boy, he’s gone to sleep again--Joe, help
Tom put in the horses.’

The horses were put in--the driver mounted--the fat boy clambered up by
his side--farewells were exchanged--and the carriage rattled off. As the
Pickwickians turned round to take a last glimpse of it, the setting sun
cast a rich glow on the faces of their entertainers, and fell upon the
form of the fat boy. His head was sunk upon his bosom; and he slumbered
again.



CHAPTER V. A SHORT ONE--SHOWING, AMONG OTHER MATTERS, HOW Mr. PICKWICK
UNDERTOOK TO DRIVE, AND MR. WINKLE TO RIDE, AND HOW THEY BOTH DID IT

Bright and pleasant was the sky, balmy the air, and beautiful the
appearance of every object around, as Mr. Pickwick leaned over the
balustrades of Rochester Bridge, contemplating nature, and waiting for
breakfast. The scene was indeed one which might well have charmed a far
less reflective mind, than that to which it was presented.

On the left of the spectator lay the ruined wall, broken in many places,
and in some, overhanging the narrow beach below in rude and heavy
masses. Huge knots of seaweed hung upon the jagged and pointed stones,
trembling in every breath of wind; and the green ivy clung mournfully
round the dark and ruined battlements. Behind it rose the ancient
castle, its towers roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but
telling us proudly of its old might and strength, as when, seven hundred
years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise
of feasting and revelry. On either side, the banks of the Medway,
covered with cornfields and pastures, with here and there a windmill, or
a distant church, stretched away as far as the eye could see, presenting
a rich and varied landscape, rendered more beautiful by the changing
shadows which passed swiftly across it as the thin and half-formed
clouds skimmed away in the light of the morning sun. The river,
reflecting the clear blue of the sky, glistened and sparkled as it
flowed noiselessly on; and the oars of the fishermen dipped into the
water with a clear and liquid sound, as their heavy but picturesque
boats glided slowly down the stream.

Mr. Pickwick was roused from the agreeable reverie into which he had
been led by the objects before him, by a deep sigh, and a touch on his
shoulder. He turned round: and the dismal man was at his side.

‘Contemplating the scene?’ inquired the dismal man.

‘I was,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘And congratulating yourself on being up so soon?’

Mr. Pickwick nodded assent.

‘Ah! people need to rise early, to see the sun in all his splendour, for
his brightness seldom lasts the day through. The morning of day and the
morning of life are but too much alike.’

‘You speak truly, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘How common the saying,’ continued the dismal man, ‘“The morning’s too
fine to last.” How well might it be applied to our everyday existence.
God! what would I forfeit to have the days of my childhood restored, or
to be able to forget them for ever!’

‘You have seen much trouble, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick compassionately.

‘I have,’ said the dismal man hurriedly; ‘I have. More than those who
see me now would believe possible.’ He paused for an instant, and then
said abruptly--

‘Did it ever strike you, on such a morning as this, that drowning would
be happiness and peace?’

‘God bless me, no!’ replied Mr. Pickwick, edging a little from the
balustrade, as the possibility of the dismal man’s tipping him over, by
way of experiment, occurred to him rather forcibly.

‘I have thought so, often,’ said the dismal man, without noticing the
action. ‘The calm, cool water seems to me to murmur an invitation to
repose and rest. A bound, a splash, a brief struggle; there is an eddy
for an instant, it gradually subsides into a gentle ripple; the waters
have closed above your head, and the world has closed upon your miseries
and misfortunes for ever.’ The sunken eye of the dismal man flashed
brightly as he spoke, but the momentary excitement quickly subsided; and
he turned calmly away, as he said--

‘There--enough of that. I wish to see you on another subject. You
invited me to read that paper, the night before last, and listened
attentively while I did so.’

‘I did,’ replied Mr. Pickwick; ‘and I certainly thought--’

‘I asked for no opinion,’ said the dismal man, interrupting him, ‘and I
want none. You are travelling for amusement and instruction. Suppose I
forward you a curious manuscript--observe, not curious because wild or
improbable, but curious as a leaf from the romance of real life--would
you communicate it to the club, of which you have spoken so frequently?’

‘Certainly,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, ‘if you wished it; and it would be
entered on their transactions.’

‘You shall have it,’ replied the dismal man. ‘Your address;’ and, Mr.
Pickwick having communicated their probable route, the dismal man
carefully noted it down in a greasy pocket-book, and, resisting Mr.
Pickwick’s pressing invitation to breakfast, left that gentleman at his
inn, and walked slowly away.

Mr. Pickwick found that his three companions had risen, and were waiting
his arrival to commence breakfast, which was ready laid in tempting
display. They sat down to the meal; and broiled ham, eggs, tea, coffee
and sundries, began to disappear with a rapidity which at once bore
testimony to the excellence of the fare, and the appetites of its
consumers.

‘Now, about Manor Farm,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘How shall we go?’

‘We had better consult the waiter, perhaps,’ said Mr. Tupman; and the
waiter was summoned accordingly.

‘Dingley Dell, gentlemen--fifteen miles, gentlemen--cross road--post-
chaise, sir?’

‘Post-chaise won’t hold more than two,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘True, sir--beg your pardon, sir.--Very nice four-wheel chaise, sir--
seat for two behind--one in front for the gentleman that drives--oh! beg
your pardon, sir--that’ll only hold three.’

‘What’s to be done?’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘Perhaps one of the gentlemen would like to ride, sir?’ suggested the
waiter, looking towards Mr. Winkle; ‘very good saddle-horses, sir--any
of Mr. Wardle’s men coming to Rochester, bring ‘em back, Sir.’

‘The very thing,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Winkle, will you go on horseback?’

Now Mr. Winkle did entertain considerable misgivings in the very lowest
recesses of his own heart, relative to his equestrian skill; but, as he
would not have them even suspected, on any account, he at once replied
with great hardihood, ‘Certainly. I should enjoy it of all things.’

Mr. Winkle had rushed upon his fate; there was no resource.

‘Let them be at the door by eleven,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Very well, sir,’ replied the waiter.

The waiter retired; the breakfast concluded; and the travellers ascended
to their respective bedrooms, to prepare a change of clothing, to take
with them on their approaching expedition.

Mr. Pickwick had made his preliminary arrangements, and was looking over
the coffee-room blinds at the passengers in the street, when the waiter
entered, and announced that the chaise was ready--an announcement which
the vehicle itself confirmed, by forthwith appearing before the coffee-
room blinds aforesaid.

It was a curious little green box on four wheels, with a low place like
a wine-bin for two behind, and an elevated perch for one in front, drawn
by an immense brown horse, displaying great symmetry of bone. An hostler
stood near, holding by the bridle another immense horse--apparently a
near relative of the animal in the chaise--ready saddled for Mr. Winkle.

‘Bless my soul!’ said Mr. Pickwick, as they stood upon the pavement
while the coats were being put in. ‘Bless my soul! who’s to drive? I
never thought of that.’

‘Oh! you, of course,’ said Mr. Tupman.

‘Of course,’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘I!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘Not the slightest fear, Sir,’ interposed the hostler. ‘Warrant him
quiet, Sir; a hinfant in arms might drive him.’

‘He don’t shy, does he?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Shy, sir?-he wouldn’t shy if he was to meet a vagin-load of monkeys
with their tails burned off.’

The last recommendation was indisputable. Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass
got into the bin; Mr. Pickwick ascended to his perch, and deposited his
feet on a floor-clothed shelf, erected beneath it for that purpose.

‘Now, shiny Villiam,’ said the hostler to the deputy hostler, ‘give the
gen’lm’n the ribbons.’

Shiny Villiam’--so called, probably, from his sleek hair and oily
countenance--placed the reins in Mr. Pickwick’s left hand; and the upper
hostler thrust a whip into his right.

‘Wo-o!’ cried Mr. Pickwick, as the tall quadruped evinced a decided
inclination to back into the coffee-room window.

‘Wo-o!’ echoed Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass, from the bin.

‘Only his playfulness, gen’lm’n,’ said the head hostler encouragingly;
‘jist kitch hold on him, Villiam.’ The deputy restrained the animal’s
impetuosity, and the principal ran to assist Mr. Winkle in mounting.

‘T’other side, sir, if you please.’

‘Blowed if the gen’lm’n worn’t a-gettin’ up on the wrong side,’
whispered a grinning post-boy to the inexpressibly gratified waiter.

Mr. Winkle, thus instructed, climbed into his saddle, with about as much
difficulty as he would have experienced in getting up the side of a
first-rate man-of-war.

‘All right?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, with an inward presentiment that it
was all wrong.

‘All right,’ replied Mr. Winkle faintly.

‘Let ‘em go,’ cried the hostler.--‘Hold him in, sir;’ and away went the
chaise, and the saddle-horse, with Mr. Pickwick on the box of the one,
and Mr. Winkle on the back of the other, to the delight and
gratification of the whole inn-yard.

‘What makes him go sideways?’ said Mr. Snodgrass in the bin, to Mr.
Winkle in the saddle.

‘I can’t imagine,’ replied Mr. Winkle. His horse was drifting up the
street in the most mysterious manner--side first, with his head towards
one side of the way, and his tail towards the other.

Mr. Pickwick had no leisure to observe either this or any other
particular, the whole of his faculties being concentrated in the
management of the animal attached to the chaise, who displayed various
peculiarities, highly interesting to a bystander, but by no means
equally amusing to any one seated behind him. Besides constantly jerking
his head up, in a very unpleasant and uncomfortable manner, and tugging
at the reins to an extent which rendered it a matter of great difficulty
for Mr. Pickwick to hold them, he had a singular propensity for darting
suddenly every now and then to the side of the road, then stopping
short, and then rushing forward for some minutes, at a speed which it
was wholly impossible to control.

‘What _can_ he mean by this?’ said Mr. Snodgrass, when the horse had
executed this manoeuvre for the twentieth time.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Mr. Tupman; ‘it looks very like shying, don’t
it?’ Mr. Snodgrass was about to reply, when he was interrupted by a
shout from Mr. Pickwick.

‘Woo!’ said that gentleman; ‘I have dropped my whip.’

‘Winkle,’ said Mr. Snodgrass, as the equestrian came trotting up on the
tall horse, with his hat over his ears, and shaking all over, as if he
would shake to pieces, with the violence of the exercise, ‘pick up the
whip, there’s a good fellow.’ Mr. Winkle pulled at the bridle of the
tall horse till he was black in the face; and having at length succeeded
in stopping him, dismounted, handed the whip to Mr. Pickwick, and
grasping the reins, prepared to remount.


Now whether the tall horse, in the natural playfulness of his
disposition, was desirous of having a little innocent recreation with
Mr. Winkle, or whether it occurred to him that he could perform the
journey as much to his own satisfaction without a rider as with one, are
points upon which, of course, we can arrive at no definite and distinct
conclusion. By whatever motives the animal was actuated, certain it is
that Mr. Winkle had no sooner touched the reins, than he slipped them
over his head, and darted backwards to their full length.

‘Poor fellow,’ said Mr. Winkle soothingly--‘poor fellow--good old
horse.’ The ‘poor fellow’ was proof against flattery; the more Mr.
Winkle tried to get nearer him, the more he sidled away; and,
notwithstanding all kinds of coaxing and wheedling, there were Mr.
Winkle and the horse going round and round each other for ten minutes,
at the end of which time each was at precisely the same distance from
the other as when they first commenced--an unsatisfactory sort of thing
under any circumstances, but particularly so in a lonely road, where no
assistance can be procured.

‘What am I to do?’ shouted Mr. Winkle, after the dodging had been
prolonged for a considerable time. ‘What am I to do? I can’t get on
him.’

‘You had better lead him till we come to a turnpike,’ replied Mr.
Pickwick from the chaise.

‘But he won’t come!’ roared Mr. Winkle. ‘Do come and hold him.’

Mr. Pickwick was the very personation of kindness and humanity: he threw
the reins on the horse’s back, and having descended from his seat,
carefully drew the chaise into the hedge, lest anything should come
along the road, and stepped back to the assistance of his distressed
companion, leaving Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass in the vehicle.

The horse no sooner beheld Mr. Pickwick advancing towards him with the
chaise whip in his hand, than he exchanged the rotary motion in which he
had previously indulged, for a retrograde movement of so very determined
a character, that it at once drew Mr. Winkle, who was still at the end
of the bridle, at a rather quicker rate than fast walking, in the
direction from which they had just come. Mr. Pickwick ran to his
assistance, but the faster Mr. Pickwick ran forward, the faster the
horse ran backward. There was a great scraping of feet, and kicking up
of the dust; and at last Mr. Winkle, his arms being nearly pulled out of
their sockets, fairly let go his hold. The horse paused, stared, shook
his head, turned round, and quietly trotted home to Rochester, leaving
Mr. Winkle and Mr. Pickwick gazing on each other with countenances of
blank dismay. A rattling noise at a little distance attracted their
attention. They looked up.

‘Bless my soul!’ exclaimed the agonised Mr. Pickwick; ‘there’s the other
horse running away!’

It was but too true. The animal was startled by the noise, and the reins
were on his back. The results may be guessed. He tore off with the four-
wheeled chaise behind him, and Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass in the four-
wheeled chaise. The heat was a short one. Mr. Tupman threw himself into
the hedge, Mr. Snodgrass followed his example, the horse dashed the
four--wheeled chaise against a wooden bridge, separated the wheels from
the body, and the bin from the perch; and finally stood stock still to
gaze upon the ruin he had made.

The first care of the two unspilt friends was to extricate their
unfortunate companions from their bed of quickset--a process which gave
them the unspeakable satisfaction of discovering that they had sustained
no injury, beyond sundry rents in their garments, and various
lacerations from the brambles. The next thing to be done was to
unharness the horse. This complicated process having been effected, the
party walked slowly forward, leading the horse among them, and
abandoning the chaise to its fate.

An hour’s walk brought the travellers to a little road-side public-
house, with two elm-trees, a horse trough, and a signpost, in front; one
or two deformed hay-ricks behind, a kitchen garden at the side, and
rotten sheds and mouldering outhouses jumbled in strange confusion all
about it. A red-headed man was working in the garden; and to him Mr.
Pickwick called lustily, ‘Hollo there!’

The red-headed man raised his body, shaded his eyes with his hand, and
stared, long and coolly, at Mr. Pickwick and his companions.

‘Hollo there!’ repeated Mr. Pickwick.

‘Hollo!’ was the red-headed man’s reply.

‘How far is it to Dingley Dell?’

‘Better er seven mile.’

‘Is it a good road?’

‘No, ‘tain’t.’ Having uttered this brief reply, and apparently satisfied
himself with another scrutiny, the red-headed man resumed his work. ‘We
want to put this horse up here,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘I suppose we can,
can’t we?’

Want to put that ere horse up, do ee?’ repeated the red-headed man,
leaning on his spade.

‘Of course,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, who had by this time advanced, horse
in hand, to the garden rails.

‘Missus’--roared the man with the red head, emerging from the garden,
and looking very hard at the horse--‘missus!’

A tall, bony woman--straight all the way down--in a coarse, blue
pelisse, with the waist an inch or two below her arm-pits, responded to
the call.

‘Can we put this horse up here, my good woman?’ said Mr. Tupman,
advancing, and speaking in his most seductive tones. The woman looked
very hard at the whole party; and the red-headed man whispered something
in her ear.

‘No,’ replied the woman, after a little consideration, ‘I’m afeerd on
it.’

‘Afraid!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, ‘what’s the woman afraid of?’

‘It got us in trouble last time,’ said the woman, turning into the
house; ‘I woan’t have nothin’ to say to ‘un.’

‘Most extraordinary thing I have ever met with in my life,’ said the
astonished Mr. Pickwick.

‘I--I--really believe,’ whispered Mr. Winkle, as his friends gathered
round him, ‘that they think we have come by this horse in some dishonest
manner.’

‘What!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, in a storm of indignation. Mr. Winkle
modestly repeated his suggestion.

‘Hollo, you fellow,’ said the angry Mr. Pickwick, ‘do you think we stole
the horse?’

‘I’m sure ye did,’ replied the red-headed man, with a grin which
agitated his countenance from one auricular organ to the other. Saying
which he turned into the house and banged the door after him.

‘It’s like a dream,’ ejaculated Mr. Pickwick, ‘a hideous dream. The idea
of a man’s walking about all day with a dreadful horse that he can’t get
rid of!’ The depressed Pickwickians turned moodily away, with the tall
quadruped, for which they all felt the most unmitigated disgust,
following slowly at their heels.

It was late in the afternoon when the four friends and their four-footed
companion turned into the lane leading to Manor Farm; and even when they
were so near their place of destination, the pleasure they would
otherwise have experienced was materially damped as they reflected on
the singularity of their appearance, and the absurdity of their
situation. Torn clothes, lacerated faces, dusty shoes, exhausted looks,
and, above all, the horse. Oh, how Mr. Pickwick cursed that horse: he
had eyed the noble animal from time to time with looks expressive of
hatred and revenge; more than once he had calculated the probable amount
of the expense he would incur by cutting his throat; and now the
temptation to destroy him, or to cast him loose upon the world, rushed
upon his mind with tenfold force. He was roused from a meditation on
these dire imaginings by the sudden appearance of two figures at a turn
of the lane. It was Mr. Wardle, and his faithful attendant, the fat boy.

‘Why, where have you been?’ said the hospitable old gentleman; ‘I’ve
been waiting for you all day. Well, you _do_ look tired. What!
Scratches! Not hurt, I hope--eh? Well, I _am_ glad to hear that--very.
So you’ve been spilt, eh? Never mind. Common accident in these parts.
Joe--he’s asleep again!--Joe, take that horse from the gentlemen, and
lead it into the stable.’

The fat boy sauntered heavily behind them with the animal; and the old
gentleman, condoling with his guests in homely phrase on so much of the
day’s adventures as they thought proper to communicate, led the way to
the kitchen.

‘We’ll have you put to rights here,’ said the old gentleman, ‘and then
I’ll introduce you to the people in the parlour. Emma, bring out the
cherry brandy; now, Jane, a needle and thread here; towels and water,
Mary. Come, girls, bustle about.’

Three or four buxom girls speedily dispersed in search of the different
articles in requisition, while a couple of large-headed, circular-
visaged males rose from their seats in the chimney-corner (for although
it was a May evening their attachment to the wood fire appeared as
cordial as if it were Christmas), and dived into some obscure recesses,
from which they speedily produced a bottle of blacking, and some half-
dozen brushes.

‘Bustle!’ said the old gentleman again, but the admonition was quite
unnecessary, for one of the girls poured out the cherry brandy, and
another brought in the towels, and one of the men suddenly seizing Mr.
Pickwick by the leg, at imminent hazard of throwing him off his balance,
brushed away at his boot till his corns were red-hot; while the other
shampooed Mr. Winkle with a heavy clothes-brush, indulging, during the
operation, in that hissing sound which hostlers are wont to produce when
engaged in rubbing down a horse.

Mr. Snodgrass, having concluded his ablutions, took a survey of the
room, while standing with his back to the fire, sipping his cherry
brandy with heartfelt satisfaction. He describes it as a large
apartment, with a red brick floor and a capacious chimney; the ceiling
garnished with hams, sides of bacon, and ropes of onions. The walls were
decorated with several hunting-whips, two or three bridles, a saddle,
and an old rusty blunderbuss, with an inscription below it, intimating
that it was ‘Loaded’--as it had been, on the same authority, for half a
century at least. An old eight-day clock, of solemn and sedate
demeanour, ticked gravely in one corner; and a silver watch, of equal
antiquity, dangled from one of the many hooks which ornamented the
dresser.

‘Ready?’ said the old gentleman inquiringly, when his guests had been
washed, mended, brushed, and brandied.

‘Quite,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Come along, then;’ and the party having traversed several dark
passages, and being joined by Mr. Tupman, who had lingered behind to
snatch a kiss from Emma, for which he had been duly rewarded with sundry
pushings and scratchings, arrived at the parlour door.

‘Welcome,’ said their hospitable host, throwing it open and stepping
forward to announce them, ‘welcome, gentlemen, to Manor Farm.’



CHAPTER VI. AN OLD-FASHIONED CARD-PARTY--THE CLERGYMAN’S VERSES--THE
STORY OF THE CONVICT’S RETURN

Several guests who were assembled in the old parlour rose to greet Mr.
Pickwick and his friends upon their entrance; and during the performance
of the ceremony of introduction, with all due formalities, Mr. Pickwick
had leisure to observe the appearance, and speculate upon the characters
and pursuits, of the persons by whom he was surrounded--a habit in which
he, in common with many other great men, delighted to indulge.

A very old lady, in a lofty cap and faded silk gown--no less a personage
than Mr. Wardle’s mother--occupied the post of honour on the right-hand
corner of the chimney-piece; and various certificates of her having been
brought up in the way she should go when young, and of her not having
departed from it when old, ornamented the walls, in the form of samplers
of ancient date, worsted landscapes of equal antiquity, and crimson silk
tea-kettle holders of a more modern period. The aunt, the two young
ladies, and Mr. Wardle, each vying with the other in paying zealous and
unremitting attentions to the old lady, crowded round her easy-chair,
one holding her ear-trumpet, another an orange, and a third a smelling-
bottle, while a fourth was busily engaged in patting and punching the
pillows which were arranged for her support. On the opposite side sat a
bald-headed old gentleman, with a good-humoured, benevolent face--the
clergyman of Dingley Dell; and next him sat his wife, a stout, blooming
old lady, who looked as if she were well skilled, not only in the art
and mystery of manufacturing home-made cordials greatly to other
people’s satisfaction, but of tasting them occasionally very much to her
own. A little hard-headed, Ripstone pippin-faced man, was conversing
with a fat old gentleman in one corner; and two or three more old
gentlemen, and two or three more old ladies, sat bolt upright and
motionless on their chairs, staring very hard at Mr. Pickwick and his
fellow-voyagers.

‘Mr. Pickwick, mother,’ said Mr. Wardle, at the very top of his voice.

‘Ah!’ said the old lady, shaking her head; ‘I can’t hear you.’

‘Mr. Pickwick, grandma!’ screamed both the young ladies together.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed the old lady. ‘Well, it don’t much matter. He don’t care
for an old ‘ooman like me, I dare say.’

‘I assure you, ma’am,’ said Mr. Pickwick, grasping the old lady’s hand,
and speaking so loud that the exertion imparted a crimson hue to his
benevolent countenance--‘I assure you, ma’am, that nothing delights me
more than to see a lady of your time of life heading so fine a family,
and looking so young and well.’

‘Ah!’ said the old lady, after a short pause: ‘it’s all very fine, I
dare say; but I can’t hear him.’

‘Grandma’s rather put out now,’ said Miss Isabella Wardle, in a low
tone; ‘but she’ll talk to you presently.’

Mr. Pickwick nodded his readiness to humour the infirmities of age, and
entered into a general conversation with the other members of the
circle.

‘Delightful situation this,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Delightful!’ echoed Messrs. Snodgrass, Tupman, and Winkle.

‘Well, I think it is,’ said Mr. Wardle.

‘There ain’t a better spot o’ ground in all Kent, sir,’ said the hard-
headed man with the pippin--face; ‘there ain’t indeed, sir--I’m sure
there ain’t, Sir.’ The hard-headed man looked triumphantly round, as if
he had been very much contradicted by somebody, but had got the better
of him at last.

‘There ain’t a better spot o’ ground in all Kent,’ said the hard-headed
man again, after a pause.

‘’Cept Mullins’s Meadows,’ observed the fat man solemnly.

‘Mullins’s Meadows!’ ejaculated the other, with profound contempt.

‘Ah, Mullins’s Meadows,’ repeated the fat man.

‘Reg’lar good land that,’ interposed another fat man.

‘And so it is, sure-ly,’ said a third fat man.

‘Everybody knows that,’ said the corpulent host.

The hard-headed man looked dubiously round, but finding himself in a
minority, assumed a compassionate air and said no more.

‘What are they talking about?’ inquired the old lady of one of her
granddaughters, in a very audible voice; for, like many deaf people, she
never seemed to calculate on the possibility of other persons hearing
what she said herself.

‘About the land, grandma.’

‘What about the land?--Nothing the matter, is there?’

‘No, no. Mr. Miller was saying our land was better than Mullins’s
Meadows.’

‘How should he know anything about it?’ inquired the old lady
indignantly. ‘Miller’s a conceited coxcomb, and you may tell him I said
so.’ Saying which, the old lady, quite unconscious that she had spoken
above a whisper, drew herself up, and looked carving-knives at the hard-
headed delinquent.

‘Come, come,’ said the bustling host, with a natural anxiety to change
the conversation, ‘what say you to a rubber, Mr. Pickwick?’

‘I should like it of all things,’ replied that gentleman; ‘but pray
don’t make up one on my account.’

‘Oh, I assure you, mother’s very fond of a rubber,’ said Mr. Wardle;
‘ain’t you, mother?’

The old lady, who was much less deaf on this subject than on any other,
replied in the affirmative.

‘Joe, Joe!’ said the gentleman; ‘Joe--damn that--oh, here he is; put out
the card-tables.’

The lethargic youth contrived without any additional rousing to set out
two card-tables; the one for Pope Joan, and the other for whist. The
whist-players were Mr. Pickwick and the old lady, Mr. Miller and the fat
gentleman. The round game comprised the rest of the company.

The rubber was conducted with all that gravity of deportment and
sedateness of demeanour which befit the pursuit entitled ‘whist’--a
solemn observance, to which, as it appears to us, the title of ‘game’
has been very irreverently and ignominiously applied. The round-game
table, on the other hand, was so boisterously merry as materially to
interrupt the contemplations of Mr. Miller, who, not being quite so much
absorbed as he ought to have been, contrived to commit various high
crimes and misdemeanours, which excited the wrath of the fat gentleman
to a very great extent, and called forth the good-humour of the old lady
in a proportionate degree.

‘There!’ said the criminal Miller triumphantly, as he took up the odd
trick at the conclusion of a hand; ‘that could not have been played
better, I flatter myself; impossible to have made another trick!’

‘Miller ought to have trumped the diamond, oughtn’t he, Sir?’ said the
old lady.

Mr. Pickwick nodded assent.

‘Ought I, though?’ said the unfortunate, with a doubtful appeal to his
partner.

‘You ought, Sir,’ said the fat gentleman, in an awful voice.

‘Very sorry,’ said the crestfallen Miller.

‘Much use that,’ growled the fat gentleman.

‘Two by honours--makes us eight,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Another hand. ‘Can you one?’ inquired the old lady.

‘I can,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘Double, single, and the rub.’

‘Never was such luck,’ said Mr. Miller.

‘Never was such cards,’ said the fat gentleman.

A solemn silence; Mr. Pickwick humorous, the old lady serious, the fat
gentleman captious, and Mr. Miller timorous.

‘Another double,’ said the old lady, triumphantly making a memorandum of
the circumstance, by placing one sixpence and a battered halfpenny under
the candlestick.

‘A double, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Quite aware of the fact, Sir,’ replied the fat gentleman sharply.

Another game, with a similar result, was followed by a revoke from the
unlucky Miller; on which the fat gentleman burst into a state of high
personal excitement which lasted until the conclusion of the game, when
he retired into a corner, and remained perfectly mute for one hour and
twenty-seven minutes; at the end of which time he emerged from his
retirement, and offered Mr. Pickwick a pinch of snuff with the air of a
man who had made up his mind to a Christian forgiveness of injuries
sustained. The old lady’s hearing decidedly improved and the unlucky
Miller felt as much out of his element as a dolphin in a sentry-box.

Meanwhile the round game proceeded right merrily. Isabella Wardle and
Mr. Trundle ‘went partners,’ and Emily Wardle and Mr. Snodgrass did the
same; and even Mr. Tupman and the spinster aunt established a joint-
stock company of fish and flattery. Old Mr. Wardle was in the very
height of his jollity; and he was so funny in his management of the
board, and the old ladies were so sharp after their winnings, that the
whole table was in a perpetual roar of merriment and laughter. There was
one old lady who always had about half a dozen cards to pay for, at
which everybody laughed, regularly every round; and when the old lady
looked cross at having to pay, they laughed louder than ever; on which
the old lady’s face gradually brightened up, till at last she laughed
louder than any of them, Then, when the spinster aunt got ‘matrimony,’
the young ladies laughed afresh, and the Spinster aunt seemed disposed
to be pettish; till, feeling Mr. Tupman squeezing her hand under the
table, she brightened up too, and looked rather knowing, as if matrimony
in reality were not quite so far off as some people thought for;
whereupon everybody laughed again, and especially old Mr. Wardle, who
enjoyed a joke as much as the youngest. As to Mr. Snodgrass, he did
nothing but whisper poetical sentiments into his partner’s ear, which
made one old gentleman facetiously sly, about partnerships at cards and
partnerships for life, and caused the aforesaid old gentleman to make
some remarks thereupon, accompanied with divers winks and chuckles,
which made the company very merry and the old gentleman’s wife
especially so. And Mr. Winkle came out with jokes which are very well
known in town, but are not all known in the country; and as everybody
laughed at them very heartily, and said they were very capital, Mr.
Winkle was in a state of great honour and glory. And the benevolent
clergyman looked pleasantly on; for the happy faces which surrounded the
table made the good old man feel happy too; and though the merriment was
rather boisterous, still it came from the heart and not from the lips;
and this is the right sort of merriment, after all.

The evening glided swiftly away, in these cheerful recreations; and when
the substantial though homely supper had been despatched, and the little
party formed a social circle round the fire, Mr. Pickwick thought he had
never felt so happy in his life, and at no time so much disposed to
enjoy, and make the most of, the passing moment.

‘Now this,’ said the hospitable host, who was sitting in great state
next the old lady’s arm-chair, with her hand fast clasped in his--‘this
is just what I like--the happiest moments of my life have been passed at
this old fireside; and I am so attached to it, that I keep up a blazing
fire here every evening, until it actually grows too hot to bear it.
Why, my poor old mother, here, used to sit before this fireplace upon
that little stool when she was a girl; didn’t you, mother?’

The tear which starts unbidden to the eye when the recollection of old
times and the happiness of many years ago is suddenly recalled, stole
down the old lady’s face as she shook her head with a melancholy smile.

‘You must excuse my talking about this old place, Mr. Pickwick,’ resumed
the host, after a short pause, ‘for I love it dearly, and know no other-
-the old houses and fields seem like living friends to me; and so does
our little church with the ivy, about which, by the bye, our excellent
friend there made a song when he first came amongst us. Mr. Snodgrass,
have you anything in your glass?’

‘Plenty, thank you,’ replied that gentleman, whose poetic curiosity had
been greatly excited by the last observation of his entertainer. ‘I beg
your pardon, but you were talking about the song of the Ivy.’

‘You must ask our friend opposite about that,’ said the host knowingly,
indicating the clergyman by a nod of his head.

‘May I say that I should like to hear you repeat it, sir?’ said Mr.
Snodgrass.

‘Why, really,’ replied the clergyman, ‘it’s a very slight affair; and
the only excuse I have for having ever perpetrated it is, that I was a
young man at the time. Such as it is, however, you shall hear it, if you
wish.’

A murmur of curiosity was of course the reply; and the old gentleman
proceeded to recite, with the aid of sundry promptings from his wife,
the lines in question. ‘I call them,’ said he,


THE IVY GREEN

Oh, a dainty plant is the Ivy green, That creepeth o’er ruins old! Of
right choice food are his meals, I ween, In his cell so lone and cold.
The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed, To pleasure his dainty
whim; And the mouldering dust that years have made, Is a merry meal for
him. Creeping where no life is seen, A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings, And a staunch old heart
has he. How closely he twineth, how tight he clings To his friend the
huge Oak Tree! And slily he traileth along the ground, And his leaves he
gently waves, As he joyously hugs and crawleth round The rich mould of
dead men’s graves. Creeping where grim death has been, A rare old plant
is the Ivy green.

Whole ages have fled and their works decayed, And nations have scattered
been; But the stout old Ivy shall never fade, From its hale and hearty
green. The brave old plant in its lonely days, Shall fatten upon the
past; For the stateliest building man can raise, Is the Ivy’s food at
last. Creeping on where time has been, A rare old plant is the Ivy
green.



While the old gentleman repeated these lines a second time, to enable
Mr. Snodgrass to note them down, Mr. Pickwick perused the lineaments of
his face with an expression of great interest. The old gentleman having
concluded his dictation, and Mr. Snodgrass having returned his note-book
to his pocket, Mr. Pickwick said--

‘Excuse me, sir, for making the remark on so short an acquaintance; but
a gentleman like yourself cannot fail, I should think, to have observed
many scenes and incidents worth recording, in the course of your
experience as a minister of the Gospel.’

‘I have witnessed some certainly,’ replied the old gentleman, ‘but the
incidents and characters have been of a homely and ordinary nature, my
sphere of action being so very limited.’

‘You did make some notes, I think, about John Edmunds, did you not?’
inquired Mr. Wardle, who appeared very desirous to draw his friend out,
for the edification of his new visitors.

The old gentleman slightly nodded his head in token of assent, and was
proceeding to change the subject, when Mr. Pickwick said--

‘I beg your pardon, sir, but pray, if I may venture to inquire, who was
John Edmunds?’

‘The very thing I was about to ask,’ said Mr. Snodgrass eagerly.

‘You are fairly in for it,’ said the jolly host. ‘You must satisfy the
curiosity of these gentlemen, sooner or later; so you had better take
advantage of this favourable opportunity, and do so at once.’

The old gentleman smiled good-humouredly as he drew his chair forward--
the remainder of the party drew their chairs closer together, especially
Mr. Tupman and the spinster aunt, who were possibly rather hard of
hearing; and the old lady’s ear-trumpet having been duly adjusted, and
Mr. Miller (who had fallen asleep during the recital of the verses)
roused from his slumbers by an admonitory pinch, administered beneath
the table by his ex-partner the solemn fat man, the old gentleman,
without further preface, commenced the following tale, to which we have
taken the liberty of prefixing the title of


THE CONVICT’S RETURN

‘When I first settled in this village,’ said the old gentleman, ‘which
is now just five-and-twenty years ago, the most notorious person among
my parishioners was a man of the name of Edmunds, who leased a small
farm near this spot. He was a morose, savage-hearted, bad man; idle and
dissolute in his habits; cruel and ferocious in his disposition. Beyond
the few lazy and reckless vagabonds with whom he sauntered away his time
in the fields, or sotted in the ale-house, he had not a single friend or
acquaintance; no one cared to speak to the man whom many feared, and
every one detested--and Edmunds was shunned by all.

‘This man had a wife and one son, who, when I first came here, was about
twelve years old. Of the acuteness of that woman’s sufferings, of the
gentle and enduring manner in which she bore them, of the agony of
solicitude with which she reared that boy, no one can form an adequate
conception. Heaven forgive me the supposition, if it be an uncharitable
one, but I do firmly and in my soul believe, that the man systematically
tried for many years to break her heart; but she bore it all for her
child’s sake, and, however strange it may seem to many, for his father’s
too; for brute as he was, and cruelly as he had treated her, she had
loved him once; and the recollection of what he had been to her,
awakened feelings of forbearance and meekness under suffering in her
bosom, to which all God’s creatures, but women, are strangers.

‘They were poor--they could not be otherwise when the man pursued such
courses; but the woman’s unceasing and unwearied exertions, early and
late, morning, noon, and night, kept them above actual want. These
exertions were but ill repaid. People who passed the spot in the
evening--sometimes at a late hour of the night--reported that they had
heard the moans and sobs of a woman in distress, and the sound of blows;
and more than once, when it was past midnight, the boy knocked softly at
the door of a neighbour’s house, whither he had been sent, to escape the
drunken fury of his unnatural father.

‘During the whole of this time, and when the poor creature often bore
about her marks of ill-usage and violence which she could not wholly
conceal, she was a constant attendant at our little church. Regularly
every Sunday, morning and afternoon, she occupied the same seat with the
boy at her side; and though they were both poorly dressed--much more so
than many of their neighbours who were in a lower station--they were
always neat and clean. Every one had a friendly nod and a kind word for
“poor Mrs. Edmunds”; and sometimes, when she stopped to exchange a few
words with a neighbour at the conclusion of the service in the little
row of elm-trees which leads to the church porch, or lingered behind to
gaze with a mother’s pride and fondness upon her healthy boy, as he
sported before her with some little companions, her careworn face would
lighten up with an expression of heartfelt gratitude; and she would
look, if not cheerful and happy, at least tranquil and contented.

‘Five or six years passed away; the boy had become a robust and well-
grown youth. The time that had strengthened the child’s slight frame and
knit his weak limbs into the strength of manhood had bowed his mother’s
form, and enfeebled her steps; but the arm that should have supported
her was no longer locked in hers; the face that should have cheered her,
no more looked upon her own. She occupied her old seat, but there was a
vacant one beside her. The Bible was kept as carefully as ever, the
places were found and folded down as they used to be: but there was no
one to read it with her; and the tears fell thick and fast upon the
book, and blotted the words from her eyes. Neighbours were as kind as
they were wont to be of old, but she shunned their greetings with
averted head. There was no lingering among the old elm-trees now--no
cheering anticipations of happiness yet in store. The desolate woman
drew her bonnet closer over her face, and walked hurriedly away.

‘Shall I tell you that the young man, who, looking back to the earliest
of his childhood’s days to which memory and consciousness extended, and
carrying his recollection down to that moment, could remember nothing
which was not in some way connected with a long series of voluntary
privations suffered by his mother for his sake, with ill-usage, and
insult, and violence, and all endured for him--shall I tell you, that
he, with a reckless disregard for her breaking heart, and a sullen,
wilful forgetfulness of all she had done and borne for him, had linked
himself with depraved and abandoned men, and was madly pursuing a
headlong career, which must bring death to him, and shame to her? Alas
for human nature! You have anticipated it long since.

‘The measure of the unhappy woman’s misery and misfortune was about to
be completed. Numerous offences had been committed in the neighbourhood;
the perpetrators remained undiscovered, and their boldness increased. A
robbery of a daring and aggravated nature occasioned a vigilance of
pursuit, and a strictness of search, they had not calculated on. Young
Edmunds was suspected, with three companions. He was apprehended--
committed--tried--condemned--to die.

‘The wild and piercing shriek from a woman’s voice, which resounded
through the court when the solemn sentence was pronounced, rings in my
ears at this moment. That cry struck a terror to the culprit’s heart,
which trial, condemnation--the approach of death itself, had failed to
awaken. The lips which had been compressed in dogged sullenness
throughout, quivered and parted involuntarily; the face turned ashy pale
as the cold perspiration broke forth from every pore; the sturdy limbs
of the felon trembled, and he staggered in the dock.

‘In the first transports of her mental anguish, the suffering mother
threw herself on her knees at my feet, and fervently sought the Almighty
Being who had hitherto supported her in all her troubles to release her
from a world of woe and misery, and to spare the life of her only child.
A burst of grief, and a violent struggle, such as I hope I may never
have to witness again, succeeded. I knew that her heart was breaking
from that hour; but I never once heard complaint or murmur escape her
lips.

‘It was a piteous spectacle to see that woman in the prison-yard from
day to day, eagerly and fervently attempting, by affection and entreaty,
to soften the hard heart of her obdurate son. It was in vain. He
remained moody, obstinate, and unmoved. Not even the unlooked-for
commutation of his sentence to transportation for fourteen years,
softened for an instant the sullen hardihood of his demeanour.

‘But the spirit of resignation and endurance that had so long upheld
her, was unable to contend against bodily weakness and infirmity. She
fell sick. She dragged her tottering limbs from the bed to visit her son
once more, but her strength failed her, and she sank powerless on the
ground.

‘And now the boasted coldness and indifference of the young man were
tested indeed; and the retribution that fell heavily upon him nearly
drove him mad. A day passed away and his mother was not there; another
flew by, and she came not near him; a third evening arrived, and yet he
had not seen her--, and in four-and-twenty hours he was to be separated
from her, perhaps for ever. Oh! how the long-forgotten thoughts of
former days rushed upon his mind, as he almost ran up and down the
narrow yard--as if intelligence would arrive the sooner for his
hurrying--and how bitterly a sense of his helplessness and desolation
rushed upon him, when he heard the truth! His mother, the only parent he
had ever known, lay ill--it might be, dying--within one mile of the
ground he stood on; were he free and unfettered, a few minutes would
place him by her side. He rushed to the gate, and grasping the iron
rails with the energy of desperation, shook it till it rang again, and
threw himself against the thick wall as if to force a passage through
the stone; but the strong building mocked his feeble efforts, and he
beat his hands together and wept like a child.

‘I bore the mother’s forgiveness and blessing to her son in prison; and
I carried the solemn assurance of repentance, and his fervent
supplication for pardon, to her sick-bed. I heard, with pity and
compassion, the repentant man devise a thousand little plans for her
comfort and support when he returned; but I knew that many months before
he could reach his place of destination, his mother would be no longer
of this world.

‘He was removed by night. A few weeks afterwards the poor woman’s soul
took its flight, I confidently hope, and solemnly believe, to a place of
eternal happiness and rest. I performed the burial service over her
remains. She lies in our little churchyard. There is no stone at her
grave’s head. Her sorrows were known to man; her virtues to God.

‘It had been arranged previously to the convict’s departure, that he
should write to his mother as soon as he could obtain permission, and
that the letter should be addressed to me. The father had positively
refused to see his son from the moment of his apprehension; and it was a
matter of indifference to him whether he lived or died. Many years
passed over without any intelligence of him; and when more than half his
term of transportation had expired, and I had received no letter, I
concluded him to be dead, as, indeed, I almost hoped he might be.

‘Edmunds, however, had been sent a considerable distance up the country
on his arrival at the settlement; and to this circumstance, perhaps, may
be attributed the fact, that though several letters were despatched,
none of them ever reached my hands. He remained in the same place during
the whole fourteen years. At the expiration of the term, steadily
adhering to his old resolution and the pledge he gave his mother, he
made his way back to England amidst innumerable difficulties, and
returned, on foot, to his native place.

‘On a fine Sunday evening, in the month of August, John Edmunds set foot
in the village he had left with shame and disgrace seventeen years
before. His nearest way lay through the churchyard. The man’s heart
swelled as he crossed the stile. The tall old elms, through whose
branches the declining sun cast here and there a rich ray of light upon
the shady part, awakened the associations of his earliest days. He
pictured himself as he was then, clinging to his mother’s hand, and
walking peacefully to church. He remembered how he used to look up into
her pale face; and how her eyes would sometimes fill with tears as she
gazed upon his features--tears which fell hot upon his forehead as she
stooped to kiss him, and made him weep too, although he little knew then
what bitter tears hers were. He thought how often he had run merrily
down that path with some childish playfellow, looking back, ever and
again, to catch his mother’s smile, or hear her gentle voice; and then a
veil seemed lifted from his memory, and words of kindness unrequited,
and warnings despised, and promises broken, thronged upon his
recollection till his heart failed him, and he could bear it no longer.

‘He entered the church. The evening service was concluded and the
congregation had dispersed, but it was not yet closed. His steps echoed
through the low building with a hollow sound, and he almost feared to be
alone, it was so still and quiet. He looked round him. Nothing was
changed. The place seemed smaller than it used to be; but there were the
old monuments on which he had gazed with childish awe a thousand times;
the little pulpit with its faded cushion; the Communion table before
which he had so often repeated the Commandments he had reverenced as a
child, and forgotten as a man. He approached the old seat; it looked
cold and desolate. The cushion had been removed, and the Bible was not
there. Perhaps his mother now occupied a poorer seat, or possibly she
had grown infirm and could not reach the church alone. He dared not
think of what he feared. A cold feeling crept over him, and he trembled
violently as he turned away. ‘An old man entered the porch just as he
reached it. Edmunds started back, for he knew him well; many a time he
had watched him digging graves in the churchyard. What would he say to
the returned convict?

‘The old man raised his eyes to the stranger’s face, bade him “good-
evening,” and walked slowly on. He had forgotten him.

‘He walked down the hill, and through the village. The weather was warm,
and the people were sitting at their doors, or strolling in their little
gardens as he passed, enjoying the serenity of the evening, and their
rest from labour. Many a look was turned towards him, and many a
doubtful glance he cast on either side to see whether any knew and
shunned him. There were strange faces in almost every house; in some he
recognised the burly form of some old schoolfellow--a boy when he last
saw him--surrounded by a troop of merry children; in others he saw,
seated in an easy-chair at a cottage door, a feeble and infirm old man,
whom he only remembered as a hale and hearty labourer; but they had all
forgotten him, and he passed on unknown.

‘The last soft light of the setting sun had fallen on the earth, casting
a rich glow on the yellow corn sheaves, and lengthening the shadows of
the orchard trees, as he stood before the old house--the home of his
infancy--to which his heart had yearned with an intensity of affection
not to be described, through long and weary years of captivity and
sorrow. The paling was low, though he well remembered the time that it
had seemed a high wall to him; and he looked over into the old garden.
There were more seeds and gayer flowers than there used to be, but there
were the old trees still--the very tree under which he had lain a
thousand times when tired of playing in the sun, and felt the soft, mild
sleep of happy boyhood steal gently upon him. There were voices within
the house. He listened, but they fell strangely upon his ear; he knew
them not. They were merry too; and he well knew that his poor old mother
could not be cheerful, and he away. The door opened, and a group of
little children bounded out, shouting and romping. The father, with a
little boy in his arms, appeared at the door, and they crowded round
him, clapping their tiny hands, and dragging him out, to join their
joyous sports. The convict thought on the many times he had shrunk from
his father’s sight in that very place. He remembered how often he had
buried his trembling head beneath the bedclothes, and heard the harsh
word, and the hard stripe, and his mother’s wailing; and though the man
sobbed aloud with agony of mind as he left the spot, his fist was
clenched, and his teeth were set, in a fierce and deadly passion.

‘And such was the return to which he had looked through the weary
perspective of many years, and for which he had undergone so much
suffering! No face of welcome, no look of forgiveness, no house to
receive, no hand to help him--and this too in the old village. What was
his loneliness in the wild, thick woods, where man was never seen, to
this!

‘He felt that in the distant land of his bondage and infamy, he had
thought of his native place as it was when he left it; and not as it
would be when he returned. The sad reality struck coldly at his heart,
and his spirit sank within him. He had not courage to make inquiries, or
to present himself to the only person who was likely to receive him with
kindness and compassion. He walked slowly on; and shunning the roadside
like a guilty man, turned into a meadow he well remembered; and covering
his face with his hands, threw himself upon the grass.

‘He had not observed that a man was lying on the bank beside him; his
garments rustled as he turned round to steal a look at the new-comer;
and Edmunds raised his head.

‘The man had moved into a sitting posture. His body was much bent, and
his face was wrinkled and yellow. His dress denoted him an inmate of the
workhouse: he had the appearance of being very old, but it looked more
the effect of dissipation or disease, than the length of years. He was
staring hard at the stranger, and though his eyes were lustreless and
heavy at first, they appeared to glow with an unnatural and alarmed
expression after they had been fixed upon him for a short time, until
they seemed to be starting from their sockets. Edmunds gradually raised
himself to his knees, and looked more and more earnestly on the old
man’s face. They gazed upon each other in silence.

‘The old man was ghastly pale. He shuddered and tottered to his feet.
Edmunds sprang to his. He stepped back a pace or two. Edmunds advanced.

‘“Let me hear you speak,” said the convict, in a thick, broken voice.

‘“Stand off!” cried the old man, with a dreadful oath. The convict drew
closer to him.

‘“Stand off!” shrieked the old man. Furious with terror, he raised his
stick, and struck Edmunds a heavy blow across the face.

‘“Father--devil!” murmured the convict between his set teeth. He rushed
wildly forward, and clenched the old man by the throat--but he was his
father; and his arm fell powerless by his side.

‘The old man uttered a loud yell which rang through the lonely fields
like the howl of an evil spirit. His face turned black, the gore rushed
from his mouth and nose, and dyed the grass a deep, dark red, as he
staggered and fell. He had ruptured a blood-vessel, and he was a dead
man before his son could raise him.


‘In that corner of the churchyard,’ said the old gentleman, after a
silence of a few moments, ‘in that corner of the churchyard of which I
have before spoken, there lies buried a man who was in my employment for
three years after this event, and who was truly contrite, penitent, and
humbled, if ever man was. No one save myself knew in that man’s lifetime
who he was, or whence he came--it was John Edmunds, the returned
convict.’



CHAPTER VII. HOW MR. WINKLE, INSTEAD OF SHOOTING AT THE PIGEON AND
KILLING THE CROW, SHOT AT THE CROW AND WOUNDED THE PIGEON; HOW THE
DINGLEY DELL CRICKET CLUB PLAYED ALL-MUGGLETON, AND HOW ALL-MUGGLETON
DINED AT THE DINGLEY DELL EXPENSE; WITH OTHER INTERESTING AND
INSTRUCTIVE MATTERS

The fatiguing adventures of the day or the somniferous influence of the
clergyman’s tale operated so strongly on the drowsy tendencies of Mr.
Pickwick, that in less than five minutes after he had been shown to his
comfortable bedroom he fell into a sound and dreamless sleep, from which
he was only awakened by the morning sun darting his bright beams
reproachfully into the apartment. Mr. Pickwick was no sluggard, and he
sprang like an ardent warrior from his tent-bedstead.

‘Pleasant, pleasant country,’ sighed the enthusiastic gentleman, as he
opened his lattice window. ‘Who could live to gaze from day to day on
bricks and slates who had once felt the influence of a scene like this?
Who could continue to exist where there are no cows but the cows on the
chimney-pots; nothing redolent of Pan but pan-tiles; no crop but stone
crop? Who could bear to drag out a life in such a spot? Who, I ask,
could endure it?’ and, having cross-examined solitude after the most
approved precedents, at considerable length, Mr. Pickwick thrust his
head out of the lattice and looked around him.

The rich, sweet smell of the hay-ricks rose to his chamber window; the
hundred perfumes of the little flower-garden beneath scented the air
around; the deep-green meadows shone in the morning dew that glistened
on every leaf as it trembled in the gentle air; and the birds sang as if
every sparkling drop were to them a fountain of inspiration. Mr.
Pickwick fell into an enchanting and delicious reverie.

‘Hollo!’ was the sound that roused him.

He looked to the right, but he saw nobody; his eyes wandered to the
left, and pierced the prospect; he stared into the sky, but he wasn’t
wanted there; and then he did what a common mind would have done at
once--looked into the garden, and there saw Mr. Wardle.

‘How are you?’ said the good-humoured individual, out of breath with his
own anticipations of pleasure.’Beautiful morning, ain’t it? Glad to see
you up so early. Make haste down, and come out. I’ll wait for you here.’

Mr. Pickwick needed no second invitation. Ten minutes sufficed for the
completion of his toilet, and at the expiration of that time he was by
the old gentleman’s side.

‘Hollo!’ said Mr. Pickwick in his turn, seeing that his companion was
armed with a gun, and that another lay ready on the grass; ‘what’s going
forward?’

‘Why, your friend and I,’ replied the host, ‘are going out rook-shooting
before breakfast. He’s a very good shot, ain’t he?’

‘I’ve heard him say he’s a capital one,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, ‘but I
never saw him aim at anything.’

‘Well,’ said the host, ‘I wish he’d come. Joe--Joe!’

The fat boy, who under the exciting influence of the morning did not
appear to be more than three parts and a fraction asleep, emerged from
the house.

‘Go up, and call the gentleman, and tell him he’ll find me and Mr.
Pickwick in the rookery. Show the gentleman the way there; d’ye hear?’

The boy departed to execute his commission; and the host, carrying both
guns like a second Robinson Crusoe, led the way from the garden.

‘This is the place,’ said the old gentleman, pausing after a few minutes
walking, in an avenue of trees. The information was unnecessary; for the
incessant cawing of the unconscious rooks sufficiently indicated their
whereabouts.

The old gentleman laid one gun on the ground, and loaded the other.

‘Here they are,’ said Mr. Pickwick; and, as he spoke, the forms of Mr.
Tupman, Mr. Snodgrass, and Mr. Winkle appeared in the distance. The fat
boy, not being quite certain which gentleman he was directed to call,
had with peculiar sagacity, and to prevent the possibility of any
mistake, called them all.

‘Come along,’ shouted the old gentleman, addressing Mr. Winkle; ‘a keen
hand like you ought to have been up long ago, even to such poor work as
this.’

Mr. Winkle responded with a forced smile, and took up the spare gun with
an expression of countenance which a metaphysical rook, impressed with a
foreboding of his approaching death by violence, may be supposed to
assume. It might have been keenness, but it looked remarkably like
misery.

The old gentleman nodded; and two ragged boys who had been marshalled to
the spot under the direction of the infant Lambert, forthwith commenced
climbing up two of the trees.

‘What are these lads for?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick abruptly. He was rather
alarmed; for he was not quite certain but that the distress of the
agricultural interest, about which he had often heard a great deal,
might have compelled the small boys attached to the soil to earn a
precarious and hazardous subsistence by making marks of themselves for
inexperienced sportsmen.

‘Only to start the game,’ replied Mr. Wardle, laughing.

‘To what?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Why, in plain English, to frighten the rooks.’

‘Oh, is that all?’

‘You are satisfied?’

‘Quite.’

‘Very well. Shall I begin?’

‘If you please,’ said Mr. Winkle, glad of any respite.

‘Stand aside, then. Now for it.’

The boy shouted, and shook a branch with a nest on it. Half a dozen
young rooks in violent conversation, flew out to ask what the matter
was. The old gentleman fired by way of reply. Down fell one bird, and
off flew the others.

‘Take him up, Joe,’ said the old gentleman.

There was a smile upon the youth’s face as he advanced. Indistinct
visions of rook-pie floated through his imagination. He laughed as he
retired with the bird--it was a plump one.

‘Now, Mr. Winkle,’ said the host, reloading his own gun. ‘Fire away.’

Mr. Winkle advanced, and levelled his gun. Mr. Pickwick and his friends
cowered involuntarily to escape damage from the heavy fall of rooks,
which they felt quite certain would be occasioned by the devastating
barrel of their friend. There was a solemn pause--a shout--a flapping of
wings--a faint click.

‘Hollo!’ said the old gentleman.

‘Won’t it go?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Missed fire,’ said Mr. Winkle, who was very pale--probably from
disappointment.

‘Odd,’ said the old gentleman, taking the gun. ‘Never knew one of them
miss fire before. Why, I don’t see anything of the cap.’

Bless my soul!’ said Mr. Winkle, ‘I declare I forgot the cap!’

The slight omission was rectified. Mr. Pickwick crouched again. Mr.
Winkle stepped forward with an air of determination and resolution; and
Mr. Tupman looked out from behind a tree. The boy shouted; four birds
flew out. Mr. Winkle fired. There was a scream as of an individual--not
a rook--in corporal anguish. Mr. Tupman had saved the lives of
innumerable unoffending birds by receiving a portion of the charge in
his left arm.

To describe the confusion that ensued would be impossible. To tell how
Mr. Pickwick in the first transports of emotion called Mr. Winkle
‘Wretch!’ how Mr. Tupman lay prostrate on the ground; and how Mr. Winkle
knelt horror-stricken beside him; how Mr. Tupman called distractedly
upon some feminine Christian name, and then opened first one eye, and
then the other, and then fell back and shut them both--all this would be
as difficult to describe in detail, as it would be to depict the gradual
recovering of the unfortunate individual, the binding up of his arm with
pocket-handkerchiefs, and the conveying him back by slow degrees
supported by the arms of his anxious friends.

They drew near the house. The ladies were at the garden gate, waiting
for their arrival and their breakfast. The spinster aunt appeared; she
smiled, and beckoned them to walk quicker. ‘Twas evident she knew not of
the disaster. Poor thing! there are times when ignorance is bliss
indeed.

They approached nearer.

‘Why, what is the matter with the little old gentleman?’ said Isabella
Wardle. The spinster aunt heeded not the remark; she thought it applied
to Mr. Pickwick. In her eyes Tracy Tupman was a youth; she viewed his
years through a diminishing glass.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ called out the old host, fearful of alarming his
daughters. The little party had crowded so completely round Mr. Tupman,
that they could not yet clearly discern the nature of the accident.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ said the host.

‘What’s the matter?’ screamed the ladies.

‘Mr. Tupman has met with a little accident; that’s all.’

The spinster aunt uttered a piercing scream, burst into an hysteric
laugh, and fell backwards in the arms of her nieces.

‘Throw some cold water over her,’ said the old gentleman.

‘No, no,’ murmured the spinster aunt; ‘I am better now. Bella, Emily--a
surgeon! Is he wounded?--Is he dead?--Is he--Ha, ha, ha!’ Here the
spinster aunt burst into fit number two, of hysteric laughter
interspersed with screams.

‘Calm yourself,’ said Mr. Tupman, affected almost to tears by this
expression of sympathy with his sufferings. ‘Dear, dear madam, calm
yourself.’

‘It is his voice!’ exclaimed the spinster aunt; and strong symptoms of
fit number three developed themselves forthwith.

‘Do not agitate yourself, I entreat you, dearest madam,’ said Mr. Tupman
soothingly. ‘I am very little hurt, I assure you.’

‘Then you are not dead!’ ejaculated the hysterical lady. ‘Oh, say you
are not dead!’

‘Don’t be a fool, Rachael,’ interposed Mr. Wardle, rather more roughly
than was consistent with the poetic nature of the scene. ‘What the
devil’s the use of his saying he isn’t dead?’

‘No, no, I am not,’ said Mr. Tupman. ‘I require no assistance but yours.
Let me lean on your arm.’ He added, in a whisper, ‘Oh, Miss Rachael!’
The agitated female advanced, and offered her arm. They turned into the
breakfast parlour. Mr. Tracy Tupman gently pressed her hand to his lips,
and sank upon the sofa.

‘Are you faint?’ inquired the anxious Rachael.

‘No,’ said Mr. Tupman. ‘It is nothing. I shall be better presently.’ He
closed his eyes.

‘He sleeps,’ murmured the spinster aunt. (His organs of vision had been
closed nearly twenty seconds.) ‘Dear--dear--Mr. Tupman!’

Mr. Tupman jumped up--‘Oh, say those words again!’ he exclaimed.

The lady started. ‘Surely you did not hear them!’ she said bashfully.

‘Oh, yes, I did!’ replied Mr. Tupman; ‘repeat them. If you would have me
recover, repeat them.’

Hush!’ said the lady. ‘My brother.’ Mr. Tracy Tupman resumed his former
position; and Mr. Wardle, accompanied by a surgeon, entered the room.

The arm was examined, the wound dressed, and pronounced to be a very
slight one; and the minds of the company having been thus satisfied,
they proceeded to satisfy their appetites with countenances to which an
expression of cheerfulness was again restored. Mr. Pickwick alone was
silent and reserved. Doubt and distrust were exhibited in his
countenance. His confidence in Mr. Winkle had been shaken--greatly
shaken--by the proceedings of the morning.

‘Are you a cricketer?’ inquired Mr. Wardle of the marksman.

At any other time, Mr. Winkle would have replied in the affirmative. He
felt the delicacy of his situation, and modestly replied, ‘No.’

‘Are you, sir?’ inquired Mr. Snodgrass.

‘I was once upon a time,’ replied the host; ‘but I have given it up now.
I subscribe to the club here, but I don’t play.’

‘The grand match is played to-day, I believe,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘It is,’ replied the host. ‘Of course you would like to see it.’

‘I, sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, ‘am delighted to view any sports which
may be safely indulged in, and in which the impotent effects of
unskilful people do not endanger human life.’ Mr. Pickwick paused, and
looked steadily on Mr. Winkle, who quailed beneath his leader’s
searching glance. The great man withdrew his eyes after a few minutes,
and added: ‘Shall we be justified in leaving our wounded friend to the
care of the ladies?’

‘You cannot leave me in better hands,’ said Mr. Tupman.

‘Quite impossible,’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

It was therefore settled that Mr. Tupman should be left at home in
charge of the females; and that the remainder of the guests, under the
guidance of Mr. Wardle, should proceed to the spot where was to be held
that trial of skill, which had roused all Muggleton from its torpor, and
inoculated Dingley Dell with a fever of excitement.

As their walk, which was not above two miles long, lay through shady
lanes and sequestered footpaths, and as their conversation turned upon
the delightful scenery by which they were on every side surrounded, Mr.
Pickwick was almost inclined to regret the expedition they had used,
when he found himself in the main street of the town of Muggleton.

Everybody whose genius has a topographical bent knows perfectly well
that Muggleton is a corporate town, with a mayor, burgesses, and
freemen; and anybody who has consulted the addresses of the mayor to the
freemen, or the freemen to the mayor, or both to the corporation, or all
three to Parliament, will learn from thence what they ought to have
known before, that Muggleton is an ancient and loyal borough, mingling a
zealous advocacy of Christian principles with a devoted attachment to
commercial rights; in demonstration whereof, the mayor, corporation, and
other inhabitants, have presented at divers times, no fewer than one
thousand four hundred and twenty petitions against the continuance of
negro slavery abroad, and an equal number against any interference with
the factory system at home; sixty-eight in favour of the sale of livings
in the Church, and eighty-six for abolishing Sunday trading in the
street.

Mr. Pickwick stood in the principal street of this illustrious town, and
gazed with an air of curiosity, not unmixed with interest, on the
objects around him. There was an open square for the market-place; and
in the centre of it, a large inn with a sign-post in front, displaying
an object very common in art, but rarely met with in nature--to wit, a
blue lion, with three bow legs in the air, balancing himself on the
extreme point of the centre claw of his fourth foot. There were, within
sight, an auctioneer’s and fire-agency office, a corn-factor’s, a linen-
draper’s, a saddler’s, a distiller’s, a grocer’s, and a shoe-shop--the
last-mentioned warehouse being also appropriated to the diffusion of
hats, bonnets, wearing apparel, cotton umbrellas, and useful knowledge.
There was a red brick house with a small paved courtyard in front, which
anybody might have known belonged to the attorney; and there was,
moreover, another red brick house with Venetian blinds, and a large
brass door-plate with a very legible announcement that it belonged to
the surgeon. A few boys were making their way to the cricket-field; and
two or three shopkeepers who were standing at their doors looked as if
they should like to be making their way to the same spot, as indeed to
all appearance they might have done, without losing any great amount of
custom thereby. Mr. Pickwick having paused to make these observations,
to be noted down at a more convenient period, hastened to rejoin his
friends, who had turned out of the main street, and were already within
sight of the field of battle.

The wickets were pitched, and so were a couple of marquees for the rest
and refreshment of the contending parties. The game had not yet
commenced. Two or three Dingley Dellers, and All-Muggletonians, were
amusing themselves with a majestic air by throwing the ball carelessly
from hand to hand; and several other gentlemen dressed like them, in
straw hats, flannel jackets, and white trousers--a costume in which they
looked very much like amateur stone-masons--were sprinkled about the
tents, towards one of which Mr. Wardle conducted the party.

Several dozen of ‘How-are-you’s?’ hailed the old gentleman’s arrival;
and a general raising of the straw hats, and bending forward of the
flannel jackets, followed his introduction of his guests as gentlemen
from London, who were extremely anxious to witness the proceedings of
the day, with which, he had no doubt, they would be greatly delighted.

‘You had better step into the marquee, I think, Sir,’ said one very
stout gentleman, whose body and legs looked like half a gigantic roll of
flannel, elevated on a couple of inflated pillow-cases.

‘You’ll find it much pleasanter, Sir,’ urged another stout gentleman,
who strongly resembled the other half of the roll of flannel aforesaid.

‘You’re very good,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘This way,’ said the first speaker; ‘they notch in here--it’s the best
place in the whole field;’ and the cricketer, panting on before,
preceded them to the tent.

‘Capital game--smart sport--fine exercise--very,’ were the words which
fell upon Mr. Pickwick’s ear as he entered the tent; and the first
object that met his eyes was his green-coated friend of the Rochester
coach, holding forth, to the no small delight and edification of a
select circle of the chosen of All-Muggleton. His dress was slightly
improved, and he wore boots; but there was no mistaking him.

The stranger recognised his friends immediately; and, darting forward
and seizing Mr. Pickwick by the hand, dragged him to a seat with his
usual impetuosity, talking all the while as if the whole of the
arrangements were under his especial patronage and direction.

‘This way--this way--capital fun--lots of beer--hogsheads; rounds of
beef--bullocks; mustard--cart-loads; glorious day--down with you--make
yourself at home--glad to see you--very.’

Mr. Pickwick sat down as he was bid, and Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass
also complied with the directions of their mysterious friend. Mr. Wardle
looked on in silent wonder.

‘Mr. Wardle--a friend of mine,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Friend of yours!--My dear sir, how are you?--Friend of my friend’s--
give me your hand, sir’--and the stranger grasped Mr. Wardle’s hand with
all the fervour of a close intimacy of many years, and then stepped back
a pace or two as if to take a full survey of his face and figure, and
then shook hands with him again, if possible, more warmly than before.

‘Well; and how came you here?’ said Mr. Pickwick, with a smile in which
benevolence struggled with surprise.

‘Come,’ replied the stranger--‘stopping at Crown--Crown at Muggleton--
met a party--flannel jackets--white trousers--anchovy sandwiches--
devilled kidney--splendid fellows--glorious.’

Mr. Pickwick was sufficiently versed in the stranger’s system of
stenography to infer from this rapid and disjointed communication that
he had, somehow or other, contracted an acquaintance with the All-
Muggletons, which he had converted, by a process peculiar to himself,
into that extent of good-fellowship on which a general invitation may be
easily founded. His curiosity was therefore satisfied, and putting on
his spectacles he prepared himself to watch the play which was just
commencing.

All-Muggleton had the first innings; and the interest became intense
when Mr. Dumkins and Mr. Podder, two of the most renowned members of
that most distinguished club, walked, bat in hand, to their respective
wickets. Mr. Luffey, the highest ornament of Dingley Dell, was pitched
to bowl against the redoubtable Dumkins, and Mr. Struggles was selected
to do the same kind office for the hitherto unconquered Podder. Several
players were stationed, to ‘look out,’ in different parts of the field,
and each fixed himself into the proper attitude by placing one hand on
each knee, and stooping very much as if he were ‘making a back’ for some
beginner at leap-frog. All the regular players do this sort of thing;--
indeed it is generally supposed that it is quite impossible to look out
properly in any other position.

The umpires were stationed behind the wickets; the scorers were prepared
to notch the runs; a breathless silence ensued. Mr. Luffey retired a few
paces behind the wicket of the passive Podder, and applied the ball to
his right eye for several seconds. Dumkins confidently awaited its
coming with his eyes fixed on the motions of Luffey.

‘Play!’ suddenly cried the bowler. The ball flew from his hand straight
and swift towards the centre stump of the wicket. The wary Dumkins was
on the alert: it fell upon the tip of the bat, and bounded far away over
the heads of the scouts, who had just stooped low enough to let it fly
over them.

‘Run--run--another.--Now, then throw her up--up with her--stop there--
another--no--yes--no--throw her up, throw her up!’--Such were the shouts
which followed the stroke; and at the conclusion of which All-Muggleton
had scored two. Nor was Podder behindhand in earning laurels wherewith
to garnish himself and Muggleton. He blocked the doubtful balls, missed
the bad ones, took the good ones, and sent them flying to all parts of
the field. The scouts were hot and tired; the bowlers were changed and
bowled till their arms ached; but Dumkins and Podder remained
unconquered. Did an elderly gentleman essay to stop the progress of the
ball, it rolled between his legs or slipped between his fingers. Did a
slim gentleman try to catch it, it struck him on the nose, and bounded
pleasantly off with redoubled violence, while the slim gentleman’s eyes
filled with water, and his form writhed with anguish. Was it thrown
straight up to the wicket, Dumkins had reached it before the ball. In
short, when Dumkins was caught out, and Podder stumped out, All-
Muggleton had notched some fifty-four, while the score of the Dingley
Dellers was as blank as their faces. The advantage was too great to be
recovered. In vain did the eager Luffey, and the enthusiastic Struggles,
do all that skill and experience could suggest, to regain the ground
Dingley Dell had lost in the contest--it was of no avail; and in an
early period of the winning game Dingley Dell gave in, and allowed the
superior prowess of All-Muggleton.

The stranger, meanwhile, had been eating, drinking, and talking, without
cessation. At every good stroke he expressed his satisfaction and
approval of the player in a most condescending and patronising manner,
which could not fail to have been highly gratifying to the party
concerned; while at every bad attempt at a catch, and every failure to
stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the
devoted individual in such denunciations as--‘Ah, ah!--stupid’--‘Now,
butter-fingers’--‘Muff’--‘Humbug’--and so forth--ejaculations which
seemed to establish him in the opinion of all around, as a most
excellent and undeniable judge of the whole art and mystery of the noble
game of cricket.

‘Capital game--well played--some strokes admirable,’ said the stranger,
as both sides crowded into the tent, at the conclusion of the game.

‘You have played it, sir?’ inquired Mr. Wardle, who had been much amused
by his loquacity.

‘Played it! Think I have--thousands of times--not here--West Indies--
exciting thing--hot work--very.’ ‘It must be rather a warm pursuit in
such a climate,’ observed Mr. Pickwick.

‘Warm!--red hot--scorching--glowing. Played a match once--single wicket-
-friend the colonel--Sir Thomas Blazo--who should get the greatest
number of runs.--Won the toss--first innings--seven o’clock A.M.--six
natives to look out--went in; kept in--heat intense--natives all
fainted--taken away--fresh half-dozen ordered--fainted also--Blazo
bowling--supported by two natives--couldn’t bowl me out--fainted too--
cleared away the colonel--wouldn’t give in--faithful attendant--Quanko
Samba--last man left--sun so hot, bat in blisters, ball scorched brown--
five hundred and seventy runs--rather exhausted--Quanko mustered up last
remaining strength--bowled me out--had a bath, and went out to dinner.’

‘And what became of what’s-his-name, Sir?’ inquired an old gentleman.

‘Blazo?’

‘No--the other gentleman.’

Quanko Samba?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Poor Quanko--never recovered it--bowled on, on my account--bowled off,
on his own--died, sir.’ Here the stranger buried his countenance in a
brown jug, but whether to hide his emotion or imbibe its contents, we
cannot distinctly affirm. We only know that he paused suddenly, drew a
long and deep breath, and looked anxiously on, as two of the principal
members of the Dingley Dell club approached Mr. Pickwick, and said--

‘We are about to partake of a plain dinner at the Blue Lion, Sir; we
hope you and your friends will join us.’

Of course,’ said Mr. Wardle, ‘among our friends we include Mr.--;’ and
he looked towards the stranger.

‘Jingle,’ said that versatile gentleman, taking the hint at once.
‘Jingle--Alfred Jingle, Esq., of No Hall, Nowhere.’

‘I shall be very happy, I am sure,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘So shall I,’ said Mr. Alfred Jingle, drawing one arm through Mr.
Pickwick’s, and another through Mr. Wardle’s, as he whispered
confidentially in the ear of the former gentleman:--

‘Devilish good dinner--cold, but capital--peeped into the room this
morning--fowls and pies, and all that sort of thing--pleasant fellows
these--well behaved, too--very.’

There being no further preliminaries to arrange, the company straggled
into the town in little knots of twos and threes; and within a quarter
of an hour were all seated in the great room of the Blue Lion Inn,
Muggleton--Mr. Dumkins acting as chairman, and Mr. Luffey officiating as
vice.

There was a vast deal of talking and rattling of knives and forks, and
plates; a great running about of three ponderous-headed waiters, and a
rapid disappearance of the substantial viands on the table; to each and
every of which item of confusion, the facetious Mr. Jingle lent the aid
of half-a-dozen ordinary men at least. When everybody had eaten as much
as possible, the cloth was removed, bottles, glasses, and dessert were
placed on the table; and the waiters withdrew to ‘clear away,’ or in
other words, to appropriate to their own private use and emolument
whatever remnants of the eatables and drinkables they could contrive to
lay their hands on.

Amidst the general hum of mirth and conversation that ensued, there was
a little man with a puffy Say-nothing-to-me,-or-I’ll-contradict-you sort
of countenance, who remained very quiet; occasionally looking round him
when the conversation slackened, as if he contemplated putting in
something very weighty; and now and then bursting into a short cough of
inexpressible grandeur. At length, during a moment of comparative
silence, the little man called out in a very loud, solemn voice,--

‘Mr. Luffey!’

Everybody was hushed into a profound stillness as the individual
addressed, replied--

‘Sir!’

‘I wish to address a few words to you, Sir, if you will entreat the
gentlemen to fill their glasses.’

Mr. Jingle uttered a patronising ‘Hear, hear,’ which was responded to by
the remainder of the company; and the glasses having been filled, the
vice-president assumed an air of wisdom in a state of profound
attention; and said--

‘Mr. Staple.’

‘Sir,’ said the little man, rising, ‘I wish to address what I have to
say to you and not to our worthy chairman, because our worthy chairman
is in some measure--I may say in a great degree--the subject of what I
have to say, or I may say to--to--’

‘State,’ suggested Mr. Jingle.

‘Yes, to state,’ said the little man, ‘I thank my honourable friend, if
he will allow me to call him so (four hears and one certainly from Mr.
Jingle), for the suggestion. Sir, I am a Deller--a Dingley Deller
(cheers). I cannot lay claim to the honour of forming an item in the
population of Muggleton; nor, Sir, I will frankly admit, do I covet that
honour: and I will tell you why, Sir (hear); to Muggleton I will readily
concede all these honours and distinctions to which it can fairly lay
claim--they are too numerous and too well known to require aid or
recapitulation from me. But, sir, while we remember that Muggleton has
given birth to a Dumkins and a Podder, let us never forget that Dingley
Dell can boast a Luffey and a Struggles. (Vociferous cheering.) Let me
not be considered as wishing to detract from the merits of the former
gentlemen. Sir, I envy them the luxury of their own feelings on this
occasion. (Cheers.) Every gentleman who hears me, is probably acquainted
with the reply made by an individual, who--to use an ordinary figure of
speech--“hung out” in a tub, to the emperor Alexander:--“if I were not
Diogenes,” said he, “I would be Alexander.” I can well imagine these
gentlemen to say, “If I were not Dumkins I would be Luffey; if I were
not Podder I would be Struggles.” (Enthusiasm.) But, gentlemen of
Muggleton, is it in cricket alone that your fellow-townsmen stand pre-
eminent? Have you never heard of Dumkins and determination? Have you
never been taught to associate Podder with property? (Great applause.)
Have you never, when struggling for your rights, your liberties, and
your privileges, been reduced, if only for an instant, to misgiving and
despair? And when you have been thus depressed, has not the name of
Dumkins laid afresh within your breast the fire which had just gone out;
and has not a word from that man lighted it again as brightly as if it
had never expired? (Great cheering.) Gentlemen, I beg to surround with a
rich halo of enthusiastic cheering the united names of “Dumkins and
Podder.”’

Here the little man ceased, and here the company commenced a raising of
voices, and thumping of tables, which lasted with little intermission
during the remainder of the evening. Other toasts were drunk. Mr. Luffey
and Mr. Struggles, Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Jingle, were, each in his turn,
the subject of unqualified eulogium; and each in due course returned
thanks for the honour.

Enthusiastic as we are in the noble cause to which we have devoted
ourselves, we should have felt a sensation of pride which we cannot
express, and a consciousness of having done something to merit
immortality of which we are now deprived, could we have laid the
faintest outline on these addresses before our ardent readers. Mr.
Snodgrass, as usual, took a great mass of notes, which would no doubt
have afforded most useful and valuable information, had not the burning
eloquence of the words or the feverish influence of the wine made that
gentleman’s hand so extremely unsteady, as to render his writing nearly
unintelligible, and his style wholly so. By dint of patient
investigation, we have been enabled to trace some characters bearing a
faint resemblance to the names of the speakers; and we can only discern
an entry of a song (supposed to have been sung by Mr. Jingle), in which
the words ‘bowl’ ‘sparkling’ ‘ruby’ ‘bright’ and ‘wine’ are frequently
repeated at short intervals. We fancy, too, that we can discern at the
very end of the notes, some indistinct reference to ‘broiled bones’; and
then the words ‘cold’ ‘without’ occur: but as any hypothesis we could
found upon them must necessarily rest upon mere conjecture, we are not
disposed to indulge in any of the speculations to which they may give
rise.

We will therefore return to Mr. Tupman; merely adding that within some
few minutes before twelve o’clock that night, the convocation of
worthies of Dingley Dell and Muggleton were heard to sing, with great
feeling and emphasis, the beautiful and pathetic national air of


‘We won’t go home till morning, We won’t go home till morning, We won’t
go home till morning, Till daylight doth appear.’



CHAPTER VIII. STRONGLY ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE POSITION, THAT THE COURSE OF
TRUE LOVE IS NOT A RAILWAY

The quiet seclusion of Dingley Dell, the presence of so many of the
gentler sex, and the solicitude and anxiety they evinced in his behalf,
were all favourable to the growth and development of those softer
feelings which nature had implanted deep in the bosom of Mr. Tracy
Tupman, and which now appeared destined to centre in one lovely object.
The young ladies were pretty, their manners winning, their dispositions
unexceptionable; but there was a dignity in the air, a touch-me-not-
ishness in the walk, a majesty in the eye, of the spinster aunt, to
which, at their time of life, they could lay no claim, which
distinguished her from any female on whom Mr. Tupman had ever gazed.
That there was something kindred in their nature, something congenial in
their souls, something mysteriously sympathetic in their bosoms, was
evident. Her name was the first that rose to Mr. Tupman’s lips as he lay
wounded on the grass; and her hysteric laughter was the first sound that
fell upon his ear when he was supported to the house. But had her
agitation arisen from an amiable and feminine sensibility which would
have been equally irrepressible in any case; or had it been called forth
by a more ardent and passionate feeling, which he, of all men living,
could alone awaken? These were the doubts which racked his brain as he
lay extended on the sofa; these were the doubts which he determined
should be at once and for ever resolved.

It was evening. Isabella and Emily had strolled out with Mr. Trundle;
the deaf old lady had fallen asleep in her chair; the snoring of the fat
boy, penetrated in a low and monotonous sound from the distant kitchen;
the buxom servants were lounging at the side door, enjoying the
pleasantness of the hour, and the delights of a flirtation, on first
principles, with certain unwieldy animals attached to the farm; and
there sat the interesting pair, uncared for by all, caring for none, and
dreaming only of themselves; there they sat, in short, like a pair of
carefully-folded kid gloves--bound up in each other.

‘I have forgotten my flowers,’ said the spinster aunt.

‘Water them now,’ said Mr. Tupman, in accents of persuasion.

‘You will take cold in the evening air,’ urged the spinster aunt
affectionately.

‘No, no,’ said Mr. Tupman, rising; ‘it will do me good. Let me accompany
you.’

The lady paused to adjust the sling in which the left arm of the youth
was placed, and taking his right arm led him to the garden.

There was a bower at the farther end, with honeysuckle, jessamine, and
creeping plants--one of those sweet retreats which humane men erect for
the accommodation of spiders.

The spinster aunt took up a large watering-pot which lay in one corner,
and was about to leave the arbour. Mr. Tupman detained her, and drew her
to a seat beside him.

‘Miss Wardle!’ said he.

The spinster aunt trembled, till some pebbles which had accidentally
found their way into the large watering-pot shook like an infant’s
rattle.

‘Miss Wardle,’ said Mr. Tupman, ‘you are an angel.’

‘Mr. Tupman!’ exclaimed Rachael, blushing as red as the watering-pot
itself.

‘Nay,’ said the eloquent Pickwickian--‘I know it but too well.’

‘All women are angels, they say,’ murmured the lady playfully.

‘Then what can you be; or to what, without presumption, can I compare
you?’ replied Mr. Tupman. ‘Where was the woman ever seen who resembled
you? Where else could I hope to find so rare a combination of excellence
and beauty? Where else could I seek to--Oh!’ Here Mr. Tupman paused, and
pressed the hand which clasped the handle of the happy watering-pot.

The lady turned aside her head. ‘Men are such deceivers,’ she softly
whispered.

‘They are, they are,’ ejaculated Mr. Tupman; ‘but not all men. There
lives at least one being who can never change--one being who would be
content to devote his whole existence to your happiness--who lives but
in your eyes--who breathes but in your smiles--who bears the heavy
burden of life itself only for you.’

‘Could such an individual be found--’ said the lady.

‘But he _can_ be found,’ said the ardent Mr. Tupman, interposing. ‘He
_is_ found. He is here, Miss Wardle.’ And ere the lady was aware of his
intention, Mr. Tupman had sunk upon his knees at her feet.

‘Mr. Tupman, rise,’ said Rachael.

‘Never!’ was the valorous reply. ‘Oh, Rachael!’ He seized her passive
hand, and the watering-pot fell to the ground as he pressed it to his
lips.--‘Oh, Rachael! say you love me.’

‘Mr. Tupman,’ said the spinster aunt, with averted head, ‘I can hardly
speak the words; but--but--you are not wholly indifferent to me.’

Mr. Tupman no sooner heard this avowal, than he proceeded to do what his
enthusiastic emotions prompted, and what, for aught we know (for we are
but little acquainted with such matters), people so circumstanced always
do. He jumped up, and, throwing his arm round the neck of the spinster
aunt, imprinted upon her lips numerous kisses, which after a due show of
struggling and resistance, she received so passively, that there is no
telling how many more Mr. Tupman might have bestowed, if the lady had
not given a very unaffected start, and exclaimed in an affrighted tone--

‘Mr. Tupman, we are observed!--we are discovered!’

Mr. Tupman looked round. There was the fat boy, perfectly motionless,
with his large circular eyes staring into the arbour, but without the
slightest expression on his face that the most expert physiognomist
could have referred to astonishment, curiosity, or any other known
passion that agitates the human breast. Mr. Tupman gazed on the fat boy,
and the fat boy stared at him; and the longer Mr. Tupman observed the
utter vacancy of the fat boy’s countenance, the more convinced he became
that he either did not know, or did not understand, anything that had
been going forward. Under this impression, he said with great firmness--


‘What do you want here, Sir?’

‘Supper’s ready, sir,’ was the prompt reply.

‘Have you just come here, sir?’ inquired Mr. Tupman, with a piercing
look.

‘Just,’ replied the fat boy.

Mr. Tupman looked at him very hard again; but there was not a wink in
his eye, or a curve in his face.

Mr. Tupman took the arm of the spinster aunt, and walked towards the
house; the fat boy followed behind.

‘He knows nothing of what has happened,’ he whispered.

‘Nothing,’ said the spinster aunt.

There was a sound behind them, as of an imperfectly suppressed chuckle.
Mr. Tupman turned sharply round. No; it could not have been the fat boy;
there was not a gleam of mirth, or anything but feeding in his whole
visage.

‘He must have been fast asleep,’ whispered Mr. Tupman.

‘I have not the least doubt of it,’ replied the spinster aunt.

They both laughed heartily.

Mr. Tupman was wrong. The fat boy, for once, had not been fast asleep.
He was awake--wide awake--to what had been going forward.

The supper passed off without any attempt at a general conversation. The
old lady had gone to bed; Isabella Wardle devoted herself exclusively to
Mr. Trundle; the spinster’s attentions were reserved for Mr. Tupman; and
Emily’s thoughts appeared to be engrossed by some distant object--
possibly they were with the absent Snodgrass.

Eleven--twelve--one o’clock had struck, and the gentlemen had not
arrived. Consternation sat on every face. Could they have been waylaid
and robbed? Should they send men and lanterns in every direction by
which they could be supposed likely to have travelled home? or should
they--Hark! there they were. What could have made them so late? A
strange voice, too! To whom could it belong? They rushed into the
kitchen, whither the truants had repaired, and at once obtained rather
more than a glimmering of the real state of the case.

Mr. Pickwick, with his hands in his pockets and his hat cocked
completely over his left eye, was leaning against the dresser, shaking
his head from side to side, and producing a constant succession of the
blandest and most benevolent smiles without being moved thereunto by any
discernible cause or pretence whatsoever; old Mr. Wardle, with a highly-
inflamed countenance, was grasping the hand of a strange gentleman
muttering protestations of eternal friendship; Mr. Winkle, supporting
himself by the eight-day clock, was feebly invoking destruction upon the
head of any member of the family who should suggest the propriety of his
retiring for the night; and Mr. Snodgrass had sunk into a chair, with an
expression of the most abject and hopeless misery that the human mind
can imagine, portrayed in every lineament of his expressive face.

‘Is anything the matter?’ inquired the three ladies.

‘Nothing the matter,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘We--we’re--all right.--I
say, Wardle, we’re all right, ain’t we?’

‘I should think so,’ replied the jolly host.--‘My dears, here’s my
friend Mr. Jingle--Mr. Pickwick’s friend, Mr. Jingle, come ‘pon--little
visit.’

‘Is anything the matter with Mr. Snodgrass, Sir?’ inquired Emily, with
great anxiety.

‘Nothing the matter, ma’am,’ replied the stranger. ‘Cricket dinner--
glorious party--capital songs--old port--claret--good--very good--wine,
ma’am--wine.’


‘It wasn’t the wine,’ murmured Mr. Snodgrass, in a broken voice. ‘It was
the salmon.’ (Somehow or other, it never is the wine, in these cases.)

‘Hadn’t they better go to bed, ma’am?’ inquired Emma. ‘Two of the boys
will carry the gentlemen upstairs.’

‘I won’t go to bed,’ said Mr. Winkle firmly.

‘No living boy shall carry me,’ said Mr. Pickwick stoutly; and he went
on smiling as before.

‘Hurrah!’ gasped Mr. Winkle faintly.

‘Hurrah!’ echoed Mr. Pickwick, taking off his hat and dashing it on the
floor, and insanely casting his spectacles into the middle of the
kitchen. At this humorous feat he laughed outright.

‘Let’s--have--‘nother--bottle,’ cried Mr. Winkle, commencing in a very
loud key, and ending in a very faint one. His head dropped upon his
breast; and, muttering his invincible determination not to go to his
bed, and a sanguinary regret that he had not ‘done for old Tupman’ in
the morning, he fell fast asleep; in which condition he was borne to his
apartment by two young giants under the personal superintendence of the
fat boy, to whose protecting care Mr. Snodgrass shortly afterwards
confided his own person, Mr. Pickwick accepted the proffered arm of Mr.
Tupman and quietly disappeared, smiling more than ever; and Mr. Wardle,
after taking as affectionate a leave of the whole family as if he were
ordered for immediate execution, consigned to Mr. Trundle the honour of
conveying him upstairs, and retired, with a very futile attempt to look
impressively solemn and dignified.

‘What a shocking scene!’ said the spinster aunt.

‘Dis-gusting!’ ejaculated both the young ladies.

‘Dreadful--dreadful!’ said Jingle, looking very grave: he was about a
bottle and a half ahead of any of his companions. ‘Horrid spectacle--
very!’

‘What a nice man!’ whispered the spinster aunt to Mr. Tupman.

‘Good-looking, too!’ whispered Emily Wardle.

‘Oh, decidedly,’ observed the spinster aunt.

Mr. Tupman thought of the widow at Rochester, and his mind was troubled.
The succeeding half-hour’s conversation was not of a nature to calm his
perturbed spirit. The new visitor was very talkative, and the number of
his anecdotes was only to be exceeded by the extent of his politeness.
Mr. Tupman felt that as Jingle’s popularity increased, he (Tupman)
retired further into the shade. His laughter was forced--his merriment
feigned; and when at last he laid his aching temples between the sheets,
he thought, with horrid delight, on the satisfaction it would afford him
to have Jingle’s head at that moment between the feather bed and the
mattress.

The indefatigable stranger rose betimes next morning, and, although his
companions remained in bed overpowered with the dissipation of the
previous night, exerted himself most successfully to promote the
hilarity of the breakfast-table. So successful were his efforts, that
even the deaf old lady insisted on having one or two of his best jokes
retailed through the trumpet; and even she condescended to observe to
the spinster aunt, that ‘He’ (meaning Jingle) ‘was an impudent young
fellow:’ a sentiment in which all her relations then and there present
thoroughly coincided.

It was the old lady’s habit on the fine summer mornings to repair to the
arbour in which Mr. Tupman had already signalised himself, in form and
manner following: first, the fat boy fetched from a peg behind the old
lady’s bedroom door, a close black satin bonnet, a warm cotton shawl,
and a thick stick with a capacious handle; and the old lady, having put
on the bonnet and shawl at her leisure, would lean one hand on the stick
and the other on the fat boy’s shoulder, and walk leisurely to the
arbour, where the fat boy would leave her to enjoy the fresh air for the
space of half an hour; at the expiration of which time he would return
and reconduct her to the house.

The old lady was very precise and very particular; and as this ceremony
had been observed for three successive summers without the slightest
deviation from the accustomed form, she was not a little surprised on
this particular morning to see the fat boy, instead of leaving the
arbour, walk a few paces out of it, look carefully round him in every
direction, and return towards her with great stealth and an air of the
most profound mystery.

The old lady was timorous--most old ladies are--and her first impression
was that the bloated lad was about to do her some grievous bodily harm
with the view of possessing himself of her loose coin. She would have
cried for assistance, but age and infirmity had long ago deprived her of
the power of screaming; she, therefore, watched his motions with
feelings of intense horror which were in no degree diminished by his
coming close up to her, and shouting in her ear in an agitated, and as
it seemed to her, a threatening tone--

‘Missus!’

Now it so happened that Mr. Jingle was walking in the garden close to
the arbour at that moment. He too heard the shouts of ‘Missus,’ and
stopped to hear more. There were three reasons for his doing so. In the
first place, he was idle and curious; secondly, he was by no means
scrupulous; thirdly, and lastly, he was concealed from view by some
flowering shrubs. So there he stood, and there he listened.

‘Missus!’ shouted the fat boy.

‘Well, Joe,’ said the trembling old lady. ‘I’m sure I have been a good
mistress to you, Joe. You have invariably been treated very kindly. You
have never had too much to do; and you have always had enough to eat.’

This last was an appeal to the fat boy’s most sensitive feelings. He
seemed touched, as he replied emphatically--

‘I knows I has.’

‘Then what can you want to do now?’ said the old lady, gaining courage.

‘I wants to make your flesh creep,’ replied the boy.

This sounded like a very bloodthirsty mode of showing one’s gratitude;
and as the old lady did not precisely understand the process by which
such a result was to be attained, all her former horrors returned.

‘What do you think I see in this very arbour last night?’ inquired the
boy.

‘Bless us! What?’ exclaimed the old lady, alarmed at the solemn manner
of the corpulent youth.

‘The strange gentleman--him as had his arm hurt--a-kissin’ and huggin’--
‘

‘Who, Joe? None of the servants, I hope.’

Worser than that,’ roared the fat boy, in the old lady’s ear.

‘Not one of my grandda’aters?’

‘Worser than that.’

‘Worse than that, Joe!’ said the old lady, who had thought this the
extreme limit of human atrocity. ‘Who was it, Joe? I insist upon
knowing.’

The fat boy looked cautiously round, and having concluded his survey,
shouted in the old lady’s ear--

‘Miss Rachael.’

‘What!’ said the old lady, in a shrill tone. ‘Speak louder.’

‘Miss Rachael,’ roared the fat boy.

‘My da’ater!’

The train of nods which the fat boy gave by way of assent, communicated
a blanc-mange like motion to his fat cheeks.

‘And she suffered him!’ exclaimed the old lady. A grin stole over the
fat boy’s features as he said--

‘I see her a-kissin’ of him agin.’

If Mr. Jingle, from his place of concealment, could have beheld the
expression which the old lady’s face assumed at this communication, the
probability is that a sudden burst of laughter would have betrayed his
close vicinity to the summer-house. He listened attentively. Fragments
of angry sentences such as, ‘Without my permission!’--‘At her time of
life’--‘Miserable old ‘ooman like me’--‘Might have waited till I was
dead,’ and so forth, reached his ears; and then he heard the heels of
the fat boy’s boots crunching the gravel, as he retired and left the old
lady alone.

It was a remarkable coincidence perhaps, but it was nevertheless a fact,
that Mr. Jingle within five minutes of his arrival at Manor Farm on the
preceding night, had inwardly resolved to lay siege to the heart of the
spinster aunt, without delay. He had observation enough to see, that his
off-hand manner was by no means disagreeable to the fair object of his
attack; and he had more than a strong suspicion that she possessed that
most desirable of all requisites, a small independence. The imperative
necessity of ousting his rival by some means or other, flashed quickly
upon him, and he immediately resolved to adopt certain proceedings
tending to that end and object, without a moment’s delay. Fielding tells
us that man is fire, and woman tow, and the Prince of Darkness sets a
light to ‘em. Mr. Jingle knew that young men, to spinster aunts, are as
lighted gas to gunpowder, and he determined to essay the effect of an
explosion without loss of time.

Full of reflections upon this important decision, he crept from his
place of concealment, and, under cover of the shrubs before mentioned,
approached the house. Fortune seemed determined to favour his design.
Mr. Tupman and the rest of the gentlemen left the garden by the side
gate just as he obtained a view of it; and the young ladies, he knew,
had walked out alone, soon after breakfast. The coast was clear.

The breakfast-parlour door was partially open. He peeped in. The
spinster aunt was knitting. He coughed; she looked up and smiled.
Hesitation formed no part of Mr. Alfred Jingle’s character. He laid his
finger on his lips mysteriously, walked in, and closed the door.

‘Miss Wardle,’ said Mr. Jingle, with affected earnestness, ‘forgive
intrusion--short acquaintance--no time for ceremony--all discovered.’

‘Sir!’ said the spinster aunt, rather astonished by the unexpected
apparition and somewhat doubtful of Mr. Jingle’s sanity.

‘Hush!’ said Mr. Jingle, in a stage-whisper--‘Large boy--dumpling face--
round eyes--rascal!’ Here he shook his head expressively, and the
spinster aunt trembled with agitation.

‘I presume you allude to Joseph, Sir?’ said the lady, making an effort
to appear composed.

‘Yes, ma’am--damn that Joe!--treacherous dog, Joe--told the old lady--
old lady furious--wild--raving--arbour--Tupman--kissing and hugging--all
that sort of thing--eh, ma’am--eh?’

‘Mr. Jingle,’ said the spinster aunt, ‘if you come here, Sir, to insult
me--’

‘Not at all--by no means,’ replied the unabashed Mr. Jingle--‘overheard
the tale--came to warn you of your danger--tender my services--prevent
the hubbub. Never mind--think it an insult--leave the room’--and he
turned, as if to carry the threat into execution.

‘What _shall_ I do!’ said the poor spinster, bursting into tears. ‘My
brother will be furious.’

‘Of course he will,’ said Mr. Jingle pausing--‘outrageous.’

Oh, Mr. Jingle, what _can_ I say!’ exclaimed the spinster aunt, in
another flood of despair.

‘Say he dreamt it,’ replied Mr. Jingle coolly.

A ray of comfort darted across the mind of the spinster aunt at this
suggestion. Mr. Jingle perceived it, and followed up his advantage.

‘Pooh, pooh!--nothing more easy--blackguard boy--lovely woman--fat boy
horsewhipped--you believed--end of the matter--all comfortable.’

Whether the probability of escaping from the consequences of this ill-
timed discovery was delightful to the spinster’s feelings, or whether
the hearing herself described as a ‘lovely woman’ softened the asperity
of her grief, we know not. She blushed slightly, and cast a grateful
look on Mr. Jingle.

That insinuating gentleman sighed deeply, fixed his eyes on the spinster
aunt’s face for a couple of minutes, started melodramatically, and
suddenly withdrew them.

‘You seem unhappy, Mr. Jingle,’ said the lady, in a plaintive voice.
‘May I show my gratitude for your kind interference, by inquiring into
the cause, with a view, if possible, to its removal?’

‘Ha!’ exclaimed Mr. Jingle, with another start--‘removal! remove my
unhappiness, and your love bestowed upon a man who is insensible to the
blessing--who even now contemplates a design upon the affections of the
niece of the creature who--but no; he is my friend; I will not expose
his vices. Miss Wardle--farewell!’ At the conclusion of this address,
the most consecutive he was ever known to utter, Mr. Jingle applied to
his eyes the remnant of a handkerchief before noticed, and turned
towards the door.

‘Stay, Mr. Jingle!’ said the spinster aunt emphatically. ‘You have made
an allusion to Mr. Tupman--explain it.’

‘Never!’ exclaimed Jingle, with a professional (i.e., theatrical) air.
‘Never!’ and, by way of showing that he had no desire to be questioned
further, he drew a chair close to that of the spinster aunt and sat
down.

‘Mr. Jingle,’ said the aunt, ‘I entreat--I implore you, if there is any
dreadful mystery connected with Mr. Tupman, reveal it.’

‘Can I,’ said Mr. Jingle, fixing his eyes on the aunt’s face--‘can I
see--lovely creature--sacrificed at the shrine--heartless avarice!’ He
appeared to be struggling with various conflicting emotions for a few
seconds, and then said in a low voice-- ‘Tupman only wants your money.’

‘The wretch!’ exclaimed the spinster, with energetic indignation. (Mr.
Jingle’s doubts were resolved. She _had_ money.)

‘More than that,’ said Jingle--‘loves another.’

‘Another!’ ejaculated the spinster. ‘Who?’

Short girl--black eyes--niece Emily.’

There was a pause.

Now, if there was one individual in the whole world, of whom the
spinster aunt entertained a mortal and deep-rooted jealousy, it was this
identical niece. The colour rushed over her face and neck, and she
tossed her head in silence with an air of ineffable contempt. At last,
biting her thin lips, and bridling up, she said--

‘It can’t be. I won’t believe it.’

‘Watch ‘em,’ said Jingle.

‘I will,’ said the aunt.

‘Watch his looks.’

‘I will.’

‘His whispers.’

‘I will.’

‘He’ll sit next her at table.’

‘Let him.’

‘He’ll flatter her.’

‘Let him.’

‘He’ll pay her every possible attention.’

‘Let him.’

‘And he’ll cut you.’

‘Cut _me_!’ screamed the spinster aunt. ‘_he_ cut _me_; will he!’ and
she trembled with rage and disappointment.

‘You will convince yourself?’ said Jingle.

‘I will.’

‘You’ll show your spirit?’

‘I will.’

You’ll not have him afterwards?’

‘Never.’

‘You’ll take somebody else?’

Yes.’

‘You shall.’

Mr. Jingle fell on his knees, remained thereupon for five minutes
thereafter; and rose the accepted lover of the spinster aunt--
conditionally upon Mr. Tupman’s perjury being made clear and manifest.

The burden of proof lay with Mr. Alfred Jingle; and he produced his
evidence that very day at dinner. The spinster aunt could hardly believe
her eyes. Mr. Tracy Tupman was established at Emily’s side, ogling,
whispering, and smiling, in opposition to Mr. Snodgrass. Not a word, not
a look, not a glance, did he bestow upon his heart’s pride of the
evening before.

‘Damn that boy!’ thought old Mr. Wardle to himself.--He had heard the
story from his mother. ‘Damn that boy! He must have been asleep. It’s
all imagination.’

‘Traitor!’ thought the spinster aunt. ‘Dear Mr. Jingle was not deceiving
me. Ugh! how I hate the wretch!’

The following conversation may serve to explain to our readers this
apparently unaccountable alteration of deportment on the part of Mr.
Tracy Tupman.

The time was evening; the scene the garden. There were two figures
walking in a side path; one was rather short and stout; the other tall
and slim. They were Mr. Tupman and Mr. Jingle. The stout figure
commenced the dialogue.

‘How did I do it?’ he inquired.

‘Splendid--capital--couldn’t act better myself--you must repeat the part
to-morrow--every evening till further notice.’

‘Does Rachael still wish it?’

‘Of course--she don’t like it--but must be done--avert suspicion--afraid
of her brother--says there’s no help for it--only a few days more--when
old folks blinded--crown your happiness.’

‘Any message?’

‘Love--best love--kindest regards--unalterable affection. Can I say
anything for you?’

‘My dear fellow,’ replied the unsuspicious Mr. Tupman, fervently
grasping his ‘friend’s’ hand--‘carry my best love--say how hard I find
it to dissemble--say anything that’s kind: but add how sensible I am of
the necessity of the suggestion she made to me, through you, this
morning. Say I applaud her wisdom and admire her discretion.’

I will. Anything more?’

‘Nothing, only add how ardently I long for the time when I may call her
mine, and all dissimulation may be unnecessary.’

‘Certainly, certainly. Anything more?’

‘Oh, my friend!’ said poor Mr. Tupman, again grasping the hand of his
companion, ‘receive my warmest thanks for your disinterested kindness;
and forgive me if I have ever, even in thought, done you the injustice
of supposing that you could stand in my way. My dear friend, can I ever
repay you?’

‘Don’t talk of it,’ replied Mr. Jingle. He stopped short, as if suddenly
recollecting something, and said--‘By the bye--can’t spare ten pounds,
can you?--very particular purpose--pay you in three days.’

‘I dare say I can,’ replied Mr. Tupman, in the fulness of his heart.
‘Three days, you say?’

‘Only three days--all over then--no more difficulties.’ Mr. Tupman
counted the money into his companion’s hand, and he dropped it piece by
piece into his pocket, as they walked towards the house.

‘Be careful,’ said Mr. Jingle--‘not a look.’

‘Not a wink,’ said Mr. Tupman.

‘Not a syllable.’

‘Not a whisper.’

‘All your attentions to the niece--rather rude, than otherwise, to the
aunt--only way of deceiving the old ones.’

‘I’ll take care,’ said Mr. Tupman aloud.

‘And _I’ll_ take care,’ said Mr. Jingle internally; and they entered the
house.

The scene of that afternoon was repeated that evening, and on the three
afternoons and evenings next ensuing. On the fourth, the host was in
high spirits, for he had satisfied himself that there was no ground for
the charge against Mr. Tupman. So was Mr. Tupman, for Mr. Jingle had
told him that his affair would soon be brought to a crisis. So was Mr.
Pickwick, for he was seldom otherwise. So was not Mr. Snodgrass, for he
had grown jealous of Mr. Tupman. So was the old lady, for she had been
winning at whist. So were Mr. Jingle and Miss Wardle, for reasons of
sufficient importance in this eventful history to be narrated in another
chapter.



CHAPTER IX. A DISCOVERY AND A CHASE

The supper was ready laid, the chairs were drawn round the table,
bottles, jugs, and glasses were arranged upon the sideboard, and
everything betokened the approach of the most convivial period in the
whole four-and-twenty hours.

‘Where’s Rachael?’ said Mr. Wardle.

‘Ay, and Jingle?’ added Mr. Pickwick.

‘Dear me,’ said the host, ‘I wonder I haven’t missed him before. Why, I
don’t think I’ve heard his voice for two hours at least. Emily, my dear,
ring the bell.’

The bell was rung, and the fat boy appeared.

‘Where’s Miss Rachael?’ He couldn’t say.

‘Where’s Mr. Jingle, then?’ He didn’t know. Everybody looked surprised.
It was late--past eleven o’clock. Mr. Tupman laughed in his sleeve. They
were loitering somewhere, talking about him. Ha, ha! capital notion
that--funny.

‘Never mind,’ said Wardle, after a short pause. ‘They’ll turn up
presently, I dare say. I never wait supper for anybody.’

‘Excellent rule, that,’ said Mr. Pickwick--‘admirable.’

‘Pray, sit down,’ said the host.

‘Certainly’ said Mr. Pickwick; and down they sat.

There was a gigantic round of cold beef on the table, and Mr. Pickwick
was supplied with a plentiful portion of it. He had raised his fork to
his lips, and was on the very point of opening his mouth for the
reception of a piece of beef, when the hum of many voices suddenly arose
in the kitchen. He paused, and laid down his fork. Mr. Wardle paused
too, and insensibly released his hold of the carving-knife, which
remained inserted in the beef. He looked at Mr. Pickwick. Mr. Pickwick
looked at him.

Heavy footsteps were heard in the passage; the parlour door was suddenly
burst open; and the man who had cleaned Mr. Pickwick’s boots on his
first arrival, rushed into the room, followed by the fat boy and all the
domestics.

‘What the devil’s the meaning of this?’ exclaimed the host.

‘The kitchen chimney ain’t a-fire, is it, Emma?’ inquired the old lady.

‘Lor, grandma! No,’ screamed both the young ladies.

‘What’s the matter?’ roared the master of the house.

The man gasped for breath, and faintly ejaculated--

‘They ha’ gone, mas’r!--gone right clean off, Sir!’ (At this juncture
Mr. Tupman was observed to lay down his knife and fork, and to turn very
pale.)

‘Who’s gone?’ said Mr. Wardle fiercely.

‘Mus’r Jingle and Miss Rachael, in a po’-chay, from Blue Lion,
Muggleton. I was there; but I couldn’t stop ‘em; so I run off to tell
‘ee.’

‘I paid his expenses!’ said Mr. Tupman, jumping up frantically. ‘He’s
got ten pounds of mine!--stop him!--he’s swindled me!--I won’t bear it!-
-I’ll have justice, Pickwick!--I won’t stand it!’ and with sundry
incoherent exclamations of the like nature, the unhappy gentleman spun
round and round the apartment, in a transport of frenzy.

‘Lord preserve us!’ ejaculated Mr. Pickwick, eyeing the extraordinary
gestures of his friend with terrified surprise. ‘He’s gone mad! What
shall we do?’

Do!’ said the stout old host, who regarded only the last words of the
sentence. ‘Put the horse in the gig! I’ll get a chaise at the Lion, and
follow ‘em instantly. Where?’--he exclaimed, as the man ran out to
execute the commission--‘where’s that villain, Joe?’

‘Here I am! but I hain’t a willin,’ replied a voice. It was the fat
boy’s.

‘Let me get at him, Pickwick,’ cried Wardle, as he rushed at the ill-
starred youth. ‘He was bribed by that scoundrel, Jingle, to put me on a
wrong scent, by telling a cock-and-bull story of my sister and your
friend Tupman!’ (Here Mr. Tupman sank into a chair.) ‘Let me get at
him!’

‘Don’t let him!’ screamed all the women, above whose exclamations the
blubbering of the fat boy was distinctly audible.

‘I won’t be held!’ cried the old man. ‘Mr. Winkle, take your hands off.
Mr. Pickwick, let me go, sir!’

It was a beautiful sight, in that moment of turmoil and confusion, to
behold the placid and philosophical expression of Mr. Pickwick’s face,
albeit somewhat flushed with exertion, as he stood with his arms firmly
clasped round the extensive waist of their corpulent host, thus
restraining the impetuosity of his passion, while the fat boy was
scratched, and pulled, and pushed from the room by all the females
congregated therein. He had no sooner released his hold, than the man
entered to announce that the gig was ready.

‘Don’t let him go alone!’ screamed the females. ‘He’ll kill somebody!’

‘I’ll go with him,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘You’re a good fellow, Pickwick,’ said the host, grasping his hand.
‘Emma, give Mr. Pickwick a shawl to tie round his neck--make haste. Look
after your grandmother, girls; she has fainted away. Now then, are you
ready?’

Mr. Pickwick’s mouth and chin having been hastily enveloped in a large
shawl, his hat having been put on his head, and his greatcoat thrown
over his arm, he replied in the affirmative.

They jumped into the gig. ‘Give her her head, Tom,’ cried the host; and
away they went, down the narrow lanes; jolting in and out of the cart-
ruts, and bumping up against the hedges on either side, as if they would
go to pieces every moment.

‘How much are they ahead?’ shouted Wardle, as they drove up to the door
of the Blue Lion, round which a little crowd had collected, late as it
was.

‘Not above three-quarters of an hour,’ was everybody’s reply.

‘Chaise-and-four directly!--out with ‘em! Put up the gig afterwards.’

‘Now, boys!’ cried the landlord--‘chaise-and-four out--make haste--look
alive there!’

Away ran the hostlers and the boys. The lanterns glimmered, as the men
ran to and fro; the horses’ hoofs clattered on the uneven paving of the
yard; the chaise rumbled as it was drawn out of the coach-house; and all
was noise and bustle.

‘Now then!--is that chaise coming out to-night?’ cried Wardle.

‘Coming down the yard now, Sir,’ replied the hostler.

Out came the chaise--in went the horses--on sprang the boys--in got the
travellers.

‘Mind--the seven-mile stage in less than half an hour!’ shouted Wardle.

‘Off with you!’

The boys applied whip and spur, the waiters shouted, the hostlers
cheered, and away they went, fast and furiously.

‘Pretty situation,’ thought Mr. Pickwick, when he had had a moment’s
time for reflection. ‘Pretty situation for the general chairman of the
Pickwick Club. Damp chaise--strange horses--fifteen miles an hour--and
twelve o’clock at night!’

For the first three or four miles, not a word was spoken by either of
the gentlemen, each being too much immersed in his own reflections to
address any observations to his companion. When they had gone over that
much ground, however, and the horses getting thoroughly warmed began to
do their work in really good style, Mr. Pickwick became too much
exhilarated with the rapidity of the motion, to remain any longer
perfectly mute.

‘We’re sure to catch them, I think,’ said he.

‘Hope so,’ replied his companion.

‘Fine night,’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking up at the moon, which was
shining brightly.

‘So much the worse,’ returned Wardle; ‘for they’ll have had all the
advantage of the moonlight to get the start of us, and we shall lose it.
It will have gone down in another hour.’

‘It will be rather unpleasant going at this rate in the dark, won’t it?’
inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘I dare say it will,’ replied his friend dryly.

Mr. Pickwick’s temporary excitement began to sober down a little, as he
reflected upon the inconveniences and dangers of the expedition in which
he had so thoughtlessly embarked. He was roused by a loud shouting of
the post-boy on the leader.

‘Yo-yo-yo-yo-yoe!’ went the first boy.

‘Yo-yo-yo-yoe!’ went the second.

‘Yo-yo-yo-yoe!’ chimed in old Wardle himself, most lustily, with his
head and half his body out of the coach window.

‘Yo-yo-yo-yoe!’ shouted Mr. Pickwick, taking up the burden of the cry,
though he had not the slightest notion of its meaning or object. And
amidst the yo-yoing of the whole four, the chaise stopped.

‘What’s the matter?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘There’s a gate here,’ replied old Wardle. ‘We shall hear something of
the fugitives.’

After a lapse of five minutes, consumed in incessant knocking and
shouting, an old man in his shirt and trousers emerged from the
turnpike-house, and opened the gate.

‘How long is it since a post-chaise went through here?’ inquired Mr.
Wardle.

‘How long?’

‘Ah!’

‘Why, I don’t rightly know. It worn’t a long time ago, nor it worn’t a
short time ago--just between the two, perhaps.’

‘Has any chaise been by at all?’

‘Oh, yes, there’s been a chay by.’

‘How long ago, my friend,’ interposed Mr. Pickwick; ‘an hour?’

‘Ah, I dare say it might be,’ replied the man.

‘Or two hours?’ inquired the post--boy on the wheeler.

‘Well, I shouldn’t wonder if it was,’ returned the old man doubtfully.

‘Drive on, boys,’ cried the testy old gentleman; ‘don’t waste any more
time with that old idiot!’

‘Idiot!’ exclaimed the old man with a grin, as he stood in the middle of
the road with the gate half-closed, watching the chaise which rapidly
diminished in the increasing distance. ‘No--not much o’ that either;
you’ve lost ten minutes here, and gone away as wise as you came, arter
all. If every man on the line as has a guinea give him, earns it half as
well, you won’t catch t’other chay this side Mich’lmas, old short-and-
fat.’ And with another prolonged grin, the old man closed the gate, re-
entered his house, and bolted the door after him.

Meanwhile the chaise proceeded, without any slackening of pace, towards
the conclusion of the stage. The moon, as Wardle had foretold, was
rapidly on the wane; large tiers of dark, heavy clouds, which had been
gradually overspreading the sky for some time past, now formed one black
mass overhead; and large drops of rain which pattered every now and then
against the windows of the chaise, seemed to warn the travellers of the
rapid approach of a stormy night. The wind, too, which was directly
against them, swept in furious gusts down the narrow road, and howled
dismally through the trees which skirted the pathway. Mr. Pickwick drew
his coat closer about him, coiled himself more snugly up into the corner
of the chaise, and fell into a sound sleep, from which he was only
awakened by the stopping of the vehicle, the sound of the hostler’s
bell, and a loud cry of ‘Horses on directly!’

But here another delay occurred. The boys were sleeping with such
mysterious soundness, that it took five minutes a-piece to wake them.
The hostler had somehow or other mislaid the key of the stable, and even
when that was found, two sleepy helpers put the wrong harness on the
wrong horses, and the whole process of harnessing had to be gone through
afresh. Had Mr. Pickwick been alone, these multiplied obstacles would
have completely put an end to the pursuit at once, but old Wardle was
not to be so easily daunted; and he laid about him with such hearty
good-will, cuffing this man, and pushing that; strapping a buckle here,
and taking in a link there, that the chaise was ready in a much shorter
time than could reasonably have been expected, under so many
difficulties.

They resumed their journey; and certainly the prospect before them was
by no means encouraging. The stage was fifteen miles long, the night was
dark, the wind high, and the rain pouring in torrents. It was impossible
to make any great way against such obstacles united; it was hard upon
one o’clock already; and nearly two hours were consumed in getting to
the end of the stage. Here, however, an object presented itself, which
rekindled their hopes, and reanimated their drooping spirits.

‘When did this chaise come in?’ cried old Wardle, leaping out of his own
vehicle, and pointing to one covered with wet mud, which was standing in
the yard.

‘Not a quarter of an hour ago, sir,’ replied the hostler, to whom the
question was addressed.

‘Lady and gentleman?’ inquired Wardle, almost breathless with
impatience.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tall gentleman--dress-coat--long legs--thin body?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Elderly lady--thin face--rather skinny--eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘By heavens, it’s the couple, Pickwick,’ exclaimed the old gentleman.

‘Would have been here before,’ said the hostler, ‘but they broke a
trace.’

‘’Tis them!’ said Wardle, ‘it is, by Jove! Chaise-and-four instantly! We
shall catch them yet before they reach the next stage. A guinea a-piece,
boys-be alive there--bustle about--there’s good fellows.’

And with such admonitions as these, the old gentleman ran up and down
the yard, and bustled to and fro, in a state of excitement which
communicated itself to Mr. Pickwick also; and under the influence of
which, that gentleman got himself into complicated entanglements with
harness, and mixed up with horses and wheels of chaises, in the most
surprising manner, firmly believing that by so doing he was materially
forwarding the preparations for their resuming their journey.

‘Jump in--jump in!’ cried old Wardle, climbing into the chaise, pulling
up the steps, and slamming the door after him. ‘Come along! Make haste!’
And before Mr. Pickwick knew precisely what he was about, he felt
himself forced in at the other door, by one pull from the old gentleman
and one push from the hostler; and off they were again.

‘Ah! we are moving now,’ said the old gentleman exultingly. They were
indeed, as was sufficiently testified to Mr. Pickwick, by his constant
collision either with the hard wood-work of the chaise, or the body of
his companion.

‘Hold up!’ said the stout old Mr. Wardle, as Mr. Pickwick dived head
foremost into his capacious waistcoat.

‘I never did feel such a jolting in my life,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Never mind,’ replied his companion, ‘it will soon be over. Steady,
steady.’

Mr. Pickwick planted himself into his own corner, as firmly as he could;
and on whirled the chaise faster than ever.

They had travelled in this way about three miles, when Mr. Wardle, who
had been looking out of the Window for two or three minutes, suddenly
drew in his face, covered with splashes, and exclaimed in breathless
eagerness--

‘Here they are!’

Mr. Pickwick thrust his head out of his window. Yes: there was a chaise-
and-four, a short distance before them, dashing along at full gallop.

‘Go on, go on,’ almost shrieked the old gentleman. ‘Two guineas a-piece,
boys--don’t let ‘em gain on us--keep it up--keep it up.’

The horses in the first chaise started on at their utmost speed; and
those in Mr. Wardle’s galloped furiously behind them.

‘I see his head,’ exclaimed the choleric old man; ‘damme, I see his
head.’

‘So do I’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘that’s he.’

Mr. Pickwick was not mistaken. The countenance of Mr. Jingle, completely
coated with mud thrown up by the wheels, was plainly discernible at the
window of his chaise; and the motion of his arm, which was waving
violently towards the postillions, denoted that he was encouraging them
to increased exertion.

The interest was intense. Fields, trees, and hedges, seemed to rush past
them with the velocity of a whirlwind, so rapid was the pace at which
they tore along. They were close by the side of the first chaise.
Jingle’s voice could be plainly heard, even above the din of the wheels,
urging on the boys. Old Mr. Wardle foamed with rage and excitement. He
roared out scoundrels and villains by the dozen, clenched his fist and
shook it expressively at the object of his indignation; but Mr. Jingle
only answered with a contemptuous smile, and replied to his menaces by a
shout of triumph, as his horses, answering the increased application of
whip and spur, broke into a faster gallop, and left the pursuers behind.

Mr. Pickwick had just drawn in his head, and Mr. Wardle, exhausted with
shouting, had done the same, when a tremendous jolt threw them forward
against the front of the vehicle. There was a sudden bump--a loud crash-
-away rolled a wheel, and over went the chaise.

After a very few seconds of bewilderment and confusion, in which nothing
but the plunging of horses, and breaking of glass could be made out, Mr.
Pickwick felt himself violently pulled out from among the ruins of the
chaise; and as soon as he had gained his feet, extricated his head from
the skirts of his greatcoat, which materially impeded the usefulness of
his spectacles, the full disaster of the case met his view.

Old Mr. Wardle without a hat, and his clothes torn in several places,
stood by his side, and the fragments of the chaise lay scattered at
their feet. The post-boys, who had succeeded in cutting the traces, were
standing, disfigured with mud and disordered by hard riding, by the
horses’ heads. About a hundred yards in advance was the other chaise,
which had pulled up on hearing the crash. The postillions, each with a
broad grin convulsing his countenance, were viewing the adverse party
from their saddles, and Mr. Jingle was contemplating the wreck from the
coach window, with evident satisfaction. The day was just breaking, and
the whole scene was rendered perfectly visible by the grey light of the
morning.


‘Hollo!’ shouted the shameless Jingle, ‘anybody damaged?--elderly
gentlemen--no light weights--dangerous work--very.’

‘You’re a rascal,’ roared Wardle.

‘Ha! ha!’ replied Jingle; and then he added, with a knowing wink, and a
jerk of the thumb towards the interior of the chaise--‘I say--she’s very
well--desires her compliments--begs you won’t trouble yourself--love to
_Tuppy_--won’t you get up behind?--drive on, boys.’

The postillions resumed their proper attitudes, and away rattled the
chaise, Mr. Jingle fluttering in derision a white handkerchief from the
coach window.

Nothing in the whole adventure, not even the upset, had disturbed the
calm and equable current of Mr. Pickwick’s temper. The villainy,
however, which could first borrow money of his faithful follower, and
then abbreviate his name to ‘Tuppy,’ was more than he could patiently
bear. He drew his breath hard, and coloured up to the very tips of his
spectacles, as he said, slowly and emphatically--

‘If ever I meet that man again, I’ll--’

‘Yes, yes,’ interrupted Wardle, ‘that’s all very well; but while we
stand talking here, they’ll get their licence, and be married in
London.’

Mr. Pickwick paused, bottled up his vengeance, and corked it down. ‘How
far is it to the next stage?’ inquired Mr. Wardle, of one of the boys.

‘Six mile, ain’t it, Tom?’

‘Rayther better.’

‘Rayther better nor six mile, Sir.’

‘Can’t be helped,’ said Wardle, ‘we must walk it, Pickwick.’

‘No help for it,’ replied that truly great man.

So sending forward one of the boys on horseback, to procure a fresh
chaise and horses, and leaving the other behind to take care of the
broken one, Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Wardle set manfully forward on the
walk, first tying their shawls round their necks, and slouching down
their hats to escape as much as possible from the deluge of rain, which
after a slight cessation had again begun to pour heavily down.



CHAPTER X. CLEARING UP ALL DOUBTS (IF ANY EXISTED) OF THE
DISINTERESTEDNESS OF MR. A. JINGLE’S CHARACTER

There are in London several old inns, once the headquarters of
celebrated coaches in the days when coaches performed their journeys in
a graver and more solemn manner than they do in these times; but which
have now degenerated into little more than the abiding and booking-
places of country wagons. The reader would look in vain for any of these
ancient hostelries, among the Golden Crosses and Bull and Mouths, which
rear their stately fronts in the improved streets of London. If he would
light upon any of these old places, he must direct his steps to the
obscurer quarters of the town, and there in some secluded nooks he will
find several, still standing with a kind of gloomy sturdiness, amidst
the modern innovations which surround them.

In the Borough especially, there still remain some half-dozen old inns,
which have preserved their external features unchanged, and which have
escaped alike the rage for public improvement and the encroachments of
private speculation. Great, rambling queer old places they are, with
galleries, and passages, and staircases, wide enough and antiquated
enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories, supposing we
should ever be reduced to the lamentable necessity of inventing any, and
that the world should exist long enough to exhaust the innumerable
veracious legends connected with old London Bridge, and its adjacent
neighbourhood on the Surrey side.

It was in the yard of one of these inns--of no less celebrated a one
than the White Hart--that a man was busily employed in brushing the dirt
off a pair of boots, early on the morning succeeding the events narrated
in the last chapter. He was habited in a coarse, striped waistcoat, with
black calico sleeves, and blue glass buttons; drab breeches and
leggings. A bright red handkerchief was wound in a very loose and
unstudied style round his neck, and an old white hat was carelessly
thrown on one side of his head. There were two rows of boots before him,
one cleaned and the other dirty, and at every addition he made to the
clean row, he paused from his work, and contemplated its results with
evident satisfaction.

The yard presented none of that bustle and activity which are the usual
characteristics of a large coach inn. Three or four lumbering wagons,
each with a pile of goods beneath its ample canopy, about the height of
the second-floor window of an ordinary house, were stowed away beneath a
lofty roof which extended over one end of the yard; and another, which
was probably to commence its journey that morning, was drawn out into
the open space. A double tier of bedroom galleries, with old clumsy
balustrades, ran round two sides of the straggling area, and a double
row of bells to correspond, sheltered from the weather by a little
sloping roof, hung over the door leading to the bar and coffee-room. Two
or three gigs and chaise-carts were wheeled up under different little
sheds and pent-houses; and the occasional heavy tread of a cart-horse,
or rattling of a chain at the farther end of the yard, announced to
anybody who cared about the matter, that the stable lay in that
direction. When we add that a few boys in smock-frocks were lying asleep
on heavy packages, wool-packs, and other articles that were scattered
about on heaps of straw, we have described as fully as need be the
general appearance of the yard of the White Hart Inn, High Street,
Borough, on the particular morning in question.

A loud ringing of one of the bells was followed by the appearance of a
smart chambermaid in the upper sleeping gallery, who, after tapping at
one of the doors, and receiving a request from within, called over the
balustrades--

‘Sam!’

‘Hollo,’ replied the man with the white hat.

‘Number twenty-two wants his boots.’

‘Ask number twenty-two, vether he’ll have ‘em now, or vait till he gets
‘em,’ was the reply.

‘Come, don’t be a fool, Sam,’ said the girl coaxingly, ‘the gentleman
wants his boots directly.’

‘Well, you _are_ a nice young ‘ooman for a musical party, you are,’ said
the boot-cleaner. ‘Look at these here boots--eleven pair o’ boots; and
one shoe as belongs to number six, with the wooden leg. The eleven boots
is to be called at half-past eight and the shoe at nine. Who’s number
twenty-two, that’s to put all the others out? No, no; reg’lar rotation,
as Jack Ketch said, ven he tied the men up. Sorry to keep you a-waitin’,
Sir, but I’ll attend to you directly.’

Saying which, the man in the white hat set to work upon a top-boot with
increased assiduity.

There was another loud ring; and the bustling old landlady of the White
Hart made her appearance in the opposite gallery.

‘Sam,’ cried the landlady, ‘where’s that lazy, idle--why, Sam--oh, there
you are; why don’t you answer?’

‘Vouldn’t be gen-teel to answer, till you’d done talking,’ replied Sam
gruffly.

‘Here, clean these shoes for number seventeen directly, and take ‘em to
private sitting-room, number five, first floor.’

The landlady flung a pair of lady’s shoes into the yard, and bustled
away.

‘Number five,’ said Sam, as he picked up the shoes, and taking a piece
of chalk from his pocket, made a memorandum of their destination on the
soles--‘Lady’s shoes and private sittin’-room! I suppose she didn’t come
in the vagin.’

‘She came in early this morning,’ cried the girl, who was still leaning
over the railing of the gallery, ‘with a gentleman in a hackney-coach,
and it’s him as wants his boots, and you’d better do ‘em, that’s all
about it.’

‘Vy didn’t you say so before,’ said Sam, with great indignation,
singling out the boots in question from the heap before him. ‘For all I
know’d he was one o’ the regular threepennies. Private room! and a lady
too! If he’s anything of a gen’l’m’n, he’s vurth a shillin’ a day, let
alone the arrands.’

Stimulated by this inspiring reflection, Mr. Samuel brushed away with
such hearty good-will, that in a few minutes the boots and shoes, with a
polish which would have struck envy to the soul of the amiable Mr.
Warren (for they used Day & Martin at the White Hart), had arrived at
the door of number five.

‘Come in,’ said a man’s voice, in reply to Sam’s rap at the door. Sam
made his best bow, and stepped into the presence of a lady and gentleman
seated at breakfast. Having officiously deposited the gentleman’s boots
right and left at his feet, and the lady’s shoes right and left at hers,
he backed towards the door.

‘Boots,’ said the gentleman.

‘Sir,’ said Sam, closing the door, and keeping his hand on the knob of
the lock.

‘Do you know--what’s a-name--Doctors’ Commons?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Paul’s Churchyard, Sir; low archway on the carriage side, bookseller’s
at one corner, hotel on the other, and two porters in the middle as
touts for licences.’

‘Touts for licences!’ said the gentleman.

‘Touts for licences,’ replied Sam. ‘Two coves in vhite aprons--touches
their hats ven you walk in--“Licence, Sir, licence?” Queer sort, them,
and their mas’rs, too, sir--Old Bailey Proctors--and no mistake.’

‘What do they do?’ inquired the gentleman.

‘Do! You, Sir! That ain’t the worst on it, neither. They puts things
into old gen’l’m’n’s heads as they never dreamed of. My father, Sir, wos
a coachman. A widower he wos, and fat enough for anything--uncommon fat,
to be sure. His missus dies, and leaves him four hundred pound. Down he
goes to the Commons, to see the lawyer and draw the blunt--very smart--
top boots on--nosegay in his button-hole--broad-brimmed tile--green
shawl--quite the gen’l’m’n. Goes through the archvay, thinking how he
should inwest the money--up comes the touter, touches his hat--“Licence,
Sir, licence?”--“What’s that?” says my father.--“Licence, Sir,” says
he.--“What licence?” says my father.--“Marriage licence,” says the
touter.--“Dash my veskit,” says my father, “I never thought o’ that.”--
“I think you wants one, Sir,” says the touter. My father pulls up, and
thinks a bit--“No,” says he, “damme, I’m too old, b’sides, I’m a many
sizes too large,” says he.--“Not a bit on it, Sir,” says the touter.--
“Think not?” says my father.--“I’m sure not,” says he; “we married a
gen’l’m’n twice your size, last Monday.”--“Did you, though?” said my
father.--“To be sure, we did,” says the touter, “you’re a babby to him--
this way, sir--this way!”--and sure enough my father walks arter him,
like a tame monkey behind a horgan, into a little back office, vere a
teller sat among dirty papers, and tin boxes, making believe he was
busy. “Pray take a seat, vile I makes out the affidavit, Sir,” says the
lawyer.--“Thank’ee, Sir,” says my father, and down he sat, and stared
with all his eyes, and his mouth vide open, at the names on the boxes.
“What’s your name, Sir,” says the lawyer.--“Tony Weller,” says my
father.--“Parish?” says the lawyer. “Belle Savage,” says my father; for
he stopped there wen he drove up, and he know’d nothing about parishes,
he didn’t.--“And what’s the lady’s name?” says the lawyer. My father was
struck all of a heap. “Blessed if I know,” says he.--“Not know!” says
the lawyer.--“No more nor you do,” says my father; “can’t I put that in
arterwards?”--“Impossible!” says the lawyer.--“Wery well,” says my
father, after he’d thought a moment, “put down Mrs. Clarke.”--“What
Clarke?” says the lawyer, dipping his pen in the ink.--“Susan Clarke,
Markis o’ Granby, Dorking,” says my father; “she’ll have me, if I ask. I
des-say--I never said nothing to her, but she’ll have me, I know.” The
licence was made out, and she _did_ have him, and what’s more she’s got
him now; and I never had any of the four hundred pound, worse luck. Beg
your pardon, sir,’ said Sam, when he had concluded, ‘but wen I gets on
this here grievance, I runs on like a new barrow with the wheel
greased.’ Having said which, and having paused for an instant to see
whether he was wanted for anything more, Sam left the room.

‘Half-past nine--just the time--off at once;’ said the gentleman, whom
we need hardly introduce as Mr. Jingle.

‘Time--for what?’ said the spinster aunt coquettishly.

‘Licence, dearest of angels--give notice at the church--call you mine,
to-morrow’--said Mr. Jingle, and he squeezed the spinster aunt’s hand.

‘The licence!’ said Rachael, blushing.

‘The licence,’ repeated Mr. Jingle--


‘In hurry, post-haste for a licence, In hurry, ding dong I come back.’

‘How you run on,’ said Rachael.

‘Run on--nothing to the hours, days, weeks, months, years, when we’re
united--run on--they’ll fly on--bolt--mizzle--steam-engine--thousand-
horse power--nothing to it.’

‘Can’t--can’t we be married before to-morrow morning?’ inquired Rachael.

‘Impossible--can’t be--notice at the church--leave the licence to-day--
ceremony come off to-morrow.’

I am so terrified, lest my brother should discover us!’ said Rachael.

‘Discover--nonsense--too much shaken by the break-down--besides--extreme
caution--gave up the post-chaise--walked on--took a hackney-coach--came
to the Borough--last place in the world that he’d look in--ha! ha!--
capital notion that--very.’

‘Don’t be long,’ said the spinster affectionately, as Mr. Jingle stuck
the pinched-up hat on his head.

‘Long away from you?--Cruel charmer,’ and Mr. Jingle skipped playfully
up to the spinster aunt, imprinted a chaste kiss upon her lips, and
danced out of the room.

‘Dear man!’ said the spinster, as the door closed after him.

‘Rum old girl,’ said Mr. Jingle, as he walked down the passage.

It is painful to reflect upon the perfidy of our species; and we will
not, therefore, pursue the thread of Mr. Jingle’s meditations, as he
wended his way to Doctors’ Commons. It will be sufficient for our
purpose to relate, that escaping the snares of the dragons in white
aprons, who guard the entrance to that enchanted region, he reached the
vicar-general’s office in safety and having procured a highly flattering
address on parchment, from the Archbishop of Canterbury, to his ‘trusty
and well-beloved Alfred Jingle and Rachael Wardle, greeting,’ he
carefully deposited the mystic document in his pocket, and retraced his
steps in triumph to the Borough.

He was yet on his way to the White Hart, when two plump gentleman and
one thin one entered the yard, and looked round in search of some
authorised person of whom they could make a few inquiries. Mr. Samuel
Weller happened to be at that moment engaged in burnishing a pair of
painted tops, the personal property of a farmer who was refreshing
himself with a slight lunch of two or three pounds of cold beef and a
pot or two of porter, after the fatigues of the Borough market; and to
him the thin gentleman straightway advanced.


‘My friend,’ said the thin gentleman.

‘You’re one o’ the adwice gratis order,’ thought Sam, ‘or you wouldn’t
be so wery fond o’ me all at once.’ But he only said--‘Well, Sir.’

‘My friend,’ said the thin gentleman, with a conciliatory hem--‘have you
got many people stopping here now? Pretty busy. Eh?’

Sam stole a look at the inquirer. He was a little high-dried man, with a
dark squeezed-up face, and small, restless, black eyes, that kept
winking and twinkling on each side of his little inquisitive nose, as if
they were playing a perpetual game of peep-bo with that feature. He was
dressed all in black, with boots as shiny as his eyes, a low white
neckcloth, and a clean shirt with a frill to it. A gold watch-chain, and
seals, depended from his fob. He carried his black kid gloves _in_ his
hands, and not ON them; and as he spoke, thrust his wrists beneath his
coat tails, with the air of a man who was in the habit of propounding
some regular posers.

‘Pretty busy, eh?’ said the little man.

‘Oh, wery well, Sir,’ replied Sam, ‘we shan’t be bankrupts, and we
shan’t make our fort’ns. We eats our biled mutton without capers, and
don’t care for horse-radish ven ve can get beef.’

‘Ah,’ said the little man, ‘you’re a wag, ain’t you?’

‘My eldest brother was troubled with that complaint,’ said Sam; ‘it may
be catching--I used to sleep with him.’

‘This is a curious old house of yours,’ said the little man, looking
round him.

‘If you’d sent word you was a-coming, we’d ha’ had it repaired;’ replied
the imperturbable Sam.

The little man seemed rather baffled by these several repulses, and a
short consultation took place between him and the two plump gentlemen.
At its conclusion, the little man took a pinch of snuff from an oblong
silver box, and was apparently on the point of renewing the
conversation, when one of the plump gentlemen, who in addition to a
benevolent countenance, possessed a pair of spectacles, and a pair of
black gaiters, interfered--

‘The fact of the matter is,’ said the benevolent gentleman, ‘that my
friend here (pointing to the other plump gentleman) will give you half a
guinea, if you’ll answer one or two--’

‘Now, my dear sir--my dear Sir,’ said the little man, ‘pray, allow me--
my dear Sir, the very first principle to be observed in these cases, is
this: if you place the matter in the hands of a professional man, you
must in no way interfere in the progress of the business; you must
repose implicit confidence in him. Really, Mr.--’ He turned to the other
plump gentleman, and said, ‘I forget your friend’s name.’

‘Pickwick,’ said Mr. Wardle, for it was no other than that jolly
personage.

‘Ah, Pickwick--really Mr. Pickwick, my dear Sir, excuse me--I shall be
happy to receive any private suggestions of yours, as AMICUS CURIAE, but
you must see the impropriety of your interfering with my conduct in this
case, with such an AD CAPTANDUM argument as the offer of half a guinea.
Really, my dear Sir, really;’ and the little man took an argumentative
pinch of snuff, and looked very profound.

‘My only wish, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘was to bring this very
unpleasant matter to as speedy a close as possible.’

‘Quite right--quite right,’ said the little man.

‘With which view,’ continued Mr. Pickwick, ‘I made use of the argument
which my experience of men has taught me is the most likely to succeed
in any case.’

‘Ay, ay,’ said the little man, ‘very good, very good, indeed; but you
should have suggested it to me. My dear sir, I’m quite certain you
cannot be ignorant of the extent of confidence which must be placed in
professional men. If any authority can be necessary on such a point, my
dear sir, let me refer you to the well-known case in Barnwell and--’

‘Never mind George Barnwell,’ interrupted Sam, who had remained a
wondering listener during this short colloquy; ‘everybody knows what
sort of a case his was, tho’ it’s always been my opinion, mind you, that
the young ‘ooman deserved scragging a precious sight more than he did.
Hows’ever, that’s neither here nor there. You want me to accept of half
a guinea. Wery well, I’m agreeable: I can’t say no fairer than that, can
I, sir?’ (Mr. Pickwick smiled.) Then the next question is, what the
devil do you want with me, as the man said, wen he see the ghost?’

‘We want to know--’ said Mr. Wardle.

‘Now, my dear sir--my dear sir,’ interposed the busy little man.

Mr. Wardle shrugged his shoulders, and was silent.

‘We want to know,’ said the little man solemnly; ‘and we ask the
question of you, in order that we may not awaken apprehensions inside--
we want to know who you’ve got in this house at present?’

‘Who there is in the house!’ said Sam, in whose mind the inmates were
always represented by that particular article of their costume, which
came under his immediate superintendence. ‘There’s a vooden leg in
number six; there’s a pair of Hessians in thirteen; there’s two pair of
halves in the commercial; there’s these here painted tops in the
snuggery inside the bar; and five more tops in the coffee-room.’

‘Nothing more?’ said the little man.

‘Stop a bit,’ replied Sam, suddenly recollecting himself. ‘Yes; there’s
a pair of Vellingtons a good deal worn, and a pair o’ lady’s shoes, in
number five.’

‘What sort of shoes?’ hastily inquired Wardle, who, together with Mr.
Pickwick, had been lost in bewilderment at the singular catalogue of
visitors.

‘Country make,’ replied Sam.

‘Any maker’s name?’

‘Brown.’

‘Where of?’

‘Muggleton.

‘It is them,’ exclaimed Wardle. ‘By heavens, we’ve found them.’

‘Hush!’ said Sam. ‘The Vellingtons has gone to Doctors’ Commons.’

‘No,’ said the little man.

‘Yes, for a licence.’

‘We’re in time,’ exclaimed Wardle. ‘Show us the room; not a moment is to
be lost.’

‘Pray, my dear sir--pray,’ said the little man; ‘caution, caution.’ He
drew from his pocket a red silk purse, and looked very hard at Sam as he
drew out a sovereign.

Sam grinned expressively.

‘Show us into the room at once, without announcing us,’ said the little
man, ‘and it’s yours.’

Sam threw the painted tops into a corner, and led the way through a dark
passage, and up a wide staircase. He paused at the end of a second
passage, and held out his hand.

‘Here it is,’ whispered the attorney, as he deposited the money on the
hand of their guide.

The man stepped forward for a few paces, followed by the two friends and
their legal adviser. He stopped at a door.

‘Is this the room?’ murmured the little gentleman.

Sam nodded assent.

Old Wardle opened the door; and the whole three walked into the room
just as Mr. Jingle, who had that moment returned, had produced the
licence to the spinster aunt.

The spinster uttered a loud shriek, and throwing herself into a chair,
covered her face with her hands. Mr. Jingle crumpled up the licence, and
thrust it into his coat pocket. The unwelcome visitors advanced into the
middle of the room.

‘You--you are a nice rascal, arn’t you?’ exclaimed Wardle, breathless
with passion.

‘My dear Sir, my dear sir,’ said the little man, laying his hat on the
table, ‘pray, consider--pray. Defamation of character: action for
damages. Calm yourself, my dear sir, pray--’

‘How dare you drag my sister from my house?’ said the old man.

Ay--ay--very good,’ said the little gentleman, ‘you may ask that. How
dare you, sir?--eh, sir?’

‘Who the devil are you?’ inquired Mr. Jingle, in so fierce a tone, that
the little gentleman involuntarily fell back a step or two.

‘Who is he, you scoundrel,’ interposed Wardle. ‘He’s my lawyer, Mr.
Perker, of Gray’s Inn. Perker, I’ll have this fellow prosecuted--
indicted--I’ll--I’ll--I’ll ruin him. And you,’ continued Mr. Wardle,
turning abruptly round to his sister--‘you, Rachael, at a time of life
when you ought to know better, what do you mean by running away with a
vagabond, disgracing your family, and making yourself miserable? Get on
your bonnet and come back. Call a hackney-coach there, directly, and
bring this lady’s bill, d’ye hear--d’ye hear?’

Cert’nly, Sir,’ replied Sam, who had answered Wardle’s violent ringing
of the bell with a degree of celerity which must have appeared
marvellous to anybody who didn’t know that his eye had been applied to
the outside of the keyhole during the whole interview.

‘Get on your bonnet,’ repeated Wardle.

‘Do nothing of the kind,’ said Jingle. ‘Leave the room, Sir--no business
here--lady’s free to act as she pleases--more than one-and-twenty.’

‘More than one-and-twenty!’ ejaculated Wardle contemptuously. ‘More than
one-and-forty!’

‘I ain’t,’ said the spinster aunt, her indignation getting the better of
her determination to faint.

‘You are,’ replied Wardle; ‘you’re fifty if you’re an hour.’

Here the spinster aunt uttered a loud shriek, and became senseless.

‘A glass of water,’ said the humane Mr. Pickwick, summoning the
landlady.

‘A glass of water!’ said the passionate Wardle. ‘Bring a bucket, and
throw it all over her; it’ll do her good, and she richly deserves it.’

‘Ugh, you brute!’ ejaculated the kind-hearted landlady. ‘Poor dear.’ And
with sundry ejaculations of ‘Come now, there’s a dear--drink a little of
this--it’ll do you good--don’t give way so--there’s a love,’ etc. etc.,
the landlady, assisted by a chambermaid, proceeded to vinegar the
forehead, beat the hands, titillate the nose, and unlace the stays of
the spinster aunt, and to administer such other restoratives as are
usually applied by compassionate females to ladies who are endeavouring
to ferment themselves into hysterics.

‘Coach is ready, Sir,’ said Sam, appearing at the door.

‘Come along,’ cried Wardle. ‘I’ll carry her downstairs.’

At this proposition, the hysterics came on with redoubled violence.

The landlady was about to enter a very violent protest against this
proceeding, and had already given vent to an indignant inquiry whether
Mr. Wardle considered himself a lord of the creation, when Mr. Jingle
interposed--

‘Boots,’ said he, ‘get me an officer.’

‘Stay, stay,’ said little Mr. Perker. ‘Consider, Sir, consider.’

‘I’ll not consider,’ replied Jingle. ‘She’s her own mistress--see who
dares to take her away--unless she wishes it.’

‘I _won’t_ be taken away,’ murmured the spinster aunt. ‘I _don’t_ wish
it.’ (Here there was a frightful relapse.)

‘My dear Sir,’ said the little man, in a low tone, taking Mr. Wardle and
Mr. Pickwick apart--‘my dear Sir, we’re in a very awkward situation.
It’s a distressing case--very; I never knew one more so; but really, my
dear sir, really we have no power to control this lady’s actions. I
warned you before we came, my dear sir, that there was nothing to look
to but a compromise.’

There was a short pause.

‘What kind of compromise would you recommend?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Why, my dear Sir, our friend’s in an unpleasant position--very much so.
We must be content to suffer some pecuniary loss.’

‘I’ll suffer any, rather than submit to this disgrace, and let her, fool
as she is, be made miserable for life,’ said Wardle.

‘I rather think it can be done,’ said the bustling little man. ‘Mr.
Jingle, will you step with us into the next room for a moment?’

Mr. Jingle assented, and the quartette walked into an empty apartment.

‘Now, sir,’ said the little man, as he carefully closed the door, ‘is
there no way of accommodating this matter--step this way, sir, for a
moment--into this window, Sir, where we can be alone--there, sir, there,
pray sit down, sir. Now, my dear Sir, between you and I, we know very
well, my dear Sir, that you have run off with this lady for the sake of
her money. Don’t frown, Sir, don’t frown; I say, between you and I, _we_
know it. We are both men of the world, and WE know very well that our
friends here, are not--eh?’

Mr. Jingle’s face gradually relaxed; and something distantly resembling
a wink quivered for an instant in his left eye.

‘Very good, very good,’ said the little man, observing the impression he
had made. ‘Now, the fact is, that beyond a few hundreds, the lady has
little or nothing till the death of her mother--fine old lady, my dear
Sir.’

‘_Old_,’ said Mr. Jingle briefly but emphatically.

‘Why, yes,’ said the attorney, with a slight cough. ‘You are right, my
dear Sir, she is rather old. She comes of an old family though, my dear
Sir; old in every sense of the word. The founder of that family came
into Kent when Julius Caesar invaded Britain;--only one member of it,
since, who hasn’t lived to eighty-five, and he was beheaded by one of
the Henrys. The old lady is not seventy-three now, my dear Sir.’ The
little man paused, and took a pinch of snuff.

‘Well,’ cried Mr. Jingle.

‘Well, my dear sir--you don’t take snuff!--ah! so much the better--
expensive habit--well, my dear Sir, you’re a fine young man, man of the
world--able to push your fortune, if you had capital, eh?’

‘Well,’ said Mr. Jingle again.

‘Do you comprehend me?’

‘Not quite.’

‘Don’t you think--now, my dear Sir, I put it to you don’t you think--
that fifty pounds and liberty would be better than Miss Wardle and
expectation?’

‘Won’t do--not half enough!’ said Mr. Jingle, rising.

‘Nay, nay, my dear Sir,’ remonstrated the little attorney, seizing him
by the button. ‘Good round sum--a man like you could treble it in no
time--great deal to be done with fifty pounds, my dear Sir.’

‘More to be done with a hundred and fifty,’ replied Mr. Jingle coolly.

‘Well, my dear Sir, we won’t waste time in splitting straws,’ resumed
the little man, ‘say--say--seventy.’

Won’t do,’ said Mr. Jingle.

‘Don’t go away, my dear sir--pray don’t hurry,’ said the little man.
‘Eighty; come: I’ll write you a cheque at once.’

‘Won’t do,’ said Mr. Jingle.

‘Well, my dear Sir, well,’ said the little man, still detaining him;
‘just tell me what _will_ do.’

‘Expensive affair,’ said Mr. Jingle. ‘Money out of pocket--posting, nine
pounds; licence, three--that’s twelve--compensation, a hundred--hundred
and twelve--breach of honour--and loss of the lady--’

‘Yes, my dear Sir, yes,’ said the little man, with a knowing look,
‘never mind the last two items. That’s a hundred and twelve--say a
hundred--come.’

‘And twenty,’ said Mr. Jingle.

‘Come, come, I’ll write you a cheque,’ said the little man; and down he
sat at the table for that purpose.

‘I’ll make it payable the day after to-morrow,’ said the little man,
with a look towards Mr. Wardle; ‘and we can get the lady away,
meanwhile.’ Mr. Wardle sullenly nodded assent.

‘A hundred,’ said the little man.

‘And twenty,’ said Mr. Jingle.

‘My dear Sir,’ remonstrated the little man.

‘Give it him,’ interposed Mr. Wardle, ‘and let him go.’

The cheque was written by the little gentleman, and pocketed by Mr.
Jingle.

‘Now, leave this house instantly!’ said Wardle, starting up.

‘My dear Sir,’ urged the little man.

‘And mind,’ said Mr. Wardle, ‘that nothing should have induced me to
make this compromise--not even a regard for my family--if I had not
known that the moment you got any money in that pocket of yours, you’d
go to the devil faster, if possible, than you would without it--’

‘My dear sir,’ urged the little man again.

‘Be quiet, Perker,’ resumed Wardle. ‘Leave the room, Sir.’

‘Off directly,’ said the unabashed Jingle. ‘Bye bye, Pickwick.’

If any dispassionate spectator could have beheld the countenance of the
illustrious man, whose name forms the leading feature of the title of
this work, during the latter part of this conversation, he would have
been almost induced to wonder that the indignant fire which flashed from
his eyes did not melt the glasses of his spectacles--so majestic was his
wrath. His nostrils dilated, and his fists clenched involuntarily, as he
heard himself addressed by the villain. But he restrained himself again-
-he did not pulverise him.

‘Here,’ continued the hardened traitor, tossing the licence at Mr.
Pickwick’s feet; ‘get the name altered--take home the lady--do for
Tuppy.’

Mr. Pickwick was a philosopher, but philosophers are only men in armour,
after all. The shaft had reached him, penetrated through his
philosophical harness, to his very heart. In the frenzy of his rage, he
hurled the inkstand madly forward, and followed it up himself. But Mr.
Jingle had disappeared, and he found himself caught in the arms of Sam.

‘Hollo,’ said that eccentric functionary, ‘furniter’s cheap where you
come from, Sir. Self-acting ink, that ‘ere; it’s wrote your mark upon
the wall, old gen’l’m’n. Hold still, Sir; wot’s the use o’ runnin’ arter
a man as has made his lucky, and got to t’other end of the Borough by
this time?’

Mr. Pickwick’s mind, like those of all truly great men, was open to
conviction. He was a quick and powerful reasoner; and a moment’s
reflection sufficed to remind him of the impotency of his rage. It
subsided as quickly as it had been roused. He panted for breath, and
looked benignantly round upon his friends.

Shall we tell the lamentations that ensued when Miss Wardle found
herself deserted by the faithless Jingle? Shall we extract Mr.
Pickwick’s masterly description of that heartrending scene? His note-
book, blotted with the tears of sympathising humanity, lies open before
us; one word, and it is in the printer’s hands. But, no! we will be
resolute! We will not wring the public bosom, with the delineation of
such suffering!

Slowly and sadly did the two friends and the deserted lady return next
day in the Muggleton heavy coach. Dimly and darkly had the sombre
shadows of a summer’s night fallen upon all around, when they again
reached Dingley Dell, and stood within the entrance to Manor Farm.



CHAPTER XI. INVOLVING ANOTHER JOURNEY, AND AN ANTIQUARIAN DISCOVERY;
RECORDING MR. PICKWICK’S DETERMINATION TO BE PRESENT AT AN ELECTION; AND
CONTAINING A MANUSCRIPT OF THE OLD CLERGYMAN’S

A night of quiet and repose in the profound silence of Dingley Dell, and
an hour’s breathing of its fresh and fragrant air on the ensuing
morning, completely recovered Mr. Pickwick from the effects of his late
fatigue of body and anxiety of mind. That illustrious man had been
separated from his friends and followers for two whole days; and it was
with a degree of pleasure and delight, which no common imagination can
adequately conceive, that he stepped forward to greet Mr. Winkle and Mr.
Snodgrass, as he encountered those gentlemen on his return from his
early walk. The pleasure was mutual; for who could ever gaze on Mr.
Pickwick’s beaming face without experiencing the sensation? But still a
cloud seemed to hang over his companions which that great man could not
but be sensible of, and was wholly at a loss to account for. There was a
mysterious air about them both, as unusual as it was alarming.

‘And how,’ said Mr. Pickwick, when he had grasped his followers by the
hand, and exchanged warm salutations of welcome--‘how is Tupman?’

Mr. Winkle, to whom the question was more peculiarly addressed, made no
reply. He turned away his head, and appeared absorbed in melancholy
reflection.

‘Snodgrass,’ said Mr. Pickwick earnestly, ‘how is our friend--he is not
ill?’

‘No,’ replied Mr. Snodgrass; and a tear trembled on his sentimental
eyelid, like a rain-drop on a window-frame--‘no; he is not ill.’

Mr. Pickwick stopped, and gazed on each of his friends in turn.

‘Winkle--Snodgrass,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘what does this mean? Where is
our friend? What has happened? Speak--I conjure, I entreat--nay, I
command you, speak.’

There was a solemnity--a dignity--in Mr. Pickwick’s manner, not to be
withstood.

‘He is gone,’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘Gone!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick. ‘Gone!’

‘Gone,’ repeated Mr. Snodgrass.

‘Where!’ ejaculated Mr. Pickwick.

‘We can only guess, from that communication,’ replied Mr. Snodgrass,
taking a letter from his pocket, and placing it in his friend’s hand.
‘Yesterday morning, when a letter was received from Mr. Wardle, stating
that you would be home with his sister at night, the melancholy which
had hung over our friend during the whole of the previous day, was
observed to increase. He shortly afterwards disappeared: he was missing
during the whole day, and in the evening this letter was brought by the
hostler from the Crown, at Muggleton. It had been left in his charge in
the morning, with a strict injunction that it should not be delivered
until night.’

Mr. Pickwick opened the epistle. It was in his friend’s hand-writing,
and these were its contents:--

‘MY DEAR PICKWICK,--_You_, my dear friend, are placed far beyond the
reach of many mortal frailties and weaknesses which ordinary people
cannot overcome. You do not know what it is, at one blow, to be deserted
by a lovely and fascinating creature, and to fall a victim to the
artifices of a villain, who had the grin of cunning beneath the mask of
friendship. I hope you never may.

‘Any letter addressed to me at the Leather Bottle, Cobham, Kent, will be
forwarded--supposing I still exist. I hasten from the sight of that
world, which has become odious to me. Should I hasten from it
altogether, pity--forgive me. Life, my dear Pickwick, has become
insupportable to me. The spirit which burns within us, is a porter’s
knot, on which to rest the heavy load of worldly cares and troubles; and
when that spirit fails us, the burden is too heavy to be borne. We sink
beneath it. You may tell Rachael--Ah, that name!--


‘TRACY TUPMAN.’

‘We must leave this place directly,’ said Mr. Pickwick, as he refolded
the note. ‘It would not have been decent for us to remain here, under
any circumstances, after what has happened; and now we are bound to
follow in search of our friend.’ And so saying, he led the way to the
house.

His intention was rapidly communicated. The entreaties to remain were
pressing, but Mr. Pickwick was inflexible. Business, he said, required
his immediate attendance.

The old clergyman was present.

‘You are not really going?’ said he, taking Mr. Pickwick aside.

Mr. Pickwick reiterated his former determination.

‘Then here,’ said the old gentleman, ‘is a little manuscript, which I
had hoped to have the pleasure of reading to you myself. I found it on
the death of a friend of mine--a medical man, engaged in our county
lunatic asylum--among a variety of papers, which I had the option of
destroying or preserving, as I thought proper. I can hardly believe that
the manuscript is genuine, though it certainly is not in my friend’s
hand. However, whether it be the genuine production of a maniac, or
founded upon the ravings of some unhappy being (which I think more
probable), read it, and judge for yourself.’

Mr. Pickwick received the manuscript, and parted from the benevolent old
gentleman with many expressions of good-will and esteem.

It was a more difficult task to take leave of the inmates of Manor Farm,
from whom they had received so much hospitality and kindness. Mr.
Pickwick kissed the young ladies--we were going to say, as if they were
his own daughters, only, as he might possibly have infused a little more
warmth into the salutation, the comparison would not be quite
appropriate--hugged the old lady with filial cordiality; and patted the
rosy cheeks of the female servants in a most patriarchal manner, as he
slipped into the hands of each some more substantial expression of his
approval. The exchange of cordialities with their fine old host and Mr.
Trundle was even more hearty and prolonged; and it was not until Mr.
Snodgrass had been several times called for, and at last emerged from a
dark passage followed soon after by Emily (whose bright eyes looked
unusually dim), that the three friends were enabled to tear themselves
from their friendly entertainers. Many a backward look they gave at the
farm, as they walked slowly away; and many a kiss did Mr. Snodgrass waft
in the air, in acknowledgment of something very like a lady’s
handkerchief, which was waved from one of the upper windows, until a
turn of the lane hid the old house from their sight.

At Muggleton they procured a conveyance to Rochester. By the time they
reached the last-named place, the violence of their grief had
sufficiently abated to admit of their making a very excellent early
dinner; and having procured the necessary information relative to the
road, the three friends set forward again in the afternoon to walk to
Cobham.

A delightful walk it was; for it was a pleasant afternoon in June, and
their way lay through a deep and shady wood, cooled by the light wind
which gently rustled the thick foliage, and enlivened by the songs of
the birds that perched upon the boughs. The ivy and the moss crept in
thick clusters over the old trees, and the soft green turf overspread
the ground like a silken mat. They emerged upon an open park, with an
ancient hall, displaying the quaint and picturesque architecture of
Elizabeth’s time. Long vistas of stately oaks and elm trees appeared on
every side; large herds of deer were cropping the fresh grass; and
occasionally a startled hare scoured along the ground, with the speed of
the shadows thrown by the light clouds which swept across a sunny
landscape like a passing breath of summer.

‘If this,’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking about him--‘if this were the place
to which all who are troubled with our friend’s complaint came, I fancy
their old attachment to this world would very soon return.’

‘I think so too,’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘And really,’ added Mr. Pickwick, after half an hour’s walking had
brought them to the village, ‘really, for a misanthrope’s choice, this
is one of the prettiest and most desirable places of residence I ever
met with.’

In this opinion also, both Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass expressed their
concurrence; and having been directed to the Leather Bottle, a clean and
commodious village ale-house, the three travellers entered, and at once
inquired for a gentleman of the name of Tupman.

‘Show the gentlemen into the parlour, Tom,’ said the landlady.

A stout country lad opened a door at the end of the passage, and the
three friends entered a long, low-roofed room, furnished with a large
number of high-backed leather-cushioned chairs, of fantastic shapes, and
embellished with a great variety of old portraits and roughly-coloured
prints of some antiquity. At the upper end of the room was a table, with
a white cloth upon it, well covered with a roast fowl, bacon, ale, and
et ceteras; and at the table sat Mr. Tupman, looking as unlike a man who
had taken his leave of the world, as possible.

On the entrance of his friends, that gentleman laid down his knife and
fork, and with a mournful air advanced to meet them.

‘I did not expect to see you here,’ he said, as he grasped Mr.
Pickwick’s hand. ‘It’s very kind.’

‘Ah!’ said Mr. Pickwick, sitting down, and wiping from his forehead the
perspiration which the walk had engendered. ‘Finish your dinner, and
walk out with me. I wish to speak to you alone.’

Mr. Tupman did as he was desired; and Mr. Pickwick having refreshed
himself with a copious draught of ale, waited his friend’s leisure. The
dinner was quickly despatched, and they walked out together.

For half an hour, their forms might have been seen pacing the churchyard
to and fro, while Mr. Pickwick was engaged in combating his companion’s
resolution. Any repetition of his arguments would be useless; for what
language could convey to them that energy and force which their great
originator’s manner communicated? Whether Mr. Tupman was already tired
of retirement, or whether he was wholly unable to resist the eloquent
appeal which was made to him, matters not, he did _not _ resist it at
last.

‘It mattered little to him,’ he said, ‘where he dragged out the
miserable remainder of his days; and since his friend laid so much
stress upon his humble companionship, he was willing to share his
adventures.’

Mr. Pickwick smiled; they shook hands, and walked back to rejoin their
companions.

It was at this moment that Mr. Pickwick made that immortal discovery,
which has been the pride and boast of his friends, and the envy of every
antiquarian in this or any other country. They had passed the door of
their inn, and walked a little way down the village, before they
recollected the precise spot in which it stood. As they turned back, Mr.
Pickwick’s eye fell upon a small broken stone, partially buried in the
ground, in front of a cottage door. He paused.

‘This is very strange,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘What is strange?’ inquired Mr. Tupman, staring eagerly at every object
near him, but the right one. ‘God bless me, what’s the matter?’

This last was an ejaculation of irrepressible astonishment, occasioned
by seeing Mr. Pickwick, in his enthusiasm for discovery, fall on his
knees before the little stone, and commence wiping the dust off it with
his pocket-handkerchief.

‘There is an inscription here,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Is it possible?’ said Mr. Tupman.

‘I can discern,’ continued Mr. Pickwick, rubbing away with all his
might, and gazing intently through his spectacles--‘I can discern a
cross, and a 13, and then a T. This is important,’ continued Mr.
Pickwick, starting up. ‘This is some very old inscription, existing
perhaps long before the ancient alms-houses in this place. It must not
be lost.’

He tapped at the cottage door. A labouring man opened it.

‘Do you know how this stone came here, my friend?’ inquired the
benevolent Mr. Pickwick.

‘No, I doan’t, Sir,’ replied the man civilly. ‘It was here long afore I
was born, or any on us.’

Mr. Pickwick glanced triumphantly at his companion.

‘You--you--are not particularly attached to it, I dare say,’ said Mr.
Pickwick, trembling with anxiety. ‘You wouldn’t mind selling it, now?’

‘Ah! but who’d buy it?’ inquired the man, with an expression of face
which he probably meant to be very cunning.

‘I’ll give you ten shillings for it, at once,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘if
you would take it up for me.’

The astonishment of the village may be easily imagined, when (the little
stone having been raised with one wrench of a spade) Mr. Pickwick, by
dint of great personal exertion, bore it with his own hands to the inn,
and after having carefully washed it, deposited it on the table.

The exultation and joy of the Pickwickians knew no bounds, when their
patience and assiduity, their washing and scraping, were crowned with
success. The stone was uneven and broken, and the letters were
straggling and irregular, but the following fragment of an inscription
was clearly to be deciphered:--


[cross]  B I L S T U M P S H I S. M. ARK

Mr. Pickwick’s eyes sparkled with delight, as he sat and gloated over
the treasure he had discovered. He had attained one of the greatest
objects of his ambition. In a county known to abound in the remains of
the early ages; in a village in which there still existed some memorials
of the olden time, he--he, the chairman of the Pickwick Club--had
discovered a strange and curious inscription of unquestionable
antiquity, which had wholly escaped the observation of the many learned
men who had preceded him. He could hardly trust the evidence of his
senses.

‘This--this,’ said he, ‘determines me. We return to town to-morrow.’

‘To-morrow!’ exclaimed his admiring followers.

‘To-morrow,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘This treasure must be at once deposited
where it can be thoroughly investigated and properly understood. I have
another reason for this step. In a few days, an election is to take
place for the borough of Eatanswill, at which Mr. Perker, a gentleman
whom I lately met, is the agent of one of the candidates. We will
behold, and minutely examine, a scene so interesting to every
Englishman.’

‘We will,’ was the animated cry of three voices.

Mr. Pickwick looked round him. The attachment and fervour of his
followers lighted up a glow of enthusiasm within him. He was their
leader, and he felt it.

‘Let us celebrate this happy meeting with a convivial glass,’ said he.
This proposition, like the other, was received with unanimous applause.
Having himself deposited the important stone in a small deal box,
purchased from the landlady for the purpose, he placed himself in an
arm-chair, at the head of the table; and the evening was devoted to
festivity and conversation.

It was past eleven o’clock--a late hour for the little village of
Cobham--when Mr. Pickwick retired to the bedroom which had been prepared
for his reception. He threw open the lattice window, and setting his
light upon the table, fell into a train of meditation on the hurried
events of the two preceding days.

The hour and the place were both favourable to contemplation; Mr.
Pickwick was roused by the church clock striking twelve. The first
stroke of the hour sounded solemnly in his ear, but when the bell ceased
the stillness seemed insupportable--he almost felt as if he had lost a
companion. He was nervous and excited; and hastily undressing himself
and placing his light in the chimney, got into bed.

Every one has experienced that disagreeable state of mind, in which a
sensation of bodily weariness in vain contends against an inability to
sleep. It was Mr. Pickwick’s condition at this moment: he tossed first
on one side and then on the other; and perseveringly closed his eyes as
if to coax himself to slumber. It was of no use. Whether it was the
unwonted exertion he had undergone, or the heat, or the brandy-and-
water, or the strange bed--whatever it was, his thoughts kept reverting
very uncomfortably to the grim pictures downstairs, and the old stories
to which they had given rise in the course of the evening. After half an
hour’s tumbling about, he came to the unsatisfactory conclusion, that it
was of no use trying to sleep; so he got up and partially dressed
himself. Anything, he thought, was better than lying there fancying all
kinds of horrors. He looked out of the window--it was very dark. He
walked about the room--it was very lonely.

He had taken a few turns from the door to the window, and from the
window to the door, when the clergyman’s manuscript for the first time
entered his head. It was a good thought. If it failed to interest him,
it might send him to sleep. He took it from his coat pocket, and drawing
a small table towards his bedside, trimmed the light, put on his
spectacles, and composed himself to read. It was a strange handwriting,
and the paper was much soiled and blotted. The title gave him a sudden
start, too; and he could not avoid casting a wistful glance round the
room. Reflecting on the absurdity of giving way to such feelings,
however, he trimmed the light again, and read as follows:--


A MADMAN’S MANUSCRIPT

‘Yes!--a madman’s! How that word would have struck to my heart, many
years ago! How it would have roused the terror that used to come upon me
sometimes, sending the blood hissing and tingling through my veins, till
the cold dew of fear stood in large drops upon my skin, and my knees
knocked together with fright! I like it now though. It’s a fine name.
Show me the monarch whose angry frown was ever feared like the glare of
a madman’s eye--whose cord and axe were ever half so sure as a madman’s
gripe. Ho! ho! It’s a grand thing to be mad! to be peeped at like a wild
lion through the iron bars--to gnash one’s teeth and howl, through the
long still night, to the merry ring of a heavy chain and to roll and
twine among the straw, transported with such brave music. Hurrah for the
madhouse! Oh, it’s a rare place!

‘I remember days when I was afraid of being mad; when I used to start
from my sleep, and fall upon my knees, and pray to be spared from the
curse of my race; when I rushed from the sight of merriment or
happiness, to hide myself in some lonely place, and spend the weary
hours in watching the progress of the fever that was to consume my
brain. I knew that madness was mixed up with my very blood, and the
marrow of my bones! that one generation had passed away without the
pestilence appearing among them, and that I was the first in whom it
would revive. I knew it must be so: that so it always had been, and so
it ever would be: and when I cowered in some obscure corner of a crowded
room, and saw men whisper, and point, and turn their eyes towards me, I
knew they were telling each other of the doomed madman; and I slunk away
again to mope in solitude.

‘I did this for years; long, long years they were. The nights here are
long sometimes--very long; but they are nothing to the restless nights,
and dreadful dreams I had at that time. It makes me cold to remember
them. Large dusky forms with sly and jeering faces crouched in the
corners of the room, and bent over my bed at night, tempting me to
madness. They told me in low whispers, that the floor of the old house
in which my father died, was stained with his own blood, shed by his own
hand in raging madness. I drove my fingers into my ears, but they
screamed into my head till the room rang with it, that in one generation
before him the madness slumbered, but that his grandfather had lived for
years with his hands fettered to the ground, to prevent his tearing
himself to pieces. I knew they told the truth--I knew it well. I had
found it out years before, though they had tried to keep it from me. Ha!
ha! I was too cunning for them, madman as they thought me.

‘At last it came upon me, and I wondered how I could ever have feared
it. I could go into the world now, and laugh and shout with the best
among them. I knew I was mad, but they did not even suspect it. How I
used to hug myself with delight, when I thought of the fine trick I was
playing them after their old pointing and leering, when I was not mad,
but only dreading that I might one day become so! And how I used to
laugh for joy, when I was alone, and thought how well I kept my secret,
and how quickly my kind friends would have fallen from me, if they had
known the truth. I could have screamed with ecstasy when I dined alone
with some fine roaring fellow, to think how pale he would have turned,
and how fast he would have run, if he had known that the dear friend who
sat close to him, sharpening a bright, glittering knife, was a madman
with all the power, and half the will, to plunge it in his heart. Oh, it
was a merry life!

‘Riches became mine, wealth poured in upon me, and I rioted in pleasures
enhanced a thousandfold to me by the consciousness of my well-kept
secret. I inherited an estate. The law--the eagle-eyed law itself--had
been deceived, and had handed over disputed thousands to a madman’s
hands. Where was the wit of the sharp-sighted men of sound mind? Where
the dexterity of the lawyers, eager to discover a flaw? The madman’s
cunning had overreached them all.

‘I had money. How I was courted! I spent it profusely. How I was
praised! How those three proud, overbearing brothers humbled themselves
before me! The old, white-headed father, too--such deference--such
respect--such devoted friendship--he worshipped me! The old man had a
daughter, and the young men a sister; and all the five were poor. I was
rich; and when I married the girl, I saw a smile of triumph play upon
the faces of her needy relatives, as they thought of their well-planned
scheme, and their fine prize. It was for me to smile. To smile! To laugh
outright, and tear my hair, and roll upon the ground with shrieks of
merriment. They little thought they had married her to a madman.

‘Stay. If they had known it, would they have saved her? A sister’s
happiness against her husband’s gold. The lightest feather I blow into
the air, against the gay chain that ornaments my body!

‘In one thing I was deceived with all my cunning. If I had not been mad-
-for though we madmen are sharp-witted enough, we get bewildered
sometimes--I should have known that the girl would rather have been
placed, stiff and cold in a dull leaden coffin, than borne an envied
bride to my rich, glittering house. I should have known that her heart
was with the dark-eyed boy whose name I once heard her breathe in her
troubled sleep; and that she had been sacrificed to me, to relieve the
poverty of the old, white-headed man and the haughty brothers.

‘I don’t remember forms or faces now, but I know the girl was beautiful.
I know she was; for in the bright moonlight nights, when I start up from
my sleep, and all is quiet about me, I see, standing still and
motionless in one corner of this cell, a slight and wasted figure with
long black hair, which, streaming down her back, stirs with no earthly
wind, and eyes that fix their gaze on me, and never wink or close. Hush!
the blood chills at my heart as I write it down--that form is _her’s_;
the face is very pale, and the eyes are glassy bright; but I know them
well. That figure never moves; it never frowns and mouths as others do,
that fill this place sometimes; but it is much more dreadful to me, even
than the spirits that tempted me many years ago--it comes fresh from the
grave; and is so very death-like.

‘For nearly a year I saw that face grow paler; for nearly a year I saw
the tears steal down the mournful cheeks, and never knew the cause. I
found it out at last though. They could not keep it from me long. She
had never liked me; I had never thought she did: she despised my wealth,
and hated the splendour in which she lived; but I had not expected that.
She loved another. This I had never thought of. Strange feelings came
over me, and thoughts, forced upon me by some secret power, whirled
round and round my brain. I did not hate her, though I hated the boy she
still wept for. I pitied--yes, I pitied--the wretched life to which her
cold and selfish relations had doomed her. I knew that she could not
live long; but the thought that before her death she might give birth to
some ill-fated being, destined to hand down madness to its offspring,
determined me. I resolved to kill her.

‘For many weeks I thought of poison, and then of drowning, and then of
fire. A fine sight, the grand house in flames, and the madman’s wife
smouldering away to cinders. Think of the jest of a large reward, too,
and of some sane man swinging in the wind for a deed he never did, and
all through a madman’s cunning! I thought often of this, but I gave it
up at last. Oh! the pleasure of stropping the razor day after day,
feeling the sharp edge, and thinking of the gash one stroke of its thin,
bright edge would make!

‘At last the old spirits who had been with me so often before whispered
in my ear that the time was come, and thrust the open razor into my
hand. I grasped it firmly, rose softly from the bed, and leaned over my
sleeping wife. Her face was buried in her hands. I withdrew them softly,
and they fell listlessly on her bosom. She had been weeping; for the
traces of the tears were still wet upon her cheek. Her face was calm and
placid; and even as I looked upon it, a tranquil smile lighted up her
pale features. I laid my hand softly on her shoulder. She started--it
was only a passing dream. I leaned forward again. She screamed, and
woke.

‘One motion of my hand, and she would never again have uttered cry or
sound. But I was startled, and drew back. Her eyes were fixed on mine. I
knew not how it was, but they cowed and frightened me; and I quailed
beneath them. She rose from the bed, still gazing fixedly and steadily
on me. I trembled; the razor was in my hand, but I could not move. She
made towards the door. As she neared it, she turned, and withdrew her
eyes from my face. The spell was broken. I bounded forward, and clutched
her by the arm. Uttering shriek upon shriek, she sank upon the ground.

‘Now I could have killed her without a struggle; but the house was
alarmed. I heard the tread of footsteps on the stairs. I replaced the
razor in its usual drawer, unfastened the door, and called loudly for
assistance.

‘They came, and raised her, and placed her on the bed. She lay bereft of
animation for hours; and when life, look, and speech returned, her
senses had deserted her, and she raved wildly and furiously.

‘Doctors were called in--great men who rolled up to my door in easy
carriages, with fine horses and gaudy servants. They were at her bedside
for weeks. They had a great meeting and consulted together in low and
solemn voices in another room. One, the cleverest and most celebrated
among them, took me aside, and bidding me prepare for the worst, told
me--me, the madman!--that my wife was mad. He stood close beside me at
an open window, his eyes looking in my face, and his hand laid upon my
arm. With one effort, I could have hurled him into the street beneath.
It would have been rare sport to have done it; but my secret was at
stake, and I let him go. A few days after, they told me I must place her
under some restraint: I must provide a keeper for her. I! I went into
the open fields where none could hear me, and laughed till the air
resounded with my shouts!

‘She died next day. The white-headed old man followed her to the grave,
and the proud brothers dropped a tear over the insensible corpse of her
whose sufferings they had regarded in her lifetime with muscles of iron.
All this was food for my secret mirth, and I laughed behind the white
handkerchief which I held up to my face, as we rode home, till the tears
came into my eyes.

‘But though I had carried my object and killed her, I was restless and
disturbed, and I felt that before long my secret must be known. I could
not hide the wild mirth and joy which boiled within me, and made me when
I was alone, at home, jump up and beat my hands together, and dance
round and round, and roar aloud. When I went out, and saw the busy
crowds hurrying about the streets; or to the theatre, and heard the
sound of music, and beheld the people dancing, I felt such glee, that I
could have rushed among them, and torn them to pieces limb from limb,
and howled in transport. But I ground my teeth, and struck my feet upon
the floor, and drove my sharp nails into my hands. I kept it down; and
no one knew I was a madman yet.

‘I remember--though it’s one of the last things I can remember: for now
I mix up realities with my dreams, and having so much to do, and being
always hurried here, have no time to separate the two, from some strange
confusion in which they get involved--I remember how I let it out at
last. Ha! ha! I think I see their frightened looks now, and feel the
ease with which I flung them from me, and dashed my clenched fist into
their white faces, and then flew like the wind, and left them screaming
and shouting far behind. The strength of a giant comes upon me when I
think of it. There--see how this iron bar bends beneath my furious
wrench. I could snap it like a twig, only there are long galleries here
with many doors--I don’t think I could find my way along them; and even
if I could, I know there are iron gates below which they keep locked and
barred. They know what a clever madman I have been, and they are proud
to have me here, to show.

‘Let me see: yes, I had been out. It was late at night when I reached
home, and found the proudest of the three proud brothers waiting to see
me--urgent business he said: I recollect it well. I hated that man with
all a madman’s hate. Many and many a time had my fingers longed to tear
him. They told me he was there. I ran swiftly upstairs. He had a word to
say to me. I dismissed the servants. It was late, and we were alone
together--for the first time.

‘I kept my eyes carefully from him at first, for I knew what he little
thought--and I gloried in the knowledge--that the light of madness
gleamed from them like fire. We sat in silence for a few minutes. He
spoke at last. My recent dissipation, and strange remarks, made so soon
after his sister’s death, were an insult to her memory. Coupling
together many circumstances which had at first escaped his observation,
he thought I had not treated her well. He wished to know whether he was
right in inferring that I meant to cast a reproach upon her memory, and
a disrespect upon her family. It was due to the uniform he wore, to
demand this explanation.

‘This man had a commission in the army--a commission, purchased with my
money, and his sister’s misery! This was the man who had been foremost
in the plot to ensnare me, and grasp my wealth. This was the man who had
been the main instrument in forcing his sister to wed me; well knowing
that her heart was given to that puling boy. Due to his uniform! The
livery of his degradation! I turned my eyes upon him--I could not help
it--but I spoke not a word.

‘I saw the sudden change that came upon him beneath my gaze. He was a
bold man, but the colour faded from his face, and he drew back his
chair. I dragged mine nearer to him; and I laughed--I was very merry
then--I saw him shudder. I felt the madness rising within me. He was
afraid of me.

‘“You were very fond of your sister when she was alive,” I said.--
“Very.”

‘He looked uneasily round him, and I saw his hand grasp the back of his
chair; but he said nothing.

‘“You villain,” said I, “I found you out: I discovered your hellish
plots against me; I know her heart was fixed on some one else before you
compelled her to marry me. I know it--I know it.”

‘He jumped suddenly from his chair, brandished it aloft, and bid me
stand back--for I took care to be getting closer to him all the time I
spoke.

‘I screamed rather than talked, for I felt tumultuous passions eddying
through my veins, and the old spirits whispering and taunting me to tear
his heart out.

‘“Damn you,” said I, starting up, and rushing upon him; “I killed her. I
am a madman. Down with you. Blood, blood! I will have it!”

‘I turned aside with one blow the chair he hurled at me in his terror,
and closed with him; and with a heavy crash we rolled upon the floor
together.

‘It was a fine struggle that; for he was a tall, strong man, fighting
for his life; and I, a powerful madman, thirsting to destroy him. I knew
no strength could equal mine, and I was right. Right again, though a
madman! His struggles grew fainter. I knelt upon his chest, and clasped
his brawny throat firmly with both hands. His face grew purple; his eyes
were starting from his head, and with protruded tongue, he seemed to
mock me. I squeezed the tighter.

‘The door was suddenly burst open with a loud noise, and a crowd of
people rushed forward, crying aloud to each other to secure the madman.

‘My secret was out; and my only struggle now was for liberty and
freedom. I gained my feet before a hand was on me, threw myself among my
assailants, and cleared my way with my strong arm, as if I bore a
hatchet in my hand, and hewed them down before me. I gained the door,
dropped over the banisters, and in an instant was in the street.

‘Straight and swift I ran, and no one dared to stop me. I heard the
noise of the feet behind, and redoubled my speed. It grew fainter and
fainter in the distance, and at length died away altogether; but on I
bounded, through marsh and rivulet, over fence and wall, with a wild
shout which was taken up by the strange beings that flocked around me on
every side, and swelled the sound, till it pierced the air. I was borne
upon the arms of demons who swept along upon the wind, and bore down
bank and hedge before them, and spun me round and round with a rustle
and a speed that made my head swim, until at last they threw me from
them with a violent shock, and I fell heavily upon the earth. When I
woke I found myself here--here in this gray cell, where the sunlight
seldom comes, and the moon steals in, in rays which only serve to show
the dark shadows about me, and that silent figure in its old corner.
When I lie awake, I can sometimes hear strange shrieks and cries from
distant parts of this large place. What they are, I know not; but they
neither come from that pale form, nor does it regard them. For from the
first shades of dusk till the earliest light of morning, it still stands
motionless in the same place, listening to the music of my iron chain,
and watching my gambols on my straw bed.’

At the end of the manuscript was written, in another hand, this note:--

[The unhappy man whose ravings are recorded above, was a melancholy
instance of the baneful results of energies misdirected in early life,
and excesses prolonged until their consequences could never be repaired.
The thoughtless riot, dissipation, and debauchery of his younger days
produced fever and delirium. The first effects of the latter was the
strange delusion, founded upon a well-known medical theory, strongly
contended for by some, and as strongly contested by others, that an
hereditary madness existed in his family. This produced a settled gloom,
which in time developed a morbid insanity, and finally terminated in
raving madness. There is every reason to believe that the events he
detailed, though distorted in the description by his diseased
imagination, really happened. It is only matter of wonder to those who
were acquainted with the vices of his early career, that his passions,
when no longer controlled by reason, did not lead him to the commission
of still more frightful deeds.]

Mr. Pickwick’s candle was just expiring in the socket, as he concluded
the perusal of the old clergyman’s manuscript; and when the light went
suddenly out, without any previous flicker by way of warning, it
communicated a very considerable start to his excited frame. Hastily
throwing off such articles of clothing as he had put on when he rose
from his uneasy bed, and casting a fearful glance around, he once more
scrambled hastily between the sheets, and soon fell fast asleep.

The sun was shining brilliantly into his chamber, when he awoke, and the
morning was far advanced. The gloom which had oppressed him on the
previous night had disappeared with the dark shadows which shrouded the
landscape, and his thoughts and feelings were as light and gay as the
morning itself. After a hearty breakfast, the four gentlemen sallied
forth to walk to Gravesend, followed by a man bearing the stone in its
deal box. They reached the town about one o’clock (their luggage they
had directed to be forwarded to the city, from Rochester), and being
fortunate enough to secure places on the outside of a coach, arrived in
London in sound health and spirits, on that same afternoon.

The next three or four days were occupied with the preparations which
were necessary for their journey to the borough of Eatanswill. As any
references to that most important undertaking demands a separate
chapter, we may devote the few lines which remain at the close of this,
to narrate, with great brevity, the history of the antiquarian
discovery.

It appears from the Transactions of the Club, then, that Mr. Pickwick
lectured upon the discovery at a General Club Meeting, convened on the
night succeeding their return, and entered into a variety of ingenious
and erudite speculations on the meaning of the inscription. It also
appears that a skilful artist executed a faithful delineation of the
curiosity, which was engraven on stone, and presented to the Royal
Antiquarian Society, and other learned bodies: that heart-burnings and
jealousies without number were created by rival controversies which were
penned upon the subject; and that Mr. Pickwick himself wrote a pamphlet,
containing ninety-six pages of very small print, and twenty-seven
different readings of the inscription: that three old gentlemen cut off
their eldest sons with a shilling a-piece for presuming to doubt the
antiquity of the fragment; and that one enthusiastic individual cut
himself off prematurely, in despair at being unable to fathom its
meaning: that Mr. Pickwick was elected an honorary member of seventeen
native and foreign societies, for making the discovery: that none of the
seventeen could make anything of it; but that all the seventeen agreed
it was very extraordinary.

Mr. Blotton, indeed--and the name will be doomed to the undying contempt
of those who cultivate the mysterious and the sublime--Mr. Blotton, we
say, with the doubt and cavilling peculiar to vulgar minds, presumed to
state a view of the case, as degrading as ridiculous. Mr. Blotton, with
a mean desire to tarnish the lustre of the immortal name of Pickwick,
actually undertook a journey to Cobham in person, and on his return,
sarcastically observed in an oration at the club, that he had seen the
man from whom the stone was purchased; that the man presumed the stone
to be ancient, but solemnly denied the antiquity of the inscription--
inasmuch as he represented it to have been rudely carved by himself in
an idle mood, and to display letters intended to bear neither more or
less than the simple construction of--‘BILL STUMPS, HIS MARK’; and that
Mr. Stumps, being little in the habit of original composition, and more
accustomed to be guided by the sound of words than by the strict rules
of orthography, had omitted the concluding ‘L’ of his Christian name.

The Pickwick Club (as might have been expected from so enlightened an
institution) received this statement with the contempt it deserved,
expelled the presumptuous and ill-conditioned Blotton from the society,
and voted Mr. Pickwick a pair of gold spectacles, in token of their
confidence and approbation: in return for which, Mr. Pickwick caused a
portrait of himself to be painted, and hung up in the club room.

Mr. Blotton was ejected but not conquered. He also wrote a pamphlet,
addressed to the seventeen learned societies, native and foreign,
containing a repetition of the statement he had already made, and rather
more than half intimating his opinion that the seventeen learned
societies were so many ‘humbugs.’ Hereupon, the virtuous indignation of
the seventeen learned societies being roused, several fresh pamphlets
appeared; the foreign learned societies corresponded with the native
learned societies; the native learned societies translated the pamphlets
of the foreign learned societies into English; the foreign learned
societies translated the pamphlets of the native learned societies into
all sorts of languages; and thus commenced that celebrated scientific
discussion so well known to all men, as the Pickwick controversy.

But this base attempt to injure Mr. Pickwick recoiled upon the head of
its calumnious author. The seventeen learned societies unanimously voted
the presumptuous Blotton an ignorant meddler, and forthwith set to work
upon more treatises than ever. And to this day the stone remains, an
illegible monument of Mr. Pickwick’s greatness, and a lasting trophy to
the littleness of his enemies.



CHAPTER XII. DESCRIPTIVE OF A VERY IMPORTANT PROCEEDING ON THE PART OF
MR. PICKWICK; NO LESS AN EPOCH IN HIS LIFE, THAN IN THIS HISTORY

Mr. Pickwick’s apartments in Goswell Street, although on a limited
scale, were not only of a very neat and comfortable description, but
peculiarly adapted for the residence of a man of his genius and
observation. His sitting-room was the first-floor front, his bedroom the
second-floor front; and thus, whether he were sitting at his desk in his
parlour, or standing before the dressing-glass in his dormitory, he had
an equal opportunity of contemplating human nature in all the numerous
phases it exhibits, in that not more populous than popular thoroughfare.
His landlady, Mrs. Bardell--the relict and sole executrix of a deceased
custom-house officer--was a comely woman of bustling manners and
agreeable appearance, with a natural genius for cooking, improved by
study and long practice, into an exquisite talent. There were no
children, no servants, no fowls. The only other inmates of the house
were a large man and a small boy; the first a lodger, the second a
production of Mrs. Bardell’s. The large man was always home precisely at
ten o’clock at night, at which hour he regularly condensed himself into
the limits of a dwarfish French bedstead in the back parlour; and the
infantine sports and gymnastic exercises of Master Bardell were
exclusively confined to the neighbouring pavements and gutters.
Cleanliness and quiet reigned throughout the house; and in it Mr.
Pickwick’s will was law.

To any one acquainted with these points of the domestic economy of the
establishment, and conversant with the admirable regulation of Mr.
Pickwick’s mind, his appearance and behaviour on the morning previous to
that which had been fixed upon for the journey to Eatanswill would have
been most mysterious and unaccountable. He paced the room to and fro
with hurried steps, popped his head out of the window at intervals of
about three minutes each, constantly referred to his watch, and
exhibited many other manifestations of impatience very unusual with him.
It was evident that something of great importance was in contemplation,
but what that something was, not even Mrs. Bardell had been enabled to
discover.

‘Mrs. Bardell,’ said Mr. Pickwick, at last, as that amiable female
approached the termination of a prolonged dusting of the apartment.

‘Sir,’ said Mrs. Bardell.

‘Your little boy is a very long time gone.’

‘Why it’s a good long way to the Borough, sir,’ remonstrated Mrs.
Bardell.

‘Ah,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘very true; so it is.’ Mr. Pickwick relapsed
into silence, and Mrs. Bardell resumed her dusting.

‘Mrs. Bardell,’ said Mr. Pickwick, at the expiration of a few minutes.

‘Sir,’ said Mrs. Bardell again.

‘Do you think it a much greater expense to keep two people, than to keep
one?’

‘La, Mr. Pickwick,’ said Mrs. Bardell, colouring up to the very border
of her cap, as she fancied she observed a species of matrimonial twinkle
in the eyes of her lodger; ‘La, Mr. Pickwick, what a question!’

‘Well, but do you?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘That depends,’ said Mrs. Bardell, approaching the duster very near to
Mr. Pickwick’s elbow which was planted on the table. ‘That depends a
good deal upon the person, you know, Mr. Pickwick; and whether it’s a
saving and careful person, sir.’

‘That’s very true,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘but the person I have in my eye
(here he looked very hard at Mrs. Bardell) I think possesses these
qualities; and has, moreover, a considerable knowledge of the world, and
a great deal of sharpness, Mrs. Bardell, which may be of material use to
me.’

‘La, Mr. Pickwick,’ said Mrs. Bardell, the crimson rising to her cap-
border again.

‘I do,’ said Mr. Pickwick, growing energetic, as was his wont in
speaking of a subject which interested him--‘I do, indeed; and to tell
you the truth, Mrs. Bardell, I have made up my mind.’

‘Dear me, sir,’ exclaimed Mrs. Bardell.

‘You’ll think it very strange now,’ said the amiable Mr. Pickwick, with
a good-humoured glance at his companion, ‘that I never consulted you
about this matter, and never even mentioned it, till I sent your little
boy out this morning--eh?’

Mrs. Bardell could only reply by a look. She had long worshipped Mr.
Pickwick at a distance, but here she was, all at once, raised to a
pinnacle to which her wildest and most extravagant hopes had never dared
to aspire. Mr. Pickwick was going to propose--a deliberate plan, too--
sent her little boy to the Borough, to get him out of the way--how
thoughtful--how considerate!

‘Well,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘what do you think?’

‘Oh, Mr. Pickwick,’ said Mrs. Bardell, trembling with agitation, ‘you’re
very kind, sir.’

‘It’ll save you a good deal of trouble, won’t it?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Oh, I never thought anything of the trouble, sir,’ replied Mrs.
Bardell; ‘and, of course, I should take more trouble to please you then,
than ever; but it is so kind of you, Mr. Pickwick, to have so much
consideration for my loneliness.’

‘Ah, to be sure,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘I never thought of that. When I am
in town, you’ll always have somebody to sit with you. To be sure, so you
will.’

‘I am sure I ought to be a very happy woman,’ said Mrs. Bardell.

‘And your little boy--’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Bless his heart!’ interposed Mrs. Bardell, with a maternal sob.

‘He, too, will have a companion,’ resumed Mr. Pickwick, ‘a lively one,
who’ll teach him, I’ll be bound, more tricks in a week than he would
ever learn in a year.’ And Mr. Pickwick smiled placidly.

‘Oh, you dear--’ said Mrs. Bardell.

Mr. Pickwick started.

‘Oh, you kind, good, playful dear,’ said Mrs. Bardell; and without more
ado, she rose from her chair, and flung her arms round Mr. Pickwick’s
neck, with a cataract of tears and a chorus of sobs.


‘Bless my soul,’ cried the astonished Mr. Pickwick; ‘Mrs. Bardell, my
good woman--dear me, what a situation--pray consider.--Mrs. Bardell,
don’t--if anybody should come--’

‘Oh, let them come,’ exclaimed Mrs. Bardell frantically; ‘I’ll never
leave you--dear, kind, good soul;’ and, with these words, Mrs. Bardell
clung the tighter.

‘Mercy upon me,’ said Mr. Pickwick, struggling violently, ‘I hear
somebody coming up the stairs. Don’t, don’t, there’s a good creature,
don’t.’ But entreaty and remonstrance were alike unavailing; for Mrs.
Bardell had fainted in Mr. Pickwick’s arms; and before he could gain
time to deposit her on a chair, Master Bardell entered the room,
ushering in Mr. Tupman, Mr. Winkle, and Mr. Snodgrass.

Mr. Pickwick was struck motionless and speechless. He stood with his
lovely burden in his arms, gazing vacantly on the countenances of his
friends, without the slightest attempt at recognition or explanation.
They, in their turn, stared at him; and Master Bardell, in his turn,
stared at everybody.

The astonishment of the Pickwickians was so absorbing, and the
perplexity of Mr. Pickwick was so extreme, that they might have remained
in exactly the same relative situations until the suspended animation of
the lady was restored, had it not been for a most beautiful and touching
expression of filial affection on the part of her youthful son. Clad in
a tight suit of corduroy, spangled with brass buttons of a very
considerable size, he at first stood at the door astounded and
uncertain; but by degrees, the impression that his mother must have
suffered some personal damage pervaded his partially developed mind, and
considering Mr. Pickwick as the aggressor, he set up an appalling and
semi-earthly kind of howling, and butting forward with his head,
commenced assailing that immortal gentleman about the back and legs,
with such blows and pinches as the strength of his arm, and the violence
of his excitement, allowed.

‘Take this little villain away,’ said the agonised Mr. Pickwick, ‘he’s
mad.’

‘What is the matter?’ said the three tongue-tied Pickwickians.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Mr. Pickwick pettishly. ‘Take away the boy.’
(Here Mr. Winkle carried the interesting boy, screaming and struggling,
to the farther end of the apartment.) ‘Now help me, lead this woman
downstairs.’

‘Oh, I am better now,’ said Mrs. Bardell faintly.

‘Let me lead you downstairs,’ said the ever-gallant Mr. Tupman.

‘Thank you, sir--thank you;’ exclaimed Mrs. Bardell hysterically. And
downstairs she was led accordingly, accompanied by her affectionate son.

‘I cannot conceive,’ said Mr. Pickwick when his friend returned--‘I
cannot conceive what has been the matter with that woman. I had merely
announced to her my intention of keeping a man-servant, when she fell
into the extraordinary paroxysm in which you found her. Very
extraordinary thing.’

‘Very,’ said his three friends.

‘Placed me in such an extremely awkward situation,’ continued Mr.
Pickwick.

‘Very,’ was the reply of his followers, as they coughed slightly, and
looked dubiously at each other.

This behaviour was not lost upon Mr. Pickwick. He remarked their
incredulity. They evidently suspected him.

‘There is a man in the passage now,’ said Mr. Tupman.

‘It’s the man I spoke to you about,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘I sent for him
to the Borough this morning. Have the goodness to call him up,
Snodgrass.’

Mr. Snodgrass did as he was desired; and Mr. Samuel Weller forthwith
presented himself.

‘Oh--you remember me, I suppose?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘I should think so,’ replied Sam, with a patronising wink. ‘Queer start
that ‘ere, but he was one too many for you, warn’t he? Up to snuff and a
pinch or two over--eh?’

‘Never mind that matter now,’ said Mr. Pickwick hastily; ‘I want to
speak to you about something else. Sit down.’

‘Thank’ee, sir,’ said Sam. And down he sat without further bidding,
having previously deposited his old white hat on the landing outside the
door. ‘’Tain’t a wery good ‘un to look at,’ said Sam, ‘but it’s an
astonishin’ ‘un to wear; and afore the brim went, it was a wery handsome
tile. Hows’ever it’s lighter without it, that’s one thing, and every
hole lets in some air, that’s another--wentilation gossamer I calls it.’
On the delivery of this sentiment, Mr. Weller smiled agreeably upon the
assembled Pickwickians.

‘Now with regard to the matter on which I, with the concurrence of these
gentlemen, sent for you,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘That’s the pint, sir,’ interposed Sam; ‘out vith it, as the father said
to his child, when he swallowed a farden.’

‘We want to know, in the first place,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘whether you
have any reason to be discontented with your present situation.’

‘Afore I answers that ‘ere question, gen’l’m’n,’ replied Mr. Weller, ‘I
should like to know, in the first place, whether you’re a-goin’ to
purwide me with a better?’

A sunbeam of placid benevolence played on Mr. Pickwick’s features as he
said, ‘I have half made up my mind to engage you myself.’

‘Have you, though?’ said Sam.

Mr. Pickwick nodded in the affirmative.

‘Wages?’ inquired Sam.

‘Twelve pounds a year,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Clothes?’

‘Two suits.’

‘Work?’

‘To attend upon me; and travel about with me and these gentlemen here.’

‘Take the bill down,’ said Sam emphatically. ‘I’m let to a single
gentleman, and the terms is agreed upon.’

‘You accept the situation?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Cert’nly,’ replied Sam. ‘If the clothes fits me half as well as the
place, they’ll do.’

‘You can get a character of course?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Ask the landlady o’ the White Hart about that, Sir,’ replied Sam.

‘Can you come this evening?’

‘I’ll get into the clothes this minute, if they’re here,’ said Sam, with
great alacrity.

‘Call at eight this evening,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘and if the inquiries
are satisfactory, they shall be provided.’

With the single exception of one amiable indiscretion, in which an
assistant housemaid had equally participated, the history of Mr.
Weller’s conduct was so very blameless, that Mr. Pickwick felt fully
justified in closing the engagement that very evening. With the
promptness and energy which characterised not only the public
proceedings, but all the private actions of this extraordinary man, he
at once led his new attendant to one of those convenient emporiums where
gentlemen’s new and second-hand clothes are provided, and the
troublesome and inconvenient formality of measurement dispensed with;
and before night had closed in, Mr. Weller was furnished with a grey
coat with the P. C. button, a black hat with a cockade to it, a pink
striped waistcoat, light breeches and gaiters, and a variety of other
necessaries, too numerous to recapitulate.

‘Well,’ said that suddenly-transformed individual, as he took his seat
on the outside of the Eatanswill coach next morning; ‘I wonder whether
I’m meant to be a footman, or a groom, or a gamekeeper, or a seedsman. I
looks like a sort of compo of every one on ‘em. Never mind; there’s a
change of air, plenty to see, and little to do; and all this suits my
complaint uncommon; so long life to the Pickvicks, says I!’



CHAPTER XIII. SOME ACCOUNT OF EATANSWILL; OF THE STATE OF PARTIES
THEREIN; AND OF THE ELECTION OF A MEMBER TO SERVE IN PARLIAMENT FOR THAT
ANCIENT, LOYAL, AND PATRIOTIC BOROUGH

We will frankly acknowledge that, up to the period of our being first
immersed in the voluminous papers of the Pickwick Club, we had never
heard of Eatanswill; we will with equal candour admit that we have in
vain searched for proof of the actual existence of such a place at the
present day. Knowing the deep reliance to be placed on every note and
statement of Mr. Pickwick’s, and not presuming to set up our
recollection against the recorded declarations of that great man, we
have consulted every authority, bearing upon the subject, to which we
could possibly refer. We have traced every name in schedules A and B,
without meeting with that of Eatanswill; we have minutely examined every
corner of the pocket county maps issued for the benefit of society by
our distinguished publishers, and the same result has attended our
investigation. We are therefore led to believe that Mr. Pickwick, with
that anxious desire to abstain from giving offence to any, and with
those delicate feelings for which all who knew him well know he was so
eminently remarkable, purposely substituted a fictitious designation,
for the real name of the place in which his observations were made. We
are confirmed in this belief by a little circumstance, apparently slight
and trivial in itself, but when considered in this point of view, not
undeserving of notice. In Mr. Pickwick’s note-book, we can just trace an
entry of the fact, that the places of himself and followers were booked
by the Norwich coach; but this entry was afterwards lined through, as if
for the purpose of concealing even the direction in which the borough is
situated. We will not, therefore, hazard a guess upon the subject, but
will at once proceed with this history, content with the materials which
its characters have provided for us.

It appears, then, that the Eatanswill people, like the people of many
other small towns, considered themselves of the utmost and most mighty
importance, and that every man in Eatanswill, conscious of the weight
that attached to his example, felt himself bound to unite, heart and
soul, with one of the two great parties that divided the town--the Blues
and the Buffs. Now the Blues lost no opportunity of opposing the Buffs,
and the Buffs lost no opportunity of opposing the Blues; and the
consequence was, that whenever the Buffs and Blues met together at
public meeting, town-hall, fair, or market, disputes and high words
arose between them. With these dissensions it is almost superfluous to
say that everything in Eatanswill was made a party question. If the
Buffs proposed to new skylight the market-place, the Blues got up public
meetings, and denounced the proceeding; if the Blues proposed the
erection of an additional pump in the High Street, the Buffs rose as one
man and stood aghast at the enormity. There were Blue shops and Buff
shops, Blue inns and Buff inns--there was a Blue aisle and a Buff aisle
in the very church itself.

Of course it was essentially and indispensably necessary that each of
these powerful parties should have its chosen organ and representative:
and, accordingly, there were two newspapers in the town--the Eatanswill
_Gazette_ and the Eatanswill _Independent_; the former advocating Blue
principles, and the latter conducted on grounds decidedly Buff. Fine
newspapers they were. Such leading articles, and such spirited attacks!-
-’Our worthless contemporary, the _Gazette_’--‘That disgraceful and
dastardly journal, the _Independent_’--‘That false and scurrilous print,
the _Independent_’--‘That vile and slanderous calumniator, the
_Gazette_;’ these, and other spirit-stirring denunciations, were strewn
plentifully over the columns of each, in every number, and excited
feelings of the most intense delight and indignation in the bosoms of
the townspeople.

Mr. Pickwick, with his usual foresight and sagacity, had chosen a
peculiarly desirable moment for his visit to the borough. Never was such
a contest known. The Honourable Samuel Slumkey, of Slumkey Hall, was the
Blue candidate; and Horatio Fizkin, Esq., of Fizkin Lodge, near
Eatanswill, had been prevailed upon by his friends to stand forward on
the Buff interest. The _Gazette_ warned the electors of Eatanswill that
the eyes not only of England, but of the whole civilised world, were
upon them; and the _Independent_ imperatively demanded to know, whether
the constituency of Eatanswill were the grand fellows they had always
taken them for, or base and servile tools, undeserving alike of the name
of Englishmen and the blessings of freedom. Never had such a commotion
agitated the town before.

It was late in the evening when Mr. Pickwick and his companions,
assisted by Sam, dismounted from the roof of the Eatanswill coach. Large
blue silk flags were flying from the windows of the Town Arms Inn, and
bills were posted in every sash, intimating, in gigantic letters, that
the Honourable Samuel Slumkey’s committee sat there daily. A crowd of
idlers were assembled in the road, looking at a hoarse man in the
balcony, who was apparently talking himself very red in the face in Mr.
Slumkey’s behalf; but the force and point of whose arguments were
somewhat impaired by the perpetual beating of four large drums which Mr.
Fizkin’s committee had stationed at the street corner. There was a busy
little man beside him, though, who took off his hat at intervals and
motioned to the people to cheer, which they regularly did, most
enthusiastically; and as the red-faced gentleman went on talking till he
was redder in the face than ever, it seemed to answer his purpose quite
as well as if anybody had heard him.

The Pickwickians had no sooner dismounted than they were surrounded by a
branch mob of the honest and independent, who forthwith set up three
deafening cheers, which being responded to by the main body (for it’s
not at all necessary for a crowd to know what they are cheering about),
swelled into a tremendous roar of triumph, which stopped even the red-
faced man in the balcony.

‘Hurrah!’ shouted the mob, in conclusion.

‘One cheer more,’ screamed the little fugleman in the balcony, and out
shouted the mob again, as if lungs were cast-iron, with steel works.

‘Slumkey for ever!’ roared the honest and independent.

‘Slumkey for ever!’ echoed Mr. Pickwick, taking off his hat.

‘No Fizkin!’ roared the crowd.

‘Certainly not!’ shouted Mr. Pickwick. ‘Hurrah!’ And then there was
another roaring, like that of a whole menagerie when the elephant has
rung the bell for the cold meat.

‘Who is Slumkey?’ whispered Mr. Tupman.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, in the same tone. ‘Hush. Don’t ask
any questions. It’s always best on these occasions to do what the mob
do.’

‘But suppose there are two mobs?’ suggested Mr. Snodgrass.

‘Shout with the largest,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

Volumes could not have said more.

They entered the house, the crowd opening right and left to let them
pass, and cheering vociferously. The first object of consideration was
to secure quarters for the night.

‘Can we have beds here?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, summoning the waiter.

‘Don’t know, Sir,’ replied the man; ‘afraid we’re full, sir--I’ll
inquire, Sir.’ Away he went for that purpose, and presently returned, to
ask whether the gentleman were ‘Blue.’

As neither Mr. Pickwick nor his companions took any vital interest in
the cause of either candidate, the question was rather a difficult one
to answer. In this dilemma Mr. Pickwick bethought himself of his new
friend, Mr. Perker.

‘Do you know a gentleman of the name of Perker?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Certainly, Sir; Honourable Mr. Samuel Slumkey’s agent.’

‘He is Blue, I think?’

‘Oh, yes, Sir.’

‘Then _we_ are Blue,’ said Mr. Pickwick; but observing that the man
looked rather doubtful at this accommodating announcement, he gave him
his card, and desired him to present it to Mr. Perker forthwith, if he
should happen to be in the house. The waiter retired; and reappearing
almost immediately with a request that Mr. Pickwick would follow him,
led the way to a large room on the first floor, where, seated at a long
table covered with books and papers, was Mr. Perker.

‘Ah--ah, my dear Sir,’ said the little man, advancing to meet him; ‘very
happy to see you, my dear Sir, very. Pray sit down. So you have carried
your intention into effect. You have come down here to see an election--
eh?’

Mr. Pickwick replied in the affirmative.

‘Spirited contest, my dear sir,’ said the little man.

‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ said Mr. Pickwick, rubbing his hands. ‘I
like to see sturdy patriotism, on whatever side it is called forth--and
so it’s a spirited contest?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said the little man, ‘very much so indeed. We have opened all
the public-houses in the place, and left our adversary nothing but the
beer-shops--masterly stroke of policy that, my dear Sir, eh?’ The little
man smiled complacently, and took a large pinch of snuff.

‘And what are the probabilities as to the result of the contest?’
inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Why, doubtful, my dear Sir; rather doubtful as yet,’ replied the little
man. ‘Fizkin’s people have got three-and-thirty voters in the lock-up
coach-house at the White Hart.’

‘In the coach-house!’ said Mr. Pickwick, considerably astonished by this
second stroke of policy.

‘They keep ‘em locked up there till they want ‘em,’ resumed the little
man. ‘The effect of that is, you see, to prevent our getting at them;
and even if we could, it would be of no use, for they keep them very
drunk on purpose. Smart fellow Fizkin’s agent--very smart fellow
indeed.’

Mr. Pickwick stared, but said nothing.

‘We are pretty confident, though,’ said Mr. Perker, sinking his voice
almost to a whisper. ‘We had a little tea-party here, last night--five-
and-forty women, my dear sir--and gave every one of ‘em a green parasol
when she went away.’

‘A parasol!’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Fact, my dear Sir, fact. Five-and-forty green parasols, at seven and
sixpence a-piece. All women like finery--extraordinary the effect of
those parasols. Secured all their husbands, and half their brothers--
beats stockings, and flannel, and all that sort of thing hollow. My
idea, my dear Sir, entirely. Hail, rain, or sunshine, you can’t walk
half a dozen yards up the street, without encountering half a dozen
green parasols.’

Here the little man indulged in a convulsion of mirth, which was only
checked by the entrance of a third party.

This was a tall, thin man, with a sandy-coloured head inclined to
baldness, and a face in which solemn importance was blended with a look
of unfathomable profundity. He was dressed in a long brown surtout, with
a black cloth waistcoat, and drab trousers. A double eyeglass dangled at
his waistcoat; and on his head he wore a very low-crowned hat with a
broad brim. The new-comer was introduced to Mr. Pickwick as Mr. Pott,
the editor of the Eatanswill _Gazette_. After a few preliminary remarks,
Mr. Pott turned round to Mr. Pickwick, and said with solemnity--

‘This contest excites great interest in the metropolis, sir?’

‘I believe it does,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘To which I have reason to know,’ said Pott, looking towards Mr. Perker
for corroboration--‘to which I have reason to know that my article of
last Saturday in some degree contributed.’

‘Not the least doubt of it,’ said the little man.

‘The press is a mighty engine, sir,’ said Pott.

Mr. Pickwick yielded his fullest assent to the proposition.

‘But I trust, sir,’ said Pott, ‘that I have never abused the enormous
power I wield. I trust, sir, that I have never pointed the noble
instrument which is placed in my hands, against the sacred bosom of
private life, or the tender breast of individual reputation; I trust,
sir, that I have devoted my energies to--to endeavours--humble they may
be, humble I know they are--to instil those principles of--which--are--’

Here the editor of the Eatanswill _Gazette_, appearing to ramble, Mr.
Pickwick came to his relief, and said--

‘Certainly.’

‘And what, Sir,’ said Pott--‘what, Sir, let me ask you as an impartial
man, is the state of the public mind in London, with reference to my
contest with the _Independent_?’

‘Greatly excited, no doubt,’ interposed Mr. Perker, with a look of
slyness which was very likely accidental.

‘The contest,’ said Pott, ‘shall be prolonged so long as I have health
and strength, and that portion of talent with which I am gifted. From
that contest, Sir, although it may unsettle men’s minds and excite their
feelings, and render them incapable for the discharge of the everyday
duties of ordinary life; from that contest, sir, I will never shrink,
till I have set my heel upon the Eatanswill _Independent_. I wish the
people of London, and the people of this country to know, sir, that they
may rely upon me--that I will not desert them, that I am resolved to
stand by them, Sir, to the last.’

Your conduct is most noble, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick; and he grasped the
hand of the magnanimous Pott.

‘You are, sir, I perceive, a man of sense and talent,’ said Mr. Pott,
almost breathless with the vehemence of his patriotic declaration. ‘I am
most happy, sir, to make the acquaintance of such a man.’

‘And I,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘feel deeply honoured by this expression of
your opinion. Allow me, sir, to introduce you to my fellow-travellers,
the other corresponding members of the club I am proud to have founded.’

‘I shall be delighted,’ said Mr. Pott.

Mr. Pickwick withdrew, and returning with his friends, presented them in
due form to the editor of the Eatanswill _Gazette_.

‘Now, my dear Pott,’ said little Mr. Perker, ‘the question is, what are
we to do with our friends here?’

‘We can stop in this house, I suppose,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Not a spare bed in the house, my dear sir--not a single bed.’

‘Extremely awkward,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Very,’ said his fellow-voyagers.

‘I have an idea upon this subject,’ said Mr. Pott, ‘which I think may be
very successfully adopted. They have two beds at the Peacock, and I can
boldly say, on behalf of Mrs. Pott, that she will be delighted to
accommodate Mr. Pickwick and any one of his friends, if the other two
gentlemen and their servant do not object to shifting, as they best can,
at the Peacock.’

After repeated pressings on the part of Mr. Pott, and repeated
protestations on that of Mr. Pickwick that he could not think of
incommoding or troubling his amiable wife, it was decided that it was
the only feasible arrangement that could be made. So it _was _made; and
after dinner together at the Town Arms, the friends separated, Mr.
Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass repairing to the Peacock, and Mr. Pickwick and
Mr. Winkle proceeding to the mansion of Mr. Pott; it having been
previously arranged that they should all reassemble at the Town Arms in
the morning, and accompany the Honourable Samuel Slumkey’s procession to
the place of nomination.

Mr. Pott’s domestic circle was limited to himself and his wife. All men
whom mighty genius has raised to a proud eminence in the world, have
usually some little weakness which appears the more conspicuous from the
contrast it presents to their general character. If Mr. Pott had a
weakness, it was, perhaps, that he was rather too submissive to the
somewhat contemptuous control and sway of his wife. We do not feel
justified in laying any particular stress upon the fact, because on the
present occasion all Mrs. Pott’s most winning ways were brought into
requisition to receive the two gentlemen.

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Pott, ‘Mr. Pickwick--Mr. Pickwick of London.’

Mrs. Pott received Mr. Pickwick’s paternal grasp of the hand with
enchanting sweetness; and Mr. Winkle, who had not been announced at all,
sidled and bowed, unnoticed, in an obscure corner.

‘P. my dear’--said Mrs. Pott.

‘My life,’ said Mr. Pott.

‘Pray introduce the other gentleman.’

‘I beg a thousand pardons,’ said Mr. Pott. ‘Permit me, Mrs. Pott, Mr.--’

‘Winkle,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Winkle,’ echoed Mr. Pott; and the ceremony of introduction was
complete.

‘We owe you many apologies, ma’am,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘for disturbing
your domestic arrangements at so short a notice.’

‘I beg you won’t mention it, sir,’ replied the feminine Pott, with
vivacity. ‘It is a high treat to me, I assure you, to see any new faces;
living as I do, from day to day, and week to week, in this dull place,
and seeing nobody.’

‘Nobody, my dear!’ exclaimed Mr. Pott archly.

‘Nobody but you,’ retorted Mrs. Pott, with asperity.

‘You see, Mr. Pickwick,’ said the host in explanation of his wife’s
lament, ‘that we are in some measure cut off from many enjoyments and
pleasures of which we might otherwise partake. My public station, as
editor of the Eatanswill _Gazette_, the position which that paper holds
in the country, my constant immersion in the vortex of politics--’

‘P. my dear--’ interposed Mrs. Pott.

‘My life--’ said the editor.

‘I wish, my dear, you would endeavour to find some topic of conversation
in which these gentlemen might take some rational interest.’

‘But, my love,’ said Mr. Pott, with great humility, ‘Mr. Pickwick does
take an interest in it.’

‘It’s well for him if he can,’ said Mrs. Pott emphatically; ‘I am
wearied out of my life with your politics, and quarrels with the
_Independent_, and nonsense. I am quite astonished, P., at your making
such an exhibition of your absurdity.’

‘But, my dear--’ said Mr. Pott.

‘Oh, nonsense, don’t talk to me,’ said Mrs. Pott. ‘Do you play ecarte,
Sir?’

‘I shall be very happy to learn under your tuition,’ replied Mr. Winkle.

‘Well, then, draw that little table into this window, and let me get out
of hearing of those prosy politics.’

‘Jane,’ said Mr. Pott, to the servant who brought in candles, ‘go down
into the office, and bring me up the file of the _Gazette_ for eighteen
hundred and twenty-six. I’ll read you,’ added the editor, turning to Mr.
Pickwick--‘I’ll just read you a few of the leaders I wrote at that time
upon the Buff job of appointing a new tollman to the turnpike here; I
rather think they’ll amuse you.’

‘I should like to hear them very much indeed,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

Up came the file, and down sat the editor, with Mr. Pickwick at his
side.

We have in vain pored over the leaves of Mr. Pickwick’s note-book, in
the hope of meeting with a general summary of these beautiful
compositions. We have every reason to believe that he was perfectly
enraptured with the vigour and freshness of the style; indeed Mr. Winkle
has recorded the fact that his eyes were closed, as if with excess of
pleasure, during the whole time of their perusal.

The announcement of supper put a stop both to the game of ecarte, and
the recapitulation of the beauties of the Eatanswill _Gazette_. Mrs.
Pott was in the highest spirits and the most agreeable humour. Mr.
Winkle had already made considerable progress in her good opinion, and
she did not hesitate to inform him, confidentially, that Mr. Pickwick
was ‘a delightful old dear.’ These terms convey a familiarity of
expression, in which few of those who were intimately acquainted with
that colossal-minded man, would have presumed to indulge. We have
preserved them, nevertheless, as affording at once a touching and a
convincing proof of the estimation in which he was held by every class
of society, and the case with which he made his way to their hearts and
feelings.

It was a late hour of the night--long after Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass
had fallen asleep in the inmost recesses of the Peacock--when the two
friends retired to rest. Slumber soon fell upon the senses of Mr.
Winkle, but his feelings had been excited, and his admiration roused;
and for many hours after sleep had rendered him insensible to earthly
objects, the face and figure of the agreeable Mrs. Pott presented
themselves again and again to his wandering imagination.

The noise and bustle which ushered in the morning were sufficient to
dispel from the mind of the most romantic visionary in existence, any
associations but those which were immediately connected with the
rapidly-approaching election. The beating of drums, the blowing of horns
and trumpets, the shouting of men, and tramping of horses, echoed and
re-echoed through the streets from the earliest dawn of day; and an
occasional fight between the light skirmishers of either party at once
enlivened the preparations, and agreeably diversified their character.

‘Well, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, as his valet appeared at his bedroom
door, just as he was concluding his toilet; ‘all alive to-day, I
suppose?’

‘Reg’lar game, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘our people’s a-collecting down
at the Town Arms, and they’re a-hollering themselves hoarse already.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘do they seem devoted to their party, Sam?’

‘Never see such dewotion in my life, Sir.’

‘Energetic, eh?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Uncommon,’ replied Sam; ‘I never see men eat and drink so much afore. I
wonder they ain’t afeer’d o’ bustin’.’

‘That’s the mistaken kindness of the gentry here,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Wery likely,’ replied Sam briefly.

‘Fine, fresh, hearty fellows they seem,’ said Mr. Pickwick, glancing
from the window.

‘Wery fresh,’ replied Sam; ‘me and the two waiters at the Peacock has
been a-pumpin’ over the independent woters as supped there last night.’

‘Pumping over independent voters!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes,’ said his attendant, ‘every man slept vere he fell down; we
dragged ‘em out, one by one, this mornin’, and put ‘em under the pump,
and they’re in reg’lar fine order now. Shillin’ a head the committee
paid for that ‘ere job.’

‘Can such things be!’ exclaimed the astonished Mr. Pickwick.

‘Lord bless your heart, sir,’ said Sam, ‘why where was you half
baptised?--that’s nothin’, that ain’t.’

‘Nothing?’said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Nothin’ at all, Sir,’ replied his attendant. ‘The night afore the last
day o’ the last election here, the opposite party bribed the barmaid at
the Town Arms, to hocus the brandy-and-water of fourteen unpolled
electors as was a-stoppin’ in the house.’

‘What do you mean by “hocussing” brandy-and-water?’ inquired Mr.
Pickwick.

‘Puttin’ laud’num in it,’ replied Sam. ‘Blessed if she didn’t send ‘em
all to sleep till twelve hours arter the election was over. They took
one man up to the booth, in a truck, fast asleep, by way of experiment,
but it was no go--they wouldn’t poll him; so they brought him back, and
put him to bed again.’

Strange practices, these,’ said Mr. Pickwick; half speaking to himself
and half addressing Sam.

‘Not half so strange as a miraculous circumstance as happened to my own
father, at an election time, in this wery place, Sir,’ replied Sam.

‘What was that?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Why, he drove a coach down here once,’ said Sam; ‘’lection time came
on, and he was engaged by vun party to bring down woters from London.
Night afore he was going to drive up, committee on t’ other side sends
for him quietly, and away he goes vith the messenger, who shows him in;-
-large room--lots of gen’l’m’n--heaps of papers, pens and ink, and all
that ‘ere. “Ah, Mr. Weller,” says the gen’l’m’n in the chair, “glad to
see you, sir; how are you?”--“Wery well, thank ‘ee, Sir,” says my
father; “I hope you’re pretty middlin,” says he.--“Pretty well,
thank’ee, Sir,” says the gen’l’m’n; “sit down, Mr. Weller--pray sit
down, sir.” So my father sits down, and he and the gen’l’m’n looks wery
hard at each other. “You don’t remember me?” said the gen’l’m’n.--“Can’t
say I do,” says my father.--“Oh, I know you,” says the gen’l’m’n:
“know’d you when you was a boy,” says he.--“Well, I don’t remember you,”
 says my father.--“That’s wery odd,” says the gen’l’m’n.”--“Wery,” says
my father.--“You must have a bad mem’ry, Mr. Weller,” says the
gen’l’m’n.--“Well, it is a wery bad ‘un,” says my father.--“I thought
so,” says the gen’l’m’n. So then they pours him out a glass of wine, and
gammons him about his driving, and gets him into a reg’lar good humour,
and at last shoves a twenty-pound note into his hand. “It’s a wery bad
road between this and London,” says the gen’l’m’n.--“Here and there it
is a heavy road,” says my father.--” ‘Specially near the canal, I
think,” says the gen’l’m’n.--“Nasty bit that ‘ere,” says my father.--
“Well, Mr. Weller,” says the gen’l’m’n, “you’re a wery good whip, and
can do what you like with your horses, we know. We’re all wery fond o’
you, Mr. Weller, so in case you should have an accident when you’re
bringing these here woters down, and should tip ‘em over into the canal
vithout hurtin’ of ‘em, this is for yourself,” says he.--“Gen’l’m’n,
you’re wery kind,” says my father, “and I’ll drink your health in
another glass of wine,” says he; vich he did, and then buttons up the
money, and bows himself out. You wouldn’t believe, sir,’ continued Sam,
with a look of inexpressible impudence at his master, ‘that on the wery
day as he came down with them woters, his coach _was _upset on that ‘ere
wery spot, and ev’ry man on ‘em was turned into the canal.’

‘And got out again?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick hastily.

‘Why,’ replied Sam very slowly, ‘I rather think one old gen’l’m’n was
missin’; I know his hat was found, but I ain’t quite certain whether his
head was in it or not. But what I look at is the hex-traordinary and
wonderful coincidence, that arter what that gen’l’m’n said, my father’s
coach should be upset in that wery place, and on that wery day!’

‘It is, no doubt, a very extraordinary circumstance indeed,’ said Mr.
Pickwick. ‘But brush my hat, Sam, for I hear Mr. Winkle calling me to
breakfast.’

With these words Mr. Pickwick descended to the parlour, where he found
breakfast laid, and the family already assembled. The meal was hastily
despatched; each of the gentlemen’s hats was decorated with an enormous
blue favour, made up by the fair hands of Mrs. Pott herself; and as Mr.
Winkle had undertaken to escort that lady to a house-top, in the
immediate vicinity of the hustings, Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Pott repaired
alone to the Town Arms, from the back window of which, one of Mr.
Slumkey’s committee was addressing six small boys and one girl, whom he
dignified, at every second sentence, with the imposing title of ‘Men of
Eatanswill,’ whereat the six small boys aforesaid cheered prodigiously.

The stable-yard exhibited unequivocal symptoms of the glory and strength
of the Eatanswill Blues. There was a regular army of blue flags, some
with one handle, and some with two, exhibiting appropriate devices, in
golden characters four feet high, and stout in proportion. There was a
grand band of trumpets, bassoons, and drums, marshalled four abreast,
and earning their money, if ever men did, especially the drum-beaters,
who were very muscular. There were bodies of constables with blue
staves, twenty committee-men with blue scarfs, and a mob of voters with
blue cockades. There were electors on horseback and electors afoot.
There was an open carriage-and-four, for the Honourable Samuel Slumkey;
and there were four carriage-and-pair, for his friends and supporters;
and the flags were rustling, and the band was playing, and the
constables were swearing, and the twenty committee-men were squabbling,
and the mob were shouting, and the horses were backing, and the post-
boys perspiring; and everybody, and everything, then and there
assembled, was for the special use, behoof, honour, and renown, of the
Honourable Samuel Slumkey, of Slumkey Hall, one of the candidates for
the representation of the borough of Eatanswill, in the Commons House of
Parliament of the United Kingdom.

Loud and long were the cheers, and mighty was the rustling of one of the
blue flags, with ‘Liberty of the Press’ inscribed thereon, when the
sandy head of Mr. Pott was discerned in one of the windows, by the mob
beneath; and tremendous was the enthusiasm when the Honourable Samuel
Slumkey himself, in top-boots, and a blue neckerchief, advanced and
seized the hand of the said Pott, and melodramatically testified by
gestures to the crowd, his ineffaceable obligations to the Eatanswill
_Gazette_.

‘Is everything ready?’ said the Honourable Samuel Slumkey to Mr. Perker.

‘Everything, my dear Sir,’ was the little man’s reply.

‘Nothing has been omitted, I hope?’ said the Honourable Samuel Slumkey.

‘Nothing has been left undone, my dear sir--nothing whatever. There are
twenty washed men at the street door for you to shake hands with; and
six children in arms that you’re to pat on the head, and inquire the age
of; be particular about the children, my dear sir--it has always a great
effect, that sort of thing.’

‘I’ll take care,’ said the Honourable Samuel Slumkey.

‘And, perhaps, my dear Sir,’ said the cautious little man, ‘perhaps if
you could--I don’t mean to say it’s indispensable--but if you could
manage to kiss one of ‘em, it would produce a very great impression on
the crowd.’

‘Wouldn’t it have as good an effect if the proposer or seconder did
that?’ said the Honourable Samuel Slumkey.

‘Why, I am afraid it wouldn’t,’ replied the agent; ‘if it were done by
yourself, my dear Sir, I think it would make you very popular.’

‘Very well,’ said the Honourable Samuel Slumkey, with a resigned air,
‘then it must be done. That’s all.’

‘Arrange the procession,’ cried the twenty committee-men.

Amidst the cheers of the assembled throng, the band, and the constables,
and the committee-men, and the voters, and the horsemen, and the
carriages, took their places--each of the two-horse vehicles being
closely packed with as many gentlemen as could manage to stand upright
in it; and that assigned to Mr. Perker, containing Mr. Pickwick, Mr.
Tupman, Mr. Snodgrass, and about half a dozen of the committee besides.

There was a moment of awful suspense as the procession waited for the
Honourable Samuel Slumkey to step into his carriage. Suddenly the crowd
set up a great cheering.

‘He has come out,’ said little Mr. Perker, greatly excited; the more so
as their position did not enable them to see what was going forward.

Another cheer, much louder.

‘He has shaken hands with the men,’ cried the little agent.

Another cheer, far more vehement.

‘He has patted the babies on the head,’ said Mr. Perker, trembling with
anxiety.

A roar of applause that rent the air.

‘He has kissed one of ‘em!’ exclaimed the delighted little man.

A second roar.

‘He has kissed another,’ gasped the excited manager.

A third roar.

‘He’s kissing ‘em all!’ screamed the enthusiastic little gentleman, and
hailed by the deafening shouts of the multitude, the procession moved
on.

How or by what means it became mixed up with the other procession, and
how it was ever extricated from the confusion consequent thereupon, is
more than we can undertake to describe, inasmuch as Mr. Pickwick’s hat
was knocked over his eyes, nose, and mouth, by one poke of a Buff flag-
staff, very early in the proceedings. He describes himself as being
surrounded on every side, when he could catch a glimpse of the scene, by
angry and ferocious countenances, by a vast cloud of dust, and by a
dense crowd of combatants. He represents himself as being forced from
the carriage by some unseen power, and being personally engaged in a
pugilistic encounter; but with whom, or how, or why, he is wholly unable
to state. He then felt himself forced up some wooden steps by the
persons from behind; and on removing his hat, found himself surrounded
by his friends, in the very front of the left hand side of the hustings.
The right was reserved for the Buff party, and the centre for the mayor
and his officers; one of whom--the fat crier of Eatanswill--was ringing
an enormous bell, by way of commanding silence, while Mr. Horatio
Fizkin, and the Honourable Samuel Slumkey, with their hands upon their
hearts, were bowing with the utmost affability to the troubled sea of
heads that inundated the open space in front; and from whence arose a
storm of groans, and shouts, and yells, and hootings, that would have
done honour to an earthquake.


‘There’s Winkle,’ said Mr. Tupman, pulling his friend by the sleeve.

‘Where!’ said Mr. Pickwick, putting on his spectacles, which he had
fortunately kept in his pocket hitherto.

‘There,’ said Mr. Tupman, ‘on the top of that house.’ And there, sure
enough, in the leaden gutter of a tiled roof, were Mr. Winkle and Mrs.
Pott, comfortably seated in a couple of chairs, waving their
handkerchiefs in token of recognition--a compliment which Mr. Pickwick
returned by kissing his hand to the lady.

The proceedings had not yet commenced; and as an inactive crowd is
generally disposed to be jocose, this very innocent action was
sufficient to awaken their facetiousness.

‘Oh, you wicked old rascal,’ cried one voice, ‘looking arter the girls,
are you?’

‘Oh, you wenerable sinner,’ cried another.

‘Putting on his spectacles to look at a married ‘ooman!’ said a third.

‘I see him a-winkin’ at her, with his wicked old eye,’ shouted a fourth.

‘Look arter your wife, Pott,’ bellowed a fifth--and then there was a
roar of laughter.

As these taunts were accompanied with invidious comparisons between Mr.
Pickwick and an aged ram, and several witticisms of the like nature; and
as they moreover rather tended to convey reflections upon the honour of
an innocent lady, Mr. Pickwick’s indignation was excessive; but as
silence was proclaimed at the moment, he contented himself by scorching
the mob with a look of pity for their misguided minds, at which they
laughed more boisterously than ever.

‘Silence!’ roared the mayor’s attendants.

‘Whiffin, proclaim silence,’ said the mayor, with an air of pomp
befitting his lofty station. In obedience to this command the crier
performed another concerto on the bell, whereupon a gentleman in the
crowd called out ‘Muffins’; which occasioned another laugh.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the mayor, at as loud a pitch as he could possibly
force his voice to--‘gentlemen. Brother electors of the borough of
Eatanswill. We are met here to-day for the purpose of choosing a
representative in the room of our late--’

Here the mayor was interrupted by a voice in the crowd.

‘Suc-cess to the mayor!’ cried the voice, ‘and may he never desert the
nail and sarspan business, as he got his money by.’

This allusion to the professional pursuits of the orator was received
with a storm of delight, which, with a bell-accompaniment, rendered the
remainder of his speech inaudible, with the exception of the concluding
sentence, in which he thanked the meeting for the patient attention with
which they heard him throughout--an expression of gratitude which
elicited another burst of mirth, of about a quarter of an hour’s
duration.

Next, a tall, thin gentleman, in a very stiff white neckerchief, after
being repeatedly desired by the crowd to ‘send a boy home, to ask
whether he hadn’t left his voice under the pillow,’ begged to nominate a
fit and proper person to represent them in Parliament. And when he said
it was Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, of Fizkin Lodge, near Eatanswill, the
Fizkinites applauded, and the Slumkeyites groaned, so long, and so
loudly, that both he and the seconder might have sung comic songs in
lieu of speaking, without anybody’s being a bit the wiser.

The friends of Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, having had their innings, a
little choleric, pink-faced man stood forward to propose another fit and
proper person to represent the electors of Eatanswill in Parliament; and
very swimmingly the pink-faced gentleman would have got on, if he had
not been rather too choleric to entertain a sufficient perception of the
fun of the crowd. But after a very few sentences of figurative
eloquence, the pink-faced gentleman got from denouncing those who
interrupted him in the mob, to exchanging defiances with the gentlemen
on the hustings; whereupon arose an uproar which reduced him to the
necessity of expressing his feelings by serious pantomime, which he did,
and then left the stage to his seconder, who delivered a written speech
of half an hour’s length, and wouldn’t be stopped, because he had sent
it all to the Eatanswill _Gazette_, and the Eatanswill _Gazette_ had
already printed it, every word.

Then Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, of Fizkin Lodge, near Eatanswill,
presented himself for the purpose of addressing the electors; which he
no sooner did, than the band employed by the Honourable Samuel Slumkey,
commenced performing with a power to which their strength in the morning
was a trifle; in return for which, the Buff crowd belaboured the heads
and shoulders of the Blue crowd; on which the Blue crowd endeavoured to
dispossess themselves of their very unpleasant neighbours the Buff
crowd; and a scene of struggling, and pushing, and fighting, succeeded,
to which we can no more do justice than the mayor could, although he
issued imperative orders to twelve constables to seize the ringleaders,
who might amount in number to two hundred and fifty, or thereabouts. At
all these encounters, Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, of Fizkin Lodge, and his
friends, waxed fierce and furious; until at last Horatio Fizkin,
Esquire, of Fizkin Lodge, begged to ask his opponent, the Honourable
Samuel Slumkey, of Slumkey Hall, whether that band played by his
consent; which question the Honourable Samuel Slumkey declining to
answer, Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, of Fizkin Lodge, shook his fist in the
countenance of the Honourable Samuel Slumkey, of Slumkey Hall; upon
which the Honourable Samuel Slumkey, his blood being up, defied Horatio
Fizkin, Esquire, to mortal combat. At this violation of all known rules
and precedents of order, the mayor commanded another fantasia on the
bell, and declared that he would bring before himself, both Horatio
Fizkin, Esquire, of Fizkin Lodge, and the Honourable Samuel Slumkey, of
Slumkey Hall, and bind them over to keep the peace. Upon this terrific
denunciation, the supporters of the two candidates interfered, and after
the friends of each party had quarrelled in pairs, for three-quarters of
an hour, Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, touched his hat to the Honourable
Samuel Slumkey; the Honourable Samuel Slumkey touched his to Horatio
Fizkin, Esquire; the band was stopped; the crowd were partially quieted;
and Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, was permitted to proceed.

The speeches of the two candidates, though differing in every other
respect, afforded a beautiful tribute to the merit and high worth of the
electors of Eatanswill. Both expressed their opinion that a more
independent, a more enlightened, a more public-spirited, a more noble-
minded, a more disinterested set of men than those who had promised to
vote for him, never existed on earth; each darkly hinted his suspicions
that the electors in the opposite interest had certain swinish and
besotted infirmities which rendered them unfit for the exercise of the
important duties they were called upon to discharge. Fizkin expressed
his readiness to do anything he was wanted: Slumkey, his determination
to do nothing that was asked of him. Both said that the trade, the
manufactures, the commerce, the prosperity of Eatanswill, would ever be
dearer to their hearts than any earthly object; and each had it in his
power to state, with the utmost confidence, that he was the man who
would eventually be returned.

There was a show of hands; the mayor decided in favour of the Honourable
Samuel Slumkey, of Slumkey Hall. Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, of Fizkin
Lodge, demanded a poll, and a poll was fixed accordingly. Then a vote of
thanks was moved to the mayor for his able conduct in the chair; and the
mayor, devoutly wishing that he had had a chair to display his able
conduct in (for he had been standing during the whole proceedings),
returned thanks. The processions reformed, the carriages rolled slowly
through the crowd, and its members screeched and shouted after them as
their feelings or caprice dictated.

During the whole time of the polling, the town was in a perpetual fever
of excitement. Everything was conducted on the most liberal and
delightful scale. Excisable articles were remarkably cheap at all the
public-houses; and spring vans paraded the streets for the accommodation
of voters who were seized with any temporary dizziness in the head--an
epidemic which prevailed among the electors, during the contest, to a
most alarming extent, and under the influence of which they might
frequently be seen lying on the pavements in a state of utter
insensibility. A small body of electors remained unpolled on the very
last day. They were calculating and reflecting persons, who had not yet
been convinced by the arguments of either party, although they had
frequent conferences with each. One hour before the close of the poll,
Mr. Perker solicited the honour of a private interview with these
intelligent, these noble, these patriotic men. It was granted. His
arguments were brief but satisfactory. They went in a body to the poll;
and when they returned, the Honourable Samuel Slumkey, of Slumkey Hall,
was returned also.



CHAPTER XIV. COMPRISING A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE COMPANY AT THE
PEACOCK ASSEMBLED; AND A TALE TOLD BY A BAGMAN

It is pleasant to turn from contemplating the strife and turmoil of
political existence, to the peaceful repose of private life. Although in
reality no great partisan of either side, Mr. Pickwick was sufficiently
fired with Mr. Pott’s enthusiasm, to apply his whole time and attention
to the proceedings, of which the last chapter affords a description
compiled from his own memoranda. Nor while he was thus occupied was Mr.
Winkle idle, his whole time being devoted to pleasant walks and short
country excursions with Mrs. Pott, who never failed, when such an
opportunity presented itself, to seek some relief from the tedious
monotony she so constantly complained of. The two gentlemen being thus
completely domesticated in the editor’s house, Mr. Tupman and Mr.
Snodgrass were in a great measure cast upon their own resources. Taking
but little interest in public affairs, they beguiled their time chiefly
with such amusements as the Peacock afforded, which were limited to a
bagatelle-board in the first floor, and a sequestered skittle-ground in
the back yard. In the science and nicety of both these recreations,
which are far more abstruse than ordinary men suppose, they were
gradually initiated by Mr. Weller, who possessed a perfect knowledge of
such pastimes. Thus, notwithstanding that they were in a great measure
deprived of the comfort and advantage of Mr. Pickwick’s society, they
were still enabled to beguile the time, and to prevent its hanging
heavily on their hands.

It was in the evening, however, that the Peacock presented attractions
which enabled the two friends to resist even the invitations of the
gifted, though prosy, Pott. It was in the evening that the ‘commercial
room’ was filled with a social circle, whose characters and manners it
was the delight of Mr. Tupman to observe; whose sayings and doings it
was the habit of Mr. Snodgrass to note down.

Most people know what sort of places commercial rooms usually are. That
of the Peacock differed in no material respect from the generality of
such apartments; that is to say, it was a large, bare-looking room, the
furniture of which had no doubt been better when it was newer, with a
spacious table in the centre, and a variety of smaller dittos in the
corners; an extensive assortment of variously shaped chairs, and an old
Turkey carpet, bearing about the same relative proportion to the size of
the room, as a lady’s pocket-handkerchief might to the floor of a watch-
box. The walls were garnished with one or two large maps; and several
weather-beaten rough greatcoats, with complicated capes, dangled from a
long row of pegs in one corner. The mantel-shelf was ornamented with a
wooden inkstand, containing one stump of a pen and half a wafer; a road-
book and directory; a county history minus the cover; and the mortal
remains of a trout in a glass coffin. The atmosphere was redolent of
tobacco-smoke, the fumes of which had communicated a rather dingy hue to
the whole room, and more especially to the dusty red curtains which
shaded the windows. On the sideboard a variety of miscellaneous articles
were huddled together, the most conspicuous of which were some very
cloudy fish-sauce cruets, a couple of driving-boxes, two or three whips,
and as many travelling shawls, a tray of knives and forks, and the
mustard.

Here it was that Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass were seated on the evening
after the conclusion of the election, with several other temporary
inmates of the house, smoking and drinking.

‘Well, gents,’ said a stout, hale personage of about forty, with only
one eye--a very bright black eye, which twinkled with a roguish
expression of fun and good-humour, ‘our noble selves, gents. I always
propose that toast to the company, and drink Mary to myself. Eh, Mary!’

‘Get along with you, you wretch,’ said the hand-maiden, obviously not
ill-pleased with the compliment, however.

‘Don’t go away, Mary,’ said the black-eyed man.

‘Let me alone, imperence,’ said the young lady.

‘Never mind,’ said the one-eyed man, calling after the girl as she left
the room. ‘I’ll step out by and by, Mary. Keep your spirits up, dear.’
Here he went through the not very difficult process of winking upon the
company with his solitary eye, to the enthusiastic delight of an elderly
personage with a dirty face and a clay pipe.

‘Rum creeters is women,’ said the dirty-faced man, after a pause.

‘Ah! no mistake about that,’ said a very red-faced man, behind a cigar.

After this little bit of philosophy there was another pause.

‘There’s rummer things than women in this world though, mind you,’ said
the man with the black eye, slowly filling a large Dutch pipe, with a
most capacious bowl.

‘Are you married?’ inquired the dirty-faced man.

‘Can’t say I am.’

‘I thought not.’ Here the dirty-faced man fell into ecstasies of mirth
at his own retort, in which he was joined by a man of bland voice and
placid countenance, who always made it a point to agree with everybody.

‘Women, after all, gentlemen,’ said the enthusiastic Mr. Snodgrass, ‘are
the great props and comforts of our existence.’

‘So they are,’ said the placid gentleman.

‘When they’re in a good humour,’ interposed the dirty-faced man.

‘And that’s very true,’ said the placid one.

‘I repudiate that qualification,’ said Mr. Snodgrass, whose thoughts
were fast reverting to Emily Wardle. ‘I repudiate it with disdain--with
indignation. Show me the man who says anything against women, as women,
and I boldly declare he is not a man.’ And Mr. Snodgrass took his cigar
from his mouth, and struck the table violently with his clenched fist.

‘That’s good sound argument,’ said the placid man.

‘Containing a position which I deny,’ interrupted he of the dirty
countenance.

‘And there’s certainly a very great deal of truth in what you observe
too, Sir,’ said the placid gentleman.

‘Your health, Sir,’ said the bagman with the lonely eye, bestowing an
approving nod on Mr. Snodgrass.

Mr. Snodgrass acknowledged the compliment.

‘I always like to hear a good argument,’ continued the bagman, ‘a sharp
one, like this: it’s very improving; but this little argument about
women brought to my mind a story I have heard an old uncle of mine tell,
the recollection of which, just now, made me say there were rummer
things than women to be met with, sometimes.’

‘I should like to hear that same story,’ said the red-faced man with the
cigar.

‘Should you?’ was the only reply of the bagman, who continued to smoke
with great vehemence.

‘So should I,’ said Mr. Tupman, speaking for the first time. He was
always anxious to increase his stock of experience.

‘Should _you_? Well then, I’ll tell it. No, I won’t. I know you won’t
believe it,’ said the man with the roguish eye, making that organ look
more roguish than ever. ‘If you say it’s true, of course I shall,’ said
Mr. Tupman.

‘Well, upon that understanding I’ll tell you,’ replied the traveller.
‘Did you ever hear of the great commercial house of Bilson & Slum? But
it doesn’t matter though, whether you did or not, because they retired
from business long since. It’s eighty years ago, since the circumstance
happened to a traveller for that house, but he was a particular friend
of my uncle’s; and my uncle told the story to me. It’s a queer name; but
he used to call it


THE BAGMAN’S STORY

and he used to tell it, something in this way.

‘One winter’s evening, about five o’clock, just as it began to grow
dusk, a man in a gig might have been seen urging his tired horse along
the road which leads across Marlborough Downs, in the direction of
Bristol. I say he might have been seen, and I have no doubt he would
have been, if anybody but a blind man had happened to pass that way; but
the weather was so bad, and the night so cold and wet, that nothing was
out but the water, and so the traveller jogged along in the middle of
the road, lonesome and dreary enough. If any bagman of that day could
have caught sight of the little neck-or-nothing sort of gig, with a
clay-coloured body and red wheels, and the vixenish, ill tempered, fast-
going bay mare, that looked like a cross between a butcher’s horse and a
twopenny post-office pony, he would have known at once, that this
traveller could have been no other than Tom Smart, of the great house of
Bilson and Slum, Cateaton Street, City. However, as there was no bagman
to look on, nobody knew anything at all about the matter; and so Tom
Smart and his clay-coloured gig with the red wheels, and the vixenish
mare with the fast pace, went on together, keeping the secret among
them, and nobody was a bit the wiser.

‘There are many pleasanter places even in this dreary world, than
Marlborough Downs when it blows hard; and if you throw in beside, a
gloomy winter’s evening, a miry and sloppy road, and a pelting fall of
heavy rain, and try the effect, by way of experiment, in your own proper
person, you will experience the full force of this observation.

‘The wind blew--not up the road or down it, though that’s bad enough,
but sheer across it, sending the rain slanting down like the lines they
used to rule in the copy-books at school, to make the boys slope well.
For a moment it would die away, and the traveller would begin to delude
himself into the belief that, exhausted with its previous fury, it had
quietly laid itself down to rest, when, whoo! he could hear it growling
and whistling in the distance, and on it would come rushing over the
hill-tops, and sweeping along the plain, gathering sound and strength as
it drew nearer, until it dashed with a heavy gust against horse and man,
driving the sharp rain into their ears, and its cold damp breath into
their very bones; and past them it would scour, far, far away, with a
stunning roar, as if in ridicule of their weakness, and triumphant in
the consciousness of its own strength and power.

‘The bay mare splashed away, through the mud and water, with drooping
ears; now and then tossing her head as if to express her disgust at this
very ungentlemanly behaviour of the elements, but keeping a good pace
notwithstanding, until a gust of wind, more furious than any that had
yet assailed them, caused her to stop suddenly and plant her four feet
firmly against the ground, to prevent her being blown over. It’s a
special mercy that she did this, for if she _had _been blown over, the
vixenish mare was so light, and the gig was so light, and Tom Smart such
a light weight into the bargain, that they must infallibly have all gone
rolling over and over together, until they reached the confines of
earth, or until the wind fell; and in either case the probability is,
that neither the vixenish mare, nor the clay-coloured gig with the red
wheels, nor Tom Smart, would ever have been fit for service again.

‘“Well, damn my straps and whiskers,” says Tom Smart (Tom sometimes had
an unpleasant knack of swearing)--“damn my straps and whiskers,” says
Tom, “if this ain’t pleasant, blow me!”

‘You’ll very likely ask me why, as Tom Smart had been pretty well blown
already, he expressed this wish to be submitted to the same process
again. I can’t say--all I know is, that Tom Smart said so--or at least
he always told my uncle he said so, and it’s just the same thing.

“‘Blow me,” says Tom Smart; and the mare neighed as if she were
precisely of the same opinion.

“‘Cheer up, old girl,” said Tom, patting the bay mare on the neck with
the end of his whip. “It won’t do pushing on, such a night as this; the
first house we come to we’ll put up at, so the faster you go the sooner
it’s over. Soho, old girl--gently--gently.”

‘Whether the vixenish mare was sufficiently well acquainted with the
tones of Tom’s voice to comprehend his meaning, or whether she found it
colder standing still than moving on, of course I can’t say. But I can
say that Tom had no sooner finished speaking, than she pricked up her
ears, and started forward at a speed which made the clay-coloured gig
rattle until you would have supposed every one of the red spokes were
going to fly out on the turf of Marlborough Downs; and even Tom, whip as
he was, couldn’t stop or check her pace, until she drew up of her own
accord, before a roadside inn on the right-hand side of the way, about
half a quarter of a mile from the end of the Downs.

‘Tom cast a hasty glance at the upper part of the house as he threw the
reins to the hostler, and stuck the whip in the box. It was a strange
old place, built of a kind of shingle, inlaid, as it were, with cross-
beams, with gabled-topped windows projecting completely over the
pathway, and a low door with a dark porch, and a couple of steep steps
leading down into the house, instead of the modern fashion of half a
dozen shallow ones leading up to it. It was a comfortable-looking place
though, for there was a strong, cheerful light in the bar window, which
shed a bright ray across the road, and even lighted up the hedge on the
other side; and there was a red flickering light in the opposite window,
one moment but faintly discernible, and the next gleaming strongly
through the drawn curtains, which intimated that a rousing fire was
blazing within. Marking these little evidences with the eye of an
experienced traveller, Tom dismounted with as much agility as his half-
frozen limbs would permit, and entered the house.

‘In less than five minutes’ time, Tom was ensconced in the room opposite
the bar--the very room where he had imagined the fire blazing--before a
substantial, matter-of-fact, roaring fire, composed of something short
of a bushel of coals, and wood enough to make half a dozen decent
gooseberry bushes, piled half-way up the chimney, and roaring and
crackling with a sound that of itself would have warmed the heart of any
reasonable man. This was comfortable, but this was not all; for a
smartly-dressed girl, with a bright eye and a neat ankle, was laying a
very clean white cloth on the table; and as Tom sat with his slippered
feet on the fender, and his back to the open door, he saw a charming
prospect of the bar reflected in the glass over the chimney-piece, with
delightful rows of green bottles and gold labels, together with jars of
pickles and preserves, and cheeses and boiled hams, and rounds of beef,
arranged on shelves in the most tempting and delicious array. Well, this
was comfortable too; but even this was not all--for in the bar, seated
at tea at the nicest possible little table, drawn close up before the
brightest possible little fire, was a buxom widow of somewhere about
eight-and-forty or thereabouts, with a face as comfortable as the bar,
who was evidently the landlady of the house, and the supreme ruler over
all these agreeable possessions. There was only one drawback to the
beauty of the whole picture, and that was a tall man--a very tall man--
in a brown coat and bright basket buttons, and black whiskers and wavy
black hair, who was seated at tea with the widow, and who it required no
great penetration to discover was in a fair way of persuading her to be
a widow no longer, but to confer upon him the privilege of sitting down
in that bar, for and during the whole remainder of the term of his
natural life.

‘Tom Smart was by no means of an irritable or envious disposition, but
somehow or other the tall man with the brown coat and the bright basket
buttons did rouse what little gall he had in his composition, and did
make him feel extremely indignant, the more especially as he could now
and then observe, from his seat before the glass, certain little
affectionate familiarities passing between the tall man and the widow,
which sufficiently denoted that the tall man was as high in favour as he
was in size. Tom was fond of hot punch--I may venture to say he was
_very_ fond of hot punch--and after he had seen the vixenish mare well
fed and well littered down, and had eaten every bit of the nice little
hot dinner which the widow tossed up for him with her own hands, he just
ordered a tumbler of it by way of experiment. Now, if there was one
thing in the whole range of domestic art, which the widow could
manufacture better than another, it was this identical article; and the
first tumbler was adapted to Tom Smart’s taste with such peculiar
nicety, that he ordered a second with the least possible delay. Hot
punch is a pleasant thing, gentlemen--an extremely pleasant thing under
any circumstances--but in that snug old parlour, before the roaring
fire, with the wind blowing outside till every timber in the old house
creaked again, Tom Smart found it perfectly delightful. He ordered
another tumbler, and then another--I am not quite certain whether he
didn’t order another after that--but the more he drank of the hot punch,
the more he thought of the tall man.

‘“Confound his impudence!” said Tom to himself, “what business has he in
that snug bar? Such an ugly villain too!” said Tom. “If the widow had
any taste, she might surely pick up some better fellow than that.” Here
Tom’s eye wandered from the glass on the chimney-piece to the glass on
the table; and as he felt himself becoming gradually sentimental, he
emptied the fourth tumbler of punch and ordered a fifth.

‘Tom Smart, gentlemen, had always been very much attached to the public
line. It had been long his ambition to stand in a bar of his own, in a
green coat, knee-cords, and tops. He had a great notion of taking the
chair at convivial dinners, and he had often thought how well he could
preside in a room of his own in the talking way, and what a capital
example he could set to his customers in the drinking department. All
these things passed rapidly through Tom’s mind as he sat drinking the
hot punch by the roaring fire, and he felt very justly and properly
indignant that the tall man should be in a fair way of keeping such an
excellent house, while he, Tom Smart, was as far off from it as ever.
So, after deliberating over the two last tumblers, whether he hadn’t a
perfect right to pick a quarrel with the tall man for having contrived
to get into the good graces of the buxom widow, Tom Smart at last
arrived at the satisfactory conclusion that he was a very ill-used and
persecuted individual, and had better go to bed.

‘Up a wide and ancient staircase the smart girl preceded Tom, shading
the chamber candle with her hand, to protect it from the currents of air
which in such a rambling old place might have found plenty of room to
disport themselves in, without blowing the candle out, but which did
blow it out nevertheless--thus affording Tom’s enemies an opportunity of
asserting that it was he, and not the wind, who extinguished the candle,
and that while he pretended to be blowing it alight again, he was in
fact kissing the girl. Be this as it may, another light was obtained,
and Tom was conducted through a maze of rooms, and a labyrinth of
passages, to the apartment which had been prepared for his reception,
where the girl bade him good-night and left him alone.

‘It was a good large room with big closets, and a bed which might have
served for a whole boarding-school, to say nothing of a couple of oaken
presses that would have held the baggage of a small army; but what
struck Tom’s fancy most was a strange, grim-looking, high backed chair,
carved in the most fantastic manner, with a flowered damask cushion, and
the round knobs at the bottom of the legs carefully tied up in red
cloth, as if it had got the gout in its toes. Of any other queer chair,
Tom would only have thought it was a queer chair, and there would have
been an end of the matter; but there was something about this particular
chair, and yet he couldn’t tell what it was, so odd and so unlike any
other piece of furniture he had ever seen, that it seemed to fascinate
him. He sat down before the fire, and stared at the old chair for half
an hour.--Damn the chair, it was such a strange old thing, he couldn’t
take his eyes off it.

‘“Well,” said Tom, slowly undressing himself, and staring at the old
chair all the while, which stood with a mysterious aspect by the
bedside, “I never saw such a rum concern as that in my days. Very odd,”
 said Tom, who had got rather sage with the hot punch--“very odd.” Tom
shook his head with an air of profound wisdom, and looked at the chair
again. He couldn’t make anything of it though, so he got into bed,
covered himself up warm, and fell asleep.

‘In about half an hour, Tom woke up with a start, from a confused dream
of tall men and tumblers of punch; and the first object that presented
itself to his waking imagination was the queer chair.

‘“I won’t look at it any more,” said Tom to himself, and he squeezed his
eyelids together, and tried to persuade himself he was going to sleep
again. No use; nothing but queer chairs danced before his eyes, kicking
up their legs, jumping over each other’s backs, and playing all kinds of
antics.

“‘I may as well see one real chair, as two or three complete sets of
false ones,” said Tom, bringing out his head from under the bedclothes.
There it was, plainly discernible by the light of the fire, looking as
provoking as ever.

‘Tom gazed at the chair; and, suddenly as he looked at it, a most
extraordinary change seemed to come over it. The carving of the back
gradually assumed the lineaments and expression of an old, shrivelled
human face; the damask cushion became an antique, flapped waistcoat; the
round knobs grew into a couple of feet, encased in red cloth slippers;
and the whole chair looked like a very ugly old man, of the previous
century, with his arms akimbo. Tom sat up in bed, and rubbed his eyes to
dispel the illusion. No. The chair was an ugly old gentleman; and what
was more, he was winking at Tom Smart.

‘Tom was naturally a headlong, careless sort of dog, and he had had five
tumblers of hot punch into the bargain; so, although he was a little
startled at first, he began to grow rather indignant when he saw the old
gentleman winking and leering at him with such an impudent air. At
length he resolved that he wouldn’t stand it; and as the old face still
kept winking away as fast as ever, Tom said, in a very angry tone--

‘“What the devil are you winking at me for?”

‘“Because I like it, Tom Smart,” said the chair; or the old gentleman,
whichever you like to call him. He stopped winking though, when Tom
spoke, and began grinning like a superannuated monkey.

‘“How do you know my name, old nut-cracker face?” inquired Tom Smart,
rather staggered; though he pretended to carry it off so well.

‘“Come, come, Tom,” said the old gentleman, “that’s not the way to
address solid Spanish mahogany. Damme, you couldn’t treat me with less
respect if I was veneered.” When the old gentleman said this, he looked
so fierce that Tom began to grow frightened.

‘“I didn’t mean to treat you with any disrespect, Sir,” said Tom, in a
much humbler tone than he had spoken in at first.

‘“Well, well,” said the old fellow, “perhaps not--perhaps not. Tom--”

‘“Sir--”

‘“I know everything about you, Tom; everything. You’re very poor, Tom.”

‘“I certainly am,” said Tom Smart. “But how came you to know that?”

‘“Never mind that,” said the old gentleman; “you’re much too fond of
punch, Tom.”

‘Tom Smart was just on the point of protesting that he hadn’t tasted a
drop since his last birthday, but when his eye encountered that of the
old gentleman he looked so knowing that Tom blushed, and was silent.

‘“Tom,” said the old gentleman, “the widow’s a fine woman--remarkably
fine woman--eh, Tom?” Here the old fellow screwed up his eyes, cocked up
one of his wasted little legs, and looked altogether so unpleasantly
amorous, that Tom was quite disgusted with the levity of his behaviour--
at his time of life, too!

‘“I am her guardian, Tom,” said the old gentleman.

‘“Are you?” inquired Tom Smart.

‘“I knew her mother, Tom,” said the old fellow: “and her grandmother.
She was very fond of me--made me this waistcoat, Tom.”

‘“Did she?” said Tom Smart.

‘“And these shoes,” said the old fellow, lifting up one of the red cloth
mufflers; “but don’t mention it, Tom. I shouldn’t like to have it known
that she was so much attached to me. It might occasion some
unpleasantness in the family.” When the old rascal said this, he looked
so extremely impertinent, that, as Tom Smart afterwards declared, he
could have sat upon him without remorse.

‘“I have been a great favourite among the women in my time, Tom,” said
the profligate old debauchee; “hundreds of fine women have sat in my lap
for hours together. What do you think of that, you dog, eh!” The old
gentleman was proceeding to recount some other exploits of his youth,
when he was seized with such a violent fit of creaking that he was
unable to proceed.

‘“Just serves you right, old boy,” thought Tom Smart; but he didn’t say
anything.

‘“Ah!” said the old fellow, “I am a good deal troubled with this now. I
am getting old, Tom, and have lost nearly all my nails. I have had an
operation performed, too--a small piece let into my back--and I found it
a severe trial, Tom.”

‘“I dare say you did, Sir,” said Tom Smart.

‘“However,” said the old gentleman, “that’s not the point. Tom! I want
you to marry the widow.”

‘“Me, Sir!” said Tom.

‘“You,” said the old gentleman.

‘“Bless your reverend locks,” said Tom (he had a few scattered horse-
hairs left)--“bless your reverend locks, she wouldn’t have me.” And Tom
sighed involuntarily, as he thought of the bar.

‘“Wouldn’t she?” said the old gentleman firmly.

‘“No, no,” said Tom; “there’s somebody else in the wind. A tall man--a
confoundedly tall man--with black whiskers.”

‘“Tom,” said the old gentleman; “she will never have him.”

‘“Won’t she?” said Tom. “If you stood in the bar, old gentleman, you’d
tell another story.”

‘“Pooh, pooh,” said the old gentleman. “I know all about that.”

‘“About what?” said Tom.

‘“The kissing behind the door, and all that sort of thing, Tom,” said
the old gentleman. And here he gave another impudent look, which made
Tom very wroth, because as you all know, gentlemen, to hear an old
fellow, who ought to know better, talking about these things, is very
unpleasant--nothing more so.

‘“I know all about that, Tom,” said the old gentleman. “I have seen it
done very often in my time, Tom, between more people than I should like
to mention to you; but it never came to anything after all.”

‘“You must have seen some queer things,” said Tom, with an inquisitive
look.

‘“You may say that, Tom,” replied the old fellow, with a very
complicated wink. “I am the last of my family, Tom,” said the old
gentleman, with a melancholy sigh.

‘“Was it a large one?” inquired Tom Smart.

‘“There were twelve of us, Tom,” said the old gentleman; “fine,
straight-backed, handsome fellows as you’d wish to see. None of your
modern abortions--all with arms, and with a degree of polish, though I
say it that should not, which it would have done your heart good to
behold.”

‘“And what’s become of the others, Sir?” asked Tom Smart--

‘The old gentleman applied his elbow to his eye as he replied, “Gone,
Tom, gone. We had hard service, Tom, and they hadn’t all my
constitution. They got rheumatic about the legs and arms, and went into
kitchens and other hospitals; and one of ‘em, with long service and hard
usage, positively lost his senses--he got so crazy that he was obliged
to be burnt. Shocking thing that, Tom.”

‘“Dreadful!” said Tom Smart.

‘The old fellow paused for a few minutes, apparently struggling with his
feelings of emotion, and then said--

‘“However, Tom, I am wandering from the point. This tall man, Tom, is a
rascally adventurer. The moment he married the widow, he would sell off
all the furniture, and run away. What would be the consequence? She
would be deserted and reduced to ruin, and I should catch my death of
cold in some broker’s shop.”

‘“Yes, but--”

‘“Don’t interrupt me,” said the old gentleman. “Of you, Tom, I entertain
a very different opinion; for I well know that if you once settled
yourself in a public-house, you would never leave it, as long as there
was anything to drink within its walls.”

‘“I am very much obliged to you for your good opinion, Sir,” said Tom
Smart.

‘“Therefore,” resumed the old gentleman, in a dictatorial tone, “you
shall have her, and he shall not.”

‘“What is to prevent it?” said Tom Smart eagerly.

‘“This disclosure,” replied the old gentleman; “he is already married.”

‘“How can I prove it?” said Tom, starting half out of bed.

‘The old gentleman untucked his arm from his side, and having pointed to
one of the oaken presses, immediately replaced it, in its old position.

‘“He little thinks,” said the old gentleman, “that in the right-hand
pocket of a pair of trousers in that press, he has left a letter,
entreating him to return to his disconsolate wife, with six--mark me,
Tom--six babes, and all of them small ones.”

‘As the old gentleman solemnly uttered these words, his features grew
less and less distinct, and his figure more shadowy. A film came over
Tom Smart’s eyes. The old man seemed gradually blending into the chair,
the damask waistcoat to resolve into a cushion, the red slippers to
shrink into little red cloth bags. The light faded gently away, and Tom
Smart fell back on his pillow, and dropped asleep.

‘Morning aroused Tom from the lethargic slumber, into which he had
fallen on the disappearance of the old man. He sat up in bed, and for
some minutes vainly endeavoured to recall the events of the preceding
night. Suddenly they rushed upon him. He looked at the chair; it was a
fantastic and grim-looking piece of furniture, certainly, but it must
have been a remarkably ingenious and lively imagination, that could have
discovered any resemblance between it and an old man.

‘“How are you, old boy?” said Tom. He was bolder in the daylight--most
men are.

‘The chair remained motionless, and spoke not a word.

‘“Miserable morning,” said Tom. No. The chair would not be drawn into
conversation.

‘“Which press did you point to?--you can tell me that,” said Tom. Devil
a word, gentlemen, the chair would say.

‘“It’s not much trouble to open it, anyhow,” said Tom, getting out of
bed very deliberately. He walked up to one of the presses. The key was
in the lock; he turned it, and opened the door. There was a pair of
trousers there. He put his hand into the pocket, and drew forth the
identical letter the old gentleman had described!

‘“Queer sort of thing, this,” said Tom Smart, looking first at the chair
and then at the press, and then at the letter, and then at the chair
again. “Very queer,” said Tom. But, as there was nothing in either, to
lessen the queerness, he thought he might as well dress himself, and
settle the tall man’s business at once--just to put him out of his
misery.

‘Tom surveyed the rooms he passed through, on his way downstairs, with
the scrutinising eye of a landlord; thinking it not impossible, that
before long, they and their contents would be his property. The tall man
was standing in the snug little bar, with his hands behind him, quite at
home. He grinned vacantly at Tom. A casual observer might have supposed
he did it, only to show his white teeth; but Tom Smart thought that a
consciousness of triumph was passing through the place where the tall
man’s mind would have been, if he had had any. Tom laughed in his face;
and summoned the landlady.

‘“Good-morning ma’am,” said Tom Smart, closing the door of the little
parlour as the widow entered.

‘“Good-morning, Sir,” said the widow. “What will you take for breakfast,
sir?”

‘Tom was thinking how he should open the case, so he made no answer.

‘“There’s a very nice ham,” said the widow, “and a beautiful cold larded
fowl. Shall I send ‘em in, Sir?”

‘These words roused Tom from his reflections. His admiration of the
widow increased as she spoke. Thoughtful creature! Comfortable provider!

‘“Who is that gentleman in the bar, ma’am?” inquired Tom.

‘“His name is Jinkins, Sir,” said the widow, slightly blushing.

‘“He’s a tall man,” said Tom.

‘“He is a very fine man, Sir,” replied the widow, “and a very nice
gentleman.”

‘“Ah!” said Tom.

‘“Is there anything more you want, Sir?” inquired the widow, rather
puzzled by Tom’s manner.

‘“Why, yes,” said Tom. “My dear ma’am, will you have the kindness to sit
down for one moment?”

‘The widow looked much amazed, but she sat down, and Tom sat down too,
close beside her. I don’t know how it happened, gentlemen--indeed my
uncle used to tell me that Tom Smart said he didn’t know how it happened
either--but somehow or other the palm of Tom’s hand fell upon the back
of the widow’s hand, and remained there while he spoke.

‘“My dear ma’am,” said Tom Smart--he had always a great notion of
committing the amiable--“my dear ma’am, you deserve a very excellent
husband--you do indeed.”

‘“Lor, Sir!” said the widow--as well she might; Tom’s mode of commencing
the conversation being rather unusual, not to say startling; the fact of
his never having set eyes upon her before the previous night being taken
into consideration. “Lor, Sir!”

‘“I scorn to flatter, my dear ma’am,” said Tom Smart. “You deserve a
very admirable husband, and whoever he is, he’ll be a very lucky man.”
 As Tom said this, his eye involuntarily wandered from the widow’s face
to the comfort around him.

‘The widow looked more puzzled than ever, and made an effort to rise.
Tom gently pressed her hand, as if to detain her, and she kept her seat.
Widows, gentlemen, are not usually timorous, as my uncle used to say.

‘“I am sure I am very much obliged to you, Sir, for your good opinion,”
 said the buxom landlady, half laughing; “and if ever I marry again--”

’”_If_,” said Tom Smart, looking very shrewdly out of the right-hand
corner of his left eye. “_If_--”

“Well,” said the widow, laughing outright this time, “_when _I do, I
hope I shall have as good a husband as you describe.”

‘“Jinkins, to wit,” said Tom.

‘“Lor, sir!” exclaimed the widow.

‘“Oh, don’t tell me,” said Tom, “I know him.”

‘“I am sure nobody who knows him, knows anything bad of him,” said the
widow, bridling up at the mysterious air with which Tom had spoken.

‘“Hem!” said Tom Smart.

‘The widow began to think it was high time to cry, so she took out her
handkerchief, and inquired whether Tom wished to insult her, whether he
thought it like a gentleman to take away the character of another
gentleman behind his back, why, if he had got anything to say, he didn’t
say it to the man, like a man, instead of terrifying a poor weak woman
in that way; and so forth.

‘“I’ll say it to him fast enough,” said Tom, “only I want you to hear it
first.”

‘“What is it?” inquired the widow, looking intently in Tom’s
countenance.

‘“I’ll astonish you,” said Tom, putting his hand in his pocket.

‘“If it is, that he wants money,” said the widow, “I know that already,
and you needn’t trouble yourself.” ‘“Pooh, nonsense, that’s nothing,”
 said Tom Smart, “I want money. ‘Tain’t that.”

‘“Oh, dear, what can it be?” exclaimed the poor widow.

‘“Don’t be frightened,” said Tom Smart. He slowly drew forth the letter,
and unfolded it. “You won’t scream?” said Tom doubtfully.

‘“No, no,” replied the widow; “let me see it.”

‘“You won’t go fainting away, or any of that nonsense?” said Tom.

‘“No, no,” returned the widow hastily.

‘“And don’t run out, and blow him up,” said Tom; “because I’ll do all
that for you. You had better not exert yourself.”

‘“Well, well,” said the widow, “let me see it.”

‘“I will,” replied Tom Smart; and, with these words, he placed the
letter in the widow’s hand.

‘Gentlemen, I have heard my uncle say, that Tom Smart said the widow’s
lamentations when she heard the disclosure would have pierced a heart of
stone. Tom was certainly very tender-hearted, but they pierced his, to
the very core. The widow rocked herself to and fro, and wrung her hands.

‘“Oh, the deception and villainy of the man!” said the widow.

‘“Frightful, my dear ma’am; but compose yourself,” said Tom Smart.

‘“Oh, I can’t compose myself,” shrieked the widow. “I shall never find
anyone else I can love so much!”

‘“Oh, yes you will, my dear soul,” said Tom Smart, letting fall a shower
of the largest-sized tears, in pity for the widow’s misfortunes. Tom
Smart, in the energy of his compassion, had put his arm round the
widow’s waist; and the widow, in a passion of grief, had clasped Tom’s
hand. She looked up in Tom’s face, and smiled through her tears. Tom
looked down in hers, and smiled through his.

‘I never could find out, gentlemen, whether Tom did or did not kiss the
widow at that particular moment. He used to tell my uncle he didn’t, but
I have my doubts about it. Between ourselves, gentlemen, I rather think
he did.

‘At all events, Tom kicked the very tall man out at the front door half
an hour later, and married the widow a month after. And he used to drive
about the country, with the clay-coloured gig with the red wheels, and
the vixenish mare with the fast pace, till he gave up business many
years afterwards, and went to France with his wife; and then the old
house was pulled down.’

‘Will you allow me to ask you,’ said the inquisitive old gentleman,
‘what became of the chair?’

‘Why,’ replied the one-eyed bagman, ‘it was observed to creak very much
on the day of the wedding; but Tom Smart couldn’t say for certain
whether it was with pleasure or bodily infirmity. He rather thought it
was the latter, though, for it never spoke afterwards.’

‘Everybody believed the story, didn’t they?’ said the dirty-faced man,
refilling his pipe.

‘Except Tom’s enemies,’ replied the bagman. ‘Some of ‘em said Tom
invented it altogether; and others said he was drunk and fancied it, and
got hold of the wrong trousers by mistake before he went to bed. But
nobody ever minded what _they _said.’

‘Tom Smart said it was all true?’

‘Every word.’

‘And your uncle?’

‘Every letter.’

‘They must have been very nice men, both of ‘em,’ said the dirty-faced
man.

‘Yes, they were,’ replied the bagman; ‘very nice men indeed!’



CHAPTER XV. IN WHICH IS GIVEN A FAITHFUL PORTRAITURE OF TWO
DISTINGUISHED PERSONS; AND AN ACCURATE DESCRIPTION OF A PUBLIC BREAKFAST
IN THEIR HOUSE AND GROUNDS: WHICH PUBLIC BREAKFAST LEADS TO THE
RECOGNITION OF AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE, AND THE COMMENCEMENT OF ANOTHER
CHAPTER

Mr. Pickwick’s conscience had been somewhat reproaching him for his
recent neglect of his friends at the Peacock; and he was just on the
point of walking forth in quest of them, on the third morning after the
election had terminated, when his faithful valet put into his hand a
card, on which was engraved the following inscription:--


Mrs. Leo Hunter THE DEN. EATANSWILL.

‘Person’s a-waitin’,’ said Sam, epigrammatically.

‘Does the person want me, Sam?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘He wants you partickler; and no one else ‘ll do, as the devil’s private
secretary said ven he fetched avay Doctor Faustus,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘_He_. Is it a gentleman?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘A wery good imitation o’ one, if it ain’t,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘But this is a lady’s card,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Given me by a gen’l’m’n, howsoever,’ replied Sam, ‘and he’s a-waitin’
in the drawing-room--said he’d rather wait all day, than not see you.’

Mr. Pickwick, on hearing this determination, descended to the drawing-
room, where sat a grave man, who started up on his entrance, and said,
with an air of profound respect:--

‘Mr. Pickwick, I presume?’

‘The same.’

‘Allow me, Sir, the honour of grasping your hand. Permit me, Sir, to
shake it,’ said the grave man.

‘Certainly,’ said Mr. Pickwick. The stranger shook the extended hand,
and then continued--

‘We have heard of your fame, sir. The noise of your antiquarian
discussion has reached the ears of Mrs. Leo Hunter--my wife, sir; I am
Mr. Leo Hunter’--the stranger paused, as if he expected that Mr.
Pickwick would be overcome by the disclosure; but seeing that he
remained perfectly calm, proceeded--

‘My wife, sir--Mrs. Leo Hunter--is proud to number among her
acquaintance all those who have rendered themselves celebrated by their
works and talents. Permit me, sir, to place in a conspicuous part of the
list the name of Mr. Pickwick, and his brother-members of the club that
derives its name from him.’

‘I shall be extremely happy to make the acquaintance of such a lady,
sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘You _shall _make it, sir,’ said the grave man. ‘To-morrow morning, sir,
we give a public breakfast--a _fete champetre_--to a great number of
those who have rendered themselves celebrated by their works and
talents. Permit Mrs. Leo Hunter, Sir, to have the gratification of
seeing you at the Den.’

‘With great pleasure,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Mrs. Leo Hunter has many of these breakfasts, Sir,’ resumed the new
acquaintance--‘“feasts of reason,” sir, “and flows of soul,” as somebody
who wrote a sonnet to Mrs. Leo Hunter on her breakfasts, feelingly and
originally observed.’

‘Was _he_ celebrated for his works and talents?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘He was Sir,’ replied the grave man, ‘all Mrs. Leo Hunter’s
acquaintances are; it is her ambition, sir, to have no other
acquaintance.’

‘It is a very noble ambition,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘When I inform Mrs. Leo Hunter, that that remark fell from your lips,
sir, she will indeed be proud,’ said the grave man. ‘You have a
gentleman in your train, who has produced some beautiful little poems, I
think, sir.’

‘My friend Mr. Snodgrass has a great taste for poetry,’ replied Mr.
Pickwick.

‘So has Mrs. Leo Hunter, Sir. She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I
may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it.
She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met
with her “Ode to an Expiring Frog,” sir.’

‘I don’t think I have,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘You astonish me, Sir,’ said Mr. Leo Hunter. ‘It created an immense
sensation. It was signed with an “L” and eight stars, and appeared
originally in a lady’s magazine. It commenced--


‘“Can I view thee panting, lying On thy stomach, without sighing; Can I
unmoved see thee dying On a log Expiring frog!”’


‘Beautiful!’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Fine,’ said Mr. Leo Hunter; ‘so simple.’

‘Very,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘The next verse is still more touching. Shall I repeat it?’

‘If you please,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘It runs thus,’ said the grave man, still more gravely.


‘“Say, have fiends in shape of boys, With wild halloo, and brutal noise,
Hunted thee from marshy joys, With a dog, Expiring frog!”’


‘Finely expressed,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘All point, Sir,’ said Mr. Leo Hunter; ‘but you shall hear Mrs. Leo
Hunter repeat it. She can do justice to it, Sir. She will repeat it, in
character, Sir, to-morrow morning.’

‘In character!’

‘As Minerva. But I forgot--it’s a fancy-dress _dejeune_.’

‘Dear me,’ said Mr. Pickwick, glancing at his own figure--‘I can’t
possibly--’

‘Can’t, sir; can’t!’ exclaimed Mr. Leo Hunter. ‘Solomon Lucas, the Jew
in the High Street, has thousands of fancy-dresses. Consider, Sir, how
many appropriate characters are open for your selection. Plato, Zeno,
Epicurus, Pythagoras--all founders of clubs.’

‘I know that,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘but as I cannot put myself in
competition with those great men, I cannot presume to wear their
dresses.’

The grave man considered deeply, for a few seconds, and then said--

‘On reflection, Sir, I don’t know whether it would not afford Mrs. Leo
Hunter greater pleasure, if her guests saw a gentleman of your celebrity
in his own costume, rather than in an assumed one. I may venture to
promise an exception in your case, sir--yes, I am quite certain that, on
behalf of Mrs. Leo Hunter, I may venture to do so.’

‘In that case,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I shall have great pleasure in
coming.’

‘But I waste your time, Sir,’ said the grave man, as if suddenly
recollecting himself. ‘I know its value, sir. I will not detain you. I
may tell Mrs. Leo Hunter, then, that she may confidently expect you and
your distinguished friends? Good-morning, Sir, I am proud to have beheld
so eminent a personage--not a step sir; not a word.’ And without giving
Mr. Pickwick time to offer remonstrance or denial, Mr. Leo Hunter
stalked gravely away.

Mr. Pickwick took up his hat, and repaired to the Peacock, but Mr.
Winkle had conveyed the intelligence of the fancy-ball there, before
him.

‘Mrs. Pott’s going,’ were the first words with which he saluted his
leader.

‘Is she?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘As Apollo,’ replied Winkle. ‘Only Pott objects to the tunic.’

‘He is right. He is quite right,’ said Mr. Pickwick emphatically.

‘Yes; so she’s going to wear a white satin gown with gold spangles.’

‘They’ll hardly know what she’s meant for; will they?’ inquired Mr.
Snodgrass.

‘Of course they will,’ replied Mr. Winkle indignantly. ‘They’ll see her
lyre, won’t they?’

‘True; I forgot that,’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘I shall go as a bandit,’ interposed Mr. Tupman.

‘What!’ said Mr. Pickwick, with a sudden start.

‘As a bandit,’ repeated Mr. Tupman, mildly.

‘You don’t mean to say,’ said Mr. Pickwick, gazing with solemn sternness
at his friend--‘you don’t mean to say, Mr. Tupman, that it is your
intention to put yourself into a green velvet jacket, with a two-inch
tail?’

‘Such _is_ my intention, Sir,’ replied Mr. Tupman warmly. ‘And why not,
sir?’

‘Because, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, considerably excited--‘because you
are too old, Sir.’

‘Too old!’ exclaimed Mr. Tupman.

‘And if any further ground of objection be wanting,’ continued Mr.
Pickwick, ‘you are too fat, sir.’

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Tupman, his face suffused with a crimson glow, ‘this is
an insult.’

‘Sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, in the same tone, ‘it is not half the
insult to you, that your appearance in my presence in a green velvet
jacket, with a two-inch tail, would be to me.’

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Tupman, ‘you’re a fellow.’

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘you’re another!’

Mr. Tupman advanced a step or two, and glared at Mr. Pickwick. Mr.
Pickwick returned the glare, concentrated into a focus by means of his
spectacles, and breathed a bold defiance. Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle
looked on, petrified at beholding such a scene between two such men.

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Tupman, after a short pause, speaking in a low, deep
voice, ‘you have called me old.’

‘I have,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘And fat.’

‘I reiterate the charge.’

‘And a fellow.’

‘So you are!’

There was a fearful pause.

‘My attachment to your person, sir,’ said Mr. Tupman, speaking in a
voice tremulous with emotion, and tucking up his wristbands meanwhile,
‘is great--very great--but upon that person, I must take summary
vengeance.’

‘Come on, Sir!’ replied Mr. Pickwick. Stimulated by the exciting nature
of the dialogue, the heroic man actually threw himself into a paralytic
attitude, confidently supposed by the two bystanders to have been
intended as a posture of defence.

‘What!’ exclaimed Mr. Snodgrass, suddenly recovering the power of
speech, of which intense astonishment had previously bereft him, and
rushing between the two, at the imminent hazard of receiving an
application on the temple from each--‘what! Mr. Pickwick, with the eyes
of the world upon you! Mr. Tupman! who, in common with us all, derives a
lustre from his undying name! For shame, gentlemen; for shame.’

The unwonted lines which momentary passion had ruled in Mr. Pickwick’s
clear and open brow, gradually melted away, as his young friend spoke,
like the marks of a black-lead pencil beneath the softening influence of
india-rubber. His countenance had resumed its usual benign expression,
ere he concluded.

‘I have been hasty,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘very hasty. Tupman; your hand.’

The dark shadow passed from Mr. Tupman’s face, as he warmly grasped the
hand of his friend.

‘I have been hasty, too,’ said he.

‘No, no,’ interrupted Mr. Pickwick, ‘the fault was mine. You will wear
the green velvet jacket?’

‘No, no,’ replied Mr. Tupman.

‘To oblige me, you will,’ resumed Mr. Pickwick.

‘Well, well, I will,’ said Mr. Tupman.


It was accordingly settled that Mr. Tupman, Mr. Winkle, and Mr.
Snodgrass, should all wear fancy-dresses. Thus Mr. Pickwick was led by
the very warmth of his own good feelings to give his consent to a
proceeding from which his better judgment would have recoiled--a more
striking illustration of his amiable character could hardly have been
conceived, even if the events recorded in these pages had been wholly
imaginary.

Mr. Leo Hunter had not exaggerated the resources of Mr. Solomon Lucas.
His wardrobe was extensive--very extensive--not strictly classical
perhaps, not quite new, nor did it contain any one garment made
precisely after the fashion of any age or time, but everything was more
or less spangled; and what can be prettier than spangles! It may be
objected that they are not adapted to the daylight, but everybody knows
that they would glitter if there were lamps; and nothing can be clearer
than that if people give fancy-balls in the day-time, and the dresses do
not show quite as well as they would by night, the fault lies solely
with the people who give the fancy-balls, and is in no wise chargeable
on the spangles. Such was the convincing reasoning of Mr. Solomon Lucas;
and influenced by such arguments did Mr. Tupman, Mr. Winkle, and Mr.
Snodgrass engage to array themselves in costumes which his taste and
experience induced him to recommend as admirably suited to the occasion.

A carriage was hired from the Town Arms, for the accommodation of the
Pickwickians, and a chariot was ordered from the same repository, for
the purpose of conveying Mr. and Mrs. Pott to Mrs. Leo Hunter’s grounds,
which Mr. Pott, as a delicate acknowledgment of having received an
invitation, had already confidently predicted in the Eatanswill
_Gazette_ ‘would present a scene of varied and delicious enchantment--a
bewildering coruscation of beauty and talent--a lavish and prodigal
display of hospitality--above all, a degree of splendour softened by the
most exquisite taste; and adornment refined with perfect harmony and the
chastest good keeping--compared with which, the fabled gorgeousness of
Eastern fairyland itself would appear to be clothed in as many dark and
murky colours, as must be the mind of the splenetic and unmanly being
who could presume to taint with the venom of his envy, the preparations
made by the virtuous and highly distinguished lady at whose shrine this
humble tribute of admiration was offered.’ This last was a piece of
biting sarcasm against the _Independent_, who, in consequence of not
having been invited at all, had been, through four numbers, affecting to
sneer at the whole affair, in his very largest type, with all the
adjectives in capital letters.

The morning came: it was a pleasant sight to behold Mr. Tupman in full
brigand’s costume, with a very tight jacket, sitting like a pincushion
over his back and shoulders, the upper portion of his legs incased in
the velvet shorts, and the lower part thereof swathed in the complicated
bandages to which all brigands are peculiarly attached. It was pleasing
to see his open and ingenuous countenance, well mustachioed and corked,
looking out from an open shirt collar; and to contemplate the sugar-loaf
hat, decorated with ribbons of all colours, which he was compelled to
carry on his knee, inasmuch as no known conveyance with a top to it,
would admit of any man’s carrying it between his head and the roof.
Equally humorous and agreeable was the appearance of Mr. Snodgrass in
blue satin trunks and cloak, white silk tights and shoes, and Grecian
helmet, which everybody knows (and if they do not, Mr. Solomon Lucas
did) to have been the regular, authentic, everyday costume of a
troubadour, from the earliest ages down to the time of their final
disappearance from the face of the earth. All this was pleasant, but
this was as nothing compared with the shouting of the populace when the
carriage drew up, behind Mr. Pott’s chariot, which chariot itself drew
up at Mr. Pott’s door, which door itself opened, and displayed the great
Pott accoutred as a Russian officer of justice, with a tremendous knout
in his hand--tastefully typical of the stern and mighty power of the
Eatanswill _Gazette_, and the fearful lashings it bestowed on public
offenders.

‘Bravo!’ shouted Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass from the passage, when
they beheld the walking allegory.

‘Bravo!’ Mr. Pickwick was heard to exclaim, from the passage.

‘Hoo-roar Pott!’ shouted the populace. Amid these salutations, Mr. Pott,
smiling with that kind of bland dignity which sufficiently testified
that he felt his power, and knew how to exert it, got into the chariot.

Then there emerged from the house, Mrs. Pott, who would have looked very
like Apollo if she hadn’t had a gown on, conducted by Mr. Winkle, who,
in his light-red coat could not possibly have been mistaken for anything
but a sportsman, if he had not borne an equal resemblance to a general
postman. Last of all came Mr. Pickwick, whom the boys applauded as loud
as anybody, probably under the impression that his tights and gaiters
were some remnants of the dark ages; and then the two vehicles proceeded
towards Mrs. Leo Hunter’s; Mr. Weller (who was to assist in waiting)
being stationed on the box of that in which his master was seated.

Every one of the men, women, boys, girls, and babies, who were assembled
to see the visitors in their fancy-dresses, screamed with delight and
ecstasy, when Mr. Pickwick, with the brigand on one arm, and the
troubadour on the other, walked solemnly up the entrance. Never were
such shouts heard as those which greeted Mr. Tupman’s efforts to fix the
sugar-loaf hat on his head, by way of entering the garden in style.

The preparations were on the most delightful scale; fully realising the
prophetic Pott’s anticipations about the gorgeousness of Eastern
fairyland, and at once affording a sufficient contradiction to the
malignant statements of the reptile _Independent_. The grounds were more
than an acre and a quarter in extent, and they were filled with people!
Never was such a blaze of beauty, and fashion, and literature. There was
the young lady who ‘did’ the poetry in the Eatanswill _Gazette_, in the
garb of a sultana, leaning upon the arm of the young gentleman who ‘did’
the review department, and who was appropriately habited in a field-
marshal’s uniform--the boots excepted. There were hosts of these
geniuses, and any reasonable person would have thought it honour enough
to meet them. But more than these, there were half a dozen lions from
London--authors, real authors, who had written whole books, and printed
them afterwards--and here you might see ‘em, walking about, like
ordinary men, smiling, and talking--aye, and talking pretty considerable
nonsense too, no doubt with the benign intention of rendering themselves
intelligible to the common people about them. Moreover, there was a band
of music in pasteboard caps; four something-ean singers in the costume
of their country, and a dozen hired waiters in the costume of _their
_country--and very dirty costume too. And above all, there was Mrs. Leo
Hunter in the character of Minerva, receiving the company, and
overflowing with pride and gratification at the notion of having called
such distinguished individuals together.

‘Mr. Pickwick, ma’am,’ said a servant, as that gentleman approached the
presiding goddess, with his hat in his hand, and the brigand and
troubadour on either arm.

‘What! Where!’ exclaimed Mrs. Leo Hunter, starting up, in an affected
rapture of surprise.

‘Here,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Is it possible that I have really the gratification of beholding Mr.
Pickwick himself!’ ejaculated Mrs. Leo Hunter.

‘No other, ma’am,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, bowing very low. ‘Permit me to
introduce my friends--Mr. Tupman--Mr. Winkle--Mr. Snodgrass--to the
authoress of “The Expiring Frog.”’

Very few people but those who have tried it, know what a difficult
process it is to bow in green velvet smalls, and a tight jacket, and
high-crowned hat; or in blue satin trunks and white silks, or knee-cords
and top-boots that were never made for the wearer, and have been fixed
upon him without the remotest reference to the comparative dimensions of
himself and the suit. Never were such distortions as Mr. Tupman’s frame
underwent in his efforts to appear easy and graceful--never was such
ingenious posturing, as his fancy-dressed friends exhibited.

‘Mr. Pickwick,’ said Mrs. Leo Hunter, ‘I must make you promise not to
stir from my side the whole day. There are hundreds of people here, that
I must positively introduce you to.’

‘You are very kind, ma’am,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘In the first place, here are my little girls; I had almost forgotten
them,’ said Minerva, carelessly pointing towards a couple of full-grown
young ladies, of whom one might be about twenty, and the other a year or
two older, and who were dressed in very juvenile costumes--whether to
make them look young, or their mamma younger, Mr. Pickwick does not
distinctly inform us.

‘They are very beautiful,’ said Mr. Pickwick, as the juveniles turned
away, after being presented.

‘They are very like their mamma, Sir,’ said Mr. Pott, majestically.

‘Oh, you naughty man,’ exclaimed Mrs. Leo Hunter, playfully tapping the
editor’s arm with her fan (Minerva with a fan!).

‘Why now, my dear Mrs. Hunter,’ said Mr. Pott, who was trumpeter in
ordinary at the Den, ‘you know that when your picture was in the
exhibition of the Royal Academy, last year, everybody inquired whether
it was intended for you, or your youngest daughter; for you were so much
alike that there was no telling the difference between you.’

‘Well, and if they did, why need you repeat it, before strangers?’ said
Mrs. Leo Hunter, bestowing another tap on the slumbering lion of the
Eatanswill _Gazette_.

‘Count, count,’ screamed Mrs. Leo Hunter to a well-whiskered individual
in a foreign uniform, who was passing by.

‘Ah! you want me?’ said the count, turning back.

‘I want to introduce two very clever people to each other,’ said Mrs.
Leo Hunter. ‘Mr. Pickwick, I have great pleasure in introducing you to
Count Smorltork.’ She added in a hurried whisper to Mr. Pickwick--‘The
famous foreigner--gathering materials for his great work on England--
hem!--Count Smorltork, Mr. Pickwick.’

Mr. Pickwick saluted the count with all the reverence due to so great a
man, and the count drew forth a set of tablets.

‘What you say, Mrs. Hunt?’ inquired the count, smiling graciously on the
gratified Mrs. Leo Hunter, ‘Pig Vig or Big Vig--what you call--lawyer--
eh? I see--that is it. Big Vig’--and the count was proceeding to enter
Mr. Pickwick in his tablets, as a gentleman of the long robe, who
derived his name from the profession to which he belonged, when Mrs. Leo
Hunter interposed.

‘No, no, count,’ said the lady, ‘Pick-wick.’

‘Ah, ah, I see,’ replied the count. ‘Peek--christian name; Weeks--
surname; good, ver good. Peek Weeks. How you do, Weeks?’

‘Quite well, I thank you,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, with all his usual
affability. ‘Have you been long in England?’

‘Long--ver long time--fortnight--more.’

‘Do you stay here long?’

‘One week.’

‘You will have enough to do,’ said Mr. Pickwick smiling, ‘to gather all
the materials you want in that time.’

‘Eh, they are gathered,’ said the count.

‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘They are here,’ added the count, tapping his forehead significantly.
‘Large book at home--full of notes--music, picture, science, potry,
poltic; all tings.’

‘The word politics, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘comprises in itself, a
difficult study of no inconsiderable magnitude.’

‘Ah!’ said the count, drawing out the tablets again, ‘ver good--fine
words to begin a chapter. Chapter forty-seven. Poltics. The word poltic
surprises by himself--’ And down went Mr. Pickwick’s remark, in Count
Smorltork’s tablets, with such variations and additions as the count’s
exuberant fancy suggested, or his imperfect knowledge of the language
occasioned.

‘Count,’ said Mrs. Leo Hunter.

‘Mrs. Hunt,’ replied the count.

‘This is Mr. Snodgrass, a friend of Mr. Pickwick’s, and a poet.’

‘Stop,’ exclaimed the count, bringing out the tablets once more. ‘Head,
potry--chapter, literary friends--name, Snowgrass; ver good. Introduced
to Snowgrass--great poet, friend of Peek Weeks--by Mrs. Hunt, which
wrote other sweet poem--what is that name?--Fog--Perspiring Fog--ver
good--ver good indeed.’ And the count put up his tablets, and with
sundry bows and acknowledgments walked away, thoroughly satisfied that
he had made the most important and valuable additions to his stock of
information.

‘Wonderful man, Count Smorltork,’ said Mrs. Leo Hunter.

‘Sound philosopher,’ said Mr. Pott.

‘Clear-headed, strong-minded person,’ added Mr. Snodgrass.

A chorus of bystanders took up the shout of Count Smorltork’s praise,
shook their heads sagely, and unanimously cried, ‘Very!’

As the enthusiasm in Count Smorltork’s favour ran very high, his praises
might have been sung until the end of the festivities, if the four
something-ean singers had not ranged themselves in front of a small
apple-tree, to look picturesque, and commenced singing their national
songs, which appeared by no means difficult of execution, inasmuch as
the grand secret seemed to be, that three of the something-ean singers
should grunt, while the fourth howled. This interesting performance
having concluded amidst the loud plaudits of the whole company, a boy
forthwith proceeded to entangle himself with the rails of a chair, and
to jump over it, and crawl under it, and fall down with it, and do
everything but sit upon it, and then to make a cravat of his legs, and
tie them round his neck, and then to illustrate the ease with which a
human being can be made to look like a magnified toad--all which feats
yielded high delight and satisfaction to the assembled spectators. After
which, the voice of Mrs. Pott was heard to chirp faintly forth,
something which courtesy interpreted into a song, which was all very
classical, and strictly in character, because Apollo was himself a
composer, and composers can very seldom sing their own music or anybody
else’s, either. This was succeeded by Mrs. Leo Hunter’s recitation of
her far-famed ‘Ode to an Expiring Frog,’ which was encored once, and
would have been encored twice, if the major part of the guests, who
thought it was high time to get something to eat, had not said that it
was perfectly shameful to take advantage of Mrs. Hunter’s good nature.
So although Mrs. Leo Hunter professed her perfect willingness to recite
the ode again, her kind and considerate friends wouldn’t hear of it on
any account; and the refreshment room being thrown open, all the people
who had ever been there before, scrambled in with all possible despatch-
-Mrs. Leo Hunter’s usual course of proceedings being, to issue cards for
a hundred, and breakfast for fifty, or in other words to feed only the
very particular lions, and let the smaller animals take care of
themselves.

‘Where is Mr. Pott?’ said Mrs. Leo Hunter, as she placed the aforesaid
lions around her.

‘Here I am,’ said the editor, from the remotest end of the room; far
beyond all hope of food, unless something was done for him by the
hostess.

‘Won’t you come up here?’

‘Oh, pray don’t mind him,’ said Mrs. Pott, in the most obliging voice--
‘you give yourself a great deal of unnecessary trouble, Mrs. Hunter.
You’ll do very well there, won’t you--dear?’

‘Certainly--love,’ replied the unhappy Pott, with a grim smile. Alas for
the knout! The nervous arm that wielded it, with such a gigantic force
on public characters, was paralysed beneath the glance of the imperious
Mrs. Pott.

Mrs. Leo Hunter looked round her in triumph. Count Smorltork was busily
engaged in taking notes of the contents of the dishes; Mr. Tupman was
doing the honours of the lobster salad to several lionesses, with a
degree of grace which no brigand ever exhibited before; Mr. Snodgrass
having cut out the young gentleman who cut up the books for the
Eatanswill _Gazette_, was engaged in an impassioned argument with the
young lady who did the poetry; and Mr. Pickwick was making himself
universally agreeable. Nothing seemed wanting to render the select
circle complete, when Mr. Leo Hunter--whose department on these
occasions, was to stand about in doorways, and talk to the less
important people--suddenly called out--

‘My dear; here’s Mr. Charles Fitz-Marshall.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs. Leo Hunter, ‘how anxiously I have been expecting
him. Pray make room, to let Mr. Fitz-Marshall pass. Tell Mr. Fitz-
Marshall, my dear, to come up to me directly, to be scolded for coming
so late.’

‘Coming, my dear ma’am,’ cried a voice, ‘as quick as I can--crowds of
people--full room--hard work--very.’

Mr. Pickwick’s knife and fork fell from his hand. He stared across the
table at Mr. Tupman, who had dropped his knife and fork, and was looking
as if he were about to sink into the ground without further notice.

‘Ah!’ cried the voice, as its owner pushed his way among the last five-
and-twenty Turks, officers, cavaliers, and Charles the Seconds, that
remained between him and the table, ‘regular mangle--Baker’s patent--not
a crease in my coat, after all this squeezing--might have “got up my
linen” as I came along--ha! ha! not a bad idea, that--queer thing to
have it mangled when it’s upon one, though--trying process--very.’

With these broken words, a young man dressed as a naval officer made his
way up to the table, and presented to the astonished Pickwickians the
identical form and features of Mr. Alfred Jingle.

The offender had barely time to take Mrs. Leo Hunter’s proffered hand,
when his eyes encountered the indignant orbs of Mr. Pickwick.

‘Hollo!’ said Jingle. ‘Quite forgot--no directions to postillion--give
‘em at once--back in a minute.’

‘The servant, or Mr. Hunter will do it in a moment, Mr. Fitz-Marshall,’
said Mrs. Leo Hunter.

‘No, no--I’ll do it--shan’t be long--back in no time,’ replied Jingle.
With these words he disappeared among the crowd.

‘Will you allow me to ask you, ma’am,’ said the excited Mr. Pickwick,
rising from his seat, ‘who that young man is, and where he resides?’

‘He is a gentleman of fortune, Mr. Pickwick,’ said Mrs. Leo Hunter, ‘to
whom I very much want to introduce you. The count will be delighted with
him.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr. Pickwick hastily. ‘His residence--’

‘Is at present at the Angel at Bury.’

‘At Bury?’

‘At Bury St. Edmunds, not many miles from here. But dear me, Mr.
Pickwick, you are not going to leave us; surely Mr. Pickwick you cannot
think of going so soon?’

But long before Mrs. Leo Hunter had finished speaking, Mr. Pickwick had
plunged through the throng, and reached the garden, whither he was
shortly afterwards joined by Mr. Tupman, who had followed his friend
closely.

‘It’s of no use,’ said Mr. Tupman. ‘He has gone.’

‘I know it,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘and I will follow him.’

‘Follow him! Where?’ inquired Mr. Tupman.

‘To the Angel at Bury,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, speaking very quickly.
‘How do we know whom he is deceiving there? He deceived a worthy man
once, and we were the innocent cause. He shall not do it again, if I can
help it; I’ll expose him! Sam! Where’s my servant?’

‘Here you are, Sir,’ said Mr. Weller, emerging from a sequestered spot,
where he had been engaged in discussing a bottle of Madeira, which he
had abstracted from the breakfast-table an hour or two before. ‘Here’s
your servant, Sir. Proud o’ the title, as the living skellinton said,
ven they show’d him.’

‘Follow me instantly,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Tupman, if I stay at Bury,
you can join me there, when I write. Till then, good-bye!’

Remonstrances were useless. Mr. Pickwick was roused, and his mind was
made up. Mr. Tupman returned to his companions; and in another hour had
drowned all present recollection of Mr. Alfred Jingle, or Mr. Charles
Fitz-Marshall, in an exhilarating quadrille and a bottle of champagne.
By that time, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, perched on the outside of a
stage-coach, were every succeeding minute placing a less and less
distance between themselves and the good old town of Bury St. Edmunds.



CHAPTER XVI. TOO FULL OF ADVENTURE TO BE BRIEFLY DESCRIBED

There is no month in the whole year in which nature wears a more
beautiful appearance than in the month of August. Spring has many
beauties, and May is a fresh and blooming month, but the charms of this
time of year are enhanced by their contrast with the winter season.
August has no such advantage. It comes when we remember nothing but
clear skies, green fields, and sweet-smelling flowers--when the
recollection of snow, and ice, and bleak winds, has faded from our minds
as completely as they have disappeared from the earth--and yet what a
pleasant time it is! Orchards and cornfields ring with the hum of
labour; trees bend beneath the thick clusters of rich fruit which bow
their branches to the ground; and the corn, piled in graceful sheaves,
or waving in every light breath that sweeps above it, as if it wooed the
sickle, tinges the landscape with a golden hue. A mellow softness
appears to hang over the whole earth; the influence of the season seems
to extend itself to the very wagon, whose slow motion across the well-
reaped field is perceptible only to the eye, but strikes with no harsh
sound upon the ear.

As the coach rolls swiftly past the fields and orchards which skirt the
road, groups of women and children, piling the fruit in sieves, or
gathering the scattered ears of corn, pause for an instant from their
labour, and shading the sun-burned face with a still browner hand, gaze
upon the passengers with curious eyes, while some stout urchin, too
small to work, but too mischievous to be left at home, scrambles over
the side of the basket in which he has been deposited for security, and
kicks and screams with delight. The reaper stops in his work, and stands
with folded arms, looking at the vehicle as it whirls past; and the
rough cart-horses bestow a sleepy glance upon the smart coach team,
which says as plainly as a horse’s glance can, ‘It’s all very fine to
look at, but slow going, over a heavy field, is better than warm work
like that, upon a dusty road, after all.’ You cast a look behind you, as
you turn a corner of the road. The women and children have resumed their
labour; the reaper once more stoops to his work; the cart-horses have
moved on; and all are again in motion.

The influence of a scene like this, was not lost upon the well-regulated
mind of Mr. Pickwick. Intent upon the resolution he had formed, of
exposing the real character of the nefarious Jingle, in any quarter in
which he might be pursuing his fraudulent designs, he sat at first
taciturn and contemplative, brooding over the means by which his purpose
could be best attained. By degrees his attention grew more and more
attracted by the objects around him; and at last he derived as much
enjoyment from the ride, as if it had been undertaken for the
pleasantest reason in the world.

‘Delightful prospect, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Beats the chimbley-pots, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, touching his hat.

‘I suppose you have hardly seen anything but chimney-pots and bricks and
mortar all your life, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, smiling.

‘I worn’t always a boots, sir,’ said Mr. Weller, with a shake of the
head. ‘I wos a vaginer’s boy, once.’

‘When was that?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘When I wos first pitched neck and crop into the world, to play at leap-
frog with its troubles,’ replied Sam. ‘I wos a carrier’s boy at
startin’; then a vaginer’s, then a helper, then a boots. Now I’m a
gen’l’m’n’s servant. I shall be a gen’l’m’n myself one of these days,
perhaps, with a pipe in my mouth, and a summer-house in the back-garden.
Who knows? I shouldn’t be surprised for one.’

‘You are quite a philosopher, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘It runs in the family, I b’lieve, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘My
father’s wery much in that line now. If my mother-in-law blows him up,
he whistles. She flies in a passion, and breaks his pipe; he steps out,
and gets another. Then she screams wery loud, and falls into ‘sterics;
and he smokes wery comfortably till she comes to agin. That’s
philosophy, Sir, ain’t it?’

‘A very good substitute for it, at all events,’ replied Mr. Pickwick,
laughing. ‘It must have been of great service to you, in the course of
your rambling life, Sam.’

‘Service, sir,’ exclaimed Sam. ‘You may say that. Arter I run away from
the carrier, and afore I took up with the vaginer, I had unfurnished
lodgin’s for a fortnight.’

‘Unfurnished lodgings?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes--the dry arches of Waterloo Bridge. Fine sleeping-place--vithin ten
minutes’ walk of all the public offices--only if there is any objection
to it, it is that the sitivation’s rayther too airy. I see some queer
sights there.’

Ah, I suppose you did,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with an air of considerable
interest.

‘Sights, sir,’ resumed Mr. Weller, ‘as ‘ud penetrate your benevolent
heart, and come out on the other side. You don’t see the reg’lar
wagrants there; trust ‘em, they knows better than that. Young beggars,
male and female, as hasn’t made a rise in their profession, takes up
their quarters there sometimes; but it’s generally the worn-out,
starving, houseless creeturs as roll themselves in the dark corners o’
them lonesome places--poor creeturs as ain’t up to the twopenny rope.’

‘And pray, Sam, what is the twopenny rope?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘The twopenny rope, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, ‘is just a cheap lodgin’
house, where the beds is twopence a night.’

‘What do they call a bed a rope for?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Bless your innocence, sir, that ain’t it,’ replied Sam. ‘Ven the lady
and gen’l’m’n as keeps the hot-el first begun business, they used to
make the beds on the floor; but this wouldn’t do at no price, ‘cos
instead o’ taking a moderate twopenn’orth o’ sleep, the lodgers used to
lie there half the day. So now they has two ropes, ‘bout six foot apart,
and three from the floor, which goes right down the room; and the beds
are made of slips of coarse sacking, stretched across ‘em.’

‘Well,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Well,’ said Mr. Weller, ‘the adwantage o’ the plan’s hobvious. At six
o’clock every mornin’ they let’s go the ropes at one end, and down falls
the lodgers. Consequence is, that being thoroughly waked, they get up
wery quietly, and walk away!’

‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ said Sam, suddenly breaking off in his
loquacious discourse. ‘Is this Bury St. Edmunds?’

‘It is,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

The coach rattled through the well-paved streets of a handsome little
town, of thriving and cleanly appearance, and stopped before a large inn
situated in a wide open street, nearly facing the old abbey.

‘And this,’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking up. ‘Is the Angel! We alight
here, Sam. But some caution is necessary. Order a private room, and do
not mention my name. You understand.’

‘Right as a trivet, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, with a wink of
intelligence; and having dragged Mr. Pickwick’s portmanteau from the
hind boot, into which it had been hastily thrown when they joined the
coach at Eatanswill, Mr. Weller disappeared on his errand. A private
room was speedily engaged; and into it Mr. Pickwick was ushered without
delay.

‘Now, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘the first thing to be done is to--’

Order dinner, Sir,’ interposed Mr. Weller. ‘It’s wery late, sir.’

‘Ah, so it is,’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking at his watch. ‘You are right,
Sam.’

‘And if I might adwise, Sir,’ added Mr. Weller, ‘I’d just have a good
night’s rest arterwards, and not begin inquiring arter this here deep
‘un till the mornin’. There’s nothin’ so refreshen’ as sleep, sir, as
the servant girl said afore she drank the egg-cupful of laudanum.’

‘I think you are right, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘But I must first
ascertain that he is in the house, and not likely to go away.’

‘Leave that to me, Sir,’ said Sam. ‘Let me order you a snug little
dinner, and make my inquiries below while it’s a-getting ready; I could
worm ev’ry secret out O’ the boots’s heart, in five minutes, Sir.’

Do so,’ said Mr. Pickwick; and Mr. Weller at once retired.

In half an hour, Mr. Pickwick was seated at a very satisfactory dinner;
and in three-quarters Mr. Weller returned with the intelligence that Mr.
Charles Fitz-Marshall had ordered his private room to be retained for
him, until further notice. He was going to spend the evening at some
private house in the neighbourhood, had ordered the boots to sit up
until his return, and had taken his servant with him.

‘Now, sir,’ argued Mr. Weller, when he had concluded his report, ‘if I
can get a talk with this here servant in the mornin’, he’ll tell me all
his master’s concerns.’

‘How do you know that?’ interposed Mr. Pickwick.

‘Bless your heart, sir, servants always do,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘Oh, ah, I forgot that,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Well.’

‘Then you can arrange what’s best to be done, sir, and we can act
accordingly.’

As it appeared that this was the best arrangement that could be made, it
was finally agreed upon. Mr. Weller, by his master’s permission, retired
to spend the evening in his own way; and was shortly afterwards elected,
by the unanimous voice of the assembled company, into the taproom chair,
in which honourable post he acquitted himself so much to the
satisfaction of the gentlemen-frequenters, that their roars of laughter
and approbation penetrated to Mr. Pickwick’s bedroom, and shortened the
term of his natural rest by at least three hours.

Early on the ensuing morning, Mr. Weller was dispelling all the feverish
remains of the previous evening’s conviviality, through the
instrumentality of a halfpenny shower-bath (having induced a young
gentleman attached to the stable department, by the offer of that coin,
to pump over his head and face, until he was perfectly restored), when
he was attracted by the appearance of a young fellow in mulberry-
coloured livery, who was sitting on a bench in the yard, reading what
appeared to be a hymn-book, with an air of deep abstraction, but who
occasionally stole a glance at the individual under the pump, as if he
took some interest in his proceedings, nevertheless.

‘You’re a rum ‘un to look at, you are!’ thought Mr. Weller, the first
time his eyes encountered the glance of the stranger in the mulberry
suit, who had a large, sallow, ugly face, very sunken eyes, and a
gigantic head, from which depended a quantity of lank black hair.
‘You’re a rum ‘un!’ thought Mr. Weller; and thinking this, he went on
washing himself, and thought no more about him.

Still the man kept glancing from his hymn-book to Sam, and from Sam to
his hymn-book, as if he wanted to open a conversation. So at last, Sam,
by way of giving him an opportunity, said with a familiar nod--

‘How are you, governor?’

‘I am happy to say, I am pretty well, Sir,’ said the man, speaking with
great deliberation, and closing the book. ‘I hope you are the same,
Sir?’

‘Why, if I felt less like a walking brandy-bottle I shouldn’t be quite
so staggery this mornin’,’ replied Sam. ‘Are you stoppin’ in this house,
old ‘un?’

The mulberry man replied in the affirmative.

‘How was it you worn’t one of us, last night?’ inquired Sam, scrubbing
his face with the towel. ‘You seem one of the jolly sort--looks as
conwivial as a live trout in a lime basket,’ added Mr. Weller, in an
undertone.

‘I was out last night with my master,’ replied the stranger.

‘What’s his name?’ inquired Mr. Weller, colouring up very red with
sudden excitement, and the friction of the towel combined.

‘Fitz-Marshall,’ said the mulberry man.

‘Give us your hand,’ said Mr. Weller, advancing; ‘I should like to know
you. I like your appearance, old fellow.’

‘Well, that is very strange,’ said the mulberry man, with great
simplicity of manner. ‘I like yours so much, that I wanted to speak to
you, from the very first moment I saw you under the pump.’

Did you though?’

‘Upon my word. Now, isn’t that curious?’

‘Wery sing’ler,’ said Sam, inwardly congratulating himself upon the
softness of the stranger. ‘What’s your name, my patriarch?’

‘Job.’

‘And a wery good name it is; only one I know that ain’t got a nickname
to it. What’s the other name?’

‘Trotter,’ said the stranger. ‘What is yours?’

Sam bore in mind his master’s caution, and replied--

‘My name’s Walker; my master’s name’s Wilkins. Will you take a drop o’
somethin’ this mornin’, Mr. Trotter?’

Mr. Trotter acquiesced in this agreeable proposal; and having deposited
his book in his coat pocket, accompanied Mr. Weller to the tap, where
they were soon occupied in discussing an exhilarating compound, formed
by mixing together, in a pewter vessel, certain quantities of British
Hollands and the fragrant essence of the clove.

‘And what sort of a place have you got?’ inquired Sam, as he filled his
companion’s glass, for the second time.

‘Bad,’ said Job, smacking his lips, ‘very bad.’

‘You don’t mean that?’ said Sam.

‘I do, indeed. Worse than that, my master’s going to be married.’

‘No.’

‘Yes; and worse than that, too, he’s going to run away with an immense
rich heiress, from boarding-school.’

‘What a dragon!’ said Sam, refilling his companion’s glass. ‘It’s some
boarding-school in this town, I suppose, ain’t it?’ Now, although this
question was put in the most careless tone imaginable, Mr. Job Trotter
plainly showed by gestures that he perceived his new friend’s anxiety to
draw forth an answer to it. He emptied his glass, looked mysteriously at
his companion, winked both of his small eyes, one after the other, and
finally made a motion with his arm, as if he were working an imaginary
pump-handle; thereby intimating that he (Mr. Trotter) considered himself
as undergoing the process of being pumped by Mr. Samuel Weller.

‘No, no,’ said Mr. Trotter, in conclusion, ‘that’s not to be told to
everybody. That is a secret--a great secret, Mr. Walker.’ As the
mulberry man said this, he turned his glass upside down, by way of
reminding his companion that he had nothing left wherewith to slake his
thirst. Sam observed the hint; and feeling the delicate manner in which
it was conveyed, ordered the pewter vessel to be refilled, whereat the
small eyes of the mulberry man glistened.

‘And so it’s a secret?’ said Sam.

‘I should rather suspect it was,’ said the mulberry man, sipping his
liquor, with a complacent face.

‘I suppose your mas’r’s wery rich?’ said Sam.

Mr. Trotter smiled, and holding his glass in his left hand, gave four
distinct slaps on the pockets of his mulberry indescribables with his
right, as if to intimate that his master might have done the same
without alarming anybody much by the chinking of coin.

‘Ah,’ said Sam, ‘that’s the game, is it?’

The mulberry man nodded significantly.

‘Well, and don’t you think, old feller,’ remonstrated Mr. Weller, ‘that
if you let your master take in this here young lady, you’re a precious
rascal?’

‘I know that,’ said Job Trotter, turning upon his companion a
countenance of deep contrition, and groaning slightly, ‘I know that, and
that’s what it is that preys upon my mind. But what am I to do?’

‘Do!’ said Sam; ‘di-wulge to the missis, and give up your master.’

‘Who’d believe me?’ replied Job Trotter. ‘The young lady’s considered
the very picture of innocence and discretion. She’d deny it, and so
would my master. Who’d believe me? I should lose my place, and get
indicted for a conspiracy, or some such thing; that’s all I should take
by my motion.’

‘There’s somethin’ in that,’ said Sam, ruminating; ‘there’s somethin’ in
that.’

‘If I knew any respectable gentleman who would take the matter up,’
continued Mr. Trotter. ‘I might have some hope of preventing the
elopement; but there’s the same difficulty, Mr. Walker, just the same. I
know no gentleman in this strange place; and ten to one if I did,
whether he would believe my story.’

‘Come this way,’ said Sam, suddenly jumping up, and grasping the
mulberry man by the arm. ‘My mas’r’s the man you want, I see.’ And after
a slight resistance on the part of Job Trotter, Sam led his newly-found
friend to the apartment of Mr. Pickwick, to whom he presented him,
together with a brief summary of the dialogue we have just repeated.

‘I am very sorry to betray my master, sir,’ said Job Trotter, applying
to his eyes a pink checked pocket-handkerchief about six inches square.

‘The feeling does you a great deal of honour,’ replied Mr. Pickwick;
‘but it is your duty, nevertheless.’

‘I know it is my duty, Sir,’ replied Job, with great emotion. ‘We should
all try to discharge our duty, Sir, and I humbly endeavour to discharge
mine, Sir; but it is a hard trial to betray a master, Sir, whose clothes
you wear, and whose bread you eat, even though he is a scoundrel, Sir.’

‘You are a very good fellow,’ said Mr. Pickwick, much affected; ‘an
honest fellow.’

‘Come, come,’ interposed Sam, who had witnessed Mr. Trotter’s tears with
considerable impatience, ‘blow this ‘ere water-cart bis’ness. It won’t
do no good, this won’t.’

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick reproachfully. ‘I am sorry to find that you
have so little respect for this young man’s feelings.’

‘His feelin’s is all wery well, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘and as
they’re so wery fine, and it’s a pity he should lose ‘em, I think he’d
better keep ‘em in his own buzzum, than let ‘em ewaporate in hot water,
‘specially as they do no good. Tears never yet wound up a clock, or
worked a steam ingin’. The next time you go out to a smoking party,
young fellow, fill your pipe with that ‘ere reflection; and for the
present just put that bit of pink gingham into your pocket. ‘Tain’t so
handsome that you need keep waving it about, as if you was a tight-rope
dancer.’

‘My man is in the right,’ said Mr. Pickwick, accosting Job, ‘although
his mode of expressing his opinion is somewhat homely, and occasionally
incomprehensible.’

‘He is, sir, very right,’ said Mr. Trotter, ‘and I will give way no
longer.’

Very well,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Now, where is this boarding-school?’

‘It is a large, old, red brick house, just outside the town, Sir,’
replied Job Trotter.

‘And when,’ said Mr. Pickwick--‘when is this villainous design to be
carried into execution--when is this elopement to take place?’

‘To-night, Sir,’ replied Job.

‘To-night!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘This very night, sir,’ replied Job Trotter. ‘That is what alarms me so
much.’

‘Instant measures must be taken,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘I will see the
lady who keeps the establishment immediately.’

‘I beg your pardon, Sir,’ said Job, ‘but that course of proceeding will
never do.’

‘Why not?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘My master, sir, is a very artful man.’

‘I know he is,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘And he has so wound himself round the old lady’s heart, Sir,’ resumed
Job, ‘that she would believe nothing to his prejudice, if you went down
on your bare knees, and swore it; especially as you have no proof but
the word of a servant, who, for anything she knows (and my master would
be sure to say so), was discharged for some fault, and does this in
revenge.’

‘What had better be done, then?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Nothing but taking him in the very act of eloping, will convince the
old lady, sir,’ replied Job.

‘All them old cats _will _run their heads agin milestones,’ observed Mr.
Weller, in a parenthesis.

‘But this taking him in the very act of elopement, would be a very
difficult thing to accomplish, I fear,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Mr. Trotter, after a few moments’ reflection.
‘I think it might be very easily done.’

‘How?’ was Mr. Pickwick’s inquiry.

‘Why,’ replied Mr. Trotter, ‘my master and I, being in the confidence of
the two servants, will be secreted in the kitchen at ten o’clock. When
the family have retired to rest, we shall come out of the kitchen, and
the young lady out of her bedroom. A post-chaise will be waiting, and
away we go.’

‘Well?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Well, sir, I have been thinking that if you were in waiting in the
garden behind, alone--’

‘Alone,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Why alone?’

‘I thought it very natural,’ replied Job, ‘that the old lady wouldn’t
like such an unpleasant discovery to be made before more persons than
can possibly be helped. The young lady, too, sir--consider her
feelings.’

‘You are very right,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘The consideration evinces your
delicacy of feeling. Go on; you are very right.’

‘Well, sir, I have been thinking that if you were waiting in the back
garden alone, and I was to let you in, at the door which opens into it,
from the end of the passage, at exactly half-past eleven o’clock, you
would be just in the very moment of time to assist me in frustrating the
designs of this bad man, by whom I have been unfortunately ensnared.’
Here Mr. Trotter sighed deeply.

‘Don’t distress yourself on that account,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘if he had
one grain of the delicacy of feeling which distinguishes you, humble as
your station is, I should have some hopes of him.’

Job Trotter bowed low; and in spite of Mr. Weller’s previous
remonstrance, the tears again rose to his eyes.

‘I never see such a feller,’ said Sam, ‘Blessed if I don’t think he’s
got a main in his head as is always turned on.’

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with great severity, ‘hold your tongue.’

‘Wery well, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘I don’t like this plan,’ said Mr. Pickwick, after deep meditation. ‘Why
cannot I communicate with the young lady’s friends?’

‘Because they live one hundred miles from here, sir,’ responded Job
Trotter.

‘That’s a clincher,’ said Mr. Weller, aside.

‘Then this garden,’ resumed Mr. Pickwick. ‘How am I to get into it?’

‘The wall is very low, sir, and your servant will give you a leg up.’

My servant will give me a leg up,’ repeated Mr. Pickwick mechanically.
‘You will be sure to be near this door that you speak of?’

‘You cannot mistake it, Sir; it’s the only one that opens into the
garden. Tap at it when you hear the clock strike, and I will open it
instantly.’

‘I don’t like the plan,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘but as I see no other, and
as the happiness of this young lady’s whole life is at stake, I adopt
it. I shall be sure to be there.’

Thus, for the second time, did Mr. Pickwick’s innate good-feeling
involve him in an enterprise from which he would most willingly have
stood aloof.

‘What is the name of the house?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Westgate House, Sir. You turn a little to the right when you get to the
end of the town; it stands by itself, some little distance off the high
road, with the name on a brass plate on the gate.’

‘I know it,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘I observed it once before, when I was
in this town. You may depend upon me.’

Mr. Trotter made another bow, and turned to depart, when Mr. Pickwick
thrust a guinea into his hand.

‘You’re a fine fellow,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘and I admire your goodness
of heart. No thanks. Remember--eleven o’clock.’

‘There is no fear of my forgetting it, sir,’ replied Job Trotter. With
these words he left the room, followed by Sam.

‘I say,’ said the latter, ‘not a bad notion that ‘ere crying. I’d cry
like a rain-water spout in a shower on such good terms. How do you do
it?’

‘It comes from the heart, Mr. Walker,’ replied Job solemnly. ‘Good-
morning, sir.’

‘You’re a soft customer, you are; we’ve got it all out o’ you, anyhow,’
thought Mr. Weller, as Job walked away.

We cannot state the precise nature of the thoughts which passed through
Mr. Trotter’s mind, because we don’t know what they were.

The day wore on, evening came, and at a little before ten o’clock Sam
Weller reported that Mr. Jingle and Job had gone out together, that
their luggage was packed up, and that they had ordered a chaise. The
plot was evidently in execution, as Mr. Trotter had foretold.

Half-past ten o’clock arrived, and it was time for Mr. Pickwick to issue
forth on his delicate errand. Resisting Sam’s tender of his greatcoat,
in order that he might have no encumbrance in scaling the wall, he set
forth, followed by his attendant.

There was a bright moon, but it was behind the clouds. It was a fine dry
night, but it was most uncommonly dark. Paths, hedges, fields, houses,
and trees, were enveloped in one deep shade. The atmosphere was hot and
sultry, the summer lightning quivered faintly on the verge of the
horizon, and was the only sight that varied the dull gloom in which
everything was wrapped--sound there was none, except the distant barking
of some restless house-dog.

They found the house, read the brass plate, walked round the wall, and
stopped at that portion of it which divided them from the bottom of the
garden.

‘You will return to the inn, Sam, when you have assisted me over,’ said
Mr. Pickwick.

‘Wery well, Sir.’

‘And you will sit up, till I return.’

‘Cert’nly, Sir.’

‘Take hold of my leg; and, when I say “Over,” raise me gently.’

‘All right, sir.’

Having settled these preliminaries, Mr. Pickwick grasped the top of the
wall, and gave the word ‘Over,’ which was literally obeyed. Whether his
body partook in some degree of the elasticity of his mind, or whether
Mr. Weller’s notions of a gentle push were of a somewhat rougher
description than Mr. Pickwick’s, the immediate effect of his assistance
was to jerk that immortal gentleman completely over the wall on to the
bed beneath, where, after crushing three gooseberry-bushes and a rose-
tree, he finally alighted at full length.

‘You ha’n’t hurt yourself, I hope, Sir?’ said Sam, in a loud whisper, as
soon as he had recovered from the surprise consequent upon the
mysterious disappearance of his master.

‘I have not hurt _myself_, Sam, certainly,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, from
the other side of the wall, ‘but I rather think that _you _have hurt
me.’

‘I hope not, Sir,’ said Sam.

‘Never mind,’ said Mr. Pickwick, rising, ‘it’s nothing but a few
scratches. Go away, or we shall be overheard.’

‘Good-bye, Sir.’

‘Good-bye.’

With stealthy steps Sam Weller departed, leaving Mr. Pickwick alone in
the garden.

Lights occasionally appeared in the different windows of the house, or
glanced from the staircases, as if the inmates were retiring to rest.
Not caring to go too near the door, until the appointed time, Mr.
Pickwick crouched into an angle of the wall, and awaited its arrival.

It was a situation which might well have depressed the spirits of many a
man. Mr. Pickwick, however, felt neither depression nor misgiving. He
knew that his purpose was in the main a good one, and he placed implicit
reliance on the high-minded Job. It was dull, certainly; not to say
dreary; but a contemplative man can always employ himself in meditation.
Mr. Pickwick had meditated himself into a doze, when he was roused by
the chimes of the neighbouring church ringing out the hour--half-past
eleven.

‘That’s the time,’ thought Mr. Pickwick, getting cautiously on his feet.
He looked up at the house. The lights had disappeared, and the shutters
were closed--all in bed, no doubt. He walked on tiptoe to the door, and
gave a gentle tap. Two or three minutes passing without any reply, he
gave another tap rather louder, and then another rather louder than
that.

At length the sound of feet was audible upon the stairs, and then the
light of a candle shone through the keyhole of the door. There was a
good deal of unchaining and unbolting, and the door was slowly opened.

Now the door opened outwards; and as the door opened wider and wider,
Mr. Pickwick receded behind it, more and more. What was his astonishment
when he just peeped out, by way of caution, to see that the person who
had opened it was--not Job Trotter, but a servant-girl with a candle in
her hand! Mr. Pickwick drew in his head again, with the swiftness
displayed by that admirable melodramatic performer, Punch, when he lies
in wait for the flat-headed comedian with the tin box of music.

‘It must have been the cat, Sarah,’ said the girl, addressing herself to
some one in the house. ‘Puss, puss, puss,--tit, tit, tit.’

But no animal being decoyed by these blandishments, the girl slowly
closed the door, and re-fastened it; leaving Mr. Pickwick drawn up
straight against the wall.

‘This is very curious,’ thought Mr. Pickwick. ‘They are sitting up
beyond their usual hour, I suppose. Extremely unfortunate, that they
should have chosen this night, of all others, for such a purpose--
exceedingly.’ And with these thoughts, Mr. Pickwick cautiously retired
to the angle of the wall in which he had been before ensconced; waiting
until such time as he might deem it safe to repeat the signal.

He had not been here five minutes, when a vivid flash of lightning was
followed by a loud peal of thunder that crashed and rolled away in the
distance with a terrific noise--then came another flash of lightning,
brighter than the other, and a second peal of thunder louder than the
first; and then down came the rain, with a force and fury that swept
everything before it.

Mr. Pickwick was perfectly aware that a tree is a very dangerous
neighbour in a thunderstorm. He had a tree on his right, a tree on his
left, a third before him, and a fourth behind. If he remained where he
was, he might fall the victim of an accident; if he showed himself in
the centre of the garden, he might be consigned to a constable. Once or
twice he tried to scale the wall, but having no other legs this time,
than those with which Nature had furnished him, the only effect of his
struggles was to inflict a variety of very unpleasant gratings on his
knees and shins, and to throw him into a state of the most profuse
perspiration.

‘What a dreadful situation,’ said Mr. Pickwick, pausing to wipe his brow
after this exercise. He looked up at the house--all was dark. They must
be gone to bed now. He would try the signal again.

He walked on tiptoe across the moist gravel, and tapped at the door. He
held his breath, and listened at the key-hole. No reply: very odd.
Another knock. He listened again. There was a low whispering inside, and
then a voice cried--

‘Who’s there?’

‘That’s not Job,’ thought Mr. Pickwick, hastily drawing himself straight
up against the wall again. ‘It’s a woman.’

He had scarcely had time to form this conclusion, when a window above
stairs was thrown up, and three or four female voices repeated the
query--‘Who’s there?’

Mr. Pickwick dared not move hand or foot. It was clear that the whole
establishment was roused. He made up his mind to remain where he was,
until the alarm had subsided; and then by a supernatural effort, to get
over the wall, or perish in the attempt.

Like all Mr. Pickwick’s determinations, this was the best that could be
made under the circumstances; but, unfortunately, it was founded upon
the assumption that they would not venture to open the door again. What
was his discomfiture, when he heard the chain and bolts withdrawn, and
saw the door slowly opening, wider and wider! He retreated into the
corner, step by step; but do what he would, the interposition of his own
person, prevented its being opened to its utmost width.

‘Who’s there?’ screamed a numerous chorus of treble voices from the
staircase inside, consisting of the spinster lady of the establishment,
three teachers, five female servants, and thirty boarders, all half-
dressed and in a forest of curl-papers.


Of course Mr. Pickwick didn’t say who was there: and then the burden of
the chorus changed into--‘Lor! I am so frightened.’

‘Cook,’ said the lady abbess, who took care to be on the top stair, the
very last of the group--‘cook, why don’t you go a little way into the
garden?’

Please, ma’am, I don’t like,’ responded the cook.

‘Lor, what a stupid thing that cook is!’ said the thirty boarders.

‘Cook,’ said the lady abbess, with great dignity; ‘don’t answer me, if
you please. I insist upon your looking into the garden immediately.’

Here the cook began to cry, and the housemaid said it was ‘a shame!’ for
which partisanship she received a month’s warning on the spot.

‘Do you hear, cook?’ said the lady abbess, stamping her foot
impatiently.

‘Don’t you hear your missis, cook?’ said the three teachers.

‘What an impudent thing that cook is!’ said the thirty boarders.

The unfortunate cook, thus strongly urged, advanced a step or two, and
holding her candle just where it prevented her from seeing at all,
declared there was nothing there, and it must have been the wind. The
door was just going to be closed in consequence, when an inquisitive
boarder, who had been peeping between the hinges, set up a fearful
screaming, which called back the cook and housemaid, and all the more
adventurous, in no time.

‘What is the matter with Miss Smithers?’ said the lady abbess, as the
aforesaid Miss Smithers proceeded to go into hysterics of four young
lady power.

‘Lor, Miss Smithers, dear,’ said the other nine-and-twenty boarders.

‘Oh, the man--the man--behind the door!’ screamed Miss Smithers.

The lady abbess no sooner heard this appalling cry, than she retreated
to her own bedroom, double-locked the door, and fainted away
comfortably. The boarders, and the teachers, and the servants, fell back
upon the stairs, and upon each other; and never was such a screaming,
and fainting, and struggling beheld. In the midst of the tumult, Mr.
Pickwick emerged from his concealment, and presented himself amongst
them.

‘Ladies--dear ladies,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Oh. he says we’re dear,’ cried the oldest and ugliest teacher. ‘Oh, the
wretch!’

‘Ladies,’ roared Mr. Pickwick, rendered desperate by the danger of his
situation. ‘Hear me. I am no robber. I want the lady of the house.’

‘Oh, what a ferocious monster!’ screamed another teacher. ‘He wants Miss
Tomkins.’

Here there was a general scream.

‘Ring the alarm bell, somebody!’ cried a dozen voices.

‘Don’t--don’t,’ shouted Mr. Pickwick. ‘Look at me. Do I look like a
robber! My dear ladies--you may bind me hand and leg, or lock me up in a
closet, if you like. Only hear what I have got to say--only hear me.’

‘How did you come in our garden?’ faltered the housemaid.

‘Call the lady of the house, and I’ll tell her everything,’ said Mr.
Pickwick, exerting his lungs to the utmost pitch. ‘Call her--only be
quiet, and call her, and you shall hear everything.’

It might have been Mr. Pickwick’s appearance, or it might have been his
manner, or it might have been the temptation--irresistible to a female
mind--of hearing something at present enveloped in mystery, that reduced
the more reasonable portion of the establishment (some four individuals)
to a state of comparative quiet. By them it was proposed, as a test of
Mr. Pickwick’s sincerity, that he should immediately submit to personal
restraint; and that gentleman having consented to hold a conference with
Miss Tomkins, from the interior of a closet in which the day boarders
hung their bonnets and sandwich-bags, he at once stepped into it, of his
own accord, and was securely locked in. This revived the others; and
Miss Tomkins having been brought to, and brought down, the conference
began.

‘What did you do in my garden, man?’ said Miss Tomkins, in a faint
voice.

‘I came to warn you that one of your young ladies was going to elope to-
night,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, from the interior of the closet.

‘Elope!’ exclaimed Miss Tomkins, the three teachers, the thirty
boarders, and the five servants. ‘Who with?’

Your friend, Mr. Charles Fitz-Marshall.’

‘_My_ friend! I don’t know any such person.’

‘Well, Mr. Jingle, then.’

‘I never heard the name in my life.’

‘Then, I have been deceived, and deluded,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘I have
been the victim of a conspiracy--a foul and base conspiracy. Send to the
Angel, my dear ma’am, if you don’t believe me. Send to the Angel for Mr.
Pickwick’s manservant, I implore you, ma’am.’

‘He must be respectable--he keeps a manservant,’ said Miss Tomkins to
the writing and ciphering governess.

‘It’s my opinion, Miss Tomkins,’ said the writing and ciphering
governess, ‘that his manservant keeps him, I think he’s a madman, Miss
Tomkins, and the other’s his keeper.’

‘I think you are very right, Miss Gwynn,’ responded Miss Tomkins. ‘Let
two of the servants repair to the Angel, and let the others remain here,
to protect us.’

So two of the servants were despatched to the Angel in search of Mr.
Samuel Weller; and the remaining three stopped behind to protect Miss
Tomkins, and the three teachers, and the thirty boarders. And Mr.
Pickwick sat down in the closet, beneath a grove of sandwich-bags, and
awaited the return of the messengers, with all the philosophy and
fortitude he could summon to his aid.

An hour and a half elapsed before they came back, and when they did
come, Mr. Pickwick recognised, in addition to the voice of Mr. Samuel
Weller, two other voices, the tones of which struck familiarly on his
ear; but whose they were, he could not for the life of him call to mind.

A very brief conversation ensued. The door was unlocked. Mr. Pickwick
stepped out of the closet, and found himself in the presence of the
whole establishment of Westgate House, Mr Samuel Weller, and--old
Wardle, and his destined son-in-law, Mr. Trundle!

‘My dear friend,’ said Mr. Pickwick, running forward and grasping
Wardle’s hand, ‘my dear friend, pray, for Heaven’s sake, explain to this
lady the unfortunate and dreadful situation in which I am placed. You
must have heard it from my servant; say, at all events, my dear fellow,
that I am neither a robber nor a madman.’

‘I have said so, my dear friend. I have said so already,’ replied Mr.
Wardle, shaking the right hand of his friend, while Mr. Trundle shook
the left.

‘And whoever says, or has said, he is,’ interposed Mr. Weller, stepping
forward, ‘says that which is not the truth, but so far from it, on the
contrary, quite the rewerse. And if there’s any number o’ men on these
here premises as has said so, I shall be wery happy to give ‘em all a
wery convincing proof o’ their being mistaken, in this here wery room,
if these wery respectable ladies ‘ll have the goodness to retire, and
order ‘em up, one at a time.’ Having delivered this defiance with great
volubility, Mr. Weller struck his open palm emphatically with his
clenched fist, and winked pleasantly on Miss Tomkins, the intensity of
whose horror at his supposing it within the bounds of possibility that
there could be any men on the premises of Westgate House Establishment
for Young Ladies, it is impossible to describe.

Mr. Pickwick’s explanation having already been partially made, was soon
concluded. But neither in the course of his walk home with his friends,
nor afterwards when seated before a blazing fire at the supper he so
much needed, could a single observation be drawn from him. He seemed
bewildered and amazed. Once, and only once, he turned round to Mr.
Wardle, and said--

‘How did you come here?’

‘Trundle and I came down here, for some good shooting on the first,’
replied Wardle. ‘We arrived to-night, and were astonished to hear from
your servant that you were here too. But I am glad you are,’ said the
old fellow, slapping him on the back--‘I am glad you are. We shall have
a jovial party on the first, and we’ll give Winkle another chance--eh,
old boy?’

Mr. Pickwick made no reply, he did not even ask after his friends at
Dingley Dell, and shortly afterwards retired for the night, desiring Sam
to fetch his candle when he rung.

The bell did ring in due course, and Mr. Weller presented himself.

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking out from under the bed-clothes.

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Weller.

Mr. Pickwick paused, and Mr. Weller snuffed the candle.

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick again, as if with a desperate effort.

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Weller, once more.

‘Where is that Trotter?’

‘Job, sir?’

‘Yes.

‘Gone, sir.’

‘With his master, I suppose?’

‘Friend or master, or whatever he is, he’s gone with him,’ replied Mr.
Weller. ‘There’s a pair on ‘em, sir.’

‘Jingle suspected my design, and set that fellow on you, with this
story, I suppose?’ said Mr. Pickwick, half choking.

‘Just that, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘It was all false, of course?’

‘All, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘Reg’lar do, sir; artful dodge.’

‘I don’t think he’ll escape us quite so easily the next time, Sam!’ said
Mr. Pickwick.

‘I don’t think he will, Sir.’

‘Whenever I meet that Jingle again, wherever it is,’ said Mr. Pickwick,
raising himself in bed, and indenting his pillow with a tremendous blow,
‘I’ll inflict personal chastisement on him, in addition to the exposure
he so richly merits. I will, or my name is not Pickwick.’

‘And venever I catches hold o’ that there melan-cholly chap with the
black hair,’ said Sam, ‘if I don’t bring some real water into his eyes,
for once in a way, my name ain’t Weller. Good-night, Sir!’



CHAPTER XVII. SHOWING THAT AN ATTACK OF RHEUMATISM, IN SOME CASES, ACTS
AS A QUICKENER TO INVENTIVE GENIUS

The constitution of Mr. Pickwick, though able to sustain a very
considerable amount of exertion and fatigue, was not proof against such
a combination of attacks as he had undergone on the memorable night,
recorded in the last chapter. The process of being washed in the night
air, and rough-dried in a closet, is as dangerous as it is peculiar. Mr.
Pickwick was laid up with an attack of rheumatism.

But although the bodily powers of the great man were thus impaired, his
mental energies retained their pristine vigour. His spirits were
elastic; his good-humour was restored. Even the vexation consequent upon
his recent adventure had vanished from his mind; and he could join in
the hearty laughter, which any allusion to it excited in Mr. Wardle,
without anger and without embarrassment. Nay, more. During the two days
Mr. Pickwick was confined to bed, Sam was his constant attendant. On the
first, he endeavoured to amuse his master by anecdote and conversation;
on the second, Mr. Pickwick demanded his writing-desk, and pen and ink,
and was deeply engaged during the whole day. On the third, being able to
sit up in his bedchamber, he despatched his valet with a message to Mr.
Wardle and Mr. Trundle, intimating that if they would take their wine
there, that evening, they would greatly oblige him. The invitation was
most willingly accepted; and when they were seated over their wine, Mr.
Pickwick, with sundry blushes, produced the following little tale, as
having been ‘edited’ by himself, during his recent indisposition, from
his notes of Mr. Weller’s unsophisticated recital.


THE PARISH CLERK A TALE OF TRUE LOVE

‘Once upon a time, in a very small country town, at a considerable
distance from London, there lived a little man named Nathaniel Pipkin,
who was the parish clerk of the little town, and lived in a little house
in the little High Street, within ten minutes’ walk from the little
church; and who was to be found every day, from nine till four, teaching
a little learning to the little boys. Nathaniel Pipkin was a harmless,
inoffensive, good-natured being, with a turned-up nose, and rather
turned-in legs, a cast in his eye, and a halt in his gait; and he
divided his time between the church and his school, verily believing
that there existed not, on the face of the earth, so clever a man as the
curate, so imposing an apartment as the vestry-room, or so well-ordered
a seminary as his own. Once, and only once, in his life, Nathaniel
Pipkin had seen a bishop--a real bishop, with his arms in lawn sleeves,
and his head in a wig. He had seen him walk, and heard him talk, at a
confirmation, on which momentous occasion Nathaniel Pipkin was so
overcome with reverence and awe, when the aforesaid bishop laid his hand
on his head, that he fainted right clean away, and was borne out of
church in the arms of the beadle.

‘This was a great event, a tremendous era, in Nathaniel Pipkin’s life,
and it was the only one that had ever occurred to ruffle the smooth
current of his quiet existence, when happening one fine afternoon, in a
fit of mental abstraction, to raise his eyes from the slate on which he
was devising some tremendous problem in compound addition for an
offending urchin to solve, they suddenly rested on the blooming
countenance of Maria Lobbs, the only daughter of old Lobbs, the great
saddler over the way. Now, the eyes of Mr. Pipkin had rested on the
pretty face of Maria Lobbs many a time and oft before, at church and
elsewhere; but the eyes of Maria Lobbs had never looked so bright, the
cheeks of Maria Lobbs had never looked so ruddy, as upon this particular
occasion. No wonder then, that Nathaniel Pipkin was unable to take his
eyes from the countenance of Miss Lobbs; no wonder that Miss Lobbs,
finding herself stared at by a young man, withdrew her head from the
window out of which she had been peeping, and shut the casement and
pulled down the blind; no wonder that Nathaniel Pipkin, immediately
thereafter, fell upon the young urchin who had previously offended, and
cuffed and knocked him about to his heart’s content. All this was very
natural, and there’s nothing at all to wonder at about it.

‘It _is_ matter of wonder, though, that anyone of Mr. Nathaniel Pipkin’s
retiring disposition, nervous temperament, and most particularly
diminutive income, should from this day forth, have dared to aspire to
the hand and heart of the only daughter of the fiery old Lobbs--of old
Lobbs, the great saddler, who could have bought up the whole village at
one stroke of his pen, and never felt the outlay--old Lobbs, who was
well known to have heaps of money, invested in the bank at the nearest
market town--who was reported to have countless and inexhaustible
treasures hoarded up in the little iron safe with the big keyhole, over
the chimney-piece in the back parlour--and who, it was well known, on
festive occasions garnished his board with a real silver teapot, cream-
ewer, and sugar-basin, which he was wont, in the pride of his heart, to
boast should be his daughter’s property when she found a man to her
mind. I repeat it, to be matter of profound astonishment and intense
wonder, that Nathaniel Pipkin should have had the temerity to cast his
eyes in this direction. But love is blind; and Nathaniel had a cast in
his eye; and perhaps these two circumstances, taken together, prevented
his seeing the matter in its proper light.

‘Now, if old Lobbs had entertained the most remote or distant idea of
the state of the affections of Nathaniel Pipkin, he would just have
razed the school-room to the ground, or exterminated its master from the
surface of the earth, or committed some other outrage and atrocity of an
equally ferocious and violent description; for he was a terrible old
fellow, was Lobbs, when his pride was injured, or his blood was up.
Swear! Such trains of oaths would come rolling and pealing over the way,
sometimes, when he was denouncing the idleness of the bony apprentice
with the thin legs, that Nathaniel Pipkin would shake in his shoes with
horror, and the hair of the pupils’ heads would stand on end with
fright.

‘Well! Day after day, when school was over, and the pupils gone, did
Nathaniel Pipkin sit himself down at the front window, and, while he
feigned to be reading a book, throw sidelong glances over the way in
search of the bright eyes of Maria Lobbs; and he hadn’t sat there many
days, before the bright eyes appeared at an upper window, apparently
deeply engaged in reading too. This was delightful, and gladdening to
the heart of Nathaniel Pipkin. It was something to sit there for hours
together, and look upon that pretty face when the eyes were cast down;
but when Maria Lobbs began to raise her eyes from her book, and dart
their rays in the direction of Nathaniel Pipkin, his delight and
admiration were perfectly boundless. At last, one day when he knew old
Lobbs was out, Nathaniel Pipkin had the temerity to kiss his hand to
Maria Lobbs; and Maria Lobbs, instead of shutting the window, and
pulling down the blind, kissed _hers _to him, and smiled. Upon which
Nathaniel Pipkin determined, that, come what might, he would develop the
state of his feelings, without further delay.

‘A prettier foot, a gayer heart, a more dimpled face, or a smarter form,
never bounded so lightly over the earth they graced, as did those of
Maria Lobbs, the old saddler’s daughter. There was a roguish twinkle in
her sparkling eyes, that would have made its way to far less susceptible
bosoms than that of Nathaniel Pipkin; and there was such a joyous sound
in her merry laugh, that the sternest misanthrope must have smiled to
hear it. Even old Lobbs himself, in the very height of his ferocity,
couldn’t resist the coaxing of his pretty daughter; and when she, and
her cousin Kate--an arch, impudent-looking, bewitching little person--
made a dead set upon the old man together, as, to say the truth, they
very often did, he could have refused them nothing, even had they asked
for a portion of the countless and inexhaustible treasures, which were
hidden from the light, in the iron safe.

‘Nathaniel Pipkin’s heart beat high within him, when he saw this
enticing little couple some hundred yards before him one summer’s
evening, in the very field in which he had many a time strolled about
till night-time, and pondered on the beauty of Maria Lobbs. But though
he had often thought then, how briskly he would walk up to Maria Lobbs
and tell her of his passion if he could only meet her, he felt, now that
she was unexpectedly before him, all the blood in his body mounting to
his face, manifestly to the great detriment of his legs, which, deprived
of their usual portion, trembled beneath him. When they stopped to
gather a hedge flower, or listen to a bird, Nathaniel Pipkin stopped
too, and pretended to be absorbed in meditation, as indeed he really
was; for he was thinking what on earth he should ever do, when they
turned back, as they inevitably must in time, and meet him face to face.
But though he was afraid to make up to them, he couldn’t bear to lose
sight of them; so when they walked faster he walked faster, when they
lingered he lingered, and when they stopped he stopped; and so they
might have gone on, until the darkness prevented them, if Kate had not
looked slyly back, and encouragingly beckoned Nathaniel to advance.
There was something in Kate’s manner that was not to be resisted, and so
Nathaniel Pipkin complied with the invitation; and after a great deal of
blushing on his part, and immoderate laughter on that of the wicked
little cousin, Nathaniel Pipkin went down on his knees on the dewy
grass, and declared his resolution to remain there for ever, unless he
were permitted to rise the accepted lover of Maria Lobbs. Upon this, the
merry laughter of Miss Lobbs rang through the calm evening air--without
seeming to disturb it, though; it had such a pleasant sound--and the
wicked little cousin laughed more immoderately than before, and
Nathaniel Pipkin blushed deeper than ever. At length, Maria Lobbs being
more strenuously urged by the love-worn little man, turned away her
head, and whispered her cousin to say, or at all events Kate did say,
that she felt much honoured by Mr. Pipkin’s addresses; that her hand and
heart were at her father’s disposal; but that nobody could be insensible
to Mr. Pipkin’s merits. As all this was said with much gravity, and as
Nathaniel Pipkin walked home with Maria Lobbs, and struggled for a kiss
at parting, he went to bed a happy man, and dreamed all night long, of
softening old Lobbs, opening the strong box, and marrying Maria.

The next day, Nathaniel Pipkin saw old Lobbs go out upon his old gray
pony, and after a great many signs at the window from the wicked little
cousin, the object and meaning of which he could by no means understand,
the bony apprentice with the thin legs came over to say that his master
wasn’t coming home all night, and that the ladies expected Mr. Pipkin to
tea, at six o’clock precisely. How the lessons were got through that
day, neither Nathaniel Pipkin nor his pupils knew any more than you do;
but they were got through somehow, and, after the boys had gone,
Nathaniel Pipkin took till full six o’clock to dress himself to his
satisfaction. Not that it took long to select the garments he should
wear, inasmuch as he had no choice about the matter; but the putting of
them on to the best advantage, and the touching of them up previously,
was a task of no inconsiderable difficulty or importance.

‘There was a very snug little party, consisting of Maria Lobbs and her
cousin Kate, and three or four romping, good-humoured, rosy-cheeked
girls. Nathaniel Pipkin had ocular demonstration of the fact, that the
rumours of old Lobbs’s treasures were not exaggerated. There were the
real solid silver teapot, cream-ewer, and sugar-basin, on the table, and
real silver spoons to stir the tea with, and real china cups to drink it
out of, and plates of the same, to hold the cakes and toast in. The only
eye-sore in the whole place was another cousin of Maria Lobbs’s, and a
brother of Kate, whom Maria Lobbs called “Henry,” and who seemed to keep
Maria Lobbs all to himself, up in one corner of the table. It’s a
delightful thing to see affection in families, but it may be carried
rather too far, and Nathaniel Pipkin could not help thinking that Maria
Lobbs must be very particularly fond of her relations, if she paid as
much attention to all of them as to this individual cousin. After tea,
too, when the wicked little cousin proposed a game at blind man’s buff,
it somehow or other happened that Nathaniel Pipkin was nearly always
blind, and whenever he laid his hand upon the male cousin, he was sure
to find that Maria Lobbs was not far off. And though the wicked little
cousin and the other girls pinched him, and pulled his hair, and pushed
chairs in his way, and all sorts of things, Maria Lobbs never seemed to
come near him at all; and once--once--Nathaniel Pipkin could have sworn
he heard the sound of a kiss, followed by a faint remonstrance from
Maria Lobbs, and a half-suppressed laugh from her female friends. All
this was odd--very odd--and there is no saying what Nathaniel Pipkin
might or might not have done, in consequence, if his thoughts had not
been suddenly directed into a new channel.

‘The circumstance which directed his thoughts into a new channel was a
loud knocking at the street door, and the person who made this loud
knocking at the street door was no other than old Lobbs himself, who had
unexpectedly returned, and was hammering away, like a coffin-maker; for
he wanted his supper. The alarming intelligence was no sooner
communicated by the bony apprentice with the thin legs, than the girls
tripped upstairs to Maria Lobbs’s bedroom, and the male cousin and
Nathaniel Pipkin were thrust into a couple of closets in the sitting-
room, for want of any better places of concealment; and when Maria Lobbs
and the wicked little cousin had stowed them away, and put the room to
rights, they opened the street door to old Lobbs, who had never left off
knocking since he first began.

‘Now it did unfortunately happen that old Lobbs being very hungry was
monstrous cross. Nathaniel Pipkin could hear him growling away like an
old mastiff with a sore throat; and whenever the unfortunate apprentice
with the thin legs came into the room, so surely did old Lobbs commence
swearing at him in a most Saracenic and ferocious manner, though
apparently with no other end or object than that of easing his bosom by
the discharge of a few superfluous oaths. At length some supper, which
had been warming up, was placed on the table, and then old Lobbs fell
to, in regular style; and having made clear work of it in no time,
kissed his daughter, and demanded his pipe.

‘Nature had placed Nathaniel Pipkin’s knees in very close juxtaposition,
but when he heard old Lobbs demand his pipe, they knocked together, as
if they were going to reduce each other to powder; for, depending from a
couple of hooks, in the very closet in which he stood, was a large,
brown-stemmed, silver-bowled pipe, which pipe he himself had seen in the
mouth of old Lobbs, regularly every afternoon and evening, for the last
five years. The two girls went downstairs for the pipe, and upstairs for
the pipe, and everywhere but where they knew the pipe was, and old Lobbs
stormed away meanwhile, in the most wonderful manner. At last he thought
of the closet, and walked up to it. It was of no use a little man like
Nathaniel Pipkin pulling the door inwards, when a great strong fellow
like old Lobbs was pulling it outwards. Old Lobbs gave it one tug, and
open it flew, disclosing Nathaniel Pipkin standing bolt upright inside,
and shaking with apprehension from head to foot. Bless us! what an
appalling look old Lobbs gave him, as he dragged him out by the collar,
and held him at arm’s length.

‘“Why, what the devil do you want here?” said old Lobbs, in a fearful
voice.

‘Nathaniel Pipkin could make no reply, so old Lobbs shook him backwards
and forwards, for two or three minutes, by way of arranging his ideas
for him.

‘“What do you want here?” roared Lobbs; “I suppose you have come after
my daughter, now!”

‘Old Lobbs merely said this as a sneer: for he did not believe that
mortal presumption could have carried Nathaniel Pipkin so far. What was
his indignation, when that poor man replied--

‘“Yes, I did, Mr. Lobbs, I did come after your daughter. I love her, Mr.
Lobbs.”

‘“Why, you snivelling, wry-faced, puny villain,” gasped old Lobbs,
paralysed by the atrocious confession; “what do you mean by that? Say
this to my face! Damme, I’ll throttle you!”

‘It is by no means improbable that old Lobbs would have carried his
threat into execution, in the excess of his rage, if his arm had not
been stayed by a very unexpected apparition: to wit, the male cousin,
who, stepping out of his closet, and walking up to old Lobbs, said--

‘“I cannot allow this harmless person, Sir, who has been asked here, in
some girlish frolic, to take upon himself, in a very noble manner, the
fault (if fault it is) which I am guilty of, and am ready to avow. I
love your daughter, sir; and I came here for the purpose of meeting
her.”

‘Old Lobbs opened his eyes very wide at this, but not wider than
Nathaniel Pipkin.

‘“You did?” said Lobbs, at last finding breath to speak.

‘“I did.”

‘“And I forbade you this house, long ago.”

‘“You did, or I should not have been here, clandestinely, to-night.”

‘I am sorry to record it of old Lobbs, but I think he would have struck
the cousin, if his pretty daughter, with her bright eyes swimming in
tears, had not clung to his arm.

‘“Don’t stop him, Maria,” said the young man; “if he has the will to
strike me, let him. I would not hurt a hair of his gray head, for the
riches of the world.”

‘The old man cast down his eyes at this reproof, and they met those of
his daughter. I have hinted once or twice before, that they were very
bright eyes, and, though they were tearful now, their influence was by
no means lessened. Old Lobbs turned his head away, as if to avoid being
persuaded by them, when, as fortune would have it, he encountered the
face of the wicked little cousin, who, half afraid for her brother, and
half laughing at Nathaniel Pipkin, presented as bewitching an expression
of countenance, with a touch of slyness in it, too, as any man, old or
young, need look upon. She drew her arm coaxingly through the old man’s,
and whispered something in his ear; and do what he would, old Lobbs
couldn’t help breaking out into a smile, while a tear stole down his
cheek at the same time.

‘Five minutes after this, the girls were brought down from the bedroom
with a great deal of giggling and modesty; and while the young people
were making themselves perfectly happy, old Lobbs got down the pipe, and
smoked it; and it was a remarkable circumstance about that particular
pipe of tobacco, that it was the most soothing and delightful one he
ever smoked.

‘Nathaniel Pipkin thought it best to keep his own counsel, and by so
doing gradually rose into high favour with old Lobbs, who taught him to
smoke in time; and they used to sit out in the garden on the fine
evenings, for many years afterwards, smoking and drinking in great
state. He soon recovered the effects of his attachment, for we find his
name in the parish register, as a witness to the marriage of Maria Lobbs
to her cousin; and it also appears, by reference to other documents,
that on the night of the wedding he was incarcerated in the village
cage, for having, in a state of extreme intoxication, committed sundry
excesses in the streets, in all of which he was aided and abetted by the
bony apprentice with the thin legs.’



CHAPTER XVIII. BRIEFLY ILLUSTRATIVE OF TWO POINTS; FIRST, THE POWER OF
HYSTERICS, AND, SECONDLY, THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCES

For two days after the _dejeune _at Mrs. Hunter’s, the Pickwickians
remained at Eatanswill, anxiously awaiting the arrival of some
intelligence from their revered leader. Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass
were once again left to their own means of amusement; for Mr. Winkle, in
compliance with a most pressing invitation, continued to reside at Mr.
Pott’s house, and to devote his time to the companionship of his amiable
lady. Nor was the occasional society of Mr. Pott himself wanting to
complete their felicity. Deeply immersed in the intensity of his
speculations for the public weal and the destruction of the
_Independent_, it was not the habit of that great man to descend from
his mental pinnacle to the humble level of ordinary minds. On this
occasion, however, and as if expressly in compliment to any follower of
Mr. Pickwick’s, he unbent, relaxed, stepped down from his pedestal, and
walked upon the ground, benignly adapting his remarks to the
comprehension of the herd, and seeming in outward form, if not in
spirit, to be one of them.

Such having been the demeanour of this celebrated public character
towards Mr. Winkle, it will be readily imagined that considerable
surprise was depicted on the countenance of the latter gentleman, when,
as he was sitting alone in the breakfast-room, the door was hastily
thrown open, and as hastily closed, on the entrance of Mr. Pott, who,
stalking majestically towards him, and thrusting aside his proffered
hand, ground his teeth, as if to put a sharper edge on what he was about
to utter, and exclaimed, in a saw-like voice--

‘Serpent!’

‘Sir!’ exclaimed Mr. Winkle, starting from his chair.

‘Serpent, Sir,’ repeated Mr. Pott, raising his voice, and then suddenly
depressing it: ‘I said, serpent, sir--make the most of it.’

When you have parted with a man at two o’clock in the morning, on terms
of the utmost good-fellowship, and he meets you again, at half-past
nine, and greets you as a serpent, it is not unreasonable to conclude
that something of an unpleasant nature has occurred meanwhile. So Mr.
Winkle thought. He returned Mr. Pott’s gaze of stone, and in compliance
with that gentleman’s request, proceeded to make the most he could of
the ‘serpent.’ The most, however, was nothing at all; so, after a
profound silence of some minutes’ duration, he said,--

‘Serpent, Sir! Serpent, Mr. Pott! What can you mean, Sir?--this is
pleasantry.’

‘Pleasantry, sir!’ exclaimed Pott, with a motion of the hand, indicative
of a strong desire to hurl the Britannia metal teapot at the head of the
visitor. ‘Pleasantry, sir!--But--no, I will be calm; I will be calm,
Sir;’ in proof of his calmness, Mr. Pott flung himself into a chair, and
foamed at the mouth.

‘My dear sir,’ interposed Mr. Winkle.

‘_DEAR _Sir!’ replied Pott. ‘How dare you address me, as dear Sir, Sir?
How dare you look me in the face and do it, sir?’

‘Well, Sir, if you come to that,’ responded Mr. Winkle, ‘how dare you
look me in the face, and call me a serpent, sir?’

‘Because you are one,’ replied Mr. Pott.

‘Prove it, Sir,’ said Mr. Winkle warmly. ‘Prove it.’

A malignant scowl passed over the profound face of the editor, as he
drew from his pocket the _Independent_ of that morning; and laying his
finger on a particular paragraph, threw the journal across the table to
Mr. Winkle.

That gentleman took it up, and read as follows:--

‘Our obscure and filthy contemporary, in some disgusting observations on
the recent election for this borough, has presumed to violate the
hallowed sanctity of private life, and to refer in a manner not to be
misunderstood, to the personal affairs of our late candidate--aye, and
notwithstanding his base defeat, we will add, our future member, Mr.
Fizkin. What does our dastardly contemporary mean? What would the
ruffian say, if we, setting at naught, like him, the decencies of social
intercourse, were to raise the curtain which happily conceals _His_
private life from general ridicule, not to say from general execration?
What, if we were even to point out, and comment on, facts and
circumstances, which are publicly notorious, and beheld by every one but
our mole-eyed contemporary--what if we were to print the following
effusion, which we received while we were writing the commencement of
this article, from a talented fellow-townsman and correspondent?


‘“LINES TO A BRASS POT

‘“Oh Pott! if you’d known How false she’d have grown, When you heard the
marriage bells tinkle; You’d have done then, I vow, What you cannot help
now,


‘What,’ said Mr. Pott solemnly--‘what rhymes to “tinkle,” villain?’

‘What rhymes to tinkle?’ said Mrs. Pott, whose entrance at the moment
forestalled the reply. ‘What rhymes to tinkle? Why, Winkle, I should
conceive.’ Saying this, Mrs. Pott smiled sweetly on the disturbed
Pickwickian, and extended her hand towards him. The agitated young man
would have accepted it, in his confusion, had not Pott indignantly
interposed.

‘Back, ma’am--back!’ said the editor. ‘Take his hand before my very
face!’

‘Mr. P.!’ said his astonished lady.

‘Wretched woman, look here,’ exclaimed the husband. ‘Look here, ma’am--
“Lines to a Brass Pot.” “Brass Pot”; that’s me, ma’am. “False _she’d_
have grown”; that’s you, ma’am--you.’ With this ebullition of rage,
which was not unaccompanied with something like a tremble, at the
expression of his wife’s face, Mr. Pott dashed the current number of the
Eatanswill _Independent_ at her feet.

‘Upon my word, Sir,’ said the astonished Mrs. Pott, stooping to pick up
the paper. ‘Upon my word, Sir!’

Mr. Pott winced beneath the contemptuous gaze of his wife. He had made a
desperate struggle to screw up his courage, but it was fast coming
unscrewed again.

There appears nothing very tremendous in this little sentence, ‘Upon my
word, sir,’ when it comes to be read; but the tone of voice in which it
was delivered, and the look that accompanied it, both seeming to bear
reference to some revenge to be thereafter visited upon the head of
Pott, produced their effect upon him. The most unskilful observer could
have detected in his troubled countenance, a readiness to resign his
Wellington boots to any efficient substitute who would have consented to
stand in them at that moment.

Mrs. Pott read the paragraph, uttered a loud shriek, and threw herself
at full length on the hearth-rug, screaming, and tapping it with the
heels of her shoes, in a manner which could leave no doubt of the
propriety of her feelings on the occasion.

‘My dear,’ said the terrified Pott, ‘I didn’t say I believed it;--I--’
but the unfortunate man’s voice was drowned in the screaming of his
partner.

‘Mrs. Pott, let me entreat you, my dear ma’am, to compose yourself,’
said Mr. Winkle; but the shrieks and tappings were louder, and more
frequent than ever.

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Pott, ‘I’m very sorry. If you won’t consider your
own health, consider me, my dear. We shall have a crowd round the
house.’ But the more strenuously Mr. Pott entreated, the more vehemently
the screams poured forth.

Very fortunately, however, attached to Mrs. Pott’s person was a
bodyguard of one, a young lady whose ostensible employment was to
preside over her toilet, but who rendered herself useful in a variety of
ways, and in none more so than in the particular department of
constantly aiding and abetting her mistress in every wish and
inclination opposed to the desires of the unhappy Pott. The screams
reached this young lady’s ears in due course, and brought her into the
room with a speed which threatened to derange, materially, the very
exquisite arrangement of her cap and ringlets.

‘Oh, my dear, dear mistress!’ exclaimed the bodyguard, kneeling
frantically by the side of the prostrate Mrs. Pott. ‘Oh, my dear
mistress, what is the matter?’

‘Your master--your brutal master,’ murmured the patient.

Pott was evidently giving way.

‘It’s a shame,’ said the bodyguard reproachfully. ‘I know he’ll be the
death on you, ma’am. Poor dear thing!’

He gave way more. The opposite party followed up the attack.

‘Oh, don’t leave me--don’t leave me, Goodwin,’ murmured Mrs. Pott,
clutching at the wrist of the said Goodwin with an hysteric jerk.
‘You’re the only person that’s kind to me, Goodwin.’

At this affecting appeal, Goodwin got up a little domestic tragedy of
her own, and shed tears copiously.

‘Never, ma’am--never,’ said Goodwin. ‘Oh, sir, you should be careful--
you should indeed; you don’t know what harm you may do missis; you’ll be
sorry for it one day, I know--I’ve always said so.’

The unlucky Pott looked timidly on, but said nothing.

‘Goodwin,’ said Mrs. Pott, in a soft voice.

‘Ma’am,’ said Goodwin.

‘If you only knew how I have loved that man--’

Don’t distress yourself by recollecting it, ma’am,’ said the bodyguard.

Pott looked very frightened. It was time to finish him.

‘And now,’ sobbed Mrs. Pott, ‘now, after all, to be treated in this way;
to be reproached and insulted in the presence of a third party, and that
party almost a stranger. But I will not submit to it! Goodwin,’
continued Mrs. Pott, raising herself in the arms of her attendant, ‘my
brother, the lieutenant, shall interfere. I’ll be separated, Goodwin!’

‘It would certainly serve him right, ma’am,’ said Goodwin.

Whatever thoughts the threat of a separation might have awakened in Mr.
Pott’s mind, he forbore to give utterance to them, and contented himself
by saying, with great humility:--

‘My dear, will you hear me?’

A fresh train of sobs was the only reply, as Mrs. Pott grew more
hysterical, requested to be informed why she was ever born, and required
sundry other pieces of information of a similar description.

‘My dear,’ remonstrated Mr. Pott, ‘do not give way to these sensitive
feelings. I never believed that the paragraph had any foundation, my
dear--impossible. I was only angry, my dear--I may say outrageous--with
the _Independent_ people for daring to insert it; that’s all.’ Mr. Pott
cast an imploring look at the innocent cause of the mischief, as if to
entreat him to say nothing about the serpent.

‘And what steps, sir, do you mean to take to obtain redress?’ inquired
Mr. Winkle, gaining courage as he saw Pott losing it.

‘Oh, Goodwin,’ observed Mrs. Pott, ‘does he mean to horsewhip the editor
of the _Independent_--does he, Goodwin?’

‘Hush, hush, ma’am; pray keep yourself quiet,’ replied the bodyguard. ‘I
dare say he will, if you wish it, ma’am.’

‘Certainly,’ said Pott, as his wife evinced decided symptoms of going
off again. ‘Of course I shall.’

‘When, Goodwin--when?’ said Mrs. Pott, still undecided about the going
off.

‘Immediately, of course,’ said Mr. Pott; ‘before the day is out.’

‘Oh, Goodwin,’ resumed Mrs. Pott, ‘it’s the only way of meeting the
slander, and setting me right with the world.’

‘Certainly, ma’am,’ replied Goodwin. ‘No man as is a man, ma’am, could
refuse to do it.’

So, as the hysterics were still hovering about, Mr. Pott said once more
that he would do it; but Mrs. Pott was so overcome at the bare idea of
having ever been suspected, that she was half a dozen times on the very
verge of a relapse, and most unquestionably would have gone off, had it
not been for the indefatigable efforts of the assiduous Goodwin, and
repeated entreaties for pardon from the conquered Pott; and finally,
when that unhappy individual had been frightened and snubbed down to his
proper level, Mrs. Pott recovered, and they went to breakfast.

‘You will not allow this base newspaper slander to shorten your stay
here, Mr. Winkle?’ said Mrs. Pott, smiling through the traces of her
tears.

‘I hope not,’ said Mr. Pott, actuated, as he spoke, by a wish that his
visitor would choke himself with the morsel of dry toast which he was
raising to his lips at the moment, and so terminate his stay
effectually.

‘I hope not.’

‘You are very good,’ said Mr. Winkle; ‘but a letter has been received
from Mr. Pickwick--so I learn by a note from Mr. Tupman, which was
brought up to my bedroom door, this morning--in which he requests us to
join him at Bury to-day; and we are to leave by the coach at noon.’

‘But you will come back?’ said Mrs. Pott.

‘Oh, certainly,’ replied Mr. Winkle.

‘You are quite sure?’ said Mrs. Pott, stealing a tender look at her
visitor.

‘Quite,’ responded Mr. Winkle.

The breakfast passed off in silence, for each of the party was brooding
over his, or her, own personal grievances. Mrs. Pott was regretting the
loss of a beau; Mr. Pott his rash pledge to horsewhip the _Independent_;
Mr. Winkle his having innocently placed himself in so awkward a
situation. Noon approached, and after many adieux and promises to
return, he tore himself away.

‘If he ever comes back, I’ll poison him,’ thought Mr. Pott, as he turned
into the little back office where he prepared his thunderbolts.

‘If I ever do come back, and mix myself up with these people again,’
thought Mr. Winkle, as he wended his way to the Peacock, ‘I shall
deserve to be horsewhipped myself--that’s all.’

His friends were ready, the coach was nearly so, and in half an hour
they were proceeding on their journey, along the road over which Mr.
Pickwick and Sam had so recently travelled, and of which, as we have
already said something, we do not feel called upon to extract Mr.
Snodgrass’s poetical and beautiful description.

Mr. Weller was standing at the door of the Angel, ready to receive them,
and by that gentleman they were ushered to the apartment of Mr.
Pickwick, where, to the no small surprise of Mr. Winkle and Mr.
Snodgrass, and the no small embarrassment of Mr. Tupman, they found old
Wardle and Trundle.

‘How are you?’ said the old man, grasping Mr. Tupman’s hand. ‘Don’t hang
back, or look sentimental about it; it can’t be helped, old fellow. For
her sake, I wish you’d had her; for your own, I’m very glad you have
not. A young fellow like you will do better one of these days, eh?’ With
this conclusion, Wardle slapped Mr. Tupman on the back, and laughed
heartily.

‘Well, and how are you, my fine fellows?’ said the old gentleman,
shaking hands with Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass at the same time. ‘I
have just been telling Pickwick that we must have you all down at
Christmas. We’re going to have a wedding--a real wedding this time.’

‘A wedding!’ exclaimed Mr. Snodgrass, turning very pale.

‘Yes, a wedding. But don’t be frightened,’ said the good-humoured old
man; ‘it’s only Trundle there, and Bella.’

‘Oh, is that all?’ said Mr. Snodgrass, relieved from a painful doubt
which had fallen heavily on his breast. ‘Give you joy, Sir. How is Joe?’

‘Very well,’ replied the old gentleman. ‘Sleepy as ever.’

‘And your mother, and the clergyman, and all of ‘em?’

‘Quite well.’

‘Where,’ said Mr. Tupman, with an effort--‘where is--_she_, Sir?’ and he
turned away his head, and covered his eyes with his hand.

‘_She_!’ said the old gentleman, with a knowing shake of the head. ‘Do
you mean my single relative--eh?’

Mr. Tupman, by a nod, intimated that his question applied to the
disappointed Rachael.

‘Oh, she’s gone away,’ said the old gentleman. ‘She’s living at a
relation’s, far enough off. She couldn’t bear to see the girls, so I let
her go. But come! Here’s the dinner. You must be hungry after your ride.
I am, without any ride at all; so let us fall to.’

Ample justice was done to the meal; and when they were seated round the
table, after it had been disposed of, Mr. Pickwick, to the intense
horror and indignation of his followers, related the adventure he had
undergone, and the success which had attended the base artifices of the
diabolical Jingle.

‘And the attack of rheumatism which I caught in that garden,’ said Mr.
Pickwick, in conclusion, ‘renders me lame at this moment.’

‘I, too, have had something of an adventure,’ said Mr. Winkle, with a
smile; and, at the request of Mr. Pickwick, he detailed the malicious
libel of the Eatanswill _Independent_, and the consequent excitement of
their friend, the editor.

Mr. Pickwick’s brow darkened during the recital. His friends observed
it, and, when Mr. Winkle had concluded, maintained a profound silence.
Mr. Pickwick struck the table emphatically with his clenched fist, and
spoke as follows:--

‘Is it not a wonderful circumstance,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘that we seem
destined to enter no man’s house without involving him in some degree of
trouble? Does it not, I ask, bespeak the indiscretion, or, worse than
that, the blackness of heart--that I should say so!--of my followers,
that, beneath whatever roof they locate, they disturb the peace of mind
and happiness of some confiding female? Is it not, I say--’

Mr. Pickwick would in all probability have gone on for some time, had
not the entrance of Sam, with a letter, caused him to break off in his
eloquent discourse. He passed his handkerchief across his forehead, took
off his spectacles, wiped them, and put them on again; and his voice had
recovered its wonted softness of tone when he said--

‘What have you there, Sam?’

‘Called at the post-office just now, and found this here letter, as has
laid there for two days,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘It’s sealed vith a vafer,
and directed in round hand.’

‘I don’t know this hand,’ said Mr. Pickwick, opening the letter. ‘Mercy
on us! what’s this? It must be a jest; it--it--can’t be true.’

‘What’s the matter?’ was the general inquiry.

‘Nobody dead, is there?’ said Wardle, alarmed at the horror in Mr.
Pickwick’s countenance.

Mr. Pickwick made no reply, but, pushing the letter across the table,
and desiring Mr. Tupman to read it aloud, fell back in his chair with a
look of vacant astonishment quite alarming to behold.

Mr. Tupman, with a trembling voice, read the letter, of which the
following is a copy:--

Freeman’s Court, Cornhill, August 28th, 1827.

Bardell against Pickwick.

Sir,

Having been instructed by Mrs. Martha Bardell to commence an action
against you for a breach of promise of marriage, for which the plaintiff
lays her damages at fifteen hundred pounds, we beg to inform you that a
writ has been issued against you in this suit in the Court of Common
Pleas; and request to know, by return of post, the name of your attorney
in London, who will accept service thereof.

We are, Sir, Your obedient servants, Dodson & Fogg.

Mr. Samuel Pickwick.

There was something so impressive in the mute astonishment with which
each man regarded his neighbour, and every man regarded Mr. Pickwick,
that all seemed afraid to speak. The silence was at length broken by Mr.
Tupman.

‘Dodson and Fogg,’ he repeated mechanically.

‘Bardell and Pickwick,’ said Mr. Snodgrass, musing.

‘Peace of mind and happiness of confiding females,’ murmured Mr. Winkle,
with an air of abstraction.

‘It’s a conspiracy,’ said Mr. Pickwick, at length recovering the power
of speech; ‘a base conspiracy between these two grasping attorneys,
Dodson and Fogg. Mrs. Bardell would never do it;--she hasn’t the heart
to do it;--she hasn’t the case to do it. Ridiculous--ridiculous.’

Of her heart,’ said Wardle, with a smile, ‘you should certainly be the
best judge. I don’t wish to discourage you, but I should certainly say
that, of her case, Dodson and Fogg are far better judges than any of us
can be.’

‘It’s a vile attempt to extort money,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘I hope it is,’ said Wardle, with a short, dry cough.

‘Who ever heard me address her in any way but that in which a lodger
would address his landlady?’ continued Mr. Pickwick, with great
vehemence. ‘Who ever saw me with her? Not even my friends here--’

‘Except on one occasion,’ said Mr. Tupman.

Mr. Pickwick changed colour.

‘Ah,’ said Mr. Wardle. ‘Well, that’s important. There was nothing
suspicious then, I suppose?’

Mr. Tupman glanced timidly at his leader. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘there was
nothing suspicious; but--I don’t know how it happened, mind--she
certainly was reclining in his arms.’

‘Gracious powers!’ ejaculated Mr. Pickwick, as the recollection of the
scene in question struck forcibly upon him; ‘what a dreadful instance of
the force of circumstances! So she was--so she was.’

‘And our friend was soothing her anguish,’ said Mr. Winkle, rather
maliciously.

‘So I was,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘I don’t deny it. So I was.’

‘Hollo!’ said Wardle; ‘for a case in which there’s nothing suspicious,
this looks rather queer--eh, Pickwick? Ah, sly dog--sly dog!’ and he
laughed till the glasses on the sideboard rang again.

‘What a dreadful conjunction of appearances!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick,
resting his chin upon his hands. ‘Winkle--Tupman--I beg your pardon for
the observations I made just now. We are all the victims of
circumstances, and I the greatest.’ With this apology Mr. Pickwick
buried his head in his hands, and ruminated; while Wardle measured out a
regular circle of nods and winks, addressed to the other members of the
company.

‘I’ll have it explained, though,’ said Mr. Pickwick, raising his head
and hammering the table. ‘I’ll see this Dodson and Fogg! I’ll go to
London to-morrow.’

‘Not to-morrow,’ said Wardle; ‘you’re too lame.’

‘Well, then, next day.’

‘Next day is the first of September, and you’re pledged to ride out with
us, as far as Sir Geoffrey Manning’s grounds at all events, and to meet
us at lunch, if you don’t take the field.’

‘Well, then, the day after,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘Thursday.--Sam!’

‘Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘Take two places outside to London, on Thursday morning, for yourself
and me.’

‘Wery well, Sir.’

Mr. Weller left the room, and departed slowly on his errand, with his
hands in his pocket and his eyes fixed on the ground.

‘Rum feller, the hemperor,’ said Mr. Weller, as he walked slowly up the
street. ‘Think o’ his makin’ up to that ‘ere Mrs. Bardell--vith a little
boy, too! Always the vay vith these here old ‘uns howsoever, as is such
steady goers to look at. I didn’t think he’d ha’ done it, though--I
didn’t think he’d ha’ done it!’ Moralising in this strain, Mr. Samuel
Weller bent his steps towards the booking-office.



CHAPTER XIX. A PLEASANT DAY WITH AN UNPLEASANT TERMINATION

The birds, who, happily for their own peace of mind and personal
comfort, were in blissful ignorance of the preparations which had been
making to astonish them, on the first of September, hailed it, no doubt,
as one of the pleasantest mornings they had seen that season. Many a
young partridge who strutted complacently among the stubble, with all
the finicking coxcombry of youth, and many an older one who watched his
levity out of his little round eye, with the contemptuous air of a bird
of wisdom and experience, alike unconscious of their approaching doom,
basked in the fresh morning air with lively and blithesome feelings, and
a few hours afterwards were laid low upon the earth. But we grow
affecting: let us proceed.

In plain commonplace matter-of-fact, then, it was a fine morning--so
fine that you would scarcely have believed that the few months of an
English summer had yet flown by. Hedges, fields, and trees, hill and
moorland, presented to the eye their ever-varying shades of deep rich
green; scarce a leaf had fallen, scarce a sprinkle of yellow mingled
with the hues of summer, warned you that autumn had begun. The sky was
cloudless; the sun shone out bright and warm; the songs of birds, the
hum of myriads of summer insects, filled the air; and the cottage
gardens, crowded with flowers of every rich and beautiful tint,
sparkled, in the heavy dew, like beds of glittering jewels. Everything
bore the stamp of summer, and none of its beautiful colour had yet faded
from the die.

Such was the morning, when an open carriage, in which were three
Pickwickians (Mr. Snodgrass having preferred to remain at home), Mr.
Wardle, and Mr. Trundle, with Sam Weller on the box beside the driver,
pulled up by a gate at the roadside, before which stood a tall, raw-
boned gamekeeper, and a half-booted, leather-legginged boy, each bearing
a bag of capacious dimensions, and accompanied by a brace of pointers.

‘I say,’ whispered Mr. Winkle to Wardle, as the man let down the steps,
‘they don’t suppose we’re going to kill game enough to fill those bags,
do they?’

‘Fill them!’ exclaimed old Wardle. ‘Bless you, yes! You shall fill one,
and I the other; and when we’ve done with them, the pockets of our
shooting-jackets will hold as much more.’

Mr. Winkle dismounted without saying anything in reply to this
observation; but he thought within himself, that if the party remained
in the open air, till he had filled one of the bags, they stood a
considerable chance of catching colds in their heads.

‘Hi, Juno, lass-hi, old girl; down, Daph, down,’ said Wardle, caressing
the dogs. ‘Sir Geoffrey still in Scotland, of course, Martin?’

The tall gamekeeper replied in the affirmative, and looked with some
surprise from Mr. Winkle, who was holding his gun as if he wished his
coat pocket to save him the trouble of pulling the trigger, to Mr.
Tupman, who was holding his as if he was afraid of it--as there is no
earthly reason to doubt he really was.

‘My friends are not much in the way of this sort of thing yet, Martin,’
said Wardle, noticing the look. ‘Live and learn, you know. They’ll be
good shots one of these days. I beg my friend Winkle’s pardon, though;
he has had some practice.’

Mr. Winkle smiled feebly over his blue neckerchief in acknowledgment of
the compliment, and got himself so mysteriously entangled with his gun,
in his modest confusion, that if the piece had been loaded, he must
inevitably have shot himself dead upon the spot.

‘You mustn’t handle your piece in that ‘ere way, when you come to have
the charge in it, Sir,’ said the tall gamekeeper gruffly; ‘or I’m damned
if you won’t make cold meat of some on us.’

Mr. Winkle, thus admonished, abruptly altered his position, and in so
doing, contrived to bring the barrel into pretty smart contact with Mr.
Weller’s head.

‘Hollo!’ said Sam, picking up his hat, which had been knocked off, and
rubbing his temple. ‘Hollo, sir! if you comes it this vay, you’ll fill
one o’ them bags, and something to spare, at one fire.’

Here the leather-legginged boy laughed very heartily, and then tried to
look as if it was somebody else, whereat Mr. Winkle frowned
majestically.

‘Where did you tell the boy to meet us with the snack, Martin?’ inquired
Wardle.

‘Side of One-tree Hill, at twelve o’clock, Sir.’

‘That’s not Sir Geoffrey’s land, is it?’

‘No, Sir; but it’s close by it. It’s Captain Boldwig’s land; but
there’ll be nobody to interrupt us, and there’s a fine bit of turf
there.’

‘Very well,’ said old Wardle. ‘Now the sooner we’re off the better. Will
you join us at twelve, then, Pickwick?’

Mr. Pickwick was particularly desirous to view the sport, the more
especially as he was rather anxious in respect of Mr. Winkle’s life and
limbs. On so inviting a morning, too, it was very tantalising to turn
back, and leave his friends to enjoy themselves. It was, therefore, with
a very rueful air that he replied--

‘Why, I suppose I must.’

‘Ain’t the gentleman a shot, Sir?’ inquired the long gamekeeper.

‘No,’ replied Wardle; ‘and he’s lame besides.’

‘I should very much like to go,’ said Mr. Pickwick--‘very much.’

There was a short pause of commiseration.

‘There’s a barrow t’other side the hedge,’ said the boy. ‘If the
gentleman’s servant would wheel along the paths, he could keep nigh us,
and we could lift it over the stiles, and that.’

‘The wery thing,’ said Mr. Weller, who was a party interested, inasmuch
as he ardently longed to see the sport. ‘The wery thing. Well said,
Smallcheek; I’ll have it out in a minute.’

But here a difficulty arose. The long gamekeeper resolutely protested
against the introduction into a shooting party, of a gentleman in a
barrow, as a gross violation of all established rules and precedents.

It was a great objection, but not an insurmountable one. The gamekeeper
having been coaxed and feed, and having, moreover, eased his mind by
‘punching’ the head of the inventive youth who had first suggested the
use of the machine, Mr. Pickwick was placed in it, and off the party
set; Wardle and the long gamekeeper leading the way, and Mr. Pickwick in
the barrow, propelled by Sam, bringing up the rear.

‘Stop, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, when they had got half across the first
field.

‘What’s the matter now?’ said Wardle.

‘I won’t suffer this barrow to be moved another step,’ said Mr.
Pickwick, resolutely, ‘unless Winkle carries that gun of his in a
different manner.’

‘How _am_ I to carry it?’ said the wretched Winkle.

‘Carry it with the muzzle to the ground,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘It’s so unsportsmanlike,’ reasoned Winkle.

‘I don’t care whether it’s unsportsmanlike or not,’ replied Mr.
Pickwick; ‘I am not going to be shot in a wheel-barrow, for the sake of
appearances, to please anybody.’

‘I know the gentleman’ll put that ‘ere charge into somebody afore he’s
done,’ growled the long man.

‘Well, well--I don’t mind,’ said poor Winkle, turning his gun-stock
uppermost--‘there.’

‘Anythin’ for a quiet life,’ said Mr. Weller; and on they went again.

‘Stop!’ said Mr. Pickwick, after they had gone a few yards farther.

‘What now?’ said Wardle.

‘That gun of Tupman’s is not safe: I know it isn’t,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Eh? What! not safe?’ said Mr. Tupman, in a tone of great alarm.

‘Not as you are carrying it,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘I am very sorry to
make any further objection, but I cannot consent to go on, unless you
carry it as Winkle does his.’

‘I think you had better, sir,’ said the long gamekeeper, ‘or you’re
quite as likely to lodge the charge in yourself as in anything else.’

Mr. Tupman, with the most obliging haste, placed his piece in the
position required, and the party moved on again; the two amateurs
marching with reversed arms, like a couple of privates at a royal
funeral.

The dogs suddenly came to a dead stop, and the party advancing
stealthily a single pace, stopped too.

‘What’s the matter with the dogs’ legs?’ whispered Mr. Winkle. ‘How
queer they’re standing.’

‘Hush, can’t you?’ replied Wardle softly. ‘Don’t you see, they’re making
a point?’

‘Making a point!’ said Mr. Winkle, staring about him, as if he expected
to discover some particular beauty in the landscape, which the sagacious
animals were calling special attention to. ‘Making a point! What are
they pointing at?’

‘Keep your eyes open,’ said Wardle, not heeding the question in the
excitement of the moment. ‘Now then.’

There was a sharp whirring noise, that made Mr. Winkle start back as if
he had been shot himself. Bang, bang, went a couple of guns--the smoke
swept quickly away over the field, and curled into the air.

‘Where are they!’ said Mr. Winkle, in a state of the highest excitement,
turning round and round in all directions. ‘Where are they? Tell me when
to fire. Where are they--where are they?’

‘Where are they!’ said Wardle, taking up a brace of birds which the dogs
had deposited at his feet. ‘Why, here they are.’

‘No, no; I mean the others,’ said the bewildered Winkle.

‘Far enough off, by this time,’ replied Wardle, coolly reloading his
gun.

‘We shall very likely be up with another covey in five minutes,’ said
the long gamekeeper. ‘If the gentleman begins to fire now, perhaps he’ll
just get the shot out of the barrel by the time they rise.’

‘Ha! ha! ha!’ roared Mr. Weller.

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, compassionating his follower’s confusion and
embarrassment.

‘Sir.’

‘Don’t laugh.’

‘Certainly not, Sir.’ So, by way of indemnification, Mr. Weller
contorted his features from behind the wheel-barrow, for the exclusive
amusement of the boy with the leggings, who thereupon burst into a
boisterous laugh, and was summarily cuffed by the long gamekeeper, who
wanted a pretext for turning round, to hide his own merriment.

‘Bravo, old fellow!’ said Wardle to Mr. Tupman; ‘you fired that time, at
all events.’

‘Oh, yes,’ replied Mr. Tupman, with conscious pride. ‘I let it off.’

‘Well done. You’ll hit something next time, if you look sharp. Very
easy, ain’t it?’

‘Yes, it’s very easy,’ said Mr. Tupman. ‘How it hurts one’s shoulder,
though. It nearly knocked me backwards. I had no idea these small
firearms kicked so.’

‘Ah,’ said the old gentleman, smiling, ‘you’ll get used to it in time.
Now then--all ready--all right with the barrow there?’

‘All right, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘Come along, then.’

‘Hold hard, Sir,’ said Sam, raising the barrow.

‘Aye, aye,’ replied Mr. Pickwick; and on they went, as briskly as need
be.

‘Keep that barrow back now,’ cried Wardle, when it had been hoisted over
a stile into another field, and Mr. Pickwick had been deposited in it
once more.

‘All right, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, pausing.

‘Now, Winkle,’ said the old gentleman, ‘follow me softly, and don’t be
too late this time.’

‘Never fear,’ said Mr. Winkle. ‘Are they pointing?’

‘No, no; not now. Quietly now, quietly.’ On they crept, and very quietly
they would have advanced, if Mr. Winkle, in the performance of some very
intricate evolutions with his gun, had not accidentally fired, at the
most critical moment, over the boy’s head, exactly in the very spot
where the tall man’s brain would have been, had he been there instead.

‘Why, what on earth did you do that for?’ said old Wardle, as the birds
flew unharmed away.

‘I never saw such a gun in my life,’ replied poor Mr. Winkle, looking at
the lock, as if that would do any good. ‘It goes off of its own accord.
It _will _do it.’

‘Will do it!’ echoed Wardle, with something of irritation in his manner.
‘I wish it would kill something of its own accord.’

‘It’ll do that afore long, Sir,’ observed the tall man, in a low,
prophetic voice.

‘What do you mean by that observation, Sir?’ inquired Mr. Winkle,
angrily.

‘Never mind, Sir, never mind,’ replied the long gamekeeper; ‘I’ve no
family myself, sir; and this here boy’s mother will get something
handsome from Sir Geoffrey, if he’s killed on his land. Load again, Sir,
load again.’

‘Take away his gun,’ cried Mr. Pickwick from the barrow, horror-stricken
at the long man’s dark insinuations. ‘Take away his gun, do you hear,
somebody?’

Nobody, however, volunteered to obey the command; and Mr. Winkle, after
darting a rebellious glance at Mr. Pickwick, reloaded his gun, and
proceeded onwards with the rest.

We are bound, on the authority of Mr. Pickwick, to state, that Mr.
Tupman’s mode of proceeding evinced far more of prudence and
deliberation, than that adopted by Mr. Winkle. Still, this by no means
detracts from the great authority of the latter gentleman, on all
matters connected with the field; because, as Mr. Pickwick beautifully
observes, it has somehow or other happened, from time immemorial, that
many of the best and ablest philosophers, who have been perfect lights
of science in matters of theory, have been wholly unable to reduce them
to practice.

Mr. Tupman’s process, like many of our most sublime discoveries, was
extremely simple. With the quickness and penetration of a man of genius,
he had at once observed that the two great points to be attained were--
first, to discharge his piece without injury to himself, and, secondly,
to do so, without danger to the bystanders--obviously, the best thing to
do, after surmounting the difficulty of firing at all, was to shut his
eyes firmly, and fire into the air.

On one occasion, after performing this feat, Mr. Tupman, on opening his
eyes, beheld a plump partridge in the act of falling, wounded, to the
ground. He was on the point of congratulating Mr. Wardle on his
invariable success, when that gentleman advanced towards him, and
grasped him warmly by the hand.

‘Tupman,’ said the old gentleman, ‘you singled out that particular
bird?’

‘No,’ said Mr. Tupman--‘no.’

‘You did,’ said Wardle. ‘I saw you do it--I observed you pick him out--I
noticed you, as you raised your piece to take aim; and I will say this,
that the best shot in existence could not have done it more beautifully.
You are an older hand at this than I thought you, Tupman; you have been
out before.’

It was in vain for Mr. Tupman to protest, with a smile of self-denial,
that he never had. The very smile was taken as evidence to the contrary;
and from that time forth his reputation was established. It is not the
only reputation that has been acquired as easily, nor are such fortunate
circumstances confined to partridge-shooting.

Meanwhile, Mr. Winkle flashed, and blazed, and smoked away, without
producing any material results worthy of being noted down; sometimes
expending his charge in mid-air, and at others sending it skimming along
so near the surface of the ground as to place the lives of the two dogs
on a rather uncertain and precarious tenure. As a display of fancy-
shooting, it was extremely varied and curious; as an exhibition of
firing with any precise object, it was, upon the whole, perhaps a
failure. It is an established axiom, that ‘every bullet has its billet.’
If it apply in an equal degree to shot, those of Mr. Winkle were
unfortunate foundlings, deprived of their natural rights, cast loose
upon the world, and billeted nowhere.

‘Well,’ said Wardle, walking up to the side of the barrow, and wiping
the streams of perspiration from his jolly red face; ‘smoking day, isn’t
it?’

‘It is, indeed,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. The sun is tremendously hot, even
to me. I don’t know how you must feel it.’

‘Why,’ said the old gentleman, ‘pretty hot. It’s past twelve, though.
You see that green hill there?’

‘Certainly.’

‘That’s the place where we are to lunch; and, by Jove, there’s the boy
with the basket, punctual as clockwork!’

‘So he is,’ said Mr. Pickwick, brightening up. ‘Good boy, that. I’ll
give him a shilling, presently. Now, then, Sam, wheel away.’

‘Hold on, sir,’ said Mr. Weller, invigorated with the prospect of
refreshments. ‘Out of the vay, young leathers. If you walley my precious
life don’t upset me, as the gen’l’m’n said to the driver when they was
a-carryin’ him to Tyburn.’ And quickening his pace to a sharp run, Mr.
Weller wheeled his master nimbly to the green hill, shot him dexterously
out by the very side of the basket, and proceeded to unpack it with the
utmost despatch.

‘Weal pie,’ said Mr. Weller, soliloquising, as he arranged the eatables
on the grass. ‘Wery good thing is weal pie, when you know the lady as
made it, and is quite sure it ain’t kittens; and arter all though,
where’s the odds, when they’re so like weal that the wery piemen
themselves don’t know the difference?’

‘Don’t they, Sam?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Not they, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, touching his hat. ‘I lodged in the
same house vith a pieman once, sir, and a wery nice man he was--reg’lar
clever chap, too--make pies out o’ anything, he could. “What a number o’
cats you keep, Mr. Brooks,” says I, when I’d got intimate with him.
“Ah,” says he, “I do--a good many,” says he, “You must be wery fond o’
cats,” says I. “Other people is,” says he, a-winkin’ at me; “they ain’t
in season till the winter though,” says he. “Not in season!” says I.
“No,” says he, “fruits is in, cats is out.” “Why, what do you mean?”
 says I. “Mean!” says he. “That I’ll never be a party to the combination
o’ the butchers, to keep up the price o’ meat,” says he. “Mr. Weller,”
 says he, a-squeezing my hand wery hard, and vispering in my ear--“don’t
mention this here agin--but it’s the seasonin’ as does it. They’re all
made o’ them noble animals,” says he, a-pointin’ to a wery nice little
tabby kitten, “and I seasons ‘em for beefsteak, weal or kidney, ‘cording
to the demand. And more than that,” says he, “I can make a weal a beef-
steak, or a beef-steak a kidney, or any one on ‘em a mutton, at a
minute’s notice, just as the market changes, and appetites wary!”’

‘He must have been a very ingenious young man, that, Sam,’ said Mr.
Pickwick, with a slight shudder.

‘Just was, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, continuing his occupation of
emptying the basket, ‘and the pies was beautiful. Tongue--, well that’s
a wery good thing when it ain’t a woman’s. Bread--knuckle o’ ham,
reg’lar picter--cold beef in slices, wery good. What’s in them stone
jars, young touch-and-go?’

‘Beer in this one,’ replied the boy, taking from his shoulder a couple
of large stone bottles, fastened together by a leathern strap--‘cold
punch in t’other.’

‘And a wery good notion of a lunch it is, take it altogether,’ said Mr.
Weller, surveying his arrangement of the repast with great satisfaction.
‘Now, gen’l’m’n, “fall on,” as the English said to the French when they
fixed bagginets.’

It needed no second invitation to induce the party to yield full justice
to the meal; and as little pressing did it require to induce Mr. Weller,
the long gamekeeper, and the two boys, to station themselves on the
grass, at a little distance, and do good execution upon a decent
proportion of the viands. An old oak afforded a pleasant shelter to the
group, and a rich prospect of arable and meadow land, intersected with
luxuriant hedges, and richly ornamented with wood, lay spread out before
them.

‘This is delightful--thoroughly delightful!’ said Mr. Pickwick; the skin
of whose expressive countenance was rapidly peeling off, with exposure
to the sun.

‘So it is--so it is, old fellow,’ replied Wardle. ‘Come; a glass of
punch!’

‘With great pleasure,’ said Mr. Pickwick; the satisfaction of whose
countenance, after drinking it, bore testimony to the sincerity of the
reply.

‘Good,’ said Mr. Pickwick, smacking his lips. ‘Very good. I’ll take
another. Cool; very cool. Come, gentlemen,’ continued Mr. Pickwick,
still retaining his hold upon the jar, ‘a toast. Our friends at Dingley
Dell.’

The toast was drunk with loud acclamations.

‘I’ll tell you what I shall do, to get up my shooting again,’ said Mr.
Winkle, who was eating bread and ham with a pocket-knife. ‘I’ll put a
stuffed partridge on the top of a post, and practise at it, beginning at
a short distance, and lengthening it by degrees. I understand it’s
capital practice.’

‘I know a gen’l’man, Sir,’ said Mr. Weller, ‘as did that, and begun at
two yards; but he never tried it on agin; for he blowed the bird right
clean away at the first fire, and nobody ever seed a feather on him
arterwards.’

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘Have the goodness to reserve your anecdotes till they are called for.’

‘Cert’nly, sir.’

Here Mr. Weller winked the eye which was not concealed by the beer-can
he was raising to his lips, with such exquisite facetiousness, that the
two boys went into spontaneous convulsions, and even the long man
condescended to smile.

‘Well, that certainly is most capital cold punch,’ said Mr. Pickwick,
looking earnestly at the stone bottle; ‘and the day is extremely warm,
and--Tupman, my dear friend, a glass of punch?’

‘With the greatest delight,’ replied Mr. Tupman; and having drank that
glass, Mr. Pickwick took another, just to see whether there was any
orange peel in the punch, because orange peel always disagreed with him;
and finding that there was not, Mr. Pickwick took another glass to the
health of their absent friend, and then felt himself imperatively called
upon to propose another in honour of the punch-compounder, unknown.

This constant succession of glasses produced considerable effect upon
Mr. Pickwick; his countenance beamed with the most sunny smiles,
laughter played around his lips, and good-humoured merriment twinkled in
his eye. Yielding by degrees to the influence of the exciting liquid,
rendered more so by the heat, Mr. Pickwick expressed a strong desire to
recollect a song which he had heard in his infancy, and the attempt
proving abortive, sought to stimulate his memory with more glasses of
punch, which appeared to have quite a contrary effect; for, from
forgetting the words of the song, he began to forget how to articulate
any words at all; and finally, after rising to his legs to address the
company in an eloquent speech, he fell into the barrow, and fast asleep,
simultaneously.

The basket having been repacked, and it being found perfectly impossible
to awaken Mr. Pickwick from his torpor, some discussion took place
whether it would be better for Mr. Weller to wheel his master back
again, or to leave him where he was, until they should all be ready to
return. The latter course was at length decided on; and as the further
expedition was not to exceed an hour’s duration, and as Mr. Weller
begged very hard to be one of the party, it was determined to leave Mr.
Pickwick asleep in the barrow, and to call for him on their return. So
away they went, leaving Mr. Pickwick snoring most comfortably in the
shade.

That Mr. Pickwick would have continued to snore in the shade until his
friends came back, or, in default thereof, until the shades of evening
had fallen on the landscape, there appears no reasonable cause to doubt;
always supposing that he had been suffered to remain there in peace. But
he was _not _suffered to remain there in peace. And this was what
prevented him.

Captain Boldwig was a little fierce man in a stiff black neckerchief and
blue surtout, who, when he did condescend to walk about his property,
did it in company with a thick rattan stick with a brass ferrule, and a
gardener and sub-gardener with meek faces, to whom (the gardeners, not
the stick) Captain Boldwig gave his orders with all due grandeur and
ferocity; for Captain Boldwig’s wife’s sister had married a marquis, and
the captain’s house was a villa, and his land ‘grounds,’ and it was all
very high, and mighty, and great.

Mr. Pickwick had not been asleep half an hour when little Captain
Boldwig, followed by the two gardeners, came striding along as fast as
his size and importance would let him; and when he came near the oak
tree, Captain Boldwig paused and drew a long breath, and looked at the
prospect as if he thought the prospect ought to be highly gratified at
having him to take notice of it; and then he struck the ground
emphatically with his stick, and summoned the head-gardener.

‘Hunt,’ said Captain Boldwig.

‘Yes, Sir,’ said the gardener.

‘Roll this place to-morrow morning--do you hear, Hunt?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘And take care that you keep this place in good order--do you hear,
Hunt?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘And remind me to have a board done about trespassers, and spring guns,
and all that sort of thing, to keep the common people out. Do you hear,
Hunt; do you hear?’

‘I’ll not forget it, Sir.’

‘I beg your pardon, Sir,’ said the other man, advancing, with his hand
to his hat.

‘Well, Wilkins, what’s the matter with you?’ said Captain Boldwig.

‘I beg your pardon, sir--but I think there have been trespassers here
to-day.’

‘Ha!’ said the captain, scowling around him.

‘Yes, sir--they have been dining here, I think, sir.’

‘Why, damn their audacity, so they have,’ said Captain Boldwig, as the
crumbs and fragments that were strewn upon the grass met his eye. ‘They
have actually been devouring their food here. I wish I had the vagabonds
here!’ said the captain, clenching the thick stick.

‘I wish I had the vagabonds here,’ said the captain wrathfully.

‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ said Wilkins, ‘but--’

‘But what? Eh?’ roared the captain; and following the timid glance of
Wilkins, his eyes encountered the wheel-barrow and Mr. Pickwick.


‘Who are you, you rascal?’ said the captain, administering several pokes
to Mr. Pickwick’s body with the thick stick. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Cold punch,’ murmured Mr. Pickwick, as he sank to sleep again.

‘What?’ demanded Captain Boldwig.

No reply.

‘What did he say his name was?’ asked the captain.

‘Punch, I think, sir,’ replied Wilkins.

‘That’s his impudence--that’s his confounded impudence,’ said Captain
Boldwig. ‘He’s only feigning to be asleep now,’ said the captain, in a
high passion. ‘He’s drunk; he’s a drunken plebeian. Wheel him away,
Wilkins, wheel him away directly.’

Where shall I wheel him to, sir?’ inquired Wilkins, with great timidity.

‘Wheel him to the devil,’ replied Captain Boldwig.

‘Very well, sir,’ said Wilkins.

‘Stay,’ said the captain.

Wilkins stopped accordingly.

‘Wheel him,’ said the captain--‘wheel him to the pound; and let us see
whether he calls himself Punch when he comes to himself. He shall not
bully me--he shall not bully me. Wheel him away.’

Away Mr. Pickwick was wheeled in compliance with this imperious mandate;
and the great Captain Boldwig, swelling with indignation, proceeded on
his walk.

Inexpressible was the astonishment of the little party when they
returned, to find that Mr. Pickwick had disappeared, and taken the
wheel-barrow with him. It was the most mysterious and unaccountable
thing that was ever heard of. For a lame man to have got upon his legs
without any previous notice, and walked off, would have been most
extraordinary; but when it came to his wheeling a heavy barrow before
him, by way of amusement, it grew positively miraculous. They searched
every nook and corner round, together and separately; they shouted,
whistled, laughed, called--and all with the same result. Mr. Pickwick
was not to be found. After some hours of fruitless search, they arrived
at the unwelcome conclusion that they must go home without him.

Meanwhile Mr. Pickwick had been wheeled to the Pound, and safely
deposited therein, fast asleep in the wheel-barrow, to the immeasurable
delight and satisfaction not only of all the boys in the village, but
three-fourths of the whole population, who had gathered round, in
expectation of his waking. If their most intense gratification had been
awakened by seeing him wheeled in, how many hundredfold was their joy
increased when, after a few indistinct cries of ‘Sam!’ he sat up in the
barrow, and gazed with indescribable astonishment on the faces before
him.

A general shout was of course the signal of his having woke up; and his
involuntary inquiry of ‘What’s the matter?’ occasioned another, louder
than the first, if possible.

‘Here’s a game!’ roared the populace.

‘Where am I?’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘In the pound,’ replied the mob.

‘How came I here? What was I doing? Where was I brought from?’

Boldwig! Captain Boldwig!’ was the only reply.

‘Let me out,’ cried Mr. Pickwick. ‘Where’s my servant? Where are my
friends?’

‘You ain’t got no friends. Hurrah!’ Then there came a turnip, then a
potato, and then an egg; with a few other little tokens of the playful
disposition of the many-headed.

How long this scene might have lasted, or how much Mr. Pickwick might
have suffered, no one can tell, had not a carriage, which was driving
swiftly by, suddenly pulled up, from whence there descended old Wardle
and Sam Weller, the former of whom, in far less time than it takes to
write it, if not to read it, had made his way to Mr. Pickwick’s side,
and placed him in the vehicle, just as the latter had concluded the
third and last round of a single combat with the town-beadle.

‘Run to the justice’s!’ cried a dozen voices.

‘Ah, run avay,’ said Mr. Weller, jumping up on the box. ‘Give my
compliments--Mr. Veller’s compliments--to the justice, and tell him I’ve
spiled his beadle, and that, if he’ll swear in a new ‘un, I’ll come back
again to-morrow and spile him. Drive on, old feller.’

‘I’ll give directions for the commencement of an action for false
imprisonment against this Captain Boldwig, directly I get to London,’
said Mr. Pickwick, as soon as the carriage turned out of the town.

‘We were trespassing, it seems,’ said Wardle.

‘I don’t care,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I’ll bring the action.’

‘No, you won’t,’ said Wardle.

‘I will, by--’ But as there was a humorous expression in Wardle’s face,
Mr. Pickwick checked himself, and said, ‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ said old Wardle, half-bursting with laughter, ‘because they
might turn on some of us, and say we had taken too much cold punch.’

Do what he would, a smile would come into Mr. Pickwick’s face; the smile
extended into a laugh; the laugh into a roar; the roar became general.
So, to keep up their good-humour, they stopped at the first roadside
tavern they came to, and ordered a glass of brandy-and-water all round,
with a magnum of extra strength for Mr. Samuel Weller.



CHAPTER XX. SHOWING HOW DODSON AND FOGG WERE MEN OF BUSINESS, AND THEIR
CLERKS MEN OF PLEASURE; AND HOW AN AFFECTING INTERVIEW TOOK PLACE
BETWEEN MR. WELLER AND HIS LONG-LOST PARENT; SHOWING ALSO WHAT CHOICE
SPIRITS ASSEMBLED AT THE MAGPIE AND STUMP, AND WHAT A CAPITAL CHAPTER
THE NEXT ONE WILL BE

In the ground-floor front of a dingy house, at the very farthest end of
Freeman’s Court, Cornhill, sat the four clerks of Messrs. Dodson & Fogg,
two of his Majesty’s attorneys of the courts of King’s Bench and Common
Pleas at Westminster, and solicitors of the High Court of Chancery--the
aforesaid clerks catching as favourable glimpses of heaven’s light and
heaven’s sun, in the course of their daily labours, as a man might hope
to do, were he placed at the bottom of a reasonably deep well; and
without the opportunity of perceiving the stars in the day-time, which
the latter secluded situation affords.

The clerks’ office of Messrs. Dodson & Fogg was a dark, mouldy, earthy-
smelling room, with a high wainscotted partition to screen the clerks
from the vulgar gaze, a couple of old wooden chairs, a very loud-ticking
clock, an almanac, an umbrella-stand, a row of hat-pegs, and a few
shelves, on which were deposited several ticketed bundles of dirty
papers, some old deal boxes with paper labels, and sundry decayed stone
ink bottles of various shapes and sizes. There was a glass door leading
into the passage which formed the entrance to the court, and on the
outer side of this glass door, Mr. Pickwick, closely followed by Sam
Weller, presented himself on the Friday morning succeeding the
occurrence of which a faithful narration is given in the last chapter.

‘Come in, can’t you!’ cried a voice from behind the partition, in reply
to Mr. Pickwick’s gentle tap at the door. And Mr. Pickwick and Sam
entered accordingly.

‘Mr. Dodson or Mr. Fogg at home, sir?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, gently,
advancing, hat in hand, towards the partition.

‘Mr. Dodson ain’t at home, and Mr. Fogg’s particularly engaged,’ replied
the voice; and at the same time the head to which the voice belonged,
with a pen behind its ear, looked over the partition, and at Mr.
Pickwick.

It was a ragged head, the sandy hair of which, scrupulously parted on
one side, and flattened down with pomatum, was twisted into little semi-
circular tails round a flat face ornamented with a pair of small eyes,
and garnished with a very dirty shirt collar, and a rusty black stock.

‘Mr. Dodson ain’t at home, and Mr. Fogg’s particularly engaged,’ said
the man to whom the head belonged.

‘When will Mr. Dodson be back, sir?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Can’t say.’

‘Will it be long before Mr. Fogg is disengaged, Sir?’

‘Don’t know.’

Here the man proceeded to mend his pen with great deliberation, while
another clerk, who was mixing a Seidlitz powder, under cover of the lid
of his desk, laughed approvingly.

‘I think I’ll wait,’ said Mr. Pickwick. There was no reply; so Mr.
Pickwick sat down unbidden, and listened to the loud ticking of the
clock and the murmured conversation of the clerks.

‘That was a game, wasn’t it?’ said one of the gentlemen, in a brown coat
and brass buttons, inky drabs, and bluchers, at the conclusion of some
inaudible relation of his previous evening’s adventures.

‘Devilish good--devilish good,’ said the Seidlitz-powder man.

‘Tom Cummins was in the chair,’ said the man with the brown coat. ‘It
was half-past four when I got to Somers Town, and then I was so uncommon
lushy, that I couldn’t find the place where the latch-key went in, and
was obliged to knock up the old ‘ooman. I say, I wonder what old Fogg
‘ud say, if he knew it. I should get the sack, I s’pose--eh?’

At this humorous notion, all the clerks laughed in concert.

‘There was such a game with Fogg here, this mornin’,’ said the man in
the brown coat, ‘while Jack was upstairs sorting the papers, and you two
were gone to the stamp-office. Fogg was down here, opening the letters
when that chap as we issued the writ against at Camberwell, you know,
came in--what’s his name again?’

‘Ramsey,’ said the clerk who had spoken to Mr. Pickwick.

‘Ah, Ramsey--a precious seedy-looking customer. “Well, sir,” says old
Fogg, looking at him very fierce--you know his way--“well, Sir, have you
come to settle?” “Yes, I have, sir,” said Ramsey, putting his hand in
his pocket, and bringing out the money, “the debt’s two pound ten, and
the costs three pound five, and here it is, Sir;” and he sighed like
bricks, as he lugged out the money, done up in a bit of blotting-paper.
Old Fogg looked first at the money, and then at him, and then he coughed
in his rum way, so that I knew something was coming. “You don’t know
there’s a declaration filed, which increases the costs materially, I
suppose,” said Fogg. “You don’t say that, sir,” said Ramsey, starting
back; “the time was only out last night, Sir.” “I do say it, though,”
 said Fogg, “my clerk’s just gone to file it. Hasn’t Mr. Jackson gone to
file that declaration in Bullman and Ramsey, Mr. Wicks?” Of course I
said yes, and then Fogg coughed again, and looked at Ramsey. “My God!”
 said Ramsey; “and here have I nearly driven myself mad, scraping this
money together, and all to no purpose.” “None at all,” said Fogg coolly;
“so you had better go back and scrape some more together, and bring it
here in time.” “I can’t get it, by God!” said Ramsey, striking the desk
with his fist. “Don’t bully me, sir,” said Fogg, getting into a passion
on purpose. “I am not bullying you, sir,” said Ramsey. “You are,” said
Fogg; “get out, sir; get out of this office, Sir, and come back, Sir,
when you know how to behave yourself.” Well, Ramsey tried to speak, but
Fogg wouldn’t let him, so he put the money in his pocket, and sneaked
out. The door was scarcely shut, when old Fogg turned round to me, with
a sweet smile on his face, and drew the declaration out of his coat
pocket. “Here, Wicks,” says Fogg, “take a cab, and go down to the Temple
as quick as you can, and file that. The costs are quite safe, for he’s a
steady man with a large family, at a salary of five-and-twenty shillings
a week, and if he gives us a warrant of attorney, as he must in the end,
I know his employers will see it paid; so we may as well get all we can
get out of him, Mr. Wicks; it’s a Christian act to do it, Mr. Wicks, for
with his large family and small income, he’ll be all the better for a
good lesson against getting into debt--won’t he, Mr. Wicks, won’t he?”--
and he smiled so good-naturedly as he went away, that it was delightful
to see him. He is a capital man of business,’ said Wicks, in a tone of
the deepest admiration, ‘capital, isn’t he?’

The other three cordially subscribed to this opinion, and the anecdote
afforded the most unlimited satisfaction.


‘Nice men these here, Sir,’ whispered Mr. Weller to his master; ‘wery
nice notion of fun they has, Sir.’

Mr. Pickwick nodded assent, and coughed to attract the attention of the
young gentlemen behind the partition, who, having now relaxed their
minds by a little conversation among themselves, condescended to take
some notice of the stranger.

‘I wonder whether Fogg’s disengaged now?’ said Jackson.

‘I’ll see,’ said Wicks, dismounting leisurely from his stool. ‘What name
shall I tell Mr. Fogg?’

‘Pickwick,’ replied the illustrious subject of these memoirs.

Mr. Jackson departed upstairs on his errand, and immediately returned
with a message that Mr. Fogg would see Mr. Pickwick in five minutes; and
having delivered it, returned again to his desk.

‘What did he say his name was?’ whispered Wicks.

‘Pickwick,’ replied Jackson; ‘it’s the defendant in Bardell and
Pickwick.’

A sudden scraping of feet, mingled with the sound of suppressed
laughter, was heard from behind the partition.

‘They’re a-twiggin’ of you, Sir,’ whispered Mr. Weller.

‘Twigging of me, Sam!’ replied Mr. Pickwick; ‘what do you mean by
twigging me?’

Mr. Weller replied by pointing with his thumb over his shoulder, and Mr.
Pickwick, on looking up, became sensible of the pleasing fact, that all
the four clerks, with countenances expressive of the utmost amusement,
and with their heads thrust over the wooden screen, were minutely
inspecting the figure and general appearance of the supposed trifler
with female hearts, and disturber of female happiness. On his looking
up, the row of heads suddenly disappeared, and the sound of pens
travelling at a furious rate over paper, immediately succeeded.

A sudden ring at the bell which hung in the office, summoned Mr. Jackson
to the apartment of Fogg, from whence he came back to say that he (Fogg)
was ready to see Mr. Pickwick if he would step upstairs.

Upstairs Mr. Pickwick did step accordingly, leaving Sam Weller below.
The room door of the one-pair back, bore inscribed in legible characters
the imposing words, ‘Mr. Fogg’; and, having tapped thereat, and been
desired to come in, Jackson ushered Mr. Pickwick into the presence.

‘Is Mr. Dodson in?’ inquired Mr. Fogg.

‘Just come in, Sir,’ replied Jackson.

‘Ask him to step here.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Exit Jackson.

‘Take a seat, sir,’ said Fogg; ‘there is the paper, sir; my partner will
be here directly, and we can converse about this matter, sir.’

Mr. Pickwick took a seat and the paper, but, instead of reading the
latter, peeped over the top of it, and took a survey of the man of
business, who was an elderly, pimply-faced, vegetable-diet sort of man,
in a black coat, dark mixture trousers, and small black gaiters; a kind
of being who seemed to be an essential part of the desk at which he was
writing, and to have as much thought or feeling.

After a few minutes’ silence, Mr. Dodson, a plump, portly, stern-looking
man, with a loud voice, appeared; and the conversation commenced.

‘This is Mr. Pickwick,’ said Fogg.

‘Ah! You are the defendant, Sir, in Bardell and Pickwick?’ said Dodson.

‘I am, sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Well, sir,’ said Dodson, ‘and what do you propose?’

‘Ah!’ said Fogg, thrusting his hands into his trousers’ pockets, and
throwing himself back in his chair, ‘what do you propose, Mr Pickwick?’

‘Hush, Fogg,’ said Dodson, ‘let me hear what Mr. Pickwick has to say.’

‘I came, gentlemen,’ said Mr. Pickwick, gazing placidly on the two
partners, ‘I came here, gentlemen, to express the surprise with which I
received your letter of the other day, and to inquire what grounds of
action you can have against me.’

‘Grounds of--’ Fogg had ejaculated this much, when he was stopped by
Dodson.

‘Mr. Fogg,’ said Dodson, ‘I am going to speak.’

I beg your pardon, Mr. Dodson,’ said Fogg.

‘For the grounds of action, sir,’ continued Dodson, with moral elevation
in his air, ‘you will consult your own conscience and your own feelings.
We, Sir, we, are guided entirely by the statement of our client. That
statement, Sir, may be true, or it may be false; it may be credible, or
it may be incredible; but, if it be true, and if it be credible, I do
not hesitate to say, Sir, that our grounds of action, Sir, are strong,
and not to be shaken. You may be an unfortunate man, Sir, or you may be
a designing one; but if I were called upon, as a juryman upon my oath,
Sir, to express an opinion of your conduct, Sir, I do not hesitate to
assert that I should have but one opinion about it.’ Here Dodson drew
himself up, with an air of offended virtue, and looked at Fogg, who
thrust his hands farther in his pockets, and nodding his head sagely,
said, in a tone of the fullest concurrence, ‘Most certainly.’

‘Well, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with considerable pain depicted in his
countenance, ‘you will permit me to assure you that I am a most
unfortunate man, so far as this case is concerned.’

‘I hope you are, Sir,’ replied Dodson; ‘I trust you may be, Sir. If you
are really innocent of what is laid to your charge, you are more
unfortunate than I had believed any man could possibly be. What do you
say, Mr. Fogg?’

‘I say precisely what you say,’ replied Fogg, with a smile of
incredulity.

‘The writ, Sir, which commences the action,’ continued Dodson, ‘was
issued regularly. Mr. Fogg, where is the _Praecipe _book?’

‘Here it is,’ said Fogg, handing over a square book, with a parchment
cover.

‘Here is the entry,’ resumed Dodson. ‘“Middlesex, Capias MARTHA BARDELL,
WIDOW, v. SAMUEL PICKWICK. Damages £1500. Dodson & Fogg for the
plaintiff, Aug. 28, 1827.” All regular, Sir; perfectly.’ Dodson coughed
and looked at Fogg, who said ‘Perfectly,’ also. And then they both
looked at Mr. Pickwick.

‘I am to understand, then,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘that it really is your
intention to proceed with this action?’

‘Understand, sir!--that you certainly may,’ replied Dodson, with
something as near a smile as his importance would allow.

‘And that the damages are actually laid at fifteen hundred pounds?’ said
Mr. Pickwick.

‘To which understanding you may add my assurance, that if we could have
prevailed upon our client, they would have been laid at treble the
amount, sir,’ replied Dodson.

‘I believe Mrs. Bardell specially said, however,’ observed Fogg,
glancing at Dodson, ‘that she would not compromise for a farthing less.’

‘Unquestionably,’ replied Dodson sternly. For the action was only just
begun; and it wouldn’t have done to let Mr. Pickwick compromise it then,
even if he had been so disposed.

‘As you offer no terms, sir,’ said Dodson, displaying a slip of
parchment in his right hand, and affectionately pressing a paper copy of
it, on Mr. Pickwick with his left, ‘I had better serve you with a copy
of this writ, sir. Here is the original, sir.’

‘Very well, gentlemen, very well,’ said Mr. Pickwick, rising in person
and wrath at the same time; ‘you shall hear from my solicitor,
gentlemen.’

‘We shall be very happy to do so,’ said Fogg, rubbing his hands.

‘Very,’ said Dodson, opening the door.

‘And before I go, gentlemen,’ said the excited Mr. Pickwick, turning
round on the landing, ‘permit me to say, that of all the disgraceful and
rascally proceedings--’

‘Stay, sir, stay,’ interposed Dodson, with great politeness. ‘Mr.
Jackson! Mr. Wicks!’

‘Sir,’ said the two clerks, appearing at the bottom of the stairs.

‘I merely want you to hear what this gentleman says,’ replied Dodson.
‘Pray, go on, sir--disgraceful and rascally proceedings, I think you
said?’

‘I did,’ said Mr. Pickwick, thoroughly roused. ‘I said, Sir, that of all
the disgraceful and rascally proceedings that ever were attempted, this
is the most so. I repeat it, sir.’

‘You hear that, Mr. Wicks,’ said Dodson.

‘You won’t forget these expressions, Mr. Jackson?’ said Fogg.

‘Perhaps you would like to call us swindlers, sir,’ said Dodson. ‘Pray
do, Sir, if you feel disposed; now pray do, Sir.’

‘I do,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘You _are _swindlers.’

‘Very good,’ said Dodson. ‘You can hear down there, I hope, Mr. Wicks?’

‘Oh, yes, Sir,’ said Wicks.

‘You had better come up a step or two higher, if you can’t,’ added Mr.
Fogg. ‘Go on, Sir; do go on. You had better call us thieves, Sir; or
perhaps You would like to assault one of _us_. Pray do it, Sir, if you
would; we will not make the smallest resistance. Pray do it, Sir.’

As Fogg put himself very temptingly within the reach of Mr. Pickwick’s
clenched fist, there is little doubt that that gentleman would have
complied with his earnest entreaty, but for the interposition of Sam,
who, hearing the dispute, emerged from the office, mounted the stairs,
and seized his master by the arm.

‘You just come away,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘Battledore and shuttlecock’s a
wery good game, vhen you ain’t the shuttlecock and two lawyers the
battledores, in which case it gets too excitin’ to be pleasant. Come
avay, Sir. If you want to ease your mind by blowing up somebody, come
out into the court and blow up me; but it’s rayther too expensive work
to be carried on here.’

And without the slightest ceremony, Mr. Weller hauled his master down
the stairs, and down the court, and having safely deposited him in
Cornhill, fell behind, prepared to follow whithersoever he should lead.

Mr. Pickwick walked on abstractedly, crossed opposite the Mansion House,
and bent his steps up Cheapside. Sam began to wonder where they were
going, when his master turned round, and said--

‘Sam, I will go immediately to Mr. Perker’s.’

‘That’s just exactly the wery place vere you ought to have gone last
night, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘I think it is, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘I _know _it is,’ said Mr. Weller.

‘Well, well, Sam,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, ‘we will go there at once; but
first, as I have been rather ruffled, I should like a glass of brandy-
and-water warm, Sam. Where can I have it, Sam?’

Mr. Weller’s knowledge of London was extensive and peculiar. He replied,
without the slightest consideration--

‘Second court on the right hand side--last house but vun on the same
side the vay--take the box as stands in the first fireplace, ‘cos there
ain’t no leg in the middle o’ the table, which all the others has, and
it’s wery inconvenient.’

Mr. Pickwick observed his valet’s directions implicitly, and bidding Sam
follow him, entered the tavern he had pointed out, where the hot brandy-
and-water was speedily placed before him; while Mr. Weller, seated at a
respectful distance, though at the same table with his master, was
accommodated with a pint of porter.

The room was one of a very homely description, and was apparently under
the especial patronage of stage-coachmen; for several gentleman, who had
all the appearance of belonging to that learned profession, were
drinking and smoking in the different boxes. Among the number was one
stout, red-faced, elderly man, in particular, seated in an opposite box,
who attracted Mr. Pickwick’s attention. The stout man was smoking with
great vehemence, but between every half-dozen puffs, he took his pipe
from his mouth, and looked first at Mr. Weller and then at Mr. Pickwick.
Then, he would bury in a quart pot, as much of his countenance as the
dimensions of the quart pot admitted of its receiving, and take another
look at Sam and Mr. Pickwick. Then he would take another half-dozen
puffs with an air of profound meditation and look at them again. At last
the stout man, putting up his legs on the seat, and leaning his back
against the wall, began to puff at his pipe without leaving off at all,
and to stare through the smoke at the new-comers, as if he had made up
his mind to see the most he could of them.

At first the evolutions of the stout man had escaped Mr. Weller’s
observation, but by degrees, as he saw Mr. Pickwick’s eyes every now and
then turning towards him, he began to gaze in the same direction, at the
same time shading his eyes with his hand, as if he partially recognised
the object before him, and wished to make quite sure of its identity.
His doubts were speedily dispelled, however; for the stout man having
blown a thick cloud from his pipe, a hoarse voice, like some strange
effort of ventriloquism, emerged from beneath the capacious shawls which
muffled his throat and chest, and slowly uttered these sounds--‘Wy,
Sammy!’

‘Who’s that, Sam?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Why, I wouldn’t ha’ believed it, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, with
astonished eyes. ‘It’s the old ‘un.’

‘Old one,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘What old one?’

‘My father, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘How are you, my ancient?’ And
with this beautiful ebullition of filial affection, Mr. Weller made room
on the seat beside him, for the stout man, who advanced pipe in mouth
and pot in hand, to greet him.

‘Wy, Sammy,’ said the father, ‘I ha’n’t seen you, for two year and
better.’

‘Nor more you have, old codger,’ replied the son. ‘How’s mother-in-law?’

‘Wy, I’ll tell you what, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, senior, with much
solemnity in his manner; ‘there never was a nicer woman as a widder,
than that ‘ere second wentur o’ mine--a sweet creetur she was, Sammy;
all I can say on her now, is, that as she was such an uncommon pleasant
widder, it’s a great pity she ever changed her condition. She don’t act
as a vife, Sammy.’

Don’t she, though?’ inquired Mr. Weller, junior.

The elder Mr. Weller shook his head, as he replied with a sigh, ‘I’ve
done it once too often, Sammy; I’ve done it once too often. Take example
by your father, my boy, and be wery careful o’ widders all your life,
‘specially if they’ve kept a public-house, Sammy.’ Having delivered this
parental advice with great pathos, Mr. Weller, senior, refilled his pipe
from a tin box he carried in his pocket; and, lighting his fresh pipe
from the ashes of the old One, commenced smoking at a great rate.

‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ he said, renewing the subject, and addressing
Mr. Pickwick, after a considerable pause, ‘nothin’ personal, I hope,
sir; I hope you ha’n’t got a widder, sir.’

‘Not I,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, laughing; and while Mr. Pickwick laughed,
Sam Weller informed his parent in a whisper, of the relation in which he
stood towards that gentleman.

‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ said Mr. Weller, senior, taking off his hat, ‘I
hope you’ve no fault to find with Sammy, Sir?’

‘None whatever,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Wery glad to hear it, sir,’ replied the old man; ‘I took a good deal o’
pains with his eddication, sir; let him run in the streets when he was
wery young, and shift for hisself. It’s the only way to make a boy
sharp, sir.’

‘Rather a dangerous process, I should imagine,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with
a smile.

‘And not a wery sure one, neither,’ added Mr. Weller; ‘I got reg’larly
done the other day.’

‘No!’ said his father.

‘I did,’ said the son; and he proceeded to relate, in as few words as
possible, how he had fallen a ready dupe to the stratagems of Job
Trotter.

Mr. Weller, senior, listened to the tale with the most profound
attention, and, at its termination, said--

‘Worn’t one o’ these chaps slim and tall, with long hair, and the gift
o’ the gab wery gallopin’?’

Mr. Pickwick did not quite understand the last item of description, but,
comprehending the first, said ‘Yes,’ at a venture.

‘T’ other’s a black-haired chap in mulberry livery, with a wery large
head?’

‘Yes, yes, he is,’ said Mr. Pickwick and Sam, with great earnestness.

‘Then I know where they are, and that’s all about it,’ said Mr. Weller;
‘they’re at Ipswich, safe enough, them two.’

‘No!’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Fact,’ said Mr. Weller, ‘and I’ll tell you how I know it. I work an
Ipswich coach now and then for a friend o’ mine. I worked down the wery
day arter the night as you caught the rheumatic, and at the Black Boy at
Chelmsford--the wery place they’d come to--I took ‘em up, right through
to Ipswich, where the man-servant--him in the mulberries--told me they
was a-goin’ to put up for a long time.’

‘I’ll follow him,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘we may as well see Ipswich as any
other place. I’ll follow him.’

‘You’re quite certain it was them, governor?’ inquired Mr. Weller,
junior.

‘Quite, Sammy, quite,’ replied his father, ‘for their appearance is wery
sing’ler; besides that ‘ere, I wondered to see the gen’l’m’n so
formiliar with his servant; and, more than that, as they sat in the
front, right behind the box, I heerd ‘em laughing and saying how they’d
done old Fireworks.’

‘Old who?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Old Fireworks, Sir; by which, I’ve no doubt, they meant you, Sir.’

There is nothing positively vile or atrocious in the appellation of ‘old
Fireworks,’ but still it is by no means a respectful or flattering
designation. The recollection of all the wrongs he had sustained at
Jingle’s hands, had crowded on Mr. Pickwick’s mind, the moment Mr.
Weller began to speak; it wanted but a feather to turn the scale, and
‘old Fireworks’ did it.

‘I’ll follow him,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with an emphatic blow on the
table.

‘I shall work down to Ipswich the day arter to-morrow, Sir,’ said Mr.
Weller the elder, ‘from the Bull in Whitechapel; and if you really mean
to go, you’d better go with me.’

‘So we had,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘very true; I can write to Bury, and
tell them to meet me at Ipswich. We will go with you. But don’t hurry
away, Mr. Weller; won’t you take anything?’

‘You’re wery good, Sir,’ replied Mr. W., stopping short;--‘perhaps a
small glass of brandy to drink your health, and success to Sammy, Sir,
wouldn’t be amiss.’

‘Certainly not,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘A glass of brandy here!’ The brandy was brought; and Mr. Weller, after
pulling his hair to Mr. Pickwick, and nodding to Sam, jerked it down his
capacious throat as if it had been a small thimbleful.

‘Well done, father,’ said Sam, ‘take care, old fellow, or you’ll have a
touch of your old complaint, the gout.’

‘I’ve found a sov’rin’ cure for that, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, setting
down the glass.

‘A sovereign cure for the gout,’ said Mr. Pickwick, hastily producing
his note-book--‘what is it?’

‘The gout, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, ‘the gout is a complaint as arises
from too much ease and comfort. If ever you’re attacked with the gout,
sir, jist you marry a widder as has got a good loud woice, with a decent
notion of usin’ it, and you’ll never have the gout agin. It’s a capital
prescription, sir. I takes it reg’lar, and I can warrant it to drive
away any illness as is caused by too much jollity.’ Having imparted this
valuable secret, Mr. Weller drained his glass once more, produced a
laboured wink, sighed deeply, and slowly retired.

‘Well, what do you think of what your father says, Sam?’ inquired Mr.
Pickwick, with a smile.

‘Think, Sir!’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘why, I think he’s the wictim o’
connubiality, as Blue Beard’s domestic chaplain said, vith a tear of
pity, ven he buried him.’

There was no replying to this very apposite conclusion, and, therefore,
Mr. Pickwick, after settling the reckoning, resumed his walk to Gray’s
Inn. By the time he reached its secluded groves, however, eight o’clock
had struck, and the unbroken stream of gentlemen in muddy high-lows,
soiled white hats, and rusty apparel, who were pouring towards the
different avenues of egress, warned him that the majority of the offices
had closed for that day.

After climbing two pairs of steep and dirty stairs, he found his
anticipations were realised. Mr. Perker’s ‘outer door’ was closed; and
the dead silence which followed Mr. Weller’s repeated kicks thereat,
announced that the officials had retired from business for the night.

‘This is pleasant, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘I shouldn’t lose an hour in
seeing him; I shall not be able to get one wink of sleep to-night, I
know, unless I have the satisfaction of reflecting that I have confided
this matter to a professional man.’

‘Here’s an old ‘ooman comin’ upstairs, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘p’raps
she knows where we can find somebody. Hollo, old lady, vere’s Mr.
Perker’s people?’

‘Mr. Perker’s people,’ said a thin, miserable-looking old woman,
stopping to recover breath after the ascent of the staircase--‘Mr.
Perker’s people’s gone, and I’m a-goin’ to do the office out.’

Are you Mr. Perker’s servant?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘I am Mr. Perker’s laundress,’ replied the woman.

‘Ah,’ said Mr. Pickwick, half aside to Sam, ‘it’s a curious
circumstance, Sam, that they call the old women in these inns,
laundresses. I wonder what’s that for?’

‘’Cos they has a mortal awersion to washing anythin’, I suppose, Sir,’
replied Mr. Weller.

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking at the old woman, whose
appearance, as well as the condition of the office, which she had by
this time opened, indicated a rooted antipathy to the application of
soap and water; ‘do you know where I can find Mr. Perker, my good
woman?’

‘No, I don’t,’ replied the old woman gruffly; ‘he’s out o’ town now.’

‘That’s unfortunate,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘where’s his clerk? Do you
know?’

‘Yes, I know where he is, but he won’t thank me for telling you,’
replied the laundress.

‘I have very particular business with him,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Won’t it do in the morning?’ said the woman.

‘Not so well,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Well,’ said the old woman, ‘if it was anything very particular, I was
to say where he was, so I suppose there’s no harm in telling. If you
just go to the Magpie and Stump, and ask at the bar for Mr. Lowten,
they’ll show you in to him, and he’s Mr. Perker’s clerk.’

With this direction, and having been furthermore informed that the
hostelry in question was situated in a court, happy in the double
advantage of being in the vicinity of Clare Market, and closely
approximating to the back of New Inn, Mr. Pickwick and Sam descended the
rickety staircase in safety, and issued forth in quest of the Magpie and
Stump.

This favoured tavern, sacred to the evening orgies of Mr. Lowten and his
companions, was what ordinary people would designate a public-house.
That the landlord was a man of money-making turn was sufficiently
testified by the fact of a small bulkhead beneath the tap-room window,
in size and shape not unlike a sedan-chair, being underlet to a mender
of shoes: and that he was a being of a philanthropic mind was evident
from the protection he afforded to a pieman, who vended his delicacies
without fear of interruption, on the very door-step. In the lower
windows, which were decorated with curtains of a saffron hue, dangled
two or three printed cards, bearing reference to Devonshire cider and
Dantzic spruce, while a large blackboard, announcing in white letters to
an enlightened public, that there were 500,000 barrels of double stout
in the cellars of the establishment, left the mind in a state of not
unpleasing doubt and uncertainty as to the precise direction in the
bowels of the earth, in which this mighty cavern might be supposed to
extend. When we add that the weather-beaten signboard bore the half-
obliterated semblance of a magpie intently eyeing a crooked streak of
brown paint, which the neighbours had been taught from infancy to
consider as the ‘stump,’ we have said all that need be said of the
exterior of the edifice.

On Mr. Pickwick’s presenting himself at the bar, an elderly female
emerged from behind the screen therein, and presented herself before
him.

‘Is Mr. Lowten here, ma’am?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes, he is, Sir,’ replied the landlady. ‘Here, Charley, show the
gentleman in to Mr. Lowten.’

‘The gen’l’m’n can’t go in just now,’ said a shambling pot-boy, with a
red head, ‘cos’ Mr. Lowten’s a-singin’ a comic song, and he’ll put him
out. He’ll be done directly, Sir.’

The red-headed pot-boy had scarcely finished speaking, when a most
unanimous hammering of tables, and jingling of glasses, announced that
the song had that instant terminated; and Mr. Pickwick, after desiring
Sam to solace himself in the tap, suffered himself to be conducted into
the presence of Mr. Lowten.

At the announcement of ‘A gentleman to speak to you, Sir,’ a puffy-faced
young man, who filled the chair at the head of the table, looked with
some surprise in the direction from whence the voice proceeded; and the
surprise seemed to be by no means diminished, when his eyes rested on an
individual whom he had never seen before.

‘I beg your pardon, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘and I am very sorry to
disturb the other gentlemen, too, but I come on very particular
business; and if you will suffer me to detain you at this end of the
room for five minutes, I shall be very much obliged to you.’

The puffy-faced young man rose, and drawing a chair close to Mr.
Pickwick in an obscure corner of the room, listened attentively to his
tale of woe.

‘Ah,’ he said, when Mr. Pickwick had concluded, ‘Dodson and Fogg--sharp
practice theirs--capital men of business, Dodson and Fogg, sir.’

Mr. Pickwick admitted the sharp practice of Dodson and Fogg, and Lowten
resumed.

‘Perker ain’t in town, and he won’t be, neither, before the end of next
week; but if you want the action defended, and will leave the copy with
me, I can do all that’s needful till he comes back.’

‘That’s exactly what I came here for,’ said Mr. Pickwick, handing over
the document. ‘If anything particular occurs, you can write to me at the
post-office, Ipswich.’

‘That’s all right,’ replied Mr. Perker’s clerk; and then seeing Mr.
Pickwick’s eye wandering curiously towards the table, he added, ‘will
you join us, for half an hour or so? We are capital company here to-
night. There’s Samkin and Green’s managing-clerk, and Smithers and
Price’s chancery, and Pimkin and Thomas’s out o’ doors--sings a capital
song, he does--and Jack Bamber, and ever so many more. You’re come out
of the country, I suppose. Would you like to join us?’

Mr. Pickwick could not resist so tempting an opportunity of studying
human nature. He suffered himself to be led to the table, where, after
having been introduced to the company in due form, he was accommodated
with a seat near the chairman and called for a glass of his favourite
beverage.

A profound silence, quite contrary to Mr. Pickwick’s expectation,
succeeded.

‘You don’t find this sort of thing disagreeable, I hope, sir?’ said his
right hand neighbour, a gentleman in a checked shirt and Mosaic studs,
with a cigar in his mouth.

‘Not in the least,’ replied Mr. Pickwick; ‘I like it very much, although
I am no smoker myself.’

‘I should be very sorry to say I wasn’t,’ interposed another gentleman
on the opposite side of the table. ‘It’s board and lodgings to me, is
smoke.’

Mr. Pickwick glanced at the speaker, and thought that if it were washing
too, it would be all the better.

Here there was another pause. Mr. Pickwick was a stranger, and his
coming had evidently cast a damp upon the party.

‘Mr. Grundy’s going to oblige the company with a song,’ said the
chairman.

‘No, he ain’t,’ said Mr. Grundy.

‘Why not?’ said the chairman.

‘Because he can’t,’ said Mr. Grundy.

‘You had better say he won’t,’ replied the chairman.

‘Well, then, he won’t,’ retorted Mr. Grundy. Mr. Grundy’s positive
refusal to gratify the company occasioned another silence.

‘Won’t anybody enliven us?’ said the chairman, despondingly.

‘Why don’t you enliven us yourself, Mr. Chairman?’ said a young man with
a whisker, a squint, and an open shirt collar (dirty), from the bottom
of the table.

‘Hear! hear!’ said the smoking gentleman, in the Mosaic jewellery.

‘Because I only know one song, and I have sung it already, and it’s a
fine of “glasses round” to sing the same song twice in a night,’ replied
the chairman.

This was an unanswerable reply, and silence prevailed again.

‘I have been to-night, gentlemen,’ said Mr. Pickwick, hoping to start a
subject which all the company could take a part in discussing, ‘I have
been to-night, in a place which you all know very well, doubtless, but
which I have not been in for some years, and know very little of; I mean
Gray’s Inn, gentlemen. Curious little nooks in a great place, like
London, these old inns are.’

‘By Jove!’ said the chairman, whispering across the table to Mr.
Pickwick, ‘you have hit upon something that one of us, at least, would
talk upon for ever. You’ll draw old Jack Bamber out; he was never heard
to talk about anything else but the inns, and he has lived alone in them
till he’s half crazy.’

The individual to whom Lowten alluded, was a little, yellow, high-
shouldered man, whose countenance, from his habit of stooping forward
when silent, Mr. Pickwick had not observed before. He wondered, though,
when the old man raised his shrivelled face, and bent his gray eye upon
him, with a keen inquiring look, that such remarkable features could
have escaped his attention for a moment. There was a fixed grim smile
perpetually on his countenance; he leaned his chin on a long, skinny
hand, with nails of extraordinary length; and as he inclined his head to
one side, and looked keenly out from beneath his ragged gray eyebrows,
there was a strange, wild slyness in his leer, quite repulsive to
behold.

This was the figure that now started forward, and burst into an animated
torrent of words. As this chapter has been a long one, however, and as
the old man was a remarkable personage, it will be more respectful to
him, and more convenient to us, to let him speak for himself in a fresh
one.



CHAPTER XXI. IN WHICH THE OLD MAN LAUNCHES FORTH INTO HIS FAVOURITE
THEME, AND RELATES A STORY ABOUT A QUEER CLIENT

‘Aha!’ said the old man, a brief description of whose manner and
appearance concluded the last chapter, ‘aha! who was talking about the
inns?’

‘I was, Sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick--‘I was observing what singular old
places they are.’

‘_You_!’ said the old man contemptuously. ‘What do _you _know of the
time when young men shut themselves up in those lonely rooms, and read
and read, hour after hour, and night after night, till their reason
wandered beneath their midnight studies; till their mental powers were
exhausted; till morning’s light brought no freshness or health to them;
and they sank beneath the unnatural devotion of their youthful energies
to their dry old books? Coming down to a later time, and a very
different day, what do _you_ know of the gradual sinking beneath
consumption, or the quick wasting of fever--the grand results of “life”
 and dissipation--which men have undergone in these same rooms? How many
vain pleaders for mercy, do you think, have turned away heart-sick from
the lawyer’s office, to find a resting-place in the Thames, or a refuge
in the jail? They are no ordinary houses, those. There is not a panel in
the old wainscotting, but what, if it were endowed with the powers of
speech and memory, could start from the wall, and tell its tale of
horror--the romance of life, Sir, the romance of life! Common-place as
they may seem now, I tell you they are strange old places, and I would
rather hear many a legend with a terrific-sounding name, than the true
history of one old set of chambers.’

There was something so odd in the old man’s sudden energy, and the
subject which had called it forth, that Mr. Pickwick was prepared with
no observation in reply; and the old man checking his impetuosity, and
resuming the leer, which had disappeared during his previous excitement,
said--

‘Look at them in another light--their most common-place and least
romantic. What fine places of slow torture they are! Think of the needy
man who has spent his all, beggared himself, and pinched his friends, to
enter the profession, which is destined never to yield him a morsel of
bread. The waiting--the hope--the disappointment--the fear--the misery--
the poverty--the blight on his hopes, and end to his career--the suicide
perhaps, or the shabby, slipshod drunkard. Am I not right about them?’
And the old man rubbed his hands, and leered as if in delight at having
found another point of view in which to place his favourite subject.

Mr. Pickwick eyed the old man with great curiosity, and the remainder of
the company smiled, and looked on in silence.

‘Talk of your German universities,’ said the little old man. ‘Pooh,
pooh! there’s romance enough at home without going half a mile for it;
only people never think of it.’

‘I never thought of the romance of this particular subject before,
certainly,’ said Mr. Pickwick, laughing.

‘To be sure you didn’t,’ said the little old man; ‘of course not. As a
friend of mine used to say to me, “What is there in chambers in
particular?” “Queer old places,” said I. “Not at all,” said he.
“Lonely,” said I. “Not a bit of it,” said he. He died one morning of
apoplexy, as he was going to open his outer door. Fell with his head in
his own letter-box, and there he lay for eighteen months. Everybody
thought he’d gone out of town.’

‘And how was he found out at last?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘The benchers determined to have his door broken open, as he hadn’t paid
any rent for two years. So they did. Forced the lock; and a very dusty
skeleton in a blue coat, black knee-shorts, and silks, fell forward in
the arms of the porter who opened the door. Queer, that. Rather,
perhaps; rather, eh?’ The little old man put his head more on one side,
and rubbed his hands with unspeakable glee.

‘I know another case,’ said the little old man, when his chuckles had in
some degree subsided. ‘It occurred in Clifford’s Inn. Tenant of a top
set--bad character--shut himself up in his bedroom closet, and took a
dose of arsenic. The steward thought he had run away: opened the door,
and put a bill up. Another man came, took the chambers, furnished them,
and went to live there. Somehow or other he couldn’t sleep--always
restless and uncomfortable. “Odd,” says he. “I’ll make the other room my
bedchamber, and this my sitting-room.” He made the change, and slept
very well at night, but suddenly found that, somehow, he couldn’t read
in the evening: he got nervous and uncomfortable, and used to be always
snuffing his candles and staring about him. “I can’t make this out,”
 said he, when he came home from the play one night, and was drinking a
glass of cold grog, with his back to the wall, in order that he mightn’t
be able to fancy there was any one behind him--“I can’t make it out,”
 said he; and just then his eyes rested on the little closet that had
been always locked up, and a shudder ran through his whole frame from
top to toe. “I have felt this strange feeling before,” said he, “I
cannot help thinking there’s something wrong about that closet.” He made
a strong effort, plucked up his courage, shivered the lock with a blow
or two of the poker, opened the door, and there, sure enough, standing
bolt upright in the corner, was the last tenant, with a little bottle
clasped firmly in his hand, and his face--well!’ As the little old man
concluded, he looked round on the attentive faces of his wondering
auditory with a smile of grim delight.

‘What strange things these are you tell us of, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick,
minutely scanning the old man’s countenance, by the aid of his glasses.

‘Strange!’ said the little old man. ‘Nonsense; you think them strange,
because you know nothing about it. They are funny, but not uncommon.’

‘Funny!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick involuntarily.

‘Yes, funny, are they not?’ replied the little old man, with a
diabolical leer; and then, without pausing for an answer, he continued--

‘I knew another man--let me see--forty years ago now--who took an old,
damp, rotten set of chambers, in one of the most ancient inns, that had
been shut up and empty for years and years before. There were lots of
old women’s stories about the place, and it certainly was very far from
being a cheerful one; but he was poor, and the rooms were cheap, and
that would have been quite a sufficient reason for him, if they had been
ten times worse than they really were. He was obliged to take some
mouldering fixtures that were on the place, and, among the rest, was a
great lumbering wooden press for papers, with large glass doors, and a
green curtain inside; a pretty useless thing for him, for he had no
papers to put in it; and as to his clothes, he carried them about with
him, and that wasn’t very hard work, either. Well, he had moved in all
his furniture--it wasn’t quite a truck-full--and had sprinkled it about
the room, so as to make the four chairs look as much like a dozen as
possible, and was sitting down before the fire at night, drinking the
first glass of two gallons of whisky he had ordered on credit, wondering
whether it would ever be paid for, and if so, in how many years’ time,
when his eyes encountered the glass doors of the wooden press. “Ah,”
 says he, “if I hadn’t been obliged to take that ugly article at the old
broker’s valuation, I might have got something comfortable for the
money. I’ll tell you what it is, old fellow,” he said, speaking aloud to
the press, having nothing else to speak to, “if it wouldn’t cost more to
break up your old carcass, than it would ever be worth afterward, I’d
have a fire out of you in less than no time.” He had hardly spoken the
words, when a sound resembling a faint groan, appeared to issue from the
interior of the case. It startled him at first, but thinking, on a
moment’s reflection, that it must be some young fellow in the next
chamber, who had been dining out, he put his feet on the fender, and
raised the poker to stir the fire. At that moment, the sound was
repeated; and one of the glass doors slowly opening, disclosed a pale
and emaciated figure in soiled and worn apparel, standing erect in the
press. The figure was tall and thin, and the countenance expressive of
care and anxiety; but there was something in the hue of the skin, and
gaunt and unearthly appearance of the whole form, which no being of this
world was ever seen to wear. “Who are you?” said the new tenant, turning
very pale; poising the poker in his hand, however, and taking a very
decent aim at the countenance of the figure. “Who are you?” “Don’t throw
that poker at me,” replied the form; “if you hurled it with ever so sure
an aim, it would pass through me, without resistance, and expend its
force on the wood behind. I am a spirit.” “And pray, what do you want
here?” faltered the tenant. “In this room,” replied the apparition, “my
worldly ruin was worked, and I and my children beggared. In this press,
the papers in a long, long suit, which accumulated for years, were
deposited. In this room, when I had died of grief, and long-deferred
hope, two wily harpies divided the wealth for which I had contested
during a wretched existence, and of which, at last, not one farthing was
left for my unhappy descendants. I terrified them from the spot, and
since that day have prowled by night--the only period at which I can
revisit the earth--about the scenes of my long-protracted misery. This
apartment is mine: leave it to me.” “If you insist upon making your
appearance here,” said the tenant, who had had time to collect his
presence of mind during this prosy statement of the ghost’s, “I shall
give up possession with the greatest pleasure; but I should like to ask
you one question, if you will allow me.” “Say on,” said the apparition
sternly. “Well,” said the tenant, “I don’t apply the observation
personally to you, because it is equally applicable to most of the
ghosts I ever heard of; but it does appear to me somewhat inconsistent,
that when you have an opportunity of visiting the fairest spots of
earth--for I suppose space is nothing to you--you should always return
exactly to the very places where you have been most miserable.” “Egad,
that’s very true; I never thought of that before,” said the ghost. “You
see, Sir,” pursued the tenant, “this is a very uncomfortable room. From
the appearance of that press, I should be disposed to say that it is not
wholly free from bugs; and I really think you might find much more
comfortable quarters: to say nothing of the climate of London, which is
extremely disagreeable.” “You are very right, Sir,” said the ghost
politely, “it never struck me till now; I’ll try change of air
directly”--and, in fact, he began to vanish as he spoke; his legs,
indeed, had quite disappeared. “And if, Sir,” said the tenant, calling
after him, “if you _would _have the goodness to suggest to the other
ladies and gentlemen who are now engaged in haunting old empty houses,
that they might be much more comfortable elsewhere, you will confer a
very great benefit on society.” “I will,” replied the ghost; “we must be
dull fellows--very dull fellows, indeed; I can’t imagine how we can have
been so stupid.” With these words, the spirit disappeared; and what is
rather remarkable,’ added the old man, with a shrewd look round the
table, ‘he never came back again.’

‘That ain’t bad, if it’s true,’ said the man in the Mosaic studs,
lighting a fresh cigar.

‘_If_!’ exclaimed the old man, with a look of excessive contempt. ‘I
suppose,’ he added, turning to Lowten, ‘he’ll say next, that my story
about the queer client we had, when I was in an attorney’s office, is
not true either--I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘I shan’t venture to say anything at all about it, seeing that I never
heard the story,’ observed the owner of the Mosaic decorations.

‘I wish you would repeat it, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Ah, do,’ said Lowten, ‘nobody has heard it but me, and I have nearly
forgotten it.’

The old man looked round the table, and leered more horribly than ever,
as if in triumph, at the attention which was depicted in every face.
Then rubbing his chin with his hand, and looking up to the ceiling as if
to recall the circumstances to his memory, he began as follows:--


THE OLD MAN’S TALE ABOUT THE QUEER CLIENT

‘It matters little,’ said the old man, ‘where, or how, I picked up this
brief history. If I were to relate it in the order in which it reached
me, I should commence in the middle, and when I had arrived at the
conclusion, go back for a beginning. It is enough for me to say that
some of its circumstances passed before my own eyes; for the remainder I
know them to have happened, and there are some persons yet living, who
will remember them but too well.

‘In the Borough High Street, near St. George’s Church, and on the same
side of the way, stands, as most people know, the smallest of our
debtors’ prisons, the Marshalsea. Although in later times it has been a
very different place from the sink of filth and dirt it once was, even
its improved condition holds out but little temptation to the
extravagant, or consolation to the improvident. The condemned felon has
as good a yard for air and exercise in Newgate, as the insolvent debtor
in the Marshalsea Prison. [Better. But this is past, in a better age,
and the prison exists no longer.]

‘It may be my fancy, or it may be that I cannot separate the place from
the old recollections associated with it, but this part of London I
cannot bear. The street is broad, the shops are spacious, the noise of
passing vehicles, the footsteps of a perpetual stream of people--all the
busy sounds of traffic, resound in it from morn to midnight; but the
streets around are mean and close; poverty and debauchery lie festering
in the crowded alleys; want and misfortune are pent up in the narrow
prison; an air of gloom and dreariness seems, in my eyes at least, to
hang about the scene, and to impart to it a squalid and sickly hue.

‘Many eyes, that have long since been closed in the grave, have looked
round upon that scene lightly enough, when entering the gate of the old
Marshalsea Prison for the first time; for despair seldom comes with the
first severe shock of misfortune. A man has confidence in untried
friends, he remembers the many offers of service so freely made by his
boon companions when he wanted them not; he has hope--the hope of happy
inexperience--and however he may bend beneath the first shock, it
springs up in his bosom, and flourishes there for a brief space, until
it droops beneath the blight of disappointment and neglect. How soon
have those same eyes, deeply sunken in the head, glared from faces
wasted with famine, and sallow from confinement, in days when it was no
figure of speech to say that debtors rotted in prison, with no hope of
release, and no prospect of liberty! The atrocity in its full extent no
longer exists, but there is enough of it left to give rise to
occurrences that make the heart bleed.

‘Twenty years ago, that pavement was worn with the footsteps of a mother
and child, who, day by day, so surely as the morning came, presented
themselves at the prison gate; often after a night of restless misery
and anxious thoughts, were they there, a full hour too soon, and then
the young mother turning meekly away, would lead the child to the old
bridge, and raising him in her arms to show him the glistening water,
tinted with the light of the morning’s sun, and stirring with all the
bustling preparations for business and pleasure that the river presented
at that early hour, endeavour to interest his thoughts in the objects
before him. But she would quickly set him down, and hiding her face in
her shawl, give vent to the tears that blinded her; for no expression of
interest or amusement lighted up his thin and sickly face. His
recollections were few enough, but they were all of one kind--all
connected with the poverty and misery of his parents. Hour after hour
had he sat on his mother’s knee, and with childish sympathy watched the
tears that stole down her face, and then crept quietly away into some
dark corner, and sobbed himself to sleep. The hard realities of the
world, with many of its worst privations--hunger and thirst, and cold
and want--had all come home to him, from the first dawnings of reason;
and though the form of childhood was there, its light heart, its merry
laugh, and sparkling eyes were wanting.

‘The father and mother looked on upon this, and upon each other, with
thoughts of agony they dared not breathe in words. The healthy, strong-
made man, who could have borne almost any fatigue of active exertion,
was wasting beneath the close confinement and unhealthy atmosphere of a
crowded prison. The slight and delicate woman was sinking beneath the
combined effects of bodily and mental illness. The child’s young heart
was breaking.

‘Winter came, and with it weeks of cold and heavy rain. The poor girl
had removed to a wretched apartment close to the spot of her husband’s
imprisonment; and though the change had been rendered necessary by their
increasing poverty, she was happier now, for she was nearer him. For two
months, she and her little companion watched the opening of the gate as
usual. One day she failed to come, for the first time. Another morning
arrived, and she came alone. The child was dead.

‘They little know, who coldly talk of the poor man’s bereavements, as a
happy release from pain to the departed, and a merciful relief from
expense to the survivor--they little know, I say, what the agony of
those bereavements is. A silent look of affection and regard when all
other eyes are turned coldly away--the consciousness that we possess the
sympathy and affection of one being when all others have deserted us--is
a hold, a stay, a comfort, in the deepest affliction, which no wealth
could purchase, or power bestow. The child had sat at his parents’ feet
for hours together, with his little hands patiently folded in each
other, and his thin wan face raised towards them. They had seen him pine
away, from day to day; and though his brief existence had been a joyless
one, and he was now removed to that peace and rest which, child as he
was, he had never known in this world, they were his parents, and his
loss sank deep into their souls.

‘It was plain to those who looked upon the mother’s altered face, that
death must soon close the scene of her adversity and trial. Her
husband’s fellow-prisoners shrank from obtruding on his grief and
misery, and left to himself alone, the small room he had previously
occupied in common with two companions. She shared it with him; and
lingering on without pain, but without hope, her life ebbed slowly away.

‘She had fainted one evening in her husband’s arms, and he had borne her
to the open window, to revive her with the air, when the light of the
moon falling full upon her face, showed him a change upon her features,
which made him stagger beneath her weight, like a helpless infant.

‘“Set me down, George,” she said faintly. He did so, and seating himself
beside her, covered his face with his hands, and burst into tears.

‘“It is very hard to leave you, George,” she said; “but it is God’s
will, and you must bear it for my sake. Oh! how I thank Him for having
taken our boy! He is happy, and in heaven now. What would he have done
here, without his mother!”

‘“You shall not die, Mary, you shall not die;” said the husband,
starting up. He paced hurriedly to and fro, striking his head with his
clenched fists; then reseating himself beside her, and supporting her in
his arms, added more calmly, “Rouse yourself, my dear girl. Pray, pray
do. You will revive yet.”

‘“Never again, George; never again,” said the dying woman. “Let them lay
me by my poor boy now, but promise me, that if ever you leave this
dreadful place, and should grow rich, you will have us removed to some
quiet country churchyard, a long, long way off--very far from here--
where we can rest in peace. Dear George, promise me you will.”

‘“I do, I do,” said the man, throwing himself passionately on his knees
before her. “Speak to me, Mary, another word; one look--but one!”

‘He ceased to speak: for the arm that clasped his neck grew stiff and
heavy. A deep sigh escaped from the wasted form before him; the lips
moved, and a smile played upon the face; but the lips were pallid, and
the smile faded into a rigid and ghastly stare. He was alone in the
world.

‘That night, in the silence and desolation of his miserable room, the
wretched man knelt down by the dead body of his wife, and called on God
to witness a terrible oath, that from that hour, he devoted himself to
revenge her death and that of his child; that thenceforth to the last
moment of his life, his whole energies should be directed to this one
object; that his revenge should be protracted and terrible; that his
hatred should be undying and inextinguishable; and should hunt its
object through the world.

‘The deepest despair, and passion scarcely human, had made such fierce
ravages on his face and form, in that one night, that his companions in
misfortune shrank affrighted from him as he passed by. His eyes were
bloodshot and heavy, his face a deadly white, and his body bent as if
with age. He had bitten his under lip nearly through in the violence of
his mental suffering, and the blood which had flowed from the wound had
trickled down his chin, and stained his shirt and neckerchief. No tear,
or sound of complaint escaped him; but the unsettled look, and
disordered haste with which he paced up and down the yard, denoted the
fever which was burning within.

‘It was necessary that his wife’s body should be removed from the
prison, without delay. He received the communication with perfect
calmness, and acquiesced in its propriety. Nearly all the inmates of the
prison had assembled to witness its removal; they fell back on either
side when the widower appeared; he walked hurriedly forward, and
stationed himself, alone, in a little railed area close to the lodge
gate, from whence the crowd, with an instinctive feeling of delicacy,
had retired. The rude coffin was borne slowly forward on men’s
shoulders. A dead silence pervaded the throng, broken only by the
audible lamentations of the women, and the shuffling steps of the
bearers on the stone pavement. They reached the spot where the bereaved
husband stood: and stopped. He laid his hand upon the coffin, and
mechanically adjusting the pall with which it was covered, motioned them
onward. The turnkeys in the prison lobby took off their hats as it
passed through, and in another moment the heavy gate closed behind it.
He looked vacantly upon the crowd, and fell heavily to the ground.

‘Although for many weeks after this, he was watched, night and day, in
the wildest ravings of fever, neither the consciousness of his loss, nor
the recollection of the vow he had made, ever left him for a moment.
Scenes changed before his eyes, place succeeded place, and event
followed event, in all the hurry of delirium; but they were all
connected in some way with the great object of his mind. He was sailing
over a boundless expanse of sea, with a blood-red sky above, and the
angry waters, lashed into fury beneath, boiling and eddying up, on every
side. There was another vessel before them, toiling and labouring in the
howling storm; her canvas fluttering in ribbons from the mast, and her
deck thronged with figures who were lashed to the sides, over which huge
waves every instant burst, sweeping away some devoted creatures into the
foaming sea. Onward they bore, amidst the roaring mass of water, with a
speed and force which nothing could resist; and striking the stem of the
foremost vessel, crushed her beneath their keel. From the huge whirlpool
which the sinking wreck occasioned, arose a shriek so loud and shrill--
the death-cry of a hundred drowning creatures, blended into one fierce
yell--that it rung far above the war-cry of the elements, and echoed,
and re-echoed till it seemed to pierce air, sky, and ocean. But what was
that--that old gray head that rose above the water’s surface, and with
looks of agony, and screams for aid, buffeted with the waves! One look,
and he had sprung from the vessel’s side, and with vigorous strokes was
swimming towards it. He reached it; he was close upon it. They were _his
_features. The old man saw him coming, and vainly strove to elude his
grasp. But he clasped him tight, and dragged him beneath the water.
Down, down with him, fifty fathoms down; his struggles grew fainter and
fainter, until they wholly ceased. He was dead; he had killed him, and
had kept his oath.

‘He was traversing the scorching sands of a mighty desert, barefoot and
alone. The sand choked and blinded him; its fine thin grains entered the
very pores of his skin, and irritated him almost to madness. Gigantic
masses of the same material, carried forward by the wind, and shone
through by the burning sun, stalked in the distance like pillars of
living fire. The bones of men, who had perished in the dreary waste, lay
scattered at his feet; a fearful light fell on everything around; so far
as the eye could reach, nothing but objects of dread and horror
presented themselves. Vainly striving to utter a cry of terror, with his
tongue cleaving to his mouth, he rushed madly forward. Armed with
supernatural strength, he waded through the sand, until, exhausted with
fatigue and thirst, he fell senseless on the earth. What fragrant
coolness revived him; what gushing sound was that? Water! It was indeed
a well; and the clear fresh stream was running at his feet. He drank
deeply of it, and throwing his aching limbs upon the bank, sank into a
delicious trance. The sound of approaching footsteps roused him. An old
gray-headed man tottered forward to slake his burning thirst. It was
_he_ again! He wound his arms round the old man’s body, and held him
back. He struggled, and shrieked for water--for but one drop of water to
save his life! But he held the old man firmly, and watched his agonies
with greedy eyes; and when his lifeless head fell forward on his bosom,
he rolled the corpse from him with his feet.

‘When the fever left him, and consciousness returned, he awoke to find
himself rich and free, to hear that the parent who would have let him
die in jail--_would_! who _had _let those who were far dearer to him
than his own existence die of want, and sickness of heart that medicine
cannot cure--had been found dead in his bed of down. He had had all the
heart to leave his son a beggar, but proud even of his health and
strength, had put off the act till it was too late, and now might gnash
his teeth in the other world, at the thought of the wealth his
remissness had left him. He awoke to this, and he awoke to more. To
recollect the purpose for which he lived, and to remember that his enemy
was his wife’s own father--the man who had cast him into prison, and
who, when his daughter and her child sued at his feet for mercy, had
spurned them from his door. Oh, how he cursed the weakness that
prevented him from being up, and active, in his scheme of vengeance!

‘He caused himself to be carried from the scene of his loss and misery,
and conveyed to a quiet residence on the sea-coast; not in the hope of
recovering his peace of mind or happiness, for both were fled for ever;
but to restore his prostrate energies, and meditate on his darling
object. And here, some evil spirit cast in his way the opportunity for
his first, most horrible revenge.

‘It was summer-time; and wrapped in his gloomy thoughts, he would issue
from his solitary lodgings early in the evening, and wandering along a
narrow path beneath the cliffs, to a wild and lonely spot that had
struck his fancy in his ramblings, seat himself on some fallen fragment
of the rock, and burying his face in his hands, remain there for hours--
sometimes until night had completely closed in, and the long shadows of
the frowning cliffs above his head cast a thick, black darkness on every
object near him.

‘He was seated here, one calm evening, in his old position, now and then
raising his head to watch the flight of a sea-gull, or carry his eye
along the glorious crimson path, which, commencing in the middle of the
ocean, seemed to lead to its very verge where the sun was setting, when
the profound stillness of the spot was broken by a loud cry for help; he
listened, doubtful of his having heard aright, when the cry was repeated
with even greater vehemence than before, and, starting to his feet, he
hastened in the direction whence it proceeded.

‘The tale told itself at once: some scattered garments lay on the beach;
a human head was just visible above the waves at a little distance from
the shore; and an old man, wringing his hands in agony, was running to
and fro, shrieking for assistance. The invalid, whose strength was now
sufficiently restored, threw off his coat, and rushed towards the sea,
with the intention of plunging in, and dragging the drowning man ashore.

‘“Hasten here, Sir, in God’s name; help, help, sir, for the love of
Heaven. He is my son, Sir, my only son!” said the old man frantically,
as he advanced to meet him. “My only son, Sir, and he is dying before
his father’s eyes!”

‘At the first word the old man uttered, the stranger checked himself in
his career, and, folding his arms, stood perfectly motionless.

‘“Great God!” exclaimed the old man, recoiling, “Heyling!”

‘The stranger smiled, and was silent.

‘“Heyling!” said the old man wildly; “my boy, Heyling, my dear boy,
look, look!” Gasping for breath, the miserable father pointed to the
spot where the young man was struggling for life.

‘“Hark!” said the old man. “He cries once more. He is alive yet.
Heyling, save him, save him!”

‘The stranger smiled again, and remained immovable as a statue.

‘“I have wronged you,” shrieked the old man, falling on his knees, and
clasping his hands together. “Be revenged; take my all, my life; cast me
into the water at your feet, and, if human nature can repress a
struggle, I will die, without stirring hand or foot. Do it, Heyling, do
it, but save my boy; he is so young, Heyling, so young to die!”

‘“Listen,” said the stranger, grasping the old man fiercely by the
wrist; “I will have life for life, and here is _one_. _My_ child died,
before his father’s eyes, a far more agonising and painful death than
that young slanderer of his sister’s worth is meeting while I speak. You
laughed--laughed in your daughter’s face, where death had already set
his hand--at our sufferings, then. What think you of them now! See
there, see there!”

‘As the stranger spoke, he pointed to the sea. A faint cry died away
upon its surface; the last powerful struggle of the dying man agitated
the rippling waves for a few seconds; and the spot where he had gone
down into his early grave, was undistinguishable from the surrounding
water.

‘Three years had elapsed, when a gentleman alighted from a private
carriage at the door of a London attorney, then well known as a man of
no great nicety in his professional dealings, and requested a private
interview on business of importance. Although evidently not past the
prime of life, his face was pale, haggard, and dejected; and it did not
require the acute perception of the man of business, to discern at a
glance, that disease or suffering had done more to work a change in his
appearance, than the mere hand of time could have accomplished in twice
the period of his whole life.

‘“I wish you to undertake some legal business for me,” said the
stranger.

‘The attorney bowed obsequiously, and glanced at a large packet which
the gentleman carried in his hand. His visitor observed the look, and
proceeded.

‘“It is no common business,” said he; “nor have these papers reached my
hands without long trouble and great expense.”

‘The attorney cast a still more anxious look at the packet; and his
visitor, untying the string that bound it, disclosed a quantity of
promissory notes, with copies of deeds, and other documents.

‘“Upon these papers,” said the client, “the man whose name they bear,
has raised, as you will see, large sums of money, for years past. There
was a tacit understanding between him and the men into whose hands they
originally went--and from whom I have by degrees purchased the whole,
for treble and quadruple their nominal value--that these loans should be
from time to time renewed, until a given period had elapsed. Such an
understanding is nowhere expressed. He has sustained many losses of
late; and these obligations accumulating upon him at once, would crush
him to the earth.”

‘“The whole amount is many thousands of pounds,” said the attorney,
looking over the papers.

‘“It is,” said the client.

‘“What are we to do?” inquired the man of business.

‘“Do!” replied the client, with sudden vehemence. “Put every engine of
the law in force, every trick that ingenuity can devise and rascality
execute; fair means and foul; the open oppression of the law, aided by
all the craft of its most ingenious practitioners. I would have him die
a harassing and lingering death. Ruin him, seize and sell his lands and
goods, drive him from house and home, and drag him forth a beggar in his
old age, to die in a common jail.”

‘“But the costs, my dear Sir, the costs of all this,” reasoned the
attorney, when he had recovered from his momentary surprise. “If the
defendant be a man of straw, who is to pay the costs, Sir?”

‘“Name any sum,” said the stranger, his hand trembling so violently with
excitement, that he could scarcely hold the pen he seized as he spoke--
“any sum, and it is yours. Don’t be afraid to name it, man. I shall not
think it dear, if you gain my object.”

‘The attorney named a large sum, at hazard, as the advance he should
require to secure himself against the possibility of loss; but more with
the view of ascertaining how far his client was really disposed to go,
than with any idea that he would comply with the demand. The stranger
wrote a cheque upon his banker, for the whole amount, and left him.

‘The draft was duly honoured, and the attorney, finding that his strange
client might be safely relied upon, commenced his work in earnest. For
more than two years afterwards, Mr. Heyling would sit whole days
together, in the office, poring over the papers as they accumulated, and
reading again and again, his eyes gleaming with joy, the letters of
remonstrance, the prayers for a little delay, the representations of the
certain ruin in which the opposite party must be involved, which poured
in, as suit after suit, and process after process, was commenced. To all
applications for a brief indulgence, there was but one reply--the money
must be paid. Land, house, furniture, each in its turn, was taken under
some one of the numerous executions which were issued; and the old man
himself would have been immured in prison had he not escaped the
vigilance of the officers, and fled.

‘The implacable animosity of Heyling, so far from being satiated by the
success of his persecution, increased a hundredfold with the ruin he
inflicted. On being informed of the old man’s flight, his fury was
unbounded. He gnashed his teeth with rage, tore the hair from his head,
and assailed with horrid imprecations the men who had been intrusted
with the writ. He was only restored to comparative calmness by repeated
assurances of the certainty of discovering the fugitive. Agents were
sent in quest of him, in all directions; every stratagem that could be
invented was resorted to, for the purpose of discovering his place of
retreat; but it was all in vain. Half a year had passed over, and he was
still undiscovered.

‘At length late one night, Heyling, of whom nothing had been seen for
many weeks before, appeared at his attorney’s private residence, and
sent up word that a gentleman wished to see him instantly. Before the
attorney, who had recognised his voice from above stairs, could order
the servant to admit him, he had rushed up the staircase, and entered
the drawing-room pale and breathless. Having closed the door, to prevent
being overheard, he sank into a chair, and said, in a low voice--

‘“Hush! I have found him at last.”

‘“No!” said the attorney. “Well done, my dear sir, well done.”

‘“He lies concealed in a wretched lodging in Camden Town,” said Heyling.
“Perhaps it is as well we _did _lose sight of him, for he has been
living alone there, in the most abject misery, all the time, and he is
poor--very poor.”

‘“Very good,” said the attorney. “You will have the caption made to-
morrow, of course?”

‘“Yes,” replied Heyling. “Stay! No! The next day. You are surprised at
my wishing to postpone it,” he added, with a ghastly smile; “but I had
forgotten. The next day is an anniversary in his life: let it be done
then.”

‘“Very good,” said the attorney. “Will you write down instructions for
the officer?”

‘“No; let him meet me here, at eight in the evening, and I will
accompany him myself.”

‘They met on the appointed night, and, hiring a hackney-coach, directed
the driver to stop at that corner of the old Pancras Road, at which
stands the parish workhouse. By the time they alighted there, it was
quite dark; and, proceeding by the dead wall in front of the Veterinary
Hospital, they entered a small by-street, which is, or was at that time,
called Little College Street, and which, whatever it may be now, was in
those days a desolate place enough, surrounded by little else than
fields and ditches.

‘Having drawn the travelling-cap he had on half over his face, and
muffled himself in his cloak, Heyling stopped before the meanest-looking
house in the street, and knocked gently at the door. It was at once
opened by a woman, who dropped a curtsey of recognition, and Heyling,
whispering the officer to remain below, crept gently upstairs, and,
opening the door of the front room, entered at once.

‘The object of his search and his unrelenting animosity, now a decrepit
old man, was seated at a bare deal table, on which stood a miserable
candle. He started on the entrance of the stranger, and rose feebly to
his feet.

‘“What now, what now?” said the old man. “What fresh misery is this?
What do you want here?”

‘“A word with _you_,” replied Heyling. As he spoke, he seated himself at
the other end of the table, and, throwing off his cloak and cap,
disclosed his features.

‘The old man seemed instantly deprived of speech. He fell backward in
his chair, and, clasping his hands together, gazed on the apparition
with a mingled look of abhorrence and fear.


‘“This day six years,” said Heyling, “I claimed the life you owed me for
my child’s. Beside the lifeless form of your daughter, old man, I swore
to live a life of revenge. I have never swerved from my purpose for a
moment’s space; but if I had, one thought of her uncomplaining,
suffering look, as she drooped away, or of the starving face of our
innocent child, would have nerved me to my task. My first act of
requital you well remember: this is my last.”

‘The old man shivered, and his hands dropped powerless by his side.

‘“I leave England to-morrow,” said Heyling, after a moment’s pause. “To-
night I consign you to the living death to which you devoted her--a
hopeless prison--”

‘He raised his eyes to the old man’s countenance, and paused. He lifted
the light to his face, set it gently down, and left the apartment.

‘“You had better see to the old man,” he said to the woman, as he opened
the door, and motioned the officer to follow him into the street. “I
think he is ill.” The woman closed the door, ran hastily upstairs, and
found him lifeless.

‘Beneath a plain gravestone, in one of the most peaceful and secluded
churchyards in Kent, where wild flowers mingle with the grass, and the
soft landscape around forms the fairest spot in the garden of England,
lie the bones of the young mother and her gentle child. But the ashes of
the father do not mingle with theirs; nor, from that night forward, did
the attorney ever gain the remotest clue to the subsequent history of
his queer client.’


As the old man concluded his tale, he advanced to a peg in one corner,
and taking down his hat and coat, put them on with great deliberation;
and, without saying another word, walked slowly away. As the gentleman
with the Mosaic studs had fallen asleep, and the major part of the
company were deeply occupied in the humorous process of dropping melted
tallow-grease into his brandy-and-water, Mr. Pickwick departed
unnoticed, and having settled his own score, and that of Mr. Weller,
issued forth, in company with that gentleman, from beneath the portal of
the Magpie and Stump.



CHAPTER XXII. MR. PICKWICK JOURNEYS TO IPSWICH AND MEETS WITH A ROMANTIC
ADVENTURE WITH A MIDDLE-AGED LADY IN YELLOW CURL-PAPERS

That ‘ere your governor’s luggage, Sammy?’ inquired Mr. Weller of his
affectionate son, as he entered the yard of the Bull Inn, Whitechapel,
with a travelling-bag and a small portmanteau.

‘You might ha’ made a worser guess than that, old feller,’ replied Mr.
Weller the younger, setting down his burden in the yard, and sitting
himself down upon it afterwards. ‘The governor hisself’ll be down here
presently.’

‘He’s a-cabbin’ it, I suppose?’ said the father.

‘Yes, he’s a havin’ two mile o’ danger at eight-pence,’ responded the
son. ‘How’s mother-in-law this mornin’?’

‘Queer, Sammy, queer,’ replied the elder Mr. Weller, with impressive
gravity. ‘She’s been gettin’ rayther in the Methodistical order lately,
Sammy; and she is uncommon pious, to be sure. She’s too good a creetur
for me, Sammy. I feel I don’t deserve her.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr. Samuel. ‘that’s wery self-denyin’ o’ you.’

‘Wery,’ replied his parent, with a sigh. ‘She’s got hold o’ some
inwention for grown-up people being born again, Sammy--the new birth, I
think they calls it. I should wery much like to see that system in
haction, Sammy. I should wery much like to see your mother-in-law born
again. Wouldn’t I put her out to nurse!’

‘What do you think them women does t’other day,’ continued Mr. Weller,
after a short pause, during which he had significantly struck the side
of his nose with his forefinger some half-dozen times. ‘What do you
think they does, t’other day, Sammy?’

‘Don’t know,’ replied Sam, ‘what?’

‘Goes and gets up a grand tea drinkin’ for a feller they calls their
shepherd,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘I was a-standing starin’ in at the pictur
shop down at our place, when I sees a little bill about it; “tickets
half-a-crown. All applications to be made to the committee. Secretary,
Mrs. Weller”; and when I got home there was the committee a-sittin’ in
our back parlour. Fourteen women; I wish you could ha’ heard ‘em, Sammy.
There they was, a-passin’ resolutions, and wotin’ supplies, and all
sorts o’ games. Well, what with your mother-in-law a-worrying me to go,
and what with my looking for’ard to seein’ some queer starts if I did, I
put my name down for a ticket; at six o’clock on the Friday evenin’ I
dresses myself out wery smart, and off I goes with the old ‘ooman, and
up we walks into a fust-floor where there was tea-things for thirty, and
a whole lot o’ women as begins whisperin’ to one another, and lookin’ at
me, as if they’d never seen a rayther stout gen’l’m’n of eight-and-fifty
afore. By and by, there comes a great bustle downstairs, and a lanky
chap with a red nose and a white neckcloth rushes up, and sings out,
“Here’s the shepherd a-coming to wisit his faithful flock;” and in comes
a fat chap in black, vith a great white face, a-smilin’ avay like
clockwork. Such goin’s on, Sammy! “The kiss of peace,” says the
shepherd; and then he kissed the women all round, and ven he’d done, the
man vith the red nose began. I was just a-thinkin’ whether I hadn’t
better begin too--‘specially as there was a wery nice lady a-sittin’
next me--ven in comes the tea, and your mother-in-law, as had been
makin’ the kettle bile downstairs. At it they went, tooth and nail. Such
a precious loud hymn, Sammy, while the tea was a brewing; such a grace,
such eatin’ and drinkin’! I wish you could ha’ seen the shepherd walkin’
into the ham and muffins. I never see such a chap to eat and drink--
never. The red-nosed man warn’t by no means the sort of person you’d
like to grub by contract, but he was nothin’ to the shepherd. Well;
arter the tea was over, they sang another hymn, and then the shepherd
began to preach: and wery well he did it, considerin’ how heavy them
muffins must have lied on his chest. Presently he pulls up, all of a
sudden, and hollers out, “Where is the sinner; where is the mis’rable
sinner?” Upon which, all the women looked at me, and began to groan as
if they was a-dying. I thought it was rather sing’ler, but howsoever, I
says nothing. Presently he pulls up again, and lookin’ wery hard at me,
says, “Where is the sinner; where is the mis’rable sinner?” and all the
women groans again, ten times louder than afore. I got rather savage at
this, so I takes a step or two for’ard and says, “My friend,” says I,
“did you apply that ‘ere obserwation to me?” ‘Stead of beggin’ my pardon
as any gen’l’m’n would ha’ done, he got more abusive than ever:--called
me a wessel, Sammy--a wessel of wrath--and all sorts o’ names. So my
blood being reg’larly up, I first gave him two or three for himself, and
then two or three more to hand over to the man with the red nose, and
walked off. I wish you could ha’ heard how the women screamed, Sammy,
ven they picked up the shepherd from underneath the table--Hollo! here’s
the governor, the size of life.’

As Mr. Weller spoke, Mr. Pickwick dismounted from a cab, and entered the
yard.

‘Fine mornin’, Sir,’ said Mr. Weller, senior.

‘Beautiful indeed,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Beautiful indeed,’ echoes a red-haired man with an inquisitive nose and
green spectacles, who had unpacked himself from a cab at the same moment
as Mr. Pickwick. ‘Going to Ipswich, Sir?’

‘I am,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Extraordinary coincidence. So am I.’

Mr. Pickwick bowed.

‘Going outside?’ said the red-haired man.

Mr. Pickwick bowed again.

‘Bless my soul, how remarkable--I am going outside, too,’ said the red-
haired man; ‘we are positively going together.’ And the red-haired man,
who was an important-looking, sharp-nosed, mysterious-spoken personage,
with a bird-like habit of giving his head a jerk every time he said
anything, smiled as if he had made one of the strangest discoveries that
ever fell to the lot of human wisdom.

‘I am happy in the prospect of your company, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Ah,’ said the new-comer, ‘it’s a good thing for both of us, isn’t it?
Company, you see--company--is--is--it’s a very different thing from
solitude--ain’t it?’

‘There’s no denying that ‘ere,’ said Mr. Weller, joining in the
conversation, with an affable smile. ‘That’s what I call a self-evident
proposition, as the dog’s-meat man said, when the housemaid told him he
warn’t a gentleman.’

‘Ah,’ said the red-haired man, surveying Mr. Weller from head to foot
with a supercilious look. ‘Friend of yours, sir?’

‘Not exactly a friend,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, in a low tone. ‘The fact
is, he is my servant, but I allow him to take a good many liberties;
for, between ourselves, I flatter myself he is an original, and I am
rather proud of him.’

‘Ah,’ said the red-haired man, ‘that, you see, is a matter of taste. I
am not fond of anything original; I don’t like it; don’t see the
necessity for it. What’s your name, sir?’

‘Here is my card, sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, much amused by the
abruptness of the question, and the singular manner of the stranger.

‘Ah,’ said the red-haired man, placing the card in his pocket-book,
‘Pickwick; very good. I like to know a man’s name, it saves so much
trouble. That’s my card, sir. Magnus, you will perceive, sir--Magnus is
my name. It’s rather a good name, I think, sir.’

‘A very good name, indeed,’ said Mr. Pickwick, wholly unable to repress
a smile.

‘Yes, I think it is,’ resumed Mr. Magnus. ‘There’s a good name before
it, too, you will observe. Permit me, sir--if you hold the card a little
slanting, this way, you catch the light upon the up-stroke. There--Peter
Magnus--sounds well, I think, sir.’

‘Very,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Curious circumstance about those initials, sir,’ said Mr. Magnus. ‘You
will observe--P.M.--post meridian. In hasty notes to intimate
acquaintance, I sometimes sign myself “Afternoon.” It amuses my friends
very much, Mr. Pickwick.’

‘It is calculated to afford them the highest gratification, I should
conceive,’ said Mr. Pickwick, rather envying the ease with which Mr.
Magnus’s friends were entertained.

‘Now, gen’l’m’n,’ said the hostler, ‘coach is ready, if you please.’

‘Is all my luggage in?’ inquired Mr. Magnus.

‘All right, sir.’

‘Is the red bag in?’

‘All right, Sir.’

‘And the striped bag?’

‘Fore boot, Sir.’

‘And the brown-paper parcel?’

‘Under the seat, Sir.’

‘And the leather hat-box?’

‘They’re all in, Sir.’

‘Now, will you get up?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Excuse me,’ replied Magnus, standing on the wheel. ‘Excuse me, Mr.
Pickwick. I cannot consent to get up, in this state of uncertainty. I am
quite satisfied from that man’s manner, that the leather hat-box is not
in.’

The solemn protestations of the hostler being wholly unavailing, the
leather hat-box was obliged to be raked up from the lowest depth of the
boot, to satisfy him that it had been safely packed; and after he had
been assured on this head, he felt a solemn presentiment, first, that
the red bag was mislaid, and next that the striped bag had been stolen,
and then that the brown-paper parcel ‘had come untied.’ At length when
he had received ocular demonstration of the groundless nature of each
and every of these suspicions, he consented to climb up to the roof of
the coach, observing that now he had taken everything off his mind, he
felt quite comfortable and happy.

‘You’re given to nervousness, ain’t you, Sir?’ inquired Mr. Weller,
senior, eyeing the stranger askance, as he mounted to his place.

‘Yes; I always am rather about these little matters,’ said the stranger,
‘but I am all right now--quite right.’

‘Well, that’s a blessin’, said Mr. Weller. ‘Sammy, help your master up
to the box; t’other leg, Sir, that’s it; give us your hand, Sir. Up with
you. You was a lighter weight when you was a boy, sir.’

True enough, that, Mr. Weller,’ said the breathless Mr. Pickwick good-
humouredly, as he took his seat on the box beside him.

‘Jump up in front, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘Now Villam, run ‘em out.
Take care o’ the archvay, gen’l’m’n. “Heads,” as the pieman says.
That’ll do, Villam. Let ‘em alone.’ And away went the coach up
Whitechapel, to the admiration of the whole population of that pretty
densely populated quarter.

‘Not a wery nice neighbourhood, this, Sir,’ said Sam, with a touch of
the hat, which always preceded his entering into conversation with his
master.

‘It is not indeed, Sam,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, surveying the crowded and
filthy street through which they were passing.

‘It’s a wery remarkable circumstance, Sir,’ said Sam, ‘that poverty and
oysters always seem to go together.’

‘I don’t understand you, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘What I mean, sir,’ said Sam, ‘is, that the poorer a place is, the
greater call there seems to be for oysters. Look here, sir; here’s a
oyster-stall to every half-dozen houses. The street’s lined vith ‘em.
Blessed if I don’t think that ven a man’s wery poor, he rushes out of
his lodgings, and eats oysters in reg’lar desperation.’

‘To be sure he does,’ said Mr. Weller, senior; ‘and it’s just the same
vith pickled salmon!’

‘Those are two very remarkable facts, which never occurred to me
before,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘The very first place we stop at, I’ll make
a note of them.’

By this time they had reached the turnpike at Mile End; a profound
silence prevailed until they had got two or three miles farther on, when
Mr. Weller, senior, turning suddenly to Mr. Pickwick, said--

‘Wery queer life is a pike-keeper’s, sir.’

‘A what?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘A pike-keeper.’

‘What do you mean by a pike-keeper?’ inquired Mr. Peter Magnus.

‘The old ‘un means a turnpike-keeper, gen’l’m’n,’ observed Mr. Samuel
Weller, in explanation.

‘Oh,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I see. Yes; very curious life. Very
uncomfortable.’

‘They’re all on ‘em men as has met vith some disappointment in life,’
said Mr. Weller, senior.

‘Ay, ay,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes. Consequence of vich, they retires from the world, and shuts
themselves up in pikes; partly with the view of being solitary, and
partly to rewenge themselves on mankind by takin’ tolls.’

‘Dear me,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I never knew that before.’

‘Fact, Sir,’ said Mr. Weller; ‘if they was gen’l’m’n, you’d call ‘em
misanthropes, but as it is, they only takes to pike-keepin’.’

With such conversation, possessing the inestimable charm of blending
amusement with instruction, did Mr. Weller beguile the tediousness of
the journey, during the greater part of the day. Topics of conversation
were never wanting, for even when any pause occurred in Mr. Weller’s
loquacity, it was abundantly supplied by the desire evinced by Mr.
Magnus to make himself acquainted with the whole of the personal history
of his fellow-travellers, and his loudly-expressed anxiety at every
stage, respecting the safety and well-being of the two bags, the leather
hat-box, and the brown-paper parcel.

In the main street of Ipswich, on the left-hand side of the way, a short
distance after you have passed through the open space fronting the Town
Hall, stands an inn known far and wide by the appellation of the Great
White Horse, rendered the more conspicuous by a stone statue of some
rampacious animal with flowing mane and tail, distantly resembling an
insane cart-horse, which is elevated above the principal door. The Great
White Horse is famous in the neighbourhood, in the same degree as a
prize ox, or a county-paper-chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig--for its
enormous size. Never was such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such
clusters of mouldy, ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens
for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one roof, as are collected
together between the four walls of the Great White Horse at Ipswich.

It was at the door of this overgrown tavern that the London coach
stopped, at the same hour every evening; and it was from this same
London coach that Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller, and Mr. Peter Magnus
dismounted, on the particular evening to which this chapter of our
history bears reference.

‘Do you stop here, sir?’ inquired Mr. Peter Magnus, when the striped
bag, and the red bag, and the brown-paper parcel, and the leather hat-
box, had all been deposited in the passage. ‘Do you stop here, sir?’

‘I do,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Dear me,’ said Mr. Magnus, ‘I never knew anything like these
extraordinary coincidences. Why, I stop here too. I hope we dine
together?’

‘With pleasure,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘I am not quite certain whether I
have any friends here or not, though. Is there any gentleman of the name
of Tupman here, waiter?’

A corpulent man, with a fortnight’s napkin under his arm, and coeval
stockings on his legs, slowly desisted from his occupation of staring
down the street, on this question being put to him by Mr. Pickwick; and,
after minutely inspecting that gentleman’s appearance, from the crown of
his hat to the lowest button of his gaiters, replied emphatically--

‘No!’

‘Nor any gentleman of the name of Snodgrass?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘No!’

‘Nor Winkle?’

‘No!’

‘My friends have not arrived to-day, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘We will
dine alone, then. Show us a private room, waiter.’

On this request being preferred, the corpulent man condescended to order
the boots to bring in the gentlemen’s luggage; and preceding them down a
long, dark passage, ushered them into a large, badly-furnished
apartment, with a dirty grate, in which a small fire was making a
wretched attempt to be cheerful, but was fast sinking beneath the
dispiriting influence of the place. After the lapse of an hour, a bit of
fish and a steak was served up to the travellers, and when the dinner
was cleared away, Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Peter Magnus drew their chairs up
to the fire, and having ordered a bottle of the worst possible port
wine, at the highest possible price, for the good of the house, drank
brandy-and-water for their own.

Mr. Peter Magnus was naturally of a very communicative disposition, and
the brandy-and-water operated with wonderful effect in warming into life
the deepest hidden secrets of his bosom. After sundry accounts of
himself, his family, his connections, his friends, his jokes, his
business, and his brothers (most talkative men have a great deal to say
about their brothers), Mr. Peter Magnus took a view of Mr. Pickwick
through his coloured spectacles for several minutes, and then said, with
an air of modesty--

‘And what do you think--what _do_ you think, Mr. Pickwick--I have come
down here for?’

‘Upon my word,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘it is wholly impossible for me to
guess; on business, perhaps.’

‘Partly right, Sir,’ replied Mr. Peter Magnus, ‘but partly wrong at the
same time; try again, Mr. Pickwick.’

‘Really,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I must throw myself on your mercy, to tell
me or not, as you may think best; for I should never guess, if I were to
try all night.’

‘Why, then, he-he-he!’ said Mr. Peter Magnus, with a bashful titter,
‘what should you think, Mr. Pickwick, if I had come down here to make a
proposal, Sir, eh? He, he, he!’

‘Think! That you are very likely to succeed,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, with
one of his beaming smiles.

‘Ah!’ said Mr. Magnus. ‘But do you really think so, Mr. Pickwick? Do
you, though?’

‘Certainly,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘No; but you’re joking, though.’

‘I am not, indeed.’

‘Why, then,’ said Mr. Magnus, ‘to let you into a little secret, I think
so too. I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Pickwick, although I’m dreadful
jealous by nature--horrid--that the lady is in this house.’ Here Mr.
Magnus took off his spectacles, on purpose to wink, and then put them on
again.

‘That’s what you were running out of the room for, before dinner, then,
so often,’ said Mr. Pickwick archly.

‘Hush! Yes, you’re right, that was it; not such a fool as to see her,
though.’

‘No!’

‘No; wouldn’t do, you know, after having just come off a journey. Wait
till to-morrow, sir; double the chance then. Mr. Pickwick, Sir, there is
a suit of clothes in that bag, and a hat in that box, which, I expect,
in the effect they will produce, will be invaluable to me, sir.’

‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes; you must have observed my anxiety about them to-day. I do not
believe that such another suit of clothes, and such a hat, could be
bought for money, Mr. Pickwick.’

Mr. Pickwick congratulated the fortunate owner of the irresistible
garments on their acquisition; and Mr. Peter Magnus remained a few
moments apparently absorbed in contemplation.

‘She’s a fine creature,’ said Mr. Magnus.

‘Is she?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Very,’ said Mr. Magnus. ‘Very. She lives about twenty miles from here,
Mr. Pickwick. I heard she would be here to-night and all to-morrow
forenoon, and came down to seize the opportunity. I think an inn is a
good sort of a place to propose to a single woman in, Mr. Pickwick. She
is more likely to feel the loneliness of her situation in travelling,
perhaps, than she would be at home. What do you think, Mr. Pickwick?’

‘I think it is very probable,’ replied that gentleman.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Pickwick,’ said Mr. Peter Magnus, ‘but I am
naturally rather curious; what may you have come down here for?’

‘On a far less pleasant errand, Sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, the colour
mounting to his face at the recollection. ‘I have come down here, Sir,
to expose the treachery and falsehood of an individual, upon whose truth
and honour I placed implicit reliance.’

‘Dear me,’ said Mr. Peter Magnus, ‘that’s very unpleasant. It is a lady,
I presume? Eh? ah! Sly, Mr. Pickwick, sly. Well, Mr. Pickwick, sir, I
wouldn’t probe your feelings for the world. Painful subjects, these,
sir, very painful. Don’t mind me, Mr. Pickwick, if you wish to give vent
to your feelings. I know what it is to be jilted, Sir; I have endured
that sort of thing three or four times.’

‘I am much obliged to you, for your condolence on what you presume to be
my melancholy case,’ said Mr. Pickwick, winding up his watch, and laying
it on the table, ‘but--’

‘No, no,’ said Mr. Peter Magnus, ‘not a word more; it’s a painful
subject. I see, I see. What’s the time, Mr. Pickwick?’

Past twelve.’

‘Dear me, it’s time to go to bed. It will never do, sitting here. I
shall be pale to-morrow, Mr. Pickwick.’

At the bare notion of such a calamity, Mr. Peter Magnus rang the bell
for the chambermaid; and the striped bag, the red bag, the leathern hat-
box, and the brown-paper parcel, having been conveyed to his bedroom, he
retired in company with a japanned candlestick, to one side of the
house, while Mr. Pickwick, and another japanned candlestick, were
conducted through a multitude of tortuous windings, to another.

‘This is your room, sir,’ said the chambermaid.

‘Very well,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, looking round him. It was a tolerably
large double-bedded room, with a fire; upon the whole, a more
comfortable-looking apartment than Mr. Pickwick’s short experience of
the accommodations of the Great White Horse had led him to expect.

‘Nobody sleeps in the other bed, of course,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Oh, no, Sir.’

‘Very good. Tell my servant to bring me up some hot water at half-past
eight in the morning, and that I shall not want him any more to-night.’

‘Yes, Sir,’ and bidding Mr. Pickwick good-night, the chambermaid
retired, and left him alone.

Mr. Pickwick sat himself down in a chair before the fire, and fell into
a train of rambling meditations. First he thought of his friends, and
wondered when they would join him; then his mind reverted to Mrs. Martha
Bardell; and from that lady it wandered, by a natural process, to the
dingy counting-house of Dodson & Fogg. From Dodson & Fogg’s it flew off
at a tangent, to the very centre of the history of the queer client; and
then it came back to the Great White Horse at Ipswich, with sufficient
clearness to convince Mr. Pickwick that he was falling asleep. So he
roused himself, and began to undress, when he recollected he had left
his watch on the table downstairs.

Now this watch was a special favourite with Mr. Pickwick, having been
carried about, beneath the shadow of his waistcoat, for a greater number
of years than we feel called upon to state at present. The possibility
of going to sleep, unless it were ticking gently beneath his pillow, or
in the watch-pocket over his head, had never entered Mr. Pickwick’s
brain. So as it was pretty late now, and he was unwilling to ring his
bell at that hour of the night, he slipped on his coat, of which he had
just divested himself, and taking the japanned candlestick in his hand,
walked quietly downstairs.

The more stairs Mr. Pickwick went down, the more stairs there seemed to
be to descend, and again and again, when Mr. Pickwick got into some
narrow passage, and began to congratulate himself on having gained the
ground-floor, did another flight of stairs appear before his astonished
eyes. At last he reached a stone hall, which he remembered to have seen
when he entered the house. Passage after passage did he explore; room
after room did he peep into; at length, as he was on the point of giving
up the search in despair, he opened the door of the identical room in
which he had spent the evening, and beheld his missing property on the
table.

Mr. Pickwick seized the watch in triumph, and proceeded to retrace his
steps to his bedchamber. If his progress downward had been attended with
difficulties and uncertainty, his journey back was infinitely more
perplexing. Rows of doors, garnished with boots of every shape, make,
and size, branched off in every possible direction. A dozen times did he
softly turn the handle of some bedroom door which resembled his own,
when a gruff cry from within of ‘Who the devil’s that?’ or ‘What do you
want here?’ caused him to steal away, on tiptoe, with a perfectly
marvellous celerity. He was reduced to the verge of despair, when an
open door attracted his attention. He peeped in. Right at last! There
were the two beds, whose situation he perfectly remembered, and the fire
still burning. His candle, not a long one when he first received it, had
flickered away in the drafts of air through which he had passed and sank
into the socket as he closed the door after him. ‘No matter,’ said Mr.
Pickwick, ‘I can undress myself just as well by the light of the fire.’

The bedsteads stood one on each side of the door; and on the inner side
of each was a little path, terminating in a rush-bottomed chair, just
wide enough to admit of a person’s getting into or out of bed, on that
side, if he or she thought proper. Having carefully drawn the curtains
of his bed on the outside, Mr. Pickwick sat down on the rush-bottomed
chair, and leisurely divested himself of his shoes and gaiters. He then
took off and folded up his coat, waistcoat, and neckcloth, and slowly
drawing on his tasselled nightcap, secured it firmly on his head, by
tying beneath his chin the strings which he always had attached to that
article of dress. It was at this moment that the absurdity of his recent
bewilderment struck upon his mind. Throwing himself back in the rush-
bottomed chair, Mr. Pickwick laughed to himself so heartily, that it
would have been quite delightful to any man of well-constituted mind to
have watched the smiles that expanded his amiable features as they shone
forth from beneath the nightcap.

‘It is the best idea,’ said Mr. Pickwick to himself, smiling till he
almost cracked the nightcap strings--‘it is the best idea, my losing
myself in this place, and wandering about these staircases, that I ever
heard of. Droll, droll, very droll.’ Here Mr. Pickwick smiled again, a
broader smile than before, and was about to continue the process of
undressing, in the best possible humour, when he was suddenly stopped by
a most unexpected interruption: to wit, the entrance into the room of
some person with a candle, who, after locking the door, advanced to the
dressing-table, and set down the light upon it.

The smile that played on Mr. Pickwick’s features was instantaneously
lost in a look of the most unbounded and wonder-stricken surprise. The
person, whoever it was, had come in so suddenly and with so little
noise, that Mr. Pickwick had had no time to call out, or oppose their
entrance. Who could it be? A robber? Some evil-minded person who had
seen him come upstairs with a handsome watch in his hand, perhaps. What
was he to do?

The only way in which Mr. Pickwick could catch a glimpse of his
mysterious visitor with the least danger of being seen himself, was by
creeping on to the bed, and peeping out from between the curtains on the
opposite side. To this manoeuvre he accordingly resorted. Keeping the
curtains carefully closed with his hand, so that nothing more of him
could be seen than his face and nightcap, and putting on his spectacles,
he mustered up courage and looked out.


Mr. Pickwick almost fainted with horror and dismay. Standing before the
dressing-glass was a middle-aged lady, in yellow curl-papers, busily
engaged in brushing what ladies call their ‘back-hair.’ However the
unconscious middle-aged lady came into that room, it was quite clear
that she contemplated remaining there for the night; for she had brought
a rushlight and shade with her, which, with praiseworthy precaution
against fire, she had stationed in a basin on the floor, where it was
glimmering away, like a gigantic lighthouse in a particularly small
piece of water.

‘Bless my soul!’ thought Mr. Pickwick, ‘what a dreadful thing!’

‘Hem!’ said the lady; and in went Mr. Pickwick’s head with automaton-
like rapidity.

‘I never met with anything so awful as this,’ thought poor Mr. Pickwick,
the cold perspiration starting in drops upon his nightcap. ‘Never. This
is fearful.’

It was quite impossible to resist the urgent desire to see what was
going forward. So out went Mr. Pickwick’s head again. The prospect was
worse than before. The middle-aged lady had finished arranging her hair;
had carefully enveloped it in a muslin nightcap with a small plaited
border; and was gazing pensively on the fire.

‘This matter is growing alarming,’ reasoned Mr. Pickwick with himself.
‘I can’t allow things to go on in this way. By the self-possession of
that lady, it is clear to me that I must have come into the wrong room.
If I call out she’ll alarm the house; but if I remain here the
consequences will be still more frightful.’

Mr. Pickwick, it is quite unnecessary to say, was one of the most modest
and delicate-minded of mortals. The very idea of exhibiting his nightcap
to a lady overpowered him, but he had tied those confounded strings in a
knot, and, do what he would, he couldn’t get it off. The disclosure must
be made. There was only one other way of doing it. He shrunk behind the
curtains, and called out very loudly--

‘Ha-hum!’

That the lady started at this unexpected sound was evident, by her
falling up against the rushlight shade; that she persuaded herself it
must have been the effect of imagination was equally clear, for when Mr.
Pickwick, under the impression that she had fainted away stone-dead with
fright, ventured to peep out again, she was gazing pensively on the fire
as before.

‘Most extraordinary female this,’ thought Mr. Pickwick, popping in
again. ‘Ha-hum!’

These last sounds, so like those in which, as legends inform us, the
ferocious giant Blunderbore was in the habit of expressing his opinion
that it was time to lay the cloth, were too distinctly audible to be
again mistaken for the workings of fancy.

‘Gracious Heaven!’ said the middle-aged lady, ‘what’s that?’

‘It’s--it’s--only a gentleman, ma’am,’ said Mr. Pickwick, from behind
the curtains.

‘A gentleman!’ said the lady, with a terrific scream.

‘It’s all over!’ thought Mr. Pickwick.

‘A strange man!’ shrieked the lady. Another instant and the house would
be alarmed. Her garments rustled as she rushed towards the door.

‘Ma’am,’ said Mr. Pickwick, thrusting out his head in the extremity of
his desperation, ‘ma’am!’

Now, although Mr. Pickwick was not actuated by any definite object in
putting out his head, it was instantaneously productive of a good
effect. The lady, as we have already stated, was near the door. She must
pass it, to reach the staircase, and she would most undoubtedly have
done so by this time, had not the sudden apparition of Mr. Pickwick’s
nightcap driven her back into the remotest corner of the apartment,
where she stood staring wildly at Mr. Pickwick, while Mr. Pickwick in
his turn stared wildly at her.

‘Wretch,’ said the lady, covering her eyes with her hands, ‘what do you
want here?’

‘Nothing, ma’am; nothing whatever, ma’am,’ said Mr. Pickwick earnestly.

‘Nothing!’ said the lady, looking up.

‘Nothing, ma’am, upon my honour,’ said Mr. Pickwick, nodding his head so
energetically, that the tassel of his nightcap danced again. ‘I am
almost ready to sink, ma’am, beneath the confusion of addressing a lady
in my nightcap (here the lady hastily snatched off hers), but I can’t
get it off, ma’am (here Mr. Pickwick gave it a tremendous tug, in proof
of the statement). It is evident to me, ma’am, now, that I have mistaken
this bedroom for my own. I had not been here five minutes, ma’am, when
you suddenly entered it.’

‘If this improbable story be really true, Sir,’ said the lady, sobbing
violently, ‘you will leave it instantly.’

‘I will, ma’am, with the greatest pleasure,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Instantly, sir,’ said the lady.

‘Certainly, ma’am,’ interposed Mr. Pickwick, very quickly. ‘Certainly,
ma’am. I--I--am very sorry, ma’am,’ said Mr. Pickwick, making his
appearance at the bottom of the bed, ‘to have been the innocent occasion
of this alarm and emotion; deeply sorry, ma’am.’

The lady pointed to the door. One excellent quality of Mr. Pickwick’s
character was beautifully displayed at this moment, under the most
trying circumstances. Although he had hastily put on his hat over his
nightcap, after the manner of the old patrol; although he carried his
shoes and gaiters in his hand, and his coat and waistcoat over his arm;
nothing could subdue his native politeness.

‘I am exceedingly sorry, ma’am,’ said Mr. Pickwick, bowing very low.

‘If you are, Sir, you will at once leave the room,’ said the lady.

‘Immediately, ma’am; this instant, ma’am,’ said Mr. Pickwick, opening
the door, and dropping both his shoes with a crash in so doing.

‘I trust, ma’am,’ resumed Mr. Pickwick, gathering up his shoes, and
turning round to bow again--‘I trust, ma’am, that my unblemished
character, and the devoted respect I entertain for your sex, will plead
as some slight excuse for this--’ But before Mr. Pickwick could conclude
the sentence, the lady had thrust him into the passage, and locked and
bolted the door behind him.

Whatever grounds of self-congratulation Mr. Pickwick might have for
having escaped so quietly from his late awkward situation, his present
position was by no means enviable. He was alone, in an open passage, in
a strange house in the middle of the night, half dressed; it was not to
be supposed that he could find his way in perfect darkness to a room
which he had been wholly unable to discover with a light, and if he made
the slightest noise in his fruitless attempts to do so, he stood every
chance of being shot at, and perhaps killed, by some wakeful traveller.
He had no resource but to remain where he was until daylight appeared.
So after groping his way a few paces down the passage, and, to his
infinite alarm, stumbling over several pairs of boots in so doing, Mr.
Pickwick crouched into a little recess in the wall, to wait for morning,
as philosophically as he might.

He was not destined, however, to undergo this additional trial of
patience; for he had not been long ensconced in his present concealment
when, to his unspeakable horror, a man, bearing a light, appeared at the
end of the passage. His horror was suddenly converted into joy, however,
when he recognised the form of his faithful attendant. It was indeed Mr.
Samuel Weller, who after sitting up thus late, in conversation with the
boots, who was sitting up for the mail, was now about to retire to rest.

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, suddenly appearing before him, ‘where’s my
bedroom?’

Mr. Weller stared at his master with the most emphatic surprise; and it
was not until the question had been repeated three several times, that
he turned round, and led the way to the long-sought apartment.

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, as he got into bed, ‘I have made one of the
most extraordinary mistakes to-night, that ever were heard of.’

‘Wery likely, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller drily.

‘But of this I am determined, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘that if I were
to stop in this house for six months, I would never trust myself about
it, alone, again.’

‘That’s the wery prudentest resolution as you could come to, Sir,’
replied Mr. Weller. ‘You rayther want somebody to look arter you, Sir,
when your judgment goes out a wisitin’.’

‘What do you mean by that, Sam?’ said Mr. Pickwick. He raised himself in
bed, and extended his hand, as if he were about to say something more;
but suddenly checking himself, turned round, and bade his valet ‘Good-
night.’

‘Good-night, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller. He paused when he got outside the
door--shook his head--walked on--stopped--snuffed the candle--shook his
head again--and finally proceeded slowly to his chamber, apparently
buried in the profoundest meditation.



CHAPTER XXIII. IN WHICH MR. SAMUEL WELLER BEGINS TO DEVOTE HIS ENERGIES
TO THE RETURN MATCH BETWEEN HIMSELF AND MR. TROTTER

In a small room in the vicinity of the stableyard, betimes in the
morning, which was ushered in by Mr. Pickwick’s adventure with the
middle--aged lady in the yellow curl-papers, sat Mr. Weller, senior,
preparing himself for his journey to London. He was sitting in an
excellent attitude for having his portrait taken; and here it is.

It is very possible that at some earlier period of his career, Mr.
Weller’s profile might have presented a bold and determined outline. His
face, however, had expanded under the influence of good living, and a
disposition remarkable for resignation; and its bold, fleshy curves had
so far extended beyond the limits originally assigned them, that unless
you took a full view of his countenance in front, it was difficult to
distinguish more than the extreme tip of a very rubicund nose. His chin,
from the same cause, had acquired the grave and imposing form which is
generally described by prefixing the word ‘double’ to that expressive
feature; and his complexion exhibited that peculiarly mottled
combination of colours which is only to be seen in gentlemen of his
profession, and in underdone roast beef. Round his neck he wore a
crimson travelling-shawl, which merged into his chin by such
imperceptible gradations, that it was difficult to distinguish the folds
of the one, from the folds of the other. Over this, he mounted a long
waistcoat of a broad pink-striped pattern, and over that again, a wide-
skirted green coat, ornamented with large brass buttons, whereof the two
which garnished the waist, were so far apart, that no man had ever
beheld them both at the same time. His hair, which was short, sleek, and
black, was just visible beneath the capacious brim of a low-crowned
brown hat. His legs were encased in knee-cord breeches, and painted top-
boots; and a copper watch-chain, terminating in one seal, and a key of
the same material, dangled loosely from his capacious waistband.

We have said that Mr. Weller was engaged in preparing for his journey to
London--he was taking sustenance, in fact. On the table before him,
stood a pot of ale, a cold round of beef, and a very respectable-looking
loaf, to each of which he distributed his favours in turn, with the most
rigid impartiality. He had just cut a mighty slice from the latter, when
the footsteps of somebody entering the room, caused him to raise his
head; and he beheld his son.

‘Mornin’, Sammy!’ said the father.

The son walked up to the pot of ale, and nodding significantly to his
parent, took a long draught by way of reply.

‘Wery good power o’ suction, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller the elder, looking
into the pot, when his first-born had set it down half empty. ‘You’d ha’
made an uncommon fine oyster, Sammy, if you’d been born in that station
o’ life.’

‘Yes, I des-say, I should ha’ managed to pick up a respectable livin’,’
replied Sam applying himself to the cold beef, with considerable vigour.

‘I’m wery sorry, Sammy,’ said the elder Mr. Weller, shaking up the ale,
by describing small circles with the pot, preparatory to drinking. ‘I’m
wery sorry, Sammy, to hear from your lips, as you let yourself be
gammoned by that ‘ere mulberry man. I always thought, up to three days
ago, that the names of Veller and gammon could never come into contract,
Sammy, never.’

‘Always exceptin’ the case of a widder, of course,’ said Sam.

‘Widders, Sammy,’ replied Mr. Weller, slightly changing colour. ‘Widders
are ‘ceptions to ev’ry rule. I have heerd how many ordinary women one
widder’s equal to in pint o’ comin’ over you. I think it’s five-and-
twenty, but I don’t rightly know vether it ain’t more.’

‘Well; that’s pretty well,’ said Sam.

‘Besides,’ continued Mr. Weller, not noticing the interruption, ‘that’s
a wery different thing. You know what the counsel said, Sammy, as
defended the gen’l’m’n as beat his wife with the poker, venever he got
jolly. “And arter all, my Lord,” says he, “it’s a amiable weakness.” So
I says respectin’ widders, Sammy, and so you’ll say, ven you gets as old
as me.’

‘I ought to ha’ know’d better, I know,’ said Sam.

‘Ought to ha’ know’d better!’ repeated Mr. Weller, striking the table
with his fist. ‘Ought to ha’ know’d better! why, I know a young ‘un as
hasn’t had half nor quarter your eddication--as hasn’t slept about the
markets, no, not six months--who’d ha’ scorned to be let in, in such a
vay; scorned it, Sammy.’ In the excitement of feeling produced by this
agonising reflection, Mr. Weller rang the bell, and ordered an
additional pint of ale.

‘Well, it’s no use talking about it now,’ said Sam. ‘It’s over, and
can’t be helped, and that’s one consolation, as they always says in
Turkey, ven they cuts the wrong man’s head off. It’s my innings now,
gov’nor, and as soon as I catches hold o’ this ‘ere Trotter, I’ll have a
good ‘un.’

‘I hope you will, Sammy. I hope you will,’ returned Mr. Weller. ‘Here’s
your health, Sammy, and may you speedily vipe off the disgrace as you’ve
inflicted on the family name.’ In honour of this toast Mr. Weller
imbibed at a draught, at least two-thirds of a newly-arrived pint, and
handed it over to his son, to dispose of the remainder, which he
instantaneously did.

‘And now, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, consulting a large double-faced
silver watch that hung at the end of the copper chain. ‘Now it’s time I
was up at the office to get my vay-bill and see the coach loaded; for
coaches, Sammy, is like guns--they requires to be loaded with wery great
care, afore they go off.’

At this parental and professional joke, Mr. Weller, junior, smiled a
filial smile. His revered parent continued in a solemn tone--

‘I’m a-goin’ to leave you, Samivel, my boy, and there’s no telling ven I
shall see you again. Your mother-in-law may ha’ been too much for me, or
a thousand things may have happened by the time you next hears any news
o’ the celebrated Mr. Veller o’ the Bell Savage. The family name depends
wery much upon you, Samivel, and I hope you’ll do wot’s right by it.
Upon all little pints o’ breedin’, I know I may trust you as vell as if
it was my own self. So I’ve only this here one little bit of adwice to
give you. If ever you gets to up’ards o’ fifty, and feels disposed to go
a-marryin’ anybody--no matter who--jist you shut yourself up in your own
room, if you’ve got one, and pison yourself off hand. Hangin’s wulgar,
so don’t you have nothin’ to say to that. Pison yourself, Samivel, my
boy, pison yourself, and you’ll be glad on it arterwards.’ With these
affecting words, Mr. Weller looked steadfastly on his son, and turning
slowly upon his heel, disappeared from his sight.

In the contemplative mood which these words had awakened, Mr. Samuel
Weller walked forth from the Great White Horse when his father had left
him; and bending his steps towards St. Clement’s Church, endeavoured to
dissipate his melancholy, by strolling among its ancient precincts. He
had loitered about, for some time, when he found himself in a retired
spot--a kind of courtyard of venerable appearance--which he discovered
had no other outlet than the turning by which he had entered. He was
about retracing his steps, when he was suddenly transfixed to the spot
by a sudden appearance; and the mode and manner of this appearance, we
now proceed to relate.

Mr. Samuel Weller had been staring up at the old brick houses now and
then, in his deep abstraction, bestowing a wink upon some healthy-
looking servant girl as she drew up a blind, or threw open a bedroom
window, when the green gate of a garden at the bottom of the yard
opened, and a man having emerged therefrom, closed the green gate very
carefully after him, and walked briskly towards the very spot where Mr.
Weller was standing.

Now, taking this, as an isolated fact, unaccompanied by any attendant
circumstances, there was nothing very extraordinary in it; because in
many parts of the world men do come out of gardens, close green gates
after them, and even walk briskly away, without attracting any
particular share of public observation. It is clear, therefore, that
there must have been something in the man, or in his manner, or both, to
attract Mr. Weller’s particular notice. Whether there was, or not, we
must leave the reader to determine, when we have faithfully recorded the
behaviour of the individual in question.

When the man had shut the green gate after him, he walked, as we have
said twice already, with a brisk pace up the courtyard; but he no sooner
caught sight of Mr. Weller than he faltered, and stopped, as if
uncertain, for the moment, what course to adopt. As the green gate was
closed behind him, and there was no other outlet but the one in front,
however, he was not long in perceiving that he must pass Mr. Samuel
Weller to get away. He therefore resumed his brisk pace, and advanced,
staring straight before him. The most extraordinary thing about the man
was, that he was contorting his face into the most fearful and
astonishing grimaces that ever were beheld. Nature’s handiwork never was
disguised with such extraordinary artificial carving, as the man had
overlaid his countenance with in one moment.

‘Well!’ said Mr. Weller to himself, as the man approached. ‘This is wery
odd. I could ha’ swore it was him.’

Up came the man, and his face became more frightfully distorted than
ever, as he drew nearer.

‘I could take my oath to that ‘ere black hair and mulberry suit,’ said
Mr. Weller; ‘only I never see such a face as that afore.’

As Mr. Weller said this, the man’s features assumed an unearthly twinge,
perfectly hideous. He was obliged to pass very near Sam, however, and
the scrutinising glance of that gentleman enabled him to detect, under
all these appalling twists of feature, something too like the small eyes
of Mr. Job Trotter to be easily mistaken.

‘Hollo, you Sir!’ shouted Sam fiercely.

The stranger stopped.

‘Hollo!’ repeated Sam, still more gruffly.

The man with the horrible face looked, with the greatest surprise, up
the court, and down the court, and in at the windows of the houses--
everywhere but at Sam Weller--and took another step forward, when he was
brought to again by another shout.

‘Hollo, you sir!’ said Sam, for the third time.

There was no pretending to mistake where the voice came from now, so the
stranger, having no other resource, at last looked Sam Weller full in
the face.

‘It won’t do, Job Trotter,’ said Sam. ‘Come! None o’ that ‘ere nonsense.
You ain’t so wery ‘andsome that you can afford to throw avay many o’
your good looks. Bring them ‘ere eyes o’ yourn back into their proper
places, or I’ll knock ‘em out of your head. D’ye hear?’

As Mr. Weller appeared fully disposed to act up to the spirit of this
address, Mr. Trotter gradually allowed his face to resume its natural
expression; and then giving a start of joy, exclaimed, ‘What do I see?
Mr. Walker!’

‘Ah,’ replied Sam. ‘You’re wery glad to see me, ain’t you?’

‘Glad!’ exclaimed Job Trotter; ‘Oh, Mr. Walker, if you had but known how
I have looked forward to this meeting! It is too much, Mr. Walker; I
cannot bear it, indeed I cannot.’ And with these words, Mr. Trotter
burst into a regular inundation of tears, and, flinging his arms around
those of Mr. Weller, embraced him closely, in an ecstasy of joy.

‘Get off!’ cried Sam, indignant at this process, and vainly endeavouring
to extricate himself from the grasp of his enthusiastic acquaintance.
‘Get off, I tell you. What are you crying over me for, you portable
engine?’

‘Because I am so glad to see you,’ replied Job Trotter, gradually
releasing Mr. Weller, as the first symptoms of his pugnacity
disappeared. ‘Oh, Mr. Walker, this is too much.’

‘Too much!’ echoed Sam, ‘I think it is too much--rayther! Now, what have
you got to say to me, eh?’

Mr. Trotter made no reply; for the little pink pocket-handkerchief was
in full force.

‘What have you got to say to me, afore I knock your head off?’ repeated
Mr. Weller, in a threatening manner.

‘Eh!’ said Mr. Trotter, with a look of virtuous surprise.

‘What have you got to say to me?’

‘I, Mr. Walker!’

‘Don’t call me Valker; my name’s Veller; you know that vell enough. What
have you got to say to me?’

‘Bless you, Mr. Walker--Weller, I mean--a great many things, if you will
come away somewhere, where we can talk comfortably. If you knew how I
have looked for you, Mr. Weller--’

‘Wery hard, indeed, I s’pose?’ said Sam drily.

‘Very, very, Sir,’ replied Mr. Trotter, without moving a muscle of his
face. ‘But shake hands, Mr. Weller.’

Sam eyed his companion for a few seconds, and then, as if actuated by a
sudden impulse, complied with his request.

‘How,’ said Job Trotter, as they walked away, ‘how is your dear, good
master? Oh, he is a worthy gentleman, Mr. Weller! I hope he didn’t catch
cold, that dreadful night, Sir.’

There was a momentary look of deep slyness in Job Trotter’s eye, as he
said this, which ran a thrill through Mr. Weller’s clenched fist, as he
burned with a desire to make a demonstration on his ribs. Sam
constrained himself, however, and replied that his master was extremely
well.

‘Oh, I am so glad,’ replied Mr. Trotter; ‘is he here?’

‘Is yourn?’ asked Sam, by way of reply.

‘Oh, yes, he is here, and I grieve to say, Mr. Weller, he is going on
worse than ever.’

‘Ah, ah!’ said Sam.

‘Oh, shocking--terrible!’

‘At a boarding-school?’ said Sam.

‘No, not at a boarding-school,’ replied Job Trotter, with the same sly
look which Sam had noticed before; ‘not at a boarding-school.’

‘At the house with the green gate?’ said Sam, eyeing his companion
closely.

‘No, no--oh, not there,’ replied Job, with a quickness very unusual to
him, ‘not there.’

‘What was you a-doin’ there?’ asked Sam, with a sharp glance. ‘Got
inside the gate by accident, perhaps?’

‘Why, Mr. Weller,’ replied Job, ‘I don’t mind telling you my little
secrets, because, you know, we took such a fancy for each other when we
first met. You recollect how pleasant we were that morning?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Sam, impatiently. ‘I remember. Well?’

‘Well,’ replied Job, speaking with great precision, and in the low tone
of a man who communicates an important secret; ‘in that house with the
green gate, Mr. Weller, they keep a good many servants.’

‘So I should think, from the look on it,’ interposed Sam.

‘Yes,’ continued Mr. Trotter, ‘and one of them is a cook, who has saved
up a little money, Mr. Weller, and is desirous, if she can establish
herself in life, to open a little shop in the chandlery way, you see.’

Yes.’

‘Yes, Mr. Weller. Well, Sir, I met her at a chapel that I go to; a very
neat little chapel in this town, Mr. Weller, where they sing the number
four collection of hymns, which I generally carry about with me, in a
little book, which you may perhaps have seen in my hand--and I got a
little intimate with her, Mr. Weller, and from that, an acquaintance
sprung up between us, and I may venture to say, Mr. Weller, that I am to
be the chandler.’

‘Ah, and a wery amiable chandler you’ll make,’ replied Sam, eyeing Job
with a side look of intense dislike.

‘The great advantage of this, Mr. Weller,’ continued Job, his eyes
filling with tears as he spoke, ‘will be, that I shall be able to leave
my present disgraceful service with that bad man, and to devote myself
to a better and more virtuous life; more like the way in which I was
brought up, Mr. Weller.’

‘You must ha’ been wery nicely brought up,’ said Sam.

‘Oh, very, Mr. Weller, very,’ replied Job. At the recollection of the
purity of his youthful days, Mr. Trotter pulled forth the pink
handkerchief, and wept copiously.

‘You must ha’ been an uncommon nice boy, to go to school vith,’ said
Sam.

‘I was, sir,’ replied Job, heaving a deep sigh; ‘I was the idol of the
place.’

‘Ah,’ said Sam, ‘I don’t wonder at it. What a comfort you must ha’ been
to your blessed mother.’

At these words, Mr. Job Trotter inserted an end of the pink handkerchief
into the corner of each eye, one after the other, and began to weep
copiously.

‘Wot’s the matter with the man,’ said Sam, indignantly. ‘Chelsea water-
works is nothin’ to you. What are you melting vith now? The
consciousness o’ willainy?’

‘I cannot keep my feelings down, Mr. Weller,’ said Job, after a short
pause. ‘To think that my master should have suspected the conversation I
had with yours, and so dragged me away in a post-chaise, and after
persuading the sweet young lady to say she knew nothing of him, and
bribing the school-mistress to do the same, deserted her for a better
speculation! Oh! Mr. Weller, it makes me shudder.’

‘Oh, that was the vay, was it?’ said Mr. Weller.

‘To be sure it was,’ replied Job.

‘Vell,’ said Sam, as they had now arrived near the hotel, ‘I vant to
have a little bit o’ talk with you, Job; so if you’re not partickler
engaged, I should like to see you at the Great White Horse to-night,
somewheres about eight o’clock.’

‘I shall be sure to come,’ said Job.

‘Yes, you’d better,’ replied Sam, with a very meaning look, ‘or else I
shall perhaps be askin’ arter you, at the other side of the green gate,
and then I might cut you out, you know.’

‘I shall be sure to be with you, sir,’ said Mr. Trotter; and wringing
Sam’s hand with the utmost fervour, he walked away.

‘Take care, Job Trotter, take care,’ said Sam, looking after him, ‘or I
shall be one too many for you this time. I shall, indeed.’ Having
uttered this soliloquy, and looked after Job till he was to be seen no
more, Mr. Weller made the best of his way to his master’s bedroom.

‘It’s all in training, Sir,’ said Sam.

‘What’s in training, Sam?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘I’ve found ‘em out, Sir,’ said Sam.

‘Found out who?’

‘That ‘ere queer customer, and the melan-cholly chap with the black
hair.’

‘Impossible, Sam!’ said Mr. Pickwick, with the greatest energy. ‘Where
are they, Sam: where are they?’

‘Hush, hush!’ replied Mr. Weller; and as he assisted Mr. Pickwick to
dress, he detailed the plan of action on which he proposed to enter.

‘But when is this to be done, Sam?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘All in good time, Sir,’ replied Sam.

Whether it was done in good time, or not, will be seen hereafter.



CHAPTER XXIV. WHEREIN MR. PETER MAGNUS GROWS JEALOUS, AND THE MIDDLE-
AGED LADY APPREHENSIVE, WHICH BRINGS THE PICKWICKIANS WITHIN THE GRASP
OF THE LAW

When Mr. Pickwick descended to the room in which he and Mr. Peter Magnus
had spent the preceding evening, he found that gentleman with the major
part of the contents of the two bags, the leathern hat-box, and the
brown-paper parcel, displaying to all possible advantage on his person,
while he himself was pacing up and down the room in a state of the
utmost excitement and agitation.

‘Good-morning, Sir,’ said Mr. Peter Magnus. ‘What do you think of this,
Sir?’

‘Very effective indeed,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, surveying the garments of
Mr. Peter Magnus with a good-natured smile.

‘Yes, I think it’ll do,’ said Mr. Magnus. ‘Mr. Pickwick, Sir, I have
sent up my card.’

‘Have you?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘And the waiter brought back word, that she would see me at eleven--at
eleven, Sir; it only wants a quarter now.’

‘Very near the time,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes, it is rather near,’ replied Mr. Magnus, ‘rather too near to be
pleasant--eh! Mr. Pickwick, sir?’

‘Confidence is a great thing in these cases,’ observed Mr. Pickwick.

‘I believe it is, Sir,’ said Mr. Peter Magnus. ‘I am very confident,
Sir. Really, Mr. Pickwick, I do not see why a man should feel any fear
in such a case as this, sir. What is it, Sir? There’s nothing to be
ashamed of; it’s a matter of mutual accommodation, nothing more. Husband
on one side, wife on the other. That’s my view of the matter, Mr.
Pickwick.’

‘It is a very philosophical one,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘But breakfast
is waiting, Mr. Magnus. Come.’

Down they sat to breakfast, but it was evident, notwithstanding the
boasting of Mr. Peter Magnus, that he laboured under a very considerable
degree of nervousness, of which loss of appetite, a propensity to upset
the tea-things, a spectral attempt at drollery, and an irresistible
inclination to look at the clock, every other second, were among the
principal symptoms.

‘He-he-he,’ tittered Mr. Magnus, affecting cheerfulness, and gasping
with agitation. ‘It only wants two minutes, Mr. Pickwick. Am I pale,
Sir?’

‘Not very,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

There was a brief pause.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Pickwick; but have you ever done this sort of
thing in your time?’ said Mr. Magnus.

‘You mean proposing?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes.’

‘Never,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with great energy, ‘never.’

‘You have no idea, then, how it’s best to begin?’ said Mr. Magnus.

‘Why,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I may have formed some ideas upon the
subject, but, as I have never submitted them to the test of experience,
I should be sorry if you were induced to regulate your proceedings by
them.’

‘I should feel very much obliged to you, for any advice, Sir,’ said Mr.
Magnus, taking another look at the clock, the hand of which was verging
on the five minutes past.

‘Well, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with the profound solemnity with which
that great man could, when he pleased, render his remarks so deeply
impressive. ‘I should commence, sir, with a tribute to the lady’s beauty
and excellent qualities; from them, Sir, I should diverge to my own
unworthiness.’

‘Very good,’ said Mr. Magnus.

‘Unworthiness for _her _only, mind, sir,’ resumed Mr. Pickwick; ‘for to
show that I was not wholly unworthy, sir, I should take a brief review
of my past life, and present condition. I should argue, by analogy, that
to anybody else, I must be a very desirable object. I should then
expatiate on the warmth of my love, and the depth of my devotion.
Perhaps I might then be tempted to seize her hand.’

‘Yes, I see,’ said Mr. Magnus; ‘that would be a very great point.’

‘I should then, Sir,’ continued Mr. Pickwick, growing warmer as the
subject presented itself in more glowing colours before him--‘I should
then, Sir, come to the plain and simple question, “Will you have me?” I
think I am justified in assuming that upon this, she would turn away her
head.’

‘You think that may be taken for granted?’ said Mr. Magnus; ‘because, if
she did not do that at the right place, it would be embarrassing.’

‘I think she would,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Upon this, sir, I should
squeeze her hand, and I think--I think, Mr. Magnus--that after I had
done that, supposing there was no refusal, I should gently draw away the
handkerchief, which my slight knowledge of human nature leads me to
suppose the lady would be applying to her eyes at the moment, and steal
a respectful kiss. I think I should kiss her, Mr. Magnus; and at this
particular point, I am decidedly of opinion that if the lady were going
to take me at all, she would murmur into my ears a bashful acceptance.’

Mr. Magnus started; gazed on Mr. Pickwick’s intelligent face, for a
short time in silence; and then (the dial pointing to the ten minutes
past) shook him warmly by the hand, and rushed desperately from the
room.

Mr. Pickwick had taken a few strides to and fro; and the small hand of
the clock following the latter part of his example, had arrived at the
figure which indicates the half-hour, when the door suddenly opened. He
turned round to meet Mr. Peter Magnus, and encountered, in his stead,
the joyous face of Mr. Tupman, the serene countenance of Mr. Winkle, and
the intellectual lineaments of Mr. Snodgrass.

As Mr. Pickwick greeted them, Mr. Peter Magnus tripped into the room.

‘My friends, the gentleman I was speaking of--Mr. Magnus,’ said Mr.
Pickwick.

‘Your servant, gentlemen,’ said Mr. Magnus, evidently in a high state of
excitement; ‘Mr. Pickwick, allow me to speak to you one moment, sir.’

As he said this, Mr. Magnus harnessed his forefinger to Mr. Pickwick’s
buttonhole, and, drawing him to a window recess, said--

‘Congratulate me, Mr. Pickwick; I followed your advice to the very
letter.’

‘And it was all correct, was it?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘It was, Sir. Could not possibly have been better,’ replied Mr. Magnus.
‘Mr. Pickwick, she is mine.’

‘I congratulate you, with all my heart,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, warmly
shaking his new friend by the hand.

‘You must see her. Sir,’ said Mr. Magnus; ‘this way, if you please.
Excuse us for one instant, gentlemen.’ Hurrying on in this way, Mr.
Peter Magnus drew Mr. Pickwick from the room. He paused at the next door
in the passage, and tapped gently thereat.

‘Come in,’ said a female voice. And in they went.

‘Miss Witherfield,’ said Mr. Magnus, ‘allow me to introduce my very
particular friend, Mr. Pickwick. Mr. Pickwick, I beg to make you known
to Miss Witherfield.’

The lady was at the upper end of the room. As Mr. Pickwick bowed, he
took his spectacles from his waistcoat pocket, and put them on; a
process which he had no sooner gone through, than, uttering an
exclamation of surprise, Mr. Pickwick retreated several paces, and the
lady, with a half-suppressed scream, hid her face in her hands, and
dropped into a chair; whereupon Mr. Peter Magnus was stricken motionless
on the spot, and gazed from one to the other, with a countenance
expressive of the extremities of horror and surprise.

This certainly was, to all appearance, very unaccountable behaviour; but
the fact is, that Mr. Pickwick no sooner put on his spectacles, than he
at once recognised in the future Mrs. Magnus the lady into whose room he
had so unwarrantably intruded on the previous night; and the spectacles
had no sooner crossed Mr. Pickwick’s nose, than the lady at once
identified the countenance which she had seen surrounded by all the
horrors of a nightcap. So the lady screamed, and Mr. Pickwick started.

‘Mr. Pickwick!’ exclaimed Mr. Magnus, lost in astonishment, ‘what is the
meaning of this, Sir? What is the meaning of it, Sir?’ added Mr. Magnus,
in a threatening, and a louder tone.

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, somewhat indignant at the very sudden manner
in which Mr. Peter Magnus had conjugated himself into the imperative
mood, ‘I decline answering that question.’

‘You decline it, Sir?’ said Mr. Magnus.

‘I do, Sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick; ‘I object to say anything which may
compromise that lady, or awaken unpleasant recollections in her breast,
without her consent and permission.’

‘Miss Witherfield,’ said Mr. Peter Magnus, ‘do you know this person?’

‘Know him!’ repeated the middle-aged lady, hesitating.

‘Yes, know him, ma’am; I said know him,’ replied Mr. Magnus, with
ferocity.

‘I have seen him,’ replied the middle-aged lady.

‘Where?’ inquired Mr. Magnus, ‘where?’

‘That,’ said the middle-aged lady, rising from her seat, and averting
her head--‘that I would not reveal for worlds.’

‘I understand you, ma’am,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘and respect your
delicacy; it shall never be revealed by _me_ depend upon it.’

‘Upon my word, ma’am,’ said Mr. Magnus, ‘considering the situation in
which I am placed with regard to yourself, you carry this matter off
with tolerable coolness--tolerable coolness, ma’am.’

‘Cruel Mr. Magnus!’ said the middle-aged lady; here she wept very
copiously indeed.

‘Address your observations to me, sir,’ interposed Mr. Pickwick; ‘I
alone am to blame, if anybody be.’

‘Oh! you alone are to blame, are you, sir?’ said Mr. Magnus; ‘I--I--see
through this, sir. You repent of your determination now, do you?’

‘My determination!’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Your determination, Sir. Oh! don’t stare at me, Sir,’ said Mr. Magnus;
‘I recollect your words last night, Sir. You came down here, sir, to
expose the treachery and falsehood of an individual on whose truth and
honour you had placed implicit reliance--eh?’ Here Mr. Peter Magnus
indulged in a prolonged sneer; and taking off his green spectacles--
which he probably found superfluous in his fit of jealousy--rolled his
little eyes about, in a manner frightful to behold.

‘Eh?’ said Mr. Magnus; and then he repeated the sneer with increased
effect. ‘But you shall answer it, Sir.’

‘Answer what?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Never mind, sir,’ replied Mr. Magnus, striding up and down the room.
‘Never mind.’

There must be something very comprehensive in this phrase of ‘Never
mind,’ for we do not recollect to have ever witnessed a quarrel in the
street, at a theatre, public room, or elsewhere, in which it has not
been the standard reply to all belligerent inquiries. ‘Do you call
yourself a gentleman, sir?’--‘Never mind, sir.’

Did I offer to say anything to the young woman, sir?’--‘Never mind,
sir.’

Do you want your head knocked up against that wall, sir?’--‘Never mind,
sir.’ It is observable, too, that there would appear to be some hidden
taunt in this universal ‘Never mind,’ which rouses more indignation in
the bosom of the individual addressed, than the most lavish abuse could
possibly awaken.

We do not mean to assert that the application of this brevity to
himself, struck exactly that indignation to Mr. Pickwick’s soul, which
it would infallibly have roused in a vulgar breast. We merely record the
fact that Mr. Pickwick opened the room door, and abruptly called out,
‘Tupman, come here!’

Mr. Tupman immediately presented himself, with a look of very
considerable surprise.

‘Tupman,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘a secret of some delicacy, in which that
lady is concerned, is the cause of a difference which has just arisen
between this gentleman and myself. When I assure him, in your presence,
that it has no relation to himself, and is not in any way connected with
his affairs, I need hardly beg you to take notice that if he continue to
dispute it, he expresses a doubt of my veracity, which I shall consider
extremely insulting.’ As Mr. Pickwick said this, he looked encyclopedias
at Mr. Peter Magnus.

Mr. Pickwick’s upright and honourable bearing, coupled with that force
and energy of speech which so eminently distinguished him, would have
carried conviction to any reasonable mind; but, unfortunately, at that
particular moment, the mind of Mr. Peter Magnus was in anything but
reasonable order. Consequently, instead of receiving Mr. Pickwick’s
explanation as he ought to have done, he forthwith proceeded to work
himself into a red-hot, scorching, consuming passion, and to talk about
what was due to his own feelings, and all that sort of thing; adding
force to his declamation by striding to and fro, and pulling his hair--
amusements which he would vary occasionally, by shaking his fist in Mr.
Pickwick’s philanthropic countenance.

Mr. Pickwick, in his turn, conscious of his own innocence and rectitude,
and irritated by having unfortunately involved the middle-aged lady in
such an unpleasant affair, was not so quietly disposed as was his wont.
The consequence was, that words ran high, and voices higher; and at
length Mr. Magnus told Mr. Pickwick he should hear from him; to which
Mr. Pickwick replied, with laudable politeness, that the sooner he heard
from him the better; whereupon the middle-aged lady rushed in terror
from the room, out of which Mr. Tupman dragged Mr. Pickwick, leaving Mr.
Peter Magnus to himself and meditation.

If the middle-aged lady had mingled much with the busy world, or had
profited at all by the manners and customs of those who make the laws
and set the fashions, she would have known that this sort of ferocity is
the most harmless thing in nature; but as she had lived for the most
part in the country, and never read the parliamentary debates, she was
little versed in these particular refinements of civilised life.
Accordingly, when she had gained her bedchamber, bolted herself in, and
began to meditate on the scene she had just witnessed, the most terrific
pictures of slaughter and destruction presented themselves to her
imagination; among which, a full-length portrait of Mr. Peter Magnus
borne home by four men, with the embellishment of a whole barrelful of
bullets in his left side, was among the very least. The more the middle-
aged lady meditated, the more terrified she became; and at length she
determined to repair to the house of the principal magistrate of the
town, and request him to secure the persons of Mr. Pickwick and Mr.
Tupman without delay.

To this decision the middle-aged lady was impelled by a variety of
considerations, the chief of which was the incontestable proof it would
afford of her devotion to Mr. Peter Magnus, and her anxiety for his
safety. She was too well acquainted with his jealous temperament to
venture the slightest allusion to the real cause of her agitation on
beholding Mr. Pickwick; and she trusted to her own influence and power
of persuasion with the little man, to quell his boisterous jealousy,
supposing that Mr. Pickwick were removed, and no fresh quarrel could
arise. Filled with these reflections, the middle-aged lady arrayed
herself in her bonnet and shawl, and repaired to the mayor’s dwelling
straightway.

Now George Nupkins, Esquire, the principal magistrate aforesaid, was as
grand a personage as the fastest walker would find out, between sunrise
and sunset, on the twenty-first of June, which being, according to the
almanacs, the longest day in the whole year, would naturally afford him
the longest period for his search. On this particular morning, Mr.
Nupkins was in a state of the utmost excitement and irritation, for
there had been a rebellion in the town; all the day-scholars at the
largest day-school had conspired to break the windows of an obnoxious
apple-seller, and had hooted the beadle and pelted the constabulary--an
elderly gentleman in top-boots, who had been called out to repress the
tumult, and who had been a peace-officer, man and boy, for half a
century at least. And Mr. Nupkins was sitting in his easy-chair,
frowning with majesty, and boiling with rage, when a lady was announced
on pressing, private, and particular business. Mr. Nupkins looked calmly
terrible, and commanded that the lady should be shown in; which command,
like all the mandates of emperors, and magistrates, and other great
potentates of the earth, was forthwith obeyed; and Miss Witherfield,
interestingly agitated, was ushered in accordingly.

‘Muzzle!’ said the magistrate.

Muzzle was an undersized footman, with a long body and short legs.

‘Muzzle!’

Yes, your Worship.’

‘Place a chair, and leave the room.’

‘Yes, your Worship.’

‘Now, ma’am, will you state your business?’ said the magistrate.

‘It is of a very painful kind, Sir,’ said Miss Witherfield.

‘Very likely, ma’am,’ said the magistrate. ‘Compose your feelings,
ma’am.’ Here Mr. Nupkins looked benignant. ‘And then tell me what legal
business brings you here, ma’am.’ Here the magistrate triumphed over the
man; and he looked stern again.

‘It is very distressing to me, Sir, to give this information,’ said Miss
Witherfield, ‘but I fear a duel is going to be fought here.’

‘Here, ma’am?’ said the magistrate. ‘Where, ma’am?’

‘In Ipswich.’

In Ipswich, ma’am! A duel in Ipswich!’ said the magistrate, perfectly
aghast at the notion. ‘Impossible, ma’am; nothing of the kind can be
contemplated in this town, I am persuaded. Bless my soul, ma’am, are you
aware of the activity of our local magistracy? Do you happen to have
heard, ma’am, that I rushed into a prize-ring on the fourth of May last,
attended by only sixty special constables; and, at the hazard of falling
a sacrifice to the angry passions of an infuriated multitude, prohibited
a pugilistic contest between the Middlesex Dumpling and the Suffolk
Bantam? A duel in Ipswich, ma’am? I don’t think--I do not think,’ said
the magistrate, reasoning with himself, ‘that any two men can have had
the hardihood to plan such a breach of the peace, in this town.’

‘My information is, unfortunately, but too correct,’ said the middle-
aged lady; ‘I was present at the quarrel.’

‘It’s a most extraordinary thing,’ said the astounded magistrate.
‘Muzzle!’

‘Yes, your Worship.’

‘Send Mr. Jinks here, directly! Instantly.’

‘Yes, your Worship.’

Muzzle retired; and a pale, sharp-nosed, half-fed, shabbily-clad clerk,
of middle age, entered the room.

‘Mr. Jinks,’ said the magistrate. ‘Mr. Jinks.’

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Jinks.

‘This lady, Mr. Jinks, has come here, to give information of an intended
duel in this town.’

Mr. Jinks, not knowing exactly what to do, smiled a dependent’s smile.

‘What are you laughing at, Mr. Jinks?’ said the magistrate.

Mr. Jinks looked serious instantly.

‘Mr. Jinks,’ said the magistrate, ‘you’re a fool.’

Mr. Jinks looked humbly at the great man, and bit the top of his pen.

‘You may see something very comical in this information, Sir--but I can
tell you this, Mr. Jinks, that you have very little to laugh at,’ said
the magistrate.

The hungry-looking Jinks sighed, as if he were quite aware of the fact
of his having very little indeed to be merry about; and, being ordered
to take the lady’s information, shambled to a seat, and proceeded to
write it down.

‘This man, Pickwick, is the principal, I understand?’ said the
magistrate, when the statement was finished.

‘He is,’ said the middle-aged lady.

‘And the other rioter--what’s his name, Mr. Jinks?’

‘Tupman, Sir.’

Tupman is the second?’

‘Yes.’

‘The other principal, you say, has absconded, ma’am?’

‘Yes,’ replied Miss Witherfield, with a short cough.

‘Very well,’ said the magistrate. ‘These are two cut-throats from
London, who have come down here to destroy his Majesty’s population,
thinking that at this distance from the capital, the arm of the law is
weak and paralysed. They shall be made an example of. Draw up the
warrants, Mr. Jinks. Muzzle!’

‘Yes, your Worship.’

‘Is Grummer downstairs?’

‘Yes, your Worship.’

‘Send him up.’

The obsequious Muzzle retired, and presently returned, introducing the
elderly gentleman in the top-boots, who was chiefly remarkable for a
bottle-nose, a hoarse voice, a snuff-coloured surtout, and a wandering
eye.

‘Grummer,’ said the magistrate.

‘Your Wash-up.’

‘Is the town quiet now?’

‘Pretty well, your Wash-up,’ replied Grummer. ‘Pop’lar feeling has in a
measure subsided, consekens o’ the boys having dispersed to cricket.’

‘Nothing but vigorous measures will do in these times, Grummer,’ said
the magistrate, in a determined manner. ‘If the authority of the king’s
officers is set at naught, we must have the riot act read. If the civil
power cannot protect these windows, Grummer, the military must protect
the civil power, and the windows too. I believe that is a maxim of the
constitution, Mr. Jinks?’

Certainly, sir,’ said Jinks.

‘Very good,’ said the magistrate, signing the warrants. ‘Grummer, you
will bring these persons before me, this afternoon. You will find them
at the Great White Horse. You recollect the case of the Middlesex
Dumpling and the Suffolk Bantam, Grummer?’

Mr. Grummer intimated, by a retrospective shake of the head, that he
should never forget it--as indeed it was not likely he would, so long as
it continued to be cited daily.

‘This is even more unconstitutional,’ said the magistrate; ‘this is even
a greater breach of the peace, and a grosser infringement of his
Majesty’s prerogative. I believe duelling is one of his Majesty’s most
undoubted prerogatives, Mr. Jinks?’

‘Expressly stipulated in Magna Charta, sir,’ said Mr. Jinks.

‘One of the brightest jewels in the British crown, wrung from his
Majesty by the barons, I believe, Mr. Jinks?’ said the magistrate.

‘Just so, Sir,’ replied Mr. Jinks.

‘Very well,’ said the magistrate, drawing himself up proudly, ‘it shall
not be violated in this portion of his dominions. Grummer, procure
assistance, and execute these warrants with as little delay as possible.
Muzzle!’

‘Yes, your Worship.’

‘Show the lady out.’

Miss Witherfield retired, deeply impressed with the magistrate’s
learning and research; Mr. Nupkins retired to lunch; Mr. Jinks retired
within himself--that being the only retirement he had, except the sofa-
bedstead in the small parlour which was occupied by his landlady’s
family in the daytime--and Mr. Grummer retired, to wipe out, by his mode
of discharging his present commission, the insult which had been
fastened upon himself, and the other representative of his Majesty--the
beadle--in the course of the morning.

While these resolute and determined preparations for the conservation of
the king’s peace were pending, Mr. Pickwick and his friends, wholly
unconscious of the mighty events in progress, had sat quietly down to
dinner; and very talkative and companionable they all were. Mr. Pickwick
was in the very act of relating his adventure of the preceding night, to
the great amusement of his followers, Mr. Tupman especially, when the
door opened, and a somewhat forbidding countenance peeped into the room.
The eyes in the forbidding countenance looked very earnestly at Mr.
Pickwick, for several seconds, and were to all appearance satisfied with
their investigation; for the body to which the forbidding countenance
belonged, slowly brought itself into the apartment, and presented the
form of an elderly individual in top-boots--not to keep the reader any
longer in suspense, in short, the eyes were the wandering eyes of Mr.
Grummer, and the body was the body of the same gentleman.

Mr. Grummer’s mode of proceeding was professional, but peculiar. His
first act was to bolt the door on the inside; his second, to polish his
head and countenance very carefully with a cotton handkerchief; his
third, to place his hat, with the cotton handkerchief in it, on the
nearest chair; and his fourth, to produce from the breast-pocket of his
coat a short truncheon, surmounted by a brazen crown, with which he
beckoned to Mr. Pickwick with a grave and ghost-like air.

Mr. Snodgrass was the first to break the astonished silence. He looked
steadily at Mr. Grummer for a brief space, and then said emphatically,
‘This is a private room, Sir. A private room.’

Mr. Grummer shook his head, and replied, ‘No room’s private to his
Majesty when the street door’s once passed. That’s law. Some people
maintains that an Englishman’s house is his castle. That’s gammon.’

The Pickwickians gazed on each other with wondering eyes.

‘Which is Mr. Tupman?’ inquired Mr. Grummer. He had an intuitive
perception of Mr. Pickwick; he knew him at once.

‘My name’s Tupman,’ said that gentleman.

‘My name’s Law,’ said Mr. Grummer.

‘What?’ said Mr. Tupman.

‘Law,’ replied Mr. Grummer--‘Law, civil power, and exekative; them’s my
titles; here’s my authority. Blank Tupman, blank Pickwick--against the
peace of our sufferin’ lord the king--stattit in the case made and
purwided--and all regular. I apprehend you Pickwick! Tupman--the
aforesaid.’

‘What do you mean by this insolence?’ said Mr. Tupman, starting up;
‘leave the room!’

‘Hollo,’ said Mr. Grummer, retreating very expeditiously to the door,
and opening it an inch or two, ‘Dubbley.’

‘Well,’ said a deep voice from the passage.

‘Come for’ard, Dubbley.’

At the word of command, a dirty-faced man, something over six feet high,
and stout in proportion, squeezed himself through the half-open door
(making his face very red in the process), and entered the room.

‘Is the other specials outside, Dubbley?’ inquired Mr. Grummer.

Mr. Dubbley, who was a man of few words, nodded assent.

‘Order in the diwision under your charge, Dubbley,’ said Mr. Grummer.

Mr. Dubbley did as he was desired; and half a dozen men, each with a
short truncheon and a brass crown, flocked into the room. Mr. Grummer
pocketed his staff, and looked at Mr. Dubbley; Mr. Dubbley pocketed his
staff and looked at the division; the division pocketed their staves and
looked at Messrs. Tupman and Pickwick.

Mr. Pickwick and his followers rose as one man.

‘What is the meaning of this atrocious intrusion upon my privacy?’ said
Mr. Pickwick.

‘Who dares apprehend me?’ said Mr. Tupman.

‘What do you want here, scoundrels?’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

Mr. Winkle said nothing, but he fixed his eyes on Grummer, and bestowed
a look upon him, which, if he had had any feeling, must have pierced his
brain. As it was, however, it had no visible effect on him whatever.

When the executive perceived that Mr. Pickwick and his friends were
disposed to resist the authority of the law, they very significantly
turned up their coat sleeves, as if knocking them down in the first
instance, and taking them up afterwards, were a mere professional act
which had only to be thought of to be done, as a matter of course. This
demonstration was not lost upon Mr. Pickwick. He conferred a few moments
with Mr. Tupman apart, and then signified his readiness to proceed to
the mayor’s residence, merely begging the parties then and there
assembled, to take notice, that it was his firm intention to resent this
monstrous invasion of his privileges as an Englishman, the instant he
was at liberty; whereat the parties then and there assembled laughed
very heartily, with the single exception of Mr. Grummer, who seemed to
consider that any slight cast upon the divine right of magistrates was a
species of blasphemy not to be tolerated.

But when Mr. Pickwick had signified his readiness to bow to the laws of
his country, and just when the waiters, and hostlers, and chambermaids,
and post-boys, who had anticipated a delightful commotion from his
threatened obstinacy, began to turn away, disappointed and disgusted, a
difficulty arose which had not been foreseen. With every sentiment of
veneration for the constituted authorities, Mr. Pickwick resolutely
protested against making his appearance in the public streets,
surrounded and guarded by the officers of justice, like a common
criminal. Mr. Grummer, in the then disturbed state of public feeling
(for it was half-holiday, and the boys had not yet gone home), as
resolutely protested against walking on the opposite side of the way,
and taking Mr. Pickwick’s parole that he would go straight to the
magistrate’s; and both Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Tupman as strenuously
objected to the expense of a post-coach, which was the only respectable
conveyance that could be obtained. The dispute ran high, and the dilemma
lasted long; and just as the executive were on the point of overcoming
Mr. Pickwick’s objection to walking to the magistrate’s, by the trite
expedient of carrying him thither, it was recollected that there stood
in the inn yard, an old sedan-chair, which, having been originally built
for a gouty gentleman with funded property, would hold Mr. Pickwick and
Mr. Tupman, at least as conveniently as a modern post-chaise. The chair
was hired, and brought into the hall; Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Tupman
squeezed themselves inside, and pulled down the blinds; a couple of
chairmen were speedily found; and the procession started in grand order.
The specials surrounded the body of the vehicle; Mr. Grummer and Mr.
Dubbley marched triumphantly in front; Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle
walked arm-in-arm behind; and the unsoaped of Ipswich brought up the
rear.

The shopkeepers of the town, although they had a very indistinct notion
of the nature of the offence, could not but be much edified and
gratified by this spectacle. Here was the strong arm of the law, coming
down with twenty gold-beater force, upon two offenders from the
metropolis itself; the mighty engine was directed by their own
magistrate, and worked by their own officers; and both the criminals, by
their united efforts, were securely shut up, in the narrow compass of
one sedan-chair. Many were the expressions of approval and admiration
which greeted Mr. Grummer, as he headed the cavalcade, staff in hand;
loud and long were the shouts raised by the unsoaped; and amidst these
united testimonials of public approbation, the procession moved slowly
and majestically along.

Mr. Weller, habited in his morning jacket, with the black calico
sleeves, was returning in a rather desponding state from an unsuccessful
survey of the mysterious house with the green gate, when, raising his
eyes, he beheld a crowd pouring down the street, surrounding an object
which had very much the appearance of a sedan-chair. Willing to divert
his thoughts from the failure of his enterprise, he stepped aside to see
the crowd pass; and finding that they were cheering away, very much to
their own satisfaction, forthwith began (by way of raising his spirits)
to cheer too, with all his might and main.

Mr. Grummer passed, and Mr. Dubbley passed, and the sedan passed, and
the bodyguard of specials passed, and Sam was still responding to the
enthusiastic cheers of the mob, and waving his hat about as if he were
in the very last extreme of the wildest joy (though, of course, he had
not the faintest idea of the matter in hand), when he was suddenly
stopped by the unexpected appearance of Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass.


‘What’s the row, gen’l’m’n? ’cried Sam. ‘Who have they got in this here
watch-box in mournin’?’

Both gentlemen replied together, but their words were lost in the
tumult.

‘Who is it?’ cried Sam again.

Once more was a joint reply returned; and, though the words were
inaudible, Sam saw by the motion of the two pairs of lips that they had
uttered the magic word ‘Pickwick.’

This was enough. In another minute Mr. Weller had made his way through
the crowd, stopped the chairmen, and confronted the portly Grummer.

‘Hollo, old gen’l’m’n!’ said Sam. ‘Who have you got in this here
conweyance?’

‘Stand back,’ said Mr. Grummer, whose dignity, like the dignity of a
great many other men, had been wondrously augmented by a little
popularity.

‘Knock him down, if he don’t,’ said Mr. Dubbley.

‘I’m wery much obliged to you, old gen’l’m’n,’ replied Sam, ‘for
consulting my conwenience, and I’m still more obliged to the other
gen’l’m’n, who looks as if he’d just escaped from a giant’s carrywan,
for his wery ‘andsome suggestion; but I should prefer your givin’ me a
answer to my question, if it’s all the same to you.--How are you, Sir?’
This last observation was addressed with a patronising air to Mr.
Pickwick, who was peeping through the front window.

Mr. Grummer, perfectly speechless with indignation, dragged the
truncheon with the brass crown from its particular pocket, and
flourished it before Sam’s eyes.

‘Ah,’ said Sam, ‘it’s wery pretty, ‘specially the crown, which is
uncommon like the real one.’

‘Stand back!’ said the outraged Mr. Grummer. By way of adding force to
the command, he thrust the brass emblem of royalty into Sam’s neckcloth
with one hand, and seized Sam’s collar with the other--a compliment
which Mr. Weller returned by knocking him down out of hand, having
previously with the utmost consideration, knocked down a chairman for
him to lie upon.

Whether Mr. Winkle was seized with a temporary attack of that species of
insanity which originates in a sense of injury, or animated by this
display of Mr. Weller’s valour, is uncertain; but certain it is, that he
no sooner saw Mr. Grummer fall than he made a terrific onslaught on a
small boy who stood next him; whereupon Mr. Snodgrass, in a truly
Christian spirit, and in order that he might take no one unawares,
announced in a very loud tone that he was going to begin, and proceeded
to take off his coat with the utmost deliberation. He was immediately
surrounded and secured; and it is but common justice both to him and Mr.
Winkle to say, that they did not make the slightest attempt to rescue
either themselves or Mr. Weller; who, after a most vigorous resistance,
was overpowered by numbers and taken prisoner. The procession then
reformed; the chairmen resumed their stations; and the march was re-
commenced.

Mr. Pickwick’s indignation during the whole of this proceeding was
beyond all bounds. He could just see Sam upsetting the specials, and
flying about in every direction; and that was all he could see, for the
sedan doors wouldn’t open, and the blinds wouldn’t pull up. At length,
with the assistance of Mr. Tupman, he managed to push open the roof; and
mounting on the seat, and steadying himself as well as he could, by
placing his hand on that gentleman’s shoulder, Mr. Pickwick proceeded to
address the multitude; to dwell upon the unjustifiable manner in which
he had been treated; and to call upon them to take notice that his
servant had been first assaulted. In this order they reached the
magistrate’s house; the chairmen trotting, the prisoners following, Mr.
Pickwick oratorising, and the crowd shouting.



CHAPTER XXV. SHOWING, AMONG A VARIETY OF PLEASANT MATTERS, HOW MAJESTIC
AND IMPARTIAL MR. NUPKINS WAS; AND HOW MR. WELLER RETURNED MR. JOB
TROTTER’S SHUTTLECOCK AS HEAVILY AS IT CAME--WITH ANOTHER MATTER, WHICH
WILL BE FOUND IN ITS PLACE

Violent was Mr. Weller’s indignation as he was borne along; numerous
were the allusions to the personal appearance and demeanour of Mr.
Grummer and his companion; and valorous were the defiances to any six of
the gentlemen present, in which he vented his dissatisfaction. Mr.
Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle listened with gloomy respect to the torrent of
eloquence which their leader poured forth from the sedan-chair, and the
rapid course of which not all Mr. Tupman’s earnest entreaties to have
the lid of the vehicle closed, were able to check for an instant. But
Mr. Weller’s anger quickly gave way to curiosity when the procession
turned down the identical courtyard in which he had met with the runaway
Job Trotter; and curiosity was exchanged for a feeling of the most
gleeful astonishment, when the all-important Mr. Grummer, commanding the
sedan-bearers to halt, advanced with dignified and portentous steps to
the very green gate from which Job Trotter had emerged, and gave a
mighty pull at the bell-handle which hung at the side thereof. The ring
was answered by a very smart and pretty-faced servant-girl, who, after
holding up her hands in astonishment at the rebellious appearance of the
prisoners, and the impassioned language of Mr. Pickwick, summoned Mr.
Muzzle. Mr. Muzzle opened one half of the carriage gate, to admit the
sedan, the captured ones, and the specials; and immediately slammed it
in the faces of the mob, who, indignant at being excluded, and anxious
to see what followed, relieved their feelings by kicking at the gate and
ringing the bell, for an hour or two afterwards. In this amusement they
all took part by turns, except three or four fortunate individuals, who,
having discovered a grating in the gate, which commanded a view of
nothing, stared through it with the indefatigable perseverance with
which people will flatten their noses against the front windows of a
chemist’s shop, when a drunken man, who has been run over by a dog-cart
in the street, is undergoing a surgical inspection in the back-parlour.

At the foot of a flight of steps, leading to the house door, which was
guarded on either side by an American aloe in a green tub, the sedan-
chair stopped. Mr. Pickwick and his friends were conducted into the
hall, whence, having been previously announced by Muzzle, and ordered in
by Mr. Nupkins, they were ushered into the worshipful presence of that
public-spirited officer.

The scene was an impressive one, well calculated to strike terror to the
hearts of culprits, and to impress them with an adequate idea of the
stern majesty of the law. In front of a big book-case, in a big chair,
behind a big table, and before a big volume, sat Mr. Nupkins, looking a
full size larger than any one of them, big as they were. The table was
adorned with piles of papers; and above the farther end of it, appeared
the head and shoulders of Mr. Jinks, who was busily engaged in looking
as busy as possible. The party having all entered, Muzzle carefully
closed the door, and placed himself behind his master’s chair to await
his orders. Mr. Nupkins threw himself back with thrilling solemnity, and
scrutinised the faces of his unwilling visitors.

‘Now, Grummer, who is that person?’ said Mr. Nupkins, pointing to Mr.
Pickwick, who, as the spokesman of his friends, stood hat in hand,
bowing with the utmost politeness and respect.

‘This here’s Pickvick, your Wash-up,’ said Grummer.

‘Come, none o’ that ‘ere, old Strike-a-light,’ interposed Mr. Weller,
elbowing himself into the front rank. ‘Beg your pardon, sir, but this
here officer o’ yourn in the gambooge tops, ‘ull never earn a decent
livin’ as a master o’ the ceremonies any vere. This here, sir’ continued
Mr. Weller, thrusting Grummer aside, and addressing the magistrate with
pleasant familiarity, ‘this here is S. Pickvick, Esquire; this here’s
Mr. Tupman; that ‘ere’s Mr. Snodgrass; and farder on, next him on the
t’other side, Mr. Winkle--all wery nice gen’l’m’n, Sir, as you’ll be
wery happy to have the acquaintance on; so the sooner you commits these
here officers o’ yourn to the tread-mill for a month or two, the sooner
we shall begin to be on a pleasant understanding. Business first,
pleasure arterwards, as King Richard the Third said when he stabbed the
t’other king in the Tower, afore he smothered the babbies.’

At the conclusion of this address, Mr. Weller brushed his hat with his
right elbow, and nodded benignly to Jinks, who had heard him throughout
with unspeakable awe.

‘Who is this man, Grummer?’ said the magistrate.

‘Wery desp’rate ch’racter, your Wash-up,’ replied Grummer. ‘He attempted
to rescue the prisoners, and assaulted the officers; so we took him into
custody, and brought him here.’

‘You did quite right,’ replied the magistrate. ‘He is evidently a
desperate ruffian.’

‘He is my servant, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick angrily.

‘Oh! he is your servant, is he?’ said Mr. Nupkins. ‘A conspiracy to
defeat the ends of justice, and murder its officers. Pickwick’s servant.
Put that down, Mr. Jinks.’

Mr. Jinks did so.

‘What’s your name, fellow?’ thundered Mr. Nupkins.

‘Veller,’ replied Sam.

‘A very good name for the Newgate Calendar,’ said Mr. Nupkins.

This was a joke; so Jinks, Grummer, Dubbley, all the specials, and
Muzzle, went into fits of laughter of five minutes’ duration.

‘Put down his name, Mr. Jinks,’ said the magistrate.

‘Two L’s, old feller,’ said Sam.

Here an unfortunate special laughed again, whereupon the magistrate
threatened to commit him instantly. It is a dangerous thing to laugh at
the wrong man, in these cases.

‘Where do you live?’ said the magistrate.

‘Vere ever I can,’ replied Sam.

‘Put down that, Mr. Jinks,’ said the magistrate, who was fast rising
into a rage.

‘Score it under,’ said Sam.

‘He is a vagabond, Mr. Jinks,’ said the magistrate. ‘He is a vagabond on
his own statement,--is he not, Mr. Jinks?’

‘Certainly, Sir.’

‘Then I’ll commit him--I’ll commit him as such,’ said Mr. Nupkins.

‘This is a wery impartial country for justice, ‘said Sam.’ There ain’t a
magistrate goin’ as don’t commit himself twice as he commits other
people.’

At this sally another special laughed, and then tried to look so
supernaturally solemn, that the magistrate detected him immediately.

‘Grummer,’ said Mr. Nupkins, reddening with passion, ‘how dare you
select such an inefficient and disreputable person for a special
constable, as that man? How dare you do it, Sir?’

‘I am very sorry, your Wash-up,’ stammered Grummer.

‘Very sorry!’ said the furious magistrate. ‘You shall repent of this
neglect of duty, Mr. Grummer; you shall be made an example of. Take that
fellow’s staff away. He’s drunk. You’re drunk, fellow.’

‘I am not drunk, your Worship,’ said the man.

‘You _are _drunk,’ returned the magistrate. ‘How dare you say you are
not drunk, Sir, when I say you are? Doesn’t he smell of spirits,
Grummer?’

‘Horrid, your Wash-up,’ replied Grummer, who had a vague impression that
there was a smell of rum somewhere.

‘I knew he did,’ said Mr. Nupkins. ‘I saw he was drunk when he first
came into the room, by his excited eye. Did you observe his excited eye,
Mr. Jinks?’

‘Certainly, Sir.’

‘I haven’t touched a drop of spirits this morning,’ said the man, who
was as sober a fellow as need be.

‘How dare you tell me a falsehood?’ said Mr. Nupkins. ‘Isn’t he drunk at
this moment, Mr. Jinks?’

‘Certainly, Sir,’ replied Jinks.

‘Mr. Jinks,’ said the magistrate, ‘I shall commit that man for contempt.
Make out his committal, Mr. Jinks.’

And committed the special would have been, only Jinks, who was the
magistrate’s adviser (having had a legal education of three years in a
country attorney’s office), whispered the magistrate that he thought it
wouldn’t do; so the magistrate made a speech, and said, that in
consideration of the special’s family, he would merely reprimand and
discharge him. Accordingly, the special was abused, vehemently, for a
quarter of an hour, and sent about his business; and Grummer, Dubbley,
Muzzle, and all the other specials, murmured their admiration of the
magnanimity of Mr. Nupkins.

‘Now, Mr. Jinks,’ said the magistrate, ‘swear Grummer.’

Grummer was sworn directly; but as Grummer wandered, and Mr. Nupkins’s
dinner was nearly ready, Mr. Nupkins cut the matter short, by putting
leading questions to Grummer, which Grummer answered as nearly in the
affirmative as he could. So the examination went off, all very smooth
and comfortable, and two assaults were proved against Mr. Weller, and a
threat against Mr. Winkle, and a push against Mr. Snodgrass. When all
this was done to the magistrate’s satisfaction, the magistrate and Mr.
Jinks consulted in whispers.

The consultation having lasted about ten minutes, Mr. Jinks retired to
his end of the table; and the magistrate, with a preparatory cough, drew
himself up in his chair, and was proceeding to commence his address,
when Mr. Pickwick interposed.

‘I beg your pardon, sir, for interrupting you,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘but
before you proceed to express, and act upon, any opinion you may have
formed on the statements which have been made here, I must claim my
right to be heard so far as I am personally concerned.’

‘Hold your tongue, Sir,’ said the magistrate peremptorily.

‘I must submit to you, Sir--’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Hold your tongue, sir,’ interposed the magistrate, ‘or I shall order an
officer to remove you.’

‘You may order your officers to do whatever you please, Sir,’ said Mr.
Pickwick; ‘and I have no doubt, from the specimen I have had of the
subordination preserved amongst them, that whatever you order, they will
execute, Sir; but I shall take the liberty, Sir, of claiming my right to
be heard, until I am removed by force.’

‘Pickvick and principle!’ exclaimed Mr. Weller, in a very audible voice.

‘Sam, be quiet,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Dumb as a drum vith a hole in it, Sir,’ replied Sam.

Mr. Nupkins looked at Mr. Pickwick with a gaze of intense astonishment,
at his displaying such unwonted temerity; and was apparently about to
return a very angry reply, when Mr. Jinks pulled him by the sleeve, and
whispered something in his ear. To this, the magistrate returned a half-
audible answer, and then the whispering was renewed. Jinks was evidently
remonstrating.

At length the magistrate, gulping down, with a very bad grace, his
disinclination to hear anything more, turned to Mr. Pickwick, and said
sharply, ‘What do you want to say?’

‘First,’ said Mr. Pickwick, sending a look through his spectacles, under
which even Nupkins quailed, ‘first, I wish to know what I and my friend
have been brought here for?’

‘Must I tell him?’ whispered the magistrate to Jinks.

‘I think you had better, sir,’ whispered Jinks to the magistrate.

‘An information has been sworn before me,’ said the magistrate, ‘that it
is apprehended you are going to fight a duel, and that the other man,
Tupman, is your aider and abettor in it. Therefore--eh, Mr. Jinks?’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Therefore, I call upon you both, to--I think that’s the course, Mr.
Jinks?’

‘Certainly, Sir.’

‘To--to--what, Mr. Jinks?’ said the magistrate pettishly.

‘To find bail, sir.’

‘Yes. Therefore, I call upon you both--as I was about to say when I was
interrupted by my clerk--to find bail.’

Good bail,’ whispered Mr. Jinks.

‘I shall require good bail,’ said the magistrate.

‘Town’s-people,’ whispered Jinks.

‘They must be townspeople,’ said the magistrate.

‘Fifty pounds each,’ whispered Jinks, ‘and householders, of course.’

‘I shall require two sureties of fifty pounds each,’ said the magistrate
aloud, with great dignity, ‘and they must be householders, of course.’

‘But bless my heart, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, who, together with Mr.
Tupman, was all amazement and indignation; ‘we are perfect strangers in
this town. I have as little knowledge of any householders here, as I
have intention of fighting a duel with anybody.’

‘I dare say,’ replied the magistrate, ‘I dare say--don’t you, Mr.
Jinks?’

‘Certainly, Sir.’

‘Have you anything more to say?’ inquired the magistrate.

Mr. Pickwick had a great deal more to say, which he would no doubt have
said, very little to his own advantage, or the magistrate’s
satisfaction, if he had not, the moment he ceased speaking, been pulled
by the sleeve by Mr. Weller, with whom he was immediately engaged in so
earnest a conversation, that he suffered the magistrate’s inquiry to
pass wholly unnoticed. Mr. Nupkins was not the man to ask a question of
the kind twice over; and so, with another preparatory cough, he
proceeded, amidst the reverential and admiring silence of the
constables, to pronounce his decision.

He should fine Weller two pounds for the first assault, and three pounds
for the second. He should fine Winkle two pounds, and Snodgrass one
pound, besides requiring them to enter into their own recognisances to
keep the peace towards all his Majesty’s subjects, and especially
towards his liege servant, Daniel Grummer. Pickwick and Tupman he had
already held to bail.

Immediately on the magistrate ceasing to speak, Mr. Pickwick, with a
smile mantling on his again good-humoured countenance, stepped forward,
and said--

‘I beg the magistrate’s pardon, but may I request a few minutes’ private
conversation with him, on a matter of deep importance to himself?’

‘What?’ said the magistrate. Mr. Pickwick repeated his request.

‘This is a most extraordinary request,’ said the magistrate. ‘A private
interview?’

‘A private interview,’ replied Mr. Pickwick firmly; ‘only, as a part of
the information which I wish to communicate is derived from my servant,
I should wish him to be present.’

The magistrate looked at Mr. Jinks; Mr. Jinks looked at the magistrate;
the officers looked at each other in amazement. Mr. Nupkins turned
suddenly pale. Could the man Weller, in a moment of remorse, have
divulged some secret conspiracy for his assassination? It was a dreadful
thought. He was a public man; and he turned paler, as he thought of
Julius Caesar and Mr. Perceval.

The magistrate looked at Mr. Pickwick again, and beckoned Mr. Jinks.

‘What do you think of this request, Mr. Jinks?’ murmured Mr. Nupkins.

Mr. Jinks, who didn’t exactly know what to think of it, and was afraid
he might offend, smiled feebly, after a dubious fashion, and, screwing
up the corners of his mouth, shook his head slowly from side to side.

‘Mr. Jinks,’ said the magistrate gravely, ‘you are an ass.’

At this little expression of opinion, Mr. Jinks smiled again--rather
more feebly than before--and edged himself, by degrees, back into his
own corner.

Mr. Nupkins debated the matter within himself for a few seconds, and
then, rising from his chair, and requesting Mr. Pickwick and Sam to
follow him, led the way into a small room which opened into the justice-
parlour. Desiring Mr. Pickwick to walk to the upper end of the little
apartment, and holding his hand upon the half-closed door, that he might
be able to effect an immediate escape, in case there was the least
tendency to a display of hostilities, Mr. Nupkins expressed his
readiness to hear the communication, whatever it might be.

‘I will come to the point at once, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘it affects
yourself and your credit materially. I have every reason to believe,
Sir, that you are harbouring in your house a gross impostor!’

‘Two,’ interrupted Sam. ‘Mulberry agin all natur, for tears and
willainny!’

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘if I am to render myself intelligible to this
gentleman, I must beg you to control your feelings.’

‘Wery sorry, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘but when I think o’ that ‘ere
Job, I can’t help opening the walve a inch or two.’

‘In one word, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘is my servant right in
suspecting that a certain Captain Fitz-Marshall is in the habit of
visiting here? Because,’ added Mr. Pickwick, as he saw that Mr. Nupkins
was about to offer a very indignant interruption, ‘because if he be, I
know that person to be a--’

‘Hush, hush,’ said Mr. Nupkins, closing the door. ‘Know him to be what,
Sir?’

‘An unprincipled adventurer--a dishonourable character--a man who preys
upon society, and makes easily-deceived people his dupes, Sir; his
absurd, his foolish, his wretched dupes, Sir,’ said the excited Mr.
Pickwick.

‘Dear me,’ said Mr. Nupkins, turning very red, and altering his whole
manner directly. ‘Dear me, Mr.--’

‘Pickvick,’ said Sam.

‘Pickwick,’ said the magistrate, ‘dear me, Mr. Pickwick--pray take a
seat--you cannot mean this? Captain Fitz-Marshall!’

‘Don’t call him a cap’en,’ said Sam, ‘nor Fitz-Marshall neither; he
ain’t neither one nor t’other. He’s a strolling actor, he is, and his
name’s Jingle; and if ever there was a wolf in a mulberry suit, that
‘ere Job Trotter’s him.’

‘It is very true, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, replying to the magistrate’s
look of amazement; ‘my only business in this town, is to expose the
person of whom we now speak.’

Mr. Pickwick proceeded to pour into the horror-stricken ear of Mr.
Nupkins, an abridged account of all Mr. Jingle’s atrocities. He related
how he had first met him; how he had eloped with Miss Wardle; how he had
cheerfully resigned the lady for a pecuniary consideration; how he had
entrapped himself into a lady’s boarding-school at midnight; and how he
(Mr. Pickwick) now felt it his duty to expose his assumption of his
present name and rank.

As the narrative proceeded, all the warm blood in the body of Mr.
Nupkins tingled up into the very tips of his ears. He had picked up the
captain at a neighbouring race-course. Charmed with his long list of
aristocratic acquaintance, his extensive travel, and his fashionable
demeanour, Mrs. Nupkins and Miss Nupkins had exhibited Captain Fitz-
Marshall, and quoted Captain Fitz-Marshall, and hurled Captain Fitz-
Marshall at the devoted heads of their select circle of acquaintance,
until their bosom friends, Mrs. Porkenham and the Misses Porkenhams, and
Mr. Sidney Porkenham, were ready to burst with jealousy and despair. And
now, to hear, after all, that he was a needy adventurer, a strolling
player, and if not a swindler, something so very like it, that it was
hard to tell the difference! Heavens! what would the Porkenhams say!
What would be the triumph of Mr. Sidney Porkenham when he found that his
addresses had been slighted for such a rival! How should he, Nupkins,
meet the eye of old Porkenham at the next quarter-sessions! And what a
handle would it be for the opposition magisterial party if the story got
abroad!

‘But after all,’ said Mr. Nupkins, brightening for a moment, after a
long pause; ‘after all, this is a mere statement. Captain Fitz-Marshall
is a man of very engaging manners, and, I dare say, has many enemies.
What proof have you of the truth of these representations?’

‘Confront me with him,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘that is all I ask, and all I
require. Confront him with me and my friends here; you will want no
further proof.’

‘Why,’ said Mr. Nupkins, ‘that might be very easily done, for he will be
here to-night, and then there would be no occasion to make the matter
public, just--just--for the young man’s own sake, you know. I--I--should
like to consult Mrs. Nupkins on the propriety of the step, in the first
instance, though. At all events, Mr. Pickwick, we must despatch this
legal business before we can do anything else. Pray step back into the
next room.’

Into the next room they went.

‘Grummer,’ said the magistrate, in an awful voice.

‘Your Wash-up,’ replied Grummer, with the smile of a favourite.

‘Come, come, Sir,’ said the magistrate sternly, ‘don’t let me see any of
this levity here. It is very unbecoming, and I can assure you that you
have very little to smile at. Was the account you gave me just now
strictly true? Now be careful, sir!’

Your Wash-up,’ stammered Grummer, ‘I-’

‘Oh, you are confused, are you?’ said the magistrate. ‘Mr. Jinks, you
observe this confusion?’

‘Certainly, Sir,’ replied Jinks.

‘Now,’ said the magistrate, ‘repeat your statement, Grummer, and again I
warn you to be careful. Mr. Jinks, take his words down.’

The unfortunate Grummer proceeded to re-state his complaint, but, what
between Mr. Jinks’s taking down his words, and the magistrate’s taking
them up, his natural tendency to rambling, and his extreme confusion, he
managed to get involved, in something under three minutes, in such a
mass of entanglement and contradiction, that Mr. Nupkins at once
declared he didn’t believe him. So the fines were remitted, and Mr.
Jinks found a couple of bail in no time. And all these solemn
proceedings having been satisfactorily concluded, Mr. Grummer was
ignominiously ordered out--an awful instance of the instability of human
greatness, and the uncertain tenure of great men’s favour.

Mrs. Nupkins was a majestic female in a pink gauze turban and a light
brown wig. Miss Nupkins possessed all her mamma’s haughtiness without
the turban, and all her ill-nature without the wig; and whenever the
exercise of these two amiable qualities involved mother and daughter in
some unpleasant dilemma, as they not infrequently did, they both
concurred in laying the blame on the shoulders of Mr. Nupkins.
Accordingly, when Mr. Nupkins sought Mrs. Nupkins, and detailed the
communication which had been made by Mr. Pickwick, Mrs. Nupkins suddenly
recollected that she had always expected something of the kind; that she
had always said it would be so; that her advice was never taken; that
she really did not know what Mr. Nupkins supposed she was; and so forth.

‘The idea!’ said Miss Nupkins, forcing a tear of very scanty proportions
into the corner of each eye; ‘the idea of my being made such a fool of!’

‘Ah! you may thank your papa, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nupkins; ‘how I have
implored and begged that man to inquire into the captain’s family
connections; how I have urged and entreated him to take some decisive
step! I am quite certain nobody would believe it--quite.’

‘But, my dear,’ said Mr. Nupkins.

‘Don’t talk to me, you aggravating thing, don’t!’ said Mrs. Nupkins.

‘My love,’ said Mr. Nupkins, ‘you professed yourself very fond of
Captain Fitz-Marshall. You have constantly asked him here, my dear, and
you have lost no opportunity of introducing him elsewhere.’

‘Didn’t I say so, Henrietta?’ cried Mrs. Nupkins, appealing to her
daughter with the air of a much-injured female. ‘Didn’t I say that your
papa would turn round and lay all this at my door? Didn’t I say so?’
Here Mrs. Nupkins sobbed.

‘Oh, pa!’ remonstrated Miss Nupkins. And here she sobbed too.

‘Isn’t it too much, when he has brought all this disgrace and ridicule
upon us, to taunt me with being the cause of it?’ exclaimed Mrs.
Nupkins.

‘How can we ever show ourselves in society!’ said Miss Nupkins.

‘How can we face the Porkenhams?’ cried Mrs. Nupkins.

‘Or the Griggs!’ cried Miss Nupkins.

‘Or the Slummintowkens!’ cried Mrs. Nupkins. ‘But what does your papa
care! What is it to _him_!’ At this dreadful reflection, Mrs. Nupkins
wept mental anguish, and Miss Nupkins followed on the same side.

Mrs. Nupkins’s tears continued to gush forth, with great velocity, until
she had gained a little time to think the matter over; when she decided,
in her own mind, that the best thing to do would be to ask Mr. Pickwick
and his friends to remain until the captain’s arrival, and then to give
Mr. Pickwick the opportunity he sought. If it appeared that he had
spoken truly, the captain could be turned out of the house without
noising the matter abroad, and they could easily account to the
Porkenhams for his disappearance, by saying that he had been appointed,
through the Court influence of his family, to the governor-generalship
of Sierra Leone, of Saugur Point, or any other of those salubrious
climates which enchant Europeans so much, that when they once get there,
they can hardly ever prevail upon themselves to come back again.

When Mrs. Nupkins dried up her tears, Miss Nupkins dried up hers, and
Mr. Nupkins was very glad to settle the matter as Mrs. Nupkins had
proposed. So Mr. Pickwick and his friends, having washed off all marks
of their late encounter, were introduced to the ladies, and soon
afterwards to their dinner; and Mr. Weller, whom the magistrate, with
his peculiar sagacity, had discovered in half an hour to be one of the
finest fellows alive, was consigned to the care and guardianship of Mr.
Muzzle, who was specially enjoined to take him below, and make much of
him.

‘How de do, sir?’ said Mr. Muzzle, as he conducted Mr. Weller down the
kitchen stairs.

‘Why, no considerable change has taken place in the state of my system,
since I see you cocked up behind your governor’s chair in the parlour, a
little vile ago,’ replied Sam.

‘You will excuse my not taking more notice of you then,’ said Mr.
Muzzle. ‘You see, master hadn’t introduced us, then. Lord, how fond he
is of you, Mr. Weller, to be sure!’

‘Ah!’ said Sam, ‘what a pleasant chap he is!’

‘Ain’t he?’ replied Mr. Muzzle.

‘So much humour,’ said Sam.

‘And such a man to speak,’ said Mr. Muzzle. ‘How his ideas flow, don’t
they?’

‘Wonderful,’ replied Sam; ‘they comes a-pouring out, knocking each
other’s heads so fast, that they seems to stun one another; you hardly
know what he’s arter, do you?’

That’s the great merit of his style of speaking,’ rejoined Mr. Muzzle.
‘Take care of the last step, Mr. Weller. Would you like to wash your
hands, sir, before we join the ladies? Here’s a sink, with the water
laid on, Sir, and a clean jack towel behind the door.’

‘Ah! perhaps I may as well have a rinse,’ replied Mr. Weller, applying
plenty of yellow soap to the towel, and rubbing away till his face shone
again. ‘How many ladies are there?’

‘Only two in our kitchen,’ said Mr. Muzzle; ‘cook and ‘ouse-maid. We
keep a boy to do the dirty work, and a gal besides, but they dine in the
wash’us.’

‘Oh, they dines in the wash’us, do they?’ said Mr. Weller.

‘Yes,’ replied Mr. Muzzle, ‘we tried ‘em at our table when they first
come, but we couldn’t keep ‘em. The gal’s manners is dreadful vulgar;
and the boy breathes so very hard while he’s eating, that we found it
impossible to sit at table with him.’

‘Young grampus!’ said Mr. Weller.

‘Oh, dreadful,’ rejoined Mr. Muzzle; ‘but that is the worst of country
service, Mr. Weller; the juniors is always so very savage. This way,
sir, if you please, this way.’

Preceding Mr. Weller, with the utmost politeness, Mr. Muzzle conducted
him into the kitchen.

‘Mary,’ said Mr. Muzzle to the pretty servant-girl, ‘this is Mr. Weller;
a gentleman as master has sent down, to be made as comfortable as
possible.’

‘And your master’s a knowin’ hand, and has just sent me to the right
place,’ said Mr. Weller, with a glance of admiration at Mary. ‘If I wos
master o’ this here house, I should alvays find the materials for
comfort vere Mary wos.’

Lor, Mr. Weller!’ said Mary blushing.

‘Well, I never!’ ejaculated the cook.

‘Bless me, cook, I forgot you,’ said Mr. Muzzle. ‘Mr. Weller, let me
introduce you.’

‘How are you, ma’am?’ said Mr. Weller. ‘Wery glad to see you, indeed,
and hope our acquaintance may be a long ‘un, as the gen’l’m’n said to
the fi’ pun’ note.’

When this ceremony of introduction had been gone through, the cook and
Mary retired into the back kitchen to titter, for ten minutes; then
returning, all giggles and blushes, they sat down to dinner.

Mr. Weller’s easy manners and conversational powers had such
irresistible influence with his new friends, that before the dinner was
half over, they were on a footing of perfect intimacy, and in possession
of a full account of the delinquency of Job Trotter.

‘I never could a-bear that Job,’ said Mary.

‘No more you never ought to, my dear,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘Why not?’ inquired Mary.

‘’Cos ugliness and svindlin’ never ought to be formiliar with elegance
and wirtew,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘Ought they, Mr. Muzzle?’

‘Not by no means,’ replied that gentleman.


Here Mary laughed, and said the cook had made her; and the cook laughed,
and said she hadn’t.

‘I ha’n’t got a glass,’ said Mary.

‘Drink with me, my dear,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘Put your lips to this here
tumbler, and then I can kiss you by deputy.’

‘For shame, Mr. Weller!’ said Mary.

‘What’s a shame, my dear?’

‘Talkin’ in that way.’

‘Nonsense; it ain’t no harm. It’s natur; ain’t it, cook?’

‘Don’t ask me, imperence,’ replied the cook, in a high state of delight;
and hereupon the cook and Mary laughed again, till what between the
beer, and the cold meat, and the laughter combined, the latter young
lady was brought to the verge of choking--an alarming crisis from which
she was only recovered by sundry pats on the back, and other necessary
attentions, most delicately administered by Mr. Samuel Weller.

In the midst of all this jollity and conviviality, a loud ring was heard
at the garden gate, to which the young gentleman who took his meals in
the wash-house, immediately responded. Mr. Weller was in the height of
his attentions to the pretty house-maid; Mr. Muzzle was busy doing the
honours of the table; and the cook had just paused to laugh, in the very
act of raising a huge morsel to her lips; when the kitchen door opened,
and in walked Mr. Job Trotter.

We have said in walked Mr. Job Trotter, but the statement is not
distinguished by our usual scrupulous adherence to fact. The door opened
and Mr. Trotter appeared. He would have walked in, and was in the very
act of doing so, indeed, when catching sight of Mr. Weller, he
involuntarily shrank back a pace or two, and stood gazing on the
unexpected scene before him, perfectly motionless with amazement and
terror.

‘Here he is!’ said Sam, rising with great glee. ‘Why we were that wery
moment a-speaking o’ you. How are you? Where have you been? Come in.’

Laying his hand on the mulberry collar of the unresisting Job, Mr.
Weller dragged him into the kitchen; and, locking the door, handed the
key to Mr. Muzzle, who very coolly buttoned it up in a side pocket.

‘Well, here’s a game!’ cried Sam. ‘Only think o’ my master havin’ the
pleasure o’ meeting yourn upstairs, and me havin’ the joy o’ meetin’ you
down here. How are you gettin’ on, and how is the chandlery bis’ness
likely to do? Well, I am so glad to see you. How happy you look. It’s
quite a treat to see you; ain’t it, Mr. Muzzle?’

‘Quite,’ said Mr. Muzzle.

‘So cheerful he is!’ said Sam.

‘In such good spirits!’ said Muzzle.

‘And so glad to see us--that makes it so much more comfortable,’ said
Sam. ‘Sit down; sit down.’

Mr. Trotter suffered himself to be forced into a chair by the fireside.
He cast his small eyes, first on Mr. Weller, and then on Mr. Muzzle, but
said nothing.

‘Well, now,’ said Sam, ‘afore these here ladies, I should jest like to
ask you, as a sort of curiosity, whether you don’t consider yourself as
nice and well-behaved a young gen’l’m’n, as ever used a pink check
pocket-handkerchief, and the number four collection?’

‘And as was ever a-going to be married to a cook,’ said that lady
indignantly. ‘The willin!’

‘And leave off his evil ways, and set up in the chandlery line
arterwards,’ said the housemaid.

‘Now, I’ll tell you what it is, young man,’ said Mr. Muzzle solemnly,
enraged at the last two allusions, ‘this here lady (pointing to the
cook) keeps company with me; and when you presume, Sir, to talk of
keeping chandlers’ shops with her, you injure me in one of the most
delicatest points in which one man can injure another. Do you understand
that, Sir?’

Here Mr. Muzzle, who had a great notion of his eloquence, in which he
imitated his master, paused for a reply.

But Mr. Trotter made no reply. So Mr. Muzzle proceeded in a solemn
manner--

‘It’s very probable, sir, that you won’t be wanted upstairs for several
minutes, Sir, because _my_ master is at this moment particularly engaged
in settling the hash of _your _master, Sir; and therefore you’ll have
leisure, Sir, for a little private talk with me, Sir. Do you understand
that, Sir?’

Mr. Muzzle again paused for a reply; and again Mr. Trotter disappointed
him.

‘Well, then,’ said Mr. Muzzle, ‘I’m very sorry to have to explain myself
before ladies, but the urgency of the case will be my excuse. The back
kitchen’s empty, Sir. If you will step in there, Sir, Mr. Weller will
see fair, and we can have mutual satisfaction till the bell rings.
Follow me, Sir!’

As Mr. Muzzle uttered these words, he took a step or two towards the
door; and, by way of saving time, began to pull off his coat as he
walked along.

Now, the cook no sooner heard the concluding words of this desperate
challenge, and saw Mr. Muzzle about to put it into execution, than she
uttered a loud and piercing shriek; and rushing on Mr. Job Trotter, who
rose from his chair on the instant, tore and buffeted his large flat
face, with an energy peculiar to excited females, and twining her hands
in his long black hair, tore therefrom about enough to make five or six
dozen of the very largest-sized mourning-rings. Having accomplished this
feat with all the ardour which her devoted love for Mr. Muzzle inspired,
she staggered back; and being a lady of very excitable and delicate
feelings, she instantly fell under the dresser, and fainted away.

At this moment, the bell rang.

‘That’s for you, Job Trotter,’ said Sam; and before Mr. Trotter could
offer remonstrance or reply--even before he had time to stanch the
wounds inflicted by the insensible lady--Sam seized one arm and Mr.
Muzzle the other, and one pulling before, and the other pushing behind,
they conveyed him upstairs, and into the parlour.

It was an impressive tableau. Alfred Jingle, Esquire, alias Captain
Fitz-Marshall, was standing near the door with his hat in his hand, and
a smile on his face, wholly unmoved by his very unpleasant situation.
Confronting him, stood Mr. Pickwick, who had evidently been inculcating
some high moral lesson; for his left hand was beneath his coat tail, and
his right extended in air, as was his wont when delivering himself of an
impressive address. At a little distance, stood Mr. Tupman with
indignant countenance, carefully held back by his two younger friends;
at the farther end of the room were Mr. Nupkins, Mrs. Nupkins, and Miss
Nupkins, gloomily grand and savagely vexed.

‘What prevents me,’ said Mr. Nupkins, with magisterial dignity, as Job
was brought in--‘what prevents me from detaining these men as rogues and
impostors? It is a foolish mercy. What prevents me?’

‘Pride, old fellow, pride,’ replied Jingle, quite at his ease. ‘Wouldn’t
do--no go--caught a captain, eh?--ha! ha! very good--husband for
daughter--biter bit--make it public--not for worlds--look stupid--very!’

‘Wretch,’ said Mr. Nupkins, ‘we scorn your base insinuations.’

‘I always hated him,’ added Henrietta.

‘Oh, of course,’ said Jingle. ‘Tall young man--old lover--Sidney
Porkenham--rich--fine fellow--not so rich as captain, though, eh?--turn
him away--off with him--anything for captain--nothing like captain
anywhere--all the girls--raving mad--eh, Job, eh?’

Here Mr. Jingle laughed very heartily; and Job, rubbing his hands with
delight, uttered the first sound he had given vent to since he entered
the house--a low, noiseless chuckle, which seemed to intimate that he
enjoyed his laugh too much, to let any of it escape in sound.

‘Mr. Nupkins,’ said the elder lady,’ this is not a fit conversation for
the servants to overhear. Let these wretches be removed.’

‘Certainly, my dear,’ Said Mr. Nupkins. ‘Muzzle!’

‘Your Worship.’

‘Open the front door.’

‘Yes, your Worship.’

‘Leave the house!’ said Mr. Nupkins, waving his hand emphatically.

Jingle smiled, and moved towards the door.

‘Stay!’ said Mr. Pickwick. Jingle stopped.

‘I might,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘have taken a much greater revenge for the
treatment I have experienced at your hands, and that of your
hypocritical friend there.’

Job Trotter bowed with great politeness, and laid his hand upon his
heart.

‘I say,’ said Mr. Pickwick, growing gradually angry, ‘that I might have
taken a greater revenge, but I content myself with exposing you, which I
consider a duty I owe to society. This is a leniency, Sir, which I hope
you will remember.’

When Mr. Pickwick arrived at this point, Job Trotter, with facetious
gravity, applied his hand to his ear, as if desirous not to lose a
syllable he uttered.

‘And I have only to add, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, now thoroughly angry,
‘that I consider you a rascal, and a--a--ruffian--and--and worse than
any man I ever saw, or heard of, except that pious and sanctified
vagabond in the mulberry livery.’

‘Ha! ha!’ said Jingle, ‘good fellow, Pickwick--fine heart--stout old
boy--but must _not _be passionate--bad thing, very--bye, bye--see you
again some day--keep up your spirits--now, Job--trot!’

With these words, Mr. Jingle stuck on his hat in his old fashion, and
strode out of the room. Job Trotter paused, looked round, smiled and
then with a bow of mock solemnity to Mr. Pickwick, and a wink to Mr.
Weller, the audacious slyness of which baffles all description, followed
the footsteps of his hopeful master.

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, as Mr. Weller was following.

‘Sir.’

Stay here.’

Mr. Weller seemed uncertain.

‘Stay here,’ repeated Mr. Pickwick.

‘Mayn’t I polish that ‘ere Job off, in the front garden?’ said Mr.
Weller.

‘Certainly not,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Mayn’t I kick him out o’ the gate, Sir?’ said Mr. Weller.

‘Not on any account,’ replied his master.

For the first time since his engagement, Mr. Weller looked, for a
moment, discontented and unhappy. But his countenance immediately
cleared up; for the wily Mr. Muzzle, by concealing himself behind the
street door, and rushing violently out, at the right instant, contrived
with great dexterity to overturn both Mr. Jingle and his attendant, down
the flight of steps, into the American aloe tubs that stood beneath.

‘Having discharged my duty, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick to Mr. Nupkins, ‘I
will, with my friends, bid you farewell. While we thank you for such
hospitality as we have received, permit me to assure you, in our joint
names, that we should not have accepted it, or have consented to
extricate ourselves in this way, from our previous dilemma, had we not
been impelled by a strong sense of duty. We return to London to-morrow.
Your secret is safe with us.’

Having thus entered his protest against their treatment of the morning,
Mr. Pickwick bowed low to the ladies, and notwithstanding the
solicitations of the family, left the room with his friends.

‘Get your hat, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘It’s below stairs, Sir,’ said Sam, and he ran down after it.

Now, there was nobody in the kitchen, but the pretty housemaid; and as
Sam’s hat was mislaid, he had to look for it, and the pretty housemaid
lighted him. They had to look all over the place for the hat. The pretty
housemaid, in her anxiety to find it, went down on her knees, and turned
over all the things that were heaped together in a little corner by the
door. It was an awkward corner. You couldn’t get at it without shutting
the door first.

‘Here it is,’ said the pretty housemaid. ‘This is it, ain’t it?’

‘Let me look,’ said Sam.

The pretty housemaid had stood the candle on the floor; and, as it gave
a very dim light, Sam was obliged to go down on _his _knees before he
could see whether it really was his own hat or not. It was a remarkably
small corner, and so--it was nobody’s fault but the man’s who built the
house--Sam and the pretty housemaid were necessarily very close
together.

‘Yes, this is it,’ said Sam. ‘Good-bye!’

‘Good-bye!’ said the pretty housemaid.

‘Good-bye!’ said Sam; and as he said it, he dropped the hat that had
cost so much trouble in looking for.

‘How awkward you are,’ said the pretty housemaid. ‘You’ll lose it again,
if you don’t take care.’

So just to prevent his losing it again, she put it on for him.

Whether it was that the pretty housemaid’s face looked prettier still,
when it was raised towards Sam’s, or whether it was the accidental
consequence of their being so near to each other, is matter of
uncertainty to this day; but Sam kissed her.

‘You don’t mean to say you did that on purpose,’ said the pretty
housemaid, blushing.

‘No, I didn’t then,’ said Sam; ‘but I will now.’

So he kissed her again.

‘Sam!’ said Mr. Pickwick, calling over the banisters.

‘Coming, Sir,’ replied Sam, running upstairs.

‘How long you have been!’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘There was something behind the door, Sir, which perwented our getting
it open, for ever so long, Sir,’ replied Sam.

And this was the first passage of Mr. Weller’s first love.



CHAPTER XXVI. WHICH CONTAINS A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE PROGRESS OF THE
ACTION OF BARDELL AGAINST PICKWICK

Having accomplished the main end and object of his journey, by the
exposure of Jingle, Mr. Pickwick resolved on immediately returning to
London, with the view of becoming acquainted with the proceedings which
had been taken against him, in the meantime, by Messrs. Dodson and Fogg.
Acting upon this resolution with all the energy and decision of his
character, he mounted to the back seat of the first coach which left
Ipswich on the morning after the memorable occurrences detailed at
length in the two preceding chapters; and accompanied by his three
friends, and Mr. Samuel Weller, arrived in the metropolis, in perfect
health and safety, the same evening.

Here the friends, for a short time, separated. Messrs. Tupman, Winkle,
and Snodgrass repaired to their several homes to make such preparations
as might be requisite for their forthcoming visit to Dingley Dell; and
Mr. Pickwick and Sam took up their present abode in very good, old-
fashioned, and comfortable quarters, to wit, the George and Vulture
Tavern and Hotel, George Yard, Lombard Street.

Mr. Pickwick had dined, finished his second pint of particular port,
pulled his silk handkerchief over his head, put his feet on the fender,
and thrown himself back in an easy-chair, when the entrance of Mr.
Weller with his carpet-bag, aroused him from his tranquil meditation.

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Weller.

‘I have just been thinking, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘that having left a
good many things at Mrs. Bardell’s, in Goswell Street, I ought to
arrange for taking them away, before I leave town again.’

‘Wery good, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘I could send them to Mr. Tupman’s, for the present, Sam,’ continued Mr.
Pickwick, ‘but before we take them away, it is necessary that they
should be looked up, and put together. I wish you would step up to
Goswell Street, Sam, and arrange about it.’

‘At once, Sir?’ inquired Mr. Weller.

‘At once,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘And stay, Sam,’ added Mr. Pickwick,
pulling out his purse, ‘there is some rent to pay. The quarter is not
due till Christmas, but you may pay it, and have done with it. A month’s
notice terminates my tenancy. Here it is, written out. Give it, and tell
Mrs. Bardell she may put a bill up, as soon as she likes.’

‘Wery good, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘anythin’ more, sir?’

‘Nothing more, Sam.’

Mr. Weller stepped slowly to the door, as if he expected something more;
slowly opened it, slowly stepped out, and had slowly closed it within a
couple of inches, when Mr. Pickwick called out--

‘Sam.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Mr. Weller, stepping quickly back, and closing the door
behind him.

‘I have no objection, Sam, to your endeavouring to ascertain how Mrs.
Bardell herself seems disposed towards me, and whether it is really
probable that this vile and groundless action is to be carried to
extremity. I say I do not object to you doing this, if you wish it,
Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

Sam gave a short nod of intelligence, and left the room. Mr. Pickwick
drew the silk handkerchief once more over his head, And composed himself
for a nap. Mr. Weller promptly walked forth, to execute his commission.

It was nearly nine o’clock when he reached Goswell Street. A couple of
candles were burning in the little front parlour, and a couple of caps
were reflected on the window-blind. Mrs. Bardell had got company.

Mr. Weller knocked at the door, and after a pretty long interval--
occupied by the party without, in whistling a tune, and by the party
within, in persuading a refractory flat candle to allow itself to be
lighted--a pair of small boots pattered over the floor-cloth, and Master
Bardell presented himself.

‘Well, young townskip,’ said Sam, ‘how’s mother?’

‘She’s pretty well,’ replied Master Bardell, ‘so am I.’

‘Well, that’s a mercy,’ said Sam; ‘tell her I want to speak to her, will
you, my hinfant fernomenon?’

Master Bardell, thus adjured, placed the refractory flat candle on the
bottom stair, and vanished into the front parlour with his message.

The two caps, reflected on the window-blind, were the respective head-
dresses of a couple of Mrs. Bardell’s most particular acquaintance, who
had just stepped in, to have a quiet cup of tea, and a little warm
supper of a couple of sets of pettitoes and some toasted cheese. The
cheese was simmering and browning away, most delightfully, in a little
Dutch oven before the fire; the pettitoes were getting on deliciously in
a little tin saucepan on the hob; and Mrs. Bardell and her two friends
were getting on very well, also, in a little quiet conversation about
and concerning all their particular friends and acquaintance; when
Master Bardell came back from answering the door, and delivered the
message intrusted to him by Mr. Samuel Weller.

‘Mr. Pickwick’s servant!’ said Mrs. Bardell, turning pale.

‘Bless my soul!’ said Mrs. Cluppins.

‘Well, I raly would not ha’ believed it, unless I had ha’ happened to
ha’ been here!’ said Mrs. Sanders.

Mrs. Cluppins was a little, brisk, busy-looking woman; Mrs. Sanders was
a big, fat, heavy-faced personage; and the two were the company.

Mrs. Bardell felt it proper to be agitated; and as none of the three
exactly knew whether under existing circumstances, any communication,
otherwise than through Dodson & Fogg, ought to be held with Mr.
Pickwick’s servant, they were all rather taken by surprise. In this
state of indecision, obviously the first thing to be done, was to thump
the boy for finding Mr. Weller at the door. So his mother thumped him,
and he cried melodiously.

‘Hold your noise--do--you naughty creetur!’ said Mrs. Bardell.

‘Yes; don’t worrit your poor mother,’ said Mrs. Sanders.

‘She’s quite enough to worrit her, as it is, without you, Tommy,’ said
Mrs. Cluppins, with sympathising resignation.

‘Ah! worse luck, poor lamb!’ said Mrs. Sanders.

At all which moral reflections, Master Bardell howled the louder.

‘Now, what shall I do?’ said Mrs. Bardell to Mrs. Cluppins.

‘I think you ought to see him,’ replied Mrs. Cluppins. ‘But on no
account without a witness.’

‘I think two witnesses would be more lawful,’ said Mrs. Sanders, who,
like the other friend, was bursting with curiosity.

‘Perhaps he’d better come in here,’ said Mrs. Bardell.

‘To be sure,’ replied Mrs. Cluppins, eagerly catching at the idea; ‘walk
in, young man; and shut the street door first, please.’

Mr. Weller immediately took the hint; and presenting himself in the
parlour, explained his business to Mrs. Bardell thus--

‘Wery sorry to ‘casion any personal inconwenience, ma’am, as the
housebreaker said to the old lady when he put her on the fire; but as me
and my governor ‘s only jest come to town, and is jest going away agin,
it can’t be helped, you see.’

‘Of course, the young man can’t help the faults of his master,’ said
Mrs. Cluppins, much struck by Mr. Weller’s appearance and conversation.

‘Certainly not,’ chimed in Mrs. Sanders, who, from certain wistful
glances at the little tin saucepan, seemed to be engaged in a mental
calculation of the probable extent of the pettitoes, in the event of
Sam’s being asked to stop to supper.

‘So all I’ve come about, is jest this here,’ said Sam, disregarding the
interruption; ‘first, to give my governor’s notice--there it is.
Secondly, to pay the rent--here it is. Thirdly, to say as all his things
is to be put together, and give to anybody as we sends for ‘em.
Fourthly, that you may let the place as soon as you like--and that’s
all.’

‘Whatever has happened,’ said Mrs. Bardell, ‘I always have said, and
always will say, that in every respect but one, Mr. Pickwick has always
behaved himself like a perfect gentleman. His money always as good as
the bank--always.’

As Mrs. Bardell said this, she applied her handkerchief to her eyes, and
went out of the room to get the receipt.

Sam well knew that he had only to remain quiet, and the women were sure
to talk; so he looked alternately at the tin saucepan, the toasted
cheese, the wall, and the ceiling, in profound silence.

‘Poor dear!’ said Mrs. Cluppins.

‘Ah, poor thing!’ replied Mrs. Sanders.

Sam said nothing. He saw they were coming to the subject.

‘I raly cannot contain myself,’ said Mrs. Cluppins, ‘when I think of
such perjury. I don’t wish to say anything to make you uncomfortable,
young man, but your master’s an old brute, and I wish I had him here to
tell him so.’

I wish you had,’ said Sam.

‘To see how dreadful she takes on, going moping about, and taking no
pleasure in nothing, except when her friends comes in, out of charity,
to sit with her, and make her comfortable,’ resumed Mrs. Cluppins,
glancing at the tin saucepan and the Dutch oven, ‘it’s shocking!’

‘Barbareous,’ said Mrs. Sanders.

‘And your master, young man! A gentleman with money, as could never feel
the expense of a wife, no more than nothing,’ continued Mrs. Cluppins,
with great volubility; ‘why there ain’t the faintest shade of an excuse
for his behaviour! Why don’t he marry her?’

‘Ah,’ said Sam, ‘to be sure; that’s the question.’

‘Question, indeed,’ retorted Mrs. Cluppins, ‘she’d question him, if
she’d my spirit. Hows’ever, there is law for us women, mis’rable
creeturs as they’d make us, if they could; and that your master will
find out, young man, to his cost, afore he’s six months older.’

At this consolatory reflection, Mrs. Cluppins bridled up, and smiled at
Mrs. Sanders, who smiled back again.

‘The action’s going on, and no mistake,’ thought Sam, as Mrs. Bardell
re-entered with the receipt.

‘Here’s the receipt, Mr. Weller,’ said Mrs. Bardell, ‘and here’s the
change, and I hope you’ll take a little drop of something to keep the
cold out, if it’s only for old acquaintance’ sake, Mr. Weller.’

Sam saw the advantage he should gain, and at once acquiesced; whereupon
Mrs. Bardell produced, from a small closet, a black bottle and a wine-
glass; and so great was her abstraction, in her deep mental affliction,
that, after filling Mr. Weller’s glass, she brought out three more wine-
glasses, and filled them too.

‘Lauk, Mrs. Bardell,’ said Mrs. Cluppins, ‘see what you’ve been and
done!’

‘Well, that is a good one!’ ejaculated Mrs. Sanders.

‘Ah, my poor head!’ said Mrs. Bardell, with a faint smile.

Sam understood all this, of course, so he said at once, that he never
could drink before supper, unless a lady drank with him. A great deal of
laughter ensued, and Mrs. Sanders volunteered to humour him, so she took
a slight sip out of her glass. Then Sam said it must go all round, so
they all took a slight sip. Then little Mrs. Cluppins proposed as a
toast, ‘Success to Bardell agin Pickwick’; and then the ladies emptied
their glasses in honour of the sentiment, and got very talkative
directly.

‘I suppose you’ve heard what’s going forward, Mr. Weller?’ said Mrs.
Bardell.

‘I’ve heerd somethin’ on it,’ replied Sam.

‘It’s a terrible thing to be dragged before the public, in that way, Mr.
Weller,’ said Mrs. Bardell; ‘but I see now, that it’s the only thing I
ought to do, and my lawyers, Mr. Dodson and Fogg, tell me that, with the
evidence as we shall call, we must succeed. I don’t know what I should
do, Mr. Weller, if I didn’t.’

The mere idea of Mrs. Bardell’s failing in her action, affected Mrs.
Sanders so deeply, that she was under the necessity of refilling and re-
emptying her glass immediately; feeling, as she said afterwards, that if
she hadn’t had the presence of mind to do so, she must have dropped.

‘Ven is it expected to come on?’ inquired Sam.

‘Either in February or March,’ replied Mrs. Bardell.

‘What a number of witnesses there’ll be, won’t there?’ said Mrs.
Cluppins.

‘Ah! won’t there!’ replied Mrs. Sanders.

‘And won’t Mr. Dodson and Fogg be wild if the plaintiff shouldn’t get
it?’ added Mrs. Cluppins, ‘when they do it all on speculation!’

‘Ah! won’t they!’ said Mrs. Sanders.

‘But the plaintiff must get it,’ resumed Mrs. Cluppins.

‘I hope so,’ said Mrs. Bardell.

‘Oh, there can’t be any doubt about it,’ rejoined Mrs. Sanders.

‘Vell,’ said Sam, rising and setting down his glass, ‘all I can say is,
that I vish you _may _get it.’

‘Thank’ee, Mr. Weller,’ said Mrs. Bardell fervently.

‘And of them Dodson and Foggs, as does these sort o’ things on spec,’
continued Mr. Weller, ‘as vell as for the other kind and gen’rous people
o’ the same purfession, as sets people by the ears, free gratis for
nothin’, and sets their clerks to work to find out little disputes among
their neighbours and acquaintances as vants settlin’ by means of
lawsuits--all I can say o’ them is, that I vish they had the reward I’d
give ‘em.’

‘Ah, I wish they had the reward that every kind and generous heart would
be inclined to bestow upon them!’ said the gratified Mrs. Bardell.

‘Amen to that,’ replied Sam, ‘and a fat and happy liven’ they’d get out
of it! Wish you good-night, ladies.’

To the great relief of Mrs. Sanders, Sam was allowed to depart without
any reference, on the part of the hostess, to the pettitoes and toasted
cheese; to which the ladies, with such juvenile assistance as Master
Bardell could afford, soon afterwards rendered the amplest justice--
indeed they wholly vanished before their strenuous exertions.

Mr. Weller wended his way back to the George and Vulture, and faithfully
recounted to his master, such indications of the sharp practice of
Dodson & Fogg, as he had contrived to pick up in his visit to Mrs.
Bardell’s. An interview with Mr. Perker, next day, more than confirmed
Mr. Weller’s statement; and Mr. Pickwick was fain to prepare for his
Christmas visit to Dingley Dell, with the pleasant anticipation that
some two or three months afterwards, an action brought against him for
damages sustained by reason of a breach of promise of marriage, would be
publicly tried in the Court of Common Pleas; the plaintiff having all
the advantages derivable, not only from the force of circumstances, but
from the sharp practice of Dodson & Fogg to boot.



CHAPTER XXVII. SAMUEL WELLER MAKES A PILGRIMAGE TO DORKING, AND BEHOLDS
HIS MOTHER-IN-LAW

There still remaining an interval of two days before the time agreed
upon for the departure of the Pickwickians to Dingley Dell, Mr. Weller
sat himself down in a back room at the George and Vulture, after eating
an early dinner, to muse on the best way of disposing of his time. It
was a remarkably fine day; and he had not turned the matter over in his
mind ten minutes, when he was suddenly stricken filial and affectionate;
and it occurred to him so strongly that he ought to go down and see his
father, and pay his duty to his mother-in-law, that he was lost in
astonishment at his own remissness in never thinking of this moral
obligation before. Anxious to atone for his past neglect without another
hour’s delay, he straightway walked upstairs to Mr. Pickwick, and
requested leave of absence for this laudable purpose.

‘Certainly, Sam, certainly,’ said Mr. Pickwick, his eyes glistening with
delight at this manifestation of filial feeling on the part of his
attendant; ‘certainly, Sam.’

Mr. Weller made a grateful bow.

‘I am very glad to see that you have so high a sense of your duties as a
son, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘I always had, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘That’s a very gratifying reflection, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick
approvingly.

‘Wery, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘if ever I wanted anythin’ o’ my
father, I always asked for it in a wery ‘spectful and obligin’ manner.
If he didn’t give it me, I took it, for fear I should be led to do
anythin’ wrong, through not havin’ it. I saved him a world o’ trouble
this vay, Sir.’

‘That’s not precisely what I meant, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, shaking his
head, with a slight smile.

‘All good feelin’, sir--the wery best intentions, as the gen’l’m’n said
ven he run away from his wife ‘cos she seemed unhappy with him,’ replied
Mr. Weller.

‘You may go, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Thank’ee, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller; and having made his best bow, and
put on his best clothes, Sam planted himself on the top of the Arundel
coach, and journeyed on to Dorking.

The Marquis of Granby, in Mrs. Weller’s time, was quite a model of a
roadside public-house of the better class--just large enough to be
convenient, and small enough to be snug. On the opposite side of the
road was a large sign-board on a high post, representing the head and
shoulders of a gentleman with an apoplectic countenance, in a red coat
with deep blue facings, and a touch of the same blue over his three-
cornered hat, for a sky. Over that again were a pair of flags; beneath
the last button of his coat were a couple of cannon; and the whole
formed an expressive and undoubted likeness of the Marquis of Granby of
glorious memory. The bar window displayed a choice collection of
geranium plants, and a well-dusted row of spirit phials. The open
shutters bore a variety of golden inscriptions, eulogistic of good beds
and neat wines; and the choice group of countrymen and hostlers lounging
about the stable door and horse-trough, afforded presumptive proof of
the excellent quality of the ale and spirits which were sold within. Sam
Weller paused, when he dismounted from the coach, to note all these
little indications of a thriving business, with the eye of an
experienced traveller; and having done so, stepped in at once, highly
satisfied with everything he had observed.

‘Now, then!’ said a shrill female voice the instant Sam thrust his head
in at the door, ‘what do you want, young man?’

Sam looked round in the direction whence the voice proceeded. It came
from a rather stout lady of comfortable appearance, who was seated
beside the fireplace in the bar, blowing the fire to make the kettle
boil for tea. She was not alone; for on the other side of the fireplace,
sitting bolt upright in a high-backed chair, was a man in threadbare
black clothes, with a back almost as long and stiff as that of the chair
itself, who caught Sam’s most particular and especial attention at once.

He was a prim-faced, red-nosed man, with a long, thin countenance, and a
semi-rattlesnake sort of eye--rather sharp, but decidedly bad. He wore
very short trousers, and black cotton stockings, which, like the rest of
his apparel, were particularly rusty. His looks were starched, but his
white neckerchief was not, and its long limp ends straggled over his
closely-buttoned waistcoat in a very uncouth and unpicturesque fashion.
A pair of old, worn, beaver gloves, a broad-brimmed hat, and a faded
green umbrella, with plenty of whalebone sticking through the bottom, as
if to counterbalance the want of a handle at the top, lay on a chair
beside him; and, being disposed in a very tidy and careful manner,
seemed to imply that the red-nosed man, whoever he was, had no intention
of going away in a hurry.

To do the red-nosed man justice, he would have been very far from wise
if he had entertained any such intention; for, to judge from all
appearances, he must have been possessed of a most desirable circle of
acquaintance, if he could have reasonably expected to be more
comfortable anywhere else. The fire was blazing brightly under the
influence of the bellows, and the kettle was singing gaily under the
influence of both. A small tray of tea-things was arranged on the table;
a plate of hot buttered toast was gently simmering before the fire; and
the red-nosed man himself was busily engaged in converting a large slice
of bread into the same agreeable edible, through the instrumentality of
a long brass toasting-fork. Beside him stood a glass of reeking hot
pine-apple rum-and-water, with a slice of lemon in it; and every time
the red-nosed man stopped to bring the round of toast to his eye, with
the view of ascertaining how it got on, he imbibed a drop or two of the
hot pine-apple rum-and-water, and smiled upon the rather stout lady, as
she blew the fire.

Sam was so lost in the contemplation of this comfortable scene, that he
suffered the first inquiry of the rather stout lady to pass unheeded. It
was not until it had been twice repeated, each time in a shriller tone,
that he became conscious of the impropriety of his behaviour.

‘Governor in?’ inquired Sam, in reply to the question.

‘No, he isn’t,’ replied Mrs. Weller; for the rather stout lady was no
other than the quondam relict and sole executrix of the dead-and-gone
Mr. Clarke; ‘no, he isn’t, and I don’t expect him, either.’

‘I suppose he’s drivin’ up to-day?’ said Sam.

‘He may be, or he may not,’ replied Mrs. Weller, buttering the round of
toast which the red-nosed man had just finished. ‘I don’t know, and,
what’s more, I don’t care.--Ask a blessin’, Mr. Stiggins.’

The red-nosed man did as he was desired, and instantly commenced on the
toast with fierce voracity.

The appearance of the red-nosed man had induced Sam, at first sight, to
more than half suspect that he was the deputy-shepherd of whom his
estimable parent had spoken. The moment he saw him eat, all doubt on the
subject was removed, and he perceived at once that if he purposed to
take up his temporary quarters where he was, he must make his footing
good without delay. He therefore commenced proceedings by putting his
arm over the half-door of the bar, coolly unbolting it, and leisurely
walking in.

‘Mother-in-law,’ said Sam, ‘how are you?’

‘Why, I do believe he is a Weller!’ said Mrs. W., raising her eyes to
Sam’s face, with no very gratified expression of countenance.

‘I rayther think he is,’ said the imperturbable Sam; ‘and I hope this
here reverend gen’l’m’n ‘ll excuse me saying that I wish I was _the
_Weller as owns you, mother-in-law.’

This was a double-barrelled compliment. It implied that Mrs. Weller was
a most agreeable female, and also that Mr. Stiggins had a clerical
appearance. It made a visible impression at once; and Sam followed up
his advantage by kissing his mother-in-law.

‘Get along with you!’ said Mrs. Weller, pushing him away.

‘For shame, young man!’ said the gentleman with the red nose.

‘No offence, sir, no offence,’ replied Sam; ‘you’re wery right, though;
it ain’t the right sort o’ thing, ven mothers-in-law is young and good-
looking, is it, Sir?’

‘It’s all vanity,’ said Mr. Stiggins.

‘Ah, so it is,’ said Mrs. Weller, setting her cap to rights.

Sam thought it was, too, but he held his peace.

The deputy-shepherd seemed by no means best pleased with Sam’s arrival;
and when the first effervescence of the compliment had subsided, even
Mrs. Weller looked as if she could have spared him without the smallest
inconvenience. However, there he was; and as he couldn’t be decently
turned out, they all three sat down to tea.

‘And how’s father?’ said Sam.

At this inquiry, Mrs. Weller raised her hands, and turned up her eyes,
as if the subject were too painful to be alluded to.

Mr. Stiggins groaned.

‘What’s the matter with that ‘ere gen’l’m’n?’ inquired Sam.

‘He’s shocked at the way your father goes on in,’ replied Mrs. Weller.

‘Oh, he is, is he?’ said Sam.

‘And with too good reason,’ added Mrs. Weller gravely.

Mr. Stiggins took up a fresh piece of toast, and groaned heavily.

‘He is a dreadful reprobate,’ said Mrs. Weller.

‘A man of wrath!’ exclaimed Mr. Stiggins. He took a large semi-circular
bite out of the toast, and groaned again.

Sam felt very strongly disposed to give the reverend Mr. Stiggins
something to groan for, but he repressed his inclination, and merely
asked, ‘What’s the old ‘un up to now?’

‘Up to, indeed!’ said Mrs. Weller, ‘Oh, he has a hard heart. Night after
night does this excellent man--don’t frown, Mr. Stiggins; I _will _say
you _are _an excellent man--come and sit here, for hours together, and
it has not the least effect upon him.’

Well, that is odd,’ said Sam; ‘it ‘ud have a wery considerable effect
upon me, if I wos in his place; I know that.’

‘The fact is, my young friend,’ said Mr. Stiggins solemnly, ‘he has an
obderrate bosom. Oh, my young friend, who else could have resisted the
pleading of sixteen of our fairest sisters, and withstood their
exhortations to subscribe to our noble society for providing the infant
negroes in the West Indies with flannel waistcoats and moral pocket-
handkerchiefs?’

‘What’s a moral pocket-ankercher?’ said Sam; ‘I never see one o’ them
articles o’ furniter.’

‘Those which combine amusement With instruction, my young friend,’
replied Mr. Stiggins, ‘blending select tales with wood-cuts.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said Sam; ‘them as hangs up in the linen-drapers’ shops,
with beggars’ petitions and all that ‘ere upon ‘em?’

Mr. Stiggins began a third round of toast, and nodded assent.

‘And he wouldn’t be persuaded by the ladies, wouldn’t he?’ said Sam.

‘Sat and smoked his pipe, and said the infant negroes were--what did he
say the infant negroes were?’ said Mrs. Weller.

‘Little humbugs,’ replied Mr. Stiggins, deeply affected.

‘Said the infant negroes were little humbugs,’ repeated Mrs. Weller. And
they both groaned at the atrocious conduct of the elder Mr. Weller.

A great many more iniquities of a similar nature might have been
disclosed, only the toast being all eaten, the tea having got very weak,
and Sam holding out no indications of meaning to go, Mr. Stiggins
suddenly recollected that he had a most pressing appointment with the
shepherd, and took himself off accordingly.

The tea-things had been scarcely put away, and the hearth swept up, when
the London coach deposited Mr. Weller, senior, at the door; his legs
deposited him in the bar; and his eyes showed him his son.

‘What, Sammy!’ exclaimed the father.

‘What, old Nobs!’ ejaculated the son. And they shook hands heartily.

‘Wery glad to see you, Sammy,’ said the elder Mr. Weller, ‘though how
you’ve managed to get over your mother-in-law, is a mystery to me. I
only vish you’d write me out the receipt, that’s all.’

‘Hush!’ said Sam, ‘she’s at home, old feller.’

She ain’t vithin hearin’,’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘she always goes and
blows up, downstairs, for a couple of hours arter tea; so we’ll just
give ourselves a damp, Sammy.’

Saying this, Mr. Weller mixed two glasses of spirits-and-water, and
produced a couple of pipes. The father and son sitting down opposite
each other; Sam on one side of the fire, in the high-backed chair, and
Mr. Weller, senior, on the other, in an easy ditto, they proceeded to
enjoy themselves with all due gravity.

‘Anybody been here, Sammy?’ asked Mr. Weller, senior, dryly, after a
long silence.

Sam nodded an expressive assent.

‘Red-nosed chap?’ inquired Mr. Weller.

Sam nodded again.

‘Amiable man that ‘ere, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, smoking violently.

‘Seems so,’ observed Sam.

‘Good hand at accounts,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘Is he?’ said Sam.

‘Borrows eighteenpence on Monday, and comes on Tuesday for a shillin’ to
make it up half-a-crown; calls again on Vensday for another half-crown
to make it five shillin’s; and goes on, doubling, till he gets it up to
a five pund note in no time, like them sums in the ‘rithmetic book ‘bout
the nails in the horse’s shoes, Sammy.’

Sam intimated by a nod that he recollected the problem alluded to by his
parent.

‘So you vouldn’t subscribe to the flannel veskits?’ said Sam, after
another interval of smoking.

‘Cert’nly not,’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘what’s the good o’ flannel veskits
to the young niggers abroad? But I’ll tell you what it is, Sammy,’ said
Mr. Weller, lowering his voice, and bending across the fireplace; ‘I’d
come down wery handsome towards strait veskits for some people at home.’

As Mr. Weller said this, he slowly recovered his former position, and
winked at his first-born, in a profound manner.

‘It cert’nly seems a queer start to send out pocket-’ankerchers to
people as don’t know the use on ‘em,’ observed Sam.

‘They’re alvays a-doin’ some gammon of that sort, Sammy,’ replied his
father. ‘T’other Sunday I wos walkin’ up the road, wen who should I see,
a-standin’ at a chapel door, with a blue soup-plate in her hand, but
your mother-in-law! I werily believe there was change for a couple o’
suv’rins in it, then, Sammy, all in ha’pence; and as the people come
out, they rattled the pennies in it, till you’d ha’ thought that no
mortal plate as ever was baked, could ha’ stood the wear and tear. What
d’ye think it was all for?’

‘For another tea-drinkin’, perhaps,’ said Sam.

‘Not a bit on it,’ replied the father; ‘for the shepherd’s water-rate,
Sammy.’

‘The shepherd’s water-rate!’ said Sam.

‘Ay,’ replied Mr. Weller, ‘there was three quarters owin’, and the
shepherd hadn’t paid a farden, not he--perhaps it might be on account
that the water warn’t o’ much use to him, for it’s wery little o’ that
tap he drinks, Sammy, wery; he knows a trick worth a good half-dozen of
that, he does. Hows’ever, it warn’t paid, and so they cuts the water
off. Down goes the shepherd to chapel, gives out as he’s a persecuted
saint, and says he hopes the heart of the turncock as cut the water off,
‘ll be softened, and turned in the right vay, but he rayther thinks he’s
booked for somethin’ uncomfortable. Upon this, the women calls a
meetin’, sings a hymn, wotes your mother-in-law into the chair,
wolunteers a collection next Sunday, and hands it all over to the
shepherd. And if he ain’t got enough out on ‘em, Sammy, to make him free
of the water company for life,’ said Mr. Weller, in conclusion, ‘I’m one
Dutchman, and you’re another, and that’s all about it.’

Mr. Weller smoked for some minutes in silence, and then resumed--

‘The worst o’ these here shepherds is, my boy, that they reg’larly turns
the heads of all the young ladies, about here. Lord bless their little
hearts, they thinks it’s all right, and don’t know no better; but
they’re the wictims o’ gammon, Samivel, they’re the wictims o’ gammon.’

‘I s’pose they are,’ said Sam.

‘Nothin’ else,’ said Mr. Weller, shaking his head gravely; ‘and wot
aggrawates me, Samivel, is to see ‘em a-wastin’ all their time and
labour in making clothes for copper-coloured people as don’t want ‘em,
and taking no notice of flesh-coloured Christians as do. If I’d my vay,
Samivel, I’d just stick some o’ these here lazy shepherds behind a heavy
wheelbarrow, and run ‘em up and down a fourteen-inch-wide plank all day.
That ‘ud shake the nonsense out of ‘em, if anythin’ vould.’

Mr. Weller, having delivered this gentle recipe with strong emphasis,
eked out by a variety of nods and contortions of the eye, emptied his
glass at a draught, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe, with native
dignity.

He was engaged in this operation, when a shrill voice was heard in the
passage.

‘Here’s your dear relation, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller; and Mrs. W. hurried
into the room.

‘Oh, you’ve come back, have you!’ said Mrs. Weller.

‘Yes, my dear,’ replied Mr. Weller, filling a fresh pipe.

‘Has Mr. Stiggins been back?’ said Mrs. Weller.

‘No, my dear, he hasn’t,’ replied Mr. Weller, lighting the pipe by the
ingenious process of holding to the bowl thereof, between the tongs, a
red-hot coal from the adjacent fire; and what’s more, my dear, I shall
manage to surwive it, if he don’t come back at all.’

‘Ugh, you wretch!’ said Mrs. Weller.

‘Thank’ee, my love,’ said Mr. Weller.

‘Come, come, father,’ said Sam, ‘none o’ these little lovin’s afore
strangers. Here’s the reverend gen’l’m’n a-comin’ in now.’

At this announcement, Mrs. Weller hastily wiped off the tears which she
had just begun to force on; and Mr. W. drew his chair sullenly into the
chimney-corner.

Mr. Stiggins was easily prevailed on to take another glass of the hot
pine-apple rum-and-water, and a second, and a third, and then to refresh
himself with a slight supper, previous to beginning again. He sat on the
same side as Mr. Weller, senior; and every time he could contrive to do
so, unseen by his wife, that gentleman indicated to his son the hidden
emotions of his bosom, by shaking his fist over the deputy-shepherd’s
head; a process which afforded his son the most unmingled delight and
satisfaction, the more especially as Mr. Stiggins went on, quietly
drinking the hot pine-apple rum-and-water, wholly unconscious of what
was going forward.

The major part of the conversation was confined to Mrs. Weller and the
reverend Mr. Stiggins; and the topics principally descanted on, were the
virtues of the shepherd, the worthiness of his flock, and the high
crimes and misdemeanours of everybody beside--dissertations which the
elder Mr. Weller occasionally interrupted by half-suppressed references
to a gentleman of the name of Walker, and other running commentaries of
the same kind.

At length Mr. Stiggins, with several most indubitable symptoms of having
quite as much pine-apple rum-and-water about him as he could comfortably
accommodate, took his hat, and his leave; and Sam was, immediately
afterwards, shown to bed by his father. The respectable old gentleman
wrung his hand fervently, and seemed disposed to address some
observation to his son; but on Mrs. Weller advancing towards him, he
appeared to relinquish that intention, and abruptly bade him good-night.

Sam was up betimes next day, and having partaken of a hasty breakfast,
prepared to return to London. He had scarcely set foot without the
house, when his father stood before him.

‘Goin’, Sammy?’ inquired Mr. Weller.

‘Off at once,’ replied Sam.

‘I vish you could muffle that ‘ere Stiggins, and take him vith you,’
said Mr. Weller.

‘I am ashamed on you!’ said Sam reproachfully; ‘what do you let him show
his red nose in the Markis o’ Granby at all, for?’

Mr. Weller the elder fixed on his son an earnest look, and replied,
‘’Cause I’m a married man, Samivel, ‘cause I’m a married man. Ven you’re
a married man, Samivel, you’ll understand a good many things as you
don’t understand now; but vether it’s worth while goin’ through so much,
to learn so little, as the charity-boy said ven he got to the end of the
alphabet, is a matter o’ taste. I rayther think it isn’t.’

Well,’ said Sam, ‘good-bye.’

‘Tar, tar, Sammy,’ replied his father.

‘I’ve only got to say this here,’ said Sam, stopping short, ‘that if I
was the properiator o’ the Markis o’ Granby, and that ‘ere Stiggins came
and made toast in my bar, I’d--’

‘What?’ interposed Mr. Weller, with great anxiety. ‘What?’

‘Pison his rum-and-water,’ said Sam.

‘No!’ said Mr. Weller, shaking his son eagerly by the hand, ‘would you
raly, Sammy-would you, though?’

‘I would,’ said Sam. ‘I wouldn’t be too hard upon him at first. I’d drop
him in the water-butt, and put the lid on; and if I found he was
insensible to kindness, I’d try the other persvasion.’

The elder Mr. Weller bestowed a look of deep, unspeakable admiration on
his son, and, having once more grasped his hand, walked slowly away,
revolving in his mind the numerous reflections to which his advice had
given rise.

Sam looked after him, until he turned a corner of the road; and then set
forward on his walk to London. He meditated at first, on the probable
consequences of his own advice, and the likelihood of his father’s
adopting it. He dismissed the subject from his mind, however, with the
consolatory reflection that time alone would show; and this is the
reflection we would impress upon the reader.



CHAPTER XXVIII. A GOOD-HUMOURED CHRISTMAS CHAPTER, CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT
OF A WEDDING, AND SOME OTHER SPORTS BESIDE: WHICH ALTHOUGH IN THEIR WAY,
EVEN AS GOOD CUSTOMS AS MARRIAGE ITSELF, ARE NOT QUITE SO RELIGIOUSLY
KEPT UP, IN THESE DEGENERATE TIMES

As brisk as bees, if not altogether as light as fairies, did the four
Pickwickians assemble on the morning of the twenty-second day of
December, in the year of grace in which these, their faithfully-recorded
adventures, were undertaken and accomplished. Christmas was close at
hand, in all his bluff and hearty honesty; it was the season of
hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness; the old year was
preparing, like an ancient philosopher, to call his friends around him,
and amidst the sound of feasting and revelry to pass gently and calmly
away. Gay and merry was the time; and right gay and merry were at least
four of the numerous hearts that were gladdened by its coming.

And numerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas brings a brief
season of happiness and enjoyment. How many families, whose members have
been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of
life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of
companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and
unalloyed delight; and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of
the world, that the religious belief of the most civilised nations, and
the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the
first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blessed
and happy! How many old recollections, and how many dormant sympathies,
does Christmas time awaken!

We write these words now, many miles distant from the spot at which,
year after year, we met on that day, a merry and joyous circle. Many of
the hearts that throbbed so gaily then, have ceased to beat; many of the
looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands we
grasped, have grown cold; the eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in
the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling
faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances
connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each
recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but
yesterday! Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions
of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of
his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of
miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home!

But we are so taken up and occupied with the good qualities of this
saint Christmas, that we are keeping Mr. Pickwick and his friends
waiting in the cold on the outside of the Muggleton coach, which they
have just attained, well wrapped up in great-coats, shawls, and
comforters. The portmanteaus and carpet-bags have been stowed away, and
Mr. Weller and the guard are endeavouring to insinuate into the fore-
boot a huge cod-fish several sizes too large for it--which is snugly
packed up, in a long brown basket, with a layer of straw over the top,
and which has been left to the last, in order that he may repose in
safety on the half-dozen barrels of real native oysters, all the
property of Mr. Pickwick, which have been arranged in regular order at
the bottom of the receptacle. The interest displayed in Mr. Pickwick’s
countenance is most intense, as Mr. Weller and the guard try to squeeze
the cod-fish into the boot, first head first, and then tail first, and
then top upward, and then bottom upward, and then side-ways, and then
long-ways, all of which artifices the implacable cod-fish sturdily
resists, until the guard accidentally hits him in the very middle of the
basket, whereupon he suddenly disappears into the boot, and with him,
the head and shoulders of the guard himself, who, not calculating upon
so sudden a cessation of the passive resistance of the cod-fish,
experiences a very unexpected shock, to the unsmotherable delight of all
the porters and bystanders. Upon this, Mr. Pickwick smiles with great
good-humour, and drawing a shilling from his waistcoat pocket, begs the
guard, as he picks himself out of the boot, to drink his health in a
glass of hot brandy-and-water; at which the guard smiles too, and
Messrs. Snodgrass, Winkle, and Tupman, all smile in company. The guard
and Mr. Weller disappear for five minutes, most probably to get the hot
brandy-and-water, for they smell very strongly of it, when they return,
the coachman mounts to the box, Mr. Weller jumps up behind, the
Pickwickians pull their coats round their legs and their shawls over
their noses, the helpers pull the horse-cloths off, the coachman shouts
out a cheery ‘All right,’ and away they go.

They have rumbled through the streets, and jolted over the stones, and
at length reach the wide and open country. The wheels skim over the hard
and frosty ground; and the horses, bursting into a canter at a smart
crack of the whip, step along the road as if the load behind them--
coach, passengers, cod-fish, oyster-barrels, and all--were but a feather
at their heels. They have descended a gentle slope, and enter upon a
level, as compact and dry as a solid block of marble, two miles long.
Another crack of the whip, and on they speed, at a smart gallop, the
horses tossing their heads and rattling the harness, as if in
exhilaration at the rapidity of the motion; while the coachman, holding
whip and reins in one hand, takes off his hat with the other, and
resting it on his knees, pulls out his handkerchief, and wipes his
forehead, partly because he has a habit of doing it, and partly because
it’s as well to show the passengers how cool he is, and what an easy
thing it is to drive four-in-hand, when you have had as much practice as
he has. Having done this very leisurely (otherwise the effect would be
materially impaired), he replaces his handkerchief, pulls on his hat,
adjusts his gloves, squares his elbows, cracks the whip again, and on
they speed, more merrily than before.

A few small houses, scattered on either side of the road, betoken the
entrance to some town or village. The lively notes of the guard’s key-
bugle vibrate in the clear cold air, and wake up the old gentleman
inside, who, carefully letting down the window-sash half-way, and
standing sentry over the air, takes a short peep out, and then carefully
pulling it up again, informs the other inside that they’re going to
change directly; on which the other inside wakes himself up, and
determines to postpone his next nap until after the stoppage. Again the
bugle sounds lustily forth, and rouses the cottager’s wife and children,
who peep out at the house door, and watch the coach till it turns the
corner, when they once more crouch round the blazing fire, and throw on
another log of wood against father comes home; while father himself, a
full mile off, has just exchanged a friendly nod with the coachman, and
turned round to take a good long stare at the vehicle as it whirls away.

And now the bugle plays a lively air as the coach rattles through the
ill-paved streets of a country town; and the coachman, undoing the
buckle which keeps his ribands together, prepares to throw them off the
moment he stops. Mr. Pickwick emerges from his coat collar, and looks
about him with great curiosity; perceiving which, the coachman informs
Mr. Pickwick of the name of the town, and tells him it was market-day
yesterday, both of which pieces of information Mr. Pickwick retails to
his fellow-passengers; whereupon they emerge from their coat collars
too, and look about them also. Mr. Winkle, who sits at the extreme edge,
with one leg dangling in the air, is nearly precipitated into the
street, as the coach twists round the sharp corner by the cheesemonger’s
shop, and turns into the market-place; and before Mr. Snodgrass, who
sits next to him, has recovered from his alarm, they pull up at the inn
yard where the fresh horses, with cloths on, are already waiting. The
coachman throws down the reins and gets down himself, and the other
outside passengers drop down also; except those who have no great
confidence in their ability to get up again; and they remain where they
are, and stamp their feet against the coach to warm them--looking, with
longing eyes and red noses, at the bright fire in the inn bar, and the
sprigs of holly with red berries which ornament the window.

But the guard has delivered at the corn-dealer’s shop, the brown paper
packet he took out of the little pouch which hangs over his shoulder by
a leathern strap; and has seen the horses carefully put to; and has
thrown on the pavement the saddle which was brought from London on the
coach roof; and has assisted in the conference between the coachman and
the hostler about the gray mare that hurt her off fore-leg last Tuesday;
and he and Mr. Weller are all right behind, and the coachman is all
right in front, and the old gentleman inside, who has kept the window
down full two inches all this time, has pulled it up again, and the
cloths are off, and they are all ready for starting, except the ‘two
stout gentlemen,’ whom the coachman inquires after with some impatience.
Hereupon the coachman, and the guard, and Sam Weller, and Mr. Winkle,
and Mr. Snodgrass, and all the hostlers, and every one of the idlers,
who are more in number than all the others put together, shout for the
missing gentlemen as loud as they can bawl. A distant response is heard
from the yard, and Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Tupman come running down it,
quite out of breath, for they have been having a glass of ale a-piece,
and Mr. Pickwick’s fingers are so cold that he has been full five
minutes before he could find the sixpence to pay for it. The coachman
shouts an admonitory ‘Now then, gen’l’m’n,’ the guard re-echoes it; the
old gentleman inside thinks it a very extraordinary thing that people
_will _get down when they know there isn’t time for it; Mr. Pickwick
struggles up on one side, Mr. Tupman on the other; Mr. Winkle cries ‘All
right’; and off they start. Shawls are pulled up, coat collars are
readjusted, the pavement ceases, the houses disappear; and they are once
again dashing along the open road, with the fresh clear air blowing in
their faces, and gladdening their very hearts within them.

Such was the progress of Mr. Pickwick and his friends by the Muggleton
Telegraph, on their way to Dingley Dell; and at three o’clock that
afternoon they all stood high and dry, safe and sound, hale and hearty,
upon the steps of the Blue Lion, having taken on the road quite enough
of ale and brandy, to enable them to bid defiance to the frost that was
binding up the earth in its iron fetters, and weaving its beautiful
network upon the trees and hedges. Mr. Pickwick was busily engaged in
counting the barrels of oysters and superintending the disinterment of
the cod-fish, when he felt himself gently pulled by the skirts of the
coat. Looking round, he discovered that the individual who resorted to
this mode of catching his attention was no other than Mr. Wardle’s
favourite page, better known to the readers of this unvarnished history,
by the distinguishing appellation of the fat boy.

‘Aha!’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Aha!’ said the fat boy.

As he said it, he glanced from the cod-fish to the oyster-barrels, and
chuckled joyously. He was fatter than ever.

‘Well, you look rosy enough, my young friend,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘I’ve been asleep, right in front of the taproom fire,’ replied the fat
boy, who had heated himself to the colour of a new chimney-pot, in the
course of an hour’s nap. ‘Master sent me over with the chay-cart, to
carry your luggage up to the house. He’d ha’ sent some saddle-horses,
but he thought you’d rather walk, being a cold day.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr. Pickwick hastily, for he remembered how they had
travelled over nearly the same ground on a previous occasion. ‘Yes, we
would rather walk. Here, Sam!’

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Weller.

‘Help Mr. Wardle’s servant to put the packages into the cart, and then
ride on with him. We will walk forward at once.’

Having given this direction, and settled with the coachman, Mr. Pickwick
and his three friends struck into the footpath across the fields, and
walked briskly away, leaving Mr. Weller and the fat boy confronted
together for the first time. Sam looked at the fat boy with great
astonishment, but without saying a word; and began to stow the luggage
rapidly away in the cart, while the fat boy stood quietly by, and seemed
to think it a very interesting sort of thing to see Mr. Weller working
by himself.

‘There,’ said Sam, throwing in the last carpet-bag, ‘there they are!’

‘Yes,’ said the fat boy, in a very satisfied tone, ‘there they are.’

‘Vell, young twenty stun,’ said Sam, ‘you’re a nice specimen of a prize
boy, you are!’

Thank’ee,’ said the fat boy.

‘You ain’t got nothin’ on your mind as makes you fret yourself, have
you?’ inquired Sam.

‘Not as I knows on,’ replied the fat boy.

‘I should rayther ha’ thought, to look at you, that you was a-labourin’
under an unrequited attachment to some young ‘ooman,’ said Sam.

The fat boy shook his head.

‘Vell,’ said Sam, ‘I am glad to hear it. Do you ever drink anythin’?’

‘I likes eating better,’ replied the boy.

‘Ah,’ said Sam, ‘I should ha’ s’posed that; but what I mean is, should
you like a drop of anythin’ as’d warm you? but I s’pose you never was
cold, with all them elastic fixtures, was you?’

‘Sometimes,’ replied the boy; ‘and I likes a drop of something, when
it’s good.’

‘Oh, you do, do you?’ said Sam, ‘come this way, then!’

The Blue Lion tap was soon gained, and the fat boy swallowed a glass of
liquor without so much as winking--a feat which considerably advanced
him in Mr. Weller’s good opinion. Mr. Weller having transacted a similar
piece of business on his own account, they got into the cart.

‘Can you drive?’ said the fat boy.

‘I should rayther think so,’ replied Sam.

‘There, then,’ said the fat boy, putting the reins in his hand, and
pointing up a lane, ‘it’s as straight as you can go; you can’t miss it.’

With these words, the fat boy laid himself affectionately down by the
side of the cod-fish, and, placing an oyster-barrel under his head for a
pillow, fell asleep instantaneously.

‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘of all the cool boys ever I set my eyes on, this here
young gen’l’m’n is the coolest. Come, wake up, young dropsy!’

But as young dropsy evinced no symptoms of returning animation, Sam
Weller sat himself down in front of the cart, and starting the old horse
with a jerk of the rein, jogged steadily on, towards the Manor Farm.

Meanwhile, Mr. Pickwick and his friends having walked their blood into
active circulation, proceeded cheerfully on. The paths were hard; the
grass was crisp and frosty; the air had a fine, dry, bracing coldness;
and the rapid approach of the gray twilight (slate-coloured is a better
term in frosty weather) made them look forward with pleasant
anticipation to the comforts which awaited them at their hospitable
entertainer’s. It was the sort of afternoon that might induce a couple
of elderly gentlemen, in a lonely field, to take off their greatcoats
and play at leap-frog in pure lightness of heart and gaiety; and we
firmly believe that had Mr. Tupman at that moment proffered ‘a back,’
Mr. Pickwick would have accepted his offer with the utmost avidity.

However, Mr. Tupman did not volunteer any such accommodation, and the
friends walked on, conversing merrily. As they turned into a lane they
had to cross, the sound of many voices burst upon their ears; and before
they had even had time to form a guess to whom they belonged, they
walked into the very centre of the party who were expecting their
arrival--a fact which was first notified to the Pickwickians, by the
loud ‘Hurrah,’ which burst from old Wardle’s lips, when they appeared in
sight.

First, there was Wardle himself, looking, if that were possible, more
jolly than ever; then there were Bella and her faithful Trundle; and,
lastly, there were Emily and some eight or ten young ladies, who had all
come down to the wedding, which was to take place next day, and who were
in as happy and important a state as young ladies usually are, on such
momentous occasions; and they were, one and all, startling the fields
and lanes, far and wide, with their frolic and laughter.

The ceremony of introduction, under such circumstances, was very soon
performed, or we should rather say that the introduction was soon over,
without any ceremony at all. In two minutes thereafter, Mr. Pickwick was
joking with the young ladies who wouldn’t come over the stile while he
looked--or who, having pretty feet and unexceptionable ankles, preferred
standing on the top rail for five minutes or so, declaring that they
were too frightened to move--with as much ease and absence of reserve or
constraint, as if he had known them for life. It is worthy of remark,
too, that Mr. Snodgrass offered Emily far more assistance than the
absolute terrors of the stile (although it was full three feet high, and
had only a couple of stepping-stones) would seem to require; while one
black-eyed young lady in a very nice little pair of boots with fur round
the top, was observed to scream very loudly, when Mr. Winkle offered to
help her over.

All this was very snug and pleasant. And when the difficulties of the
stile were at last surmounted, and they once more entered on the open
field, old Wardle informed Mr. Pickwick how they had all been down in a
body to inspect the furniture and fittings-up of the house, which the
young couple were to tenant, after the Christmas holidays; at which
communication Bella and Trundle both coloured up, as red as the fat boy
after the taproom fire; and the young lady with the black eyes and the
fur round the boots, whispered something in Emily’s ear, and then
glanced archly at Mr. Snodgrass; to which Emily responded that she was a
foolish girl, but turned very red, notwithstanding; and Mr. Snodgrass,
who was as modest as all great geniuses usually are, felt the crimson
rising to the crown of his head, and devoutly wished, in the inmost
recesses of his own heart, that the young lady aforesaid, with her black
eyes, and her archness, and her boots with the fur round the top, were
all comfortably deposited in the adjacent county.

But if they were social and happy outside the house, what was the warmth
and cordiality of their reception when they reached the farm! The very
servants grinned with pleasure at sight of Mr. Pickwick; and Emma
bestowed a half-demure, half-impudent, and all-pretty look of
recognition, on Mr. Tupman, which was enough to make the statue of
Bonaparte in the passage, unfold his arms, and clasp her within them.

The old lady was seated with customary state in the front parlour, but
she was rather cross, and, by consequence, most particularly deaf. She
never went out herself, and like a great many other old ladies of the
same stamp, she was apt to consider it an act of domestic treason, if
anybody else took the liberty of doing what she couldn’t. So, bless her
old soul, she sat as upright as she could, in her great chair, and
looked as fierce as might be--and that was benevolent after all.

‘Mother,’ said Wardle, ‘Mr. Pickwick. You recollect him?’

‘Never mind,’ replied the old lady, with great dignity. ‘Don’t trouble
Mr. Pickwick about an old creetur like me. Nobody cares about me now,
and it’s very nat’ral they shouldn’t.’ Here the old lady tossed her
head, and smoothed down her lavender-coloured silk dress with trembling
hands.

‘Come, come, ma’am,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I can’t let you cut an old
friend in this way. I have come down expressly to have a long talk, and
another rubber with you; and we’ll show these boys and girls how to
dance a minuet, before they’re eight-and-forty hours older.’

The old lady was rapidly giving way, but she did not like to do it all
at once; so she only said, ‘Ah! I can’t hear him!’

‘Nonsense, mother,’ said Wardle. ‘Come, come, don’t be cross, there’s a
good soul. Recollect Bella; come, you must keep her spirits up, poor
girl.’

The good old lady heard this, for her lip quivered as her son said it.
But age has its little infirmities of temper, and she was not quite
brought round yet. So, she smoothed down the lavender-coloured dress
again, and turning to Mr. Pickwick said, ‘Ah, Mr. Pickwick, young people
was very different, when I was a girl.’

‘No doubt of that, ma’am,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘and that’s the reason why
I would make much of the few that have any traces of the old stock’--and
saying this, Mr. Pickwick gently pulled Bella towards him, and bestowing
a kiss upon her forehead, bade her sit down on the little stool at her
grandmother’s feet. Whether the expression of her countenance, as it was
raised towards the old lady’s face, called up a thought of old times, or
whether the old lady was touched by Mr. Pickwick’s affectionate good-
nature, or whatever was the cause, she was fairly melted; so she threw
herself on her granddaughter’s neck, and all the little ill-humour
evaporated in a gush of silent tears.

A happy party they were, that night. Sedate and solemn were the score of
rubbers in which Mr. Pickwick and the old lady played together;
uproarious was the mirth of the round table. Long after the ladies had
retired, did the hot elder wine, well qualified with brandy and spice,
go round, and round, and round again; and sound was the sleep and
pleasant were the dreams that followed. It is a remarkable fact that
those of Mr. Snodgrass bore constant reference to Emily Wardle; and that
the principal figure in Mr. Winkle’s visions was a young lady with black
eyes, and arch smile, and a pair of remarkably nice boots with fur round
the tops.

Mr. Pickwick was awakened early in the morning, by a hum of voices and a
pattering of feet, sufficient to rouse even the fat boy from his heavy
slumbers. He sat up in bed and listened. The female servants and female
visitors were running constantly to and fro; and there were such
multitudinous demands for hot water, such repeated outcries for needles
and thread, and so many half-suppressed entreaties of ‘Oh, do come and
tie me, there’s a dear!’ that Mr. Pickwick in his innocence began to
imagine that something dreadful must have occurred--when he grew more
awake, and remembered the wedding. The occasion being an important one,
he dressed himself with peculiar care, and descended to the breakfast-
room.

There were all the female servants in a bran new uniform of pink muslin
gowns with white bows in their caps, running about the house in a state
of excitement and agitation which it would be impossible to describe.
The old lady was dressed out in a brocaded gown, which had not seen the
light for twenty years, saving and excepting such truant rays as had
stolen through the chinks in the box in which it had been laid by,
during the whole time. Mr. Trundle was in high feather and spirits, but
a little nervous withal. The hearty old landlord was trying to look very
cheerful and unconcerned, but failing signally in the attempt. All the
girls were in tears and white muslin, except a select two or three, who
were being honoured with a private view of the bride and bridesmaids,
upstairs. All the Pickwickians were in most blooming array; and there
was a terrific roaring on the grass in front of the house, occasioned by
all the men, boys, and hobbledehoys attached to the farm, each of whom
had got a white bow in his button-hole, and all of whom were cheering
with might and main; being incited thereto, and stimulated therein by
the precept and example of Mr. Samuel Weller, who had managed to become
mighty popular already, and was as much at home as if he had been born
on the land.

A wedding is a licensed subject to joke upon, but there really is no
great joke in the matter after all;--we speak merely of the ceremony,
and beg it to be distinctly understood that we indulge in no hidden
sarcasm upon a married life. Mixed up with the pleasure and joy of the
occasion, are the many regrets at quitting home, the tears of parting
between parent and child, the consciousness of leaving the dearest and
kindest friends of the happiest portion of human life, to encounter its
cares and troubles with others still untried and little known--natural
feelings which we would not render this chapter mournful by describing,
and which we should be still more unwilling to be supposed to ridicule.

Let us briefly say, then, that the ceremony was performed by the old
clergyman, in the parish church of Dingley Dell, and that Mr. Pickwick’s
name is attached to the register, still preserved in the vestry thereof;
that the young lady with the black eyes signed her name in a very
unsteady and tremulous manner; that Emily’s signature, as the other
bridesmaid, is nearly illegible; that it all went off in very admirable
style; that the young ladies generally thought it far less shocking than
they had expected; and that although the owner of the black eyes and the
arch smile informed Mr. Wardle that she was sure she could never submit
to anything so dreadful, we have the very best reasons for thinking she
was mistaken. To all this, we may add, that Mr. Pickwick was the first
who saluted the bride, and that in so doing he threw over her neck a
rich gold watch and chain, which no mortal eyes but the jeweller’s had
ever beheld before. Then, the old church bell rang as gaily as it could,
and they all returned to breakfast.

‘Vere does the mince-pies go, young opium-eater?’ said Mr. Weller to the
fat boy, as he assisted in laying out such articles of consumption as
had not been duly arranged on the previous night.

The fat boy pointed to the destination of the pies.

‘Wery good,’ said Sam, ‘stick a bit o’ Christmas in ‘em. T’other dish
opposite. There; now we look compact and comfortable, as the father said
ven he cut his little boy’s head off, to cure him o’ squintin’.’

As Mr. Weller made the comparison, he fell back a step or two, to give
full effect to it, and surveyed the preparations with the utmost
satisfaction.

‘Wardle,’ said Mr. Pickwick, almost as soon as they were all seated, ‘a
glass of wine in honour of this happy occasion!’

‘I shall be delighted, my boy,’ said Wardle. ‘Joe--damn that boy, he’s
gone to sleep.’

No, I ain’t, sir,’ replied the fat boy, starting up from a remote
corner, where, like the patron saint of fat boys--the immortal Horner--
he had been devouring a Christmas pie, though not with the coolness and
deliberation which characterised that young gentleman’s proceedings.

‘Fill Mr. Pickwick’s glass.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The fat boy filled Mr. Pickwick’s glass, and then retired behind his
master’s chair, from whence he watched the play of the knives and forks,
and the progress of the choice morsels from the dishes to the mouths of
the company, with a kind of dark and gloomy joy that was most
impressive.

‘God bless you, old fellow!’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Same to you, my boy,’ replied Wardle; and they pledged each other,
heartily.

‘Mrs. Wardle,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘we old folks must have a glass of
wine together, in honour of this joyful event.’

The old lady was in a state of great grandeur just then, for she was
sitting at the top of the table in the brocaded gown, with her newly-
married granddaughter on one side, and Mr. Pickwick on the other, to do
the carving. Mr. Pickwick had not spoken in a very loud tone, but she
understood him at once, and drank off a full glass of wine to his long
life and happiness; after which the worthy old soul launched forth into
a minute and particular account of her own wedding, with a dissertation
on the fashion of wearing high-heeled shoes, and some particulars
concerning the life and adventures of the beautiful Lady Tollimglower,
deceased; at all of which the old lady herself laughed very heartily
indeed, and so did the young ladies too, for they were wondering among
themselves what on earth grandma was talking about. When they laughed,
the old lady laughed ten times more heartily, and said that these always
had been considered capital stories, which caused them all to laugh
again, and put the old lady into the very best of humours. Then the cake
was cut, and passed through the ring; the young ladies saved pieces to
put under their pillows to dream of their future husbands on; and a
great deal of blushing and merriment was thereby occasioned.

‘Mr. Miller,’ said Mr. Pickwick to his old acquaintance, the hard-headed
gentleman, ‘a glass of wine?’

‘With great satisfaction, Mr. Pickwick,’ replied the hard-headed
gentleman solemnly.

‘You’ll take me in?’ said the benevolent old clergyman.

‘And me,’ interposed his wife.

‘And me, and me,’ said a couple of poor relations at the bottom of the
table, who had eaten and drunk very heartily, and laughed at everything.

Mr. Pickwick expressed his heartfelt delight at every additional
suggestion; and his eyes beamed with hilarity and cheerfulness.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Mr. Pickwick, suddenly rising.

‘Hear, hear! Hear, hear! Hear, hear!’ cried Mr. Weller, in the
excitement of his feelings.

‘Call in all the servants,’ cried old Wardle, interposing to prevent the
public rebuke which Mr. Weller would otherwise most indubitably have
received from his master. ‘Give them a glass of wine each to drink the
toast in. Now, Pickwick.’

Amidst the silence of the company, the whispering of the women-servants,
and the awkward embarrassment of the men, Mr. Pickwick proceeded--

‘Ladies and gentlemen--no, I won’t say ladies and gentlemen, I’ll call
you my friends, my dear friends, if the ladies will allow me to take so
great a liberty--’

Here Mr. Pickwick was interrupted by immense applause from the ladies,
echoed by the gentlemen, during which the owner of the eyes was
distinctly heard to state that she could kiss that dear Mr. Pickwick.
Whereupon Mr. Winkle gallantly inquired if it couldn’t be done by
deputy: to which the young lady with the black eyes replied ‘Go away,’
and accompanied the request with a look which said as plainly as a look
could do, ‘if you can.’

‘My dear friends,’ resumed Mr. Pickwick, ‘I am going to propose the
health of the bride and bridegroom--God bless ‘em (cheers and tears). My
young friend, Trundle, I believe to be a very excellent and manly
fellow; and his wife I know to be a very amiable and lovely girl, well
qualified to transfer to another sphere of action the happiness which
for twenty years she has diffused around her, in her father’s house.
(Here, the fat boy burst forth into stentorian blubberings, and was led
forth by the coat collar, by Mr. Weller.) I wish,’ added Mr. Pickwick--
‘I wish I was young enough to be her sister’s husband (cheers), but,
failing that, I am happy to be old enough to be her father; for, being
so, I shall not be suspected of any latent designs when I say, that I
admire, esteem, and love them both (cheers and sobs). The bride’s
father, our good friend there, is a noble person, and I am proud to know
him (great uproar). He is a kind, excellent, independent-spirited, fine-
hearted, hospitable, liberal man (enthusiastic shouts from the poor
relations, at all the adjectives; and especially at the two last). That
his daughter may enjoy all the happiness, even he can desire; and that
he may derive from the contemplation of her felicity all the
gratification of heart and peace of mind which he so well deserves, is,
I am persuaded, our united wish. So, let us drink their healths, and
wish them prolonged life, and every blessing!’

Mr. Pickwick concluded amidst a whirlwind of applause; and once more
were the lungs of the supernumeraries, under Mr. Weller’s command,
brought into active and efficient operation. Mr. Wardle proposed Mr.
Pickwick; Mr. Pickwick proposed the old lady. Mr. Snodgrass proposed Mr.
Wardle; Mr. Wardle proposed Mr. Snodgrass. One of the poor relations
proposed Mr. Tupman, and the other poor relation proposed Mr. Winkle;
all was happiness and festivity, until the mysterious disappearance of
both the poor relations beneath the table, warned the party that it was
time to adjourn.

At dinner they met again, after a five-and-twenty mile walk, undertaken
by the males at Wardle’s recommendation, to get rid of the effects of
the wine at breakfast. The poor relations had kept in bed all day, with
the view of attaining the same happy consummation, but, as they had been
unsuccessful, they stopped there. Mr. Weller kept the domestics in a
state of perpetual hilarity; and the fat boy divided his time into small
alternate allotments of eating and sleeping.

The dinner was as hearty an affair as the breakfast, and was quite as
noisy, without the tears. Then came the dessert and some more toasts.
Then came the tea and coffee; and then, the ball.

The best sitting-room at Manor Farm was a good, long, dark-panelled room
with a high chimney-piece, and a capacious chimney, up which you could
have driven one of the new patent cabs, wheels and all. At the upper end
of the room, seated in a shady bower of holly and evergreens were the
two best fiddlers, and the only harp, in all Muggleton. In all sorts of
recesses, and on all kinds of brackets, stood massive old silver
candlesticks with four branches each. The carpet was up, the candles
burned bright, the fire blazed and crackled on the hearth, and merry
voices and light-hearted laughter rang through the room. If any of the
old English yeomen had turned into fairies when they died, it was just
the place in which they would have held their revels.

If anything could have added to the interest of this agreeable scene, it
would have been the remarkable fact of Mr. Pickwick’s appearing without
his gaiters, for the first time within the memory of his oldest friends.

‘You mean to dance?’ said Wardle.

‘Of course I do,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘Don’t you see I am dressed for
the purpose?’ Mr. Pickwick called attention to his speckled silk
stockings, and smartly tied pumps.

‘_You _in silk stockings!’ exclaimed Mr. Tupman jocosely.

‘And why not, sir--why not?’ said Mr. Pickwick, turning warmly upon him.

‘Oh, of course there is no reason why you shouldn’t wear them,’
responded Mr. Tupman.

‘I imagine not, sir--I imagine not,’ said Mr. Pickwick, in a very
peremptory tone.

Mr. Tupman had contemplated a laugh, but he found it was a serious
matter; so he looked grave, and said they were a pretty pattern.

‘I hope they are,’ said Mr. Pickwick, fixing his eyes upon his friend.
‘You see nothing extraordinary in the stockings, _as_ stockings, I
trust, Sir?’

‘Certainly not. Oh, certainly not,’ replied Mr. Tupman. He walked away;
and Mr. Pickwick’s countenance resumed its customary benign expression.

‘We are all ready, I believe,’ said Mr. Pickwick, who was stationed with
the old lady at the top of the dance, and had already made four false
starts, in his excessive anxiety to commence.

‘Then begin at once,’ said Wardle. ‘Now!’

Up struck the two fiddles and the one harp, and off went Mr. Pickwick
into hands across, when there was a general clapping of hands, and a cry
of ‘Stop, stop!’

‘What’s the matter?’ said Mr. Pickwick, who was only brought to, by the
fiddles and harp desisting, and could have been stopped by no other
earthly power, if the house had been on fire.

‘Where’s Arabella Allen?’ cried a dozen voices.

‘And Winkle?’ added Mr. Tupman.

‘Here we are!’ exclaimed that gentleman, emerging with his pretty
companion from the corner; as he did so, it would have been hard to tell
which was the redder in the face, he or the young lady with the black
eyes.

‘What an extraordinary thing it is, Winkle,’ said Mr. Pickwick, rather
pettishly, ‘that you couldn’t have taken your place before.’

‘Not at all extraordinary,’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘Well,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with a very expressive smile, as his eyes
rested on Arabella, ‘well, I don’t know that it _was _extraordinary,
either, after all.’

However, there was no time to think more about the matter, for the
fiddles and harp began in real earnest. Away went Mr. Pickwick--hands
across--down the middle to the very end of the room, and half-way up the
chimney, back again to the door--poussette everywhere--loud stamp on the
ground--ready for the next couple--off again--all the figure over once
more--another stamp to beat out the time--next couple, and the next, and
the next again--never was such going; at last, after they had reached
the bottom of the dance, and full fourteen couple after the old lady had
retired in an exhausted state, and the clergyman’s wife had been
substituted in her stead, did that gentleman, when there was no demand
whatever on his exertions, keep perpetually dancing in his place, to
keep time to the music, smiling on his partner all the while with a
blandness of demeanour which baffles all description.


Long before Mr. Pickwick was weary of dancing, the newly-married couple
had retired from the scene. There was a glorious supper downstairs,
notwithstanding, and a good long sitting after it; and when Mr. Pickwick
awoke, late the next morning, he had a confused recollection of having,
severally and confidentially, invited somewhere about five-and-forty
people to dine with him at the George and Vulture, the very first time
they came to London; which Mr. Pickwick rightly considered a pretty
certain indication of his having taken something besides exercise, on
the previous night.

‘And so your family has games in the kitchen to-night, my dear, has
they?’ inquired Sam of Emma.

‘Yes, Mr. Weller,’ replied Emma; ‘we always have on Christmas Eve.
Master wouldn’t neglect to keep it up on any account.’

‘Your master’s a wery pretty notion of keeping anythin’ up, my dear,’
said Mr. Weller; ‘I never see such a sensible sort of man as he is, or
such a reg’lar gen’l’m’n.’

Oh, that he is!’ said the fat boy, joining in the conversation; ‘don’t
he breed nice pork!’ The fat youth gave a semi-cannibalic leer at Mr.
Weller, as he thought of the roast legs and gravy.

‘Oh, you’ve woke up, at last, have you?’ said Sam.

The fat boy nodded.

‘I’ll tell you what it is, young boa-constructer,’ said Mr. Weller
impressively; ‘if you don’t sleep a little less, and exercise a little
more, wen you comes to be a man you’ll lay yourself open to the same
sort of personal inconwenience as was inflicted on the old gen’l’m’n as
wore the pigtail.’

‘What did they do to him?’ inquired the fat boy, in a faltering voice.

‘I’m a-going to tell you,’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘he was one o’ the
largest patterns as was ever turned out--reg’lar fat man, as hadn’t
caught a glimpse of his own shoes for five-and-forty year.’

‘Lor!’ exclaimed Emma.

‘No, that he hadn’t, my dear,’ said Mr. Weller; ‘and if you’d put an
exact model of his own legs on the dinin’-table afore him, he wouldn’t
ha’ known ‘em. Well, he always walks to his office with a wery handsome
gold watch-chain hanging out, about a foot and a quarter, and a gold
watch in his fob pocket as was worth--I’m afraid to say how much, but as
much as a watch can be--a large, heavy, round manufacter, as stout for a
watch, as he was for a man, and with a big face in proportion. “You’d
better not carry that ‘ere watch,” says the old gen’l’m’n’s friends,
“you’ll be robbed on it,” says they. “Shall I?” says he. “Yes, you
will,” says they. “Well,” says he, “I should like to see the thief as
could get this here watch out, for I’m blessed if I ever can, it’s such
a tight fit,” says he, “and wenever I vants to know what’s o’clock, I’m
obliged to stare into the bakers’ shops,” he says. Well, then he laughs
as hearty as if he was a-goin’ to pieces, and out he walks agin with his
powdered head and pigtail, and rolls down the Strand with the chain
hangin’ out furder than ever, and the great round watch almost bustin’
through his gray kersey smalls. There warn’t a pickpocket in all London
as didn’t take a pull at that chain, but the chain ‘ud never break, and
the watch ‘ud never come out, so they soon got tired of dragging such a
heavy old gen’l’m’n along the pavement, and he’d go home and laugh till
the pigtail wibrated like the penderlum of a Dutch clock. At last, one
day the old gen’l’m’n was a-rollin’ along, and he sees a pickpocket as
he know’d by sight, a-coming up, arm in arm with a little boy with a
wery large head. “Here’s a game,” says the old gen’l’m’n to himself,
“they’re a-goin’ to have another try, but it won’t do!” So he begins a-
chucklin’ wery hearty, wen, all of a sudden, the little boy leaves hold
of the pickpocket’s arm, and rushes head foremost straight into the old
gen’l’m’n’s stomach, and for a moment doubles him right up with the
pain. “Murder!” says the old gen’l’m’n. “All right, Sir,” says the
pickpocket, a-wisperin’ in his ear. And wen he come straight agin, the
watch and chain was gone, and what’s worse than that, the old
gen’l’m’n’s digestion was all wrong ever afterwards, to the wery last
day of his life; so just you look about you, young feller, and take care
you don’t get too fat.’

As Mr. Weller concluded this moral tale, with which the fat boy appeared
much affected, they all three repaired to the large kitchen, in which
the family were by this time assembled, according to annual custom on
Christmas Eve, observed by old Wardle’s forefathers from time
immemorial.

From the centre of the ceiling of this kitchen, old Wardle had just
suspended, with his own hands, a huge branch of mistletoe, and this same
branch of mistletoe instantaneously gave rise to a scene of general and
most delightful struggling and confusion; in the midst of which, Mr.
Pickwick, with a gallantry that would have done honour to a descendant
of Lady Tollimglower herself, took the old lady by the hand, led her
beneath the mystic branch, and saluted her in all courtesy and decorum.
The old lady submitted to this piece of practical politeness with all
the dignity which befitted so important and serious a solemnity, but the
younger ladies, not being so thoroughly imbued with a superstitious
veneration for the custom, or imagining that the value of a salute is
very much enhanced if it cost a little trouble to obtain it, screamed
and struggled, and ran into corners, and threatened and remonstrated,
and did everything but leave the room, until some of the less
adventurous gentlemen were on the point of desisting, when they all at
once found it useless to resist any longer, and submitted to be kissed
with a good grace. Mr. Winkle kissed the young lady with the black eyes,
and Mr. Snodgrass kissed Emily; and Mr. Weller, not being particular
about the form of being under the mistletoe, kissed Emma and the other
female servants, just as he caught them. As to the poor relations, they
kissed everybody, not even excepting the plainer portions of the young
lady visitors, who, in their excessive confusion, ran right under the
mistletoe, as soon as it was hung up, without knowing it! Wardle stood
with his back to the fire, surveying the whole scene, with the utmost
satisfaction; and the fat boy took the opportunity of appropriating to
his own use, and summarily devouring, a particularly fine mince-pie,
that had been carefully put by, for somebody else.

Now, the screaming had subsided, and faces were in a glow, and curls in
a tangle, and Mr. Pickwick, after kissing the old lady as before
mentioned, was standing under the mistletoe, looking with a very pleased
countenance on all that was passing around him, when the young lady with
the black eyes, after a little whispering with the other young ladies,
made a sudden dart forward, and, putting her arm round Mr. Pickwick’s
neck, saluted him affectionately on the left cheek; and before Mr.
Pickwick distinctly knew what was the matter, he was surrounded by the
whole body, and kissed by every one of them.

It was a pleasant thing to see Mr. Pickwick in the centre of the group,
now pulled this way, and then that, and first kissed on the chin, and
then on the nose, and then on the spectacles, and to hear the peals of
laughter which were raised on every side; but it was a still more
pleasant thing to see Mr. Pickwick, blinded shortly afterwards with a
silk handkerchief, falling up against the wall, and scrambling into
corners, and going through all the mysteries of blind-man’s buff, with
the utmost relish for the game, until at last he caught one of the poor
relations, and then had to evade the blind-man himself, which he did
with a nimbleness and agility that elicited the admiration and applause
of all beholders. The poor relations caught the people who they thought
would like it, and, when the game flagged, got caught themselves. When
they all tired of blind-man’s buff, there was a great game at snap-
dragon, and when fingers enough were burned with that, and all the
raisins were gone, they sat down by the huge fire of blazing logs to a
substantial supper, and a mighty bowl of wassail, something smaller than
an ordinary wash-house copper, in which the hot apples were hissing and
bubbling with a rich look, and a jolly sound, that were perfectly
irresistible.

‘This,’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking round him, ‘this is, indeed,
comfort.’ ‘Our invariable custom,’ replied Mr. Wardle. ‘Everybody sits
down with us on Christmas Eve, as you see them now--servants and all;
and here we wait, until the clock strikes twelve, to usher Christmas in,
and beguile the time with forfeits and old stories. Trundle, my boy,
rake up the fire.’

Up flew the bright sparks in myriads as the logs were stirred. The deep
red blaze sent forth a rich glow, that penetrated into the farthest
corner of the room, and cast its cheerful tint on every face.

‘Come,’ said Wardle, ‘a song--a Christmas song! I’ll give you one, in
default of a better.’

‘Bravo!’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Fill up,’ cried Wardle. ‘It will be two hours, good, before you see the
bottom of the bowl through the deep rich colour of the wassail; fill up
all round, and now for the song.’

Thus saying, the merry old gentleman, in a good, round, sturdy voice,
commenced without more ado--


A CHRISTMAS CAROL

‘I care not for Spring; on his fickle wing Let the blossoms and buds be
borne; He woos them amain with his treacherous rain, And he scatters
them ere the morn. An inconstant elf, he knows not himself, Nor his own
changing mind an hour, He’ll smile in your face, and, with wry grimace,
He’ll wither your youngest flower.

‘Let the Summer sun to his bright home run, He shall never be sought by
me; When he’s dimmed by a cloud I can laugh aloud And care not how sulky
he be! For his darling child is the madness wild That sports in fierce
fever’s train; And when love is too strong, it don’t last long, As many
have found to their pain.

‘A mild harvest night, by the tranquil light Of the modest and gentle
moon, Has a far sweeter sheen for me, I ween, Than the broad and
unblushing noon. But every leaf awakens my grief, As it lieth beneath
the tree; So let Autumn air be never so fair, It by no means agrees with
me.

‘But my song I troll out, for _Christmas _Stout, The hearty, the true,
and the bold; A bumper I drain, and with might and main Give three
cheers for this Christmas old! We’ll usher him in with a merry din That
shall gladden his joyous heart, And we’ll keep him up, while there’s
bite or sup, And in fellowship good, we’ll part. ‘In his fine honest
pride, he scorns to hide One jot of his hard-weather scars; They’re no
disgrace, for there’s much the same trace On the cheeks of our bravest
tars. Then again I sing till the roof doth ring And it echoes from wall
to wall--To the stout old wight, fair welcome to-night, As the King of
the Seasons all!’

This song was tumultuously applauded--for friends and dependents make a
capital audience--and the poor relations, especially, were in perfect
ecstasies of rapture. Again was the fire replenished, and again went the
wassail round.

‘How it snows!’ said one of the men, in a low tone.

‘Snows, does it?’ said Wardle.

‘Rough, cold night, Sir,’ replied the man; ‘and there’s a wind got up,
that drifts it across the fields, in a thick white cloud.’

‘What does Jem say?’ inquired the old lady. ‘There ain’t anything the
matter, is there?’

‘No, no, mother,’ replied Wardle; ‘he says there’s a snowdrift, and a
wind that’s piercing cold. I should know that, by the way it rumbles in
the chimney.’

‘Ah!’ said the old lady, ‘there was just such a wind, and just such a
fall of snow, a good many years back, I recollect--just five years
before your poor father died. It was a Christmas Eve, too; and I
remember that on that very night he told us the story about the goblins
that carried away old Gabriel Grub.’

‘The story about what?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ replied Wardle. ‘About an old sexton, that the
good people down here suppose to have been carried away by goblins.’

‘Suppose!’ ejaculated the old lady. ‘Is there anybody hardy enough to
disbelieve it? Suppose! Haven’t you heard ever since you were a child,
that he _was _carried away by the goblins, and don’t you know he was?’

‘Very well, mother, he was, if you like,’ said Wardle laughing. ‘He
_was_ carried away by goblins, Pickwick; and there’s an end of the
matter.’

‘No, no,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘not an end of it, I assure you; for I must
hear how, and why, and all about it.’

Wardle smiled, as every head was bent forward to hear, and filling out
the wassail with no stinted hand, nodded a health to Mr. Pickwick, and
began as follows--

But bless our editorial heart, what a long chapter we have been betrayed
into! We had quite forgotten all such petty restrictions as chapters, we
solemnly declare. So here goes, to give the goblin a fair start in a new
one. A clear stage and no favour for the goblins, ladies and gentlemen,
if you please.



CHAPTER XXIX. THE STORY OF THE GOBLINS WHO STOLE A SEXTON

‘In an old abbey town, down in this part of the country, a long, long
while ago--so long, that the story must be a true one, because our
great-grandfathers implicitly believed it--there officiated as sexton
and grave-digger in the churchyard, one Gabriel Grub. It by no means
follows that because a man is a sexton, and constantly surrounded by the
emblems of mortality, therefore he should be a morose and melancholy
man; your undertakers are the merriest fellows in the world; and I once
had the honour of being on intimate terms with a mute, who in private
life, and off duty, was as comical and jocose a little fellow as ever
chirped out a devil-may-care song, without a hitch in his memory, or
drained off a good stiff glass without stopping for breath. But
notwithstanding these precedents to the contrary, Gabriel Grub was an
ill-conditioned, cross-grained, surly fellow--a morose and lonely man,
who consorted with nobody but himself, and an old wicker bottle which
fitted into his large deep waistcoat pocket--and who eyed each merry
face, as it passed him by, with such a deep scowl of malice and ill-
humour, as it was difficult to meet without feeling something the worse
for.

‘A little before twilight, one Christmas Eve, Gabriel shouldered his
spade, lighted his lantern, and betook himself towards the old
churchyard; for he had got a grave to finish by next morning, and,
feeling very low, he thought it might raise his spirits, perhaps, if he
went on with his work at once. As he went his way, up the ancient
street, he saw the cheerful light of the blazing fires gleam through the
old casements, and heard the loud laugh and the cheerful shouts of those
who were assembled around them; he marked the bustling preparations for
next day’s cheer, and smelled the numerous savoury odours consequent
thereupon, as they steamed up from the kitchen windows in clouds. All
this was gall and wormwood to the heart of Gabriel Grub; and when groups
of children bounded out of the houses, tripped across the road, and were
met, before they could knock at the opposite door, by half a dozen
curly-headed little rascals who crowded round them as they flocked
upstairs to spend the evening in their Christmas games, Gabriel smiled
grimly, and clutched the handle of his spade with a firmer grasp, as he
thought of measles, scarlet fever, thrush, whooping-cough, and a good
many other sources of consolation besides.

‘In this happy frame of mind, Gabriel strode along, returning a short,
sullen growl to the good-humoured greetings of such of his neighbours as
now and then passed him, until he turned into the dark lane which led to
the churchyard. Now, Gabriel had been looking forward to reaching the
dark lane, because it was, generally speaking, a nice, gloomy, mournful
place, into which the townspeople did not much care to go, except in
broad daylight, and when the sun was shining; consequently, he was not a
little indignant to hear a young urchin roaring out some jolly song
about a merry Christmas, in this very sanctuary which had been called
Coffin Lane ever since the days of the old abbey, and the time of the
shaven-headed monks. As Gabriel walked on, and the voice drew nearer, he
found it proceeded from a small boy, who was hurrying along, to join one
of the little parties in the old street, and who, partly to keep himself
company, and partly to prepare himself for the occasion, was shouting
out the song at the highest pitch of his lungs. So Gabriel waited until
the boy came up, and then dodged him into a corner, and rapped him over
the head with his lantern five or six times, just to teach him to
modulate his voice. And as the boy hurried away with his hand to his
head, singing quite a different sort of tune, Gabriel Grub chuckled very
heartily to himself, and entered the churchyard, locking the gate behind
him.


‘He took off his coat, set down his lantern, and getting into the
unfinished grave, worked at it for an hour or so with right good-will.
But the earth was hardened with the frost, and it was no very easy
matter to break it up, and shovel it out; and although there was a moon,
it was a very young one, and shed little light upon the grave, which was
in the shadow of the church. At any other time, these obstacles would
have made Gabriel Grub very moody and miserable, but he was so well
pleased with having stopped the small boy’s singing, that he took little
heed of the scanty progress he had made, and looked down into the grave,
when he had finished work for the night, with grim satisfaction,
murmuring as he gathered up his things--


Brave lodgings for one, brave lodgings for one, A few feet of cold
earth, when life is done; A stone at the head, a stone at the feet, A
rich, juicy meal for the worms to eat; Rank grass overhead, and damp
clay around, Brave lodgings for one, these, in holy ground!

‘“Ho! ho!” laughed Gabriel Grub, as he sat himself down on a flat
tombstone which was a favourite resting-place of his, and drew forth his
wicker bottle. “A coffin at Christmas! A Christmas box! Ho! ho! ho!”

‘“Ho! ho! ho!” repeated a voice which sounded close behind him.

‘Gabriel paused, in some alarm, in the act of raising the wicker bottle
to his lips, and looked round. The bottom of the oldest grave about him
was not more still and quiet than the churchyard in the pale moonlight.
The cold hoar frost glistened on the tombstones, and sparkled like rows
of gems, among the stone carvings of the old church. The snow lay hard
and crisp upon the ground; and spread over the thickly-strewn mounds of
earth, so white and smooth a cover that it seemed as if corpses lay
there, hidden only by their winding sheets. Not the faintest rustle
broke the profound tranquillity of the solemn scene. Sound itself
appeared to be frozen up, all was so cold and still.

‘“It was the echoes,” said Gabriel Grub, raising the bottle to his lips
again.

‘“It was _not_,” said a deep voice.

‘Gabriel started up, and stood rooted to the spot with astonishment and
terror; for his eyes rested on a form that made his blood run cold.

‘Seated on an upright tombstone, close to him, was a strange, unearthly
figure, whom Gabriel felt at once, was no being of this world. His long,
fantastic legs which might have reached the ground, were cocked up, and
crossed after a quaint, fantastic fashion; his sinewy arms were bare;
and his hands rested on his knees. On his short, round body, he wore a
close covering, ornamented with small slashes; a short cloak dangled at
his back; the collar was cut into curious peaks, which served the goblin
in lieu of ruff or neckerchief; and his shoes curled up at his toes into
long points. On his head, he wore a broad-brimmed sugar-loaf hat,
garnished with a single feather. The hat was covered with the white
frost; and the goblin looked as if he had sat on the same tombstone very
comfortably, for two or three hundred years. He was sitting perfectly
still; his tongue was put out, as if in derision; and he was grinning at
Gabriel Grub with such a grin as only a goblin could call up.

‘“It was _not _the echoes,” said the goblin.

‘Gabriel Grub was paralysed, and could make no reply.

‘“What do you do here on Christmas Eve?” said the goblin sternly.

‘“I came to dig a grave, Sir,” stammered Gabriel Grub.

‘“What man wanders among graves and churchyards on such a night as
this?” cried the goblin.

‘“Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!” screamed a wild chorus of voices that
seemed to fill the churchyard. Gabriel looked fearfully round--nothing
was to be seen.

‘“What have you got in that bottle?” said the goblin.

‘“Hollands, sir,” replied the sexton, trembling more than ever; for he
had bought it of the smugglers, and he thought that perhaps his
questioner might be in the excise department of the goblins.

‘“Who drinks Hollands alone, and in a churchyard, on such a night as
this?” said the goblin.

‘“Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!” exclaimed the wild voices again.

‘The goblin leered maliciously at the terrified sexton, and then raising
his voice, exclaimed--

‘“And who, then, is our fair and lawful prize?”

‘To this inquiry the invisible chorus replied, in a strain that sounded
like the voices of many choristers singing to the mighty swell of the
old church organ--a strain that seemed borne to the sexton’s ears upon a
wild wind, and to die away as it passed onward; but the burden of the
reply was still the same, “Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!”

‘The goblin grinned a broader grin than before, as he said, “Well,
Gabriel, what do you say to this?”

‘The sexton gasped for breath.

‘“What do you think of this, Gabriel?” said the goblin, kicking up his
feet in the air on either side of the tombstone, and looking at the
turned-up points with as much complacency as if he had been
contemplating the most fashionable pair of Wellingtons in all Bond
Street.

‘“It’s--it’s--very curious, Sir,” replied the sexton, half dead with
fright; “very curious, and very pretty, but I think I’ll go back and
finish my work, Sir, if you please.”

‘“Work!” said the goblin, “what work?”

‘“The grave, Sir; making the grave,” stammered the sexton.

‘“Oh, the grave, eh?” said the goblin; “who makes graves at a time when
all other men are merry, and takes a pleasure in it?”

‘Again the mysterious voices replied, “Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!”

‘“I am afraid my friends want you, Gabriel,” said the goblin, thrusting
his tongue farther into his cheek than ever--and a most astonishing
tongue it was--“I’m afraid my friends want you, Gabriel,” said the
goblin.

‘“Under favour, Sir,” replied the horror-stricken sexton, “I don’t think
they can, Sir; they don’t know me, Sir; I don’t think the gentlemen have
ever seen me, Sir.”

‘“Oh, yes, they have,” replied the goblin; “we know the man with the
sulky face and grim scowl, that came down the street to-night, throwing
his evil looks at the children, and grasping his burying-spade the
tighter. We know the man who struck the boy in the envious malice of his
heart, because the boy could be merry, and he could not. We know him, we
know him.”

‘Here, the goblin gave a loud, shrill laugh, which the echoes returned
twentyfold; and throwing his legs up in the air, stood upon his head, or
rather upon the very point of his sugar-loaf hat, on the narrow edge of
the tombstone, whence he threw a Somerset with extraordinary agility,
right to the sexton’s feet, at which he planted himself in the attitude
in which tailors generally sit upon the shop-board.

‘“I--I--am afraid I must leave you, Sir,” said the sexton, making an
effort to move.

‘“Leave us!” said the goblin, “Gabriel Grub going to leave us. Ho! ho!
ho!”

‘As the goblin laughed, the sexton observed, for one instant, a
brilliant illumination within the windows of the church, as if the whole
building were lighted up; it disappeared, the organ pealed forth a
lively air, and whole troops of goblins, the very counterpart of the
first one, poured into the churchyard, and began playing at leap-frog
with the tombstones, never stopping for an instant to take breath, but
“overing” the highest among them, one after the other, with the most
marvellous dexterity. The first goblin was a most astonishing leaper,
and none of the others could come near him; even in the extremity of his
terror the sexton could not help observing, that while his friends were
content to leap over the common-sized gravestones, the first one took
the family vaults, iron railings and all, with as much ease as if they
had been so many street-posts.

‘At last the game reached to a most exciting pitch; the organ played
quicker and quicker, and the goblins leaped faster and faster, coiling
themselves up, rolling head over heels upon the ground, and bounding
over the tombstones like footballs. The sexton’s brain whirled round
with the rapidity of the motion he beheld, and his legs reeled beneath
him, as the spirits flew before his eyes; when the goblin king, suddenly
darting towards him, laid his hand upon his collar, and sank with him
through the earth.

‘When Gabriel Grub had had time to fetch his breath, which the rapidity
of his descent had for the moment taken away, he found himself in what
appeared to be a large cavern, surrounded on all sides by crowds of
goblins, ugly and grim; in the centre of the room, on an elevated seat,
was stationed his friend of the churchyard; and close behind him stood
Gabriel Grub himself, without power of motion.

‘“Cold to-night,” said the king of the goblins, “very cold. A glass of
something warm here!”

‘At this command, half a dozen officious goblins, with a perpetual smile
upon their faces, whom Gabriel Grub imagined to be courtiers, on that
account, hastily disappeared, and presently returned with a goblet of
liquid fire, which they presented to the king.

‘“Ah!” cried the goblin, whose cheeks and throat were transparent, as he
tossed down the flame, “this warms one, indeed! Bring a bumper of the
same, for Mr. Grub.”

‘It was in vain for the unfortunate sexton to protest that he was not in
the habit of taking anything warm at night; one of the goblins held him
while another poured the blazing liquid down his throat; the whole
assembly screeched with laughter, as he coughed and choked, and wiped
away the tears which gushed plentifully from his eyes, after swallowing
the burning draught.

‘“And now,” said the king, fantastically poking the taper corner of his
sugar-loaf hat into the sexton’s eye, and thereby occasioning him the
most exquisite pain; “and now, show the man of misery and gloom, a few
of the pictures from our own great storehouse!”

‘As the goblin said this, a thick cloud which obscured the remoter end
of the cavern rolled gradually away, and disclosed, apparently at a
great distance, a small and scantily furnished, but neat and clean
apartment. A crowd of little children were gathered round a bright fire,
clinging to their mother’s gown, and gambolling around her chair. The
mother occasionally rose, and drew aside the window-curtain, as if to
look for some expected object; a frugal meal was ready spread upon the
table; and an elbow chair was placed near the fire. A knock was heard at
the door; the mother opened it, and the children crowded round her, and
clapped their hands for joy, as their father entered. He was wet and
weary, and shook the snow from his garments, as the children crowded
round him, and seizing his cloak, hat, stick, and gloves, with busy
zeal, ran with them from the room. Then, as he sat down to his meal
before the fire, the children climbed about his knee, and the mother sat
by his side, and all seemed happiness and comfort.

‘But a change came upon the view, almost imperceptibly. The scene was
altered to a small bedroom, where the fairest and youngest child lay
dying; the roses had fled from his cheek, and the light from his eye;
and even as the sexton looked upon him with an interest he had never
felt or known before, he died. His young brothers and sisters crowded
round his little bed, and seized his tiny hand, so cold and heavy; but
they shrank back from its touch, and looked with awe on his infant face;
for calm and tranquil as it was, and sleeping in rest and peace as the
beautiful child seemed to be, they saw that he was dead, and they knew
that he was an angel looking down upon, and blessing them, from a bright
and happy Heaven.

‘Again the light cloud passed across the picture, and again the subject
changed. The father and mother were old and helpless now, and the number
of those about them was diminished more than half; but content and
cheerfulness sat on every face, and beamed in every eye, as they crowded
round the fireside, and told and listened to old stories of earlier and
bygone days. Slowly and peacefully, the father sank into the grave, and,
soon after, the sharer of all his cares and troubles followed him to a
place of rest. The few who yet survived them, kneeled by their tomb, and
watered the green turf which covered it with their tears; then rose, and
turned away, sadly and mournfully, but not with bitter cries, or
despairing lamentations, for they knew that they should one day meet
again; and once more they mixed with the busy world, and their content
and cheerfulness were restored. The cloud settled upon the picture, and
concealed it from the sexton’s view.

‘“What do you think of _that_?” said the goblin, turning his large face
towards Gabriel Grub.

‘Gabriel murmured out something about its being very pretty, and looked
somewhat ashamed, as the goblin bent his fiery eyes upon him.

‘“You a miserable man!” said the goblin, in a tone of excessive
contempt. “You!” He appeared disposed to add more, but indignation
choked his utterance, so he lifted up one of his very pliable legs, and,
flourishing it above his head a little, to insure his aim, administered
a good sound kick to Gabriel Grub; immediately after which, all the
goblins in waiting crowded round the wretched sexton, and kicked him
without mercy, according to the established and invariable custom of
courtiers upon earth, who kick whom royalty kicks, and hug whom royalty
hugs.

‘“Show him some more!” said the king of the goblins.

‘At these words, the cloud was dispelled, and a rich and beautiful
landscape was disclosed to view--there is just such another, to this
day, within half a mile of the old abbey town. The sun shone from out
the clear blue sky, the water sparkled beneath his rays, and the trees
looked greener, and the flowers more gay, beneath its cheering
influence. The water rippled on with a pleasant sound, the trees rustled
in the light wind that murmured among their leaves, the birds sang upon
the boughs, and the lark carolled on high her welcome to the morning.
Yes, it was morning; the bright, balmy morning of summer; the minutest
leaf, the smallest blade of grass, was instinct with life. The ant crept
forth to her daily toil, the butterfly fluttered and basked in the warm
rays of the sun; myriads of insects spread their transparent wings, and
revelled in their brief but happy existence. Man walked forth, elated
with the scene; and all was brightness and splendour.

’”_You _a miserable man!” said the king of the goblins, in a more
contemptuous tone than before. And again the king of the goblins gave
his leg a flourish; again it descended on the shoulders of the sexton;
and again the attendant goblins imitated the example of their chief.

‘Many a time the cloud went and came, and many a lesson it taught to
Gabriel Grub, who, although his shoulders smarted with pain from the
frequent applications of the goblins’ feet thereunto, looked on with an
interest that nothing could diminish. He saw that men who worked hard,
and earned their scanty bread with lives of labour, were cheerful and
happy; and that to the most ignorant, the sweet face of Nature was a
never-failing source of cheerfulness and joy. He saw those who had been
delicately nurtured, and tenderly brought up, cheerful under privations,
and superior to suffering, that would have crushed many of a rougher
grain, because they bore within their own bosoms the materials of
happiness, contentment, and peace. He saw that women, the tenderest and
most fragile of all God’s creatures, were the oftenest superior to
sorrow, adversity, and distress; and he saw that it was because they
bore, in their own hearts, an inexhaustible well-spring of affection and
devotion. Above all, he saw that men like himself, who snarled at the
mirth and cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair
surface of the earth; and setting all the good of the world against the
evil, he came to the conclusion that it was a very decent and
respectable sort of world after all. No sooner had he formed it, than
the cloud which had closed over the last picture, seemed to settle on
his senses, and lull him to repose. One by one, the goblins faded from
his sight; and, as the last one disappeared, he sank to sleep.

‘The day had broken when Gabriel Grub awoke, and found himself lying at
full length on the flat gravestone in the churchyard, with the wicker
bottle lying empty by his side, and his coat, spade, and lantern, all
well whitened by the last night’s frost, scattered on the ground. The
stone on which he had first seen the goblin seated, stood bolt upright
before him, and the grave at which he had worked, the night before, was
not far off. At first, he began to doubt the reality of his adventures,
but the acute pain in his shoulders when he attempted to rise, assured
him that the kicking of the goblins was certainly not ideal. He was
staggered again, by observing no traces of footsteps in the snow on
which the goblins had played at leap-frog with the gravestones, but he
speedily accounted for this circumstance when he remembered that, being
spirits, they would leave no visible impression behind them. So, Gabriel
Grub got on his feet as well as he could, for the pain in his back; and,
brushing the frost off his coat, put it on, and turned his face towards
the town.

‘But he was an altered man, and he could not bear the thought of
returning to a place where his repentance would be scoffed at, and his
reformation disbelieved. He hesitated for a few moments; and then turned
away to wander where he might, and seek his bread elsewhere.

‘The lantern, the spade, and the wicker bottle were found, that day, in
the churchyard. There were a great many speculations about the sexton’s
fate, at first, but it was speedily determined that he had been carried
away by the goblins; and there were not wanting some very credible
witnesses who had distinctly seen him whisked through the air on the
back of a chestnut horse blind of one eye, with the hind-quarters of a
lion, and the tail of a bear. At length all this was devoutly believed;
and the new sexton used to exhibit to the curious, for a trifling
emolument, a good-sized piece of the church weathercock which had been
accidentally kicked off by the aforesaid horse in his aerial flight, and
picked up by himself in the churchyard, a year or two afterwards.

‘Unfortunately, these stories were somewhat disturbed by the unlooked-
for reappearance of Gabriel Grub himself, some ten years afterwards, a
ragged, contented, rheumatic old man. He told his story to the
clergyman, and also to the mayor; and in course of time it began to be
received as a matter of history, in which form it has continued down to
this very day. The believers in the weathercock tale, having misplaced
their confidence once, were not easily prevailed upon to part with it
again, so they looked as wise as they could, shrugged their shoulders,
touched their foreheads, and murmured something about Gabriel Grub
having drunk all the Hollands, and then fallen asleep on the flat
tombstone; and they affected to explain what he supposed he had
witnessed in the goblin’s cavern, by saying that he had seen the world,
and grown wiser. But this opinion, which was by no means a popular one
at any time, gradually died off; and be the matter how it may, as
Gabriel Grub was afflicted with rheumatism to the end of his days, this
story has at least one moral, if it teach no better one--and that is,
that if a man turn sulky and drink by himself at Christmas time, he may
make up his mind to be not a bit the better for it: let the spirits be
never so good, or let them be even as many degrees beyond proof, as
those which Gabriel Grub saw in the goblin’s cavern.’



CHAPTER XXX. HOW THE PICKWICKIANS MADE AND CULTIVATED THE ACQUAINTANCE
OF A COUPLE OF NICE YOUNG MEN BELONGING TO ONE OF THE LIBERAL
PROFESSIONS; HOW THEY DISPORTED THEMSELVES ON THE ICE; AND HOW THEIR
VISIT CAME TO A CONCLUSION

Well, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, as that favoured servitor entered his
bed-chamber, with his warm water, on the morning of Christmas Day,
‘still frosty?’

‘Water in the wash-hand basin’s a mask o’ ice, Sir,’ responded Sam.

‘Severe weather, Sam,’ observed Mr. Pickwick.

‘Fine time for them as is well wropped up, as the Polar bear said to
himself, ven he was practising his skating,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘I shall be down in a quarter of an hour, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick,
untying his nightcap.

‘Wery good, sir,’ replied Sam. ‘There’s a couple o’ sawbones
downstairs.’

‘A couple of what!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, sitting up in bed.

‘A couple o’ sawbones,’ said Sam.

‘What’s a sawbones?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, not quite certain whether it
was a live animal, or something to eat.

‘What! Don’t you know what a sawbones is, sir?’ inquired Mr. Weller. ‘I
thought everybody know’d as a sawbones was a surgeon.’

‘Oh, a surgeon, eh?’ said Mr. Pickwick, with a smile.

‘Just that, sir,’ replied Sam. ‘These here ones as is below, though,
ain’t reg’lar thoroughbred sawbones; they’re only in trainin’.’

In other words they’re medical students, I suppose?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

Sam Weller nodded assent.

‘I am glad of it,’ said Mr. Pickwick, casting his nightcap energetically
on the counterpane. ‘They are fine fellows--very fine fellows; with
judgments matured by observation and reflection; and tastes refined by
reading and study. I am very glad of it.’

‘They’re a-smokin’ cigars by the kitchen fire,’ said Sam.

‘Ah!’ observed Mr. Pickwick, rubbing his hands, ‘overflowing with kindly
feelings and animal spirits. Just what I like to see.’

And one on ‘em,’ said Sam, not noticing his master’s interruption, ‘one
on ‘em’s got his legs on the table, and is a-drinking brandy neat, vile
the t’other one--him in the barnacles--has got a barrel o’ oysters
atween his knees, which he’s a-openin’ like steam, and as fast as he
eats ‘em, he takes a aim vith the shells at young dropsy, who’s a
sittin’ down fast asleep, in the chimbley corner.’

‘Eccentricities of genius, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘You may retire.’

Sam did retire accordingly. Mr. Pickwick at the expiration of the
quarter of an hour, went down to breakfast.

‘Here he is at last!’ said old Mr. Wardle. ‘Pickwick, this is Miss
Allen’s brother, Mr. Benjamin Allen. Ben we call him, and so may you, if
you like. This gentleman is his very particular friend, Mr.--’

‘Mr. Bob Sawyer,’ interposed Mr. Benjamin Allen; whereupon Mr. Bob
Sawyer and Mr. Benjamin Allen laughed in concert.

Mr. Pickwick bowed to Bob Sawyer, and Bob Sawyer bowed to Mr. Pickwick.
Bob and his very particular friend then applied themselves most
assiduously to the eatables before them; and Mr. Pickwick had an
opportunity of glancing at them both.

Mr. Benjamin Allen was a coarse, stout, thick-set young man, with black
hair cut rather short, and a white face cut rather long. He was
embellished with spectacles, and wore a white neckerchief. Below his
single-breasted black surtout, which was buttoned up to his chin,
appeared the usual number of pepper-and-salt coloured legs, terminating
in a pair of imperfectly polished boots. Although his coat was short in
the sleeves, it disclosed no vestige of a linen wristband; and although
there was quite enough of his face to admit of the encroachment of a
shirt collar, it was not graced by the smallest approach to that
appendage. He presented, altogether, rather a mildewy appearance, and
emitted a fragrant odour of full-flavoured Cubas.

Mr. Bob Sawyer, who was habited in a coarse, blue coat, which, without
being either a greatcoat or a surtout, partook of the nature and
qualities of both, had about him that sort of slovenly smartness, and
swaggering gait, which is peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the
streets by day, shout and scream in the same by night, call waiters by
their Christian names, and do various other acts and deeds of an equally
facetious description. He wore a pair of plaid trousers, and a large,
rough, double-breasted waistcoat; out of doors, he carried a thick stick
with a big top. He eschewed gloves, and looked, upon the whole,
something like a dissipated Robinson Crusoe.

Such were the two worthies to whom Mr. Pickwick was introduced, as he
took his seat at the breakfast-table on Christmas morning.

‘Splendid morning, gentlemen,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

Mr. Bob Sawyer slightly nodded his assent to the proposition, and asked
Mr. Benjamin Allen for the mustard.

‘Have you come far this morning, gentlemen?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Blue Lion at Muggleton,’ briefly responded Mr. Allen.

‘You should have joined us last night,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘So we should,’ replied Bob Sawyer, ‘but the brandy was too good to
leave in a hurry; wasn’t it, Ben?’

‘Certainly,’ said Mr. Benjamin Allen; ‘and the cigars were not bad, or
the pork-chops either; were they, Bob?’

‘Decidedly not,’ said Bob. The particular friends resumed their attack
upon the breakfast, more freely than before, as if the recollection of
last night’s supper had imparted a new relish to the meal.

‘Peg away, Bob,’ said Mr. Allen, to his companion, encouragingly.

‘So I do,’ replied Bob Sawyer. And so, to do him justice, he did.

‘Nothing like dissecting, to give one an appetite,’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer,
looking round the table.

Mr. Pickwick slightly shuddered.

‘By the bye, Bob,’ said Mr. Allen, ‘have you finished that leg yet?’

‘Nearly,’ replied Sawyer, helping himself to half a fowl as he spoke.
‘It’s a very muscular one for a child’s.’

Is it?’ inquired Mr. Allen carelessly.

‘Very,’ said Bob Sawyer, with his mouth full.

‘I’ve put my name down for an arm at our place,’ said Mr. Allen. ‘We’re
clubbing for a subject, and the list is nearly full, only we can’t get
hold of any fellow that wants a head. I wish you’d take it.’

‘No,’ replied ‘Bob Sawyer; ‘can’t afford expensive luxuries.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Allen.

‘Can’t, indeed,’ rejoined Bob Sawyer, ‘I wouldn’t mind a brain, but I
couldn’t stand a whole head.’

Hush, hush, gentlemen, pray,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I hear the ladies.’

As Mr. Pickwick spoke, the ladies, gallantly escorted by Messrs.
Snodgrass, Winkle, and Tupman, returned from an early walk.

‘Why, Ben!’ said Arabella, in a tone which expressed more surprise than
pleasure at the sight of her brother.

‘Come to take you home to-morrow,’ replied Benjamin.

Mr. Winkle turned pale.

‘Don’t you see Bob Sawyer, Arabella?’ inquired Mr. Benjamin Allen,
somewhat reproachfully. Arabella gracefully held out her hand, in
acknowledgment of Bob Sawyer’s presence. A thrill of hatred struck to
Mr. Winkle’s heart, as Bob Sawyer inflicted on the proffered hand a
perceptible squeeze.

‘Ben, dear!’ said Arabella, blushing; ‘have--have--you been introduced
to Mr. Winkle?’

‘I have not been, but I shall be very happy to be, Arabella,’ replied
her brother gravely. Here Mr. Allen bowed grimly to Mr. Winkle, while
Mr. Winkle and Mr. Bob Sawyer glanced mutual distrust out of the corners
of their eyes.

The arrival of the two new visitors, and the consequent check upon Mr.
Winkle and the young lady with the fur round her boots, would in all
probability have proved a very unpleasant interruption to the hilarity
of the party, had not the cheerfulness of Mr. Pickwick, and the good
humour of the host, been exerted to the very utmost for the common weal.
Mr. Winkle gradually insinuated himself into the good graces of Mr.
Benjamin Allen, and even joined in a friendly conversation with Mr. Bob
Sawyer; who, enlivened with the brandy, and the breakfast, and the
talking, gradually ripened into a state of extreme facetiousness, and
related with much glee an agreeable anecdote, about the removal of a
tumour on some gentleman’s head, which he illustrated by means of an
oyster-knife and a half-quartern loaf, to the great edification of the
assembled company. Then the whole train went to church, where Mr.
Benjamin Allen fell fast asleep; while Mr. Bob Sawyer abstracted his
thoughts from worldly matters, by the ingenious process of carving his
name on the seat of the pew, in corpulent letters of four inches long.

‘Now,’ said Wardle, after a substantial lunch, with the agreeable items
of strong beer and cherry-brandy, had been done ample justice to, ‘what
say you to an hour on the ice? We shall have plenty of time.’

‘Capital!’ said Mr. Benjamin Allen.

‘Prime!’ ejaculated Mr. Bob Sawyer.

‘You skate, of course, Winkle?’ said Wardle.

‘Ye-yes; oh, yes,’ replied Mr. Winkle. ‘I--I--am _rather _out of
practice.’

‘Oh, _do_ skate, Mr. Winkle,’ said Arabella. ‘I like to see it so much.’

‘Oh, it is _so_ graceful,’ said another young lady.

A third young lady said it was elegant, and a fourth expressed her
opinion that it was ‘swan-like.’

‘I should be very happy, I’m sure,’ said Mr. Winkle, reddening; ‘but I
have no skates.’

This objection was at once overruled. Trundle had a couple of pair, and
the fat boy announced that there were half a dozen more downstairs;
whereat Mr. Winkle expressed exquisite delight, and looked exquisitely
uncomfortable.

Old Wardle led the way to a pretty large sheet of ice; and the fat boy
and Mr. Weller, having shovelled and swept away the snow which had
fallen on it during the night, Mr. Bob Sawyer adjusted his skates with a
dexterity which to Mr. Winkle was perfectly marvellous, and described
circles with his left leg, and cut figures of eight, and inscribed upon
the ice, without once stopping for breath, a great many other pleasant
and astonishing devices, to the excessive satisfaction of Mr. Pickwick,
Mr. Tupman, and the ladies; which reached a pitch of positive
enthusiasm, when old Wardle and Benjamin Allen, assisted by the
aforesaid Bob Sawyer, performed some mystic evolutions, which they
called a reel.

All this time, Mr. Winkle, with his face and hands blue with the cold,
had been forcing a gimlet into the sole of his feet, and putting his
skates on, with the points behind, and getting the straps into a very
complicated and entangled state, with the assistance of Mr. Snodgrass,
who knew rather less about skates than a Hindoo. At length, however,
with the assistance of Mr. Weller, the unfortunate skates were firmly
screwed and buckled on, and Mr. Winkle was raised to his feet.

‘Now, then, Sir,’ said Sam, in an encouraging tone; ‘off vith you, and
show ‘em how to do it.’

‘Stop, Sam, stop!’ said Mr. Winkle, trembling violently, and clutching
hold of Sam’s arms with the grasp of a drowning man. ‘How slippery it
is, Sam!’

‘Not an uncommon thing upon ice, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘Hold up,
Sir!’

This last observation of Mr. Weller’s bore reference to a demonstration
Mr. Winkle made at the instant, of a frantic desire to throw his feet in
the air, and dash the back of his head on the ice.

‘These--these--are very awkward skates; ain’t they, Sam?’ inquired Mr.
Winkle, staggering.

‘I’m afeerd there’s a orkard gen’l’m’n in ‘em, Sir,’ replied Sam.

‘Now, Winkle,’ cried Mr. Pickwick, quite unconscious that there was
anything the matter. ‘Come; the ladies are all anxiety.’

‘Yes, yes,’ replied Mr. Winkle, with a ghastly smile. ‘I’m coming.’

‘Just a-goin’ to begin,’ said Sam, endeavouring to disengage himself.
‘Now, Sir, start off!’

‘Stop an instant, Sam,’ gasped Mr. Winkle, clinging most affectionately
to Mr. Weller. ‘I find I’ve got a couple of coats at home that I don’t
want, Sam. You may have them, Sam.’

‘Thank’ee, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘Never mind touching your hat, Sam,’ said Mr. Winkle hastily. ‘You
needn’t take your hand away to do that. I meant to have given you five
shillings this morning for a Christmas box, Sam. I’ll give it you this
afternoon, Sam.’

‘You’re wery good, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘Just hold me at first, Sam; will you?’ said Mr. Winkle. ‘There--that’s
right. I shall soon get in the way of it, Sam. Not too fast, Sam; not
too fast.’

Mr. Winkle, stooping forward, with his body half doubled up, was being
assisted over the ice by Mr. Weller, in a very singular and un-swan-like
manner, when Mr. Pickwick most innocently shouted from the opposite
bank--

‘Sam!’

‘Sir?’

‘Here. I want you.’

‘Let go, Sir,’ said Sam. ‘Don’t you hear the governor a-callin’? Let go,
sir.’

With a violent effort, Mr. Weller disengaged himself from the grasp of
the agonised Pickwickian, and, in so doing, administered a considerable
impetus to the unhappy Mr. Winkle. With an accuracy which no degree of
dexterity or practice could have insured, that unfortunate gentleman
bore swiftly down into the centre of the reel, at the very moment when
Mr. Bob Sawyer was performing a flourish of unparalleled beauty. Mr.
Winkle struck wildly against him, and with a loud crash they both fell
heavily down. Mr. Pickwick ran to the spot. Bob Sawyer had risen to his
feet, but Mr. Winkle was far too wise to do anything of the kind, in
skates. He was seated on the ice, making spasmodic efforts to smile; but
anguish was depicted on every lineament of his countenance.

‘Are you hurt?’ inquired Mr. Benjamin Allen, with great anxiety.

‘Not much,’ said Mr. Winkle, rubbing his back very hard.

‘I wish you’d let me bleed you,’ said Mr. Benjamin, with great
eagerness.

‘No, thank you,’ replied Mr. Winkle hurriedly.

‘I really think you had better,’ said Allen.

‘Thank you,’ replied Mr. Winkle; ‘I’d rather not.’

‘What do _you _think, Mr. Pickwick?’ inquired Bob Sawyer.

Mr. Pickwick was excited and indignant. He beckoned to Mr. Weller, and
said in a stern voice, ‘Take his skates off.’

‘No; but really I had scarcely begun,’ remonstrated Mr. Winkle.

‘Take his skates off,’ repeated Mr. Pickwick firmly.

The command was not to be resisted. Mr. Winkle allowed Sam to obey it,
in silence.

‘Lift him up,’ said Mr. Pickwick. Sam assisted him to rise.

Mr. Pickwick retired a few paces apart from the bystanders; and,
beckoning his friend to approach, fixed a searching look upon him, and
uttered in a low, but distinct and emphatic tone, these remarkable
words--

‘You’re a humbug, sir.’

A what?’ said Mr. Winkle, starting.

‘A humbug, Sir. I will speak plainer, if you wish it. An impostor, sir.’

With those words, Mr. Pickwick turned slowly on his heel, and rejoined
his friends.

While Mr. Pickwick was delivering himself of the sentiment just
recorded, Mr. Weller and the fat boy, having by their joint endeavours
cut out a slide, were exercising themselves thereupon, in a very
masterly and brilliant manner. Sam Weller, in particular, was displaying
that beautiful feat of fancy-sliding which is currently denominated
‘knocking at the cobbler’s door,’ and which is achieved by skimming over
the ice on one foot, and occasionally giving a postman’s knock upon it
with the other. It was a good long slide, and there was something in the
motion which Mr. Pickwick, who was very cold with standing still, could
not help envying.

‘It looks a nice warm exercise that, doesn’t it?’ he inquired of Wardle,
when that gentleman was thoroughly out of breath, by reason of the
indefatigable manner in which he had converted his legs into a pair of
compasses, and drawn complicated problems on the ice.

‘Ah, it does, indeed,’ replied Wardle. ‘Do you slide?’

‘I used to do so, on the gutters, when I was a boy,’ replied Mr.
Pickwick.

‘Try it now,’ said Wardle.

‘Oh, do, please, Mr. Pickwick!’ cried all the ladies.

‘I should be very happy to afford you any amusement,’ replied Mr.
Pickwick, ‘but I haven’t done such a thing these thirty years.’

‘Pooh! pooh! Nonsense!’ said Wardle, dragging off his skates with the
impetuosity which characterised all his proceedings. ‘Here; I’ll keep
you company; come along!’ And away went the good-tempered old fellow
down the slide, with a rapidity which came very close upon Mr. Weller,
and beat the fat boy all to nothing.

Mr. Pickwick paused, considered, pulled off his gloves and put them in
his hat; took two or three short runs, baulked himself as often, and at
last took another run, and went slowly and gravely down the slide, with
his feet about a yard and a quarter apart, amidst the gratified shouts
of all the spectators.

‘Keep the pot a-bilin’, Sir!’ said Sam; and down went Wardle again, and
then Mr. Pickwick, and then Sam, and then Mr. Winkle, and then Mr. Bob
Sawyer, and then the fat boy, and then Mr. Snodgrass, following closely
upon each other’s heels, and running after each other with as much
eagerness as if their future prospects in life depended on their
expedition.

It was the most intensely interesting thing, to observe the manner in
which Mr. Pickwick performed his share in the ceremony; to watch the
torture of anxiety with which he viewed the person behind, gaining upon
him at the imminent hazard of tripping him up; to see him gradually
expend the painful force he had put on at first, and turn slowly round
on the slide, with his face towards the point from which he had started;
to contemplate the playful smile which mantled on his face when he had
accomplished the distance, and the eagerness with which he turned round
when he had done so, and ran after his predecessor, his black gaiters
tripping pleasantly through the snow, and his eyes beaming cheerfulness
and gladness through his spectacles. And when he was knocked down (which
happened upon the average every third round), it was the most
invigorating sight that can possibly be imagined, to behold him gather
up his hat, gloves, and handkerchief, with a glowing countenance, and
resume his station in the rank, with an ardour and enthusiasm that
nothing Could abate.

The sport was at its height, the sliding was at the quickest, the
laughter was at the loudest, when a sharp smart crack was heard. There
was a quick rush towards the bank, a wild scream from the ladies, and a
shout from Mr. Tupman. A large mass of ice disappeared; the water
bubbled up over it; Mr. Pickwick’s hat, gloves, and handkerchief were
floating on the surface; and this was all of Mr. Pickwick that anybody
could see.

Dismay and anguish were depicted on every countenance; the males turned
pale, and the females fainted; Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle grasped each
other by the hand, and gazed at the spot where their leader had gone
down, with frenzied eagerness; while Mr. Tupman, by way of rendering the
promptest assistance, and at the same time conveying to any persons who
might be within hearing, the clearest possible notion of the
catastrophe, ran off across the country at his utmost speed, screaming
‘Fire!’ with all his might.

It was at this moment, when old Wardle and Sam Weller were approaching
the hole with cautious steps, and Mr. Benjamin Allen was holding a
hurried consultation with Mr. Bob Sawyer on the advisability of bleeding
the company generally, as an improving little bit of professional
practice--it was at this very moment, that a face, head, and shoulders,
emerged from beneath the water, and disclosed the features and
spectacles of Mr. Pickwick.

‘Keep yourself up for an instant--for only one instant!’ bawled Mr.
Snodgrass.

‘Yes, do; let me implore you--for my sake!’ roared Mr. Winkle, deeply
affected. The adjuration was rather unnecessary; the probability being,
that if Mr. Pickwick had declined to keep himself up for anybody else’s
sake, it would have occurred to him that he might as well do so, for his
own.

‘Do you feel the bottom there, old fellow?’ said Wardle.

‘Yes, certainly,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, wringing the water from his head
and face, and gasping for breath. ‘I fell upon my back. I couldn’t get
on my feet at first.’

The clay upon so much of Mr. Pickwick’s coat as was yet visible, bore
testimony to the accuracy of this statement; and as the fears of the
spectators were still further relieved by the fat boy’s suddenly
recollecting that the water was nowhere more than five feet deep,
prodigies of valour were performed to get him out. After a vast quantity
of splashing, and cracking, and struggling, Mr. Pickwick was at length
fairly extricated from his unpleasant position, and once more stood on
dry land.

‘Oh, he’ll catch his death of cold,’ said Emily.

‘Dear old thing!’ said Arabella. ‘Let me wrap this shawl round you, Mr.
Pickwick.’

‘Ah, that’s the best thing you can do,’ said Wardle; ‘and when you’ve
got it on, run home as fast as your legs can carry you, and jump into
bed directly.’

A dozen shawls were offered on the instant. Three or four of the
thickest having been selected, Mr. Pickwick was wrapped up, and started
off, under the guidance of Mr. Weller; presenting the singular
phenomenon of an elderly gentleman, dripping wet, and without a hat,
with his arms bound down to his sides, skimming over the ground, without
any clearly-defined purpose, at the rate of six good English miles an
hour.

But Mr. Pickwick cared not for appearances in such an extreme case, and
urged on by Sam Weller, he kept at the very top of his speed until he
reached the door of Manor Farm, where Mr. Tupman had arrived some five
minutes before, and had frightened the old lady into palpitations of the
heart by impressing her with the unalterable conviction that the kitchen
chimney was on fire--a calamity which always presented itself in glowing
colours to the old lady’s mind, when anybody about her evinced the
smallest agitation.

Mr. Pickwick paused not an instant until he was snug in bed. Sam Weller
lighted a blazing fire in the room, and took up his dinner; a bowl of
punch was carried up afterwards, and a grand carouse held in honour of
his safety. Old Wardle would not hear of his rising, so they made the
bed the chair, and Mr. Pickwick presided. A second and a third bowl were
ordered in; and when Mr. Pickwick awoke next morning, there was not a
symptom of rheumatism about him; which proves, as Mr. Bob Sawyer very
justly observed, that there is nothing like hot punch in such cases; and
that if ever hot punch did fail to act as a preventive, it was merely
because the patient fell into the vulgar error of not taking enough of
it.

The jovial party broke up next morning. Breakings-up are capital things
in our school-days, but in after life they are painful enough. Death,
self-interest, and fortune’s changes, are every day breaking up many a
happy group, and scattering them far and wide; and the boys and girls
never come back again. We do not mean to say that it was exactly the
case in this particular instance; all we wish to inform the reader is,
that the different members of the party dispersed to their several
homes; that Mr. Pickwick and his friends once more took their seats on
the top of the Muggleton coach; and that Arabella Allen repaired to her
place of destination, wherever it might have been--we dare say Mr.
Winkle knew, but we confess we don’t--under the care and guardianship of
her brother Benjamin, and his most intimate and particular friend, Mr.
Bob Sawyer.

Before they separated, however, that gentleman and Mr. Benjamin Allen
drew Mr. Pickwick aside with an air of some mystery; and Mr. Bob Sawyer,
thrusting his forefinger between two of Mr. Pickwick’s ribs, and thereby
displaying his native drollery, and his knowledge of the anatomy of the
human frame, at one and the same time, inquired--

‘I say, old boy, where do you hang out?’ Mr. Pickwick replied that he
was at present suspended at the George and Vulture.

‘I wish you’d come and see me,’ said Bob Sawyer.

‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘There’s my lodgings,’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer, producing a card. ‘Lant
Street, Borough; it’s near Guy’s, and handy for me, you know. Little
distance after you’ve passed St. George’s Church--turns out of the High
Street on the right hand side the way.’

‘I shall find it,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Come on Thursday fortnight, and bring the other chaps with you,’ said
Mr. Bob Sawyer; ‘I’m going to have a few medical fellows that night.’

Mr. Pickwick expressed the pleasure it would afford him to meet the
medical fellows; and after Mr. Bob Sawyer had informed him that he meant
to be very cosy, and that his friend Ben was to be one of the party,
they shook hands and separated.

We feel that in this place we lay ourself open to the inquiry whether
Mr. Winkle was whispering, during this brief conversation, to Arabella
Allen; and if so, what he said; and furthermore, whether Mr. Snodgrass
was conversing apart with Emily Wardle; and if so, what _he_ said. To
this, we reply, that whatever they might have said to the ladies, they
said nothing at all to Mr. Pickwick or Mr. Tupman for eight-and-twenty
miles, and that they sighed very often, refused ale and brandy, and
looked gloomy. If our observant lady readers can deduce any satisfactory
inferences from these facts, we beg them by all means to do so.



CHAPTER XXXI. WHICH IS ALL ABOUT THE LAW, AND SUNDRY GREAT AUTHORITIES
LEARNED THEREIN

Scattered about, in various holes and corners of the Temple, are certain
dark and dirty chambers, in and out of which, all the morning in
vacation, and half the evening too in term time, there may be seen
constantly hurrying with bundles of papers under their arms, and
protruding from their pockets, an almost uninterrupted succession of
lawyers’ clerks. There are several grades of lawyers’ clerks. There is
the articled clerk, who has paid a premium, and is an attorney in
perspective, who runs a tailor’s bill, receives invitations to parties,
knows a family in Gower Street, and another in Tavistock Square; who
goes out of town every long vacation to see his father, who keeps live
horses innumerable; and who is, in short, the very aristocrat of clerks.
There is the salaried clerk--out of door, or in door, as the case may
be--who devotes the major part of his thirty shillings a week to his
Personal pleasure and adornments, repairs half-price to the Adelphi
Theatre at least three times a week, dissipates majestically at the
cider cellars afterwards, and is a dirty caricature of the fashion which
expired six months ago. There is the middle-aged copying clerk, with a
large family, who is always shabby, and often drunk. And there are the
office lads in their first surtouts, who feel a befitting contempt for
boys at day-schools, club as they go home at night, for saveloys and
porter, and think there’s nothing like ‘life.’ There are varieties of
the genus, too numerous to recapitulate, but however numerous they may
be, they are all to be seen, at certain regulated business hours,
hurrying to and from the places we have just mentioned.

These sequestered nooks are the public offices of the legal profession,
where writs are issued, judgments signed, declarations filed, and
numerous other ingenious machines put in motion for the torture and
torment of His Majesty’s liege subjects, and the comfort and emolument
of the practitioners of the law. They are, for the most part, low-
roofed, mouldy rooms, where innumerable rolls of parchment, which have
been perspiring in secret for the last century, send forth an agreeable
odour, which is mingled by day with the scent of the dry-rot, and by
night with the various exhalations which arise from damp cloaks,
festering umbrellas, and the coarsest tallow candles.

About half-past seven o’clock in the evening, some ten days or a
fortnight after Mr. Pickwick and his friends returned to London, there
hurried into one of these offices, an individual in a brown coat and
brass buttons, whose long hair was scrupulously twisted round the rim of
his napless hat, and whose soiled drab trousers were so tightly strapped
over his Blucher boots, that his knees threatened every moment to start
from their concealment. He produced from his coat pockets a long and
narrow strip of parchment, on which the presiding functionary impressed
an illegible black stamp. He then drew forth four scraps of paper, of
similar dimensions, each containing a printed copy of the strip of
parchment with blanks for a name; and having filled up the blanks, put
all the five documents in his pocket, and hurried away.

The man in the brown coat, with the cabalistic documents in his pocket,
was no other than our old acquaintance Mr. Jackson, of the house of
Dodson & Fogg, Freeman’s Court, Cornhill. Instead of returning to the
office whence he came, however, he bent his steps direct to Sun Court,
and walking straight into the George and Vulture, demanded to know
whether one Mr. Pickwick was within.

‘Call Mr. Pickwick’s servant, Tom,’ said the barmaid of the George and
Vulture.

‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ said Mr. Jackson. ‘I’ve come on business. If
you’ll show me Mr. Pickwick’s room I’ll step up myself.’

‘What name, Sir?’ said the waiter.

‘Jackson,’ replied the clerk.

The waiter stepped upstairs to announce Mr. Jackson; but Mr. Jackson
saved him the trouble by following close at his heels, and walking into
the apartment before he could articulate a syllable.

Mr. Pickwick had, that day, invited his three friends to dinner; they
were all seated round the fire, drinking their wine, when Mr. Jackson
presented himself, as above described.

‘How de do, sir?’ said Mr. Jackson, nodding to Mr. Pickwick.

That gentleman bowed, and looked somewhat surprised, for the physiognomy
of Mr. Jackson dwelt not in his recollection.

‘I have called from Dodson and Fogg’s,’ said Mr. Jackson, in an
explanatory tone.

Mr. Pickwick roused at the name. ‘I refer you to my attorney, Sir; Mr.
Perker, of Gray’s Inn,’ said he. ‘Waiter, show this gentleman out.’

‘Beg your pardon, Mr. Pickwick,’ said Jackson, deliberately depositing
his hat on the floor, and drawing from his pocket the strip of
parchment. ‘But personal service, by clerk or agent, in these cases, you
know, Mr. Pickwick--nothing like caution, sir, in all legal forms--eh?’

Here Mr. Jackson cast his eye on the parchment; and, resting his hands
on the table, and looking round with a winning and persuasive smile,
said, ‘Now, come; don’t let’s have no words about such a little matter
as this. Which of you gentlemen’s name’s Snodgrass?’

At this inquiry, Mr. Snodgrass gave such a very undisguised and palpable
start, that no further reply was needed.

‘Ah! I thought so,’ said Mr. Jackson, more affably than before. ‘I’ve a
little something to trouble you with, Sir.’

‘Me!’ exclaimed Mr. Snodgrass.

‘It’s only a subpoena in Bardell and Pickwick on behalf of the
plaintiff,’ replied Jackson, singling out one of the slips of paper, and
producing a shilling from his waistcoat pocket. ‘It’ll come on, in the
settens after Term: fourteenth of Febooary, we expect; we’ve marked it a
special jury cause, and it’s only ten down the paper. That’s yours, Mr.
Snodgrass.’ As Jackson said this, he presented the parchment before the
eyes of Mr. Snodgrass, and slipped the paper and the shilling into his
hand.

Mr. Tupman had witnessed this process in silent astonishment, when
Jackson, turning sharply upon him, said--

‘I think I ain’t mistaken when I say your name’s Tupman, am I?’

Mr. Tupman looked at Mr. Pickwick; but, perceiving no encouragement in
that gentleman’s widely-opened eyes to deny his name, said--

‘Yes, my name is Tupman, Sir.’

‘And that other gentleman’s Mr. Winkle, I think?’ said Jackson. Mr.
Winkle faltered out a reply in the affirmative; and both gentlemen were
forthwith invested with a slip of paper, and a shilling each, by the
dexterous Mr. Jackson.

‘Now,’ said Jackson, ‘I’m afraid you’ll think me rather troublesome, but
I want somebody else, if it ain’t inconvenient. I have Samuel Weller’s
name here, Mr. Pickwick.’

‘Send my servant here, waiter,’ said Mr. Pickwick. The waiter retired,
considerably astonished, and Mr. Pickwick motioned Jackson to a seat.

There was a painful pause, which was at length broken by the innocent
defendant.

‘I suppose, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, his indignation rising while he
spoke--‘I suppose, Sir, that it is the intention of your employers to
seek to criminate me upon the testimony of my own friends?’

Mr. Jackson struck his forefinger several times against the left side of
his nose, to intimate that he was not there to disclose the secrets of
the prison house, and playfully rejoined--

‘Not knowin’, can’t say.’

‘For what other reason, Sir,’ pursued Mr. Pickwick, ‘are these subpoenas
served upon them, if not for this?’

‘Very good plant, Mr. Pickwick,’ replied Jackson, slowly shaking his
head. ‘But it won’t do. No harm in trying, but there’s little to be got
out of me.’

Here Mr. Jackson smiled once more upon the company, and, applying his
left thumb to the tip of his nose, worked a visionary coffee-mill with
his right hand, thereby performing a very graceful piece of pantomime
(then much in vogue, but now, unhappily, almost obsolete) which was
familiarly denominated ‘taking a grinder.’

‘No, no, Mr. Pickwick,’ said Jackson, in conclusion; ‘Perker’s people
must guess what we’ve served these subpoenas for. If they can’t, they
must wait till the action comes on, and then they’ll find out.’

Mr. Pickwick bestowed a look of excessive disgust on his unwelcome
visitor, and would probably have hurled some tremendous anathema at the
heads of Messrs. Dodson & Fogg, had not Sam’s entrance at the instant
interrupted him.

‘Samuel Weller?’ said Mr. Jackson, inquiringly.

‘Vun o’ the truest things as you’ve said for many a long year,’ replied
Sam, in a most composed manner.

‘Here’s a subpoena for you, Mr. Weller,’ said Jackson.

‘What’s that in English?’ inquired Sam.

‘Here’s the original,’ said Jackson, declining the required explanation.

‘Which?’ said Sam.

‘This,’ replied Jackson, shaking the parchment.

‘Oh, that’s the ‘rig’nal, is it?’ said Sam. ‘Well, I’m wery glad I’ve
seen the ‘rig’nal, ‘cos it’s a gratifyin’ sort o’ thing, and eases vun’s
mind so much.’

‘And here’s the shilling,’ said Jackson. ‘It’s from Dodson and Fogg’s.’

‘And it’s uncommon handsome o’ Dodson and Fogg, as knows so little of
me, to come down vith a present,’ said Sam. ‘I feel it as a wery high
compliment, sir; it’s a wery honorable thing to them, as they knows how
to reward merit werever they meets it. Besides which, it’s affectin’ to
one’s feelin’s.’

As Mr. Weller said this, he inflicted a little friction on his right
eyelid, with the sleeve of his coat, after the most approved manner of
actors when they are in domestic pathetics.

Mr. Jackson seemed rather puzzled by Sam’s proceedings; but, as he had
served the subpoenas, and had nothing more to say, he made a feint of
putting on the one glove which he usually carried in his hand, for the
sake of appearances; and returned to the office to report progress.

Mr. Pickwick slept little that night; his memory had received a very
disagreeable refresher on the subject of Mrs. Bardell’s action. He
breakfasted betimes next morning, and, desiring Sam to accompany him,
set forth towards Gray’s Inn Square.

‘Sam!’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking round, when they got to the end of
Cheapside.

‘Sir?’ said Sam, stepping up to his master.

‘Which way?’

Up Newgate Street.’

Mr. Pickwick did not turn round immediately, but looked vacantly in
Sam’s face for a few seconds, and heaved a deep sigh.

‘What’s the matter, sir?’ inquired Sam.

‘This action, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘is expected to come on, on the
fourteenth of next month.’

Remarkable coincidence that ‘ere, sir,’ replied Sam.

‘Why remarkable, Sam?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Walentine’s day, sir,’ responded Sam; ‘reg’lar good day for a breach o’
promise trial.’

Mr. Weller’s smile awakened no gleam of mirth in his master’s
countenance. Mr. Pickwick turned abruptly round, and led the way in
silence.

They had walked some distance, Mr. Pickwick trotting on before, plunged
in profound meditation, and Sam following behind, with a countenance
expressive of the most enviable and easy defiance of everything and
everybody, when the latter, who was always especially anxious to impart
to his master any exclusive information he possessed, quickened his pace
until he was close at Mr. Pickwick’s heels; and, pointing up at a house
they were passing, said--

‘Wery nice pork-shop that ‘ere, sir.’

‘Yes, it seems so,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Celebrated sassage factory,’ said Sam.

‘Is it?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Is it!’ reiterated Sam, with some indignation; ‘I should rayther think
it was. Why, sir, bless your innocent eyebrows, that’s where the
mysterious disappearance of a ‘spectable tradesman took place four years
ago.’

‘You don’t mean to say he was burked, Sam?’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking
hastily round.

‘No, I don’t indeed, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, ‘I wish I did; far worse
than that. He was the master o’ that ‘ere shop, sir, and the inwentor o’
the patent-never-leavin’-off sassage steam-ingin, as ‘ud swaller up a
pavin’ stone if you put it too near, and grind it into sassages as easy
as if it was a tender young babby. Wery proud o’ that machine he was, as
it was nat’ral he should be, and he’d stand down in the celler a-lookin’
at it wen it was in full play, till he got quite melancholy with joy. A
wery happy man he’d ha’ been, Sir, in the procession o’ that ‘ere ingin
and two more lovely hinfants besides, if it hadn’t been for his wife,
who was a most owdacious wixin. She was always a-follerin’ him about,
and dinnin’ in his ears, till at last he couldn’t stand it no longer.
“I’ll tell you what it is, my dear,” he says one day; “if you persewere
in this here sort of amusement,” he says, “I’m blessed if I don’t go
away to ‘Merriker; and that’s all about it.” “You’re a idle willin,”
 says she, “and I wish the ‘Merrikins joy of their bargain.” Arter which
she keeps on abusin’ of him for half an hour, and then runs into the
little parlour behind the shop, sets to a-screamin’, says he’ll be the
death on her, and falls in a fit, which lasts for three good hours--one
o’ them fits wich is all screamin’ and kickin’. Well, next mornin’, the
husband was missin’. He hadn’t taken nothin’ from the till--hadn’t even
put on his greatcoat--so it was quite clear he warn’t gone to ‘Merriker.
Didn’t come back next day; didn’t come back next week; missis had bills
printed, sayin’ that, if he’d come back, he should be forgiven
everythin’ (which was very liberal, seein’ that he hadn’t done nothin’
at all); the canals was dragged, and for two months arterwards, wenever
a body turned up, it was carried, as a reg’lar thing, straight off to
the sassage shop. Hows’ever, none on ‘em answered; so they gave out that
he’d run away, and she kep’ on the bis’ness. One Saturday night, a
little, thin, old gen’l’m’n comes into the shop in a great passion and
says, “Are you the missis o’ this here shop?” “Yes, I am,” says she.
“Well, ma’am,” says he, “then I’ve just looked in to say that me and my
family ain’t a-goin’ to be choked for nothin’; and more than that,
ma’am,” he says, “you’ll allow me to observe that as you don’t use the
primest parts of the meat in the manafacter o’ sassages, I’d think you’d
find beef come nearly as cheap as buttons.” “As buttons, Sir!” says she.
“Buttons, ma’am,” says the little, old gentleman, unfolding a bit of
paper, and showin’ twenty or thirty halves o’ buttons. “Nice seasonin’
for sassages, is trousers’ buttons, ma’am.” “They’re my husband’s
buttons!” says the widder beginnin’ to faint, “What!” screams the little
old gen’l’m’n, turnin’ wery pale. “I see it all,” says the widder; “in a
fit of temporary insanity he rashly converted hisself into sassages!”
 And so he had, Sir,’ said Mr. Weller, looking steadily into Mr.
Pickwick’s horror-stricken countenance, ‘or else he’d been draw’d into
the ingin; but however that might ha’ been, the little, old gen’l’m’n,
who had been remarkably partial to sassages all his life, rushed out o’
the shop in a wild state, and was never heerd on arterwards!’

The relation of this affecting incident of private life brought master
and man to Mr. Perker’s chambers. Lowten, holding the door half open,
was in conversation with a rustily-clad, miserable-looking man, in boots
without toes and gloves without fingers. There were traces of privation
and suffering--almost of despair--in his lank and care-worn countenance;
he felt his poverty, for he shrank to the dark side of the staircase as
Mr. Pickwick approached.

‘It’s very unfortunate,’ said the stranger, with a sigh.

‘Very,’ said Lowten, scribbling his name on the doorpost with his pen,
and rubbing it out again with the feather. ‘Will you leave a message for
him?’

‘When do you think he’ll be back?’ inquired the stranger.

‘Quite uncertain,’ replied Lowten, winking at Mr. Pickwick, as the
stranger cast his eyes towards the ground.

‘You don’t think it would be of any use my waiting for him?’ said the
stranger, looking wistfully into the office.

‘Oh, no, I’m sure it wouldn’t,’ replied the clerk, moving a little more
into the centre of the doorway. ‘He’s certain not to be back this week,
and it’s a chance whether he will be next; for when Perker once gets out
of town, he’s never in a hurry to come back again.’

‘Out of town!’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘dear me, how unfortunate!’

‘Don’t go away, Mr. Pickwick,’ said Lowten, ‘I’ve got a letter for you.’
The stranger, seeming to hesitate, once more looked towards the ground,
and the clerk winked slyly at Mr. Pickwick, as if to intimate that some
exquisite piece of humour was going forward, though what it was Mr.
Pickwick could not for the life of him divine.

‘Step in, Mr. Pickwick,’ said Lowten. ‘Well, will you leave a message,
Mr. Watty, or will you call again?’

‘Ask him to be so kind as to leave out word what has been done in my
business,’ said the man; ‘for God’s sake don’t neglect it, Mr. Lowten.’

‘No, no; I won’t forget it,’ replied the clerk. ‘Walk in, Mr. Pickwick.
Good-morning, Mr. Watty; it’s a fine day for walking, isn’t it?’ Seeing
that the stranger still lingered, he beckoned Sam Weller to follow his
master in, and shut the door in his face.

‘There never was such a pestering bankrupt as that since the world
began, I do believe!’ said Lowten, throwing down his pen with the air of
an injured man. ‘His affairs haven’t been in Chancery quite four years
yet, and I’m d----d if he don’t come worrying here twice a week. Step
this way, Mr. Pickwick. Perker _is_ in, and he’ll see you, I know.
Devilish cold,’ he added pettishly, ‘standing at that door, wasting
one’s time with such seedy vagabonds!’ Having very vehemently stirred a
particularly large fire with a particularly small poker, the clerk led
the way to his principal’s private room, and announced Mr. Pickwick.

‘Ah, my dear Sir,’ said little Mr. Perker, bustling up from his chair.
‘Well, my dear sir, and what’s the news about your matter, eh? Anything
more about our friends in Freeman’s Court? They’ve not been sleeping, I
know that. Ah, they’re very smart fellows; very smart, indeed.’

As the little man concluded, he took an emphatic pinch of snuff, as a
tribute to the smartness of Messrs. Dodson and Fogg.

‘They are great scoundrels,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Aye, aye,’ said the little man; ‘that’s a matter of opinion, you know,
and we won’t dispute about terms; because of course you can’t be
expected to view these subjects with a professional eye. Well, we’ve
done everything that’s necessary. I have retained Serjeant Snubbin.’

‘Is he a good man?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Good man!’ replied Perker; ‘bless your heart and soul, my dear Sir,
Serjeant Snubbin is at the very top of his profession. Gets treble the
business of any man in court--engaged in every case. You needn’t mention
it abroad; but we say--we of the profession--that Serjeant Snubbin leads
the court by the nose.’

The little man took another pinch of snuff as he made this
communication, and nodded mysteriously to Mr. Pickwick.

‘They have subpoenaed my three friends,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Ah! of course they would,’ replied Perker. ‘Important witnesses; saw
you in a delicate situation.’

‘But she fainted of her own accord,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘She threw
herself into my arms.’

‘Very likely, my dear Sir,’ replied Perker; ‘very likely and very
natural. Nothing more so, my dear Sir, nothing. But who’s to prove it?’

‘They have subpoenaed my servant, too,’ said Mr. Pickwick, quitting the
other point; for there Mr. Perker’s question had somewhat staggered him.

‘Sam?’ said Perker.

Mr. Pickwick replied in the affirmative.

‘Of course, my dear Sir; of course. I knew they would. I could have told
you that, a month ago. You know, my dear Sir, if you _will _take the
management of your affairs into your own hands after entrusting them to
your solicitor, you must also take the consequences.’ Here Mr. Perker
drew himself up with conscious dignity, and brushed some stray grains of
snuff from his shirt frill.

‘And what do they want him to prove?’ asked Mr. Pickwick, after two or
three minutes’ silence.

‘That you sent him up to the plaintiff ‘s to make some offer of a
compromise, I suppose,’ replied Perker. ‘It don’t matter much, though; I
don’t think many counsel could get a great deal out of _him_.’

‘I don’t think they could,’ said Mr. Pickwick, smiling, despite his
vexation, at the idea of Sam’s appearance as a witness. ‘What course do
we pursue?’

‘We have only one to adopt, my dear Sir,’ replied Perker; ‘cross-examine
the witnesses; trust to Snubbin’s eloquence; throw dust in the eyes of
the judge; throw ourselves on the jury.’

‘And suppose the verdict is against me?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

Mr. Perker smiled, took a very long pinch of snuff, stirred the fire,
shrugged his shoulders, and remained expressively silent.

‘You mean that in that case I must pay the damages?’ said Mr. Pickwick,
who had watched this telegraphic answer with considerable sternness.

Perker gave the fire another very unnecessary poke, and said, ‘I am
afraid so.’

‘Then I beg to announce to you my unalterable determination to pay no
damages whatever,’ said Mr. Pickwick, most emphatically. ‘None, Perker.
Not a pound, not a penny of my money, shall find its way into the
pockets of Dodson and Fogg. That is my deliberate and irrevocable
determination.’ Mr. Pickwick gave a heavy blow on the table before him,
in confirmation of the irrevocability of his intention.

‘Very well, my dear Sir, very well,’ said Perker. ‘You know best, of
course.’

‘Of course,’ replied Mr. Pickwick hastily. ‘Where does Serjeant Snubbin
live?’

In Lincoln’s Inn Old Square,’ replied Perker.

‘I should like to see him,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘See Serjeant Snubbin, my dear Sir!’ rejoined Perker, in utter
amazement. ‘Pooh, pooh, my dear Sir, impossible. See Serjeant Snubbin!
Bless you, my dear Sir, such a thing was never heard of, without a
consultation fee being previously paid, and a consultation fixed. It
couldn’t be done, my dear Sir; it couldn’t be done.’

Mr. Pickwick, however, had made up his mind not only that it could be
done, but that it should be done; and the consequence was, that within
ten minutes after he had received the assurance that the thing was
impossible, he was conducted by his solicitor into the outer office of
the great Serjeant Snubbin himself.

It was an uncarpeted room of tolerable dimensions, with a large writing-
table drawn up near the fire, the baize top of which had long since lost
all claim to its original hue of green, and had gradually grown gray
with dust and age, except where all traces of its natural colour were
obliterated by ink-stains. Upon the table were numerous little bundles
of papers tied with red tape; and behind it, sat an elderly clerk, whose
sleek appearance and heavy gold watch-chain presented imposing
indications of the extensive and lucrative practice of Mr. Serjeant
Snubbin.

‘Is the Serjeant in his room, Mr. Mallard?’ inquired Perker, offering
his box with all imaginable courtesy.

‘Yes, he is,’ was the reply, ‘but he’s very busy. Look here; not an
opinion given yet, on any one of these cases; and an expedition fee paid
with all of ‘em.’ The clerk smiled as he said this, and inhaled the
pinch of snuff with a zest which seemed to be compounded of a fondness
for snuff and a relish for fees.

‘Something like practice that,’ said Perker.

‘Yes,’ said the barrister’s clerk, producing his own box, and offering
it with the greatest cordiality; ‘and the best of it is, that as nobody
alive except myself can read the serjeant’s writing, they are obliged to
wait for the opinions, when he has given them, till I have copied ‘em,
ha-ha-ha!’

‘Which makes good for we know who, besides the serjeant, and draws a
little more out of the clients, eh?’ said Perker; ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ At this
the serjeant’s clerk laughed again--not a noisy boisterous laugh, but a
silent, internal chuckle, which Mr. Pickwick disliked to hear. When a
man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he
laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

‘You haven’t made me out that little list of the fees that I’m in your
debt, have you?’ said Perker.

‘No, I have not,’ replied the clerk.

‘I wish you would,’ said Perker. ‘Let me have them, and I’ll send you a
cheque. But I suppose you’re too busy pocketing the ready money, to
think of the debtors, eh? ha, ha, ha!’ This sally seemed to tickle the
clerk amazingly, and he once more enjoyed a little quiet laugh to
himself.

‘But, Mr. Mallard, my dear friend,’ said Perker, suddenly recovering his
gravity, and drawing the great man’s great man into a Corner, by the
lappel of his coat; ‘you must persuade the Serjeant to see me, and my
client here.’

‘Come, come,’ said the clerk, ‘that’s not bad either. See the Serjeant!
come, that’s too absurd.’ Notwithstanding the absurdity of the proposal,
however, the clerk allowed himself to be gently drawn beyond the hearing
of Mr. Pickwick; and after a short conversation conducted in whispers,
walked softly down a little dark passage, and disappeared into the legal
luminary’s sanctum, whence he shortly returned on tiptoe, and informed
Mr. Perker and Mr. Pickwick that the Serjeant had been prevailed upon,
in violation of all established rules and customs, to admit them at
once.


Mr. Serjeant Snubbins was a lantern-faced, sallow-complexioned man, of
about five-and-forty, or--as the novels say--he might be fifty. He had
that dull-looking, boiled eye which is often to be seen in the heads of
people who have applied themselves during many years to a weary and
laborious course of study; and which would have been sufficient, without
the additional eyeglass which dangled from a broad black riband round
his neck, to warn a stranger that he was very near-sighted. His hair was
thin and weak, which was partly attributable to his having never devoted
much time to its arrangement, and partly to his having worn for five-
and-twenty years the forensic wig which hung on a block beside him. The
marks of hairpowder on his coat-collar, and the ill-washed and worse
tied white neckerchief round his throat, showed that he had not found
leisure since he left the court to make any alteration in his dress;
while the slovenly style of the remainder of his costume warranted the
inference that his personal appearance would not have been very much
improved if he had. Books of practice, heaps of papers, and opened
letters, were scattered over the table, without any attempt at order or
arrangement; the furniture of the room was old and rickety; the doors of
the book-case were rotting in their hinges; the dust flew out from the
carpet in little clouds at every step; the blinds were yellow with age
and dirt; the state of everything in the room showed, with a clearness
not to be mistaken, that Mr. Serjeant Snubbin was far too much occupied
with his professional pursuits to take any great heed or regard of his
personal comforts.

The Serjeant was writing when his clients entered; he bowed abstractedly
when Mr. Pickwick was introduced by his solicitor; and then, motioning
them to a seat, put his pen carefully in the inkstand, nursed his left
leg, and waited to be spoken to.

‘Mr. Pickwick is the defendant in Bardell and Pickwick, Serjeant
Snubbin,’ said Perker.

‘I am retained in that, am I?’ said the Serjeant.

‘You are, Sir,’ replied Perker.

The Serjeant nodded his head, and waited for something else.

‘Mr. Pickwick was anxious to call upon you, Serjeant Snubbin,’ said
Perker, ‘to state to you, before you entered upon the case, that he
denies there being any ground or pretence whatever for the action
against him; and that unless he came into court with clean hands, and
without the most conscientious conviction that he was right in resisting
the plaintiff’s demand, he would not be there at all. I believe I state
your views correctly; do I not, my dear Sir?’ said the little man,
turning to Mr. Pickwick.

‘Quite so,’ replied that gentleman.

Mr. Serjeant Snubbin unfolded his glasses, raised them to his eyes; and,
after looking at Mr. Pickwick for a few seconds with great curiosity,
turned to Mr. Perker, and said, smiling slightly as he spoke--

‘Has Mr. Pickwick a strong case?’

The attorney shrugged his shoulders.

‘Do you propose calling witnesses?’

‘No.’

The smile on the Serjeant’s countenance became more defined; he rocked
his leg with increased violence; and, throwing himself back in his easy-
chair, coughed dubiously.

These tokens of the Serjeant’s presentiments on the subject, slight as
they were, were not lost on Mr. Pickwick. He settled the spectacles,
through which he had attentively regarded such demonstrations of the
barrister’s feelings as he had permitted himself to exhibit, more firmly
on his nose; and said with great energy, and in utter disregard of all
Mr. Perker’s admonitory winkings and frownings--

‘My wishing to wait upon you, for such a purpose as this, Sir, appears,
I have no doubt, to a gentleman who sees so much of these matters as you
must necessarily do, a very extraordinary circumstance.’

The Serjeant tried to look gravely at the fire, but the smile came back
again.

‘Gentlemen of your profession, Sir,’ continued Mr. Pickwick, ‘see the
worst side of human nature. All its disputes, all its ill-will and bad
blood, rise up before you. You know from your experience of juries (I
mean no disparagement to you, or them) how much depends upon effect; and
you are apt to attribute to others, a desire to use, for purposes of
deception and self-interest, the very instruments which you, in pure
honesty and honour of purpose, and with a laudable desire to do your
utmost for your client, know the temper and worth of so well, from
constantly employing them yourselves. I really believe that to this
circumstance may be attributed the vulgar but very general notion of
your being, as a body, suspicious, distrustful, and over-cautious.
Conscious as I am, sir, of the disadvantage of making such a declaration
to you, under such circumstances, I have come here, because I wish you
distinctly to understand, as my friend Mr. Perker has said, that I am
innocent of the falsehood laid to my charge; and although I am very well
aware of the inestimable value of your assistance, Sir, I must beg to
add, that unless you sincerely believe this, I would rather be deprived
of the aid of your talents than have the advantage of them.’

Long before the close of this address, which we are bound to say was of
a very prosy character for Mr. Pickwick, the Serjeant had relapsed into
a state of abstraction. After some minutes, however, during which he had
reassumed his pen, he appeared to be again aware of the presence of his
clients; raising his head from the paper, he said, rather snappishly--

‘Who is with me in this case?’

‘Mr. Phunky, Serjeant Snubbin,’ replied the attorney.

‘Phunky--Phunky,’ said the Serjeant, ‘I never heard the name before. He
must be a very young man.’

‘Yes, he is a very young man,’ replied the attorney. ‘He was only called
the other day. Let me see--he has not been at the Bar eight years yet.’

‘Ah, I thought not,’ said the Serjeant, in that sort of pitying tone in
which ordinary folks would speak of a very helpless little child. ‘Mr.
Mallard, send round to Mr.--Mr.--’

Phunky’s--Holborn Court, Gray’s Inn,’ interposed Perker. (Holborn Court,
by the bye, is South Square now.)--‘Mr. Phunky, and say I should be glad
if he’d step here, a moment.’

Mr. Mallard departed to execute his commission; and Serjeant Snubbin
relapsed into abstraction until Mr. Phunky himself was introduced.

Although an infant barrister, he was a full-grown man. He had a very
nervous manner, and a painful hesitation in his speech; it did not
appear to be a natural defect, but seemed rather the result of timidity,
arising from the consciousness of being ‘kept down’ by want of means, or
interest, or connection, or impudence, as the case might be. He was
overawed by the Serjeant, and profoundly courteous to the attorney.

‘I have not had the pleasure of seeing you before, Mr. Phunky,’ said
Serjeant Snubbin, with haughty condescension.

Mr. Phunky bowed. He _had _had the pleasure of seeing the Serjeant, and
of envying him too, with all a poor man’s envy, for eight years and a
quarter.

‘You are with me in this case, I understand?’ said the Serjeant.

If Mr. Phunky had been a rich man, he would have instantly sent for his
clerk to remind him; if he had been a wise one, he would have applied
his forefinger to his forehead, and endeavoured to recollect, whether,
in the multiplicity of his engagements, he had undertaken this one or
not; but as he was neither rich nor wise (in this sense, at all events)
he turned red, and bowed.

‘Have you read the papers, Mr. Phunky?’ inquired the Serjeant.

Here again, Mr. Phunky should have professed to have forgotten all about
the merits of the case; but as he had read such papers as had been laid
before him in the course of the action, and had thought of nothing else,
waking or sleeping, throughout the two months during which he had been
retained as Mr. Serjeant Snubbin’s junior, he turned a deeper red and
bowed again.

‘This is Mr. Pickwick,’ said the Serjeant, waving his pen in the
direction in which that gentleman was standing.

Mr. Phunky bowed to Mr. Pickwick, with a reverence which a first client
must ever awaken; and again inclined his head towards his leader.

‘Perhaps you will take Mr. Pickwick away,’ said the Serjeant, ‘and--and-
-and--hear anything Mr. Pickwick may wish to communicate. We shall have
a consultation, of course.’ With that hint that he had been interrupted
quite long enough, Mr. Serjeant Snubbin, who had been gradually growing
more and more abstracted, applied his glass to his eyes for an instant,
bowed slightly round, and was once more deeply immersed in the case
before him, which arose out of an interminable lawsuit, originating in
the act of an individual, deceased a century or so ago, who had stopped
up a pathway leading from some place which nobody ever came from, to
some other place which nobody ever went to.

Mr. Phunky would not hear of passing through any door until Mr. Pickwick
and his solicitor had passed through before him, so it was some time
before they got into the Square; and when they did reach it, they walked
up and down, and held a long conference, the result of which was, that
it was a very difficult matter to say how the verdict would go; that
nobody could presume to calculate on the issue of an action; that it was
very lucky they had prevented the other party from getting Serjeant
Snubbin; and other topics of doubt and consolation, common in such a
position of affairs.

Mr. Weller was then roused by his master from a sweet sleep of an hour’s
duration; and, bidding adieu to Lowten, they returned to the city.



CHAPTER XXXII. DESCRIBES, FAR MORE FULLY THAN THE COURT NEWSMAN EVER
DID, A BACHELOR’S PARTY, GIVEN BY MR. BOB SAWYER AT HIS LODGINGS IN THE
BOROUGH

There is a repose about Lant Street, in the Borough, which sheds a
gentle melancholy upon the soul. There are always a good many houses to
let in the street: it is a by-street too, and its dulness is soothing. A
house in Lant Street would not come within the denomination of a first-
rate residence, in the strict acceptation of the term; but it is a most
desirable spot nevertheless. If a man wished to abstract himself from
the world--to remove himself from within the reach of temptation--to
place himself beyond the possibility of any inducement to look out of
the window--we should recommend him by all means go to Lant Street.

In this happy retreat are colonised a few clear-starchers, a sprinkling
of journeymen bookbinders, one or two prison agents for the Insolvent
Court, several small housekeepers who are employed in the Docks, a
handful of mantua-makers, and a seasoning of jobbing tailors. The
majority of the inhabitants either direct their energies to the letting
of furnished apartments, or devote themselves to the healthful and
invigorating pursuit of mangling. The chief features in the still life
of the street are green shutters, lodging-bills, brass door-plates, and
bell-handles; the principal specimens of animated nature, the pot-boy,
the muffin youth, and the baked-potato man. The population is migratory,
usually disappearing on the verge of quarter-day, and generally by
night. His Majesty’s revenues are seldom collected in this happy valley;
the rents are dubious; and the water communication is very frequently
cut off.

Mr. Bob Sawyer embellished one side of the fire, in his first-floor
front, early on the evening for which he had invited Mr. Pickwick, and
Mr. Ben Allen the other. The preparations for the reception of visitors
appeared to be completed. The umbrellas in the passage had been heaped
into the little corner outside the back-parlour door; the bonnet and
shawl of the landlady’s servant had been removed from the bannisters;
there were not more than two pairs of pattens on the street-door mat;
and a kitchen candle, with a very long snuff, burned cheerfully on the
ledge of the staircase window. Mr. Bob Sawyer had himself purchased the
spirits at a wine vaults in High Street, and had returned home preceding
the bearer thereof, to preclude the possibility of their delivery at the
wrong house. The punch was ready-made in a red pan in the bedroom; a
little table, covered with a green baize cloth, had been borrowed from
the parlour, to play at cards on; and the glasses of the establishment,
together with those which had been borrowed for the occasion from the
public-house, were all drawn up in a tray, which was deposited on the
landing outside the door.

Notwithstanding the highly satisfactory nature of all these
arrangements, there was a cloud on the countenance of Mr. Bob Sawyer, as
he sat by the fireside. There was a sympathising expression, too, in the
features of Mr. Ben Allen, as he gazed intently on the coals, and a tone
of melancholy in his voice, as he said, after a long silence--

‘Well, it is unlucky she should have taken it in her head to turn sour,
just on this occasion. She might at least have waited till to-morrow.’

‘That’s her malevolence--that’s her malevolence,’ returned Mr. Bob
Sawyer vehemently. ‘She says that if I can afford to give a party I
ought to be able to pay her confounded “little bill.”’

How long has it been running?’ inquired Mr. Ben Allen. A bill, by the
bye, is the most extraordinary locomotive engine that the genius of man
ever produced. It would keep on running during the longest lifetime,
without ever once stopping of its own accord.

‘Only a quarter, and a month or so,’ replied Mr. Bob Sawyer.

Ben Allen coughed hopelessly, and directed a searching look between the
two top bars of the stove.

‘It’ll be a deuced unpleasant thing if she takes it into her head to let
out, when those fellows are here, won’t it?’ said Mr. Ben Allen at
length.

‘Horrible,’ replied Bob Sawyer, ‘horrible.’

A low tap was heard at the room door. Mr. Bob Sawyer looked expressively
at his friend, and bade the tapper come in; whereupon a dirty, slipshod
girl in black cotton stockings, who might have passed for the neglected
daughter of a superannuated dustman in very reduced circumstances,
thrust in her head, and said--

‘Please, Mister Sawyer, Missis Raddle wants to speak to you.’

Before Mr. Bob Sawyer could return any answer, the girl suddenly
disappeared with a jerk, as if somebody had given her a violent pull
behind; this mysterious exit was no sooner accomplished, than there was
another tap at the door--a smart, pointed tap, which seemed to say,
‘Here I am, and in I’m coming.’

Mr. Bob Sawyer glanced at his friend with a look of abject apprehension,
and once more cried, ‘Come in.’

The permission was not at all necessary, for, before Mr. Bob Sawyer had
uttered the words, a little, fierce woman bounced into the room, all in
a tremble with passion, and pale with rage.

‘Now, Mr. Sawyer,’ said the little, fierce woman, trying to appear very
calm, ‘if you’ll have the kindness to settle that little bill of mine
I’ll thank you, because I’ve got my rent to pay this afternoon, and my
landlord’s a-waiting below now.’ Here the little woman rubbed her hands,
and looked steadily over Mr. Bob Sawyer’s head, at the wall behind him.

‘I am very sorry to put you to any inconvenience, Mrs. Raddle,’ said Bob
Sawyer deferentially, ‘but--’

‘Oh, it isn’t any inconvenience,’ replied the little woman, with a
shrill titter. ‘I didn’t want it particular before to-day; leastways, as
it has to go to my landlord directly, it was as well for you to keep it
as me. You promised me this afternoon, Mr. Sawyer, and every gentleman
as has ever lived here, has kept his word, Sir, as of course anybody as
calls himself a gentleman does.’ Mrs. Raddle tossed her head, bit her
lips, rubbed her hands harder, and looked at the wall more steadily than
ever. It was plain to see, as Mr. Bob Sawyer remarked in a style of
Eastern allegory on a subsequent occasion, that she was ‘getting the
steam up.’

‘I am very sorry, Mrs. Raddle,’ said Bob Sawyer, with all imaginable
humility, ‘but the fact is, that I have been disappointed in the City
to-day.’--Extraordinary place that City. An astonishing number of men
always _are _getting disappointed there.

‘Well, Mr. Sawyer,’ said Mrs. Raddle, planting herself firmly on a
purple cauliflower in the Kidderminster carpet, ‘and what’s that to me,
Sir?’

‘I--I--have no doubt, Mrs. Raddle,’ said Bob Sawyer, blinking this last
question, ‘that before the middle of next week we shall be able to set
ourselves quite square, and go on, on a better system, afterwards.’

This was all Mrs. Raddle wanted. She had bustled up to the apartment of
the unlucky Bob Sawyer, so bent upon going into a passion, that, in all
probability, payment would have rather disappointed her than otherwise.
She was in excellent order for a little relaxation of the kind, having
just exchanged a few introductory compliments with Mr. R. in the front
kitchen.

‘Do you suppose, Mr. Sawyer,’ said Mrs. Raddle, elevating her voice for
the information of the neighbours--‘do you suppose that I’m a-going day
after day to let a fellar occupy my lodgings as never thinks of paying
his rent, nor even the very money laid out for the fresh butter and lump
sugar that’s bought for his breakfast, and the very milk that’s took in,
at the street door? Do you suppose a hard-working and industrious woman
as has lived in this street for twenty year (ten year over the way, and
nine year and three-quarters in this very house) has nothing else to do
but to work herself to death after a parcel of lazy idle fellars, that
are always smoking and drinking, and lounging, when they ought to be
glad to turn their hands to anything that would help ‘em to pay their
bills? Do you--’

‘My good soul,’ interposed Mr. Benjamin Allen soothingly.

‘Have the goodness to keep your observashuns to yourself, Sir, I beg,’
said Mrs. Raddle, suddenly arresting the rapid torrent of her speech,
and addressing the third party with impressive slowness and solemnity.
‘I am not aweer, Sir, that you have any right to address your
conversation to me. I don’t think I let these apartments to you, Sir.’

‘No, you certainly did not,’ said Mr. Benjamin Allen.

‘Very good, Sir,’ responded Mrs. Raddle, with lofty politeness. ‘Then
p’raps, Sir, you’ll confine yourself to breaking the arms and legs of
the poor people in the hospitals, and keep yourself _to_ yourself, Sir,
or there may be some persons here as will make you, Sir.’

‘But you are such an unreasonable woman,’ remonstrated Mr. Benjamin
Allen.

‘I beg your parding, young man,’ said Mrs. Raddle, in a cold
perspiration of anger. ‘But will you have the goodness just to call me
that again, sir?’

‘I didn’t make use of the word in any invidious sense, ma’am,’ replied
Mr. Benjamin Allen, growing somewhat uneasy on his own account.

‘I beg your parding, young man,’ demanded Mrs. Raddle, in a louder and
more imperative tone. ‘But who do you call a woman? Did you make that
remark to me, sir?’

‘Why, bless my heart!’ said Mr. Benjamin Allen.

‘Did you apply that name to me, I ask of you, sir?’ interrupted Mrs.
Raddle, with intense fierceness, throwing the door wide open.

‘Why, of course I did,’ replied Mr. Benjamin Allen.

‘Yes, of course you did,’ said Mrs. Raddle, backing gradually to the
door, and raising her voice to its loudest pitch, for the special behoof
of Mr. Raddle in the kitchen. ‘Yes, of course you did! And everybody
knows that they may safely insult me in my own ‘ouse while my husband
sits sleeping downstairs, and taking no more notice than if I was a dog
in the streets. He ought to be ashamed of himself (here Mrs. Raddle
sobbed) to allow his wife to be treated in this way by a parcel of young
cutters and carvers of live people’s bodies, that disgraces the lodgings
(another sob), and leaving her exposed to all manner of abuse; a base,
faint-hearted, timorous wretch, that’s afraid to come upstairs, and face
the ruffinly creatures--that’s afraid--that’s afraid to come!’ Mrs.
Raddle paused to listen whether the repetition of the taunt had roused
her better half; and finding that it had not been successful, proceeded
to descend the stairs with sobs innumerable; when there came a loud
double knock at the street door; whereupon she burst into an hysterical
fit of weeping, accompanied with dismal moans, which was prolonged until
the knock had been repeated six times, when, in an uncontrollable burst
of mental agony, she threw down all the umbrellas, and disappeared into
the back parlour, closing the door after her with an awful crash.

‘Does Mr. Sawyer live here?’ said Mr. Pickwick, when the door was
opened.

‘Yes,’ said the girl, ‘first floor. It’s the door straight afore you,
when you gets to the top of the stairs.’ Having given this instruction,
the handmaid, who had been brought up among the aboriginal inhabitants
of Southwark, disappeared, with the candle in her hand, down the kitchen
stairs, perfectly satisfied that she had done everything that could
possibly be required of her under the circumstances.

Mr. Snodgrass, who entered last, secured the street door, after several
ineffectual efforts, by putting up the chain; and the friends stumbled
upstairs, where they were received by Mr. Bob Sawyer, who had been
afraid to go down, lest he should be waylaid by Mrs. Raddle.

‘How are you?’ said the discomfited student. ‘Glad to see you--take care
of the glasses.’ This caution was addressed to Mr. Pickwick, who had put
his hat in the tray.

‘Dear me,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Don’t mention it, don’t mention it,’ said Bob Sawyer. ‘I’m rather
confined for room here, but you must put up with all that, when you come
to see a young bachelor. Walk in. You’ve seen this gentleman before, I
think?’ Mr. Pickwick shook hands with Mr. Benjamin Allen, and his
friends followed his example. They had scarcely taken their seats when
there was another double knock.

‘I hope that’s Jack Hopkins!’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer. ‘Hush. Yes, it is.
Come up, Jack; come up.’

A heavy footstep was heard upon the stairs, and Jack Hopkins presented
himself. He wore a black velvet waistcoat, with thunder-and-lightning
buttons; and a blue striped shirt, with a white false collar.

‘You’re late, Jack?’ said Mr. Benjamin Allen.

‘Been detained at Bartholomew’s,’ replied Hopkins.

‘Anything new?’

‘No, nothing particular. Rather a good accident brought into the
casualty ward.’

‘What was that, sir?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Only a man fallen out of a four pair of stairs’ window; but it’s a very
fair case indeed.’

‘Do you mean that the patient is in a fair way to recover?’ inquired Mr.
Pickwick.

‘No,’ replied Mr. Hopkins carelessly. ‘No, I should rather say he
wouldn’t. There must be a splendid operation, though, to-morrow--
magnificent sight if Slasher does it.’

‘You consider Mr. Slasher a good operator?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Best alive,’ replied Hopkins. ‘Took a boy’s leg out of the socket last
week--boy ate five apples and a gingerbread cake--exactly two minutes
after it was all over, boy said he wouldn’t lie there to be made game
of, and he’d tell his mother if they didn’t begin.’

‘Dear me!’ said Mr. Pickwick, astonished.

‘Pooh! That’s nothing, that ain’t,’ said Jack Hopkins. ‘Is it, Bob?’

‘Nothing at all,’ replied Mr. Bob Sawyer.

‘By the bye, Bob,’ said Hopkins, with a scarcely perceptible glance at
Mr. Pickwick’s attentive face, ‘we had a curious accident last night. A
child was brought in, who had swallowed a necklace.’

‘Swallowed what, Sir?’ interrupted Mr. Pickwick.

‘A necklace,’ replied Jack Hopkins. ‘Not all at once, you know, that
would be too much--you couldn’t swallow that, if the child did--eh, Mr.
Pickwick? ha, ha!’ Mr. Hopkins appeared highly gratified with his own
pleasantry, and continued--‘No, the way was this. Child’s parents were
poor people who lived in a court. Child’s eldest sister bought a
necklace--common necklace, made of large black wooden beads. Child being
fond of toys, cribbed the necklace, hid it, played with it, cut the
string, and swallowed a bead. Child thought it capital fun, went back
next day, and swallowed another bead.’

‘Bless my heart,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘what a dreadful thing! I beg your
pardon, Sir. Go on.’

‘Next day, child swallowed two beads; the day after that, he treated
himself to three, and so on, till in a week’s time he had got through
the necklace--five-and-twenty beads in all. The sister, who was an
industrious girl, and seldom treated herself to a bit of finery, cried
her eyes out, at the loss of the necklace; looked high and low for it;
but, I needn’t say, didn’t find it. A few days afterwards, the family
were at dinner--baked shoulder of mutton, and potatoes under it--the
child, who wasn’t hungry, was playing about the room, when suddenly
there was heard a devil of a noise, like a small hailstorm. “Don’t do
that, my boy,” said the father. “I ain’t a-doin’ nothing,” said the
child. “Well, don’t do it again,” said the father. There was a short
silence, and then the noise began again, worse than ever. “If you don’t
mind what I say, my boy,” said the father, “you’ll find yourself in bed,
in something less than a pig’s whisper.” He gave the child a shake to
make him obedient, and such a rattling ensued as nobody ever heard
before. “Why, damme, it’s _in_ the child!” said the father, “he’s got
the croup in the wrong place!” “No, I haven’t, father,” said the child,
beginning to cry, “it’s the necklace; I swallowed it, father.”--The
father caught the child up, and ran with him to the hospital; the beads
in the boy’s stomach rattling all the way with the jolting; and the
people looking up in the air, and down in the cellars, to see where the
unusual sound came from. He’s in the hospital now,’ said Jack Hopkins,
‘and he makes such a devil of a noise when he walks about, that they’re
obliged to muffle him in a watchman’s coat, for fear he should wake the
patients.’

‘That’s the most extraordinary case I ever heard of,’ said Mr. Pickwick,
with an emphatic blow on the table.

‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ said Jack Hopkins. ‘Is it, Bob?’

‘Certainly not,’ replied Bob Sawyer.

‘Very singular things occur in our profession, I can assure you, Sir,’
said Hopkins.

‘So I should be disposed to imagine,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

Another knock at the door announced a large-headed young man in a black
wig, who brought with him a scorbutic youth in a long stock. The next
comer was a gentleman in a shirt emblazoned with pink anchors, who was
closely followed by a pale youth with a plated watchguard. The arrival
of a prim personage in clean linen and cloth boots rendered the party
complete. The little table with the green baize cover was wheeled out;
the first instalment of punch was brought in, in a white jug; and the
succeeding three hours were devoted to _Vingt-et-un_ at sixpence a
dozen, which was only once interrupted by a slight dispute between the
scorbutic youth and the gentleman with the pink anchors; in the course
of which, the scorbutic youth intimated a burning desire to pull the
nose of the gentleman with the emblems of hope; in reply to which, that
individual expressed his decided unwillingness to accept of any ‘sauce’
on gratuitous terms, either from the irascible young gentleman with the
scorbutic countenance, or any other person who was ornamented with a
head.

When the last ‘natural’ had been declared, and the profit and loss
account of fish and sixpences adjusted, to the satisfaction of all
parties, Mr. Bob Sawyer rang for supper, and the visitors squeezed
themselves into corners while it was getting ready.

It was not so easily got ready as some people may imagine. First of all,
it was necessary to awaken the girl, who had fallen asleep with her face
on the kitchen table; this took a little time, and, even when she did
answer the bell, another quarter of an hour was consumed in fruitless
endeavours to impart to her a faint and distant glimmering of reason.
The man to whom the order for the oysters had been sent, had not been
told to open them; it is a very difficult thing to open an oyster with a
limp knife and a two-pronged fork; and very little was done in this way.
Very little of the beef was done either; and the ham (which was also
from the German-sausage shop round the corner) was in a similar
predicament. However, there was plenty of porter in a tin can; and the
cheese went a great way, for it was very strong. So upon the whole,
perhaps, the supper was quite as good as such matters usually are.

After supper, another jug of punch was put upon the table, together with
a paper of cigars, and a couple of bottles of spirits. Then there was an
awful pause; and this awful pause was occasioned by a very common
occurrence in this sort of place, but a very embarrassing one
notwithstanding.

The fact is, the girl was washing the glasses. The establishment boasted
four: we do not record the circumstance as at all derogatory to Mrs.
Raddle, for there never was a lodging-house yet, that was not short of
glasses. The landlady’s glasses were little, thin, blown-glass tumblers,
and those which had been borrowed from the public-house were great,
dropsical, bloated articles, each supported on a huge gouty leg. This
would have been in itself sufficient to have possessed the company with
the real state of affairs; but the young woman of all work had prevented
the possibility of any misconception arising in the mind of any
gentleman upon the subject, by forcibly dragging every man’s glass away,
long before he had finished his beer, and audibly stating, despite the
winks and interruptions of Mr. Bob Sawyer, that it was to be conveyed
downstairs, and washed forthwith.

It is a very ill wind that blows nobody any good. The prim man in the
cloth boots, who had been unsuccessfully attempting to make a joke
during the whole time the round game lasted, saw his opportunity, and
availed himself of it. The instant the glasses disappeared, he commenced
a long story about a great public character, whose name he had
forgotten, making a particularly happy reply to another eminent and
illustrious individual whom he had never been able to identify. He
enlarged at some length and with great minuteness upon divers collateral
circumstances, distantly connected with the anecdote in hand, but for
the life of him he couldn’t recollect at that precise moment what the
anecdote was, although he had been in the habit of telling the story
with great applause for the last ten years.

‘Dear me,’ said the prim man in the cloth boots, ‘it is a very
extraordinary circumstance.’

‘I am sorry you have forgotten it,’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer, glancing
eagerly at the door, as he thought he heard the noise of glasses
jingling; ‘very sorry.’

‘So am I,’ responded the prim man, ‘because I know it would have
afforded so much amusement. Never mind; I dare say I shall manage to
recollect it, in the course of half an hour or so.’

The prim man arrived at this point just as the glasses came back, when
Mr. Bob Sawyer, who had been absorbed in attention during the whole
time, said he should very much like to hear the end of it, for, so far
as it went, it was, without exception, the very best story he had ever
heard.

The sight of the tumblers restored Bob Sawyer to a degree of equanimity
which he had not possessed since his interview with his landlady. His
face brightened up, and he began to feel quite convivial.

‘Now, Betsy,’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer, with great suavity, and dispersing,
at the same time, the tumultuous little mob of glasses the girl had
collected in the centre of the table--‘now, Betsy, the warm water; be
brisk, there’s a good girl.’

‘You can’t have no warm water,’ replied Betsy.

‘No warm water!’ exclaimed Mr. Bob Sawyer.

‘No,’ said the girl, with a shake of the head which expressed a more
decided negative than the most copious language could have conveyed.
‘Missis Raddle said you warn’t to have none.’

The surprise depicted on the countenances of his guests imparted new
courage to the host.

‘Bring up the warm water instantly--instantly!’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer,
with desperate sternness.

‘No. I can’t,’ replied the girl; ‘Missis Raddle raked out the kitchen
fire afore she went to bed, and locked up the kittle.’

‘Oh, never mind; never mind. Pray don’t disturb yourself about such a
trifle,’ said Mr. Pickwick, observing the conflict of Bob Sawyer’s
passions, as depicted in his countenance, ‘cold water will do very
well.’

‘Oh, admirably,’ said Mr. Benjamin Allen.

‘My landlady is subject to some slight attacks of mental derangement,’
remarked Bob Sawyer, with a ghastly smile; ‘I fear I must give her
warning.’

‘No, don’t,’ said Ben Allen.

‘I fear I must,’ said Bob, with heroic firmness. ‘I’ll pay her what I
owe her, and give her warning to-morrow morning.’ Poor fellow! how
devoutly he wished he could!

Mr. Bob Sawyer’s heart-sickening attempts to rally under this last blow,
communicated a dispiriting influence to the company, the greater part of
whom, with the view of raising their spirits, attached themselves with
extra cordiality to the cold brandy-and-water, the first perceptible
effects of which were displayed in a renewal of hostilities between the
scorbutic youth and the gentleman in the shirt. The belligerents vented
their feelings of mutual contempt, for some time, in a variety of
frownings and snortings, until at last the scorbutic youth felt it
necessary to come to a more explicit understanding on the matter; when
the following clear understanding took place.

‘Sawyer,’ said the scorbutic youth, in a loud voice.

‘Well, Noddy,’ replied Mr. Bob Sawyer.

‘I should be very sorry, Sawyer,’ said Mr. Noddy, ‘to create any
unpleasantness at any friend’s table, and much less at yours, Sawyer--
very; but I must take this opportunity of informing Mr. Gunter that he
is no gentleman.’

‘And I should be very sorry, Sawyer, to create any disturbance in the
street in which you reside,’ said Mr. Gunter, ‘but I’m afraid I shall be
under the necessity of alarming the neighbours by throwing the person
who has just spoken, out o’ window.’

‘What do you mean by that, sir?’ inquired Mr. Noddy.

‘What I say, Sir,’ replied Mr. Gunter.

‘I should like to see you do it, Sir,’ said Mr. Noddy.

‘You shall _feel _me do it in half a minute, Sir,’ replied Mr. Gunter.

‘I request that you’ll favour me with your card, Sir,’ said Mr. Noddy.

‘I’ll do nothing of the kind, Sir,’ replied Mr. Gunter.

‘Why not, Sir?’ inquired Mr. Noddy.

‘Because you’ll stick it up over your chimney-piece, and delude your
visitors into the false belief that a gentleman has been to see you,
Sir,’ replied Mr. Gunter.

‘Sir, a friend of mine shall wait on you in the morning,’ said Mr.
Noddy.

‘Sir, I’m very much obliged to you for the caution, and I’ll leave
particular directions with the servant to lock up the spoons,’ replied
Mr. Gunter.

At this point the remainder of the guests interposed, and remonstrated
with both parties on the impropriety of their conduct; on which Mr.
Noddy begged to state that his father was quite as respectable as Mr.
Gunter’s father; to which Mr. Gunter replied that his father was to the
full as respectable as Mr. Noddy’s father, and that his father’s son was
as good a man as Mr. Noddy, any day in the week. As this announcement
seemed the prelude to a recommencement of the dispute, there was another
interference on the part of the company; and a vast quantity of talking
and clamouring ensued, in the course of which Mr. Noddy gradually
allowed his feelings to overpower him, and professed that he had ever
entertained a devoted personal attachment towards Mr. Gunter. To this
Mr. Gunter replied that, upon the whole, he rather preferred Mr. Noddy
to his own brother; on hearing which admission, Mr. Noddy magnanimously
rose from his seat, and proffered his hand to Mr. Gunter. Mr. Gunter
grasped it with affecting fervour; and everybody said that the whole
dispute had been conducted in a manner which was highly honourable to
both parties concerned.

‘Now,’ said Jack Hopkins, ‘just to set us going again, Bob, I don’t mind
singing a song.’ And Hopkins, incited thereto by tumultuous applause,
plunged himself at once into ‘The King, God bless him,’ which he sang as
loud as he could, to a novel air, compounded of the ‘Bay of Biscay,’ and
‘A Frog he would.’ The chorus was the essence of the song; and, as each
gentleman sang it to the tune he knew best, the effect was very striking
indeed.

It was at the end of the chorus to the first verse, that Mr. Pickwick
held up his hand in a listening attitude, and said, as soon as silence
was restored--

‘Hush! I beg your pardon. I thought I heard somebody calling from
upstairs.’

A profound silence immediately ensued; and Mr. Bob Sawyer was observed
to turn pale.

‘I think I hear it now,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Have the goodness to open
the door.’

The door was no sooner opened than all doubt on the subject was removed.

‘Mr. Sawyer! Mr. Sawyer!’ screamed a voice from the two-pair landing.

‘It’s my landlady,’ said Bob Sawyer, looking round him with great
dismay. ‘Yes, Mrs. Raddle.’

‘What do you mean by this, Mr. Sawyer?’ replied the voice, with great
shrillness and rapidity of utterance. ‘Ain’t it enough to be swindled
out of one’s rent, and money lent out of pocket besides, and abused and
insulted by your friends that dares to call themselves men, without
having the house turned out of the window, and noise enough made to
bring the fire-engines here, at two o’clock in the morning?--Turn them
wretches away.’

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,’ said the voice of Mr. Raddle,
which appeared to proceed from beneath some distant bed-clothes.

‘Ashamed of themselves!’ said Mrs. Raddle. ‘Why don’t you go down and
knock ‘em every one downstairs? You would if you was a man.’

I should if I was a dozen men, my dear,’ replied Mr. Raddle pacifically,
‘but they have the advantage of me in numbers, my dear.’

‘Ugh, you coward!’ replied Mrs. Raddle, with supreme contempt. ‘_Do_ you
mean to turn them wretches out, or not, Mr. Sawyer?’

‘They’re going, Mrs. Raddle, they’re going,’ said the miserable Bob. ‘I
am afraid you’d better go,’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer to his friends. ‘I
thought you were making too much noise.’

‘It’s a very unfortunate thing,’ said the prim man. ‘Just as we were
getting so comfortable too!’ The prim man was just beginning to have a
dawning recollection of the story he had forgotten.

‘It’s hardly to be borne,’ said the prim man, looking round. ‘Hardly to
be borne, is it?’

‘Not to be endured,’ replied Jack Hopkins; ‘let’s have the other verse,
Bob. Come, here goes!’

‘No, no, Jack, don’t,’ interposed Bob Sawyer; ‘it’s a capital song, but
I am afraid we had better not have the other verse. They are very
violent people, the people of the house.’

‘Shall I step upstairs, and pitch into the landlord?’ inquired Hopkins,
‘or keep on ringing the bell, or go and groan on the staircase? You may
command me, Bob.’

‘I am very much indebted to you for your friendship and good-nature,
Hopkins,’ said the wretched Mr. Bob Sawyer, ‘but I think the best plan
to avoid any further dispute is for us to break up at once.’

‘Now, Mr. Sawyer,’ screamed the shrill voice of Mrs. Raddle, ‘are them
brutes going?’

‘They’re only looking for their hats, Mrs. Raddle,’ said Bob; ‘they are
going directly.’

‘Going!’ said Mrs. Raddle, thrusting her nightcap over the banisters
just as Mr. Pickwick, followed by Mr. Tupman, emerged from the sitting-
room. ‘Going! what did they ever come for?’

‘My dear ma’am,’ remonstrated Mr. Pickwick, looking up.

‘Get along with you, old wretch!’ replied Mrs. Raddle, hastily
withdrawing the nightcap. ‘Old enough to be his grandfather, you willin!
You’re worse than any of ‘em.’

Mr. Pickwick found it in vain to protest his innocence, so hurried
downstairs into the street, whither he was closely followed by Mr.
Tupman, Mr. Winkle, and Mr. Snodgrass. Mr. Ben Allen, who was dismally
depressed with spirits and agitation, accompanied them as far as London
Bridge, and in the course of the walk confided to Mr. Winkle, as an
especially eligible person to intrust the secret to, that he was
resolved to cut the throat of any gentleman, except Mr. Bob Sawyer, who
should aspire to the affections of his sister Arabella. Having expressed
his determination to perform this painful duty of a brother with proper
firmness, he burst into tears, knocked his hat over his eyes, and,
making the best of his way back, knocked double knocks at the door of
the Borough Market office, and took short naps on the steps alternately,
until daybreak, under the firm impression that he lived there, and had
forgotten the key.

The visitors having all departed, in compliance with the rather pressing
request of Mrs. Raddle, the luckless Mr. Bob Sawyer was left alone, to
meditate on the probable events of to-morrow, and the pleasures of the
evening.



CHAPTER XXXIII. MR. WELLER THE ELDER DELIVERS SOME CRITICAL SENTIMENTS
RESPECTING LITERARY COMPOSITION; AND, ASSISTED BY HIS SON SAMUEL, PAYS A
SMALL INSTALMENT OF RETALIATION TO THE ACCOUNT OF THE REVEREND GENTLEMAN
WITH THE RED NOSE

The morning of the thirteenth of February, which the readers of this
authentic narrative know, as well as we do, to have been the day
immediately preceding that which was appointed for the trial of Mrs.
Bardell’s action, was a busy time for Mr. Samuel Weller, who was
perpetually engaged in travelling from the George and Vulture to Mr.
Perker’s chambers and back again, from and between the hours of nine
o’clock in the morning and two in the afternoon, both inclusive. Not
that there was anything whatever to be done, for the consultation had
taken place, and the course of proceeding to be adopted, had been
finally determined on; but Mr. Pickwick being in a most extreme state of
excitement, persevered in constantly sending small notes to his
attorney, merely containing the inquiry, ‘Dear Perker. Is all going on
well?’ to which Mr. Perker invariably forwarded the reply, ‘Dear
Pickwick. As well as possible’; the fact being, as we have already
hinted, that there was nothing whatever to go on, either well or ill,
until the sitting of the court on the following morning.

But people who go voluntarily to law, or are taken forcibly there, for
the first time, may be allowed to labour under some temporary irritation
and anxiety; and Sam, with a due allowance for the frailties of human
nature, obeyed all his master’s behests with that imperturbable good-
humour and unruffable composure which formed one of his most striking
and amiable characteristics.

Sam had solaced himself with a most agreeable little dinner, and was
waiting at the bar for the glass of warm mixture in which Mr. Pickwick
had requested him to drown the fatigues of his morning’s walks, when a
young boy of about three feet high, or thereabouts, in a hairy cap and
fustian overalls, whose garb bespoke a laudable ambition to attain in
time the elevation of an hostler, entered the passage of the George and
Vulture, and looked first up the stairs, and then along the passage, and
then into the bar, as if in search of somebody to whom he bore a
commission; whereupon the barmaid, conceiving it not improbable that the
said commission might be directed to the tea or table spoons of the
establishment, accosted the boy with--

‘Now, young man, what do you want?’

‘Is there anybody here, named Sam?’ inquired the youth, in a loud voice
of treble quality.

‘What’s the t’other name?’ said Sam Weller, looking round.

‘How should I know?’ briskly replied the young gentleman below the hairy
cap.

‘You’re a sharp boy, you are,’ said Mr. Weller; ‘only I wouldn’t show
that wery fine edge too much, if I was you, in case anybody took it off.
What do you mean by comin’ to a hot-el, and asking arter Sam, vith as
much politeness as a vild Indian?’

‘’Cos an old gen’l’m’n told me to,’ replied the boy.

‘What old gen’l’m’n?’ inquired Sam, with deep disdain.

‘Him as drives a Ipswich coach, and uses our parlour,’ rejoined the boy.
‘He told me yesterday mornin’ to come to the George and Wultur this
arternoon, and ask for Sam.’

‘It’s my father, my dear,’ said Mr. Weller, turning with an explanatory
air to the young lady in the bar; ‘blessed if I think he hardly knows
wot my other name is. Well, young brockiley sprout, wot then?’

‘Why then,’ said the boy, ‘you was to come to him at six o’clock to our
‘ouse, ‘cos he wants to see you--Blue Boar, Leaden’all Markit. Shall I
say you’re comin’?’

‘You may wenture on that ‘ere statement, Sir,’ replied Sam. And thus
empowered, the young gentleman walked away, awakening all the echoes in
George Yard as he did so, with several chaste and extremely correct
imitations of a drover’s whistle, delivered in a tone of peculiar
richness and volume.

Mr. Weller having obtained leave of absence from Mr. Pickwick, who, in
his then state of excitement and worry, was by no means displeased at
being left alone, set forth, long before the appointed hour, and having
plenty of time at his disposal, sauntered down as far as the Mansion
House, where he paused and contemplated, with a face of great calmness
and philosophy, the numerous cads and drivers of short stages who
assemble near that famous place of resort, to the great terror and
confusion of the old-lady population of these realms. Having loitered
here, for half an hour or so, Mr. Weller turned, and began wending his
way towards Leadenhall Market, through a variety of by-streets and
courts. As he was sauntering away his spare time, and stopped to look at
almost every object that met his gaze, it is by no means surprising that
Mr. Weller should have paused before a small stationer’s and print-
seller’s window; but without further explanation it does appear
surprising that his eyes should have no sooner rested on certain
pictures which were exposed for sale therein, than he gave a sudden
start, smote his right leg with great vehemence, and exclaimed, with
energy, ‘if it hadn’t been for this, I should ha’ forgot all about it,
till it was too late!’

The particular picture on which Sam Weller’s eyes were fixed, as he said
this, was a highly-coloured representation of a couple of human hearts
skewered together with an arrow, cooking before a cheerful fire, while a
male and female cannibal in modern attire, the gentleman being clad in a
blue coat and white trousers, and the lady in a deep red pelisse with a
parasol of the same, were approaching the meal with hungry eyes, up a
serpentine gravel path leading thereunto. A decidedly indelicate young
gentleman, in a pair of wings and nothing else, was depicted as
superintending the cooking; a representation of the spire of the church
in Langham Place, London, appeared in the distance; and the whole formed
a ‘valentine,’ of which, as a written inscription in the window
testified, there was a large assortment within, which the shopkeeper
pledged himself to dispose of, to his countrymen generally, at the
reduced rate of one-and-sixpence each.

‘I should ha’ forgot it; I should certainly ha’ forgot it!’ said Sam; so
saying, he at once stepped into the stationer’s shop, and requested to
be served with a sheet of the best gilt-edged letter-paper, and a hard-
nibbed pen which could be warranted not to splutter. These articles
having been promptly supplied, he walked on direct towards Leadenhall
Market at a good round pace, very different from his recent lingering
one. Looking round him, he there beheld a signboard on which the
painter’s art had delineated something remotely resembling a cerulean
elephant with an aquiline nose in lieu of trunk. Rightly conjecturing
that this was the Blue Boar himself, he stepped into the house, and
inquired concerning his parent.

‘He won’t be here this three-quarters of an hour or more,’ said the
young lady who superintended the domestic arrangements of the Blue Boar.

‘Wery good, my dear,’ replied Sam. ‘Let me have nine-penn’oth o’ brandy-
and-water luke, and the inkstand, will you, miss?’

The brandy-and-water luke, and the inkstand, having been carried into
the little parlour, and the young lady having carefully flattened down
the coals to prevent their blazing, and carried away the poker to
preclude the possibility of the fire being stirred, without the full
privity and concurrence of the Blue Boar being first had and obtained,
Sam Weller sat himself down in a box near the stove, and pulled out the
sheet of gilt-edged letter-paper, and the hard-nibbed pen. Then looking
carefully at the pen to see that there were no hairs in it, and dusting
down the table, so that there might be no crumbs of bread under the
paper, Sam tucked up the cuffs of his coat, squared his elbows, and
composed himself to write.

To ladies and gentlemen who are not in the habit of devoting themselves
practically to the science of penmanship, writing a letter is no very
easy task; it being always considered necessary in such cases for the
writer to recline his head on his left arm, so as to place his eyes as
nearly as possible on a level with the paper, and, while glancing
sideways at the letters he is constructing, to form with his tongue
imaginary characters to correspond. These motions, although
unquestionably of the greatest assistance to original composition,
retard in some degree the progress of the writer; and Sam had
unconsciously been a full hour and a half writing words in small text,
smearing out wrong letters with his little finger, and putting in new
ones which required going over very often to render them visible through
the old blots, when he was roused by the opening of the door and the
entrance of his parent.

‘Vell, Sammy,’ said the father.

‘Vell, my Prooshan Blue,’ responded the son, laying down his pen.
‘What’s the last bulletin about mother-in-law?’

‘Mrs. Veller passed a very good night, but is uncommon perwerse, and
unpleasant this mornin’. Signed upon oath, Tony Veller, Esquire. That’s
the last vun as was issued, Sammy,’ replied Mr. Weller, untying his
shawl.

‘No better yet?’ inquired Sam.

‘All the symptoms aggerawated,’ replied Mr. Weller, shaking his head.
‘But wot’s that, you’re a-doin’ of? Pursuit of knowledge under
difficulties, Sammy?’

‘I’ve done now,’ said Sam, with slight embarrassment; ‘I’ve been a-
writin’.’

‘So I see,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘Not to any young ‘ooman, I hope,
Sammy?’

‘Why, it’s no use a-sayin’ it ain’t,’ replied Sam; ‘it’s a walentine.’

‘A what!’ exclaimed Mr. Weller, apparently horror-stricken by the word.

‘A walentine,’ replied Sam.

‘Samivel, Samivel,’ said Mr. Weller, in reproachful accents, ‘I didn’t
think you’d ha’ done it. Arter the warnin’ you’ve had o’ your father’s
wicious propensities; arter all I’ve said to you upon this here wery
subject; arter actiwally seein’ and bein’ in the company o’ your own
mother-in-law, vich I should ha’ thought wos a moral lesson as no man
could never ha’ forgotten to his dyin’ day! I didn’t think you’d ha’
done it, Sammy, I didn’t think you’d ha’ done it!’ These reflections
were too much for the good old man. He raised Sam’s tumbler to his lips
and drank off its contents.

‘Wot’s the matter now?’ said Sam.

‘Nev’r mind, Sammy,’ replied Mr. Weller, ‘it’ll be a wery agonisin’
trial to me at my time of life, but I’m pretty tough, that’s vun
consolation, as the wery old turkey remarked wen the farmer said he wos
afeerd he should be obliged to kill him for the London market.’


‘Wot’ll be a trial?’ inquired Sam.

‘To see you married, Sammy--to see you a dilluded wictim, and thinkin’
in your innocence that it’s all wery capital,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘It’s
a dreadful trial to a father’s feelin’s, that ‘ere, Sammy--’

‘Nonsense,’ said Sam. ‘I ain’t a-goin’ to get married, don’t you fret
yourself about that; I know you’re a judge of these things. Order in
your pipe and I’ll read you the letter. There!’

We cannot distinctly say whether it was the prospect of the pipe, or the
consolatory reflection that a fatal disposition to get married ran in
the family, and couldn’t be helped, which calmed Mr. Weller’s feelings,
and caused his grief to subside. We should be rather disposed to say
that the result was attained by combining the two sources of
consolation, for he repeated the second in a low tone, very frequently;
ringing the bell meanwhile, to order in the first. He then divested
himself of his upper coat; and lighting the pipe and placing himself in
front of the fire with his back towards it, so that he could feel its
full heat, and recline against the mantel-piece at the same time, turned
towards Sam, and, with a countenance greatly mollified by the softening
influence of tobacco, requested him to ‘fire away.’

Sam dipped his pen into the ink to be ready for any corrections, and
began with a very theatrical air--

‘“Lovely--“’

‘Stop,’ said Mr. Weller, ringing the bell. ‘A double glass o’ the
inwariable, my dear.’

‘Very well, Sir,’ replied the girl; who with great quickness appeared,
vanished, returned, and disappeared.

‘They seem to know your ways here,’ observed Sam.

‘Yes,’ replied his father, ‘I’ve been here before, in my time. Go on,
Sammy.’

‘“Lovely creetur,”’ repeated Sam.

‘’Tain’t in poetry, is it?’ interposed his father.

‘No, no,’ replied Sam.

‘Wery glad to hear it,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘Poetry’s unnat’ral; no man
ever talked poetry ‘cept a beadle on boxin’-day, or Warren’s blackin’,
or Rowland’s oil, or some of them low fellows; never you let yourself
down to talk poetry, my boy. Begin agin, Sammy.’

Mr. Weller resumed his pipe with critical solemnity, and Sam once more
commenced, and read as follows:

‘“Lovely creetur I feel myself a damned--“’

That ain’t proper,’ said Mr. Weller, taking his pipe from his mouth.

‘No; it ain’t “damned,”’ observed Sam, holding the letter up to the
light, ‘it’s “shamed,” there’s a blot there--“I feel myself ashamed.”’

‘Wery good,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘Go on.’

‘Feel myself ashamed, and completely cir--’ I forget what this here word
is,’ said Sam, scratching his head with the pen, in vain attempts to
remember.

‘Why don’t you look at it, then?’ inquired Mr. Weller.

‘So I am a-lookin’ at it,’ replied Sam, ‘but there’s another blot.
Here’s a “c,” and a “i,” and a “d.”’

‘Circumwented, p’raps,’ suggested Mr. Weller.

‘No, it ain’t that,’ said Sam, ‘“circumscribed”; that’s it.’

‘That ain’t as good a word as “circumwented,” Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller
gravely.

‘Think not?’ said Sam.

‘Nothin’ like it,’ replied his father.

‘But don’t you think it means more?’ inquired Sam.

‘Vell p’raps it’s a more tenderer word,’ said Mr. Weller, after a few
moments’ reflection. ‘Go on, Sammy.’

‘“Feel myself ashamed and completely circumscribed in a-dressin’ of you,
for you are a nice gal and nothin’ but it.”’

‘That’s a wery pretty sentiment,’ said the elder Mr. Weller, removing
his pipe to make way for the remark.

‘Yes, I think it is rayther good,’ observed Sam, highly flattered.

‘Wot I like in that ‘ere style of writin’,’ said the elder Mr. Weller,
‘is, that there ain’t no callin’ names in it--no Wenuses, nor nothin’ o’
that kind. Wot’s the good o’ callin’ a young ‘ooman a Wenus or a angel,
Sammy?’

‘Ah! what, indeed?’ replied Sam.

‘You might jist as well call her a griffin, or a unicorn, or a king’s
arms at once, which is wery well known to be a collection o’ fabulous
animals,’ added Mr. Weller.

‘Just as well,’ replied Sam.

‘Drive on, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller.

Sam complied with the request, and proceeded as follows; his father
continuing to smoke, with a mixed expression of wisdom and complacency,
which was particularly edifying.

‘“Afore I see you, I thought all women was alike.”’

‘So they are,’ observed the elder Mr. Weller parenthetically.

‘“But now,”’ continued Sam, ‘“now I find what a reg’lar soft-headed,
inkred’lous turnip I must ha’ been; for there ain’t nobody like you,
though I like you better than nothin’ at all.” I thought it best to make
that rayther strong,’ said Sam, looking up.

Mr. Weller nodded approvingly, and Sam resumed.

‘“So I take the privilidge of the day, Mary, my dear--as the gen’l’m’n
in difficulties did, ven he valked out of a Sunday--to tell you that the
first and only time I see you, your likeness was took on my hart in much
quicker time and brighter colours than ever a likeness was took by the
profeel macheen (wich p’raps you may have heerd on Mary my dear) altho
it _does _finish a portrait and put the frame and glass on complete,
with a hook at the end to hang it up by, and all in two minutes and a
quarter.”’

‘I am afeerd that werges on the poetical, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller
dubiously.

‘No, it don’t,’ replied Sam, reading on very quickly, to avoid
contesting the point--

‘“Except of me Mary my dear as your walentine and think over what I’ve
said.--My dear Mary I will now conclude.” That’s all,’ said Sam.

‘That’s rather a Sudden pull-up, ain’t it, Sammy?’ inquired Mr. Weller.

‘Not a bit on it,’ said Sam; ‘she’ll vish there wos more, and that’s the
great art o’ letter-writin’.’

‘Well,’ said Mr. Weller, ‘there’s somethin’ in that; and I wish your
mother-in-law ‘ud only conduct her conwersation on the same gen-teel
principle. Ain’t you a-goin’ to sign it?’

‘That’s the difficulty,’ said Sam; ‘I don’t know what to sign it.’

‘Sign it--“Veller”,’ said the oldest surviving proprietor of that name.

‘Won’t do,’ said Sam. ‘Never sign a walentine with your own name.’

‘Sign it “Pickwick,” then,’ said Mr. Weller; ‘it’s a wery good name, and
a easy one to spell.’

The wery thing,’ said Sam. ‘I _could _end with a werse; what do you
think?’

‘I don’t like it, Sam,’ rejoined Mr. Weller. ‘I never know’d a
respectable coachman as wrote poetry, ‘cept one, as made an affectin’
copy o’ werses the night afore he was hung for a highway robbery; and he
wos only a Cambervell man, so even that’s no rule.’

But Sam was not to be dissuaded from the poetical idea that had occurred
to him, so he signed the letter--


‘Your love-sick Pickwick.’

And having folded it, in a very intricate manner, squeezed a downhill
direction in one corner: ‘To Mary, Housemaid, at Mr. Nupkins’s, Mayor’s,
Ipswich, Suffolk’; and put it into his pocket, wafered, and ready for
the general post. This important business having been transacted, Mr.
Weller the elder proceeded to open that, on which he had summoned his
son.

‘The first matter relates to your governor, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller.
‘He’s a-goin’ to be tried to-morrow, ain’t he?’

‘The trial’s a-comin’ on,’ replied Sam.

‘Vell,’ said Mr. Weller, ‘Now I s’pose he’ll want to call some witnesses
to speak to his character, or p’rhaps to prove a alleybi. I’ve been a-
turnin’ the bis’ness over in my mind, and he may make his-self easy,
Sammy. I’ve got some friends as’ll do either for him, but my adwice ‘ud
be this here--never mind the character, and stick to the alleybi.
Nothing like a alleybi, Sammy, nothing.’ Mr. Weller looked very profound
as he delivered this legal opinion; and burying his nose in his tumbler,
winked over the top thereof, at his astonished son.

‘Why, what do you mean?’ said Sam; ‘you don’t think he’s a-goin’ to be
tried at the Old Bailey, do you?’

‘That ain’t no part of the present consideration, Sammy,’ replied Mr.
Weller. ‘Verever he’s a-goin’ to be tried, my boy, a alleybi’s the thing
to get him off. Ve got Tom Vildspark off that ‘ere manslaughter, with a
alleybi, ven all the big vigs to a man said as nothing couldn’t save
him. And my ‘pinion is, Sammy, that if your governor don’t prove a
alleybi, he’ll be what the Italians call reg’larly flummoxed, and that’s
all about it.’

As the elder Mr. Weller entertained a firm and unalterable conviction
that the Old Bailey was the supreme court of judicature in this country,
and that its rules and forms of proceeding regulated and controlled the
practice of all other courts of justice whatsoever, he totally
disregarded the assurances and arguments of his son, tending to show
that the alibi was inadmissible; and vehemently protested that Mr.
Pickwick was being ‘wictimised.’ Finding that it was of no use to
discuss the matter further, Sam changed the subject, and inquired what
the second topic was, on which his revered parent wished to consult him.

‘That’s a pint o’ domestic policy, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘This here
Stiggins--’

‘Red-nosed man?’ inquired Sam.

‘The wery same,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘This here red-nosed man, Sammy,
wisits your mother-in-law vith a kindness and constancy I never see
equalled. He’s sitch a friend o’ the family, Sammy, that wen he’s avay
from us, he can’t be comfortable unless he has somethin’ to remember us
by.’

‘And I’d give him somethin’ as ‘ud turpentine and beeswax his memory for
the next ten years or so, if I wos you,’ interposed Sam.

‘Stop a minute,’ said Mr. Weller; ‘I wos a-going to say, he always
brings now, a flat bottle as holds about a pint and a half, and fills it
vith the pine-apple rum afore he goes avay.’

‘And empties it afore he comes back, I s’pose?’ said Sam.

‘Clean!’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘never leaves nothin’ in it but the cork
and the smell; trust him for that, Sammy. Now, these here fellows, my
boy, are a-goin’ to-night to get up the monthly meetin’ o’ the Brick
Lane Branch o’ the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance
Association. Your mother-in-law wos a-goin’, Sammy, but she’s got the
rheumatics, and can’t; and I, Sammy--I’ve got the two tickets as wos
sent her.’ Mr. Weller communicated this secret with great glee, and
winked so indefatigably after doing so, that Sam began to think he must
have got the _Tic Doloureux_ in his right eyelid.

‘Well?’ said that young gentleman.

‘Well,’ continued his progenitor, looking round him very cautiously,
‘you and I’ll go, punctiwal to the time. The deputy-shepherd won’t,
Sammy; the deputy-shepherd won’t.’ Here Mr. Weller was seized with a
paroxysm of chuckles, which gradually terminated in as near an approach
to a choke as an elderly gentleman can, with safety, sustain.

‘Well, I never see sitch an old ghost in all my born days,’ exclaimed
Sam, rubbing the old gentleman’s back, hard enough to set him on fire
with the friction. ‘What are you a-laughin’ at, corpilence?’

‘Hush! Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, looking round him with increased
caution, and speaking in a whisper. ‘Two friends o’ mine, as works the
Oxford Road, and is up to all kinds o’ games, has got the deputy-
shepherd safe in tow, Sammy; and ven he does come to the Ebenezer
Junction (vich he’s sure to do: for they’ll see him to the door, and
shove him in, if necessary), he’ll be as far gone in rum-and-water, as
ever he wos at the Markis o’ Granby, Dorkin’, and that’s not sayin’ a
little neither.’ And with this, Mr. Weller once more laughed
immoderately, and once more relapsed into a state of partial
suffocation, in consequence.

Nothing could have been more in accordance with Sam Weller’s feelings
than the projected exposure of the real propensities and qualities of
the red-nosed man; and it being very near the appointed hour of meeting,
the father and son took their way at once to Brick Lane, Sam not
forgetting to drop his letter into a general post-office as they walked
along.

The monthly meetings of the Brick Lane Branch of the United Grand
Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association were held in a large room,
pleasantly and airily situated at the top of a safe and commodious
ladder. The president was the straight-walking Mr. Anthony Humm, a
converted fireman, now a schoolmaster, and occasionally an itinerant
preacher; and the secretary was Mr. Jonas Mudge, chandler’s shopkeeper,
an enthusiastic and disinterested vessel, who sold tea to the members.
Previous to the commencement of business, the ladies sat upon forms, and
drank tea, till such time as they considered it expedient to leave off;
and a large wooden money-box was conspicuously placed upon the green
baize cloth of the business-table, behind which the secretary stood, and
acknowledged, with a gracious smile, every addition to the rich vein of
copper which lay concealed within.

On this particular occasion the women drank tea to a most alarming
extent; greatly to the horror of Mr. Weller, senior, who, utterly
regardless of all Sam’s admonitory nudgings, stared about him in every
direction with the most undisguised astonishment.

‘Sammy,’ whispered Mr. Weller, ‘if some o’ these here people don’t want
tappin’ to-morrow mornin’, I ain’t your father, and that’s wot it is.
Why, this here old lady next me is a-drowndin’ herself in tea.’

Be quiet, can’t you?’ murmured Sam.

‘Sam,’ whispered Mr. Weller, a moment afterwards, in a tone of deep
agitation, ‘mark my vords, my boy. If that ‘ere secretary fellow keeps
on for only five minutes more, he’ll blow hisself up with toast and
water.’

‘Well, let him, if he likes,’ replied Sam; ‘it ain’t no bis’ness o’
yourn.’

‘If this here lasts much longer, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, in the same
low voice, ‘I shall feel it my duty, as a human bein’, to rise and
address the cheer. There’s a young ‘ooman on the next form but two, as
has drunk nine breakfast cups and a half; and she’s a-swellin’ wisibly
before my wery eyes.’

There is little doubt that Mr. Weller would have carried his benevolent
intention into immediate execution, if a great noise, occasioned by
putting up the cups and saucers, had not very fortunately announced that
the tea-drinking was over. The crockery having been removed, the table
with the green baize cover was carried out into the centre of the room,
and the business of the evening was commenced by a little emphatic man,
with a bald head and drab shorts, who suddenly rushed up the ladder, at
the imminent peril of snapping the two little legs incased in the drab
shorts, and said--

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I move our excellent brother, Mr. Anthony Humm,
into the chair.’

The ladies waved a choice selection of pocket-handkerchiefs at this
proposition; and the impetuous little man literally moved Mr. Humm into
the chair, by taking him by the shoulders and thrusting him into a
mahogany-frame which had once represented that article of furniture. The
waving of handkerchiefs was renewed; and Mr. Humm, who was a sleek,
white-faced man, in a perpetual perspiration, bowed meekly, to the great
admiration of the females, and formally took his seat. Silence was then
proclaimed by the little man in the drab shorts, and Mr. Humm rose and
said--That, with the permission of his Brick Lane Branch brothers and
sisters, then and there present, the secretary would read the report of
the Brick Lane Branch committee; a proposition which was again received
with a demonstration of pocket-handkerchiefs.

The secretary having sneezed in a very impressive manner, and the cough
which always seizes an assembly, when anything particular is going to be
done, having been duly performed, the following document was read:

‘REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE OF THE BRICK LANE BRANCH OF THE UNITED GRAND
JUNCTION EBENEZER TEMPERANCE ASSOCIATION

‘Your committee have pursued their grateful labours during the past
month, and have the unspeakable pleasure of reporting the following
additional cases of converts to Temperance.

‘H. Walker, tailor, wife, and two children. When in better
circumstances, owns to having been in the constant habit of drinking ale
and beer; says he is not certain whether he did not twice a week, for
twenty years, taste “dog’s nose,” which your committee find upon
inquiry, to be compounded of warm porter, moist sugar, gin, and nutmeg
(a groan, and ‘So it is!’ from an elderly female). Is now out of work
and penniless; thinks it must be the porter (cheers) or the loss of the
use of his right hand; is not certain which, but thinks it very likely
that, if he had drunk nothing but water all his life, his fellow-workman
would never have stuck a rusty needle in him, and thereby occasioned his
accident (tremendous cheering). Has nothing but cold water to drink, and
never feels thirsty (great applause).

‘Betsy Martin, widow, one child, and one eye. Goes out charing and
washing, by the day; never had more than one eye, but knows her mother
drank bottled stout, and shouldn’t wonder if that caused it (immense
cheering). Thinks it not impossible that if she had always abstained
from spirits she might have had two eyes by this time (tremendous
applause). Used, at every place she went to, to have eighteen-pence a
day, a pint of porter, and a glass of spirits; but since she became a
member of the Brick Lane Branch, has always demanded three-and-sixpence
(the announcement of this most interesting fact was received with
deafening enthusiasm).

‘Henry Beller was for many years toast-master at various corporation
dinners, during which time he drank a great deal of foreign wine; may
sometimes have carried a bottle or two home with him; is not quite
certain of that, but is sure if he did, that he drank the contents.
Feels very low and melancholy, is very feverish, and has a constant
thirst upon him; thinks it must be the wine he used to drink (cheers).
Is out of employ now; and never touches a drop of foreign wine by any
chance (tremendous plaudits).

‘Thomas Burton is purveyor of cat’s meat to the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs,
and several members of the Common Council (the announcement of this
gentleman’s name was received with breathless interest). Has a wooden
leg; finds a wooden leg expensive, going over the stones; used to wear
second-hand wooden legs, and drink a glass of hot gin-and-water
regularly every night--sometimes two (deep sighs). Found the second-hand
wooden legs split and rot very quickly; is firmly persuaded that their
constitution was undermined by the gin-and-water (prolonged cheering).
Buys new wooden legs now, and drinks nothing but water and weak tea. The
new legs last twice as long as the others used to do, and he attributes
this solely to his temperate habits (triumphant cheers).’

Anthony Humm now moved that the assembly do regale itself with a song.
With a view to their rational and moral enjoyment, Brother Mordlin had
adapted the beautiful words of ‘Who hasn’t heard of a Jolly Young
Waterman?’ to the tune of the Old Hundredth, which he would request them
to join him in singing (great applause). He might take that opportunity
of expressing his firm persuasion that the late Mr. Dibdin, seeing the
errors of his former life, had written that song to show the advantages
of abstinence. It was a temperance song (whirlwinds of cheers). The
neatness of the young man’s attire, the dexterity of his feathering, the
enviable state of mind which enabled him in the beautiful words of the
poet, to


‘Row along, thinking of nothing at all,’

all combined to prove that he must have been a water-drinker (cheers).
Oh, what a state of virtuous jollity! (rapturous cheering). And what was
the young man’s reward? Let all young men present mark this:


‘The maidens all flocked to his boat so readily.’

(Loud cheers, in which the ladies joined.) What a bright example! The
sisterhood, the maidens, flocking round the young waterman, and urging
him along the stream of duty and of temperance. But, was it the maidens
of humble life only, who soothed, consoled, and supported him? No!


‘He was always first oars with the fine city ladies.’

(Immense cheering.) The soft sex to a man--he begged pardon, to a
female--rallied round the young waterman, and turned with disgust from
the drinker of spirits (cheers). The Brick Lane Branch brothers were
watermen (cheers and laughter). That room was their boat; that audience
were the maidens; and he (Mr. Anthony Humm), however unworthily, was
‘first oars’ (unbounded applause).

‘Wot does he mean by the soft sex, Sammy?’ inquired Mr. Weller, in a
whisper.

‘The womin,’ said Sam, in the same tone.

‘He ain’t far out there, Sammy,’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘they _must _be a
soft sex--a wery soft sex, indeed--if they let themselves be gammoned by
such fellers as him.’

Any further observations from the indignant old gentleman were cut short
by the announcement of the song, which Mr. Anthony Humm gave out two
lines at a time, for the information of such of his hearers as were
unacquainted with the legend. While it was being sung, the little man
with the drab shorts disappeared; he returned immediately on its
conclusion, and whispered Mr. Anthony Humm, with a face of the deepest
importance.

‘My friends,’ said Mr. Humm, holding up his hand in a deprecatory
manner, to bespeak the silence of such of the stout old ladies as were
yet a line or two behind; ‘my friends, a delegate from the Dorking
Branch of our society, Brother Stiggins, attends below.’

Out came the pocket-handkerchiefs again, in greater force than ever; for
Mr. Stiggins was excessively popular among the female constituency of
Brick Lane.

‘He may approach, I think,’ said Mr. Humm, looking round him, with a fat
smile. ‘Brother Tadger, let him come forth and greet us.’

The little man in the drab shorts who answered to the name of Brother
Tadger, bustled down the ladder with great speed, and was immediately
afterwards heard tumbling up with the Reverend Mr. Stiggins.

‘He’s a-comin’, Sammy,’ whispered Mr. Weller, purple in the countenance
with suppressed laughter.

‘Don’t say nothin’ to me,’ replied Sam, ‘for I can’t bear it. He’s close
to the door. I hear him a-knockin’ his head again the lath and plaster
now.’

As Sam Weller spoke, the little door flew open, and Brother Tadger
appeared, closely followed by the Reverend Mr. Stiggins, who no sooner
entered, than there was a great clapping of hands, and stamping of feet,
and flourishing of handkerchiefs; to all of which manifestations of
delight, Brother Stiggins returned no other acknowledgment than staring
with a wild eye, and a fixed smile, at the extreme top of the wick of
the candle on the table, swaying his body to and fro, meanwhile, in a
very unsteady and uncertain manner.

‘Are you unwell, Brother Stiggins?’ whispered Mr. Anthony Humm.

‘I am all right, Sir,’ replied Mr. Stiggins, in a tone in which ferocity
was blended with an extreme thickness of utterance; ‘I am all right,
Sir.’

‘Oh, very well,’ rejoined Mr. Anthony Humm, retreating a few paces.

‘I believe no man here has ventured to say that I am not all right,
Sir?’ said Mr. Stiggins.

‘Oh, certainly not,’ said Mr. Humm.

‘I should advise him not to, Sir; I should advise him not,’ said Mr.
Stiggins.

By this time the audience were perfectly silent, and waited with some
anxiety for the resumption of business.

‘Will you address the meeting, brother?’ said Mr. Humm, with a smile of
invitation.

‘No, sir,’ rejoined Mr. Stiggins; ‘No, sir. I will not, sir.’

The meeting looked at each other with raised eyelids; and a murmur of
astonishment ran through the room.

‘It’s my opinion, sir,’ said Mr. Stiggins, unbuttoning his coat, and
speaking very loudly--‘it’s my opinion, sir, that this meeting is drunk,
sir. Brother Tadger, sir!’ said Mr. Stiggins, suddenly increasing in
ferocity, and turning sharp round on the little man in the drab shorts,
‘_you _are drunk, sir!’ With this, Mr. Stiggins, entertaining a
praiseworthy desire to promote the sobriety of the meeting, and to
exclude therefrom all improper characters, hit Brother Tadger on the
summit of the nose with such unerring aim, that the drab shorts
disappeared like a flash of lightning. Brother Tadger had been knocked,
head first, down the ladder.

Upon this, the women set up a loud and dismal screaming; and rushing in
small parties before their favourite brothers, flung their arms around
them to preserve them from danger. An instance of affection, which had
nearly proved fatal to Humm, who, being extremely popular, was all but
suffocated, by the crowd of female devotees that hung about his neck,
and heaped caresses upon him. The greater part of the lights were
quickly put out, and nothing but noise and confusion resounded on all
sides.

‘Now, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, taking off his greatcoat with much
deliberation, ‘just you step out, and fetch in a watchman.’

‘And wot are you a-goin’ to do, the while?’ inquired Sam.

‘Never you mind me, Sammy,’ replied the old gentleman; ‘I shall ockipy
myself in havin’ a small settlement with that ‘ere Stiggins.’ Before Sam
could interfere to prevent it, his heroic parent had penetrated into a
remote corner of the room, and attacked the Reverend Mr. Stiggins with
manual dexterity.

‘Come off!’ said Sam.

‘Come on!’ cried Mr. Weller; and without further invitation he gave the
Reverend Mr. Stiggins a preliminary tap on the head, and began dancing
round him in a buoyant and cork-like manner, which in a gentleman at his
time of life was a perfect marvel to behold.

Finding all remonstrances unavailing, Sam pulled his hat firmly on,
threw his father’s coat over his arm, and taking the old man round the
waist, forcibly dragged him down the ladder, and into the street; never
releasing his hold, or permitting him to stop, until they reached the
corner. As they gained it, they could hear the shouts of the populace,
who were witnessing the removal of the Reverend Mr. Stiggins to strong
lodgings for the night, and could hear the noise occasioned by the
dispersion in various directions of the members of the Brick Lane Branch
of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association.



CHAPTER XXXIV. IS WHOLLY DEVOTED TO A FULL AND FAITHFUL REPORT OF THE
MEMORABLE TRIAL OF BARDELL AGAINST PICKWICK

I wonder what the foreman of the jury, whoever he’ll be, has got for
breakfast,’ said Mr. Snodgrass, by way of keeping up a conversation on
the eventful morning of the fourteenth of February.

‘Ah!’ said Perker, ‘I hope he’s got a good one.’

Why so?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Highly important--very important, my dear Sir,’ replied Perker. ‘A
good, contented, well-breakfasted juryman is a capital thing to get hold
of. Discontented or hungry jurymen, my dear sir, always find for the
plaintiff.’

‘Bless my heart,’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking very blank, ‘what do they
do that for?’

‘Why, I don’t know,’ replied the little man coolly; ‘saves time, I
suppose. If it’s near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when
the jury has retired, and says, “Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to
five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen.” “So do I,” says everybody
else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than
half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts
up his watch:--“Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant,
gentlemen? I rather think, so far as I am concerned, gentlemen,--I say,
I rather think--but don’t let that influence you--I _rather_ think the
plaintiff’s the man.” Upon this, two or three other men are sure to say
that they think so too--as of course they do; and then they get on very
unanimously and comfortably. Ten minutes past nine!’ said the little
man, looking at his watch. ‘Time we were off, my dear sir; breach of
promise trial-court is generally full in such cases. You had better ring
for a coach, my dear sir, or we shall be rather late.’

Mr. Pickwick immediately rang the bell, and a coach having been
procured, the four Pickwickians and Mr. Perker ensconced themselves
therein, and drove to Guildhall; Sam Weller, Mr. Lowten, and the blue
bag, following in a cab.

‘Lowten,’ said Perker, when they reached the outer hall of the court,
‘put Mr. Pickwick’s friends in the students’ box; Mr. Pickwick himself
had better sit by me. This way, my dear sir, this way.’ Taking Mr.
Pickwick by the coat sleeve, the little man led him to the low seat just
beneath the desks of the King’s Counsel, which is constructed for the
convenience of attorneys, who from that spot can whisper into the ear of
the leading counsel in the case, any instructions that may be necessary
during the progress of the trial. The occupants of this seat are
invisible to the great body of spectators, inasmuch as they sit on a
much lower level than either the barristers or the audience, whose seats
are raised above the floor. Of course they have their backs to both, and
their faces towards the judge.

‘That’s the witness-box, I suppose?’ said Mr. Pickwick, pointing to a
kind of pulpit, with a brass rail, on his left hand.

‘That’s the witness-box, my dear sir,’ replied Perker, disinterring a
quantity of papers from the blue bag, which Lowten had just deposited at
his feet.

‘And that,’ said Mr. Pickwick, pointing to a couple of enclosed seats on
his right, ‘that’s where the jurymen sit, is it not?’

‘The identical place, my dear Sir,’ replied Perker, tapping the lid of
his snuff-box.

Mr. Pickwick stood up in a state of great agitation, and took a glance
at the court. There were already a pretty large sprinkling of spectators
in the gallery, and a numerous muster of gentlemen in wigs, in the
barristers’ seats, who presented, as a body, all that pleasing and
extensive variety of nose and whisker for which the Bar of England is so
justly celebrated. Such of the gentlemen as had a brief to carry,
carried it in as conspicuous a manner as possible, and occasionally
scratched their noses therewith, to impress the fact more strongly on
the observation of the spectators. Other gentlemen, who had no briefs to
show, carried under their arms goodly octavos, with a red label behind,
and that under-done-pie-crust-coloured cover, which is technically known
as ‘law calf.’ Others, who had neither briefs nor books, thrust their
hands into their pockets, and looked as wise as they conveniently could;
others, again, moved here and there with great restlessness and
earnestness of manner, content to awaken thereby the admiration and
astonishment of the uninitiated strangers. The whole, to the great
wonderment of Mr. Pickwick, were divided into little groups, who were
chatting and discussing the news of the day in the most unfeeling manner
possible--just as if no trial at all were coming on.

A bow from Mr. Phunky, as he entered, and took his seat behind the row
appropriated to the King’s Counsel, attracted Mr. Pickwick’s attention;
and he had scarcely returned it, when Mr. Serjeant Snubbin appeared,
followed by Mr. Mallard, who half hid the Serjeant behind a large
crimson bag, which he placed on his table, and, after shaking hands with
Perker, withdrew. Then there entered two or three more Serjeants; and
among them, one with a fat body and a red face, who nodded in a friendly
manner to Mr. Serjeant Snubbin, and said it was a fine morning.

‘Who’s that red-faced man, who said it was a fine morning, and nodded to
our counsel?’ whispered Mr. Pickwick.

‘Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz,’ replied Perker. ‘He’s opposed to us; he leads on
the other side. That gentleman behind him is Mr. Skimpin, his junior.’

Mr. Pickwick was on the point of inquiring, with great abhorrence of the
man’s cold-blooded villainy, how Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz, who was counsel
for the opposite party, dared to presume to tell Mr. Serjeant Snubbin,
who was counsel for him, that it was a fine morning, when he was
interrupted by a general rising of the barristers, and a loud cry of
‘Silence!’ from the officers of the court. Looking round, he found that
this was caused by the entrance of the judge.

Mr. Justice Stareleigh (who sat in the absence of the Chief Justice,
occasioned by indisposition) was a most particularly short man, and so
fat, that he seemed all face and waistcoat. He rolled in, upon two
little turned legs, and having bobbed gravely to the Bar, who bobbed
gravely to him, put his little legs underneath his table, and his little
three-cornered hat upon it; and when Mr. Justice Stareleigh had done
this, all you could see of him was two queer little eyes, one broad pink
face, and somewhere about half of a big and very comical-looking wig.

The judge had no sooner taken his seat, than the officer on the floor of
the court called out ‘Silence!’ in a commanding tone, upon which another
officer in the gallery cried ‘Silence!’ in an angry manner, whereupon
three or four more ushers shouted ‘Silence!’ in a voice of indignant
remonstrance. This being done, a gentleman in black, who sat below the
judge, proceeded to call over the names of the jury; and after a great
deal of bawling, it was discovered that only ten special jurymen were
present. Upon this, Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz prayed a _tales_; the gentleman
in black then proceeded to press into the special jury, two of the
common jurymen; and a greengrocer and a chemist were caught directly.

‘Answer to your names, gentlemen, that you may be sworn,’ said the
gentleman in black. ‘Richard Upwitch.’

‘Here,’ said the greengrocer.

‘Thomas Groffin.’

‘Here,’ said the chemist.

‘Take the book, gentlemen. You shall well and truly try--’

‘I beg this court’s pardon,’ said the chemist, who was a tall, thin,
yellow-visaged man, ‘but I hope this court will excuse my attendance.’

‘On what grounds, Sir?’ said Mr. Justice Stareleigh.

‘I have no assistant, my Lord,’ said the chemist.

‘I can’t help that, Sir,’ replied Mr. Justice Stareleigh. ‘You should
hire one.’

‘I can’t afford it, my Lord,’ rejoined the chemist.

‘Then you ought to be able to afford it, Sir,’ said the judge,
reddening; for Mr. Justice Stareleigh’s temper bordered on the
irritable, and brooked not contradiction.

‘I know I _ought _to do, if I got on as well as I deserved; but I don’t,
my Lord,’ answered the chemist.

‘Swear the gentleman,’ said the judge peremptorily.

The officer had got no further than the ‘You shall well and truly try,’
when he was again interrupted by the chemist.

‘I am to be sworn, my Lord, am I?’ said the chemist.

‘Certainly, sir,’ replied the testy little judge.

‘Very well, my Lord,’ replied the chemist, in a resigned manner. ‘Then
there’ll be murder before this trial’s over; that’s all. Swear me, if
you please, Sir;’ and sworn the chemist was, before the judge could find
words to utter.

‘I merely wanted to observe, my Lord,’ said the chemist, taking his seat
with great deliberation, ‘that I’ve left nobody but an errand-boy in my
shop. He is a very nice boy, my Lord, but he is not acquainted with
drugs; and I know that the prevailing impression on his mind is, that
Epsom salts means oxalic acid; and syrup of senna, laudanum. That’s all,
my Lord.’ With this, the tall chemist composed himself into a
comfortable attitude, and, assuming a pleasant expression of
countenance, appeared to have prepared himself for the worst.

Mr. Pickwick was regarding the chemist with feelings of the deepest
horror, when a slight sensation was perceptible in the body of the
court; and immediately afterwards Mrs. Bardell, supported by Mrs.
Cluppins, was led in, and placed, in a drooping state, at the other end
of the seat on which Mr. Pickwick sat. An extra-sized umbrella was then
handed in by Mr. Dodson, and a pair of pattens by Mr. Fogg, each of whom
had prepared a most sympathising and melancholy face for the occasion.
Mrs. Sanders then appeared, leading in Master Bardell. At sight of her
child, Mrs. Bardell started; suddenly recollecting herself, she kissed
him in a frantic manner; then relapsing into a state of hysterical
imbecility, the good lady requested to be informed where she was. In
reply to this, Mrs. Cluppins and Mrs. Sanders turned their heads away
and wept, while Messrs. Dodson and Fogg entreated the plaintiff to
compose herself. Serjeant Buzfuz rubbed his eyes very hard with a large
white handkerchief, and gave an appealing look towards the jury, while
the judge was visibly affected, and several of the beholders tried to
cough down their emotion.

‘Very good notion that indeed,’ whispered Perker to Mr. Pickwick.
‘Capital fellows those Dodson and Fogg; excellent ideas of effect, my
dear Sir, excellent.’

As Perker spoke, Mrs. Bardell began to recover by slow degrees, while
Mrs. Cluppins, after a careful survey of Master Bardell’s buttons and
the button-holes to which they severally belonged, placed him on the
floor of the court in front of his mother--a commanding position in
which he could not fail to awaken the full commiseration and sympathy of
both judge and jury. This was not done without considerable opposition,
and many tears, on the part of the young gentleman himself, who had
certain inward misgivings that the placing him within the full glare of
the judge’s eye was only a formal prelude to his being immediately
ordered away for instant execution, or for transportation beyond the
seas, during the whole term of his natural life, at the very least.

‘Bardell and Pickwick,’ cried the gentleman in black, calling on the
case, which stood first on the list.

‘I am for the plaintiff, my Lord,’ said Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz.

‘Who is with you, Brother Buzfuz?’ said the judge. Mr. Skimpin bowed, to
intimate that he was.

‘I appear for the defendant, my Lord,’ said Mr. Serjeant Snubbin.

‘Anybody with you, Brother Snubbin?’ inquired the court.

‘Mr. Phunky, my Lord,’ replied Serjeant Snubbin.

‘Serjeant Buzfuz and Mr. Skimpin for the plaintiff,’ said the judge,
writing down the names in his note-book, and reading as he wrote; ‘for
the defendant, Serjeant Snubbin and Mr. Monkey.’

‘Beg your Lordship’s pardon, Phunky.’

‘Oh, very good,’ said the judge; ‘I never had the pleasure of hearing
the gentleman’s name before.’ Here Mr. Phunky bowed and smiled, and the
judge bowed and smiled too, and then Mr. Phunky, blushing into the very
whites of his eyes, tried to look as if he didn’t know that everybody
was gazing at him, a thing which no man ever succeeded in doing yet, or
in all reasonable probability, ever will.

‘Go on,’ said the judge.

The ushers again called silence, and Mr. Skimpin proceeded to ‘open the
case’; and the case appeared to have very little inside it when he had
opened it, for he kept such particulars as he knew, completely to
himself, and sat down, after a lapse of three minutes, leaving the jury
in precisely the same advanced stage of wisdom as they were in before.

Serjeant Buzfuz then rose with all the majesty and dignity which the
grave nature of the proceedings demanded, and having whispered to
Dodson, and conferred briefly with Fogg, pulled his gown over his
shoulders, settled his wig, and addressed the jury.

Serjeant Buzfuz began by saying, that never, in the whole course of his
professional experience--never, from the very first moment of his
applying himself to the study and practice of the law--had he approached
a case with feelings of such deep emotion, or with such a heavy sense of
the responsibility imposed upon him--a responsibility, he would say,
which he could never have supported, were he not buoyed up and sustained
by a conviction so strong, that it amounted to positive certainty that
the cause of truth and justice, or, in other words, the cause of his
much-injured and most oppressed client, must prevail with the high-
minded and intelligent dozen of men whom he now saw in that box before
him.

Counsel usually begin in this way, because it puts the jury on the very
best terms with themselves, and makes them think what sharp fellows they
must be. A visible effect was produced immediately, several jurymen
beginning to take voluminous notes with the utmost eagerness.

‘You have heard from my learned friend, gentlemen,’ continued Serjeant
Buzfuz, well knowing that, from the learned friend alluded to, the
gentlemen of the jury had heard just nothing at all--‘you have heard
from my learned friend, gentlemen, that this is an action for a breach
of promise of marriage, in which the damages are laid at £1,500. But you
have not heard from my learned friend, inasmuch as it did not come
within my learned friend’s province to tell you, what are the facts and
circumstances of the case. Those facts and circumstances, gentlemen, you
shall hear detailed by me, and proved by the unimpeachable female whom I
will place in that box before you.’

Here, Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz, with a tremendous emphasis on the word ‘box,’
smote his table with a mighty sound, and glanced at Dodson and Fogg, who
nodded admiration of the Serjeant, and indignant defiance of the
defendant.

‘The plaintiff, gentlemen,’ continued Serjeant Buzfuz, in a soft and
melancholy voice, ‘the plaintiff is a widow; yes, gentlemen, a widow.
The late Mr. Bardell, after enjoying, for many years, the esteem and
confidence of his sovereign, as one of the guardians of his royal
revenues, glided almost imperceptibly from the world, to seek elsewhere
for that repose and peace which a custom-house can never afford.’

At this pathetic description of the decease of Mr. Bardell, who had been
knocked on the head with a quart-pot in a public-house cellar, the
learned serjeant’s voice faltered, and he proceeded, with emotion--

‘Some time before his death, he had stamped his likeness upon a little
boy. With this little boy, the only pledge of her departed exciseman,
Mrs. Bardell shrank from the world, and courted the retirement and
tranquillity of Goswell Street; and here she placed in her front parlour
window a written placard, bearing this inscription--“Apartments
furnished for a single gentleman. Inquire within.”’ Here Serjeant Buzfuz
paused, while several gentlemen of the jury took a note of the document.

‘There is no date to that, is there?’ inquired a juror.

‘There is no date, gentlemen,’ replied Serjeant Buzfuz; ‘but I am
instructed to say that it was put in the plaintiff’s parlour window just
this time three years. I entreat the attention of the jury to the
wording of this document--“Apartments furnished for a single gentleman”!
Mrs. Bardell’s opinions of the opposite sex, gentlemen, were derived
from a long contemplation of the inestimable qualities of her lost
husband. She had no fear, she had no distrust, she had no suspicion; all
was confidence and reliance. “Mr. Bardell,” said the widow--“Mr. Bardell
was a man of honour, Mr. Bardell was a man of his word, Mr. Bardell was
no deceiver, Mr. Bardell was once a single gentleman himself; to single
gentlemen I look for protection, for assistance, for comfort, and for
consolation; in single gentlemen I shall perpetually see something to
remind me of what Mr. Bardell was when he first won my young and untried
affections; to a single gentleman, then, shall my lodgings be let.”
 Actuated by this beautiful and touching impulse (among the best impulses
of our imperfect nature, gentlemen), the lonely and desolate widow dried
her tears, furnished her first floor, caught her innocent boy to her
maternal bosom, and put the bill up in her parlour window. Did it remain
there long? No. The serpent was on the watch, the train was laid, the
mine was preparing, the sapper and miner was at work. Before the bill
had been in the parlour window three days--three days, gentlemen--a
being, erect upon two legs, and bearing all the outward semblance of a
man, and not of a monster, knocked at the door of Mrs. Bardell’s house.
He inquired within--he took the lodgings; and on the very next day he
entered into possession of them. This man was Pickwick--Pickwick, the
defendant.’

Serjeant Buzfuz, who had proceeded with such volubility that his face
was perfectly crimson, here paused for breath. The silence awoke Mr.
Justice Stareleigh, who immediately wrote down something with a pen
without any ink in it, and looked unusually profound, to impress the
jury with the belief that he always thought most deeply with his eyes
shut. Serjeant Buzfuz proceeded--

‘Of this man Pickwick I will say little; the subject presents but few
attractions; and I, gentlemen, am not the man, nor are you, gentlemen,
the men, to delight in the contemplation of revolting heartlessness, and
of systematic villainy.’

Here Mr. Pickwick, who had been writhing in silence for some time, gave
a violent start, as if some vague idea of assaulting Serjeant Buzfuz, in
the august presence of justice and law, suggested itself to his mind. An
admonitory gesture from Perker restrained him, and he listened to the
learned gentleman’s continuation with a look of indignation, which
contrasted forcibly with the admiring faces of Mrs. Cluppins and Mrs.
Sanders.

‘I say systematic villainy, gentlemen,’ said Serjeant Buzfuz, looking
through Mr. Pickwick, and talking _at_ him; ‘and when I say systematic
villainy, let me tell the defendant Pickwick, if he be in court, as I am
informed he is, that it would have been more decent in him, more
becoming, in better judgment, and in better taste, if he had stopped
away. Let me tell him, gentlemen, that any gestures of dissent or
disapprobation in which he may indulge in this court will not go down
with you; that you will know how to value and how to appreciate them;
and let me tell him further, as my Lord will tell you, gentlemen, that a
counsel, in the discharge of his duty to his client, is neither to be
intimidated nor bullied, nor put down; and that any attempt to do either
the one or the other, or the first, or the last, will recoil on the head
of the attempter, be he plaintiff or be he defendant, be his name
Pickwick, or Noakes, or Stoakes, or Stiles, or Brown, or Thompson.’


This little divergence from the subject in hand, had, of course, the
intended effect of turning all eyes to Mr. Pickwick. Serjeant Buzfuz,
having partially recovered from the state of moral elevation into which
he had lashed himself, resumed--

‘I shall show you, gentlemen, that for two years, Pickwick continued to
reside constantly, and without interruption or intermission, at Mrs.
Bardell’s house. I shall show you that Mrs. Bardell, during the whole of
that time, waited on him, attended to his comforts, cooked his meals,
looked out his linen for the washerwoman when it went abroad, darned,
aired, and prepared it for wear, when it came home, and, in short,
enjoyed his fullest trust and confidence. I shall show you that, on many
occasions, he gave halfpence, and on some occasions even sixpences, to
her little boy; and I shall prove to you, by a witness whose testimony
it will be impossible for my learned friend to weaken or controvert,
that on one occasion he patted the boy on the head, and, after inquiring
whether he had won any “_alley tors_” or “_commoneys_” lately (both of
which I understand to be a particular species of marbles much prized by
the youth of this town), made use of this remarkable expression, “How
should you like to have another father?” I shall prove to you,
gentlemen, that about a year ago, Pickwick suddenly began to absent
himself from home, during long intervals, as if with the intention of
gradually breaking off from my client; but I shall show you also, that
his resolution was not at that time sufficiently strong, or that his
better feelings conquered, if better feelings he has, or that the charms
and accomplishments of my client prevailed against his unmanly
intentions, by proving to you, that on one occasion, when he returned
from the country, he distinctly and in terms, offered her marriage:
previously, however, taking special care that there would be no witness
to their solemn contract; and I am in a situation to prove to you, on
the testimony of three of his own friends--most unwilling witnesses,
gentlemen--most unwilling witnesses--that on that morning he was
discovered by them holding the plaintiff in his arms, and soothing her
agitation by his caresses and endearments.’

A visible impression was produced upon the auditors by this part of the
learned Serjeant’s address. Drawing forth two very small scraps of
paper, he proceeded--

‘And now, gentlemen, but one word more. Two letters have passed between
these parties, letters which are admitted to be in the handwriting of
the defendant, and which speak volumes, indeed. The letters, too,
bespeak the character of the man. They are not open, fervent, eloquent
epistles, breathing nothing but the language of affectionate attachment.
They are covert, sly, underhanded communications, but, fortunately, far
more conclusive than if couched in the most glowing language and the
most poetic imagery--letters that must be viewed with a cautious and
suspicious eye--letters that were evidently intended at the time, by
Pickwick, to mislead and delude any third parties into whose hands they
might fall. Let me read the first: “Garraways, twelve o’clock. Dear Mrs.
B.--Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, _Pickwick_.” Gentlemen, what does
this mean? Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick! Chops! Gracious
heavens! and tomato sauce! Gentlemen, is the happiness of a sensitive
and confiding female to be trifled away, by such shallow artifices as
these? The next has no date whatever, which is in itself suspicious.
“Dear Mrs. B., I shall not be at home till to-morrow. Slow coach.” And
then follows this very remarkable expression. “Don’t trouble yourself
about the warming-pan.” The warming-pan! Why, gentlemen, who _does
_trouble himself about a warming-pan? When was the peace of mind of man
or woman broken or disturbed by a warming-pan, which is in itself a
harmless, a useful, and I will add, gentlemen, a comforting article of
domestic furniture? Why is Mrs. Bardell so earnestly entreated not to
agitate herself about this warming-pan, unless (as is no doubt the case)
it is a mere cover for hidden fire--a mere substitute for some endearing
word or promise, agreeably to a preconcerted system of correspondence,
artfully contrived by Pickwick with a view to his contemplated
desertion, and which I am not in a condition to explain? And what does
this allusion to the slow coach mean? For aught I know, it may be a
reference to Pickwick himself, who has most unquestionably been a
criminally slow coach during the whole of this transaction, but whose
speed will now be very unexpectedly accelerated, and whose wheels,
gentlemen, as he will find to his cost, will very soon be greased by
you!’

Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz paused in this place, to see whether the jury smiled
at his joke; but as nobody took it but the greengrocer, whose
sensitiveness on the subject was very probably occasioned by his having
subjected a chaise-cart to the process in question on that identical
morning, the learned Serjeant considered it advisable to undergo a
slight relapse into the dismals before he concluded.

‘But enough of this, gentlemen,’ said Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz, ‘it is
difficult to smile with an aching heart; it is ill jesting when our
deepest sympathies are awakened. My client’s hopes and prospects are
ruined, and it is no figure of speech to say that her occupation is gone
indeed. The bill is down--but there is no tenant. Eligible single
gentlemen pass and repass--but there is no invitation for to inquire
within or without. All is gloom and silence in the house; even the voice
of the child is hushed; his infant sports are disregarded when his
mother weeps; his “alley tors” and his “commoneys” are alike neglected;
he forgets the long familiar cry of “knuckle down,” and at tip-cheese,
or odd and even, his hand is out. But Pickwick, gentlemen, Pickwick, the
ruthless destroyer of this domestic oasis in the desert of Goswell
Street--Pickwick who has choked up the well, and thrown ashes on the
sward--Pickwick, who comes before you to-day with his heartless tomato
sauce and warming-pans--Pickwick still rears his head with unblushing
effrontery, and gazes without a sigh on the ruin he has made. Damages,
gentlemen--heavy damages is the only punishment with which you can visit
him; the only recompense you can award to my client. And for those
damages she now appeals to an enlightened, a high-minded, a right-
feeling, a conscientious, a dispassionate, a sympathising, a
contemplative jury of her civilised countrymen.’ With this beautiful
peroration, Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz sat down, and Mr. Justice Stareleigh
woke up.

‘Call Elizabeth Cluppins,’ said Serjeant Buzfuz, rising a minute
afterwards, with renewed vigour.

The nearest usher called for Elizabeth Tuppins; another one, at a little
distance off, demanded Elizabeth Jupkins; and a third rushed in a
breathless state into King Street, and screamed for Elizabeth Muffins
till he was hoarse.

Meanwhile Mrs. Cluppins, with the combined assistance of Mrs. Bardell,
Mrs. Sanders, Mr. Dodson, and Mr. Fogg, was hoisted into the witness-
box; and when she was safely perched on the top step, Mrs. Bardell stood
on the bottom one, with the pocket-handkerchief and pattens in one hand,
and a glass bottle that might hold about a quarter of a pint of
smelling-salts in the other, ready for any emergency. Mrs. Sanders,
whose eyes were intently fixed on the judge’s face, planted herself
close by, with the large umbrella, keeping her right thumb pressed on
the spring with an earnest countenance, as if she were fully prepared to
put it up at a moment’s notice.

‘Mrs. Cluppins,’ said Serjeant Buzfuz, ‘pray compose yourself, ma’am.’
Of course, directly Mrs. Cluppins was desired to compose herself, she
sobbed with increased vehemence, and gave divers alarming manifestations
of an approaching fainting fit, or, as she afterwards said, of her
feelings being too many for her.

‘Do you recollect, Mrs. Cluppins,’ said Serjeant Buzfuz, after a few
unimportant questions--‘do you recollect being in Mrs. Bardell’s back
one pair of stairs, on one particular morning in July last, when she was
dusting Pickwick’s apartment?’

‘Yes, my Lord and jury, I do,’ replied Mrs. Cluppins.

‘Mr. Pickwick’s sitting-room was the first-floor front, I believe?’

‘Yes, it were, Sir,’ replied Mrs. Cluppins.

‘What were you doing in the back room, ma’am?’ inquired the little
judge.

‘My Lord and jury,’ said Mrs. Cluppins, with interesting agitation, ‘I
will not deceive you.’

‘You had better not, ma’am,’ said the little judge.

‘I was there,’ resumed Mrs. Cluppins, ‘unbeknown to Mrs. Bardell; I had
been out with a little basket, gentlemen, to buy three pound of red
kidney pertaties, which was three pound tuppence ha’penny, when I see
Mrs. Bardell’s street door on the jar.’

‘On the what?’ exclaimed the little judge.

‘Partly open, my Lord,’ said Serjeant Snubbin.

‘She said on the jar,’ said the little judge, with a cunning look.

‘It’s all the same, my Lord,’ said Serjeant Snubbin. The little judge
looked doubtful, and said he’d make a note of it. Mrs. Cluppins then
resumed--

‘I walked in, gentlemen, just to say good-mornin’, and went, in a
permiscuous manner, upstairs, and into the back room. Gentlemen, there
was the sound of voices in the front room, and--’

‘And you listened, I believe, Mrs. Cluppins?’ said Serjeant Buzfuz.

‘Beggin’ your pardon, Sir,’ replied Mrs. Cluppins, in a majestic manner,
‘I would scorn the haction. The voices was very loud, Sir, and forced
themselves upon my ear.’

‘Well, Mrs. Cluppins, you were not listening, but you heard the voices.
Was one of those voices Pickwick’s?’

‘Yes, it were, Sir.’ And Mrs. Cluppins, after distinctly stating that
Mr. Pickwick addressed himself to Mrs. Bardell, repeated by slow
degrees, and by dint of many questions, the conversation with which our
readers are already acquainted.

The jury looked suspicious, and Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz smiled as he sat
down. They looked positively awful when Serjeant Snubbin intimated that
he should not cross-examine the witness, for Mr. Pickwick wished it to
be distinctly stated that it was due to her to say, that her account was
in substance correct.

Mrs. Cluppins having once broken the ice, thought it a favourable
opportunity for entering into a short dissertation on her own domestic
affairs; so she straightway proceeded to inform the court that she was
the mother of eight children at that present speaking, and that she
entertained confident expectations of presenting Mr. Cluppins with a
ninth, somewhere about that day six months. At this interesting point,
the little judge interposed most irascibly; and the effect of the
interposition was, that both the worthy lady and Mrs. Sanders were
politely taken out of court, under the escort of Mr. Jackson, without
further parley.

‘Nathaniel Winkle!’ said Mr. Skimpin.

‘Here!’ replied a feeble voice. Mr. Winkle entered the witness-box, and
having been duly sworn, bowed to the judge with considerable deference.

‘Don’t look at me, Sir,’ said the judge sharply, in acknowledgment of
the salute; ‘look at the jury.’

Mr. Winkle obeyed the mandate, and looked at the place where he thought
it most probable the jury might be; for seeing anything in his then
state of intellectual complication was wholly out of the question.

Mr. Winkle was then examined by Mr. Skimpin, who, being a promising
young man of two or three-and-forty, was of course anxious to confuse a
witness who was notoriously predisposed in favour of the other side, as
much as he could.

‘Now, Sir,’ said Mr. Skimpin, ‘have the goodness to let his Lordship
know what your name is, will you?’ and Mr. Skimpin inclined his head on
one side to listen with great sharpness to the answer, and glanced at
the jury meanwhile, as if to imply that he rather expected Mr. Winkle’s
natural taste for perjury would induce him to give some name which did
not belong to him.

‘Winkle,’ replied the witness.

‘What’s your Christian name, Sir?’ angrily inquired the little judge.

‘Nathaniel, Sir.’

‘Daniel--any other name?’

‘Nathaniel, sir--my Lord, I mean.’

‘Nathaniel Daniel, or Daniel Nathaniel?’

‘No, my Lord, only Nathaniel--not Daniel at all.’

‘What did you tell me it was Daniel for, then, sir?’ inquired the judge.

‘I didn’t, my Lord,’ replied Mr. Winkle.

‘You did, Sir,’ replied the judge, with a severe frown. ‘How could I
have got Daniel on my notes, unless you told me so, Sir?’

This argument was, of course, unanswerable.

‘Mr. Winkle has rather a short memory, my Lord,’ interposed Mr. Skimpin,
with another glance at the jury. ‘We shall find means to refresh it
before we have quite done with him, I dare say.’

‘You had better be careful, Sir,’ said the little judge, with a sinister
look at the witness.

Poor Mr. Winkle bowed, and endeavoured to feign an easiness of manner,
which, in his then state of confusion, gave him rather the air of a
disconcerted pickpocket.

‘Now, Mr. Winkle,’ said Mr. Skimpin, ‘attend to me, if you please, Sir;
and let me recommend you, for your own sake, to bear in mind his
Lordship’s injunctions to be careful. I believe you are a particular
friend of Mr. Pickwick, the defendant, are you not?’

‘I have known Mr. Pickwick now, as well as I recollect at this moment,
nearly--’

‘Pray, Mr. Winkle, do not evade the question. Are you, or are you not, a
particular friend of the defendant’s?’

‘I was just about to say, that--’

‘Will you, or will you not, answer my question, Sir?’

If you don’t answer the question, you’ll be committed, Sir,’ interposed
the little judge, looking over his note-book.

‘Come, Sir,’ said Mr. Skimpin, ‘yes or no, if you please.’

‘Yes, I am,’ replied Mr. Winkle.

‘Yes, you are. And why couldn’t you say that at once, Sir? Perhaps you
know the plaintiff too? Eh, Mr. Winkle?’

‘I don’t know her; I’ve seen her.’

‘Oh, you don’t know her, but you’ve seen her? Now, have the goodness to
tell the gentlemen of the jury what you mean by that, Mr. Winkle.’

‘I mean that I am not intimate with her, but I have seen her when I went
to call on Mr. Pickwick, in Goswell Street.’

‘How often have you seen her, Sir?’

‘How often?’

‘Yes, Mr. Winkle, how often? I’ll repeat the question for you a dozen
times, if you require it, Sir.’ And the learned gentleman, with a firm
and steady frown, placed his hands on his hips, and smiled suspiciously
to the jury.

On this question there arose the edifying brow-beating, customary on
such points. First of all, Mr. Winkle said it was quite impossible for
him to say how many times he had seen Mrs. Bardell. Then he was asked if
he had seen her twenty times, to which he replied, ‘Certainly--more than
that.’ Then he was asked whether he hadn’t seen her a hundred times--
whether he couldn’t swear that he had seen her more than fifty times--
whether he didn’t know that he had seen her at least seventy-five times,
and so forth; the satisfactory conclusion which was arrived at, at last,
being, that he had better take care of himself, and mind what he was
about. The witness having been by these means reduced to the requisite
ebb of nervous perplexity, the examination was continued as follows--

‘Pray, Mr. Winkle, do you remember calling on the defendant Pickwick at
these apartments in the plaintiff’s house in Goswell Street, on one
particular morning, in the month of July last?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Were you accompanied on that occasion by a friend of the name of
Tupman, and another by the name of Snodgrass?’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘Are they here?’

Yes, they are,’ replied Mr. Winkle, looking very earnestly towards the
spot where his friends were stationed.

‘Pray attend to me, Mr. Winkle, and never mind your friends,’ said Mr.
Skimpin, with another expressive look at the jury. ‘They must tell their
stories without any previous consultation with you, if none has yet
taken place (another look at the jury). Now, Sir, tell the gentlemen of
the jury what you saw on entering the defendant’s room, on this
particular morning. Come; out with it, Sir; we must have it, sooner or
later.’

‘The defendant, Mr. Pickwick, was holding the plaintiff in his arms,
with his hands clasping her waist,’ replied Mr. Winkle with natural
hesitation, ‘and the plaintiff appeared to have fainted away.’

‘Did you hear the defendant say anything?’

‘I heard him call Mrs. Bardell a good creature, and I heard him ask her
to compose herself, for what a situation it was, if anybody should come,
or words to that effect.’

‘Now, Mr. Winkle, I have only one more question to ask you, and I beg
you to bear in mind his Lordship’s caution. Will you undertake to swear
that Pickwick, the defendant, did not say on the occasion in question--
“My dear Mrs. Bardell, you’re a good creature; compose yourself to this
situation, for to this situation you must come,” or words to that
effect?’

‘I--I didn’t understand him so, certainly,’ said Mr. Winkle, astounded
on this ingenious dove-tailing of the few words he had heard. ‘I was on
the staircase, and couldn’t hear distinctly; the impression on my mind
is--’

‘The gentlemen of the jury want none of the impressions on your mind,
Mr. Winkle, which I fear would be of little service to honest,
straightforward men,’ interposed Mr. Skimpin. ‘You were on the
staircase, and didn’t distinctly hear; but you will not swear that
Pickwick did not make use of the expressions I have quoted? Do I
understand that?’

‘No, I will not,’ replied Mr. Winkle; and down sat Mr. Skimpin with a
triumphant countenance.

Mr. Pickwick’s case had not gone off in so particularly happy a manner,
up to this point, that it could very well afford to have any additional
suspicion cast upon it. But as it could afford to be placed in a rather
better light, if possible, Mr. Phunky rose for the purpose of getting
something important out of Mr. Winkle in cross-examination. Whether he
did get anything important out of him, will immediately appear.

‘I believe, Mr. Winkle,’ said Mr. Phunky, ‘that Mr. Pickwick is not a
young man?’

‘Oh, no,’ replied Mr. Winkle; ‘old enough to be my father.’

‘You have told my learned friend that you have known Mr. Pickwick a long
time. Had you ever any reason to suppose or believe that he was about to
be married?’

‘Oh, no; certainly not;’ replied Mr. Winkle with so much eagerness, that
Mr. Phunky ought to have got him out of the box with all possible
dispatch. Lawyers hold that there are two kinds of particularly bad
witnesses--a reluctant witness, and a too-willing witness; it was Mr.
Winkle’s fate to figure in both characters.

‘I will even go further than this, Mr. Winkle,’ continued Mr. Phunky, in
a most smooth and complacent manner. ‘Did you ever see anything in Mr.
Pickwick’s manner and conduct towards the opposite sex, to induce you to
believe that he ever contemplated matrimony of late years, in any case?’

‘Oh, no; certainly not,’ replied Mr. Winkle.

‘Has his behaviour, when females have been in the case, always been that
of a man, who, having attained a pretty advanced period of life, content
with his own occupations and amusements, treats them only as a father
might his daughters?’

‘Not the least doubt of it,’ replied Mr. Winkle, in the fulness of his
heart. ‘That is--yes--oh, yes--certainly.’

‘You have never known anything in his behaviour towards Mrs. Bardell, or
any other female, in the least degree suspicious?’ said Mr. Phunky,
preparing to sit down; for Serjeant Snubbin was winking at him.

‘N-n-no,’ replied Mr. Winkle, ‘except on one trifling occasion, which, I
have no doubt, might be easily explained.’

Now, if the unfortunate Mr. Phunky had sat down when Serjeant Snubbin
had winked at him, or if Serjeant Buzfuz had stopped this irregular
cross-examination at the outset (which he knew better than to do;
observing Mr. Winkle’s anxiety, and well knowing it would, in all
probability, lead to something serviceable to him), this unfortunate
admission would not have been elicited. The moment the words fell from
Mr. Winkle’s lips, Mr. Phunky sat down, and Serjeant Snubbin rather
hastily told him he might leave the box, which Mr. Winkle prepared to do
with great readiness, when Serjeant Buzfuz stopped him.

‘Stay, Mr. Winkle, stay!’ said Serjeant Buzfuz, ‘will your Lordship have
the goodness to ask him, what this one instance of suspicious behaviour
towards females on the part of this gentleman, who is old enough to be
his father, was?’

‘You hear what the learned counsel says, Sir,’ observed the judge,
turning to the miserable and agonised Mr. Winkle. ‘Describe the occasion
to which you refer.’

‘My Lord,’ said Mr. Winkle, trembling with anxiety, ‘I--I’d rather not.’

‘Perhaps so,’ said the little judge; ‘but you must.’

Amid the profound silence of the whole court, Mr. Winkle faltered out,
that the trifling circumstance of suspicion was Mr. Pickwick’s being
found in a lady’s sleeping-apartment at midnight; which had terminated,
he believed, in the breaking off of the projected marriage of the lady
in question, and had led, he knew, to the whole party being forcibly
carried before George Nupkins, Esq., magistrate and justice of the
peace, for the borough of Ipswich!

‘You may leave the box, Sir,’ said Serjeant Snubbin. Mr. Winkle did
leave the box, and rushed with delirious haste to the George and
Vulture, where he was discovered some hours after, by the waiter,
groaning in a hollow and dismal manner, with his head buried beneath the
sofa cushions.

Tracy Tupman, and Augustus Snodgrass, were severally called into the
box; both corroborated the testimony of their unhappy friend; and each
was driven to the verge of desperation by excessive badgering.

Susannah Sanders was then called, and examined by Serjeant Buzfuz, and
cross-examined by Serjeant Snubbin. Had always said and believed that
Pickwick would marry Mrs. Bardell; knew that Mrs. Bardell’s being
engaged to Pickwick was the current topic of conversation in the
neighbourhood, after the fainting in July; had been told it herself by
Mrs. Mudberry which kept a mangle, and Mrs. Bunkin which clear-starched,
but did not see either Mrs. Mudberry or Mrs. Bunkin in court. Had heard
Pickwick ask the little boy how he should like to have another father.
Did not know that Mrs. Bardell was at that time keeping company with the
baker, but did know that the baker was then a single man and is now
married. Couldn’t swear that Mrs. Bardell was not very fond of the
baker, but should think that the baker was not very fond of Mrs.
Bardell, or he wouldn’t have married somebody else. Thought Mrs. Bardell
fainted away on the morning in July, because Pickwick asked her to name
the day: knew that she (witness) fainted away stone dead when Mr.
Sanders asked her to name the day, and believed that everybody as called
herself a lady would do the same, under similar circumstances. Heard
Pickwick ask the boy the question about the marbles, but upon her oath
did not know the difference between an ‘alley tor’ and a ‘commoney.’

By the _court_.--During the period of her keeping company with Mr.
Sanders, had received love letters, like other ladies. In the course of
their correspondence Mr. Sanders had often called her a ‘duck,’ but
never ‘chops,’ nor yet ‘tomato sauce.’ He was particularly fond of
ducks. Perhaps if he had been as fond of chops and tomato sauce, he
might have called her that, as a term of affection.

Serjeant Buzfuz now rose with more importance than he had yet exhibited,
if that were possible, and vociferated; ‘Call Samuel Weller.’

It was quite unnecessary to call Samuel Weller; for Samuel Weller
stepped briskly into the box the instant his name was pronounced; and
placing his hat on the floor, and his arms on the rail, took a bird’s-
eye view of the Bar, and a comprehensive survey of the Bench, with a
remarkably cheerful and lively aspect.

‘What’s your name, sir?’ inquired the judge.

‘Sam Weller, my Lord,’ replied that gentleman.

‘Do you spell it with a “V” or a “W”?’ inquired the judge.

‘That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller, my Lord,’ replied
Sam; ‘I never had occasion to spell it more than once or twice in my
life, but I spells it with a “V.”’

Here a voice in the gallery exclaimed aloud, ‘Quite right too, Samivel,
quite right. Put it down a “we,” my Lord, put it down a “we.”’

Who is that, who dares address the court?’ said the little judge,
looking up. ‘Usher.’

‘Yes, my Lord.’

‘Bring that person here instantly.’

‘Yes, my Lord.’

But as the usher didn’t find the person, he didn’t bring him; and, after
a great commotion, all the people who had got up to look for the
culprit, sat down again. The little judge turned to the witness as soon
as his indignation would allow him to speak, and said--

‘Do you know who that was, sir?’

‘I rayther suspect it was my father, my lord,’ replied Sam.

‘Do you see him here now?’ said the judge.

‘No, I don’t, my Lord,’ replied Sam, staring right up into the lantern
at the roof of the court.

‘If you could have pointed him out, I would have committed him
instantly,’ said the judge. Sam bowed his acknowledgments and turned,
with unimpaired cheerfulness of countenance, towards Serjeant Buzfuz.

‘Now, Mr. Weller,’ said Serjeant Buzfuz.

‘Now, sir,’ replied Sam.

‘I believe you are in the service of Mr. Pickwick, the defendant in this
case? Speak up, if you please, Mr. Weller.’

‘I mean to speak up, Sir,’ replied Sam; ‘I am in the service o’ that
‘ere gen’l’man, and a wery good service it is.’

‘Little to do, and plenty to get, I suppose?’ said Serjeant Buzfuz, with
jocularity.

‘Oh, quite enough to get, Sir, as the soldier said ven they ordered him
three hundred and fifty lashes,’ replied Sam.

‘You must not tell us what the soldier, or any other man, said, Sir,’
interposed the judge; ‘it’s not evidence.’

‘Wery good, my Lord,’ replied Sam.

‘Do you recollect anything particular happening on the morning when you
were first engaged by the defendant; eh, Mr. Weller?’ said Serjeant
Buzfuz.

‘Yes, I do, sir,’ replied Sam.

‘Have the goodness to tell the jury what it was.’

‘I had a reg’lar new fit out o’ clothes that mornin’, gen’l’men of the
jury,’ said Sam, ‘and that was a wery partickler and uncommon
circumstance vith me in those days.’

Hereupon there was a general laugh; and the little judge, looking with
an angry countenance over his desk, said, ‘You had better be careful,
Sir.’

‘So Mr. Pickwick said at the time, my Lord,’ replied Sam; ‘and I was
wery careful o’ that ‘ere suit o’ clothes; wery careful indeed, my
Lord.’

The judge looked sternly at Sam for full two minutes, but Sam’s features
were so perfectly calm and serene that the judge said nothing, and
motioned Serjeant Buzfuz to proceed.

‘Do you mean to tell me, Mr. Weller,’ said Serjeant Buzfuz, folding his
arms emphatically, and turning half-round to the jury, as if in mute
assurance that he would bother the witness yet--‘do you mean to tell me,
Mr. Weller, that you saw nothing of this fainting on the part of the
plaintiff in the arms of the defendant, which you have heard described
by the witnesses?’

Certainly not,’ replied Sam; ‘I was in the passage till they called me
up, and then the old lady was not there.’

‘Now, attend, Mr. Weller,’ said Serjeant Buzfuz, dipping a large pen
into the inkstand before him, for the purpose of frightening Sam with a
show of taking down his answer. ‘You were in the passage, and yet saw
nothing of what was going forward. Have you a pair of eyes, Mr. Weller?’

‘Yes, I have a pair of eyes,’ replied Sam, ‘and that’s just it. If they
wos a pair o’ patent double million magnifyin’ gas microscopes of hextra
power, p’raps I might be able to see through a flight o’ stairs and a
deal door; but bein’ only eyes, you see, my wision ‘s limited.’

At this answer, which was delivered without the slightest appearance of
irritation, and with the most complete simplicity and equanimity of
manner, the spectators tittered, the little judge smiled, and Serjeant
Buzfuz looked particularly foolish. After a short consultation with
Dodson & Fogg, the learned Serjeant again turned towards Sam, and said,
with a painful effort to conceal his vexation, ‘Now, Mr. Weller, I’ll
ask you a question on another point, if you please.’

‘If you please, Sir,’ rejoined Sam, with the utmost good-humour.

‘Do you remember going up to Mrs. Bardell’s house, one night in November
last?’

Oh, yes, wery well.’

‘Oh, you do remember that, Mr. Weller,’ said Serjeant Buzfuz, recovering
his spirits; ‘I thought we should get at something at last.’

‘I rayther thought that, too, sir,’ replied Sam; and at this the
spectators tittered again.

‘Well; I suppose you went up to have a little talk about this trial--eh,
Mr. Weller?’ said Serjeant Buzfuz, looking knowingly at the jury.

‘I went up to pay the rent; but we did get a-talkin’ about the trial,’
replied Sam.

‘Oh, you did get a-talking about the trial,’ said Serjeant Buzfuz,
brightening up with the anticipation of some important discovery. ‘Now,
what passed about the trial; will you have the goodness to tell us, Mr.
Weller’?’

‘Vith all the pleasure in life, sir,’ replied Sam. ‘Arter a few
unimportant obserwations from the two wirtuous females as has been
examined here to-day, the ladies gets into a very great state o’
admiration at the honourable conduct of Mr. Dodson and Fogg--them two
gen’l’men as is settin’ near you now.’ This, of course, drew general
attention to Dodson & Fogg, who looked as virtuous as possible.

‘The attorneys for the plaintiff,’ said Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz. ‘Well! They
spoke in high praise of the honourable conduct of Messrs. Dodson and
Fogg, the attorneys for the plaintiff, did they?’

‘Yes,’ said Sam, ‘they said what a wery gen’rous thing it was o’ them to
have taken up the case on spec, and to charge nothing at all for costs,
unless they got ‘em out of Mr. Pickwick.’

At this very unexpected reply, the spectators tittered again, and Dodson
& Fogg, turning very red, leaned over to Serjeant Buzfuz, and in a
hurried manner whispered something in his ear.

‘You are quite right,’ said Serjeant Buzfuz aloud, with affected
composure. ‘It’s perfectly useless, my Lord, attempting to get at any
evidence through the impenetrable stupidity of this witness. I will not
trouble the court by asking him any more questions. Stand down, sir.’

‘Would any other gen’l’man like to ask me anythin’?’ inquired Sam,
taking up his hat, and looking round most deliberately.

‘Not I, Mr. Weller, thank you,’ said Serjeant Snubbin, laughing.

‘You may go down, sir,’ said Serjeant Buzfuz, waving his hand
impatiently. Sam went down accordingly, after doing Messrs. Dodson &
Fogg’s case as much harm as he conveniently could, and saying just as
little respecting Mr. Pickwick as might be, which was precisely the
object he had had in view all along.

‘I have no objection to admit, my Lord,’ said Serjeant Snubbin, ‘if it
will save the examination of another witness, that Mr. Pickwick has
retired from business, and is a gentleman of considerable independent
property.’

‘Very well,’ said Serjeant Buzfuz, putting in the two letters to be
read, ‘then that’s my case, my Lord.’

Serjeant Snubbin then addressed the jury on behalf of the defendant; and
a very long and a very emphatic address he delivered, in which he
bestowed the highest possible eulogiums on the conduct and character of
Mr. Pickwick; but inasmuch as our readers are far better able to form a
correct estimate of that gentleman’s merits and deserts, than Serjeant
Snubbin could possibly be, we do not feel called upon to enter at any
length into the learned gentleman’s observations. He attempted to show
that the letters which had been exhibited, merely related to Mr.
Pickwick’s dinner, or to the preparations for receiving him in his
apartments on his return from some country excursion. It is sufficient
to add in general terms, that he did the best he could for Mr. Pickwick;
and the best, as everybody knows, on the infallible authority of the old
adage, could do no more.

Mr. Justice Stareleigh summed up, in the old-established and most
approved form. He read as much of his notes to the jury as he could
decipher on so short a notice, and made running-comments on the evidence
as he went along. If Mrs. Bardell were right, it was perfectly clear
that Mr. Pickwick was wrong, and if they thought the evidence of Mrs.
Cluppins worthy of credence they would believe it, and, if they didn’t,
why, they wouldn’t. If they were satisfied that a breach of promise of
marriage had been committed they would find for the plaintiff with such
damages as they thought proper; and if, on the other hand, it appeared
to them that no promise of marriage had ever been given, they would find
for the defendant with no damages at all. The jury then retired to their
private room to talk the matter over, and the judge retired to _his
_private room, to refresh himself with a mutton chop and a glass of
sherry.

An anxious quarter of a hour elapsed; the jury came back; the judge was
fetched in. Mr. Pickwick put on his spectacles, and gazed at the foreman
with an agitated countenance and a quickly-beating heart.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the individual in black, ‘are you all agreed upon your
verdict?’

‘We are,’ replied the foreman.

‘Do you find for the plaintiff, gentlemen, or for the defendant?’

For the plaintiff.’

‘With what damages, gentlemen?’

‘Seven hundred and fifty pounds.’

Mr. Pickwick took off his spectacles, carefully wiped the glasses,
folded them into their case, and put them in his pocket; then, having
drawn on his gloves with great nicety, and stared at the foreman all the
while, he mechanically followed Mr. Perker and the blue bag out of
court.

They stopped in a side room while Perker paid the court fees; and here,
Mr. Pickwick was joined by his friends. Here, too, he encountered
Messrs. Dodson & Fogg, rubbing their hands with every token of outward
satisfaction.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Well, Sir,’ said Dodson, for self and partner.

‘You imagine you’ll get your costs, don’t you, gentlemen?’ said Mr.
Pickwick.

Fogg said they thought it rather probable. Dodson smiled, and said
they’d try.

‘You may try, and try, and try again, Messrs. Dodson and Fogg,’ said Mr.
Pickwick vehemently, ‘but not one farthing of costs or damages do you
ever get from me, if I spend the rest of my existence in a debtor’s
prison.’

‘Ha! ha!’ laughed Dodson. ‘You’ll think better of that, before next
term, Mr. Pickwick.’

‘He, he, he! We’ll soon see about that, Mr. Pickwick,’ grinned Fogg.

Speechless with indignation, Mr. Pickwick allowed himself to be led by
his solicitor and friends to the door, and there assisted into a
hackney-coach, which had been fetched for the purpose, by the ever-
watchful Sam Weller.

Sam had put up the steps, and was preparing to jump upon the box, when
he felt himself gently touched on the shoulder; and, looking round, his
father stood before him. The old gentleman’s countenance wore a mournful
expression, as he shook his head gravely, and said, in warning accents--

‘I know’d what ‘ud come o’ this here mode o’ doin’ bisness. Oh, Sammy,
Sammy, vy worn’t there a alleybi!’



CHAPTER XXXV. IN WHICH MR. PICKWICK THINKS HE HAD BETTER GO TO BATH; AND
GOES ACCORDINGLY

But surely, my dear sir,’ said little Perker, as he stood in Mr.
Pickwick’s apartment on the morning after the trial, ‘surely you don’t
really mean--really and seriously now, and irritation apart--that you
won’t pay these costs and damages?’

‘Not one halfpenny,’ said Mr. Pickwick firmly; ‘not one halfpenny.’

‘Hooroar for the principle, as the money-lender said ven he vouldn’t
renew the bill,’ observed Mr. Weller, who was clearing away the
breakfast-things.

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘have the goodness to step downstairs.’

‘Cert’nly, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller; and acting on Mr. Pickwick’s gentle
hint, Sam retired.

‘No, Perker,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with great seriousness of manner, ‘my
friends here have endeavoured to dissuade me from this determination,
but without avail. I shall employ myself as usual, until the opposite
party have the power of issuing a legal process of execution against me;
and if they are vile enough to avail themselves of it, and to arrest my
person, I shall yield myself up with perfect cheerfulness and content of
heart. When can they do this?’

‘They can issue execution, my dear Sir, for the amount of the damages
and taxed costs, next term,’ replied Perker, ‘just two months hence, my
dear sir.’

‘Very good,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Until that time, my dear fellow, let me
hear no more of the matter. And now,’ continued Mr. Pickwick, looking
round on his friends with a good-humoured smile, and a sparkle in the
eye which no spectacles could dim or conceal, ‘the only question is,
Where shall we go next?’

Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass were too much affected by their friend’s
heroism to offer any reply. Mr. Winkle had not yet sufficiently
recovered the recollection of his evidence at the trial, to make any
observation on any subject, so Mr. Pickwick paused in vain.

‘Well,’ said that gentleman, ‘if you leave me to suggest our
destination, I say Bath. I think none of us have ever been there.’

Nobody had; and as the proposition was warmly seconded by Perker, who
considered it extremely probable that if Mr. Pickwick saw a little
change and gaiety he would be inclined to think better of his
determination, and worse of a debtor’s prison, it was carried
unanimously; and Sam was at once despatched to the White Horse Cellar,
to take five places by the half-past seven o’clock coach, next morning.

There were just two places to be had inside, and just three to be had
out; so Sam Weller booked for them all, and having exchanged a few
compliments with the booking-office clerk on the subject of a pewter
half-crown which was tendered him as a portion of his ‘change,’ walked
back to the George and Vulture, where he was pretty busily employed
until bed-time in reducing clothes and linen into the smallest possible
compass, and exerting his mechanical genius in constructing a variety of
ingenious devices for keeping the lids on boxes which had neither locks
nor hinges.

The next was a very unpropitious morning for a journey--muggy, damp, and
drizzly. The horses in the stages that were going out, and had come
through the city, were smoking so, that the outside passengers were
invisible. The newspaper-sellers looked moist, and smelled mouldy; the
wet ran off the hats of the orange-vendors as they thrust their heads
into the coach windows, and diluted the insides in a refreshing manner.
The Jews with the fifty-bladed penknives shut them up in despair; the
men with the pocket-books made pocket-books of them. Watch-guards and
toasting-forks were alike at a discount, and pencil-cases and sponges
were a drug in the market.

Leaving Sam Weller to rescue the luggage from the seven or eight porters
who flung themselves savagely upon it, the moment the coach stopped, and
finding that they were about twenty minutes too early, Mr. Pickwick and
his friends went for shelter into the travellers’ room--the last
resource of human dejection.

The travellers’ room at the White Horse Cellar is of course
uncomfortable; it would be no travellers’ room if it were not. It is the
right-hand parlour, into which an aspiring kitchen fireplace appears to
have walked, accompanied by a rebellious poker, tongs, and shovel. It is
divided into boxes, for the solitary confinement of travellers, and is
furnished with a clock, a looking-glass, and a live waiter, which latter
article is kept in a small kennel for washing glasses, in a corner of
the apartment.

One of these boxes was occupied, on this particular occasion, by a
stern-eyed man of about five-and-forty, who had a bald and glossy
forehead, with a good deal of black hair at the sides and back of his
head, and large black whiskers. He was buttoned up to the chin in a
brown coat; and had a large sealskin travelling-cap, and a greatcoat and
cloak, lying on the seat beside him. He looked up from his breakfast as
Mr. Pickwick entered, with a fierce and peremptory air, which was very
dignified; and, having scrutinised that gentleman and his companions to
his entire satisfaction, hummed a tune, in a manner which seemed to say
that he rather suspected somebody wanted to take advantage of him, but
it wouldn’t do.

‘Waiter,’ said the gentleman with the whiskers.

‘Sir?’ replied a man with a dirty complexion, and a towel of the same,
emerging from the kennel before mentioned.

‘Some more toast.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Buttered toast, mind,’ said the gentleman fiercely.

‘Directly, sir,’ replied the waiter.

The gentleman with the whiskers hummed a tune in the same manner as
before, and pending the arrival of the toast, advanced to the front of
the fire, and, taking his coat tails under his arms, looked at his boots
and ruminated.

‘I wonder whereabouts in Bath this coach puts up,’ said Mr. Pickwick,
mildly addressing Mr. Winkle.

‘Hum--eh--what’s that?’ said the strange man.

‘I made an observation to my friend, sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, always
ready to enter into conversation. ‘I wondered at what house the Bath
coach put up. Perhaps you can inform me.’

Are you going to Bath?’ said the strange man.

‘I am, sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘And those other gentlemen?’

‘They are going also,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Not inside--I’ll be damned if you’re going inside,’ said the strange
man.

‘Not all of us,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘No, not all of you,’ said the strange man emphatically. ‘I’ve taken two
places. If they try to squeeze six people into an infernal box that only
holds four, I’ll take a post-chaise and bring an action. I’ve paid my
fare. It won’t do; I told the clerk when I took my places that it
wouldn’t do. I know these things have been done. I know they are done
every day; but I never was done, and I never will be. Those who know me
best, best know it; crush me!’ Here the fierce gentleman rang the bell
with great violence, and told the waiter he’d better bring the toast in
five seconds, or he’d know the reason why.

‘My good sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘you will allow me to observe that
this is a very unnecessary display of excitement. I have only taken
places inside for two.’

‘I am glad to hear it,’ said the fierce man. ‘I withdraw my expressions.
I tender an apology. There’s my card. Give me your acquaintance.’

‘With great pleasure, Sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘We are to be fellow-
travellers, and I hope we shall find each other’s society mutually
agreeable.’

‘I hope we shall,’ said the fierce gentleman. ‘I know we shall. I like
your looks; they please me. Gentlemen, your hands and names. Know me.’

Of course, an interchange of friendly salutations followed this gracious
speech; and the fierce gentleman immediately proceeded to inform the
friends, in the same short, abrupt, jerking sentences, that his name was
Dowler; that he was going to Bath on pleasure; that he was formerly in
the army; that he had now set up in business as a gentleman; that he
lived upon the profits; and that the individual for whom the second
place was taken, was a personage no less illustrious than Mrs. Dowler,
his lady wife.

‘She’s a fine woman,’ said Mr. Dowler. ‘I am proud of her. I have
reason.’

‘I hope I shall have the pleasure of judging,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with a
smile.

‘You shall,’ replied Dowler. ‘She shall know you. She shall esteem you.
I courted her under singular circumstances. I won her through a rash
vow. Thus. I saw her; I loved her; I proposed; she refused me.--“You
love another?”--“Spare my blushes.”--“I know him.”--“You do.”--“Very
good; if he remains here, I’ll skin him.”’

‘Lord bless me!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick involuntarily.

‘Did you skin the gentleman, Sir?’ inquired Mr. Winkle, with a very pale
face.

‘I wrote him a note, I said it was a painful thing. And so it was.’

‘Certainly,’ interposed Mr. Winkle.

‘I said I had pledged my word as a gentleman to skin him. My character
was at stake. I had no alternative. As an officer in His Majesty’s
service, I was bound to skin him. I regretted the necessity, but it must
be done. He was open to conviction. He saw that the rules of the service
were imperative. He fled. I married her. Here’s the coach. That’s her
head.’

As Mr. Dowler concluded, he pointed to a stage which had just driven up,
from the open window of which a rather pretty face in a bright blue
bonnet was looking among the crowd on the pavement, most probably for
the rash man himself. Mr. Dowler paid his bill, and hurried out with his
travelling cap, coat, and cloak; and Mr. Pickwick and his friends
followed to secure their places.

Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass had seated themselves at the back part of
the coach; Mr. Winkle had got inside; and Mr. Pickwick was preparing to
follow him, when Sam Weller came up to his master, and whispering in his
ear, begged to speak to him, with an air of the deepest mystery.

‘Well, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘what’s the matter now?’

‘Here’s rayther a rum go, sir,’ replied Sam.

‘What?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘This here, Sir,’ rejoined Sam. ‘I’m wery much afeerd, sir, that the
properiator o’ this here coach is a playin’ some imperence vith us.’

‘How is that, Sam?’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘aren’t the names down on the
way-bill?’

‘The names is not only down on the vay-bill, Sir,’ replied Sam, ‘but
they’ve painted vun on ‘em up, on the door o’ the coach.’ As Sam spoke,
he pointed to that part of the coach door on which the proprietor’s name
usually appears; and there, sure enough, in gilt letters of a goodly
size, was the magic name of _Pickwick_!

‘Dear me,’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, quite staggered by the coincidence;
‘what a very extraordinary thing!’

‘Yes, but that ain’t all,’ said Sam, again directing his master’s
attention to the coach door; ‘not content vith writin’ up “Pick-wick,”
 they puts “Moses” afore it, vich I call addin’ insult to injury, as the
parrot said ven they not only took him from his native land, but made
him talk the English langwidge arterwards.’

‘It’s odd enough, certainly, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘but if we stand
talking here, we shall lose our places.’

‘Wot, ain’t nothin’ to be done in consequence, sir?’ exclaimed Sam,
perfectly aghast at the coolness with which Mr. Pickwick prepared to
ensconce himself inside.

‘Done!’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘What should be done?’

Ain’t nobody to be whopped for takin’ this here liberty, sir?’ said Mr.
Weller, who had expected that at least he would have been commissioned
to challenge the guard and the coachman to a pugilistic encounter on the
spot.

‘Certainly not,’ replied Mr. Pickwick eagerly; ‘not on any account. Jump
up to your seat directly.’

‘I am wery much afeered,’ muttered Sam to himself, as he turned away,
‘that somethin’ queer’s come over the governor, or he’d never ha’ stood
this so quiet. I hope that ‘ere trial hasn’t broke his spirit, but it
looks bad, wery bad.’ Mr. Weller shook his head gravely; and it is
worthy of remark, as an illustration of the manner in which he took this
circumstance to heart, that he did not speak another word until the
coach reached the Kensington turnpike. Which was so long a time for him
to remain taciturn, that the fact may be considered wholly
unprecedented.

Nothing worthy of special mention occurred during the journey. Mr.
Dowler related a variety of anecdotes, all illustrative of his own
personal prowess and desperation, and appealed to Mrs. Dowler in
corroboration thereof; when Mrs. Dowler invariably brought in, in the
form of an appendix, some remarkable fact or circumstance which Mr.
Dowler had forgotten, or had perhaps through modesty, omitted; for the
addenda in every instance went to show that Mr. Dowler was even a more
wonderful fellow than he made himself out to be. Mr. Pickwick and Mr.
Winkle listened with great admiration, and at intervals conversed with
Mrs. Dowler, who was a very agreeable and fascinating person. So, what
between Mr. Dowler’s stories, and Mrs. Dowler’s charms, and Mr.
Pickwick’s good-humour, and Mr. Winkle’s good listening, the insides
contrived to be very companionable all the way.

The outsides did as outsides always do. They were very cheerful and
talkative at the beginning of every stage, and very dismal and sleepy in
the middle, and very bright and wakeful again towards the end. There was
one young gentleman in an India-rubber cloak, who smoked cigars all day;
and there was another young gentleman in a parody upon a greatcoat, who
lighted a good many, and feeling obviously unsettled after the second
whiff, threw them away when he thought nobody was looking at him. There
was a third young man on the box who wished to be learned in cattle; and
an old one behind, who was familiar with farming. There was a constant
succession of Christian names in smock-frocks and white coats, who were
invited to have a ‘lift’ by the guard, and who knew every horse and
hostler on the road and off it; and there was a dinner which would have
been cheap at half-a-crown a mouth, if any moderate number of mouths
could have eaten it in the time. And at seven o’clock P.M. Mr. Pickwick
and his friends, and Mr. Dowler and his wife, respectively retired to
their private sitting-rooms at the White Hart Hotel, opposite the Great
Pump Room, Bath, where the waiters, from their costume, might be
mistaken for Westminster boys, only they destroy the illusion by
behaving themselves much better.

Breakfast had scarcely been cleared away on the succeeding morning, when
a waiter brought in Mr. Dowler’s card, with a request to be allowed
permission to introduce a friend. Mr. Dowler at once followed up the
delivery of the card, by bringing himself and the friend also.

The friend was a charming young man of not much more than fifty, dressed
in a very bright blue coat with resplendent buttons, black trousers, and
the thinnest possible pair of highly-polished boots. A gold eye-glass
was suspended from his neck by a short, broad, black ribbon; a gold
snuff-box was lightly clasped in his left hand; gold rings innumerable
glittered on his fingers; and a large diamond pin set in gold glistened
in his shirt frill. He had a gold watch, and a gold curb chain with
large gold seals; and he carried a pliant ebony cane with a gold top.
His linen was of the very whitest, finest, and stiffest; his wig of the
glossiest, blackest, and curliest. His snuff was princes’ mixture; his
scent _bouquet du roi_. His features were contracted into a perpetual
smile; and his teeth were in such perfect order that it was difficult at
a small distance to tell the real from the false.

‘Mr. Pickwick,’ said Mr. Dowler; ‘my friend, Angelo Cyrus Bantam,
Esquire, M.C.; Bantam; Mr. Pickwick. Know each other.’

‘Welcome to Ba--ath, Sir. This is indeed an acquisition. Most welcome to
Ba--ath, sir. It is long--very long, Mr. Pickwick, since you drank the
waters. It appears an age, Mr. Pickwick. Re-markable!’

Such were the expressions with which Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esquire, M.C.,
took Mr. Pickwick’s hand; retaining it in his, meantime, and shrugging
up his shoulders with a constant succession of bows, as if he really
could not make up his mind to the trial of letting it go again.

‘It is a very long time since I drank the waters, certainly,’ replied
Mr. Pickwick; ‘for, to the best of my knowledge, I was never here
before.’

‘Never in Ba--ath, Mr. Pickwick!’ exclaimed the Grand Master, letting
the hand fall in astonishment. ‘Never in Ba--ath! He! he! Mr. Pickwick,
you are a wag. Not bad, not bad. Good, good. He! he! he! Re-markable!’

‘To my shame, I must say that I am perfectly serious,’ rejoined Mr.
Pickwick. ‘I really never was here before.’

‘Oh, I see,’ exclaimed the Grand Master, looking extremely pleased;
‘yes, yes--good, good--better and better. You are the gentleman of whom
we have heard. Yes; we know you, Mr. Pickwick; we know you.’

‘The reports of the trial in those confounded papers,’ thought Mr.
Pickwick. ‘They have heard all about me.’

You are the gentleman residing on Clapham Green,’ resumed Bantam, ‘who
lost the use of his limbs from imprudently taking cold after port wine;
who could not be moved in consequence of acute suffering, and who had
the water from the king’s bath bottled at one hundred and three degrees,
and sent by wagon to his bedroom in town, where he bathed, sneezed, and
the same day recovered. Very remarkable!’

Mr. Pickwick acknowledged the compliment which the supposition implied,
but had the self-denial to repudiate it, notwithstanding; and taking
advantage of a moment’s silence on the part of the M.C., begged to
introduce his friends, Mr. Tupman, Mr. Winkle, and Mr. Snodgrass. An
introduction which overwhelmed the M.C. with delight and honour.

‘Bantam,’ said Mr. Dowler, ‘Mr. Pickwick and his friends are strangers.
They must put their names down. Where’s the book?’

‘The register of the distinguished visitors in Ba--ath will be at the
Pump Room this morning at two o’clock,’ replied the M.C. ‘Will you guide
our friends to that splendid building, and enable me to procure their
autographs?’

‘I will,’ rejoined Dowler. ‘This is a long call. It’s time to go. I
shall be here again in an hour. Come.’

‘This is a ball-night,’ said the M.C., again taking Mr. Pickwick’s hand,
as he rose to go. ‘The ball-nights in Ba--ath are moments snatched from
paradise; rendered bewitching by music, beauty, elegance, fashion,
etiquette, and--and--above all, by the absence of tradespeople, who are
quite inconsistent with paradise, and who have an amalgamation of
themselves at the Guildhall every fortnight, which is, to say the least,
remarkable. Good-bye, good-bye!’ and protesting all the way downstairs
that he was most satisfied, and most delighted, and most overpowered,
and most flattered, Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esquire, M.C., stepped into a
very elegant chariot that waited at the door, and rattled off.

At the appointed hour, Mr. Pickwick and his friends, escorted by Dowler,
repaired to the Assembly Rooms, and wrote their names down in the book--
an instance of condescension at which Angelo Bantam was even more
overpowered than before. Tickets of admission to that evening’s assembly
were to have been prepared for the whole party, but as they were not
ready, Mr. Pickwick undertook, despite all the protestations to the
contrary of Angelo Bantam, to send Sam for them at four o’clock in the
afternoon, to the M.C.’s house in Queen Square. Having taken a short
walk through the city, and arrived at the unanimous conclusion that Park
Street was very much like the perpendicular streets a man sees in a
dream, which he cannot get up for the life of him, they returned to the
White Hart, and despatched Sam on the errand to which his master had
pledged him.

Sam Weller put on his hat in a very easy and graceful manner, and,
thrusting his hands in his waistcoat pockets, walked with great
deliberation to Queen Square, whistling as he went along, several of the
most popular airs of the day, as arranged with entirely new movements
for that noble instrument the organ, either mouth or barrel. Arriving at
the number in Queen Square to which he had been directed, he left off
whistling and gave a cheerful knock, which was instantaneously answered
by a powdered-headed footman in gorgeous livery, and of symmetrical
stature.

‘Is this here Mr. Bantam’s, old feller?’ inquired Sam Weller, nothing
abashed by the blaze of splendour which burst upon his sight in the
person of the powdered-headed footman with the gorgeous livery.

‘Why, young man?’ was the haughty inquiry of the powdered-headed
footman.

‘’Cos if it is, jist you step in to him with that ‘ere card, and say Mr.
Veller’s a-waitin’, will you?’ said Sam. And saying it, he very coolly
walked into the hall, and sat down.

The powdered-headed footman slammed the door very hard, and scowled very
grandly; but both the slam and the scowl were lost upon Sam, who was
regarding a mahogany umbrella-stand with every outward token of critical
approval.

Apparently his master’s reception of the card had impressed the
powdered-headed footman in Sam’s favour, for when he came back from
delivering it, he smiled in a friendly manner, and said that the answer
would be ready directly.

‘Wery good,’ said Sam. ‘Tell the old gen’l’m’n not to put himself in a
perspiration. No hurry, six-foot. I’ve had my dinner.’

‘You dine early, sir,’ said the powdered-headed footman.

‘I find I gets on better at supper when I does,’ replied Sam.

‘Have you been long in Bath, sir?’ inquired the powdered-headed footman.
‘I have not had the pleasure of hearing of you before.’

‘I haven’t created any wery surprisin’ sensation here, as yet,’ rejoined
Sam, ‘for me and the other fash’nables only come last night.’

‘Nice place, Sir,’ said the powdered-headed footman.

‘Seems so,’ observed Sam.

‘Pleasant society, sir,’ remarked the powdered-headed footman. ‘Very
agreeable servants, sir.’

‘I should think they wos,’ replied Sam. ‘Affable, unaffected, say-
nothin’-to-nobody sorts o’ fellers.’

‘Oh, very much so, indeed, sir,’ said the powdered-headed footman,
taking Sam’s remarks as a high compliment. ‘Very much so indeed. Do you
do anything in this way, Sir?’ inquired the tall footman, producing a
small snuff-box with a fox’s head on the top of it.

‘Not without sneezing,’ replied Sam.

‘Why, it _is_ difficult, sir, I confess,’ said the tall footman. ‘It may
be done by degrees, Sir. Coffee is the best practice. I carried coffee,
Sir, for a long time. It looks very like rappee, sir.’

Here, a sharp peal at the bell reduced the powdered-headed footman to
the ignominious necessity of putting the fox’s head in his pocket, and
hastening with a humble countenance to Mr. Bantam’s ‘study.’ By the bye,
who ever knew a man who never read or wrote either, who hadn’t got some
small back parlour which he _would _call a study!

‘There is the answer, sir,’ said the powdered-headed footman. ‘I’m
afraid you’ll find it inconveniently large.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ said Sam, taking a letter with a small enclosure.
‘It’s just possible as exhausted natur’ may manage to surwive it.’

‘I hope we shall meet again, Sir,’ said the powdered-headed footman,
rubbing his hands, and following Sam out to the door-step.

‘You are wery obligin’, sir,’ replied Sam. ‘Now, don’t allow yourself to
be fatigued beyond your powers; there’s a amiable bein’. Consider what
you owe to society, and don’t let yourself be injured by too much work.
For the sake o’ your feller-creeturs, keep yourself as quiet as you can;
only think what a loss you would be!’ With these pathetic words, Sam
Weller departed.

‘A very singular young man that,’ said the powdered-headed footman,
looking after Mr. Weller, with a countenance which clearly showed he
could make nothing of him.

Sam said nothing at all. He winked, shook his head, smiled, winked
again; and, with an expression of countenance which seemed to denote
that he was greatly amused with something or other, walked merrily away.

At precisely twenty minutes before eight o’clock that night, Angelo
Cyrus Bantam, Esq., the Master of the Ceremonies, emerged from his
chariot at the door of the Assembly Rooms in the same wig, the same
teeth, the same eye-glass, the same watch and seals, the same rings, the
same shirt-pin, and the same cane. The only observable alterations in
his appearance were, that he wore a brighter blue coat, with a white
silk lining, black tights, black silk stockings, and pumps, and a white
waistcoat, and was, if possible, just a thought more scented.

Thus attired, the Master of the Ceremonies, in strict discharge of the
important duties of his all-important office, planted himself in the
room to receive the company.

Bath being full, the company, and the sixpences for tea, poured in, in
shoals. In the ballroom, the long card-room, the octagonal card-room,
the staircases, and the passages, the hum of many voices, and the sound
of many feet, were perfectly bewildering. Dresses rustled, feathers
waved, lights shone, and jewels sparkled. There was the music--not of
the quadrille band, for it had not yet commenced; but the music of soft,
tiny footsteps, with now and then a clear, merry laugh--low and gentle,
but very pleasant to hear in a female voice, whether in Bath or
elsewhere. Brilliant eyes, lighted up with pleasurable expectation,
gleamed from every side; and, look where you would, some exquisite form
glided gracefully through the throng, and was no sooner lost, than it
was replaced by another as dainty and bewitching.

In the tea-room, and hovering round the card-tables, were a vast number
of queer old ladies, and decrepit old gentlemen, discussing all the
small talk and scandal of the day, with a relish and gusto which
sufficiently bespoke the intensity of the pleasure they derived from the
occupation. Mingled with these groups, were three or four match-making
mammas, appearing to be wholly absorbed by the conversation in which
they were taking part, but failing not from time to time to cast an
anxious sidelong glance upon their daughters, who, remembering the
maternal injunction to make the best use of their youth, had already
commenced incipient flirtations in the mislaying scarves, putting on
gloves, setting down cups, and so forth; slight matters apparently, but
which may be turned to surprisingly good account by expert
practitioners.

Lounging near the doors, and in remote corners, were various knots of
silly young men, displaying various varieties of puppyism and stupidity;
amusing all sensible people near them with their folly and conceit; and
happily thinking themselves the objects of general admiration--a wise
and merciful dispensation which no good man will quarrel with.

And lastly, seated on some of the back benches, where they had already
taken up their positions for the evening, were divers unmarried ladies
past their grand climacteric, who, not dancing because there were no
partners for them, and not playing cards lest they should be set down as
irretrievably single, were in the favourable situation of being able to
abuse everybody without reflecting on themselves. In short, they could
abuse everybody, because everybody was there. It was a scene of gaiety,
glitter, and show; of richly-dressed people, handsome mirrors, chalked
floors, girandoles and wax-candles; and in all parts of the scene,
gliding from spot to spot in silent softness, bowing obsequiously to
this party, nodding familiarly to that, and smiling complacently on all,
was the sprucely-attired person of Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esquire, the
Master of the Ceremonies.

‘Stop in the tea-room. Take your sixpenn’orth. Then lay on hot water,
and call it tea. Drink it,’ said Mr. Dowler, in a loud voice, directing
Mr. Pickwick, who advanced at the head of the little party, with Mrs.
Dowler on his arm. Into the tea-room Mr. Pickwick turned; and catching
sight of him, Mr. Bantam corkscrewed his way through the crowd and
welcomed him with ecstasy.

‘My dear Sir, I am highly honoured. Ba--ath is favoured. Mrs. Dowler,
you embellish the rooms. I congratulate you on your feathers. Re-
markable!’

‘Anybody here?’ inquired Dowler suspiciously.

‘Anybody! The _elite _of Ba--ath. Mr. Pickwick, do you see the old lady
in the gauze turban?’

‘The fat old lady?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick innocently.

‘Hush, my dear sir--nobody’s fat or old in Ba--ath. That’s the Dowager
Lady Snuphanuph.’

‘Is it, indeed?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘No less a person, I assure you,’ said the Master of the Ceremonies.
‘Hush. Draw a little nearer, Mr. Pickwick. You see the splendidly-
dressed young man coming this way?’

‘The one with the long hair, and the particularly small forehead?’
inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘The same. The richest young man in Ba--ath at this moment. Young Lord
Mutanhed.’

‘You don’t say so?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes. You’ll hear his voice in a moment, Mr. Pickwick. He’ll speak to
me. The other gentleman with him, in the red under-waistcoat and dark
moustache, is the Honourable Mr. Crushton, his bosom friend. How do you
do, my Lord?’

‘Veway hot, Bantam,’ said his Lordship.

‘It _is_ very warm, my Lord,’ replied the M.C.

‘Confounded,’ assented the Honourable Mr. Crushton.

‘Have you seen his Lordship’s mail-cart, Bantam?’ inquired the
Honourable Mr. Crushton, after a short pause, during which young Lord
Mutanhed had been endeavouring to stare Mr. Pickwick out of countenance,
and Mr. Crushton had been reflecting what subject his Lordship could
talk about best.

‘Dear me, no,’ replied the M.C. ‘A mail-cart! What an excellent idea.
Re-markable!’

‘Gwacious heavens!’ said his Lordship, ‘I thought evewebody had seen the
new mail-cart; it’s the neatest, pwettiest, gwacefullest thing that ever
wan upon wheels. Painted wed, with a cweam piebald.’

‘With a real box for the letters, and all complete,’ said the Honourable
Mr. Crushton.

‘And a little seat in fwont, with an iwon wail, for the dwiver,’ added
his Lordship. ‘I dwove it over to Bwistol the other morning, in a
cwimson coat, with two servants widing a quarter of a mile behind; and
confound me if the people didn’t wush out of their cottages, and awest
my pwogwess, to know if I wasn’t the post. Glorwious--glorwious!’

At this anecdote his Lordship laughed very heartily, as did the
listeners, of course. Then, drawing his arm through that of the
obsequious Mr. Crushton, Lord Mutanhed walked away.

‘Delightful young man, his Lordship,’ said the Master of the Ceremonies.

‘So I should think,’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick drily.

The dancing having commenced, the necessary introductions having been
made, and all preliminaries arranged, Angelo Bantam rejoined Mr.
Pickwick, and led him into the card-room.

Just at the very moment of their entrance, the Dowager Lady Snuphanuph
and two other ladies of an ancient and whist-like appearance, were
hovering over an unoccupied card-table; and they no sooner set eyes upon
Mr. Pickwick under the convoy of Angelo Bantam, than they exchanged
glances with each other, seeing that he was precisely the very person
they wanted, to make up the rubber.

‘My dear Bantam,’ said the Dowager Lady Snuphanuph coaxingly, ‘find us
some nice creature to make up this table; there’s a good soul.’ Mr.
Pickwick happened to be looking another way at the moment, so her
Ladyship nodded her head towards him, and frowned expressively.

‘My friend Mr. Pickwick, my Lady, will be most happy, I am sure,
remarkably so,’ said the M.C., taking the hint. ‘Mr. Pickwick, Lady
Snuphanuph--Mrs. Colonel Wugsby--Miss Bolo.’


Mr. Pickwick bowed to each of the ladies, and, finding escape
impossible, cut. Mr. Pickwick and Miss Bolo against Lady Snuphanuph and
Mrs. Colonel Wugsby.

As the trump card was turned up, at the commencement of the second deal,
two young ladies hurried into the room, and took their stations on
either side of Mrs. Colonel Wugsby’s chair, where they waited patiently
until the hand was over.

‘Now, Jane,’ said Mrs. Colonel Wugsby, turning to one of the girls,
‘what is it?’

I came to ask, ma, whether I might dance with the youngest Mr. Crawley,’
whispered the prettier and younger of the two.

‘Good God, Jane, how can you think of such things?’ replied the mamma
indignantly. ‘Haven’t you repeatedly heard that his father has eight
hundred a year, which dies with him? I am ashamed of you. Not on any
account.’

‘Ma,’ whispered the other, who was much older than her sister, and very
insipid and artificial, ‘Lord Mutanhed has been introduced to me. I said
I thought I wasn’t engaged, ma.’

‘You’re a sweet pet, my love,’ replied Mrs. Colonel Wugsby, tapping her
daughter’s cheek with her fan, ‘and are always to be trusted. He’s
immensely rich, my dear. Bless you!’ With these words Mrs. Colonel
Wugsby kissed her eldest daughter most affectionately, and frowning in a
warning manner upon the other, sorted her cards.

Poor Mr. Pickwick! he had never played with three thorough-paced female
card-players before. They were so desperately sharp, that they quite
frightened him. If he played a wrong card, Miss Bolo looked a small
armoury of daggers; if he stopped to consider which was the right one,
Lady Snuphanuph would throw herself back in her chair, and smile with a
mingled glance of impatience and pity to Mrs. Colonel Wugsby, at which
Mrs. Colonel Wugsby would shrug up her shoulders, and cough, as much as
to say she wondered whether he ever would begin. Then, at the end of
every hand, Miss Bolo would inquire with a dismal countenance and
reproachful sigh, why Mr. Pickwick had not returned that diamond, or led
the club, or roughed the spade, or finessed the heart, or led through
the honour, or brought out the ace, or played up to the king, or some
such thing; and in reply to all these grave charges, Mr. Pickwick would
be wholly unable to plead any justification whatever, having by this
time forgotten all about the game. People came and looked on, too, which
made Mr. Pickwick nervous. Besides all this, there was a great deal of
distracting conversation near the table, between Angelo Bantam and the
two Misses Matinter, who, being single and singular, paid great court to
the Master of the Ceremonies, in the hope of getting a stray partner now
and then. All these things, combined with the noises and interruptions
of constant comings in and goings out, made Mr. Pickwick play rather
badly; the cards were against him, also; and when they left off at ten
minutes past eleven, Miss Bolo rose from the table considerably
agitated, and went straight home, in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair.

Being joined by his friends, who one and all protested that they had
scarcely ever spent a more pleasant evening, Mr. Pickwick accompanied
them to the White Hart, and having soothed his feelings with something
hot, went to bed, and to sleep, almost simultaneously.



CHAPTER XXXVI. THE CHIEF FEATURES OF WHICH WILL BE FOUND TO BE AN
AUTHENTIC VERSION OF THE LEGEND OF PRINCE BLADUD, AND A MOST
EXTRAORDINARY CALAMITY THAT BEFELL MR. WINKLE

As Mr. Pickwick contemplated a stay of at least two months in Bath, he
deemed it advisable to take private lodgings for himself and friends for
that period; and as a favourable opportunity offered for their securing,
on moderate terms, the upper portion of a house in the Royal Crescent,
which was larger than they required, Mr. and Mrs. Dowler offered to
relieve them of a bedroom and sitting-room. This proposition was at once
accepted, and in three days’ time they were all located in their new
abode, when Mr. Pickwick began to drink the waters with the utmost
assiduity. Mr. Pickwick took them systematically. He drank a quarter of
a pint before breakfast, and then walked up a hill; and another quarter
of a pint after breakfast, and then walked down a hill; and, after every
fresh quarter of a pint, Mr. Pickwick declared, in the most solemn and
emphatic terms, that he felt a great deal better; whereat his friends
were very much delighted, though they had not been previously aware that
there was anything the matter with him.

The Great Pump Room is a spacious saloon, ornamented with Corinthian
pillars, and a music-gallery, and a Tompion clock, and a statue of Nash,
and a golden inscription, to which all the water-drinkers should attend,
for it appeals to them in the cause of a deserving charity. There is a
large bar with a marble vase, out of which the pumper gets the water;
and there are a number of yellow-looking tumblers, out of which the
company get it; and it is a most edifying and satisfactory sight to
behold the perseverance and gravity with which they swallow it. There
are baths near at hand, in which a part of the company wash themselves;
and a band plays afterwards, to congratulate the remainder on their
having done so. There is another pump room, into which infirm ladies and
gentlemen are wheeled, in such an astonishing variety of chairs and
chaises, that any adventurous individual who goes in with the regular
number of toes, is in imminent danger of coming out without them; and
there is a third, into which the quiet people go, for it is less noisy
than either. There is an immensity of promenading, on crutches and off,
with sticks and without, and a great deal of conversation, and
liveliness, and pleasantry.

Every morning, the regular water-drinkers, Mr. Pickwick among the
number, met each other in the pump room, took their quarter of a pint,
and walked constitutionally. At the afternoon’s promenade, Lord
Mutanhed, and the Honourable Mr. Crushton, the Dowager Lady Snuphanuph,
Mrs. Colonel Wugsby, and all the great people, and all the morning
water-drinkers, met in grand assemblage. After this, they walked out, or
drove out, or were pushed out in bath-chairs, and met one another again.
After this, the gentlemen went to the reading-rooms, and met divisions
of the mass. After this, they went home. If it were theatre-night,
perhaps they met at the theatre; if it were assembly-night, they met at
the rooms; and if it were neither, they met the next day. A very
pleasant routine, with perhaps a slight tinge of sameness.

Mr. Pickwick was sitting up by himself, after a day spent in this
manner, making entries in his journal, his friends having retired to
bed, when he was roused by a gentle tap at the room door.

‘Beg your pardon, Sir,’ said Mrs. Craddock, the landlady, peeping in;
‘but did you want anything more, sir?’

‘Nothing more, ma’am,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘My young girl is gone to bed, Sir,’ said Mrs. Craddock; ‘and Mr. Dowler
is good enough to say that he’ll sit up for Mrs. Dowler, as the party
isn’t expected to be over till late; so I was thinking that if you
wanted nothing more, Mr. Pickwick, I would go to bed.’

‘By all means, ma’am,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Wish you good-night, Sir,’ said Mrs. Craddock.

‘Good-night, ma’am,’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick.

Mrs. Craddock closed the door, and Mr. Pickwick resumed his writing.

In half an hour’s time the entries were concluded. Mr. Pickwick
carefully rubbed the last page on the blotting-paper, shut up the book,
wiped his pen on the bottom of the inside of his coat tail, and opened
the drawer of the inkstand to put it carefully away. There were a couple
of sheets of writing-paper, pretty closely written over, in the inkstand
drawer, and they were folded so, that the title, which was in a good
round hand, was fully disclosed to him. Seeing from this, that it was no
private document; and as it seemed to relate to Bath, and was very
short: Mr. Pick-wick unfolded it, lighted his bedroom candle that it
might burn up well by the time he finished; and drawing his chair nearer
the fire, read as follows--


THE TRUE LEGEND OF PRINCE BLADUD

‘Less than two hundred years ago, on one of the public baths in this
city, there appeared an inscription in honour of its mighty founder, the
renowned Prince Bladud. That inscription is now erased.

‘For many hundred years before that time, there had been handed down,
from age to age, an old legend, that the illustrious prince being
afflicted with leprosy, on his return from reaping a rich harvest of
knowledge in Athens, shunned the court of his royal father, and
consorted moodily with husbandman and pigs. Among the herd (so said the
legend) was a pig of grave and solemn countenance, with whom the prince
had a fellow-feeling--for he too was wise--a pig of thoughtful and
reserved demeanour; an animal superior to his fellows, whose grunt was
terrible, and whose bite was sharp. The young prince sighed deeply as he
looked upon the countenance of the majestic swine; he thought of his
royal father, and his eyes were bedewed with tears.

‘This sagacious pig was fond of bathing in rich, moist mud. Not in
summer, as common pigs do now, to cool themselves, and did even in those
distant ages (which is a proof that the light of civilisation had
already begun to dawn, though feebly), but in the cold, sharp days of
winter. His coat was ever so sleek, and his complexion so clear, that
the prince resolved to essay the purifying qualities of the same water
that his friend resorted to. He made the trial. Beneath that black mud,
bubbled the hot springs of Bath. He washed, and was cured. Hastening to
his father’s court, he paid his best respects, and returning quickly
hither, founded this city and its famous baths.

‘He sought the pig with all the ardour of their early friendship--but,
alas! the waters had been his death. He had imprudently taken a bath at
too high a temperature, and the natural philosopher was no more! He was
succeeded by Pliny, who also fell a victim to his thirst for knowledge.

‘This was the legend. Listen to the true one.

‘A great many centuries since, there flourished, in great state, the
famous and renowned Lud Hudibras, king of Britain. He was a mighty
monarch. The earth shook when he walked--he was so very stout. His
people basked in the light of his countenance--it was so red and
glowing. He was, indeed, every inch a king. And there were a good many
inches of him, too, for although he was not very tall, he was a
remarkable size round, and the inches that he wanted in height, he made
up in circumference. If any degenerate monarch of modern times could be
in any way compared with him, I should say the venerable King Cole would
be that illustrious potentate.

‘This good king had a queen, who eighteen years before, had had a son,
who was called Bladud. He was sent to a preparatory seminary in his
father’s dominions until he was ten years old, and was then despatched,
in charge of a trusty messenger, to a finishing school at Athens; and as
there was no extra charge for remaining during the holidays, and no
notice required previous to the removal of a pupil, there he remained
for eight long years, at the expiration of which time, the king his
father sent the lord chamberlain over, to settle the bill, and to bring
him home; which, the lord chamberlain doing, was received with shouts,
and pensioned immediately.

‘When King Lud saw the prince his son, and found he had grown up such a
fine young man, he perceived what a grand thing it would be to have him
married without delay, so that his children might be the means of
perpetuating the glorious race of Lud, down to the very latest ages of
the world. With this view, he sent a special embassy, composed of great
noblemen who had nothing particular to do, and wanted lucrative
employment, to a neighbouring king, and demanded his fair daughter in
marriage for his son; stating at the same time that he was anxious to be
on the most affectionate terms with his brother and friend, but that if
they couldn’t agree in arranging this marriage, he should be under the
unpleasant necessity of invading his kingdom and putting his eyes out.
To this, the other king (who was the weaker of the two) replied that he
was very much obliged to his friend and brother for all his goodness and
magnanimity, and that his daughter was quite ready to be married,
whenever Prince Bladud liked to come and fetch her.

‘This answer no sooner reached Britain, than the whole nation was
transported with joy. Nothing was heard, on all sides, but the sounds of
feasting and revelry--except the chinking of money as it was paid in by
the people to the collector of the royal treasures, to defray the
expenses of the happy ceremony. It was upon this occasion that King Lud,
seated on the top of his throne in full council, rose, in the exuberance
of his feelings, and commanded the lord chief justice to order in the
richest wines and the court minstrels--an act of graciousness which has
been, through the ignorance of traditionary historians, attributed to
King Cole, in those celebrated lines in which his Majesty is represented
as


Calling for his pipe, and calling for his pot, And calling for his
fiddlers three.

Which is an obvious injustice to the memory of King Lud, and a dishonest
exaltation of the virtues of King Cole.

‘But, in the midst of all this festivity and rejoicing, there was one
individual present, who tasted not when the sparkling wines were poured
forth, and who danced not, when the minstrels played. This was no other
than Prince Bladud himself, in honour of whose happiness a whole people
were, at that very moment, straining alike their throats and purse-
strings. The truth was, that the prince, forgetting the undoubted right
of the minister for foreign affairs to fall in love on his behalf, had,
contrary to every precedent of policy and diplomacy, already fallen in
love on his own account, and privately contracted himself unto the fair
daughter of a noble Athenian.

‘Here we have a striking example of one of the manifold advantages of
civilisation and refinement. If the prince had lived in later days, he
might at once have married the object of his father’s choice, and then
set himself seriously to work, to relieve himself of the burden which
rested heavily upon him. He might have endeavoured to break her heart by
a systematic course of insult and neglect; or, if the spirit of her sex,
and a proud consciousness of her many wrongs had upheld her under this
ill-treatment, he might have sought to take her life, and so get rid of
her effectually. But neither mode of relief suggested itself to Prince
Bladud; so he solicited a private audience, and told his father.

‘It is an old prerogative of kings to govern everything but their
passions. King Lud flew into a frightful rage, tossed his crown up to
the ceiling, and caught it again--for in those days kings kept their
crowns on their heads, and not in the Tower--stamped the ground, rapped
his forehead, wondered why his own flesh and blood rebelled against him,
and, finally, calling in his guards, ordered the prince away to instant
Confinement in a lofty turret; a course of treatment which the kings of
old very generally pursued towards their sons, when their matrimonial
inclinations did not happen to point to the same quarter as their own.

‘When Prince Bladud had been shut up in the lofty turret for the greater
part of a year, with no better prospect before his bodily eyes than a
stone wall, or before his mental vision than prolonged imprisonment, he
naturally began to ruminate on a plan of escape, which, after months of
preparation, he managed to accomplish; considerately leaving his dinner-
knife in the heart of his jailer, lest the poor fellow (who had a
family) should be considered privy to his flight, and punished
accordingly by the infuriated king.

‘The monarch was frantic at the loss of his son. He knew not on whom to
vent his grief and wrath, until fortunately bethinking himself of the
lord chamberlain who had brought him home, he struck off his pension and
his head together.

‘Meanwhile, the young prince, effectually disguised, wandered on foot
through his father’s dominions, cheered and supported in all his
hardships by sweet thoughts of the Athenian maid, who was the innocent
cause of his weary trials. One day he stopped to rest in a country
village; and seeing that there were gay dances going forward on the
green, and gay faces passing to and fro, ventured to inquire of a
reveller who stood near him, the reason for this rejoicing.

‘“Know you not, O stranger,” was the reply, “of the recent proclamation
of our gracious king?”

‘“Proclamation! No. What proclamation?” rejoined the prince--for he had
travelled along the by and little-frequented ways, and knew nothing of
what had passed upon the public roads, such as they were.

‘“Why,” replied the peasant, “the foreign lady that our prince wished to
wed, is married to a foreign noble of her own country, and the king
proclaims the fact, and a great public festival besides; for now, of
course, Prince Bladud will come back and marry the lady his father
chose, who they say is as beautiful as the noonday sun. Your health,
sir. God save the king!”

‘The prince remained to hear no more. He fled from the spot, and plunged
into the thickest recesses of a neighbouring wood. On, on, he wandered,
night and day; beneath the blazing sun, and the cold pale moon; through
the dry heat of noon, and the damp cold of night; in the gray light of
morn, and the red glare of eve. So heedless was he of time or object,
that being bound for Athens, he wandered as far out of his way as Bath.

‘There was no city where Bath stands, then. There was no vestige of
human habitation, or sign of man’s resort, to bear the name; but there
was the same noble country, the same broad expanse of hill and dale, the
same beautiful channel stealing on, far away, the same lofty mountains
which, like the troubles of life, viewed at a distance, and partially
obscured by the bright mist of its morning, lose their ruggedness and
asperity, and seem all ease and softness. Moved by the gentle beauty of
the scene, the prince sank upon the green turf, and bathed his swollen
feet in his tears.

‘“Oh!” said the unhappy Bladud, clasping his hands, and mournfully
raising his eyes towards the sky, “would that my wanderings might end
here! Would that these grateful tears with which I now mourn hope
misplaced, and love despised, might flow in peace for ever!”

‘The wish was heard. It was in the time of the heathen deities, who used
occasionally to take people at their words, with a promptness, in some
cases, extremely awkward. The ground opened beneath the prince’s feet;
he sank into the chasm; and instantaneously it closed upon his head for
ever, save where his hot tears welled up through the earth, and where
they have continued to gush forth ever since.

‘It is observable that, to this day, large numbers of elderly ladies and
gentlemen who have been disappointed in procuring partners, and almost
as many young ones who are anxious to obtain them, repair annually to
Bath to drink the waters, from which they derive much strength and
comfort. This is most complimentary to the virtue of Prince Bladud’s
tears, and strongly corroborative of the veracity of this legend.’

Mr. Pickwick yawned several times when he had arrived at the end of this
little manuscript, carefully refolded, and replaced it in the inkstand
drawer, and then, with a countenance expressive of the utmost weariness,
lighted his chamber candle, and went upstairs to bed.

He stopped at Mr. Dowler’s door, according to custom, and knocked to say
good-night.

‘Ah!’ said Dowler, ‘going to bed? I wish I was. Dismal night. Windy;
isn’t it?’

‘Very,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Good-night.’

‘Good-night.’

Mr. Pickwick went to his bedchamber, and Mr. Dowler resumed his seat
before the fire, in fulfilment of his rash promise to sit up till his
wife came home.

There are few things more worrying than sitting up for somebody,
especially if that somebody be at a party. You cannot help thinking how
quickly the time passes with them, which drags so heavily with you; and
the more you think of this, the more your hopes of their speedy arrival
decline. Clocks tick so loud, too, when you are sitting up alone, and
you seem as if you had an under-garment of cobwebs on. First, something
tickles your right knee, and then the same sensation irritates your
left. You have no sooner changed your position, than it comes again in
the arms; when you have fidgeted your limbs into all sorts of queer
shapes, you have a sudden relapse in the nose, which you rub as if to
rub it off--as there is no doubt you would, if you could. Eyes, too, are
mere personal inconveniences; and the wick of one candle gets an inch
and a half long, while you are snuffing the other. These, and various
other little nervous annoyances, render sitting up for a length of time
after everybody else has gone to bed, anything but a cheerful amusement.

This was just Mr. Dowler’s opinion, as he sat before the fire, and felt
honestly indignant with all the inhuman people at the party who were
keeping him up. He was not put into better humour either, by the
reflection that he had taken it into his head, early in the evening, to
think he had got an ache there, and so stopped at home. At length, after
several droppings asleep, and fallings forward towards the bars, and
catchings backward soon enough to prevent being branded in the face, Mr.
Dowler made up his mind that he would throw himself on the bed in the
back room and think--not sleep, of course.

‘I’m a heavy sleeper,’ said Mr. Dowler, as he flung himself on the bed.
‘I must keep awake. I suppose I shall hear a knock here. Yes. I thought
so. I can hear the watchman. There he goes. Fainter now, though. A
little fainter. He’s turning the corner. Ah!’ When Mr. Dowler arrived at
this point, he turned the corner at which he had been long hesitating,
and fell fast asleep.

Just as the clock struck three, there was blown into the crescent a
sedan-chair with Mrs. Dowler inside, borne by one short, fat chairman,
and one long, thin one, who had had much ado to keep their bodies
perpendicular: to say nothing of the chair. But on that high ground, and
in the crescent, which the wind swept round and round as if it were
going to tear the paving stones up, its fury was tremendous. They were
very glad to set the chair down, and give a good round loud double-knock
at the street door.

They waited some time, but nobody came.

‘Servants is in the arms o’ Porpus, I think,’ said the short chairman,
warming his hands at the attendant link-boy’s torch.

‘I wish he’d give ‘em a squeeze and wake ‘em,’ observed the long one.

‘Knock again, will you, if you please,’ cried Mrs. Dowler from the
chair. ‘Knock two or three times, if you please.’

The short man was quite willing to get the job over, as soon as
possible; so he stood on the step, and gave four or five most startling
double-knocks, of eight or ten knocks a-piece, while the long man went
into the road, and looked up at the windows for a light.

Nobody came. It was all as silent and dark as ever.

‘Dear me!’ said Mrs. Dowler. ‘You must knock again, if you please.’

There ain’t a bell, is there, ma’am?’ said the short chairman.

‘Yes, there is,’ interposed the link-boy, ‘I’ve been a-ringing at it
ever so long.’

‘It’s only a handle,’ said Mrs. Dowler, ‘the wire’s broken.’

‘I wish the servants’ heads wos,’ growled the long man.

‘I must trouble you to knock again, if you please,’ said Mrs. Dowler,
with the utmost politeness.

The short man did knock again several times, without producing the
smallest effect. The tall man, growing very impatient, then relieved
him, and kept on perpetually knocking double-knocks of two loud knocks
each, like an insane postman.

At length Mr. Winkle began to dream that he was at a club, and that the
members being very refractory, the chairman was obliged to hammer the
table a good deal to preserve order; then he had a confused notion of an
auction room where there were no bidders, and the auctioneer was buying
everything in; and ultimately he began to think it just within the
bounds of possibility that somebody might be knocking at the street
door. To make quite certain, however, he remained quiet in bed for ten
minutes or so, and listened; and when he had counted two or three-and-
thirty knocks, he felt quite satisfied, and gave himself a great deal of
credit for being so wakeful.

‘Rap rap-rap rap-rap rap-ra, ra, ra, ra, ra, rap!’ went the knocker.

Mr. Winkle jumped out of bed, wondering very much what could possibly be
the matter, and hastily putting on his stockings and slippers, folded
his dressing-gown round him, lighted a flat candle from the rush-light
that was burning in the fireplace, and hurried downstairs.

‘Here’s somebody comin’ at last, ma’am,’ said the short chairman.

‘I wish I wos behind him vith a bradawl,’ muttered the long one.

‘Who’s there?’ cried Mr. Winkle, undoing the chain.

‘Don’t stop to ask questions, cast-iron head,’ replied the long man,
with great disgust, taking it for granted that the inquirer was a
footman; ‘but open the door.’

‘Come, look sharp, timber eyelids,’ added the other encouragingly.

Mr. Winkle, being half asleep, obeyed the command mechanically, opened
the door a little, and peeped out. The first thing he saw, was the red
glare of the link-boy’s torch. Startled by the sudden fear that the
house might be on fire, he hastily threw the door wide open, and holding
the candle above his head, stared eagerly before him, not quite certain
whether what he saw was a sedan-chair or a fire-engine. At this instant
there came a violent gust of wind; the light was blown out; Mr. Winkle
felt himself irresistibly impelled on to the steps; and the door blew
to, with a loud crash.

‘Well, young man, now you _have _done it!’ said the short chairman.

Mr. Winkle, catching sight of a lady’s face at the window of the sedan,
turned hastily round, plied the knocker with all his might and main, and
called frantically upon the chairman to take the chair away again.


‘Take it away, take it away,’ cried Mr. Winkle. ‘Here’s somebody coming
out of another house; put me into the chair. Hide me! Do something with
me!’

All this time he was shivering with cold; and every time he raised his
hand to the knocker, the wind took the dressing-gown in a most
unpleasant manner.

‘The people are coming down the crescent now. There are ladies with ‘em;
cover me up with something. Stand before me!’ roared Mr. Winkle. But the
chairmen were too much exhausted with laughing to afford him the
slightest assistance, and the ladies were every moment approaching
nearer and nearer.

Mr. Winkle gave a last hopeless knock; the ladies were only a few doors
off. He threw away the extinguished candle, which, all this time he had
held above his head, and fairly bolted into the sedan-chair where Mrs.
Dowler was.

Now, Mrs. Craddock had heard the knocking and the voices at last; and,
only waiting to put something smarter on her head than her nightcap, ran
down into the front drawing-room to make sure that it was the right
party. Throwing up the window-sash as Mr. Winkle was rushing into the
chair, she no sooner caught sight of what was going forward below, than
she raised a vehement and dismal shriek, and implored Mr. Dowler to get
up directly, for his wife was running away with another gentleman.

Upon this, Mr. Dowler bounced off the bed as abruptly as an India-rubber
ball, and rushing into the front room, arrived at one window just as Mr.
Pickwick threw up the other, when the first object that met the gaze of
both, was Mr. Winkle bolting into the sedan-chair.

‘Watchman,’ shouted Dowler furiously, ‘stop him--hold him--keep him
tight--shut him in, till I come down. I’ll cut his throat--give me a
knife--from ear to ear, Mrs. Craddock--I will!’ And breaking from the
shrieking landlady, and from Mr. Pickwick, the indignant husband seized
a small supper-knife, and tore into the street.

But Mr. Winkle didn’t wait for him. He no sooner heard the horrible
threat of the valorous Dowler, than he bounced out of the sedan, quite
as quickly as he had bounced in, and throwing off his slippers into the
road, took to his heels and tore round the crescent, hotly pursued by
Dowler and the watchman. He kept ahead; the door was open as he came
round the second time; he rushed in, slammed it in Dowler’s face,
mounted to his bedroom, locked the door, piled a wash-hand-stand, chest
of drawers, and a table against it, and packed up a few necessaries
ready for flight with the first ray of morning.

Dowler came up to the outside of the door; avowed, through the keyhole,
his steadfast determination of cutting Mr. Winkle’s throat next day;
and, after a great confusion of voices in the drawing-room, amidst which
that of Mr. Pickwick was distinctly heard endeavouring to make peace,
the inmates dispersed to their several bed-chambers, and all was quiet
once more.

It is not unlikely that the inquiry may be made, where Mr. Weller was,
all this time? We will state where he was, in the next chapter.



CHAPTER XXXVII. HONOURABLY ACCOUNTS FOR MR. WELLER’S ABSENCE, BY
DESCRIBING A SOIREE TO WHICH HE WAS INVITED AND WENT; ALSO RELATES HOW
HE WAS ENTRUSTED BY MR. PICKWICK WITH A PRIVATE MISSION OF DELICACY AND
IMPORTANCE

Mr. Weller,’ said Mrs. Craddock, upon the morning of this very eventful
day, ‘here’s a letter for you.’

‘Wery odd that,’ said Sam; ‘I’m afeerd there must be somethin’ the
matter, for I don’t recollect any gen’l’m’n in my circle of acquaintance
as is capable o’ writin’ one.’

‘Perhaps something uncommon has taken place,’ observed Mrs. Craddock.

‘It must be somethin’ wery uncommon indeed, as could perduce a letter
out o’ any friend o’ mine,’ replied Sam, shaking his head dubiously;
‘nothin’ less than a nat’ral conwulsion, as the young gen’l’m’n observed
ven he wos took with fits. It can’t be from the gov’ner,’ said Sam,
looking at the direction. ‘He always prints, I know, ‘cos he learnt
writin’ from the large bills in the booking-offices. It’s a wery strange
thing now, where this here letter can ha’ come from.’

As Sam said this, he did what a great many people do when they are
uncertain about the writer of a note--looked at the seal, and then at
the front, and then at the back, and then at the sides, and then at the
superscription; and, as a last resource, thought perhaps he might as
well look at the inside, and try to find out from that.

‘It’s wrote on gilt-edged paper,’ said Sam, as he unfolded it, ‘and
sealed in bronze vax vith the top of a door key. Now for it.’ And, with
a very grave face, Mr. Weller slowly read as follows--

‘A select company of the Bath footmen presents their compliments to Mr.
Weller, and requests the pleasure of his company this evening, to a
friendly swarry, consisting of a boiled leg of mutton with the usual
trimmings. The swarry to be on table at half-past nine o’clock
punctually.’

This was inclosed in another note, which ran thus--

‘Mr. John Smauker, the gentleman who had the pleasure of meeting Mr.
Weller at the house of their mutual acquaintance, Mr. Bantam, a few days
since, begs to inclose Mr. Weller the herewith invitation. If Mr. Weller
will call on Mr. John Smauker at nine o’clock, Mr. John Smauker will
have the pleasure of introducing Mr. Weller.


(Signed)           ‘_John Smauker_.’

The envelope was directed to blank Weller, Esq., at Mr. Pickwick’s; and
in a parenthesis, in the left hand corner, were the words ‘airy bell,’
as an instruction to the bearer.

‘Vell,’ said Sam, ‘this is comin’ it rayther powerful, this is. I never
heerd a biled leg o’ mutton called a swarry afore. I wonder wot they’d
call a roast one.’

However, without waiting to debate the point, Sam at once betook himself
into the presence of Mr. Pickwick, and requested leave of absence for
that evening, which was readily granted. With this permission and the
street-door key, Sam Weller issued forth a little before the appointed
time, and strolled leisurely towards Queen Square, which he no sooner
gained than he had the satisfaction of beholding Mr. John Smauker
leaning his powdered head against a lamp-post at a short distance off,
smoking a cigar through an amber tube.

‘How do you do, Mr. Weller?’ said Mr. John Smauker, raising his hat
gracefully with one hand, while he gently waved the other in a
condescending manner. ‘How do you do, Sir?’

‘Why, reasonably conwalessent,’ replied Sam. ‘How do _you _find
yourself, my dear feller?’

‘Only so so,’ said Mr. John Smauker.

‘Ah, you’ve been a-workin’ too hard,’ observed Sam. ‘I was fearful you
would; it won’t do, you know; you must not give way to that ‘ere
uncompromisin’ spirit o’ yourn.’

‘It’s not so much that, Mr. Weller,’ replied Mr. John Smauker, ‘as bad
wine; I’m afraid I’ve been dissipating.’

‘Oh! that’s it, is it?’ said Sam; ‘that’s a wery bad complaint, that.’

‘And yet the temptation, you see, Mr. Weller,’ observed Mr. John
Smauker.

‘Ah, to be sure,’ said Sam.

‘Plunged into the very vortex of society, you know, Mr. Weller,’ said
Mr. John Smauker, with a sigh.

‘Dreadful, indeed!’ rejoined Sam.

‘But it’s always the way,’ said Mr. John Smauker; ‘if your destiny leads
you into public life, and public station, you must expect to be
subjected to temptations which other people is free from, Mr. Weller.’

‘Precisely what my uncle said, ven he vent into the public line,’
remarked Sam, ‘and wery right the old gen’l’m’n wos, for he drank
hisself to death in somethin’ less than a quarter.’

Mr. John Smauker looked deeply indignant at any parallel being drawn
between himself and the deceased gentleman in question; but, as Sam’s
face was in the most immovable state of calmness, he thought better of
it, and looked affable again.

‘Perhaps we had better be walking,’ said Mr. Smauker, consulting a
copper timepiece which dwelt at the bottom of a deep watch-pocket, and
was raised to the surface by means of a black string, with a copper key
at the other end.

‘P’raps we had,’ replied Sam, ‘or they’ll overdo the swarry, and that’ll
spile it.’

‘Have you drank the waters, Mr. Weller?’ inquired his companion, as they
walked towards High Street.

‘Once,’ replied Sam.

‘What did you think of ‘em, Sir?’

‘I thought they was particklery unpleasant,’ replied Sam.

‘Ah,’ said Mr. John Smauker, ‘you disliked the killibeate taste,
perhaps?’

‘I don’t know much about that ‘ere,’ said Sam. ‘I thought they’d a wery
strong flavour o’ warm flat irons.’

‘That _is_ the killibeate, Mr. Weller,’ observed Mr. John Smauker
contemptuously.

‘Well, if it is, it’s a wery inexpressive word, that’s all,’ said Sam.
‘It may be, but I ain’t much in the chimical line myself, so I can’t
say.’ And here, to the great horror of Mr. John Smauker, Sam Weller
began to whistle.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Weller,’ said Mr. John Smauker, agonised at the
exceeding ungenteel sound, ‘will you take my arm?’

‘Thank’ee, you’re wery good, but I won’t deprive you of it,’ replied
Sam. ‘I’ve rayther a way o’ putting my hands in my pockets, if it’s all
the same to you.’ As Sam said this, he suited the action to the word,
and whistled far louder than before.

‘This way,’ said his new friend, apparently much relieved as they turned
down a by-street; ‘we shall soon be there.’

‘Shall we?’ said Sam, quite unmoved by the announcement of his close
vicinity to the select footmen of Bath.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. John Smauker. ‘Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Weller.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Sam.

‘You’ll see some very handsome uniforms, Mr. Weller,’ continued Mr. John
Smauker; ‘and perhaps you’ll find some of the gentlemen rather high at
first, you know, but they’ll soon come round.’

‘That’s wery kind on ‘em,’ replied Sam.

‘And you know,’ resumed Mr. John Smauker, with an air of sublime
protection--‘you know, as you’re a stranger, perhaps, they’ll be rather
hard upon you at first.’

‘They won’t be wery cruel, though, will they?’ inquired Sam.

‘No, no,’ replied Mr. John Smauker, pulling forth the fox’s head, and
taking a gentlemanly pinch. ‘There are some funny dogs among us, and
they will have their joke, you know; but you mustn’t mind ‘em, you
mustn’t mind ‘em.’

‘I’ll try and bear up agin such a reg’lar knock down o’ talent,’ replied
Sam.

‘That’s right,’ said Mr. John Smauker, putting forth his fox’s head, and
elevating his own; ‘I’ll stand by you.’

By this time they had reached a small greengrocer’s shop, which Mr. John
Smauker entered, followed by Sam, who, the moment he got behind him,
relapsed into a series of the very broadest and most unmitigated grins,
and manifested other demonstrations of being in a highly enviable state
of inward merriment.

Crossing the greengrocer’s shop, and putting their hats on the stairs in
the little passage behind it, they walked into a small parlour; and here
the full splendour of the scene burst upon Mr. Weller’s view.

A couple of tables were put together in the middle of the parlour,
covered with three or four cloths of different ages and dates of
washing, arranged to look as much like one as the circumstances of the
case would allow. Upon these were laid knives and forks for six or eight
people. Some of the knife handles were green, others red, and a few
yellow; and as all the forks were black, the combination of colours was
exceedingly striking. Plates for a corresponding number of guests were
warming behind the fender; and the guests themselves were warming before
it: the chief and most important of whom appeared to be a stoutish
gentleman in a bright crimson coat with long tails, vividly red
breeches, and a cocked hat, who was standing with his back to the fire,
and had apparently just entered, for besides retaining his cocked hat on
his head, he carried in his hand a high stick, such as gentlemen of his
profession usually elevate in a sloping position over the roofs of
carriages.

‘Smauker, my lad, your fin,’ said the gentleman with the cocked hat.

Mr. Smauker dovetailed the top joint of his right-hand little finger
into that of the gentleman with the cocked hat, and said he was charmed
to see him looking so well.

‘Well, they tell me I am looking pretty blooming,’ said the man with the
cocked hat, ‘and it’s a wonder, too. I’ve been following our old woman
about, two hours a day, for the last fortnight; and if a constant
contemplation of the manner in which she hooks-and-eyes that infernal
lavender-coloured old gown of hers behind, isn’t enough to throw anybody
into a low state of despondency for life, stop my quarter’s salary.’

At this, the assembled selections laughed very heartily; and one
gentleman in a yellow waistcoat, with a coach-trimming border, whispered
a neighbour in green-foil smalls, that Tuckle was in spirits to-night.

‘By the bye,’ said Mr. Tuckle, ‘Smauker, my boy, you--’ The remainder of
the sentence was forwarded into Mr. John Smauker’s ear, by whisper.

‘Oh, dear me, I quite forgot,’ said Mr. John Smauker. ‘Gentlemen, my
friend Mr. Weller.’

‘Sorry to keep the fire off you, Weller,’ said Mr. Tuckle, with a
familiar nod. ‘Hope you’re not cold, Weller.’

‘Not by no means, Blazes,’ replied Sam. ‘It ‘ud be a wery chilly subject
as felt cold wen you stood opposite. You’d save coals if they put you
behind the fender in the waitin’-room at a public office, you would.’

As this retort appeared to convey rather a personal allusion to Mr.
Tuckle’s crimson livery, that gentleman looked majestic for a few
seconds, but gradually edging away from the fire, broke into a forced
smile, and said it wasn’t bad.

‘Wery much obliged for your good opinion, sir,’ replied Sam. ‘We shall
get on by degrees, I des-say. We’ll try a better one by and bye.’

At this point the conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a
gentleman in orange-coloured plush, accompanied by another selection in
purple cloth, with a great extent of stocking. The new-comers having
been welcomed by the old ones, Mr. Tuckle put the question that supper
be ordered in, which was carried unanimously.

The greengrocer and his wife then arranged upon the table a boiled leg
of mutton, hot, with caper sauce, turnips, and potatoes. Mr. Tuckle took
the chair, and was supported at the other end of the board by the
gentleman in orange plush. The greengrocer put on a pair of wash-leather
gloves to hand the plates with, and stationed himself behind Mr.
Tuckle’s chair.

‘Harris,’ said Mr. Tuckle, in a commanding tone.

‘Sir,’ said the greengrocer.

‘Have you got your gloves on?’

Yes, Sir.’

‘Then take the kiver off.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

The greengrocer did as he was told, with a show of great humility, and
obsequiously handed Mr. Tuckle the carving-knife; in doing which, he
accidentally gaped.

‘What do you mean by that, Sir?’ said Mr. Tuckle, with great asperity.

‘I beg your pardon, Sir,’ replied the crestfallen greengrocer, ‘I didn’t
mean to do it, Sir; I was up very late last night, Sir.’

‘I tell you what my opinion of you is, Harris,’ said Mr. Tuckle, with a
most impressive air, ‘you’re a wulgar beast.’

‘I hope, gentlemen,’ said Harris, ‘that you won’t be severe with me,
gentlemen. I am very much obliged to you indeed, gentlemen, for your
patronage, and also for your recommendations, gentlemen, whenever
additional assistance in waiting is required. I hope, gentlemen, I give
satisfaction.’

‘No, you don’t, Sir,’ said Mr. Tuckle. ‘Very far from it, Sir.’

‘We consider you an inattentive reskel,’ said the gentleman in the
orange plush.

‘And a low thief,’ added the gentleman in the green-foil smalls.

‘And an unreclaimable blaygaird,’ added the gentleman in purple.

The poor greengrocer bowed very humbly while these little epithets were
bestowed upon him, in the true spirit of the very smallest tyranny; and
when everybody had said something to show his superiority, Mr. Tuckle
proceeded to carve the leg of mutton, and to help the company.

This important business of the evening had hardly commenced, when the
door was thrown briskly open, and another gentleman in a light-blue
suit, and leaden buttons, made his appearance.

‘Against the rules,’ said Mr. Tuckle. ‘Too late, too late.’

‘No, no; positively I couldn’t help it,’ said the gentleman in blue. ‘I
appeal to the company. An affair of gallantry now, an appointment at the
theayter.’

‘Oh, that indeed,’ said the gentleman in the orange plush.

‘Yes; raly now, honour bright,’ said the man in blue. ‘I made a promese
to fetch our youngest daughter at half-past ten, and she is such an
uncauminly fine gal, that I raly hadn’t the ‘art to disappint her. No
offence to the present company, Sir, but a petticut, sir--a petticut,
Sir, is irrevokeable.’

‘I begin to suspect there’s something in that quarter,’ said Tuckle, as
the new-comer took his seat next Sam, ‘I’ve remarked, once or twice,
that she leans very heavy on your shoulder when she gets in and out of
the carriage.’

‘Oh, raly, raly, Tuckle, you shouldn’t,’ said the man in blue. ‘It’s not
fair. I may have said to one or two friends that she wos a very divine
creechure, and had refused one or two offers without any hobvus cause,
but--no, no, no, indeed, Tuckle--before strangers, too--it’s not right--
you shouldn’t. Delicacy, my dear friend, delicacy!’ And the man in blue,
pulling up his neckerchief, and adjusting his coat cuffs, nodded and
frowned as if there were more behind, which he could say if he liked,
but was bound in honour to suppress.

The man in blue being a light-haired, stiff-necked, free and easy sort
of footman, with a swaggering air and pert face, had attracted Mr.
Weller’s special attention at first, but when he began to come out in
this way, Sam felt more than ever disposed to cultivate his
acquaintance; so he launched himself into the conversation at once, with
characteristic independence.

‘Your health, Sir,’ said Sam. ‘I like your conversation much. I think
it’s wery pretty.’

At this the man in blue smiled, as if it were a compliment he was well
used to; but looked approvingly on Sam at the same time, and said he
hoped he should be better acquainted with him, for without any flattery
at all he seemed to have the makings of a very nice fellow about him,
and to be just the man after his own heart.

‘You’re wery good, sir,’ said Sam. ‘What a lucky feller you are!’

‘How do you mean?’ inquired the gentleman in blue.

‘That ‘ere young lady,’ replied Sam. ‘She knows wot’s wot, she does. Ah!
I see.’ Mr. Weller closed one eye, and shook his head from side to side,
in a manner which was highly gratifying to the personal vanity of the
gentleman in blue.

‘I’m afraid you’re a cunning fellow, Mr. Weller,’ said that individual.

‘No, no,’ said Sam. ‘I leave all that ‘ere to you. It’s a great deal
more in your way than mine, as the gen’l’m’n on the right side o’ the
garden vall said to the man on the wrong un, ven the mad bull vos a-
comin’ up the lane.’

‘Well, well, Mr. Weller,’ said the gentleman in blue, ‘I think she has
remarked my air and manner, Mr. Weller.’

‘I should think she couldn’t wery well be off o’ that,’ said Sam.

‘Have you any little thing of that kind in hand, sir?’ inquired the
favoured gentleman in blue, drawing a toothpick from his waistcoat
pocket.

‘Not exactly,’ said Sam. ‘There’s no daughters at my place, else o’
course I should ha’ made up to vun on ‘em. As it is, I don’t think I can
do with anythin’ under a female markis. I might keep up with a young
‘ooman o’ large property as hadn’t a title, if she made wery fierce love
to me. Not else.’

‘Of course not, Mr. Weller,’ said the gentleman in blue, ‘one can’t be
troubled, you know; and _we_ know, Mr. Weller--we, who are men of the
world--that a good uniform must work its way with the women, sooner or
later. In fact, that’s the only thing, between you and me, that makes
the service worth entering into.’

‘Just so,’ said Sam. ‘That’s it, o’ course.’

When this confidential dialogue had gone thus far, glasses were placed
round, and every gentleman ordered what he liked best, before the
public-house shut up. The gentleman in blue, and the man in orange, who
were the chief exquisites of the party, ordered ‘cold shrub and water,’
but with the others, gin-and-water, sweet, appeared to be the favourite
beverage. Sam called the greengrocer a ‘desp’rate willin,’ and ordered a
large bowl of punch--two circumstances which seemed to raise him very
much in the opinion of the selections.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the man in blue, with an air of the most consummate
dandyism, ‘I’ll give you the ladies; come.’

‘Hear, hear!’ said Sam. ‘The young mississes.’

Here there was a loud cry of ‘Order,’ and Mr. John Smauker, as the
gentleman who had introduced Mr. Weller into that company, begged to
inform him that the word he had just made use of, was unparliamentary.

‘Which word was that ‘ere, Sir?’ inquired Sam.

‘Mississes, Sir,’ replied Mr. John Smauker, with an alarming frown. ‘We
don’t recognise such distinctions here.’

‘Oh, wery good,’ said Sam; ‘then I’ll amend the obserwation and call ‘em
the dear creeturs, if Blazes vill allow me.’

Some doubt appeared to exist in the mind of the gentleman in the green-
foil smalls, whether the chairman could be legally appealed to, as
‘Blazes,’ but as the company seemed more disposed to stand upon their
own rights than his, the question was not raised. The man with the
cocked hat breathed short, and looked long at Sam, but apparently
thought it as well to say nothing, in case he should get the worst of
it. After a short silence, a gentleman in an embroidered coat reaching
down to his heels, and a waistcoat of the same which kept one half of
his legs warm, stirred his gin-and-water with great energy, and putting
himself upon his feet, all at once by a violent effort, said he was
desirous of offering a few remarks to the company, whereupon the person
in the cocked hat had no doubt that the company would be very happy to
hear any remarks that the man in the long coat might wish to offer.

‘I feel a great delicacy, gentlemen, in coming for’ard,’ said the man in
the long coat, ‘having the misforchune to be a coachman, and being only
admitted as a honorary member of these agreeable swarrys, but I do feel
myself bound, gentlemen--drove into a corner, if I may use the
expression--to make known an afflicting circumstance which has come to
my knowledge; which has happened I may say within the soap of my
everyday contemplation. Gentlemen, our friend Mr. Whiffers (everybody
looked at the individual in orange), our friend Mr. Whiffers has
resigned.’

Universal astonishment fell upon the hearers. Each gentleman looked in
his neighbour’s face, and then transferred his glance to the upstanding
coachman.

‘You may well be sapparised, gentlemen,’ said the coachman. ‘I will not
wenchure to state the reasons of this irrepairabel loss to the service,
but I will beg Mr. Whiffers to state them himself, for the improvement
and imitation of his admiring friends.’

The suggestion being loudly approved of, Mr. Whiffers explained. He said
he certainly could have wished to have continued to hold the appointment
he had just resigned. The uniform was extremely rich and expensive, the
females of the family was most agreeable, and the duties of the
situation was not, he was bound to say, too heavy; the principal service
that was required of him, being, that he should look out of the hall
window as much as possible, in company with another gentleman, who had
also resigned. He could have wished to have spared that company the
painful and disgusting detail on which he was about to enter, but as the
explanation had been demanded of him, he had no alternative but to
state, boldly and distinctly, that he had been required to eat cold
meat.

It is impossible to conceive the disgust which this avowal awakened in
the bosoms of the hearers. Loud cries of ‘Shame,’ mingled with groans
and hisses, prevailed for a quarter of an hour.

Mr. Whiffers then added that he feared a portion of this outrage might
be traced to his own forbearing and accommodating disposition. He had a
distinct recollection of having once consented to eat salt butter, and
he had, moreover, on an occasion of sudden sickness in the house, so far
forgotten himself as to carry a coal-scuttle up to the second floor. He
trusted he had not lowered himself in the good opinion of his friends by
this frank confession of his faults; and he hoped the promptness with
which he had resented the last unmanly outrage on his feelings, to which
he had referred, would reinstate him in their good opinion, if he had.

Mr. Whiffers’s address was responded to, with a shout of admiration, and
the health of the interesting martyr was drunk in a most enthusiastic
manner; for this, the martyr returned thanks, and proposed their
visitor, Mr. Weller--a gentleman whom he had not the pleasure of an
intimate acquaintance with, but who was the friend of Mr. John Smauker,
which was a sufficient letter of recommendation to any society of
gentlemen whatever, or wherever. On this account, he should have been
disposed to have given Mr. Weller’s health with all the honours, if his
friends had been drinking wine; but as they were taking spirits by way
of a change, and as it might be inconvenient to empty a tumbler at every
toast, he should propose that the honours be understood.

At the conclusion of this speech, everybody took a sip in honour of Sam;
and Sam having ladled out, and drunk, two full glasses of punch in
honour of himself, returned thanks in a neat speech.

‘Wery much obliged to you, old fellers,’ said Sam, ladling away at the
punch in the most unembarrassed manner possible, ‘for this here
compliment; which, comin’ from sich a quarter, is wery overvelmin’. I’ve
heered a good deal on you as a body, but I will say, that I never
thought you was sich uncommon nice men as I find you air. I only hope
you’ll take care o’ yourselves, and not compromise nothin’ o’ your
dignity, which is a wery charmin’ thing to see, when one’s out a-
walkin’, and has always made me wery happy to look at, ever since I was
a boy about half as high as the brass-headed stick o’ my wery
respectable friend, Blazes, there. As to the wictim of oppression in the
suit o’ brimstone, all I can say of him, is, that I hope he’ll get jist
as good a berth as he deserves; in vitch case it’s wery little cold
swarry as ever he’ll be troubled with agin.’

Here Sam sat down with a pleasant smile, and his speech having been
vociferously applauded, the company broke up.

‘Wy, you don’t mean to say you’re a-goin’ old feller?’ said Sam Weller
to his friend, Mr. John Smauker.

‘I must, indeed,’ said Mr. Smauker; ‘I promised Bantam.’

‘Oh, wery well,’ said Sam; ‘that’s another thing. P’raps he’d resign if
you disappinted him. You ain’t a-goin’, Blazes?’

‘Yes, I am,’ said the man with the cocked hat.

‘Wot, and leave three-quarters of a bowl of punch behind you!’ said Sam;
‘nonsense, set down agin.’

Mr. Tuckle was not proof against this invitation. He laid aside the
cocked hat and stick which he had just taken up, and said he would have
one glass, for good fellowship’s sake.

As the gentleman in blue went home the same way as Mr. Tuckle, he was
prevailed upon to stop too. When the punch was about half gone, Sam
ordered in some oysters from the green-grocer’s shop; and the effect of
both was so extremely exhilarating, that Mr. Tuckle, dressed out with
the cocked hat and stick, danced the frog hornpipe among the shells on
the table, while the gentleman in blue played an accompaniment upon an
ingenious musical instrument formed of a hair-comb upon a curl-paper. At
last, when the punch was all gone, and the night nearly so, they sallied
forth to see each other home. Mr. Tuckle no sooner got into the open
air, than he was seized with a sudden desire to lie on the curbstone;
Sam thought it would be a pity to contradict him, and so let him have
his own way. As the cocked hat would have been spoiled if left there,
Sam very considerately flattened it down on the head of the gentleman in
blue, and putting the big stick in his hand, propped him up against his
own street-door, rang the bell, and walked quietly home.

At a much earlier hour next morning than his usual time of rising, Mr.
Pickwick walked downstairs completely dressed, and rang the bell.

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, when Mr. Weller appeared in reply to the
summons, ‘shut the door.’

Mr. Weller did so.

‘There was an unfortunate occurrence here, last night, Sam,’ said Mr.
Pickwick, ‘which gave Mr. Winkle some cause to apprehend violence from
Mr. Dowler.’

‘So I’ve heerd from the old lady downstairs, Sir,’ replied Sam.

‘And I’m sorry to say, Sam,’ continued Mr. Pickwick, with a most
perplexed countenance, ‘that in dread of this violence, Mr. Winkle has
gone away.’

‘Gone avay!’ said Sam.

‘Left the house early this morning, without the slightest previous
communication with me,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘And is gone, I know not
where.’

‘He should ha’ stopped and fought it out, Sir,’ replied Sam
contemptuously. ‘It wouldn’t take much to settle that ‘ere Dowler, Sir.’

‘Well, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I may have my doubts of his great
bravery and determination also. But however that may be, Mr. Winkle is
gone. He must be found, Sam. Found and brought back to me.’

And s’pose he won’t come back, Sir?’ said Sam.

‘He must be made, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Who’s to do it, Sir?’ inquired Sam, with a smile.

‘You,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Wery good, Sir.’

With these words Mr. Weller left the room, and immediately afterwards
was heard to shut the street door. In two hours’ time he returned with
so much coolness as if he had been despatched on the most ordinary
message possible, and brought the information that an individual, in
every respect answering Mr. Winkle’s description, had gone over to
Bristol that morning, by the branch coach from the Royal Hotel.

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, grasping his hand, ‘you’re a capital fellow;
an invaluable fellow. You must follow him, Sam.’

‘Cert’nly, Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘The instant you discover him, write to me immediately, Sam,’ said Mr.
Pickwick. ‘If he attempts to run away from you, knock him down, or lock
him up. You have my full authority, Sam.’

‘I’ll be wery careful, sir,’ rejoined Sam.

‘You’ll tell him,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘that I am highly excited, highly
displeased, and naturally indignant, at the very extraordinary course he
has thought proper to pursue.’

‘I will, Sir,’ replied Sam.

‘You’ll tell him,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘that if he does not come back to
this very house, with you, he will come back with me, for I will come
and fetch him.’

‘I’ll mention that ‘ere, Sir,’ rejoined Sam.

‘You think you can find him, Sam?’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking earnestly
in his face.

‘Oh, I’ll find him if he’s anyvere,’ rejoined Sam, with great
confidence.

‘Very well,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Then the sooner you go the better.’

With these instructions, Mr. Pickwick placed a sum of money in the hands
of his faithful servitor, and ordered him to start for Bristol
immediately, in pursuit of the fugitive.

Sam put a few necessaries in a carpet-bag, and was ready for starting.
He stopped when he had got to the end of the passage, and walking
quietly back, thrust his head in at the parlour door.

‘Sir,’ whispered Sam.

‘Well, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘I fully understands my instructions, do I, Sir?’ inquired Sam.

‘I hope so,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘It’s reg’larly understood about the knockin’ down, is it, Sir?’
inquired Sam.

‘Perfectly,’ replied Pickwick. ‘Thoroughly. Do what you think necessary.
You have my orders.’

Sam gave a nod of intelligence, and withdrawing his head from the door,
set forth on his pilgrimage with a light heart.



CHAPTER XXXVIII. HOW MR. WINKLE, WHEN HE STEPPED OUT OF THE FRYING-PAN,
WALKED GENTLY AND COMFORTABLY INTO THE FIRE

The ill-starred gentleman who had been the unfortunate cause of the
unusual noise and disturbance which alarmed the inhabitants of the Royal
Crescent in manner and form already described, after passing a night of
great confusion and anxiety, left the roof beneath which his friends
still slumbered, bound he knew not whither. The excellent and
considerate feelings which prompted Mr. Winkle to take this step can
never be too highly appreciated or too warmly extolled. ‘If,’ reasoned
Mr. Winkle with himself--‘if this Dowler attempts (as I have no doubt he
will) to carry into execution his threat of personal violence against
myself, it will be incumbent on me to call him out. He has a wife; that
wife is attached to, and dependent on him. Heavens! If I should kill him
in the blindness of my wrath, what would be my feelings ever
afterwards!’ This painful consideration operated so powerfully on the
feelings of the humane young man, as to cause his knees to knock
together, and his countenance to exhibit alarming manifestations of
inward emotion. Impelled by such reflections, he grasped his carpet-bag,
and creeping stealthily downstairs, shut the detestable street door with
as little noise as possible, and walked off. Bending his steps towards
the Royal Hotel, he found a coach on the point of starting for Bristol,
and, thinking Bristol as good a place for his purpose as any other he
could go to, he mounted the box, and reached his place of destination in
such time as the pair of horses, who went the whole stage and back
again, twice a day or more, could be reasonably supposed to arrive
there.

He took up his quarters at the Bush, and designing to postpone any
communication by letter with Mr. Pickwick until it was probable that Mr.
Dowler’s wrath might have in some degree evaporated, walked forth to
view the city, which struck him as being a shade more dirty than any
place he had ever seen. Having inspected the docks and shipping, and
viewed the cathedral, he inquired his way to Clifton, and being directed
thither, took the route which was pointed out to him. But as the
pavements of Bristol are not the widest or cleanest upon earth, so its
streets are not altogether the straightest or least intricate; and Mr.
Winkle, being greatly puzzled by their manifold windings and twistings,
looked about him for a decent shop in which he could apply afresh for
counsel and instruction.

His eye fell upon a newly-painted tenement which had been recently
converted into something between a shop and a private house, and which a
red lamp, projecting over the fanlight of the street door, would have
sufficiently announced as the residence of a medical practitioner, even
if the word ‘Surgery’ had not been inscribed in golden characters on a
wainscot ground, above the window of what, in times bygone, had been the
front parlour. Thinking this an eligible place wherein to make his
inquiries, Mr. Winkle stepped into the little shop where the gilt-
labelled drawers and bottles were; and finding nobody there, knocked
with a half-crown on the counter, to attract the attention of anybody
who might happen to be in the back parlour, which he judged to be the
innermost and peculiar sanctum of the establishment, from the repetition
of the word surgery on the door--painted in white letters this time, by
way of taking off the monotony.

At the first knock, a sound, as of persons fencing with fire-irons,
which had until now been very audible, suddenly ceased; at the second, a
studious-looking young gentleman in green spectacles, with a very large
book in his hand, glided quietly into the shop, and stepping behind the
counter, requested to know the visitor’s pleasure.

‘I am sorry to trouble you, Sir,’ said Mr. Winkle, ‘but will you have
the goodness to direct me to--’

‘Ha! ha! ha!’ roared the studious young gentleman, throwing the large
book up into the air, and catching it with great dexterity at the very
moment when it threatened to smash to atoms all the bottles on the
counter. ‘Here’s a start!’

There was, without doubt; for Mr. Winkle was so very much astonished at
the extraordinary behaviour of the medical gentleman, that he
involuntarily retreated towards the door, and looked very much disturbed
at his strange reception.

‘What, don’t you know me?’ said the medical gentleman.

Mr. Winkle murmured, in reply, that he had not that pleasure.

‘Why, then,’ said the medical gentleman, ‘there are hopes for me yet; I
may attend half the old women in Bristol, if I’ve decent luck. Get out,
you mouldy old villain, get out!’ With this adjuration, which was
addressed to the large book, the medical gentleman kicked the volume
with remarkable agility to the farther end of the shop, and, pulling off
his green spectacles, grinned the identical grin of Robert Sawyer,
Esquire, formerly of Guy’s Hospital in the Borough, with a private
residence in Lant Street.

‘You don’t mean to say you weren’t down upon me?’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer,
shaking Mr. Winkle’s hand with friendly warmth.

‘Upon my word I was not,’ replied Mr. Winkle, returning his pressure.

‘I wonder you didn’t see the name,’ said Bob Sawyer, calling his
friend’s attention to the outer door, on which, in the same white paint,
were traced the words ‘Sawyer, late Nockemorf.’

‘It never caught my eye,’ returned Mr. Winkle.

‘Lord, if I had known who you were, I should have rushed out, and caught
you in my arms,’ said Bob Sawyer; ‘but upon my life, I thought you were
the King’s-taxes.’

‘No!’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘I did, indeed,’ responded Bob Sawyer, ‘and I was just going to say that
I wasn’t at home, but if you’d leave a message I’d be sure to give it to
myself; for he don’t know me; no more does the Lighting and Paving. I
think the Church-rates guesses who I am, and I know the Water-works
does, because I drew a tooth of his when I first came down here. But
come in, come in!’ Chattering in this way, Mr. Bob Sawyer pushed Mr.
Winkle into the back room, where, amusing himself by boring little
circular caverns in the chimney-piece with a red-hot poker, sat no less
a person than Mr. Benjamin Allen.

‘Well!’ said Mr. Winkle. ‘This is indeed a pleasure I did not expect.
What a very nice place you have here!’

‘Pretty well, pretty well,’ replied Bob Sawyer. ‘I _passed_, soon after
that precious party, and my friends came down with the needful for this
business; so I put on a black suit of clothes, and a pair of spectacles,
and came here to look as solemn as I could.’

‘And a very snug little business you have, no doubt?’ said Mr. Winkle
knowingly.

‘Very,’ replied Bob Sawyer. ‘So snug, that at the end of a few years you
might put all the profits in a wine-glass, and cover ‘em over with a
gooseberry leaf.’

You cannot surely mean that?’ said Mr. Winkle. ‘The stock itself--’

Dummies, my dear boy,’ said Bob Sawyer; ‘half the drawers have nothing
in ‘em, and the other half don’t open.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘Fact--honour!’ returned Bob Sawyer, stepping out into the shop, and
demonstrating the veracity of the assertion by divers hard pulls at the
little gilt knobs on the counterfeit drawers. ‘Hardly anything real in
the shop but the leeches, and _they _are second-hand.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought it!’ exclaimed Mr. Winkle, much surprised.

‘I hope not,’ replied Bob Sawyer, ‘else where’s the use of appearances,
eh? But what will you take? Do as we do? That’s right. Ben, my fine
fellow, put your hand into the cupboard, and bring out the patent
digester.’

Mr. Benjamin Allen smiled his readiness, and produced from the closet at
his elbow a black bottle half full of brandy.

‘You don’t take water, of course?’ said Bob Sawyer.

‘Thank you,’ replied Mr. Winkle. ‘It’s rather early. I should like to
qualify it, if you have no objection.’

‘None in the least, if you can reconcile it to your conscience,’ replied
Bob Sawyer, tossing off, as he spoke, a glass of the liquor with great
relish. ‘Ben, the pipkin!’

Mr. Benjamin Allen drew forth, from the same hiding-place, a small brass
pipkin, which Bob Sawyer observed he prided himself upon, particularly
because it looked so business-like. The water in the professional pipkin
having been made to boil, in course of time, by various little
shovelfuls of coal, which Mr. Bob Sawyer took out of a practicable
window-seat, labelled ‘Soda Water,’ Mr. Winkle adulterated his brandy;
and the conversation was becoming general, when it was interrupted by
the entrance into the shop of a boy, in a sober gray livery and a gold-
laced hat, with a small covered basket under his arm, whom Mr. Bob
Sawyer immediately hailed with, ‘Tom, you vagabond, come here.’

The boy presented himself accordingly.

‘You’ve been stopping to “over” all the posts in Bristol, you idle young
scamp!’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer.

‘No, sir, I haven’t,’ replied the boy.

‘You had better not!’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer, with a threatening aspect.
‘Who do you suppose will ever employ a professional man, when they see
his boy playing at marbles in the gutter, or flying the garter in the
horse-road? Have you no feeling for your profession, you groveller? Did
you leave all the medicine?’

Yes, Sir.’

‘The powders for the child, at the large house with the new family, and
the pills to be taken four times a day at the ill-tempered old
gentleman’s with the gouty leg?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then shut the door, and mind the shop.’

‘Come,’ said Mr. Winkle, as the boy retired, ‘things are not quite so
bad as you would have me believe, either. There is _some _medicine to be
sent out.’

Mr. Bob Sawyer peeped into the shop to see that no stranger was within
hearing, and leaning forward to Mr. Winkle, said, in a low tone--

‘He leaves it all at the wrong houses.’

Mr. Winkle looked perplexed, and Bob Sawyer and his friend laughed.

‘Don’t you see?’ said Bob. ‘He goes up to a house, rings the area bell,
pokes a packet of medicine without a direction into the servant’s hand,
and walks off. Servant takes it into the dining-parlour; master opens
it, and reads the label: “Draught to be taken at bedtime--pills as
before--lotion as usual--the powder. From Sawyer’s, late Nockemorf’s.
Physicians’ prescriptions carefully prepared,” and all the rest of it.
Shows it to his wife--she reads the label; it goes down to the servants-
-_they_ read the label. Next day, boy calls: “Very sorry--his mistake--
immense business--great many parcels to deliver--Mr. Sawyer’s
compliments--late Nockemorf.” The name gets known, and that’s the thing,
my boy, in the medical way. Bless your heart, old fellow, it’s better
than all the advertising in the world. We have got one four-ounce bottle
that’s been to half the houses in Bristol, and hasn’t done yet.’

‘Dear me, I see,’ observed Mr. Winkle; ‘what an excellent plan!’

‘Oh, Ben and I have hit upon a dozen such,’ replied Bob Sawyer, with
great glee. ‘The lamplighter has eighteenpence a week to pull the night-
bell for ten minutes every time he comes round; and my boy always rushes
into the church just before the psalms, when the people have got nothing
to do but look about ‘em, and calls me out, with horror and dismay
depicted on his countenance. “Bless my soul,” everybody says, “somebody
taken suddenly ill! Sawyer, late Nockemorf, sent for. What a business
that young man has!”’

At the termination of this disclosure of some of the mysteries of
medicine, Mr. Bob Sawyer and his friend, Ben Allen, threw themselves
back in their respective chairs, and laughed boisterously. When they had
enjoyed the joke to their heart’s content, the discourse changed to
topics in which Mr. Winkle was more immediately interested.

We think we have hinted elsewhere, that Mr. Benjamin Allen had a way of
becoming sentimental after brandy. The case is not a peculiar one, as we
ourself can testify, having, on a few occasions, had to deal with
patients who have been afflicted in a similar manner. At this precise
period of his existence, Mr. Benjamin Allen had perhaps a greater
predisposition to maudlinism than he had ever known before; the cause of
which malady was briefly this. He had been staying nearly three weeks
with Mr. Bob Sawyer; Mr. Bob Sawyer was not remarkable for temperance,
nor was Mr. Benjamin Allen for the ownership of a very strong head; the
consequence was that, during the whole space of time just mentioned, Mr.
Benjamin Allen had been wavering between intoxication partial, and
intoxication complete.

‘My dear friend,’ said Mr. Ben Allen, taking advantage of Mr. Bob
Sawyer’s temporary absence behind the counter, whither he had retired to
dispense some of the second-hand leeches, previously referred to; ‘my
dear friend, I am very miserable.’

Mr. Winkle professed his heartfelt regret to hear it, and begged to know
whether he could do anything to alleviate the sorrows of the suffering
student.

‘Nothing, my dear boy, nothing,’ said Ben. ‘You recollect Arabella,
Winkle? My sister Arabella--a little girl, Winkle, with black eyes--when
we were down at Wardle’s? I don’t know whether you happened to notice
her--a nice little girl, Winkle. Perhaps my features may recall her
countenance to your recollection?’

Mr. Winkle required nothing to recall the charming Arabella to his mind;
and it was rather fortunate he did not, for the features of her brother
Benjamin would unquestionably have proved but an indifferent refresher
to his memory. He answered, with as much calmness as he could assume,
that he perfectly remembered the young lady referred to, and sincerely
trusted she was in good health.

‘Our friend Bob is a delightful fellow, Winkle,’ was the only reply of
Mr. Ben Allen.

‘Very,’ said Mr. Winkle, not much relishing this close connection of the
two names.

‘I designed ‘em for each other; they were made for each other, sent into
the world for each other, born for each other, Winkle,’ said Mr. Ben
Allen, setting down his glass with emphasis. ‘There’s a special destiny
in the matter, my dear sir; there’s only five years’ difference between
‘em, and both their birthdays are in August.’

Mr. Winkle was too anxious to hear what was to follow to express much
wonderment at this extraordinary coincidence, marvellous as it was; so
Mr. Ben Allen, after a tear or two, went on to say that, notwithstanding
all his esteem and respect and veneration for his friend, Arabella had
unaccountably and undutifully evinced the most determined antipathy to
his person.

‘And I think,’ said Mr. Ben Allen, in conclusion. ‘I think there’s a
prior attachment.’

‘Have you any idea who the object of it might be?’ asked Mr. Winkle,
with great trepidation.

Mr. Ben Allen seized the poker, flourished it in a warlike manner above
his head, inflicted a savage blow on an imaginary skull, and wound up by
saying, in a very expressive manner, that he only wished he could guess;
that was all.

‘I’d show him what I thought of him,’ said Mr. Ben Allen. And round went
the poker again, more fiercely than before.

All this was, of course, very soothing to the feelings of Mr. Winkle,
who remained silent for a few minutes; but at length mustered up
resolution to inquire whether Miss Allen was in Kent.

‘No, no,’ said Mr. Ben Allen, laying aside the poker, and looking very
cunning; ‘I didn’t think Wardle’s exactly the place for a headstrong
girl; so, as I am her natural protector and guardian, our parents being
dead, I have brought her down into this part of the country to spend a
few months at an old aunt’s, in a nice, dull, close place. I think that
will cure her, my boy. If it doesn’t, I’ll take her abroad for a little
while, and see what that’ll do.’

‘Oh, the aunt’s is in Bristol, is it?’ faltered Mr. Winkle.

‘No, no, not in Bristol,’ replied Mr. Ben Allen, jerking his thumb over
his right shoulder; ‘over that way--down there. But, hush, here’s Bob.
Not a word, my dear friend, not a word.’

Short as this conversation was, it roused in Mr. Winkle the highest
degree of excitement and anxiety. The suspected prior attachment rankled
in his heart. Could he be the object of it? Could it be for him that the
fair Arabella had looked scornfully on the sprightly Bob Sawyer, or had
he a successful rival? He determined to see her, cost what it might; but
here an insurmountable objection presented itself, for whether the
explanatory ‘over that way,’ and ‘down there,’ of Mr. Ben Allen, meant
three miles off, or thirty, or three hundred, he could in no wise guess.

But he had no opportunity of pondering over his love just then, for Bob
Sawyer’s return was the immediate precursor of the arrival of a meat-pie
from the baker’s, of which that gentleman insisted on his staying to
partake. The cloth was laid by an occasional charwoman, who officiated
in the capacity of Mr. Bob Sawyer’s housekeeper; and a third knife and
fork having been borrowed from the mother of the boy in the gray livery
(for Mr. Sawyer’s domestic arrangements were as yet conducted on a
limited scale), they sat down to dinner; the beer being served up, as
Mr. Sawyer remarked, ‘in its native pewter.’

After dinner, Mr. Bob Sawyer ordered in the largest mortar in the shop,
and proceeded to brew a reeking jorum of rum-punch therein, stirring up
and amalgamating the materials with a pestle in a very creditable and
apothecary-like manner. Mr. Sawyer, being a bachelor, had only one
tumbler in the house, which was assigned to Mr. Winkle as a compliment
to the visitor, Mr. Ben Allen being accommodated with a funnel with a
cork in the narrow end, and Bob Sawyer contented himself with one of
those wide-lipped crystal vessels inscribed with a variety of cabalistic
characters, in which chemists are wont to measure out their liquid drugs
in compounding prescriptions. These preliminaries adjusted, the punch
was tasted, and pronounced excellent; and it having been arranged that
Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen should be considered at liberty to fill twice
to Mr. Winkle’s once, they started fair, with great satisfaction and
good-fellowship.

There was no singing, because Mr. Bob Sawyer said it wouldn’t look
professional; but to make amends for this deprivation there was so much
talking and laughing that it might have been heard, and very likely was,
at the end of the street. Which conversation materially lightened the
hours and improved the mind of Mr. Bob Sawyer’s boy, who, instead of
devoting the evening to his ordinary occupation of writing his name on
the counter, and rubbing it out again, peeped through the glass door,
and thus listened and looked on at the same time.


The mirth of Mr. Bob Sawyer was rapidly ripening into the furious, Mr.
Ben Allen was fast relapsing into the sentimental, and the punch had
well-nigh disappeared altogether, when the boy hastily running in,
announced that a young woman had just come over, to say that Sawyer late
Nockemorf was wanted directly, a couple of streets off. This broke up
the party. Mr. Bob Sawyer, understanding the message, after some twenty
repetitions, tied a wet cloth round his head to sober himself, and,
having partially succeeded, put on his green spectacles and issued
forth. Resisting all entreaties to stay till he came back, and finding
it quite impossible to engage Mr. Ben Allen in any intelligible
conversation on the subject nearest his heart, or indeed on any other,
Mr. Winkle took his departure, and returned to the Bush.

The anxiety of his mind, and the numerous meditations which Arabella had
awakened, prevented his share of the mortar of punch producing that
effect upon him which it would have had under other circumstances. So,
after taking a glass of soda-water and brandy at the bar, he turned into
the coffee-room, dispirited rather than elevated by the occurrences of
the evening.

Sitting in front of the fire, with his back towards him, was a tallish
gentleman in a greatcoat: the only other occupant of the room. It was
rather a cool evening for the season of the year, and the gentleman drew
his chair aside to afford the new-comer a sight of the fire. What were
Mr. Winkle’s feelings when, in doing so, he disclosed to view the face
and figure of the vindictive and sanguinary Dowler!

Mr. Winkle’s first impulse was to give a violent pull at the nearest
bell-handle, but that unfortunately happened to be immediately behind
Mr. Dowler’s head. He had made one step towards it, before he checked
himself. As he did so, Mr. Dowler very hastily drew back.

‘Mr. Winkle, Sir. Be calm. Don’t strike me. I won’t bear it. A blow!
Never!’ said Mr. Dowler, looking meeker than Mr. Winkle had expected in
a gentleman of his ferocity.

‘A blow, Sir?’ stammered Mr. Winkle.

‘A blow, Sir,’ replied Dowler. ‘Compose your feelings. Sit down. Hear
me.’

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Winkle, trembling from head to foot, ‘before I consent
to sit down beside, or opposite you, without the presence of a waiter, I
must be secured by some further understanding. You used a threat against
me last night, Sir, a dreadful threat, Sir.’ Here Mr. Winkle turned very
pale indeed, and stopped short.

‘I did,’ said Dowler, with a countenance almost as white as Mr.
Winkle’s. ‘Circumstances were suspicious. They have been explained. I
respect your bravery. Your feeling is upright. Conscious innocence.
There’s my hand. Grasp it.’

‘Really, Sir,’ said Mr. Winkle, hesitating whether to give his hand or
not, and almost fearing that it was demanded in order that he might be
taken at an advantage, ‘really, Sir, I--’

‘I know what you mean,’ interposed Dowler. ‘You feel aggrieved. Very
natural. So should I. I was wrong. I beg your pardon. Be friendly.
Forgive me.’ With this, Dowler fairly forced his hand upon Mr. Winkle,
and shaking it with the utmost vehemence, declared he was a fellow of
extreme spirit, and he had a higher opinion of him than ever.

‘Now,’ said Dowler, ‘sit down. Relate it all. How did you find me? When
did you follow? Be frank. Tell me.’

‘It’s quite accidental,’ replied Mr. Winkle, greatly perplexed by the
curious and unexpected nature of the interview. ‘Quite.’

‘Glad of it,’ said Dowler. ‘I woke this morning. I had forgotten my
threat. I laughed at the accident. I felt friendly. I said so.’

‘To whom?’ inquired Mr. Winkle.

‘To Mrs. Dowler. “You made a vow,” said she. “I did,” said I. “It was a
rash one,” said she. “It was,” said I. “I’ll apologise. Where is he?”’

‘Who?’ inquired Mr. Winkle.

‘You,’ replied Dowler. ‘I went downstairs. You were not to be found.
Pickwick looked gloomy. Shook his head. Hoped no violence would be
committed. I saw it all. You felt yourself insulted. You had gone, for a
friend perhaps. Possibly for pistols. “High spirit,” said I. “I admire
him.”’

Mr. Winkle coughed, and beginning to see how the land lay, assumed a
look of importance.

‘I left a note for you,’ resumed Dowler. ‘I said I was sorry. So I was.
Pressing business called me here. You were not satisfied. You followed.
You required a verbal explanation. You were right. It’s all over now. My
business is finished. I go back to-morrow. Join me.’

As Dowler progressed in his explanation, Mr. Winkle’s countenance grew
more and more dignified. The mysterious nature of the commencement of
their conversation was explained; Mr. Dowler had as great an objection
to duelling as himself; in short, this blustering and awful personage
was one of the most egregious cowards in existence, and interpreting Mr.
Winkle’s absence through the medium of his own fears, had taken the same
step as himself, and prudently retired until all excitement of feeling
should have subsided.

As the real state of the case dawned upon Mr. Winkle’s mind, he looked
very terrible, and said he was perfectly satisfied; but at the same
time, said so with an air that left Mr. Dowler no alternative but to
infer that if he had not been, something most horrible and destructive
must inevitably have occurred. Mr. Dowler appeared to be impressed with
a becoming sense of Mr. Winkle’s magnanimity and condescension; and the
two belligerents parted for the night, with many protestations of
eternal friendship.

About half-past twelve o’clock, when Mr. Winkle had been revelling some
twenty minutes in the full luxury of his first sleep, he was suddenly
awakened by a loud knocking at his chamber door, which, being repeated
with increased vehemence, caused him to start up in bed, and inquire who
was there, and what the matter was.

‘Please, Sir, here’s a young man which says he must see you directly,’
responded the voice of the chambermaid.

‘A young man!’ exclaimed Mr. Winkle.

‘No mistake about that ‘ere, Sir,’ replied another voice through the
keyhole; ‘and if that wery same interestin’ young creetur ain’t let in
vithout delay, it’s wery possible as his legs vill enter afore his
countenance.’ The young man gave a gentle kick at one of the lower
panels of the door, after he had given utterance to this hint, as if to
add force and point to the remark.

‘Is that you, Sam?’ inquired Mr. Winkle, springing out of bed.

‘Quite unpossible to identify any gen’l’m’n vith any degree o’ mental
satisfaction, vithout lookin’ at him, Sir,’ replied the voice
dogmatically.

Mr. Winkle, not much doubting who the young man was, unlocked the door;
which he had no sooner done than Mr. Samuel Weller entered with great
precipitation, and carefully relocking it on the inside, deliberately
put the key in his waistcoat pocket; and, after surveying Mr. Winkle
from head to foot, said--

‘You’re a wery humorous young gen’l’m’n, you air, Sir!’

‘What do you mean by this conduct, Sam?’ inquired Mr. Winkle
indignantly. ‘Get out, sir, this instant. What do you mean, Sir?’

‘What do I mean,’ retorted Sam; ‘come, Sir, this is rayther too rich, as
the young lady said when she remonstrated with the pastry-cook, arter
he’d sold her a pork pie as had got nothin’ but fat inside. What do I
mean! Well, that ain’t a bad ‘un, that ain’t.’

‘Unlock that door, and leave this room immediately, Sir,’ said Mr.
Winkle.

‘I shall leave this here room, sir, just precisely at the wery same
moment as you leaves it,’ responded Sam, speaking in a forcible manner,
and seating himself with perfect gravity. ‘If I find it necessary to
carry you away, pick-a-back, o’ course I shall leave it the least bit o’
time possible afore you; but allow me to express a hope as you won’t
reduce me to extremities; in saying wich, I merely quote wot the
nobleman said to the fractious pennywinkle, ven he vouldn’t come out of
his shell by means of a pin, and he conseqvently began to be afeered
that he should be obliged to crack him in the parlour door.’ At the end
of this address, which was unusually lengthy for him, Mr. Weller planted
his hands on his knees, and looked full in Mr. Winkle’s face, with an
expression of countenance which showed that he had not the remotest
intention of being trifled with.

‘You’re a amiably-disposed young man, Sir, I don’t think,’ resumed Mr.
Weller, in a tone of moral reproof, ‘to go inwolving our precious
governor in all sorts o’ fanteegs, wen he’s made up his mind to go
through everythink for principle. You’re far worse nor Dodson, Sir; and
as for Fogg, I consider him a born angel to you!’ Mr. Weller having
accompanied this last sentiment with an emphatic slap on each knee,
folded his arms with a look of great disgust, and threw himself back in
his chair, as if awaiting the criminal’s defence.

‘My good fellow,’ said Mr. Winkle, extending his hand--his teeth
chattering all the time he spoke, for he had been standing, during the
whole of Mr. Weller’s lecture, in his night-gear--‘my good fellow, I
respect your attachment to my excellent friend, and I am very sorry
indeed to have added to his causes for disquiet. There, Sam, there!’

‘Well,’ said Sam, rather sulkily, but giving the proffered hand a
respectful shake at the same time--‘well, so you ought to be, and I am
very glad to find you air; for, if I can help it, I won’t have him put
upon by nobody, and that’s all about it.’

‘Certainly not, Sam,’ said Mr. Winkle. ‘There! Now go to bed, Sam, and
we’ll talk further about this in the morning.’

‘I’m wery sorry,’ said Sam, ‘but I can’t go to bed.’

‘Not go to bed!’ repeated Mr. Winkle.

‘No,’ said Sam, shaking his head. ‘Can’t be done.’

‘You don’t mean to say you’re going back to-night, Sam?’ urged Mr.
Winkle, greatly surprised.

‘Not unless you particklerly wish it,’ replied Sam; ‘but I mustn’t leave
this here room. The governor’s orders wos peremptory.’

‘Nonsense, Sam,’ said Mr. Winkle, ‘I must stop here two or three days;
and more than that, Sam, you must stop here too, to assist me in gaining
an interview with a young lady--Miss Allen, Sam; you remember her--whom
I must and will see before I leave Bristol.’

But in reply to each of these positions, Sam shook his head with great
firmness, and energetically replied, ‘It can’t be done.’

After a great deal of argument and representation on the part of Mr.
Winkle, however, and a full disclosure of what had passed in the
interview with Dowler, Sam began to waver; and at length a compromise
was effected, of which the following were the main and principal
conditions:--

That Sam should retire, and leave Mr. Winkle in the undisturbed
possession of his apartment, on the condition that he had permission to
lock the door on the outside, and carry off the key; provided always,
that in the event of an alarm of fire, or other dangerous contingency,
the door should be instantly unlocked. That a letter should be written
to Mr. Pickwick early next morning, and forwarded per Dowler, requesting
his consent to Sam and Mr. Winkle’s remaining at Bristol, for the
purpose and with the object already assigned, and begging an answer by
the next coach--, if favourable, the aforesaid parties to remain
accordingly, and if not, to return to Bath immediately on the receipt
thereof. And, lastly, that Mr. Winkle should be understood as distinctly
pledging himself not to resort to the window, fireplace, or other
surreptitious mode of escape in the meanwhile. These stipulations having
been concluded, Sam locked the door and departed.

He had nearly got downstairs, when he stopped, and drew the key from his
pocket.

‘I quite forgot about the knockin’ down,’ said Sam, half turning back.
‘The governor distinctly said it was to be done. Amazin’ stupid o’ me,
that ‘ere! Never mind,’ said Sam, brightening up, ‘it’s easily done to-
morrow, anyvays.’

Apparently much consoled by this reflection, Mr. Weller once more
deposited the key in his pocket, and descending the remainder of the
stairs without any fresh visitations of conscience, was soon, in common
with the other inmates of the house, buried in profound repose.



CHAPTER XXXIX. MR. SAMUEL WELLER, BEING INTRUSTED WITH A MISSION OF
LOVE, PROCEEDS TO EXECUTE IT; WITH WHAT SUCCESS WILL HEREINAFTER APPEAR

During the whole of next day, Sam kept Mr. Winkle steadily in sight,
fully determined not to take his eyes off him for one instant, until he
should receive express instructions from the fountain-head. However
disagreeable Sam’s very close watch and great vigilance were to Mr.
Winkle, he thought it better to bear with them, than, by any act of
violent opposition, to hazard being carried away by force, which Mr.
Weller more than once strongly hinted was the line of conduct that a
strict sense of duty prompted him to pursue. There is little reason to
doubt that Sam would very speedily have quieted his scruples, by bearing
Mr. Winkle back to Bath, bound hand and foot, had not Mr. Pickwick’s
prompt attention to the note, which Dowler had undertaken to deliver,
forestalled any such proceeding. In short, at eight o’clock in the
evening, Mr. Pickwick himself walked into the coffee-room of the Bush
Tavern, and told Sam with a smile, to his very great relief, that he had
done quite right, and it was unnecessary for him to mount guard any
longer.

‘I thought it better to come myself,’ said Mr. Pickwick, addressing Mr.
Winkle, as Sam disencumbered him of his great-coat and travelling-shawl,
‘to ascertain, before I gave my consent to Sam’s employment in this
matter, that you are quite in earnest and serious, with respect to this
young lady.’

‘Serious, from my heart--from my soul!’ returned Mr. Winkle, with great
energy.

‘Remember,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with beaming eyes, ‘we met her at our
excellent and hospitable friend’s, Winkle. It would be an ill return to
tamper lightly, and without due consideration, with this young lady’s
affections. I’ll not allow that, sir. I’ll not allow it.’

‘I have no such intention, indeed,’ exclaimed Mr. Winkle warmly. ‘I have
considered the matter well, for a long time, and I feel that my
happiness is bound up in her.’

‘That’s wot we call tying it up in a small parcel, sir,’ interposed Mr.
Weller, with an agreeable smile.

Mr. Winkle looked somewhat stern at this interruption, and Mr. Pickwick
angrily requested his attendant not to jest with one of the best
feelings of our nature; to which Sam replied, ‘That he wouldn’t, if he
was aware on it; but there were so many on ‘em, that he hardly know’d
which was the best ones wen he heerd ‘em mentioned.’

Mr. Winkle then recounted what had passed between himself and Mr. Ben
Allen, relative to Arabella; stated that his object was to gain an
interview with the young lady, and make a formal disclosure of his
passion; and declared his conviction, founded on certain dark hints and
mutterings of the aforesaid Ben, that, wherever she was at present
immured, it was somewhere near the Downs. And this was his whole stock
of knowledge or suspicion on the subject.

With this very slight clue to guide him, it was determined that Mr.
Weller should start next morning on an expedition of discovery; it was
also arranged that Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Winkle, who were less confident
of their powers, should parade the town meanwhile, and accidentally drop
in upon Mr. Bob Sawyer in the course of the day, in the hope of seeing
or hearing something of the young lady’s whereabouts.

Accordingly, next morning, Sam Weller issued forth upon his quest, in no
way daunted by the very discouraging prospect before him; and away he
walked, up one street and down another--we were going to say, up one
hill and down another, only it’s all uphill at Clifton--without meeting
with anything or anybody that tended to throw the faintest light on the
matter in hand. Many were the colloquies into which Sam entered with
grooms who were airing horses on roads, and nursemaids who were airing
children in lanes; but nothing could Sam elicit from either the first-
mentioned or the last, which bore the slightest reference to the object
of his artfully-prosecuted inquiries. There were a great many young
ladies in a great many houses, the greater part whereof were shrewdly
suspected by the male and female domestics to be deeply attached to
somebody, or perfectly ready to become so, if opportunity afforded. But
as none among these young ladies was Miss Arabella Allen, the
information left Sam at exactly the old point of wisdom at which he had
stood before.

Sam struggled across the Downs against a good high wind, wondering
whether it was always necessary to hold your hat on with both hands in
that part of the country, and came to a shady by-place, about which were
sprinkled several little villas of quiet and secluded appearance.
Outside a stable door at the bottom of a long back lane without a
thoroughfare, a groom in undress was idling about, apparently persuading
himself that he was doing something with a spade and a wheel-barrow. We
may remark, in this place, that we have scarcely ever seen a groom near
a stable, in his lazy moments, who has not been, to a greater or less
extent, the victim of this singular delusion.

Sam thought he might as well talk to this groom as to any one else,
especially as he was very tired with walking, and there was a good large
stone just opposite the wheel-barrow; so he strolled down the lane, and,
seating himself on the stone, opened a conversation with the ease and
freedom for which he was remarkable.

‘Mornin’, old friend,’ said Sam.

‘Arternoon, you mean,’ replied the groom, casting a surly look at Sam.

‘You’re wery right, old friend,’ said Sam; ‘I _do_ mean arternoon. How
are you?’

‘Why, I don’t find myself much the better for seeing of you,’ replied
the ill-tempered groom.

‘That’s wery odd--that is,’ said Sam, ‘for you look so uncommon
cheerful, and seem altogether so lively, that it does vun’s heart good
to see you.’

The surly groom looked surlier still at this, but not sufficiently so to
produce any effect upon Sam, who immediately inquired, with a
countenance of great anxiety, whether his master’s name was not Walker.

‘No, it ain’t,’ said the groom.

‘Nor Brown, I s’pose?’ said Sam.

‘No, it ain’t.’

‘Nor Vilson?’

‘No; nor that either,’ said the groom.

‘Vell,’ replied Sam, ‘then I’m mistaken, and he hasn’t got the honour o’
my acquaintance, which I thought he had. Don’t wait here out o’
compliment to me,’ said Sam, as the groom wheeled in the barrow, and
prepared to shut the gate. ‘Ease afore ceremony, old boy; I’ll excuse
you.’

‘I’d knock your head off for half-a-crown,’ said the surly groom,
bolting one half of the gate.

‘Couldn’t afford to have it done on those terms,’ rejoined Sam. ‘It ‘ud
be worth a life’s board wages at least, to you, and ‘ud be cheap at
that. Make my compliments indoors. Tell ‘em not to vait dinner for me,
and say they needn’t mind puttin’ any by, for it’ll be cold afore I come
in.’

In reply to this, the groom waxing very wroth, muttered a desire to
damage somebody’s person; but disappeared without carrying it into
execution, slamming the door angrily after him, and wholly unheeding
Sam’s affectionate request, that he would leave him a lock of his hair
before he went.

Sam continued to sit on the large stone, meditating upon what was best
to be done, and revolving in his mind a plan for knocking at all the
doors within five miles of Bristol, taking them at a hundred and fifty
or two hundred a day, and endeavouring to find Miss Arabella by that
expedient, when accident all of a sudden threw in his way what he might
have sat there for a twelvemonth and yet not found without it.

Into the lane where he sat, there opened three or four garden gates,
belonging to as many houses, which though detached from each other, were
only separated by their gardens. As these were large and long, and well
planted with trees, the houses were not only at some distance off, but
the greater part of them were nearly concealed from view. Sam was
sitting with his eyes fixed upon the dust-heap outside the next gate to
that by which the groom had disappeared, profoundly turning over in his
mind the difficulties of his present undertaking, when the gate opened,
and a female servant came out into the lane to shake some bedside
carpets.

Sam was so very busy with his own thoughts, that it is probable he would
have taken no more notice of the young woman than just raising his head
and remarking that she had a very neat and pretty figure, if his
feelings of gallantry had not been most strongly roused by observing
that she had no one to help her, and that the carpets seemed too heavy
for her single strength. Mr. Weller was a gentleman of great gallantry
in his own way, and he no sooner remarked this circumstance than he
hastily rose from the large stone, and advanced towards her.

‘My dear,’ said Sam, sliding up with an air of great respect, ‘you’ll
spile that wery pretty figure out o’ all perportion if you shake them
carpets by yourself. Let me help you.’

The young lady, who had been coyly affecting not to know that a
gentleman was so near, turned round as Sam spoke--no doubt (indeed she
said so, afterwards) to decline this offer from a perfect stranger--when
instead of speaking, she started back, and uttered a half-suppressed
scream. Sam was scarcely less staggered, for in the countenance of the
well-shaped female servant, he beheld the very features of his
valentine, the pretty housemaid from Mr. Nupkins’s.

‘Wy, Mary, my dear!’ said Sam.

‘Lauk, Mr. Weller,’ said Mary, ‘how you do frighten one!’

Sam made no verbal answer to this complaint, nor can we precisely say
what reply he did make. We merely know that after a short pause Mary
said, ‘Lor, do adun, Mr. Weller!’ and that his hat had fallen off a few
moments before--from both of which tokens we should be disposed to infer
that one kiss, or more, had passed between the parties.

‘Why, how did you come here?’ said Mary, when the conversation to which
this interruption had been offered, was resumed.

‘O’ course I came to look arter you, my darlin’,’ replied Mr. Weller;
for once permitting his passion to get the better of his veracity.

‘And how did you know I was here?’ inquired Mary. ‘Who could have told
you that I took another service at Ipswich, and that they afterwards
moved all the way here? Who _could _have told you that, Mr. Weller?’

‘Ah, to be sure,’ said Sam, with a cunning look, ‘that’s the pint. Who
could ha’ told me?’

‘It wasn’t Mr. Muzzle, was it?’ inquired Mary.

‘Oh, no.’ replied Sam, with a solemn shake of the head, ‘it warn’t him.’

‘It must have been the cook,’ said Mary.

‘O’ course it must,’ said Sam.

‘Well, I never heard the like of that!’ exclaimed Mary.

‘No more did I,’ said Sam. ‘But Mary, my dear’--here Sam’s manner grew
extremely affectionate--‘Mary, my dear, I’ve got another affair in hand
as is wery pressin’. There’s one o’ my governor’s friends--Mr. Winkle,
you remember him?’

‘Him in the green coat?’ said Mary. ‘Oh, yes, I remember him.’

‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘he’s in a horrid state o’ love; reg’larly comfoozled,
and done over vith it.’

‘Lor!’ interposed Mary.

‘Yes,’ said Sam; ‘but that’s nothin’ if we could find out the young
‘ooman;’ and here Sam, with many digressions upon the personal beauty of
Mary, and the unspeakable tortures he had experienced since he last saw
her, gave a faithful account of Mr. Winkle’s present predicament.

‘Well,’ said Mary, ‘I never did!’

‘O’ course not,’ said Sam, ‘and nobody never did, nor never vill
neither; and here am I a-walkin’ about like the wandering Jew--a
sportin’ character you have perhaps heerd on Mary, my dear, as vos
alvays doin’ a match agin’ time, and never vent to sleep--looking arter
this here Miss Arabella Allen.’

‘Miss who?’ said Mary, in great astonishment.

‘Miss Arabella Allen,’ said Sam.

‘Goodness gracious!’ said Mary, pointing to the garden door which the
sulky groom had locked after him. ‘Why, it’s that very house; she’s been
living there these six weeks. Their upper house-maid, which is lady’s-
maid too, told me all about it over the wash-house palin’s before the
family was out of bed, one mornin’.’

‘Wot, the wery next door to you?’ said Sam.

‘The very next,’ replied Mary.

Mr. Weller was so deeply overcome on receiving this intelligence that he
found it absolutely necessary to cling to his fair informant for
support; and divers little love passages had passed between them, before
he was sufficiently collected to return to the subject.

‘Vell,’ said Sam at length, ‘if this don’t beat cock-fightin’ nothin’
never vill, as the lord mayor said, ven the chief secretary o’ state
proposed his missis’s health arter dinner. That wery next house! Wy,
I’ve got a message to her as I’ve been a-trying all day to deliver.’

‘Ah,’ said Mary, ‘but you can’t deliver it now, because she only walks
in the garden in the evening, and then only for a very little time; she
never goes out, without the old lady.’

Sam ruminated for a few moments, and finally hit upon the following plan
of operations; that he should return just at dusk--the time at which
Arabella invariably took her walk--and, being admitted by Mary into the
garden of the house to which she belonged, would contrive to scramble up
the wall, beneath the overhanging boughs of a large pear-tree, which
would effectually screen him from observation; would there deliver his
message, and arrange, if possible, an interview on behalf of Mr. Winkle
for the ensuing evening at the same hour. Having made this arrangement
with great despatch, he assisted Mary in the long-deferred occupation of
shaking the carpets.

It is not half as innocent a thing as it looks, that shaking little
pieces of carpet--at least, there may be no great harm in the shaking,
but the folding is a very insidious process. So long as the shaking
lasts, and the two parties are kept the carpet’s length apart, it is as
innocent an amusement as can well be devised; but when the folding
begins, and the distance between them gets gradually lessened from one
half its former length to a quarter, and then to an eighth, and then to
a sixteenth, and then to a thirty-second, if the carpet be long enough,
it becomes dangerous. We do not know, to a nicety, how many pieces of
carpet were folded in this instance, but we can venture to state that as
many pieces as there were, so many times did Sam kiss the pretty
housemaid.

Mr. Weller regaled himself with moderation at the nearest tavern until
it was nearly dusk, and then returned to the lane without the
thoroughfare. Having been admitted into the garden by Mary, and having
received from that lady sundry admonitions concerning the safety of his
limbs and neck, Sam mounted into the pear-tree, to wait until Arabella
should come into sight.

He waited so long without this anxiously-expected event occurring, that
he began to think it was not going to take place at all, when he heard
light footsteps upon the gravel, and immediately afterwards beheld
Arabella walking pensively down the garden. As soon as she came nearly
below the tree, Sam began, by way of gently indicating his presence, to
make sundry diabolical noises similar to those which would probably be
natural to a person of middle age who had been afflicted with a
combination of inflammatory sore throat, croup, and whooping-cough, from
his earliest infancy.

Upon this, the young lady cast a hurried glance towards the spot whence
the dreadful sounds proceeded; and her previous alarm being not at all
diminished when she saw a man among the branches, she would most
certainly have decamped, and alarmed the house, had not fear fortunately
deprived her of the power of moving, and caused her to sink down on a
garden seat, which happened by good luck to be near at hand.

‘She’s a-goin’ off,’ soliloquised Sam in great perplexity. ‘Wot a thing
it is, as these here young creeturs will go a-faintin’ avay just ven
they oughtn’t to. Here, young ‘ooman, Miss Sawbones, Mrs. Vinkle,
don’t!’

Whether it was the magic of Mr. Winkle’s name, or the coolness of the
open air, or some recollection of Mr. Weller’s voice, that revived
Arabella, matters not. She raised her head and languidly inquired,
‘Who’s that, and what do you want?’

‘Hush,’ said Sam, swinging himself on to the wall, and crouching there
in as small a compass as he could reduce himself to, ‘only me, miss,
only me.’

‘Mr. Pickwick’s servant!’ said Arabella earnestly.

‘The wery same, miss,’ replied Sam. ‘Here’s Mr. Vinkle reg’larly sewed
up vith desperation, miss.’

‘Ah!’ said Arabella, drawing nearer the wall.

‘Ah, indeed,’ said Sam. ‘Ve thought ve should ha’ been obliged to
strait-veskit him last night; he’s been a-ravin’ all day; and he says if
he can’t see you afore to-morrow night’s over, he vishes he may be
somethin’ unpleasanted if he don’t drownd hisself.’

‘Oh, no, no, Mr. Weller!’ said Arabella, clasping her hands.

‘That’s wot he says, miss,’ replied Sam coolly. ‘He’s a man of his word,
and it’s my opinion he’ll do it, miss. He’s heerd all about you from the
sawbones in barnacles.’

‘From my brother!’ said Arabella, having some faint recognition of Sam’s
description.

‘I don’t rightly know which is your brother, miss,’ replied Sam. ‘Is it
the dirtiest vun o’ the two?’

‘Yes, yes, Mr. Weller,’ returned Arabella, ‘go on. Make haste, pray.’

‘Well, miss,’ said Sam, ‘he’s heerd all about it from him; and it’s the
gov’nor’s opinion that if you don’t see him wery quick, the sawbones as
we’ve been a-speakin’ on, ‘ull get as much extra lead in his head as’ll
rayther damage the dewelopment o’ the orgins if they ever put it in
spirits artervards.’

‘Oh, what can I do to prevent these dreadful quarrels!’ exclaimed
Arabella.

‘It’s the suspicion of a priory ‘tachment as is the cause of it all,’
replied Sam. ‘You’d better see him, miss.’

‘But how?--where?’ cried Arabella. ‘I dare not leave the house alone. My
brother is so unkind, so unreasonable! I know how strange my talking
thus to you may appear, Mr. Weller, but I am very, very unhappy--’ and
here poor Arabella wept so bitterly that Sam grew chivalrous.

‘It may seem wery strange talkin’ to me about these here affairs, miss,’
said Sam, with great vehemence; ‘but all I can say is, that I’m not only
ready but villin’ to do anythin’ as’ll make matters agreeable; and if
chuckin’ either o’ them sawboneses out o’ winder ‘ull do it, I’m the
man.’ As Sam Weller said this, he tucked up his wristbands, at the
imminent hazard of falling off the wall in so doing, to intimate his
readiness to set to work immediately.

Flattering as these professions of good feeling were, Arabella
resolutely declined (most unaccountably, as Sam thought) to avail
herself of them. For some time she strenuously refused to grant Mr.
Winkle the interview Sam had so pathetically requested; but at length,
when the conversation threatened to be interrupted by the unwelcome
arrival of a third party, she hurriedly gave him to understand, with
many professions of gratitude, that it was barely possible she might be
in the garden an hour later, next evening. Sam understood this perfectly
well; and Arabella, bestowing upon him one of her sweetest smiles,
tripped gracefully away, leaving Mr. Weller in a state of very great
admiration of her charms, both personal and mental.

Having descended in safety from the wall, and not forgotten to devote a
few moments to his own particular business in the same department, Mr.
Weller then made the best of his way back to the Bush, where his
prolonged absence had occasioned much speculation and some alarm.

‘We must be careful,’ said Mr. Pickwick, after listening attentively to
Sam’s tale, ‘not for our sakes, but for that of the young lady. We must
be very cautious.’

‘_We_!’ said Mr. Winkle, with marked emphasis.

Mr. Pickwick’s momentary look of indignation at the tone of this remark,
subsided into his characteristic expression of benevolence, as he
replied--

‘_We_, Sir! I shall accompany you.’

‘You!’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘I,’ replied Mr. Pickwick mildly. ‘In affording you this interview, the
young lady has taken a natural, perhaps, but still a very imprudent
step. If I am present at the meeting--a mutual friend, who is old enough
to be the father of both parties--the voice of calumny can never be
raised against her hereafter.’

Mr. Pickwick’s eyes lightened with honest exultation at his own
foresight, as he spoke thus. Mr. Winkle was touched by this little trait
of his delicate respect for the young _protegee _of his friend, and took
his hand with a feeling of regard, akin to veneration.

‘You _SHALL _ go,’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘I will,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Sam, have my greatcoat and shawl ready,
and order a conveyance to be at the door to-morrow evening, rather
earlier than is absolutely necessary, in order that we may be in good
time.’

Mr. Weller touched his hat, as an earnest of his obedience, and withdrew
to make all needful preparations for the expedition.

The coach was punctual to the time appointed; and Mr. Weller, after duly
installing Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Winkle inside, took his seat on the box
by the driver. They alighted, as had been agreed on, about a quarter of
a mile from the place of rendezvous, and desiring the coachman to await
their return, proceeded the remaining distance on foot.

It was at this stage of the undertaking that Mr. Pickwick, with many
smiles and various other indications of great self-satisfaction,
produced from one of his coat pockets a dark lantern, with which he had
specially provided himself for the occasion, and the great mechanical
beauty of which he proceeded to explain to Mr. Winkle, as they walked
along, to the no small surprise of the few stragglers they met.

‘I should have been the better for something of this kind, in my last
garden expedition, at night; eh, Sam?’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking good-
humouredly round at his follower, who was trudging behind.

‘Wery nice things, if they’re managed properly, Sir,’ replied Mr.
Weller; ‘but wen you don’t want to be seen, I think they’re more useful
arter the candle’s gone out, than wen it’s alight.’

Mr. Pickwick appeared struck by Sam’s remarks, for he put the lantern
into his pocket again, and they walked on in silence.

‘Down here, Sir,’ said Sam. ‘Let me lead the way. This is the lane,
Sir.’

Down the lane they went, and dark enough it was. Mr. Pickwick brought
out the lantern, once or twice, as they groped their way along, and
threw a very brilliant little tunnel of light before them, about a foot
in diameter. It was very pretty to look at, but seemed to have the
effect of rendering surrounding objects rather darker than before.

At length they arrived at the large stone. Here Sam recommended his
master and Mr. Winkle to seat themselves, while he reconnoitred, and
ascertained whether Mary was yet in waiting.

After an absence of five or ten minutes, Sam returned to say that the
gate was opened, and all quiet. Following him with stealthy tread, Mr.
Pickwick and Mr. Winkle soon found themselves in the garden. Here
everybody said, ‘Hush!’ a good many times; and that being done, no one
seemed to have any very distinct apprehension of what was to be done
next.

‘Is Miss Allen in the garden yet, Mary?’ inquired Mr. Winkle, much
agitated.

‘I don’t know, sir,’ replied the pretty housemaid. ‘The best thing to be
done, sir, will be for Mr. Weller to give you a hoist up into the tree,
and perhaps Mr. Pickwick will have the goodness to see that nobody comes
up the lane, while I watch at the other end of the garden. Goodness
gracious, what’s that?’

‘That ‘ere blessed lantern ‘ull be the death on us all,’ exclaimed Sam
peevishly. ‘Take care wot you’re a-doin’ on, sir; you’re a-sendin’ a
blaze o’ light, right into the back parlour winder.’

‘Dear me!’ said Mr. Pickwick, turning hastily aside, ‘I didn’t mean to
do that.’

‘Now, it’s in the next house, sir,’ remonstrated Sam.

‘Bless my heart!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, turning round again.

‘Now, it’s in the stable, and they’ll think the place is afire,’ said
Sam. ‘Shut it up, sir, can’t you?’

‘It’s the most extraordinary lantern I ever met with, in all my life!’
exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, greatly bewildered by the effects he had so
unintentionally produced. ‘I never saw such a powerful reflector.’

‘It’ll be vun too powerful for us, if you keep blazin’ avay in that
manner, sir,’ replied Sam, as Mr. Pickwick, after various unsuccessful
efforts, managed to close the slide. ‘There’s the young lady’s
footsteps. Now, Mr. Winkle, sir, up vith you.’

‘Stop, stop!’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I must speak to her first. Help me up,
Sam.’

‘Gently, Sir,’ said Sam, planting his head against the wall, and making
a platform of his back. ‘Step atop o’ that ‘ere flower-pot, Sir. Now
then, up vith you.’

‘I’m afraid I shall hurt you, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Never mind me, Sir,’ replied Sam. ‘Lend him a hand, Mr. Winkle, sir.
Steady, sir, steady! That’s the time o’ day!’

As Sam spoke, Mr. Pickwick, by exertions almost supernatural in a
gentleman of his years and weight, contrived to get upon Sam’s back; and
Sam gently raising himself up, and Mr. Pickwick holding on fast by the
top of the wall, while Mr. Winkle clasped him tight by the legs, they
contrived by these means to bring his spectacles just above the level of
the coping.

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking over the wall, and catching sight
of Arabella, on the other side, ‘don’t be frightened, my dear, it’s only
me.’ ‘Oh, pray go away, Mr. Pickwick,’ said Arabella. ‘Tell them all to
go away. I am so dreadfully frightened. Dear, dear Mr. Pickwick, don’t
stop there. You’ll fall down and kill yourself, I know you will.’

‘Now, pray don’t alarm yourself, my dear,’ said Mr. Pickwick soothingly.
‘There is not the least cause for fear, I assure you. Stand firm, Sam,’
said Mr. Pickwick, looking down.

‘All right, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘Don’t be longer than you can
conweniently help, sir. You’re rayther heavy.’

‘Only another moment, Sam,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘I merely wished you to know, my dear, that I should not have allowed my
young friend to see you in this clandestine way, if the situation in
which you are placed had left him any alternative; and, lest the
impropriety of this step should cause you any uneasiness, my love, it
may be a satisfaction to you, to know that I am present. That’s all, my
dear.’

‘Indeed, Mr. Pickwick, I am very much obliged to you for your kindness
and consideration,’ replied Arabella, drying her tears with her
handkerchief. She would probably have said much more, had not Mr.
Pickwick’s head disappeared with great swiftness, in consequence of a
false step on Sam’s shoulder which brought him suddenly to the ground.
He was up again in an instant however; and bidding Mr. Winkle make haste
and get the interview over, ran out into the lane to keep watch, with
all the courage and ardour of youth. Mr. Winkle himself, inspired by the
occasion, was on the wall in a moment, merely pausing to request Sam to
be careful of his master.

‘I’ll take care on him, sir,’ replied Sam. ‘Leave him to me.’

‘Where is he? What’s he doing, Sam?’ inquired Mr. Winkle.

‘Bless his old gaiters,’ rejoined Sam, looking out at the garden door.
‘He’s a-keepin’ guard in the lane vith that ‘ere dark lantern, like a
amiable Guy Fawkes! I never see such a fine creetur in my days. Blessed
if I don’t think his heart must ha’ been born five-and-twenty year arter
his body, at least!’

Mr. Winkle stayed not to hear the encomium upon his friend. He had
dropped from the wall; thrown himself at Arabella’s feet; and by this
time was pleading the sincerity of his passion with an eloquence worthy
even of Mr. Pickwick himself.

While these things were going on in the open air, an elderly gentleman
of scientific attainments was seated in his library, two or three houses
off, writing a philosophical treatise, and ever and anon moistening his
clay and his labours with a glass of claret from a venerable-looking
bottle which stood by his side. In the agonies of composition, the
elderly gentleman looked sometimes at the carpet, sometimes at the
ceiling, and sometimes at the wall; and when neither carpet, ceiling,
nor wall afforded the requisite degree of inspiration, he looked out of
the window.

In one of these pauses of invention, the scientific gentleman was gazing
abstractedly on the thick darkness outside, when he was very much
surprised by observing a most brilliant light glide through the air, at
a short distance above the ground, and almost instantaneously vanish.
After a short time the phenomenon was repeated, not once or twice, but
several times; at last the scientific gentleman, laying down his pen,
began to consider to what natural causes these appearances were to be
assigned.

They were not meteors; they were too low. They were not glow-worms; they
were too high. They were not will-o’-the-wisps; they were not fireflies;
they were not fireworks. What could they be? Some extraordinary and
wonderful phenomenon of nature, which no philosopher had ever seen
before; something which it had been reserved for him alone to discover,
and which he should immortalise his name by chronicling for the benefit
of posterity. Full of this idea, the scientific gentleman seized his pen
again, and committed to paper sundry notes of these unparalleled
appearances, with the date, day, hour, minute, and precise second at
which they were visible: all of which were to form the data of a
voluminous treatise of great research and deep learning, which should
astonish all the atmospherical wiseacres that ever drew breath in any
part of the civilised globe.

He threw himself back in his easy-chair, wrapped in contemplations of
his future greatness. The mysterious light appeared more brilliantly
than before, dancing, to all appearance, up and down the lane, crossing
from side to side, and moving in an orbit as eccentric as comets
themselves.

The scientific gentleman was a bachelor. He had no wife to call in and
astonish, so he rang the bell for his servant.

‘Pruffle,’ said the scientific gentleman, ‘there is something very
extraordinary in the air to-night? Did you see that?’ said the
scientific gentleman, pointing out of the window, as the light again
became visible.

‘Yes, I did, Sir.’

‘What do you think of it, Pruffle?’

‘Think of it, Sir?’

‘Yes. You have been bred up in this country. What should you say was the
cause for those lights, now?’

The scientific gentleman smilingly anticipated Pruffle’s reply that he
could assign no cause for them at all. Pruffle meditated.

‘I should say it was thieves, Sir,’ said Pruffle at length.

‘You’re a fool, and may go downstairs,’ said the scientific gentleman.

‘Thank you, Sir,’ said Pruffle. And down he went.

But the scientific gentleman could not rest under the idea of the
ingenious treatise he had projected being lost to the world, which must
inevitably be the case if the speculation of the ingenious Mr. Pruffle
were not stifled in its birth. He put on his hat and walked quickly down
the garden, determined to investigate the matter to the very bottom.

Now, shortly before the scientific gentleman walked out into the garden,
Mr. Pickwick had run down the lane as fast as he could, to convey a
false alarm that somebody was coming that way; occasionally drawing back
the slide of the dark lantern to keep himself from the ditch. The alarm
was no sooner given, than Mr. Winkle scrambled back over the wall, and
Arabella ran into the house; the garden gate was shut, and the three
adventurers were making the best of their way down the lane, when they
were startled by the scientific gentleman unlocking his garden gate.

‘Hold hard,’ whispered Sam, who was, of course, the first of the party.
‘Show a light for just vun second, Sir.’

Mr. Pickwick did as he was desired, and Sam, seeing a man’s head peeping
out very cautiously within half a yard of his own, gave it a gentle tap
with his clenched fist, which knocked it, with a hollow sound, against
the gate. Having performed this feat with great suddenness and
dexterity, Mr. Weller caught Mr. Pickwick up on his back, and followed
Mr. Winkle down the lane at a pace which, considering the burden he
carried, was perfectly astonishing.

‘Have you got your vind back agin, Sir,’ inquired Sam, when they had
reached the end.

‘Quite. Quite, now,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Then come along, Sir,’ said Sam, setting his master on his feet again.
‘Come betveen us, sir. Not half a mile to run. Think you’re vinnin’ a
cup, sir. Now for it.’

Thus encouraged, Mr. Pickwick made the very best use of his legs. It may
be confidently stated that a pair of black gaiters never got over the
ground in better style than did those of Mr. Pickwick on this memorable
occasion.

The coach was waiting, the horses were fresh, the roads were good, and
the driver was willing. The whole party arrived in safety at the Bush
before Mr. Pickwick had recovered his breath.

‘In with you at once, sir,’ said Sam, as he helped his master out.
‘Don’t stop a second in the street, arter that ‘ere exercise. Beg your
pardon, sir,’ continued Sam, touching his hat as Mr. Winkle descended,
‘hope there warn’t a priory ‘tachment, sir?’

Mr. Winkle grasped his humble friend by the hand, and whispered in his
ear, ‘It’s all right, Sam; quite right.’ Upon which Mr. Weller struck
three distinct blows upon his nose in token of intelligence, smiled,
winked, and proceeded to put the steps up, with a countenance expressive
of lively satisfaction.

As to the scientific gentleman, he demonstrated, in a masterly treatise,
that these wonderful lights were the effect of electricity; and clearly
proved the same by detailing how a flash of fire danced before his eyes
when he put his head out of the gate, and how he received a shock which
stunned him for a quarter of an hour afterwards; which demonstration
delighted all the scientific associations beyond measure, and caused him
to be considered a light of science ever afterwards.



CHAPTER XL. INTRODUCES MR. PICKWICK TO A NEW AND NOT UNINTERESTING SCENE
IN THE GREAT DRAMA OF LIFE

The remainder of the period which Mr. Pickwick had assigned as the
duration of the stay at Bath passed over without the occurrence of
anything material. Trinity term commenced. On the expiration of its
first week, Mr. Pickwick and his friends returned to London; and the
former gentleman, attended of course by Sam, straightway repaired to his
old quarters at the George and Vulture.

On the third morning after their arrival, just as all the clocks in the
city were striking nine individually, and somewhere about nine hundred
and ninety-nine collectively, Sam was taking the air in George Yard,
when a queer sort of fresh-painted vehicle drove up, out of which there
jumped with great agility, throwing the reins to a stout man who sat
beside him, a queer sort of gentleman, who seemed made for the vehicle,
and the vehicle for him.

The vehicle was not exactly a gig, neither was it a stanhope. It was not
what is currently denominated a dog-cart, neither was it a taxed cart,
nor a chaise-cart, nor a guillotined cabriolet; and yet it had something
of the character of each and every of these machines. It was painted a
bright yellow, with the shafts and wheels picked out in black; and the
driver sat in the orthodox sporting style, on cushions piled about two
feet above the rail. The horse was a bay, a well-looking animal enough;
but with something of a flash and dog-fighting air about him,
nevertheless, which accorded both with the vehicle and his master.

The master himself was a man of about forty, with black hair, and
carefully combed whiskers. He was dressed in a particularly gorgeous
manner, with plenty of articles of jewellery about him--all about three
sizes larger than those which are usually worn by gentlemen--and a rough
greatcoat to crown the whole. Into one pocket of this greatcoat, he
thrust his left hand the moment he dismounted, while from the other he
drew forth, with his right, a very bright and glaring silk handkerchief,
with which he whisked a speck or two of dust from his boots, and then,
crumpling it in his hand, swaggered up the court.

It had not escaped Sam’s attention that, when this person dismounted, a
shabby-looking man in a brown greatcoat shorn of divers buttons, who had
been previously slinking about, on the opposite side of the way, crossed
over, and remained stationary close by. Having something more than a
suspicion of the object of the gentleman’s visit, Sam preceded him to
the George and Vulture, and, turning sharp round, planted himself in the
centre of the doorway.

‘Now, my fine fellow!’ said the man in the rough coat, in an imperious
tone, attempting at the same time to push his way past.

‘Now, Sir, wot’s the matter?’ replied Sam, returning the push with
compound interest.

‘Come, none of this, my man; this won’t do with me,’ said the owner of
the rough coat, raising his voice, and turning white. ‘Here, Smouch!’

‘Well, wot’s amiss here?’ growled the man in the brown coat, who had
been gradually sneaking up the court during this short dialogue.

‘Only some insolence of this young man’s,’ said the principal, giving
Sam another push.

‘Come, none o’ this gammon,’ growled Smouch, giving him another, and a
harder one.

This last push had the effect which it was intended by the experienced
Mr. Smouch to produce; for while Sam, anxious to return the compliment,
was grinding that gentleman’s body against the door-post, the principal
crept past, and made his way to the bar, whither Sam, after bandying a
few epithetical remarks with Mr. Smouch, followed at once.

‘Good-morning, my dear,’ said the principal, addressing the young lady
at the bar, with Botany Bay ease, and New South Wales gentility; ‘which
is Mr. Pickwick’s room, my dear?’

‘Show him up,’ said the barmaid to a waiter, without deigning another
look at the exquisite, in reply to his inquiry.

The waiter led the way upstairs as he was desired, and the man in the
rough coat followed, with Sam behind him, who, in his progress up the
staircase, indulged in sundry gestures indicative of supreme contempt
and defiance, to the unspeakable gratification of the servants and other
lookers-on. Mr. Smouch, who was troubled with a hoarse cough, remained
below, and expectorated in the passage.

Mr. Pickwick was fast asleep in bed, when his early visitor, followed by
Sam, entered the room. The noise they made, in so doing, awoke him.

‘Shaving-water, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, from within the curtains.

‘Shave you directly, Mr. Pickwick,’ said the visitor, drawing one of
them back from the bed’s head. ‘I’ve got an execution against you, at
the suit of Bardell.--Here’s the warrant.--Common Pleas.--Here’s my
card. I suppose you’ll come over to my house.’ Giving Mr. Pickwick a
friendly tap on the shoulder, the sheriff’s officer (for such he was)
threw his card on the counterpane, and pulled a gold toothpick from his
waistcoat pocket.

‘Namby’s the name,’ said the sheriff’s deputy, as Mr. Pickwick took his
spectacles from under the pillow, and put them on, to read the card.
‘Namby, Bell Alley, Coleman Street.’

At this point, Sam Weller, who had had his eyes fixed hitherto on Mr.
Namby’s shining beaver, interfered.

‘Are you a Quaker?’ said Sam.

‘I’ll let you know I am, before I’ve done with you,’ replied the
indignant officer. ‘I’ll teach you manners, my fine fellow, one of these
fine mornings.’

‘Thank’ee,’ said Sam. ‘I’ll do the same to you. Take your hat off.’ With
this, Mr. Weller, in the most dexterous manner, knocked Mr. Namby’s hat
to the other side of the room, with such violence, that he had very
nearly caused him to swallow the gold toothpick into the bargain.

‘Observe this, Mr. Pickwick,’ said the disconcerted officer, gasping for
breath. ‘I’ve been assaulted in the execution of my dooty by your
servant in your chamber. I’m in bodily fear. I call you to witness
this.’

‘Don’t witness nothin’, Sir,’ interposed Sam. ‘Shut your eyes up tight,
Sir. I’d pitch him out o’ winder, only he couldn’t fall far enough,
‘cause o’ the leads outside.’

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, in an angry voice, as his attendant made
various demonstrations of hostilities, ‘if you say another word, or
offer the slightest interference with this person, I discharge you that
instant.’

‘But, Sir!’ said Sam.

‘Hold your tongue,’ interposed Mr. Pickwick. ‘Take that hat up again.’

But this Sam flatly and positively refused to do; and, after he had been
severely reprimanded by his master, the officer, being in a hurry,
condescended to pick it up himself, venting a great variety of threats
against Sam meanwhile, which that gentleman received with perfect
composure, merely observing that if Mr. Namby would have the goodness to
put his hat on again, he would knock it into the latter end of next
week. Mr. Namby, perhaps thinking that such a process might be
productive of inconvenience to himself, declined to offer the
temptation, and, soon after, called up Smouch. Having informed him that
the capture was made, and that he was to wait for the prisoner until he
should have finished dressing, Namby then swaggered out, and drove away.
Smouch, requesting Mr. Pickwick in a surly manner ‘to be as alive as he
could, for it was a busy time,’ drew up a chair by the door and sat
there, until he had finished dressing. Sam was then despatched for a
hackney-coach, and in it the triumvirate proceeded to Coleman Street. It
was fortunate the distance was short; for Mr. Smouch, besides possessing
no very enchanting conversational powers, was rendered a decidedly
unpleasant companion in a limited space, by the physical weakness to
which we have elsewhere adverted.

The coach having turned into a very narrow and dark street, stopped
before a house with iron bars to all the windows; the door-posts of
which were graced by the name and title of ‘Namby, Officer to the
Sheriffs of London’; the inner gate having been opened by a gentleman
who might have passed for a neglected twin-brother of Mr. Smouch, and
who was endowed with a large key for the purpose, Mr. Pickwick was shown
into the ‘coffee-room.’

This coffee-room was a front parlour, the principal features of which
were fresh sand and stale tobacco smoke. Mr. Pickwick bowed to the three
persons who were seated in it when he entered; and having despatched Sam
for Perker, withdrew into an obscure corner, and looked thence with some
curiosity upon his new companions.

One of these was a mere boy of nineteen or twenty, who, though it was
yet barely ten o’clock, was drinking gin-and-water, and smoking a cigar-
-amusements to which, judging from his inflamed countenance, he had
devoted himself pretty constantly for the last year or two of his life.
Opposite him, engaged in stirring the fire with the toe of his right
boot, was a coarse, vulgar young man of about thirty, with a sallow face
and harsh voice; evidently possessed of that knowledge of the world, and
captivating freedom of manner, which is to be acquired in public-house
parlours, and at low billiard tables. The third tenant of the apartment
was a middle-aged man in a very old suit of black, who looked pale and
haggard, and paced up and down the room incessantly; stopping, now and
then, to look with great anxiety out of the window as if he expected
somebody, and then resuming his walk.

‘You’d better have the loan of my razor this morning, Mr. Ayresleigh,’
said the man who was stirring the fire, tipping the wink to his friend
the boy.

‘Thank you, no, I shan’t want it; I expect I shall be out, in the course
of an hour or so,’ replied the other in a hurried manner. Then, walking
again up to the window, and once more returning disappointed, he sighed
deeply, and left the room; upon which the other two burst into a loud
laugh.

‘Well, I never saw such a game as that,’ said the gentleman who had
offered the razor, whose name appeared to be Price. ‘Never!’ Mr. Price
confirmed the assertion with an oath, and then laughed again, when of
course the boy (who thought his companion one of the most dashing
fellows alive) laughed also.

‘You’d hardly think, would you now,’ said Price, turning towards Mr.
Pickwick, ‘that that chap’s been here a week yesterday, and never once
shaved himself yet, because he feels so certain he’s going out in half
an hour’s time, thinks he may as well put it off till he gets home?’

‘Poor man!’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Are his chances of getting out of his
difficulties really so great?’

‘Chances be d----d,’ replied Price; ‘he hasn’t half the ghost of one. I
wouldn’t give _that _for his chance of walking about the streets this
time ten years.’ With this, Mr. Price snapped his fingers
contemptuously, and rang the bell.

‘Give me a sheet of paper, Crookey,’ said Mr. Price to the attendant,
who in dress and general appearance looked something between a bankrupt
glazier, and a drover in a state of insolvency; ‘and a glass of brandy-
and-water, Crookey, d’ye hear? I’m going to write to my father, and I
must have a stimulant, or I shan’t be able to pitch it strong enough
into the old boy.’ At this facetious speech, the young boy, it is almost
needless to say, was fairly convulsed.

‘That’s right,’ said Mr. Price. ‘Never say die. All fun, ain’t it?’

‘Prime!’ said the young gentleman.

‘You’ve got some spirit about you, you have,’ said Price. ‘You’ve seen
something of life.’

‘I rather think I have!’ replied the boy. He had looked at it through
the dirty panes of glass in a bar door.

Mr. Pickwick, feeling not a little disgusted with this dialogue, as well
as with the air and manner of the two beings by whom it had been carried
on, was about to inquire whether he could not be accommodated with a
private sitting-room, when two or three strangers of genteel appearance
entered, at sight of whom the boy threw his cigar into the fire, and
whispering to Mr. Price that they had come to ‘make it all right’ for
him, joined them at a table in the farther end of the room.

It would appear, however, that matters were not going to be made all
right quite so speedily as the young gentleman anticipated; for a very
long conversation ensued, of which Mr. Pickwick could not avoid hearing
certain angry fragments regarding dissolute conduct, and repeated
forgiveness. At last, there were very distinct allusions made by the
oldest gentleman of the party to one Whitecross Street, at which the
young gentleman, notwithstanding his primeness and his spirit, and his
knowledge of life into the bargain, reclined his head upon the table,
and howled dismally.

Very much satisfied with this sudden bringing down of the youth’s
valour, and this effectual lowering of his tone, Mr. Pickwick rang the
bell, and was shown, at his own request, into a private room furnished
with a carpet, table, chairs, sideboard and sofa, and ornamented with a
looking-glass, and various old prints. Here he had the advantage of
hearing Mrs. Namby’s performance on a square piano overhead, while the
breakfast was getting ready; when it came, Mr. Perker came too.

‘Aha, my dear sir,’ said the little man, ‘nailed at last, eh? Come,
come, I’m not sorry for it either, because now you’ll see the absurdity
of this conduct. I’ve noted down the amount of the taxed costs and
damages for which the ca-sa was issued, and we had better settle at once
and lose no time. Namby is come home by this time, I dare say. What say
you, my dear sir? Shall I draw a cheque, or will you?’ The little man
rubbed his hands with affected cheerfulness as he said this, but
glancing at Mr. Pickwick’s countenance, could not forbear at the same
time casting a desponding look towards Sam Weller.

‘Perker,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘let me hear no more of this, I beg. I see
no advantage in staying here, so I shall go to prison to-night.’

‘You can’t go to Whitecross Street, my dear Sir,’ said Perker.
‘Impossible! There are sixty beds in a ward; and the bolt’s on, sixteen
hours out of the four-and-twenty.’

‘I would rather go to some other place of confinement if I can,’ said
Mr. Pickwick. ‘If not, I must make the best I can of that.’

‘You can go to the Fleet, my dear Sir, if you’re determined to go
somewhere,’ said Perker.

‘That’ll do,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘I’ll go there directly I have finished
my breakfast.’

‘Stop, stop, my dear Sir; not the least occasion for being in such a
violent hurry to get into a place that most other men are as eager to
get out of,’ said the good-natured little attorney. ‘We must have a
habeas-corpus. There’ll be no judge at chambers till four o’clock this
afternoon. You must wait till then.’

‘Very good,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with unmoved patience. ‘Then we will
have a chop here, at two. See about it, Sam, and tell them to be
punctual.’

Mr. Pickwick remaining firm, despite all the remonstrances and arguments
of Perker, the chops appeared and disappeared in due course; he was then
put into another hackney coach, and carried off to Chancery Lane, after
waiting half an hour or so for Mr. Namby, who had a select dinner-party
and could on no account be disturbed before.

There were two judges in attendance at Serjeant’s Inn--one King’s Bench,
and one Common Pleas--and a great deal of business appeared to be
transacting before them, if the number of lawyer’s clerks who were
hurrying in and out with bundles of papers, afforded any test. When they
reached the low archway which forms the entrance to the inn, Perker was
detained a few moments parlaying with the coachman about the fare and
the change; and Mr. Pickwick, stepping to one side to be out of the way
of the stream of people that were pouring in and out, looked about him
with some curiosity.

The people that attracted his attention most, were three or four men of
shabby-genteel appearance, who touched their hats to many of the
attorneys who passed, and seemed to have some business there, the nature
of which Mr. Pickwick could not divine. They were curious-looking
fellows. One was a slim and rather lame man in rusty black, and a white
neckerchief; another was a stout, burly person, dressed in the same
apparel, with a great reddish-black cloth round his neck; a third was a
little weazen, drunken-looking body, with a pimply face. They were
loitering about, with their hands behind them, and now and then with an
anxious countenance whispered something in the ear of some of the
gentlemen with papers, as they hurried by. Mr. Pickwick remembered to
have very often observed them lounging under the archway when he had
been walking past; and his curiosity was quite excited to know to what
branch of the profession these dingy-looking loungers could possibly
belong.

He was about to propound the question to Namby, who kept close beside
him, sucking a large gold ring on his little finger, when Perker bustled
up, and observing that there was no time to lose, led the way into the
inn. As Mr. Pickwick followed, the lame man stepped up to him, and
civilly touching his hat, held out a written card, which Mr. Pickwick,
not wishing to hurt the man’s feelings by refusing, courteously accepted
and deposited in his waistcoat pocket.

‘Now,’ said Perker, turning round before he entered one of the offices,
to see that his companions were close behind him. ‘In here, my dear sir.
Hallo, what do you want?’

This last question was addressed to the lame man, who, unobserved by Mr.
Pickwick, made one of the party. In reply to it, the lame man touched
his hat again, with all imaginable politeness, and motioned towards Mr.
Pickwick.

‘No, no,’ said Perker, with a smile. ‘We don’t want you, my dear friend,
we don’t want you.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said the lame man. ‘The gentleman took my
card. I hope you will employ me, sir. The gentleman nodded to me. I’ll
be judged by the gentleman himself. You nodded to me, sir?’

‘Pooh, pooh, nonsense. You didn’t nod to anybody, Pickwick? A mistake, a
mistake,’ said Perker.

‘The gentleman handed me his card,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, producing it
from his waistcoat pocket. ‘I accepted it, as the gentleman seemed to
wish it--in fact I had some curiosity to look at it when I should be at
leisure. I--’

The little attorney burst into a loud laugh, and returning the card to
the lame man, informing him it was all a mistake, whispered to Mr.
Pickwick as the man turned away in dudgeon, that he was only a bail.

‘A what!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘A bail,’ replied Perker.

‘A bail!’

Yes, my dear sir--half a dozen of ‘em here. Bail you to any amount, and
only charge half a crown. Curious trade, isn’t it?’ said Perker,
regaling himself with a pinch of snuff.

‘What! Am I to understand that these men earn a livelihood by waiting
about here, to perjure themselves before the judges of the land, at the
rate of half a crown a crime?’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, quite aghast at
the disclosure.

‘Why, I don’t exactly know about perjury, my dear sir,’ replied the
little gentleman. ‘Harsh word, my dear sir, very harsh word indeed. It’s
a legal fiction, my dear sir, nothing more.’ Saying which, the attorney
shrugged his shoulders, smiled, took a second pinch of snuff, and led
the way into the office of the judge’s clerk.

This was a room of specially dirty appearance, with a very low ceiling
and old panelled walls; and so badly lighted, that although it was broad
day outside, great tallow candles were burning on the desks. At one end,
was a door leading to the judge’s private apartment, round which were
congregated a crowd of attorneys and managing clerks, who were called
in, in the order in which their respective appointments stood upon the
file. Every time this door was opened to let a party out, the next party
made a violent rush to get in; and, as in addition to the numerous
dialogues which passed between the gentlemen who were waiting to see the
judge, a variety of personal squabbles ensued between the greater part
of those who had seen him, there was as much noise as could well be
raised in an apartment of such confined dimensions.

Nor were the conversations of these gentlemen the only sounds that broke
upon the ear. Standing on a box behind a wooden bar at another end of
the room was a clerk in spectacles who was ‘taking the affidavits’;
large batches of which were, from time to time, carried into the private
room by another clerk for the judge’s signature. There were a large
number of attorneys’ clerks to be sworn, and it being a moral
impossibility to swear them all at once, the struggles of these
gentlemen to reach the clerk in spectacles, were like those of a crowd
to get in at the pit door of a theatre when Gracious Majesty honours it
with its presence. Another functionary, from time to time, exercised his
lungs in calling over the names of those who had been sworn, for the
purpose of restoring to them their affidavits after they had been signed
by the judge, which gave rise to a few more scuffles; and all these
things going on at the same time, occasioned as much bustle as the most
active and excitable person could desire to behold. There were yet
another class of persons--those who were waiting to attend summonses
their employers had taken out, which it was optional to the attorney on
the opposite side to attend or not--and whose business it was, from time
to time, to cry out the opposite attorney’s name; to make certain that
he was not in attendance without their knowledge.

For example. Leaning against the wall, close beside the seat Mr.
Pickwick had taken, was an office-lad of fourteen, with a tenor voice;
near him a common-law clerk with a bass one.

A clerk hurried in with a bundle of papers, and stared about him.

‘Sniggle and Blink,’ cried the tenor.

‘Porkin and Snob,’ growled the bass.

‘Stumpy and Deacon,’ said the new-comer.

Nobody answered; the next man who came in, was bailed by the whole
three; and he in his turn shouted for another firm; and then somebody
else roared in a loud voice for another; and so forth.

All this time, the man in the spectacles was hard at work, swearing the
clerks; the oath being invariably administered, without any effort at
punctuation, and usually in the following terms:--

‘Take the book in your right hand this is your name and hand-writing you
swear that the contents of this your affidavit are true so help you God
a shilling you must get change I haven’t got it.’

‘Well, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I suppose they are getting the _Habeas-
corpus_ ready?’

‘Yes,’ said Sam, ‘and I vish they’d bring out the have-his-carcase. It’s
wery unpleasant keepin’ us vaitin’ here. I’d ha’ got half a dozen have-
his-carcases ready, pack’d up and all, by this time.’

What sort of cumbrous and unmanageable machine, Sam Weller imagined a
habeas-corpus to be, does not appear; for Perker, at that moment, walked
up and took Mr. Pickwick away.

The usual forms having been gone through, the body of Samuel Pickwick
was soon afterwards confided to the custody of the tipstaff, to be by
him taken to the warden of the Fleet Prison, and there detained until
the amount of the damages and costs in the action of Bardell against
Pickwick was fully paid and satisfied.

‘And that,’ said Mr. Pickwick, laughing, ‘will be a very long time. Sam,
call another hackney-coach. Perker, my dear friend, good-bye.’

‘I shall go with you, and see you safe there,’ said Perker.

‘Indeed,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, ‘I would rather go without any other
attendant than Sam. As soon as I get settled, I will write and let you
know, and I shall expect you immediately. Until then, good-bye.’

As Mr. Pickwick said this, he got into the coach which had by this time
arrived, followed by the tipstaff. Sam having stationed himself on the
box, it rolled away.

‘A most extraordinary man that!’ said Perker, as he stopped to pull on
his gloves.

‘What a bankrupt he’d make, Sir,’ observed Mr. Lowten, who was standing
near. ‘How he would bother the commissioners! He’d set ‘em at defiance
if they talked of committing him, Sir.’

The attorney did not appear very much delighted with his clerk’s
professional estimate of Mr. Pickwick’s character, for he walked away
without deigning any reply.

The hackney-coach jolted along Fleet Street, as hackney-coaches usually
do. The horses ‘went better’, the driver said, when they had anything
before them (they must have gone at a most extraordinary pace when there
was nothing), and so the vehicle kept behind a cart; when the cart
stopped, it stopped; and when the cart went on again, it did the same.
Mr. Pickwick sat opposite the tipstaff; and the tipstaff sat with his
hat between his knees, whistling a tune, and looking out of the coach
window.

Time performs wonders. By the powerful old gentleman’s aid, even a
hackney-coach gets over half a mile of ground. They stopped at length,
and Mr. Pickwick alighted at the gate of the Fleet.

The tipstaff, just looking over his shoulder to see that his charge was
following close at his heels, preceded Mr. Pickwick into the prison;
turning to the left, after they had entered, they passed through an open
door into a lobby, from which a heavy gate, opposite to that by which
they had entered, and which was guarded by a stout turnkey with the key
in his hand, led at once into the interior of the prison.

Here they stopped, while the tipstaff delivered his papers; and here Mr.
Pickwick was apprised that he would remain, until he had undergone the
ceremony, known to the initiated as ‘sitting for your portrait.’

‘Sitting for my portrait?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Having your likeness taken, sir,’ replied the stout turnkey.

‘We’re capital hands at likenesses here. Take ‘em in no time, and always
exact. Walk in, sir, and make yourself at home.’


Mr. Pickwick complied with the invitation, and sat himself down; when
Mr. Weller, who stationed himself at the back of the chair, whispered
that the sitting was merely another term for undergoing an inspection by
the different turnkeys, in order that they might know prisoners from
visitors.

‘Well, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘then I wish the artists would come.
This is rather a public place.’

‘They von’t be long, Sir, I des-say,’ replied Sam. ‘There’s a Dutch
clock, sir.’

‘So I see,’ observed Mr. Pickwick.

‘And a bird-cage, sir,’ says Sam. ‘Veels vithin veels, a prison in a
prison. Ain’t it, Sir?’

As Mr. Weller made this philosophical remark, Mr. Pickwick was aware
that his sitting had commenced. The stout turnkey having been relieved
from the lock, sat down, and looked at him carelessly, from time to
time, while a long thin man who had relieved him, thrust his hands
beneath his coat tails, and planting himself opposite, took a good long
view of him. A third rather surly-looking gentleman, who had apparently
been disturbed at his tea, for he was disposing of the last remnant of a
crust and butter when he came in, stationed himself close to Mr.
Pickwick; and, resting his hands on his hips, inspected him narrowly;
while two others mixed with the group, and studied his features with
most intent and thoughtful faces. Mr. Pickwick winced a good deal under
the operation, and appeared to sit very uneasily in his chair; but he
made no remark to anybody while it was being performed, not even to Sam,
who reclined upon the back of the chair, reflecting, partly on the
situation of his master, and partly on the great satisfaction it would
have afforded him to make a fierce assault upon all the turnkeys there
assembled, one after the other, if it were lawful and peaceable so to
do.

At length the likeness was completed, and Mr. Pickwick was informed that
he might now proceed into the prison.

‘Where am I to sleep to-night?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Why, I don’t rightly know about to-night,’ replied the stout turnkey.
‘You’ll be chummed on somebody to-morrow, and then you’ll be all snug
and comfortable. The first night’s generally rather unsettled, but
you’ll be set all squares to-morrow.’

After some discussion, it was discovered that one of the turnkeys had a
bed to let, which Mr. Pickwick could have for that night. He gladly
agreed to hire it.

‘If you’ll come with me, I’ll show it you at once,’ said the man. ‘It
ain’t a large ‘un; but it’s an out-and-outer to sleep in. This way,
sir.’

They passed through the inner gate, and descended a short flight of
steps. The key was turned after them; and Mr. Pickwick found himself,
for the first time in his life, within the walls of a debtors’ prison.



CHAPTER XLI. WHAT BEFELL MR. PICKWICK WHEN HE GOT INTO THE FLEET; WHAT
PRISONERS HE SAW THERE, AND HOW HE PASSED THE NIGHT

Mr. Tom Roker, the gentleman who had accompanied Mr. Pickwick into the
prison, turned sharp round to the right when he got to the bottom of the
little flight of steps, and led the way, through an iron gate which
stood open, and up another short flight of steps, into a long narrow
gallery, dirty and low, paved with stone, and very dimly lighted by a
window at each remote end.

‘This,’ said the gentleman, thrusting his hands into his pockets, and
looking carelessly over his shoulder to Mr. Pickwick--‘this here is the
hall flight.’

‘Oh,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, looking down a dark and filthy staircase,
which appeared to lead to a range of damp and gloomy stone vaults,
beneath the ground, ‘and those, I suppose, are the little cellars where
the prisoners keep their small quantities of coals. Unpleasant places to
have to go down to; but very convenient, I dare say.’

‘Yes, I shouldn’t wonder if they was convenient,’ replied the gentleman,
‘seeing that a few people live there, pretty snug. That’s the Fair, that
is.’

‘My friend,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘you don’t really mean to say that human
beings live down in those wretched dungeons?’

‘Don’t I?’ replied Mr. Roker, with indignant astonishment; ‘why
shouldn’t I?’

‘Live!--live down there!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘Live down there! Yes, and die down there, too, very often!’ replied Mr.
Roker; ‘and what of that? Who’s got to say anything agin it? Live down
there! Yes, and a wery good place it is to live in, ain’t it?’

As Roker turned somewhat fiercely upon Mr. Pickwick in saying this, and
moreover muttered in an excited fashion certain unpleasant invocations
concerning his own eyes, limbs, and circulating fluids, the latter
gentleman deemed it advisable to pursue the discourse no further. Mr.
Roker then proceeded to mount another staircase, as dirty as that which
led to the place which has just been the subject of discussion, in which
ascent he was closely followed by Mr. Pickwick and Sam.

‘There,’ said Mr. Roker, pausing for breath when they reached another
gallery of the same dimensions as the one below, ‘this is the coffee-
room flight; the one above’s the third, and the one above that’s the
top; and the room where you’re a-going to sleep to-night is the warden’s
room, and it’s this way--come on.’ Having said all this in a breath, Mr.
Roker mounted another flight of stairs with Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller
following at his heels.

These staircases received light from sundry windows placed at some
little distance above the floor, and looking into a gravelled area
bounded by a high brick wall, with iron _chevaux-de-frise_ at the top.
This area, it appeared from Mr. Roker’s statement, was the racket-
ground; and it further appeared, on the testimony of the same gentleman,
that there was a smaller area in that portion of the prison which was
nearest Farringdon Street, denominated and called ‘the Painted Ground,’
from the fact of its walls having once displayed the semblance of
various men-of-war in full sail, and other artistical effects achieved
in bygone times by some imprisoned draughtsman in his leisure hours.

Having communicated this piece of information, apparently more for the
purpose of discharging his bosom of an important fact, than with any
specific view of enlightening Mr. Pickwick, the guide, having at length
reached another gallery, led the way into a small passage at the extreme
end, opened a door, and disclosed an apartment of an appearance by no
means inviting, containing eight or nine iron bedsteads.

‘There,’ said Mr. Roker, holding the door open, and looking triumphantly
round at Mr. Pickwick, ‘there’s a room!’

Mr. Pickwick’s face, however, betokened such a very trifling portion of
satisfaction at the appearance of his lodging, that Mr. Roker looked,
for a reciprocity of feeling, into the countenance of Samuel Weller,
who, until now, had observed a dignified silence.

‘There’s a room, young man,’ observed Mr. Roker.

‘I see it,’ replied Sam, with a placid nod of the head.

‘You wouldn’t think to find such a room as this in the Farringdon Hotel,
would you?’ said Mr. Roker, with a complacent smile.

To this Mr. Weller replied with an easy and unstudied closing of one
eye; which might be considered to mean, either that he would have
thought it, or that he would not have thought it, or that he had never
thought anything at all about it, as the observer’s imagination
suggested. Having executed this feat, and reopened his eye, Mr. Weller
proceeded to inquire which was the individual bedstead that Mr. Roker
had so flatteringly described as an out-and-outer to sleep in.

‘That’s it,’ replied Mr. Roker, pointing to a very rusty one in a
corner. ‘It would make any one go to sleep, that bedstead would, whether
they wanted to or not.’

‘I should think,’ said Sam, eyeing the piece of furniture in question
with a look of excessive disgust--‘I should think poppies was nothing to
it.’

‘Nothing at all,’ said Mr. Roker.

‘And I s’pose,’ said Sam, with a sidelong glance at his master, as if to
see whether there were any symptoms of his determination being shaken by
what passed, ‘I s’pose the other gen’l’men as sleeps here _are
_gen’l’men.’

‘Nothing but it,’ said Mr. Roker. ‘One of ‘em takes his twelve pints of
ale a day, and never leaves off smoking even at his meals.’

‘He must be a first-rater,’ said Sam.

‘A1,’ replied Mr. Roker.

Nothing daunted, even by this intelligence, Mr. Pickwick smilingly
announced his determination to test the powers of the narcotic bedstead
for that night; and Mr. Roker, after informing him that he could retire
to rest at whatever hour he thought proper, without any further notice
or formality, walked off, leaving him standing with Sam in the gallery.

It was getting dark; that is to say, a few gas jets were kindled in this
place which was never light, by way of compliment to the evening, which
had set in outside. As it was rather warm, some of the tenants of the
numerous little rooms which opened into the gallery on either hand, had
set their doors ajar. Mr. Pickwick peeped into them as he passed along,
with great curiosity and interest. Here, four or five great hulking
fellows, just visible through a cloud of tobacco smoke, were engaged in
noisy and riotous conversation over half-emptied pots of beer, or
playing at all-fours with a very greasy pack of cards. In the adjoining
room, some solitary tenant might be seen poring, by the light of a
feeble tallow candle, over a bundle of soiled and tattered papers,
yellow with dust and dropping to pieces from age, writing, for the
hundredth time, some lengthened statement of his grievances, for the
perusal of some great man whose eyes it would never reach, or whose
heart it would never touch. In a third, a man, with his wife and a whole
crowd of children, might be seen making up a scanty bed on the ground,
or upon a few chairs, for the younger ones to pass the night in. And in
a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh, the noise, and the
beer, and the tobacco smoke, and the cards, all came over again in
greater force than before.

In the galleries themselves, and more especially on the stair-cases,
there lingered a great number of people, who came there, some because
their rooms were empty and lonesome, others because their rooms were
full and hot; the greater part because they were restless and
uncomfortable, and not possessed of the secret of exactly knowing what
to do with themselves. There were many classes of people here, from the
labouring man in his fustian jacket, to the broken-down spendthrift in
his shawl dressing-gown, most appropriately out at elbows; but there was
the same air about them all--a kind of listless, jail-bird, careless
swagger, a vagabondish who’s-afraid sort of bearing, which is wholly
indescribable in words, but which any man can understand in one moment
if he wish, by setting foot in the nearest debtors’ prison, and looking
at the very first group of people he sees there, with the same interest
as Mr. Pickwick did.

‘It strikes me, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, leaning over the iron rail at
the stair-head, ‘it strikes me, Sam, that imprisonment for debt is
scarcely any punishment at all.’

‘Think not, sir?’ inquired Mr. Weller.

‘You see how these fellows drink, and smoke, and roar,’ replied Mr.
Pickwick. ‘It’s quite impossible that they can mind it much.’

‘Ah, that’s just the wery thing, Sir,’ rejoined Sam, ‘they don’t mind
it; it’s a reg’lar holiday to them--all porter and skittles. It’s the
t’other vuns as gets done over vith this sort o’ thing; them down-
hearted fellers as can’t svig avay at the beer, nor play at skittles
neither; them as vould pay if they could, and gets low by being boxed
up. I’ll tell you wot it is, sir; them as is always a-idlin’ in public-
houses it don’t damage at all, and them as is alvays a-workin’ wen they
can, it damages too much. “It’s unekal,” as my father used to say wen
his grog worn’t made half-and-half: “it’s unekal, and that’s the fault
on it.”’

‘I think you’re right, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, after a few moments’
reflection, ‘quite right.’

‘P’raps, now and then, there’s some honest people as likes it,’ observed
Mr. Weller, in a ruminative tone, ‘but I never heerd o’ one as I can
call to mind, ‘cept the little dirty-faced man in the brown coat; and
that was force of habit.’

‘And who was he?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Wy, that’s just the wery point as nobody never know’d,’ replied Sam.

‘But what did he do?’

‘Wy, he did wot many men as has been much better know’d has done in
their time, Sir,’ replied Sam, ‘he run a match agin the constable, and
vun it.’

‘In other words, I suppose,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘he got into debt.’

‘Just that, Sir,’ replied Sam, ‘and in course o’ time he come here in
consekens. It warn’t much--execution for nine pound nothin’, multiplied
by five for costs; but hows’ever here he stopped for seventeen year. If
he got any wrinkles in his face, they were stopped up vith the dirt, for
both the dirty face and the brown coat wos just the same at the end o’
that time as they wos at the beginnin’. He wos a wery peaceful,
inoffendin’ little creetur, and wos alvays a-bustlin’ about for
somebody, or playin’ rackets and never vinnin’; till at last the
turnkeys they got quite fond on him, and he wos in the lodge ev’ry
night, a-chattering vith ‘em, and tellin’ stories, and all that ‘ere.
Vun night he wos in there as usual, along vith a wery old friend of his,
as wos on the lock, ven he says all of a sudden, “I ain’t seen the
market outside, Bill,” he says (Fleet Market wos there at that time)--“I
ain’t seen the market outside, Bill,” he says, “for seventeen year.” “I
know you ain’t,” says the turnkey, smoking his pipe. “I should like to
see it for a minit, Bill,” he says. “Wery probable,” says the turnkey,
smoking his pipe wery fierce, and making believe he warn’t up to wot the
little man wanted. “Bill,” says the little man, more abrupt than afore,
“I’ve got the fancy in my head. Let me see the public streets once more
afore I die; and if I ain’t struck with apoplexy, I’ll be back in five
minits by the clock.” “And wot ‘ud become o’ me if you _wos _struck with
apoplexy?” said the turnkey. “Wy,” says the little creetur, “whoever
found me, ‘ud bring me home, for I’ve got my card in my pocket, Bill,”
 he says, “No. 20, Coffee-room Flight”: and that wos true, sure enough,
for wen he wanted to make the acquaintance of any new-comer, he used to
pull out a little limp card vith them words on it and nothin’ else; in
consideration of vich, he vos alvays called Number Tventy. The turnkey
takes a fixed look at him, and at last he says in a solemn manner,
“Tventy,” he says, “I’ll trust you; you Won’t get your old friend into
trouble.” “No, my boy; I hope I’ve somethin’ better behind here,” says
the little man; and as he said it he hit his little vesket wery hard,
and then a tear started out o’ each eye, which wos wery extraordinary,
for it wos supposed as water never touched his face. He shook the
turnkey by the hand; out he vent--’

‘And never came back again,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Wrong for vunce, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, ‘for back he come, two
minits afore the time, a-bilin’ with rage, sayin’ how he’d been nearly
run over by a hackney-coach that he warn’t used to it; and he was blowed
if he wouldn’t write to the lord mayor. They got him pacified at last;
and for five years arter that, he never even so much as peeped out o’
the lodge gate.’

‘At the expiration of that time he died, I suppose,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘No, he didn’t, Sir,’ replied Sam. ‘He got a curiosity to go and taste
the beer at a new public-house over the way, and it wos such a wery nice
parlour, that he took it into his head to go there every night, which he
did for a long time, always comin’ back reg’lar about a quarter of an
hour afore the gate shut, which was all wery snug and comfortable. At
last he began to get so precious jolly, that he used to forget how the
time vent, or care nothin’ at all about it, and he went on gettin’ later
and later, till vun night his old friend wos just a-shuttin’ the gate--
had turned the key in fact--wen he come up. “Hold hard, Bill,” he says.
“Wot, ain’t you come home yet, Tventy?” says the turnkey, “I thought you
wos in, long ago.” “No, I wasn’t,” says the little man, with a smile.
“Well, then, I’ll tell you wot it is, my friend,” says the turnkey,
openin’ the gate wery slow and sulky, “it’s my ‘pinion as you’ve got
into bad company o’ late, which I’m wery sorry to see. Now, I don’t wish
to do nothing harsh,” he says, “but if you can’t confine yourself to
steady circles, and find your vay back at reg’lar hours, as sure as
you’re a-standin’ there, I’ll shut you out altogether!” The little man
was seized vith a wiolent fit o’ tremblin’, and never vent outside the
prison walls artervards!’

As Sam concluded, Mr. Pickwick slowly retraced his steps downstairs.
After a few thoughtful turns in the Painted Ground, which, as it was now
dark, was nearly deserted, he intimated to Mr. Weller that he thought it
high time for him to withdraw for the night; requesting him to seek a
bed in some adjacent public-house, and return early in the morning, to
make arrangements for the removal of his master’s wardrobe from the
George and Vulture. This request Mr. Samuel Weller prepared to obey,
with as good a grace as he could assume, but with a very considerable
show of reluctance nevertheless. He even went so far as to essay sundry
ineffectual hints regarding the expediency of stretching himself on the
gravel for that night; but finding Mr. Pickwick obstinately deaf to any
such suggestions, finally withdrew.

There is no disguising the fact that Mr. Pickwick felt very low-spirited
and uncomfortable--not for lack of society, for the prison was very
full, and a bottle of wine would at once have purchased the utmost good-
fellowship of a few choice spirits, without any more formal ceremony of
introduction; but he was alone in the coarse, vulgar crowd, and felt the
depression of spirits and sinking of heart, naturally consequent on the
reflection that he was cooped and caged up, without a prospect of
liberation. As to the idea of releasing himself by ministering to the
sharpness of Dodson & Fogg, it never for an instant entered his
thoughts.

In this frame of mind he turned again into the coffee-room gallery, and
walked slowly to and fro. The place was intolerably dirty, and the smell
of tobacco smoke perfectly suffocating. There was a perpetual slamming
and banging of doors as the people went in and out; and the noise of
their voices and footsteps echoed and re-echoed through the passages
constantly. A young woman, with a child in her arms, who seemed scarcely
able to crawl, from emaciation and misery, was walking up and down the
passage in conversation with her husband, who had no other place to see
her in. As they passed Mr. Pickwick, he could hear the female sob
bitterly; and once she burst into such a passion of grief, that she was
compelled to lean against the wall for support, while the man took the
child in his arms, and tried to soothe her.

Mr. Pickwick’s heart was really too full to bear it, and he went
upstairs to bed.

Now, although the warder’s room was a very uncomfortable one (being, in
every point of decoration and convenience, several hundred degrees
inferior to the common infirmary of a county jail), it had at present
the merit of being wholly deserted save by Mr. Pickwick himself. So, he
sat down at the foot of his little iron bedstead, and began to wonder
how much a year the warder made out of the dirty room. Having satisfied
himself, by mathematical calculation, that the apartment was about equal
in annual value to the freehold of a small street in the suburbs of
London, he took to wondering what possible temptation could have induced
a dingy-looking fly that was crawling over his pantaloons, to come into
a close prison, when he had the choice of so many airy situations--a
course of meditation which led him to the irresistible conclusion that
the insect was insane. After settling this point, he began to be
conscious that he was getting sleepy; whereupon he took his nightcap out
of the pocket in which he had had the precaution to stow it in the
morning, and, leisurely undressing himself, got into bed and fell
asleep.

‘Bravo! Heel over toe--cut and shuffle--pay away at it, Zephyr! I’m
smothered if the opera house isn’t your proper hemisphere. Keep it up!
Hooray!’ These expressions, delivered in a most boisterous tone, and
accompanied with loud peals of laughter, roused Mr. Pickwick from one of
those sound slumbers which, lasting in reality some half-hour, seem to
the sleeper to have been protracted for three weeks or a month.

The voice had no sooner ceased than the room was shaken with such
violence that the windows rattled in their frames, and the bedsteads
trembled again. Mr. Pickwick started up, and remained for some minutes
fixed in mute astonishment at the scene before him.


On the floor of the room, a man in a broad-skirted green coat, with
corduroy knee-smalls and gray cotton stockings, was performing the most
popular steps of a hornpipe, with a slang and burlesque caricature of
grace and lightness, which, combined with the very appropriate character
of his costume, was inexpressibly absurd. Another man, evidently very
drunk, who had probably been tumbled into bed by his companions, was
sitting up between the sheets, warbling as much as he could recollect of
a comic song, with the most intensely sentimental feeling and
expression; while a third, seated on one of the bedsteads, was
applauding both performers with the air of a profound connoisseur, and
encouraging them by such ebullitions of feeling as had already roused
Mr. Pickwick from his sleep.

This last man was an admirable specimen of a class of gentry which never
can be seen in full perfection but in such places--they may be met with,
in an imperfect state, occasionally about stable-yards and Public-
houses; but they never attain their full bloom except in these hot-beds,
which would almost seem to be considerately provided by the legislature
for the sole purpose of rearing them.

He was a tall fellow, with an olive complexion, long dark hair, and very
thick bushy whiskers meeting under his chin. He wore no neckerchief, as
he had been playing rackets all day, and his open shirt collar displayed
their full luxuriance. On his head he wore one of the common
eighteenpenny French skull-caps, with a gaudy tassel dangling therefrom,
very happily in keeping with a common fustian coat. His legs, which,
being long, were afflicted with weakness, graced a pair of Oxford-
mixture trousers, made to show the full symmetry of those limbs. Being
somewhat negligently braced, however, and, moreover, but imperfectly
buttoned, they fell in a series of not the most graceful folds over a
pair of shoes sufficiently down at heel to display a pair of very soiled
white stockings. There was a rakish, vagabond smartness, and a kind of
boastful rascality, about the whole man, that was worth a mine of gold.

This figure was the first to perceive that Mr. Pickwick was looking on;
upon which he winked to the Zephyr, and entreated him, with mock
gravity, not to wake the gentleman.

‘Why, bless the gentleman’s honest heart and soul!’ said the Zephyr,
turning round and affecting the extremity of surprise; ‘the gentleman is
awake. Hem, Shakespeare! How do you do, Sir? How is Mary and Sarah, sir?
and the dear old lady at home, Sir? Will you have the kindness to put my
compliments into the first little parcel you’re sending that way, sir,
and say that I would have sent ‘em before, only I was afraid they might
be broken in the wagon, sir?’

‘Don’t overwhelm the gentlemen with ordinary civilities when you see
he’s anxious to have something to drink,’ said the gentleman with the
whiskers, with a jocose air. ‘Why don’t you ask the gentleman what he’ll
take?’

‘Dear me, I quite forgot,’ replied the other. ‘What will you take, sir?
Will you take port wine, sir, or sherry wine, sir? I can recommend the
ale, sir; or perhaps you’d like to taste the porter, sir? Allow me to
have the felicity of hanging up your nightcap, Sir.’

With this, the speaker snatched that article of dress from Mr.
Pickwick’s head, and fixed it in a twinkling on that of the drunken man,
who, firmly impressed with the belief that he was delighting a numerous
assembly, continued to hammer away at the comic song in the most
melancholy strains imaginable.

Taking a man’s nightcap from his brow by violent means, and adjusting it
on the head of an unknown gentleman, of dirty exterior, however
ingenious a witticism in itself, is unquestionably one of those which
come under the denomination of practical jokes. Viewing the matter
precisely in this light, Mr. Pickwick, without the slightest intimation
of his purpose, sprang vigorously out of bed, struck the Zephyr so smart
a blow in the chest as to deprive him of a considerable portion of the
commodity which sometimes bears his name, and then, recapturing his
nightcap, boldly placed himself in an attitude of defence.

‘Now,’ said Mr. Pickwick, gasping no less from excitement than from the
expenditure of so much energy, ‘come on--both of you--both of you!’ With
this liberal invitation the worthy gentleman communicated a revolving
motion to his clenched fists, by way of appalling his antagonists with a
display of science.

It might have been Mr. Pickwick’s very unexpected gallantry, or it might
have been the complicated manner in which he had got himself out of bed,
and fallen all in a mass upon the hornpipe man, that touched his
adversaries. Touched they were; for, instead of then and there making an
attempt to commit man-slaughter, as Mr. Pickwick implicitly believed
they would have done, they paused, stared at each other a short time,
and finally laughed outright.

‘Well, you’re a trump, and I like you all the better for it,’ said the
Zephyr. ‘Now jump into bed again, or you’ll catch the rheumatics. No
malice, I hope?’ said the man, extending a hand the size of the yellow
clump of fingers which sometimes swings over a glover’s door.

‘Certainly not,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with great alacrity; for, now that
the excitement was over, he began to feel rather cool about the legs.

‘Allow me the H-onour,’ said the gentleman with the whiskers, presenting
his dexter hand, and aspirating the h.

‘With much pleasure, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick; and having executed a very
long and solemn shake, he got into bed again.

‘My name is Smangle, sir,’ said the man with the whiskers.

‘Oh,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Mine is Mivins,’ said the man in the stockings.

‘I am delighted to hear it, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Hem,’ coughed Mr. Smangle.

‘Did you speak, sir?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘No, I did not, sir,’ said Mr. Smangle.

All this was very genteel and pleasant; and, to make matters still more
comfortable, Mr. Smangle assured Mr. Pickwick a great many more times
that he entertained a very high respect for the feelings of a gentleman;
which sentiment, indeed, did him infinite credit, as he could be in no
wise supposed to understand them.

‘Are you going through the court, sir?’ inquired Mr. Smangle.

‘Through the what?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Through the court--Portugal Street--the Court for Relief of--you know.’

‘Oh, no,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘No, I am not.’

‘Going out, perhaps?’ suggested Mr. Mivins.

‘I fear not,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘I refuse to pay some damages, and
am here in consequence.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr. Smangle, ‘paper has been my ruin.’

‘A stationer, I presume, Sir?’ said Mr. Pickwick innocently.

‘Stationer! No, no; confound and curse me! Not so low as that. No trade.
When I say paper, I mean bills.’

‘Oh, you use the word in that sense. I see,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Damme! A gentleman must expect reverses,’ said Smangle. ‘What of that?
Here am I in the Fleet Prison. Well; good. What then? I’m none the worse
for that, am I?’

‘Not a bit,’ replied Mr. Mivins. And he was quite right; for, so far
from Mr. Smangle being any the worse for it, he was something the
better, inasmuch as to qualify himself for the place, he had attained
gratuitous possession of certain articles of jewellery, which, long
before that, had found their way to the pawnbroker’s.

‘Well; but come,’ said Mr. Smangle; ‘this is dry work. Let’s rinse our
mouths with a drop of burnt sherry; the last-comer shall stand it,
Mivins shall fetch it, and I’ll help to drink it. That’s a fair and
gentlemanlike division of labour, anyhow. Curse me!’

Unwilling to hazard another quarrel, Mr. Pickwick gladly assented to the
proposition, and consigned the money to Mr. Mivins, who, as it was
nearly eleven o’clock, lost no time in repairing to the coffee-room on
his errand.

‘I say,’ whispered Smangle, the moment his friend had left the room;
‘what did you give him?’

‘Half a sovereign,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘He’s a devilish pleasant gentlemanly dog,’ said Mr. Smangle;--‘infernal
pleasant. I don’t know anybody more so; but--’ Here Mr. Smangle stopped
short, and shook his head dubiously.

‘You don’t think there is any probability of his appropriating the money
to his own use?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Oh, no! Mind, I don’t say that; I expressly say that he’s a devilish
gentlemanly fellow,’ said Mr. Smangle. ‘But I think, perhaps, if
somebody went down, just to see that he didn’t dip his beak into the jug
by accident, or make some confounded mistake in losing the money as he
came upstairs, it would be as well. Here, you sir, just run downstairs,
and look after that gentleman, will you?’

This request was addressed to a little timid-looking, nervous man, whose
appearance bespoke great poverty, and who had been crouching on his
bedstead all this while, apparently stupefied by the novelty of his
situation.

‘You know where the coffee-room is,’ said Smangle; ‘just run down, and
tell that gentleman you’ve come to help him up with the jug. Or--stop--
I’ll tell you what--I’ll tell you how we’ll do him,’ said Smangle, with
a cunning look.

‘How?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Send down word that he’s to spend the change in cigars. Capital
thought. Run and tell him that; d’ye hear? They shan’t be wasted,’
continued Smangle, turning to Mr. Pickwick. ‘_I’ll_ smoke ‘em.’

This manoeuvring was so exceedingly ingenious and, withal, performed
with such immovable composure and coolness, that Mr. Pickwick would have
had no wish to disturb it, even if he had had the power. In a short time
Mr. Mivins returned, bearing the sherry, which Mr. Smangle dispensed in
two little cracked mugs; considerately remarking, with reference to
himself, that a gentleman must not be particular under such
circumstances, and that, for his part, he was not too proud to drink out
of the jug. In which, to show his sincerity, he forthwith pledged the
company in a draught which half emptied it.

An excellent understanding having been by these means promoted, Mr.
Smangle proceeded to entertain his hearers with a relation of divers
romantic adventures in which he had been from time to time engaged,
involving various interesting anecdotes of a thoroughbred horse, and a
magnificent Jewess, both of surpassing beauty, and much coveted by the
nobility and gentry of these kingdoms.

Long before these elegant extracts from the biography of a gentleman
were concluded, Mr. Mivins had betaken himself to bed, and had set in
snoring for the night, leaving the timid stranger and Mr. Pickwick to
the full benefit of Mr. Smangle’s experiences.

Nor were the two last-named gentlemen as much edified as they might have
been by the moving passages narrated. Mr. Pickwick had been in a state
of slumber for some time, when he had a faint perception of the drunken
man bursting out afresh with the comic song, and receiving from Mr.
Smangle a gentle intimation, through the medium of the water-jug, that
his audience was not musically disposed. Mr. Pickwick then once again
dropped off to sleep, with a confused consciousness that Mr. Smangle was
still engaged in relating a long story, the chief point of which
appeared to be that, on some occasion particularly stated and set forth,
he had ‘done’ a bill and a gentleman at the same time.



CHAPTER XLII. ILLUSTRATIVE, LIKE THE PRECEDING ONE, OF THE OLD PROVERB,
THAT ADVERSITY BRINGS A MAN ACQUAINTED WITH STRANGE BEDFELLOWS--
LIKEWISE CONTAINING MR. PICKWICK’S EXTRAORDINARY AND STARTLING
ANNOUNCEMENT TO MR. SAMUEL WELLER

When Mr. Pickwick opened his eyes next morning, the first object upon
which they rested was Samuel Weller, seated upon a small black
portmanteau, intently regarding, apparently in a condition of profound
abstraction, the stately figure of the dashing Mr. Smangle; while Mr.
Smangle himself, who was already partially dressed, was seated on his
bedstead, occupied in the desperately hopeless attempt of staring Mr.
Weller out of countenance. We say desperately hopeless, because Sam,
with a comprehensive gaze which took in Mr. Smangle’s cap, feet, head,
face, legs, and whiskers, all at the same time, continued to look
steadily on, with every demonstration of lively satisfaction, but with
no more regard to Mr. Smangle’s personal sentiments on the subject than
he would have displayed had he been inspecting a wooden statue, or a
straw-embowelled Guy Fawkes.

‘Well; will you know me again?’ said Mr. Smangle, with a frown.

‘I’d svear to you anyveres, Sir,’ replied Sam cheerfully.

‘Don’t be impertinent to a gentleman, Sir,’ said Mr. Smangle.

‘Not on no account,’ replied Sam. ‘If you’ll tell me wen he wakes, I’ll
be upon the wery best extra-super behaviour!’ This observation, having a
remote tendency to imply that Mr. Smangle was no gentleman, kindled his
ire.

‘Mivins!’ said Mr. Smangle, with a passionate air.

‘What’s the office?’ replied that gentleman from his couch.

‘Who the devil is this fellow?’

‘’Gad,’ said Mr. Mivins, looking lazily out from under the bed-clothes,
‘I ought to ask _you _that. Hasn’t he any business here?’

‘No,’ replied Mr. Smangle.

‘Then knock him downstairs, and tell him not to presume to get up till I
come and kick him,’ rejoined Mr. Mivins; with this prompt advice that
excellent gentleman again betook himself to slumber.

The conversation exhibiting these unequivocal symptoms of verging on the
personal, Mr. Pickwick deemed it a fit point at which to interpose.

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Sir,’ rejoined that gentleman.

‘Has anything new occurred since last night?’

‘Nothin’ partickler, sir,’ replied Sam, glancing at Mr. Smangle’s
whiskers; ‘the late prewailance of a close and confined atmosphere has
been rayther favourable to the growth of veeds, of an alarmin’ and
sangvinary natur; but vith that ‘ere exception things is quiet enough.’

‘I shall get up,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘give me some clean things.’

Whatever hostile intentions Mr. Smangle might have entertained, his
thoughts were speedily diverted by the unpacking of the portmanteau; the
contents of which appeared to impress him at once with a most favourable
opinion, not only of Mr. Pickwick, but of Sam also, who, he took an
early opportunity of declaring in a tone of voice loud enough for that
eccentric personage to overhear, was a regular thoroughbred original,
and consequently the very man after his own heart. As to Mr. Pickwick,
the affection he conceived for him knew no limits.

‘Now is there anything I can do for you, my dear Sir?’ said Smangle.

‘Nothing that I am aware of, I am obliged to you,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘No linen that you want sent to the washerwoman’s? I know a delightful
washerwoman outside, that comes for my things twice a week; and, by
Jove!--how devilish lucky!--this is the day she calls. Shall I put any
of those little things up with mine? Don’t say anything about the
trouble. Confound and curse it! if one gentleman under a cloud is not to
put himself a little out of the way to assist another gentleman in the
same condition, what’s human nature?’

Thus spake Mr. Smangle, edging himself meanwhile as near as possible to
the portmanteau, and beaming forth looks of the most fervent and
disinterested friendship.

‘There’s nothing you want to give out for the man to brush, my dear
creature, is there?’ resumed Smangle.

‘Nothin’ whatever, my fine feller,’ rejoined Sam, taking the reply into
his own mouth. ‘P’raps if vun of us wos to brush, without troubling the
man, it ‘ud be more agreeable for all parties, as the schoolmaster said
when the young gentleman objected to being flogged by the butler.’

‘And there’s nothing I can send in my little box to the washer-woman’s,
is there?’ said Smangle, turning from Sam to Mr. Pickwick, with an air
of some discomfiture.

‘Nothin’ whatever, Sir,’ retorted Sam; ‘I’m afeered the little box must
be chock full o’ your own as it is.’

This speech was accompanied with such a very expressive look at that
particular portion of Mr. Smangle’s attire, by the appearance of which
the skill of laundresses in getting up gentlemen’s linen is generally
tested, that he was fain to turn upon his heel, and, for the present at
any rate, to give up all design on Mr. Pickwick’s purse and wardrobe. He
accordingly retired in dudgeon to the racket-ground, where he made a
light and whole-some breakfast on a couple of the cigars which had been
purchased on the previous night.

Mr. Mivins, who was no smoker, and whose account for small articles of
chandlery had also reached down to the bottom of the slate, and been
‘carried over’ to the other side, remained in bed, and, in his own
words, ‘took it out in sleep.’

After breakfasting in a small closet attached to the coffee-room, which
bore the imposing title of the Snuggery, the temporary inmate of which,
in consideration of a small additional charge, had the unspeakable
advantage of overhearing all the conversation in the coffee-room
aforesaid; and, after despatching Mr. Weller on some necessary errands,
Mr. Pickwick repaired to the lodge, to consult Mr. Roker concerning his
future accommodation.

‘Accommodation, eh?’ said that gentleman, consulting a large book.
‘Plenty of that, Mr. Pickwick. Your chummage ticket will be on twenty-
seven, in the third.’

‘Oh,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘My what, did you say?’

‘Your chummage ticket,’ replied Mr. Roker; ‘you’re up to that?’

‘Not quite,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, with a smile.

‘Why,’ said Mr. Roker, ‘it’s as plain as Salisbury. You’ll have a
chummage ticket upon twenty-seven in the third, and them as is in the
room will be your chums.’

‘Are there many of them?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick dubiously.

‘Three,’ replied Mr. Roker.

Mr. Pickwick coughed.

‘One of ‘em’s a parson,’ said Mr. Roker, filling up a little piece of
paper as he spoke; ‘another’s a butcher.’

‘Eh?’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘A butcher,’ repeated Mr. Roker, giving the nib of his pen a tap on the
desk to cure it of a disinclination to mark. ‘What a thorough-paced goer
he used to be sure-ly! You remember Tom Martin, Neddy?’ said Roker,
appealing to another man in the lodge, who was paring the mud off his
shoes with a five-and-twenty-bladed pocket-knife.

‘I should think so,’ replied the party addressed, with a strong emphasis
on the personal pronoun.

‘Bless my dear eyes!’ said Mr. Roker, shaking his head slowly from side
to side, and gazing abstractedly out of the grated windows before him,
as if he were fondly recalling some peaceful scene of his early youth;
‘it seems but yesterday that he whopped the coal-heaver down Fox-under-
the-Hill by the wharf there. I think I can see him now, a-coming up the
Strand between the two street-keepers, a little sobered by the bruising,
with a patch o’ winegar and brown paper over his right eyelid, and that
‘ere lovely bulldog, as pinned the little boy arterwards, a-following at
his heels. What a rum thing time is, ain’t it, Neddy?’

The gentleman to whom these observations were addressed, who appeared of
a taciturn and thoughtful cast, merely echoed the inquiry; Mr. Roker,
shaking off the poetical and gloomy train of thought into which he had
been betrayed, descended to the common business of life, and resumed his
pen.

‘Do you know what the third gentlemen is?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, not
very much gratified by this description of his future associates.

‘What is that Simpson, Neddy?’ said Mr. Roker, turning to his companion.

‘What Simpson?’ said Neddy.

‘Why, him in twenty-seven in the third, that this gentleman’s going to
be chummed on.’

‘Oh, him!’ replied Neddy; ‘he’s nothing exactly. He _was _a horse
chaunter: he’s a leg now.’

‘Ah, so I thought,’ rejoined Mr. Roker, closing the book, and placing
the small piece of paper in Mr. Pickwick’s hands. ‘That’s the ticket,
sir.’

Very much perplexed by this summary disposition of this person, Mr.
Pickwick walked back into the prison, revolving in his mind what he had
better do. Convinced, however, that before he took any other steps it
would be advisable to see, and hold personal converse with, the three
gentlemen with whom it was proposed to quarter him, he made the best of
his way to the third flight.

After groping about in the gallery for some time, attempting in the dim
light to decipher the numbers on the different doors, he at length
appealed to a pot-boy, who happened to be pursuing his morning
occupation of gleaning for pewter.

‘Which is twenty-seven, my good fellow?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Five doors farther on,’ replied the pot-boy. ‘There’s the likeness of a
man being hung, and smoking the while, chalked outside the door.’

Guided by this direction, Mr. Pickwick proceeded slowly along the
gallery until he encountered the ‘portrait of a gentleman,’ above
described, upon whose countenance he tapped, with the knuckle of his
forefinger--gently at first, and then audibly. After repeating this
process several times without effect, he ventured to open the door and
peep in.

There was only one man in the room, and he was leaning out of window as
far as he could without overbalancing himself, endeavouring, with great
perseverance, to spit upon the crown of the hat of a personal friend on
the parade below. As neither speaking, coughing, sneezing, knocking, nor
any other ordinary mode of attracting attention, made this person aware
of the presence of a visitor, Mr. Pickwick, after some delay, stepped up
to the window, and pulled him gently by the coat tail. The individual
brought in his head and shoulders with great swiftness, and surveying
Mr. Pickwick from head to foot, demanded in a surly tone what the--
something beginning with a capital H--he wanted.

‘I believe,’ said Mr. Pickwick, consulting his ticket--‘I believe this
is twenty-seven in the third?’

‘Well?’ replied the gentleman.

‘I have come here in consequence of receiving this bit of paper,’
rejoined Mr. Pickwick.

‘Hand it over,’ said the gentleman.

Mr. Pickwick complied.

‘I think Roker might have chummed you somewhere else,’ said Mr. Simpson
(for it was the leg), after a very discontented sort of a pause.

Mr. Pickwick thought so also; but, under all the circumstances, he
considered it a matter of sound policy to be silent.

Mr. Simpson mused for a few moments after this, and then, thrusting his
head out of the window, gave a shrill whistle, and pronounced some word
aloud, several times. What the word was, Mr. Pickwick could not
distinguish; but he rather inferred that it must be some nickname which
distinguished Mr. Martin, from the fact of a great number of gentlemen
on the ground below, immediately proceeding to cry ‘Butcher!’ in
imitation of the tone in which that useful class of society are wont,
diurnally, to make their presence known at area railings.

Subsequent occurrences confirmed the accuracy of Mr. Pickwick’s
impression; for, in a few seconds, a gentleman, prematurely broad for
his years, clothed in a professional blue jean frock and top-boots with
circular toes, entered the room nearly out of breath, closely followed
by another gentleman in very shabby black, and a sealskin cap. The
latter gentleman, who fastened his coat all the way up to his chin by
means of a pin and a button alternately, had a very coarse red face, and
looked like a drunken chaplain; which, indeed, he was.

These two gentlemen having by turns perused Mr. Pickwick’s billet, the
one expressed his opinion that it was ‘a rig,’ and the other his
conviction that it was ‘a go.’ Having recorded their feelings in these
very intelligible terms, they looked at Mr. Pickwick and each other in
awkward silence.

‘It’s an aggravating thing, just as we got the beds so snug,’ said the
chaplain, looking at three dirty mattresses, each rolled up in a
blanket; which occupied one corner of the room during the day, and
formed a kind of slab, on which were placed an old cracked basin, ewer,
and soap-dish, of common yellow earthenware, with a blue flower--‘very
aggravating.’

Mr. Martin expressed the same opinion in rather stronger terms; Mr.
Simpson, after having let a variety of expletive adjectives loose upon
society without any substantive to accompany them, tucked up his
sleeves, and began to wash the greens for dinner.

While this was going on, Mr. Pickwick had been eyeing the room, which
was filthily dirty, and smelt intolerably close. There was no vestige of
either carpet, curtain, or blind. There was not even a closet in it.
Unquestionably there were but few things to put away, if there had been
one; but, however few in number, or small in individual amount, still,
remnants of loaves and pieces of cheese, and damp towels, and scrags of
meat, and articles of wearing apparel, and mutilated crockery, and
bellows without nozzles, and toasting-forks without prongs, do present
somewhat of an uncomfortable appearance when they are scattered about
the floor of a small apartment, which is the common sitting and sleeping
room of three idle men.

‘I suppose this can be managed somehow,’ said the butcher, after a
pretty long silence. ‘What will you take to go out?’

I beg your pardon,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘What did you say? I hardly
understand you.’

‘What will you take to be paid out?’ said the butcher. ‘The regular
chummage is two-and-six. Will you take three bob?’

‘And a bender,’ suggested the clerical gentleman.

‘Well, I don’t mind that; it’s only twopence a piece more,’ said Mr.
Martin. ‘What do you say, now? We’ll pay you out for three-and-sixpence
a week. Come!’

‘And stand a gallon of beer down,’ chimed in Mr. Simpson. ‘There!’

‘And drink it on the spot,’ said the chaplain. ‘Now!’

‘I really am so wholly ignorant of the rules of this place,’ returned
Mr. Pickwick, ‘that I do not yet comprehend you. Can I live anywhere
else? I thought I could not.’

At this inquiry Mr. Martin looked, with a countenance of excessive
surprise, at his two friends, and then each gentleman pointed with his
right thumb over his left shoulder. This action imperfectly described in
words by the very feeble term of ‘over the left,’ when performed by any
number of ladies or gentlemen who are accustomed to act in unison, has a
very graceful and airy effect; its expression is one of light and
playful sarcasm.

‘_Can _you!’ repeated Mr. Martin, with a smile of pity.

‘Well, if I knew as little of life as that, I’d eat my hat and swallow
the buckle whole,’ said the clerical gentleman.

‘So would I,’ added the sporting one solemnly.

After this introductory preface, the three chums informed Mr. Pickwick,
in a breath, that money was, in the Fleet, just what money was out of
it; that it would instantly procure him almost anything he desired; and
that, supposing he had it, and had no objection to spend it, if he only
signified his wish to have a room to himself, he might take possession
of one, furnished and fitted to boot, in half an hour’s time.

With this the parties separated, very much to their common satisfaction;
Mr. Pickwick once more retracing his steps to the lodge, and the three
companions adjourning to the coffee-room, there to spend the five
shillings which the clerical gentleman had, with admirable prudence and
foresight, borrowed of him for the purpose.

‘I knowed it!’ said Mr. Roker, with a chuckle, when Mr. Pickwick stated
the object with which he had returned. ‘Didn’t I say so, Neddy?’

The philosophical owner of the universal penknife growled an
affirmative.

‘I knowed you’d want a room for yourself, bless you!’ said Mr. Roker.
‘Let me see. You’ll want some furniture. You’ll hire that of me, I
suppose? That’s the reg’lar thing.’

‘With great pleasure,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘There’s a capital room up in the coffee-room flight, that belongs to a
Chancery prisoner,’ said Mr. Roker. ‘It’ll stand you in a pound a week.
I suppose you don’t mind that?’

‘Not at all,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Just step there with me,’ said Roker, taking up his hat with great
alacrity; ‘the matter’s settled in five minutes. Lord! why didn’t you
say at first that you was willing to come down handsome?’

The matter was soon arranged, as the turnkey had foretold. The Chancery
prisoner had been there long enough to have lost his friends, fortune,
home, and happiness, and to have acquired the right of having a room to
himself. As he laboured, however, under the inconvenience of often
wanting a morsel of bread, he eagerly listened to Mr. Pickwick’s
proposal to rent the apartment, and readily covenanted and agreed to
yield him up the sole and undisturbed possession thereof, in
consideration of the weekly payment of twenty shillings; from which fund
he furthermore contracted to pay out any person or persons that might be
chummed upon it.

As they struck the bargain, Mr. Pickwick surveyed him with a painful
interest. He was a tall, gaunt, cadaverous man, in an old greatcoat and
slippers, with sunken cheeks, and a restless, eager eye. His lips were
bloodless, and his bones sharp and thin. God help him! the iron teeth of
confinement and privation had been slowly filing him down for twenty
years.

‘And where will you live meanwhile, Sir?’ said Mr. Pickwick, as he laid
the amount of the first week’s rent, in advance, on the tottering table.

The man gathered up the money with a trembling hand, and replied that he
didn’t know yet; he must go and see where he could move his bed to.

‘I am afraid, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, laying his hand gently and
compassionately on his arm--‘I am afraid you will have to live in some
noisy, crowded place. Now, pray, consider this room your own when you
want quiet, or when any of your friends come to see you.’

‘Friends!’ interposed the man, in a voice which rattled in his throat.
‘if I lay dead at the bottom of the deepest mine in the world; tight
screwed down and soldered in my coffin; rotting in the dark and filthy
ditch that drags its slime along, beneath the foundations of this
prison; I could not be more forgotten or unheeded than I am here. I am a
dead man; dead to society, without the pity they bestow on those whose
souls have passed to judgment. Friends to see me! My God! I have sunk,
from the prime of life into old age, in this place, and there is not one
to raise his hand above my bed when I lie dead upon it, and say, “It is
a blessing he is gone!”’

The excitement, which had cast an unwonted light over the man’s face,
while he spoke, subsided as he concluded; and pressing his withered
hands together in a hasty and disordered manner, he shuffled from the
room.

‘Rides rather rusty,’ said Mr. Roker, with a smile. ‘Ah! they’re like
the elephants. They feel it now and then, and it makes ‘em wild!’

Having made this deeply-sympathising remark, Mr. Roker entered upon his
arrangements with such expedition, that in a short time the room was
furnished with a carpet, six chairs, a table, a sofa bedstead, a tea-
kettle, and various small articles, on hire, at the very reasonable rate
of seven-and-twenty shillings and sixpence per week.

‘Now, is there anything more we can do for you?’ inquired Mr. Roker,
looking round with great satisfaction, and gaily chinking the first
week’s hire in his closed fist.

‘Why, yes,’ said Mr. Pickwick, who had been musing deeply for some time.
‘Are there any people here who run on errands, and so forth?’

‘Outside, do you mean?’ inquired Mr. Roker.

‘Yes. I mean who are able to go outside. Not prisoners.’

‘Yes, there is,’ said Roker. ‘There’s an unfortunate devil, who has got
a friend on the poor side, that’s glad to do anything of that sort. He’s
been running odd jobs, and that, for the last two months. Shall I send
him?’

‘If you please,’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick. ‘Stay; no. The poor side, you
say? I should like to see it. I’ll go to him myself.’

The poor side of a debtor’s prison is, as its name imports, that in
which the most miserable and abject class of debtors are confined. A
prisoner having declared upon the poor side, pays neither rent nor
chummage. His fees, upon entering and leaving the jail, are reduced in
amount, and he becomes entitled to a share of some small quantities of
food: to provide which, a few charitable persons have, from time to
time, left trifling legacies in their wills. Most of our readers will
remember, that, until within a very few years past, there was a kind of
iron cage in the wall of the Fleet Prison, within which was posted some
man of hungry looks, who, from time to time, rattled a money-box, and
exclaimed in a mournful voice, ‘Pray, remember the poor debtors; pray
remember the poor debtors.’ The receipts of this box, when there were
any, were divided among the poor prisoners; and the men on the poor side
relieved each other in this degrading office.

Although this custom has been abolished, and the cage is now boarded up,
the miserable and destitute condition of these unhappy persons remains
the same. We no longer suffer them to appeal at the prison gates to the
charity and compassion of the passersby; but we still leave unblotted
the leaves of our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of
succeeding ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the
sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor
shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction.
Not a week passes over our head, but, in every one of our prisons for
debt, some of these men must inevitably expire in the slow agonies of
want, if they were not relieved by their fellow-prisoners.

Turning these things in his mind, as he mounted the narrow staircase at
the foot of which Roker had left him, Mr. Pickwick gradually worked
himself to the boiling-over point; and so excited was he with his
reflections on this subject, that he had burst into the room to which he
had been directed, before he had any distinct recollection, either of
the place in which he was, or of the object of his visit.

The general aspect of the room recalled him to himself at once; but he
had no sooner cast his eye on the figure of a man who was brooding over
the dusty fire, than, letting his hat fall on the floor, he stood
perfectly fixed and immovable with astonishment.

Yes; in tattered garments, and without a coat; his common calico shirt,
yellow and in rags; his hair hanging over his face; his features changed
with suffering, and pinched with famine--there sat Mr. Alfred Jingle;
his head resting on his hands, his eyes fixed upon the fire, and his
whole appearance denoting misery and dejection!

Near him, leaning listlessly against the wall, stood a strong-built
countryman, flicking with a worn-out hunting-whip the top-boot that
adorned his right foot; his left being thrust into an old slipper.
Horses, dogs, and drink had brought him there, pell-mell. There was a
rusty spur on the solitary boot, which he occasionally jerked into the
empty air, at the same time giving the boot a smart blow, and muttering
some of the sounds by which a sportsman encourages his horse. He was
riding, in imagination, some desperate steeplechase at that moment. Poor
wretch! He never rode a match on the swiftest animal in his costly stud,
with half the speed at which he had torn along the course that ended in
the Fleet.

On the opposite side of the room an old man was seated on a small wooden
box, with his eyes riveted on the floor, and his face settled into an
expression of the deepest and most hopeless despair. A young girl--his
little grand-daughter--was hanging about him, endeavouring, with a
thousand childish devices, to engage his attention; but the old man
neither saw nor heard her. The voice that had been music to him, and the
eyes that had been light, fell coldly on his senses. His limbs were
shaking with disease, and the palsy had fastened on his mind.


There were two or three other men in the room, congregated in a little
knot, and noiselessly talking among themselves. There was a lean and
haggard woman, too--a prisoner’s wife--who was watering, with great
solicitude, the wretched stump of a dried-up, withered plant, which, it
was plain to see, could never send forth a green leaf again--too true an
emblem, perhaps, of the office she had come there to discharge.

Such were the objects which presented themselves to Mr. Pickwick’s view,
as he looked round him in amazement. The noise of some one stumbling
hastily into the room, roused him. Turning his eyes towards the door,
they encountered the new-comer; and in him, through his rags and dirt,
he recognised the familiar features of Mr. Job Trotter.

‘Mr. Pickwick!’ exclaimed Job aloud.

‘Eh?’ said Jingle, starting from his seat.

‘Mr ----! So it is--queer place--strange things--serves me right--very.’
Mr. Jingle thrust his hands into the place where his trousers pockets
used to be, and, dropping his chin upon his breast, sank back into his
chair.

Mr. Pickwick was affected; the two men looked so very miserable. The
sharp, involuntary glance Jingle had cast at a small piece of raw loin
of mutton, which Job had brought in with him, said more of their reduced
state than two hours’ explanation could have done. Mr. Pickwick looked
mildly at Jingle, and said--

‘I should like to speak to you in private. Will you step out for an
instant?’

‘Certainly,’ said Jingle, rising hastily. ‘Can’t step far--no danger of
overwalking yourself here--spike park--grounds pretty--romantic, but not
extensive--open for public inspection--family always in town--
housekeeper desperately careful--very.’

‘You have forgotten your coat,’ said Mr. Pickwick, as they walked out to
the staircase, and closed the door after them.

‘Eh?’ said Jingle. ‘Spout--dear relation--uncle Tom--couldn’t help it--
must eat, you know. Wants of nature--and all that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Gone, my dear sir--last coat--can’t help it. Lived on a pair of boots,
whole fortnight. Silk umbrella--ivory handle--week--fact--honour--ask
Job--knows it.’

‘Lived for three weeks upon a pair of boots, and a silk umbrella with an
ivory handle!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, who had only heard of such things
in shipwrecks or read of them in Constable’s Miscellany.

‘True,’ said Jingle, nodding his head. ‘Pawnbroker’s shop--duplicates
here--small sums--mere nothing--all rascals.’

‘Oh,’ said Mr. Pickwick, much relieved by this explanation; ‘I
understand you. You have pawned your wardrobe.’

‘Everything--Job’s too--all shirts gone--never mind--saves washing.
Nothing soon--lie in bed--starve--die--inquest--little bone-house--poor
prisoner--common necessaries--hush it up--gentlemen of the jury--
warden’s tradesmen--keep it snug--natural death--coroner’s order--
workhouse funeral--serve him right--all over--drop the curtain.’

Jingle delivered this singular summary of his prospects in life, with
his accustomed volubility, and with various twitches of the countenance
to counterfeit smiles. Mr. Pickwick easily perceived that his
recklessness was assumed, and looking him full, but not unkindly, in the
face, saw that his eyes were moist with tears.

‘Good fellow,’ said Jingle, pressing his hand, and turning his head
away. ‘Ungrateful dog--boyish to cry--can’t help it--bad fever--weak--
ill--hungry. Deserved it all--but suffered much--very.’ Wholly unable to
keep up appearances any longer, and perhaps rendered worse by the effort
he had made, the dejected stroller sat down on the stairs, and, covering
his face with his hands, sobbed like a child.

‘Come, come,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with considerable emotion, ‘we will see
what can be done, when I know all about the matter. Here, Job; where is
that fellow?’

‘Here, sir,’ replied Job, presenting himself on the staircase. We have
described him, by the bye, as having deeply-sunken eyes, in the best of
times. In his present state of want and distress, he looked as if those
features had gone out of town altogether.

‘Here, sir,’ cried Job.

‘Come here, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, trying to look stern, with four
large tears running down his waistcoat. ‘Take that, sir.’

Take what? In the ordinary acceptation of such language, it should have
been a blow. As the world runs, it ought to have been a sound, hearty
cuff; for Mr. Pickwick had been duped, deceived, and wronged by the
destitute outcast who was now wholly in his power. Must we tell the
truth? It was something from Mr. Pickwick’s waistcoat pocket, which
chinked as it was given into Job’s hand, and the giving of which,
somehow or other imparted a sparkle to the eye, and a swelling to the
heart, of our excellent old friend, as he hurried away.

Sam had returned when Mr. Pickwick reached his own room, and was
inspecting the arrangements that had been made for his comfort, with a
kind of grim satisfaction which was very pleasant to look upon. Having a
decided objection to his master’s being there at all, Mr. Weller
appeared to consider it a high moral duty not to appear too much pleased
with anything that was done, said, suggested, or proposed.

‘Well, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Well, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘Pretty comfortable now, eh, Sam?’

‘Pretty vell, sir,’ responded Sam, looking round him in a disparaging
manner.

‘Have you seen Mr. Tupman and our other friends?’

‘Yes, I _have _seen ‘em, sir, and they’re a-comin’ to-morrow, and wos
wery much surprised to hear they warn’t to come to-day,’ replied Sam.

‘You have brought the things I wanted?’

Mr. Weller in reply pointed to various packages which he had arranged,
as neatly as he could, in a corner of the room.

‘Very well, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, after a little hesitation; ‘listen
to what I am going to say, Sam.’

‘Cert’nly, Sir,’ rejoined Mr. Weller; ‘fire away, Sir.’

‘I have felt from the first, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with much
solemnity, ‘that this is not the place to bring a young man to.’

‘Nor an old ‘un neither, Sir,’ observed Mr. Weller.

‘You’re quite right, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘but old men may come here
through their own heedlessness and unsuspicion, and young men may be
brought here by the selfishness of those they serve. It is better for
those young men, in every point of view, that they should not remain
here. Do you understand me, Sam?’

‘Vy no, Sir, I do _not_,’ replied Mr. Weller doggedly.

‘Try, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Vell, sir,’ rejoined Sam, after a short pause, ‘I think I see your
drift; and if I do see your drift, it’s my ‘pinion that you’re a-comin’
it a great deal too strong, as the mail-coachman said to the snowstorm,
ven it overtook him.’

‘I see you comprehend me, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Independently of my
wish that you should not be idling about a place like this, for years to
come, I feel that for a debtor in the Fleet to be attended by his
manservant is a monstrous absurdity. Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘for a
time you must leave me.’

‘Oh, for a time, eh, sir?’ rejoined Mr. Weller rather sarcastically.

‘Yes, for the time that I remain here,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Your wages I
shall continue to pay. Any one of my three friends will be happy to take
you, were it only out of respect to me. And if I ever do leave this
place, Sam,’ added Mr. Pickwick, with assumed cheerfulness--‘if I do, I
pledge you my word that you shall return to me instantly.’

‘Now I’ll tell you wot it is, Sir,’ said Mr. Weller, in a grave and
solemn voice. ‘This here sort o’ thing won’t do at all, so don’t let’s
hear no more about it.’

I am serious, and resolved, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘You air, air you, sir?’ inquired Mr. Weller firmly. ‘Wery good, Sir;
then so am I.’

Thus speaking, Mr. Weller fixed his hat on his head with great
precision, and abruptly left the room.

‘Sam!’ cried Mr. Pickwick, calling after him, ‘Sam! Here!’

But the long gallery ceased to re-echo the sound of footsteps. Sam
Weller was gone.



CHAPTER XLIII. SHOWING HOW MR. SAMUEL WELLER GOT INTO DIFFICULTIES

In a lofty room, ill-lighted and worse ventilated, situated in Portugal
Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, there sit nearly the whole year round,
one, two, three, or four gentlemen in wigs, as the case may be, with
little writing-desks before them, constructed after the fashion of those
used by the judges of the land, barring the French polish. There is a
box of barristers on their right hand; there is an enclosure of
insolvent debtors on their left; and there is an inclined plane of most
especially dirty faces in their front. These gentlemen are the
Commissioners of the Insolvent Court, and the place in which they sit,
is the Insolvent Court itself.

It is, and has been, time out of mind, the remarkable fate of this court
to be, somehow or other, held and understood, by the general consent of
all the destitute shabby-genteel people in London, as their common
resort, and place of daily refuge. It is always full. The steams of beer
and spirits perpetually ascend to the ceiling, and, being condensed by
the heat, roll down the walls like rain; there are more old suits of
clothes in it at one time, than will be offered for sale in all
Houndsditch in a twelvemonth; more unwashed skins and grizzly beards
than all the pumps and shaving-shops between Tyburn and Whitechapel
could render decent, between sunrise and sunset.

It must not be supposed that any of these people have the least shadow
of business in, or the remotest connection with, the place they so
indefatigably attend. If they had, it would be no matter of surprise,
and the singularity of the thing would cease. Some of them sleep during
the greater part of the sitting; others carry small portable dinners
wrapped in pocket-handkerchiefs or sticking out of their worn-out
pockets, and munch and listen with equal relish; but no one among them
was ever known to have the slightest personal interest in any case that
was ever brought forward. Whatever they do, there they sit from the
first moment to the last. When it is heavy, rainy weather, they all come
in, wet through; and at such times the vapours of the court are like
those of a fungus-pit.

A casual visitor might suppose this place to be a temple dedicated to
the Genius of Seediness. There is not a messenger or process-server
attached to it, who wears a coat that was made for him; not a tolerably
fresh, or wholesome-looking man in the whole establishment, except a
little white-headed apple-faced tipstaff, and even he, like an ill-
conditioned cherry preserved in brandy, seems to have artificially dried
and withered up into a state of preservation to which he can lay no
natural claim. The very barristers’ wigs are ill-powdered, and their
curls lack crispness.

But the attorneys, who sit at a large bare table below the
commissioners, are, after all, the greatest curiosities. The
professional establishment of the more opulent of these gentlemen,
consists of a blue bag and a boy; generally a youth of the Jewish
persuasion. They have no fixed offices, their legal business being
transacted in the parlours of public-houses, or the yards of prisons,
whither they repair in crowds, and canvass for customers after the
manner of omnibus cads. They are of a greasy and mildewed appearance;
and if they can be said to have any vices at all, perhaps drinking and
cheating are the most conspicuous among them. Their residences are
usually on the outskirts of ‘the Rules,’ chiefly lying within a circle
of one mile from the obelisk in St. George’s Fields. Their looks are not
prepossessing, and their manners are peculiar.

Mr. Solomon Pell, one of this learned body, was a fat, flabby, pale man,
in a surtout which looked green one minute, and brown the next, with a
velvet collar of the same chameleon tints. His forehead was narrow, his
face wide, his head large, and his nose all on one side, as if Nature,
indignant with the propensities she observed in him in his birth, had
given it an angry tweak which it had never recovered. Being short-necked
and asthmatic, however, he respired principally through this feature;
so, perhaps, what it wanted in ornament, it made up in usefulness.

‘I’m sure to bring him through it,’ said Mr. Pell.

‘Are you, though?’ replied the person to whom the assurance was pledged.

‘Certain sure,’ replied Pell; ‘but if he’d gone to any irregular
practitioner, mind you, I wouldn’t have answered for the consequences.’

‘Ah!’ said the other, with open mouth.

‘No, that I wouldn’t,’ said Mr. Pell; and he pursed up his lips,
frowned, and shook his head mysteriously.

Now, the place where this discourse occurred was the public-house just
opposite to the Insolvent Court; and the person with whom it was held
was no other than the elder Mr. Weller, who had come there, to comfort
and console a friend, whose petition to be discharged under the act, was
to be that day heard, and whose attorney he was at that moment
consulting.

‘And vere is George?’ inquired the old gentleman.

Mr. Pell jerked his head in the direction of a back parlour, whither Mr.
Weller at once repairing, was immediately greeted in the warmest and
most flattering manner by some half-dozen of his professional brethren,
in token of their gratification at his arrival. The insolvent gentleman,
who had contracted a speculative but imprudent passion for horsing long
stages, which had led to his present embarrassments, looked extremely
well, and was soothing the excitement of his feelings with shrimps and
porter.

The salutation between Mr. Weller and his friends was strictly confined
to the freemasonry of the craft; consisting of a jerking round of the
right wrist, and a tossing of the little finger into the air at the same
time. We once knew two famous coachmen (they are dead now, poor fellows)
who were twins, and between whom an unaffected and devoted attachment
existed. They passed each other on the Dover road, every day, for
twenty-four years, never exchanging any other greeting than this; and
yet, when one died, the other pined away, and soon afterwards followed
him!

‘Vell, George,’ said Mr. Weller senior, taking off his upper coat, and
seating himself with his accustomed gravity. ‘How is it? All right
behind, and full inside?’

‘All right, old feller,’ replied the embarrassed gentleman.

‘Is the gray mare made over to anybody?’ inquired Mr. Weller anxiously.

George nodded in the affirmative.

‘Vell, that’s all right,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘Coach taken care on, also?’

‘Con-signed in a safe quarter,’ replied George, wringing the heads off
half a dozen shrimps, and swallowing them without any more ado.

‘Wery good, wery good,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘Alvays see to the drag ven you
go downhill. Is the vay-bill all clear and straight for’erd?’

‘The schedule, sir,’ said Pell, guessing at Mr. Weller’s meaning, ‘the
schedule is as plain and satisfactory as pen and ink can make it.’

Mr. Weller nodded in a manner which bespoke his inward approval of these
arrangements; and then, turning to Mr. Pell, said, pointing to his
friend George--

‘Ven do you take his cloths off?’

‘Why,’ replied Mr. Pell, ‘he stands third on the opposed list, and I
should think it would be his turn in about half an hour. I told my clerk
to come over and tell us when there was a chance.’

Mr. Weller surveyed the attorney from head to foot with great
admiration, and said emphatically--

‘And what’ll you take, sir?’

‘Why, really,’ replied Mr. Pell, ‘you’re very--. Upon my word and
honour, I’m not in the habit of--. It’s so very early in the morning,
that, actually, I am almost--. Well, you may bring me threepenn’orth of
rum, my dear.’

The officiating damsel, who had anticipated the order before it was
given, set the glass of spirits before Pell, and retired.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Mr. Pell, looking round upon the company, ‘success to
your friend! I don’t like to boast, gentlemen; it’s not my way; but I
can’t help saying, that, if your friend hadn’t been fortunate enough to
fall into hands that--But I won’t say what I was going to say.
Gentlemen, my service to you.’ Having emptied the glass in a twinkling,
Mr. Pell smacked his lips, and looked complacently round on the
assembled coachmen, who evidently regarded him as a species of divinity.

‘Let me see,’ said the legal authority. ‘What was I a-saying,
gentlemen?’

‘I think you was remarkin’ as you wouldn’t have no objection to another
o’ the same, Sir,’ said Mr. Weller, with grave facetiousness.

‘Ha, ha!’ laughed Mr. Pell. ‘Not bad, not bad. A professional man, too!
At this time of the morning, it would be rather too good a--Well, I
don’t know, my dear--you may do that again, if you please. Hem!’

This last sound was a solemn and dignified cough, in which Mr. Pell,
observing an indecent tendency to mirth in some of his auditors,
considered it due to himself to indulge.

‘The late Lord Chancellor, gentlemen, was very fond of me,’ said Mr.
Pell.

‘And wery creditable in him, too,’ interposed Mr. Weller.

‘Hear, hear,’ assented Mr. Pell’s client. ‘Why shouldn’t he be?

‘Ah! Why, indeed!’ said a very red-faced man, who had said nothing yet,
and who looked extremely unlikely to say anything more. ‘Why shouldn’t
he?’

A murmur of assent ran through the company.

‘I remember, gentlemen,’ said Mr. Pell, ‘dining with him on one
occasion; there was only us two, but everything as splendid as if twenty
people had been expected--the great seal on a dumb-waiter at his right
hand, and a man in a bag-wig and suit of armour guarding the mace with a
drawn sword and silk stockings--which is perpetually done, gentlemen,
night and day; when he said, “Pell,” he said, “no false delicacy, Pell.
You’re a man of talent; you can get anybody through the Insolvent Court,
Pell; and your country should be proud of you.” Those were his very
words. “My Lord,” I said, “you flatter me.”--“Pell,” he said, “if I do,
I’m damned.”’

‘Did he say that?’ inquired Mr. Weller.

‘He did,’ replied Pell.

‘Vell, then,’ said Mr. Weller, ‘I say Parliament ought to ha’ took it
up; and if he’d been a poor man, they would ha’ done it.’

‘But, my dear friend,’ argued Mr. Pell, ‘it was in confidence.’

‘In what?’ said Mr. Weller.

‘In confidence.’

‘Oh! wery good,’ replied Mr. Weller, after a little reflection. ‘If he
damned hisself in confidence, o’ course that was another thing.’

‘Of course it was,’ said Mr. Pell. ‘The distinction’s obvious, you will
perceive.’

‘Alters the case entirely,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘Go on, Sir.’

No, I will not go on, Sir,’ said Mr. Pell, in a low and serious tone.
‘You have reminded me, Sir, that this conversation was private--private
and confidential, gentlemen. Gentlemen, I am a professional man. It may
be that I am a good deal looked up to, in my profession--it may be that
I am not. Most people know. I say nothing. Observations have already
been made, in this room, injurious to the reputation of my noble friend.
You will excuse me, gentlemen; I was imprudent. I feel that I have no
right to mention this matter without his concurrence. Thank you, Sir;
thank you.’ Thus delivering himself, Mr. Pell thrust his hands into his
pockets, and, frowning grimly around, rattled three halfpence with
terrible determination.

This virtuous resolution had scarcely been formed, when the boy and the
blue bag, who were inseparable companions, rushed violently into the
room, and said (at least the boy did, for the blue bag took no part in
the announcement) that the case was coming on directly. The intelligence
was no sooner received than the whole party hurried across the street,
and began to fight their way into court--a preparatory ceremony, which
has been calculated to occupy, in ordinary cases, from twenty-five
minutes to thirty.

Mr. Weller, being stout, cast himself at once into the crowd, with the
desperate hope of ultimately turning up in some place which would suit
him. His success was not quite equal to his expectations; for having
neglected to take his hat off, it was knocked over his eyes by some
unseen person, upon whose toes he had alighted with considerable force.
Apparently this individual regretted his impetuosity immediately
afterwards, for, muttering an indistinct exclamation of surprise, he
dragged the old man out into the hall, and, after a violent struggle,
released his head and face.

‘Samivel!’ exclaimed Mr. Weller, when he was thus enabled to behold his
rescuer.

Sam nodded.

‘You’re a dutiful and affectionate little boy, you are, ain’t you,’ said
Mr. Weller, ‘to come a-bonnetin’ your father in his old age?’

‘How should I know who you wos?’ responded the son. ‘Do you s’pose I wos
to tell you by the weight o’ your foot?’

‘Vell, that’s wery true, Sammy,’ replied Mr. Weller, mollified at once;
‘but wot are you a-doin’ on here? Your gov’nor can’t do no good here,
Sammy. They won’t pass that werdick, they won’t pass it, Sammy.’ And Mr.
Weller shook his head with legal solemnity.

‘Wot a perwerse old file it is!’ exclaimed Sam, ‘always a-goin’ on about
werdicks and alleybis and that. Who said anything about the werdick?’

Mr. Weller made no reply, but once more shook his head most learnedly.

‘Leave off rattlin’ that ‘ere nob o’ yourn, if you don’t want it to come
off the springs altogether,’ said Sam impatiently, ‘and behave
reasonable. I vent all the vay down to the Markis o’ Granby, arter you,
last night.’

‘Did you see the Marchioness o’ Granby, Sammy?’ inquired Mr. Weller,
with a sigh.

‘Yes, I did,’ replied Sam.

‘How wos the dear creetur a-lookin’?’

‘Wery queer,’ said Sam. ‘I think she’s a-injurin’ herself gradivally
vith too much o’ that ‘ere pine-apple rum, and other strong medicines of
the same natur.’

‘You don’t mean that, Sammy?’ said the senior earnestly.

‘I do, indeed,’ replied the junior.

Mr. Weller seized his son’s hand, clasped it, and let it fall. There was
an expression on his countenance in doing so--not of dismay or
apprehension, but partaking more of the sweet and gentle character of
hope. A gleam of resignation, and even of cheerfulness, passed over his
face too, as he slowly said, ‘I ain’t quite certain, Sammy; I wouldn’t
like to say I wos altogether positive, in case of any subsekent
disappointment, but I rayther think, my boy, I rayther think, that the
shepherd’s got the liver complaint!’

‘Does he look bad?’ inquired Sam.

‘He’s uncommon pale,’ replied his father, ‘’cept about the nose, which
is redder than ever. His appetite is wery so-so, but he imbibes
wonderful.’

Some thoughts of the rum appeared to obtrude themselves on Mr. Weller’s
mind, as he said this; for he looked gloomy and thoughtful; but he very
shortly recovered, as was testified by a perfect alphabet of winks, in
which he was only wont to indulge when particularly pleased.

‘Vell, now,’ said Sam, ‘about my affair. Just open them ears o’ yourn,
and don’t say nothin’ till I’ve done.’ With this preface, Sam related,
as succinctly as he could, the last memorable conversation he had had
with Mr. Pickwick.

‘Stop there by himself, poor creetur!’ exclaimed the elder Mr. Weller,
‘without nobody to take his part! It can’t be done, Samivel, it can’t be
done.’

‘O’ course it can’t,’ asserted Sam: ‘I know’d that, afore I came.’

Why, they’ll eat him up alive, Sammy,’ exclaimed Mr. Weller.

Sam nodded his concurrence in the opinion.

‘He goes in rayther raw, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller metaphorically, ‘and
he’ll come out, done so ex-ceedin’ brown, that his most formiliar
friends won’t know him. Roast pigeon’s nothin’ to it, Sammy.’

Again Sam Weller nodded.

‘It oughtn’t to be, Samivel,’ said Mr. Weller gravely.

‘It mustn’t be,’ said Sam.

‘Cert’nly not,’ said Mr. Weller.

‘Vell now,’ said Sam, ‘you’ve been a-prophecyin’ away, wery fine, like a
red-faced Nixon, as the sixpenny books gives picters on.’

‘Who wos he, Sammy?’ inquired Mr. Weller.

‘Never mind who he was,’ retorted Sam; ‘he warn’t a coachman; that’s
enough for you.’

I know’d a ostler o’ that name,’ said Mr. Weller, musing.

‘It warn’t him,’ said Sam. ‘This here gen’l’m’n was a prophet.’

‘Wot’s a prophet?’ inquired Mr. Weller, looking sternly on his son.

‘Wy, a man as tells what’s a-goin’ to happen,’ replied Sam.

‘I wish I’d know’d him, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘P’raps he might ha’
throw’d a small light on that ‘ere liver complaint as we wos a-speakin’
on, just now. Hows’ever, if he’s dead, and ain’t left the bisness to
nobody, there’s an end on it. Go on, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, with a
sigh.

‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘you’ve been a-prophecyin’ avay about wot’ll happen to
the gov’ner if he’s left alone. Don’t you see any way o’ takin’ care on
him?’

‘No, I don’t, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, with a reflective visage.

‘No vay at all?’ inquired Sam.

‘No vay,’ said Mr. Weller, ‘unless’--and a gleam of intelligence lighted
up his countenance as he sank his voice to a whisper, and applied his
mouth to the ear of his offspring--‘unless it is getting him out in a
turn-up bedstead, unbeknown to the turnkeys, Sammy, or dressin’ him up
like a old ‘ooman vith a green wail.’

Sam Weller received both of these suggestions with unexpected contempt,
and again propounded his question.

‘No,’ said the old gentleman; ‘if he von’t let you stop there, I see no
vay at all. It’s no thoroughfare, Sammy, no thoroughfare.’

‘Well, then, I’ll tell you wot it is,’ said Sam, ‘I’ll trouble you for
the loan of five-and-twenty pound.’

‘Wot good’ll that do?’ inquired Mr. Weller.

‘Never mind,’ replied Sam. ‘P’raps you may ask for it five minits
arterwards; p’raps I may say I von’t pay, and cut up rough. You von’t
think o’ arrestin’ your own son for the money, and sendin’ him off to
the Fleet, will you, you unnat’ral wagabone?’

At this reply of Sam’s, the father and son exchanged a complete code of
telegraph nods and gestures, after which, the elder Mr. Weller sat
himself down on a stone step and laughed till he was purple.

‘Wot a old image it is!’ exclaimed Sam, indignant at this loss of time.
‘What are you a-settin’ down there for, con-wertin’ your face into a
street-door knocker, wen there’s so much to be done. Where’s the money?’

‘In the boot, Sammy, in the boot,’ replied Mr. Weller, composing his
features. ‘Hold my hat, Sammy.’

Having divested himself of this encumbrance, Mr. Weller gave his body a
sudden wrench to one side, and by a dexterous twist, contrived to get
his right hand into a most capacious pocket, from whence, after a great
deal of panting and exertion, he extricated a pocket-book of the large
octavo size, fastened by a huge leathern strap. From this ledger he drew
forth a couple of whiplashes, three or four buckles, a little sample-bag
of corn, and, finally, a small roll of very dirty bank-notes, from which
he selected the required amount, which he handed over to Sam.

‘And now, Sammy,’ said the old gentleman, when the whip-lashes, and the
buckles, and the samples, had been all put back, and the book once more
deposited at the bottom of the same pocket, ‘now, Sammy, I know a
gen’l’m’n here, as’ll do the rest o’ the bisness for us, in no time--a
limb o’ the law, Sammy, as has got brains like the frogs, dispersed all
over his body, and reachin’ to the wery tips of his fingers; a friend of
the Lord Chancellorship’s, Sammy, who’d only have to tell him what he
wanted, and he’d lock you up for life, if that wos all.’

‘I say,’ said Sam, ‘none o’ that.’

‘None o’ wot?’ inquired Mr. Weller.

‘Wy, none o’ them unconstitootional ways o’ doin’ it,’ retorted Sam.
‘The have-his-carcass, next to the perpetual motion, is vun of the
blessedest things as wos ever made. I’ve read that ‘ere in the
newspapers wery of’en.’

‘Well, wot’s that got to do vith it?’ inquired Mr. Weller.

‘Just this here,’ said Sam, ‘that I’ll patronise the inwention, and go
in, that vay. No visperin’s to the Chancellorship--I don’t like the
notion. It mayn’t be altogether safe, vith reference to gettin’ out
agin.’

Deferring to his son’s feeling upon this point, Mr. Weller at once
sought the erudite Solomon Pell, and acquainted him with his desire to
issue a writ, instantly, for the _sum _of twenty-five pounds, and costs
of process; to be executed without delay upon the body of one Samuel
Weller; the charges thereby incurred, to be paid in advance to Solomon
Pell.

The attorney was in high glee, for the embarrassed coach-horser was
ordered to be discharged forthwith. He highly approved of Sam’s
attachment to his master; declared that it strongly reminded him of his
own feelings of devotion to his friend, the Chancellor; and at once led
the elder Mr. Weller down to the Temple, to swear the affidavit of debt,
which the boy, with the assistance of the blue bag, had drawn up on the
spot.

Meanwhile, Sam, having been formally introduced to the whitewashed
gentleman and his friends, as the offspring of Mr. Weller, of the Belle
Savage, was treated with marked distinction, and invited to regale
himself with them in honour of the occasion--an invitation which he was
by no means backward in accepting.

The mirth of gentlemen of this class is of a grave and quiet character,
usually; but the present instance was one of peculiar festivity, and
they relaxed in proportion. After some rather tumultuous toasting of the
Chief Commissioner and Mr. Solomon Pell, who had that day displayed such
transcendent abilities, a mottled-faced gentleman in a blue shawl
proposed that somebody should sing a song. The obvious suggestion was,
that the mottled-faced gentleman, being anxious for a song, should sing
it himself; but this the mottled-faced gentleman sturdily, and somewhat
offensively, declined to do. Upon which, as is not unusual in such
cases, a rather angry colloquy ensued.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the coach-horser, ‘rather than disturb the harmony of
this delightful occasion, perhaps Mr. Samuel Weller will oblige the
company.’

‘Raly, gentlemen,’ said Sam, ‘I’m not wery much in the habit o’ singin’
without the instrument; but anythin’ for a quiet life, as the man said
wen he took the sitivation at the lighthouse.’

With this prelude, Mr. Samuel Weller burst at once into the following
wild and beautiful legend, which, under the impression that it is not
generally known, we take the liberty of quoting. We would beg to call
particular attention to the monosyllable at the end of the second and
fourth lines, which not only enables the singer to take breath at those
points, but greatly assists the metre.


ROMANCE

I

Bold Turpin vunce, on Hounslow Heath, His bold mare Bess bestrode--er;
Ven there he see’d the Bishop’s coach A-coming along the road--er. So he
gallops close to the ‘orse’s legs, And he claps his head vithin; And the
Bishop says, ‘Sure as eggs is eggs, This here’s the bold Turpin!’

CHORUS

And the Bishop says, ‘Sure as eggs is eggs, This here’s the bold
Turpin!’

II

Says Turpin, ‘You shall eat your words, With a sarse of leaden bul--
let;’ So he puts a pistol to his mouth, And he fires it down his gul--
let. The coachman he not likin’ the job, Set off at full gal-lop, But
Dick put a couple of balls in his nob, And perwailed on him to stop.

CHORUS (sarcastically)

But Dick put a couple of balls in his nob, And perwailed on him to stop.

‘I maintain that that ‘ere song’s personal to the cloth,’ said the
mottled-faced gentleman, interrupting it at this point. ‘I demand the
name o’ that coachman.’

‘Nobody know’d,’ replied Sam. ‘He hadn’t got his card in his pocket.’

‘I object to the introduction o’ politics,’ said the mottled-faced
gentleman. ‘I submit that, in the present company, that ‘ere song’s
political; and, wot’s much the same, that it ain’t true. I say that that
coachman did not run away; but that he died game--game as pheasants; and
I won’t hear nothin’ said to the contrairey.’

As the mottled-faced gentleman spoke with great energy and
determination, and as the opinions of the company seemed divided on the
subject, it threatened to give rise to fresh altercation, when Mr.
Weller and Mr. Pell most opportunely arrived.

‘All right, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller.

‘The officer will be here at four o’clock,’ said Mr. Pell. ‘I suppose
you won’t run away meanwhile, eh? Ha! ha!’

‘P’raps my cruel pa ‘ull relent afore then,’ replied Sam, with a broad
grin.

‘Not I,’ said the elder Mr. Weller.

‘Do,’ said Sam.

‘Not on no account,’ replied the inexorable creditor.

‘I’ll give bills for the amount, at sixpence a month,’ said Sam.

‘I won’t take ‘em,’ said Mr. Weller.

‘Ha, ha, ha! very good, very good,’ said Mr. Solomon Pell, who was
making out his little bill of costs; ‘a very amusing incident indeed!
Benjamin, copy that.’ And Mr. Pell smiled again, as he called Mr.
Weller’s attention to the amount.

‘Thank you, thank you,’ said the professional gentleman, taking up
another of the greasy notes as Mr. Weller took it from the pocket-book.
‘Three ten and one ten is five. Much obliged to you, Mr. Weller. Your
son is a most deserving young man, very much so indeed, Sir. It’s a very
pleasant trait in a young man’s character, very much so,’ added Mr.
Pell, smiling smoothly round, as he buttoned up the money.

‘Wot a game it is!’ said the elder Mr. Weller, with a chuckle. ‘A
reg’lar prodigy son!’

‘Prodigal--prodigal son, Sir,’ suggested Mr. Pell, mildly.

‘Never mind, Sir,’ said Mr. Weller, with dignity. ‘I know wot’s o’clock,
Sir. Wen I don’t, I’ll ask you, Sir.’

By the time the officer arrived, Sam had made himself so extremely
popular, that the congregated gentlemen determined to see him to prison
in a body. So off they set; the plaintiff and defendant walking arm in
arm, the officer in front, and eight stout coachmen bringing up the
rear. At Serjeant’s Inn Coffee-house the whole party halted to refresh,
and, the legal arrangements being completed, the procession moved on
again.

Some little commotion was occasioned in Fleet Street, by the pleasantry
of the eight gentlemen in the flank, who persevered in walking four
abreast; it was also found necessary to leave the mottled-faced
gentleman behind, to fight a ticket-porter, it being arranged that his
friends should call for him as they came back. Nothing but these little
incidents occurred on the way. When they reached the gate of the Fleet,
the cavalcade, taking the time from the plaintiff, gave three tremendous
cheers for the defendant, and, after having shaken hands all round, left
him.

Sam, having been formally delivered into the warder’s custody, to the
intense astonishment of Roker, and to the evident emotion of even the
phlegmatic Neddy, passed at once into the prison, walked straight to his
master’s room, and knocked at the door.

‘Come in,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

Sam appeared, pulled off his hat, and smiled.

‘Ah, Sam, my good lad!’ said Mr. Pickwick, evidently delighted to see
his humble friend again; ‘I had no intention of hurting your feelings
yesterday, my faithful fellow, by what I said. Put down your hat, Sam,
and let me explain my meaning, a little more at length.’

‘Won’t presently do, sir?’ inquired Sam.

‘Certainly,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘but why not now?’

‘I’d rayther not now, sir,’ rejoined Sam.

‘Why?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘’Cause--’ said Sam, hesitating.

‘Because of what?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, alarmed at his follower’s
manner. ‘Speak out, Sam.’

‘’Cause,’ rejoined Sam--‘’cause I’ve got a little bisness as I want to
do.’

‘What business?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, surprised at Sam’s confused
manner.

‘Nothin’ partickler, Sir,’ replied Sam.

‘Oh, if it’s nothing particular,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with a smile, ‘you
can speak with me first.’

‘I think I’d better see arter it at once,’ said Sam, still hesitating.

Mr. Pickwick looked amazed, but said nothing.

‘The fact is--’ said Sam, stopping short.

‘Well!’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Speak out, Sam.’

‘Why, the fact is,’ said Sam, with a desperate effort, ‘perhaps I’d
better see arter my bed afore I do anythin’ else.’

‘_Your bed!_’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, in astonishment.

‘Yes, my bed, Sir,’ replied Sam, ‘I’m a prisoner. I was arrested this
here wery arternoon for debt.’

‘You arrested for debt!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, sinking into a chair.

‘Yes, for debt, Sir,’ replied Sam. ‘And the man as puts me in, ‘ull
never let me out till you go yourself.’

‘Bless my heart and soul!’ ejaculated Mr. Pickwick. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Wot I say, Sir,’ rejoined Sam. ‘If it’s forty years to come, I shall be
a prisoner, and I’m very glad on it; and if it had been Newgate, it
would ha’ been just the same. Now the murder’s out, and, damme, there’s
an end on it!’

With these words, which he repeated with great emphasis and violence,
Sam Weller dashed his hat upon the ground, in a most unusual state of
excitement; and then, folding his arms, looked firmly and fixedly in his
master’s face.



CHAPTER LXIV. TREATS OF DIVERS LITTLE MATTERS WHICH OCCURRED IN THE
FLEET, AND OF MR. WINKLE’S MYSTERIOUS BEHAVIOUR; AND SHOWS HOW THE POOR
CHANCERY PRISONER OBTAINED HIS RELEASE AT LAST

Mr. Pickwick felt a great deal too much touched by the warmth of Sam’s
attachment, to be able to exhibit any manifestation of anger or
displeasure at the precipitate course he had adopted, in voluntarily
consigning himself to a debtor’s prison for an indefinite period. The
only point on which he persevered in demanding an explanation, was, the
name of Sam’s detaining creditor; but this Mr. Weller as perseveringly
withheld.

‘It ain’t o’ no use, sir,’ said Sam, again and again; ‘he’s a malicious,
bad-disposed, vorldly-minded, spiteful, windictive creetur, with a hard
heart as there ain’t no soft’nin’, as the wirtuous clergyman remarked of
the old gen’l’m’n with the dropsy, ven he said, that upon the whole he
thought he’d rayther leave his property to his vife than build a chapel
vith it.’

‘But consider, Sam,’ Mr. Pickwick remonstrated, ‘the sum is so small
that it can very easily be paid; and having made up my mind that you
shall stop with me, you should recollect how much more useful you would
be, if you could go outside the walls.’

Wery much obliged to you, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller gravely; ‘but I’d
rayther not.’

‘Rather not do what, Sam?’

‘Wy, I’d rayther not let myself down to ask a favour o’ this here
unremorseful enemy.’

‘But it is no favour asking him to take his money, Sam,’ reasoned Mr.
Pickwick.

‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ rejoined Sam, ‘but it ‘ud be a wery great favour
to pay it, and he don’t deserve none; that’s where it is, sir.’

Here Mr. Pickwick, rubbing his nose with an air of some vexation, Mr.
Weller thought it prudent to change the theme of the discourse.

‘I takes my determination on principle, Sir,’ remarked Sam, ‘and you
takes yours on the same ground; wich puts me in mind o’ the man as
killed his-self on principle, wich o’ course you’ve heerd on, Sir.’ Mr.
Weller paused when he arrived at this point, and cast a comical look at
his master out of the corners of his eyes.

‘There is no “of course” in the case, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, gradually
breaking into a smile, in spite of the uneasiness which Sam’s obstinacy
had given him. ‘The fame of the gentleman in question, never reached my
ears.’

‘No, sir!’ exclaimed Mr. Weller. ‘You astonish me, Sir; he wos a clerk
in a gov’ment office, sir.’

‘Was he?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes, he wos, Sir,’ rejoined Mr. Weller; ‘and a wery pleasant gen’l’m’n
too--one o’ the precise and tidy sort, as puts their feet in little
India-rubber fire-buckets wen it’s wet weather, and never has no other
bosom friends but hare-skins; he saved up his money on principle, wore a
clean shirt ev’ry day on principle; never spoke to none of his relations
on principle, ‘fear they shou’d want to borrow money of him; and wos
altogether, in fact, an uncommon agreeable character. He had his hair
cut on principle vunce a fortnight, and contracted for his clothes on
the economic principle--three suits a year, and send back the old uns.
Being a wery reg’lar gen’l’m’n, he din’d ev’ry day at the same place,
where it was one-and-nine to cut off the joint, and a wery good one-and-
nine’s worth he used to cut, as the landlord often said, with the tears
a-tricklin’ down his face, let alone the way he used to poke the fire in
the vinter time, which wos a dead loss o’ four-pence ha’penny a day, to
say nothin’ at all o’ the aggrawation o’ seein’ him do it. So uncommon
grand with it too! “_Post _arter the next gen’l’m’n,” he sings out ev’ry
day ven he comes in. “See arter the TIMES, Thomas; let me look at the
MORNIN’ HERALD, when it’s out o’ hand; don’t forget to bespeak the
CHRONICLE; and just bring the ‘TIZER, vill you:” and then he’d set vith
his eyes fixed on the clock, and rush out, just a quarter of a minit
‘fore the time to waylay the boy as wos a-comin’ in with the evenin’
paper, which he’d read with sich intense interest and persewerance as
worked the other customers up to the wery confines o’ desperation and
insanity, ‘specially one i-rascible old gen’l’m’n as the vaiter wos
always obliged to keep a sharp eye on, at sich times, fear he should be
tempted to commit some rash act with the carving-knife. Vell, Sir, here
he’d stop, occupyin’ the best place for three hours, and never takin’
nothin’ arter his dinner, but sleep, and then he’d go away to a coffee-
house a few streets off, and have a small pot o’ coffee and four
crumpets, arter wich he’d walk home to Kensington and go to bed. One
night he wos took very ill; sends for a doctor; doctor comes in a green
fly, with a kind o’ Robinson Crusoe set o’ steps, as he could let down
wen he got out, and pull up arter him wen he got in, to perwent the
necessity o’ the coachman’s gettin’ down, and thereby undeceivin’ the
public by lettin’ ‘em see that it wos only a livery coat as he’d got on,
and not the trousers to match. “Wot’s the matter?” says the doctor.
“Wery ill,” says the patient. “Wot have you been a-eatin’ on?” says the
doctor. “Roast weal,” says the patient. “Wot’s the last thing you
dewoured?” says the doctor. “Crumpets,” says the patient. “That’s it!”
 says the doctor. “I’ll send you a box of pills directly, and don’t you
never take no more of ‘em,” he says. “No more o’ wot?” says the patient-
-“pills?” “No; crumpets,” says the doctor. “Wy?” says the patient,
starting up in bed; “I’ve eat four crumpets, ev’ry night for fifteen
year, on principle.” “Well, then, you’d better leave ‘em off, on
principle,” says the doctor. “Crumpets is _not _wholesome, Sir,” says
the doctor, wery fierce. “But they’re so cheap,” says the patient,
comin’ down a little, “and so wery fillin’ at the price.” “They’d be
dear to you, at any price; dear if you wos paid to eat ‘em,” says the
doctor. “Four crumpets a night,” he says, “vill do your business in six
months!” The patient looks him full in the face, and turns it over in
his mind for a long time, and at last he says, “Are you sure o’ that
‘ere, Sir?” “I’ll stake my professional reputation on it,” says the
doctor. “How many crumpets, at a sittin’, do you think ‘ud kill me off
at once?” says the patient. “I don’t know,” says the doctor. “Do you
think half-a-crown’s wurth ‘ud do it?” says the patient. “I think it
might,” says the doctor. “Three shillins’ wurth ‘ud be sure to do it, I
s’pose?” says the patient. “Certainly,” says the doctor. “Wery good,”
 says the patient; “good-night.” Next mornin’ he gets up, has a fire lit,
orders in three shillins’ wurth o’ crumpets, toasts ‘em all, eats ‘em
all, and blows his brains out.’

‘What did he do that for?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick abruptly; for he was
considerably startled by this tragical termination of the narrative.

‘Wot did he do it for, Sir?’ reiterated Sam. ‘Wy, in support of his
great principle that crumpets wos wholesome, and to show that he
wouldn’t be put out of his way for nobody!’

With such like shiftings and changings of the discourse, did Mr. Weller
meet his master’s questioning on the night of his taking up his
residence in the Fleet. Finding all gentle remonstrance useless, Mr.
Pickwick at length yielded a reluctant consent to his taking lodgings by
the week, of a bald-headed cobbler, who rented a small slip room in one
of the upper galleries. To this humble apartment Mr. Weller moved a
mattress and bedding, which he hired of Mr. Roker; and, by the time he
lay down upon it at night, was as much at home as if he had been bred in
the prison, and his whole family had vegetated therein for three
generations.

‘Do you always smoke arter you goes to bed, old cock?’ inquired Mr.
Weller of his landlord, when they had both retired for the night.

‘Yes, I does, young bantam,’ replied the cobbler.

‘Will you allow me to in-quire wy you make up your bed under that ‘ere
deal table?’ said Sam.

‘’Cause I was always used to a four-poster afore I came here, and I find
the legs of the table answer just as well,’ replied the cobbler.

‘You’re a character, sir,’ said Sam.

‘I haven’t got anything of the kind belonging to me,’ rejoined the
cobbler, shaking his head; ‘and if you want to meet with a good one, I’m
afraid you’ll find some difficulty in suiting yourself at this register
office.’

The above short dialogue took place as Mr. Weller lay extended on his
mattress at one end of the room, and the cobbler on his, at the other;
the apartment being illumined by the light of a rush-candle, and the
cobbler’s pipe, which was glowing below the table, like a red-hot coal.
The conversation, brief as it was, predisposed Mr. Weller strongly in
his landlord’s favour; and, raising himself on his elbow, he took a more
lengthened survey of his appearance than he had yet had either time or
inclination to make.

He was a sallow man--all cobblers are; and had a strong bristly beard--
all cobblers have. His face was a queer, good-tempered, crooked-featured
piece of workmanship, ornamented with a couple of eyes that must have
worn a very joyous expression at one time, for they sparkled yet. The
man was sixty, by years, and Heaven knows how old by imprisonment, so
that his having any look approaching to mirth or contentment, was
singular enough. He was a little man, and, being half doubled up as he
lay in bed, looked about as long as he ought to have been without his
legs. He had a great red pipe in his mouth, and was smoking, and staring
at the rush-light, in a state of enviable placidity.

‘Have you been here long?’ inquired Sam, breaking the silence which had
lasted for some time.

‘Twelve year,’ replied the cobbler, biting the end of his pipe as he
spoke.

‘Contempt?’ inquired Sam.

The cobbler nodded.

‘Well, then,’ said Sam, with some sternness, ‘wot do you persevere in
bein’ obstinit for, vastin’ your precious life away, in this here
magnified pound? Wy don’t you give in, and tell the Chancellorship that
you’re wery sorry for makin’ his court contemptible, and you won’t do so
no more?’

The cobbler put his pipe in the corner of his mouth, while he smiled,
and then brought it back to its old place again; but said nothing.

‘Wy don’t you?’ said Sam, urging his question strenuously.

‘Ah,’ said the cobbler, ‘you don’t quite understand these matters. What
do you suppose ruined me, now?’

‘Wy,’ said Sam, trimming the rush-light, ‘I s’pose the beginnin’ wos,
that you got into debt, eh?’

‘Never owed a farden,’ said the cobbler; ‘try again.’

‘Well, perhaps,’ said Sam, ‘you bought houses, wich is delicate English
for goin’ mad; or took to buildin’, wich is a medical term for bein’
incurable.’

The cobbler shook his head and said, ‘Try again.’

‘You didn’t go to law, I hope?’ said Sam suspiciously.

‘Never in my life,’ replied the cobbler. ‘The fact is, I was ruined by
having money left me.’

‘Come, come,’ said Sam, ‘that von’t do. I wish some rich enemy ‘ud try
to vork my destruction in that ‘ere vay. I’d let him.’

‘Oh, I dare say you don’t believe it,’ said the cobbler, quietly smoking
his pipe. ‘I wouldn’t if I was you; but it’s true for all that.’

‘How wos it?’ inquired Sam, half induced to believe the fact already, by
the look the cobbler gave him.

‘Just this,’ replied the cobbler; ‘an old gentleman that I worked for,
down in the country, and a humble relation of whose I married--she’s
dead, God bless her, and thank Him for it!--was seized with a fit and
went off.’

‘Where?’ inquired Sam, who was growing sleepy after the numerous events
of the day.

‘How should I know where he went?’ said the cobbler, speaking through
his nose in an intense enjoyment of his pipe. ‘He went off dead.’

‘Oh, that indeed,’ said Sam. ‘Well?’

‘Well,’ said the cobbler, ‘he left five thousand pound behind him.’

‘And wery gen-teel in him so to do,’ said Sam.

‘One of which,’ continued the cobbler, ‘he left to me, ‘cause I married
his relation, you see.’

‘Wery good,’ murmured Sam.

‘And being surrounded by a great number of nieces and nevys, as was
always quarrelling and fighting among themselves for the property, he
makes me his executor, and leaves the rest to me in trust, to divide it
among ‘em as the will prowided.’

‘Wot do you mean by leavin’ it on trust?’ inquired Sam, waking up a
little. ‘If it ain’t ready-money, were’s the use on it?’

‘It’s a law term, that’s all,’ said the cobbler.

‘I don’t think that,’ said Sam, shaking his head. ‘There’s wery little
trust at that shop. Hows’ever, go on.’

Well,’ said the cobbler, ‘when I was going to take out a probate of the
will, the nieces and nevys, who was desperately disappointed at not
getting all the money, enters a caveat against it.’

What’s that?’ inquired Sam.

‘A legal instrument, which is as much as to say, it’s no go,’ replied
the cobbler.

‘I see,’ said Sam, ‘a sort of brother-in-law o’ the have-his-carcass.
Well.’

‘But,’ continued the cobbler, ‘finding that they couldn’t agree among
themselves, and consequently couldn’t get up a case against the will,
they withdrew the caveat, and I paid all the legacies. I’d hardly done
it, when one nevy brings an action to set the will aside. The case comes
on, some months afterwards, afore a deaf old gentleman, in a back room
somewhere down by Paul’s Churchyard; and arter four counsels had taken a
day a-piece to bother him regularly, he takes a week or two to consider,
and read the evidence in six volumes, and then gives his judgment that
how the testator was not quite right in his head, and I must pay all the
money back again, and all the costs. I appealed; the case come on before
three or four very sleepy gentlemen, who had heard it all before in the
other court, where they’re lawyers without work; the only difference
being, that, there, they’re called doctors, and in the other place
delegates, if you understand that; and they very dutifully confirmed the
decision of the old gentleman below. After that, we went into Chancery,
where we are still, and where I shall always be. My lawyers have had all
my thousand pound long ago; and what between the estate, as they call
it, and the costs, I’m here for ten thousand, and shall stop here, till
I die, mending shoes. Some gentlemen have talked of bringing it before
Parliament, and I dare say would have done it, only they hadn’t time to
come to me, and I hadn’t power to go to them, and they got tired of my
long letters, and dropped the business. And this is God’s truth, without
one word of suppression or exaggeration, as fifty people, both in this
place and out of it, very well know.’

The cobbler paused to ascertain what effect his story had produced on
Sam; but finding that he had dropped asleep, knocked the ashes out of
his pipe, sighed, put it down, drew the bed-clothes over his head, and
went to sleep, too.

Mr. Pickwick was sitting at breakfast, alone, next morning (Sam being
busily engaged in the cobbler’s room, polishing his master’s shoes and
brushing the black gaiters) when there came a knock at the door, which,
before Mr. Pickwick could cry ‘Come in!’ was followed by the appearance
of a head of hair and a cotton-velvet cap, both of which articles of
dress he had no difficulty in recognising as the personal property of
Mr. Smangle.

‘How are you?’ said that worthy, accompanying the inquiry with a score
or two of nods; ‘I say--do you expect anybody this morning? Three men--
devilish gentlemanly fellows--have been asking after you downstairs, and
knocking at every door on the hall flight; for which they’ve been most
infernally blown up by the collegians that had the trouble of opening
‘em.’

‘Dear me! How very foolish of them,’ said Mr. Pickwick, rising. ‘Yes; I
have no doubt they are some friends whom I rather expected to see,
yesterday.’

‘Friends of yours!’ exclaimed Smangle, seizing Mr. Pickwick by the hand.
‘Say no more. Curse me, they’re friends of mine from this minute, and
friends of Mivins’s, too. Infernal pleasant, gentlemanly dog, Mivins,
isn’t he?’ said Smangle, with great feeling.

‘I know so little of the gentleman,’ said Mr. Pickwick, hesitating,
‘that I--’

‘I know you do,’ interrupted Smangle, clasping Mr. Pickwick by the
shoulder. ‘You shall know him better. You’ll be delighted with him. That
man, Sir,’ said Smangle, with a solemn countenance, ‘has comic powers
that would do honour to Drury Lane Theatre.’

‘Has he indeed?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Ah, by Jove he has!’ replied Smangle. ‘Hear him come the four cats in
the wheel-barrow--four distinct cats, sir, I pledge you my honour. Now
you know that’s infernal clever! Damme, you can’t help liking a man,
when you see these traits about him. He’s only one fault--that little
failing I mentioned to you, you know.’

As Mr. Smangle shook his head in a confidential and sympathising manner
at this juncture, Mr. Pickwick felt that he was expected to say
something, so he said, ‘Ah!’ and looked restlessly at the door.

‘Ah!’ echoed Mr. Smangle, with a long-drawn sigh. ‘He’s delightful
company, that man is, sir. I don’t know better company anywhere; but he
has that one drawback. If the ghost of his grandfather, Sir, was to rise
before him this minute, he’d ask him for the loan of his acceptance on
an eightpenny stamp.’

Dear me!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes,’ added Mr. Smangle; ‘and if he’d the power of raising him again,
he would, in two months and three days from this time, to renew the
bill!’

‘Those are very remarkable traits,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘but I’m afraid
that while we are talking here, my friends may be in a state of great
perplexity at not finding me.’

‘I’ll show ‘em the way,’ said Smangle, making for the door. ‘Good-day. I
won’t disturb you while they’re here, you know. By the bye--’

As Smangle pronounced the last three words, he stopped suddenly,
reclosed the door which he had opened, and, walking softly back to Mr.
Pickwick, stepped close up to him on tiptoe, and said, in a very soft
whisper--

‘You couldn’t make it convenient to lend me half-a-crown till the latter
end of next week, could you?’

Mr. Pickwick could scarcely forbear smiling, but managing to preserve
his gravity, he drew forth the coin, and placed it in Mr. Smangle’s
palm; upon which, that gentleman, with many nods and winks, implying
profound mystery, disappeared in quest of the three strangers, with whom
he presently returned; and having coughed thrice, and nodded as many
times, as an assurance to Mr. Pickwick that he would not forget to pay,
he shook hands all round, in an engaging manner, and at length took
himself off.

‘My dear friends,’ said Mr. Pickwick, shaking hands alternately with Mr.
Tupman, Mr. Winkle, and Mr. Snodgrass, who were the three visitors in
question, ‘I am delighted to see you.’

The triumvirate were much affected. Mr. Tupman shook his head
deploringly, Mr. Snodgrass drew forth his handkerchief, with undisguised
emotion; and Mr. Winkle retired to the window, and sniffed aloud.

‘Mornin’, gen’l’m’n,’ said Sam, entering at the moment with the shoes
and gaiters. ‘Avay vith melincholly, as the little boy said ven his
schoolmissus died. Velcome to the college, gen’l’m’n.’

‘This foolish fellow,’ said Mr. Pickwick, tapping Sam on the head as he
knelt down to button up his master’s gaiters--‘this foolish fellow has
got himself arrested, in order to be near me.’

‘What!’ exclaimed the three friends.

‘Yes, gen’l’m’n,’ said Sam, ‘I’m a--stand steady, sir, if you please--
I’m a prisoner, gen’l’m’n. Con-fined, as the lady said.’

‘A prisoner!’ exclaimed Mr. Winkle, with unaccountable vehemence.

‘Hollo, sir!’ responded Sam, looking up. ‘Wot’s the matter, Sir?’

‘I had hoped, Sam, that--Nothing, nothing,’ said Mr. Winkle
precipitately.

There was something so very abrupt and unsettled in Mr. Winkle’s manner,
that Mr. Pickwick involuntarily looked at his two friends for an
explanation.

‘We don’t know,’ said Mr. Tupman, answering this mute appeal aloud. ‘He
has been much excited for two days past, and his whole demeanour very
unlike what it usually is. We feared there must be something the matter,
but he resolutely denies it.’

‘No, no,’ said Mr. Winkle, colouring beneath Mr. Pickwick’s gaze; ‘there
is really nothing. I assure you there is nothing, my dear sir. It will
be necessary for me to leave town, for a short time, on private
business, and I had hoped to have prevailed upon you to allow Sam to
accompany me.’

Mr. Pickwick looked more astonished than before.

‘I think,’ faltered Mr. Winkle, ‘that Sam would have had no objection to
do so; but, of course, his being a prisoner here, renders it impossible.
So I must go alone.’

As Mr. Winkle said these words, Mr. Pickwick felt, with some
astonishment, that Sam’s fingers were trembling at the gaiters, as if he
were rather surprised or startled. Sam looked up at Mr. Winkle, too,
when he had finished speaking; and though the glance they exchanged was
instantaneous, they seemed to understand each other.

‘Do you know anything of this, Sam?’ said Mr. Pickwick sharply.

‘No, I don’t, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, beginning to button with
extraordinary assiduity.

‘Are you sure, Sam?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Wy, sir,’ responded Mr. Weller; ‘I’m sure so far, that I’ve never heerd
anythin’ on the subject afore this moment. If I makes any guess about
it,’ added Sam, looking at Mr. Winkle, ‘I haven’t got any right to say
what it is, ‘fear it should be a wrong ‘un.’

‘I have no right to make any further inquiry into the private affairs of
a friend, however intimate a friend,’ said Mr. Pickwick, after a short
silence; ‘at present let me merely say, that I do not understand this at
all. There. We have had quite enough of the subject.’

Thus expressing himself, Mr. Pickwick led the conversation to different
topics, and Mr. Winkle gradually appeared more at ease, though still
very far from being completely so. They had all so much to converse
about, that the morning very quickly passed away; and when, at three
o’clock, Mr. Weller produced upon the little dining-table, a roast leg
of mutton and an enormous meat-pie, with sundry dishes of vegetables,
and pots of porter, which stood upon the chairs or the sofa bedstead, or
where they could, everybody felt disposed to do justice to the meal,
notwithstanding that the meat had been purchased, and dressed, and the
pie made, and baked, at the prison cookery hard by.

To these succeeded a bottle or two of very good wine, for which a
messenger was despatched by Mr. Pickwick to the Horn Coffee-house, in
Doctors’ Commons. The bottle or two, indeed, might be more properly
described as a bottle or six, for by the time it was drunk, and tea
over, the bell began to ring for strangers to withdraw.

But, if Mr. Winkle’s behaviour had been unaccountable in the morning, it
became perfectly unearthly and solemn when, under the influence of his
feelings, and his share of the bottle or six, he prepared to take leave
of his friend. He lingered behind, until Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass
had disappeared, and then fervently clenched Mr. Pickwick’s hand, with
an expression of face in which deep and mighty resolve was fearfully
blended with the very concentrated essence of gloom.

‘Good-night, my dear Sir!’ said Mr. Winkle between his set teeth.

‘Bless you, my dear fellow!’ replied the warm-hearted Mr. Pickwick, as
he returned the pressure of his young friend’s hand.

‘Now then!’ cried Mr. Tupman from the gallery.

‘Yes, yes, directly,’ replied Mr. Winkle. ‘Good-night!’

‘Good-night,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

There was another good-night, and another, and half a dozen more after
that, and still Mr. Winkle had fast hold of his friend’s hand, and was
looking into his face with the same strange expression.

‘Is anything the matter?’ said Mr. Pickwick at last, when his arm was
quite sore with shaking.

‘Nothing,’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘Well then, good-night,’ said Mr. Pickwick, attempting to disengage his
hand.

‘My friend, my benefactor, my honoured companion,’ murmured Mr. Winkle,
catching at his wrist. ‘Do not judge me harshly; do not, when you hear
that, driven to extremity by hopeless obstacles, I--’

‘Now then,’ said Mr. Tupman, reappearing at the door. ‘Are you coming,
or are we to be locked in?’

‘Yes, yes, I am ready,’ replied Mr. Winkle. And with a violent effort he
tore himself away.

As Mr. Pickwick was gazing down the passage after them in silent
astonishment, Sam Weller appeared at the stair-head, and whispered for
one moment in Mr. Winkle’s ear.

‘Oh, certainly, depend upon me,’ said that gentleman aloud.

‘Thank’ee, sir. You won’t forget, sir?’ said Sam.

‘Of course not,’ replied Mr. Winkle.

‘Wish you luck, Sir,’ said Sam, touching his hat. ‘I should very much
liked to ha’ joined you, Sir; but the gov’nor, o’ course, is paramount.’

‘It is very much to your credit that you remain here,’ said Mr. Winkle.
With these words they disappeared down the stairs.

‘Very extraordinary,’ said Mr. Pickwick, going back into his room, and
seating himself at the table in a musing attitude. ‘What can that young
man be going to do?’

He had sat ruminating about the matter for some time, when the voice of
Roker, the turnkey, demanded whether he might come in.

‘By all means,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘I’ve brought you a softer pillow, Sir,’ said Mr. Roker, ‘instead of the
temporary one you had last night.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Will you take a glass of wine?’

‘You’re wery good, Sir,’ replied Mr. Roker, accepting the proffered
glass. ‘Yours, sir.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘I’m sorry to say that your landlord’s wery bad to-night, Sir,’ said
Roker, setting down the glass, and inspecting the lining of his hat
preparatory to putting it on again.

‘What! The Chancery prisoner!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘He won’t be a Chancery prisoner wery long, Sir,’ replied Roker, turning
his hat round, so as to get the maker’s name right side upwards, as he
looked into it.

‘You make my blood run cold,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s been consumptive for a long time past,’ said Mr. Roker, ‘and he’s
taken wery bad in the breath to-night. The doctor said, six months ago,
that nothing but change of air could save him.’

‘Great Heaven!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick; ‘has this man been slowly
murdered by the law for six months?’

‘I don’t know about that,’ replied Roker, weighing the hat by the brim
in both hands. ‘I suppose he’d have been took the same, wherever he was.
He went into the infirmary, this morning; the doctor says his strength
is to be kept up as much as possible; and the warden’s sent him wine and
broth and that, from his own house. It’s not the warden’s fault, you
know, sir.’

‘Of course not,’ replied Mr. Pickwick hastily.

‘I’m afraid, however,’ said Roker, shaking his head, ‘that it’s all up
with him. I offered Neddy two six-penn’orths to one upon it just now,
but he wouldn’t take it, and quite right. Thank’ee, Sir. Good-night,
sir.’

‘Stay,’ said Mr. Pickwick earnestly. ‘Where is this infirmary?’

‘Just over where you slept, sir,’ replied Roker. ‘I’ll show you, if you
like to come.’ Mr. Pickwick snatched up his hat without speaking, and
followed at once.

The turnkey led the way in silence; and gently raising the latch of the
room door, motioned Mr. Pickwick to enter. It was a large, bare,
desolate room, with a number of stump bedsteads made of iron, on one of
which lay stretched the shadow of a man--wan, pale, and ghastly. His
breathing was hard and thick, and he moaned painfully as it came and
went. At the bedside sat a short old man in a cobbler’s apron, who, by
the aid of a pair of horn spectacles, was reading from the Bible aloud.
It was the fortunate legatee.

The sick man laid his hand upon his attendant’s arm, and motioned him to
stop. He closed the book, and laid it on the bed.

‘Open the window,’ said the sick man.

He did so. The noise of carriages and carts, the rattle of wheels, the
cries of men and boys, all the busy sounds of a mighty multitude
instinct with life and occupation, blended into one deep murmur, floated
into the room. Above the hoarse loud hum, arose, from time to time, a
boisterous laugh; or a scrap of some jingling song, shouted forth, by
one of the giddy crowd, would strike upon the ear, for an instant, and
then be lost amidst the roar of voices and the tramp of footsteps; the
breaking of the billows of the restless sea of life, that rolled heavily
on, without. These are melancholy sounds to a quiet listener at any
time; but how melancholy to the watcher by the bed of death!

‘There is no air here,’ said the man faintly. ‘The place pollutes it. It
was fresh round about, when I walked there, years ago; but it grows hot
and heavy in passing these walls. I cannot breathe it.’

‘We have breathed it together, for a long time,’ said the old man.
‘Come, come.’

There was a short silence, during which the two spectators approached
the bed. The sick man drew a hand of his old fellow-prisoner towards
him, and pressing it affectionately between both his own, retained it in
his grasp.

‘I hope,’ he gasped after a while, so faintly that they bent their ears
close over the bed to catch the half-formed sounds his pale lips gave
vent to--‘I hope my merciful Judge will bear in mind my heavy punishment
on earth. Twenty years, my friend, twenty years in this hideous grave!
My heart broke when my child died, and I could not even kiss him in his
little coffin. My loneliness since then, in all this noise and riot, has
been very dreadful. May God forgive me! He has seen my solitary,
lingering death.’

He folded his hands, and murmuring something more they could not hear,
fell into a sleep--only a sleep at first, for they saw him smile.

They whispered together for a little time, and the turnkey, stooping
over the pillow, drew hastily back. ‘He has got his discharge, by G--!’
said the man.

He had. But he had grown so like death in life, that they knew not when
he died.



CHAPTER XLIV. DESCRIPTIVE OF AN AFFECTING INTERVIEW BETWEEN MR. SAMUEL
WELLER AND A FAMILY PARTY. MR. PICKWICK MAKES A TOUR OF THE DIMINUTIVE
WORLD HE INHABITS, AND RESOLVES TO MIX WITH IT, IN FUTURE, AS LITTLE AS
POSSIBLE

A few mornings after his incarceration, Mr. Samuel Weller, having
arranged his master’s room with all possible care, and seen him
comfortably seated over his books and papers, withdrew to employ himself
for an hour or two to come, as he best could. It was a fine morning, and
it occurred to Sam that a pint of porter in the open air would lighten
his next quarter of an hour or so, as well as any little amusement in
which he could indulge.

Having arrived at this conclusion, he betook himself to the tap. Having
purchased the beer, and obtained, moreover, the day-but-one-before-
yesterday’s paper, he repaired to the skittle-ground, and seating
himself on a bench, proceeded to enjoy himself in a very sedate and
methodical manner.

First of all, he took a refreshing draught of the beer, and then he
looked up at a window, and bestowed a platonic wink on a young lady who
was peeling potatoes thereat. Then he opened the paper, and folded it so
as to get the police reports outwards; and this being a vexatious and
difficult thing to do, when there is any wind stirring, he took another
draught of the beer when he had accomplished it. Then, he read two lines
of the paper, and stopped short to look at a couple of men who were
finishing a game at rackets, which, being concluded, he cried out ‘wery
good,’ in an approving manner, and looked round upon the spectators, to
ascertain whether their sentiments coincided with his own. This involved
the necessity of looking up at the windows also; and as the young lady
was still there, it was an act of common politeness to wink again, and
to drink to her good health in dumb show, in another draught of the
beer, which Sam did; and having frowned hideously upon a small boy who
had noted this latter proceeding with open eyes, he threw one leg over
the other, and, holding the newspaper in both hands, began to read in
real earnest.

He had hardly composed himself into the needful state of abstraction,
when he thought he heard his own name proclaimed in some distant
passage. Nor was he mistaken, for it quickly passed from mouth to mouth,
and in a few seconds the air teemed with shouts of ‘Weller!’

Here!’ roared Sam, in a stentorian voice. ‘Wot’s the matter? Who wants
him? Has an express come to say that his country house is afire?’

‘Somebody wants you in the hall,’ said a man who was standing by.

‘Just mind that ‘ere paper and the pot, old feller, will you?’ said Sam.
‘I’m a-comin’. Blessed, if they was a-callin’ me to the bar, they
couldn’t make more noise about it!’

Accompanying these words with a gentle rap on the head of the young
gentleman before noticed, who, unconscious of his close vicinity to the
person in request, was screaming ‘Weller!’ with all his might, Sam
hastened across the ground, and ran up the steps into the hall. Here,
the first object that met his eyes was his beloved father sitting on a
bottom stair, with his hat in his hand, shouting out ‘Weller!’ in his
very loudest tone, at half-minute intervals.

‘Wot are you a-roarin’ at?’ said Sam impetuously, when the old gentleman
had discharged himself of another shout; ‘making yourself so precious
hot that you looks like a aggrawated glass-blower. Wot’s the matter?’

‘Aha!’ replied the old gentleman, ‘I began to be afeerd that you’d gone
for a walk round the Regency Park, Sammy.’

‘Come,’ said Sam, ‘none o’ them taunts agin the wictim o’ avarice, and
come off that ‘ere step. Wot are you a-settin’ down there for? I don’t
live there.’

‘I’ve got such a game for you, Sammy,’ said the elder Mr. Weller,
rising.

‘Stop a minit,’ said Sam, ‘you’re all vite behind.’

‘That’s right, Sammy, rub it off,’ said Mr. Weller, as his son dusted
him. ‘It might look personal here, if a man walked about with vitevash
on his clothes, eh, Sammy?’

As Mr. Weller exhibited in this place unequivocal symptoms of an
approaching fit of chuckling, Sam interposed to stop it.

‘Keep quiet, do,’ said Sam, ‘there never vos such a old picter-card
born. Wot are you bustin’ vith, now?’

‘Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, wiping his forehead, ‘I’m afeerd that vun o’
these days I shall laugh myself into a appleplexy, my boy.’

‘Vell, then, wot do you do it for?’ said Sam. ‘Now, then, wot have you
got to say?’

‘Who do you think’s come here with me, Samivel?’ said Mr. Weller,
drawing back a pace or two, pursing up his mouth, and extending his
eyebrows.

‘Pell?’ said Sam.

Mr. Weller shook his head, and his red cheeks expanded with the laughter
that was endeavouring to find a vent.

‘Mottled-faced man, p’raps?’ asked Sam.

Again Mr. Weller shook his head.

‘Who then?’asked Sam.

‘Your mother-in-law,’ said Mr. Weller; and it was lucky he did say it,
or his cheeks must inevitably have cracked, from their most unnatural
distension.

‘Your mother-in-law, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, ‘and the red-nosed man, my
boy; and the red-nosed man. Ho! ho! ho!’

With this, Mr. Weller launched into convulsions of laughter, while Sam
regarded him with a broad grin gradually over-spreading his whole
countenance.

‘They’ve come to have a little serious talk with you, Samivel,’ said Mr.
Weller, wiping his eyes. ‘Don’t let out nothin’ about the unnat’ral
creditor, Sammy.’

‘Wot, don’t they know who it is?’ inquired Sam.

‘Not a bit on it,’ replied his father.

‘Vere are they?’ said Sam, reciprocating all the old gentleman’s grins.

‘In the snuggery,’ rejoined Mr. Weller. ‘Catch the red-nosed man a-goin’
anyvere but vere the liquors is; not he, Samivel, not he. Ve’d a wery
pleasant ride along the road from the Markis this mornin’, Sammy,’ said
Mr. Weller, when he felt himself equal to the task of speaking in an
articulate manner. ‘I drove the old piebald in that ‘ere little chay-
cart as belonged to your mother-in-law’s first wenter, into vich a harm-
cheer wos lifted for the shepherd; and I’m blessed,’ said Mr. Weller,
with a look of deep scorn--‘I’m blessed if they didn’t bring a portable
flight o’ steps out into the road a-front o’ our door for him, to get up
by.’

‘You don’t mean that?’ said Sam.

‘I do mean that, Sammy,’ replied his father, ‘and I vish you could ha’
seen how tight he held on by the sides wen he did get up, as if he wos
afeerd o’ being precipitayted down full six foot, and dashed into a
million hatoms. He tumbled in at last, however, and avay ve vent; and I
rayther think--I say I rayther think, Samivel--that he found his-self a
little jolted ven ve turned the corners.’

‘Wot, I s’pose you happened to drive up agin a post or two?’ said Sam.

‘I’m afeerd,’ replied Mr. Weller, in a rapture of winks--‘I’m afeerd I
took vun or two on ‘em, Sammy; he wos a-flyin’ out o’ the arm-cheer all
the way.’

Here the old gentleman shook his head from side to side, and was seized
with a hoarse internal rumbling, accompanied with a violent swelling of
the countenance, and a sudden increase in the breadth of all his
features; symptoms which alarmed his son not a little.

‘Don’t be frightened, Sammy, don’t be frightened,’ said the old
gentleman, when by dint of much struggling, and various convulsive
stamps upon the ground, he had recovered his voice. ‘It’s only a kind o’
quiet laugh as I’m a-tryin’ to come, Sammy.’

‘Well, if that’s wot it is,’ said Sam, ‘you’d better not try to come it
agin. You’ll find it rayther a dangerous inwention.’

‘Don’t you like it, Sammy?’ inquired the old gentleman.

‘Not at all,’ replied Sam.

‘Well,’ said Mr. Weller, with the tears still running down his cheeks,
‘it ‘ud ha’ been a wery great accommodation to me if I could ha’ done
it, and ‘ud ha’ saved a good many vords atween your mother-in-law and
me, sometimes; but I’m afeerd you’re right, Sammy, it’s too much in the
appleplexy line--a deal too much, Samivel.’

This conversation brought them to the door of the snuggery, into which
Sam--pausing for an instant to look over his shoulder, and cast a sly
leer at his respected progenitor, who was still giggling behind--at once
led the way.

‘Mother-in-law,’ said Sam, politely saluting the lady, ‘wery much
obliged to you for this here wisit.--Shepherd, how air you?’

‘Oh, Samuel!’ said Mrs. Weller. ‘This is dreadful.’

‘Not a bit on it, mum,’ replied Sam.--‘Is it, shepherd?’

Mr. Stiggins raised his hands, and turned up his eyes, until the whites-
-or rather the yellows--were alone visible; but made no reply in words.

‘Is this here gen’l’m’n troubled with any painful complaint?’ said Sam,
looking to his mother-in-law for explanation.

‘The good man is grieved to see you here, Samuel,’ replied Mrs. Weller.

‘Oh, that’s it, is it?’ said Sam. ‘I was afeerd, from his manner, that
he might ha’ forgotten to take pepper vith that ‘ere last cowcumber he
eat. Set down, Sir, ve make no extra charge for settin’ down, as the
king remarked wen he blowed up his ministers.’

‘Young man,’ said Mr. Stiggins ostentatiously, ‘I fear you are not
softened by imprisonment.’

‘Beg your pardon, Sir,’ replied Sam; ‘wot wos you graciously pleased to
hobserve?’

‘I apprehend, young man, that your nature is no softer for this
chastening,’ said Mr. Stiggins, in a loud voice.

‘Sir,’ replied Sam, ‘you’re wery kind to say so. I hope my natur is _NOT
_ a soft vun, Sir. Wery much obliged to you for your good opinion, Sir.’

At this point of the conversation, a sound, indecorously approaching to
a laugh, was heard to proceed from the chair in which the elder Mr.
Weller was seated; upon which Mrs. Weller, on a hasty consideration of
all the circumstances of the case, considered it her bounden duty to
become gradually hysterical.

‘Weller,’ said Mrs. W. (the old gentleman was seated in a corner);
‘Weller! Come forth.’

‘Wery much obleeged to you, my dear,’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘but I’m quite
comfortable vere I am.’

Upon this, Mrs. Weller burst into tears.

‘Wot’s gone wrong, mum?’ said Sam.

‘Oh, Samuel!’ replied Mrs. Weller, ‘your father makes me wretched. Will
nothing do him good?’

‘Do you hear this here?’ said Sam. ‘Lady vants to know vether nothin’
‘ull do you good.’

‘Wery much indebted to Mrs. Weller for her po-lite inquiries, Sammy,’
replied the old gentleman. ‘I think a pipe vould benefit me a good deal.
Could I be accommodated, Sammy?’

Here Mrs. Weller let fall some more tears, and Mr. Stiggins groaned.

‘Hollo! Here’s this unfortunate gen’l’m’n took ill agin,’ said Sam,
looking round. ‘Vere do you feel it now, sir?’

‘In the same place, young man,’ rejoined Mr. Stiggins, ‘in the same
place.’

‘Vere may that be, Sir?’ inquired Sam, with great outward simplicity.

‘In the buzzim, young man,’ replied Mr. Stiggins, placing his umbrella
on his waistcoat.

At this affecting reply, Mrs. Weller, being wholly unable to suppress
her feelings, sobbed aloud, and stated her conviction that the red-nosed
man was a saint; whereupon Mr. Weller, senior, ventured to suggest, in
an undertone, that he must be the representative of the united parishes
of St. Simon Without and St. Walker Within.

‘I’m afeered, mum,’ said Sam, ‘that this here gen’l’m’n, with the twist
in his countenance, feels rather thirsty, with the melancholy spectacle
afore him. Is it the case, mum?’

The worthy lady looked at Mr. Stiggins for a reply; that gentleman, with
many rollings of the eye, clenched his throat with his right hand, and
mimicked the act of swallowing, to intimate that he was athirst.

‘I am afraid, Samuel, that his feelings have made him so indeed,’ said
Mrs. Weller mournfully.

‘Wot’s your usual tap, sir?’ replied Sam.

‘Oh, my dear young friend,’ replied Mr. Stiggins, ‘all taps is
vanities!’

‘Too true, too true, indeed,’ said Mrs. Weller, murmuring a groan, and
shaking her head assentingly.

‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘I des-say they may be, sir; but wich is your
partickler wanity? Wich wanity do you like the flavour on best, sir?’

‘Oh, my dear young friend,’ replied Mr. Stiggins, ‘I despise them all.
If,’ said Mr. Stiggins--‘if there is any one of them less odious than
another, it is the liquor called rum. Warm, my dear young friend, with
three lumps of sugar to the tumbler.’

‘Wery sorry to say, sir,’ said Sam, ‘that they don’t allow that
particular wanity to be sold in this here establishment.’

‘Oh, the hardness of heart of these inveterate men!’ ejaculated Mr.
Stiggins. ‘Oh, the accursed cruelty of these inhuman persecutors!’

With these words, Mr. Stiggins again cast up his eyes, and rapped his
breast with his umbrella; and it is but justice to the reverend
gentleman to say, that his indignation appeared very real and unfeigned
indeed.

After Mrs. Weller and the red-nosed gentleman had commented on this
inhuman usage in a very forcible manner, and had vented a variety of
pious and holy execrations against its authors, the latter recommended a
bottle of port wine, warmed with a little water, spice, and sugar, as
being grateful to the stomach, and savouring less of vanity than many
other compounds. It was accordingly ordered to be prepared, and pending
its preparation the red-nosed man and Mrs. Weller looked at the elder W.
and groaned.

‘Well, Sammy,’ said the gentleman, ‘I hope you’ll find your spirits rose
by this here lively wisit. Wery cheerful and improvin’ conwersation,
ain’t it, Sammy?’

‘You’re a reprobate,’ replied Sam; ‘and I desire you won’t address no
more o’ them ungraceful remarks to me.’

So far from being edified by this very proper reply, the elder Mr.
Weller at once relapsed into a broad grin; and this inexorable conduct
causing the lady and Mr. Stiggins to close their eyes, and rock
themselves to and fro on their chairs, in a troubled manner, he
furthermore indulged in several acts of pantomime, indicative of a
desire to pummel and wring the nose of the aforesaid Stiggins, the
performance of which, appeared to afford him great mental relief. The
old gentleman very narrowly escaped detection in one instance; for Mr.
Stiggins happening to give a start on the arrival of the negus, brought
his head in smart contact with the clenched fist with which Mr. Weller
had been describing imaginary fireworks in the air, within two inches of
his ear, for some minutes.

‘Wot are you a-reachin’ out, your hand for the tumbler in that ‘ere
sawage way for?’ said Sam, with great promptitude. ‘Don’t you see you’ve
hit the gen’l’m’n?’

‘I didn’t go to do it, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, in some degree abashed
by the very unexpected occurrence of the incident.

‘Try an in’ard application, sir,’ said Sam, as the red-nosed gentleman
rubbed his head with a rueful visage. ‘Wot do you think o’ that, for a
go o’ wanity, warm, Sir?’

Mr. Stiggins made no verbal answer, but his manner was expressive. He
tasted the contents of the glass which Sam had placed in his hand, put
his umbrella on the floor, and tasted it again, passing his hand
placidly across his stomach twice or thrice; he then drank the whole at
a breath, and smacking his lips, held out the tumbler for more.

Nor was Mrs. Weller behind-hand in doing justice to the composition. The
good lady began by protesting that she couldn’t touch a drop--then took
a small drop--then a large drop--then a great many drops; and her
feelings being of the nature of those substances which are powerfully
affected by the application of strong waters, she dropped a tear with
every drop of negus, and so got on, melting the feelings down, until at
length she had arrived at a very pathetic and decent pitch of misery.

The elder Mr. Weller observed these signs and tokens with many
manifestations of disgust, and when, after a second jug of the same, Mr.
Stiggins began to sigh in a dismal manner, he plainly evinced his
disapprobation of the whole proceedings, by sundry incoherent ramblings
of speech, among which frequent angry repetitions of the word ‘gammon’
were alone distinguishable to the ear.

‘I’ll tell you wot it is, Samivel, my boy,’ whispered the old gentleman
into his son’s ear, after a long and steadfast contemplation of his lady
and Mr. Stiggins; ‘I think there must be somethin’ wrong in your mother-
in-law’s inside, as vell as in that o’ the red-nosed man.’

‘Wot do you mean?’ said Sam.

‘I mean this here, Sammy,’ replied the old gentleman, ‘that wot they
drink, don’t seem no nourishment to ‘em; it all turns to warm water, and
comes a-pourin’ out o’ their eyes. ‘Pend upon it, Sammy, it’s a
constitootional infirmity.’


Mr. Weller delivered this scientific opinion with many confirmatory
frowns and nods; which, Mrs. Weller remarking, and concluding that they
bore some disparaging reference either to herself or to Mr. Stiggins, or
to both, was on the point of becoming infinitely worse, when Mr.
Stiggins, getting on his legs as well as he could, proceeded to deliver
an edifying discourse for the benefit of the company, but more
especially of Mr. Samuel, whom he adjured in moving terms to be upon his
guard in that sink of iniquity into which he was cast; to abstain from
all hypocrisy and pride of heart; and to take in all things exact
pattern and copy by him (Stiggins), in which case he might calculate on
arriving, sooner or later at the comfortable conclusion, that, like him,
he was a most estimable and blameless character, and that all his
acquaintances and friends were hopelessly abandoned and profligate
wretches. Which consideration, he said, could not but afford him the
liveliest satisfaction.

He furthermore conjured him to avoid, above all things, the vice of
intoxication, which he likened unto the filthy habits of swine, and to
those poisonous and baleful drugs which being chewed in the mouth, are
said to filch away the memory. At this point of his discourse, the
reverend and red-nosed gentleman became singularly incoherent, and
staggering to and fro in the excitement of his eloquence, was fain to
catch at the back of a chair to preserve his perpendicular.

Mr. Stiggins did not desire his hearers to be upon their guard against
those false prophets and wretched mockers of religion, who, without
sense to expound its first doctrines, or hearts to feel its first
principles, are more dangerous members of society than the common
criminal; imposing, as they necessarily do, upon the weakest and worst
informed, casting scorn and contempt on what should be held most sacred,
and bringing into partial disrepute large bodies of virtuous and well-
conducted persons of many excellent sects and persuasions. But as he
leaned over the back of the chair for a considerable time, and closing
one eye, winked a good deal with the other, it is presumed that he
thought all this, but kept it to himself.

During the delivery of the oration, Mrs. Weller sobbed and wept at the
end of the paragraphs; while Sam, sitting cross-legged on a chair and
resting his arms on the top rail, regarded the speaker with great
suavity and blandness of demeanour; occasionally bestowing a look of
recognition on the old gentleman, who was delighted at the beginning,
and went to sleep about half-way.

‘Brayvo; wery pretty!’ said Sam, when the red-nosed man having finished,
pulled his worn gloves on, thereby thrusting his fingers through the
broken tops till the knuckles were disclosed to view. ‘Wery pretty.’

‘I hope it may do you good, Samuel,’ said Mrs. Weller solemnly.

‘I think it vill, mum,’ replied Sam.

‘I wish I could hope that it would do your father good,’ said Mrs.
Weller.

‘Thank’ee, my dear,’ said Mr. Weller, senior. ‘How do you find yourself
arter it, my love?’

‘Scoffer!’ exclaimed Mrs. Weller.

‘Benighted man!’ said the Reverend Mr. Stiggins.

‘If I don’t get no better light than that ‘ere moonshine o’ yourn, my
worthy creetur,’ said the elder Mr. Weller, ‘it’s wery likely as I shall
continey to be a night coach till I’m took off the road altogether. Now,
Mrs. We, if the piebald stands at livery much longer, he’ll stand at
nothin’ as we go back, and p’raps that ‘ere harm-cheer ‘ull be tipped
over into some hedge or another, with the shepherd in it.’

At this supposition, the Reverend Mr. Stiggins, in evident
consternation, gathered up his hat and umbrella, and proposed an
immediate departure, to which Mrs. Weller assented. Sam walked with them
to the lodge gate, and took a dutiful leave.

‘A-do, Samivel,’ said the old gentleman.

‘Wot’s a-do?’ inquired Sammy.

‘Well, good-bye, then,’ said the old gentleman.

‘Oh, that’s wot you’re aimin’ at, is it?’ said Sam. ‘Good-bye!’

‘Sammy,’ whispered Mr. Weller, looking cautiously round; ‘my duty to
your gov’nor, and tell him if he thinks better o’ this here bis’ness, to
com-moonicate vith me. Me and a cab’net-maker has dewised a plan for
gettin’ him out. A pianner, Samivel--a pianner!’ said Mr. Weller,
striking his son on the chest with the back of his hand, and falling
back a step or two.

‘Wot do you mean?’ said Sam.

‘A pianner-forty, Samivel,’ rejoined Mr. Weller, in a still more
mysterious manner, ‘as he can have on hire; vun as von’t play, Sammy.’

‘And wot ‘ud be the good o’ that?’ said Sam.

‘Let him send to my friend, the cabinet-maker, to fetch it back, Sammy,’
replied Mr. Weller. ‘Are you avake, now?’

‘No,’ rejoined Sam.

‘There ain’t no vurks in it,’ whispered his father. ‘It ‘ull hold him
easy, vith his hat and shoes on, and breathe through the legs, vich his
holler. Have a passage ready taken for ‘Merriker. The ‘Merrikin gov’ment
will never give him up, ven vunce they find as he’s got money to spend,
Sammy. Let the gov’nor stop there, till Mrs. Bardell’s dead, or Mr.
Dodson and Fogg’s hung (wich last ewent I think is the most likely to
happen first, Sammy), and then let him come back and write a book about
the ‘Merrikins as’ll pay all his expenses and more, if he blows ‘em up
enough.’

Mr. Weller delivered this hurried abstract of his plot with great
vehemence of whisper; and then, as if fearful of weakening the effect of
the tremendous communication by any further dialogue, he gave the
coachman’s salute, and vanished.

Sam had scarcely recovered his usual composure of countenance, which had
been greatly disturbed by the secret communication of his respected
relative, when Mr. Pickwick accosted him.

‘Sam,’ said that gentleman.

‘Sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘I am going for a walk round the prison, and I wish you to attend me. I
see a prisoner we know coming this way, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick,
smiling.

‘Wich, Sir?’ inquired Mr. Weller; ‘the gen’l’m’n vith the head o’ hair,
or the interestin’ captive in the stockin’s?’

‘Neither,’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick. ‘He is an older friend of yours, Sam.’

‘O’ mine, Sir?’ exclaimed Mr. Weller.

‘You recollect the gentleman very well, I dare say, Sam,’ replied Mr.
Pickwick, ‘or else you are more unmindful of your old acquaintances than
I think you are. Hush! not a word, Sam; not a syllable. Here he is.’

As Mr. Pickwick spoke, Jingle walked up. He looked less miserable than
before, being clad in a half-worn suit of clothes, which, with Mr.
Pickwick’s assistance, had been released from the pawnbroker’s. He wore
clean linen too, and had had his hair cut. He was very pale and thin,
however; and as he crept slowly up, leaning on a stick, it was easy to
see that he had suffered severely from illness and want, and was still
very weak. He took off his hat as Mr. Pickwick saluted him, and seemed
much humbled and abashed at the sight of Sam Weller.

Following close at his heels, came Mr. Job Trotter, in the catalogue of
whose vices, want of faith and attachment to his companion could at all
events find no place. He was still ragged and squalid, but his face was
not quite so hollow as on his first meeting with Mr. Pickwick, a few
days before. As he took off his hat to our benevolent old friend, he
murmured some broken expressions of gratitude, and muttered something
about having been saved from starving.

‘Well, well,’ said Mr. Pickwick, impatiently interrupting him, ‘you can
follow with Sam. I want to speak to you, Mr. Jingle. Can you walk
without his arm?’

‘Certainly, sir--all ready--not too fast--legs shaky--head queer--round
and round--earthquaky sort of feeling--very.’

‘Here, give me your arm,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘No, no,’ replied Jingle; ‘won’t indeed--rather not.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘lean upon me, I desire, Sir.’

Seeing that he was confused and agitated, and uncertain what to do, Mr.
Pickwick cut the matter short by drawing the invalided stroller’s arm
through his, and leading him away, without saying another word about it.

During the whole of this time the countenance of Mr. Samuel Weller had
exhibited an expression of the most overwhelming and absorbing
astonishment that the imagination can portray. After looking from Job to
Jingle, and from Jingle to Job in profound silence, he softly ejaculated
the words, ‘Well, I _am_ damn’d!’ which he repeated at least a score of
times; after which exertion, he appeared wholly bereft of speech, and
again cast his eyes, first upon the one and then upon the other, in mute
perplexity and bewilderment.

‘Now, Sam!’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking back.

‘I’m a-comin’, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, mechanically following his
master; and still he lifted not his eyes from Mr. Job Trotter, who
walked at his side in silence.

Job kept his eyes fixed on the ground for some time. Sam, with his glued
to Job’s countenance, ran up against the people who were walking about,
and fell over little children, and stumbled against steps and railings,
without appearing at all sensible of it, until Job, looking stealthily
up, said--

‘How do you do, Mr. Weller?’

‘It _is_ him!’ exclaimed Sam; and having established Job’s identity
beyond all doubt, he smote his leg, and vented his feelings in a long,
shrill whistle.

‘Things has altered with me, sir,’ said Job.

‘I should think they had,’ exclaimed Mr. Weller, surveying his
companion’s rags with undisguised wonder. ‘This is rayther a change for
the worse, Mr. Trotter, as the gen’l’m’n said, wen he got two doubtful
shillin’s and sixpenn’orth o’ pocket-pieces for a good half-crown.’

‘It is indeed,’ replied Job, shaking his head. ‘There is no deception
now, Mr. Weller. Tears,’ said Job, with a look of momentary slyness--
‘tears are not the only proofs of distress, nor the best ones.’

‘No, they ain’t,’ replied Sam expressively.

‘They may be put on, Mr. Weller,’ said Job.

‘I know they may,’ said Sam; ‘some people, indeed, has ‘em always ready
laid on, and can pull out the plug wenever they likes.’

‘Yes,’ replied Job; ‘but these sort of things are not so easily
counterfeited, Mr. Weller, and it is a more painful process to get them
up.’ As he spoke, he pointed to his sallow, sunken cheeks, and, drawing
up his coat sleeve, disclosed an arm which looked as if the bone could
be broken at a touch, so sharp and brittle did it appear, beneath its
thin covering of flesh.

‘Wot have you been a-doin’ to yourself?’ said Sam, recoiling.

‘Nothing,’ replied Job.

‘Nothin’!’ echoed Sam.

‘I have been doin’ nothing for many weeks past,’ said Job; and eating
and drinking almost as little.’

Sam took one comprehensive glance at Mr. Trotter’s thin face and
wretched apparel; and then, seizing him by the arm, commenced dragging
him away with great violence.

‘Where are you going, Mr. Weller?’ said Job, vainly struggling in the
powerful grasp of his old enemy.

‘Come on,’ said Sam; ‘come on!’ He deigned no further explanation till
they reached the tap, and then called for a pot of porter, which was
speedily produced.

‘Now,’ said Sam, ‘drink that up, ev’ry drop on it, and then turn the pot
upside down, to let me see as you’ve took the medicine.’

‘But, my dear Mr. Weller,’ remonstrated Job.

‘Down vith it!’ said Sam peremptorily.

Thus admonished, Mr. Trotter raised the pot to his lips, and, by gentle
and almost imperceptible degrees, tilted it into the air. He paused
once, and only once, to draw a long breath, but without raising his face
from the vessel, which, in a few moments thereafter, he held out at
arm’s length, bottom upward. Nothing fell upon the ground but a few
particles of froth, which slowly detached themselves from the rim, and
trickled lazily down.

‘Well done!’ said Sam. ‘How do you find yourself arter it?’

‘Better, Sir. I think I am better,’ responded Job.

‘O’ course you air,’ said Sam argumentatively. ‘It’s like puttin’ gas in
a balloon. I can see with the naked eye that you gets stouter under the
operation. Wot do you say to another o’ the same dimensions?’

‘I would rather not, I am much obliged to you, Sir,’ replied Job--‘much
rather not.’

‘Vell, then, wot do you say to some wittles?’ inquired Sam.

‘Thanks to your worthy governor, Sir,’ said Mr. Trotter, ‘we have half a
leg of mutton, baked, at a quarter before three, with the potatoes under
it to save boiling.’

‘Wot! Has _he_ been a-purwidin’ for you?’ asked Sam emphatically.

‘He has, Sir,’ replied Job. ‘More than that, Mr. Weller; my master being
very ill, he got us a room--we were in a kennel before--and paid for it,
Sir; and come to look at us, at night, when nobody should know. Mr.
Weller,’ said Job, with real tears in his eyes, for once, ‘I could serve
that gentleman till I fell down dead at his feet.’

‘I say!’ said Sam, ‘I’ll trouble you, my friend! None o’ that!’

Job Trotter looked amazed.

‘None o’ that, I say, young feller,’ repeated Sam firmly. ‘No man serves
him but me. And now we’re upon it, I’ll let you into another secret
besides that,’ said Sam, as he paid for the beer. ‘I never heerd, mind
you, or read of in story-books, nor see in picters, any angel in tights
and gaiters--not even in spectacles, as I remember, though that may ha’
been done for anythin’ I know to the contrairey--but mark my vords, Job
Trotter, he’s a reg’lar thoroughbred angel for all that; and let me see
the man as wenturs to tell me he knows a better vun.’ With this
defiance, Mr. Weller buttoned up his change in a side pocket, and, with
many confirmatory nods and gestures by the way, proceeded in search of
the subject of discourse.

They found Mr. Pickwick, in company with Jingle, talking very earnestly,
and not bestowing a look on the groups who were congregated on the
racket-ground; they were very motley groups too, and worth the looking
at, if it were only in idle curiosity.

‘Well,’ said Mr. Pickwick, as Sam and his companion drew nigh, ‘you will
see how your health becomes, and think about it meanwhile. Make the
statement out for me when you feel yourself equal to the task, and I
will discuss the subject with you when I have considered it. Now, go to
your room. You are tired, and not strong enough to be out long.’

Mr. Alfred Jingle, without one spark of his old animation--with nothing
even of the dismal gaiety which he had assumed when Mr. Pickwick first
stumbled on him in his misery--bowed low without speaking, and,
motioning to Job not to follow him just yet, crept slowly away.

‘Curious scene this, is it not, Sam?’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking good-
humouredly round.

‘Wery much so, Sir,’ replied Sam. ‘Wonders ‘ull never cease,’ added Sam,
speaking to himself. ‘I’m wery much mistaken if that ‘ere Jingle worn’t
a-doin somethin’ in the water-cart way!’

The area formed by the wall in that part of the Fleet in which Mr.
Pickwick stood was just wide enough to make a good racket-court; one
side being formed, of course, by the wall itself, and the other by that
portion of the prison which looked (or rather would have looked, but for
the wall) towards St. Paul’s Cathedral. Sauntering or sitting about, in
every possible attitude of listless idleness, were a great number of
debtors, the major part of whom were waiting in prison until their day
of ‘going up’ before the Insolvent Court should arrive; while others had
been remanded for various terms, which they were idling away as they
best could. Some were shabby, some were smart, many dirty, a few clean;
but there they all lounged, and loitered, and slunk about with as little
spirit or purpose as the beasts in a menagerie.

Lolling from the windows which commanded a view of this promenade were a
number of persons, some in noisy conversation with their acquaintance
below, others playing at ball with some adventurous throwers outside,
others looking on at the racket-players, or watching the boys as they
cried the game. Dirty, slipshod women passed and repassed, on their way
to the cooking-house in one corner of the yard; children screamed, and
fought, and played together, in another; the tumbling of the skittles,
and the shouts of the players, mingled perpetually with these and a
hundred other sounds; and all was noise and tumult--save in a little
miserable shed a few yards off, where lay, all quiet and ghastly, the
body of the Chancery prisoner who had died the night before, awaiting
the mockery of an inquest. The body! It is the lawyer’s term for the
restless, whirling mass of cares and anxieties, affections, hopes, and
griefs, that make up the living man. The law had his body; and there it
lay, clothed in grave-clothes, an awful witness to its tender mercy.

‘Would you like to see a whistling-shop, Sir?’ inquired Job Trotter.

‘What do you mean?’ was Mr. Pickwick’s counter inquiry.

‘A vistlin’ shop, Sir,’ interposed Mr. Weller.

‘What is that, Sam?--A bird-fancier’s?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Bless your heart, no, Sir,’ replied Job; ‘a whistling-shop, Sir, is
where they sell spirits.’ Mr. Job Trotter briefly explained here, that
all persons, being prohibited under heavy penalties from conveying
spirits into debtors’ prisons, and such commodities being highly prized
by the ladies and gentlemen confined therein, it had occurred to some
speculative turnkey to connive, for certain lucrative considerations, at
two or three prisoners retailing the favourite article of gin, for their
own profit and advantage.

‘This plan, you see, Sir, has been gradually introduced into all the
prisons for debt,’ said Mr. Trotter.

‘And it has this wery great advantage,’ said Sam, ‘that the turnkeys
takes wery good care to seize hold o’ ev’rybody but them as pays ‘em,
that attempts the willainy, and wen it gets in the papers they’re
applauded for their wigilance; so it cuts two ways--frightens other
people from the trade, and elewates their own characters.’

‘Exactly so, Mr. Weller,’ observed Job.

‘Well, but are these rooms never searched to ascertain whether any
spirits are concealed in them?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Cert’nly they are, Sir,’ replied Sam; ‘but the turnkeys knows
beforehand, and gives the word to the wistlers, and you may wistle for
it wen you go to look.’

By this time, Job had tapped at a door, which was opened by a gentleman
with an uncombed head, who bolted it after them when they had walked in,
and grinned; upon which Job grinned, and Sam also; whereupon Mr.
Pickwick, thinking it might be expected of him, kept on smiling to the
end of the interview.

The gentleman with the uncombed head appeared quite satisfied with this
mute announcement of their business, and, producing a flat stone bottle,
which might hold about a couple of quarts, from beneath his bedstead,
filled out three glasses of gin, which Job Trotter and Sam disposed of
in a most workmanlike manner.

‘Any more?’ said the whistling gentleman.

‘No more,’ replied Job Trotter.

Mr. Pickwick paid, the door was unbolted, and out they came; the
uncombed gentleman bestowing a friendly nod upon Mr. Roker, who happened
to be passing at the moment.

From this spot, Mr. Pickwick wandered along all the galleries, up and
down all the staircases, and once again round the whole area of the
yard. The great body of the prison population appeared to be Mivins, and
Smangle, and the parson, and the butcher, and the leg, over and over,
and over again. There were the same squalor, the same turmoil and noise,
the same general characteristics, in every corner; in the best and the
worst alike. The whole place seemed restless and troubled; and the
people were crowding and flitting to and fro, like the shadows in an
uneasy dream.

‘I have seen enough,’ said Mr. Pickwick, as he threw himself into a
chair in his little apartment. ‘My head aches with these scenes, and my
heart too. Henceforth I will be a prisoner in my own room.’

And Mr. Pickwick steadfastly adhered to this determination. For three
long months he remained shut up, all day; only stealing out at night to
breathe the air, when the greater part of his fellow-prisoners were in
bed or carousing in their rooms. His health was beginning to suffer from
the closeness of the confinement, but neither the often-repeated
entreaties of Perker and his friends, nor the still more frequently-
repeated warnings and admonitions of Mr. Samuel Weller, could induce him
to alter one jot of his inflexible resolution.



CHAPTER XLVI. RECORDS A TOUCHING ACT OF DELICATE FEELING, NOT UNMIXED
WITH PLEASANTRY, ACHIEVED AND PERFORMED BY Messrs. DODSON AND FOGG

It was within a week of the close of the month of July, that a hackney
cabriolet, number unrecorded, was seen to proceed at a rapid pace up
Goswell Street; three people were squeezed into it besides the driver,
who sat in his own particular little dickey at the side; over the apron
were hung two shawls, belonging to two small vixenish-looking ladies
under the apron; between whom, compressed into a very small compass, was
stowed away, a gentleman of heavy and subdued demeanour, who, whenever
he ventured to make an observation, was snapped up short by one of the
vixenish ladies before-mentioned. Lastly, the two vixenish ladies and
the heavy gentleman were giving the driver contradictory directions, all
tending to the one point, that he should stop at Mrs. Bardell’s door;
which the heavy gentleman, in direct opposition to, and defiance of, the
vixenish ladies, contended was a green door and not a yellow one.

‘Stop at the house with a green door, driver,’ said the heavy gentleman.

‘Oh! You perwerse creetur!’ exclaimed one of the vixenish ladies. ‘Drive
to the ‘ouse with the yellow door, cabmin.’

Upon this the cabman, who in a sudden effort to pull up at the house
with the green door, had pulled the horse up so high that he nearly
pulled him backward into the cabriolet, let the animal’s fore-legs down
to the ground again, and paused.

‘Now vere am I to pull up?’ inquired the driver. ‘Settle it among
yourselves. All I ask is, vere?’

Here the contest was renewed with increased violence; and the horse
being troubled with a fly on his nose, the cabman humanely employed his
leisure in lashing him about on the head, on the counter-irritation
principle.

‘Most wotes carries the day!’ said one of the vixenish ladies at length.
‘The ‘ouse with the yellow door, cabman.’

But after the cabriolet had dashed up, in splendid style, to the house
with the yellow door, ‘making,’ as one of the vixenish ladies
triumphantly said, ‘acterrally more noise than if one had come in one’s
own carriage,’ and after the driver had dismounted to assist the ladies
in getting out, the small round head of Master Thomas Bardell was thrust
out of the one-pair window of a house with a red door, a few numbers
off.

‘Aggrawatin’ thing!’ said the vixenish lady last-mentioned, darting a
withering glance at the heavy gentleman.

‘My dear, it’s not my fault,’ said the gentleman.

‘Don’t talk to me, you creetur, don’t,’ retorted the lady. ‘The house
with the red door, cabmin. Oh! If ever a woman was troubled with a
ruffinly creetur, that takes a pride and a pleasure in disgracing his
wife on every possible occasion afore strangers, I am that woman!’

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Raddle,’ said the other little
woman, who was no other than Mrs. Cluppins.

‘What have I been a-doing of?’ asked Mr. Raddle.

‘Don’t talk to me, don’t, you brute, for fear I should be perwoked to
forgit my sect and strike you!’ said Mrs. Raddle.

While this dialogue was going on, the driver was most ignominiously
leading the horse, by the bridle, up to the house with the red door,
which Master Bardell had already opened. Here was a mean and low way of
arriving at a friend’s house! No dashing up, with all the fire and fury
of the animal; no jumping down of the driver; no loud knocking at the
door; no opening of the apron with a crash at the very last moment, for
fear of the ladies sitting in a draught; and then the man handing the
shawls out, afterwards, as if he were a private coachman! The whole edge
of the thing had been taken off--it was flatter than walking.

‘Well, Tommy,’ said Mrs. Cluppins, ‘how’s your poor dear mother?’

‘Oh, she’s very well,’ replied Master Bardell. ‘She’s in the front
parlour, all ready. I’m ready too, I am.’ Here Master Bardell put his
hands in his pockets, and jumped off and on the bottom step of the door.

‘Is anybody else a-goin’, Tommy?’ said Mrs. Cluppins, arranging her
pelerine.

‘Mrs. Sanders is going, she is,’ replied Tommy; ‘I’m going too, I am.’

‘Drat the boy,’ said little Mrs. Cluppins. ‘He thinks of nobody but
himself. Here, Tommy, dear.’

‘Well,’ said Master Bardell.

‘Who else is a-goin’, lovey?’ said Mrs. Cluppins, in an insinuating
manner.

‘Oh! Mrs. Rogers is a-goin’,’ replied Master Bardell, opening his eyes
very wide as he delivered the intelligence.

‘What? The lady as has taken the lodgings!’ ejaculated Mrs. Cluppins.

Master Bardell put his hands deeper down into his pockets, and nodded
exactly thirty-five times, to imply that it was the lady-lodger, and no
other.

‘Bless us!’ said Mrs. Cluppins. ‘It’s quite a party!’

‘Ah, if you knew what was in the cupboard, you’d say so,’ replied Master
Bardell.

‘What is there, Tommy?’ said Mrs. Cluppins coaxingly. ‘You’ll tell _me_,
Tommy, I know.’

No, I won’t,’ replied Master Bardell, shaking his head, and applying
himself to the bottom step again.

‘Drat the child!’ muttered Mrs. Cluppins. ‘What a prowokin’ little
wretch it is! Come, Tommy, tell your dear Cluppy.’

‘Mother said I wasn’t to,’ rejoined Master Bardell, ‘I’m a-goin’ to have
some, I am.’ Cheered by this prospect, the precocious boy applied
himself to his infantile treadmill, with increased vigour.

The above examination of a child of tender years took place while Mr.
and Mrs. Raddle and the cab-driver were having an altercation concerning
the fare, which, terminating at this point in favour of the cabman, Mrs.
Raddle came up tottering.

‘Lauk, Mary Ann! what’s the matter?’ said Mrs. Cluppins.

‘It’s put me all over in such a tremble, Betsy,’ replied Mrs. Raddle.
‘Raddle ain’t like a man; he leaves everythink to me.’

This was scarcely fair upon the unfortunate Mr. Raddle, who had been
thrust aside by his good lady in the commencement of the dispute, and
peremptorily commanded to hold his tongue. He had no opportunity of
defending himself, however, for Mrs. Raddle gave unequivocal signs of
fainting; which, being perceived from the parlour window, Mrs. Bardell,
Mrs. Sanders, the lodger, and the lodger’s servant, darted precipitately
out, and conveyed her into the house, all talking at the same time, and
giving utterance to various expressions of pity and condolence, as if
she were one of the most suffering mortals on earth. Being conveyed into
the front parlour, she was there deposited on a sofa; and the lady from
the first floor running up to the first floor, returned with a bottle of
sal-volatile, which, holding Mrs. Raddle tight round the neck, she
applied in all womanly kindness and pity to her nose, until that lady
with many plunges and struggles was fain to declare herself decidedly
better.

‘Ah, poor thing!’ said Mrs. Rogers, ‘I know what her feelin’s is, too
well.’

Ah, poor thing! so do I,’ said Mrs. Sanders; and then all the ladies
moaned in unison, and said they knew what it was, and they pitied her
from their hearts, they did. Even the lodger’s little servant, who was
thirteen years old and three feet high, murmured her sympathy.

‘But what’s been the matter?’ said Mrs. Bardell.

‘Ah, what has decomposed you, ma’am?’ inquired Mrs. Rogers.

‘I have been a good deal flurried,’ replied Mrs. Raddle, in a
reproachful manner. Thereupon the ladies cast indignant glances at Mr.
Raddle.

‘Why, the fact is,’ said that unhappy gentleman, stepping forward, ‘when
we alighted at this door, a dispute arose with the driver of the
cabrioily--’ A loud scream from his wife, at the mention of this word,
rendered all further explanation inaudible.

‘You’d better leave us to bring her round, Raddle,’ said Mrs. Cluppins.
‘She’ll never get better as long as you’re here.’

All the ladies concurred in this opinion; so Mr. Raddle was pushed out
of the room, and requested to give himself an airing in the back yard.
Which he did for about a quarter of an hour, when Mrs. Bardell announced
to him with a solemn face that he might come in now, but that he must be
very careful how he behaved towards his wife. She knew he didn’t mean to
be unkind; but Mary Ann was very far from strong, and, if he didn’t take
care, he might lose her when he least expected it, which would be a very
dreadful reflection for him afterwards; and so on. All this, Mr. Raddle
heard with great submission, and presently returned to the parlour in a
most lamb-like manner.

‘Why, Mrs. Rogers, ma’am,’ said Mrs. Bardell, ‘you’ve never been
introduced, I declare! Mr. Raddle, ma’am; Mrs. Cluppins, ma’am; Mrs.
Raddle, ma’am.’

‘Which is Mrs. Cluppins’s sister,’ suggested Mrs. Sanders.

‘Oh, indeed!’ said Mrs. Rogers graciously; for she was the lodger, and
her servant was in waiting, so she was more gracious than intimate, in
right of her position. ‘Oh, indeed!’

Mrs. Raddle smiled sweetly, Mr. Raddle bowed, and Mrs. Cluppins said,
‘she was sure she was very happy to have an opportunity of being known
to a lady which she had heerd so much in favour of, as Mrs. Rogers.’ A
compliment which the last-named lady acknowledged with graceful
condescension.

‘Well, Mr. Raddle,’ said Mrs. Bardell; ‘I’m sure you ought to feel very
much honoured at you and Tommy being the only gentlemen to escort so
many ladies all the way to the Spaniards, at Hampstead. Don’t you think
he ought, Mrs. Rogers, ma’am?’

Oh, certainly, ma’am,’ replied Mrs. Rogers; after whom all the other
ladies responded, ‘Oh, certainly.’

‘Of course I feel it, ma’am,’ said Mr. Raddle, rubbing his hands, and
evincing a slight tendency to brighten up a little. ‘Indeed, to tell you
the truth, I said, as we was a-coming along in the cabrioily--’

At the recapitulation of the word which awakened so many painful
recollections, Mrs. Raddle applied her handkerchief to her eyes again,
and uttered a half-suppressed scream; so that Mrs. Bardell frowned upon
Mr. Raddle, to intimate that he had better not say anything more, and
desired Mrs. Rogers’s servant, with an air, to ‘put the wine on.’

This was the signal for displaying the hidden treasures of the closet,
which comprised sundry plates of oranges and biscuits, and a bottle of
old crusted port--that at one-and-nine--with another of the celebrated
East India sherry at fourteen-pence, which were all produced in honour
of the lodger, and afforded unlimited satisfaction to everybody. After
great consternation had been excited in the mind of Mrs. Cluppins, by an
attempt on the part of Tommy to recount how he had been cross-examined
regarding the cupboard then in action (which was fortunately nipped in
the bud by his imbibing half a glass of the old crusted ‘the wrong way,’
and thereby endangering his life for some seconds), the party walked
forth in quest of a Hampstead stage. This was soon found, and in a
couple of hours they all arrived safely in the Spaniards Tea-gardens,
where the luckless Mr. Raddle’s very first act nearly occasioned his
good lady a relapse; it being neither more nor less than to order tea
for seven, whereas (as the ladies one and all remarked), what could have
been easier than for Tommy to have drank out of anybody’s cup--or
everybody’s, if that was all--when the waiter wasn’t looking, which
would have saved one head of tea, and the tea just as good!

However, there was no help for it, and the tea-tray came, with seven
cups and saucers, and bread-and-butter on the same scale. Mrs. Bardell
was unanimously voted into the chair, and Mrs. Rogers being stationed on
her right hand, and Mrs. Raddle on her left, the meal proceeded with
great merriment and success.

‘How sweet the country is, to be sure!’ sighed Mrs. Rogers; ‘I almost
wish I lived in it always.’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t like that, ma’am,’ replied Mrs. Bardell, rather
hastily; for it was not at all advisable, with reference to the
lodgings, to encourage such notions; ‘you wouldn’t like it, ma’am.’

‘Oh! I should think you was a deal too lively and sought after, to be
content with the country, ma’am,’ said little Mrs. Cluppins.

‘Perhaps I am, ma’am. Perhaps I am,’ sighed the first-floor lodger.

‘For lone people as have got nobody to care for them, or take care of
them, or as have been hurt in their mind, or that kind of thing,’
observed Mr. Raddle, plucking up a little cheerfulness, and looking
round, ‘the country is all very well. The country for a wounded spirit,
they say.’

Now, of all things in the world that the unfortunate man could have
said, any would have been preferable to this. Of course Mrs. Bardell
burst into tears, and requested to be led from the table instantly; upon
which the affectionate child began to cry too, most dismally.

‘Would anybody believe, ma’am,’ exclaimed Mrs. Raddle, turning fiercely
to the first-floor lodger, ‘that a woman could be married to such a
unmanly creetur, which can tamper with a woman’s feelings as he does,
every hour in the day, ma’am?’

‘My dear,’ remonstrated Mr. Raddle, ‘I didn’t mean anything, my dear.’

‘You didn’t mean!’ repeated Mrs. Raddle, with great scorn and contempt.
‘Go away. I can’t bear the sight on you, you brute.’

‘You must not flurry yourself, Mary Ann,’ interposed Mrs. Cluppins. ‘You
really must consider yourself, my dear, which you never do. Now go away,
Raddle, there’s a good soul, or you’ll only aggravate her.’

‘You had better take your tea by yourself, Sir, indeed,’ said Mrs.
Rogers, again applying the smelling-bottle.

Mrs. Sanders, who, according to custom, was very busy with the bread-
and-butter, expressed the same opinion, and Mr. Raddle quietly retired.

After this, there was a great hoisting up of Master Bardell, who was
rather a large size for hugging, into his mother’s arms, in which
operation he got his boots in the tea-board, and occasioned some
confusion among the cups and saucers. But that description of fainting
fits, which is contagious among ladies, seldom lasts long; so when he
had been well kissed, and a little cried over, Mrs. Bardell recovered,
set him down again, wondering how she could have been so foolish, and
poured out some more tea.

It was at this moment, that the sound of approaching wheels was heard,
and that the ladies, looking up, saw a hackney-coach stop at the garden
gate.

‘More company!’ said Mrs. Sanders.

‘It’s a gentleman,’ said Mrs. Raddle.

‘Well, if it ain’t Mr. Jackson, the young man from Dodson and Fogg’s!’
cried Mrs. Bardell. ‘Why, gracious! Surely Mr. Pickwick can’t have paid
the damages.’

‘Or hoffered marriage!’ said Mrs. Cluppins.

‘Dear me, how slow the gentleman is,’ exclaimed Mrs. Rogers. ‘Why
doesn’t he make haste!’

As the lady spoke these words, Mr. Jackson turned from the coach where
he had been addressing some observations to a shabby man in black
leggings, who had just emerged from the vehicle with a thick ash stick
in his hand, and made his way to the place where the ladies were seated;
winding his hair round the brim of his hat, as he came along.

‘Is anything the matter? Has anything taken place, Mr. Jackson?’ said
Mrs. Bardell eagerly.

‘Nothing whatever, ma’am,’ replied Mr. Jackson. ‘How de do, ladies? I
have to ask pardon, ladies, for intruding--but the law, ladies--the
law.’ With this apology Mr. Jackson smiled, made a comprehensive bow,
and gave his hair another wind. Mrs. Rogers whispered Mrs. Raddle that
he was really an elegant young man.

‘I called in Goswell Street,’ resumed Mr. Jackson, ‘and hearing that you
were here, from the slavey, took a coach and came on. Our people want
you down in the city directly, Mrs. Bardell.’

‘Lor!’ ejaculated that lady, starting at the sudden nature of the
communication.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Jackson, biting his lip. ‘It’s very important and
pressing business, which can’t be postponed on any account. Indeed,
Dodson expressly said so to me, and so did Fogg. I’ve kept the coach on
purpose for you to go back in.’

‘How very strange!’ exclaimed Mrs. Bardell.

The ladies agreed that it _was _ very strange, but were unanimously of
opinion that it must be very important, or Dodson & Fogg would never
have sent; and further, that the business being urgent, she ought to
repair to Dodson & Fogg’s without any delay.

There was a certain degree of pride and importance about being wanted by
one’s lawyers in such a monstrous hurry, that was by no means
displeasing to Mrs. Bardell, especially as it might be reasonably
supposed to enhance her consequence in the eyes of the first-floor
lodger. She simpered a little, affected extreme vexation and hesitation,
and at last arrived at the conclusion that she supposed she must go.

‘But won’t you refresh yourself after your walk, Mr. Jackson?’ said Mrs.
Bardell persuasively.

‘Why, really there ain’t much time to lose,’ replied Jackson; ‘and I’ve
got a friend here,’ he continued, looking towards the man with the ash
stick.

‘Oh, ask your friend to come here, Sir,’ said Mrs. Bardell. ‘Pray ask
your friend here, Sir.’

‘Why, thank’ee, I’d rather not,’ said Mr. Jackson, with some
embarrassment of manner. ‘He’s not much used to ladies’ society, and it
makes him bashful. If you’ll order the waiter to deliver him anything
short, he won’t drink it off at once, won’t he!--only try him!’ Mr.
Jackson’s fingers wandered playfully round his nose at this portion of
his discourse, to warn his hearers that he was speaking ironically.

The waiter was at once despatched to the bashful gentleman, and the
bashful gentleman took something; Mr. Jackson also took something, and
the ladies took something, for hospitality’s sake. Mr. Jackson then said
he was afraid it was time to go; upon which, Mrs. Sanders, Mrs.
Cluppins, and Tommy (who it was arranged should accompany Mrs. Bardell,
leaving the others to Mr. Raddle’s protection), got into the coach.

‘Isaac,’ said Jackson, as Mrs. Bardell prepared to get in, looking up at
the man with the ash stick, who was seated on the box, smoking a cigar.

‘Well?’

‘This is Mrs. Bardell.’

‘Oh, I know’d that long ago,’ said the man.

Mrs. Bardell got in, Mr. Jackson got in after her, and away they drove.
Mrs. Bardell could not help ruminating on what Mr. Jackson’s friend had
said. Shrewd creatures, those lawyers. Lord bless us, how they find
people out!

‘Sad thing about these costs of our people’s, ain’t it,’ said Jackson,
when Mrs. Cluppins and Mrs. Sanders had fallen asleep; ‘your bill of
costs, I mean.’

‘I’m very sorry they can’t get them,’ replied Mrs. Bardell. ‘But if you
law gentlemen do these things on speculation, why you must get a loss
now and then, you know.’

‘You gave them a _cognovit _for the amount of your costs, after the
trial, I’m told!’ said Jackson.

‘Yes. Just as a matter of form,’ replied Mrs. Bardell.

‘Certainly,’ replied Jackson drily. ‘Quite a matter of form. Quite.’

On they drove, and Mrs. Bardell fell asleep. She was awakened, after
some time, by the stopping of the coach.

‘Bless us!’ said the lady. ‘Are we at Freeman’s Court?’

‘We’re not going quite so far,’ replied Jackson. ‘Have the goodness to
step out.’

Mrs. Bardell, not yet thoroughly awake, complied. It was a curious
place: a large wall, with a gate in the middle, and a gas-light burning
inside.


‘Now, ladies,’ cried the man with the ash stick, looking into the coach,
and shaking Mrs. Sanders to wake her, ‘Come!’ Rousing her friend, Mrs.
Sanders alighted. Mrs. Bardell, leaning on Jackson’s arm, and leading
Tommy by the hand, had already entered the porch. They followed.

The room they turned into was even more odd-looking than the porch. Such
a number of men standing about! And they stared so!

‘What place is this?’ inquired Mrs. Bardell, pausing.

‘Only one of our public offices,’ replied Jackson, hurrying her through
a door, and looking round to see that the other women were following.
‘Look sharp, Isaac!’

‘Safe and sound,’ replied the man with the ash stick. The door swung
heavily after them, and they descended a small flight of steps.

‘Here we are at last. All right and tight, Mrs. Bardell!’ said Jackson,
looking exultingly round.

‘What do you mean?’ said Mrs. Bardell, with a palpitating heart.

‘Just this,’ replied Jackson, drawing her a little on one side; ‘don’t
be frightened, Mrs. Bardell. There never was a more delicate man than
Dodson, ma’am, or a more humane man than Fogg. It was their duty in the
way of business, to take you in execution for them costs; but they were
anxious to spare your feelings as much as they could. What a comfort it
must be, to you, to think how it’s been done! This is the Fleet, ma’am.
Wish you good-night, Mrs. Bardell. Good-night, Tommy!’

As Jackson hurried away in company with the man with the ash stick
another man, with a key in his hand, who had been looking on, led the
bewildered female to a second short flight of steps leading to a
doorway. Mrs. Bardell screamed violently; Tommy roared; Mrs. Cluppins
shrunk within herself; and Mrs. Sanders made off, without more ado. For
there stood the injured Mr. Pickwick, taking his nightly allowance of
air; and beside him leant Samuel Weller, who, seeing Mrs. Bardell, took
his hat off with mock reverence, while his master turned indignantly on
his heel.

‘Don’t bother the woman,’ said the turnkey to Weller; ‘she’s just come
in.’

‘A prisoner!’ said Sam, quickly replacing his hat. ‘Who’s the
plaintives? What for? Speak up, old feller.’

‘Dodson and Fogg,’ replied the man; ‘execution on _cognovit _for costs.’

‘Here, Job, Job!’ shouted Sam, dashing into the passage. ‘Run to Mr.
Perker’s, Job. I want him directly. I see some good in this. Here’s a
game. Hooray! vere’s the gov’nor?’

But there was no reply to these inquiries, for Job had started furiously
off, the instant he received his commission, and Mrs. Bardell had
fainted in real downright earnest.



CHAPTER XLVII. IS CHIEFLY DEVOTED TO MATTERS OF BUSINESS, AND THE
TEMPORAL ADVANTAGE OF DODSON AND FOGG--MR. WINKLE REAPPEARS UNDER
EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES--MR. PICKWICK’S BENEVOLENCE PROVES STRONGER
THAN HIS OBSTINACY

Job Trotter, abating nothing of his speed, ran up Holborn, sometimes in
the middle of the road, sometimes on the pavement, sometimes in the
gutter, as the chances of getting along varied with the press of men,
women, children, and coaches, in each division of the thoroughfare, and,
regardless of all obstacles stopped not for an instant until he reached
the gate of Gray’s Inn. Notwithstanding all the expedition he had used,
however, the gate had been closed a good half-hour when he reached it,
and by the time he had discovered Mr. Perker’s laundress, who lived with
a married daughter, who had bestowed her hand upon a non-resident
waiter, who occupied the one-pair of some number in some street closely
adjoining to some brewery somewhere behind Gray’s Inn Lane, it was
within fifteen minutes of closing the prison for the night. Mr. Lowten
had still to be ferreted out from the back parlour of the Magpie and
Stump; and Job had scarcely accomplished this object, and communicated
Sam Weller’s message, when the clock struck ten.

‘There,’ said Lowten, ‘it’s too late now. You can’t get in to-night;
you’ve got the key of the street, my friend.’

‘Never mind me,’ replied Job. ‘I can sleep anywhere. But won’t it be
better to see Mr. Perker to-night, so that we may be there, the first
thing in the morning?’

‘Why,’ responded Lowten, after a little consideration, ‘if it was in
anybody else’s case, Perker wouldn’t be best pleased at my going up to
his house; but as it’s Mr. Pickwick’s, I think I may venture to take a
cab and charge it to the office.’ Deciding on this line of conduct, Mr.
Lowten took up his hat, and begging the assembled company to appoint a
deputy-chairman during his temporary absence, led the way to the nearest
coach-stand. Summoning the cab of most promising appearance, he directed
the driver to repair to Montague Place, Russell Square.

Mr. Perker had had a dinner-party that day, as was testified by the
appearance of lights in the drawing-room windows, the sound of an
improved grand piano, and an improvable cabinet voice issuing therefrom,
and a rather overpowering smell of meat which pervaded the steps and
entry. In fact, a couple of very good country agencies happening to come
up to town, at the same time, an agreeable little party had been got
together to meet them, comprising Mr. Snicks, the Life Office Secretary,
Mr. Prosee, the eminent counsel, three solicitors, one commissioner of
bankrupts, a special pleader from the Temple, a small-eyed peremptory
young gentleman, his pupil, who had written a lively book about the law
of demises, with a vast quantity of marginal notes and references; and
several other eminent and distinguished personages. From this society,
little Mr. Perker detached himself, on his clerk being announced in a
whisper; and repairing to the dining-room, there found Mr. Lowten and
Job Trotter looking very dim and shadowy by the light of a kitchen
candle, which the gentleman who condescended to appear in plush shorts
and cottons for a quarterly stipend, had, with a becoming contempt for
the clerk and all things appertaining to ‘the office,’ placed upon the
table.

‘Now, Lowten,’ said little Mr. Perker, shutting the door, ‘what’s the
matter? No important letter come in a parcel, is there?’

‘No, Sir,’ replied Lowten. ‘This is a messenger from Mr. Pickwick, Sir.’

‘From Pickwick, eh?’ said the little man, turning quickly to Job. ‘Well,
what is it?’

‘Dodson and Fogg have taken Mrs. Bardell in execution for her costs,
Sir,’ said Job.

‘No!’ exclaimed Perker, putting his hands in his pockets, and reclining
against the sideboard.

‘Yes,’ said Job. ‘It seems they got a cognovit out of her, for the
amount of ‘em, directly after the trial.’

‘By Jove!’ said Perker, taking both hands out of his pockets, and
striking the knuckles of his right against the palm of his left,
emphatically, ‘those are the cleverest scamps I ever had anything to do
with!’

‘The sharpest practitioners I ever knew, Sir,’ observed Lowten.

‘Sharp!’ echoed Perker. ‘There’s no knowing where to have them.’

‘Very true, Sir, there is not,’ replied Lowten; and then, both master
and man pondered for a few seconds, with animated countenances, as if
they were reflecting upon one of the most beautiful and ingenious
discoveries that the intellect of man had ever made. When they had in
some measure recovered from their trance of admiration, Job Trotter
discharged himself of the rest of his commission. Perker nodded his head
thoughtfully, and pulled out his watch.

‘At ten precisely, I will be there,’ said the little man. ‘Sam is quite
right. Tell him so. Will you take a glass of wine, Lowten?’

No, thank you, Sir.’

‘You mean yes, I think,’ said the little man, turning to the sideboard
for a decanter and glasses.

As Lowten _did _mean yes, he said no more on the subject, but inquired
of Job, in an audible whisper, whether the portrait of Perker, which
hung opposite the fireplace, wasn’t a wonderful likeness, to which Job
of course replied that it was. The wine being by this time poured out,
Lowten drank to Mrs. Perker and the children, and Job to Perker. The
gentleman in the plush shorts and cottons considering it no part of his
duty to show the people from the office out, consistently declined to
answer the bell, and they showed themselves out. The attorney betook
himself to his drawing-room, the clerk to the Magpie and Stump, and Job
to Covent Garden Market to spend the night in a vegetable basket.

Punctually at the appointed hour next morning, the good-humoured little
attorney tapped at Mr. Pickwick’s door, which was opened with great
alacrity by Sam Weller.

‘Mr. Perker, sir,’ said Sam, announcing the visitor to Mr. Pickwick, who
was sitting at the window in a thoughtful attitude. ‘Wery glad you’ve
looked in accidentally, Sir. I rather think the gov’nor wants to have a
word and a half with you, Sir.’

Perker bestowed a look of intelligence on Sam, intimating that he
understood he was not to say he had been sent for; and beckoning him to
approach, whispered briefly in his ear.

‘You don’t mean that ‘ere, Sir?’ said Sam, starting back in excessive
surprise.

Perker nodded and smiled.

Mr. Samuel Weller looked at the little lawyer, then at Mr. Pickwick,
then at the ceiling, then at Perker again; grinned, laughed outright,
and finally, catching up his hat from the carpet, without further
explanation, disappeared.

‘What does this mean?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, looking at Perker with
astonishment. ‘What has put Sam into this extraordinary state?’

‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ replied Perker. ‘Come, my dear Sir, draw up your
chair to the table. I have a good deal to say to you.’

‘What papers are those?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, as the little man
deposited on the table a small bundle of documents tied with red tape.

‘The papers in Bardell and Pickwick,’ replied Perker, undoing the knot
with his teeth.

Mr. Pickwick grated the legs of his chair against the ground; and
throwing himself into it, folded his hands and looked sternly--if Mr.
Pickwick ever could look sternly--at his legal friend.

‘You don’t like to hear the name of the cause?’ said the little man,
still busying himself with the knot.

‘No, I do not indeed,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Sorry for that,’ resumed Perker, ‘because it will form the subject of
our conversation.’

‘I would rather that the subject should be never mentioned between us,
Perker,’ interposed Mr. Pickwick hastily.

‘Pooh, pooh, my dear Sir,’ said the little man, untying the bundle, and
glancing eagerly at Mr. Pickwick out of the corners of his eyes. ‘It
must be mentioned. I have come here on purpose. Now, are you ready to
hear what I have to say, my dear Sir? No hurry; if you are not, I can
wait. I have this morning’s paper here. Your time shall be mine. There!’
Hereupon, the little man threw one leg over the other, and made a show
of beginning to read with great composure and application.

‘Well, well,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with a sigh, but softening into a smile
at the same time. ‘Say what you have to say; it’s the old story, I
suppose?’

‘With a difference, my dear Sir; with a difference,’ rejoined Perker,
deliberately folding up the paper and putting it into his pocket again.
‘Mrs. Bardell, the plaintiff in the action, is within these walls, Sir.’

‘I know it,’ was Mr. Pickwick’s reply.

‘Very good,’ retorted Perker. ‘And you know how she comes here, I
suppose; I mean on what grounds, and at whose suit?’

‘Yes; at least I have heard Sam’s account of the matter,’ said Mr.
Pickwick, with affected carelessness.

‘Sam’s account of the matter,’ replied Perker, ‘is, I will venture to
say, a perfectly correct one. Well now, my dear Sir, the first question
I have to ask, is, whether this woman is to remain here?’

‘To remain here!’ echoed Mr. Pickwick.

‘To remain here, my dear Sir,’ rejoined Perker, leaning back in his
chair and looking steadily at his client.

‘How can you ask me?’ said that gentleman. ‘It rests with Dodson and
Fogg; you know that very well.’

‘I know nothing of the kind,’ retorted Perker firmly. ‘It does _not
_rest with Dodson and Fogg; you know the men, my dear Sir, as well as I
do. It rests solely, wholly, and entirely with you.’

‘With me!’ ejaculated Mr. Pickwick, rising nervously from his chair, and
reseating himself directly afterwards.

The little man gave a double-knock on the lid of his snuff-box, opened
it, took a great pinch, shut it up again, and repeated the words, ‘With
you.’

‘I say, my dear Sir,’ resumed the little man, who seemed to gather
confidence from the snuff--‘I say, that her speedy liberation or
perpetual imprisonment rests with you, and with you alone. Hear me out,
my dear Sir, if you please, and do not be so very energetic, for it will
only put you into a perspiration and do no good whatever. I say,’
continued Perker, checking off each position on a different finger, as
he laid it down--‘I say that nobody but you can rescue her from this den
of wretchedness; and that you can only do that, by paying the costs of
this suit--both of plaintive and defendant--into the hands of these
Freeman Court sharks. Now pray be quiet, my dear sir.’

Mr. Pickwick, whose face had been undergoing most surprising changes
during this speech, and was evidently on the verge of a strong burst of
indignation, calmed his wrath as well as he could. Perker, strengthening
his argumentative powers with another pinch of snuff, proceeded--

‘I have seen the woman, this morning. By paying the costs, you can
obtain a full release and discharge from the damages; and further--this
I know is a far greater object of consideration with you, my dear sir--a
voluntary statement, under her hand, in the form of a letter to me, that
this business was, from the very first, fomented, and encouraged, and
brought about, by these men, Dodson and Fogg; that she deeply regrets
ever having been the instrument of annoyance or injury to you; and that
she entreats me to intercede with you, and implore your pardon.’

‘If I pay her costs for her,’ said Mr. Pickwick indignantly. ‘A valuable
document, indeed!’

‘No “if” in the case, my dear Sir,’ said Perker triumphantly. ‘There is
the very letter I speak of. Brought to my office by another woman at
nine o’clock this morning, before I had set foot in this place, or held
any communication with Mrs. Bardell, upon my honour.’ Selecting the
letter from the bundle, the little lawyer laid it at Mr. Pickwick’s
elbow, and took snuff for two consecutive minutes, without winking.

‘Is this all you have to say to me?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick mildly.

‘Not quite,’ replied Perker. ‘I cannot undertake to say, at this moment,
whether the wording of the cognovit, the nature of the ostensible
consideration, and the proof we can get together about the whole conduct
of the suit, will be sufficient to justify an indictment for conspiracy.
I fear not, my dear Sir; they are too clever for that, I doubt. I do
mean to say, however, that the whole facts, taken together, will be
sufficient to justify you, in the minds of all reasonable men. And now,
my dear Sir, I put it to you. This one hundred and fifty pounds, or
whatever it may be--take it in round numbers--is nothing to you. A jury
had decided against you; well, their verdict is wrong, but still they
decided as they thought right, and it _is_ against you. You have now an
opportunity, on easy terms, of placing yourself in a much higher
position than you ever could, by remaining here; which would only be
imputed, by people who didn’t know you, to sheer dogged, wrongheaded,
brutal obstinacy; nothing else, my dear Sir, believe me. Can you
hesitate to avail yourself of it, when it restores you to your friends,
your old pursuits, your health and amusements; when it liberates your
faithful and attached servant, whom you otherwise doom to imprisonment
for the whole of your life; and above all, when it enables you to take
the very magnanimous revenge--which I know, my dear sir, is one after
your own heart--of releasing this woman from a scene of misery and
debauchery, to which no man should ever be consigned, if I had my will,
but the infliction of which on any woman, is even more frightful and
barbarous. Now I ask you, my dear sir, not only as your legal adviser,
but as your very true friend, will you let slip the occasion of
attaining all these objects, and doing all this good, for the paltry
consideration of a few pounds finding their way into the pockets of a
couple of rascals, to whom it makes no manner of difference, except that
the more they gain, the more they’ll seek, and so the sooner be led into
some piece of knavery that must end in a crash? I have put these
considerations to you, my dear Sir, very feebly and imperfectly, but I
ask you to think of them. Turn them over in your mind as long as you
please. I wait here most patiently for your answer.’


Before Mr. Pickwick could reply, before Mr. Perker had taken one
twentieth part of the snuff with which so unusually long an address
imperatively required to be followed up, there was a low murmuring of
voices outside, and then a hesitating knock at the door.

‘Dear, dear,’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, who had been evidently roused by
his friend’s appeal; ‘what an annoyance that door is! Who is that?’

‘Me, Sir,’ replied Sam Weller, putting in his head.

‘I can’t speak to you just now, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘I am engaged
at this moment, Sam.’

‘Beg your pardon, Sir,’ rejoined Mr. Weller. ‘But here’s a lady here,
Sir, as says she’s somethin’ wery partickler to disclose.’

‘I can’t see any lady,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, whose mind was filled with
visions of Mrs. Bardell.

‘I wouldn’t make too sure o’ that, Sir,’ urged Mr. Weller, shaking his
head. ‘If you know’d who was near, sir, I rayther think you’d change
your note; as the hawk remarked to himself vith a cheerful laugh, ven he
heerd the robin-redbreast a-singin’ round the corner.’

‘Who is it?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Will you see her, Sir?’ asked Mr. Weller, holding the door in his hand
as if he had some curious live animal on the other side.

‘I suppose I must,’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking at Perker.

‘Well then, all in to begin!’ cried Sam. ‘Sound the gong, draw up the
curtain, and enter the two conspiraytors.’

As Sam Weller spoke, he threw the door open, and there rushed
tumultuously into the room, Mr. Nathaniel Winkle, leading after him by
the hand, the identical young lady who at Dingley Dell had worn the
boots with the fur round the tops, and who, now a very pleasing compound
of blushes and confusion, and lilac silk, and a smart bonnet, and a rich
lace veil, looked prettier than ever.

‘Miss Arabella Allen!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, rising from his chair.

‘No,’ replied Mr. Winkle, dropping on his knees. ‘Mrs. Winkle. Pardon,
my dear friend, pardon!’

Mr. Pickwick could scarcely believe the evidence of his senses, and
perhaps would not have done so, but for the corroborative testimony
afforded by the smiling countenance of Perker, and the bodily presence,
in the background, of Sam and the pretty housemaid; who appeared to
contemplate the proceedings with the liveliest satisfaction.

‘Oh, Mr. Pickwick!’ said Arabella, in a low voice, as if alarmed at the
silence. ‘Can you forgive my imprudence?’

Mr. Pickwick returned no verbal response to this appeal; but he took off
his spectacles in great haste, and seizing both the young lady’s hands
in his, kissed her a great number of times--perhaps a greater number
than was absolutely necessary--and then, still retaining one of her
hands, told Mr. Winkle he was an audacious young dog, and bade him get
up. This, Mr. Winkle, who had been for some seconds scratching his nose
with the brim of his hat, in a penitent manner, did; whereupon Mr.
Pickwick slapped him on the back several times, and then shook hands
heartily with Perker, who, not to be behind-hand in the compliments of
the occasion, saluted both the bride and the pretty housemaid with right
good-will, and, having wrung Mr. Winkle’s hand most cordially, wound up
his demonstrations of joy by taking snuff enough to set any half-dozen
men with ordinarily-constructed noses, a-sneezing for life.

‘Why, my dear girl,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘how has all this come about?
Come! Sit down, and let me hear it all. How well she looks, doesn’t she,
Perker?’ added Mr. Pickwick, surveying Arabella’s face with a look of as
much pride and exultation, as if she had been his daughter.

‘Delightful, my dear Sir,’ replied the little man. ‘If I were not a
married man myself, I should be disposed to envy you, you dog.’ Thus
expressing himself, the little lawyer gave Mr. Winkle a poke in the
chest, which that gentleman reciprocated; after which they both laughed
very loudly, but not so loudly as Mr. Samuel Weller, who had just
relieved his feelings by kissing the pretty housemaid under cover of the
cupboard door.

‘I can never be grateful enough to you, Sam, I am sure,’ said Arabella,
with the sweetest smile imaginable. ‘I shall not forget your exertions
in the garden at Clifton.’

‘Don’t say nothin’ wotever about it, ma’am,’ replied Sam. ‘I only
assisted natur, ma’am; as the doctor said to the boy’s mother, after
he’d bled him to death.’

‘Mary, my dear, sit down,’ said Mr. Pickwick, cutting short these
compliments. ‘Now then; how long have you been married, eh?’

Arabella looked bashfully at her lord and master, who replied, ‘Only
three days.’

‘Only three days, eh?’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Why, what have you been doing
these three months?’

‘Ah, to be sure!’ interposed Perker; ‘come, account for this idleness.
You see Mr. Pickwick’s only astonishment is, that it wasn’t all over,
months ago.’

‘Why the fact is,’ replied Mr. Winkle, looking at his blushing young
wife, ‘that I could not persuade Bella to run away, for a long time. And
when I had persuaded her, it was a long time more before we could find
an opportunity. Mary had to give a month’s warning, too, before she
could leave her place next door, and we couldn’t possibly have done it
without her assistance.’

Upon my word,’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, who by this time had resumed his
spectacles, and was looking from Arabella to Winkle, and from Winkle to
Arabella, with as much delight depicted in his countenance as
warmheartedness and kindly feeling can communicate to the human face--
‘upon my word! you seem to have been very systematic in your
proceedings. And is your brother acquainted with all this, my dear?’

‘Oh, no, no,’ replied Arabella, changing colour. ‘Dear Mr. Pickwick, he
must only know it from you--from your lips alone. He is so violent, so
prejudiced, and has been so--so anxious in behalf of his friend, Mr.
Sawyer,’ added Arabella, looking down, ‘that I fear the consequences
dreadfully.’

‘Ah, to be sure,’ said Perker gravely. ‘You must take this matter in
hand for them, my dear sir. These young men will respect you, when they
would listen to nobody else. You must prevent mischief, my dear Sir. Hot
blood, hot blood.’ And the little man took a warning pinch, and shook
his head doubtfully.

‘You forget, my love,’ said Mr. Pickwick gently, ‘you forget that I am a
prisoner.’

‘No, indeed I do not, my dear Sir,’ replied Arabella. ‘I never have
forgotten it. I have never ceased to think how great your sufferings
must have been in this shocking place. But I hoped that what no
consideration for yourself would induce you to do, a regard to our
happiness might. If my brother hears of this, first, from you, I feel
certain we shall be reconciled. He is my only relation in the world, Mr.
Pickwick, and unless you plead for me, I fear I have lost even him. I
have done wrong, very, very wrong, I know.’ Here poor Arabella hid her
face in her handkerchief, and wept bitterly.

Mr. Pickwick’s nature was a good deal worked upon, by these same tears;
but when Mrs. Winkle, drying her eyes, took to coaxing and entreating in
the sweetest tones of a very sweet voice, he became particularly
restless, and evidently undecided how to act, as was evinced by sundry
nervous rubbings of his spectacle-glasses, nose, tights, head, and
gaiters.

Taking advantage of these symptoms of indecision, Mr. Perker (to whom,
it appeared, the young couple had driven straight that morning) urged
with legal point and shrewdness that Mr. Winkle, senior, was still
unacquainted with the important rise in life’s flight of steps which his
son had taken; that the future expectations of the said son depended
entirely upon the said Winkle, senior, continuing to regard him with
undiminished feelings of affection and attachment, which it was very
unlikely he would, if this great event were long kept a secret from him;
that Mr. Pickwick, repairing to Bristol to seek Mr. Allen, might, with
equal reason, repair to Birmingham to seek Mr. Winkle, senior; lastly,
that Mr. Winkle, senior, had good right and title to consider Mr.
Pickwick as in some degree the guardian and adviser of his son, and that
it consequently behoved that gentleman, and was indeed due to his
personal character, to acquaint the aforesaid Winkle, senior,
personally, and by word of mouth, with the whole circumstances of the
case, and with the share he had taken in the transaction.

Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass arrived, most opportunely, in this stage of
the pleadings, and as it was necessary to explain to them all that had
occurred, together with the various reasons pro and con, the whole of
the arguments were gone over again, after which everybody urged every
argument in his own way, and at his own length. And, at last, Mr.
Pickwick, fairly argued and remonstrated out of all his resolutions, and
being in imminent danger of being argued and remonstrated out of his
wits, caught Arabella in his arms, and declaring that she was a very
amiable creature, and that he didn’t know how it was, but he had always
been very fond of her from the first, said he could never find it in his
heart to stand in the way of young people’s happiness, and they might do
with him as they pleased.

Mr. Weller’s first act, on hearing this concession, was to despatch Job
Trotter to the illustrious Mr. Pell, with an authority to deliver to the
bearer the formal discharge which his prudent parent had had the
foresight to leave in the hands of that learned gentleman, in case it
should be, at any time, required on an emergency; his next proceeding
was, to invest his whole stock of ready-money in the purchase of five-
and-twenty gallons of mild porter, which he himself dispensed on the
racket-ground to everybody who would partake of it; this done, he
hurra’d in divers parts of the building until he lost his voice, and
then quietly relapsed into his usual collected and philosophical
condition.

At three o’clock that afternoon, Mr. Pickwick took a last look at his
little room, and made his way, as well as he could, through the throng
of debtors who pressed eagerly forward to shake him by the hand, until
he reached the lodge steps. He turned here, to look about him, and his
eye lightened as he did so. In all the crowd of wan, emaciated faces, he
saw not one which was not happier for his sympathy and charity.

‘Perker,’ said Mr. Pickwick, beckoning one young man towards him, ‘this
is Mr. Jingle, whom I spoke to you about.’

‘Very good, my dear Sir,’ replied Perker, looking hard at Jingle. ‘You
will see me again, young man, to-morrow. I hope you may live to remember
and feel deeply, what I shall have to communicate, Sir.’

Jingle bowed respectfully, trembled very much as he took Mr. Pickwick’s
proffered hand, and withdrew.

‘Job you know, I think?’ said Mr. Pickwick, presenting that gentleman.

‘I know the rascal,’ replied Perker good-humouredly. ‘See after your
friend, and be in the way to-morrow at one. Do you hear? Now, is there
anything more?’

‘Nothing,’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick. ‘You have delivered the little parcel
I gave you for your old landlord, Sam?’

‘I have, Sir,’ replied Sam. ‘He bust out a-cryin’, Sir, and said you wos
wery gen’rous and thoughtful, and he only wished you could have him
innockilated for a gallopin’ consumption, for his old friend as had
lived here so long wos dead, and he’d noweres to look for another.’

Poor fellow, poor fellow!’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘God bless you, my
friends!’

As Mr. Pickwick uttered this adieu, the crowd raised a loud shout. Many
among them were pressing forward to shake him by the hand again, when he
drew his arm through Perker’s, and hurried from the prison, far more sad
and melancholy, for the moment, than when he had first entered it. Alas!
how many sad and unhappy beings had he left behind!

A happy evening was that for at least one party in the George and
Vulture; and light and cheerful were two of the hearts that emerged from
its hospitable door next morning. The owners thereof were Mr. Pickwick
and Sam Weller, the former of whom was speedily deposited inside a
comfortable post-coach, with a little dickey behind, in which the latter
mounted with great agility.

‘Sir,’ called out Mr. Weller to his master.

‘Well, Sam,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, thrusting his head out of the window.

‘I wish them horses had been three months and better in the Fleet, Sir.’

‘Why, Sam?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Wy, Sir,’ exclaimed Mr. Weller, rubbing his hands, ‘how they would go
if they had been!’



CHAPTER XLVIII. RELATES HOW MR. PICKWICK, WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF SAMUEL
WELLER, ESSAYED TO SOFTEN THE HEART OF MR. BENJAMIN ALLEN, AND TO
MOLLIFY THE WRATH OF MR. ROBERT SAWYER

Mr. Ben Allen and Mr. Bob Sawyer sat together in the little surgery
behind the shop, discussing minced veal and future prospects, when the
discourse, not unnaturally, turned upon the practice acquired by Bob the
aforesaid, and his present chances of deriving a competent independence
from the honourable profession to which he had devoted himself.

‘Which, I think,’ observed Mr. Bob Sawyer, pursuing the thread of the
subject--‘which, I think, Ben, are rather dubious.’

‘What’s rather dubious?’ inquired Mr. Ben Allen, at the same time
sharpening his intellect with a draught of beer. ‘What’s dubious?’

‘Why, the chances,’ responded Mr. Bob Sawyer.

‘I forgot,’ said Mr. Ben Allen. ‘The beer has reminded me that I forgot,
Bob--yes; they _are _dubious.’

‘It’s wonderful how the poor people patronise me,’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer
reflectively. ‘They knock me up, at all hours of the night; they take
medicine to an extent which I should have conceived impossible; they put
on blisters and leeches with a perseverance worthy of a better cause;
they make additions to their families, in a manner which is quite awful.
Six of those last-named little promissory notes, all due on the same
day, Ben, and all intrusted to me!’

‘It’s very gratifying, isn’t it?’ said Mr. Ben Allen, holding his plate
for some more minced veal.

‘Oh, very,’ replied Bob; ‘only not quite so much so as the confidence of
patients with a shilling or two to spare would be. This business was
capitally described in the advertisement, Ben. It is a practice, a very
extensive practice--and that’s all.’

‘Bob,’ said Mr. Ben Allen, laying down his knife and fork, and fixing
his eyes on the visage of his friend, ‘Bob, I’ll tell you what it is.’

‘What is it?’ inquired Mr. Bob Sawyer.

‘You must make yourself, with as little delay as possible, master of
Arabella’s one thousand pounds.’

‘Three per cent. consolidated bank annuities, now standing in her name
in the book or books of the governor and company of the Bank of
England,’ added Bob Sawyer, in legal phraseology.

‘Exactly so,’ said Ben. ‘She has it when she comes of age, or marries.
She wants a year of coming of age, and if you plucked up a spirit she
needn’t want a month of being married.’

‘She’s a very charming and delightful creature,’ quoth Mr. Robert
Sawyer, in reply; ‘and has only one fault that I know of, Ben. It
happens, unfortunately, that that single blemish is a want of taste. She
don’t like me.’

‘It’s my opinion that she don’t know what she does like,’ said Mr. Ben
Allen contemptuously.

‘Perhaps not,’ remarked Mr. Bob Sawyer. ‘But it’s my opinion that she
does know what she doesn’t like, and that’s of more importance.’

‘I wish,’ said Mr. Ben Allen, setting his teeth together, and speaking
more like a savage warrior who fed on raw wolf’s flesh which he carved
with his fingers, than a peaceable young gentleman who ate minced veal
with a knife and fork--‘I wish I knew whether any rascal really has been
tampering with her, and attempting to engage her affections. I think I
should assassinate him, Bob.’

‘I’d put a bullet in him, if I found him out,’ said Mr. Sawyer, stopping
in the course of a long draught of beer, and looking malignantly out of
the porter pot. ‘If that didn’t do his business, I’d extract it
afterwards, and kill him that way.’

Mr. Benjamin Allen gazed abstractedly on his friend for some minutes in
silence, and then said--

‘You have never proposed to her, point-blank, Bob?’

‘No. Because I saw it would be of no use,’ replied Mr. Robert Sawyer.

‘You shall do it, before you are twenty-four hours older,’ retorted Ben,
with desperate calmness. ‘She shall have you, or I’ll know the reason
why. I’ll exert my authority.’

‘Well,’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer, ‘we shall see.’

‘We shall see, my friend,’ replied Mr. Ben Allen fiercely. He paused for
a few seconds, and added in a voice broken by emotion, ‘You have loved
her from a child, my friend. You loved her when we were boys at school
together, and, even then, she was wayward and slighted your young
feelings. Do you recollect, with all the eagerness of a child’s love,
one day pressing upon her acceptance, two small caraway-seed biscuits
and one sweet apple, neatly folded into a circular parcel with the leaf
of a copy-book?’

‘I do,’ replied Bob Sawyer.

‘She slighted that, I think?’ said Ben Allen.

‘She did,’ rejoined Bob. ‘She said I had kept the parcel so long in the
pockets of my corduroys, that the apple was unpleasantly warm.’

‘I remember,’ said Mr. Allen gloomily. ‘Upon which we ate it ourselves,
in alternate bites.’

Bob Sawyer intimated his recollection of the circumstance last alluded
to, by a melancholy frown; and the two friends remained for some time
absorbed, each in his own meditations.

While these observations were being exchanged between Mr. Bob Sawyer and
Mr. Benjamin Allen; and while the boy in the gray livery, marvelling at
the unwonted prolongation of the dinner, cast an anxious look, from time
to time, towards the glass door, distracted by inward misgivings
regarding the amount of minced veal which would be ultimately reserved
for his individual cravings; there rolled soberly on through the streets
of Bristol, a private fly, painted of a sad green colour, drawn by a
chubby sort of brown horse, and driven by a surly-looking man with his
legs dressed like the legs of a groom, and his body attired in the coat
of a coachman. Such appearances are common to many vehicles belonging
to, and maintained by, old ladies of economic habits; and in this
vehicle sat an old lady who was its mistress and proprietor.

‘Martin!’ said the old lady, calling to the surly man, out of the front
window.

‘Well?’ said the surly man, touching his hat to the old lady.

‘Mr. Sawyer’s,’ said the old lady.

‘I was going there,’ said the surly man.

The old lady nodded the satisfaction which this proof of the surly man’s
foresight imparted to her feelings; and the surly man giving a smart
lash to the chubby horse, they all repaired to Mr. Bob Sawyer’s
together.

‘Martin!’ said the old lady, when the fly stopped at the door of Mr.
Robert Sawyer, late Nockemorf.

‘Well?’ said Martin.

‘Ask the lad to step out, and mind the horse.’

‘I’m going to mind the horse myself,’ said Martin, laying his whip on
the roof of the fly.

‘I can’t permit it, on any account,’ said the old lady; ‘your testimony
will be very important, and I must take you into the house with me. You
must not stir from my side during the whole interview. Do you hear?’

‘I hear,’ replied Martin.

‘Well; what are you stopping for?’

‘Nothing,’ replied Martin. So saying, the surly man leisurely descended
from the wheel, on which he had been poising himself on the tops of the
toes of his right foot, and having summoned the boy in the gray livery,
opened the coach door, flung down the steps, and thrusting in a hand
enveloped in a dark wash-leather glove, pulled out the old lady with as
much unconcern in his manner as if she were a bandbox.

‘Dear me!’ exclaimed the old lady. ‘I am so flurried, now I have got
here, Martin, that I’m all in a tremble.’

Mr. Martin coughed behind the dark wash-leather gloves, but expressed no
sympathy; so the old lady, composing herself, trotted up Mr. Bob
Sawyer’s steps, and Mr. Martin followed. Immediately on the old lady’s
entering the shop, Mr. Benjamin Allen and Mr. Bob Sawyer, who had been
putting the spirits-and-water out of sight, and upsetting nauseous drugs
to take off the smell of the tobacco smoke, issued hastily forth in a
transport of pleasure and affection.

‘My dear aunt,’ exclaimed Mr. Ben Allen, ‘how kind of you to look in
upon us! Mr. Sawyer, aunt; my friend Mr. Bob Sawyer whom I have spoken
to you about, regarding--you know, aunt.’ And here Mr. Ben Allen, who
was not at the moment extraordinarily sober, added the word ‘Arabella,’
in what was meant to be a whisper, but which was an especially audible
and distinct tone of speech which nobody could avoid hearing, if anybody
were so disposed.

‘My dear Benjamin,’ said the old lady, struggling with a great shortness
of breath, and trembling from head to foot, ‘don’t be alarmed, my dear,
but I think I had better speak to Mr. Sawyer, alone, for a moment. Only
for one moment.’

‘Bob,’ said Mr. Allen, ‘will you take my aunt into the surgery?’

‘Certainly,’ responded Bob, in a most professional voice. ‘Step this
way, my dear ma’am. Don’t be frightened, ma’am. We shall be able to set
you to rights in a very short time, I have no doubt, ma’am. Here, my
dear ma’am. Now then!’ With this, Mr. Bob Sawyer having handed the old
lady to a chair, shut the door, drew another chair close to her, and
waited to hear detailed the symptoms of some disorder from which he saw
in perspective a long train of profits and advantages.

The first thing the old lady did, was to shake her head a great many
times, and began to cry.

‘Nervous,’ said Bob Sawyer complacently. ‘Camphor-julep and water three
times a day, and composing draught at night.’

‘I don’t know how to begin, Mr. Sawyer,’ said the old lady. ‘It is so
very painful and distressing.’

‘You need not begin, ma’am,’ rejoined Mr. Bob Sawyer. ‘I can anticipate
all you would say. The head is in fault.’

‘I should be very sorry to think it was the heart,’ said the old lady,
with a slight groan.

‘Not the slightest danger of that, ma’am,’ replied Bob Sawyer. ‘The
stomach is the primary cause.’

‘Mr. Sawyer!’ exclaimed the old lady, starting.

‘Not the least doubt of it, ma’am,’ rejoined Bob, looking wondrous wise.
‘Medicine, in time, my dear ma’am, would have prevented it all.’

‘Mr. Sawyer,’ said the old lady, more flurried than before, ‘this
conduct is either great impertinence to one in my situation, Sir, or it
arises from your not understanding the object of my visit. If it had
been in the power of medicine, or any foresight I could have used, to
prevent what has occurred, I should certainly have done so. I had better
see my nephew at once,’ said the old lady, twirling her reticule
indignantly, and rising as she spoke.

‘Stop a moment, ma’am,’ said Bob Sawyer; ‘I’m afraid I have not
understood you. What _is_ the matter, ma’am?’

‘My niece, Mr. Sawyer,’ said the old lady: ‘your friend’s sister.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Bob, all impatience; for the old lady, although much
agitated, spoke with the most tantalising deliberation, as old ladies
often do. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Left my home, Mr. Sawyer, three days ago, on a pretended visit to my
sister, another aunt of hers, who keeps the large boarding-school, just
beyond the third mile-stone, where there is a very large laburnum-tree
and an oak gate,’ said the old lady, stopping in this place to dry her
eyes.

‘Oh, devil take the laburnum-tree, ma’am!’ said Bob, quite forgetting
his professional dignity in his anxiety. ‘Get on a little faster; put a
little more steam on, ma’am, pray.’

‘This morning,’ said the old lady slowly--‘this morning, she--’

‘She came back, ma’am, I suppose,’ said Bob, with great animation. ‘Did
she come back?’

‘No, she did not; she wrote,’ replied the old lady.

‘What did she say?’ inquired Bob eagerly.

‘She said, Mr. Sawyer,’ replied the old lady--‘and it is this I want to
prepare Benjamin’s mind for, gently and by degrees; she said that she
was--I have got the letter in my pocket, Mr. Sawyer, but my glasses are
in the carriage, and I should only waste your time if I attempted to
point out the passage to you, without them; she said, in short, Mr.
Sawyer, that she was married.’

What!’ said, or rather shouted, Mr. Bob Sawyer.

‘Married,’ repeated the old lady.

Mr. Bob Sawyer stopped to hear no more; but darting from the surgery
into the outer shop, cried in a stentorian voice, ‘Ben, my boy, she’s
bolted!’

Mr. Ben Allen, who had been slumbering behind the counter, with his head
half a foot or so below his knees, no sooner heard this appalling
communication, than he made a precipitate rush at Mr. Martin, and,
twisting his hand in the neck-cloth of that taciturn servitor, expressed
an obliging intention of choking him where he stood. This intention,
with a promptitude often the effect of desperation, he at once commenced
carrying into execution, with much vigour and surgical skill.

Mr. Martin, who was a man of few words and possessed but little power of
eloquence or persuasion, submitted to this operation with a very calm
and agreeable expression of countenance, for some seconds; finding,
however, that it threatened speedily to lead to a result which would
place it beyond his power to claim any wages, board or otherwise, in all
time to come, he muttered an inarticulate remonstrance and felled Mr.
Benjamin Allen to the ground. As that gentleman had his hands entangled
in his cravat, he had no alternative but to follow him to the floor.
There they both lay struggling, when the shop door opened, and the party
was increased by the arrival of two most unexpected visitors, to wit,
Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Samuel Weller.

The impression at once produced on Mr. Weller’s mind by what he saw,
was, that Mr. Martin was hired by the establishment of Sawyer, late
Nockemorf, to take strong medicine, or to go into fits and be
experimentalised upon, or to swallow poison now and then with the view
of testing the efficacy of some new antidotes, or to do something or
other to promote the great science of medicine, and gratify the ardent
spirit of inquiry burning in the bosoms of its two young professors. So,
without presuming to interfere, Sam stood perfectly still, and looked
on, as if he were mightily interested in the result of the then pending
experiment. Not so, Mr. Pickwick. He at once threw himself on the
astonished combatants, with his accustomed energy, and loudly called
upon the bystanders to interpose.

This roused Mr. Bob Sawyer, who had been hitherto quite paralysed by the
frenzy of his companion. With that gentleman’s assistance, Mr. Pickwick
raised Ben Allen to his feet. Mr. Martin finding himself alone on the
floor, got up, and looked about him.

‘Mr. Allen,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘what is the matter, Sir?’

‘Never mind, Sir!’ replied Mr. Allen, with haughty defiance.

‘What is it?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, looking at Bob Sawyer. ‘Is he
unwell?’

Before Bob could reply, Mr. Ben Allen seized Mr. Pickwick by the hand,
and murmured, in sorrowful accents, ‘My sister, my dear Sir; my sister.’

‘Oh, is that all!’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘We shall easily arrange that
matter, I hope. Your sister is safe and well, and I am here, my dear
Sir, to--’

‘Sorry to do anythin’ as may cause an interruption to such wery pleasant
proceedin’s, as the king said wen he dissolved the parliament,’
interposed Mr. Weller, who had been peeping through the glass door; ‘but
there’s another experiment here, sir. Here’s a wenerable old lady a--
lyin’ on the carpet waitin’ for dissection, or galwinism, or some other
rewivin’ and scientific inwention.’

‘I forgot,’ exclaimed Mr. Ben Allen. ‘It is my aunt.’

‘Dear me!’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Poor lady! Gently Sam, gently.’

‘Strange sitivation for one o’ the family,’ observed Sam Weller,
hoisting the aunt into a chair. ‘Now depitty sawbones, bring out the
wollatilly!’

The latter observation was addressed to the boy in gray, who, having
handed over the fly to the care of the street-keeper, had come back to
see what all the noise was about. Between the boy in gray, and Mr. Bob
Sawyer, and Mr. Benjamin Allen (who having frightened his aunt into a
fainting fit, was affectionately solicitous for her recovery) the old
lady was at length restored to consciousness; then Mr. Ben Allen,
turning with a puzzled countenance to Mr. Pickwick, asked him what he
was about to say, when he had been so alarmingly interrupted.

‘We are all friends here, I presume?’ said Mr. Pickwick, clearing his
voice, and looking towards the man of few words with the surly
countenance, who drove the fly with the chubby horse.

This reminded Mr. Bob Sawyer that the boy in gray was looking on, with
eyes wide open, and greedy ears. The incipient chemist having been
lifted up by his coat collar, and dropped outside the door, Bob Sawyer
assured Mr. Pickwick that he might speak without reserve.

‘Your sister, my dear Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, turning to Benjamin
Allen, ‘is in London; well and happy.’

‘Her happiness is no object to me, sir,’ said Benjamin Allen, with a
flourish of the hand.

‘Her husband _is_ an object to _me_, Sir,’ said Bob Sawyer. ‘He shall be
an object to me, sir, at twelve paces, and a pretty object I’ll make of
him, sir--a mean-spirited scoundrel!’ This, as it stood, was a very
pretty denunciation, and magnanimous withal; but Mr. Bob Sawyer rather
weakened its effect, by winding up with some general observations
concerning the punching of heads and knocking out of eyes, which were
commonplace by comparison.

‘Stay, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘before you apply those epithets to the
gentleman in question, consider, dispassionately, the extent of his
fault, and above all remember that he is a friend of mine.’

‘What!’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer. ‘His name!’ cried Ben Allen. ‘His name!’

‘Mr. Nathaniel Winkle,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

Mr. Benjamin Allen deliberately crushed his spectacles beneath the heel
of his boot, and having picked up the pieces, and put them into three
separate pockets, folded his arms, bit his lips, and looked in a
threatening manner at the bland features of Mr. Pickwick.

‘Then it’s you, is it, Sir, who have encouraged and brought about this
match?’ inquired Mr. Benjamin Allen at length.

‘And it’s this gentleman’s servant, I suppose,’ interrupted the old
lady, ‘who has been skulking about my house, and endeavouring to entrap
my servants to conspire against their mistress.--Martin!’

‘Well?’ said the surly man, coming forward.

‘Is that the young man you saw in the lane, whom you told me about, this
morning?’

Mr. Martin, who, as it has already appeared, was a man of few words,
looked at Sam Weller, nodded his head, and growled forth, ‘That’s the
man.’ Mr. Weller, who was never proud, gave a smile of friendly
recognition as his eyes encountered those of the surly groom, and
admitted in courteous terms, that he had ‘knowed him afore.’

‘And this is the faithful creature,’ exclaimed Mr. Ben Allen, ‘whom I
had nearly suffocated!--Mr. Pickwick, how dare you allow your fellow to
be employed in the abduction of my sister? I demand that you explain
this matter, sir.’

‘Explain it, sir!’ cried Bob Sawyer fiercely.

‘It’s a conspiracy,’ said Ben Allen.

‘A regular plant,’ added Mr. Bob Sawyer.

‘A disgraceful imposition,’ observed the old lady.

‘Nothing but a do,’ remarked Martin.

‘Pray hear me,’ urged Mr. Pickwick, as Mr. Ben Allen fell into a chair
that patients were bled in, and gave way to his pocket-handkerchief. ‘I
have rendered no assistance in this matter, beyond being present at one
interview between the young people which I could not prevent, and from
which I conceived my presence would remove any slight colouring of
impropriety that it might otherwise have had; this is the whole share I
have had in the transaction, and I had no suspicion that an immediate
marriage was even contemplated. Though, mind,’ added Mr. Pickwick,
hastily checking himself--‘mind, I do not say I should have prevented
it, if I had known that it was intended.’

‘You hear that, all of you; you hear that?’ said Mr. Benjamin Allen.

‘I hope they do,’ mildly observed Mr. Pickwick, looking round, ‘and,’
added that gentleman, his colour mounting as he spoke, ‘I hope they hear
this, Sir, also. That from what has been stated to me, sir, I assert
that you were by no means justified in attempting to force your sister’s
inclinations as you did, and that you should rather have endeavoured by
your kindness and forbearance to have supplied the place of other nearer
relations whom she had never known, from a child. As regards my young
friend, I must beg to add, that in every point of worldly advantage he
is, at least, on an equal footing with yourself, if not on a much better
one, and that unless I hear this question discussed with becoming temper
and moderation, I decline hearing any more said upon the subject.’

‘I wish to make a wery few remarks in addition to wot has been put
for’ard by the honourable gen’l’m’n as has jist give over,’ said Mr.
Weller, stepping forth, ‘wich is this here: a indiwidual in company has
called me a feller.’

‘That has nothing whatever to do with the matter, Sam,’ interposed Mr.
Pickwick. ‘Pray hold your tongue.’

‘I ain’t a-goin’ to say nothin’ on that ‘ere pint, sir,’ replied Sam,
‘but merely this here. P’raps that gen’l’m’n may think as there wos a
priory ‘tachment; but there worn’t nothin’ o’ the sort, for the young
lady said in the wery beginnin’ o’ the keepin’ company, that she
couldn’t abide him. Nobody’s cut him out, and it ‘ud ha’ been jist the
wery same for him if the young lady had never seen Mr. Vinkle. That’s
what I wished to say, sir, and I hope I’ve now made that ‘ere
gen’l’m’n’s mind easy.

A short pause followed these consolatory remarks of Mr. Weller. Then Mr.
Ben Allen rising from his chair, protested that he would never see
Arabella’s face again; while Mr. Bob Sawyer, despite Sam’s flattering
assurance, vowed dreadful vengeance on the happy bridegroom.

But, just when matters were at their height, and threatening to remain
so, Mr. Pickwick found a powerful assistant in the old lady, who,
evidently much struck by the mode in which he had advocated her niece’s
cause, ventured to approach Mr. Benjamin Allen with a few comforting
reflections, of which the chief were, that after all, perhaps, it was
well it was no worse; the least said the soonest mended, and upon her
word she did not know that it was so very bad after all; what was over
couldn’t be begun, and what couldn’t be cured must be endured; with
various other assurances of the like novel and strengthening
description. To all of these, Mr. Benjamin Allen replied that he meant
no disrespect to his aunt, or anybody there, but if it were all the same
to them, and they would allow him to have his own way, he would rather
have the pleasure of hating his sister till death, and after it.

At length, when this determination had been announced half a hundred
times, the old lady suddenly bridling up and looking very majestic,
wished to know what she had done that no respect was to be paid to her
years or station, and that she should be obliged to beg and pray, in
that way, of her own nephew, whom she remembered about five-and-twenty
years before he was born, and whom she had known, personally, when he
hadn’t a tooth in his head; to say nothing of her presence on the first
occasion of his having his hair cut, and assistance at numerous other
times and ceremonies during his babyhood, of sufficient importance to
found a claim upon his affection, obedience, and sympathies, for ever.

While the good lady was bestowing this objurgation on Mr. Ben Allen, Bob
Sawyer and Mr. Pickwick had retired in close conversation to the inner
room, where Mr. Sawyer was observed to apply himself several times to
the mouth of a black bottle, under the influence of which, his features
gradually assumed a cheerful and even jovial expression. And at last he
emerged from the room, bottle in hand, and, remarking that he was very
sorry to say he had been making a fool of himself, begged to propose the
health and happiness of Mr. and Mrs. Winkle, whose felicity, so far from
envying, he would be the first to congratulate them upon. Hearing this,
Mr. Ben Allen suddenly arose from his chair, and, seizing the black
bottle, drank the toast so heartily, that, the liquor being strong, he
became nearly as black in the face as the bottle. Finally, the black
bottle went round till it was empty, and there was so much shaking of
hands and interchanging of compliments, that even the metal-visaged Mr.
Martin condescended to smile.

‘And now,’ said Bob Sawyer, rubbing his hands, ‘we’ll have a jolly
night.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘that I must return to my inn. I have
not been accustomed to fatigue lately, and my journey has tired me
exceedingly.’

‘You’ll take some tea, Mr. Pickwick?’ said the old lady, with
irresistible sweetness.

‘Thank you, I would rather not,’ replied that gentleman. The truth is,
that the old lady’s evidently increasing admiration was Mr. Pickwick’s
principal inducement for going away. He thought of Mrs. Bardell; and
every glance of the old lady’s eyes threw him into a cold perspiration.

As Mr. Pickwick could by no means be prevailed upon to stay, it was
arranged at once, on his own proposition, that Mr. Benjamin Allen should
accompany him on his journey to the elder Mr. Winkle’s, and that the
coach should be at the door, at nine o’clock next morning. He then took
his leave, and, followed by Samuel Weller, repaired to the Bush. It is
worthy of remark, that Mr. Martin’s face was horribly convulsed as he
shook hands with Sam at parting, and that he gave vent to a smile and an
oath simultaneously; from which tokens it has been inferred by those who
were best acquainted with that gentleman’s peculiarities, that he
expressed himself much pleased with Mr. Weller’s society, and requested
the honour of his further acquaintance.

‘Shall I order a private room, Sir?’ inquired Sam, when they reached the
Bush.

‘Why, no, Sam,’ replied Mr. Pickwick; ‘as I dined in the coffee-room,
and shall go to bed soon, it is hardly worth while. See who there is in
the travellers’ room, Sam.’

Mr. Weller departed on his errand, and presently returned to say that
there was only a gentleman with one eye; and that he and the landlord
were drinking a bowl of bishop together.

‘I will join them,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘He’s a queer customer, the vun-eyed vun, sir,’ observed Mr. Weller, as
he led the way. ‘He’s a-gammonin’ that ‘ere landlord, he is, sir, till
he don’t rightly know wether he’s a-standing on the soles of his boots
or the crown of his hat.’

The individual to whom this observation referred, was sitting at the
upper end of the room when Mr. Pickwick entered, and was smoking a large
Dutch pipe, with his eye intently fixed on the round face of the
landlord; a jolly-looking old personage, to whom he had recently been
relating some tale of wonder, as was testified by sundry disjointed
exclamations of, ‘Well, I wouldn’t have believed it! The strangest thing
I ever heard! Couldn’t have supposed it possible!’ and other expressions
of astonishment which burst spontaneously from his lips, as he returned
the fixed gaze of the one-eyed man.

‘Servant, sir,’ said the one-eyed man to Mr. Pickwick. ‘Fine night,
sir.’

‘Very much so indeed,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, as the waiter placed a
small decanter of brandy, and some hot water before him.

While Mr. Pickwick was mixing his brandy-and-water, the one-eyed man
looked round at him earnestly, from time to time, and at length said--

‘I think I’ve seen you before.’

‘I don’t recollect you,’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick.

‘I dare say not,’ said the one-eyed man. ‘You didn’t know me, but I knew
two friends of yours that were stopping at the Peacock at Eatanswill, at
the time of the election.’

‘Oh, indeed!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes,’ rejoined the one-eyed man. ‘I mentioned a little circumstance to
them about a friend of mine of the name of Tom Smart. Perhaps you’ve
heard them speak of it.’

‘Often,’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick, smiling. ‘He was your uncle, I think?’

‘No, no; only a friend of my uncle’s,’ replied the one-eyed man.

‘He was a wonderful man, that uncle of yours, though,’ remarked the
landlord shaking his head.

‘Well, I think he was; I think I may say he was,’ answered the one-eyed
man. ‘I could tell you a story about that same uncle, gentlemen, that
would rather surprise you.’

‘Could you?’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Let us hear it, by all means.’

The one-eyed bagman ladled out a glass of negus from the bowl, and drank
it; smoked a long whiff out of the Dutch pipe; and then, calling to Sam
Weller who was lingering near the door, that he needn’t go away unless
he wanted to, because the story was no secret, fixed his eye upon the
landlord’s, and proceeded, in the words of the next chapter.



CHAPTER XLIX. CONTAINING THE STORY OF THE BAGMAN’S UNCLE

My uncle, gentlemen,’ said the bagman, ‘was one of the merriest,
pleasantest, cleverest fellows, that ever lived. I wish you had known
him, gentlemen. On second thoughts, gentlemen, I don’t wish you had
known him, for if you had, you would have been all, by this time, in the
ordinary course of nature, if not dead, at all events so near it, as to
have taken to stopping at home and giving up company, which would have
deprived me of the inestimable pleasure of addressing you at this
moment. Gentlemen, I wish your fathers and mothers had known my uncle.
They would have been amazingly fond of him, especially your respectable
mothers; I know they would. If any two of his numerous virtues
predominated over the many that adorned his character, I should say they
were his mixed punch and his after-supper song. Excuse my dwelling on
these melancholy recollections of departed worth; you won’t see a man
like my uncle every day in the week.

‘I have always considered it a great point in my uncle’s character,
gentlemen, that he was the intimate friend and companion of Tom Smart,
of the great house of Bilson and Slum, Cateaton Street, City. My uncle
collected for Tiggin and Welps, but for a long time he went pretty near
the same journey as Tom; and the very first night they met, my uncle
took a fancy for Tom, and Tom took a fancy for my uncle. They made a bet
of a new hat before they had known each other half an hour, who should
brew the best quart of punch and drink it the quickest. My uncle was
judged to have won the making, but Tom Smart beat him in the drinking by
about half a salt-spoonful. They took another quart apiece to drink each
other’s health in, and were staunch friends ever afterwards. There’s a
destiny in these things, gentlemen; we can’t help it.

‘In personal appearance, my uncle was a trifle shorter than the middle
size; he was a thought stouter too, than the ordinary run of people, and
perhaps his face might be a shade redder. He had the jolliest face you
ever saw, gentleman: something like Punch, with a handsome nose and
chin; his eyes were always twinkling and sparkling with good-humour; and
a smile--not one of your unmeaning wooden grins, but a real, merry,
hearty, good-tempered smile--was perpetually on his countenance. He was
pitched out of his gig once, and knocked, head first, against a
milestone. There he lay, stunned, and so cut about the face with some
gravel which had been heaped up alongside it, that, to use my uncle’s
own strong expression, if his mother could have revisited the earth, she
wouldn’t have known him. Indeed, when I come to think of the matter,
gentlemen, I feel pretty sure she wouldn’t, for she died when my uncle
was two years and seven months old, and I think it’s very likely that,
even without the gravel, his top-boots would have puzzled the good lady
not a little; to say nothing of his jolly red face. However, there he
lay, and I have heard my uncle say, many a time, that the man said who
picked him up that he was smiling as merrily as if he had tumbled out
for a treat, and that after they had bled him, the first faint
glimmerings of returning animation, were his jumping up in bed, bursting
out into a loud laugh, kissing the young woman who held the basin, and
demanding a mutton chop and a pickled walnut. He was very fond of
pickled walnuts, gentlemen. He said he always found that, taken without
vinegar, they relished the beer.

‘My uncle’s great journey was in the fall of the leaf, at which time he
collected debts, and took orders, in the north; going from London to
Edinburgh, from Edinburgh to Glasgow, from Glasgow back to Edinburgh,
and thence to London by the smack. You are to understand that his second
visit to Edinburgh was for his own pleasure. He used to go back for a
week, just to look up his old friends; and what with breakfasting with
this one, lunching with that, dining with the third, and supping with
another, a pretty tight week he used to make of it. I don’t know whether
any of you, gentlemen, ever partook of a real substantial hospitable
Scotch breakfast, and then went out to a slight lunch of a bushel of
oysters, a dozen or so of bottled ale, and a noggin or two of whiskey to
close up with. If you ever did, you will agree with me that it requires
a pretty strong head to go out to dinner and supper afterwards.

‘But bless your hearts and eyebrows, all this sort of thing was nothing
to my uncle! He was so well seasoned, that it was mere child’s play. I
have heard him say that he could see the Dundee people out, any day, and
walk home afterwards without staggering; and yet the Dundee people have
as strong heads and as strong punch, gentlemen, as you are likely to
meet with, between the poles. I have heard of a Glasgow man and a Dundee
man drinking against each other for fifteen hours at a sitting. They
were both suffocated, as nearly as could be ascertained, at the same
moment, but with this trifling exception, gentlemen, they were not a bit
the worse for it.

‘One night, within four-and-twenty hours of the time when he had settled
to take shipping for London, my uncle supped at the house of a very old
friend of his, a Bailie Mac something and four syllables after it, who
lived in the old town of Edinburgh. There were the bailie’s wife, and
the bailie’s three daughters, and the bailie’s grown-up son, and three
or four stout, bushy eye-browed, canny, old Scotch fellows, that the
bailie had got together to do honour to my uncle, and help to make
merry. It was a glorious supper. There was kippered salmon, and Finnan
haddocks, and a lamb’s head, and a haggis--a celebrated Scotch dish,
gentlemen, which my uncle used to say always looked to him, when it came
to table, very much like a Cupid’s stomach--and a great many other
things besides, that I forget the names of, but very good things,
notwithstanding. The lassies were pretty and agreeable; the bailie’s
wife was one of the best creatures that ever lived; and my uncle was in
thoroughly good cue. The consequence of which was, that the young ladies
tittered and giggled, and the old lady laughed out loud, and the bailie
and the other old fellows roared till they were red in the face, the
whole mortal time. I don’t quite recollect how many tumblers of whiskey-
toddy each man drank after supper; but this I know, that about one
o’clock in the morning, the bailie’s grown-up son became insensible
while attempting the first verse of “Willie brewed a peck o’ maut”; and
he having been, for half an hour before, the only other man visible
above the mahogany, it occurred to my uncle that it was almost time to
think about going, especially as drinking had set in at seven o’clock,
in order that he might get home at a decent hour. But, thinking it might
not be quite polite to go just then, my uncle voted himself into the
chair, mixed another glass, rose to propose his own health, addressed
himself in a neat and complimentary speech, and drank the toast with
great enthusiasm. Still nobody woke; so my uncle took a little drop
more--neat this time, to prevent the toddy from disagreeing with him--
and, laying violent hands on his hat, sallied forth into the street.

‘It was a wild, gusty night when my uncle closed the bailie’s door, and
settling his hat firmly on his head to prevent the wind from taking it,
thrust his hands into his pockets, and looking upward, took a short
survey of the state of the weather. The clouds were drifting over the
moon at their giddiest speed; at one time wholly obscuring her; at
another, suffering her to burst forth in full splendour and shed her
light on all the objects around; anon, driving over her again, with
increased velocity, and shrouding everything in darkness. “Really, this
won’t do,” said my uncle, addressing himself to the weather, as if he
felt himself personally offended. “This is not at all the kind of thing
for my voyage. It will not do at any price,” said my uncle, very
impressively. Having repeated this, several times, he recovered his
balance with some difficulty--for he was rather giddy with looking up
into the sky so long--and walked merrily on.

‘The bailie’s house was in the Canongate, and my uncle was going to the
other end of Leith Walk, rather better than a mile’s journey. On either
side of him, there shot up against the dark sky, tall, gaunt, straggling
houses, with time-stained fronts, and windows that seemed to have shared
the lot of eyes in mortals, and to have grown dim and sunken with age.
Six, seven, eight storey high, were the houses; storey piled upon
storey, as children build with cards--throwing their dark shadows over
the roughly paved road, and making the dark night darker. A few oil
lamps were scattered at long distances, but they only served to mark the
dirty entrance to some narrow close, or to show where a common stair
communicated, by steep and intricate windings, with the various flats
above. Glancing at all these things with the air of a man who had seen
them too often before, to think them worthy of much notice now, my uncle
walked up the middle of the street, with a thumb in each waistcoat
pocket, indulging from time to time in various snatches of song, chanted
forth with such good-will and spirit, that the quiet honest folk started
from their first sleep and lay trembling in bed till the sound died away
in the distance; when, satisfying themselves that it was only some
drunken ne’er-do-weel finding his way home, they covered themselves up
warm and fell asleep again.

‘I am particular in describing how my uncle walked up the middle of the
street, with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, gentlemen, because, as
he often used to say (and with great reason too) there is nothing at all
extraordinary in this story, unless you distinctly understand at the
beginning, that he was not by any means of a marvellous or romantic
turn.

‘Gentlemen, my uncle walked on with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets,
taking the middle of the street to himself, and singing, now a verse of
a love song, and then a verse of a drinking one, and when he was tired
of both, whistling melodiously, until he reached the North Bridge,
which, at this point, connects the old and new towns of Edinburgh. Here
he stopped for a minute, to look at the strange, irregular clusters of
lights piled one above the other, and twinkling afar off so high, that
they looked like stars, gleaming from the castle walls on the one side
and the Calton Hill on the other, as if they illuminated veritable
castles in the air; while the old picturesque town slept heavily on, in
gloom and darkness below: its palace and chapel of Holyrood, guarded day
and night, as a friend of my uncle’s used to say, by old Arthur’s Seat,
towering, surly and dark, like some gruff genius, over the ancient city
he has watched so long. I say, gentlemen, my uncle stopped here, for a
minute, to look about him; and then, paying a compliment to the weather,
which had a little cleared up, though the moon was sinking, walked on
again, as royally as before; keeping the middle of the road with great
dignity, and looking as if he would very much like to meet with somebody
who would dispute possession of it with him. There was nobody at all
disposed to contest the point, as it happened; and so, on he went, with
his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, like a lamb.

‘When my uncle reached the end of Leith Walk, he had to cross a pretty
large piece of waste ground which separated him from a short street
which he had to turn down to go direct to his lodging. Now, in this
piece of waste ground, there was, at that time, an enclosure belonging
to some wheelwright who contracted with the Post Office for the purchase
of old, worn-out mail coaches; and my uncle, being very fond of coaches,
old, young, or middle-aged, all at once took it into his head to step
out of his road for no other purpose than to peep between the palings at
these mails--about a dozen of which he remembered to have seen, crowded
together in a very forlorn and dismantled state, inside. My uncle was a
very enthusiastic, emphatic sort of person, gentlemen; so, finding that
he could not obtain a good peep between the palings he got over them,
and sitting himself quietly down on an old axle-tree, began to
contemplate the mail coaches with a deal of gravity.

‘There might be a dozen of them, or there might be more--my uncle was
never quite certain on this point, and being a man of very scrupulous
veracity about numbers, didn’t like to say--but there they stood, all
huddled together in the most desolate condition imaginable. The doors
had been torn from their hinges and removed; the linings had been
stripped off, only a shred hanging here and there by a rusty nail; the
lamps were gone, the poles had long since vanished, the ironwork was
rusty, the paint was worn away; the wind whistled through the chinks in
the bare woodwork; and the rain, which had collected on the roofs, fell,
drop by drop, into the insides with a hollow and melancholy sound. They
were the decaying skeletons of departed mails, and in that lonely place,
at that time of night, they looked chill and dismal.

‘My uncle rested his head upon his hands, and thought of the busy,
bustling people who had rattled about, years before, in the old coaches,
and were now as silent and changed; he thought of the numbers of people
to whom one of these crazy, mouldering vehicles had borne, night after
night, for many years, and through all weathers, the anxiously expected
intelligence, the eagerly looked-for remittance, the promised assurance
of health and safety, the sudden announcement of sickness and death. The
merchant, the lover, the wife, the widow, the mother, the school-boy,
the very child who tottered to the door at the postman’s knock--how had
they all looked forward to the arrival of the old coach. And where were
they all now?

‘Gentlemen, my uncle used to _say _that he thought all this at the time,
but I rather suspect he learned it out of some book afterwards, for he
distinctly stated that he fell into a kind of doze, as he sat on the old
axle-tree looking at the decayed mail coaches, and that he was suddenly
awakened by some deep church bell striking two. Now, my uncle was never
a fast thinker, and if he had thought all these things, I am quite
certain it would have taken him till full half-past two o’clock at the
very least. I am, therefore, decidedly of opinion, gentlemen, that my
uncle fell into a kind of doze, without having thought about anything at
all.

‘Be this as it may, a church bell struck two. My uncle woke, rubbed his
eyes, and jumped up in astonishment.

‘In one instant, after the clock struck two, the whole of this deserted
and quiet spot had become a scene of most extraordinary life and
animation. The mail coach doors were on their hinges, the lining was
replaced, the ironwork was as good as new, the paint was restored, the
lamps were alight; cushions and greatcoats were on every coach-box,
porters were thrusting parcels into every boot, guards were stowing away
letter-bags, hostlers were dashing pails of water against the renovated
wheels; numbers of men were pushing about, fixing poles into every
coach; passengers arrived, portmanteaus were handed up, horses were put
to; in short, it was perfectly clear that every mail there, was to be
off directly. Gentlemen, my uncle opened his eyes so wide at all this,
that, to the very last moment of his life, he used to wonder how it fell
out that he had ever been able to shut ‘em again.

‘“Now then!” said a voice, as my uncle felt a hand on his shoulder,
“you’re booked for one inside. You’d better get in.”

‘“I booked!” said my uncle, turning round.

‘“Yes, certainly.”

‘My uncle, gentlemen, could say nothing, he was so very much astonished.
The queerest thing of all was that although there was such a crowd of
persons, and although fresh faces were pouring in, every moment, there
was no telling where they came from. They seemed to start up, in some
strange manner, from the ground, or the air, and disappear in the same
way. When a porter had put his luggage in the coach, and received his
fare, he turned round and was gone; and before my uncle had well begun
to wonder what had become of him, half a dozen fresh ones started up,
and staggered along under the weight of parcels, which seemed big enough
to crush them. The passengers were all dressed so oddly too! Large,
broad-skirted laced coats, with great cuffs and no collars; and wigs,
gentlemen--great formal wigs with a tie behind. My uncle could make
nothing of it.


‘“Now, are you going to get in?” said the person who had addressed my
uncle before. He was dressed as a mail guard, with a wig on his head and
most enormous cuffs to his coat, and had a lantern in one hand, and a
huge blunderbuss in the other, which he was going to stow away in his
little arm-chest. “_are _you going to get in, Jack Martin?” said the
guard, holding the lantern to my uncle’s face.

‘“Hollo!” said my uncle, falling back a step or two. “That’s familiar!”

‘“It’s so on the way-bill,” said the guard.

‘“Isn’t there a ‘Mister’ before it?” said my uncle. For he felt,
gentlemen, that for a guard he didn’t know, to call him Jack Martin, was
a liberty which the Post Office wouldn’t have sanctioned if they had
known it.

‘“No, there is not,” rejoined the guard coolly.

‘“Is the fare paid?” inquired my uncle.

‘“Of course it is,” rejoined the guard.

‘“It is, is it?” said my uncle. “Then here goes! Which coach?”

‘“This,” said the guard, pointing to an old-fashioned Edinburgh and
London mail, which had the steps down and the door open. “Stop! Here are
the other passengers. Let them get in first.”

‘As the guard spoke, there all at once appeared, right in front of my
uncle, a young gentleman in a powdered wig, and a sky-blue coat trimmed
with silver, made very full and broad in the skirts, which were lined
with buckram. Tiggin and Welps were in the printed calico and waistcoat
piece line, gentlemen, so my uncle knew all the materials at once. He
wore knee breeches, and a kind of leggings rolled up over his silk
stockings, and shoes with buckles; he had ruffles at his wrists, a
three-cornered hat on his head, and a long taper sword by his side. The
flaps of his waist-coat came half-way down his thighs, and the ends of
his cravat reached to his waist. He stalked gravely to the coach door,
pulled off his hat, and held it above his head at arm’s length, cocking
his little finger in the air at the same time, as some affected people
do, when they take a cup of tea. Then he drew his feet together, and
made a low, grave bow, and then put out his left hand. My uncle was just
going to step forward, and shake it heartily, when he perceived that
these attentions were directed, not towards him, but to a young lady who
just then appeared at the foot of the steps, attired in an old-fashioned
green velvet dress with a long waist and stomacher. She had no bonnet on
her head, gentlemen, which was muffled in a black silk hood, but she
looked round for an instant as she prepared to get into the coach, and
such a beautiful face as she disclosed, my uncle had never seen--not
even in a picture. She got into the coach, holding up her dress with one
hand; and as my uncle always said with a round oath, when he told the
story, he wouldn’t have believed it possible that legs and feet could
have been brought to such a state of perfection unless he had seen them
with his own eyes.

‘But, in this one glimpse of the beautiful face, my uncle saw that the
young lady cast an imploring look upon him, and that she appeared
terrified and distressed. He noticed, too, that the young fellow in the
powdered wig, notwithstanding his show of gallantry, which was all very
fine and grand, clasped her tight by the wrist when she got in, and
followed himself immediately afterwards. An uncommonly ill-looking
fellow, in a close brown wig, and a plum-coloured suit, wearing a very
large sword, and boots up to his hips, belonged to the party; and when
he sat himself down next to the young lady, who shrank into a corner at
his approach, my uncle was confirmed in his original impression that
something dark and mysterious was going forward, or, as he always said
himself, that “there was a screw loose somewhere.” It’s quite surprising
how quickly he made up his mind to help the lady at any peril, if she
needed any help.

‘“Death and lightning!” exclaimed the young gentleman, laying his hand
upon his sword as my uncle entered the coach.

‘“Blood and thunder!” roared the other gentleman. With this, he whipped
his sword out, and made a lunge at my uncle without further ceremony. My
uncle had no weapon about him, but with great dexterity he snatched the
ill-looking gentleman’s three-cornered hat from his head, and, receiving
the point of his sword right through the crown, squeezed the sides
together, and held it tight.

‘“Pink him behind!” cried the ill-looking gentleman to his companion, as
he struggled to regain his sword.

‘“He had better not,” cried my uncle, displaying the heel of one of his
shoes, in a threatening manner. “I’ll kick his brains out, if he has
any--, or fracture his skull if he hasn’t.” Exerting all his strength,
at this moment, my uncle wrenched the ill-looking man’s sword from his
grasp, and flung it clean out of the coach window, upon which the
younger gentleman vociferated, “Death and lightning!” again, and laid
his hand upon the hilt of his sword, in a very fierce manner, but didn’t
draw it. Perhaps, gentlemen, as my uncle used to say with a smile,
perhaps he was afraid of alarming the lady.

‘“Now, gentlemen,” said my uncle, taking his seat deliberately, “I don’t
want to have any death, with or without lightning, in a lady’s presence,
and we have had quite blood and thundering enough for one journey; so,
if you please, we’ll sit in our places like quiet insides. Here, guard,
pick up that gentleman’s carving-knife.”

‘As quickly as my uncle said the words, the guard appeared at the coach
window, with the gentleman’s sword in his hand. He held up his lantern,
and looked earnestly in my uncle’s face, as he handed it in, when, by
its light, my uncle saw, to his great surprise, that an immense crowd of
mail-coach guards swarmed round the window, every one of whom had his
eyes earnestly fixed upon him too. He had never seen such a sea of white
faces, red bodies, and earnest eyes, in all his born days.

‘“This is the strangest sort of thing I ever had anything to do with,”
 thought my uncle; “allow me to return you your hat, sir.”

‘The ill-looking gentleman received his three-cornered hat in silence,
looked at the hole in the middle with an inquiring air, and finally
stuck it on the top of his wig with a solemnity the effect of which was
a trifle impaired by his sneezing violently at the moment, and jerking
it off again.

‘“All right!” cried the guard with the lantern, mounting into his little
seat behind. Away they went. My uncle peeped out of the coach window as
they emerged from the yard, and observed that the other mails, with
coachmen, guards, horses, and passengers, complete, were driving round
and round in circles, at a slow trot of about five miles an hour. My
uncle burned with indignation, gentlemen. As a commercial man, he felt
that the mail-bags were not to be trifled with, and he resolved to
memorialise the Post Office on the subject, the very instant he reached
London.

‘At present, however, his thoughts were occupied with the young lady who
sat in the farthest corner of the coach, with her face muffled closely
in her hood; the gentleman with the sky-blue coat sitting opposite to
her; the other man in the plum-coloured suit, by her side; and both
watching her intently. If she so much as rustled the folds of her hood,
he could hear the ill-looking man clap his hand upon his sword, and
could tell by the other’s breathing (it was so dark he couldn’t see his
face) that he was looking as big as if he were going to devour her at a
mouthful. This roused my uncle more and more, and he resolved, come what
might, to see the end of it. He had a great admiration for bright eyes,
and sweet faces, and pretty legs and feet; in short, he was fond of the
whole sex. It runs in our family, gentleman--so am I.

‘Many were the devices which my uncle practised, to attract the lady’s
attention, or at all events, to engage the mysterious gentlemen in
conversation. They were all in vain; the gentlemen wouldn’t talk, and
the lady didn’t dare. He thrust his head out of the coach window at
intervals, and bawled out to know why they didn’t go faster. But he
called till he was hoarse; nobody paid the least attention to him. He
leaned back in the coach, and thought of the beautiful face, and the
feet and legs. This answered better; it whiled away the time, and kept
him from wondering where he was going, and how it was that he found
himself in such an odd situation. Not that this would have worried him
much, anyway--he was a mighty free and easy, roving, devil-may-care sort
of person, was my uncle, gentlemen.

‘All of a sudden the coach stopped. “Hollo!” said my uncle, “what’s in
the wind now?”

‘“Alight here,” said the guard, letting down the steps.

‘“Here!” cried my uncle.

‘“Here,” rejoined the guard.

‘“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” said my uncle.

‘“Very well, then stop where you are,” said the guard.

‘“I will,” said my uncle.

‘“Do,” said the guard.

‘The passengers had regarded this colloquy with great attention, and,
finding that my uncle was determined not to alight, the younger man
squeezed past him, to hand the lady out. At this moment, the ill-looking
man was inspecting the hole in the crown of his three-cornered hat. As
the young lady brushed past, she dropped one of her gloves into my
uncle’s hand, and softly whispered, with her lips so close to his face
that he felt her warm breath on his nose, the single word “Help!”
 Gentlemen, my uncle leaped out of the coach at once, with such violence
that it rocked on the springs again.

‘“Oh! you’ve thought better of it, have you?” said the guard, when he
saw my uncle standing on the ground.

‘My uncle looked at the guard for a few seconds, in some doubt whether
it wouldn’t be better to wrench his blunderbuss from him, fire it in the
face of the man with the big sword, knock the rest of the company over
the head with the stock, snatch up the young lady, and go off in the
smoke. On second thoughts, however, he abandoned this plan, as being a
shade too melodramatic in the execution, and followed the two mysterious
men, who, keeping the lady between them, were now entering an old house
in front of which the coach had stopped. They turned into the passage,
and my uncle followed.

‘Of all the ruinous and desolate places my uncle had ever beheld, this
was the most so. It looked as if it had once been a large house of
entertainment; but the roof had fallen in, in many places, and the
stairs were steep, rugged, and broken. There was a huge fireplace in the
room into which they walked, and the chimney was blackened with smoke;
but no warm blaze lighted it up now. The white feathery dust of burned
wood was still strewed over the hearth, but the stove was cold, and all
was dark and gloomy.

‘“Well,” said my uncle, as he looked about him, “a mail travelling at
the rate of six miles and a half an hour, and stopping for an indefinite
time at such a hole as this, is rather an irregular sort of proceeding,
I fancy. This shall be made known. I’ll write to the papers.”

‘My uncle said this in a pretty loud voice, and in an open, unreserved
sort of manner, with the view of engaging the two strangers in
conversation if he could. But, neither of them took any more notice of
him than whispering to each other, and scowling at him as they did so.
The lady was at the farther end of the room, and once she ventured to
wave her hand, as if beseeching my uncle’s assistance.

‘At length the two strangers advanced a little, and the conversation
began in earnest.

‘“You don’t know this is a private room, I suppose, fellow?” said the
gentleman in sky-blue.

‘“No, I do not, fellow,” rejoined my uncle. “Only, if this is a private
room specially ordered for the occasion, I should think the public room
must be a _very _comfortable one;” with this, my uncle sat himself down
in a high-backed chair, and took such an accurate measure of the
gentleman, with his eyes, that Tiggin and Welps could have supplied him
with printed calico for a suit, and not an inch too much or too little,
from that estimate alone.

‘“Quit this room,” said both men together, grasping their swords.

‘“Eh?” said my uncle, not at all appearing to comprehend their meaning.

‘“Quit the room, or you are a dead man,” said the ill-looking fellow
with the large sword, drawing it at the same time and flourishing it in
the air.

‘“Down with him!” cried the gentleman in sky-blue, drawing his sword
also, and falling back two or three yards. “Down with him!” The lady
gave a loud scream.

‘Now, my uncle was always remarkable for great boldness, and great
presence of mind. All the time that he had appeared so indifferent to
what was going on, he had been looking slily about for some missile or
weapon of defence, and at the very instant when the swords were drawn,
he espied, standing in the chimney-corner, an old basket-hilted rapier
in a rusty scabbard. At one bound, my uncle caught it in his hand, drew
it, flourished it gallantly above his head, called aloud to the lady to
keep out of the way, hurled the chair at the man in sky-blue, and the
scabbard at the man in plum-colour, and taking advantage of the
confusion, fell upon them both, pell-mell.

‘Gentlemen, there is an old story--none the worse for being true--
regarding a fine young Irish gentleman, who being asked if he could play
the fiddle, replied he had no doubt he could, but he couldn’t exactly
say, for certain, because he had never tried. This is not inapplicable
to my uncle and his fencing. He had never had a sword in his hand
before, except once when he played Richard the Third at a private
theatre, upon which occasion it was arranged with Richmond that he was
to be run through, from behind, without showing fight at all. But here
he was, cutting and slashing with two experienced swordsman, thrusting,
and guarding, and poking, and slicing, and acquitting himself in the
most manful and dexterous manner possible, although up to that time he
had never been aware that he had the least notion of the science. It
only shows how true the old saying is, that a man never knows what he
can do till he tries, gentlemen.

‘The noise of the combat was terrific; each of the three combatants
swearing like troopers, and their swords clashing with as much noise as
if all the knives and steels in Newport market were rattling together,
at the same time. When it was at its very height, the lady (to encourage
my uncle most probably) withdrew her hood entirely from her face, and
disclosed a countenance of such dazzling beauty, that he would have
fought against fifty men, to win one smile from it and die. He had done
wonders before, but now he began to powder away like a raving mad giant.

‘At this very moment, the gentleman in sky-blue turning round, and
seeing the young lady with her face uncovered, vented an exclamation of
rage and jealousy, and, turning his weapon against her beautiful bosom,
pointed a thrust at her heart, which caused my uncle to utter a cry of
apprehension that made the building ring. The lady stepped lightly
aside, and snatching the young man’s sword from his hand, before he had
recovered his balance, drove him to the wall, and running it through
him, and the panelling, up to the very hilt, pinned him there, hard and
fast. It was a splendid example. My uncle, with a loud shout of triumph,
and a strength that was irresistible, made his adversary retreat in the
same direction, and plunging the old rapier into the very centre of a
large red flower in the pattern of his waistcoat, nailed him beside his
friend; there they both stood, gentlemen, jerking their arms and legs
about in agony, like the toy-shop figures that are moved by a piece of
pack-thread. My uncle always said, afterwards, that this was one of the
surest means he knew of, for disposing of an enemy; but it was liable to
one objection on the ground of expense, inasmuch as it involved the loss
of a sword for every man disabled.

‘“The mail, the mail!” cried the lady, running up to my uncle and
throwing her beautiful arms round his neck; “we may yet escape.”

‘“May!” cried my uncle; “why, my dear, there’s nobody else to kill, is
there?” My uncle was rather disappointed, gentlemen, for he thought a
little quiet bit of love-making would be agreeable after the
slaughtering, if it were only to change the subject.

‘“We have not an instant to lose here,” said the young lady. “He
(pointing to the young gentleman in sky-blue) is the only son of the
powerful Marquess of Filletoville.”

‘“Well then, my dear, I’m afraid he’ll never come to the title,” said my
uncle, looking coolly at the young gentleman as he stood fixed up
against the wall, in the cockchafer fashion that I have described. “You
have cut off the entail, my love.”

‘“I have been torn from my home and my friends by these villains,” said
the young lady, her features glowing with indignation. “That wretch
would have married me by violence in another hour.”

‘“Confound his impudence!” said my uncle, bestowing a very contemptuous
look on the dying heir of Filletoville.

‘“As you may guess from what you have seen,” said the young lady, “the
party were prepared to murder me if I appealed to any one for
assistance. If their accomplices find us here, we are lost. Two minutes
hence may be too late. The mail!” With these words, overpowered by her
feelings, and the exertion of sticking the young Marquess of
Filletoville, she sank into my uncle’s arms. My uncle caught her up, and
bore her to the house door. There stood the mail, with four long-tailed,
flowing-maned, black horses, ready harnessed; but no coachman, no guard,
no hostler even, at the horses’ heads.

‘Gentlemen, I hope I do no injustice to my uncle’s memory, when I
express my opinion, that although he was a bachelor, he had held some
ladies in his arms before this time; I believe, indeed, that he had
rather a habit of kissing barmaids; and I know, that in one or two
instances, he had been seen by credible witnesses, to hug a landlady in
a very perceptible manner. I mention the circumstance, to show what a
very uncommon sort of person this beautiful young lady must have been,
to have affected my uncle in the way she did; he used to say, that as
her long dark hair trailed over his arm, and her beautiful dark eyes
fixed themselves upon his face when she recovered, he felt so strange
and nervous that his legs trembled beneath him. But who can look in a
sweet, soft pair of dark eyes, without feeling queer? I can’t,
gentlemen. I am afraid to look at some eyes I know, and that’s the truth
of it.

‘“You will never leave me,” murmured the young lady.

‘“Never,” said my uncle. And he meant it too.

‘“My dear preserver!” exclaimed the young lady. “My dear, kind, brave
preserver!”

‘“Don’t,” said my uncle, interrupting her.

‘“‘Why?” inquired the young lady.

‘“Because your mouth looks so beautiful when you speak,” rejoined my
uncle, “that I’m afraid I shall be rude enough to kiss it.”

‘The young lady put up her hand as if to caution my uncle not to do so,
and said--No, she didn’t say anything--she smiled. When you are looking
at a pair of the most delicious lips in the world, and see them gently
break into a roguish smile--if you are very near them, and nobody else
by--you cannot better testify your admiration of their beautiful form
and colour than by kissing them at once. My uncle did so, and I honour
him for it.

‘“Hark!” cried the young lady, starting. “The noise of wheels, and
horses!”

‘“So it is,” said my uncle, listening. He had a good ear for wheels, and
the trampling of hoofs; but there appeared to be so many horses and
carriages rattling towards them, from a distance, that it was impossible
to form a guess at their number. The sound was like that of fifty
brakes, with six blood cattle in each.

‘“We are pursued!” cried the young lady, clasping her hands. “We are
pursued. I have no hope but in you!”

‘There was such an expression of terror in her beautiful face, that my
uncle made up his mind at once. He lifted her into the coach, told her
not to be frightened, pressed his lips to hers once more, and then
advising her to draw up the window to keep the cold air out, mounted to
the box.

‘“Stay, love,” cried the young lady.

‘“What’s the matter?” said my uncle, from the coach-box.

‘“I want to speak to you,” said the young lady; “only a word. Only one
word, dearest.”

‘“Must I get down?” inquired my uncle. The lady made no answer, but she
smiled again. Such a smile, gentlemen! It beat the other one, all to
nothing. My uncle descended from his perch in a twinkling.

‘“What is it, my dear?” said my uncle, looking in at the coach window.
The lady happened to bend forward at the same time, and my uncle thought
she looked more beautiful than she had done yet. He was very close to
her just then, gentlemen, so he really ought to know.

‘“What is it, my dear?” said my uncle.

‘“Will you never love any one but me--never marry any one beside?” said
the young lady.

‘My uncle swore a great oath that he never would marry anybody else, and
the young lady drew in her head, and pulled up the window. He jumped
upon the box, squared his elbows, adjusted the ribands, seized the whip
which lay on the roof, gave one flick to the off leader, and away went
the four long-tailed, flowing-maned black horses, at fifteen good
English miles an hour, with the old mail-coach behind them. Whew! How
they tore along!

‘The noise behind grew louder. The faster the old mail went, the faster
came the pursuers--men, horses, dogs, were leagued in the pursuit. The
noise was frightful, but, above all, rose the voice of the young lady,
urging my uncle on, and shrieking, “Faster! Faster!”

‘They whirled past the dark trees, as feathers would be swept before a
hurricane. Houses, gates, churches, haystacks, objects of every kind
they shot by, with a velocity and noise like roaring waters suddenly let
loose. But still the noise of pursuit grew louder, and still my uncle
could hear the young lady wildly screaming, “Faster! Faster!”

‘My uncle plied whip and rein, and the horses flew onward till they were
white with foam; and yet the noise behind increased; and yet the young
lady cried, “Faster! Faster!” My uncle gave a loud stamp on the boot in
the energy of the moment, and--found that it was gray morning, and he
was sitting in the wheelwright’s yard, on the box of an old Edinburgh
mail, shivering with the cold and wet and stamping his feet to warm
them! He got down, and looked eagerly inside for the beautiful young
lady. Alas! There was neither door nor seat to the coach. It was a mere
shell.

‘Of course, my uncle knew very well that there was some mystery in the
matter, and that everything had passed exactly as he used to relate it.
He remained staunch to the great oath he had sworn to the beautiful
young lady, refusing several eligible landladies on her account, and
dying a bachelor at last. He always said what a curious thing it was
that he should have found out, by such a mere accident as his clambering
over the palings, that the ghosts of mail-coaches and horses, guards,
coachmen, and passengers, were in the habit of making journeys regularly
every night. He used to add, that he believed he was the only living
person who had ever been taken as a passenger on one of these
excursions. And I think he was right, gentlemen--at least I never heard
of any other.’

‘I wonder what these ghosts of mail-coaches carry in their bags,’ said
the landlord, who had listened to the whole story with profound
attention.

‘The dead letters, of course,’ said the bagman.

‘Oh, ah! To be sure,’ rejoined the landlord. ‘I never thought of that.’



CHAPTER L. HOW MR. PICKWICK SPED UPON HIS MISSION, AND HOW HE WAS
REINFORCED IN THE OUTSET BY A MOST UNEXPECTED AUXILIARY

The horses were put to, punctually at a quarter before nine next
morning, and Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller having each taken his seat, the
one inside and the other out, the postillion was duly directed to repair
in the first instance to Mr. Bob Sawyer’s house, for the purpose of
taking up Mr. Benjamin Allen.

It was with feelings of no small astonishment, when the carriage drew up
before the door with the red lamp, and the very legible inscription of
‘Sawyer, late Nockemorf,’ that Mr. Pickwick saw, on popping his head out
of the coach window, the boy in the gray livery very busily employed in
putting up the shutters--the which, being an unusual and an
unbusinesslike proceeding at that hour of the morning, at once suggested
to his mind two inferences: the one, that some good friend and patient
of Mr. Bob Sawyer’s was dead; the other, that Mr. Bob Sawyer himself was
bankrupt.

‘What is the matter?’ said Mr. Pickwick to the boy.

‘Nothing’s the matter, Sir,’ replied the boy, expanding his mouth to the
whole breadth of his countenance.

‘All right, all right!’ cried Bob Sawyer, suddenly appearing at the
door, with a small leathern knapsack, limp and dirty, in one hand, and a
rough coat and shawl thrown over the other arm. ‘I’m going, old fellow.’

‘You!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes,’ replied Bob Sawyer, ‘and a regular expedition we’ll make of it.
Here, Sam! Look out!’ Thus briefly bespeaking Mr. Weller’s attention,
Mr. Bob Sawyer jerked the leathern knapsack into the dickey, where it
was immediately stowed away, under the seat, by Sam, who regarded the
proceeding with great admiration. This done, Mr. Bob Sawyer, with the
assistance of the boy, forcibly worked himself into the rough coat,
which was a few sizes too small for him, and then advancing to the coach
window, thrust in his head, and laughed boisterously.

‘What a start it is, isn’t it?’ cried Bob, wiping the tears out of his
eyes, with one of the cuffs of the rough coat.

‘My dear Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with some embarrassment, ‘I had no
idea of your accompanying us.’

‘No, that’s just the very thing,’ replied Bob, seizing Mr. Pickwick by
the lappel of his coat. ‘That’s the joke.’

‘Oh, that’s the joke, is it?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Of course,’ replied Bob. ‘It’s the whole point of the thing, you know--
that, and leaving the business to take care of itself, as it seems to
have made up its mind not to take care of me.’ With this explanation of
the phenomenon of the shutters, Mr. Bob Sawyer pointed to the shop, and
relapsed into an ecstasy of mirth.

‘Bless me, you are surely not mad enough to think of leaving your
patients without anybody to attend them!’ remonstrated Mr. Pickwick in a
very serious tone.

‘Why not?’ asked Bob, in reply. ‘I shall save by it, you know. None of
them ever pay. Besides,’ said Bob, lowering his voice to a confidential
whisper, ‘they will be all the better for it; for, being nearly out of
drugs, and not able to increase my account just now, I should have been
obliged to give them calomel all round, and it would have been certain
to have disagreed with some of them. So it’s all for the best.’

There was a philosophy and a strength of reasoning about this reply,
which Mr. Pickwick was not prepared for. He paused a few moments, and
added, less firmly than before--

‘But this chaise, my young friend, will only hold two; and I am pledged
to Mr. Allen.’

‘Don’t think of me for a minute,’ replied Bob. ‘I’ve arranged it all;
Sam and I will share the dickey between us. Look here. This little bill
is to be wafered on the shop door: “Sawyer, late Nockemorf. Inquire of
Mrs. Cripps over the way.” Mrs. Cripps is my boy’s mother. “Mr. Sawyer’s
very sorry,” says Mrs. Cripps, “couldn’t help it--fetched away early
this morning to a consultation of the very first surgeons in the
country--couldn’t do without him--would have him at any price--
tremendous operation.” The fact is,’ said Bob, in conclusion, ‘it’ll do
me more good than otherwise, I expect. If it gets into one of the local
papers, it will be the making of me. Here’s Ben; now then, jump in!’

With these hurried words, Mr. Bob Sawyer pushed the postboy on one side,
jerked his friend into the vehicle, slammed the door, put up the steps,
wafered the bill on the street door, locked it, put the key in his
pocket, jumped into the dickey, gave the word for starting, and did the
whole with such extraordinary precipitation, that before Mr. Pickwick
had well begun to consider whether Mr. Bob Sawyer ought to go or not,
they were rolling away, with Mr. Bob Sawyer thoroughly established as
part and parcel of the equipage.

So long as their progress was confined to the streets of Bristol, the
facetious Bob kept his professional green spectacles on, and conducted
himself with becoming steadiness and gravity of demeanour; merely giving
utterance to divers verbal witticisms for the exclusive behoof and
entertainment of Mr. Samuel Weller. But when they emerged on the open
road, he threw off his green spectacles and his gravity together, and
performed a great variety of practical jokes, which were calculated to
attract the attention of the passersby, and to render the carriage and
those it contained objects of more than ordinary curiosity; the least
conspicuous among these feats being a most vociferous imitation of a
key-bugle, and the ostentatious display of a crimson silk pocket-
handkerchief attached to a walking-stick, which was occasionally waved
in the air with various gestures indicative of supremacy and defiance.

‘I wonder,’ said Mr. Pickwick, stopping in the midst of a most sedate
conversation with Ben Allen, bearing reference to the numerous good
qualities of Mr. Winkle and his sister--‘I wonder what all the people we
pass, can see in us to make them stare so.’

‘It’s a neat turn-out,’ replied Ben Allen, with something of pride in
his tone. ‘They’re not used to see this sort of thing, every day, I dare
say.’

‘Possibly,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘It may be so. Perhaps it is.’

Mr. Pickwick might very probably have reasoned himself into the belief
that it really was, had he not, just then happening to look out of the
coach window, observed that the looks of the passengers betokened
anything but respectful astonishment, and that various telegraphic
communications appeared to be passing between them and some persons
outside the vehicle, whereupon it occurred to him that these
demonstrations might be, in some remote degree, referable to the
humorous deportment of Mr. Robert Sawyer.

‘I hope,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘that our volatile friend is committing no
absurdities in that dickey behind.’

‘Oh dear, no,’ replied Ben Allen. ‘Except when he’s elevated, Bob’s the
quietest creature breathing.’

Here a prolonged imitation of a key-bugle broke upon the ear, succeeded
by cheers and screams, all of which evidently proceeded from the throat
and lungs of the quietest creature breathing, or in plainer designation,
of Mr. Bob Sawyer himself.


Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Ben Allen looked expressively at each other, and
the former gentleman taking off his hat, and leaning out of the coach
window until nearly the whole of his waistcoat was outside it, was at
length enabled to catch a glimpse of his facetious friend.

Mr. Bob Sawyer was seated, not in the dickey, but on the roof of the
chaise, with his legs as far asunder as they would conveniently go,
wearing Mr. Samuel Weller’s hat on one side of his head, and bearing, in
one hand, a most enormous sandwich, while, in the other, he supported a
goodly-sized case-bottle, to both of which he applied himself with
intense relish, varying the monotony of the occupation by an occasional
howl, or the interchange of some lively badinage with any passing
stranger. The crimson flag was carefully tied in an erect position to
the rail of the dickey; and Mr. Samuel Weller, decorated with Bob
Sawyer’s hat, was seated in the centre thereof, discussing a twin
sandwich, with an animated countenance, the expression of which
betokened his entire and perfect approval of the whole arrangement.

This was enough to irritate a gentleman with Mr. Pickwick’s sense of
propriety, but it was not the whole extent of the aggravation, for a
stage-coach full, inside and out, was meeting them at the moment, and
the astonishment of the passengers was very palpably evinced. The
congratulations of an Irish family, too, who were keeping up with the
chaise, and begging all the time, were of rather a boisterous
description, especially those of its male head, who appeared to consider
the display as part and parcel of some political or other procession of
triumph.

‘Mr. Sawyer!’ cried Mr. Pickwick, in a state of great excitement, ‘Mr.
Sawyer, Sir!’

‘Hollo!’ responded that gentleman, looking over the side of the chaise
with all the coolness in life.

‘Are you mad, sir?’ demanded Mr. Pickwick.

‘Not a bit of it,’ replied Bob; ‘only cheerful.’

‘Cheerful, sir!’ ejaculated Mr. Pickwick. ‘Take down that scandalous red
handkerchief, I beg. I insist, Sir. Sam, take it down.’

Before Sam could interpose, Mr. Bob Sawyer gracefully struck his
colours, and having put them in his pocket, nodded in a courteous manner
to Mr. Pickwick, wiped the mouth of the case-bottle, and applied it to
his own, thereby informing him, without any unnecessary waste of words,
that he devoted that draught to wishing him all manner of happiness and
prosperity. Having done this, Bob replaced the cork with great care, and
looking benignantly down on Mr. Pickwick, took a large bite out of the
sandwich, and smiled.

‘Come,’ said Mr. Pickwick, whose momentary anger was not quite proof
against Bob’s immovable self-possession, ‘pray let us have no more of
this absurdity.’

‘No, no,’ replied Bob, once more exchanging hats with Mr. Weller; ‘I
didn’t mean to do it, only I got so enlivened with the ride that I
couldn’t help it.’

‘Think of the look of the thing,’ expostulated Mr. Pickwick; ‘have some
regard to appearances.’

‘Oh, certainly,’ said Bob, ‘it’s not the sort of thing at all. All over,
governor.’

Satisfied with this assurance, Mr. Pickwick once more drew his head into
the chaise and pulled up the glass; but he had scarcely resumed the
conversation which Mr. Bob Sawyer had interrupted, when he was somewhat
startled by the apparition of a small dark body, of an oblong form, on
the outside of the window, which gave sundry taps against it, as if
impatient of admission.

‘What’s this?’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘It looks like a case-bottle;’ remarked Ben Allen, eyeing the object in
question through his spectacles with some interest; ‘I rather think it
belongs to Bob.’

The impression was perfectly accurate; for Mr. Bob Sawyer, having
attached the case-bottle to the end of the walking-stick, was battering
the window with it, in token of his wish, that his friends inside would
partake of its contents, in all good-fellowship and harmony.

‘What’s to be done?’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking at the bottle. ‘This
proceeding is more absurd than the other.’

‘I think it would be best to take it in,’ replied Mr. Ben Allen; ‘it
would serve him right to take it in and keep it, wouldn’t it?’

‘It would,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘shall I?’

‘I think it the most proper course we could possibly adopt,’ replied
Ben.

This advice quite coinciding with his own opinion, Mr. Pickwick gently
let down the window and disengaged the bottle from the stick; upon which
the latter was drawn up, and Mr. Bob Sawyer was heard to laugh heartily.

‘What a merry dog it is!’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking round at his
companion, with the bottle in his hand.

‘He is,’ said Mr. Allen.

‘You cannot possibly be angry with him,’ remarked Mr. Pickwick.

‘Quite out of the question,’ observed Benjamin Allen.

During this short interchange of sentiments, Mr. Pickwick had, in an
abstracted mood, uncorked the bottle.

‘What is it?’ inquired Ben Allen carelessly.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, with equal carelessness. ‘It
smells, I think, like milk-punch.’

Oh, indeed?’ said Ben.

‘I _think _so,’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick, very properly guarding himself
against the possibility of stating an untruth; ‘mind, I could not
undertake to say certainly, without tasting it.’

‘You had better do so,’ said Ben; ‘we may as well know what it is.’

‘Do you think so?’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘Well; if you are curious to
know, of course I have no objection.’

Ever willing to sacrifice his own feelings to the wishes of his friend,
Mr. Pickwick at once took a pretty long taste.

‘What is it?’ inquired Ben Allen, interrupting him with some impatience.

‘Curious,’ said Mr. Pickwick, smacking his lips, ‘I hardly know, now.
Oh, yes!’ said Mr. Pickwick, after a second taste. ‘It _is_ punch.’

Mr. Ben Allen looked at Mr. Pickwick; Mr. Pickwick looked at Mr. Ben
Allen; Mr. Ben Allen smiled; Mr. Pickwick did not.

‘It would serve him right,’ said the last-named gentleman, with some
severity--‘it would serve him right to drink it every drop.’

‘The very thing that occurred to me,’ said Ben Allen.

‘Is it, indeed?’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick. ‘Then here’s his health!’ With
these words, that excellent person took a most energetic pull at the
bottle, and handed it to Ben Allen, who was not slow to imitate his
example. The smiles became mutual, and the milk-punch was gradually and
cheerfully disposed of.

‘After all,’ said Mr. Pickwick, as he drained the last drop, ‘his pranks
are really very amusing; very entertaining indeed.’

‘You may say that,’ rejoined Mr. Ben Allen. In proof of Bob Sawyer’s
being one of the funniest fellows alive, he proceeded to entertain Mr.
Pickwick with a long and circumstantial account how that gentleman once
drank himself into a fever and got his head shaved; the relation of
which pleasant and agreeable history was only stopped by the stoppage of
the chaise at the Bell at Berkeley Heath, to change horses.

‘I say! We’re going to dine here, aren’t we?’ said Bob, looking in at
the window.

‘Dine!’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Why, we have only come nineteen miles, and
have eighty-seven and a half to go.’

‘Just the reason why we should take something to enable us to bear up
against the fatigue,’ remonstrated Mr. Bob Sawyer.

‘Oh, it’s quite impossible to dine at half-past eleven o’clock in the
day,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, looking at his watch.

‘So it is,’ rejoined Bob, ‘lunch is the very thing. Hollo, you sir!
Lunch for three, directly; and keep the horses back for a quarter of an
hour. Tell them to put everything they have cold, on the table, and some
bottled ale, and let us taste your very best Madeira.’ Issuing these
orders with monstrous importance and bustle, Mr. Bob Sawyer at once
hurried into the house to superintend the arrangements; in less than
five minutes he returned and declared them to be excellent.

The quality of the lunch fully justified the eulogium which Bob had
pronounced, and very great justice was done to it, not only by that
gentleman, but Mr. Ben Allen and Mr. Pickwick also. Under the auspices
of the three, the bottled ale and the Madeira were promptly disposed of;
and when (the horses being once more put to) they resumed their seats,
with the case-bottle full of the best substitute for milk-punch that
could be procured on so short a notice, the key-bugle sounded, and the
red flag waved, without the slightest opposition on Mr. Pickwick’s part.

At the Hop Pole at Tewkesbury, they stopped to dine; upon which occasion
there was more bottled ale, with some more Madeira, and some port
besides; and here the case-bottle was replenished for the fourth time.
Under the influence of these combined stimulants, Mr. Pickwick and Mr.
Ben Allen fell fast asleep for thirty miles, while Bob and Mr. Weller
sang duets in the dickey.

It was quite dark when Mr. Pickwick roused himself sufficiently to look
out of the window. The straggling cottages by the road-side, the dingy
hue of every object visible, the murky atmosphere, the paths of cinders
and brick-dust, the deep-red glow of furnace fires in the distance, the
volumes of dense smoke issuing heavily forth from high toppling
chimneys, blackening and obscuring everything around; the glare of
distant lights, the ponderous wagons which toiled along the road, laden
with clashing rods of iron, or piled with heavy goods--all betokened
their rapid approach to the great working town of Birmingham.

As they rattled through the narrow thoroughfares leading to the heart of
the turmoil, the sights and sounds of earnest occupation struck more
forcibly on the senses. The streets were thronged with working people.
The hum of labour resounded from every house; lights gleamed from the
long casement windows in the attic storeys, and the whirl of wheels and
noise of machinery shook the trembling walls. The fires, whose lurid,
sullen light had been visible for miles, blazed fiercely up, in the
great works and factories of the town. The din of hammers, the rushing
of steam, and the dead heavy clanking of engines, was the harsh music
which arose from every quarter.

The postboy was driving briskly through the open streets, and past the
handsome and well-lighted shops that intervene between the outskirts of
the town and the Old Royal Hotel, before Mr. Pickwick had begun to
consider the very difficult and delicate nature of the commission which
had carried him thither.

The delicate nature of this commission, and the difficulty of executing
it in a satisfactory manner, were by no means lessened by the voluntary
companionship of Mr. Bob Sawyer. Truth to tell, Mr. Pickwick felt that
his presence on the occasion, however considerate and gratifying, was by
no means an honour he would willingly have sought; in fact, he would
cheerfully have given a reasonable sum of money to have had Mr. Bob
Sawyer removed to any place at not less than fifty miles’ distance,
without delay.

Mr. Pickwick had never held any personal communication with Mr. Winkle,
senior, although he had once or twice corresponded with him by letter,
and returned satisfactory answers to his inquiries concerning the moral
character and behaviour of his son; he felt nervously sensible that to
wait upon him, for the first time, attended by Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen,
both slightly fuddled, was not the most ingenious and likely means that
could have been hit upon to prepossess him in his favour.

‘However,’ said Mr. Pickwick, endeavouring to reassure himself, ‘I must
do the best I can. I must see him to-night, for I faithfully promised to
do so. If they persist in accompanying me, I must make the interview as
brief as possible, and be content that, for their own sakes, they will
not expose themselves.’

As he comforted himself with these reflections, the chaise stopped at
the door of the Old Royal. Ben Allen having been partially awakened from
a stupendous sleep, and dragged out by the collar by Mr. Samuel Weller,
Mr. Pickwick was enabled to alight. They were shown to a comfortable
apartment, and Mr. Pickwick at once propounded a question to the waiter
concerning the whereabout of Mr. Winkle’s residence.

‘Close by, Sir,’ said the waiter, ‘not above five hundred yards, Sir.
Mr. Winkle is a wharfinger, Sir, at the canal, sir. Private residence is
not--oh dear, no, sir, not five hundred yards, sir.’ Here the waiter
blew a candle out, and made a feint of lighting it again, in order to
afford Mr. Pickwick an opportunity of asking any further questions, if
he felt so disposed.

‘Take anything now, Sir?’ said the waiter, lighting the candle in
desperation at Mr. Pickwick’s silence. ‘Tea or coffee, Sir? Dinner,
sir?’

‘Nothing now.’

‘Very good, sir. Like to order supper, Sir?’

‘Not just now.’

‘Very good, Sir.’ Here, he walked slowly to the door, and then stopping
short, turned round and said, with great suavity--

‘Shall I send the chambermaid, gentlemen?’

‘You may if you please,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘If _you _please, sir.’

‘And bring some soda-water,’ said Bob Sawyer.

‘Soda-water, Sir! Yes, Sir.’ With his mind apparently relieved from an
overwhelming weight, by having at last got an order for something, the
waiter imperceptibly melted away. Waiters never walk or run. They have a
peculiar and mysterious power of skimming out of rooms, which other
mortals possess not.

Some slight symptoms of vitality having been awakened in Mr. Ben Allen
by the soda-water, he suffered himself to be prevailed upon to wash his
face and hands, and to submit to be brushed by Sam. Mr. Pickwick and Bob
Sawyer having also repaired the disorder which the journey had made in
their apparel, the three started forth, arm in arm, to Mr. Winkle’s; Bob
Sawyer impregnating the atmosphere with tobacco smoke as he walked
along.

About a quarter of a mile off, in a quiet, substantial-looking street,
stood an old red brick house with three steps before the door, and a
brass plate upon it, bearing, in fat Roman capitals, the words, ‘Mr.
Winkle.’ The steps were very white, and the bricks were very red, and
the house was very clean; and here stood Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Benjamin
Allen, and Mr. Bob Sawyer, as the clock struck ten.

A smart servant-girl answered the knock, and started on beholding the
three strangers.

‘Is Mr. Winkle at home, my dear?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘He is just going to supper, Sir,’ replied the girl.

‘Give him that card if you please,’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick. ‘Say I am
sorry to trouble him at so late an hour; but I am anxious to see him to-
night, and have only just arrived.’

The girl looked timidly at Mr. Bob Sawyer, who was expressing his
admiration of her personal charms by a variety of wonderful grimaces;
and casting an eye at the hats and greatcoats which hung in the passage,
called another girl to mind the door while she went upstairs. The
sentinel was speedily relieved; for the girl returned immediately, and
begging pardon of the gentlemen for leaving them in the street, ushered
them into a floor-clothed back parlour, half office and half dressing
room, in which the principal useful and ornamental articles of furniture
were a desk, a wash-hand stand and shaving-glass, a boot-rack and boot-
jack, a high stool, four chairs, a table, and an old eight-day clock.
Over the mantelpiece were the sunken doors of an iron safe, while a
couple of hanging shelves for books, an almanac, and several files of
dusty papers, decorated the walls.

‘Very sorry to leave you standing at the door, Sir,’ said the girl,
lighting a lamp, and addressing Mr. Pickwick with a winning smile, ‘but
you was quite strangers to me; and we have such a many trampers that
only come to see what they can lay their hands on, that really--’

‘There is not the least occasion for any apology, my dear,’ said Mr.
Pickwick good-humouredly.

‘Not the slightest, my love,’ said Bob Sawyer, playfully stretching
forth his arms, and skipping from side to side, as if to prevent the
young lady’s leaving the room.

The young lady was not at all softened by these allurements, for she at
once expressed her opinion, that Mr. Bob Sawyer was an ‘odous creetur;’
and, on his becoming rather more pressing in his attentions, imprinted
her fair fingers upon his face, and bounced out of the room with many
expressions of aversion and contempt.

Deprived of the young lady’s society, Mr. Bob Sawyer proceeded to divert
himself by peeping into the desk, looking into all the table drawers,
feigning to pick the lock of the iron safe, turning the almanac with its
face to the wall, trying on the boots of Mr. Winkle, senior, over his
own, and making several other humorous experiments upon the furniture,
all of which afforded Mr. Pickwick unspeakable horror and agony, and
yielded Mr. Bob Sawyer proportionate delight.

At length the door opened, and a little old gentleman in a snuff-
coloured suit, with a head and face the precise counterpart of those
belonging to Mr. Winkle, junior, excepting that he was rather bald,
trotted into the room with Mr. Pickwick’s card in one hand, and a silver
candlestick in the other.

‘Mr. Pickwick, sir, how do you do?’ said Winkle the elder, putting down
the candlestick and proffering his hand. ‘Hope I see you well, sir. Glad
to see you. Be seated, Mr. Pickwick, I beg, Sir. This gentleman is--’

‘My friend, Mr. Sawyer,’ interposed Mr. Pickwick, ‘your son’s friend.’

‘Oh,’ said Mr. Winkle the elder, looking rather grimly at Bob. ‘I hope
you are well, sir.’

‘Right as a trivet, sir,’ replied Bob Sawyer.

‘This other gentleman,’ cried Mr. Pickwick, ‘is, as you will see when
you have read the letter with which I am intrusted, a very near
relative, or I should rather say a very particular friend of your son’s.
His name is Allen.’

‘_That _gentleman?’ inquired Mr. Winkle, pointing with the card towards
Ben Allen, who had fallen asleep in an attitude which left nothing of
him visible but his spine and his coat collar.

Mr. Pickwick was on the point of replying to the question, and reciting
Mr. Benjamin Allen’s name and honourable distinctions at full length,
when the sprightly Mr. Bob Sawyer, with a view of rousing his friend to
a sense of his situation, inflicted a startling pinch upon the fleshly
part of his arm, which caused him to jump up with a shriek. Suddenly
aware that he was in the presence of a stranger, Mr. Ben Allen advanced
and, shaking Mr. Winkle most affectionately by both hands for about five
minutes, murmured, in some half-intelligible fragments of sentences, the
great delight he felt in seeing him, and a hospitable inquiry whether he
felt disposed to take anything after his walk, or would prefer waiting
‘till dinner-time;’ which done, he sat down and gazed about him with a
petrified stare, as if he had not the remotest idea where he was, which
indeed he had not.

All this was most embarrassing to Mr. Pickwick, the more especially as
Mr. Winkle, senior, evinced palpable astonishment at the eccentric--not
to say extraordinary--behaviour of his two companions. To bring the
matter to an issue at once, he drew a letter from his pocket, and
presenting it to Mr. Winkle, senior, said--

‘This letter, Sir, is from your son. You will see, by its contents, that
on your favourable and fatherly consideration of it, depend his future
happiness and welfare. Will you oblige me by giving it the calmest and
coolest perusal, and by discussing the subject afterwards with me, in
the tone and spirit in which alone it ought to be discussed? You may
judge of the importance of your decision to your son, and his intense
anxiety upon the subject, by my waiting upon you, without any previous
warning, at so late an hour; and,’ added Mr. Pickwick, glancing slightly
at his two companions--‘and under such unfavourable circumstances.’

With this prelude, Mr. Pickwick placed four closely-written sides of
extra superfine wire-wove penitence in the hands of the astounded Mr.
Winkle, senior. Then reseating himself in his chair, he watched his
looks and manner: anxiously, it is true, but with the open front of a
gentleman who feels he has taken no part which he need excuse or
palliate.

The old wharfinger turned the letter over, looked at the front, back,
and sides, made a microscopic examination of the fat little boy on the
seal, raised his eyes to Mr. Pickwick’s face, and then, seating himself
on the high stool, and drawing the lamp closer to him, broke the wax,
unfolded the epistle, and lifting it to the light, prepared to read.

Just at this moment, Mr. Bob Sawyer, whose wit had lain dormant for some
minutes, placed his hands on his knees, and made a face after the
portraits of the late Mr. Grimaldi, as clown. It so happened that Mr.
Winkle, senior, instead of being deeply engaged in reading the letter,
as Mr. Bob Sawyer thought, chanced to be looking over the top of it at
no less a person than Mr. Bob Sawyer himself; rightly conjecturing that
the face aforesaid was made in ridicule and derision of his own person,
he fixed his eyes on Bob with such expressive sternness, that the late
Mr. Grimaldi’s lineaments gradually resolved themselves into a very fine
expression of humility and confusion.

‘Did you speak, Sir?’ inquired Mr. Winkle, senior, after an awful
silence.

‘No, sir,’ replied Bob, With no remains of the clown about him, save and
except the extreme redness of his cheeks.

‘You are sure you did not, sir?’ said Mr. Winkle, senior.

‘Oh dear, yes, sir, quite,’ replied Bob.

‘I thought you did, Sir,’ replied the old gentleman, with indignant
emphasis. ‘Perhaps you _looked _at me, sir?’

‘Oh, no! sir, not at all,’ replied Bob, with extreme civility.

‘I am very glad to hear it, sir,’ said Mr. Winkle, senior. Having
frowned upon the abashed Bob with great magnificence, the old gentleman
again brought the letter to the light, and began to read it seriously.

Mr. Pickwick eyed him intently as he turned from the bottom line of the
first page to the top line of the second, and from the bottom of the
second to the top of the third, and from the bottom of the third to the
top of the fourth; but not the slightest alteration of countenance
afforded a clue to the feelings with which he received the announcement
of his son’s marriage, which Mr. Pickwick knew was in the very first
half-dozen lines.

He read the letter to the last word, folded it again with all the
carefulness and precision of a man of business, and, just when Mr.
Pickwick expected some great outbreak of feeling, dipped a pen in the
ink-stand, and said, as quietly as if he were speaking on the most
ordinary counting-house topic--

‘What is Nathaniel’s address, Mr. Pickwick?’

‘The George and Vulture, at present,’ replied that gentleman.

‘George and Vulture. Where is that?’

‘George Yard, Lombard Street.’

‘In the city?’

‘Yes.’

The old gentleman methodically indorsed the address on the back of the
letter; and then, placing it in the desk, which he locked, said, as he
got off the stool and put the bunch of keys in his pocket--

‘I suppose there is nothing else which need detain us, Mr. Pickwick?’

‘Nothing else, my dear Sir!’ observed that warm-hearted person in
indignant amazement. ‘Nothing else! Have you no opinion to express on
this momentous event in our young friend’s life? No assurance to convey
to him, through me, of the continuance of your affection and protection?
Nothing to say which will cheer and sustain him, and the anxious girl
who looks to him for comfort and support? My dear Sir, consider.’

‘I will consider,’ replied the old gentleman. ‘I have nothing to say
just now. I am a man of business, Mr. Pickwick. I never commit myself
hastily in any affair, and from what I see of this, I by no means like
the appearance of it. A thousand pounds is not much, Mr. Pickwick.’

‘You’re very right, Sir,’ interposed Ben Allen, just awake enough to
know that he had spent his thousand pounds without the smallest
difficulty. ‘You’re an intelligent man. Bob, he’s a very knowing fellow
this.’

‘I am very happy to find that you do me the justice to make the
admission, sir,’ said Mr. Winkle, senior, looking contemptuously at Ben
Allen, who was shaking his head profoundly. ‘The fact is, Mr. Pickwick,
that when I gave my son a roving license for a year or so, to see
something of men and manners (which he has done under your auspices), so
that he might not enter life a mere boarding-school milk-sop to be
gulled by everybody, I never bargained for this. He knows that very
well, so if I withdraw my countenance from him on this account, he has
no call to be surprised. He shall hear from me, Mr. Pickwick. Good-
night, sir.--Margaret, open the door.’

All this time, Bob Sawyer had been nudging Mr. Ben Allen to say
something on the right side; Ben accordingly now burst, without the
slightest preliminary notice, into a brief but impassioned piece of
eloquence.

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Ben Allen, staring at the old gentleman, out of a pair
of very dim and languid eyes, and working his right arm vehemently up
and down, ‘you--you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

‘As the lady’s brother, of course you are an excellent judge of the
question,’ retorted Mr. Winkle, senior. ‘There; that’s enough. Pray say
no more, Mr. Pickwick. Good-night, gentlemen!’

With these words the old gentleman took up the candle-stick and opening
the room door, politely motioned towards the passage.

‘You will regret this, Sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, setting his teeth close
together to keep down his choler; for he felt how important the effect
might prove to his young friend.

‘I am at present of a different opinion,’ calmly replied Mr. Winkle,
senior. ‘Once again, gentlemen, I wish you a good-night.’

Mr. Pickwick walked with angry strides into the street. Mr. Bob Sawyer,
completely quelled by the decision of the old gentleman’s manner, took
the same course. Mr. Ben Allen’s hat rolled down the steps immediately
afterwards, and Mr. Ben Allen’s body followed it directly. The whole
party went silent and supperless to bed; and Mr. Pickwick thought, just
before he fell asleep, that if he had known Mr. Winkle, senior, had been
quite so much of a man of business, it was extremely probable he might
never have waited upon him, on such an errand.



CHAPTER LI. IN WHICH MR. PICKWICK ENCOUNTERS AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE--TO
WHICH FORTUNATE CIRCUMSTANCE THE READER IS MAINLY INDEBTED FOR MATTER OF
THRILLING INTEREST HEREIN SET DOWN, CONCERNING TWO GREAT PUBLIC MEN OF
MIGHT AND POWER

The morning which broke upon Mr. Pickwick’s sight at eight o’clock, was
not at all calculated to elevate his spirits, or to lessen the
depression which the unlooked-for result of his embassy inspired. The
sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw, the streets were wet
and sloppy. The smoke hung sluggishly above the chimney-tops as if it
lacked the courage to rise, and the rain came slowly and doggedly down,
as if it had not even the spirit to pour. A game-cock in the stableyard,
deprived of every spark of his accustomed animation, balanced himself
dismally on one leg in a corner; a donkey, moping with drooping head
under the narrow roof of an outhouse, appeared from his meditative and
miserable countenance to be contemplating suicide. In the street,
umbrellas were the only things to be seen, and the clicking of pattens
and splashing of rain-drops were the only sounds to be heard.

The breakfast was interrupted by very little conversation; even Mr. Bob
Sawyer felt the influence of the weather, and the previous day’s
excitement. In his own expressive language he was ‘floored.’ So was Mr.
Ben Allen. So was Mr. Pickwick.

In protracted expectation of the weather clearing up, the last evening
paper from London was read and re-read with an intensity of interest
only known in cases of extreme destitution; every inch of the carpet was
walked over with similar perseverance; the windows were looked out of,
often enough to justify the imposition of an additional duty upon them;
all kinds of topics of conversation were started, and failed; and at
length Mr. Pickwick, when noon had arrived, without a change for the
better, rang the bell resolutely, and ordered out the chaise.

Although the roads were miry, and the drizzling rain came down harder
than it had done yet, and although the mud and wet splashed in at the
open windows of the carriage to such an extent that the discomfort was
almost as great to the pair of insides as to the pair of outsides, still
there was something in the motion, and the sense of being up and doing,
which was so infinitely superior to being pent in a dull room, looking
at the dull rain dripping into a dull street, that they all agreed, on
starting, that the change was a great improvement, and wondered how they
could possibly have delayed making it as long as they had done.

When they stopped to change at Coventry, the steam ascended from the
horses in such clouds as wholly to obscure the hostler, whose voice was
however heard to declare from the mist, that he expected the first gold
medal from the Humane Society on their next distribution of rewards, for
taking the postboy’s hat off; the water descending from the brim of
which, the invisible gentleman declared, must have drowned him (the
postboy), but for his great presence of mind in tearing it promptly from
his head, and drying the gasping man’s countenance with a wisp of straw.

‘This is pleasant,’ said Bob Sawyer, turning up his coat collar, and
pulling the shawl over his mouth to concentrate the fumes of a glass of
brandy just swallowed.

‘Wery,’ replied Sam composedly.

‘You don’t seem to mind it,’ observed Bob.

‘Vy, I don’t exactly see no good my mindin’ on it ‘ud do, sir,’ replied
Sam.

‘That’s an unanswerable reason, anyhow,’ said Bob.

‘Yes, sir,’ rejoined Mr. Weller. ‘Wotever is, is right, as the young
nobleman sweetly remarked wen they put him down in the pension list ‘cos
his mother’s uncle’s vife’s grandfather vunce lit the king’s pipe vith a
portable tinder-box.’

Not a bad notion that, Sam,’ said Mr. Bob Sawyer approvingly.

‘Just wot the young nobleman said ev’ry quarter-day arterwards for the
rest of his life,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘Wos you ever called in,’ inquired Sam, glancing at the driver, after a
short silence, and lowering his voice to a mysterious whisper--‘wos you
ever called in, when you wos ‘prentice to a sawbones, to wisit a
postboy.’

‘I don’t remember that I ever was,’ replied Bob Sawyer.

‘You never see a postboy in that ‘ere hospital as you _walked _(as they
says o’ the ghosts), did you?’ demanded Sam.

‘No,’ replied Bob Sawyer. ‘I don’t think I ever did.’

‘Never know’d a churchyard were there wos a postboy’s tombstone, or see
a dead postboy, did you?’ inquired Sam, pursuing his catechism.

‘No,’ rejoined Bob, ‘I never did.’

‘No!’ rejoined Sam triumphantly. ‘Nor never vill; and there’s another
thing that no man never see, and that’s a dead donkey. No man never see
a dead donkey ‘cept the gen’l’m’n in the black silk smalls as know’d the
young ‘ooman as kep’ a goat; and that wos a French donkey, so wery
likely he warn’t wun o’ the reg’lar breed.’

‘Well, what has that got to do with the postboys?’ asked Bob Sawyer.

‘This here,’ replied Sam. ‘Without goin’ so far as to as-sert, as some
wery sensible people do, that postboys and donkeys is both immortal, wot
I say is this: that wenever they feels theirselves gettin’ stiff and
past their work, they just rides off together, wun postboy to a pair in
the usual way; wot becomes on ‘em nobody knows, but it’s wery probable
as they starts avay to take their pleasure in some other vorld, for
there ain’t a man alive as ever see either a donkey or a postboy a-
takin’ his pleasure in this!’

Expatiating upon this learned and remarkable theory, and citing many
curious statistical and other facts in its support, Sam Weller beguiled
the time until they reached Dunchurch, where a dry postboy and fresh
horses were procured; the next stage was Daventry, and the next
Towcester; and at the end of each stage it rained harder than it had
done at the beginning.

‘I say,’ remonstrated Bob Sawyer, looking in at the coach window, as
they pulled up before the door of the Saracen’s Head, Towcester, ‘this
won’t do, you know.’

‘Bless me!’ said Mr. Pickwick, just awakening from a nap, ‘I’m afraid
you’re wet.’

‘Oh, you are, are you?’ returned Bob. ‘Yes, I am, a little that way,
Uncomfortably damp, perhaps.’

Bob did look dampish, inasmuch as the rain was streaming from his neck,
elbows, cuffs, skirts, and knees; and his whole apparel shone so with
the wet, that it might have been mistaken for a full suit of prepared
oilskin.

‘I _am_ rather wet,’ said Bob, giving himself a shake and casting a
little hydraulic shower around, like a Newfoundland dog just emerged
from the water.

‘I think it’s quite impossible to go on to-night,’ interposed Ben.

‘Out of the question, sir,’ remarked Sam Weller, coming to assist in the
conference; ‘it’s a cruelty to animals, sir, to ask ‘em to do it.
There’s beds here, sir,’ said Sam, addressing his master, ‘everything
clean and comfortable. Wery good little dinner, sir, they can get ready
in half an hour--pair of fowls, sir, and a weal cutlet; French beans,
‘taturs, tart, and tidiness. You’d better stop vere you are, sir, if I
might recommend. Take adwice, sir, as the doctor said.’

The host of the Saracen’s Head opportunely appeared at this moment, to
confirm Mr. Weller’s statement relative to the accommodations of the
establishment, and to back his entreaties with a variety of dismal
conjectures regarding the state of the roads, the doubt of fresh horses
being to be had at the next stage, the dead certainty of its raining all
night, the equally mortal certainty of its clearing up in the morning,
and other topics of inducement familiar to innkeepers.

‘Well,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘but I must send a letter to London by some
conveyance, so that it may be delivered the very first thing in the
morning, or I must go forwards at all hazards.’

The landlord smiled his delight. Nothing could be easier than for the
gentleman to inclose a letter in a sheet of brown paper, and send it on,
either by the mail or the night coach from Birmingham. If the gentleman
were particularly anxious to have it left as soon as possible, he might
write outside, ‘To be delivered immediately,’ which was sure to be
attended to; or ‘Pay the bearer half-a-crown extra for instant
delivery,’ which was surer still.

‘Very well,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘then we will stop here.’

‘Lights in the Sun, John; make up the fire; the gentlemen are wet!’
cried the landlord. ‘This way, gentlemen; don’t trouble yourselves about
the postboy now, sir. I’ll send him to you when you ring for him, sir.
Now, John, the candles.’

The candles were brought, the fire was stirred up, and a fresh log of
wood thrown on. In ten minutes’ time, a waiter was laying the cloth for
dinner, the curtains were drawn, the fire was blazing brightly, and
everything looked (as everything always does, in all decent English
inns) as if the travellers had been expected, and their comforts
prepared, for days beforehand.

Mr. Pickwick sat down at a side table, and hastily indited a note to Mr.
Winkle, merely informing him that he was detained by stress of weather,
but would certainly be in London next day; until when he deferred any
account of his proceedings. This note was hastily made into a parcel,
and despatched to the bar per Mr. Samuel Weller.

Sam left it with the landlady, and was returning to pull his master’s
boots off, after drying himself by the kitchen fire, when glancing
casually through a half-opened door, he was arrested by the sight of a
gentleman with a sandy head who had a large bundle of newspapers lying
on the table before him, and was perusing the leading article of one
with a settled sneer which curled up his nose and all other features
into a majestic expression of haughty contempt.

‘Hollo!’ said Sam, ‘I ought to know that ‘ere head and them features;
the eyeglass, too, and the broad-brimmed tile! Eatansvill to vit, or I’m
a Roman.’

Sam was taken with a troublesome cough, at once, for the purpose of
attracting the gentleman’s attention; the gentleman starting at the
sound, raised his head and his eyeglass, and disclosed to view the
profound and thoughtful features of Mr. Pott, of the Eatanswill
_Gazette_.

‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir,’ said Sam, advancing with a bow, ‘my master’s
here, Mr. Pott.’

‘Hush! hush!’ cried Pott, drawing Sam into the room, and closing the
door, with a countenance of mysterious dread and apprehension.

‘Wot’s the matter, Sir?’ inquired Sam, looking vacantly about him.

‘Not a whisper of my name,’ replied Pott; ‘this is a buff neighbourhood.
If the excited and irritable populace knew I was here, I should be torn
to pieces.’

‘No! Vould you, sir?’ inquired Sam.

‘I should be the victim of their fury,’ replied Pott. ‘Now young man,
what of your master?’

‘He’s a-stopping here to-night on his vay to town, with a couple of
friends,’ replied Sam.

‘Is Mr. Winkle one of them?’ inquired Pott, with a slight frown.

‘No, Sir. Mr. Vinkle stops at home now,’ rejoined Sam. ‘He’s married.’

‘Married!’ exclaimed Pott, with frightful vehemence. He stopped, smiled
darkly, and added, in a low, vindictive tone, ‘It serves him right!’

Having given vent to this cruel ebullition of deadly malice and cold-
blooded triumph over a fallen enemy, Mr. Pott inquired whether Mr.
Pickwick’s friends were ‘blue?’ Receiving a most satisfactory answer in
the affirmative from Sam, who knew as much about the matter as Pott
himself, he consented to accompany him to Mr. Pickwick’s room, where a
hearty welcome awaited him, and an agreement to club their dinners
together was at once made and ratified.

‘And how are matters going on in Eatanswill?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick,
when Pott had taken a seat near the fire, and the whole party had got
their wet boots off, and dry slippers on. ‘Is the _Independent_ still in
being?’

‘The _Independent_, sir,’ replied Pott, ‘is still dragging on a wretched
and lingering career. Abhorred and despised by even the few who are
cognisant of its miserable and disgraceful existence, stifled by the
very filth it so profusely scatters, rendered deaf and blind by the
exhalations of its own slime, the obscene journal, happily unconscious
of its degraded state, is rapidly sinking beneath that treacherous mud
which, while it seems to give it a firm standing with the low and
debased classes of society, is nevertheless rising above its detested
head, and will speedily engulf it for ever.’

Having delivered this manifesto (which formed a portion of his last
week’s leader) with vehement articulation, the editor paused to take
breath, and looked majestically at Bob Sawyer.

‘You are a young man, sir,’ said Pott.

Mr. Bob Sawyer nodded.

‘So are you, sir,’ said Pott, addressing Mr. Ben Allen.

Ben admitted the soft impeachment.

‘And are both deeply imbued with those blue principles, which, so long
as I live, I have pledged myself to the people of these kingdoms to
support and to maintain?’ suggested Pott.

‘Why, I don’t exactly know about that,’ replied Bob Sawyer. ‘I am--’

‘Not buff, Mr. Pickwick,’ interrupted Pott, drawing back his chair,
‘your friend is not buff, sir?’

‘No, no,’ rejoined Bob, ‘I’m a kind of plaid at present; a compound of
all sorts of colours.’

‘A waverer,’ said Pott solemnly, ‘a waverer. I should like to show you a
series of eight articles, Sir, that have appeared in the Eatanswill
_Gazette_. I think I may venture to say that you would not be long in
establishing your opinions on a firm and solid blue basis, sir.’

I dare say I should turn very blue, long before I got to the end of
them,’ responded Bob.

Mr. Pott looked dubiously at Bob Sawyer for some seconds, and, turning
to Mr. Pickwick, said--

‘You have seen the literary articles which have appeared at intervals in
the Eatanswill _Gazette_ in the course of the last three months, and
which have excited such general--I may say such universal--attention and
admiration?’

‘Why,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, slightly embarrassed by the question, ‘the
fact is, I have been so much engaged in other ways, that I really have
not had an opportunity of perusing them.’

‘You should do so, Sir,’ said Pott, with a severe countenance.

‘I will,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘They appeared in the form of a copious review of a work on Chinese
metaphysics, Sir,’ said Pott.

‘Oh,’ observed Mr. Pickwick; ‘from your pen, I hope?’

‘From the pen of my critic, Sir,’ rejoined Pott, with dignity.

‘An abstruse subject, I should conceive,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Very, Sir,’ responded Pott, looking intensely sage. ‘He _crammed _for
it, to use a technical but expressive term; he read up for the subject,
at my desire, in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica.”’

‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘I was not aware that that valuable work
contained any information respecting Chinese metaphysics.’

‘He read, Sir,’ rejoined Pott, laying his hand on Mr. Pickwick’s knee,
and looking round with a smile of intellectual superiority--‘he read for
metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and
combined his information, Sir!’

Mr. Pott’s features assumed so much additional grandeur at the
recollection of the power and research displayed in the learned
effusions in question, that some minutes elapsed before Mr. Pickwick
felt emboldened to renew the conversation; at length, as the editor’s
countenance gradually relaxed into its customary expression of moral
supremacy, he ventured to resume the discourse by asking--

‘Is it fair to inquire what great object has brought you so far from
home?’

‘That object which actuates and animates me in all my gigantic labours,
Sir,’ replied Pott, with a calm smile: ‘my country’s good.’

I supposed it was some public mission,’ observed Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes, Sir,’ resumed Pott, ‘it is.’ Here, bending towards Mr. Pickwick,
he whispered in a deep, hollow voice, ‘A Buff ball, Sir, will take place
in Birmingham to-morrow evening.’

‘God bless me!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes, Sir, and supper,’ added Pott.

‘You don’t say so!’ ejaculated Mr. Pickwick.

Pott nodded portentously.

Now, although Mr. Pickwick feigned to stand aghast at this disclosure,
he was so little versed in local politics that he was unable to form an
adequate comprehension of the importance of the dire conspiracy it
referred to; observing which, Mr. Pott, drawing forth the last number of
the Eatanswill _Gazette_, and referring to the same, delivered himself
of the following paragraph:--


HOLE-AND-CORNER BUFFERY.

‘A reptile contemporary has recently sweltered forth his black venom in
the vain and hopeless attempt of sullying the fair name of our
distinguished and excellent representative, the Honourable Mr. Slumkey--
that Slumkey whom we, long before he gained his present noble and
exalted position, predicted would one day be, as he now is, at once his
country’s brightest honour, and her proudest boast: alike her bold
defender and her honest pride--our reptile contemporary, we say, has
made himself merry, at the expense of a superbly embossed plated coal-
scuttle, which has been presented to that glorious man by his enraptured
constituents, and towards the purchase of which, the nameless wretch
insinuates, the Honourable Mr. Slumkey himself contributed, through a
confidential friend of his butler’s, more than three-fourths of the
whole sum subscribed. Why, does not the crawling creature see, that even
if this be the fact, the Honourable Mr. Slumkey only appears in a still
more amiable and radiant light than before, if that be possible? Does
not even his obtuseness perceive that this amiable and touching desire
to carry out the wishes of the constituent body, must for ever endear
him to the hearts and souls of such of his fellow townsmen as are not
worse than swine; or, in other words, who are not as debased as our
contemporary himself? But such is the wretched trickery of hole-and-
corner Buffery! These are not its only artifices. Treason is abroad. We
boldly state, now that we are goaded to the disclosure, and we throw
ourselves on the country and its constables for protection--we boldly
state that secret preparations are at this moment in progress for a Buff
ball; which is to be held in a Buff town, in the very heart and centre
of a Buff population; which is to be conducted by a Buff master of the
ceremonies; which is to be attended by four ultra Buff members of
Parliament, and the admission to which, is to be by Buff tickets! Does
our fiendish contemporary wince? Let him writhe, in impotent malice, as
we pen the words, _We will be there_.’

‘There, Sir,’ said Pott, folding up the paper quite exhausted, ‘that is
the state of the case!’

The landlord and waiter entering at the moment with dinner, caused Mr.
Pott to lay his finger on his lips, in token that he considered his life
in Mr. Pickwick’s hands, and depended on his secrecy. Messrs. Bob Sawyer
and Benjamin Allen, who had irreverently fallen asleep during the
reading of the quotation from the Eatanswill _Gazette_, and the
discussion which followed it, were roused by the mere whispering of the
talismanic word ‘Dinner’ in their ears; and to dinner they went with
good digestion waiting on appetite, and health on both, and a waiter on
all three.

In the course of the dinner and the sitting which succeeded it, Mr. Pott
descending, for a few moments, to domestic topics, informed Mr. Pickwick
that the air of Eatanswill not agreeing with his lady, she was then
engaged in making a tour of different fashionable watering-places with a
view to the recovery of her wonted health and spirits; this was a
delicate veiling of the fact that Mrs. Pott, acting upon her often-
repeated threat of separation, had, in virtue of an arrangement
negotiated by her brother, the lieutenant, and concluded by Mr. Pott,
permanently retired with the faithful bodyguard upon one moiety or half
part of the annual income and profits arising from the editorship and
sale of the Eatanswill _Gazette_.

While the great Mr. Pott was dwelling upon this and other matters,
enlivening the conversation from time to time with various extracts from
his own lucubrations, a stern stranger, calling from the window of a
stage-coach, outward bound, which halted at the inn to deliver packages,
requested to know whether if he stopped short on his journey and
remained there for the night, he could be furnished with the necessary
accommodation of a bed and bedstead.

‘Certainly, sir,’ replied the landlord.

‘I can, can I?’ inquired the stranger, who seemed habitually suspicious
in look and manner.

‘No doubt of it, Sir,’ replied the landlord.

‘Good,’ said the stranger. ‘Coachman, I get down here. Guard, my carpet-
bag!’

Bidding the other passengers good-night, in a rather snappish manner,
the stranger alighted. He was a shortish gentleman, with very stiff
black hair cut in the porcupine or blacking-brush style, and standing
stiff and straight all over his head; his aspect was pompous and
threatening; his manner was peremptory; his eyes were sharp and
restless; and his whole bearing bespoke a feeling of great confidence in
himself, and a consciousness of immeasurable superiority over all other
people.

This gentleman was shown into the room originally assigned to the
patriotic Mr. Pott; and the waiter remarked, in dumb astonishment at the
singular coincidence, that he had no sooner lighted the candles than the
gentleman, diving into his hat, drew forth a newspaper, and began to
read it with the very same expression of indignant scorn, which, upon
the majestic features of Pott, had paralysed his energies an hour
before. The man observed too, that, whereas Mr. Pott’s scorn had been
roused by a newspaper headed the Eatanswill _Independent_, this
gentleman’s withering contempt was awakened by a newspaper entitled the
Eatanswill _Gazette_.

‘Send the landlord,’ said the stranger.

‘Yes, sir,’ rejoined the waiter.

The landlord was sent, and came.

‘Are you the landlord?’ inquired the gentleman.

‘I am sir,’ replied the landlord.

‘Do you know me?’ demanded the gentleman.

‘I have not had that pleasure, Sir,’ rejoined the landlord.

‘My name is Slurk,’ said the gentleman.

The landlord slightly inclined his head.

‘Slurk, sir,’ repeated the gentleman haughtily. ‘Do you know me now,
man?’

The landlord scratched his head, looked at the ceiling, and at the
stranger, and smiled feebly.

‘Do you know me, man?’ inquired the stranger angrily.

The landlord made a strong effort, and at length replied, ‘Well, Sir, I
do _not_ know you.’

‘Great Heaven!’ said the stranger, dashing his clenched fist upon the
table. ‘And this is popularity!’

The landlord took a step or two towards the door; the stranger fixing
his eyes upon him, resumed.

‘This,’ said the stranger--‘this is gratitude for years of labour and
study in behalf of the masses. I alight wet and weary; no enthusiastic
crowds press forward to greet their champion; the church bells are
silent; the very name elicits no responsive feeling in their torpid
bosoms. It is enough,’ said the agitated Mr. Slurk, pacing to and fro,
‘to curdle the ink in one’s pen, and induce one to abandon their cause
for ever.’

‘Did you say brandy-and-water, Sir?’ said the landlord, venturing a
hint.

‘Rum,’ said Mr. Slurk, turning fiercely upon him. ‘Have you got a fire
anywhere?’

‘We can light one directly, Sir,’ said the landlord.

‘Which will throw out no heat until it is bed-time,’ interrupted Mr.
Slurk. ‘Is there anybody in the kitchen?’

Not a soul. There was a beautiful fire. Everybody had gone, and the
house door was closed for the night.

‘I will drink my rum-and-water,’ said Mr. Slurk, ‘by the kitchen fire.’
So, gathering up his hat and newspaper, he stalked solemnly behind the
landlord to that humble apartment, and throwing himself on a settle by
the fireside, resumed his countenance of scorn, and began to read and
drink in silent dignity.

Now, some demon of discord, flying over the Saracen’s Head at that
moment, on casting down his eyes in mere idle curiosity, happened to
behold Slurk established comfortably by the kitchen fire, and Pott
slightly elevated with wine in another room; upon which the malicious
demon, darting down into the last-mentioned apartment with inconceivable
rapidity, passed at once into the head of Mr. Bob Sawyer, and prompted
him for his (the demon’s) own evil purpose to speak as follows:--

‘I say, we’ve let the fire out. It’s uncommonly cold after the rain,
isn’t it?’

‘It really is,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, shivering.

‘It wouldn’t be a bad notion to have a cigar by the kitchen fire, would
it?’ said Bob Sawyer, still prompted by the demon aforesaid.

‘It would be particularly comfortable, I think,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.
‘Mr. Pott, what do you say?’

Mr. Pott yielded a ready assent; and all four travellers, each with his
glass in his hand, at once betook themselves to the kitchen, with Sam
Weller heading the procession to show them the way.

The stranger was still reading; he looked up and started. Mr. Pott
started.

‘What’s the matter?’ whispered Mr. Pickwick.

‘That reptile!’ replied Pott.

‘What reptile?’ said Mr. Pickwick, looking about him for fear he should
tread on some overgrown black beetle, or dropsical spider.

‘That reptile,’ whispered Pott, catching Mr. Pickwick by the arm, and
pointing towards the stranger. ‘That reptile Slurk, of the
_Independent_!’

‘Perhaps we had better retire,’ whispered Mr. Pickwick.

‘Never, Sir,’ rejoined Pott, pot-valiant in a double sense--‘never.’
With these words, Mr. Pott took up his position on an opposite settle,
and selecting one from a little bundle of newspapers, began to read
against his enemy.

Mr. Pott, of course read the _Independent_, and Mr. Slurk, of course,
read the _Gazette_; and each gentleman audibly expressed his contempt at
the other’s compositions by bitter laughs and sarcastic sniffs; whence
they proceeded to more open expressions of opinion, such as ‘absurd,’
‘wretched,’ ‘atrocity,’ ‘humbug,’ ‘knavery’, ‘dirt,’ ‘filth,’ ‘slime,’
‘ditch-water,’ and other critical remarks of the like nature.

Both Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Ben Allen had beheld these symptoms of
rivalry and hatred, with a degree of delight which imparted great
additional relish to the cigars at which they were puffing most
vigorously. The moment they began to flag, the mischievous Mr. Bob
Sawyer, addressing Slurk with great politeness, said--

‘Will you allow me to look at your paper, Sir, when you have quite done
with it?’

‘You will find very little to repay you for your trouble in this
contemptible _thing_, sir,’ replied Slurk, bestowing a Satanic frown on
Pott.

‘You shall have this presently,’ said Pott, looking up, pale with rage,
and quivering in his speech, from the same cause. ‘Ha! ha! you will be
amused with this _fellow’s_ audacity.’

Terrible emphasis was laid upon ‘thing’ and ‘fellow’; and the faces of
both editors began to glow with defiance.

‘The ribaldry of this miserable man is despicably disgusting,’ said
Pott, pretending to address Bob Sawyer, and scowling upon Slurk.

Here, Mr. Slurk laughed very heartily, and folding up the paper so as to
get at a fresh column conveniently, said, that the blockhead really
amused him.

‘What an impudent blunderer this fellow is,’ said Pott, turning from
pink to crimson.

‘Did you ever read any of this man’s foolery, Sir?’ inquired Slurk of
Bob Sawyer.

‘Never,’ replied Bob; ‘is it very bad?’

‘Oh, shocking! shocking!’ rejoined Slurk.

‘Really! Dear me, this is too atrocious!’ exclaimed Pott, at this
juncture; still feigning to be absorbed in his reading.

‘If you can wade through a few sentences of malice, meanness, falsehood,
perjury, treachery, and cant,’ said Slurk, handing the paper to Bob,
‘you will, perhaps, be somewhat repaid by a laugh at the style of this
ungrammatical twaddler.’

‘What’s that you said, Sir?’ inquired Mr. Pott, looking up, trembling
all over with passion.

‘What’s that to you, sir?’ replied Slurk.

‘Ungrammatical twaddler, was it, sir?’ said Pott.

‘Yes, sir, it was,’ replied Slurk; ‘and _blue bore_, Sir, if you like
that better; ha! ha!’

Mr. Pott retorted not a word at this jocose insult, but deliberately
folded up his copy of the _Independent_, flattened it carefully down,
crushed it beneath his boot, spat upon it with great ceremony, and flung
it into the fire.

‘There, sir,’ said Pott, retreating from the stove, ‘and that’s the way
I would serve the viper who produces it, if I were not, fortunately for
him, restrained by the laws of my country.’

‘Serve him so, sir!’ cried Slurk, starting up. ‘Those laws shall never
be appealed to by him, sir, in such a case. Serve him so, sir!’

‘Hear! hear!’ said Bob Sawyer.

‘Nothing can be fairer,’ observed Mr. Ben Allen.

‘Serve him so, sir!’ reiterated Slurk, in a loud voice.

Mr. Pott darted a look of contempt, which might have withered an anchor.

‘Serve him so, sir!’ reiterated Slurk, in a louder voice than before.

‘I will not, sir,’ rejoined Pott.

‘Oh, you won’t, won’t you, sir?’ said Mr. Slurk, in a taunting manner;
‘you hear this, gentlemen! He won’t; not that he’s afraid--, oh, no! he
_won’t_. Ha! ha!’

‘I consider you, sir,’ said Mr. Pott, moved by this sarcasm, ‘I consider
you a viper. I look upon you, sir, as a man who has placed himself
beyond the pale of society, by his most audacious, disgraceful, and
abominable public conduct. I view you, sir, personally and politically,
in no other light than as a most unparalleled and unmitigated viper.’

The indignant Independent did not wait to hear the end of this personal
denunciation; for, catching up his carpet-bag, which was well stuffed
with movables, he swung it in the air as Pott turned away, and, letting
it fall with a circular sweep on his head, just at that particular angle
of the bag where a good thick hairbrush happened to be packed, caused a
sharp crash to be heard throughout the kitchen, and brought him at once
to the ground.


‘Gentlemen,’ cried Mr. Pickwick, as Pott started up and seized the fire-
shovel--‘gentlemen! Consider, for Heaven’s sake--help--Sam--here--pray,
gentlemen--interfere, somebody.’

Uttering these incoherent exclamations, Mr. Pickwick rushed between the
infuriated combatants just in time to receive the carpet-bag on one side
of his body, and the fire-shovel on the other. Whether the
representatives of the public feeling of Eatanswill were blinded by
animosity, or (being both acute reasoners) saw the advantage of having a
third party between them to bear all the blows, certain it is that they
paid not the slightest attention to Mr. Pickwick, but defying each other
with great spirit, plied the carpet-bag and the fire-shovel most
fearlessly. Mr. Pickwick would unquestionably have suffered severely for
his humane interference, if Mr. Weller, attracted by his master’s cries,
had not rushed in at the moment, and, snatching up a meal-sack,
effectually stopped the conflict by drawing it over the head and
shoulders of the mighty Pott, and clasping him tight round the
shoulders.

‘Take away that ‘ere bag from the t’other madman,’ said Sam to Ben Allen
and Bob Sawyer, who had done nothing but dodge round the group, each
with a tortoise-shell lancet in his hand, ready to bleed the first man
stunned. ‘Give it up, you wretched little creetur, or I’ll smother you
in it.’

Awed by these threats, and quite out of breath, the _Independent_
suffered himself to be disarmed; and Mr. Weller, removing the
extinguisher from Pott, set him free with a caution.

‘You take yourselves off to bed quietly,’ said Sam, ‘or I’ll put you
both in it, and let you fight it out vith the mouth tied, as I vould a
dozen sich, if they played these games. And you have the goodness to
come this here way, sir, if you please.’

Thus addressing his master, Sam took him by the arm, and led him off,
while the rival editors were severally removed to their beds by the
landlord, under the inspection of Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Benjamin Allen;
breathing, as they went away, many sanguinary threats, and making vague
appointments for mortal combat next day. When they came to think it
over, however, it occurred to them that they could do it much better in
print, so they recommenced deadly hostilities without delay; and all
Eatanswill rung with their boldness--on paper.

They had taken themselves off in separate coaches, early next morning,
before the other travellers were stirring; and the weather having now
cleared up, the chaise companions once more turned their faces to
London.



CHAPTER LII. INVOLVING A SERIOUS CHANGE IN THE WELLER FAMILY, AND THE
UNTIMELY DOWNFALL OF MR. STIGGINS

Considering it a matter of delicacy to abstain from introducing either
Bob Sawyer or Ben Allen to the young couple, until they were fully
prepared to expect them, and wishing to spare Arabella’s feelings as
much as possible, Mr. Pickwick proposed that he and Sam should alight in
the neighbourhood of the George and Vulture, and that the two young men
should for the present take up their quarters elsewhere. To this they
very readily agreed, and the proposition was accordingly acted upon; Mr.
Ben Allen and Mr. Bob Sawyer betaking themselves to a sequestered pot-
shop on the remotest confines of the Borough, behind the bar door of
which their names had in other days very often appeared at the head of
long and complex calculations worked in white chalk.

‘Dear me, Mr. Weller,’ said the pretty housemaid, meeting Sam at the
door.

‘Dear _me_ I vish it vos, my dear,’ replied Sam, dropping behind, to let
his master get out of hearing. ‘Wot a sweet-lookin’ creetur you are,
Mary!’

‘Lor’, Mr. Weller, what nonsense you do talk!’ said Mary. ‘Oh! don’t,
Mr. Weller.’

‘Don’t what, my dear?’ said Sam.

‘Why, that,’ replied the pretty housemaid. ‘Lor, do get along with you.’
Thus admonishing him, the pretty housemaid pushed Sam against the wall,
declaring that he had tumbled her cap, and put her hair quite out of
curl.

‘And prevented what I was going to say, besides,’ added Mary. ‘There’s a
letter been waiting here for you four days; you hadn’t gone away, half
an hour, when it came; and more than that, it’s got “immediate,” on the
outside.’

‘Vere is it, my love?’ inquired Sam.

‘I took care of it, for you, or I dare say it would have been lost long
before this,’ replied Mary. ‘There, take it; it’s more than you
deserve.’

With these words, after many pretty little coquettish doubts and fears,
and wishes that she might not have lost it, Mary produced the letter
from behind the nicest little muslin tucker possible, and handed it to
Sam, who thereupon kissed it with much gallantry and devotion.

‘My goodness me!’ said Mary, adjusting the tucker, and feigning
unconsciousness, ‘you seem to have grown very fond of it all at once.’

To this Mr. Weller only replied by a wink, the intense meaning of which
no description could convey the faintest idea of; and, sitting himself
down beside Mary on a window-seat, opened the letter and glanced at the
contents.

‘Hollo!’ exclaimed Sam, ‘wot’s all this?’

‘Nothing the matter, I hope?’ said Mary, peeping over his shoulder.

‘Bless them eyes o’ yourn!’ said Sam, looking up.

‘Never mind my eyes; you had much better read your letter,’ said the
pretty housemaid; and as she said so, she made the eyes twinkle with
such slyness and beauty that they were perfectly irresistible.

Sam refreshed himself with a kiss, and read as follows:--


‘MARKIS GRAN ‘By DORKEN ‘Wensdy.

‘My DEAR SAMMLE,

‘I am wery sorry to have the pleasure of being a Bear of ill news your
Mother in law cort cold consekens of imprudently settin too long on the
damp grass in the rain a hearin of a shepherd who warnt able to leave
off till late at night owen to his having vound his-self up vith brandy
and vater and not being able to stop his-self till he got a little sober
which took a many hours to do the doctor says that if she’d svallo’d
varm brandy and vater artervards insted of afore she mightn’t have been
no vus her veels wos immedetly greased and everythink done to set her
agoin as could be inwented your father had hopes as she vould have
vorked round as usual but just as she wos a turnen the corner my boy she
took the wrong road and vent down hill vith a welocity you never see and
notvithstandin that the drag wos put on drectly by the medikel man it
wornt of no use at all for she paid the last pike at twenty minutes
afore six o’clock yesterday evenin havin done the jouney wery much under
the reglar time vich praps was partly owen to her haven taken in wery
little luggage by the vay your father says that if you vill come and see
me Sammy he vill take it as a wery great favor for I am wery lonely
Samivel N. B. he _vill _have it spelt that vay vich I say ant right and
as there is sich a many things to settle he is sure your guvner wont
object of course he vill not Sammy for I knows him better so he sends
his dooty in which I join and am Samivel infernally yours


‘TONY VELLER.’

‘Wot a incomprehensible letter,’ said Sam; ‘who’s to know wot it means,
vith all this he-ing and I-ing! It ain’t my father’s writin’, ‘cept this
here signater in print letters; that’s his.’

‘Perhaps he got somebody to write it for him, and signed it himself
afterwards,’ said the pretty housemaid.

‘Stop a minit,’ replied Sam, running over the letter again, and pausing
here and there, to reflect, as he did so. ‘You’ve hit it. The gen’l’m’n
as wrote it wos a-tellin’ all about the misfortun’ in a proper vay, and
then my father comes a-lookin’ over him, and complicates the whole
concern by puttin’ his oar in. That’s just the wery sort o’ thing he’d
do. You’re right, Mary, my dear.’

Having satisfied himself on this point, Sam read the letter all over,
once more, and, appearing to form a clear notion of its contents for the
first time, ejaculated thoughtfully, as he folded it up--

‘And so the poor creetur’s dead! I’m sorry for it. She warn’t a bad-
disposed ‘ooman, if them shepherds had let her alone. I’m wery sorry for
it.’

Mr. Weller uttered these words in so serious a manner, that the pretty
housemaid cast down her eyes and looked very grave.

‘Hows’ever,’ said Sam, putting the letter in his pocket with a gentle
sigh, ‘it wos to be--and wos, as the old lady said arter she’d married
the footman. Can’t be helped now, can it, Mary?’

Mary shook her head, and sighed too.

‘I must apply to the hemperor for leave of absence,’ said Sam.

Mary sighed again--the letter was so very affecting.

‘Good-bye!’ said Sam.

‘Good-bye,’ rejoined the pretty housemaid, turning her head away.

‘Well, shake hands, won’t you?’ said Sam.

The pretty housemaid put out a hand which, although it was a
housemaid’s, was a very small one, and rose to go.

‘I shan’t be wery long avay,’ said Sam.

‘You’re always away,’ said Mary, giving her head the slightest possible
toss in the air. ‘You no sooner come, Mr. Weller, than you go again.’

Mr. Weller drew the household beauty closer to him, and entered upon a
whispering conversation, which had not proceeded far, when she turned
her face round and condescended to look at him again. When they parted,
it was somehow or other indispensably necessary for her to go to her
room, and arrange the cap and curls before she could think of presenting
herself to her mistress; which preparatory ceremony she went off to
perform, bestowing many nods and smiles on Sam over the banisters as she
tripped upstairs.

‘I shan’t be avay more than a day, or two, Sir, at the furthest,’ said
Sam, when he had communicated to Mr. Pickwick the intelligence of his
father’s loss.

‘As long as may be necessary, Sam,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, ‘you have my
full permission to remain.’

Sam bowed.

‘You will tell your father, Sam, that if I can be of any assistance to
him in his present situation, I shall be most willing and ready to lend
him any aid in my power,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Thank’ee, sir,’ rejoined Sam. ‘I’ll mention it, sir.’

And with some expressions of mutual good-will and interest, master and
man separated.

It was just seven o’clock when Samuel Weller, alighting from the box of
a stage-coach which passed through Dorking, stood within a few hundred
yards of the Marquis of Granby. It was a cold, dull evening; the little
street looked dreary and dismal; and the mahogany countenance of the
noble and gallant marquis seemed to wear a more sad and melancholy
expression than it was wont to do, as it swung to and fro, creaking
mournfully in the wind. The blinds were pulled down, and the shutters
partly closed; of the knot of loungers that usually collected about the
door, not one was to be seen; the place was silent and desolate.

Seeing nobody of whom he could ask any preliminary questions, Sam walked
softly in, and glancing round, he quickly recognised his parent in the
distance.

The widower was seated at a small round table in the little room behind
the bar, smoking a pipe, with his eyes intently fixed upon the fire. The
funeral had evidently taken place that day, for attached to his hat,
which he still retained on his head, was a hatband measuring about a
yard and a half in length, which hung over the top rail of the chair and
streamed negligently down. Mr. Weller was in a very abstracted and
contemplative mood. Notwithstanding that Sam called him by name several
times, he still continued to smoke with the same fixed and quiet
countenance, and was only roused ultimately by his son’s placing the
palm of his hand on his shoulder.

‘Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, ‘you’re welcome.’

‘I’ve been a-callin’ to you half a dozen times,’ said Sam, hanging his
hat on a peg, ‘but you didn’t hear me.’

‘No, Sammy,’ replied Mr. Weller, again looking thoughtfully at the fire.
‘I was in a referee, Sammy.’

‘Wot about?’ inquired Sam, drawing his chair up to the fire.

‘In a referee, Sammy,’ replied the elder Mr. Weller, ‘regarding _her_,
Samivel.’ Here Mr. Weller jerked his head in the direction of Dorking
churchyard, in mute explanation that his words referred to the late Mrs.
Weller.

‘I wos a-thinkin’, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, eyeing his son, with great
earnestness, over his pipe, as if to assure him that however
extraordinary and incredible the declaration might appear, it was
nevertheless calmly and deliberately uttered. ‘I wos a-thinkin’, Sammy,
that upon the whole I wos wery sorry she wos gone.’

‘Vell, and so you ought to be,’ replied Sam.

Mr. Weller nodded his acquiescence in the sentiment, and again fastening
his eyes on the fire, shrouded himself in a cloud, and mused deeply.

‘Those wos wery sensible observations as she made, Sammy,’ said Mr.
Weller, driving the smoke away with his hand, after a long silence.

‘Wot observations?’ inquired Sam.

‘Them as she made, arter she was took ill,’ replied the old gentleman.

‘Wot was they?’

‘Somethin’ to this here effect. “Veller,” she says, “I’m afeered I’ve
not done by you quite wot I ought to have done; you’re a wery kind-
hearted man, and I might ha’ made your home more comfortabler. I begin
to see now,” she says, “ven it’s too late, that if a married ‘ooman
vishes to be religious, she should begin vith dischargin’ her dooties at
home, and makin’ them as is about her cheerful and happy, and that vile
she goes to church, or chapel, or wot not, at all proper times, she
should be wery careful not to con-wert this sort o’ thing into a excuse
for idleness or self-indulgence. I have done this,” she says, “and I’ve
vasted time and substance on them as has done it more than me; but I
hope ven I’m gone, Veller, that you’ll think on me as I wos afore I
know’d them people, and as I raly wos by natur.” ‘“Susan,” says I--I wos
took up wery short by this, Samivel; I von’t deny it, my boy--“Susan,” I
says, “you’ve been a wery good vife to me, altogether; don’t say nothin’
at all about it; keep a good heart, my dear; and you’ll live to see me
punch that ‘ere Stiggins’s head yet.” She smiled at this, Samivel,’ said
the old gentleman, stifling a sigh with his pipe, ‘but she died arter
all!’

‘Vell,’ said Sam, venturing to offer a little homely consolation, after
the lapse of three or four minutes, consumed by the old gentleman in
slowly shaking his head from side to side, and solemnly smoking, ‘vell,
gov’nor, ve must all come to it, one day or another.’

‘So we must, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller the elder.

‘There’s a Providence in it all,’ said Sam.

‘O’ course there is,’ replied his father, with a nod of grave approval.
‘Wot ‘ud become of the undertakers vithout it, Sammy?’

Lost in the immense field of conjecture opened by this reflection, the
elder Mr. Weller laid his pipe on the table, and stirred the fire with a
meditative visage.

While the old gentleman was thus engaged, a very buxom-looking cook,
dressed in mourning, who had been bustling about, in the bar, glided
into the room, and bestowing many smirks of recognition upon Sam,
silently stationed herself at the back of his father’s chair, and
announced her presence by a slight cough, the which, being disregarded,
was followed by a louder one.

‘Hollo!’ said the elder Mr. Weller, dropping the poker as he looked
round, and hastily drew his chair away. ‘Wot’s the matter now?’

‘Have a cup of tea, there’s a good soul,’ replied the buxom female
coaxingly.

‘I von’t,’ replied Mr. Weller, in a somewhat boisterous manner. ‘I’ll
see you--’ Mr. Weller hastily checked himself, and added in a low tone,
‘furder fust.’

‘Oh, dear, dear! How adwersity does change people!’ said the lady,
looking upwards.

‘It’s the only thing ‘twixt this and the doctor as shall change my
condition,’ muttered Mr. Weller.

‘I really never saw a man so cross,’ said the buxom female.

‘Never mind. It’s all for my own good; vich is the reflection vith vich
the penitent school-boy comforted his feelin’s ven they flogged him,’
rejoined the old gentleman.

The buxom female shook her head with a compassionate and sympathising
air; and, appealing to Sam, inquired whether his father really ought not
to make an effort to keep up, and not give way to that lowness of
spirits.

‘You see, Mr. Samuel,’ said the buxom female, ‘as I was telling him
yesterday, he will feel lonely, he can’t expect but what he should, sir,
but he should keep up a good heart, because, dear me, I’m sure we all
pity his loss, and are ready to do anything for him; and there’s no
situation in life so bad, Mr. Samuel, that it can’t be mended. Which is
what a very worthy person said to me when my husband died.’ Here the
speaker, putting her hand before her mouth, coughed again, and looked
affectionately at the elder Mr. Weller.

‘As I don’t rekvire any o’ your conversation just now, mum, vill you
have the goodness to re-tire?’ inquired Mr. Weller, in a grave and
steady voice.

‘Well, Mr. Weller,’ said the buxom female, ‘I’m sure I only spoke to you
out of kindness.’

‘Wery likely, mum,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘Samivel, show the lady out, and
shut the door after her.’

This hint was not lost upon the buxom female; for she at once left the
room, and slammed the door behind her, upon which Mr. Weller, senior,
falling back in his chair in a violent perspiration, said--

‘Sammy, if I wos to stop here alone vun week--only vun week, my boy--
that ‘ere ‘ooman ‘ud marry me by force and wiolence afore it was over.’

‘Wot! is she so wery fond on you?’ inquired Sam.

‘Fond!’ replied his father. ‘I can’t keep her avay from me. If I was
locked up in a fireproof chest vith a patent Brahmin, she’d find means
to get at me, Sammy.’

‘Wot a thing it is to be so sought arter!’ observed Sam, smiling.

‘I don’t take no pride out on it, Sammy,’ replied Mr. Weller, poking the
fire vehemently, ‘it’s a horrid sitiwation. I’m actiwally drove out o’
house and home by it. The breath was scarcely out o’ your poor mother-
in-law’s body, ven vun old ‘ooman sends me a pot o’ jam, and another a
pot o’ jelly, and another brews a blessed large jug o’ camomile-tea,
vich she brings in vith her own hands.’ Mr. Weller paused with an aspect
of intense disgust, and looking round, added in a whisper, ‘They wos all
widders, Sammy, all on ‘em, ‘cept the camomile-tea vun, as wos a single
young lady o’ fifty-three.’

Sam gave a comical look in reply, and the old gentleman having broken an
obstinate lump of coal, with a countenance expressive of as much
earnestness and malice as if it had been the head of one of the widows
last-mentioned, said:

‘In short, Sammy, I feel that I ain’t safe anyveres but on the box.’

‘How are you safer there than anyveres else?’ interrupted Sam.

‘’Cos a coachman’s a privileged indiwidual,’ replied Mr. Weller, looking
fixedly at his son. ‘’Cos a coachman may do vithout suspicion wot other
men may not; ‘cos a coachman may be on the wery amicablest terms with
eighty mile o’ females, and yet nobody think that he ever means to marry
any vun among ‘em. And wot other man can say the same, Sammy?’

‘Vell, there’s somethin’ in that,’ said Sam.

‘If your gov’nor had been a coachman,’ reasoned Mr. Weller, ‘do you
s’pose as that ‘ere jury ‘ud ever ha’ conwicted him, s’posin’ it
possible as the matter could ha’ gone to that extremity? They dustn’t
ha’ done it.’

‘Wy not?’ said Sam, rather disparagingly.

‘Wy not!’ rejoined Mr. Weller; ‘’cos it ‘ud ha’ gone agin their
consciences. A reg’lar coachman’s a sort o’ con-nectin’ link betwixt
singleness and matrimony, and every practicable man knows it.’

‘Wot! You mean, they’re gen’ral favorites, and nobody takes adwantage on
‘em, p’raps?’ said Sam.

His father nodded.

‘How it ever come to that ‘ere pass,’ resumed the parent Weller, ‘I
can’t say. Wy it is that long-stage coachmen possess such insiniwations,
and is alvays looked up to--a-dored I may say--by ev’ry young ‘ooman in
ev’ry town he vurks through, I don’t know. I only know that so it is.
It’s a regulation of natur--a dispensary, as your poor mother-in-law
used to say.’

‘A dispensation,’ said Sam, correcting the old gentleman.

‘Wery good, Samivel, a dispensation if you like it better,’ returned Mr.
Weller; ‘I call it a dispensary, and it’s always writ up so, at the
places vere they gives you physic for nothin’ in your own bottles;
that’s all.’

With these words, Mr. Weller refilled and relighted his pipe, and once
more summoning up a meditative expression of countenance, continued as
follows--

‘Therefore, my boy, as I do not see the adwisability o’ stoppin here to
be married vether I vant to or not, and as at the same time I do not
vish to separate myself from them interestin’ members o’ society
altogether, I have come to the determination o’ driving the Safety, and
puttin’ up vunce more at the Bell Savage, vich is my nat’ral born
element, Sammy.’

‘And wot’s to become o’ the bis’ness?’ inquired Sam.

‘The bis’ness, Samivel,’ replied the old gentleman, ‘good-vill, stock,
and fixters, vill be sold by private contract; and out o’ the money, two
hundred pound, agreeable to a rekvest o’ your mother-in-law’s to me, a
little afore she died, vill be invested in your name in--What do you
call them things agin?’

‘Wot things?’ inquired Sam.

‘Them things as is always a-goin’ up and down, in the city.’

‘Omnibuses?’ suggested Sam.

‘Nonsense,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘Them things as is alvays a-
fluctooatin’, and gettin’ theirselves inwolved somehow or another vith
the national debt, and the chequers bill; and all that.’

‘Oh! the funds,’ said Sam.

‘Ah!’ rejoined Mr. Weller, ‘the funs; two hundred pounds o’ the money is
to be inwested for you, Samivel, in the funs; four and a half per cent.
reduced counsels, Sammy.’

‘Wery kind o’ the old lady to think o’ me,’ said Sam, ‘and I’m wery much
obliged to her.’

‘The rest will be inwested in my name,’ continued the elder Mr. Weller;
‘and wen I’m took off the road, it’ll come to you, so take care you
don’t spend it all at vunst, my boy, and mind that no widder gets a
inklin’ o’ your fortun’, or you’re done.’

Having delivered this warning, Mr. Weller resumed his pipe with a more
serene countenance; the disclosure of these matters appearing to have
eased his mind considerably.

‘Somebody’s a-tappin’ at the door,’ said Sam.

‘Let ‘em tap,’ replied his father, with dignity.

Sam acted upon the direction. There was another tap, and another, and
then a long row of taps; upon which Sam inquired why the tapper was not
admitted.

‘Hush,’ whispered Mr. Weller, with apprehensive looks, ‘don’t take no
notice on ‘em, Sammy, it’s vun o’ the widders, p’raps.’

No notice being taken of the taps, the unseen visitor, after a short
lapse, ventured to open the door and peep in. It was no female head that
was thrust in at the partially-opened door, but the long black locks and
red face of Mr. Stiggins. Mr. Weller’s pipe fell from his hands.

The reverend gentleman gradually opened the door by almost imperceptible
degrees, until the aperture was just wide enough to admit of the passage
of his lank body, when he glided into the room and closed it after him,
with great care and gentleness. Turning towards Sam, and raising his
hands and eyes in token of the unspeakable sorrow with which he regarded
the calamity that had befallen the family, he carried the high-backed
chair to his old corner by the fire, and, seating himself on the very
edge, drew forth a brown pocket-handkerchief, and applied the same to
his optics.

While this was going forward, the elder Mr. Weller sat back in his
chair, with his eyes wide open, his hands planted on his knees, and his
whole countenance expressive of absorbing and overwhelming astonishment.
Sam sat opposite him in perfect silence, waiting, with eager curiosity,
for the termination of the scene.

Mr. Stiggins kept the brown pocket-handkerchief before his eyes for some
minutes, moaning decently meanwhile, and then, mastering his feelings by
a strong effort, put it in his pocket and buttoned it up. After this, he
stirred the fire; after that, he rubbed his hands and looked at Sam.

‘Oh, my young friend,’ said Mr. Stiggins, breaking the silence, in a
very low voice, ‘here’s a sorrowful affliction!’

Sam nodded very slightly.

‘For the man of wrath, too!’ added Mr. Stiggins; ‘it makes a vessel’s
heart bleed!’

Mr. Weller was overheard by his son to murmur something relative to
making a vessel’s nose bleed; but Mr. Stiggins heard him not.

‘Do you know, young man,’ whispered Mr. Stiggins, drawing his chair
closer to Sam, ‘whether she has left Emanuel anything?’

‘Who’s he?’ inquired Sam.

‘The chapel,’ replied Mr. Stiggins; ‘our chapel; our fold, Mr. Samuel.’

‘She hasn’t left the fold nothin’, nor the shepherd nothin’, nor the
animals nothin’,’ said Sam decisively; ‘nor the dogs neither.’

Mr. Stiggins looked slily at Sam; glanced at the old gentleman, who was
sitting with his eyes closed, as if asleep; and drawing his chair still
nearer, said--

‘Nothing for _me_, Mr. Samuel?’

Sam shook his head.

‘I think there’s something,’ said Stiggins, turning as pale as he could
turn. ‘Consider, Mr. Samuel; no little token?’

‘Not so much as the vorth o’ that ‘ere old umberella o’ yourn,’ replied
Sam.

‘Perhaps,’ said Mr. Stiggins hesitatingly, after a few moments’ deep
thought, ‘perhaps she recommended me to the care of the man of wrath,
Mr. Samuel?’

‘I think that’s wery likely, from what he said,’ rejoined Sam; ‘he wos
a-speakin’ about you, jist now.’

‘Was he, though?’ exclaimed Stiggins, brightening up. ‘Ah! He’s changed,
I dare say. We might live very comfortably together now, Mr. Samuel, eh?
I could take care of his property when you are away--good care, you
see.’

Heaving a long-drawn sigh, Mr. Stiggins paused for a response. Sam
nodded, and Mr. Weller the elder gave vent to an extraordinary sound,
which, being neither a groan, nor a grunt, nor a gasp, nor a growl,
seemed to partake in some degree of the character of all four.

Mr. Stiggins, encouraged by this sound, which he understood to betoken
remorse or repentance, looked about him, rubbed his hands, wept, smiled,
wept again, and then, walking softly across the room to a well-
remembered shelf in one corner, took down a tumbler, and with great
deliberation put four lumps of sugar in it. Having got thus far, he
looked about him again, and sighed grievously; with that, he walked
softly into the bar, and presently returning with the tumbler half full
of pine-apple rum, advanced to the kettle which was singing gaily on the
hob, mixed his grog, stirred it, sipped it, sat down, and taking a long
and hearty pull at the rum-and-water, stopped for breath.

The elder Mr. Weller, who still continued to make various strange and
uncouth attempts to appear asleep, offered not a single word during
these proceedings; but when Stiggins stopped for breath, he darted upon
him, and snatching the tumbler from his hand, threw the remainder of the
rum-and-water in his face, and the glass itself into the grate. Then,
seizing the reverend gentleman firmly by the collar, he suddenly fell to
kicking him most furiously, accompanying every application of his top-
boot to Mr. Stiggins’s person, with sundry violent and incoherent
anathemas upon his limbs, eyes, and body.

‘Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, ‘put my hat on tight for me.’

Sam dutifully adjusted the hat with the long hatband more firmly on his
father’s head, and the old gentleman, resuming his kicking with greater
agility than before, tumbled with Mr. Stiggins through the bar, and
through the passage, out at the front door, and so into the street--the
kicking continuing the whole way, and increasing in vehemence, rather
than diminishing, every time the top-boot was lifted.

It was a beautiful and exhilarating sight to see the red-nosed man
writhing in Mr. Weller’s grasp, and his whole frame quivering with
anguish as kick followed kick in rapid succession; it was a still more
exciting spectacle to behold Mr. Weller, after a powerful struggle,
immersing Mr. Stiggins’s head in a horse-trough full of water, and
holding it there, until he was half suffocated.

‘There!’ said Mr. Weller, throwing all his energy into one most
complicated kick, as he at length permitted Mr. Stiggins to withdraw his
head from the trough, ‘send any vun o’ them lazy shepherds here, and
I’ll pound him to a jelly first, and drownd him artervards! Sammy, help
me in, and fill me a small glass of brandy. I’m out o’ breath, my boy.’



CHAPTER LIII. COMPRISING THE FINAL EXIT OF MR. JINGLE AND JOB TROTTER,
WITH A GREAT MORNING OF BUSINESS IN GRAY’S INN SQUARE--CONCLUDING WITH A
DOUBLE KNOCK AT MR. PERKER’S DOOR

When Arabella, after some gentle preparation and many assurances that
there was not the least occasion for being low-spirited, was at length
made acquainted by Mr. Pickwick with the unsatisfactory result of his
visit to Birmingham, she burst into tears, and sobbing aloud, lamented
in moving terms that she should have been the unhappy cause of any
estrangement between a father and his son.

‘My dear girl,’ said Mr. Pickwick kindly, ‘it is no fault of yours. It
was impossible to foresee that the old gentleman would be so strongly
prepossessed against his son’s marriage, you know. I am sure,’ added Mr.
Pickwick, glancing at her pretty face, ‘he can have very little idea of
the pleasure he denies himself.’

‘Oh, my dear Mr. Pickwick,’ said Arabella, ‘what shall we do, if he
continues to be angry with us?’

‘Why, wait patiently, my dear, until he thinks better of it,’ replied
Mr. Pickwick cheerfully.

‘But, dear Mr. Pickwick, what is to become of Nathaniel if his father
withdraws his assistance?’ urged Arabella.

‘In that case, my love,’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick, ‘I will venture to
prophesy that he will find some other friend who will not be backward in
helping him to start in the world.’

The significance of this reply was not so well disguised by Mr. Pickwick
but that Arabella understood it. So, throwing her arms round his neck,
and kissing him affectionately, she sobbed louder than before.

‘Come, come,’ said Mr. Pickwick taking her hand, ‘we will wait here a
few days longer, and see whether he writes or takes any other notice of
your husband’s communication. If not, I have thought of half a dozen
plans, any one of which would make you happy at once. There, my dear,
there!’

With these words, Mr. Pickwick gently pressed Arabella’s hand, and bade
her dry her eyes, and not distress her husband. Upon which, Arabella,
who was one of the best little creatures alive, put her handkerchief in
her reticule, and by the time Mr. Winkle joined them, exhibited in full
lustre the same beaming smiles and sparkling eyes that had originally
captivated him.

‘This is a distressing predicament for these young people,’ thought Mr.
Pickwick, as he dressed himself next morning. ‘I’ll walk up to Perker’s,
and consult him about the matter.’

As Mr. Pickwick was further prompted to betake himself to Gray’s Inn
Square by an anxious desire to come to a pecuniary settlement with the
kind-hearted little attorney without further delay, he made a hurried
breakfast, and executed his intention so speedily, that ten o’clock had
not struck when he reached Gray’s Inn.

It still wanted ten minutes to the hour when he had ascended the
staircase on which Perker’s chambers were. The clerks had not arrived
yet, and he beguiled the time by looking out of the staircase window.

The healthy light of a fine October morning made even the dingy old
houses brighten up a little; some of the dusty windows actually looking
almost cheerful as the sun’s rays gleamed upon them. Clerk after clerk
hastened into the square by one or other of the entrances, and looking
up at the Hall clock, accelerated or decreased his rate of walking
according to the time at which his office hours nominally commenced; the
half-past nine o’clock people suddenly becoming very brisk, and the ten
o’clock gentlemen falling into a pace of most aristocratic slowness. The
clock struck ten, and clerks poured in faster than ever, each one in a
greater perspiration than his predecessor. The noise of unlocking and
opening doors echoed and re-echoed on every side; heads appeared as if
by magic in every window; the porters took up their stations for the
day; the slipshod laundresses hurried off; the postman ran from house to
house; and the whole legal hive was in a bustle.

‘You’re early, Mr. Pickwick,’ said a voice behind him.

‘Ah, Mr. Lowten,’ replied that gentleman, looking round, and recognising
his old acquaintance.

‘Precious warm walking, isn’t it?’ said Lowten, drawing a Bramah key
from his pocket, with a small plug therein, to keep the dust out.

‘You appear to feel it so,’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick, smiling at the clerk,
who was literally red-hot.

‘I’ve come along, rather, I can tell you,’ replied Lowten. ‘It went the
half hour as I came through the Polygon. I’m here before him, though, so
I don’t mind.’

Comforting himself with this reflection, Mr. Lowten extracted the plug
from the door-key; having opened the door, replugged and repocketed his
Bramah, and picked up the letters which the postman had dropped through
the box, he ushered Mr. Pickwick into the office. Here, in the twinkling
of an eye, he divested himself of his coat, put on a threadbare garment,
which he took out of a desk, hung up his hat, pulled forth a few sheets
of cartridge and blotting-paper in alternate layers, and, sticking a pen
behind his ear, rubbed his hands with an air of great satisfaction.

‘There, you see, Mr. Pickwick,’ he said, ‘now I’m complete. I’ve got my
office coat on, and my pad out, and let him come as soon as he likes.
You haven’t got a pinch of snuff about you, have you?’

‘No, I have not,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘I’m sorry for it,’ said Lowten. ‘Never mind. I’ll run out presently,
and get a bottle of soda. Don’t I look rather queer about the eyes, Mr.
Pickwick?’

The individual appealed to, surveyed Mr. Lowten’s eyes from a distance,
and expressed his opinion that no unusual queerness was perceptible in
those features.

‘I’m glad of it,’ said Lowten. ‘We were keeping it up pretty tolerably
at the Stump last night, and I’m rather out of sorts this morning.
Perker’s been about that business of yours, by the bye.’

‘What business?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick. ‘Mrs. Bardell’s costs?’

‘No, I don’t mean that,’ replied Mr. Lowten. ‘About getting that
customer that we paid the ten shillings in the pound to the bill-
discounter for, on your account--to get him out of the Fleet, you know--
about getting him to Demerara.’

‘Oh, Mr. Jingle,’ said Mr. Pickwick hastily. ‘Yes. Well?’

‘Well, it’s all arranged,’ said Lowten, mending his pen. ‘The agent at
Liverpool said he had been obliged to you many times when you were in
business, and he would be glad to take him on your recommendation.’

‘That’s well,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘I am delighted to hear it.’

‘But I say,’ resumed Lowten, scraping the back of the pen preparatory to
making a fresh split, ‘what a soft chap that other is!’

‘Which other?’

‘Why, that servant, or friend, or whatever he is; you know, Trotter.’

‘Ah!’ said Mr. Pickwick, with a smile. ‘I always thought him the
reverse.’

‘Well, and so did I, from what little I saw of him,’ replied Lowten, ‘it
only shows how one may be deceived. What do you think of his going to
Demerara, too?’

‘What! And giving up what was offered him here!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

‘Treating Perker’s offer of eighteen bob a week, and a rise if he
behaved himself, like dirt,’ replied Lowten. ‘He said he must go along
with the other one, and so they persuaded Perker to write again, and
they’ve got him something on the same estate; not near so good, Perker
says, as a convict would get in New South Wales, if he appeared at his
trial in a new suit of clothes.’

‘Foolish fellow,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with glistening eyes. ‘Foolish
fellow.’

‘Oh, it’s worse than foolish; it’s downright sneaking, you know,’
replied Lowten, nibbing the pen with a contemptuous face. ‘He says that
he’s the only friend he ever had, and he’s attached to him, and all
that. Friendship’s a very good thing in its way--we are all very
friendly and comfortable at the Stump, for instance, over our grog,
where every man pays for himself; but damn hurting yourself for anybody
else, you know! No man should have more than two attachments--the first,
to number one, and the second to the ladies; that’s what I say--ha! ha!’
Mr. Lowten concluded with a loud laugh, half in jocularity, and half in
derision, which was prematurely cut short by the sound of Perker’s
footsteps on the stairs, at the first approach of which, he vaulted on
his stool with an agility most remarkable, and wrote intensely.

The greeting between Mr. Pickwick and his professional adviser was warm
and cordial; the client was scarcely ensconced in the attorney’s arm-
chair, however, when a knock was heard at the door, and a voice inquired
whether Mr. Perker was within.

‘Hark!’ said Perker, ‘that’s one of our vagabond friends--Jingle
himself, my dear Sir. Will you see him?’

‘What do you think?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, hesitating.

‘Yes, I think you had better. Here, you Sir, what’s your name, walk in,
will you?’

In compliance with this unceremonious invitation, Jingle and Job walked
into the room, but, seeing Mr. Pickwick, stopped short in some
confusion.

‘Well,’ said Perker, ‘don’t you know that gentleman?’

‘Good reason to,’ replied Mr. Jingle, stepping forward. ‘Mr. Pickwick--
deepest obligations--life preserver--made a man of me--you shall never
repent it, Sir.’

‘I am happy to hear you say so,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘You look much
better.’

‘Thanks to you, sir--great change--Majesty’s Fleet--unwholesome place--
very,’ said Jingle, shaking his head. He was decently and cleanly
dressed, and so was Job, who stood bolt upright behind him, staring at
Mr. Pickwick with a visage of iron.

‘When do they go to Liverpool?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick, half aside to
Perker.

‘This evening, Sir, at seven o’clock,’ said Job, taking one step
forward. ‘By the heavy coach from the city, Sir.’

‘Are your places taken?’

‘They are, sir,’ replied Job.

‘You have fully made up your mind to go?’

‘I have sir,’ answered Job.

‘With regard to such an outfit as was indispensable for Jingle,’ said
Perker, addressing Mr. Pickwick aloud. ‘I have taken upon myself to make
an arrangement for the deduction of a small sum from his quarterly
salary, which, being made only for one year, and regularly remitted,
will provide for that expense. I entirely disapprove of your doing
anything for him, my dear sir, which is not dependent on his own
exertions and good conduct.’

‘Certainly,’ interposed Jingle, with great firmness. ‘Clear head--man of
the world--quite right--perfectly.’

‘By compounding with his creditor, releasing his clothes from the
pawnbroker’s, relieving him in prison, and paying for his passage,’
continued Perker, without noticing Jingle’s observation, ‘you have
already lost upwards of fifty pounds.’

‘Not lost,’ said Jingle hastily, ‘Pay it all--stick to business--cash
up--every farthing. Yellow fever, perhaps--can’t help that--if not--’
Here Mr. Jingle paused, and striking the crown of his hat with great
violence, passed his hand over his eyes, and sat down.

‘He means to say,’ said Job, advancing a few paces, ‘that if he is not
carried off by the fever, he will pay the money back again. If he lives,
he will, Mr. Pickwick. I will see it done. I know he will, Sir,’ said
Job, with energy. ‘I could undertake to swear it.’

‘Well, well,’ said Mr. Pickwick, who had been bestowing a score or two
of frowns upon Perker, to stop his summary of benefits conferred, which
the little attorney obstinately disregarded, ‘you must be careful not to
play any more desperate cricket matches, Mr. Jingle, or to renew your
acquaintance with Sir Thomas Blazo, and I have little doubt of your
preserving your health.’

Mr. Jingle smiled at this sally, but looked rather foolish
notwithstanding; so Mr. Pickwick changed the subject by saying--

‘You don’t happen to know, do you, what has become of another friend of
yours--a more humble one, whom I saw at Rochester?’

‘Dismal Jemmy?’ inquired Jingle.

‘Yes.’

Jingle shook his head.

‘Clever rascal--queer fellow, hoaxing genius--Job’s brother.’

‘Job’s brother!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick. ‘Well, now I look at him
closely, there _is_ a likeness.’

‘We were always considered like each other, Sir,’ said Job, with a
cunning look just lurking in the corners of his eyes, ‘only I was really
of a serious nature, and he never was. He emigrated to America, Sir, in
consequence of being too much sought after here, to be comfortable; and
has never been heard of since.’

‘That accounts for my not having received the “page from the romance of
real life,” which he promised me one morning when he appeared to be
contemplating suicide on Rochester Bridge, I suppose,’ said Mr.
Pickwick, smiling. ‘I need not inquire whether his dismal behaviour was
natural or assumed.’

‘He could assume anything, Sir,’ said Job. ‘You may consider yourself
very fortunate in having escaped him so easily. On intimate terms he
would have been even a more dangerous acquaintance than--’ Job looked at
Jingle, hesitated, and finally added, ‘than--than-myself even.’

‘A hopeful family yours, Mr. Trotter,’ said Perker, sealing a letter
which he had just finished writing.

‘Yes, Sir,’ replied Job. ‘Very much so.’

‘Well,’ said the little man, laughing, ‘I hope you are going to disgrace
it. Deliver this letter to the agent when you reach Liverpool, and let
me advise you, gentlemen, not to be too knowing in the West Indies. If
you throw away this chance, you will both richly deserve to be hanged,
as I sincerely trust you will be. And now you had better leave Mr.
Pickwick and me alone, for we have other matters to talk over, and time
is precious.’ As Perker said this, he looked towards the door, with an
evident desire to render the leave-taking as brief as possible.

It was brief enough on Mr. Jingle’s part. He thanked the little attorney
in a few hurried words for the kindness and promptitude with which he
had rendered his assistance, and, turning to his benefactor, stood for a
few seconds as if irresolute what to say or how to act. Job Trotter
relieved his perplexity; for, with a humble and grateful bow to Mr.
Pickwick, he took his friend gently by the arm, and led him away.

‘A worthy couple!’ said Perker, as the door closed behind them.

‘I hope they may become so,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘What do you think?
Is there any chance of their permanent reformation?’

Perker shrugged his shoulders doubtfully, but observing Mr. Pickwick’s
anxious and disappointed look, rejoined--

‘Of course there is a chance. I hope it may prove a good one. They are
unquestionably penitent now; but then, you know, they have the
recollection of very recent suffering fresh upon them. What they may
become, when that fades away, is a problem that neither you nor I can
solve. However, my dear Sir,’ added Perker, laying his hand on Mr.
Pickwick’s shoulder, ‘your object is equally honourable, whatever the
result is. Whether that species of benevolence which is so very cautious
and long-sighted that it is seldom exercised at all, lest its owner
should be imposed upon, and so wounded in his self-love, be real charity
or a worldly counterfeit, I leave to wiser heads than mine to determine.
But if those two fellows were to commit a burglary to-morrow, my opinion
of this action would be equally high.’

With these remarks, which were delivered in a much more animated and
earnest manner than is usual in legal gentlemen, Perker drew his chair
to his desk, and listened to Mr. Pickwick’s recital of old Mr. Winkle’s
obstinacy.

‘Give him a week,’ said Perker, nodding his head prophetically.

‘Do you think he will come round?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘I think he will,’ rejoined Perker. ‘If not, we must try the young
lady’s persuasion; and that is what anybody but you would have done at
first.’

Mr. Perker was taking a pinch of snuff with various grotesque
contractions of countenance, eulogistic of the persuasive powers
appertaining unto young ladies, when the murmur of inquiry and answer
was heard in the outer office, and Lowten tapped at the door.

‘Come in!’ cried the little man.

The clerk came in, and shut the door after him, with great mystery.

‘What’s the matter?’ inquired Perker.

‘You’re wanted, Sir.’

‘Who wants me?’

Lowten looked at Mr. Pickwick, and coughed.

‘Who wants me? Can’t you speak, Mr. Lowten?’

‘Why, sir,’ replied Lowten, ‘it’s Dodson; and Fogg is with him.’

‘Bless my life!’ said the little man, looking at his watch, ‘I appointed
them to be here at half-past eleven, to settle that matter of yours,
Pickwick. I gave them an undertaking on which they sent down your
discharge; it’s very awkward, my dear Sir; what will you do? Would you
like to step into the next room?’

The next room being the identical room in which Messrs. Dodson & Fogg
were, Mr. Pickwick replied that he would remain where he was: the more
especially as Messrs. Dodson & Fogg ought to be ashamed to look him in
the face, instead of his being ashamed to see them. Which latter
circumstance he begged Mr. Perker to note, with a glowing countenance
and many marks of indignation.

‘Very well, my dear Sir, very well,’ replied Perker, ‘I can only say
that if you expect either Dodson or Fogg to exhibit any symptom of shame
or confusion at having to look you, or anybody else, in the face, you
are the most sanguine man in your expectations that I ever met with.
Show them in, Mr. Lowten.’

Mr. Lowten disappeared with a grin, and immediately returned ushering in
the firm, in due form of precedence--Dodson first, and Fogg afterwards.

‘You have seen Mr. Pickwick, I believe?’ said Perker to Dodson,
inclining his pen in the direction where that gentleman was seated.

‘How do you do, Mr. Pickwick?’ said Dodson, in a loud voice.

‘Dear me,’ cried Fogg, ‘how do you do, Mr. Pickwick? I hope you are
well, Sir. I thought I knew the face,’ said Fogg, drawing up a chair,
and looking round him with a smile.

Mr. Pickwick bent his head very slightly, in answer to these
salutations, and, seeing Fogg pull a bundle of papers from his coat
pocket, rose and walked to the window.

‘There’s no occasion for Mr. Pickwick to move, Mr. Perker,’ said Fogg,
untying the red tape which encircled the little bundle, and smiling
again more sweetly than before. ‘Mr. Pickwick is pretty well acquainted
with these proceedings. There are no secrets between us, I think. He!
he! he!’

‘Not many, I think,’ said Dodson. ‘Ha! ha! ha!’ Then both the partners
laughed together--pleasantly and cheerfully, as men who are going to
receive money often do.

‘We shall make Mr. Pickwick pay for peeping,’ said Fogg, with
considerable native humour, as he unfolded his papers. ‘The amount of
the taxed costs is one hundred and thirty-three, six, four, Mr. Perker.’

There was a great comparing of papers, and turning over of leaves, by
Fogg and Perker, after this statement of profit and loss. Meanwhile,
Dodson said, in an affable manner, to Mr. Pickwick--

‘I don’t think you are looking quite so stout as when I had the pleasure
of seeing you last, Mr. Pickwick.’

‘Possibly not, Sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, who had been flashing forth
looks of fierce indignation, without producing the smallest effect on
either of the sharp practitioners; ‘I believe I am not, Sir. I have been
persecuted and annoyed by scoundrels of late, Sir.’

Perker coughed violently, and asked Mr. Pickwick whether he wouldn’t
like to look at the morning paper. To which inquiry Mr. Pickwick
returned a most decided negative.

‘True,’ said Dodson, ‘I dare say you have been annoyed in the Fleet;
there are some odd gentry there. Whereabouts were your apartments, Mr.
Pickwick?’

‘My one room,’ replied that much-injured gentleman, ‘was on the coffee-
room flight.’

‘Oh, indeed!’ said Dodson. ‘I believe that is a very pleasant part of
the establishment.’

‘Very,’ replied Mr. Pickwick drily.

There was a coolness about all this, which, to a gentleman of an
excitable temperament, had, under the circumstances, rather an
exasperating tendency. Mr. Pickwick restrained his wrath by gigantic
efforts; but when Perker wrote a cheque for the whole amount, and Fogg
deposited it in a small pocket-book, with a triumphant smile playing
over his pimply features, which communicated itself likewise to the
stern countenance of Dodson, he felt the blood in his cheeks tingling
with indignation.

‘Now, Mr. Dodson,’ said Fogg, putting up the pocket-book and drawing on
his gloves, ‘I am at your service.’

‘Very good,’ said Dodson, rising; ‘I am quite ready.’

‘I am very happy,’ said Fogg, softened by the cheque, ‘to have had the
pleasure of making Mr. Pickwick’s acquaintance. I hope you don’t think
quite so ill of us, Mr. Pickwick, as when we first had the pleasure of
seeing you.’

‘I hope not,’ said Dodson, with the high tone of calumniated virtue.
‘Mr. Pickwick now knows us better, I trust; whatever your opinion of
gentlemen of our profession may be, I beg to assure you, sir, that I
bear no ill-will or vindictive feeling towards you for the sentiments
you thought proper to express in our office in Freeman’s Court,
Cornhill, on the occasion to which my partner has referred.’

‘Oh, no, no; nor I,’ said Fogg, in a most forgiving manner.

‘Our conduct, Sir,’ said Dodson, ‘will speak for itself, and justify
itself, I hope, upon every occasion. We have been in the profession some
years, Mr. Pickwick, and have been honoured with the confidence of many
excellent clients. I wish you good-morning, Sir.’

‘Good-morning, Mr. Pickwick,’ said Fogg. So saying, he put his umbrella
under his arm, drew off his right glove, and extended the hand of
reconciliation to that most indignant gentleman; who, thereupon, thrust
his hands beneath his coat tails, and eyed the attorney with looks of
scornful amazement.

‘Lowten!’ cried Perker, at this moment. ‘Open the door.’

‘Wait one instant,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Perker, I _will _speak.’

‘My dear Sir, pray let the matter rest where it is,’ said the little
attorney, who had been in a state of nervous apprehension during the
whole interview; ‘Mr. Pickwick, I beg--’

‘I will not be put down, Sir,’ replied Mr. Pickwick hastily. ‘Mr.
Dodson, you have addressed some remarks to me.’

Dodson turned round, bent his head meekly, and smiled.

‘Some remarks to me,’ repeated Mr. Pickwick, almost breathless; ‘and
your partner has tendered me his hand, and you have both assumed a tone
of forgiveness and high-mindedness, which is an extent of impudence that
I was not prepared for, even in you.’

‘What, sir!’ exclaimed Dodson.

‘What, sir!’ reiterated Fogg.

‘Do you know that I have been the victim of your plots and
conspiracies?’ continued Mr. Pickwick. ‘Do you know that I am the man
whom you have been imprisoning and robbing? Do you know that you were
the attorneys for the plaintiff, in Bardell and Pickwick?’

‘Yes, sir, we do know it,’ replied Dodson.

‘Of course we know it, Sir,’ rejoined Fogg, slapping his pocket--perhaps
by accident.

‘I see that you recollect it with satisfaction,’ said Mr. Pickwick,
attempting to call up a sneer for the first time in his life, and
failing most signally in so doing. ‘Although I have long been anxious to
tell you, in plain terms, what my opinion of you is, I should have let
even this opportunity pass, in deference to my friend Perker’s wishes,
but for the unwarrantable tone you have assumed, and your insolent
familiarity. I say insolent familiarity, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick,
turning upon Fogg with a fierceness of gesture which caused that person
to retreat towards the door with great expedition.

‘Take care, Sir,’ said Dodson, who, though he was the biggest man of the
party, had prudently entrenched himself behind Fogg, and was speaking
over his head with a very pale face. ‘Let him assault you, Mr. Fogg;
don’t return it on any account.’

‘No, no, I won’t return it,’ said Fogg, falling back a little more as he
spoke; to the evident relief of his partner, who by these means was
gradually getting into the outer office.

‘You are,’ continued Mr. Pickwick, resuming the thread of his discourse-
-’you are a well-matched pair of mean, rascally, pettifogging robbers.’

‘Well,’ interposed Perker, ‘is that all?’

‘It is all summed up in that,’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick; ‘they are mean,
rascally, pettifogging robbers.’

‘There!’ said Perker, in a most conciliatory tone. ‘My dear sirs, he has
said all he has to say. Now pray go. Lowten, is that door open?’

Mr. Lowten, with a distant giggle, replied in the affirmative.

‘There, there--good-morning--good-morning--now pray, my dear sirs--Mr.
Lowten, the door!’ cried the little man, pushing Dodson & Fogg, nothing
loath, out of the office; ‘this way, my dear sirs--now pray don’t
prolong this--Dear me--Mr. Lowten--the door, sir--why don’t you attend?’

‘If there’s law in England, sir,’ said Dodson, looking towards Mr.
Pickwick, as he put on his hat, ‘you shall smart for this.’

‘You are a couple of mean--’

‘Remember, sir, you pay dearly for this,’ said Fogg.

‘--Rascally, pettifogging robbers!’ continued Mr. Pickwick, taking not
the least notice of the threats that were addressed to him.

‘Robbers!’ cried Mr. Pickwick, running to the stair-head, as the two
attorneys descended.

‘Robbers!’ shouted Mr. Pickwick, breaking from Lowten and Perker, and
thrusting his head out of the staircase window.

When Mr. Pickwick drew in his head again, his countenance was smiling
and placid; and, walking quietly back into the office, he declared that
he had now removed a great weight from his mind, and that he felt
perfectly comfortable and happy.

Perker said nothing at all until he had emptied his snuff-box, and sent
Lowten out to fill it, when he was seized with a fit of laughing, which
lasted five minutes; at the expiration of which time he said that he
supposed he ought to be very angry, but he couldn’t think of the
business seriously yet--when he could, he would be.

‘Well, now,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘let me have a settlement with you.’

Of the same kind as the last?’ inquired Perker, with another laugh.

‘Not exactly,’ rejoined Mr. Pickwick, drawing out his pocket-book, and
shaking the little man heartily by the hand, ‘I only mean a pecuniary
settlement. You have done me many acts of kindness that I can never
repay, and have no wish to repay, for I prefer continuing the
obligation.’

With this preface, the two friends dived into some very complicated
accounts and vouchers, which, having been duly displayed and gone
through by Perker, were at once discharged by Mr. Pickwick with many
professions of esteem and friendship.

They had no sooner arrived at this point, than a most violent and
startling knocking was heard at the door; it was not an ordinary double-
knock, but a constant and uninterrupted succession of the loudest single
raps, as if the knocker were endowed with the perpetual motion, or the
person outside had forgotten to leave off.

‘Dear me, what’s that?’ exclaimed Perker, starting.

‘I think it is a knock at the door,’ said Mr. Pickwick, as if there
could be the smallest doubt of the fact.

The knocker made a more energetic reply than words could have yielded,
for it continued to hammer with surprising force and noise, without a
moment’s cessation.

‘Dear me!’ said Perker, ringing his bell, ‘we shall alarm the inn. Mr.
Lowten, don’t you hear a knock?’

‘I’ll answer the door in one moment, Sir,’ replied the clerk.

The knocker appeared to hear the response, and to assert that it was
quite impossible he could wait so long. It made a stupendous uproar.

‘It’s quite dreadful,’ said Mr. Pickwick, stopping his ears.

‘Make haste, Mr. Lowten,’ Perker called out; ‘we shall have the panels
beaten in.’

Mr. Lowten, who was washing his hands in a dark closet, hurried to the
door, and turning the handle, beheld the appearance which is described
in the next chapter.



CHAPTER LIV. CONTAINING SOME PARTICULARS RELATIVE TO THE DOUBLE KNOCK,
AND OTHER MATTERS: AMONG WHICH CERTAIN INTERESTING DISCLOSURES RELATIVE
TO MR. SNODGRASS AND A YOUNG LADY ARE BY NO MEANS IRRELEVANT TO THIS
HISTORY

The object that presented itself to the eyes of the astonished clerk,
was a boy--a wonderfully fat boy--habited as a serving lad, standing
upright on the mat, with his eyes closed as if in sleep. He had never
seen such a fat boy, in or out of a travelling caravan; and this,
coupled with the calmness and repose of his appearance, so very
different from what was reasonably to have been expected of the
inflicter of such knocks, smote him with wonder.

‘What’s the matter?’ inquired the clerk.

The extraordinary boy replied not a word; but he nodded once, and
seemed, to the clerk’s imagination, to snore feebly.

‘Where do you come from?’ inquired the clerk.

The boy made no sign. He breathed heavily, but in all other respects was
motionless.

The clerk repeated the question thrice, and receiving no answer,
prepared to shut the door, when the boy suddenly opened his eyes, winked
several times, sneezed once, and raised his hand as if to repeat the
knocking. Finding the door open, he stared about him with astonishment,
and at length fixed his eyes on Mr. Lowten’s face.

‘What the devil do you knock in that way for?’ inquired the clerk
angrily.

‘Which way?’ said the boy, in a slow and sleepy voice.

‘Why, like forty hackney-coachmen,’ replied the clerk.

‘Because master said, I wasn’t to leave off knocking till they opened
the door, for fear I should go to sleep,’ said the boy.

‘Well,’ said the clerk, ‘what message have you brought?’

‘He’s downstairs,’ rejoined the boy.

‘Who?’

‘Master. He wants to know whether you’re at home.’

Mr. Lowten bethought himself, at this juncture, of looking out of the
window. Seeing an open carriage with a hearty old gentleman in it,
looking up very anxiously, he ventured to beckon him; on which, the old
gentleman jumped out directly.

‘That’s your master in the carriage, I suppose?’ said Lowten.

The boy nodded.

All further inquiries were superseded by the appearance of old Wardle,
who, running upstairs and just recognising Lowten, passed at once into
Mr. Perker’s room.

‘Pickwick!’ said the old gentleman. ‘Your hand, my boy! Why have I never
heard until the day before yesterday of your suffering yourself to be
cooped up in jail? And why did you let him do it, Perker?’

‘I couldn’t help it, my dear Sir,’ replied Perker, with a smile and a
pinch of snuff; ‘you know how obstinate he is?’

‘Of course I do; of course I do,’ replied the old gentleman. ‘I am
heartily glad to see him, notwithstanding. I will not lose sight of him
again, in a hurry.’

With these words, Wardle shook Mr. Pickwick’s hand once more, and,
having done the same by Perker, threw himself into an arm-chair, his
jolly red face shining again with smiles and health.

‘Well!’ said Wardle. ‘Here are pretty goings on--a pinch of your snuff,
Perker, my boy--never were such times, eh?’

‘What do you mean?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Mean!’ replied Wardle. ‘Why, I think the girls are all running mad;
that’s no news, you’ll say? Perhaps it’s not; but it’s true, for all
that.’

‘You have not come up to London, of all places in the world, to tell us
that, my dear Sir, have you?’ inquired Perker.

‘No, not altogether,’ replied Wardle; ‘though it was the main cause of
my coming. How’s Arabella?’

‘Very well,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, ‘and will be delighted to see you, I
am sure.’

‘Black-eyed little jilt!’ replied Wardle. ‘I had a great idea of
marrying her myself, one of these odd days. But I am glad of it too,
very glad.’

‘How did the intelligence reach you?’ asked Mr. Pickwick.

‘Oh, it came to my girls, of course,’ replied Wardle. ‘Arabella wrote,
the day before yesterday, to say she had made a stolen match without her
husband’s father’s consent, and so you had gone down to get it when his
refusing it couldn’t prevent the match, and all the rest of it. I
thought it a very good time to say something serious to my girls; so I
said what a dreadful thing it was that children should marry without
their parents’ consent, and so forth; but, bless your hearts, I couldn’t
make the least impression upon them. They thought it such a much more
dreadful thing that there should have been a wedding without
bridesmaids, that I might as well have preached to Joe himself.’

Here the old gentleman stopped to laugh; and having done so to his
heart’s content, presently resumed--

‘But this is not the best of it, it seems. This is only half the love-
making and plotting that have been going forward. We have been walking
on mines for the last six months, and they’re sprung at last.’

‘What do you mean?’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, turning pale; ‘no other
secret marriage, I hope?’

‘No, no,’ replied old Wardle; ‘not so bad as that; no.’

‘What then?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick; ‘am I interested in it?’

‘Shall I answer that question, Perker?’ said Wardle.

‘If you don’t commit yourself by doing so, my dear Sir.’

‘Well then, you are,’ said Wardle.

‘How?’ asked Mr. Pickwick anxiously. ‘In what way?’

‘Really,’ replied Wardle, ‘you’re such a fiery sort of a young fellow
that I am almost afraid to tell you; but, however, if Perker will sit
between us to prevent mischief, I’ll venture.’

Having closed the room door, and fortified himself with another
application to Perker’s snuff-box, the old gentleman proceeded with his
great disclosure in these words--

‘The fact is, that my daughter Bella--Bella, who married young Trundle,
you know.’

‘Yes, yes, we know,’ said Mr. Pickwick impatiently.

‘Don’t alarm me at the very beginning. My daughter Bella--Emily having
gone to bed with a headache after she had read Arabella’s letter to me--
sat herself down by my side the other evening, and began to talk over
this marriage affair. “Well, pa,” she says, “what do you think of it?”
 “Why, my dear,” I said, “I suppose it’s all very well; I hope it’s for
the best.” I answered in this way because I was sitting before the fire
at the time, drinking my grog rather thoughtfully, and I knew my
throwing in an undecided word now and then, would induce her to continue
talking. Both my girls are pictures of their dear mother, and as I grow
old I like to sit with only them by me; for their voices and looks carry
me back to the happiest period of my life, and make me, for the moment,
as young as I used to be then, though not quite so light-hearted. “It’s
quite a marriage of affection, pa,” said Bella, after a short silence.
“Yes, my dear,” said I, “but such marriages do not always turn out the
happiest.”’

‘I question that, mind!’ interposed Mr. Pickwick warmly.

‘Very good,’ responded Wardle, ‘question anything you like when it’s
your turn to speak, but don’t interrupt me.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Granted,’ replied Wardle. ‘“I am sorry to hear you express your opinion
against marriages of affection, pa,” said Bella, colouring a little. “I
was wrong; I ought not to have said so, my dear, either,” said I,
patting her cheek as kindly as a rough old fellow like me could pat it,
“for your mother’s was one, and so was yours.” “It’s not that I meant,
pa,” said Bella. “The fact is, pa, I wanted to speak to you about
Emily.”’

Mr. Pickwick started.

‘What’s the matter now?’ inquired Wardle, stopping in his narrative.

‘Nothing,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘Pray go on.’

‘I never could spin out a story,’ said Wardle abruptly. ‘It must come
out, sooner or later, and it’ll save us all a great deal of time if it
comes at once. The long and the short of it is, then, that Bella at last
mustered up courage to tell me that Emily was very unhappy; that she and
your young friend Snodgrass had been in constant correspondence and
communication ever since last Christmas; that she had very dutifully
made up her mind to run away with him, in laudable imitation of her old
friend and school-fellow; but that having some compunctions of
conscience on the subject, inasmuch as I had always been rather kindly
disposed to both of them, they had thought it better in the first
instance to pay me the compliment of asking whether I would have any
objection to their being married in the usual matter-of-fact manner.
There now, Mr. Pickwick, if you can make it convenient to reduce your
eyes to their usual size again, and to let me hear what you think we
ought to do, I shall feel rather obliged to you!’

The testy manner in which the hearty old gentleman uttered this last
sentence was not wholly unwarranted; for Mr. Pickwick’s face had settled
down into an expression of blank amazement and perplexity, quite curious
to behold.

‘Snodgrass!--since last Christmas!’ were the first broken words that
issued from the lips of the confounded gentleman.

‘Since last Christmas,’ replied Wardle; ‘that’s plain enough, and very
bad spectacles we must have worn, not to have discovered it before.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ruminating; ‘I cannot really
understand it.’

‘It’s easy enough to understand it,’ replied the choleric old gentleman.
‘If you had been a younger man, you would have been in the secret long
ago; and besides,’ added Wardle, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘the truth
is, that, knowing nothing of this matter, I have rather pressed Emily
for four or five months past, to receive favourably (if she could; I
would never attempt to force a girl’s inclinations) the addresses of a
young gentleman down in our neighbourhood. I have no doubt that, girl-
like, to enhance her own value and increase the ardour of Mr. Snodgrass,
she has represented this matter in very glowing colours, and that they
have both arrived at the conclusion that they are a terribly-persecuted
pair of unfortunates, and have no resource but clandestine matrimony, or
charcoal. Now the question is, what’s to be done?’

‘What have _you _done?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘_I!_’

‘I mean what did you do when your married daughter told you this?’

‘Oh, I made a fool of myself of course,’ rejoined Wardle.

‘Just so,’ interposed Perker, who had accompanied this dialogue with
sundry twitchings of his watch-chain, vindictive rubbings of his nose,
and other symptoms of impatience. ‘That’s very natural; but how?’

‘I went into a great passion and frightened my mother into a fit,’ said
Wardle.

‘That was judicious,’ remarked Perker; ‘and what else?’

‘I fretted and fumed all next day, and raised a great disturbance,’
rejoined the old gentleman. ‘At last I got tired of rendering myself
unpleasant and making everybody miserable; so I hired a carriage at
Muggleton, and, putting my own horses in it, came up to town, under
pretence of bringing Emily to see Arabella.’

‘Miss Wardle is with you, then?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘To be sure she is,’ replied Wardle. ‘She is at Osborne’s Hotel in the
Adelphi at this moment, unless your enterprising friend has run away
with her since I came out this morning.’

‘You are reconciled then?’ said Perker.

‘Not a bit of it,’ answered Wardle; ‘she has been crying and moping ever
since, except last night, between tea and supper, when she made a great
parade of writing a letter that I pretended to take no notice of.’

‘You want my advice in this matter, I suppose?’ said Perker, looking
from the musing face of Mr. Pickwick to the eager countenance of Wardle,
and taking several consecutive pinches of his favourite stimulant.

‘I suppose so,’ said Wardle, looking at Mr. Pickwick.

‘Certainly,’ replied that gentleman.

‘Well then,’ said Perker, rising and pushing his chair back, ‘my advice
is, that you both walk away together, or ride away, or get away by some
means or other, for I’m tired of you, and just talk this matter over
between you. If you have not settled it by the next time I see you, I’ll
tell you what to do.’

‘This is satisfactory,’ said Wardle, hardly knowing whether to smile or
be offended.

‘Pooh, pooh, my dear Sir,’ returned Perker. ‘I know you both a great
deal better than you know yourselves. You have settled it already, to
all intents and purposes.’

Thus expressing himself, the little gentleman poked his snuff-box first
into the chest of Mr. Pickwick, and then into the waistcoat of Mr.
Wardle, upon which they all three laughed, especially the two last-named
gentlemen, who at once shook hands again, without any obvious or
particular reason.

‘You dine with me to-day,’ said Wardle to Perker, as he showed them out.

‘Can’t promise, my dear Sir, can’t promise,’ replied Perker. ‘I’ll look
in, in the evening, at all events.’

‘I shall expect you at five,’ said Wardle. ‘Now, Joe!’ And Joe having
been at length awakened, the two friends departed in Mr. Wardle’s
carriage, which in common humanity had a dickey behind for the fat boy,
who, if there had been a footboard instead, would have rolled off and
killed himself in his very first nap.

Driving to the George and Vulture, they found that Arabella and her maid
had sent for a hackney-coach immediately on the receipt of a short note
from Emily announcing her arrival in town, and had proceeded straight to
the Adelphi. As Wardle had business to transact in the city, they sent
the carriage and the fat boy to his hotel, with the information that he
and Mr. Pickwick would return together to dinner at five o’clock.

Charged with this message, the fat boy returned, slumbering as peaceably
in his dickey, over the stones, as if it had been a down bed on watch
springs. By some extraordinary miracle he awoke of his own accord, when
the coach stopped, and giving himself a good shake to stir up his
faculties, went upstairs to execute his commission.

Now, whether the shake had jumbled the fat boy’s faculties together,
instead of arranging them in proper order, or had roused such a quantity
of new ideas within him as to render him oblivious of ordinary forms and
ceremonies, or (which is also possible) had proved unsuccessful in
preventing his falling asleep as he ascended the stairs, it is an
undoubted fact that he walked into the sitting-room without previously
knocking at the door; and so beheld a gentleman with his arms clasping
his young mistress’s waist, sitting very lovingly by her side on a sofa,
while Arabella and her pretty handmaid feigned to be absorbed in looking
out of a window at the other end of the room. At the sight of this
phenomenon, the fat boy uttered an interjection, the ladies a scream,
and the gentleman an oath, almost simultaneously.

‘Wretched creature, what do you want here?’ said the gentleman, who it
is needless to say was Mr. Snodgrass.

To this the fat boy, considerably terrified, briefly responded,
‘Missis.’

‘What do you want me for,’ inquired Emily, turning her head aside, ‘you
stupid creature?’

‘Master and Mr. Pickwick is a-going to dine here at five,’ replied the
fat boy.

‘Leave the room!’ said Mr. Snodgrass, glaring upon the bewildered youth.

‘No, no, no,’ added Emily hastily. ‘Bella, dear, advise me.’

Upon this, Emily and Mr. Snodgrass, and Arabella and Mary, crowded into
a corner, and conversed earnestly in whispers for some minutes, during
which the fat boy dozed.

‘Joe,’ said Arabella, at length, looking round with a most bewitching
smile, ‘how do you do, Joe?’

‘Joe,’ said Emily, ‘you’re a very good boy; I won’t forget you, Joe.’

‘Joe,’ said Mr. Snodgrass, advancing to the astonished youth, and
seizing his hand, ‘I didn’t know you before. There’s five shillings for
you, Joe!”

‘I’ll owe you five, Joe,’ said Arabella, ‘for old acquaintance sake, you
know;’ and another most captivating smile was bestowed upon the
corpulent intruder.

The fat boy’s perception being slow, he looked rather puzzled at first
to account for this sudden prepossession in his favour, and stared about
him in a very alarming manner. At length his broad face began to show
symptoms of a grin of proportionately broad dimensions; and then,
thrusting half-a-crown into each of his pockets, and a hand and wrist
after it, he burst into a horse laugh: being for the first and only time
in his existence.

‘He understands us, I see,’ said Arabella.

‘He had better have something to eat, immediately,’ remarked Emily.

The fat boy almost laughed again when he heard this suggestion. Mary,
after a little more whispering, tripped forth from the group and said--


‘I am going to dine with you to-day, sir, if you have no objection.’

‘This way,’ said the fat boy eagerly. ‘There is such a jolly meat-pie!’

With these words, the fat boy led the way downstairs; his pretty
companion captivating all the waiters and angering all the chambermaids
as she followed him to the eating-room.

There was the meat-pie of which the youth had spoken so feelingly, and
there were, moreover, a steak, and a dish of potatoes, and a pot of
porter.

‘Sit down,’ said the fat boy. ‘Oh, my eye, how prime! I am _so_ hungry.’

Having apostrophised his eye, in a species of rapture, five or six
times, the youth took the head of the little table, and Mary seated
herself at the bottom.

‘Will you have some of this?’ said the fat boy, plunging into the pie up
to the very ferules of the knife and fork.

‘A little, if you please,’ replied Mary.

The fat boy assisted Mary to a little, and himself to a great deal, and
was just going to begin eating when he suddenly laid down his knife and
fork, leaned forward in his chair, and letting his hands, with the knife
and fork in them, fall on his knees, said, very slowly--

‘I say! How nice you look!’

This was said in an admiring manner, and was, so far, gratifying; but
still there was enough of the cannibal in the young gentleman’s eyes to
render the compliment a double one.

‘Dear me, Joseph,’ said Mary, affecting to blush, ‘what do you mean?’

The fat boy, gradually recovering his former position, replied with a
heavy sigh, and, remaining thoughtful for a few moments, drank a long
draught of the porter. Having achieved this feat, he sighed again, and
applied himself assiduously to the pie.

‘What a nice young lady Miss Emily is!’ said Mary, after a long silence.

The fat boy had by this time finished the pie. He fixed his eyes on
Mary, and replied--

‘I knows a nicerer.’

‘Indeed!’ said Mary.

‘Yes, indeed!’ replied the fat boy, with unwonted vivacity.

‘What’s her name?’ inquired Mary.

‘What’s yours?’

‘Mary.’

‘So’s hers,’ said the fat boy. ‘You’re her.’ The boy grinned to add
point to the compliment, and put his eyes into something between a
squint and a cast, which there is reason to believe he intended for an
ogle.

‘You mustn’t talk to me in that way,’ said Mary; ‘you don’t mean it.’

‘Don’t I, though?’ replied the fat boy. ‘I say?’

‘Well?’

‘Are you going to come here regular?’

‘No,’ rejoined Mary, shaking her head, ‘I’m going away again to-night.
Why?’

‘Oh,’ said the fat boy, in a tone of strong feeling; ‘how we should have
enjoyed ourselves at meals, if you had been!’

‘I might come here sometimes, perhaps, to see you,’ said Mary, plaiting
the table-cloth in assumed coyness, ‘if you would do me a favour.’

The fat boy looked from the pie-dish to the steak, as if he thought a
favour must be in a manner connected with something to eat; and then
took out one of the half-crowns and glanced at it nervously.

‘Don’t you understand me?’ said Mary, looking slily in his fat face.

Again he looked at the half-crown, and said faintly, ‘No.’

‘The ladies want you not to say anything to the old gentleman about the
young gentleman having been upstairs; and I want you too.’

‘Is that all?’ said the fat boy, evidently very much relieved, as he
pocketed the half-crown again. ‘Of course I ain’t a-going to.’

‘You see,’ said Mary, ‘Mr. Snodgrass is very fond of Miss Emily, and
Miss Emily’s very fond of him, and if you were to tell about it, the old
gentleman would carry you all away miles into the country, where you’d
see nobody.’

‘No, no, I won’t tell,’ said the fat boy stoutly.

‘That’s a dear,’ said Mary. ‘Now it’s time I went upstairs, and got my
lady ready for dinner.’

‘Don’t go yet,’ urged the fat boy.

‘I must,’ replied Mary. ‘Good-bye, for the present.’

The fat boy, with elephantine playfulness, stretched out his arms to
ravish a kiss; but as it required no great agility to elude him, his
fair enslaver had vanished before he closed them again; upon which the
apathetic youth ate a pound or so of steak with a sentimental
countenance, and fell fast asleep.

There was so much to say upstairs, and there were so many plans to
concert for elopement and matrimony in the event of old Wardle
continuing to be cruel, that it wanted only half an hour of dinner when
Mr. Snodgrass took his final adieu. The ladies ran to Emily’s bedroom to
dress, and the lover, taking up his hat, walked out of the room. He had
scarcely got outside the door, when he heard Wardle’s voice talking
loudly, and looking over the banisters beheld him, followed by some
other gentlemen, coming straight upstairs. Knowing nothing of the house,
Mr. Snodgrass in his confusion stepped hastily back into the room he had
just quitted, and passing thence into an inner apartment (Mr. Wardle’s
bedchamber), closed the door softly, just as the persons he had caught a
glimpse of entered the sitting-room. These were Mr. Wardle, Mr.
Pickwick, Mr. Nathaniel Winkle, and Mr. Benjamin Allen, whom he had no
difficulty in recognising by their voices.

‘Very lucky I had the presence of mind to avoid them,’ thought Mr.
Snodgrass with a smile, and walking on tiptoe to another door near the
bedside; ‘this opens into the same passage, and I can walk quietly and
comfortably away.’

There was only one obstacle to his walking quietly and comfortably away,
which was that the door was locked and the key gone.

‘Let us have some of your best wine to-day, waiter,’ said old Wardle,
rubbing his hands.

‘You shall have some of the very best, sir,’ replied the waiter.

‘Let the ladies know we have come in.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

Devoutly and ardently did Mr. Snodgrass wish that the ladies could know
he had come in. He ventured once to whisper, ‘Waiter!’ through the
keyhole, but the probability of the wrong waiter coming to his relief,
flashed upon his mind, together with a sense of the strong resemblance
between his own situation and that in which another gentleman had been
recently found in a neighbouring hotel (an account of whose misfortunes
had appeared under the head of ‘Police’ in that morning’s paper), he sat
himself on a portmanteau, and trembled violently.

‘We won’t wait a minute for Perker,’ said Wardle, looking at his watch;
‘he is always exact. He will be here, in time, if he means to come; and
if he does not, it’s of no use waiting. Ha! Arabella!’

‘My sister!’ exclaimed Mr. Benjamin Allen, folding her in a most
romantic embrace.

‘Oh, Ben, dear, how you do smell of tobacco,’ said Arabella, rather
overcome by this mark of affection.

‘Do I?’ said Mr. Benjamin Allen. ‘Do I, Bella? Well, perhaps I do.’

Perhaps he did, having just left a pleasant little smoking-party of
twelve medical students, in a small back parlour with a large fire.

‘But I am delighted to see you,’ said Mr. Ben Allen. ‘Bless you, Bella!’

‘There,’ said Arabella, bending forward to kiss her brother; ‘don’t take
hold of me again, Ben, dear, because you tumble me so.’

At this point of the reconciliation, Mr. Ben Allen allowed his feelings
and the cigars and porter to overcome him, and looked round upon the
beholders with damp spectacles.

‘Is nothing to be said to me?’ cried Wardle, with open arms.

‘A great deal,’ whispered Arabella, as she received the old gentleman’s
hearty caress and congratulation. ‘You are a hard-hearted, unfeeling,
cruel monster.’

‘You are a little rebel,’ replied Wardle, in the same tone, ‘and I am
afraid I shall be obliged to forbid you the house. People like you, who
get married in spite of everybody, ought not to be let loose on society.
But come!’ added the old gentleman aloud, ‘here’s the dinner; you shall
sit by me. Joe; why, damn the boy, he’s awake!’

To the great distress of his master, the fat boy was indeed in a state
of remarkable vigilance, his eyes being wide open, and looking as if
they intended to remain so. There was an alacrity in his manner, too,
which was equally unaccountable; every time his eyes met those of Emily
or Arabella, he smirked and grinned; once, Wardle could have sworn, he
saw him wink.

This alteration in the fat boy’s demeanour originated in his increased
sense of his own importance, and the dignity he acquired from having
been taken into the confidence of the young ladies; and the smirks, and
grins, and winks were so many condescending assurances that they might
depend upon his fidelity. As these tokens were rather calculated to
awaken suspicion than allay it, and were somewhat embarrassing besides,
they were occasionally answered by a frown or shake of the head from
Arabella, which the fat boy, considering as hints to be on his guard,
expressed his perfect understanding of, by smirking, grinning, and
winking, with redoubled assiduity.

‘Joe,’ said Mr. Wardle, after an unsuccessful search in all his pockets,
‘is my snuff-box on the sofa?’

‘No, sir,’ replied the fat boy.

‘Oh, I recollect; I left it on my dressing-table this morning,’ said
Wardle. ‘Run into the next room and fetch it.’

The fat boy went into the next room; and, having been absent about a
minute, returned with the snuff-box, and the palest face that ever a fat
boy wore.

‘What’s the matter with the boy?’ exclaimed Wardle.

‘Nothen’s the matter with me,’ replied Joe nervously.

‘Have you been seeing any spirits?’ inquired the old gentleman.

‘Or taking any?’ added Ben Allen.

‘I think you’re right,’ whispered Wardle across the table. ‘He is
intoxicated, I’m sure.’

Ben Allen replied that he thought he was; and, as that gentleman had
seen a vast deal of the disease in question, Wardle was confirmed in an
impression which had been hovering about his mind for half an hour, and
at once arrived at the conclusion that the fat boy was drunk.

‘Just keep your eye upon him for a few minutes,’ murmured Wardle. ‘We
shall soon find out whether he is or not.’

The unfortunate youth had only interchanged a dozen words with Mr.
Snodgrass, that gentleman having implored him to make a private appeal
to some friend to release him, and then pushed him out with the snuff-
box, lest his prolonged absence should lead to a discovery. He ruminated
a little with a most disturbed expression of face, and left the room in
search of Mary.

But Mary had gone home after dressing her mistress, and the fat boy came
back again more disturbed than before.

Wardle and Mr. Ben Allen exchanged glances.

‘Joe!’ said Wardle.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What did you go away for?’

The fat boy looked hopelessly in the face of everybody at table, and
stammered out that he didn’t know.

‘Oh,’ said Wardle, ‘you don’t know, eh? Take this cheese to Mr.
Pickwick.’

Now, Mr. Pickwick being in the very best health and spirits, had been
making himself perfectly delightful all dinner-time, and was at this
moment engaged in an energetic conversation with Emily and Mr. Winkle;
bowing his head, courteously, in the emphasis of his discourse, gently
waving his left hand to lend force to his observations, and all glowing
with placid smiles. He took a piece of cheese from the plate, and was on
the point of turning round to renew the conversation, when the fat boy,
stooping so as to bring his head on a level with that of Mr. Pickwick,
pointed with his thumb over his shoulder, and made the most horrible and
hideous face that was ever seen out of a Christmas pantomime.

‘Dear me!’ said Mr. Pickwick, starting, ‘what a very--Eh?’ He stopped,
for the fat boy had drawn himself up, and was, or pretended to be, fast
asleep.

‘What’s the matter?’ inquired Wardle.

‘This is such an extremely singular lad!’ replied Mr. Pickwick, looking
uneasily at the boy. ‘It seems an odd thing to say, but upon my word I
am afraid that, at times, he is a little deranged.’

‘Oh! Mr. Pickwick, pray don’t say so,’ cried Emily and Arabella, both at
once.

‘I am not certain, of course,’ said Mr. Pickwick, amidst profound
silence and looks of general dismay; ‘but his manner to me this moment
really was very alarming. Oh!’ ejaculated Mr. Pickwick, suddenly jumping
up with a short scream. ‘I beg your pardon, ladies, but at that moment
he ran some sharp instrument into my leg. Really, he is not safe.’

‘He’s drunk,’ roared old Wardle passionately. ‘Ring the bell! Call the
waiters! He’s drunk.’

‘I ain’t,’ said the fat boy, falling on his knees as his master seized
him by the collar. ‘I ain’t drunk.’

‘Then you’re mad; that’s worse. Call the waiters,’ said the old
gentleman.

‘I ain’t mad; I’m sensible,’ rejoined the fat boy, beginning to cry.

‘Then, what the devil did you run sharp instruments into Mr. Pickwick’s
legs for?’ inquired Wardle angrily.

‘He wouldn’t look at me,’ replied the boy. ‘I wanted to speak to him.’

‘What did you want to say?’ asked half a dozen voices at once.

The fat boy gasped, looked at the bedroom door, gasped again, and wiped
two tears away with the knuckle of each of his forefingers.

‘What did you want to say?’ demanded Wardle, shaking him.

‘Stop!’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘allow me. What did you wish to communicate
to me, my poor boy?’

‘I want to whisper to you,’ replied the fat boy.

‘You want to bite his ear off, I suppose,’ said Wardle. ‘Don’t come near
him; he’s vicious; ring the bell, and let him be taken downstairs.’

Just as Mr. Winkle caught the bell-rope in his hand, it was arrested by
a general expression of astonishment; the captive lover, his face
burning with confusion, suddenly walked in from the bedroom, and made a
comprehensive bow to the company.

‘Hollo!’ cried Wardle, releasing the fat boy’s collar, and staggering
back. ‘What’s this?’

‘I have been concealed in the next room, sir, since you returned,’
explained Mr. Snodgrass.

‘Emily, my girl,’ said Wardle reproachfully, ‘I detest meanness and
deceit; this is unjustifiable and indelicate in the highest degree. I
don’t deserve this at your hands, Emily, indeed!’

‘Dear papa,’ said Emily, ‘Arabella knows--everybody here knows--Joe
knows--that I was no party to this concealment. Augustus, for Heaven’s
sake, explain it!’

Mr. Snodgrass, who had only waited for a hearing, at once recounted how
he had been placed in his then distressing predicament; how the fear of
giving rise to domestic dissensions had alone prompted him to avoid Mr.
Wardle on his entrance; how he merely meant to depart by another door,
but, finding it locked, had been compelled to stay against his will. It
was a painful situation to be placed in; but he now regretted it the
less, inasmuch as it afforded him an opportunity of acknowledging,
before their mutual friends, that he loved Mr. Wardle’s daughter deeply
and sincerely; that he was proud to avow that the feeling was mutual;
and that if thousands of miles were placed between them, or oceans
rolled their waters, he could never for an instant forget those happy
days, when first--et cetera, et cetera.

Having delivered himself to this effect, Mr. Snodgrass bowed again,
looked into the crown of his hat, and stepped towards the door.

‘Stop!’ shouted Wardle. ‘Why, in the name of all that’s--’

‘Inflammable,’ mildly suggested Mr. Pickwick, who thought something
worse was coming.

‘Well--that’s inflammable,’ said Wardle, adopting the substitute;
‘couldn’t you say all this to me in the first instance?’

‘Or confide in me?’ added Mr. Pickwick.

‘Dear, dear,’ said Arabella, taking up the defence, ‘what is the use of
asking all that now, especially when you know you had set your covetous
old heart on a richer son-in-law, and are so wild and fierce besides,
that everybody is afraid of you, except me? Shake hands with him, and
order him some dinner, for goodness gracious’ sake, for he looks half
starved; and pray have your wine up at once, for you’ll not be tolerable
until you have taken two bottles at least.’

The worthy old gentleman pulled Arabella’s ear, kissed her without the
smallest scruple, kissed his daughter also with great affection, and
shook Mr. Snodgrass warmly by the hand.

‘She is right on one point at all events,’ said the old gentleman
cheerfully. ‘Ring for the wine!’

The wine came, and Perker came upstairs at the same moment. Mr.
Snodgrass had dinner at a side table, and, when he had despatched it,
drew his chair next Emily, without the smallest opposition on the old
gentleman’s part.

The evening was excellent. Little Mr. Perker came out wonderfully, told
various comic stories, and sang a serious song which was almost as funny
as the anecdotes. Arabella was very charming, Mr. Wardle very jovial,
Mr. Pickwick very harmonious, Mr. Ben Allen very uproarious, the lovers
very silent, Mr. Winkle very talkative, and all of them very happy.



CHAPTER LV. MR. SOLOMON PELL, ASSISTED BY A SELECT COMMITTEE OF
COACHMEN, ARRANGES THE AFFAIRS OF THE ELDER MR. WELLER

Samivel,’ said Mr. Weller, accosting his son on the morning after the
funeral, ‘I’ve found it, Sammy. I thought it wos there.’

‘Thought wot wos there?’ inquired Sam.

‘Your mother-in-law’s vill, Sammy,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘In wirtue o’
vich, them arrangements is to be made as I told you on, last night,
respectin’ the funs.’

‘Wot, didn’t she tell you were it wos?’ inquired Sam.

‘Not a bit on it, Sammy,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘We wos a adjestin’ our
little differences, and I wos a-cheerin’ her spirits and bearin’ her up,
so that I forgot to ask anythin’ about it. I don’t know as I should ha’
done it, indeed, if I had remembered it,’ added Mr. Weller, ‘for it’s a
rum sort o’ thing, Sammy, to go a-hankerin’ arter anybody’s property,
ven you’re assistin’ ‘em in illness. It’s like helping an outside
passenger up, ven he’s been pitched off a coach, and puttin’ your hand
in his pocket, vile you ask him, vith a sigh, how he finds his-self,
Sammy.’

With this figurative illustration of his meaning, Mr. Weller unclasped
his pocket-book, and drew forth a dirty sheet of letter-paper, on which
were inscribed various characters crowded together in remarkable
confusion.

‘This here is the dockyment, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller. ‘I found it in the
little black tea-pot, on the top shelf o’ the bar closet. She used to
keep bank-notes there, ‘fore she vos married, Samivel. I’ve seen her
take the lid off, to pay a bill, many and many a time. Poor creetur, she
might ha’ filled all the tea-pots in the house vith vills, and not have
inconwenienced herself neither, for she took wery little of anythin’ in
that vay lately, ‘cept on the temperance nights, ven they just laid a
foundation o’ tea to put the spirits atop on!’

‘What does it say?’ inquired Sam.

‘Jist vot I told you, my boy,’ rejoined his parent. ‘Two hundred pound
vurth o’ reduced counsels to my son-in-law, Samivel, and all the rest o’
my property, of ev’ry kind and description votsoever, to my husband, Mr.
Tony Veller, who I appint as my sole eggzekiter.’

‘That’s all, is it?’ said Sam.

‘That’s all,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘And I s’pose as it’s all right and
satisfactory to you and me as is the only parties interested, ve may as
vell put this bit o’ paper into the fire.’

‘Wot are you a-doin’ on, you lunatic?’ said Sam, snatching the paper
away, as his parent, in all innocence, stirred the fire preparatory to
suiting the action to the word. ‘You’re a nice eggzekiter, you are.’

‘Vy not?’ inquired Mr. Weller, looking sternly round, with the poker in
his hand.

‘Vy not?’ exclaimed Sam. ‘’Cos it must be proved, and probated, and
swore to, and all manner o’ formalities.’

‘You don’t mean that?’ said Mr. Weller, laying down the poker.

Sam buttoned the will carefully in a side pocket; intimating by a look,
meanwhile, that he did mean it, and very seriously too.

‘Then I’ll tell you wot it is,’ said Mr. Weller, after a short
meditation, ‘this is a case for that ‘ere confidential pal o’ the
Chancellorship’s. Pell must look into this, Sammy. He’s the man for a
difficult question at law. Ve’ll have this here brought afore the
Solvent Court, directly, Samivel.’

‘I never did see such a addle-headed old creetur!’ exclaimed Sam
irritably; ‘Old Baileys, and Solvent Courts, and alleybis, and ev’ry
species o’ gammon alvays a-runnin’ through his brain. You’d better get
your out o’ door clothes on, and come to town about this bisness, than
stand a-preachin’ there about wot you don’t understand nothin’ on.’

‘Wery good, Sammy,’ replied Mr. Weller, ‘I’m quite agreeable to anythin’
as vill hexpedite business, Sammy. But mind this here, my boy, nobody
but Pell--nobody but Pell as a legal adwiser.’

‘I don’t want anybody else,’ replied Sam. ‘Now, are you a-comin’?’

‘Vait a minit, Sammy,’ replied Mr. Weller, who, having tied his shawl
with the aid of a small glass that hung in the window, was now, by dint
of the most wonderful exertions, struggling into his upper garments.
‘Vait a minit’ Sammy; ven you grow as old as your father, you von’t get
into your veskit quite as easy as you do now, my boy.’

‘If I couldn’t get into it easier than that, I’m blessed if I’d vear vun
at all,’ rejoined his son.

‘You think so now,’ said Mr. Weller, with the gravity of age, ‘but
you’ll find that as you get vider, you’ll get viser. Vidth and visdom,
Sammy, alvays grows together.’

As Mr. Weller delivered this infallible maxim--the result of many years’
personal experience and observation--he contrived, by a dexterous twist
of his body, to get the bottom button of his coat to perform its office.
Having paused a few seconds to recover breath, he brushed his hat with
his elbow, and declared himself ready.

‘As four heads is better than two, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, as they
drove along the London Road in the chaise-cart, ‘and as all this here
property is a wery great temptation to a legal gen’l’m’n, ve’ll take a
couple o’ friends o’ mine vith us, as’ll be wery soon down upon him if
he comes anythin’ irreg’lar; two o’ them as saw you to the Fleet that
day. They’re the wery best judges,’ added Mr. Weller, in a half-whisper-
-’the wery best judges of a horse, you ever know’d.’

‘And of a lawyer too?’ inquired Sam.

‘The man as can form a ackerate judgment of a animal, can form a
ackerate judgment of anythin’,’ replied his father, so dogmatically,
that Sam did not attempt to controvert the position.

In pursuance of this notable resolution, the services of the mottled-
faced gentleman and of two other very fat coachmen--selected by Mr.
Weller, probably, with a view to their width and consequent wisdom--were
put into requisition; and this assistance having been secured, the party
proceeded to the public-house in Portugal Street, whence a messenger was
despatched to the Insolvent Court over the way, requiring Mr. Solomon
Pell’s immediate attendance.

The messenger fortunately found Mr. Solomon Pell in court, regaling
himself, business being rather slack, with a cold collation of an
Abernethy biscuit and a saveloy. The message was no sooner whispered in
his ear than he thrust them in his pocket among various professional
documents, and hurried over the way with such alacrity that he reached
the parlour before the messenger had even emancipated himself from the
court.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Mr. Pell, touching his hat, ‘my service to you all. I
don’t say it to flatter you, gentlemen, but there are not five other men
in the world, that I’d have come out of that court for, to-day.’

‘So busy, eh?’ said Sam.

‘Busy!’ replied Pell; ‘I’m completely sewn up, as my friend the late
Lord Chancellor many a time used to say to me, gentlemen, when he came
out from hearing appeals in the House of Lords. Poor fellow; he was very
susceptible to fatigue; he used to feel those appeals uncommonly. I
actually thought more than once that he’d have sunk under ‘em; I did,
indeed.’

Here Mr. Pell shook his head and paused; on which, the elder Mr. Weller,
nudging his neighbour, as begging him to mark the attorney’s high
connections, asked whether the duties in question produced any permanent
ill effects on the constitution of his noble friend.

‘I don’t think he ever quite recovered them,’ replied Pell; ‘in fact I’m
sure he never did. “Pell,” he used to say to me many a time, “how the
blazes you can stand the head-work you do, is a mystery to me.”--“Well,”
 I used to answer, “I hardly know how I do it, upon my life.”--“Pell,”
 he’d add, sighing, and looking at me with a little envy--friendly envy,
you know, gentlemen, mere friendly envy; I never minded it--“Pell,
you’re a wonder; a wonder.” Ah! you’d have liked him very much if you
had known him, gentlemen. Bring me three-penn’orth of rum, my dear.’

Addressing this latter remark to the waitress, in a tone of subdued
grief, Mr. Pell sighed, looked at his shoes and the ceiling; and, the
rum having by that time arrived, drank it up.

‘However,’ said Pell, drawing a chair to the table, ‘a professional man
has no right to think of his private friendships when his legal
assistance is wanted. By the bye, gentlemen, since I saw you here
before, we have had to weep over a very melancholy occurrence.’

Mr. Pell drew out a pocket-handkerchief, when he came to the word weep,
but he made no further use of it than to wipe away a slight tinge of rum
which hung upon his upper lip.

‘I saw it in the ADVERTISER, Mr. Weller,’ continued Pell. ‘Bless my
soul, not more than fifty-two! Dear me--only think.’

These indications of a musing spirit were addressed to the mottled-faced
man, whose eyes Mr. Pell had accidentally caught; on which, the mottled-
faced man, whose apprehension of matters in general was of a foggy
nature, moved uneasily in his seat, and opined that, indeed, so far as
that went, there was no saying how things was brought about; which
observation, involving one of those subtle propositions which it is
difficult to encounter in argument, was controverted by nobody.

‘I have heard it remarked that she was a very fine woman, Mr. Weller,’
said Pell, in a sympathising manner.

‘Yes, sir, she wos,’ replied the elder Mr. Weller, not much relishing
this mode of discussing the subject, and yet thinking that the attorney,
from his long intimacy with the late Lord Chancellor, must know best on
all matters of polite breeding. ‘She wos a wery fine ‘ooman, sir, ven I
first know’d her. She wos a widder, sir, at that time.’

‘Now, it’s curious,’ said Pell, looking round with a sorrowful smile;
‘Mrs. Pell was a widow.’

‘That’s very extraordinary,’ said the mottled-faced man.

‘Well, it is a curious coincidence,’ said Pell.

‘Not at all,’ gruffly remarked the elder Mr. Weller. ‘More widders is
married than single wimin.’

‘Very good, very good,’ said Pell, ‘you’re quite right, Mr. Weller. Mrs.
Pell was a very elegant and accomplished woman; her manners were the
theme of universal admiration in our neighbourhood. I was proud to see
that woman dance; there was something so firm and dignified, and yet
natural, in her motion. Her cutting, gentlemen, was simplicity itself.
Ah! well, well! Excuse my asking the question, Mr. Samuel,’ continued
the attorney in a lower voice, ‘was your mother-in-law tall?’

‘Not wery,’ replied Sam.

‘Mrs. Pell was a tall figure,’ said Pell, ‘a splendid woman, with a
noble shape, and a nose, gentlemen, formed to command and be majestic.
She was very much attached to me--very much--highly connected, too. Her
mother’s brother, gentlemen, failed for eight hundred pounds, as a law
stationer.’

‘Vell,’ said Mr. Weller, who had grown rather restless during this
discussion, ‘vith regard to bis’ness.’

The word was music to Pell’s ears. He had been revolving in his mind
whether any business was to be transacted, or whether he had been merely
invited to partake of a glass of brandy-and-water, or a bowl of punch,
or any similar professional compliment, and now the doubt was set at
rest without his appearing at all eager for its solution. His eyes
glistened as he laid his hat on the table, and said--

‘What is the business upon which--um? Either of these gentlemen wish to
go through the court? We require an arrest; a friendly arrest will do,
you know; we are all friends here, I suppose?’

‘Give me the dockyment, Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller, taking the will from
his son, who appeared to enjoy the interview amazingly. ‘Wot we rekvire,
sir, is a probe o’ this here.’

‘Probate, my dear Sir, probate,’ said Pell.

‘Well, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller sharply, ‘probe and probe it, is wery
much the same; if you don’t understand wot I mean, sir, I des-say I can
find them as does.’

‘No offence, I hope, Mr. Weller,’ said Pell meekly. ‘You are the
executor, I see,’ he added, casting his eyes over the paper.

‘I am, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘These other gentlemen, I presume, are legatees, are they?’ inquired
Pell, with a congratulatory smile.

‘Sammy is a leg-at-ease,’ replied Mr. Weller; ‘these other gen’l’m’n is
friends o’ mine, just come to see fair; a kind of umpires.’

‘Oh!’ said Pell, ‘very good. I have no objections, I’m sure. I shall
want a matter of five pound of you before I begin, ha! ha! ha!’

It being decided by the committee that the five pound might be advanced,
Mr. Weller produced that sum; after which, a long consultation about
nothing particular took place, in the course whereof Mr. Pell
demonstrated to the perfect satisfaction of the gentlemen who saw fair,
that unless the management of the business had been intrusted to him, it
must all have gone wrong, for reasons not clearly made out, but no doubt
sufficient. This important point being despatched, Mr. Pell refreshed
himself with three chops, and liquids both malt and spirituous, at the
expense of the estate; and then they all went away to Doctors’ Commons.

The next day there was another visit to Doctors’ Commons, and a great
to-do with an attesting hostler, who, being inebriated, declined
swearing anything but profane oaths, to the great scandal of a proctor
and surrogate. Next week, there were more visits to Doctors’ Commons,
and there was a visit to the Legacy Duty Office besides, and there were
treaties entered into, for the disposal of the lease and business, and
ratifications of the same, and inventories to be made out, and lunches
to be taken, and dinners to be eaten, and so many profitable things to
be done, and such a mass of papers accumulated that Mr. Solomon Pell,
and the boy, and the blue bag to boot, all got so stout that scarcely
anybody would have known them for the same man, boy, and bag, that had
loitered about Portugal Street, a few days before.

At length all these weighty matters being arranged, a day was fixed for
selling out and transferring the stock, and of waiting with that view
upon Wilkins Flasher, Esquire, stock-broker, of somewhere near the bank,
who had been recommended by Mr. Solomon Pell for the purpose.

It was a kind of festive occasion, and the parties were attired
accordingly. Mr. Weller’s tops were newly cleaned, and his dress was
arranged with peculiar care; the mottled-faced gentleman wore at his
button-hole a full-sized dahlia with several leaves; and the coats of
his two friends were adorned with nosegays of laurel and other
evergreens. All three were habited in strict holiday costume; that is to
say, they were wrapped up to the chins, and wore as many clothes as
possible, which is, and has been, a stage-coachman’s idea of full dress
ever since stage-coaches were invented.

Mr. Pell was waiting at the usual place of meeting at the appointed
time; even he wore a pair of gloves and a clean shirt, much frayed at
the collar and wristbands by frequent washings.

‘A quarter to two,’ said Pell, looking at the parlour clock. ‘If we are
with Mr. Flasher at a quarter past, we shall just hit the best time.’

‘What should you say to a drop o’ beer, gen’l’m’n?’ suggested the
mottled-faced man.

‘And a little bit o’ cold beef,’ said the second coachman.

‘Or a oyster,’ added the third, who was a hoarse gentleman, supported by
very round legs.

‘Hear, hear!’ said Pell; ‘to congratulate Mr. Weller, on his coming into
possession of his property, eh? Ha! ha!’

‘I’m quite agreeable, gen’l’m’n,’ answered Mr. Weller. ‘Sammy, pull the
bell.’

Sammy complied; and the porter, cold beef, and oysters being promptly
produced, the lunch was done ample justice to. Where everybody took so
active a part, it is almost invidious to make a distinction; but if one
individual evinced greater powers than another, it was the coachman with
the hoarse voice, who took an imperial pint of vinegar with his oysters,
without betraying the least emotion.

‘Mr. Pell, Sir,’ said the elder Mr. Weller, stirring a glass of brandy-
and-water, of which one was placed before every gentleman when the
oyster shells were removed--‘Mr. Pell, Sir, it wos my intention to have
proposed the funs on this occasion, but Samivel has vispered to me--’

Here Mr. Samuel Weller, who had silently eaten his oysters with tranquil
smiles, cried, ‘Hear!’ in a very loud voice.

‘--Has vispered to me,’ resumed his father, ‘that it vould be better to
dewote the liquor to vishin’ you success and prosperity, and thankin’
you for the manner in which you’ve brought this here business through.
Here’s your health, sir.’

‘Hold hard there,’ interposed the mottled-faced gentleman, with sudden
energy; ‘your eyes on me, gen’l’m’n!’


Saying this, the mottled-faced gentleman rose, as did the other
gentlemen. The mottled-faced gentleman reviewed the company, and slowly
lifted his hand, upon which every man (including him of the mottled
countenance) drew a long breath, and lifted his tumbler to his lips. In
one instant, the mottled-faced gentleman depressed his hand again, and
every glass was set down empty. It is impossible to describe the
thrilling effect produced by this striking ceremony. At once dignified,
solemn, and impressive, it combined every element of grandeur.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ said Mr. Pell, ‘all I can say is, that such marks of
confidence must be very gratifying to a professional man. I don’t wish
to say anything that might appear egotistical, gentlemen, but I’m very
glad, for your own sakes, that you came to me; that’s all. If you had
gone to any low member of the profession, it’s my firm conviction, and I
assure you of it as a fact, that you would have found yourselves in
Queer Street before this. I could have wished my noble friend had been
alive to have seen my management of this case. I don’t say it out of
pride, but I think--However, gentlemen, I won’t trouble you with that.
I’m generally to be found here, gentlemen, but if I’m not here, or over
the way, that’s my address. You’ll find my terms very cheap and
reasonable, and no man attends more to his clients than I do, and I hope
I know a little of my profession besides. If you have any opportunity of
recommending me to any of your friends, gentlemen, I shall be very much
obliged to you, and so will they too, when they come to know me. Your
healths, gentlemen.’

With this expression of his feelings, Mr. Solomon Pell laid three small
written cards before Mr. Weller’s friends, and, looking at the clock
again, feared it was time to be walking. Upon this hint Mr. Weller
settled the bill, and, issuing forth, the executor, legatee, attorney,
and umpires, directed their steps towards the city.

The office of Wilkins Flasher, Esquire, of the Stock Exchange, was in a
first floor up a court behind the Bank of England; the house of Wilkins
Flasher, Esquire, was at Brixton, Surrey; the horse and stanhope of
Wilkins Flasher, Esquire, were at an adjacent livery stable; the groom
of Wilkins Flasher, Esquire, was on his way to the West End to deliver
some game; the clerk of Wilkins Flasher, Esquire, had gone to his
dinner; and so Wilkins Flasher, Esquire, himself, cried, ‘Come in,’ when
Mr. Pell and his companions knocked at the counting-house door.

‘Good-morning, Sir,’ said Pell, bowing obsequiously. ‘We want to make a
little transfer, if you please.’

‘Oh, just come in, will you?’ said Mr. Flasher. ‘Sit down a minute; I’ll
attend to you directly.’

‘Thank you, Sir,’ said Pell, ‘there’s no hurry. Take a chair, Mr.
Weller.’

Mr. Weller took a chair, and Sam took a box, and the umpires took what
they could get, and looked at the almanac and one or two papers which
were wafered against the wall, with as much open-eyed reverence as if
they had been the finest efforts of the old masters.

‘Well, I’ll bet you half a dozen of claret on it; come!’ said Wilkins
Flasher, Esquire, resuming the conversation to which Mr. Pell’s entrance
had caused a momentary interruption.

This was addressed to a very smart young gentleman who wore his hat on
his right whisker, and was lounging over the desk, killing flies with a
ruler. Wilkins Flasher, Esquire, was balancing himself on two legs of an
office stool, spearing a wafer-box with a penknife, which he dropped
every now and then with great dexterity into the very centre of a small
red wafer that was stuck outside. Both gentlemen had very open
waistcoats and very rolling collars, and very small boots, and very big
rings, and very little watches, and very large guard-chains, and
symmetrical inexpressibles, and scented pocket-handkerchiefs.

‘I never bet half a dozen!’ said the other gentleman. ‘I’ll take a
dozen.’

‘Done, Simmery, done!’ said Wilkins Flasher, Esquire.

‘P. P., mind,’ observed the other.

‘Of course,’ replied Wilkins Flasher, Esquire. Wilkins Flasher, Esquire,
entered it in a little book, with a gold pencil-case, and the other
gentleman entered it also, in another little book with another gold
pencil-case.

‘I see there’s a notice up this morning about Boffer,’ observed Mr.
Simmery. ‘Poor devil, he’s expelled the house!’

‘I’ll bet you ten guineas to five, he cuts his throat,’ said Wilkins
Flasher, Esquire.

‘Done,’ replied Mr. Simmery.

‘Stop! I bar,’ said Wilkins Flasher, Esquire, thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps he
may hang himself.’

‘Very good,’ rejoined Mr. Simmery, pulling out the gold pencil-case
again. ‘I’ve no objection to take you that way. Say, makes away with
himself.’

‘Kills himself, in fact,’ said Wilkins Flasher, Esquire.

‘Just so,’ replied Mr. Simmery, putting it down. ‘“Flasher--ten guineas
to five, Boffer kills himself.” Within what time shall we say?’

‘A fortnight?’ suggested Wilkins Flasher, Esquire.

‘Con-found it, no,’ rejoined Mr. Simmery, stopping for an instant to
smash a fly with the ruler. ‘Say a week.’

‘Split the difference,’ said Wilkins Flasher, Esquire. ‘Make it ten
days.’

‘Well; ten days,’ rejoined Mr. Simmery.

So it was entered down on the little books that Boffer was to kill
himself within ten days, or Wilkins Flasher, Esquire, was to hand over
to Frank Simmery, Esquire, the sum of ten guineas; and that if Boffer
did kill himself within that time, Frank Simmery, Esquire, would pay to
Wilkins Flasher, Esquire, five guineas, instead.

‘I’m very sorry he has failed,’ said Wilkins Flasher, Esquire. ‘Capital
dinners he gave.’

‘Fine port he had too,’ remarked Mr. Simmery. ‘We are going to send our
butler to the sale to-morrow, to pick up some of that sixty-four.’

‘The devil you are!’ said Wilkins Flasher, Esquire. ‘My man’s going too.
Five guineas my man outbids your man.’

‘Done.’

Another entry was made in the little books, with the gold pencil-cases;
and Mr. Simmery, having by this time killed all the flies and taken all
the bets, strolled away to the Stock Exchange to see what was going
forward.

Wilkins Flasher, Esquire, now condescended to receive Mr. Solomon Pell’s
instructions, and having filled up some printed forms, requested the
party to follow him to the bank, which they did: Mr. Weller and his
three friends staring at all they beheld in unbounded astonishment, and
Sam encountering everything with a coolness which nothing could disturb.

Crossing a courtyard which was all noise and bustle, and passing a
couple of porters who seemed dressed to match the red fire engine which
was wheeled away into a corner, they passed into an office where their
business was to be transacted, and where Pell and Mr. Flasher left them
standing for a few moments, while they went upstairs into the Will
Office.

‘Wot place is this here?’ whispered the mottled-faced gentleman to the
elder Mr. Weller.

‘Counsel’s Office,’ replied the executor in a whisper.

‘Wot are them gen’l’men a-settin’ behind the counters?’ asked the hoarse
coachman.

‘Reduced counsels, I s’pose,’ replied Mr. Weller. ‘Ain’t they the
reduced counsels, Samivel?’

‘Wy, you don’t suppose the reduced counsels is alive, do you?’ inquired
Sam, with some disdain.

‘How should I know?’ retorted Mr. Weller; ‘I thought they looked wery
like it. Wot are they, then?’

‘Clerks,’ replied Sam.

‘Wot are they all a-eatin’ ham sangwidges for?’ inquired his father.

‘’Cos it’s in their dooty, I suppose,’ replied Sam, ‘it’s a part o’ the
system; they’re alvays a-doin’ it here, all day long!’

Mr. Weller and his friends had scarcely had a moment to reflect upon
this singular regulation as connected with the monetary system of the
country, when they were rejoined by Pell and Wilkins Flasher, Esquire,
who led them to a part of the counter above which was a round blackboard
with a large ‘W.’ on it.

‘Wot’s that for, Sir?’ inquired Mr. Weller, directing Pell’s attention
to the target in question.

‘The first letter of the name of the deceased,’ replied Pell.

‘I say,’ said Mr. Weller, turning round to the umpires, there’s
somethin’ wrong here. We’s our letter--this won’t do.’

The referees at once gave it as their decided opinion that the business
could not be legally proceeded with, under the letter W., and in all
probability it would have stood over for one day at least, had it not
been for the prompt, though, at first sight, undutiful behaviour of Sam,
who, seizing his father by the skirt of the coat, dragged him to the
counter, and pinned him there, until he had affixed his signature to a
couple of instruments; which, from Mr. Weller’s habit of printing, was a
work of so much labour and time, that the officiating clerk peeled and
ate three Ribstone pippins while it was performing.

As the elder Mr. Weller insisted on selling out his portion forthwith,
they proceeded from the bank to the gate of the Stock Exchange, to which
Wilkins Flasher, Esquire, after a short absence, returned with a cheque
on Smith, Payne, & Smith, for five hundred and thirty pounds; that being
the money to which Mr. Weller, at the market price of the day, was
entitled, in consideration of the balance of the second Mrs. Weller’s
funded savings. Sam’s two hundred pounds stood transferred to his name,
and Wilkins Flasher, Esquire, having been paid his commission, dropped
the money carelessly into his coat pocket, and lounged back to his
office.

Mr. Weller was at first obstinately determined on cashing the cheque in
nothing but sovereigns; but it being represented by the umpires that by
so doing he must incur the expense of a small sack to carry them home
in, he consented to receive the amount in five-pound notes.

‘My son,’ said Mr. Weller, as they came out of the banking-house--‘my
son and me has a wery partickler engagement this arternoon, and I should
like to have this here bis’ness settled out of hand, so let’s jest go
straight avay someveres, vere ve can hordit the accounts.’

A quiet room was soon found, and the accounts were produced and audited.
Mr. Pell’s bill was taxed by Sam, and some charges were disallowed by
the umpires; but, notwithstanding Mr. Pell’s declaration, accompanied
with many solemn asseverations that they were really too hard upon him,
it was by very many degrees the best professional job he had ever had,
and one on which he boarded, lodged, and washed, for six months
afterwards.

The umpires having partaken of a dram, shook hands and departed, as they
had to drive out of town that night. Mr. Solomon Pell, finding that
nothing more was going forward, either in the eating or drinking way,
took a friendly leave, and Sam and his father were left alone.

‘There!’ said Mr. Weller, thrusting his pocket-book in his side pocket.
‘Vith the bills for the lease, and that, there’s eleven hundred and
eighty pound here. Now, Samivel, my boy, turn the horses’ heads to the
George and Wulter!’



CHAPTER LVI. AN IMPORTANT CONFERENCE TAKES PLACE BETWEEN MR. PICKWICK
AND SAMUEL WELLER, AT WHICH HIS PARENT ASSISTS--AN OLD GENTLEMAN IN A
SNUFF-COLOURED SUIT ARRIVES UNEXPECTEDLY

Mr. Pickwick was sitting alone, musing over many things, and thinking
among other considerations how he could best provide for the young
couple whose present unsettled condition was matter of constant regret
and anxiety to him, when Mary stepped lightly into the room, and,
advancing to the table, said, rather hastily--

‘Oh, if you please, Sir, Samuel is downstairs, and he says may his
father see you?’

‘Surely,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘Thank you, Sir,’ said Mary, tripping towards the door again.

‘Sam has not been here long, has he?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Oh, no, Sir,’ replied Mary eagerly. ‘He has only just come home. He is
not going to ask you for any more leave, Sir, he says.’

Mary might have been conscious that she had communicated this last
intelligence with more warmth than seemed actually necessary, or she
might have observed the good-humoured smile with which Mr. Pickwick
regarded her, when she had finished speaking. She certainly held down
her head, and examined the corner of a very smart little apron, with
more closeness than there appeared any absolute occasion for.

‘Tell them they can come up at once, by all means,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

Mary, apparently much relieved, hurried away with her message.

Mr. Pickwick took two or three turns up and down the room; and, rubbing
his chin with his left hand as he did so, appeared lost in thought.

‘Well, well,’ said Mr. Pickwick, at length in a kind but somewhat
melancholy tone, ‘it is the best way in which I could reward him for his
attachment and fidelity; let it be so, in Heaven’s name. It is the fate
of a lonely old man, that those about him should form new and different
attachments and leave him. I have no right to expect that it should be
otherwise with me. No, no,’ added Mr. Pickwick more cheerfully, ‘it
would be selfish and ungrateful. I ought to be happy to have an
opportunity of providing for him so well. I am. Of course I am.’

Mr. Pickwick had been so absorbed in these reflections, that a knock at
the door was three or four times repeated before he heard it. Hastily
seating himself, and calling up his accustomed pleasant looks, he gave
the required permission, and Sam Weller entered, followed by his father.

‘Glad to see you back again, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘How do you do,
Mr. Weller?’

‘Wery hearty, thank’ee, sir,’ replied the widower; ‘hope I see you well,
sir.’

‘Quite, I thank you,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

‘I wanted to have a little bit o’ conwersation with you, sir,’ said Mr.
Weller, ‘if you could spare me five minits or so, sir.’

‘Certainly,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘Sam, give your father a chair.’

‘Thank’ee, Samivel, I’ve got a cheer here,’ said Mr. Weller, bringing
one forward as he spoke; ‘uncommon fine day it’s been, sir,’ added the
old gentleman, laying his hat on the floor as he sat himself down.

‘Remarkably so, indeed,’ replied Mr. Pickwick. ‘Very seasonable.’

‘Seasonablest veather I ever see, sir,’ rejoined Mr. Weller. Here, the
old gentleman was seized with a violent fit of coughing, which, being
terminated, he nodded his head and winked and made several supplicatory
and threatening gestures to his son, all of which Sam Weller steadily
abstained from seeing.

Mr. Pickwick, perceiving that there was some embarrassment on the old
gentleman’s part, affected to be engaged in cutting the leaves of a book
that lay beside him, and waited patiently until Mr. Weller should arrive
at the object of his visit.

‘I never see sich a aggrawatin’ boy as you are, Samivel,’ said Mr.
Weller, looking indignantly at his son; ‘never in all my born days.’

‘What is he doing, Mr. Weller?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘He von’t begin, sir,’ rejoined Mr. Weller; ‘he knows I ain’t ekal to
ex-pressin’ myself ven there’s anythin’ partickler to be done, and yet
he’ll stand and see me a-settin’ here taking up your walable time, and
makin’ a reg’lar spectacle o’ myself, rayther than help me out vith a
syllable. It ain’t filial conduct, Samivel,’ said Mr. Weller, wiping his
forehead; ‘wery far from it.’

‘You said you’d speak,’ replied Sam; ‘how should I know you wos done up
at the wery beginnin’?’

‘You might ha’ seen I warn’t able to start,’ rejoined his father; ‘I’m
on the wrong side of the road, and backin’ into the palin’s, and all
manner of unpleasantness, and yet you von’t put out a hand to help me.
I’m ashamed on you, Samivel.’

‘The fact is, Sir,’ said Sam, with a slight bow, ‘the gov’nor’s been a-
drawin’ his money.’

‘Wery good, Samivel, wery good,’ said Mr. Weller, nodding his head with
a satisfied air, ‘I didn’t mean to speak harsh to you, Sammy. Wery good.
That’s the vay to begin. Come to the pint at once. Wery good indeed,
Samivel.’

Mr. Weller nodded his head an extraordinary number of times, in the
excess of his gratification, and waited in a listening attitude for Sam
to resume his statement.

‘You may sit down, Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, apprehending that the
interview was likely to prove rather longer than he had expected.

Sam bowed again and sat down; his father looking round, he continued--

‘The gov’nor, sir, has drawn out five hundred and thirty pound.’

‘Reduced counsels,’ interposed Mr. Weller, senior, in an undertone.

‘It don’t much matter vether it’s reduced counsels, or wot not,’ said
Sam; ‘five hundred and thirty pounds is the sum, ain’t it?’

‘All right, Samivel,’ replied Mr. Weller.

‘To vich sum, he has added for the house and bisness--’

‘Lease, good-vill, stock, and fixters,’ interposed Mr. Weller.

‘As much as makes it,’ continued Sam, ‘altogether, eleven hundred and
eighty pound.’

‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘I am delighted to hear it. I congratulate
you, Mr. Weller, on having done so well.’

‘Vait a minit, Sir,’ said Mr. Weller, raising his hand in a deprecatory
manner. ‘Get on, Samivel.’

‘This here money,’ said Sam, with a little hesitation, ‘he’s anxious to
put someveres, vere he knows it’ll be safe, and I’m wery anxious too,
for if he keeps it, he’ll go a-lendin’ it to somebody, or inwestin’
property in horses, or droppin’ his pocket-book down an airy, or makin’
a Egyptian mummy of his-self in some vay or another.’

‘Wery good, Samivel,’ observed Mr. Weller, in as complacent a manner as
if Sam had been passing the highest eulogiums on his prudence and
foresight. ‘Wery good.’

‘For vich reasons,’ continued Sam, plucking nervously at the brim of his
hat--‘for vich reasons, he’s drawn it out to-day, and come here vith me
to say, leastvays to offer, or in other vords--’

‘To say this here,’ said the elder Mr. Weller impatiently, ‘that it
ain’t o’ no use to me. I’m a-goin’ to vork a coach reg’lar, and ha’n’t
got noveres to keep it in, unless I vos to pay the guard for takin’ care
on it, or to put it in vun o’ the coach pockets, vich ‘ud be a
temptation to the insides. If you’ll take care on it for me, sir, I
shall be wery much obliged to you. P’raps,’ said Mr. Weller, walking up
to Mr. Pickwick and whispering in his ear--‘p’raps it’ll go a little vay
towards the expenses o’ that ‘ere conwiction. All I say is, just you
keep it till I ask you for it again.’ With these words, Mr. Weller
placed the pocket-book in Mr. Pickwick’s hands, caught up his hat, and
ran out of the room with a celerity scarcely to be expected from so
corpulent a subject.

‘Stop him, Sam!’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick earnestly. ‘Overtake him; bring
him back instantly! Mr. Weller--here--come back!’

Sam saw that his master’s injunctions were not to be disobeyed; and,
catching his father by the arm as he was descending the stairs, dragged
him back by main force.

‘My good friend,’ said Mr. Pickwick, taking the old man by the hand,
‘your honest confidence overpowers me.’

‘I don’t see no occasion for nothin’ o’ the kind, Sir,’ replied Mr.
Weller obstinately.

‘I assure you, my good friend, I have more money than I can ever need;
far more than a man at my age can ever live to spend,’ said Mr.
Pickwick.

‘No man knows how much he can spend, till he tries,’ observed Mr.
Weller.

‘Perhaps not,’ replied Mr. Pickwick; ‘but as I have no intention of
trying any such experiments, I am not likely to come to want. I must beg
you to take this back, Mr. Weller.’

Wery well,’ said Mr. Weller, with a discontented look. ‘Mark my vords,
Sammy, I’ll do somethin’ desperate vith this here property; somethin’
desperate!’

‘You’d better not,’ replied Sam.

Mr. Weller reflected for a short time, and then, buttoning up his coat
with great determination, said--

‘I’ll keep a pike.’

‘Wot!’ exclaimed Sam.

‘A pike!’ rejoined Mr. Weller, through his set teeth; ‘I’ll keep a pike.
Say good-bye to your father, Samivel. I dewote the remainder of my days
to a pike.’

This threat was such an awful one, and Mr. Weller, besides appearing
fully resolved to carry it into execution, seemed so deeply mortified by
Mr. Pickwick’s refusal, that that gentleman, after a short reflection,
said--

‘Well, well, Mr. Weller, I will keep your money. I can do more good with
it, perhaps, than you can.’

‘Just the wery thing, to be sure,’ said Mr. Weller, brightening up; ‘o’
course you can, sir.’

‘Say no more about it,’ said Mr. Pickwick, locking the pocket-book in
his desk; ‘I am heartily obliged to you, my good friend. Now sit down
again. I want to ask your advice.’

The internal laughter occasioned by the triumphant success of his visit,
which had convulsed not only Mr. Weller’s face, but his arms, legs, and
body also, during the locking up of the pocket-book, suddenly gave place
to the most dignified gravity as he heard these words.

‘Wait outside a few minutes, Sam, will you?’ said Mr. Pickwick.

Sam immediately withdrew.

Mr. Weller looked uncommonly wise and very much amazed, when Mr.
Pickwick opened the discourse by saying--

‘You are not an advocate for matrimony, I think, Mr. Weller?’

Mr. Weller shook his head. He was wholly unable to speak; vague thoughts
of some wicked widow having been successful in her designs on Mr.
Pickwick, choked his utterance.

‘Did you happen to see a young girl downstairs when you came in just now
with your son?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Yes. I see a young gal,’ replied Mr. Weller shortly.

‘What did you think of her, now? Candidly, Mr. Weller, what did you
think of her?’

‘I thought she wos wery plump, and vell made,’ said Mr. Weller, with a
critical air.

‘So she is,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘so she is. What did you think of her
manners, from what you saw of her?’

‘Wery pleasant,’ rejoined Mr. Weller. ‘Wery pleasant and comformable.’

The precise meaning which Mr. Weller attached to this last-mentioned
adjective, did not appear; but, as it was evident from the tone in which
he used it that it was a favourable expression, Mr. Pickwick was as well
satisfied as if he had been thoroughly enlightened on the subject.

‘I take a great interest in her, Mr. Weller,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

Mr. Weller coughed.

‘I mean an interest in her doing well,’ resumed Mr. Pickwick; ‘a desire
that she may be comfortable and prosperous. You understand?’

‘Wery clearly,’ replied Mr. Weller, who understood nothing yet.

‘That young person,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘is attached to your son.’

‘To Samivel Veller!’ exclaimed the parent.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘It’s nat’ral,’ said Mr. Weller, after some consideration, ‘nat’ral, but
rayther alarmin’. Sammy must be careful.’

‘How do you mean?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

‘Wery careful that he don’t say nothin’ to her,’ responded Mr. Weller.
‘Wery careful that he ain’t led avay, in a innocent moment, to say
anythin’ as may lead to a conwiction for breach. You’re never safe vith
‘em, Mr. Pickwick, ven they vunce has designs on you; there’s no knowin’
vere to have ‘em; and vile you’re a-considering of it, they have you. I
wos married fust, that vay myself, Sir, and Sammy wos the consekens o’
the manoover.’

‘You give me no great encouragement to conclude what I have to say,’
observed Mr. Pickwick, ‘but I had better do so at once. This young
person is not only attached to your son, Mr. Weller, but your son is
attached to her.’

‘Vell,’ said Mr. Weller, ‘this here’s a pretty sort o’ thing to come to
a father’s ears, this is!’

‘I have observed them on several occasions,’ said Mr. Pickwick, making
no comment on Mr. Weller’s last remark; ‘and entertain no doubt at all
about it. Supposing I were desirous of establishing them comfortably as
man and wife in some little business or situation, where they might hope
to obtain a decent living, what should you think of it, Mr. Weller?’

At first, Mr. Weller received with wry faces a proposition involving the
marriage of anybody in whom he took an interest; but, as Mr. Pickwick
argued the point with him, and laid great stress on the fact that Mary
was not a widow, he gradually became more tractable. Mr. Pickwick had
great influence over him, and he had been much struck with Mary’s
appearance; having, in fact, bestowed several very unfatherly winks upon
her, already. At length he said that it was not for him to oppose Mr.
Pickwick’s inclination, and that he would be very happy to yield to his
advice; upon which, Mr. Pickwick joyfully took him at his word, and
called Sam back into the room.

‘Sam,’ said Mr. Pickwick, clearing his throat, ‘your father and I have
been having some conversation about you.’

‘About you, Samivel,’ said Mr. Weller, in a patronising and impressive
voice.

‘I am not so blind, Sam, as not to have seen, a long time since, that
you entertain something more than a friendly feeling towards Mrs.
Winkle’s maid,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘You hear this, Samivel?’ said Mr. Weller, in the same judicial form of
speech as before.

‘I hope, Sir,’ said Sam, addressing his master, ‘I hope there’s no harm
in a young man takin’ notice of a young ‘ooman as is undeniably good-
looking and well-conducted.’

‘Certainly not,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Not by no means,’ acquiesced Mr. Weller, affably but magisterially.

‘So far from thinking there is anything wrong in conduct so natural,’
resumed Mr. Pickwick, ‘it is my wish to assist and promote your wishes
in this respect. With this view, I have had a little conversation with
your father; and finding that he is of my opinion--’

‘The lady not bein’ a widder,’ interposed Mr. Weller in explanation.

‘The lady not being a widow,’ said Mr. Pickwick, smiling. ‘I wish to
free you from the restraint which your present position imposes upon
you, and to mark my sense of your fidelity and many excellent qualities,
by enabling you to marry this girl at once, and to earn an independent
livelihood for yourself and family. I shall be proud, Sam,’ said Mr.
Pickwick, whose voice had faltered a little hitherto, but now resumed
its customary tone, ‘proud and happy to make your future prospects in
life my grateful and peculiar care.’

There was a profound silence for a short time, and then Sam said, in a
low, husky sort of voice, but firmly withal--

‘I’m very much obliged to you for your goodness, Sir, as is only like
yourself; but it can’t be done.’

‘Can’t be done!’ ejaculated Mr. Pickwick in astonishment.

‘Samivel!’ said Mr. Weller, with dignity.

‘I say it can’t be done,’ repeated Sam in a louder key. ‘Wot’s to become
of you, Sir?’

‘My good fellow,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, ‘the recent changes among my
friends will alter my mode of life in future, entirely; besides, I am
growing older, and want repose and quiet. My rambles, Sam, are over.’

‘How do I know that ‘ere, sir?’ argued Sam. ‘You think so now! S’pose
you wos to change your mind, vich is not unlikely, for you’ve the spirit
o’ five-and-twenty in you still, what ‘ud become on you vithout me? It
can’t be done, Sir, it can’t be done.’

‘Wery good, Samivel, there’s a good deal in that,’ said Mr. Weller
encouragingly.

‘I speak after long deliberation, Sam, and with the certainty that I
shall keep my word,’ said Mr. Pickwick, shaking his head. ‘New scenes
have closed upon me; my rambles are at an end.’

‘Wery good,’ rejoined Sam. ‘Then, that’s the wery best reason wy you
should alvays have somebody by you as understands you, to keep you up
and make you comfortable. If you vant a more polished sort o’ feller,
vell and good, have him; but vages or no vages, notice or no notice,
board or no board, lodgin’ or no lodgin’, Sam Veller, as you took from
the old inn in the Borough, sticks by you, come what may; and let
ev’rythin’ and ev’rybody do their wery fiercest, nothin’ shall ever
perwent it!’

At the close of this declaration, which Sam made with great emotion, the
elder Mr. Weller rose from his chair, and, forgetting all considerations
of time, place, or propriety, waved his hat above his head, and gave
three vehement cheers.

‘My good fellow,’ said Mr. Pickwick, when Mr. Weller had sat down again,
rather abashed at his own enthusiasm, ‘you are bound to consider the
young woman also.’

‘I do consider the young ‘ooman, Sir,’ said Sam. ‘I have considered the
young ‘ooman. I’ve spoke to her. I’ve told her how I’m sitivated; she’s
ready to vait till I’m ready, and I believe she vill. If she don’t,
she’s not the young ‘ooman I take her for, and I give her up vith
readiness. You’ve know’d me afore, Sir. My mind’s made up, and nothin’
can ever alter it.’

Who could combat this resolution? Not Mr. Pickwick. He derived, at that
moment, more pride and luxury of feeling from the disinterested
attachment of his humble friends, than ten thousand protestations from
the greatest men living could have awakened in his heart.

While this conversation was passing in Mr. Pickwick’s room, a little old
gentleman in a suit of snuff-coloured clothes, followed by a porter
carrying a small portmanteau, presented himself below; and, after
securing a bed for the night, inquired of the waiter whether one Mrs.
Winkle was staying there, to which question the waiter of course
responded in the affirmative.

‘Is she alone?’ inquired the old gentleman.

‘I believe she is, Sir,’ replied the waiter; ‘I can call her own maid,
Sir, if you--’

‘No, I don’t want her,’ said the old gentleman quickly. ‘Show me to her
room without announcing me.’

‘Eh, Sir?’ said the waiter.

‘Are you deaf?’ inquired the little old gentleman.

‘No, sir.’

‘Then listen, if you please. Can you hear me now?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘That’s well. Show me to Mrs. Winkle’s room, without announcing me.’

As the little old gentleman uttered this command, he slipped five
shillings into the waiter’s hand, and looked steadily at him.

‘Really, sir,’ said the waiter, ‘I don’t know, sir, whether--’

‘Ah! you’ll do it, I see,’ said the little old gentleman. ‘You had
better do it at once. It will save time.’

There was something so very cool and collected in the gentleman’s
manner, that the waiter put the five shillings in his pocket, and led
him upstairs without another word.

‘This is the room, is it?’ said the gentleman. ‘You may go.’

The waiter complied, wondering much who the gentleman could be, and what
he wanted; the little old gentleman, waiting till he was out of sight,
tapped at the door.

‘Come in,’ said Arabella.

‘Um, a pretty voice, at any rate,’ murmured the little old gentleman;
‘but that’s nothing.’ As he said this, he opened the door and walked in.
Arabella, who was sitting at work, rose on beholding a stranger--a
little confused--but by no means ungracefully so.

‘Pray don’t rise, ma’am,’ said the unknown, walking in, and closing the
door after him. ‘Mrs. Winkle, I believe?’

Arabella inclined her head.

‘Mrs. Nathaniel Winkle, who married the son of the old man at
Birmingham?’ said the stranger, eyeing Arabella with visible curiosity.

Again Arabella inclined her head, and looked uneasily round, as if
uncertain whether to call for assistance.

‘I surprise you, I see, ma’am,’ said the old gentleman.

‘Rather, I confess,’ replied Arabella, wondering more and more.

‘I’ll take a chair, if you’ll allow me, ma’am,’ said the stranger.

He took one; and drawing a spectacle-case from his pocket, leisurely
pulled out a pair of spectacles, which he adjusted on his nose.

‘You don’t know me, ma’am?’ he said, looking so intently at Arabella
that she began to feel alarmed.

‘No, sir,’ she replied timidly.

‘No,’ said the gentleman, nursing his left leg; ‘I don’t know how you
should. You know my name, though, ma’am.’

‘Do I?’ said Arabella, trembling, though she scarcely knew why. ‘May I
ask what it is?’

‘Presently, ma’am, presently,’ said the stranger, not having yet removed
his eyes from her countenance. ‘You have been recently married, ma’am?’

‘I have,’ replied Arabella, in a scarcely audible tone, laying aside her
work, and becoming greatly agitated as a thought, that had occurred to
her before, struck more forcibly upon her mind.

‘Without having represented to your husband the propriety of first
consulting his father, on whom he is dependent, I think?’ said the
stranger.

Arabella applied her handkerchief to her eyes.

‘Without an endeavour, even, to ascertain, by some indirect appeal, what
were the old man’s sentiments on a point in which he would naturally
feel much interested?’ said the stranger.

‘I cannot deny it, Sir,’ said Arabella.

‘And without having sufficient property of your own to afford your
husband any permanent assistance in exchange for the worldly advantages
which you knew he would have gained if he had married agreeably to his
father’s wishes?’ said the old gentleman. ‘This is what boys and girls
call disinterested affection, till they have boys and girls of their
own, and then they see it in a rougher and very different light!’

Arabella’s tears flowed fast, as she pleaded in extenuation that she was
young and inexperienced; that her attachment had alone induced her to
take the step to which she had resorted; and that she had been deprived
of the counsel and guidance of her parents almost from infancy.

‘It was wrong,’ said the old gentleman in a milder tone, ‘very wrong. It
was romantic, unbusinesslike, foolish.’

‘It was my fault; all my fault, Sir,’ replied poor Arabella, weeping.

‘Nonsense,’ said the old gentleman; ‘it was not your fault that he fell
in love with you, I suppose? Yes it was, though,’ said the old
gentleman, looking rather slily at Arabella. ‘It was your fault. He
couldn’t help it.’

This little compliment, or the little gentleman’s odd way of paying it,
or his altered manner--so much kinder than it was, at first--or all
three together, forced a smile from Arabella in the midst of her tears.

‘Where’s your husband?’ inquired the old gentleman, abruptly; stopping a
smile which was just coming over his own face.

‘I expect him every instant, sir,’ said Arabella. ‘I persuaded him to
take a walk this morning. He is very low and wretched at not having
heard from his father.’

‘Low, is he?’ said the old gentlemen. ‘Serve him right!’

‘He feels it on my account, I am afraid,’ said Arabella; ‘and indeed,
Sir, I feel it deeply on his. I have been the sole means of bringing him
to his present condition.’

‘Don’t mind it on his account, my dear,’ said the old gentleman. ‘It
serves him right. I am glad of it--actually glad of it, as far as he is
concerned.’

The words were scarcely out of the old gentleman’s lips, when footsteps
were heard ascending the stairs, which he and Arabella seemed both to
recognise at the same moment. The little gentleman turned pale; and,
making a strong effort to appear composed, stood up, as Mr. Winkle
entered the room.

‘Father!’ cried Mr. Winkle, recoiling in amazement.

‘Yes, sir,’ replied the little old gentleman. ‘Well, Sir, what have you
got to say to me?’

Mr. Winkle remained silent.

‘You are ashamed of yourself, I hope, Sir?’ said the old gentleman.

Still Mr. Winkle said nothing.

‘Are you ashamed of yourself, Sir, or are you not?’ inquired the old
gentleman.

‘No, Sir,’ replied Mr. Winkle, drawing Arabella’s arm through his. ‘I am
not ashamed of myself, or of my wife either.’

‘Upon my word!’ cried the old gentleman ironically.

‘I am very sorry to have done anything which has lessened your affection
for me, Sir,’ said Mr. Winkle; ‘but I will say, at the same time, that I
have no reason to be ashamed of having this lady for my wife, nor you of
having her for a daughter.’

‘Give me your hand, Nat,’ said the old gentleman, in an altered voice.
‘Kiss me, my love. You are a very charming little daughter-in-law after
all!’

In a few minutes’ time Mr. Winkle went in search of Mr. Pickwick, and
returning with that gentleman, presented him to his father, whereupon
they shook hands for five minutes incessantly.

‘Mr. Pickwick, I thank you most heartily for all your kindness to my
son,’ said old Mr. Winkle, in a bluff, straightforward way. ‘I am a
hasty fellow, and when I saw you last, I was vexed and taken by
surprise. I have judged for myself now, and am more than satisfied.
Shall I make any more apologies, Mr. Pickwick?’

‘Not one,’ replied that gentleman. ‘You have done the only thing wanting
to complete my happiness.’

Hereupon there was another shaking of hands for five minutes longer,
accompanied by a great number of complimentary speeches, which, besides
being complimentary, had the additional and very novel recommendation of
being sincere.

Sam had dutifully seen his father to the Belle Sauvage, when, on
returning, he encountered the fat boy in the court, who had been charged
with the delivery of a note from Emily Wardle.

‘I say,’ said Joe, who was unusually loquacious, ‘what a pretty girl
Mary is, isn’t she? I am _so_ fond of her, I am!’

Mr. Weller made no verbal remark in reply; but eyeing the fat boy for a
moment, quite transfixed at his presumption, led him by the collar to
the corner, and dismissed him with a harmless but ceremonious kick.
After which, he walked home, whistling.



CHAPTER LVII. IN WHICH THE PICKWICK CLUB IS FINALLY DISSOLVED, AND
EVERYTHING CONCLUDED TO THE SATISFACTION OF EVERYBODY

For a whole week after the happy arrival of Mr. Winkle from Birmingham,
Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller were from home all day long, only returning
just in time for dinner, and then wearing an air of mystery and
importance quite foreign to their natures. It was evident that very
grave and eventful proceedings were on foot; but various surmises were
afloat, respecting their precise character. Some (among whom was Mr.
Tupman) were disposed to think that Mr. Pickwick contemplated a
matrimonial alliance; but this idea the ladies most strenuously
repudiated. Others rather inclined to the belief that he had projected
some distant tour, and was at present occupied in effecting the
preliminary arrangements; but this again was stoutly denied by Sam
himself, who had unequivocally stated, when cross-examined by Mary, that
no new journeys were to be undertaken. At length, when the brains of the
whole party had been racked for six long days, by unavailing
speculation, it was unanimously resolved that Mr. Pickwick should be
called upon to explain his conduct, and to state distinctly why he had
thus absented himself from the society of his admiring friends.

With this view, Mr. Wardle invited the full circle to dinner at the
Adelphi; and the decanters having been thrice sent round, opened the
business.

‘We are all anxious to know,’ said the old gentleman, ‘what we have done
to offend you, and to induce you to desert us and devote yourself to
these solitary walks.’

‘Are you?’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘It is singular enough that I had intended
to volunteer a full explanation this very day; so, if you will give me
another glass of wine, I will satisfy your curiosity.’

The decanters passed from hand to hand with unwonted briskness, and Mr.
Pickwick, looking round on the faces of his friends with a cheerful
smile, proceeded--

‘All the changes that have taken place among us,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘I
mean the marriage that _has _taken place, and the marriage that WILL
take place, with the changes they involve, rendered it necessary for me
to think, soberly and at once, upon my future plans. I determined on
retiring to some quiet, pretty neighbourhood in the vicinity of London;
I saw a house which exactly suited my fancy; I have taken it and
furnished it. It is fully prepared for my reception, and I intend
entering upon it at once, trusting that I may yet live to spend many
quiet years in peaceful retirement, cheered through life by the society
of my friends, and followed in death by their affectionate remembrance.’

Here Mr. Pickwick paused, and a low murmur ran round the table.

‘The house I have taken,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘is at Dulwich. It has a
large garden, and is situated in one of the most pleasant spots near
London. It has been fitted up with every attention to substantial
comfort; perhaps to a little elegance besides; but of that you shall
judge for yourselves. Sam accompanies me there. I have engaged, on
Perker’s representation, a housekeeper--a very old one--and such other
servants as she thinks I shall require. I propose to consecrate this
little retreat, by having a ceremony in which I take a great interest,
performed there. I wish, if my friend Wardle entertains no objection,
that his daughter should be married from my new house, on the day I take
possession of it. The happiness of young people,’ said Mr. Pickwick, a
little moved, ‘has ever been the chief pleasure of my life. It will warm
my heart to witness the happiness of those friends who are dearest to
me, beneath my own roof.’

Mr. Pickwick paused again: Emily and Arabella sobbed audibly.

‘I have communicated, both personally and by letter, with the club,’
resumed Mr. Pickwick, ‘acquainting them with my intention. During our
long absence, it has suffered much from internal dissentions; and the
withdrawal of my name, coupled with this and other circumstances, has
occasioned its dissolution. The Pickwick Club exists no longer.

‘I shall never regret,’ said Mr. Pickwick in a low voice, ‘I shall never
regret having devoted the greater part of two years to mixing with
different varieties and shades of human character, frivolous as my
pursuit of novelty may have appeared to many. Nearly the whole of my
previous life having been devoted to business and the pursuit of wealth,
numerous scenes of which I had no previous conception have dawned upon
me--I hope to the enlargement of my mind, and the improvement of my
understanding. If I have done but little good, I trust I have done less
harm, and that none of my adventures will be other than a source of
amusing and pleasant recollection to me in the decline of life. God
bless you all!’

With these words, Mr. Pickwick filled and drained a bumper with a
trembling hand; and his eyes moistened as his friends rose with one
accord, and pledged him from their hearts.

There were few preparatory arrangements to be made for the marriage of
Mr. Snodgrass. As he had neither father nor mother, and had been in his
minority a ward of Mr. Pickwick’s, that gentleman was perfectly well
acquainted with his possessions and prospects. His account of both was
quite satisfactory to Wardle--as almost any other account would have
been, for the good old gentleman was overflowing with hilarity and
kindness--and a handsome portion having been bestowed upon Emily, the
marriage was fixed to take place on the fourth day from that time--the
suddenness of which preparations reduced three dressmakers and a tailor
to the extreme verge of insanity.

Getting post-horses to the carriage, old Wardle started off, next day,
to bring his mother back to town. Communicating his intelligence to the
old lady with characteristic impetuosity, she instantly fainted away;
but being promptly revived, ordered the brocaded silk gown to be packed
up forthwith, and proceeded to relate some circumstances of a similar
nature attending the marriage of the eldest daughter of Lady
Tollimglower, deceased, which occupied three hours in the recital, and
were not half finished at last.

Mrs. Trundle had to be informed of all the mighty preparations that were
making in London; and, being in a delicate state of health, was informed
thereof through Mr. Trundle, lest the news should be too much for her;
but it was not too much for her, inasmuch as she at once wrote off to
Muggleton, to order a new cap and a black satin gown, and moreover
avowed her determination of being present at the ceremony. Hereupon, Mr.
Trundle called in the doctor, and the doctor said Mrs. Trundle ought to
know best how she felt herself, to which Mrs. Trundle replied that she
felt herself quite equal to it, and that she had made up her mind to go;
upon which the doctor, who was a wise and discreet doctor, and knew what
was good for himself, as well as for other people, said that perhaps if
Mrs. Trundle stopped at home, she might hurt herself more by fretting,
than by going, so perhaps she had better go. And she did go; the doctor
with great attention sending in half a dozen of medicine, to be drunk
upon the road.

In addition to these points of distraction, Wardle was intrusted with
two small letters to two small young ladies who were to act as
bridesmaids; upon the receipt of which, the two young ladies were driven
to despair by having no ‘things’ ready for so important an occasion, and
no time to make them in--a circumstance which appeared to afford the two
worthy papas of the two small young ladies rather a feeling of
satisfaction than otherwise. However, old frocks were trimmed, and new
bonnets made, and the young ladies looked as well as could possibly have
been expected of them. And as they cried at the subsequent ceremony in
the proper places, and trembled at the right times, they acquitted
themselves to the admiration of all beholders.

How the two poor relations ever reached London--whether they walked, or
got behind coaches, or procured lifts in wagons, or carried each other
by turns--is uncertain; but there they were, before Wardle; and the very
first people that knocked at the door of Mr. Pickwick’s house, on the
bridal morning, were the two poor relations, all smiles and shirt
collar.

They were welcomed heartily though, for riches or poverty had no
influence on Mr. Pickwick; the new servants were all alacrity and
readiness; Sam was in a most unrivalled state of high spirits and
excitement; Mary was glowing with beauty and smart ribands.

The bridegroom, who had been staying at the house for two or three days
previous, sallied forth gallantly to Dulwich Church to meet the bride,
attended by Mr. Pickwick, Ben Allen, Bob Sawyer, and Mr. Tupman; with
Sam Weller outside, having at his button-hole a white favour, the gift
of his lady-love, and clad in a new and gorgeous suit of livery invented
for the occasion. They were met by the Wardles, and the Winkles, and the
bride and bridesmaids, and the Trundles; and the ceremony having been
performed, the coaches rattled back to Mr. Pickwick’s to breakfast,
where little Mr. Perker already awaited them.

Here, all the light clouds of the more solemn part of the proceedings
passed away; every face shone forth joyously; and nothing was to be
heard but congratulations and commendations. Everything was so
beautiful! The lawn in front, the garden behind, the miniature
conservatory, the dining-room, the drawing-room, the bedrooms, the
smoking-room, and, above all, the study, with its pictures and easy-
chairs, and odd cabinets, and queer tables, and books out of number,
with a large cheerful window opening upon a pleasant lawn and commanding
a pretty landscape, dotted here and there with little houses almost
hidden by the trees; and then the curtains, and the carpets, and the
chairs, and the sofas! Everything was so beautiful, so compact, so neat,
and in such exquisite taste, said everybody, that there really was no
deciding what to admire most.

And in the midst of all this, stood Mr. Pickwick, his countenance
lighted up with smiles, which the heart of no man, woman, or child,
could resist: himself the happiest of the group: shaking hands, over and
over again, with the same people, and when his own hands were not so
employed, rubbing them with pleasure: turning round in a different
direction at every fresh expression of gratification or curiosity, and
inspiring everybody with his looks of gladness and delight.

Breakfast is announced. Mr. Pickwick leads the old lady (who has been
very eloquent on the subject of Lady Tollimglower) to the top of a long
table; Wardle takes the bottom; the friends arrange themselves on either
side; Sam takes his station behind his master’s chair; the laughter and
talking cease; Mr. Pickwick, having said grace, pauses for an instant
and looks round him. As he does so, the tears roll down his cheeks, in
the fullness of his joy.

Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed
happiness, of which, if we seek them, there are ever some, to cheer our
transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth, but its
lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have
better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such
optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the
visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of
the world is blazing full upon them.

It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world, and attain even
the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lose them in the
course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create
imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the
full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an
account of them besides.

In compliance with this custom--unquestionably a bad one--we subjoin a
few biographical words, in relation to the party at Mr. Pickwick’s
assembled.

Mr. and Mrs. Winkle, being fully received into favour by the old
gentleman, were shortly afterwards installed in a newly-built house, not
half a mile from Mr. Pickwick’s. Mr. Winkle, being engaged in the city
as agent or town correspondent of his father, exchanged his old costume
for the ordinary dress of Englishmen, and presented all the external
appearance of a civilised Christian ever afterwards.

Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass settled at Dingley Dell, where they purchased and
cultivated a small farm, more for occupation than profit. Mr. Snodgrass,
being occasionally abstracted and melancholy, is to this day reputed a
great poet among his friends and acquaintance, although we do not find
that he has ever written anything to encourage the belief. There are
many celebrated characters, literary, philosophical, and otherwise, who
hold a high reputation on a similar tenure.

Mr. Tupman, when his friends married, and Mr. Pickwick settled, took
lodgings at Richmond, where he has ever since resided. He walks
constantly on the terrace during the summer months, with a youthful and
jaunty air, which has rendered him the admiration of the numerous
elderly ladies of single condition, who reside in the vicinity. He has
never proposed again.

Mr. Bob Sawyer, having previously passed through the _Gazette_, passed
over to Bengal, accompanied by Mr. Benjamin Allen; both gentlemen having
received surgical appointments from the East India Company. They each
had the yellow fever fourteen times, and then resolved to try a little
abstinence; since which period, they have been doing well. Mrs. Bardell
let lodgings to many conversable single gentlemen, with great profit,
but never brought any more actions for breach of promise of marriage.
Her attorneys, Messrs. Dodson & Fogg, continue in business, from which
they realise a large income, and in which they are universally
considered among the sharpest of the sharp.

Sam Weller kept his word, and remained unmarried, for two years. The old
housekeeper dying at the end of that time, Mr. Pickwick promoted Mary to
the situation, on condition of her marrying Mr. Weller at once, which
she did without a murmur. From the circumstance of two sturdy little
boys having been repeatedly seen at the gate of the back garden, there
is reason to suppose that Sam has some family.

The elder Mr. Weller drove a coach for twelve months, but being
afflicted with the gout, was compelled to retire. The contents of the
pocket-book had been so well invested for him, however, by Mr. Pickwick,
that he had a handsome independence to retire on, upon which he still
lives at an excellent public-house near Shooter’s Hill, where he is
quite reverenced as an oracle, boasting very much of his intimacy with
Mr. Pickwick, and retaining a most unconquerable aversion to widows.

Mr. Pickwick himself continued to reside in his new house, employing his
leisure hours in arranging the memoranda which he afterwards presented
to the secretary of the once famous club, or in hearing Sam Weller read
aloud, with such remarks as suggested themselves to his mind, which
never failed to afford Mr. Pickwick great amusement. He was much
troubled at first, by the numerous applications made to him by Mr.
Snodgrass, Mr. Winkle, and Mr. Trundle, to act as godfather to their
offspring; but he has become used to it now, and officiates as a matter
of course. He never had occasion to regret his bounty to Mr. Jingle; for
both that person and Job Trotter became, in time, worthy members of
society, although they have always steadily objected to return to the
scenes of their old haunts and temptations. Mr. Pickwick is somewhat
infirm now; but he retains all his former juvenility of spirit, and may
still be frequently seen, contemplating the pictures in the Dulwich
Gallery, or enjoying a walk about the pleasant neighbourhood on a fine
day. He is known by all the poor people about, who never fail to take
their hats off, as he passes, with great respect. The children idolise
him, and so indeed does the whole neighbourhood. Every year he repairs
to a large family merry-making at Mr. Wardle’s; on this, as on all other
occasions, he is invariably attended by the faithful Sam, between whom
and his master there exists a steady and reciprocal attachment which
nothing but death will terminate.



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The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: A Tale of Two Cities
       A Story of the French Revolution

Author: Charles Dickens

Release Date: January, 1994 [EBook #98]
Posting Date: November 28, 2009
Last Updated: March 4, 2018

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A TALE OF TWO CITIES ***




Produced by Judith Boss








A TALE OF TWO CITIES

A STORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

By Charles Dickens


CONTENTS


     Book the First--Recalled to Life

     Chapter I      The Period
     Chapter II     The Mail
     Chapter III    The Night Shadows
     Chapter IV     The Preparation
     Chapter V      The Wine-shop
     Chapter VI     The Shoemaker


     Book the Second--the Golden Thread

     Chapter I      Five Years Later
     Chapter II     A Sight
     Chapter III    A Disappointment
     Chapter IV     Congratulatory
     Chapter V      The Jackal
     Chapter VI     Hundreds of People
     Chapter VII    Monseigneur in Town
     Chapter VIII   Monseigneur in the Country
     Chapter IX     The Gorgon's Head
     Chapter X      Two Promises
     Chapter XI     A Companion Picture
     Chapter XII    The Fellow of Delicacy
     Chapter XIII   The Fellow of no Delicacy
     Chapter XIV    The Honest Tradesman
     Chapter XV     Knitting
     Chapter XVI    Still Knitting
     Chapter XVII   One Night
     Chapter XVIII  Nine Days
     Chapter XIX    An Opinion
     Chapter XX     A Plea
     Chapter XXI    Echoing Footsteps
     Chapter XXII   The Sea Still Rises
     Chapter XXIII  Fire Rises
     Chapter XXIV   Drawn to the Loadstone Rock


     Book the Third--the Track of a Storm

     Chapter I      In Secret
     Chapter II     The Grindstone
     Chapter III    The Shadow
     Chapter IV     Calm in Storm
     Chapter V      The Wood-sawyer
     Chapter VI     Triumph
     Chapter VII    A Knock at the Door
     Chapter VIII   A Hand at Cards
     Chapter IX     The Game Made
     Chapter X      The Substance of the Shadow
     Chapter XI     Dusk
     Chapter XII    Darkness
     Chapter XIII   Fifty-two
     Chapter XIV    The Knitting Done
     Chapter XV     The Footsteps Die Out For Ever





Book the First--Recalled to Life




I. The Period


It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven,
we were all going direct the other way--
in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of
its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for
evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the
throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with
a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer
than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes,
that things in general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period,
as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth
blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had
heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were
made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane
ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its
messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally
deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the
earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People,
from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange
to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any
communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane
brood.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her
sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down
hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her
Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane
achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue
torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not
kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks
which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty
yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and
Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death,
already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into
boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in
it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses
of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were
sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with
rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which
the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of
the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work
unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about
with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion
that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to
justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and
highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night;
families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing
their furniture to upholsterers' warehouses for security; the highwayman
in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and
challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of
“the Captain,” gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the
mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and
then got shot dead himself by the other four, “in consequence of the
failure of his ammunition:” after which the mail was robbed in peace;
that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand
and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the
illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London
gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law
fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball;
thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at
Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles's, to search
for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the
musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences
much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy
and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing
up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on
Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the
hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of
Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer,
and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of
sixpence.

All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close
upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded,
those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the
fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights
with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred
and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small
creatures--the creatures of this chronicle among the rest--along the
roads that lay before them.




II. The Mail


It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November,
before the first of the persons with whom this history has business.
The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up
Shooter's Hill. He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail,
as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish
for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill,
and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the
horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the
coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back
to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in
combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose
otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals
are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to
their duty.

With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through
the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were
falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested
them and brought them to a stand, with a wary “Wo-ho! so-ho-then!” the
near leader violently shook his head and everything upon it--like an
unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the
hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a
nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.

There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its
forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding
none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the
air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the
waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out
everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings,
and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed
into it, as if they had made it all.

Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the
side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the
ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from
anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was
hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from
the eyes of the body, of his two companions. In those days, travellers
were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on
the road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter,
when every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in
“the Captain's” pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable
non-descript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard
of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November, one
thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter's Hill, as
he stood on his own particular perch behind the mail, beating his feet,
and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before him, where a
loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols,
deposited on a substratum of cutlass.

The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected
the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they
all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but
the horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have
taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the
journey.

“Wo-ho!” said the coachman. “So, then! One more pull and you're at the
top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you to
it!--Joe!”

“Halloa!” the guard replied.

“What o'clock do you make it, Joe?”

“Ten minutes, good, past eleven.”

“My blood!” ejaculated the vexed coachman, “and not atop of Shooter's
yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!”

The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative,
made a decided scramble for it, and the three other horses followed
suit. Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its
passengers squashing along by its side. They had stopped when the coach
stopped, and they kept close company with it. If any one of the three
had had the hardihood to propose to another to walk on a little ahead
into the mist and darkness, he would have put himself in a fair way of
getting shot instantly as a highwayman.

The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses
stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the wheel for
the descent, and open the coach-door to let the passengers in.

“Tst! Joe!” cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down from his
box.

“What do you say, Tom?”

They both listened.

“I say a horse at a canter coming up, Joe.”

“_I_ say a horse at a gallop, Tom,” returned the guard, leaving his hold
of the door, and mounting nimbly to his place. “Gentlemen! In the king's
name, all of you!”

With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on
the offensive.

The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step, getting in;
the two other passengers were close behind him, and about to follow. He
remained on the step, half in the coach and half out of; they remained
in the road below him. They all looked from the coachman to the guard,
and from the guard to the coachman, and listened. The coachman looked
back and the guard looked back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up
his ears and looked back, without contradicting.

The stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and labouring
of the coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it very quiet
indeed. The panting of the horses communicated a tremulous motion to
the coach, as if it were in a state of agitation. The hearts of the
passengers beat loud enough perhaps to be heard; but at any rate, the
quiet pause was audibly expressive of people out of breath, and holding
the breath, and having the pulses quickened by expectation.

The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.

“So-ho!” the guard sang out, as loud as he could roar. “Yo there! Stand!
I shall fire!”

The pace was suddenly checked, and, with much splashing and floundering,
a man's voice called from the mist, “Is that the Dover mail?”

“Never you mind what it is!” the guard retorted. “What are you?”

“_Is_ that the Dover mail?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I want a passenger, if it is.”

“What passenger?”

“Mr. Jarvis Lorry.”

Our booked passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. The guard,
the coachman, and the two other passengers eyed him distrustfully.

“Keep where you are,” the guard called to the voice in the mist,
“because, if I should make a mistake, it could never be set right in
your lifetime. Gentleman of the name of Lorry answer straight.”

“What is the matter?” asked the passenger, then, with mildly quavering
speech. “Who wants me? Is it Jerry?”

(“I don't like Jerry's voice, if it is Jerry,” growled the guard to
himself. “He's hoarser than suits me, is Jerry.”)

“Yes, Mr. Lorry.”

“What is the matter?”

“A despatch sent after you from over yonder. T. and Co.”

“I know this messenger, guard,” said Mr. Lorry, getting down into the
road--assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by the other two
passengers, who immediately scrambled into the coach, shut the door, and
pulled up the window. “He may come close; there's nothing wrong.”

“I hope there ain't, but I can't make so 'Nation sure of that,” said the
guard, in gruff soliloquy. “Hallo you!”

“Well! And hallo you!” said Jerry, more hoarsely than before.

“Come on at a footpace! d'ye mind me? And if you've got holsters to that
saddle o' yourn, don't let me see your hand go nigh 'em. For I'm a devil
at a quick mistake, and when I make one it takes the form of Lead. So
now let's look at you.”

The figures of a horse and rider came slowly through the eddying mist,
and came to the side of the mail, where the passenger stood. The rider
stooped, and, casting up his eyes at the guard, handed the passenger
a small folded paper. The rider's horse was blown, and both horse and
rider were covered with mud, from the hoofs of the horse to the hat of
the man.

“Guard!” said the passenger, in a tone of quiet business confidence.

The watchful guard, with his right hand at the stock of his raised
blunderbuss, his left at the barrel, and his eye on the horseman,
answered curtly, “Sir.”

“There is nothing to apprehend. I belong to Tellson's Bank. You must
know Tellson's Bank in London. I am going to Paris on business. A crown
to drink. I may read this?”

“If so be as you're quick, sir.”

He opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and
read--first to himself and then aloud: “'Wait at Dover for Mam'selle.'
It's not long, you see, guard. Jerry, say that my answer was, RECALLED
TO LIFE.”

Jerry started in his saddle. “That's a Blazing strange answer, too,”
 said he, at his hoarsest.

“Take that message back, and they will know that I received this, as
well as if I wrote. Make the best of your way. Good night.”

With those words the passenger opened the coach-door and got in; not at
all assisted by his fellow-passengers, who had expeditiously secreted
their watches and purses in their boots, and were now making a general
pretence of being asleep. With no more definite purpose than to escape
the hazard of originating any other kind of action.

The coach lumbered on again, with heavier wreaths of mist closing round
it as it began the descent. The guard soon replaced his blunderbuss
in his arm-chest, and, having looked to the rest of its contents, and
having looked to the supplementary pistols that he wore in his belt,
looked to a smaller chest beneath his seat, in which there were a
few smith's tools, a couple of torches, and a tinder-box. For he was
furnished with that completeness that if the coach-lamps had been blown
and stormed out, which did occasionally happen, he had only to shut
himself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks well off the straw,
and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if he were lucky) in
five minutes.

“Tom!” softly over the coach roof.

“Hallo, Joe.”

“Did you hear the message?”

“I did, Joe.”

“What did you make of it, Tom?”

“Nothing at all, Joe.”

“That's a coincidence, too,” the guard mused, “for I made the same of it
myself.”

Jerry, left alone in the mist and darkness, dismounted meanwhile, not
only to ease his spent horse, but to wipe the mud from his face, and
shake the wet out of his hat-brim, which might be capable of
holding about half a gallon. After standing with the bridle over his
heavily-splashed arm, until the wheels of the mail were no longer within
hearing and the night was quite still again, he turned to walk down the
hill.

“After that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won't trust your
fore-legs till I get you on the level,” said this hoarse messenger,
glancing at his mare. “'Recalled to life.' That's a Blazing strange
message. Much of that wouldn't do for you, Jerry! I say, Jerry! You'd
be in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion,
Jerry!”




III. The Night Shadows


A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is
constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A
solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every
one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every
room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating
heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of
its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the
awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I
turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time
to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable
water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses
of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the
book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read
but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an
eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood
in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead,
my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable
consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that
individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In
any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there
a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their
innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

As to this, his natural and not to be alienated inheritance, the
messenger on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the King, the
first Minister of State, or the richest merchant in London. So with the
three passengers shut up in the narrow compass of one lumbering old mail
coach; they were mysteries to one another, as complete as if each had
been in his own coach and six, or his own coach and sixty, with the
breadth of a county between him and the next.

The messenger rode back at an easy trot, stopping pretty often at
ale-houses by the way to drink, but evincing a tendency to keep his
own counsel, and to keep his hat cocked over his eyes. He had eyes that
assorted very well with that decoration, being of a surface black, with
no depth in the colour or form, and much too near together--as if they
were afraid of being found out in something, singly, if they kept too
far apart. They had a sinister expression, under an old cocked-hat like
a three-cornered spittoon, and over a great muffler for the chin and
throat, which descended nearly to the wearer's knees. When he stopped
for drink, he moved this muffler with his left hand, only while he
poured his liquor in with his right; as soon as that was done, he
muffled again.

“No, Jerry, no!” said the messenger, harping on one theme as he rode.
“It wouldn't do for you, Jerry. Jerry, you honest tradesman, it wouldn't
suit _your_ line of business! Recalled--! Bust me if I don't think he'd
been a drinking!”

His message perplexed his mind to that degree that he was fain, several
times, to take off his hat to scratch his head. Except on the crown,
which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all
over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was
so like Smith's work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked
wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might
have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go over.

While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night
watchman in his box at the door of Tellson's Bank, by Temple Bar, who
was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the
night took such shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such
shapes to the mare as arose out of _her_ private topics of uneasiness.
They seemed to be numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road.

What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon
its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom,
likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms
their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.

Tellson's Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank
passenger--with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what
lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger,
and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach got a special
jolt--nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little
coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the
bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great
stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money,
and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson's, with
all its foreign and home connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then
the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson's, with such of their valuable
stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a
little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among
them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them
safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them.

But, though the bank was almost always with him, and though the coach
(in a confused way, like the presence of pain under an opiate) was
always with him, there was another current of impression that never
ceased to run, all through the night. He was on his way to dig some one
out of a grave.

Now, which of the multitude of faces that showed themselves before him
was the true face of the buried person, the shadows of the night did
not indicate; but they were all the faces of a man of five-and-forty by
years, and they differed principally in the passions they expressed,
and in the ghastliness of their worn and wasted state. Pride, contempt,
defiance, stubbornness, submission, lamentation, succeeded one another;
so did varieties of sunken cheek, cadaverous colour, emaciated hands
and figures. But the face was in the main one face, and every head was
prematurely white. A hundred times the dozing passenger inquired of this
spectre:

“Buried how long?”

The answer was always the same: “Almost eighteen years.”

“You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?”

“Long ago.”

“You know that you are recalled to life?”

“They tell me so.”

“I hope you care to live?”

“I can't say.”

“Shall I show her to you? Will you come and see her?”

The answers to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes
the broken reply was, “Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon.”
 Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was,
“Take me to her.” Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it
was, “I don't know her. I don't understand.”

After such imaginary discourse, the passenger in his fancy would dig,
and dig, dig--now with a spade, now with a great key, now with his
hands--to dig this wretched creature out. Got out at last, with earth
hanging about his face and hair, he would suddenly fan away to dust. The
passenger would then start to himself, and lower the window, to get the
reality of mist and rain on his cheek.

Yet even when his eyes were opened on the mist and rain, on the moving
patch of light from the lamps, and the hedge at the roadside retreating
by jerks, the night shadows outside the coach would fall into the train
of the night shadows within. The real Banking-house by Temple Bar, the
real business of the past day, the real strong rooms, the real express
sent after him, and the real message returned, would all be there. Out
of the midst of them, the ghostly face would rise, and he would accost
it again.

“Buried how long?”

“Almost eighteen years.”

“I hope you care to live?”

“I can't say.”

Dig--dig--dig--until an impatient movement from one of the two
passengers would admonish him to pull up the window, draw his arm
securely through the leathern strap, and speculate upon the two
slumbering forms, until his mind lost its hold of them, and they again
slid away into the bank and the grave.

“Buried how long?”

“Almost eighteen years.”

“You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?”

“Long ago.”

The words were still in his hearing as just spoken--distinctly in
his hearing as ever spoken words had been in his life--when the weary
passenger started to the consciousness of daylight, and found that the
shadows of the night were gone.

He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a
ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left
last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood,
in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained
upon the trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear,
and the sun rose bright, placid, and beautiful.

“Eighteen years!” said the passenger, looking at the sun. “Gracious
Creator of day! To be buried alive for eighteen years!”




IV. The Preparation


When the mail got successfully to Dover, in the course of the forenoon,
the head drawer at the Royal George Hotel opened the coach-door as his
custom was. He did it with some flourish of ceremony, for a mail journey
from London in winter was an achievement to congratulate an adventurous
traveller upon.

By that time, there was only one adventurous traveller left be
congratulated: for the two others had been set down at their respective
roadside destinations. The mildewy inside of the coach, with its damp
and dirty straw, its disagreeable smell, and its obscurity, was rather
like a larger dog-kennel. Mr. Lorry, the passenger, shaking himself out
of it in chains of straw, a tangle of shaggy wrapper, flapping hat, and
muddy legs, was rather like a larger sort of dog.

“There will be a packet to Calais, tomorrow, drawer?”

“Yes, sir, if the weather holds and the wind sets tolerable fair. The
tide will serve pretty nicely at about two in the afternoon, sir. Bed,
sir?”

“I shall not go to bed till night; but I want a bedroom, and a barber.”

“And then breakfast, sir? Yes, sir. That way, sir, if you please.
Show Concord! Gentleman's valise and hot water to Concord. Pull off
gentleman's boots in Concord. (You will find a fine sea-coal fire, sir.)
Fetch barber to Concord. Stir about there, now, for Concord!”

The Concord bed-chamber being always assigned to a passenger by the
mail, and passengers by the mail being always heavily wrapped up from
head to foot, the room had the odd interest for the establishment of the
Royal George, that although but one kind of man was seen to go into it,
all kinds and varieties of men came out of it. Consequently, another
drawer, and two porters, and several maids and the landlady, were all
loitering by accident at various points of the road between the Concord
and the coffee-room, when a gentleman of sixty, formally dressed in a
brown suit of clothes, pretty well worn, but very well kept, with large
square cuffs and large flaps to the pockets, passed along on his way to
his breakfast.

The coffee-room had no other occupant, that forenoon, than the gentleman
in brown. His breakfast-table was drawn before the fire, and as he sat,
with its light shining on him, waiting for the meal, he sat so still,
that he might have been sitting for his portrait.

Very orderly and methodical he looked, with a hand on each knee, and a
loud watch ticking a sonorous sermon under his flapped waist-coat,
as though it pitted its gravity and longevity against the levity and
evanescence of the brisk fire. He had a good leg, and was a little vain
of it, for his brown stockings fitted sleek and close, and were of a
fine texture; his shoes and buckles, too, though plain, were trim. He
wore an odd little sleek crisp flaxen wig, setting very close to his
head: which wig, it is to be presumed, was made of hair, but which
looked far more as though it were spun from filaments of silk or glass.
His linen, though not of a fineness in accordance with his stockings,
was as white as the tops of the waves that broke upon the neighbouring
beach, or the specks of sail that glinted in the sunlight far at sea. A
face habitually suppressed and quieted, was still lighted up under the
quaint wig by a pair of moist bright eyes that it must have cost
their owner, in years gone by, some pains to drill to the composed and
reserved expression of Tellson's Bank. He had a healthy colour in his
cheeks, and his face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety.
But, perhaps the confidential bachelor clerks in Tellson's Bank were
principally occupied with the cares of other people; and perhaps
second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.

Completing his resemblance to a man who was sitting for his portrait,
Mr. Lorry dropped off to sleep. The arrival of his breakfast roused him,
and he said to the drawer, as he moved his chair to it:

“I wish accommodation prepared for a young lady who may come here at any
time to-day. She may ask for Mr. Jarvis Lorry, or she may only ask for a
gentleman from Tellson's Bank. Please to let me know.”

“Yes, sir. Tellson's Bank in London, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, sir. We have oftentimes the honour to entertain your gentlemen in
their travelling backwards and forwards betwixt London and Paris, sir. A
vast deal of travelling, sir, in Tellson and Company's House.”

“Yes. We are quite a French House, as well as an English one.”

“Yes, sir. Not much in the habit of such travelling yourself, I think,
sir?”

“Not of late years. It is fifteen years since we--since I--came last
from France.”

“Indeed, sir? That was before my time here, sir. Before our people's
time here, sir. The George was in other hands at that time, sir.”

“I believe so.”

“But I would hold a pretty wager, sir, that a House like Tellson and
Company was flourishing, a matter of fifty, not to speak of fifteen
years ago?”

“You might treble that, and say a hundred and fifty, yet not be far from
the truth.”

“Indeed, sir!”

Rounding his mouth and both his eyes, as he stepped backward from the
table, the waiter shifted his napkin from his right arm to his left,
dropped into a comfortable attitude, and stood surveying the guest while
he ate and drank, as from an observatory or watchtower. According to the
immemorial usage of waiters in all ages.

When Mr. Lorry had finished his breakfast, he went out for a stroll on
the beach. The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away
from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine
ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling
wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was
destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and
brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of so strong
a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be
dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea. A little
fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of strolling about by
night, and looking seaward: particularly at those times when the tide
made, and was near flood. Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever,
sometimes unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it was remarkable
that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter.

As the day declined into the afternoon, and the air, which had been
at intervals clear enough to allow the French coast to be seen, became
again charged with mist and vapour, Mr. Lorry's thoughts seemed to cloud
too. When it was dark, and he sat before the coffee-room fire, awaiting
his dinner as he had awaited his breakfast, his mind was busily digging,
digging, digging, in the live red coals.

A bottle of good claret after dinner does a digger in the red coals no
harm, otherwise than as it has a tendency to throw him out of work.
Mr. Lorry had been idle a long time, and had just poured out his last
glassful of wine with as complete an appearance of satisfaction as is
ever to be found in an elderly gentleman of a fresh complexion who has
got to the end of a bottle, when a rattling of wheels came up the narrow
street, and rumbled into the inn-yard.

He set down his glass untouched. “This is Mam'selle!” said he.

In a very few minutes the waiter came in to announce that Miss Manette
had arrived from London, and would be happy to see the gentleman from
Tellson's.

“So soon?”

Miss Manette had taken some refreshment on the road, and required none
then, and was extremely anxious to see the gentleman from Tellson's
immediately, if it suited his pleasure and convenience.

The gentleman from Tellson's had nothing left for it but to empty his
glass with an air of stolid desperation, settle his odd little flaxen
wig at the ears, and follow the waiter to Miss Manette's apartment.
It was a large, dark room, furnished in a funereal manner with black
horsehair, and loaded with heavy dark tables. These had been oiled and
oiled, until the two tall candles on the table in the middle of the room
were gloomily reflected on every leaf; as if _they_ were buried, in deep
graves of black mahogany, and no light to speak of could be expected
from them until they were dug out.

The obscurity was so difficult to penetrate that Mr. Lorry, picking his
way over the well-worn Turkey carpet, supposed Miss Manette to be, for
the moment, in some adjacent room, until, having got past the two tall
candles, he saw standing to receive him by the table between them and
the fire, a young lady of not more than seventeen, in a riding-cloak,
and still holding her straw travelling-hat by its ribbon in her hand. As
his eyes rested on a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden
hair, a pair of blue eyes that met his own with an inquiring look, and
a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth
it was), of rifting and knitting itself into an expression that was
not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright
fixed attention, though it included all the four expressions--as his
eyes rested on these things, a sudden vivid likeness passed before him,
of a child whom he had held in his arms on the passage across that very
Channel, one cold time, when the hail drifted heavily and the sea ran
high. The likeness passed away, like a breath along the surface of
the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital
procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were
offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the
feminine gender--and he made his formal bow to Miss Manette.

“Pray take a seat, sir.” In a very clear and pleasant young voice; a
little foreign in its accent, but a very little indeed.

“I kiss your hand, miss,” said Mr. Lorry, with the manners of an earlier
date, as he made his formal bow again, and took his seat.

“I received a letter from the Bank, sir, yesterday, informing me that
some intelligence--or discovery--”

“The word is not material, miss; either word will do.”

“--respecting the small property of my poor father, whom I never saw--so
long dead--”

Mr. Lorry moved in his chair, and cast a troubled look towards the
hospital procession of negro cupids. As if _they_ had any help for
anybody in their absurd baskets!

“--rendered it necessary that I should go to Paris, there to communicate
with a gentleman of the Bank, so good as to be despatched to Paris for
the purpose.”

“Myself.”

“As I was prepared to hear, sir.”

She curtseyed to him (young ladies made curtseys in those days), with a
pretty desire to convey to him that she felt how much older and wiser he
was than she. He made her another bow.

“I replied to the Bank, sir, that as it was considered necessary, by
those who know, and who are so kind as to advise me, that I should go to
France, and that as I am an orphan and have no friend who could go with
me, I should esteem it highly if I might be permitted to place myself,
during the journey, under that worthy gentleman's protection. The
gentleman had left London, but I think a messenger was sent after him to
beg the favour of his waiting for me here.”

“I was happy,” said Mr. Lorry, “to be entrusted with the charge. I shall
be more happy to execute it.”

“Sir, I thank you indeed. I thank you very gratefully. It was told me
by the Bank that the gentleman would explain to me the details of the
business, and that I must prepare myself to find them of a surprising
nature. I have done my best to prepare myself, and I naturally have a
strong and eager interest to know what they are.”

“Naturally,” said Mr. Lorry. “Yes--I--”

After a pause, he added, again settling the crisp flaxen wig at the
ears, “It is very difficult to begin.”

He did not begin, but, in his indecision, met her glance. The young
forehead lifted itself into that singular expression--but it was pretty
and characteristic, besides being singular--and she raised her hand,
as if with an involuntary action she caught at, or stayed some passing
shadow.

“Are you quite a stranger to me, sir?”

“Am I not?” Mr. Lorry opened his hands, and extended them outwards with
an argumentative smile.

Between the eyebrows and just over the little feminine nose, the line of
which was as delicate and fine as it was possible to be, the expression
deepened itself as she took her seat thoughtfully in the chair by which
she had hitherto remained standing. He watched her as she mused, and the
moment she raised her eyes again, went on:

“In your adopted country, I presume, I cannot do better than address you
as a young English lady, Miss Manette?”

“If you please, sir.”

“Miss Manette, I am a man of business. I have a business charge to
acquit myself of. In your reception of it, don't heed me any more than
if I was a speaking machine--truly, I am not much else. I will, with
your leave, relate to you, miss, the story of one of our customers.”

“Story!”

He seemed wilfully to mistake the word she had repeated, when he added,
in a hurry, “Yes, customers; in the banking business we usually call
our connection our customers. He was a French gentleman; a scientific
gentleman; a man of great acquirements--a Doctor.”

“Not of Beauvais?”

“Why, yes, of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your father, the
gentleman was of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your father, the
gentleman was of repute in Paris. I had the honour of knowing him there.
Our relations were business relations, but confidential. I was at that
time in our French House, and had been--oh! twenty years.”

“At that time--I may ask, at what time, sir?”

“I speak, miss, of twenty years ago. He married--an English lady--and
I was one of the trustees. His affairs, like the affairs of many other
French gentlemen and French families, were entirely in Tellson's hands.
In a similar way I am, or I have been, trustee of one kind or other for
scores of our customers. These are mere business relations, miss;
there is no friendship in them, no particular interest, nothing like
sentiment. I have passed from one to another, in the course of my
business life, just as I pass from one of our customers to another in
the course of my business day; in short, I have no feelings; I am a mere
machine. To go on--”

“But this is my father's story, sir; and I begin to think”--the
curiously roughened forehead was very intent upon him--“that when I was
left an orphan through my mother's surviving my father only two years,
it was you who brought me to England. I am almost sure it was you.”

Mr. Lorry took the hesitating little hand that confidingly advanced
to take his, and he put it with some ceremony to his lips. He then
conducted the young lady straightway to her chair again, and, holding
the chair-back with his left hand, and using his right by turns to rub
his chin, pull his wig at the ears, or point what he said, stood looking
down into her face while she sat looking up into his.

“Miss Manette, it _was_ I. And you will see how truly I spoke of myself
just now, in saying I had no feelings, and that all the relations I hold
with my fellow-creatures are mere business relations, when you reflect
that I have never seen you since. No; you have been the ward of
Tellson's House since, and I have been busy with the other business of
Tellson's House since. Feelings! I have no time for them, no chance
of them. I pass my whole life, miss, in turning an immense pecuniary
Mangle.”

After this odd description of his daily routine of employment, Mr. Lorry
flattened his flaxen wig upon his head with both hands (which was most
unnecessary, for nothing could be flatter than its shining surface was
before), and resumed his former attitude.

“So far, miss (as you have remarked), this is the story of your
regretted father. Now comes the difference. If your father had not died
when he did--Don't be frightened! How you start!”

She did, indeed, start. And she caught his wrist with both her hands.

“Pray,” said Mr. Lorry, in a soothing tone, bringing his left hand from
the back of the chair to lay it on the supplicatory fingers that clasped
him in so violent a tremble: “pray control your agitation--a matter of
business. As I was saying--”

Her look so discomposed him that he stopped, wandered, and began anew:

“As I was saying; if Monsieur Manette had not died; if he had suddenly
and silently disappeared; if he had been spirited away; if it had not
been difficult to guess to what dreadful place, though no art could
trace him; if he had an enemy in some compatriot who could exercise a
privilege that I in my own time have known the boldest people afraid
to speak of in a whisper, across the water there; for instance, the
privilege of filling up blank forms for the consignment of any one
to the oblivion of a prison for any length of time; if his wife had
implored the king, the queen, the court, the clergy, for any tidings of
him, and all quite in vain;--then the history of your father would have
been the history of this unfortunate gentleman, the Doctor of Beauvais.”

“I entreat you to tell me more, sir.”

“I will. I am going to. You can bear it?”

“I can bear anything but the uncertainty you leave me in at this
moment.”

“You speak collectedly, and you--_are_ collected. That's good!” (Though
his manner was less satisfied than his words.) “A matter of business.
Regard it as a matter of business--business that must be done. Now
if this doctor's wife, though a lady of great courage and spirit,
had suffered so intensely from this cause before her little child was
born--”

“The little child was a daughter, sir.”

“A daughter. A-a-matter of business--don't be distressed. Miss, if the
poor lady had suffered so intensely before her little child was born,
that she came to the determination of sparing the poor child the
inheritance of any part of the agony she had known the pains of, by
rearing her in the belief that her father was dead--No, don't kneel! In
Heaven's name why should you kneel to me!”

“For the truth. O dear, good, compassionate sir, for the truth!”

“A--a matter of business. You confuse me, and how can I transact
business if I am confused? Let us be clear-headed. If you could kindly
mention now, for instance, what nine times ninepence are, or how many
shillings in twenty guineas, it would be so encouraging. I should be so
much more at my ease about your state of mind.”

Without directly answering to this appeal, she sat so still when he had
very gently raised her, and the hands that had not ceased to clasp
his wrists were so much more steady than they had been, that she
communicated some reassurance to Mr. Jarvis Lorry.

“That's right, that's right. Courage! Business! You have business before
you; useful business. Miss Manette, your mother took this course with
you. And when she died--I believe broken-hearted--having never slackened
her unavailing search for your father, she left you, at two years old,
to grow to be blooming, beautiful, and happy, without the dark cloud
upon you of living in uncertainty whether your father soon wore his
heart out in prison, or wasted there through many lingering years.”

As he said the words he looked down, with an admiring pity, on the
flowing golden hair; as if he pictured to himself that it might have
been already tinged with grey.

“You know that your parents had no great possession, and that what
they had was secured to your mother and to you. There has been no new
discovery, of money, or of any other property; but--”

He felt his wrist held closer, and he stopped. The expression in the
forehead, which had so particularly attracted his notice, and which was
now immovable, had deepened into one of pain and horror.

“But he has been--been found. He is alive. Greatly changed, it is too
probable; almost a wreck, it is possible; though we will hope the best.
Still, alive. Your father has been taken to the house of an old servant
in Paris, and we are going there: I, to identify him if I can: you, to
restore him to life, love, duty, rest, comfort.”

A shiver ran through her frame, and from it through his. She said, in a
low, distinct, awe-stricken voice, as if she were saying it in a dream,

“I am going to see his Ghost! It will be his Ghost--not him!”

Mr. Lorry quietly chafed the hands that held his arm. “There, there,
there! See now, see now! The best and the worst are known to you, now.
You are well on your way to the poor wronged gentleman, and, with a fair
sea voyage, and a fair land journey, you will be soon at his dear side.”

She repeated in the same tone, sunk to a whisper, “I have been free, I
have been happy, yet his Ghost has never haunted me!”

“Only one thing more,” said Mr. Lorry, laying stress upon it as a
wholesome means of enforcing her attention: “he has been found under
another name; his own, long forgotten or long concealed. It would be
worse than useless now to inquire which; worse than useless to seek to
know whether he has been for years overlooked, or always designedly
held prisoner. It would be worse than useless now to make any inquiries,
because it would be dangerous. Better not to mention the subject,
anywhere or in any way, and to remove him--for a while at all
events--out of France. Even I, safe as an Englishman, and even
Tellson's, important as they are to French credit, avoid all naming of
the matter. I carry about me, not a scrap of writing openly referring
to it. This is a secret service altogether. My credentials, entries,
and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line, 'Recalled to Life;'
which may mean anything. But what is the matter! She doesn't notice a
word! Miss Manette!”

Perfectly still and silent, and not even fallen back in her chair, she
sat under his hand, utterly insensible; with her eyes open and fixed
upon him, and with that last expression looking as if it were carved or
branded into her forehead. So close was her hold upon his arm, that he
feared to detach himself lest he should hurt her; therefore he called
out loudly for assistance without moving.

A wild-looking woman, whom even in his agitation, Mr. Lorry observed to
be all of a red colour, and to have red hair, and to be dressed in some
extraordinary tight-fitting fashion, and to have on her head a most
wonderful bonnet like a Grenadier wooden measure, and good measure too,
or a great Stilton cheese, came running into the room in advance of the
inn servants, and soon settled the question of his detachment from the
poor young lady, by laying a brawny hand upon his chest, and sending him
flying back against the nearest wall.

(“I really think this must be a man!” was Mr. Lorry's breathless
reflection, simultaneously with his coming against the wall.)

“Why, look at you all!” bawled this figure, addressing the inn servants.
“Why don't you go and fetch things, instead of standing there staring
at me? I am not so much to look at, am I? Why don't you go and fetch
things? I'll let you know, if you don't bring smelling-salts, cold
water, and vinegar, quick, I will.”

There was an immediate dispersal for these restoratives, and she
softly laid the patient on a sofa, and tended her with great skill and
gentleness: calling her “my precious!” and “my bird!” and spreading her
golden hair aside over her shoulders with great pride and care.

“And you in brown!” she said, indignantly turning to Mr. Lorry;
“couldn't you tell her what you had to tell her, without frightening her
to death? Look at her, with her pretty pale face and her cold hands. Do
you call _that_ being a Banker?”

Mr. Lorry was so exceedingly disconcerted by a question so hard to
answer, that he could only look on, at a distance, with much feebler
sympathy and humility, while the strong woman, having banished the inn
servants under the mysterious penalty of “letting them know” something
not mentioned if they stayed there, staring, recovered her charge by a
regular series of gradations, and coaxed her to lay her drooping head
upon her shoulder.

“I hope she will do well now,” said Mr. Lorry.

“No thanks to you in brown, if she does. My darling pretty!”

“I hope,” said Mr. Lorry, after another pause of feeble sympathy and
humility, “that you accompany Miss Manette to France?”

“A likely thing, too!” replied the strong woman. “If it was ever
intended that I should go across salt water, do you suppose Providence
would have cast my lot in an island?”

This being another question hard to answer, Mr. Jarvis Lorry withdrew to
consider it.




V. The Wine-shop


A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The
accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled
out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just
outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.

All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their
idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular
stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have
thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them,
had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own
jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down,
made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help
women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all
run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in
the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with
handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants'
mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran;
others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and
there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new
directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed
pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted
fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the
wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up
along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street,
if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous
presence.

A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices--voices of men, women,
and children--resounded in the street while this wine game lasted. There
was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a
special companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part
of every one to join some other one, which led, especially among the
luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths,
shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen
together. When the wine was gone, and the places where it had been
most abundant were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these
demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. The man who
had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting, set it in
motion again; the women who had left on a door-step the little pot of
hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the pain in her own
starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it; men
with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged into
the winter light from cellars, moved away, to descend again; and a gloom
gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than sunshine.

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street
in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had
stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many
wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks
on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was
stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again.
Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a
tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his
head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled
upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees--BLOOD.

The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the
street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.

And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary
gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was
heavy--cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in
waiting on the saintly presence--nobles of great power all of them;
but, most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a
terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the
fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner,
passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window, fluttered
in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook. The mill which
had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the
children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the
grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh,
was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out
of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and
lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and
paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of
firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless
chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal,
among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the
baker's shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of
bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that
was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting
chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every
farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant
drops of oil.

Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding
street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets
diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags
and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon them
that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was yet some
wild-beast thought of the possibility of turning at bay. Depressed and
slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor
compressed lips, white with what they suppressed; nor foreheads knitted
into the likeness of the gallows-rope they mused about enduring, or
inflicting. The trade signs (and they were almost as many as the shops)
were, all, grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman
painted up, only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest of
meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops,
croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer, and were
gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was represented in a
flourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but, the cutler's knives
and axes were sharp and bright, the smith's hammers were heavy, and the
gunmaker's stock was murderous. The crippling stones of the pavement,
with their many little reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but
broke off abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down
the middle of the street--when it ran at all: which was only after heavy
rains, and then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses. Across
the streets, at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and
pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let these down, and lighted,
and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dim wicks swung in a sickly
manner overhead, as if they were at sea. Indeed they were at sea, and
the ship and crew were in peril of tempest.

For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region
should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so
long, as to conceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling
up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their
condition. But, the time was not come yet; and every wind that blew over
France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of
song and feather, took no warning.

The wine-shop was a corner shop, better than most others in its
appearance and degree, and the master of the wine-shop had stood outside
it, in a yellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking on at the struggle
for the lost wine. “It's not my affair,” said he, with a final shrug
of the shoulders. “The people from the market did it. Let them bring
another.”

There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his joke,
he called to him across the way:

“Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?”

The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance, as is often
the way with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely failed, as is
often the way with his tribe too.

“What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital?” said the wine-shop
keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with a handful of
mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it. “Why do you write
in the public streets? Is there--tell me thou--is there no other place
to write such words in?”

In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps accidentally,
perhaps not) upon the joker's heart. The joker rapped it with his
own, took a nimble spring upward, and came down in a fantastic dancing
attitude, with one of his stained shoes jerked off his foot into his
hand, and held out. A joker of an extremely, not to say wolfishly
practical character, he looked, under those circumstances.

“Put it on, put it on,” said the other. “Call wine, wine; and finish
there.” With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand upon the joker's
dress, such as it was--quite deliberately, as having dirtied the hand on
his account; and then recrossed the road and entered the wine-shop.

This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty,
and he should have been of a hot temperament, for, although it was a
bitter day, he wore no coat, but carried one slung over his shoulder.
His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, too, and his brown arms were bare to
the elbows. Neither did he wear anything more on his head than his own
crisply-curling short dark hair. He was a dark man altogether, with good
eyes and a good bold breadth between them. Good-humoured looking on
the whole, but implacable-looking, too; evidently a man of a strong
resolution and a set purpose; a man not desirable to be met, rushing
down a narrow pass with a gulf on either side, for nothing would turn
the man.

Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter as he
came in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his own age, with
a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand
heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of
manner. There was a character about Madame Defarge, from which one might
have predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself
in any of the reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being
sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright
shawl twined about her head, though not to the concealment of her large
earrings. Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it down to pick
her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged, with her right elbow supported
by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing when her lord came in, but
coughed just one grain of cough. This, in combination with the lifting
of her darkly defined eyebrows over her toothpick by the breadth of a
line, suggested to her husband that he would do well to look round the
shop among the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while
he stepped over the way.

The wine-shop keeper accordingly rolled his eyes about, until they
rested upon an elderly gentleman and a young lady, who were seated in
a corner. Other company were there: two playing cards, two playing
dominoes, three standing by the counter lengthening out a short supply
of wine. As he passed behind the counter, he took notice that the
elderly gentleman said in a look to the young lady, “This is our man.”

“What the devil do _you_ do in that galley there?” said Monsieur Defarge
to himself; “I don't know you.”

But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into discourse
with the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at the counter.

“How goes it, Jacques?” said one of these three to Monsieur Defarge. “Is
all the spilt wine swallowed?”

“Every drop, Jacques,” answered Monsieur Defarge.

When this interchange of Christian name was effected, Madame Defarge,
picking her teeth with her toothpick, coughed another grain of cough,
and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.

“It is not often,” said the second of the three, addressing Monsieur
Defarge, “that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or
of anything but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?”

“It is so, Jacques,” Monsieur Defarge returned.

At this second interchange of the Christian name, Madame Defarge, still
using her toothpick with profound composure, coughed another grain of
cough, and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.

The last of the three now said his say, as he put down his empty
drinking vessel and smacked his lips.

“Ah! So much the worse! A bitter taste it is that such poor cattle
always have in their mouths, and hard lives they live, Jacques. Am I
right, Jacques?”

“You are right, Jacques,” was the response of Monsieur Defarge.

This third interchange of the Christian name was completed at the moment
when Madame Defarge put her toothpick by, kept her eyebrows up, and
slightly rustled in her seat.

“Hold then! True!” muttered her husband. “Gentlemen--my wife!”

The three customers pulled off their hats to Madame Defarge, with three
flourishes. She acknowledged their homage by bending her head, and
giving them a quick look. Then she glanced in a casual manner round the
wine-shop, took up her knitting with great apparent calmness and repose
of spirit, and became absorbed in it.

“Gentlemen,” said her husband, who had kept his bright eye observantly
upon her, “good day. The chamber, furnished bachelor-fashion, that you
wished to see, and were inquiring for when I stepped out, is on the
fifth floor. The doorway of the staircase gives on the little courtyard
close to the left here,” pointing with his hand, “near to the window of
my establishment. But, now that I remember, one of you has already been
there, and can show the way. Gentlemen, adieu!”

They paid for their wine, and left the place. The eyes of Monsieur
Defarge were studying his wife at her knitting when the elderly
gentleman advanced from his corner, and begged the favour of a word.

“Willingly, sir,” said Monsieur Defarge, and quietly stepped with him to
the door.

Their conference was very short, but very decided. Almost at the first
word, Monsieur Defarge started and became deeply attentive. It had
not lasted a minute, when he nodded and went out. The gentleman then
beckoned to the young lady, and they, too, went out. Madame Defarge
knitted with nimble fingers and steady eyebrows, and saw nothing.

Mr. Jarvis Lorry and Miss Manette, emerging from the wine-shop thus,
joined Monsieur Defarge in the doorway to which he had directed his own
company just before. It opened from a stinking little black courtyard,
and was the general public entrance to a great pile of houses, inhabited
by a great number of people. In the gloomy tile-paved entry to the
gloomy tile-paved staircase, Monsieur Defarge bent down on one knee
to the child of his old master, and put her hand to his lips. It was
a gentle action, but not at all gently done; a very remarkable
transformation had come over him in a few seconds. He had no good-humour
in his face, nor any openness of aspect left, but had become a secret,
angry, dangerous man.

“It is very high; it is a little difficult. Better to begin slowly.”
 Thus, Monsieur Defarge, in a stern voice, to Mr. Lorry, as they began
ascending the stairs.

“Is he alone?” the latter whispered.

“Alone! God help him, who should be with him!” said the other, in the
same low voice.

“Is he always alone, then?”

“Yes.”

“Of his own desire?”

“Of his own necessity. As he was, when I first saw him after they
found me and demanded to know if I would take him, and, at my peril be
discreet--as he was then, so he is now.”

“He is greatly changed?”

“Changed!”

The keeper of the wine-shop stopped to strike the wall with his hand,
and mutter a tremendous curse. No direct answer could have been half so
forcible. Mr. Lorry's spirits grew heavier and heavier, as he and his
two companions ascended higher and higher.

Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more crowded
parts of Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that time, it was vile
indeed to unaccustomed and unhardened senses. Every little habitation
within the great foul nest of one high building--that is to say,
the room or rooms within every door that opened on the general
staircase--left its own heap of refuse on its own landing, besides
flinging other refuse from its own windows. The uncontrollable and
hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would have polluted
the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it with their
intangible impurities; the two bad sources combined made it almost
insupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt
and poison, the way lay. Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to
his young companion's agitation, which became greater every instant, Mr.
Jarvis Lorry twice stopped to rest. Each of these stoppages was made
at a doleful grating, by which any languishing good airs that were left
uncorrupted, seemed to escape, and all spoilt and sickly vapours seemed
to crawl in. Through the rusted bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were
caught of the jumbled neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer
or lower than the summits of the two great towers of Notre-Dame, had any
promise on it of healthy life or wholesome aspirations.

At last, the top of the staircase was gained, and they stopped for the
third time. There was yet an upper staircase, of a steeper inclination
and of contracted dimensions, to be ascended, before the garret story
was reached. The keeper of the wine-shop, always going a little in
advance, and always going on the side which Mr. Lorry took, as though he
dreaded to be asked any question by the young lady, turned himself about
here, and, carefully feeling in the pockets of the coat he carried over
his shoulder, took out a key.

“The door is locked then, my friend?” said Mr. Lorry, surprised.

“Ay. Yes,” was the grim reply of Monsieur Defarge.

“You think it necessary to keep the unfortunate gentleman so retired?”

“I think it necessary to turn the key.” Monsieur Defarge whispered it
closer in his ear, and frowned heavily.

“Why?”

“Why! Because he has lived so long, locked up, that he would be
frightened--rave--tear himself to pieces--die--come to I know not what
harm--if his door was left open.”

“Is it possible!” exclaimed Mr. Lorry.

“Is it possible!” repeated Defarge, bitterly. “Yes. And a beautiful
world we live in, when it _is_ possible, and when many other such things
are possible, and not only possible, but done--done, see you!--under
that sky there, every day. Long live the Devil. Let us go on.”

This dialogue had been held in so very low a whisper, that not a word
of it had reached the young lady's ears. But, by this time she trembled
under such strong emotion, and her face expressed such deep anxiety,
and, above all, such dread and terror, that Mr. Lorry felt it incumbent
on him to speak a word or two of reassurance.

“Courage, dear miss! Courage! Business! The worst will be over in a
moment; it is but passing the room-door, and the worst is over. Then,
all the good you bring to him, all the relief, all the happiness you
bring to him, begin. Let our good friend here, assist you on that side.
That's well, friend Defarge. Come, now. Business, business!”

They went up slowly and softly. The staircase was short, and they were
soon at the top. There, as it had an abrupt turn in it, they came all at
once in sight of three men, whose heads were bent down close together at
the side of a door, and who were intently looking into the room to which
the door belonged, through some chinks or holes in the wall. On hearing
footsteps close at hand, these three turned, and rose, and showed
themselves to be the three of one name who had been drinking in the
wine-shop.

“I forgot them in the surprise of your visit,” explained Monsieur
Defarge. “Leave us, good boys; we have business here.”

The three glided by, and went silently down.

There appearing to be no other door on that floor, and the keeper of
the wine-shop going straight to this one when they were left alone, Mr.
Lorry asked him in a whisper, with a little anger:

“Do you make a show of Monsieur Manette?”

“I show him, in the way you have seen, to a chosen few.”

“Is that well?”

“_I_ think it is well.”

“Who are the few? How do you choose them?”

“I choose them as real men, of my name--Jacques is my name--to whom the
sight is likely to do good. Enough; you are English; that is another
thing. Stay there, if you please, a little moment.”

With an admonitory gesture to keep them back, he stooped, and looked in
through the crevice in the wall. Soon raising his head again, he struck
twice or thrice upon the door--evidently with no other object than to
make a noise there. With the same intention, he drew the key across it,
three or four times, before he put it clumsily into the lock, and turned
it as heavily as he could.

The door slowly opened inward under his hand, and he looked into the
room and said something. A faint voice answered something. Little more
than a single syllable could have been spoken on either side.

He looked back over his shoulder, and beckoned them to enter. Mr. Lorry
got his arm securely round the daughter's waist, and held her; for he
felt that she was sinking.

“A-a-a-business, business!” he urged, with a moisture that was not of
business shining on his cheek. “Come in, come in!”

“I am afraid of it,” she answered, shuddering.

“Of it? What?”

“I mean of him. Of my father.”

Rendered in a manner desperate, by her state and by the beckoning of
their conductor, he drew over his neck the arm that shook upon his
shoulder, lifted her a little, and hurried her into the room. He sat her
down just within the door, and held her, clinging to him.

Defarge drew out the key, closed the door, locked it on the inside,
took out the key again, and held it in his hand. All this he did,
methodically, and with as loud and harsh an accompaniment of noise as he
could make. Finally, he walked across the room with a measured tread to
where the window was. He stopped there, and faced round.

The garret, built to be a depository for firewood and the like, was dim
and dark: for, the window of dormer shape, was in truth a door in the
roof, with a little crane over it for the hoisting up of stores from
the street: unglazed, and closing up the middle in two pieces, like any
other door of French construction. To exclude the cold, one half of this
door was fast closed, and the other was opened but a very little way.
Such a scanty portion of light was admitted through these means, that it
was difficult, on first coming in, to see anything; and long habit
alone could have slowly formed in any one, the ability to do any work
requiring nicety in such obscurity. Yet, work of that kind was being
done in the garret; for, with his back towards the door, and his face
towards the window where the keeper of the wine-shop stood looking at
him, a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very
busy, making shoes.




VI. The Shoemaker


“Good day!” said Monsieur Defarge, looking down at the white head that
bent low over the shoemaking.

It was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice responded to the
salutation, as if it were at a distance:

“Good day!”

“You are still hard at work, I see?”

After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment, and the
voice replied, “Yes--I am working.” This time, a pair of haggard eyes
had looked at the questioner, before the face had dropped again.

The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the
faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no
doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was
the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo
of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and
resonance of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once
beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak stain. So sunken and
suppressed it was, that it was like a voice underground. So expressive
it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveller,
wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would have remembered
home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die.

Some minutes of silent work had passed: and the haggard eyes had looked
up again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a dull mechanical
perception, beforehand, that the spot where the only visitor they were
aware of had stood, was not yet empty.

“I want,” said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the shoemaker,
“to let in a little more light here. You can bear a little more?”

The shoemaker stopped his work; looked with a vacant air of listening,
at the floor on one side of him; then similarly, at the floor on the
other side of him; then, upward at the speaker.

“What did you say?”

“You can bear a little more light?”

“I must bear it, if you let it in.” (Laying the palest shadow of a
stress upon the second word.)

The opened half-door was opened a little further, and secured at that
angle for the time. A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and
showed the workman with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his
labour. His few common tools and various scraps of leather were at his
feet and on his bench. He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very
long, a hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes. The hollowness and
thinness of his face would have caused them to look large, under his yet
dark eyebrows and his confused white hair, though they had been really
otherwise; but, they were naturally large, and looked unnaturally so.
His yellow rags of shirt lay open at the throat, and showed his body
to be withered and worn. He, and his old canvas frock, and his loose
stockings, and all his poor tatters of clothes, had, in a long seclusion
from direct light and air, faded down to such a dull uniformity of
parchment-yellow, that it would have been hard to say which was which.

He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the very bones
of it seemed transparent. So he sat, with a steadfastly vacant gaze,
pausing in his work. He never looked at the figure before him, without
first looking down on this side of himself, then on that, as if he had
lost the habit of associating place with sound; he never spoke, without
first wandering in this manner, and forgetting to speak.

“Are you going to finish that pair of shoes to-day?” asked Defarge,
motioning to Mr. Lorry to come forward.

“What did you say?”

“Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes to-day?”

“I can't say that I mean to. I suppose so. I don't know.”

But, the question reminded him of his work, and he bent over it again.

Mr. Lorry came silently forward, leaving the daughter by the door. When
he had stood, for a minute or two, by the side of Defarge, the shoemaker
looked up. He showed no surprise at seeing another figure, but the
unsteady fingers of one of his hands strayed to his lips as he looked at
it (his lips and his nails were of the same pale lead-colour), and then
the hand dropped to his work, and he once more bent over the shoe. The
look and the action had occupied but an instant.

“You have a visitor, you see,” said Monsieur Defarge.

“What did you say?”

“Here is a visitor.”

The shoemaker looked up as before, but without removing a hand from his
work.

“Come!” said Defarge. “Here is monsieur, who knows a well-made shoe when
he sees one. Show him that shoe you are working at. Take it, monsieur.”

Mr. Lorry took it in his hand.

“Tell monsieur what kind of shoe it is, and the maker's name.”

There was a longer pause than usual, before the shoemaker replied:

“I forget what it was you asked me. What did you say?”

“I said, couldn't you describe the kind of shoe, for monsieur's
information?”

“It is a lady's shoe. It is a young lady's walking-shoe. It is in the
present mode. I never saw the mode. I have had a pattern in my hand.” He
glanced at the shoe with some little passing touch of pride.

“And the maker's name?” said Defarge.

Now that he had no work to hold, he laid the knuckles of the right hand
in the hollow of the left, and then the knuckles of the left hand in the
hollow of the right, and then passed a hand across his bearded chin, and
so on in regular changes, without a moment's intermission. The task of
recalling him from the vagrancy into which he always sank when he
had spoken, was like recalling some very weak person from a swoon, or
endeavouring, in the hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a
fast-dying man.

“Did you ask me for my name?”

“Assuredly I did.”

“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.”

“Is that all?”

“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.”

With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan, he bent to work
again, until the silence was again broken.

“You are not a shoemaker by trade?” said Mr. Lorry, looking steadfastly
at him.

His haggard eyes turned to Defarge as if he would have transferred the
question to him: but as no help came from that quarter, they turned back
on the questioner when they had sought the ground.

“I am not a shoemaker by trade? No, I was not a shoemaker by trade. I-I
learnt it here. I taught myself. I asked leave to--”

He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured changes on his
hands the whole time. His eyes came slowly back, at last, to the face
from which they had wandered; when they rested on it, he started, and
resumed, in the manner of a sleeper that moment awake, reverting to a
subject of last night.

“I asked leave to teach myself, and I got it with much difficulty after
a long while, and I have made shoes ever since.”

As he held out his hand for the shoe that had been taken from him, Mr.
Lorry said, still looking steadfastly in his face:

“Monsieur Manette, do you remember nothing of me?”

The shoe dropped to the ground, and he sat looking fixedly at the
questioner.

“Monsieur Manette”; Mr. Lorry laid his hand upon Defarge's arm; “do you
remember nothing of this man? Look at him. Look at me. Is there no old
banker, no old business, no old servant, no old time, rising in your
mind, Monsieur Manette?”

As the captive of many years sat looking fixedly, by turns, at Mr.
Lorry and at Defarge, some long obliterated marks of an actively intent
intelligence in the middle of the forehead, gradually forced themselves
through the black mist that had fallen on him. They were overclouded
again, they were fainter, they were gone; but they had been there. And
so exactly was the expression repeated on the fair young face of her who
had crept along the wall to a point where she could see him, and where
she now stood looking at him, with hands which at first had been only
raised in frightened compassion, if not even to keep him off and
shut out the sight of him, but which were now extending towards him,
trembling with eagerness to lay the spectral face upon her warm young
breast, and love it back to life and hope--so exactly was the expression
repeated (though in stronger characters) on her fair young face, that it
looked as though it had passed like a moving light, from him to her.

Darkness had fallen on him in its place. He looked at the two, less and
less attentively, and his eyes in gloomy abstraction sought the ground
and looked about him in the old way. Finally, with a deep long sigh, he
took the shoe up, and resumed his work.

“Have you recognised him, monsieur?” asked Defarge in a whisper.

“Yes; for a moment. At first I thought it quite hopeless, but I have
unquestionably seen, for a single moment, the face that I once knew so
well. Hush! Let us draw further back. Hush!”

She had moved from the wall of the garret, very near to the bench on
which he sat. There was something awful in his unconsciousness of the
figure that could have put out its hand and touched him as he stooped
over his labour.

Not a word was spoken, not a sound was made. She stood, like a spirit,
beside him, and he bent over his work.

It happened, at length, that he had occasion to change the instrument
in his hand, for his shoemaker's knife. It lay on that side of him
which was not the side on which she stood. He had taken it up, and was
stooping to work again, when his eyes caught the skirt of her dress. He
raised them, and saw her face. The two spectators started forward,
but she stayed them with a motion of her hand. She had no fear of his
striking at her with the knife, though they had.

He stared at her with a fearful look, and after a while his lips began
to form some words, though no sound proceeded from them. By degrees, in
the pauses of his quick and laboured breathing, he was heard to say:

“What is this?”

With the tears streaming down her face, she put her two hands to her
lips, and kissed them to him; then clasped them on her breast, as if she
laid his ruined head there.

“You are not the gaoler's daughter?”

She sighed “No.”

“Who are you?”

Not yet trusting the tones of her voice, she sat down on the bench
beside him. He recoiled, but she laid her hand upon his arm. A strange
thrill struck him when she did so, and visibly passed over his frame; he
laid the knife down softly, as he sat staring at her.

Her golden hair, which she wore in long curls, had been hurriedly pushed
aside, and fell down over her neck. Advancing his hand by little and
little, he took it up and looked at it. In the midst of the action
he went astray, and, with another deep sigh, fell to work at his
shoemaking.

But not for long. Releasing his arm, she laid her hand upon his
shoulder. After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if to
be sure that it was really there, he laid down his work, put his hand
to his neck, and took off a blackened string with a scrap of folded rag
attached to it. He opened this, carefully, on his knee, and it contained
a very little quantity of hair: not more than one or two long golden
hairs, which he had, in some old day, wound off upon his finger.

He took her hair into his hand again, and looked closely at it. “It is
the same. How can it be! When was it! How was it!”

As the concentrated expression returned to his forehead, he seemed to
become conscious that it was in hers too. He turned her full to the
light, and looked at her.

“She had laid her head upon my shoulder, that night when I was summoned
out--she had a fear of my going, though I had none--and when I was
brought to the North Tower they found these upon my sleeve. 'You will
leave me them? They can never help me to escape in the body, though they
may in the spirit.' Those were the words I said. I remember them very
well.”

He formed this speech with his lips many times before he could utter it.
But when he did find spoken words for it, they came to him coherently,
though slowly.

“How was this?--_Was it you_?”

Once more, the two spectators started, as he turned upon her with a
frightful suddenness. But she sat perfectly still in his grasp, and only
said, in a low voice, “I entreat you, good gentlemen, do not come near
us, do not speak, do not move!”

“Hark!” he exclaimed. “Whose voice was that?”

His hands released her as he uttered this cry, and went up to his white
hair, which they tore in a frenzy. It died out, as everything but his
shoemaking did die out of him, and he refolded his little packet and
tried to secure it in his breast; but he still looked at her, and
gloomily shook his head.

“No, no, no; you are too young, too blooming. It can't be. See what the
prisoner is. These are not the hands she knew, this is not the face
she knew, this is not a voice she ever heard. No, no. She was--and He
was--before the slow years of the North Tower--ages ago. What is your
name, my gentle angel?”

Hailing his softened tone and manner, his daughter fell upon her knees
before him, with her appealing hands upon his breast.

“O, sir, at another time you shall know my name, and who my mother was,
and who my father, and how I never knew their hard, hard history. But I
cannot tell you at this time, and I cannot tell you here. All that I may
tell you, here and now, is, that I pray to you to touch me and to bless
me. Kiss me, kiss me! O my dear, my dear!”

His cold white head mingled with her radiant hair, which warmed and
lighted it as though it were the light of Freedom shining on him.

“If you hear in my voice--I don't know that it is so, but I hope it
is--if you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once was
sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it! If you touch, in
touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved head that lay on your
breast when you were young and free, weep for it, weep for it! If, when
I hint to you of a Home that is before us, where I will be true to you
with all my duty and with all my faithful service, I bring back the
remembrance of a Home long desolate, while your poor heart pined away,
weep for it, weep for it!”

She held him closer round the neck, and rocked him on her breast like a
child.

“If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your agony is over, and that I
have come here to take you from it, and that we go to England to be at
peace and at rest, I cause you to think of your useful life laid waste,
and of our native France so wicked to you, weep for it, weep for it! And
if, when I shall tell you of my name, and of my father who is living,
and of my mother who is dead, you learn that I have to kneel to my
honoured father, and implore his pardon for having never for his sake
striven all day and lain awake and wept all night, because the love of
my poor mother hid his torture from me, weep for it, weep for it! Weep
for her, then, and for me! Good gentlemen, thank God! I feel his sacred
tears upon my face, and his sobs strike against my heart. O, see! Thank
God for us, thank God!”

He had sunk in her arms, and his face dropped on her breast: a sight so
touching, yet so terrible in the tremendous wrong and suffering which
had gone before it, that the two beholders covered their faces.

When the quiet of the garret had been long undisturbed, and his heaving
breast and shaken form had long yielded to the calm that must follow all
storms--emblem to humanity, of the rest and silence into which the storm
called Life must hush at last--they came forward to raise the father and
daughter from the ground. He had gradually dropped to the floor, and lay
there in a lethargy, worn out. She had nestled down with him, that his
head might lie upon her arm; and her hair drooping over him curtained
him from the light.

“If, without disturbing him,” she said, raising her hand to Mr. Lorry as
he stooped over them, after repeated blowings of his nose, “all could be
arranged for our leaving Paris at once, so that, from the very door, he
could be taken away--”

“But, consider. Is he fit for the journey?” asked Mr. Lorry.

“More fit for that, I think, than to remain in this city, so dreadful to
him.”

“It is true,” said Defarge, who was kneeling to look on and hear. “More
than that; Monsieur Manette is, for all reasons, best out of France.
Say, shall I hire a carriage and post-horses?”

“That's business,” said Mr. Lorry, resuming on the shortest notice his
methodical manners; “and if business is to be done, I had better do it.”

“Then be so kind,” urged Miss Manette, “as to leave us here. You see how
composed he has become, and you cannot be afraid to leave him with me
now. Why should you be? If you will lock the door to secure us from
interruption, I do not doubt that you will find him, when you come back,
as quiet as you leave him. In any case, I will take care of him until
you return, and then we will remove him straight.”

Both Mr. Lorry and Defarge were rather disinclined to this course, and
in favour of one of them remaining. But, as there were not only carriage
and horses to be seen to, but travelling papers; and as time pressed,
for the day was drawing to an end, it came at last to their hastily
dividing the business that was necessary to be done, and hurrying away
to do it.

Then, as the darkness closed in, the daughter laid her head down on the
hard ground close at the father's side, and watched him. The darkness
deepened and deepened, and they both lay quiet, until a light gleamed
through the chinks in the wall.

Mr. Lorry and Monsieur Defarge had made all ready for the journey, and
had brought with them, besides travelling cloaks and wrappers, bread and
meat, wine, and hot coffee. Monsieur Defarge put this provender, and the
lamp he carried, on the shoemaker's bench (there was nothing else in the
garret but a pallet bed), and he and Mr. Lorry roused the captive, and
assisted him to his feet.

No human intelligence could have read the mysteries of his mind, in
the scared blank wonder of his face. Whether he knew what had happened,
whether he recollected what they had said to him, whether he knew that
he was free, were questions which no sagacity could have solved. They
tried speaking to him; but, he was so confused, and so very slow to
answer, that they took fright at his bewilderment, and agreed for
the time to tamper with him no more. He had a wild, lost manner of
occasionally clasping his head in his hands, that had not been seen
in him before; yet, he had some pleasure in the mere sound of his
daughter's voice, and invariably turned to it when she spoke.

In the submissive way of one long accustomed to obey under coercion, he
ate and drank what they gave him to eat and drink, and put on the cloak
and other wrappings, that they gave him to wear. He readily responded to
his daughter's drawing her arm through his, and took--and kept--her hand
in both his own.

They began to descend; Monsieur Defarge going first with the lamp, Mr.
Lorry closing the little procession. They had not traversed many steps
of the long main staircase when he stopped, and stared at the roof and
round at the walls.

“You remember the place, my father? You remember coming up here?”

“What did you say?”

But, before she could repeat the question, he murmured an answer as if
she had repeated it.

“Remember? No, I don't remember. It was so very long ago.”

That he had no recollection whatever of his having been brought from his
prison to that house, was apparent to them. They heard him mutter,
“One Hundred and Five, North Tower;” and when he looked about him, it
evidently was for the strong fortress-walls which had long encompassed
him. On their reaching the courtyard he instinctively altered his
tread, as being in expectation of a drawbridge; and when there was
no drawbridge, and he saw the carriage waiting in the open street, he
dropped his daughter's hand and clasped his head again.

No crowd was about the door; no people were discernible at any of the
many windows; not even a chance passerby was in the street. An unnatural
silence and desertion reigned there. Only one soul was to be seen, and
that was Madame Defarge--who leaned against the door-post, knitting, and
saw nothing.

The prisoner had got into a coach, and his daughter had followed
him, when Mr. Lorry's feet were arrested on the step by his asking,
miserably, for his shoemaking tools and the unfinished shoes. Madame
Defarge immediately called to her husband that she would get them, and
went, knitting, out of the lamplight, through the courtyard. She quickly
brought them down and handed them in;--and immediately afterwards leaned
against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing.

Defarge got upon the box, and gave the word “To the Barrier!” The
postilion cracked his whip, and they clattered away under the feeble
over-swinging lamps.

Under the over-swinging lamps--swinging ever brighter in the better
streets, and ever dimmer in the worse--and by lighted shops, gay crowds,
illuminated coffee-houses, and theatre-doors, to one of the city
gates. Soldiers with lanterns, at the guard-house there. “Your papers,
travellers!” “See here then, Monsieur the Officer,” said Defarge,
getting down, and taking him gravely apart, “these are the papers of
monsieur inside, with the white head. They were consigned to me, with
him, at the--” He dropped his voice, there was a flutter among the
military lanterns, and one of them being handed into the coach by an arm
in uniform, the eyes connected with the arm looked, not an every day
or an every night look, at monsieur with the white head. “It is well.
Forward!” from the uniform. “Adieu!” from Defarge. And so, under a short
grove of feebler and feebler over-swinging lamps, out under the great
grove of stars.

Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights; some, so remote from
this little earth that the learned tell us it is doubtful whether their
rays have even yet discovered it, as a point in space where anything
is suffered or done: the shadows of the night were broad and black.
All through the cold and restless interval, until dawn, they once more
whispered in the ears of Mr. Jarvis Lorry--sitting opposite the buried
man who had been dug out, and wondering what subtle powers were for ever
lost to him, and what were capable of restoration--the old inquiry:

“I hope you care to be recalled to life?”

And the old answer:

“I can't say.”


The end of the first book.





Book the Second--the Golden Thread




I. Five Years Later


Tellson's Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the
year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very
dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place,
moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were
proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness,
proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence
in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if
it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was
no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more
convenient places of business. Tellson's (they said) wanted
no elbow-room, Tellson's wanted no light, Tellson's wanted no
embellishment. Noakes and Co.'s might, or Snooks Brothers' might; but
Tellson's, thank Heaven--!

Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the
question of rebuilding Tellson's. In this respect the House was much
on a par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for
suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly
objectionable, but were only the more respectable.

Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson's was the triumphant perfection
of inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with
a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson's down two steps,
and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little
counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the
wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of
windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street,
and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the
heavy shadow of Temple Bar. If your business necessitated your seeing
“the House,” you were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the back,
where you meditated on a misspent life, until the House came with its
hands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the dismal
twilight. Your money came out of, or went into, wormy old wooden
drawers, particles of which flew up your nose and down your throat when
they were opened and shut. Your bank-notes had a musty odour, as if they
were fast decomposing into rags again. Your plate was stowed away among
the neighbouring cesspools, and evil communications corrupted its good
polish in a day or two. Your deeds got into extemporised strong-rooms
made of kitchens and sculleries, and fretted all the fat out of their
parchments into the banking-house air. Your lighter boxes of family
papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide room, that always had a great
dining-table in it and never had a dinner, and where, even in the year
one thousand seven hundred and eighty, the first letters written to you
by your old love, or by your little children, were but newly released
from the horror of being ogled through the windows, by the heads
exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of
Abyssinia or Ashantee.

But indeed, at that time, putting to death was a recipe much in vogue
with all trades and professions, and not least of all with Tellson's.
Death is Nature's remedy for all things, and why not Legislation's?
Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note
was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death; the
purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the holder
of a horse at Tellson's door, who made off with it, was put to
Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of
three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to
Death. Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention--it
might almost have been worth remarking that the fact was exactly the
reverse--but, it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each
particular case, and left nothing else connected with it to be looked
after. Thus, Tellson's, in its day, like greater places of business,
its contemporaries, had taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid
low before it had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately
disposed of, they would probably have excluded what little light the
ground floor had, in a rather significant manner.

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the
oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young
man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was
old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full
Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to
be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches
and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment.

Outside Tellson's--never by any means in it, unless called in--was an
odd-job-man, an occasional porter and messenger, who served as the live
sign of the house. He was never absent during business hours, unless
upon an errand, and then he was represented by his son: a grisly urchin
of twelve, who was his express image. People understood that Tellson's,
in a stately way, tolerated the odd-job-man. The house had always
tolerated some person in that capacity, and time and tide had drifted
this person to the post. His surname was Cruncher, and on the youthful
occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of darkness, in the
easterly parish church of Hounsditch, he had received the added
appellation of Jerry.

The scene was Mr. Cruncher's private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley,
Whitefriars: the time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy March
morning, Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty. (Mr. Cruncher himself
always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under
the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a
popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.)

Mr. Cruncher's apartments were not in a savoury neighbourhood, and were
but two in number, even if a closet with a single pane of glass in it
might be counted as one. But they were very decently kept. Early as
it was, on the windy March morning, the room in which he lay abed was
already scrubbed throughout; and between the cups and saucers arranged
for breakfast, and the lumbering deal table, a very clean white cloth
was spread.

Mr. Cruncher reposed under a patchwork counterpane, like a Harlequin
at home. At first, he slept heavily, but, by degrees, began to roll
and surge in bed, until he rose above the surface, with his spiky hair
looking as if it must tear the sheets to ribbons. At which juncture, he
exclaimed, in a voice of dire exasperation:

“Bust me, if she ain't at it agin!”

A woman of orderly and industrious appearance rose from her knees in a
corner, with sufficient haste and trepidation to show that she was the
person referred to.

“What!” said Mr. Cruncher, looking out of bed for a boot. “You're at it
agin, are you?”

After hailing the morn with this second salutation, he threw a boot at
the woman as a third. It was a very muddy boot, and may introduce the
odd circumstance connected with Mr. Cruncher's domestic economy, that,
whereas he often came home after banking hours with clean boots, he
often got up next morning to find the same boots covered with clay.

“What,” said Mr. Cruncher, varying his apostrophe after missing his
mark--“what are you up to, Aggerawayter?”

“I was only saying my prayers.”

“Saying your prayers! You're a nice woman! What do you mean by flopping
yourself down and praying agin me?”

“I was not praying against you; I was praying for you.”

“You weren't. And if you were, I won't be took the liberty with. Here!
your mother's a nice woman, young Jerry, going a praying agin your
father's prosperity. You've got a dutiful mother, you have, my son.
You've got a religious mother, you have, my boy: going and flopping
herself down, and praying that the bread-and-butter may be snatched out
of the mouth of her only child.”

Master Cruncher (who was in his shirt) took this very ill, and, turning
to his mother, strongly deprecated any praying away of his personal
board.

“And what do you suppose, you conceited female,” said Mr. Cruncher, with
unconscious inconsistency, “that the worth of _your_ prayers may be?
Name the price that you put _your_ prayers at!”

“They only come from the heart, Jerry. They are worth no more than
that.”

“Worth no more than that,” repeated Mr. Cruncher. “They ain't worth
much, then. Whether or no, I won't be prayed agin, I tell you. I can't
afford it. I'm not a going to be made unlucky by _your_ sneaking. If
you must go flopping yourself down, flop in favour of your husband and
child, and not in opposition to 'em. If I had had any but a unnat'ral
wife, and this poor boy had had any but a unnat'ral mother, I might
have made some money last week instead of being counter-prayed and
countermined and religiously circumwented into the worst of luck.
B-u-u-ust me!” said Mr. Cruncher, who all this time had been putting
on his clothes, “if I ain't, what with piety and one blowed thing and
another, been choused this last week into as bad luck as ever a poor
devil of a honest tradesman met with! Young Jerry, dress yourself, my
boy, and while I clean my boots keep a eye upon your mother now and
then, and if you see any signs of more flopping, give me a call. For, I
tell you,” here he addressed his wife once more, “I won't be gone agin,
in this manner. I am as rickety as a hackney-coach, I'm as sleepy as
laudanum, my lines is strained to that degree that I shouldn't know, if
it wasn't for the pain in 'em, which was me and which somebody else, yet
I'm none the better for it in pocket; and it's my suspicion that you've
been at it from morning to night to prevent me from being the better for
it in pocket, and I won't put up with it, Aggerawayter, and what do you
say now!”

Growling, in addition, such phrases as “Ah! yes! You're religious, too.
You wouldn't put yourself in opposition to the interests of your husband
and child, would you? Not you!” and throwing off other sarcastic sparks
from the whirling grindstone of his indignation, Mr. Cruncher betook
himself to his boot-cleaning and his general preparation for business.
In the meantime, his son, whose head was garnished with tenderer spikes,
and whose young eyes stood close by one another, as his father's did,
kept the required watch upon his mother. He greatly disturbed that poor
woman at intervals, by darting out of his sleeping closet, where he made
his toilet, with a suppressed cry of “You are going to flop, mother.
--Halloa, father!” and, after raising this fictitious alarm, darting in
again with an undutiful grin.

Mr. Cruncher's temper was not at all improved when he came to his
breakfast. He resented Mrs. Cruncher's saying grace with particular
animosity.

“Now, Aggerawayter! What are you up to? At it again?”

His wife explained that she had merely “asked a blessing.”

“Don't do it!” said Mr. Crunches looking about, as if he rather expected
to see the loaf disappear under the efficacy of his wife's petitions. “I
ain't a going to be blest out of house and home. I won't have my wittles
blest off my table. Keep still!”

Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at a party
which had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry Cruncher worried
his breakfast rather than ate it, growling over it like any four-footed
inmate of a menagerie. Towards nine o'clock he smoothed his ruffled
aspect, and, presenting as respectable and business-like an exterior as
he could overlay his natural self with, issued forth to the occupation
of the day.

It could scarcely be called a trade, in spite of his favourite
description of himself as “a honest tradesman.” His stock consisted of
a wooden stool, made out of a broken-backed chair cut down, which stool,
young Jerry, walking at his father's side, carried every morning to
beneath the banking-house window that was nearest Temple Bar: where,
with the addition of the first handful of straw that could be gleaned
from any passing vehicle to keep the cold and wet from the odd-job-man's
feet, it formed the encampment for the day. On this post of his, Mr.
Cruncher was as well known to Fleet-street and the Temple, as the Bar
itself,--and was almost as in-looking.

Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his
three-cornered hat to the oldest of men as they passed in to Tellson's,
Jerry took up his station on this windy March morning, with young Jerry
standing by him, when not engaged in making forays through the Bar, to
inflict bodily and mental injuries of an acute description on passing
boys who were small enough for his amiable purpose. Father and son,
extremely like each other, looking silently on at the morning traffic
in Fleet-street, with their two heads as near to one another as the two
eyes of each were, bore a considerable resemblance to a pair of monkeys.
The resemblance was not lessened by the accidental circumstance, that
the mature Jerry bit and spat out straw, while the twinkling eyes of the
youthful Jerry were as restlessly watchful of him as of everything else
in Fleet-street.

The head of one of the regular indoor messengers attached to Tellson's
establishment was put through the door, and the word was given:

“Porter wanted!”

“Hooray, father! Here's an early job to begin with!”

Having thus given his parent God speed, young Jerry seated himself on
the stool, entered on his reversionary interest in the straw his father
had been chewing, and cogitated.

“Al-ways rusty! His fingers is al-ways rusty!” muttered young Jerry.
“Where does my father get all that iron rust from? He don't get no iron
rust here!”




II. A Sight


“You know the Old Bailey well, no doubt?” said one of the oldest of
clerks to Jerry the messenger.

“Ye-es, sir,” returned Jerry, in something of a dogged manner. “I _do_
know the Bailey.”

“Just so. And you know Mr. Lorry.”

“I know Mr. Lorry, sir, much better than I know the Bailey. Much
better,” said Jerry, not unlike a reluctant witness at the establishment
in question, “than I, as a honest tradesman, wish to know the Bailey.”

“Very well. Find the door where the witnesses go in, and show the
door-keeper this note for Mr. Lorry. He will then let you in.”

“Into the court, sir?”

“Into the court.”

Mr. Cruncher's eyes seemed to get a little closer to one another, and to
interchange the inquiry, “What do you think of this?”

“Am I to wait in the court, sir?” he asked, as the result of that
conference.

“I am going to tell you. The door-keeper will pass the note to Mr.
Lorry, and do you make any gesture that will attract Mr. Lorry's
attention, and show him where you stand. Then what you have to do, is,
to remain there until he wants you.”

“Is that all, sir?”

“That's all. He wishes to have a messenger at hand. This is to tell him
you are there.”

As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the note,
Mr. Cruncher, after surveying him in silence until he came to the
blotting-paper stage, remarked:

“I suppose they'll be trying Forgeries this morning?”

“Treason!”

“That's quartering,” said Jerry. “Barbarous!”

“It is the law,” remarked the ancient clerk, turning his surprised
spectacles upon him. “It is the law.”

“It's hard in the law to spile a man, I think. It's hard enough to kill
him, but it's wery hard to spile him, sir.”

“Not at all,” retained the ancient clerk. “Speak well of the law. Take
care of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the law to take
care of itself. I give you that advice.”

“It's the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice,” said Jerry. “I
leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a living mine is.”

“Well, well,” said the old clerk; “we all have our various ways of
gaining a livelihood. Some of us have damp ways, and some of us have dry
ways. Here is the letter. Go along.”

Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less internal
deference than he made an outward show of, “You are a lean old one,
too,” made his bow, informed his son, in passing, of his destination,
and went his way.

They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so the street outside Newgate had
not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since attached to it.
But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and
villainy were practised, and where dire diseases were bred, that came
into court with the prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight from the
dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself, and pulled him off the bench. It
had more than once happened, that the Judge in the black cap pronounced
his own doom as certainly as the prisoner's, and even died before him.
For the rest, the Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard,
from which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches, on
a violent passage into the other world: traversing some two miles and a
half of public street and road, and shaming few good citizens, if any.
So powerful is use, and so desirable to be good use in the beginning. It
was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old institution, that inflicted
a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent; also, for
the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and
softening to behold in action; also, for extensive transactions in
blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom, systematically
leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be committed
under Heaven. Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice
illustration of the precept, that “Whatever is is right;” an aphorism
that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome
consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.

Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and down this
hideous scene of action, with the skill of a man accustomed to make his
way quietly, the messenger found out the door he sought, and handed in
his letter through a trap in it. For, people then paid to see the play
at the Old Bailey, just as they paid to see the play in Bedlam--only the
former entertainment was much the dearer. Therefore, all the Old Bailey
doors were well guarded--except, indeed, the social doors by which the
criminals got there, and those were always left wide open.

After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its hinges a
very little way, and allowed Mr. Jerry Cruncher to squeeze himself into
court.

“What's on?” he asked, in a whisper, of the man he found himself next
to.

“Nothing yet.”

“What's coming on?”

“The Treason case.”

“The quartering one, eh?”

“Ah!” returned the man, with a relish; “he'll be drawn on a hurdle to
be half hanged, and then he'll be taken down and sliced before his own
face, and then his inside will be taken out and burnt while he looks on,
and then his head will be chopped off, and he'll be cut into quarters.
That's the sentence.”

“If he's found Guilty, you mean to say?” Jerry added, by way of proviso.

“Oh! they'll find him guilty,” said the other. “Don't you be afraid of
that.”

Mr. Cruncher's attention was here diverted to the door-keeper, whom he
saw making his way to Mr. Lorry, with the note in his hand. Mr. Lorry
sat at a table, among the gentlemen in wigs: not far from a wigged
gentleman, the prisoner's counsel, who had a great bundle of papers
before him: and nearly opposite another wigged gentleman with his hands
in his pockets, whose whole attention, when Mr. Cruncher looked at him
then or afterwards, seemed to be concentrated on the ceiling of the
court. After some gruff coughing and rubbing of his chin and signing
with his hand, Jerry attracted the notice of Mr. Lorry, who had stood up
to look for him, and who quietly nodded and sat down again.

“What's _he_ got to do with the case?” asked the man he had spoken with.

“Blest if I know,” said Jerry.

“What have _you_ got to do with it, then, if a person may inquire?”

“Blest if I know that either,” said Jerry.

The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent great stir and settling
down in the court, stopped the dialogue. Presently, the dock became the
central point of interest. Two gaolers, who had been standing there,
went out, and the prisoner was brought in, and put to the bar.

Everybody present, except the one wigged gentleman who looked at the
ceiling, stared at him. All the human breath in the place, rolled
at him, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire. Eager faces strained round
pillars and corners, to get a sight of him; spectators in back rows
stood up, not to miss a hair of him; people on the floor of the court,
laid their hands on the shoulders of the people before them, to help
themselves, at anybody's cost, to a view of him--stood a-tiptoe, got
upon ledges, stood upon next to nothing, to see every inch of him.
Conspicuous among these latter, like an animated bit of the spiked wall
of Newgate, Jerry stood: aiming at the prisoner the beery breath of a
whet he had taken as he came along, and discharging it to mingle with
the waves of other beer, and gin, and tea, and coffee, and what not,
that flowed at him, and already broke upon the great windows behind him
in an impure mist and rain.

The object of all this staring and blaring, was a young man of about
five-and-twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek and
a dark eye. His condition was that of a young gentleman. He was plainly
dressed in black, or very dark grey, and his hair, which was long and
dark, was gathered in a ribbon at the back of his neck; more to be out
of his way than for ornament. As an emotion of the mind will express
itself through any covering of the body, so the paleness which his
situation engendered came through the brown upon his cheek, showing the
soul to be stronger than the sun. He was otherwise quite self-possessed,
bowed to the Judge, and stood quiet.

The sort of interest with which this man was stared and breathed at,
was not a sort that elevated humanity. Had he stood in peril of a less
horrible sentence--had there been a chance of any one of its savage
details being spared--by just so much would he have lost in his
fascination. The form that was to be doomed to be so shamefully mangled,
was the sight; the immortal creature that was to be so butchered
and torn asunder, yielded the sensation. Whatever gloss the various
spectators put upon the interest, according to their several arts and
powers of self-deceit, the interest was, at the root of it, Ogreish.

Silence in the court! Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty to
an indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle and jangle) for that
he was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent, and so
forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his having, on divers
occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted Lewis, the French
King, in his wars against our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and
so forth; that was to say, by coming and going, between the dominions of
our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, and those of the
said French Lewis, and wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and otherwise
evil-adverbiously, revealing to the said French Lewis what forces our
said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had in preparation
to send to Canada and North America. This much, Jerry, with his head
becoming more and more spiky as the law terms bristled it, made out with
huge satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously at the understanding that
the aforesaid, and over and over again aforesaid, Charles Darnay, stood
there before him upon his trial; that the jury were swearing in; and
that Mr. Attorney-General was making ready to speak.

The accused, who was (and who knew he was) being mentally hanged,
beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there, neither flinched from
the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it. He was quiet and
attentive; watched the opening proceedings with a grave interest;
and stood with his hands resting on the slab of wood before him, so
composedly, that they had not displaced a leaf of the herbs with which
it was strewn. The court was all bestrewn with herbs and sprinkled with
vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air and gaol fever.

Over the prisoner's head there was a mirror, to throw the light down
upon him. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected in
it, and had passed from its surface and this earth's together. Haunted
in a most ghastly manner that abominable place would have been, if the
glass could ever have rendered back its reflections, as the ocean is one
day to give up its dead. Some passing thought of the infamy and disgrace
for which it had been reserved, may have struck the prisoner's mind. Be
that as it may, a change in his position making him conscious of a bar
of light across his face, he looked up; and when he saw the glass his
face flushed, and his right hand pushed the herbs away.

It happened, that the action turned his face to that side of the court
which was on his left. About on a level with his eyes, there sat,
in that corner of the Judge's bench, two persons upon whom his look
immediately rested; so immediately, and so much to the changing of his
aspect, that all the eyes that were turned upon him, turned to them.

The spectators saw in the two figures, a young lady of little more than
twenty, and a gentleman who was evidently her father; a man of a very
remarkable appearance in respect of the absolute whiteness of his hair,
and a certain indescribable intensity of face: not of an active kind,
but pondering and self-communing. When this expression was upon him, he
looked as if he were old; but when it was stirred and broken up--as
it was now, in a moment, on his speaking to his daughter--he became a
handsome man, not past the prime of life.

His daughter had one of her hands drawn through his arm, as she sat by
him, and the other pressed upon it. She had drawn close to him, in her
dread of the scene, and in her pity for the prisoner. Her forehead had
been strikingly expressive of an engrossing terror and compassion
that saw nothing but the peril of the accused. This had been so very
noticeable, so very powerfully and naturally shown, that starers who
had had no pity for him were touched by her; and the whisper went about,
“Who are they?”

Jerry, the messenger, who had made his own observations, in his own
manner, and who had been sucking the rust off his fingers in his
absorption, stretched his neck to hear who they were. The crowd about
him had pressed and passed the inquiry on to the nearest attendant, and
from him it had been more slowly pressed and passed back; at last it got
to Jerry:

“Witnesses.”

“For which side?”

“Against.”

“Against what side?”

“The prisoner's.”

The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general direction, recalled them,
leaned back in his seat, and looked steadily at the man whose life was
in his hand, as Mr. Attorney-General rose to spin the rope, grind the
axe, and hammer the nails into the scaffold.




III. A Disappointment


Mr. Attorney-General had to inform the jury, that the prisoner before
them, though young in years, was old in the treasonable practices which
claimed the forfeit of his life. That this correspondence with the
public enemy was not a correspondence of to-day, or of yesterday, or
even of last year, or of the year before. That, it was certain the
prisoner had, for longer than that, been in the habit of passing and
repassing between France and England, on secret business of which
he could give no honest account. That, if it were in the nature of
traitorous ways to thrive (which happily it never was), the real
wickedness and guilt of his business might have remained undiscovered.
That Providence, however, had put it into the heart of a person who
was beyond fear and beyond reproach, to ferret out the nature of the
prisoner's schemes, and, struck with horror, to disclose them to his
Majesty's Chief Secretary of State and most honourable Privy Council.
That, this patriot would be produced before them. That, his position and
attitude were, on the whole, sublime. That, he had been the prisoner's
friend, but, at once in an auspicious and an evil hour detecting his
infamy, had resolved to immolate the traitor he could no longer cherish
in his bosom, on the sacred altar of his country. That, if statues
were decreed in Britain, as in ancient Greece and Rome, to public
benefactors, this shining citizen would assuredly have had one. That, as
they were not so decreed, he probably would not have one. That, Virtue,
as had been observed by the poets (in many passages which he well
knew the jury would have, word for word, at the tips of their tongues;
whereat the jury's countenances displayed a guilty consciousness that
they knew nothing about the passages), was in a manner contagious; more
especially the bright virtue known as patriotism, or love of country.
That, the lofty example of this immaculate and unimpeachable witness
for the Crown, to refer to whom however unworthily was an honour, had
communicated itself to the prisoner's servant, and had engendered in him
a holy determination to examine his master's table-drawers and pockets,
and secrete his papers. That, he (Mr. Attorney-General) was prepared to
hear some disparagement attempted of this admirable servant; but that,
in a general way, he preferred him to his (Mr. Attorney-General's)
brothers and sisters, and honoured him more than his (Mr.
Attorney-General's) father and mother. That, he called with confidence
on the jury to come and do likewise. That, the evidence of these two
witnesses, coupled with the documents of their discovering that would be
produced, would show the prisoner to have been furnished with lists of
his Majesty's forces, and of their disposition and preparation, both by
sea and land, and would leave no doubt that he had habitually conveyed
such information to a hostile power. That, these lists could not be
proved to be in the prisoner's handwriting; but that it was all the
same; that, indeed, it was rather the better for the prosecution, as
showing the prisoner to be artful in his precautions. That, the proof
would go back five years, and would show the prisoner already engaged
in these pernicious missions, within a few weeks before the date of the
very first action fought between the British troops and the Americans.
That, for these reasons, the jury, being a loyal jury (as he knew they
were), and being a responsible jury (as _they_ knew they were), must
positively find the prisoner Guilty, and make an end of him, whether
they liked it or not. That, they never could lay their heads upon their
pillows; that, they never could tolerate the idea of their wives laying
their heads upon their pillows; that, they never could endure the notion
of their children laying their heads upon their pillows; in short, that
there never more could be, for them or theirs, any laying of heads upon
pillows at all, unless the prisoner's head was taken off. That head
Mr. Attorney-General concluded by demanding of them, in the name of
everything he could think of with a round turn in it, and on the faith
of his solemn asseveration that he already considered the prisoner as
good as dead and gone.

When the Attorney-General ceased, a buzz arose in the court as if
a cloud of great blue-flies were swarming about the prisoner, in
anticipation of what he was soon to become. When toned down again, the
unimpeachable patriot appeared in the witness-box.

Mr. Solicitor-General then, following his leader's lead, examined the
patriot: John Barsad, gentleman, by name. The story of his pure soul was
exactly what Mr. Attorney-General had described it to be--perhaps, if
it had a fault, a little too exactly. Having released his noble bosom
of its burden, he would have modestly withdrawn himself, but that the
wigged gentleman with the papers before him, sitting not far from Mr.
Lorry, begged to ask him a few questions. The wigged gentleman sitting
opposite, still looking at the ceiling of the court.

Had he ever been a spy himself? No, he scorned the base insinuation.
What did he live upon? His property. Where was his property? He didn't
precisely remember where it was. What was it? No business of anybody's.
Had he inherited it? Yes, he had. From whom? Distant relation. Very
distant? Rather. Ever been in prison? Certainly not. Never in a debtors'
prison? Didn't see what that had to do with it. Never in a debtors'
prison?--Come, once again. Never? Yes. How many times? Two or three
times. Not five or six? Perhaps. Of what profession? Gentleman. Ever
been kicked? Might have been. Frequently? No. Ever kicked downstairs?
Decidedly not; once received a kick on the top of a staircase, and fell
downstairs of his own accord. Kicked on that occasion for cheating at
dice? Something to that effect was said by the intoxicated liar who
committed the assault, but it was not true. Swear it was not true?
Positively. Ever live by cheating at play? Never. Ever live by play? Not
more than other gentlemen do. Ever borrow money of the prisoner? Yes.
Ever pay him? No. Was not this intimacy with the prisoner, in reality a
very slight one, forced upon the prisoner in coaches, inns, and packets?
No. Sure he saw the prisoner with these lists? Certain. Knew no more
about the lists? No. Had not procured them himself, for instance? No.
Expect to get anything by this evidence? No. Not in regular government
pay and employment, to lay traps? Oh dear no. Or to do anything? Oh dear
no. Swear that? Over and over again. No motives but motives of sheer
patriotism? None whatever.

The virtuous servant, Roger Cly, swore his way through the case at a
great rate. He had taken service with the prisoner, in good faith and
simplicity, four years ago. He had asked the prisoner, aboard the Calais
packet, if he wanted a handy fellow, and the prisoner had engaged him.
He had not asked the prisoner to take the handy fellow as an act of
charity--never thought of such a thing. He began to have suspicions of
the prisoner, and to keep an eye upon him, soon afterwards. In arranging
his clothes, while travelling, he had seen similar lists to these in the
prisoner's pockets, over and over again. He had taken these lists from
the drawer of the prisoner's desk. He had not put them there first. He
had seen the prisoner show these identical lists to French gentlemen
at Calais, and similar lists to French gentlemen, both at Calais and
Boulogne. He loved his country, and couldn't bear it, and had given
information. He had never been suspected of stealing a silver tea-pot;
he had been maligned respecting a mustard-pot, but it turned out to be
only a plated one. He had known the last witness seven or eight years;
that was merely a coincidence. He didn't call it a particularly curious
coincidence; most coincidences were curious. Neither did he call it a
curious coincidence that true patriotism was _his_ only motive too. He
was a true Briton, and hoped there were many like him.

The blue-flies buzzed again, and Mr. Attorney-General called Mr. Jarvis
Lorry.

“Mr. Jarvis Lorry, are you a clerk in Tellson's bank?”

“I am.”

“On a certain Friday night in November one thousand seven hundred and
seventy-five, did business occasion you to travel between London and
Dover by the mail?”

“It did.”

“Were there any other passengers in the mail?”

“Two.”

“Did they alight on the road in the course of the night?”

“They did.”

“Mr. Lorry, look upon the prisoner. Was he one of those two passengers?”

“I cannot undertake to say that he was.”

“Does he resemble either of these two passengers?”

“Both were so wrapped up, and the night was so dark, and we were all so
reserved, that I cannot undertake to say even that.”

“Mr. Lorry, look again upon the prisoner. Supposing him wrapped up as
those two passengers were, is there anything in his bulk and stature to
render it unlikely that he was one of them?”

“No.”

“You will not swear, Mr. Lorry, that he was not one of them?”

“No.”

“So at least you say he may have been one of them?”

“Yes. Except that I remember them both to have been--like
myself--timorous of highwaymen, and the prisoner has not a timorous
air.”

“Did you ever see a counterfeit of timidity, Mr. Lorry?”

“I certainly have seen that.”

“Mr. Lorry, look once more upon the prisoner. Have you seen him, to your
certain knowledge, before?”

“I have.”

“When?”

“I was returning from France a few days afterwards, and, at Calais, the
prisoner came on board the packet-ship in which I returned, and made the
voyage with me.”

“At what hour did he come on board?”

“At a little after midnight.”

“In the dead of the night. Was he the only passenger who came on board
at that untimely hour?”

“He happened to be the only one.”

“Never mind about 'happening,' Mr. Lorry. He was the only passenger who
came on board in the dead of the night?”

“He was.”

“Were you travelling alone, Mr. Lorry, or with any companion?”

“With two companions. A gentleman and lady. They are here.”

“They are here. Had you any conversation with the prisoner?”

“Hardly any. The weather was stormy, and the passage long and rough, and
I lay on a sofa, almost from shore to shore.”

“Miss Manette!”

The young lady, to whom all eyes had been turned before, and were now
turned again, stood up where she had sat. Her father rose with her, and
kept her hand drawn through his arm.

“Miss Manette, look upon the prisoner.”

To be confronted with such pity, and such earnest youth and beauty, was
far more trying to the accused than to be confronted with all the crowd.
Standing, as it were, apart with her on the edge of his grave, not all
the staring curiosity that looked on, could, for the moment, nerve him
to remain quite still. His hurried right hand parcelled out the herbs
before him into imaginary beds of flowers in a garden; and his efforts
to control and steady his breathing shook the lips from which the colour
rushed to his heart. The buzz of the great flies was loud again.

“Miss Manette, have you seen the prisoner before?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where?”

“On board of the packet-ship just now referred to, sir, and on the same
occasion.”

“You are the young lady just now referred to?”

“O! most unhappily, I am!”

The plaintive tone of her compassion merged into the less musical voice
of the Judge, as he said something fiercely: “Answer the questions put
to you, and make no remark upon them.”

“Miss Manette, had you any conversation with the prisoner on that
passage across the Channel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Recall it.”

In the midst of a profound stillness, she faintly began: “When the
gentleman came on board--”

“Do you mean the prisoner?” inquired the Judge, knitting his brows.

“Yes, my Lord.”

“Then say the prisoner.”

“When the prisoner came on board, he noticed that my father,” turning
her eyes lovingly to him as he stood beside her, “was much fatigued
and in a very weak state of health. My father was so reduced that I was
afraid to take him out of the air, and I had made a bed for him on the
deck near the cabin steps, and I sat on the deck at his side to take
care of him. There were no other passengers that night, but we four.
The prisoner was so good as to beg permission to advise me how I could
shelter my father from the wind and weather, better than I had done. I
had not known how to do it well, not understanding how the wind would
set when we were out of the harbour. He did it for me. He expressed
great gentleness and kindness for my father's state, and I am sure he
felt it. That was the manner of our beginning to speak together.”

“Let me interrupt you for a moment. Had he come on board alone?”

“No.”

“How many were with him?”

“Two French gentlemen.”

“Had they conferred together?”

“They had conferred together until the last moment, when it was
necessary for the French gentlemen to be landed in their boat.”

“Had any papers been handed about among them, similar to these lists?”

“Some papers had been handed about among them, but I don't know what
papers.”

“Like these in shape and size?”

“Possibly, but indeed I don't know, although they stood whispering very
near to me: because they stood at the top of the cabin steps to have the
light of the lamp that was hanging there; it was a dull lamp, and they
spoke very low, and I did not hear what they said, and saw only that
they looked at papers.”

“Now, to the prisoner's conversation, Miss Manette.”

“The prisoner was as open in his confidence with me--which arose out
of my helpless situation--as he was kind, and good, and useful to my
father. I hope,” bursting into tears, “I may not repay him by doing him
harm to-day.”

Buzzing from the blue-flies.

“Miss Manette, if the prisoner does not perfectly understand that
you give the evidence which it is your duty to give--which you must
give--and which you cannot escape from giving--with great unwillingness,
he is the only person present in that condition. Please to go on.”

“He told me that he was travelling on business of a delicate and
difficult nature, which might get people into trouble, and that he was
therefore travelling under an assumed name. He said that this business
had, within a few days, taken him to France, and might, at intervals,
take him backwards and forwards between France and England for a long
time to come.”

“Did he say anything about America, Miss Manette? Be particular.”

“He tried to explain to me how that quarrel had arisen, and he said
that, so far as he could judge, it was a wrong and foolish one on
England's part. He added, in a jesting way, that perhaps George
Washington might gain almost as great a name in history as George the
Third. But there was no harm in his way of saying this: it was said
laughingly, and to beguile the time.”

Any strongly marked expression of face on the part of a chief actor in
a scene of great interest to whom many eyes are directed, will be
unconsciously imitated by the spectators. Her forehead was painfully
anxious and intent as she gave this evidence, and, in the pauses when
she stopped for the Judge to write it down, watched its effect upon
the counsel for and against. Among the lookers-on there was the same
expression in all quarters of the court; insomuch, that a great majority
of the foreheads there, might have been mirrors reflecting the witness,
when the Judge looked up from his notes to glare at that tremendous
heresy about George Washington.

Mr. Attorney-General now signified to my Lord, that he deemed it
necessary, as a matter of precaution and form, to call the young lady's
father, Doctor Manette. Who was called accordingly.

“Doctor Manette, look upon the prisoner. Have you ever seen him before?”

“Once. When he called at my lodgings in London. Some three years, or
three years and a half ago.”

“Can you identify him as your fellow-passenger on board the packet, or
speak to his conversation with your daughter?”

“Sir, I can do neither.”

“Is there any particular and special reason for your being unable to do
either?”

He answered, in a low voice, “There is.”

“Has it been your misfortune to undergo a long imprisonment, without
trial, or even accusation, in your native country, Doctor Manette?”

He answered, in a tone that went to every heart, “A long imprisonment.”

“Were you newly released on the occasion in question?”

“They tell me so.”

“Have you no remembrance of the occasion?”

“None. My mind is a blank, from some time--I cannot even say what
time--when I employed myself, in my captivity, in making shoes, to the
time when I found myself living in London with my dear daughter
here. She had become familiar to me, when a gracious God restored
my faculties; but, I am quite unable even to say how she had become
familiar. I have no remembrance of the process.”

Mr. Attorney-General sat down, and the father and daughter sat down
together.

A singular circumstance then arose in the case. The object in hand being
to show that the prisoner went down, with some fellow-plotter untracked,
in the Dover mail on that Friday night in November five years ago, and
got out of the mail in the night, as a blind, at a place where he did
not remain, but from which he travelled back some dozen miles or more,
to a garrison and dockyard, and there collected information; a witness
was called to identify him as having been at the precise time required,
in the coffee-room of an hotel in that garrison-and-dockyard town,
waiting for another person. The prisoner's counsel was cross-examining
this witness with no result, except that he had never seen the prisoner
on any other occasion, when the wigged gentleman who had all this time
been looking at the ceiling of the court, wrote a word or two on a
little piece of paper, screwed it up, and tossed it to him. Opening
this piece of paper in the next pause, the counsel looked with great
attention and curiosity at the prisoner.

“You say again you are quite sure that it was the prisoner?”

The witness was quite sure.

“Did you ever see anybody very like the prisoner?”

Not so like (the witness said) as that he could be mistaken.

“Look well upon that gentleman, my learned friend there,” pointing
to him who had tossed the paper over, “and then look well upon the
prisoner. How say you? Are they very like each other?”

Allowing for my learned friend's appearance being careless and slovenly
if not debauched, they were sufficiently like each other to surprise,
not only the witness, but everybody present, when they were thus brought
into comparison. My Lord being prayed to bid my learned friend lay aside
his wig, and giving no very gracious consent, the likeness became
much more remarkable. My Lord inquired of Mr. Stryver (the prisoner's
counsel), whether they were next to try Mr. Carton (name of my learned
friend) for treason? But, Mr. Stryver replied to my Lord, no; but he
would ask the witness to tell him whether what happened once, might
happen twice; whether he would have been so confident if he had seen
this illustration of his rashness sooner, whether he would be so
confident, having seen it; and more. The upshot of which, was, to smash
this witness like a crockery vessel, and shiver his part of the case to
useless lumber.

Mr. Cruncher had by this time taken quite a lunch of rust off his
fingers in his following of the evidence. He had now to attend while Mr.
Stryver fitted the prisoner's case on the jury, like a compact suit
of clothes; showing them how the patriot, Barsad, was a hired spy and
traitor, an unblushing trafficker in blood, and one of the greatest
scoundrels upon earth since accursed Judas--which he certainly did look
rather like. How the virtuous servant, Cly, was his friend and partner,
and was worthy to be; how the watchful eyes of those forgers and false
swearers had rested on the prisoner as a victim, because some family
affairs in France, he being of French extraction, did require his making
those passages across the Channel--though what those affairs were, a
consideration for others who were near and dear to him, forbade him,
even for his life, to disclose. How the evidence that had been warped
and wrested from the young lady, whose anguish in giving it they
had witnessed, came to nothing, involving the mere little innocent
gallantries and politenesses likely to pass between any young gentleman
and young lady so thrown together;--with the exception of that
reference to George Washington, which was altogether too extravagant and
impossible to be regarded in any other light than as a monstrous joke.
How it would be a weakness in the government to break down in this
attempt to practise for popularity on the lowest national antipathies
and fears, and therefore Mr. Attorney-General had made the most of it;
how, nevertheless, it rested upon nothing, save that vile and infamous
character of evidence too often disfiguring such cases, and of which the
State Trials of this country were full. But, there my Lord interposed
(with as grave a face as if it had not been true), saying that he could
not sit upon that Bench and suffer those allusions.

Mr. Stryver then called his few witnesses, and Mr. Cruncher had next to
attend while Mr. Attorney-General turned the whole suit of clothes Mr.
Stryver had fitted on the jury, inside out; showing how Barsad and
Cly were even a hundred times better than he had thought them, and the
prisoner a hundred times worse. Lastly, came my Lord himself, turning
the suit of clothes, now inside out, now outside in, but on the whole
decidedly trimming and shaping them into grave-clothes for the prisoner.

And now, the jury turned to consider, and the great flies swarmed again.

Mr. Carton, who had so long sat looking at the ceiling of the court,
changed neither his place nor his attitude, even in this excitement.
While his learned friend, Mr. Stryver, massing his papers before him,
whispered with those who sat near, and from time to time glanced
anxiously at the jury; while all the spectators moved more or less, and
grouped themselves anew; while even my Lord himself arose from his seat,
and slowly paced up and down his platform, not unattended by a suspicion
in the minds of the audience that his state was feverish; this one man
sat leaning back, with his torn gown half off him, his untidy wig put
on just as it had happened to light on his head after its removal, his
hands in his pockets, and his eyes on the ceiling as they had been all
day. Something especially reckless in his demeanour, not only gave him
a disreputable look, but so diminished the strong resemblance he
undoubtedly bore to the prisoner (which his momentary earnestness,
when they were compared together, had strengthened), that many of the
lookers-on, taking note of him now, said to one another they would
hardly have thought the two were so alike. Mr. Cruncher made the
observation to his next neighbour, and added, “I'd hold half a guinea
that _he_ don't get no law-work to do. Don't look like the sort of one
to get any, do he?”

Yet, this Mr. Carton took in more of the details of the scene than he
appeared to take in; for now, when Miss Manette's head dropped upon
her father's breast, he was the first to see it, and to say audibly:
“Officer! look to that young lady. Help the gentleman to take her out.
Don't you see she will fall!”

There was much commiseration for her as she was removed, and much
sympathy with her father. It had evidently been a great distress to
him, to have the days of his imprisonment recalled. He had shown
strong internal agitation when he was questioned, and that pondering or
brooding look which made him old, had been upon him, like a heavy cloud,
ever since. As he passed out, the jury, who had turned back and paused a
moment, spoke, through their foreman.

They were not agreed, and wished to retire. My Lord (perhaps with George
Washington on his mind) showed some surprise that they were not agreed,
but signified his pleasure that they should retire under watch and ward,
and retired himself. The trial had lasted all day, and the lamps in
the court were now being lighted. It began to be rumoured that the
jury would be out a long while. The spectators dropped off to get
refreshment, and the prisoner withdrew to the back of the dock, and sat
down.

Mr. Lorry, who had gone out when the young lady and her father went out,
now reappeared, and beckoned to Jerry: who, in the slackened interest,
could easily get near him.

“Jerry, if you wish to take something to eat, you can. But, keep in the
way. You will be sure to hear when the jury come in. Don't be a moment
behind them, for I want you to take the verdict back to the bank. You
are the quickest messenger I know, and will get to Temple Bar long
before I can.”

Jerry had just enough forehead to knuckle, and he knuckled it in
acknowledgment of this communication and a shilling. Mr. Carton came up
at the moment, and touched Mr. Lorry on the arm.

“How is the young lady?”

“She is greatly distressed; but her father is comforting her, and she
feels the better for being out of court.”

“I'll tell the prisoner so. It won't do for a respectable bank gentleman
like you, to be seen speaking to him publicly, you know.”

Mr. Lorry reddened as if he were conscious of having debated the point
in his mind, and Mr. Carton made his way to the outside of the bar.
The way out of court lay in that direction, and Jerry followed him, all
eyes, ears, and spikes.

“Mr. Darnay!”

The prisoner came forward directly.

“You will naturally be anxious to hear of the witness, Miss Manette. She
will do very well. You have seen the worst of her agitation.”

“I am deeply sorry to have been the cause of it. Could you tell her so
for me, with my fervent acknowledgments?”

“Yes, I could. I will, if you ask it.”

Mr. Carton's manner was so careless as to be almost insolent. He stood,
half turned from the prisoner, lounging with his elbow against the bar.

“I do ask it. Accept my cordial thanks.”

“What,” said Carton, still only half turned towards him, “do you expect,
Mr. Darnay?”

“The worst.”

“It's the wisest thing to expect, and the likeliest. But I think their
withdrawing is in your favour.”

Loitering on the way out of court not being allowed, Jerry heard no
more: but left them--so like each other in feature, so unlike each other
in manner--standing side by side, both reflected in the glass above
them.

An hour and a half limped heavily away in the thief-and-rascal crowded
passages below, even though assisted off with mutton pies and ale.
The hoarse messenger, uncomfortably seated on a form after taking that
refection, had dropped into a doze, when a loud murmur and a rapid tide
of people setting up the stairs that led to the court, carried him along
with them.

“Jerry! Jerry!” Mr. Lorry was already calling at the door when he got
there.

“Here, sir! It's a fight to get back again. Here I am, sir!”

Mr. Lorry handed him a paper through the throng. “Quick! Have you got
it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hastily written on the paper was the word “ACQUITTED.”

“If you had sent the message, 'Recalled to Life,' again,” muttered
Jerry, as he turned, “I should have known what you meant, this time.”

He had no opportunity of saying, or so much as thinking, anything else,
until he was clear of the Old Bailey; for, the crowd came pouring out
with a vehemence that nearly took him off his legs, and a loud buzz
swept into the street as if the baffled blue-flies were dispersing in
search of other carrion.




IV. Congratulatory


From the dimly-lighted passages of the court, the last sediment of the
human stew that had been boiling there all day, was straining off, when
Doctor Manette, Lucie Manette, his daughter, Mr. Lorry, the solicitor
for the defence, and its counsel, Mr. Stryver, stood gathered round Mr.
Charles Darnay--just released--congratulating him on his escape from
death.

It would have been difficult by a far brighter light, to recognise
in Doctor Manette, intellectual of face and upright of bearing, the
shoemaker of the garret in Paris. Yet, no one could have looked at him
twice, without looking again: even though the opportunity of observation
had not extended to the mournful cadence of his low grave voice, and
to the abstraction that overclouded him fitfully, without any apparent
reason. While one external cause, and that a reference to his long
lingering agony, would always--as on the trial--evoke this condition
from the depths of his soul, it was also in its nature to arise of
itself, and to draw a gloom over him, as incomprehensible to those
unacquainted with his story as if they had seen the shadow of the actual
Bastille thrown upon him by a summer sun, when the substance was three
hundred miles away.

Only his daughter had the power of charming this black brooding from
his mind. She was the golden thread that united him to a Past beyond his
misery, and to a Present beyond his misery: and the sound of her voice,
the light of her face, the touch of her hand, had a strong beneficial
influence with him almost always. Not absolutely always, for she could
recall some occasions on which her power had failed; but they were few
and slight, and she believed them over.

Mr. Darnay had kissed her hand fervently and gratefully, and had turned
to Mr. Stryver, whom he warmly thanked. Mr. Stryver, a man of little
more than thirty, but looking twenty years older than he was, stout,
loud, red, bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy, had a pushing
way of shouldering himself (morally and physically) into companies and
conversations, that argued well for his shouldering his way up in life.

He still had his wig and gown on, and he said, squaring himself at his
late client to that degree that he squeezed the innocent Mr. Lorry clean
out of the group: “I am glad to have brought you off with honour, Mr.
Darnay. It was an infamous prosecution, grossly infamous; but not the
less likely to succeed on that account.”

“You have laid me under an obligation to you for life--in two senses,”
 said his late client, taking his hand.

“I have done my best for you, Mr. Darnay; and my best is as good as
another man's, I believe.”

It clearly being incumbent on some one to say, “Much better,” Mr. Lorry
said it; perhaps not quite disinterestedly, but with the interested
object of squeezing himself back again.

“You think so?” said Mr. Stryver. “Well! you have been present all day,
and you ought to know. You are a man of business, too.”

“And as such,” quoth Mr. Lorry, whom the counsel learned in the law had
now shouldered back into the group, just as he had previously shouldered
him out of it--“as such I will appeal to Doctor Manette, to break up
this conference and order us all to our homes. Miss Lucie looks ill, Mr.
Darnay has had a terrible day, we are worn out.”

“Speak for yourself, Mr. Lorry,” said Stryver; “I have a night's work to
do yet. Speak for yourself.”

“I speak for myself,” answered Mr. Lorry, “and for Mr. Darnay, and for
Miss Lucie, and--Miss Lucie, do you not think I may speak for us all?”
 He asked her the question pointedly, and with a glance at her father.

His face had become frozen, as it were, in a very curious look at
Darnay: an intent look, deepening into a frown of dislike and distrust,
not even unmixed with fear. With this strange expression on him his
thoughts had wandered away.

“My father,” said Lucie, softly laying her hand on his.

He slowly shook the shadow off, and turned to her.

“Shall we go home, my father?”

With a long breath, he answered “Yes.”

The friends of the acquitted prisoner had dispersed, under the
impression--which he himself had originated--that he would not be
released that night. The lights were nearly all extinguished in the
passages, the iron gates were being closed with a jar and a rattle,
and the dismal place was deserted until to-morrow morning's interest of
gallows, pillory, whipping-post, and branding-iron, should repeople it.
Walking between her father and Mr. Darnay, Lucie Manette passed into
the open air. A hackney-coach was called, and the father and daughter
departed in it.

Mr. Stryver had left them in the passages, to shoulder his way back
to the robing-room. Another person, who had not joined the group, or
interchanged a word with any one of them, but who had been leaning
against the wall where its shadow was darkest, had silently strolled
out after the rest, and had looked on until the coach drove away. He now
stepped up to where Mr. Lorry and Mr. Darnay stood upon the pavement.

“So, Mr. Lorry! Men of business may speak to Mr. Darnay now?”

Nobody had made any acknowledgment of Mr. Carton's part in the day's
proceedings; nobody had known of it. He was unrobed, and was none the
better for it in appearance.

“If you knew what a conflict goes on in the business mind, when the
business mind is divided between good-natured impulse and business
appearances, you would be amused, Mr. Darnay.”

Mr. Lorry reddened, and said, warmly, “You have mentioned that before,
sir. We men of business, who serve a House, are not our own masters. We
have to think of the House more than ourselves.”

“_I_ know, _I_ know,” rejoined Mr. Carton, carelessly. “Don't be
nettled, Mr. Lorry. You are as good as another, I have no doubt: better,
I dare say.”

“And indeed, sir,” pursued Mr. Lorry, not minding him, “I really don't
know what you have to do with the matter. If you'll excuse me, as very
much your elder, for saying so, I really don't know that it is your
business.”

“Business! Bless you, _I_ have no business,” said Mr. Carton.

“It is a pity you have not, sir.”

“I think so, too.”

“If you had,” pursued Mr. Lorry, “perhaps you would attend to it.”

“Lord love you, no!--I shouldn't,” said Mr. Carton.

“Well, sir!” cried Mr. Lorry, thoroughly heated by his indifference,
“business is a very good thing, and a very respectable thing. And, sir,
if business imposes its restraints and its silences and impediments, Mr.
Darnay as a young gentleman of generosity knows how to make allowance
for that circumstance. Mr. Darnay, good night, God bless you, sir!
I hope you have been this day preserved for a prosperous and happy
life.--Chair there!”

Perhaps a little angry with himself, as well as with the barrister, Mr.
Lorry bustled into the chair, and was carried off to Tellson's. Carton,
who smelt of port wine, and did not appear to be quite sober, laughed
then, and turned to Darnay:

“This is a strange chance that throws you and me together. This must
be a strange night to you, standing alone here with your counterpart on
these street stones?”

“I hardly seem yet,” returned Charles Darnay, “to belong to this world
again.”

“I don't wonder at it; it's not so long since you were pretty far
advanced on your way to another. You speak faintly.”

“I begin to think I _am_ faint.”

“Then why the devil don't you dine? I dined, myself, while those
numskulls were deliberating which world you should belong to--this, or
some other. Let me show you the nearest tavern to dine well at.”

Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgate-hill to
Fleet-street, and so, up a covered way, into a tavern. Here, they were
shown into a little room, where Charles Darnay was soon recruiting
his strength with a good plain dinner and good wine: while Carton sat
opposite to him at the same table, with his separate bottle of port
before him, and his fully half-insolent manner upon him.

“Do you feel, yet, that you belong to this terrestrial scheme again, Mr.
Darnay?”

“I am frightfully confused regarding time and place; but I am so far
mended as to feel that.”

“It must be an immense satisfaction!”

He said it bitterly, and filled up his glass again: which was a large
one.

“As to me, the greatest desire I have, is to forget that I belong to it.
It has no good in it for me--except wine like this--nor I for it. So we
are not much alike in that particular. Indeed, I begin to think we are
not much alike in any particular, you and I.”

Confused by the emotion of the day, and feeling his being there with
this Double of coarse deportment, to be like a dream, Charles Darnay was
at a loss how to answer; finally, answered not at all.

“Now your dinner is done,” Carton presently said, “why don't you call a
health, Mr. Darnay; why don't you give your toast?”

“What health? What toast?”

“Why, it's on the tip of your tongue. It ought to be, it must be, I'll
swear it's there.”

“Miss Manette, then!”

“Miss Manette, then!”

Looking his companion full in the face while he drank the toast, Carton
flung his glass over his shoulder against the wall, where it shivered to
pieces; then, rang the bell, and ordered in another.

“That's a fair young lady to hand to a coach in the dark, Mr. Darnay!”
 he said, filling his new goblet.

A slight frown and a laconic “Yes,” were the answer.

“That's a fair young lady to be pitied by and wept for by! How does it
feel? Is it worth being tried for one's life, to be the object of such
sympathy and compassion, Mr. Darnay?”

Again Darnay answered not a word.

“She was mightily pleased to have your message, when I gave it her. Not
that she showed she was pleased, but I suppose she was.”

The allusion served as a timely reminder to Darnay that this
disagreeable companion had, of his own free will, assisted him in the
strait of the day. He turned the dialogue to that point, and thanked him
for it.

“I neither want any thanks, nor merit any,” was the careless rejoinder.
“It was nothing to do, in the first place; and I don't know why I did
it, in the second. Mr. Darnay, let me ask you a question.”

“Willingly, and a small return for your good offices.”

“Do you think I particularly like you?”

“Really, Mr. Carton,” returned the other, oddly disconcerted, “I have
not asked myself the question.”

“But ask yourself the question now.”

“You have acted as if you do; but I don't think you do.”

“_I_ don't think I do,” said Carton. “I begin to have a very good
opinion of your understanding.”

“Nevertheless,” pursued Darnay, rising to ring the bell, “there is
nothing in that, I hope, to prevent my calling the reckoning, and our
parting without ill-blood on either side.”

Carton rejoining, “Nothing in life!” Darnay rang. “Do you call the whole
reckoning?” said Carton. On his answering in the affirmative, “Then
bring me another pint of this same wine, drawer, and come and wake me at
ten.”

The bill being paid, Charles Darnay rose and wished him good night.
Without returning the wish, Carton rose too, with something of a threat
of defiance in his manner, and said, “A last word, Mr. Darnay: you think
I am drunk?”

“I think you have been drinking, Mr. Carton.”

“Think? You know I have been drinking.”

“Since I must say so, I know it.”

“Then you shall likewise know why. I am a disappointed drudge, sir. I
care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.”

“Much to be regretted. You might have used your talents better.”

“May be so, Mr. Darnay; may be not. Don't let your sober face elate you,
however; you don't know what it may come to. Good night!”

When he was left alone, this strange being took up a candle, went to a
glass that hung against the wall, and surveyed himself minutely in it.

“Do you particularly like the man?” he muttered, at his own image; “why
should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing
in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change you have
made in yourself! A good reason for taking to a man, that he shows you
what you have fallen away from, and what you might have been! Change
places with him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes as
he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and
have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.”

He resorted to his pint of wine for consolation, drank it all in a few
minutes, and fell asleep on his arms, with his hair straggling over the
table, and a long winding-sheet in the candle dripping down upon him.




V. The Jackal


Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard. So very great is
the improvement Time has brought about in such habits, that a moderate
statement of the quantity of wine and punch which one man would swallow
in the course of a night, without any detriment to his reputation as a
perfect gentleman, would seem, in these days, a ridiculous exaggeration.
The learned profession of the law was certainly not behind any other
learned profession in its Bacchanalian propensities; neither was Mr.
Stryver, already fast shouldering his way to a large and lucrative
practice, behind his compeers in this particular, any more than in the
drier parts of the legal race.

A favourite at the Old Bailey, and eke at the Sessions, Mr. Stryver had
begun cautiously to hew away the lower staves of the ladder on which
he mounted. Sessions and Old Bailey had now to summon their favourite,
specially, to their longing arms; and shouldering itself towards the
visage of the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of King's Bench, the
florid countenance of Mr. Stryver might be daily seen, bursting out of
the bed of wigs, like a great sunflower pushing its way at the sun from
among a rank garden-full of flaring companions.

It had once been noted at the Bar, that while Mr. Stryver was a glib
man, and an unscrupulous, and a ready, and a bold, he had not that
faculty of extracting the essence from a heap of statements, which is
among the most striking and necessary of the advocate's accomplishments.
But, a remarkable improvement came upon him as to this. The more
business he got, the greater his power seemed to grow of getting at its
pith and marrow; and however late at night he sat carousing with Sydney
Carton, he always had his points at his fingers' ends in the morning.

Sydney Carton, idlest and most unpromising of men, was Stryver's great
ally. What the two drank together, between Hilary Term and Michaelmas,
might have floated a king's ship. Stryver never had a case in hand,
anywhere, but Carton was there, with his hands in his pockets, staring
at the ceiling of the court; they went the same Circuit, and even there
they prolonged their usual orgies late into the night, and Carton was
rumoured to be seen at broad day, going home stealthily and unsteadily
to his lodgings, like a dissipated cat. At last, it began to get about,
among such as were interested in the matter, that although Sydney Carton
would never be a lion, he was an amazingly good jackal, and that he
rendered suit and service to Stryver in that humble capacity.

“Ten o'clock, sir,” said the man at the tavern, whom he had charged to
wake him--“ten o'clock, sir.”

“_What's_ the matter?”

“Ten o'clock, sir.”

“What do you mean? Ten o'clock at night?”

“Yes, sir. Your honour told me to call you.”

“Oh! I remember. Very well, very well.”

After a few dull efforts to get to sleep again, which the man
dexterously combated by stirring the fire continuously for five minutes,
he got up, tossed his hat on, and walked out. He turned into the Temple,
and, having revived himself by twice pacing the pavements of King's
Bench-walk and Paper-buildings, turned into the Stryver chambers.

The Stryver clerk, who never assisted at these conferences, had gone
home, and the Stryver principal opened the door. He had his slippers on,
and a loose bed-gown, and his throat was bare for his greater ease. He
had that rather wild, strained, seared marking about the eyes, which
may be observed in all free livers of his class, from the portrait of
Jeffries downward, and which can be traced, under various disguises of
Art, through the portraits of every Drinking Age.

“You are a little late, Memory,” said Stryver.

“About the usual time; it may be a quarter of an hour later.”

They went into a dingy room lined with books and littered with papers,
where there was a blazing fire. A kettle steamed upon the hob, and in
the midst of the wreck of papers a table shone, with plenty of wine upon
it, and brandy, and rum, and sugar, and lemons.

“You have had your bottle, I perceive, Sydney.”

“Two to-night, I think. I have been dining with the day's client; or
seeing him dine--it's all one!”

“That was a rare point, Sydney, that you brought to bear upon the
identification. How did you come by it? When did it strike you?”

“I thought he was rather a handsome fellow, and I thought I should have
been much the same sort of fellow, if I had had any luck.”

Mr. Stryver laughed till he shook his precocious paunch.

“You and your luck, Sydney! Get to work, get to work.”

Sullenly enough, the jackal loosened his dress, went into an adjoining
room, and came back with a large jug of cold water, a basin, and a towel
or two. Steeping the towels in the water, and partially wringing them
out, he folded them on his head in a manner hideous to behold, sat down
at the table, and said, “Now I am ready!”

“Not much boiling down to be done to-night, Memory,” said Mr. Stryver,
gaily, as he looked among his papers.

“How much?”

“Only two sets of them.”

“Give me the worst first.”

“There they are, Sydney. Fire away!”

The lion then composed himself on his back on a sofa on one side of the
drinking-table, while the jackal sat at his own paper-bestrewn table
proper, on the other side of it, with the bottles and glasses ready to
his hand. Both resorted to the drinking-table without stint, but each in
a different way; the lion for the most part reclining with his hands in
his waistband, looking at the fire, or occasionally flirting with some
lighter document; the jackal, with knitted brows and intent face,
so deep in his task, that his eyes did not even follow the hand he
stretched out for his glass--which often groped about, for a minute or
more, before it found the glass for his lips. Two or three times, the
matter in hand became so knotty, that the jackal found it imperative on
him to get up, and steep his towels anew. From these pilgrimages to the
jug and basin, he returned with such eccentricities of damp headgear as
no words can describe; which were made the more ludicrous by his anxious
gravity.

At length the jackal had got together a compact repast for the lion, and
proceeded to offer it to him. The lion took it with care and caution,
made his selections from it, and his remarks upon it, and the jackal
assisted both. When the repast was fully discussed, the lion put his
hands in his waistband again, and lay down to meditate. The jackal then
invigorated himself with a bumper for his throttle, and a fresh application
to his head, and applied himself to the collection of a second meal;
this was administered to the lion in the same manner, and was not
disposed of until the clocks struck three in the morning.

“And now we have done, Sydney, fill a bumper of punch,” said Mr.
Stryver.

The jackal removed the towels from his head, which had been steaming
again, shook himself, yawned, shivered, and complied.

“You were very sound, Sydney, in the matter of those crown witnesses
to-day. Every question told.”

“I always am sound; am I not?”

“I don't gainsay it. What has roughened your temper? Put some punch to
it and smooth it again.”

With a deprecatory grunt, the jackal again complied.

“The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School,” said Stryver, nodding
his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past, “the
old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits and
now in despondency!”

“Ah!” returned the other, sighing: “yes! The same Sydney, with the same
luck. Even then, I did exercises for other boys, and seldom did my own.”

“And why not?”

“God knows. It was my way, I suppose.”

He sat, with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out before
him, looking at the fire.

“Carton,” said his friend, squaring himself at him with a bullying air,
as if the fire-grate had been the furnace in which sustained endeavour
was forged, and the one delicate thing to be done for the old Sydney
Carton of old Shrewsbury School was to shoulder him into it, “your way
is, and always was, a lame way. You summon no energy and purpose. Look
at me.”

“Oh, botheration!” returned Sydney, with a lighter and more
good-humoured laugh, “don't _you_ be moral!”

“How have I done what I have done?” said Stryver; “how do I do what I
do?”

“Partly through paying me to help you, I suppose. But it's not worth
your while to apostrophise me, or the air, about it; what you want to
do, you do. You were always in the front rank, and I was always behind.”

“I had to get into the front rank; I was not born there, was I?”

“I was not present at the ceremony; but my opinion is you were,” said
Carton. At this, he laughed again, and they both laughed.

“Before Shrewsbury, and at Shrewsbury, and ever since Shrewsbury,”
 pursued Carton, “you have fallen into your rank, and I have fallen into
mine. Even when we were fellow-students in the Student-Quarter of Paris,
picking up French, and French law, and other French crumbs that we
didn't get much good of, you were always somewhere, and I was always
nowhere.”

“And whose fault was that?”

“Upon my soul, I am not sure that it was not yours. You were always
driving and riving and shouldering and passing, to that restless degree
that I had no chance for my life but in rust and repose. It's a gloomy
thing, however, to talk about one's own past, with the day breaking.
Turn me in some other direction before I go.”

“Well then! Pledge me to the pretty witness,” said Stryver, holding up
his glass. “Are you turned in a pleasant direction?”

Apparently not, for he became gloomy again.

“Pretty witness,” he muttered, looking down into his glass. “I have had
enough of witnesses to-day and to-night; who's your pretty witness?”

“The picturesque doctor's daughter, Miss Manette.”

“_She_ pretty?”

“Is she not?”

“No.”

“Why, man alive, she was the admiration of the whole Court!”

“Rot the admiration of the whole Court! Who made the Old Bailey a judge
of beauty? She was a golden-haired doll!”

“Do you know, Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, looking at him with sharp eyes,
and slowly drawing a hand across his florid face: “do you know, I rather
thought, at the time, that you sympathised with the golden-haired doll,
and were quick to see what happened to the golden-haired doll?”

“Quick to see what happened! If a girl, doll or no doll, swoons within a
yard or two of a man's nose, he can see it without a perspective-glass.
I pledge you, but I deny the beauty. And now I'll have no more drink;
I'll get to bed.”

When his host followed him out on the staircase with a candle, to light
him down the stairs, the day was coldly looking in through its grimy
windows. When he got out of the house, the air was cold and sad, the
dull sky overcast, the river dark and dim, the whole scene like a
lifeless desert. And wreaths of dust were spinning round and round
before the morning blast, as if the desert-sand had risen far away, and
the first spray of it in its advance had begun to overwhelm the city.

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still
on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the
wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and
perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries
from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the
fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight.
A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of
houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its
pillow was wet with wasted tears.

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of
good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise,
incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight
on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.




VI. Hundreds of People


The quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street-corner not
far from Soho-square. On the afternoon of a certain fine Sunday when the
waves of four months had rolled over the trial for treason, and carried
it, as to the public interest and memory, far out to sea, Mr. Jarvis
Lorry walked along the sunny streets from Clerkenwell where he lived,
on his way to dine with the Doctor. After several relapses into
business-absorption, Mr. Lorry had become the Doctor's friend, and the
quiet street-corner was the sunny part of his life.

On this certain fine Sunday, Mr. Lorry walked towards Soho, early in
the afternoon, for three reasons of habit. Firstly, because, on fine
Sundays, he often walked out, before dinner, with the Doctor and Lucie;
secondly, because, on unfavourable Sundays, he was accustomed to be with
them as the family friend, talking, reading, looking out of window, and
generally getting through the day; thirdly, because he happened to have
his own little shrewd doubts to solve, and knew how the ways of the
Doctor's household pointed to that time as a likely time for solving
them.

A quainter corner than the corner where the Doctor lived, was not to be
found in London. There was no way through it, and the front windows of
the Doctor's lodgings commanded a pleasant little vista of street that
had a congenial air of retirement on it. There were few buildings then,
north of the Oxford-road, and forest-trees flourished, and wild flowers
grew, and the hawthorn blossomed, in the now vanished fields. As a
consequence, country airs circulated in Soho with vigorous freedom,
instead of languishing into the parish like stray paupers without a
settlement; and there was many a good south wall, not far off, on which
the peaches ripened in their season.

The summer light struck into the corner brilliantly in the earlier part
of the day; but, when the streets grew hot, the corner was in shadow,
though not in shadow so remote but that you could see beyond it into a
glare of brightness. It was a cool spot, staid but cheerful, a wonderful
place for echoes, and a very harbour from the raging streets.

There ought to have been a tranquil bark in such an anchorage, and
there was. The Doctor occupied two floors of a large stiff house, where
several callings purported to be pursued by day, but whereof little was
audible any day, and which was shunned by all of them at night. In
a building at the back, attainable by a courtyard where a plane-tree
rustled its green leaves, church-organs claimed to be made, and silver
to be chased, and likewise gold to be beaten by some mysterious giant
who had a golden arm starting out of the wall of the front hall--as if
he had beaten himself precious, and menaced a similar conversion of all
visitors. Very little of these trades, or of a lonely lodger rumoured
to live up-stairs, or of a dim coach-trimming maker asserted to have
a counting-house below, was ever heard or seen. Occasionally, a stray
workman putting his coat on, traversed the hall, or a stranger peered
about there, or a distant clink was heard across the courtyard, or a
thump from the golden giant. These, however, were only the exceptions
required to prove the rule that the sparrows in the plane-tree behind
the house, and the echoes in the corner before it, had their own way
from Sunday morning unto Saturday night.

Doctor Manette received such patients here as his old reputation, and
its revival in the floating whispers of his story, brought him.
His scientific knowledge, and his vigilance and skill in conducting
ingenious experiments, brought him otherwise into moderate request, and
he earned as much as he wanted.

These things were within Mr. Jarvis Lorry's knowledge, thoughts, and
notice, when he rang the door-bell of the tranquil house in the corner,
on the fine Sunday afternoon.

“Doctor Manette at home?”

Expected home.

“Miss Lucie at home?”

Expected home.

“Miss Pross at home?”

Possibly at home, but of a certainty impossible for handmaid to
anticipate intentions of Miss Pross, as to admission or denial of the
fact.

“As I am at home myself,” said Mr. Lorry, “I'll go upstairs.”

Although the Doctor's daughter had known nothing of the country of her
birth, she appeared to have innately derived from it that ability to
make much of little means, which is one of its most useful and most
agreeable characteristics. Simple as the furniture was, it was set off
by so many little adornments, of no value but for their taste and fancy,
that its effect was delightful. The disposition of everything in the
rooms, from the largest object to the least; the arrangement of colours,
the elegant variety and contrast obtained by thrift in trifles, by
delicate hands, clear eyes, and good sense; were at once so pleasant in
themselves, and so expressive of their originator, that, as Mr. Lorry
stood looking about him, the very chairs and tables seemed to ask him,
with something of that peculiar expression which he knew so well by this
time, whether he approved?

There were three rooms on a floor, and, the doors by which they
communicated being put open that the air might pass freely through them
all, Mr. Lorry, smilingly observant of that fanciful resemblance which
he detected all around him, walked from one to another. The first was
the best room, and in it were Lucie's birds, and flowers, and books,
and desk, and work-table, and box of water-colours; the second was
the Doctor's consulting-room, used also as the dining-room; the third,
changingly speckled by the rustle of the plane-tree in the yard, was the
Doctor's bedroom, and there, in a corner, stood the disused shoemaker's
bench and tray of tools, much as it had stood on the fifth floor of the
dismal house by the wine-shop, in the suburb of Saint Antoine in Paris.

“I wonder,” said Mr. Lorry, pausing in his looking about, “that he keeps
that reminder of his sufferings about him!”

“And why wonder at that?” was the abrupt inquiry that made him start.

It proceeded from Miss Pross, the wild red woman, strong of hand, whose
acquaintance he had first made at the Royal George Hotel at Dover, and
had since improved.

“I should have thought--” Mr. Lorry began.

“Pooh! You'd have thought!” said Miss Pross; and Mr. Lorry left off.

“How do you do?” inquired that lady then--sharply, and yet as if to
express that she bore him no malice.

“I am pretty well, I thank you,” answered Mr. Lorry, with meekness; “how
are you?”

“Nothing to boast of,” said Miss Pross.

“Indeed?”

“Ah! indeed!” said Miss Pross. “I am very much put out about my
Ladybird.”

“Indeed?”

“For gracious sake say something else besides 'indeed,' or you'll
fidget me to death,” said Miss Pross: whose character (dissociated from
stature) was shortness.

“Really, then?” said Mr. Lorry, as an amendment.

“Really, is bad enough,” returned Miss Pross, “but better. Yes, I am
very much put out.”

“May I ask the cause?”

“I don't want dozens of people who are not at all worthy of Ladybird, to
come here looking after her,” said Miss Pross.

“_Do_ dozens come for that purpose?”

“Hundreds,” said Miss Pross.

It was characteristic of this lady (as of some other people before her
time and since) that whenever her original proposition was questioned,
she exaggerated it.

“Dear me!” said Mr. Lorry, as the safest remark he could think of.

“I have lived with the darling--or the darling has lived with me, and
paid me for it; which she certainly should never have done, you may take
your affidavit, if I could have afforded to keep either myself or her
for nothing--since she was ten years old. And it's really very hard,”
 said Miss Pross.

Not seeing with precision what was very hard, Mr. Lorry shook his head;
using that important part of himself as a sort of fairy cloak that would
fit anything.

“All sorts of people who are not in the least degree worthy of the pet,
are always turning up,” said Miss Pross. “When you began it--”

“_I_ began it, Miss Pross?”

“Didn't you? Who brought her father to life?”

“Oh! If _that_ was beginning it--” said Mr. Lorry.

“It wasn't ending it, I suppose? I say, when you began it, it was hard
enough; not that I have any fault to find with Doctor Manette, except
that he is not worthy of such a daughter, which is no imputation on
him, for it was not to be expected that anybody should be, under any
circumstances. But it really is doubly and trebly hard to have crowds
and multitudes of people turning up after him (I could have forgiven
him), to take Ladybird's affections away from me.”

Mr. Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her by
this time to be, beneath the service of her eccentricity, one of those
unselfish creatures--found only among women--who will, for pure love and
admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, to youth when they have lost
it, to beauty that they never had, to accomplishments that they were
never fortunate enough to gain, to bright hopes that never shone upon
their own sombre lives. He knew enough of the world to know that there
is nothing in it better than the faithful service of the heart; so
rendered and so free from any mercenary taint, he had such an exalted
respect for it, that in the retributive arrangements made by his own
mind--we all make such arrangements, more or less--he stationed Miss
Pross much nearer to the lower Angels than many ladies immeasurably
better got up both by Nature and Art, who had balances at Tellson's.

“There never was, nor will be, but one man worthy of Ladybird,” said
Miss Pross; “and that was my brother Solomon, if he hadn't made a
mistake in life.”

Here again: Mr. Lorry's inquiries into Miss Pross's personal history had
established the fact that her brother Solomon was a heartless scoundrel
who had stripped her of everything she possessed, as a stake to
speculate with, and had abandoned her in her poverty for evermore, with
no touch of compunction. Miss Pross's fidelity of belief in Solomon
(deducting a mere trifle for this slight mistake) was quite a serious
matter with Mr. Lorry, and had its weight in his good opinion of her.

“As we happen to be alone for the moment, and are both people of
business,” he said, when they had got back to the drawing-room and had
sat down there in friendly relations, “let me ask you--does the Doctor,
in talking with Lucie, never refer to the shoemaking time, yet?”

“Never.”

“And yet keeps that bench and those tools beside him?”

“Ah!” returned Miss Pross, shaking her head. “But I don't say he don't
refer to it within himself.”

“Do you believe that he thinks of it much?”

“I do,” said Miss Pross.

“Do you imagine--” Mr. Lorry had begun, when Miss Pross took him up
short with:

“Never imagine anything. Have no imagination at all.”

“I stand corrected; do you suppose--you go so far as to suppose,
sometimes?”

“Now and then,” said Miss Pross.

“Do you suppose,” Mr. Lorry went on, with a laughing twinkle in his
bright eye, as it looked kindly at her, “that Doctor Manette has any
theory of his own, preserved through all those years, relative to
the cause of his being so oppressed; perhaps, even to the name of his
oppressor?”

“I don't suppose anything about it but what Ladybird tells me.”

“And that is--?”

“That she thinks he has.”

“Now don't be angry at my asking all these questions; because I am a
mere dull man of business, and you are a woman of business.”

“Dull?” Miss Pross inquired, with placidity.

Rather wishing his modest adjective away, Mr. Lorry replied, “No, no,
no. Surely not. To return to business:--Is it not remarkable that Doctor
Manette, unquestionably innocent of any crime as we are all well assured
he is, should never touch upon that question? I will not say with me,
though he had business relations with me many years ago, and we are now
intimate; I will say with the fair daughter to whom he is so devotedly
attached, and who is so devotedly attached to him? Believe me, Miss
Pross, I don't approach the topic with you, out of curiosity, but out of
zealous interest.”

“Well! To the best of my understanding, and bad's the best, you'll tell
me,” said Miss Pross, softened by the tone of the apology, “he is afraid
of the whole subject.”

“Afraid?”

“It's plain enough, I should think, why he may be. It's a dreadful
remembrance. Besides that, his loss of himself grew out of it. Not
knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never
feel certain of not losing himself again. That alone wouldn't make the
subject pleasant, I should think.”

It was a profounder remark than Mr. Lorry had looked for. “True,” said
he, “and fearful to reflect upon. Yet, a doubt lurks in my mind, Miss
Pross, whether it is good for Doctor Manette to have that suppression
always shut up within him. Indeed, it is this doubt and the uneasiness
it sometimes causes me that has led me to our present confidence.”

“Can't be helped,” said Miss Pross, shaking her head. “Touch that
string, and he instantly changes for the worse. Better leave it alone.
In short, must leave it alone, like or no like. Sometimes, he gets up in
the dead of the night, and will be heard, by us overhead there, walking
up and down, walking up and down, in his room. Ladybird has learnt to
know then that his mind is walking up and down, walking up and down, in
his old prison. She hurries to him, and they go on together, walking up
and down, walking up and down, until he is composed. But he never says
a word of the true reason of his restlessness, to her, and she finds it
best not to hint at it to him. In silence they go walking up and down
together, walking up and down together, till her love and company have
brought him to himself.”

Notwithstanding Miss Pross's denial of her own imagination, there was a
perception of the pain of being monotonously haunted by one sad idea,
in her repetition of the phrase, walking up and down, which testified to
her possessing such a thing.

The corner has been mentioned as a wonderful corner for echoes; it
had begun to echo so resoundingly to the tread of coming feet, that it
seemed as though the very mention of that weary pacing to and fro had
set it going.

“Here they are!” said Miss Pross, rising to break up the conference;
“and now we shall have hundreds of people pretty soon!”

It was such a curious corner in its acoustical properties, such a
peculiar Ear of a place, that as Mr. Lorry stood at the open window,
looking for the father and daughter whose steps he heard, he fancied
they would never approach. Not only would the echoes die away, as though
the steps had gone; but, echoes of other steps that never came would be
heard in their stead, and would die away for good when they seemed close
at hand. However, father and daughter did at last appear, and Miss Pross
was ready at the street door to receive them.

Miss Pross was a pleasant sight, albeit wild, and red, and grim, taking
off her darling's bonnet when she came up-stairs, and touching it up
with the ends of her handkerchief, and blowing the dust off it, and
folding her mantle ready for laying by, and smoothing her rich hair with
as much pride as she could possibly have taken in her own hair if she
had been the vainest and handsomest of women. Her darling was a pleasant
sight too, embracing her and thanking her, and protesting against
her taking so much trouble for her--which last she only dared to do
playfully, or Miss Pross, sorely hurt, would have retired to her own
chamber and cried. The Doctor was a pleasant sight too, looking on at
them, and telling Miss Pross how she spoilt Lucie, in accents and with
eyes that had as much spoiling in them as Miss Pross had, and would
have had more if it were possible. Mr. Lorry was a pleasant sight too,
beaming at all this in his little wig, and thanking his bachelor
stars for having lighted him in his declining years to a Home. But, no
Hundreds of people came to see the sights, and Mr. Lorry looked in vain
for the fulfilment of Miss Pross's prediction.

Dinner-time, and still no Hundreds of people. In the arrangements of
the little household, Miss Pross took charge of the lower regions, and
always acquitted herself marvellously. Her dinners, of a very modest
quality, were so well cooked and so well served, and so neat in their
contrivances, half English and half French, that nothing could be
better. Miss Pross's friendship being of the thoroughly practical
kind, she had ravaged Soho and the adjacent provinces, in search of
impoverished French, who, tempted by shillings and half-crowns, would
impart culinary mysteries to her. From these decayed sons and daughters
of Gaul, she had acquired such wonderful arts, that the woman and girl
who formed the staff of domestics regarded her as quite a Sorceress,
or Cinderella's Godmother: who would send out for a fowl, a rabbit,
a vegetable or two from the garden, and change them into anything she
pleased.

On Sundays, Miss Pross dined at the Doctor's table, but on other days
persisted in taking her meals at unknown periods, either in the lower
regions, or in her own room on the second floor--a blue chamber, to
which no one but her Ladybird ever gained admittance. On this occasion,
Miss Pross, responding to Ladybird's pleasant face and pleasant efforts
to please her, unbent exceedingly; so the dinner was very pleasant, too.

It was an oppressive day, and, after dinner, Lucie proposed that the
wine should be carried out under the plane-tree, and they should sit
there in the air. As everything turned upon her, and revolved about her,
they went out under the plane-tree, and she carried the wine down for
the special benefit of Mr. Lorry. She had installed herself, some
time before, as Mr. Lorry's cup-bearer; and while they sat under the
plane-tree, talking, she kept his glass replenished. Mysterious backs
and ends of houses peeped at them as they talked, and the plane-tree
whispered to them in its own way above their heads.

Still, the Hundreds of people did not present themselves. Mr. Darnay
presented himself while they were sitting under the plane-tree, but he
was only One.

Doctor Manette received him kindly, and so did Lucie. But, Miss Pross
suddenly became afflicted with a twitching in the head and body, and
retired into the house. She was not unfrequently the victim of this
disorder, and she called it, in familiar conversation, “a fit of the
jerks.”

The Doctor was in his best condition, and looked specially young. The
resemblance between him and Lucie was very strong at such times, and as
they sat side by side, she leaning on his shoulder, and he resting
his arm on the back of her chair, it was very agreeable to trace the
likeness.

He had been talking all day, on many subjects, and with unusual
vivacity. “Pray, Doctor Manette,” said Mr. Darnay, as they sat under the
plane-tree--and he said it in the natural pursuit of the topic in hand,
which happened to be the old buildings of London--“have you seen much of
the Tower?”

“Lucie and I have been there; but only casually. We have seen enough of
it, to know that it teems with interest; little more.”

“_I_ have been there, as you remember,” said Darnay, with a smile,
though reddening a little angrily, “in another character, and not in a
character that gives facilities for seeing much of it. They told me a
curious thing when I was there.”

“What was that?” Lucie asked.

“In making some alterations, the workmen came upon an old dungeon, which
had been, for many years, built up and forgotten. Every stone of
its inner wall was covered by inscriptions which had been carved by
prisoners--dates, names, complaints, and prayers. Upon a corner stone
in an angle of the wall, one prisoner, who seemed to have gone to
execution, had cut as his last work, three letters. They were done with
some very poor instrument, and hurriedly, with an unsteady hand.
At first, they were read as D. I. C.; but, on being more carefully
examined, the last letter was found to be G. There was no record or
legend of any prisoner with those initials, and many fruitless guesses
were made what the name could have been. At length, it was suggested
that the letters were not initials, but the complete word, DIG. The
floor was examined very carefully under the inscription, and, in the
earth beneath a stone, or tile, or some fragment of paving, were found
the ashes of a paper, mingled with the ashes of a small leathern case
or bag. What the unknown prisoner had written will never be read, but he
had written something, and hidden it away to keep it from the gaoler.”

“My father,” exclaimed Lucie, “you are ill!”

He had suddenly started up, with his hand to his head. His manner and
his look quite terrified them all.

“No, my dear, not ill. There are large drops of rain falling, and they
made me start. We had better go in.”

He recovered himself almost instantly. Rain was really falling in large
drops, and he showed the back of his hand with rain-drops on it. But, he
said not a single word in reference to the discovery that had been told
of, and, as they went into the house, the business eye of Mr. Lorry
either detected, or fancied it detected, on his face, as it turned
towards Charles Darnay, the same singular look that had been upon it
when it turned towards him in the passages of the Court House.

He recovered himself so quickly, however, that Mr. Lorry had doubts of
his business eye. The arm of the golden giant in the hall was not more
steady than he was, when he stopped under it to remark to them that he
was not yet proof against slight surprises (if he ever would be), and
that the rain had startled him.

Tea-time, and Miss Pross making tea, with another fit of the jerks upon
her, and yet no Hundreds of people. Mr. Carton had lounged in, but he
made only Two.

The night was so very sultry, that although they sat with doors and
windows open, they were overpowered by heat. When the tea-table was
done with, they all moved to one of the windows, and looked out into the
heavy twilight. Lucie sat by her father; Darnay sat beside her; Carton
leaned against a window. The curtains were long and white, and some of
the thunder-gusts that whirled into the corner, caught them up to the
ceiling, and waved them like spectral wings.

“The rain-drops are still falling, large, heavy, and few,” said Doctor
Manette. “It comes slowly.”

“It comes surely,” said Carton.

They spoke low, as people watching and waiting mostly do; as people in a
dark room, watching and waiting for Lightning, always do.

There was a great hurry in the streets of people speeding away to
get shelter before the storm broke; the wonderful corner for echoes
resounded with the echoes of footsteps coming and going, yet not a
footstep was there.

“A multitude of people, and yet a solitude!” said Darnay, when they had
listened for a while.

“Is it not impressive, Mr. Darnay?” asked Lucie. “Sometimes, I have
sat here of an evening, until I have fancied--but even the shade of
a foolish fancy makes me shudder to-night, when all is so black and
solemn--”

“Let us shudder too. We may know what it is.”

“It will seem nothing to you. Such whims are only impressive as we
originate them, I think; they are not to be communicated. I have
sometimes sat alone here of an evening, listening, until I have made
the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming
by-and-bye into our lives.”

“There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that be so,”
 Sydney Carton struck in, in his moody way.

The footsteps were incessant, and the hurry of them became more and more
rapid. The corner echoed and re-echoed with the tread of feet; some,
as it seemed, under the windows; some, as it seemed, in the room; some
coming, some going, some breaking off, some stopping altogether; all in
the distant streets, and not one within sight.

“Are all these footsteps destined to come to all of us, Miss Manette, or
are we to divide them among us?”

“I don't know, Mr. Darnay; I told you it was a foolish fancy, but you
asked for it. When I have yielded myself to it, I have been alone, and
then I have imagined them the footsteps of the people who are to come
into my life, and my father's.”

“I take them into mine!” said Carton. “_I_ ask no questions and make no
stipulations. There is a great crowd bearing down upon us, Miss Manette,
and I see them--by the Lightning.” He added the last words, after there
had been a vivid flash which had shown him lounging in the window.

“And I hear them!” he added again, after a peal of thunder. “Here they
come, fast, fierce, and furious!”

It was the rush and roar of rain that he typified, and it stopped him,
for no voice could be heard in it. A memorable storm of thunder and
lightning broke with that sweep of water, and there was not a moment's
interval in crash, and fire, and rain, until after the moon rose at
midnight.

The great bell of Saint Paul's was striking one in the cleared air, when
Mr. Lorry, escorted by Jerry, high-booted and bearing a lantern, set
forth on his return-passage to Clerkenwell. There were solitary patches
of road on the way between Soho and Clerkenwell, and Mr. Lorry, mindful
of foot-pads, always retained Jerry for this service: though it was
usually performed a good two hours earlier.

“What a night it has been! Almost a night, Jerry,” said Mr. Lorry, “to
bring the dead out of their graves.”

“I never see the night myself, master--nor yet I don't expect to--what
would do that,” answered Jerry.

“Good night, Mr. Carton,” said the man of business. “Good night, Mr.
Darnay. Shall we ever see such a night again, together!”

Perhaps. Perhaps, see the great crowd of people with its rush and roar,
bearing down upon them, too.




VII. Monseigneur in Town


Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court, held his
fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was in
his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to
the crowd of worshippers in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur
was about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many
things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed to be rather
rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning's chocolate could not so
much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four
strong men besides the Cook.

Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the
Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his
pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to
conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur's lips. One lacquey carried
the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed
the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function;
a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold
watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to
dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high
place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon
his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three
men; he must have died of two.

Monseigneur had been out at a little supper last night, where the Comedy
and the Grand Opera were charmingly represented. Monseigneur was out at
a little supper most nights, with fascinating company. So polite and so
impressible was Monseigneur, that the Comedy and the Grand Opera had far
more influence with him in the tiresome articles of state affairs and
state secrets, than the needs of all France. A happy circumstance
for France, as the like always is for all countries similarly
favoured!--always was for England (by way of example), in the regretted
days of the merry Stuart who sold it.

Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business, which
was, to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public
business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all go
his way--tend to his own power and pocket. Of his pleasures, general and
particular, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea, that the world
was made for them. The text of his order (altered from the original
by only a pronoun, which is not much) ran: “The earth and the fulness
thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur.”

Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar embarrassments crept into
his affairs, both private and public; and he had, as to both classes of
affairs, allied himself perforce with a Farmer-General. As to finances
public, because Monseigneur could not make anything at all of them, and
must consequently let them out to somebody who could; as to finances
private, because Farmer-Generals were rich, and Monseigneur, after
generations of great luxury and expense, was growing poor. Hence
Monseigneur had taken his sister from a convent, while there was yet
time to ward off the impending veil, the cheapest garment she could
wear, and had bestowed her as a prize upon a very rich Farmer-General,
poor in family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate cane with
a golden apple on the top of it, was now among the company in the outer
rooms, much prostrated before by mankind--always excepting superior
mankind of the blood of Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked
down upon him with the loftiest contempt.

A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood in his
stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body-women
waited on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing but plunder and
forage where he could, the Farmer-General--howsoever his matrimonial
relations conduced to social morality--was at least the greatest reality
among the personages who attended at the hotel of Monseigneur that day.

For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and adorned with
every device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time could
achieve, were, in truth, not a sound business; considered with any
reference to the scarecrows in the rags and nightcaps elsewhere (and not
so far off, either, but that the watching towers of Notre Dame, almost
equidistant from the two extremes, could see them both), they would
have been an exceedingly uncomfortable business--if that could have
been anybody's business, at the house of Monseigneur. Military officers
destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship;
civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the
worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives;
all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly in
pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of
Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from which
anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the score and the
score. People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State,
yet equally unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives
passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, were
no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies
for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly
patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had
discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the
State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to
root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears
they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving
Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making
card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving
Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this
wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of
the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time--and has been
since--to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural
subject of human interest, were in the most exemplary state of
exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had these various
notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the spies
among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur--forming a goodly half
of the polite company--would have found it hard to discover among
the angels of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and
appearance, owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of
bringing a troublesome creature into this world--which does not go far
towards the realisation of the name of mother--there was no such thing
known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close,
and brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and
supped as at twenty.

The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance
upon Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional
people who had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving in them that
things in general were going rather wrong. As a promising way of setting
them right, half of the half-dozen had become members of a fantastic
sect of Convulsionists, and were even then considering within themselves
whether they should foam, rage, roar, and turn cataleptic on the
spot--thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to the
Future, for Monseigneur's guidance. Besides these Dervishes, were other
three who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters with a
jargon about “the Centre of Truth:” holding that Man had got out of the
Centre of Truth--which did not need much demonstration--but had not got
out of the Circumference, and that he was to be kept from flying out of
the Circumference, and was even to be shoved back into the Centre,
by fasting and seeing of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much
discoursing with spirits went on--and it did a world of good which never
became manifest.

But, the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel of
Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been
ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally
correct. Such frizzling and powdering and sticking up of hair, such
delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended, such gallant
swords to look at, and such delicate honour to the sense of smell, would
surely keep anything going, for ever and ever. The exquisite gentlemen
of the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they
languidly moved; these golden fetters rang like precious little bells;
and what with that ringing, and with the rustle of silk and brocade and
fine linen, there was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and
his devouring hunger far away.

Dress was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keeping all
things in their places. Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball that
was never to leave off. From the Palace of the Tuileries, through
Monseigneur and the whole Court, through the Chambers, the Tribunals
of Justice, and all society (except the scarecrows), the Fancy Ball
descended to the Common Executioner: who, in pursuance of the charm, was
required to officiate “frizzled, powdered, in a gold-laced coat, pumps,
and white silk stockings.” At the gallows and the wheel--the axe was a
rarity--Monsieur Paris, as it was the episcopal mode among his brother
Professors of the provinces, Monsieur Orleans, and the rest, to call
him, presided in this dainty dress. And who among the company at
Monseigneur's reception in that seventeen hundred and eightieth year
of our Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system rooted in a frizzled
hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk stockinged, would
see the very stars out!

Monseigneur having eased his four men of their burdens and taken his
chocolate, caused the doors of the Holiest of Holiests to be thrown
open, and issued forth. Then, what submission, what cringing and
fawning, what servility, what abject humiliation! As to bowing down in
body and spirit, nothing in that way was left for Heaven--which may have
been one among other reasons why the worshippers of Monseigneur never
troubled it.

Bestowing a word of promise here and a smile there, a whisper on one
happy slave and a wave of the hand on another, Monseigneur affably
passed through his rooms to the remote region of the Circumference of
Truth. There, Monseigneur turned, and came back again, and so in due
course of time got himself shut up in his sanctuary by the chocolate
sprites, and was seen no more.

The show being over, the flutter in the air became quite a little storm,
and the precious little bells went ringing downstairs. There was soon
but one person left of all the crowd, and he, with his hat under his arm
and his snuff-box in his hand, slowly passed among the mirrors on his
way out.

“I devote you,” said this person, stopping at the last door on his way,
and turning in the direction of the sanctuary, “to the Devil!”

With that, he shook the snuff from his fingers as if he had shaken the
dust from his feet, and quietly walked downstairs.

He was a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner, and
with a face like a fine mask. A face of a transparent paleness; every
feature in it clearly defined; one set expression on it. The nose,
beautifully formed otherwise, was very slightly pinched at the top
of each nostril. In those two compressions, or dints, the only little
change that the face ever showed, resided. They persisted in changing
colour sometimes, and they would be occasionally dilated and contracted
by something like a faint pulsation; then, they gave a look of
treachery, and cruelty, to the whole countenance. Examined with
attention, its capacity of helping such a look was to be found in the
line of the mouth, and the lines of the orbits of the eyes, being much
too horizontal and thin; still, in the effect of the face made, it was a
handsome face, and a remarkable one.

Its owner went downstairs into the courtyard, got into his carriage, and
drove away. Not many people had talked with him at the reception; he had
stood in a little space apart, and Monseigneur might have been warmer
in his manner. It appeared, under the circumstances, rather agreeable
to him to see the common people dispersed before his horses, and
often barely escaping from being run down. His man drove as if he were
charging an enemy, and the furious recklessness of the man brought no
check into the face, or to the lips, of the master. The complaint had
sometimes made itself audible, even in that deaf city and dumb age,
that, in the narrow streets without footways, the fierce patrician
custom of hard driving endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in a
barbarous manner. But, few cared enough for that to think of it a second
time, and, in this matter, as in all others, the common wretches were
left to get out of their difficulties as they could.

With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of
consideration not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage
dashed through streets and swept round corners, with women screaming
before it, and men clutching each other and clutching children out of
its way. At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its
wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a
number of voices, and the horses reared and plunged.

But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably would not have
stopped; carriages were often known to drive on, and leave their wounded
behind, and why not? But the frightened valet had got down in a hurry,
and there were twenty hands at the horses' bridles.

“What has gone wrong?” said Monsieur, calmly looking out.

A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of
the horses, and had laid it on the basement of the fountain, and was
down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.

“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and submissive man, “it is
a child.”

“Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?”

“Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis--it is a pity--yes.”

The fountain was a little removed; for the street opened, where it was,
into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly
got up from the ground, and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the
Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.

“Killed!” shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending both arms at
their length above his head, and staring at him. “Dead!”

The people closed round, and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. There was
nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness
and eagerness; there was no visible menacing or anger. Neither did the
people say anything; after the first cry, they had been silent, and they
remained so. The voice of the submissive man who had spoken, was flat
and tame in its extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes
over them all, as if they had been mere rats come out of their holes.

He took out his purse.

“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care
of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is for ever in
the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give
him that.”

He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads
craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The
tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”

He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest
made way. On seeing him, the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder,
sobbing and crying, and pointing to the fountain, where some women were
stooping over the motionless bundle, and moving gently about it. They
were as silent, however, as the men.

“I know all, I know all,” said the last comer. “Be a brave man, my
Gaspard! It is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to
live. It has died in a moment without pain. Could it have lived an hour
as happily?”

“You are a philosopher, you there,” said the Marquis, smiling. “How do
they call you?”

“They call me Defarge.”

“Of what trade?”

“Monsieur the Marquis, vendor of wine.”

“Pick up that, philosopher and vendor of wine,” said the Marquis,
throwing him another gold coin, “and spend it as you will. The horses
there; are they right?”

Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time, Monsieur the
Marquis leaned back in his seat, and was just being driven away with the
air of a gentleman who had accidentally broke some common thing, and had
paid for it, and could afford to pay for it; when his ease was suddenly
disturbed by a coin flying into his carriage, and ringing on its floor.

“Hold!” said Monsieur the Marquis. “Hold the horses! Who threw that?”

He looked to the spot where Defarge the vendor of wine had stood, a
moment before; but the wretched father was grovelling on his face on
the pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood beside him was the
figure of a dark stout woman, knitting.

“You dogs!” said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front,
except as to the spots on his nose: “I would ride over any of you very
willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which rascal
threw at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he
should be crushed under the wheels.”

So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of
what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not
a voice, or a hand, or even an eye was raised. Among the men, not one.
But the woman who stood knitting looked up steadily, and looked the
Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it; his
contemptuous eyes passed over her, and over all the other rats; and he
leaned back in his seat again, and gave the word “Go on!”

He was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick
succession; the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, the
Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the Comedy, the
whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous flow, came whirling by. The rats
had crept out of their holes to look on, and they remained looking
on for hours; soldiers and police often passing between them and the
spectacle, and making a barrier behind which they slunk, and through
which they peeped. The father had long ago taken up his bundle and
bidden himself away with it, when the women who had tended the bundle
while it lay on the base of the fountain, sat there watching the running
of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball--when the one woman who
had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness
of Fate. The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran
into evening, so much life in the city ran into death according to rule,
time and tide waited for no man, the rats were sleeping close together
in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all
things ran their course.




VIII. Monseigneur in the Country


A beautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it, but not abundant.
Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor peas
and beans, patches of most coarse vegetable substitutes for wheat. On
inanimate nature, as on the men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent
tendency towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly--a dejected
disposition to give up, and wither away.

Monsieur the Marquis in his travelling carriage (which might have been
lighter), conducted by four post-horses and two postilions, fagged up
a steep hill. A blush on the countenance of Monsieur the Marquis was
no impeachment of his high breeding; it was not from within; it was
occasioned by an external circumstance beyond his control--the setting
sun.

The sunset struck so brilliantly into the travelling carriage when it
gained the hill-top, that its occupant was steeped in crimson. “It will
die out,” said Monsieur the Marquis, glancing at his hands, “directly.”

In effect, the sun was so low that it dipped at the moment. When the
heavy drag had been adjusted to the wheel, and the carriage slid down
hill, with a cinderous smell, in a cloud of dust, the red glow departed
quickly; the sun and the Marquis going down together, there was no glow
left when the drag was taken off.

But, there remained a broken country, bold and open, a little village
at the bottom of the hill, a broad sweep and rise beyond it, a
church-tower, a windmill, a forest for the chase, and a crag with a
fortress on it used as a prison. Round upon all these darkening objects
as the night drew on, the Marquis looked, with the air of one who was
coming near home.

The village had its one poor street, with its poor brewery, poor
tannery, poor tavern, poor stable-yard for relays of post-horses, poor
fountain, all usual poor appointments. It had its poor people too. All
its people were poor, and many of them were sitting at their doors,
shredding spare onions and the like for supper, while many were at the
fountain, washing leaves, and grasses, and any such small yieldings of
the earth that could be eaten. Expressive signs of what made them poor,
were not wanting; the tax for the state, the tax for the church, the tax
for the lord, tax local and tax general, were to be paid here and to be
paid there, according to solemn inscription in the little village, until
the wonder was, that there was any village left unswallowed.

Few children were to be seen, and no dogs. As to the men and women,
their choice on earth was stated in the prospect--Life on the lowest
terms that could sustain it, down in the little village under the mill;
or captivity and Death in the dominant prison on the crag.

Heralded by a courier in advance, and by the cracking of his postilions'
whips, which twined snake-like about their heads in the evening air, as
if he came attended by the Furies, Monsieur the Marquis drew up in
his travelling carriage at the posting-house gate. It was hard by the
fountain, and the peasants suspended their operations to look at him.
He looked at them, and saw in them, without knowing it, the slow
sure filing down of misery-worn face and figure, that was to make the
meagreness of Frenchmen an English superstition which should survive the
truth through the best part of a hundred years.

Monsieur the Marquis cast his eyes over the submissive faces that
drooped before him, as the like of himself had drooped before
Monseigneur of the Court--only the difference was, that these faces
drooped merely to suffer and not to propitiate--when a grizzled mender
of the roads joined the group.

“Bring me hither that fellow!” said the Marquis to the courier.

The fellow was brought, cap in hand, and the other fellows closed round
to look and listen, in the manner of the people at the Paris fountain.

“I passed you on the road?”

“Monseigneur, it is true. I had the honour of being passed on the road.”

“Coming up the hill, and at the top of the hill, both?”

“Monseigneur, it is true.”

“What did you look at, so fixedly?”

“Monseigneur, I looked at the man.”

He stooped a little, and with his tattered blue cap pointed under the
carriage. All his fellows stooped to look under the carriage.

“What man, pig? And why look there?”

“Pardon, Monseigneur; he swung by the chain of the shoe--the drag.”

“Who?” demanded the traveller.

“Monseigneur, the man.”

“May the Devil carry away these idiots! How do you call the man? You
know all the men of this part of the country. Who was he?”

“Your clemency, Monseigneur! He was not of this part of the country. Of
all the days of my life, I never saw him.”

“Swinging by the chain? To be suffocated?”

“With your gracious permission, that was the wonder of it, Monseigneur.
His head hanging over--like this!”

He turned himself sideways to the carriage, and leaned back, with his
face thrown up to the sky, and his head hanging down; then recovered
himself, fumbled with his cap, and made a bow.

“What was he like?”

“Monseigneur, he was whiter than the miller. All covered with dust,
white as a spectre, tall as a spectre!”

The picture produced an immense sensation in the little crowd; but all
eyes, without comparing notes with other eyes, looked at Monsieur
the Marquis. Perhaps, to observe whether he had any spectre on his
conscience.

“Truly, you did well,” said the Marquis, felicitously sensible that such
vermin were not to ruffle him, “to see a thief accompanying my carriage,
and not open that great mouth of yours. Bah! Put him aside, Monsieur
Gabelle!”

Monsieur Gabelle was the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary
united; he had come out with great obsequiousness to assist at this
examination, and had held the examined by the drapery of his arm in an
official manner.

“Bah! Go aside!” said Monsieur Gabelle.

“Lay hands on this stranger if he seeks to lodge in your village
to-night, and be sure that his business is honest, Gabelle.”

“Monseigneur, I am flattered to devote myself to your orders.”

“Did he run away, fellow?--where is that Accursed?”

The accursed was already under the carriage with some half-dozen
particular friends, pointing out the chain with his blue cap. Some
half-dozen other particular friends promptly hauled him out, and
presented him breathless to Monsieur the Marquis.

“Did the man run away, Dolt, when we stopped for the drag?”

“Monseigneur, he precipitated himself over the hill-side, head first, as
a person plunges into the river.”

“See to it, Gabelle. Go on!”

The half-dozen who were peering at the chain were still among the
wheels, like sheep; the wheels turned so suddenly that they were lucky
to save their skins and bones; they had very little else to save, or
they might not have been so fortunate.

The burst with which the carriage started out of the village and up the
rise beyond, was soon checked by the steepness of the hill. Gradually,
it subsided to a foot pace, swinging and lumbering upward among the many
sweet scents of a summer night. The postilions, with a thousand gossamer
gnats circling about them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the
points to the lashes of their whips; the valet walked by the horses; the
courier was audible, trotting on ahead into the dull distance.

At the steepest point of the hill there was a little burial-ground,
with a Cross and a new large figure of Our Saviour on it; it was a poor
figure in wood, done by some inexperienced rustic carver, but he had
studied the figure from the life--his own life, maybe--for it was
dreadfully spare and thin.

To this distressful emblem of a great distress that had long been
growing worse, and was not at its worst, a woman was kneeling. She
turned her head as the carriage came up to her, rose quickly, and
presented herself at the carriage-door.

“It is you, Monseigneur! Monseigneur, a petition.”

With an exclamation of impatience, but with his unchangeable face,
Monseigneur looked out.

“How, then! What is it? Always petitions!”

“Monseigneur. For the love of the great God! My husband, the forester.”

“What of your husband, the forester? Always the same with you people. He
cannot pay something?”

“He has paid all, Monseigneur. He is dead.”

“Well! He is quiet. Can I restore him to you?”

“Alas, no, Monseigneur! But he lies yonder, under a little heap of poor
grass.”

“Well?”

“Monseigneur, there are so many little heaps of poor grass?”

“Again, well?”

She looked an old woman, but was young. Her manner was one of passionate
grief; by turns she clasped her veinous and knotted hands together
with wild energy, and laid one of them on the carriage-door--tenderly,
caressingly, as if it had been a human breast, and could be expected to
feel the appealing touch.

“Monseigneur, hear me! Monseigneur, hear my petition! My husband died of
want; so many die of want; so many more will die of want.”

“Again, well? Can I feed them?”

“Monseigneur, the good God knows; but I don't ask it. My petition is,
that a morsel of stone or wood, with my husband's name, may be placed
over him to show where he lies. Otherwise, the place will be quickly
forgotten, it will never be found when I am dead of the same malady, I
shall be laid under some other heap of poor grass. Monseigneur, they
are so many, they increase so fast, there is so much want. Monseigneur!
Monseigneur!”

The valet had put her away from the door, the carriage had broken into
a brisk trot, the postilions had quickened the pace, she was left far
behind, and Monseigneur, again escorted by the Furies, was rapidly
diminishing the league or two of distance that remained between him and
his chateau.

The sweet scents of the summer night rose all around him, and rose, as
the rain falls, impartially, on the dusty, ragged, and toil-worn group
at the fountain not far away; to whom the mender of roads, with the aid
of the blue cap without which he was nothing, still enlarged upon his
man like a spectre, as long as they could bear it. By degrees, as they
could bear no more, they dropped off one by one, and lights twinkled
in little casements; which lights, as the casements darkened, and more
stars came out, seemed to have shot up into the sky instead of having
been extinguished.

The shadow of a large high-roofed house, and of many over-hanging trees,
was upon Monsieur the Marquis by that time; and the shadow was exchanged
for the light of a flambeau, as his carriage stopped, and the great door
of his chateau was opened to him.

“Monsieur Charles, whom I expect; is he arrived from England?”

“Monseigneur, not yet.”




IX. The Gorgon's Head


It was a heavy mass of building, that chateau of Monsieur the Marquis,
with a large stone courtyard before it, and two stone sweeps of
staircase meeting in a stone terrace before the principal door. A stony
business altogether, with heavy stone balustrades, and stone urns, and
stone flowers, and stone faces of men, and stone heads of lions, in
all directions. As if the Gorgon's head had surveyed it, when it was
finished, two centuries ago.

Up the broad flight of shallow steps, Monsieur the Marquis, flambeau
preceded, went from his carriage, sufficiently disturbing the darkness
to elicit loud remonstrance from an owl in the roof of the great pile
of stable building away among the trees. All else was so quiet, that the
flambeau carried up the steps, and the other flambeau held at the great
door, burnt as if they were in a close room of state, instead of being
in the open night-air. Other sound than the owl's voice there was none,
save the falling of a fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of
those dark nights that hold their breath by the hour together, and then
heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath again.

The great door clanged behind him, and Monsieur the Marquis crossed a
hall grim with certain old boar-spears, swords, and knives of the chase;
grimmer with certain heavy riding-rods and riding-whips, of which many a
peasant, gone to his benefactor Death, had felt the weight when his lord
was angry.

Avoiding the larger rooms, which were dark and made fast for the night,
Monsieur the Marquis, with his flambeau-bearer going on before, went up
the staircase to a door in a corridor. This thrown open, admitted him
to his own private apartment of three rooms: his bed-chamber and two
others. High vaulted rooms with cool uncarpeted floors, great dogs upon
the hearths for the burning of wood in winter time, and all luxuries
befitting the state of a marquis in a luxurious age and country.
The fashion of the last Louis but one, of the line that was never to
break--the fourteenth Louis--was conspicuous in their rich furniture;
but, it was diversified by many objects that were illustrations of old
pages in the history of France.

A supper-table was laid for two, in the third of the rooms; a round
room, in one of the chateau's four extinguisher-topped towers. A small
lofty room, with its window wide open, and the wooden jalousie-blinds
closed, so that the dark night only showed in slight horizontal lines of
black, alternating with their broad lines of stone colour.

“My nephew,” said the Marquis, glancing at the supper preparation; “they
said he was not arrived.”

Nor was he; but, he had been expected with Monseigneur.

“Ah! It is not probable he will arrive to-night; nevertheless, leave the
table as it is. I shall be ready in a quarter of an hour.”

In a quarter of an hour Monseigneur was ready, and sat down alone to his
sumptuous and choice supper. His chair was opposite to the window, and
he had taken his soup, and was raising his glass of Bordeaux to his
lips, when he put it down.

“What is that?” he calmly asked, looking with attention at the
horizontal lines of black and stone colour.

“Monseigneur? That?”

“Outside the blinds. Open the blinds.”

It was done.

“Well?”

“Monseigneur, it is nothing. The trees and the night are all that are
here.”

The servant who spoke, had thrown the blinds wide, had looked out into
the vacant darkness, and stood with that blank behind him, looking round
for instructions.

“Good,” said the imperturbable master. “Close them again.”

That was done too, and the Marquis went on with his supper. He was
half way through it, when he again stopped with his glass in his hand,
hearing the sound of wheels. It came on briskly, and came up to the
front of the chateau.

“Ask who is arrived.”

It was the nephew of Monseigneur. He had been some few leagues behind
Monseigneur, early in the afternoon. He had diminished the distance
rapidly, but not so rapidly as to come up with Monseigneur on the road.
He had heard of Monseigneur, at the posting-houses, as being before him.

He was to be told (said Monseigneur) that supper awaited him then and
there, and that he was prayed to come to it. In a little while he came.
He had been known in England as Charles Darnay.

Monseigneur received him in a courtly manner, but they did not shake
hands.

“You left Paris yesterday, sir?” he said to Monseigneur, as he took his
seat at table.

“Yesterday. And you?”

“I come direct.”

“From London?”

“Yes.”

“You have been a long time coming,” said the Marquis, with a smile.

“On the contrary; I come direct.”

“Pardon me! I mean, not a long time on the journey; a long time
intending the journey.”

“I have been detained by”--the nephew stopped a moment in his
answer--“various business.”

“Without doubt,” said the polished uncle.

So long as a servant was present, no other words passed between them.
When coffee had been served and they were alone together, the nephew,
looking at the uncle and meeting the eyes of the face that was like a
fine mask, opened a conversation.

“I have come back, sir, as you anticipate, pursuing the object that
took me away. It carried me into great and unexpected peril; but it is
a sacred object, and if it had carried me to death I hope it would have
sustained me.”

“Not to death,” said the uncle; “it is not necessary to say, to death.”

“I doubt, sir,” returned the nephew, “whether, if it had carried me to
the utmost brink of death, you would have cared to stop me there.”

The deepened marks in the nose, and the lengthening of the fine straight
lines in the cruel face, looked ominous as to that; the uncle made a
graceful gesture of protest, which was so clearly a slight form of good
breeding that it was not reassuring.

“Indeed, sir,” pursued the nephew, “for anything I know, you may have
expressly worked to give a more suspicious appearance to the suspicious
circumstances that surrounded me.”

“No, no, no,” said the uncle, pleasantly.

“But, however that may be,” resumed the nephew, glancing at him with
deep distrust, “I know that your diplomacy would stop me by any means,
and would know no scruple as to means.”

“My friend, I told you so,” said the uncle, with a fine pulsation in the
two marks. “Do me the favour to recall that I told you so, long ago.”

“I recall it.”

“Thank you,” said the Marquis--very sweetly indeed.

His tone lingered in the air, almost like the tone of a musical
instrument.

“In effect, sir,” pursued the nephew, “I believe it to be at once your
bad fortune, and my good fortune, that has kept me out of a prison in
France here.”

“I do not quite understand,” returned the uncle, sipping his coffee.
“Dare I ask you to explain?”

“I believe that if you were not in disgrace with the Court, and had not
been overshadowed by that cloud for years past, a letter de cachet would
have sent me to some fortress indefinitely.”

“It is possible,” said the uncle, with great calmness. “For the honour
of the family, I could even resolve to incommode you to that extent.
Pray excuse me!”

“I perceive that, happily for me, the Reception of the day before
yesterday was, as usual, a cold one,” observed the nephew.

“I would not say happily, my friend,” returned the uncle, with refined
politeness; “I would not be sure of that. A good opportunity for
consideration, surrounded by the advantages of solitude, might influence
your destiny to far greater advantage than you influence it for
yourself. But it is useless to discuss the question. I am, as you say,
at a disadvantage. These little instruments of correction, these gentle
aids to the power and honour of families, these slight favours that
might so incommode you, are only to be obtained now by interest
and importunity. They are sought by so many, and they are granted
(comparatively) to so few! It used not to be so, but France in all such
things is changed for the worse. Our not remote ancestors held the right
of life and death over the surrounding vulgar. From this room, many such
dogs have been taken out to be hanged; in the next room (my bedroom),
one fellow, to our knowledge, was poniarded on the spot for professing
some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter--_his_ daughter? We have
lost many privileges; a new philosophy has become the mode; and the
assertion of our station, in these days, might (I do not go so far as
to say would, but might) cause us real inconvenience. All very bad, very
bad!”

The Marquis took a gentle little pinch of snuff, and shook his head;
as elegantly despondent as he could becomingly be of a country still
containing himself, that great means of regeneration.

“We have so asserted our station, both in the old time and in the modern
time also,” said the nephew, gloomily, “that I believe our name to be
more detested than any name in France.”

“Let us hope so,” said the uncle. “Detestation of the high is the
involuntary homage of the low.”

“There is not,” pursued the nephew, in his former tone, “a face I can
look at, in all this country round about us, which looks at me with any
deference on it but the dark deference of fear and slavery.”

“A compliment,” said the Marquis, “to the grandeur of the family,
merited by the manner in which the family has sustained its grandeur.
Hah!” And he took another gentle little pinch of snuff, and lightly
crossed his legs.

But, when his nephew, leaning an elbow on the table, covered his eyes
thoughtfully and dejectedly with his hand, the fine mask looked at
him sideways with a stronger concentration of keenness, closeness,
and dislike, than was comportable with its wearer's assumption of
indifference.

“Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear
and slavery, my friend,” observed the Marquis, “will keep the dogs
obedient to the whip, as long as this roof,” looking up to it, “shuts
out the sky.”

That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture of the
chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as
they too were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to
him that night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from
the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked rains. As for the roof
he vaunted, he might have found _that_ shutting out the sky in a new
way--to wit, for ever, from the eyes of the bodies into which its lead
was fired, out of the barrels of a hundred thousand muskets.

“Meanwhile,” said the Marquis, “I will preserve the honour and repose
of the family, if you will not. But you must be fatigued. Shall we
terminate our conference for the night?”

“A moment more.”

“An hour, if you please.”

“Sir,” said the nephew, “we have done wrong, and are reaping the fruits
of wrong.”

“_We_ have done wrong?” repeated the Marquis, with an inquiring smile,
and delicately pointing, first to his nephew, then to himself.

“Our family; our honourable family, whose honour is of so much account
to both of us, in such different ways. Even in my father's time, we did
a world of wrong, injuring every human creature who came between us and
our pleasure, whatever it was. Why need I speak of my father's time,
when it is equally yours? Can I separate my father's twin-brother, joint
inheritor, and next successor, from himself?”

“Death has done that!” said the Marquis.

“And has left me,” answered the nephew, “bound to a system that is
frightful to me, responsible for it, but powerless in it; seeking to
execute the last request of my dear mother's lips, and obey the last
look of my dear mother's eyes, which implored me to have mercy and to
redress; and tortured by seeking assistance and power in vain.”

“Seeking them from me, my nephew,” said the Marquis, touching him on the
breast with his forefinger--they were now standing by the hearth--“you
will for ever seek them in vain, be assured.”

Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness of his face, was
cruelly, craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking
quietly at his nephew, with his snuff-box in his hand. Once again he
touched him on the breast, as though his finger were the fine point of
a small sword, with which, in delicate finesse, he ran him through the
body, and said,

“My friend, I will die, perpetuating the system under which I have
lived.”

When he had said it, he took a culminating pinch of snuff, and put his
box in his pocket.

“Better to be a rational creature,” he added then, after ringing a small
bell on the table, “and accept your natural destiny. But you are lost,
Monsieur Charles, I see.”

“This property and France are lost to me,” said the nephew, sadly; “I
renounce them.”

“Are they both yours to renounce? France may be, but is the property? It
is scarcely worth mentioning; but, is it yet?”

“I had no intention, in the words I used, to claim it yet. If it passed
to me from you, to-morrow--”

“Which I have the vanity to hope is not probable.”

“--or twenty years hence--”

“You do me too much honour,” said the Marquis; “still, I prefer that
supposition.”

“--I would abandon it, and live otherwise and elsewhere. It is little to
relinquish. What is it but a wilderness of misery and ruin!”

“Hah!” said the Marquis, glancing round the luxurious room.

“To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity,
under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste,
mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness,
and suffering.”

“Hah!” said the Marquis again, in a well-satisfied manner.

“If it ever becomes mine, it shall be put into some hands better
qualified to free it slowly (if such a thing is possible) from the
weight that drags it down, so that the miserable people who cannot leave
it and who have been long wrung to the last point of endurance, may, in
another generation, suffer less; but it is not for me. There is a curse
on it, and on all this land.”

“And you?” said the uncle. “Forgive my curiosity; do you, under your new
philosophy, graciously intend to live?”

“I must do, to live, what others of my countrymen, even with nobility at
their backs, may have to do some day--work.”

“In England, for example?”

“Yes. The family honour, sir, is safe from me in this country. The
family name can suffer from me in no other, for I bear it in no other.”

The ringing of the bell had caused the adjoining bed-chamber to be
lighted. It now shone brightly, through the door of communication. The
Marquis looked that way, and listened for the retreating step of his
valet.

“England is very attractive to you, seeing how indifferently you have
prospered there,” he observed then, turning his calm face to his nephew
with a smile.

“I have already said, that for my prospering there, I am sensible I may
be indebted to you, sir. For the rest, it is my Refuge.”

“They say, those boastful English, that it is the Refuge of many. You
know a compatriot who has found a Refuge there? A Doctor?”

“Yes.”

“With a daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” said the Marquis. “You are fatigued. Good night!”

As he bent his head in his most courtly manner, there was a secrecy
in his smiling face, and he conveyed an air of mystery to those words,
which struck the eyes and ears of his nephew forcibly. At the same
time, the thin straight lines of the setting of the eyes, and the thin
straight lips, and the markings in the nose, curved with a sarcasm that
looked handsomely diabolic.

“Yes,” repeated the Marquis. “A Doctor with a daughter. Yes. So
commences the new philosophy! You are fatigued. Good night!”

It would have been of as much avail to interrogate any stone face
outside the chateau as to interrogate that face of his. The nephew
looked at him, in vain, in passing on to the door.

“Good night!” said the uncle. “I look to the pleasure of seeing you
again in the morning. Good repose! Light Monsieur my nephew to his
chamber there!--And burn Monsieur my nephew in his bed, if you will,” he
added to himself, before he rang his little bell again, and summoned his
valet to his own bedroom.

The valet come and gone, Monsieur the Marquis walked to and fro in his
loose chamber-robe, to prepare himself gently for sleep, that hot still
night. Rustling about the room, his softly-slippered feet making no
noise on the floor, he moved like a refined tiger:--looked like some
enchanted marquis of the impenitently wicked sort, in story, whose
periodical change into tiger form was either just going off, or just
coming on.

He moved from end to end of his voluptuous bedroom, looking again at the
scraps of the day's journey that came unbidden into his mind; the slow
toil up the hill at sunset, the setting sun, the descent, the mill, the
prison on the crag, the little village in the hollow, the peasants at
the fountain, and the mender of roads with his blue cap pointing out the
chain under the carriage. That fountain suggested the Paris fountain,
the little bundle lying on the step, the women bending over it, and the
tall man with his arms up, crying, “Dead!”

“I am cool now,” said Monsieur the Marquis, “and may go to bed.”

So, leaving only one light burning on the large hearth, he let his thin
gauze curtains fall around him, and heard the night break its silence
with a long sigh as he composed himself to sleep.

The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black night
for three heavy hours; for three heavy hours, the horses in the stables
rattled at their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl made a noise with
very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to
the owl by men-poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures
hardly ever to say what is set down for them.

For three heavy hours, the stone faces of the chateau, lion and human,
stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the landscape,
dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust on all the roads.
The burial-place had got to the pass that its little heaps of poor grass
were undistinguishable from one another; the figure on the Cross might
have come down, for anything that could be seen of it. In the village,
taxers and taxed were fast asleep. Dreaming, perhaps, of banquets, as
the starved usually do, and of ease and rest, as the driven slave and
the yoked ox may, its lean inhabitants slept soundly, and were fed and
freed.

The fountain in the village flowed unseen and unheard, and the fountain
at the chateau dropped unseen and unheard--both melting away, like the
minutes that were falling from the spring of Time--through three dark
hours. Then, the grey water of both began to be ghostly in the light,
and the eyes of the stone faces of the chateau were opened.

Lighter and lighter, until at last the sun touched the tops of the still
trees, and poured its radiance over the hill. In the glow, the water
of the chateau fountain seemed to turn to blood, and the stone faces
crimsoned. The carol of the birds was loud and high, and, on the
weather-beaten sill of the great window of the bed-chamber of Monsieur
the Marquis, one little bird sang its sweetest song with all its might.
At this, the nearest stone face seemed to stare amazed, and, with open
mouth and dropped under-jaw, looked awe-stricken.

Now, the sun was full up, and movement began in the village. Casement
windows opened, crazy doors were unbarred, and people came forth
shivering--chilled, as yet, by the new sweet air. Then began the rarely
lightened toil of the day among the village population. Some, to the
fountain; some, to the fields; men and women here, to dig and delve; men
and women there, to see to the poor live stock, and lead the bony cows
out, to such pasture as could be found by the roadside. In the church
and at the Cross, a kneeling figure or two; attendant on the latter
prayers, the led cow, trying for a breakfast among the weeds at its
foot.

The chateau awoke later, as became its quality, but awoke gradually and
surely. First, the lonely boar-spears and knives of the chase had been
reddened as of old; then, had gleamed trenchant in the morning sunshine;
now, doors and windows were thrown open, horses in their stables looked
round over their shoulders at the light and freshness pouring in at
doorways, leaves sparkled and rustled at iron-grated windows, dogs
pulled hard at their chains, and reared impatient to be loosed.

All these trivial incidents belonged to the routine of life, and the
return of morning. Surely, not so the ringing of the great bell of the
chateau, nor the running up and down the stairs; nor the hurried
figures on the terrace; nor the booting and tramping here and there and
everywhere, nor the quick saddling of horses and riding away?

What winds conveyed this hurry to the grizzled mender of roads, already
at work on the hill-top beyond the village, with his day's dinner (not
much to carry) lying in a bundle that it was worth no crow's while to
peck at, on a heap of stones? Had the birds, carrying some grains of it
to a distance, dropped one over him as they sow chance seeds? Whether or
no, the mender of roads ran, on the sultry morning, as if for his life,
down the hill, knee-high in dust, and never stopped till he got to the
fountain.

All the people of the village were at the fountain, standing about
in their depressed manner, and whispering low, but showing no other
emotions than grim curiosity and surprise. The led cows, hastily brought
in and tethered to anything that would hold them, were looking stupidly
on, or lying down chewing the cud of nothing particularly repaying their
trouble, which they had picked up in their interrupted saunter. Some of
the people of the chateau, and some of those of the posting-house, and
all the taxing authorities, were armed more or less, and were crowded
on the other side of the little street in a purposeless way, that was
highly fraught with nothing. Already, the mender of roads had penetrated
into the midst of a group of fifty particular friends, and was smiting
himself in the breast with his blue cap. What did all this portend,
and what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur Gabelle behind
a servant on horseback, and the conveying away of the said Gabelle
(double-laden though the horse was), at a gallop, like a new version of
the German ballad of Leonora?

It portended that there was one stone face too many, up at the chateau.

The Gorgon had surveyed the building again in the night, and had added
the one stone face wanting; the stone face for which it had waited
through about two hundred years.

It lay back on the pillow of Monsieur the Marquis. It was like a fine
mask, suddenly startled, made angry, and petrified. Driven home into the
heart of the stone figure attached to it, was a knife. Round its hilt
was a frill of paper, on which was scrawled:

“Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques.”




X. Two Promises


More months, to the number of twelve, had come and gone, and Mr. Charles
Darnay was established in England as a higher teacher of the French
language who was conversant with French literature. In this age, he
would have been a Professor; in that age, he was a Tutor. He read with
young men who could find any leisure and interest for the study of a
living tongue spoken all over the world, and he cultivated a taste for
its stores of knowledge and fancy. He could write of them, besides, in
sound English, and render them into sound English. Such masters were not
at that time easily found; Princes that had been, and Kings that were
to be, were not yet of the Teacher class, and no ruined nobility had
dropped out of Tellson's ledgers, to turn cooks and carpenters. As a
tutor, whose attainments made the student's way unusually pleasant and
profitable, and as an elegant translator who brought something to his
work besides mere dictionary knowledge, young Mr. Darnay soon became
known and encouraged. He was well acquainted, more-over, with the
circumstances of his country, and those were of ever-growing interest.
So, with great perseverance and untiring industry, he prospered.

In London, he had expected neither to walk on pavements of gold, nor
to lie on beds of roses; if he had had any such exalted expectation, he
would not have prospered. He had expected labour, and he found it, and
did it and made the best of it. In this, his prosperity consisted.

A certain portion of his time was passed at Cambridge, where he
read with undergraduates as a sort of tolerated smuggler who drove a
contraband trade in European languages, instead of conveying Greek
and Latin through the Custom-house. The rest of his time he passed in
London.

Now, from the days when it was always summer in Eden, to these days
when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes, the world of a man has
invariably gone one way--Charles Darnay's way--the way of the love of a
woman.

He had loved Lucie Manette from the hour of his danger. He had never
heard a sound so sweet and dear as the sound of her compassionate voice;
he had never seen a face so tenderly beautiful, as hers when it was
confronted with his own on the edge of the grave that had been dug for
him. But, he had not yet spoken to her on the subject; the assassination
at the deserted chateau far away beyond the heaving water and the long,
long, dusty roads--the solid stone chateau which had itself become the
mere mist of a dream--had been done a year, and he had never yet, by so
much as a single spoken word, disclosed to her the state of his heart.

That he had his reasons for this, he knew full well. It was again a
summer day when, lately arrived in London from his college occupation,
he turned into the quiet corner in Soho, bent on seeking an opportunity
of opening his mind to Doctor Manette. It was the close of the summer
day, and he knew Lucie to be out with Miss Pross.

He found the Doctor reading in his arm-chair at a window. The energy
which had at once supported him under his old sufferings and aggravated
their sharpness, had been gradually restored to him. He was now a
very energetic man indeed, with great firmness of purpose, strength
of resolution, and vigour of action. In his recovered energy he was
sometimes a little fitful and sudden, as he had at first been in the
exercise of his other recovered faculties; but, this had never been
frequently observable, and had grown more and more rare.

He studied much, slept little, sustained a great deal of fatigue with
ease, and was equably cheerful. To him, now entered Charles Darnay, at
sight of whom he laid aside his book and held out his hand.

“Charles Darnay! I rejoice to see you. We have been counting on your
return these three or four days past. Mr. Stryver and Sydney Carton were
both here yesterday, and both made you out to be more than due.”

“I am obliged to them for their interest in the matter,” he answered,
a little coldly as to them, though very warmly as to the Doctor. “Miss
Manette--”

“Is well,” said the Doctor, as he stopped short, “and your return will
delight us all. She has gone out on some household matters, but will
soon be home.”

“Doctor Manette, I knew she was from home. I took the opportunity of her
being from home, to beg to speak to you.”

There was a blank silence.

“Yes?” said the Doctor, with evident constraint. “Bring your chair here,
and speak on.”

He complied as to the chair, but appeared to find the speaking on less
easy.

“I have had the happiness, Doctor Manette, of being so intimate here,”
 so he at length began, “for some year and a half, that I hope the topic
on which I am about to touch may not--”

He was stayed by the Doctor's putting out his hand to stop him. When he
had kept it so a little while, he said, drawing it back:

“Is Lucie the topic?”

“She is.”

“It is hard for me to speak of her at any time. It is very hard for me
to hear her spoken of in that tone of yours, Charles Darnay.”

“It is a tone of fervent admiration, true homage, and deep love, Doctor
Manette!” he said deferentially.

There was another blank silence before her father rejoined:

“I believe it. I do you justice; I believe it.”

His constraint was so manifest, and it was so manifest, too, that it
originated in an unwillingness to approach the subject, that Charles
Darnay hesitated.

“Shall I go on, sir?”

Another blank.

“Yes, go on.”

“You anticipate what I would say, though you cannot know how earnestly
I say it, how earnestly I feel it, without knowing my secret heart, and
the hopes and fears and anxieties with which it has long been
laden. Dear Doctor Manette, I love your daughter fondly, dearly,
disinterestedly, devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love
her. You have loved yourself; let your old love speak for me!”

The Doctor sat with his face turned away, and his eyes bent on the
ground. At the last words, he stretched out his hand again, hurriedly,
and cried:

“Not that, sir! Let that be! I adjure you, do not recall that!”

His cry was so like a cry of actual pain, that it rang in Charles
Darnay's ears long after he had ceased. He motioned with the hand he had
extended, and it seemed to be an appeal to Darnay to pause. The latter
so received it, and remained silent.

“I ask your pardon,” said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, after some
moments. “I do not doubt your loving Lucie; you may be satisfied of it.”

He turned towards him in his chair, but did not look at him, or
raise his eyes. His chin dropped upon his hand, and his white hair
overshadowed his face:

“Have you spoken to Lucie?”

“No.”

“Nor written?”

“Never.”

“It would be ungenerous to affect not to know that your self-denial is
to be referred to your consideration for her father. Her father thanks
you.”

He offered his hand; but his eyes did not go with it.

“I know,” said Darnay, respectfully, “how can I fail to know, Doctor
Manette, I who have seen you together from day to day, that between
you and Miss Manette there is an affection so unusual, so touching, so
belonging to the circumstances in which it has been nurtured, that it
can have few parallels, even in the tenderness between a father and
child. I know, Doctor Manette--how can I fail to know--that, mingled
with the affection and duty of a daughter who has become a woman, there
is, in her heart, towards you, all the love and reliance of infancy
itself. I know that, as in her childhood she had no parent, so she is
now devoted to you with all the constancy and fervour of her present
years and character, united to the trustfulness and attachment of the
early days in which you were lost to her. I know perfectly well that if
you had been restored to her from the world beyond this life, you could
hardly be invested, in her sight, with a more sacred character than that
in which you are always with her. I know that when she is clinging to
you, the hands of baby, girl, and woman, all in one, are round your
neck. I know that in loving you she sees and loves her mother at her
own age, sees and loves you at my age, loves her mother broken-hearted,
loves you through your dreadful trial and in your blessed restoration. I
have known this, night and day, since I have known you in your home.”

Her father sat silent, with his face bent down. His breathing was a
little quickened; but he repressed all other signs of agitation.

“Dear Doctor Manette, always knowing this, always seeing her and you
with this hallowed light about you, I have forborne, and forborne, as
long as it was in the nature of man to do it. I have felt, and do even
now feel, that to bring my love--even mine--between you, is to touch
your history with something not quite so good as itself. But I love her.
Heaven is my witness that I love her!”

“I believe it,” answered her father, mournfully. “I have thought so
before now. I believe it.”

“But, do not believe,” said Darnay, upon whose ear the mournful voice
struck with a reproachful sound, “that if my fortune were so cast as
that, being one day so happy as to make her my wife, I must at any time
put any separation between her and you, I could or would breathe a
word of what I now say. Besides that I should know it to be hopeless, I
should know it to be a baseness. If I had any such possibility, even at
a remote distance of years, harboured in my thoughts, and hidden in my
heart--if it ever had been there--if it ever could be there--I could not
now touch this honoured hand.”

He laid his own upon it as he spoke.

“No, dear Doctor Manette. Like you, a voluntary exile from France; like
you, driven from it by its distractions, oppressions, and miseries; like
you, striving to live away from it by my own exertions, and trusting
in a happier future; I look only to sharing your fortunes, sharing your
life and home, and being faithful to you to the death. Not to divide
with Lucie her privilege as your child, companion, and friend; but to
come in aid of it, and bind her closer to you, if such a thing can be.”

His touch still lingered on her father's hand. Answering the touch for a
moment, but not coldly, her father rested his hands upon the arms of
his chair, and looked up for the first time since the beginning of the
conference. A struggle was evidently in his face; a struggle with that
occasional look which had a tendency in it to dark doubt and dread.

“You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay, that I thank
you with all my heart, and will open all my heart--or nearly so. Have
you any reason to believe that Lucie loves you?”

“None. As yet, none.”

“Is it the immediate object of this confidence, that you may at once
ascertain that, with my knowledge?”

“Not even so. I might not have the hopefulness to do it for weeks; I
might (mistaken or not mistaken) have that hopefulness to-morrow.”

“Do you seek any guidance from me?”

“I ask none, sir. But I have thought it possible that you might have it
in your power, if you should deem it right, to give me some.”

“Do you seek any promise from me?”

“I do seek that.”

“What is it?”

“I well understand that, without you, I could have no hope. I well
understand that, even if Miss Manette held me at this moment in her
innocent heart--do not think I have the presumption to assume so much--I
could retain no place in it against her love for her father.”

“If that be so, do you see what, on the other hand, is involved in it?”

“I understand equally well, that a word from her father in any suitor's
favour, would outweigh herself and all the world. For which reason,
Doctor Manette,” said Darnay, modestly but firmly, “I would not ask that
word, to save my life.”

“I am sure of it. Charles Darnay, mysteries arise out of close love, as
well as out of wide division; in the former case, they are subtle and
delicate, and difficult to penetrate. My daughter Lucie is, in this one
respect, such a mystery to me; I can make no guess at the state of her
heart.”

“May I ask, sir, if you think she is--” As he hesitated, her father
supplied the rest.

“Is sought by any other suitor?”

“It is what I meant to say.”

Her father considered a little before he answered:

“You have seen Mr. Carton here, yourself. Mr. Stryver is here too,
occasionally. If it be at all, it can only be by one of these.”

“Or both,” said Darnay.

“I had not thought of both; I should not think either, likely. You want
a promise from me. Tell me what it is.”

“It is, that if Miss Manette should bring to you at any time, on her own
part, such a confidence as I have ventured to lay before you, you will
bear testimony to what I have said, and to your belief in it. I hope you
may be able to think so well of me, as to urge no influence against
me. I say nothing more of my stake in this; this is what I ask. The
condition on which I ask it, and which you have an undoubted right to
require, I will observe immediately.”

“I give the promise,” said the Doctor, “without any condition. I believe
your object to be, purely and truthfully, as you have stated it. I
believe your intention is to perpetuate, and not to weaken, the ties
between me and my other and far dearer self. If she should ever tell me
that you are essential to her perfect happiness, I will give her to you.
If there were--Charles Darnay, if there were--”

The young man had taken his hand gratefully; their hands were joined as
the Doctor spoke:

“--any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything whatsoever,
new or old, against the man she really loved--the direct responsibility
thereof not lying on his head--they should all be obliterated for her
sake. She is everything to me; more to me than suffering, more to me
than wrong, more to me--Well! This is idle talk.”

So strange was the way in which he faded into silence, and so strange
his fixed look when he had ceased to speak, that Darnay felt his own
hand turn cold in the hand that slowly released and dropped it.

“You said something to me,” said Doctor Manette, breaking into a smile.
“What was it you said to me?”

He was at a loss how to answer, until he remembered having spoken of a
condition. Relieved as his mind reverted to that, he answered:

“Your confidence in me ought to be returned with full confidence on my
part. My present name, though but slightly changed from my mother's, is
not, as you will remember, my own. I wish to tell you what that is, and
why I am in England.”

“Stop!” said the Doctor of Beauvais.

“I wish it, that I may the better deserve your confidence, and have no
secret from you.”

“Stop!”

For an instant, the Doctor even had his two hands at his ears; for
another instant, even had his two hands laid on Darnay's lips.

“Tell me when I ask you, not now. If your suit should prosper, if Lucie
should love you, you shall tell me on your marriage morning. Do you
promise?”

“Willingly.

“Give me your hand. She will be home directly, and it is better she
should not see us together to-night. Go! God bless you!”

It was dark when Charles Darnay left him, and it was an hour later and
darker when Lucie came home; she hurried into the room alone--for
Miss Pross had gone straight up-stairs--and was surprised to find his
reading-chair empty.

“My father!” she called to him. “Father dear!”

Nothing was said in answer, but she heard a low hammering sound in his
bedroom. Passing lightly across the intermediate room, she looked in at
his door and came running back frightened, crying to herself, with her
blood all chilled, “What shall I do! What shall I do!”

Her uncertainty lasted but a moment; she hurried back, and tapped at
his door, and softly called to him. The noise ceased at the sound of
her voice, and he presently came out to her, and they walked up and down
together for a long time.

She came down from her bed, to look at him in his sleep that night. He
slept heavily, and his tray of shoemaking tools, and his old unfinished
work, were all as usual.




XI. A Companion Picture


“Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, on that self-same night, or morning, to his
jackal; “mix another bowl of punch; I have something to say to you.”

Sydney had been working double tides that night, and the night before,
and the night before that, and a good many nights in succession, making
a grand clearance among Mr. Stryver's papers before the setting in
of the long vacation. The clearance was effected at last; the Stryver
arrears were handsomely fetched up; everything was got rid of until
November should come with its fogs atmospheric, and fogs legal, and
bring grist to the mill again.

Sydney was none the livelier and none the soberer for so much
application. It had taken a deal of extra wet-towelling to pull him
through the night; a correspondingly extra quantity of wine had preceded
the towelling; and he was in a very damaged condition, as he now pulled
his turban off and threw it into the basin in which he had steeped it at
intervals for the last six hours.

“Are you mixing that other bowl of punch?” said Stryver the portly, with
his hands in his waistband, glancing round from the sofa where he lay on
his back.

“I am.”

“Now, look here! I am going to tell you something that will rather
surprise you, and that perhaps will make you think me not quite as
shrewd as you usually do think me. I intend to marry.”

“_Do_ you?”

“Yes. And not for money. What do you say now?”

“I don't feel disposed to say much. Who is she?”

“Guess.”

“Do I know her?”

“Guess.”

“I am not going to guess, at five o'clock in the morning, with my brains
frying and sputtering in my head. If you want me to guess, you must ask
me to dinner.”

“Well then, I'll tell you,” said Stryver, coming slowly into a sitting
posture. “Sydney, I rather despair of making myself intelligible to you,
because you are such an insensible dog.”

“And you,” returned Sydney, busy concocting the punch, “are such a
sensitive and poetical spirit--”

“Come!” rejoined Stryver, laughing boastfully, “though I don't prefer
any claim to being the soul of Romance (for I hope I know better), still
I am a tenderer sort of fellow than _you_.”

“You are a luckier, if you mean that.”

“I don't mean that. I mean I am a man of more--more--”

“Say gallantry, while you are about it,” suggested Carton.

“Well! I'll say gallantry. My meaning is that I am a man,” said Stryver,
inflating himself at his friend as he made the punch, “who cares more to
be agreeable, who takes more pains to be agreeable, who knows better how
to be agreeable, in a woman's society, than you do.”

“Go on,” said Sydney Carton.

“No; but before I go on,” said Stryver, shaking his head in his bullying
way, “I'll have this out with you. You've been at Doctor Manette's house
as much as I have, or more than I have. Why, I have been ashamed of your
moroseness there! Your manners have been of that silent and sullen and
hangdog kind, that, upon my life and soul, I have been ashamed of you,
Sydney!”

“It should be very beneficial to a man in your practice at the bar, to
be ashamed of anything,” returned Sydney; “you ought to be much obliged
to me.”

“You shall not get off in that way,” rejoined Stryver, shouldering the
rejoinder at him; “no, Sydney, it's my duty to tell you--and I tell you
to your face to do you good--that you are a devilish ill-conditioned
fellow in that sort of society. You are a disagreeable fellow.”

Sydney drank a bumper of the punch he had made, and laughed.

“Look at me!” said Stryver, squaring himself; “I have less need to make
myself agreeable than you have, being more independent in circumstances.
Why do I do it?”

“I never saw you do it yet,” muttered Carton.

“I do it because it's politic; I do it on principle. And look at me! I
get on.”

“You don't get on with your account of your matrimonial intentions,”
 answered Carton, with a careless air; “I wish you would keep to that. As
to me--will you never understand that I am incorrigible?”

He asked the question with some appearance of scorn.

“You have no business to be incorrigible,” was his friend's answer,
delivered in no very soothing tone.

“I have no business to be, at all, that I know of,” said Sydney Carton.
“Who is the lady?”

“Now, don't let my announcement of the name make you uncomfortable,
Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, preparing him with ostentatious friendliness
for the disclosure he was about to make, “because I know you don't mean
half you say; and if you meant it all, it would be of no importance. I
make this little preface, because you once mentioned the young lady to
me in slighting terms.”

“I did?”

“Certainly; and in these chambers.”

Sydney Carton looked at his punch and looked at his complacent friend;
drank his punch and looked at his complacent friend.

“You made mention of the young lady as a golden-haired doll. The young
lady is Miss Manette. If you had been a fellow of any sensitiveness or
delicacy of feeling in that kind of way, Sydney, I might have been a
little resentful of your employing such a designation; but you are not.
You want that sense altogether; therefore I am no more annoyed when I
think of the expression, than I should be annoyed by a man's opinion of
a picture of mine, who had no eye for pictures: or of a piece of music
of mine, who had no ear for music.”

Sydney Carton drank the punch at a great rate; drank it by bumpers,
looking at his friend.

“Now you know all about it, Syd,” said Mr. Stryver. “I don't care about
fortune: she is a charming creature, and I have made up my mind to
please myself: on the whole, I think I can afford to please myself. She
will have in me a man already pretty well off, and a rapidly rising man,
and a man of some distinction: it is a piece of good fortune for her,
but she is worthy of good fortune. Are you astonished?”

Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, “Why should I be
astonished?”

“You approve?”

Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, “Why should I not approve?”

“Well!” said his friend Stryver, “you take it more easily than I fancied
you would, and are less mercenary on my behalf than I thought you would
be; though, to be sure, you know well enough by this time that your
ancient chum is a man of a pretty strong will. Yes, Sydney, I have had
enough of this style of life, with no other as a change from it; I
feel that it is a pleasant thing for a man to have a home when he feels
inclined to go to it (when he doesn't, he can stay away), and I feel
that Miss Manette will tell well in any station, and will always do me
credit. So I have made up my mind. And now, Sydney, old boy, I want to
say a word to _you_ about _your_ prospects. You are in a bad way, you
know; you really are in a bad way. You don't know the value of money,
you live hard, you'll knock up one of these days, and be ill and poor;
you really ought to think about a nurse.”

The prosperous patronage with which he said it, made him look twice as
big as he was, and four times as offensive.

“Now, let me recommend you,” pursued Stryver, “to look it in the face.
I have looked it in the face, in my different way; look it in the face,
you, in your different way. Marry. Provide somebody to take care of
you. Never mind your having no enjoyment of women's society, nor
understanding of it, nor tact for it. Find out somebody. Find out some
respectable woman with a little property--somebody in the landlady way,
or lodging-letting way--and marry her, against a rainy day. That's the
kind of thing for _you_. Now think of it, Sydney.”

“I'll think of it,” said Sydney.




XII. The Fellow of Delicacy


Mr. Stryver having made up his mind to that magnanimous bestowal of good
fortune on the Doctor's daughter, resolved to make her happiness known
to her before he left town for the Long Vacation. After some mental
debating of the point, he came to the conclusion that it would be as
well to get all the preliminaries done with, and they could then arrange
at their leisure whether he should give her his hand a week or two
before Michaelmas Term, or in the little Christmas vacation between it
and Hilary.

As to the strength of his case, he had not a doubt about it, but clearly
saw his way to the verdict. Argued with the jury on substantial worldly
grounds--the only grounds ever worth taking into account--it was a
plain case, and had not a weak spot in it. He called himself for the
plaintiff, there was no getting over his evidence, the counsel for
the defendant threw up his brief, and the jury did not even turn to
consider. After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer
case could be.

Accordingly, Mr. Stryver inaugurated the Long Vacation with a formal
proposal to take Miss Manette to Vauxhall Gardens; that failing, to
Ranelagh; that unaccountably failing too, it behoved him to present
himself in Soho, and there declare his noble mind.

Towards Soho, therefore, Mr. Stryver shouldered his way from the Temple,
while the bloom of the Long Vacation's infancy was still upon it.
Anybody who had seen him projecting himself into Soho while he was yet
on Saint Dunstan's side of Temple Bar, bursting in his full-blown way
along the pavement, to the jostlement of all weaker people, might have
seen how safe and strong he was.

His way taking him past Tellson's, and he both banking at Tellson's and
knowing Mr. Lorry as the intimate friend of the Manettes, it entered Mr.
Stryver's mind to enter the bank, and reveal to Mr. Lorry the brightness
of the Soho horizon. So, he pushed open the door with the weak rattle
in its throat, stumbled down the two steps, got past the two ancient
cashiers, and shouldered himself into the musty back closet where Mr.
Lorry sat at great books ruled for figures, with perpendicular iron
bars to his window as if that were ruled for figures too, and everything
under the clouds were a sum.

“Halloa!” said Mr. Stryver. “How do you do? I hope you are well!”

It was Stryver's grand peculiarity that he always seemed too big for any
place, or space. He was so much too big for Tellson's, that old clerks
in distant corners looked up with looks of remonstrance, as though he
squeezed them against the wall. The House itself, magnificently reading
the paper quite in the far-off perspective, lowered displeased, as if
the Stryver head had been butted into its responsible waistcoat.

The discreet Mr. Lorry said, in a sample tone of the voice he would
recommend under the circumstances, “How do you do, Mr. Stryver? How do
you do, sir?” and shook hands. There was a peculiarity in his manner
of shaking hands, always to be seen in any clerk at Tellson's who shook
hands with a customer when the House pervaded the air. He shook in a
self-abnegating way, as one who shook for Tellson and Co.

“Can I do anything for you, Mr. Stryver?” asked Mr. Lorry, in his
business character.

“Why, no, thank you; this is a private visit to yourself, Mr. Lorry; I
have come for a private word.”

“Oh indeed!” said Mr. Lorry, bending down his ear, while his eye strayed
to the House afar off.

“I am going,” said Mr. Stryver, leaning his arms confidentially on the
desk: whereupon, although it was a large double one, there appeared to
be not half desk enough for him: “I am going to make an offer of myself
in marriage to your agreeable little friend, Miss Manette, Mr. Lorry.”

“Oh dear me!” cried Mr. Lorry, rubbing his chin, and looking at his
visitor dubiously.

“Oh dear me, sir?” repeated Stryver, drawing back. “Oh dear you, sir?
What may your meaning be, Mr. Lorry?”

“My meaning,” answered the man of business, “is, of course, friendly and
appreciative, and that it does you the greatest credit, and--in short,
my meaning is everything you could desire. But--really, you know, Mr.
Stryver--” Mr. Lorry paused, and shook his head at him in the oddest
manner, as if he were compelled against his will to add, internally,
“you know there really is so much too much of you!”

“Well!” said Stryver, slapping the desk with his contentious hand,
opening his eyes wider, and taking a long breath, “if I understand you,
Mr. Lorry, I'll be hanged!”

Mr. Lorry adjusted his little wig at both ears as a means towards that
end, and bit the feather of a pen.

“D--n it all, sir!” said Stryver, staring at him, “am I not eligible?”

“Oh dear yes! Yes. Oh yes, you're eligible!” said Mr. Lorry. “If you say
eligible, you are eligible.”

“Am I not prosperous?” asked Stryver.

“Oh! if you come to prosperous, you are prosperous,” said Mr. Lorry.

“And advancing?”

“If you come to advancing you know,” said Mr. Lorry, delighted to be
able to make another admission, “nobody can doubt that.”

“Then what on earth is your meaning, Mr. Lorry?” demanded Stryver,
perceptibly crestfallen.

“Well! I--Were you going there now?” asked Mr. Lorry.

“Straight!” said Stryver, with a plump of his fist on the desk.

“Then I think I wouldn't, if I was you.”

“Why?” said Stryver. “Now, I'll put you in a corner,” forensically
shaking a forefinger at him. “You are a man of business and bound to
have a reason. State your reason. Why wouldn't you go?”

“Because,” said Mr. Lorry, “I wouldn't go on such an object without
having some cause to believe that I should succeed.”

“D--n _me_!” cried Stryver, “but this beats everything.”

Mr. Lorry glanced at the distant House, and glanced at the angry
Stryver.

“Here's a man of business--a man of years--a man of experience--_in_
a Bank,” said Stryver; “and having summed up three leading reasons for
complete success, he says there's no reason at all! Says it with his
head on!” Mr. Stryver remarked upon the peculiarity as if it would have
been infinitely less remarkable if he had said it with his head off.

“When I speak of success, I speak of success with the young lady; and
when I speak of causes and reasons to make success probable, I speak of
causes and reasons that will tell as such with the young lady. The young
lady, my good sir,” said Mr. Lorry, mildly tapping the Stryver arm, “the
young lady. The young lady goes before all.”

“Then you mean to tell me, Mr. Lorry,” said Stryver, squaring his
elbows, “that it is your deliberate opinion that the young lady at
present in question is a mincing Fool?”

“Not exactly so. I mean to tell you, Mr. Stryver,” said Mr. Lorry,
reddening, “that I will hear no disrespectful word of that young lady
from any lips; and that if I knew any man--which I hope I do not--whose
taste was so coarse, and whose temper was so overbearing, that he could
not restrain himself from speaking disrespectfully of that young lady at
this desk, not even Tellson's should prevent my giving him a piece of my
mind.”

The necessity of being angry in a suppressed tone had put Mr. Stryver's
blood-vessels into a dangerous state when it was his turn to be angry;
Mr. Lorry's veins, methodical as their courses could usually be, were in
no better state now it was his turn.

“That is what I mean to tell you, sir,” said Mr. Lorry. “Pray let there
be no mistake about it.”

Mr. Stryver sucked the end of a ruler for a little while, and then stood
hitting a tune out of his teeth with it, which probably gave him the
toothache. He broke the awkward silence by saying:

“This is something new to me, Mr. Lorry. You deliberately advise me not
to go up to Soho and offer myself--_my_self, Stryver of the King's Bench
bar?”

“Do you ask me for my advice, Mr. Stryver?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Very good. Then I give it, and you have repeated it correctly.”

“And all I can say of it is,” laughed Stryver with a vexed laugh, “that
this--ha, ha!--beats everything past, present, and to come.”

“Now understand me,” pursued Mr. Lorry. “As a man of business, I am
not justified in saying anything about this matter, for, as a man of
business, I know nothing of it. But, as an old fellow, who has carried
Miss Manette in his arms, who is the trusted friend of Miss Manette and
of her father too, and who has a great affection for them both, I have
spoken. The confidence is not of my seeking, recollect. Now, you think I
may not be right?”

“Not I!” said Stryver, whistling. “I can't undertake to find third
parties in common sense; I can only find it for myself. I suppose sense
in certain quarters; you suppose mincing bread-and-butter nonsense. It's
new to me, but you are right, I dare say.”

“What I suppose, Mr. Stryver, I claim to characterise for myself--And
understand me, sir,” said Mr. Lorry, quickly flushing again, “I
will not--not even at Tellson's--have it characterised for me by any
gentleman breathing.”

“There! I beg your pardon!” said Stryver.

“Granted. Thank you. Well, Mr. Stryver, I was about to say:--it might be
painful to you to find yourself mistaken, it might be painful to Doctor
Manette to have the task of being explicit with you, it might be very
painful to Miss Manette to have the task of being explicit with you. You
know the terms upon which I have the honour and happiness to stand with
the family. If you please, committing you in no way, representing you
in no way, I will undertake to correct my advice by the exercise of a
little new observation and judgment expressly brought to bear upon
it. If you should then be dissatisfied with it, you can but test its
soundness for yourself; if, on the other hand, you should be satisfied
with it, and it should be what it now is, it may spare all sides what is
best spared. What do you say?”

“How long would you keep me in town?”

“Oh! It is only a question of a few hours. I could go to Soho in the
evening, and come to your chambers afterwards.”

“Then I say yes,” said Stryver: “I won't go up there now, I am not so
hot upon it as that comes to; I say yes, and I shall expect you to look
in to-night. Good morning.”

Then Mr. Stryver turned and burst out of the Bank, causing such a
concussion of air on his passage through, that to stand up against it
bowing behind the two counters, required the utmost remaining strength
of the two ancient clerks. Those venerable and feeble persons were
always seen by the public in the act of bowing, and were popularly
believed, when they had bowed a customer out, still to keep on bowing in
the empty office until they bowed another customer in.

The barrister was keen enough to divine that the banker would not have
gone so far in his expression of opinion on any less solid ground than
moral certainty. Unprepared as he was for the large pill he had to
swallow, he got it down. “And now,” said Mr. Stryver, shaking his
forensic forefinger at the Temple in general, when it was down, “my way
out of this, is, to put you all in the wrong.”

It was a bit of the art of an Old Bailey tactician, in which he found
great relief. “You shall not put me in the wrong, young lady,” said Mr.
Stryver; “I'll do that for you.”

Accordingly, when Mr. Lorry called that night as late as ten o'clock,
Mr. Stryver, among a quantity of books and papers littered out for the
purpose, seemed to have nothing less on his mind than the subject of
the morning. He even showed surprise when he saw Mr. Lorry, and was
altogether in an absent and preoccupied state.

“Well!” said that good-natured emissary, after a full half-hour of
bootless attempts to bring him round to the question. “I have been to
Soho.”

“To Soho?” repeated Mr. Stryver, coldly. “Oh, to be sure! What am I
thinking of!”

“And I have no doubt,” said Mr. Lorry, “that I was right in the
conversation we had. My opinion is confirmed, and I reiterate my
advice.”

“I assure you,” returned Mr. Stryver, in the friendliest way, “that I
am sorry for it on your account, and sorry for it on the poor father's
account. I know this must always be a sore subject with the family; let
us say no more about it.”

“I don't understand you,” said Mr. Lorry.

“I dare say not,” rejoined Stryver, nodding his head in a smoothing and
final way; “no matter, no matter.”

“But it does matter,” Mr. Lorry urged.

“No it doesn't; I assure you it doesn't. Having supposed that there was
sense where there is no sense, and a laudable ambition where there is
not a laudable ambition, I am well out of my mistake, and no harm is
done. Young women have committed similar follies often before, and have
repented them in poverty and obscurity often before. In an unselfish
aspect, I am sorry that the thing is dropped, because it would have been
a bad thing for me in a worldly point of view; in a selfish aspect, I am
glad that the thing has dropped, because it would have been a bad thing
for me in a worldly point of view--it is hardly necessary to say I could
have gained nothing by it. There is no harm at all done. I have not
proposed to the young lady, and, between ourselves, I am by no means
certain, on reflection, that I ever should have committed myself to
that extent. Mr. Lorry, you cannot control the mincing vanities and
giddinesses of empty-headed girls; you must not expect to do it, or you
will always be disappointed. Now, pray say no more about it. I tell you,
I regret it on account of others, but I am satisfied on my own account.
And I am really very much obliged to you for allowing me to sound you,
and for giving me your advice; you know the young lady better than I do;
you were right, it never would have done.”

Mr. Lorry was so taken aback, that he looked quite stupidly at Mr.
Stryver shouldering him towards the door, with an appearance of
showering generosity, forbearance, and goodwill, on his erring head.
“Make the best of it, my dear sir,” said Stryver; “say no more about it;
thank you again for allowing me to sound you; good night!”

Mr. Lorry was out in the night, before he knew where he was. Mr. Stryver
was lying back on his sofa, winking at his ceiling.




XIII. The Fellow of No Delicacy


If Sydney Carton ever shone anywhere, he certainly never shone in the
house of Doctor Manette. He had been there often, during a whole year,
and had always been the same moody and morose lounger there. When he
cared to talk, he talked well; but, the cloud of caring for nothing,
which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely
pierced by the light within him.

And yet he did care something for the streets that environed that house,
and for the senseless stones that made their pavements. Many a night
he vaguely and unhappily wandered there, when wine had brought no
transitory gladness to him; many a dreary daybreak revealed his solitary
figure lingering there, and still lingering there when the first beams
of the sun brought into strong relief, removed beauties of architecture
in spires of churches and lofty buildings, as perhaps the quiet time
brought some sense of better things, else forgotten and unattainable,
into his mind. Of late, the neglected bed in the Temple Court had known
him more scantily than ever; and often when he had thrown himself upon
it no longer than a few minutes, he had got up again, and haunted that
neighbourhood.

On a day in August, when Mr. Stryver (after notifying to his jackal
that “he had thought better of that marrying matter”) had carried his
delicacy into Devonshire, and when the sight and scent of flowers in the
City streets had some waifs of goodness in them for the worst, of health
for the sickliest, and of youth for the oldest, Sydney's feet still trod
those stones. From being irresolute and purposeless, his feet became
animated by an intention, and, in the working out of that intention,
they took him to the Doctor's door.

He was shown up-stairs, and found Lucie at her work, alone. She had
never been quite at her ease with him, and received him with some little
embarrassment as he seated himself near her table. But, looking up at
his face in the interchange of the first few common-places, she observed
a change in it.

“I fear you are not well, Mr. Carton!”

“No. But the life I lead, Miss Manette, is not conducive to health. What
is to be expected of, or by, such profligates?”

“Is it not--forgive me; I have begun the question on my lips--a pity to
live no better life?”

“God knows it is a shame!”

“Then why not change it?”

Looking gently at him again, she was surprised and saddened to see that
there were tears in his eyes. There were tears in his voice too, as he
answered:

“It is too late for that. I shall never be better than I am. I shall
sink lower, and be worse.”

He leaned an elbow on her table, and covered his eyes with his hand. The
table trembled in the silence that followed.

She had never seen him softened, and was much distressed. He knew her to
be so, without looking at her, and said:

“Pray forgive me, Miss Manette. I break down before the knowledge of
what I want to say to you. Will you hear me?”

“If it will do you any good, Mr. Carton, if it would make you happier,
it would make me very glad!”

“God bless you for your sweet compassion!”

He unshaded his face after a little while, and spoke steadily.

“Don't be afraid to hear me. Don't shrink from anything I say. I am like
one who died young. All my life might have been.”

“No, Mr. Carton. I am sure that the best part of it might still be; I am
sure that you might be much, much worthier of yourself.”

“Say of you, Miss Manette, and although I know better--although in the
mystery of my own wretched heart I know better--I shall never forget
it!”

She was pale and trembling. He came to her relief with a fixed despair
of himself which made the interview unlike any other that could have
been holden.

“If it had been possible, Miss Manette, that you could have returned the
love of the man you see before yourself--flung away, wasted, drunken,
poor creature of misuse as you know him to be--he would have been
conscious this day and hour, in spite of his happiness, that he would
bring you to misery, bring you to sorrow and repentance, blight you,
disgrace you, pull you down with him. I know very well that you can have
no tenderness for me; I ask for none; I am even thankful that it cannot
be.”

“Without it, can I not save you, Mr. Carton? Can I not recall
you--forgive me again!--to a better course? Can I in no way repay your
confidence? I know this is a confidence,” she modestly said, after a
little hesitation, and in earnest tears, “I know you would say this to
no one else. Can I turn it to no good account for yourself, Mr. Carton?”

He shook his head.

“To none. No, Miss Manette, to none. If you will hear me through a very
little more, all you can ever do for me is done. I wish you to know that
you have been the last dream of my soul. In my degradation I have not
been so degraded but that the sight of you with your father, and of this
home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had
died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that
I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from
old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I
have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off
sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all
a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down,
but I wish you to know that you inspired it.”

“Will nothing of it remain? O Mr. Carton, think again! Try again!”

“No, Miss Manette; all through it, I have known myself to be quite
undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the
weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me,
heap of ashes that I am, into fire--a fire, however, inseparable in
its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no
service, idly burning away.”

“Since it is my misfortune, Mr. Carton, to have made you more unhappy
than you were before you knew me--”

“Don't say that, Miss Manette, for you would have reclaimed me, if
anything could. You will not be the cause of my becoming worse.”

“Since the state of your mind that you describe, is, at all events,
attributable to some influence of mine--this is what I mean, if I can
make it plain--can I use no influence to serve you? Have I no power for
good, with you, at all?”

“The utmost good that I am capable of now, Miss Manette, I have come
here to realise. Let me carry through the rest of my misdirected life,
the remembrance that I opened my heart to you, last of all the world;
and that there was something left in me at this time which you could
deplore and pity.”

“Which I entreated you to believe, again and again, most fervently, with
all my heart, was capable of better things, Mr. Carton!”

“Entreat me to believe it no more, Miss Manette. I have proved myself,
and I know better. I distress you; I draw fast to an end. Will you let
me believe, when I recall this day, that the last confidence of my life
was reposed in your pure and innocent breast, and that it lies there
alone, and will be shared by no one?”

“If that will be a consolation to you, yes.”

“Not even by the dearest one ever to be known to you?”

“Mr. Carton,” she answered, after an agitated pause, “the secret is
yours, not mine; and I promise to respect it.”

“Thank you. And again, God bless you.”

He put her hand to his lips, and moved towards the door.

“Be under no apprehension, Miss Manette, of my ever resuming this
conversation by so much as a passing word. I will never refer to it
again. If I were dead, that could not be surer than it is henceforth. In
the hour of my death, I shall hold sacred the one good remembrance--and
shall thank and bless you for it--that my last avowal of myself was made
to you, and that my name, and faults, and miseries were gently carried
in your heart. May it otherwise be light and happy!”

He was so unlike what he had ever shown himself to be, and it was so
sad to think how much he had thrown away, and how much he every day kept
down and perverted, that Lucie Manette wept mournfully for him as he
stood looking back at her.

“Be comforted!” he said, “I am not worth such feeling, Miss Manette. An
hour or two hence, and the low companions and low habits that I scorn
but yield to, will render me less worth such tears as those, than any
wretch who creeps along the streets. Be comforted! But, within myself, I
shall always be, towards you, what I am now, though outwardly I shall be
what you have heretofore seen me. The last supplication but one I make
to you, is, that you will believe this of me.”

“I will, Mr. Carton.”

“My last supplication of all, is this; and with it, I will relieve
you of a visitor with whom I well know you have nothing in unison, and
between whom and you there is an impassable space. It is useless to say
it, I know, but it rises out of my soul. For you, and for any dear to
you, I would do anything. If my career were of that better kind that
there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would
embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you. Try to hold
me in your mind, at some quiet times, as ardent and sincere in this one
thing. The time will come, the time will not be long in coming, when new
ties will be formed about you--ties that will bind you yet more tenderly
and strongly to the home you so adorn--the dearest ties that will ever
grace and gladden you. O Miss Manette, when the little picture of a
happy father's face looks up in yours, when you see your own bright
beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is
a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!”

He said, “Farewell!” said a last “God bless you!” and left her.




XIV. The Honest Tradesman


To the eyes of Mr. Jeremiah Cruncher, sitting on his stool in
Fleet-street with his grisly urchin beside him, a vast number and
variety of objects in movement were every day presented. Who could sit
upon anything in Fleet-street during the busy hours of the day, and
not be dazed and deafened by two immense processions, one ever tending
westward with the sun, the other ever tending eastward from the sun,
both ever tending to the plains beyond the range of red and purple where
the sun goes down!

With his straw in his mouth, Mr. Cruncher sat watching the two streams,
like the heathen rustic who has for several centuries been on duty
watching one stream--saving that Jerry had no expectation of their ever
running dry. Nor would it have been an expectation of a hopeful kind,
since a small part of his income was derived from the pilotage of timid
women (mostly of a full habit and past the middle term of life) from
Tellson's side of the tides to the opposite shore. Brief as such
companionship was in every separate instance, Mr. Cruncher never failed
to become so interested in the lady as to express a strong desire to
have the honour of drinking her very good health. And it was from
the gifts bestowed upon him towards the execution of this benevolent
purpose, that he recruited his finances, as just now observed.

Time was, when a poet sat upon a stool in a public place, and mused in
the sight of men. Mr. Cruncher, sitting on a stool in a public place,
but not being a poet, mused as little as possible, and looked about him.

It fell out that he was thus engaged in a season when crowds were
few, and belated women few, and when his affairs in general were so
unprosperous as to awaken a strong suspicion in his breast that Mrs.
Cruncher must have been “flopping” in some pointed manner, when an
unusual concourse pouring down Fleet-street westward, attracted his
attention. Looking that way, Mr. Cruncher made out that some kind of
funeral was coming along, and that there was popular objection to this
funeral, which engendered uproar.

“Young Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, turning to his offspring, “it's a
buryin'.”

“Hooroar, father!” cried Young Jerry.

The young gentleman uttered this exultant sound with mysterious
significance. The elder gentleman took the cry so ill, that he watched
his opportunity, and smote the young gentleman on the ear.

“What d'ye mean? What are you hooroaring at? What do you want to conwey
to your own father, you young Rip? This boy is a getting too many for
_me_!” said Mr. Cruncher, surveying him. “Him and his hooroars! Don't
let me hear no more of you, or you shall feel some more of me. D'ye
hear?”

“I warn't doing no harm,” Young Jerry protested, rubbing his cheek.

“Drop it then,” said Mr. Cruncher; “I won't have none of _your_ no
harms. Get a top of that there seat, and look at the crowd.”

His son obeyed, and the crowd approached; they were bawling and hissing
round a dingy hearse and dingy mourning coach, in which mourning coach
there was only one mourner, dressed in the dingy trappings that were
considered essential to the dignity of the position. The position
appeared by no means to please him, however, with an increasing rabble
surrounding the coach, deriding him, making grimaces at him, and
incessantly groaning and calling out: “Yah! Spies! Tst! Yaha! Spies!”
 with many compliments too numerous and forcible to repeat.

Funerals had at all times a remarkable attraction for Mr. Cruncher; he
always pricked up his senses, and became excited, when a funeral passed
Tellson's. Naturally, therefore, a funeral with this uncommon attendance
excited him greatly, and he asked of the first man who ran against him:

“What is it, brother? What's it about?”

“_I_ don't know,” said the man. “Spies! Yaha! Tst! Spies!”

He asked another man. “Who is it?”

“_I_ don't know,” returned the man, clapping his hands to his mouth
nevertheless, and vociferating in a surprising heat and with the
greatest ardour, “Spies! Yaha! Tst, tst! Spi--ies!”

At length, a person better informed on the merits of the case, tumbled
against him, and from this person he learned that the funeral was the
funeral of one Roger Cly.

“Was he a spy?” asked Mr. Cruncher.

“Old Bailey spy,” returned his informant. “Yaha! Tst! Yah! Old Bailey
Spi--i--ies!”

“Why, to be sure!” exclaimed Jerry, recalling the Trial at which he had
assisted. “I've seen him. Dead, is he?”

“Dead as mutton,” returned the other, “and can't be too dead. Have 'em
out, there! Spies! Pull 'em out, there! Spies!”

The idea was so acceptable in the prevalent absence of any idea,
that the crowd caught it up with eagerness, and loudly repeating the
suggestion to have 'em out, and to pull 'em out, mobbed the two vehicles
so closely that they came to a stop. On the crowd's opening the coach
doors, the one mourner scuffled out by himself and was in their hands
for a moment; but he was so alert, and made such good use of his time,
that in another moment he was scouring away up a bye-street, after
shedding his cloak, hat, long hatband, white pocket-handkerchief, and
other symbolical tears.

These, the people tore to pieces and scattered far and wide with great
enjoyment, while the tradesmen hurriedly shut up their shops; for a
crowd in those times stopped at nothing, and was a monster much dreaded.
They had already got the length of opening the hearse to take the coffin
out, when some brighter genius proposed instead, its being escorted to
its destination amidst general rejoicing. Practical suggestions being
much needed, this suggestion, too, was received with acclamation, and
the coach was immediately filled with eight inside and a dozen out,
while as many people got on the roof of the hearse as could by any
exercise of ingenuity stick upon it. Among the first of these volunteers
was Jerry Cruncher himself, who modestly concealed his spiky head from
the observation of Tellson's, in the further corner of the mourning
coach.

The officiating undertakers made some protest against these changes in
the ceremonies; but, the river being alarmingly near, and several voices
remarking on the efficacy of cold immersion in bringing refractory
members of the profession to reason, the protest was faint and brief.
The remodelled procession started, with a chimney-sweep driving the
hearse--advised by the regular driver, who was perched beside him, under
close inspection, for the purpose--and with a pieman, also attended
by his cabinet minister, driving the mourning coach. A bear-leader, a
popular street character of the time, was impressed as an additional
ornament, before the cavalcade had gone far down the Strand; and his
bear, who was black and very mangy, gave quite an Undertaking air to
that part of the procession in which he walked.

Thus, with beer-drinking, pipe-smoking, song-roaring, and infinite
caricaturing of woe, the disorderly procession went its way, recruiting
at every step, and all the shops shutting up before it. Its destination
was the old church of Saint Pancras, far off in the fields. It got there
in course of time; insisted on pouring into the burial-ground; finally,
accomplished the interment of the deceased Roger Cly in its own way, and
highly to its own satisfaction.

The dead man disposed of, and the crowd being under the necessity of
providing some other entertainment for itself, another brighter
genius (or perhaps the same) conceived the humour of impeaching casual
passers-by, as Old Bailey spies, and wreaking vengeance on them. Chase
was given to some scores of inoffensive persons who had never been near
the Old Bailey in their lives, in the realisation of this fancy, and
they were roughly hustled and maltreated. The transition to the sport of
window-breaking, and thence to the plundering of public-houses, was easy
and natural. At last, after several hours, when sundry summer-houses had
been pulled down, and some area-railings had been torn up, to arm
the more belligerent spirits, a rumour got about that the Guards were
coming. Before this rumour, the crowd gradually melted away, and perhaps
the Guards came, and perhaps they never came, and this was the usual
progress of a mob.

Mr. Cruncher did not assist at the closing sports, but had remained
behind in the churchyard, to confer and condole with the undertakers.
The place had a soothing influence on him. He procured a pipe from a
neighbouring public-house, and smoked it, looking in at the railings and
maturely considering the spot.

“Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, apostrophising himself in his usual way,
“you see that there Cly that day, and you see with your own eyes that he
was a young 'un and a straight made 'un.”

Having smoked his pipe out, and ruminated a little longer, he turned
himself about, that he might appear, before the hour of closing, on his
station at Tellson's. Whether his meditations on mortality had touched
his liver, or whether his general health had been previously at all
amiss, or whether he desired to show a little attention to an eminent
man, is not so much to the purpose, as that he made a short call upon
his medical adviser--a distinguished surgeon--on his way back.

Young Jerry relieved his father with dutiful interest, and reported No
job in his absence. The bank closed, the ancient clerks came out, the
usual watch was set, and Mr. Cruncher and his son went home to tea.

“Now, I tell you where it is!” said Mr. Cruncher to his wife, on
entering. “If, as a honest tradesman, my wenturs goes wrong to-night, I
shall make sure that you've been praying again me, and I shall work you
for it just the same as if I seen you do it.”

The dejected Mrs. Cruncher shook her head.

“Why, you're at it afore my face!” said Mr. Cruncher, with signs of
angry apprehension.

“I am saying nothing.”

“Well, then; don't meditate nothing. You might as well flop as meditate.
You may as well go again me one way as another. Drop it altogether.”

“Yes, Jerry.”

“Yes, Jerry,” repeated Mr. Cruncher sitting down to tea. “Ah! It _is_
yes, Jerry. That's about it. You may say yes, Jerry.”

Mr. Cruncher had no particular meaning in these sulky corroborations,
but made use of them, as people not unfrequently do, to express general
ironical dissatisfaction.

“You and your yes, Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, taking a bite out of his
bread-and-butter, and seeming to help it down with a large invisible
oyster out of his saucer. “Ah! I think so. I believe you.”

“You are going out to-night?” asked his decent wife, when he took
another bite.

“Yes, I am.”

“May I go with you, father?” asked his son, briskly.

“No, you mayn't. I'm a going--as your mother knows--a fishing. That's
where I'm going to. Going a fishing.”

“Your fishing-rod gets rayther rusty; don't it, father?”

“Never you mind.”

“Shall you bring any fish home, father?”

“If I don't, you'll have short commons, to-morrow,” returned that
gentleman, shaking his head; “that's questions enough for you; I ain't a
going out, till you've been long abed.”

He devoted himself during the remainder of the evening to keeping a
most vigilant watch on Mrs. Cruncher, and sullenly holding her in
conversation that she might be prevented from meditating any petitions
to his disadvantage. With this view, he urged his son to hold her in
conversation also, and led the unfortunate woman a hard life by dwelling
on any causes of complaint he could bring against her, rather than
he would leave her for a moment to her own reflections. The devoutest
person could have rendered no greater homage to the efficacy of an
honest prayer than he did in this distrust of his wife. It was as if a
professed unbeliever in ghosts should be frightened by a ghost story.

“And mind you!” said Mr. Cruncher. “No games to-morrow! If I, as a
honest tradesman, succeed in providing a jinte of meat or two, none
of your not touching of it, and sticking to bread. If I, as a honest
tradesman, am able to provide a little beer, none of your declaring
on water. When you go to Rome, do as Rome does. Rome will be a ugly
customer to you, if you don't. _I_'m your Rome, you know.”

Then he began grumbling again:

“With your flying into the face of your own wittles and drink! I don't
know how scarce you mayn't make the wittles and drink here, by your
flopping tricks and your unfeeling conduct. Look at your boy: he _is_
your'n, ain't he? He's as thin as a lath. Do you call yourself a mother,
and not know that a mother's first duty is to blow her boy out?”

This touched Young Jerry on a tender place; who adjured his mother to
perform her first duty, and, whatever else she did or neglected, above
all things to lay especial stress on the discharge of that maternal
function so affectingly and delicately indicated by his other parent.

Thus the evening wore away with the Cruncher family, until Young Jerry
was ordered to bed, and his mother, laid under similar injunctions,
obeyed them. Mr. Cruncher beguiled the earlier watches of the night with
solitary pipes, and did not start upon his excursion until nearly one
o'clock. Towards that small and ghostly hour, he rose up from his chair,
took a key out of his pocket, opened a locked cupboard, and brought
forth a sack, a crowbar of convenient size, a rope and chain, and other
fishing tackle of that nature. Disposing these articles about him
in skilful manner, he bestowed a parting defiance on Mrs. Cruncher,
extinguished the light, and went out.

Young Jerry, who had only made a feint of undressing when he went to
bed, was not long after his father. Under cover of the darkness he
followed out of the room, followed down the stairs, followed down the
court, followed out into the streets. He was in no uneasiness concerning
his getting into the house again, for it was full of lodgers, and the
door stood ajar all night.

Impelled by a laudable ambition to study the art and mystery of his
father's honest calling, Young Jerry, keeping as close to house fronts,
walls, and doorways, as his eyes were close to one another, held his
honoured parent in view. The honoured parent steering Northward, had not
gone far, when he was joined by another disciple of Izaak Walton, and
the two trudged on together.

Within half an hour from the first starting, they were beyond the
winking lamps, and the more than winking watchmen, and were out upon a
lonely road. Another fisherman was picked up here--and that so silently,
that if Young Jerry had been superstitious, he might have supposed the
second follower of the gentle craft to have, all of a sudden, split
himself into two.

The three went on, and Young Jerry went on, until the three stopped
under a bank overhanging the road. Upon the top of the bank was a low
brick wall, surmounted by an iron railing. In the shadow of bank and
wall the three turned out of the road, and up a blind lane, of which
the wall--there, risen to some eight or ten feet high--formed one side.
Crouching down in a corner, peeping up the lane, the next object that
Young Jerry saw, was the form of his honoured parent, pretty well
defined against a watery and clouded moon, nimbly scaling an iron gate.
He was soon over, and then the second fisherman got over, and then the
third. They all dropped softly on the ground within the gate, and lay
there a little--listening perhaps. Then, they moved away on their hands
and knees.

It was now Young Jerry's turn to approach the gate: which he did,
holding his breath. Crouching down again in a corner there, and looking
in, he made out the three fishermen creeping through some rank grass!
and all the gravestones in the churchyard--it was a large churchyard
that they were in--looking on like ghosts in white, while the church
tower itself looked on like the ghost of a monstrous giant. They did not
creep far, before they stopped and stood upright. And then they began to
fish.

They fished with a spade, at first. Presently the honoured parent
appeared to be adjusting some instrument like a great corkscrew.
Whatever tools they worked with, they worked hard, until the awful
striking of the church clock so terrified Young Jerry, that he made off,
with his hair as stiff as his father's.

But, his long-cherished desire to know more about these matters, not
only stopped him in his running away, but lured him back again. They
were still fishing perseveringly, when he peeped in at the gate for
the second time; but, now they seemed to have got a bite. There was a
screwing and complaining sound down below, and their bent figures were
strained, as if by a weight. By slow degrees the weight broke away the
earth upon it, and came to the surface. Young Jerry very well knew what
it would be; but, when he saw it, and saw his honoured parent about to
wrench it open, he was so frightened, being new to the sight, that he
made off again, and never stopped until he had run a mile or more.

He would not have stopped then, for anything less necessary than breath,
it being a spectral sort of race that he ran, and one highly desirable
to get to the end of. He had a strong idea that the coffin he had seen
was running after him; and, pictured as hopping on behind him, bolt
upright, upon its narrow end, always on the point of overtaking him
and hopping on at his side--perhaps taking his arm--it was a pursuer to
shun. It was an inconsistent and ubiquitous fiend too, for, while it
was making the whole night behind him dreadful, he darted out into the
roadway to avoid dark alleys, fearful of its coming hopping out of them
like a dropsical boy's kite without tail and wings. It hid in doorways
too, rubbing its horrible shoulders against doors, and drawing them up
to its ears, as if it were laughing. It got into shadows on the road,
and lay cunningly on its back to trip him up. All this time it was
incessantly hopping on behind and gaining on him, so that when the boy
got to his own door he had reason for being half dead. And even then
it would not leave him, but followed him upstairs with a bump on every
stair, scrambled into bed with him, and bumped down, dead and heavy, on
his breast when he fell asleep.

From his oppressed slumber, Young Jerry in his closet was awakened after
daybreak and before sunrise, by the presence of his father in the
family room. Something had gone wrong with him; at least, so Young Jerry
inferred, from the circumstance of his holding Mrs. Cruncher by the
ears, and knocking the back of her head against the head-board of the
bed.

“I told you I would,” said Mr. Cruncher, “and I did.”

“Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!” his wife implored.

“You oppose yourself to the profit of the business,” said Jerry, “and me
and my partners suffer. You was to honour and obey; why the devil don't
you?”

“I try to be a good wife, Jerry,” the poor woman protested, with tears.

“Is it being a good wife to oppose your husband's business? Is it
honouring your husband to dishonour his business? Is it obeying your
husband to disobey him on the wital subject of his business?”

“You hadn't taken to the dreadful business then, Jerry.”

“It's enough for you,” retorted Mr. Cruncher, “to be the wife of a
honest tradesman, and not to occupy your female mind with calculations
when he took to his trade or when he didn't. A honouring and obeying
wife would let his trade alone altogether. Call yourself a religious
woman? If you're a religious woman, give me a irreligious one! You have
no more nat'ral sense of duty than the bed of this here Thames river has
of a pile, and similarly it must be knocked into you.”

The altercation was conducted in a low tone of voice, and terminated in
the honest tradesman's kicking off his clay-soiled boots, and lying down
at his length on the floor. After taking a timid peep at him lying on
his back, with his rusty hands under his head for a pillow, his son lay
down too, and fell asleep again.

There was no fish for breakfast, and not much of anything else. Mr.
Cruncher was out of spirits, and out of temper, and kept an iron pot-lid
by him as a projectile for the correction of Mrs. Cruncher, in case
he should observe any symptoms of her saying Grace. He was brushed
and washed at the usual hour, and set off with his son to pursue his
ostensible calling.

Young Jerry, walking with the stool under his arm at his father's side
along sunny and crowded Fleet-street, was a very different Young Jerry
from him of the previous night, running home through darkness and
solitude from his grim pursuer. His cunning was fresh with the day,
and his qualms were gone with the night--in which particulars it is not
improbable that he had compeers in Fleet-street and the City of London,
that fine morning.

“Father,” said Young Jerry, as they walked along: taking care to keep
at arm's length and to have the stool well between them: “what's a
Resurrection-Man?”

Mr. Cruncher came to a stop on the pavement before he answered, “How
should I know?”

“I thought you knowed everything, father,” said the artless boy.

“Hem! Well,” returned Mr. Cruncher, going on again, and lifting off his
hat to give his spikes free play, “he's a tradesman.”

“What's his goods, father?” asked the brisk Young Jerry.

“His goods,” said Mr. Cruncher, after turning it over in his mind, “is a
branch of Scientific goods.”

“Persons' bodies, ain't it, father?” asked the lively boy.

“I believe it is something of that sort,” said Mr. Cruncher.

“Oh, father, I should so like to be a Resurrection-Man when I'm quite
growed up!”

Mr. Cruncher was soothed, but shook his head in a dubious and moral way.
“It depends upon how you dewelop your talents. Be careful to dewelop
your talents, and never to say no more than you can help to nobody, and
there's no telling at the present time what you may not come to be fit
for.” As Young Jerry, thus encouraged, went on a few yards in advance,
to plant the stool in the shadow of the Bar, Mr. Cruncher added to
himself: “Jerry, you honest tradesman, there's hopes wot that boy will
yet be a blessing to you, and a recompense to you for his mother!”




XV. Knitting


There had been earlier drinking than usual in the wine-shop of Monsieur
Defarge. As early as six o'clock in the morning, sallow faces peeping
through its barred windows had descried other faces within, bending over
measures of wine. Monsieur Defarge sold a very thin wine at the best
of times, but it would seem to have been an unusually thin wine that
he sold at this time. A sour wine, moreover, or a souring, for its
influence on the mood of those who drank it was to make them gloomy. No
vivacious Bacchanalian flame leaped out of the pressed grape of Monsieur
Defarge: but, a smouldering fire that burnt in the dark, lay hidden in
the dregs of it.

This had been the third morning in succession, on which there had been
early drinking at the wine-shop of Monsieur Defarge. It had begun
on Monday, and here was Wednesday come. There had been more of early
brooding than drinking; for, many men had listened and whispered and
slunk about there from the time of the opening of the door, who could
not have laid a piece of money on the counter to save their souls. These
were to the full as interested in the place, however, as if they could
have commanded whole barrels of wine; and they glided from seat to seat,
and from corner to corner, swallowing talk in lieu of drink, with greedy
looks.

Notwithstanding an unusual flow of company, the master of the wine-shop
was not visible. He was not missed; for, nobody who crossed the
threshold looked for him, nobody asked for him, nobody wondered to see
only Madame Defarge in her seat, presiding over the distribution of
wine, with a bowl of battered small coins before her, as much defaced
and beaten out of their original impress as the small coinage of
humanity from whose ragged pockets they had come.

A suspended interest and a prevalent absence of mind, were perhaps
observed by the spies who looked in at the wine-shop, as they looked in
at every place, high and low, from the king's palace to the criminal's
gaol. Games at cards languished, players at dominoes musingly built
towers with them, drinkers drew figures on the tables with spilt drops
of wine, Madame Defarge herself picked out the pattern on her sleeve
with her toothpick, and saw and heard something inaudible and invisible
a long way off.

Thus, Saint Antoine in this vinous feature of his, until midday. It was
high noontide, when two dusty men passed through his streets and under
his swinging lamps: of whom, one was Monsieur Defarge: the other a
mender of roads in a blue cap. All adust and athirst, the two entered
the wine-shop. Their arrival had lighted a kind of fire in the breast
of Saint Antoine, fast spreading as they came along, which stirred and
flickered in flames of faces at most doors and windows. Yet, no one had
followed them, and no man spoke when they entered the wine-shop, though
the eyes of every man there were turned upon them.

“Good day, gentlemen!” said Monsieur Defarge.

It may have been a signal for loosening the general tongue. It elicited
an answering chorus of “Good day!”

“It is bad weather, gentlemen,” said Defarge, shaking his head.

Upon which, every man looked at his neighbour, and then all cast down
their eyes and sat silent. Except one man, who got up and went out.

“My wife,” said Defarge aloud, addressing Madame Defarge: “I have
travelled certain leagues with this good mender of roads, called
Jacques. I met him--by accident--a day and half's journey out of Paris.
He is a good child, this mender of roads, called Jacques. Give him to
drink, my wife!”

A second man got up and went out. Madame Defarge set wine before the
mender of roads called Jacques, who doffed his blue cap to the company,
and drank. In the breast of his blouse he carried some coarse dark
bread; he ate of this between whiles, and sat munching and drinking near
Madame Defarge's counter. A third man got up and went out.

Defarge refreshed himself with a draught of wine--but, he took less
than was given to the stranger, as being himself a man to whom it was no
rarity--and stood waiting until the countryman had made his breakfast.
He looked at no one present, and no one now looked at him; not even
Madame Defarge, who had taken up her knitting, and was at work.

“Have you finished your repast, friend?” he asked, in due season.

“Yes, thank you.”

“Come, then! You shall see the apartment that I told you you could
occupy. It will suit you to a marvel.”

Out of the wine-shop into the street, out of the street into a
courtyard, out of the courtyard up a steep staircase, out of the
staircase into a garret--formerly the garret where a white-haired man
sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes.

No white-haired man was there now; but, the three men were there who had
gone out of the wine-shop singly. And between them and the white-haired
man afar off, was the one small link, that they had once looked in at
him through the chinks in the wall.

Defarge closed the door carefully, and spoke in a subdued voice:

“Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques Three! This is the witness
encountered by appointment, by me, Jacques Four. He will tell you all.
Speak, Jacques Five!”

The mender of roads, blue cap in hand, wiped his swarthy forehead with
it, and said, “Where shall I commence, monsieur?”

“Commence,” was Monsieur Defarge's not unreasonable reply, “at the
commencement.”

“I saw him then, messieurs,” began the mender of roads, “a year ago this
running summer, underneath the carriage of the Marquis, hanging by the
chain. Behold the manner of it. I leaving my work on the road, the sun
going to bed, the carriage of the Marquis slowly ascending the hill, he
hanging by the chain--like this.”

Again the mender of roads went through the whole performance; in which
he ought to have been perfect by that time, seeing that it had been
the infallible resource and indispensable entertainment of his village
during a whole year.

Jacques One struck in, and asked if he had ever seen the man before?

“Never,” answered the mender of roads, recovering his perpendicular.

Jacques Three demanded how he afterwards recognised him then?

“By his tall figure,” said the mender of roads, softly, and with his
finger at his nose. “When Monsieur the Marquis demands that evening,
'Say, what is he like?' I make response, 'Tall as a spectre.'”

“You should have said, short as a dwarf,” returned Jacques Two.

“But what did I know? The deed was not then accomplished, neither did he
confide in me. Observe! Under those circumstances even, I do not
offer my testimony. Monsieur the Marquis indicates me with his finger,
standing near our little fountain, and says, 'To me! Bring that rascal!'
My faith, messieurs, I offer nothing.”

“He is right there, Jacques,” murmured Defarge, to him who had
interrupted. “Go on!”

“Good!” said the mender of roads, with an air of mystery. “The tall man
is lost, and he is sought--how many months? Nine, ten, eleven?”

“No matter, the number,” said Defarge. “He is well hidden, but at last
he is unluckily found. Go on!”

“I am again at work upon the hill-side, and the sun is again about to
go to bed. I am collecting my tools to descend to my cottage down in the
village below, where it is already dark, when I raise my eyes, and see
coming over the hill six soldiers. In the midst of them is a tall man
with his arms bound--tied to his sides--like this!”

With the aid of his indispensable cap, he represented a man with his
elbows bound fast at his hips, with cords that were knotted behind him.

“I stand aside, messieurs, by my heap of stones, to see the soldiers
and their prisoner pass (for it is a solitary road, that, where any
spectacle is well worth looking at), and at first, as they approach, I
see no more than that they are six soldiers with a tall man bound, and
that they are almost black to my sight--except on the side of the sun
going to bed, where they have a red edge, messieurs. Also, I see that
their long shadows are on the hollow ridge on the opposite side of the
road, and are on the hill above it, and are like the shadows of giants.
Also, I see that they are covered with dust, and that the dust moves
with them as they come, tramp, tramp! But when they advance quite near
to me, I recognise the tall man, and he recognises me. Ah, but he would
be well content to precipitate himself over the hill-side once again, as
on the evening when he and I first encountered, close to the same spot!”

He described it as if he were there, and it was evident that he saw it
vividly; perhaps he had not seen much in his life.

“I do not show the soldiers that I recognise the tall man; he does not
show the soldiers that he recognises me; we do it, and we know it, with
our eyes. 'Come on!' says the chief of that company, pointing to the
village, 'bring him fast to his tomb!' and they bring him faster. I
follow. His arms are swelled because of being bound so tight, his wooden
shoes are large and clumsy, and he is lame. Because he is lame, and
consequently slow, they drive him with their guns--like this!”

He imitated the action of a man's being impelled forward by the
butt-ends of muskets.

“As they descend the hill like madmen running a race, he falls. They
laugh and pick him up again. His face is bleeding and covered with dust,
but he cannot touch it; thereupon they laugh again. They bring him into
the village; all the village runs to look; they take him past the mill,
and up to the prison; all the village sees the prison gate open in the
darkness of the night, and swallow him--like this!”

He opened his mouth as wide as he could, and shut it with a sounding
snap of his teeth. Observant of his unwillingness to mar the effect by
opening it again, Defarge said, “Go on, Jacques.”

“All the village,” pursued the mender of roads, on tiptoe and in a low
voice, “withdraws; all the village whispers by the fountain; all the
village sleeps; all the village dreams of that unhappy one, within the
locks and bars of the prison on the crag, and never to come out of it,
except to perish. In the morning, with my tools upon my shoulder, eating
my morsel of black bread as I go, I make a circuit by the prison, on
my way to my work. There I see him, high up, behind the bars of a lofty
iron cage, bloody and dusty as last night, looking through. He has no
hand free, to wave to me; I dare not call to him; he regards me like a
dead man.”

Defarge and the three glanced darkly at one another. The looks of all
of them were dark, repressed, and revengeful, as they listened to the
countryman's story; the manner of all of them, while it was secret, was
authoritative too. They had the air of a rough tribunal; Jacques One
and Two sitting on the old pallet-bed, each with his chin resting on
his hand, and his eyes intent on the road-mender; Jacques Three, equally
intent, on one knee behind them, with his agitated hand always gliding
over the network of fine nerves about his mouth and nose; Defarge
standing between them and the narrator, whom he had stationed in the
light of the window, by turns looking from him to them, and from them to
him.

“Go on, Jacques,” said Defarge.

“He remains up there in his iron cage some days. The village looks
at him by stealth, for it is afraid. But it always looks up, from a
distance, at the prison on the crag; and in the evening, when the work
of the day is achieved and it assembles to gossip at the fountain, all
faces are turned towards the prison. Formerly, they were turned towards
the posting-house; now, they are turned towards the prison. They
whisper at the fountain, that although condemned to death he will not be
executed; they say that petitions have been presented in Paris, showing
that he was enraged and made mad by the death of his child; they say
that a petition has been presented to the King himself. What do I know?
It is possible. Perhaps yes, perhaps no.”

“Listen then, Jacques,” Number One of that name sternly interposed.
“Know that a petition was presented to the King and Queen. All here,
yourself excepted, saw the King take it, in his carriage in the street,
sitting beside the Queen. It is Defarge whom you see here, who, at the
hazard of his life, darted out before the horses, with the petition in
his hand.”

“And once again listen, Jacques!” said the kneeling Number Three:
his fingers ever wandering over and over those fine nerves, with a
strikingly greedy air, as if he hungered for something--that was neither
food nor drink; “the guard, horse and foot, surrounded the petitioner,
and struck him blows. You hear?”

“I hear, messieurs.”

“Go on then,” said Defarge.

“Again; on the other hand, they whisper at the fountain,” resumed the
countryman, “that he is brought down into our country to be executed on
the spot, and that he will very certainly be executed. They even whisper
that because he has slain Monseigneur, and because Monseigneur was the
father of his tenants--serfs--what you will--he will be executed as a
parricide. One old man says at the fountain, that his right hand, armed
with the knife, will be burnt off before his face; that, into wounds
which will be made in his arms, his breast, and his legs, there will be
poured boiling oil, melted lead, hot resin, wax, and sulphur; finally,
that he will be torn limb from limb by four strong horses. That old man
says, all this was actually done to a prisoner who made an attempt on
the life of the late King, Louis Fifteen. But how do I know if he lies?
I am not a scholar.”

“Listen once again then, Jacques!” said the man with the restless hand
and the craving air. “The name of that prisoner was Damiens, and it was
all done in open day, in the open streets of this city of Paris; and
nothing was more noticed in the vast concourse that saw it done, than
the crowd of ladies of quality and fashion, who were full of eager
attention to the last--to the last, Jacques, prolonged until nightfall,
when he had lost two legs and an arm, and still breathed! And it was
done--why, how old are you?”

“Thirty-five,” said the mender of roads, who looked sixty.

“It was done when you were more than ten years old; you might have seen
it.”

“Enough!” said Defarge, with grim impatience. “Long live the Devil! Go
on.”

“Well! Some whisper this, some whisper that; they speak of nothing else;
even the fountain appears to fall to that tune. At length, on Sunday
night when all the village is asleep, come soldiers, winding down from
the prison, and their guns ring on the stones of the little street.
Workmen dig, workmen hammer, soldiers laugh and sing; in the morning, by
the fountain, there is raised a gallows forty feet high, poisoning the
water.”

The mender of roads looked _through_ rather than _at_ the low ceiling,
and pointed as if he saw the gallows somewhere in the sky.

“All work is stopped, all assemble there, nobody leads the cows out,
the cows are there with the rest. At midday, the roll of drums. Soldiers
have marched into the prison in the night, and he is in the midst
of many soldiers. He is bound as before, and in his mouth there is
a gag--tied so, with a tight string, making him look almost as if he
laughed.” He suggested it, by creasing his face with his two thumbs,
from the corners of his mouth to his ears. “On the top of the gallows is
fixed the knife, blade upwards, with its point in the air. He is hanged
there forty feet high--and is left hanging, poisoning the water.”

They looked at one another, as he used his blue cap to wipe his face,
on which the perspiration had started afresh while he recalled the
spectacle.

“It is frightful, messieurs. How can the women and the children draw
water! Who can gossip of an evening, under that shadow! Under it, have
I said? When I left the village, Monday evening as the sun was going to
bed, and looked back from the hill, the shadow struck across the church,
across the mill, across the prison--seemed to strike across the earth,
messieurs, to where the sky rests upon it!”

The hungry man gnawed one of his fingers as he looked at the other
three, and his finger quivered with the craving that was on him.

“That's all, messieurs. I left at sunset (as I had been warned to do),
and I walked on, that night and half next day, until I met (as I was
warned I should) this comrade. With him, I came on, now riding and now
walking, through the rest of yesterday and through last night. And here
you see me!”

After a gloomy silence, the first Jacques said, “Good! You have acted
and recounted faithfully. Will you wait for us a little, outside the
door?”

“Very willingly,” said the mender of roads. Whom Defarge escorted to the
top of the stairs, and, leaving seated there, returned.

The three had risen, and their heads were together when he came back to
the garret.

“How say you, Jacques?” demanded Number One. “To be registered?”

“To be registered, as doomed to destruction,” returned Defarge.

“Magnificent!” croaked the man with the craving.

“The chateau, and all the race?” inquired the first.

“The chateau and all the race,” returned Defarge. “Extermination.”

The hungry man repeated, in a rapturous croak, “Magnificent!” and began
gnawing another finger.

“Are you sure,” asked Jacques Two, of Defarge, “that no embarrassment
can arise from our manner of keeping the register? Without doubt it is
safe, for no one beyond ourselves can decipher it; but shall we always
be able to decipher it--or, I ought to say, will she?”

“Jacques,” returned Defarge, drawing himself up, “if madame my wife
undertook to keep the register in her memory alone, she would not lose
a word of it--not a syllable of it. Knitted, in her own stitches and her
own symbols, it will always be as plain to her as the sun. Confide in
Madame Defarge. It would be easier for the weakest poltroon that lives,
to erase himself from existence, than to erase one letter of his name or
crimes from the knitted register of Madame Defarge.”

There was a murmur of confidence and approval, and then the man who
hungered, asked: “Is this rustic to be sent back soon? I hope so. He is
very simple; is he not a little dangerous?”

“He knows nothing,” said Defarge; “at least nothing more than would
easily elevate himself to a gallows of the same height. I charge myself
with him; let him remain with me; I will take care of him, and set him
on his road. He wishes to see the fine world--the King, the Queen, and
Court; let him see them on Sunday.”

“What?” exclaimed the hungry man, staring. “Is it a good sign, that he
wishes to see Royalty and Nobility?”

“Jacques,” said Defarge; “judiciously show a cat milk, if you wish her
to thirst for it. Judiciously show a dog his natural prey, if you wish
him to bring it down one day.”

Nothing more was said, and the mender of roads, being found already
dozing on the topmost stair, was advised to lay himself down on the
pallet-bed and take some rest. He needed no persuasion, and was soon
asleep.

Worse quarters than Defarge's wine-shop, could easily have been found
in Paris for a provincial slave of that degree. Saving for a mysterious
dread of madame by which he was constantly haunted, his life was very
new and agreeable. But, madame sat all day at her counter, so expressly
unconscious of him, and so particularly determined not to perceive that
his being there had any connection with anything below the surface, that
he shook in his wooden shoes whenever his eye lighted on her. For, he
contended with himself that it was impossible to foresee what that lady
might pretend next; and he felt assured that if she should take it
into her brightly ornamented head to pretend that she had seen him do a
murder and afterwards flay the victim, she would infallibly go through
with it until the play was played out.

Therefore, when Sunday came, the mender of roads was not enchanted
(though he said he was) to find that madame was to accompany monsieur
and himself to Versailles. It was additionally disconcerting to have
madame knitting all the way there, in a public conveyance; it was
additionally disconcerting yet, to have madame in the crowd in the
afternoon, still with her knitting in her hands as the crowd waited to
see the carriage of the King and Queen.

“You work hard, madame,” said a man near her.

“Yes,” answered Madame Defarge; “I have a good deal to do.”

“What do you make, madame?”

“Many things.”

“For instance--”

“For instance,” returned Madame Defarge, composedly, “shrouds.”

The man moved a little further away, as soon as he could, and the mender
of roads fanned himself with his blue cap: feeling it mightily close
and oppressive. If he needed a King and Queen to restore him, he was
fortunate in having his remedy at hand; for, soon the large-faced King
and the fair-faced Queen came in their golden coach, attended by the
shining Bull's Eye of their Court, a glittering multitude of laughing
ladies and fine lords; and in jewels and silks and powder and splendour
and elegantly spurning figures and handsomely disdainful faces of both
sexes, the mender of roads bathed himself, so much to his temporary
intoxication, that he cried Long live the King, Long live the Queen,
Long live everybody and everything! as if he had never heard of
ubiquitous Jacques in his time. Then, there were gardens, courtyards,
terraces, fountains, green banks, more King and Queen, more Bull's Eye,
more lords and ladies, more Long live they all! until he absolutely wept
with sentiment. During the whole of this scene, which lasted some three
hours, he had plenty of shouting and weeping and sentimental company,
and throughout Defarge held him by the collar, as if to restrain him
from flying at the objects of his brief devotion and tearing them to
pieces.

“Bravo!” said Defarge, clapping him on the back when it was over, like a
patron; “you are a good boy!”

The mender of roads was now coming to himself, and was mistrustful of
having made a mistake in his late demonstrations; but no.

“You are the fellow we want,” said Defarge, in his ear; “you make
these fools believe that it will last for ever. Then, they are the more
insolent, and it is the nearer ended.”

“Hey!” cried the mender of roads, reflectively; “that's true.”

“These fools know nothing. While they despise your breath, and would
stop it for ever and ever, in you or in a hundred like you rather than
in one of their own horses or dogs, they only know what your breath
tells them. Let it deceive them, then, a little longer; it cannot
deceive them too much.”

Madame Defarge looked superciliously at the client, and nodded in
confirmation.

“As to you,” said she, “you would shout and shed tears for anything, if
it made a show and a noise. Say! Would you not?”

“Truly, madame, I think so. For the moment.”

“If you were shown a great heap of dolls, and were set upon them to
pluck them to pieces and despoil them for your own advantage, you would
pick out the richest and gayest. Say! Would you not?”

“Truly yes, madame.”

“Yes. And if you were shown a flock of birds, unable to fly, and were
set upon them to strip them of their feathers for your own advantage,
you would set upon the birds of the finest feathers; would you not?”

“It is true, madame.”

“You have seen both dolls and birds to-day,” said Madame Defarge, with
a wave of her hand towards the place where they had last been apparent;
“now, go home!”




XVI. Still Knitting


Madame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned amicably to the
bosom of Saint Antoine, while a speck in a blue cap toiled through the
darkness, and through the dust, and down the weary miles of avenue by
the wayside, slowly tending towards that point of the compass where
the chateau of Monsieur the Marquis, now in his grave, listened to
the whispering trees. Such ample leisure had the stone faces, now,
for listening to the trees and to the fountain, that the few village
scarecrows who, in their quest for herbs to eat and fragments of dead
stick to burn, strayed within sight of the great stone courtyard and
terrace staircase, had it borne in upon their starved fancy that
the expression of the faces was altered. A rumour just lived in the
village--had a faint and bare existence there, as its people had--that
when the knife struck home, the faces changed, from faces of pride to
faces of anger and pain; also, that when that dangling figure was hauled
up forty feet above the fountain, they changed again, and bore a cruel
look of being avenged, which they would henceforth bear for ever. In the
stone face over the great window of the bed-chamber where the murder
was done, two fine dints were pointed out in the sculptured nose, which
everybody recognised, and which nobody had seen of old; and on the
scarce occasions when two or three ragged peasants emerged from the
crowd to take a hurried peep at Monsieur the Marquis petrified, a
skinny finger would not have pointed to it for a minute, before they all
started away among the moss and leaves, like the more fortunate hares
who could find a living there.

Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the
stone floor, and the pure water in the village well--thousands of acres
of land--a whole province of France--all France itself--lay under the
night sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line. So does a whole
world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling
star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse
the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in
the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every
vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.

The Defarges, husband and wife, came lumbering under the starlight,
in their public vehicle, to that gate of Paris whereunto their
journey naturally tended. There was the usual stoppage at the barrier
guardhouse, and the usual lanterns came glancing forth for the usual
examination and inquiry. Monsieur Defarge alighted; knowing one or two
of the soldiery there, and one of the police. The latter he was intimate
with, and affectionately embraced.

When Saint Antoine had again enfolded the Defarges in his dusky wings,
and they, having finally alighted near the Saint's boundaries, were
picking their way on foot through the black mud and offal of his
streets, Madame Defarge spoke to her husband:

“Say then, my friend; what did Jacques of the police tell thee?”

“Very little to-night, but all he knows. There is another spy
commissioned for our quarter. There may be many more, for all that he
can say, but he knows of one.”

“Eh well!” said Madame Defarge, raising her eyebrows with a cool
business air. “It is necessary to register him. How do they call that
man?”

“He is English.”

“So much the better. His name?”

“Barsad,” said Defarge, making it French by pronunciation. But, he had
been so careful to get it accurately, that he then spelt it with perfect
correctness.

“Barsad,” repeated madame. “Good. Christian name?”

“John.”

“John Barsad,” repeated madame, after murmuring it once to herself.
“Good. His appearance; is it known?”

“Age, about forty years; height, about five feet nine; black hair;
complexion dark; generally, rather handsome visage; eyes dark, face
thin, long, and sallow; nose aquiline, but not straight, having a
peculiar inclination towards the left cheek; expression, therefore,
sinister.”

“Eh my faith. It is a portrait!” said madame, laughing. “He shall be
registered to-morrow.”

They turned into the wine-shop, which was closed (for it was midnight),
and where Madame Defarge immediately took her post at her desk, counted
the small moneys that had been taken during her absence, examined the
stock, went through the entries in the book, made other entries of
her own, checked the serving man in every possible way, and finally
dismissed him to bed. Then she turned out the contents of the bowl
of money for the second time, and began knotting them up in her
handkerchief, in a chain of separate knots, for safe keeping through the
night. All this while, Defarge, with his pipe in his mouth, walked
up and down, complacently admiring, but never interfering; in which
condition, indeed, as to the business and his domestic affairs, he
walked up and down through life.

The night was hot, and the shop, close shut and surrounded by so foul a
neighbourhood, was ill-smelling. Monsieur Defarge's olfactory sense was
by no means delicate, but the stock of wine smelt much stronger than
it ever tasted, and so did the stock of rum and brandy and aniseed. He
whiffed the compound of scents away, as he put down his smoked-out pipe.

“You are fatigued,” said madame, raising her glance as she knotted the
money. “There are only the usual odours.”

“I am a little tired,” her husband acknowledged.

“You are a little depressed, too,” said madame, whose quick eyes had
never been so intent on the accounts, but they had had a ray or two for
him. “Oh, the men, the men!”

“But my dear!” began Defarge.

“But my dear!” repeated madame, nodding firmly; “but my dear! You are
faint of heart to-night, my dear!”

“Well, then,” said Defarge, as if a thought were wrung out of his
breast, “it _is_ a long time.”

“It is a long time,” repeated his wife; “and when is it not a long time?
Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.”

“It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning,” said
Defarge.

“How long,” demanded madame, composedly, “does it take to make and store
the lightning? Tell me.”

Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were something in that
too.

“It does not take a long time,” said madame, “for an earthquake to
swallow a town. Eh well! Tell me how long it takes to prepare the
earthquake?”

“A long time, I suppose,” said Defarge.

“But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces everything
before it. In the meantime, it is always preparing, though it is not
seen or heard. That is your consolation. Keep it.”

She tied a knot with flashing eyes, as if it throttled a foe.

“I tell thee,” said madame, extending her right hand, for emphasis,
“that although it is a long time on the road, it is on the road and
coming. I tell thee it never retreats, and never stops. I tell thee it
is always advancing. Look around and consider the lives of all the world
that we know, consider the faces of all the world that we know, consider
the rage and discontent to which the Jacquerie addresses itself with
more and more of certainty every hour. Can such things last? Bah! I mock
you.”

“My brave wife,” returned Defarge, standing before her with his head
a little bent, and his hands clasped at his back, like a docile and
attentive pupil before his catechist, “I do not question all this. But
it has lasted a long time, and it is possible--you know well, my wife,
it is possible--that it may not come, during our lives.”

“Eh well! How then?” demanded madame, tying another knot, as if there
were another enemy strangled.

“Well!” said Defarge, with a half complaining and half apologetic shrug.
“We shall not see the triumph.”

“We shall have helped it,” returned madame, with her extended hand in
strong action. “Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all
my soul, that we shall see the triumph. But even if not, even if I knew
certainly not, show me the neck of an aristocrat and tyrant, and still I
would--”

Then madame, with her teeth set, tied a very terrible knot indeed.

“Hold!” cried Defarge, reddening a little as if he felt charged with
cowardice; “I too, my dear, will stop at nothing.”

“Yes! But it is your weakness that you sometimes need to see your victim
and your opportunity, to sustain you. Sustain yourself without that.
When the time comes, let loose a tiger and a devil; but wait for the
time with the tiger and the devil chained--not shown--yet always ready.”

Madame enforced the conclusion of this piece of advice by striking her
little counter with her chain of money as if she knocked its brains
out, and then gathering the heavy handkerchief under her arm in a serene
manner, and observing that it was time to go to bed.

Next noontide saw the admirable woman in her usual place in the
wine-shop, knitting away assiduously. A rose lay beside her, and if she
now and then glanced at the flower, it was with no infraction of her
usual preoccupied air. There were a few customers, drinking or not
drinking, standing or seated, sprinkled about. The day was very hot,
and heaps of flies, who were extending their inquisitive and adventurous
perquisitions into all the glutinous little glasses near madame, fell
dead at the bottom. Their decease made no impression on the other flies
out promenading, who looked at them in the coolest manner (as if they
themselves were elephants, or something as far removed), until they met
the same fate. Curious to consider how heedless flies are!--perhaps they
thought as much at Court that sunny summer day.

A figure entering at the door threw a shadow on Madame Defarge which she
felt to be a new one. She laid down her knitting, and began to pin her
rose in her head-dress, before she looked at the figure.

It was curious. The moment Madame Defarge took up the rose, the
customers ceased talking, and began gradually to drop out of the
wine-shop.

“Good day, madame,” said the new-comer.

“Good day, monsieur.”

She said it aloud, but added to herself, as she resumed her knitting:
“Hah! Good day, age about forty, height about five feet nine, black
hair, generally rather handsome visage, complexion dark, eyes dark,
thin, long and sallow face, aquiline nose but not straight, having a
peculiar inclination towards the left cheek which imparts a sinister
expression! Good day, one and all!”

“Have the goodness to give me a little glass of old cognac, and a
mouthful of cool fresh water, madame.”

Madame complied with a polite air.

“Marvellous cognac this, madame!”

It was the first time it had ever been so complimented, and Madame
Defarge knew enough of its antecedents to know better. She said,
however, that the cognac was flattered, and took up her knitting. The
visitor watched her fingers for a few moments, and took the opportunity
of observing the place in general.

“You knit with great skill, madame.”

“I am accustomed to it.”

“A pretty pattern too!”

“_You_ think so?” said madame, looking at him with a smile.

“Decidedly. May one ask what it is for?”

“Pastime,” said madame, still looking at him with a smile while her
fingers moved nimbly.

“Not for use?”

“That depends. I may find a use for it one day. If I do--Well,” said
madame, drawing a breath and nodding her head with a stern kind of
coquetry, “I'll use it!”

It was remarkable; but, the taste of Saint Antoine seemed to be
decidedly opposed to a rose on the head-dress of Madame Defarge. Two
men had entered separately, and had been about to order drink, when,
catching sight of that novelty, they faltered, made a pretence of
looking about as if for some friend who was not there, and went away.
Nor, of those who had been there when this visitor entered, was there
one left. They had all dropped off. The spy had kept his eyes open,
but had been able to detect no sign. They had lounged away in a
poverty-stricken, purposeless, accidental manner, quite natural and
unimpeachable.

“_John_,” thought madame, checking off her work as her fingers knitted,
and her eyes looked at the stranger. “Stay long enough, and I shall knit
'BARSAD' before you go.”

“You have a husband, madame?”

“I have.”

“Children?”

“No children.”

“Business seems bad?”

“Business is very bad; the people are so poor.”

“Ah, the unfortunate, miserable people! So oppressed, too--as you say.”

“As _you_ say,” madame retorted, correcting him, and deftly knitting an
extra something into his name that boded him no good.

“Pardon me; certainly it was I who said so, but you naturally think so.
Of course.”

“_I_ think?” returned madame, in a high voice. “I and my husband have
enough to do to keep this wine-shop open, without thinking. All we
think, here, is how to live. That is the subject _we_ think of, and
it gives us, from morning to night, enough to think about, without
embarrassing our heads concerning others. _I_ think for others? No, no.”

The spy, who was there to pick up any crumbs he could find or make, did
not allow his baffled state to express itself in his sinister face; but,
stood with an air of gossiping gallantry, leaning his elbow on Madame
Defarge's little counter, and occasionally sipping his cognac.

“A bad business this, madame, of Gaspard's execution. Ah! the poor
Gaspard!” With a sigh of great compassion.

“My faith!” returned madame, coolly and lightly, “if people use knives
for such purposes, they have to pay for it. He knew beforehand what the
price of his luxury was; he has paid the price.”

“I believe,” said the spy, dropping his soft voice to a tone
that invited confidence, and expressing an injured revolutionary
susceptibility in every muscle of his wicked face: “I believe there
is much compassion and anger in this neighbourhood, touching the poor
fellow? Between ourselves.”

“Is there?” asked madame, vacantly.

“Is there not?”

“--Here is my husband!” said Madame Defarge.

As the keeper of the wine-shop entered at the door, the spy saluted
him by touching his hat, and saying, with an engaging smile, “Good day,
Jacques!” Defarge stopped short, and stared at him.

“Good day, Jacques!” the spy repeated; with not quite so much
confidence, or quite so easy a smile under the stare.

“You deceive yourself, monsieur,” returned the keeper of the wine-shop.
“You mistake me for another. That is not my name. I am Ernest Defarge.”

“It is all the same,” said the spy, airily, but discomfited too: “good
day!”

“Good day!” answered Defarge, drily.

“I was saying to madame, with whom I had the pleasure of chatting when
you entered, that they tell me there is--and no wonder!--much sympathy
and anger in Saint Antoine, touching the unhappy fate of poor Gaspard.”

“No one has told me so,” said Defarge, shaking his head. “I know nothing
of it.”

Having said it, he passed behind the little counter, and stood with his
hand on the back of his wife's chair, looking over that barrier at the
person to whom they were both opposed, and whom either of them would
have shot with the greatest satisfaction.

The spy, well used to his business, did not change his unconscious
attitude, but drained his little glass of cognac, took a sip of fresh
water, and asked for another glass of cognac. Madame Defarge poured it
out for him, took to her knitting again, and hummed a little song over
it.

“You seem to know this quarter well; that is to say, better than I do?”
 observed Defarge.

“Not at all, but I hope to know it better. I am so profoundly interested
in its miserable inhabitants.”

“Hah!” muttered Defarge.

“The pleasure of conversing with you, Monsieur Defarge, recalls to me,”
 pursued the spy, “that I have the honour of cherishing some interesting
associations with your name.”

“Indeed!” said Defarge, with much indifference.

“Yes, indeed. When Doctor Manette was released, you, his old domestic,
had the charge of him, I know. He was delivered to you. You see I am
informed of the circumstances?”

“Such is the fact, certainly,” said Defarge. He had had it conveyed
to him, in an accidental touch of his wife's elbow as she knitted and
warbled, that he would do best to answer, but always with brevity.

“It was to you,” said the spy, “that his daughter came; and it was
from your care that his daughter took him, accompanied by a neat brown
monsieur; how is he called?--in a little wig--Lorry--of the bank of
Tellson and Company--over to England.”

“Such is the fact,” repeated Defarge.

“Very interesting remembrances!” said the spy. “I have known Doctor
Manette and his daughter, in England.”

“Yes?” said Defarge.

“You don't hear much about them now?” said the spy.

“No,” said Defarge.

“In effect,” madame struck in, looking up from her work and her little
song, “we never hear about them. We received the news of their safe
arrival, and perhaps another letter, or perhaps two; but, since then,
they have gradually taken their road in life--we, ours--and we have held
no correspondence.”

“Perfectly so, madame,” replied the spy. “She is going to be married.”

“Going?” echoed madame. “She was pretty enough to have been married long
ago. You English are cold, it seems to me.”

“Oh! You know I am English.”

“I perceive your tongue is,” returned madame; “and what the tongue is, I
suppose the man is.”

He did not take the identification as a compliment; but he made the best
of it, and turned it off with a laugh. After sipping his cognac to the
end, he added:

“Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married. But not to an Englishman; to
one who, like herself, is French by birth. And speaking of Gaspard (ah,
poor Gaspard! It was cruel, cruel!), it is a curious thing that she is
going to marry the nephew of Monsieur the Marquis, for whom Gaspard
was exalted to that height of so many feet; in other words, the present
Marquis. But he lives unknown in England, he is no Marquis there; he is
Mr. Charles Darnay. D'Aulnais is the name of his mother's family.”

Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the intelligence had a palpable
effect upon her husband. Do what he would, behind the little counter,
as to the striking of a light and the lighting of his pipe, he was
troubled, and his hand was not trustworthy. The spy would have been no
spy if he had failed to see it, or to record it in his mind.

Having made, at least, this one hit, whatever it might prove to be
worth, and no customers coming in to help him to any other, Mr. Barsad
paid for what he had drunk, and took his leave: taking occasion to say,
in a genteel manner, before he departed, that he looked forward to the
pleasure of seeing Monsieur and Madame Defarge again. For some minutes
after he had emerged into the outer presence of Saint Antoine, the
husband and wife remained exactly as he had left them, lest he should
come back.

“Can it be true,” said Defarge, in a low voice, looking down at his wife
as he stood smoking with his hand on the back of her chair: “what he has
said of Ma'amselle Manette?”

“As he has said it,” returned madame, lifting her eyebrows a little, “it
is probably false. But it may be true.”

“If it is--” Defarge began, and stopped.

“If it is?” repeated his wife.

“--And if it does come, while we live to see it triumph--I hope, for her
sake, Destiny will keep her husband out of France.”

“Her husband's destiny,” said Madame Defarge, with her usual composure,
“will take him where he is to go, and will lead him to the end that is
to end him. That is all I know.”

“But it is very strange--now, at least, is it not very strange”--said
Defarge, rather pleading with his wife to induce her to admit it,
“that, after all our sympathy for Monsieur her father, and herself, her
husband's name should be proscribed under your hand at this moment, by
the side of that infernal dog's who has just left us?”

“Stranger things than that will happen when it does come,” answered
madame. “I have them both here, of a certainty; and they are both here
for their merits; that is enough.”

She rolled up her knitting when she had said those words, and presently
took the rose out of the handkerchief that was wound about her head.
Either Saint Antoine had an instinctive sense that the objectionable
decoration was gone, or Saint Antoine was on the watch for its
disappearance; howbeit, the Saint took courage to lounge in, very
shortly afterwards, and the wine-shop recovered its habitual aspect.

In the evening, at which season of all others Saint Antoine turned
himself inside out, and sat on door-steps and window-ledges, and came
to the corners of vile streets and courts, for a breath of air, Madame
Defarge with her work in her hand was accustomed to pass from place
to place and from group to group: a Missionary--there were many like
her--such as the world will do well never to breed again. All the women
knitted. They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a
mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the
jaws and the digestive apparatus: if the bony fingers had been still,
the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched.

But, as the fingers went, the eyes went, and the thoughts. And as Madame
Defarge moved on from group to group, all three went quicker and fiercer
among every little knot of women that she had spoken with, and left
behind.

Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with admiration. “A
great woman,” said he, “a strong woman, a grand woman, a frightfully
grand woman!”

Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church bells and
the distant beating of the military drums in the Palace Courtyard, as
the women sat knitting, knitting. Darkness encompassed them. Another
darkness was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then ringing
pleasantly in many an airy steeple over France, should be melted into
thundering cannon; when the military drums should be beating to drown a
wretched voice, that night all potent as the voice of Power and Plenty,
Freedom and Life. So much was closing in about the women who sat
knitting, knitting, that they their very selves were closing in around
a structure yet unbuilt, where they were to sit knitting, knitting,
counting dropping heads.




XVII. One Night


Never did the sun go down with a brighter glory on the quiet corner in
Soho, than one memorable evening when the Doctor and his daughter sat
under the plane-tree together. Never did the moon rise with a milder
radiance over great London, than on that night when it found them still
seated under the tree, and shone upon their faces through its leaves.

Lucie was to be married to-morrow. She had reserved this last evening
for her father, and they sat alone under the plane-tree.

“You are happy, my dear father?”

“Quite, my child.”

They had said little, though they had been there a long time. When it
was yet light enough to work and read, she had neither engaged herself
in her usual work, nor had she read to him. She had employed herself in
both ways, at his side under the tree, many and many a time; but, this
time was not quite like any other, and nothing could make it so.

“And I am very happy to-night, dear father. I am deeply happy in the
love that Heaven has so blessed--my love for Charles, and Charles's love
for me. But, if my life were not to be still consecrated to you, or
if my marriage were so arranged as that it would part us, even by
the length of a few of these streets, I should be more unhappy and
self-reproachful now than I can tell you. Even as it is--”

Even as it was, she could not command her voice.

In the sad moonlight, she clasped him by the neck, and laid her face
upon his breast. In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of
the sun itself is--as the light called human life is--at its coming and
its going.

“Dearest dear! Can you tell me, this last time, that you feel quite,
quite sure, no new affections of mine, and no new duties of mine, will
ever interpose between us? _I_ know it well, but do you know it? In your
own heart, do you feel quite certain?”

Her father answered, with a cheerful firmness of conviction he could
scarcely have assumed, “Quite sure, my darling! More than that,” he
added, as he tenderly kissed her: “my future is far brighter, Lucie,
seen through your marriage, than it could have been--nay, than it ever
was--without it.”

“If I could hope _that_, my father!--”

“Believe it, love! Indeed it is so. Consider how natural and how plain
it is, my dear, that it should be so. You, devoted and young, cannot
fully appreciate the anxiety I have felt that your life should not be
wasted--”

She moved her hand towards his lips, but he took it in his, and repeated
the word.

“--wasted, my child--should not be wasted, struck aside from the
natural order of things--for my sake. Your unselfishness cannot entirely
comprehend how much my mind has gone on this; but, only ask yourself,
how could my happiness be perfect, while yours was incomplete?”

“If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been quite happy
with you.”

He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would have been unhappy
without Charles, having seen him; and replied:

“My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not been
Charles, it would have been another. Or, if it had been no other, I
should have been the cause, and then the dark part of my life would have
cast its shadow beyond myself, and would have fallen on you.”

It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him
refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new
sensation while his words were in her ears; and she remembered it long
afterwards.

“See!” said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards the moon.
“I have looked at her from my prison-window, when I could not bear her
light. I have looked at her when it has been such torture to me to think
of her shining upon what I had lost, that I have beaten my head against
my prison-walls. I have looked at her, in a state so dull and lethargic,
that I have thought of nothing but the number of horizontal lines I
could draw across her at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines
with which I could intersect them.” He added in his inward and pondering
manner, as he looked at the moon, “It was twenty either way, I remember,
and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in.”

The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that time,
deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to shock her in
the manner of his reference. He only seemed to contrast his present
cheerfulness and felicity with the dire endurance that was over.

“I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times upon the unborn
child from whom I had been rent. Whether it was alive. Whether it had
been born alive, or the poor mother's shock had killed it. Whether it
was a son who would some day avenge his father. (There was a time in my
imprisonment, when my desire for vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it
was a son who would never know his father's story; who might even live
to weigh the possibility of his father's having disappeared of his own
will and act. Whether it was a daughter who would grow to be a woman.”

She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand.

“I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful of
me--rather, altogether ignorant of me, and unconscious of me. I have
cast up the years of her age, year after year. I have seen her married
to a man who knew nothing of my fate. I have altogether perished from
the remembrance of the living, and in the next generation my place was a
blank.”

“My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a daughter who
never existed, strikes to my heart as if I had been that child.”

“You, Lucie? It is out of the Consolation and restoration you have
brought to me, that these remembrances arise, and pass between us and
the moon on this last night.--What did I say just now?”

“She knew nothing of you. She cared nothing for you.”

“So! But on other moonlight nights, when the sadness and the silence
have touched me in a different way--have affected me with something as
like a sorrowful sense of peace, as any emotion that had pain for its
foundations could--I have imagined her as coming to me in my cell, and
leading me out into the freedom beyond the fortress. I have seen her
image in the moonlight often, as I now see you; except that I never held
her in my arms; it stood between the little grated window and the door.
But, you understand that that was not the child I am speaking of?”

“The figure was not; the--the--image; the fancy?”

“No. That was another thing. It stood before my disturbed sense of
sight, but it never moved. The phantom that my mind pursued, was another
and more real child. Of her outward appearance I know no more than
that she was like her mother. The other had that likeness too--as you
have--but was not the same. Can you follow me, Lucie? Hardly, I think?
I doubt you must have been a solitary prisoner to understand these
perplexed distinctions.”

His collected and calm manner could not prevent her blood from running
cold, as he thus tried to anatomise his old condition.

“In that more peaceful state, I have imagined her, in the moonlight,
coming to me and taking me out to show me that the home of her married
life was full of her loving remembrance of her lost father. My picture
was in her room, and I was in her prayers. Her life was active,
cheerful, useful; but my poor history pervaded it all.”

“I was that child, my father, I was not half so good, but in my love
that was I.”

“And she showed me her children,” said the Doctor of Beauvais, “and
they had heard of me, and had been taught to pity me. When they passed
a prison of the State, they kept far from its frowning walls, and looked
up at its bars, and spoke in whispers. She could never deliver me; I
imagined that she always brought me back after showing me such things.
But then, blessed with the relief of tears, I fell upon my knees, and
blessed her.”

“I am that child, I hope, my father. O my dear, my dear, will you bless
me as fervently to-morrow?”

“Lucie, I recall these old troubles in the reason that I have to-night
for loving you better than words can tell, and thanking God for my great
happiness. My thoughts, when they were wildest, never rose near the
happiness that I have known with you, and that we have before us.”

He embraced her, solemnly commended her to Heaven, and humbly thanked
Heaven for having bestowed her on him. By-and-bye, they went into the
house.

There was no one bidden to the marriage but Mr. Lorry; there was even to
be no bridesmaid but the gaunt Miss Pross. The marriage was to make no
change in their place of residence; they had been able to extend it,
by taking to themselves the upper rooms formerly belonging to the
apocryphal invisible lodger, and they desired nothing more.

Doctor Manette was very cheerful at the little supper. They were only
three at table, and Miss Pross made the third. He regretted that Charles
was not there; was more than half disposed to object to the loving
little plot that kept him away; and drank to him affectionately.

So, the time came for him to bid Lucie good night, and they separated.
But, in the stillness of the third hour of the morning, Lucie came
downstairs again, and stole into his room; not free from unshaped fears,
beforehand.

All things, however, were in their places; all was quiet; and he lay
asleep, his white hair picturesque on the untroubled pillow, and his
hands lying quiet on the coverlet. She put her needless candle in the
shadow at a distance, crept up to his bed, and put her lips to his;
then, leaned over him, and looked at him.

Into his handsome face, the bitter waters of captivity had worn; but, he
covered up their tracks with a determination so strong, that he held the
mastery of them even in his sleep. A more remarkable face in its quiet,
resolute, and guarded struggle with an unseen assailant, was not to be
beheld in all the wide dominions of sleep, that night.

She timidly laid her hand on his dear breast, and put up a prayer that
she might ever be as true to him as her love aspired to be, and as his
sorrows deserved. Then, she withdrew her hand, and kissed his lips once
more, and went away. So, the sunrise came, and the shadows of the leaves
of the plane-tree moved upon his face, as softly as her lips had moved
in praying for him.




XVIII. Nine Days


The marriage-day was shining brightly, and they were ready outside the
closed door of the Doctor's room, where he was speaking with Charles
Darnay. They were ready to go to church; the beautiful bride, Mr.
Lorry, and Miss Pross--to whom the event, through a gradual process of
reconcilement to the inevitable, would have been one of absolute bliss,
but for the yet lingering consideration that her brother Solomon should
have been the bridegroom.

“And so,” said Mr. Lorry, who could not sufficiently admire the bride,
and who had been moving round her to take in every point of her quiet,
pretty dress; “and so it was for this, my sweet Lucie, that I brought
you across the Channel, such a baby! Lord bless me! How little I thought
what I was doing! How lightly I valued the obligation I was conferring
on my friend Mr. Charles!”

“You didn't mean it,” remarked the matter-of-fact Miss Pross, “and
therefore how could you know it? Nonsense!”

“Really? Well; but don't cry,” said the gentle Mr. Lorry.

“I am not crying,” said Miss Pross; “_you_ are.”

“I, my Pross?” (By this time, Mr. Lorry dared to be pleasant with her,
on occasion.)

“You were, just now; I saw you do it, and I don't wonder at it. Such
a present of plate as you have made 'em, is enough to bring tears into
anybody's eyes. There's not a fork or a spoon in the collection,” said
Miss Pross, “that I didn't cry over, last night after the box came, till
I couldn't see it.”

“I am highly gratified,” said Mr. Lorry, “though, upon my honour, I
had no intention of rendering those trifling articles of remembrance
invisible to any one. Dear me! This is an occasion that makes a man
speculate on all he has lost. Dear, dear, dear! To think that there
might have been a Mrs. Lorry, any time these fifty years almost!”

“Not at all!” From Miss Pross.

“You think there never might have been a Mrs. Lorry?” asked the
gentleman of that name.

“Pooh!” rejoined Miss Pross; “you were a bachelor in your cradle.”

“Well!” observed Mr. Lorry, beamingly adjusting his little wig, “that
seems probable, too.”

“And you were cut out for a bachelor,” pursued Miss Pross, “before you
were put in your cradle.”

“Then, I think,” said Mr. Lorry, “that I was very unhandsomely dealt
with, and that I ought to have had a voice in the selection of my
pattern. Enough! Now, my dear Lucie,” drawing his arm soothingly round
her waist, “I hear them moving in the next room, and Miss Pross and
I, as two formal folks of business, are anxious not to lose the final
opportunity of saying something to you that you wish to hear. You leave
your good father, my dear, in hands as earnest and as loving as your
own; he shall be taken every conceivable care of; during the next
fortnight, while you are in Warwickshire and thereabouts, even Tellson's
shall go to the wall (comparatively speaking) before him. And when, at
the fortnight's end, he comes to join you and your beloved husband, on
your other fortnight's trip in Wales, you shall say that we have sent
him to you in the best health and in the happiest frame. Now, I hear
Somebody's step coming to the door. Let me kiss my dear girl with an
old-fashioned bachelor blessing, before Somebody comes to claim his
own.”

For a moment, he held the fair face from him to look at the
well-remembered expression on the forehead, and then laid the bright
golden hair against his little brown wig, with a genuine tenderness and
delicacy which, if such things be old-fashioned, were as old as Adam.

The door of the Doctor's room opened, and he came out with Charles
Darnay. He was so deadly pale--which had not been the case when they
went in together--that no vestige of colour was to be seen in his face.
But, in the composure of his manner he was unaltered, except that to the
shrewd glance of Mr. Lorry it disclosed some shadowy indication that the
old air of avoidance and dread had lately passed over him, like a cold
wind.

He gave his arm to his daughter, and took her down-stairs to the chariot
which Mr. Lorry had hired in honour of the day. The rest followed in
another carriage, and soon, in a neighbouring church, where no strange
eyes looked on, Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette were happily married.

Besides the glancing tears that shone among the smiles of the little
group when it was done, some diamonds, very bright and sparkling,
glanced on the bride's hand, which were newly released from the
dark obscurity of one of Mr. Lorry's pockets. They returned home to
breakfast, and all went well, and in due course the golden hair that had
mingled with the poor shoemaker's white locks in the Paris garret, were
mingled with them again in the morning sunlight, on the threshold of the
door at parting.

It was a hard parting, though it was not for long. But her father
cheered her, and said at last, gently disengaging himself from her
enfolding arms, “Take her, Charles! She is yours!”

And her agitated hand waved to them from a chaise window, and she was
gone.

The corner being out of the way of the idle and curious, and the
preparations having been very simple and few, the Doctor, Mr. Lorry,
and Miss Pross, were left quite alone. It was when they turned into
the welcome shade of the cool old hall, that Mr. Lorry observed a great
change to have come over the Doctor; as if the golden arm uplifted
there, had struck him a poisoned blow.

He had naturally repressed much, and some revulsion might have been
expected in him when the occasion for repression was gone. But, it was
the old scared lost look that troubled Mr. Lorry; and through his absent
manner of clasping his head and drearily wandering away into his own
room when they got up-stairs, Mr. Lorry was reminded of Defarge the
wine-shop keeper, and the starlight ride.

“I think,” he whispered to Miss Pross, after anxious consideration, “I
think we had best not speak to him just now, or at all disturb him.
I must look in at Tellson's; so I will go there at once and come back
presently. Then, we will take him a ride into the country, and dine
there, and all will be well.”

It was easier for Mr. Lorry to look in at Tellson's, than to look out of
Tellson's. He was detained two hours. When he came back, he ascended the
old staircase alone, having asked no question of the servant; going thus
into the Doctor's rooms, he was stopped by a low sound of knocking.

“Good God!” he said, with a start. “What's that?”

Miss Pross, with a terrified face, was at his ear. “O me, O me! All is
lost!” cried she, wringing her hands. “What is to be told to Ladybird?
He doesn't know me, and is making shoes!”

Mr. Lorry said what he could to calm her, and went himself into the
Doctor's room. The bench was turned towards the light, as it had been
when he had seen the shoemaker at his work before, and his head was bent
down, and he was very busy.

“Doctor Manette. My dear friend, Doctor Manette!”

The Doctor looked at him for a moment--half inquiringly, half as if he
were angry at being spoken to--and bent over his work again.

He had laid aside his coat and waistcoat; his shirt was open at the
throat, as it used to be when he did that work; and even the old
haggard, faded surface of face had come back to him. He worked
hard--impatiently--as if in some sense of having been interrupted.

Mr. Lorry glanced at the work in his hand, and observed that it was a
shoe of the old size and shape. He took up another that was lying by
him, and asked what it was.

“A young lady's walking shoe,” he muttered, without looking up. “It
ought to have been finished long ago. Let it be.”

“But, Doctor Manette. Look at me!”

He obeyed, in the old mechanically submissive manner, without pausing in
his work.

“You know me, my dear friend? Think again. This is not your proper
occupation. Think, dear friend!”

Nothing would induce him to speak more. He looked up, for an instant at
a time, when he was requested to do so; but, no persuasion would extract
a word from him. He worked, and worked, and worked, in silence, and
words fell on him as they would have fallen on an echoless wall, or on
the air. The only ray of hope that Mr. Lorry could discover, was, that
he sometimes furtively looked up without being asked. In that, there
seemed a faint expression of curiosity or perplexity--as though he were
trying to reconcile some doubts in his mind.

Two things at once impressed themselves on Mr. Lorry, as important above
all others; the first, that this must be kept secret from Lucie;
the second, that it must be kept secret from all who knew him. In
conjunction with Miss Pross, he took immediate steps towards the latter
precaution, by giving out that the Doctor was not well, and required a
few days of complete rest. In aid of the kind deception to be practised
on his daughter, Miss Pross was to write, describing his having been
called away professionally, and referring to an imaginary letter of
two or three hurried lines in his own hand, represented to have been
addressed to her by the same post.

These measures, advisable to be taken in any case, Mr. Lorry took in
the hope of his coming to himself. If that should happen soon, he kept
another course in reserve; which was, to have a certain opinion that he
thought the best, on the Doctor's case.

In the hope of his recovery, and of resort to this third course
being thereby rendered practicable, Mr. Lorry resolved to watch him
attentively, with as little appearance as possible of doing so. He
therefore made arrangements to absent himself from Tellson's for the
first time in his life, and took his post by the window in the same
room.

He was not long in discovering that it was worse than useless to speak
to him, since, on being pressed, he became worried. He abandoned that
attempt on the first day, and resolved merely to keep himself always
before him, as a silent protest against the delusion into which he had
fallen, or was falling. He remained, therefore, in his seat near the
window, reading and writing, and expressing in as many pleasant and
natural ways as he could think of, that it was a free place.

Doctor Manette took what was given him to eat and drink, and worked on,
that first day, until it was too dark to see--worked on, half an hour
after Mr. Lorry could not have seen, for his life, to read or write.
When he put his tools aside as useless, until morning, Mr. Lorry rose
and said to him:

“Will you go out?”

He looked down at the floor on either side of him in the old manner,
looked up in the old manner, and repeated in the old low voice:

“Out?”

“Yes; for a walk with me. Why not?”

He made no effort to say why not, and said not a word more. But, Mr.
Lorry thought he saw, as he leaned forward on his bench in the dusk,
with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, that he was in
some misty way asking himself, “Why not?” The sagacity of the man of
business perceived an advantage here, and determined to hold it.

Miss Pross and he divided the night into two watches, and observed him
at intervals from the adjoining room. He paced up and down for a long
time before he lay down; but, when he did finally lay himself down, he
fell asleep. In the morning, he was up betimes, and went straight to his
bench and to work.

On this second day, Mr. Lorry saluted him cheerfully by his name,
and spoke to him on topics that had been of late familiar to them. He
returned no reply, but it was evident that he heard what was said, and
that he thought about it, however confusedly. This encouraged Mr. Lorry
to have Miss Pross in with her work, several times during the day;
at those times, they quietly spoke of Lucie, and of her father then
present, precisely in the usual manner, and as if there were nothing
amiss. This was done without any demonstrative accompaniment, not long
enough, or often enough to harass him; and it lightened Mr. Lorry's
friendly heart to believe that he looked up oftener, and that he
appeared to be stirred by some perception of inconsistencies surrounding
him.

When it fell dark again, Mr. Lorry asked him as before:

“Dear Doctor, will you go out?”

As before, he repeated, “Out?”

“Yes; for a walk with me. Why not?”

This time, Mr. Lorry feigned to go out when he could extract no answer
from him, and, after remaining absent for an hour, returned. In the
meanwhile, the Doctor had removed to the seat in the window, and had
sat there looking down at the plane-tree; but, on Mr. Lorry's return, he
slipped away to his bench.

The time went very slowly on, and Mr. Lorry's hope darkened, and his
heart grew heavier again, and grew yet heavier and heavier every day.
The third day came and went, the fourth, the fifth. Five days, six days,
seven days, eight days, nine days.

With a hope ever darkening, and with a heart always growing heavier and
heavier, Mr. Lorry passed through this anxious time. The secret was
well kept, and Lucie was unconscious and happy; but he could not fail to
observe that the shoemaker, whose hand had been a little out at first,
was growing dreadfully skilful, and that he had never been so intent on
his work, and that his hands had never been so nimble and expert, as in
the dusk of the ninth evening.




XIX. An Opinion


Worn out by anxious watching, Mr. Lorry fell asleep at his post. On the
tenth morning of his suspense, he was startled by the shining of the sun
into the room where a heavy slumber had overtaken him when it was dark
night.

He rubbed his eyes and roused himself; but he doubted, when he had
done so, whether he was not still asleep. For, going to the door of the
Doctor's room and looking in, he perceived that the shoemaker's bench
and tools were put aside again, and that the Doctor himself sat reading
at the window. He was in his usual morning dress, and his face (which
Mr. Lorry could distinctly see), though still very pale, was calmly
studious and attentive.

Even when he had satisfied himself that he was awake, Mr. Lorry felt
giddily uncertain for some few moments whether the late shoemaking might
not be a disturbed dream of his own; for, did not his eyes show him his
friend before him in his accustomed clothing and aspect, and employed
as usual; and was there any sign within their range, that the change of
which he had so strong an impression had actually happened?

It was but the inquiry of his first confusion and astonishment, the
answer being obvious. If the impression were not produced by a real
corresponding and sufficient cause, how came he, Jarvis Lorry, there?
How came he to have fallen asleep, in his clothes, on the sofa in Doctor
Manette's consulting-room, and to be debating these points outside the
Doctor's bedroom door in the early morning?

Within a few minutes, Miss Pross stood whispering at his side. If he
had had any particle of doubt left, her talk would of necessity have
resolved it; but he was by that time clear-headed, and had none.
He advised that they should let the time go by until the regular
breakfast-hour, and should then meet the Doctor as if nothing unusual
had occurred. If he appeared to be in his customary state of mind, Mr.
Lorry would then cautiously proceed to seek direction and guidance from
the opinion he had been, in his anxiety, so anxious to obtain.

Miss Pross, submitting herself to his judgment, the scheme was worked
out with care. Having abundance of time for his usual methodical
toilette, Mr. Lorry presented himself at the breakfast-hour in his usual
white linen, and with his usual neat leg. The Doctor was summoned in the
usual way, and came to breakfast.

So far as it was possible to comprehend him without overstepping those
delicate and gradual approaches which Mr. Lorry felt to be the only safe
advance, he at first supposed that his daughter's marriage had taken
place yesterday. An incidental allusion, purposely thrown out, to
the day of the week, and the day of the month, set him thinking and
counting, and evidently made him uneasy. In all other respects, however,
he was so composedly himself, that Mr. Lorry determined to have the aid
he sought. And that aid was his own.

Therefore, when the breakfast was done and cleared away, and he and the
Doctor were left together, Mr. Lorry said, feelingly:

“My dear Manette, I am anxious to have your opinion, in confidence, on a
very curious case in which I am deeply interested; that is to say, it is
very curious to me; perhaps, to your better information it may be less
so.”

Glancing at his hands, which were discoloured by his late work, the
Doctor looked troubled, and listened attentively. He had already glanced
at his hands more than once.

“Doctor Manette,” said Mr. Lorry, touching him affectionately on the
arm, “the case is the case of a particularly dear friend of mine. Pray
give your mind to it, and advise me well for his sake--and above all,
for his daughter's--his daughter's, my dear Manette.”

“If I understand,” said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, “some mental
shock--?”

“Yes!”

“Be explicit,” said the Doctor. “Spare no detail.”

Mr. Lorry saw that they understood one another, and proceeded.

“My dear Manette, it is the case of an old and a prolonged shock,
of great acuteness and severity to the affections, the feelings,
the--the--as you express it--the mind. The mind. It is the case of a
shock under which the sufferer was borne down, one cannot say for how
long, because I believe he cannot calculate the time himself, and there
are no other means of getting at it. It is the case of a shock from
which the sufferer recovered, by a process that he cannot trace
himself--as I once heard him publicly relate in a striking manner. It is
the case of a shock from which he has recovered, so completely, as to
be a highly intelligent man, capable of close application of mind, and
great exertion of body, and of constantly making fresh additions to his
stock of knowledge, which was already very large. But, unfortunately,
there has been,” he paused and took a deep breath--“a slight relapse.”

The Doctor, in a low voice, asked, “Of how long duration?”

“Nine days and nights.”

“How did it show itself? I infer,” glancing at his hands again, “in the
resumption of some old pursuit connected with the shock?”

“That is the fact.”

“Now, did you ever see him,” asked the Doctor, distinctly and
collectedly, though in the same low voice, “engaged in that pursuit
originally?”

“Once.”

“And when the relapse fell on him, was he in most respects--or in all
respects--as he was then?”

“I think in all respects.”

“You spoke of his daughter. Does his daughter know of the relapse?”

“No. It has been kept from her, and I hope will always be kept from her.
It is known only to myself, and to one other who may be trusted.”

The Doctor grasped his hand, and murmured, “That was very kind. That was
very thoughtful!” Mr. Lorry grasped his hand in return, and neither of
the two spoke for a little while.

“Now, my dear Manette,” said Mr. Lorry, at length, in his most
considerate and most affectionate way, “I am a mere man of business,
and unfit to cope with such intricate and difficult matters. I do not
possess the kind of information necessary; I do not possess the kind of
intelligence; I want guiding. There is no man in this world on whom
I could so rely for right guidance, as on you. Tell me, how does this
relapse come about? Is there danger of another? Could a repetition of it
be prevented? How should a repetition of it be treated? How does it come
about at all? What can I do for my friend? No man ever can have been
more desirous in his heart to serve a friend, than I am to serve mine,
if I knew how.

“But I don't know how to originate, in such a case. If your sagacity,
knowledge, and experience, could put me on the right track, I might be
able to do so much; unenlightened and undirected, I can do so little.
Pray discuss it with me; pray enable me to see it a little more clearly,
and teach me how to be a little more useful.”

Doctor Manette sat meditating after these earnest words were spoken, and
Mr. Lorry did not press him.

“I think it probable,” said the Doctor, breaking silence with an effort,
“that the relapse you have described, my dear friend, was not quite
unforeseen by its subject.”

“Was it dreaded by him?” Mr. Lorry ventured to ask.

“Very much.” He said it with an involuntary shudder.

“You have no idea how such an apprehension weighs on the sufferer's
mind, and how difficult--how almost impossible--it is, for him to force
himself to utter a word upon the topic that oppresses him.”

“Would he,” asked Mr. Lorry, “be sensibly relieved if he could prevail
upon himself to impart that secret brooding to any one, when it is on
him?”

“I think so. But it is, as I have told you, next to impossible. I even
believe it--in some cases--to be quite impossible.”

“Now,” said Mr. Lorry, gently laying his hand on the Doctor's arm again,
after a short silence on both sides, “to what would you refer this
attack?”

“I believe,” returned Doctor Manette, “that there had been a strong and
extraordinary revival of the train of thought and remembrance that
was the first cause of the malady. Some intense associations of a most
distressing nature were vividly recalled, I think. It is probable that
there had long been a dread lurking in his mind, that those associations
would be recalled--say, under certain circumstances--say, on a
particular occasion. He tried to prepare himself in vain; perhaps the
effort to prepare himself made him less able to bear it.”

“Would he remember what took place in the relapse?” asked Mr. Lorry,
with natural hesitation.

The Doctor looked desolately round the room, shook his head, and
answered, in a low voice, “Not at all.”

“Now, as to the future,” hinted Mr. Lorry.

“As to the future,” said the Doctor, recovering firmness, “I should have
great hope. As it pleased Heaven in its mercy to restore him so soon, I
should have great hope. He, yielding under the pressure of a complicated
something, long dreaded and long vaguely foreseen and contended against,
and recovering after the cloud had burst and passed, I should hope that
the worst was over.”

“Well, well! That's good comfort. I am thankful!” said Mr. Lorry.

“I am thankful!” repeated the Doctor, bending his head with reverence.

“There are two other points,” said Mr. Lorry, “on which I am anxious to
be instructed. I may go on?”

“You cannot do your friend a better service.” The Doctor gave him his
hand.

“To the first, then. He is of a studious habit, and unusually energetic;
he applies himself with great ardour to the acquisition of professional
knowledge, to the conducting of experiments, to many things. Now, does
he do too much?”

“I think not. It may be the character of his mind, to be always in
singular need of occupation. That may be, in part, natural to it; in
part, the result of affliction. The less it was occupied with healthy
things, the more it would be in danger of turning in the unhealthy
direction. He may have observed himself, and made the discovery.”

“You are sure that he is not under too great a strain?”

“I think I am quite sure of it.”

“My dear Manette, if he were overworked now--”

“My dear Lorry, I doubt if that could easily be. There has been a
violent stress in one direction, and it needs a counterweight.”

“Excuse me, as a persistent man of business. Assuming for a moment,
that he _was_ overworked; it would show itself in some renewal of this
disorder?”

“I do not think so. I do not think,” said Doctor Manette with the
firmness of self-conviction, “that anything but the one train of
association would renew it. I think that, henceforth, nothing but some
extraordinary jarring of that chord could renew it. After what has
happened, and after his recovery, I find it difficult to imagine any
such violent sounding of that string again. I trust, and I almost
believe, that the circumstances likely to renew it are exhausted.”

He spoke with the diffidence of a man who knew how slight a thing
would overset the delicate organisation of the mind, and yet with the
confidence of a man who had slowly won his assurance out of personal
endurance and distress. It was not for his friend to abate that
confidence. He professed himself more relieved and encouraged than he
really was, and approached his second and last point. He felt it to
be the most difficult of all; but, remembering his old Sunday morning
conversation with Miss Pross, and remembering what he had seen in the
last nine days, he knew that he must face it.

“The occupation resumed under the influence of this passing affliction
so happily recovered from,” said Mr. Lorry, clearing his throat, “we
will call--Blacksmith's work, Blacksmith's work. We will say, to put a
case and for the sake of illustration, that he had been used, in his bad
time, to work at a little forge. We will say that he was unexpectedly
found at his forge again. Is it not a pity that he should keep it by
him?”

The Doctor shaded his forehead with his hand, and beat his foot
nervously on the ground.

“He has always kept it by him,” said Mr. Lorry, with an anxious look at
his friend. “Now, would it not be better that he should let it go?”

Still, the Doctor, with shaded forehead, beat his foot nervously on the
ground.

“You do not find it easy to advise me?” said Mr. Lorry. “I quite
understand it to be a nice question. And yet I think--” And there he
shook his head, and stopped.

“You see,” said Doctor Manette, turning to him after an uneasy pause,
“it is very hard to explain, consistently, the innermost workings
of this poor man's mind. He once yearned so frightfully for that
occupation, and it was so welcome when it came; no doubt it relieved
his pain so much, by substituting the perplexity of the fingers for
the perplexity of the brain, and by substituting, as he became more
practised, the ingenuity of the hands, for the ingenuity of the mental
torture; that he has never been able to bear the thought of putting it
quite out of his reach. Even now, when I believe he is more hopeful of
himself than he has ever been, and even speaks of himself with a kind
of confidence, the idea that he might need that old employment, and not
find it, gives him a sudden sense of terror, like that which one may
fancy strikes to the heart of a lost child.”

He looked like his illustration, as he raised his eyes to Mr. Lorry's
face.

“But may not--mind! I ask for information, as a plodding man of business
who only deals with such material objects as guineas, shillings, and
bank-notes--may not the retention of the thing involve the retention of
the idea? If the thing were gone, my dear Manette, might not the fear go
with it? In short, is it not a concession to the misgiving, to keep the
forge?”

There was another silence.

“You see, too,” said the Doctor, tremulously, “it is such an old
companion.”

“I would not keep it,” said Mr. Lorry, shaking his head; for he gained
in firmness as he saw the Doctor disquieted. “I would recommend him to
sacrifice it. I only want your authority. I am sure it does no good.
Come! Give me your authority, like a dear good man. For his daughter's
sake, my dear Manette!”

Very strange to see what a struggle there was within him!

“In her name, then, let it be done; I sanction it. But, I would not take
it away while he was present. Let it be removed when he is not there;
let him miss his old companion after an absence.”

Mr. Lorry readily engaged for that, and the conference was ended. They
passed the day in the country, and the Doctor was quite restored. On the
three following days he remained perfectly well, and on the fourteenth
day he went away to join Lucie and her husband. The precaution that
had been taken to account for his silence, Mr. Lorry had previously
explained to him, and he had written to Lucie in accordance with it, and
she had no suspicions.

On the night of the day on which he left the house, Mr. Lorry went into
his room with a chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer, attended by Miss Pross
carrying a light. There, with closed doors, and in a mysterious and
guilty manner, Mr. Lorry hacked the shoemaker's bench to pieces, while
Miss Pross held the candle as if she were assisting at a murder--for
which, indeed, in her grimness, she was no unsuitable figure. The
burning of the body (previously reduced to pieces convenient for the
purpose) was commenced without delay in the kitchen fire; and the tools,
shoes, and leather, were buried in the garden. So wicked do destruction
and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross,
while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its
traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible
crime.




XX. A Plea


When the newly-married pair came home, the first person who appeared, to
offer his congratulations, was Sydney Carton. They had not been at home
many hours, when he presented himself. He was not improved in habits, or
in looks, or in manner; but there was a certain rugged air of fidelity
about him, which was new to the observation of Charles Darnay.

He watched his opportunity of taking Darnay aside into a window, and of
speaking to him when no one overheard.

“Mr. Darnay,” said Carton, “I wish we might be friends.”

“We are already friends, I hope.”

“You are good enough to say so, as a fashion of speech; but, I don't
mean any fashion of speech. Indeed, when I say I wish we might be
friends, I scarcely mean quite that, either.”

Charles Darnay--as was natural--asked him, in all good-humour and
good-fellowship, what he did mean?

“Upon my life,” said Carton, smiling, “I find that easier to comprehend
in my own mind, than to convey to yours. However, let me try. You
remember a certain famous occasion when I was more drunk than--than
usual?”

“I remember a certain famous occasion when you forced me to confess that
you had been drinking.”

“I remember it too. The curse of those occasions is heavy upon me, for I
always remember them. I hope it may be taken into account one day,
when all days are at an end for me! Don't be alarmed; I am not going to
preach.”

“I am not at all alarmed. Earnestness in you, is anything but alarming
to me.”

“Ah!” said Carton, with a careless wave of his hand, as if he waved that
away. “On the drunken occasion in question (one of a large number, as
you know), I was insufferable about liking you, and not liking you. I
wish you would forget it.”

“I forgot it long ago.”

“Fashion of speech again! But, Mr. Darnay, oblivion is not so easy to
me, as you represent it to be to you. I have by no means forgotten it,
and a light answer does not help me to forget it.”

“If it was a light answer,” returned Darnay, “I beg your forgiveness
for it. I had no other object than to turn a slight thing, which, to my
surprise, seems to trouble you too much, aside. I declare to you, on the
faith of a gentleman, that I have long dismissed it from my mind. Good
Heaven, what was there to dismiss! Have I had nothing more important to
remember, in the great service you rendered me that day?”

“As to the great service,” said Carton, “I am bound to avow to you, when
you speak of it in that way, that it was mere professional claptrap, I
don't know that I cared what became of you, when I rendered it.--Mind! I
say when I rendered it; I am speaking of the past.”

“You make light of the obligation,” returned Darnay, “but I will not
quarrel with _your_ light answer.”

“Genuine truth, Mr. Darnay, trust me! I have gone aside from my purpose;
I was speaking about our being friends. Now, you know me; you know I am
incapable of all the higher and better flights of men. If you doubt it,
ask Stryver, and he'll tell you so.”

“I prefer to form my own opinion, without the aid of his.”

“Well! At any rate you know me as a dissolute dog, who has never done
any good, and never will.”

“I don't know that you 'never will.'”

“But I do, and you must take my word for it. Well! If you could endure
to have such a worthless fellow, and a fellow of such indifferent
reputation, coming and going at odd times, I should ask that I might be
permitted to come and go as a privileged person here; that I might
be regarded as an useless (and I would add, if it were not for the
resemblance I detected between you and me, an unornamental) piece of
furniture, tolerated for its old service, and taken no notice of. I
doubt if I should abuse the permission. It is a hundred to one if I
should avail myself of it four times in a year. It would satisfy me, I
dare say, to know that I had it.”

“Will you try?”

“That is another way of saying that I am placed on the footing I have
indicated. I thank you, Darnay. I may use that freedom with your name?”

“I think so, Carton, by this time.”

They shook hands upon it, and Sydney turned away. Within a minute
afterwards, he was, to all outward appearance, as unsubstantial as ever.

When he was gone, and in the course of an evening passed with Miss
Pross, the Doctor, and Mr. Lorry, Charles Darnay made some mention of
this conversation in general terms, and spoke of Sydney Carton as a
problem of carelessness and recklessness. He spoke of him, in short, not
bitterly or meaning to bear hard upon him, but as anybody might who saw
him as he showed himself.

He had no idea that this could dwell in the thoughts of his fair young
wife; but, when he afterwards joined her in their own rooms, he found
her waiting for him with the old pretty lifting of the forehead strongly
marked.

“We are thoughtful to-night!” said Darnay, drawing his arm about her.

“Yes, dearest Charles,” with her hands on his breast, and the inquiring
and attentive expression fixed upon him; “we are rather thoughtful
to-night, for we have something on our mind to-night.”

“What is it, my Lucie?”

“Will you promise not to press one question on me, if I beg you not to
ask it?”

“Will I promise? What will I not promise to my Love?”

What, indeed, with his hand putting aside the golden hair from the
cheek, and his other hand against the heart that beat for him!

“I think, Charles, poor Mr. Carton deserves more consideration and
respect than you expressed for him to-night.”

“Indeed, my own? Why so?”

“That is what you are not to ask me. But I think--I know--he does.”

“If you know it, it is enough. What would you have me do, my Life?”

“I would ask you, dearest, to be very generous with him always, and very
lenient on his faults when he is not by. I would ask you to believe that
he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and that there are deep
wounds in it. My dear, I have seen it bleeding.”

“It is a painful reflection to me,” said Charles Darnay, quite
astounded, “that I should have done him any wrong. I never thought this
of him.”

“My husband, it is so. I fear he is not to be reclaimed; there is
scarcely a hope that anything in his character or fortunes is reparable
now. But, I am sure that he is capable of good things, gentle things,
even magnanimous things.”

She looked so beautiful in the purity of her faith in this lost man,
that her husband could have looked at her as she was for hours.

“And, O my dearest Love!” she urged, clinging nearer to him, laying her
head upon his breast, and raising her eyes to his, “remember how strong
we are in our happiness, and how weak he is in his misery!”

The supplication touched him home. “I will always remember it, dear
Heart! I will remember it as long as I live.”

He bent over the golden head, and put the rosy lips to his, and folded
her in his arms. If one forlorn wanderer then pacing the dark streets,
could have heard her innocent disclosure, and could have seen the drops
of pity kissed away by her husband from the soft blue eyes so loving of
that husband, he might have cried to the night--and the words would not
have parted from his lips for the first time--

“God bless her for her sweet compassion!”




XXI. Echoing Footsteps


A wonderful corner for echoes, it has been remarked, that corner where
the Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the golden thread which bound
her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress and
companion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house in
the tranquilly resounding corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of
years.

At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy young wife,
when her work would slowly fall from her hands, and her eyes would be
dimmed. For, there was something coming in the echoes, something light,
afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that stirred her heart too much.
Fluttering hopes and doubts--hopes, of a love as yet unknown to her:
doubts, of her remaining upon earth, to enjoy that new delight--divided
her breast. Among the echoes then, there would arise the sound of
footsteps at her own early grave; and thoughts of the husband who would
be left so desolate, and who would mourn for her so much, swelled to her
eyes, and broke like waves.

That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among the
advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the sound of
her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they would, the young
mother at the cradle side could always hear those coming. They came, and
the shady house was sunny with a child's laugh, and the Divine friend of
children, to whom in her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take
her child in his arms, as He took the child of old, and made it a sacred
joy to her.

Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all together,
weaving the service of her happy influence through the tissue of all
their lives, and making it predominate nowhere, Lucie heard in the
echoes of years none but friendly and soothing sounds. Her husband's
step was strong and prosperous among them; her father's firm and equal.
Lo, Miss Pross, in harness of string, awakening the echoes, as an
unruly charger, whip-corrected, snorting and pawing the earth under the
plane-tree in the garden!

Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they were not
harsh nor cruel. Even when golden hair, like her own, lay in a halo on a
pillow round the worn face of a little boy, and he said, with a radiant
smile, “Dear papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you both, and to
leave my pretty sister; but I am called, and I must go!” those were not
tears all of agony that wetted his young mother's cheek, as the spirit
departed from her embrace that had been entrusted to it. Suffer them and
forbid them not. They see my Father's face. O Father, blessed words!

Thus, the rustling of an Angel's wings got blended with the other
echoes, and they were not wholly of earth, but had in them that breath
of Heaven. Sighs of the winds that blew over a little garden-tomb were
mingled with them also, and both were audible to Lucie, in a hushed
murmur--like the breathing of a summer sea asleep upon a sandy shore--as
the little Lucie, comically studious at the task of the morning, or
dressing a doll at her mother's footstool, chattered in the tongues of
the Two Cities that were blended in her life.

The Echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney Carton. Some
half-dozen times a year, at most, he claimed his privilege of coming in
uninvited, and would sit among them through the evening, as he had once
done often. He never came there heated with wine. And one other thing
regarding him was whispered in the echoes, which has been whispered by
all true echoes for ages and ages.

No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a
blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a mother,
but her children had a strange sympathy with him--an instinctive
delicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities are touched in
such a case, no echoes tell; but it is so, and it was so here. Carton
was the first stranger to whom little Lucie held out her chubby arms,
and he kept his place with her as she grew. The little boy had spoken of
him, almost at the last. “Poor Carton! Kiss him for me!”

Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some great engine
forcing itself through turbid water, and dragged his useful friend in
his wake, like a boat towed astern. As the boat so favoured is usually
in a rough plight, and mostly under water, so, Sydney had a swamped
life of it. But, easy and strong custom, unhappily so much easier and
stronger in him than any stimulating sense of desert or disgrace, made
it the life he was to lead; and he no more thought of emerging from his
state of lion's jackal, than any real jackal may be supposed to think of
rising to be a lion. Stryver was rich; had married a florid widow with
property and three boys, who had nothing particularly shining about them
but the straight hair of their dumpling heads.

These three young gentlemen, Mr. Stryver, exuding patronage of the most
offensive quality from every pore, had walked before him like three
sheep to the quiet corner in Soho, and had offered as pupils to
Lucie's husband: delicately saying “Halloa! here are three lumps of
bread-and-cheese towards your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!” The polite
rejection of the three lumps of bread-and-cheese had quite bloated Mr.
Stryver with indignation, which he afterwards turned to account in the
training of the young gentlemen, by directing them to beware of the
pride of Beggars, like that tutor-fellow. He was also in the habit of
declaiming to Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on the arts
Mrs. Darnay had once put in practice to “catch” him, and on the
diamond-cut-diamond arts in himself, madam, which had rendered him “not
to be caught.” Some of his King's Bench familiars, who were occasionally
parties to the full-bodied wine and the lie, excused him for the
latter by saying that he had told it so often, that he believed
it himself--which is surely such an incorrigible aggravation of an
originally bad offence, as to justify any such offender's being carried
off to some suitably retired spot, and there hanged out of the way.

These were among the echoes to which Lucie, sometimes pensive, sometimes
amused and laughing, listened in the echoing corner, until her little
daughter was six years old. How near to her heart the echoes of her
child's tread came, and those of her own dear father's, always active
and self-possessed, and those of her dear husband's, need not be told.
Nor, how the lightest echo of their united home, directed by herself
with such a wise and elegant thrift that it was more abundant than any
waste, was music to her. Nor, how there were echoes all about her, sweet
in her ears, of the many times her father had told her that he found her
more devoted to him married (if that could be) than single, and of the
many times her husband had said to her that no cares and duties seemed
to divide her love for him or her help to him, and asked her “What is
the magic secret, my darling, of your being everything to all of us,
as if there were only one of us, yet never seeming to be hurried, or to
have too much to do?”

But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled menacingly
in the corner all through this space of time. And it was now, about
little Lucie's sixth birthday, that they began to have an awful sound,
as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea rising.

On a night in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine, Mr.
Lorry came in late, from Tellson's, and sat himself down by Lucie and
her husband in the dark window. It was a hot, wild night, and they were
all three reminded of the old Sunday night when they had looked at the
lightning from the same place.

“I began to think,” said Mr. Lorry, pushing his brown wig back, “that
I should have to pass the night at Tellson's. We have been so full of
business all day, that we have not known what to do first, or which way
to turn. There is such an uneasiness in Paris, that we have actually a
run of confidence upon us! Our customers over there, seem not to be able
to confide their property to us fast enough. There is positively a mania
among some of them for sending it to England.”

“That has a bad look,” said Darnay--

“A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay? Yes, but we don't know what reason
there is in it. People are so unreasonable! Some of us at Tellson's are
getting old, and we really can't be troubled out of the ordinary course
without due occasion.”

“Still,” said Darnay, “you know how gloomy and threatening the sky is.”

“I know that, to be sure,” assented Mr. Lorry, trying to persuade
himself that his sweet temper was soured, and that he grumbled, “but I
am determined to be peevish after my long day's botheration. Where is
Manette?”

“Here he is,” said the Doctor, entering the dark room at the moment.

“I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and forebodings by
which I have been surrounded all day long, have made me nervous without
reason. You are not going out, I hope?”

“No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you like,” said the
Doctor.

“I don't think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not fit to be
pitted against you to-night. Is the teaboard still there, Lucie? I can't
see.”

“Of course, it has been kept for you.”

“Thank ye, my dear. The precious child is safe in bed?”

“And sleeping soundly.”

“That's right; all safe and well! I don't know why anything should be
otherwise than safe and well here, thank God; but I have been so put out
all day, and I am not as young as I was! My tea, my dear! Thank ye. Now,
come and take your place in the circle, and let us sit quiet, and hear
the echoes about which you have your theory.”

“Not a theory; it was a fancy.”

“A fancy, then, my wise pet,” said Mr. Lorry, patting her hand. “They
are very numerous and very loud, though, are they not? Only hear them!”

Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody's
life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained red, the
footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat in
the dark London window.

Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrows
heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above the billowy
heads, where steel blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendous
roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked arms
struggled in the air like shrivelled branches of trees in a winter wind:
all the fingers convulsively clutching at every weapon or semblance of a
weapon that was thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off.

Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began, through what
agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at a time, over the
heads of the crowd, like a kind of lightning, no eye in the throng could
have told; but, muskets were being distributed--so were cartridges,
powder, and ball, bars of iron and wood, knives, axes, pikes, every
weapon that distracted ingenuity could discover or devise. People who
could lay hold of nothing else, set themselves with bleeding hands to
force stones and bricks out of their places in walls. Every pulse and
heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever strain and at high-fever heat.
Every living creature there held life as of no account, and was demented
with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it.

As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging
circled round Defarge's wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron
had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself,
already begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms,
thrust this man back, dragged this man forward, disarmed one to arm
another, laboured and strove in the thickest of the uproar.

“Keep near to me, Jacques Three,” cried Defarge; “and do you, Jacques
One and Two, separate and put yourselves at the head of as many of these
patriots as you can. Where is my wife?”

“Eh, well! Here you see me!” said madame, composed as ever, but not
knitting to-day. Madame's resolute right hand was occupied with an axe,
in place of the usual softer implements, and in her girdle were a pistol
and a cruel knife.

“Where do you go, my wife?”

“I go,” said madame, “with you at present. You shall see me at the head
of women, by-and-bye.”

“Come, then!” cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. “Patriots and
friends, we are ready! The Bastille!”

With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped
into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on
depth, and overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells ringing, drums
beating, the sea raging and thundering on its new beach, the attack
began.

Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great
towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire and through
the smoke--in the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast him up against
a cannon, and on the instant he became a cannonier--Defarge of the
wine-shop worked like a manful soldier, Two fierce hours.

Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers,
cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One drawbridge down! “Work, comrades
all, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand, Jacques
Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name of all
the Angels or the Devils--which you prefer--work!” Thus Defarge of the
wine-shop, still at his gun, which had long grown hot.

“To me, women!” cried madame his wife. “What! We can kill as well as
the men when the place is taken!” And to her, with a shrill thirsty
cry, trooping women variously armed, but all armed alike in hunger and
revenge.

Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but, still the deep ditch, the single
drawbridge, the massive stone walls, and the eight great towers. Slight
displacements of the raging sea, made by the falling wounded. Flashing
weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggonloads of wet straw, hard work
at neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks, volleys,
execrations, bravery without stint, boom smash and rattle, and the
furious sounding of the living sea; but, still the deep ditch, and the
single drawbridge, and the massive stone walls, and the eight great
towers, and still Defarge of the wine-shop at his gun, grown doubly hot
by the service of Four fierce hours.

A white flag from within the fortress, and a parley--this dimly
perceptible through the raging storm, nothing audible in it--suddenly
the sea rose immeasurably wider and higher, and swept Defarge of the
wine-shop over the lowered drawbridge, past the massive stone outer
walls, in among the eight great towers surrendered!

So resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that even to
draw his breath or turn his head was as impracticable as if he had been
struggling in the surf at the South Sea, until he was landed in the
outer courtyard of the Bastille. There, against an angle of a wall, he
made a struggle to look about him. Jacques Three was nearly at his side;
Madame Defarge, still heading some of her women, was visible in the
inner distance, and her knife was in her hand. Everywhere was tumult,
exultation, deafening and maniacal bewilderment, astounding noise, yet
furious dumb-show.

“The Prisoners!”

“The Records!”

“The secret cells!”

“The instruments of torture!”

“The Prisoners!”

Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherences, “The Prisoners!” was
the cry most taken up by the sea that rushed in, as if there were an
eternity of people, as well as of time and space. When the foremost
billows rolled past, bearing the prison officers with them, and
threatening them all with instant death if any secret nook remained
undisclosed, Defarge laid his strong hand on the breast of one of
these men--a man with a grey head, who had a lighted torch in his
hand--separated him from the rest, and got him between himself and the
wall.

“Show me the North Tower!” said Defarge. “Quick!”

“I will faithfully,” replied the man, “if you will come with me. But
there is no one there.”

“What is the meaning of One Hundred and Five, North Tower?” asked
Defarge. “Quick!”

“The meaning, monsieur?”

“Does it mean a captive, or a place of captivity? Or do you mean that I
shall strike you dead?”

“Kill him!” croaked Jacques Three, who had come close up.

“Monsieur, it is a cell.”

“Show it me!”

“Pass this way, then.”

Jacques Three, with his usual craving on him, and evidently disappointed
by the dialogue taking a turn that did not seem to promise bloodshed,
held by Defarge's arm as he held by the turnkey's. Their three heads had
been close together during this brief discourse, and it had been as much
as they could do to hear one another, even then: so tremendous was the
noise of the living ocean, in its irruption into the Fortress, and
its inundation of the courts and passages and staircases. All around
outside, too, it beat the walls with a deep, hoarse roar, from which,
occasionally, some partial shouts of tumult broke and leaped into the
air like spray.

Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, past
hideous doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps,
and again up steep rugged ascents of stone and brick, more like dry
waterfalls than staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and Jacques Three,
linked hand and arm, went with all the speed they could make. Here and
there, especially at first, the inundation started on them and swept by;
but when they had done descending, and were winding and climbing up a
tower, they were alone. Hemmed in here by the massive thickness of walls
and arches, the storm within the fortress and without was only audible
to them in a dull, subdued way, as if the noise out of which they had
come had almost destroyed their sense of hearing.

The turnkey stopped at a low door, put a key in a clashing lock, swung
the door slowly open, and said, as they all bent their heads and passed
in:

“One hundred and five, North Tower!”

There was a small, heavily-grated, unglazed window high in the wall,
with a stone screen before it, so that the sky could be only seen by
stooping low and looking up. There was a small chimney, heavily barred
across, a few feet within. There was a heap of old feathery wood-ashes
on the hearth. There was a stool, and table, and a straw bed. There were
the four blackened walls, and a rusted iron ring in one of them.

“Pass that torch slowly along these walls, that I may see them,” said
Defarge to the turnkey.

The man obeyed, and Defarge followed the light closely with his eyes.

“Stop!--Look here, Jacques!”

“A. M.!” croaked Jacques Three, as he read greedily.

“Alexandre Manette,” said Defarge in his ear, following the letters
with his swart forefinger, deeply engrained with gunpowder. “And here he
wrote 'a poor physician.' And it was he, without doubt, who scratched
a calendar on this stone. What is that in your hand? A crowbar? Give it
me!”

He had still the linstock of his gun in his own hand. He made a sudden
exchange of the two instruments, and turning on the worm-eaten stool and
table, beat them to pieces in a few blows.

“Hold the light higher!” he said, wrathfully, to the turnkey. “Look
among those fragments with care, Jacques. And see! Here is my knife,”
 throwing it to him; “rip open that bed, and search the straw. Hold the
light higher, you!”

With a menacing look at the turnkey he crawled upon the hearth, and,
peering up the chimney, struck and prised at its sides with the crowbar,
and worked at the iron grating across it. In a few minutes, some mortar
and dust came dropping down, which he averted his face to avoid; and
in it, and in the old wood-ashes, and in a crevice in the chimney
into which his weapon had slipped or wrought itself, he groped with a
cautious touch.

“Nothing in the wood, and nothing in the straw, Jacques?”

“Nothing.”

“Let us collect them together, in the middle of the cell. So! Light
them, you!”

The turnkey fired the little pile, which blazed high and hot. Stooping
again to come out at the low-arched door, they left it burning, and
retraced their way to the courtyard; seeming to recover their sense
of hearing as they came down, until they were in the raging flood once
more.

They found it surging and tossing, in quest of Defarge himself. Saint
Antoine was clamorous to have its wine-shop keeper foremost in the guard
upon the governor who had defended the Bastille and shot the people.
Otherwise, the governor would not be marched to the Hotel de Ville for
judgment. Otherwise, the governor would escape, and the people's
blood (suddenly of some value, after many years of worthlessness) be
unavenged.

In the howling universe of passion and contention that seemed to
encompass this grim old officer conspicuous in his grey coat and red
decoration, there was but one quite steady figure, and that was a
woman's. “See, there is my husband!” she cried, pointing him out.
“See Defarge!” She stood immovable close to the grim old officer, and
remained immovable close to him; remained immovable close to him through
the streets, as Defarge and the rest bore him along; remained immovable
close to him when he was got near his destination, and began to
be struck at from behind; remained immovable close to him when the
long-gathering rain of stabs and blows fell heavy; was so close to him
when he dropped dead under it, that, suddenly animated, she put her foot
upon his neck, and with her cruel knife--long ready--hewed off his head.

The hour was come, when Saint Antoine was to execute his horrible idea
of hoisting up men for lamps to show what he could be and do. Saint
Antoine's blood was up, and the blood of tyranny and domination by the
iron hand was down--down on the steps of the Hotel de Ville where the
governor's body lay--down on the sole of the shoe of Madame Defarge
where she had trodden on the body to steady it for mutilation. “Lower
the lamp yonder!” cried Saint Antoine, after glaring round for a new
means of death; “here is one of his soldiers to be left on guard!” The
swinging sentinel was posted, and the sea rushed on.

The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive upheaving
of wave against wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed and whose forces
were yet unknown. The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes,
voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering
until the touch of pity could make no mark on them.

But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was
in vivid life, there were two groups of faces--each seven in number--so
fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll which bore
more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly
released by the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried high
overhead: all scared, all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the Last
Day were come, and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits.
Other seven faces there were, carried higher, seven dead faces, whose
drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last Day. Impassive
faces, yet with a suspended--not an abolished--expression on them;
faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped
lids of the eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless lips, “THOU DIDST
IT!”

Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes, the keys of the
accursed fortress of the eight strong towers, some discovered letters
and other memorials of prisoners of old time, long dead of broken
hearts,--such, and such--like, the loudly echoing footsteps of Saint
Antoine escort through the Paris streets in mid-July, one thousand seven
hundred and eighty-nine. Now, Heaven defeat the fancy of Lucie Darnay,
and keep these feet far out of her life! For, they are headlong, mad,
and dangerous; and in the years so long after the breaking of the cask
at Defarge's wine-shop door, they are not easily purified when once
stained red.




XXII. The Sea Still Rises


Haggard Saint Antoine had had only one exultant week, in which to soften
his modicum of hard and bitter bread to such extent as he could, with
the relish of fraternal embraces and congratulations, when Madame
Defarge sat at her counter, as usual, presiding over the customers.
Madame Defarge wore no rose in her head, for the great brotherhood of
Spies had become, even in one short week, extremely chary of trusting
themselves to the saint's mercies. The lamps across his streets had a
portentously elastic swing with them.

Madame Defarge, with her arms folded, sat in the morning light and heat,
contemplating the wine-shop and the street. In both, there were several
knots of loungers, squalid and miserable, but now with a manifest sense
of power enthroned on their distress. The raggedest nightcap, awry on
the wretchedest head, had this crooked significance in it: “I know how
hard it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to support life in myself;
but do you know how easy it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to
destroy life in you?” Every lean bare arm, that had been without work
before, had this work always ready for it now, that it could strike.
The fingers of the knitting women were vicious, with the experience that
they could tear. There was a change in the appearance of Saint Antoine;
the image had been hammering into this for hundreds of years, and the
last finishing blows had told mightily on the expression.

Madame Defarge sat observing it, with such suppressed approval as was
to be desired in the leader of the Saint Antoine women. One of her
sisterhood knitted beside her. The short, rather plump wife of a starved
grocer, and the mother of two children withal, this lieutenant had
already earned the complimentary name of The Vengeance.

“Hark!” said The Vengeance. “Listen, then! Who comes?”

As if a train of powder laid from the outermost bound of Saint Antoine
Quarter to the wine-shop door, had been suddenly fired, a fast-spreading
murmur came rushing along.

“It is Defarge,” said madame. “Silence, patriots!”

Defarge came in breathless, pulled off a red cap he wore, and looked
around him! “Listen, everywhere!” said madame again. “Listen to him!”
 Defarge stood, panting, against a background of eager eyes and open
mouths, formed outside the door; all those within the wine-shop had
sprung to their feet.

“Say then, my husband. What is it?”

“News from the other world!”

“How, then?” cried madame, contemptuously. “The other world?”

“Does everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the famished people
that they might eat grass, and who died, and went to Hell?”

“Everybody!” from all throats.

“The news is of him. He is among us!”

“Among us!” from the universal throat again. “And dead?”

“Not dead! He feared us so much--and with reason--that he caused himself
to be represented as dead, and had a grand mock-funeral. But they have
found him alive, hiding in the country, and have brought him in. I have
seen him but now, on his way to the Hotel de Ville, a prisoner. I have
said that he had reason to fear us. Say all! _Had_ he reason?”

Wretched old sinner of more than threescore years and ten, if he had
never known it yet, he would have known it in his heart of hearts if he
could have heard the answering cry.

A moment of profound silence followed. Defarge and his wife looked
steadfastly at one another. The Vengeance stooped, and the jar of a drum
was heard as she moved it at her feet behind the counter.

“Patriots!” said Defarge, in a determined voice, “are we ready?”

Instantly Madame Defarge's knife was in her girdle; the drum was beating
in the streets, as if it and a drummer had flown together by magic; and
The Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about
her head like all the forty Furies at once, was tearing from house to
house, rousing the women.

The men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger with which they looked
from windows, caught up what arms they had, and came pouring down into
the streets; but, the women were a sight to chill the boldest. From
such household occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from their
children, from their aged and their sick crouching on the bare ground
famished and naked, they ran out with streaming hair, urging one
another, and themselves, to madness with the wildest cries and actions.
Villain Foulon taken, my sister! Old Foulon taken, my mother! Miscreant
Foulon taken, my daughter! Then, a score of others ran into the midst of
these, beating their breasts, tearing their hair, and screaming, Foulon
alive! Foulon who told the starving people they might eat grass! Foulon
who told my old father that he might eat grass, when I had no bread
to give him! Foulon who told my baby it might suck grass, when these
breasts were dry with want! O mother of God, this Foulon! O Heaven our
suffering! Hear me, my dead baby and my withered father: I swear on my
knees, on these stones, to avenge you on Foulon! Husbands, and brothers,
and young men, Give us the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon,
Give us the heart of Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rend
Foulon to pieces, and dig him into the ground, that grass may grow from
him! With these cries, numbers of the women, lashed into blind frenzy,
whirled about, striking and tearing at their own friends until they
dropped into a passionate swoon, and were only saved by the men
belonging to them from being trampled under foot.

Nevertheless, not a moment was lost; not a moment! This Foulon was at
the Hotel de Ville, and might be loosed. Never, if Saint Antoine knew
his own sufferings, insults, and wrongs! Armed men and women flocked out
of the Quarter so fast, and drew even these last dregs after them with
such a force of suction, that within a quarter of an hour there was not
a human creature in Saint Antoine's bosom but a few old crones and the
wailing children.

No. They were all by that time choking the Hall of Examination where
this old man, ugly and wicked, was, and overflowing into the adjacent
open space and streets. The Defarges, husband and wife, The Vengeance,
and Jacques Three, were in the first press, and at no great distance
from him in the Hall.

“See!” cried madame, pointing with her knife. “See the old villain bound
with ropes. That was well done to tie a bunch of grass upon his back.
Ha, ha! That was well done. Let him eat it now!” Madame put her knife
under her arm, and clapped her hands as at a play.

The people immediately behind Madame Defarge, explaining the cause of
her satisfaction to those behind them, and those again explaining to
others, and those to others, the neighbouring streets resounded with the
clapping of hands. Similarly, during two or three hours of drawl,
and the winnowing of many bushels of words, Madame Defarge's frequent
expressions of impatience were taken up, with marvellous quickness, at
a distance: the more readily, because certain men who had by some
wonderful exercise of agility climbed up the external architecture
to look in from the windows, knew Madame Defarge well, and acted as a
telegraph between her and the crowd outside the building.

At length the sun rose so high that it struck a kindly ray as of hope or
protection, directly down upon the old prisoner's head. The favour was
too much to bear; in an instant the barrier of dust and chaff that had
stood surprisingly long, went to the winds, and Saint Antoine had got
him!

It was known directly, to the furthest confines of the crowd. Defarge
had but sprung over a railing and a table, and folded the miserable
wretch in a deadly embrace--Madame Defarge had but followed and turned
her hand in one of the ropes with which he was tied--The Vengeance and
Jacques Three were not yet up with them, and the men at the windows
had not yet swooped into the Hall, like birds of prey from their high
perches--when the cry seemed to go up, all over the city, “Bring him
out! Bring him to the lamp!”

Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now, on
his knees; now, on his feet; now, on his back; dragged, and struck at,
and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his
face by hundreds of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always
entreating and beseeching for mercy; now full of vehement agony of
action, with a small clear space about him as the people drew one
another back that they might see; now, a log of dead wood drawn through
a forest of legs; he was hauled to the nearest street corner where one
of the fatal lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let him go--as a cat
might have done to a mouse--and silently and composedly looked at him
while they made ready, and while he besought her: the women passionately
screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling out to have
him killed with grass in his mouth. Once, he went aloft, and the rope
broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope
broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful, and
held him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the
mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of.

Nor was this the end of the day's bad work, for Saint Antoine so shouted
and danced his angry blood up, that it boiled again, on hearing when
the day closed in that the son-in-law of the despatched, another of the
people's enemies and insulters, was coming into Paris under a guard
five hundred strong, in cavalry alone. Saint Antoine wrote his crimes
on flaring sheets of paper, seized him--would have torn him out of the
breast of an army to bear Foulon company--set his head and heart on
pikes, and carried the three spoils of the day, in Wolf-procession
through the streets.

Not before dark night did the men and women come back to the children,
wailing and breadless. Then, the miserable bakers' shops were beset by
long files of them, patiently waiting to buy bad bread; and while
they waited with stomachs faint and empty, they beguiled the time by
embracing one another on the triumphs of the day, and achieving them
again in gossip. Gradually, these strings of ragged people shortened and
frayed away; and then poor lights began to shine in high windows, and
slender fires were made in the streets, at which neighbours cooked in
common, afterwards supping at their doors.

Scanty and insufficient suppers those, and innocent of meat, as of
most other sauce to wretched bread. Yet, human fellowship infused
some nourishment into the flinty viands, and struck some sparks of
cheerfulness out of them. Fathers and mothers who had had their full
share in the worst of the day, played gently with their meagre children;
and lovers, with such a world around them and before them, loved and
hoped.

It was almost morning, when Defarge's wine-shop parted with its last
knot of customers, and Monsieur Defarge said to madame his wife, in
husky tones, while fastening the door:

“At last it is come, my dear!”

“Eh well!” returned madame. “Almost.”

Saint Antoine slept, the Defarges slept: even The Vengeance slept with
her starved grocer, and the drum was at rest. The drum's was the
only voice in Saint Antoine that blood and hurry had not changed. The
Vengeance, as custodian of the drum, could have wakened him up and had
the same speech out of him as before the Bastille fell, or old Foulon
was seized; not so with the hoarse tones of the men and women in Saint
Antoine's bosom.




XXIII. Fire Rises


There was a change on the village where the fountain fell, and where
the mender of roads went forth daily to hammer out of the stones on the
highway such morsels of bread as might serve for patches to hold his
poor ignorant soul and his poor reduced body together. The prison on the
crag was not so dominant as of yore; there were soldiers to guard it,
but not many; there were officers to guard the soldiers, but not one of
them knew what his men would do--beyond this: that it would probably not
be what he was ordered.

Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desolation.
Every green leaf, every blade of grass and blade of grain, was as
shrivelled and poor as the miserable people. Everything was bowed down,
dejected, oppressed, and broken. Habitations, fences, domesticated
animals, men, women, children, and the soil that bore them--all worn
out.

Monseigneur (often a most worthy individual gentleman) was a national
blessing, gave a chivalrous tone to things, was a polite example of
luxurious and shining life, and a great deal more to equal purpose;
nevertheless, Monseigneur as a class had, somehow or other, brought
things to this. Strange that Creation, designed expressly for
Monseigneur, should be so soon wrung dry and squeezed out! There must
be something short-sighted in the eternal arrangements, surely! Thus it
was, however; and the last drop of blood having been extracted from the
flints, and the last screw of the rack having been turned so often that
its purchase crumbled, and it now turned and turned with nothing
to bite, Monseigneur began to run away from a phenomenon so low and
unaccountable.

But, this was not the change on the village, and on many a village like
it. For scores of years gone by, Monseigneur had squeezed it and wrung
it, and had seldom graced it with his presence except for the pleasures
of the chase--now, found in hunting the people; now, found in hunting
the beasts, for whose preservation Monseigneur made edifying spaces
of barbarous and barren wilderness. No. The change consisted in
the appearance of strange faces of low caste, rather than in the
disappearance of the high caste, chiselled, and otherwise beautified and
beautifying features of Monseigneur.

For, in these times, as the mender of roads worked, solitary, in the
dust, not often troubling himself to reflect that dust he was and
to dust he must return, being for the most part too much occupied in
thinking how little he had for supper and how much more he would eat if
he had it--in these times, as he raised his eyes from his lonely labour,
and viewed the prospect, he would see some rough figure approaching on
foot, the like of which was once a rarity in those parts, but was now
a frequent presence. As it advanced, the mender of roads would discern
without surprise, that it was a shaggy-haired man, of almost barbarian
aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that were clumsy even to the eyes of a
mender of roads, grim, rough, swart, steeped in the mud and dust of many
highways, dank with the marshy moisture of many low grounds, sprinkled
with the thorns and leaves and moss of many byways through woods.

Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at noon in the July weather,
as he sat on his heap of stones under a bank, taking such shelter as he
could get from a shower of hail.

The man looked at him, looked at the village in the hollow, at the mill,
and at the prison on the crag. When he had identified these objects
in what benighted mind he had, he said, in a dialect that was just
intelligible:

“How goes it, Jacques?”

“All well, Jacques.”

“Touch then!”

They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones.

“No dinner?”

“Nothing but supper now,” said the mender of roads, with a hungry face.

“It is the fashion,” growled the man. “I meet no dinner anywhere.”

He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and
steel, pulled at it until it was in a bright glow: then, suddenly held
it from him and dropped something into it from between his finger and
thumb, that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke.

“Touch then.” It was the turn of the mender of roads to say it this
time, after observing these operations. They again joined hands.

“To-night?” said the mender of roads.

“To-night,” said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth.

“Where?”

“Here.”

He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently at
one another, with the hail driving in between them like a pigmy charge
of bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the village.

“Show me!” said the traveller then, moving to the brow of the hill.

“See!” returned the mender of roads, with extended finger. “You go down
here, and straight through the street, and past the fountain--”

“To the Devil with all that!” interrupted the other, rolling his eye
over the landscape. “_I_ go through no streets and past no fountains.
Well?”

“Well! About two leagues beyond the summit of that hill above the
village.”

“Good. When do you cease to work?”

“At sunset.”

“Will you wake me, before departing? I have walked two nights without
resting. Let me finish my pipe, and I shall sleep like a child. Will you
wake me?”

“Surely.”

The wayfarer smoked his pipe out, put it in his breast, slipped off his
great wooden shoes, and lay down on his back on the heap of stones. He
was fast asleep directly.

As the road-mender plied his dusty labour, and the hail-clouds, rolling
away, revealed bright bars and streaks of sky which were responded to
by silver gleams upon the landscape, the little man (who wore a red cap
now, in place of his blue one) seemed fascinated by the figure on the
heap of stones. His eyes were so often turned towards it, that he used
his tools mechanically, and, one would have said, to very poor account.
The bronze face, the shaggy black hair and beard, the coarse woollen
red cap, the rough medley dress of home-spun stuff and hairy skins of
beasts, the powerful frame attenuated by spare living, and the sullen
and desperate compression of the lips in sleep, inspired the mender
of roads with awe. The traveller had travelled far, and his feet were
footsore, and his ankles chafed and bleeding; his great shoes, stuffed
with leaves and grass, had been heavy to drag over the many long
leagues, and his clothes were chafed into holes, as he himself was into
sores. Stooping down beside him, the road-mender tried to get a peep at
secret weapons in his breast or where not; but, in vain, for he slept
with his arms crossed upon him, and set as resolutely as his lips.
Fortified towns with their stockades, guard-houses, gates, trenches, and
drawbridges, seemed to the mender of roads, to be so much air as against
this figure. And when he lifted his eyes from it to the horizon and
looked around, he saw in his small fancy similar figures, stopped by no
obstacle, tending to centres all over France.

The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of
brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the paltering lumps
of dull ice on his body and the diamonds into which the sun changed
them, until the sun was low in the west, and the sky was glowing. Then,
the mender of roads having got his tools together and all things ready
to go down into the village, roused him.

“Good!” said the sleeper, rising on his elbow. “Two leagues beyond the
summit of the hill?”

“About.”

“About. Good!”

The mender of roads went home, with the dust going on before him
according to the set of the wind, and was soon at the fountain,
squeezing himself in among the lean kine brought there to drink, and
appearing even to whisper to them in his whispering to all the village.
When the village had taken its poor supper, it did not creep to bed,
as it usually did, but came out of doors again, and remained there. A
curious contagion of whispering was upon it, and also, when it gathered
together at the fountain in the dark, another curious contagion of
looking expectantly at the sky in one direction only. Monsieur Gabelle,
chief functionary of the place, became uneasy; went out on his house-top
alone, and looked in that direction too; glanced down from behind his
chimneys at the darkening faces by the fountain below, and sent word to
the sacristan who kept the keys of the church, that there might be need
to ring the tocsin by-and-bye.

The night deepened. The trees environing the old chateau, keeping its
solitary state apart, moved in a rising wind, as though they threatened
the pile of building massive and dark in the gloom. Up the two terrace
flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like a
swift messenger rousing those within; uneasy rushes of wind went through
the hall, among the old spears and knives, and passed lamenting up the
stairs, and shook the curtains of the bed where the last Marquis
had slept. East, West, North, and South, through the woods, four
heavy-treading, unkempt figures crushed the high grass and cracked the
branches, striding on cautiously to come together in the courtyard. Four
lights broke out there, and moved away in different directions, and all
was black again.

But, not for long. Presently, the chateau began to make itself strangely
visible by some light of its own, as though it were growing luminous.
Then, a flickering streak played behind the architecture of the front,
picking out transparent places, and showing where balustrades, arches,
and windows were. Then it soared higher, and grew broader and brighter.
Soon, from a score of the great windows, flames burst forth, and the
stone faces awakened, stared out of fire.

A faint murmur arose about the house from the few people who were left
there, and there was a saddling of a horse and riding away. There was
spurring and splashing through the darkness, and bridle was drawn in the
space by the village fountain, and the horse in a foam stood at Monsieur
Gabelle's door. “Help, Gabelle! Help, every one!” The tocsin rang
impatiently, but other help (if that were any) there was none. The
mender of roads, and two hundred and fifty particular friends, stood
with folded arms at the fountain, looking at the pillar of fire in the
sky. “It must be forty feet high,” said they, grimly; and never moved.

The rider from the chateau, and the horse in a foam, clattered away
through the village, and galloped up the stony steep, to the prison on
the crag. At the gate, a group of officers were looking at the fire;
removed from them, a group of soldiers. “Help, gentlemen--officers! The
chateau is on fire; valuable objects may be saved from the flames by
timely aid! Help, help!” The officers looked towards the soldiers who
looked at the fire; gave no orders; and answered, with shrugs and biting
of lips, “It must burn.”

As the rider rattled down the hill again and through the street, the
village was illuminating. The mender of roads, and the two hundred and
fifty particular friends, inspired as one man and woman by the idea of
lighting up, had darted into their houses, and were putting candles in
every dull little pane of glass. The general scarcity of everything,
occasioned candles to be borrowed in a rather peremptory manner of
Monsieur Gabelle; and in a moment of reluctance and hesitation on
that functionary's part, the mender of roads, once so submissive to
authority, had remarked that carriages were good to make bonfires with,
and that post-horses would roast.

The chateau was left to itself to flame and burn. In the roaring and
raging of the conflagration, a red-hot wind, driving straight from the
infernal regions, seemed to be blowing the edifice away. With the rising
and falling of the blaze, the stone faces showed as if they were in
torment. When great masses of stone and timber fell, the face with the
two dints in the nose became obscured: anon struggled out of the smoke
again, as if it were the face of the cruel Marquis, burning at the stake
and contending with the fire.

The chateau burned; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire,
scorched and shrivelled; trees at a distance, fired by the four fierce
figures, begirt the blazing edifice with a new forest of smoke. Molten
lead and iron boiled in the marble basin of the fountain; the water ran
dry; the extinguisher tops of the towers vanished like ice before the
heat, and trickled down into four rugged wells of flame. Great rents and
splits branched out in the solid walls, like crystallisation; stupefied
birds wheeled about and dropped into the furnace; four fierce figures
trudged away, East, West, North, and South, along the night-enshrouded
roads, guided by the beacon they had lighted, towards their next
destination. The illuminated village had seized hold of the tocsin, and,
abolishing the lawful ringer, rang for joy.

Not only that; but the village, light-headed with famine, fire, and
bell-ringing, and bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had to do with
the collection of rent and taxes--though it was but a small instalment
of taxes, and no rent at all, that Gabelle had got in those latter
days--became impatient for an interview with him, and, surrounding his
house, summoned him to come forth for personal conference. Whereupon,
Monsieur Gabelle did heavily bar his door, and retire to hold counsel
with himself. The result of that conference was, that Gabelle again
withdrew himself to his housetop behind his stack of chimneys; this time
resolved, if his door were broken in (he was a small Southern man
of retaliative temperament), to pitch himself head foremost over the
parapet, and crush a man or two below.

Probably, Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there, with the
distant chateau for fire and candle, and the beating at his door,
combined with the joy-ringing, for music; not to mention his having an
ill-omened lamp slung across the road before his posting-house gate,
which the village showed a lively inclination to displace in his favour.
A trying suspense, to be passing a whole summer night on the brink of
the black ocean, ready to take that plunge into it upon which Monsieur
Gabelle had resolved! But, the friendly dawn appearing at last, and the
rush-candles of the village guttering out, the people happily dispersed,
and Monsieur Gabelle came down bringing his life with him for that
while.

Within a hundred miles, and in the light of other fires, there were
other functionaries less fortunate, that night and other nights, whom
the rising sun found hanging across once-peaceful streets, where they
had been born and bred; also, there were other villagers and townspeople
less fortunate than the mender of roads and his fellows, upon whom the
functionaries and soldiery turned with success, and whom they strung up
in their turn. But, the fierce figures were steadily wending East, West,
North, and South, be that as it would; and whosoever hung, fire burned.
The altitude of the gallows that would turn to water and quench it,
no functionary, by any stretch of mathematics, was able to calculate
successfully.




XXIV. Drawn to the Loadstone Rock


In such risings of fire and risings of sea--the firm earth shaken by
the rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb, but was always on the
flow, higher and higher, to the terror and wonder of the beholders on
the shore--three years of tempest were consumed. Three more birthdays
of little Lucie had been woven by the golden thread into the peaceful
tissue of the life of her home.

Many a night and many a day had its inmates listened to the echoes in
the corner, with hearts that failed them when they heard the thronging
feet. For, the footsteps had become to their minds as the footsteps of
a people, tumultuous under a red flag and with their country declared in
danger, changed into wild beasts, by terrible enchantment long persisted
in.

Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the phenomenon of
his not being appreciated: of his being so little wanted in France, as
to incur considerable danger of receiving his dismissal from it, and
this life together. Like the fabled rustic who raised the Devil with
infinite pains, and was so terrified at the sight of him that he could
ask the Enemy no question, but immediately fled; so, Monseigneur, after
boldly reading the Lord's Prayer backwards for a great number of years,
and performing many other potent spells for compelling the Evil One, no
sooner beheld him in his terrors than he took to his noble heels.

The shining Bull's Eye of the Court was gone, or it would have been the
mark for a hurricane of national bullets. It had never been a good
eye to see with--had long had the mote in it of Lucifer's pride,
Sardanapalus's luxury, and a mole's blindness--but it had dropped
out and was gone. The Court, from that exclusive inner circle to its
outermost rotten ring of intrigue, corruption, and dissimulation, was
all gone together. Royalty was gone; had been besieged in its Palace and
“suspended,” when the last tidings came over.

The August of the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two was
come, and Monseigneur was by this time scattered far and wide.

As was natural, the head-quarters and great gathering-place of
Monseigneur, in London, was Tellson's Bank. Spirits are supposed to
haunt the places where their bodies most resorted, and Monseigneur
without a guinea haunted the spot where his guineas used to be.
Moreover, it was the spot to which such French intelligence as was most
to be relied upon, came quickest. Again: Tellson's was a munificent
house, and extended great liberality to old customers who had fallen
from their high estate. Again: those nobles who had seen the coming
storm in time, and anticipating plunder or confiscation, had made
provident remittances to Tellson's, were always to be heard of there
by their needy brethren. To which it must be added that every new-comer
from France reported himself and his tidings at Tellson's, almost as
a matter of course. For such variety of reasons, Tellson's was at that
time, as to French intelligence, a kind of High Exchange; and this
was so well known to the public, and the inquiries made there were in
consequence so numerous, that Tellson's sometimes wrote the latest news
out in a line or so and posted it in the Bank windows, for all who ran
through Temple Bar to read.

On a steaming, misty afternoon, Mr. Lorry sat at his desk, and Charles
Darnay stood leaning on it, talking with him in a low voice. The
penitential den once set apart for interviews with the House, was now
the news-Exchange, and was filled to overflowing. It was within half an
hour or so of the time of closing.

“But, although you are the youngest man that ever lived,” said Charles
Darnay, rather hesitating, “I must still suggest to you--”

“I understand. That I am too old?” said Mr. Lorry.

“Unsettled weather, a long journey, uncertain means of travelling, a
disorganised country, a city that may not be even safe for you.”

“My dear Charles,” said Mr. Lorry, with cheerful confidence, “you touch
some of the reasons for my going: not for my staying away. It is safe
enough for me; nobody will care to interfere with an old fellow of hard
upon fourscore when there are so many people there much better worth
interfering with. As to its being a disorganised city, if it were not a
disorganised city there would be no occasion to send somebody from our
House here to our House there, who knows the city and the business, of
old, and is in Tellson's confidence. As to the uncertain travelling, the
long journey, and the winter weather, if I were not prepared to submit
myself to a few inconveniences for the sake of Tellson's, after all
these years, who ought to be?”

“I wish I were going myself,” said Charles Darnay, somewhat restlessly,
and like one thinking aloud.

“Indeed! You are a pretty fellow to object and advise!” exclaimed Mr.
Lorry. “You wish you were going yourself? And you a Frenchman born? You
are a wise counsellor.”

“My dear Mr. Lorry, it is because I am a Frenchman born, that the
thought (which I did not mean to utter here, however) has passed through
my mind often. One cannot help thinking, having had some sympathy for
the miserable people, and having abandoned something to them,” he spoke
here in his former thoughtful manner, “that one might be listened to,
and might have the power to persuade to some restraint. Only last night,
after you had left us, when I was talking to Lucie--”

“When you were talking to Lucie,” Mr. Lorry repeated. “Yes. I wonder you
are not ashamed to mention the name of Lucie! Wishing you were going to
France at this time of day!”

“However, I am not going,” said Charles Darnay, with a smile. “It is
more to the purpose that you say you are.”

“And I am, in plain reality. The truth is, my dear Charles,” Mr. Lorry
glanced at the distant House, and lowered his voice, “you can have no
conception of the difficulty with which our business is transacted, and
of the peril in which our books and papers over yonder are involved. The
Lord above knows what the compromising consequences would be to numbers
of people, if some of our documents were seized or destroyed; and they
might be, at any time, you know, for who can say that Paris is not set
afire to-day, or sacked to-morrow! Now, a judicious selection from these
with the least possible delay, and the burying of them, or otherwise
getting of them out of harm's way, is within the power (without loss of
precious time) of scarcely any one but myself, if any one. And shall
I hang back, when Tellson's knows this and says this--Tellson's, whose
bread I have eaten these sixty years--because I am a little stiff about
the joints? Why, I am a boy, sir, to half a dozen old codgers here!”

“How I admire the gallantry of your youthful spirit, Mr. Lorry.”

“Tut! Nonsense, sir!--And, my dear Charles,” said Mr. Lorry, glancing at
the House again, “you are to remember, that getting things out of
Paris at this present time, no matter what things, is next to an
impossibility. Papers and precious matters were this very day brought
to us here (I speak in strict confidence; it is not business-like to
whisper it, even to you), by the strangest bearers you can imagine,
every one of whom had his head hanging on by a single hair as he passed
the Barriers. At another time, our parcels would come and go, as easily
as in business-like Old England; but now, everything is stopped.”

“And do you really go to-night?”

“I really go to-night, for the case has become too pressing to admit of
delay.”

“And do you take no one with you?”

“All sorts of people have been proposed to me, but I will have nothing
to say to any of them. I intend to take Jerry. Jerry has been my
bodyguard on Sunday nights for a long time past and I am used to him.
Nobody will suspect Jerry of being anything but an English bull-dog, or
of having any design in his head but to fly at anybody who touches his
master.”

“I must say again that I heartily admire your gallantry and
youthfulness.”

“I must say again, nonsense, nonsense! When I have executed this little
commission, I shall, perhaps, accept Tellson's proposal to retire and
live at my ease. Time enough, then, to think about growing old.”

This dialogue had taken place at Mr. Lorry's usual desk, with
Monseigneur swarming within a yard or two of it, boastful of what he
would do to avenge himself on the rascal-people before long. It was too
much the way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a refugee, and it
was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this
terrible Revolution as if it were the only harvest ever known under
the skies that had not been sown--as if nothing had ever been done, or
omitted to be done, that had led to it--as if observers of the wretched
millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that
should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming,
years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw. Such
vapouring, combined with the extravagant plots of Monseigneur for the
restoration of a state of things that had utterly exhausted itself,
and worn out Heaven and earth as well as itself, was hard to be endured
without some remonstrance by any sane man who knew the truth. And it was
such vapouring all about his ears, like a troublesome confusion of blood
in his own head, added to a latent uneasiness in his mind, which had
already made Charles Darnay restless, and which still kept him so.

Among the talkers, was Stryver, of the King's Bench Bar, far on his
way to state promotion, and, therefore, loud on the theme: broaching
to Monseigneur, his devices for blowing the people up and exterminating
them from the face of the earth, and doing without them: and for
accomplishing many similar objects akin in their nature to the abolition
of eagles by sprinkling salt on the tails of the race. Him, Darnay heard
with a particular feeling of objection; and Darnay stood divided between
going away that he might hear no more, and remaining to interpose his
word, when the thing that was to be, went on to shape itself out.

The House approached Mr. Lorry, and laying a soiled and unopened letter
before him, asked if he had yet discovered any traces of the person to
whom it was addressed? The House laid the letter down so close to Darnay
that he saw the direction--the more quickly because it was his own right
name. The address, turned into English, ran:

“Very pressing. To Monsieur heretofore the Marquis St. Evremonde, of
France. Confided to the cares of Messrs. Tellson and Co., Bankers,
London, England.”

On the marriage morning, Doctor Manette had made it his one urgent and
express request to Charles Darnay, that the secret of this name should
be--unless he, the Doctor, dissolved the obligation--kept inviolate
between them. Nobody else knew it to be his name; his own wife had no
suspicion of the fact; Mr. Lorry could have none.

“No,” said Mr. Lorry, in reply to the House; “I have referred it,
I think, to everybody now here, and no one can tell me where this
gentleman is to be found.”

The hands of the clock verging upon the hour of closing the Bank, there
was a general set of the current of talkers past Mr. Lorry's desk. He
held the letter out inquiringly; and Monseigneur looked at it, in the
person of this plotting and indignant refugee; and Monseigneur looked at
it in the person of that plotting and indignant refugee; and This, That,
and The Other, all had something disparaging to say, in French or in
English, concerning the Marquis who was not to be found.

“Nephew, I believe--but in any case degenerate successor--of the
polished Marquis who was murdered,” said one. “Happy to say, I never
knew him.”

“A craven who abandoned his post,” said another--this Monseigneur had
been got out of Paris, legs uppermost and half suffocated, in a load of
hay--“some years ago.”

“Infected with the new doctrines,” said a third, eyeing the direction
through his glass in passing; “set himself in opposition to the last
Marquis, abandoned the estates when he inherited them, and left them to
the ruffian herd. They will recompense him now, I hope, as he deserves.”

“Hey?” cried the blatant Stryver. “Did he though? Is that the sort of
fellow? Let us look at his infamous name. D--n the fellow!”

Darnay, unable to restrain himself any longer, touched Mr. Stryver on
the shoulder, and said:

“I know the fellow.”

“Do you, by Jupiter?” said Stryver. “I am sorry for it.”

“Why?”

“Why, Mr. Darnay? D'ye hear what he did? Don't ask, why, in these
times.”

“But I do ask why?”

“Then I tell you again, Mr. Darnay, I am sorry for it. I am sorry to
hear you putting any such extraordinary questions. Here is a fellow,
who, infected by the most pestilent and blasphemous code of devilry that
ever was known, abandoned his property to the vilest scum of the earth
that ever did murder by wholesale, and you ask me why I am sorry that a
man who instructs youth knows him? Well, but I'll answer you. I am sorry
because I believe there is contamination in such a scoundrel. That's
why.”

Mindful of the secret, Darnay with great difficulty checked himself, and
said: “You may not understand the gentleman.”

“I understand how to put _you_ in a corner, Mr. Darnay,” said Bully
Stryver, “and I'll do it. If this fellow is a gentleman, I _don't_
understand him. You may tell him so, with my compliments. You may also
tell him, from me, that after abandoning his worldly goods and position
to this butcherly mob, I wonder he is not at the head of them. But, no,
gentlemen,” said Stryver, looking all round, and snapping his fingers,
“I know something of human nature, and I tell you that you'll never
find a fellow like this fellow, trusting himself to the mercies of such
precious _protégés_. No, gentlemen; he'll always show 'em a clean pair
of heels very early in the scuffle, and sneak away.”

With those words, and a final snap of his fingers, Mr. Stryver
shouldered himself into Fleet-street, amidst the general approbation of
his hearers. Mr. Lorry and Charles Darnay were left alone at the desk,
in the general departure from the Bank.

“Will you take charge of the letter?” said Mr. Lorry. “You know where to
deliver it?”

“I do.”

“Will you undertake to explain, that we suppose it to have been
addressed here, on the chance of our knowing where to forward it, and
that it has been here some time?”

“I will do so. Do you start for Paris from here?”

“From here, at eight.”

“I will come back, to see you off.”

Very ill at ease with himself, and with Stryver and most other men,
Darnay made the best of his way into the quiet of the Temple, opened the
letter, and read it. These were its contents:


“Prison of the Abbaye, Paris.

“June 21, 1792. “MONSIEUR HERETOFORE THE MARQUIS.

“After having long been in danger of my life at the hands of the
village, I have been seized, with great violence and indignity, and
brought a long journey on foot to Paris. On the road I have suffered a
great deal. Nor is that all; my house has been destroyed--razed to the
ground.

“The crime for which I am imprisoned, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis,
and for which I shall be summoned before the tribunal, and shall lose my
life (without your so generous help), is, they tell me, treason against
the majesty of the people, in that I have acted against them for an
emigrant. It is in vain I represent that I have acted for them, and not
against, according to your commands. It is in vain I represent that,
before the sequestration of emigrant property, I had remitted the
imposts they had ceased to pay; that I had collected no rent; that I had
had recourse to no process. The only response is, that I have acted for
an emigrant, and where is that emigrant?

“Ah! most gracious Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, where is that
emigrant? I cry in my sleep where is he? I demand of Heaven, will he
not come to deliver me? No answer. Ah Monsieur heretofore the Marquis,
I send my desolate cry across the sea, hoping it may perhaps reach your
ears through the great bank of Tilson known at Paris!

“For the love of Heaven, of justice, of generosity, of the honour of
your noble name, I supplicate you, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, to
succour and release me. My fault is, that I have been true to you. Oh
Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, I pray you be you true to me!

“From this prison here of horror, whence I every hour tend nearer and
nearer to destruction, I send you, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, the
assurance of my dolorous and unhappy service.

“Your afflicted,

“Gabelle.”


The latent uneasiness in Darnay's mind was roused to vigourous life
by this letter. The peril of an old servant and a good one, whose
only crime was fidelity to himself and his family, stared him so
reproachfully in the face, that, as he walked to and fro in the Temple
considering what to do, he almost hid his face from the passersby.

He knew very well, that in his horror of the deed which had culminated
the bad deeds and bad reputation of the old family house, in his
resentful suspicions of his uncle, and in the aversion with which his
conscience regarded the crumbling fabric that he was supposed to uphold,
he had acted imperfectly. He knew very well, that in his love for Lucie,
his renunciation of his social place, though by no means new to his own
mind, had been hurried and incomplete. He knew that he ought to have
systematically worked it out and supervised it, and that he had meant to
do it, and that it had never been done.

The happiness of his own chosen English home, the necessity of being
always actively employed, the swift changes and troubles of the time
which had followed on one another so fast, that the events of this week
annihilated the immature plans of last week, and the events of the week
following made all new again; he knew very well, that to the force of
these circumstances he had yielded:--not without disquiet, but still
without continuous and accumulating resistance. That he had watched
the times for a time of action, and that they had shifted and struggled
until the time had gone by, and the nobility were trooping from
France by every highway and byway, and their property was in course of
confiscation and destruction, and their very names were blotting out,
was as well known to himself as it could be to any new authority in
France that might impeach him for it.

But, he had oppressed no man, he had imprisoned no man; he was so
far from having harshly exacted payment of his dues, that he had
relinquished them of his own will, thrown himself on a world with no
favour in it, won his own private place there, and earned his own
bread. Monsieur Gabelle had held the impoverished and involved estate
on written instructions, to spare the people, to give them what little
there was to give--such fuel as the heavy creditors would let them have
in the winter, and such produce as could be saved from the same grip in
the summer--and no doubt he had put the fact in plea and proof, for his
own safety, so that it could not but appear now.

This favoured the desperate resolution Charles Darnay had begun to make,
that he would go to Paris.

Yes. Like the mariner in the old story, the winds and streams had driven
him within the influence of the Loadstone Rock, and it was drawing him
to itself, and he must go. Everything that arose before his mind drifted
him on, faster and faster, more and more steadily, to the terrible
attraction. His latent uneasiness had been, that bad aims were being
worked out in his own unhappy land by bad instruments, and that he who
could not fail to know that he was better than they, was not there,
trying to do something to stay bloodshed, and assert the claims of mercy
and humanity. With this uneasiness half stifled, and half reproaching
him, he had been brought to the pointed comparison of himself with the
brave old gentleman in whom duty was so strong; upon that comparison
(injurious to himself) had instantly followed the sneers of Monseigneur,
which had stung him bitterly, and those of Stryver, which above all were
coarse and galling, for old reasons. Upon those, had followed Gabelle's
letter: the appeal of an innocent prisoner, in danger of death, to his
justice, honour, and good name.

His resolution was made. He must go to Paris.

Yes. The Loadstone Rock was drawing him, and he must sail on, until he
struck. He knew of no rock; he saw hardly any danger. The intention
with which he had done what he had done, even although he had left
it incomplete, presented it before him in an aspect that would be
gratefully acknowledged in France on his presenting himself to assert
it. Then, that glorious vision of doing good, which is so often the
sanguine mirage of so many good minds, arose before him, and he even
saw himself in the illusion with some influence to guide this raging
Revolution that was running so fearfully wild.

As he walked to and fro with his resolution made, he considered that
neither Lucie nor her father must know of it until he was gone.
Lucie should be spared the pain of separation; and her father, always
reluctant to turn his thoughts towards the dangerous ground of old,
should come to the knowledge of the step, as a step taken, and not in
the balance of suspense and doubt. How much of the incompleteness of his
situation was referable to her father, through the painful anxiety
to avoid reviving old associations of France in his mind, he did not
discuss with himself. But, that circumstance too, had had its influence
in his course.

He walked to and fro, with thoughts very busy, until it was time to
return to Tellson's and take leave of Mr. Lorry. As soon as he arrived
in Paris he would present himself to this old friend, but he must say
nothing of his intention now.

A carriage with post-horses was ready at the Bank door, and Jerry was
booted and equipped.

“I have delivered that letter,” said Charles Darnay to Mr. Lorry. “I
would not consent to your being charged with any written answer, but
perhaps you will take a verbal one?”

“That I will, and readily,” said Mr. Lorry, “if it is not dangerous.”

“Not at all. Though it is to a prisoner in the Abbaye.”

“What is his name?” said Mr. Lorry, with his open pocket-book in his
hand.

“Gabelle.”

“Gabelle. And what is the message to the unfortunate Gabelle in prison?”

“Simply, 'that he has received the letter, and will come.'”

“Any time mentioned?”

“He will start upon his journey to-morrow night.”

“Any person mentioned?”

“No.”

He helped Mr. Lorry to wrap himself in a number of coats and cloaks,
and went out with him from the warm atmosphere of the old Bank, into the
misty air of Fleet-street. “My love to Lucie, and to little Lucie,” said
Mr. Lorry at parting, “and take precious care of them till I come back.”
 Charles Darnay shook his head and doubtfully smiled, as the carriage
rolled away.

That night--it was the fourteenth of August--he sat up late, and wrote
two fervent letters; one was to Lucie, explaining the strong obligation
he was under to go to Paris, and showing her, at length, the reasons
that he had, for feeling confident that he could become involved in no
personal danger there; the other was to the Doctor, confiding Lucie and
their dear child to his care, and dwelling on the same topics with the
strongest assurances. To both, he wrote that he would despatch letters
in proof of his safety, immediately after his arrival.

It was a hard day, that day of being among them, with the first
reservation of their joint lives on his mind. It was a hard matter to
preserve the innocent deceit of which they were profoundly unsuspicious.
But, an affectionate glance at his wife, so happy and busy, made him
resolute not to tell her what impended (he had been half moved to do it,
so strange it was to him to act in anything without her quiet aid), and
the day passed quickly. Early in the evening he embraced her, and her
scarcely less dear namesake, pretending that he would return by-and-bye
(an imaginary engagement took him out, and he had secreted a valise
of clothes ready), and so he emerged into the heavy mist of the heavy
streets, with a heavier heart.

The unseen force was drawing him fast to itself, now, and all the tides
and winds were setting straight and strong towards it. He left his
two letters with a trusty porter, to be delivered half an hour before
midnight, and no sooner; took horse for Dover; and began his journey.
“For the love of Heaven, of justice, of generosity, of the honour of
your noble name!” was the poor prisoner's cry with which he strengthened
his sinking heart, as he left all that was dear on earth behind him, and
floated away for the Loadstone Rock.


The end of the second book.





Book the Third--the Track of a Storm




I. In Secret


The traveller fared slowly on his way, who fared towards Paris from
England in the autumn of the year one thousand seven hundred and
ninety-two. More than enough of bad roads, bad equipages, and bad
horses, he would have encountered to delay him, though the fallen and
unfortunate King of France had been upon his throne in all his glory;
but, the changed times were fraught with other obstacles than
these. Every town-gate and village taxing-house had its band of
citizen-patriots, with their national muskets in a most explosive state
of readiness, who stopped all comers and goers, cross-questioned them,
inspected their papers, looked for their names in lists of their own,
turned them back, or sent them on, or stopped them and laid them in
hold, as their capricious judgment or fancy deemed best for the dawning
Republic One and Indivisible, of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or
Death.

A very few French leagues of his journey were accomplished, when Charles
Darnay began to perceive that for him along these country roads there
was no hope of return until he should have been declared a good citizen
at Paris. Whatever might befall now, he must on to his journey's end.
Not a mean village closed upon him, not a common barrier dropped across
the road behind him, but he knew it to be another iron door in
the series that was barred between him and England. The universal
watchfulness so encompassed him, that if he had been taken in a net,
or were being forwarded to his destination in a cage, he could not have
felt his freedom more completely gone.

This universal watchfulness not only stopped him on the highway twenty
times in a stage, but retarded his progress twenty times in a day, by
riding after him and taking him back, riding before him and stopping him
by anticipation, riding with him and keeping him in charge. He had been
days upon his journey in France alone, when he went to bed tired out, in
a little town on the high road, still a long way from Paris.

Nothing but the production of the afflicted Gabelle's letter from his
prison of the Abbaye would have got him on so far. His difficulty at the
guard-house in this small place had been such, that he felt his journey
to have come to a crisis. And he was, therefore, as little surprised as
a man could be, to find himself awakened at the small inn to which he
had been remitted until morning, in the middle of the night.

Awakened by a timid local functionary and three armed patriots in rough
red caps and with pipes in their mouths, who sat down on the bed.

“Emigrant,” said the functionary, “I am going to send you on to Paris,
under an escort.”

“Citizen, I desire nothing more than to get to Paris, though I could
dispense with the escort.”

“Silence!” growled a red-cap, striking at the coverlet with the butt-end
of his musket. “Peace, aristocrat!”

“It is as the good patriot says,” observed the timid functionary. “You
are an aristocrat, and must have an escort--and must pay for it.”

“I have no choice,” said Charles Darnay.

“Choice! Listen to him!” cried the same scowling red-cap. “As if it was
not a favour to be protected from the lamp-iron!”

“It is always as the good patriot says,” observed the functionary. “Rise
and dress yourself, emigrant.”

Darnay complied, and was taken back to the guard-house, where other
patriots in rough red caps were smoking, drinking, and sleeping, by
a watch-fire. Here he paid a heavy price for his escort, and hence he
started with it on the wet, wet roads at three o'clock in the morning.

The escort were two mounted patriots in red caps and tri-coloured
cockades, armed with national muskets and sabres, who rode one on either
side of him.

The escorted governed his own horse, but a loose line was attached to
his bridle, the end of which one of the patriots kept girded round his
wrist. In this state they set forth with the sharp rain driving in their
faces: clattering at a heavy dragoon trot over the uneven town pavement,
and out upon the mire-deep roads. In this state they traversed without
change, except of horses and pace, all the mire-deep leagues that lay
between them and the capital.

They travelled in the night, halting an hour or two after daybreak, and
lying by until the twilight fell. The escort were so wretchedly clothed,
that they twisted straw round their bare legs, and thatched their ragged
shoulders to keep the wet off. Apart from the personal discomfort of
being so attended, and apart from such considerations of present danger
as arose from one of the patriots being chronically drunk, and carrying
his musket very recklessly, Charles Darnay did not allow the restraint
that was laid upon him to awaken any serious fears in his breast; for,
he reasoned with himself that it could have no reference to the merits
of an individual case that was not yet stated, and of representations,
confirmable by the prisoner in the Abbaye, that were not yet made.

But when they came to the town of Beauvais--which they did at eventide,
when the streets were filled with people--he could not conceal from
himself that the aspect of affairs was very alarming. An ominous crowd
gathered to see him dismount of the posting-yard, and many voices called
out loudly, “Down with the emigrant!”

He stopped in the act of swinging himself out of his saddle, and,
resuming it as his safest place, said:

“Emigrant, my friends! Do you not see me here, in France, of my own
will?”

“You are a cursed emigrant,” cried a farrier, making at him in a
furious manner through the press, hammer in hand; “and you are a cursed
aristocrat!”

The postmaster interposed himself between this man and the rider's
bridle (at which he was evidently making), and soothingly said, “Let him
be; let him be! He will be judged at Paris.”

“Judged!” repeated the farrier, swinging his hammer. “Ay! and condemned
as a traitor.” At this the crowd roared approval.

Checking the postmaster, who was for turning his horse's head to the
yard (the drunken patriot sat composedly in his saddle looking on, with
the line round his wrist), Darnay said, as soon as he could make his
voice heard:

“Friends, you deceive yourselves, or you are deceived. I am not a
traitor.”

“He lies!” cried the smith. “He is a traitor since the decree. His life
is forfeit to the people. His cursed life is not his own!”

At the instant when Darnay saw a rush in the eyes of the crowd, which
another instant would have brought upon him, the postmaster turned his
horse into the yard, the escort rode in close upon his horse's flanks,
and the postmaster shut and barred the crazy double gates. The farrier
struck a blow upon them with his hammer, and the crowd groaned; but, no
more was done.

“What is this decree that the smith spoke of?” Darnay asked the
postmaster, when he had thanked him, and stood beside him in the yard.

“Truly, a decree for selling the property of emigrants.”

“When passed?”

“On the fourteenth.”

“The day I left England!”

“Everybody says it is but one of several, and that there will be
others--if there are not already--banishing all emigrants, and
condemning all to death who return. That is what he meant when he said
your life was not your own.”

“But there are no such decrees yet?”

“What do I know!” said the postmaster, shrugging his shoulders; “there
may be, or there will be. It is all the same. What would you have?”

They rested on some straw in a loft until the middle of the night, and
then rode forward again when all the town was asleep. Among the many
wild changes observable on familiar things which made this wild ride
unreal, not the least was the seeming rarity of sleep. After long and
lonely spurring over dreary roads, they would come to a cluster of poor
cottages, not steeped in darkness, but all glittering with lights, and
would find the people, in a ghostly manner in the dead of the night,
circling hand in hand round a shrivelled tree of Liberty, or all drawn
up together singing a Liberty song. Happily, however, there was sleep in
Beauvais that night to help them out of it and they passed on once more
into solitude and loneliness: jingling through the untimely cold and
wet, among impoverished fields that had yielded no fruits of the earth
that year, diversified by the blackened remains of burnt houses, and by
the sudden emergence from ambuscade, and sharp reining up across their
way, of patriot patrols on the watch on all the roads.

Daylight at last found them before the wall of Paris. The barrier was
closed and strongly guarded when they rode up to it.

“Where are the papers of this prisoner?” demanded a resolute-looking man
in authority, who was summoned out by the guard.

Naturally struck by the disagreeable word, Charles Darnay requested the
speaker to take notice that he was a free traveller and French citizen,
in charge of an escort which the disturbed state of the country had
imposed upon him, and which he had paid for.

“Where,” repeated the same personage, without taking any heed of him
whatever, “are the papers of this prisoner?”

The drunken patriot had them in his cap, and produced them. Casting his
eyes over Gabelle's letter, the same personage in authority showed some
disorder and surprise, and looked at Darnay with a close attention.

He left escort and escorted without saying a word, however, and went
into the guard-room; meanwhile, they sat upon their horses outside the
gate. Looking about him while in this state of suspense, Charles
Darnay observed that the gate was held by a mixed guard of soldiers and
patriots, the latter far outnumbering the former; and that while ingress
into the city for peasants' carts bringing in supplies, and for similar
traffic and traffickers, was easy enough, egress, even for the homeliest
people, was very difficult. A numerous medley of men and women, not
to mention beasts and vehicles of various sorts, was waiting to issue
forth; but, the previous identification was so strict, that they
filtered through the barrier very slowly. Some of these people knew
their turn for examination to be so far off, that they lay down on the
ground to sleep or smoke, while others talked together, or loitered
about. The red cap and tri-colour cockade were universal, both among men
and women.

When he had sat in his saddle some half-hour, taking note of these
things, Darnay found himself confronted by the same man in authority,
who directed the guard to open the barrier. Then he delivered to the
escort, drunk and sober, a receipt for the escorted, and requested him
to dismount. He did so, and the two patriots, leading his tired horse,
turned and rode away without entering the city.

He accompanied his conductor into a guard-room, smelling of common wine
and tobacco, where certain soldiers and patriots, asleep and awake,
drunk and sober, and in various neutral states between sleeping and
waking, drunkenness and sobriety, were standing and lying about. The
light in the guard-house, half derived from the waning oil-lamps of
the night, and half from the overcast day, was in a correspondingly
uncertain condition. Some registers were lying open on a desk, and an
officer of a coarse, dark aspect, presided over these.

“Citizen Defarge,” said he to Darnay's conductor, as he took a slip of
paper to write on. “Is this the emigrant Evremonde?”

“This is the man.”

“Your age, Evremonde?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Married, Evremonde?”

“Yes.”

“Where married?”

“In England.”

“Without doubt. Where is your wife, Evremonde?”

“In England.”

“Without doubt. You are consigned, Evremonde, to the prison of La
Force.”

“Just Heaven!” exclaimed Darnay. “Under what law, and for what offence?”

The officer looked up from his slip of paper for a moment.

“We have new laws, Evremonde, and new offences, since you were here.” He
said it with a hard smile, and went on writing.

“I entreat you to observe that I have come here voluntarily, in response
to that written appeal of a fellow-countryman which lies before you. I
demand no more than the opportunity to do so without delay. Is not that
my right?”

“Emigrants have no rights, Evremonde,” was the stolid reply. The officer
wrote until he had finished, read over to himself what he had written,
sanded it, and handed it to Defarge, with the words “In secret.”

Defarge motioned with the paper to the prisoner that he must accompany
him. The prisoner obeyed, and a guard of two armed patriots attended
them.

“Is it you,” said Defarge, in a low voice, as they went down the
guardhouse steps and turned into Paris, “who married the daughter of
Doctor Manette, once a prisoner in the Bastille that is no more?”

“Yes,” replied Darnay, looking at him with surprise.

“My name is Defarge, and I keep a wine-shop in the Quarter Saint
Antoine. Possibly you have heard of me.”

“My wife came to your house to reclaim her father? Yes!”

The word “wife” seemed to serve as a gloomy reminder to Defarge, to say
with sudden impatience, “In the name of that sharp female newly-born,
and called La Guillotine, why did you come to France?”

“You heard me say why, a minute ago. Do you not believe it is the
truth?”

“A bad truth for you,” said Defarge, speaking with knitted brows, and
looking straight before him.

“Indeed I am lost here. All here is so unprecedented, so changed, so
sudden and unfair, that I am absolutely lost. Will you render me a
little help?”

“None.” Defarge spoke, always looking straight before him.

“Will you answer me a single question?”

“Perhaps. According to its nature. You can say what it is.”

“In this prison that I am going to so unjustly, shall I have some free
communication with the world outside?”

“You will see.”

“I am not to be buried there, prejudged, and without any means of
presenting my case?”

“You will see. But, what then? Other people have been similarly buried
in worse prisons, before now.”

“But never by me, Citizen Defarge.”

Defarge glanced darkly at him for answer, and walked on in a steady
and set silence. The deeper he sank into this silence, the fainter hope
there was--or so Darnay thought--of his softening in any slight degree.
He, therefore, made haste to say:

“It is of the utmost importance to me (you know, Citizen, even better
than I, of how much importance), that I should be able to communicate to
Mr. Lorry of Tellson's Bank, an English gentleman who is now in Paris,
the simple fact, without comment, that I have been thrown into the
prison of La Force. Will you cause that to be done for me?”

“I will do,” Defarge doggedly rejoined, “nothing for you. My duty is to
my country and the People. I am the sworn servant of both, against you.
I will do nothing for you.”

Charles Darnay felt it hopeless to entreat him further, and his pride
was touched besides. As they walked on in silence, he could not but see
how used the people were to the spectacle of prisoners passing along the
streets. The very children scarcely noticed him. A few passers turned
their heads, and a few shook their fingers at him as an aristocrat;
otherwise, that a man in good clothes should be going to prison, was no
more remarkable than that a labourer in working clothes should be
going to work. In one narrow, dark, and dirty street through which they
passed, an excited orator, mounted on a stool, was addressing an excited
audience on the crimes against the people, of the king and the royal
family. The few words that he caught from this man's lips, first made
it known to Charles Darnay that the king was in prison, and that the
foreign ambassadors had one and all left Paris. On the road (except at
Beauvais) he had heard absolutely nothing. The escort and the universal
watchfulness had completely isolated him.

That he had fallen among far greater dangers than those which had
developed themselves when he left England, he of course knew now. That
perils had thickened about him fast, and might thicken faster and faster
yet, he of course knew now. He could not but admit to himself that he
might not have made this journey, if he could have foreseen the events
of a few days. And yet his misgivings were not so dark as, imagined by
the light of this later time, they would appear. Troubled as the future
was, it was the unknown future, and in its obscurity there was ignorant
hope. The horrible massacre, days and nights long, which, within a few
rounds of the clock, was to set a great mark of blood upon the blessed
garnering time of harvest, was as far out of his knowledge as if it had
been a hundred thousand years away. The “sharp female newly-born, and
called La Guillotine,” was hardly known to him, or to the generality
of people, by name. The frightful deeds that were to be soon done, were
probably unimagined at that time in the brains of the doers. How could
they have a place in the shadowy conceptions of a gentle mind?

Of unjust treatment in detention and hardship, and in cruel separation
from his wife and child, he foreshadowed the likelihood, or the
certainty; but, beyond this, he dreaded nothing distinctly. With this on
his mind, which was enough to carry into a dreary prison courtyard, he
arrived at the prison of La Force.

A man with a bloated face opened the strong wicket, to whom Defarge
presented “The Emigrant Evremonde.”

“What the Devil! How many more of them!” exclaimed the man with the
bloated face.

Defarge took his receipt without noticing the exclamation, and withdrew,
with his two fellow-patriots.

“What the Devil, I say again!” exclaimed the gaoler, left with his wife.
“How many more!”

The gaoler's wife, being provided with no answer to the question, merely
replied, “One must have patience, my dear!” Three turnkeys who entered
responsive to a bell she rang, echoed the sentiment, and one added, “For
the love of Liberty;” which sounded in that place like an inappropriate
conclusion.

The prison of La Force was a gloomy prison, dark and filthy, and with a
horrible smell of foul sleep in it. Extraordinary how soon the noisome
flavour of imprisoned sleep, becomes manifest in all such places that
are ill cared for!

“In secret, too,” grumbled the gaoler, looking at the written paper. “As
if I was not already full to bursting!”

He stuck the paper on a file, in an ill-humour, and Charles Darnay
awaited his further pleasure for half an hour: sometimes, pacing to and
fro in the strong arched room: sometimes, resting on a stone seat: in
either case detained to be imprinted on the memory of the chief and his
subordinates.

“Come!” said the chief, at length taking up his keys, “come with me,
emigrant.”

Through the dismal prison twilight, his new charge accompanied him by
corridor and staircase, many doors clanging and locking behind them,
until they came into a large, low, vaulted chamber, crowded with
prisoners of both sexes. The women were seated at a long table, reading
and writing, knitting, sewing, and embroidering; the men were for the
most part standing behind their chairs, or lingering up and down the
room.

In the instinctive association of prisoners with shameful crime and
disgrace, the new-comer recoiled from this company. But the crowning
unreality of his long unreal ride, was, their all at once rising to
receive him, with every refinement of manner known to the time, and with
all the engaging graces and courtesies of life.

So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison manners and
gloom, so spectral did they become in the inappropriate squalor and
misery through which they were seen, that Charles Darnay seemed to stand
in a company of the dead. Ghosts all! The ghost of beauty, the ghost
of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of
frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all
waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes
that were changed by the death they had died in coming there.

It struck him motionless. The gaoler standing at his side, and the other
gaolers moving about, who would have been well enough as to appearance
in the ordinary exercise of their functions, looked so extravagantly
coarse contrasted with sorrowing mothers and blooming daughters who were
there--with the apparitions of the coquette, the young beauty, and the
mature woman delicately bred--that the inversion of all experience and
likelihood which the scene of shadows presented, was heightened to its
utmost. Surely, ghosts all. Surely, the long unreal ride some progress
of disease that had brought him to these gloomy shades!

“In the name of the assembled companions in misfortune,” said a
gentleman of courtly appearance and address, coming forward, “I have the
honour of giving you welcome to La Force, and of condoling with you
on the calamity that has brought you among us. May it soon terminate
happily! It would be an impertinence elsewhere, but it is not so here,
to ask your name and condition?”

Charles Darnay roused himself, and gave the required information, in
words as suitable as he could find.

“But I hope,” said the gentleman, following the chief gaoler with his
eyes, who moved across the room, “that you are not in secret?”

“I do not understand the meaning of the term, but I have heard them say
so.”

“Ah, what a pity! We so much regret it! But take courage; several
members of our society have been in secret, at first, and it has lasted
but a short time.” Then he added, raising his voice, “I grieve to inform
the society--in secret.”

There was a murmur of commiseration as Charles Darnay crossed the room
to a grated door where the gaoler awaited him, and many voices--among
which, the soft and compassionate voices of women were conspicuous--gave
him good wishes and encouragement. He turned at the grated door, to
render the thanks of his heart; it closed under the gaoler's hand; and
the apparitions vanished from his sight forever.

The wicket opened on a stone staircase, leading upward. When they had
ascended forty steps (the prisoner of half an hour already counted
them), the gaoler opened a low black door, and they passed into a
solitary cell. It struck cold and damp, but was not dark.

“Yours,” said the gaoler.

“Why am I confined alone?”

“How do I know!”

“I can buy pen, ink, and paper?”

“Such are not my orders. You will be visited, and can ask then. At
present, you may buy your food, and nothing more.”

There were in the cell, a chair, a table, and a straw mattress. As
the gaoler made a general inspection of these objects, and of the four
walls, before going out, a wandering fancy wandered through the mind of
the prisoner leaning against the wall opposite to him, that this gaoler
was so unwholesomely bloated, both in face and person, as to look like
a man who had been drowned and filled with water. When the gaoler was
gone, he thought in the same wandering way, “Now am I left, as if I were
dead.” Stopping then, to look down at the mattress, he turned from it
with a sick feeling, and thought, “And here in these crawling creatures
is the first condition of the body after death.”

“Five paces by four and a half, five paces by four and a half, five
paces by four and a half.” The prisoner walked to and fro in his cell,
counting its measurement, and the roar of the city arose like muffled
drums with a wild swell of voices added to them. “He made shoes, he made
shoes, he made shoes.” The prisoner counted the measurement again, and
paced faster, to draw his mind with him from that latter repetition.
“The ghosts that vanished when the wicket closed. There was one among
them, the appearance of a lady dressed in black, who was leaning in the
embrasure of a window, and she had a light shining upon her golden
hair, and she looked like * * * * Let us ride on again, for God's sake,
through the illuminated villages with the people all awake! * * * * He
made shoes, he made shoes, he made shoes. * * * * Five paces by four and
a half.” With such scraps tossing and rolling upward from the depths of
his mind, the prisoner walked faster and faster, obstinately counting
and counting; and the roar of the city changed to this extent--that it
still rolled in like muffled drums, but with the wail of voices that he
knew, in the swell that rose above them.




II. The Grindstone


Tellson's Bank, established in the Saint Germain Quarter of Paris, was
in a wing of a large house, approached by a courtyard and shut off from
the street by a high wall and a strong gate. The house belonged to
a great nobleman who had lived in it until he made a flight from the
troubles, in his own cook's dress, and got across the borders. A
mere beast of the chase flying from hunters, he was still in his
metempsychosis no other than the same Monseigneur, the preparation
of whose chocolate for whose lips had once occupied three strong men
besides the cook in question.

Monseigneur gone, and the three strong men absolving themselves from the
sin of having drawn his high wages, by being more than ready and
willing to cut his throat on the altar of the dawning Republic one and
indivisible of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, Monseigneur's
house had been first sequestrated, and then confiscated. For, all
things moved so fast, and decree followed decree with that fierce
precipitation, that now upon the third night of the autumn month
of September, patriot emissaries of the law were in possession of
Monseigneur's house, and had marked it with the tri-colour, and were
drinking brandy in its state apartments.

A place of business in London like Tellson's place of business in Paris,
would soon have driven the House out of its mind and into the Gazette.
For, what would staid British responsibility and respectability have
said to orange-trees in boxes in a Bank courtyard, and even to a Cupid
over the counter? Yet such things were. Tellson's had whitewashed the
Cupid, but he was still to be seen on the ceiling, in the coolest
linen, aiming (as he very often does) at money from morning to
night. Bankruptcy must inevitably have come of this young Pagan, in
Lombard-street, London, and also of a curtained alcove in the rear of
the immortal boy, and also of a looking-glass let into the wall, and
also of clerks not at all old, who danced in public on the slightest
provocation. Yet, a French Tellson's could get on with these things
exceedingly well, and, as long as the times held together, no man had
taken fright at them, and drawn out his money.

What money would be drawn out of Tellson's henceforth, and what would
lie there, lost and forgotten; what plate and jewels would tarnish in
Tellson's hiding-places, while the depositors rusted in prisons,
and when they should have violently perished; how many accounts with
Tellson's never to be balanced in this world, must be carried over into
the next; no man could have said, that night, any more than Mr. Jarvis
Lorry could, though he thought heavily of these questions. He sat by
a newly-lighted wood fire (the blighted and unfruitful year was
prematurely cold), and on his honest and courageous face there was a
deeper shade than the pendent lamp could throw, or any object in the
room distortedly reflect--a shade of horror.

He occupied rooms in the Bank, in his fidelity to the House of which
he had grown to be a part, like strong root-ivy. It chanced that they
derived a kind of security from the patriotic occupation of the main
building, but the true-hearted old gentleman never calculated about
that. All such circumstances were indifferent to him, so that he did
his duty. On the opposite side of the courtyard, under a colonnade,
was extensive standing--for carriages--where, indeed, some carriages
of Monseigneur yet stood. Against two of the pillars were fastened two
great flaring flambeaux, and in the light of these, standing out in the
open air, was a large grindstone: a roughly mounted thing which appeared
to have hurriedly been brought there from some neighbouring smithy,
or other workshop. Rising and looking out of window at these harmless
objects, Mr. Lorry shivered, and retired to his seat by the fire. He had
opened, not only the glass window, but the lattice blind outside it, and
he had closed both again, and he shivered through his frame.

From the streets beyond the high wall and the strong gate, there came
the usual night hum of the city, with now and then an indescribable ring
in it, weird and unearthly, as if some unwonted sounds of a terrible
nature were going up to Heaven.

“Thank God,” said Mr. Lorry, clasping his hands, “that no one near and
dear to me is in this dreadful town to-night. May He have mercy on all
who are in danger!”

Soon afterwards, the bell at the great gate sounded, and he thought,
“They have come back!” and sat listening. But, there was no loud
irruption into the courtyard, as he had expected, and he heard the gate
clash again, and all was quiet.

The nervousness and dread that were upon him inspired that vague
uneasiness respecting the Bank, which a great change would naturally
awaken, with such feelings roused. It was well guarded, and he got up to
go among the trusty people who were watching it, when his door suddenly
opened, and two figures rushed in, at sight of which he fell back in
amazement.

Lucie and her father! Lucie with her arms stretched out to him, and with
that old look of earnestness so concentrated and intensified, that it
seemed as though it had been stamped upon her face expressly to give
force and power to it in this one passage of her life.

“What is this?” cried Mr. Lorry, breathless and confused. “What is the
matter? Lucie! Manette! What has happened? What has brought you here?
What is it?”

With the look fixed upon him, in her paleness and wildness, she panted
out in his arms, imploringly, “O my dear friend! My husband!”

“Your husband, Lucie?”

“Charles.”

“What of Charles?”

“Here.

“Here, in Paris?”

“Has been here some days--three or four--I don't know how many--I can't
collect my thoughts. An errand of generosity brought him here unknown to
us; he was stopped at the barrier, and sent to prison.”

The old man uttered an irrepressible cry. Almost at the same moment, the
bell of the great gate rang again, and a loud noise of feet and voices
came pouring into the courtyard.

“What is that noise?” said the Doctor, turning towards the window.

“Don't look!” cried Mr. Lorry. “Don't look out! Manette, for your life,
don't touch the blind!”

The Doctor turned, with his hand upon the fastening of the window, and
said, with a cool, bold smile:

“My dear friend, I have a charmed life in this city. I have been
a Bastille prisoner. There is no patriot in Paris--in Paris? In
France--who, knowing me to have been a prisoner in the Bastille, would
touch me, except to overwhelm me with embraces, or carry me in triumph.
My old pain has given me a power that has brought us through the
barrier, and gained us news of Charles there, and brought us here. I
knew it would be so; I knew I could help Charles out of all danger; I
told Lucie so.--What is that noise?” His hand was again upon the window.

“Don't look!” cried Mr. Lorry, absolutely desperate. “No, Lucie, my
dear, nor you!” He got his arm round her, and held her. “Don't be so
terrified, my love. I solemnly swear to you that I know of no harm
having happened to Charles; that I had no suspicion even of his being in
this fatal place. What prison is he in?”

“La Force!”

“La Force! Lucie, my child, if ever you were brave and serviceable in
your life--and you were always both--you will compose yourself now, to
do exactly as I bid you; for more depends upon it than you can think, or
I can say. There is no help for you in any action on your part to-night;
you cannot possibly stir out. I say this, because what I must bid you
to do for Charles's sake, is the hardest thing to do of all. You must
instantly be obedient, still, and quiet. You must let me put you in a
room at the back here. You must leave your father and me alone for
two minutes, and as there are Life and Death in the world you must not
delay.”

“I will be submissive to you. I see in your face that you know I can do
nothing else than this. I know you are true.”

The old man kissed her, and hurried her into his room, and turned the
key; then, came hurrying back to the Doctor, and opened the window and
partly opened the blind, and put his hand upon the Doctor's arm, and
looked out with him into the courtyard.

Looked out upon a throng of men and women: not enough in number, or near
enough, to fill the courtyard: not more than forty or fifty in all. The
people in possession of the house had let them in at the gate, and they
had rushed in to work at the grindstone; it had evidently been set up
there for their purpose, as in a convenient and retired spot.

But, such awful workers, and such awful work!

The grindstone had a double handle, and, turning at it madly were two
men, whose faces, as their long hair flapped back when the whirlings of
the grindstone brought their faces up, were more horrible and cruel than
the visages of the wildest savages in their most barbarous disguise.
False eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck upon them, and their
hideous countenances were all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with
howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of
sleep. As these ruffians turned and turned, their matted locks now flung
forward over their eyes, now flung backward over their necks, some women
held wine to their mouths that they might drink; and what with dropping
blood, and what with dropping wine, and what with the stream of sparks
struck out of the stone, all their wicked atmosphere seemed gore and
fire. The eye could not detect one creature in the group free from
the smear of blood. Shouldering one another to get next at the
sharpening-stone, were men stripped to the waist, with the stain all
over their limbs and bodies; men in all sorts of rags, with the stain
upon those rags; men devilishly set off with spoils of women's lace
and silk and ribbon, with the stain dyeing those trifles through
and through. Hatchets, knives, bayonets, swords, all brought to be
sharpened, were all red with it. Some of the hacked swords were tied to
the wrists of those who carried them, with strips of linen and fragments
of dress: ligatures various in kind, but all deep of the one colour. And
as the frantic wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream
of sparks and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in
their frenzied eyes;--eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have
given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun.

All this was seen in a moment, as the vision of a drowning man, or of
any human creature at any very great pass, could see a world if it
were there. They drew back from the window, and the Doctor looked for
explanation in his friend's ashy face.

“They are,” Mr. Lorry whispered the words, glancing fearfully round at
the locked room, “murdering the prisoners. If you are sure of what you
say; if you really have the power you think you have--as I believe you
have--make yourself known to these devils, and get taken to La Force. It
may be too late, I don't know, but let it not be a minute later!”

Doctor Manette pressed his hand, hastened bareheaded out of the room,
and was in the courtyard when Mr. Lorry regained the blind.

His streaming white hair, his remarkable face, and the impetuous
confidence of his manner, as he put the weapons aside like water,
carried him in an instant to the heart of the concourse at the stone.
For a few moments there was a pause, and a hurry, and a murmur, and
the unintelligible sound of his voice; and then Mr. Lorry saw him,
surrounded by all, and in the midst of a line of twenty men long, all
linked shoulder to shoulder, and hand to shoulder, hurried out with
cries of--“Live the Bastille prisoner! Help for the Bastille prisoner's
kindred in La Force! Room for the Bastille prisoner in front there! Save
the prisoner Evremonde at La Force!” and a thousand answering shouts.

He closed the lattice again with a fluttering heart, closed the window
and the curtain, hastened to Lucie, and told her that her father was
assisted by the people, and gone in search of her husband. He found
her child and Miss Pross with her; but, it never occurred to him to be
surprised by their appearance until a long time afterwards, when he sat
watching them in such quiet as the night knew.

Lucie had, by that time, fallen into a stupor on the floor at his feet,
clinging to his hand. Miss Pross had laid the child down on his own
bed, and her head had gradually fallen on the pillow beside her pretty
charge. O the long, long night, with the moans of the poor wife! And O
the long, long night, with no return of her father and no tidings!

Twice more in the darkness the bell at the great gate sounded, and the
irruption was repeated, and the grindstone whirled and spluttered.
“What is it?” cried Lucie, affrighted. “Hush! The soldiers' swords are
sharpened there,” said Mr. Lorry. “The place is national property now,
and used as a kind of armoury, my love.”

Twice more in all; but, the last spell of work was feeble and fitful.
Soon afterwards the day began to dawn, and he softly detached himself
from the clasping hand, and cautiously looked out again. A man, so
besmeared that he might have been a sorely wounded soldier creeping back
to consciousness on a field of slain, was rising from the pavement by
the side of the grindstone, and looking about him with a vacant air.
Shortly, this worn-out murderer descried in the imperfect light one of
the carriages of Monseigneur, and, staggering to that gorgeous vehicle,
climbed in at the door, and shut himself up to take his rest on its
dainty cushions.

The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr. Lorry looked out again,
and the sun was red on the courtyard. But, the lesser grindstone stood
alone there in the calm morning air, with a red upon it that the sun had
never given, and would never take away.




III. The Shadow


One of the first considerations which arose in the business mind of Mr.
Lorry when business hours came round, was this:--that he had no right to
imperil Tellson's by sheltering the wife of an emigrant prisoner under
the Bank roof. His own possessions, safety, life, he would have hazarded
for Lucie and her child, without a moment's demur; but the great trust
he held was not his own, and as to that business charge he was a strict
man of business.

At first, his mind reverted to Defarge, and he thought of finding out
the wine-shop again and taking counsel with its master in reference to
the safest dwelling-place in the distracted state of the city. But, the
same consideration that suggested him, repudiated him; he lived in the
most violent Quarter, and doubtless was influential there, and deep in
its dangerous workings.

Noon coming, and the Doctor not returning, and every minute's delay
tending to compromise Tellson's, Mr. Lorry advised with Lucie. She said
that her father had spoken of hiring a lodging for a short term, in that
Quarter, near the Banking-house. As there was no business objection to
this, and as he foresaw that even if it were all well with Charles, and
he were to be released, he could not hope to leave the city, Mr. Lorry
went out in quest of such a lodging, and found a suitable one, high up
in a removed by-street where the closed blinds in all the other windows
of a high melancholy square of buildings marked deserted homes.

To this lodging he at once removed Lucie and her child, and Miss Pross:
giving them what comfort he could, and much more than he had himself.
He left Jerry with them, as a figure to fill a doorway that would bear
considerable knocking on the head, and returned to his own occupations.
A disturbed and doleful mind he brought to bear upon them, and slowly
and heavily the day lagged on with him.

It wore itself out, and wore him out with it, until the Bank closed. He
was again alone in his room of the previous night, considering what to
do next, when he heard a foot upon the stair. In a few moments, a
man stood in his presence, who, with a keenly observant look at him,
addressed him by his name.

“Your servant,” said Mr. Lorry. “Do you know me?”

He was a strongly made man with dark curling hair, from forty-five
to fifty years of age. For answer he repeated, without any change of
emphasis, the words:

“Do you know me?”

“I have seen you somewhere.”

“Perhaps at my wine-shop?”

Much interested and agitated, Mr. Lorry said: “You come from Doctor
Manette?”

“Yes. I come from Doctor Manette.”

“And what says he? What does he send me?”

Defarge gave into his anxious hand, an open scrap of paper. It bore the
words in the Doctor's writing:

    “Charles is safe, but I cannot safely leave this place yet.
     I have obtained the favour that the bearer has a short note
     from Charles to his wife.  Let the bearer see his wife.”

It was dated from La Force, within an hour.

“Will you accompany me,” said Mr. Lorry, joyfully relieved after reading
this note aloud, “to where his wife resides?”

“Yes,” returned Defarge.

Scarcely noticing as yet, in what a curiously reserved and mechanical
way Defarge spoke, Mr. Lorry put on his hat and they went down into the
courtyard. There, they found two women; one, knitting.

“Madame Defarge, surely!” said Mr. Lorry, who had left her in exactly
the same attitude some seventeen years ago.

“It is she,” observed her husband.

“Does Madame go with us?” inquired Mr. Lorry, seeing that she moved as
they moved.

“Yes. That she may be able to recognise the faces and know the persons.
It is for their safety.”

Beginning to be struck by Defarge's manner, Mr. Lorry looked dubiously
at him, and led the way. Both the women followed; the second woman being
The Vengeance.

They passed through the intervening streets as quickly as they might,
ascended the staircase of the new domicile, were admitted by Jerry,
and found Lucie weeping, alone. She was thrown into a transport by the
tidings Mr. Lorry gave her of her husband, and clasped the hand that
delivered his note--little thinking what it had been doing near him in
the night, and might, but for a chance, have done to him.

     “DEAREST,--Take courage.  I am well, and your father has
      influence around me.  You cannot answer this.
      Kiss our child for me.”

That was all the writing. It was so much, however, to her who received
it, that she turned from Defarge to his wife, and kissed one of the
hands that knitted. It was a passionate, loving, thankful, womanly
action, but the hand made no response--dropped cold and heavy, and took
to its knitting again.

There was something in its touch that gave Lucie a check. She stopped in
the act of putting the note in her bosom, and, with her hands yet at her
neck, looked terrified at Madame Defarge. Madame Defarge met the lifted
eyebrows and forehead with a cold, impassive stare.

“My dear,” said Mr. Lorry, striking in to explain; “there are frequent
risings in the streets; and, although it is not likely they will ever
trouble you, Madame Defarge wishes to see those whom she has the power
to protect at such times, to the end that she may know them--that she
may identify them. I believe,” said Mr. Lorry, rather halting in his
reassuring words, as the stony manner of all the three impressed itself
upon him more and more, “I state the case, Citizen Defarge?”

Defarge looked gloomily at his wife, and gave no other answer than a
gruff sound of acquiescence.

“You had better, Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry, doing all he could to
propitiate, by tone and manner, “have the dear child here, and our
good Pross. Our good Pross, Defarge, is an English lady, and knows no
French.”

The lady in question, whose rooted conviction that she was more than a
match for any foreigner, was not to be shaken by distress and, danger,
appeared with folded arms, and observed in English to The Vengeance,
whom her eyes first encountered, “Well, I am sure, Boldface! I hope
_you_ are pretty well!” She also bestowed a British cough on Madame
Defarge; but, neither of the two took much heed of her.

“Is that his child?” said Madame Defarge, stopping in her work for the
first time, and pointing her knitting-needle at little Lucie as if it
were the finger of Fate.

“Yes, madame,” answered Mr. Lorry; “this is our poor prisoner's darling
daughter, and only child.”

The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed to fall so
threatening and dark on the child, that her mother instinctively
kneeled on the ground beside her, and held her to her breast. The
shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed then to fall,
threatening and dark, on both the mother and the child.

“It is enough, my husband,” said Madame Defarge. “I have seen them. We
may go.”

But, the suppressed manner had enough of menace in it--not visible and
presented, but indistinct and withheld--to alarm Lucie into saying, as
she laid her appealing hand on Madame Defarge's dress:

“You will be good to my poor husband. You will do him no harm. You will
help me to see him if you can?”

“Your husband is not my business here,” returned Madame Defarge, looking
down at her with perfect composure. “It is the daughter of your father
who is my business here.”

“For my sake, then, be merciful to my husband. For my child's sake! She
will put her hands together and pray you to be merciful. We are more
afraid of you than of these others.”

Madame Defarge received it as a compliment, and looked at her husband.
Defarge, who had been uneasily biting his thumb-nail and looking at her,
collected his face into a sterner expression.

“What is it that your husband says in that little letter?” asked Madame
Defarge, with a lowering smile. “Influence; he says something touching
influence?”

“That my father,” said Lucie, hurriedly taking the paper from her
breast, but with her alarmed eyes on her questioner and not on it, “has
much influence around him.”

“Surely it will release him!” said Madame Defarge. “Let it do so.”

“As a wife and mother,” cried Lucie, most earnestly, “I implore you to
have pity on me and not to exercise any power that you possess, against
my innocent husband, but to use it in his behalf. O sister-woman, think
of me. As a wife and mother!”

Madame Defarge looked, coldly as ever, at the suppliant, and said,
turning to her friend The Vengeance:

“The wives and mothers we have been used to see, since we were as little
as this child, and much less, have not been greatly considered? We have
known _their_ husbands and fathers laid in prison and kept from them,
often enough? All our lives, we have seen our sister-women suffer, in
themselves and in their children, poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst,
sickness, misery, oppression and neglect of all kinds?”

“We have seen nothing else,” returned The Vengeance.

“We have borne this a long time,” said Madame Defarge, turning her eyes
again upon Lucie. “Judge you! Is it likely that the trouble of one wife
and mother would be much to us now?”

She resumed her knitting and went out. The Vengeance followed. Defarge
went last, and closed the door.

“Courage, my dear Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry, as he raised her. “Courage,
courage! So far all goes well with us--much, much better than it has of
late gone with many poor souls. Cheer up, and have a thankful heart.”

“I am not thankless, I hope, but that dreadful woman seems to throw a
shadow on me and on all my hopes.”

“Tut, tut!” said Mr. Lorry; “what is this despondency in the brave
little breast? A shadow indeed! No substance in it, Lucie.”

But the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself,
for all that, and in his secret mind it troubled him greatly.




IV. Calm in Storm


Doctor Manette did not return until the morning of the fourth day of his
absence. So much of what had happened in that dreadful time as could be
kept from the knowledge of Lucie was so well concealed from her, that
not until long afterwards, when France and she were far apart, did she
know that eleven hundred defenceless prisoners of both sexes and all
ages had been killed by the populace; that four days and nights had been
darkened by this deed of horror; and that the air around her had been
tainted by the slain. She only knew that there had been an attack upon
the prisons, that all political prisoners had been in danger, and that
some had been dragged out by the crowd and murdered.

To Mr. Lorry, the Doctor communicated under an injunction of secrecy on
which he had no need to dwell, that the crowd had taken him through a
scene of carnage to the prison of La Force. That, in the prison he had
found a self-appointed Tribunal sitting, before which the prisoners were
brought singly, and by which they were rapidly ordered to be put forth
to be massacred, or to be released, or (in a few cases) to be sent back
to their cells. That, presented by his conductors to this Tribunal, he
had announced himself by name and profession as having been for eighteen
years a secret and unaccused prisoner in the Bastille; that, one of the
body so sitting in judgment had risen and identified him, and that this
man was Defarge.

That, hereupon he had ascertained, through the registers on the table,
that his son-in-law was among the living prisoners, and had pleaded hard
to the Tribunal--of whom some members were asleep and some awake, some
dirty with murder and some clean, some sober and some not--for his life
and liberty. That, in the first frantic greetings lavished on himself as
a notable sufferer under the overthrown system, it had been accorded
to him to have Charles Darnay brought before the lawless Court, and
examined. That, he seemed on the point of being at once released, when
the tide in his favour met with some unexplained check (not intelligible
to the Doctor), which led to a few words of secret conference. That,
the man sitting as President had then informed Doctor Manette that
the prisoner must remain in custody, but should, for his sake, be held
inviolate in safe custody. That, immediately, on a signal, the prisoner
was removed to the interior of the prison again; but, that he, the
Doctor, had then so strongly pleaded for permission to remain and
assure himself that his son-in-law was, through no malice or mischance,
delivered to the concourse whose murderous yells outside the gate had
often drowned the proceedings, that he had obtained the permission, and
had remained in that Hall of Blood until the danger was over.

The sights he had seen there, with brief snatches of food and sleep by
intervals, shall remain untold. The mad joy over the prisoners who were
saved, had astounded him scarcely less than the mad ferocity against
those who were cut to pieces. One prisoner there was, he said, who had
been discharged into the street free, but at whom a mistaken savage had
thrust a pike as he passed out. Being besought to go to him and dress
the wound, the Doctor had passed out at the same gate, and had found him
in the arms of a company of Samaritans, who were seated on the bodies
of their victims. With an inconsistency as monstrous as anything in this
awful nightmare, they had helped the healer, and tended the wounded man
with the gentlest solicitude--had made a litter for him and escorted him
carefully from the spot--had then caught up their weapons and plunged
anew into a butchery so dreadful, that the Doctor had covered his eyes
with his hands, and swooned away in the midst of it.

As Mr. Lorry received these confidences, and as he watched the face of
his friend now sixty-two years of age, a misgiving arose within him that
such dread experiences would revive the old danger.

But, he had never seen his friend in his present aspect: he had never
at all known him in his present character. For the first time the Doctor
felt, now, that his suffering was strength and power. For the first time
he felt that in that sharp fire, he had slowly forged the iron which
could break the prison door of his daughter's husband, and deliver him.
“It all tended to a good end, my friend; it was not mere waste and ruin.
As my beloved child was helpful in restoring me to myself, I will be
helpful now in restoring the dearest part of herself to her; by the aid
of Heaven I will do it!” Thus, Doctor Manette. And when Jarvis Lorry saw
the kindled eyes, the resolute face, the calm strong look and bearing
of the man whose life always seemed to him to have been stopped, like a
clock, for so many years, and then set going again with an energy which
had lain dormant during the cessation of its usefulness, he believed.

Greater things than the Doctor had at that time to contend with, would
have yielded before his persevering purpose. While he kept himself
in his place, as a physician, whose business was with all degrees
of mankind, bond and free, rich and poor, bad and good, he used his
personal influence so wisely, that he was soon the inspecting physician
of three prisons, and among them of La Force. He could now assure Lucie
that her husband was no longer confined alone, but was mixed with the
general body of prisoners; he saw her husband weekly, and brought sweet
messages to her, straight from his lips; sometimes her husband himself
sent a letter to her (though never by the Doctor's hand), but she was
not permitted to write to him: for, among the many wild suspicions of
plots in the prisons, the wildest of all pointed at emigrants who were
known to have made friends or permanent connections abroad.

This new life of the Doctor's was an anxious life, no doubt; still, the
sagacious Mr. Lorry saw that there was a new sustaining pride in it.
Nothing unbecoming tinged the pride; it was a natural and worthy one;
but he observed it as a curiosity. The Doctor knew, that up to that
time, his imprisonment had been associated in the minds of his daughter
and his friend, with his personal affliction, deprivation, and weakness.
Now that this was changed, and he knew himself to be invested through
that old trial with forces to which they both looked for Charles's
ultimate safety and deliverance, he became so far exalted by the change,
that he took the lead and direction, and required them as the weak, to
trust to him as the strong. The preceding relative positions of himself
and Lucie were reversed, yet only as the liveliest gratitude and
affection could reverse them, for he could have had no pride but in
rendering some service to her who had rendered so much to him. “All
curious to see,” thought Mr. Lorry, in his amiably shrewd way, “but all
natural and right; so, take the lead, my dear friend, and keep it; it
couldn't be in better hands.”

But, though the Doctor tried hard, and never ceased trying, to get
Charles Darnay set at liberty, or at least to get him brought to trial,
the public current of the time set too strong and fast for him. The new
era began; the king was tried, doomed, and beheaded; the Republic of
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, declared for victory or death
against the world in arms; the black flag waved night and day from the
great towers of Notre Dame; three hundred thousand men, summoned to rise
against the tyrants of the earth, rose from all the varying soils
of France, as if the dragon's teeth had been sown broadcast, and
had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain, on rock, in gravel, and
alluvial mud, under the bright sky of the South and under the clouds of
the North, in fell and forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds
and among the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along the
fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the sea-shore.
What private solicitude could rear itself against the deluge of the Year
One of Liberty--the deluge rising from below, not falling from above,
and with the windows of Heaven shut, not opened!

There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no
measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as regularly as when
time was young, and the evening and morning were the first day, other
count of time there was none. Hold of it was lost in the raging fever
of a nation, as it is in the fever of one patient. Now, breaking the
unnatural silence of a whole city, the executioner showed the people the
head of the king--and now, it seemed almost in the same breath, the
head of his fair wife which had had eight weary months of imprisoned
widowhood and misery, to turn it grey.

And yet, observing the strange law of contradiction which obtains in
all such cases, the time was long, while it flamed by so fast. A
revolutionary tribunal in the capital, and forty or fifty thousand
revolutionary committees all over the land; a law of the Suspected,
which struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered over
any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons gorged
with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain no hearing;
these things became the established order and nature of appointed
things, and seemed to be ancient usage before they were many weeks old.
Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before
the general gaze from the foundations of the world--the figure of the
sharp female called La Guillotine.

It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache,
it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it imparted a
peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which
shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine, looked through the little window
and sneezed into the sack. It was the sign of the regeneration of the
human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts
from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and
believed in where the Cross was denied.

It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted,
were a rotten red. It was taken to pieces, like a toy-puzzle for a young
Devil, and was put together again when the occasion wanted it. It hushed
the eloquent, struck down the powerful, abolished the beautiful and
good. Twenty-two friends of high public mark, twenty-one living and one
dead, it had lopped the heads off, in one morning, in as many minutes.
The name of the strong man of Old Scripture had descended to the chief
functionary who worked it; but, so armed, he was stronger than his
namesake, and blinder, and tore away the gates of God's own Temple every
day.

Among these terrors, and the brood belonging to them, the Doctor walked
with a steady head: confident in his power, cautiously persistent in his
end, never doubting that he would save Lucie's husband at last. Yet the
current of the time swept by, so strong and deep, and carried the time
away so fiercely, that Charles had lain in prison one year and three
months when the Doctor was thus steady and confident. So much more
wicked and distracted had the Revolution grown in that December month,
that the rivers of the South were encumbered with the bodies of the
violently drowned by night, and prisoners were shot in lines and squares
under the southern wintry sun. Still, the Doctor walked among the
terrors with a steady head. No man better known than he, in Paris at
that day; no man in a stranger situation. Silent, humane, indispensable
in hospital and prison, using his art equally among assassins and
victims, he was a man apart. In the exercise of his skill, the
appearance and the story of the Bastille Captive removed him from all
other men. He was not suspected or brought in question, any more than if
he had indeed been recalled to life some eighteen years before, or were
a Spirit moving among mortals.




V. The Wood-Sawyer


One year and three months. During all that time Lucie was never
sure, from hour to hour, but that the Guillotine would strike off her
husband's head next day. Every day, through the stony streets, the
tumbrils now jolted heavily, filled with Condemned. Lovely girls; bright
women, brown-haired, black-haired, and grey; youths; stalwart men and
old; gentle born and peasant born; all red wine for La Guillotine, all
daily brought into light from the dark cellars of the loathsome prisons,
and carried to her through the streets to slake her devouring thirst.
Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death;--the last, much the easiest to
bestow, O Guillotine!

If the suddenness of her calamity, and the whirling wheels of the time,
had stunned the Doctor's daughter into awaiting the result in idle
despair, it would but have been with her as it was with many. But, from
the hour when she had taken the white head to her fresh young bosom in
the garret of Saint Antoine, she had been true to her duties. She was
truest to them in the season of trial, as all the quietly loyal and good
will always be.

As soon as they were established in their new residence, and her father
had entered on the routine of his avocations, she arranged the little
household as exactly as if her husband had been there. Everything had
its appointed place and its appointed time. Little Lucie she taught,
as regularly, as if they had all been united in their English home. The
slight devices with which she cheated herself into the show of a belief
that they would soon be reunited--the little preparations for his speedy
return, the setting aside of his chair and his books--these, and the
solemn prayer at night for one dear prisoner especially, among the many
unhappy souls in prison and the shadow of death--were almost the only
outspoken reliefs of her heavy mind.

She did not greatly alter in appearance. The plain dark dresses, akin to
mourning dresses, which she and her child wore, were as neat and as well
attended to as the brighter clothes of happy days. She lost her colour,
and the old and intent expression was a constant, not an occasional,
thing; otherwise, she remained very pretty and comely. Sometimes, at
night on kissing her father, she would burst into the grief she had
repressed all day, and would say that her sole reliance, under Heaven,
was on him. He always resolutely answered: “Nothing can happen to him
without my knowledge, and I know that I can save him, Lucie.”

They had not made the round of their changed life many weeks, when her
father said to her, on coming home one evening:

“My dear, there is an upper window in the prison, to which Charles can
sometimes gain access at three in the afternoon. When he can get to
it--which depends on many uncertainties and incidents--he might see you
in the street, he thinks, if you stood in a certain place that I can
show you. But you will not be able to see him, my poor child, and even
if you could, it would be unsafe for you to make a sign of recognition.”

“O show me the place, my father, and I will go there every day.”

From that time, in all weathers, she waited there two hours. As the
clock struck two, she was there, and at four she turned resignedly away.
When it was not too wet or inclement for her child to be with her, they
went together; at other times she was alone; but, she never missed a
single day.

It was the dark and dirty corner of a small winding street. The hovel
of a cutter of wood into lengths for burning, was the only house at that
end; all else was wall. On the third day of her being there, he noticed
her.

“Good day, citizeness.”

“Good day, citizen.”

This mode of address was now prescribed by decree. It had been
established voluntarily some time ago, among the more thorough patriots;
but, was now law for everybody.

“Walking here again, citizeness?”

“You see me, citizen!”

The wood-sawyer, who was a little man with a redundancy of gesture (he
had once been a mender of roads), cast a glance at the prison, pointed
at the prison, and putting his ten fingers before his face to represent
bars, peeped through them jocosely.

“But it's not my business,” said he. And went on sawing his wood.

Next day he was looking out for her, and accosted her the moment she
appeared.

“What? Walking here again, citizeness?”

“Yes, citizen.”

“Ah! A child too! Your mother, is it not, my little citizeness?”

“Do I say yes, mamma?” whispered little Lucie, drawing close to her.

“Yes, dearest.”

“Yes, citizen.”

“Ah! But it's not my business. My work is my business. See my saw! I
call it my Little Guillotine. La, la, la; La, la, la! And off his head
comes!”

The billet fell as he spoke, and he threw it into a basket.

“I call myself the Samson of the firewood guillotine. See here again!
Loo, loo, loo; Loo, loo, loo! And off _her_ head comes! Now, a child.
Tickle, tickle; Pickle, pickle! And off _its_ head comes. All the
family!”

Lucie shuddered as he threw two more billets into his basket, but it was
impossible to be there while the wood-sawyer was at work, and not be in
his sight. Thenceforth, to secure his good will, she always spoke to him
first, and often gave him drink-money, which he readily received.

He was an inquisitive fellow, and sometimes when she had quite forgotten
him in gazing at the prison roof and grates, and in lifting her heart
up to her husband, she would come to herself to find him looking at her,
with his knee on his bench and his saw stopped in its work. “But it's
not my business!” he would generally say at those times, and would
briskly fall to his sawing again.

In all weathers, in the snow and frost of winter, in the bitter winds of
spring, in the hot sunshine of summer, in the rains of autumn, and again
in the snow and frost of winter, Lucie passed two hours of every day at
this place; and every day on leaving it, she kissed the prison wall.
Her husband saw her (so she learned from her father) it might be once in
five or six times: it might be twice or thrice running: it might be, not
for a week or a fortnight together. It was enough that he could and did
see her when the chances served, and on that possibility she would have
waited out the day, seven days a week.

These occupations brought her round to the December month, wherein her
father walked among the terrors with a steady head. On a lightly-snowing
afternoon she arrived at the usual corner. It was a day of some wild
rejoicing, and a festival. She had seen the houses, as she came along,
decorated with little pikes, and with little red caps stuck upon them;
also, with tricoloured ribbons; also, with the standard inscription
(tricoloured letters were the favourite), Republic One and Indivisible.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death!

The miserable shop of the wood-sawyer was so small, that its whole
surface furnished very indifferent space for this legend. He had got
somebody to scrawl it up for him, however, who had squeezed Death in
with most inappropriate difficulty. On his house-top, he displayed pike
and cap, as a good citizen must, and in a window he had stationed his
saw inscribed as his “Little Sainte Guillotine”--for the great sharp
female was by that time popularly canonised. His shop was shut and he
was not there, which was a relief to Lucie, and left her quite alone.

But, he was not far off, for presently she heard a troubled movement
and a shouting coming along, which filled her with fear. A moment
afterwards, and a throng of people came pouring round the corner by the
prison wall, in the midst of whom was the wood-sawyer hand in hand with
The Vengeance. There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and
they were dancing like five thousand demons. There was no other music
than their own singing. They danced to the popular Revolution song,
keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison.
Men and women danced together, women danced together, men danced
together, as hazard had brought them together. At first, they were a
mere storm of coarse red caps and coarse woollen rags; but, as they
filled the place, and stopped to dance about Lucie, some ghastly
apparition of a dance-figure gone raving mad arose among them. They
advanced, retreated, struck at one another's hands, clutched at one
another's heads, spun round alone, caught one another and spun round
in pairs, until many of them dropped. While those were down, the rest
linked hand in hand, and all spun round together: then the ring broke,
and in separate rings of two and four they turned and turned until they
all stopped at once, began again, struck, clutched, and tore, and then
reversed the spin, and all spun round another way. Suddenly they stopped
again, paused, struck out the time afresh, formed into lines the width
of the public way, and, with their heads low down and their hands high
up, swooped screaming off. No fight could have been half so terrible
as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport--a something, once
innocent, delivered over to all devilry--a healthy pastime changed into
a means of angering the blood, bewildering the senses, and steeling the
heart. Such grace as was visible in it, made it the uglier, showing how
warped and perverted all things good by nature were become. The maidenly
bosom bared to this, the pretty almost-child's head thus distracted, the
delicate foot mincing in this slough of blood and dirt, were types of
the disjointed time.

This was the Carmagnole. As it passed, leaving Lucie frightened and
bewildered in the doorway of the wood-sawyer's house, the feathery snow
fell as quietly and lay as white and soft, as if it had never been.

“O my father!” for he stood before her when she lifted up the eyes she
had momentarily darkened with her hand; “such a cruel, bad sight.”

“I know, my dear, I know. I have seen it many times. Don't be
frightened! Not one of them would harm you.”

“I am not frightened for myself, my father. But when I think of my
husband, and the mercies of these people--”

“We will set him above their mercies very soon. I left him climbing to
the window, and I came to tell you. There is no one here to see. You may
kiss your hand towards that highest shelving roof.”

“I do so, father, and I send him my Soul with it!”

“You cannot see him, my poor dear?”

“No, father,” said Lucie, yearning and weeping as she kissed her hand,
“no.”

A footstep in the snow. Madame Defarge. “I salute you, citizeness,”
 from the Doctor. “I salute you, citizen.” This in passing. Nothing more.
Madame Defarge gone, like a shadow over the white road.

“Give me your arm, my love. Pass from here with an air of cheerfulness
and courage, for his sake. That was well done;” they had left the spot;
“it shall not be in vain. Charles is summoned for to-morrow.”

“For to-morrow!”

“There is no time to lose. I am well prepared, but there are precautions
to be taken, that could not be taken until he was actually summoned
before the Tribunal. He has not received the notice yet, but I know
that he will presently be summoned for to-morrow, and removed to the
Conciergerie; I have timely information. You are not afraid?”

She could scarcely answer, “I trust in you.”

“Do so, implicitly. Your suspense is nearly ended, my darling; he shall
be restored to you within a few hours; I have encompassed him with every
protection. I must see Lorry.”

He stopped. There was a heavy lumbering of wheels within hearing. They
both knew too well what it meant. One. Two. Three. Three tumbrils faring
away with their dread loads over the hushing snow.

“I must see Lorry,” the Doctor repeated, turning her another way.

The staunch old gentleman was still in his trust; had never left it. He
and his books were in frequent requisition as to property confiscated
and made national. What he could save for the owners, he saved. No
better man living to hold fast by what Tellson's had in keeping, and to
hold his peace.

A murky red and yellow sky, and a rising mist from the Seine, denoted
the approach of darkness. It was almost dark when they arrived at the
Bank. The stately residence of Monseigneur was altogether blighted and
deserted. Above a heap of dust and ashes in the court, ran the letters:
National Property. Republic One and Indivisible. Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity, or Death!

Who could that be with Mr. Lorry--the owner of the riding-coat upon the
chair--who must not be seen? From whom newly arrived, did he come out,
agitated and surprised, to take his favourite in his arms? To whom did
he appear to repeat her faltering words, when, raising his voice and
turning his head towards the door of the room from which he had issued,
he said: “Removed to the Conciergerie, and summoned for to-morrow?”




VI. Triumph


The dread tribunal of five Judges, Public Prosecutor, and determined
Jury, sat every day. Their lists went forth every evening, and were
read out by the gaolers of the various prisons to their prisoners. The
standard gaoler-joke was, “Come out and listen to the Evening Paper, you
inside there!”

“Charles Evremonde, called Darnay!”

So at last began the Evening Paper at La Force.

When a name was called, its owner stepped apart into a spot reserved
for those who were announced as being thus fatally recorded. Charles
Evremonde, called Darnay, had reason to know the usage; he had seen
hundreds pass away so.

His bloated gaoler, who wore spectacles to read with, glanced over them
to assure himself that he had taken his place, and went through the
list, making a similar short pause at each name. There were twenty-three
names, but only twenty were responded to; for one of the prisoners so
summoned had died in gaol and been forgotten, and two had already been
guillotined and forgotten. The list was read, in the vaulted chamber
where Darnay had seen the associated prisoners on the night of his
arrival. Every one of those had perished in the massacre; every human
creature he had since cared for and parted with, had died on the
scaffold.

There were hurried words of farewell and kindness, but the parting was
soon over. It was the incident of every day, and the society of La Force
were engaged in the preparation of some games of forfeits and a little
concert, for that evening. They crowded to the grates and shed tears
there; but, twenty places in the projected entertainments had to be
refilled, and the time was, at best, short to the lock-up hour, when the
common rooms and corridors would be delivered over to the great dogs
who kept watch there through the night. The prisoners were far from
insensible or unfeeling; their ways arose out of the condition of the
time. Similarly, though with a subtle difference, a species of fervour
or intoxication, known, without doubt, to have led some persons to
brave the guillotine unnecessarily, and to die by it, was not mere
boastfulness, but a wild infection of the wildly shaken public mind. In
seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the
disease--a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have
like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke
them.

The passage to the Conciergerie was short and dark; the night in its
vermin-haunted cells was long and cold. Next day, fifteen prisoners were
put to the bar before Charles Darnay's name was called. All the fifteen
were condemned, and the trials of the whole occupied an hour and a half.

“Charles Evremonde, called Darnay,” was at length arraigned.

His judges sat upon the Bench in feathered hats; but the rough red cap
and tricoloured cockade was the head-dress otherwise prevailing. Looking
at the Jury and the turbulent audience, he might have thought that the
usual order of things was reversed, and that the felons were trying the
honest men. The lowest, cruelest, and worst populace of a city, never
without its quantity of low, cruel, and bad, were the directing
spirits of the scene: noisily commenting, applauding, disapproving,
anticipating, and precipitating the result, without a check. Of the men,
the greater part were armed in various ways; of the women, some wore
knives, some daggers, some ate and drank as they looked on, many
knitted. Among these last, was one, with a spare piece of knitting under
her arm as she worked. She was in a front row, by the side of a man whom
he had never seen since his arrival at the Barrier, but whom he directly
remembered as Defarge. He noticed that she once or twice whispered in
his ear, and that she seemed to be his wife; but, what he most noticed
in the two figures was, that although they were posted as close to
himself as they could be, they never looked towards him. They seemed to
be waiting for something with a dogged determination, and they looked at
the Jury, but at nothing else. Under the President sat Doctor Manette,
in his usual quiet dress. As well as the prisoner could see, he and Mr.
Lorry were the only men there, unconnected with the Tribunal, who
wore their usual clothes, and had not assumed the coarse garb of the
Carmagnole.

Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, was accused by the public prosecutor
as an emigrant, whose life was forfeit to the Republic, under the decree
which banished all emigrants on pain of Death. It was nothing that the
decree bore date since his return to France. There he was, and there was
the decree; he had been taken in France, and his head was demanded.

“Take off his head!” cried the audience. “An enemy to the Republic!”

The President rang his bell to silence those cries, and asked the
prisoner whether it was not true that he had lived many years in
England?

Undoubtedly it was.

Was he not an emigrant then? What did he call himself?

Not an emigrant, he hoped, within the sense and spirit of the law.

Why not? the President desired to know.

Because he had voluntarily relinquished a title that was distasteful
to him, and a station that was distasteful to him, and had left
his country--he submitted before the word emigrant in the present
acceptation by the Tribunal was in use--to live by his own industry in
England, rather than on the industry of the overladen people of France.

What proof had he of this?

He handed in the names of two witnesses; Theophile Gabelle, and
Alexandre Manette.

But he had married in England? the President reminded him.

True, but not an English woman.

A citizeness of France?

Yes. By birth.

Her name and family?

“Lucie Manette, only daughter of Doctor Manette, the good physician who
sits there.”

This answer had a happy effect upon the audience. Cries in exaltation
of the well-known good physician rent the hall. So capriciously were
the people moved, that tears immediately rolled down several ferocious
countenances which had been glaring at the prisoner a moment before, as
if with impatience to pluck him out into the streets and kill him.

On these few steps of his dangerous way, Charles Darnay had set his foot
according to Doctor Manette's reiterated instructions. The same cautious
counsel directed every step that lay before him, and had prepared every
inch of his road.

The President asked, why had he returned to France when he did, and not
sooner?

He had not returned sooner, he replied, simply because he had no means
of living in France, save those he had resigned; whereas, in England,
he lived by giving instruction in the French language and literature.
He had returned when he did, on the pressing and written entreaty of
a French citizen, who represented that his life was endangered by his
absence. He had come back, to save a citizen's life, and to bear his
testimony, at whatever personal hazard, to the truth. Was that criminal
in the eyes of the Republic?

The populace cried enthusiastically, “No!” and the President rang his
bell to quiet them. Which it did not, for they continued to cry “No!”
 until they left off, of their own will.

The President required the name of that citizen. The accused explained
that the citizen was his first witness. He also referred with confidence
to the citizen's letter, which had been taken from him at the Barrier,
but which he did not doubt would be found among the papers then before
the President.

The Doctor had taken care that it should be there--had assured him that
it would be there--and at this stage of the proceedings it was produced
and read. Citizen Gabelle was called to confirm it, and did so. Citizen
Gabelle hinted, with infinite delicacy and politeness, that in the
pressure of business imposed on the Tribunal by the multitude of
enemies of the Republic with which it had to deal, he had been slightly
overlooked in his prison of the Abbaye--in fact, had rather passed out
of the Tribunal's patriotic remembrance--until three days ago; when he
had been summoned before it, and had been set at liberty on the Jury's
declaring themselves satisfied that the accusation against him was
answered, as to himself, by the surrender of the citizen Evremonde,
called Darnay.

Doctor Manette was next questioned. His high personal popularity,
and the clearness of his answers, made a great impression; but, as he
proceeded, as he showed that the Accused was his first friend on his
release from his long imprisonment; that, the accused had remained in
England, always faithful and devoted to his daughter and himself in
their exile; that, so far from being in favour with the Aristocrat
government there, he had actually been tried for his life by it, as
the foe of England and friend of the United States--as he brought these
circumstances into view, with the greatest discretion and with the
straightforward force of truth and earnestness, the Jury and the
populace became one. At last, when he appealed by name to Monsieur
Lorry, an English gentleman then and there present, who, like himself,
had been a witness on that English trial and could corroborate his
account of it, the Jury declared that they had heard enough, and that
they were ready with their votes if the President were content to
receive them.

At every vote (the Jurymen voted aloud and individually), the populace
set up a shout of applause. All the voices were in the prisoner's
favour, and the President declared him free.

Then, began one of those extraordinary scenes with which the populace
sometimes gratified their fickleness, or their better impulses towards
generosity and mercy, or which they regarded as some set-off against
their swollen account of cruel rage. No man can decide now to which of
these motives such extraordinary scenes were referable; it is probable,
to a blending of all the three, with the second predominating. No sooner
was the acquittal pronounced, than tears were shed as freely as blood
at another time, and such fraternal embraces were bestowed upon the
prisoner by as many of both sexes as could rush at him, that after
his long and unwholesome confinement he was in danger of fainting from
exhaustion; none the less because he knew very well, that the very same
people, carried by another current, would have rushed at him with
the very same intensity, to rend him to pieces and strew him over the
streets.

His removal, to make way for other accused persons who were to be tried,
rescued him from these caresses for the moment. Five were to be tried
together, next, as enemies of the Republic, forasmuch as they had not
assisted it by word or deed. So quick was the Tribunal to compensate
itself and the nation for a chance lost, that these five came down to
him before he left the place, condemned to die within twenty-four
hours. The first of them told him so, with the customary prison sign
of Death--a raised finger--and they all added in words, “Long live the
Republic!”

The five had had, it is true, no audience to lengthen their proceedings,
for when he and Doctor Manette emerged from the gate, there was a great
crowd about it, in which there seemed to be every face he had seen in
Court--except two, for which he looked in vain. On his coming out, the
concourse made at him anew, weeping, embracing, and shouting, all by
turns and all together, until the very tide of the river on the bank of
which the mad scene was acted, seemed to run mad, like the people on the
shore.

They put him into a great chair they had among them, and which they had
taken either out of the Court itself, or one of its rooms or passages.
Over the chair they had thrown a red flag, and to the back of it they
had bound a pike with a red cap on its top. In this car of triumph, not
even the Doctor's entreaties could prevent his being carried to his home
on men's shoulders, with a confused sea of red caps heaving about him,
and casting up to sight from the stormy deep such wrecks of faces, that
he more than once misdoubted his mind being in confusion, and that he
was in the tumbril on his way to the Guillotine.

In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they met and pointing
him out, they carried him on. Reddening the snowy streets with the
prevailing Republican colour, in winding and tramping through them, as
they had reddened them below the snow with a deeper dye, they carried
him thus into the courtyard of the building where he lived. Her father
had gone on before, to prepare her, and when her husband stood upon his
feet, she dropped insensible in his arms.

As he held her to his heart and turned her beautiful head between his
face and the brawling crowd, so that his tears and her lips might come
together unseen, a few of the people fell to dancing. Instantly, all the
rest fell to dancing, and the courtyard overflowed with the Carmagnole.
Then, they elevated into the vacant chair a young woman from the
crowd to be carried as the Goddess of Liberty, and then swelling and
overflowing out into the adjacent streets, and along the river's bank,
and over the bridge, the Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled
them away.

After grasping the Doctor's hand, as he stood victorious and proud
before him; after grasping the hand of Mr. Lorry, who came panting in
breathless from his struggle against the waterspout of the Carmagnole;
after kissing little Lucie, who was lifted up to clasp her arms round
his neck; and after embracing the ever zealous and faithful Pross who
lifted her; he took his wife in his arms, and carried her up to their
rooms.

“Lucie! My own! I am safe.”

“O dearest Charles, let me thank God for this on my knees as I have
prayed to Him.”

They all reverently bowed their heads and hearts. When she was again in
his arms, he said to her:

“And now speak to your father, dearest. No other man in all this France
could have done what he has done for me.”

She laid her head upon her father's breast, as she had laid his poor
head on her own breast, long, long ago. He was happy in the return he
had made her, he was recompensed for his suffering, he was proud of his
strength. “You must not be weak, my darling,” he remonstrated; “don't
tremble so. I have saved him.”




VII. A Knock at the Door


“I have saved him.” It was not another of the dreams in which he had
often come back; he was really here. And yet his wife trembled, and a
vague but heavy fear was upon her.

All the air round was so thick and dark, the people were so passionately
revengeful and fitful, the innocent were so constantly put to death on
vague suspicion and black malice, it was so impossible to forget that
many as blameless as her husband and as dear to others as he was to
her, every day shared the fate from which he had been clutched, that her
heart could not be as lightened of its load as she felt it ought to be.
The shadows of the wintry afternoon were beginning to fall, and even now
the dreadful carts were rolling through the streets. Her mind pursued
them, looking for him among the Condemned; and then she clung closer to
his real presence and trembled more.

Her father, cheering her, showed a compassionate superiority to this
woman's weakness, which was wonderful to see. No garret, no shoemaking,
no One Hundred and Five, North Tower, now! He had accomplished the task
he had set himself, his promise was redeemed, he had saved Charles. Let
them all lean upon him.

Their housekeeping was of a very frugal kind: not only because that was
the safest way of life, involving the least offence to the people, but
because they were not rich, and Charles, throughout his imprisonment,
had had to pay heavily for his bad food, and for his guard, and towards
the living of the poorer prisoners. Partly on this account, and
partly to avoid a domestic spy, they kept no servant; the citizen and
citizeness who acted as porters at the courtyard gate, rendered them
occasional service; and Jerry (almost wholly transferred to them by
Mr. Lorry) had become their daily retainer, and had his bed there every
night.

It was an ordinance of the Republic One and Indivisible of Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity, or Death, that on the door or doorpost of every
house, the name of every inmate must be legibly inscribed in letters
of a certain size, at a certain convenient height from the ground. Mr.
Jerry Cruncher's name, therefore, duly embellished the doorpost down
below; and, as the afternoon shadows deepened, the owner of that name
himself appeared, from overlooking a painter whom Doctor Manette had
employed to add to the list the name of Charles Evremonde, called
Darnay.

In the universal fear and distrust that darkened the time, all the usual
harmless ways of life were changed. In the Doctor's little household, as
in very many others, the articles of daily consumption that were wanted
were purchased every evening, in small quantities and at various small
shops. To avoid attracting notice, and to give as little occasion as
possible for talk and envy, was the general desire.

For some months past, Miss Pross and Mr. Cruncher had discharged the
office of purveyors; the former carrying the money; the latter, the
basket. Every afternoon at about the time when the public lamps were
lighted, they fared forth on this duty, and made and brought home
such purchases as were needful. Although Miss Pross, through her long
association with a French family, might have known as much of their
language as of her own, if she had had a mind, she had no mind in that
direction; consequently she knew no more of that “nonsense” (as she was
pleased to call it) than Mr. Cruncher did. So her manner of marketing
was to plump a noun-substantive at the head of a shopkeeper without any
introduction in the nature of an article, and, if it happened not to be
the name of the thing she wanted, to look round for that thing, lay hold
of it, and hold on by it until the bargain was concluded. She always
made a bargain for it, by holding up, as a statement of its just price,
one finger less than the merchant held up, whatever his number might be.

“Now, Mr. Cruncher,” said Miss Pross, whose eyes were red with felicity;
“if you are ready, I am.”

Jerry hoarsely professed himself at Miss Pross's service. He had worn
all his rust off long ago, but nothing would file his spiky head down.

“There's all manner of things wanted,” said Miss Pross, “and we shall
have a precious time of it. We want wine, among the rest. Nice toasts
these Redheads will be drinking, wherever we buy it.”

“It will be much the same to your knowledge, miss, I should think,”
 retorted Jerry, “whether they drink your health or the Old Un's.”

“Who's he?” said Miss Pross.

Mr. Cruncher, with some diffidence, explained himself as meaning “Old
Nick's.”

“Ha!” said Miss Pross, “it doesn't need an interpreter to explain the
meaning of these creatures. They have but one, and it's Midnight Murder,
and Mischief.”

“Hush, dear! Pray, pray, be cautious!” cried Lucie.

“Yes, yes, yes, I'll be cautious,” said Miss Pross; “but I may say
among ourselves, that I do hope there will be no oniony and tobaccoey
smotherings in the form of embracings all round, going on in the
streets. Now, Ladybird, never you stir from that fire till I come back!
Take care of the dear husband you have recovered, and don't move your
pretty head from his shoulder as you have it now, till you see me again!
May I ask a question, Doctor Manette, before I go?”

“I think you may take that liberty,” the Doctor answered, smiling.

“For gracious sake, don't talk about Liberty; we have quite enough of
that,” said Miss Pross.

“Hush, dear! Again?” Lucie remonstrated.

“Well, my sweet,” said Miss Pross, nodding her head emphatically, “the
short and the long of it is, that I am a subject of His Most Gracious
Majesty King George the Third;” Miss Pross curtseyed at the name; “and
as such, my maxim is, Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish
tricks, On him our hopes we fix, God save the King!”

Mr. Cruncher, in an access of loyalty, growlingly repeated the words
after Miss Pross, like somebody at church.

“I am glad you have so much of the Englishman in you, though I wish you
had never taken that cold in your voice,” said Miss Pross, approvingly.
“But the question, Doctor Manette. Is there”--it was the good creature's
way to affect to make light of anything that was a great anxiety
with them all, and to come at it in this chance manner--“is there any
prospect yet, of our getting out of this place?”

“I fear not yet. It would be dangerous for Charles yet.”

“Heigh-ho-hum!” said Miss Pross, cheerfully repressing a sigh as she
glanced at her darling's golden hair in the light of the fire, “then we
must have patience and wait: that's all. We must hold up our heads and
fight low, as my brother Solomon used to say. Now, Mr. Cruncher!--Don't
you move, Ladybird!”

They went out, leaving Lucie, and her husband, her father, and the
child, by a bright fire. Mr. Lorry was expected back presently from the
Banking House. Miss Pross had lighted the lamp, but had put it aside in
a corner, that they might enjoy the fire-light undisturbed. Little Lucie
sat by her grandfather with her hands clasped through his arm: and he,
in a tone not rising much above a whisper, began to tell her a story of
a great and powerful Fairy who had opened a prison-wall and let out
a captive who had once done the Fairy a service. All was subdued and
quiet, and Lucie was more at ease than she had been.

“What is that?” she cried, all at once.

“My dear!” said her father, stopping in his story, and laying his hand
on hers, “command yourself. What a disordered state you are in! The
least thing--nothing--startles you! _You_, your father's daughter!”

“I thought, my father,” said Lucie, excusing herself, with a pale face
and in a faltering voice, “that I heard strange feet upon the stairs.”

“My love, the staircase is as still as Death.”

As he said the word, a blow was struck upon the door.

“Oh father, father. What can this be! Hide Charles. Save him!”

“My child,” said the Doctor, rising, and laying his hand upon her
shoulder, “I _have_ saved him. What weakness is this, my dear! Let me go
to the door.”

He took the lamp in his hand, crossed the two intervening outer rooms,
and opened it. A rude clattering of feet over the floor, and four rough
men in red caps, armed with sabres and pistols, entered the room.

“The Citizen Evremonde, called Darnay,” said the first.

“Who seeks him?” answered Darnay.

“I seek him. We seek him. I know you, Evremonde; I saw you before the
Tribunal to-day. You are again the prisoner of the Republic.”

The four surrounded him, where he stood with his wife and child clinging
to him.

“Tell me how and why am I again a prisoner?”

“It is enough that you return straight to the Conciergerie, and will
know to-morrow. You are summoned for to-morrow.”

Doctor Manette, whom this visitation had so turned into stone, that he
stood with the lamp in his hand, as if he were a statue made to hold it,
moved after these words were spoken, put the lamp down, and confronting
the speaker, and taking him, not ungently, by the loose front of his red
woollen shirt, said:

“You know him, you have said. Do you know me?”

“Yes, I know you, Citizen Doctor.”

“We all know you, Citizen Doctor,” said the other three.

He looked abstractedly from one to another, and said, in a lower voice,
after a pause:

“Will you answer his question to me then? How does this happen?”

“Citizen Doctor,” said the first, reluctantly, “he has been denounced to
the Section of Saint Antoine. This citizen,” pointing out the second who
had entered, “is from Saint Antoine.”

The citizen here indicated nodded his head, and added:

“He is accused by Saint Antoine.”

“Of what?” asked the Doctor.

“Citizen Doctor,” said the first, with his former reluctance, “ask no
more. If the Republic demands sacrifices from you, without doubt you as
a good patriot will be happy to make them. The Republic goes before all.
The People is supreme. Evremonde, we are pressed.”

“One word,” the Doctor entreated. “Will you tell me who denounced him?”

“It is against rule,” answered the first; “but you can ask Him of Saint
Antoine here.”

The Doctor turned his eyes upon that man. Who moved uneasily on his
feet, rubbed his beard a little, and at length said:

“Well! Truly it is against rule. But he is denounced--and gravely--by
the Citizen and Citizeness Defarge. And by one other.”

“What other?”

“Do _you_ ask, Citizen Doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Then,” said he of Saint Antoine, with a strange look, “you will be
answered to-morrow. Now, I am dumb!”




VIII. A Hand at Cards


Happily unconscious of the new calamity at home, Miss Pross threaded her
way along the narrow streets and crossed the river by the bridge of the
Pont-Neuf, reckoning in her mind the number of indispensable purchases
she had to make. Mr. Cruncher, with the basket, walked at her side. They
both looked to the right and to the left into most of the shops they
passed, had a wary eye for all gregarious assemblages of people, and
turned out of their road to avoid any very excited group of talkers. It
was a raw evening, and the misty river, blurred to the eye with blazing
lights and to the ear with harsh noises, showed where the barges were
stationed in which the smiths worked, making guns for the Army of the
Republic. Woe to the man who played tricks with _that_ Army, or got
undeserved promotion in it! Better for him that his beard had never
grown, for the National Razor shaved him close.

Having purchased a few small articles of grocery, and a measure of oil
for the lamp, Miss Pross bethought herself of the wine they wanted.
After peeping into several wine-shops, she stopped at the sign of the
Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity, not far from the National Palace,
once (and twice) the Tuileries, where the aspect of things rather
took her fancy. It had a quieter look than any other place of the same
description they had passed, and, though red with patriotic caps, was
not so red as the rest. Sounding Mr. Cruncher, and finding him of her
opinion, Miss Pross resorted to the Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity,
attended by her cavalier.

Slightly observant of the smoky lights; of the people, pipe in mouth,
playing with limp cards and yellow dominoes; of the one bare-breasted,
bare-armed, soot-begrimed workman reading a journal aloud, and of
the others listening to him; of the weapons worn, or laid aside to be
resumed; of the two or three customers fallen forward asleep, who in the
popular high-shouldered shaggy black spencer looked, in that attitude,
like slumbering bears or dogs; the two outlandish customers approached
the counter, and showed what they wanted.

As their wine was measuring out, a man parted from another man in a
corner, and rose to depart. In going, he had to face Miss Pross. No
sooner did he face her, than Miss Pross uttered a scream, and clapped
her hands.

In a moment, the whole company were on their feet. That somebody was
assassinated by somebody vindicating a difference of opinion was the
likeliest occurrence. Everybody looked to see somebody fall, but only
saw a man and a woman standing staring at each other; the man with all
the outward aspect of a Frenchman and a thorough Republican; the woman,
evidently English.

What was said in this disappointing anti-climax, by the disciples of the
Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity, except that it was something very
voluble and loud, would have been as so much Hebrew or Chaldean to Miss
Pross and her protector, though they had been all ears. But, they had no
ears for anything in their surprise. For, it must be recorded, that
not only was Miss Pross lost in amazement and agitation, but,
Mr. Cruncher--though it seemed on his own separate and individual
account--was in a state of the greatest wonder.

“What is the matter?” said the man who had caused Miss Pross to scream;
speaking in a vexed, abrupt voice (though in a low tone), and in
English.

“Oh, Solomon, dear Solomon!” cried Miss Pross, clapping her hands again.
“After not setting eyes upon you or hearing of you for so long a time,
do I find you here!”

“Don't call me Solomon. Do you want to be the death of me?” asked the
man, in a furtive, frightened way.

“Brother, brother!” cried Miss Pross, bursting into tears. “Have I ever
been so hard with you that you ask me such a cruel question?”

“Then hold your meddlesome tongue,” said Solomon, “and come out, if you
want to speak to me. Pay for your wine, and come out. Who's this man?”

Miss Pross, shaking her loving and dejected head at her by no means
affectionate brother, said through her tears, “Mr. Cruncher.”

“Let him come out too,” said Solomon. “Does he think me a ghost?”

Apparently, Mr. Cruncher did, to judge from his looks. He said not a
word, however, and Miss Pross, exploring the depths of her reticule
through her tears with great difficulty paid for her wine. As she did
so, Solomon turned to the followers of the Good Republican Brutus
of Antiquity, and offered a few words of explanation in the French
language, which caused them all to relapse into their former places and
pursuits.

“Now,” said Solomon, stopping at the dark street corner, “what do you
want?”

“How dreadfully unkind in a brother nothing has ever turned my love away
from!” cried Miss Pross, “to give me such a greeting, and show me no
affection.”

“There. Confound it! There,” said Solomon, making a dab at Miss Pross's
lips with his own. “Now are you content?”

Miss Pross only shook her head and wept in silence.

“If you expect me to be surprised,” said her brother Solomon, “I am not
surprised; I knew you were here; I know of most people who are here. If
you really don't want to endanger my existence--which I half believe you
do--go your ways as soon as possible, and let me go mine. I am busy. I
am an official.”

“My English brother Solomon,” mourned Miss Pross, casting up her
tear-fraught eyes, “that had the makings in him of one of the best and
greatest of men in his native country, an official among foreigners, and
such foreigners! I would almost sooner have seen the dear boy lying in
his--”

“I said so!” cried her brother, interrupting. “I knew it. You want to be
the death of me. I shall be rendered Suspected, by my own sister. Just
as I am getting on!”

“The gracious and merciful Heavens forbid!” cried Miss Pross. “Far
rather would I never see you again, dear Solomon, though I have ever
loved you truly, and ever shall. Say but one affectionate word to me,
and tell me there is nothing angry or estranged between us, and I will
detain you no longer.”

Good Miss Pross! As if the estrangement between them had come of any
culpability of hers. As if Mr. Lorry had not known it for a fact, years
ago, in the quiet corner in Soho, that this precious brother had spent
her money and left her!

He was saying the affectionate word, however, with a far more grudging
condescension and patronage than he could have shown if their relative
merits and positions had been reversed (which is invariably the case,
all the world over), when Mr. Cruncher, touching him on the shoulder,
hoarsely and unexpectedly interposed with the following singular
question:

“I say! Might I ask the favour? As to whether your name is John Solomon,
or Solomon John?”

The official turned towards him with sudden distrust. He had not
previously uttered a word.

“Come!” said Mr. Cruncher. “Speak out, you know.” (Which, by the way,
was more than he could do himself.) “John Solomon, or Solomon John? She
calls you Solomon, and she must know, being your sister. And _I_ know
you're John, you know. Which of the two goes first? And regarding that
name of Pross, likewise. That warn't your name over the water.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I don't know all I mean, for I can't call to mind what your name
was, over the water.”

“No?”

“No. But I'll swear it was a name of two syllables.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes. T'other one's was one syllable. I know you. You was a spy--witness
at the Bailey. What, in the name of the Father of Lies, own father to
yourself, was you called at that time?”

“Barsad,” said another voice, striking in.

“That's the name for a thousand pound!” cried Jerry.

The speaker who struck in, was Sydney Carton. He had his hands behind
him under the skirts of his riding-coat, and he stood at Mr. Cruncher's
elbow as negligently as he might have stood at the Old Bailey itself.

“Don't be alarmed, my dear Miss Pross. I arrived at Mr. Lorry's, to his
surprise, yesterday evening; we agreed that I would not present myself
elsewhere until all was well, or unless I could be useful; I present
myself here, to beg a little talk with your brother. I wish you had a
better employed brother than Mr. Barsad. I wish for your sake Mr. Barsad
was not a Sheep of the Prisons.”

Sheep was a cant word of the time for a spy, under the gaolers. The spy,
who was pale, turned paler, and asked him how he dared--

“I'll tell you,” said Sydney. “I lighted on you, Mr. Barsad, coming out
of the prison of the Conciergerie while I was contemplating the walls,
an hour or more ago. You have a face to be remembered, and I remember
faces well. Made curious by seeing you in that connection, and having
a reason, to which you are no stranger, for associating you with
the misfortunes of a friend now very unfortunate, I walked in your
direction. I walked into the wine-shop here, close after you, and
sat near you. I had no difficulty in deducing from your unreserved
conversation, and the rumour openly going about among your admirers, the
nature of your calling. And gradually, what I had done at random, seemed
to shape itself into a purpose, Mr. Barsad.”

“What purpose?” the spy asked.

“It would be troublesome, and might be dangerous, to explain in the
street. Could you favour me, in confidence, with some minutes of your
company--at the office of Tellson's Bank, for instance?”

“Under a threat?”

“Oh! Did I say that?”

“Then, why should I go there?”

“Really, Mr. Barsad, I can't say, if you can't.”

“Do you mean that you won't say, sir?” the spy irresolutely asked.

“You apprehend me very clearly, Mr. Barsad. I won't.”

Carton's negligent recklessness of manner came powerfully in aid of his
quickness and skill, in such a business as he had in his secret mind,
and with such a man as he had to do with. His practised eye saw it, and
made the most of it.

“Now, I told you so,” said the spy, casting a reproachful look at his
sister; “if any trouble comes of this, it's your doing.”

“Come, come, Mr. Barsad!” exclaimed Sydney. “Don't be ungrateful.
But for my great respect for your sister, I might not have led up so
pleasantly to a little proposal that I wish to make for our mutual
satisfaction. Do you go with me to the Bank?”

“I'll hear what you have got to say. Yes, I'll go with you.”

“I propose that we first conduct your sister safely to the corner of her
own street. Let me take your arm, Miss Pross. This is not a good city,
at this time, for you to be out in, unprotected; and as your escort
knows Mr. Barsad, I will invite him to Mr. Lorry's with us. Are we
ready? Come then!”

Miss Pross recalled soon afterwards, and to the end of her life
remembered, that as she pressed her hands on Sydney's arm and looked up
in his face, imploring him to do no hurt to Solomon, there was a braced
purpose in the arm and a kind of inspiration in the eyes, which not only
contradicted his light manner, but changed and raised the man. She was
too much occupied then with fears for the brother who so little deserved
her affection, and with Sydney's friendly reassurances, adequately to
heed what she observed.

They left her at the corner of the street, and Carton led the way to Mr.
Lorry's, which was within a few minutes' walk. John Barsad, or Solomon
Pross, walked at his side.

Mr. Lorry had just finished his dinner, and was sitting before a cheery
little log or two of fire--perhaps looking into their blaze for the
picture of that younger elderly gentleman from Tellson's, who had looked
into the red coals at the Royal George at Dover, now a good many years
ago. He turned his head as they entered, and showed the surprise with
which he saw a stranger.

“Miss Pross's brother, sir,” said Sydney. “Mr. Barsad.”

“Barsad?” repeated the old gentleman, “Barsad? I have an association
with the name--and with the face.”

“I told you you had a remarkable face, Mr. Barsad,” observed Carton,
coolly. “Pray sit down.”

As he took a chair himself, he supplied the link that Mr. Lorry wanted,
by saying to him with a frown, “Witness at that trial.” Mr. Lorry
immediately remembered, and regarded his new visitor with an undisguised
look of abhorrence.

“Mr. Barsad has been recognised by Miss Pross as the affectionate
brother you have heard of,” said Sydney, “and has acknowledged the
relationship. I pass to worse news. Darnay has been arrested again.”

Struck with consternation, the old gentleman exclaimed, “What do you
tell me! I left him safe and free within these two hours, and am about
to return to him!”

“Arrested for all that. When was it done, Mr. Barsad?”

“Just now, if at all.”

“Mr. Barsad is the best authority possible, sir,” said Sydney, “and I
have it from Mr. Barsad's communication to a friend and brother Sheep
over a bottle of wine, that the arrest has taken place. He left the
messengers at the gate, and saw them admitted by the porter. There is no
earthly doubt that he is retaken.”

Mr. Lorry's business eye read in the speaker's face that it was loss
of time to dwell upon the point. Confused, but sensible that something
might depend on his presence of mind, he commanded himself, and was
silently attentive.

“Now, I trust,” said Sydney to him, “that the name and influence of
Doctor Manette may stand him in as good stead to-morrow--you said he
would be before the Tribunal again to-morrow, Mr. Barsad?--”

“Yes; I believe so.”

“--In as good stead to-morrow as to-day. But it may not be so. I own
to you, I am shaken, Mr. Lorry, by Doctor Manette's not having had the
power to prevent this arrest.”

“He may not have known of it beforehand,” said Mr. Lorry.

“But that very circumstance would be alarming, when we remember how
identified he is with his son-in-law.”

“That's true,” Mr. Lorry acknowledged, with his troubled hand at his
chin, and his troubled eyes on Carton.

“In short,” said Sydney, “this is a desperate time, when desperate games
are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I
will play the losing one. No man's life here is worth purchase. Any one
carried home by the people to-day, may be condemned tomorrow. Now, the
stake I have resolved to play for, in case of the worst, is a friend
in the Conciergerie. And the friend I purpose to myself to win, is Mr.
Barsad.”

“You need have good cards, sir,” said the spy.

“I'll run them over. I'll see what I hold,--Mr. Lorry, you know what a
brute I am; I wish you'd give me a little brandy.”

It was put before him, and he drank off a glassful--drank off another
glassful--pushed the bottle thoughtfully away.

“Mr. Barsad,” he went on, in the tone of one who really was looking
over a hand at cards: “Sheep of the prisons, emissary of Republican
committees, now turnkey, now prisoner, always spy and secret informer,
so much the more valuable here for being English that an Englishman
is less open to suspicion of subornation in those characters than a
Frenchman, represents himself to his employers under a false name.
That's a very good card. Mr. Barsad, now in the employ of the republican
French government, was formerly in the employ of the aristocratic
English government, the enemy of France and freedom. That's an excellent
card. Inference clear as day in this region of suspicion, that Mr.
Barsad, still in the pay of the aristocratic English government, is the
spy of Pitt, the treacherous foe of the Republic crouching in its bosom,
the English traitor and agent of all mischief so much spoken of and so
difficult to find. That's a card not to be beaten. Have you followed my
hand, Mr. Barsad?”

“Not to understand your play,” returned the spy, somewhat uneasily.

“I play my Ace, Denunciation of Mr. Barsad to the nearest Section
Committee. Look over your hand, Mr. Barsad, and see what you have. Don't
hurry.”

He drew the bottle near, poured out another glassful of brandy, and
drank it off. He saw that the spy was fearful of his drinking himself
into a fit state for the immediate denunciation of him. Seeing it, he
poured out and drank another glassful.

“Look over your hand carefully, Mr. Barsad. Take time.”

It was a poorer hand than he suspected. Mr. Barsad saw losing cards
in it that Sydney Carton knew nothing of. Thrown out of his honourable
employment in England, through too much unsuccessful hard swearing
there--not because he was not wanted there; our English reasons for
vaunting our superiority to secrecy and spies are of very modern
date--he knew that he had crossed the Channel, and accepted service in
France: first, as a tempter and an eavesdropper among his own countrymen
there: gradually, as a tempter and an eavesdropper among the natives. He
knew that under the overthrown government he had been a spy upon Saint
Antoine and Defarge's wine-shop; had received from the watchful police
such heads of information concerning Doctor Manette's imprisonment,
release, and history, as should serve him for an introduction to
familiar conversation with the Defarges; and tried them on Madame
Defarge, and had broken down with them signally. He always remembered
with fear and trembling, that that terrible woman had knitted when he
talked with her, and had looked ominously at him as her fingers moved.
He had since seen her, in the Section of Saint Antoine, over and over
again produce her knitted registers, and denounce people whose lives the
guillotine then surely swallowed up. He knew, as every one employed as
he was did, that he was never safe; that flight was impossible; that
he was tied fast under the shadow of the axe; and that in spite of
his utmost tergiversation and treachery in furtherance of the reigning
terror, a word might bring it down upon him. Once denounced, and on such
grave grounds as had just now been suggested to his mind, he foresaw
that the dreadful woman of whose unrelenting character he had seen many
proofs, would produce against him that fatal register, and would quash
his last chance of life. Besides that all secret men are men soon
terrified, here were surely cards enough of one black suit, to justify
the holder in growing rather livid as he turned them over.

“You scarcely seem to like your hand,” said Sydney, with the greatest
composure. “Do you play?”

“I think, sir,” said the spy, in the meanest manner, as he turned to Mr.
Lorry, “I may appeal to a gentleman of your years and benevolence, to
put it to this other gentleman, so much your junior, whether he can
under any circumstances reconcile it to his station to play that Ace
of which he has spoken. I admit that _I_ am a spy, and that it is
considered a discreditable station--though it must be filled by
somebody; but this gentleman is no spy, and why should he so demean
himself as to make himself one?”

“I play my Ace, Mr. Barsad,” said Carton, taking the answer on himself,
and looking at his watch, “without any scruple, in a very few minutes.”

“I should have hoped, gentlemen both,” said the spy, always striving to
hook Mr. Lorry into the discussion, “that your respect for my sister--”

“I could not better testify my respect for your sister than by finally
relieving her of her brother,” said Sydney Carton.

“You think not, sir?”

“I have thoroughly made up my mind about it.”

The smooth manner of the spy, curiously in dissonance with his
ostentatiously rough dress, and probably with his usual demeanour,
received such a check from the inscrutability of Carton,--who was a
mystery to wiser and honester men than he,--that it faltered here and
failed him. While he was at a loss, Carton said, resuming his former air
of contemplating cards:

“And indeed, now I think again, I have a strong impression that I
have another good card here, not yet enumerated. That friend and
fellow-Sheep, who spoke of himself as pasturing in the country prisons;
who was he?”

“French. You don't know him,” said the spy, quickly.

“French, eh?” repeated Carton, musing, and not appearing to notice him
at all, though he echoed his word. “Well; he may be.”

“Is, I assure you,” said the spy; “though it's not important.”

“Though it's not important,” repeated Carton, in the same mechanical
way--“though it's not important--No, it's not important. No. Yet I know
the face.”

“I think not. I am sure not. It can't be,” said the spy.

“It-can't-be,” muttered Sydney Carton, retrospectively, and idling his
glass (which fortunately was a small one) again. “Can't-be. Spoke good
French. Yet like a foreigner, I thought?”

“Provincial,” said the spy.

“No. Foreign!” cried Carton, striking his open hand on the table, as a
light broke clearly on his mind. “Cly! Disguised, but the same man. We
had that man before us at the Old Bailey.”

“Now, there you are hasty, sir,” said Barsad, with a smile that gave his
aquiline nose an extra inclination to one side; “there you really give
me an advantage over you. Cly (who I will unreservedly admit, at this
distance of time, was a partner of mine) has been dead several years. I
attended him in his last illness. He was buried in London, at the church
of Saint Pancras-in-the-Fields. His unpopularity with the blackguard
multitude at the moment prevented my following his remains, but I helped
to lay him in his coffin.”

Here, Mr. Lorry became aware, from where he sat, of a most remarkable
goblin shadow on the wall. Tracing it to its source, he discovered it
to be caused by a sudden extraordinary rising and stiffening of all the
risen and stiff hair on Mr. Cruncher's head.

“Let us be reasonable,” said the spy, “and let us be fair. To show you
how mistaken you are, and what an unfounded assumption yours is, I will
lay before you a certificate of Cly's burial, which I happened to have
carried in my pocket-book,” with a hurried hand he produced and opened
it, “ever since. There it is. Oh, look at it, look at it! You may take
it in your hand; it's no forgery.”

Here, Mr. Lorry perceived the reflection on the wall to elongate, and
Mr. Cruncher rose and stepped forward. His hair could not have been more
violently on end, if it had been that moment dressed by the Cow with the
crumpled horn in the house that Jack built.

Unseen by the spy, Mr. Cruncher stood at his side, and touched him on
the shoulder like a ghostly bailiff.

“That there Roger Cly, master,” said Mr. Cruncher, with a taciturn and
iron-bound visage. “So _you_ put him in his coffin?”

“I did.”

“Who took him out of it?”

Barsad leaned back in his chair, and stammered, “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Mr. Cruncher, “that he warn't never in it. No! Not he!
I'll have my head took off, if he was ever in it.”

The spy looked round at the two gentlemen; they both looked in
unspeakable astonishment at Jerry.

“I tell you,” said Jerry, “that you buried paving-stones and earth in
that there coffin. Don't go and tell me that you buried Cly. It was a
take in. Me and two more knows it.”

“How do you know it?”

“What's that to you? Ecod!” growled Mr. Cruncher, “it's you I have got a
old grudge again, is it, with your shameful impositions upon tradesmen!
I'd catch hold of your throat and choke you for half a guinea.”

Sydney Carton, who, with Mr. Lorry, had been lost in amazement at
this turn of the business, here requested Mr. Cruncher to moderate and
explain himself.

“At another time, sir,” he returned, evasively, “the present time is
ill-conwenient for explainin'. What I stand to, is, that he knows well
wot that there Cly was never in that there coffin. Let him say he was,
in so much as a word of one syllable, and I'll either catch hold of his
throat and choke him for half a guinea;” Mr. Cruncher dwelt upon this as
quite a liberal offer; “or I'll out and announce him.”

“Humph! I see one thing,” said Carton. “I hold another card, Mr. Barsad.
Impossible, here in raging Paris, with Suspicion filling the air, for
you to outlive denunciation, when you are in communication with another
aristocratic spy of the same antecedents as yourself, who, moreover, has
the mystery about him of having feigned death and come to life again!
A plot in the prisons, of the foreigner against the Republic. A strong
card--a certain Guillotine card! Do you play?”

“No!” returned the spy. “I throw up. I confess that we were so unpopular
with the outrageous mob, that I only got away from England at the risk
of being ducked to death, and that Cly was so ferreted up and down, that
he never would have got away at all but for that sham. Though how this
man knows it was a sham, is a wonder of wonders to me.”

“Never you trouble your head about this man,” retorted the contentious
Mr. Cruncher; “you'll have trouble enough with giving your attention to
that gentleman. And look here! Once more!”--Mr. Cruncher could not
be restrained from making rather an ostentatious parade of his
liberality--“I'd catch hold of your throat and choke you for half a
guinea.”

The Sheep of the prisons turned from him to Sydney Carton, and said,
with more decision, “It has come to a point. I go on duty soon, and
can't overstay my time. You told me you had a proposal; what is it?
Now, it is of no use asking too much of me. Ask me to do anything in my
office, putting my head in great extra danger, and I had better trust my
life to the chances of a refusal than the chances of consent. In short,
I should make that choice. You talk of desperation. We are all desperate
here. Remember! I may denounce you if I think proper, and I can swear my
way through stone walls, and so can others. Now, what do you want with
me?”

“Not very much. You are a turnkey at the Conciergerie?”

“I tell you once for all, there is no such thing as an escape possible,”
 said the spy, firmly.

“Why need you tell me what I have not asked? You are a turnkey at the
Conciergerie?”

“I am sometimes.”

“You can be when you choose?”

“I can pass in and out when I choose.”

Sydney Carton filled another glass with brandy, poured it slowly out
upon the hearth, and watched it as it dropped. It being all spent, he
said, rising:

“So far, we have spoken before these two, because it was as well that
the merits of the cards should not rest solely between you and me. Come
into the dark room here, and let us have one final word alone.”




IX. The Game Made


While Sydney Carton and the Sheep of the prisons were in the adjoining
dark room, speaking so low that not a sound was heard, Mr. Lorry looked
at Jerry in considerable doubt and mistrust. That honest tradesman's
manner of receiving the look, did not inspire confidence; he changed the
leg on which he rested, as often as if he had fifty of those limbs,
and were trying them all; he examined his finger-nails with a very
questionable closeness of attention; and whenever Mr. Lorry's eye caught
his, he was taken with that peculiar kind of short cough requiring the
hollow of a hand before it, which is seldom, if ever, known to be an
infirmity attendant on perfect openness of character.

“Jerry,” said Mr. Lorry. “Come here.”

Mr. Cruncher came forward sideways, with one of his shoulders in advance
of him.

“What have you been, besides a messenger?”

After some cogitation, accompanied with an intent look at his patron,
Mr. Cruncher conceived the luminous idea of replying, “Agicultooral
character.”

“My mind misgives me much,” said Mr. Lorry, angrily shaking a forefinger
at him, “that you have used the respectable and great house of Tellson's
as a blind, and that you have had an unlawful occupation of an infamous
description. If you have, don't expect me to befriend you when you
get back to England. If you have, don't expect me to keep your secret.
Tellson's shall not be imposed upon.”

“I hope, sir,” pleaded the abashed Mr. Cruncher, “that a gentleman like
yourself wot I've had the honour of odd jobbing till I'm grey at it,
would think twice about harming of me, even if it wos so--I don't say it
is, but even if it wos. And which it is to be took into account that if
it wos, it wouldn't, even then, be all o' one side. There'd be two sides
to it. There might be medical doctors at the present hour, a picking
up their guineas where a honest tradesman don't pick up his
fardens--fardens! no, nor yet his half fardens--half fardens! no, nor
yet his quarter--a banking away like smoke at Tellson's, and a cocking
their medical eyes at that tradesman on the sly, a going in and going
out to their own carriages--ah! equally like smoke, if not more so.
Well, that 'ud be imposing, too, on Tellson's. For you cannot sarse the
goose and not the gander. And here's Mrs. Cruncher, or leastways wos
in the Old England times, and would be to-morrow, if cause given,
a floppin' again the business to that degree as is ruinating--stark
ruinating! Whereas them medical doctors' wives don't flop--catch 'em at
it! Or, if they flop, their floppings goes in favour of more patients,
and how can you rightly have one without t'other? Then, wot with
undertakers, and wot with parish clerks, and wot with sextons, and wot
with private watchmen (all awaricious and all in it), a man wouldn't get
much by it, even if it wos so. And wot little a man did get, would never
prosper with him, Mr. Lorry. He'd never have no good of it; he'd want
all along to be out of the line, if he, could see his way out, being
once in--even if it wos so.”

“Ugh!” cried Mr. Lorry, rather relenting, nevertheless, “I am shocked at
the sight of you.”

“Now, what I would humbly offer to you, sir,” pursued Mr. Cruncher,
“even if it wos so, which I don't say it is--”

“Don't prevaricate,” said Mr. Lorry.

“No, I will _not_, sir,” returned Mr. Crunches as if nothing were
further from his thoughts or practice--“which I don't say it is--wot I
would humbly offer to you, sir, would be this. Upon that there stool, at
that there Bar, sets that there boy of mine, brought up and growed up to
be a man, wot will errand you, message you, general-light-job you, till
your heels is where your head is, if such should be your wishes. If it
wos so, which I still don't say it is (for I will not prewaricate to
you, sir), let that there boy keep his father's place, and take care of
his mother; don't blow upon that boy's father--do not do it, sir--and
let that father go into the line of the reg'lar diggin', and make amends
for what he would have undug--if it wos so--by diggin' of 'em in with
a will, and with conwictions respectin' the futur' keepin' of 'em safe.
That, Mr. Lorry,” said Mr. Cruncher, wiping his forehead with his
arm, as an announcement that he had arrived at the peroration of his
discourse, “is wot I would respectfully offer to you, sir. A man don't
see all this here a goin' on dreadful round him, in the way of Subjects
without heads, dear me, plentiful enough fur to bring the price down
to porterage and hardly that, without havin' his serious thoughts of
things. And these here would be mine, if it wos so, entreatin' of you
fur to bear in mind that wot I said just now, I up and said in the good
cause when I might have kep' it back.”

“That at least is true,” said Mr. Lorry. “Say no more now. It may be
that I shall yet stand your friend, if you deserve it, and repent in
action--not in words. I want no more words.”

Mr. Cruncher knuckled his forehead, as Sydney Carton and the spy
returned from the dark room. “Adieu, Mr. Barsad,” said the former; “our
arrangement thus made, you have nothing to fear from me.”

He sat down in a chair on the hearth, over against Mr. Lorry. When they
were alone, Mr. Lorry asked him what he had done?

“Not much. If it should go ill with the prisoner, I have ensured access
to him, once.”

Mr. Lorry's countenance fell.

“It is all I could do,” said Carton. “To propose too much, would be
to put this man's head under the axe, and, as he himself said, nothing
worse could happen to him if he were denounced. It was obviously the
weakness of the position. There is no help for it.”

“But access to him,” said Mr. Lorry, “if it should go ill before the
Tribunal, will not save him.”

“I never said it would.”

Mr. Lorry's eyes gradually sought the fire; his sympathy with his
darling, and the heavy disappointment of his second arrest, gradually
weakened them; he was an old man now, overborne with anxiety of late,
and his tears fell.

“You are a good man and a true friend,” said Carton, in an altered
voice. “Forgive me if I notice that you are affected. I could not see my
father weep, and sit by, careless. And I could not respect your
sorrow more, if you were my father. You are free from that misfortune,
however.”

Though he said the last words, with a slip into his usual manner, there
was a true feeling and respect both in his tone and in his touch,
that Mr. Lorry, who had never seen the better side of him, was wholly
unprepared for. He gave him his hand, and Carton gently pressed it.

“To return to poor Darnay,” said Carton. “Don't tell Her of this
interview, or this arrangement. It would not enable Her to go to see
him. She might think it was contrived, in case of the worse, to convey
to him the means of anticipating the sentence.”

Mr. Lorry had not thought of that, and he looked quickly at Carton to
see if it were in his mind. It seemed to be; he returned the look, and
evidently understood it.

“She might think a thousand things,” Carton said, “and any of them would
only add to her trouble. Don't speak of me to her. As I said to you when
I first came, I had better not see her. I can put my hand out, to do any
little helpful work for her that my hand can find to do, without that.
You are going to her, I hope? She must be very desolate to-night.”

“I am going now, directly.”

“I am glad of that. She has such a strong attachment to you and reliance
on you. How does she look?”

“Anxious and unhappy, but very beautiful.”

“Ah!”

It was a long, grieving sound, like a sigh--almost like a sob. It
attracted Mr. Lorry's eyes to Carton's face, which was turned to the
fire. A light, or a shade (the old gentleman could not have said which),
passed from it as swiftly as a change will sweep over a hill-side on a
wild bright day, and he lifted his foot to put back one of the little
flaming logs, which was tumbling forward. He wore the white riding-coat
and top-boots, then in vogue, and the light of the fire touching their
light surfaces made him look very pale, with his long brown hair,
all untrimmed, hanging loose about him. His indifference to fire was
sufficiently remarkable to elicit a word of remonstrance from Mr. Lorry;
his boot was still upon the hot embers of the flaming log, when it had
broken under the weight of his foot.

“I forgot it,” he said.

Mr. Lorry's eyes were again attracted to his face. Taking note of the
wasted air which clouded the naturally handsome features, and having
the expression of prisoners' faces fresh in his mind, he was strongly
reminded of that expression.

“And your duties here have drawn to an end, sir?” said Carton, turning
to him.

“Yes. As I was telling you last night when Lucie came in so
unexpectedly, I have at length done all that I can do here. I hoped to
have left them in perfect safety, and then to have quitted Paris. I have
my Leave to Pass. I was ready to go.”

They were both silent.

“Yours is a long life to look back upon, sir?” said Carton, wistfully.

“I am in my seventy-eighth year.”

“You have been useful all your life; steadily and constantly occupied;
trusted, respected, and looked up to?”

“I have been a man of business, ever since I have been a man. Indeed, I
may say that I was a man of business when a boy.”

“See what a place you fill at seventy-eight. How many people will miss
you when you leave it empty!”

“A solitary old bachelor,” answered Mr. Lorry, shaking his head. “There
is nobody to weep for me.”

“How can you say that? Wouldn't She weep for you? Wouldn't her child?”

“Yes, yes, thank God. I didn't quite mean what I said.”

“It _is_ a thing to thank God for; is it not?”

“Surely, surely.”

“If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night,
'I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or
respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no
regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!'
your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they
not?”

“You say truly, Mr. Carton; I think they would be.”

Sydney turned his eyes again upon the fire, and, after a silence of a
few moments, said:

“I should like to ask you:--Does your childhood seem far off? Do the
days when you sat at your mother's knee, seem days of very long ago?”

Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry answered:

“Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw
closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and
nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and
preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many remembrances
that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!),
and by many associations of the days when what we call the World was not
so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in me.”

“I understand the feeling!” exclaimed Carton, with a bright flush. “And
you are the better for it?”

“I hope so.”

Carton terminated the conversation here, by rising to help him on with
his outer coat; “But you,” said Mr. Lorry, reverting to the theme, “you
are young.”

“Yes,” said Carton. “I am not old, but my young way was never the way to
age. Enough of me.”

“And of me, I am sure,” said Mr. Lorry. “Are you going out?”

“I'll walk with you to her gate. You know my vagabond and restless
habits. If I should prowl about the streets a long time, don't be
uneasy; I shall reappear in the morning. You go to the Court to-morrow?”

“Yes, unhappily.”

“I shall be there, but only as one of the crowd. My Spy will find a
place for me. Take my arm, sir.”

Mr. Lorry did so, and they went down-stairs and out in the streets. A
few minutes brought them to Mr. Lorry's destination. Carton left him
there; but lingered at a little distance, and turned back to the gate
again when it was shut, and touched it. He had heard of her going to
the prison every day. “She came out here,” he said, looking about him,
“turned this way, must have trod on these stones often. Let me follow in
her steps.”

It was ten o'clock at night when he stood before the prison of La Force,
where she had stood hundreds of times. A little wood-sawyer, having
closed his shop, was smoking his pipe at his shop-door.

“Good night, citizen,” said Sydney Carton, pausing in going by; for, the
man eyed him inquisitively.

“Good night, citizen.”

“How goes the Republic?”

“You mean the Guillotine. Not ill. Sixty-three to-day. We shall mount
to a hundred soon. Samson and his men complain sometimes, of being
exhausted. Ha, ha, ha! He is so droll, that Samson. Such a Barber!”

“Do you often go to see him--”

“Shave? Always. Every day. What a barber! You have seen him at work?”

“Never.”

“Go and see him when he has a good batch. Figure this to yourself,
citizen; he shaved the sixty-three to-day, in less than two pipes! Less
than two pipes. Word of honour!”

As the grinning little man held out the pipe he was smoking, to explain
how he timed the executioner, Carton was so sensible of a rising desire
to strike the life out of him, that he turned away.

“But you are not English,” said the wood-sawyer, “though you wear
English dress?”

“Yes,” said Carton, pausing again, and answering over his shoulder.

“You speak like a Frenchman.”

“I am an old student here.”

“Aha, a perfect Frenchman! Good night, Englishman.”

“Good night, citizen.”

“But go and see that droll dog,” the little man persisted, calling after
him. “And take a pipe with you!”

Sydney had not gone far out of sight, when he stopped in the middle of
the street under a glimmering lamp, and wrote with his pencil on a scrap
of paper. Then, traversing with the decided step of one who remembered
the way well, several dark and dirty streets--much dirtier than usual,
for the best public thoroughfares remained uncleansed in those times of
terror--he stopped at a chemist's shop, which the owner was closing with
his own hands. A small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill
thoroughfare, by a small, dim, crooked man.

Giving this citizen, too, good night, as he confronted him at his
counter, he laid the scrap of paper before him. “Whew!” the chemist
whistled softly, as he read it. “Hi! hi! hi!”

Sydney Carton took no heed, and the chemist said:

“For you, citizen?”

“For me.”

“You will be careful to keep them separate, citizen? You know the
consequences of mixing them?”

“Perfectly.”

Certain small packets were made and given to him. He put them, one by
one, in the breast of his inner coat, counted out the money for them,
and deliberately left the shop. “There is nothing more to do,” said he,
glancing upward at the moon, “until to-morrow. I can't sleep.”

It was not a reckless manner, the manner in which he said these words
aloud under the fast-sailing clouds, nor was it more expressive of
negligence than defiance. It was the settled manner of a tired man, who
had wandered and struggled and got lost, but who at length struck into
his road and saw its end.

Long ago, when he had been famous among his earliest competitors as a
youth of great promise, he had followed his father to the grave. His
mother had died, years before. These solemn words, which had been
read at his father's grave, arose in his mind as he went down the dark
streets, among the heavy shadows, with the moon and the clouds sailing
on high above him. “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord:
he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and
whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”

In a city dominated by the axe, alone at night, with natural sorrow
rising in him for the sixty-three who had been that day put to death,
and for to-morrow's victims then awaiting their doom in the prisons,
and still of to-morrow's and to-morrow's, the chain of association that
brought the words home, like a rusty old ship's anchor from the deep,
might have been easily found. He did not seek it, but repeated them and
went on.

With a solemn interest in the lighted windows where the people were
going to rest, forgetful through a few calm hours of the horrors
surrounding them; in the towers of the churches, where no prayers
were said, for the popular revulsion had even travelled that length
of self-destruction from years of priestly impostors, plunderers, and
profligates; in the distant burial-places, reserved, as they wrote upon
the gates, for Eternal Sleep; in the abounding gaols; and in the streets
along which the sixties rolled to a death which had become so common and
material, that no sorrowful story of a haunting Spirit ever arose among
the people out of all the working of the Guillotine; with a solemn
interest in the whole life and death of the city settling down to its
short nightly pause in fury; Sydney Carton crossed the Seine again for
the lighter streets.

Few coaches were abroad, for riders in coaches were liable to be
suspected, and gentility hid its head in red nightcaps, and put on heavy
shoes, and trudged. But, the theatres were all well filled, and the
people poured cheerfully out as he passed, and went chatting home. At
one of the theatre doors, there was a little girl with a mother, looking
for a way across the street through the mud. He carried the child over,
and before the timid arm was loosed from his neck asked her for a kiss.

“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth
in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and
believeth in me, shall never die.”

Now, that the streets were quiet, and the night wore on, the words
were in the echoes of his feet, and were in the air. Perfectly calm
and steady, he sometimes repeated them to himself as he walked; but, he
heard them always.

The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the
water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where the
picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the light
of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out of the
sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned pale and died,
and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were delivered over to
Death's dominion.

But, the glorious sun, rising, seemed to strike those words, that burden
of the night, straight and warm to his heart in its long bright rays.
And looking along them, with reverently shaded eyes, a bridge of light
appeared to span the air between him and the sun, while the river
sparkled under it.

The strong tide, so swift, so deep, and certain, was like a congenial
friend, in the morning stillness. He walked by the stream, far from the
houses, and in the light and warmth of the sun fell asleep on the
bank. When he awoke and was afoot again, he lingered there yet a little
longer, watching an eddy that turned and turned purposeless, until the
stream absorbed it, and carried it on to the sea.--“Like me.”

A trading-boat, with a sail of the softened colour of a dead leaf, then
glided into his view, floated by him, and died away. As its silent track
in the water disappeared, the prayer that had broken up out of his heart
for a merciful consideration of all his poor blindnesses and errors,
ended in the words, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Mr. Lorry was already out when he got back, and it was easy to surmise
where the good old man was gone. Sydney Carton drank nothing but a
little coffee, ate some bread, and, having washed and changed to refresh
himself, went out to the place of trial.

The court was all astir and a-buzz, when the black sheep--whom many fell
away from in dread--pressed him into an obscure corner among the crowd.
Mr. Lorry was there, and Doctor Manette was there. She was there,
sitting beside her father.

When her husband was brought in, she turned a look upon him, so
sustaining, so encouraging, so full of admiring love and pitying
tenderness, yet so courageous for his sake, that it called the healthy
blood into his face, brightened his glance, and animated his heart. If
there had been any eyes to notice the influence of her look, on Sydney
Carton, it would have been seen to be the same influence exactly.

Before that unjust Tribunal, there was little or no order of procedure,
ensuring to any accused person any reasonable hearing. There could have
been no such Revolution, if all laws, forms, and ceremonies, had not
first been so monstrously abused, that the suicidal vengeance of the
Revolution was to scatter them all to the winds.

Every eye was turned to the jury. The same determined patriots and good
republicans as yesterday and the day before, and to-morrow and the day
after. Eager and prominent among them, one man with a craving face, and
his fingers perpetually hovering about his lips, whose appearance
gave great satisfaction to the spectators. A life-thirsting,
cannibal-looking, bloody-minded juryman, the Jacques Three of St.
Antoine. The whole jury, as a jury of dogs empannelled to try the deer.

Every eye then turned to the five judges and the public prosecutor.
No favourable leaning in that quarter to-day. A fell, uncompromising,
murderous business-meaning there. Every eye then sought some other eye
in the crowd, and gleamed at it approvingly; and heads nodded at one
another, before bending forward with a strained attention.

Charles Evremonde, called Darnay. Released yesterday. Reaccused and
retaken yesterday. Indictment delivered to him last night. Suspected and
Denounced enemy of the Republic, Aristocrat, one of a family of tyrants,
one of a race proscribed, for that they had used their abolished
privileges to the infamous oppression of the people. Charles Evremonde,
called Darnay, in right of such proscription, absolutely Dead in Law.

To this effect, in as few or fewer words, the Public Prosecutor.

The President asked, was the Accused openly denounced or secretly?

“Openly, President.”

“By whom?”

“Three voices. Ernest Defarge, wine-vendor of St. Antoine.”

“Good.”

“Therese Defarge, his wife.”

“Good.”

“Alexandre Manette, physician.”

A great uproar took place in the court, and in the midst of it, Doctor
Manette was seen, pale and trembling, standing where he had been seated.

“President, I indignantly protest to you that this is a forgery and
a fraud. You know the accused to be the husband of my daughter. My
daughter, and those dear to her, are far dearer to me than my life. Who
and where is the false conspirator who says that I denounce the husband
of my child!”

“Citizen Manette, be tranquil. To fail in submission to the authority of
the Tribunal would be to put yourself out of Law. As to what is dearer
to you than life, nothing can be so dear to a good citizen as the
Republic.”

Loud acclamations hailed this rebuke. The President rang his bell, and
with warmth resumed.

“If the Republic should demand of you the sacrifice of your child
herself, you would have no duty but to sacrifice her. Listen to what is
to follow. In the meanwhile, be silent!”

Frantic acclamations were again raised. Doctor Manette sat down, with
his eyes looking around, and his lips trembling; his daughter drew
closer to him. The craving man on the jury rubbed his hands together,
and restored the usual hand to his mouth.

Defarge was produced, when the court was quiet enough to admit of his
being heard, and rapidly expounded the story of the imprisonment, and of
his having been a mere boy in the Doctor's service, and of the release,
and of the state of the prisoner when released and delivered to him.
This short examination followed, for the court was quick with its work.

“You did good service at the taking of the Bastille, citizen?”

“I believe so.”

Here, an excited woman screeched from the crowd: “You were one of the
best patriots there. Why not say so? You were a cannonier that day
there, and you were among the first to enter the accursed fortress when
it fell. Patriots, I speak the truth!”

It was The Vengeance who, amidst the warm commendations of the audience,
thus assisted the proceedings. The President rang his bell; but, The
Vengeance, warming with encouragement, shrieked, “I defy that bell!”
 wherein she was likewise much commended.

“Inform the Tribunal of what you did that day within the Bastille,
citizen.”

“I knew,” said Defarge, looking down at his wife, who stood at the
bottom of the steps on which he was raised, looking steadily up at him;
“I knew that this prisoner, of whom I speak, had been confined in a cell
known as One Hundred and Five, North Tower. I knew it from himself. He
knew himself by no other name than One Hundred and Five, North Tower,
when he made shoes under my care. As I serve my gun that day, I resolve,
when the place shall fall, to examine that cell. It falls. I mount to
the cell, with a fellow-citizen who is one of the Jury, directed by a
gaoler. I examine it, very closely. In a hole in the chimney, where a
stone has been worked out and replaced, I find a written paper. This is
that written paper. I have made it my business to examine some specimens
of the writing of Doctor Manette. This is the writing of Doctor Manette.
I confide this paper, in the writing of Doctor Manette, to the hands of
the President.”

“Let it be read.”

In a dead silence and stillness--the prisoner under trial looking
lovingly at his wife, his wife only looking from him to look with
solicitude at her father, Doctor Manette keeping his eyes fixed on the
reader, Madame Defarge never taking hers from the prisoner, Defarge
never taking his from his feasting wife, and all the other eyes there
intent upon the Doctor, who saw none of them--the paper was read, as
follows.




X. The Substance of the Shadow


“I, Alexandre Manette, unfortunate physician, native of Beauvais, and
afterwards resident in Paris, write this melancholy paper in my doleful
cell in the Bastille, during the last month of the year, 1767. I write
it at stolen intervals, under every difficulty. I design to secrete it
in the wall of the chimney, where I have slowly and laboriously made a
place of concealment for it. Some pitying hand may find it there, when I
and my sorrows are dust.

“These words are formed by the rusty iron point with which I write with
difficulty in scrapings of soot and charcoal from the chimney, mixed
with blood, in the last month of the tenth year of my captivity. Hope
has quite departed from my breast. I know from terrible warnings I have
noted in myself that my reason will not long remain unimpaired, but I
solemnly declare that I am at this time in the possession of my right
mind--that my memory is exact and circumstantial--and that I write the
truth as I shall answer for these my last recorded words, whether they
be ever read by men or not, at the Eternal Judgment-seat.

“One cloudy moonlight night, in the third week of December (I think the
twenty-second of the month) in the year 1757, I was walking on a retired
part of the quay by the Seine for the refreshment of the frosty air,
at an hour's distance from my place of residence in the Street of the
School of Medicine, when a carriage came along behind me, driven very
fast. As I stood aside to let that carriage pass, apprehensive that it
might otherwise run me down, a head was put out at the window, and a
voice called to the driver to stop.

“The carriage stopped as soon as the driver could rein in his horses,
and the same voice called to me by my name. I answered. The carriage
was then so far in advance of me that two gentlemen had time to open the
door and alight before I came up with it.

“I observed that they were both wrapped in cloaks, and appeared to
conceal themselves. As they stood side by side near the carriage door,
I also observed that they both looked of about my own age, or rather
younger, and that they were greatly alike, in stature, manner, voice,
and (as far as I could see) face too.

“'You are Doctor Manette?' said one.

“I am.”

“'Doctor Manette, formerly of Beauvais,' said the other; 'the young
physician, originally an expert surgeon, who within the last year or two
has made a rising reputation in Paris?'

“'Gentlemen,' I returned, 'I am that Doctor Manette of whom you speak so
graciously.'

“'We have been to your residence,' said the first, 'and not being
so fortunate as to find you there, and being informed that you were
probably walking in this direction, we followed, in the hope of
overtaking you. Will you please to enter the carriage?'

“The manner of both was imperious, and they both moved, as these words
were spoken, so as to place me between themselves and the carriage door.
They were armed. I was not.

“'Gentlemen,' said I, 'pardon me; but I usually inquire who does me
the honour to seek my assistance, and what is the nature of the case to
which I am summoned.'

“The reply to this was made by him who had spoken second. 'Doctor,
your clients are people of condition. As to the nature of the case,
our confidence in your skill assures us that you will ascertain it for
yourself better than we can describe it. Enough. Will you please to
enter the carriage?'

“I could do nothing but comply, and I entered it in silence. They both
entered after me--the last springing in, after putting up the steps. The
carriage turned about, and drove on at its former speed.

“I repeat this conversation exactly as it occurred. I have no doubt that
it is, word for word, the same. I describe everything exactly as it took
place, constraining my mind not to wander from the task. Where I make
the broken marks that follow here, I leave off for the time, and put my
paper in its hiding-place.

        *****

“The carriage left the streets behind, passed the North Barrier, and
emerged upon the country road. At two-thirds of a league from the
Barrier--I did not estimate the distance at that time, but afterwards
when I traversed it--it struck out of the main avenue, and presently
stopped at a solitary house, We all three alighted, and walked, by
a damp soft footpath in a garden where a neglected fountain had
overflowed, to the door of the house. It was not opened immediately, in
answer to the ringing of the bell, and one of my two conductors struck
the man who opened it, with his heavy riding glove, across the face.

“There was nothing in this action to attract my particular attention,
for I had seen common people struck more commonly than dogs. But, the
other of the two, being angry likewise, struck the man in like manner
with his arm; the look and bearing of the brothers were then so exactly
alike, that I then first perceived them to be twin brothers.

“From the time of our alighting at the outer gate (which we found
locked, and which one of the brothers had opened to admit us, and had
relocked), I had heard cries proceeding from an upper chamber. I was
conducted to this chamber straight, the cries growing louder as we
ascended the stairs, and I found a patient in a high fever of the brain,
lying on a bed.

“The patient was a woman of great beauty, and young; assuredly not much
past twenty. Her hair was torn and ragged, and her arms were bound to
her sides with sashes and handkerchiefs. I noticed that these bonds were
all portions of a gentleman's dress. On one of them, which was a fringed
scarf for a dress of ceremony, I saw the armorial bearings of a Noble,
and the letter E.

“I saw this, within the first minute of my contemplation of the patient;
for, in her restless strivings she had turned over on her face on the
edge of the bed, had drawn the end of the scarf into her mouth, and was
in danger of suffocation. My first act was to put out my hand to relieve
her breathing; and in moving the scarf aside, the embroidery in the
corner caught my sight.

“I turned her gently over, placed my hands upon her breast to calm her
and keep her down, and looked into her face. Her eyes were dilated and
wild, and she constantly uttered piercing shrieks, and repeated the
words, 'My husband, my father, and my brother!' and then counted up to
twelve, and said, 'Hush!' For an instant, and no more, she would pause
to listen, and then the piercing shrieks would begin again, and she
would repeat the cry, 'My husband, my father, and my brother!' and
would count up to twelve, and say, 'Hush!' There was no variation in the
order, or the manner. There was no cessation, but the regular moment's
pause, in the utterance of these sounds.

“'How long,' I asked, 'has this lasted?'

“To distinguish the brothers, I will call them the elder and the
younger; by the elder, I mean him who exercised the most authority. It
was the elder who replied, 'Since about this hour last night.'

“'She has a husband, a father, and a brother?'

“'A brother.'

“'I do not address her brother?'

“He answered with great contempt, 'No.'

“'She has some recent association with the number twelve?'

“The younger brother impatiently rejoined, 'With twelve o'clock?'

“'See, gentlemen,' said I, still keeping my hands upon her breast, 'how
useless I am, as you have brought me! If I had known what I was coming
to see, I could have come provided. As it is, time must be lost. There
are no medicines to be obtained in this lonely place.'

“The elder brother looked to the younger, who said haughtily, 'There is
a case of medicines here;' and brought it from a closet, and put it on
the table.

        *****

“I opened some of the bottles, smelt them, and put the stoppers to my
lips. If I had wanted to use anything save narcotic medicines that were
poisons in themselves, I would not have administered any of those.

“'Do you doubt them?' asked the younger brother.

“'You see, monsieur, I am going to use them,' I replied, and said no
more.

“I made the patient swallow, with great difficulty, and after many
efforts, the dose that I desired to give. As I intended to repeat it
after a while, and as it was necessary to watch its influence, I then
sat down by the side of the bed. There was a timid and suppressed woman
in attendance (wife of the man down-stairs), who had retreated into
a corner. The house was damp and decayed, indifferently
furnished--evidently, recently occupied and temporarily used. Some thick
old hangings had been nailed up before the windows, to deaden the
sound of the shrieks. They continued to be uttered in their regular
succession, with the cry, 'My husband, my father, and my brother!' the
counting up to twelve, and 'Hush!' The frenzy was so violent, that I had
not unfastened the bandages restraining the arms; but, I had looked to
them, to see that they were not painful. The only spark of encouragement
in the case, was, that my hand upon the sufferer's breast had this much
soothing influence, that for minutes at a time it tranquillised the
figure. It had no effect upon the cries; no pendulum could be more
regular.

“For the reason that my hand had this effect (I assume), I had sat by
the side of the bed for half an hour, with the two brothers looking on,
before the elder said:

“'There is another patient.'

“I was startled, and asked, 'Is it a pressing case?'

“'You had better see,' he carelessly answered; and took up a light.

        *****

“The other patient lay in a back room across a second staircase, which
was a species of loft over a stable. There was a low plastered ceiling
to a part of it; the rest was open, to the ridge of the tiled roof, and
there were beams across. Hay and straw were stored in that portion of
the place, fagots for firing, and a heap of apples in sand. I had to
pass through that part, to get at the other. My memory is circumstantial
and unshaken. I try it with these details, and I see them all, in
this my cell in the Bastille, near the close of the tenth year of my
captivity, as I saw them all that night.

“On some hay on the ground, with a cushion thrown under his head, lay a
handsome peasant boy--a boy of not more than seventeen at the most.
He lay on his back, with his teeth set, his right hand clenched on his
breast, and his glaring eyes looking straight upward. I could not see
where his wound was, as I kneeled on one knee over him; but, I could see
that he was dying of a wound from a sharp point.

“'I am a doctor, my poor fellow,' said I. 'Let me examine it.'

“'I do not want it examined,' he answered; 'let it be.'

“It was under his hand, and I soothed him to let me move his hand away.
The wound was a sword-thrust, received from twenty to twenty-four hours
before, but no skill could have saved him if it had been looked to
without delay. He was then dying fast. As I turned my eyes to the elder
brother, I saw him looking down at this handsome boy whose life was
ebbing out, as if he were a wounded bird, or hare, or rabbit; not at all
as if he were a fellow-creature.

“'How has this been done, monsieur?' said I.

“'A crazed young common dog! A serf! Forced my brother to draw upon him,
and has fallen by my brother's sword--like a gentleman.'

“There was no touch of pity, sorrow, or kindred humanity, in this
answer. The speaker seemed to acknowledge that it was inconvenient to
have that different order of creature dying there, and that it would
have been better if he had died in the usual obscure routine of his
vermin kind. He was quite incapable of any compassionate feeling about
the boy, or about his fate.

“The boy's eyes had slowly moved to him as he had spoken, and they now
slowly moved to me.

“'Doctor, they are very proud, these Nobles; but we common dogs are
proud too, sometimes. They plunder us, outrage us, beat us, kill us; but
we have a little pride left, sometimes. She--have you seen her, Doctor?'

“The shrieks and the cries were audible there, though subdued by the
distance. He referred to them, as if she were lying in our presence.

“I said, 'I have seen her.'

“'She is my sister, Doctor. They have had their shameful rights, these
Nobles, in the modesty and virtue of our sisters, many years, but we
have had good girls among us. I know it, and have heard my father say
so. She was a good girl. She was betrothed to a good young man, too: a
tenant of his. We were all tenants of his--that man's who stands there.
The other is his brother, the worst of a bad race.'

“It was with the greatest difficulty that the boy gathered bodily force
to speak; but, his spirit spoke with a dreadful emphasis.

“'We were so robbed by that man who stands there, as all we common dogs
are by those superior Beings--taxed by him without mercy, obliged to
work for him without pay, obliged to grind our corn at his mill, obliged
to feed scores of his tame birds on our wretched crops, and forbidden
for our lives to keep a single tame bird of our own, pillaged and
plundered to that degree that when we chanced to have a bit of meat, we
ate it in fear, with the door barred and the shutters closed, that his
people should not see it and take it from us--I say, we were so robbed,
and hunted, and were made so poor, that our father told us it was a
dreadful thing to bring a child into the world, and that what we should
most pray for, was, that our women might be barren and our miserable
race die out!'

“I had never before seen the sense of being oppressed, bursting forth
like a fire. I had supposed that it must be latent in the people
somewhere; but, I had never seen it break out, until I saw it in the
dying boy.

“'Nevertheless, Doctor, my sister married. He was ailing at that time,
poor fellow, and she married her lover, that she might tend and comfort
him in our cottage--our dog-hut, as that man would call it. She had not
been married many weeks, when that man's brother saw her and admired
her, and asked that man to lend her to him--for what are husbands among
us! He was willing enough, but my sister was good and virtuous, and
hated his brother with a hatred as strong as mine. What did the two
then, to persuade her husband to use his influence with her, to make her
willing?'

“The boy's eyes, which had been fixed on mine, slowly turned to the
looker-on, and I saw in the two faces that all he said was true. The two
opposing kinds of pride confronting one another, I can see, even in this
Bastille; the gentleman's, all negligent indifference; the peasant's, all
trodden-down sentiment, and passionate revenge.

“'You know, Doctor, that it is among the Rights of these Nobles to
harness us common dogs to carts, and drive us. They so harnessed him and
drove him. You know that it is among their Rights to keep us in their
grounds all night, quieting the frogs, in order that their noble sleep
may not be disturbed. They kept him out in the unwholesome mists at
night, and ordered him back into his harness in the day. But he was
not persuaded. No! Taken out of harness one day at noon, to feed--if he
could find food--he sobbed twelve times, once for every stroke of the
bell, and died on her bosom.'

“Nothing human could have held life in the boy but his determination to
tell all his wrong. He forced back the gathering shadows of death, as
he forced his clenched right hand to remain clenched, and to cover his
wound.

“'Then, with that man's permission and even with his aid, his
brother took her away; in spite of what I know she must have told his
brother--and what that is, will not be long unknown to you, Doctor, if
it is now--his brother took her away--for his pleasure and diversion,
for a little while. I saw her pass me on the road. When I took the
tidings home, our father's heart burst; he never spoke one of the words
that filled it. I took my young sister (for I have another) to a place
beyond the reach of this man, and where, at least, she will never be
_his_ vassal. Then, I tracked the brother here, and last night climbed
in--a common dog, but sword in hand.--Where is the loft window? It was
somewhere here?'

“The room was darkening to his sight; the world was narrowing around
him. I glanced about me, and saw that the hay and straw were trampled
over the floor, as if there had been a struggle.

“'She heard me, and ran in. I told her not to come near us till he was
dead. He came in and first tossed me some pieces of money; then struck
at me with a whip. But I, though a common dog, so struck at him as to
make him draw. Let him break into as many pieces as he will, the sword
that he stained with my common blood; he drew to defend himself--thrust
at me with all his skill for his life.'

“My glance had fallen, but a few moments before, on the fragments of
a broken sword, lying among the hay. That weapon was a gentleman's. In
another place, lay an old sword that seemed to have been a soldier's.

“'Now, lift me up, Doctor; lift me up. Where is he?'

“'He is not here,' I said, supporting the boy, and thinking that he
referred to the brother.

“'He! Proud as these nobles are, he is afraid to see me. Where is the
man who was here? Turn my face to him.'

“I did so, raising the boy's head against my knee. But, invested for the
moment with extraordinary power, he raised himself completely: obliging
me to rise too, or I could not have still supported him.

“'Marquis,' said the boy, turned to him with his eyes opened wide, and
his right hand raised, 'in the days when all these things are to be
answered for, I summon you and yours, to the last of your bad race, to
answer for them. I mark this cross of blood upon you, as a sign that
I do it. In the days when all these things are to be answered for,
I summon your brother, the worst of the bad race, to answer for them
separately. I mark this cross of blood upon him, as a sign that I do
it.'

“Twice, he put his hand to the wound in his breast, and with his
forefinger drew a cross in the air. He stood for an instant with the
finger yet raised, and as it dropped, he dropped with it, and I laid him
down dead.

        *****

“When I returned to the bedside of the young woman, I found her raving
in precisely the same order of continuity. I knew that this might last
for many hours, and that it would probably end in the silence of the
grave.

“I repeated the medicines I had given her, and I sat at the side of
the bed until the night was far advanced. She never abated the piercing
quality of her shrieks, never stumbled in the distinctness or the order
of her words. They were always 'My husband, my father, and my brother!
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven,
twelve. Hush!'

“This lasted twenty-six hours from the time when I first saw her. I had
come and gone twice, and was again sitting by her, when she began to
falter. I did what little could be done to assist that opportunity, and
by-and-bye she sank into a lethargy, and lay like the dead.

“It was as if the wind and rain had lulled at last, after a long and
fearful storm. I released her arms, and called the woman to assist me to
compose her figure and the dress she had torn. It was then that I knew
her condition to be that of one in whom the first expectations of being
a mother have arisen; and it was then that I lost the little hope I had
had of her.

“'Is she dead?' asked the Marquis, whom I will still describe as the
elder brother, coming booted into the room from his horse.

“'Not dead,' said I; 'but like to die.'

“'What strength there is in these common bodies!' he said, looking down
at her with some curiosity.

“'There is prodigious strength,' I answered him, 'in sorrow and
despair.'

“He first laughed at my words, and then frowned at them. He moved a
chair with his foot near to mine, ordered the woman away, and said in a
subdued voice,

“'Doctor, finding my brother in this difficulty with these hinds, I
recommended that your aid should be invited. Your reputation is high,
and, as a young man with your fortune to make, you are probably mindful
of your interest. The things that you see here, are things to be seen,
and not spoken of.'

“I listened to the patient's breathing, and avoided answering.

“'Do you honour me with your attention, Doctor?'

“'Monsieur,' said I, 'in my profession, the communications of patients
are always received in confidence.' I was guarded in my answer, for I
was troubled in my mind with what I had heard and seen.

“Her breathing was so difficult to trace, that I carefully tried the
pulse and the heart. There was life, and no more. Looking round as I
resumed my seat, I found both the brothers intent upon me.

        *****

“I write with so much difficulty, the cold is so severe, I am so
fearful of being detected and consigned to an underground cell and total
darkness, that I must abridge this narrative. There is no confusion or
failure in my memory; it can recall, and could detail, every word that
was ever spoken between me and those brothers.

“She lingered for a week. Towards the last, I could understand some few
syllables that she said to me, by placing my ear close to her lips. She
asked me where she was, and I told her; who I was, and I told her. It
was in vain that I asked her for her family name. She faintly shook her
head upon the pillow, and kept her secret, as the boy had done.

“I had no opportunity of asking her any question, until I had told the
brothers she was sinking fast, and could not live another day. Until
then, though no one was ever presented to her consciousness save the
woman and myself, one or other of them had always jealously sat behind
the curtain at the head of the bed when I was there. But when it came to
that, they seemed careless what communication I might hold with her; as
if--the thought passed through my mind--I were dying too.

“I always observed that their pride bitterly resented the younger
brother's (as I call him) having crossed swords with a peasant, and that
peasant a boy. The only consideration that appeared to affect the mind
of either of them was the consideration that this was highly degrading
to the family, and was ridiculous. As often as I caught the younger
brother's eyes, their expression reminded me that he disliked me deeply,
for knowing what I knew from the boy. He was smoother and more polite to
me than the elder; but I saw this. I also saw that I was an incumbrance
in the mind of the elder, too.

“My patient died, two hours before midnight--at a time, by my watch,
answering almost to the minute when I had first seen her. I was alone
with her, when her forlorn young head drooped gently on one side, and
all her earthly wrongs and sorrows ended.

“The brothers were waiting in a room down-stairs, impatient to ride
away. I had heard them, alone at the bedside, striking their boots with
their riding-whips, and loitering up and down.

“'At last she is dead?' said the elder, when I went in.

“'She is dead,' said I.

“'I congratulate you, my brother,' were his words as he turned round.

“He had before offered me money, which I had postponed taking. He now
gave me a rouleau of gold. I took it from his hand, but laid it on
the table. I had considered the question, and had resolved to accept
nothing.

“'Pray excuse me,' said I. 'Under the circumstances, no.'

“They exchanged looks, but bent their heads to me as I bent mine to
them, and we parted without another word on either side.

        *****

“I am weary, weary, weary--worn down by misery. I cannot read what I
have written with this gaunt hand.

“Early in the morning, the rouleau of gold was left at my door in a
little box, with my name on the outside. From the first, I had anxiously
considered what I ought to do. I decided, that day, to write privately
to the Minister, stating the nature of the two cases to which I had been
summoned, and the place to which I had gone: in effect, stating all the
circumstances. I knew what Court influence was, and what the immunities
of the Nobles were, and I expected that the matter would never be
heard of; but, I wished to relieve my own mind. I had kept the matter a
profound secret, even from my wife; and this, too, I resolved to state
in my letter. I had no apprehension whatever of my real danger; but
I was conscious that there might be danger for others, if others were
compromised by possessing the knowledge that I possessed.

“I was much engaged that day, and could not complete my letter that
night. I rose long before my usual time next morning to finish it.
It was the last day of the year. The letter was lying before me just
completed, when I was told that a lady waited, who wished to see me.

        *****

“I am growing more and more unequal to the task I have set myself. It is
so cold, so dark, my senses are so benumbed, and the gloom upon me is so
dreadful.

“The lady was young, engaging, and handsome, but not marked for long
life. She was in great agitation. She presented herself to me as the
wife of the Marquis St. Evremonde. I connected the title by which the
boy had addressed the elder brother, with the initial letter embroidered
on the scarf, and had no difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that I
had seen that nobleman very lately.

“My memory is still accurate, but I cannot write the words of our
conversation. I suspect that I am watched more closely than I was, and I
know not at what times I may be watched. She had in part suspected, and
in part discovered, the main facts of the cruel story, of her husband's
share in it, and my being resorted to. She did not know that the girl
was dead. Her hope had been, she said in great distress, to show her,
in secret, a woman's sympathy. Her hope had been to avert the wrath of
Heaven from a House that had long been hateful to the suffering many.

“She had reasons for believing that there was a young sister living, and
her greatest desire was, to help that sister. I could tell her nothing
but that there was such a sister; beyond that, I knew nothing. Her
inducement to come to me, relying on my confidence, had been the hope
that I could tell her the name and place of abode. Whereas, to this
wretched hour I am ignorant of both.

        *****

“These scraps of paper fail me. One was taken from me, with a warning,
yesterday. I must finish my record to-day.

“She was a good, compassionate lady, and not happy in her marriage. How
could she be! The brother distrusted and disliked her, and his influence
was all opposed to her; she stood in dread of him, and in dread of her
husband too. When I handed her down to the door, there was a child, a
pretty boy from two to three years old, in her carriage.

“'For his sake, Doctor,' she said, pointing to him in tears, 'I would do
all I can to make what poor amends I can. He will never prosper in his
inheritance otherwise. I have a presentiment that if no other innocent
atonement is made for this, it will one day be required of him. What
I have left to call my own--it is little beyond the worth of a few
jewels--I will make it the first charge of his life to bestow, with the
compassion and lamenting of his dead mother, on this injured family, if
the sister can be discovered.'

“She kissed the boy, and said, caressing him, 'It is for thine own dear
sake. Thou wilt be faithful, little Charles?' The child answered her
bravely, 'Yes!' I kissed her hand, and she took him in her arms, and
went away caressing him. I never saw her more.

“As she had mentioned her husband's name in the faith that I knew it,
I added no mention of it to my letter. I sealed my letter, and, not
trusting it out of my own hands, delivered it myself that day.

“That night, the last night of the year, towards nine o'clock, a man in
a black dress rang at my gate, demanded to see me, and softly followed
my servant, Ernest Defarge, a youth, up-stairs. When my servant came
into the room where I sat with my wife--O my wife, beloved of my heart!
My fair young English wife!--we saw the man, who was supposed to be at
the gate, standing silent behind him.

“An urgent case in the Rue St. Honore, he said. It would not detain me,
he had a coach in waiting.

“It brought me here, it brought me to my grave. When I was clear of the
house, a black muffler was drawn tightly over my mouth from behind, and
my arms were pinioned. The two brothers crossed the road from a dark
corner, and identified me with a single gesture. The Marquis took from
his pocket the letter I had written, showed it me, burnt it in the light
of a lantern that was held, and extinguished the ashes with his foot.
Not a word was spoken. I was brought here, I was brought to my living
grave.

“If it had pleased _God_ to put it in the hard heart of either of the
brothers, in all these frightful years, to grant me any tidings of
my dearest wife--so much as to let me know by a word whether alive or
dead--I might have thought that He had not quite abandoned them. But,
now I believe that the mark of the red cross is fatal to them, and that
they have no part in His mercies. And them and their descendants, to the
last of their race, I, Alexandre Manette, unhappy prisoner, do this last
night of the year 1767, in my unbearable agony, denounce to the times
when all these things shall be answered for. I denounce them to Heaven
and to earth.”

A terrible sound arose when the reading of this document was done. A
sound of craving and eagerness that had nothing articulate in it but
blood. The narrative called up the most revengeful passions of the time,
and there was not a head in the nation but must have dropped before it.

Little need, in presence of that tribunal and that auditory, to show
how the Defarges had not made the paper public, with the other captured
Bastille memorials borne in procession, and had kept it, biding their
time. Little need to show that this detested family name had long been
anathematised by Saint Antoine, and was wrought into the fatal register.
The man never trod ground whose virtues and services would have
sustained him in that place that day, against such denunciation.

And all the worse for the doomed man, that the denouncer was a
well-known citizen, his own attached friend, the father of his wife. One
of the frenzied aspirations of the populace was, for imitations of
the questionable public virtues of antiquity, and for sacrifices and
self-immolations on the people's altar. Therefore when the President
said (else had his own head quivered on his shoulders), that the good
physician of the Republic would deserve better still of the Republic by
rooting out an obnoxious family of Aristocrats, and would doubtless feel
a sacred glow and joy in making his daughter a widow and her child an
orphan, there was wild excitement, patriotic fervour, not a touch of
human sympathy.

“Much influence around him, has that Doctor?” murmured Madame Defarge,
smiling to The Vengeance. “Save him now, my Doctor, save him!”

At every juryman's vote, there was a roar. Another and another. Roar and
roar.

Unanimously voted. At heart and by descent an Aristocrat, an enemy
of the Republic, a notorious oppressor of the People. Back to the
Conciergerie, and Death within four-and-twenty hours!




XI. Dusk


The wretched wife of the innocent man thus doomed to die, fell under
the sentence, as if she had been mortally stricken. But, she uttered no
sound; and so strong was the voice within her, representing that it was
she of all the world who must uphold him in his misery and not augment
it, that it quickly raised her, even from that shock.

The Judges having to take part in a public demonstration out of doors,
the Tribunal adjourned. The quick noise and movement of the court's
emptying itself by many passages had not ceased, when Lucie stood
stretching out her arms towards her husband, with nothing in her face
but love and consolation.

“If I might touch him! If I might embrace him once! O, good citizens, if
you would have so much compassion for us!”

There was but a gaoler left, along with two of the four men who had
taken him last night, and Barsad. The people had all poured out to the
show in the streets. Barsad proposed to the rest, “Let her embrace
him then; it is but a moment.” It was silently acquiesced in, and they
passed her over the seats in the hall to a raised place, where he, by
leaning over the dock, could fold her in his arms.

“Farewell, dear darling of my soul. My parting blessing on my love. We
shall meet again, where the weary are at rest!”

They were her husband's words, as he held her to his bosom.

“I can bear it, dear Charles. I am supported from above: don't suffer
for me. A parting blessing for our child.”

“I send it to her by you. I kiss her by you. I say farewell to her by
you.”

“My husband. No! A moment!” He was tearing himself apart from her.
“We shall not be separated long. I feel that this will break my heart
by-and-bye; but I will do my duty while I can, and when I leave her, God
will raise up friends for her, as He did for me.”

Her father had followed her, and would have fallen on his knees to both
of them, but that Darnay put out a hand and seized him, crying:

“No, no! What have you done, what have you done, that you should kneel
to us! We know now, what a struggle you made of old. We know, now what
you underwent when you suspected my descent, and when you knew it. We
know now, the natural antipathy you strove against, and conquered, for
her dear sake. We thank you with all our hearts, and all our love and
duty. Heaven be with you!”

Her father's only answer was to draw his hands through his white hair,
and wring them with a shriek of anguish.

“It could not be otherwise,” said the prisoner. “All things have worked
together as they have fallen out. It was the always-vain endeavour to
discharge my poor mother's trust that first brought my fatal presence
near you. Good could never come of such evil, a happier end was not in
nature to so unhappy a beginning. Be comforted, and forgive me. Heaven
bless you!”

As he was drawn away, his wife released him, and stood looking after him
with her hands touching one another in the attitude of prayer, and
with a radiant look upon her face, in which there was even a comforting
smile. As he went out at the prisoners' door, she turned, laid her head
lovingly on her father's breast, tried to speak to him, and fell at his
feet.

Then, issuing from the obscure corner from which he had never moved,
Sydney Carton came and took her up. Only her father and Mr. Lorry were
with her. His arm trembled as it raised her, and supported her head.
Yet, there was an air about him that was not all of pity--that had a
flush of pride in it.

“Shall I take her to a coach? I shall never feel her weight.”

He carried her lightly to the door, and laid her tenderly down in a
coach. Her father and their old friend got into it, and he took his seat
beside the driver.

When they arrived at the gateway where he had paused in the dark not
many hours before, to picture to himself on which of the rough stones of
the street her feet had trodden, he lifted her again, and carried her up
the staircase to their rooms. There, he laid her down on a couch, where
her child and Miss Pross wept over her.

“Don't recall her to herself,” he said, softly, to the latter, “she is
better so. Don't revive her to consciousness, while she only faints.”

“Oh, Carton, Carton, dear Carton!” cried little Lucie, springing up and
throwing her arms passionately round him, in a burst of grief. “Now that
you have come, I think you will do something to help mamma, something to
save papa! O, look at her, dear Carton! Can you, of all the people who
love her, bear to see her so?”

He bent over the child, and laid her blooming cheek against his face. He
put her gently from him, and looked at her unconscious mother.

“Before I go,” he said, and paused--“I may kiss her?”

It was remembered afterwards that when he bent down and touched her face
with his lips, he murmured some words. The child, who was nearest to
him, told them afterwards, and told her grandchildren when she was a
handsome old lady, that she heard him say, “A life you love.”

When he had gone out into the next room, he turned suddenly on Mr. Lorry
and her father, who were following, and said to the latter:

“You had great influence but yesterday, Doctor Manette; let it at least
be tried. These judges, and all the men in power, are very friendly to
you, and very recognisant of your services; are they not?”

“Nothing connected with Charles was concealed from me. I had the
strongest assurances that I should save him; and I did.” He returned the
answer in great trouble, and very slowly.

“Try them again. The hours between this and to-morrow afternoon are few
and short, but try.”

“I intend to try. I will not rest a moment.”

“That's well. I have known such energy as yours do great things before
now--though never,” he added, with a smile and a sigh together, “such
great things as this. But try! Of little worth as life is when we misuse
it, it is worth that effort. It would cost nothing to lay down if it
were not.”

“I will go,” said Doctor Manette, “to the Prosecutor and the President
straight, and I will go to others whom it is better not to name. I will
write too, and--But stay! There is a Celebration in the streets, and no
one will be accessible until dark.”

“That's true. Well! It is a forlorn hope at the best, and not much the
forlorner for being delayed till dark. I should like to know how you
speed; though, mind! I expect nothing! When are you likely to have seen
these dread powers, Doctor Manette?”

“Immediately after dark, I should hope. Within an hour or two from
this.”

“It will be dark soon after four. Let us stretch the hour or two. If I
go to Mr. Lorry's at nine, shall I hear what you have done, either from
our friend or from yourself?”

“Yes.”

“May you prosper!”

Mr. Lorry followed Sydney to the outer door, and, touching him on the
shoulder as he was going away, caused him to turn.

“I have no hope,” said Mr. Lorry, in a low and sorrowful whisper.

“Nor have I.”

“If any one of these men, or all of these men, were disposed to spare
him--which is a large supposition; for what is his life, or any man's
to them!--I doubt if they durst spare him after the demonstration in the
court.”

“And so do I. I heard the fall of the axe in that sound.”

Mr. Lorry leaned his arm upon the door-post, and bowed his face upon it.

“Don't despond,” said Carton, very gently; “don't grieve. I encouraged
Doctor Manette in this idea, because I felt that it might one day be
consolatory to her. Otherwise, she might think 'his life was wantonly
thrown away or wasted,' and that might trouble her.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” returned Mr. Lorry, drying his eyes, “you are right.
But he will perish; there is no real hope.”

“Yes. He will perish: there is no real hope,” echoed Carton.

And walked with a settled step, down-stairs.




XII. Darkness


Sydney Carton paused in the street, not quite decided where to go. “At
Tellson's banking-house at nine,” he said, with a musing face. “Shall I
do well, in the mean time, to show myself? I think so. It is best that
these people should know there is such a man as I here; it is a sound
precaution, and may be a necessary preparation. But care, care, care!
Let me think it out!”

Checking his steps which had begun to tend towards an object, he took a
turn or two in the already darkening street, and traced the thought
in his mind to its possible consequences. His first impression was
confirmed. “It is best,” he said, finally resolved, “that these people
should know there is such a man as I here.” And he turned his face
towards Saint Antoine.

Defarge had described himself, that day, as the keeper of a wine-shop in
the Saint Antoine suburb. It was not difficult for one who knew the city
well, to find his house without asking any question. Having ascertained
its situation, Carton came out of those closer streets again, and dined
at a place of refreshment and fell sound asleep after dinner. For the
first time in many years, he had no strong drink. Since last night he
had taken nothing but a little light thin wine, and last night he had
dropped the brandy slowly down on Mr. Lorry's hearth like a man who had
done with it.

It was as late as seven o'clock when he awoke refreshed, and went out
into the streets again. As he passed along towards Saint Antoine, he
stopped at a shop-window where there was a mirror, and slightly altered
the disordered arrangement of his loose cravat, and his coat-collar, and
his wild hair. This done, he went on direct to Defarge's, and went in.

There happened to be no customer in the shop but Jacques Three, of the
restless fingers and the croaking voice. This man, whom he had seen upon
the Jury, stood drinking at the little counter, in conversation with the
Defarges, man and wife. The Vengeance assisted in the conversation, like
a regular member of the establishment.

As Carton walked in, took his seat and asked (in very indifferent
French) for a small measure of wine, Madame Defarge cast a careless
glance at him, and then a keener, and then a keener, and then advanced
to him herself, and asked him what it was he had ordered.

He repeated what he had already said.

“English?” asked Madame Defarge, inquisitively raising her dark
eyebrows.

After looking at her, as if the sound of even a single French word were
slow to express itself to him, he answered, in his former strong foreign
accent. “Yes, madame, yes. I am English!”

Madame Defarge returned to her counter to get the wine, and, as he
took up a Jacobin journal and feigned to pore over it puzzling out its
meaning, he heard her say, “I swear to you, like Evremonde!”

Defarge brought him the wine, and gave him Good Evening.

“How?”

“Good evening.”

“Oh! Good evening, citizen,” filling his glass. “Ah! and good wine. I
drink to the Republic.”

Defarge went back to the counter, and said, “Certainly, a little like.”
 Madame sternly retorted, “I tell you a good deal like.” Jacques Three
pacifically remarked, “He is so much in your mind, see you, madame.”
 The amiable Vengeance added, with a laugh, “Yes, my faith! And you
are looking forward with so much pleasure to seeing him once more
to-morrow!”

Carton followed the lines and words of his paper, with a slow
forefinger, and with a studious and absorbed face. They were all leaning
their arms on the counter close together, speaking low. After a silence
of a few moments, during which they all looked towards him without
disturbing his outward attention from the Jacobin editor, they resumed
their conversation.

“It is true what madame says,” observed Jacques Three. “Why stop? There
is great force in that. Why stop?”

“Well, well,” reasoned Defarge, “but one must stop somewhere. After all,
the question is still where?”

“At extermination,” said madame.

“Magnificent!” croaked Jacques Three. The Vengeance, also, highly
approved.

“Extermination is good doctrine, my wife,” said Defarge, rather
troubled; “in general, I say nothing against it. But this Doctor has
suffered much; you have seen him to-day; you have observed his face when
the paper was read.”

“I have observed his face!” repeated madame, contemptuously and angrily.
“Yes. I have observed his face. I have observed his face to be not the
face of a true friend of the Republic. Let him take care of his face!”

“And you have observed, my wife,” said Defarge, in a deprecatory manner,
“the anguish of his daughter, which must be a dreadful anguish to him!”

“I have observed his daughter,” repeated madame; “yes, I have observed
his daughter, more times than one. I have observed her to-day, and I
have observed her other days. I have observed her in the court, and
I have observed her in the street by the prison. Let me but lift my
finger--!” She seemed to raise it (the listener's eyes were always on
his paper), and to let it fall with a rattle on the ledge before her, as
if the axe had dropped.

“The citizeness is superb!” croaked the Juryman.

“She is an Angel!” said The Vengeance, and embraced her.

“As to thee,” pursued madame, implacably, addressing her husband, “if it
depended on thee--which, happily, it does not--thou wouldst rescue this
man even now.”

“No!” protested Defarge. “Not if to lift this glass would do it! But I
would leave the matter there. I say, stop there.”

“See you then, Jacques,” said Madame Defarge, wrathfully; “and see you,
too, my little Vengeance; see you both! Listen! For other crimes as
tyrants and oppressors, I have this race a long time on my register,
doomed to destruction and extermination. Ask my husband, is that so.”

“It is so,” assented Defarge, without being asked.

“In the beginning of the great days, when the Bastille falls, he finds
this paper of to-day, and he brings it home, and in the middle of the
night when this place is clear and shut, we read it, here on this spot,
by the light of this lamp. Ask him, is that so.”

“It is so,” assented Defarge.

“That night, I tell him, when the paper is read through, and the lamp is
burnt out, and the day is gleaming in above those shutters and between
those iron bars, that I have now a secret to communicate. Ask him, is
that so.”

“It is so,” assented Defarge again.

“I communicate to him that secret. I smite this bosom with these two
hands as I smite it now, and I tell him, 'Defarge, I was brought up
among the fishermen of the sea-shore, and that peasant family so injured
by the two Evremonde brothers, as that Bastille paper describes, is my
family. Defarge, that sister of the mortally wounded boy upon the ground
was my sister, that husband was my sister's husband, that unborn child
was their child, that brother was my brother, that father was my father,
those dead are my dead, and that summons to answer for those things
descends to me!' Ask him, is that so.”

“It is so,” assented Defarge once more.

“Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop,” returned madame; “but don't
tell me.”

Both her hearers derived a horrible enjoyment from the deadly nature
of her wrath--the listener could feel how white she was, without seeing
her--and both highly commended it. Defarge, a weak minority, interposed
a few words for the memory of the compassionate wife of the Marquis; but
only elicited from his own wife a repetition of her last reply. “Tell
the Wind and the Fire where to stop; not me!”

Customers entered, and the group was broken up. The English customer
paid for what he had had, perplexedly counted his change, and asked, as
a stranger, to be directed towards the National Palace. Madame Defarge
took him to the door, and put her arm on his, in pointing out the road.
The English customer was not without his reflections then, that it might
be a good deed to seize that arm, lift it, and strike under it sharp and
deep.

But, he went his way, and was soon swallowed up in the shadow of the
prison wall. At the appointed hour, he emerged from it to present
himself in Mr. Lorry's room again, where he found the old gentleman
walking to and fro in restless anxiety. He said he had been with Lucie
until just now, and had only left her for a few minutes, to come and
keep his appointment. Her father had not been seen, since he quitted the
banking-house towards four o'clock. She had some faint hopes that his
mediation might save Charles, but they were very slight. He had been
more than five hours gone: where could he be?

Mr. Lorry waited until ten; but, Doctor Manette not returning, and
he being unwilling to leave Lucie any longer, it was arranged that he
should go back to her, and come to the banking-house again at midnight.
In the meanwhile, Carton would wait alone by the fire for the Doctor.

He waited and waited, and the clock struck twelve; but Doctor Manette
did not come back. Mr. Lorry returned, and found no tidings of him, and
brought none. Where could he be?

They were discussing this question, and were almost building up some
weak structure of hope on his prolonged absence, when they heard him on
the stairs. The instant he entered the room, it was plain that all was
lost.

Whether he had really been to any one, or whether he had been all that
time traversing the streets, was never known. As he stood staring at
them, they asked him no question, for his face told them everything.

“I cannot find it,” said he, “and I must have it. Where is it?”

His head and throat were bare, and, as he spoke with a helpless look
straying all around, he took his coat off, and let it drop on the floor.

“Where is my bench? I have been looking everywhere for my bench, and I
can't find it. What have they done with my work? Time presses: I must
finish those shoes.”

They looked at one another, and their hearts died within them.

“Come, come!” said he, in a whimpering miserable way; “let me get to
work. Give me my work.”

Receiving no answer, he tore his hair, and beat his feet upon the
ground, like a distracted child.

“Don't torture a poor forlorn wretch,” he implored them, with a dreadful
cry; “but give me my work! What is to become of us, if those shoes are
not done to-night?”

Lost, utterly lost!

It was so clearly beyond hope to reason with him, or try to restore him,
that--as if by agreement--they each put a hand upon his shoulder, and
soothed him to sit down before the fire, with a promise that he should
have his work presently. He sank into the chair, and brooded over the
embers, and shed tears. As if all that had happened since the garret
time were a momentary fancy, or a dream, Mr. Lorry saw him shrink into
the exact figure that Defarge had had in keeping.

Affected, and impressed with terror as they both were, by this spectacle
of ruin, it was not a time to yield to such emotions. His lonely
daughter, bereft of her final hope and reliance, appealed to them both
too strongly. Again, as if by agreement, they looked at one another with
one meaning in their faces. Carton was the first to speak:

“The last chance is gone: it was not much. Yes; he had better be taken
to her. But, before you go, will you, for a moment, steadily attend to
me? Don't ask me why I make the stipulations I am going to make, and
exact the promise I am going to exact; I have a reason--a good one.”

“I do not doubt it,” answered Mr. Lorry. “Say on.”

The figure in the chair between them, was all the time monotonously
rocking itself to and fro, and moaning. They spoke in such a tone as
they would have used if they had been watching by a sick-bed in the
night.

Carton stooped to pick up the coat, which lay almost entangling his
feet. As he did so, a small case in which the Doctor was accustomed to
carry the lists of his day's duties, fell lightly on the floor. Carton
took it up, and there was a folded paper in it. “We should look
at this!” he said. Mr. Lorry nodded his consent. He opened it, and
exclaimed, “Thank _God!_”

“What is it?” asked Mr. Lorry, eagerly.

“A moment! Let me speak of it in its place. First,” he put his hand in
his coat, and took another paper from it, “that is the certificate which
enables me to pass out of this city. Look at it. You see--Sydney Carton,
an Englishman?”

Mr. Lorry held it open in his hand, gazing in his earnest face.

“Keep it for me until to-morrow. I shall see him to-morrow, you
remember, and I had better not take it into the prison.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know; I prefer not to do so. Now, take this paper that Doctor
Manette has carried about him. It is a similar certificate, enabling him
and his daughter and her child, at any time, to pass the barrier and the
frontier! You see?”

“Yes!”

“Perhaps he obtained it as his last and utmost precaution against evil,
yesterday. When is it dated? But no matter; don't stay to look; put it
up carefully with mine and your own. Now, observe! I never doubted until
within this hour or two, that he had, or could have such a paper. It is
good, until recalled. But it may be soon recalled, and, I have reason to
think, will be.”

“They are not in danger?”

“They are in great danger. They are in danger of denunciation by Madame
Defarge. I know it from her own lips. I have overheard words of that
woman's, to-night, which have presented their danger to me in strong
colours. I have lost no time, and since then, I have seen the spy. He
confirms me. He knows that a wood-sawyer, living by the prison wall,
is under the control of the Defarges, and has been rehearsed by
Madame Defarge as to his having seen Her”--he never mentioned Lucie's
name--“making signs and signals to prisoners. It is easy to foresee that
the pretence will be the common one, a prison plot, and that it will
involve her life--and perhaps her child's--and perhaps her father's--for
both have been seen with her at that place. Don't look so horrified. You
will save them all.”

“Heaven grant I may, Carton! But how?”

“I am going to tell you how. It will depend on you, and it could depend
on no better man. This new denunciation will certainly not take place
until after to-morrow; probably not until two or three days afterwards;
more probably a week afterwards. You know it is a capital crime, to
mourn for, or sympathise with, a victim of the Guillotine. She and her
father would unquestionably be guilty of this crime, and this woman (the
inveteracy of whose pursuit cannot be described) would wait to add that
strength to her case, and make herself doubly sure. You follow me?”

“So attentively, and with so much confidence in what you say, that for
the moment I lose sight,” touching the back of the Doctor's chair, “even
of this distress.”

“You have money, and can buy the means of travelling to the seacoast
as quickly as the journey can be made. Your preparations have been
completed for some days, to return to England. Early to-morrow have your
horses ready, so that they may be in starting trim at two o'clock in the
afternoon.”

“It shall be done!”

His manner was so fervent and inspiring, that Mr. Lorry caught the
flame, and was as quick as youth.

“You are a noble heart. Did I say we could depend upon no better man?
Tell her, to-night, what you know of her danger as involving her child
and her father. Dwell upon that, for she would lay her own fair head
beside her husband's cheerfully.” He faltered for an instant; then went
on as before. “For the sake of her child and her father, press upon her
the necessity of leaving Paris, with them and you, at that hour. Tell
her that it was her husband's last arrangement. Tell her that more
depends upon it than she dare believe, or hope. You think that her
father, even in this sad state, will submit himself to her; do you not?”

“I am sure of it.”

“I thought so. Quietly and steadily have all these arrangements made in
the courtyard here, even to the taking of your own seat in the carriage.
The moment I come to you, take me in, and drive away.”

“I understand that I wait for you under all circumstances?”

“You have my certificate in your hand with the rest, you know, and will
reserve my place. Wait for nothing but to have my place occupied, and
then for England!”

“Why, then,” said Mr. Lorry, grasping his eager but so firm and steady
hand, “it does not all depend on one old man, but I shall have a young
and ardent man at my side.”

“By the help of Heaven you shall! Promise me solemnly that nothing will
influence you to alter the course on which we now stand pledged to one
another.”

“Nothing, Carton.”

“Remember these words to-morrow: change the course, or delay in it--for
any reason--and no life can possibly be saved, and many lives must
inevitably be sacrificed.”

“I will remember them. I hope to do my part faithfully.”

“And I hope to do mine. Now, good bye!”

Though he said it with a grave smile of earnestness, and though he even
put the old man's hand to his lips, he did not part from him then. He
helped him so far to arouse the rocking figure before the dying embers,
as to get a cloak and hat put upon it, and to tempt it forth to find
where the bench and work were hidden that it still moaningly besought
to have. He walked on the other side of it and protected it to the
courtyard of the house where the afflicted heart--so happy in
the memorable time when he had revealed his own desolate heart to
it--outwatched the awful night. He entered the courtyard and remained
there for a few moments alone, looking up at the light in the window of
her room. Before he went away, he breathed a blessing towards it, and a
Farewell.




XIII. Fifty-two


In the black prison of the Conciergerie, the doomed of the day awaited
their fate. They were in number as the weeks of the year. Fifty-two were
to roll that afternoon on the life-tide of the city to the boundless
everlasting sea. Before their cells were quit of them, new occupants
were appointed; before their blood ran into the blood spilled yesterday,
the blood that was to mingle with theirs to-morrow was already set
apart.

Two score and twelve were told off. From the farmer-general of seventy,
whose riches could not buy his life, to the seamstress of twenty, whose
poverty and obscurity could not save her. Physical diseases, engendered
in the vices and neglects of men, will seize on victims of all degrees;
and the frightful moral disorder, born of unspeakable suffering,
intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference, smote equally
without distinction.

Charles Darnay, alone in a cell, had sustained himself with no
flattering delusion since he came to it from the Tribunal. In every line
of the narrative he had heard, he had heard his condemnation. He had
fully comprehended that no personal influence could possibly save him,
that he was virtually sentenced by the millions, and that units could
avail him nothing.

Nevertheless, it was not easy, with the face of his beloved wife fresh
before him, to compose his mind to what it must bear. His hold on life
was strong, and it was very, very hard, to loosen; by gradual efforts
and degrees unclosed a little here, it clenched the tighter there; and
when he brought his strength to bear on that hand and it yielded,
this was closed again. There was a hurry, too, in all his thoughts,
a turbulent and heated working of his heart, that contended against
resignation. If, for a moment, he did feel resigned, then his wife and
child who had to live after him, seemed to protest and to make it a
selfish thing.

But, all this was at first. Before long, the consideration that there
was no disgrace in the fate he must meet, and that numbers went the same
road wrongfully, and trod it firmly every day, sprang up to stimulate
him. Next followed the thought that much of the future peace of mind
enjoyable by the dear ones, depended on his quiet fortitude. So,
by degrees he calmed into the better state, when he could raise his
thoughts much higher, and draw comfort down.

Before it had set in dark on the night of his condemnation, he had
travelled thus far on his last way. Being allowed to purchase the means
of writing, and a light, he sat down to write until such time as the
prison lamps should be extinguished.

He wrote a long letter to Lucie, showing her that he had known nothing
of her father's imprisonment, until he had heard of it from herself,
and that he had been as ignorant as she of his father's and uncle's
responsibility for that misery, until the paper had been read. He had
already explained to her that his concealment from herself of the name
he had relinquished, was the one condition--fully intelligible now--that
her father had attached to their betrothal, and was the one promise he
had still exacted on the morning of their marriage. He entreated her,
for her father's sake, never to seek to know whether her father had
become oblivious of the existence of the paper, or had had it recalled
to him (for the moment, or for good), by the story of the Tower, on
that old Sunday under the dear old plane-tree in the garden. If he had
preserved any definite remembrance of it, there could be no doubt that
he had supposed it destroyed with the Bastille, when he had found no
mention of it among the relics of prisoners which the populace had
discovered there, and which had been described to all the world. He
besought her--though he added that he knew it was needless--to console
her father, by impressing him through every tender means she could think
of, with the truth that he had done nothing for which he could justly
reproach himself, but had uniformly forgotten himself for their joint
sakes. Next to her preservation of his own last grateful love and
blessing, and her overcoming of her sorrow, to devote herself to their
dear child, he adjured her, as they would meet in Heaven, to comfort her
father.

To her father himself, he wrote in the same strain; but, he told her
father that he expressly confided his wife and child to his care. And
he told him this, very strongly, with the hope of rousing him from any
despondency or dangerous retrospect towards which he foresaw he might be
tending.

To Mr. Lorry, he commended them all, and explained his worldly affairs.
That done, with many added sentences of grateful friendship and warm
attachment, all was done. He never thought of Carton. His mind was so
full of the others, that he never once thought of him.

He had time to finish these letters before the lights were put out. When
he lay down on his straw bed, he thought he had done with this world.

But, it beckoned him back in his sleep, and showed itself in shining
forms. Free and happy, back in the old house in Soho (though it had
nothing in it like the real house), unaccountably released and light of
heart, he was with Lucie again, and she told him it was all a dream, and
he had never gone away. A pause of forgetfulness, and then he had even
suffered, and had come back to her, dead and at peace, and yet there
was no difference in him. Another pause of oblivion, and he awoke in the
sombre morning, unconscious where he was or what had happened, until it
flashed upon his mind, “this is the day of my death!”

Thus, had he come through the hours, to the day when the fifty-two heads
were to fall. And now, while he was composed, and hoped that he could
meet the end with quiet heroism, a new action began in his waking
thoughts, which was very difficult to master.

He had never seen the instrument that was to terminate his life. How
high it was from the ground, how many steps it had, where he would be
stood, how he would be touched, whether the touching hands would be dyed
red, which way his face would be turned, whether he would be the first,
or might be the last: these and many similar questions, in nowise
directed by his will, obtruded themselves over and over again, countless
times. Neither were they connected with fear: he was conscious of no
fear. Rather, they originated in a strange besetting desire to know what
to do when the time came; a desire gigantically disproportionate to the
few swift moments to which it referred; a wondering that was more like
the wondering of some other spirit within his, than his own.

The hours went on as he walked to and fro, and the clocks struck the
numbers he would never hear again. Nine gone for ever, ten gone for
ever, eleven gone for ever, twelve coming on to pass away. After a hard
contest with that eccentric action of thought which had last perplexed
him, he had got the better of it. He walked up and down, softly
repeating their names to himself. The worst of the strife was over.
He could walk up and down, free from distracting fancies, praying for
himself and for them.

Twelve gone for ever.

He had been apprised that the final hour was Three, and he knew he would
be summoned some time earlier, inasmuch as the tumbrils jolted heavily
and slowly through the streets. Therefore, he resolved to keep Two
before his mind, as the hour, and so to strengthen himself in the
interval that he might be able, after that time, to strengthen others.

Walking regularly to and fro with his arms folded on his breast, a very
different man from the prisoner, who had walked to and fro at La Force,
he heard One struck away from him, without surprise. The hour had
measured like most other hours. Devoutly thankful to Heaven for his
recovered self-possession, he thought, “There is but another now,” and
turned to walk again.

Footsteps in the stone passage outside the door. He stopped.

The key was put in the lock, and turned. Before the door was opened, or
as it opened, a man said in a low voice, in English: “He has never seen
me here; I have kept out of his way. Go you in alone; I wait near. Lose
no time!”

The door was quickly opened and closed, and there stood before him
face to face, quiet, intent upon him, with the light of a smile on his
features, and a cautionary finger on his lip, Sydney Carton.

There was something so bright and remarkable in his look, that, for the
first moment, the prisoner misdoubted him to be an apparition of his own
imagining. But, he spoke, and it was his voice; he took the prisoner's
hand, and it was his real grasp.

“Of all the people upon earth, you least expected to see me?” he said.

“I could not believe it to be you. I can scarcely believe it now. You
are not”--the apprehension came suddenly into his mind--“a prisoner?”

“No. I am accidentally possessed of a power over one of the keepers
here, and in virtue of it I stand before you. I come from her--your
wife, dear Darnay.”

The prisoner wrung his hand.

“I bring you a request from her.”

“What is it?”

“A most earnest, pressing, and emphatic entreaty, addressed to you
in the most pathetic tones of the voice so dear to you, that you well
remember.”

The prisoner turned his face partly aside.

“You have no time to ask me why I bring it, or what it means; I have
no time to tell you. You must comply with it--take off those boots you
wear, and draw on these of mine.”

There was a chair against the wall of the cell, behind the prisoner.
Carton, pressing forward, had already, with the speed of lightning, got
him down into it, and stood over him, barefoot.

“Draw on these boots of mine. Put your hands to them; put your will to
them. Quick!”

“Carton, there is no escaping from this place; it never can be done. You
will only die with me. It is madness.”

“It would be madness if I asked you to escape; but do I? When I ask you
to pass out at that door, tell me it is madness and remain here. Change
that cravat for this of mine, that coat for this of mine. While you do
it, let me take this ribbon from your hair, and shake out your hair like
this of mine!”

With wonderful quickness, and with a strength both of will and action,
that appeared quite supernatural, he forced all these changes upon him.
The prisoner was like a young child in his hands.

“Carton! Dear Carton! It is madness. It cannot be accomplished, it never
can be done, it has been attempted, and has always failed. I implore you
not to add your death to the bitterness of mine.”

“Do I ask you, my dear Darnay, to pass the door? When I ask that,
refuse. There are pen and ink and paper on this table. Is your hand
steady enough to write?”

“It was when you came in.”

“Steady it again, and write what I shall dictate. Quick, friend, quick!”

Pressing his hand to his bewildered head, Darnay sat down at the table.
Carton, with his right hand in his breast, stood close beside him.

“Write exactly as I speak.”

“To whom do I address it?”

“To no one.” Carton still had his hand in his breast.

“Do I date it?”

“No.”

The prisoner looked up, at each question. Carton, standing over him with
his hand in his breast, looked down.

“'If you remember,'” said Carton, dictating, “'the words that passed
between us, long ago, you will readily comprehend this when you see it.
You do remember them, I know. It is not in your nature to forget them.'”

He was drawing his hand from his breast; the prisoner chancing to look
up in his hurried wonder as he wrote, the hand stopped, closing upon
something.

“Have you written 'forget them'?” Carton asked.

“I have. Is that a weapon in your hand?”

“No; I am not armed.”

“What is it in your hand?”

“You shall know directly. Write on; there are but a few words more.” He
dictated again. “'I am thankful that the time has come, when I can prove
them. That I do so is no subject for regret or grief.'” As he said these
words with his eyes fixed on the writer, his hand slowly and softly
moved down close to the writer's face.

The pen dropped from Darnay's fingers on the table, and he looked about
him vacantly.

“What vapour is that?” he asked.

“Vapour?”

“Something that crossed me?”

“I am conscious of nothing; there can be nothing here. Take up the pen
and finish. Hurry, hurry!”

As if his memory were impaired, or his faculties disordered, the
prisoner made an effort to rally his attention. As he looked at Carton
with clouded eyes and with an altered manner of breathing, Carton--his
hand again in his breast--looked steadily at him.

“Hurry, hurry!”

The prisoner bent over the paper, once more.

“'If it had been otherwise;'” Carton's hand was again watchfully and
softly stealing down; “'I never should have used the longer opportunity.
If it had been otherwise;'” the hand was at the prisoner's face; “'I
should but have had so much the more to answer for. If it had been
otherwise--'” Carton looked at the pen and saw it was trailing off into
unintelligible signs.

Carton's hand moved back to his breast no more. The prisoner sprang up
with a reproachful look, but Carton's hand was close and firm at his
nostrils, and Carton's left arm caught him round the waist. For a few
seconds he faintly struggled with the man who had come to lay down his
life for him; but, within a minute or so, he was stretched insensible on
the ground.

Quickly, but with hands as true to the purpose as his heart was, Carton
dressed himself in the clothes the prisoner had laid aside, combed back
his hair, and tied it with the ribbon the prisoner had worn. Then, he
softly called, “Enter there! Come in!” and the Spy presented himself.

“You see?” said Carton, looking up, as he kneeled on one knee beside the
insensible figure, putting the paper in the breast: “is your hazard very
great?”

“Mr. Carton,” the Spy answered, with a timid snap of his fingers, “my
hazard is not _that_, in the thick of business here, if you are true to
the whole of your bargain.”

“Don't fear me. I will be true to the death.”

“You must be, Mr. Carton, if the tale of fifty-two is to be right. Being
made right by you in that dress, I shall have no fear.”

“Have no fear! I shall soon be out of the way of harming you, and the
rest will soon be far from here, please God! Now, get assistance and
take me to the coach.”

“You?” said the Spy nervously.

“Him, man, with whom I have exchanged. You go out at the gate by which
you brought me in?”

“Of course.”

“I was weak and faint when you brought me in, and I am fainter now you
take me out. The parting interview has overpowered me. Such a thing has
happened here, often, and too often. Your life is in your own hands.
Quick! Call assistance!”

“You swear not to betray me?” said the trembling Spy, as he paused for a
last moment.

“Man, man!” returned Carton, stamping his foot; “have I sworn by no
solemn vow already, to go through with this, that you waste the precious
moments now? Take him yourself to the courtyard you know of, place
him yourself in the carriage, show him yourself to Mr. Lorry, tell him
yourself to give him no restorative but air, and to remember my words of
last night, and his promise of last night, and drive away!”

The Spy withdrew, and Carton seated himself at the table, resting his
forehead on his hands. The Spy returned immediately, with two men.

“How, then?” said one of them, contemplating the fallen figure. “So
afflicted to find that his friend has drawn a prize in the lottery of
Sainte Guillotine?”

“A good patriot,” said the other, “could hardly have been more afflicted
if the Aristocrat had drawn a blank.”

They raised the unconscious figure, placed it on a litter they had
brought to the door, and bent to carry it away.

“The time is short, Evremonde,” said the Spy, in a warning voice.

“I know it well,” answered Carton. “Be careful of my friend, I entreat
you, and leave me.”

“Come, then, my children,” said Barsad. “Lift him, and come away!”

The door closed, and Carton was left alone. Straining his powers of
listening to the utmost, he listened for any sound that might denote
suspicion or alarm. There was none. Keys turned, doors clashed,
footsteps passed along distant passages: no cry was raised, or hurry
made, that seemed unusual. Breathing more freely in a little while, he
sat down at the table, and listened again until the clock struck Two.

Sounds that he was not afraid of, for he divined their meaning, then
began to be audible. Several doors were opened in succession, and
finally his own. A gaoler, with a list in his hand, looked in, merely
saying, “Follow me, Evremonde!” and he followed into a large dark room,
at a distance. It was a dark winter day, and what with the shadows
within, and what with the shadows without, he could but dimly discern
the others who were brought there to have their arms bound. Some were
standing; some seated. Some were lamenting, and in restless motion;
but, these were few. The great majority were silent and still, looking
fixedly at the ground.

As he stood by the wall in a dim corner, while some of the fifty-two
were brought in after him, one man stopped in passing, to embrace him,
as having a knowledge of him. It thrilled him with a great dread of
discovery; but the man went on. A very few moments after that, a young
woman, with a slight girlish form, a sweet spare face in which there was
no vestige of colour, and large widely opened patient eyes, rose from
the seat where he had observed her sitting, and came to speak to him.

“Citizen Evremonde,” she said, touching him with her cold hand. “I am a
poor little seamstress, who was with you in La Force.”

He murmured for answer: “True. I forget what you were accused of?”

“Plots. Though the just Heaven knows that I am innocent of any. Is it
likely? Who would think of plotting with a poor little weak creature
like me?”

The forlorn smile with which she said it, so touched him, that tears
started from his eyes.

“I am not afraid to die, Citizen Evremonde, but I have done nothing. I
am not unwilling to die, if the Republic which is to do so much good
to us poor, will profit by my death; but I do not know how that can be,
Citizen Evremonde. Such a poor weak little creature!”

As the last thing on earth that his heart was to warm and soften to, it
warmed and softened to this pitiable girl.

“I heard you were released, Citizen Evremonde. I hoped it was true?”

“It was. But, I was again taken and condemned.”

“If I may ride with you, Citizen Evremonde, will you let me hold your
hand? I am not afraid, but I am little and weak, and it will give me
more courage.”

As the patient eyes were lifted to his face, he saw a sudden doubt in
them, and then astonishment. He pressed the work-worn, hunger-worn young
fingers, and touched his lips.

“Are you dying for him?” she whispered.

“And his wife and child. Hush! Yes.”

“O you will let me hold your brave hand, stranger?”

“Hush! Yes, my poor sister; to the last.”

        *****

The same shadows that are falling on the prison, are falling, in that
same hour of the early afternoon, on the Barrier with the crowd about
it, when a coach going out of Paris drives up to be examined.

“Who goes here? Whom have we within? Papers!”

The papers are handed out, and read.

“Alexandre Manette. Physician. French. Which is he?”

This is he; this helpless, inarticulately murmuring, wandering old man
pointed out.

“Apparently the Citizen-Doctor is not in his right mind? The
Revolution-fever will have been too much for him?”

Greatly too much for him.

“Hah! Many suffer with it. Lucie. His daughter. French. Which is she?”

This is she.

“Apparently it must be. Lucie, the wife of Evremonde; is it not?”

It is.

“Hah! Evremonde has an assignation elsewhere. Lucie, her child. English.
This is she?”

She and no other.

“Kiss me, child of Evremonde. Now, thou hast kissed a good Republican;
something new in thy family; remember it! Sydney Carton. Advocate.
English. Which is he?”

He lies here, in this corner of the carriage. He, too, is pointed out.

“Apparently the English advocate is in a swoon?”

It is hoped he will recover in the fresher air. It is represented that
he is not in strong health, and has separated sadly from a friend who is
under the displeasure of the Republic.

“Is that all? It is not a great deal, that! Many are under the
displeasure of the Republic, and must look out at the little window.
Jarvis Lorry. Banker. English. Which is he?”

“I am he. Necessarily, being the last.”

It is Jarvis Lorry who has replied to all the previous questions. It
is Jarvis Lorry who has alighted and stands with his hand on the coach
door, replying to a group of officials. They leisurely walk round the
carriage and leisurely mount the box, to look at what little luggage it
carries on the roof; the country-people hanging about, press nearer to
the coach doors and greedily stare in; a little child, carried by its
mother, has its short arm held out for it, that it may touch the wife of
an aristocrat who has gone to the Guillotine.

“Behold your papers, Jarvis Lorry, countersigned.”

“One can depart, citizen?”

“One can depart. Forward, my postilions! A good journey!”

“I salute you, citizens.--And the first danger passed!”

These are again the words of Jarvis Lorry, as he clasps his hands, and
looks upward. There is terror in the carriage, there is weeping, there
is the heavy breathing of the insensible traveller.

“Are we not going too slowly? Can they not be induced to go faster?”
 asks Lucie, clinging to the old man.

“It would seem like flight, my darling. I must not urge them too much;
it would rouse suspicion.”

“Look back, look back, and see if we are pursued!”

“The road is clear, my dearest. So far, we are not pursued.”

Houses in twos and threes pass by us, solitary farms, ruinous buildings,
dye-works, tanneries, and the like, open country, avenues of leafless
trees. The hard uneven pavement is under us, the soft deep mud is on
either side. Sometimes, we strike into the skirting mud, to avoid the
stones that clatter us and shake us; sometimes, we stick in ruts and
sloughs there. The agony of our impatience is then so great, that in our
wild alarm and hurry we are for getting out and running--hiding--doing
anything but stopping.

Out of the open country, in again among ruinous buildings, solitary
farms, dye-works, tanneries, and the like, cottages in twos and threes,
avenues of leafless trees. Have these men deceived us, and taken us back
by another road? Is not this the same place twice over? Thank Heaven,
no. A village. Look back, look back, and see if we are pursued! Hush!
the posting-house.

Leisurely, our four horses are taken out; leisurely, the coach stands in
the little street, bereft of horses, and with no likelihood upon it
of ever moving again; leisurely, the new horses come into visible
existence, one by one; leisurely, the new postilions follow, sucking and
plaiting the lashes of their whips; leisurely, the old postilions count
their money, make wrong additions, and arrive at dissatisfied results.
All the time, our overfraught hearts are beating at a rate that would
far outstrip the fastest gallop of the fastest horses ever foaled.

At length the new postilions are in their saddles, and the old are left
behind. We are through the village, up the hill, and down the hill, and
on the low watery grounds. Suddenly, the postilions exchange speech with
animated gesticulation, and the horses are pulled up, almost on their
haunches. We are pursued?

“Ho! Within the carriage there. Speak then!”

“What is it?” asks Mr. Lorry, looking out at window.

“How many did they say?”

“I do not understand you.”

“--At the last post. How many to the Guillotine to-day?”

“Fifty-two.”

“I said so! A brave number! My fellow-citizen here would have it
forty-two; ten more heads are worth having. The Guillotine goes
handsomely. I love it. Hi forward. Whoop!”

The night comes on dark. He moves more; he is beginning to revive, and
to speak intelligibly; he thinks they are still together; he asks him,
by his name, what he has in his hand. O pity us, kind Heaven, and help
us! Look out, look out, and see if we are pursued.

The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and
the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of
us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else.




XIV. The Knitting Done


In that same juncture of time when the Fifty-Two awaited their fate
Madame Defarge held darkly ominous council with The Vengeance and
Jacques Three of the Revolutionary Jury. Not in the wine-shop did Madame
Defarge confer with these ministers, but in the shed of the wood-sawyer,
erst a mender of roads. The sawyer himself did not participate in the
conference, but abided at a little distance, like an outer satellite who
was not to speak until required, or to offer an opinion until invited.

“But our Defarge,” said Jacques Three, “is undoubtedly a good
Republican? Eh?”

“There is no better,” the voluble Vengeance protested in her shrill
notes, “in France.”

“Peace, little Vengeance,” said Madame Defarge, laying her hand with
a slight frown on her lieutenant's lips, “hear me speak. My husband,
fellow-citizen, is a good Republican and a bold man; he has deserved
well of the Republic, and possesses its confidence. But my husband has
his weaknesses, and he is so weak as to relent towards this Doctor.”

“It is a great pity,” croaked Jacques Three, dubiously shaking his head,
with his cruel fingers at his hungry mouth; “it is not quite like a good
citizen; it is a thing to regret.”

“See you,” said madame, “I care nothing for this Doctor, I. He may wear
his head or lose it, for any interest I have in him; it is all one to
me. But, the Evremonde people are to be exterminated, and the wife and
child must follow the husband and father.”

“She has a fine head for it,” croaked Jacques Three. “I have seen blue
eyes and golden hair there, and they looked charming when Samson held
them up.” Ogre that he was, he spoke like an epicure.

Madame Defarge cast down her eyes, and reflected a little.

“The child also,” observed Jacques Three, with a meditative enjoyment
of his words, “has golden hair and blue eyes. And we seldom have a child
there. It is a pretty sight!”

“In a word,” said Madame Defarge, coming out of her short abstraction,
“I cannot trust my husband in this matter. Not only do I feel, since
last night, that I dare not confide to him the details of my projects;
but also I feel that if I delay, there is danger of his giving warning,
and then they might escape.”

“That must never be,” croaked Jacques Three; “no one must escape. We
have not half enough as it is. We ought to have six score a day.”

“In a word,” Madame Defarge went on, “my husband has not my reason for
pursuing this family to annihilation, and I have not his reason for
regarding this Doctor with any sensibility. I must act for myself,
therefore. Come hither, little citizen.”

The wood-sawyer, who held her in the respect, and himself in the
submission, of mortal fear, advanced with his hand to his red cap.

“Touching those signals, little citizen,” said Madame Defarge, sternly,
“that she made to the prisoners; you are ready to bear witness to them
this very day?”

“Ay, ay, why not!” cried the sawyer. “Every day, in all weathers, from
two to four, always signalling, sometimes with the little one, sometimes
without. I know what I know. I have seen with my eyes.”

He made all manner of gestures while he spoke, as if in incidental
imitation of some few of the great diversity of signals that he had
never seen.

“Clearly plots,” said Jacques Three. “Transparently!”

“There is no doubt of the Jury?” inquired Madame Defarge, letting her
eyes turn to him with a gloomy smile.

“Rely upon the patriotic Jury, dear citizeness. I answer for my
fellow-Jurymen.”

“Now, let me see,” said Madame Defarge, pondering again. “Yet once more!
Can I spare this Doctor to my husband? I have no feeling either way. Can
I spare him?”

“He would count as one head,” observed Jacques Three, in a low voice.
“We really have not heads enough; it would be a pity, I think.”

“He was signalling with her when I saw her,” argued Madame Defarge; “I
cannot speak of one without the other; and I must not be silent, and
trust the case wholly to him, this little citizen here. For, I am not a
bad witness.”

The Vengeance and Jacques Three vied with each other in their fervent
protestations that she was the most admirable and marvellous of
witnesses. The little citizen, not to be outdone, declared her to be a
celestial witness.

“He must take his chance,” said Madame Defarge. “No, I cannot spare
him! You are engaged at three o'clock; you are going to see the batch of
to-day executed.--You?”

The question was addressed to the wood-sawyer, who hurriedly replied in
the affirmative: seizing the occasion to add that he was the most ardent
of Republicans, and that he would be in effect the most desolate of
Republicans, if anything prevented him from enjoying the pleasure of
smoking his afternoon pipe in the contemplation of the droll national
barber. He was so very demonstrative herein, that he might have been
suspected (perhaps was, by the dark eyes that looked contemptuously at
him out of Madame Defarge's head) of having his small individual fears
for his own personal safety, every hour in the day.

“I,” said madame, “am equally engaged at the same place. After it is
over--say at eight to-night--come you to me, in Saint Antoine, and we
will give information against these people at my Section.”

The wood-sawyer said he would be proud and flattered to attend the
citizeness. The citizeness looking at him, he became embarrassed, evaded
her glance as a small dog would have done, retreated among his wood, and
hid his confusion over the handle of his saw.

Madame Defarge beckoned the Juryman and The Vengeance a little nearer to
the door, and there expounded her further views to them thus:

“She will now be at home, awaiting the moment of his death. She will
be mourning and grieving. She will be in a state of mind to impeach the
justice of the Republic. She will be full of sympathy with its enemies.
I will go to her.”

“What an admirable woman; what an adorable woman!” exclaimed Jacques
Three, rapturously. “Ah, my cherished!” cried The Vengeance; and
embraced her.

“Take you my knitting,” said Madame Defarge, placing it in her
lieutenant's hands, “and have it ready for me in my usual seat. Keep
me my usual chair. Go you there, straight, for there will probably be a
greater concourse than usual, to-day.”

“I willingly obey the orders of my Chief,” said The Vengeance with
alacrity, and kissing her cheek. “You will not be late?”

“I shall be there before the commencement.”

“And before the tumbrils arrive. Be sure you are there, my soul,” said
The Vengeance, calling after her, for she had already turned into the
street, “before the tumbrils arrive!”

Madame Defarge slightly waved her hand, to imply that she heard, and
might be relied upon to arrive in good time, and so went through the
mud, and round the corner of the prison wall. The Vengeance and the
Juryman, looking after her as she walked away, were highly appreciative
of her fine figure, and her superb moral endowments.

There were many women at that time, upon whom the time laid a dreadfully
disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among them more to be dreaded
than this ruthless woman, now taking her way along the streets. Of a
strong and fearless character, of shrewd sense and readiness, of great
determination, of that kind of beauty which not only seems to impart
to its possessor firmness and animosity, but to strike into others an
instinctive recognition of those qualities; the troubled time would have
heaved her up, under any circumstances. But, imbued from her childhood
with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class,
opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without
pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of
her.

It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of
his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that
his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was
insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and
her prey, and as such had no right to live. To appeal to her, was made
hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself. If she had
been laid low in the streets, in any of the many encounters in which
she had been engaged, she would not have pitied herself; nor, if she had
been ordered to the axe to-morrow, would she have gone to it with any
softer feeling than a fierce desire to change places with the man who
sent her there.

Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly
worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her
dark hair looked rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her
bosom, was a loaded pistol. Lying hidden at her waist, was a sharpened
dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking with the confident tread of such
a character, and with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually
walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown
sea-sand, Madame Defarge took her way along the streets.

Now, when the journey of the travelling coach, at that very moment
waiting for the completion of its load, had been planned out last night,
the difficulty of taking Miss Pross in it had much engaged Mr. Lorry's
attention. It was not merely desirable to avoid overloading the coach,
but it was of the highest importance that the time occupied in examining
it and its passengers, should be reduced to the utmost; since their
escape might depend on the saving of only a few seconds here and there.
Finally, he had proposed, after anxious consideration, that Miss Pross
and Jerry, who were at liberty to leave the city, should leave it at
three o'clock in the lightest-wheeled conveyance known to that period.
Unencumbered with luggage, they would soon overtake the coach, and,
passing it and preceding it on the road, would order its horses in
advance, and greatly facilitate its progress during the precious hours
of the night, when delay was the most to be dreaded.

Seeing in this arrangement the hope of rendering real service in that
pressing emergency, Miss Pross hailed it with joy. She and Jerry had
beheld the coach start, had known who it was that Solomon brought, had
passed some ten minutes in tortures of suspense, and were now concluding
their arrangements to follow the coach, even as Madame Defarge,
taking her way through the streets, now drew nearer and nearer to the
else-deserted lodging in which they held their consultation.

“Now what do you think, Mr. Cruncher,” said Miss Pross, whose agitation
was so great that she could hardly speak, or stand, or move, or live:
“what do you think of our not starting from this courtyard? Another
carriage having already gone from here to-day, it might awaken
suspicion.”

“My opinion, miss,” returned Mr. Cruncher, “is as you're right. Likewise
wot I'll stand by you, right or wrong.”

“I am so distracted with fear and hope for our precious creatures,” said
Miss Pross, wildly crying, “that I am incapable of forming any plan. Are
_you_ capable of forming any plan, my dear good Mr. Cruncher?”

“Respectin' a future spear o' life, miss,” returned Mr. Cruncher, “I
hope so. Respectin' any present use o' this here blessed old head o'
mine, I think not. Would you do me the favour, miss, to take notice o'
two promises and wows wot it is my wishes fur to record in this here
crisis?”

“Oh, for gracious sake!” cried Miss Pross, still wildly crying, “record
them at once, and get them out of the way, like an excellent man.”

“First,” said Mr. Cruncher, who was all in a tremble, and who spoke with
an ashy and solemn visage, “them poor things well out o' this, never no
more will I do it, never no more!”

“I am quite sure, Mr. Cruncher,” returned Miss Pross, “that you
never will do it again, whatever it is, and I beg you not to think it
necessary to mention more particularly what it is.”

“No, miss,” returned Jerry, “it shall not be named to you. Second: them
poor things well out o' this, and never no more will I interfere with
Mrs. Cruncher's flopping, never no more!”

“Whatever housekeeping arrangement that may be,” said Miss Pross,
striving to dry her eyes and compose herself, “I have no doubt it
is best that Mrs. Cruncher should have it entirely under her own
superintendence.--O my poor darlings!”

“I go so far as to say, miss, moreover,” proceeded Mr. Cruncher, with a
most alarming tendency to hold forth as from a pulpit--“and let my words
be took down and took to Mrs. Cruncher through yourself--that wot my
opinions respectin' flopping has undergone a change, and that wot I only
hope with all my heart as Mrs. Cruncher may be a flopping at the present
time.”

“There, there, there! I hope she is, my dear man,” cried the distracted
Miss Pross, “and I hope she finds it answering her expectations.”

“Forbid it,” proceeded Mr. Cruncher, with additional solemnity,
additional slowness, and additional tendency to hold forth and hold
out, “as anything wot I have ever said or done should be wisited on my
earnest wishes for them poor creeturs now! Forbid it as we shouldn't all
flop (if it was anyways conwenient) to get 'em out o' this here dismal
risk! Forbid it, miss! Wot I say, for-_bid_ it!” This was Mr. Cruncher's
conclusion after a protracted but vain endeavour to find a better one.

And still Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, came
nearer and nearer.

“If we ever get back to our native land,” said Miss Pross, “you may rely
upon my telling Mrs. Cruncher as much as I may be able to remember and
understand of what you have so impressively said; and at all events
you may be sure that I shall bear witness to your being thoroughly in
earnest at this dreadful time. Now, pray let us think! My esteemed Mr.
Cruncher, let us think!”

Still, Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, came nearer
and nearer.

“If you were to go before,” said Miss Pross, “and stop the vehicle and
horses from coming here, and were to wait somewhere for me; wouldn't
that be best?”

Mr. Cruncher thought it might be best.

“Where could you wait for me?” asked Miss Pross.

Mr. Cruncher was so bewildered that he could think of no locality but
Temple Bar. Alas! Temple Bar was hundreds of miles away, and Madame
Defarge was drawing very near indeed.

“By the cathedral door,” said Miss Pross. “Would it be much out of
the way, to take me in, near the great cathedral door between the two
towers?”

“No, miss,” answered Mr. Cruncher.

“Then, like the best of men,” said Miss Pross, “go to the posting-house
straight, and make that change.”

“I am doubtful,” said Mr. Cruncher, hesitating and shaking his head,
“about leaving of you, you see. We don't know what may happen.”

“Heaven knows we don't,” returned Miss Pross, “but have no fear for me.
Take me in at the cathedral, at Three o'Clock, or as near it as you can,
and I am sure it will be better than our going from here. I feel certain
of it. There! Bless you, Mr. Cruncher! Think-not of me, but of the lives
that may depend on both of us!”

This exordium, and Miss Pross's two hands in quite agonised entreaty
clasping his, decided Mr. Cruncher. With an encouraging nod or two, he
immediately went out to alter the arrangements, and left her by herself
to follow as she had proposed.

The having originated a precaution which was already in course of
execution, was a great relief to Miss Pross. The necessity of composing
her appearance so that it should attract no special notice in the
streets, was another relief. She looked at her watch, and it was twenty
minutes past two. She had no time to lose, but must get ready at once.

Afraid, in her extreme perturbation, of the loneliness of the deserted
rooms, and of half-imagined faces peeping from behind every open door
in them, Miss Pross got a basin of cold water and began laving her eyes,
which were swollen and red. Haunted by her feverish apprehensions, she
could not bear to have her sight obscured for a minute at a time by the
dripping water, but constantly paused and looked round to see that there
was no one watching her. In one of those pauses she recoiled and cried
out, for she saw a figure standing in the room.

The basin fell to the ground broken, and the water flowed to the feet of
Madame Defarge. By strange stern ways, and through much staining blood,
those feet had come to meet that water.

Madame Defarge looked coldly at her, and said, “The wife of Evremonde;
where is she?”

It flashed upon Miss Pross's mind that the doors were all standing open,
and would suggest the flight. Her first act was to shut them. There were
four in the room, and she shut them all. She then placed herself before
the door of the chamber which Lucie had occupied.

Madame Defarge's dark eyes followed her through this rapid movement,
and rested on her when it was finished. Miss Pross had nothing beautiful
about her; years had not tamed the wildness, or softened the grimness,
of her appearance; but, she too was a determined woman in her different
way, and she measured Madame Defarge with her eyes, every inch.

“You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer,” said Miss
Pross, in her breathing. “Nevertheless, you shall not get the better of
me. I am an Englishwoman.”

Madame Defarge looked at her scornfully, but still with something of
Miss Pross's own perception that they two were at bay. She saw a tight,
hard, wiry woman before her, as Mr. Lorry had seen in the same figure a
woman with a strong hand, in the years gone by. She knew full well that
Miss Pross was the family's devoted friend; Miss Pross knew full well
that Madame Defarge was the family's malevolent enemy.

“On my way yonder,” said Madame Defarge, with a slight movement of
her hand towards the fatal spot, “where they reserve my chair and my
knitting for me, I am come to make my compliments to her in passing. I
wish to see her.”

“I know that your intentions are evil,” said Miss Pross, “and you may
depend upon it, I'll hold my own against them.”

Each spoke in her own language; neither understood the other's words;
both were very watchful, and intent to deduce from look and manner, what
the unintelligible words meant.

“It will do her no good to keep herself concealed from me at this
moment,” said Madame Defarge. “Good patriots will know what that means.
Let me see her. Go tell her that I wish to see her. Do you hear?”

“If those eyes of yours were bed-winches,” returned Miss Pross, “and I
was an English four-poster, they shouldn't loose a splinter of me. No,
you wicked foreign woman; I am your match.”

Madame Defarge was not likely to follow these idiomatic remarks in
detail; but, she so far understood them as to perceive that she was set
at naught.

“Woman imbecile and pig-like!” said Madame Defarge, frowning. “I take no
answer from you. I demand to see her. Either tell her that I demand
to see her, or stand out of the way of the door and let me go to her!”
 This, with an angry explanatory wave of her right arm.

“I little thought,” said Miss Pross, “that I should ever want to
understand your nonsensical language; but I would give all I have,
except the clothes I wear, to know whether you suspect the truth, or any
part of it.”

Neither of them for a single moment released the other's eyes. Madame
Defarge had not moved from the spot where she stood when Miss Pross
first became aware of her; but, she now advanced one step.

“I am a Briton,” said Miss Pross, “I am desperate. I don't care an
English Twopence for myself. I know that the longer I keep you here, the
greater hope there is for my Ladybird. I'll not leave a handful of that
dark hair upon your head, if you lay a finger on me!”

Thus Miss Pross, with a shake of her head and a flash of her eyes
between every rapid sentence, and every rapid sentence a whole breath.
Thus Miss Pross, who had never struck a blow in her life.

But, her courage was of that emotional nature that it brought the
irrepressible tears into her eyes. This was a courage that Madame
Defarge so little comprehended as to mistake for weakness. “Ha, ha!” she
laughed, “you poor wretch! What are you worth! I address myself to that
Doctor.” Then she raised her voice and called out, “Citizen Doctor! Wife
of Evremonde! Child of Evremonde! Any person but this miserable fool,
answer the Citizeness Defarge!”

Perhaps the following silence, perhaps some latent disclosure in the
expression of Miss Pross's face, perhaps a sudden misgiving apart from
either suggestion, whispered to Madame Defarge that they were gone.
Three of the doors she opened swiftly, and looked in.

“Those rooms are all in disorder, there has been hurried packing, there
are odds and ends upon the ground. There is no one in that room behind
you! Let me look.”

“Never!” said Miss Pross, who understood the request as perfectly as
Madame Defarge understood the answer.

“If they are not in that room, they are gone, and can be pursued and
brought back,” said Madame Defarge to herself.

“As long as you don't know whether they are in that room or not, you are
uncertain what to do,” said Miss Pross to herself; “and you shall not
know that, if I can prevent your knowing it; and know that, or not know
that, you shall not leave here while I can hold you.”

“I have been in the streets from the first, nothing has stopped me,
I will tear you to pieces, but I will have you from that door,” said
Madame Defarge.

“We are alone at the top of a high house in a solitary courtyard, we are
not likely to be heard, and I pray for bodily strength to keep you here,
while every minute you are here is worth a hundred thousand guineas to
my darling,” said Miss Pross.

Madame Defarge made at the door. Miss Pross, on the instinct of the
moment, seized her round the waist in both her arms, and held her tight.
It was in vain for Madame Defarge to struggle and to strike; Miss Pross,
with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate,
clasped her tight, and even lifted her from the floor in the struggle
that they had. The two hands of Madame Defarge buffeted and tore her
face; but, Miss Pross, with her head down, held her round the waist, and
clung to her with more than the hold of a drowning woman.

Soon, Madame Defarge's hands ceased to strike, and felt at her encircled
waist. “It is under my arm,” said Miss Pross, in smothered tones, “you
shall not draw it. I am stronger than you, I bless Heaven for it. I hold
you till one or other of us faints or dies!”

Madame Defarge's hands were at her bosom. Miss Pross looked up, saw
what it was, struck at it, struck out a flash and a crash, and stood
alone--blinded with smoke.

All this was in a second. As the smoke cleared, leaving an awful
stillness, it passed out on the air, like the soul of the furious woman
whose body lay lifeless on the ground.

In the first fright and horror of her situation, Miss Pross passed the
body as far from it as she could, and ran down the stairs to call for
fruitless help. Happily, she bethought herself of the consequences of
what she did, in time to check herself and go back. It was dreadful to
go in at the door again; but, she did go in, and even went near it, to
get the bonnet and other things that she must wear. These she put on,
out on the staircase, first shutting and locking the door and taking
away the key. She then sat down on the stairs a few moments to breathe
and to cry, and then got up and hurried away.

By good fortune she had a veil on her bonnet, or she could hardly have
gone along the streets without being stopped. By good fortune, too, she
was naturally so peculiar in appearance as not to show disfigurement
like any other woman. She needed both advantages, for the marks of
gripping fingers were deep in her face, and her hair was torn, and her
dress (hastily composed with unsteady hands) was clutched and dragged a
hundred ways.

In crossing the bridge, she dropped the door key in the river. Arriving
at the cathedral some few minutes before her escort, and waiting there,
she thought, what if the key were already taken in a net, what if
it were identified, what if the door were opened and the remains
discovered, what if she were stopped at the gate, sent to prison, and
charged with murder! In the midst of these fluttering thoughts, the
escort appeared, took her in, and took her away.

“Is there any noise in the streets?” she asked him.

“The usual noises,” Mr. Cruncher replied; and looked surprised by the
question and by her aspect.

“I don't hear you,” said Miss Pross. “What do you say?”

It was in vain for Mr. Cruncher to repeat what he said; Miss Pross could
not hear him. “So I'll nod my head,” thought Mr. Cruncher, amazed, “at
all events she'll see that.” And she did.

“Is there any noise in the streets now?” asked Miss Pross again,
presently.

Again Mr. Cruncher nodded his head.

“I don't hear it.”

“Gone deaf in an hour?” said Mr. Cruncher, ruminating, with his mind
much disturbed; “wot's come to her?”

“I feel,” said Miss Pross, “as if there had been a flash and a crash,
and that crash was the last thing I should ever hear in this life.”

“Blest if she ain't in a queer condition!” said Mr. Cruncher, more and
more disturbed. “Wot can she have been a takin', to keep her courage up?
Hark! There's the roll of them dreadful carts! You can hear that, miss?”

“I can hear,” said Miss Pross, seeing that he spoke to her, “nothing. O,
my good man, there was first a great crash, and then a great stillness,
and that stillness seems to be fixed and unchangeable, never to be
broken any more as long as my life lasts.”

“If she don't hear the roll of those dreadful carts, now very nigh their
journey's end,” said Mr. Cruncher, glancing over his shoulder, “it's my
opinion that indeed she never will hear anything else in this world.”

And indeed she never did.




XV. The Footsteps Die Out For Ever


Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six
tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and
insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself,
are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in
France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf,
a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under
conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush
humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will
twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of
rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield
the same fruit according to its kind.

Six tumbrils roll along the streets. Change these back again to what
they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be
the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the
toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not my father's
house but dens of thieves, the huts of millions of starving peasants!
No; the great magician who majestically works out the appointed order
of the Creator, never reverses his transformations. “If thou be changed
into this shape by the will of God,” say the seers to the enchanted, in
the wise Arabian stories, “then remain so! But, if thou wear this
form through mere passing conjuration, then resume thy former aspect!”
 Changeless and hopeless, the tumbrils roll along.

As the sombre wheels of the six carts go round, they seem to plough up
a long crooked furrow among the populace in the streets. Ridges of faces
are thrown to this side and to that, and the ploughs go steadily onward.
So used are the regular inhabitants of the houses to the spectacle, that
in many windows there are no people, and in some the occupation of the
hands is not so much as suspended, while the eyes survey the faces in
the tumbrils. Here and there, the inmate has visitors to see the sight;
then he points his finger, with something of the complacency of a
curator or authorised exponent, to this cart and to this, and seems to
tell who sat here yesterday, and who there the day before.

Of the riders in the tumbrils, some observe these things, and all
things on their last roadside, with an impassive stare; others, with
a lingering interest in the ways of life and men. Some, seated with
drooping heads, are sunk in silent despair; again, there are some so
heedful of their looks that they cast upon the multitude such glances as
they have seen in theatres, and in pictures. Several close their eyes,
and think, or try to get their straying thoughts together. Only one, and
he a miserable creature, of a crazed aspect, is so shattered and made
drunk by horror, that he sings, and tries to dance. Not one of the whole
number appeals by look or gesture, to the pity of the people.

There is a guard of sundry horsemen riding abreast of the tumbrils,
and faces are often turned up to some of them, and they are asked some
question. It would seem to be always the same question, for, it is
always followed by a press of people towards the third cart. The
horsemen abreast of that cart, frequently point out one man in it with
their swords. The leading curiosity is, to know which is he; he stands
at the back of the tumbril with his head bent down, to converse with a
mere girl who sits on the side of the cart, and holds his hand. He has
no curiosity or care for the scene about him, and always speaks to the
girl. Here and there in the long street of St. Honore, cries are raised
against him. If they move him at all, it is only to a quiet smile, as he
shakes his hair a little more loosely about his face. He cannot easily
touch his face, his arms being bound.

On the steps of a church, awaiting the coming-up of the tumbrils, stands
the Spy and prison-sheep. He looks into the first of them: not there.
He looks into the second: not there. He already asks himself, “Has he
sacrificed me?” when his face clears, as he looks into the third.

“Which is Evremonde?” says a man behind him.

“That. At the back there.”

“With his hand in the girl's?”

“Yes.”

The man cries, “Down, Evremonde! To the Guillotine all aristocrats!
Down, Evremonde!”

“Hush, hush!” the Spy entreats him, timidly.

“And why not, citizen?”

“He is going to pay the forfeit: it will be paid in five minutes more.
Let him be at peace.”

But the man continuing to exclaim, “Down, Evremonde!” the face of
Evremonde is for a moment turned towards him. Evremonde then sees the
Spy, and looks attentively at him, and goes his way.

The clocks are on the stroke of three, and the furrow ploughed among the
populace is turning round, to come on into the place of execution, and
end. The ridges thrown to this side and to that, now crumble in and
close behind the last plough as it passes on, for all are following
to the Guillotine. In front of it, seated in chairs, as in a garden of
public diversion, are a number of women, busily knitting. On one of the
fore-most chairs, stands The Vengeance, looking about for her friend.

“Therese!” she cries, in her shrill tones. “Who has seen her? Therese
Defarge!”

“She never missed before,” says a knitting-woman of the sisterhood.

“No; nor will she miss now,” cries The Vengeance, petulantly. “Therese.”

“Louder,” the woman recommends.

Ay! Louder, Vengeance, much louder, and still she will scarcely hear
thee. Louder yet, Vengeance, with a little oath or so added, and yet
it will hardly bring her. Send other women up and down to seek her,
lingering somewhere; and yet, although the messengers have done dread
deeds, it is questionable whether of their own wills they will go far
enough to find her!

“Bad Fortune!” cries The Vengeance, stamping her foot in the chair, “and
here are the tumbrils! And Evremonde will be despatched in a wink, and
she not here! See her knitting in my hand, and her empty chair ready for
her. I cry with vexation and disappointment!”

As The Vengeance descends from her elevation to do it, the tumbrils
begin to discharge their loads. The ministers of Sainte Guillotine are
robed and ready. Crash!--A head is held up, and the knitting-women who
scarcely lifted their eyes to look at it a moment ago when it could
think and speak, count One.

The second tumbril empties and moves on; the third comes up. Crash!--And
the knitting-women, never faltering or pausing in their Work, count Two.

The supposed Evremonde descends, and the seamstress is lifted out next
after him. He has not relinquished her patient hand in getting out, but
still holds it as he promised. He gently places her with her back to the
crashing engine that constantly whirrs up and falls, and she looks into
his face and thanks him.

“But for you, dear stranger, I should not be so composed, for I am
naturally a poor little thing, faint of heart; nor should I have been
able to raise my thoughts to Him who was put to death, that we might
have hope and comfort here to-day. I think you were sent to me by
Heaven.”

“Or you to me,” says Sydney Carton. “Keep your eyes upon me, dear child,
and mind no other object.”

“I mind nothing while I hold your hand. I shall mind nothing when I let
it go, if they are rapid.”

“They will be rapid. Fear not!”

The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak as
if they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, heart to
heart, these two children of the Universal Mother, else so wide apart
and differing, have come together on the dark highway, to repair home
together, and to rest in her bosom.

“Brave and generous friend, will you let me ask you one last question? I
am very ignorant, and it troubles me--just a little.”

“Tell me what it is.”

“I have a cousin, an only relative and an orphan, like myself, whom I
love very dearly. She is five years younger than I, and she lives in a
farmer's house in the south country. Poverty parted us, and she knows
nothing of my fate--for I cannot write--and if I could, how should I
tell her! It is better as it is.”

“Yes, yes: better as it is.”

“What I have been thinking as we came along, and what I am still
thinking now, as I look into your kind strong face which gives me so
much support, is this:--If the Republic really does good to the poor,
and they come to be less hungry, and in all ways to suffer less, she may
live a long time: she may even live to be old.”

“What then, my gentle sister?”

“Do you think:” the uncomplaining eyes in which there is so much
endurance, fill with tears, and the lips part a little more and tremble:
“that it will seem long to me, while I wait for her in the better land
where I trust both you and I will be mercifully sheltered?”

“It cannot be, my child; there is no Time there, and no trouble there.”

“You comfort me so much! I am so ignorant. Am I to kiss you now? Is the
moment come?”

“Yes.”

She kisses his lips; he kisses hers; they solemnly bless each other.
The spare hand does not tremble as he releases it; nothing worse than
a sweet, bright constancy is in the patient face. She goes next before
him--is gone; the knitting-women count Twenty-Two.

“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth
in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and
believeth in me shall never die.”

The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, the pressing
on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd, so that it swells
forward in a mass, like one great heave of water, all flashes away.
Twenty-Three.

        *****

They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the
peacefullest man's face ever beheld there. Many added that he looked
sublime and prophetic.

One of the most remarkable sufferers by the same axe--a woman--had asked
at the foot of the same scaffold, not long before, to be allowed to
write down the thoughts that were inspiring her. If he had given any
utterance to his, and they were prophetic, they would have been these:

“I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge,
long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of
the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease
out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people
rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in
their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil
of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural
birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.

“I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful,
prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see
Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father,
aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his
healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their
friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing
tranquilly to his reward.

“I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of
their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping
for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their
course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know
that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul,
than I was in the souls of both.

“I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man
winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him
winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the
light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him,
fore-most of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name,
with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place--then fair to
look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement--and I hear him
tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a
far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”











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